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In
March, 1836, a convention met at Washington-on-the-Brazos
for the purpose of framing a constitution for the fledgling Republic of Texas.
The Republic really didn’t exist yet, since San
Jacinto was not yet fought. The constitution provided for a presidential election
to take place in the fall of 1836. In the meantime, a temporary government with
David G. Burnet as interim president directed the affairs of the Republic.
Initially
there were two candidates for the Republic’s first presidency, Henry
Smith and Stephen F.
Austin. There was also a groundswell urging Sam
Houston to run for president. Houston,
however, insisted he wasn’t interested. It seems very likely the ‘groundswell’
was engineered by Houston
himself, through his most trusted associates. He continued to insist that he wasn’t
interested in the presidency until just thirteen days before the election was
held.
At the time Texas had fewer than 6,000
people eligible to vote. Houston
received 4,374 votes. Smith
got 743 votes, Austin
578. Houston immediately appointed
Austin as his Secretary
of State and Smith as his
Secretary of the Treasury. The first Congress of the Republic of Texas met at
Columbia on October
3, 1836. A date was selected—October 22—for the inauguration of the Republic’s
first President.
On the morning of October 22 interim President David
G. Burnet resigned the office. At 4 PM Houston
was inaugurated. According to legend, he had just four hours in order to prepare
an inaugural address, but considering what we know of Houston
now, you may be sure he had his inaugural address written and likely memorized
even before he announced he would be a candidate.
Houston’s
inaugural address touched heavily on the subject of annexation to the United States.
This was a matter of some debate, a lot of it acrimonious, in the new Republic.
While a lot of people—mostly former US citizens—wanted annexation, there were
quite a lot of immigrants from other nations who weren’t all that excited about
it. There were also the Tejanos, who were not particularly enthusiastic about
annexing Texas to the US.
In his speech, Houston
left no doubt that, as President of the Republic, he would work toward annexing
Texas to the US. In his own words, “In our recent
election the important subject of annexation to the United States of America was
submitted to the consideration of the people. They expressed their feelings and
their wishes on that momentous subject. They have, with a unanimity unparalleled,
declared that they will be reunited to the great republican family of the north.
This appeal is made by a willing people. Will our friends disregard it?”
The catch is, there wasn’t, in 1836, a groundswell of enthusiasm in Texas
for annexation—and there was even less of a groundswell in the US. Texas
had been settled, largely, from the American South. While Mexico had declared
slavery illegal—in the province of Tejas alone, it was perfectly legal in the
rest of Mexico—it had accepted completely the fiction of indentured servitude.
Those Southerners who brought slaves to Texas with
them ‘freed’ the slaves with a stroke of a pen—and with a second stroke ‘indentured’
them for a term of 99 years. Even in 1836 the agitation of abolitionists to free
all slaves was making itself felt all over the South. The former Southerners who
owned slaves in the new Republic didn’t want to find themselves back in a country
where abolitionism was growing.
Mexico had, at the time, the largest standing
army in the Western Hemisphere. The US had one of the smallest. The US really
couldn’t afford to antagonize Mexico—that is, the dictator of Mexico, Santa Anna—any
more than it already had. In addition, if Texas came
into the US, it would come in as a slave state, which would upset the very delicate
balance of power between slave states and free states in the US Congress. Most
of the free states opposed the idea of annexing Texas
.
As a result, Texas remained an independent
Republic for almost ten years.
One of the usually-un-thought-of—and occasionally
ignored--results of that is the fact that the Texas state flag is the only state
flag that can be flown at the same height as the national colors. Because it was
once the flag of an independent republic, as part of the treaty of annexation
the Republic’s flag, which became the state’s flag, the Texas flag can fly at
the same height as the national flag. Every other state flag has to be flown at
a lesser height.
© C.
F. Eckhardt July
9, 2011 column
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