Daniel sent us this one — he wants to talk about the history of Texas as an independent country, specifically when Texas actually became part of the US as we know it today, and how differently the place functioned under each sovereign that controlled it. And I have to say, Texas is the only state that was its own country before joining the union, and its constitution still lets it split into five states if it ever wanted to. That alone tells you this is not a normal statehood story.
It really is not. Most states followed the same basic path — territory, petition, admission. Texas walked in the front door as a sovereign nation and negotiated terms. And those terms still shape how the state operates today, from its power grid to its public lands to the way its politicians talk about federal authority.
Where do we even start with this? There are essentially four layers of governance to work through.
Four distinct sovereign periods. Spanish colonial rule starting in 1519, then Mexican Texas from 1821 to 1836, the Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1845, and US statehood from 1845 onward. Each one left a different imprint on how the place was governed, and some of those imprints are still visible.
What makes the Spanish period worth paying attention to? Most people skip straight to the Alamo.
The Spanish period matters because it set the template for what Texas was — a sparsely populated frontier province of New Spain, governed from Mexico City with almost no local autonomy. For nearly three centuries, the Spanish presence in Texas was basically a string of missions and presidios. San Antonio, founded in 1718, was the only real settlement of any size. The rest was Comanche territory, Apache territory, and a whole lot of empty space that Spain claimed but did not control.
Claimed but did not control — that feels like a theme that runs through a lot of Texas history.
Spain's governance model was top-down and distant. The governor of Texas reported to the commandant general of the Provincias Internas, who reported to the viceroy in Mexico City, who reported to the Council of the Indies in Spain. Local settlers had essentially no representation. There was no colonial assembly, no town meetings, nothing resembling self-government. The missions were supposed to convert Native populations and turn them into Spanish subjects, but by the late eighteenth century most of the missions were in decline. The population of Spanish Texas in 1800 was maybe four thousand people, and that is being generous.
Four thousand people across a territory larger than France.
Larger than France, yes. It was a paper claim more than a governed territory. And that thin Spanish presence is exactly why Mexico, after winning independence in 1821, faced a serious problem — how do you actually populate and control this enormous northern frontier?
Which brings us to the Mexican period. And this is where the story gets genuinely interesting, because Mexico's approach was radically different from Spain's.
The real shift began when Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821. Under the 1824 Constitution of Mexico, the country became a federal republic, and Texas was merged with Coahuila to form the state of Coahuila y Tejas. The capital was Saltillo, which is about three hundred miles south of the Rio Grande. Texas itself was represented in the state legislature, but the distance made meaningful governance deeply impractical.
You have settlers in Nacogdoches and San Antonio who are supposed to be represented in a legislature that is weeks of travel away.
And this is where the Empresario system enters the picture. Mexico needed settlers, and it could not attract enough from the interior, so it opened the door to Anglo-American immigration. Austin brought the first group — the so-called Old Three Hundred — in the early 1820s. Under the terms of his contract with the Mexican government, these settlers were required to convert to Catholicism, swear allegiance to Mexico, and abide by Mexican law. In exchange, they got generous land grants. Austin himself was given broad authority to administer his colony, including judicial powers.
Mexico essentially outsourced the governance of its northern frontier to private contractors.
That is exactly what happened. And it worked, for a while. By 1830, Anglo settlers outnumbered Tejanos — Mexican-born Texans — by roughly five to one. The Mexican government tried to slow immigration with the Law of April 6, 1830, which prohibited further Anglo settlement and banned the introduction of new slaves. But enforcement was weak, and settlers kept coming.
Slavery is the fault line running through all of this.
It is the central tension. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, but Texas was given an exemption. Anglo settlers brought enslaved people with them and built cotton plantations along the Brazos and Colorado rivers. The Mexican government kept threatening to enforce abolition, and the settlers kept finding ways around it, including reclassifying enslaved people as indentured servants with ninety-nine-year contracts. The whole thing was a legal fiction, and everyone knew it.
You have cultural differences, religious differences — most of the Anglo settlers were Protestant despite the required conversion — and an existential economic disagreement over slavery. What actually triggered the revolution?
In 1835, Antonio López de Santa Anna abolished the 1824 federalist constitution and replaced it with a centralist system that concentrated power in Mexico City. The states were reduced to military departments run by governors appointed from the capital. For the Anglo settlers in Texas, this was the breaking point. They had been operating under a federal system that gave them at least nominal representation. Now Santa Anna was dismantling that system, and he was sending troops to enforce the new order.
The Texas Revolution starts in October 1835. The Alamo happens in March 1836. That is the battle everyone knows. But the Alamo was a Mexican victory.
Santa Anna's forces killed roughly two hundred defenders after a thirteen-day siege. It was a catastrophe for the Texian forces, but it became a rallying cry. Six weeks later, on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston's army surprised Santa Anna's forces at San Jacinto, near present-day Houston. The battle lasted eighteen minutes. The Texians captured Santa Anna the next day and forced him to sign the Treaties of Velasco, which recognized Texas independence and set the Rio Grande as the southern border.
That is shorter than a podcast episode.
Shorter than most podcast episodes. And just like that, the Republic of Texas was born. But here is what most people miss — being an independent country sounds glamorous, but the Republic of Texas was deeply in debt and militarily vulnerable from day one.
Let's dig into how the republic actually functioned. What did its government look like?
The Republic of Texas government was modeled closely on the US Constitution, but with several key differences. The president served a three-year term and could not run for immediate re-election — a direct reaction to fears of executive overreach, given what they had just experienced with Santa Anna. Sam Houston was the first president, followed by Mirabeau Lamar, then Houston again. The Congress was bicameral, with a Senate and a House of Representatives. The republic had its own currency — the Texas dollar — its own postal system, its own courts, and its own diplomatic corps.
Slavery was explicitly protected.
The 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas explicitly protected slavery and prohibited free Black people from residing in the republic without congressional approval. This was not an incidental feature of the legal system — it was a core economic and political commitment. The republic's leadership saw slavery as essential to the cotton economy, and they wrote that commitment into the founding document.
Which is why the United States did not immediately annex Texas, even though most Texians wanted annexation from the start.
Texas sought annexation in 1837, and the United States said no. The reason was slavery. Northern states opposed admitting a new slave state because it would upset the balance in the Senate. President Martin Van Buren, a New York Democrat, shelved the annexation request to avoid a sectional crisis. So Texas spent nearly a decade as an independent republic, not because it wanted to be independent, but because the US would not take it.
How long exactly was the republic period?
Nine years, eleven months, and eight days. From March 2, 1836, when the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed, to December 29, 1845, when Texas formally entered the union. Just under a decade.
During that decade, the republic was recognized internationally?
The United States recognized the Republic of Texas in 1837. France followed in 1839, the United Kingdom in 1840, the Netherlands and Belgium in 1840 as well. So Texas had diplomatic recognition from several major European powers. Mexico, notably, never recognized Texas independence. Mexico considered Texas a rebellious province the entire time, which meant the republic lived under constant threat of invasion.
Which brings us to annexation. How did Texas finally get into the union?
This is one of the most procedurally interesting parts of the whole story. Texas was annexed by a joint resolution of Congress on March 1, 1845, not by treaty. A treaty requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate, and the annexation treaty failed in the Senate in 1844 because of — you guessed it — the slavery debate. So President John Tyler and his allies in Congress used a joint resolution instead, which requires only a simple majority in both chambers.
They found a procedural workaround to bypass the slavery impasse.
The 1844 presidential election was effectively a referendum on annexation. Polk ran on a pro-annexation, pro-expansion platform and won. Tyler took that as a mandate and pushed the joint resolution through in the final days of his administration. Texas formally entered the union on December 29, 1845.
Then the borders got sorted out.
The borders were far from settled. The Republic of Texas had claimed territory extending all the way to the headwaters of the Rio Grande, which would have included parts of present-day New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas. That claim was never realistically enforced — Santa Fe, for example, was under Mexican control the entire time. The Compromise of 1850 resolved the border question. Texas gave up its claims to those vast northern territories in exchange for ten million dollars, which it used to pay off its republic-era debt. The compromise established the modern borders of Texas, with the Rio Grande as the southern boundary.
Mexico had already accepted the Rio Grande as the border under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War. So by 1850, the borders were essentially what they are today.
And here is where the republic-era legacy starts showing up in concrete ways. Under the terms of annexation, Texas retained control of its public lands. This is unique. When other states joined the union, they ceded their public lands to the federal government. Texas kept them. That is why the federal government owns very little land in Texas compared to other western states — something like two percent of Texas is federally owned, versus more than sixty percent of Utah or Nevada.
Which is why Texas can do things like fund its public schools through the Permanent School Fund, which was established in 1854 using two million dollars from the Compromise of 1850 settlement.
That fund now holds something like fifty billion dollars and generates revenue from state-owned lands and mineral rights. It is a direct legacy of the republic's negotiation of annexation terms. Texas walked into the union with assets that no other state had.
Then there is the power grid.
ERCOT — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — operates the Texas Interconnection, which covers most of the state and is deliberately isolated from the two major national grids. This is not an accident of geography. It is a legacy of the republic-era insistence on independence from federal regulation. Texas utilities intentionally avoided interstate transmission lines to stay outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Power Act, which regulated interstate electricity sales starting in 1935. The result is that Texas controls its own grid, which gives it autonomy but also isolation — when the grid fails, as it did in February 2021, Texas cannot import power from neighboring states at scale.
The independence cuts both ways.
It always does. And that is perhaps the single best summary of Texas's entire political identity — the independence cuts both ways.
Let's talk about the five-state provision. This is one of those facts that sounds like a bar-trivia urban legend, but it is actually real.
It is absolutely real. Under the terms of the 1845 joint resolution for annexation, Texas was given the right to divide itself into up to five states. This provision is baked into Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, which governs the admission of new states, and it is reiterated in the Texas state constitution. The idea was that Texas was so large that it might eventually make sense to split it up, and the provision was included to give Texas that option without requiring further congressional approval.
Has Texas ever seriously considered using it?
It has been proposed multiple times, usually as a political maneuver. In the decades after the Civil War, there were proposals to split Texas to create more Republican-leaning or Democratic-leaning Senate seats. None of them went anywhere. The provision remains on the books, but the practical barriers are enormous — you would need agreement on how to divide assets, water rights, public debt, and the Permanent School Fund. It is unlikely, but it is not impossible.
If I am understanding you correctly, Texas's path to statehood was fundamentally different from every other state because Texas negotiated entry as a sovereign entity rather than petitioning as a territory.
That is the core distinction. Every other state that joined the union — with the brief and complicated exceptions of Vermont and Hawaii — went through a territorial phase where the federal government exercised direct authority before statehood. Texas skipped that entirely. It entered as a co-equal sovereign, and it retained rights and assets that no other state has. The Texas state flag is identical to the flag of the Republic of Texas. The Texas pledge of allegiance, adopted in 1933, pledges allegiance to "the Texas flag" in addition to the US flag. These are not just cultural quirks — they are expressions of a legal and historical identity that is unique.
The pledge of allegiance to the Texas flag is something I grew up saying in school, and I never really thought about the fact that it dates back to the republic.
It does not directly date to the republic — the pledge was written in 1933 — but it references the republic explicitly. The wording is "Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible." And that phrase "one and indivisible" was added in 2007 as a direct rebuttal to secessionist rhetoric. It is a fascinating example of how the republic-era identity keeps surfacing in contemporary political discourse.
Which brings us to secession. Texas politicians talk about secession more than any other state's politicians, and that is not an accident.
It is not. The republic experience created a political culture in which independence is seen as a live option, even if the legal reality is that secession is not constitutionally permitted — the Supreme Court settled that in Texas versus White in 1869. But the cultural memory of having been an independent country is powerful. It shapes how Texas politicians talk about federal overreach, about state sovereignty, about the Tenth Amendment. It is baked into the state's political DNA.
Let me pull us back to the prompt's second question — how differently did Texas function under each sovereign? We have covered the shift from Spanish distant rule to Mexican federalism to republican independence to US statehood. Can you summarize what actually changed for people living there?
Under Spain, if you were a settler in Texas, you had essentially no political representation. The governor was appointed from Mexico City, the laws were made in Madrid, and the missions and presidios were the only institutions that mattered. You were a subject of the Spanish crown, not a citizen with rights.
Under Mexico, after 1824, you were a citizen of a federal republic. You had representation in the state legislature in Saltillo, at least in theory. The Empresario system gave Anglo settlers a degree of local autonomy that was unprecedented under Spanish rule. But the distance from the capital, the cultural tensions, and the slavery question made the arrangement unstable.
Under the republic, you were a citizen of an independent nation. You had a constitution, a president, a congress, courts, a postal system, a currency. But the republic was poor, its currency depreciated rapidly, its military was underfunded, and the threat of Mexican invasion was constant. Independence was exhilarating in principle and exhausting in practice.
Under the United States, after 1845, you were a citizen of a federal union. You gained access to the US postal system, the US military, US courts, and US currency. The federal government assumed Texas's debt under the Compromise of 1850. But Texas retained control of its public lands and its unique legal status. The transition from republic to state was not a loss of sovereignty — it was a negotiated transfer of certain sovereign functions in exchange for security and economic stability.
That is a useful framework. The republic traded theoretical independence for practical survival.
And that trade-off is still being debated in Texas politics today. Every time a Texas governor talks about federal overreach, every time the legislature passes a law challenging federal authority, every time someone raises the possibility of secession — they are re-litigating the terms of that 1845 negotiation.
There is something else worth noting about the annexation process. The joint resolution that admitted Texas also preserved the state's right to split into five states, as we discussed, but it also explicitly allowed Texas to retain its public lands and required Texas to pay off its own debt. The ten million dollars from the Compromise of 1850 was not a gift — it was payment for territory that Texas ceded. The whole thing was structured as a transaction between sovereigns.
That transactional nature is what makes Texas unique. The United States did not conquer Texas. It did not purchase Texas, as it purchased the Louisiana Territory or Alaska. It negotiated entry terms with a sovereign republic that had other options — Texas could have remained independent, it could have sought closer ties with Britain or France. The United States wanted Texas, and Texas leveraged that desire to extract concessions.
Britain was actively involved in Texas during the republic period. The British government saw an independent Texas as a counterweight to American expansion and a potential source of cotton that was not dependent on US slave labor. There was serious diplomatic engagement between London and the Republic of Texas.
That British interest is part of what pushed the United States to annex Texas. The prospect of a British-aligned republic on the southern border was unacceptable to American strategic interests. The 1844 election was fought partly on that question — Polk's expansionism versus Clay's more cautious approach, with annexation of Texas as the central issue.
When we look at the full arc from Spanish colony to US state, what is the through line?
The through line is that Texas has always been a place where sovereignty is contested and negotiated rather than simply imposed. Spain claimed it but could not control it. Mexico federalized it but could not integrate it. The republic declared independence but could not sustain it. The United States annexed it but had to accommodate its unique status. Every sovereign that has claimed Texas has had to adapt to the realities on the ground.
Which brings us to the modern implications. You mentioned earlier that there was a Texas constitutional convention authorized by voters in 2024.
Yes, and this is significant. The 2026 Texas constitutional convention is the first opportunity in decades to fundamentally reshape the state's governing document. The Texas constitution, adopted in 1876, is one of the longest and most amended state constitutions in the country — it has been amended more than five hundred times. The convention could address everything from the structure of state government to the relationship between Texas and federal authority. There are voices calling for the convention to reaffirm Texas's unique sovereignty status, and there are voices calling for a more conventional relationship with the federal government.
The question of how Texas relates to the union is not settled history — it is a live political question.
It has never been settled. Every generation renegotiates the terms. The republic period was just under ten years, but the identity it created has lasted for nearly two centuries.
Let me ask you something. If someone is listening to this and thinking, okay, I understand why Texas is different, but does any of this actually matter for how the state is governed today — beyond the power grid and the flag and the pledge?
It matters enormously. Texas's control of its public lands means the state, not the federal government, regulates oil and gas drilling on most of its territory. The Texas Railroad Commission — which despite its name regulates oil and gas, not railroads — was for decades one of the most powerful economic regulatory bodies in the world. Its prorationing system, which controlled oil production to stabilize prices, was explicitly copied by OPEC when it formed in 1960.
OPEC copied Texas.
OPEC copied Texas. The Railroad Commission's system of setting production quotas for each well was the model for OPEC's quota system. A state regulatory agency in Texas shaped the global oil market for roughly forty years.
That is an astonishing fact that I feel like more people should know.
It really is. And it connects directly to the republic-era legacy. Texas's ability to regulate its own resources, to fund its own institutions through land and mineral wealth, to maintain its own power grid — all of this flows from the negotiated terms of annexation in 1845. The republic may have lasted less than a decade, but its institutional DNA is still replicating.
Let's talk about some of the misconceptions people have about this history. The Alamo being the decisive battle is probably the biggest one.
The Alamo was a defeat. It was strategically significant because it delayed Santa Anna's advance and gave Sam Houston time to organize his forces, but the revolution was won at San Jacinto. The Alamo gets the attention because of the drama and the sacrifice, but San Jacinto is where the actual military victory happened.
The idea that Texas was an independent country for a decade — that is close but not quite right.
Nine years, eleven months, and eight days. Just under a decade. And for much of that time, Texas was actively seeking annexation. It was not a decade of confident independence — it was a decade of financial struggle, military vulnerability, and diplomatic maneuvering to join the United States.
Another misconception is that Texas's borders have always been what they are today.
The Republic of Texas claimed a massive territory that extended into what is now New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and even parts of Oklahoma and Kansas. The map of the republic that you sometimes see on historical markers is aspirational, not actual. Texas never effectively controlled most of that territory. The Compromise of 1850 reduced the state to its current borders.
The Rio Grande as the southern border was disputed by Mexico until 1848.
Mexico never accepted the Treaties of Velasco because Santa Anna signed them under duress — he was a prisoner of war. Mexico maintained that the Nueces River, not the Rio Grande, was the southern boundary of Texas. The dispute over that strip of territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was one of the triggers for the Mexican-American War. It was not resolved until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
The border that seems natural and obvious on a map today was contested for decades and resolved through war and treaty.
Which is true of most borders, once you look at the history. Episode 568 covered this beautifully — borders are not natural features, they are political constructions, and the Texas border is a particularly vivid example.
One thing I want to circle back to is the slavery question, because it is impossible to understand Texas's path to statehood without it. The republic's constitution protected slavery. The delay in annexation was driven by the slavery debate. The procedural workaround — the joint resolution instead of a treaty — was a response to the slavery impasse. The Compromise of 1850 was partly about slavery. And fifteen years after annexation, Texas seceded from the union to join the Confederacy.
The Civil War is the next chapter in this story. Texas seceded from the United States in 1861, fought for the Confederacy, and was readmitted to the union in 1870 after Reconstruction. Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, was removed as governor because he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy. He opposed secession, arguing that Texas had fought too hard to join the union to throw it away. He was right, and he was sidelined for it.
Houston is a fascinating figure. He was the president of the republic, the governor of two different states — Tennessee and Texas — and a US senator. And he ended his career opposing secession, warning that it would destroy everything he had built.
He saw the arc clearly. He understood that the republic's independence was a means to an end — joining the United States on favorable terms — and that secession would undo that achievement. History proved him right.
If we look at Texas today, with its massive economy, its growing population, its political influence, and its unique legal status, it is hard not to see the republic-era DNA in all of it. The Texas economy is larger than that of most countries — if Texas were an independent nation, it would have the eighth or ninth largest economy in the world. The state's political leaders routinely invoke sovereignty and independence in ways that no other state's leaders do. The power grid, the public lands, the Permanent School Fund, the flag, the pledge — all of it traces back to those nine years, eleven months, and eight days of independence.
The five-state provision is still there, sitting in the constitution, waiting. It probably will never be used, but its mere existence shapes how people think about the state's relationship with the federal government.
To answer the prompt's two questions directly: Texas became part of the United States as we know it today on December 29, 1845, with its modern borders finalized by the Compromise of 1850. And under each sovereign, the experience of living in Texas was fundamentally different — from the distant neglect of Spanish rule, to the unstable federalism of Mexican rule, to the precarious independence of the republic, to the negotiated semi-autonomy of US statehood. The through line is that governance in Texas has always been thin, contested, and negotiated rather than imposed.
That is a crisp summary. I would add only that the republic period, short as it was, created an institutional and cultural legacy that has proven remarkably durable. Texas joined the union on its own terms, and it has never stopped reminding everyone of that fact.
The open question, I think, is whether Texas's unique sovereignty status becomes a model or a warning as debates about federalism intensify. There are people who look at Texas and see a template for how states can assert independence within the union. There are others who look at Texas and see a cautionary tale about the risks of romanticizing independence. The 2026 constitutional convention will be a test of which vision prevails.
That is worth watching closely. The convention could reaffirm the republic-era identity, or it could steer Texas toward a more conventional relationship with the federal government. Either way, the decisions made in that convention will be shaped by the history we have been discussing.
I suspect that whatever happens, Texas will continue to be Texas — which is to say, unlike anywhere else.
That is the safest prediction anyone can make about Texas.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early 1500s, Ainu fishermen in the Kuril Islands developed a specialized knot for lashing sea lion hides to driftwood frames, using a sequential tightening technique that allowed the hide to stretch in salt water without tearing — and they refused to teach it to anyone outside their immediate family, treating the knot as a form of inherited property.
A proprietary knot.
Intellectual property law, sixteenth-century Ainu edition.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review — it helps more people find the show. We will be back with another prompt soon.
