WI: Texas keeps all its land

Buzz

Banned
In honor of Texas Rising, here is a thread

When Texas became a state, it was much larger. It had land in 5 current states, but sold it so the US Federal Government would take up all its debt from it was a Republic.

Say it keeps all its land. Texas is now larger then California. How does this impact history?
 
This should read "what if Texas gets all the land it *claims*"? To act as if it ever actually exercised control over all this land, or as if its claim to all of it was not disputed, is false.

Could Texas as a state in the US get its maximum claims recognized? Given northern control of the House of Representatives it seems very unlikely. In particular there was strong opposition to acknowledging its claim to Santa Fe.

How much it could win as an independent nation in a war with Mexico is another matter.
 

Buzz

Banned
Is this a state of Texas with all the land the Republic of Texas claimed or an independent Texas?

This should read "what if Texas gets all the land it *claims*"? To act as if it ever actually exercised control over all this land, or as if its claim to all of it was not disputed, is false.

Could Texas as a state in the US get its maximum claims recognized? Given northern control of the House of Representatives it seems very unlikely. In particular there was strong opposition to acknowledging its claim to Santa Fe.

How much it could win as an independent nation in a war with Mexico is another matter.

What if the State of Texas, a state in the United States, had all the land they claimed back when they were a Republic.

Which did happen, but they sold it to the Federal Government. What if they didnt
 
Map of Republic of Texas

To help the discussion, I have added a map of the Republic of Texas.

Regards

Stubear1012

Texas1836map.jpg
 
What if the State of Texas, a state in the United States, had all the land they claimed back when they were a Republic.

Which did happen, but they sold it to the Federal Government. What if they didnt

Once again, I must emphasize that in admitting Texas as a state, the US was *not* necessarily committing itself to Texas's claims about its borders. So it's not a matter of "Texas on joining the Union was admitted with all the land it claimed, but it later gave up some of it in return for settlement of its debt" etc. Rather it's "the US admitted Texas with its borders undetermined--and later a compromise was reached (including the payment of Texas's debt) as to what those borders were."

I know this may seem nitpicking, but you seem to believe that Texas's claim to its asserted borders was clear and recognized by the US before the Compromise of 1850. Which it wasn't. "The boundary was purposely left undetermined in the joint resolution which annexed Texas to the United States in 1845." https://books.google.com/books?id=Ts82mdWcyOYC&pg=PA307 And this fact is relevant in determining just how plausible it was that Congress would agree to Texas's maximum claims in 1850.

If Texas had acted unlilaterally and marched on Santa Fe as it threatened to do, this would have meant war with the US government--both Taylor and (more discreetly but just as firmly) Fillmore indicated that they would not tolerate such unilateral action.
 
Texas invaded the Province of Nuevo Mexico three times and got stomped each time:

Sante Fe Expedition of 1841 which surrendered to a force of 100 militia.
Warfield Expedition to Mora of 1843 which was defeated by locals (buffalo hunters and ranchers) who rescued their enslaved families and sent the Tejanos back on foot with no boots
Associated Snively Expedition of 1843 which was sent (200 men) to prey on New Mexico merchants on Sante Fe Trail. They were confronted US Army dragoons, disarmed and sent home.
 
I've never seen this map before but it's odd when you think about what it covers. At the time it would cut off U.S. access overland to both Mormon settlements in Utah, California (Trail), Oregon (Trail) as it includes South Pass through the Rockies that imminent wagon trains relied on and the key wayfaring resupply point at Fort Laramie in Wyoming. So potentially a Mormon nation like Texas, Deseret, where polygamy remains without the 1856 invasion by U.S. troops. California without a land route either becomes a British colony as their warships hoped when the Spanish there fell and the locals needed a new protector with seapower or it stays it's own republic and forges alliances with both the British and Americans, while Oregon and Washington states would remain part of British Canada. It includes the city sites of Casper, Cheyenne, Denver, Fort Collins, Santa Fe, Roswell...a lot of additional oil reserves in Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico unlikely to have been known at the time. I think the Colorado gold rush is in part or all of Texas's claim, a decade or so in the future.

Fort Laramie in Wyoming is an essential and key logistics base for the Army as well as the Oregon and California Trails, control of that (by negotiation as both Texas and the U.S. would have a heck of a time attacking, defending given the distance and paucity of other posts.)

So the U.S. would end in the shortgrass prairie states, British Canada'd be far stronger, the Texas Republic even more challenging to protect and develop, and two more independent but probably allied countries of California and Utah.

As President of Texas instead of Governor, Sam Houston likely could have kept Texas out of allying with either foreign power, the U.S. or Confederacy but might well have gotten involved driving the French out of Mexico instead (and grown Galveston tremendously as a direct seaport for British goods for the Confederacy instead of the smaller port at Matamoros on the Mexican side of the border.)
 
Well it means Texas can't be a slave state. OTL that is why they agreed to shave off that northern slice that is now part of Oklahoma.
 
as a former Texan sure it would be grand if Texas still had all of the land it claimed, but what it actually controlled was a lot less.

The Santa Fe expedition in 1841 was a disaster, while the Comanche Wars were in full swing, so pretty much all of Texas west of modern I35 was at best disputed and most of it really belonged to the Apache and Comanche, or in the very far west belonged to Mexico (the Rio Grande in modern New Mexico and El Paso in Texas)

Actually Texas got a hell of deal... no debt, massive amounts of land anyway, federal troops, no more Mexican invasions (or fool hardy Texas invasions of Mexico either)
 

Jasen777

Donor
Actually Texas got a hell of deal... no debt, massive amounts of land anyway, federal troops, no more Mexican invasions (or fool hardy Texas invasions of Mexico either)

More territory than they actually controlled plus a large part of the U.S. army to protect against Natives.
 
One way to get Texas to keep all of it's claimed territory was for there to be no Missouri Compromise. Remember the deal was that states below 36 degrees 30 minutes would be slave states. Texas trimmed off it's territory so it would be allowed into the US. If you look at a map the top of it's panhandle corresponds to the aforementioned border.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
The realities of admission have been explained, but:

In honor of Texas Rising, here is a thread

When Texas became a state, it was much larger. It had land in 5 current states, but sold it so the US Federal Government would take up all its debt from it was a Republic.

Say it keeps all its land. Texas is now larger then California. How does this impact history?

The realities of admission have been explained, but:

The line of settlement in Texas basically stopped at the 98th Meridian, which runs (more or less) north to south through Wichita, Oklahoma City, and San Antonio, between the Trinity and the Brazos, and which was (naturally) where the woodlands stopped and the prairie began...

West of the 98th, annual rainfall drops below 20 inches; this is where the Plains begin, essentially. There is timber, in the bottomlands, but that gets sparser and sparser - a hundred miles west (Lubbock and Amarillo, today) would be pure grassland, absent irrigation.

When Parker's Fort was raided in 1835, there was - literally - no American/Mexican settlement from the Trinity westward until the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, bounded by Santa Fe in the north and El Paso to the south.

So "Texas" as such included the southeastern quarter of what is shown on the map; the rest was, essentially, open wilderness, and Texas lost nothing by agreeing to the borders as drawn historically.

Best,
 
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http://newmexicohistory.org/events/1841-texan-santa-fe-expedition

Final sentence is "...Cooke confronted and disarmed Snively and his men, thus bringing to an end Texas aggression against New Mexico..."
 

Jasen777

Donor
The Office of the State Historian is a division of the Commission of Public Records, State Records Center and Archives.

Ok, you meant it was a victory for Mexico/Residents of current New Mexico. I thought you meant from the Texas viewpoint.
 
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