Is Texas Southern, Western, or Truly a Lone Star?
http://www.texasmonthly.com/daily-post/texas-southern-western-or-truly-lone-star“I don’t think anyone much questioned Texas’s essential Southernness until the twentieth-century,” says Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Texas History chair at TCU, past president of the Texas State Historical Association, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. “And they started doing so as a way of distancing themselves from the late unpleasantness of the 1860s and 1870s. Defeat, military occupation, Jim Crow and lynching, and all of those unpleasant things that are very much a part of Texas history as a Southern state, were things that a lot of Texans would probably just as soon not talk about a lot.”
Nationally, Dixie was stigmatized as a backward, ignorant, and violent hotbed of Ku Kluxry and religious hypocrisy. Why remain linked to all that baggage? Why not, forward-looking Texans began to think, align with the West instead? Back then, and to a certain degree today, the West was seen as optimistic, the place of second chances, the land of the golden tomorrow, a stark contrast when compared to Dixie’s melancholy and tragic yesterdays.
So Texas’s politicians, educators and ad-men went to work, Cantrell says, and have since all but totally recast the very ideal of what it means to be a Texan.
“And so what do you do? You play up the frontier, you play up the Texas Revolution and the Alamo, you play up the (in reality not-very-glorious) ten years of the Texas Republic, and then you talk about the Indian Wars and the cattle drives, all culminating in Spindletop and the discovery of oil,” he says. “All of these things made Texas seem like anything but a Southern state.”
great Article
= new reply since forum marked as read
República del Río Grande was an independent nation that insurgents against the Central Mexican Government sought to establish in northern Mexico. The rebellion lasted from January 17 to November 6, 1840 and the Republic of the Rio Grande was never officially recognized.
On January 17, 1840 a meeting was held at the Oreveña Ranch near Laredo. A group of notables from the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas advocated a rebellion seeking secession from Mexico and formation of their own federal republic with Laredo as the capital. However, those states' own congresses and governments never took any action to support the insurgents, and requested the help of the Central government in Mexico City to aid the local state armies.
The Battle of Saltillo (March 24–25, 1840) was fought between insurgents under the command of Colonel Samuel Jordan fighting for the Republic of the Rio Grande and the Centeralists under the command of General Rafael Vasquez fighting for the First Mexican Republic. The result was a victory for the Centeralist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_the_Rio_Grande
Texas has never been a lone star, but a conglomerate of many. That the Anglos ultimately prevailed is an accident of history and not manifest destiny.
