For more than 150 years, Texas has had the right to secede from itself

Before John Nance Garner became Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, before he declared the job “not worth a jug of hot drinks,” the cow-shooting, whiskey-drinking, poker-playing German A Texas lawmaker is pushing a plan to gain more influence in his already-large state. Throughout his career as a turn-of-the-century Texas legislator, "Cactus Jack" viewed Texas as It can and should be split into five states.

"A region twice the size of the new one, with a rapidly growing population," Garner told the *** in April 1921: "England should have at least ten senators. The only way we can get them is The way to get elected is to create five states, not five small states, mind you, but five great states. ” without any action from Congress, a power no other state has.

Garner’s idea went nowhere. But the congressman from Uvalde, a hilly region west of San Antonio, is in West Texas Texas has a long tradition of trying to turn the Lone Star State into a constellation. Dividing Texas into many smaller Texas states was seriously considered when Texas became a state, and in subsequent decades. Yes. The idea survives today as a quirk in American law, a remnant of Texas' brief history as an independent nation and part of its identity as such a large state. A special section that can divide itself even if it loves its own bigness too much to do so

"We are the only state that can divide itself without anyone's permission," Donald W. said Whisenhunt, author of the 1987 book "Texas Five: An Immoral Proposal." Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution requires Congress to approve any new state. Texas' claim to the exception stems directly from the 1845 Joint Resolution of Congress, which allowed Texas to enter the state, which read: "Outside the State of Texas, it may hereafter be established with the consent of that State." New states are established outside the territory of this state, with no more than 4 states and sufficient population. Supporters of the Texas Division said this meant Congress pre-approved secession. This map shows the border between the United States and Texas in 1839 (University of Texas Perry Casta?eda Library Atlas) < /p>

Slavery, and the tense balance of power between the North and the South in the 1840s, explain the size of the territory Texas claimed when it joined the United States as an independent republic nine years later. It claimed even more than today's 268,580 square miles and a strange chimney of land formed in part by the Rio Grande and Arkansas rivers that stretched north into what is now central Colorado and Russia. Oklahoma, Kansas and even Wyoming poked right above the Missouri Compromise Line of 1820, which did not allow slavery at 36 degrees north latitude.

How could such a huge piece of the West be divided? In early 1845, when Congress was debating the admission of Texas, northern congressmen wanted to split Texas in two, east of Corpus Christi. coast to the northwest corner of the state, bisecting the state diagonally, with Austin to the east and San Antonio to the west. Slavery would be outlawed in sparsely populated West Texas, where it already existed. Many anti-slavery Germans settled there, but Southerners rejected the proposal as an excessive restriction on slavery. President Isaac Van Zandt promoted the new states clause as a Southern-friendly alternative: "Van Zandt ... became very close to the senators and representatives from the southern states, " Weston Joseph McConnell wrote in his 1925 book "Social Dividing in Texas." Van Zandt, like the Southerners, divided Texas into The states would give the South more power. The Texas statehood, including the new statehood clause, passed Congress 120-98. The only concession from the North was that slaves would be banned in any state north of the Missouri Compromise Line. system. In 1847, Van Zant ran for governor of Texas, promising to divide the state into four states. Van Zandt believed that dividing the state would give Texas more power in Washington. , small settlements hundreds of miles apart, Texas couldn't be governed effectively (apparently making himself governor of a smaller state didn't bother Van Zandt) Historians of Texas tend to believe. VanZant likely would have won and divided the state had he not died of yellow fever a month before the election.

When Congress was redrawing Texas' northern and western borders, As part of the Compromise of 1850, which paid Texas $10 million to acquire eastern New Mexico and four other states, the statute included a line retaining provisions for the new state.

But in 1852, the Texas Legislature voted 33 to 15 to divide Texas into two states on the Brazos River. Most of its supporters came from eastern Brazil, another example of widespread dissatisfaction between East and West Texas. Each accused the other of inexperience and negligence. But that argument ultimately lost out to Texans' pride in their shared history. "Which state will have a star emblem? Who will abandon the blood-stained walls of the Alamo?" the Texas Gazette asked.

Texas again came close to collapse during Reconstruction. Radical Democrats, elected at a time when most of the former Confederacy could not vote, attempted to carve up Texas at the Constitutional Convention of 1868-1869. Their stated goal was to create a Union-friendly West Texas that might rejoin the United States earlier than other states; critics argued that they really wanted to create more state offices for themselves. Pro-secession delegates held a majority in the convention, but they could not agree on a map—a hurdle that Texas secessionism repeatedly encountered in its early years. "It was impossible to get Texans, despite their bad temper, to agree to a plan," said Whisenmont on this 1842 map showing the boundaries of the Texas Revolution at the time. (The University of Texas Perry Casta?eda Library Map Collection) "KDSP" prevented radical Democrats from writing a "West Texas Constitution" that promised blacks with civil rights, while proposing to deny votes to former rebels, Ku Klux Klan members, and pro-Confederate newspaper editors and ministers. (This provocative and potentially unconstitutional idea reflected the Reconstruction debate over the restoration of rights and citizenship to former members of the Confederacy.) But public opinion turned against their plan. Support meetings are rarely engaging. Nearly every newspaper in the state rejected the idea. Some scoffed at the idea of ??a state in sparsely populated West Texas, proposing another name: "Cactaea State," or "Coyote State."

Frustrated, activists appealed to President-elect Ulysses S. Grant and asked the Army general to intercede. He didn't. Grant told reporters, "One Texas is enough to make people shine." After that, Texas never came close to secession, although West Texas coyotes howled to leave when they felt neglected . In April 1921, they threatened to dissolve the state when Governor Pat M. Neff vetoed a bill to build a university in West Texas. On the same day as the veto, 5,000 angry West Texans met in the town of Sweetwater and drafted a resolution calling for dissolution unless the Legislature redistributed the state to establish a college. Their threats may have inspired Garner to speak to the ***'s department later that month.

"Over the next three years, West Texans adopted radical attitudes inside and outside the Legislature," Ernest Wallace wrote in his 1979 book The Howling Man "The Legislature established Texas Technical College in Lubbock in 1923, now Texas Tech University. “This symbolic appeasement calmed secession sentiments,” Wallace wrote, “and in 1930, out of anger at Congress’ passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, Garner filed for secession again.” Texas would make 220 "The state became Rhode Island, 54 states were Connecticut and 6 states were New York," said Garner, who still hopes a divided Texas will overtake the Yankee State.

Garner is the last to support A prominent politician in the Texas Division, but the idea lives on in the game of blue-red maps that political fanatics obsess over. In 2009, five-and-eight-year-old Nate Silver devised a fantasy. The five-way split created three Democratic states, a blue state along the Rio Grande and a swing state around Austin, according to the 2004 Texas Law Review. The paper "Let's Mess With Texas" (Let's Mess With Texas) argues that cunning Texas Republicans could use the new state clause of 1845 to change their ways and give 8 Senate seats and Electoral College votes, former State Bar of Texas director Ralph H. Brock responded that the new states clause would violate the Supreme Court's equality mandate. Principle.

The idea that Texas could be divided and capture eight Senate seats fits Texas's self-image as a unique, vast, powerful state. Awareness will prevent Texans from actually trying it.

"It's a novel idea that they might like at first glance," said Whisenmont, who wrote a book encouraging Texans. Thirty years after the department's book, he's now convinced that's essentially impossible. How to divide Texas' oil wealth, which funds its major state universities, recalled Whisenhout, 78. The trauma inflicted on Texas when Alaska replaced Texas as the largest state in the United States in 1959.

He said: “There is a strong sense of pride in being the biggest, the best, the first in the world.

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