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Texas seceded from the United States in 1861 and joined the Confederate States of America on the eve of the American Civil War. It replaced the pro-Union governor, Sam Houston, in the process. During the war, slavery in Texas was little affected, and prices for enslaved people remained high until the last few months of the war.
Texas annexation, wrote Walker, would eliminate all these dangers and "fortify the whole Union." [94] Walker's pamphlet brought forth strident demands for Texas from pro-slavery expansionists in the South; in the North, it allowed anti-slavery expansionists to embrace Texas without appearing to be aligned with pro-slavery extremists. [95]
Texas' annexation as a state that tolerated slavery had caused tension in the United States among slave states and those that did not allow slavery. The tension was partially defused with the Compromise of 1850 , in which Texas ceded some of its territory to the federal government to become non-slave-owning areas but gained El Paso.
Texas passed a new constitution in 1876 that segregated schools and established a poll tax to support them, but it was not originally required for voting. [13] In 1901 the Democratic-dominated legislature imposed a poll tax as a requirement for voting, and succeeded in disfranchising most blacks.
Regarding slavery, influential settler Stephen F. Austin, who reasoned that the success of his colonies needed slave labor and the economics it produced to lure more whites to the area, used his relationships to get an exemption from the law. [7] Therefore, slavery remained in Texas until the end of the American Civil War.
Most of the newcomers continued to migrate from the states of the lower South; slavery was granted legal protection by the Texas constitution of 1845. The Texas population by 1860 was quite diverse, with large elements of European whites (from the American South), African Americans (mostly slaves brought from the east), Tejanos (Hispanics with ...
The Constitution of the Republic of Texas was the supreme law of Texas from 1836 to 1845. On March 2, 1836, Texas declared itself an independent republic [1] because of a lack of support in the United States for the Texas Revolution. [2] The declaration of independence was written by George Childress [3] and modeled after the United States ...
Throughout U.S. history there have been disputes about whether the Constitution was proslavery or antislavery. James Oakes writes that the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause and Three-Fifths Clause "might well be considered the bricks and mortar of the proslavery Constitution". [5] "But", Oakes adds, "there was also an antislavery ...