How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [90]
Still, Houston did not completely oppose expansion; his views were simply more pragmatic. After returning to the presidency in December 1841, Houston described to the U.S. minister to Texas an astonishing vision for the future if the United States did not offer it statehood:
Houston’s vision of United States without Texas
The union of Oregon and Texas will be much more natural and convenient than for either separately to belong to the United States.… Such an event may appear fanciful to many, but I assure you there are no Rocky Mountains interposing to such a project. But one thing can prevent its accomplishment and that is annexation.… Most of the provinces of Chihuahua, Sonora, and Upper and Lower California, as well as Santa Fe, which we now claim, will have to be brought into the connection of Texas and Oregon. This you will see, by reference to the map, is no bugbear to those who will reflect upon the achievement of the Anglo-Saxon people.8
Such a map did indeed seem both fanciful and logical. The time had come for the United States to make up its mind about Texas.
On April 12, 1844, President John Tyler signed and sent to the Senate a treaty with the Republic of Texas that would convert the republic into an American territory. During the treaty’s negotiations, public opinion was highly divided over whether or not the nation wanted Texas. Many in the North vehemently opposed the annexation of Texas, and not simply because it would be a slave state, but because Congress gave Texas the option of becoming as many as five states more equal in size with other states. Consequently, Southerners, envisioning ten additional proslavery votes in the Senate, vehemently supported its annexation. Texans, however, had developed such a strong sense of identify that they never considered subdividing the state. To remain a slave state, though, Texas had to relinquish its land north of 36°30’ (the top of its Panhandle) to be in compliance with the Missouri Compromise.
Ultimately, a quest shared by Northerners and Southerners—expansion of the nation—prevailed over their slavery conflict, and Texas was admitted to the Union on March 1, 1845. Houston was elected to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate, where he participated in an additional boundary change. With the state still facing enormous debts from its days as a republic, Houston supported the $10 million sale to the United States of a large chunk of western Texas, which was then annexed to New Mexico.
More important was the context in which that sale took place: the Compromise of 1850, in which the central issue was slavery. Without the Compromise of 1850, the South would have seceded, as ten years later it nevertheless did. Though Sam Houston supported slavery, he opposed secession till the day he died in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. Back during the debate in 1850, he had summoned all of his oratorical skills on behalf of loyalty to the Union. Those skills, like so many of Sam Houston’s skills, were formidable. So formidable that a future president filched one of the lines from Houston’s speech: “A nation divided against itself cannot stand.”9
UTAH, NEVADA, ARIZONA
BRIGHAM YOUNG
The Boundary of Religion Revisited
The Mormons are, at present, eliciting considerable interest and inquiry in reference to the organization of a new State in the far West under the cognomen, State of Deseret.… Ought they be admitted without strict inquiry? For a starting point, Congress might appoint a committee to inquire into and report the facts … relative to polygamy and, if the facts are unfavorable, that they be not … styled “the State of Deseret but “the State of Whoredom.”… And, further, to inquire whether the whole movement