Texas Independence

Texas secession movements principally focus on the secession of Texas during the American Civil War and the activities of organizations that have existed since the 1990s. The United States Constitution does not address secession of states and the issue was a topic of debate from after the Revolutionary War up until the Civil War, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Texas v. White, that states cannot secede. Texas claimed to be a sovereign state for nine years prior to the negotiated annexation with the United States, but its claim was not recognized by Mexico, nor did Texas actually control the entirety of its claimed territory. This history has affected the state's politics ever since, including its standing in the Confederacy in the Civil War to education and even tourism in the 20th century. Modern secession efforts have existed in the state at least since the 1990s, focusing first on the Republic of Texas organization founded by Richard Lance McLaren and later on the Texas Nationalist Movement headed by Daniel Miller.

Discussion about the right of U.S. states to secede from the union began shortly after the American Revolutionary War. The United States Constitution does not address secession. Each of the colonies originated by separate grants from the British Crown and had evolved relatively distinct political and cultural institutions prior to national independence. Craig S. Lerner has written that the Constitution's Supremacy Clause weighs against a right of secession, but that the Republican Guarantee Clause can be interpreted to indicate that the federal government has no right to keep a state from leaving as long as it maintains a republican form of government.

The question remained open in the decades before the Civil War. In 1825, observed, "If today one of these same states wanted to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be quite difficult to prove that it could not do so. To combat it, the federal government would have no evident support in either force or right." However, Joseph Story wrote in 1830 in Commentaries on the Constitution that the document foreclosed the right of secession. On the eve of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln argued that states were not sovereign before the Constitution but instead they were created by it.

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