Your understanding of history is drastically distorted. The two nations in question were the U.S. and Texas. That’s right, Texas was it’s own country first, independent of the United States.
Texas did begin as a Mexican colony. When Texas was founded, Americans migrated to the Texas colony because they felt welcomed by the Mexican government. At first, the Anglo colonists lived in peace with the Mexican government. However, the Mexican government began to take more interest in Texas, and assert more control. The government began to become more corrupt. This corruption sparked the Texicans (as they called themselves, to reflect connection to Mexico) to protest. Those protests escalated through actions from the Mexican government. This lead to the Texicans revolting. There was no control by the U.S. government at any time in the Texas revolt. The Texicans (who eventually dubbed themselves Texans to show separation from Mexico) did not immediately seek to join the U.S., nor did they feel themselves interested at the time to become a U.S. territory or state. Rather, they formed their own independent government, and after the successful revolt, their own independent nation.
Subsequently, the Texans decided it was advantageous to join the United States. The United States felt it advantageous to allow Texas to join. Each independent government voted to allow it to happen.
Manifest Destiny played no part in the Texas revolt from Mexico.
The only people these days that bemoan the inclusion of Texas to the US are historical revisionists that want to say that all of the Southwest and Texas were seized by force from an Imperialist Aggresor state.
Darn tootin’. It isn’t like the time was short, either. The Republic of Texas was founded after independence from Mexico in 1836. Texas wasn’t admitted to the US until 1845.
– Dewey, who remembers a few things from 7th grade Texas history.
Don’t forget that apparently some of the paper work didn’t get filed correctly. This led to the modern Republic of Texas movment that landed those fellas in federal pens.
Of course, “corruption” was a good screen against the actual complaint–Mexico’s prohibition of slavery.
I agree that the 1845 annexation of the nation of Texas was not a violent land grab in the way that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was. Comparisons of Iraq and the U.S. should be limited to New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
The annexation of Texas produced the peaceful model for Hawaii, in which the larger country simply floods the smaller country with immigrants, then lets the immigrants vote to rejoin their former nation.
Slavery and also the adoptation of Roman Catholicism as Mexico’s official religion and subsidies to the Catholic Church really pissed off a lot of Texican Methodists and Baptists, and also Santa Anna’s coming to power helped contribute to it.
It was the Mexican govt’s decision to not let us have any say in our own governance that was the main factor in my decision to rebel against Mexico and seek to form my own country.
Catholicism wasn’t a major pain, since the American immigrants to Texas new going in that they would have to adopt it, or at least pay lip service to it, as it was part of the agreement they made in order to be able to colonize the area. Austin was even fairly effective in his efforts to suppress other religions. Religion played a really minor part in the Texas Revolution.
The big things were that the Mexican government outlawed slavery and, to an extent, when Mexico forbade further American immigration (in one of the more amusing ironic twists considering current attitudes in the American southwest regarding immigration).
mystic may be referring to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848. Before that, there were conflicting claims to the Trans-Nueces Region (between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers).
Between 1836 and 1848, both Mexico and Texas (and the U.S. from 1845-1848) claimed that region.
In my readings on the Texian Revolution, the causes seem to range. Slavery and immigration cuts played a role, but not as big of one as some have put it (largely because, especially with the immigration rules, no one really enforced it). The analysis I’ve seen most about it is that the Texian Revolution should be views around the same way as other “federalist vs. centralist” conflict in the early stages of Mexican history, which helps to explain why there were Tejanos fighting on the federalist (Texian) side in virtually every (if not every) battle, and why there were Irish soldiers on the centralist (Mexican government) side at the battle of Nuecus Crossing.
Well let’s see, the Mexicans annexed Mexico from the French. The French annexed Mexico from the Spanish who annexed it from the native Americans who annexed it from other native Americans who came from the old world via the land bridge in the ice age who took the land from the Neanderthals who are not extinct.
Another point that is often forgotten is that under the Texas republic, Mexican descended people fully participated in the government. Juan Seguin was the mayor of San Antonio (the largest city at that time) and Lorenzo de Zavala was the Republic’s first Vice President. He also signed the Texas declaration of Independence along with Jose Antonio Navarro.
Independent Texas was not an all Anglo regime, and certainly far from the “race war” both some on the extreme left and extreme right would indicate. I was after the annexation that Mexican Americans were deprived of many civil rights or at best, socially excluded from the ruling population.
As far as Iraq is concerned, Kuwait was more or less part of “Mesopotamia” for most of the regions history under the Ottomans. The boundaries between the different Arab (or African for that matter) states are rather artificial, and mostly are a result of colonial era League of Nations mandates. The Bedouins of the region still have little regard for the difference between “Iraqi”, “Kuwaiti” or “Saudi” territory. Iraq does have a historic claim on Kuwait. However, most reasonable people would agree that did not justify in any form violent invasion or the widespread damage caused by the Iraqis.
Also…as a semi-professional historian, I should add that I think it is intellectually lazy to compare distinct events to they point that one event becomes the template for every similar event. The Iraqi annexation of Kuwait was not like the Texas annexation…its was a completely distinct event that requires its own analysis.
No, Kuwait had de facto independence from the Ottomans since the mid-1700s. They had been a British protectorate since the late 1890s, an arrangement arrived at due to fears the Ottomans were looking to annex them. Iraq has no real historic claim on Kuwait. While the exact boundaries are fairly arbitrary, the general idea that the basic area should be independent from Iraq is not.