Jack of Harts

A little known fact of the American election of 1860 that catapulted the Third Republican Party into majorities in both Houses of Congress, and the Presidency, is that it was done with a minority of the vote. The Democrats had a massive majority, but were divided between three competing factions that year. They split the election between them, allowing the man history would call Honest Abe to slip through with an electoral majority. The Democrats were shocked and horrified at having lost, when nobody thought the man they’d called an idiot and worse had any chance of winning. They declared they would never submit to such a man in the Presidency. They called for resistance against him, for driving his supporters out of society, and for outright rebellion against his rule. And seven States, including Texas, officially seceded from the Union a month before Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President of the United States of America.

Texas achieved independence long after the First Republican Party rose and fell in the 1790s and 1820s. And the Second Republican Party, commonly known as the National Republicans, fell in 1834, shortly before Texas gained its independence. So when Texas joined the Union in the 1840s, and incorporated themselves into America’s larger economy and political structure throughout the 1850s, there was no major Republican Party. Texas was officially a Slave State, with most of their slaves in the oldest colonies of Central and North Eastern Texas. With that rich power base to operate from, the Pro-Slavery Democrats held impressive political power in Texas. Therefore it was the Third Republican Party, founded in 1854, that was a threat to the established Texas power structure of the time. The Republicans promoted stopping the expansion of Slavery into the American Territories, and held the less public mission of helping slaves escape from Slave States. So when the Republicans surprised everyone by winning both Houses of Congress and the Presidency in 1860, the Democrats in control of Texas did not react well.

Once the American military had secured the Mexican capital, a diplomatic mission was sent to deal with the mutual misunderstanding of where the border was. Texas, all the way to the Rio Grande. And now that they had been forced to go through all this fighting and occupation, America was going to keep New Mexico and California. America was happy to buy all that territory at a fair price, and Mexico would be happy to sell them at a fair price. It turned out that Mexico was not necessarily happy to sell a third of their territory at half the price per acre the Americans had offered before the war, but they were willing to, in exchange for a treaty of peace and an end to the occupation. At which point, the Americans turned around, marched back north of the Rio Grande, and happily washed their hands of Mexican lands for the next two centuries. Mexico, not nearly so happy about the whole ordeal, spent the next two centuries dreaming of the day they could get their conquered and rebellious regions back.