# Texas Revolution The 1835–36 war that separated Texas from Mexico and created the independent Republic of Texas — remembered in American mythology as a heroic freedom struggle, and remembered less often for the role that slavery played in it. The [[Alamo]] gave the country an enduring martyrdom story; the political economy underneath it is the part the mythology tends to scrub. ## The War The revolution opened on October 2, 1835, at the Battle of Gonzales — the "Come and Take It" skirmish over a small cannon — and ended on April 21, 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto. In between came the two defining events of the Texan founding legend. The Convention of 1836 adopted the **Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836**, at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Four days later, on **March 6, 1836**, the [[Alamo]] fell after a thirteen-day siege (begun February 23). Nearly all of the roughly 200 defenders were killed, and "Remember the Alamo" became the rallying cry of the war. Weeks later came the Goliad massacre, when Mexican forces executed hundreds of captured Texan soldiers. The war was decided in eighteen minutes. On April 21, 1836, [[Sam Houston]] surprised Santa Anna's army at San Jacinto; the Mexican general was captured the next day, effectively ending the conflict and securing Texan independence. ## The Slavery Dimension The founding mythology treats the revolution as a straightforward fight for liberty against a tyrant. The complication is slavery. Mexico had **abolished slavery in 1829**, and the institution's future in Mexican Texas was increasingly precarious for the Anglo colonists — many from the American South — who had brought enslaved people with them and built their cotton economy on slave labor. The Mexican Laws of April 6, 1830, which curtailed further Anglo immigration and pressured slaveholding, deepened the settlers' grievances. When the Republic of Texas wrote its 1836 constitution, it made slavery permanent and explicit: it barred slaveholders from freeing enslaved people without government consent and barred the Congress of the Republic from restricting the slave trade or emancipating anyone. The enslaved population of Texas grew from roughly 5,000 in 1836 to about 27,000 by 1845. Whatever else the revolution was, it was also — in significant part — a war to preserve and expand slavery, a dimension that the Alamo-centered heritage narrative reliably omits. ## Republic to Statehood The Republic of Texas lasted from 1836 until December 29, 1845, when Texas was annexed as the 28th state — and as a slave state, an annexation that helped trigger the Mexican-American War. Texas would go on to secede with [[The Confederacy]] in 1861, endure [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]], and carry [[The Lost Cause]] mythology into the twentieth century. The line from the revolution's slaveholding founding to the state's later racial and political order is direct. ## RWKB Significance The Texas Revolution is a case study in how founding mythology launders political economy. The Alamo functions as an [[American Exceptionalism]] icon — sacrifice, heroism, "come and take it" defiance — that quietly displaces the fact that the revolution defended slavery. That structure of remembering the courage and forgetting the cause is the same one that animates [[The Lost Cause]] and the fights over how Texas teaches its own history in the [[Texas Textbook Wars]]. ## See Also - [[Alamo]] - [[Sam Houston]] - [[The Confederacy]] - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] - [[The Lost Cause]] - [[American Exceptionalism]] - [[Manifest Destiny]] - [[Texas History Hub]]