These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Mexico wouldn’t sell its own land, but the Mexican territories of Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton. “If we do not take the present opportunity to people Texas,” one Mexican official warned, “day by day the strength of the United States will grow until it will annex Texas, Coahuila, Saltillo, and Nuevo León.” (At the time, Texas included much of what later became Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.) In 1835, Americans in Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of a political daredevil named Sam Houston. In 1836, Texas declared its independence, founding the Republic of Texas, with Houston its president. Mexico’s president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, warned that, if he were to discover that the U.S. government had been behind the Texas rebellion, he would march “his army to Washington and place upon its Capitol the Mexican flag.”