As the 1836 Project would have it, there is an inescapable sense of fatedness to the Republic of Texas. It was doomed to fail. On this point, Johnson seems to agree. The 1836 Project stages this failure as a kind of tragic play that memorializes sovereign Texas and its ideological commitments as an aspirational state always worth aiming for. Johnson, however, sees the formation of the republic as a strange, flailing political strategy. He shows that even Texas’s leaders seemed to anticipate its failure from the get-go. This is because the republic, which would exist for only nine years, could not survive on its own.
Texas had to seek out trading partners for its newfound cotton economy while keeping a militia functional, ostensibly to protect its colonies from the Comanche; those who escaped enslavement to go to Mexico; the dispossessed Apache, Kiowas, and other Indigenous groups; and a perceived threat from the increasingly consolidated Mexican state. In doing so, the republic accrued crushing debt. The strategy of interest is how and with whom Texas made its allegiances, first economically and then politically. Texas sought support from England, the greatest consumer of cotton in the world. When this failed due to England’s abolition movement, Texas turned to the US, which was more divided on the matter of the slavery regime at the time. Johnson describes a set of diplomatic moves that hinged on arguments for economic prosperity as what enabled the US decision to absorb Texas and its plantation slavery regime in 1845, forgiving the republic’s debt and starting a war with Mexico as a result.
After the conclusion of the Mexican-American War with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Texas would become a successful cotton-producing American state for approximately 13 years before joining the Confederacy and fighting for secession again, now from the US. The end of this period is marked by the now-federal holiday Juneteenth, a historically Black Texan–specific celebration of the end of slavery. Even with the granting of land as freedom colonies to formerly enslaved families, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War would reconsolidate forms of white loyalty to Texas’s 1836 image of itself, now materialized less in the economic potentials of cotton plantations and more in other modes of extraction enabled by its property regime.