Both in 1827 and in 1829, the United States Government attempted to purchase Texas, and in the latter year the proposition was actually made to the Mexican Government to sell to the United States the territory lying to the northwest of the watershed of the River Nueces. It was, however, promptly rejected by that Government.
Naturally these attempts encouraged the colonists in Texas to feel that the United States sympathized with them in their desire for emancipation from Mexican rule, and to hope that this sympathy might, at some future time, lead to positive assistance.
| Overthrow of the federal system in Mexico. |
The Texans were, however, for the moment, left to their own devices. They first tried to have Texas separated from Coahuila and made a separate Commonwealth of the Mexican Union, but the Mexican central government refused to assent to this. This was in 1833. Two years later Santa Anna, the Mexican President, forcibly displaced the federal system of government established in Mexico by the constitution of 1824, and instituted the centralized system, virtually by a presidential edict.
Some of the Commonwealths of the Mexican Union resisted this usurpation of the President, and among them, naturally, was Coahuila-Texas. Moreover, some of the Coahuila members of the legislature of the Commonwealth, partisans of Santa Anna, withdrew from that body, and the Texan members found themselves, for the first time, in a majority in it. Of course the feeling of resistance to the overthrow of the right of local self-government became now a settled and resolute purpose with them, and Santa Anna, upon learning their attitude, resolved to reduce them to obedience by military power.
| The Texan revolution. |
In September of 1835, a Mexican war-ship appeared upon the Texan coast, and its commander declared the Texan ports in a state of blockade. About the same time, the Mexican General Cos appeared, with a force of some fifteen hundred soldiers, at the Texan village of Gonzales. The resistance of the inhabitants of the town to Cos' order to surrender their arms precipitated the struggle. The Texans immediately organized a temporary government, drove the Mexicans out of the country before the close of the year, and, on March 2nd, 1836, declared their independence of Mexico.
While the Texan convention, which had declared independence and was framing the constitution for the state of Texas, was still in session, the Mexican soldiery, under the command of Santa Anna himself, returned to Texas and committed the atrocities of the Alamo and of Goliad. After these barbarous deeds there could no longer be any hope of an accommodation between the Mexicans and the Texans. It was independence or extermination.