December 29, 2020, marks the 175th anniversary of the United States’ annexation of the Republic of Texas, an occasion that Texans seem to have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, Texans love their country as much as any other Americans. On the other hand, nostalgia for the republic’s decade of independence is ingrained in the Texas character. And talk of secession seems to be on the rise during this politically fraught time—after the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, Texas congressman Randy Weber posted a pro-secession meme on his Facebook page and state representative Kyle Biedermann threatened to file legislation that would give Texans the opportunity to vote on a secession referendum. A pair of recently published books offer sharp insights into what we should make of this contradiction. Journalist Richard Kreitner’s Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union (Little, Brown and Company) and historian Thomas Richards Jr.’s Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States (Johns Hopkins University Press) demonstrate that the Republic of Texas played an outsized role in our nation’s development by inspiring other groups to strike out on their own. And they prompt us to ask some hard questions: What would have happened if Washington had rejected Texas’s entreaties to be annexed? Would Texas have managed to carve out an independent path and spurred others to do the same, upending the map of North America as we know it? Or would a Republic of Texas that never joined the Union have eventually wrecked on the shore of its own ambitions? Kreitner and Richards don’t explicitly address such counterfactuals, but they both point to some pretty clear answers.
Neither book focuses exclusively on Texas. Break It Up ranges more widely, from New England’s and California’s separatist flirtations during the antebellum period to the anarchist and feminist secessionisms that proliferated after the Civil War and continue to this day. Kreitner, a contributor to the liberal magazine The Nation, particularly shines when he focuses on the pre–Civil War era of disunionism. “The Age of Breakaway Republics,” he calls it, making clear that Texas served as the model for other regions in the United States that were looking, in Sam Houston’s words, to lift their heads “and stand among the nations.”