Have West Texas secede from East Texas a la West Virginia

Marc

Donor
A recent conversation with a friend from Austin made me consider this scenario, which I haven't seen before.

The underlying premise that that slave plantation institutions were concentrated in East Texas - which more resembled the Deep South than the usual cliches about Texas. Say, West Texas follows Sam Houston vision.
 

Marc

Donor
On looking a bit into Texas circa 1860, I realized that my proposed scenario would have been extremely unlikely. Contrary to whole lot of informal history and "Western" fiction, Texas fundamentally was a hard core member of the Deep South states - not too surprising since the vast majority of the gringo population came from Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. It had a population of around 600,000, about a third of them slaves; Mexicans were a relatively small minority. The legislative vote to secede was nearly unanimous from all parts of the State. And more bluntly than some of the other States, it proclaimed that the primary reason for secession absolutely was about slavery. Apparently they thought that the whole Preserve the Union (still popular with apologists) meme was garbage, those Texans knew that the North was going to abolish slavery, sooner or later. And to borrow a cliche, they wouldn't give up slaves until they were taken from their cold, dead hands.

Shame, it might have made for an interesting forking...
 
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