Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Republic of Texas (1861)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete.  Jujutacular  talk 00:26, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Republic of Texas (1861)

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As has been explained in depth at the talk page, this is a non-blatant hoax: Texas never claimed to be a republic in 1861, and the information on this page is a mistaken (although apparently good faith) falsehood. This is related to Texas in the American Civil War, but it's an unlikely enough search target that it wouldn't be good to redirect. Nyttend (talk) 23:30, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Texas-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:47, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:47, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * DELETE - This article is in error - the Republic of Texas was not reconstituted by the State of Texas following its attempted secession of 1861. During the time between the passage of the secession ordinance and the acceptance of membership in the Confederate States of America, Texas referred to itself as a State, not a Republic, which was consistent with the sovereign State ideology of the secessionists, and the language of the 19th century South, which saw a "State" as a sovereign entity no different than a republic unless bound into a union or confederation. To wit, Section I of the document generated by the secessionist government of Texas formally accepting membership in the CSA reads as follows:


 * "The People of Texas, in Convention assembled, Have ordained and declared, and do hereby ordain and declare, that the delegation aforesaid, to the Congress aforesaid, be, and they are hereby instructed, and we do accordingly instruct them, in behalf of the State, and as representing its sovereign authority, to apply for the admission of this State into said Confederacy; and to that end and for that purpose, to give in the adhesion of Texas to the provisional Constitution of said Confederate States; and which said Constitution, this Convention hereby approves, ratifies and accepts."


 * Note that this document states that the delegation it had sent to the Confederate Congress as an independent entity was instructed "in behalf of the State" to apply for admission of "this State" to the Confederacy. This is the government of Texas in the period between the adoption of the secession ordinance and accession to the CSA speaking of itself as the State of Texas, not the Republic of Texas. The ROT was legally dissolved by consent of the people of Texas with the treaty of accession into the USA in 1845 and reorganized into the State of Texas, which in 1861 continued to operate on a presumption of independence from secession.


 * Given that the entity described by this article never existed, this page contains false information and should be removed.


 * (The documentary evidence included here is drawn from: The Constitution of the State of Texas, (as Amended in 1861, The Constitution of the Confederate States of America, The Ordinances of the Texas Convention, and An Address to the People of Texas. Austin: Printed by John Marshall, State Printer, 1861, pp. 24-25.)

Professor Storyteller (talk) 03:21, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment Professor Storyteller's words here are functionally identical to his/her words at the talk page to which I referred earlier. Nyttend (talk) 04:02, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment The entire argument presented by Storyteller, seems to revolve around the name of the country, not its existence, that is not a reason for deletion, since a simple article rename and some copyediting can correct that problem. 76.66.200.95 (talk) 04:54, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Ordinarily it wouldn't be a problem, but in this case it's an unlikely enough search target that we have no good reason to maintain it as a redirect. Nyttend (talk) 12:18, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment-RebuttalThe argument I presented is that there is no Republic of Texas in 1861, the fundamental assertion of this article. If one copyedits it to "State of Texas" to match the evidence, then we have a stub of an article pointing out that the State of Texas attempted to secede from the Union in early 1861 and joined the Confederacy a few weeks later - facts already covered in articles on Texas and the Civil War.  That would make this article redundant in the extreme - and thus still an excellent candidate for deletion.  One final point - the Supreme Court ruled in 1868 that the ordinance of secession of Texas in 1861 was null and void, being without legal force, and thus no "country" existed as a result of that legally nullified action.  The Republic of Texas as a nation ceased to exist with its accession to the Union in the 1840s, and has not existed since.Professor Storyteller (talk) 05:00, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment-Reply we have articles on Transnistria, Somaliland, South Ossetia, etc, various self-declared countries where the constitutional courts of their progenitor countries have not recognized their existences. So the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States of America saying that the Confederate States of America did not legally exist is not really relevant. As this "country" existed between the declaration of succession and preceding the accession to the CSA, it is like many other countries that we have articles on that existed a matter of weeks. We have several such articles about European countries. There's also Taiwan, where we have a treatment of the subject in the manner of a country, when it is really a separate government that covers part of the territory of a country, and is a separate central government, with a second central government that covers the rest of the country, which is also somewhat applicable here, since this is a separate central government that governs a portion of a country than the other central government, if we take your stand that Texas never left the Union. 76.66.200.95 (talk) 06:26, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment-Rebuttal*** Again, you've missed the point. The State of Texas has its own article, which covers the whole of Texan history, including the period when the State of Texas claimed to be separated from USA and not yet integrated into the CSA.  This article is redundant - except that it claims the State of Texas reorganized itself as the "Republic of Texas" for a few weeks in 1861.  Since that is patently untrue - see the document excerpt above - the article simply notes a period when the State of Texas claimed to be independent.  As that period is already covered by other articles, the article has no point.  Also, while this is irrelevant to whether or not this article should be retained, it is not *my* stand that Texas never left the Union - it is the binding constitutional consensus of American law, a consensus that existed prior to the Civil War.Professor Storyteller (talk) 08:37, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The suggestion to rename the article would be good in many other circumstances; however, such a move would duplicate information already in the Texas in the Civil War article, so it's pointless to maintain this as a separate article. Additionally, if this article had a title such as "Texas (1861)", I'd simply redirect it to the Texas in the Civil War article; however, there's not likely to be anyone who searches for "Republic of Texas (1861)" when they really want "Texas in the American Civil War", so it would not be a good redirect.  That's why I've come here to AFD.  Nyttend (talk) 12:18, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Since this "Republic of texas" was only around for a month or two and since this article is just a stub and is unlikely to get much longer due to the short duration of its existence I would suggest just merging it into the texas article. If at some point in the future enough information is available (which is unlikely) then the article could be recreated. --Kumioko (talk) 14:45, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Kumioko - This "Republic of Texas" never existed. See the information above.Professor Storyteller (talk) 18:37, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep - While content may never be massive, the topic seems sufficient to merit an encyclopedic entry. Even if the article never expands beyond the stub stage, the information is significant and encyclopedia-worthy. —Carrite, Oct. 10, 2010.


 * Carrite - why would false information be significant and encyclopedia-worthy?Professor Storyteller (talk) 18:37, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I'll get out of the way on this. Stricken. Carrite (talk) 16:29, 14 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Weak delete and comment - The process of Texas secession and joining the CSA is covered in the section Texas in the American Civil War. If there is enough info to warrant breaking that section out into its own page, that would be fine. We do have, for example, Missouri secession. Every CSA state had a period between secession and joining the CSA. Info about it is covered in each state's "..in the Amerian Civil War" page. I don't see a need for also having pages specifically about each state's existence between secession and joining, formatted in the manner of pages about sovereign nations. However, I note we have the page Republic of South Carolina. As far as I can tell it is the only other CSA state with a page of this kind. It makes a little more sense for South Carolina to have a page like this, perhaps, although I'm not sure it should be titled "republic of". Pfly (talk) 21:37, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Also, unless I'm mistaken, wasn't the idea at the time that the seceding states were sovereign all along, and merely leaving one federation and joining another confederation? What I mean is that Texas as a "sovereign state" did not begin on the date of its secession from the Union, rather Texas had been sovereign all along, no? Isn't this basically the idea that was later rejected by the Supreme Court? If this is the case, then wouldn't the republic/state of Texas described on this page be the exact same Texas described on the Texas page? That one of the issues of the Civil War was whether states were in fact truly sovereign or not? Pfly (talk) 21:37, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree that South Carolina should not be listed as a Republic, unless someone has found sources showing that the state government reconstituted itself as such between secession and accession to the CSA. I'm not an expert there - I do remember a quasi-humorous aside from a South Carolinian unionist to the effect that the state was too small to be a republic, but that's the extent of my knowledge without some research.  Let me know if you want to make a change there, however, and I will help if I can.  And I do agree that a notation of Texas' period between secession and accession would be better served in another article, rather than broken out separately - unless a state went to the effort of calling itself a sovereign nation in its own documents in this period, I think we're better off treating them as viewing their actions as the "reclaiming" of status as sovereign states, then forming a new entity.  There's no evidence I am aware of that these states ever intended to maintain independent existences - secession was a painful choice, and all involved were very aware of the risks of going it alone.  They all intended to create a "new and more perfect union" - as evidenced by the similarity of the CS Constitution to the US Constitution.


 * As to the question of sovereignty, that was indeed the hot-button constitutional issue underlying the larger fight over slavery. All the way back to the Founders at Philadelphia, who ditched the idea of sovereign states in favor of the sovereign people represented by "We, the People of the United States of America," this issue has been resisted by those who favor the approach maintained in the Articles of Confederation.  The southern states in 1861 were indeed operating under the idea that they had never sacrificed their sovereignty, in a change from their position on New England secession a few decades before.  However, the rest of the nation supported the constitutional concept of the sovereign people, which underlies the Supreme Court decision on Texas secession in 1868.  In effect, SCOTUS ruled that as the people of America as a whole are sovereign, only they as a whole can approve the loss of part of America to secession - not just that fraction of the sovereign people living in the secessionist state.  The Civil War, and with it this court decision, reinforced the assertions at the root of the Constitution and crushed the opposition idea - at least until fairly recently.


 * But, in fact, if we take your argument that Texas is the same entity whether Republic, state within the USA, state operating as secessionist independent sovereignty, state with the CSA, or state restored to the USA, then there is no need for separate pages on Texas. Yet the Republic of Texas that existed from the 1830s to the mid-1840s does have notable significance for being an independent nation for nearly a decade, and I believe it merits inclusion on those grounds, *because it claimed to be a republic in this period*, which it did not in 1861.
 * Reply: I didn't intend to say the Republic of Texas was the same as the State of Texas. I used the word republic because this page is titled Republic of Texas (1861). That's the so-called "republic" I was referring to. The Republic of Texas is obviously a special case. Even things like the California Republic, which was very short-lived and never really a "state", are obvious special cases, because of their historical importance and the widespread usage of the names. Pfly (talk) 22:27, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Reply - My apologies for misunderstanding. I agree completely.Professor Storyteller (talk) 22:56, 10 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment - I've looked into this a bit more. It turns out the "Republic of South Carolina" is a term used in reliable sources, and even described in one as "technically an independent nation". I added a reference to the Republic of South Carolina page. I searched for but could not find any evidence of the phrase "Republic of Texas" being used for the 1861 state. On the contrary, Article XIII of the 1861 Constitution of the State of Texas makes an explicit distinction between the terms Republic of Texas and State of Texas (online here). Further, my searching made it rather clear that the secession of Texas and the joining of the CSA were very tightly linked--that there was no real intention for Texas to be an independent nation. See, for example, TSHA, Constitution of 1861. Also TSHA, Secession ("...With a touch of drama the secession of the state became official on March 2, Texas Independence Day. On March 5 the Secession Convention reassembled and took further steps to join the Confederacy... All current state officials were obligated to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.") In short, by the time Texas seceded it was clear that there would be a new confederation to join. South Carolina, being the first, did not have the luxury of knowing for sure that any other state would secede. Pfly (talk) 04:26, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete. Based on the research provided herein (as well as my own), there appears to be no source indicating that the term "Republic of Texas" was used again for the entity of Texas between secession from the Union and joining of the Confederacy. As it stands, this article violates WP:V. -- Kinu t /c  05:41, 11 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Pfly - I stand corrected, then, on South Carolina - thank you for the research! This is truly fascinating information, especially the actions of the Secession Convention with regards to the CSA and the oaths.  I also did not know about 2 March 1861 being Texas Independence Day in nullified state law.


 * Would I be correct, then, in thinking you've moved from weak delete to stronger support for deletion?Professor Storyteller (talk) 06:02, 11 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Kinu - thank you for your thoughts!Professor Storyteller (talk) 06:02, 11 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete The claim that Texas was an independent state before it became CSA is WP:OR. Even if it were not, nobody has written about it so the claim is not noteworhy. Shii (tock) 05:16, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.