No secession ball will mark the day. Nor, it appears, are any other commemorative events planned by Texas, which would rather boast of its time as an independent country. But 150 years ago today, shortly after 11 a.m. on Feb. 1, 1861, a state convention voted overwhelmingly to secede from the Union.
In Austin, on the second floor of the old Texas statehouse just south of the current Capitol building (near the present-day Alamo and Texas Rangers monuments), cheering delegates to the special convention approved a short document declaring that the federal government was becoming "a weapon with which to strike down the interests and prosperity of the people of Texas and her Sister slaveholding States." Texas, they stated, was henceforth a "separate Sovereign state ... absolved from all allegiance to the United States." (An even more explicit "declaration of causes" followed a day later; it's well worth a read.)
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