Volumes sufficient to fill multiple warehouses have been written about the Texas Revolution of 1836 in the century and a half since it culminated in the seventeen minute Battle of San Jacinto. Few topics have inspired such polarized feelings. Many blame Mexico's loss of her northernmost regions on a conscious premeditated conspiracy of Anglo-Americans in the United States to steal Texas by whatever means possible. This conspiracy, supported by the American government in Washington, D.C., first bore fruit in 1835-36 with the Texas Revolution and culminated ten years later with the Mexican War which resulted in the loss of the present-day states of New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California. At the other end of the continuum are those who blame the Mexican people for the misrule of Texas and the ruthless dictatorship of Santa Anna for provoking a fully justified rebellion by Anglo-Americans and Tejanos. While such extreme positions are far too simplistic to explain the events of 1835-36, they continue to be voiced today - a century and a half after the fact.
In truth, there were a multiplicity of factors which led to the revolution.
The Expansionist History of the United States
Certainly one of the most important reasons for Mexico's loss of Texas was the historic expansionism of the United States, which had been growing by leaps and bounds even prior to the American war of independence. British colonists had occupied and developed the Tidewater and Piedmont areas of the Atlantic Seaboard and were occupying the Appalachians when revolution broke out. Americans now, they conquered and peopled the Ohio River Valley, the Transmississippi West of Kentucky and Tennessee, then Florida, and portions of the massive Louisiana Purchase territory. By the time Mexico gained its independence from Spain, Americans were already on the border of the new nation - and in some cases were already over the border.
Whether it was because they wanted new virgin farmland, or they wanted to make the United States a transcontinental nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or they wanted to fulfill what they saw as America's divine mission to bring Christianity and civilization to all of North America - "they wanted" is the key phrase. Because the United States had been expanding for its entire history, many Americans were determined to see that trend continue - either through purchase, or negotiations, or militarily. They looked upon American acquisition of vast areas of Northern Mexico as an inevitability.
