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Federalists Seek Support in Texas

edifice to be erected; the basis of a friendship useful to both countries is laid, but they have still a common enemy to reduce to the impossibility of doing them harm, and therefore the establishment of a political intercourse between Texas and the federal part of Mexico is not the less important.

The defensive-offensive alliance which Santángelo advocated was to be based upon a treaty specifically acknowledging the absolute and perpetual independence of the former state of "Coahuila and Texas."[3]  He regarded Texas as comprising "the whole ancient territory of Coahuila and Texas" and did not expect it to be a member of the new Mexican federation. It would have the power to treat with the federation as a sovereign state.

The troops to be furnished by Texas in defense of the contemplated federation were to be maintained at the expense of the federation while operating in its jurisdiction. "Neither . . . allied power shall ever interfere in the interior organization of each other, under any political, legislative, civil, military, or religious aspect." Furthermore, the treaty should pledge that no other Mexican state might be admitted to the new Mexican union unless it subscribe fully to the treaty then in effect between the federation and Texas. The news alone of the formation of such an alliance, he declared, would cause the "hordes of Centralists now advancing to the stroke of the whip, to fall back terrified, and their government to be struck with sudden death." If Texas, however, should elect to remain satisfied and a "cool spectator" of the present contest between Centralism and Federalism, "the latter, either conquerors or conquered, would justly and undoubtedly become enraged, and a Mexican war, truly national, would threaten for a long time to come, the political existence of Texas, both as a nation and as a colony.[4]

The idea of such an alliance between Texas and some of the north Mexican states was not new. Three months after the battle of San Jacinto a Zacatecan federalist appealed for "a small assistance on the part of the Texians" to enable the states of Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Sonora, a part of Jalisco, and the territories of both Californias and Nuevo México to separate from the southern part of the Mexican



3. Santángelo incorrectly assumed that Coahuila and Texas were one state, while Texas had only been a district or province attached to Coahuila for administrative purposes.

4. O. de A. Santángelo to Francis Moore, Jr., Editor of the Telegraph and Texas Register, March 6, 1839, in Telegraph and Texas Register, April 10, 1839.

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AFTER SAN JACINTO: The Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1836-1841
Joseph Milton Nance, 1963