In
Break It Up, Kreitner details stories overlooked in most histories of the country’s nineteenth century. For instance, thanks to Texas’s success in cracking off of Mexico, the leading American separatist group at the time—thousands of Mormons, restless in Illinois, looking to find a home beyond the reach of Washington—nearly chose South Texas over Salt Lake City. The Mormons “had closely followed Texan developments, sympathizing with another experiment in independence,” Kreitner writes. Perhaps the Republic of Texas could host the wayward Latter-day Saints. Perhaps Texas could be their new Zion. Kreitner continues:
Sam Houston was all ears. Warring with Comanches, wary of Mexico’s attempts to reclaim its lost province, worried that annexation to the United States would never happen, Houston believed that allowing the Mormons to settle in southern Texas offered advantages for both sides: Texas would have a buffer, defended by the Mormons’ impressive militia, between itself and Mexico, while the Saints could finally have a land all their own, far from their American tormentors.
Those dreams of a Texan-Mormon alliance never came to fruition, largely because raging Americans murdered Mormon founder Joseph Smith soon thereafter. The new leader, Brigham Young, Kreitner says, broke off talks with Texas because he believed, rightly, that the Lone Star Republic was gravitating toward eventual American annexation. And so Texas’s underbelly remained soft, ripe for a revanchist Mexico to come storming northward once more. Rather than the Mormons and the Texans allying in mutually reinforcing independence, both went their separate ways—and, perhaps as a result, ended up in America’s embrace.