1836 – Sam Houston is elected as the first president of the Republic of Texas. Samuel Houston (March 2, 1793 – July 26, 1863) was an American military general and statesman who played a prominent role in the Texas Revolution in which the Republic of Texas seceded from Mexico. He served as the first and third president of the Republic of Texas and then one of the first two United States Senators from Texas after it became a U.S. state. Earlier he served as the sixth governor of Tennessee, and later as the seventh governor of Texas, the only individual to be elected governor of two different U.S. states. Houston was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia to a slave-owning family and would own slaves throughout his life. The family relocated to Maryville, Tennessee, while he was a teenager. Houston ran away from home to live about three years in a Cherokee village, becoming known as "Raven". He served under General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, and was appointed as a sub-agent to oversee the removal of the Cherokee from Tennessee into Arkansas Territory in 1818. With the support of Jackson and others, Houston won election to the House of Representatives in 1823. He strongly supported Jackson's presidential candidacies and, in 1827, Houston was elected governor of Tennessee. In 1829, after divorcing his first wife, Houston resigned and moved to the Arkansas Territory to live with the Cherokee again. In 1832, Houston settled in Mexican Texas, amidst rising tensions between U.S. immigrants and the Centralist government of Mexico. After the 1835 Battle of Gonzales, he became prominent in Texas's revolutionary government and the Texian Army, which he led in the decisive 1836 victory at San Jacinto. After the war, Houston won the 1836 Texan presidential election. He left office due to term limits in 1838, but won another term in the 1841 Texas presidential election. Houston supported the U.S. annexation of Texas, which finally took place in 1845. In 1846, he was elected to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate. Despite remaining a slave-owner, Houston's Senate record was marked by his unionism and opposition to radicals from both the North and South. He voted for the Compromise of 1850, which settled disputes concerning the lands taken from Mexico, but against the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which he believed would increase tensions over slavery, later leaving the Democratic Party over the act. He unsuccessfully contested the presidential nomination of the American Party in the 1856 presidential election and of the Constitutional Union Party in the 1860 presidential election. In 1859, Houston was elected governor of Texas. In this role, he opposed Southern secession, and unsuccessfully sought to keep Texas out of the Confederate States of America at the start of the U.S. Civil War. A Texas political convention voted to secede from the United States on February 1, 1861, and after Houston refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, the legislature declared the governorship vacant.
