Texas divisionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Texas divisionism is a mainly historical movement that advocates the division of the U.S. state of Texas into as many as five states, a prerogative guaranteed to Texas as a condition of the former Republic of Texas joining the Union in 1845.

Texas divisionists would tend to argue that the division of their state is desirable because as the second largest and second most populous state in the U.S. Texas is too large to be governed efficiently as one political unit and/or that in several states Texans would gain more power at the federal level, particularly in the U.S. Senate to which each state elects two Senators and by extension in the Electoral College in which each state gets two electoral votes for their Senators in addition to an electoral vote for each Representative.

Texas' division was frequently proposed in the early decades of Texan statehood, particularly in the decades immediately prior to and following the American Civil War in which Texas seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. Since approximately the 1930s, Texas divisionism has generally been seen as a fringe movement and proposals to divide the state have not usually been taken seriously.

To this day, Texas is divided by residents into five regions (North Texas, East Texas, Central Texas, South Texas, and West Texas) even though according to the Texas Almanac, Texas has only four major physical regions: Gulf Coastal Plains, Interior Lowlands, Great Plains, and Basin and Range Province. This has been cited as a difference between human geography and physical geography, however some see the perceived existence of five regions (plus, perhaps, the fact that the regions' names usually lack the -ern suffix which is attached to most U.S. states' regions names) as relics of Texas' prerogative to divide itself.