Texas Comes Home: Readmitted to the Union, 1870
On March 30, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act readmitting Texas to the Union, ending five years of Reconstruction rule.
Texas had been out of the Union for nine years. It seceded in 1861, fought for the Confederacy, and when the Civil War ended in 1865 it entered a long, turbulent limbo. Presidential Reconstruction came first and failed; then, with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Congress placed Texas under direct Congressional Reconstruction, with federal authority overseeing the state.
Congress laid out a steep path back. Texas would have to hold a constitutional convention — with delegates elected by all men over twenty-one, regardless of race, color, or "previous condition of servitude" — write a new constitution guaranteeing universal male suffrage, and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The convention met in Austin in June 1868 and labored until February 1869, producing a constitution that built a stronger, more centralized state government than Texas had ever had.
In February 1870, the new Twelfth Legislature assembled in Austin and moved quickly. It ratified the Fourteenth Amendment — and the Fifteenth as well — and chose the state's two new U.S. senators, Morgan C. Hamilton and James W. Flanagan. Every condition Congress had set was met.
On March 30, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act readmitting Texas to representation in Congress. Congressional Reconstruction in Texas was over.
The road had been bitter and contested, and the years ahead would bring their own struggles over the meaning of the rights the new constitution promised. But the bargain of March 30, 1870, still stands: Texas returned to the Union on the terms Congress set — full citizenship and the vote for Black Texans among them. Notably, the readmission act contains no language allowing Texas to leave the Union again. The Lone Star State came home that day, for good.
Photo: Paul B. Joiner (flag design), public domain.
