[Prospero]

I'm a seventh generation Texan, tried and true. I could enjoy independence also and am ambivalent about the Union, but history compels me to remember South Carolina's port of Charleston in 1860 provided fully two-thirds of the revenue to the federal government. This explains in part their reluctance to allow South Carolina to leave the Union, other than feet first.

It's one of those sad facts of history not taught in government schools, just as their were 700 free African Americans who were slave owners living in Charleston, also, according to the 1860 Census.

If such an undertaking as declaring Independence in Texas were to succeed, it would need to overcome reluctance to commit the same errors of the Confederacy at the outbreak of the War Between the States. After First Manassas, not moving directly into Washington was an error the Army of Northern Virginia lived to regret.

The logistics of a war with Mexico invading from the South and the Union invading from the North, both unnecessarily galvanized by the convenient distraction of "rebellion" is a nightmare I would rather not dwell on.

Peaceful Non-Cooperation is a better choice, it seems to me, to achieve the purposes of a Free People, bound to gain the support of those who love Liberty everywhere, though I can also think of few things less likely to happen if Texas' cooperation in the Union's agenda is coerced. Just such a horror might be precisely what the Statists would prefer, don't you imagine? What would serve their purposes better than the unifying spell of hatred that could be cast elsewhere in the Union?

Still, like Lee, if Texas were to decide to leave the Union, I would choose to fight or die in her defense. The Collective knows this better than we give them credit for, as they always use the conscience of those who have a conscience as a club to beat down the spirit of Independence and individual liberty.

She who bore me is worthy of more than life, as is liberty, though no such fight is necessary. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

[x]

... history compels me to remember South Carolina's port of Charleston in 1860 provided fully two-thirds of the revenue to the federal government. This explains in part their reluctance to allow South Carolina to leave the Union, other than feet first.

It's one of those sad facts of history not taught in government schools ...

Do you have a source on that? New Orleans would have been a busier port at that time. But taxes were paid on goods coming in, not on goods going out.

My guess is that more tariff revenue would have come from New York than from Charleston: "By about 1840, more passengers and a greater tonnage of cargo came through the port of New York than all other major harbors in the country combined ... [Wikipedia]"