Volume 10 , Issue 4

The Texas Cession

By the terms of the compromise under which the State of Missouri had been admitted into the Union, there were to be no new slave states West of Missouri, North of the southern boundary of that state. When Texas was annexed to the United States, in 1845, her dominions West of the 100 Meridian extended North to the Arkansas River and therefore included parts of the present states of Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

In compliance with the provision of the Missouri Compromise which forbade the admission of states with slave territory North of the southern boundary of Missouri (Latitude 36 30′, North), the State of Texas relinquished it claim to the ownership of all lands North of that line, November 25, 1850.

The region thus ceded by the State of Texas thus became a part of the public domain of the United States. Oddly enough, in 1857 the Supreme Court of the United States rendered a decision declaring that the Missouri Compromise Act was unconstitutional. -- A Standard History of Oklahoma, Joseph B. Thoburn, Chapter XXVIII, pg. 207, Vol. 1.
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