Sam Houston

Biography

Sam Houston was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in 1793 and moved with his family to Maryville, Tennessee, as a teenager. He spent about three years living among the Cherokee, who called him "Raven", and later served under Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. In 1818 he became a sub-agent overseeing the removal of Cherokee from Tennessee to Arkansas Territory.

With Jackson's backing he entered the U.S. House of Representatives in 1823 and was elected governor of Tennessee in 1827. He resigned in 1829 after the end of his first marriage and went back to live with the Cherokee in Arkansas Territory. In 1832 he moved to Mexican Texas, where he rose to lead the Texian Army during the Texas Revolution and won the decisive victory at San Jacinto in 1836.

Houston was elected the first president of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and won a second, non-consecutive term in 1841. He favored annexation by the United States, which came in 1845, and from 1846 represented Texas in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. A unionist slave-owner, he backed the Compromise of 1850 but opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, and later sought the presidential nominations of the American Party and the Constitutional Union Party without success.

Elected governor of Texas in 1859, he opposed secession and refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy, which led to his removal from office in 1861. He died at his home in Huntsville in July 1863. He remains the only person elected governor of two different U.S. states.