1836 – Sam Houston is inaugurated as the first President of the Republic of Texas. Samuel Houston (March 2, 1793 – July 26, 1863) was an American military general and statesman who played a prominent role in the Texas Revolution in which the Republic of Texas seceded from Mexico. He served as the first and third president of the Republic of Texas and then one of the first two United States Senators from Texas after it became a U.S. state. Prior to this, he served as the sixth governor of Tennessee, and later as the seventh governor of Texas, thereby becoming the only individual to be elected governor of two different U.S. states. In 1832, Houston settled in Mexican Texas, amidst rising tensions between U.S. immigrants and the Centralist government of Mexico. After the 1835 Battle of Gonzales, he became prominent in Texas's revolutionary government and the Texian Army, which he led in the decisive 1836 victory at San Jacinto. After the war, Houston won the 1836 Texan presidential election. He left office due to term limits in 1838, but won another term in the 1841 Texas presidential election. Houston supported the U.S. annexation of Texas, which finally took place in 1845. In 1846, he was elected to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate. He joined the Democratic Party and supported President James K. Polk's Mexican–American War, sparked by the annexation and resulting in the Mexican Cession of further vast territory which would become the Southwestern United States. Despite remaining a slave-owner, Houston's Senate record was marked by his unionism and opposition to radicals from both the North and South. He voted for the Compromise of 1850, which settled disputes concerning the lands taken from Mexico, but against the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which he believed would increase tensions over slavery, later leaving the Democratic Party over the act. He unsuccessfully contested the presidential nomination of the American Party in the 1856 presidential election and of the Constitutional Union Party in the 1860 presidential election. In 1859, Houston was elected governor of Texas. In this role, he opposed Southern secession, and unsuccessfully sought to keep Texas out of the Confederate States of America at the start of the U.S. Civil War. He was the only Southern governor who refused an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy when states started seceding and was forced out of office in 1861.