Sam Houston had initially sought annexation by…

Sam Houston had initially sought annexation by the U.S. but drops that hope during his first term as president, which ends on December 10, 1838; the Texas constitution does not allow a president to serve consecutive terms.

Texas' second president, Mirabeau B. Lamar, had served under Georgia's Governor George M. Troup during the expropriation of Creek Indian lands for the benefit of white settlers in that state.

Never sympathetic toward natives in general and predisposed to the removal of the Cherokee, in the wake of the Killough incident and the publication of Rachel Plummer's narrative of her captivity among the Comanche, Lamar's demands that the Cherokee leave Texas will result in the Cherokee War in 1839 and the violent expulsion—commonly referred to as "removal"—of the Cherokee to Indian Territory.