If you visit Houston, Texas, you can stay at the Sam Houston Hotel, visit the Sam Houston Monument, drive on the Sam Houston Parkway or take a Sam Houston Boat Tour.

A Virginia native, he took a real shine to the Lone Star State. His dying words to his third wife were, “Texas, Margaret, Texas.” But Tennessee, where he moved as a child, is where his political career began. Like the city of Houston in Texas, Houston County in Tennessee is named for him.

After serving under then Gen. Andrew Jackson, Houston studied law, opened a law office in Lebanon and served as Davidson County’s district attorney, according to the National Governors Association.

He was elected governor of Tennessee in 1827 after a stint in Congress. In a lengthy message to Tennessee House and Senate members, printed in the National Banner and Nashville Whig on Oct. 20, 1827, he implored lawmakers to better the lives of the rural poor.

“The first care of all governments should be, to provide that each individual should have a permanent home and residence,” he wrote.

He didn’t last long as Tennessee’s governor, though. He resigned two years in after separating from his first wife, Eliza, amid talk of alcoholism and infidelity. He headed back to Washington to represent the Cherokee Nation but that didn’t go so well, either.

James K. Polk, then a Tennessee congressman, kept him from clobbering William Stanbery, a representative from Ohio he was feuding with. But Houston and the business end of his cane caught up with his nemesis on April 13, 1832, according to the Tennessee Bar Association.

Francis Scott Key was his defense lawyer. He was fined $500.

So, off to Texas.

After the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, Houston was elected the first president of the Republic of Texas, serving two nonconsecutive terms, according to the NGA. He later served Texas in the U.S. Senate, then as governor.

He was, to put it mildly, a man of contradictions. For a time, he lived among the Cherokee, who called him “Raven.” Using the pen names Tah-lohn-tus-ky and Standing Bear, he wrote in defense of the Cherokee, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Yet he was lifelong friends with Jackson, whose signature on the Indian Removal Act led to the Trail of Tears.

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Houston owned enslaved people during his lifetime but voted against the expansion of slavery, opposed secession in Texas and would not swear an oath to the Confederacy. That ran him out of office for good. The Texas Secession Convention declared the office of governor vacant, and Houston was succeeded by the lieutenant governor in 1861, according to the NGA.

The only person to have served two states as a congressional representative and governor, he retired to his farm near Huntsville, Texas, where he died in 1863. He is buried in Huntsville’s Oakwood Cemetery.

A quote from his friend Andrew Jackson appears on his grave: “The world will take care of Houston’s fame.”

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Sam Houston was governor of both Tennessee, Texas