Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History)

by Andrew J. Torget

The result was one of the most consequential alignments of the nineteenth century: at precisely the same moment the cotton revolution made slave labor more profitable than ever, the rising power of global antislavery forces put that labor system under sustained political attack for the first time in human history.

This book examines the Texas borderlands as the far-western front of the cotton revolution in North America, arguing that the same economic and political forces that created Mississippi and Alabama reached beyond U.S. borders and remade northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the American South. The wrenching changes that overtook this corner of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, in turn, brought far-reaching consequences to both Mexico and the United States, as struggles over cotton and slavery helped reshape the wider continent.

One of the central themes of this book, therefore, is that understanding the complex relationship of the Texas borderlands to the rest of the world is central to understanding the evolution of this portion of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands.

Because cotton production was so tightly interwoven with enslaved labor during the first half of the nineteenth century, international disputes over slavery emerged as the third defining force shaping the Texas borderlands.

This is a history of how the rise of a particular form of capitalism—the cotton complex, which relied on enslaved labor and intricate systems of finance and international trade regulated by various governments—shaped the movement of people and ideas into the U.S.-Mexican borderlands during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Explanations for how the United States came to control Mexico’s far-northern territories, for example, have long centered on notions of “manifest destiny” propelling Americans westward in an inexorable march toward the Pacific Ocean.

The movement of Americans into Texas was, instead, the result of global economic forces and specific government policies that together convinced tens of thousands of individuals to seize opportunities in the region on their own behalf rather than as the vanguard of the United States.

The rush of Americans into Texas during the 1820s, for example, simply could not have happened as it did without the consent—if not outright support—of the Mexican government and people.

Despite the pioneering work of a handful of historians who have delved into the expansion of American slavery into the Mexican frontier, that story has remained a sidelight within the literature that rarely connects the evolution of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands to the rapid development of the Mississippi River Valley.14 The history of cotton in pre-annexation Texas has received even less attention, with mentions of the industry—and its connections to controversies over slavery—scattered among a handful of works.

Because Americans in Mexico had to operate within Mexico’s federal political system, it was the Mexicans of Texas—not the Anglo-Americans—who became the essential powerbrokers in forging political alliances that brought the global cotton market into northern Mexico.

The Texas nation was, instead, a dress rehearsal for the creation of the Confederacy two decades later, offering a remarkable window into the worldview of nineteenth-century American slaveholders and their hopes for building a cotton empire along the Gulf Coast of North America.

The central premise of this work is that common threads ran throughout those decades that tied together disparate events—ranging from Comanche raids in New Spain during the 1810s to fights between the United States and Mexico over annexation during the 1840s—which have long appeared to have little in common. These were, indeed, the same threads that tied the territory and its people to the larger world around them.

The transformation of Texas, as a result, proved far more volatile and destabilizing for Mexico than the evolution of New Mexico or California. Texas was, for example, the only portion of Mexico’s frontier where expatriate Americans became the dominant population, the only region where plantation agriculture came to define the economy, and the only territory in Mexico that evolved into a slaveholding society.

Although men and women from the southern United States did their utmost to transform the region into a Mexican version of Mississippi, they instead found themselves attempting to build a plantation society in circumstances unlike anything they encountered in the American South.

In the end, what was so remarkable about the Texas Republic was its swift downfall, and how its collapse marked the first failure of American farmers to construct a nation built atop cotton and slavery.

The story of Texas lays bare not only the powerful role that cotton played in shaping a particular vision for the Gulf Coast among American slaveholders during the first half of the nineteenth century but also the profound limits of that vision.

The flood, while devastating, had merely exposed the decay left by what the governor saw as a century of neglect and mismanagement by Spanish authorities. Texas, he recognized, had always been treated by the Spanish crown as a distant, unimportant hinterland, leaving outposts like San Antonio—even before the flood—in desperate straits.

Southern portions of Austin’s colony encompassed Karankawa lands, leading to violent encounters between the tribe’s various nomadic bands and the new American arrivals. Austin began organizing militia raids on Karankawa camps in 1823 and then launched an all-out war of extermination—“to pursue and kill all those Indians wherever they are found”—that decimated the tribe and pushed the survivors west of the Colorado River by 1825.

Following several shows of force by the empresario—Austin, in one case, forced a Tonkawa chief to whip several of his men for stealing Anglo horses—the Tonkawas signed a formal peace accord and then retreated northward, beyond the limits of the new Anglo settlements.

The Anglo-Tejano alliance had thus succeeded in opening northern Mexico to American colonization, in part because people like Erasmo Seguín and Stephen F. Austin—each for his own reason—saw great value in bringing the cotton frontier into Texas. Yet much of that success hinged on how Americans imagined Mexico, and Austin and the Tejanos spent enormous amounts of time attempting to persuade leaders in Mexico City to establish policies and laws that would reassure would-be American migrants that life in northern Mexico would be as secure as life in the southern United States.

By refusing to outlaw slavery, despite widespread antislavery sentiment within the congress, Mexico’s national government made it possible for the cotton frontier to make its way into northeastern Mexico.

Bean’s proposal revolved around a simple plan for changing the legal status of enslaved people in northern Mexico. He proposed that Austin’s colonists take their enslaved laborers before the nearest Mexican official, declare how much they had paid for each slave, and then offer to allow those slaves to gain their freedom by repaying their own value through labor. Each slave would become, in effect, a contracted laborer, working for however long it took to repay their “debt” to their former master. Bean’s proposal, however, was never meant to free anyone. Because masters would control the accounting, Bean pointed out, they would also make certain that a slave’s debt could never be repaid, ensuring that enslaved men and women in Texas “will be the same to you as Before.”

All the colonists would need to do in order to preserve slavery in Texas, Bean explained to Austin, was simply call the institution something other than slavery.

Although Mexico City had delegated questions of American colonization to individual states, that had done nothing to resolve disputes among Mexicans about the role slavery would play in the development of northern Mexico.

The debates that had once raged in Mexico City over slavery, colonization, and cotton thus reemerged with new intensity in Coahuila during the late 1820s, when Anglo-Americans, Tejanos, and Coahuilans fought with one another over the future of American migration into the territory.

Yet the resulting battles produced a state that neither fully embraced nor fully rejected slavery, ensuring that neither vision for the future of Texas would be realized.

Although leaders of the Anglo-Tejano alliance might carve out a place for cotton and slavery to endure in Texas, they also came to realize that they could not build a thriving slave society while in conflict with their government.

As drafted by the legislature in Saltillo, Article 13 of the new constitution read: “The state prohibits absolutely and for all time slavery in all its territory, and slaves that already reside in the state will be free from the day of the publication of the constitution in this capital.”

Resurrecting arguments they had made in Mexico City in 1823–24, Tejano elites protested that northeastern Mexico would remain impoverished and ungovernable for the foreseeable future without slave-based agriculture driving Americans into Texas.

The rapid closing of Anglo-Tejano ranks revealed the shared commitment of men like Austin and Saucedo to defend slavery as a means for supporting American colonization. Yet it also revealed their practical response to the daunting new challenges of developing the region under the shadow of Coahuila. With only a single Texas representative in the Coahuila-Texas legislature, any revision of Article 13—or any other law or policy concerning Texas—would require all the political force that Anglos and Tejanos could collectively muster.

If Texas slaves learned that the state legislature were about to declare them free, Thompson and Payton feared, enslaved men and women in the region might resort to violence to prevent their masters from returning them to enslavement in the United States.

The ongoing debates within the Saltillo legislature about the future of slavery in northeastern Mexico had thus become part of the debates in the U.S. press about the future of slavery in North America.

Yet the seeds for a more militant and confrontational antislavery movement had already taken root in the United States by the late 1820s, as moral and political concerns about the institution’s future in the country continued to grow in certain—mostly northeastern—communities.

There would be no self-reproducing class of enslaved laborers in the Texas colonies, as had developed in the American South, to continue working the cotton fields of the Anglo colonists. The current generation of slaves in northeastern Mexico, the Saltillo Congress had decided, would be the last to be enslaved for life.

Reports of Edwards’s ill behavior eventually reached the desk of the president of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria, who revoked his empresario grant and ordered Saucedo to expel the American from Mexico. A disgruntled Edwards responded by riding into Nacogdoches in December 1826 at the head of a dozen armed men, who promptly took over the town. Edwards and his posse then launched a rebellion, declaring Texas to be the independent “Republic of Fredonia” and promising to throw off Mexican rule as “the yoke of an imbecile, faithless, and despotic government, miscalled a Republic.”

Fearing that the Fredonian rebellion could give Manuel Carrillo’s antislavery coalition control of the ongoing slavery debate in Saltillo, Austin urged the rebels to surrender themselves immediately to Mexican authorities as the “one way for you all to save yourselves and only one.”

The disputes that led to the Fredonian rebellion were not themselves about slavery, and the revolt itself failed within a matter of weeks because so few Anglos rallied to its cause.

Reports bandied about in U.S. newspapers of American slaveholders rebelling against Mexican abolitionism helped foment an image of the Texas borderlands as an unstable region where cotton planters clashed violently with the Mexican government. Such stories would prove highly effective at dissuading potential colonists in the southern United States from considering migration to Mexico, creating problems that American empresarios and Tejano leaders could not easily undo, no matter what the Saltillo legislature decided.

On January 31, 1827, the newly revised version of Article 13 was read before the Congress: “In the state no one is born a slave and six months after the publication of this constitution in each center of the state the introduction of slaves will not be permitted under any pretext.”55 The revisions represented a significant shift from the article’s original thrust, in that it no longer promised to free slaves already present in northeastern Mexico. It would, however, end the importation of slaves following a six-month period, and promised freedom upon birth to the children of enslaved parents.

Emancipated black people, he explained, would never attain high standing in society. Thus they needed to be trained “to be laborers and servants” in order to survive, and he could think of no better school for that than slavery.

They published it in Saltillo with the completed constitution on March 11, 1827, and in its final form Article 13 remained unchanged from the revisions that had taken place between November 1826 and January 1827: “In the state no one is born a slave, and six months after the publication of this constitution in the centers of each part of the state neither will the introduction of slaves be permitted under any pretext.”

By lining up strategic support in the Congress through Baron de Bastrop, the Anglo-Texans and Tejanos had managed to wield greater influence in the state legislature than their single representative could have managed alone, and thereby pressured the Saltillo Congress into making significant changes in the interest of Texas’s long-term development.

Bringing the Viesca faction of the state legislature into their proslavery alliance played a key role in that success, and the end result was an Article 13 far different from its original design: instead of immediately abolishing slavery outright, the constitution established a long-term framework for gradual abolition to come to northeastern Mexico. In the process, the constitution implicitly endorsed the continued lifelong enslavement of African people already in the region by making no provision for their freedom and by opening a six-month window for future slave importations.

For Coahuilan legislators like Manuel Carrillo and Dionisio Elizondo, the original goal of immediate abolition in Article 13 had been traded away in exchange for antislavery provisions that committed the state to embracing freedom within a generation. For empresarios like Stephen F. Austin and the Tejano leadership in San Antonio, the constitution’s slave provisions pitted important short-term gains against significant long-term challenges. While there would be no widespread confiscation of enslaved property by the state, Texas officials would be hard pressed to convince new settlers from the United States to move with their slaves to Mexican territory.

When weighing all the risks that came with beginning a new life in Mexico, most Americans preferred the relative security of Austin’s established colonies over the relative insecurity of any of the other less established empresario grants. A focus on security helped Austin by funneling more Americans migrants into his colonies, but it also revealed in stark detail just how easily U.S. perceptions of Mexico—particularly in regard to slavery—could shift and disrupt the movement of Americans.

“Only article 13 of our constitution is preventing many wealthy and powerful people from moving to Texas,” Austin informed the governor. If the state government were to endorse slavery, thus opening northeastern Mexico to an exodus of disgruntled American farmers looking for a new place to grow cotton for export to England, Austin promised that “in a very few years the State of Coahuila and Texas will have more wealth and trade than any other state in the entire Mexican federation.”

“These ideas that so much degrade the men who proclaim so greatly liberalism,” Madero thundered to his fellow legislators, “I do not think the colonists of Austin, the Colorado and Guadalupe have abandoned them on the other side of the Sabine.”

Despite strenuous objections from Texas—Austin protested that “the result would be to eliminate emigration in its entirety” and “the state of Coahuila-Texas will be reduced to ruin”—the passage of this law in September 1827 demonstrated the resilience of antislavery sentiment in certain quarters of northern Mexico.

By the summer of 1828, no census of the slaves in Texas had yet arrived in Saltillo, and the political head of Texas, Ramón Músquiz, forwarded a report to the governor of Coahuila-Texas detailing why. The report included two letters from Austin’s colony explaining that the slave census had not been collected because local slaveholders did not speak Spanish (and thus did not know that reporting their slaves to local authorities was necessary) and because the planters all lived too far from one another to make visiting each plantation practical.

With the possible failure of the American colonies looming, Austin gathered the leading settlers of his colony on March 31, 1828, to seek a way around the problem of emancipation. As they debated possible solutions, a consensus emerged to adopt the same scheme that Peter Ellis Bean proposed two years earlier in his letter from Mexico City. “Considering the paralyzed state of immigration to this Jurisdiction from the U.S. arrising from the difficulties encountered by Imigrants in bringing servants and hirelings with them,” they declared at the end of their meeting, “this Body conceive it their duty to propose to the Legislature of this state” the need to pass a “Law whereby emigrants and inhabitants of this state may be secured in the Contracts made by them with servants or hirelings in foreign countries.”