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.
