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 majority of long-term Anglo settlers, particularly those who stood to lose extensive investments in cotton farms and plantations, resisted calls for outright independence and pushed instead for the restoration of the Constitution of 1824. A smaller group, composed largely of younger Anglos and recent arrivals from the United States—particularly those who had come during the 1830s cotton boom—pushed hard for Texas to declare independence, hoping to turn a rebellion against Mexico City into a rebellion against Mexico as a nation. Most Tejanos, for their part, saw the struggle as part of the broader centralist-federalist civil war raging within Mexico—and since most Tejanos counted themselves as ardent federalists, they threw themselves into the fight alongside the Anglos.