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

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.”