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
...more
