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September 15 - September 24, 2024
The Anglo colonists, in effect, planned to adopt the language of Mexican debt peonage as a means for protecting chattel slavery.
Coahuila’s most wealthy and powerful family, the Sánchez Navarros, used thousands of peons to run their expansive haciendas that sprawled out around Monclova, which collectively made up one of the largest ranching operations in North America. These peons often suffered forms of physical abuse and coercion (such as chaining, beatings, and whipping) not much different from practices on American plantations, although most Coahuilans nonetheless saw meaningful differences between peonage and chattel slavery. Austin’s colonists, however, planned to blur those distinctions in order to provide legal
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Austin’s contract was nothing more than an attempt to redefine chattel slavery as debt peonage, with no meaningful distinction drawn between the two. Yet with the seal of a notary public from the United States on it, such a document would enable Americans to resume importing slaves into northeastern Mexico.
Slavery rested heavily on the understanding that the government stood behind the institution, and the cloud of uncertainty and insecurity that hung over Texas cotton fields had become simply too much for many Americans. The hopes of Anglos and Tejanos to take advantage of the American cotton economy had run headlong into the antislavery convictions of many Coahuilan politicians.
Most historians argue that slavery played no significant part in bringing on the Texas Revolution and see the onset of the war instead as an almost inevitable clash of cultures between Americans and Mexicans who found themselves too different to remain long under the same government.
A handful of dissenting historians, however, particularly those who study Mexico, have argued the opposite, claiming that slavery played a central—perhaps defining—role in the outbreak of the revolution.
Both approaches focus on slavery as an end in itself for the colonists, rather than placing the institution within the larger context of what slavery was meant to support: the agricultural and economic development of Texas. In so doing, both miss how slavery was embedded in broader economic, social, and political changes sweeping across the territory during those crucial years, as tensions surrounding slave-based agriculture in Texas became part of larger battles raging in Mexico over state sovereignty and federalism.
Adopting a wider perspective, indeed, reveals how a complex tangle of cotton, slavery, and Mexican federalism—rather than any single factor—produced the fights that eventually led to the Texas Revolution.
These matters finally came to a head when they did because of a global boom in cotton prices during the early 1830s that led to a massive expansion in American migration into northern Mexico. The result was a doubling of the region’s Anglo population in only four years that badly exacerbated tensions between those in Texas and dismayed authorities in Mexico City.
When a cabal led by Santa Anna then moved to centralize all authority in Mexico City, Texans rebelled in the name of federalism in order to defend their ability to control the development of the territory.
The difference was that in Texas local control meant, among other things, empowering Anglos and Tejanos to foster the region’s economic development by supporting slave-based agriculture.
It was at the intersection of those powerful forces in northern Mexico—where concerns over Mexican federalism became entangled in the vision that Americans and Tejanos held for Texas as a cotton empire—that we find the underlying causes of the Texas Revolution and the territory’s break from Mexico.
“The men now in power in this state wish to tolerate slavery,” Austin observed with delight, and with the European market possibly turning from “the ‘tarriffed cotton’ of the U.S. to the fine long staple of Texas,” conditions seemed ideal for a flood of American farmers to begin pouring into northern Mexico.8 And then everything changed. On September 15, 1829, President Vicente Guerrero declared an end to slavery throughout all of Mexico, promising to “free those who until today had been considered slaves.”
“It is not conceivable that a free Republic should subject some of its children to slavery,” Tornel thundered, “let us leave such contradictions to the United States of North America.”
Tornel’s efforts at abolition, he later recalled, were calculated at establishing “a barrier between Mexico and the United States” by discouraging further immigration of Americans into Texas, although he had been unable to convince a majority of his fellow legislators to join him.12 When Spain mounted an invasion of Mexico in July 1829, however, the Mexican Congress invested President Guerrero with emergency war powers, suspended the Constitution, and allowed him to rule the country by decree for the duration of the crisis.
For the former slaves the degree was a life-changing event. But for most people in Guerrero, as for most Mexicans, slavery was an integral part of neither their economy nor their lives, and so the president’s decree garnered little notice.15 In Saltillo and Texas, however, the emancipation order produced a firestorm that prompted state officials to defy the presidential directive.
Any effort by the national government to interject itself into such matters of state policy by emancipating the Texas slaves, Músquiz cautioned the governor, would badly undermine Anglo allegiance to Mexico. “There would be absolutely no respect for any authority,” he warned.
With Mexico’s military presence in the region as scant as ever, one consequence of the growing American population in Texas was a corresponding contraction of the ability of Mexican officials to enforce their will in the region when it ran counter to the desires of the Anglo settlers.
Officials in Texas and Coahuila won their reprieve when President Guerrero issued an exemption for Texas in late 1829—almost certainly at the behest of Agustín Viesca—thereby excluding the abolition order from the only portion of Mexico where slavery retained a central role in society.
Public outcry over the president’s use of his wartime powers gave rise to a rebellion that began in Jalapa and ended with Guerrero being forcibly ousted from office at the end of December 1829. Guerrero went into hiding in the mountains of southern Mexico, until he was eventually captured, tried for treason, and executed in February 1831. Nearly all of his decrees—including the one abolishing slavery—were subsequently annulled by Mexico’s national Congress.
Federalism’s failure to bring stability to the nation eroded much of the system’s appeal for some Mexicans and thereby opened the door for the first time since Iturbide for a renewed push toward a more assertive national government. Under the leadership of Alamán, the Bustamante administration thus began centralizing power in Mexico City.
The most controversial portions of the law, however, sought to end all immigration from the United States into Mexico. “It is prohibited that emigrants from nations bordering on this Republic shall settle in the states or territory adjacent to their own nation,” read the law’s eleventh article, which also suspended all ongoing empresario contracts “not already completed.”
The Law of April 6, 1830, was nothing short of a sweeping reassertion of national control over colonization in Texas by cutting off the Anglo settlements’ connections to the United States.
Austin made clear that his newfound opposition to the institution did not come from any concern for people of African descent. His sudden reservations about slavery, he insisted, sprang instead from fears that the black population might one day outnumber and overtake the white population. The massive slave revolt of 1791–1804 that had overthrown French power on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) provided a terrifying example to white Americans like Austin of the dangers that came with a rapidly expanding black population.
And without slave-based agriculture driving a thriving economy in Texas, there would be no migration from the United States to sustain the colonies. “Therefore we must either abandon the finest portion of Texas to its original uselessness,” concluded Fisher, “or submit to the acknowledged, but lesser evil of Slavery.”
Fighting began in Texas in October 1835 when a group of Anglo-Texans opened fire on a Mexican cavalry unit near the hamlet of Gonzales.
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
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Practically every prominent Tejano who had supported Anglo colonization during the 1820s—such as José Antonio Navarro, Francisco Ruiz, and Juan Antonio Padilla—lined up alongside the Anglos against Santa Anna’s centralist regime.
As the rebellion caught fire during the fall of 1835, leaders from across the colonies established a “General Council” charged with creating a new Texas government, even if no one could yet agree on whether that government would be for a new Mexican state or a newly independent nation.
There was, however, widespread agreement among rebel leaders that the financial stability of the region’s next government would depend on cotton.
The rebellion was no longer solely a revolt against centralism—it had become a war to make the Texas borderlands independent of Mexico. The men who made this decision were almost all Anglos—of the fifty-nine delegates at the convention, only two, José Antonio Navarro and Francisco Ruiz, were Tejano—and nearly half of those Anglos had arrived in Texas within the past two years, during the 1830s cotton boom.
Delegates recommended that the Texas Congress be stripped of any power to emancipate slaves or prevent the unlimited importation of enslaved people from the United States. Free blacks were, again, banned from living within Texas, and even slaveholders themselves were forbidden to free their own slaves unless they sent the emancipated to live outside the boundaries of Texas.
Although none of the delegates made any effort to prosecute ongoing importations by people like Monroe Edwards, all agreed that the new Texas government must issue an unequivocal declaration of opposition to the international slave trade as “abhorrent to the laws of God and the feelings of all civilized nations.”82 They recognized—much as Mexico had during the 1820s—that engaging in such traffic would bring international condemnation, making it impossible for Texans to secure the foreign assistance necessary to win their revolution.
“We must be governed by the opinions of others,” the delegates concluded, and so the convention recommended that Texas outlaw the African slave trade as “piracy,” punishable by death.
At least on paper, the new Texas government promised to be the most protective slave regime in North America.
On his way into Texas, Santa Anna sent letters to Mexico City seeking official sanction for freeing slaves as part of the eradication of the rebellion. “There is a considerable number of slaves in Texas also, who have been introduced by their masters under cover of certain questionable contracts, but who according to our laws should be free,” he wrote to his minister of war in Mexico City. “Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of cast or color?”94 Santa Anna’s vision for redeeming northeastern Mexico
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NO MENACING NEW THREAT to slavery or colonization had emerged during 1835 and 1836 that pushed the people of Texas into revolution. In explaining their actions, the revolutionaries pointed instead to Santa Anna’s overthrow of the federalist system under the Constitution of 1824 as the prime mover toward war. With the rise of centralism in the form of a dictatorship in Mexico City, they insisted, there could be no future for Anglo colonies or Tejano villages under a Mexican government that did not support their rights under federalism.
By 1836, however, questions of federalism in Texas could not be separated from the slave-based agriculture that supported growing colonies of expatriate Americans in the region.
It was, in fact, the power of that system to transform the Texas borderlands that brought the colonies into conflict with Mexico’s national government during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Fears that growing American influence along the Mexican frontier might shear the region from Mexico prompted national officials to reassert the power of the central government.
Indeed, by demonstrating that an assertive national government would be highly disruptive to the ongoing development of Texas, Mexico City helped cement the strident devotion to federalism among colonists and Tejanos that led them to revolt against the centralist regime of Santa Anna.
While authorities in Texas managed to find a way to keep slavery alive despite antislavery legislation, they also recognized that Texas could never develop a truly successful slave-based economy without the open support of the government.
The emergence of the Republic of Texas is best understood as an effort among Anglo-Texans to establish a haven for American cotton farmers in a world increasingly hostile to slave labor, foreshadowing similar efforts by the Confederates several decades later.
The break of Texas from Mexico also marked the beginning of a lasting shift in the relationship between Anglo-Americans and non-Anglos, as Tejanos and Indians found themselves increasingly pushed aside in the new Texas borderlands.
Without the funds necessary to support several hundred prisoners of war, the Texas army began leasing out captured Mexican soldiers as “servants” to any Anglo willing to house, clothe, and feed them.
When voters also unanimously approved the March 1836 Constitution and elected a slate of representatives for the new Congress, Texas emerged as the most unlikely creation: an independent slaveholders’ republic, dominated by Anglo-Americans, dedicated to cotton, and built between the borders of the United States and the Republic of Mexico.
The Texas diplomat, in other words, was to sell annexation as the only sure way for U.S. authorities to prevent Texas farms and plantations from becoming powerful economic rivals to the U.S. cotton industry.
Austin slipped into unconsciousness. The former empresario, who did more than anyone to bring Americans into the Texas borderlands, died in the backroom of a ramshackle cabin on December 27, 1836.26
Although the place of slavery within the United States had been contested since the American Revolution, the challenge of balancing political power between slave and free states within the U.S. federal system had become increasingly difficult since the firestorm that erupted in 1819 with Missouri’s petition to enter the Union as a slave state.
In a tortured attempt to portray the Texas nation as a friend to Great Britain’s antislavery efforts, the Texas diplomat found himself resorting to outright lies. It was true, Henderson conceded, that the Republic of Texas sanctioned slavery, but he blamed Mexico for the institution’s endurance. Mexico, he argued, had repeatedly refused to outlaw slavery, and Mexicans had even “sanctioned the introduction of slaves into Texas from Africa.”
And because the anemic Texas government could not afford the manpower needed to enforce tariff duties or slow smuggling along the border, the Republic then turned to levying taxes directly on its citizens. In June 1837 the Texas Congress decreed that every citizen would be required to pay a 1.5 percent tax on the value of certain personal property he or she owned, such as land, slaves, mules, and horses.
