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September 15 - September 24, 2024
The crush of American farmers making their way into Texas ensured rapid growth of the Republic during the late 1830s, a movement driven by a series of favorable circumstances that enabled Texas to undercut the land market in the southern United States.
Although Texas land had been consistently cheaper than comparable tracts in the United States since the early 1820s, the region’s independence from Mexico made these lands newly attractive to American farmers. The potential insecurities of life under Mexican rule had long dissuaded many would-be American migrants. Yet the emergence of the Republic of Texas as an independent nation meant there was now little in terms of language, political structure, and population that distinguished Texas from most western U.S. states.
By 1839, Galveston emerged as the largest town in Texas—swelling to more than three thousand residents—as it became the epicenter of the Republic’s economy, boasting several commercial wharves and a thriving trade with New Orleans.
Cotton, indeed, often composed more than 90 percent of the Republic’s entire export trade (small shipments of animal hides made up the country’s second-most-valuable export).90 There was a great deal of money to be made serving the needs of the growing number of farmers arriving in Texas, whether from land speculation, supplying the equipment for their farms, or marketing the cotton bales that came from their fields.
The Texas Republic could, in other words, offer slaveholders everything that the United States could not—a government fully supportive of slavery, dedicated to building the infrastructure and trade system necessary for a dynamic cotton economy—thereby making the Republic a sanctuary for American southerners hoping to escape the bane of abolitionism.
Because Texas remained almost entirely a one-crop economy (cotton composed 95 percent of the Republic’s exports as late as 1844), the nation proved deeply vulnerable to any price fluctuations in the market.143 It was, in fact, the combination of cotton prices bottoming out in New Orleans and the profound weakness of Texas currency that accounted for the decimation of the Republic’s economy during the early 1840s.
Whatever his motives, the Texas Senate gleefully approved the first two treaties when they arrived in Austin in January 1841, and promptly sent them back to London. The anti-slave-trade treaty, however, did not arrive until after the close of the legislative session, which meant it could not even be considered until Congress reconvened the following year. Hamilton, in the meantime, attempted to present the first two treaties for Parliament’s approval, but Palmerston coolly informed him that nothing could be done until the Texas Senate also approved the anti-slave-trade treaty. The politics of
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And so, without approval from the Texas Congress, Lamar outfitted a 320-man expedition of soldiers, traders, newspapermen, and adventurers who began an arduous overland trek toward New Mexico in June 1841. New Mexicans, however, had no interest in joining Texas, and Governor Manuel Armijo placed the entire Texas delegation under arrest four months later when it finally straggled into Santa Fe. The Texas prisoners were then put on a forced march to Mexico City (several dying along the way), as the entire debacle became an international political embarrassment for the Republic and sparked
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“Old Sam H.,” observed one Texan, “with all his faults appears to be the only man for Texas—He is still unsteady, intemperate, but drunk in a ditch is worth a thousand of Lamar and Burnet.”
Yet the hard lesson of the Republic’s early years was that the political liabilities attached to being a slaveholding nation outweighed the economic advantages of being cotton country.
Even as it floundered, the Republic’s existence continued to transform the region. By undercutting the American land market, the Republic remained a magnet for Americans searching for cheap cotton lands and, by the early 1840s, for southerners escaping bankruptcy in the United States after the Panic of 1837. Swarms of new settlers overwhelmed the Indian and Tejano populations in eastern Texas, producing violence that forced eastern tribes and Tejano natives from their homes and communities.
Mass migrations of American farmers also meant that forced migrations of African Americans into Texas grew dramatically during these years. From 1837 to 1842, the enslaved population of Texas expanded from around five thousand to nearly twenty thousand men, women, and children.
Indeed, nearly all of the slaveholders who came to claim acreage in the Republic during these years were smallholders. Men of means in places like Mississippi, Alabama, or Louisiana recognized that the Republic’s dysfunctional government could not enforce its own statutes, and so most made the calculation that the risks of relocating to Texas outweighed the benefits of cheap land.
It was this profound failure of Texas as a slaveholding republic and cotton nation that led to the unlikely annexation of the Texas borderlands to the United States.
The British were betting, in other words, that Texans would prove to be more dedicated to ensuring the survival of their new nation than preserving their labor system. Yet the British badly misjudged Texan priorities.
The Vasquez invasion also demonstrated how the flood of Americans who came into Texas after 1836 in pursuit of cotton lands had rapidly eroded relations between Tejanos and Anglo-Americans.
Following several narrow escapes from bands of roving vigilantes, Seguín realized he would not survive long if he remained in Texas and decided that his only option was to seek refuge in Mexico. Riding along the same road that had guided Vasquez, Seguín crossed the Río Grande in May 1842. He was then promptly arrested by Mexican authorities, who threw him into prison as a traitor to Mexico for his role in the Texas Revolution.
The rapid fall of Juan Seguín from Texan grace, from hero of the 1836 revolution to despised Mexican traitor, revealed how the founding of Texas as a cotton nation had led to a broad shift in attitudes among Anglo-Texans toward ethnic Mexicans. It also shone a bright light on the deep sense of vulnerability and desperation that now pervaded the embattled slaveholders’ republic.
Mexican diplomats also used slavery as the centerpiece in their ongoing diplomatic efforts to undermine the chances of Texas’s gaining international support and reminded European governments as often as they could of the Republic’s dedication to the institution.
One of the remarkable consequences of the heated debates that took place within the United States during the late 1830s over annexing Texas—fights that invariably turned on slavery and American westward expansion—was how they made their way into Mexico, where they bolstered widespread fears of a U.S. slaveholder conspiracy to steal northern Mexico.
But as they looked back on the 1836 secession of Texas and read wild accusations made over slavery and Texas in American newspapers, most Mexicans came to believe that powerful slaveholding forces within the United States were colluding to tear away Texas.18 Such fears added tremendous urgency within Mexico to reclaim Texas and helped produce the Vasquez raid in March 1842. Mexico then launched a second invasion in September 1842, when an army of twelve hundred under the command of General Adrian Woll captured and occupied San Antonio for nine days. Among the invaders was Juan Seguín, who had
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Indeed, the flood of Americans coming to the Republic of Texas soon slowed to a trickle. The Republic had survived during the late 1830s solely because of the large and steady stream of American immigrants spurred on by the prospect of cheap cotton lands and the Republic’s promises to provide more security for farmers—particularly on slavery—than Mexico had. By the early 1840s, however, much of that appeal had evaporated. The ineptitude of the Texas government and recent invasions by Mexico convinced most reasonable people that Texas could not defend itself or its citizens, while the
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The fact that Mexico offered a haven to escaped slaves fed directly into Anglo-Texan fears about collusion among Mexicans, Indians, and African Americans. Newspaper accounts of runaways often speculated that Mexican agents, apparently hoping to destabilize the Texas Republic, were actively encouraging slaves to escape.
In March 1839, while pursuing a band of Mexicans and Indians, an Anglo-Texan posse captured “a negro by the name of Raphael.” Under interrogation, Raphael testified that he had joined up with a roving gang of Mexicans and Indians in armed opposition to the Republic of Texas and “acknowledged himself a friend to their designs, and declared that he would continue to be.” The audacity of this African American’s “hostile attitude toward the Texans” convinced his captors that Raphael was beyond redemption. They shot him and then rode on.
“Opinion stigmatizes persons who maltreat their Slaves,” he explained, “and the general tendency is to feed them sufficiently, and to use them without rigour.” Yet the Republic’s legal code afforded virtually no rights to the enslaved because, as Kennedy pointed out, Texans had purposefully strengthened the laws protecting slavery when they established the Republic.
“The institution of slavery is engrafted upon our Constitution, and interwoven with the very existence of the Government,” explained the Gazette’s editor. “Its abolition would involve the overthrow of both, as well as bear along with it a train of evils, resulting not only in the destruction of the civil institutions of the country, but of all order and security both to person and property.”
With almost no other options, the Houston administration launched a renewed push to convince the United States to annex the Texas borderlands. Its strategy was to overcome American resistance to annexation by emphasizing how the eminent collapse of Texas would leave the southern United States vulnerable to British influence.
Such reports confirmed a growing suspicion among John Tyler’s closest advisers that Great Britain intended to assault the slave-based economy of the U.S. South as part of a larger strategy to encircle and stymie the further growth of the United States. The Tyler administration, therefore, responded immediately to suggestions from Texas to renew annexation talks, hoping to prevent Great Britain from using the implosion of the Texas Republic as a means for undermining the further development of the southwestern United States.
Northern politicians who might have otherwise opposed annexation as the expansion of U.S. slave territory suddenly found themselves eager to strike a blow against British encroachment and allowed the Tyler administration to quietly round up enough supporters to ensure the approval of an annexation treaty in the next session of the U.S. Senate. “I can make the question so clear,” Upshur bragged to a friend, “that even the Yankees will go for annexation.”
At his inauguration as the Republic’s second president in 1838, Lamar had outright rejected the idea of annexation because he believed that joining the United States would expose Anglo-Texans to the deadly influence of American abolitionists. By the mid-1840s, however, Lamar had come to fear abolitionists in Great Britain even more, and he now urged his fellow Texans to join the United States because it represented the only sure way to preserve slavery in the region. “I paused in my opinions,” he explained, “and turned to seek for my country a shelter from the grasp of British cupidity beneath
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Because nothing about annexation was certain, Texas diplomats also worked on a backup strategy. In collaboration with a Louisiana congressman, Van Zandt managed to get another bill introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives to eliminate American taxes on cotton imported from Texas.
Seething with anger over the possibility of Great Britain using Texas as a means for attacking slavery in the United States, Calhoun denounced British interference in North America and heralded the impending annexation of Texas as indispensable for protecting the future of American slavery.113 Reprinted in newspapers across the United States, Calhoun’s blistering proslavery remarks seemed to reveal annexation as nothing more than an effort to defend the sectional interests of the southern United States. With sectional tensions now inflamed, northern support for the treaty evaporated.
Tyler and Van Zandt had long discussed various fallback measures if the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the 1844 treaty, and they agreed to attempt to push a joint resolution for annexation through the U.S. Congress. An unprecedented method (and therefore legally questionable), a joint resolution would require only a bare majority in both houses rather than the clearly impossible two-thirds majority in the Senate. The U.S. Congress took up the matter when it reconvened in early 1845, and the House of Representatives passed the resolution on January 25, 1845, by a vote of 120 to 98. The wisdom of
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More important than anything, however, was the promise by the United States to settle the boundary dispute between Texas and Mexico. Mexico still did not recognize Texas as an independent state and maintained that the Nueces River marked the region’s southern boundary. Anglo-Texans continued to insist that Mexico had no claim to the territory and that the Río Grande marked the southern border of Texas. The United States now offered to enforce the perspective of the Anglo-Texans.
Most people, however, pointed toward a single defining reason for annexation: the Republic’s painful experiment in nationhood had failed, and the U.S. government could now offer them the security in their slaveholdings and the protection for their farms needed to develop the full agricultural potential of the region.
Up until the mid-1840s, most Texas newspapers had applauded the tiny stream of immigration coming from Europe, particularly the small contingent of Germans who made their way into the western portions of the Republic. Following the failure of the 1844 annexation treaty, however, paranoia about British efforts to root out slavery in the region reached new levels, giving rise to wild rumors of abolition coming to Texas in the form of European immigrants. Because new arrivals could become voting citizens of Texas within six months, many Anglo-Texans feared that abolitionists would send enough new
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President James K. Polk came into office determined to wrest California from Mexico, anxious to claim the rich Pacific coastline—and all the lucrative trade opportunities that would come with it—for the United States.
Polk dispatched a special envoy to Mexico City during the fall of 1845—even before annexation was complete—with an offer to pay up to $25 million in exchange for the territory between Texas and California. Mexico’s leaders, deeply divided among themselves and unwilling to cede their far-northern territories to the United States, refused to receive the envoy. Polk, in response, ordered the U.S. Army to take up a position along the banks of the Río Grande, far beyond the Nueces River that Mexico considered the border of Texas. When the Mexican commander on the other side retaliated, the U.S.
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In late July 1846, McCulloch’s company discovered that Juan Seguín was somewhere in the territories north of Monterrey, commanding a small Mexican cavalry unit known as the Escuadrón Auxiliar de Béjar. The Escuadrón consisted of displaced Tejanos who, like Seguín, had fled into northern Mexico during the years since 1836—pushed out by increasing Anglo violence against Mexican Texans—and in the process had been branded by Anglo-Texans as traitors for seeking refuge in Mexico.
It was a remarkable turn of events, since the Seguín family had done more than almost anyone in Mexico to bring Americans into the Texas borderlands.
The increasing flood of Americans making their way into the territory soon overran both Tejanos and Indians. Secession from Mexico stripped Tejanos of their unique political standing within the region (since they no longer could serve as power brokers between Anglo settlements and the Mexican government), rapidly eroding their status within the new Republic of Texas.
Through it all, three broad forces—the Atlantic cotton economy, the international debates over slavery, and the efforts of various governments to control the Texas borderlands—had combined to shape these migrations and thereby transformed the shared edges of the United States and Mexico in ways that brought momentous changes to the rest of North America.
Heated debates broke out even before the end of the U.S.-Mexican War and only intensified when California petitioned in 1849 to enter the Union as a free state. During the years that followed, political fights surrounding the future of the territories taken from Mexico eroded nearly all the middle ground between pro- and antislavery forces in the United States.
The Confederates lost their war for independence in 1865 and thus never had the opportunity to test the strength of their proposed nation. The Republic of Texas, however, survived for nearly a decade, offering a tantalizing glimpse into what might have been for the Confederacy.
Following annexation and the close of the U.S.-Mexican War, Americans flooded into the newest addition to the United States in unprecedented numbers. During the three years from 1847 to 1850, more than 70,000 people came into Texas. During the decade that followed, another 400,000 followed. By the eve of the American Civil War, four out of every five Texans had arrived in the region only after it became part of the United States.
No one played a more active role in opening Texas to Anglo-Americans than the Tejano leadership in San Antonio. Yet Tejanos, too, found themselves forced to the margins of Texas society by the transformations they helped create. American-written histories of Texas soon began offering Anglo-centric explanations for how the Mexican Far North had become the American Southwest, and their pages had no room for the pivotal role Tejanos played in ushering the cotton empire into Texas.
José Antonio Navarro, one of Stephen F. Austin’s closest collaborators and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, published a series of newspaper articles during the 1850s arguing that the history of Tejano sacrifice for Texas required that the Anglo-Americans “treat with more respect this race of men who, as the legitimate proprietors of this land, lost it together with their lives and their hopes.”
