The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
A new opportunity for those on the make appeared when the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, a move that brought Anglo American settlers to the New Orleans region. The proceeds of clandestine commerce were not equitably distributed among all segments of Texas society, however, as the large rancheros were the primary beneficiaries.
The king had ever prohibited such international trade, but during the 1770s he passed decrees regulating access to wild herds (including the levying of fees upon those rounding up mesteño stock), cattle branding, and the exportation of livestock. Then he appointed governors who proved unduly strict in enforcing these laws. Furthermore, legal restrictions upon the rancheros and the reduction of the wild herds due to slaughtering and exportation by Tejanos produced economic difficulties, further angering the ranching elite. Over the years, the pobladores of Texas had developed an identity tied more to their daily necessities than to the imperial designs that the authorities sought to implement. During the colonial era, the Tejanos had survived almost on their own, living by their wits, ignoring the king’s decrees when they conflicted with immediate concerns. They had come to appreciate their semiautonomous relationship with the heartland, and now they resented what seemed an unnecessary intrusion into their personal affairs.
Independence from Spain
The Bourbon Reforms of the Enlightenment, which helped Spain make a remarkable recovery, produced resentment and discontent toward the mother country in New Spain. Over the centuries, Mexico had come to perceive itself as something greater than a mere colony. Thus, Mexicans resented the newly appointed peninsular administrators who practically monopolized the intendancy and tax‐collection positions enacted by the reforms. Furthermore, they disliked the arrogant attitudes of the peninsulares, who insisted upon deference and even subservience to their positions. Naturally, the people resented these developments, but vexation did not signify a wish to overthrow the system, rather a desire to replace a bad government that denied them full participation with a more democratic one (Figure 2.6).
Figure 2.6 The marketplace was the center of life in frontier towns.
Source: Courtesy of the Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas (#1936–6518 P).
It was, then, an imperial crisis that ultimately led the people of Mexico, already alienated by the Bourbon Reforms, to talk of doing something about their dependent status. Spain’s European wars after 1789 sapped the Spanish treasury, which in turn, exhausted the colonies; stepped‐up taxation and other forced contributions to the Crown produced financial distress throughout Spain’s New World holdings. Mexicans denounced the injustices but continued to pay homage to the king.
The drive for Mexican autonomy mounted following Napoleon’s conquest of Spain in 1808. Spaniards resisted the French occupation on May 2 (Dos de Mayo), then organized a Cortes (parliament) to hold the land while the deposed King Ferdinand VII remained in exile. Copying the Iberian example, the Latin American colonies established juntas (committees) to protect the New World empire until Ferdinand could reassume the throne.
In New Spain, criollos in Querétaro (in the state of Querétaro) established a similar junta. Most colonists had felt the pinch of Spain’s money‐raising measures during the era of the Napoleonic wars, among them a priest from Dolores, Guanajuato, named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Suddenly exposed as a plotter to overthrow the peninsular officials who had been running Mexico since Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, Hidalgo opted for a war against bad government. Skirmishes broke out in Hidalgo’s parish at Dolores on September 16, 1810 (Diez y Seis de Septiembre) and developed into the unexpected: a social revolution between the colony’s elite and the downtrodden lower classes, many of the former being the criollos who themselves had planned to gain their independence from the peninsulares.
The revolt rippled into far‐off Texas. Despite the distance between the core government and the frontier, the province was never so isolated that political winds blowing in the interior did not earn the notice of Tejanos. In Texas, one Juan Bautista de las Casas, a military veteran, took up Hidalgo’s grito (cry, or yell) for independence, garnering the support of some of the soldiers in the Béxar presidio, members of the lower class in the city, and local rancheros who had been alienated by recent Crown policies. On January 22, 1811, Las Casas displaced the few official representatives of royalist government still living in Béxar. From the capital, the insurrection widened to other parts of the province. But Las Casas’s rebellion had not gained the support of all Béxareños, and it soon encountered opposition from proroyalist forces in the city who ousted Las Casas on March 2, 1811. Given a trial in Coahuila, Las Casas received a death sentence and was shot in the back for treason; to remind would‐be rebels of the penalty for challenging the status quo, royal officials sent his head to Béxar for public display. Meanwhile, Father Hidalgo, who was defeated in battle on March 21, 1811, also suffered execution.
The sympathy Tejanos displayed for the limited independence movement brought destruction to the province, for civil war did not end following the defeat of Las Casas. One Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, from Nuevo Santander, assumed Hidalgo’s revolutionary mantle. Apparently encouraged by US officials wanting to develop an appropriate foreign policy toward New Spain once that country had achieved its independence, Gutiérrez de Lara worked to wrest Texas from royalist control, rejecting like other liberals in New Spain, the Bourbon belief in the divine right of kings. He encouraged Tejanos, in documents he and his supporters introduced into Texas in early summer 1812, to discard the royal authority under which they had long lived and through revolution, create a political world granting sovereignty to the mass of people (or in the Spanish tradition, to the ayuntamiento). Accompanied by Augustus W. Magee, a former US Army officer at Natchitoches, Louisiana, whose design and those of 130 volunteers was on Texas land, Gutiérrez forded the Sabine River in August 1812 at the head of the Republican Army of the North and captured Nacogdoches. Soon, the expedition exceeded 700 in number, attracting recruits from among Anglo volunteers in Louisiana and members of the local militia. From East Texas, the expedition marched toward Central Texas, captured La Bahía and San Antonio, and proclaimed Texas as an independent state in the spring of 1813. But in August, a royalist force led by José Joaquín Arredondo crushed the rebels (sans Gutiérrez de Lara, who by then had lost favor among the republicans and had been replaced as commander) south of San Antonio at the Battle of the Medina River. It was the bloodiest battle ever fought on Texas soil, with some 1300 rebel soldiers killed. Soon thereafter, the royalists shot 327 suspected rebel sympathizers in San Antonio, and Nacogdoches became the scene of another bloody purge committed by one of Arredondo’s lieutenants. The royalists now ravaged the ranchos, compelling many Tejanos to flee across the Sabine River into Louisiana. For the next several years, these agents of peninsular and criollo power dominated the region, living off the land and harassing the frontier people, most of whom sympathized with the insurgents. By 1821, Spanish rule ended when New Spain achieved its independence. Nacogdoches, with much of its populace having fled, faced extinction as a community.
Resilience
Throughout the colonial era, the number of people who lived in Texas fluctuated, reaching the aforementioned figure of about 4000 early in the nineteenth century, then dwindling to 2240 (excluding soldiers) by 1821. Remarkably, these few thousand pobladores succeeded in transporting traits of their heritage into the next era. Numbers by themselves, therefore, are deceptive: they do not testify to enduring aspects of the Tejanos, among them a unique character as a people of the frontier. As already indicated, the central government of Spain did not strictly dictate life in the Far North. Relative isolation had always guaranteed a modicum of independence and honed the development of attitudes and skills necessary for survival in an unforgiving environment. Even the governor and other royal officials pursued a compromise with viceregal rule, adhering to the old dictum of obedezco