The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
Immigration
These incidents were portents of threats to Texas, forebodings of forces pushing landholders westward from the US Gulf Coast slave states. An ascending cotton revolution in England during the early nineteenth century, along with other motivating impulses, stirred Southern expansionism into Mexico’s northeastern borderlands. In England, cloth manufacturers were rapidly shifting from wool to cotton in a drive to gratify public preference for cloth. The US Slave South emerged as the largest cotton producer, supplying England’s booming industrial plants as well as emerging textile mills in the US northeast. But purchasing new cotton lands in Mississippi and Alabama to meet orders came at prohibitively high costs. Southern plantation owners thereupon fixed their sights on Texas, as cheap farmland there offered prospects for cotton yields enabling growers to accommodate manufacturer demands. Allied in designs upon Texas were ordinary folks harboring their own individual and personal motives (often to flee creditors) for starting fresh in a new frontier.
Texas appeared vulnerable to US intentions given circumstances in the province. Comanches and other Indians regularly swooped into Texas settlements to rustle livestock that they intended to exchange for firearms in markets Americans set up along the Louisiana/Texas border. Southerners readily assented to the Indians’ motives, eager to acquire mules and horses increasingly needed for the heavy work of cotton cultivation. The turbulence of the raids weakened the province, leaving Tejanos contemplating opening Texas to foreign settlement as a countermeasure to Indian devastation.
The material shape of the region further made Texas vulnerable to foreign encroachment, but as in the case of Indian hostilities, outside immigration presented a remedy to the weakened state of the province. Arredondo’s campaign to eliminate all opposition to Spanish rule during the 1810s had left the outpost in ruins. His men had killed so many people or forced entire families to flee to Louisiana that the province struggled for plain survival. Colonists who remained struggled for life essentials, lacking food, clothes, and medical attention. Buildings on the eve of Mexico’s independence stood in a state of disrepair and many fields lay fallow. Anglo immigration posed dangers, but it also extended possibilities for economic deliverance.
Tejanos and local officials appealed to the motherland for help and Mexico searched for answers. Peopling Texas offered a solution to the region’s myriad difficulties, but previous plans for colonization, among them relocating people north from the interior, had failed. With about six million inhabitants settled over an expanse reaching from California to Central America, Mexico lacked the necessary personnel to occupy its vast territory. A government‐directed colonization of the area by foreigners offered an alternative course of action. Immigrants from the United States and Europe would act as buffers in preventing determined US expansion. New communities would form a barrier wall against persistent Comanche raids upon established Texas settlements–Anglo villages and farmsteads forming a cordon to buffer the western outpost of San Antonio would serve such a purpose. Industrious pioneers would help reclaim Texas from its economic plight. After careful consideration, the short‐lived Iturbide government turned to plans that would entice European and Anglo American settlers into Texas.
Actually, Spain had addressed the desperate situation in Texas just before Mexico gained its independence. In January 1821, the Spanish government agreed to a proposal by Moses Austin to let him oversee the settlement of American citizens in Texas. According to the contract, Austin was to relocate 300 Catholic families from the United States to Texas in exchange for a huge personal grant of Texas lands. Since the start of the nineteenth century, Austin had prospered in lead mining in Missouri (once part of Spanish Upper Louisiana). Then the War of 1812 and the subsequent Panic of 1819 had wiped him out, and now he hoped that the Texas venture would help him recover financially.
Upon Moses Austin's death (in Missouri) on June 10, 1821, his twenty‐seven‐year‐old son, Stephen F. Austin (Figure 3.1), assumed the Austin contract, the Spanish‐born governor of Texas, Antonio Martínez, having recognized its legality. Prospective colonists (some of them slave owners) began to arrive in the settlement by the end of 1821, as authorized. In March 1822, however, the national congress informed Martínez that independent Mexico no longer recognized Moses Austin's colonization contract. As the legislature prepared to draft its own law, Austin journeyed to Mexico City to press his claim.
Figure 3.1 Stephen F. Austin. CN 01436, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
He arrived there in late April 1822. He witnessed Iturbide's coronation as emperor in July, then for the next five months waited for the new government to act. He, along with other prospective empresarios (immigration agents) also in Mexico City soliciting land contracts, pressed congress to legally embody into any colonization program the use of slavery, insisting that only through the application of slave labor could the rich Texas lands be converted into productive units. An oligarchy composed of leading families, merchants, and rancheros long living in Texas supported these outsiders in their petitions seeing, in the legitimization of slavery, benefits to economic growth but also the founding of settlements to shield them against the Indians. But the congress thought slavery in Texas problematic; most legislators opposed human bondage. An Imperial Colonization Law passed on January 3, 1823, did open Texas to settlement but it decreed that slaves brought into the province would gradually be freed. Although disappointed that the government had not endorsed the Anglos’ and Tejanos’ call for the broad legalization of the peculiar institution, Austin left partially satisfied, for his contract had been approved that March. However, with Iturbide's overthrow that same month, a new congress was called, all acts of the previous government were annulled, and Austin had to restart his petition. Finally, on April 14, the new congress confirmed his grant, authorizing him to proceed with his plans to import families under the original agreement made between his father and the Spanish government.
His right to locate the full complement of 300 families in Texas finally established, Austin left Mexico City in April 1823 and returned to his colony to find the settlers he had left there in a state of uncertainty. Attacks by the Karankawas, food shortages, and other misfortunes had convinced many of the first wave of settlers to depart. Those who had “toughed it out” awaited word on the recognition of the Austin contract. Others who had moved into the colony since early 1822, when Mexico had ceased to recognize Austin’s right to settle families, similarly hoped that Austin would get his concessions officially sanctioned by the government in Mexico City, so that their presence in Texas might be legalized. Austin regrouped and renewed his call for colonists to fill his contract’s allotment. By the end of the summer of 1824, the land commissioner, Baron de Bastrop, who had originally helped Moses Austin get his contract, had approved most of Stephen F. Austin’s remaining land titles. Some historians refer to the settlers who helped Austin complete his first contract as the Old Three Hundred. San Felipe de Austin, on the Brazos River, became Austin Colony’s principal settlement; it lay some eighty miles from the Gulf, or about sixty miles from today’s Houston (and should not be confused with Austin, the present‐day capital of Texas).
The colonization laws of Mexico
Although several prospective American empresarios had been in Mexico City at the same time as Austin was trying to secure his colonization contracts, only Austin managed to win approval from the provisional congress that succeeded the Iturbide regime. The peopling of Texas, therefore, occurred mainly under the National Colonization Law of August 18, 1824, which the Mexican congress passed while still debating the details of a new national constitution. Though establishing certain restrictions for colonization, the Colonization Law left the individual states of Mexico with complete control over immigration and the disposal of public lands. The legislation instructed the states, however, to remain within the limits of the national constitution. Even though general sentiment in Mexico scorned human