The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
The National Colonization Law of 1824 emanated from a developing federalist‐liberal philosophy advanced by men who planned the creation of a republic based on the principles of the American Revolution and the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The Federalists, so called because their party advocated concentrating government power in the states, included leaders such as Valentín Gómez Farías of Zacatecas and Lorenzo de Zavala of Yucatán. They were opposed by conservatives, whose support came from the clergy, major landholders, and the military, and because they favored a strong central government, were called Centralists. Using the unfulfilled dream of establishing a republic and the abdication of Iturbide to their advantage, the liberals created the Federal Constitution of the United States of Mexico on October 4, 1824. (Measures such as the National Colonization Law that the congress passed in the months preceding the constitution’s adoption were not superseded by the new document.) The republican constitution sought to satisfy regional interests by giving states control over their internal affairs and by diluting the power of the national government. As its framers had hoped, the new document resembled the US Constitution in many ways as well as borrowing items from the Spanish Constitution of 1812. Among those who signed the new constitution was a forty‐two‐year‐old Tejano ranchero, Erasmo Seguín.
In the north, the national government united the old Spanish provinces of Coahuila and Texas into one state, Coahuila y Texas. Via a decree issued in early 1825 by the state constitutional congress at Saltillo, which functioned as a legislature while it drew up a constitution for the new state, Texas from the Nueces to the Sabine River became a departamento (called the “Department of Texas”). It was to be presided over by a jefe político (political chief) appointed by the governor of the state. The jefe politico was responsible for overseeing the defense of Texas (including the command of local militias), education, taxes, censuses, and elections, as well as for enforcing the laws and supervising the ayuntamientos. When, on March 11, 1827, the congress finally promulgated the new constitution, this agreement was incorporated into the Coahuiltejano government. Furthermore, the legislature allowed two deputies for Texas, with provisions to add more as the population of the province grew.
Also decreed by the provisional state constitutional congress was the State Colonization Law of March 24, 1825. Through this measure, the legislature sought to achieve several goals, namely the peopling of Coahuila and Texas, the encouragement of farming and ranching in the state, and the stimulation there of commercial activity. The plan permitted the immigration of Anglo Americans into Coahuila and Texas, but it also sought to prod Mexicans into moving north by giving them priority in land acquisition. For modest fees, heads of families qualified to obtain a league or sitio (4428.4 acres) of grazing land and a labor (177.1 acres) of farming land. Immigrants were temporarily exempted from paying tariffs or custom duties. Provisions required all new residents of Coahuila and Texas who were not already Mexican citizens to take an oath declaring that they would abide by the federal and state constitutions and promise to observe the Christian religion. The legislature made no explicit mention of Catholicism: it was simply understood that the people of Mexico practiced no other religion. After agreeing to said conditions and establishing residence by obtaining lands, the land grantees were regarded by the government as naturalized Mexicans. The wording of the Colonization Law of 1825 was so vague that it did not immediately prohibit the importation of slaves.
The Constitution of 1827, on the other hand, more precisely addressed slavery in Texas. Abolitionists from Coahuila opposed the institution vigorously, but an alliance of Anglo slave owners, Tejano oligarchs, and entrepreneurs from Coahuila, arguing that barring slavery would stifle US immigration and destroy the labor force essential to Texas prosperity, succeeded in preserving it under the law. But the concession was temporary as the constitution nonetheless mandated that children of slave parents were to be born free and that six months following the constitution’s publication, no new slaves were to be brought into Texas.
Empresario Contracts
Negotiations for land titles under the State Colonization Law could be handled individually or through immigration agents, or empresarios, who acted on behalf of the state government to select colonists, allocate land, and see to the enforcement of the laws in the colonies they helped to found. As compensation for their work, empresarios qualified personally to receive five leagues and five labores (a total of 23,027.5 acres) for each 100 families they settled in Texas.
As of 1835, a total of forty‐one empresario contracts had been signed, both under the National Colonization Law of 1824 and the State Colonization Law of 1825, permitting some 13,500 families to come to Texas. Anglo Americans from the United States entered into most of these contracts.
By 1825, Stephen F. Austin had nearly completed the terms of his first contract, and that year the government made a second agreement with him to settle 500 families. Two years later, he negotiated to locate another one hundred families in what are today Bastrop and Travis counties. In 1828, Austin obtained another land deal, and in 1831 he received his last contract. Actually, Austin only complied fully with his first contract and never came close to meeting his obligations on the other four. He used part of his grants for speculating purposes, profiting by selling parcels of his property to new arrivals. But for that matter, so did the other land agents (and even some settlers) part with portions of their holdings, thus gaining financially from the Mexican government's generosity.
To the west of Austin’s original lands, between the Guadalupe and Lavaca rivers, Green DeWitt planted a colony with its center at Gonzales. This contract expired in 1831, however, by which time DeWitt had settled only about one‐third of the 400 families he had pledged to bring. Bordering the DeWitt colony to the southeast lay the tract belonging to the rancher Martín de León. Issued at San Antonio in 1824 (even before the enactment of the Colonization Law of 1825), this grant had ill‐defined boundaries, which caused some disputes between de León’s and DeWitt’s settlers, at least until DeWitt’s land became part of the public domain in 1832. De León’s colony, with its principal settlement at Victoria, remained small, though titles had been issued to 162 families by 1835. Figure 3.2 shows the extent of the empresario contracts in the region.
Most other empresarial colonies achieved only moderate success in the 1820s. In 1825, Robert Leftwich received (on behalf of a cooperative venture called the Texas Association of Nashville, Tennessee) a contract to settle lands situated northwest of Austin’s lands, but no one colonized them until the early 1830s, when a Tennessean named Sterling C. Robertson took over as empresario for the Texas Association. Farther east, Haden Edwards’s colonization contract called for 800 families to settle around the Nacogdoches region, but following his armed uprising in 1826 against government officials (the so‐called Fredonian Rebellion, discussed later) his vacated land reverted to the state. Part of Edwards’s tract went to David G. Burnet, and another portion of it went to a German merchant named Joseph Vehlein in 1826. Lorenzo de Zavala, one of the framers of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, received land along the Sabine River in 1829, but he never colonized it.
Figure 3.2 Empresario contracts.
The Native Mexicans of Texas
As Anglo settlers arrived in East Texas, the native Mexicans were, according to historian Andrés A. Tijerina, experiencing a resurrection in fortunes following the devastation of the war for independence. Ranches between Béxar and La Bahía (the latter called Goliad after 1829–from an anagram of the name Hidalgo) were reestablished in the mid‐1820s along the entire stretch and on both sides of the San Antonio River and its tributaries. These ranches belonged to Texas Mexicans of wealth and status, men like Martín de León of Victoria,