The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
liberal, Federalist standard and the Viesca faction.
Among Anglos, a radical faction of the Federalists, which has come to be known in Texas history as the “war party,” emerged from the outrage over the Law of 6 April. In the summer of 1832, friction between settlers and authorities trying to enforce recently instituted policies regulating commerce in the Gulf ports and the collection of new tariffs (to which they were previously exempted) reached a high pitch at the military post in Anahuac. Colonel Juan Davis Bradburn, an Anglo American adventurer who had joined the Centralist cause in Mexico, arrested the lawyer William Barret Travis when the latter attempted a ruse to secure the release of two runaway slaves that Bradburn had in protective custody. In response to Travis’s arrest, vigilantes gathered to call for his release. When Bradburn refused to surrender his prisoner, the colonists, accustomed to the Anglo American tradition of the separation of military and civilian law, and to trial by jury, labeled Bradburn a despot.
Consequently, in June of 1832, a party of Anglo Texans from around Anahuac and the port town of Brazoria marched on Bradburn’s garrison. A full‐scale battle seemed imminent, but, while waiting for reinforcements, the Anglos issued a document known as the Turtle Bayou Resolutions on June 13, 1832, which cleverly argued that their actions at Anahuac were not an uprising but a demand for their constitutional rights as Mexican citizens, adding that their cause was in sympathy to that of the Federalists and their leader, Antonio López de Santa Anna, then attempting to overthrow the Centralists, the party to which Bradburn belonged. Higher military officials avoided further bloodshed at Anahuac by replacing Bradburn and releasing Travis and others whom Bradburn had arrested.
At this time, however, the radical war party failed to garner popular endorsement; indeed, many Texans condemned the group as adventurers. Most Texans belonged to a “peace party,” led by Austin, which preferred to work for solutions to settlers’ grievances via established political channels. Hence, on October 1, 1832, delegates from several Anglo settlements met at San Felipe de Austin and drafted petitions requesting certain concessions from the national government, among them, the removal of the article in the Law of April 6, 1830, that severely limited immigration.
This meeting, or consultation, was not legal; under Mexican law, such protests had to originate with the ayuntamientos. Although he sympathized with the protesters, Ramón Músquiz, the political chief in Béxar, followed the law and refused to forward the peace party’s petitions to the governor. The convention of 1832 bore no fruit.
In late 1832, leading citizens of Béxar, among them Juan N. Seguín and José María Balmaceda, met in San Antonio to express their own grievances to the state government in Saltillo. They complained about the constant intervention of the national government in the state colonization program and contended that the Law of April 6, 1830, threatened to dissuade useful capitalists from moving into Texas. They further demanded bilingual administrators, more judges, better militia protection from hostile Indians, and certain tax exemptions for businesses. These complaints, along with the October petition from Austin’s group, were part of the groundswell of federalism pervasive throughout Mexico in 1832.
The ayuntamientos of Goliad, Nacogdoches, and San Felipe endorsed the Tejanos’ petition, and Political Chief Músquiz submitted it to the governor, explaining that the Tejanos’ boisterous tone was designed to remedy a situation that might otherwise lead the Anglos to try to separate Tejas from Coahuila. What the Tejanos wanted, he assured the governor, were reforms, not the creation of their own state. The Tejanos understood that should Texas become a separate state with its own legislature, Anglo Americans, who already outnumbered the native Mexicans, would dominate politics.
Because little had come out of the Anglos’ 1832 consultation, another was held at San Felipe de Austin in April of the following year. But those attending the second meeting included new leaders who opposed Austin’s position of caution and conciliation with Mexico. Among the new group were the brothers William and John Wharton, David G. Burnet, and the former governor of Tennessee, Sam Houston, who had arrived recently in Texas. Scholars attribute different motives to Houston’s immigration, from attempts to buy up all the stock remaining in the Leftwich contract (he had been among the investors in the Texas Association in 1822), to an honest desire to start anew in Texas, perhaps as a landholder, lawyer, or politician. Overall, this second consultation desired the division of Coahuila y Tejas, maintaining that a separated Texas would enjoy political autonomy to make decision affecting its own well‐being. Uppermost, Texans and Tejanos wanted confirmation that slavery and colonization would continue uninterrupted. As things stood during that time, the rivalry for power between the Federalists and Centralists in Coahuila muffled clamors by Anglos and Tejanos for legislative action on slavery and immigration. Only if Texas stood apart from Coahuila could it implement a program with provisions favorable to economic progress in the region. Upon adjourning, the second consultation entrusted Erasmo Seguín, Stephen F. Austin, and Dr. James B. Miller of San Felipe with taking the grievances to Mexico City where any decision about separate statehood would be decided. Of the three, only Austin made the long journey to the capital.
Liberals in Power
In January 1833, Santa Anna ushered in a brief liberal era in Mexican politics when he was elected president as a Federalist. Back in favor, the liberals in Coahuila y Tejas and the Viesca brothers immediately arranged for the state legislature to petition the national government for the repeal of the Law of April 6, 1830. Now they had more helpful allies in Mexico City, among them Gómez Farías, whom Santa Anna appointed as his acting president before retreating to his hacienda in Vera Cruz, and Lorenzo de Zavala (Figure 3.4), the legislator from Yucatán who still held interests in Texas lands for which he sought settlers from the United States. Working alongside the Federalists in Mexico City was Stephen F. Austin, who had arrived there following the consultation of April 1833. Ultimately, effective May 1834, Mexico’s senate revoked the section in the Law of April 6, 1830, that had curtailed the immigration of Anglos into the Mexican nation.
Figure 3.4 Lorenzo de Zavala. University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio (MS 362: 76‐31).
Austin failed, however, to gain the separation of Coahuila and Texas. And when officials discovered letters between him and the San Antonio ayuntamiento encouraging Texas’s separation from Coahuila, they threw Austin in prison (early in 1834). Nonetheless, the state and national governments abided by their previous stand on colonization, and liberal legislation continued to emanate from Coahuila. New acts recognized the acceptance of English as a legal language of the state, permitted the extension of empresario contracts, expanded the number of local courts, and provided for trial by jury. The Coahuilan legislature also raised Texas’s representation in the state congress and increased the number of departments in Texas to three. Actually, the district of Nacogdoches, which extended from the watershed between the Brazos and the Trinity rivers to the Sabine, had been created in 1831 to accommodate the rise in the Anglo population. In order to allow more self‐autonomy in the province, the legislature in 1834 established the Department of Brazos, with its capital at San Felipe de Austin, which extended from the Nacogdoches district to a north‐south line from the coast to the Red River, just east of the Béxar and Goliad settlements. The third zone, the Department of Béxar, included San Antonio and extended to the Nueces River.
The Ineffectiveness of the Law of April 6, 1830
These changes point starkly to the ineffectiveness of the Law of April 6, 1830. Because Mexican officials had not been strict in interpreting the provisions of the decree, Anglos had continued to come into those colonies whose empresarios had imported the minimum one hundred families by the time the Centralists enacted the law. In addition, two empresario groups from Ireland persisted in their efforts to complete contracts