Petitioner, Prisoner, Rebel: Stephen F. Austin and Anglo Texas

In the first days of January 1823, in Mexico City, the emperor Agustín de Iturbide signed a colonization law that a twenty-nine-year-old American from Missouri had spent months pressing on the imperial government. Stephen F. Austin had come to the capital because Mexico, newly independent of Spain, had refused to honor the Spanish grant that his late father, Moses Austin, had obtained to settle three hundred families in Texas. Settlers recruited on the strength of that grant were already arriving on the Brazos and Colorado Rivers, and their claims had no secure legal footing. Through what his biographer Eugene C. Barker called unremitting attention, Austin persuaded Iturbide's rump legislature, the junta instituyente, to finish a general colonization law, and the emperor signed it.^[1] Austin was no admirer of the regime he was petitioning. While in the capital he wrote and circulated manuscript tracts in Spanish urging republican government, and he later recalled that he had "serious fears" Iturbide would succeed in making himself an absolute monarch.^[2] Within three months events overtook those fears. Iturbide's empire collapsed, the emperor abdicated, and the law fell with him. Austin stayed on, and in April 1823 the government that succeeded Iturbide confirmed his right to settle three hundred families under the terms of the annulled law.^[3]

That season in Mexico City set the pattern for what followed. Austin succeeded in Texas because he learned to work inside Mexican politics, patiently and at close range, and his colony survived because the Mexican government wanted it to survive. Mexico invited Americans into Texas under a policy meant to strengthen the young republic's hold on a thinly settled frontier, and that policy produced the population that broke Texas away. Austin went to Mexico City in 1822 as a petitioner, returned to it in 1834 as a prisoner, and came home in 1835 to lead armed Texans against the government that had made him an empresario. This is the story of those twelve years.

Mexico Opens the Door

The imperial law set the template for Mexican colonization. It required its settlers to be Catholic and worked through agents called empresarios, who contracted to bring in families in units of two hundred. Land was measured in Spanish units: the labor, about 177 acres, for farming, and the league or sitio, about 4,428 acres, for grazing; a family that farmed and raised stock could receive one of each. An empresario could earn roughly 67,000 acres of premium land for every two hundred families he settled. One article, by inference, allowed immigrants to bring slaves, while declaring that children born to slaves in Mexico would be free at fourteen.^[4]

After Iturbide's fall, Mexico adopted a federal system and rebuilt its colonization policy to match. The national law of August 18, 1824, gave most authority over public land to the states but kept important powers in Mexico City. No grants could be made within twenty leagues of an international border or ten leagues of the coast without federal approval, and Congress reserved the right to stop immigration from any particular nation in the interest of national security. Texas was joined to Coahuila as a single state, whose legislature passed its own colonization law in March 1825. Each immigrant head of family could receive a league of land for a modest fee paid in installments, empresarios earned five leagues for every hundred families, and colonists were to be free of taxes for ten years.^[5]

The reasoning behind this generosity was practical. Texas was so sparsely populated that it formed a single department of the new state, governed from San Antonio, and Mexican officials hoped that farmers drawn by cheap land, and by the cotton boom along the Gulf Coast, would bring prosperity to an exposed northern frontier.^[6] Repeated American efforts to buy Texas, territory many in the United States had once claimed as part of the Louisiana Purchase, sharpened Mexican anxiety as the colonies grew.^[7] Austin won his contract in the year President James Monroe warned Europe against further colonization in the Americas, a declaration that said nothing about the pressure the United States would itself put on Mexico's northern frontier. In both capitals, the question of who would ultimately control Texas was being deferred rather than settled.

Building the Colony: Land, Law, and Fees

Austin largely fulfilled his first contract and, under the state law, obtained three more, in 1825, 1827, and 1828, to settle nine hundred additional families in and around his original colony. Each married settler received a league of land and owed the state thirty dollars within six years.^[8] For most of the 1820s Austin was effectively the government of his colony. Until 1828 he held complete civil and military authority, subject only to nominal supervision from San Antonio and Monterrey. He let the colonists elect their own militia officers and alcaldes, local magistrates roughly like American justices of the peace, and wrote a simple civil and criminal code for their courts. Because Mexican practice issued titles on loose sheets with no permanent record, he won permission to record them in a bound volume with the force of the originals.^[9]

Money was a constant strain. Austin had originally proposed to charge colonists 12½ cents an acre for surveying, titling, and the other services an empresario provided, and the first settlers welcomed those terms. When the imperial law promised empresarios compensation in land instead, some refused to pay, and the political chief at San Antonio upheld them. Austin then arranged privately to share the land commissioner's fee for signing titles, and under the 1825 state law he required colonists to pay, or promise to pay, first sixty and then fifty dollars a league. Barker concluded that nearly all of the money went to public expenses no one else would cover.^[10] The settlers who refused to pay plainly saw the matter differently.

Loyal Mexicans: The Fredonian Test

The first serious test of Anglo-American loyalty came in East Texas. On April 14, 1825, Haden Edwards received an empresario grant to settle as many as eight hundred families around Nacogdoches, an old settlement with existing landholders. Edwards arrived on September 25, 1825, and posted notices on street corners announcing that previous landowners must prove their claims or forfeit their land to new settlers. Probably few titles were actually at risk, but the threat divided old residents from newcomers. A disputed election for alcalde that December deepened the split, and by the middle of 1826 the authorities had declared Edwards's grant forfeit.^[11]

Edwards and his brother Benjamin chose rebellion. On December 21, 1826, they and their followers signed a declaration of independence for a republic they called Fredonia, sixteen years after American settlers had declared a republic in Spanish West Florida. Their flag carried two bars, red and white, meant to represent an alliance of Indians and whites, and bore the words "Independence, Liberty, Justice." The rebels signed a treaty with the Cherokee leaders Richard Fields and John Dunn Hunter, but the Cherokee support never materialized. Lieutenant Colonel Mateo Ahumada marched from San Antonio with Mexican troops and enlisted Austin, who sided firmly with the government. When the Mexican force, joined by militia from Austin's colony, reached Nacogdoches on January 31, 1827, the Fredonians fled across the Sabine River into the United States.^[12]

Austin rallied his colonists in blunt terms. In an address to the colony's inhabitants on January 22, 1827, he warned that the rebels threatened "Indian Massacre and the plunder of our property" and declared that "they are no longer Americans, for they have forfeited all title to that high name."^[13] He led the militia from the Brazos and Colorado in person. Before 1832 his settled policy was to take no part in Mexico's political convulsions, a stance he summed up in 1831 when he advised Samuel May Williams to "play the turtle, head and feet within your own shell."^[14] Yet a rebellion by Anglo-Americans, however quickly suppressed, also confirmed the fears of Mexican officials watching the American population of Texas grow.

Mier y Terán's Warning and the Law of April 6, 1830

The government sent an observer to see for itself. On November 10, 1827, General Manuel de Mier y Terán, an engineer by training and a veteran of the independence war, left Mexico City at the head of a boundary commission charged with fixing the border with the United States, observing the land and Indian peoples of Texas, and assessing the number and attitudes of its American settlers. He traveled with a military escort in a large coach inlaid with silver, accompanied by scientists including the naturalist Jean Louis Berlandier. The commission reached San Antonio on March 1, 1828, San Felipe on April 27, and Nacogdoches on June 3, and Mier y Terán remained in East Texas until January 16, 1829.^[15] Writing from Nacogdoches to President Guadalupe Victoria on June 30, 1828, he warned that Mexican influence faded almost to nothing as one traveled east, and that "Texas could throw the whole nation into revolution."^[16] His report urged new garrisons around the settlements, closer trade ties with the Mexican interior, and the encouragement of Mexican and European settlers.^[17]

Those recommendations fed into the Law of April 6, 1830, initiated by the minister of foreign relations, Lucas Alamán. The law authorized a loan to transport colonists to Texas, opened the coastal trade to foreign ships for four years, created a federal commissioner of colonization, and forbade the further introduction of slaves. Its eleventh article, which came from Alamán rather than from Mier y Terán, was meant to prohibit or limit immigration from the United States. Mier y Terán doubted Article 11 and the provisions on slavery and passports, though he accepted the post of commissioner.^[18]

The law alarmed Austin. He tried to calm his colonists while protesting to Mier y Terán and to President Anastasio Bustamante, and through what Barker called an ingenious and somewhat tortuous reading of Articles 10 and 11 he secured an exemption for his own colonies and for that of his neighbor Green DeWitt. Immigration from the United States continued through that loophole, and Austin worked for years to have Article 11 repealed.^[19] The law shook his belief in the goodwill of the Mexican government. In poor health and increasingly despondent over colonization and Mexican politics, Mier y Terán took his own life on July 3, 1832, at Padilla in Tamaulipas, where Iturbide had been executed in 1824.^[20]

Slavery: The Guerrero Decree and Austin's Shifting Position

Slavery ran through every stage of the colonization of Texas, and Austin's position on it moved with circumstances. Expecting most colonists to come from the slave states, he offered eighty acres for each slave a settler brought under the terms he first announced in 1821, and in Mexico City he persuaded the imperial junta to legalize slavery in the colonization law.^[21] The Constitution of Coahuila and Texas of 1827 then forbade slavery after its promulgation and barred any further introduction of slaves after six months.^[22] At Austin's suggestion the legislature evaded the ban with a law permitting labor contracts with nominally emancipated slaves, under which settlers brought enslaved people into Texas as indentured servants under contract to their former owners.^[23] For a time he seemed to change his mind. On June 16, 1830, explaining the new federal law to a group of prospective settlers, he wrote that he had once favored a limited admission of slaves to get the colony started, and when he came to the question of whether Texas would become a slave state, he answered, "I will be candid with you on this point, and say that I hope it never may."^[24] The colonists were not persuaded, and Austin's own conviction did not last. Writing from Matamoros in May 1833, on his way to Mexico City, he told a correspondent, "I have now, and for the last six months, changed my views of that matter." Texas, he went on, "must be a slave country. Circumstances and unavoidable necessity compels it."^[25] Barker, a broadly sympathetic biographer, concluded that whatever Austin's private convictions were, they gave way to what seemed the present needs of Texas.^[26]

The most alarming moment for slaveholding colonists had come in 1829. On September 15 of that year President Vicente Guerrero issued a decree abolishing slavery throughout Mexico except in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. His motives remain uncertain. He may have acted under the influence of José María Tornel, who hoped the decree would check American immigration, or he may have issued it for personal reasons, because his enemies accused him of partial African descent. When it reached Texas on October 16, the political chief, Ramón Músquiz, withheld its publication because it violated the colonization laws' guarantees of security in persons and property. After Texans petitioned, the secretary of relations, Agustín Viesca, wrote on December 2 that slaves in Texas would be left as they were. The decree never took effect there, but it left many colonists convinced that their interests were not safe under Mexican rule.^[27]

Economics lay beneath this anxiety. As quoted by the historian Andrew J. Torget, Austin wrote that cotton would lift the colonists out of poverty and that they could not grow it "without the help of slaves."^[28] How central slavery was to the revolt that followed is genuinely debated among historians. Torget argues that repeated clashes over slavery between Texans and abolitionists in the Mexican government culminated in the Texas Revolution, and that the Republic of Texas was built on cotton and slavery.^[29] Randolph B. Campbell's history of slavery in Texas, the first comprehensive study of the subject, treats the institution as central to Texas history from the colonial period onward and gives a separate chapter to its place in the revolution.^[30] An older tradition, represented by Barker, explains the break mainly through political grievances: the ban on American immigration, the enforcement of tariffs, the demand for separate statehood, and the turmoil of Mexican national politics.^[31]

Anahuac and the Conventions, 1832–1833

The Law of April 6, 1830, brought soldiers and customs collectors to the Texas coast, and with them the first armed clash. On October 26, 1830, Colonel Juan Davis Bradburn landed with about forty officers and men near the mouth of the Trinity River to establish a garrison and a town, which became Anahuac. His orders were to prevent smuggling and enforce the immigration restrictions. Friction over land titles and customs duties sharpened when Bradburn gave asylum to two or three runaway slaves from Louisiana. William M. Logan of Louisiana hired William B. Travis, a young lawyer, to recover the fugitives, and Travis appears to have tried to trick Bradburn with a false warning that Logan had returned with a large force. Bradburn arrested Travis and his law partner, Patrick C. Jack, and held them first in a guardhouse and then in brick kilns.^[32] A rescue force of perhaps two hundred men from the Brazos settlements reached Turtle Bayou, six miles north of Anahuac, on June 9, 1832.^[33] On June 13 they adopted the Turtle Bayou Resolutions, which justified their uprising by "the arbitrary, and unconstitutional measures" of Bustamante's administration and aligned them with the Federalist revolt of General Antonio López de Santa Anna.^[34] Bradburn's superior soon removed him, and the prisoners were released.^[35]

Austin was away at Saltillo, serving in the state legislature, when the trouble began. From there, in a letter of April 9, 1832, to his secretary, Samuel May Williams, he had defended his caution against critics who called it weakness: "Some men in the world hold the doctrine that it is degrading and corrupt to use policy in anything," he wrote, but "there is no degradation in prudence and a well tempered and well timed moderation."^[36] The uprising forced him to abandon his policy of aloofness and declare for Santa Anna against Bustamante. Santa Anna won, and the colonists expected a reward for their support. By 1832 Austin's colonies counted about eight thousand people, and others had brought in many more, which made his cautious leadership harder to sustain. The Convention of 1832 met in October and asked for repeal of the immigration ban, an extension of the tariff exemption, and separation from Coahuila as a state. Austin presided but doubted the wisdom of the meeting, in part because San Antonio's Mexican residents sent no delegates, and for reasons that remain unclear its petitions were never presented. A second convention met at San Felipe on April 1, 1833, repeated the requests, and drafted a constitution for the proposed state. Although Austin thought the movement ill-timed, the delegates chose him to carry their petitions to Mexico City.^[37]

The Saltillo Arrest and Twenty-Eight Months Away

Austin left San Felipe in April 1833 and reached Mexico City in July. Cholera and civil war delayed the business of Congress, and his patience gave out.^[38] On October 2, 1833, he wrote to the ayuntamiento of San Antonio urging every town council in Texas to begin communicating at once so that a local government for Texas, organized as a state of the federation, would be ready to act if Congress refused its approval. Texas, he warned, was lost unless its inhabitants took their affairs into their own hands.^[39] The San Antonio council forwarded the letter to state authorities. On December 11, 1833, J. Miguel Falcón, the secretary of state of Coahuila and Texas, sent a copy to the alcalde of San Antonio, José Miguel de Arciniega, warning that it contained subversive ideas capable of sparking a revolution, and ordered Austin's arrest.^[40]

Meanwhile Austin's mission appeared to succeed. In November 1833 he reported that both houses of Congress had voted to repeal Article 11, although at Santa Anna's request the repeal would not take effect until May 21, 1834.^[41] Santa Anna would not approve a separate state government for Texas, but the government promised reforms in local administration, and Austin started home in December reasonably satisfied.^[42] On January 3, 1834, he was arrested on his arrival at Saltillo by the commandant general on an order from the minister of war, as he described it in a letter written from Monterrey nine days later.^[43] He was eventually taken back to Mexico City. No charges were filed against him, and no court would accept jurisdiction over his case. He was moved from prison to prison until December 1834, when he was released on bond and confined to the Federal District.^[44] In his prison diary he wrote on February 22, 1834, "What a horrible punishment is solitary confinement," and insisted that his intentions had been pure.^[45]

While Austin was held in the capital, the political ground in Mexico shifted beneath Texas. Santa Anna, who had risen as the champion of the Federalists, turned toward the Centralists, who favored a strong national government and weak states. In June 1834 a rump group of state deputies at Monclova declared against Santa Anna's Plan of Cuernavaca, and Coahuila split between rival governments at Monclova and Saltillo, locked in a quarrel over the capital and over control of the government. General Martín Perfecto de Cos, the federal military commander, backed Saltillo and ordered troops to disband the legislature at Monclova, which adjourned hastily on April 21, 1835. Governor Agustín Viesca, the same official who had reassured Texans about slavery in 1829, resolved to make San Antonio the capital and on May 25 left Monclova with the state archives. Turned back before he could cross the Rio Grande, he tried to slip away a second time and was captured. In the judgment of the historian Jesús F. de la Teja, this overthrow of constitutional government, together with Viesca's arrest, brought long-smoldering resistance in Texas into the open.^[46]

Texans were divided. When customs collection resumed at Anahuac in 1835, a merchant named Andrew Briscoe deliberately provoked the new commander, Captain Antonio Tenorio, who arrested him. Travis raised volunteers, and on June 20, 1835, Tenorio surrendered his small garrison to twenty-five insurgents. Travis had acted without real community support, however, and he felt obliged to apologize publicly so as not to endanger Austin, who was still in Mexico City.^[47] Freed by a general amnesty law in July, Austin returned by way of New Orleans and reached Texas at the end of August.^[48]

Brazoria, Gonzales, and the End of Patience

Austin had been gone twenty-eight months. He came home to find that an unofficial call had gone out for a convention, to be known as the Consultation. Barker thought he could probably have quashed it. Instead, at a dinner given in his honor at Brazoria on September 8, 1835, he told his listeners that he had no doubt the federal constitution would be destroyed and a central government established. "I see but one way," he said, "and that is by a general consultation of the people."^[49] Through September and early October he chaired a central committee at San Felipe, in effect the civil head of Anglo-American Texas.^[50] On September 19, as reports arrived that General Cos was bringing more troops to San Antonio, the committee issued a circular over Austin's signature urging every district to organize and drill its militia. "War is our only resource," it declared.^[51]

The fighting began over a small cannon. In 1831 the settlement of Gonzales had received a cannon for defense against Indian raids. When the colonists refused to give it up, Domingo de Ugartechea, the military commander in Texas, sent Francisco de Castañeda with one hundred dragoons to retrieve it, with instructions to use force if necessary but to avoid open conflict if possible. Castañeda left San Antonio on September 27, 1835, and two days later found the Guadalupe crossing at Gonzales blocked by high water and eighteen militiamen. After Castañeda moved upriver, the Texans crossed on the night of October 1 and attacked his camp the next morning. During a lull, the Texan commander, John Henry Moore, said they were fighting to keep their cannon and uphold the federal Constitution of 1824. Castañeda answered that he was a Federalist himself but bound by his orders, and, outnumbered, withdrew toward San Antonio. The engagement was only a brief skirmish, but it marked a clear break between the colonists and the Mexican government.^[52]

On October 11 the volunteers gathered at Gonzales chose Austin "without opposition" as their commander-in-chief,^[53] and he led them against the Mexican army at San Antonio. The Consultation organized on November 3, 1835, and that month the provisional government chose Austin as one of three commissioners to the United States, charged with raising loans, volunteers, and supplies and with seeking American recognition. He returned in June 1836, lost the presidential election that September, served as secretary of state, and died on December 27, 1836, at forty-three.^[54]

Why the Twelve Years Mattered

In July 1836, a few months before his death, Austin described the prosperity of Texas as "the idol of my existence," a cause that had guided his thoughts and actions for fifteen years.^[55] His loyalty to Mexico was real, but it was bound up with the safety and growth of the colony he had built. As long as the Mexican government offered land, tolerated slavery in practice, and left the colonists largely to govern themselves, he could hold both loyalties together. The Law of April 6, 1830, the Guerrero Decree, the soldiers at Anahuac, his own imprisonment, and finally the dismantling of the federal system pulled them apart.

The Mexican policy of 1823 to 1825 did what it was designed to do in one sense: it filled Texas with settlers. For a decade many of them were loyal Mexican citizens. Most of them, however, came from the American South, and many brought slaves and the habits of a slave society with them.^[56] When the national government moved first to restrict immigration and then to centralize power, the population it had invited had both the numbers and the organization, built up through conventions, committees, and militia companies, to resist. Historians continue to debate how much of that resistance concerned constitutional rights and how much concerned the protection of slavery and the cotton economy, and the evidence suggests that the two concerns were intertwined rather than separate.^[57]

Austin's career traces the larger story. In January 1823 he waited in Mexico City for an emperor's signature, a petitioner whose entire enterprise depended on Mexican goodwill. Eleven years later he sat in a Mexican cell without charge, held for a letter urging Texans to act on their own. In the autumn of 1835 he led armed volunteers out of Gonzales toward San Antonio. The same policy, generous in intent and fateful in result, set him on each of those journeys.