A Collision Course Begins: The Effects of the Law of April 6 (May 5, 2024)
by Scott Sosbee
This week we continue with the series on the causes and coming of the Texas Revolution. This entry examines how the Anglos in Texas and the Mexican government began to be at odds.
When the Mexican Congress approved the Law of April 6, 1830, its members may or may not have been aware of the tensions it would cause, but ultimately its passage began the march down a road that would lead to rebellion in their Texas province. It would be easy to say that they should have, but that would also, to some degree, ignore the whole of Mexican history, of which Texas was certainly a part. One of the blind spots of many who study Texas is to discount or overlook the fact that Texas was part of a larger Mexican nation and thus subject to the crosscurrents of that nation’s political and social development. Mexico, in the 1830s, was in an almost constant state of upheaval as it tried to work out who would lead its government and what form that government would take, as well as how to construct and unite a large nation that included an incredible diversity of people, cultures, and lifeways. Texas was just one of many of those conundrums Mexican leaders faced and, at the time, one of the least significant of its problems.
However, Mexico’s political leaders were not completely unaware of the contempt its northern residents often had for the national government and how they viewed the actions of the federal entity. The majority of the population in Texas were Anglos and they carried with them the innate racial and cultural biases present at the time. Just as Mier y Terán had looked at the Anglos with a condescending eye, the Anglos viewed their Mexican hosts with equal hostility. Some of that hostility was exceptionalism, a belief that the American system they left was superior in any except those constructed wholly in its image, but an equal part of that was ethnocentrism with the tinge of racism; the majority of Anglos viewed “Mexicans” as a “mongrel race” incapable of organizing an effective government and society. The dual notions that separated the two people would prove fatal before the 1830s came to a close.
In the most immediate sense and given the realities of the ideas of the time, two of Mexico’s primary components of the Law of April 8, 1830, were the exact two that the Anglos would find the most contemptible: the effective end of immigration from the United States and the restriction on slavery. The termination of legal immigration was particularly galling for the Anglos in Texas because it ended the empresario system (except for the contracts of Austin and DeWitt Green). The abrogation of a legal way to immigrate meant an end to a way to obtain legal title to land, and without a clear, legal title the residents who would come to Texas in the years after 1830 and until legal immigration was restored in 1833—and despite the end of legal immigration Americans did continue to come—would always have to deal with a cloud over the legality of their property. And, while Mexico had been cooperative in allowing the institution of slavery to continue in Texas, there was an equal shadow among the Anglos that Mexico could free enslaved people with the stroke of a federal governmental pen.
There was, again, a national feature at work that complicated the situation in Texas. It was a Conservative Centralist Party congress led by a Conservative president that passed the Law of April 6, 1830. The Centralists favored a policy forged in Mexico City and one that eliminated state power; they viewed the influx of Anglos as a mechanism that strengthened the power of their opponents, the Federalists, who in different degrees opposed all or some of the Law of April 6. The state of Coahuila y Tejas, also, was one of the strongest Federalists regions in the nation. The practical effect of that would have also have a role in the coming of the Texas Revolution. Despite the ban on immigration from the United States, Coahuila y Tejas did not take an active role in enforcing that law and they also continued to issue land titles to Americans illegally in Texas, which was also an avenue that had the potential of a head-on crash with Centralist authority. Adding to those tectonic elements were the issues of taxes, the building of forts and garrisoning of troops in Texas (and other Mexican states) to enforce Centralist passed laws, and how and if the national government would support and allow an economy in Texas based on cash crops and trade with the United States. It was a cauldron of boiling ingredients that was becoming ripe for bubbling over.
At the same time, there were developing political factions in Texas. The population of Texas in 1830-1831 was one almost equally divided between residents who had been in Texas for almost a decade—such as the “Old 300” who had come to Austin’s colony—and brand-new residents who had been in Texas for only a year or two, such as new resident and fire-eating hot-head William Barret Travis, a lawyer who fled debts and jealous husbands in Alabama. The older residents had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Their titles and power depended on being a part of the larger Mexican nation and while they may have been committed Federalists, they were not bound to leaving the nation in a peal of revolutionary thunder. The newer residents—most of who came when immigration from the U.S. was illegal—had no vested obligation to Mexican nationalism. In fact, for them, their interests would very well have been better served by leaving the Mexican nation and forming a new entity. These two factions would eventually form political parties in Texas, the “Peace Party,” which was mostly older residents, and the “War Party,” almost exclusively those who had recently come to Texas.
These potential conflagratory elements would be thrown together in a flaming tinderbox and, in the years between 1832 and 1835, would eventually flame into full rebellion. Before that, however, there would be efforts to work out differences, although eventually the disparities in Texas and in larger Mexico would be too great to stop the coming fire.
Next week: Texas holds two “consultations” to send its grievances to the Mexican national government, gripes that will eventually lead to open violence.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.
