Moses Austin’s Scheme Presents an Opportunity (Mar 17, 2024)
by Scott Sosebee
This week, we continue with the series on the causes and coming of the Texas Revolution. This entry examines the early stages of how Mexico would eventually institute the “Empresario System” to populate Texas, which would lead to Texas becoming a Mexican province dominated by former residents of the United States, a consequence that will ultimately lead to the Revolution.
When Spanish and American diplomats signed the Adams-Onís Treaty in 1819, they seemingly settled the long-standing border issue between Texas and Louisiana, but what the treaty did not solve was the fact that Texas was grossly underpopulated and had very few readily available solutions to solving that problem. Of course, Texas was also likely one of the farthest things from Spanish officials’ minds since their primary problem at that time was trying to fend off losing control of New Spain, the jewel of their American empire.
While Royalist and Rebel forces were clashing to decide whether or not there would be a nation of Mexico during the 1810s, something else began to happen in Texas that would eventually have consequences in creating another new nation in the 1830s. The incursion of American filibusters into Texas during the early 1800s was the most visible of Anglo attempts to separate Texas from Spain, but much less discernable was the movement of hundreds of Anglos into Spanish Texas who came without organization or motivation beyond just trying to find land in which to live and have some sort of economic opportunity. These “squatters” who moved illegally into territory in Northeast Texas near the Arkansas border all the way down to the lands just across the Sabine in the Ayish Bayou basin could almost be termed “refugees” from the harsh realities of U.S. population movement and patterns. As the United States began to expand its settlements into the areas between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River after the American Revolution, the first opportunists who virtually sprinted into the region were land speculators. These speculators bought and claimed the largest portions of the cheap land in the region and then either began their own slave plantations or sold their new holdings at highly inflated prices to others who would begin their own plantation operations. The result was not only an expansion of the “slavocracy”—which would also eventually have repercussions in Texas—but a quick end to the idea of “surplus” western lands that was a key part of the Jeffersonian “Yeoman farmer” republic idea in the young United States. Now, if people of lesser means hoped to find a spot with arable land that would allow them to advance to an independent economic position, they would have to keep expanding.
Seemingly, Spanish Texas was an immediate obstacle for Americans hoping to move over the Mississippi and make their way west, and for more “law-abiding” Americans I suppose it was, although it did not stop those “squatters” who disregarded a closed border and moved into Texas anyway. Still, the fact that some of those westward-moving Americans did not pause at the Spanish border of Texas offered proof that there were some people who did want to take a chance in Texas. All they likely needed to prod such a movement was a plan and someone to implement it. Into such a breach stepped one Moses Austin.
Moses Austin was born in Connecticut in 1761 and moved to Virginia as a young man to get involved in the lead mining and smelting business. The lead business in Virginia was good, so profitable that Austin and men like him had essentially exhausted the supply of the precious metal by the late 1790s. That led Austin to move to Spanish Missouri, where that nation’s colonial government granted him a league of land. He founded a town—Potosi—opened a general store, and built a smelter to start exploiting Missouri’s metal deposit. Moses Austin did well and added to the fortune he had made in Virginia, but poor speculative decisions and the Panic of 1819 destroyed his business empire and, as 1820 was nearing its end, Moses Austin’s business empire lay in ruins.
Austin was not yet sixty and not ready to end his hopes of accumulating wealth. But he needed another scheme, and for that, he looked south and west. He was aware of the Spanish difficulty in populating Texas and thought he had a stratagem in mind that could both aid Spain and also help him re-establish his wealth. He traveled to San Antonio in December 1820, where he pitched his idea to Spanish Governor Antonio María Martinez. He asked Spain to give him permission to bring three hundred settlers into Texas and allow them to claim land to establish homesteads where they would become loyal Spanish subjects. Martinez saw the specter of another American filibuster mission and ordered Austin to leave Spanish territory,
Moses was disheartened by his setback but not unbowed. On his way out of San Antonio, he came across a man who called himself Baron de Bastrop but was really Felipe Enrique Neri, a Dutch national who was in Texas fleeing debts and other pursuers, reinventing himself as a nobleman. Bastrop may have been a fraud, but he had gained favor with the Spanish governor, and he agreed to intervene on Austin’s behalf. It worked, and Martinez agreed to forward Austin’s scheme to Joaquín de Arredondo, the military commandant of Texas. Arredondo saw Austin’s idea as a way to finally get people to Texas, so he agreed, in January 1821, to a plan that granted Moses Austin 200,000 acres in which he could settle three hundred families. There was no provision of how Austin would distribute the land or how he would make it fruitful for him, but that would come later. He now had to make plans to move his family and recruit those settlers. Moses Austin had to move quickly, and so even after he contracted pneumonia, he did not rest. That proved fatal, and Moses Austin died on June 10 1821, before he could put his land settlement scheme in place.
While his father made plans for Texas, Stephen Fuller Austin, Moses Austin’s oldest son, was living in New Orleans and studying to become a lawyer. He had not shared his father’s ardor for his Texas venture, but as a dutiful son, he had agreed to help, and he was in Natchitoches, Louisiana, waiting for Moses in order to accompany him to San Antonio when he received word of his father’s death. Now, the effectiveness of his father’s dream fell on his shoulders, and so he prepared to travel to San Antonio alone and pick up the family’s mantle. What he would do while in San Antonio would help set Texas on a course toward the Revolution.
Next week, Stephen F. Austin becomes the first “Empresario”
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.