Texas Becomes an Anglo Province (Mar 31, 2024)

by Scott Sosebee

Stephen F. Austin was the first empresario under the Mexican system, but he would not be the only one. He would be followed by a number of others, most American, but also Mexican. What they all had in common was that the vast majority of colonists who came to take up land in Texas came from the United States. Texas remained sparsely populated; even at the time of the Texas Revolution in 1835, census counts—which, granted, could be inaccurate—counted no more than 30,000 non-Native people living in Texas. But the percentage change in the population in the roughly decade and a half was astounding, and the vast majority of those who came to live in Texas were from the United States. By 1830, Texas had become an Anglo-dominated province within larger Mexican nation, a cultural collision that would produce tensions. Perhaps, if this collision had happened later in the nineteenth century, or if it had occurred on different ground, the differences and strain between the newly arrived and unassimilated Anglos and the Mexican authorities and citizens in the larger nation could have come to a peaceable resolution, but in the time, space, and circumstances of the populating of Texas in the 1820s and early 1830s, friction and conflict between the two groups seemed inevitable, which, of course, it was.

Austin, himself, was not content with just one contract for a colony; he persuaded the state of Coahuila y Tejas to grant him three more settlement contracts, which gave him the right to settle 900 more families in a much bigger grant of land. Austin’s total colonial grants, in the end, took up much of the land between the lower Colorado and Brazos Rivers, and certainly the vast majority of the most arable land. In the end, between the national government of Mexico and the state of Coahuila y Tejas, twenty empresarios received grants to settle families in Texas, including men such as Yucatán politician Lorenzo de Zavala, Austin’s first partner and later rival Sterling Robertson, John McMullen, New Jersey born and experienced South American filibusterer David G. Burnet (who would become the interim president of Texas in 1836), and Kentucky and Mississippi land speculator Haden Edwards, whose contentious Nacogdoches grant would eventually produce some of the first armed conflicts in the northern province. Eventually, conflicts, abuses, and outright fraud would lead to all empresario contracts, except for Austin’s and Green DeWitt’s, to be declared null and void by the Law of April 6, 1830.

Texas was, of course, a part of a larger nation and one that was going through a number of trials and tribulations. Besides the ongoing fight between Centralists and Federalists that dominated Mexican politics at all levels, the transition from an Imperial government under Agustín I to a republican one initiated under the Constitution of 1824 also created some ambiguity and turmoil, particularly in relations between the Mexican government and its new American colonists. Under the Constitution of 1824, which created a Federal system, Texas became a part of the larger Coahuila y Tejas. San Antonio would become a “department” and the state capital would be placed in Saltillo—a long and arduous journey from the interior of Texas, which hindered communication and understanding between the state and its most distant part.

The new Federal nation and its constitution also brought about significant social and cultural clashes between Mexico and its most far-flung settlement. The new constitution enshrined Catholicism and designated it as the only form of public religious worship, and while the stricture was not absolute and allowed for private religious freedom, such a legal investiture jarred the sensibilities of the mostly Protestant Anglos. The result in Texas was basically an 1820s version of “don’t ask, don’t tell;” most of the new American residents ignored the requirement, and most authorities—especially outside San Antonio which was not an Anglo city—paid little attention to their disregard.

More problematic, and also more ambiguous, was Mexican law as it regarded the practice of slavery. Many of the new American residents of Texas brought their enslaved people with them, and many more hoped to obtain and use enslaved people as labor on their grants. Stephen F. Austin certainly understood the centrality of allowing slavery to the flourishment of his Texas project. He had, even before the Constitution of 1824, convinced the Mexican Imperial government to legalize slavery, but when the new constitution of Coahuila y Tejas was finally approved in 1827, it prohibited further introduction of enslaved people by immigration, which suggested that those who were in Texas before the constitution remained slaves, but there would be no more introduction of slaves. So, a form of “gradual emancipation” seemed to be the policy. Austin, aided by his friend Baron De Bastrop, who represented Texas in the Coahuila y Tejas legislature, understood that this would lead to a serious hindrance to attracting Americans to Texas. So, they worked around the illegality of slavery. Bastrop had the state body include language that made labor contracts—such as one between a master and an indentured servant—outside the bounds of laws that restricted slavery. That allowed the new residents of Texas to declare their slaves “indentured servants” and placed them under 99-year contracts. The question of whether or not slavery was legal in Texas was temporarily placated, but it also opened the question up to further political debate and possible enforcement of the ban.

As the late 1820s arrived, Texas had become an Anglo province, albeit one that lay within a larger Mexican nation. Stephen F. Austin and other empresarios worked to make sure possible conflicts and tensions remained cool between the groups, but they could not stop the inevitability of such a collision occurring. Such an instance would happen in Nacogdoches, the central town within Haden Edwards’ empresario grant. The Fredonian Rebellion would be brief and never truly threatened Mexican sovereignty over Texas, but Mexico certainly did not want something like it to happen again, and thus the state and national governments began to question the wisdom of continued Anglo infiltration into Texas.

The brief Fredonian Rebellion is quashed, but it leads to a new national law that would increase and inflame the tensions between Anglos and Mexico in Texas.

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.