Why Revolution? (Jun 30, 2024)

by Scott Sosebee

This concludes the series on the causes of the Texas Revolution

The clash at Gonzales in October 1835 began the Texas Revolution, a part of the state’s history that has received some of—if not the most—attention of any part of our shared past. It has also, more so in recent years, generated some of the most rigorous debate about Texas’ past, specifically centered on what caused the fight to begin between the residents of the Texas province and the Mexican government headed by Antonio López de Santa Anna. It is a discussion that has ebbed, flowed, and changed through the years but one in which there remains much argument, distortion, and even ambiguity almost two hundred years after it began.

Texas had spent less than a decade and a half as a frontier province in the Mexican Republic, and tension and friction were a constant characteristic. That chafing, to me, has to be the first element that needs to be added to the dangerous and combustible mix that were relations between the government of Mexico and its citizens on the far northern frontier of Texas. Mexico, in their zeal, perhaps desperation, to populate Texas, chose a plan to do so that would place almost precisely the wrong people in a location that would be far from the seats of power and influence in the nation. When Mexican leaders approved Stephen F. Austin’s plan of settlement and essentially invited thousands of Anglo-Americans to live on a frontier almost wholly devoid of any mechanisms that would allow the assimilation of these new residents to Mexican customs, traditions, and ideas about government, they were almost guaranteeing future revolt. These Anglos lived adjacent to their former homeland, were allowed to reanimate the same social structure of the land they had left behind, and had virtually no oversight. In short, the Anglos in Texas remained Americans and not Mexicans. If a revolution is a fire, then the presence of unassimilated Americans in Texas was the kindling.

It also mattered where these Americans came from and who they were. The vast majority of Anglos in Texas came from the American South, and even more significantly, a healthy number from the “Deep South.” The American South—and more specifically states such as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—had begun, in the 1830s, to develop a distinct culture. These were the areas into which frontier people, largely those outside the elite culture of society, had begun to spread from the East Coast. They were an expansionist, frontier people, ones who dealt in land speculation, preferred to adopt and live under their self-imposed laws and conditions, and were generally wary of any sort of governmental centralization or authority. Democracy was their inner calling, which is why they expanded the vote and the number of elected offices and officials in their region. They were the same people who expanded American ideas of democracy that characterized the Jacksonian Era in the United States. Essentially, they were the vanguard of “Manifest Destiny,” a uniquely American expansionist idea that combined commitment to a market economy, evangelical Protestantism, and revolutionary zeal to transfer American ideas on social and governmental liberty to the rest of the world. In many ways, Texas was Manifest Destiny’s first laboratory.

The “elephant in the room” when it comes to this discussion is, of course, the issue of slavery. Citing the protection of the institution of slavery as the cause or, at least, a primary cause of the Texas Revolution has long been a factor in many scholarly interpretations of the Texas Revolution, and in recent years it has become perhaps the most pervasive and “mainstream” of such elucidations. I will be the first to admit that such an interpretation is credible and, in many ways, a satisfying explanation. However, I also think that blaming the Texas Revolution solely on the presence of and protection of slavery is simplistic. Certainly, most of the Anglos who came to Texas in the 1830s either brought enslaved people with them, hoped to perhaps one day participate in the institution, or at least supported the legality of slavery. Also, Texas was—as both Andrew Torget and Randolph Campbell, the two foremost historians of the institution in Texas, have pointed out—the vanguard of the expansion of the institution and the primary basis of imperial slavery in the South. However, it must be noted that explicit reference to slavery in the rhetoric and documents of the revolt is not present and that Mexico had done everything in their power to exclude Anglo Texas from its policies on slavery. When war broke out in 1835, Santa Anna—who had certainly taken dictatorial actions—had made no threat to ending Anglo Texas’ use of enslaved people as labor. We must also realize that many of the arguments Southerners would come to make about the protection of slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War crystalized in the 1840s and 1850s, and many of those could be attributed to the debate over Texas becoming part of the Union. However, the Texas Revolution occurred in the 1830s, before such arguments matured. In the end, I agree with Randolph Campbell’s take that the protection of slavery may have been a part of Anglo Texas’ move toward revolution and independence, but to attribute to it as the or even a primary cause of the revolt is a bit misguided.

Just as claiming the protection of slavery as a cause is an oversimplification, another sweeping statement that gilds the causes is to call the revolution a movement of Anglo Texans fighting oppression. Mexico, during most of the drive to revolution, was a representative republic, one that had granted the Anglo Texans as much—if not in many ways more—self-government than they had received in the United States. Despite such a stance and long before Santa Anna seized control as a dictator, Anglos in Texas had resisted Mexican rule. One could argue that the residents of Texas may not have understood Mexican institutions of self-government and freedom, but not that Mexico denied them to the residents of the province.

What this means to me is that the situation in Texas by 1835 was a tinderbox, a smoldering cauldron of a number of issues and grievances that any spark may have set off. Anglo Texan leaders such as Stephen F. Austin, along with Mexican politicians such as Valentín Farias, had done what they could in the years between 1827 and 1835 to make sure that box did not become a flame, but when Santa Anna seized power as a dictator, he threw a match into the works and a conflagration erupted.

This ends a long series on the movement toward the Texas Revolution. I hope you have enjoyed it, and it has brought some light to an issue often clouded by emotion. 

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.