Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Another contractor, Haden Edwards, secured permission to build a colony in east Texas near the Sabine. Here, conflicting claims with earlier Mexican settlers did produce a war, which was one of the preludes to the Texan Revolution. Edwards's colony failed.
In 1830, the Mexican government halted all immigration, only to renew it again in 1834. After this year, the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company acquired the rights earlier secured by David G. Burnet, Joseph Vehlein, and Lorenzo de Zavala in east Texas. This company originated tactics that were used in the West for many years: it advertised irresponsibly in the United States, sublet large tracts to fly-by-night subcontractors, and sold scrip on 7,500,000 acres of Texas land at from one to ten cents per acre, though it did not legally own the land. Stephen Austin was very bitter about this company; he felt it was bringing all the abuses of the old American land-speculation fever to Texas. The government at first refused to recognize any Galveston Bay claims, but the company, through a judicious use of influence and payments, finally secured land titles for one thousand holders of its scrip.
Another company, the Nashville Company, was better known by the name of its agent, Sterling Robertson. Robertson acquired lands north and northwest of Austin's colony, sold scrip, and generally damaged honest immigration. The Mexican government voided Robertson's contract and turned the region over to Austin and a partner, Williams. However, after the revolution the government of Texas returned to Robertson premium lands for 379 families.
Arthur G. Wavell, an Englishman, was commissioned to settle 500 families in deep northeast Texas. Wavell's partner, Benjamin Milam, succeeded in locating some families, but ran into a boundary problem with the United States, which claimed his grant lay east and north of Mexican Texas. No premium lands were ever secured.
Two colonies were begun with the idea of settling families direct from Europe. James Power, an Irishman, and James Hewetson, an Irish-born citizen of Monclova, Mexico, got special approval to locate a settlement within the federally reserved coastal strip between the Lavaca and Nueces rivers, immediately south of De León. Evil fortune dogged these two Irishmen and their settlers. They became involved in legal difficulties with the irascible Martín de León; their capital, Refugio, on the site of an old mission, unfortunately brought them within the jurisdiction of the ayuntamiento of one of the three Mexican towns in Texas, La Bahía. Two shiploads of hopeful people setting out from Ireland were struck by cholera; seventy of these had to be abandoned at New Orleans as unfit for Texas, while many others died and were buried at sea.
The survivors reached the inhospitable south-Texas coast, but lost their ships and all their tools and farm implements with them. After a grim struggle, Power and Hewetson granted 200 land titles; these were supposedly to Irish immigrants, but actually many were in fact to entering North Americans.
The other Irish colony, which was called "The Irish Colony," was founded by McMullen and McGloin, in the old Coahuiltec country south of San Antonio. Its town was known as San Patricio. Only eighty-four titles were issued, and the colony did not succeed, but the Irish settlers grimly stuck. These people were far south of, and had no contact with, the Anglo-Americans farther north and east. In spite of this, they assisted with the Americanization of Texas because they spoke English; eventually, except for their religion, they were indistinguishable from the frontier mass.
Other proposed colonies, such as that of the Englishman Dr. John Charles Beales, came to nothing. Many of these comprised lands unfit for cultivation or were in deep Indian country. Beales took some people west of the Nueces, but with the appearance of Comanches this colony was abandoned. Other than some six or seven, all the empresarios were either impractical dreamers, concerned with creating a refuge in the wilds for unfortunates or oppressed peoples, or else speculators hoping to get rich.
All the immigrants in this colonial period did not come at the invitation of the authorities. Even before Moses Austin rode to San Antonio, a trickle of English-speaking people were wandering across the Sabine or Red. These men wanted nothing to do with dons or empresarios. The Texas historian Strickland accurately described them as follows: "They came from Kentucky and Tennessee by the way of Missouri and Arkansas. Their fathers had followed Boone and Harrod over the Wilderness Road to Harrodsburg or Bryant's Station or pioneered with Sevier along the waters of the Holston or French Broad."
They were part of the grim, tough, Anglo-Celt vanguard, eternally moving on. They came out of the mountains with their hatchets and rifles and filtered through the forest until they came to the forest's end. They lived in Indian country—that of the also-moving Choctaws and Cherokees, who were being pushed west into east Texas and who in turn pushed the peaceful remnants of the Caddoans out into the borderlands between the pine woods and the Plains. They cut clearings and hunted in the wilderness along the Red River, and some of the people who came close behind them planted corn.
By 1815, the Wetmores had a trading station at Pecan Point on the Red. Jonesborough, another frontier town, was founded thirty miles further west. Trammel's trace, a road which linked this area with Nacogdoches, was soon defined. It was used primarily by horse thieves, who raided in Missouri. By 1821, there were some 80 settled families in these squatters' settlements; after 1825, the population greatly swelled. When Austin formed his colony, a few of these people chose to move south and legalize their claims, and the Gillilands, Robinsons, and Varners became part of the Old Three Hundred. But the majority of these hunter-trappers lived in splendid isolation, like their forebears. Not for many years were they brought into the jurisdiction, to become a part of Texas.
By 1825, then, both planter and frontiersman were firmly ensconced within the boundaries of Mexican Texas. Each would make, in his own way, his own abortive culture, live and die, and leave his descendants and legends in the land. The dynamic dualism—Old South and Old Frontier—that was to characterize the history of the state was established early. The foundations of the Cotton and Cattle kingdoms were already laid.
After a decade of the empresarios, there were 20,000 Anglo-Americans, with their slaves, in Texas. This exceeded the Spanish-speaking inhabitants by 5 to 1. Gradually, the principal problem of Don Estévan Austin, the great empresario, became not how to tear down the wilderness but how to stand between the sovereign Republic of Mexico, to which he was politically loyal, and a swarm of his own race who were rapidly re-creating Spanish Texas in their North American image. Austin, an intelligent and perceptive man, had a foot in both worlds and saw values in each. In the best sense, he was loyal to both sides. But a profound clash of cultures had already begun, which Austin never anticipated and which proved to be beyond even his powers, and his great good will, to solve.
Chapter10
THE CLASH OF CULTURES
This is the most liberal and munificent Govt. on earth to emigra[n]ts—after being here one year you will oppose a change even to Uncle Sam.
STEPHEN F. AUSTIN, IN A LETTER TO HIS SISTER, 1829
Mexicans! Watch closely, for you know all too well the Anglo-Saxon greed for territory. We have generously granted land to these Nordics; they have made their homes with us, but their hearts are with their native land. We are continually in civil wars and revolutions; we are weak, and know it—and they know it also. They may conspire with the United States to take Texas from us. From this time, be on your guard!
FROM A SPEECH TO A SECRET SESSION OF THE MEXICAN CONGRESS, 1830, THE SENTIMENTS OF WHICH WERE WIDELY ECHOED IN MEXICAN PAPERS AND PRONOUNCEMENTS
The strongest cause in bringing the Texas Revolution, however, was the lack of sympathy between the Mexican people and the Anglo-Saxon colonists. They could not understand our methods of government and we could not endure their idea of a republic.
FROM A HISTORY OF TEXAS USED IN 19TH-CENTURY TEXAS SCHOOLS
THREE major facets illuminated and determined the continuing struggle for the North American continent between Hispanic and Anglo-American civilization in the early-19th century. The first was the dissolution of the Spanish empire into successor states, and the enormous crisis of order into which these states, like the entire Hispanic world, now passed. The second was the serious national suspicions and rivalries between the two new republics of the United States and Mexico. The third, which probably made conflict inevitable, was the ethnic clash between two very different peoples and ways of life as they met in Texas.
In the summer of 1821, when Stephen Austin was exploring the Texas coastal plains for the best site to plant his American civilization, word reached Texas that Mexico was now free of Spain. A shout of
¡Viva Independencia!
went up—for the announcement was not of a new revolution but of a
fait accompli
. But then, for almost a year, nothing changed. No one in distant Texas really knew what had happened to the south.
In the middle of organizing his colony in March 1822, Austin received bad news from the last Royalist Governor, Don Antonio Martínez. Officials of the new government at Monterrey had revoked Austin's commission. Further, the government of the Mexican nation was preparing a new colonization law for Texas and the Californias. Martínez, who was soon to be replaced, advised Austin to go at once to the capital and protect his interests. This Austin immediately did.
What had happened in New Spain was never easy for Anglo-Americans, who knew the society dimly, to understand. Padre Hidalgo's revolt in 1810 did not, like the stirrings of the American Revolution, attract the support of substantial men. Its leaders were primarily people's priests, who saw the anguish of the poorest classes, and its masses were a swarm of ragged Indians. Here and there a genuine
rico
, such as Bernardo Gutiérrez, with genuine republican sentiments, joined the cause. But Hidalgo, Mier, Morelos, and Matamoros led a screaming horde with enormous grievances but with no real hope of success. The army, the Church, the bureaucracy, and the
hacendados
, all the foundations of the Spanish state, sided with the Crown. One by one, the rebellious priests were defrocked, hunted down, imprisoned by the Inquisition, and stood against a wall. Their followers were massacred.
The revolution did not die. A few leaders, the most important Vicente Guerrero and Ignacio Rayón, and Gutiérrez through Magee in Texas, kept guerrilla warfare and a spark of resistance alive. But real revolution was so completely crushed that by 1819 the Viceroy, Apodaca, informed the King there was no more need for troops.
Now the situation completely swung about. A revolution broke out in metropolitan Spain, based in part upon the crushing taxes and thousands of soldiers raised in the home country to put down rebellion in the empire. Spanish liberals came briefly to power; they dominated the
Cortés
, or parliament, and made a virtual prisoner of the King. The liberals forced Ferdinand VII to restore the liberal Constitution of 1812, which he had voided, and began to dismantle the enormous privileges of the Spanish Catholic clergy. Monasteries that sprouted all over Spain like mushrooms were closed; the lands of the orders were sequestered, and the higher orders of the clergy reformed by civil law. Thus began a Church-State struggle in Hispanic civilization that was to continue for more than a century. The liberals in Spain were soon crushed by a Catholic reaction and by the invasion of foreign troops from Bourbon France, but not before the shock of a revolutionary regime at home wreaked historic damage in New Spain.
These events, wrote the American Minister to Mexico, "were viewed with dread by the clergy" and also the upper classes. The Mexican Church, the landowners, and a large part of the army went over to independence. The first successful revolt in Mexico came not to end, but to preserve, the old regime.
The Royalist general Agustín de Iturbide, who had equaled Arredondo's efforts to stamp out the unrest, now made a deal with Vicente Guerrero's surviving forces in the south. Guerrero and Iturbide met, talked, and issued a proclamation called
El Plan de Iguala
, in February 1821. This was a compromise, or was meant to be, between the Royalists and liberals in New Spain. Mexico was proclaimed an "independent, moderate, constitutional monarchy." The Roman Catholic religion, with all privileges of the clergy, including its enormous property, and racial equality were both guaranteed. Although in perspective this proclamation looked like something of a Royalist plot, it temporarily reunited all classes. When the new Spanish Viceroy, Juan O'Donojú, arrived in Mexico in July, he quickly realized the cause of Spain was lost. He tried to salvage something for the Bourbons by working out a new deal with Iturbide, in which a regency council was formed. The "moderate, constitutional" throne was to be offered first to the King, Ferdinand VII, and then to members of the Royal family in turn. Under these provisions, conflict ceased, and Iturbide and the Republicans entered the capital, Mexico City, in September 1821.
But O'Donojú soon died. The
Cortés
in Madrid repudiated his treaty with Iturbide, pending its own solution to colonial problems, and this left the field to a power struggle between Generalissimo Iturbide and a group of uneasy Republicans. When Stephen Austin reached Mexico, he found the regency council quarreling bitterly within itself, and Iturbide quietly increasing his real power.