Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Poinsett had one other tremendous liability, which Austin lacked. Austin had no ideology. He wanted to Americanize Texas as part of a great development scheme. He dealt with despots, potentates, dictators, generals, or republican liberals with equal courtesy and finesse; he would deal with anyone to serve his purpose. Poinsett, however, was deeply prejudiced in favor of the Mexican liberals, who, unfortunately from his point of view, were not in power. His biases led him to choose sides in purely domestic matters in Mexico, and to make moves that destroyed his usefulness to his own government. He was among the first, but certainly not the last, American diplomat of his kind.
Significantly, Poinsett, on his first public appearance in the City of Mexico in 1825, at first drew a great ovation from an audience made up of Mexican congressmen and other notables by eulogizing Mexican independence and American friendship. Then, in mid-speech, Poinsett broached the idea that the 1819 treaty should be changed. He had not mentioned this to anyone in Mexico beforehand.
As a British observer wrote, the effect was much as if he had thrown a bomb among his listeners. They were outraged and shocked. Poinsett had tossed a delicate mission out before the public, and the public was hostile. A little feeling of his ground would have told Poinsett this. Furthermore, his abrupt action alienated those politicians who might have entertained the notion.
With this great gaffe, Poinsett actually convinced many Mexican government officials that the United States was preparing to take a hard, or aggressive line against the territorial provisions of the 1819 treaty. A few quiet words would have ensured they understood the real situation—that Adams was making a
pro forma
offer, to please the American West, and actually was not disposed to push the issue.
Some Mexicans believed the age of filibusters was reopening. These men had never been convinced that the American nation had not actively supported the earlier invasions, or believed that the expeditions had been purely private enterprise the Presidents of the United States had been powerless to stop. Magee had been a regular army officer, and there was suspicion that his Volunteers were really not volunteers. All of the filibusters had been able to recruit men and raise money and supplies along the border, and as soon as they had crossed it, they proclaimed the sovereign independence of Texas from the Spanish-speaking world—with great support by certain American newspapers. Not understanding the American social or governmental system, Spanish minds fell prey to pervasive suspicions.
Austin was able to proceed only because the treaty of 1819 seemed to remove Texas as a legitimate American goal; the United States renounced Texas "forever." When Poinsett seemed to reopen the issue, this was to have a far-reaching effect. Some Mexicans believed the United States government again favored schemes to separate Texas from Mexico.
Poinsett found the ruling conservatives in Mexico frosty to his overtures. He delayed, and advised Clay to delay, hoping for changes in Texas due to immigration, or in Mexico due to a change in government. The formal offer to buy Texas was not tendered until 1827. When it was made, this move merely threw oil on smoldering fires.
Meanwhile, Poinsett proceeded to disaster in other ways. Angered by the attitude of the clerical and monarchical-minded Mexican conservatives, he tried to "promote republican principles," as he called it. He had discovered that Freemasonry had an immense hold on the educated classes, and actually formed the basis for a political club in Mexico. But there were certain enormous differences between Mexican and North American Masons. Freemasonry had been introduced into the Hispanic world in Bourbon times as an aristocratic organization, composed of men of birth and wealth. Up to this time, as in France and Spain, Masonry in Mexico was anything but politically liberal in the Anglo-American sense. The Scottish Rite, or
Escoseses
, instead formed a genuine political vehicle for the ultraconservative cause. The liberal-minded republican Mexicans were also strongly attracted to Masonry, but could not break conservative control of the order.
Poinsett had what he felt was a brilliant inspiration. He introduced the York Rite into the capital, offering it to the liberals as their vehicle to compete with the
Escoceses
. Poinsett believed he was serving both the cause of liberty and his country, but as the
Yorkinos
became a secret society plotting against the existing regime, the true effect on the ruling party can easily be imagined. Poinsett became pe
rsona non grata
.
Aside from the irritation and anger aroused by such meddling in the affairs of a foreign power, Poinsett, and many other Americans in government, had made dangerously false assumptions about both the Mexican liberals and the effects of American immigration into Texas. As George Lockhart Rives wrote in his monumental study of United States—Mexican relations between 1821 and 1848, "a government whose existence depended in any degree on popular opinion had never been known to part with territory, except as the result of unsuccessful war."
The Mexican liberals did not favor selling Texas; they were as vehement as the conservatives, or more so, where national sovereignty was concerned. After Mexico became independent, there was never the faintest chance that sovereign Mexico would sell Texas, or its North American possessions, voluntarily.
This attitude annoyed Poinsett. He wrote President Adams, "They regard the United States with distrust and the most unfounded jealousy . . . It is vain that I represent the disinterested and generous conduct of the United States toward these countries and assure them that so far from our regarding their property with envy (as they, with unequalled vanity, suppose) we are most desirous that the Mexican state should augment in wealth and in power, and that they may become more profitable customers and more efficient allies . . . " He put down the Mexican reluctance to part with Texas as a dog-in-the manger attitude, and never understood how even his disclaimers tended to infuriate the Mexicans.
Mexico, like all new nations, was developing a heady nationalism, although this emotion had not yet produced national unity. The ruling groups were
actually most united on the determination to hold Texas. Remote, unpopulated, and unconquered as the province was, it was still Mexican soil, and such soil, everywhere in similar circumstances, tends to acquire mystic symbolism. Such territory could be bought with blood, but never with money.
Poinsett and Clay, meanwhile, simply could not comprehend the matter of Mexican pride. Mexico—in fact, the entire Hispanic world—was tyrannical, clerical, and backward by 19th-century American notions. The Mexicans, unlike North Americans, had been able neither to form a free government, nor a viable government. Anglo-Americans took pride primarily in the fact that they were free men, and their contempt for any men who could not achieve a similar system of government was both genuine and unavoidable. Americans did not understand cultural pride—a lack of comprehension that was to color all Anglo-American relations with Hispanic societies.
La raza
, as Mexicans were beginning to call themselves, did not mean "race" in the sense of the English word. It was a cultural thing, actually untranslatable into American English.
La raza
referred not to blood in the veins, but to an entire cultural heritage that extended back to Rome, and to a value system every Mexican felt was as valid as, if different from, the values prized by the English-speaking. The concept was symbolic and mystical, and held by a race that valued mysticism. And it pointed up a separation that had existed since the days when Nordics crashed against the Latin Roman Empire. If Nordics saw Latins as somewhat degenerate, tyrannical, slavish, and cruel, Latins considered the Northerners arrant barbarians.
This deep-seated pride, and the American failure to understand it, acerbated all American-Mexican dealings.
Ironically, the British Minister to Mexico, Henry Ward, saw the real state of affairs better than any American. Ward wrote Canning in September 1825:
. . . Six hundred North American families are already established in Texas; their numbers are increasing daily, and though they nominally recognize the authority of the Mexican government, a very little time will enable them to set at defiance any attempt to enforce it."
Ward also reminded the British Foreign Secretary that the Americans were "backwoodsmen—a bold and hardy race, but likely to prove bad subjects, and most inconvenient neighbors." The British government, of course, had had some experience with this kind.
The British Minister further illuminated the difference between Mexican attitudes toward Texas, and the reality of what Mexican officialdom was actually doing. " . . . Were but one-hundredth part of the attention paid to practical encroachment, which will be bestowed upon . . . verbal cession, Mexico would have little to fear."
Thus, while the capital buzzed with tales of American plots, and public speeches denounced Poinsett, Adams, Clay, and the American nation, Austin brought 5,000 Anglo-American settlers into Texas, and loose Mexican administration permitted thousands of others to filter over the border. Worse, for the eventual destiny of Mexico, many Mexican citizens exercised their option to buy up eleven leagues of Texas lands; they never settled in Texas or had any intention of settling, but they sold these land rights to North Americans for handsome profits.
This was the reality that caused Stephen Austin to make his biting comment—over which Mexican historians still writhe—that Mexicans would sell their birthright if appearances could only be preserved. The majority of Hispanic historians have always accorded Austin the honor of being honest, and of being a gentleman whose loyalty to Mexico was true until it was put to unbearable strains.
The question of the Texas Purchase smoldered without action through the Adams Administration. Mexico demanded that the United States again officially renounce Texas, as a preliminary to further treaties. Adams accepted this in 1828, but this new treaty was not ratified by the Senate. When Adams left office in 1829, the United States not only had failed to acquire Texas, but had deepened suspicion and distrust as to its intentions below the Rio Grande.
In these years, Austin was the real ruler and power in Anglo-Texas. He summed up his own experience in these words, in a letter of 1829: "I had an ignorant, whimsical, selfish, and suspicious set of rulers over me to keep good-natured, a perplexed, confused colonization law to enforce, and a set of North American frontier republicans to control, who felt that they were sovereigns, for they were beyond the arm of the government, or of the law, unless it pleased them to be controlled." By sheer skill, Austin kept both the capital and his unruly frontiersmen in good humor.
But there were other empresarios who lacked Austin's tact and skill. Haden Edwards, a Kentuckian, was granted a tract in east Texas for the purpose of settling 800 families. Edwards arrived at Nacogdoches, which was to be his seat, in October 1825. Although Edwards's title from the State of Coahuila seemed clear enough, he inherited a very confused situation around the town. He was required to respect the rights of earlier settlers who held legal land titles in the area, but did not have to honor squatters' rights. The trouble was that many people in east Texas, old Spanish, Mexicans, and rough border Americans, had no legal certificates or standing of any kind. All these people, including many Indians, were actually on Edwards's grant.
Edwards announced that settlers claiming land under old Spanish grants must present their papers to him; this alarmed everyone, Mexican and American alike. The Mexicans were particularly resentful of a North American empresario being placed over them. Edwards next arbitrarily ordered an election for
alcalde
for the district, and tried to swing the post to his son-in-law. This election, however, was set aside by the political chief at San Antonio; Norris, the "Mexican candidate" was installed, and Edwards's colonists found that apparently they could not win a disputed land case against an old settler.
Edwards was required to return to the United States on business. He left his colony in charge of his brother, Benjamin. Ben Edwards, acting on Austin's advice, wrote Governor Blanco of Coahuila-Texas a full explanation of the troubles, and requested clarification. Blanco's reply was to begin by stating Edwards's letter showed a lack of "respect for superior officials," and to decree the annulment of the empresario contract, and expel both Edwards brothers from the Mexican Republic.
Haden Edwards had spent some $50,000 bringing Americans to east Texas, and many of his colonists also had gone to great expense. Mexicans around Nacogdoches now claimed title to the lands Edwards's colonists had settled. Benjamin Edwards, understandably angry with this incomprehensible government that granted lands with one hand and withdrew them with the other, raised the standard of revolt. On December 20, 1826, the "Republic of Fredonia" was declared. The Republic divided Texas into two spheres, American and Indian, because Edwards was trying to make an alliance with the Cherokees, now moving strongly into the province. Edwards, who had about two hundred supporters, wrote Stephen Austin for aid.
But Austin refused any part in the revolt. In fact, his colony sent a hundred men to aid the Mexican force that pushed north under Colonel Ahumada. Peter Ellis Bean, the old filibuster who was now in the Mexican service, successfully separated the restive Cherokees from the Fredonians. Although Austin got Ahumada to issue a proclamation of amnesty to any rebel who surrendered, Edwards fought on, hopelessly. In January 1827, the Fredonians fled to the United States. Again, through Austin's pleading, those of Edwards's people who stayed behind were treated reasonably well by the Mexican authorities, though the Edwards grant was divided between two other empresarios.