Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The Fredonian revolt caused a sensation far beyond its actual importance. American newspapers played it up—"200 Men Against a Nation!"—and expressed sympathy, while these "apostles of democracy were crushed by an alien civilization." In the Mexican capital, when the first confused reports arrived (actually, while the rebellion was being cleaned up on the spot), the Congress authorized massive measures "to repel invasion." Mexican opinion claimed the Fredonian affair was part of a greater North American plot. The President, General Guadalupe Victoria, knew better, but he also knew better than to express in public unpopular views. The Mexican government, through its Minister to Washington, Obregón, asked the United States to disclaim any part in the Fredonian revolution. Henry Clay did this, and was believed by those Mexicans actually in power. But neither Clay nor President Adams could control American newspapers. Obregón saw, and wrote home, that American sympathy was with the rebellion, and advised there would be trouble in days to come if American colonization of Texas were allowed to continue.
The fact that Austin's colony had supported the legal government, and that North Americans had fought against Edwards, was overlooked in Mexico and widely disapproved in the United States.
There had arisen in Mexico a group of officials who were deeply concerned with the American danger. This attitude was as much ethnic as national, and most of this anti-Americanism centered in the educated Hispanic elite. They feared the Anglo-American value system was producing a relentlessly aggressive national neighbor to the north, and they were determined to defend the Mexican way of life. They hoped to make their countrymen see the danger. This faction included such important men as General Don José María Tornel, General Don Manuel Mier y Terán, and the Mexican Minister of Foreign Relations, Don Lúcas Alamán.
General Mier y Terán investigated Texas during 1828–29 for the government. He wrote a most disturbing report. According to the messages he sent the President, the Mexican presence "disappeared" beyond San Antonio. The ratio of Mexicans to
Norteamericanos
was 1 to 10, and Mexicans were becoming the very lowest class. The foreign immigrants had their own schools
(the Mexicans had none), and their older children were sent back to the United States to be educated. With these schools, and their terrible energy and enterprise, the foreigners were bound to take over the country. There was already resentment between the North Americans and local Mexicans, and this could lead to trouble and plunge the whole nation into revolution. The President was warned to take "timely measures," or lose the province forever.
Mier y Terán made several specific recommendations, which show both Mexican fear and helplessness: The government should send ethnic Mexican colonists to Texas; encourage Swiss and Germans to colonize; encourage trade between Texas and the Gulf coast of Mexico; garrison more troops in Texas, using convict conscriptees who after their term of service might be forced to settle in the province.
Terán's inspection resulted in several attempts to curtail the American colony. General Tornel prevailed upon the new President, Vicente Guerrero, to sign a decree abolishing slavery in the entire republic; since there was no chattel slavery in Mexico, this was aimed at weakening Austin's people and discouraging more Americans from immigrating. Other Mexican officials, however, saw to it that Texas was exempted. Actually, the whole Mexican legal attitude toward slavery was confusing in the extreme. On several occasions during the 1820s and 1830s, the Mexican government curtailed or abolished slavery and peonage contracts, only to reinstate them with convenient loopholes in the law. The Texas colonists brought approximately 1,000 Negro slaves into the region, and their status was always uncertain. Two things were certain, however; the North Americans generally ignored whatever decrees the capital issued, and these were never enforced.
Lúcas Alamán, meanwhile, presented Terán's proposals to the Congress, in a secret session. This resulted in the Decree of April 6, 1830, which in Article II expressly forbade any further colonization of Mexican territory by citizens of adjacent countries—meaning the United States. The decree also prevented any foreigner entering Texas "from the North" unless he possessed a passport made out by a Mexican consular agent in his own country. Importation of slaves was again prohibited.
Alamán's recommendations to the Mexican Congress went much further, and these too were adopted as policy, although not officially made public in a decree:
To settle Mexican convicts in Texas.
To introduce colonists from nations that differed widely from the Anglo-Saxons, to dilute and offset the English-speaking colonization.
To collect customs and supervise trade, so as to make Texas trade with Mexico rather than the United States.
To place Texas directly under the control of the central government so that the province could be closely observed.
To dispatch competent persons to Texas to gather information—in short, to keep government spies in the province.
Alamán's pervasive ethnic hostility to North Americans precipitated these acts and became a significant part of Mexican policy toward Texas from this time forward.
The Decree of April 6, 1830, and the other actions were taken to "meet an emergency" caused by "imperious circumstances," Alamán stated. The emergency at this time was almost entirely in the anti-American cabal's mind.
The United States had no overt aggressive intentions toward Texas. The overwhelming majority of Anglo-Texans were loyal to Mexico, though in their own fashion. Alamán and the others, however, very effectively created a genuine emergency in the ensuing months and years.
The colonists had sworn allegiance to Mexico and promised to obey its laws, and this was an argument and a justification that Mexican historians and apologists were to hammer upon for the next century. However, the most notable feature of the Mexican colonization program in the 1820s was its munificence and liberality. In effect, the colonists were promised exemption from virtually all duties and laws—anything to get them to settle the land and create a buffer against the marauding Indians. The statement of a Nacogdoches land commissioner summed up the state of affairs in Anglo-Texas during its formative period: "Come what may I am convinced that Texas must prosper. We pay no taxes, work no public roads, get our land at cost, and perform no public duties of any kind."
While Mexicans were subject to military service, taxes, customs duties, and mandatory church tithes, Anglo-Texans were not. Their government was left to the empresarios, who let them regulate themselves. However, this munificence was no sacrifice to the Mexican Republic; the colonists were given no military protection or government services of any kind. The Anglo-Texans were simply allotted lands the Mexicans had never been able to use, and within ten years they were chipping out a sort of Jeffersonian paradise: a commonwealth rich in natural resources, where every man with a white skin was more or less equal with his league of land, and hampered by no distant government, beneficial or otherwise.
Even aside from the fact that Anglo-Americans belonged to two different civilizations, with different value and manners systems, the reintegration of such a republic within a republic must have caused enormous problems. No band of pioneers, grown used to such an environment, would willingly tolerate the sort of regulation that was normal to Mexico.
The status of religion and the Indian problem in Texas give some indication both as to Mexican motivation in allowing the colony, and their disappointment with it. Although Mexico was by law a Roman Catholic nation, for a full decade Austin was unable to secure a curate for his colony. There was no one to baptize, marry, or bury, according to Mexican law. Austin complained regularly. The problem was not a shortage of priests but one of footing the costs. The Texans had been relieved of all taxes and church tithes for ten years, so any clergy had to be supported by the central government. Finally, in the 1830s, Austin's people received a priest, an Irish curate named Muldoon. Father Muldoon was a kindly man who did not inquire too closely into the state of the colonists' religion, but, as one Texas historian wrote euphemistically, he "did not always live up to the standards of piety which Anglo-Americans held up for the ministry." Among other things, he had an alcohol problem. Actually, there was no overt religious trouble. The settlers left their formal churches at the Sabine, and although a few itinerant Protestant preachers wandered Texas, occasionally getting in difficulty with the authorities, the religious problem was really a part of the ethnic problem. The colonists did not bring new temples, but they brought a completely Protestant ethos, in attitudes toward work, money, art, God, state, and man, while Mexican officials who detested the clergy, who had not been inside a church in years, and were members of the Masonic Order remained unconsciously but utterly Catholic in their culture. Every President of the Mexican Republic was a Freemason, but almost every one of them instinctively distrusted heretics.
The Indian situation in Texas deeply frustrated the Mexicans. The single biggest reason for allowing foreign immigration was to create an Indian buffer. But Austin's people were only up against tribes who were no problem for the Mexicans. With the dread Comanches Austin was able to make a very real peace. The Comanches recognized the Anglo-Texans as a separate people from the Mexicans and did not bother them, while they continued to harass the Mexican ranches at Béxar and along the Bravo. Inevitably, the Mexican authorities came to look upon this peace with the Comanches as a North American plot, a prelude to an Indian alliance that would seize all Texas. Austin's failure to engage in all-out conflict with the Comanches is understandable, but this was not what the Mexicans had hoped. Oddly, in the light of future history, in 1836 a Scots-American traveler wrote truthfully that the settlement of Anglo-Texas had been accomplished with the killing of fewer white men than any other American state, with the exception of Pennsylvania. The writer did not class Spaniards and Mexicans, of course, as white. So long as Austin's colony remained east of the Colorado, it was safe, but the Mexicans to the west were continually burned out, killed, or carried off.
The Mexican mistake, beyond the original allowing of a large horde of self-disciplined, armed land seekers to cross the borders, was in permitting the Anglos to create, without hindrance, their own community within nominal Mexican territory. The immigrants did abandon their own homeland and its sovereignty. But, as Yoakum wrote, these Americans "brought with them here, as household gods, their own first lessons in politics, morals, religion, and business, and they wished not to unlearn those lessons to learn others." In other words, the immigrants never had any real intention of becoming Mexicans—in fact, they had no opportunity to do so. Only Austin and certain other Anglo officials, who were in direct contact with Mexicans, ever learned the Spanish language.
The settlers could not learn Mexican culture and the Mexican language in schools, because the only schools were the ones the colonists started themselves.
That this was not seen at first as a problem was due to the fact that the Austins and the Spanish officials who negotiated the colonization were all born into the 18th century, before modern nationalism was strong. But by 1820, both American and Mexican nationalism were becoming virulent, in a way many leaders did not yet fully understand.
The real, underlying cause of the Texas Revolution was extreme ethnic difference between two sets of men, neither of whom, because of different ideas of government, religion, and society, had any respect for the other. Added to this was the inherent distaste of Anglo-Americans for the racial composition of the Mexican nation. This attitude was not peculiar to Americans; every European traveler of the time, including Spaniards, commented openly on the vices of a mixed, or
mestizo
, race. The 19th century was quite intolerant of mixed blood, and very honest about it. As Rives wrote:
They [the Texans] were, in fact, always ready to conform to laws which they understood, but that had been their custom and the custom of their fathers for many generations. They would never submit to the domination of a race they regarded as inferior. They despised Mexicans as they despised negroes and Indians.
In short, it was perfectly possible for Anglo-Texas to fly the Mexican flag and be legally a part of the Mexican nation—most substantial settlers were happy with the arrangement, since they fared better under the liberal colonization laws than they would have in the United States—but only as a self-governing commonwealth. This goal seems to have been what everyone originally had in mind, both Austin and the framers of the Mexican Constitution of 1824. But they reckoned without the inherent Hispanic centralist drive, and the underlying ethnic hostility and fear of the United States of men like Lúcas Alamán. Mexico, fatally, was unable to create another North American empire along the pluralistic lines of the nation it disliked most.
If the underlying reason for revolt was ethnic hatred on both sides, the immediate cause was Mexico's determination, after 1830, to bring Anglo-Texas under the national authority and to integrate the province under Mexican terms. Legally, Mexico had every right to attempt this. Morally, the colonists had every right to resist. What was coming was deep cultural conflict, in which two peoples clashed, and as anthropologists have shown again and again, in cultural conflict there is seldom any clear-cut right or wrong. Men are moral or ethical only in terms of their own values, and no one else's.