Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Laws also granted large portions of public land to any and all the veterans of Texas wars, from the heirs of the Alamo dead to later American volunteers. Thus it was virtually impossible, theoretically, for a Texas family to be landless.
However, the laws did not prevent speculation, frauds, resale, and other unsound practices. Land speculation was already an American curse; it was carried intact into Texas. Speculators continually worked to secure title to lands ahead of the actual wave of white settlement. Using their own, or purchased, or fraudulent claims, sharp operators established legal claims to choice properties far west of the current farm line. Locators and surveyors sneaked into Indian country, staked out river bottoms, river crossings, and other selected sites. The state then certified title to these lands, which were legally "public domain"; during the Republic it was established that Indians held no property rights. The federal government, in these years, could not negotiate even a treaty with the Texas Indians, because in Texas the American nation owned no soil. The federal courts, of course, determined eventual equity at law. But during the 19th century American constitutional practice held that the function of the federal judiciary was to uphold state law.
An interesting fact of the Texas frontier is that the land maps of virtually every central Texas county show that the best lands, with their precious water rights, passed into private ownership between ten and thirty years before these counties were settled by whites, even before county governments were organized. The true farmer-pioneer in Texas often found the lands he wanted alienated before he had reached them. This, and other land practices, caused continual litigation and turbulence on the western line. Millions of acres continued with "unquiet" titles. There was horrendous litigation, lasting for years in many parts of Texas. In the Southwest, Spanish land grants, grants of the Republic or state, homestead rights, and simple purchase might all conflict, since all might cover a portion of the same acreage. Some titles were not quieted at law until the next century. All this produced, among many true frontiersmen, a ferocious hatred of "Eastern" law and a vast dislike of lawyers, who usually emerged with choice plots, whoever won in court.
The Republic confused an already chaotic situation in the early 1840s by reopening empresario contracts. Several important new empresario commissions were authorized, very much on the terms of the old Spanish practice. Thousands of square miles beyond the fringe of settlement were marked off for an empresario colony; the empresario was to receive ten premium sections for each hundred families settled onto the land. He also had other direct means of income, from surveying, selling cabins, necessities, and charging for transportation costs to colonists he recruited. The Republic took this step primarily to raise money. The government reserved alternate sections of 640 acres within the empresario grants, and it was felt that rapid settlement would allow the Republic to sell these off and make a profit from immigration at last.
The program was at once ferociously unpopular with the public. Many Texans felt empresarios were now anachronisms, and the removal of millions of acres of public domain for such purposes was bitterly opposed. These sentiments, prevailed, and in 1844 the program was voided; further, the Republic and state began a process of harassment and legal action to take back what had been granted. This was a breach of faith, but it was taken with overwhelming public approbation. Several important empresario contracts had been let: to W. S. Peters and Associates in the region of the future city of Dallas, to Charles F. Mercer south of Peters, to Fisher and Miller further west, and to Count Henri de Castro of France, southwest of San Antonio.
Peters, operating as the Texas Emigration and Land Company, introduced two thousand families, mostly from Kentucky, but he was soon involved in insurmountable difficulties brought on by public hostility. In 1845 the attorney general filed suit to cancel his contract. The court battles continued for years. Mercer faced the same problems. In 1848, a Texas magistrate rather arbitrarily voided his contract, although the legislature passed a relief act in favor of his settlers. The state never dispossessed families who moved onto the new empresario grants, but it did work to dispossess the empresarios. Generally, the state succeeded, and one by one the new proprietors were put out of business. However, claims and litigation clouded the issues for decades: Mercer's claim against Texas was not finally disallowed by the Supreme Court until 1882, on a split decision.
The Fisher-Miller grant proved to be entirely inside Comanche hunting grounds, and the proprietors were not able to settle anyone on it. The empresarios unloaded their rights to a German emigration society, actually after they had been forfeited for noncompliance with the terms of contract.
The empresario Castro was not dispossessed legally, and he founded the first successful town south of San Antonio in September 1844.
Despite the admitted legal troubles and occasional chaotic situation with unquieted land titles, millions of acres of Texas soil were still transferred successfully. This land pulled hundreds of thousands of Americans across the Sabine. In 1835, the settlement of Texas was confined to the Guadalupe, Colorado, Brazos, and Trinity rivers, with the region surrounding Nacogdoches and several deep-woods enclaves on the Red. Nowhere on the settled streams did the frontier line run inland more than 200 miles, and the interfluves were empty and unpreempted. This unsettled land in the old Austin colony allowed room for development, and President Lamar's campaigns of 1839 cleared the Indians out of all of east and northeast Texas. While thousands of families settled in the older, river-bottom regions, the major push of Texas expansion after 1835 went across the northeast from the Sabine, and followed the Trinity and Brazos rivers inland from the coast, far beyond the coastal plains into the oak belt and beyond it, to the black-soiled prairie. By 1860 both the black waxy prairie and the adjoining "Grand Prairie" were settled, and the frontier line had reached the Cross Timbers—where the rain and wood ran out. This frontier ran roughly north to south along the 98th meridian, from the Fort Worth–Dallas region to just west of Austin, looped a few miles southwest of San Antonio, and swung into the coast along the Nueces. There was no Anglo settlement south of the Nueces except for some towns and ranches hugging the north bank of the Rio Grande. These towns, like Brownsville, had grown up as a result of the Mexican War, and the stationing of the army on the new border. The population of the border area was heavily ethnic Mexican, but the towns were developing an American dominant class. The land between the border and the Nueces remained as unsettled and as sun-bleached as it had been fifty years before; in fact, it was less settled, because when Mexican General Woll retreated in 1842, he ordered the Mexican population to evacuate the country with him, and many ranchers did.
San Antonio itself, in 1860, still had very few Anglo citizens. The vast mass of the population was European and Mexican. One little-known fact is that by 1850, and for many years afterward, European, mostly German, immigrants in San Antonio outnumbered both Mexicans and Anglos.
The slave plantation economy had a large expansion between 1835 and 1860, with the greatest increase coming in the first years of statehood. The older regions near the Gulf developed rapidly, as the existing planters spread out and took in more land, and new farmer-capitalists deserted already worn-out regions of the old South for Texas. The river bottoms of the entire coastal plains were devoted to cotton plantations. The new area of expansion was in the deep northeast, along the Red. Not gradually but explosively, like all American settlement of the past decades, the pine woods region was filled up with new plantations, and thousands more acres broken to the plow by black men.
The farming, society, and outlook of this region, although it was rougher and had the earmarks of a newer frontier, were identical with the old South. Planters moved out of Mississippi and Georgia into east Texas without crossing any real frontier.
However, in those years it was not understood that the soils of the prairies that opened up beyond the tree belts in Texas would grow cotton. Also, this far inland the rivers shallowed and became unreliable for navigation, and the plantation economy of the South had always been river-bound. In the antebellum period, the plantation economy and Negro slavery generally halted about halfway through the Texas geographical prairies province, even before it reached its "natural" limits with the dropping rainfall and rising stony plateaus that began almost in the center of the state. The rich lands of the Waxy Black Prairie and the Grand Prairie that bordered on the pine and post-oak woods were first broken by Tennesseeans and Alabamans who migrated from the hill regions of those states, and owned few slaves.
Almost half the settled regions of Texas, extending beyond the river-bottom plantation belts, were populated by yeoman farmers, hill and forest men from the South. This area built a frontier farm economy and a frontier crop system very similar to that of the Midwest. The people who staked out their small farms along this great semicircle, reaching from Sherman-Denison in the north down to the vicinity of Austin, were alien, even hostile, to black servitude. The society was a rough, scattered one of distant small farms dotting the broad horizons. It was puritan, hardy, hardworking, and intolerant, in the way the Anglo-Celtic frontier of America had always been. The people had a passion for the land and an everlasting bias against social organism.
Thus this region between the Sabine and the Gulf and the inland, rising plateau line, where antebellum settlement stopped, which was to become the heartland of the state, was already divided economically and socially between the two great divisions of the old South, the old plantation and the old frontier. The coastal nucleus of Texas consisted of great plantations laid out among the moss-hung oaks along the broad, muddy rivers, where cotton grew splendidly in the mucky alluvial soils. Inland, where gently rolling post-oak belts and rich, blackland prairies began, the country was a series of log cabins and rough-hewed farm fences, enclosing fields of straggling corn. Beyond the oak and prairie belt, where the horizons broadened into rising plateaus of low, flat, stony-soiled hills, and the enormous seas of grass began, the settlement dribbled out. The cabins became more distant, separated by miles and miles, and the settlements significantly were no longer called towns, but forts. If the lights in the Texas forest by the middle of the 19th century were still few, in the middle of the state, on a north–south line that extended only a few miles south of San Antonio, the lights on the edge of the Plains were swallowed in vastness.
Within the confines of this prairie province, between the deep pine woods and the semidesert on the west, in a broad band running southeast from Dallas–Fort Worth to the fringes of Austin, excluding San Antonio, and curving inward toward the coast along the Guadalupe River—an expanded Colorado-Trinity enclave—most of the migrants settled, and a hundred years afterward, in these regions most Texans still lived. This must be called the Anglo heartland. It was completely agricultural in occupation, rural in outlook, ethnically divided between white Southern Americans and Negro slaves. There were almost no other influences beyond those of the old South and the old Southern frontier.
The origins of immigration into this heartland provide the key to Texan institutions and history as a whole. In 1836 the total population consisted of approximately 30,000 Anglo whites, 4,000 Mexicans, and 5,000 Negro slaves. By 1847, there were 100,000 Anglo whites, who owned 40,000 slaves. An enormous part of the early influx was made up of Southern planters, who came to acquire cheap or free lands, and brought their capital in the form of Negroes. For some years, the greatest inflow came from the upper regions of the South, hill men and small farmers, who took up the outer fringes of the heartland. In fact, immigration into Texas was almost equally divided between the upper and the deep South, but the percentage of Negroes, with the steady expansion of the cotton kingdom, rose. In 1850, Texas had 154,034 whites, 397 black freemen, and 58,161 slaves. But ten years later, in 1860, in a total population of 604,215, there were 182,000 slaves. These blacks were not spread evenly throughout the settled portions of the state. They were confined almost entirely to the eastern plantations; on the western frontier, and south of the Guadalupe River, slaves existed only rarely, and then as house or body servants.
This immigration into Texas was part of the expansion of the South itself; it was not an expansion out of the adjacent states of Louisiana or Arkansas, but by families who leapfrogged from Alabama or Tennessee. One-half the white population came from these two states, Alabama and Tennessee. These settlers largely came from the hill and forest sections, not from the plantation South; they were "red-necks" or yeoman farmers who went entirely into the prairie and post-oak regions far up the Texas rivers. They wanted to get away from the slave plantations, with which they could not compete; they could most easily acquire land on the far edge of settlement, and there was, noticeably, in these people an urge toward the far frontier. They took their cabin lights to the edge of Indian country.
Beyond even the Alabamans and men from Tennessee, there was a fringe of Missourians—these were borderers who pushed early across the Mississippi from Kentucky, and then moved southwest.
Georgia and Mississippi supplied large contingents, especially to the plantation regions near the coast. Georgians went heavily into the pine woods in the northeast and were also responsible for the growth of plantations along the Red. Only a small minority of Texas immigrants came from Louisiana and Arkansas in the years before 1860.