Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Because of climate, occupation, familiarity, and associations, immigrants congregated remarkably in certain regions. The Louisianans were mainly sugar planters or merchants. They rarely ventured beyond sight or smell of the Gulf of Mexico. They formed an actual majority of settlers from the Sabine to Galveston Bay; they made small enclaves at the mouths of the Nueces and even the distant Rio Grande.
Georgians and Mississippians stayed in the vicinity of Nacogdoches, expanding the slave society northward to the Red. One large group of Mississippi people gathered far south on the Guadalupe, however, and brought Negroes further south than they had been before. Other planters from these states helped fill the prairies between the river bottoms near the coast.
The Alabamans almost always went west of the coastal plains, up to where the rolling hills and oak trees began. They staked out their farms in rolling, grassy, tree-studded country, where once the Tawakonis and Wacos of the Wichita tribes had made a buffer between the Comanches and the coast. The Tennesseeans went even further west, across the two large prairie bands of north-central Texas, and to the edge of the cross timbers that stopped abruptly near Fort Worth. Here, there were also enclaves of Alabamans and Missourians, but the great outer frontier was populated primarily from Tennessee.
A phenomenon of this settlement was that pioneers from different distant areas did not usually congregate or mix. For hundreds of miles along a certain band, settlers from one region, such as Alabama or Tennessee, would be a hundred to a hundred fifty times more numerous than settlers from all other states combined. Mississippians and Georgians likewise peopled entire counties, and built them in a familiar image. The Missourians on the rimlands retained a Western, rather than a Southern, flavor. Ninety percent of all Texas immigration arrived out of the Southern states, but this did not mean it was entirely cohesive: west and east Texas re-created something similar to the old division between Appalachia and the tidewater.
One real variation in Texas, compared to the South, was the percentage of European immigration. In 1860, 43,422 Texans were foreign-born. Of these, 12,000 were Mexicans; "foreign," although most had been born in Texas, since they had not been born citizens of the United States. This Mexican population was almost entirely south of the Colorado River, and outside the heartland of Anglo-Texas.
In the early 1840s the Mavericks and a few others were the only Anglos in San Antonio, and there was only a handful of non-Mexicans in the settlements north of the Rio Grande.
One striking feature of the southwestern regions of Texas is that the border settlements were organized and dominated by people the Mexicans called Anglos, but who were primarily European immigrants. Germans, French, Austrians, and other assorted nationalities drifted to the frontier of Texas in those years in large numbers. They joined with a few Americans, almost all of whom came out of the Northern states, such as Pennsylvania or New York. These men were traders or merchants, following professions largely outside the Southern ethos; just as Pennsylvania Presbyterians had become the merchant class of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, they cropped up surprisingly often on the dusty border, where the economy was entirely based on the Mexico trade and supplying Army garrisons. Conspicuous examples of these mercantilists were Captains Kenedy and King, who first arrived in South Texas as steamboat men serving the U.S. forces holding the Rio Grande. There were ephemeral fortunes to be made freighting and trading along the Rio Grande, and these men filled a vacuum the native Spanish-speaking ranchers could not fill. They hauled goods, loaned money, and acquired lands.
The tenor of Mexican life remained almost unchanged at the bottom, but at the top political control passed completely into the hands of the new arrivals. American and European immigrants organized the new counties, assumed the offices, and ran the country. This was not part of any ethnic plot to dispossess the Mexicans, who by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were U.S. citizens. But few Mexicans were literate; they refused to learn English, and even the upper class was entirely ignorant of Anglo-Saxon institutions and politics and tended to be contemptuous of both. Under these circumstances political as well as economic control passed into the hands of recent American or European arrivals, from Brownsville to San Antonio. The Mexicans, whose vote was all-important, were "voted," as the saying went. They elected Anglo sheriffs and judges as they were told by Anglo merchants and bankers. In these first years, however, there was much social mixture and intermarriage between American newcomers—the merchant adventurers, unlike farmers out of Tennessee, rarely brought wives—and members of the Spanish upper castes.
In the 1850s, the border towns of El Paso and Brownsville, and San Antonio itself, were dominated by a handful of leading merchants or financial men, none of whom were born in Texas or the South. This peculiar politico-social system, in which ethnic Mexicans usually possessed numerical superiority but remained politically inert as individuals, became a lasting feature of south-Texas life. It was a logical outcome to centuries of Hispanic-Mexican tradition, in which the Indian and
mestizo
base were allowed no function in politics, and in which even the Spanish landed elite possessed no initiative beyond being permitted to sit on local municipal councils. Another feature of this developing society was that the American or Americanized newcomers acquired extensive lands; the early entrepreneur, if he stayed, became a rancher. In this way Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, who with a few others at one time dominated all Texas south of the Nueces from Brownsville, became two of the largest landowners in the South. In the 1850s the nucleus of the immense King Ranch was formed.
In this way, also, much of the old caste and class structure of Mexico was perpetuated in south Texas. An Anglo-Saxon, or mixed Anglo-European-Spanish caste replaced the old Spanish land grantees at the apex of society. Although the new structure was American-oriented, English-speaking, and politically aware, it unconsciously adopted much of the patronizing attitude of the
rancheros
, whose ignorance of and impatience with the vagaries of American law and political practice completed their decline. Many Spanish landowners could never adapt to the American practice of taxation, where lands were taxed on assessed values, rather than merely on what they happened to produce from year to year. Each party—American and Spanish—considered the other system immoral, but the older owners' failure to exploit their lands cost them many titles through public sales. Further, the vast majority of Mexican inhabitants of the border regions could never make up their minds as to citizenship—American or Mexican—for almost one hundred years. This left them able to enter Mexico any time they chose, and many Texas-born Mexicans became prominent in Mexican government over the years, but it left them at a disadvantage at home.
Just as the Mexican presence that clung stubbornly to the fringe areas of Texas was outside or beyond the Anglo heartland, the great part of the European immigration avoided the Anglo regions. In 1860, there were slightly more than 30,000 European-born citizens in Texas. The vast majority were settled in the south-southwest, somewhere west and south of the Colorado. Unlike much of the foreign immigration that was now pouring into the northern United States, these migrants were almost entirely rurally oriented and agricultural.
During the 1820s and 1830s a number of French and Germans (Austrians and Swiss were among these, but usually called themselves Germans) entered Texas, but these men or families came individually. They either took up farming or sought employment as mechanics or artisans in the settlements, almost always founding their own businesses, since none existed before they came. The early immigrants joined in with the people of Anglo-Texas and almost invariably lost their European cultural identity quickly. The people who arrived in the 1840s and later did not, because they came en masse and formed enclaves. Meanwhile, the Irish colonies in south Texas had thrown in their lot with the Anglos politically in 1835, and except for a lasting Catholicism in some families, were hardly distinguishable from the Anglo mass. In Texas, no potato-famine Irish ever arrived.
The first successful non-English-speaking enclave was founded by Henri de Castro, on the Medina River fifty miles southwest of San Antonio in September 1844. Castro's empresario grant, which included lands far south and west to the border, was in the path of the Comanche raiding trail to Mexico. He placed his town of Castroville in its safest, far northeastern corner. This was beautiful, rolling country, on the fringes of the Balcones Scarp, with a band of tall cypresses rising along the clear Medina. The region had stretches of fertile, river-valley soils, much like the area immediately surrounding San Antonio, though the general tenor of the landscape was rock and brush. Castro began with 300 colonists, most of whom were French citizens of Alsatian origin.
Though Henri de Castro himself went bankrupt in the process, he advertised widely in France and the regions of the Upper Rhine in Germany. He acquired many colonists. Medina County, which grew from this settlement of Castroville, spread for some miles along the river on either side of the town, which retained a certain Old World charm, blended with the starkness of the New World frontier. In three years, Castro brought a total of 2,134 settlers in through the Gulf of Mexico. The majority of these were listed in old censuses as French, but this tended to be confusing. They were primarily ethnic Alsatians; they spoke a Germanic tongue, and in Texas they generally described themselves as "Germans." A number of the Castroville people were also Swabians, Württembergers, and Swiss. They were heavily Catholic, and built one of the first non-Hispanic Roman churches in Texas. This colony clung, grew, and spread north and east until it merged, almost imperceptibly, with spreading German settlement coming down from the Balcones Scarp. The Castroites, however, kept their own historic and sentimental identity; in the 20th century thousands of south-central Texans, who could no longer speak a foreign language, referred to themselves as "Alsatians." They held annual mass reunions, but more from historic sentiment than cultural aloofness, for they had become indistinguishable from most Anglo-Texans.
There was a French colony, founded on the socialist principles of Fourier, established not far from Dallas in 1855. Here, 500 people gathered, cooperated briefly, quarreled, and drifted away. This colony, La Reunion, failed, but many of its educated French zealots stayed within the state. Small Scandinavian and Czech groups arrived in the 1840s. The Czechs (listed under Austrian nationality) were mainly intellectuals, fleeing the turmoil and repressions of 1848. They achieved, because of their level of culture, a remarkable influence in the skimpy intellectual landscape, though they merged quickly with the frontier population. Bedicheks and Nowaks soon sat comfortably in the pews of the Baptist Church.
English and Scots entered Texas. Forty-odd men born in the British Isles died in the Alamo, but since none of these came in bunches, and merged rapidly, they left no lasting mark, except Scots names on many of the places along the frontier. Cameron County, where both Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma were fought, was named for a Scot in the Texas service.
In Texas, however, the German people planted what was to be their only successful colony overseas. Other Americans, and Germans touring Texas, are often startled to hear German speech, and to find wholly German townships scattered through the scenic plateau on a diagonal stretching northwest above San Antonio from Cibolo–New Braunfels to the town of Fredericksburg, and to find almost a dozen counties in this hill country, so typical of the American Western frontier, where Germanic surnames predominate. Germans in Texas, not Indian-fighting pioneers, made the first permanent settlements above the Balcones fault.
This came about because of a tragicomic-romantic dream of a group of German noblemen, whose princedoms for the most part had been mediatized by Prussia. The vision and idealism of these princes is hard to fault, but the manner in which their ideas were implemented almost produced tragedy. It did result in one of the enduring legends of the Texas frontier, and in the end, sank German seed in Texas soil.
In 1842, these Prussian nobles formed the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, called
Adelsverein
in German for short. The purposes of the
Adelsverein
were several: to create a new German fatherland in America, where the German working classes and peasantry might emigrate and prosper, thus opening new markets for the industry at home, also developing German maritime commerce. The concept was thus the usual mixture of paternalistic idealism and mercantile colonialism that permeated many European circles. It is certain that some of the men involved genuinely wanted to offer the crowded and oppressed peasantry in the industrializing Germanies a better life; others were seeking an opportunity to plant German influence, if not the flag, overseas. The Republic of Texas was chosen as the colonial base, for three reasons. It had the reputation in Europe of having a healthful climate and good soils; it lacked the tariff and other barriers erected by the United States and other American republics; and last, Texas was small and emerging, and the princes hoped the German immigrants would be able to take and hold an influential, if not dominant, place in the Republic.
The Society sent one of its most energetic members, Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, to Texas in 1844, while thousands of emigrants were recruited in the north-central German states. The Society offered the following bargain to each willing head of household for $240 and a promise to cultivate at least 15 acres for three years: free transportation to Texas, free land (320 acres per family), a log house, financing through his first crop, and a system of public services, such as mills, gins, hospitals, churches, asylums, and the like built at
Adelsverein
expense in the community. Only some $80,000 was raised by the noble members to finance these services. This was extremely optimistic, but the Society was mistakenly convinced that huge profits would be made soon by the sale of Texas lands. The
Adelsverein
had acquired the old Fisher-Miller empresario grant and proposed to settle half and sell the other.