Stephen F. Austin, Cotton, & Chattel Slavery In Texas
The Settlement of Austin’s Colony,” a painting by Henry Arthur McArdle, hanging in the House of Representatives chamber in the Texas Capitol.
While the annihilation of Native Americans was still in progress, chattel slavery appeared. Slavery in the United States began in 1619. Still, it would be hundreds of years before being introduced to the northern part of the Mexican province of Coahuila y Tejas (modern-day Texas), specifically, in 1816. Retired United States military officers, turned pirates, originated slave auctions on the island of Galveston. Those first auctions began fifty years (1816 - 1866) of the illegal American-led slave trade and chattel slavery in the Mexican state. While Galveston became the birthplace of the Tejas slave trade, Mexico joined other nations in a worldwide moral revolt against the slave trade. Beginning in 1821, Mexico offered full citizenship to all free blacks, including land ownership and other privileges. It is for that reason that free blacks and escaped hostages from the slave states were attracted to Mexico. It offered promise.
A few years later, the first empresarial grant made by Spanish-controlled Mexico was awarded to the passionate Stephen F. Austin. In 1822, Austin brought a group known as the “Old Three Hundred” to settle an area on the Brazos River. The newly independent Mexican government later ratified the grant. Austin knew the dreams of prosperity that new settlers brought with them, and shared their belief that chattel slavery was a needed resource for the new Tejas economy. “Austin understood early on that all of his hopes and dreams and plans for Tejas depended upon the cotton economy,” said Greg Cantrell, a history professor at Texas Christian University.
Cantrell, the author of Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas said, “He understood very clearly that the cotton economy depended upon slave labor. On numerous occasions, when people raised this issue with him, he said, ‘Texas must be a slave country,’ and he put his money where his mouth was.” Austin lobbied hard to ensure slavery in Texas despite the attempts of the Mexican government to ban the institution. However, in 1824, Mexico passed the General Colonization Law, which enabled all heads of household, regardless of race, religion, or immigrant status, to acquire land in Coahuila y Tejas. Mexico was attempting for all men, including Black peoples, what the United States offered in the constitution only to white men; life, liberty, and land ownership.
“Texas must be a slave country.”
Mexico’s General Colonization Law was followed up in 1829 by the Guerrero Decree, named after Afro-Mexican President Vicente Guerrero. This decree conditionally abolished slavery throughout all Mexican territories. The Guerrero Decree read in part, “All inhabitants . . . without distinction of their European, African or Indian origins are citizens . . . with full freedom to pursue their livelihoods according to their merits and virtues.”
The law was meant in part to discourage the further migration of slave owners to Tejas, but instead, it increased tensions for slaveholding Anglo-Americans already scattered throughout the territory. The white foreigners were greatly displeased and resisted.
That same year Austin successfully lobbied for the Tejas province to be exempt from the Mexican national government’s abolition of slavery until 1830. Austin next lobbied the state government to pass a law that allowed slavery to continue, but under a different name. According to Professor Cantrell, “Before slave owners left the United States to come as migrants to Tejas in Mexico, they could technically emancipate their slaves then force them to sign a 99-year contract of indenture, making their slaves indentured slaves.” Their emancipation was but a legal technicality. The reality was blacks were pawns in a slave economy. Yes, technically, free blacks still had favorable conditions until the 1830s, but things rapidly changed as more white supremacists migrated into the area.
The Marshall Trilogy
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in 1823 that American Indians, who have lived on the land for tens of thousands of years, didn’t own land. The first of three court cases, now called the “Marshall Trilogy,” became the foundation of American Indian law. The case involves a series of land transfers. In the 1770s, the ancestors of plaintiff Thomas Johnson purchased land from Indians. The defendant William McIntosh obtained a United States land patent that happened to occupy the Johnson parcel of land. The plaintiff sued for an ejectment claiming the legal title. However, the claim was rejected because Indians could not legitimately own land. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall decided to uphold the McIntosh family’s ownership of land purchased from the federal government (Johnson v McIntosh). The ruling meant that whatever lands claimed by the federal government could not belong to Indians no matter how long the native peoples had resided on those lands.
At best, Indians were entitled only to a “right of occupancy.” Indians did not and could not have the land title. Chief Justice Marshall based his decision on the aforementioned “Discovery Doctrine.” Marshall argued that European colonial powers laid claim to newly “discovered” lands in the Western Hemisphere. Those claims gave legal titles to the land. This Catholic doctrine completely ignored all land possession/occupation by native peoples.
While the Federal Courts used immoral means to justify land theft, abolitionists gave birth to the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was developed by religious people, like Quakers, who opposed slavery on Biblical and moral grounds. Abolitionist newspaper publishers, like William Lloyd Garrison, and other people of good conscience and faith, including former slaves, joined forces with fugitive slaves to provide a path to liberation.
Through a network of safe houses, often hunted fugitive slaves would escape from plantations to head north to freedom. As many as 100,000 slaves reached liberty during the 1830s, the heyday of the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the railroad, escaped from Maryland to Philadelphia in 1849. Upwards of 300 slaves escaped due to Tubman’s many risky and deadly missions. Tubman would go on to serve the Union Army during the “war to make men free” as a scout and a spy. She later married a free black man.
As news of the Underground Railroad’s success spread, more and more abolitionism spread. Together with a changing political landscape in northern states, pro-slavery southerners felt their institutions were endangered. This threat fueled further interest in slaveholders migrating west to countries like Mexico (specifically Tejas) and new American territories promising white supremacists the freedom to continue their oppressive regime of slave capitalism.
Back in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, local officials grew concerned because President Santa Anna revoked the constitution and began to consolidate power. American settlers to the Tejas area anticipated more freedom. They did not imagine any control from the far-away capital Mexico City. When called on to follow the law of the land, white settlers refused to pay taxes, and they opposed all anti-slavery stances of the federal government. To make matters worse, by the mid-1830s, there were 35,000 settlers of American descent in Tejas or four times the number of Mexicans.
