‘CURSE OF CURSES’
Stephen F. Austin compromised on slavery
Would Texas even exist if not for slavery? In the beginning, the Father of Texas himself had his doubts. Of course, Mexican Texas already existed when Stephen F. Austin took over his late father’s colonizing efforts in 1821, but as one-half of a dual state called Coahuila y Tejas it was a thinly populated wilderness backwater, its future less than promising. Slavery existed, as well, on a small scale, but it would soon grow larger. When the Mexican government recognized the younger Austin as heir to his father’s contract, the agreement made each settler eligible for 80 acres of land for every enslaved person they brought with them.
Slavery troubled Austin, but he reluctantly concluded that Texas, whether an Anglo province of Mexico, an independent republic or one of America’s united states, would never grow and prosper without slave labor. Slavery may have been the “curse of curses,” in Austin’s view, but without it he worried that “we will have nothing but poverty for a very long time, perhaps the rest of our lives.”
Austin wasn’t the only nation-builder willing to compromise his principles if it meant nurturing a vibrant, economically successful Texas. Tejano leader Jose Antonio Navarro, one of three Mexican signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, also came to the reluctant conclusion that slavery was a practical necessity. He told Austin that if farmers from the Southern states were not allowed to bring their slaves with them into Texas, colonization would fail. Juan Seguin and other prominent Tejanos agreed.
Navarro, a San Antonian serving in the Coahuila y Tejas Congress in 1828, helped draft legislation designed to allow Austin and other Texas colonizers to circumvent Mexican laws against importing slaves. The scheme simply redefined slavery as debt peonage. These newly defined “indentured servants” were accorded the right to pay their masters for the cost of emancipating them, but it would take, on average, 60 years. “Such a ruse, they hoped, would circumvent existing antislavery statutes and open the region to renewed migration of masters and ‘servants’ from the southern United States,” historian Andrew Torget points out in his book “Seeds of Empire.”
Texas leaders, legends and icons — men whose names would one day adorn towns, schools, streets and counties— were slave holders. Alamo martyr Jim Bowie was a slave trader. He and his brother Rezin worked out a profitable slave-running scheme with another pair of brothers, pirate entrepreneurs Jean and Pierre Laffite. According to famed folklorist J. Frank Dobie, writing in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in 1957, the Bowie brothers realized a profit of some $65,000 before turning to other ventures.
Between the arrival of colonizers in 1821 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, slavery spread over the eastern two-fifths of Texas, an area where climate, rainfall and soil conditions favored farming over ranching. The fact that calls for revolt bubbled up among Texans in the primary slave-holding region is no coincidence.
“Disputes over slavery did not constitute an immediate cause of the Texas Revolution, but the institution was always in the background as what the noted Texas historian Eugene C. Barker called a ‘dull, organic ache,’” historian Randolph B. Campbell observes in “The Handbook of Texas.” “In other words, it was an underlying cause of the struggle in 18351836.”
It was an underlying cause because the expatriate Americans who settled Texas constantly fretted that Mexico at some point would not only abolish slavery but also strictly enforce the abolition. “They (Mexico) took a stand against slavery,” Campbell said, “and then allowed Texans a loophole.”
With political factions incessantly fighting among themselves over federalism and state sovereignty, the Mexican government from a Texan perspective was fickle about slavery. So- called War Dogs, including a recent arrival from Alabama named William Barret Travis, wanted certainty. Triggering a rebellion and declaring independence, they wrote a constitution that recognized slavery as a permanent and inviolable component of the Texas economy.
The Texas rebels included the following in their Constitution: “All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude. ... Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the Republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall Congress have the power to emancipate slaves; nor shall any slave holder be allowed to emancipate his or her slave without the consent of Congress, unless he or she shall send his or her slave or slaves without the limits of the Republic. … No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic, without the consent of Congress.”
At the time of the Revolution, approximately 5,000 enslaved persons lived in Texas, in a total population estimated at 38,470. When the U.S. annexed the economically anemic, debt-burdened Republic of Texas in 1845, the state was home to at least 30,000 enslaved people. After statehood, slavery grew even more rapidly. The census of 1850 reported 58,161 slaves, 27.4 percent of the 212,592 people in Texas. A decade later the census recorded 182,566 slaves, 30.2 percent of the total population, the same percentage as Virginia. Slaves made up 80 percent of the population of Wharton County, 60 percent of Fort Bend County.
Most slaves arrived with owners who were moving into Texas from plantations in the Deep South, although would-be slave owners in Texas could travel to Galveston or Houston to haggle with slave dealers. More than a quarter of Texas families owned slaves, most only a handful, although some Southeast Texas plantation owners built veritable industries relying on slaves.
Jared Groce, for example, brought 90 slaves with him from Alabama in 1822 and built — or rather his slaves built — the Republic’s first and largest cotton plantation, Liendo, on a Brazos bluff four miles south of present-day Hempstead. In Brazoria County, the property known today as the Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site, evolved fromthe early 1820s into a sugar plantation relying on 66 slaves working 13,500 acres of land. (Not long after the Civil War, the plantation relied on convict labor.)
Frederick Law Olmsted, best known as the visionary architect of Central Park in the heart of New York City, came to Texas in 1853 and wrote a book about his travels. In addition to detailed reporting and observation, “A Journey Through Texas” contains Olmsted’s ruminations about slavery, a practice he found not only morally reprehensible but economically counter-productive. Slavery, he contended, contributed to the squalor, indolence and thoughtless cruelty he found in East Texas, in stark contrast to the neatness, thrift and enterprise he found — and greatly admired— in the Hill Country, settled by German immigrants who did not rely on slaves.
Olmsted and his fellow abolitionists may have been reluctant to admit it, but slavery was profitable in Texas. Planters who invested in slaves to produce cotton were making a 6 percent return on their investment in the years before the war. Slaveholders were a minority of the state’s population, but they owned 73 percent of the state’s wealth. They also dominated politically. From the Capitol to the courthouse, elected officials were slave owners.
Despite Sam Houston’s warning about the dire consequences of secession, members of the Texas ruling class cast their lot with the Confederacy to protect their investment. “The fundamental reason that Texas joined the Confederacy was slavery,” Campbell contends. “The issue of state’s rights was merely an abstraction.”
The state’s slaveholders lost their secession bet, as Houston predicted. Slavery, though, was difficult to uproot, even after Federal troops arrived in Galveston in June 1865. The bluecoats were under the command of Major General Gordon Granger, who issued his famous order on June 19 ( Juneteenth) reminding Texans that slaves had been declared free by President Abraham Lincoln nearly three years earlier.
“Texas in particular remained a last resort for diehard enslavers,” Rice University historian Caleb McDaniel has written in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America” (2019). Some former slaveholders asked their freedmen, as they came to be called, to stay and work for wages. Others resorted to violence to keep them enslaved. Vigilantes hanged black bodies from trees as a warning to ex-slaves who dared exercise their right to leave. A Galveston newspaper reported in 1865 that a group of planters had organized to prevent former slaves from seeking more humane employers. As McDaniel writes, the group resolved that “every negro, if he or she attempts to leave the premises, shall be brought back and chastised in the most severe manner.”
In 1866, a newly elected governor, James Throckmorton, publicly accepted the end of slavery, but, as McDaniel points out, he expected that white Texans, once back in power, would “’ be enabled to adopt a coercive system of labor’ that would look much like slavery.” He was right. In Texas and throughout the South, the next hundred years would bring severe Jim Crow laws, strict segregation of schools and public facilities, lynching and KKK intimidation, real- estate redlining, voting restrictions, miscegenation laws, employment discrimination, police brutality and numerous other forms of race-based coercion.
The new system did indeed “look much like slavery.”