He helped the enslaved flee to Mexico; now he’s buried by Trump’s border wall
Somewhere among the graves of a small family cemetery, in the thin strip of land sandwiched between the Rio Grande to the south and former president Donald Trump’s border wall to the north, lie the buried remains of Nathaniel Jackson.
The precise location of his remains is unknown — his headstone washed away in this flood-prone area near the South Texas town of San Juan — and Jackson himself has been largely forgotten. But his story is at the heart of the history of an overlooked southern spur of the Underground Railroad, along which thousands of enslaved Americans fled Southern plantations. Historians estimate between 2,000 and 10,000 enslaved people used this route to freedom in Mexico, compared with an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 who fled north to the free states of the United States.
After losing nearly half its territory to the United States following the MexicanAmerican War of 1846 to 1848, the Mexican government welcomed these runaways by not only granting them freedom, but giving them land in a bid to increase the population of a desolate northeastern part of the country.
Ultimately, Jackson’s tale is part of a larger historical rethinking of Mexico’s influence in what one local historian called the “push-pull factor” of slavery in the United States — with enslaved Americans looking to escape the shackles of servitude and Mexico actively seeking to entice them — as well as the fight for Texas independence and the U.S. Civil War itself.
It’s also a tale of family, survival and espionage — all set against the modern backdrop of Mr. Trump’s border wall and the festering debate over immigration. Where this region once represented freedom to people fleeing south, it has become ground zero for the effort to prevent migrants from fleeing north into the United States.
Jackson was a White man fromAlabama. His commonlaw wife, Matilda Hicks, was enslaved by his father, according to Roseann BachaGarza, program manager of the Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools (CHAPS), an initiative of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley that has been documenting the southern Underground Railroad.
As with so many Southern planters, human bondage was a part of Jackson’s life from his childhood in Georgia in a Quaker family. In 1804, when Jackson was 6, records show, his father, Joseph, bought several enslaved people. Among the purchases was 4-year-old Matilda.
Joseph Jackson eventually moved his family to Alabama, and records show that by 1830, Nathaniel owned his own land and enslaved as many as 25 people. Surreptitiously, he and Matilda began having children. She is known to have had three childrenbefore Jackson, and she had seven more with him. While there is evidence that the Jacksons had a tightknit family, it’s unknown whether their relationship was fully consensual at a time when many White men had coercive relations with enslaved Black women.
Jackson and Matilda built a family against a backdrop of international conflict and upheaval in the region. Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821 and immediately began implementing anti-slavery laws. Fifteen years later, in 1836, Texas declared independence from Mexico and became a republic, in great measure to preserve slavery among the Anglo cotton farmers who were moving into the state. And in 1845, the United States annexed Texas, a move Mexico disputed because it never recognized Texas’ independence.
A year later, the United States invaded Mexico to begin the Mexican-American War, which ended in 1848 with the United States seizing the formerly Mexican states of Texas, California, Nevada and Utah, as well as parts of present-day Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming — more than half of Mexico’s land.
In a move aimed at preserving the remainder of its northern territory, Mexico began aggressively trying to populate the land, offering free or cheap land to emancipated enslaved people, Ms. Bacha-Garza said.
In 1857, the 59-year-old Jackson— who eventually became an ardent abolitionist — along with 57-year-old Matilda, began a westward trek in five covered wagons with all their adult children, their grandchildren and other extended family members, initially headed for Matamoros, Mexico. Apart from Jackson, a few other white men joined the caravan, but most members of the convoy were listed as enslaved in the 1850 Alabamacensus.
Flush with cash after selling more than 700 acres in Alabama and an unknown amount of acreage that he inherited from his father, Jackson eventually bought more than 5,500 acres of riverfront land in South Texas.
It’s unknown why Jackson stayed in the U.S., where slave catchers could earn $600 a head for runaways, but Ms. Bacha-Garza points to another mixed-race couple named Silvia and John Webber who owned a ranch nearby. The Webbers initially lived in Central Texas, where John founded a town that is now called Webberville. But he and his emancipated wife faced prejudice there and eventually moved to South Texas.
Both the Webber and Jackson ranches had licensed ferries adjacent to their land that allowed them to easily cross an oftentreacherous Rio Grande, Ms. Bacha-Garza said. Word soon got out among enslaved people in Texas and Louisiana that these families welcomed runaways and would aid in their escape to Mexico.
The journey to South Texas, particularly across a 150-mile stretch known as the Nueces Strip — between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande — was perilous. An unknown number of people heading south died in this dry, barren and snake-filled land — the same area where modern-day migrants have died going north.
When the Civil War began in April 1861, at least three Jackson sons joined the Confederate army to patrol the border region, though they may not have been ardent Confederates. “It was mostly for self-preservation,” Ms. Bacha-Garza said. “If they hadn’t joined, people might have started asking why.” It also may have aided them as they helped people evade slave catchers. “What better way for them to keep their fingers on the pulse of Confederate operations in the immediate area and be able to move their loved ones over the river to safety in Mexico?” she said.
Nathaniel Jackson died in 1865; it’s unknown when Matilda died. His land was divided among his heirs. One of them, Eli Jackson, is honored by a state historical marker on a highway that runs adjacent to the Jackson holdings and the border wall. It says of Nathaniel, “He was known for his generosity and hospitality, and many, including runaway slaves, came to the ranch in need of lodging and other resources.”