Austin's colony was unofficially made a municipality, which was divided into two districts, or precincts, the Colorado and the Brazos. Austin allowed two alcaldes to be elected; these magistrates were to have real problems struggling with their decisions in the light of Mexican law, of which they were ignorant.
The court system of this government, in American eyes, was impossible. Both the commissar and the alcalde could hear cases, but neither was allowed to rule on them. The testimony had to be transmitted to the state capital at Saltillo, a distance of more than four hundred miles. A Mexican magistrate called the asesor general then examined the testimony and issued his dictamen, or ruling. This then had to be approved by the Mexican Supreme Court. Any error in the written accounts vitiated the whole process, which could go on for years. Only two things made the legal system supportable in Anglo-Texas: there was almost no crime (all observers agree on this), and what little there was the empresario handled outside the courts. San Felipe de Austin never built a cárcel, or jail.
In this system, the empresario had enormous powers; Austin was in reality a theoretical despot. He could appoint all his officials if he chose. Since the colony was excused from state and national taxes, church tithes, and customs duties, and was created in Mexican eyes to defend Northern Mexico and itself at its own expense, in its crucial formative years official Mexico had no real interest in it. Austin in his early years was warned repeatedly to govern and defend himself and not to let his colony be a nuisance. For this purpose, the empresario was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Mexican Army, made military and political commander of his colony, and Austin was even permitted to develop and codify his own laws. He did this, following the Mexican Constitution of 1824 so far as he thought wise.
Although Austin knew better than to act as a petty potentate, his duties and responsibilities were still enormous. He delegated such local government as seemed needed to the alcaldes, alguaciles, and comisarios his settlements chose to elect; his settlers, unable to pronounce these Arabic-derived titles, stubbornly called their officials mayors, sheriffs, and justices of the peace. Austin's real function was to deal with the state and national Mexican governments, which were often unsympathetic and remained foreign. He had to stand between these and his Anglo-Saxon planters, who might be self-reliant, hardy, and law-abiding, but were also usually prejudiced, stubborn, ignorant of the true situation, violently jealous of what they considered inherent American rights, and determined to find fault with anyone in authority, particularly the empresario. Austin had to pass on every settler; he was responsible to the state for every colonist. The Baron de Bastrop merely signed his name to the land titles; Austin had to see to the surveying and all the details. The alcaldes whom the people elected carried out rules and regulations, civil and criminal, that Austin drafted first. His power and position were resented fiercely by many colonists who came begging land.
At one stage the settlers revolted against the twelve-and-a-half-cents-per-acre fee Austin was supposed to collect, not because it was unfair or exorbitant, but because it was making Austin "rich at their expense." The subgovernor remitted this fee, and henceforth charged colonists only a small, set title price. Austin received a part of this, but his potential profits were enormously reduced.
Austin's efforts for his colony, meanwhile, as one observer wrote, "could not be exaggerated." He was the greatest colonial proprietor in North American history. But he was also something more. He was a politician of exquisite skill, who seemed to understand almost any kind of mind he came in contact with—Mexican, planter, or the various frontier types. He found out people's weaknesses and worked on them, with the utter pragmatism the Anglo-American frontier mentality called forth. Austin had no ideology, and he was entirely sincere; otherwise he could not have survived an incredible succession of Mexican Royalists, Imperialists, Republicans, and dictators. He began in Missouri as a businessman, but he became something immensely more important: he was a visionary, capitalist, developer, and Father of his People, all in one. Somewhere along the line, Austin lost interest in his personal fortune and developed an obsession to "redeem Texas from its wilderness state by means of the plow alone, in spreading over it North American population, enterprise, and intelligence." Austin had no notion—not for many years—of taking the land away from Mexico. What his Mexican colleagues, totally lacking in such instincts, could never comprehend was his sincere and boundless joy at the destruction of the wilderness. Each crashing tree along the Brazos gave Austin pleasure; each mud-paved town hammered together in the middle of nowhere instilled in him a sense of destiny fulfilled. In this, Stephen Austin was not unusual. Destroying nature and creating civilization as they knew it was already a fetish in North American minds. Austin merely had more vision and far more ability than most. The wilderness, beautiful but economically barren, was an offense in Anglo-American eyes. Only when the land was tamed and all the resources of Nature put to man's use would Nature's plan be complete.
In all, there were twenty-six empresarios in colonial Texas. Austin was immeasurably the greatest, not because he was the first, or most powerful, but because he saw his role as something more than merely selling land.
Don Estévan Austin, as he was called, was essentially a civilized man, and a civilizer. He was never a frontier hero. He was slender, rather handsome, charismatic, especially to Latins, and very much the gentleman. He was really the creator of Anglo-Texas, but he was not to be the Texans' greatest hero. Austin was not a man on horseback. He was appalled by conflict and preferred to save his people by more devious ways than war.
Austin never married; he devoted his life to his cause. He took on hundreds of informal tasks beyond his position as empresario. Prospective colonists were put up at his house, and shown about, at his expense. Planters called on him to act as a collection agency, and also as their agents for commercial transactions in the United States. Men badgered him for loans, and to settle personal disputes. Parents in the South wrote him continually to find, or look out for, strayed, lost, or emigrating offspring. Austin carried all these burdens voluntarily and well.
After his first three hundred patents were used up, he applied for and got more. His colony was gradually enlarged, beginning in 1825. In ten years, Austin located more than 1,500 American families, and these became the heart of Anglo-Texas. In a single decade, these people chopped more wood, cleared more land, broke more soil, raised more crops, had more children, and built more towns than the Spanish had in three hundred years.
The various laws and decrees that permitted Austin to open Texas for colonization applied only to him. But on August 18, 1824, the Republic of Mexico, continuing Spanish practice, issued a general colonization law. This national law had four key provisions:
Public lands were remanded to the Mexican States for administration.
State land codes must conform to the Constitution.
No person could acquire more than eleven leagues (48,708 acres) for colonization.
No foreigner was to be granted land; immigrants must become citizens.
The Republican Constitution of 1824 was federalist in concept, a strong break with Spanish centralist tradition. Austin himself had something to do with this, as he recommended certain key provisions to important men in Mexico. A federal Act of May 1824, made the former Spanish provinces into supposedly sovereign states, on paper at least, on the North American order. Coahuila and Texas were incorporated into one state, with its capital at Saltillo. The act provided that Texas might become a state when its population grew sufficiently; the Mexican mood at that time was to grant the northern colony a definite measure of independence within the greater nation. The legislature of Coahuila in 1825 passed a colonization law for Texas, in conformance with the federal enabling act. The provisions of this law were that Texas was to be opened to Roman Catholics who could prove Christian belief, morality, and good habits. Immigration could be by individuals, or through empresarios. New empresarios were commissioned with
territories bordering Austin's. They could continue to grant up to one sitio per family, and they were to receive five sitios and five labores of land for every 100 families settled, up to a limit of 800.
Native-born Mexicans could simply buy up to eleven sitios for a small fee. The decrees remitting state taxes, church tithes, and customs duties were continued.
The year 1825 saw an explosion in empresarios and immigration into Texas. Twenty-five empresario commissions were granted in all, but only a few of these had any permanent effects. Although native Mexicans could acquire land in Texas under much more favorable circumstances than Americans, and the relaxation of taxes and tithes applied to them also, very few families went north. The push to this still wild frontier came almost entirely from the United States, with a few families arriving from Europe.
Next to Stephen F. Austin in importance as an empresario was Green DeWitt of Missouri. DeWitt had gone to Mexico at about the same time as Austin, for the same reasons. His contract was authorized in April 1825, for 400 families to be located south of Austin's colony, on the Guadalupe, San Marcos, and Lavaca rivers. DeWitt laid out Gonzales, his headquarters town, named for the current Governor of Coahuila, a few months later. However, in July 1826, a serious Indian attack pushed the Gonzales settlers down toward the coast. This drew them into conflict with Martín de León, who had in peculiar circumstances been granted empresario lands that overlapped the Missourian's.
De León originally was commissioned not by Coahuila but by the provincial government of Texas at Béxar in 1824. He settled between 100 and 200 families, almost all Mexican, along the lower Guadalupe River. This area was shortly afterward granted to DeWitt, but De León proved belligerent in defending his position.
De León's Mexican birth counted heavily for him, and the Governor of Coahuila confirmed the fact that he should be given first choice under the law. De León laid out his small capital, Victoria, while DeWitt's people, led by James Kerr, a Missouri state senator, returned west of the Colorado to Gonzales. By 1828 Kerr and DeWitt had Gonzales firmly established, with blockhouses and a small fort. DeWitt was able to issue and have confirmed 166 land titles, but most of his allotted lands remained vacant. The Gonzales settlers felt they had been treated unfairly by De León, and by the law. There was hostility between Gonzales and Victoria, which might have resulted in feuds and war. Austin himself took on the role of peacemaker, and his efforts finally damped the quarrel. José Antonio Navarro, through Austin's help, confirmed the Gonzales colony's holdings in 1831.
Another contractor, Haden Edwards, secured permission to build a colony in east Texas near the Sabine. Here, conflicting claims with earlier Mexican settlers did produce a war, which was one of the preludes to the Texan Revolution. Edwards's colony failed.
In 1830, the Mexican government halted all immigration, only to renew it again in 1834. After this year, the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company acquired the rights earlier secured by David G. Burnet, Joseph Vehlein, and Lorenzo de Zavala in east Texas. This company originated tactics that were used in the West for many years: it advertised irresponsibly in the United States, sublet large tracts to fly-by-night subcontractors, and sold scrip on 7,500,000 acres of Texas land at from one to ten cents per acre, though it did not legally own the land. Stephen Austin was very bitter about this company; he felt it was bringing all the abuses of the old American land-speculation fever to Texas. The government at first refused to recognize any Galveston Bay claims, but the company, through a judicious use of influence and payments, finally secured land titles for one thousand holders of its scrip.
Another company, the Nashville Company, was better known by the name of its agent, Sterling Robertson. Robertson acquired lands north and northwest of Austin's colony, sold scrip, and generally damaged honest immigration. The Mexican government voided Robertson's contract and turned the region over to Austin and a partner, Williams. However, after the revolution the government of Texas returned to Robertson premium lands for 379 families.
Arthur G. Wavell, an Englishman, was commissioned to settle 500 families in deep northeast Texas. Wavell's partner, Benjamin Milam, succeeded in locating some families, but ran into a boundary problem with the United States, which claimed his grant lay east and north of Mexican Texas. No premium lands were ever secured.
Two colonies were begun with the idea of settling families direct from Europe. James Power, an Irishman, and James Hewetson, an Irish-born citizen of Monclova, Mexico, got special approval to locate a settlement within the federally reserved coastal strip between the Lavaca and Nueces rivers, immediately south of De León. Evil fortune dogged these two Irishmen and their settlers. They became involved in legal difficulties with the irascible Martín de León; their capital, Refugio, on the site of an old mission, unfortunately brought them within the jurisdiction of the ayuntamiento of one of the three Mexican towns in Texas, La Bahía. Two shiploads of hopeful people setting out from Ireland were struck by cholera; seventy of these had to be abandoned at New Orleans as unfit for Texas, while many others died and were buried at sea.
The survivors reached the inhospitable south-Texas coast, but lost their ships and all their tools and farm implements with them. After a grim struggle, Power and Hewetson granted 200 land titles; these were supposedly to Irish immigrants, but actually many were in fact to entering North Americans.
The other Irish colony, which was called "The Irish Colony," was founded by McMullen and McGloin, in the old Coahuiltec country south of San Antonio. Its town was known as San Patricio. Only eighty-four titles were issued, and the colony did not succeed, but the Irish settlers grimly stuck. These people were far south of, and had no contact with, the Anglo-Americans farther north and east. In spite of this, they assisted with the Americanization of Texas because they spoke English; eventually, except for their religion, they were indistinguishable from the frontier mass.
Other proposed colonies, such as that of the Englishman Dr. John Charles Beales, came to nothing. Many of these comprised lands unfit for cultivation or were in deep Indian country. Beales took some people west of the Nueces, but with the appearance of Comanches this colony was abandoned. Other than some six or seven, all the empresarios were either impractical dreamers, concerned with creating a refuge in the wilds for unfortunates or oppressed peoples, or else speculators hoping to get rich.
All the immigrants in this colonial period did not come at the invitation of the authorities. Even before Moses Austin rode to San Antonio, a trickle of English-speaking people were wandering across the Sabine or Red. These men wanted nothing to do with dons or empresarios. The Texas historian Strickland accurately described them as follows: "They came from Kentucky and Tennessee by the way of Missouri and Arkansas. Their fathers had followed Boone and Harrod over the Wilderness Road to Harrodsburg or Bryant's Station or pioneered with Sevier along the waters of the Holston or French Broad."
They were part of the grim, tough, Anglo-Celt vanguard, eternally moving on. They came out of the mountains with their hatchets and rifles and filtered through the forest until they came to the forest's end. They lived in Indian country—that of the also-moving Choctaws and Cherokees, who were being pushed west into east Texas and who in turn pushed the peaceful remnants of the Caddoans out into the borderlands between the pine woods and the Plains. They cut clearings and hunted in the wilderness along the Red River, and some of the people who came close behind them planted corn.
By 1815, the Wetmores had a trading station at Pecan Point on the Red. Jonesborough, another frontier town, was founded thirty miles further west. Trammel's trace, a road which linked this area with Nacogdoches, was soon defined. It was used primarily by horse thieves, who raided in Missouri. By 1821, there were some 80 settled families in these squatters' settlements; after 1825, the population greatly swelled. When Austin formed his colony, a few of these people chose to move south and legalize their claims, and the Gillilands, Robinsons, and Varners became part of the Old Three Hundred. But the majority
of these hunter-trappers lived in splendid isolation, like their forebears. Not for many years were they brought into the jurisdiction, to become a part of Texas.
By 1825, then, both planter and frontiersman were firmly ensconced within the boundaries of Mexican Texas. Each would make, in his own way, his own abortive culture, live and die, and leave his descendants and legends in the land. The dynamic dualism—Old South and Old Frontier—that was to characterize the history of the state was established early. The foundations of the Cotton and Cattle kingdoms were already laid.
After a decade of the empresarios, there were 20,000 Anglo-Americans, with their slaves, in Texas. This exceeded the Spanish-speaking inhabitants by 5 to 1. Gradually, the principal problem of Don Estévan Austin, the great empresario, became not how to tear down the wilderness but how to stand between the sovereign Republic of Mexico, to which he was politically loyal, and a swarm of his own race who were rapidly re-creating Spanish Texas in their North American image. Austin, an intelligent and perceptive man, had a foot in both worlds and saw values in each. In the best sense, he was loyal to both sides. But a profound clash of cultures had already begun, which Austin never anticipated and which proved to be beyond even his powers, and his great good will, to solve.
Chapter10
THE CLASH OF CULTURES
This is the most liberal and munificent Govt. on earth to emigra[n]ts—after being here one year you will oppose a change even to Uncle Sam.
STEPHEN F. AUSTIN, IN A LETTER TO HIS SISTER, 1829
Mexicans! Watch closely, for you know all too well the Anglo-Saxon greed for territory. We have generously granted land to these Nordics; they have made their homes with us, but their hearts are with their native land. We are continually in civil wars and revolutions; we are weak, and know it—and they know it also. They may conspire with the United States to take Texas from us. From this time, be on your guard!
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