Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Lúcas Alamán, meanwhile, presented Terán's proposals to the Congress, in a secret session. This resulted in the Decree of April 6, 1830, which in Article II expressly forbade any further colonization of Mexican territory by citizens of adjacent countries—meaning the United States. The decree also prevented any foreigner entering Texas "from the North" unless he possessed a passport made out by a Mexican consular agent in his own country. Importation of slaves was again prohibited.

  Alamán's recommendations to the Mexican Congress went much further, and these too were adopted as policy, although not officially made public in a decree:

  To settle Mexican convicts in Texas.

  To introduce colonists from nations that differed widely from the Anglo-Saxons, to dilute and offset the English-speaking colonization.

  To collect customs and supervise trade, so as to make Texas trade with Mexico rather than the United States.

  To place Texas directly under the control of the central government so that the province could be closely observed.

  To dispatch competent persons to Texas to gather information—in short, to keep government spies in the province.

  Alamán's pervasive ethnic hostility to North Americans precipitated these acts and became a significant part of Mexican policy toward Texas from this time forward.

  The Decree of April 6, 1830, and the other actions were taken to "meet an emergency" caused by "imperious circumstances," Alamán stated. The emergency at this time was almost entirely in the anti-American cabal's mind.

  The United States had no overt aggressive intentions toward Texas. The overwhelming majority of Anglo-Texans were loyal to Mexico, though in their own fashion. Alamán and the others, however, very effectively created a genuine emergency in the ensuing months and years.

  The colonists had sworn allegiance to Mexico and promised to obey its laws, and this was an argument and a justification that Mexican historians and apologists were to hammer upon for the next century. However, the most notable feature of the Mexican colonization program in the 1820s was its munificence and liberality. In effect, the colonists were promised exemption from virtually all duties and laws—anything to get them to settle the land and create a buffer against the marauding Indians. The statement of a Nacogdoches land commissioner summed up the state of affairs in Anglo-Texas during its formative period: "Come what may I am convinced that Texas must prosper. We pay no taxes, work no public roads, get our land at cost, and perform no public duties of any kind."

  While Mexicans were subject to military service, taxes, customs duties, and mandatory church tithes, Anglo-Texans were not. Their government was left to the empresarios, who let them regulate themselves. However, this munificence was no sacrifice to the Mexican Republic; the colonists were given no military protection or government services of any kind. The Anglo-Texans were simply allotted lands the Mexicans had never been able to use, and within ten years they were chipping out a sort of Jeffersonian paradise: a commonwealth rich in natural resources, where every man with a white skin was more or less equal with his league of land, and hampered by no distant government, beneficial or otherwise.

  Even aside from the fact that Anglo-Americans belonged to two different civilizations, with different value and manners systems, the reintegration of such a republic within a republic must have caused enormous problems. No band of pioneers, grown used to such an environment, would willingly tolerate the sort of regulation that was normal to Mexico.

  The status of religion and the Indian problem in Texas give some indication both as to Mexican motivation in allowing the colony, and their disappointment with it. Although Mexico was by law a Roman Catholic nation, for a full decade Austin was unable to secure a curate for his colony. There was no one to baptize, marry, or bury, according to Mexican law. Austin complained regularly. The problem was not a shortage of priests but one of footing the costs. The Texans had been relieved of all taxes and church tithes for ten years, so any clergy had to be supported by the central government. Finally, in the 1830s, Austin's people received a priest, an Irish curate named Muldoon. Father Muldoon was a kindly man who did not inquire too closely into the state of the colonists' religion, but, as one Texas historian wrote euphemistically, he "did not always live up to the standards of piety which Anglo-Americans held up for the ministry." Among other things, he had an alcohol problem. Actually, there was no overt religious trouble. The settlers left their formal churches at the Sabine, and although a few itinerant Protestant preachers wandered Texas, occasionally getting in difficulty with the authorities, the religious problem was really a part of the ethnic problem. The colonists did not bring new temples, but they brought a completely Protestant ethos, in attitudes toward work, money, art, God, state, and man, while Mexican officials who detested the clergy, who had not been inside a church in years, and were members of the Masonic Order remained unconsciously but utterly Catholic in their culture. Every President of the Mexican Republic was a Freemason, but almost every one of them instinctively distrusted heretics.

  The Indian situation in Texas deeply frustrated the Mexicans. The single biggest reason for allowing foreign immigration was to create an Indian buffer. But Austin's people were only up against tribes who were no problem for the Mexicans. With the dread Comanches Austin was able to make a very real peace. The Comanches recognized the Anglo-Texans as a separate people from the Mexicans and did not bother them, while they continued to harass the Mexican ranches at Béxar and along the Bravo. Inevitably, the Mexican authorities came to look upon this peace with the Comanches as a North American plot, a prelude to an Indian alliance that would seize all Texas. Austin's failure to engage in all-out conflict with the Comanches is understandable, but this was not what the Mexicans had hoped. Oddly, in the light of future history, in 1836 a Scots-American traveler wrote truthfully that the settlement of Anglo-Texas had been accomplished with the killing of fewer white men than any other American state, with the exception of Pennsylvania. The writer did not class Spaniards and Mexicans, of course, as white. So long as Austin's colony remained east of the Colorado, it was safe, but the Mexicans to the west were continually burned out, killed, or carried off.

  The Mexican mistake, beyond the original allowing of a large horde of self-disciplined, armed land seekers to cross the borders, was in permitting the Anglos to create, without hindrance, their own community within nominal Mexican territory. The immigrants did abandon their own homeland and its sovereignty. But, as Yoakum wrote, these Americans "brought with them here, as household gods, their own first lessons in politics, morals, religion, and business, and they wished not to unlearn those lessons to learn others." In other words, the immigrants never had any real intention of becoming Mexicans—in fact, they had no opportunity to do so. Only Austin and certain other Anglo officials, who were in direct contact with Mexicans, ever learned the Spanish language.

  The settlers could not learn Mexican culture and the Mexican language in schools, because the only schools were the ones the colonists started themselves.

  That this was not seen at first as a problem was due to the fact that the Austins and the Spanish officials who negotiated the colonization were all born into the 18th century, before modern nationalism was strong. But by 1820, both American and Mexican nationalism were becoming virulent, in a way many leaders did not yet fully understand.

  The real, underlying cause of the Texas Revolution was extreme ethnic difference between two sets of men, neither of whom, because of different ideas of government, religion, and society, had any respect for the other. Added to this was the inherent distaste of Anglo-Americans for the racial composition of the Mexican nation. This attitude was not peculiar to Americans; every European traveler of the time, including Spaniards, commented openly on the vices of a mixed, or mestizo, race. The 19th century was quite intolerant of mixed blood, and very honest about it. As Rives wrote:

  They [the Texans] were, in fact, always ready to conform to laws which they understood, but that h
ad been their custom and the custom of their fathers for many generations. They would never submit to the domination of a race they regarded as inferior. They despised Mexicans as they despised negroes and Indians.

  In short, it was perfectly possible for Anglo-Texas to fly the Mexican flag and be legally a part of the Mexican nation—most substantial settlers were happy with the arrangement, since they fared better under the liberal colonization laws than they would have in the United States—but only as a self-governing commonwealth. This goal seems to have been what everyone originally had in mind, both Austin and the framers of the Mexican Constitution of 1824. But they reckoned without the inherent Hispanic centralist drive, and the underlying ethnic hostility and fear of the United States of men like Lúcas Alamán. Mexico, fatally, was unable to create another North American empire along the pluralistic lines of the nation it disliked most.

  If the underlying reason for revolt was ethnic hatred on both sides, the immediate cause was Mexico's determination, after 1830, to bring Anglo-Texas under the national authority and to integrate the province under Mexican terms. Legally, Mexico had every right to attempt this. Morally, the colonists had every right to resist. What was coming was deep cultural conflict, in which two peoples clashed, and as anthropologists have shown again and again, in cultural conflict there is seldom any clear-cut right or wrong. Men are moral or ethical only in terms of their own values, and no one else's.

  In failing to comprehend, or in rejecting, the fact that Anglo-Texans were loyal only so long as they were left to themselves, the Mexican government was hardly unique. A British ministry had made a similar error two generations before.

  The Edict of April 6, 1830, was received with consternation in Anglo-Texas. It was seen, correctly, as a calamity. The colony was now really beginning to grow, and the prosperity of many of its citizens was based on growth. Immigration meant more towns—there were already thirteen municipalities, predominantly Anglo—more stores, more cotton ginned, more commerce and increasing values of every kind. The whole Anglo ethos centered around this growth, this tearing down the wilderness and planting more producing, consuming people. The end of immigration meant the stagnation of Texas. Worse, it separated families, denying entry to some who planned to come. Finally, the Texans regarded it as all immigrants would—a gratuitous insult to their kind.

  Meetings were called, protests were issued. Understandably, the Mexican authorities at San Antonio and other places saw these as seditious, because peaceful assembly had never been an Hispanic trait.

  But if the cessation of immigration stunned Texas (Austin and De Witt, cleverly, were able to get around the law on a technicality for two years), the other actions of the central government began to infuriate the Texans.

  The settlement of convicts and deserters among them was never successful—Mexico could not make even this kind of people pioneer—but the idea rankled among Austin's peaceful planters. Mexico did send special battalions of convict soldiers, however, to the far frontier, with eventually disastrous results.

  The time allowed for freedom from customs duties and taxes now expired. Taxes were levied on Texas, and customs houses built. These in themselves were not unreasonable, nor unfair. While there was a certain element in Texas—as in every country—determined to ignore these levies and to bring in luxuries duty-free, the evidence is clear that Austin and most substantial citizens counseled compliance with the law. But the methods the government used to enforce its rules were regarded by all Anglo-Texans as humiliating. Old Mexico itself, in these days, was rapidly coming under military dictatorship. Vicente Guerrero failed to gain reelection in 1828; he raised the standard of revolt, took the government away from Gómez Pedraza, the legally elected President, and was inaugurated in 1829. Nine months after assuming office, Guerrero was deposed and executed by his own Vice President, Anastasio Bustamante. Then, Gómez was restored through the efforts of a popular military hero, Don Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had repulsed an attack on Tampico by Spain. The Constitution of 1824 was hanging now in shreds, as yorkinos and escoceses, Federalist liberals and conservative Centralists, battled with armies for control. The armies, and their leaders, were the only winners, and generalship had become synonymous with government.

  The collapse of Mexico into political anarchy and caudillaje, with military rule imposed everywhere by garrisons, caused a dangerous situation in Texas. Instinctively, the ruling authorities sent army garrisons north of the Bravo, twelve in all, to hold the province under the central government. Texas was not being especially subjected to military domination; the army garrison was becoming the real power structure everywhere in Mexico.

  Texas was placed under the command of the able, scholarly, and American-hating Don Manuel Mier y Terán. Colonel Don José de las Piedras and 350 soldiers were stationed at Nacogdoches. Captain Juan Bradburn with 150 men built a post at Anáhuac, on Galveston Bay. Under Colonel Don Domingo de Ugartechea, another 100 garrisoned Velasco, at the mouth of the Brazos. There were smaller forces at the Presidio of Terán, on the Neches, and at La Bahía, which was now renamed Goliad, an anagram of the revolutionary priest Hidalgo's name. The standing troops at San Antonio (which the Anglos still called Béxar) were increased. This was, as every Anglo-American immigrant believed from his own folk-history, a "martial array." And in William Barret (Buck) Travis, a young firebrand lawyer from Alabama, Texas was to find its Patrick Henry.

  No people on earth were less amenable to military rule at this time than Anglo-Americans. They would have detested any soldiery placed over them, but they detested this "foreign" soldiery particularly. The commanding officers were imperious dons, and the rag-tag ranks were dark-skinned and culled from the lowest classes. Knowing they were the balance of power, the troops swaggered about obnoxiously; the commandants arrested civilians or declared martial law under the flimsiest pretexts. All this had become the practice in revolt-torn Mexico, and Mexican law allowed imprisonment without specific charges. But Anglo sensibilities and morality were outraged.

  Trouble flared in late 1831. In this year, the state government in Coahuila changed; the new governor, Letona, reopened settlement under the old colonization law of 1825 to Americans who were already in Texas by 1830—thus setting aside some provisions of the 1830 Decree. With Letona's approval, a number of latecomers were granted land titles in east Texas, and organized the town of Liberty, not far from the military garrison at Anahuac.

  General Mier y Terán was outraged. Asserting military authority, he ordered Captain Bradburn to arrest the Coahuilan land officials responsible for issuing the new titles. Bradburn, a peculiarly arrogant officer, went even further than his orders. He marched troops into Liberty, officially abolished the community, ignored all civil authority in the region, and redistributed the land grants himself. He treated all civilians, Mexican and Anglo alike, with contempt. Bradburn was especially detested by the settlers, for three reasons. He was the most arbitrary of all Mexican officers, utterly lacking in tact or courtesy; his main duty was enforcing customs regulations on the coast; and he was an American, a Kentuckian, by birth. Anglos considered him a turncoat, a racial traitor.

  The action against Liberty caused a public complaint within the municipality. Bradburn answered this by ordering all the ports except Anáhuac closed. A group of colonists assembled at Brazoria on December 31, 1831, and vowed not to submit to such tyranny. Although Bradburn reopened the ports, relations between him and the local citizens deteriorated rapidly.

  In May 1832, Bradburn suddenly declared ten leagues of the coast under martial law and arrested several civilians, including William B. Travis and one Patrick Jack. The prisoners were jailed in an old brick kiln; no charges were filed; and Bradburn refused to turn them over to the civil law. There is no question that Travis and Jack had been making trouble for Bradburn. They had passed insulting remarks, and while not openly treasonous, they had apparently manufactured spurious messages concerning plots and armed revolts and sent these on to Br
adburn, probably hoping to goad him into some ill-considered action. They succeeded. But almost every Anglo-Texan felt that their punishment by imprisonment was extreme.

  Patrick Jack had a brother, William. When William Jack was unable to secure a release, he rode angrily to San Felipe. Here he found that Stephen Austin was in Saltillo on some official business, and there was no one else in authority who could help. Jack began walking the streets of San Felipe, bitterly telling everyone about his brother's plight.

  By this time, there had arisen a distinct new element in Anglo-Texas. The Decree of April 6, 1830, had created a large group of late immigrants who had failed to get lands; some of these were legitimate colonists frustrated by circumstance, others merely border drifters who had wandered to the Brazos. Their status was ambiguous, and many were actually now classed as illegal immigrants. Further, the new restrictions put into effect in 1830 had created great hardships for Anglo lawyers and merchants newly arrived in Texas. Most of these people now had no legal right to work in Texas; Travis himself was one of these. All these men, frustrated or balked in various ways, formed a potential unruly element. Bradburn's tyranny gave their resentment a focal point. When William Jack harangued crowds on the streets of San Felipe, rebellion suddenly burst.

  Jack shouted that he intended to return to Anáhuac to free his brother, and asked the citizenry to join him. Dozens of armed men fell in behind him, openly urging an attack on Bradburn's fort. Then, a larger assembly was held at the site of the abolished town of Liberty. Here, most of the people were aggrieved. Both honest farmers and drifters began to appear with their rifles.