by H. W. Brands
Sixteen was hardly too young to start a career in those days, although it wasn’t the career Stephen had envisioned. He wanted to be a lawyer and hoped to apprentice for the profession. But for now the lead mines—that is, Moses—called, and Stephen couldn’t refuse. He worked at headquarters until, during the summer of 1811, Moses consigned him a cargo of lead to float to New Orleans. Troubles delayed the departure: Stephen contracted malaria, and then a large portion of the downstream population caught yellow fever. Winter brought the yellow fever under control, as it usually did, but that winter also brought something quite extraordinary for the Mississippi Valley: a series of very large earthquakes. The tremors were centered southwest of New Madrid in southern Missouri, yet were so strong they rang church bells in Boston. They also rerouted the Mississippi River and threw river traffic into a horrible tangle.
By the time Stephen got away, in April 1812, the river was spring full and the ride daunting. “This is one of the worst eddies in the river and ought carefully to be guarded against by hugging the left shore very close,” Stephen wrote of a stretch above Cape Girardeau, in a journal he kept of the voyage. He managed to escape the eddies and guide his barge nearly to New Orleans, only to strike a sandbank almost within sight of the Crescent City. The barge started taking on water and, predictably for a box filled with lead, sank.
It might have remained on the river bottom had Congress not recently declared war against Britain. The local price for lead plunged as cargoes backed up on the docks, but Stephen guessed that the war would push the price higher. “Sheet lead will sell well, and also shot,” he told Moses. Accordingly he returned upriver to the site of the sinking and, after considerable effort, raised most of the lead.
The trouble and expense went to naught. Stephen’s prediction about the demand for lead proved wrong, and after several weeks in New Orleans without finding a buyer, he turned north for home.
The nineteen-year-old was a likely candidate for military service against the British and their Indian allies, and he enlisted. On account of his business experience—and perhaps, too, on account of his comparatively delicate appearance—he was made quartermaster of his regiment in the territorial volunteers. He learned what moving men and animals through unsettled country required: how an army marches on its stomach but sleeps on its back, how volunteers can be cajoled but less effectively ordered, how horses are faster than mules but mules more reliable. He also learned about the evanescent nature of militia service. When his regiment encountered insufficient fighting to keep the men interested, it melted away as they returned to their civilian occupations. Stephen Austin soon followed their example.
The end of the war raised lead prices but not enough to rescue the Austin business. Moses, discouraged and distracted, leased the operation to Stephen, who accepted the transfer with ambivalence. “I have taken possession of the mines and the whole establishment here,” he wrote his brother-in-law, James Bryan, “and commenced business under the style of S. F. Austin & Co., and am flattering myself with the pleasing hope of being able by the end of this year to free the family from every embarrassment.” Yet the task would require all his energy and wit. “I shall literally bury myself this spring and summer in the mines.”
He nonetheless found time to enter public service, gaining election to the territorial legislature. With many—perhaps most—of the members, he saw public service as a complement to his private enterprises. He drafted a petition to Congress to raise the duty on imported lead, arguing that encouragement of the lead industry would “add another most important item to the prosperity and independence of the Nation.” It went without his saying that a higher tariff would also contribute to the prosperity and independence of the Austin family.
But neither Stephen’s work in the mines nor his appeal to Congress brought relief to the business. The gloom that already afflicted Moses descended on Stephen. “My opinion of mankind has, unfortunately perhaps, been as bad as it could be for some years,” he told James Bryan, “but the longer I live the worse it grows.” His father’s debts, which had become his own, weighed upon him—yet, paradoxically, gave him a reason to carry on. “As for myself, I believe I am nearly indifferent what becomes of me, or whether I live or die, unless I am to be of use to my family by living.” Usefulness took one form above all: paying off the family debt. “When the day arrives that the whole family are out of debt I mean to celebrate it as my wedding day—which never will come until then.”
In marrying Moses’ debt, Stephen bound himself—without realizing it—to Moses’ Texas venture. While Moses was dreaming of Texas and what a man might accomplish there, Stephen attempted a fresh start in Arkansas. He acquired an interest in properties that showed promise as town sites, including one on the Arkansas River at Little Rock. But though the town flourished, other men were quicker and shrewder than he at extracting the profits. He won appointment to be circuit court judge, only to have his court closed by the territorial legislature almost before he robed up.
He moved farther south, to New Orleans, where the elder brother of a college classmate took him in as an apprentice lawyer. Austin’s sponsor, Joseph Hawkins, was an attorney with standing in the community. “He is not rich,” Stephen explained to his mother, “but he has a most generous heart. He has made me this offer: if I will remain with him, he will board me, permit me the use of his books, and money for clothes, give me all the instruction in his power until I am well fitted to commence the practice of law in this country; for my board and the use of his books he will charge nothing, and for the money he advances he will wait until I make enough by my profession to repay him.” Having failed at business, Stephen saw the law as a means to make good what Moses had lost. “If I am left alone a few years I may get up and pay all off.”
Yet he was not left alone. At the very moment that Stephen was launching his career as a lawyer, Moses was winning approval for his Texas scheme, and catching pneumonia. In May 1821 Moses wrote to Stephen from his sickbed, relating his success with the Spanish government and urging his son to join him in what would be a crowning achievement. “I now can go forward with confidence,” Moses said, “and I hope and pray you will discharge your doubts as to the enterprise and, if any means can be commanded, use your utmost to have every thing brought into motion. . . . Times are changing. A new chance presents itself. Nothing is wanting but concert and firmness.” Less than a month after receiving this letter, Stephen learned that Moses had died, in the letter in which Maria related Moses’ final request.
Whether filial obligation alone would have deflected Stephen from his path toward law is hard to say; in any event, Joseph Hawkins seconded Moses’ advice about looking to Texas for salvation. Hawkins seems to have had the best interests of his protégé at heart—“our intercourse has resulted in mutually warm and I trust lasting attachment,” Hawkins assured Maria—but like nearly everyone else in the West, he couldn’t resist a promising speculation in land. Moses had cut Hawkins in on the deal, and though Hawkins disliked losing a bright young assistant, he essentially pushed Stephen out the door toward Texas. He also put up the cash for the first stage of the colonization. “I have advanced Stephen all the funds he desired for the expedition,” Hawkins wrote Maria, “and have promised to furnish more as he requires them.”
A more forceful person might have resisted the pressure impelling him west, but not Stephen Austin. His legal career cut short, his family in debt, his father giving orders from beyond the grave, he put down his books and headed for Texas.
Austin’s timing in launching the Texas venture could hardly have been better. In the aftermath of the War of 1812 with Britain and the 1819 treaty with Spain, American affairs relating to the West were at once settled and uncertain. The British war had demonstrated that the United States was not going to acquire Canada, having tried and failed three times to do so during the course of that conflict. The Spanish treaty gave the United States Florida, rounding out American holdings east of the Mississippi.
It also declared Texas definitively part of New Spain.
Yet mere declarations could never be definitive in the face of America’s hunger for land. The Canada question had been settled by force of British arms, the Florida question by force of American arms. And the settlement of those two questions channeled American expansionist energies toward Texas, where neither Spanish arms nor American—nor Comanche, for that matter—had established a decisive advantage. It didn’t take much imagination to guess that Texas would be fought over before its fate was settled.
But the fighting developed differently than most imagined. The critical event of the second decade of the nineteenth century for the future of Texas was not the war with Britain nor the treaty with Spain, but the implosion of the American economy. Stephen Austin, sitting impatiently with his cargo of lead in New Orleans in 1812, might have been forgiven for thinking wars the principal cause of financial distress in the United States. In fact, peace was often harder on the economy. American money in those days consisted primarily of paper notes issued by scores of banks scattered across the several states, and because these banks, like all banks, owed more (to depositors) than they kept in their vaults, the slightest financial disturbance could set off a chain of failures, which might result in a strangling contraction of the money supply. Such a series of events produced the Panic of 1819, with prices plunging, debtors defaulting, mortgage holders foreclosing, and thousands of families losing their land. The effect was most dramatic in the West, where the entire economy was premised on rising—not falling—prices for land. The panic and its aftermath set an army on the march: an army not of soldiers but of farmers and their dependents, men and women and children akin to those bedraggled pilgrims Moses Austin had seen in 1796 looking for their promised land in Kentucky. The growth in population since then had pushed the promised land farther west, to the American territories of the upper Louisiana Purchase—and, as things developed, to the Spanish territory of Texas.
While financial developments made emigration to Texas appealing, technological developments made it possible. The greatest inventions of the era were the cotton gin and the steamboat. Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of a mechanical technique for separating seeds from fibers of the short-staple cotton that flourished on the Gulf Coastal plain opened whole new territories to settlement. Whitney’s gin reduced costs of cotton goods, putting manufactured textiles within the reach, and on the backs, of millions who previously wore homespun. Cotton had been a crop; now it became an industry, and a very profitable one for those who acquired land inexpensively. Within a generation the territories of Alabama and Mississippi filled up with cotton planters and their slaves. Some plantations were large, sophisticated enterprises, with hundreds of slaves toiling under the supervision of hired managers and overseers. Other plantations were mere farms, with the owners toiling beside their slaves. But large or small, the cotton operations required land, and the cheaper the better.
Robert Fulton’s steamboat was no less decisive for the development of the West. Observers laughed when Fulton guided his belching, banging contraption up the Hudson River in 1807, but as the revolutionary nature of his antigravity device—a boat that could travel upstream, under its own power—became apparent, its commercial and hence demographic promise silenced the laughter. Never in American history had the self-sufficient farm been more than a myth; farmers required access to markets. Before Fulton, access had often been slow and subject to the uncertainties of weather and river currents (like those that sank Stephen Austin’s barge). Fulton weakened the tyranny of nature by letting boats climb against the current and keep to more or less regular schedules. The first steamboats were ungainly and subject to spontaneous explosion, but as the technology developed they became (relatively) safe and able to navigate even the most modest watercourses. Every river promised to be a highway, along whose banks farmers could grow crops for sale; every estuary became a potential port of entry, the hub of a thriving community upstream.
“The land lies on the Colorado and Brazos rivers and includes a situation on the Bay of St. Bernard, suitable for a sea-port, at which place a port of entry is ordered to be established,” Stephen Austin wrote in July 1821, in a public notice regarding the Texas venture. “This concession to my father is granted by Don Joaquin de Arredondo, the governor of the Internal Provinces, and is duly confirmed by the Supreme Council of those Provinces. . . . It contains a permission to settle three hundred families on the lands, to each of whom a tract of land is to be given and to whom most liberal privileges are secured, both in regard to commercial interests and civil rights.”
Austin’s notice, printed in several western papers, had an immediate effect. “This part of the country is all alive and nothing spoken of but the province of Texas since your publications in the papers have appeared,” Maria Austin wrote from Missouri. “And I have no doubt but one-third of the population of Missouri will move in the course of another year.”
There was much to do before the settlers arrived—starting with a visit by Austin to the territory he had suddenly begun promoting. He traveled by steamboat up the Mississippi from New Orleans to the Red River, and up the Red River to Natchitoches. There he met Erasmo Seguín, the emissary who had brought the news from San Antonio de Béxar that Moses Austin’s proposal had been approved. Accepting Stephen in place of his father, Seguín led Austin west.
Austin kept a log of the journey; on July 16, 1821, he described his first impression of the land to which he had linked his fate.
Started from Camp Ripley [on the Sabine River] and entered the Province of Texas. . . . The first 4 miles fine timber and poor land. We then suddenly came to an open rolling country thinly timbered, soil about the color of Spanish brown, and in some places redder. This land is very productive and is covered with the most luxuriant growth of grass I ever beheld in any country; almost any of it would produce as much hay as the best meadows. The country so far is well watered.
A few days farther on he noted:
The general face of the country from within 5 miles of the Sabine to Nacogdoches is gently rolling. . . . The grass is more abundant and of a ranker and more luxuriant growth than I have ever seen before in any country and is indicative of a strong rich soil. . . . The creeks are numerous and water very pure and limpid.
For one who came late to the idea of colonizing Texas, Austin caught on quickly. The two months of this first visit were a continuous search for the richest soil, the lushest grass, the sturdiest timber, the purest streams, the most promising town sites, and the most navigable waterways. His journal recorded his rising excitement at a project he initially considered dubious but which now seemed inspired. “Large rich bottoms on the banks and good pasturage on the upland,” he wrote of a creek just west of Nacogdoches. On July 31 he reached the Brazos River and described the land along its banks as “very good: rolling prairie, black soil.” West of the Brazos was the Colorado, which flowed between high banks on which a town might be located safely above the flood line. The soil on either side of the stream was obviously rich: “Grapes in immense quantities on low vines, red, large and well flavored, good for red wine.” Fish crowded the river and buffalo and deer its banks. “I killed a fat buck,” he recorded on August 5.
The landscape grew still more inviting as Austin and Seguín angled south toward San Antonio. Of the valley of the San Marcos River, Austin observed, “Country beautifully rolling, soil very black and rich.” The San Marcos was striking in that it arose abruptly from three springs and immediately crashed down a waterfall “fine for mills.” The valley of the Guadalupe River was even more delectable. “Country the most beautiful I ever saw—rolling prairies, soil very black and deep.” Mesquite trees, which could supply lumber, grew along the creeks that fed the Guadalupe; dazzling white limestone, ideal for building, lay all about.
As fortunate as Austin’s timing was with regard to events in America, it was most unfortunate with respect to developments in Mexico. Or so it seemed on his ap
proach to San Antonio de Béxar, when three scouts Seguín sent ahead returned with news that Mexico, after more than a decade of revolution, had finally won its independence from Spain. Austin’s companions were delighted. “The Spaniards,” he wrote (apparently without noting the irony of this characterization of Seguín and the others), “hailed this news with acclamations of ‘Viva independencia’ and every other demonstration of joy.”
Austin took part in the celebration even while wondering what the change of governments meant for the Texas project. The charter he had inherited from his father bore the seal of Spanish authorities, now ousted. Whether their Mexican successors would view the American colonization of Texas in the same light was anyone’s guess.
Austin carried on as though the charter still held. Seguín introduced him to Governor Martínez, explaining that the young man had come to carry out the commitment given by his father and to see Texas for himself. The Baron de Bastrop again acted as interpreter and go-between. Austin was encouraged upon hearing that Martínez still supported the colonization project, and, at the governor’s invitation, Austin submitted a more specific plan for allotting land to settlers. Splitting the difference between American custom, which had evolved in relatively rainy country where crops were the primary concern, and Mexican practice, suited to arid country devoted to livestock, Austin proposed to give each family 320 acres of crop land and 640 acres of grazing land. Additional amounts would be awarded depending on the number of people in the families.
Martínez had no quibble with the size of the plots. Considering the immensity of Texas, he probably would have accepted parcels ten times that large. What mattered more to Martínez was the conduct of the colonists. As director—empresario, in Spanish usage—of the project, Austin would be answerable for the behavior of those he brought in. “They must be governed by and be subordinate to you,” Martínez insisted. Austin said they would be.