by H. W. Brands
Yet even some of the white sheep grew restive, especially when Austin began charging them for land the Mexican government gave him for free. He had his reasons, starting with the fact that planting a colony cost far more than he had reckoned. He was constantly spending money; traveling to and from Mexico City and supporting himself there for twelve months had been a sizable drain in itself. Through much of this period, he relied on the funds Joseph Hawkins contributed; but Hawkins died in early 1824, cutting off that source. As empresario, Austin was entitled to a great deal of land upon the completion of his contract with the Mexican government—that is, when the three hundred families were fairly settled—but even then he might be cash-poor, for with Mexico giving away land, there wouldn’t be many people willing to pay for it. Consequently, Austin had to devise a scheme for coaxing money out of his immigrants.
His empresario agreement allowed him to charge a reasonable fee for the services—surveying, allotting, registering—he provided the immigrants. He decided to set the fee at twelve and a half cents per acre. Although this was a bargain in per-acre terms, it nonetheless required the typical family to come up with more than five hundred dollars for its league—a substantial sum for that time, place, and clientele. Austin was willing to accept goods in lieu of cash, and he offered installment plans for those who couldn’t pay at once. “I will receive any kind of property that will not be a dead loss to me, such as horses, mules, cattle, hogs, peltry, furs, bees’ wax, home-made cloth, dressed deer skins, etc.,” he announced. “Only a small part will be required in hand; for the balance I will wait one, two, and three years, according to the capacity of the persons to pay.”
Despite Austin’s flexibility, many of the immigrants felt badly used. They knew that Austin was paying the Mexican government nothing for the land for which he was charging them hundreds of dollars, and though the acre price in Austin’s colony was lower than anything they could find in the States, they resented his middleman’s cut. Some suspected him of partiality in distributing the lands, of reserving the best parcels for friends and family. The small number of Americans whose presence in Texas preceded Austin’s included several who wondered what right this newcomer had to pronounce on their actions. Aylett Buckner, with a farm on the Colorado, was a veteran of the Gutiérrez expedition. “I was one of the first men who built a cabin on this river, the first man who had a plough stuck in the field,” he wrote Austin. Buckner recounted the costs he had incurred making things easier for those who came after. “I have never asked the first cent for a man eating under my roof and have fed as many and I believe more people than any man in this colony. . . . I have lost as much and I believe more property by the depredations of Indians than every other man on this river.” Yet others were now benefiting unfairly from his hardships. “Some men get half a league and don’t pay a cent because the other half is transferred to you or your brother. I know that lands are unequally divided. I do not consider myself a perfect simpleton, neither am I blind. My eyes are open and I look and watch with vigilance.” If Austin refused to deliver justice, Buckner would seek it elsewhere. “If you refuse granting me that which I think the Government will generously bestow on me, I shall apply to that authority.”
Other warnings were more dire. Jacob Betts traveled to Texas with the first Austin colonists. “I came to this colony with every assurance that I would be governed by one of our countrymen, whom I had anticipated the greatest satisfaction of spending the remainder of my days with. . . . I have spent the three last years of my life in poverty and misery, looking forward for better times, part of the time fed with soft words and fair promises.” Now Betts discovered that late arrivals were being offered better farms than he had received, thereby “reaping the rewards of my labor.” Betts didn’t try to hide his anger. “I have to say, all confidence is lost. . . . I therefore consider myself a free man and an injured one.” Betts asserted that if he received justice, even belatedly, “you will find me disposed to render my services for the benefit of the colony as fair as is in my power.” But if not: “You will find I can do you or the colony as much injury as any other man.”
The complaints against Austin reached the Mexican authorities. José Antonio Saucedo was the political chief (jefe) of Texas, stationed in San Antonio de Béxar and responsible to Mexico City for order and welfare in Texas. Hearing the carping from the Colorado and Brazos, Saucedo initially defended Austin against his detractors. “You should listen with attention and confidence to your immediate chief (Colonel Austin) whose authority is from the supreme powers of the nation to which you now voluntarily belong,” Saucedo urged Austin’s colonists. “You should disregard and despise all those idle slanders and vague stories which are put in circulation by the enemies of good order for the sole purpose of creating confusion and discontent.”
The grumblers, however, weren’t any more inclined to heed Saucedo than to follow Austin, and as the level of dissatisfaction rose, the political chief felt obliged to take stronger action. In May 1824 Saucedo suspended Austin’s fee schedule and introduced a schedule of his own. The fee for a league was reduced to $192, with $127 going to the land commissioner (the Baron de Bastrop), $27 to the surveyor, and $38 to the government. Austin was left in the cold.
Now it was Austin’s turn to feel aggrieved, and he took his case to the colonists. Detailing his efforts to secure their titles to the land they occupied, he said, “Look at the difficulties I have had to surmount, the risks of property, of life, of all, which I have exposed myself to; consider the advantages which you will receive from my labors; and then let your unbiased judgment decide upon my motives and say whether I have been right or wrong in the measures which I have adopted.” He reminded the settlers that he had been forthright from the beginning about the terms of settlement, including the twelve-and-a-half-cent fee they would be charged. He pointed out that although Texas was welcoming enough now, it hadn’t been so at the time his father applied for permission to establish the colony. “Let it be remembered that at that time this Province, with the exception of San Antonio and La Bahía, was a desert, that it was interdicted to the American settler. . . . Until this permission was obtained by my father, those who emigrated here did so, as it were, by stealth and without any other security for their property or lives than the caprice of the commandants who governed.” He conceded that the Texas project had originated as a speculation, but once the settlers began arriving it became something else to him. “Success was now no longer considered by me so much a matter of speculation as a point of honor to redeem my pledged word to the settlers.” He rebutted the allegations that he stood to make a fortune from the acreage fee, citing the high cost of surveys (which averaged, he said, seventy dollars per league, or more than twice the twenty-seven dollars Saucedo allowed), the taxes due the government, and the discount that had to be applied to the in-kind payments he accepted. “I appeal to you all to say whether I would now get, either here or anywhere else, 40, 50, or 60 dollars for horses which I have received at 100, 120, or 150 dollars.”
The appropriate standard for judging whether his fee scheme was reasonable, Austin said, could be summarized in a single question: “Was it not worth it?” Could the settlers have obtained their land less expensively in any other way? Nor did this question apply merely to the past. If the settlers considered the original contract dissolved, then so might Austin.
Why have I not the same privilege to consider myself also free from all obligation to procure titles for their lands, and say to those who refuse to comply with the original terms stipulated with them: Attend to your business; go elsewhere to procure your titles; I will have nothing more to do with the business—a thing which I might in justice do, if the original contract was disregarded, and which I certainly would do were I to be governed solely by motives of self-interest.
In fact, Austin wasn’t about to walk away from the colony, as the settlers must have realized. This doubtless contributed to their complaints: appreciating his emotional i
nvestment, they reckoned that he wouldn’t abandon them—which would have been disastrous, with many surveys uncompleted and titles imperfect—no matter how much they complained.
Yet it was hard for Austin not to be discouraged. He continued to hear that his Texas project was being described to the world in the most unflattering terms. “A report has been in circulation here for some days . . . ,” wrote a correspondent from New Orleans, “that all your settlers have raised the standard of rebellion and refuse obedience to law or any authority whatever.” The son of Joseph Hawkins, who naturally wanted the colony to succeed, not least that he might recapture his father’s investment, wrote from Missouri, “I have done everything in my power to cause the people to emigrate to that country, but so many false reports come from there that if a man has not been there he is too apt to believe such reports and decline going.” An associate from Austin’s time in Mexico City, Arthur Wavell, wrote from the Mexican capital, “I am sorry to hear such very unfavorable reports of the state of your settlement.”
Austin soldiered on as best he could. He arranged a deal with Bastrop—who realized even more than the colonists that Austin was indispensable—by which Austin would receive a third of the commissioner’s fee. Although this forty-two dollars per league wouldn’t cover Austin’s costs, it kept the cash flowing temporarily.
The longer term looked bleak. “You ask how I am getting on,” Austin wrote Wavell. “To which I answer, not very well. And I assure you I am heartily sick of the whole business and shall gain nothing by it but losses and fatigue. . . . I have spent more in this damned affair than it will ever be worth.”
The most serious of Austin’s settler troubles originated outside his colony. Austin wasn’t the only empresario seeking to bring immigrants to Texas; his competitors included several men he had met in Mexico City. James Wilkinson—Aaron Burr’s co-conspirator—was characteristically brash and simultaneously secretive about his plans. Robert Leftwich represented a group of Tennessee investors, including a rising young politician named Sam Houston, calling themselves the Texas Company. Haden Edwards had speculated successfully in Mississippi and hoped to repeat his good fortune in Texas.
Austin was more persistent than the others, or perhaps just better at persuading the right people, and his was the first project to get government approval and actually put settlers on the ground. But in the reorganization of the Mexican government in 1824, the Mexican congress approved a law allowing the states of the Mexican union to set the conditions of colonization within their own borders. The state of Coahuila y Texas (which embraced Texas and its neighbor to the southwest) authorized several empresarios, including Leftwich and Edwards, to bring settlers to Texas on terms similar to those granted Austin.
The Edwards tract lay to the northeast of Austin’s colony, near Nacogdoches. For this reason Edwards (and his brother Benjamin, who eventually shouldered more of the administration of the project) encountered problems Austin was spared. All the empresarios were required to honor existing claims, and though these were comparatively few along the Brazos and Colorado, they were many more around Nacogdoches. Often accompanying the earlier claims were the earlier claimants—the squatters, drifters, smugglers, debtors, and felons who frolicked in the old Neutral Ground and still found little reason to adapt their habits to those expected of settled societies. In particular they saw little reason to comply with Edwards’s demand, posted at street corners in Nacogdoches and at crossroads in the vicinity during the autumn of 1825, that they show proof of the validity of their claims. “If they do not do this,” Edwards’s notice warned, “the said lands will be sold, without distinction, to the first person who occupies them.”
A formula more likely to pit newcomers against old-timers could hardly have been imagined. The rift became evident within months, in an election for alcalde. Edwards put up a candidate, Chichester Chaplin, who was suspect in the minds of the old settlers not simply for his Christian name—Chichester?—but for the maiden name of his wife, who was Edwards’s daughter. Against Chaplin the old settlers ran a candidate of their own, Sam Norris. Chaplin won, partly because Edwards counted the votes, which prompted the Norris side to dispute the election to jefe Saucedo at San Antonio. Upon investigating, Saucedo overturned the election and ordered Chaplin to give up the office. Edwards took the decision as a personal affront and objected loudly, causing Norris and the old-timers to threaten to seize the office by force. Edwards eventually yielded, but he and brother Benjamin vilified Saucedo and the state government so insultingly that the government canceled the Edwards grant.
Now the new settlers were outraged. Very few of them had perfected title to the lands Edwards assigned them; as a result the cancellation of his grant left them with nothing to show for their investment of time and resources since coming to Texas. Many flatly refused to accept the state’s decree. In November 1826 a band of three dozen of the newcomers, organized militia fashion, arrested Norris and supporter José Sepúlveda. They arrested Edwards also, but only, as it turned out, to mask their intentions, for he was soon released while Norris and Sepúlveda were “tried” for crimes against the people, convicted, and sentenced to death—a sentence that was magnanimously commuted to disbarment from public office. The Edwards crowd, led by Benjamin Edwards, who pranced on horseback through Nacogdoches waving a flag inscribed “Independence, Liberty, and Justice,” thereupon seized the government building in the town and proclaimed the “Republic of Fredonia.” “The Americans in this end of the Province have at length resolved to throw off the yoke of despotism and to be free men,” Edwards declared. He added: “The flag of Liberty now floats in triumph in the soil of Texas, and the Americans are daily rallying around it, with a determination to support their rights or die in their defense.”
To Mexican officials this was treason pure and simple. Saucedo and the Mexican commandant at San Antonio, Colonel Mateo Ahumada, marched toward Nacogdoches with a regiment of troops.
The news of the Mexican approach caused the outnumbered Fredonians to seek an alliance with neighboring Indians. Some years earlier a band of Cherokees, concluding after chronic mistreatment in the American South that they’d never be safe on American soil, sought permission from the Spanish government of Mexico to settle along the Sabine River above Nacogdoches. Their request met various delays—which didn’t stop the Cherokees from moving in—and was still pending (with the government of independent Mexico) at the time of the Fredonian rebellion. Edwards guessed that in their frustration at the Mexican bureaucracy the Cherokees might be willing to join the secession. Why they should feel safer under a government of Americans than they did under the government of Mexico was unclear to many observers (and to more than a few Cherokees), but the very thought that the Fredonians were trying to unleash the Indians sent shudders along the frontier.
Stephen Austin had no difficulty determining where his allegiance lay between Mexico and the rebels. “I am a Mexican citizen and officer and I will sacrifice my life before I will violate my duty and oath of office,” he declared. Duty and oath aside, Austin’s interests were all with Mexico. After its stumbling start, his colony was getting on its feet, and it did so under the aegis of the Mexican government. Austin’s settlers held title to their land and lived in as much peace and order as they had any right to expect so far from real civilization. Independence couldn’t improve their condition or his; on the contrary, it was likely to throw everything into turmoil. He didn’t wish it for his own colony, and he wouldn’t tolerate it for his neighbors.
Austin denounced the rebels to Saucedo. One of their leaders was a man named Burrell Thompson, whom Austin had earlier assisted and who now presumed on that assistance to link Austin to the insurgency. “When I knew him in Missouri,” Austin told Saucedo, by way of disclaimer, “he bore a good character.” But he had since gone bad—and apparently mad. “I have nothing to say in his behalf, further than that he has turned crazy and is surrounded by crazy people.”
Austin spoke
even more bluntly to Thompson and the rebels. He damned them for calling on the Cherokees for help. “Great God,” he said, “can it be possible that Americans, high-minded, free born, and honorable themselves, will so far forget the country of their birth, so far forget themselves as to league with barbarians and join a band of savages in a war of murder, massacre, and desolation?” Anyway, the rebels deluded themselves to think they could defeat the Mexican army, or to believe that other settlers would come to their aid. “They can send 3000 men to Nacogdoches if it should be necessary,” Austin said of the Mexican army. “And there is not a man in this colony who would not join them.”
To the Cherokees, Austin issued a counsel of patience—wrapped in a warning. Even a tactical alliance with the rebels, he said, in the hopes of obtaining a land grant from the Mexican government, was fraught with the gravest peril. Speaking from his own experience in Mexico City, Austin wrote to John Hunter, one of the Indian leaders aligned with the Fredonians: “I know that the Cherokees can get their lands if the legal steps are adopted, and if they take the wrong course they are lost. . . . Before the sword is drawn the Government will yield a little to the Cherokees to keep it in its scabbard, but once drawn and stained with blood they will never yield one hair’s breadth and nothing short of extermination or expulsion of that nation will satisfy them.”