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| A recent Houston Chronicle guest editorial contended that the "Alamo is a lie," the Texas War of Independence was for the retention of slavery and that Mexico under Santa Anna lost Texas because he took the "high road" on the slavery issue. | |
Were the Alamo Defenders defending slavery? Was slavery an issue in the Texas rebellion? Was Santa Anna the Abe Lincoln of Texas? |
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08/05/98When I wrote a history paper a few years ago, my professors (who knew nothing of the Texas Revolution) told me the war was about land grabbing and slavery. I was appalled. You have to understand that I am one of those Defenders of the Defenders. They're not God-like, but I hate when people try to destroy their hero image.
In my paper I said that Texas had slaves, but on plantations. But many Texans did not own slaves and many could not afford them if they wanted to. At first the Texans fought for the Constitution of 1824 which prohibited slavery. If the rebellion was about slavery why would they fight to keep slavery illegal?
The part about Santa Anna being an Abe Lincoln is ridiculous. His government made and repealed slavery laws on and off for years. They never took a stand for or against it. Santa Anna came to San Antonio with his slave, Ben. Lincoln never owned a slave.
Not all the Texans were Southerners or slave owners either. Many were from the North or foreign countries. I guess it comes down to the point of arguing if the Civil War was about slavery. Many Southerners contend it was for States Rights, while us Northerners contend it was to end slavery and preserve the Union.
I read somewhere (I'm not sure where at this time) that slavery was not even mentioned as an issue until after the war as a means of Santa Anna to spread propaganda after the war.
Melinda M. Zupon
08/09/98Eugene Barker in Public Opinion in Texas Preceding the Revolution (Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1911) (See: Sons of DeWitt Colony of Texas ) states "the truth is, so far as one may judge from the absence of discussion of the subject in Texas, that slavery played no part in precipitating the revolution." Barker found only "three contemporary references which might indicate a potential connection between the slavery question and the revolution: (1) In a Fourth of July address intended to stir the colonists to resistance R. M. Williamson, a prominent radical, declared that the Mexicans were coming to Texas to compel the Texans, among other things, to give up their slaves (a broadside in the Bexar archives; "Publications" of So. Hist. Assn., VIII, 7-18). (2) In a letter of August 21,1835, Stephen F. Austin said "Texas must be a slave country. It is no longer a matter of doubt" (Quarterly of Tex.State Hist. Assn., XIII, 271). (3) On August 28 the radicals issued a circular in which they quoted H. A. Alsberry, who had recently returned from Mexico, as saying that the Mexicans boasted that they would free the slaves of the Texans and set them against their masters (Broadside in the Austin Papers)."
Von Holst in Constitutional History of the United States 11, 553: "Settlers came with their slaves from the slave States [to Texas]. In this the heads of individual persons may have been haunted by far-reaching projects; but I can find no support for the assertion that back of it there was a definite plan of the South."
Unlike the clash between North and South in the United States, slavery was a non-issue in the clash between Texians (and all Mexican Federalist and Constitutionalists) and the centralist Mexican dictatorship. However, the archives are replete with the agony and the struggle of Anglo and Hispanic Mexican Texians with the short and long term moral, economic, political and legal consequences of slavery (Sons of DeWitt Colony of Texas and Slavery in Early Texas by Lester Bugbee, 1898). In this respect, a full study and understanding of the struggle and unfolding of the institution of slavery within Texas in 1820-1836 is as far as one need look to see the complicated interplay of region, climate, economics, principle, law and race to understand the institution as it unfolded in the United States.
Was Santa Anna the Abe Lincoln of Texas?
To imply that the "Chameleon of the West," the one individual along with Creoles of similar vice-regal and corrupt self-serving philosophy, that represented the tragic subversion of the hope for a second democratic Federal republic in North America in the 19th century, can be in any way compared with Abe Lincoln is akin to claiming the same for Hitler, Stalin and Mao in the 20th century.
It is an insult to the populist vision and sacrifices, however bloody, of Creole patriots Hidalgo, Morelos, Mier y Teran, Presidents Felix Hernandez (Guadalupe Hidalgo) and Vicente Guerrero and reformer Gomez Farias who tried to work within the chaos of the Santa Anna regimes . If Santa Anna was even intellectually capable of pondering, much less dissecting, the complicated moral, philosophical and economic issues related to human bondage and indenture, it was certainly a topic of no interest to him except to the extent that he could turn it to personal political advantage. Self-serving chameleonic personalities like Santa Anna enslaved the people of the great Mexican Republic both politically and economically from which Texas necessarily split and left a legacy from which their descendants are still recovering today. A more appropriate comparison to Abe Lincoln in context of Texian history would be Stephen F. Austin or General Manuel Mier y Teran who strove, unsuccessfully, against hopeless odds to hold the Mexican-Texas "Union" together.
Wallace L. McKeehan
Sons of Dewitt Colony of Texas
http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/dewitt.htmlFor additional reading and links to the above, see Slavery in the DeWitt Colony and Texas.
10 Aug 1998
I have always thought that the role of slavery in the Texas Revolution was somewhat similar to the role of slavery in the American Revolution: not an immediate cause of the rebellion, but an institution which was given a new lease on life when the slaveholders achieved a previously unknown degree of self-government. In both cases (the American Revolution and the Texan), had the rebellions NOT been successful, slavery would almost certainly have come to a quicker end in both places.
The statement made by a respondent that the Constitution of 1824 banned slavery is simply not true—unless you want to argue that the Texan slaveholders were even more flagrant lawbreakers than the actually were! The decree of President Guerrero banning slavery in 1829, from which Texas quickly received an exemption following the protests of S. F. Austin and numerous Coahuila y Tejas politicians, would obviously have been absurd if the constitution in force already banned the institution. (And what in the world does this respondent mean when she says that "Texas had slaves, but on plantations"??? What does the writer think the Texans would have used their slaves for otherwise—dungeon guards? bookends?)
The complex place of slavery in the Mexican constitution and in Mexican law receives careful attention in E. C. Barker's Life of Stephen F. Austin. For a fair and insightful modern treatment of the role of slavery in the Texas Revolution, readers should consult the prize-winning article published by Paul D. Lack in Vol. 89 (1985) of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. A complementary and very full treatment of the question of slavery as a cause of the Texas Revolution is Randolph B. Campbell's An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (LSU Press, 1989).
Campbell concludes that although logic and common sense might argue that a defense of slavery would be an important part of the Texans' decision to rebel against Mexican rule, the evidence simply does not show this to be the case.
It should be stressed, however, that although Lack might see slavery as being slightly more important in the coming of the revolution that does Campbell, both historians agree that the impact of the revolution on slavery was enormous, both during the Revolution (in terms of fears of slave revolts, etc.) and even moreso after the Revolution, with the flourishing of an institution that was now given powerful protection by the new government.
And for those who don't think that the slavery issue was important in the coming of the American Civil War—dream on! The ironic point, though, is that the North did NOT go to war to put an end to slavery; but to compel the South to remain in the Union, and thus to save the "Union" and the integrity of the nation itself. The Lower South seceded because the national government under the Republicans were sworn not to let slavery expand any further territorially, and this issue alone was enough to send Texas and the other six states of the first Confederacy out of the Union; in other words, the South split in two over the issue of the necessity of slavery's expansion. When Lincoln said that secession was unacceptable and vowed to use force to maintain the Union, the South split again, with the half of the Upper South remaining in the Union (Maryland, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, & Delaware were all legally "slave" areas in 1860), and half of them peeling off to join the Confederacy (Arkansas, Tennessee, N. C., & Virginia.)
The issues of slavery expansion and secession, which were the paramount issues which caused the war, split the South and united the North. The issue of emancipation of the slaves, if raised in 1861, would have done the opposite: split the North and united the South. But the war did not become an emancipatory war until 1863, and it became so not as a primary war aim of the North, but as a military and political necessity in the changed circumstances that the war itself had produced.
James E. Crisp Dept. of History
N. C. State University
08/11/98
I just read the guest editorial that sparked this month's War Room topic and I have to say that it just made me tired all over. I am so sick of this politically correct claptrap. The reason Santa Anna and Mexico (as well as other nations of the day) could afford to take such a high road on the slavery issue is a little thing called the caste system. Indian peons in Mexico were virtual slaves, with no way to change their lot in life. Santa Anna an abolitionist? He wasn't interested in anyone's freedom but his own.
Jeff Pendleton
08/15/98
I am unaware of a complete personal history study on all Alamo Defenders which I hope will emerge sooner or later and for that matter all those in the service of Texian independence. However, there is no evidence that slavery even as a remote property issue would have been a motivational factor for the unique subset of defenders, the Gonzales Ranger Alamo Relief Force , who most clearly, aggressively and uniquely among Texians outside the garrison, demonstrated their willingness to defend the Alamo. This was after all "Houstonian" questions of doubt of centralist motives and resolve were disproved by the surrounding of the garrison and announcement of "deguello," no quarter by Santa Anna.
Of the 30 (David Cummings was not a resident and joined along the way) from the DeWitt Colony capital Gonzales who penetrated surrounding centralist lines, at least 22 were homestead and property owners (or members of families who were) of record in the colony, legal and loyal citizens of the Republic of Mexico. Not one was clearly a soldier of fortune, filibuster or adventurer. Three were civil servants of record, most were farmers and ranchers, two were merchants and two were skilled blacksmiths with shops in Gonzales, the best of developing regional Texian society. Not one (or their family) of record brought slaves into Texas or held a slave at the time. Although not for certain because of lack of records, this conclusion may extend to all Alamo Defenders from the DeWitt Colony whose contribution per resident was larger than any other single municipality or district of Texas. Members of families of the Municipality of Gonzales, who comprised only about 4% of the total population of Texas, accounted for 20% of the casualties at the Alamo. Put another way, over 4% of the total population of the DeWitt Colony, among them their most productive landholders, ranchers and farmers as well as merchants and civic leaders, died in the Alamo while total Alamo casualties represented less than 0.5% of the total population of Texas.
The personal histories, despite large gaps, of these Mexican citizens show clearly that they were motivated by immediate defense of family and their investment in the opportunity and promises given them by the libertarian principles of the Federal Republic of Mexico (see Andrew Kent story, and William King family story. Personal loyalties to defenders in the garrison who were members of the community may have played a part. Secondary motivation was principle that they were defending personal and regional freedom to pursue a better life with minimal government interference, which most Anglos had already gotten enough of in the land of their birth. This general conclusion may apply to the majority of Alamo Defenders and for that matter those who participated on the side of Texas and the Mexican Federalists, a surprising minority of Texas residents by the way, until the Mexican War of 1847.
The continuous struggle of self-rightous academics and other apologists as Señor Olvera ("The Alamo is a Lie" article) for self-serving centralists, who view the world through "race war" glasses, to put the image of loss of and fear of liberation of bonded blacks in the minds of these patriots as they rode to Bexar and penetrated centralist lines as well as their co-defenders in the garrison is an interesting exercise in sociology (socio-pathology?) rather than historical perspective.
Wallace L. McKeehan
SONS OF DEWITT COLONY TEXAS
08/17/98The Texas cause looks much better at a distance than it does upon a near approach. The people of Texas made no opposition to Santa Anna or the Mexican government as long as they were not required to comply with the revenue laws & were permitted to keep slaves, which the Mexican constitution prohibits. When the Mexican Government became so much settled as to allow the authorities to attend to the distant provinces an officer was sent to establish the Custom House in Texas and to enforce the article in the Constitution wich [sic] prohibits slavery. The people saw at once an end of their dreams of wealth and accusing the Mexican government of tyranny, assailed, abused and drove off the custom house officers & prepared for defenses & in a short time set up for themselves. They were immediately joined by a large band of land speculators who are always prowling about new countries, and this war of independence as it is called is in fact a rebellion, and Santa Anna has so far had the advantage. If he abstains from enticing the Indians to join him he may succeed and will deserve success.This letter was written by veteran Army officer Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a native of Vermont and commandant of the cadets at West Point from1829-1833. Hitchcock served as chief of staff to General Gaines at the start of the Second Seminole War and later held the same position for General Winfield Scott in the Mexican War. Hitchcock, following Gaines return from Florida to his command in Louisiana, was on duty at and near Fort Jesup during the middle of the Texas Revolution and would be the officer who carried Sam Houston's San Jacinto Victory statement sent to Gaines on to Andrew Jackson. The letter was written to his mother, and dated April 9, 1836 at Natchitoches. On the outside of the letter Hitchcock wrote, "I charge you particularly not to let my name out with the opinions give in this letter as to the causes of the Texas quarrel. It would get me into a quarrel & although I belong to the army I don't wish to fight except in the regular war of business." A photostat of the original letter is in the Vermont Historical Society Collection. It was recently edited and published in a short article by Marshall M. True.Not but that a very many honest men are involved in the Texas, difficulties and very many women and children are sufferers. Now this view of the matter is new to you I have no doubt and to many of our good people, it would read like treason against my native land....
Submitted by Kevin R. Young
08/26/98The excerpt from Hitchcock's letter home is interesting and relevant, but his observations and opinions must be tempered with an eye to where he was born and raised. As far back as the 1830's Vermont and much of New England was culturally more evolved in the area of slavery and some would say a hotbed of radical anti-slavery sentiment of the John Brown zealot variety.
While I don't know that Hitchcock or his family shared these beliefs its influence in the region should be considered. The North and South were already growing drastically apart and although 25 more years would pass before it came to a head the citizens of one very often saw the lives and beliefs of the other as something foreign and therefore unamerican.
Jeff Pendleton
08/29/98In evaluating the Hitchcock letter:
The Texas cause looks much better at a distance than it does upon a near approach.
Obviously the "near approach" did not include consideration of the lack of majority archival evidence which has been pointed out in this series by myself in reference to Barker and Bugbee's analysis. Hitchcock's "near approach" was influenced probably on what was around him in the neutral ground and Louisiana coast, the worst of lawless freebooters, filibusters, corsairs and pirates with their eyes on Texas.
The people of Texas made no opposition to Santa Anna or the Mexican government as long as they were not required to comply with the revenue laws…..
There is truth to the revenue law question, protest against selective regional "taxation without representation," etc., but many, including Austin and regional Mexican officials and Gen. Mier y Teran , believed that the Anahuac and Velasco flareups were preventable if they had not been pre-occupied in Mexico and to no small degree were due to local mismanagement of enforcement by Bradburn and Fisher. There was also conflict between state and central Mexican authorities in enforcement.
Colonists were permitted to keep slaves, which the Mexican constitution prohibits.
As pointed out by respondent Crisp, the Mexican Constitution of 1824 did not prohibit slavery. Liberal and sincere President Guerrero, with his war powers granted in response to Spanish invasion, was duped into the anti-slavery decree by vice-regal Creole militarist and racist Tornel. Texians underwent grueling political work within the system to gain exemption (related to this, I am unsure what respondent Crisp meant "…the Texan slaveholders were even more flagrant lawbreakers than they actually were!").
When the Mexican Government became so much settled as to allow the authorities to attend to the distant provinces an officer was sent to establish the Custom House in Texas and to enforce the article in the Constitution wich [sic] prohibits slavery.
Can anyone find orders for officials sent to Texas that state explicitly what Hitchcock suggests? According to his memorial , Col. Juan Bradburn was confused as to what he was to do with runaway slaves from Louisiana appealing for his protection and put them to work under his protection until he could get orders from his superior Gen. Teran. Of course the impetuous Travis and colleagues would not allow him the time to perform that duty required of any military officer.
They were immediately joined by a large band of land speculators who are always prowling about new countries….
Barker argues strongly that land speculation actually delayed the Texas rebellion rather than accelerated it.
Santa Anna has so far had the advantage. If he abstains from enticing the Indians to join him he may succeed and will deserve success….
The meaning of this statement by Hitchcock is unclear to me and I hope that other respondents will comment on it.
In sum, Hitchcock was the military end of the group described by Barker:
"Earnest patriots like Benjamin Lundy, William Ellery Channing, and John Quincy Adams saw in the Texas revolution a disgraceful affair promoted by sordid slaveholders and land speculators. Even to the critical ear of the modern historian [and those with axes to grind, chips on the shoulder as Sr. Olvera-WLM] their arguments sound plausible, and it is not strange that in a period distinguished by sectionalism they were accepted by partisans at full value. The fundamental defect of these arguments lay in the fact that their authors knew too little of contemporary opinion in Texas."In view of his background and record, Hitchcock was the military end of that large group of elitist, self-righteous citizens from largely the northeastern part of the United States of the North who contributed nothing directly to the grassroot struggles in settling and development of the west. Their sole objective was to acquire its riches for their exploitation and control as well as to secure borders and more dumping ground for displaced Indians (sounds a lot like the objectives of the centralists from Mexico City?). The struggles for identity and regional self-determination and development of Texas as either a state of Mexico separate from Coahuila y Tejas or a Republic separate from Mexico was of little concern (if it even crossed their minds) and possibly a threat to those objectives as this group acquired the region to the Pacific in 1847, Hitchcock at the forefront as chief of staff.Wallace L. McKeehan
SONS OF DEWITT COLONY TEXAS
http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/dewitt.html
1030/98Santa Anna did outlaw slavery in Texas, however, he did not outlaw it in Mexico proper. THey were still using Indian labor to work in the mines and therefore, he cannot be the Abe Lincoln of Texas. Furthermore, at least thirty of the Alamo defenders were not Southerners. They were from such great slaveholding states as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennslyvannia. Thirty more of them were not even Americans to begin with. They were Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, German, and Danish. The Irishmen were themselves enslaved in their own country during that time period. And what about the Tejanos? In any case, I find the argument that soldiers during the Revolution were fighting for slavery to be entirely without merit. Of course, that's just my opinion...
Respectfully,
Brady Hutchison