Someone is out to make a quick buck.

Poor Santa Anna, such a victim of evil American Imperialism.

I read the Time article and the writer acts like he discovered water on the moon. Much of what he wrote is old news, throw in the cherry-picking interviews that made it all about race. I was disappointed that no credit was given to the courageous Tejanos that fought in the Alamo and why they were there. Nor does he mention the Mexican government repealing the Constitution of 1824 under Siete Leyes (Seven Laws), which centralized power to the federals in Mexico City & Santa Anna, leaving all Texans with no voice in their own country. I guess he never heard the phrase "no involvement, no commitment".

The article is a one sided story and I wouldn't have expected anything different from Time. It's all about scoring woke points. My adolescent high schooler could have written a better story.

Let me say that I've known one of the authors for 15 years. He's a former AP reporter, and he's kind of the poster child for the white guilt philosophy. Everything to him is about race. He is biased and nothing he writes can be trusted to be fair and honest.

I find articles and uncommonly known tidbits of history like these very interesting. History is not supposed to be personal, just a chronocling of events. Yet we get deeply offended when someone challenges the narrative we let ourselves believe despite not really disputing the facts. It should be no secret that we have whitewashed elements of our history of a time when much of society was overtly racist.

Quote:

---

The Mexican government, by its colonization laws, invited and induced the Anglo-American population of Texas to colonize its wilderness under the pledged faith of a written constitution, that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in the land of their birth, the United States of America.

In this expectation they have been cruelly disappointed, inasmuch as the Mexican nation has acquiesced in the late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now offers us the cruel alternative, either to abandon our homes, acquired by so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny, the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood.

It has sacrificed our welfare to the state of Coahuila, by which our interests have been continually depressed through a jealous and partial course of legislation, carried on at a far distant seat of government, by a hostile majority, in an unknown tongue, and this too, notwithstanding we have petitioned in the humblest terms for the establishment of a separate state government, and have, in accordance with the provisions of the national constitution, presented to the general Congress a republican constitution, which was, without just cause, contemptuously rejected.

It incarcerated in a dungeon, for a long time, one of our citizens, for no other cause but a zealous endeavor to procure the acceptance of our constitution, and the establishment of a state government.
It has failed and refused to secure, on a firm basis, the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty, and only safe guarantee for the life, liberty, and property of the citizen.

It has failed to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources, (the public domain,) and although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self government.

It has suffered the military commandants, stationed among us, to exercise arbitrary acts of oppression and tyrrany, thus trampling upon the most sacred rights of the citizens, and rendering the military superior to the civil power.

It has dissolved, by force of arms, the state Congress of Coahuila and Texas, and obliged our representatives to fly for their lives from the seat of government, thus depriving us of the fundamental political right of representation.

It has demanded the surrender of a number of our citizens, and ordered military detachments to seize and carry them into the Interior for trial, in contempt of the civil authorities, and in defiance of the laws and the constitution.

It has made piratical attacks upon our commerce, by commissioning foreign desperadoes, and authorizing them to seize our vessels, and convey the property of our citizens to far distant ports for confiscation.

It denies us the right of worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience, by the support of a national religion, calculated to promote the temporal interest of its human functionaries, rather than the glory of the true and living God.

It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defence, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments.

It has invaded our country both by sea and by land, with intent to lay waste our territory, and drive us from our homes; and has now a large mercenary army advancing, to carry on against us a war of extermination.

It has, through its emissaries, incited the merciless savage, with the tomahawk and scalping knife, to massacre the inhabitants of our defenseless frontiers.

It hath been, during the whole time of our connection with it, the contemptible sport and victim of successive military revolutions, and hath continually exhibited every characteristic of a weak, corrupt, and tyrranical government.

These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, untill they reached that point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. We then took up arms in defence of the national constitution. We appealed to our Mexican brethren for assistance. Our appeal has been made in vain. Though months have elapsed, no sympathetic response has yet been heard from the Interior.
We are, therefore, forced to the melancholy conclusion, that the Mexican people have acquiesced in the destruction of their liberty, and the substitution therfor of a military government; that they are unfit to be free, and incapable of self government.

The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.
We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations.

[Signed, in the order shown on the handwritten document]

---

No other grievances at all, it was just all about slavery.

Modern "history" can be such junk and I just can't understand why.

Ghost of Andrew Eaton said:

---

I wonder if you can explain why slavery was never mentioned in the Texas Declaration of Independence?

---

Perhaps they were saving it for the constitution where it is abundantly mentioned and only drafted a few months later. In addition, many freedman and slaves sided with the Mexican government that provided freedom, including a hundred person slave revolt along the Brazos river when it was rumored that Mexican troops were approaching. This leads you to believe that contemporaries knew what an Anglo victory meant in terms of slavery. And the speed and amount of stipulations put into the constitution about slavery indicates that they knew in advance what they wanted to do about slavery, as elderly as going as far to NOT give congress the power to reverse much of it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying this is the only reason for the revolution. It is just a part that has severely been down played.

pmart said:

---

Ghost of Andrew Eaton said:

---

I wonder if you can explain why slavery was never mentioned in the Texas Declaration of Independence?

---

Perhaps they were saving it for the constitution where it is abundantly mentioned and only drafted a few months later. In addition, many freedman and slaves sided with the Mexican government that provided freedom, including a hundred person slave revolt along the Brazos river when it was rumored that Mexican troops were approaching. This leads you to believe that contemporaries knew what an Anglo victory meant in terms of slavery. And the speed and amount of stipulations put into the constitution about slavery indicates that they knew in advance what they wanted to do about slavery, as elderly as going as far to NOT give congress the power to reverse much of it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying this is the only reason for the revolution. It is just a part that has severely been down played.

---

That makes no sense. They actually listed the reasons they went to war and slavery was absent. One generation later was bragging that slavery was why they were seceding. Seems like the evidence is light to your hypothesis.

I'm always down to read other sources though.

Belton Ag said:

---

Poor Santa Anna, such a victim of evil American Imperialism.

---

Santa Anna's American imperialism argument doesn't have a leg to stand on.

HarleySpoon said:

---

Belton Ag said:

---

Poor Santa Anna, such a victim of evil American Imperialism.

---

Santa Anna's American imperialism argument doesn't have a leg to stand on.

---

pmart said:

---

Ghost of Andrew Eaton said:

---

I wonder if you can explain why slavery was never mentioned in the Texas Declaration of Independence?

---

Perhaps they were saving it for the constitution where it is abundantly mentioned and only drafted a few months later. In addition, many freedman and slaves sided with the Mexican government that provided freedom, including a hundred person slave revolt along the Brazos river when it was rumored that Mexican troops were approaching. This leads you to believe that contemporaries knew what an Anglo victory meant in terms of slavery. And the speed and amount of stipulations put into the constitution about slavery indicates that they knew in advance what they wanted to do about slavery, as elderly as going as far to NOT give congress the power to reverse much of it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying this is the only reason for the revolution. It is just a part that has severely been down played.

---

You are right in one sense but perhaps take your argument too far.

You are right in that our history has been "sanitized" and it shouldn't be. There's lots to be proud of and thankful for in Texas history, but also lots to regret.

However, you take your argument too far in that you put everything in the context of slavery and past wrongs. Just because slavery existed and was wrong doesn't mean that it motivated every single action. People had other motives as well.

Wow, where to begin.

First, who is this "we" that you complain are ignoring the history of slavery? Surely not this board because it is discussed here extensively. Surely not current academia, where it is discussed endlessly.

And your premise is flawed. Certainly the early settlers of Texas and the founders of the Republic included many slave owners and intended for Texas to be a slave state. And surely that was wrong, even morally repugnant. But that doesn't mean that everything they did was motivated primarily by slavery. In other words, their motives in seeking independence from Mexico had very little to do with slavery, even though Texas reauthorizing the institution was inevitable once it gained its independence.

You rightly hold Texas responsible for the words she chose in drafting her Constitution. Why do you then feel it is permissible to impose words into the Texas Declaration of Independence that its authors chose not to use? Do you think that the authors of the Declaration were trying to hide something? Why would they? In their time and cultural milieu, slavery was not seen as the great evil that it is today.

Finally, even though we all agree (I hope) that slavery was wrong, even judged by the standards of its own time, we also ought to be very careful in judging people in the past. It is wrong to judge people by the standards of today; perhaps they should be judged by the standards of their own day.

You are correct that, in the past, we have whitewashed our history. In the past, we did not teach of the atrocities committed by our Texan predecessors, not only slavery, but also the mass lynchings of the Germans and of the Cherokees as well as many other wrongs, I suspect. But in the attempt to avoid whitewashing, we also need to be careful not to go to the other extreme of "blackwashing", that is, painting everything over with the "sins" of our predecessors. For example, when we study the rise of Islam, we should recognize the atrocities it committed, but that does not define all of historical Islam. The kings of England also committed many atrocities on individuals, but that doesn't fully define their reigns.

Finally, it is not inaccurate to say that slavery was widespread worldwide during most of its existence in the U.S. That's not necessarily a defense of slavery. Rather, it is a recognition of its historical context and an attempt to understand how and why it existed in the US and even how it changed here. Refusing to even discuss slavery's existence worldwide is as much an attempt to ignore history as was the "whitewashing" of which you complain.

p_bubel said:

---

Quote:

---

The Mexican government, by its colonization laws, invited and induced the Anglo-American population of Texas to colonize its wilderness under the pledged faith of a written constitution, that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in the land of their birth, the United States of America.

In this expectation they have been cruelly disappointed, inasmuch as the Mexican nation has acquiesced in the late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now offers us the cruel alternative, either to abandon our homes, acquired by so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny, the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood.

It has sacrificed our welfare to the state of Coahuila, by which our interests have been continually depressed through a jealous and partial course of legislation, carried on at a far distant seat of government, by a hostile majority, in an unknown tongue, and this too, notwithstanding we have petitioned in the humblest terms for the establishment of a separate state government, and have, in accordance with the provisions of the national constitution, presented to the general Congress a republican constitution, which was, without just cause, contemptuously rejected.

It incarcerated in a dungeon, for a long time, one of our citizens, for no other cause but a zealous endeavor to procure the acceptance of our constitution, and the establishment of a state government.
It has failed and refused to secure, on a firm basis, the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty, and only safe guarantee for the life, liberty, and property of the citizen.

It has failed to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources, (the public domain,) and although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self government.

It has suffered the military commandants, stationed among us, to exercise arbitrary acts of oppression and tyrrany, thus trampling upon the most sacred rights of the citizens, and rendering the military superior to the civil power.

It has dissolved, by force of arms, the state Congress of Coahuila and Texas, and obliged our representatives to fly for their lives from the seat of government, thus depriving us of the fundamental political right of representation.

It has demanded the surrender of a number of our citizens, and ordered military detachments to seize and carry them into the Interior for trial, in contempt of the civil authorities, and in defiance of the laws and the constitution.

It has made piratical attacks upon our commerce, by commissioning foreign desperadoes, and authorizing them to seize our vessels, and convey the property of our citizens to far distant ports for confiscation.

It denies us the right of worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience, by the support of a national religion, calculated to promote the temporal interest of its human functionaries, rather than the glory of the true and living God.

It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defence, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments.

It has invaded our country both by sea and by land, with intent to lay waste our territory, and drive us from our homes; and has now a large mercenary army advancing, to carry on against us a war of extermination.

It has, through its emissaries, incited the merciless savage, with the tomahawk and scalping knife, to massacre the inhabitants of our defenseless frontiers.

It hath been, during the whole time of our connection with it, the contemptible sport and victim of successive military revolutions, and hath continually exhibited every characteristic of a weak, corrupt, and tyrranical government.

These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, untill they reached that point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. We then took up arms in defence of the national constitution. We appealed to our Mexican brethren for assistance. Our appeal has been made in vain. Though months have elapsed, no sympathetic response has yet been heard from the Interior.
We are, therefore, forced to the melancholy conclusion, that the Mexican people have acquiesced in the destruction of their liberty, and the substitution therfor of a military government; that they are unfit to be free, and incapable of self government.

The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.
We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations.

[Signed, in the order shown on the handwritten document]

---

No other grievances at all, it was just all about slavery.

Modern "history" can be such junk and I just can't understand why.

---

Function of post-modernism, which is pretty much crap empirically. There are facts that prove the 19th century was a tough place to live with people using draconian measures, including murder and torture because those were the methods of warfare. The Geneva convention and laws of land warfare happened to modify the brutality and carnage. Fast forward to the late 20th century in which scholars, not content to merely record events, attempt to formulate grand universal theories in tying those events to "ethnicity" in attempts to explain systemic cultural failures.

Relative who fought at San Jacinto had no slaves !

Former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson recently wrote on Facebook debunking the recent "woke" claims that the Texas Revolution was simply all about slavery:

Jerry Patterson - The recent Texas Monthly reprint from the... | Facebook

His key points:

Quote:

---

1-When writing about the causes of the Texas Revolution, it would seem obvious to review and refer to the six general and fourteen specific causes for rebellion listed in the March 2, 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. Not one of the 20 listed causes mentioned slavery. If slavery were a cause, I guess it didn't rank any higher than #21. The authors should address this inconvenient fact, not ignore it.

2-There were five other Mexican states (Zacatecas, Yucatan, Tabasco, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas) in rebellion at some time during the same period (1835 - 1846) and they were non-slave holding states. This would indicate there were other far more significant reasons for revolution reasons that were shared across Mexico, including in Texas.

3-Santa Anna's enactment in late 1835 of "Siete Leyes" (Seven Laws) nullified the federal constitution of 1824 that had given power to the states, disbanded state legislatures, and replaced elected governors with appointed ones. This was not well received and was considered the last straw by many. Texans, as did citizens of other Mexican states, fought for a return to the constitution of 1824. In fact, one of the Texas battle flags was a Mexican tri-color that featured "1824" in the center white panel.

4-The majority of prominent Texans who identified with the "Peace Party," the faction in pre-war Texas that from 1832 - late 1835 opposed war and wanted to maintain Texas as its own state within Mexico, were slave owners. Prominent among this group were Stephen F. Austin, Thomas J. Chambers, David G. Burnet, and Josiah Bell. Ironically, Austin, as the book conclusively proves, was a slavery supporter, who opposed war and independence until very end. The authors would have us believe the war was overwhelmingly about slavery notwithstanding that many of those who opposed the war were themselves slave owners.

5-The vast majority of Texas combatants were not slave owners. Would they be willing to die for those of the slave owner/planter class? There were certainly opponents of slavery in the Texas ranks. In fact, one of those who fought at Gonzales and later died at the Alamo was Amos Pollard, a well educated physician who came to Texas from Massachusetts. Pollard was an ardent abolitionist who corresponded with the prominent abolitionist of the day, William Lloyd Garrison, who published Pollard's letter in the Abolitionists pamphlet "The Liberator".

---

From my weekly Texas History email from Copano Bay Press

aalan94 said:

---

Let me say that I've known one of the authors for 15 years. He's a former AP reporter, and he's kind of the poster child for the white guilt philosophy. Everything to him is about race. He is biased and nothing he writes can be trusted to be fair and honest.

---

Chris Tomlinson?

Dude is getting raked over the coals by Jerry Patterson. The damage is done though.

Quote:

---

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying this is the only reason for the revolution. It is just a part that has severely been down played.

---

OK, I'll wade in here a bit. I am not an expert, because my research is mostly about the era before the 1836 revolution, but I know a fair deal about the time period, have over the years read all the arguments, been in tons of TSHA forums with folks who know this stuff far better than me.seen a ton of documents and even have the two volume collection of the laws of the Coahuila y Texas legislature from the 1820s sitting on my desk as we speak. Haven't read all of it, of course, but enough to support my other reading.

I do think my revolution of 1812-13 research provides insights, and leads me to possible new interpretations, but these are in some cases ideas worth exploring, not hard and fast theories. Unlike the authors of this book we're arguing about, I don't think you come up with your answer first, then write your book second. It should go the other way around. So some of these ideas are impressions, which need to be tested against the facts. If my first book does well, maybe I go into this in the next one.

First of all, slavery has been downplayed in the narrative, as you say. But among modern historians, that is clearly not the case. In fact, it's been OVER emphasized, and more of them lean to the slavery as a big issue argument (though few would say it was the overriding issue as this book does). On the other hand, I will also take issue with quoting from the declaration of independence and seeing the absence of slavery in the document as proof that it wasn't an issue. I've seen lots of these documents and until the secession documents, they really don't talk about it in public documents so much. But I do think it was not the overriding issue as I'll note below.

Observations:
1. All historians of the 19th Century make a common mistake, and it is to look at everything from the perspective of the civil war looking backwards. This is what drives the narrative to find a slavery correlation in everything. This is wrong, and not how history works. As should be obvious, history moves forward only. If I were the God of history, I would make it illegal to use the phrase "antebellum period." The reason is that it WASN'T "antebellum" for those people. With the exception of John Brown and a half dozen fire eaters, no one North or South thought of themselves as living in a pre-war period.

Sure, you might say, the signs are all there. You say that because you've read about them in your history books, and they've been linked (through the eyes of hindsight): Nat Turner, the caning of Charles Sumner, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bleeding Kansas, the John Brown Raid. Once you've started looking at history backwards, you can extend this back in time to much less plausible origins further back until you're somehow all the way to 1619, like some idiot New York Times reporter with an Journalism degree. (I have a journalism degree. As far as helping you be a great writer, it is awesome. I have zero respect for the degree teaching critical thinking.)

However, let's flip the score. Imagine you're sitting in your room comfortably in 2021 and Marty McFly IV., the eminent historian from Texas A&M from 2090, appears in your living room to ask you to fill out a survey for his students. He asks you how you feel living in the "2nd Antebellum" period. "What?" You say. "There is no such thing." He says well, everything you do has led up to the 2045 2nd American Civil War, which pitted liberals vs. conservatives, and then he starts walking you through Wokeness vs. Trumpism, BLM, antifa, the proud boys, the congressional baseball shooter, all that junk. That seems plausible enough, but then he goes back and shows how the 2nd Civil War of 2045 was made inevitable as far back as Waco, Ruby Ridge, the OJ Simpson trials, Rooftop Koreans, even Jim Jones and Woodstock. "How can you possibly not have seen it coming?" he will ask you, "Didn't you realize 50 million Americans would die in 2045 because of all that?"

Of course, this is ludicrous and we all know it.This future is open to us, but so are a lot of others that are good. But what you can see is that he has created a history that plausibly fits a narrative as an era of rising tensions and interconnected issues that from hindsight, tells a story of inevitability. But it is false because it ignores human agency, decision making, chance, dynamic personalities, etc. It's basically Kant on steroids: The utter NONSENSE that history has a direction of its own independent of us that can't be halted, reversed, or diverted. Technology may have a direction, and progress in a very, very vague sense entirely alienated from politics, perhaps. But history does not. In 1938, almost every historian in America saw the future of the world as a guaranteed outcome with the total state in either fascist or communist absolutes, as an inevitability that could not be stopped. And yet here we are.

This is exactly how I view the Civil War/sectionalism/slavery narrative as embraced by most historians today. Yes, all these threads are relevant, but they are also taking place with a lot of context and alternatives that could also have happened.

I started thinking about this when I researched my 1812-13 filibusters and started seeing people impute to them the same motivations (pro-slavery, Southern expansionist) that were being used for the men of 1836. Only, my research started blowing holes in this right away. The American special agent was a New Yorker who owned a slave. Yes, New Yorkers still did in 1812. (His family would own slaves at least until the 1820s based on the gradual emancipation laws). The composition of the army was extremely diverse. Previous historians had said, "Well, they're all from Kentucky and Tennessee and Louisiana, so they're all like people of those states." Except when I did their genealogies, I realized, they're all first generation from those states, sometimes residents of only 2-3 years, but were often born in places like New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. And of course, the whole southern expansionist narrative falls flat for 1812. First of all, ALL of America was expanding in 1812, and the people of Upstate New York and Ohio wanted to conquer Canada at the same time Americans were invading Texas. And of course, before the Compromise of 1820, slavery was not constrained, so expansionism looks very different then.

2. What I learned in my research of 1812 is that a good percentage of the survivors of that war later settled in Texas (two 1836 settlers go back to the 1790s in Texas). So lumping them into 1836 from a motivation standpoint is problematic. It's like saying that everything that happened in the 1970s was motivated by Vietnam and disco, ignoring the fact that the WWII generation, in their 50s, and even some of the pre-war generation were alive and active participants in society. In fact, they were actually the ones running all the corporations and were the key leaders in congress. They gave not one **** for disco and saw Vietnam very differently from the hippies. The fact that we look at the "in" generation of the time and ignore the two other generations that are still in play during their time frame makes it very dangerous to presume a motive to a whole population that is diverse (from an age standpoint, not to mention other diversities like immigrants). Imagine if our time-travelling historian asked you what it was like living in the "era of the millennial."

So the question is, as far as analysis of motivations for coming to Texas either as settlers or as fighters (more on that later), can we put these people in the same box that we have traditionally interpreted 1836 by? Seeing as there was almost no pro-slavery motive to come in 1812, but there was in 1836, then a returning fighter/settler has either changed his motives to fit the changing times, or their motive is not a slavery motive. Although my subset of people is small, when you look at the broader group of settlers/fighters in 1836, they turn out to be more diverse than the traditional narrative recognizes.

3. One other thing to note: The traditional histories look at the events and try to interpret them almost without even considering the people individually. Or they'll cherry pick a quote and use it to apply to a whole class of people. What my book does and I think the same could be done for 1836 is use modern technology and digitized resources to go closer to the individual level and start to look at the trees, not just the forest. As noted, I haven't done this for 1836, but I really suspect that once it is done (which no one really has done outside of some really poor attempts at biographical summaries of the Alamo defenders) one will find some interesting things. Here's what I suspect to be true. There is a difference in groups of people.

a. First of all, the settlers. These come in several waves. The early settlers come as far back as 1824-30. These people are citizens of Mexico for a decade before the revolution happens. They live peacefully in Mexico with few complaints and show no revolutionary tendencies. It is really stretching the historical record to show them as some kind of agents for American expansionism, much less a pro-slavery expansion. Yes, they have slaves, but Mexico doesn't care. Mexico never enforces a ban on slavery, and these people don't expect they will. When the revolution comes, there are a lot of people who are hesitant even violently opposed up to a point with breaking from Mexico. These people make up a peace party. Anecdotally (and this is where I need to do more research), my gut tells me most of the early settlers gravitated towards it.
b. Now we have the later settlers. These are where you get more of your firebrands, and I suspect that a larger number of these are from the non-Austin colonies. These are the people like Travis.
c. Lastly you have the filibusters. This is a claim I don't know has been made, but I think could very easily be made: that hidden within the Texas Revolution is a filibuster. In fact, large numbers of the people who died at the Alamo weren't Texas residents. The revolution happened and the majority of Texans stayed close to home, but these outsiders came in and did a lot of the fighting. Now the actual Texas residents are more likely to be found at San Jacinto, but a lot of them were also escorting their families to safety during the runaway scrape.

So you have three groups, which I suspect will line up roughly with the peace and war parties, with a. to b. to c being a continuum of peace to war. And I say this because you can't say the revolution is about slavery without considering the fact that many people are hesitant to revolt and others are eager to do so. They are almost ALL slave owners. So if you have a peace party that is 95 percent slave owners and a war party that is 95 percent slave owners, can you really say it is about slavery? If it was all about slavery, ALL groups would be eager to fight, which is demonstrably not true.

4. Slavery was a part of this, not because people really wanted vast plantations with large numbers of field hands, but because it was how they made cotton work, and cotton was the crop that offered them chances of rising to wealth. Not to dismiss the evils of slavery in any way, but it was the wealth that they sought, and the cotton and then the slaves enabled it. If they could have found wealth through things other than cotton, they would have done it, and if they could have grown cotton without the hassles of slavery, they would have done that. If John Deere tractors had been invented, the would have used them instead, but they weren't. The reality is that slavery was a practical but morally bankrupt solution to an economic ambition, but it was the ambition, not the slavery itself, which motivated them. We are right to condemn them, but we are also hypocrites too when we judge them. If you have read or seen anything about how our products are produced in sweat shops in China or seen the mines in Rwanda and the Congo and places in Africa where the minerals powering our cell phones or computers are mined and we're basically doing the exact same thing as they did, just putting the problem in a distant place where it is out of sight out of mind and subcontracting out the brutality to communist administrators or conflict mining warlords instead of plantation overseers.

4. Now we get to the timeline of the revolution. There is crucial context that must be kept in mind. Mexico banned slavery in 1829, but gave Texas until 1830 to comply. The state of Coahuila y Texas, where something like 90 percent of the delegates were Coahuilans and only 10 percent Texans, passed a law to allow very long indentured servitude contracts, which basically carved out an exception to the Mexican ban. The Mexican government never sought to overturn this, and in effect accepted it, or more accurately, ignored it because Mexico had bigger problems to deal with.

Now, we come to the law of April 6, 1830, which banned new immigrants from the U.S. This was FAR MORE TROUBLING to the Anglo settlers than slavery, for a number of reasons. First of all, they needed more of their kind to set up businesses and create trade. Secondly, the early settlers had gotten giant land contracts and saw a future in selling land to newcomers basically erased by the Mexican action. Even the Tejanos opposed the law. They had actually supported the Anglos in the legislature on just about everything even the slavery carve out, not because they were afraid of Anglo settlement, but because they wanted more. Texas had for the first time in its 118 year history a real economy and that was a rising tide that lifted all boats.

So slavery wasn't really under any real imminent threat if Texas remained in Mexico in peace. But there was a federal law there that the government could assert should they really want to do so, and as anyone who knows history will realize very quickly, the very last thing you want to do in that situation is rock the boat and give them an excuse to march north with an army and free the slaves using the law as pretext which is ultimately what happened. That they rocked the boat anyway is because they thought they didn't have a choice.

5. The Mexican federal constitution of 1824 was decaying long before Texas revolted. Mexico was basically in a low grade civil war for most of its lifetime prior to 1835. This impacted Texas long before any of the moves toward separatism occurred. In 1832 or so (I can't recall exactly), the perennial dispute between Monclova and Saltillo for the capital of Coahuila erupted and troops of the Monclova faction basically marched to Saltillo and kicked out the government. So Texas basically lost its state government, which created an intolerable anarchic situation. This coming as the Mexican central government was moving more troops into Texas, enforcing taxes that had never been enforced (almost zero taxes was the chief incentive to settle in Texas, but the growing economic activity attracted Mexican attention) the Anahuac disturbances (which had a slavery connection but were far deeper than just one issue and also strongly opposed by the peace party), etc. all was coming to a head at the same time.

Texas' response to the collapse of the Coahuila y Texas legislature was to start its own movement towards separate statehood, to insulate themselves from the dysfunction south of the Rio Grande. This created enormous concern in Mexico, already worried that the population of Texas had become something like 30-1 Anglo by this point. It was this movement, which indirectly led to Austin's imprisonment, which finally set the wheels moving for rebellion and independence. And that really had little to do with slavery. After all, the Texans were effectively trying to secede from the very state government that had given them a carve-out for slavery. The real danger was that Mexico would say, "Sure, you're a state now, but all previous Coahuila y Texas laws no longer apply." That would have been a disaster. But the people of Texas felt they had no alternative. With no real state government, they were effectively under federal control. And I'm not an expert on the Mexican constitution, but if their national leaders were chosen by the Coahuila y Texas legislature (as they were in the US, the pattern for the Mexican constitution), then they basically had no representation while the federal authorities were bringing in more and more troops. This is a dangerous cocktail in which slavery, though not meaningless, was effectively a secondary complaint.

6. Texas was still not really moving towards rebellion until Stephen F. Austin's imprisonment by the Mexicans (for supporting independent statehood). That inflamed Texans and started the ball really rolling. He had been a Spanish resident as a child in Missouri, then followed his father's dream to Texas as a young man. He poured his life into the Texas project, accommodated the Mexican authorities as much as possible, and when American settlers in Nacogdoches (the Fredonians) rebelled against Mexico, formed a militia made up of moderate settlers and marched on the rebels, who promptly gave up and fled the territory before it ever came to a battle. Austin was really as pro-Mexican as you could be. And yet, here he was thrown in prison, which dispelled a lot of illusions that the moderates in Texas had about Mexico, and allowed the firebrands to say, "see, told you so." When Austin, the leader of the peace party, came back from his imprisonment in a dungeon a convert to the side of resistance, it was game on. Austin's motivation was not slavery, it was rescuing his people from certain destruction as a part of this ongoing struggle with the centralists. Note that neither he, nor most Texans, declared for independence until 7 months after he was freed from prison, and by then, the war was already on them, with the enemy surrounding the Alamo. His preference was to resist until a possible change occurred in Mexico that would allow them to resume the status quo. The fact is, if slavery was the cause, and was embraced by the Texians, it could have happened just as easily beginning with the Anauac Disturbances in 1832. Four years did nothing to change the slavery situation. If the imperative was equally there in 1832 and 1836, why would the peace party write petitions disavowing the firebrand's activities, restrain them and specifically avoid revolution, and then four years later the peace party joined the war party almost universally. The answer is because the revolution came from other sources independent of slavery.

7. Texas' revolution was not unique, and this is really the kicker that blows up the revolution was for slavery's sake argument. Because the revolution was general and occurred simultaneously across Mexico in lots of places that did not have slavery. When the 1824 constitution was abolished and the 7 laws put in place in 1835, not only Texas revolted, but also Alta California, (today's California), Nuevo Mexico, Guanajuato, Sonora, Zacatecas, Durango, Queretaro, Michoacan, Yucutan, Jalisco, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and San Luis Potosi. If you look at the map, minus Chihuahua, which was a major military stronghold, it's basically all of northern Mexico plus a few other outlying states. These uprisings varied from small to outright rebellion, but only Texas' succeeded, because only Texas had outside assistance to the rebels.

See map:



The fact is, the Texans had immigrated under liberal laws to a country they thought was stable. Many of them as you can read from their petitions were sincere in their desire to remain Mexicans, and in this they were no different from other Americans, Irishmen, Germans, etc. who immigrated to Mexico before and after (including people like Vicente Fox's ancestors). There were firebrands too, but these were hardly the majority and their counsels failed so long as there was hope of a real chance that Mexico would stabilize and be a normal country. Slavery was a contributor to the revolution insofar as some of the early southern expansionists supported the filibuster of Americans joining the Texian army, but even this is overstated, because the contribution from the United States was more general. After all, the cannon used at San Jacinto came from Ohio, not Georgia.

So slavery was not a direct issue until Santa Anna marched into Texas and offered freedom to any slaves he captured. This did not cause the war because at that point, the war was well underway. The people of Texas certainly feared the loss of their slaves, but they also feared their wives would be killed, their livelihoods destroyed, their crops burned, their land taken, their government which had already been suppressed never restored, and their own lives forfeited. Next to those, slavery was, while not entirely an afterthought, certainly not the most critical factor in their revolution.

Thank you for sharing this. I think it might be the single most informative thing I have read in this forum, and as we all know, there have been MANY very informative things posted in this forum. Real historic analysis.