Slaves and Slavery in Texas Part 2 - After the Anglos Arrive

This is Episode 49 – Slaves and Slavery in Texas Part 2 - After the Anglos Arrive.  I’m your host and guide Hank Wilson. And as always, brought to you by Ashby Navis and Tennyson Media Publishers, producers of  a comprehensive catalog of  audiobooks and high-quality games, productivity, and mental health apps. Visit AshbyNavis.com for more information.

In this episode I’m going to continue my discussion about a topic that often makes some folks a tad uncomfortable and that’s because I’m going to talk about slaves and slavery in Texas. In the last episode, I focused on slavery in what we call New Spain. That is the territories that were colonized by the Spanish in the 1500s up through the mid to early1800s. Slavery was a fact of life in the Spanish colonies, and then after Mexico declared their independence from Spain in 1810, and a rebel congress took control. In 1813 under the leadership of Father José María Morelos, they met at Chilpancingo  they declared an end to slavery and to the casta or class system in New Spain. Now we have no records of whether or not the declaration of the Congress of Chilpancingo ever reached Texas.

Mexico achieved independence in 1821 and there were still about 3,000 slaves in the country and a several of those lived in Texas. In the summer of 1822, the new Mexican congress met and established a constitutional government for the nation. That congress quickly set out to promote the ideals of Chilpancingo and on September 17 issued a law abolishing racial categorization in official documents.

In a correspondence to the city council of San Antonio, Father Refugio de la Garza, a native Texan who represented the province in which he referred to the new social and political relations of the Spanish regime: “all that is over. We are all equal, and without this equality, our rights would not be inviolate and sacred.”  After that date, Texas census reports drop all mention of casta data, showing that Mexico’s leaders accepted the new “race-free” society. However, slavery still existed and the fact that it did caused race relations to take a new and dangerous direction for Mexican and Spanish residents of Texas, with the arrival of the Anglo-American settlers in the course of the 1820s. For the most part, those early settlers had roots in the deep south and brought with them  their prejudices and social customs. One of those customs was slavery.

While Mexicans generally objected to slavery, especially as it was allowed and implemented in the United State, many politicians turned a blind eye to the system. They were eager to profit from the production of cotton that Texans produced. Steven F. Austin, said, “The primary product that will elevate us from poverty is cotton and we cannot do this without the help of slaves.”  As a result, Anglo-Americans where able to bring their family slaves with them to Texas. Until 1840, they were also allowed to buy and sell them. One concession the Anglos made was to agree that the Grandchildren of those original slaves would eventually be gradually freed upon reaching certain ages. When, in1827, the provincial government hinted it might emancipate slaves earlier, many of the immigrants made their slaves sign indenture contracts binding them for ninety-nine years. This was ostensibly to work off the purchase price, upkeep, and transportation to Texas of the slaves.

Mexican officials thought of this as the same as the tradition of debt peonage, and as a result Black slaves continued to arrive in Texas. As the 1820s came to a close, the most serious threat to Anglo slaveholders took place when on September 15th, 1829, Mexico President Vicente Ramón Guerrero, in commemoration of Mexican Independence, emancipated all slaves. The powerful friends that Austin had in Mexico’s government quickly secured an exemption from the law for Texas and slavery was permitted to continue in the province.