Not true. Mexico gave Texas a dispensation on slavery. And Texas declared independence along with something like 5 other Mexican states, including Yucatan and Zacatecas due to Santa Anna tearing up the Constitution and making himself a dictator. Did Yucatan declare independence over slavery? How about Zacatecas?
Disputes over slavery did not constitute an immediate cause of the Texas Revolution, but the institution was always in the background as what the noted Texas historian Eugene C. Barker called a “dull, organic ache.” In other words, it was an underlying cause of the struggle in 1835‑1836. Moreover, once the revolution came, slavery was very much on the minds of those involved. Texans worried constantly that the Mexicans were going to free their slaves or at least cause servile insurrection. And when they declared independence and wrote a constitution for their new republic, they made every effort, in the words of a later Texas Supreme Court justice, to “remove all doubt and uneasiness among the citizens of Texas in regard to the tenure by which they held dominion over their slaves.”
I will but that. It was there in the background, but the Texas Declaration on Indepence didnt mention it.
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/texas175/declaration
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.
So, not a proximate cause.
So? That wasn’t the claim.
The claim was that slavery was, in part, a cause of the Texas Revolution. Which it clearly was.
ETA: Or I guess I’ll just quote it here:
bolding mine
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.
(bolding mine)
What do you think slaves were?
And read the cite I gave- why wasnt it mentioned in the Texas Declaration of Independence? Many other things were.
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.
Not to mention, there were maybe 5000 slave in all of texas at that time. Not a big issue.
That number grew to nearly 200000 before the Civil war.
Yes, they were property, but so were guns, crops, stoves atc- is there anything that indicates they meant slaves?
So did the Confederate congress ever actually pass and enforce a ban on the importation of slaves, or did they have more pressing matters on their minds?
Oh their lives were highly significant: most planters had to go into debt every year to cover their costs until the cotton was harvested and sold; in the meantime those slaves were collateral on the loans.
Is there anything that indicates they did not?
That’s surprising to me. I hadn’t been familiar enough with the Confederate constitution to know they came right out and said it.
I was going to mention, this might all be just word games, as slaveholders were usually careful never to use the word “slave” or “slavery”. It was always a euphemism. The “peculiar institution” was a common phrasing, and “unfree persons”. The infamous Three-Fifths clause simply categorizes them as “other” (From Wikipedia):
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons [italics added].
Yeah, they come right out with it. It’s ridiculous on its face for anybody to claim it was not a major cause of the Civil War.
Here’s the equivalent section (Article 1) of the CSA constitution:
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included within this Confederacy, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all slaves.
Some more bits that just come right out and admit it (Article IV, section 2, part 3):
No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs,. or to whom such service or labor may be due.
And states (whatever other ‘rights’ they may have had) were expressly forbidden from not recognizing the legality of slavery (Article IV, Section 3, part 3):
In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
Note that bit in this last one. The “institution of negro slavery”. This is not some kind of modern leftist revisionism of history. They put it out there for the world to see.
You’re wrong. Mexico did outlaw slavery decades before the US. That is an indisputable fact. It is also true that they did not enforce that decision in their northern territory because they knew full well they did not have the manpower to enforce that decision and if they tried it would result in a full blown revolt, which was proved all the more right when Texas once again fought a war to keep their slaves during the American Civil War.
I was always under the impression that making the Roman Catholic Church the religion of the Nation … was a more powerful driver for Texas independence, being most of the settlers were some kind of Protestant.
article 3 “ The religion of the Mexican nation is and and will permanently be the Roman, Catholic, Apostolic religion. Then nation protects her with wise and just laws and prohibits exercise of any other religion.
Once the upper South states had joined the Confederacy, the primary need for that clause was basically over.
The states of the upper South - VA, TN, NC, AR and to a lesser extent MD, KY and MO - were net exporters of the enslaved to the cotton states. Losing that market (due to the CSA’s nonimportation clause) would have decreased the value of their human property. Joining the seceding states, on the other hand, meant that selling their enslaved workers south would not only be possible but that they would not have to compete with those imported from Africa or the Caribbean, thus keeping values up and profits fat. So it was a carrot-and-stick approach to getting those states to join the CSA, though in the event it took firing on Fort Sumter to get them to take the plunge. And the rump Confederacy, the Gulf Coast states plus GA & SC, needed those other states, or the CSA would have been doomed to failure.
Attempting to reopen the Middle Passage also would have played poorly in the U.K. and France, two countries that the CSA desperately wanted on their side, and effectively futile given the strength of the Royal Navy. Since domestic demand could be filled from the states of the upper South, it was a small concession economically.
But: to answer your question more directly, the CSA Congress did pass such a law, and at least the first attempt was vetoed by Jefferson Davis, apparently because he spotted a loophole in the law. I’m guessing he managed to convey to Congress the importance of the nonimportation act sufficiently thereafter. Note that the veto came before Sumter and the secession of the upper South states.
In 1808 Congress did pass a law banning the import of slaves. How much it was enforced is a different question. The US constitution forbade such a law before 1808, so it was passed as early as possible. I read somewhere of a slave boat arriving in the 1860s, however. The last known example.
I always want to point out, whenever the three-fifths clause is mentioned, that people today think of it wrongly.
The obvious implication is that the North wanted slaves to count as a whole person, and the South wanted to not count them as they were property.
Just the opposite. The South wanted slaves to count equally to whites, the North did not want them to count at all.
The reason is straightforward. The higher the population count, the more representatives a state was apportioned in the House, which was at the creation considered by far more important than the Senate and equal to the President. Southern states benefited from having a large number of slaves: for the first seven censuses, they were overrepresented. (Since reapportionment bills always lag the census, and did not happen until 1862, the seceded states lost out on the eighth, 1860, census.)
That the Confederate Constitution kept the clause is probably explained by the huge differences in percentages of slaves across the South. Mississippi and South Carolina had more slaves than whites; Arkansas and Tennessee only a third as many. The latter would be at a disadvantage.
He’s actually kind of right (and kind of wrong). There’s a complicated sequence of events:
-
Mexico abolishes slavery entirely September 15, 1829
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American immigrants to Texas get upset and ask they will be affected.
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" On December 2 Agustín Viesca, secretary of relations, wrote the governor of Texas that no change would be made respecting the slaves in Texas."
So yes, Mexico abolished slavery way before the U.S. without any conditions. They then walked it back regarding Texas.
But the big picture remains unchanged - the very idea that non-Texas Mexicans didn’t love slavery with every fiber in their being was an insult to the honor and a threat to the livelihood of the slave-holding Texans - and the fact that such a decree could even be considered meant (in their minds) that rebellion was required (see the later behavior of the South which rebelled at the election of a President who had the gall not to love slavery)
My original words were:
A) Mexico abolished slavery decades before the US (fact) and
B) The War for Texas Independance was “at least in part” due to slavery.
I’m not going to belabor the second point because it’s exactly the same argument southern aplogists get into whenever the American Civil War is discussed. We’re arguing people’s deep rooted fears and intentions. Suffice it to say the Texas settlers saw the writing on the wall and knew full well the direction Mexico were taking on the issue of slavery.
Oh, you’re absolutely right in everything you say - Texas rebelled twice (once against Mexico and once against the US) and both times largely because of slavery
[Moderating]
On the one hand, I don’t think we can really answer the OP’s actual question (“what did the author of this quote mean?”), without tracking down the source of the quote.
On the other hand, most of the discussion after that hasn’t been so much about the facts, which aren’t in dispute, as about the implications of those facts.
Between these two hands, I think this thread would be better in GD than in FQ. Moving.
Here’s another thing I’ll throw out there, Mexico gave women the right to vote before the US, legalized gay marriage before the US, and now they have elected the first woman president (a scientist by profession) before the US.
The US has lagged behind Mexico on most civil rights issues…but now I’m wandering way off topic.