I’m less curious about the percentage of white Texans who were slavers, and more curious about the percentage of Texas politicians who were. Of the ones who participated in the decision to declare independence, how many were enslavers?
Add me to the chorus who have found this thread educational. I never realized how central slavery was to the very existence of Texas before.
Yup
I would need to learn more to have a strong opinion about why they seceded. But I’ll agree with someone above who pointed out that “a successful secession is possible” is a necessary but not sufficient reason to secede, and all the states had that in common. But that’s hardly a motive, just a necessary condition.
It sure looks like that’s the case.
Well, they probably included land, and probably guns, as well as slaves. May i remind you that to slave holders, cattle and slaves are somewhat interchangable. They feel the same ownership rights in both, and both are owned under similar theories. Especially in the American slave experience (which Texas is indisputably part of.)
If slaveholders were anxious about the ownership of their cattle, they would certainly be at least as concerned with the ownership of their humans. And laws preventing the breeding or importation of slave are an existential threat to the the institution of slavery.
That’s a really interesting question.
If I remember correctly, wasn’t that part of the dynamic in Virginia and Tennessee? That the slavers dominated the government, but small business and farmers, who didn’t have such a vested interest, weren’t as supportive of slavery, which led to West Virginia and Andy Johnson in Tennessee being union supporters?
Many of them, and nearly all the wealthy, prominent ones. Most of the hero figures, certainly, especially the Alamo crowd, at some point in their lives if not their entire lives owned and/or traded in slaves.
Stephen F Austin, Sam Houston, James Fannin, William B Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett
But I’m not sure how many of those as a percentage. Probably higher than the Texas average of the era
Some interesting code words here. Racists seem to use them.
In Texas, ‘property’ was a code word for ‘slaves’.
In the 1960’s ‘Law and Order’ was a code word for opposition to civil rights.
Today ‘illegal immigrant’ is a code word for el donald’s scapegoats.
That was my impression. In a society with widespread slavery, enslaving people is a tremendous multiplier of personal power, and it’s almost axiomatic that the people with the most power in that society will be enslavers. When Texas allowed slavery, it would be bizarre for enslavers not to have seized political power, as they did throughout the rest of the world.
So it’s missing the point to talk about how a minority of White Texans were slavers, since it’s exactly that minority who were making the decision about revolution.
Yep. They were the equivalent of our 1% (or 0.1%) today. The movers and shakers whose interests matter. Not the other larger crowd whose interests really don’t, despite a certain amount of lip service in their general direction.
Well. Running down the list of names on the 1836 Declaration of Independence, out of 59 signatories I can find reference to 29 of them owning slaves. That does not mean that the others didn’t own slaves, to be clear, it means that I was not able to find a record of them owning or selling slaves in a couple hours of going through public records and nauseatingly soft-focused family histories about kindly masters and the faithful slaves who followed them west. I am sure the number is higher; Stephen Everitt, for instance, was vociferously hostile to emancipation but a cursory search doesn’t show him actually owning any human beings.
However, having wasted a good chunk of my evening on these shameless racists, I’m disinclined to waste any more. If someone else wants to look at them*, have at it. Agreed with the general sentiment that this was elucidating. I was vaguely aware that slavery was a point of disagreement between the Brave Defenders of the Alamo™ and the Mexican government, but not just how pervasive and cancerous it was in Revolutionary Texas.
\* Specifically, besides Everitt,
Badgett, Bower, Byrom, Caldwell, Clark, Conrad, Crawford, Collinsworth, Goodrich, Hardin, Lacy, Latimer, Legrand, Moore, Mottley, Pennington, Power, Roberts, Ruiz, Scates, Stapp, Stewart, Taylor, Thomas, Turner, and West bear investigation. Ruiz was a Tejano, so he’s less likely, but José Antonio Navarro had slaves so who knows.
If I could give you an award, I would. Thank you for digging through the records!
Thank you so much for your work!
Also, from the linked page:
Fifty-seven of the sixty moved to Texas from the United States,[11]and ten of them had lived in Texas for more than six years, while one-quarter of them had been in the province for less than a year.[12] This is significant, because it indicates that the majority of signatories had moved to Texas after the Law of April 6, 1830. This law, banning immigration, had taken effect and this meant that the majority were legally citizens of the United States, occupying Texas illegally.
So the majority were undocumented workers.
To be fair, many of them apparently didn’t do any work.
I also appreciate having learned from this thread that a desire to preserve slavery was a key driver in Texas’ declaring independence from Mexico.
De nada! That said: belatedly, you also asked about politicians, and while some of the signatories were later politicians, not all of them were. So, in terms of the scope of the practice and looking at a more manageable list, out of the 9 speakers of the Congress of the Republic of Texas:
- Seven—Joseph Rowe, Kenneth Lewis Anderson, Nicholas Henry Darnell, John M. Hansford, John Lewis, David Spangler Kaufman, and Richardson A. Scurry—definitely owned slaves
- Branch Tanner Archer was raised in a slave-owning family, and died living on an extensive plantation. However—as he put it in entreating a relative to join him so they could “enjoy a steady diet of fish, fowl, and whiskey and live like fighting cocks”—he had crashed out by that point, separating from his family, and those slaves might’ve been the property of the widow he was shacked up with (this forms the first part of Chapter 4 of Mark Carroll’s Homesteads Ungovernable) instead.
- Ira Ingram, at least, might actually not have been a slave-owner. He died in 1837, when record-keeping was a bit spotty. His brother Seth, with whom he went into business on his arrival, did own slaves but at least on Ira’s death there were no men and women to be bequeathed as property in his will.
Oddly, newspaper columnists writing about these politicians in the runup to Texas joining the union and the years after don’t have a whole lot to say about all those other Mexican states that rebelled at the same time and maybe they should join too. They do, however, have strong opinions about the unfairness of the Missouri compromise.and denouncing people as traitors for defending slavery in Texas but conceding that Congress could ban it in DC.
Thing is, David Spangler’s brother Daniel was an ardent abolitionist. David was a racist firebrand who sponsored multiple pro-slavery laws in Texas and spoke in defense of slavery before the US Congress, among other places, where he also turned out to be a huge misogynist who was similarly upset about the prospect of women receiving the franchise.
So, like. These were people who could have known better instead of committing the Republic to being so devoted to slavery. But then, if they’d been abolitionists they wouldn’t have been in Texas to begin with.
Again, great information. Thank you.
It’s the larger issue of “there’s a lot of grabby Americans, and if you’ve got something they want, God help you.”
The Texians were filibusters. It was a thing with certain Americans in that era. Arron Burr was one. He owned slaves and the new nation he’d hoped to strip off the King of Spain would probably have been based on it. William Walker, the most infamous filibuster, was himself anti-slavery. But his financial backers were slavery-expansionists, so his convictions (such as they were beyond personal ambition) changed with the winds.
Could highjack this into how Halliburton was just a modern filibuster, but instead will cite Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ: when the settlers, regardless of their ethnicities and national identities, got past the cotton country of East Texas into the Hill Country, the land just wouldn’t support a slave economy. It’s just grazing land, and you can’t really give a cowboy a gun and a horse and expect him to stick around as a slave.
The Mexicans wanted a buffer between themselves and Comancheria, invited a bunch of Tennesseans, Missourians and Germans to provide it; and, even at the expense of Texas, they succeeded.