What Hath God Wrought (97 page)

Douglass, like Emerson, put his faith in an American melting pot, out of which would spring a new humanity. Strong advocate of racial integration and equal opportunity, he scorned to take refuge in any form of black separatism. One of his reasons for speaking and writing in standard nineteenth-century literary English, rather than an African American dialect, was to underscore his message of cosmopolitan universalism.

Like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass was a self-made man in a century that cherished the ideal of self-making. When the two met for the first time in the White House during the Civil War, Douglass sensed that the president treated him with no taint of condescension and regarded him as a kindred spirit—a man who had dedicated himself, as Lincoln had, to self-improvement. Having often doubted Lincoln in the past, Douglass came away from their encounter profoundly reassured. Two more meetings later confirmed this favorable impression.
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VI

Southerners since the time of Jefferson had frequently apologized that slavery was not a system of their own making, but one they had inherited and of which they could only make the best. Abolitionists regarded this line of defense as an evasion; in response, they insisted upon the moral responsibility of each individual under every circumstance to do right. The abolitionists strongly affirmed one of the basic premises of the American Renaissance: the power and trustworthiness of the human conscience. No more forceful statement of their moral stance exists than a poem published in December 1845 by the abolitionist James Russell Lowell, husband of Margaret Fuller’s disciple Maria White Lowell. In it the poet affirms millennial confidence in the long-term providence of God, while declaring that the ultimate victory of the right depends for now upon the courageous witness of a prophetic few.

 

Once to every man and nation

Comes the moment to decide

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

For the good or evil side….

Then it is the brave man chooses,

While the coward stands aside

Till the multitude make virtue

Of the faith they have denied….

Though the cause of evil prosper,

Yet ’tis truth alone is strong,

Though her portion be the scaffold

And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future,

And behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above his own.
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Lowell’s verses, like Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” and Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” evoke the heroic moral striving of the American Renaissance. Lowell entitled his poem “The Present Crisis,” by which he meant the pending action by Congress to make the Republic of Texas one of the states in the American Union. Why an abolitionist believed Texas annexation presented a moral crisis requires explanation.

On July 16, 1821, Erasmo Seguín and Stephen Austin crossed the international boundary at the Sabine River and entered Texas, then part of New Spain. They headed for the Texan capital, San Antonio de Béxar (which we call San Antonio but which their contemporaries more often called Béxar or Béjar). The two companions exemplified two peoples, Hispanic and Anglo, destined to share in shaping Texan history.
¹
Seguín, the older of the two, was a merchant. Named for the Dutch writer and reformer Erasmus, he carried on a family tradition of liberal politics. He now accompanied the twenty-eight-year-old Austin because he believed in encouraging immigration from the United States into Texas. The sparsely populated region had suffered severely during fighting between Mexican rebels and the Spanish army, and critically needed skilled settlers. A liberal Spanish Cortes (parliament) in Madrid had decided to encourage such settlement, and Stephen’s father, Moses Austin, had won authorization to bring colonists from the United States into Texas. But Moses suddenly died, and at Seguín’s urging Stephen took up what seemed like his inherited responsibility.
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On August 12, the travelers heard the astonishing news that Mexico had suddenly achieved her long deferred independence from Spain. Seguín rejoiced. In due course the new government confirmed Austin’s role as
empresario
, that is, colonization agent. If he could fulfill the stipulation to bring in settlers, Austin stood to make a fortune in Texas land for himself. But he also embraced Seguín’s romantic vision of a prosperous Texas. To achieve this within a Mexican context, Austin learned Spanish, became a naturalized Mexican citizen, and, sometimes calling himself Esteban Austin, functioned as a mediator between the Anglo settlers and the authorities. Terms of settlement in his Mexican colony compared favorably with the $1.25 per acre the American government charged pioneers, and over the years Austin brought in about 1,500 families.
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Thus, the ink had scarcely dried on the ratifications of the Adams-Onís Treaty assigning Texas to Spain when events significantly transformed the situation on the ground: First, Mexico replaced Spain as sovereign over Texas, and second, American settlers began to move there.

Others from the United States also gained the status of
empresario
, though Austin remained the most important one. The terms the
empresarios
offered attracted many settlers from the southern and western states, adventuresome individuals as well as families hurt by the Panic of 1819 and looking to make a new life. Some of the immigrants didn’t locate in any properly organized colonies but simply squatted. By 1830, the Anglos in Texas outnumbered Hispanic
tejanos
more than two to one. When, in 1829, the Mexican government moved to emancipate the slaves that Anglo colonists brought with them, Austin, although expressing grave reservations about slavery as an institution, protected the interests of his clients. The colonists pretended their workers had long-term labor contracts. Such a “contract,” drawn up in Austin’s colony in 1833 between Marmaduke Sandifer and Clarissa, “a girl of color,” stipulated that Clarissa would “conduct & demean herself as an honest & faithful servant, renouncing and disclaiming all her right and claim to personal liberty for & during the term of ninety-nine years,” in return for food, lodging, medical care, and security against disability.
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Colonists simply ignored the rule that they should convert to the Roman Catholic faith; even Austin himself did not do so. In practice the Church left them alone, and they tactfully refrained from building Protestant meetinghouses.
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Besides economic benefits to Texas, the Anglos provided allies for the Hispanics in fighting the Comanches and other Indian tribes. Native Americans and African Americans, though excluded from political power, also played their parts in making Texan history.

The liberal Mexican Constitution of 1824 accorded much autonomy to the states within what it named the
Estados Unidos Mexicanos
. Texas had too few people to qualify as a Mexican state but formed a district within the state of Coahuila y Texas. The Anglo settlements enjoyed a measure of self-government and partial exemption from customs duties. In 1827, they gained the right to trial by jury in criminal cases. Yet, from the Mexican point of view, they did not make altogether responsible use of their privileges. Highly individualistic, most of these people had little community spirit and no ties to Mexico. In December 1826, a rogue
empresario
put himself at the head of some discontented settlers and declared the independence of the “Republic of Fredonia.” Austin supported the Mexican authorities, who put down the little rebellion with no difficulty.
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By the late 1820s, Mexican officials entertained doubts about their Texas policy. They had hoped that Texas would attract migrants from Europe and central Mexico, but although some German settlements had been established, these did not effectively counterbalance the Anglo-American settlers. Signs multiplied that the United States government and public took an unwelcome kind of interest in Texas. Spain’s experience with losing the Floridas to the United States, as well as periodic unofficial military expeditions called “filibusters,” launched from U.S. bases into Latin America, set a worrisome example. Two such filibusterings, in 1811 and 1819, had been directed into Texas, only to be repulsed.
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Worst of all, U.S. diplomats kept pressing Mexico to sell Texas.

After the Mier y Terán fact-finding commission confirmed fears about U.S. intentions toward Texas in its report of 1829, the Mexican Congress passed a law suspending immigration from the United States in April 1830. Austin got an exemption from it for his own recruits, and others too found it easy to slip through the border. Mexico suffered the problem of illegal immigration from the United States until Austin’s lobbying in Mexico City helped secure repeal of the ban in November 1833. Desire to promote the economic growth of Texas eventually outweighed fears for the Mexican national interest. By 1836, there were at least thirty-five thousand Anglos in Texas, now outnumbering Hispanics ten to one. “The old Latin mistake had been repeated,” the historian Frederick Merk wryly observed: “admitting Gauls into the empire.”
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In 1829, Spain made a belated attempt to recover her lost dominion and landed an army at Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico. Rallying to defend their independence, the Mexicans defeated the invasion under the leadership of General Antonio López de Santa Anna (pronounced as one word, “san-
tah
-na”), who became a national hero. Santa Anna dominated politics in Mexico for the next generation, somewhat as another charismatic military hero, Andrew Jackson, did in the United States; Mexico, however, lacked the long Anglo-American tradition of constitutional limitation on executive power. Bold, energetic, and patriotic in his way, Santa Anna was also an opportunistic egomaniac. He saw himself as a New World Napoleon. He affiliated at first with the liberal
federalista
party that admired the constitution of the United States; middle-class intellectuals like Erasmo Seguín and his son Juan supported it. When elected president of Mexico in 1833, Santa Anna enjoyed the favor of both Anglo and Hispanic Texans. Soon, however, he betrayed his followers and embraced the
centralistas
, a conservative, clerical, and authoritarian party. He got rid of the
federalista
vice president, who had been associated with a reform program, repudiated the Constitution of 1824, and set himself up as dictator. Revolts broke out in several Mexican states where
federalistas
did not acquiesce in the
centralista
coup. The Texans observed with horror Santa Anna’s bloody suppression of revolts in Zacatecas and Coahuila. Their own rebellion was triggered by conflicts over the collection of customs duties and the military presence of Mexican soldiers sent to enforce
santanista
authority. At Gonzales on 2 October 1835 Texan militia refused to return a cannon that had been lent them by the Mexican army for protection against Indians. The ensuing skirmish is considered “the Lexington of Texas,” the start of the Texan Revolution.

For all the tensions over religion, culture, and slavery in Texas, none of these actually provoked the fighting. When it materialized, the Texan (or, as contemporaries called it, “Texian”) Revolution broke out over economic and constitutional issues not very different from those that had provoked the American Revolution sixty years earlier. Like the American Revolution, the Texian Revolution reflected among its concerns the determination of the settlers to trade freely; neither group of colonists rested content with economic self-sufficiency. Like the British in 1775, the Mexicans could feel that theirs had been a tolerant
imperium
that had pursued a policy of “benign neglect.” Like the American Patriots of 1775, who espoused the “rights of Englishmen,” the Texian rebels of 1835 at first fought to restore the Mexican Constitution of 1824. At a gathering held in November, called the “Consultation,” they decided to declare Texas a separate state within the Mexican Republic (that is, no longer a part of Coahuila y Texas) and appointed an acting state governor, Henry Smith. Austin and his tenants, squatters, Texians and
tejanos
: All could and did join together on such a platform. They hoped to rally
federalistas
throughout Mexico to their support; and indeed there were uprisings in other states, especially peripheral ones including Alta California, Nuevo México, and Yucatán. The Texians noticed the parallels with the American Revolution and invoked them.
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Newspapers in the United States reported events in Texas in a sensational way, calculated to boost circulation. Most of them depended heavily on reprinting stories from the New Orleans papers, which got the news first, and which were eager to make Texas safe for slavery. The accounts in the press often portrayed the issue in racial terms, as simply white Americans versus Mexicans and Indians; they drew young men by the thousand from the South and West to go to Texas looking for a fight.
¹⁰
In the northern states, however, the antislavery press reported the Texan Revolution very differently. Abolitionists like Benjamin Lundy, who had spent a good deal of time in Texas, compiled evidence that the goals of the rebels included forestalling enforcement of the antislavery legislation enacted by both Mexican state and national authorities. And indeed Texan newspapers themselves warned that “the merciless soldiery” of Santa Anna came “to give liberty to our slaves, and to make slaves of ourselves.”
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Seizing what looked like an opportunity for freedom when war broke out in October 1835, some of the slaves along the Brazos River in Austin’s colony rose in rebellion, intending to redistribute the land to themselves and raise cotton for market. Anglo-Texans crushed the revolt and returned one hundred would-be free people to slavery; some were hanged or “whipd [
sic
] nearly to death,” a report informed the
empresario
. Other prospective slave uprisings were nipped in the bud. Anglo-Texan men often made their top priority the security of their own communities against slave discontent, not going off to fight the Mexican army. This helps explain why so much of the burden of waging the revolutionary war fell upon the filibusterers coming in from the United States. However, many African Americans served on the Texan side of the Revolution, either voluntarily as a few free black men did or, more commonly, as enslaved laborers impressed from their masters into helping the war effort.
¹²

The provisional government established by the Texas Consultation never worked well. Governor Smith antagonized his council; the Texan armed forces lacked effective central control; officers bickered over command; their soldiers debated whether to obey orders. Austin found that his considerable talents did not include military leadership and felt relieved to be sent off to the United States to negotiate loans and aid. The rebels captured San Antonio de Béxar in December 1835 after a siege and house-to-house combat. In terms of organizing a revolution, however, the winter of 1835–36 has been described as a descent into anarchy.
¹³

Meanwhile, Santa Anna planned the subjugation of Texas to his authority, borrowing money at exorbitant interest to finance the campaign. He undertook a two-pronged offensive: General José Urrea advanced one army along the Gulf Coast while
el presidente
himself commanded another aimed at retaking San Antonio. A small Texian force at Goliad stood in Urrea’s path; another one occupied an old mission nicknamed the Alamo, awaiting Santa Anna. It was symptomatic of the Texans’ ineffective strategic command and control that they did not respond to the invasion by combining these forces, evacuating either position, or reinforcing them. They just waited.
¹⁴

Although not strategically vital, the Alamo had psychological importance for both sides. Its approximately 150 defenders consisted mostly of recent arrivals from the United States, fired with zeal for the Texan cause, and led by an eloquent twenty-six-year-old lawyer named William Travis who had been in Texas since 1831. Among them were Juan Seguín, Erasmo’s son and a captain in the Texas cavalry; Jim Bowie, co-commander with Travis until he fell ill, famous for the big knife with which he had killed a man; and the former Whig congressman from Tennessee, Davy Crockett. Crockett probably expected a prominent role in the Texas Revolution to help revive his political career, but he was also a man of principle and willing to take risks. He had defended Indian rights against Andrew Jackson though it cost him his seat in Congress; now he would defend Texan rights against Santa Anna at the cost of his life. Despite his status as a frontier celebrity, Crockett had a strong sense of dignity; he preferred to be called David rather than Davy, and he habitually dressed, a Texan commented, “like a gentleman and not a backwoodsman.”
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