Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 by Andrew J. Torget (review)

Andrew J. Torget’s Seeds of Empire is a work of major scholarly significance for historians of Texas, northeastern Mexico, the Slave South, and the U.S. Civil War. Torget argues that the history of Texas during the first half of the nineteenth century was part of a much larger story in which the powerful forces of the global cotton economy reached “beyond U.S. borders and remade northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the American South” (5). By examining the turbulent history of Texas from the late Spanish colonial period until the years following its annexation to the United States, Torget’s innovative monograph offers important insights into the struggles over territorial sovereignty in North America, the growth of the cotton frontier along the Gulf Coast after 1800, debates over slavery in the Mexican Republic, and the growing significance of the international abolitionist movement by the middle of the nineteenth century. Civil War historians will be especially interested in Torget’s contention that the swift rise and fall of the Republic of Texas as a North American slave-holding nation foreshadowed the historical trajectory of the Confederacy in the 1860s.

As Torget explains, after Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government attempted to populate the nation’s northeastern frontier. In a section titled “Bringing Mississippi to Mexico,” he describes the consequences of Mexico City’s fateful decision to permit Anglo-American empresarios, most notably Stephen F. Austin, to relocate American families into Mexican Texas. Many of these families, the vast majority of whom came from the U.S. South, brought their slaves with them into Texas. Tejano elites embraced the introduction of U.S. slavery into the Mexican northeast. Prominent Tejanos, Torget notes, had “powerful economic incentives” to actively support the growth of slavery in Mexican Texas. For Tejano leaders, the advance of the cotton frontier into the region “represented the only means they had for fostering a robust economy and stable population in northeastern Mexico” (71, 174). Realizing that the emigration of American cotton farmers into the Mexican northeast depended upon laws guaranteeing the security of chattel slavery, politically connected Tejanos such as José Antonio Navarro aligned with Anglo-American slaveholders in Texas and lobbied the central government in Mexico City and the state government of Coahuila-Texas to pass legislation formalizing these government protections.

The dramatic growth of chattel slavery in the northeast forced Mexican officials at both the state and federal level to grapple with the future of slavery in the Republic of Mexico. One of the signal achievements of Torget’s book is that his research in Mexican archives allows him to tell the story of the nineteenth-century antislavery debates from the point of view of Mexican politicians and intellectuals. As he shows, these debates played a profound role in shaping the history of Mexican Texas. A vast majority of Mexicans were morally opposed to slavery, a form of unfree labor that, except for Mexican Texas, had died out in most of the nation by the 1820s. Antislavery forces were especially powerful in Mexico’s national congress. The federalist Constitution of 1824, however, “punted” the question of slavery to state congresses, such as the one devised for the combined departments of Coahuila-Texas (77). Mexican federalism cut both ways for Texas slaveholders. On one hand, the vociferous antislavery feeling in Mexico City and the Coahuila-Texas legislature, reported on and discussed in great detail by U.S. newspapers, retarded American emigration into Texas. On the other hand, some influential members of the state congress were willing to work with Tejano politicians to protect the future of slavery in Mexican Texas. In a bit of legislative chicanery, for instance, in the 1820s the Coahuila-Texas legislature passed a law redefining chattel slaves coming into Texas from the U.S. as apprentice laborers, but...