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

Most historians argue that the Texas Revolution resulted from an inevitable “clash of cultures” between Anglos and Mexicans and had little to do with slavery (p. 140). Andrew J. Torget rejects this view in this deeply researched and clearly written study. “Questions of cotton and slavery,” he writes, “lurked just beneath the surface of disputes .... Indeed, nearly every dispute between Anglo colonists and the government in Mexico City and Saltillo during that time revolved around slavery” (p. 139). Texas, Torget argues, was part of the development of the cotton economy in the larger Gulf Coast region. Tensions surrounding slave-based agriculture became part of the battle raging in Mexico between supporters of federalism and of centralism. In Texas, local control meant support for the expansion of slavery. His argument is entirely convincing.

During the Mexican War of Independence, Spanish-speaking residents of Texas were decimated by Indian raiders, particularly Apaches and Comanches, in pursuit of horses and mules to supply the voracious demand of the booming slave economy of the Old Southwest. In the meantime, Anglo Americans flooded across the border from Arkansas and Louisiana, turning East Texas into a haven for slavery. Galveston became the center of the illegal slave trade along the Gulf Coast. By 1820 Spanish authority in Texas was near collapse. Officials viewed Moses and Stephen F. Austin’s colonization plan as their last hope for holding the territory. The Austin contract said nothing about slavery because the institution was legal in both New Spain and the United States. Nearly 90 percent of the colonists came from the slave South, and they established a slave-based cotton economy on the rich alluvial plains of coastal Texas.

But the Mexican independence struggle fostered strong antislavery sentiments among Mexican liberals, and following the establishment of the Mexican state there were persistent attempts to abolish chattel slavery. Torget’s research in Mexican archives introduces important new evidence detailing the struggles between proslavery and antislavery factions in Saltillo, the provincial capital of the state of Coahuila y Tejas. The state constitution, adopted in 1827, put slavery on a slow road to extinction, but lobbying by Tejanos—who were as committed to slavery as the Anglos—created a loophole with a peonage law. Liberals in Mexico City protested. “It is not conceivable that a free Republic should subject some of its children to slavery,” one legislator declared; “let us leave such contradictions to the United States of North America” (p. 144). In 1829, when Spanish forces invaded Mexico in an attempt at reconquest, Mexican president Vicente Guerrero was given emergency powers, and he used them to declare an end to slavery throughout the republic. In the face of protests from Tejanos and Anglos, Guerrero issued an exemption for Texas, the only part of Mexico where slavery was important. But within months Mexico’s national congress enacted a law prohibiting the further immigration of Anglos and their slaves into Texas, and legislators in Saltillo repealed the peonage loophole.

“Texas must be a slave country,” Stephen F. Austin declared (p. 156). The price of cotton rose (it reached a fifteen-year peak in 1835), and Texas rapidly became an outpost of the Atlantic cotton economy. Americans continued to pour into the province with their slaves. The Anglo population more than doubled between 1830 and 1834, by which time the population of slaves alone outnumbered Tejano residents. “[S]lave-based agriculture remained the foundational issue underlying disputes over colonization,” writes Torget (p. 163). It was the conflict over slavery “that hardened both Anglos and Tejanos into such ardent federalists” (p. 164). As the conflict moved to outright rebellion, Texans created a new state that passed a series of laws with unambiguous protections for slavery that made Texas, in Torget’s words, “the...