Los Brazos de Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821--1865

4. Germans, Anglos, and the Politics of Slavery

Chapter 4 Germans, anglos, and the Politics of Slavery The Brazos was unusual among antebellum plantation regions in its ability to attract a significant number of immigrants. Several factors were responsible: liberal Mexican land policies in the 1830s, coupled with a preference for nonU .S. immigrants; the founding of several immigrant enclaves just a few years before plantation agriculture took hold; and a sustained chain migration from several parts of German-speaking Europe. In the 1830s and 1840s, Germans and Anglos enjoyed good relations. This fact was actually quite significant in an ideological sense. Rural southern culture placed a premium on neighborliness , and to a great extent Anglos imagined the political process to be a way of affirming and regulating neighborly relations. But it was slavery that made Anglo southerners particularly sensitive to their neighbors. In order to function, slavery required not just an accommodation between master and bondsman, but an agreement that all free people would respect the masterslave relationship. Slaveholders needed to recognize each other’s authority and refrain from interfering with each other’s laborers, and nonslaveholders would have to do the same. In general, they did: throughout the South a tacit understanding existed among slaveholders and yeomen that the head of a household ruled it as his own domain. No interference with household dependents, be they slaves, wives, or children, would be tolerated. Of course, the ideal was one thing and practice often another. In reality, people tampered with others’ slaves on a regular basis. In normal times, slaveholders regarded interference as a nuisance, or at most an affront to their honor, but not as a threat to the institution of slavery itself. Yet as the sectional crisis unfolded, and as the German population increased, Brazos slaveholders became obsessed with their neighbors’ views on the question. Germans, while 131 germans, anglos, and the politics of slavery never condemning slavery outright, generally did not embrace it and showed little support for the sort of Southern Rights politicians who gained popularity in the 1850s. Upset at German unsoundness on the slavery question, Anglo residents began to worry that their neighbors were in fact a cadre of cryptoabolitionists . For Anglo slaveholders and their allies, the immigrant presence made the abolitionist threat a very real one. Ironically, the more the Germans came under attack for their alleged softness on the question of slavery, the more they were driven into real political opposition. Neighborly reciprocities, German-Anglo relations, and sectional politics thus fused into one, adding fuel to secessionist fires. Neighborly Politics Brazos residents, like many other rural people, idealized what might be termed a code of neighborliness. Neighborliness was grounded in the assumption that heads of households would respect each other’s prerogatives: good neighbors did not interfere with each other’s dependents; intervention was tolerated only under the most unusual of circumstances. Neighborliness also implied a large, but vague, set of interhousehold reciprocities. Most often it was invoked in the breech, such as when one neighbor’s livestock created a nuisance on another’s land, a frequent occurrence in open-range societies like the Brazos. A romp by a young colt through the fields of Chappell Hill’s William W. Browning was the occasion of a typical neighborly exchange. When Browning complained, the owner, B. D. Dashiell, removed the animal immediately, telling Browning, “I feel under many obligations for the priviledge granted me and regret that the colt have caused you any trouble.”1 Rebecca Pilsbury, a native of Massachusetts who lived on Gulf Prairie, learned of her obligations on the occasion of a neighbor’s illness. The neighbor , a Mrs. Blackwell, was upset that Rebecca’s husband, U.S. Representative Timothy Pilsbury, had left for Washington, DC, without calling on her. Rebecca visited Mrs. Blackwell the day after her husband departed and found her “quite grieved” over the matter. “I fancied she attributed his failing to do so to me,” Rebecca wrote in her diary, “and if I am not mistaken she queried whether I would be neighborly during his absence.” Eager to please Mrs. Blackwell, Rebecca visited her regularly over the next few months. Just before Christmas, she even sent several slaves to Mrs. Blackwell to help her kill some los br azos de dios 132 hogs. “Quite a tax I think,” wrote Rebecca, “but I have no doubt [Mrs. Blackwell ] thinks it an honorable and honored custom.” That Rebecca Pilsbury’s overture involved sending...