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Chapter 1 Migrations Humorist Joseph Glover Baldwin has left us the most enduring sketch of the Brazos migrant. In an 1853 piece titled “How the Times Served the Virginians,” he contrasted two types of Mississippi planters during the “Flush Times” of the 1830s. The first was the well-heeled and honorable Virginia gentleman who moved to the Magnolia State and haplessly lost the family fortune to gamblers , speculators, and other crooks. The second was the wily southwesterner, a rather coarse man on the make, scarcely different from the predators who preyed upon the Virginians. In Baldwin’s telling, the latter was the archetype of the Brazos planter. Hounded perpetually by his creditors, he sought relief through such ruses as feigned bankruptcy and fraudulent property conveyances . When those tricks failed, he “[sent] out coffins to the graveyard, with negroes inside, carried off by sudden spells of disease, to be ‘resurrected’ in due time, grinning, along the banks of the Brazos.”1 Baldwin’s sketch was, of course, overdrawn and played to the racial stereotypes of the era, but its core contained a kernel of truth. Plantation agriculture made and unmade a great many fortunes. For the thousands of planters and farmers who experienced financial death in their home states (and for those who had never been financially “born”), a move to the Brazos promised financial resurrection. For the thousands of African Americans who accompanied them, it promised not resurrection , as in Baldwin’s telling, but the continued “social death” of slavery. For all its color, Baldwin’s sketch missed the complexity of the Brazos migrations. In fact, no fewer than four major migrations (more, if we choose to dissect them further) made the Brazos one of the most demographically complex areas of the American South. The first and most statistically significant was the movement of Anglos and enslaved African Americans from the southern United States beginning in the 1820s and increasing steadily through 21 migr ations the antebellum period. As we will see, this migration was actually three, comprising the initial migrants, who built their fortunes on Mexican land grants, mostly in the Lower Country; the later migrants, who purchased their lands from the grantees and settled mostly in the Upper Country; and the slaves that each group brought with them. The second major migration involved more than six thousand African Americans who were sold to the Brazos on the interregional slave market from the slave-exporting states of the upper and the seaboard South. Most of these came initially to New Orleans, but some came through the lesser slave markets of Houston and Galveston. Because these migrants arrived as property of slave-trading firms and not as part of a master’s retinue, they deserve consideration apart from the planter migrations. The third major group of travelers consisted of about three thousand Germanspeakers from central Europe. The earliest German settlements appeared on the Brazos in the 1830s, and the numbers increased slowly but steadily before accelerating rapidly during the 1850s. The fourth group of migrants endured the longest and most painful journey to the Brazos. They were Africans, born free but enslaved and shipped to Cuba during adolescence or early adulthood. In the years surrounding the Texas Revolution, Brazos planters financed the transportation of several hundred Africans from Cuba to Texas, where their influence belied their relatively small numbers. These migrations shared much in common. All were in some way connected to the expansion of the Atlantic economy. What historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed “the dual revolutions” transformed Europe and the New World in complex ways. The rise of industry in Europe and the northeastern United States stoked a demand for New World products. Some of these, such as cotton and indigo, supplied the textile mills that drove the early industrial revolution. Other products, such as sugar, tobacco, rice, and coffee, fed or stimulated a growing population of peasants-cum-wage-laborers, no longer able to produce their own food. The demand for these products led to the geographic expansion of slavery into the continental interior of both North and South America, often fueled by an illegal African slave trade. All of these migrations were also in some way affected by the border politics of Mexico and the United States, from the Mexican government’s initial invitation to Anglo colonists to the skillful exploitation of border conflict to import African slaves. Even the presence of the Germans was partly due to the fact that Mexican au- [3.19.56.45...

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