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chapter 6 The Alabama Settlement The preceding chapter outlines the battle of the empresarios as they scrambled for land and power. Nevertheless, that story gives us pitifully little to go on if we want to understand how Texas culture was cut from the bedrock of people’s daily lives. We still want to know about the settlers who scratched a living from the Texas soil, enduring blazing heat and numbing cold, terrible deprivations, and endless hard work. Most histories of Texas emphasize the individual men who came to Texas to seek adventure and fortune, as well as perhaps to escape an unfortunate transgression committed in their past, political wheelers and dealers like Sterling Robertson, Stephen Austin, and Sam Houston. In this chapter I want to convey a sense of the families who came to Texas to create a new home, the hardworking, down-to-earth yeoman farmers more interested in family ties than sudden fortune. The men and women of the Alabama Settlement were such folk. The Alabama Settlement came to Austin’s colony in 1830 and put down roots near where the Brazos and Navidad rivers meet and flow into Matagorda Bay at the Gulf of Mexico. Because this large group of kith and kin came from northern Alabama and settled together in one area, historian John Henry Brown early on dubbed them the Alabama Settlement of Austin’s colony .1 These law-abiding Christians were not among those who, in coming to Texas, were fleeing the law or interested in making a fortune. Rather, they came to make a new home on land they could get for free. Closely related through kinship and marriage, they were a tightly knit group led by senior kinsmen experienced in organizing life on the frontier. Theirs was no spurof -the-moment migration; it was deliberately planned over several years.2 The size of the group alone—around three hundred people—would have made such a move unusual, but it did not seem out of the ordinary to them. The relocation to Texas was not their first migration. The men and women of the Alabama Settlement were stout, devout Methodists , fiercely loyal to and protective of their family. According to my father, as good Methodists they brought to Texas their eighteenth-century notions The Alabama Settlement 57 of reason, but as clannish Scots they also embraced that century’s romanticism . When they shouted “Damn the king!” they meant George III.3 Most of the older adults of the Alabama Settlement were born in Virginia in the late eighteenth century to parents who came there from the Highlands of Scotland. These Highland Scots had been subjected to “the Clearances” during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, when English landlords forced the Scottish crofters off land they had lived on for generations . During the eighteenth century, the clearances ignited a massive migration first to Ireland and then to America, and the Sutherland clan was part of this exodus. They landed in Virginia and settled west of the tidewater area, where the English elites had received the earlier land grants. One member of the clan was a young man named John Sutherland, who was married to Agnes Shelton. He, his father, and a brother all fought in the Revolutionary War, at the same time providing beef to the Revolutionary Army. When the Cumberland Gap opened up the Tennessee Valley for settlement some time in 1800, the next generation—the American-born Sutherlands—took their families to Knoxville, Tennessee. There they cleared land for farms, built communities, and raised their children. In Knoxville, three of John Sutherland’s offspring married three children of John Menefee and Frances Rhodes. When these three families of sibling marriages relocated to Alabama , John Sutherland joined them there in 1822.4 During the early 1800s Tennessee was flush with settlers who had ideas about the freedom of the frontier. Riding this tide of grassroots democracy and individualism, Andrew Jackson led a populist democracy movement and, to the horror of the Eastern establishment, moved into the White House. At the same time that the “west” moved into government in the east, goods from the industrial revolution moved in the opposite direction, sweeping through the western United States, particularly Tennessee. New opportunities for merchants who could ferry such desirable commodities to remote areas were created by this expansion. The Sutherlands and Menefees, although they had large stakes in their communities in Alabama, were swept up in this period of economic change and democracy...

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