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Post by Allen Wiener on Feb 26, 2010 8:42:07 GMT -5
Good question, Stuart. Coincidentally, I've been reading Jim Bevill's "The Paper Republic" and he has a short section on the carryings-on of the brothers Lafitte and the brothers Bowie re: the illegal importation of slaves. Around 1818 (still under Spain, not an independent Mexico), Texas was a conduit for such smuggling and the Bowies and Laffites were very active in the trade. As you know, the importation of slaves into the United States became illegal in 1808, which created a large market for illegally imported slaves. The U.S. passed a new law authorizing seizure of illegal slave ships and the sale of captured slaves at auction. Those turning in illegal slaves were entitled to one-half the sale price of the slaves when they were auctioned. The Bowies had a lucrative scam going for a while, whereby they bought illegally imported slaves from Laffite in Texas for $1 Spanish dollar per pound and took them into Louisiana, where they turned them over to U.S. Customs. They were then entitled to half the proceeds when the slaves were auctioned. The Bowies could buy back the slaves they had turned in and get back half the purchase price, effectively giving them a 50% discount on the slaves they bought. This effectively "laundered" their illegal smuggling of the slaves into the U.S. and enable them to re-sell them legitimately -- at an average of $1,000 to $1,500 each.
I don't know the extent of this practice or how many people were involved in it, but there seems to have been a fairly active traffic in illegal slaves at the time.
Regarding slavery as a cause of the Texas Revolution, I think it was a peripheral issue at most. Although Texan colonists complained about the Mexican ban, it doesn't appear to ave been enforced. Other issues seemed far more prominent, including the two states of Coahuilla and Tejas being treated as one. And remember -- when the revolution started, most long-term colonists were not interested and most fighting was done by the newer arrivals. So the slavery issue couldn't have been that big a deal to those who likely owned most of the slaves in Texas. After the revolution, however, it was a different story and the new Texas government made sure that abolition was made illegal in the country's constitution, which also (IIRC) prohibited free blacks from entering Texas.
Paul Lack goes into this in some details, along with interesting statistics, in his book "The Texas Revolutionary Experience."
And I should add that Jack Davis has a lot of info on the Laffite-Bowie slave trade in "Three Roads to the Alamo" and also wrote a book on the Laffites, "The Pirates Laffite."
Allen
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Post by pawbear on Feb 26, 2010 11:30:57 GMT -5
Don't let the British off to easily. A public stance on and issue such as slavery is one thing for the home population, but a bit of turning the head on the issue to feed cotton to its mills is quite enough. Whether there were British soldiers in the Mexican Army is immaterial to the fact that it had a sophisticated foreign service core and were making deals between Texas and Mexico up until annexation to keep hold of Texas cotton.
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Post by Herb on Feb 26, 2010 14:16:32 GMT -5
What's interesting to me is that, while the Mexican government did not endorse slavery, it's ironic that he had a "domestic servant" who accompanied the Alamo survivors. Sometimes it's a matter of semantics when trying to decipher policy. Paul Mexico's position on slavery in Texas was ambiguous and deliberatly so, it wasn't the clear cut issue that many of the PC crowd try to make it out to be. All one has to do is look at the Mexican slave policy in New Mexico - that remained in effect until Kearny conquered New Mexico in 1846. New Mexicans would mount slave raids especially on the Navajo and sell their captives throughout Mexico - to include Mexico City. No serious effort was ever mounted to end the New Mexican slave trade. Despite "official" public policy, the unofficial Mexican policy in Texas was the same - until Texas revolted, and Santa Anna attempts to use it, to gain world favor (read British).
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Post by Allen Wiener on Feb 26, 2010 14:45:28 GMT -5
It's also worth remembering that slavery was often the rule, not the exception, in history, pretty much going back as far as you want to. The Indians also kept slaves (one of the indications that the Cherokee had become as "civilized" as the whites was the fact that they kept slaves, but Indians had practiced slavery long before Europeans got here). There was never anything "right" about slavery, regardless of how widespread or accepted it may have been, but the American colonies and later the U.S. were not unusual in their practice of it. Several countries eventually got around to abolition, including the United States. No one's hands were particularly clean on this issue. And, in fact, slavery is still practiced in varying forms to this day.
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Post by Herb on Feb 26, 2010 15:17:08 GMT -5
In response to Stuart's question. Groce's plantation is the only large scale Anglo slave operation, I'm personally aware of in Revolutionary Texas.
In 1835-36 most of East Texas, the Civil War era Cotton Kingdom, except along the Gulf Coast, was still primarily Piney Woods, requiring vast clearing and improvement, before being adapted to large scale production.
The development of East Texas in the decade between the Revolution and the Mexican War was radical, and it continued to develop into cotton/slave country all the way up to the Civil War. Even today, census data (black majority counties), pretty much shows where the pre Civil War Cotton Kingdom and large slave populations were. Most of this area was for all practical purposes unihabited by AngloAmericans in 1835-36.
Unrelated, but the noted 1870s cattleman Shanghai Pierce emigrated from Rhode Island to Texas prior to the Civil War. Arriving in Galveston, he went to work breaking horses for a mustanger that owned one slave. Pierce, was standing with the mustanger, watching the slave breaking a horse when the owner's wife came upon them and lit into the owner. She tore into him for risking the life and limb of their $1,000 slave, when their 50 cent a day Yankee was just standing there watching! From that day forward Pierce and not the slave broke the horses.
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Post by stuart on Feb 26, 2010 15:21:26 GMT -5
I was aware of the Bowie scam from reading Jack Davis' book, but what interests me more is the timing of annexation.
As I've argued above I get the impression that industrial level slavery within Texas wasn't that common and probably wasn't a significant factor in the revolution.
From the New Orleans Mob's point of view Texas was valuable, and had been valuable for some time, principally as a conduit for the clandestine importation of slaves into the US.
Securing independence for Texas would also secure that conduit; Mexico might be ambivalent to slavery, but Britain wasn't and with Mexican consent was in a position to mount patrols along the coast to intercept traffickers. If on the other hand Texas was annexed by the United States, slavery would be legalised within its borders, but the importation of slaves would be illegal and it would be the US Navy which prevented it.
An independent Texas in which both the owning and importing of slaves was legal was therefore vital to sustain industrial level slavery in the United States simply because without imports it would be impossible to maintain the numbers of slaves required.
However, British recognition of Texas and mediation to achieve a peace settlement with Mexico was conditional on an agreement to cease the importation of slaves. Funding for a compensation scheme for slave owners was also proposed in order to facilitate emancipation, and its at that point that British recognition and peace with Mexico is rejected in favour of annexation. The importation of slaves has already been scuppered, so there's nothing to lose by joining the US and thus preserving slavery within Texas.
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Post by Kevin Young on Feb 26, 2010 16:18:02 GMT -5
George Childress introduced an addition the Texas Constiution that outlawed the African Slave Trade. The Naval Affairs Committe made the same recommendation. According to Campbell, An English Schooner was reported to land blacks from Grenada at Galveston in January 1836, The Revolution was allowing some increased activity to the African trade, including of course, by James Fannin. In the end , the Constitution prohibited "the importation or admission of Africans or negroes into this republic, excepting from the United States of America" and went so far as to declare it "piracy."
The major critics of the enforcment of this were of course the British, who complained that Texas was doing little to enforce the law. Campbell goes into this on page 53-54 but concludes that "only a tiny fraction of the state's bondsmen were brought in by the illegal African trade."
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Post by pawbear on Feb 27, 2010 12:21:46 GMT -5
A good deal of the slave trade prior to the Civil War was domestic with costal states such as Virginia suppling the deep south, which was next to Texas with slaves. As for the British, it was always confused between its public policies and public needs (the wool industry). England opposed slavery but courted the Confederacy.
Personally I never believed slavery was the cause of the Texan Revolution but that it was a result as an evolution of a lot more conflicting issues - some include Mexico's unstable government and Jacksonian and southern states desire for the territory. As for the Texans, themselves, I think the point made earlier is that there was an initial split between older and newer settlers about their relation to Mexico. But, the catalyst was how the Santa Anna government treated Stephen Austin as well as it increased presence in the province. Regarding slavery and the Texans, not every Texan owned a slave but not every slaveholder was a large plantation owner, but owned but one or a few.
But one point, remember in the annexation question, the extension of slavery was a major dividing line between the pro and anti proponents.
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Post by timniesen on Aug 15, 2011 12:29:51 GMT -5
Allen, I agree that abolitionism and racial (not necessarily equated with racist) thought were not mutually exclusive, the evidence indicates that Dr. Pollard was an abolitionalist. In fact, even the Afro-Americans of the 19th Century were open to the racial theories of the era. Note the reprinted letter in the Alamo Journal from Dr. Pollard to an abolitionalist newspaper (Garrison's Liberator, if I remember correctly.) Benjamin Lundy's attempt to promote a Afro-American colony in Mexican Texas was not the last of its kind. The obscure journey of Black nationalist Martin Delany in the late 1830s to the Texas Republic, for another example. Tim
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Post by Allen Wiener on Aug 15, 2011 13:57:41 GMT -5
Hi Tim - glad to see your post. Could you list the issue number for the Alamo Journal you mentioned? Mine are not indexed. Thanks!
Allen
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Post by timniesen on Jan 10, 2012 19:04:54 GMT -5
Allen, I will look for the exact issue tonight. The white abolitionists were not free from racial thinking in the Nineteenth Century. However, one must separate the two types of racialism in the Nineteenth Century: first the racialism of those who thought like Lincoln, who thought that Blacks were designed by God to inhabit both the tropics and the semi-tropics (like the deep South and Texas.) This racial thinking derived from a German scientist who taught at Harvard, and his theory remained dominent in American thought until the 1880s when the acceptance of Darwinism by the German academics caused a rapid decline in the acceptance of this theory by the American intellectual elite, causing the acceptance of Social Darwinism in the 1890s. American always looked to Germany for learning in the Nineteenth Century. Then there was the racist thinking of the American racial theorists like E. G. Squier and Gliddon who proposed that Blacks were not only inferior but also that their rapid amalgamation with whites in America would cause their extinction because mixed races were both weaker and infertile compared to unmixed races. The black racial theorist Dr. James McClune Smith dialectically turned this theory on its head, asserting that mixed Black men like himself were superior to racially pure races. The latter man has some relevance to the Alamo because of his wonderful description of Gen. Santa Anna's servant Ben in Frederick Douglass's newspaper. Also reprinted in the Alamo Journal. Tim
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Post by Allen Wiener on Jan 10, 2012 19:14:54 GMT -5
Many thanks, Tim! That is very interesting and some of it is new to me. I'll look forward to reading the article.
My impression has always been that it would have been difficult to find many whites anywhere in the U.S. in the 19th century who did not believe that non-whites were inferior in some way. However, many separated that view from their view that slavery was wrong and had always been wrong and should be abolished.
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Post by timniesen on Jan 11, 2012 12:28:45 GMT -5
Allen, I looked last night for the Dr. Pollard letter but failed to find it. I will look again tonight. Dr. Smith's letter is in the the September 2006 issue of the Alamo Journal. At least one important Alamo scholar (who is not on this site) agrees with me that this letter is very important. Ben Harris/Harrison was not the effeminite waiter as depicted in the most recent Alamo movie. One can only imagine the conversations between him and E. G. Squier, but the latter's classic travel narrative, Nicaragua, reveals much of his disposition and character. He was a stone cold killer, a masterful cook and bodyguard for Capt. Gillespie in Old California and Minister Squier in Central America, and his translation skills were masterful, far exceeding the skills of his American employers who spoke Castillian Spanish only. What he did for Sam Houston and against Gen. Santa Anna in Texas remains in the realm of speculation. Tim
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Post by Allen Wiener on Jan 11, 2012 13:36:40 GMT -5
Thanks Tim; I'll dig that issue out. Were these letters in the "Documents" section of AJ?
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Post by Hollowhorn on Jan 11, 2012 15:42:55 GMT -5
Could you list the issue number for the Alamo Journal you mentioned? Mine are not indexed. Allen, I believe Bill has an 'Index' available.
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