TEXAS

During a fifteen-year span, from 1820 to 1835, Texas changed from a sparsely settled outpost on the northeast fringe of the Spanish North American empire to a territory, dominated by approximately thirty thousand immigrants from the United States, on the brink of rebellion against Santa Anna's Mexico. The individual who set this transformation in motion was Moses Austin, a man who had spent most of his adult life in the borderlands between Spanish-and Anglo-America.

Austin was born in 1761 in Connecticut. As a young man he established himself as a businessman, first in Connecticut, then successively in Philadelphia and Richmond, Virginia. In 1789, in partnership with his brother Stephen, he acquired control of a lead mine in southwestern Virginia. Three years later he moved his family there to manage the enterprise; in 1797, facing financial difficulties with the Virginia mines, he relocated much farther west, to a site in Spanish Louisiana (now in Missouri) south of St. Louis, where he again acquired and developed rich deposits of lead.

Austin differed from most Americans who moved west in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, he had little interest in acquiring land for agricultural production. He was a businessman and a frontier industrialist, seeking to extract and process nonagricultural resources from the land. Second, his search for wealth was not confined by national boundaries. In 1797 he crossed the Mississippi and established himself in Spanish territory, seeking and winning contracts from Spanish authorities to develop mineral wealth. Six years later the Louisiana Purchase returned him to American jurisdiction.

When the Panic of 1819 drove him into bankruptcy, Moses Austin again looked to Spanish America for opportunity. Familiar with the land hunger of his countrymen, Austin traveled to San Antonio in 1820 and convinced the Spanish governor there that as a former Spanish subject he should be allowed to bring in three hundred American families to colonize Texas. Austin intended to regain his fortune through the venture, with extensive land for himself and fees from his settlers. The Spanish, in turn, expected to gain needed population for their border province, securing it from external invasion and stimulating its economic development.

Neither party survived to achieve its goals. Other leaders under different political authority would carry out the colonization of Texas. Austin died in early 1821 after returning to Missouri to organize his Texas colony; his eldest son, Stephen F. Austin, took over the project. When he returned to Texas to finalize plans he learned that the Spanish authorities had been deposed, and a new independent Mexican nation was being organized. Austin traveled to Mexico City where he succeeded in convincing Mexican officials to reauthorize his father's project.

Stephen F. Austin was the most successful of the empresarios (colony organizers), and his colony rapidly transformed Texas. He settled the 300 families required by his father's contract and proceeded to award a total of 1,540 land grants, which by 1830 represented a population of 4,248. Other empresarios followed Austin's example. Colonists rushed to Texas, stimulated by the economic troubles of the early 1820s and plentiful supplies of cheap land. Mexican authorities estimated the 1830 population of Texas as 21,000 persons—15,000 Anglos, 2,000 African American slaves, and 4,000 Tejanos (Mexican residents of Texas). The Spanish plan to secure Texas through colonization succumbed to its own success. By 1830 Anglos, outnumbering Tejanos by almost 4 to 1, had essentially assumed control of the territory. Within a few years conflicts over slavery, immigration policy, taxation, culture, and politics led to rebellion and Texas independence.

See alsoExpansion; Louisiana Purchase; Spanish Borderlands; Spanish Empire .

bibliography

Brands, H. W. Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence, and Changed America. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

Cantrell, Gregg. Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

Gracy, David B, II. Moses Austin: His Life. San Antonio, Tex.: Trinity University Press, 1987.

Cary D. Wintz