Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja
Interviewee: Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja
Interviewer: Doug Exton
Description: While the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836, has become an iconic moment in Texas--and due to the influence of Hollywood in American history--it was only one event in a chain that began decades earlier in Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain and stretched through the American Civil War. The siege and battle of the Alamo is a good way, then, to examine how ethnic, racial, political, economic, and social tensions in the westering of the United States worked themselves out in the face of Mexican and indigenous interests in what was to become the American Southwest. Bio: Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja is Regents’ Professor Emeritus and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University in San Marcos. He obtained the Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Texas at Austin, and between 1985 and 1991 he worked in the Archives and Records Division of the Texas General Land Office. In 2018-2020 he served as Chief Executive Officer of the Texas State Historical Association. He has published extensively on Spanish, Mexican, and Republic-era Texas, including the award-winning San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier, and most recently Faces of Béxar: Writings on Early San Antonio and Texas. He served as book review editor for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly from 1997 to 2014 and as managing editor of Catholic Southwest: A Journal of History and Culture from 1991 to 2005.
Date: 2021-08-24
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Doug Exton: All right. Thank you so much for joining us for today's Connected Conversation, a program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, Idaho humanities.org. And I'd also like to remind you that you may submit any questions using the Q&A feature or the chat located at the bottom of your screen.
And with me today is Frank de la Teja and it's an honor to have you with us today. And I turn it over to you to talk about the Alamo.
Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja: All right. Well, good afternoon. And, I, was just, wondering with Doug about, why, choosing the Alamo as a topic, but I guess, perhaps, some of you, or many of you are aware that, a book that, recently came out and in fact, I think it came out after I was asked, to, do this presentation, about the Alamo.
It's called "Forget the Alamo" was done by three reporters, here. Who in Texas? Who, Decided to take a rather, jaundiced view of, what the Alamo might mean. And, and so the the Alamo has once again, and I mean, once again, because over the years, it's happened numerous times. But that would be, the subject of another talk, not this one.
But the Alamo has become embroiled in a number of, what we what we have come to call these days, culture wars. And so it's, it's kind of fitting because, here in Texas, in fact, the revision of how we, address historical topics, particularly those having to do with the Texas Revolution and, of course, the Alamo is, this the the central, event, more so than the actual victory that led to independence, at San Jacinto.
A month later, or a little bit more than a month later. But these, these issues, have been also caught up in, what is now referred to by, by the acronym CRT, CRT, the, critical race theory, issue. And so in Texas, in the which is, has a legislature and a state government, entirely controlled, by Republicans.
It has, these issues have also become embroiled in kind of a national discussion about, how, the, teaching of history, in American history in particular, are caught up with the issues of social justice and, economic, and racial, equality. And so CRT in particular, critical race theory, which is, has been the target of a legislation that is now being, addressed in the special session of the legislature, in an effort to, prevent, the teaching of CRT.
And, that in itself is problematic since CRT is more of a theory than an actual curriculum or anything else. So it's very controversial. And the other side of it is, of course, that, because there has been critique of, the, Texas Revolution and particularly revolutionary heroes, such as, Bill Travis and Jim Bowie and so forth.
During the regular session of the legislature, which just ended, there was, bill passed, that, to kind of I don't know if it was to mock, or as a counterweight, to the 1619 project, that The New York Times has, put forth as a way to do new curriculum and, that, these the, legislature passed a bill called the 1836 project.
The effort there, being to, promote the teaching of a, kind of a heroic version of, Texas, revolution. So, my point being that, here in Texas, we're in the middle of, addressing these issues, they have become embroiled in the more general, issues of, of social justice, and racial equality and all of these at the national scope.
And, they have therefore become very politicized. Those of us who are working historians who are not, and who deal with that period of time, who, would much rather just say, here's the history, that, as we understand it and as we're trying to interpret it to the, well, I don't know about, are you, as anybody else having trouble?
There's somebody who came up, said they were having trouble with the audio. Not, I don't know that I'm having trouble with the audio. Okay, so. And it's probably on the receiving end rather than the sending in. And so, the, the, the point being that, those of us historians working on the, topic are in fact interested in, broadening the way that we understand the Texas Revolution, and, and not teaching it in the same way that it was taught, 50,60, 70 years ago, because, teaching it that way, becomes less and less relevant to the increasingly diverse population of, of Texas.
We have, soon Texas will be, a majority Hispanic state. And yet, they were largely written out of the Texas Revolution for a very long time. African Americans continue to be an important, demographic here in the state. In their role in Texas history, remained minimized for a very long period of time. So, the point is that we, we need to be able to explain history.
We're not inventing anything. But we're bringing, parts of the history that hadn't been left out of what was taught and what was explained to the general public. We're trying to bring it back in, into the story. And I think it makes for a richer, story, as I hope that you'll understand as, as we, as I go through my presentation.
So what I'm going to, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to, turn on a PowerPoint presentation, that will allow those of you who, are interested in, the pictures rather than me, to stay with me. And, for those of you who are, not, the, you can just, well, you're going to be entertained by the pictures, if not by my talk.
Let's leave it there. And so, there were assuming the available ... and, and Sam Houston's and, and Burlington's accounts are accurate 21 to Hannah's at the battle of San Jacinto or San Jacinto. 20 made up Captain Juan Seguin, cavalry company, which happened to fight on foot that day. They were joined by a recent recruit named Juan Lopez, in his 1875 affidavit.
That is 40 years, after the events took place, in support of a Texas pension, Lopez told the story that, I'd like to relate to you, John Rosenheimer, the Bear County, notary, reported that Lopez was born in Natchitoches in the state of Louisiana, on or about the year 1819, that his parents were originally from Yucatan and had been transferred to Louisiana by orders of the Spanish government, with several other families from the from the former of these provinces.
In a view of settling that contested border, that he had remained with his parents, who were settled in the country not far from Natchitoches until the death of his parents, his mother having died in childbed and his father having been killed a short time after in a fight against Indians. Affiant remained an orphan and entirely destitute. At about the age of 15 years, he joined a train of American carts and arrived at Nacogdoches in the latter part of the year 1835, sometime after finding himself out of occupation, he was accepted as a cart driver in a body of Texian troops raised and commanded as much as Affiant can make out by Captain Henry Peel.
These troops had been a view of coming to the support of the Texian forces that were retreating, retreating before the Mexican army under the command of General Santa Ana, the party joined the Texian forces at Harrisburg, and the first military service rendered by Affiant was to volunteer his services to help in crossing the artillery and other military stores to the left bank of Buffalo Bayou.
It was at Harrisburg that Affiant became acquainted with some of the men belonging to the company of J. Seguin. On the second and last day of the fighting at San Jacinto, Affiant, who was on the spot and without any rifle, picked up an old sword, and having joined the men of Seguin company, whom he considered as being more his countrymen than the other troops.
In reason of their language, he entered the battle with his sword until he was ordered to lay hold of a musket rifle belonging to one of the men who, claiming to be sick and unable to fight, was laying on the ground. He abided by the order and fought till he received a flesh wound on the external part of his left knee.
The scar of said wound is yet apparent. So who were the Tejanos who served under Juan Seguin? Lopez, our intrepid teenager, was not born in Texas. He had not arrived until late 1835. He was, in fact, like most of the Texians who participated in the battle, a recent immigrant from the United States fighting more for an idea presented to him by his leaders than anything else.
He, like most of the Texians who fought to attend Jacinto, had no property in Texas. No sophisticated sense of the politics behind the revolt against Mexican rule, and certainly no concept of the repercussions of his actions. Lopez was a diagonal because, as he makes clear in his statement, despite his Louisiana birth and recent arrival, he felt more comfortable among men who were most like him in language, customs and appearance.
The suppression or ignorance of his presence in the battle is part of the legacy of the revolution. That is the theme of my talk today.
Before diving into other issues, let's establish some definitions. Tejano is simply a term that historians have been using for about 30 years now, to refer to Texans whose ethnic and cultural heritage are linked to the country we now call Mexico. It is, after all, the equivalent of Texan in Spanish. Anybody from Texas, regardless of race or ethnicity, who travels to Mexico, is a Tejano once you get there.
By the same token, the English term for someone from the United States who claimed Texas as home was not quite set in 1836, Texican was rarely used, but Texian and Texan were popular. Of course, the enslaved African-Americans brought to Texas by their owners were not considered Texans by the Anglo-Americans, and their status was not entirely settled as far as Mexican law was concerned, an issue that was to become one of the causes of the rebellion and to be and to play a part in the culture wars of today.
And existing native people of Texas further complicated the human landscape, of the province. Despite what Austin said about Texas being a howling wilderness when he arrived, indigenous groups could be found in all parts of the territory that would become Texas, which greatly contributed to the legacy of Mexican and Republic Texas. And if you're if you see on this slide, you'll note that, there are, the words ... and Comanches and then in smaller other groups are noted with their camps and areas all throughout the, the map that Stephen F. Austin drew.
So, it was lightly populated mostly by non sedentary peoples who moved about in ranges that they claimed as their homes and which they defended both against the Spanish and Mexicans and later, they defended these territories against Anglo-Americans. Obviously in a losing effort, to retain control of of the region. If race and ethnicity are complicated, so is the, political geography.
I must define what is meant by Texas for the Texas of 1835 was not the Lone Star state of today. Texas, on the eve of its war of Independence, included only the area from north and east of the Medina and Nueces rivers all the way to the Sabine, where the treaty of 1819 had established a permanent boundary between Spanish and U.S. territory until 1848.
Today, South Texas below San Antonio and Corpus Christi belong to Coachella and Tamaulipas. Today's West Texas belonged to New Mexico and Chihuahua. The idea of Texas is extending to the Rio Grande, dated to the Louisiana Purchase. But that also is, another story for another day. What is important for us today is that in winning the Revolution, Texas was able to make a claim on the Rio Grande, a claim that was turned into reality with the US victory in the Mexican War of 1846 1848.
But it has become popular and became popular a number of years ago. And you can buy in map stores and online. You can buy these very elaborate maps called the Republic of Texas Maps, and they show the boundaries claimed by the Republic, which stretch all the way into the, the southern portion of, of Wyoming and cover parts of Colorado.
The eastern half of New Mexico, parts of Oklahoma and Kans. I mean, it's a it's a huge territory, which, the, final, boundaries of which were determined by the, the agreement that was part of the compromise of 1850. But again, that's that's another story. We're going to move on here to what was going on.
What this means is that the history of Texas in the 1820s and 1830s has direct relevance to the shape that the United States ultimately took to the presence of an indigenous Hispanic population in the region, whether Tejano, Nuevo Mexicano or California. Due to the growing sexual crisis that resulted in the Civil War, and to the love hate relationship that has characterized Mexican U.S affairs for almost 200 years now.
In this story, the role of Tejanos has largely been marginalized, although central to the turn of events. And so it is something that I want to emphasize. True, there were not many Tejanos, but small numbers does not necessarily mean small influence. The channels were instrumental in shaping Texas history, but as a decreasing proportion of the population throughout the 19th century, their role almost completely disappeared at the hands of triumphalist, Anglo American writers, particularly those who followed Frederick Jackson Turner.
The culture war of today in Texas over how the Texas Revolution is understood and the role that the institution of field slavery played in it are a direct result of how Texas and American historians generally chose to represent the development of Texas from the coming of Mexican independence to the end of the Civil War. We won't get into the latter event, but let me just say that it was a history that was written by white men for a white audience, and with the changing demographics of the state, which will soon be majority Hispanic, the traditional story faces a rocky future.
So let me explain. In 1821, there were approximately 3000 Tejanos and only a handful of Texians, although the population had been nearly twice as large in 1800. The onset of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810, which reached Texas, twice, devastated the province. The channels who sided with the insurgents were killed or fled to Louisiana or Indian controlled areas, while San Antonio suffered population decline.
Economic disintegration Indian raids, and was the site of the single bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas. The Battle of Medina, fought in 1813. Nacogdoches was almost entirely deserted, and other recently established settlements were abandoned in the face of Indian attack, floods, and neglect. Spanish control of Texas extended little beyond the immediate confines of the town of San Antonio and the presidio community of la by today's Goliad.
Most of Texas then remained in the hands of native peoples, such as Apaches and Comanches, who did not recognize Spanish, Mexican, or American sovereignty, or of newly arrived groups such as Cherokees, Alabamas and Shawnees, who hoped to find refuge west of the Sabine River, but who were never accepted by the Tejano population. Under such circumstances, Tejanos faced a variety of problems as Mexican at Mexican independence.
First, they faced chronic Indian warfare without adequate military support from the national government, a situation they felt went well back into the 18th century and which prevented the safe movement even in the immediate area of the communities. Second, they faced economic disaster. The Spanish government had been unable to pay the garrisons at San Antonio and La Bahia with any regularity, so that soldiers and their families were destitute, with obvious consequences for merchants, farmers and artisans who depended on military payrolls for their business and the soldiers services for protection.
Third, without safe conditions or economic activity beyond the subsistence level, there was little chance of population growth, particularly on the part of people of means unwilling to take the risks involved in establishing themselves on a hostile Indian frontier. Newly independent Mexico appeared poorly equipped to meet the needs of far off and unproductive Texas. Mexico had lost over a million people to the War of Independence.
The mining economy had collapsed as a result of deliberate destruction, or from flooding and collapse of mines, from inattention and the unavailability of labor. Similarly, agricultural land went barren for lack of fields feelings. The Texas Dam relied almost exclusively on import and export tariffs and inadequate funding situation. Even if corruption and waste were not rampant, and a healthy chunk of the available funds were not spent on a bloated military.
Although Texas representatives to the National Congress in the 1822 1824 period were gladdened by the political autonomy and new, social compact that independence had produced, they were sobered by the knowledge that the national government could do little on its own to improve the lot of Texas and Tejanos. Texas's first representative in Mexico City, San Antonio native and parish priest Refugio de la Garza had written home that divisions among Mexicans based on race or status had ended, but in economic terms, the most he could get for his province was minimal.
Texas's representative to the Second Constitutional Congress, Erasmus, again struggled to find a place for Texas in the emergent federal nation state. Texas did not have a large enough population to be a state on its own, so in the spring of 1824, Seguin managed to reach an alliance with the neighboring province of Kohala, Texas's poor neighbor to the south.
In order to avoid becoming federal territory, ... promised greater local autonomy for Texas. It was the least bad of the scenarios that confronted Seguin, but it would prove to be an unworkable marriage. In the meantime, the hanno sought the solution to Texas bills elsewhere in instead the Americans. Already on the eve of Mexican independence, Moses Austin had come to San Antonio to ask for permission to establish a colony of Roman Catholic Americans for whom he would serve as empresario, and that is a land agent who contracted with the government to oversee the settlement of of colonists, and manage affairs while, settlement got going,
Like his biblical namesake, Moses Austin was destined not to enter the Promised Land with his people. A task that fell to his son, Stephen, who soon changed his name to Esteban to fit in. He learned Spanish, sent his brother Brown to live with the Syrians in San Antonio so that he might learn the language and the customs of the people with whom he would be working for the rest of his life.
Stephen Austin also established, good working relations with other Tejanos instrumental to the success of Austin's early colony. Were Jose Antonio Saucedo, a long time public figure who was serving as the chief administrative officer for Texas at the time. When Austin was getting himself organized, it was Saucedo who kept Austin within the law and offered advice on how to establish rules for the colony.
Austin later, Austin, later employed the services of San Antonio businessmen as part of Flores and Miguel La Cienega, and worked closely with political chief Ramon Muskies, another native of Cole Wheeler, who was attempting to establish economic interests in Texas. Soon, other Anglo American seeking opportunities in Texas joined in the land speculation business. Texas was about land, and Tejanos understood that Anglo-Americans had access to the labor, capital and business context necessary to bring about development.
Another leading Tejano who had fought against the Spanish rule, Francisco Ruiz, famously wrote that quote, I cannot help seeing advantages which, to my knowledge, to my way of thinking, would result if we admitted honest, hard working people, regardless of what country they come from, even hell itself. With few people and lots of land, the first order of business for Tejanos was to get the land settled and the Indian frontier defended.
Anglo Americans brought an uncompromising attitude toward native peoples that promised to solve the long running problem of insecurity for Hispanic communities. Tejanos did not have the resources to defeat Apaches, Comanches, and other aggressive autonomous tribes. The Anglo-Americans did. There were not enough Tejanos or migrants from the interior of Mexico to cultivate Texas commercially, but Anglo Americans were hellbent on exploiting international cotton demand by expanding production everywhere possible.
Tejanos saw incoming cotton interests, people whom they referred to as capitalists because they had access to financial resources unavailable to Mexicans as exactly what Texas needed. Never mind that they brought slaves to the country that had renounced human bondage. Many of the early arriving Anglo Americans saw Texas as a largely vacant land, ready to be lifted up out of savagery and superstition by the by their hard work and investment at every turn.
Then the vast majority of the Tejano leadership favored, promoted, encouraged and defended Anglo American immigration, while Anglo-Americans sought to recreate the American South in Mexican Texas. In the early years of Anglo American immigration, Texas lobbying had kept abolition out of the national Constitution of 1824, which set up a federal form of government and left immigration and slavery in state hands at the state Congress.
In Saltillo and later at Mount Clover, Texas, such as Jose Antonio Navarro, defended the practice of slavery in Texas as necessary to the economic development of the province. Properly regulated under more humane Spanish Mexican laws, slaves in Texas could serve the interests of development, was the argument they made when the state legislature opted for emancipation. In the state constitution of 1827, it was the 200 delegates who presented Austin's plan to allow the practice of indentured servitude.
By this ruse, slave owners would many admit their enslaved workers on paper before crossing over into Texas on condition that the freedmen paid for their freedom with, what amounted to 99 years of labor. For a while it kept the doors open to Anglo American immigration. In 1829, when President Vicente Guerrero attempted to abolish slavery, intense lobbying by Texans led to a waiver for the province.
When the national law of April 6th, 1830, threatened to stop almost all immigration from the US, they had no such as political chief Ramon Muskies and Texas representatives to the legislature Rafael Antonio Nancherla and Jose Maria del Rey. Such complaints that Mount was expelled from the legislature and Montoya, centered for Anglo-Americans, the anti-slavery attitudes of the state legislature and the National Congress, along with the insistence of the Mexican authorities that settlers begin to pay import taxes and more closely observe Mexican law, were ominous signs that their efforts to build Texas into an economic powerhouse in the image of the southern United States well were in trouble.
There were some tyrannous who were actively engaged in establishing new communities and economic activities. Martin de Leon, the only Tejano impresario, founded the town of Victoria. And until his death in the cholera epidemic of 1832 33, attempted to establish good working relations with Americans and European immigrants, settling in the coastal region. His son Fernando and his son in law, Placido Benavides, continued their warm relations with most Texians and identified themselves with the general Federalists just to the south, in the Goliad area, Carlos de la Garza, a member of an old presidio family, established one of the largest ranching communities in the region.
He counted among his friends various of the Irish and Anglo families that moved into the area in the early 1830s.
As my talk so far makes obvious, Texas did not lack for Hispanic leadership, and I might argue that without that leadership, Anglo American immigration might well have gone far more slowly. In 1831 33, the cannons were still much farther away from rebellion than the growing Texian population, which less and less had reason to conform to Mexican practices. Although I had taken an oath to be good Mexicans, Anglo settlers, in the absence of the no neighbors or Mexican authorities, had recreated Southern society in Texas.
They were practicing. They were using such practices as jury trials, which were until reforms in the mid 1830s were unknown in the Mexican system which followed the Napoleonic code and European style of, of magisterial type justice. So the jury system, was being used in Texas, with American lawyers who had come to Texas, without any knowledge of, of Mexican law.
But were practicing, based on whatever they picked up, along the way and continued to, to practice, American. And that's just one example. Of what was going on. There was also, in the, in the area of religion where although technically the only, religion that could be practiced publicly was Catholicism. There were numerous, Protestant, preachers, who were, practicing in, their profession, by, by moving from community to community, and trying to avoid being noticed by the few Mexican authorities in, in the province.
Beyond the Tejano zone, then along the San Antonio and Guadalupe rivers, San Antonio is at the upper end of the San Antonio River. And Goliad, is at the lower end of the San Antonio River, closer to the coast. Anglo Texan communities increasingly resembled places in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Whites ran their affairs in English, and Blacks, although technically free, were treated as slaves.
One inspector from the national government wrote that the Anglo Americans all carried a copy of the Constitution of the U.S. in their back pockets, as if it were the law of the land outside of Texas. The situation inspired little confidence for the political stability and progress of the country. The hostility between the two main ideological factions of the country, centralist who wanted a strong national government and very weak state governments, and federalists who supported state autonomy, a reduction in the power of the Catholic Church, and the role of the military in public affairs contributed to coups, rebellions, and general instability.
The problem was no better at the state level, where Texas's interests appeared to take a backseat to the squabbles between the more powerful factions. Centered in Saltillo and Clover, Texians saw the legislature as corrupt in making special deals with American land speculators, and in ignoring what they saw as the deal that had been made to allow slave labor to operate in Texas.
In 1833, the Texians called two conventions, the first of which in the spring even produced a draft state constitution, for a separate state and authorized delegation to proceed to Mexico City to advocate for Texas statehood and other reforms. The second, in the fall, attempted to organize Texas Resistance to what was perceived as growing interference in local affairs.
They did not attend either convention, claiming that they were illegal meetings, because they weren't following the due process in under Mexican law, although there was considerable sympathy among them for the grievances outlined in the meetings. As the political situation in Mexico City in Mexico deteriorated in 1834 and 1835, they had faced increasingly difficult choices once again, who had assumed the office of political chief in January 1834, had to announce the news that Stephen F. Austin had been arrested and taken to Mexico City under charges of sedition.
Austin had traveled to the nation's capital to work for the separation of Texas from Col Wheeler and to get the National government to free up immigration into Texas. Frustrated with the lack of progress in negotiating separate statehood for Texas, he had written a letter telling the people of Texas to start preparing for separation, whether the national government approved or not.
While Austin was in jail, Seguin attempted to call a convention, in San Antonio, of representatives from all of the municipalities of Texas to decide on a course of action. Given the fighting that had erupted between the opponents and supporters of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's reactionary takeover of the national government and call Wheeler the Anti Santa Ana State Legislature.
Sitting at home, Clover faced off against the pro Santa Ana politicians in San Diego who called on Mexico City to support their efforts to brand them on global government. Illegal for Tejanos, these disputes required taking sides, and Seguin saw Texas as naturally in the Anti Santa Ana pro state's rights. Federalist camp A large number of Texans wanted no part of that struggle.
However, increasingly they had come to see Mexican politics as mired in personality disputes, corruption and superstition as they like to call the Catholic Church, and their increasingly violent run ins with Mexican officials convinced them that a military dictatorship was in the works. Their fear seemed confirmed when a large body of troops under the command of Martín Perfecto de Cos arrived in the summer of 1835, making demands for the arrest of Texans on charges of disloyalty and sending troops to Gonzalez to retrieve a small cannon previously loaned to the community for Indian defense.
The confrontation between Mexican troops and the local militia of Gonzalez is generally treated as the first battle of the Texas Revolution, but fighting had broken out earlier along the coast when Texian merchants had resisted a Mexican customs ship from confiscating a merchant vessel that had tried to sail without paying duties. In the fall of 1835, when rebellion broke out in Texas, it may have done so in the Texian portions of the province, but the hands were more ready to take part for their own reasons.
Once again had raised the company of of San Antonio natives to defend Texas against government aggression, and had participated in an abortive effort to rescue the state's Federalist governor from centralist. Earlier in the year. Placido Benavides did the same in Goliad for the Tainos rebellion was a legitimate tool of resistance to the usurpation of power by Santa Ana and his centralist allies.
They viewed the Texas revolt as one more round of struggle against despotism. Only in the spring of 1836, when the rebellion against Santa Anna's rule turned into a war for independence, that the hands have a new choice to make, assume responsibility for their portion of the fight, or remain loyal to Mexico, even if, it was an increasingly despotic government, most chose the path of independence once again, and his men fought during the Runaway Scrape.
And at San Jacinto, Jose Antonio Navarro and Francisco Ruiz signed the Texas Declaration of Independence along with the Mexican nationalist Lorenzo de Zavala. The disaffected Zavala is a good example of how the loyalty of even those Mexicans who had helped fight for and secure independence from Spain and had then organized the country under a federal system, was stretched to the point, beyond the breaking point.
So all had not only helped write the Constitution of 1824, he had served as governor of the State of Mexico and as ambassador to France. He was an admirer of the American political system and had become a bitter enemy of Santa Ana, although he was not a de Hannibal, and although he had arrived in Texas only in 1835, he cast his luck with the revolution that he believed would bring a more rational and free political order into existence.
Not all Tejanos sided with the cause of independence. Carlos de la Garza organized a company of men loyal to Mexico and assisted Mexican General La in his coastal campaign. Nevertheless, Garza was unwilling to see his Texian friends persecuted and lent aid to a number of them. Perhaps because of this, he was unmolested in his property following the war, and lived to establish a sizable, progeny in the Goliad area, but this, unwilling to cross the line between rebellion against bad government and rejection of Mexico, went home to sit out the rest of the struggle.
When he found out about the Declaration of Independence and the aftermath of the war, the fate of the hands was a mixed bag. The DeLeon clan, which had sacrificed much on behalf of the rebellion, found itself in exile to Louisiana. Their slow return to the Victoria area in the 1840s was marked by forced sales of land cover, property taxes, and suspension, and suspicions of disloyalty.
Once again, when the initial success as a senator to the Republic Congress and as Mayor of San Antonio equally suffered a fall from grace following accusations of collaboration with Mexico, which remained unwilling to accept Texas independence. Antonio Navarro, on the other hand, continued to hold public office as late as the annexation convention in the summer of 1845, and help defend the status of the US as citizens in the new Constitution and beyond.
And then there is Antonio Menchaca, who served under Seguin and sometimes into participated in the Indian campaigns that followed and help defend San Antonio against the invasion of Mexican General Adrian Wool in 1842. This career as a public figure in San Antonio, and as a founding member of the Texas Veterans Association cemented his status as a loyal, quote, loyal Mexican.
For Afro Texans and for the over 200,000 enslaved Afro Americans who were brought to Texas from 1836 to the end of the Civil War, the Texas Revolution certainly was not about liberty, although the Texas Declaration of Independence was careful to avoid the difference between Texans and other Mexicans over the issue of slavery. The Constitution of the Republic, issued in mid-March 1836 explicitly put Texas in the pro-slavery camp to an even greater degree than most U.S. southern states.
It incorporated the harshest anti-black practices found in state laws. Let me read to you section nine and the first sentence in section ten of the Republic Constitution, section nine, all persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in a state of servitude, provided the said slave shall be the bonafide property of the person.
So holding said slave as a force that Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit immigrants from the United States of America to bring their slaves into the Republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States. Nor shall Congress have power to emancipate slaves, nor shall any slave holder be allowed to emancipate his or her slave or slaves without the consent of Congress, unless he or she shall send his or her slave or slaves without the limits of the Republic.
No free person of African descent, either in whole or in part, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic without the consent of Congress, and the importation or admission of Africans or Negroes into the Republic, excepting from the United States of America, is forever prohibited and declared to be piracy. Section ten. All persons Africans, the descendants of Africans and Indians, accepted who were residing in Texas on the day of the Declaration of Independence, shall be considered citizens of the Republic and entitled to all the privileges of such.
Which brings me to the legacy of the Texas Revolution with regard to indigenous Texans and their immigrant Indian brethren, because the Constitution of the Republic explicitly excluded Indians from citizenship, Texans felt justified in removing even those tribal groups who had established settlements, open forms, and were otherwise engaged in creating for themselves communities that in many ways mirrored those of the Texians.
Only a small band of immigrant Indians, the Alabama-Coushatta, managed to obtain recognition of their communal existence when they were allowed to retain a small tract of land in East Texas that today consists of about one square mile in Polk County and East Texas. Although President Sam Houston attempted to reach peace deals with other tribes, his successor, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, carried out a practice of forced removal.
One last note on this score the annexation agreement between Texas and the US allowed Texas to keep its public lands. However, because the federal government had exclusive authority to deal with Indian tribes, a conflict arose. The federal government had no place to establish reservations within Texas, although it was responsible for the Indians of Texas. The result was that the US Army was used to support white settlement and to protect peaceful Indians.
It didn't work despite the interruption of the Civil War. By the mid 1870s, the Indians of Texas were gone, with the exception of one tiny reservation for the Alabama.
As for Tejanos, in the long run, the problem for them was that their few numbers, their mixed racial background, their Catholic heritage, their Mexican culture, and their Spanish language combined to isolate them within a society dominated by your American Protestant English speakers. Because of their Mexican cultural heritage, mostly handles were looked upon as Mexicans and Mexicans were mixed blood in foreigners and enemies.
Men such as Antonio Navarro once again and Antonio Manchego, who could bank on their European ancestry, made a lasting impression on their fellow Texans. The names of a county and a couple of towns attest to their status, but overall, there was little interest on the part of an increasingly Anglo American population. So remember the significant role that the House had played in fostering immigration and protecting the rights of Americans in Texas?
In a way, Tejanos encapsulated the racial, ethnic, and cultural tensions from the Texas that had come to be dominated by American Southerners. It is the legacy with which the state continues to struggle today. Thank you.
Okay. And there we are.
Doug Exton: Yeah. Thank you so much for all that information. It was really enlightening. I really appreciated how you touched on the, you know, the different perspectives and the different experiences. You know, within, you know, especially, you know, for me, I didn't know really anything about the Texas Revolution going into this. I should share that with you prior. So yeah, it was really enlightening.
And we are now open for the Q&A, so feel free to submit your questions in the chat or the Q&A. The first question that I have for you, it's more of like an aftermath kind of thing. How did, you know, Texas after it was annexed? How did they deal with the 13th amendment since it was pretty clear in there, you know, the original laws that were passed, you know, that African Americans will be, you know, some form of slavery kind of in perpetuity while they're independent.
Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja: Right. Well, the interesting thing is when Texas joins the United States, obviously, they, there's a new constitution that's written in 1845, and I could read from it, a lot of the language in it with regard to African-Americans mirrors what's in the Constitution of the Republic. That Constitution is accepted by Congress. There's still no 13th, 14th or 15th amendments.
So we're we're we have to get to the Civil War. An argument has been made that because of the agreement, between Texas in the United States, the Texas could be subdivided into five different states. And, because that we joined through a joint resolution that Texas could actually leave the union. The problem with that are and we could still do that today.
The problem with those arguments is that the Civil War changed the rules for everybody when this the southern states rebelled, including Texas. It meant that Texas, which wanted to rejoin the Union afterwards, had to write new constitutions. So anything that had happened before the Civil War was null and void. All of the southern states, in order to be readmitted into the Union, had to accept the 1314 15th amendment.
They also had to, prepare constitutions that would meet muster with, with Congress. So, hastily, there was a constitution that was done in 1869 that did that. And, Texas did everything that Congress needed, done in order to the, to rejoin the union. And among those was the acceptance of, of the, abolition of slavery.
The, the the protection of African-American rights, since all of those things, had to be accepted, by the state, and they were so, the constitutions of 1836 and 1845 are cultural artifacts that tell us what the thinking of the majority was before the Civil War. But they don't have any legal bearing afterwards, because the Civil War itself, marked a new beginning.
Doug Exton: Does a reset of, you know. And then the other thing I was wondering is if you'd be able to talk a little bit on the role women played, within the within the revolution.
Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja: Yes. Well, it's, it's interesting, that, that is another aspect of the talk I didn't get around to today, that lately has come, to the into focus that, the roles of women have been largely excluded. The sources are not many. We have a couple of diaries from, the, the fleeing of the civilian population, ahead of the Mexican army, between the fall of the Alamo on March 6th, 1836, and, San Jacinto on April 21st.
The Anglo American population fled north and east toward the Louisiana border. And that flight that max, mass flight is called the runaway scrape. We do have, a couple of sources, a couple of diaries that tell us about women during a runaway scrape. And so we can. And so we know that, it was an it was an extremely difficult time.
The problem with the the women's side of the story is that since they weren't participating in the military events and since they weren't participating in the political events, it is it is a matter of telling the social history side of the revolution, not the political or military sides of the revolution. And as far as the social sides of the revolution, one can pretty much imagine, that women having to abandon their homesteads, having to, in some cases give birth while they are in winter.
Remember, all of this is taking place in late winter or early spring. And it was a rainy and cold spring. The sources do tell us conditions were not ideal crossing rivers and and and creeks, and getting bogged down in swamps. This is all in the record. So one can imagine the difficulties that women and and children faced.
There was a lot of disease. So generally speaking, it was a really and then they came back and so for, and, and so we do have the story of a number of women, who have to come back in and sort of rebuild from scratch. Their homes have either been burnt down or, Indians, were able to come in in the absence of owners and whatnot and just, take away whatever, the mess or kill the whatever domestic animals were available.
So women face really harsh conditions for the time. And there are some there are some sources. I guess this is a good time for me to say if anybody's interested in some books on the revolution, to cover some of what I talked about today, and also to talk about women in the revolution, please, send me an email, and my emails.
Real simple. It's ... And I'll be happy to correspond with you on on any of that.
Doug Exton: And then we just got a question and it is, could you please tell the reason Santa Anna gave away Texas, the story and Mexican books and Mexican books are totally different.
Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja: Well, yes. Okay. So, Santa Ana is is the, there's one place where Texans and Mexicans have always agreed and that is in hating Santa Ana. So it's it's there's a common bond there. And, Santa Ana is a very interesting figure. He didn't quite give away, Texas. He he's had a gun pointed to his head in after San Jacinto.
He was captured. And so, he does a couple of things. Immediately after his capture, he signs in order to his second in command, a general named Fili Sola that the Mexican forces need to retreat below the Rio Grande, which the Texans then took, to, signify that, the Mexicans agreed that the Texas border was along the Rio Grande.
Of course, that's a very Texan and, interpretation of something that just was not historical reality. But we'll leave that alone for the moment. But then subsequent to that, he did sign two treaties, a public treaty and a secret treaty with the Texans, which provided the means for him to then be sent to the United States, where he was, where he actually met with Andrew Jackson, before returning to Mexico later on.
But those two treaties, of course, the Mexican government refused to acknowledge because they were signed by somebody who was being held captive by the enemy. And, the nobody in their right mind accepts, agreements that are signed by somebody who's being held prisoner. But nevertheless, in those treaties, he said that he would work, for recognition of, of Texas independence.
But it, but he did not explicitly grant Texas independence because it really wasn't in his power to do so. He said he would. So the two actions that he took, first making, Mexican forces retreat below the Rio Grande, made, had an implication in that that was the border with Texas. And secondly, that he would work to, get Texas independence.
Has always been kind of interpreted that he granted Texas independence, but he didn't. And of course, the Mexican government refused to accept Texas independence. And one has to remember that, the Texas Revolution therefore, has two very different perspectives from the American Texas Mexican perspective. It's over after San Jacinto from the Mexican perspective, the Texas Revolution isn't over until 1848, when the Treaty of Waterloo Hidalgo formalizes Mexico's loss of Texas.
Before that, Texas remains a province in rebellion. And if you look at the documents from Mexico, from the period of the late 1830s and in the through the Mexican War, you see that Texas is still being referred to as essentially a breakaway, province, but still part of Mexico. If I if there's a modern analogy to be used and and I and I'll tread try to tread very carefully here it would be Tijuana from the perspective of of Taiwan and Taiwan's friends.
Taiwan is is not China, but from the perspective of China. Taiwan is a breakaway province, and it's still part of, of of China. So the tension that was that is there in that relationship, existed in Mexico, Texas, even though Mexicans immediately started trading with the Texans and there was all kind of, aside from military activity.
And there's all kinds of, efforts to, if not normalize, at least profit from, cross-border, activities.
Doug Exton: I really appreciate that analogy because it puts it into a really, you know, clear perspective, at least for me, of, you know, the relationships in the dynamic between Texas and Mexico especially, you know, that aftermath kind of gray area, so to speak. Yeah. And our last question that we'll be able to get to is in the Republic of Texas, were women considered full citizens with full rights like men, or did that have to wait until 1920?
Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja: Okay. Well, Texas. Yes, Texas is actually Texas passes. A constitutional amendment in 1919, one year before the women get the vote at the national level, they get the vote in Texas. Before that, they had not had the vote, so they did not have full rights. The interesting thing in Texas is that there was a recognition that, the Spanish and Mexican civil law actually provided more protections for women than the American common law.
So, very interestingly, in 1840, during the republic, when Texas changes its legal system, and formally adopts the English common law, a couple of areas are are excluded from that, transfer. One of them is what we, like to, can, what we call today community property, which one also sees in some of the other states that have a Spanish, legal tradition, like California, and Florida, and that is that women have certain property rights, over their, their personal individual property, so women can inherit property separate from their husbands.
Women have a right to half of the estate, that is created during marriage. There are limits on how men can dispose of women's property. And so there are certain rights, particularly property rights, that are given to women in Texas from much earlier than they have them in states that, fully embrace the American, and the English common law system, in the United States.
But no, as far as full citizenship is concerned, it doesn't happen till 1919, one year before it happens at the national level.
Doug Exton: Well, thank you again. We are unfortunately out of time, but we were able to get to all the questions that popped through. So that's oh it's good. So thank you everyone for attending and thank you Frank for all the information.
Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja: Thank you very much. Have a great day. And like I said, if anybody wishes to contact me, or Doug, maybe if you didn't get a chance to email address Doug in and can again forwarded to you, I'll be happy to communicate with anybody individually. You have a great day. Bye bye.
Doug Exton: Have a good one.