This concise guide is conceived as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions advanced herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as elementary points of departure. The material is presented with the utmost commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is not, and cannot be, neutral.
Prof. Jorge Majfud.
“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
(Still working on this topic)
- Why and how did Anglo-Americans move to Texas before its independence?
- What was one of the central reasons that led to the secession of Texas from Mexico and the annexation to the US?
- What happened to Texas in the following 30 years after its secession from Mexico?
Table of contents
The Alamo
Texas 1800-1950.pdf
Adams–Onís Treaty, 1819
Adams–Onís Treaty, 1819 (ratified 1828):
Digital Austin Papers
Discover the Texas borderlands through the eyes of Stephen F. Austin.
First Texas Constitution
Colonel Edward Stiff, 1840. The Texan Emigrant: Being a Narration of the Adventures of the Author in Texas:
«Livestock»
Forced Reproduction: coercion and rape
Enslavers enforced control over enslaved women’s reproduction through various means. One way they ensured the production of a laboring population was through breeding. Slave breeding involved forced relationships between enslaved men and women, and rape of enslaved women by white enslavers, overseers, and slave drivers. Enslaved women also received incentives, although very limited, for reproducing and raising children on the plantation. Whites attempted to counteract the deaths of enslaved children through practices of forced breeding without changing the unhealthy and hazardous conditions of pregnancy and childbirth, malnutrition, and over-exhaustion, which were all causes of infant mortality. https://www.aaihs.org/enslaved-womens-sexual-health-reproductive-rights-as-resistance/
Black Breastfeeding after a History of Trauma
other sources https://www.searchablemuseum.com/to-be-a-woman/
«Speech on Slavery as a ‘Positive Good’» (1837)
“The institution of slavery is instead of an evil, a positive good. It is the only substitute for liberty for the African, and for the social order of the white race. The n***, by the laws of nature and of God, is incapable of self-government; the white man, to preserve his own liberty, must hold property in slaves.”
Senator John C. Calhoun
In his “Mudsill Speech” (1858, U.S. Senate):
“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life, so that the rest may have leisure to cultivate their faculties. That class is the laboring class, and slavery is the method by which their labor is secured and civilization maintained. Without it, property and liberty for the superior class could not exist.»
Governor of South Carolina James Henry Hammond
Notice: The following pages are not mandatory readings. They provide a historical background drawn from «The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America» that may be considered for this topic as a different view of documented historical records.
“My business relative to the settlement is now, acting on and in less than 10 days I shall be dispatched with everything freely arranged. The principal difficulty is slavery, this they will not admit―as the [Mexican] law is all slaves are to be free in ten years, but I am trying to have it amended so as to make them slaves for life and their children free at 21 years―but do not think I shall succeed in this point, and that the law will pass as it now is, that is, that the slaves introduced by the settlers shall be free after 10 years. As regards all other matters there will be no difficulty…”
Stephen Austin to Edward Lovelace [or Josiah Bell?] City of Mexico. November 22, 1822
“It cannot be doubted that the speedy settlement of these lands constitutes the true interest of the republic. The wealth and strength of a country are its population, and the best part of that population are cultivators of the soil. Independent farmers are everywhere the basis of society and true friends of liberty.… After a harassing warfare, prolonged by the nature of the country and by the difficulty of procuring subsistence, the Indians were entirely defeated, and the disaffected band dispersed or destroyed. The result has been creditable to the troops engaged in the service. Severe as is the lesson to the Indians, it was rendered necessary by their unprovoked aggressions, and it is to be hoped that its impression will be permanent and salutary.”
President Andrew Jackson. Fourth Annual Message to Congress. December 4, 1832
“We, your most dutiful and loving citizens, being too proud to work, and too parsimonious to hire, do most earnestly request that we may be permitted to kidnap and enslave for life others; and we would prefer the privilege of owning those of a different colour from ourselves, to the end that gentlemen may be distinguished from those in servitude by appearance, that non can mistake who possess the gift of sight, viz: we want ne***es, and as for the blind who cannot see us, we care nothing about them. Now as a good citizens and descendants of those who hate the sight of a n***o as much as they do a Catholic Priest, we will take the liberty of staying that if you do not allow us the privilege of holding in perpetual bondage the offspring of those African descendants of Cain—and further if you do not allow us liberty of worshipping our Creator agreeable to the dictates of our most tender consciousness, we will at least have two pretexts for rebellion…”
Coronel Edward Stiff. The Texan Emigrant. Texas 1840
——–
1822. The American Dream
Texas, Mexico. January 21, 1822—With forty carriages and ninety slaves, the prosperous farmer Jared Ellison Groce crosses the border into Mexico to settle in Brazos River, on the fertile coastal strip of the Gulf. Groce is one of the 297 Anglo-Americans to whom the Mexican government has gifted land for cultivation, honoring the agreement of their Spanish enemies with the recently deceased businessman Moses Austin. Suddenly, Texas becomes a land of freedom, but for the opposite reasons history will remember. Businessmen cross in search of greater profits and new opportunities to expand the slave system. Criminals cross to avoid the laws of the land of laws. “If there hadn’t been a place called Texas, I’d have been hanged by now,” says one immigrant, as Colonel Edward Stiff would recall in his 1840 book. Definitely, the United States isn’t sending its best to Mexico.
But before the businessmen and common criminals, slaves from the north had begun crossing the same border in search of a different kind of freedom. Amid the miraculous prosperity of the northern plantations, some time ago, word had reached some slaves that south of the South there’s a country where Blacks are accepted as refugees. The white masters assure that Mexicans are barbarians, who have decided to defy God’s order and civilization by abolishing slavery and, therefore, this country is ungovernable. The tradition of blacks fleeing to Indian territories, increasingly scarce and remote, is not new, and many cross the Spanish border in search of wild freedom. The successful farmers of the North often follow them. The hunt for blacks is more costly than the prey, but more than the value of each slave, the bad example must be avoided at any cost. If the Anglo-Saxon fanatics understood anything from the beginning, it is the incalculable value of the bad example, so they spared no effort in combating it. In generations to come, many will give their lives to exterminate the bad example in lands and seas even farther away.
Thus, it was how the Anglo entrepreneurs discovered that one of the Mexican provinces is fertile in its lands but not in its population. Now the son of Moses, Stephen Austin, known as The Empresario, has begun to travel to Mexico City to convince its Congress of the convenience of opening the borders to American immigration. Someday this practice will be known as lobbying. Austin knows that the Mexican Congress is interested in populating Texas. San Antonio is still a small town, exposed to the Comanche threat. In Mexico City, the options under debate are two: receive poor immigrants from Europe or open the border to the rich farmers of the North. As a good businessman, Austin is skilled and patient. In a few years, and after repeated attempts, he manages to sell Plan B as the best option. The American farmers had proven (for decades, argues the young entrepreneur) their inexplicable energy capable of turning a depopulated land, or one populated by Indians, into prosperous states, blessed by abundant harvests, order, and civilization. Like Moctezuma and his advisors opened the doors of the Aztec Empire to Hernán Cortés three hundred years ago, the Mexican Congress approves Austin’s proposal.
The next step, known in the world of big business, will be to move from dream to reality. Once one of the parties is inoculated with a desire, they will do everything possible to make it come true. Austin proposes to Governor Antonio María Martínez to grant each Anglo-Saxon man 320 acres of land to cultivate and 640 acres for raising cattle, with an option of an extra 200 acres if he brings his wife and another 100 for each child.[1] The governor agrees, restricting the benefit to a strip between San Antonio and the Brazos River. Furthermore, the new settlers will not pay taxes for ten years and will be able to opt for Mexican citizenship in exchange for working the land. Austin sells the idea in the United States and in the next fifteen years, thousands of other Anglo settlers will follow the path of the white gold fever, cotton.
With the invention of the new looms thirty years ago, the factories of England had replaced domestic workshops, and cotton had replaced wool and linen. Soon, new types of fabrics (fabrics) began to be produced at an unprecedented speed. The machines multiplied by the thousands and needed more and more cotton. The United States, the rebel colonies, knew how to meet this demand. Above all, the vast states south of the parallel that separates malaria from the nascent industries of the North had experience in agricultural production. As a result, the slave system, which England now condemns, was consolidated and spread like an oil stain across the Atlantic, in the southern United States and northern Brazil, thanks to the machines and English pragmatism.
The fields of the South and the cities of the North prosper as never before, but the foundation of the new country’s prosperity, founded on the ideals of democracy and freedom, is not cotton but the black slaves who are not a minority except in the power that exploits them. The slaves don’t know it, but they know that is not the life they want to live.
The newspapers in the United States announce Stephen Austin’s business: one thousand acres of fertile Texan land for each single farmer and two thousand for each married farmer willing to cross the border. Over the years, the empresario will manage to guarantee every white farmer with ambitions of progress a plot of 4,400 acres.
Too much fertile land for a family without slaves. On November 22, from Mexico City, Stephen Austin writes to Edward Lovelace: “The business with the Anglo settlers is moving forward. In less than ten days, I leave with everything settled. The only problem is the issue of slavery, which the Mexicans will not accept, as they have determined by law that all slaves in this land be freed within ten years. I am trying to get them to introduce an amendment to this law so that the slaves who arrive continue to be slaves for life and their children remain so until the age of 21”. This same superstition of innate superiority, of messianic exceptionalism, and of a radically utilitarian worldview, will transcend the borders of the “peculiar institution”, as they will call traditional slavery. On December 26, the Mexican ambassador in Washington, José Manuel Bermúdez Zozaya, informs Chancellor José Manuel de Herrera: “The arrogance of these republicans does not allow them to see us as equals but as inferiors; their conceit leads them to believe, in my judgment, that their capital will be the capital of all the Americas; they deeply love our money, not us, nor are they capable of entering into alliance or trade agreements, except for their own convenience, ignoring reciprocity… In the sessions of the General Congress and in the sessions of the individual States, there is no talk of anything other than organizing the army and militias, and this undoubtedly has no other purpose than ambitious designs on the Province of Texas”.
The American dream of the Anglos in Mexico will be a complete success. For this, the dream of runaway black people and that of the unsuspecting Mexicans must end with the Conservative Reaction of 1836, which will be known as the Texas Revolution of Independence. It will continue with the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty of 1848, through which Mexico will lose more than half of its territory, and it will never truly come to an end.
History, specialized in forgetting, will remember the 297 young pioneers as The Three Hundred Old Menand will claim that Texas gained independence from Mexico fifteen years later because the Americans wanted to establish political freedoms in that unpopulated territory. Students in schools and colleges will know no other description of these events. Hollywood will confirm this in classics like The Alamo and through the admirable faces brimming with self-confidence like those of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood fighting against the dictatorship of General Santa Anna and for the freedom of the individuals who make up a true republic. Outraged politicians, journalists swollen with patriotism, and even new citizens arriving from the south, desperate to feel like successful Americans, will repeat the same sweet and heroic story. None will say that the freedom pursued by the heroes of Texas was the freedom to enslave black people and continue the tradition of turning other inferior races into foreigners in their own land.
Bad hombres.
1823. Letter from Alabama, Sir
Mobile, Alabama. November 14, 1823—George Nixon, both cautious and concerned, writes to The Empresario, Stephen Austin: “I believe it is my duty to inform you that, as far as we know, all black people in the provinces of Mexico have been freed and that slavery will not be tolerated in that territory. We have also been told that you do not have the authority to distribute land in Mexico.” Nothing worse for a dream seller than when the people lose faith, which is why The Entrepreneur urgently needs some providential signs.
After many months navigating the halls of the Congress of Mexico, Austin had managed to get the first families from Louisiana accepted along with their blacks as slaves, on the condition that their children would be free men and women upon turning 14. The law, passed earlier this year, has been confirmed by Emperor Agustín de Iturbide. However, last July the same Congress of that country decided to prohibit the introduction of any new slaves into Mexican territory.
Although the Catholics distrust, although the Anglos will say that the future revolution will be to secure the freedom of their religion, the Mexicans do not seem to have much problem inviting the Protestant farmers from the north. In fact, they give them land. The less successful whites from the United States begin to emigrate to Mexico in search of the new promised land. Texas is a fertile province, and most prosper quickly in the business of the white gold that fills the looms of England.
Too good to be true. Shortly after arriving, they realize the deception. The blacks are welcome, but not as slaves, and the successful immigrants from the north cannot be successful without slaves. Someone must work the land. But a deception is repaid with another. That is how, just as it happened when they crossed the Appalachians and liberated the native nations, when the settlers cross the border they bring their own laws. Except for the law that provides them with free land to work on, they ignore all the other laws of the country that welcomes them. Starting with the prohibition of owning slaves and continuing with the oath to respect the laws of the new country that receives them.
As a good salesman, Stephen Austin exaggerates. He writes to Gaspar Flores informing him that he has received hundreds of letters from the United States from “people known for their good character.” There’s just one problem. They are all concerned about the little issue of slavery, which, it is said, is illegal in Mexico. In Mexico, in a letter dated June 4, Randall Jones laments: “nothing would be easier than to once and for all recognize the right to slavery.”
1824. With their blacks and other properties
San Felipe de Austin, Mexico. June 10, 1824—Stephen Austin, Jared Groce, James Cummings, and Juan Coles send a formal petition to the Mexican Congress drafted by the committee formed to represent the Anglo settlers of Texas: “The settlers emigrated to this land from Louisiana by direct invitation of the empresario Stephen Austin. Many of them brought with them their black slaves, as well as other properties necessary to settle permanently in this province. The settlers have received with concern the news published in the Gazette that Your Honor is ready to pass a law that would free all the slaves brought by the immigrants. The settlers of Texas wish to express that they have not brought any slaves for the purpose of trading them, but solely for the purpose of having them work their land. In fact, they are not even Africans but servants since birth, whose labor consists of helping their owners clear and work the land… The settlers humbly ask that Your Honor kindly allow the slaves brought to this land to remain slaves for life.”
In the Mexican capital, monarchists and conservatives yield to the liberal and republican surge. Finally, Congress approves the new constitution, somewhat radical: both the trade and trafficking of slaves are prohibited throughout the national territory, regardless of the country of origin. Any slave brought to Mexico against their will must be freed.
News of the new country’s humanist idealism and aspirations for sovereignty and independence reaches the hamlet of San Felipe. Stephen Austin bangs the table and writes to his Mexican friend, Erasmo Seguín. If he wants prosperity to continue, Seguín must do everything possible to ensure that those absurd laws are never applied to the province of Tejas. Never.
In San Felipe de Austin, Austin has just created the fearsome Texas Rangers, known for generations as the Tejano Devils. There aren’t many of them, just ten landless men. They are untrained and not heavily armed, but in terms of pride and conviction, no one can beat them. Nor do they represent a significant population. Ten years later, San Felipe, a few houses on either side of Commerce Street, will have six hundred inhabitants. But the imprint left by its founding will multiply like a stem cell along with its population, immigrants from the north and the south. By the time Texas becomes a slave Republic, the Rangers will number three hundred uniformed men (dressed head to toe like Mexican cowboys or Clint Eastwood in an Italian cowboy movie filmed in Spain). First, they will chase Cherokee and Comanche Indians at gunpoint for their traitorous support of the Mexican cause. Then, for the next two hundred years, in the name of “Law and Order,” they will continue to impose their law and order along the entire southern border, on both sides.
1825. The slaveholders worry about freedom of conscience
Pinckneyville, Mississippi. January 16, 1825—James Phelps, upon his return from Texas, writes to Stephen Austin: “There is no other reason that holds back the wealthy plantation owners of Louisiana from investing in Texas more than the issue of slavery. We have read with concern in the press that the Republic of Mexico has passed some laws that prohibit the introduction of Blacks as private property without any exception, threatening those who violate these laws with the most humiliating punishments. We are also informed that this republic has decided to emancipate all slaves currently owned by the settlers of Texas, as well as any other enslaved Black who sets foot on Mexican territory.”
He also receives a letter from the wealthy cotton planter Charles Douglas, dated in Alabama on February 15, 1825, concerned about the Mexican government’s obstinacy against slavery (which would not encourage the arrival of the wealthiest cotton planters, he claims) and its doubtful commitment to the tolerance of different religions and “freedom of conscience.” Four years later, from Veracruz, on April 25, 1829, Douglas writes to him again, reflecting on the difference between the freedom of whites and the libertinage of Blacks, between the good governance of slave states and the misgovernance of the southern countries: “our most valuable inhabitants are the Blacks, and no American owner is willing to move to Mexico unless they are first guaranteed the right to property.”
On July 24, the Texan Juan Seguín, future hero of the Texas War of Independence and later expelled from his own land for being Mexican, writes to Stephen Austin: “Friend, I understand that you cannot convince your compatriots to emigrate to Texas if we do not let them bring their slaves. But that argument is not even heard in our national congress.”
The officials of that barbaric country discover that the immigrants receive Mexican lands and impose their own laws. The number of slaves increases every day. Initially, the authorities simply notify the fact. They insist: in this land, it is illegal to own slaves. The immigrants continue with their business, and the warnings become a nuisance. On June 4th, Randall Jones writes a prophetic letter to Austin: “This province must be populated as quickly as possible so that, at a certain point, the majority can impose slavery“. Meanwhile, the immigrants from the north send letters promising to obey Mexico’s laws, but once on the other side, they forget their promises. The laws of the country that welcomes them and gifts them land are absurd, unjust, contrary to nature and property.
Fifteen years later, in 1840, Colonel Edward Stiff will publish his memoirs The Texan Emigrant, in which he will acknowledge that “we are so proud of our work and demand the right to kidnap and enslave others for life, especially those of a different color, so they can be distinguished from us and remain subjected to slavery because of their appearance; we want Blacks and only a blind man cannot see that we don’t give a damn how we treat them; as good citizens and as descendants of those who hate the mere presence of a Black person as much as that of a Catholic priest, we take the liberty to declare that if we are not allowed to enslave those children of Africa, descendants of Cain, their children, and their children’s children, and if we are also not allowed the right to pray to the Creator according to our tender freedom of conscience, we will have at least two good excuses to rebel”.
1826. All men are born equal
Coahuila-Texas, Mexico. July 1826—The representatives gathered in Saltillo continue the discussions of the national Congress. Liberals and conservatives delay with old disputes. The conservatives distrust the new Anglo immigrants; the liberals admire the republic of the north, but something doesn’t sit right with them. All are afflicted by the same perplexity that overcame Simón Bolívar when, on January 10th, 1807, he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, to visit for a few months the land of his admired northern revolutionaries. But the shameful spectacle before his eyes had nothing to do with the declarations of equality and freedom from the land of laws. Instead, he witnessed one of the largest centers of the slave trade, a contradiction to everything else, a reality his prosperous hosts either could not or would not see.
Thomas Jefferson became a French citizen before becoming president of the United States, and all the other founders, in some way, held a deep admiration for the Enlightenment philosophers and, in particular, for French culture. Jefferson’s ideas, like those of the other founders, did not align much with the rest of the Anglo-Saxon population, to the extent that, after his death, his books were banned in many libraries under the exaggerated accusation of atheism. The idea of creating an impenetrable wall separating government from religion was too radical. However, this foundational elite shared with the rest the misfortune of racism and double standards. Benjamin Franklin’s genius did not want immigration that was not white and Anglo-Saxon. Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom not only led him to abuse a minor whom he made a mother several times, but, moreover, he never freed her because she was mulatto. The beautiful slave, Sally Hemings, was the illegitimate daughter of his father-in-law with another slave. Above all, starting from the new era (of pride in one’s own ignorance and in the contempt for others), initiated by Andrew Jackson, the disgust for Indians, for Chinese, for Mexicans, and for the Irish (before they could become assimilated whites) completes the map of contempt and dispossession for all that was not Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. The beautiful phrase “We the people” assumed that, in fact, by “the people,” they neither referred to Blacks, nor to Indians, nor to Mexican hybrids, nor to anyone who did not belong to the race of the founders. But Jefferson was right when he said that “the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.”
From his seat, a representative from Coahuila reads aloud the paragraph from the Declaration of Independence of their prosperous neighbor: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”
A silence falls over the great hall, piercing like the light filtering through the arches and reflecting on the particles of dust. It doesn’t last long. Someone shouts: “Hypocrites”. Liberals and conservatives seem to agree on something, but everything else divides and distracts them. When they awaken from their internal disputes, it will be too late.
Justice holds a sword in her hand, but she is blind.
1826. Where is justice, law, and order?
San Antonio, Texas. June 1826—Antonio Saucedo, the political chief of Texas, receives a letter from the Dutchman Baron de Bastrop, a representative in the Congress of Saltillo under the name of Felipe Enrique Neri. It is a copy of the draft of the new state constitution. Saucedo reads it with concern and, after thinking about it for a few days, forwards it to The Empresario. Stephen Austin tightens his lips as he listens to the slow translation of the letter from the only representative of Texas in the congress of Mexico. Article 13 is a promise of immediate ruin: “The State hereby and forever prohibits slavery within its entire territory. Every slave residing in the territory shall be set free from the moment this constitution is published…”
Damn Article 13 is the work of the liberals with the complicity of the conservatives, who do not trust the good intentions of the pale immigrants from the north. Its author, Manuel Carrillo (think the aggrieved Anglos), although an admirer of the federal system of the United States, is a radical liberal, blinded by a fashionable foreign ideology in Europe, detached from all reality and removed from the hypocritical commercial demands of that same Europe. The real estate investor Baron de Bastrop warns that, should their attempts to block this article fail, Texas will be ruined, the Blacks will not only become free men and women, but they will also be granted Mexican citizenship.
By August, nearly all of Austin’s men had read Bastrop’s letter. The indignation of each one grew as more landowners and businessmen learned of its contents. Austin receives another flood of letters from the settlers who know how to write. One laments: “They condemn our children to a future of poverty.” Another: “Where is the right, the law, and the order that was promised to us?” The Anglo settlers swear not to yield to the potential loss of their rights. The first of all, the right to property, which included the new lands, horses, mules, Mulatas, and Blacks. On August 11th, Jesse Thompson writes to Austin: “Dear friend: I have been enjoying life, as any man in this land. Until I received the unpleasant news that the government of Mexico had banned slavery in this province. I am ruined, whichever way you look at it. I still hold some hope that things are not as they seem…”
Colonel José de las Piedras, military commander of Nacogdoches, recognizes that Article 13 could spark a rebellion. Piedras reports objectively: “The colony of Mr. Austin was born thanks to slavery and, without it, it would be nothing.” The outraged are all Anglo immigrants. The informed are all Anglo immigrants. Only the whites read the draft of the new constitution that establishes the freedom of the blacks. The blacks never find out about the new law. They can’t read. Even though they speak English, they can’t hear. They can’t know. They can’t think. They can’t do anything, they say, because they’re black.
After the initial outrage over Article 13, some moderate voices begin to emerge. In the congress of Mexico, mediators arise. A gradual abolition of slavery in Texas, some say, would be more convenient than the one proposed by Carrillo’s liberals.
Newspapers in the United States reflect the panic of the colonists in Texas. The Arkansas Gazette talks of independence. With the exception of a handful of newspapers from the far north of the North, all agree and dedicate themselves to building the idea and the habit of the idea. For the colonists, it becomes increasingly clear: if Article 13 is approved, there will be only one way to regain freedom: independence. Austin is a pragmatic man and tries to calm tempers and avert catastrophe. The middle path must be followed. For now, they hope the article won’t be approved. For now, they plan to sue the Mexican government for $500,000 (13 billion at 2020 value) in “property damage reparations” if they lose their slaves or if they have to pay free blacks a wage.
Finally, in Mexico, it is agreed to amend the original proposal. Now, Article 13 only recognizes freedom of the womb with some conditions. The children of slaves will be free, but not their parents, and the importation of more slaves who cannot be freed is prohibited.
Austin is a moderate, but he doesn’t waste time. After gaining time and concessions in Congress, he will go for more. He easily gets the Texan landowners on his side. The alliance between Anglos and Tejanos won’t break until Texas gains independence ten years later. Then, the Texan ranchers will become, before they realize it, Mexican invaders, foreigners in their own land, and as such, they will be expelled or stripped of their properties.
1826. The freedom of some to enslave others
Nacogdoches, Texas. June 1826—Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria nullifies the contract by which lands had been granted to Haden Edwards, an immigrant from Mississippi, who is deported to the United States. Edwards is accused of illegally taking lands granted to another immigrant. No mention is made of his habit of taking lands from poorer ranchers who spoke Spanish, who had occupied them without documents for countless generations. Edwards is not welcome in Coahuila and Texas, not even by his compatriots from the North, and he swears revenge on his accuser, Mayor Samuel Norris.
Edwards has the same entrepreneurial imagination as Stephen Austin. He stays. But he doesn’t hide on any farm or from any law written by Mexican despots. He neither accepts the laws nor the orders of an inferior race. Bending over the land to live off a wage is not worthy of his name. To gain 400 soldiers, he offers the Cherokee tribe land titles for the land they occupied. He has two horses. He gets six more. Someone lends him eleven dollars. A Cuero farmer, whom he meets in a Sublime tavern, gives him three dollars in exchange for a drink and a promise he no longer recalls. Five more horses and three landless settlers (two from Mississippi and three from Louisiana) join the group at an Alto bar.
On November 22, 32 of his men arrest Mayor Samuel Norris. Then they get rid of the Mexican militia chief, José Antonio Sepúlveda, and attack Nacogdoches. His boys win, and Edwards appoints his son-in-law as the town’s mayor. Immediately afterward, he decrees the creation of the Republic of Fredonia on December 21.
Stephen Austin fears that his negotiations in Mexico will fail due to this hasty venture and tries to mediate with Edwards to dissuade him from his plan. Edwards tells him to go to hell. Before a group of nearly a hundred patriots, on December 21, he proclaims and promises “to liberate the people from the despotic, imbecilic, and faithless yoke of the Mexican government, mistakenly called a Republic.” His red and white flag includes the foundational slogan: “Independence, Liberty, and Justice.” As Austin feared, the Mexican government forcefully expels Edwards and decides to reduce the flow of American immigrants, but the new laws will not stop illegal immigration.
Not all newspapers in the United States sympathize with the Anglo cause in Texas. In April 1827, the New York Observer will denounce that the declaration of independence of Fredonia “only defends the freedom of some to enslave others.”
Fredonia was destined to disappear. Everyone wanted to be governor. In any case, its example and its morality will survive in the new Republic of Texas. More than that: its example will survive for a few more centuries.
1827. Slavery, a humanitarian reason
Saltillo, Mexico. March 11, 1827—At 10 in the morning, the Congress of the State of Coahuila and Texas approves the controversial constitutional proposal with some modifications. The new constitution, more moderate than its original draft, in its articles 11 and 13 establishes that “in the state, no one is born a slave from the moment this Constitution is published in the capital of each district, and after six months, their introduction is also not permitted under any pretext.” Although still radical, the text represents a partial victory for Anglos in Texas: blacks born in another territory can continue to be slaves in Mexico until they die, meaning not much beyond the productive life of a slave. But, on the other hand, it leaves no room for the development and prosperity of their children.
Time to push for more. Soon, they discover a new argument: slavery must be extended to the ill-born for “humanitarian reasons.” The entrepreneur Stephen Austin has a plan. He thinks he can convince Mexican legislators once again: the prohibition on importing slaves, he says, is inhumane. His brother James Elijah Brown Austin writes to him vehemently supporting his argument: if the true intention of Mexico and Article 13 of the state constitution of Texas is to fight slavery, the best they can do is raise the age of liberation from fourteen to twenty-five and allow the importation of slaves from the United States. That way, the children of slaves could benefit from Mexico’s generous laws and become free blacks, something impossible in the great democracy of the north. What better way to serve a humanitarian cause? asks Stephen F. Austin.
Austin’s argument sounds reasonable, so he risks more: the children of slaves should be rewarded with freedom and citizenship only when they reach twenty-five years of age. That way, they would be trained in the techniques and habits of work that they would otherwise be unable to acquire. If every black is declared free simply by being born, they will become part of a growing population of vagabonds. Blacks, thinks The Entrepreneur and no one questions, will never, ever reach the social status of any white. For that reason, “slavery is their best school.”
Austin will be remembered for centuries with the name of a great city.
1830. Poor maidens, white and defenseless
San Felipe, Texas. June 16, 1830—With a traditional pornographic imagination, Austin writes to Richard Ellis from the city that, a few years later, will bear his surname, about the terrifying possibility that Mexican law will be enforced and slaves will be freed by force: “Suppose you will be alive by the time the Blacks are free and that by then you will have an adorable family with a wife, daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters. The future of those poor creatures will be terrible… If Texas is administered with wisdom and prudence, it will be saved from this fate, as I have demonstrated based on pure mathematics. In this way, whites will be able to find refuge in Mexico, without having to emigrate to the frigid regions of the north. Talking to an American slave owner about humanism and social justice is like talking to a deaf person, but I also do not believe anyone would want to live in that chilling future I just described at the beginning.”
In a letter sent to his sister, Stephen Austin recalls the Haitian rebellion in 1804 and warns, long before the birth of commercial pornography, what could happen in Texas, with the wives, daughters, and granddaughters of white settlers. Then, falling back on the double identity, a central characteristic of the masked Anglo-Saxon superhero, the businessman Austin becomes the man Stephen, and on June 17, he writes to S. Rhoads Fisher: “My ambition has always been to lay the foundations for the prosperity of Texas. I do not believe that can be achieved through any union with the United States, as it would imply slavery in this beautiful region, which could become the Eden of America. Just as the Devil entered the Garden of Eden in the form of a serpent, so it will happen if Blacks are allowed to enter Texas. We have been well treated by the government of Mexico, and we are bound by our oaths to remain loyal to it. I would rather lose my life than fail in that obligation or not fulfill my duty as a Mexican citizen.”
Three years later, on May 30, 1833, he writes to Wiley Martin from Matamoros: “The principle of a slave Texas never fully convinced me. However, in the last six months, I have changed my mind on the matter: although my abstract ideas remain the same, I believe Texas must become a slave state. Circumstances demand it. If that is the people’s wish, it is my obligation to execute it as soon as possible. And I will indeed do so…”
Once again, the people are the people. The rest are animals in human forms with dark skin.
1835. They attacked us first
Brazoria, Texas. June 20, 1835—Mexican authorities seize the American ship Martha for entering their national waters without authorization, and the Texas Republican newspaper headlines this act, as will be the tradition for centuries to come, as “The most outrageous act of piracy ever committed.” Whoever wins the semantic war wins the other wars.[2] In September, in Louisiana, Thomas McKinney, using his own sailboat, captures the Correo de México. McKinney, in partnership with Samuel May Williams, has made some investments in Galveston and donated $99,000 (three million in 2020) to the cause of Texas Independence. A few years later, he will become one of the richest men in the new republic.
The management in that province had not been entirely friendly. For over a decade, the famous businessman Stephen Austin had tried to convince the Mexican government and Congress of the need for a legal exception to allow slavery in Texas. When the optimism of the new Anglo immigrants had been rekindled by some humanitarian concessions from Mexico, on September 15, 1829, the mulatto president, Vicente Guerrero, tired of gradual abolition and the ceremonies in the squares freeing slaves, decided that enough was enough, that not a single slave would be tolerated in the Mexican republic. Either the same law applied to everyone or all speeches were worthless. The liberation had to be without delay, and the compensations to the Anglo-Saxon owners would be made according to the availability of resources. For other reasons, the mulatto who had reached the presidency by force (that is, bypassing the sacred votes of the Creole oligarchy), had lasted less than a year in power. He was executed by the conservatives. A few years later, the government would declare him a national hero, and later, when nothing matters anymore, a state would be named in his honor.
While liberals and conservatives fought for power in Mexico, Stephen Austin continued his persuasive work on behalf of pragmatism and realpolitik. Some Mexicans were concerned because the new immigrants were not Catholic and they forgot about the issue of slavery. They wanted to populate Texas and they wanted to be as prosperous as their northern neighbors, but without slaves, there was no success and no white immigrants. A representative from Yucatán, Lorenzo de Zavala, had proposed a temporary exception for Texas, as Austin and his men wanted, so that the new Anglo immigrants could make a gradual transition from the slave system to a free one. Austin had breathed a sigh of relief. Something was something. Finally, someone reasonable in Congress. But the rest of the legislators did not see it as reasonable. “Slavery is an intolerable abuse,” said a representative named Francisco García, demanding that this institution be abolished once and for all at the national level. The representative from Guanajuato, Juan Ignacio Godoy, had dared to define that thing about the slavery of the new immigrants, as if it were a property right, as something “repugnant to any human reason.”
The Texan exception was never approved. Even less so when Mexico embarked on other internal struggles between centralists and federalists. The country weakened until it fell to its knees, and when the federal option that could give some hope to Texans and white Anglos dissipated in the air, the solution for American businessmen was more than clear: “Political freedom for Texas.”
By the fall of 1835, the Anglo rebels took possession of vast territories and established a General Council. The new Council issued a tax of one dollar for every black slave over fourteen years old. Then they passed a law prohibiting the immigration of free blacks to prevent “the introduction of dissatisfaction and disobedience into the minds of honest and contented slaves.” Any person with any black blood who dared to enter Texas would be sold as a slave, while any white person traveling with free blacks to the Republic of Texas would be punished with jail and a fine of 5,000 dollars (155,000 dollars in 2020). The new Council, with supposed Congressional powers, also prohibited any owner from having a moment of diabolical weakness and freeing their slaves. Thousands of slaves continued fleeing to Mexico, among them the black Tom, property of the future hero and president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston. Tom would join the Mexican army to fight against “the freedom of Texas.”
Meanwhile, several merchants from New Orleans sent 100,000 dollars in loans for the Texan cause (2.9 billion at 2020 value). Thomas McKinney negotiated a 20,000-dollar loan from the banks of Louisiana, and the interim Revolutionary government of Texas sent McKinney and Samuel Williams to secure another 100,000 dollars in war funds in exchange for cotton crops. New Orleans filled its pockets with Texan cotton, and Texas received dollars and warships from New Orleans to secure the liberating Revolution in Mexico. To leave no doubt about the decency of the revolutionaries, the new Congress explicitly decided, for the centuries to come, that never, ever would anyone in said territory question, even in words, the sacred institution of slavery, a foundational value of the new republic.
The rebellion and independence of Texas were complete success. Half of the new Texan congress that decided the secession had arrived in that land just two years prior. They were all Anglos and Tejanos, meaning either rich or poor whites from the north and wealthy ranchers from the south. When the glorious independence of Texas becomes a reality, their Texan friends will, overnight, turn into invading enemies. The color of their skin and their language will be more than enough evidence. Many will be stripped of their ranches and deported “to their country of origin,” as is fitting in a country where laws are respected.
The new laws of Texas will restore decency and normality. The 1936 constitution will make it clear that slavery is a sacred, civilizing, and necessary institution for any prosperity. Historians will say that slavery was not a relevant factor in Texas’ independence, that Texas became independent due to an “irreconcilable cultural difference” with the rest of Mexico. Some dissenters will agree: besides the tacos al pastor, which would be invented by Lebanese immigrants more than a century later, and the mariachis that didn’t yet exist, the culture of racism, greed, and arrogance was different enough, if not in its nature then at least in its level of intoxication.
1836. Finally free from the Mexican yoke
New Bern, North Carolina. May 13, 1836—On its front page, the weekly Newbern Spectator and Political Register reports on the facts known at the time, which led to the rebellion in Texas: “The Anglo-Saxon settlers were not only allowed to take large portions of land, but they were also permitted to bring all the items necessary for production… Thus, they imported weapons, ammunition, and slaves, even though these had been prohibited by the constitution and laws of the State and national government of Mexico… The United States government made an offer to purchase Texas, which was rejected by the Mexican government… Then, the settlers realized that the option was to grow strong until they could separate from that country and thus perpetuate slavery. For this reason, the immigration of southern Americans was accelerated, even despite a prohibition in Mexican law that had decided to suspend its offer.”
Two clarifying footnotes mention, with some errors, that 1: “A year ago, a pamphlet was distributed clarifying that ‘in Texas, the inhabitants are free and satisfied with their condition and desire nothing more. Texas is a free republic, just as the United States is. The people choose and decide their own laws.’” The Arkansas Gazette, in 1830, had published that, despite the land being productive and exempt from taxes, “the American settlers in Texas will soon free themselves from the yoke of the Mexican government, which, without a doubt, they will do as soon as they find a good excuse to do so.” 2: “The inhabitants of Mexico, almost without exception, are against slavery. The regime was abolished throughout the territory, except for Texas, since the Constitution of 1824 was passed… Years later, representatives of the Texas settlers were sent to Congress to explain that the slaves, being extremely ignorant individuals, could not be set free.”
In 1830, the Indian Removal Act (passed in Washington unilaterally and violating all previous treaties) made possible the acceleration of the dispossession of vast Indian territories. In his fourth annual message on December 4, 1832, President Andrew Jackson acknowledged it in a triumphant speech before Congress and explained the reasons: “Undoubtedly, the interest of the Republic is that the new lands be occupied as soon as possible. The wealth and strength of a country lie in its population, and the best part of that population is the farmers. Independent farmers are, everywhere, the foundation of society and are the true friends of liberty… The Indians were completely defeated, and the band of discontented was expelled or destroyed… Though we had to act harshly, it was necessary; they attacked us without provocation, and we hope they have learned a healthy lesson forever.”
With the dispossession of Indian territories not only did the Treasury in Washington swell its coffers, but the expansion of slavery westward became possible, a “peculiar institution” to which the savages were not inclined. Now it is Mexico’s turn. Incidentally, the new Indian territories had served to expand the slavery of Africans and their descendants, the most productive workers of the independent farmers and friends of liberty. For the same reasons, by the same methods, and with the same results, six years later, the same story is repeated on Mexican soil.
The lawyer from Tennessee, George Childress, is tasked with drafting the Constitution of the new country. Like thousands of other Anglos, on December 13, 1835, Childress had illegally crossed the border, according to the recent treaty of 1830. The constitutional convention, mostly composed of illegal immigrants who arrived in Mexico in the last two years, approves the draft on March 2, and the constitution is ratified on the 16th. Slavery, the sacred institution of order and civilization and the central reason for the “struggle for liberty,” is now guaranteed by the founding charter of the new republic. In the General Provision section, Section 9, the first constitution of Texas resolves the old debate: “Congress shall not pass any law prohibiting immigrants from the United States of America from bringing with them their slaves to the Republic and maintaining them under the same conditions as they were held in the United States; Congress shall not emancipate slaves; Nor shall any slaveholder be allowed to emancipate his slave or slaves without the consent of Congress, unless he sends his slave or slaves beyond the limits of the Republic. No person of African descent, wholly or partially, shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic without the consent of Congress.”
On October 22, in his inaugural speech as the first president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston returns to the tradition of denying reality with the fanatical and overwhelming force of political fiction that will be repeated for the next two hundred years: “Our enemies have opposed all the principles of civilized warfare: bad faith, inhumanity, and devastation marked their path of invasion. We were few, fighting for liberty; they were thousands, well-equipped and well-supplied, seeking to chain us or drive us from our lands. Their cruelties have provoked the universal denunciation of Christendom.”
Finally, decent people obtain the liberty to enslave inferior races and keep the gifted lands without conditions. In 1845 Texas will join the United States by twisting the arm of Congress in Washington in favor of pro-slavery advocates. When, twenty years later, the pro-slavery advocates lose the political and cultural war, Texas and other Southern states will declare their independence from the United States and defend it with a bloody civil war. Always for the same reasons.
Childress will not be as successful as a lawyer. Five years later, harassed by a meager income and by his own ideas about failure, he will commit suicide by cutting his guts with a knife. At least he did not die of diarrhea, like the U.S. presidents who will take half of Mexico a few years later.
1837. In reality, we were attacked first
Washington DC. January 19, 1837—Two months before leaving the White House, President Andrew Jackson resolves: “The security of our nation is the supreme law. If Great Britain reaches an agreement with the Texans, as it seems from their negotiations, then we will be exposed to their diplomatic intrigues. They will bring their armies and begin to incite the Blacks against us and then the Indians to rebel. All of this will cost us rivers of blood and hundreds of millions of dollars. Texas must be ours for reasons of national security. We must take it peacefully, if we can, or by force if necessary.”
Well into the 21st century, patriotic historians will not accept that the dispute over slavery could have been a determining factor in the independence of Texas. The foundation of success, prosperity, and nearly the entire economy of Texas has a name: slavery, the savage exploitation of others. But this is a detail, like the fact that rain wets and death kills. According to these radio and television historians, the reason is cultural: the new Anglo-Saxon culture of the immigrants and the previous culture of the Mexicans cannot coexist, just as oil and water do not mix, just as the Anglo-Saxon race cannot mix with any other inferior race. If, due to base instincts, they do mix, the result is subjected to slavery. The independence of Texas is yet another front in the struggle for the freedom of the country of Jefferson and Jackson. Freedom to oppress, freedom to enslave others, freedom to take fertile land, freedom to expel the natives, the undesirables, the ugly.
From Texas to California, the cowboy becomes a symbol of freedom and the living representation of the true American. This is what Americans will believe and how the rest of the world will see it. Novels and movies will ultimately complete this fictional character a hundred years later. Clint Eastwood will blow the hat off a bad man with a single shot, while spitting to the side or lighting his cigar for the hundredth time and gazing at the horizon with his unshaven face and a calm that no one has ever seen in these lands.[3] But the cowboy is none other than the Anglo immigrant who, upon crossing the Mexican border in search of the American dream, adopts many of the traditions of that country. Mexico seeps into the accent of the English he speaks, into the pants he wears, into the revolver, into the hat, into the entire culture of the Mexican rancher that neither the settlers nor the founding fathers of the United States would have recognized as their own. The cowboy is the Mexican rancher driven from his land for not accepting the slave laws brought by his guest from the north. He is the illegal immigrant with a pale face and the resolute gaze of those who believe they are God’s chosen ones. He is the white son of the Indian or creole Mexican woman, the fair-eyed son who speaks English and is ashamed of his mother and drives her from her own land.
On April 21, 1836, the forces of Samuel Houston had achieved a decisive victory in the Battle of San Jacinto. The Mexican army had been caught off guard in the afternoon during their siesta. The assault lasted 18 minutes, and the defeated were lynched, beheaded, or executed while shouting “I am not [me no] Álamo.” Few managed to escape. The dead include over six hundred Mexicans and only nine Americans. Few were spared from the slaughter for their usefulness, such as General Santa Anna, the acting president of Mexico. A crushing and decisive victory for the taking of Texas.
However, the battle elevated to the status of myth will not be this one but the one that took place a month earlier at the Alamo mission. In this battle, two hundred Americans and five hundred Mexicans died, but the encyclopedias will highlight the brutality of the Mexican forces and the desire for justice of the occupying forces, which will justify the massacre of Mexicans at San Jacinto. Every country needs national tragedies and exaggerated victories, but the United States needs a long series with the same theme: we fight for freedom, we were attacked first, and we defended ourselves. “Remember the Alamo” will be the central leitmotiv of a long series that will continue with many other emotional calls to memory, such as “Remember the Maine“ (1898) or “We will never forget” (2001).
Thousands of articles and books will be written about the heroic defense of the Alamo, each more fantastic and convenient than the last. In 1960, the movie The Alamo will be released. According to this mythology, the heroic cowboys fighting for freedom were massacred by Mexican forces. Not a word about the fight for slavery. The celebrated musician and actor Samuel George Davis Jr. will request the role of a slave in the film from John Wayne, but the producers will oppose it because Davis Jr. was dating the Swedish actress May Britt, a white woman he married two days after the 1960 elections.[4] The producer and director of The Alamo, John Wayne, an icon of American cinema and known for his disdain for Black people, “irresponsible people,” in an interview published by People magazine in May 1971, will claim that Indian reservations in the United States are a socialist vice. No one is responsible for what happened in the past, he will say, when “there were many people who needed land, and the Indians selfishly wanted to keep it for themselves.”
Five hundred Mexicans and two hundred Americans died in the Battle of the Alamo, in which the Anglos fought to reinstate slavery on Mexican soil, and the Mexicans fought to reclaim their territory. But a century later, audiences in the new air-conditioned theaters will be convinced that at the Alamo, the heroes were massacred by the savage Mexicans, and that the independence of Texas was for the freedom of the Texan people and against the corruption of the dark-skinned invading despots. This amiable fiction will be almost all that subsequent generations will believe they know and will repeat with the same fervor as those who lived through the events.
1837. If you don’t agree, go to another country
Puerto Plata, Haiti. Sometime in 1837—Zephaniah Kingsley, an English immigrant, slave owner in South Carolina and later in Florida, is forced to move to Haiti with his entire family after he became radicalized against slavery, against the “peculiar institution” that created perpetual and hereditary slavery based on skin color.
For centuries, Haiti had harbored the deepest fears of European and Anglo-American fanatical fantasies. For generations, Haiti had contributed a third of all the foreign trade of the French Empire, and the new republic, the United States, was willing to change history. In 1791, it sent weapons to the rebels on the island because it didn’t want the French in its backyard, but shortly after, in 1799, President John Adams made it clear that he also didn’t want their independence and, even less, a republic of Black people so close. Despite everything, the revolution of Jean-Jacques Dessalines had triumphed, creating in 1804 the first free republic in the Americas. 4,000 white men and women were accused of conspiring against the Revolution and were executed. Thomas Jefferson also couldn’t tolerate a republic of free Black people and joined forces with the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte to end the bad example. The Revolution resisted but was destroyed. The president of Southern Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, offered France 15 million francs for half the island (the same amount Jefferson had paid for Louisiana in 1803 for a territory 75 times larger), but Louis XVIII refused. Haiti was condemned to pay France an exorbitant “reparation indemnity” of 100 million francs (21 billion dollars in 2020 value), a debt that would consume the energies of half the island for over a century, until 1947.
Before his own personal crisis, Zephaniah Kingsley had opposed allowing slaves to participate in religious prayers, noting that all rebellions had been initiated by slaves who had, in some way, come into contact with the Gospels. The rebel crucified as a common criminal by an empire remained a rebel to those who could not afford a Bible or knew how to read. It wasn’t until 1806 that Kingsley traveled to Cuba and met a thirteen-year-old slave named Anna Madgigine Jai, a kidnapped princess from Gambia and Senegal. Kingsley was struck by Anna’s beauty and bought her for the price they asked. Soon after, the fervent Christian and polygamist married her in an African ceremony. In those days, it was customary for white men to take Black girls as lovers. Thomas Jefferson also had a long relationship with an enslaved minor named Sally, the daughter of his father-in-law with another enslaved woman, and whom he made a mother several times. Unlike the Founding Father of the United States, Kingsley granted freedom to his wife and all their mixed-race children.
Under the efficient management of his young Senegalese wife, within twenty-five years, Mister Kingsley’s plantations became the most prosperous in the region that would later become the city of Jacksonville. The slaves who had not yet been freed closely resembled the wage-slaves of the 20th century on any family-owned sympathetic farm: after finishing their workday, they could dedicate themselves to whatever they wanted, such as working on their own gardens, whose produce they sold for their own benefit. Kingsley recorded that the slaves on his plantation “are honest and appear happy” and do not fear him because he does not punish them for not finishing their work. During those twenty-five years, Kingsley, due to magic or African love, changed sides.
When in 1821 Florida was incorporated into the United States, the Seminole Indians were expelled to Western reservations. Likely with no other options, Kingsley got into politics and campaigned to maintain the free status of blacks granted by previous Spanish laws, which were nonexistent in the powerful, ever-expanding North. Even, from his own experience, he argued that miscegenation, immoral and illegal in the United States, was not only not a problem, but could even be beneficial. His nine children were proof of this.
Now, Anglo-Americans cross the non-existent border in greater numbers and demand an end to this immorality, no matter how prosperous and peaceful it was. Before fleeing with her family, Anna sets fire to the plantation. Zephaniah Kingsley is not accused of being a communist, but of being anti-racist, which is why he must flee with his wife, children, and 53 slaves to the free republic of Haiti, to the province of Puerto Plata, which would later become part of the Dominican Republic. Many agree: the solution to the Negro problem is to send them back to Africa and the Caribbean, where they had never been. Abolitionists in the North believe that this will make blacks truly free, and slave owners in the South fear the idea of free blacks who can read and set a bad example for their ignorant blacks. Thus, Liberia is founded in Africa. Some blacks are sent to Haiti. Some white rebels are too.
Interracial marriage would cease to be illegal throughout the United States some time later, in 1967, two years before man landed on the Moon. Not endemic racism.
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[1] In some cases, land will be offered at 0.05 cents per acre, tax-free for seven years, with the option to obtain more land if the Anglo immigrant marries a Mexican woman.
[2] The Narrative of the Invisible / Ideological Meanings of Latin America (2005)
[3] As if that were not enough, the iconic film that would elevate Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef to the status of American icons, will be Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). The most American film of the Wild West will be directed by the Italian Sergio Leone (who could barely speak more than four words in English), the setting will be Italy and Spain and the music, the most recognized in the Western genre, will be created by another Italian, Ennio Morricone.
[4] Some close confidants will claim that John Kennedy had asked Sammy Davis to postpone his wedding until after the elections. In 1960, interracial marriage will be illegal in most states of the country.
Related Topics
- Brief Introduction to the Reconquista
- The Year 1492
- The Fall of the Native World
- The Mexican Revolution
- US Occupation of Caribbean and Central American Countries. Banana Republics (1900–1930)
- Anglo Immigration to Latin America and Latino Immigration to the US
- Slavery, Abolition, and «Legitimate Commerce»
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