Colin Woodard (32 page)

But by this time, a great deal of Mexican territory had already been annexed to the United States. The conquest of El Norte was well under way.

CHAPTER 19

B
y the time the slave lords' eyes turned its way, El Norte was in an extremely vulnerable position. Mexico was born into bankruptcy and chaos in 1821, its economy destroyed in a bloody war for independence that had killed a tenth of its people. Gross national product fell by half and would not recover its 1805 level until the 1870s. Governments in far-off Mexico City fell with alarming frequency—the presidency changed hands thirty-six times between 1833 and 1855—leaving the provinces largely on their own.
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What little support El Norte had received from central authorities broke down in the aftermath of independence. Soldiers and missionaries stopped receiving their pay. The money supply disappeared. Caravans no longer arrived to resupply the region's outposts and to carry away the hides and tallow it produced. Soldiers began sacking mission complexes in search of provisions. Franciscan missionaries were banned from entering Mexico, and El Norte officials received orders to expel the rest. (California's governor refused, noting that if he did so,“the rest of the inhabitants and troops would perish.”) What little assistance the central government did provide was counterproductive. A shipment of convicts was sent to California to bolster the local population, but without supplies; they spent their time raiding gardens and orchards and causing trouble for the governor. Newly promulgated Mexican laws, like the requirement of an annual income of 1,500 pesos to be a congressman and 2,000 pesos to be a governor, alienated
norteños.
“No one in California has the capital to become a governor, senator, or deputy,” one observer noted.
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Cut off from central Mexico, El Norte's leaders looked to the United States for trade, supplies, and settlers.
Tejanos
flouted Mexico's ban on foreign trade by driving their horses to markets in Louisiana, while Franciscan
Californios
sold cowhides and sea otter skins to smugglers. Government officials made no attempt to stop the trade, with one noting that “necessity makes licit what is not licit by law.” California governor Mariano Chico noted that without smuggling, “the Californias would not exist.”

El Norte's border had become porous to more than goods, however. In the 1820s Mexican authorities were helpless to defend their frontier from waves of illegal immigrants pouring across from the north and east in search of economic opportunity. Texas bore the brunt of this flood of immigration due to its long borders with increasingly populated Louisiana and Arkansas. Under Mexican law, Anglo-Americans were unwelcome, but Texas officials were desperate enough for settlers to look the other way. “I cannot help seeing advantages which . . . would result if we admitted honest, hard working people, regardless of what country they come from . . . even Hell itself,” said San Antonio politico Francisco Ruiz.
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By 1823, some 3,000 Anglo-Americans (mostly Deep Southern or Appalachian in origin) were living in Texas illegally, roughly equal to the official population of the territory. Several hundred more had followed Moses and Stephen Austin, a father-and-son team who'd convinced Spanish authorities to give them a large land grant on the eve of Mexican independence. Proponents of immigration reform were encouraged by the Austins' behavior: Stephen, who took over after his father's death, learned Spanish, took Mexican citizenship, and acted as an arbiter between immigrants and local authorities. (Southern California's few early immigrants behaved similarly, generally assimilating into and respecting the local culture.) Reformers won the day in 1824–25, when federal authorities and those in what was then the territory of Coahuila y Texas legalized immigration. Most of Texas north of Corpus Christi would practically be given away to colonization agents like Austin, who then retailed it to settlers in 4,400-acre grants. Authorities hoped the newcomers would adapt to El Norte's ways; to encourage this, they banned slavery and required settlers to convert to Roman Catholicism.
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The immigration experiment, however, quickly got out of hand. Settlers—many of them fleeing creditors in the Deep South—began flooding into east Texas, and by 1830 they numbered at least 7,000, more than double the
norteño
population. To make matters worse, the newcomers were making no effort to assimilate, spurning Catholicism and settling away from the
norteño
enclaves around San Antonio and Golidad. A Mexican general traveling northward to the booming east Texas town of Nacogdoches realized he had crossed into a foreign culture. “As one covers the distance from San Antonio to [Nacogdoches] he will note that Mexican influence is proportionately diminished until, arriving in this place, he will see that it is almost nothing,” he wrote his superiors. The Nacogdoches area had been granted to a hotheaded Appalachia-born slave planter, Haden Edwards, who'd tried to rid the area of
norteños
and squatters alike, to make way for “respectable” Deep Southern planters. When his illegal expropriations led authorities to withdraw his grant in 1826, Edwards declared independence, appointing himself the head of the “Republic of Fredonia.” Mexican troops drove him back across the border, but the event alarmed the establishment. American immigrants were undermining the region's Mexicanness, flouting laws, languages, and customs. Something had to be done.
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In 1830 Mexico reversed policy and banned American immigration altogether, for fear that otherwise “Texas will be lost to this Republic.” Many
norteños
opposed the move, with several leading Texas officials petitioning Mexico City for it to be reversed. In any case the law failed to stem the tide. American immigration actually increased, reaching 1,000 a month by 1835, at which point
Tejanos
were outnumbered by American immigrants by more than ten to one. The general in charge of the region reported in 1831 that “there is no physical force that can stop the entrance of the norteamericanos, who are exclusive owners of the coast and the borders of Texas.” (In New Mexico and California—much more difficult to reach from the United States—immigrants came in small numbers and did not present an immediate cultural challenge.) Authorities in central Mexico feared that if the region was inundated with Deep Southerners, rebellion and U.S. annexation might soon follow. Ironically, when rebellion did come,
norteños
themselves played a leading role.
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El Norte—which has a more individualistic, self-sufficient, and commercial attitude than central Mexico—is often said to be at the forefront of Mexican reform and revolution. That reputation began with the region's armed resistance to Mexico's first military dictator, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who seized power in 1833, suspended the constitution, and expelled his political opponents. Santa Anna was forced to put down a series of revolts in El Norte, first in Coahuila, then in Texas, New Mexico, and California.
Californio
legislators in Monterey actually declared their province independent until such a time as the constitution was restored; when a new governor arrived from Mexico City, he and his guards were disarmed and sent packing. Meanwhile, Pueblo Indians in New Mexico captured Santa Fe, beheaded Santa Anna's governor, and put a mestizo buffalo hunter in his place; the rebellion was put down a few months later by Santa Anna's troops. In 1839 opposition politicians in the northern states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila declared their independence and loyalty to the old constitution; their Republic of the Rio Grande was crushed a few months later, and its leaders took refuge in neighboring Texas.
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The Texas Revolution of 1835–36 was the most successful and decisive of the revolts. Offended by Santa Anna's dictatorship, much of the
Tejano
political establishment joined the rebellion, including the bilingual mayor of San Antonio, Juan Seguín, an ally of Stephen Austin. Initially, moderates like Austin and Seguín sought merely to separate from Coahuila but remain a part of Mexico, a position that earned them the epithet “Tories” from east Texas's Appalachian and Deep Southern settlers, who wanted outright independence. Most
Tejanos
appear to have been neutral on the matter, wishing only to survive the conflict with a minimum of disruption. But when Santa Anna's forces invaded the renegade province, Seguín and other
Tejano
leaders joined the secessionists in proclaiming an independent Republic of Texas. Seguín served as an officer in the revolutionary army and was later elected to the republic's senate; another
Tejano
, Lorenzo de Zavala, served as Texas's vice president. Seven
Tejanos
died for Texas at the Battle of the Alamo, where Seguín served as one of Austin's scouts and, later, supervised the burial of the dead. Deep Southern newspapers covered the war intensively, casting it as a racial struggle between barbarous Hispanics and virtuous whites, inspiring thousands of Southern adventurers to cross into Texas to join the fighting. Ultimately Santa Anna's troops were drawn into east Texas, where they were surprised during their siesta by a rebel army led by an Appalachian slave owner, Sam Houston. Santa Anna was captured and, to save his life, agreed to withdraw beyond the Rio Grande. While the war continued for several years, Texas was effectively independent.
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Unfortunately for the
Tejanos
their Appalachian and Deep Southern neighbors had no intention of giving them a place in the new order. Most Americans of English descent had deep-seated prejudices against Latin Americans, dating back to the Spanish monarchy's sixteenth-century crusades to rid the world of Protestants. Mexicans offered an additional affront to Anglo-American norms: most were, in the language of the times, racial “half-breeds”—part European, part Native American—and therefore supposedly degraded and lazy. Such racial mixing was particular offensive to Deep Southerners, but it played badly in Indian-fighting Appalachia as well. Even the moderate Stephen Austin characterized Texans' struggle for independence as “a war of barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race against civilization and the Anglo-American race.”
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Norteño
landowners quickly found themselves strangers in their own country as tens of thousands of additional Appalachian and Deep Southern immigrants poured into the country. (Census records show that Appalachian people settled the north-central tier of the state, while Deep Southerners colonized east Texas, concentrating their slave plantations in the Brazos River valley.) The invaders regarded
norteños
as inferiors and enemies to be dispossessed, just as the Cherokee had been. Over the next decade
norteños
were robbed of their livestock and landholdings by force, threats, and fraud, then relegated to the lower ranks of society. All
norteños
were denied citizenship and property rights unless they could prove they had supported the revolution, while a bill to forbid nonwhites from voting was only narrowly defeated. Even Juan Seguín, hero of the Texas Revolution and the elected mayor of San Antonio, was driven into exile after a local hoodlum claimed he was a Mexican sympathizer. “Some envied my position, as held by a
Mexican
; others found me an obstacle to the accomplishment of their villainous [property-seizing] plans,” Seguín lamented. “I had been tried by a rabble, condemned without a hearing, and consequently was [forced] to provide for my own safety.” He would return to Texas years later to discover that no “Mexican” could rise to a leadership position, and very few retained property.
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In effect the Texas Revolution pushed the northeastern border of El Norte back to its current location: just north of San Antonio and just south of Corpus Christi. Northeast, north-central, and central Texas—areas never really populated by
norteños
—were absorbed into Appalachia, while the northern half of the Gulf Coast was annexed into the Deep South, creating the state's classic divides between Houston and Dallas, the Hill Country and the coastal plain, the Hispanic south and the Anglo-dominated north. The northern panhandle would later emerge as a land apart, settled as it was by Midlanders.
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But the revolution was only the first phase in the rolling back of El Norte's cultural sphere. Pressured by the Deep South and its “Golden Circle” lobby, in 1845 the U.S. Congress took up a bill to grant statehood to the Texas Republic as a slave state. Predictably the vote passed along clear national lines: Yankeedom and the Midlands against; Appalachia, Tidewater, New Netherland, and the Deep South in favor. Mexico refused to recognize the new border, which included disputed territory in the Rio Grande Valley. U.S. forces were dispatched to the area, where they blockaded river access to the undisputedly Mexican city of Matamoros. After the resulting skirmish was disingenuously cast by President James K. Polk (of Appalachia) as “Mexican aggression,” the U.S. House declared war by a vote of 174–14, with all of the dissenters coming from Yankeedom.

As in many future conflicts, opposition to the Mexican-American War was concentrated in Yankeedom, which viewed it as an imperial war of conquest and a betrayal of republican values and pietistic Christian morality. “Who believes that a score of victories over Mexico, the ‘annexation' of half her provinces, will give us more Liberty, a purer Morality, a more prosperous industry, than we now have?” asked one prominent critic, the Yankee-born newspaperman Horace Greeley. “Murder [cannot] be hid from the sight of God by a few flimsy rags called banners.... Awake and arrest the work of butchery ere it shall be too late to preserve your souls from the guilt of wholesale slaughter!” The Massachusetts legislature, for its part, denounced it as a “war against freedom, against humanity, against justice” because it had “the triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening slave power, and of obtaining the control of the Free States.”
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