GELO Assignment, Option 3 Topic: Texas Independence & Slavery Topic: Manifest Destiny:

GELO Assignment, Option 3

Topic: Texas Independence & Slavery

Topic: Manifest Destiny: The three sources below provide information relevant to the role of slavery in Texas and the reason for Texas independence and the later U.S. annexation of Texas. Be sure to review the part of our Western Expansion & Civil War lesson on Texas before working on this assignment. Note that the historical context (what is the lesson) will help you to place the following sources in context.

As you move through the sources, understand the author’s perspective. How did the author’s perspective influence what he said regarding Texas independence (and later annexation) and slavery? How do the sources below show that the expansion west helped to raise the issue of slavery?

Source: Santa Anna to Ministry of War, February 16, 1836

Background: Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821. During that same decade, Anglo-Americans had moved into Texas (and had brought their slaves with them). At the end of the decade, in 1829, Mexico abolished slavery. Stephen Austin, a leader of the Anglo-Texans, went to Mexico City and gained an exemption for Texas. (Mexico wanted to end slavery but did not want Texas to rebel. Mexico was already concerned about the number of Anglo-Americans that had moved into the area by then.) The question over slavery continued, however, and Texans feared that Mexico would outlaw it in Texas again. This was a leading reason for the Texas Revolution. (Although it sounds bad, so the myth of the Alamo has continued in America rather than the emphasize the role of slavery.) Santa Ana, was then President of Mexico. In 1830, he had repealed the 1824 Constitution. In this 1836 letter to his Ministry of War, Santa Ana denounced Texans who continue to bring slaves into the region, and who circumvent Mexican law by calling slaves apprentices.

The Source Itself: …There is a considerable number of slaves in Texas also, who have been introduced by their masters under cover of certain questionable contracts, but who according to our laws should be free. Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose kind laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of cast or color?

…Greater still is the astonishment of the civilized world to see the United States maintain the institution of slavery with its cruel laws to support it and propagate it, at a time when the other nations of the world have agreed to cooperate in the philanthropic enterprise of eradicating this blot and shame of the human race. Don Lorenzo de Zavala in his Trip to the United States, a work which he seems to have written to laud them to the stars while depreciating his country to the lowest depths, at a time when perhaps he was already meditating his dark treason, cannot resist the natural instinct of repulsion inspired by the contrast of the humane and truly liberal policy of Mexico and the cruel and sanguinary one of the United States in regard to the slaves. “In crossing from the Mexican Republic to the states of our sister Republic,” says Zavala, “the philosopher cannot help but feel the contrast presented by the two countries, nor can he fail to experience a grateful feeling for those who abolished this degrading traffic in human flesh, removing from our midst every vestige of so humiliating a spectacle of misery.” As a matter of fact, without having proclaimed as pompously as the United States the rights of man, we have respected them better by abolishing all distinctions of class or race and considering as our brothers all creatures created by our common father. The land speculators of Texas have tried to convert it into a mart of human flesh where the slaves of the south might be sold and others from Africa might be introduced, since it is not possible to do it directly through the United States. “It seems,” says Mrs. Trollope, “that it is a general and deep-rooted opinion throughout the United States that the black race cannot be trusted. According to the prevailing opinion of the country, fear is the only force that moves a slave. It is not strange, therefore, that these poor wretches should act in keeping with such a policy.” This mutual distrust, this reciprocal fear between master and slave will some day result in the freedom of more than three million men, a fact to which the thinking men of the neighboring republic are not blind….. What will be the course followed by the United States? To maintain and encourage this institution as long as possible and when the fatal hour of destiny arrives which is to destroy this tyrannous and opprobrious system, to treat them as the Indians, driving them into Mexican territory also…. It is upon Texas and perhaps upon New Mexico and the two Californias that the anxious eyes of those who even now are giving their attention to the future destinies of the colored race rest. As in the United States nothing is done without a preconceived plan, and since everybody works by common accord as if by an admirable instinct for the realization of the ends pursued, it is incredible that the slow working out of the means by which some day certain difficulties whose transcendental importance has been fully realized will be solved should have been ignored in their reckoning. Thus we see the concurrence of an infinite number of interests of the United States converging for the stimulation of their policy of expansion…..

Copyright 2016 Digital History

Source: Benjamin Lundy, The War in Texas (Philadelphia, 1836).

Background: Lundy, a New Jersey born Quaker, helped popularize the thesis that the Slave Power, a group consisting the nation’s largest slaveholders, fomented revolution in Texas to seize fresh lands for slavery.

The Source Itself: …The prime cause, and the real objects of this war [the Texas Revolution], are not distinctly understood by a large portion of the honest, disinterested, and well-meaning citizens of the United States…. They have been induced to believe that the inhabitants of Texas were engaged in a legitimate contest for the maintenance of the sacred principles of Liberty, and the natural, inalienable Rights of Man: –whereas, the motives of its instigators, and their chief incentives to action, have been, from the commencement, of a directly opposite character and tendency…to wrest the large and valuable territory of Texas from the Mexican Republic, in order to re-establish the SYSTEM OF SLAVERY; to open a vast and profitable SLAVE-MARKET therein; and, ultimately, to annex it to the United States…. The Slaveholding Interest is now paramount in the Executive branch of our national government….

Copyright 2016 Digital History

Source: John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Volume 17 (New York: 1845), 5-6, 9-10.

Background: American political leaders wanted to avoid annexing Texas (which had requested to join the United States). Their reasoning was that they wanted to avoid the controversy over allowing Texas in as a slave state. (The goal was to keep the balance of power between free and slave states within the U.S. government.) John Louis O’Sullivan, a popular editor and columnist, articulated the long-standing American belief in the God-given mission of the United States to lead the world in the transition to democracy. He called this America’s “manifest destiny.” This idea motivated wars of American expansion. He explained this idea in the following essay where he advocated adding Texas to the United States.

The Source Itself:
It is time now for opposition to the Annexation of Texas to cease, all further agitation of the waters of bitterness and strife, at least in connexion with this question . . . It is time for the common duty of Patriotism to the Country to succeed;— if this claim will not be recognized, it is at least time for common sense to acquiesce with decent grace in the inevitable and the irrevocable.

Texas is now ours. Already, before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; and made the requisite changes in her already republican form of constitution to adopt it to its future federal relations. Her star and her stripe may already be said to have taken their place in the glorious blazon of our common nationality; and the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land. . . .

Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. This we have seen done by England, our old rival and enemy; and by France, strangely coupled with her against us. . . .

It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous— military conquest under forms of peace and law— territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice, and justice due by a double sanctity to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded, and has been before so amply refuted in these pages, as well as in a thousand other modes, that we shall not again dwell upon it. The independence of Texas was complete and absolute. It was an independence, not only in fact but of right. No obligation of duty towards Mexico tended in the least degree to restrain our right to effect the desired recovery of the fair province once our own— motives of policy might have prompted a more deferential consideration of her feelings and her pride, as involved in the question. If Texas became peopled with an American population, it was by no contrivance of our government, but on the express invitation of that of Mexico herself; accompanied with such guaranties of State independence, and the maintenance of a federal system analogous to our own, as constituted a compact fully justifying the strongest measures of redress on the part of those afterwards deceived in this guaranty, and sought to be enslaved under the yoke imposed by its violation. She was released, rightfully and absolutely released, from all Mexican allegiance, or duty of cohesion to the Mexican political body, by the acts and fault of Mexico herself, and Mexico alone. There never was a clearer case. . . .

Nor is there any just foundation for the charge that Annexation is a great pro-slavery measure— to increase and perpetuate that institution. Slavery had nothing to do with it. Opinions were and are greatly divided, both at the North and South, as to the influence to be exerted by it on Slavery and the Slave States. That it will tend to facilitate and hasten the disappearance of Slavery from all the northern tier of the present Slave States, cannot surely admit of serious question. The greater value in Texas of the slave labor now employed in those States, must soon produce the effect of draining off that labor southwardly, by the same unvarying law that bids water descend the slope that invites it. Every new Slave State in Texas will make at least one Free State from among those in which that institution now exists— say nothing of those portions of Texas on which slavery cannot spring and grow— say nothing of the far more rapid growth of new States in the free West and Northwest, as these fine regions are overspread by the emigration fast flowing over them from Europe, as well as from the Northern and Eastern States of the Union as it exists. On the other hand, it is undeniably much gained for the cause of the eventual voluntary abolition of slavery, that it should have been thus drained off towards the only outlet which appeared to furnish much probability of it the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders. The Spanish-Indian-American populations of Mexico, Central America and South America, afford the only receptacle capable of absorbing that race whenever we shall be prepared to slough it off— emancipate it from slavery, and (simultaneously necessary) to remove it from the midst of our own. Themselves already of mixed and confused blood, and free from the “prejudices” which among us so insuperably forbid the social amalgamation which can alone elevate the Negro race out of a virtually servile degradation even though legally free, the regions occupied by those populations must strongly attract the black race in that direction; and as soon as the destined hour of emancipation shall arrive, will relieve the question of one of its worst difficulties, if not absolutely the greatest.