The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 6, July 1902 - April, 1903 Page: 150
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150 Texas Historical Association Quarterly.
this undertaking that during the five years following 1825 grants
were made to a dozen or more individuals, each of whom contracted
to settle from two hundred to eight hundred families. And, though
none of these empresarios save Austin quite fulfilled his contract,
the number of immigrants introduced by 1830 reached perhaps
20,000.1 After that date Mexico became alarmed for her province,
and sought to discourage immigration, but despite her efforts the
Anglo-American population rapidly increased. But in Mexico,
where a system of peonage obtained which allowed employers all the
conveniences with none of the attendant disadvantages and odium
of slave-holding, sentiment opposed slavery. A decree of the con-
stituent congress, issued July 13, 1824, prohibited the slave trade,
domestic or foreign, in the most emphatic terms, and the constitu-
tion of Coahuila and Texas, promulgated in 1827, forbade, after
six months, the further introduction of slaves into its territory,
and provided for the general emancipation of those already in.
The Mexicans objected to the name rather than the institution,
however, and when immigrants devised the ingenious scheme of
converting their blacks into servants indented for life, the Legis-
lature gave the subterfuge legal sanction.2 And when President
Guerrero, in 1829, by virtue of the extraordinary power with which
he had been invested issued a decree emancipating the slaves
throughout the republic, he made special exception of those in
Texas."
Indeed, under some name, negro slavery, it may be said, was ab-
solutely essential to the development of Texas. The land was a
wilderness upon which single laborers could make but hopelessly
little impression, and free labor was not available, even had the col-
onists possessed the money to pay for it. Moreover, the most fertile
soil lay in the bottoms of the Brazos, Colorado, and Trinity--
where, to this day, the virulent malaria necessitates almost exclu-
sive use of negro labor-and thus another argument, if such were
needed, was furnished for the use of slaves. Even such men as
Stephen F. Austin, who were personally opposed to the institution,
recognized and bowed to the necessity.
It is not surprising, therefore, that a few of the colonists with
1Bancroft, North Mexican States and Texas, II 76.
'Laws and Decrees of Coahuila and Texas, 103.
8Political Science Quarterly, XIII 655-656.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 6, July 1902 - April, 1903, periodical, 1903; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101028/m1/154/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.