The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 27, July 1923 - April, 1924 Page: 118
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118 Southwestern Historical Quarterly
that of a free state must soon be abandoned. The overwhelming
majority of the colonists of Texas, whatever their point of orig-
inal departure, emigrated immediately from slave states. By
strenuous exertions Austin obtained from the federal congress of
Mexico in 1823 reluctant permission for the three hundred fam-
ilies of his first colony to introduce slaves, and when the state con-
stitution prohibited slavery in 1827 he induced the legislature to
pass a law recognizing contracts with indented servants, by which
the constitution was evaded.41 The census of Austin's colony, as
we have just seen, gave a total of 443 slaves in 1825. Eleven
families, with from eleven to ninety slaves, owned 271 of these,
and the remaining 172 were distributed among fifty-eight fam-
ilies, with from one to eight in a family.42 In 1834 an inspector
of the federal government reported a thousand slaves in Austin's
colonies and another thousand in the rest of Texas.43 In 1836
Texas declared its independence of Mexico, and adopted a con-
stitution which legalized slavery. In 1845 the United States
annexed Texas as a slave state, with provision for its ultimate
division into four states.
This chain of events undoubtedly presented plausible ground
for abolitionist suspicion that it was the result of premeditated
scheming. But twenty years of browsing through newspapers,
pamphlets, and manuscripts of the period has discovered but one
contemporary utterance that would indicate consciousness that
Texas might be made to compensate the south for the loss of ter-
ritory north of the Missouri Compromise line.44 That is an edi-
torial remark quoted by John Fiske from the Richmond (Vir-
ginia) Enquirer of March 7, 1820, that southern and western rep-
resentatives "must keep their eyes firmly fixed on Texas; if we
are cooped up on the north, we must have elbow-room to the
"Down to 1830 he thought slavery essential to the development of Texas,
partly because most of the colonists were to be expected from the adjacent
slave states, and partly because the lack of free labor for hire made slaves
indispensable to any capitalistic agriculture.
"Records of General Land Office of Texas, Vol. 54, pp. 8-17.
"J. N. Almonte, Notici Estadistica sobre Tejas, etc., 50, 68.
"Indeed, subtracting from the north the "Great American Desert," as it
then appeared on the map, the disparity of the compromise between the
slave and free sections was not so great as at first glance it now appears.
I am indebted to Professor T. M. Marshall of Washington University for
this suggestion.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 27, July 1923 - April, 1924, periodical, 1924; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101086/m1/124/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.