In the colonial era tens of millions of voluntary and forced immigrants came west from Europe and Africa to the Americas. In the nineteenth century that motion continued as millions of Americans of European background kept going west, often seeking free land on which to farm. Those seeking land for cotton cultivation often brought African American slaves with them or bought slaves the slave traders had marched west in chains. Many Native Americans found themselves pushed into the West as white settlers demanded more and more of their land, especially in the Gulf Coast region. For good or ill, the westward impulse was a major driver in American history. “If hell lay to the west,” a popular saying held, “Americans would cross heaven to get to it.”
The idea that God had opened the American continent for settlers’ prosperity and freedom had deep roots in the colonial era. But in 1845, as Americans debated the annexation of the Republic of Texas, northern newspaper writer John O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny.” Manifest destiny explained why Americans would “overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Thomas Jefferson had expressed hope that the expanding western frontier would create an “Empire of Liberty.” Taking in the millions of acres of farmland encompassed by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Jefferson believed, would secure America’s status as a nation of independent farmers, who were the lifeblood of the republic. When Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark’s expedition into the West, it only stoked many Americans’ fascination with it. In 1811, John Quincy Adams averred that the whole continent was “destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, [and] professing one general system of religious and political principles.”
Many American writers and artists were fascinated with the undeveloped West. Painters associated with the Hudson River school depicted the majesty and fearsomeness of the frontier. Like many American intellectuals, painters such as Thomas Cole were influenced by Romanticism and its idealization of the “sublime,” or the awe-inspiring qualities of nature. Cole’s work such as A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch) often depicted humans dwarfed by an imposing landscape.
Improved transportation and booming cotton increased Americans’ thoughts of moving west and exploiting the commercial and agricultural opportunities there. Canal builders such as New York’s DeWitt Clinton stated that projects like the Erie Canal would “extend the empire of improvement, of knowledge, of refinement and of religion” into America’s frontier regions. The connection between westward expansion and the growth of slavery introduced a divisive question: would the new western states be slave or free? Starting with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the issue of slavery’s future in the West became the most contentious problem in American politics.
Some southern politicians took an expansive view of slavery’s spread. Senator Albert Brown of Mississippi proclaimed in the 1850s that he wanted American slavery to move into Cuba and Mexico (in addition to the parts of Mexico seized by the United States in the Mexican War of the 1840s) and other parts of Central America. “I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.” Brown even wanted to re-legalize slavery in the northern states.
Of course, the American West was hardly an empty wilderness. Hundreds of thousands of Indians still lived west of the Mississippi River during the antebellum era. As white settlement moved onto the frontier, it precipitated more cycles of disease, conflict, and displacement among Native Americans. Some tribes were already too weakened to put up much of an organized resistance. Others such as the Comanches set the terms of interaction with both Americans and with neighboring Indian groups. As Spaniards had moved into the Texas interior in the mid-eighteenth century, they discovered that Comanche power held them in check. Comanches destroyed Mission San Saba, northeast of San Antonio, in 1758. When the Spanish attempted to punish the Comanches by sending a campaign into northern Texas the next year, they suffered another humiliating defeat by the Comanches. After that the Spanish concluded that fighting the Comanches was largely fruitless and they needed to pursue treaties with them instead.
Spanish settlement in Texas had always proceeded more slowly than in New Mexico, in any case. In 1790, just over 2,500 people of Hispanic background lived in Texas. Spain found it increasingly difficult to govern the native-born Spanish population of Mexico, and in 1821, Spain abandoned the country and acknowledged Mexican independence. Much of what would become the American Southwest, from Texas to California, now formed the northern regions of the independent Mexican nation.
Upon Mexican independence, Anglo settlers began pouring into Texas. The Mexican government sometimes encouraged this, hoping to make the area more stable and to form a buffer against Comanche power. But Mexican authorities wished for the Anglo settlers to adhere, at least in name, to Catholicism, the official religion of the nation. Protestant settlers were often fiercely anti-Catholic. Many of them scoffed at this expectation of accepting Catholicism. Other European settlers in Texas were already Catholic, or quietly agreed to practice the Catholic faith while there. Baptist and Methodist itinerants followed the tide of immigrants, however, and in the early 1830s, Protestant churches appeared in Texas.
Another source of concern in Texas was slavery. Mexico frowned on the institution, but many of the Anglo settlers came to southeast Texas to farm cotton, and they brought slaves with them. By 1834, some 15,000 white US immigrants were living in Texas, plus a couple of thousand African American slaves. The Hispanic Mexican population of Texas stood at about 4,000.
Texas was being overrun by Americans, and the unnerved Mexican government tried to suspend white immigration starting in the early 1830s. But they kept coming into Texas and all of northern Mexico. (One historian has noted that these Anglo settlers were the “illegal immigrants” of the time.) A Mexican governor complained that the nation was “threatened by hordes of Yankee immigrants . . . whose progress we cannot resist.” Growing fear that Mexico would seek to emancipate the “Texians’” slaves fueled a secessionist movement, which envisioned declaring an independent Texas republic.
Texians reacted badly to the authoritarian rule of Mexican general and president Antonio López de Santa Anna, positioning themselves as patriots in a new American revolution against tyrannical government. But as with the American Revolution, the Texas Revolution was connected to the institution of slavery. Former president John Quincy Adams lamented that when Texas and Mexico came to blows, “the flags of liberty will be those of Mexico, and ours, I blush to say so, the flags of slavery!” When war with Mexico started in late 1835, hundreds of slaves tried to rise up against their Texian masters, but the slave revolt was crushed. Some free blacks sided with the Texians, however, and white masters used slaves in the war effort against Mexico.
The Texian rebels captured San Antonio in late 1835, and General Santa Anna took personal responsibility for taking it back. He was met by 187 Texians, many of them recent arrivals to Texas from South Carolina and other southern states, who defended San Antonio at the old mission called the Alamo. Among the defenders was former congressman and Tennessee backwoodsman Davy Crockett. (Crockett now dressed as a gentleman and preferred to be called David rather than Davy.) On March 6, 1836, Santa Anna overwhelmed the Alamo with a fierce artillery assault and ten times more soldiers than the Texians. The general denied quarter to the handful of Texians not killed in the battle and had the prisoners slashed to death with swords. Reports held that Crockett was among those murdered. The tragedy of the Alamo immediately passed into the annals of military epic and Texas lore. Santa Anna soon furthered his campaign of terror by ordering the execution of hundreds more Texians captured at Goliad, Texas, later in March 1836.
Texas declared independence from Mexico shortly before the assault on the Alamo, and the new constitution of the Republic of Texas was similar to the US Constitution, with the addition of a transparent commitment to slavery. David G. Burnet became the republic’s first president. To balance power between Anglos and Hispanics, Lorenzo de Závala was chosen as vice president. But newer Texian settlers tended to distrust all Hispanics, and they viewed the Texas Revolution as designed to ensure white rule and legal slavery in the new republic.
After the Alamo and Goliad, Sam Houston became the commander of the Texian army. Houston was a former governor of Tennessee and an ally of Andrew Jackson. Houston drew Santa Anna into southeast Texas, engaging the Mexican army on favorable ground at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, outside of the present city of Houston, founded later that year. The angry Texians devastated the strung-out Mexican army, shouting “Remember the Alamo!” as they assaulted Santa Anna’s forces. The Texians undoubtedly killed many who were trying to surrender, but they also took 700 prisoners. Among them was Santa Anna himself. Santa Anna agreed to remove the Mexican army from Texas, withdrawing south of the Rio Grande. (The southern border of Texas had traditionally been at the Nueces River, 150 miles farther north than the Rio Grande.) The Texians rejoiced, believing that this signaled Mexican recognition of the independent Texas Republic. In late 1836, Sam Houston won an overwhelming electoral victory to become the new president of the republic. The United States officially acknowledged Texan independence on the last day of Andrew Jackson’s presidency in 1837. The annexation of Texas by the United States had to wait, however. It was a politically delicate issue, as northern opponents argued that Texas was the cornerstone of a broader southern plan to expand slavery into the West.
Not all was well in Texas, either, as Mexican authorities denied Texas’s independence. Mexico and the Texians engaged in intermittent violence for much of the republic’s short existence. White settlers in Texas found that the Mexican army was not the only threat with which they had to contend. One of the worst episodes of violence between civilian Anglos and Comanches in Texas came a month after the Battle of San Jacinto. A group of Primitive Baptists (who taught a strict version of Calvinism and opposed national missionary societies) had established a settlement near the Navasota River in central Texas. There the Primitive Baptists, led by members of the extended Parker family, built one of the first Protestant churches in Texas. They also built a fort to defend against Indian attacks, but when the Comanches assaulted the fort on May 19, 1836, the Indians found it largely undefended. They killed several of the whites and took captives.
Most famously, the Comanches stole away nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, who lived for years among the Comanches and married a Comanche man. Texas Rangers recaptured her and returned her to white society decades later, in 1860. Her sefs in the Comanches’ history. In the 1870s, Parker would finally agree to take his Quahada Comanches, the last holdout Comanche faction, to a reservation in Oklahoma. The quest to find Cynthia Ann Parker and return her to her white family became the basis of the 1956 John Wayne movie The Searchers, which many regard as one of the finest American western films ever made.
Written by Thomas S. Kidd in "American History 1492 to Present, B & H Publishers, USA, 2019. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.