History of the American Frontier - 1763-1893 by Frederic L. Paxson

History of the American Frontier - 1763-1893 by Frederic L. Paxson

Author:Frederic L. Paxson [Paxson, Frederic L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-11-29T05:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 34

THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF TEXAS

The deliberate attempt of the leaders of the southern political machine to safeguard and conserve the institution of slavery, has been a subject for repeated attack and criticism from northern historians. It was indeed a disturbing element in the politics of the nineteenth century, but it was by no means the only force that tended to give shape to party controversy. The abolitionist historians, and the great learning of Hermann von Holst, gave wide currency to the idea that the settlement of Texas was an organic part of the pro-slavery attempt, and that both the creation and the annexation of Texas were to be regarded as parts of a gigantic conspiracy of slaveholders. Since the publication of the Constitutional History of von Holst, materials have come from the archives of the independent State of Texas that bear a different testimony. The studies of Garrison, Barker, Rives, and Justin H. Smith make it possible to reconstruct the Texas story, and to show it not as a conspiracy but as a normal fragment of the Jacksonian migration.[102] The fact that the land of Texas happened to be owned by a foreign nation no longer conceals the other fact that the social laws determining the extension of the frontier applied to the whole expanse of the western border, south as well as north. The remote consequences of this wave of population are to be found upon social “beaches” in the Upper Mississippi Valley, where Wisconsin and Iowa took shape, and on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, along the line of the Spanish road from San Antonio to Nacogdoches, where Texas became important. Texas and Wisconsin were equally the consequence of the westward movement.

Until about the time of the Mexican revolution in 1821 there was no appreciable pressure of the American agricultural frontier upon the Texas boundary. The northern extension of New Spain bad stopped, so far as its own driving force was concerned, before it reached the Sabine River. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, when Marquette, Joliet, and La Salle were establishing French claims to the Lower Mississippi, the Spanish rulers attempted to make a foothold in the same region. They appreciated that this was to be a frontier of empire. They occupied eastern Texas and established various missions among the Indians, but found it necessary to abandon most of them. At the northwest corner of the State of Louisiana, where the Red and Sabine rivers approach each other, their military frontier established itself de facto. The French built a post at Natchitoches in 1713. The Spanish were entrenched some years earlier than this on the Rio Grande, at San Juan Bautista, near Eagle Pass; and in 1718 they advanced to San Antonio and there constructed a town, a presidio, and a mission. The Spanish road from Eagle Pass, through San Antonio, to the Red River at Natchitoches, became a great highway for the priests and soldiers upon whom Spain relied to hold her empire.



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