Howdy, Texas

Say the word “Texas”, and what pops into everyone’s minds are cowboys, the desert, oil riches, big-everything (even by American standards), country music, and of course, the famous Texan drawl and slang (Howdy, pardner?).

 

While Texas may be synonymous with America for many around the world, once upon a time, Texas was a part of Mexico. This interesting snippet from a book says that as the global demand for cotton in the 1820’s and 30’s spiked, Texas “became part of the mad rush to grow cotton”. Soil conditions and climate aside, Texas was also located close to the hugely important port of New Orleans.

“But growing cotton meant slaves, and slavery was illegal in Mexico, so the Americans that had gone to Texas to grow cotton made herculean efforts to ignore or circumvent the Mexican slavery ban.”

After all, without slaves, “Anglo Texas” was doomed.

 

With Mexico not budging on its stance of the illegality of slavery, Anglo Texas did what anyone in an equivalent situation has done throughout history: rename whatever you do to something else. A slave thus became an “indentured servant”:

“Each incoming slave would be forced to sign an employment contract with his owner. The slave would be paid twenty dollars a year, and in return could buy his freedom for $1,200, i.e., after sixty years. The catch was, the slave would also be charged for food and housing, making emancipation all but impossible.”

 

Some skulduggery later, that legislation was passed by the Mexican side:

“The Texas slavery problem had been solved.”

Or had it? To the Americans on the other side of the border, the move was “too clever”, “too risky”. They demanded guarantees that the Mexican government wouldn’t free the slaves. After all:

“(At any minute) some Mexican politician was pushing another law to ban slavery.”

Thus, Texas didn’t get the flood of American investors that it had expected. Things reached a climax when the Mexican President grabbed emergency powers to fend off a Spanish invasion attempt and promptly:

“He used them (emergency powers) to announce that all slaves in Mexico were to be freed.”

Anglo Texans went into a tizzy. After all:

“(Anglo Texas) was formed for slavery, and without it her inhabi­tants would be nothing.”

Not surprisingly, Texas launched an insurrection, and eventually joined the US.

 

Obnoxious while it was, this episode explains the American South’s attitude towards blacks even today. Since a lot of the South depended on cotton cultivation, all those states needed slaves. No wonder then that Abraham Lincoln’s decision to remove slavery set off a North-South Civil War in the US…