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©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... The Limits of Liberty:

African Americans, Indians, and Peons in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1820-1860

A Dissertation Presented

James David Nichols

The Graduate School

in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

History

Stony Brook University

May 2012

James David Nichols

We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation.

April F. Masten – Dissertation Advisor Assistant Professor, History, Stony Brook University

Paul Gootenberg - Chairperson of Defense Professor, History, Stony Brook University

Kathleen Wilson Professor, History, Stony Brook University

Karl Jacoby Professor, History, Brown University

This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School

Charles Taber Interim Dean of the Graduate School

ii Abstract of the Dissertation

The Limits of Liberty:

African Americans, Indians, and Peons in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1820-1860

James David Nichols

Doctor of Philosophy

History

Stony Brook University

2012

In the decades surrounding the U.S.-Mexico war, the borderlands of Texas and Northeastern Mexico teemed with mobile peoples crossing to the other side in search of better working and living conditions. While these migrants authored virtually no written sources, they left their mark in other ways. They employed one of the few resources available to them—mobility—to pioneer alternative routes across the borderlands. Runaway slaves who sought freedom in Mexico, Mexican indebted laborers who sought liberal working conditions in Texas, and Native Americans who hoped to assert their cultural autonomy blazed routes across the Rio Grande/Bravo. But once they reached their destinations, the insecurity of conditions on the ground put very real limits on their liberty. For one thing, in the absence of more regular diplomatic options, Texan regulars and volunteers kept up constant military pressure on Mexico to return runaway slaves and punish errant Indians. For another, the poverty of the Mexican frontier and the inability of commanders to meet the challenges of the Texans and the needs of the migrants added to the insecurity. Meanwhile, Native tribes who immigrated to Mexico found that the inhabitants of the Mexican North thought of them no differently than the Comanches with whom they were at war. The situation was not much improved for the migrants who charted the opposite trajectory, escaping debt peonage in Mexico to find more liberal working conditions in Texas. Mexicans who failed to replicate the racism of West Texas often found their lives hemmed in by violence. Most threatening of all to these people “in-between,” however, was the prospect of international cooperation between the United States and Mexico, both of whom sought to assert their sovereignty over the borderlands in the 1850s. Nevertheless, mobile peoples forced Northern Mexican officials to take a stand against slavery and racism, and the experience of peons in Texas nudged Mexicans towards embracing free labor. In the final analysis, border-crossers had a significant impact not only on the meaning of the borderlands, but also on the understanding that Northern Mexicans and Texans had of themselves, their societies, and their respective nations.

iii Dedicated to my father, James Allen Nichols

iv Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………..…………………...... ……1

I. “Impatient for the Promised Freedom”: Runaway Slaves in the West Texas Borderlands……………………………………………….……………..………...…20 II. “A Great System of Roaming”: Runaway Peons in the West Texas Borderlands………………………………………………………………..…………60 III. “Under the Ample Protection of the Law”: Afronorteamericanos in the Texas- Tamaulipas Borderlands……...…………………………………...……..…………106 IV. “Semi-Civilizados”: Immigrant Tribes in the Texas-Coahuila Borderlands……………………………………………………………..…..………145 V. “A Pretty Respectable African Colony”: Violence in the borderlands of Slavery and Freedom………………………………………………..……………………...……188 VI. “Entre Las Fronteras de Ambos Países”: War and Peace in Lipan Apachería…….233 Conclusion……………………………………………………….…………………282 Bibliography………………………………………………………..………………302

v List of Figures

West Texas in 1851…………………………………………...………..………………...... ……20

Ben Kinchelow, May 22, 1937……………………………………..…………….…...... ……132

The Texas-Mexico Borderlands before 1848………………………....………………...... ……233

vi List of Abbreviations

AGN Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City. AGEC Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila, Saltillo, Coahuila. FSXIX AGEC Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila Fondo Siglo XIX [Satillo, Coahuila] AMG AGEC Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila Fondo Archivo Municipal Guerrero FCMO AGEC Fondo Colonias Militares Orientales SEDNA Archivo de la Secretaría de Defensa Nacional SRE Archivo de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City LE SRE Archivo de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriories Fondo Legajo Encauderno AEMEUA SRE Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo de la Embajada Mexicana en los Estados Unidos de América AHMAT Archivo Historico de Matamoros, Tamaulipas AMS Archivo Municipal Saltillo, Coahuila AGENL Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, Monterrey CAH Center for American History, Austin Texas WPW CAH Walter Prescott Webb papers TIP Texas Indian Papers TSA Texas State Archives NAW National Archives Washington, microfilm (consulted at Colegio de México) L legajo E expediente C caja F and fs. foja

vii Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without an army of supporters, well- wishers, friends, and sympathizers. First of all, my entire graduate career would have come to naught without the intellectual guidance of my committee members at Stony Brook University. I thank Professor Kathleen Wilson for helping me think hard about issues of freedom and slavery.

After taking her seminars, I will never be able to see identity as something stable or whole ever again. Professor Paul Gootenberg, meanwhile, introduced me to the entire world of Latin

American history and social sciences, and for that I am eternally indebted. As a fellow audiophile, he has also hipped me in the arcane art of turntablism. Finally, Professor April

Masten is the person most responsible for my intellectual development over the past decade. Not only has she awakened me to the social responsibility that historians share with their subjects, she has ignited in me a passion for 19th century history. I am fortunate to count her as both a mentor and a friend. I would also like to acknowledge the enormous impact that a class on the

“Age of the U.S.-Mexico” war taken with Professor Walter Johnson at New York University had on my thinking. And finally, I owe much in my scholarship about borderlands to both the writing and personal guidance of Professor Karl Jacoby—who was also kind enough to serve as my outside reader for the dissertation.

Of course, scholarly and emotional support alone cannot sustain an extensive research trip. An International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research

Council made this work possible financially. I would not have completed my dissertation without this grant. It afforded me the rare luxury for a graduate student of having nothing to do except research and think for an entire year—and in a wonderful host country to boot.

viii The generosity of the SSRC got me to Mexico, and once there I had the invaluable assistance of a number of scholars. These included Carlos Manuel Valdés and Francisco

Rodríguez in Saltillo, Luís García in Monterrey, and Gerald Gurza and Paulina del Moral in

Mexico City. Cyrilla Quintero in Matamoros, meanwhile, was immensely helpful in getting me acquainted with that town. Most importantly, my affiliation at Colegio de México immersed me in the intellectual life of that great city. A meeting with Josefina Vásquez led me to a number of sources and got me into the tightly-guarded Archivo de la Secretaría de Defensa Nacional.

Finally, I will be eternally grateful to my advisor in Mexico, Dr. Clara Lida, for her support and for introducing me to the charms of San Ángel.

In addition to my institutional guidance, I would also like to acknowledge the friendly and knowledgeable archival and library staffs whom I encountered in Texas. I am also obliged to the Texas State Historical Association for partially funding my work. I began my research at the

Center for American History at the University of Texas on a John H. Jenkins Research Grant.

Three years later, I finished my work there with a William and Madeline Smith Travel Award, which funded a month long stay in the city of Austin.

Archival and library staffs in Mexico likewise lent me vital assistance. In Mexico City, the staff at Archivo General de la Nación always made me feel welcome. I am also forever indebted to Stony Brook’s own Froylan Enciso, who guided me to a number of boxes at the

Archivo de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores that had not seen the light of day in decades. In

Monterrey, my research was helped along greatly by the curator and baseball aficionado,

Artemio Benavides. In Saltillo, the staff at the Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila was the most helpful and friendly I encountered in a country renowned for its hospitality. In Monterrey, I

ix thank the Martínez-Tortella family for allowing me to stay with them. In Saltillo, Martha, Victor, and Marijo Linares were lovely hosts.

Finally, I acknowledge the most important support I received. I could have done nothing without the encouragement of my mom, my dad, and my wife Lilla, who accompanied me to

Mexico and did her best never to let my spirits flag. She is my soul mate. I am most thankful for and to her and Alma—who may be too small to understand what this dissertation is about, but is my heart.

x Introduction

On October 1, 1855 Texas Ranger Captains James Callahan of Blanco, William Henry of

San Antonio, and Nat Benton of Seguin arrived at the border in search of Apaches and runaway slaves. The citizens of Eagle Pass welcomed them. Like many in West Texas they had suffered as a result of Lipan Apache depredations, so they cheered the captains whom they hoped would go into Mexico to destroy the Lipan camp. If the filibusterers caught some runaway slaves while they were there, so much the better. But the attitude of the vecinos (citizens) of Piedras Negras,

Mexico, just across the river from Eagle Pass was quite different. Although the vecinos owed their existence largely to commerce with the nearby establishments in Texas—Piedras Negras had sprung up in no small part to provide the new forts along the border with itinerant laborers— they greatly feared the Rangers. They knew that Mexicans would bear the brunt of any raid into their territory. Callahan and the other captains had two hundred wooly veterans of West Texas in tow ready to chase after the Lipans. The gathering Texans sat within plain sight of Piedras

Negras across the river, waiting for the signal to cross.1

Before he crossed, Captain Callahan gathered together the citizens of Eagle Pass. He read off a litany of complaints against the Lipan Apaches to justify his imminent filibuster, but he saved some of his fiercest vitriol for the nation of Mexico, which had given the Lipans shelter.

He told the gathering crowd that he did not intend to rest until he had exterminated all of the warriors in that band of “savages,” and he would do this whether the Mexicans approved his

1 J. Hubley Ashton, Counsel of the United States, Piedras Negras Claims in the American and Mexican Joint

1 course of action or not. 2 Callahan and his subordinates received the blessing of the Texans. Later, he even claimed to have gained the permission of the alcalde (mayor) of Piedras Negras and the vecinos of the District of the Rio Grande to cross over into Mexico.3 This claim was most likely false. There was very little love lost between Mexicans in the North and Apaches, but they rarely made common cause with the Texans. It would later come to light that Callahan had negotiated a potential extradition deal with a colonel in Mexico before the filibuster, but he could not count on the support of most vecinos.

On the 5th of October, the vecinos of Piedras Negras looked on as the filibusterers crossed over into sovereign Mexican territory. Callahan, Henry, and Benton rallied their men and then rode off in the direction of the dusty little town of San Fernando twenty miles or so to the southwest, where runaway slaves and renegade Indians escaping Texas had taken up residence.

The men mustered into service, who came from the western Texan counties of Comal, Heys,

Guadalupe, and Bexar, were familiar with the paths that runaways and renegade Indians had blazed across West Texas to Mexico. Since their region had suffered unduly from recent Lipan

Apache violence, they were bent on revenge against the Indians and their protectors.4

Furthermore, the westernmost settled counties of Texas had been losing slaves in droves to

Mexico. Hence, these men were not just along for the adventure against their old Lipan rivals.

They did not say so explicitly, but they likely intended to punctuate their punishment of the

Lipan camp with a slave raid on the camps that African Americans and black Indians had established at Nacimiento, just outside of San Fernando.

2 Galveston Weekly, October 17, 1855. 3 On slave-hunting in the Callahan Raid see Ernest C. Shearer, “The Callahan Expedition, 1855,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 54 (October, 1951), 430-451 and Ronnie C. Tyler, “The Callahan Expedition of 1855: Indians or Negroes?” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 70 (April, 1967), 574-585. 4 Governor Pease to James Callahan, July 5, 1855, Vol. 2, Correspondence Concerning the Texas Rangers, 1851- 1856, WPW CAH.

2 Fortunately for the African American and Indian migrants to Mexico, the filibusterers never made it to San Fernando. Soon after they left Piedras Negras, a Mexican army assembled by the new caudillo of Nuevo León, Santiago Vidaurri, met the Texas volunteers on the field of battle. The Mexican force comprised a motley lot of two hundred men: regular soldiers, volunteer vecinos from the nearby towns, Seminole Indians, and even a few Lipan Apaches and

African Americans.5 These men stood to lose the most if Texan filibusterers were allowed to call the shots in the borderlands. So not suprisingly, they roundly defeated the Texans after backing them up against a local gulch known as the Rio Escondido.

After their defeat, Callahan’s forces retreated to Piedras Negras and waited for the swollen river to recede, meanwhile the Mexican forces restocked their ammunition. While the

Texans waited, they looted, and when military detachments under Evaristo Madero and Miguel

Patiño began to catch up to them, the Texans set fire to the town to cover their retreat. The vecinos of Piedras Negras watched the tragedy unfold from the safety of the nearby cliffs. They saw plumes of smoke and heard the sound of a cannonade; the artillery at nearby Fort Duncan was helping cover the filibusterers’ retreat. The blaze consumed Piedras Negras and destroyed the possessions of every vecino in that town. Among those who lost everything in the fire were impoverished vecinos, including Mexican cartmen who lost the tools of their trade and a mulatto fiddler named Pedro Tauns who later served as star witness in the claims made against the U.S. government. So great was the damage that when the town was rebuilt a few years later its vecinos moved the whole settlement a couple of klicks down the river. 6 Regrettably, the border

5 Emilio Langberg to the Bejareño, San Antonio, October 19, 1855, C 117, Militares AGENL. 6 Paper given by Francisco Javier Rodríguez Gutiérrez, “Algunos documentales para la historia de la funcación de Piedras Negras, 1848-1855,” 14-15, in possession of author.

3 was a peripheral concern to both the Mexican and U.S. federal governments. The vecinos would have to wait twenty years for the joint boundary commission of 1873 to address their claims.7

In the meantime, the townspeople of Piedras Negras and other small pueblos that dotted the Mexican frontier were on their own. Vecinos would continue countering illegal raids and threats from Texans who hoped to bend the borderlands to their will. Only these citizens stood between refugees in Mexico and the volunteers from Texas who were trying to exert control over a borderland that runaway slaves, peons, and renegade Indians had turned to their own advantage.

The filibusterers almost certainly saw themselves as regulators who brought the rule of law to a poorly-policed frontier zone. But their efforts would be constantly frustrated by a coalition that has as of yet received little historical attention.

Mobile Peoples and Borderlands

It is the point of this dissertation to illustrate how mobile peoples put the borderlands to a variety of liberty-related uses and drove its history both before and after the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo set the international boundary at the Rio Grande/Bravo in 1848. Time and history have muted the voices of these mostly unlettered historical actors, but even the most familiar of contemporary accounts reveal their presence if we look for them.8 My work confirms the importance of “unauthorized” migrants in shaping the history of the borderlands in the early to mid-nineteenth century, if not also beyond. It draws upon a vast array of archival sources—from

Mexico City, Monterrey, Saltillo, Matamoros, Austin, and San Antonio—to compose a narrative of the lower Rio Grande/Bravo that makes the role of mobile peoples central. Using hundreds of

7 Ashely, 1, 31, 13; Emilio Langberg, Piedras Negras, to Secretary of the governor, Monterrey, October 8, 1855, f. 17, C3 E5, Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasion de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE; El Siglo XIX (Mexico City), November 12, 1855. 8 See, for instance, Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas, Of, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier: with a Statistical Index (New York: Dix, Edwards, and Company, 1857).

4 handwritten archival sources, newspapers, and missives fired off from one minor frontier official to another, it pieces together the historical trajectory of the Indians, African Americans, and peons whose lives were defined by mobility across the borderlands. My research recovers the experiences of these people who subverted dominant meanings that Texans and Mexicans assigned to the international border, turning it instead into a gateway to freedom and refuge.

Migrants of all sorts employed the tact of mobility across borders to exert control over their labor and life opportunities. It turns out that there were many such “mobile peoples” (as I most commonly refer to unauthorized migrants in the dissertation). African Americans escaping bondage in Texas and Indian Territory, Immigrant Tribesmen and women, wandering nomads, and migrant Mexican labors all sought to press this new border into their service and find—as one runaway slave described it to a Mexican official—a country where they could “acquire liberty.” 9 They used the border for leverage in a way that administrators and bureaucrats had probably not foreseen, turning this most stable of borderland institutions to their own advantage.

During the course of my research, I was surprised to see just how important these migrants were to history along the border in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Mexicans and North Americans alike blamed each other for the problems they had retaining laborers and disciplining Indians in the borderlands. They were both convinced that the other side was deftly manipulating mobile peoples in a covert war against them. Their refusal to recognize the agency of migrants resulted in a war of both words and deeds—a “guerra sorda”

(or cold war) as one astute Mexican colonel called it.10 Historian Brian has blamed the U.S.-

Mexico war on a similar misunderstanding—but this dirty little war in the borderlands I discuss had roots reaching back even further into the 1820s, and it extended well beyond the Treaty of

9 Gaceta del Gobierno de Tamaulipas, June 26, 1841 (Rafael de la Fuente to governor of department Monclova, May 5, 1841) [In Archivo Histórico Matamoros, Hemeroteca Caja 1]. 10 Emilio Langberg to Santiago Vidaurri, August 16, 1855, Vidaurri Correspondence, AGENL.

5 Guadalupe Hidalgo.11 During these years, Mexicans and Texans alike travelled through both official and unofficial channels in a vain attempt to dam up this human flood of laborers and

Indians. But in the end neither side could close up the frontier the way they would have liked to.

A little-known war resulted.

A more sobering reality my research helped me uncover was the fact that mobility did not equate into agency for mobile peoples. Hence, this dissertation is not just a story of unfettered freedom for people escaping repression—far from it. Rather, mobile peoples maneuvered between a set of historical blocs that existed along the border in search of the least bad option.

Although I am careful not to denigrate the meaning of liberty that refugees and migrants associated with the border, I did not find that Mexico was simply a “free country.” Instead, I recognize the danger that refugees faced when they used mobility to pursue greater opportunity.

There were very real limits to the liberty that migrants sought out on the other side, and I recuperate a great number of bitter experiences in the dissertation. African Americans found that, due to Texan filibusterers and apathy on the part of many vecinos, their lives were not particularly secure in Mexico; peons found themselves subject to discrimination from Tejanos and Texans alike who could not quite consider lower-class Mexicans white; Immigrant tribesmen and women, as well as Lipan Apaches, found that people in Coahuila and Nuevo León held a traditional hostility against Indians of all sorts. Each chapter tells the story of a different group of migrants, and their stories do not often end happily. It is for this reason that I have entitled this dissertation “the Limits of Liberty.”

“The limits of liberty” for migrant outsiders were most clearly reflected in the fact that trans-borderlands routes very rarely led to new rootedness. Very few of the groups discussed in this dissertation became sedentary after their journey. The only exception was a number of

11 Brian Delay, The War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale, 2008)

6 African American migrants to Mexico who associated liberty and self-subsistence farming together in Coahuila. Their rootedness was only a function of slavery, however, and when emancipation at last came to Texas many of them took to the roads again. A whole society of people in motion existed in the borderlands, a result of the fact that only mobility across the border expanded life possibilities.

Historiography

In this dissertation I bring to light a social history of African Americans, Indians, and peons who crossed the border in search of greater opportunities. They lent their own meaning to the border, perverting greater national goals. But they are not the only actors in this story who sought to lend meaning to the borderlands between Mexico and Texas. Their crossings affected the way that Mexicans from northern Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas (norteños) and Texans thought about themselves, their cultures, and their respective nations. I am particularly interested in uncovering the history of the norteños who had to reconsider their understandings of such basic ideas as slavery, imperialism, and patriotism in the wake of an immense human flood of filibusterers, runaway slaves, renegade Indians, and Mexican peons entering their locales. Thus, I must stand on the shoulders of many scholars in many different fields of history to construct a comprehensible history of a region that falls outside of national historical narratives. In seeking coherence, I have dedicated a chapter to each one of the discrete groups who comprised this flow of mobile peoples.

Given its focus on westward-faring peoples, this dissertation fits snugly within the canon of Western (Pan)American history, but only as defined by the revisionist turn that has reinvigorated the field over the past two decades. The New Western History integrates the

7 advances made in social and cultural history to complicate older narratives of the West that tended to focus squarely on the role that white pioneers and their representatives played in bringing frontier spaces to heel. New histories of the West jettison the frontier myth and take the particularities of specific Western places into account. These revisionist histories also take the stories of the dispossessed and the victims of racial discrimination seriously in an effort to reclaim history from the “violence” of national narratives.12

Unfortunately for those seeking coherence, Western history detached from myth, does not fit comfortably within the confines of familiar narratives. Histories that take place in the borderlands do not follow the turning points, epochs, and periods of national U.S.—or, for that matter, Mexican—history.13 There is no period of open frontier followed by national consolidation. Nor do new Western histories comfortably follow the trajectory from open borderland to closed “bordered land” proposed so elegantly by Jeremey Adelman and Stephen

Aron.14 But the problems that the New Western History and its academic companion, borderlands history, present in terms of organization and narration more than make up for it this the way they queer the familiar tropes and clichés of the American “West.” At last we have come to a startling realization: whether the region beyond the Mississippi is even the “West” at all is simply a matter of viewpoint. For some Indians, it may well be the “East.”

One approach to writing the New Western History has been to incorporate the history of people who typically fall outside of the Old Western history (pun fully intended). African

12 Patricia Nelson Limerick “What on Earth is the New Western History?” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 40:3 (Summer, 1990), 61-64; “Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World,” The American Historical Review 100: 3 (June, 1995), 697-716; The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken History of America’s Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 275-278. 13 On the problem of turning points in borderlands history see Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98:2 (September, 2011), 338-361. 14 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104:3 (June, 1999): 814-841.

8 Americans, to name just one prominent example, have only recently entered the chronicles of

Western History in a major way. Given its unique history, Texas has been an especially significant place for this revision. In 1836, Texas broke off from Mexico in a federalist conspiracy made up of both Hispanos and Anglos who chafed under the newly centralized and

Conservative government of General López de Santa Anna. In forging their new Republic, most

Anglos hoped to safeguard slavery—although it would be unfair to say that this was the only motive the Texans had for breaking off from the Mexican Republic.15 In any case, a slave

Republic emerged from the ashes of Spanish Tejas. Then, in 1845, when Texas was admitted to the Union, it became a slave state. Slavery was central to the growth of Texas in the Brazos

River, along the Gulf Coast, and west of the Piney Woods. So greatly did Anglo migrants to

Texas model their new society after the older Southern states that historian Randolph B.

Campbell has concluded that the “institution” was fundamentally unchanged in Texas. More recent scholarship has challenged this concept to a degree. Other historians argue that the proximity of Mexico—which abolished slavery in 1829—as well as nearby Indians, and the frontier conditions of East Texas and the Brazos Valley made slavery in Texas somewhat unique.

These newer studies sometimes posit the entire, enormous state of Texas as a “borderland” of slavery.16 I find that such use of “borderland” for a slave state somewhat overgeneralizes the term.

15 For the Texas troubles as told in a borderlands context see especially: Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier, Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and David Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1982). 16 Andrew Torget, Cotton Empire: Slavery, the Texas Borderlands and the Origins of the Mexican-American War (forthcoming); Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Sean Kelley, Los Brazos del Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2010); Sean Kelley, “Mexico in His Head: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860” Journal of Social History, 37:3 (2004), 709-723, and Robert S. Shelton, “On Empire’s Shores: Free and Unfree Workers in Galveston, Texas, 1840-1860, Journal of

9 I am also concerned with a “borderland” of slavery and freedom, but I define it more narrowly. As we shall see in chapter one, I focus on the area of Texas south and west of the San

Antonio River where there were few human inhabitants and no dominant state. Among the people that lived there, Hispanos and Indians vastly outnumbered Anglos. I argue that both the frontier conditions as well as the proximity of Mexico to the near-south Texan towns of San

Antonio, Austin, Seguin, Bastrop, and Refugio greatly tempered the institution of slavery there.

The presence of Mexican liberty so nearby distorted the practice of slavery in this region known to antebellum Texans as “West Texas.” Runaway slaves effectively turned the borderlands and— after 1848—turned the Rio Grande/Bravo itself into an escape hatch from bondage. This transformation in the meaning of the border frustrated slaveholders’ efforts to limit the spread of freedom and replicate southern slavery in West Texas.

Besides African Americans, people of mestizo (mixed race) and Iberian heritage played significant historical roles in the borderlands during the decades between Mexican Independence and the Civil War. They were important intermediaries between the fading institutions of Mexico and the newly emergent Anglo Republic and market economy that took their place. This transition from Old Mexico to Young America was not instantaneous. Mexico refused to recognize the independence of Texas in the years that followed Santa Anna’s defeat at San

Jacinto in 1836, and as a result a war over contested boundaries raged between the Mexico and

Texas until the United States intervened in 1846. Tejanos (Hispanophone Texans), border elites, vecinos in the Northeastern Mexican states, and peones (indebted laborers) had contrasting interests in this war. As we shall see in chapter two, the reaction of Hispanos to the “Guerra

Sorda” between Mexico and Texas should not be considered monolithically.

Social History 40:3, (2007), 717-730; On runaways to Mexico: Rosalie Schwartz, Across the Rio to Freedom (El Paso: Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1974); Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves.”

10 Chapter two outlines the role that Mexican peons played in the history of mobility and liberty in the borderlands. They had the most in common with the enslaved laborers and disenfranchised Indians who were seeking refuge by crossing boundaries, and they often encountered one another in their journeys. The greatest difference between peons and the others is, of course, that they ran in the opposite direction. Indebted laborers made up the bulk of the workforce on norteño and Tejano haciendas (landholdings). But theirs was not a particularly happy existence. There were a number of odds stacked against them that conspired to keep them tied to the land of their bondholder and subject to a great number of arbitrary abuses. The arrival of slave-holding Anglos to the borderlands and the free market economy they brought with them had the ironic effect of opening up more liberal working conditions for peons who were interested in escaping debt and seigniorial Hispanic society. After the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo drew the border along the Rio Grande/Bravo in 1848, they ran away with increasing frequency to Texas, especially to the cities of Austin and San Antonio. In Texas they would find definite “limits” to their liberty, however—in no small part due to the discrimination that accompanied efforts by Hispanos and Anglos alike to “other” them as racial subordinates.

I differ from most Chicano/a historians in the way that I treat Texan Hispano society in this chapter. Although Hispanos have probably received more attention in the annals of Texas history than any other non-white group, I find their history somewhat confused. In an attempt to assign Spanish-speaking Texans a group identity some historians have called them “Tejanos”—a term which is an artifact of the elusive search for Chicano/a identity in the 1970s and beyond.

Unfortunately, as we shall see below, there really was no one coherent identity amongst

Hispanos in Texas. There were enormous differences between elite Hispanic families who intermarried with white ranchers and merchants and lowly peons who owed all past and future

11 wages to Hispano landholders. Some histories of the Mexican/Mexican-American experience in

Texas have failed to take these immense social differences into account. Runaway peons have also escaped the purview of Tejano history since their lives were typically transnational

(although we should remember peonage was practiced in the newly-annexed U.S. Southwest as well).17 As a result of the shortcomings of this historiography, I have relied heavily upon the history of labor and peonage in the Mexican North to help discover how runaway peons turned the international border into a gateway to more liberal working conditions. Especially central in inspiring my thinking on this subject is the work on Northern haciendas done by the late

Friedrich Katz.18 His understanding of the complexity of hacienda labor in Mexico has helped me see the connections between labor conditions and mobility on both sides of the border.

Chapter three returns to the subject of African Americans, but looks at their experience in

Tamaulipas to compare the promise of liberty with the reality they encountered on the ground. In this chapter, I draw upon the history of race in Mexico to describe and contrast the experiences of African Americans in Mexico and Texas. Like most 19th century Westerners, norteños certainly saw the world in racial terms; but they saw it more along the lines of civilized versus

17 Andrés Tijerina: Tejanos & Texas Under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836 (College Station: Texas A & M University, 1994); Jesús F. De la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); David Montejanos, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988); Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes towards Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas, 1983); Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York,:Harper and Rowe, 1981). An exception to the above critiques can be found in Raúl Ramos’ excellent Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1860 (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 18 Katz, “Labor Conditions”; François Chavalier, “The North Mexican Hacienda: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, The New World Looks at Its History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 101-106; Frédéric Mauro, “Sistem Agrario y Régime de Trabajo” Historia Mexicana, 38:4 (1989), 842.; Alan Knight, Mexico: The Colonial Era (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 98-102 and “Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?” Journal of Latin American Studies, 18:1 (May, 1986), 41-74; Arnold J. Bauer, “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression, Hispanic American Historical Review, 59:1 (February, 1979), 43-48; For a comparative study in the near-Mexican North see Harry E. Cross, “Debt Peonage Reconsidered: A Case Study in Nineteenth- Century Zacatecas” Business History Review 53:4 (Winter, 1979), 473-495

12 savage rather than black versus white.19 Phenotypical differences were nowhere near as important as cultural differences to Mexicans. As a result, African Americans experienced far less racism in Mexico than in the United States, especially from Mexican officials well-versed in the values of anti-“Yanqui” centralism. My findings fit the theory of Douglas R. Cope who suggests that race was a secondary concern in the lives of most African Americans in Mexico.

Despite official color-blindness, blacks in Mexico still found their lives hemmed in by the restrictions of class.20 Furthermore, despite the promise of the “ample protection of Mexican laws,” the borderlands of freedom and slavery remained fraught with ambiguity as long as filibustering and slave catching continued.

Besides African Americans and Mexican Peons, Indians have an equally important bearing on any retelling of the history of the borderlands. Indians were, of course, the original inhabitants of the borderlands. Prior to the Mexican victory in the War of Independence in 1821, the borderlands between the San Antonio River and the Rio Panuco belonged to the colonial department of Nueva Vizcaya. But this was just what the maps said; in reality it was home to a host of Native peoples consisting most significantly of Caddoes and Taumilpecos. Also, in the

18th century, Comanches and Apaches began to move into the borderlands of the Rio

Grande/Bravo.21

19 Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1995); Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Alan Knight “Racism, Revolution , and Indegenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940: in Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America,: 1870-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Nancy P. Appelbaum et al, The Idea of Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, especially Aims McGuinness, “Searching for ‘Latin America’’: Race and Sovereignty in the Americas in the 1850s” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 20 R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 21 Thomas A. Britten, The Lipan Apaches: People of Wind and Lightening (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009); Martha Rodríguez, Historias de Resistencia y Exterminio: Los Indios de Coahuila Durante El Siglo XIX (Saltillo, Coahuila: CIESAS, 1995); Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire; Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Nancy McGown Minor, Turning Adversity

13 Chapter four deals with a different group of Indians. This chapter places the history of the

“Immigrant Tribes” in its proper borderlands context. In the 1820s, the Mexican government infamously opened Texas up to settlers from the United States as well as displaced “Immigrant

Tribes” from the Southeastern United States.22 After 1836, when Texas broke off from the

Mexican Republic, many of these Immigrant Tribesmen and women began to make their way southward into Mexico. Just like African Americans and Mexican Peons, they found greater liberty on the other side of the borderlands; but they also experienced more racism. Norteños had, in no small part, predicated their identities in opposition to the unreduced nomadic Indians who roamed the North and sometimes laid waste to their settlements. The Civilized and “Semi-

Civilized” Tribesmen and women—displaced Texas Cherokees, Southern Kickapoos, Caddoes,

Coacoochee’s Seminoles, and the Mascogos—inspired intense distrust in the vecinos. Adding injury to insult, they also experienced severe destitution when the government of Coahuila was not forthcoming with promised resources. The Immigrant Tribes by and large fulfilled their duties, but with no state assistance their lives were hemmed in by insecurity, and their dream of establishing a Pan-Indian colony in Mexico remained just that.

In chapter five we return to the most contentious issue along the border in the 1850s, the problem of runaway slaves in Mexico. Besides outlining the experiences that blacks had in

Coahuila, this chapter looks at how filibusterers operating in the employ of Texas slaveholders

to Advantage: A History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and Northern Mexico (Lanham Maryland: University Press of America, 2009); Nancy McGown Minor, “The Light Gray People”” An Ethno-History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and Northern Mexico (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 2009); Gabriel Saldívar, Los Indios de Tamaulipas (Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1943); Paul Kirchoff, “The Hunter- Gathering People of North Mexico” in Basil C., Hedrick, J. Charles Kelley, and Carroll L. Riley, eds., The North Mexican Frontier: Readings in Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnograpy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971). 22 Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2005), esp. 134-158; A.M. Gibson, The Kickapoos: Lords of the Middle Border (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 141-178; Diana Everett, The Texas Cherokees: A People Between Two Fires, 1890-1840 (Norman: University Oklahoma Press, 1990); Martha Rodríguez, Historias de Resistencia y Exterminio.

14 sought to push their agenda to Mexico. The intentions of this chapter are twofold. On one hand, it compares the experiences of blacks in Coahuila with the experiences of African Americans in

Texas and Tamaulipas. Second, it looks at the way that the issues surrounding black refuge seekers in Coahuila led to an increased militarization of the border on both sides after 1848.

Issues of liberty dragged Mexican vecinos and their officials into this guerra sorda with Texans.

By looking at the fighting that “agents of Manifest Destiny” engaged in on the ground, this chapter complicates some of the more recent cultural histories of American empire. It is my hope to connect the fables and fantasies of American might deployed by ideologues of Manifest

Destiny with the actual experiences had by the shock troops American empire-building in the

Texas-Mexico borderlands. 23

Chapter six turns to some of the oldest inhabitants of the borderlands and seeks to uncover their understandings of the new border and how they put it to their own use. The Lipan

Apaches arrived to the lower Rio Grande/Bravo Valley in the early 18th century and managed to eke out a “middle ground” with the vecinos that assured the mutual survival of both cultures through routinizing the violence that both sides visited upon each other. As new forces and powers arrived to the borderlands, however, the Lipan Apaches found their lives increasingly restricted. They also discovered that they could win entirely new liberties by crossing the borderlands to make war on one side and peace on the other. This final chapter most closely follows the model of borderlands history. Lipans were the quintessential “people-in-between;”

23 Shelley Streeby American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Donald E. Pease, Amy Kaplan, et al. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard, 1991); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London: Verso, 2003); Laura E. Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Pess, 1985).

15 they were people who could play one side off against the other in an effort to procure for themselves the best possible terms. This chapter closely follows the trajectory of a middle ground from its establishment to its dissolution.24

By making the “people-in-between” central actors, I believe my research helps escape the blinders that national narratives of progress across unsettled spaces put on us. Indeed, the Lipan narrative that unfolds in chapter six is not the story of a wilderness transformed into civilization so common to older frontier histories inspired by the great Frederick Jackson Turner.25 Rather,

Lipan history is far more messy, and it can hardly be contained within established historical turning points. Their history is not really one of extermination or resistance; but neither is it necessarily a history of accommodation. Their motives were mixed, their lives were complex, and they were both the perpetrators and victims of violence. They resisted borders and at the same time they benefited from them. The coming of the international border was merely an event in their history, not an ending to it. As is so often the case with the borderlands, the history of the

Lipans lacks resolution.

The Lipans, like all of the other groups who are the subject of this dissertation, moved between different nations with seeming ease. In reality, they pursued trans-borderland mobility at great personal risk. Nevertheless, they left their traces in archives that exist on both sides of the border as well as in more central places. I have discovered while pursuing this project that transnational archival research is our best chance to recover the stories of people who lived lives beyond the confines of the state. Not only does research in distant archives complicate national myths. It also helps us to rediscover people who were central actors in local places at the margins

24 For the quintessential “Algonquin” middle ground see: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 25Adelman and Aron; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes; White, Middle Ground; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011).

16 of the nation. It helps us make more fundamental connections with the people we share places with, peoples whose histories have been obscured by later events. As a historian, I believe that this is exactly the sort of business we should be involved in. Like the subjects of this dissertation, we should look to borders for opportunities and to border-crossers to tell more inclusive stories.

Beyond the social historical concerns addressed by this dissertation, there is also a theoretical dimension to this conflict brought on by restive peoples in the borderlands, and I rely upon a sizeable body of works dealing with mobility and frontiers to address this aspect. I am not the first person to see mobility as a tactic of negotiation, of course. I owe something to Cynthia

Radding’s concept of “Wandering Peoples” and James C. Scott’s idea of “hidden transcripts” in this respect. In theorizing the “limits of liberty,” meanwhile, I draw upon the ideas of both

Howard Lamar and Friedrich Katz, who long ago recognized that frontiers rarely breed free labor conditions. They realize that most new colonies secure servile labor at the first opportunity, but they also recognize that frontiers are, at the same time, contradictorily characterized by mobility of both the social and geographical sort. Accordingly, attempts to control labor are most typically repressive and fraught in borderlands—a generalization that my dissertation confirms.26

In addition to these social scientists, I have also drawn upon a number of theorists of space to make my argument. I look to a group of social geographers following Michel de Certau who have recognized the primacy of particular places over abstract spaces. There is nothing more abstract than a “bordered land,” and socio-spatial practices have a tendency to endure and shape even the most concerted efforts of states to bend particular places into conformity with

26 Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwest Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale, 1990); Hoard Lemar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600-1890 in Stephen Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 293-326; Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies” Hispanic American Historical Review, 54:1 (Feb., 1974).

17 maps. In theorizing the presence of alternative routes, I have found the mutually constitutive concepts of place and space to be of immeasurable value.27 Alternative routes and geographical epistemologies endured despite the efforts of states and their local deputies to lend the border its meaning as a line that hermetically sealed one nation off from the other; alternative routes encompassed a whole history of transborderlands social practices that intercepted the new, supposedly evacuated space mapped out by the new boundary. Just to cite one example of this phenomenon, after 1848, older routes to Mexico took on increased significance precisely because of the power that administrators from both countries assigned to the new boundary that left the old borderlands riven in two. It gave runaways a definite place to go.

Finally, I look to a number of different scholars to think through questions of social networking. My dissertation follows the idea that underground “chains and networks” connect mobile people to their larger communities—something that Ira Berlin, Eugene Genovese, and

Stephen Hahn have all written about briefly in the context of chattel slavery. Unlike Genovese

(or Albert O. Hirschman for that matter), however, I do not view exiting from institutional repression as a politically neutral maneuver.28 Rather, I think of runaways as a self-selected group who pioneered the potential for flight. This potential in turn fundamentally changed the relationship between slaves and masters, Indians and Bureau chiefs, peons and debt-holders all over the borderlands. I even hypothesize that this growing network of routes employed by

27 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991); Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 62:4 (November, 2003), 1057- 1078; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998), 7. 28 Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976 [1972]), 656-657; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003), 33-42; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 339; Albert O. Hirshman, “Exit, Voice, and the State” World Politics, 31:1 (October, 1978), 90-107.

18 mobile peoples eventually reached into larger African and Indian America, connecting static communities of Indians, peons, and African Americans deep within the interior on one side of the border to their fleet of foot brethren on the other side. Trans-borderlands routes transformed the worldviews of all repressed groups caught on plantations, reservations, and haciendas in or near the borderlands, fundamentally reshaping their “interpretive communities”—to borrow historian Sean Kelly’s term.29

These theoretical interventions deal with how mobile peoples understood and manipulated spatial divides. Taken together, they complicate the idea as theorized by Jeremy

Adelman and Stephen Aaron in their landmark 1999 article that new boundaries turn

“borderlands” into “bordered lands.” The survival of alternative routes and epistemologies resists border-making. Hence, the institution of borders did not mark the end of the flow of people and goods—both licit and illicit—along the lower Rio Grande/Bravo; nor did it end the power that

“people-in-between” had to play one side against another; nor did it suppress earlier routes that intercepted the new boundary. After 1848, with two starkly different societies to be found on either side of the Rio Grande/Bravo, mobile peoples found a hinge in the border. The border mattered to mobile peoples and they employed it for leverage into the Civil War era and beyond.

Perhaps their history was not of their own making—at least in the sense that they did not have unlimited options—but mobility across the border granted runaways a degree of maneuverability to negotiate their place which would have been unimaginable to people caught within repressive institutions further inland. Each group contributed countless international passages, making the meaning of the border ever more fraught with ambiguity with each crossing. In sum, this dissertation tells a story that is more about the “opening” up of frontiers rather than the “closing” of them—and the role that a large number of people outside of history played in that saga.

29 Kelley, 712-713.

West Texas in 1851: excerpt from J. De Cordova’s “Map of the State of Texas Compiled from the Records of the General Land Office of the State, by Robert Creuzbaur, Houston, 1851..." Engraved by J. M. Atwood, New York. Map courtesy Dorothy Sloan-Rare Books, Austin, Texas, CAH.

20 Chapter 1

“Impatient for the Promised Freedom” Runaway Slaves in the West Texas Borderlands

Noah Sedgwick, who was one of the main chroniclers of early Texas, did not sit down to record his memories until he reached a ripe old age. When he did, he recalled the tremendous insecurity that characterized slavery in Texas before it seceded from Mexico in 1836. Designated as a buffer zone by central Mexican administrators, Texas comprised a borderland that lie between the U.S. South and Mexico. Then, when Mexican president Vicente Guerrero officially emancipated slavery everywhere except for impresario Stephen F. Austin’s colony in 1829, he transformed the entire area south and west of the Anglo colonies in Texas into a vast borderland between slavery and freedom. Even in the Anglo settlements, slavery only existed precariously.

The earliest white settlers in Texas had to reclassify their slaves as indebted peons, a servile form of labor recognized under Mexican law.1

Texan slaveholders could see the writing on the wall as Mexico deepened its commitment to emancipation. Many of the enslaved likewise recognized the precariousness of the situation and sought to take full advantage of their geographical good fortune, fleeing towards the villages on the Rio Grande/Bravo. Sedgwick is candid in his recollections about the difficulty slaveholders had establishing their institution in the face of runaways during the era that Texas belonged to Mexico. He concludes that it was “probably owing to [the slaves’] ignorance of the

1 Noah Sedgwick, Recollections of Old Texas Days (Austin: H. P. N. Gammel, 1900); Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989), 22-23.

21 language and country that more of them did not leave” for Mexico. 2 Until slaveholders could settle Texas on their own terms, Texas remained an unsafe bet for would-be migrants from the

Old South and only the roughest hewn of slaveholding pioneers went to Texas before it seceded from Mexico in 1836. More would follow once the United States annexed Texas (1845) and established a boundary at the Rio Grande/Bravo (1848), but these new immigrants would likewise be disappointed by slave intransigence. Runaways turned the area west of the plantation belt that ran through central Texas into a borderland of liberty.

Runaway slaves knew that, when they went toward Mexico, they were going into a foreign and unknown land; but they also knew they were on their way to a country that had emancipated slavery for once and for all in 1829. Once a slave entered Mexican territory, he or she was free by virtue of setting foot on Mexican soil. Thus, despite the perilous journey and the unfamiliarity of the country, many slaves were—again, according to Sedgwick—“impatient for the promised freedom” and took their chances. They ran away from slaveholding territory and did not stop until they reached the Mexican settlements beyond the San Antonio River, most often continuing their journeys until they reached the Mexican towns along the Rio

Grande/Bravo.3

Runaway slaves were, indeed, “rebels on the plantation.” Historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger have noted that American chattel slavery, by its very nature, created a

“milieu for interracial conflict,” and that all acts which disrupted the system should be read within this context. At the heart of this conflict were individual acts of resistance, and in Texas this usually meant running away to Mexico. Drawing too easy a corollary between flight and resistance has met with some criticism, however. Eugene Genovese, for instance, once levied a

2 Sedgwick, 36-37. 3 Ibid.

22 criticism of runaway slaves that portended contemporary debates about brain drain in the third world. He argued that only the most resourceful and motivated of slaves ran away from the plantation, and they left their repressed class behind without leaders who could take advantage of any revolutionary spark that might present itself. But even as committed a corporatist as

Genovese had to admit that chances of successful slave insurrection in the 19th century South were near zero. Further, he discounted the connections that all migrants retain with their home populations. As Steven Hahn has recently reminded us, African Americans in the slave south and beyond were no exception to this rule, maintaining invisible chains and networks with kin and companions that crossed immense geographical divides. Taking into consideration the effect that migrants always have on sending communities—and considering that the “sending community” of the slaves was held in place by naked violence—running away and seeking shelter must be considered acts of resistance.4

It was the geographical fortune of the enslaved in Texas that allowed them to play such an important role in contesting the boundaries of slavery. Indeed, emigration can be a form of dissidence in closed societies, although some have claimed that it only confirms “closure and not reform” in the home society. Migration (or “exit”) is supposed to be politically neutral. But new thoughts on mobility brought on by the sheer scale of migration in an increasingly global age have called this hypothesis into question. It turns out that cross-border mobility is not merely a safety valve, but it also puts pressure on the entire (national) system to either reform or lose its most productive members. Hence, unauthorized mobility—i.e., mobility that uses routes that defy state authority—has the effect of troubling national goals. And by using unauthorized routes,

4 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford: 1999), 6; John W. Blasingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford, 1972), 194-200; Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976 [1972]), 656-657; for hidden networks amongst the enslaved: Steven Hahn, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003), 33-37.

23 migrants can trouble national territoriality itself.5 Applying these thoughts to 19th century Texas, runaway slaves could actively contest the boundaries of slave country through their illicit mobility.

The mobility of slaves was dangerous in another way. It directly translated into the spread of an alternative epistemology amongst the enslaved. Mobility greatly enhanced the power of communications amongst the oppressed, and most importantly for the enslaved in

Texas, mobility translated directly into expanded geographical knowledge, which would have important implications for the entire slave community in Texas and beyond. My finding on the cardinal importance of geographical knowledge in spurring rebellion and flight amongst the

Texas enslaved is in accordance with other historians. Ira Berlin discusses briefly how mobility

“gave slaves a fuller knowledge of the world beyond the plantation’s boundaries,” and finds that attempts to compress the slave populations almost always included proscriptions on mobility.

Steven Hahn also points out that (chiefly male) slaves with more regular mobility were the chief disseminators of alternative geographical knowledge. He finds that when slaves returned home to share their experience, the slave community’s understanding of the larger world expanded and they could imagine places beyond the limits of the plantation. David S. Cecelski, meanwhile, who has written lovingly on the watermen of maritime North Carolina assigns mobility an especially important role in the spread of political and revolutionary ideals from the Atlantic

World towards more isolated backwater slave communities in that state during a time of liberty.

He points to the overtly repressive Negro Seaman Acts of the 1820s as evidence of an implicit

5 Exit, Voice, and Loyalty are Albert O. Hirshman’s terms: “Exit, Voice, and the State” World Politics, 31:1 (October, 1978), 90-107; Quote from Rogers Brubaker, “Frontier Theses: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in East Germany” Migration World, 18.3/4 (1990), 13; David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 62:4 (November, 2003), 1057-1078, on Hirshman see f. 1064. For classic treatments of social routes that thrive despite top down efforts to enforce geography from the top down: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and Yi-Fu Taun, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), esp. 67-84.

24 admission by the state of the grave threat posed by mobile slaves.6 In Texas things were no different. Mobile slaves were the conduit through which information about Mexico travelled, and they brought back dangerous knowledge. The greatest insurrection in West Texas (whether imagined or real) during these years was a plot in Bastrop authored by slaves in 1856, discussed below, that hinged on running away to Mexico. Mobility and resistance went hand in hand in the borderlands of freedom and slavery.

Such a high degree of mobility amongst the enslaved meant that the slaveholders of

Texas were put on special guard. They stepped up repression in an effort to clamp down on runaway slaves, and the violence they deployed against these runaways reverberated beyond the master-slave struggle into the world beyond. Waves of violence reached out from the very core of slavery—the brutal subjugation of one human being by another—into the larger world outside of this social relationship structured by violence. Ultimately, it brought all sorts of outsiders into its path and even put Northeasterners on alert to the brutally repressive society with slaves that

Texans inhabited.7

Noah Sedgwick was, once again, candid in his memories of how slave mobility turned

Texas into a society under siege, writing about how he sometimes joined in with his white (and probably also Tejano8) comrades to form runaway slave-hunting parties. 9 Anglo Texans were trying to build a society on the repression of slaves and they organized its social fabric around

6 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 339, Quote from pg. 267; Hahn, 41-42; On geographic knowledge and interpretative communities in Texas: Sean Kelley, “Mexico in His Head: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860” Journal of Social History, 37:3 (2004), 712-713; David S. Ceceslki, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), xvi., 53. 7 My discussion of waves of violence owes to Ned Blackhawk’s use of the concept in Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard, 2006), 9-10. 8 Tejano is generally used in the literature to connote a Spanish speaker, often of Mestizo descent, who lived in Texas. It is an awkward term that was not used in the 19th century, but is analytically useful in separating people of Hispanic descent on the Texas side of the border. See especially Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes towards Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas, 1983). 9 Sedgwick, 36-37.

25 white supremacy. Runaway slaves and those that aided and abetted them stood against this transformation of Texas society on the terms of white supremacy engendered by the Jacksonian

Democracy. Slaves and masters were violently struggling over the boundary between slavery and freedom in Texas—and the stakes in this battle were high indeed. As the editor of the Clarksville

Northern Standard agonized: “If slavery should be abolished by force of circumstances in

Western Texas, how much longer will it continue in the East?”10 Did runaway slaves have the power to undo slavery at the border and beyond, sending ripples of their resistance into the heart of the Deep South?

In any case, slave resistance certainly affected the institution in Texas. Accordingly, this chapter builds on a point that historian Randolph B. Campbell made in passing in his great survey of slavery in Texas, An Empire for Slavery.11 Even though Campbell argues that the main reason slavery did not expand into the borderlands was due to the limited potential for cotton- growing there, I argue that the proximity of Mexico was a much more important reason for this failure to introduce slavery west of the San Antonio River. There is no reason to believe that slavery could not have been employed in agricultural enterprises other than cotton production in

West Texas; after all, many slaves in Texas cared for the tamed mustangs and leggy longhorns that Mexican and Anglo Texans domesticated in the 18th and 19th century. Rather, the failure of

Texans to exercise uncontested sovereignty beyond the San Antonio river resulted in the failure of slavery to reach into the borderlands.

The slaves’ knowledge that they could be free in Mexico limited the expansion of slavery into southwestern Texas. This fact alone frustrated efforts to establish slavery west of the San

Antonio River and south of Matagorda Bay—the area that constituted “West Texas” in the

10 Clarksville Northern Standard, November 11, 1854; Kelley puts the number nearer 4000, see “Mexico in his Head,” 33. 11 Campbell, 64.

26 geographical imagination of antebellum Texans. The boundary between Mexico and the United

States was a hinge between freedom and slavery, and West Texas constituted the westernmost borderlands of U.S. slavery. Further, what happened there had the potential to threaten slavery everywhere else.

The Limits of Liberty

The geographical boundary between slavery and liberty in the Texas borderlands was a moving target. It receded alongside the expanding boundary claimed by Texans, but runaway slaves and Mexican bureaucrats did their best to contest the geographical limits claimed by

Texans in their Republic (est. 1836) and then the newly-annexed U.S. state of Texas (1845).

Runaway slaves had to reorient themselves each time that the boundary moved, but they were always ready to move past new lines drawn in the sand between liberty and slavery. In the process they turned the entire region of West Texas into a North American borderland of liberty.

As early as the 1820s, runaway slaves knew that Mexico was a country with very little slavery. Outside of Mexican Texas, there were an extremely small number of people who remained enslaved in Mexico after Independence. Slaves knew they could be free there, as evidenced by the fact that at least a few runaways went deep into that country to claim their freedom in the first decade of Mexican Independence. Some moved far into the interior of the country, possibly to avoid entirely the areas of Texas settled by white men. One man of color,

Andrés Dortola, who fled to Mexico at the remarkably early date of 1825, did not stop running from slavery until he was deep in the heart of Mexico. Only once he reached Guadalajara, in the western state of Jalisco, did Dortola petition the Mexican government, claiming that he had

27 adopted Catholicism and met all of the tenets of citizenship. Nestled deep within Mexico,

Dortola had little risk of capture and re-enslavement.12

Then, in 1829 Mexico emancipated the few slaves who remained in that country. From that point forward the entire country, with the exception Austin’s colony, offered freedom to runaway slaves. Runaways very quickly took advantage of this emancipation and began fleeing into Mexican Texas from Louisiana, crossing at Nagadoches near the Sabine and at other points.13 But as soon as they crossed the line from slavery to liberty they caused enormous difficulties for the Mexican bureaucrats who manned the frontier. Juan (originally John) Davis

Bradburn, a Mexican official in Texas born in Kentucky, was one such official charged with the arduous task of dealing with runaways. Serving as the commander at Anahuac, it fell upon his shoulders to enforce the Mexican laws outlawing slavery. Bradburn did not seem a likely enemy to Texas slaveholders. He had generally supported planter and mercantile interests in Mexican

Texas. Indeed, he had even trafficked in slaves himself as a young man in Natchez,

Mississippi.14 As the commander at Anahuac, however, he was duty-bound to follow the letter of the Mexican law, which recognized no slaves outside of Austin’s grant.

Hence, he granted two runaway slaves from Louisiana asylum in Texas that year for the mere act of having stepped on Mexican soil. Predictably, this move greatly angered the slaveholders in Texas, and Bradburn soon caught wind of a rumor that one hundred armed men were at the ready at the Louisiana frontier, preparing to cross the Sabine River into Mexican

12 Solicitude of Andrés Dortola to Seccíon de Gobierno, February 8, 1825, C58 E12 fs. 28-29, Gobernación, AGN; For gradualistic emancipation of slavery in Veracruz, especially around Jalapa, see Patrick J. Caroll, Blacks in Veracruz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2003); Rosalie Schwartz, Across the Rio to Freedom: U.S. Negroes in Mexico (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1975), 8. 13 Jose Manuel de Letorna to Aguirre, Ministro de Guerra, D.F., April 25, 1831, C51 F9 E2 2F, Fondo XIX AGEC. 14 Forest E. Ward, “Pre-Revolutionary Activity in Brazoria County,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly [Hereafter SWHQ], 64 (October, 1960), 214; Paul Lack, The Texas Revolutionary Experience: A Political and Social History, 1835-1836 (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1992), 183-207; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 666.

28 Texas to reclaim the runaways. The rumor turned out to be a ruse, and no such conspiracy ever came to pass. But while Bradburn prepared to fight off the invaders, William B. Travis attempted to take advantage of the commander’s divided attention to kidnap the two runaways who had found shelter at the military installation at Anahuac. But Travis did not time his subterfuge well and he failed to recover the runaways, landing himself in prison for a short time as a consequence. His imprisonment infuriated his fellow Texans and led to even more disturbances around the fort at Anahuac.15

A few years after the trouble at Anahuac, the Texans elected to revolt and break off their country from the Mexican Republic after the overthrow of the Federalists in Mexico City. The abuses of López de Santa Anna, especially his arrogation of power to the central government and dissolution of state governments—placing military departments in their stead—did not sit will with the overwhelmingly Democratic Texans. They were jealous of their liberty, which they defined in opposition to government power. The fact that Mexico had deepened its commitment to the emancipation of slavery during the presidency of Vicente Guerrero (himself an Afro-

Mestizo) only added to their resolve.16 Once the fighting began, slaves realized that they might have an ally in the Mexican army. Texans caught wind of this fact, and feared that slaves might comprise a fifth column as the Mexican army approached, a fear that caused particular alarm among Texan slaveholders. The Texan rebels even alleged at one point that the on-again president of Mexico and general of the punitive military expedition, Santa Anna himself,

15 Margaret Sweet Henson, Juan Davis Bradburn, a Reappraisal of the Mexican Commander of Anahuac (College Station: Texas A and M University Press, 1982), 94-97. Ironically, another slave, Harriett, tried to help Travis escape after his imprisonment by Bradburn. 16 Howe, 662; James Crisp, “Race, Revolution, and the Texas Republic,” in The Texas Military Experience, ed. Joseph Dawson (College Station, Tex., 1995), 32–48; The claim that Guerrero’s ethnic background shaped his political ideas is dubious. Nevertheless, see Theodore G. Vincent, “The Contributions of Mexico’s First Black President, Vicente Guerrero,” The Journal of Negro History, 86 (2001), 148-159.

29 entertained a plan of re-conquest that involved inciting the slaves to revolt.17 The specter of Haiti haunted the proceedings in Texas, even as it filled up with volunteers from all over the antebellum interested in turning Texas into an extension of their country. The Mexicans took advantage of this fear of rebellion in a vain attempt to cow the refractory Texans back into line.

Their officers and subordinates were likely the source of rumors of conspiracy.

One slave rebellion did break out during the war—perhaps led by African-born slaves— showing that the Texans were right to fear the specter of Haiti. As soon as the fighting began, the slaves along the Brazos River attempted a revolt. The Texans quelled the rebellion and then took up nearly 100 slaves who had been involved, whipping some almost to the death, and hanging those accused of being the chief conspirators. In this uncovered conspiracy of slaves, the accusers asserted that the revolting slaves intended to expropriate the cotton plantations and put the whites to work on them, turning the social order upside down. The fear of a black revolution persisted during the Texas rebellion and dampened the spirits of the volunteers from Texas and beyond, even as they pressed on in what would become the most storied adventure in Texas’ early history.18

But running away to the Mexican lines was by far the most common act of rebellion amongst the slaves during the revolt. In an episode handed down in Texas lore as the “the

Runaway Scrape,” (ironically enough) many families in central Texas fled towards Louisiana before the arrival of the advancing Mexican army in March and April of 1836. They ran out of a fear of their own slaves as much as a dread of the Mexican military. A rumor circulated just before they fled that the slaves had planned a revolt to coincide with the arrival of the Mexican

17 Wendell G. Addington, “Slave Insurrections in Texas,” Journal of Negro History, 35:4 (October, 1950), 411; Campbell, 10-35; Sean Kelley, Los Brazos del Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 2010), 100-101. 18 Addington, 412.

30 army. Put on guard, many slaveholding families gathered together what possessions and slaves they could and retreated eastward before the vastly superior Mexican force arrived. But the slaves did not necessarily have revolt in mind. Once the “Runaway Scrape” broke out, many slaves ran in the opposite direction in the confusion, taking advantage of the opportunity to escape towards the Mexican lines.19

Runaway slaves and African Americans opposed to the Texans also proved themselves loyal auxiliaries during the war with Mexico. Mexican officers in revolutionary Texas even asked African Americans to serve as spies, deploying them to report on their masters. Juan

Alamonte, a high ranking officer in the borderlands during these years, hired African American valets and generally took advantage of their familiarity with Texas for reconnaissance. In 1836,

Texans near Galveston captured one of Alamonte’s African American servants, who only subsequently escaped with the help of Santa Anna’s personal secretary. He reached General

Pedro Ampudia to report on the number of “yanqui” soldiers gathering in that city and to inform him that the majority of Texan volunteers in Galveston were in fact adventurers from New

Orleans.20 This confirmed the suspicion of the Mexican bureaucrats that the majority of insurgents in Texas comprised of southern Democratic filibusters who were busy radicalizing the rebels.

Unfortunately for the runaways, just a few short months later a rebel force would surprise

Santa Anna at San Jacinto and force him to sign a treaty recognizing Texan independence. As the lines of soldiers slowly headed southward, many runaway slaves joined the retreating soldiers.

19 Ibid; Kelley, “Mexico, in His Head,” 15; Ronnie C. Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico” The Journal of Nero History, 57:1 (Jan. 1972), 2. 20 Diario del Gobierno de la República de Mexico, November 28, 1836; As late as 1854 Juan Alamonte still retained two “free men of color” as servants, William Turley Blake and Augustine Watts: W. S. Marcy to Juan N. Alamonte, July 28, 1854, Frame 99 Roll 70, Microfilm, Colegio de México, Notes to the Foreign Legations in the United States from the Department of State, NAW.

31 Mexican officers generally accepted the runaways into their lines. José Urrea, a Mexican commander in Texas, for one, reported that fourteen slaves came to him with their families seeking asylum at the conclusion of the war with Texas. He sent them on to live in Ciudad

Victoria in Tamaulipas. Urrea’s course of action was not the only one that Mexican commanders took, however. Although the central government outlawed slavery and officially granted asylum to any runaways who made it to Mexico, officers in the borderlands were often hesitant to enforce freedom for African Americans. Interested in maintaining some sort of peace with their neighbors to the north in Texas, Mexican commanders sometimes acted against the wishes of their superiors and sent runaways back to slavery in Texas. Urrea registered his disgust when the

General-in-Chief of the Mexican army in Texas, Vicente Filisola, agreed to return the slaves who had run away to his lines during to the conflict to the Texan peace commissioners.21

This discrepancy between Mexican commanders vis-à-vis runaways demonstrates a central paradox in the borderlands and one that we will return to time and time again. Enforcing edicts handed down by a distant central government was not often a top priority among officials saddled with the day-to-day burden of maintaining a semblance of peace along the contested boundary. Nevertheless, the townspeople of Matamoros would have no part of Filisola’s plan to return the slaves to the Texas peace commissioners. Once a party of Texans arrived in

Matamoros to retrieve their slaves, several vecinos (citizens) in that town colluded with the authorities to hide the fugitives. Further, instead of turning over the runaways, the authorities arrested the Texas peace commissioners, who were eventually forced to return to Texas empty handed. 22 In the end, the war concluded with Texas winning its independence but losing a good number of slaves who ran away to the liberty offered behind enemy lines. This was a bitter pill to

21 Schwartz, 24-25. 22 Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves,” 2; R. M. Potter, “Escape of Karnes and Teal from Matamoros” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, 4 (Oct., 1900), 73-78.

32 swallow, and as late as 1840 Texan slaveholders and bounty hunters were still crossing into

Mexico searching for the runaways who had joined the retreating Mexican armies four years earlier.23

The years of the Texan conflict with Mexico mark an especially important period for the history of runaway slaves. So greatly did they roam the state during these years as fugitives, runaways, turncoats, and spies that the slaves’ “interpretative communities” gained essential geographical information. The mobility of the Texas slaves who took advantage of the confusion caused by the war translated directly into an expanded knowledge of where the limits of liberty lay. Hence, it was also during these years that, at least in West Texas, running away became the focal point of slave resistance. The presence of so many Mexicans who represented a foreign government that lie just south of their location and the experience that so many fugitives had with them travelled back through the slaves’ networks and translated into more and more black sojourns across the borderlands to liberty. The black community maintained its contact with the

Mexican army even after its defeat, further enriching the community’s geographical knowledge.24

Even with independence won from Mexico, Texan slaveholders had failed to remove the threat posed by Mexico to their much-vaunted institution. The proximity of a free country and the presence of a hostile army nearby turned out to have long-term destabilizing effects on slavery in Texas. The routes laid down by mobile African Americans in the borderlands remained outside of the control of Texas authorities—and they would be travelled with increasing frequency in the years to come. Pedro Ampudia and the commander of Matamoros,

Mariano Arista, for instance, encountered blacks far to the south in the Nueces Strip. They

23 Joseph Milton Nance, After San Jacinto: the Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1836-1841 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 232-233. 24 Kelley, 712-713.

33 sometimes even relied on the reports of mobile African Americans for reconnaissance. In 1840 both officers wrote to the Minister of War on different occasions after receiving intelligence about the Texans from blacks that wandered into their camps near the Rio Grande/Bravo.

Confident in their new knowledge of the state’s geography, at least some runway slaves had begun to wander in the contested Nueces strip, which comprised the borderland between the

Republic of Texas and Mexico—and, by extension, the limits of slavery and freedom.25

Likely the number of runaways increased in the years of intermittent warfare between

Texas and Mexico that followed Texan Independence. During these years effective control of

Texas over its territory functionally ceased at the San Antonio River. Nor were runaway slaves the only fugitives that posed a problem to Anglo control over the Nueces Strip. In October of

1845, the Mexican officers along the Rio Bravo announced that they would treat any military deserters from the U.S. side with amnesty. Once Zachary Taylor’s force arrived in the Nueces

Strip in March of 1846, the problems of desertion immediately multiplied. Many of the volunteers who had mustered into companies all over the South were initially excited to do their service for American empire, but they quickly became disillusioned and bored once the realities of camp life set in. Hence, in April, an especially large party of forty-three deserters left with six runaway slaves to Matamoros. The Mexican authorities, seeing that their policy had netted some fruit, further sweetened the deal; they began offering land to any soldiers who would desert the

U.S. army.26

25 Comandante de Mier to Pedro Ampudia: testimony of Eduardo Ros (an Anglo-African), April 14, 1840, L1544 fs. 51-52, SEDNA; Mariano Arista to Ministro de Guerra, May 7, 1840, L1544 f.130, SEDNA. 26 On policy towards deserters: Eco del Norte de Tamaulipas, Oct. 15, 1845; On officers in Matamoros: Robert H. Ferrell, Monterrey is Ours! The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845-1847, (Lexington: University of Kentucky Pres, 1990), 45; On difference between regulars and volunteers see Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 31-112.

34 And of course, the African American auxiliaries to the North American officers were likewise tempted by offers of Mexican amnesty. Many officers in Taylor’s army had brought their slaves with them on campaign since the army paid them an extra stipend of up to $10 a month to defray the cost of keeping servants. These slaves, naturally, began to desert as soon as the officers arrived on the Mexican side of the Bravo/Grande in May. Again in Matamoros, at least one large group of slaves took advantage of the proximity of freedom and ran away, leaving behind three very disappointed officers stationed in that Mexican town who would henceforth have to do without the comforts of home.27

Following the conclusion of the war in early 1848, the slave community in Texas learned that the boundary between slavery and freedom now lie at the Rio Grande/Bravo, along the newly-established international boundary. More and more runaways took advantage of this knowledge and were certain, after their long experience with Mexico during the conflicts with

Texas, that the Mexicans would welcome them. In the years that followed, runaways’ routes stayed in place, making a mockery of the slaveholders’ boundaries. In 1851, Mexicans estimated that “upwards of two thousand fugitive slaves” were to be found in Mexico east of the Sierra

Madre, and by 1854 the number had grown even larger. Legendary Ranger John Salmon Ford

(“Ol’ Rip”), in an attempt to get up a filibustering party to recover runaways, put the number closer to 5000—or nearly 10% of the entire slave population.28 Almost certainly these numbers were exaggerated, but they betrayed the fact that slavery in West Texas had a tentative hold at best.

27 Spirit of the Times, May 16, 1846 (cited in John Gasden, “Runaway Slaves in Matamoros,” Master’s Thesis, University of Texas Pan America, 1994), 61. 28 John Salmon Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, ed. Stephen B. Oates (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 250.

35 Runaway Slaves

In the 1850s, the number of runaway slaves from West Texas increased dramatically.

They were rebels who made a mockery of their masters’ pretensions to control them, shared their knowledge and experiences with their enslaved peers, and violently contested the will of the slaveholders and the limits of slave country. They were an especially inventive lot, perhaps the most resourceful of the whole slave community in Texas—“self-starters” who took advantage of the circuits opened up by others and paragons to their enslaved peers. They pressed the latitude that Texas masters allowed them to travel the ranges and conduct business along the border to their own service. They employed the tools of Texas frontier life to their own ends, investing everyday items and events with violently subversive meaning. They sometimes even pressed their own skin into service, passing fluently amongst the many different groups and colors that comprised the borderlands populations. When they ran away, they carried weapons, met at religious revivals and agreed-upon way stations, rode stolen horses, and occasionally even came back to Texas—more familiar with the route, and more confident in helping others escape to

Mexico.

The everyday items that runaways most often pressed into their own service were the firearms their masters lent them. These were perhaps the most important items that slaves carried if they intended to go west into Mexico, hunt for themselves, and pass amongst the plains raiders and Texan slave hunters. When a slave named John ran away from his master near Fort Worth, for example, he armed himself to the teeth, taking not only a silver-mounted Colt five shooter, but also a double-barreled shotgun.29 Another group of at least four runaways that headed west from Wallbarger’s Creek were likewise heavily armed, carrying a gun each and a cache of extra

29 Dallas Herald, June 21, 1856.

36 weapons.30 Others had to rely on arms used primarily for hunting in the case of a confrontation, such as Lewis, who fled from Washington on the Brazos in the company of six or seven other runaways. He only carried an antiquated single-barrel English shotgun.”31

There was nothing unusual about travelling armed through the plains of Texas; guns were common articles of frontier life. Nor was it unusual for slaves to use shotguns to hunt game or take on tasks for the master. But the firearm started to have quite a different meaning once the slave elected to head towards freedom in Mexico. When runaways stole weapons from their former masters, they pressed their property into rebellion against them, putting everyday frontier items to their own rebellious use and transforming the supposed mastery of the slaveholders into the stuff of myth. Erstwhile masters watched as groups of armed runaway slaves left the plantations for freedom in Mexico and—at least on some occasions—willing to defend their flight. One Texan white, for example, spotted a runaway outside of San Antonio and attempted to arrest him. In order to avoid arrest, however, the runaway beat his would-be captor over the head with a pistol and severely hurt him. Another runaway near Washington on the Brazos opened fire on a “Mr. Yerby” who sought to re-enslave him but missed his mark, only losing his freedom when Yerby returned fire and “empt[ied] the contents of his shotgun” to cripple the runaway.32 Yet another runaway from somewhere near Bastrop used the barrel of his gun to beat his would-be captor, a Mr. Layman, senseless.33

The news items and runaway advertisements that circulated in Texas newspapers usually listed the firearms the runaways were carrying. This was not only to help identify the runaway, but also to give fair warning to any potential bounty hunters. Try through they might to see

30 Indianola Bulletin, July 7, 1855. 31 Washington Texas Ranger and Lonestar, November 30, 1854. 32 Washington Texas Ranger and Lonestar, June 16, 1855. 33 Southern Intelligencer, April 27, 1859.

37 docility in the enslaved, runaways brought the violent core of slavery out into the open and attested mightily to the will and revolutionary potential of the runaway. Frederick Law Olmsted who travelled through the state in the 1850s, took note of the determination of runaways and called slavery in Texas “slavery with a will.” He insisted that in Texas, the state of slavery harkened back to the “moment of captivity,” and “the state of war in which slavery arises seems to continue in undertone to the present.”34

Olmsted was particularly interested in laying bare the violence that mobile slaves were capable of in his effort to demystify the supposed benevolence of the “peculiar institution.”

Olmsted, as a self-described “scientific farmer,” was a Free Soil man, and he hoped to halt the expansion of slave territory into any territory acquired by the United States. Accordingly, he was particularly interested in undermining the arguments of Southern intellectuals who had in the previous decades began to posit slavery as a “positive good.”35 To this effect, he writes of encountering a Texan master in pursuit of an escaped slave that had run off with a stolen shotgun.

The master grew impatient as he slowly realized that the bounty hunter he hired to track down the runaway was not going to appear at the agreed-upon time and place. Demonstrating some degree of humility, the aggrieved master asked for help from the other men gathered around him at a tavern, receiving an earful of useful and not-so-useful advice from the would-be masters of slaves who surrounded him. They all offered to help the put-out master, and one even had a clever ruse in mind. He said he could “induce him [the runaway] to let me take the gun by pretending I wanted to look at it...I’d talk to him simple make as if I was a stranger, and ask him

34 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York: Dix, Edwards, and Co., 1857), 123-124. 35 Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011), 3, 43. For the rise of radical racialism see Howe, 478. 480; Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 118-244; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 116-158.

38 about the road and so on, and finally ask him what he had got for the gun, and to let me look at it?” The owner didn’t believe he would let go of the gun, the runaway was, after all a “nigger of sense—as much sense as a white man...” The slaveholder eventually decided to give up the pursuit as he assumed that every African American and Mexican the runaway encountered along the way would probably help him get away to Mexico.36

Olmsted wrote that the runaway slave’s former master discouraged arousing retribution from the rebellious slave who had left with his firearm, implicitly acknowledging the will and agency of the black man. Despite the fact that this acknowledgement undermined the very bedrock of racialized slavery, the master knew better than to try this foolish minstrelsy-like ruse.

He looked beyond the antics of Cuffy and Jim Crow, so popular on the Jacksonian stage, to see the willful slave and recognize the his capacity for independent rebelliousness and personal agency. When real personal danger could occur, masters were quick to drop their belief in the runaway’s docility and the natural servility of Africans. Olmsted implies that these little dramas were endemic to Texas where the frontier of slave country generated a particularly confrontational mode of slavery that undermined any monopolistic claim that post-independence

Texan whites might have had on violence, mastery, and (significantly for Texas after 1836) revolution. This anecdote Olmsted recorded undercut the tremendous work that slaveholders put into constructing the image of the docile slave. Armed slaves travelling independently through the borderlands and, as Noah Sedgwick said, “impatient for the promised freedom” did much harm to the presumed mastery of white men.37

36 Olmsted, 106. 37 On minstrelsy and racialism in Jacksonian America see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 234-235 and Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 109- 126; Maggie Montesinos Sales, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham: Duke UP, 1997) esp. 146-172 for a close reading of Melville’s Benito Cereno

39 Runaways needed tools besides firearms and a stubborn will to make good their flight to

Mexico. As such, they pressed other quotidian elements of frontier life into their rebellion—most notably, horses. Blacks on the border (like runaway sirvientes from Mexico) would become notorious for riding and dealing in stolen horses. One African American known as Francisco to border Mexicans became an especially well-known rustler, and the authorities in Texas informed their counterparts in Mexico that he was wanted for horse thievery alongside “others of the same color” with whom he worked. In August of 1851 he was spotted with some accomplices in the barren plains that lie just west of the San Antonio-Eagle Pass line carrying a herd of stolen animals.38 The Mexican military authorities apprehended this band of thieves and the animals they transported, presumably once they had reached the terminus of their route in Mexico. It turns out that the horse, mare, mule, and two colts that they were driving had come all the way from the Colorado River and bore Texas brands. Always eager to avoid conflict with the Texans, the Mexicans sought to punish this gang of thieves after their apprehension and return the animals to their owners. Nevertheless, as long as Mexicans were willing to buy stolen animals from Texas the traffic continued, and runaway slaves played an important role in it.39

Horses were perhaps an obvious resource deployed by runaways. A less obvious resource was the ability to pass. The racial fluidity of West Texas confounded the whites who moved there from the closed slave societies back East in the years following the Texan secession from

Mexico. The cultural and biological mixture represented by mulattos and mestizos perplexed new Texans used to reading race through the blunt heuristic categories of red, black, and white.

Texan whites had particular difficulty with runaways like George Smith, a runaway from near

whereby she studies how liberal subjectivity was largely foreclosed to blacks through dismissing their claim to the “trope of revolutionary masculinity.” 38 Serapio Fragoso secretario del gobierno del Estado de Coahuila, to presidente municipal, Guerrero, August 15, 1851, C5 E54, AGEC AMG. 39 Jesús Castillon to the Secretary of the Governor of Coahuila, August 1, 1851, C8 F1 E1, FSXIX AGEC.

40 Corpus Christi, who attempted to pass as a “Mexican Greaser” (which was, of course, the preferred Texan slur for Mestizos and lower class Mexicans.)40

Another runaway, a mulatto with “small hands and feet,” pressed his own skin into the service of flight. Besides twenty-five pounds of bacon, a gallon or two of corn meal, pens, pencils, paper, an arithmetic, and two horses, he also packed good clothing including two extra white shirts before he ran away to Mexico. A literate man in Mexico would have more opportunities, and in addition to his lighter skin he would need to dress the part to pass as an educated free man. Unfortunately for him, a Judge Jones in Blanco City mistook him for an

Indian, shot him and killed him, and the runaway never made it to Mexico.41 In this particular case, the mulatto fell victim to the risks of fair skin. Texas pioneers, who were used to dealing with Comanche and Lipan horse thieves, had little compunction about murdering Indians.

Runaway slaves, on the other hand, were too valuable for such treatment. Judge Jones’ failure to correctly read the race of the runaway not only resulted in the murder of a fellow human being, but it also cost him what could have been a considerable reward.

The percentage of mulattos or lighter-skinned African Americans amongst the runaways seems markedly high, in fact. This may have had to do with the fact that they gleaned more information from their contacts in domestic service, but more likely it was because their lighter skin served them well in their flight from slavery. The ability to pass could be an essential component in a successful escape. Thomas Houston, for instance, was an early and much- celebrated runaway who escaped from Samuel Houston’s service in the company of his “servant,” the darker African American Shadwick. This ruse helped the two runaways from Cedar Point

40 The Nueces Valley (Corpus Christi), March 18, 1854. 41 Texas State Times, March 15, 1856.

41 plantation pass unmolested through the Nueces Strip and into the Mexican border towns, well within the limits of liberty.42 We will return to their story in a future chapter.

The most dangerous tool that the runaways had at their disposal, however, was the expanded geographical knowledge that they possessed, gained through roaming and plugging into subterranean communication networks that reached all the way into Mexico. The most dangerous runaways were the ones who shared this knowledge with others in the slave community on the occasional instances when they returned from Mexico. Sometimes they even guided others of their enslaved brethren to freedom. One of the few recorded examples of this phenomenon comes from LaGrange, Texas. It was there, in January of 1851, that a runaway slave named Philander spent an evening visiting a campground on the outskirts of town. He stayed behind at night, after the din of the religious revival held there during the day had died down, and waited until everybody left. As night fell, Philander fell upon some horses that answered his purpose and rode them off. Unfortunately he did not make it far. He was quickly apprehended with the stolen horses alongside another African American named Talbot, who, it turned out, had already made the journey to Mexico before. Talbot was more than likely planning to guide Philander to Mexico, and they just needed mounts to make the trip. Probably

Talbot had charged Philander with the duty of ascertaining horses from the campgrounds. Instead, both men were undoubtedly re-enslaved.43

Talbot was not the only runaway who returned to Texas to spread underground geographical knowledge and experience. On another occasion, a wildly unkempt stranger materialized from the wilderness in the town of LaGrange to report that he had seen three runaways armed with rifles and mounted on two mules near Brenham. Even more alarmingly,

42 Joseph D. McCutchan, Mier Expedition Diary: A Texan Prisoner’s Account (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978 [1842]), 67-70. 43 LaGrange Monument, Oct. 10 (year missing).

42 they were in the company of a slave who belonged to a man named McIntyre. He had somehow managed to recapture the runaway from Mexico the year before and had brought him back to his property. In the meantime, the recaptured runaway had shared his experience with McIntyre’s other slaves, several of whom decided to join him in attempting another escape.44 Such examples show that there were indeed mobile African Americans who travelled back and forth between

Mexico and Texas—sometimes voluntarily and sometimes against their will—as active agents, spreading the word along an underground information network that prepared and encouraged runaways in their trip to Mexico.

Indeed, geographical knowledge was the most important and revolutionary tool that runaways pressed into their service. By the 1850s, runaways and the enslaved had a clearly established network that reached from the West Texas plantations into the far North of Mexico.

Perhaps this route into Mexico even rivaled the Underground Railroad in the upper South. News items from the 1850s indicate that there were agreed-upon places for large groups of runaways where they could meet with a guide or join together before heading to the Rio Grande/Bravo.

Chief among these places was the town of Bastrop. The Bastrop Road drew slaves westward and was the initial stage in many flights to Mexico.45 Due west of the main plantation settlements of

East Texas, it made for a convenient stopover on the way towards the Indian country to the west or to the largely Hispanic settlements to the south. In fact, a disproportionate number of the runaway slaves advertised in papers hailed from Bastrop, nearby Austin, and the region just east of the Colorado River. The banks of the Colorado River were often the last place where Texans

44 LaGrange Monument, January 8, 1851. 45 La Grange Monument, August 7, 1850.

43 would see their runaway slaves, just before they waded across the river and started upon their journey to Mexico.46

Way stations were places mobile slaves could gather together, glean information, and even ask for assistance from migrant Mexicans—and Bastrop emerged as an especially important one early on. Right after the United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 and war between the U.S. and Mexico loomed large on the horizon, twenty-five blacks ran away together from Bastrop, supposedly induced by the Mexicans of the area. Seventeen were later caught near

Seguin, directly to the west, but seven or eight likely escaped to the Mexican towns on the Rio

Grande/Bravo. Ten years later, the town continued to have the same problem. In 1857, a “squad” of runaways “piloted” to Mexico by “a couple of peones [sic]” had made good their getaway, even though slave hunters eventually recaptured two of the runaways.47 So great was the traffic of runaway slaves through Bastrop that one man with a “No. 1 pack of hounds well trained for catching negroes” sought to turn other’s misfortune to his pecuniary advantage, and placed an advertisement for his hounds’ services in the newspaper.48

Even as the Civil War fast approached, Bastrop remained a hotbed of insurrectionary activity, and runaways form far and wide could be found there. In August of 1860, the Bastrop

Advertiser claimed that the woods around the town “seem[ed] to be alive with runaway slaves” and six young men had been jailed within ten days. The year of 1860 witnessed plots and rumors of slave rebellion all over the South. Typical of West Texas, the Bastrop slave conspiracy centered on a plot to run away to Mexico. Slave hunters were put on the alert by an increased

46 See for instance: La Grange Texas Monument, August 31, 1853 and October 19, 1853; Texas State Gazette, December 21. 1850, August 5, 1851, September 18, 1851, and March 26, 1853; Washington Texas Ranger and Lone Star, July 23, 1853; Texas State Times September 15, 1855 and September 21, 1856. 47 Houston Telegraph and Texas Register, January 15, 1845; Houston Telegraph and Texas Register, January 22, 1845; Texas State Gazette, June 2, 1855. 48 Bastrop Advertizer, March 14, 1857 [sic: probably 1847].

44 number of runaways around the town and even managed to capture a few who they could question. They determined that some of the runaways came from the region around Bastrop, but that others had come from far away and perhaps even from other states. All runaways accused in this alleged plot had as their ultimate goal “to enter Mexican territory, where they expected to be free after their arrival there.” One of the “boys” captured even said that this was his third attempt to reach Mexico. He had been captured before, but this had never dimmed his resolve to reach freedom and he had undoubtedly already shared his knowledge about the road to Mexico with his enslaved piers. Further, the fact that some of these runaways came from far away, perhaps even other states, attests mightily to the strength and reach of the communication networks of the enslaved.49

Once they left Bastrop, the runaways could go either south or west. We will deal with those who went west in further detail in chapter 5. For those who continued south, meanwhile, on the road towards the border towns on the lower Rio Grande/Bravo, they would pass Texan towns that contained a vast majority of Hispanics over whites. In these towns individuals and groups of runaway slaves might find Mexican guides. Thus, these towns were especially attractive way stations for runaways and their arrival put local whites on alert. In 1852 a runaway named Alfred, a mulatto with a “bold and impudent appearance,” ran away from Colorado

County and passed through Goliad.50 A year later, three blacks who escaped from the area around Gonzales passed through the same town en route to the border.51 Meanwhile, just to the east of Goliad, in Victoria, an eighteen year-old runaway named Frank from Lavaca County

49 Matagorda Gazette, Aug. 22, 1860. see also: Texas State Times, Aug 25, 1855, Nov. 3, 1855, Tri-Weekly State Times, Nov. 14, 1853, La Grange Texas Monument, March 3, 1852, Texas State Gazette, Austin, Jan 20, 1853, Bastrop Advertiser, June 5, 1858. 50 Victoria Texian Advocate, September 18, 1852. 51 Gonzales Inquirer, August 13, 1853.

45 passed on his way to freedom.52 All of these runaways probably made good their escape, and there were certainly many more just like them who avoided detection altogether passing through the overwhelmingly Hispanic towns en route to the border.53

Once runaways moved beyond the Texas towns, crossed the Nueces Strip, and reached the banks of the Grande/Bravo, they still had to cross the physical line between freedom and slavery. The post-1848 border, as we have seen, was a hinge between slavery and freedom. As a result, the river itself took on increased significance in the battle between slaves and would-be masters over the limits of slavery after 1848, and it lay as the final obstacle in the path of the slave’s freedom. The most immediate danger was the river itself, where the notoriously treacherous currents claimed their share of lives indiscriminate of color.54

But the river itself was not the only threat. Some of the greatest scuffles between slave catchers and their quarry occurred along the banks of the Rio Grande/Bravo. There, Texans could count on some assistance from Hispanic elites. The social milieu that runaway slaves entered once they arrived at the border settlements was extraordinarily complex and navigating it was no easy task. Given the informal alliance that existed between many merchant Tejanos and whites downriver—and the prominence of certain whites in both Brownsville and Laredo— runaways had to be especially careful when passing through these towns. Hispanic borderlanders who owned ranches along the Rio Grande/Bravo were distinct from the peones (migrant day laborers) who runaway slaves interacted with in West Texas and most often lent their assistance to runaway slaves. The Hispanic elite who they encountered along the river—especially on the

Texas side—were often closely connected by marriage and commercial interests to the new and

52 Victoria Texian Advocate, June 12, 1852. 53 For a description of these towns see Olmsted, 240-266. 54 Texas State Gazette, Sep. 9, 1854 counts two drownings of runaways in one week, one near Eagle Pass and another further downriver.

46 powerful Anglos who had begun to arrive in small numbers immediately following the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexico War. They were also considerably lighter-skinned, a little- considered factor that allowed for Texans to look past their racial biases. The so-called Merchant

Wars of the early 1850s had deepened the ad hoc alliance that existed between whites and elite

Hispanics (especially Tejanos) who lived along the river. During the conflict, white Texans had swelled the ranks of the Tejano José María de Carvajal’s freebooter army, which was intent on filibustering in Northern Mexico for the cause of free trade. One of several goals that Texans hoped to achieve by throwing in their lot with Carvajal and other Federalist, anti-tariff revolutionaries in Texas and Tamaulipas was the safety of slavery.55

Safeguarding the institution of slavery was an important aspect of the Merchant Wars and a primary goal for the whites who supported Carvajal. When they joined up with the Tejano filibusterer, a committee of Texan merchants drafted a “Declaration of Independence” for the

“Seven Northern States of the Sierra Madre of Mexico” (conspicuously written in English) to this effect, which included as one of its articles the legalization of slavery in the Mexican borderlands. They imagined northern Mexico would become a buffer zone for slaveholders, rather than remaining the refuge for those seeking liberty that it had become. But the revolt failed and the Mexican authorities labeled Carvajal a traitor for bringing Texas Rangers into his army.

Nevertheless, attempts to establish this supposed Republic of the Sierra Madre fired the imagination of both Hispanic and Anglo Texan filibusterers intermittently for the duration of the

1850s, and this revolutionary movement—alongside the rewards offered for the return of runaways—inspired individual slaveholders and their agents to cross into Mexico illegally and

55 J. Fred Rippy, “Border Troubles along the Rio Grande, 1848-1860,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 23 (October, 1919), 91-111; Earnest C. Shearer, “The Carvajal Disturbances,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 55 (October, 1951), 201-230; Joseph E. Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal: The Life and Times of a Mexican Revolutionary (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2006).

47 kidnap freemen. 56 As a result, the slave raids that occurred along the river east of Laredo can be understood within the larger context of these “Merchant Wars” that occupied the frontier authorities and the Mexican National Guard in the early 1850s. Certainly, Anglo-Texas were sympathetic to the causes of federalism and the lifting of tariffs and duties. But despite such political grandstanding, individual raids made from Texas into Mexico rarely had any greater purpose than to kidnap African Americans for profit.

Sometimes the white residents of the border towns acted alone in delivering up runaways to their masters, as in 1857, when a man in Laredo named Mr. Level, captured two runaways and returned them to their owner on the Colette River.57 But Tejanos often captured runaway slaves as well, acting out of deferment to their social superiors—the prominent and successful white merchants who had married into elite Tejano families—and reaping a reward for their trouble. In

November of 1860, for instance, some Texans spotted a pair of runaways on the Laredo road. A party of whites set out after them, but only managed to capture one of the runaways. Later that day, however, some of the Tejanos who lived in Laredo delivered the other.58

56Defensor de Tamaulipas, extra, June 26, 1846 Declaration of Independence, June 16, 1849, The Unanimous Declaration of the Seven Northern States of the Sierra Madre of Mexico found in Leg. 3057 f. 13, SEDNA; The republic of the Rio Grande was an earlier attempt to create a federalist republic in the North of Mexico: see David M. Vigness, “Relations of the Republic of Texas and the Republic of the Rio Grande,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 57 (January, 1954), 312-321; David M. Vigness, “A Texas Expedition into Mexico, 1840” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 62 (July, 1958), 18-29, and most importantly, Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “La Supuesta República del Río Grande” Historia Mexicana, 36:141 (1986), 49-80; For the movement for the Republic of the Sierra Madre see: Earl W. Fornell, “Texas Filibusterers in the 1850s,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 59 (April, 1956), 411-428; Earnest C. Shearer, “The Callahan Expedition, 1855,” Southwestern Historical Quqrterly, 54 (October, 1951), 431-451 and Ronnie C. Tyler, Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1973); On Anglo and Tejano relations along the border, see Montejano, Anglos and Mexican, 34-43; For the turn away from Independent Mexico and towards the U.S. economy along the Rio Grande/Bravo see Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, “Neglected Citizens and Willing Traders: The Villas del Norte (Tamaulipas) in Mexico’s Northern Borderlands, 1749-1846 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 18:2 (Summer 2002), pp. 251-296 and for this phenomenon writ large see Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 57 Southern Intelligencer, December 16, 1857. 58 Corpus Christi Ranchero, November 17, 1860.

48 Another incident that occurred in Laredo in 1860 demonstrates why we should not automatically assume that all Tejanos and African Americans had some sort of alliance born out of shared racial oppression.59 A runaway who chose to cross at Laredo had the misfortune of passing too closely to the dominion of Santos Benavides, a native of Laredo who would go on to become the only commissioned Tejano Confederate officer during the American Civil War.60

Benavides, upon learning the news that a runaway had paid a ferryman to take him across to

Nuevo Laredo, got up a party of ten friends (both whites and Tejanos) to cross over and recapture the runaway. He succeeded, and the Corpus Christi Ranchero was enthusiastic in commending his efforts and his loyalty to Texas’ “laws and institutions.” The mixed party had crossed the river in disguise, travelled to the house of Francisco Cipriano in Nuevo Laredo, kidnapped the African American, and then dragged him across his will to the other side of the river. The Mexican authorities in Laredo mounted an investigation into the abduction, but it did not ultimately come to much. The commission interviewed a ferryman who testified that the skiff they had used to cross over and spirit the abducted African American back to Texas was soaked in blood. Another witness, meanwhile, had heard a gunshot, and a third witness indicated that among the men who had crossed the river to steal the black man back was one “Juan N.,” the administrator of the customs house in Laredo, Texas. 61 Despite Mexico’s official policy on freedom, the black man was successfully and violently re-enslaved in a demonstration of just how fungible the border between slavery and liberty could be, a topic to which we will return in chapter 3.

59 Indeed, this supposition is made by de León, They Called Them Greasers; for a revised and more nuanced understanding of this dynamic along the lower Rio Grande/Bravo see Elliott Young, “Red Men, Princess Pocahontas, and George Washington: Harmonizing Race Relations in Laredo at the Turn of the Century” Western Historical Quarterly, 29 (Spring, 1998), 48-85. 60 For the career of Santos Benavides during the U.S. Civil War see Jerry D. Thompson, Vaqueros in Blue and Grey (Austin: State House Press, 2000 [1977]), 25-41. 61 Corpus Christi Ranchero, November 6, 1860; Investigation of alcalde constitutional of Nuevo Laredo, begun November 6, 1860, [copy 1873] C3 E13 F7, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE.

49 Other nearby border towns likewise saw their share of violence between runaways and their captors. In 1856, a notable scuffle occurred between runaways and Texan slave hunters at

Rio Grande City on the Texan side of the river, across from Camargo, Tamaulipas. Although they lost their horses in the fight, the runaways still managed to pass into Mexico unnoticed by the Mexican authorities. The runaways were accompanied by three Mexicans, who were, like the runaways, well-armed and well-mounted. Undoubtedly they had travelled together from West

Texas.62

The Mexicans with whom the runaways rode across were most likely peones, who had agreed to help them find their way to Mexico from West Texas. The “peons” who found themselves accused of aiding and abetting slaves the most were of a different class than the elite

Tejanos who lived along the border on the Texan side. It was almost certainly the peons or (even more offensively) “greasers”–i.e. Mexican laborers who sojourned in Texas—who helped the runaways on most occasions. Migrant Mexicans living and laboring in Texas had very little gain from the white power structure. Whites in Texas often drew an almost racial distinction between

Mexican migrant laborers and resident Tejanos whose fortunes were often tied up with them. As

Rip Ford’s Southwestern American put it, in an attempt to mystify class distinctions amongst

Hispanos by assigning to the peones racial markers:

…there are Mexicans who are white men and gentlemen, and the term peon does not suit for there are greasers who are not peons. The term greasers means all that mongrel class of Mexicans who are slaves in their own country and vagabonds in this—all that class among themselves ‘peons, pelados, picaros, sin verguenzas [sic] or putas.’ In short the whole tribe of low flung Mexicans.63

62 Texas State Times, Nov. 15, 1856. 63“ Quote from Southern Intelligencer, January 26, 1858. Transient was the language adopted to determine which Mexicans to expel as a class in 1854 from Austin and other Midwestern Texas towns for “tampering” with the slaves see La Grange Texas Monument, October 17, 1854, Texas State Gazette, October 21, 1854, and Texas State Times, October 14, 1854. For difference between peons and those Mexicans “vouched” for by the vigilance committee see: Texas State Gazette, Oct 24, 1854. For discursive conflation of “peon” and lower class Mexicans see Gonzales Inquirer, September 17, 1853 and Texas State Times, October 21, 1855.

50 Migrants were naturally the Mexicans who had the most to gain and the least to lose from helping runaway slaves. Referred to repeatedly as transients in the Texas press, this mobile population of Mexican laborers raised the hackles of white Texans and elite Tejanos almost immediately upon their arrival in Texas en masse in the 1850s (a migration discussed further in the next chapter).

Despite tremendous obstacles, mobile African Americans still managed to turn the boundary between Mexico and the United States into a hinge between slavery and freedom—and in the process they turned all of West Texas into a borderlands of liberty. Runaway slaves lent meaning to the receding border between Mexico and Texas, transforming it into a line between slavery and freedom. And once they crossed over into Mexico, ex-slaves began to think of themselves very differently. Certainly one has to read for their dignity very rigorously through the scorn heaped upon them, but the pride they felt in their accomplishment still stands out against the grain. For one example, there is a dispatch from the Bejareño, a Tejano correspondent for the San Antonio Ledger who wrote from Monterrey. He claimed that the African Americans in that city who had found some measure of success “carr[ied] their heads high as monkies

[sic].”64 In another instance drawn from Monterrey, a runaway known simply as Dan in Texas chose to adopt his Mexican father-in-law’s name once he married. He became Don Dioniso de

Echavaría and claimed that his old name was only fit for a “plantation nigger.” Indeed, this Don

Dionisio even went so far as to complain about “lazy Mexicans,” which was certainly a sign that he had adopted some of the more elitist customs of his host country.65 Frederick Olmsted, meanwhile, visited Piedras Negras across the river from Eagle Pass, and claimed that runaway slaves were “constantly arriving” there. Olmsted was particularly taken aback when one African

64 San Antonio Daily Ledger, August 16, 1861. 65 Cora Montgomery, Eagle Pass, or Life on the Border (New York: Putnam, 1852), 139-140.

51 American he met there looked at him and “grinned impudently—expressing plainly enough—‘I am not afraid of you.’”66

Tales of freedom from slavery and racial abjection circulated back into Texas, creating a feedback loop that constantly challenged the line drawn between slavery and freedom at the

Grande/Bravo. Knowledge about freedom in Mexico, the routes, and the necessary preparations for the trip would continue to filter back to the enslaved in Texas via the conduit of especially mobile and willful slaves who shared their experiences and geographical knowledge. Even after emancipation, this knowledge continued to circulate, making Mexico into a special place in the historical imagination of African Americans. As ex-slave Felix Haywood so elegantly put it to the Works Project Administration in the 1930s: “In Mexico you could be free, they didn’t care what color you were, black, white, yellow, or blue. Hundreds of slaves did go to Mexico and got on all right.”67

West Texas Under Siege

Nothing better illustrates the power of mobile slaves to disrupt the presumed mastery of

Texan slaveholders than the fact that they forced slaveholders to turn West Texas into a police state. Masters in Texas reported excitedly on runaways in the 1850s, sure that slavery was in peril. It was not supposed to be the way. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo placed the contested Nueces Strip in Texan hands and permanently removed the Mexican military to the other side of the Grande/Bravo. The new border was supposed to have shored up the doubts of slaveholders, and thousands of newcomers had just arrived with their slaves, confident that the troubles with Mexico were over.

66 Olmsted, 323-324. 67 Ed. Ron C. Tyler, The Slave Narratives of Texas, (Austin: State House Press, 1997), 69-70.

52 Instead, The newcomers who ended up in West Texas found a society under siege.

Slaveholders began moving into the Matagorda Bay area and the Colorado River Valley in the

1850s. These two areas, broadly considered, would constitute the slaveholder’s frontier in Texas; indeed, they represented the furthest south and west that slave country ever extended in the antebellum United States. This area never really evolved into a “slave society,” however, as no county in either of these areas contained more than 1,000 slaves on the eve of the Civil War, a number which in most cases was well under 50% of the population. The population in these areas remained overwhelmingly Hispanic and free of slavery.68

This failure to extend slave country into these areas was in no small part due to the efforts of runaway slaves themselves. To runaways, the border mattered and crossing it meant freedom.

Naturally, the uncertainty of slaveholders, the proximity of Mexico, and the presence of

Mexicans in West Texas all aroused a great deal of paranoia on the part of the slaveholder.

Further, the fact that so many of the runaways came from near the Colorado River and

Matagorda Bay did not do much to mollify the slaveholders’ fears in West Texas. In the end, alongside the demographic surge that Texas experienced in the 1850s, the growing volume of runaway ads in Texas newspapers suggest that the incidents of flight amongst the slaves also increased.

Texas slaveholders, in their continued effort to see docility in the enslaved despite such plain evidence to the contrary, ignored runaway slaves’ personal agency and instead tried to place the blame for their flights on others. In their search for trouble-makers, slaveholders blamed outsiders, particularly itinerant Mexicans, abolitionists, free blacks, strangers, and anyone else whom the mob could find accountable. When several slaves ran away from Goliad, for example, the authorities looked for the party or parties responsible and eventually uncovered

68 Map in Campbell, 59; Slave society is Ira Berlin’s term, Many Thousands Gone, 93-109.

53 a remarkable and most unlikely conspiracy. When the authorities caught up to the runaways and apprehended them, they were in the company of two thieves who had “decoyed” the black men off, leaving the authorities with “no doubt of the existence of …a gang of desesperados [sic] and their extensive machinations.” The report continued, saying that the headquarters of the

“desesperados” were “established on the Rio Grande, and their plan of operation appears to [be to] send out prowling parties into the planting sections of West, to decoy slaves away under the promise of transporting them to Mexico.” But they reported that the promised liberty was only a cruel trick. The thieves allegedly transported the slaves “through an obscure route” to Louisiana and other slaveholding states further east after helping them escape.69 Another rumor had it that white men were “decoying” slaves away from Texas to sell to Mexican hacendados.70 Stories like these, which uncovered remarkable and unlikely conspiracies, had the palliative effect for slaveholders of explaining away the runaways’ agency.

The fact that Texans slaveholders were so quick to blame outsiders who “decoyed” off their slaves speaks volumes about Texan masters and their paranoia, brought on by the deluge of runaway slaves to Mexico. Aggrieved slaveholders could take solace in the myth that slaves only ran away if instigated and they continued believing that if left alone African Americans remained a docile and servile workforce. And masters in West Texas undoubtedly let their slaves know the moral of these apocryphal tales of desperados operating out of Mexico: even if the slave got away successfully, he or she was still vulnerable to the machinations of outside agitators looking to make a profit on the misfortune of the trusting runaway. Planters likely told their slaves that they should not trust strangers who approached them and made promises to them that they would not keep. Perhaps some slaveholders were even arrogant enough to believe their own stories.

69 Western Texian, November 18, 1854. 70 Washington Texas Ranger and Lonestar, July 13, 1854.

54 After all, if they did not need to worry about outside agitators, masters were comfortable believing that their slaves were content with their lot in life—it was, they said, better than that of the “peons” who had fled from Mexico with whom the African Americans so often associated.71

Convinced that slaves were vulnerable to conniving outsiders who could decoy them off,

Texans on occasion visited brutal mob justice on alleged agitators. In their efforts to see conspiracy and deny agency to slaves, masters looked everywhere for outsiders who might instigate runaways. In November of 1854, Navarro County witnessed the flight of several slaves.

Texan authorities alleged that a man named Wells acted in conjunction with another outsider named Morgan to run a real life “skin game.”72 The itinerant laborers had been employed by a

Colonel Elliot to work alongside African Americans, and these con men had supposedly struck upon a great idea while at work. They would take two of the slaves with them when they left who were “very bright mulattos.” They would then black-up their faces with burnt cork and resell them on their way South. They would then steal them back two or three times before they reached Mexico. Afterwards, they would cross the border, thus fulfilling their promise to transport the slaves to freedom in Mexico.

The detail that the men would black-up the mulattos before selling them indicates that the plot was foiled mid-hatch, and it was probably not all that well-conceived if it even existed

(although Eric Lott, for one, has argued that nineteenth century Americans were often convinced that burnt cork was the “genuine article.”73) Nevertheless, this was a detail of the skin game that only emerged after a “posse of citizens” caught up to Morgan and tortured him. The mob gave

Morgan five minutes to give them all of the details of the conspiracy or they would kill him. He confessed that not only did he and his accomplice plan to run the slaves to Mexico after re-

71 Texas State Gazette, September 30, 1854. 72 The Skin Game it the title of a 1972 film starring James Garner and Lou Gossett that tells a very similar tale. 73 Lott, 144-145.

55 selling them several times for profit, but that Wells had also planned to murder Elliott before absconding with two of his slaves. After extracting this confession from Morgan, the posse caught up to Wells.

A few days later, a group of men building a bridge found Wells’ lifeless body floating in a creek. The posse had tried to tie his body to the bottom of the river after murdering him, but it floated to the top anyways. According to the coroner’s report, his neck bore the imprint of the cord used to hang him, his arms had been slashed, his genitals cut off, and his “abdomen split open the whole length with a knife, and his bowels taken out, together with his liver, heart and lungs.” Further, the investigation into his murder revealed that “some of the most respectable and prominent men in the county of Navarro” had comprised the posse. Of the nine men accused, however, all were honorably acquitted. Meanwhile, Morgan, who was Wells’ supposed accomplice, recanted his confession, saying that it had only been extracted under the most excruciating torture. The moral economy of the mob that demanded the horrific mutilation of

Wells just goes to show how united slaveholders were in looking for outside agitators as the cause for their slaves’ rebellion rather than seeing the desire for freedom amongst the enslaved themselves.74

Masters looked not only to white strangers in their search for outside agitators. They also accused the very small number of free blacks who lived in Texas. Bastrop, for instance, witnessed West Texas’ most serious slave conspiracy (or at least imagined conspiracy) in 1856, a plot that revolved around running away to Mexico. The principal instigators in this plot were a

“large number of slaves” in Colorado County who had “armed themselves for the purpose of fighting their way into Mexico.” They had held a secret convention and allegedly struck upon a great conspiracy. At that secret meeting, they decided to flee en masse to Mexico, but only after

74 Washington Texas Ranger and Lonestar, November 18, 1854; Western Texian, November 23, 1854.

56 murdering all the whites. Upon investigating, it was found that most of the slaves of the county had been armed with either guns or homemade knives. Some two hundred slaves were lashed for their involvement, and several of the principal organizers put to death. Ultimately, a free black was blamed for the entire episode, an accusation that conveniently enough allowed slaveholders to continue believing in the docility of their slaves. Free blacks could not be blamed for too many conspiracies, however; they were a tiny population in Texas, a state where African Americans were not even legally allowed to be free. In 1850, there were only 394 free blacks counted in the state census.75

Another group in Texas widely rumored to help the runaway slaves were the German immigrants who began filtering in to the territory west of San Antonio in the 1850s. Runaways who headed west towards Piedras Negras passed very closely to their settlements along a route that became, according to one scholar, the quickest way to the border from San Antonio. It also contained much less desolate country than the trails that crossed the Nueces strip into the eastern border settlements along the lower Rio Grande/Bravo. It had the added advantage of passing through the Texas “Free Thinker” towns of Castroville and Comfort settled by recent German immigrants, some of whom had been involved in the social upheavals of 1848. Quasi-socialist

Germans had founded these towns in the previous decades, and according to rumor, they were willing to help runaways reach their destinations. Indeed, in February of 1855, two mulattos who were “decoyed” off by white men were later discovered in a German settlement near Texana in southeast Texas.76

For the most part Texans admired the industry and thrift of the Germans who immigrated and tried to scratch out a living in the semi-arid West Texas dirt. But there were others who

75 Dallas Herald, September 25, 1856; On free blacks see Campbell, 110-114. 76 Chance, 89; Texas Ranger, February 3, 1855 [reprinted from the Leon Pioneer].

57 denounced them wildly, seeing conspiracy in their Free Soil convictions. The Southern

Intelligencer wrote of this dynamic quite openly. The newspaper quoted one man who wished to both reopen the African slave trade and run all Germans and Mexican immigrants off. The

Intelligencer was quite balanced when it responded to the vitriol of this “firebrand” they encountered, characterizing his ideas as “a kindred sentiment to that which denounces all

‘foreigners’ who do not ‘trade in niggers.’” 77 For the slaveholders, those who did not help them retain their slaves were traitors to their society and perhaps whiteness itself. Thus, even the

German Immigrants, who were in most instances above rebuke and were certainly considered white men, suffered from butting up against a society under siege. Mexican “peons” were considered an even greater threat—something we will look at in greater depth in the following chapter.

In the end, outsiders, whether phantasmagorical or real, greatly troubled the institution of slavery in Texas and revealed the deep insecurity of slaveholders. This insecurity justified mob violence and the commissioning of bounty hunters in the minds of Texans. Either way, blaming outside forces continued to propagate the fallacy of slave docility in Western Texas. Whether there had ever been such an organized plot as the violent insurrection that investigators uncovered in Bastrop in 1856 remains a mystery, but the fact that slaveholders in West Texas could imagine it reveals the reality of this “slavery with a will.” West Texan slaveholders’ great desire to see docility in their enslaved workforce was doomed from the start. Outsiders could only stand in as proxies for slave rebellion up to a point.

77 For glowing reports on the Germans in Texas: Southwestern American, March 9, 1853 and Seguin Mercury, October 23, 1853; Texas State Gazette, August 5, 1854. The German-lanugage Zeitung published in San Antonio, meanwhile, had a reputation as an abolitionist paper according to Texas State Gazette, June 23, 1855. “Fire brands” from Southern Intelligencer, April 11, 1858; Southern Confederacy, September 6, 1861.

58 For observers of Texas slavery, meanwhile, the violence at the margins of slave country underscored the centrality of violence to the institution at its core. Northerners in the U.S. looked on appalled, as they read stories of confrontations between slaves and masters in Texas and learned about the state of siege with which West Texans lived. Incidents like the murder and mutilation of Wells underscored the brutality upon which the entire system rested. For another example, The Freemen’s Manual of Ohio published a story from Texas where eight runaways were spotted en route to Mexico crossing the Colorado, all carrying double-barrel shotguns.

Particularly distressing to Easterners and Northerners was the supposition, made by the Bastrop

Advertizer and reprinted in the Manual, that halting runaway slaves would require “the annexation of Mexico forthwith.”78 Not only did slavery in Texas lay bare the violence that was the beating heart of the institution, the conflict that armed slaves in Texas were driving with their erstwhile masters threatened to glom on even more slave territory to the United States. Hence, runaway slaves in Texas did their own small part in bringing on a tremendous and bloody civil war between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states who at last went to war in the 1860s.

Conclusion

In the end, the mobility of slaves in West Texas afforded by the geographical proximity of Mexico greatly destabilized the institution of slavery at its furthest western extent. West Texas was a borderland of liberty where runaway slaves and would-be masters violently contested the line between slavery and freedom. This conflict turned the whole area into a society under siege from which few could escape the collateral damage.

78 From the Bastrop Advertizer reprinted in L. L. Rice, Freemen’s Manual: A Campaign Serial of the Independent Democracy, Vol. 1 No.1 (Columbus, Ohio: published by author, June 1, 1853), 54.

59 Meanwhile, the unauthorized routes these runaways took extended the communication networks among the enslaved into Mexico and expanded their geographical knowledge of the borderlands, setting up an entirely alternative epistemology. Thus, the mobility of runaways slaves encouraged even more to take flight, initiating a sort of chain migration. For this reason alone, flight must be considered the most damaging sort of insurrection in West Texas. Mobile slaves who ran away to Mexico did not abandon their enslaved brethren; in a very real sense, they took them with them. Through violent contestation with would-be masters, runaway slaves actively invested the new boundary with the most powerful of meanings. To them, the border mattered; it was the gateway to freedom.

Thus, from the very beginnings of Anglo settlement in Texas, the proximity and possibility of freedom in Mexico gravely troubled slavery. As long as running away to freedom in Mexico remained a possibility, the slaveholders of Texas continually had to tip their hand, and they could do very little to hide the violence that undergirded chattel slavery in antebellum

America. And it was precisely this violence that Northeasterners like Frederick Law Olmsted wrote so eloquently about. His writings on slavery in Texas may have even helped Easterners and Northerners in the U.S. along to the conclusion that the “peculiar” institution was not so peculiar after all. In Texas at least, it was a bloody, brutal, inhumane and soul-blighting transformation of people into property. It was far from the benign and semi-feudal system run by romantic cavaliers from the gallant South that apologists touted it to be. At the margins of slave country, in West Texas, the violence endemic to the system at its core came out into the open.

60 Chapter 2

“A Great System of Roaming”: Runaway Peons in the West Texas Borderlands

In 1851, the Mexican minister plenipotentiary in Washington, Luís de la Rosa, received an extraordinary letter anonymously signed by “an ex-member” of the U.S. senate. In this letter, the ex-senator warned de la Rosa of a vast conspiracy authored by Texans to introduce African slavery in the Northern Mexican states. Likely he was talking about the plans of slaveholder filibusterers to establish a Republic of the Sierra Madre, and he made a number of suggestions to de la Rosa to prevent them from gaining a foothold in Mexico. He advised de la Rosa not only to forbid the settlement of slaveholders in Mexico’s northern territory, but also to encourage the immigration of free working men from England and the Northern United States.1 This immigration would serve as a bulwark against the feared expansion of slave country into the borderlands, increase the availability of labor at the frontier, and perhaps even lead to the economic development of an area largely perceived as a wasteland. The ex-senator’s suggestion resonated with the Mexican foreign secretary as his forbearers had already introduced a number of plans to bring European laborers to Northern Mexico as agricultural colonists. But not surprisingly, and given the insecurity of life in the borderlands, these projects never turned into much.

Not only did Mexico fail to attract laborers to the frontier in the 1850s, the northern states actually lost many of the agricultural workers who were already there. The ex-senator pointed up

1 An Ex-member of the U.S. Senate to Luís de la Rosa, August 15, 1851, L33 E1, fs. 29-30, AEMEUA SRE; An Ex- senator of the United States to Percy Doyle, Washington, copy dated and signed Luís de la Rosa, August 21, 1851, L33 E1 fs. 430-432, AEMEUA SRE.

61 the problem when he ended his letter to de la Rosa with the meddlesome suggestion that the

Mexicans should not only be on guard against the designs of slaveholders in Texas, but that it

“would do well to limit the continuance of peonage also.”2 By 1851, a discussion of debt peonage in Mexico had horned its way into the much larger debate over slavery and free labor then affecting Northerners and Southerners alike in the United States. Peonaje was a labor system native to Mexico and one that many North Americans who visited Mexico pointed out bore uncomfortable similarities to slavery.

The arrival of Texan ranchers and planters in South and West Texas following Guadalupe

Hidalgo immediately began to attract the most motivated migrant laborers from Mexico. Soon after the treaty established the international boundary at the Rio Grande/Bravo, runaway peons became a conspicuous presence in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Not unlike the runaway slaves from Texas discussed in the previous chapter, peons saw an improvement of their condition on the other side of the new international border. They did meet resistance, however. In response to the loss of their laborers to Texas, Mexican amos (debt holders or “masters”) sometimes resorted to coercive force to keep their debtors in place. They pursued runaways personally, deputized local authorities to recover them, and even reached out to Texans on occasion to return their laborers. Some Texans received their advances warmly, wary of the threat that runaway peons represented to their slaves. Others saw in their flight a confirmation of the “liberty” that Texas offered.

But the cause of Mexican amos was ultimately doomed. Western Texas and the borderlands between the Nueces and Rio Grande underwent a profound economic transformation following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Economic development on the Texas side led to the

2 An Ex-senator of the United States to Percy Doyle, Washington, copy dated and signed Luís de la Rosa, August 15, 1851, L33 E1 fs. 430-432, AEMEUA SRE.

62 rise of a broad transnational labor in the second half of the nineteenth century driven by Texan ranchers and agriculturalists—and runaway peons plugged their labor and stolen horses directly into this market. Accordingly, they were the conduits for a tremendous transfer of resources and laboring men from one side of the Grande/Bravo to the other.

At the same time, Mexican migrant laborers in the westernmost section of the Southern

U.S. plantation belt, near the Colorado and San Antonio Rivers, caused tremendous social upheaval. In that area, the arrival of thousands of migrants from Mexico undermined the white power structure. Mobile lower class Mexicans fraternized with slaves, shared knowledge about

Mexico, and even helped arrange the flights of some slaves from Texas—although there were of course exceptions. Nevertheless, until the Civil War abolished slavery, Mexican migrants in

Texas greatly threatened slaveholders there and they would suffer unduly because of it. But the repression, victimization, and racism they experienced at the hands of the Anglos and some

Tejanos did not stop them from coming to Texas. The draw of slightly less degraded working conditions in West Texas and higher wages were simply too great for the most motivated laborers to resist. The racism and violence they faced in West Texas put limits on their liberty, but migrant laborers nevertheless succeeded in turning the border between the two countries into a hinge between vassalage and free labor.

Debt Peonage in the Mexican North

At least until the great social revolution that Mexico experienced in the early twentieth century, debt peonage was a common system of labor throughout that country. It had its roots in the colonial epoch of New Spain and effectively indentured Mexican agricultural laborers to

63 their “amos.” Amos were debt-holders who held a balance of about six months’ wages against their employees. The debt peon, until he or she repaid the debt in full, did not regain his or her freedom of movement.

Nevertheless, peonage defies reduction to an easy symmetry with chattel bondage. It was a repressive system with its own set of abuses, inhumanities, and variations across time and space. Despite the well-intended polemics of John Kenneth Turner or, more recently, Kevin

Bales, debt peonage was (and perhaps is) a unique labor system that differs fundamentally from

19th century North American slavery in several important aspects. Most importantly, it was the labor embodied by the peons’ debt that was a commodity, not the peons’ physical body itself.

Secondly, the presence of the church and ascending hierarchies of authority in the Hispanic world often served to mitigate the master’s control over his indebted laborers. Graduated spheres of authority provided the debt peon with a form of redress in case of abuse. Accordingly, peonage in the Hispanic Americas may have benefitted from the same ameliorative effects as slavery in the Spanish Atlantic, at least if we follow the tenets of Frank Tannenbaum’s classic thesis.3

Peonage’s purest form could be found in central Mexico and in the highland plateaus of the near-North where it emerged alongside the hacienda’s rise as the premier agricultural institution in Colonial Mexico. Its rise followed the decline of the encomienda and repartamiento systems and was subject to less abuse than these earlier forms of labor coercion.

Peones, or sirvientes as Mexicans knew them, were typically Indian peasants who contracted as

3 John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico: An Indictment of a Cruel and Corrupt System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010 [1911]); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Classic Comparative Study of Race Relations in the Americas (Beacon, 1992 [1947]).

64 seasonal workers to sustain their independent village life and then fell into debt to hacendados, to whom they owed their labor until they repaid their debt in full.

But indebted servitude was not categorically a repressive institution in central Mexico.

The hacendado could provide services and security to peasants and peons who desperately needed them given the cyclical nature of subsistence farming. As a result, some peasants developed a symbiotic relationship of dependency and even affection with local landholders, passing in and out of debt depending upon local circumstances. In the highland plateaus of central Mexico indebtedness could even be considered an honor. It was often a link that bound together master and servant, and the quantity that the peon owed his master indicated both his trustworthiness and credit worthiness. Bearing these factors in mind, several historians have argued that the majority of sirvientes found reciprocity rather than arbitrariness in the relationship they maintained with their masters. Even though the word amo translates roughly into “master,” (indeed, slaveholders were also called amos) the term in the Latin world also carried the significance of filial attachment, a connotation missing in its English translation.

These affective bonds help explain the presence of large peon forces not only at work in Mexican fields and ranches, but also filling the ranks of caudillo landholder’s armies during the 19th century.4 In charge of large forces of loyal attendants, Mexican landowners could imagine themselves as the sort of reincarnation of medieval signors, whose noblesse oblige highlighted the reciprocal rather than repressive aspects of servitude. Only with the agricultural compression brought on by the boom in the Mexican peasant population in the late 19th century, and abetted

4 Alan Knight, Mexico: The Colonial Era (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 98-102 and “Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?” Journal of Latin American Studies, 18:1 (May, 1986), 41-74; Arnold J. Bauer, “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression, Hispanic American Historical Review, 59:1 (February, 1979), 43-48; For a comparative study in the near-Mexican North see Harry E. Cross, “Debt Peonage Reconsidered: A Case Study in Nineteenth-Century Zacatecas” Business History Review 53:4 (Winter, 1979), 473- 495; On peon armies: Eric Van Young, “Beyond the Hacienda: Agrarian Relations and Socioeconomic Change in Rural Mesoamerica Ethnohistory, 50:1 (Winter, 2003), 230-231.

65 by Liberal consolidation and reforms that encouraged hacendado land grabs, did labor conditions become subject to greater abuse in central Mexico.5

In the far North, however, these generalizations about the benignity of debt peonage in the first half of the 19th century do not hold true. Several characteristics of the northern borderlands of Mexico set this region off from central Mexico and affected the rise of peonaje there. For one thing, the haciendas in the North encompassed vast geographic territory since the frontier was so sparsely settled and the extensive development of large ranges was necessary to make an hacienda productive. As a result, a few latifundias, such as the Sánchez-Navarros’ holdings in present-day Coahuila and the Hacienda de La Sauteña in Tamaulipas, came to dominate vast regions.6 If peasants or free vecinos needed credit in the North, they only had one clan of people with whom they could deal. There were no other potential lenders or employers.

Another factor weakening the position from which laborers could negotiate in the North was the particular culture of the Indians who inhabited the frontier. Comanches and Apaches—

New Spain’s famous “bárbaros”—were only present in this part of the country. These nomadic

Indians remained outside of Mexican institutions (including the hacienda) and tended to move their rancherías with the season. As a result, the Indian village never developed as an important institution on the frontier and the Indians were never reduced to semi-dependent peasants and villagers who could provide hacendados with labor. In other parts of the country landlords could count on the labor of nearby Indians, and the colonial institutions of the Indian village and hacienda rose together symbiotically. Not so in the North, where an independent Indian peasantry that could pass back and forth from village to hacienda never developed and landlords

5 “Agricultural compression” is John Tutino’s term, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 277-321. 6 Octavio Herrera Pérez, “El Clan Fronterizo. Genesis Y Desarollo de Un Grupo De Poder Politico En El Norte De Tamaulipas 1821-1852,” Sociotam 4:1, (1994), 25-61.

66 came to depend almost entirely on permanent workers. Freeholders and villagers existed in the

North in small numbers, but permanent peon, vaquero, and peon acasillado (seasonal) workers provided the large sprawling haciendas with the bulk of their labor needs.7

Another important difference was that, in the North of Mexico, laborers on the haciendas did not belong to any particular ethnic group. Workers there never identified themselves as

Indians of any sort, even if commentators from the United States who travelled through Northern

Mexico did. Anglo Americans took the darker skin color of peons in the North as a marker of

Indian-ness, but they were misreading their bodies and grafting onto them a foreign meaning.

Dark bodies signaled native ancestry, but much more important was the fact that dark bodies betokened relative poverty in the North, at least in relation to the lighter-skinned hacendados and rancheros.8 Given their lack of ethnic identity, the origins of these peons who made up the workforces of the large landholdings in the North remains something of a historical mystery. A few were aboriginal migrants from central Mexico transported to the frontier under the viceroyalty. The Tlaxcalans of Coahuila are the best-known example of this type. Others were likely descended from enslaved Indians or genízaros (mixed breeds) who had no tribal identifications. Still others were probably neophytes cut loose from the mission complex who did not belong to any group and gravitated towards large landholders to find work.9 But wherever they came from, the lack of Indian identity stripped indebted laborers of any sort of refuge that an Indian community or village might have offered.

7 Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies” Hispanic American Historical Review, 54:1 (Feb., 1974), 31-32; François Chavalier, “The North Mexican Hacienda: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, The New World Looks at Its History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 101-106; Frédéric Mauro, “Sistem Agrario y Régime de Trabajo” Historia Mexicana, 38:4 (1989), 842. 8 On “Indian” peons in Mexico, San Antonio Daily Express, June 25, 1860; Cora Montgomery, Eagle Pass; Or, Life on the Border (New York: Geroge P. Putnam & Co., 1852), 34-35. 9 Knight, Mexico,131-137; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, The Brief Edition (Yale University Press, 2009), 91-97; James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 124-128; On Tlaxcalans: María Elena Santoscoy et al, Breve Historia de Coahuila (D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), 44-55.

67 Large landholdings, the presence of unreduced Indians, and labor arrangements that tended towards permanency all conspired together to keep peons immobile in the borderlands.

Until other opportunities arose, frontier peons had very little room to maneuver. Further, aboriginal plains raiders acted alongside landholders to keep them chained to the land. Bárbaros and hacendados may have made strange bedfellows, but their interests converged to reduce peons to dependency. The walled hacienda complexes often offered the only protection from the near-constant depredations of Comanche and Apache peoples, and peons typically chose virtual imprisonment on the hacienda rather than death out on the open plains. The fortress-like center of the hacienda could provide the only protection for miles around against an Indian attack—and even so the peons, especially shepherds who worked far out in the fields, were still quite vulnerable.10

Hence, the plains raiders were a push factor, causing peons to congregate into the relative safety of hacendados complexes. Another coercive factor was the legal framework that gave amos complete control over their indebted servants. Even if a peon ran away and managed to escape harm, all nearby municipal authorities were legally required to return fleeing debtors to their masters. Given the scarcity of labor, the authorities in the borderlands made the return of fleeing debtors an utmost priority. And even if a peon somehow managed to make it intact through Indian country, he or she would likely be spotted in one of the dusty, scarcely populated and endogenous town centers that dotted the frontier.11

Surely some amos in the North treated their peons with charity, but the absence of a sizeable peasant community free from the hacienda did not allow for physical mobility or negotiation with social superiors. With no options, and walled in by plains raiders on all sides,

10 See Siglo Diez y Nueve, July 23, 1852 and July 22, 1854 for two examples. 11 Charles H. Harris III, A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the Sánchez Navarros, 1765-1867 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 228-229.

68 peons often lived desperate lives. To use one oft-cited example, the peons who lived on the latifundia of the Sánchez-Navarro clan, which at its height contained the majority of the present day state of Coahuila, suffered terribly. By all accounts, conditions on the Sánchez-Navarro haciendas were wretched. One outside observer wrote that the walled compound he discovered on one hacienda held many once-free vecinos from Coahuila. Reduced to peonage because of their debt to the Sánchez-Navarros, the peasants had no choice but to move to the hacienda and live in the “little huts made of corn stalks” and labor alongside “200 lousy peons [who] lived in misery while working off their debt.”12 Peons were not often able to put their entire wages towards their debts, either. They typically had to buy their effects at company stores, or tiendas de rayas, with hacienda tokens. Without their own ejidos (subsistence plots), peons on Northern hacendados were completely at the mercy of the hacendado and his clerk’s price-gouging. There was no elasticity built into the peasant or the peon’s cycle of sustenance, and there was no home plot to sustain life in difficult times; hard times resulted in indebtedness and indenture.13

In the state of Nuevo León, labor conditions may have been the worst on the Mexican frontier during the early Republican period. The relative poverty of the landlords in this largely undeveloped state compounded difficulties for peons who sought shelter on the haciendas.

Hacendados in that state did not have the wealth of landowners in central Mexico or the

Sánchez-Navarros and, as a result, they could not pay the better wages or provide the services that peons in other parts of the country demanded. Central Mexican hacendados, and probably even the Sánchez-Navarro haciendas, typically offered some medical services and schooling to resident laborers and their families. In Nuevo León, however, the only perk the peons received

12 Harris, 207-230. Quote from Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2001), 180. 13 Harris, 228-229.

69 was some respite from the near-constant war Comanches made on that state during the 1830s and

1840s.14

Labor conditions in the Mexican North would remain stagnant until the watershed years of the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) when, at last, peons would have a place to which they could escape. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, they became exemplary “people-in- between” borders—to borrow historians Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s term—and they could renegotiate the terms of their labor through mobility.15 Henceforth, they moved frequently across the border, playing one state off of the other, and procuring for themselves the best possible working conditions in the trade. As a result, labor conditions in the North of Mexico would go from being the most degraded in the country to becoming perhaps the best.

American Slavery, Mexican Peonage

Following 1848, Mexican peons began to flood into the state of Texas initiating what must be one of the largest and most durable migratory patterns in human history. The arrival of so many fleeing peons into the state did not go unnoticed, and it drew commentary from far and wide. Adding to it import, this human tide coincided with a crucial moment in U.S. history: they arrived en masse just as sectional strife in the U.S. came to a head as a result of the annexation of

Mexican territory. Free Soilers and Democrats struggled over whether the new territory would be slave or free, and southwestern U.S. slaveholders hoped to put the arrival of runaway peons in

Texas to good political use in this battle. Accordingly, they began to measure the benignity of

American slavery against the foil of Mexican debt peonage. Why, they asked, would so many

14 Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848- 1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 154-159; Brian Delay, The War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale, 2008), 317-318. 15 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review, 104:3 (June1999), 815-816.

70 workers flee from Mexico to Texas if labor conditions in the slave states were so degraded? As we have already seen, Texans sought to explain their own runaway problem through subscribing to various conspiracy theories. But these same men allowed Mexicans no such latitude in attempting to explain their own fugitive laborers. Rather, peons came to Texas because they were attracted to the more liberal working conditions available to free [white] men on the other side of the river. Once the peons in Texas became problematic, however, they would lose their defenders. Indeed, they would even lose their whiteness.

Discourse about the peons’ plight in Mexico grew dramatically during the U.S.-Mexico war. Volunteers serving under Taylor wrote copiously on the plight of the peon in the North in their memoirs. They compared peons to slaves—even worse sometimes—and saw their liberation as one of the of U.S. imperialism in Mexico. Clearly, given the context in which criticism of peonage in Mexican arose, modern historians have rightly questioned the straightforward equation of Mexican peonaje with North American slavery.16 But contemporary observers—especially North American volunteers serving in Taylor’s forces during the years of the U.S.-Mexico War—were not hesitant to offer up exactly this type of comparison.17 Several

U.S. volunteers who wrote memoirs of the invasion waxed eloquent on the destitution of hacienda laborers and the enormous obstacles they faced in paying off their debts. Drawing on these volunteers’ reports and memoirs, pro-slavery writers pointed to a sharp contrast between the destitution of the hacienda system and the benignity of Southern slavery. This discourse would have effects far and wide, and when David Wilmot issued his famous proviso to a war

16 For one thing, it has contributed to the rise of the stereotype of the sadistic elite Mexican and the lackadaisical Mexican plebe put to such good use by Sam Peckinpah and John Sturges in their Westerns. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 418-427; Sara Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4-6. 17 Alan Knight, “Mexican Peonage,” 45-46 and Harry E. Cross, “Living Standards in Rural Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Zacatecas, 1820-1880” Journal of Latin American Studies,10:1 (1978), 1-19.

71 appropriations bill in 1847 he included not just an injunction against racialized chattel slavery in the territory taken from Mexico, but against all forms of “involuntary servitude” there.18

Wilmot’s proviso was meant to ensure that any land acquired in the war would remain an area free from not just chattel slavery but bonded labor in all its forms, and his was far from the last note sounded on this theme.

Texans had actually learned about Mexican peonage long before the 1850s. As we have seen in the previous chapter, slaveholders who immigrated to Texas in the 1820s and 1830s— during the years when Mexico gradually outlawed chattel slavery—sometimes skirted the law by re-defining their slaves as extraordinarily indebted laborers.19 But when the issue of peonage entered wider public discourse around the time of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Texan slaveholders became some of the fiercest enemies of peonage. In newspaper editorials, advocates of slavery pointed to the tide of Mexican laborers crossing the border to work in Texas, sure that these people were escaping from conditions far worse south of the border. They defended their own system, asking why peons would run north if liberty lie to the south as their slaves believed. The

Texas Gazette, for one example, expected its readers (and perhaps potential runaway slaves) to see slavery as a more benign option than Mexican penury. Hence:

The inducement for a negro to run off to Mexico, is the idea that he will be there on a footing with the peon Mexican whom he sees here, and with whom he associates on a perfect equality. He little considers…that the very peons around him in Texas, were starved out in Mexico, and came here to be able to obtain a living. When the negro gets to Mexico, he makes the discovery, and finds nothing but the most squalid wretchedness, poverty, and starvation for his lot.20

18 Winders, 179-180; Robert Johanssen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 205; American Star (Mexico City), July 25, 1847; For text of the Wilmot Proviso, David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis. 1848-1861 (New York: Harper, 1977), 54. 19 Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1831-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 23-25. 20 Texas State Gazette, September 30, 1854.

72 John Salmon Ford was particularly sanguine in commenting on the hypocrisy of

Mexicans. In relation to Mexican officials’ stark opposition to slavery, he wrote that Mexicans

“seemed to forget that they made their own countrymen slaves—peons—for the inability to pay a debt.” (In the American republic, meanwhile, only African and Irish outsiders were servants).21

He also referred to the criticism of Indian and black slavery in the northern U.S. press as a vast

“humbug,” and wondered why Mexican peonage came in for so little scrutiny by these same authors. Cora Montgomery, a contemporary of Ford’s, also wrote extensively of her experiences in the borderlands from her home in Eagle Pass. For her part, she simply referred to peonage as

Mexican slavery and criticized the anti-slavery Free Soilers for taking on only one form of human bondage in their platform.22

There was one notable exception. Frederick Olmsted, who spent the 1850s travelling through the South and writing widely on slavery, offered his own opinion on peonage. In his

Journey Through Texas, writes Olmsted, I was “amused at the horror with which this Mexican

Peon Law is viewed,” adding that “I have been asked, many times, if I did not think it worse than negro slavery,” which he did not. Olmsted wrote his book over the course of the early 1850s with a mind to promote the Free Soil agenda over the expansion of slavery. He chose to write about

Texas as an example of what happened to free territory when slaveholders seized the land.

Accordingly, his criticism of slavery ended up tacitly defending peonage. He found peonage to be, while not an “enlightened” labor system, far less damaging to the soil and society than slavery.23

21 John Salmon Ford, ed. Stephen B. Oates Rip Ford’s Texas, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 214. 22 Southwestern American, May 12, 1852; Montgomery, 34. 23 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York: Dix, Edwards, and Co., 1857), 334-335.

73 Perhaps Olmsted wrote against the grain of public opinion in an effort to point out the hypocrisy of slaveholders. While in Texas, he learned that some of the most resolute slaveholders were in fact also the most vehement critics of peonage. In 1852, around the same time he passed through Texas, the authors of the “Sierra Madre Republic” movement assaulted the tiny village of Cerralvo in northern Tamaulipas. Anglo Texans, in conjunction with the forces of the Tejano caudillo José María de Jesús Carvajal, attacked this town in their effort to filibuster in the North and break off an independent “Republic of the Sierra Madre” from Mexico. The

Anglos and Tejanos who made up the movement shared many of the same political and economic convictions. Further, they were both hostile to debt peonage and friendly to slavery. In fact, the group referred specifically to Mexican peonage in their founding doctrine, declaring that the signers were “tired of the National Declaration that Slavery shall not exist in our Land when

Peonage, a system hideous and cruel, exists, unrestricted and unnoticed.”24 The Sierra Madre

Republic movement, which Ford thought of as the greatest opportunity for Texans to safeguard slavery in their state, sought to spread slavery into Northern Mexico on the principal that it was, in fact, more benign than peonage.25

Clearly then, any Texan criticisms of peonage must be entered into the record with extreme caution. And in fact, critics of peonage glossed over some very important legal differences between indentured labor in Mexico and slavery in the U.S. South. For one thing, indebted workers on Mexican haciendas had greater legal recourse than did slaves on Texan plantations. Mexican amos were subject to a number of laws that protected the rights of peons. In the early 1850s, in a well-publicized case from San Fernando, Coahuila, a peon successfully sued

24Olmsted, 333; Defensor de Tamaulipas, extra, June 26, 1849 Declaration of Independence, June 16, 1849, The Unanimous Declaration of the Seven Northern States of the Sierra Madre of Mexico. found in L. 3057 f. 13, SEDNA. 25 Southwestern American, November 17, 1852; Ford, 215.

74 his master for back wages.26 Another compelling example comes from Nuevo León, and involves a remarkably unfortunate peon named José María Botello. In early 1856, a band of

Lipan Apaches approached Botello as he labored in the countryside and took him captive. He was freed when the Mexican Army of the North massacred the Lipan camp in March that year.

After his redemption, however, an officer named Antonio Zapata claimed Botello as his own servant. Botello contested this new captivity and pressed his case with the juzgado (magistrate) in Guerrero, claiming that his amo had died shortly before his capture by the Lipans.27 Botello’s ultimate fate did not make it onto the historical record, but unlike recaptured runaway slaves from Texas, his case demonstrates that peons did have at least some legal recourse against the arbitrary abuse of power.

Some Mexicans were quick to point to cases such as these to prove that peons had legal protection and to disrupt the burgeoning image in the American mind of the Mexican debt-holder as a sadist. Their sirvientes’ recourse to tribunals made the “custom” of peonage much more

“noble and human” than slavery, at least according to a writer for Mexico City’s La Sociedad.28

But the bureaucratic cogs of the Mexican state turned slowly in the Mexican North if, indeed, they turned at all. Mexico’s northern frontier had never followed the pattern of state incorporation in the colonial or early national epochs. Thus, the legal protection that a peon may have had in Central Mexico did not have as much purchase in the North of the country. In practice, frontier peons could be treated just as poorly as slaves, and it was precisely the arbitrariness of the relationship between peon and master that lay at the heart of the problem. As the case of Botello illustrates above, neither peon nor peasant was immune to erratic treatment by powerful men.

26 Olmsted, 334-335. 27 José María G. Cuellar, Guerrero, to Secretaría del Gobierno, D.F., April 15, 1856, C121, Militares AGENL. 28 La Sociedad, Periódico Político y Literario, (Mexico City) June 17, 1858.

75 Another difference between peonage and slavery was that, in theory, peons also had the right to buy, sell, or trade their debt, introducing an element of contract into a relationship that was otherwise largely medieval. If peons found conditions unsatisfactory on the hacienda, they could ask another amo to buy their debt. This right legally granted peons a degree of mobility and control over their destiny unimaginable to American slaves. But this relative liberality had a down side: the alienability of peon debt could also break the bonds of reciprocity between masters and debtors. This ability to separate the person from the debt lie at the root of many observations that hacendados seldom felt personally responsible for the well-being of peons, especially once debtors grew too old to work. One Pennsylvania volunteer even wrote that masters could transfer peons on a whim and treat debts like chattel, sending old men away from their families once they were no longer productive and required intensive care. He had witnessed the transfer of one peon to a new master and referred to it as a sale worse than any made by

Southern slaveholders.29 Surely these statements helped bolster the image of the “peculiar” institution, but there is no reason to doubt the veracity of this Pennsylvania volunteer’s observation.

Yet another alleged difference between the two systems of bonded labor was that debt could not supersede the lifetime of the peon, whereas the children of slaves ‘followed the condition of the mother.’ Amos had to keep very clear accounts of the exact sum their peons owed them, and they had to show these libros de cuentas anytime the (usually illiterate) peon asked to see them. The libro de cuentas expired with the debt-holder’s life—although neither

North American nor Mexican commentators were much impressed with the commitment of

29 Winders, 180-181.

76 Mexican amos to this principal.30 In reality, debts could pass from one generation to the next through last rites fees as well as simple ignorance and disobedience of the law. John Ford, for one, reported that indebted shepherds, herders, and laborers earned about twenty-five cents a day, a rate he suggested was not enough to sustain life. As a result, at the end of the month the worker always found himself or herself deeper in debt. Given the growing debt that fathers often incurred over a lifetime, his wife and children often followed him into service for the same amo who could arbitrarily and illegally force them to honor the deceased father’s debt.31 As one high- ranking U.S. diplomat put it, a peon “is not only a slave for life, but his children after him [are as well], unless the employer chooses to release [them] from his service.”32 Cora Montgomery, meanwhile, described a particular injustice she herself witnessed. She wrote of an occasion when a Mexican amo crossed over to Eagle Pass, Texas to capture a Mexican woman who he claimed owed a sizeable sum for her indebted father’s funeral expenses.33 Examples like Montgomery’s illustrate how easily the cycle of debt could pass from generation to generation—even if amos followed the letter of the law outlawing hereditary debt.

Finally, observers were correct when they wrote that peonage drew many free plebian norteños into its web since landholders were the only source for loans in an area that suffered from a dearth of people, resources, and opportunities. Yet another North American volunteer offered up an observation about how laboring Mexican “mechanics” (a term that implied the very essence of artisanal Republican virtue in the United States) could fall into debt and find themselves at the mercy of the master’s whims. The mechanic borrowed money from a local

30 De León, Matías Romero, A Study of Subjects Affecting their political, Commercial, And Social Relations, Made with A View to their Promotion. Vol. 1. (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1898), 507-511; Mr. Polk’s Army, 180. 31 Texas State Times, June 24 1854 refers to 25 cents a day as the typical wage. 32 Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico: by Waddy Thompson Eq. Lt. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States at Mexico (New York and London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 7. 33 Montgomery, 81.

77 landholder to pay the priest’s fees for the sacred rites performed at his wedding; he then became

“as much a slave as the negro of the south, and in far worse condition” until, and if, he could repay the debt. This source confirms what historian Charles H. Harris finds in his study of the

Sánchez-Navarro landholdings in Coahuila; the marriage ceremony and its related fees very often began the cycle of debt for peasants who then fell into long, if not permanent, tenures as peons on neighboring haciendas.34

Probably the observers were right: there was little difference between slavery and peonage when there were no authorities present to enforce the juridical rights of the laborer. As such, despite the milieu in which North Americans made these remarks against debt peonage, they were probably not far off the mark. And despite the anger many Mexicans felt towards their aggressive neighbors to the North, some Mexicans agreed with the observations that volunteers made. The commander of the frontier of Coahuila, Emilio Langberg, for instance, seconded criticisms of debt peonage emanating from North America. He witnessed the abuse of hacienda peons first hand and sometimes commented on the system’s physical violence. He tersely summed up his feelings in a letter to frontier caudillo Santiago Vidaurri when he stated that

Texas slaves “were treated with more consideration [by their masters] than we treat our own peons.”35

Descriptions of the decrepitude of labor in a neighboring country helped remind North

Americans of their own artisanal Republican roots—and at exactly the right time. North

Americans had, after all, just annexed a large part of the republic next door to their own supposedly non-imperial republic, and they made this annexation in order to add more slave

34 George C. Furber. The Twelve Month Volunteer: Or Journal of a Private Tennessee Regiment of Cavalry, In the Campaign, In Mexico, 1846-1847 (Cincinnati: U.P. James, 1847), 210-211; Harris, 219; On mechanics: Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1998 [1987]). 35 Emilio Langberg, Piedras Negras, to Santiago Vidaurri, September 1, 1855, Vidaurri Correspondence, AGENL.

78 territory to the United States. Fortunately for them, Mexican peonage could emerge as a foil against which they could measure the health of their own Republican institutions; and if slaveholders could also grab hold of this discourse to criticize the anti-slavery tenets of Mexico, so much the better. After all, as John Ford argued, at least North Americans did not “make their own countrymen” slaves as the Mexicans did. They only made outsiders slaves—an important distinction made by the Herrenvolk Democracts of Jacksonian America.36

And not only did North Americans deploy anti-peonage discourse to bolster their own

[white] Republicanism, this strain of rhetoric also justified imperialism since the U.S. was actively expanding the borders of (to borrow Thomas Jefferson’s term) a North American

“empire of liberty.” Overturning the repression caused by debt peonage, in part, justified North

American occupation of a poor post-colonial neighbor. The “enslavement” of some Mexicans by other Mexicans sullied the very Republicanism to which the Mexicans aspired. As a result, all sorts of North Americans, from the ex-senator mentioned in the introduction on down, wrote freely and often on the brutality of debt peonage.37 Meanwhile, condemning Mexican peonage was something both pro and anti-slavery Americans could agree on—at least until runaway peons became a burden to Texan slaveholders in the mid-1850s.

Mexicans did not necessarily agree, however, and they did not fault the system of debt peonage itself per se. First of all, they did not understand why Americans were proclaiming to be a model Republic when they criticized Mexican peonage. They failed to comprehend the racial tenets upon which American Democracy was based and why some groups were repressed in

36 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised Edition (New York: Verso, 1999 [1991]), 59-60; Pierre L. Van Den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1981). 37 On roots of liberty and artisanal republicanism see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford, 1984); Gordon S. Wood, An Empire of Liberty; A History of the Early Republic, 1790-1815 (New York: Oxford, 2009 [2008]).

79 order to ensure the greater liberty of others. According to an editor for Mexico City’s El

Universal, who wrote in the aftermath of the North American Intervention:

Why is it that, in the [United States] despite the Federal system they profess, and notwithstanding the principal of equality established there, and not withstanding their jealousy of the natural rights of man, are slaves, Indians, all people of color, and all other rational beings and individuals making up a large part of society excluded from elections, the military and from public office? The answer is simple: they do not know their natural rights because… they are kept in a state of frightening misery and sad intellectual degradation.38

Second, peonage had a long pedigree in the Latin world. Many interlocking systems of vassalage and hierarchy had existed since the conquest of Mexico (if not even longer, dating back to the great tributary indigenous Mesoamerican empires). As a result, servitude did not carry the same stigma for Mexicans as it did for fiercely independent North Americans who would only enslave Africans and not their own countrymen. Mexicans simply did not possess the same cult of Republican individualism and liberty that viewed any countryman who served another with suspicion. The quasi-feudal bonds of loyalty and honor held over from Iberian seigniorial culture, which many Mexican believed sustained the system of peonage, contrasted sharply with the capitalist system of the United States. Accordingly, Mexican critics did not fault peonage, but rather pointed to its corruption by amos motivated more by profit than by patronage as the problem.39 Rather than condemn the system in its ideal form, critics from El Universal drew attention to the arbitrariness of amos who emulated American slaveholders. They claimed that some amos were “hardhearted” towards their servants and that peons were supposed to be treated as loyal dependents and not “natural enemies.”40 They were not enslaved alien outsiders,

38 El Universal, 1848-1855 (Mexico City), February 11, 1849. 39 Which is of course exactly what allowed the system to function in a Republican society. For racial dimensions of North American Republicanism see: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975), 316-337; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 41-45; Roediger, 43-64. 40 El Universal 1848-1855 (Mexico City), March 8, 1849.

80 as were Africans in America. Rather, sirvientes were countrymen enmeshed in what was supposed to be a mutually beneficial relationship in a country that valued social hierarchies. If they were treated abusively, that was a miscarriage of justice.

But just as was the case with the noblesse oblige of the slave South, the medievalism of

Mexican servitude probably owed less to chivalry and more to profit margins. After all, there was no greater indictment of the system than the fact that so many northern peons fled to Texas at the very first opportunity. Thus, Mexico’s commitment to the emancipation of slavery, discussed in the first chapter, must be seen as only half of the story. They had their own runaway problems.

1848 and the Mobilization of Labor

The new dynamics brought on by the arrival of the international border to the Rio

Grande/Bravo in 1848 changed the dynamics of peonaje at the Mexican frontier drastically and forever. The growth and proximity of Texan settlements along the river and in West Texas following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew Mexicans peasants and peons trapped in the endless cycles of debt and servitude to Texas ranches. Frontier amos and bureaucrats, try though they might, could not control their routes and borderland Texans took full advantage of the new, plentiful, and pliant labor force.

The Texas side did not only offer opportunity—it also offered anonymity. The flight of peons and their trade in stolen animals could continue unabated precisely because the ranches on the Texas side were so spread out. Texas ranches sprawled over vast spaces whereas, in Mexico, one could “almost see the houses from one ranch to the others.” In Texas people could not recognize the “vagrants” and “gente perdida” who passed through their towns and found

81 employment on their ranches.41 North American development patterns encouraged the sort of itinerancy and anonymity that allowed laborers to their escape oppressive (and overly intimate) environment in the Mexican North. Open space bred the conditions for free labor, de- particularizing individuals before plugging their labor into the ranching and agricultural economy.

Certainly peons faced challenges in mobilizing new routes and reaching the free labor market in Texas. They had to escape the vigilance of horseback overseers armed with shotguns, travel through Indian territory, and pass unnoticed through small provincial villages where they could be easily spotted and turned in by Mexican authorities.42 But once peons escaped the vigilance of norteños and reached this transnational labor market, the peons crossed a very meaningful frontier. The border was a hinge between servitude and contract labor. Simply by planting their feet on the Texan side, they went from being servile labors to free laborers. Thus, with the arrival of the new international border in 1848, sirvientes prófugos (runaway peons) immediately became a problem for Northern Mexican employers. They transformed the border into a line between free labor and peonage.

As we have seen, the runaway problems began early, during the U.S.-Mexico War, even before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made the Rio Grande/Bravo the official line. In 1846, shortly after Zachary Taylor’s forces arrived at the river, runaway peons began seeking refuge in his army’s encampments near Matamoros. It did not take long for hacendados and ranchers to notice that their agricultural servants were fleeing in increasing numbers to the North American lines, and the flight of these peons had immediate consequences for borderlands agriculture.

41 Testimonies of C. Luís Ramos and Andres Escamilla, Nuevo Laredo, July 2, 1873, fs. 182-185, LE 1590 SRE. 42 Harris, 222-223; Karl Jacoby, “Between North and South: The Alternative Borderlands of William H. Ellis and the African American Colony of 1895” in eds. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S- Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke, 2004), 221.

82 According to various reports, a cluster of cotton plantations had existed along the lower Rio

Grande/Bravo outside of Matamoros before the U.S. Intervention in Mexico. These plantations had relied on a large pliant work force, but cotton-cultivation along the river came to an abrupt end with the arrival of the U.S. forces. According to one observer, its demise owed entirely to the crossing of Mexican laborers to the U.S. side during the war. As soon as indebted workers saw the U.S. army arrive on the Rio Grande/Bravo, they began to leave the Mexican cotton plantations in droves. A few amos wrote to General Taylor personally, in the hopes that he would oversee the return of their sirvientes, but he refused to turn them over and even employed a good number of them in his own camp.43

Taylor was not the only one pleased with this turn of events. This new limit of liberty for the indebted laborers, triggered by the expansion of the U.S. military frontier to the Rio

Grande/Bravo, aroused extensive favorable comment by the volunteers stationed near

Matamoros. One soldier from Illinois took heart in the fact that, if the U.S. forces stayed camped in one spot for any length of time, runaway peons would eventually find their way into the army’s lines. Such volunteers saw themselves as the liberators of abused and indebted Mexicans.

The obvious irony that some volunteers’ and officers’ African American slaves deserted to

Mexico seems to have been lost on these memoirists; but, then again, African slaves were not their own “countrymen,” and they were not blessed with the same sovereign protection of liberties guaranteed to all free [white] men in America.44

43 Jose María Girón to Zachary Taylor, June 10, 1846, Matamoros Archives, 2Q279, Volume LV, Matamoros Archives, CAH; Jose María Girón to Zachary Taylor, June 17, 1846, Matamoros Archives, 2Q279, Volume LV, Matamoros Archives, CAH; Ford, 214-215. 44 Winders, 184; Robert E. May, “Invisible Men: Blacks in the U.S. Army During the Mexican War” The Historian, 49 (August, 1987), 463-477; Mexican-Americans were in fact considered white on censuses until the 20th century, see Neil Foley, White Scourge: Whites and Mexicans in the Making of Texan Cotton Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999); for discourse on free [white] men see Maggie Montesinos Sales, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinities (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 29-58.

83 No matter where the North American soldier or sojourner at the military frontier came from, he or she cheered on the liberty that peons found when they escaped to the American camp.

Helen Chapman, who travelled to Matamoros in 1848 as an army officer’s wife, was a progressive New Englander who applauded the escape of peons from their masters and their new employment by the U.S. forces.45 The occupying soldiers and their attendants could feel good about a war that most Whigs saw as a slaveholder land grab, and runaway peons found immediate employment when they left their amos. Some of the fleeing laborers even found work with the army quartermaster who reportedly paid the Mexicans a rate of thirty dollars per month—significantly greater than the twenty-five cents a day reputed to be an average peon’s wage in Mexico.46

Meanwhile, the ranchers and planters who lived near Matamoros, Tamaulipas not only complained because of the loss of their laborers. Their flight had also brought on an upswing in crime on the frontier. Peons who followed the U.S. army likely associated with the North

Americans criminals and smugglers who deserted from or followed Taylor’s forces in Mexico.

Hacendados watched helplessly as their former servants moved about freely among the baser elements of the occupying army and its hanger-ons. In fact, some of the first recorded joint criminal ventures along the border between Anglos and Mexicans occurred around Matamoros during the North American occupation of that city.47 Then, in 1848, two Mexicans who migrated to the American side created a particular scandal when they were involved in a series of ranch

45 Helen Chapman, Ed. Caleb Coker, The News From Brownsville: Helen Chapman’s Letters from the Texas Military Frontier, 1848-1852 (Austin: The Texas State Historical Association, 1992), 18-19. 46 Ford, 214-215. 47 Coronel Clark to the Alcalde of Matamoros, Sept. 26, 1846, 2Q279, Volume LIII, Matamoros Archive, CAH.

84 robberies committed by North American deserters camped at a pond eight miles from

Matamoros.48

As a result of these indiscretions, Mexican authorities began to conflate together labor migrancy and criminal delinquency. In newspapers and circulars, they published a few broad pronouncements against runaway servants and their North American accomplices. One minister alleged that once Mexican peons arrived in Texas they threw in their lot with rustlers and criminals and led forays back into Mexico.49 Mexican peons who ran away to Texas knew the exact location of norteño agostaderos (pastures) and the size of their herds and could easily lead forays back to them. Some norteño employers knew that peons possessed this geographical knowledge, and they claimed that escaped Mexicans on the Texan side of the river were too lazy or unable to find work. They alleged that runaways entirely sustained their existence through raiding the herds of their former employers.50 Thus, in addition to the problems that runaway peons presented to cotton agriculture along the Rio Grande, their presence was also a grave threat to the property of ranchers along the border.

The norteños’ problems would only intensify after 1848. Once the United States secured the Nueces Strip, Texan merchants and ranchers expanded into the borderlands, opening up still more opportunities for Mexican migrant laborers. The Anglo-Texans Charles Stillman, Edward

King, and John Salmon Ford all founded towns along the river shortly after the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo and quickly became principal merchants in the borderlands. The ranches that immediately bordered the Rio Grande/Bravo remained in Tejano hands, but soon after

Guadalupe Hidalgo, white agriculturalists began to move into the region. They expanded their

48 Colonel Will Davenport to Zachary Taylor, November, 30, 1847, AHMAT, Casamata, Caja 9, Exp. 25; Colonel Will Davenport to Zachary Taylor, December 10, 1847, AHMAT, Casamata, Caja 9, Exp. 25. 49 El Constitutional, Tamaulipas, September. 16, 1848 (found in AHMAT, Caja Hemeroteca). 50 Testimony of Andrés Garcia, Nuevo Laredo, July 25, 1873, f. 91, LE 1590 SRE.

85 ranges into the Nueces strip and beyond beginning in the 1850s. The new ranches that dotted this territory, formerly known on maps as the “Wild Horse Desert,” both increased the competition for labor and provided a market for horses stolen from Hispanic ranchers on both sides of the

Grande/Bravo. In addition, the absence of an extradition treaty for criminals and runaways helped plug the labor of runaway peons directly into the economic growth of Texas. Once peons passed the river they were usually safe, protected by Anglo authorities who wanted to meet the demands of ranchers for both laborers and horses.51

Indeed, when Anglos established North American authority on the left bank of the Rio

Grande in 1848, the new bosses immediately took advantage of their power to the detriment of

Mexican ranchers. One Mexican rancher remembered how, in the years following the drawing of the boundary, there had been instances of extreme impropriety on the part of the Texan officials.

He even alleged that the sheriff of Roma, on the Texas side, had assisted in the robbery of horses in the 1850s.52 Many other witnesses likewise attested to the assistance of Texan officials in the illegal traffic, explicitly implicating the sheriffs of Eagle Pass and Edinburg in addition to the sheriff of Roma. Vecinos and ranchers on the Mexican side of the border insisted that the runaway servants had established routes and contacts with not just Texan Anglos, but also

Tejanos and transient Mexicans on the other side to facilitate the crossing of stolen animals.53

Migrant laborers found that Anglo Texan authorities along the river would protect them from the Mexican authorities for reasons that were both principled and practical, even if their complicity provoked outrage on the Mexican side of the river. Clemente Zapata, who owned and

51 David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: Texas UP, 1988), 18-19; Testimony of Agustín Dias, Nuevo Laredo, July 3, 1873, f 183, LE 1590 SRE. 52 Testimony of André Garcia, Nuevo Laredo, July 25, 1873, f. 93, LE 1590 SRE. 53 Testimony of Cesario de Luna, Candela, June 28, 1873, f. 83 LE 1590 SRE; Testimony of Lorenzo Dominguez, Piedras Negras, August 22, 1873, f. 100; Testimony of Agustín Dias, Nuevo Laredo, July 3, 1873, f. 83 LE 1590 SRE.

86 managed a ranch on the Texas side named Clareño with his brother Octaviano during the 1850s, testified about the immense traffic in stolen animals that runaway peons conducted with Anglo

Texans. He watched from his ranch as Mexican laborers crossed over to Texas with stolen animals; they would take even more from Tejano ranchers as they travelled towards the interior of the state. For his part, Zapata knew they were stolen because of the low prices for which they sold. He fumed over the protection authorities offered to these criminals. On occasion, Mexican ranchers crossed over to the Texas side to try to reclaim stolen animals from the Anglo authorities who dominated the new towns founded after the U.S.-Mexican War. But he did not recall many instances when ranchers had met with success. Their failure to recover the stolen animals was due in large part to the onerous requirements that Texan authorities placed on

Mexicans for proving ownership. Even if Mexican ranchers could meet the burden of proof on

Texan terms, the court costs that these ranchers incurred in trying to reclaim their animals were prohibitively expensive. There had even been cases where the court costs exceeded the price of the stolen livestock itself.54

Zapata testified that he had also been a victim. Runaway peons passed his ranch and occasionally stole his animals, which they then passed on to the interior. He once found his stolen animals as far away as San Antonio and attempted to reclaim them. He approached the authorities and showed that the stolen horses bore his brand, but Zapata recognized that the odds were stacked against him. A “North American” (Anglo) with no proof of ownership except for some corroborating witnesses, “proved” that Zapata’s horses were his own property and took them away. This problem was systematic according to Zapata; he insisted that no rancher in

West Texas or the Nueces Strip could resist the urge to buy animals at the cheap prices that runaway peons asked for them. In effect, Texans were acting in conjunction with the runaway

54 Testimony of Clemente Zapata, Nuevo Laredo, July 25, 1873, fs. 93-94, LE 1590 SRE.

87 peons to transfer the great horse herds from Mexico to Texas. Texans—acting to their own advantage—refused to condemn this theft, and ultimately sanctioned the growth of a tremendous trade in stolen goods.

An additional factor aiding the runaways’ transfer of wealth across the Rio Grande/

Bravo was the fact that Texans were not legally required to recognize the papers that certified

Mexican rancher’s brands.55 As a result, Texans bought the animals from runaway servants at very low risk and for very low prices, sometimes paying as little as five pesos per animal—less than half the market value.56 Some Mexicans counted on friends and family connections on the other side of the border to recover their animals. But runaway peons and migrant laborers also had friends on the other side who would help them conduct the animals towards the interior.

Once horses were on their way to San Antonio, it proved impossible to recover the stolen property.57

The Mexicans most often accused of crimes neither owned property nor stayed in one place for very long. This fact made it exceedingly difficult for Mexican ranchers on either side of the river to locate the criminals and their associates.58 Further compounding things, the majority of vecinos did not even know whether it was Mexicans from the Texas side or their own side who committed the majority of the crimes. Most witnesses assumed they acted in tandem and pointed to a vast transnational underground network of cattle and horse thieves with contacts all over the border region and far into the interior of Texas. Julian Donet for example, to name just one successful rancher from the period, owned a ranch that was located due north of Eagle Pass and that reputedly owed its entire existence to the trade in stolen animals carried on by runaway

55 Testimony of Lorenzo Guevara, Nuevo Laredo, August 22, 1873, f. 98 LE 1590 SRE. 56 Testimony of André Garcia, Nuevo Laredo, July 25, 1873, f. 91 LE 1590 SRE. 57 Testimony of José María Garcia, Sabinas Hidalgo, June 21, 1873, f. 79 LE 1590 SRE. 58 Testimony of Luciano Ramirez, Matamoros, September 24, 1873, fs. 200-201 LE 1590 SRE.

88 servants and their companions. Reportedly there was even a “yerno” of African American rustlers who worked with peons and camped alongside the Salado in-between their forays to the border during the 1860s, if not also earlier.59 For reasons we will see below, it is not at all surprising that peons and African Americans would work in conjunction to rustle in the borderlands.

Since they could find no justice on the Texan side, Mexican hacendados and ranchers clamped down hard on their laborers in an effort to stem the flow of treasure northward. In a vain effort to suppress the routes that runaway peons had mobilized following 1848, the authorities enforced some heavy-handed repressive measures. The North might have even witnessed a resurgence in corporal punishment due to the new pressures caused by the international border.

Minister de la Rosa noted in 1851 that a recent law had just passed in the Northern Mexican states that allowed amos to whip their peons.60 The Mexican authorities also tried others approaches to contain the problem from their side. In Tamaulipas they passed a measure that made amos responsible for thefts committed by their laborers. The purpose of this measure was to make somebody accountable for the thieves who had passed over to the Texan side.61 But this measure also may have deputized amos to step up their brutal treatment of their laborers, lest they be punished themselves for the crimes their servants committed.

The authorities also militarized the borders in order to cut off the laborer’s access to free markets, giving us another example of just how strikingly mobility can undermine national goals.62 In July of 1848, the authorities in Matamoros passed a measure that required every

59 Testimony of José Mara Ramirez, Piedras Negras, August 22, 1873, fs. 99-100, LE 1590 SRE. 60 De la Rosa al Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, Reservada, Washington, August 27, 1851, L33 E1 f. 427, AEMEUA SRE. 61 El Constitutional, Tamaulipas, Nov. 25, 1850. 62 David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 62:4 (November, 2003), 1057-1078

89 Mexican crossing the river into Texas to carry a passport and show it to the border guards.63

Military colonies were another option tested by Mexican authorities. They were intended, primarily, to combat against Comanche and Apache raids into Mexico; but the governor of

Tamaulipas insisted that it would also be the job of the colonists to pursue evildoers, rustlers, and runaway servants searching for “impunity” in the United States.64 Given the increasing number of complaints from ranchers on the lower Rio Grande about runaway servants, it is doubtful that these top-down measures met with much success. Probably the most successful measure employed by Mexicans to recover their runaway peons were individual efforts made by Mexican ranchers. On occasion, Mexicans crossed over into Texas to violently extract debtors from the state in flagrant violation of Texan sovereignty—just as Texans did in Mexico to recover runaway slaves.65

Mexican ranchers and hacendados also began to pressure their ministers to seek out diplomatic solutions to the runaway problem. They called loudly for an extradition treaty with

Texas, putting special pressure on Mexican diplomats to come to some sort of arrangement.66

Thus, it fell upon de la Rosa, the Mexican Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington, to do something about this problem. And despite the warnings of the “ex-senator” against peonage mentioned in the introduction, de la Rosa drafted a treaty with the North Americans containing an article that called for the return of servants from Coahuila and other parts of Mexico who had fled to Texas and owed their masters large debts. But for this measure to be put into effect, the

U.S. minister insisted that Mexico would have to agree to return African Americans living in

63 Carpeta que encierra oficios de los Jueces de Policia, Francisco V. Fernandez to Ayuntamiento de Matamoros, Ciudad Victoria, July 31, 1848. C9 E35, AHMAT. 64 Odie B. Faulk, “Projected Mexican Military Colonies for the Borderlands” Journal of Arizona History, 9 (1968), 39-47; Francisco V. Fernandez, Ciudad Victoria, to Ayuntamiento de Matamoros, July 31, 1848, Ilustre Ayuntamiento, C9 E23, AHMAT. 65 Montgomery, 38-39. 66 El Constitutional, Tamaulipas, [Jésus Cárdenas to Jorge Hophannn, minstro de relaciones,] Sept. 16, 1850 (found in AHMAT, Caja hemeroteca).

90 Mexico—a trade off which de la Rosa found “odious.” Accordingly, the treaty included neither a provision for the return of Texan slaves nor a provision for the return of runaway peons and it pleased nobody. De la Rosa’s failure to find a diplomatic solution to the problem of runaway peons enraged norteños. To them, it implied that the central government did not have their interests at heart. The loss of servants and “the impunity of thieves,”—according to one provincial newspaper editor—was costing the frontier its ”scarce fortune.” And there was very little anybody could do about it.67 Some norteños resorted to local and informal solutions in the absence of a diplomatic one. “Get out of the way presidents and senates” one Texan wrote after learning that a local treaty had been signed in Rio Grande City to return runaway laborers.68 But despite this limited success, the border continued to hemorrhage productive laborers and horses from the northern frontier of Mexico into Texas.

Mexicans did not only try repressive tactics to keep their laborers in place. When the stick failed the Mexican administrators they turned to the carrot. In March of 1851, for example, the government of Nuevo León took up the cause of indebted peons, likely in an attempt to stem the tide of runaways. The state legislature explicitly outlawed the practice of passing on debts from deceased fathers. The measure was probably an attempt to bring amos to heel and to ameliorate the condition of indebted laborers who were abandoning Mexico in flocks to work in

Texas after 1848.69 Another reform targeted the practice of making peons buy articles at the hacienda’s tienda de rayas (company store). Again, in a top-down effort meant to curb flight to

67 De la Rosas to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, May 19, 1850, L32 E2 f. 112, AEMEUA SRE; El Constitutional (Matamoros) September 16, 1850 and September 30, 1850 (found in Caja Hemeroteca AHMAT) 68 Goliad Express, July 4, 1857. 69 Boletín Oficial (Monterrey), June 22, 1861 (??).

91 Texas, the legislature of Nuevo León passed a law that demanded the articles at the stores be priced at market value.70

But despite these reform efforts, laborers continued to leave. And after having failed to work out a diplomatic solution to the runaway peon problem, Mexican employers found themselves at a disadvantage when dealing with potential laborers. Employers had to begin reconsidering the terms with which they contracted peones acasillados, giving workers entering into short and long-term contracts an advance on their wages. This practice would persist into the

Porfiriato, but was not entirely satisfactory to the amos. They often complained that many debtors fled to “asylum” in Texas after receiving an advance payment.71 Nevertheless, these reforms were baby steps towards the liberalization of labor in the North of Mexico. Eventually, the border would bring so much pressure to bear on northern employers that norteño laborers would enjoy the most favorable working conditions in the entire country.72

But through it all, the cycles of debt and peonage in the Mexican North continued. No law could eliminate the depression, drought, and Indian raids that so easily drew new victims into the cycle. As a result, laborers left in droves for Texas. By all accounts, the state of Coahuila lost the most peons and property to Texas. With the Comanches on the retreat towards the

Panhandle in the 1850s, runaway peons could pass with impunity from Coahuila to San Antonio and the other West Texas towns. So great did the volume of migrants to West Texas become that the old military colony of Guerrero turned into something of a way station for laborers en route to Texas. So many families and single men arrived there in the early months of 1852 that the

70 Siglo Diez y Nueve, July 7, 1852. 71 El Constitutional, (Tamaulipas) September 16, 1850. 72 Katz, “Labor,” 7-8. Katz also argues that conditions on Northern haciendas greatly liberalized during the Porfiriato due to increased competition for laborers, and with the opportunities in railroads and mining in addition to the cross-border labor market, 31-36; Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: Univeresity of Chicago Press, 1981).

92 commander of the frontier took special note of it, saying that the new arrivals in town came almost entirely from “the class of sirvientes prófugos—murderers and thieves—who were looking for refuge and to liberate themselves from the knife of the law” in Texas. 73 Guerrero connected to San Antonio along a western road through the state, and it was probably the border town through which the majority of migrants who left Coahuila passed en route to West Texas.

Eventually, many of the runaway peons from Coahuila ended up far in the interior, swelling the population of San Antonio and adding to the herds of its citizens and neighbors.74

Thus, an unforeseen result of the establishment of the border at the Rio Grande/Bravo was the tremendous loss of laborers and capital from the Mexican side to the Texan side. In the mid-1850s, a correspondent for the Mexico City newspaper Siglo Diez y Nueve travelled to the

North and ended up offering some startling facts regarding runaway peons in Coahuila. He wrote that, in 1840, 73,000 souls had inhabited the state of Coahuila. By 1851, however, the population of Coahuila had decreased to 70,000. Even more disturbingly, he reported that a year later the population had decreased by another 4,000, leaving the number of inhabitants in Coahuila at a diminished 66,000. The author reasoned that the shrinking population could only be explained by the flight of indebted laborers. He blamed the system itself—sirvientes in Coahuila, “found themselves in a state of slavery worse than that of beasts; they suffer every type of terrible treatment and they never receive the money that is the fruit of their work.” They were stuck in a cycle of debt, they received articles of poor quality rather than wages, and they could never hope to escape indebted bondage. Their only option was to flee “in bands” to Texas, and to this end the newspaper claimed that, in 1856, 11,000 Mexicans had immigrated from Coahuila to San

Antonio. (A number that, in fact, exceeds the number of Mexicans living in San Antonio that

73 Ayuntamiento of Matamoros to Ayuntamiento of Nuevo Laredo, June 21, 1850, LE 1595 f. 236, LE 1595 SRE; de la Rosas to Minister of Foreign Relations, May 19, 1850, L 32 E2 f. 112, AEMEUA SRE. 74 Siglo Diez y Nueve (Mexico City), October 10, 1856.

93 year). There were, the same newspaper claimed, another 40,000 Mexicans to be found in other parts of the state.75

The flight of peons and other debtors into Texas continued unabated for the next twenty- five years and beyond. In 1873, the Mexican boundary commission again attempted some numbers. They found that 2,812 servants had fled from Nuevo León and Coahuila since 1848, often with their families (the women and children comprised an additional loss of 2,582 souls from the state population.) The commissioners also calculated that runaway peons were responsible for a loss of about 250,000 pesos from the state of Nuevo León and 125,000 pesos from Coahuila in debts and stolen animals. Further, this great drain of capital, the commissioners maintained, was entirely to Texas’ gain.76 Thus, in 1873 norteños were still clamoring for an extradition treaty with Texas. They believed it would go a long way towards recovering labor and capital lost to this “great system of roaming …indulged in by the people of the States of

Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas, towards the frontier of Texas.”77 Mexico would never recover these resources or workers, however. The transfer of wealth and labor across the frontier made by runaway peons was permanent.

Peons in a Society Under Siege

On the other side of the Rio Grande/Bravo, meanwhile, newly mobilized laborers quickly discovered the limits to their liberty. Whether they migrated to the border towns and ranches that lie along the left bank of the river, or whether they gravitated towards the environs of West

Texas, they found themselves increasingly at odds with the newly ascendant white power

75 El Siglo Diez y Nueve, January 10, 1856. 76 Reports of the Committee of Investigation Sent in 1873 by the Mexican Government to the Frontier of Texas (New York: Baker and Goodwin Printers, 1875), 402-403. 77 Ibid., 403

94 structure. As a result, peons—who just a few short years earlier, North Americans had celebrated as seekers of liberty behind military lines—underwent a “racial” transformation in West Texan discourse. This discourse differentiated migrant Mexican laborers through the language of racial stereotypes, creating images of lower class Mexicans that would remain deeply entrenched.

Newspaper editors and other observers began to wax at great length on the racial shortcomings of the mobile laborers flooding into the state, conflating together categories of race and class, in an effort to assign racial degradation to the class of laboring Mexicans who troubled the white power structure. This was an entirely practical solution to a nettlesome problem. Many influential Texans racialized and othered peons in an effort to both condemn their association with African Americans and to deny them any claim they might have had on the promises of

Republican liberty.78

Along the Rio Grande/Bravo, itinerant Mexicans lived in particular peril amongst the new Anglos who had come to dominate the legal and economic life of the border towns (with the notable exception of Laredo.79) The case of Juan Chapa Guerra aptly demonstrates the hazards of life for roaming Mexican laborers. When one of the most important new Anglo merchants in

Brownville, Charles Stillman, lost several horses to rustlers in 1852 he immediately began to look for the culprit. Indeed, Texan Anglos were happy to buy horses stolen from Mexico by fleeing peons, but they also sought to bring the full brunt of their power and influence to bear against anyone who stole from their own herds. Stillman ended up blaming the itinerant Mexican

Juan Chapa Guerra for the theft and deputized a posse to cross over to Mexico to capture him.

The mob did its work and brought Guerra back to Stillman’s ranch, where they whipped him mercilessly before hanging him. The Mexican authorities soon learned what had happened. They

78 On early racial discourse in Texas see Foley, 4-10. 79 Fernando Garza Gonzalez, Una Puerta al Pasado: La Historia de los Dos Laredos, (Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas: s.n., 1998).

95 also learned that Guerra had been innocent. The Mexican consul in Brownsville sought some form of redress for this grievous wrong but to no avail. And even though Guerra’s case had aroused great indignation on the part of Mexican diplomats all the way up to the ambassador in

Washington, his murder was just one injustice among many that would go unpunished.

Eventually, the brutality with which powerful white men along the border treated Mexican commoners would pave the way for the uprising that Juan Cortina led against the white power structure on the left bank of the river in 1859.80

While some mobile laborers, like Juan Chapa Guerra, ended up on the new Anglo-owned ranches that lay just beyond the border towns, others moved further towards the interior of the state. Perhaps they sought to offload stolen horses, or perhaps they were looking for safety from recapture. Whatever the case, thousands of Mexicans arrived in West Texas during the 1850s to take the place of many of the Tejano elite who had departed during the years of uncertainty between the Texan secession and the U.S.-Mexico War. If we take the editors of Texan newspapers at their word, this migration of Mexican comprised mostly of peons, which corroborates the claims made by the Mexican sources mentioned above. Working on local farms for low wages that were still superior to the money they earned in Mexico, the new laborers earned a rate of six to eight dollars a month alongside a ration of corn and beans. Basically they worked out the same arrangement as peons de sueldo y ración in Mexico, except they were better remunerated. Another continuation of their career from Mexico was that, in Texas, they worked as sheep and cattle herders.81 Mexican laborers also managed to corner the carting trade. As early

80 On Chapa Guerra: Arista to Ministro de Relaciones, February 14, 1850 [Copy: February 18, 1850] L32 E3 f. 30, AEMEUA SRE; De las Rosas to John M. Clayton, February 26, 1850 [copy, March 4, 1850] L32 E3 f. 43, AEMEUA SRE; Sobre emisiones del punto llamado el Ranchito y asesinato del C. Juan Chapa Guerra [1872], C4 f. 27, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE; Jerry Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2007). 81 Olmsted, 162-163.

96 as 1850, San Antonio employers were visiting the border towns to contract peons as carters in

Texas—despite the Mexican authorities fears that they would run off from their debts while they were in Texas.82

Texans should have been happy to receive this cheap, plentiful, and pliant labor force— and, as we have seen, they were at first. But ultimately slavery disrupted the peacefulness of this flow of workers. Many of the slaveholders in Texas who had pointed to peonage in Mexico as a reaffirmation of the benignity of the “peculiar institution,” saw things differently on the ground.

Peons who entered the society with slaves that lie west of the Colorado River found themselves in a society under siege, where the violence necessary to maintain slavery threatened to spill over from the master-slave relationship and affect them directly. In Gonzales, Bastrop, Austin, San

Antonio, Refugio, and Goliad, migrant laborers were seen as a tremendous threat to Anglo property and slaves. And the slaveholders’ anxiety about the new peons in their neighborhood deepened when they discovered that, for a small fee, a few migrant laborers were willing to help

African Americans reach the Rio Grande/Bravo. Running slaves to Mexico was an odd job that migrant Mexicans in West Texas took on at tremendous personal risk, but the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that some did just this. Their involvement with this activity was probably overblown, but even the slightest offense drew wide comment and broadly infuriated

Texans. 83

The first great outrage occurred in 1851 when Charles Couple, a citizen of San Antonio, overheard a Mexican man offer to take a slave to the Rio Grande. The Mexican had offered to supply the slave with a horse and even to show him the way to the border for a fixed price. For this grave affront, Couple alerted the authorities who captured the Mexican the very next

82 Manuel Maldonado, Rio Grande, to Antonio Juáregui, March 7, 1850, C5 F6 E92 F3, FCMO AGEC; Juáregui, Monterrey, to Maldonado, March 18, 1850, C5 F6 E92 F3, FCMO AGEC. 83 Texas State Gazette, (Austin) September 30. 1854.

97 morning and brought him before a judge. Much to the chagrin of local slaveholders, however, the judge found that there was no law on the books that punished the attempted robbery of a slave; attempted robbery only counted as a misdemeanor. Seriously offended by the shortcomings of the law, forty-eight citizens of San Antonio wrote to the governor asking for a law that would make “tampering” with the slave population punishable. They wrote that they were especially concerned about Mexicans in San Antonio, given the great “insecurity of slave property” in Bexar County.84 This frontier of slavery ran right through the middle of this large county.

Enormously afraid that they would lose their human property, West Texans overreacted to the perceived threat of peons and began to propose decrees that sought to expel all Hispanics from the area. The aggrieved slaveholders of Bexar County were the first to propose an expulsion decree. Their attempt was not ultimately successful since whites were greatly outnumbered in that city, but some nearby towns copied the expulsion degree and succeeded where San Antonio had failed. The towns of Seguin, Bastrop, and Austin—as well as the counties of Uvalde, Matagorda, and Colorado—all passed measures during the 1850s that expelled Mexican laborers as a class from the city or county limits.85

In Matagorda, reprisals were particularly harsh. In 1852, the authorities caught a group of

Mexicans stealing horses and running three slaves off to Mexico.86 The population reacted swiftly and severely, expelling the entire population of Mexicans from the town. One editor justified their expulsion by saying that it was a much milder course than the other option— resorting to lynch law.87 A couple of years later, in nearby La Grange, every Mexican in the

84 Petition to S.A. Maverick and the members of Bexar Delegation, December 20, 1851, Box 100-357, TSA. 85 Montejanos, 28-29; Olmsted, 163-164; Bastrop Advertiser, March 14, 1857. 86 Gonzales Inquirer, August 13, 1853. 87 Quoted in Gonzales Inquirer, September 17, 1853.

98 county faced the accusation that they had tried to help slaves escape to Mexico. The La Grange vigilance committee arrested the principal leaders of the alleged conspiracy and expelled the rest of the Hispanic population, telling them that their return would be punishable by death. The

Texas State Time, reflecting on the banishment, explained that they were “satisfied that the lower class of Mexican population are incendiaries in any country where slave are held and should be dealt with accordingly.”88 The Texan’s violence against Mexicans took aim particularly at lower class Mexicans, who suffered the lion’s share of racism and discrimination during the 1850s.

Other West Texans resorted to vigilante violence in the face of this perceived threat that lower class Mexicans represented to slavery. Although an expulsion decree failed to pass in San

Antonio, some evidence suggests that Texan Anglos resorted to extra-legal means to rid themselves of the lower class Mexican population. In 1851, a particularly ragged lot of Hispanic

Texans arrived in Laredo at the terminus of one of the routes toward Mexico from San Antonio.

The refugees declared that vigilantes had recently assassinated seventy-five Hispanics from

Bexar County, and they had robbed many more. Clearly the Anglos of Bexar County had begun to take out their frustration on the entire Hispanic population, causing a considerable number to flee. The commander at Laredo noted that the refugees had left in such a hurry that they had brought neither their property nor the fruits of their harvest.89 In nearby Gonzales, meanwhile, a white mob also resorted to violence to deal with the perceived treachery of migrant peons. In

1854, some men there caught a peon who had helped a slave escape, and local whites demanded a fitting punishment for the Mexican. As a result, some men held him tight while a companion with a branding iron burned a letter “T” for traitor into his forehead. The mob then administered

88 Texas State Times, September 27, 1856. 89 Comandante Subalterno de Nuevo Laredo to Gefe [sic] Politico del Distrito del Norte de Tamaulipas, September 25, 1851 [copy 1873], f. 28, LE 1595 SRE.

99 one hundred and fifty lashes to his bare back.90 Anglos had treated Mexicans with suspicion ever since they had rebelled for Texan independence, but in the 1850s their perceived treachery to the white power structure reached new heights.

Some Texans were astute enough to realize that their problem lie with the new migrants and not with the old guard Tejanos—or as one editor referred to them, the “white Mexicans”— who had lived in Texas for generations. The lower class Mexicans were, according to the same editor, “greasers,” a class that included “peons, pelados, picaros, sin verguenzas, [and] putas,…in short, the whole tribe of low flung Mexicans.” These Mexicans alone comprised the great threat to slave property and livestock in Texas. This editor continued, arguing that the only solution to their laziness and thieving was to force them all to become “sheep and stock peons.”91

Their just deserts would be to return to their servile status, having been found undeserving of the liberty offered to free [white] men in America. Another observer minced no words in saying just which Mexicans were guilty of robbery and meddling. It was the migrant laborers he said, or, to borrow his words, the “lower class of ‘Peon’ Mexicans…[who] have no fixed domicile…[and] hang around the plantation, taking the likeliest negro girls for wives….and endeavor to run them to Mexico.”92 The Texans were drawing a hard and fast line between the elite Tejanos who they occasionally considered friends and the great tide of lower class migrant laborers then working its way into the state of Texas.

Increasingly, Texans did not believe that “peons” or “greasers” had a right to the

Republican liberty and freedom from servility that they had sought when they crossed the Rio

Grande/Bravo. The invention of the term “greaser” reveals that they had spotted a class division amongst the Hispanics in Texans, and they would try to lend special meaning to this division

90 La Grange Texas Monument, February 6, 1854. 91 Texas State Gazette, Jan 6, 1858; Ibid, May 18, 1858. 92 Quoted in Gonzales Inquirer, September 17, 1853.

100 during the 1850s. It would not take long for white Texans to begin deploying the most familiar of discursive tools in an effort to “other” and “racialize” lower class Mexicans as they did in the examples above. Thus, in an attempt to spare elite Tejanos from the racism and violence they directed towards migrant laborers, they sought only to assign negative racial characteristics to the lower class Mexicans. And, indeed, some evidence suggests that the old guard Tejanos may have shared some of their convictions. The Spanish-language Bejareño, for instance, wrote disparagingly of the gambling and raucousness endemic to the migrants’ working class culture, an opinion shared by the Anglo petticoat brigade in San Antonio.93

The key element in the “racialization” of lower class Mexicans resulted from their failure to adapt the racial norms of their neighbors and discriminate against African Americans. Olmsted noticed the tremendous strife that peons who associated with Africans caused between Anglos and Hispanics in Texas. Texans found the “intimate terms” on which migrant Mexicans associated with slaves troubling indeed; associating with blacks indicted the whiteness of lower class Mexicans, refuted their claims on (white) republican liberty, and threatened slaveholder’s power.94 Laboring Mexicans caused tremendous upset to the repression of African Americans that lay at the bedrock of slavery and the foundation of West Texas’ society under siege. In exchange for this perceived racial treachery, they became “greasers” in the minds of Texans.

These reports of Mexican “treachery” were not just white hysteria, however. It is irrefutable that some Mexicans formed intimate bonds with slaves, and that their relationships went beyond the mere trading of goods for services. In the fall of 1854 a large number of peons began to arrive in Austin—and almost immediately the racial situation deteriorated.95 According to one report, many Mexican laborers who worked for various Austin employers camped in the

93 El Bejareño (San Antonio), February 7, 1855. 94 Olmsted, 163 95 Paul Lack, “Slavery and Vigilantism” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 4 (1981), 1-20.

101 suburbs of the city, where they met with the local slaves in the evening and formed personal and recreational connections. A traveler between Bastrop and Austin in 1854 remarked that he had:

…discovered at a late hour of night, at a Mexican camp, in the vicinity of [Austin. There were] a large number of Peons, Mexican women and slaves. The Peons and slaves were playing at monte, smoking cigars and drinking liquor. He noticed one slave with his arms around a señora and another señora lay her shawl over a slave while he was reclining on the ground.

He continued, saying that “[i]t is not surprising that our citizens should feel disposed to rid themselves of this low and dangerous class of Mexican Peones, [sic] when scenes like these are transpiring around us.” A week later, the local vigilance committee rode to the outskirts of the city and instructed the Mexicans they found camped there to leave the county. Patrols were appointed soon afterwards, and the Mexicans who remained were forcibly ejected. 96

A year later, however, they had returned, and another newspaper reported on a similar camp in the area. It alleged that through socializing together Mexicans and African

Americans sometimes struck upon deals:

There is no doubt but they are, and have been, abetting negroes to escape from their owners. On last Saturday night Mr. Butts visited the camp and found two negroes in it. He caught one and called to his wife to bring a rope to tie him [but] before she could reach him, the negro tore loose from him. Mr. Novell went to camp on another occasion, and found the Mexicans dealing monte and the negroes betting. Something must be done to prevent the negroes and Mexicans from associating.97

A week later, the citizens held another meeting, and this time they elected to resort to the same expulsion measure that had recently passed in other West Texan towns. They expelled all

“transient Mexicans” in order to “relieve the community from the pernicious and growing

96 Texas State Gazette, October 14, 21, and 28 1854. 97 Texas State Times, October 7, 1855.

102 influence of the Mexican peon population now in our midst.” This expulsion order was, in fact, the second decreed in Austin within a span of three years.98

In the early 1850s, western Texans came to the conclusion that they no longer needed to defend the rights of runaway peons. They continued to employ them, but they were seen as a tremendous source of insecurity. And as long as West Texans continued to rely primarily on slave labor, they entertained many options to try and deport the Mexicans and stave off further migrants into Texas. Other than expulsion decrees, they hit upon another potential solution in

1855, when a commission from San Antonio made an offer to the commander of the Mexican frontier to return all peons in Bexar county in exchange for whatever runaway slaves could be rounded up in Mexico.99 As we will see in the following chapter, Mexican officialdom’s dedication to emancipation prevented this deal from coming through. But similar deals were constantly in the offing between Texans and Mexicans, who were both in desperate search of laboring men and women on the frontier.

Justified by nascent anti-Mexican racism, Texans ratcheted up the violence against

Mexican laborers in the ensuing years. But the fact that many western Texans did not welcome them did not stop Mexican peons and laborers from making the jornada to work in Texas. Not even the so-called “Cart Wars” of 1857, which signaled a real spike in white on Mexican violence, held them back.100 The Cart Wars occurred alongside the ascent of the Know-Nothing party in West Texas, and both were symptoms of the rise in racial discord brought on by the arrival of thousands of Mexican laborers and peons to Texas. But despite the increased violence and discrimination against Mexicans, San Antonio would continue to draw migrant Mexicans—a

98 Texas State Times, October 14 and October 21, 1855; Olmsted, 163. 99 El Siglo XIX, November 12, 1855. 100 Southern Intelligencer, September 9, 1857; Ibid, September 23, 1857; Ibid, Oct. 7, 1857; Ibid, Dec. 7 and Jan. 6, 1858, May 8, 1858. De León, 82-83; Montejanos 28-29.

103 fact that speaks clearly to the lack of opportunity on the other side of the border. In both 1857, following the Cart Wars, and in 1861, following the outbreak of the Civil War, large groups of

Hispanics would leave Texas for Mexico.101 But those who went home typically returned later.

Violence could disrupt migration patterns, but it could not remove the paths to greater economic freedom newly mobilized by Mexican peons.

Conclusion

In sum, the border between the United States and Mexico represented an opportunity for runaway peons from Mexico just as it did for runaway slaves from Texas. These mobile people lent an extraordinary meaning to the post-1848 boundary, turning it into a border between free labor and servitude. North Americans, meanwhile, were at first happy to receive this influx of laborers from Mexican haciendas and ranches. Runaway peons justified the U.S. military’s endeavors in Mexico, and cast doubt upon the Mexican Republic’s dedication to the principles of emancipation and liberty. In addition, mobile workers inserted their labor directly into the ranching revolution then transforming the borderlands north of the Rio Grande/Bravo.

And not only did fleeing peons represent a vindication of Anglo Republican and free- market values, their flight also resulted in a tremendous transfer of resources from the Mexican to the Texan side of the border. But the impoverishment of the Mexican frontier was not the only effect that fleeing peons had on Mexico. The mobilization of routes between the Mexican North and Texas labor markets would also have a profound effect on labor in the Mexican frontier in general. The runaway peons’ peers and families, who remained behind on Mexican haciendas in

101 Founding of Resurreción by immigrant Bejareños, fs. 160-163, SRE 29-15-46; Boletín Oficial, Monterey, Nov 30. 1861; On the Civil War: Testimony of Jacinto Olivares, f. 48, Regino Ramón f. 48, and H.E. Evans, f. 49, 1873, C2, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE.

104 the North, would force wages there to rise and working conditions to liberalize lest they also look for opportunity on the other side.

The history of runaway peons in the borderlands does not simply end at the Rio

Grande/Bravo, however. When they crossed the boundary between peonage and free labor, peons quickly found another limit to their liberty. The presence of slavery greatly complicated what could have been a peaceful flow of the most ambitious workers from a poor country to a wealthier one. Peons, upon entering Texas, entered a vortex of violence and distrust brought on by the jealousies and fears of Texas slaveholders. Already insecure in their institution of slavery, runaway peons represented a tremendous threat. Discursively, some of the most pernicious

“racial” stereotypes that Texans assigned to Mexicans owe to this period and the social interactions between peons and slaves. But the fact that laboring Mexicans continued to migrate—despite the vigilante violence and crippling racism they suffered at the hands of Texan whites—speaks to the great drawing power that expanded economic opportunities can have for labors caught in a stagnant cycle of semi-dependency and poverty. Thanks to opportunities on the other side, their lives would henceforth be slightly less desperate—even if they were not all that much more secure.

105 Chapter 3

“Under the Ample Protection of the Law”: Afronorteamericanos in the Texas-Tamaulipas Borderlands

In 1842, General Pedro Ampudia in command of seven hundred men surprised two hundred Texan volunteers at the town of Mier, Tamaulipas in one of the key battles that took place during the undeclared borderlands war that lasted from Texan Independence in 1836 until the North American Intervention. After his victory, Ampudia took the Texan combatants prisoner and forced them to march under armed escort to Matamoros, near the mouth of the Rio

Grande. As they made their way, the villagers who lived along the border turned out to celebrate the victorious general, warmly receiving him in each of the towns where the military convoy stopped. Among the friends and “principle men” who turned out to greet Ampudia in the tiny village of Guadalupe were two runaway slaves named Esau and Thomas. They were General

Samuel Houston’s former slaves, and perhaps the most famous runaways in Texas history. As

Esau and General Ampudia embraced, Ampudia’s Texan prisoners looked on impertinently, desirous to make a “carcas” [sic] of the man. Esau, who more than likely ran away while hired out from Houston’s Cedar Point plantation in 1840, undoubtedly received their meaning and stayed far away from the Texan prisoners. Thomas, however, had no fear of venturing amongst the Texans and even represented himself as Houston’s former secretary and a man of importance in Ampudia’s entourage.1

1 Joseph D. McCutchan, Mier Expedition Diary: A Texan Prisoner’s Account (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978 [1842]), 67-70.

106 Soon, the convoy left Tom and Esau behind to continue its journey on to Matamoros.

Once there, the Mexican army paraded the prisoners along the streets and the townsfolk turned out en masse to witness the spectacle and celebrate the Mexican victory over the Texan volunteers. The Mier prisoners had become unwilling participants in an important ritual of the political culture of the 19th century Mexican North, a rite that helped denizens of the borderlands feel the draw of the newly independent Mexican nation. In the zócolos (central plazas) of these dusty frontier towns, patriotic spectacles inculcated a largely illiterate frontier society with a sense of belonging to the newly independent nation of Mexico. And for the very special events that attended the capture of the Mier prisoners in 1842, the display of the prisoners’ bodies comprised the centerpiece of the patriotic festivities.2

The capture of the Texans raiders had been quite a fête for the Mexican army, and the display of their bodies was meant to inculcate in the borderlanders a sense of “Mexicanidad”—or

Mexican national identity—that would set them apart from the Texans. The vecinos of

Matamoros “othered” the Texan prisoners in an affirmation of their own norteño identity, turning the festivity into an event that was far from trivial. The border towns, including Matamoros, were probably most famous for their Federalist pretensions and the predilection of residents for smuggling and consuming North American merchandise. Located within the sphere of the New

Orleans trade diaspora, Matamorenses and the citizens of the other Villas del Norte felt the draw of the economic juggernaut to the North much more than they did the weak state slowly forming around Mexico City, hundreds of miles to the South.3

2 Alberto Barrera Enderle, “Plaza Pública Y Discurso Regionalista en Nuevo León, 1848-1856” in Artemio Benavides Hinojosa ed., Sociedad, Milicia y Política en Nuevo León, Siglos XVIII y XIX (Monterrey: Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, Gobierno del Estado, 2005), 43-73. 3 Octavio Herrera Pérez, “Reflexiones de una decada de frontera indefinida entre México y Estados Unidos (Texas) en el bajo Río Bravo” in Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, ed. Historia y Nación: Actas del Congreso en Homenaje a Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (Toluca: Universidad Autonoma del Estado de México, 1998), 338-340; Omar S. Valerio- Jiménez, “Neglected Citizens and Willing Traders: The Villas del Norte (Tamaulipas) in Mexico’s Northern

107 The display of the Mier prisoners was an effort to draw borderland Mexicans towards the center. And indeed, the spectacle drew a broad cross section of the vecinos (citizens) and inhabitants of Matamoros, including the runaway slaves who had taken up residence in that town.

One of the prisoners named William Stapp, even as he endured the agony of the exhibition, spotted the “ebony-vissages” of some Texan runaway slaves amongst the other spectators. He claimed to recognize several of the African Americans in Mexico (Afronorteamericanos), saying that they had once belonged to friends at home in Texas. But African Americans were just part of the great crowd gawking at the North Americans, reversing the order of things, and “othering” the unfree white Texans.4 Indeed, Matamoros society was represented in microcosm on this celebratory occasion, hierarchically arranged from top to bottom in the physical space of the city streets. The upper levels of the houses and the balconies were filled with finely-dressed Mexican ladies and gentlemen who had left the isolated security of their drawing rooms to witness the scene. Beneath the terraces occupied by Matamoros’ genteel set, meanwhile, Stapp wrote that the crowds on the streets below “positively hived with the lower orders of the population” and “ill- vissaged beggars,” who “hissed at us as we passed, with a venomous malice and hate.”5 But what all these borderlanders had in common was that, for a brief moment, they were all united in their opposition to the captured Texan raiders and the affirmation of their Mexicanidad. In a show of charity (and perhaps fear of retribution), the women of the town eventually took up a collection

Borderlands, 1749-1846” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 1:2 (Summer, 2002): 251-296; Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier, Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117-123. 4 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 135-161 for how whiteness was constructed out of the slave market. 5 Stapp, William Preston, The Prisoners of Perote: Containing a Journal Kept by the Author, who was captured by the Mexicans, at Mier, Dec. 25, 1842, and released from Perote May 16, 1844 (Philadelpha: G. B. Zieber and Co, 1845), 43-44.

108 to ease the prisoners’ suffering.6 There is little reason to believe that the commoners felt the same pity, however. Unlike local merchants, they had little to gain from sympathizing with raiders who made their lives ever more insecure.

As the Texan prisoners looked upon the African American men’s faces in the throng, it must have come to them as a surprise that their once-loyal servants would swell the crowd that had turned out to celebrate their capture and the merciless execution of their more unfortunate comrades left behind at Mier. One incident in particular reflects the menace with which Texans viewed the African Americans who lived within the shadow of Mexican liberty. A prisoner named Andrew Neill at last learned from an African American in Matamoros what had happened to a certain Mr. Stinnett who had disappeared from Texas two years before. It turns out that

Stinnett had run across a camp of African American runaways who were en route to Mexico and had hailed them cheerfully in the dark, mistaking them for fellow hunters. The runaways immediately relieved the white man of his horses, provisions, money, and life. The African

American who related this information to Colonel Neill also told him where he should look for the body so it could be “found and interred.”7 Another runaway in Matamoros named Sawney displayed a “professed devotion” to the Texan prisoners, and even an “attachment to their interest,” visiting them regularly in the jail. But, when the Texans hatched a daring plan of escape, Sawney alerted the Mexican authorities who quickly put an end to the plan.8

As the accounts of the Mier prisoners clearly relate, runaways were a significant presence in the Rio Grande/Bravo borderlands in the decades before the Civil War. African Americans took advantage of the liberality of the officials on the Mexican side of the border and showed up

6 Helen Chapman, ed. Caleb Coker, The News From Brownsville: Helen Chapman’s Letters from the Texas Military Frontier, 1848-1852 (Austin: The Texas State Historical Association, 1992), 23. 7 James T. De Shields, Border Wars of Texas: Being a Popular Account (Tioga Texas: The Herald Company, 1912), 193. 8 Stapp, 55.

109 in significant numbers. The sheer volume of runaways to the towns of the lower Rio Grande forced Mexican frontier officials to take a stand on the issue of slavery and, as a result, runaway blacks found an important ally in them.

In the last two chapters, we have seen how runaways to Mexico troubled the institution of slave labor in Texas. This chapter, meanwhile, is concerned with the experiences that African

Americans had once they arrived in the borderlands that lie between U.S. slave country and

Tamaulipas, Mexico. As I have argued before, African Americans from Texas and Louisiana saw in Mexico a liberal country that guaranteed freedom for all who lived within its borders and

Mexican officials generally did not return runaway slaves to Texas. Although they did not codify the freedom of all refugees into law until the 1857 constitution, Mexican officials began granting asylum to runaway slaves immediately following the Texan secession from Mexico in 1836.9

Mexican officials did not just defend the rights of runaways because of a greater belief in the principle of freedom. It was also because of the bitter pill they had been forced to swallow when the Texans defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto in 1836 and made him sign papers that recognized the independence of the Republic of Texas. For the next ten years, the Republics of

Mexico and Texas would battle over the location of the border. Runaways played an important role in this ongoing conflict and helped tie together the issues of anti-North Americanism and anti-slavery in Mexico. These two issues could not be separated; the two strongest laws that

Mexicans passed against slavery in the North were dated 1837 and 1846, years that coincided with two wars where Mexico lost large portions of its territory to North American aggression.10

9 Ronnie C. Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico” The Journal of Negro History, 57:1 (January 1972): 10. For evolution of laws in Mexico regarding slavery in the 1830s see Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 27-49. 10 Mariano Arista, Mexico City, to Manuel Maldonado, October 17, 1850, fs. 926-928, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138 (tribus de paz), FCMO AGEC; Antonio Juáregui to Maldonado, November 5, 1852, C20 F1 E9 1F, FCMO AGEC.

110 Officials and army officers like Ampudia saw in the protection of runaway slaves and the promotion of their rights one way that they could oppose the Texans. And by inculcating anti- slavery in the vecinos of the North they hoped to instill in them one small tenet of Mexican national identity, namely, the defense of civil liberties regardless the color of the individual. The freedom of runaways in Mexico may have represented a grave affront to slaveholding Texans, but their freedom reflected the greater liberality of Mexico. And by insisting on their freedom in the borderlands, Mexican officials found an opportunity to demonstrate of the sovereignty of

Mexico and its laws at the frontier.

Unfortunately for African Americans who took up refuge in Mexico, Texans were not bound to respect the sovereignty of Mexico. The continued aggression of Texans who looted, revolutionized, rustled, and kidnapped African Americans in Mexico deeply troubled the significance of the boundary and the security of those who sought refuge under Mexican law.

Both Hispanic and Anglo Texans brought on this transnational violence, earning for themselves in the trade such labels as adventurer, pirate, and filibusterer. And their aggression continued from the moment Texas rebelled, up through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and into the era of the Civil War.

Texan slaveholders and slave hunters were likewise able to recruit many of the residents of the lower Rio Grande/Bravo to their cause, undoing the efforts of Mexican officials who hoped to draw borderlands vecinos closer to the Mexican state. A good number of vecinos in

Matamoros and the other border towns had spent years living alongside the Texans; they were familiar with the ways of both Hispanophone and Anglophone Texans, and they were eager to enter into commerce with them. As we shall see, one of the more nefarious ways they did business with them was through pursuing bounties offered by slaveholders for runaways. The

111 fickleness of some vecinos along the lower Rio Grande, added to the fact that Texans were quite willing to violate Mexican sovereignty to recover runaways, made the borderlands between slavery in Texas and freedom in Mexico ambiguous and the lives of runaway slaves and other

African Americans there insecure. This ambiguity would remain long after the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo set the official boundary at the Rio Grande in 1848.

Afronorteamericanos in Tamaulipas

Africans had been a presence in Northeast Mexico for many years before Anglophone pioneers pushed into Texas during the 1820s. A century earlier, the Spanish crown authorized mining expeditions into the south of Tamaulipas, then known vaguely as the Seno Mexicano.

These ventures were generally unsuccessful, but a couple of decades later—and after England and France had begun to make overtures towards the Gulf Coast—the colonial state renewed its efforts to colonize the Northeast. The crown deputized the peninsular (Spaniard) José de

Escandón to establish a colony there in an attempt to assert Spanish authority over this long stretch of the Gulf Coast. He founded the colony of Nuevo Santander, which was bound to the north by the Rio Nueces, to the South by the Rio Panuco, and to the west by the Sierra Madre

Oriental. The new colony experienced a brief mining bonanza around the town of San Carlo between 1769 and 1777.11

During these early years many African slaves worked in the mines of Nuevo Santander.

Maria Luisa Herrera Casasús, a historian of the African presence in Tamaulipas, has uncovered documents from this era including the baptismal record of a “Mandingan” woman named Maria

Antonia Francisca de Paula. She also found that through the end of the eighteenth century some

11 Octavio Herrera Pérez, Breve Historia de Tamaulipas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 58-65, 87-88.

112 slaves were still being introduced into the country through Refugio, a port near present day

Matamoros.12 The nearby mountains of Real de San Nicolás would continue to give up their silver, zinc, and copper to the African slaves and Indians who worked them into the 19th century.

But it was the demographic makeover of Nuevo Santander brought on by this boom that became the mining bonanza’s most enduring legacy along the Gulf Coast.13 From 1792-1805, the parochial records of San Carlo record the very beginning of intermarriage between Africans and others. During that period there was only one full-blooded African baptized. But in the same stretch of time, there were 153 Afromestizos (mixed-bloods) baptized, a fact that betrays a very rapid transformation and adaptation of Africans to their new surroundings.14

Similar to other areas in Mexico that used slave labor, probably within a generation or two the most socially motivated African males mixed in with the Indian, Mestizo, and even

Spanish populations to produce mixed-blood offspring.15 (The gender balance of Africans is unknown). A census from 1788 conducted by the viceroyalty reveals this intermixture, finding that out of a total population of 24, 543 inhabitants in Nuevo Santander, there were 2,030 negros—the racial designator used by Spanish census-takers and casta painters alike to signify full-blooded Africans—as well as 6,019 mulattos, and 250 lobos, or Afro-Natives. This population of African descendents comprised almost a third of the population of Nuevo

Santander, and they were concentrated especially heavily around the mining district of San

Carlo.16

12 Maria Luisa Herrera Casasús, Raíces Africanas en la Población de Tamaulipas (Victoria: Universidad de Tamaulipas, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1998), 52, 54. 13 Herrera Pérez, 87-88. 14 Casasús, 57. 122 “Indios mestizos” (who would have carried no African blood), but 153 Afromestizos including 139 mulatos, 4 lobos, and 10 coyotes—the latter being mixes of Indian, Spanish, and African lineage. 15 Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race Ethnicity and Regional Development, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 112. 16 Census reprinted in María Luisa Herrera Casasús, 69-71.

113 The racial makeup of the northern Gulf Coast drew comment from far and wide in the years that followed. Then, in 1831, after the new Republic of Mexico had abolished slavery for good, the great British abolitionist Benjamin Lundy visited Tamaulipas (formerly Nuevo

Santander) with the objective of establishing a free black colony there. Upon arriving, he immediately noticed the racial fluidity of the Mexican Northeast, undoubtedly a result of the migrations to the area that had occurred the century before. While touring the region he pronounced that the Tamaulipecos were “descended from European, African, and original

American ancestors, their color [sic] varies from the Castilian white to the darkest shades of the torrid climes.”17 Mexicans and North Americans alike were uncommonly disposed towards commenting on the racial fluidity of Mexico’s many regions; but the tone of their observations should not obscure the fact that Tamaulipas was indeed inhabited by people of many different hues and ancestral backgrounds. Given the fact that North Americans in the 1830s began to restrict severely the rights and life possibilities of those who fell outside of the privileged sphere of whiteness, the comparative racial fluidity of Mexico was not lost on African Americans.18

Many slaves who travelled back and forth with their masters to the cotton emporium of

Matamoros undoubtedly realized that Tamaulipas might offer them a new and much more tolerant home.

After independence, the Mexican port cities along the Gulf began to attract all sorts of visitors and semi-permanent residents, including a significant influx of North American merchants. During the previous centuries, the Spanish crown had designated only a handful of cities as royal ports and any commerce that took place outside of these mercantile entrepôts was

17 Benjamin Lundy, A Circular, Addressed to Agriculturists, Manufacturers, Mechanics And C. on the Subject of Mexican Colonization (Philadelphia: Published for the Author, 1835), 14. 18 Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (New York: Verso, 1990), 127-161; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, (New York: Verso, 1991), 55-60 for “whiteness” in the 1830s.

114 piratical. Then, when the Federalists came to power in Mexico in the early 1820s, laws governing trade liberalized significantly. As a result, many North American merchants began to set up shop in the untapped markets of Matamoros and other coastal towns in Tamaulipas.

Matamoros would become a center for the cotton trade and a significant trading partner for New

Orleans merchants in the ensuing years.19

North American merchants and clerks found, however, that the conditions for race- baiting changed significantly in Mexico. Despite the much greater racial fluidity of Tamaulipas in comparison with the Southern United States and Texas, many white North Americans still carried their prejudices with them when they went to Mexico. Their attitudes contrasted sharply with those of the Mexican officials. The new Republic of Mexico embraced the principal of equality regardless of color in its law, and this principle included a growing dedication to anti- slavery. Mexican officials could, in fact, be quite determined on this point. As early as 1833, the

U.S. consul in New Orleans asked his Mexican counterpart for a reciprocal treaty that returned the runaways who had escaped from Louisiana to Mexico, which was undoubtedly a consequence of the augmented trade between New Orleans and Northeast Mexico. The Mexican foreign ministry flatly refused.20 On one hand, the young Republic’s faith in liberty for all peoples and anti-slavery was born out of ideals promulgated by the Afromestizo revolutionary leaders José Morelos and Vicente Guerrero, the latter of whom passed the official abolition of slavery in Mexico in 1829. On the other, the majority of the Mexican population comprised of people whom North Americans would know as mixed race—or to use the Mexican term,

Mestizos—who reflected the racial fluidity of the country at large.

19 Valerio-Jiménez, 281-282; Terre. J. Salazar, “La Historia del Oro Blanco en H. Matamoros, Tamaulipas” 87-92 in Kearney, Milo, Anthony Knopp, and Antonio Zavaleta, eds. Studies in Rio Grande Valley History. Brownsville, TX: The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, 2005. 20 Francisco Pizarro Martínez to Secretario de Estado de Despacho de Relaciones, March 1, 1833, Folder 5-16-8599, SRE.

115 Blacks in Mexico were emboldened by the more liberal laws there and Mexican bureaucrats were not likely to defend the tenets of white supremacy when called upon to do so.

This commitment on the part of the authorities caused several conflicts involving blacks, whites, and Mexicans brought on by the jealously of white Americans who arrogated racial privilege to themselves. At a fandango in Matamoros, for instance, one of the North American clerks attending the ball saw that there were a number of black men in attendance, and called them

“damned niggers,” adding that they should never have been admitted in the first place. One of the black men overheard the clerk, however, and called him out for his insult, knocking him down, hurting him quite badly, and landing both of them in prison.21

Even more surprising to North Americans in Mexico, however, was the fact that Mexican officials sometimes intervened on the side of African Americans—something unthinkable in

America, where blacks were generally considered non-citizens unless they could prove otherwise.

In Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas, another altercation occurred between fearless blacks and race-baiting whites. When two “genteel” black men visited a fine hotel owned by an

Irishman to have a drink they were refused service probably because some North American merchants had complained to, and perhaps bribed, the bartender. In a demonstration of just how firmly the Mexican officials stood on the side of the rights of all clients regardless of color, the alcalde of Victoria fined the landlord ten dollars for the “insolence” of the bartender.22

Benjamin Lundy travelled through Mexican Texas at about the same time. While there, he met a black man who had been freed upon his master’s death in Nacogdoches. His former master’s heirs had tried to re-enslave him but had been unsuccessful; nevertheless, the attempt probably prompted the African American to move further into Mexican territory, and he ended

21 Benjamin Lundy, The Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (Philadelphia: William D. Parrish, 1847), 145. 22 Ibid., 149.

116 up in San Antonio. He was most impressed with the Mexicans there, saying that they “paid him the same respect as other laboring people, there being no difference here on account of color.”23

Thus, the experience of African Americans in the Mexican borderlands contrasted sharply with their peers in Austin’s colony and New Orleans. Lundy continued to encounter many African (North) Americans (as well as blacks from other regions in the diaspora) during his travels through Tamaulipas in 1834. His on-again, off-again guide through Tamaulipas, the

“supercilious” Nicolas Dronette for instance, was a darkly-colored mulatto who travelled easily between New Orleans and the various parts of Tamaulipas, having once even served in the

Mexican army.24 While in Matamoros, Lundy attended several assemblies of the Matamoros blacks held at Dronette’s house, and was impressed by the fact that “coloured people prosper here in pecuniary matters.” He, likewise, made the acquaintance of a couple of mulattos who originally hailed from New Orleans and had found lucrative opportunities in Matamoros as a cabinet-maker and an engineer respectively.25 In Mexico, African Americans found not only a more tolerant home, but also that their life opportunities were greatly augmented.

If anything, the Mexican government would strengthen its resolve to protect the rights of

African Americans following its switch to Centralism and the subsequent secession of Texas in

1836. As we have seen, Mexicans already had comparatively fluid ideas about race; but the experiences the young Republic of Mexico had with Texan slaveholders in 1836 confirmed their opposition to slavery. When they lost the territory of Texas north of the Nueces River, they reacted militarily by defending the area between the Nueces and Rio Grande River and, on a discursive level, by attacking the land hunger and racism that they considered characteristic of

23 Ibid., 48 24 Ibid., 113, 157. 25 Ibid.,143.

117 the Texans. Their criticism even extended to an attack on the racism in general of Anglo North

Americans.26

In the intervening years between Texan secession and the North American invasion,

Texans would continue fighting a running war with Mexican federal troops in the borderlands over possession of the Nueces Strip that lie between the Rio Grande and Nueces. This war was punctuated by a series of attacks and counter-attacks. The most notable of these was the Mexican capture of San Antonio by Adrián Woll in 1842 and the reprisal that Texans attempted to visit upon the town of Mier, mentioned in the introduction. Nevertheless, and despite the celebrations that followed in the wake of Ampudia’s victory over the Mier raiders, this war with Texas was not necessarily a popular war in the lower Rio Grande borderlands; merchants in the region contrasted sharply with their officials over the wisdom of continuing warfare against the Texans.

They also greatly resented the presence of government troops who remained stationed around

Matamoros during the conflict. Not only did the troops’ presence hamper cross-border commerce of both the legal and illegal sorts, their rowdiness disrupted business-as-usual and probably even added to the general feeling of insecurity in Matamoros. Indeed, the presence of so many soldiers, who were reportedly committing robberies and even on one occasion “butchering” women “in the streets” caused many foreigners in Matamoros to pack up and leave.27 Included among the foreigners who left the city in the years between the Texan Secession and the North American

Intervention were undoubtedly a large number of British and North American merchants.

The norteños’ greatest opposition to Centralism stemmed from their dislike for the standing army. The merchants of Matamoros even wrote a formal complaint to the government tin 1842, grumbling that the army’s presence amounted to “an indignity that reigns over all

26 For just one example see El Mosquito Mexicano, January 1, 1836. 27 D.W. Smith, Consulate of the U.S.A. in Matamoros, to John Forsyth, July 1, 1836, Roll no. 281, NAW.

118 classes.” By that point, the army had been stationed in and around Matamoros for seven years and had become a significant burden upon the vecindario (citizens) of the lower Rio

Grande/Bravo. The government raised the resources necessary to keep a standing army in place through a series of forced loans on the vecinos. Thus, even though the commanders insisted upon these loans as a patriotic duty, the merchants of Matamoros alleged that these levies and the general lack of resources hurt laborers, merchants, hacendados, and artisans alike.28

The presence of the army enforced the edicts of the new Central supreme government in a heavy-handed, but—as we have seen in the festivities surrounding the capture of the Mier prisoners—effective way. One of the edicts they promoted was liberty for African Americans.

As a result, blacks in the Mexican North typically allied with the army. A few blacks even served in a military capacity alongside Mexican federal troops. In April of 1839, Mexican troops faced off against a force of Texan Rangers serving under Ed Burleson and Ben McCulloch in West

Texas. One of the captives the Texans took after a battle near Seguin was a very large

Francophone black man named Raphael. Despite his protests that he had never been a slave, the following day the Rangers executed him at the crack of dawn. The execution of this unfortunate man was a much-celebrated affair amongst the Rangers; the Texan James O. Rice even paid a soldier assigned to the firing squad five dollars to take his place. Ironically, Rice’s gun failed upon firing, leaving the man “crestfallen.”29

Mexican troops continued to fight for possession of the borderlands up to the Nueces

River in the intervening years between 1836 and 1846. They also continued to recruit significantly among the enemies of the Texans. Juan Córdova, for one, headed a band of fifty to a hundred men allegedly comprised for the most part of Indians supported by “Mexicans,

28 Petition, Sala Capitular del Ayuntamiento de Matamoros, August 11, 1842, C7 E1, Ayuntamiento, AHMAT. 29 Joseph Milton Nance. After San Jacinto: The Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1836-1841 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 127-128.

119 mulattos, negroes, and desperate renegade Americans.” This force committed depredations between the Rio Grande/Bravo and Nueces in the spring and summer of 1840 in an effort to keep

Texans out of the Nueces Strip. Then, in March of 1841, Ed Burleson met this “motley crew of

Mexicans, runaway negroes and Bilouxie [sic] Indians” near Seguin. During the battle,

Burleson’s Rangers captured an elderly black man alongside another black man serving the

Mexicans and prepared to sell them into slavery. The old man violently protested, however, claiming that he had run away from slavery years ago to work with the Mexicans in a silver mine just south of Seguin. Further, he refused to be sold back into slavery, and said to Burleson, “You had better kill us now, for we will fight till we die before we will be slaves again.” He said that while he was a slave he had killed many others. He continued: “I kilt [sic] my master and his whole family, nine in number, to get freedom and, I won’t be a slave long at a time no more.”

Accordingly, the Texans executed both the elderly African American and his unfortunate companion.30

At last the North American military intervened in the conflict in 1846, a year after annexing the Republic of Texans to U.S. national territory. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which resolved the North American Intervention, left the Texans with uncontested control of the

Nueces strip—and the North Americans in possession of everything Mexico had claimed west and north of the Rio Grande/Bravo. The violence between Texans, Mexican vecinos, and African

Americans would continue in the borderlands, however. With Texans in control of the Nueces

Strip, the violence simply moved further south and west in the 1850s, to the immediate environs of the bounding river itself.

30 Catherine McDowell ed., James Wilson Nichols, Now you Hear my Horn, the Journal of James Wilson Nichols, 1820-1887 (Austin, and London: University of Texas Press, 2010), 36.

120 Much of this violence was brought on by the new assertion of the Mexican state over its remaining territory. In a bold affirmation of Mexican sovereignty at the frontier, officials again stepped up their rhetoric of anti-slavery; it was a sort of knee jerk reaction to the thrashing they had just received at the hands of North Americans regulars and volunteers. They even passed another law absolutely forbidding slavery in any new colonies at the frontier in 1846.31 As far south as Mexico City, Mexicans began to celebrate their republic’s dedication to color equality in the face of the recent Yankee aggression. As an editor for El Universal in Mexico City put it,

Mexico afforded all people greater life opportunities regardless of color: “in the United States neither the most moral nor the richest descendent of Africans is free to enjoy the benefits of other men who have no advantage except for the color of their skin.” From a more Conservative corner in Mexico City came a similar condemnation of racism. According to El Monitor Republicano,

“the Catholic Laity does not now see distinctions of blood or color amongst Mexicans. They protect with equal benevolence all of the sons [sic] of this country, whether they are white, black, pardo, or cobrizo. They give charity to men of all origins, and prepare for the fusion of all human races, something that is coming to pass more and more every day.”32 Perhaps it was this greater racial fluidity and tolerance, noticed by Lundy as early as 1834, that made for the sharpest contrast between the Mexican and North American states that bordered either side of the

Rio Grande.

As a result of this official doxy of color equality, African Americans continued to stream into Mexico. U.S consuls, and later, filibusterers, would do their best to stop this human flood, keeping up a constant pressure on Mexico to reconsider its position vis-à-vis runaway slaves to whom they offered the protection of the law. The most significant way that U.S. diplomats could

31 Arista, Mexico City, to Maldonado, October 17, 1850, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138 (tribus de paz), FCMO AGEC. 32 El Universal 1848-1855, April 28, 1850 (Mexico City); El Monitor Republicano, May 21, 1847 (Mexico City).

121 strong-arm their Mexican counterparts was through refusing to issue “Cartas de Seguridad”

(identity cards) to runaway slaves. A Carta functioned as a sort of visa and guaranteed the foreigner in Mexico protection by the U.S. Department of State.33 In 1838 this issue came to a head when a “multitude” of mulatto mechanics migrated from the city of New Orleans to

Tampico, Tamaulipas. When the North American consulate in Tampico discovered that this group of African Americans had arrived in the city, he contacted the U.S. consul in New Orleans,

Powhatan Ellis, for guidance on the matter. Ellis refused to vouch for the freedom of the African

American migrants. U.S. consular law demanded that African Americans prove their freedom before they would be recognized as citizens and granted a Carta de Seguridad. This law, which put the burden to prove their freedom on the African Americans themselves, assumed that the natural state of any African American was to be a slave. This assumption of non-citizen status was completely alien to Mexican legal structures, however. Probably the Mexican minister of foreign relations was correct when he wrote that the only reason these immigrants had raised a flag at the North American consulate was because they were “of color.”34

In the end, Ellis was unable to prove that the men had been unfree in the United States, and as a result, the U.S. consul dropped the case. The Mexican authorities in Tampico, meanwhile, vouched for the “laborious and useful” immigrants, issuing them Cartas guaranteed by the Mexican government.35 The governor of the state of Tamaulipas was well aware of the

U.S. Department of State’s preference that African Americans be turned back when they sought

33 Sarah Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves in Mexico, 1833-1862,” in Unshackled Spaces: Fugitives from Slavery and Maroon Communities in the Americas, ed. Barbara Krauthamer (Yale University Press, forthcoming); Rosalie Schwartz, Across the Rio to Freedom: U.S. Negroes in Mexico (El Paso: Southwestern Studies Monograph No. 44, Texas Western Press, 1975). 34 Juan de Villasoro, to Francisco Cordero, secretaría del gobierno del departamento de Tamaulipas, August 5, 1839, f. 221, GD 129, Vol. 16, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN; José A. Quintero to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, August 13, 1839, f. 222 AGN, GD 129 Vol. 16, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN. 35 Quintero to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, November 27, 1839, f. 230, GD 129 Vol. 16, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN.

122 to immigrate to Mexico through official channels; but he allowed the African Americans entry into Tampico regardless. Then, when eight more people of “low color” (baja color) arrived in

Tampico in 1843, they again went unrecognized by the U.S. consul. The Mexican foreign minister agreed to recognize them, however, and even agreed to pay the fee for their Cartas as the African Americans had arrived absolutely penniless. In return the African American immigrants would be expected to act as loyal auxiliaries to the National Guard.36

In 1854, the United States Department of State sought to resolve this issue once and for all and put teeth into the policy devised by Waddy Thompson in 1838 regarding African

American migrants. The new policy would henceforth disenfranchise African Americans as a class in Mexico and all other places, reflecting a general restriction on the rights of free blacks that was occurring simultaneously in the United States. James Gadsden, then serving as

Secretary of State, denied them the rights of North American citizens abroad, which included the right to seek out consular protection through requesting a Carta de Seguridad. As Gadsden wrote, the “Africans who are flocking in numbers from the United States to Mexico” were not recognized as citizens in the United States, and they would not be able to claim citizenship in

Mexico either.37

Mexican officials were clever in discovering several loopholes that allowed African

Americans to stay in Mexico without official consular protection, however. In the town of

Nadadores, Coahuila—far to the west—for instance, the president of the municipality simply did

36 Juan Bocanegra to the governor of the state of Tamaulipas, December 18, 1843, f. 74, GD 129 Vol. 37, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN; José Ignacio Guerrera to Bocanegra, January 25, 1844, f. 75, GD 129 Vol. 37, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN. 37 Circular to consuls of the United States acting under Exequaturs of the Republic of Mexico, Mexico City, June 25, 1854, Roll 2, Microcopy 281, NAW; Thomas Hirgan, consulate of the U.S.A., Matamoros, to William D. Marcy, November 25, 1854, Roll 2, Microcopy 281, NAW.

123 not report the presence of three African Americans who had fled from Texas.38 In nearby San

Buenaventura, Coahuila, meanwhile, the official in charge issued a Carta de Seguridad to a black man named “Alejandro Ardí” who had crossed the frontier with his family and wanted to live in

Mexico where they would be protected “under the ample protection of the law.” There was no

U.S. consul in San Buenaventura, and the deputized Mexican official simply recorded Ardí as a

“natural of Africa,” skirting the issue of his citizenship.39 Possibly, Ardí was one of the 1,000 or so Africans who populated the Brazos Valley, imported to Texas illegally from the Gold Coast.40

Whatever the case, there was of course, no consul for the “country” of Africa in the little pueblo of San Buenaventura or anywhere else in Mexico, so the government vouched for him and his family’s presence.

Yet, it was not principles alone that guided the actions of Mexican officials. They had another equally compelling reason for allowing blacks unfettered passage into Mexico, and one that also had to do with U.S. imperial violence. At least some of these African American immigrants from New Orleans were experienced artillerymen, and by allowing the immigrants to settle in Tampico, the commanders of the plaza assured their loyalty. In fact, these “mechanics” offered valuable experience and served dutifully in the artillery during a North American filibuster attempt on Tampico in 1844.41 Five years later the “mulattos” of New Orleans would again provide valuable military assistance when a revolutionary movement broke out in Tampico.

The commander of the plaza put the “gente de color” from New Orleans under his command, informing them that the revolutionary movement had as its object the annexation of the state of

38 Presidencia municipal de Nadadores to the secretaría de gobierno de Coahuila, Jan 12, 1853, C1 F2 E6 F2, FSXIX AGEC. 39 Filación de Alejandro Tardí, Buenaventura Oct. 4, 11, and 30, 1854, fs. 186-188, GD 129 Vol. 113, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN. 40 Sean M. Kelley, Los Brazos de Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 25-26, 49. 41 Jorge Luís Lara, Prefecture of the North to the Governor of Tamaulipas, January 12, 1844, fs. 77-78, GD 129 Vol. 37, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN.

124 Tamaulipas to the United States. Moved to action by this rumor, the mulattos proved successful in recapturing the plaza from the rebels. They were able to put their mechanical experience to good effect manning the cannons the commander employed to stop the revolutionaries.42

Tampico, like Matamoros, was a town with important commercial ties to New Orleans, however. Thus, the African Americans’ loyalty to the commanders did little to ingratiate them to the citizens of Tampico, who were likely more interested in unfettered trade than the lofty principals pronounced by the central government. The shelter that Centralist officials granted to

African Americans complicated the desire of Liberals and Federalists for greater commercial and political autonomy and distressed merchants allied to New Orleans trading houses. Further, the vecinos of Tampico alleged that the generals in charge could easily bribe the African Americans, as they were completely dependent on their largesse for their safety. Thus, the African

Americans in Tampico also signaled a Centralist presence that was generally unwelcome to the elites and merchants of Tampico—a couple of whom were, at least on one occasion, arrested without habeas corpus for their role in allegedly supporting revolutionaries.43 Dependent upon others to protect their freedom in a country that knew few respites from political upheaval, the

New Orleans refugees’ lives were hardly secure. Most likely, they lived in their small community proud to serve their commanders and put their mechanical offices to good use, but also in constant fear of re-enslavement.

As such, Mexican officials were quite successful in tying the interests of African

American immigrants to centralized Mexican interests. This was also the case along the Rio

Grande/Bravo. Mariano Arista, who cobbled together a plan of defense for the northern frontier

42 Jesús Cardenas to Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, Victoria, February 14, 1849, fs. 132-133, LE 1094 SRE. 43 El Bien Público (Matamoros), June 18 1849. Garay, the commander who arrested them had close ties to Jesús Cardenas, the governor of Tamaulipas, who had been a key player in Antonio Canales Federalist revolt of 1838. The alleged treachery of these military commanders in Tamaulipas earned the unending scorn of North Americans and federalists alike who kept up with the coups and revolts that wracked that state in the 1830s and 1840s.

125 following the disastrous U.S. Intervention in Mexico, early on recognized the key role that

African Americans—as well as other North American dissidents—could play in the insecure

North. When Tampico was threatened by an invasion from abroad, Arista looked for soldiers to come to the aid of the Republic who would be free from “the seduction of our enemies.” The commander of the plaza in Tampico nominated the black immigrants in Tampico, saying they would “decisively defend the country in which they had found liberty and protection under the laws.” He suggested that they be drilled frequently with a Howitzer captured from the North

Americans after they left Tampico.44 He continued, saying of the emigrants from New Orleans,

“although they are a small number, [they] are the natural enemies of the Americans, they have always been prompt to lend their services of the Mexican Republican, and they have never, despite having been invited, mixed in any disturbance of any class.”45 Again, they most likely sought to live quiet lives outside of the spotlight. Every change in power imperiled their situation, and try though they might to weather the vicissitudes of life in an embattled Republic, they could never trust entirely in their security—especially when they were employed by one faction over the other. As we will see in chapter five, Mexican commanders were not above threatening them with their freedom if they did not serve their interests.

Arista, who was then serving as Secretary of War, recognized that the cause of freedom could be tied to his own attempts at nation building. Runaway slaves and other African

Americans in search of freedom could be quite useful to the Republic of Mexico. Their interests were tied to the Central government and, as such, they were loyal citizens in the North of Mexico, an area that was wracked by Federalist conspiracies following the rebellion in Texas. They could lend military assistance to the North in the face of filibusterers from New Orleans and Texas,

44 Jesús Cardenas to Mariano Arista, August 30. 1849, fs. 76-77, Vol. 3072, SEDNA; Arista to General De la Vega, Comandante General de Tamaulipas, Tampico, August 29, 1849. fs. 81-83, Vol. 3072, SEDNA. 45 De la Vega to Arista, Tampico, August 18. 1849, fs. 43-45, Vol. 3072, SEDNA.

126 who were, according to the commander of the plaza in Tampico, their “natural enemies.” Thus, into this vortex of imperialism brought on by filibusters from Texas and New Orleans looking to expand into Mexican territory, African Americans emerged as important players early on. They actively tied their own interests to that of the newly independent Mexican state. Nation-building and the cause of freedom would become increasingly linked in the ensuing decades as officers and officials at the frontier attempted to inculcate in the vecinos under their command a sense of patriotism in the face of continued threats from North America. One of the tenets of this patriotism was a dedication to the principal of liberty for all. African Americans naturally dedicated themselves to this principal. But this lofty principal would have to compete with the more worldly and material concerns of other borderland vecinos.

Runaway Slaves in the Mexican Borderlands

As we have seen above, Matamoros emerged as an early center for black immigration to

Mexico. Fortunately, the North American consul who served in Matamoros during the 1830s and 1840s ignored the injunction against allowing African Americans Cartas de Seguridad.46 As a result of this oversight, the central Mexican government was able to conduct a survey in 1844, which contained an overview of some—although certainly not all—of the blacks in Matamoros.

There were twenty men listed, the earliest of whom had arrived in Matamoros from Texas in

1830. There were five manual laborers, two carpenters, and two merchants. Others were involved in more menial work: there were three cooks and three tailors, two of whom were blacks who had emigrated from San Domingo (Haiti) to Matamoros. There was also a scavenger, a brick mason and three barbers, which was of course an especially common profession for

46 Thomas Hirgan, consulate of the U.S.A., Matamoros, to William D. Marcy, November 25, 1854, Roll 2 Microcopy 281, NAW.

127 African Americans in the 19th century, and one that the runaways Thomas and Esau were reported to practice in Mexico.47 Most of these blacks originally hailed from Texas, although there were also two “Irish” blacks and two Haitians included in the survey. The list only begins to hint at the black community in Matamoros, however, and likely only includes the more prominent blacks. It does not include itinerant African Americans who ranged outside of town gathering stock and doing other odd jobs. Nor does it include women or dependents who, like the black washerwoman Gertrudis Paner or the servant Matilda Haynes, were neither counted individually in censuses nor given individual Cartas de Seguridad.48

Matamoros would continue to be a significant draw for African Americans until at least the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1844, when one of the Texan commissioners’ slaves deserted him in Matamoros to join the free black community, the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph reported on the exact problem that Matamoros represented. It printed the admonition that, although a

Texan might believe his slave “faithful and trustworthy…the fallacy of this is seen in the fact, that the city of Matamoros is overrunning with these trusty now insolent negroes.”49 A free black community did indeed grow up on the outskirts of Matamoros during the antebellum years. In

1853, official reports from Matamoros detailed the number of foreigners living in that city of roughly 11,000, counting among that number fifty “negro” heads of household.50 This number was low, for one reason, because African Americans did not only fit into the racial category of

“negro” in Mexico. While the census for 1853 only counted 201 “negros” total in Matamoros, it

47 Manuel Saucedo to Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores (copia) [Ciudad Victoria], August 23, 1844, fs. 225-226, GD 129 Vol. 29, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN; Clarksville Northern Standard, May 22, 1844; Douglas W. Bristol Jr., Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom, (Johns Hopkins, 2009). 48 Report to Ciudad Victoria, November 14, 1845, C34 E10, Justicia, AHMAT. 49 Houston Tri-Weekly, without date, 1844. 50 Casasús, 71, she cites Noticas Estadística del departamento de Tamaulipas, formado por el Comisionado del Supremo Gobierno, agrimesnor e hidromensor D. Apolinar Márquez, 1852 s.p.i. For population of Matamoros: Scott Cook, Mexican Brick Culture in the Building of Texas, 1800s-1980s (College Station: Texas A & M UP, 1998), 30.

128 also counted 250 mulattos (together comprising about 4.5% of the city’s population). In the entire state of Tamaulipas, meanwhile, which included 180, 514 souls in 1853, some 10,541 or about 5.8% had African ancestry, in most cases probably dating back to the previous century’s mining bonanza outside of San Carlo. Matamoros and the Southern port city of Tampico, had the most marked concentrations of African descendents. The Villas del Norte, i.e. the towns of

Laredo, Mier, and Reynosa, also registered some African descendents.51

One of the African Americans living in Matamoros in the 1840s and 1850s was the young mulatto Ben Kinchelow, who had been born into Texas slavery. Late in life, he remembered his youth in Matamoros and the opportunities afforded by that town for the Works

Project Administration. His mother, Lizaar Moore, went directly to Matamoros with Kinchelow and his brother after her master (and Kinchelow’s father) Sandy Moore emancipated them in

1847. Once there, she joined the black community and worked as a washerwoman, allowing young Kinchelow to grow up with much greater opportunities. Kinchelow remembered the community warmly; his family lived in a log cabin with a grass roof just outside of town, not unlike the ones inhabited by their neighbors with whom they shared the game they killed and the corn dodgers they cooked in a Dutch oven.52

As a youth growing up along the Rio Grande, Kinchelow learned ranch work from the

Mexican day laborers who lived around Matamoros and Fort Brown on the Texas side of the river. The Mexican laborers were reportedly quite friendly to the black community and its growth, even encouraging visiting blacks to escape from their masters while they were in

Matamoros. Kinchelow recalled watching black drivers bring their masters’ cotton to the port of

Brownsville across from Matamoros, and then, “persuaded to go across the border by Meskins

51 Casasús, 71. 52 Work Projects Administration, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Texas Narratives, Part 2, (Washington: 1941), 267-269.

129 [sic]”, they would cross over and “never return to their master,” adding that was “how lots of

Negroes got to be free.”53 Indeed, as we have seen in the last chapter, day laborers in Texas were quite friendly to African Americans in other parts of the state as well.

Matamoros boomed with the cotton trade in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

During these years, slaves often visited Matamoros for their masters to drive cotton and herds, as another ex-slave, James Cape, remembered.54 But Texan masters only tasked the slaves with these jobs at their own peril. Trusting in the seemingly natural servility of their slaves, they took their “trusty negroes” with them to Matamoros. Perhaps they were even arrogant enough to believe that the slaves were “too much attached to…master to quit him under any circumstances.”

The Tri-Weekly Telegraph commented on this short-sightedness, however. The myth of the trusty black hopelessly dedicated to his master could be plainly exposed by “trusty now insolent negroes.” Indeed, just as Lundy had observed the decade before, being in Mexico dramatically altered the way that blacks and whites interacted.55

It was not only working class Mexicans who enjoined the visiting slaves to claim their freedom and stay in Matamoros. When a Texas Commissioner’s slave ran away from his master in Matamoros in 1844, the townsfolk collected $80 from neighborly donations to buy his freedom.56 The runaways already in Matamoros also helped convince them to stay, promising them opportunities and independence. The Texas press put this promise rather pejoratively, saying that the Mexicans promised the runaways that they could earn many “shining dollars, which just now, in this cotton emporium, are plentiful” with which to buy “gew-gaws, jim cracks, and Yankee notions” and impress the “hundreds of loose colored women [who] smile

53 Ibid.; John H. Fuller, “Ben Kinchelow: A Trail Driver on the Chisholm Trail,” in Sara R. Massey, ed., Black Cowboys of Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000), 100-103 54 Fuller, 34-35. 55 Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, date missing. 56 Clarksville Northern Standard, May 22, 1844.

130 lasciviously upon [them].”57 Through the scorn and ridicule heaped upon the free blacks of

Matamoros in this excerpt from the Tri-Weekly Telegraph there shines a small diamond of truth: in Matamoros blacks did have increased opportunities both to consume and to consummate.

Undoubtedly, many of the runaways did indeed live in poverty—as the Texans often maintained—but the opportunities afforded them in Mexico and guaranteed by the officials there still acted as a mighty draw for the enslaved in Texas.

Matamoros remained a town that was particularly friendly to the runaway slaves at least until the Civil War, when a “multitude” of blacks would runaway to the suburbs of Matamoros probably to join earlier migrants in the confusion that surrounded secession. In 1860, the U.S.

Consul would even complain that the vecinos of Matamoros were “deadly hostile to every

American (unless they are Negro or Mulatto)...”58 The friendliness of the majority of the vecinos does not mean, however, that African Americans in Mexico were all immune from the machinations of Texas slaveholders and slave hunters.

The Ambiguity of Liberty

Texans did not find themselves bound to respect Mexico’s difference on the subjects of race and slavery. Nor did they much respect figures of Mexican authority, and they often threw their lots in with Federalist conspirators in the borderlands who they recognized as their best hope for the recovery of runaway slaves. In As we have seen, in 1851, they allied with the

Tejano caudillo José María de Jesús Carvajal who filibustered in Tamaulipas in the fall of that year. This revolution aimed, for the most part, to liberalize trade across the new frontier; but if the revolution had been successful, Cavajal would have allowed Texans unimpeded access to

57 Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, without date, 1844. 58 El Rifle de Tamaulipas, February 23, 1861; Joseph E. Chance, José de María de Jesús Carvajal: The Life and Times of a Mexican Revolutionary (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2006), 89.

131

Ben Kinchelow, May 22, 1937. Part of: Portraits of African American ex-slaves from the U.S. Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers' Project slave narratives collections. Public Domain. http://www.encore- editions.com/ben-kinchelow-ex-slave-hondo accessed 9/15/2011

132 Tamaulipas in order to recapture runaways.

It is not coincidental then, that the figure around whom the opposition to Carvajal and the

Texas filibusterers materialized was the commander of Matamoros, Francisco Avalos, who also just happened to be an Afromestizo.59 Avalos’ National Guard brigade defeated Carvajal’s forces in the fall of 1851 when the caudillo attempted to take the plaza of Matamoros, and he earned the title of “heroic” for the town of Matamoros in the trade.60 The opposition to Avalos did not stop there, however, as he remained a figure who represented Central Mexican strength as well as color-blindness in the Mexican North. In June of the following year, a gang of at least six men visited Matamoros assaulting three houses, forcing open their doors and beating the people they found inside. These were in fact Texan Hispanics (Tejanos) who had taken up refuge on the

Texas side after serving as spies during the North American Intervention. Hence, they could no longer be “considered Mexican citizens,” according to one officer. During the raid they spoke loudly against the authorities of Mexican for imprisoning Texans, made gross insults, and concluded with the remark:

…that if the negro Avalos had the power to execute an American, his fellow citizens had sufficient power to avenge themselves on the Mexicans, and if this resulted in a war between the nations, then it would be an opportunity for the United States to earn the satisfaction of whipping Mexico for the second time.61

Avalos was an object of particular ridicule to Anglophone Texans as well. One commissioner assigned to settle land claims on the Rio Grande/Bravo after the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo, informed Avalos “that if he were caught east of the Colorado, he would

59 Chance, 87-94. 60 Santiago Vidaurri to ayuntamiento of Matamoros, Monterrey, November 5, 1851, C11 E24, AHMAT. 61 Joaquin J. De Castillo, Brownsville, Tx., al Sr. Ministro Plenipotencia de la República Mexicana, Washington, June 22, 1852, f. 95, L38 E3, AEMEUA SRE.

133 readily sell for a prim negro, and be put to work in a cotton field.”62 These attacks on Avalos were symptomatic of the much larger racial structure of feeling that dominated among Texan slaveholders and their allies all the way down to the river. The aspersions on Avalos also illustrate the disrespect that so many Anglo Texans—especially those who immigrated to the area after the Revolution of 1836—felt for Mexico, its laws, its officials, and its principals.

Avalos was indeed a beleaguered figured. Besides the personal insults he routinely endured, he was in charge of what had to be one of the most difficult posts in the entire army. In the poorly regulated lower Rio Grande/Bravo borderlands it was very difficult to carry out

Mexican national edicts, including the abolition of slavery and racial equality. Examples of small infractions against these laws are legion; to name just one, masters often took their slaves with them to Matamoros. Strictly speaking, this should have been illegal as Mexico explicitly outlawed slavery in its entire territory. But the minor infraction of the laws was just one of the ways that the area below the Rio Grande constituted a borderland of slavery. Even more significantly, and despite the best efforts of central officials, the national laws governing freedom and slavery were often violently nullified through the actions of filibusterers and slave hunters.

Matamorenses and other vecinos in the area, who maintained close commercial ties with both Anglophone and Hispanophone Texans on the other side of the river, were careful about embracing Mexico’s anti-slavery too fully. Further, following the North American Intervention, the Mexican army’s presence in the borderlands was much diminished—thus, it became much harder to enforce Mexican laws. By 1853, Avalos was gone and federal troops were seen crossing over to Brownsville and carousing with Texan soldiers and citizens.63 Thus, despite the best efforts of Avalos and other put-upon officials, it was very difficult to carry out national

62 Texas State Gazette, Sept. 5, 1851. 63 Victoria Texan Advocate, March 19, 1853.

134 interests given the porous nature of the border. And into this situation stepped one more commercial pursuit that Texans and vecinos occasionally shared—bounty-hunting African

Americans for aggrieved masters back in Texas. Frontier officials and the majority of vecinos, try as they might to stop the dealing in slaves on Mexican soil, found that they had very few resources to handle the problem. Further, their entreaties for racial justice fell upon deaf ears in

Texas, and the cash-strapped vecindario of the lower Rio Grande/Bravo on occasion took advantage of rewards that slaveholders offered, especially when there was very little risk of punishment.

Indeed, wherever runaways ventured, slave hunters were sure to follow. One August evening in 1850 witnessed a particularly terrifying episode. It began innocently enough when several North Americans staying at a boarding house in Matamoros approached the owner of the house, Luís del Fierro, and invited him to accompany them to a concert. Del Fierro did not even know the foreigners’ names, however, and this seeming act of bonhomie aroused his suspicion.

He declined their invitation and began preparing himself for bed, taking particular care to remain aware of any unusual activity. Meanwhile, just north of the town, a Texan named William

Cheney and an accomplice crossed the river and began heading towards the del Fierro house.

Just a short while later, del Fierro heard a shriek coming from downstairs that belonged to

Matilda Haynes (or perhaps Hanna), an African American woman living with the family. She had hoped to rouse the mistress of the house with her scream. What she had just witnessed terrified her: Cheney and his accomplice had suddenly broken into the house through a back door and fallen upon her. The men were armed and intended to kidnap her, as well as “a small creature of color” who was also present at the scene, likely her child. 64

64 Investigation of the alcalde of Matamoros, August 1850 [copy 1873] fs. 1-3, C3 E13, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE.

135 This scream, which must have been blood-curdling indeed, immediately aroused del

Fierro from his slumber. He quickly descended to the main room with a firearm and confronted the men, demanding they tell him their names and purpose for being in his house. Meanwhile, del Fierro’s wife lit out onto the balcony upstairs and called for the police. Del Fierro’s interrogation of the men netted little information, and just as the police arrived at the scene

Cheney’s accomplice grabbed the black child and ran out the back door. The police gave chase and the Texan slave hunter, losing ground to his pursuers, abandoned the child. He probably did not stop running until he reached safety on the other side of the river.65

Cheney, meanwhile, was taken into custody. He maintained his innocence claiming that he had simply sought Haynes out so that the two might come to an arrangement, testifying that he had hoped to deal with her rationally and calmly, and that he had simply implored her to pay for her rescate (emancipation) or else return to his power after finishing her work in Matamoros.

Cheney felt that she still owed him service as she had more than likely come to Matamoros in

Cheney’s custody and refused to return afterwards, taking advantage of the freedom offered by

Mexican law. None of the other witnesses corroborated Cheney’s version of events, however.

The other witnesses described a terrifying attempt to abduct mother and child at the point of a gun. As a result, Haynes remained free as Cheney languished in a Matamoros calaboose. A month later, when he petitioned the local judge for his release owing to his own “grave internal injuries” and the infirmity of his wife in Texas, he was still imprisoned.66

This attack had many of the hallmarks of a typical Texan slave hunt in Northeast Mexico.

An investigation into the attack revealed that the raid had been meticulously planned and included conspirators on the Mexican side of the border. The invaders could only have known

65 Ibid. 66 Leonardo Espinosa to Sr. Juez del Primer Instancia, Matamoros, September 14, 1850, C35-A E911, Justicia, AHMAT.

136 about the back door of the house through information supplied to them by the North American boarders. Further, the investigating judge learned that Cheney had, in fact, made extensive efforts to recruit people in Matamoros as auxiliaries in his attempt to re-enslave Haynes and the child. Another witness, a foreigner named Enrique Fority (probably Richard Ford) who lived in

Matamoros, testified that Cheney had offered him a hundred pesos to help him, a sum that he had refused. Cheney did not attempt to recruit any cash-strapped vecinos from Matamoros, but other slave hunters would. The most significant feature of this attack was, however, the fact that

Cheney’s attempted abduction landed him in a Matamoros jail. This demonstrated that Mexican officials were not going to tolerate illegal raids into Mexico, especially those raids aimed at recovering runaway slaves.

As a result, runaways could generally rely on government officials to protect them. In fact, Mexican officials even punished their own citizens if they found them guilty of assisting

Texan slave hunters. In another attack that occurred near Matamoros in 1859, Luís Cabos and his brother Timoteo lent assistance to Texan slave hunters and would be punished for doing so. They had surprised the African American Anastacio Aguado (or Elua) while he labored at his brother- in-law Juan Cos’ ranch. They passed him over the river in a ferry owned and operated by their brother, and then, once on the other side, they delivered Aguado to two North Americans. The

Texans immediately stripped off Agaudo’s clothing, tied him to a stake they had pounded into the ground for the purpose, and proceeded to whip him all the while accusing him of rustling.

They then carried him off to Brownsville.67

The following day, Aguado’s brother-in-law Juan Cos reported the kidnapping to the regional juzgado (magistrate). An investigation followed, and the Mexican consulate in

67 Justo Treviño, Investigation by juzgado del Primer Instancia del Distrito del Norte de Tamaulipas, January 1859 [1873], fs. 3-5, C3 E13, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE.

137 Brownsville discovered that Francisco Camargo (probably Frank Cameron in fact) had recently offered a reward to any Mexican who would help him recover runaway slaves. The Cabos brothers had decided to capitalize on this proposition, kidnapping Aguado, who may not have even been a runaway slave. The Mexican Consul in Brownsville, meanwhile, once made aware of this indiscretion on the part of the Cabos family, discovered Aguado in a Cameron County jail. The consul, after some wrangling, managed to return him to his wife and brother-in-law at the nearby Mexican ranch. Upon returning to Mexico, Aguado himself testified before the regional magistrate and exculpated himself from the charges of cattle rustling (a charge which was, in fact, a much greater offense than running away from a master and subject to lynch law on the Texas side). He also condemned the Cabos brothers. In the end, the judge found Luis Cabos and Timoteo Cabos guilty of kidnapping and condemned them to four-year sentences. Their accomplice, Manuel Hernandez, could not be found, having undoubtedly escaped to the Texas side.68

Thus, in Mexico African Americans could accuse others of wrong-doing and expect, at least sometimes, a just punishment. These accorded rights contrasted sharply with the rights allotted to blacks on the other side of the border where they were non-citizens. In Texas, in fact, the legislature had outlawed the very presence of free blacks in the entire state of Texas in 1840 in an attempt to explicitly conflate together the categories of servility, blackness, and non- citizenship.69 North Americans of all sorts were involved in trying to push this racial agenda into

Mexico. Even regular soldiers serving in the newly-constructed forts along the U.S. side of the border speculated in slaves on occasion. In 1854, a report circulated as far away as New England that soldiers from Fort Brown had aided in the recovery of several runaways in Brownsville who

68 Ibid. 69 Harold Schoen, “The Free Negro in the Republic of Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 41:1 (July, 1937), 106-107.

138 were en route to Matamoros. This caused great outrage in the Northern United States when leading anti-slavery advocates learned of it.70 Further west, as we shall see in chapter five, soldiers actually crossed into Mexico in search of slaves. In a very real sense, North Americans were actively spreading the rights of slaveholders into the borderlands through a violence that was only considered licit on one side of the border. Try though they might to contest it, the failure of Mexican officials to do so revealed their weakness in the face of imperial aggression.

It was the bounties that slaveholders offered for runaways—which actually increased once the slave reached Mexico—that caused so many Texans to violate international law and resulted in so many vecinos going against the laws of their own country to help them. In 1859, an

African American woman named “Merlley” [sic] crossed over from Edinburg in Texas and visited the alcalde of Reynosa, Tamaulipas. She informed him that, a short time before, an entire family of African Americans named Henderson had been abducted from near Reynosa and returned to their old master. This family—a black man, his wife Anna and four children—had come to Mexico “to liberate themselves” from slavery and found employment and shelter at the ranch of Juan Longoria Tijerina. Their freedom would not last long, however. A suspicious group of North Americans had recently appeared in northern Tamaulipas, allegedly seeking out cattle and horses for Texas buyers, but who were in fact reconnoitering the area for runaway slaves. After learning the whereabouts of the Hendersons from an acquaintance of the family named Manuel Muñoz, the Texans waited one night until after dark and then smuggled the black family across the river. They paid Muñoz for his guidance, and likely remunerated the vecino

Salvador Cavazos as well, who owned the boat that the men used to cross the family across the

70 Friend’s Intelligencer Vol. X (Philadelphia: 108 Wm. M. Moor, 1854), 108.

139 river. At least one of the Henderson girls could be found in domestic service in Brownsville the following month and the consul in that town was powerless to do anything for the family.71

Thus, however much the officials wanted to protect the runaways, they were still subject to the whims of slave hunters who were perfectly willing to nullify the laws of Mexico. As long as they were willing to violently transform persons on the Mexican side into profit—violating

Mexican sovereignty over its side of the frontier in trade—officials on the Mexican side were helpless if they could not muster the force to respond. Sometimes Texans flagrantly demonstrated that force majeure could overcome any law of God or man, abducting African

Americans granted official asylum in Mexico. Three runaway slaves, for instance, who were well aware that just on the other side of the new border they could be free, crossed the Rio Grande to

Mexico in 1850. Once there, they went to the alcalde of Nuevo Laredo to seek out the refuge—or

“amparo”—that Mexico offered to fugitives. The alcalde granted them the protection they requested, but soon after he had granted them this freedom several “North Americans” appeared before the alcalde of the town to claim that the slaves were their property. The alcalde followed the letter of the Mexican law and refused to turn the black men over to them, citing the official line, that slaves were free once they set foot on Mexican territory. He could not, however, stop the Texans from crossing over, “scorning Mexican laws,” and kidnapping one of the runaway slaves back.72 Mexican judges could punish their won citizens who acted as accomplices, but they had no jurisdiction over Texan pirates.

A similar episode occurred about a year later at Mier, Tamaulipas. A free African

American named Melchor Valenzuela lived and worked in Mier, employed by a shipbuilder

71 Investigation by Primer Alcalde de Reynosa, March 8, 1853 [Copy 1873], fs. 5-6, C3 E13, Fondo Comision Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE. 72 Alcalde Laredo to Governor of Tamaulipas, January 17, 1850 [Copy 1873], f. 239, LE 1595 SRE. ; Governor of Tamaulipas to Alcalde Laredo, March 2, 1850 [copies 1873].f. 239, LE 1595 SRE.

140 named Bernardo Baker. In many ways, Valenzuela lived a typical life for an African American in the borderlands, scraping to get by in both the formal and informal economy. Valenzuela was well-known as a fiddler who performed at the fandangos thrown by merchants and officers in the borderlands. He also may have dabbled in cattle rustling and even stolen a Mexican barge on one occasion, putting it up for sale on the Texas side in Roma. Wanted for crimes in Texas,

Valenzuela would ultimately lose his freedom to the whims of slave hunters. One night, while performing at a fandango thrown by his employer, two Texans—a Captain Jack and a man known as “Dickson” (Dixon)—approached him, shoved a gun into his chest, and crossed him over to the Texas side.

The raiders justified the kidnapping by saying that Valenzuela’s employer Baker had owed a debt to a merchant in Roma. Thus, even once he found freedom in Mexico, an African

American could still be transformed at the point of a gun into chattel. No black was secure from this illegitimate use of violence, and even in Mexico African Americans could not completely escape the violent reduction of blackness to servility. Texas had long ago outlawed the very presence of free blacks within the state, and through violent confrontations with African

Americans in Mexico, Texans were looking to expand their racial regime beyond their borders.

When the kidnappers secured Valenzuela as payment on a debt they stripped him of his personhood and transformed him into a commodity, flaunting the laws of Mexico, overpowering him and reducing him to slavery with no greater justification than their own might. They removed him from his social milieu, tore him away from his Mexican wife, and left him with an unfulfilled work contract in Mier. Undoubtedly the Texans sold him into slavery to repay the

Roma merchant’s debt. The “social death” of slavery found Valenzuela even once he had achieved freedom. The social alienation and violence that defined North American slavery had

141 reached Valenzuela—even after he had reached relative safety on the other side of the river and found refuge under the supposedly ample protection of Mexican law.

Baker tried to recover Valenzuela, even consulting a lawyer in Starr County, but he had no success. The Jefe Político of Mier had the final word on the episode: These Texan “pirates” had not only abducted an African American, but also “violate[d] Mexican territory” and cast indignity upon her “national honor”—yet again.73 Juridical responses could not ensure the freedom of African Americans on the Mexican side of the border. Official channels were dominated by the whims of the markedly more powerful United States. Hence, if they were serious about protecting the rights of runaway African Americans, Mexicans would have to meet

Texan pirates on their own terms.

Further down the river, in the borderlands around Eagle Pass and Guerrero, Mexican officials would do just this. It is to this story that we will turn in chapter five.

Conclusion

Thus, in the dusty border towns that dotted the frontier between Mexico and Texas, the defense of African Americans had taken on a nationalist cast. But the ambiguity of freedom in the borderlands signaled the fact that Mexicans did not enjoy a monopoly on violence in their own territory. This fact greatly troubled their pretended sovereignty over the northeastern frontier. Further, they had much trouble in enlisting some vecinos in the cause when the rewards that Texans offered for the return of runaway slaves were so tempting. Probably the great majority of the vecinos in “heroic” Matamoros—especially the poorer ones74—were sympathetic

73 Investigation of alcalde of Mier, July 7, 1851 [copy 1873], fs. 8-10, C3 E13, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE. 74 So claimed the Clarksville Northern Standard, May 22, 1844.

142 to the plight of African Americans and wary of Texans, but they were powerless to protect them against extralegal and transnational violence.

The lower Rio Grande borderlands contained a significant African American population in the years before the Civil War, but their existence there was a precarious one. Their fortunes rose and fell with the power and sovereignty that Mexican officials wielded over the frontier.

During the years following the Texan secession, the army presence in Matamoros was pronounced and African Americans there enjoyed relative security, a fact that the Mier prisoners unhappily recognized. But when the Federal Army presence diminished after the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo, African Americans became increasingly subject to the whims of merchants, ranchers, and even ferrymen on the Mexican side of the border who believed that their fortunes were more closely tied to the Anglophone and Hispanophone Texans on the other side of the river then their own officials. They also wanted to cash in on the rewards they offered. More than likely there was also a class component in this back and forth struggle over freedom in the borderlands; day laborers and federal troops in particular seemed to sympathize with runaway slaves. But the fact that so many slave raiders could count on some allies on the Mexican side meant that they could violently recapture runaway slaves or sell free African Americans into slavery—even after they had found shelter in Mexico.

Mexican officials espoused a credo of liberty for all, but they were powerless to enforce it unilaterally in the borderlands given the lopsided nature of power along the border. They depended upon Texas in enforcing the border, and they had starkly different interests, and this was a particular conundrum given the nature of international borders—i.e., no one single power can ever act alone in enforcing national law along boundaries. As Rachel St. John has so clearly

143 illustrated in another context along the U.S.-Mexico border, there is no such thing as unilateral action along boundaries.75

Hence, even though the equation of Mexican centralized power and anti-slavery—indeed, anti-racism—was set soon after the Texans rebelled against the rise of Centralism in the 1830s it was ineffective in guaranteeing the rights of African Americans in Mexico. Texans quickly learned that the only way they could deal with Mexico on this issue of runaway slaves was through irregular means and extralegal violence. As a result, they continually employed violence to try and bend the borderlands to their will, transforming themselves into pirates in the trade.

But Mexican federal forces would meet force with force as often as they could. And after the

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as we shall see in chapter five, it was the western borderlands, where Coahuila and Texas butted up against each other, that this war between slaveholders and federal forces reached its climax.

75 Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand, A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton University Press, 2011. Kindle e-book), location 291.

144 Chapter 4

“Semi-Civilizados”: Immigrant Tribes in the Texas-Coahuila Borderlands

As we have already seen in the previous chapter, there were at least a few African

Americans who went through official channels to establish themselves in Mexico. The black mechanics who went to Tampico from New Orleans, for example, differed from the rest of the refugees from slavery in that they worked out a reciprocal arrangement with Mexican officials.

Experienced as artillerymen, they would offer their expertise in exchange for liberty. But African

Americans were not the only refugees from the United States seeking the “ample protection” of

Mexican law and offering their services in exchange. Indeed, Mexico offered an alternative to other groups opposed to North America’s expansive white Republicanism.

This chapter examines a bold experiment embarked upon by the military commanders who represented the Mexican state at the northern frontier to invite disenfranchised Indians from the United States to settle in Coahuila. Inundated with refugee and runaway Natives who left the

Republic of Texas shortly after its inception, the commanders of the frontier sought to put this flood of migrants to advantage. For once, they would exert some sort of control over the human tide moving across the borderlands into Mexico. In essence, the commanders renewed the Old

Spanish friars’ mission in the North. They would civilize and catechize the newcomers, make them into Hispanicized peasants and turn them loose against the remaining “bárbaros” who continued to lay waste to the Mexican North. They could also halt U.S. filibusterers. In the meantime, the Indians would hopefully become ideal vecinos or “Buenos Mexicanos” in the process, settling in an area that desperately needed population and pacification.

145 In some ways the project achieved its goals. The Civilized Tribesmen—Cherokees,

Kickapoos, Seminoles, Caddoes and even some Tonkawas and Lipan Apaches—who immigrated to Coahuila became great killers of Comanches. And the Indianized African Americans in

Coahuila (known as Mascogos) who travelled alongside them took up agriculture with a relish.

But the poverty of the frontier and the failure of the government to deliver the promised resources conspired together to doom the project.

Further, due to lack of resources, the project of “Tribus Emigradas” (Immigrant Tribes) had the ironic effect of actually increasing social strife on the frontier. Nearby vecinos, who were likewise impoverished and jealous of the attention paid to the Immigrant Tribes, failed to get along with their new neighbors. Nor could the vecinos distinguish the so-called Civilized Tribes who were formally invited to settle in Mexico from the plains raiders with whom they had been locked in a death struggle for generations. And once the Kickapoos and Seminoles resorted to raiding and threatening violence in order to procure necessary sustenance and redistribute the scarce resource held by vecinos, they became an especially unwelcome presence. Finally, the self-segregation that the Immigrant Tribes chose to practice isolated them from their neighbors and did little to bring them into the fabric of frontier life. By the end of the 1850s, tired of poverty in Mexico, most of the tribesmen and women returned to the United States with the notable exception of the Mascogos (who will be discussed in greater depth in the following chapter.)

The project of the Immigrant Tribes is well known to U.S. historians, although the cause of its failure has received relatively little attention. Kenneth Wiggins Porter is the most notable historian of these groups. He lovingly wrote on Coacoochee’s (Wild Cat’s) Seminoles giving great attention to detail and leaving no oral or written source unexamined. Kevin Mulroy and

146 Paulina del Moral, meanwhile, have written extensively on the Mascogos and their struggles for freedom. Still others have written on the Mexican Kickapoos and their culture in the Mexican

North.1 These works, for the most part, are social histories of the discreet individual groups.

They pay little attention to their role as border-crossers. For our purposes here, these groups will be considered collectively as another example of “migrants” crossing the border. They are an example of people electing to exit from the United States’ nation-building project and enter the

Mexican Republic in search of an alternative to options on the U.S. side of the border.

Considered in this light, the Indian refugees made up one part of a much larger human wave of migrants both troubling and lending meaning to the post-1848 boundary by taking advantage of the protection of Mexican laws. As such, their history is comparable to other groups who were pushing the limits of liberty at the international border in the 19th century.

This study explores the reasons why the Immigrant Tribes did not, in the end, become

“Buenos Mexicanos” as the frontier commanders so hoped they would. I argue that, overall, the project of the Immigrant Tribes was a failure—the latest in a series of failures to pacify the frontier that stretched across two centuries—since it did not achieve its goals of pacifying and populating the Mexican countryside on the right bank of the Rio Grande/Bravo. The official apathy on the part of Mexican bureaucrats as well as the overwhelming poverty of resources on

1 The literature on the “Immigrant Tribes” in Mexico for the most part considers each group individually. On the Seminoles and Black Seminoles (Mascogos) See Thomas A. Britten, A Brief History of the Seminoles-Negro Indians Scouts (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 41-86; Daniel Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1991 [1973]), 138-180; Kenneth W. Porter “The Seminole in Mexico, 1850-1861” Hispanic American Historical Review, 31:1 (February, 1951): 1-36 and The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), 137-175; Paulina del Moral Gonzalez, “De Florida a Coahuila: la historia de los Mascogos y Seminole Blacks” in Carlos Manuel Valdés, Rodolfo Gutierrez F. y Adolfo Falcón Garza, eds., Lectura de Coahuila (Saltillo, Coahuila: Secretaría de Educación Pública de Coahuila, 1999), 120-132 and Tribus Olvidados de Coahuila (Saltillo: Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y Artes de Coahuila, 1999); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 61-107. On the Kickapoos: Felipe A. Latorre and Dolores L. Latorre, The Mexican Kickapoo Indians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976); A. M. Gibson, The Kickapoos: Lords of the Middle Border (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 179-193. Considered together as “Indios semicivilizados”: Martha Rodríguez, La Guerra Entre Bárbaros y Civilizados: El Exterminio del Nómada en Coahuila, 1840-1880, 197-214.

147 the Mexican frontier were to blame for this failure. As a result of indifference and dearth, the

Mexican state could neither transform the ethnic identities of the Immigrant Tribes nor suppress the routes they had continued to mobilize back and forth across the border. In the end, the frontier was further destabilized by efforts of the Mexican government to invite these Indians, settle them, and employ them to best advantage.

The Immigrant Tribes

The term “Immigrant Tribes” (Tribus Emigradas) as applied by Mexican bureaucrats to

North American Indians dates to the arrival of several disparate Indian bands from the United

States to Mexican Texas during the 1820s. They were Native Americans who had spilled over from the Southeastern United States’ expansive plantation belt into what was then Mexican territory, south of the Red River. The Mexican bureaucrats at the Texas frontier noticed their entry into that insecure corner of the brand new Republic immediately and it fired their imagination. Drawing upon the ideas of their Bourbon predecessors, they envisaged these

Indians settling at the Texan frontier and forming a buffer against Anglo Americans to the north and east and Comanches to the west. Accordingly, the administrators of the Northern frontier petitioned energetically for their admittance into the Republic.2

Mexican Texas would not offer the Indians shelter from aggressive Anglo expansionists for long, however. Once Texas seceded in 1836, many of the Immigrant Tribesmen and women in the new Republic found themselves beached in a hostile and foreign land newly populated with the very same Anglo Southeasterners who had pushed them out in the previous decade.

2 Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2005), 200; del Moral, Las Tribus Olvidadas de Coahuila, 31; For history of the Southeast that focuses on expansionism see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005), 20-23; David W. Meining, The Shaping of America; A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Volume 2 Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale, 1993)

148 Consequently, many Indians began to gravitate towards Mexican territory south of the Nueces since they had already established diplomatic relations with Mexico during the previous decade.

Mobile Indians soon pioneered new routes into Coahuila that they would continue to follow into the Civil War era and beyond. The Immigrant Tribes were not like other border crossers, however. They differed from unauthorized mobile peoples like runaway slaves and sirvientes prófugos in that they often went through the proper bureaucratic channels to establish themselves legally in Mexico. They also differed considerably in culture from Indians further to the west like the Comanches, Mescaleros, and some Lipan bands who crossed the borderlands into Mexico with impunity and frequency to raid and trade. Unlike these “bárbaros” with whom the norteños had such tremendous difficulties, the Immigrant Tribes were “semi-civilizados.”3 For the most part, they were at least partly sedentary and they were familiar with the functions of national governments and their deputies.

Individual bands of “semi-civilized” Indians began to arrive south of the Rio

Grande/Bravo almost immediately after Texan secession, and their movement caused considerable concern on the part of the new Texan Republic. A group of Cherokees and

Kickapoos who the War Chief Bowles (or Duwal’li) had confederated under his command were among the first to blaze routes into Mexico following the Mexican defeat at San Jacinto. The

Cherokees in Mexican Texas had received a land grant near Nagadoches in 1824 from the central government, but after Texan secession they saw their fortunes fade quickly.4 Consequently, they sought to renew their ties with Mexico, and in 1836 fifteen of Chief Bowles’ warriors visited

Matamoros to seek out General Uriah to this end. They offered to serve in a military capacity

3 For just one example of this term see Santiago Vidaurri to Ignacio Galindo, Minister of War, Dec. 5, 1855 [copy 1873], f. 100, LE 1596 SRE; For the genealogy of the term bárbaro David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale, 2006). 4 Anderson, 119-120

149 against the Texans, with whom the Mexican army still considered itself at war, and even to open up a second front against them along the Sabine.5

The Texans soon learned of their negotiations, and it only added to their resentment of the Cherokees since they knew that Chief Bowles had met with representatives of Santa Anna even earlier.6 Just as Texans had feared that the Mexican army might incite slaves to rebel during the secession from Mexico, Texans feared a fifth column comprised of vengeful Indians fighting alongside the Mexican army. These fears were soon realized in 1837, when a group of

Cherokees helped the Mexican army recover some escaped Texan prisoners found along the

Nueces River, the disputed southern boundary of the Texan Republic.7 Their military assistance to the Mexican cause did not ultimately succeed in reversing the tide of independence, however.

The Republic of Texas forcibly ejected the entire Cherokee nation after claiming victory against them in the battle at the Neches River in 1839.8 Some refugees from this battle headed towards

Cross Timbers in the northwest of Texas; others went to Mexico.

Chief Bowles died at the hands of the Texans in this battle, but his followers soldiered on, eventually making it to Mexico and entering into a formal agreement with the government to settle south of the Rio Grande/Bravo. Like other groups that would immigrate to Mexico, they were an ethnically diverse group brought together by similar goals, geographical proximity, and a shared culture of mobility. Bowles’ band included Cherokees, about eighty Southern Kickapoo, and most likely a number of runaway slaves from Texas.9 These men and women all had in

5 D. H. Smith to John Forsyth, July 1, 1836, Microcopy 281, Consuls in Matamoros, NAW. 6 Anderson, 164-168. 7 D. H. Smith to John Forsyth, January 6, 1837, Microcopy 281, Consuls in Matamoros, NAW; for Cherokee grants in Texas see Anderson, 26-27. 8 Anderson, 177-179; John H. Reagan, “The Expulsion of the Cherokees from East Texas”, Texas Historical Quarterly, I (July, 1897): 38-46. 9 Del Moral, Las Tribus Olvidadas de Coahuila, 31-32; Ujiya found a colony of maroons at San Cranto, discussed below, see the Cherokee Advocate, June 26, 1845 reprinted in Chronicles of Oklahoma, 12: 1 (1934): 36-41 (http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v012/v012p025.html) accessed September 11, 2010.

150 common their opposition to the informal empire of Anglo-American settlers in the Texas.

Mexican officers south of the Nueces River, who were likewise wary of further Anglo American expansion at the expense of Mexican territory, accepted the refugees as a geopolitical precaution.

Their immigration to Mexican territory south of the Grande/Bravo seemed natural; the

Cherokees had, after all, been Mexican citizens before the Texan rebellion. And with the declining fortunes of the frontier in mind, Mariano Arista—who served as the commander of

Matamoros during the 1830s—spoke highly of them. He held that they had proven themselves the most loyal “Mexicans” in Texas, and he gladly welcomed them to the Republic.10

They would prove their loyalty in combat with the refractory Texans, with whom the

Mexican frontier commanders kept up an ongoing war until the North Americans intervened in

1845. Thus, when the late Bowles’ band arrived, they received rations, munitions, and clothing in exchange for a promise to serve in the military and they immediately threw themselves back into the fray with Texas. They mustered into service, relocated to a spot near Morelos, Coahuila, and became the most recent participants in a frontier ritual that dated back at least a century where the state exchanged resources for service.11 The Indian band was soon sent out against a party of Texans and their Mexican servants who Mexican agents had discovered in the no-man’s land of the Nueces Strip travelling on the road that ran from San Antonio to Mier. The Indians killed all of the white men but spared the lives of their servants, merely imprisoning them and returning them to Matamoros. This grizzly warning against Anglo expansion into the borderlands could not have been clearer.12 Cut loose from their homelands by the informal empire of Anglo-

10 Mariano Arista to the Secretary of War, January 24, 1840, fs. 225-228, Vol. 1544 SEDNA; “Community of Interest” is James Brook’s term: Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 75. 11 Del Moral, Las Tribus Olvidadas, 32. 12 D. H. Smith to John Forsyth, January 1, 1840, Microcopy 281, Consuls in Matamoros, NAW.

151 settlers in Texas, these confederated Indians had become the shock troops resisting its further expansion.

Other Indians followed Bowles’ group, and they soon began to tax the scarce resources available to and being offered by the frontier commanders in Mexico. In that same year, 1839, another group of Indians traveling under the guidance of Chief Bowles’ son, John, mobilized a route to Mexico from Cross Timbers in North Central Texas. John Bowles died along the route, but the survivors carried on, crossing over into the military department of Rio Grande in

Coahuila on February 7, 1840. There they met with the Mexican commander of the frontier, Juan

José Galán. They informed him that they had come to see the lands they would inhabit. They were in a miserable state after their long journey and in dire need of the commanders’ assistance.

Many were shabbily clothed and starving as a result of recent attacks by Texans. They were also hungry because they had not possessed sufficient gunpowder to hunt during their journey across the sterile plains of the Nueces Strip to Mexico. Galán fed the weary travelers, doled out scarce resources, and reported that afterwards many of them fainted and remained sick for days, causing

“much compassion in those who saw them in such misery.” Galán even reached into his cash reserves to assist the weary Indians, handing over to them a portion of the rents he had collected from the people of San Fernando de Rosas.13

Hence, the Mexican state immediately began to give out communal resources to ease the establishment of the Indians. The Cherokees had suffered untold misery in their journey, so that they could “live under the protection [amparo] of the Mexican government,” said Galán, and he hoped that the jefe of the frontier, Arista, would speedily send along the implements the immigrants needed to plant their corn. They were already a drain on state coffers, but Arista was certain that the investment was worth it. He hoped that the “Buenos Indios”—as he called them

13 Arista to Minister of War, February 20, 1840, fs. 229-230, Vol. 1544 SEDNA.

152 in an effort to distinguish them from the bárbaros Comanches and Apaches—would establish themselves alongside the Rio Grande/Bravo and form a barrier against Texans and the “ferocious incursions” of raiding Indians from the west. He asked for two thousand pesos from the federal government to expedite this process and speed along their establishment so that they could stem the flow of blood and treasure northward into Texas and Comanchería.14

State resources would also go towards a policy of ethnogenesis aimed at reducing the

Immigrant Tribes to Hispanic Catholic peasants. Indeed, the Cherokees, Caddoes, and Kickapoos who arrived in 1839 and 1840 may not have been the most ideal settlers. They were not Catholic, they were really only semi-sedentary, and they did not speak Spanish. Nevertheless, Arista tirelessly advocated for them, believing that their redución would not cost too much, pointing to the “semi-civilization” they had already achieved in an effort to justify defraying the cost of their immigration. He starkly contrasted them with the “bárbaros” whom the norteños had battled for the better part of a century, and even went so far as to claim that the Immigrant Tribesmen were

“all white men and brothers [who] work the land.” The mere fact that they planted corn set them apart from the non-“white” “bárbaros” (even if, in fact, the Lipan Apaches were semi-sedentary as well.) In the mind of the Mexican officers, “whiteness” was not a reference to these Indians’ phenotype alone, although centuries of intermixture with Europeans did probably make them lighter than the Comanches and Apaches. In the Mexican North, vecinos and officers conflated civilization and whiteness, evincing a sort of “soft racism,” to borrow historian Alexander

Saxton’s term to describe the belief in the mutability of people regardless of race. Hence, like the friars who had come two hundred years before them, the commanders believed that the Indians

14 Ibid.

153 had the potential to transform themselves into civilizados.15 Further, the Indian-ness of the

Comanches and Lipans threw into sharp relief the putative “whiteness” of the Cherokees. The plains raider emerged as the ideal “other,” the foil against which Mexicans could measure the

“whiteness” of the Immigrant Tribes. Hence, at least in Arista’s mind, the Cherokees were already well along their way towards civilization on Hispanic terms.

Adding to their desirable “racial” qualities were the martial virtues the Immigrant Tribes embodied. Their willingness to labor as warriors was an important resource in the Mexican

North, and something very dear in the war-ravaged frontier between Coahuila and Comanchería.

Although it may seem ironic to us in the 21st century, norteños had long considered the willingness to shed Indian blood a hallmark of civilization and whiteness. Manly violence in the

North turned the tide of the borderlands against “savages” making the territory safe for God- fearing ranchers, peons, and peasants. Hence organized warfare against others was not only a step on the stage to civilization; it was an important aspect of frontier civilization itself. The principal men of the frontier from Chihuahua eastward had earned their reputations doling out pain and violence to plains raiders. Accordingly, when Arista quipped that “The bárbaros and

Texans have infinite fear of the Immigrant Tribes” he was in fact singling them out for praise and marking their progress towards whiteness and civilization on frontier terms.16

Despite Arista’s praise, the Cherokee colony never amounted to very much and they quickly lost access to whatever scarce supplies might have sped along their settlement. They

15Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (Verso, 1990): 260-262; Herbert E. Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies,” The American Historical Review 23:1 (Oct., 1917): 41-80. 16 Saxton, 226-227; For manly violence see Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution, an Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); For an American take on how the cult of violence has survived in the modern day myth of the gunfighter see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

154 could not attract the promised number of their kinsmen to the colony and therefore failed to gain a permanent land grant because of this. When the Cherokee Ujiya visited the Mexican Cherokees in 1842, the colony remained impoverished and underdeveloped. He even had to borrow a horse from the neighboring Mexican military colony just to make the trip back to Texas. The

Cherokees and the affiliated tribes had failed to bring more settlers and live up to their side of the agreement. As such, they were not officially entitled to the resources, land, and assistance of the frontier officials. They would, however, remain a presence in northern Mexico alongside the

Kickapoos until the early 20th century, even if not a very significant one. 17

Cherokees were not the only North American Indians sounding out possibilities in

Mexico, however. The Caddoes, who were the oldest inhabitants of eastern Texas, had also endured increasing tension with the Texans after having sided with Mexico during the Texan secession.18 Thus, in the late spring of 1841, a group of three hundred and thirty Caddoes— including one hundred and thirty warriors—chiefly from the Nadaco and “Jamel” contingent of the Hasani people, set out for Coahuila. They travelled to Saltillo to propose joining a company of Mexican troops then preparing for a counter-attack against Texas.19 Whether they actually comprised a part of Adrián Woll’s forces, which attacked San Antonio in 1842, is difficult to know. Nevertheless, large numbers of dissidents from the tribe could be found wandering the borderlands during these same years. In 1842, as many as 1,200 Caddoes of the Amai and

Nadaco factions were camped alongside the confluence of the Sabinas and Canete Rivers in

Coahuila. Their settlement was likely part of a much larger plan proposed by the “Mascogue”

17 Ujiya, 36-41. Diana Everett, The Texas Cherokees: A People Between Two Fires, 1890-1840 (Norman: University Oklahoma Press, 1990), 114-116; William Pulte and Kathy Altom, “The Mexican Cherokees and the Kickapoos of Nacimiento, Mexico: A Previously Unreported Relationship” Journal of Cherokee Studies 9:1 (Spring, 1984): 35-37. 18 Francisco Pizarro Martinez, Mexican Consul in New Orleans, to foreign minister in Washington, February 22, 1836, f. 52, L26 E12, AEMEUA SRE. 19 Gaceta del Gobierno de Tamaulipas, June 26, 1841 (Rafael de la Fuente to governor of department Monclova, May 5, 1841) [In Archivo Histórico Matamoros, Hemeroteca Caja 1].

155 Espogne Imaya (either a Creek or Afro mixed blood) to negotiate the transfer of the entire population of Natives in Indian Territory alongside the Caddoes—over 120,000 souls in all—to

Mexico. This migration never occurred, of course, and the Caddoes were likely left waiting as negotiations stalled. Their negotiations with the Mexican government never bore fruit, and they would eventually return to the other side of the Grande/Bravo after being assigned a reservation on the Brazos when the U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845.20

After the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexico War in 1848, the project of the Immigrant Tribes at last met with some success when it became a part of the more general militarization of the frontier engineered by Mariano Arista after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Now serving as

Secretary of War, Arista considered it essential to hold the frontier at the Rio Grande/Bravo.

Accordingly, he installed military colonies along the new border with the United States in a belated effort to renew the old Bourbon institution of presidios. In July of 1848, he decreed military colonies in the deserted presidios of Guerrero, San Vicente and Monclova Viejo that would serve as bulwarks against the hostile Indians who continued to sweep into Coahuila near the long-deserted pueblo of Resurección. Arista also imagined that the military colonies would help the United States comply with Article 11 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which stipulated that the United States was responsible for keeping “North American” Indians—i.e.

Comanches and Apaches—out of Mexico. By all accounts, these new military colonies were extremely modest affairs. They were severely understaffed, manned only by a handful of impoverished presidial soldiers armed with flintlock muskets, and supplemented by a smattering

20 “Tratado de Paz Entre Espopogne Imaya, Jefe de la Tribu Mascogue Dalgi, y El Gobierno Mexicano Para Establecerse en el Ro Sabinas, 1843,” December 22, 1843, in Martha Rodriguez, Historias de Resistencia y Exterminio: Los Indios de Coahuila Durante el Siglo XIX (Saltillo: Centro e Investigaciones y Estudios, 1995), 159- 161.

156 of civilian colonists. (The soldiers would desert all three colonies by the end of the 1850s.)21 The

Immigrant Tribes, who were much more mobile than the military colonists and able to contend with horseback raiders, would be the most effective part of the planned militarization of the frontier.22

The first group of Indians invited to settle along the Mexican side of the new border arrived in June of 1850 headed up by the Seminole pan-Indianist Coacoochee (known as Wild

Cat to the Americans and Gato del Monte to the Mexicans). The migration he headed was the end result of an impressive pan-Indian project he had engineered during the previous decade.

Travelling widely through the Llano Estacado and the Creek Indian Territory in the late 1840s,

Coacoochee had practiced an adroit diplomacy of the plains, gathering a large number of potential immigrants. His plans were well known in Indian Territory, and may have even been a power play to take over leadership of the Seminole nation. In the end, the groups that

Coacoochee brought with him to Mexico were ethnically diverse, but they all shared an opposition to Creek hegemony in Indian Territory as well as a distrust of Anglo Americans and their government. Together these diverse tribes comprised a similar “community of interest” to the disaffected Indians who had migrated to Mexico with Chief Bowles ten years earlier.23

Not surprisingly, as the immigrants waited around the new military colonies at Guerrero and Monclova Viejo, they began to eat their way through the commanders’ supplies. The first contingent of Indian colonists who had arrived at Piedras Negras in July of 1850 numbered over seven hundred and they were in a pitiful shape due to the hardships of the month-long journey to

21 Rodríguez, Historias, 123; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York: Dix, Edwards, and Co., 1857), 340-341. 22 I owe this insight to a conversation with Ana Nieto at Colegio de la Frontera Norte who is currently at work on a dissertation that deals primarily with the military colonies in the North during the 1850s. 23 Porter, “The Seminole in Mexico, 1850-1861,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 35; Brooks, 79.

157 the frontier.24 Not only their raggedness, but also the sheer numbers in the group had caught the

Mexican commander at Piedras Negras, Sub-Inspector Manuel Maldonado, unprepared. He quickly fired off a missive to his superior in Monterrey, Antonio Juáregui, asking him to forward a request on to the central government for tools, oxen, and plows so that the immigrants could plant their corn. He assured them that they just needed to be established, and that they would not be a permanent drain on state coffers.25 Just as Arista had argued ten years before, in relation to the immigration of the late Chief Bowle’s band, Maldonado said that these immigrants were already “semi-civilized” and they would soon be able to sustain themselves.

But Juáregui and Maldonado understood that these 700 immigrants only comprised the initial migration to Mexico and that many more Indians were on their way. Coacoochee promised that up to 1,800 more of his people would arrive shortly, and the great Chief also believed that he could convince the balance of Seminoles to migrate from Creek Territory to

Mexico.26 Then, a few months later, in October, when the central government of Mexico at last formalized a treaty with the Immigrant Tribes, Coacoochee promised that he would bring 4,000 more Indians from Arkansas, mostly Kickapoos.27 The number of Immigrant Tribesmen and women was growing quickly, and in November of 1850, another sizeable group of Immigrant

Indians presented themselves to Maldonado; they swore allegiance to Mexico, and were admitted into the territory “as Mexicans.”28 Then, the following month, the rest of the Southern Kickapoos belonging to “captaincillos” Marcua and Pecan’s tribes arrived and added over 500 more people to the growing camp of Indian refugees stationed outside of Monclova Viejo. A month later,

24 Maldonado to Juáregui, July 24, 1850, fs. 851-852, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 25 Contract, Maldonado (San Fernando), July 24, 1850, f. 849, C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC; Minister of War (Mexico City), Oct. 17, 1850 (copy), fs. 927-928, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27, FCMO AGEC. 26 Juáregui to Arista, July 27, 1850, f. 861, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 27 Maldonado to Juáregui, October 26, 1850, f. 941, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 28 Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, Nov 20, 1850, fs. 1012-1014, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC.

158 Coacoochee returned to Coahuila from Indian Territory with more than 100 additional Seminoles,

Mascogos, and runaway slaves from the Creeks.29

All told, somewhere near 1,500 Immigrant Tribesmen and women sat outside of

Monclova Viejo and El Remolino that winter waiting for some sort of direction and needing to be fed. Thus, when Arista made another plea in favor of these Indians, he was likely speaking against the growing criticism mounted by nearby vecinos and officials in Mexico City who could scarcely afford to meet the needs of the immigrants. Their settlement may have resembled a refugee camp, but Arista still wrote glowingly of these immigrants, seeing in them the key to stabilizing the frontier. Just as he had said of the Cherokees ten years before, he maintained that the new immigrants were very different from the “bárbaros…[who were] used to spilling human blood and razing the countryside.”30 The Immigrant Tribes were warriors (guerreros) and hard- working; if they were stripped of their customs, they would become the ideal colonists— especially in the North because they were the “masters of the desert, close to nature,” and perhaps most importantly, considering what was to follow, they were also “greatly used to suffering.”31 Privation would indeed be their lot in Mexico—and their poverty would lead to increased insecurity on the frontier.

Dearth

The Immigrant Tribes more or less fulfilled the commanders’ expectations as warriors, especially in the initial years of the project. They led over forty campaigns against the

29 Juáregui, Mumilque, to Arista, Dec. 27, 1850, fs. 1036-1037, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC; Arista to Juáregui, December (ill.), 1850, Ficha 1134 C10, F8 E112 1F, FCMO AGEC. 30 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, July 13, 1850, Ficha 805 C8 F1 E7 2F, FCMO AGEC. 31 Maldonado, Rio Grande, to Juáregui, Rio Grande, October 2, 1850, fs. 939-942, C8 F2 E27 F 138, FCMO AGEC; Laura (Mexico City) to Governor of Nuevo León, Oct 18, 1850, Concluidos, AGENL.

159 Comanches and Lipan Apaches.32 But their transformation into sedentary farmers demanded a tremendous array of resources that the Mexican commanders did not have. As early as December of 1850, just six months after the initial group had arrived in Mexico, the tribes were already in a

“critical state,” lacking the plows, oxen, and seeds promised by the Mexican commanders.

Juáregui admitted candidly in a letter to his superior that they were in dire straits. Short of the promised resources he feared the Immigrant Tribes’ retribution. Their poverty could have real consequences, and the commanders feared that the Tribes might begin to commit depredations if the government did not start living up to its word.33 Even Juáregui—an early champion of the project—worried about the very large congregation of Immigrant Indians situated on the outskirts of Monclova Viejo in early 1851. He asked for an additional 2,000 pesos from Arista to tend to them. He was certain that, without aid, they would begin to attack and cause considerable damage to the frontier.34

Unhappy with the situation, the vast majority of the Southern Kickapoos who immigrated to Mexico in 1850 and early 1851 were the first to defect from the project. Hundreds of these

Indians had accompanied Coacoochee to Mexico in his original journey. More soon joined, and by January of 1851 the entire bands belonging to captaincillos Marcua, Pecan, and Cibolo were living amongst Papicua’s Kickapoos, clustered around Monclova Viejo and Remolino in an unknown land and in dire need of assistance.35 Adding to their troubles, vecinos in the same neighborhood looked on admiringly at the Kickapoos’ sizeable horse herds. In the end, at least one vecino won a horse from the Kickapoos’ herd after complaining that it had been stolen from

32 Porter, 35. 33 Juáregui, Mumilique, to Arista, December 27, 1850, fs. 1035-1036, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 34 Juáregui, Mumilique, to Arista, December 29, 1850, fs. 1035-1036, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado to Juáregui, December 17, 1850, fs. 1035-1036, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 35 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, Dec. 28, 1850, fs. 1052-1056, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138 FCMO AGEC; Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, Jan 16 1851, Ficha 1167 C11 F3 E27 1F, FCMO AGEC.

160 him some years ago. For his part, the Indian who formerly owned the horse claimed he had bought it from the Comanches long ago and, since it was the only horse he owned, “he loved him very much.” But he handed the animal over anyway. Unfortunately, more vecinos came forth to claim Kickapoo horses after Maldonado resolved to return the animal to the vecino and compensate the Kickapoo with ten pesos.36 The jealousies that arose between vecinos and

Immigrant Tribes would not diminish in the years to come.

After the fiasco with the horses, the Kickapoos must have realized that they had not entered a rich country. Later that winter, tired of waiting around the military colony for supplies that would never arrive, several Kickapoos visited the governor of Nuevo León to seek employment, but his suggestion that they muster into National Guard units was not realistic.37

Then, in March, several Kickapoo men approached Commander Galán with tears in their eyes, insisting that they needed food for their families while they waited for the meager corn to grow in the creek bed of Tulillo. Upon hearing of this request, Sub-Inspector Maldonado was quite moved: these were “men with children, who are very poor [and] in a strange land.” But he could do very little to soothe their pain.38

Given the insufficient resources on the frontier, squabbles between the Kickapoos and the vecinos over scarce foodstuffs, gunpowder, and horses intensified in the coming months. Also in

March, the Kickapoos visited several pueblos on the frontier to try to sell a number of antique flintlock muskets, one of the few things the Mexican government had actually been able to provide them with. During these visits to the pueblos, they also allegedly began to demand

36 Ignacio Galán, Monclova, to Maldonado, Sept. 10, 1850, Ficha 931 C9 F3 E40 10F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, Sept. 14, 1850, Ficha 931 C9 F3 E40 10F, FCMO AGEC; Juáregui to Maldonado, Sept. 24, 1850, Ficha 931 C9 F3 E40 10F, FCMO AGEC. 37 Robles, Minster of War, to Juáregui, January 3, 1851, f. 994, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 38 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui March 27 1851, Ficha 1302 C12 F6 E64 3F, FCMO AGEC; Ayuntamiento of Guerrero to governor of Coahuila, April 4, 1851, C3 F7 E6 1F, FSXIX AGEC.

161 “presents” from the townspeople. 39 A bit later, starving and ravaged by a small pox outbreak, a group of Kickapoos approached the town of Guerrero where Maldonado reported that they ordered the townspeople to give them corn, meat, flour and other items. If they could not meet the Kickapoos’ requirements, the Kickapoos commanded the exact amount of thirty-two pesos to buy these things for themselves. For their part, the vecinos feared an attack if they did not comply with the Kickapoos’ demands and they again complained loudly to their flustered officials. Maldonado ultimately acquiesced to the Kickapoos’ blackmail and scrounged up the money to buy food for them.40 Maldonado’s boss, Juáregui, also grumbled about the Kickapoos’ behavior, but he somehow found 900 pesos to buy tools for them from Texas, since the implements could not be found on the Mexican side of the border.41 Relations between the

Kickapoos and vecinos continued to diminish as they carried on arguing over scarce frontier resources. They deteriorated even further in May of 1851 when the authorities caught the norteño Teodor Treviño trafficking horses stolen from the Kickapoos.42

Then, just as the Comanches were ramping up for the summer raiding season and the

Kickapoos were needed the most, the tribe decided to leave Mexico. This decision came at the worst time. Juáregui had just mustered the warriors from the Immigrant Tribes into service after a Comanche and Lipan Apache entrada into the Laguna de Jaco at the frontiers of Coahuila and

Chihuahua in June.43 The Kickapoos, alongside the Seminole and Mascogos, left for the campaign against the raiders, but once they reached the desert to the west of the settlements of northern Coahuila they deserted. This left the presidial soldiers, Mascogos, and Seminoles

39 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, March 30, 1851, Ficha 1311 C12 F6 E73 2F, FCMO AGEC. 40 President of Ayuntamiento de Guerrero to Governor of Coahuila, March 4, 1851 (copy March 17th), Ficha 1280, C12 F 3 E 42 3F, FCMO AGEC; Rafael de la Fuente to Juáregui, Saltillo, March 17, 1851, Ficha 1280, C12 F 3 E 42 3F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado to Ayuntamiento of Guerrero, March 4, 1851, f. 41, LE 1596 SRE. 41 Juáregui to Maldonado, April 21, 1851, Ficha 1342 C13 F5 E25 3F, FCMO AGEC. 42 Juáregui to Maldonado, May 31, 1851, Ficha 1432 C13 F15 E115 3F, FCMO AGEC. 43 Tomás Martinez Zulaica, alcalde de Rosas, to Juan José Galán, June (ill.), 1851, Ficha 1462 C14 F2 E 29 1F, FCMO AGEC.

162 undermanned in the middle of serious dangers. When they deserted the Kickapoos also took with them the pay, gunpowder, flour, tobacco, and arms they had received as provisions for the campaign. In addition, they took twenty-six of the horses that the campaign had recovered in a brief initial encounter with the Comanche raiders.44 The Mexican commanders complained bitterly of this alleged theft and the governor, who was already wary of the whole project of tribus emigrados, forbade them from ever returning.45 Most likely the Kickapoos considered these purloined supplies their due for having suffered through a particularly hard winter with little of the promised assistance ever materializing.

Most of the Kickapoos decided to return to their homes along the Arkansas River in the

United States as their god, Wisaka, had commanded them to do after deserting. He had ordered the Kickapoos to return to the world of the whites, a people whom the Kickapoo believed had been blessed with abundance, unlike the impoverished Mexicans.46 Accordingly, they collected together their families after deserting and began the retreat; but, on the way, tensions between the vecinos and Kickapoos flared again. One Kickapoo warrior even killed a vecino in Guerrero after an altercation that occurred just before they crossed the river. As the Kickapoos abandoned

Mexico in the wake of this murder, they left other Mexicans terrified of further reprisals.47 Only a small contingent of Kickapoos under Papicua—nine men, seven women and four children— stayed in Mexico, near Monclova Viejo.48

The U.S. Indian Bureau was certainly cognizant of the poverty that Pecan and Marcua’s

Kickapoo bands had suffered in Mexico, and they sought to take advantage of Mexican

44 La Patria (Saltillo), July 19, 1851; Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, July 15, 1851, Ficha 1477 C 14 F 3 E44 2F, FCMO AGEC. 45 Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, July 18, 1851, Ficha 1486 C14 F4 E53 9F, FCMO AGEC. 46 Latorre and Latorre, 262-263. 47 Maldonado to Juáregui, July 18, 1851 [contains copy of Wilson to Maldonado, July 16, 1851], Ficha 1486 C14 F4 E 53 9F, FCMO AGEC; Robles to Juáregui, August 14, 1851, Ficha 1519 C14 F6 E86 1F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, August 14, 1851, fs. 50-51, LE 1596 SRE. 48 Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, July 18, 1851, Ficha 1486 C14 F4 E53 9F, FCMO AGEC.

163 weakness to entice potential enemies away from the border. It even turns out that they were instrumental in causing the Kickapoo’s desertion. That June, just before the Comanche and

Lipan Apache entrada, a U.S. Indian Bureau Agent had deputized the Kickapoo Seslvot [sic] to negotiate with captaincillo Pecan for his band’s return to the Arkansas River. Seslvot caught up to the chief while they were out on campaign and—conferring with him in English—left the

Mexican commanders who knew none of that language to puzzle over the meaning of his visit.

The Immigrant Tribes, exemplary people-in-between, were still playing the U.S. and Mexico off one even after immigrating across the frontier. Ultimately they realized better conditions for themselves, convincing the U.S. government to promise them 7,000 pesos payable immediately upon their return.49

The Mexican authorities’ failure to deliver the promised resources had doomed their project and even caused greater insecurity to the people they purported to protect. As even

Papicua admitted, the Kickapoos who had deserted the campaign were especially predisposed towards hurting the vecinos after their bitter experience. 50 Put on alert, Maldonado wrote to

Colonel Wilson at Fort Duncan to try and apprehend the Kickapoos once they crossed over the

Rio Grande/Bravo into Texas, but nothing came of his request.51

In the end, the Kickapoo debacle resulted in the norteños gaining even more enemies to fear. A couple of years later, Juan Zuazua, who took over as commander of the frontier in 1853, reported that the Kickapoos had begun to raid in the far western frontier in Coahuila—and they quickly earned a reputation for staging a kind of war with no quarter against the Mexicans. When

Zuazua made an expedition with a force of 120 men towards the Laguna de Leche, he reported

49 Maldonado to Juáregui, July 18, 1851 [contains copy of Wilson to Maldonado, July 16, 1851], Ficha 1486 C14 F4 E 53 9F, FCMO AGEC; Robles to Juáregui, August 14, 1851, Ficha 1519 C14 F6 E86 1F, FCMO AGEC. 50 La Patria, (Saltillo), August 9, 1851; Latorre and Latorre, 263. 51 Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, August 14, 1851, fs. 50-51, LE 1596 SRE.

164 on the cruelty of the Kickapoos who were camped near the headwaters of the Sabinas. The raiders had murdered all the Mexicans in their path rather than taking captives, and they had not even spared the children they encountered. Further, they killed all of the wild horses they found, transporting only the tame ones that they could use immediately, and left a trail of butchered animals in their wake. Zuazua, who was privy to the rumors of Kickapoo cruelty that had circulated since their desertion a couple of years earlier, was certain of the identity of the raiders, saying that it was the same Kickapoos who still crossed back and forth from Texas to Coahuila to make their correrías (raids).52 Zuazua’s reports need to be taken with a grain of salt; Nuevo

León had suffered unduly from the loss of blood and treasure to Comanche raiders over the previous forty years. As a result, they had become the most Indian-hating of the vecinos who populated a frontier that was, in general, far from enamored with Natives. But more than likely he knew his enemies. For the Kickapoos who deserted, raiding turned out to be much more lucrative and secure than waiting on the broken promises of the Mexican government and dealing with jealous vecinos. For the Mexican government, failure to live up to their side of the bargain had resulted in disastrous consequences and destabilized the frontier further. As long as reverting to old raiding patterns remained an option, the frontier would not be secure while it was impoverished.

The Immigrant Tribes who remained after the majority of Kickapoos deserted remained poor. Indeed, the governor of Coahuila’s desk positively groaned under the weight of the many unanswered requests made by the Mexican commanders for plows, oxen, seeds, and arms for the

Immigrant Tribes (as well as the Hispanic military colonists). The frontier authorities’ appeals to the governor and to Juáregui were quite emotional, betraying their utter bewilderment at the

52 [Zuazua commander of the Northern Frontier?] to Vidaurri, s/f (April 30, 1853?), C89 4F, Militares, AGENL; Zuazua to Vidaurri, April 30, 1853, C89 4F, Militares, AGENL.

165 array of forces set against them and their fears of the consequences if they did not act. In one remarkable letter dating from 1852, the alcalde of Músquiz informed the governor that the women of the Immigrant tribes had approached him while the warriors were out on campaign in the Comanche redoubt of the Laguna de Jaco. They complained that they were in a state of great misery; their husbands were not there to help while they planted and they had not received their monthly sum from the government. They asked for corn, oxen and plows—which on this occasion at least, were granted to them.53 The derelict state of the women served as a sobering reminder of the broken promises that the government had made to the Immigrant Tribes. These women, wasting away from hunger, did not resemble the wives of healthy and independent civilized frontier vecinos.54

Coacoochee, who had entertained such high hopes for the project, also realized that the

Mexican government did not have the ability to keep the promises it had made. In 1852 he travelled to Mexico City against the wishes of the local commanders to negotiate for the transfer of the Hacienda of Nacimiento to the Immigrant Tribes. He at last received this land grant as a result of the victory that fourteen of his Seminoles, four of Papicua’s Kickapoos, and three

Mascogos had achieved alongside the presidial soldiers of Monclova Viejo against the Tejano cuadillo José María de Jesús Carvajal.55 Unfortunately, the land grant did not immediately ease the poverty in which the growing population of Immigrant Tribesmen and women lived.

The following year, Coacoochee again stepped outside the chain of command to forward his concerns about the poverty of the colony directly to the governor of Coahuila. First of all, he wrote that of the 100 muskets, gunpowder, and balls promised to the colony none had arrived.

53 Alcalde de Músquiz to governor of Coahuila, March 8, 1852, LE 1596 SRE. 54 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, September 11 1852, Ficha 1953 C19 F3 E20 3F, FCMO AGEC for a typical report on Comanche raiders. 55 Antonio Juáregui and José Maria Garcia to Secretary of War, June 30, 1852, fs. 115, 119, Vol. 3157 SEDNA; Texian Advocate (Victoria), January 3, 1852.

166 Nor could the colony feed itself and it had recently endured a small pox outbreak. Coacoochee played on the sympathies of the governor, pointing to just how derelict domesticity had become as the colony now contained a number of widows who had recently lost their husbands to the war against the Comanches. These women suffered greatly and could not even clothe themselves.

Coacoochee simply asked that these widows be allowed to cover their shame—especially given the fact that his people had just won an engagement against the Comanches, capturing three captives and returning three horses to Santa Rosa.56 The great chief was clever to refer to the women of his tribe. The Indians had done their part to meet the terms of Hispanic civilization, but dearth undermined the officials’ efforts and the Indians’ good faith.

Coacoochee’s letter also engaged in a remarkable bit of borderlands diplomacy and touched on what must have been the governor’s rawest nerve after the Kickapoos’ desertion. He realized that the North Americans were enemies of the Mexicans; he even alleged that Texans paid other Indians to make war against the Mexicans, playing on a long-standing fear that the commanders had. But he also said that a representative of the U.S. government had recently visited the colonists at Nacimiento to request that the Seminoles return to the Creek Reservation.

His surrogates had heard the representative out, revealing that they were still “people-in-between” as much as citizens of the Mexican North. Coacoochee declined the offer and even informed the

North American agent that he still planned to transport the balance of 2,000 Seminoles remaining in Creek Territory to Coahuila.57 But despite his faithfulness, he complained to the governor that the Mexicans had done very little to help him bring the rest of his people to Mexico—another

56 On travelling to Mexico City in 1852 see: Robles, Mexico City, to Juáregui, May 28, 1852, Ficha 1785 C17 F4 E31 2F, FCMO AGEC; Robles (Mexico City) to Juáregui, May 4, 1852, Ficha 1762 C17 F1 E18 1F, FCMO AGEC. 57 Maldonado to Juáregui, July 18 [contains copy of Wilson to Maldonado, July 16, 1851], Ficha 1486 C14 F4 E 53 9F, FCMO AGEC; Robles to Juáregui, August 14, 1851, Ficha 1519 C14 F6 E86 1F, FCMO AGEC.

167 promise they had failed to fulfill.58 In fact, as we will see below, the Mexican commanders had largely aborted the project of the Immigrant Tribes after Coacoochee’s arrival due to the immense trouble that their arrival had aroused with the neighboring vecinos. In any case, the hardships faced by the Immigrant Tribesmen and women had discouraged further immigration from Indian Territory and, as a result, frustrated Coacoochee’s bid to take command of the entire tribe.

But compared to his other complaints this one was a minor quibble. Coacoochee wrote a second letter to the governor of Nuevo León that contained an even longer litany of complaints against Mexico for not issuing the Immigrant Tribes the promised resources. First of all, the president of Mexico himself had promised Coacoochee a bull and cow for each family alongside supplies and corn, but they had failed to deliver them. Second, he complained that the authorities made unfair demands on the Seminoles, taking away what scarce resources they had. The governor of Coahuila had recently asked for two of the Seminoles who were most useful to

Coacoochee to come to Saltillo to serve him. The first was one of the few literate Seminoles who, alongside the black man Julian, served as Coacoochee’s interpreter. The second was a blacksmith, an essential role in the Indian’s military colony since they needed to keep the few rifles they had brought with them in working order; using the government-issued flintlock muskets to hunt and fight Comanches was not an option.59

The Immigrant Tribes also found themselves constantly despoiled of the booty they captured from the Comanches and Lipan Apaches. The vecinos of Santa Rosa laid claim to the recaptured horses they brought back with them from their engagements. And the governor demanded the recaptured captives. Coacoochee would have liked to assimilate the redeemed

58 Coacoochee to governor of Nuevo León, October 20, 1853, C96 1F, Militares, AGENL. 59 Coacoochee to governor of Nuevo León, s/f, C96 2F, AGENL.

168 captives into his colony, but instead he had to forfeit them to the governor. In the North, captives had long represented a particularly attractive resource on the frontier violently traded back and forth between vecinos and Indians. They were de-ethnicized, and like the genízaros who had played such an important role in the domestic economy of both vecinos and Indians over the previous century, they could easily assimilate into their host society. They were particularly willing laborers since they had no place to go, except for back to the their original captors (which, of course, they often did). Many captives did not remember their original language; and they often remembered very little of the society from which they were abducted as children. This made them the ideal laborers and colonists, and the governor was eager to assign any redeemed captives to public works. But turning captives over to the frontier authorities deprived

Coacoochee of potential fictive kin as well as a very valuable source of labor on the frontier.60

Thus, not only did the Immigrant Tribes squabble with the vecinos over scarce resources; the commanders and officials of the frontier themselves sometimes entered into the fray.

In sum, the Kickapoo desertion was a symptom that, as of the mid-1850s, the Immigrant

Tribes were still far from becoming the settled vecinos who would transform the borderlands.

The dearth of resources on the Mexican side of the border was perhaps the greatest contribution to this failure. Without appreciable resources, the government could not even hope to fulfill its promises to the Immigrant Tribes. And in the case of the Kickapoos, this failure had already led to even greater insecurity in the borderlands. Dearth led to conditions that disrupted peace on the frontier and ended in squabbles between vecinos and the Immigrant Tribes over scanty resources.

In the face of scarcity, Immigrant Tribesmen increasingly reverted to a political economy of

60 Ibid.; Maldonado, Rosas, to Juáregui, August 4, 1851, Ficha 1507 C14 F5 E77 3F, FCMO AGEC; On capture of assimilated Comanche Captives:, Maldonado to Juáregui, August (ill.), 1851, Ficha 1232 C14 F3 E74 3F, FCMO AGEC.

169 raiding and trading that contrasted starkly with the ranchers and townspeople they lived alongside. This would do little to improve relations.

Insecurity

In his letter to the governor, Coacoochee also spoke of the bad faith that existed between the Immigrant Tribes and the Mexicans on the frontier. It was the vecinos of Santa Rosa with whom Coacoochee found himself most at odds. The vecinos, he claimed, were “bad people” and

“treat us very poorly, running them [the Seminoles] off instead of allowing them to buy the things they need for the pueblo and even threatening them with arms despite the fact that they did nothing to the vecinos.”61 Indeed, the townspeople generally did not appreciate the presence of the Immigrant Tribes. Decades of warfare had made them unfamiliar with the concept of a

“friendly Indian” or “Buenos Indios.”62 Further complicating things, scarce resources almost certainly led to a revival of raiding amongst the Immigrant Tribes, further deteriorating the situation. As we shall see below, the tensions between vecinos and Immigrant Tribes were greatest in the neighboring state of Nuevo León, which did not have a treaty with the Immigrant

Tribes. Once the Immigrant Tribes began raiding in that state, they revived their ancient hatred of all Indians. Then, when they began raiding in Texas as well, they threatened the very sovereignty of Mexico over its northern frontier. As far as most vecinos were concerned the

Immigrant Tribes added to rather than ameliorated the frontier’s problems.

The commanders had anticipated the conflicts the Immigrant Tribes would have with the locals. Try though they might to differentiate the Immigrant Tribes from the bárbaros who ravaged the western frontiers, norteño identity—as we have seen—was in no small part

61 Coacoochee to governor of Nuevo León, s/f, C96 2F, AGENL. 62 For an example of this often-used term: Arista to the Minister of War, February 20, 1840, fs. 229-230, Vol. 1544, SEDNA.

170 predicated upon violence against Indians. And despite Mariano Arista’s appeal to the “whiteness” of the Immigrant Tribes, and Manuel Maldonado’s affirmation of their “semi-civility,” the vecinos who inhabited the dusty pueblos of the frontier remained skeptical of the entire project.

Further, the failure of either Immigrant Indians or vecinos to form meaningful bonds across ethnic lines resulted in a lack of compassion, empathy, and understanding. Renewed raiding on the part of the Immigrant Tribes only added to this misunderstanding.

For their part, the vecinos of northern Coahuila manifested their suspicions of the project from the moment that the tribes arrived. An unfavorable appraisal of the Immigrant Tribes sent from the Ayuntamiento of Cuatro Ciénegas, Coahuila in August of 1850 points to the distrust that the vecinos had of all Indians. The Ayuntamiento declared that Indian troubles would not diminish with the arrival of the Immigrant Tribes, but instead they would “grow alongside the benevolent shelter that has been given to the tribes.” The ayuntamiento’s report continued, stating that the Immigrant Tribes “pretend to be tame, and offer to us what they are incapable of complying with…in order to learn…. about our weaknesses and take possession of isolated lands.” Further, they alleged that their “dress and arms have been seen many times” among the

Comanches. Finally, their familiarity with the Comanche language betrayed the many years they had spent on the plains among them. It was also jealousy that led to the vecinos' distaste for the project. The Ayuntamiento was equally irritated by the fact that Juáregui did not respect the

“Mexican Warriors” in the western colonies and hired Immigrant Tribesmen warriors instead.63

(In fact, Maldonado had earlier encountered extreme difficulty finding any Mexican willing to go

63 Apreciaciones del Ayuntamiento de Cuatro Ciénegas al Gobierno del Estado sobre los Seminoles y su Jefe Gato Del Monte, Agosto de 1850, reprinted in Martha Rodríguez, Historias de Resistencia y Exterminio: Los Indios de Coahuila Durante El Siglo XIX (Saltillo, Coahuila: CIESAS, 1995), 176-178.

171 near Comanche territory.64) Thus, not only would they have to compete with the new arrivals for the scarce resources that the commanders doled out, they would also have to compete with them for their respect.

The vecinos saw very little of the promised assimilation of the Immigrant Tribes. Perhaps most damning in this regard was the fact that the Immigrant Tribes simply looked different from civilized Mexicans—a fact commented on by many who wrote about them. The Seminoles retained most of their customs in Mexico; they continued to carry rifles with them, wear bangles and bracelets, sport brightly colored and boldly patterned frocks, and wear turbans adorned with turkey feathers.65 Then, when the commanders conceded to Coacoochee’s requests for autonomy in his own colony, they undermined their own efforts to assimilate the Indians. Coacoochee was interested primarily in founding a pan-Indian colony, and his ideas of assimilating into the social fabric of Mexican life on the frontier did not include Hispanicization or intermarriage. Thus, when the commanders appointed the chief as juez de paz (magistrate) of the Immigrant Tribes, they allowed him a latitude that made for even greater isolation. Coacoochee even issued laws that differed from neighboring juzgados; he decreed the death penalty for any Indian in his colony who sold lands from the colony without permission, committed adultery, or murdered a fellow Immigrant Indian in an effort to promote group cohesion. Thus, even though he enjoined his fellow tribesmen and women to observe the Mexican laws so that peace would rein between

“our various tribes and with the inhabitants of our adopted country,” his intentions were clearly not assimilative, even if they were peaceable. 66 The fact that he absolutely forbade Mexican men

64 Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, August 13, 1850, fs. 894-895, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 65 For sartorial differences see Kevin Mulroy, 68 and pictures on pp. 90-91. 66 decree of Corecuchi [sic], March 28, 1851 reprinted in Martha Rodríguez, Historias, 107.

172 from visiting the colony when the warriors were out on campaign confirmed the chief’s desire to protect the tribe’s women. But this policy also led to biological and cultural segregation.67

Nor did Immigrant Tribes enter into the local economy in a meaningful ways. For their part, the Seminoles and Kickapoos continued to live from scavenging, farming, hunting, gathering, and limited trade in the absence of meaningful assistance from the government. They supplemented their meager corn with deer, turkey, and bears killed in the foothills of the Santa

Rosa Mountains.68 The women of the tribes, meanwhile, gathered many of the fruits of the countryside and brought them to Músquiz to sell or exchange for basic foodstuffs they needed to feed their families.69 None of these activities brought them into sustained contact with the vecinos, however. And despite the fact that the commanders hoped that the Immigrant Tribesmen and women would work on the neighboring haciendas and ranchos to supplement their village life, this did not happen in a major way.70 Inexperienced as agriculturalists (with the exception of the Mascogos), the Immigrant Tribes did not often lend their labor to neighboring landowners.

There were exceptions, of course: Tiger, for instance, was a high-ranking Seminole who worked alongside two others at the ranch of Rafael Aldape in 1854.71 But the Mascogos were much more involved in the Hispanic economy than the other Immigrant Tribesmen and women. The

Seminoles and Kickapoos, for their part, were much more likely to supplement their corn with hunting rather than wage labor. Indeed, this allowed them to maintain, to borrow Sarah

67 Maldonado to Juáregui Aug. 13, 1850, fs. 889-890, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado to Juáregui, f. 1891, August 26, 1850, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 68 Alcalde de Músquiz to Doroteo Nava, Dec. 21, 1852, LE 1596 SRE. 69 Alcalde de Músquiz to governor of Coahuila, September 6, 1852, LE 1596 SRE. 70 Juáregui, Moras, to Minister of War, July 27, 1850, f. 861, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138 f. 861, FCMO AGEC. 71 Alcalde de Músquiz to Pablo Espinosa, July 10, 1854, LE 1596 SRE.

173 Deutsch’s term, their “separate refuge,” but it did not particularly ingratiate them to their neighbors.72

Segregation was not only the Immigrant Tribes’ choice, however. Well aware of the bias against Indians in the North, the commanders had thought it best to keep the vecinos and Indians separated from the beginning—even if this policy contradicted their effort to assimilate the immigrants. Shortly after their arrival, several of the Mascogos and Kickapoos presented themselves to the captain of Monclova Viejo and they asked him for a passport to go on to San

Fernando, assuming that they would settle there, near the old Cherokee colony and the most populated pueblo on the frontier. The captain, however, balked at this request. He was afraid of allowing a population comprised of armed Indians from the United States, known for being

“bellicose,” in the midst of a Mexican population. 73 The governor of Coahuila, for his part, cringed when he saw the number of Indians entering the territory and realized that they could now muster more warriors than any of the towns. Accordingly, he declared that any future immigrants must be pre-approved by the Supreme [Central] Government. He probably reflected the concerns of the vecinos when he asserted that the Immigrant Tribes must settle far away from the main population centers and the best lands of Coahuila.74 On one hand, the norteños wanted the Indians close by for purposes of surveillance. On the other hand, they wanted them far away so that they would not have easy access to the towns. As a result, they put their burgeoning camps at a physical remove from the military colonies, but still under their jurisdiction— registering in physical space itself the ambivalence of the project.

72 Sara Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 38. 73 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, July 13, 1850, C8 F1 E7 2F, FCMO AGEC; Governor of Coahuila to Juáregui, November 5, 1850, fs. 961-962, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138 FCMO AGEC. 74 Governor of Coahuila to Santiago Rodríguez, August 10, 1850, f. 874, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, AGEC FCMO.

174 The commanders, for their part, became much more trusting of the Immigrant Tribes after their many victories against the Comanches and they sought to strengthen the Indians’ ties to the country. When, to the great delight of the commanders, the Indians began to clamor for a primary school, they received a golden opportunity to integrate them into norteño society.75

Indeed, within a few years, all Mascogo and Seminole youth began to receive a parochial education, underwent the rite of Baptism, and received the catechism in Músquiz.76 They also chose Spanish names and Godparents (padrinos) to administer to their spiritual needs.77 Juan

Vidaurri (likely a nephew of the great caudillo of the North) served as schoolmaster and

Godfather of many of the Seminoles and Mascogos. As a tribute to his role in administering to the spiritual and educational needs of the children, Vidaurri became a very common surname among the Immigrant Tribes.78 Even the Sub-Inspector of the frontier who had welcomed the

Immigrant Tribes to Coahuila, Manuel Maldonado, served as a padrino on occasion. While

Papicua lay on his deathbed in December of 1852, the Sub-Inspector granted the Kickapoo chief his last request, serving as Godfather while a priest administered the rites of Baptism.79 Thus, personal ties of a very important sort connected the Immigrant Tribes to the administrators of the frontier. But unfortunately these connections did not extend to the wider neighborhood.

When the Immigrant Tribes began raiding again they only made what was an already- deteriorating relationship with their neighbors worse. A raid attributed to the Seminoles in

October of 1852 caused particular alarm. A party of Indians attacked twenty vecinos from

75 Alcalde Músquiz to governor of Coahuila, April 12, 1852, LE 1595 SRE; Aguila to Santa Anna, Dec 31 1853, C8 F14 E6 2F, FSXIX AGEC 76 La Unión (Mexico City), 1853, pg. 2. 77 Deutsche, Separate Refuge, 48-49 on the way that the godparent system created community ties across kith and kin. 78 SRE LE 1596 f. 55, Alcalde Músquiz to Jesús Garza Gonzales, July 21, 1859, f. 55, LE 1596 SRE for the Kickapoo Pedro Vidaurri; The preceptor of the school changed hands from Juan Vidaurri to Juan Francisco Váldez in May of 1856; Alcalde de Músquiz to governor, May 16, 1856, f. 16, SRE LE1596. 79 Maldonado, Nava, to Juáregui, December 7, 1852, Ficha 2068 C20 F5 E44 2F, FCMO AGEC.

175 Abasolo, Nuevo León who were returning from the Sabinas River, where they had been mustanging in territory very close to the Indian colony at Nacimiento. The attackers ambushed them near the point known as Santa Cruz, killed one of the vecinos, stole all of their horses and saddles and then ran the terrified men off, scattering them in all directions. In response to this outrage, the alcalde of Abasolo wrote to his counterpart in Santa Rosa and copied the governor with an accusation against the Immigrant Tribes. He was convinced that either the Seminoles or

Papicua’s Kickapoos—or as he called them, the state’s “newest enemies”—had perpetrated the attack and then “thrown themselves out into the desert.” His evidence was damning. The attackers traveled in a group of twenty, whereas Comanche raiding parties usually consisted of no more than a handful of warriors. In addition, the attackers had light skin, wore hats, and carried carbines instead of bows and arrows. The alcalde did not have the evidence to condemn them without a doubt, but he was sure that the Seminoles raided in “certain points of the state.”

In fact, the accusation from Nuevo León was likely a slander upon the Immigrant Tribes. At least two women had accompanied the war party, and it was only the Comanches and Lipan Apaches who travelled with their wives when they made raids. Further, the carbines they spotted could have been buffalo rifles, used primarily by Comanches.80

The alcalde of Músquiz had seen a tremendous drop in Comanche raids into his war-torn village ever since the Immigrant Tribes had arrived, and he hoped to defend the Seminoles against the charges from Nuevo León. He said that, in general, the Immigrant Tribes have “good intentions” and make war against the Comanches, but it was inescapable that, “motivated by booty” and the poverty in which they live they make “correrías [raids] which cause notorious

80 Alcalde de Abasolo to governor of Coahuila September 13, 1852 [copy September 27, 1852], Ficha 1979 C19 F5 E46 3F, FCMO AGEC.

176 damage to the lives and property of the citizens.”81 Nevertheless, he agreed to watch over them, even though he repudiated the allegations made from Nuevo León—a state where they were hostile to Indians of any sort given their long history with Comanche raids.82 Zuazua would shortly bring this hostility to a point.

But the alcalde of Músquiz was much more candid in a letter he wrote to General

Doroteo Nava. He said that the impoverished Immigrant Tribesmen felt a great temptation to plunder in the neighboring towns due to the scarcity in which they lived. Further, they could easily overpower the vecinos and then ride out into the western deserts where the vecinos would be very unlikely to follow them. Nor could he keep tabs on them at all times as they often failed to request a passport when they went out to hunt deer around the Sabinas. Finally, they had recently stolen several fat cows from the vecinos to “attend to their own personal conservation, the supreme law of society.”83 Even the alcalde of Músquiz—whose besieged frontier town sat in the foothills of the Santa Rosa Mountains and had benefitted the most from the arrival of the

Immigrant Tribes—could not entirely endorse the Indians. And their raids would only further antagonize relations between officials in Coahuila and Nuevo León.

Even if they were innocent of the attack made in Abasolo mentioned above, the

Immigrant Tribes were certainly guilty of some of the raids that followed in Nuevo León. In

April of 1853, a party of Indians killed four men at the Puerto de los Pedernales near Mina,

81 Governor of Coahuila to Juáregui, October 7, 1852, Ficha 1979 C19 F5 E46 3F, FCMO AGEC. On Mescalero parties: alcalde Músquiz to senior prefect of the district, April 9, 1855 (Copy 1873), f. 120, LE 1596 SRE. Ujiya, 34; La Patria (Saltillo), September 25, 1852; On women in Comanche raiding parties see Herman Lehmann, Nine Years Among the Indians, 1870-1879: The Story of the Captivity and Life of a Texan Among the Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 168, 174. 82 Alcalde of Músquiz to Alcalde Abasolo, Oct. 4, 1852, f. 9, LE 1596, SRE; De la Fuente, governor Coahuila, to Secretary of Defense, January 1, 1853 (Copy: February 10, 1853), f. 268, Vol. 3151, SEDNA; Maldonado to Secretary, February 10, 1853, f. 268, Vol. 3151, SEDNA; Rafael de la Fuente to Secretary, September 27, 1852, f. 268, f. 268, Vol. 3151, SEDNA; Juáregui to Secretary of war, October 20, 1853, f. 271, Vol. 3151, SEDNA; On Comanche raids in Nuevo León see Brian DeLay, The War of a Thousand Deserts: Indians Raids and the U.S.- Mexico War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 75-76, 164, 175, 188. 83 Alcalde de Músquiz to juez official, Doroteo Nava, December 21, 1852, f. 10, LE 1596 SRE.

177 Nuevo León in a manner that appalled the officials of that state. One of the men killed, a peon of

Santiago Villareal, had suffered terribly; the Indians “reduced his head to nothing from the force of blows.” After investigating, the juzgado of Mina wrote that it must have been Coacoochee’s

Indians who perpetrated the attacks; the men were well-armed, wore blue frocks and levas, and carried pistols in their belts.84 The vecinos of Nuevo León knew when the authors of an attack were from a different nation than the Comanches, with whom they had a long and terrible intimacy.

The Immigrant Tribes did not particularly get along with the vecinos closer to

Nacimiento either, although they refrained from large-scale raiding in Coahuila. Near Músquiz, the incidents that involved the Seminoles had a character that more closely resembled squabbles between fractious neighbors than large-scale depredations. In late 1853, for example, two

Seminoles whom the Mexicans generally regarded as drunks tried to steal two horses from the pastures of Músquiz, but they were captured. They were then beaten with rocks on the head and knifed in the back. Remarkably, they were not killed. The alcalde had tried to keep the Indians out of the villages before this incident, but they had begun to enter and demand sweet corn and money from the vecinos.85 Showing too much partiality to the Immigrant Tribes when mitigating conflicts could set the vecinos off against their officials, however. The alcalde of Músquiz was aware that the Immigrant Tribes were at the root of a reduction in Comanche violence visited upon the towns. Nevertheless, he could do little to soothe the troubled relationship between the

Immigrant Tribes of Nacimiento and the vecinos of the frontier of Coahuila.

84 First Constitutional Court of the Village of Mina to the Governor of the state of Nuevo León, April 28, 1853 (Copy: August 15, 1873), f. 266, LE 1591 SRE. 85 Ramón Marcena to governor of Nuevo León, Oct 17, 1853, C96, Militares, AGENL; alcalde de Músquiz to prefecto de distrito, May 10, 1854, LE 1595 SRE.

178 As a result, and much to Coacoochee’s dismay, the alcalde made several efforts to keep the Indian men out of the town; but his efforts seem to have had little effect. Frederick Olmsted, when he passed through nearby San Fernando in the early 1850s, observed the ongoing conflict between Immigrant Tribes and vecinos. He said that the Indians congregated on street corners in mixed groups comprised of Lipans, Mescaleros, Tonkawas, and Seminoles and molested any strangers who passed through the town. They were especially curious to handle the strangers’ rifles. During his visit, he also witnessed a group of Indians in town acting particularly riotously.

They were, according to the writer, entering and exiting the vecinos’ houses without knocking, laying about in the streets, imbibing spirits, “patting women on the cheek,” and generally

“carrying themselves everywhere with such an air as indicated they were masters of the town.”

The townspeople, for their part, were quite used to the Indians, and commented little on their presence.86 But the Comanche presence in Mexico had recently diminished as a result of both the

Seminoles’ efforts as well as the expansion of the U.S. military frontier. Perhaps the vecinos of

Músquiz were increasingly anxious to be rid all Indians—whether “semi-civilized” or not.

Finally, it was not just raids on the vecinos that set the locals off against the Indians.

Texans had also convinced themselves that it was the authorities in Mexico who were putting up the Indians to raid in Texas. The slave hunter Warren Adams accused the Mexicans of this conspiracy when he wrote of a recent Tonkawa and Mexican attack on some Americans near the camp of Lake Campacua in 1852. He even alleged that these “fiends” had taken the right hand of each of the seven men they killed to collect a reward of thirty or forty dollars from the Mexican authorities.87 The Mexican authorities, for their part, sought to punish the murderers, but were sure that the whole incident had been an illicit deal between Mexican and Texan rustlers that had

86 Olmsted, 345-346 and 350-352. 87 American Flag, May 15, 1852.

179 gone terribly wrong.88 Fringe elements from both the vecinos and Immigrant Tribes were apparently working together along the border, but almost certainly the authorities had not put them up to it. The Texans, however, could not be convinced of this fact.

The vecinos’ troubles only deepened when the Seminoles began to raid regularly in Texas as early as 1853 in order to supplement their meager corn and hunting. Thus, the fear of retribution from Texas always hung over the heads of the vecinos, and the Immigrant Tribes were the cause of this insecurity; their intransigence threatened the very sovereignty of Mexico over its frontier. Despite the gravest injunction that Arista and his subordinates could muster against marauding in Texas, the Seminoles kept up their raiding in that state to at least some degree.89 Given their traditional enmity with the Anglos and the difficulty that the Mexicans had keeping up their promises to the Immigrant Tribes, the Texas herds presented just too tempting of a target. Consequently, Texan ranchers began to clamor about the bands of Indians led by

Coacoochee who were committing depredations along the Rio Grande/Bravo.90

According to the Texans, the Seminoles took full advantage of their protection in Mexico to make raids into Texas. They travelled along the left side of the river until they discovered the place they wished to attack, and then they would pass and fall “like a thunder cloud” upon the

Texans and remove their herds. They were especially offended by Coacoochee’s mock diplomacy; once his bands removed Texan’s herds they would then open up a negotiation with the former owners for their return. In the spring of 1854, for example, Coacoochee’s bands stole a large herd from within three miles of Fort Duncan. The chief then let the Texans know that if they wanted their animals back they would have to send a representative to meet with him. The

88 May 22, 1852, L20 E1, f. 70 AEMEUA SRE. 89 La Patria, (Saltillo, Coahuila), November 9, 1850; Kenneth Porter, “The Seminole in Mexico,” 6-7. This clause is not present in the original treaty signed with Maldonado July 26, 1850, San Fernando de Rosas, fs. 855-858, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 90 Seguin Mercury, Dec. 24, 1853.

180 Texans, for their part, were convinced that Coacoochee operated in cahoots with the government of Coahuila, pointing to Coacoochee’s appointment as a juez de paz to make the case for corroboration.91 The Texans even accused the governor of Coahuila of having given him permission, tacit or otherwise, to conduct raids into Texas. This is extremely unlikely, of course, given the governor’s hesitance in regard to the whole Immigrant Indian project. Nor is it very likely that Coacoochee split the booty with him, as the Texans newspapers alleged, given the supreme desire for peace on the frontier expressed by so many norteño authorities. 92 The

Texans—blinded by their conviction that neither Indians nor Africans could do much of anything without the assistance of whites—had difficulty recognizing that Coacoochee’s bands acted independently.

Tensions reached a boiling point by the middle of the decade. In May of 1854, Texas rancher Griffith Jones lost forty animals to the Seminoles, and this theft caused the issue to catch fire. The Texas Ranger and Lonestar even alleged that Coacoochee “made affidavit” to the fact that the Mexicans paid him to raid Texas herds, adding that his “commission…would be speedily terminated if he [is] seen on Texas soil.”93 Then, the following month “500 Seminoles”

(supposedly in conjunction with the Comanches) reportedly attacked a company of U.S. soldiers,

Mexican mustangers, and traders along the Nueces, killing over thirty. As a result, many of the western settlers began fleeing and seeking refuge in the denser settlements, holding meetings in

San Antonio, Leona, and Castroville to devise ways to protect the frontier against the renewed attacks on the ranchers’ herds.94 The solution they most typically lit upon was to get together a party of filibusterers to raid Coahuila and punish the marauding Indians.

91 Juáregui to Arista, Oct. 16, 1850, f. 914, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC. 92 Gonzales Inquirer (quoted from the Western Texan), May 13, 1854. 93 Texas Ranger and Lonestar, March 30, 1854. 94 Ibid., June 8, 1854.

181 Thus, the raids carried out by hungry Immigrant Tribesmen added yet another layer of insecurity to a frontier that Indian attacks, poverty, and the failure of state institutions had already prostrated. Adding fuel to the fire, U.S. Secretary of State Marcy finally learned in 1855 that the Mexicans had indeed employed Coacoochee’s Indians as auxiliaries for frontier defense.

Incensed by this news, Marcy insisted that the Mexicans’ confidence in these Indians was misplaced, and that by employing these Indians the Mexicans were risking their friendship with the United States.95 The Seminoles had jeopardized diplomatic relations not just with the neighbors in Texas, but also with no less an authority than the Secretary of State. With the memory of losing half of their territory still fresh in their minds, Mexicans feared that the

Immigrant Tribes would instigate yet another military intervention from the United States.

The Immigrant Tribesmen’s raids increasingly threatened the very sovereignty of Mexico over its frontier, especially since Texans seemed anxious to find any pretext for filibustering in the Mexican North. They would not have to wait too long. In May of 1855, Governor E. M.

Pease mustered the seasoned Ranger James H. Callahan and his volunteers into service to protect the environs of San Antonio from Indian raids.96 They were supposed to stay on the Texas side of the river, but Mexicans watched warily as this company patrolled south of San Antonio.

Meanwhile, the Texas State Times fanned the flames, saying: “If Mexico has the right to keep these savages near our border, to steal our property and kill our citizens, we also have an equal right to pursue them into their hiding places and visit retributive justice upon them—and we will do it.”97 At last, on September 8, 1855, Edward Burleson’s company of Rangers had a fight with a small party of Native rustlers that seemed to prove the allegations leveled against the

95 Marcy, Department of State, Washington, January 8, 1855, Frame 99 Roll 70, NAW. 96 Pease to John C. Callahan, executive docket July 5, 1855, Governor’s Correspondences, WPW CAH; Texas Ranger, July 28, 1855. 97 Texas State Times, September 1 1855

182 Seminoles. In the scuffle they had managed to shoot a black man who belonged to Coacoochee’s party.98 A filibuster to solve the problem once and for all would soon materialize.

One month later a hundred Rangers from Callahan’s recently de-mustered company approached the pass at Piedras Negras where they violently overpowered the Mexican skiff operators and crossed over to the Mexican side. They hoped to settle their problems with runaway slaves, the Immigrant Tribes, and the Lipan Apaches and secure the border once and for all.99 As we have seen in the introduction, a mixed force of presidial soldiers, vecinos, and Indian warriors defeated Callahan’s de-mustered Rangers at the Battle of Rio Escondido. But, after the battle, Callahan departed with his volunteers to Piedras Negras and burned to the ground to cover his retreat back across the Grande/Bravo. When he returned to Texas he published his renewed resolution “to punish” the “Seminoles, Muscaleroes [sic], and Lipans” who would continue to

“scourge Texas with blood and outrage as long as they remain unchastised.” 100 As a result, the threat of another invasion would continue to hang over the heads of the vecinos on the frontier.

The following month, rumor had it that 1,000 men were gathered in San Antonio planning to cross over the Grande/Bravo to attack the Seminole camp.101

The Seminoles had indeed participated in the repulsion of Callahan’s forces, a fact that could have tied them closer to the vecinos of the frontier. The vecinos had, after all, suffered much at the hands of Texan filibusterers ever since the War. Abasolo, Laredo, Reynosa, Mier, and, now, Piedras Negras had been hijacked, looted, or burned by the Texans in the past decade.

But their distrust of the Immigrant Tribes would not fade away. In fact, they more than likely felt

98 Governor’s Correspondences, WPW CAH Ed Burleson to Governor Pease, Sept. 8, 1856 [sic 1855], Governor’s Correspondences, WPW CAH. 99 Siglo Diez y Nueve, October 2, 1855; Vidaurri to Marcy, Oct. 18, 1855, fs. 25-26, E50 Cuaderno 10, “Sobre la Invasión de Piedras Negras,” SRE Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte. 100 Galveston Weekly, October 17, 1855; Texas State Times, October 13, 1855. 101 Siglo Diez y Nueve, November 16, 1855.

183 that the Immigrant tribes had—at least in part—precipitated this attack from Texas, disturbing the peace of the frontier once again. As long as the Immigrant Tribes continued to raid in Texas, the border remained insecure, subject to violation by Texan filibusterers whenever they felt justified.

Even as popular a figure as Santiago Vidaurri could not unite the frontier in his support of the Immigrant Tribes. The performance of the Immigrant Tribes at Rio Escondido had likely impressed the frontier caudillo, and he had begun to negotiate for more Indians to immigrate to

Coahuila in 1856, the same year that small pox carried Coacoochee and two other top chiefs away. Vidaurri hoped to revitalize the Immigrant Indian colony, which was in danger of disintegrating after the loss of its charismatic leader. Singling the Seminoles out for individual praise, he said that they had become good farmers and had “civilized in a certain way,” but had not ceased to be guardian warriors. Consequently, he contracted with an agent in Corpus Christi to transport 500 more Seminoles to the frontier. He even considered expanding the project to invite the small and impoverished groups of Tonkawas that roamed the borderlands to settle the frontier and take up arms.102 Perhaps Vidaurri also wanted them to serve as auxiliaries in his

Liberal revolution, but if these were his designs, they were dashed when the Seminoles and

Mascogos refused to fight other Mexicans.103 In any case, Vidaurri imagined the 500 new arrivals would help in the war against the Comanches, transform the “desert” into farmland, and become citizen farmers and laborers who could reinvigorate the project.

Vidaurri did not, however, count on the strong disapproval of his countrymen. In October of 1857, the Tamaulipas paper, Prisma, warned against colonizing the frontier with yet more

“savages.” The editor called on Vidaurri to stop experimenting with Indian colonization. He

102 Vidaurri to Minister of development, colonization, industry and commerce, September 14, 1856 [1873], f. 108, LE 1596 SRE. 103 Porter, 25; Mulroy, 83-84.

184 referred to their arrival as “a terribly disastrous plague,” and wrote that the Seminoles were far from civilized. In his mind, the vecinos and military colonists could finish the war against the

“savage.” And sounding an old theme on the frontier, he insisted that the frontier should be

“colonized with honorable, industrious, and enlightened men from Europe who will make our society progress.”104 Such colonists were unavailable in the borderlands, of course. And like so many other norteños, the editor absolutely refused to draw a distinction between the Seminoles and plains raiders. The hoped-for immigration never occurred, and in the years to follow, complaints against the Seminoles continued, many of which were unjustified. 105 As a result, bad faith continued to characterize the relationship between the Immigrant Tribes, the vecinos, and, of course, the Texans. Even the Mascogos and Seminoles began to turn against each other after

Coacoochee’s death in 1856. The drop in Comanche violence in the Mexican North, a result of the U.S. military’s pressure against them as well as the military colonies, likely contributed to the vecinos’ conviction that the Immigrant Tribes were no longer needed there—if they had, indeed, ever been needed.

Having made great sacrifices to fight the Comanches over the previous decade, and feeling unappreciated, the Seminoles were easily convinced to leave. Accordingly, when U.S.

Indian Bureau Agents invited the Seminoles to return to the Creek Reservation in U.S. Indian

Territory in 1858, most accepted and slowly began returning—to the deep disappointment of the

Mexican commanders. Then, when the Sánchez-Navarros claimed that they had never been reimbursed for the hacienda of Nacimiento, the few Seminoles who remained in Mexico reconsidered their options and left. A vecino of Músquiz who encountered twenty-five of the

Seminoles camped at Remolino with their families en route to Texas, reported back on the

104 Ibid. 105 Benavides to Vidaurri, Feb. 20, 1859, Vidaurri Correspondence, AGENL; Felix Treviño to the governor, Salinas Victoria, N.L, February 19, 1859, C 135, Militares AGENL.

185 Indians’ feelings. He said that they were going back to their lands in the United States because the “Mexican government did not give them justice.”106 They had never received the promised resources, their land grant was in jeopardy, and the entire project had failed.

Conclusion

Hence, the arrival of North American Indian Immigrants to the borderlands brought out a paradox. Even though they were known as Civilized Tribes in the U.S., most northern Mexicans, who knew only “bárbaros,” watched their arrival with great apprehension. Even the Mexican commanders of the frontier responsible for the project evinced a sort of ambiguity. When they officially welcomed the Tribus Emigradas to Mexico as frontier guardians, they discovered that these Indians did not fit easily into the category of either bárbaro or civilizado. To wit, these tribesmen’s reputation as warriors largely rested on their familiarity with other Indians; but this familiarity in turn rested upon decades of diplomacy with the Comanches, who were the mortal enemies of the norteños. And norteños had difficulty looking past the basic fact that these migrants maintained their Indian identities even in Mexico. No matter how loyal they proved themselves, their Indian identity continued to be an impediment to their transformation into de- ethnicized Mexican vecinos. There would be no “frontier of inclusion” at this far northern locale for Indians who the Mexican state brought into its fold.

Nor did the Immigrant Tribesmen and women do themselves any favors by raiding across borders in Nuevo León and Texas. These raids further threatened the sovereignty of the frontier and turned the vecinos and many officials off to the entire project. By the time of the Callahan

Raid and the Battle of Rio Escondido in 1855, they had so alienated themselves from the vecinos

106 Manuel G. Bejan, Monterrey, al Sor. Alcalde del Saltillo, December 12, 1860, 34 C103/1 E 118, AMS; Commander del Canton de Rio Grande to Vidaurri, May 24, 1861, f. 87, LE 1596 SRE.

186 that Vidaurri had to scuttle the entire project. Raiding, mounting squabbles between vecinos and

Indians, unfettered mobility, and the never-ending struggle between borderlanders over resources, demonstrated that the project did not help stabilize the frontier. Rather, it further destabilized it.

The greatest cause of insecurity, however, was the impoverishment of the frontier. Scarce resources had led to struggles of every sort between vecinos and Indians, increased raiding across borders, and crime amongst neighbors. Thus, when the United States Indian Bureau promised to deliver the resources that Mexico simply could not afford, the Immigrant Tribes elected to return to the other side of the border. The Indian Agency stood to gain from this arrangement. The extent of Seminole raiding in Texas was likely exaggerated, but bringing them back to Indian

Territory would quiet the Texans’ complaints. It dramatically reduced the Indians options, however. They would no longer be able to renegotiate terms with U.S. Indian Agents from the safety of Coahuila. As people-in between, the Indians had historically kept their options open in search of the best deal for themselves. In Mexico, the Indians had been free to maintain their identity, liberty, and mobility to a much greater degree than in the United States—if for no other reason than because it was impossible to enforce checks on their movement. But what good was freedom if also meant poverty and insecurity?

187 Chapter 5

“A Pretty Respectable African Colony” Violence in the borderlands of Slavery and Freedom

In February of 1850, four soldiers went AWOL from Fort Duncan to speculate in runaway slaves. They had recently learned that a runaway had taken up shelter on a local ranch named

Sanguijuela, just outside of Guerrero, and they left their posts to cross the river and find him.

Once they reached their destination with the help of a couple of Mexican guides, they held the inhabitants of the ranch hostage and demanded that they turn over the African American who worked there. They abducted the black man, but the violence did not stop after they had achieved this end. The soldiers also badly beat Ramón Gonzales, the elderly man who owned the ranch.

Gonzales’ son and wife came in for similar treatment, suffering mightily from the physical blows that the soldiers dealt to them before retreating to the other side of the river.1

The Mexican minister plenipotentiary, Luís de las Rosas, investigated this outrageous attack, but he found that the victims could get no reprieve from the U.S. Department of State. De las Rosas protested that this African American who had been illegally re-enslaved had “fled from slavery in search of the liberty that the Mexican laws offered,” but as was so often case, raiders from the other side of the river had failed to respect the difference in Mexican law.2 In the end, the Mexican authorities could only investigate the conspiracy on their own side of the river. They exercised the right to punish their own citizens, however, and they imprisoned one of the

Mexicans who had led the soldiers to the ranch for violating the anti-slavery laws of 1837 and

1 De las Rosas to John M. Clayton, March, 1850, f. 43, L32 E2, AEMEUA SRE. 2 De las Rosas to Minister of Foreign Relations, March 20, 1850, f. 42, L28 E3, AEMEUA SRE.

188 1846. But they had no diplomatic channels through which to deal with the North American soldiers once they had escaped to the other side.3

This event did not catch the Mexicans completely off guard. In investigating the failure of the government to secure its own inhabitants, de las Rosas learned that a small force of vecinos drawn from the nearby villages had pursued the raiders alongside a few military colonists as they withdrew towards the river. Even though this force had failed to reach the raiders, the alcalde of

Guerrero expressed his sanguine hope that the next time such a raid occurred, they would be able to repel “force with equal force.”4 Henceforth, duty to the nation and the defense of runaway slaves’ liberty would become inextricably tied together in the Coahuiltecan frontier. In a coupling that must be considered more coincidental than kismet, the liberty of runaways and

Mexicanidad (“Mexican-ness”) would become intertwined in the borderlands. Mexicans and runaway slaves at this far corner of the frontier shared a common understanding of the border.

Hence, in that years that followed, Texan and Mexican volunteers would meet each other time and again on the field of battle over the issue of runaway slaves. In the absence of more regular diplomatic options, the two sides violently contested the border’s meaning as a line of liberty.

It was not simple altruism that directed the actions of the nearby vecindario and officials, however. In cases like the slave raid on Sanguijuela, Mexican vecinos suffered collateral damage.

Indeed, the violence endemic to the relationship between slave and master spread beyond West

Texas and had the capacity to cross borders. Hence, raids made by Texan slaveholders to Mexico involved Mexicans on the other side of the border in a violent war that was not of their own

3 Francisco Barela, Rio Grande, to Maldonado, January 24, 1850 (copy January 28, 1850), Ficha 392 C5 F2 E16 5F, FCMO AGEC; Ibid, Francisco Barela, Guerrero, to Maldonado January 26, 1850 (copy January 28, 1850), Ficha 392 C5 F2 E16 5F, FCMO AGEC. 4 Lauana to the Minister Plenipotentiary of México in Washington, February 12, 1850, fs. 15-16, L28 E3, AEMEUA SRE; Ibid, Government of the state of Coahuila, Santiago Rodriguez to the Minister of Foreign Relations, January 31, 1850 (copy), fs. 15-16, L28 E3, AEMEUA SRE; Jose María de la Garza, Nava, al Ayuntamiento de Guerrero, January 16, 1850, C1 F9 E2 1F, FSXIX AGEC; Jose María de la Garza, Nava, to Ayuntamiento de Guerrero, February 8, 1850, C1 F9 E2 1F, FSXIX AGEC.

189 making. And as long as the border functioned as an escape hatch for runaways, the violence surrounding this issue would continue.

Violence directed towards securing the border on slaveholders’ terms escalated as a direct result of new migrations to West Texas. In the 1840s and 1850s, a large number of runaway slaves and Black Indians gravitated towards the Coahuiltecan frontier, causing no end of problems to frontier officials on either side of the line. Blacks found in Coahuila the sort of autonomy they had dreamed of, and their population grew accordingly. But nipping at their heels came the raiders whom slaveholders deputized to recapture runaways. As we will see below, pleas made by Mexican diplomats to the federal government of the United States did little to stop these illegal raids. In fact, local governments on the U.S. side of the border more often than not encouraged raids, whether tacitly or outright. The raiders mentioned above, for instance, were regular soldiers stationed at Fort Duncan who completely escaped punishment for their crimes.

The result of official negligence, vigilantes and officials from Texas became foot soldiers in an undeclared war—a “guerra sorda”—between Texas and Mexico driven by runaway slaves.

With diplomatic channels closed and slave hunters active in the borderlands, Mexican vecinos in the North became involved in this “guerra sorda”—despite the fact that they did not particularly appreciate the presence of the black fugitives. But they dealt with the Texas raiders out of a patriotic duty and on the only terms available to them: they resolved to meet “force with force.” As a result large communities of volunteers organized on both sides of the border—in

Texas to cross over illegally, and in Coahuila to cease such raids and dole out pain to filibusterers. In the process Mexicans gained a sense of nationalism and masculine pride born at least partly—and rather ironically as we shall see—out of the defense of runaway slaves. Thus, in a belated attempt to build the nation in the absence of the state, militias began to rise “up for

190 the defense of the country” and to “punish the arrogance of the Texan[s]” who crossed the border with impunity. It was perhaps only a mere coincidence that so many vecinos would “fly to their arms and horses” for the sake of runaway slaves.5

Ultimately this battle would threaten to consume the Mexican frontier. As a result, the dedication of frontier authorities to the principal of liberty for African Americans would diminish. Warfare as a proxy for diplomacy threatened the very sovereignty of Mexico over its frontier. But for a short time, the martial culture of manly violence that increasingly characterized the lives of norteños was directed towards the defense of liberty.

Afronorteamericanos in Coahuila

Runaway slaves and fugitive Black Indians took advantage of the liberty offered by

Mexican law to make lives for themselves in Coahuila. The conditions they found in that western

Mexican state proved favorable and attracted many African Americans from Texas and Black

Indians over the course of the 1840s and 1850s. In fact, the experiences they had there differed markedly from those of African Americans in Tamaulipas. For one thing, there was already an autonomous maroon colony established in Coahuila by the 1840s around which they could build their lives. Hence, the autonomy they found in Coahuila would come to define the terms of liberty that runaways to this corner of the frontier sought. But, as in Tamaulipas, runaways found limits placed on their liberty. They continued to face re-enslavement as a result of the aggression of Texas slave hunters and the weakness and complicity of Mexican officials and vecinos alike.

Nevertheless, those who inhabited the frontier could practice self-subsistence agriculture, likely supplemented by the men’s wage work and the women’s selling of surplus produce. In general,

5 Alcalde Sabinas Hidalgo to governor Nuevo León y Coahuila, March 23, 1859, C135, Militares AGENL.

191 they could live the independent lives categorically denied to them in Texas and Indian Territory.

In fact, so greatly did they value their independence and autonomy that they slowly turned away from their Mexican protectors—as well as the duties they had pledged to the state.

1836 is a seminal year in the history of runaway slaves to Mexico. Before the events of that tumultuous year, slaves in Texas really had no place to run to. For one thing, the status of slavery in Mexico remained something of an open question as long as Austin’s colony could legally exist under that country’s jurisdiction in Mexican Texas. Meanwhile, the Indians who inhabited Texas were nomadic and had little use for sedentary farmers. Thus, running away to the wilderness or the nearby tribes was not a particularly attractive option for the enslaved in

Texas.6 After Texan secession, conditions changed. Runaway slaves began to join the ranks of the Immigrant Tribes passing through the Republic of Texas en route to Mexico.

The Cherokee Ujiya, a wanderer of sorts, spotted what must have been the earliest

Maroon colony in Coahuila in 1842. Located just seven miles past “San Cranto” [sic: San

Fernando], it was comprised of African Americans who had likely accompanied the Mexican

Cherokees when they first arrived four years earlier. Ujiya found that two or three of the African

Americans he encountered there could even speak the Cherokee language, evidence of just how closely the runaway slaves’ fortunes were tied up with those of the Immigrant Tribes in the

West.7

Runaway slaves joined other convoys of Immigrant Tribes passing through Texas.

Coyote, the captain of a large contingent of Caddoes, was another Texas Indian crossing the borderlands in search of better options for his people after San Jacinto. He travelled with his tribe

6 Sean M. Kelley, Los Brazos de Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821-1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 98-101. 7 From the Cherokee Advocate, June 26, 1845 reprinted in Chronicles of Oklahoma, 12: 1 (1934): 36-41 (http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v012/v012p025.html) accessed September 11, 2010.

192 to Coahuila in 1841 to join the Mexican army there and he set up his camp along the confluence of the Sabinas and Canete Rivers. He also brought with him a runaway slave whom he had encountered near the headwaters of the Frio River and who was “in search of a country where he could acquire liberty.” Coyote turned the young African American man over to the authorities in

Monclova who employed him, likely on public works, while they resolved what to do with him.8

It is doubtful that they ever returned the black man to the Texans, but the Mexican commanders would only strengthen their resolve to protect runaways in the years to come.

Runaways continued to travel along the routes mobilized by Immigrant Tribes into

Mexico in search of liberty during the years of internecine warfare between Mexico and the short-lived Republic of Texas, but they took to these roads at no small personal risk. In the 1840s the area between San Antonio and Monclova consisted of a vast semi-desert redoubt for the

Comanches. Plains Raiders owned the territory to the west of the Santa Rosa Mountains and they made frequent incursions into the area east of it. Further north, in Texas, Comanches were still the uncontested masters of the western plains. Thus, a nebulously-defined borderlands between

Texas, Coahuila, and Comanchería sat right in the middle of the former Mexican state of Tejas y

Coahuila and along the route to freedom in Coahuila. Only an occasional desert oasis, a handful of small villages, and a rare spring interrupted the desolation of this area that the Comanches had turned into a tributary of their great empire.9

The desolation of this territory likely discouraged many runaway slaves from making the trip, as parties of runaway slaves sometimes lost their way within this vast territory. On one particularly grizzly occasion, after becoming disoriented in the sterile plains west of San Antonio,

8 Gaceta del Gobierno de Tamaulipas, June 26, 1841 (Rafael de la Fuente to governor of department Monclova, May 5, 1841) [In Archivo Histórico Matamoros, Hemeroteca Caja 1]. 9 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 200-201.

193 a convoy of runaways even resorted to cannibalism.10 And even as Comanche power waned in the 1850s, there were still instances of African Americans being taken captive by that tribe.11

The Comanches remained great adversaries to the runaways who travelled west along the

Presidio road for years to come, especially after Coacoochee founded his military colony in 1850.

The Comanches had stepped up their attacks on runaway parties during these years in a concerted effort to slow the colony’s growth, and anyone who travelled these roads did so at their own peril.12 Nevertheless, many runaway slaves still made the trip and got away safely.

The African Americans who took this route to freedom were a self-selected group. For one thing, they were a good deal more comfortable with Natives after having successfully navigated the western plains. They were also more familiar with frontier ways than their enslaved peers from the Brazos River Valley or East Texas. Runaway slaves to Coahuila came from West Texas, especially the Colorado River Valley and Bexar County—which at the time constituted an enormous region of Texas west of the San Antonio River and reaching all the way to the Paso de Águila.13 Evidence of this origin stems from the fact that slaveholders established around the San Antonio, Blanco, and San Marcos Rivers complained the loudest about runaways to Coahuila.

The freedom offered by Mexico caused the limited number of slaveholders in this region no end of woes and, as a result, they enacted an especially draconian series of slave ordinances in the 1850s. Included among the ordinances in San Antonio were the injunctions that no slaves

10 Ronnie C. Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” The Journal of Negro History 57:1 (January, 1972): 3. 11 Texas Ranger, 1850, Month and day missing; Tyler, 3. 12 Randolph B. Marcy, Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border (J. B. Lippincot Company, Philadelphia and New York, 1963 [1866]), 14-15. 13 Jesse Sumpter, Paso de Águila, A Chronicle of Frontier Days on the Texas Borders as recorded in the Memoirs of Jesse Sumpter, ed. Ben E. Pingenot (Austin: The Encino Press, 1969), 22.

194 could gather together in groups, and they had a curfew imposed on them.14 Further, many of the filibustering expeditions into Mexico—including the Callahan Expedition of 1855—were comprised of men from the westernmost counties of Texas. With its proximity to the border, large peon population, and the presence of socialistic Central European immigrants nearby, San

Antonio and its environs were perhaps the least secure area for slavery in the state of Texas.

Slaveholders there complained loudly and frequently about this fact, resolving to do something about it even in the absence of an extradition treaty.15

But the largest numbers of black migrants to Coahuila were free AfroIndians from the

Indian Territory north of the Red River. In the 1840s, it was not a widely known fact that a large number of free blacks inhabited U.S. Indian Territory. Even the Seminole Agent Robert Duval mistook the free blacks there for slaves of the Seminoles. And the Creeks, who dominated the

Indian Territory, did not respect their freedom.16 Nevertheless, the majority of free blacks in

Indian Territory belonged to the Seminole tribe and had a special history, having earned their freedom as maroons in Florida fighting in the Second Seminole War of 1835-1842. At the conclusion of the war, the U.S government had relocated some of the maroons to Indian

Territory alongside their Seminole allies. Henceforth, they would be known to U.S. history as the

Black Seminoles and, later, the Seminole Negro Scouts (or Buffalo Soldiers.) Mexican officials, meanwhile, had observed their campaigns in Florida from a distance, and they would not forget

14 San Antonio Daily Ledger, August 30, 1860; Larry P. Knight, “Defending the Unnecessary: Slavery in San Antonio in the 1850s” Journal of South Texas History 15 (Spring, 2002): 57-72. 15 Petition to S.A. Maverick and the members of Bexar Delegation, December 20, 1851, Box 100-367, TSA. 16 Robert Duval to Peter Bell, October 20, 1850, Vol. 1 2R291, 1846-1850, Correspondence Concerning the Texas Rangers, WPW CAH; Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press), 61-62.

195 the part they had played alongside the Seminoles in holding off the United State’s occupation of

Florida.17

Relocated to the Indian Territory after the Florida wars, the Black Seminoles lived in constant insecurity alongside the slaves of the Creeks. The U.S. Indian Bureau refused to recognize their membership in the Seminole nation. As a result, they were particularly receptive to Coacoochee’s plans to found a colony independent of both the United States and the Creeks in

Coahuila, where, as we have seen, the Mexican commanders of the frontier eagerly petitioned for their settlement. They migrated alongside the great chief in the summer of 1850 and, when they arrived in Mexico, they earned yet one more name to describe their group: Los Mascogos. This name likely derived from a Castillian corruption of the word Muscogee, but this was an appropriate name for the group as it connoted their facility with the Creek and Seminoles’ language. Already familiar with English from their years as slaves in Georgia in addition to

Muscogee, they likely picked up Spanish much quicker than any of the other migrants to Mexico.

It was not just Black Seminoles who would become Mascogos in Coahuila, however.

Alongside the Black Seminoles who left Indian Territory for Coahuila there were probably an even larger number of escaped Creek slaves. Although not many scholars have taken note of it, mixing between free Black Seminoles and Creek slaves undoubtedly occurred in the Indian

Territory during the 1840s, and they probably took a large group of Creek slaves when they left for Coahuila.18 Evidence of this hypothesis stems from the fact that large parties of Creek men, reported to number up to four or five hundred, attacked Coacoochee’s convoy to Mexico on at

17 Francisco Pizarro Martínez, Mexican Consul in New Orleans to Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, March 24, 1836, fs. 57-59, L26 E12, AEMEUA SRE; Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977); Mulroy, 6-35. 18 Antonio Juáregui, Mumilique, to Mariano Arista, Dec. 27, 1850, fs. 1036-1037, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC; Arista, Mexico City, to Juáregui, December 26, 1850 [copy], Ficha 1134 C10 F8 E112 1F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, Jan. 24, 1851, fs. 979-982, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27, FCMO AGEC.

196 least one occasion in order to capture the blacks who accompanied him.19 Despite these attacks the blacks made it to the border and, once they crossed over, they lived together and melded into one colony. But there were still indications of the diverse origins of the group. For one thing,

Mexican frontier officials sometimes referred to the blacks as “Negros” (blacks) in their documents rather than Mascogos, a description that reveals that even they were not entirely sure of the migrants’ ethnicity. Hence, Mascogo was, at least at first, an inclusive identity for African descendants in Coahuila.

Soon the Mexican authorities considered all of the black immigrants in Coahuila as

Mascogos—and they granted them the same privileges as all the other Immigrant Tribesmen and women. Thus, the Black Seminoles and the runaway slaves who joined them were reborn with a new ethnic identity, and one that guaranteed their freedom. This may have been a top-down attempt on the part of the Mexican officials to engineer an identity for the black newcomers, but it was a mutually beneficial ploy. It made them easier to organize and attached their statuses as freemen and women to their newly devised ethnicity. Indeed, the Sub-Inspector of the frontier,

Manuel Maldonado, was quick to clarify to the Immigrant tribes (and any North Americans who might have been watching) that the Mascogos and other Africans travelling with the Immigrant

Tribes were all “free blacks.” Since all immigrants were now subject to a law passed in 1848 that absolutely forbade chattel slavery in any new Mexican colonies, all blacks in that country were free by virtue of setting foot on Mexican soil.20

In the months to come, even more African Americans and Black Indians would arrive in

Coahuila and become Mascogos, many of whom had also probably been former Creek slaves. In

19 Juáregui, Mumilque, to Arista, Dec. 27, 1850, fs. 1036-1037, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC; Texas Ranger, date missing, 1850; Texian Advocate, Victoria, November 7, 1850. 20 Contract signed by Maldonado, San Fernando, July 24, 1850, f. 849, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC; Decree, Minister of War, Mexico City, Oct. 17, 1850 (copy), Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27, fs. 927-928, FCMO AGEC.

197 the summer of 1850, Coacoochee transported somewhere around sixty blacks into Coahuila from

Indian Territory. Then, in September and October somewhere between 150 and 200 blacks left

Indian Territory when Coacoochee made his second journey. In December, he conducted still more African Americans and Black Indians to Mexico. So great did the number of blacks crossing into Mexico become that the Seminole Agent, Robert Duval, deputized the commander at Fort Duncan to detain forcibly all people of African descent who approached this corner of the frontier. Further, he offered a reward of fifty dollars per head for any black man or woman

(whether free or not) that bounty hunters captured. This reward deeply implicated the federal government in bounty hunting fugitive slaves; it also resulted in the capture of around sixty

African Americans by Texans and Creeks. Among those runaways who Duval hoped to capture was one man who had once belonged to his Creek brother-in-law.21

Once the majority of runaways and Black Indians escaped to Mexico safely, they adapted to life in Mexico better than their Seminole and Kickapoo companions. Almost immediately the community pressured the authorities for a piece of land so that they could begin subsistence farming and get on with building their independent lives. For their part, the commanders were enthusiastic about the request for land—even if it would take them almost two years to grant it.

Meanwhile, the Mascogos were forced to depend on the caprice of the commanders as they waited for plots.22 Nevertheless, the blacks had been exposed to European land practices and animal husbandry during their tenure as slaves, whether in Georgia or the Indian Territory, and the Mexican officials were impressed with their aptitude for agriculture.

21 Duval to Bell, governor of Texas, October, 20, 1850, Vol. 1, 2R291 1846-1850, Correspondence Regarding Texas Rangers, WPW CAH; Texas Ranger, 1850, no month or day; La Grange Texas Monument, December 4, 1850; Victoria Texas Advocate, November 7, 1850. 22 Maldonado to Juáregui, Nov. 20, 1850, Ficha 825, C8 F2 E27 F138, fs. 1028-1029, FCMO AGEC.

198 When they finally received Nacimiento alongside the other Immigrant Tribes in 1852, they split their colony off from the others, founding Nacimiento de los Negros a couple of miles from the Seminole settlement. By all accounts they threw themselves immediately into work once they received their land, happy to have at last found independence. They also reached out into the larger community to hire out their labor, and to supplement their village income at

Nacimiento de los Negros. In the years to come, they could be found laboring at a number of ranches and haciendas in Coahuila, including Evaristo Madero’s.23 Thus, not unlike peasants in central Mexico, the blacks supplemented their village life and harvests with sojourns to work at neighboring haciendas. Meanwhile, they retained a largely autonomous existence and a real place of refuge in their community at Nacimiento de los Negros as semi-peasants. Their lives became increasingly independent of the other Immigrant Tribes.

But if they integrated their labor into larger society to a more significant degree than the

Seminoles did, just as the commanders had hoped, they were not so quick to lend their services to the state as warriors. The Mascogos were especially interested in farming their own plots of land, and as the decade progressed it would be increasingly difficult to convince them to leave their farms on military campaigns.24 Besides the fact that they had a couple of very bad experiences while on campaign (discussed below), there was another reason they were hesitant to leave. Black men worked their fields alongside the women, and when duty called at harvest time, they were reluctant to leave their crops. Thus, unlike the Seminole men who maintained a good deal of their subsistence through hunting, the blacks were likely not so available to make war

23 Pablo Espinosa to sr. alcalde primero de la villa de Guerrero, May 27, 1859, C3 F4 E7 F1, FSXIX AGEC; Pablo Espinosa to sr. alcalde primero de la villa de Guerrero, May 29, 1859, C3 F4 E9 1F, FSXIX AGEC; Pablo Espinosa Morelos, to alcalde de la Villa de Guerrero, September 12, 1859, C4 F1 E13 1F, FSXIX AGEC. 24 Alcalde de Músquiz to Secretary of the Governor, September 6, 1857 [Copy 1873], f. 20, LE 1596 SRE.

199 against the Plains Raiders. If the men left too long on campaign, their harvests diminished and their families suffered.

Nevertheless, the Mascogos earned an outstanding reputation as farmers and the authorities came to increasingly rely on them to oversee agricultural enterprises at Nacimiento.

When water troubles arose between the Seminoles and Mascogos in the late 1850s, for instance, the authorities chose a Mascogo named Felipe to adjudicate between the two tribes as he was

“well-suited to the practice of agriculture.” Despite great protest on the part of the Seminoles, the

Mascogos were simply more familiar with the irrigation needs of the holdings at Hacienda de

Nacimiento—familiar enough, in fact, that they had begun pilfering from the Seminole’s reservoir. Adding insult to injury, the Seminoles did not have an equal say in issues that arose between the tribes since the Mexicans better respected the Mascogos as farmers. Further, more blacks could speak Spanish than the Seminoles, who often relied on black translators to make their needs known to the authorities.25

The Mascogos took on the trappings of Hispanic civilization more willingly than their

Seminole and Kickapoo counterparts in other ways as well. They were far keener than their

Seminole or Kickapoo neighbors to embrace Catholicism. They became good Catholics, learned

Spanish, took up Iberian surnames, received the Catechism, and tended dutifully to the spiritual education of their children. Both the Mascogos and the Seminoles sent their youth between the ages of six and sixteen to receive a spiritual education from the schoolmaster at Nacimiento. But the Mascogos always seemed to embrace their spiritual tutorship more fully, and as of 1856, eighteen Mascogo girls and twenty-three boys had received the articles of faith. So impressive was their progress that the schoolmaster, Juan Vidaurri, wrote that the Mascogo children were

25 Alcalde Músquiz to Felipe the Mascogo, July 27, 1857 [1873], fs. 19020, LE 1596 SRE.

200 consistent, docile, and concentrated well on their studies.26 Vidaurri was certain that the 43

Mascogo children under his tutelage in April of 1856 showed the “patience and leniency” necessary in a “barbarous tribe” if they were to be instructed in the tenets of Catholicism and

Hispanic civilization.27 The Mascogo leadership also encouraged Catholicism and compradazgo

(Godparents) in what was probably an effort to tie their colony more closely to the frontier authorities. That same year, 1856, the Mascogo leader John Horse underwent a spiritual conversion. After choosing schoolmaster Vidaurri as his Padrino he became known henceforth as Juan de Santos Dios Vidaurri. 28

Over the course of the decade, the black colony grew impressively. They would greatly outnumber the Seminoles by 1858 (another point of contention), after a small pox epidemic devastated the Indian colony and carried away the Seminole leadership. Further, Nacimiento de los Negros continued to attract runaways and other free blacks from Texas and Indian Territory throughout the 1850s. The Mascogos seem to have had an open policy with regards to granting asylum to runaway slaves.

Despite their embrace of Hispanic ways, however, trouble began to brew between the

Mascogos and the authorities when they stopped leaving willingly on military campaigns in the late 1850s.29 The commanders had explicitly stipulated that Mascogos lend military service in exchange for their settlement in Mexico; but the Mascogos began to neglect their military duties following their participation in a particularly long campaign in early 1856. During this campaign the wives and families left behind at Nacimiento suffered keenly. They were unable to complete the farmwork on their own and had yet to receive their sons and husbands’ salaries. Finally, the

26 Juan Francisco Váldes, Hacienda de Nacimiento, July 1, 1856, C121, Militares AGENL. 27 Juan N. Vidaurri, Nacimiento, to governor of Nuevo León y Coahuila, April 30, 1856, C121, Militares AGENL. 28 El Republicano (Mexico City), June 14, 1856. On John Horse: Francisco Treviño, Parras, to Vidaurri, June 1, 1856, C124, Militares AGENL. 29 Alcalde de Músquiz to Secretary of the Governor, September 6, 1857 [Copy 1873], f. 20, LE1596 SRE.

201 mother of a Mascogo soldier named Juan Garza travelled to Parras to complain to General

Francisco Treviño about the military assignment. Ostensibly, she had come to take Garza’s wife—likely a Mexicana that Garza had met while stationed in Parras—back to Santa Rosa to join the rest of the family in their labors. While in that city, however, she also visited Treviño to ask for her son’s release, complaining that he was not even capable of carrying arms because of his youth (although he was apparently old enough to marry). Treviño agreed, remarking that

Garza was indeed of a tender young age, and he commenced a review of the rest of the

Mascogos under arms. Ultimately, Treviño decided to release the other thirteen Mascogos and pay them their full salaries, minus the cost of the food they consumed while on campaign in the desert. None of the Mascogos had yet received their entire payment; and what they had received had been given to them in very small parts. Treviño admitted the paltry sum contributed little to the maintenance of their families.30

Even these small salaries could be paid only after Treviño had made a special entreaty to his boss, Santiago Vidaurri, recommending full payment for the Mascogos. Despite the worsening alcoholism of John Horse, the Mascogos had done well on a campaign against the

Comanches that had seen the Mexican companies in the expedition mutiny. But resources meant to fund the military services of the recently united states of Coahuila y Nuevo León were low throughout the entire 1850s. The War of Reform and Vidaurri’s Liberal revolution in the

North—as well as the continuing war against the Comanches being waged at the frontier of

Coahuila and Chihuahua—consumed whatever resources were available in state coffers. Further, the only source of real revenue for the state was the customs house at Piedras Negras, a city whose commerce was comprised in no small part of illegal trade.31 Treviño did appreciate the

30 Francisco Treviño, Parras, to Vidaurri, June 4, 1856, C124, Militares AGENL. 31 Ibid.

202 loyalty of the Mascogos, however, and divided the animals taken from the Indians in the Laguna de Jaco amongst the men who had accompanied him. He noted however that the resources of the frontier became scarcer with each passing day, and that it was very difficult to pay the soldiers what they were owed.32

Unlike the Immigrant Tribes, it was not just dearth and lack of resources that caused the

Mascogo warriors to rethink their commitment to the Mexican state. It was also the fact that they could not entirely trust the authorities to guarantee their freedom. As cash-strapped vecinos, commanders, and officials scrambled wherever they could to find ready money, the African

Americans often found themselves in danger of being re-enslaved by their erstwhile allies. Even so close a friend to the runaway blacks as Coacoochee was not above speculating in slaves on occasion. One of the free blacks who immigrated to Coahuila alongside Coacoochee made an egregious complaint against the chief in 1853. The African American man, known simply as

Cofé (Cuffy), had left his family behind in Santa Rosa to travel alongside Coacoochee as his interpreter in 1852. Once they crossed over to Eagle Pass, however, the Seminole chief sold the

African American to a white man for 80 pesos. After paying Coacoochee, Cofé’s captor bound him and carried him off to San Antonio. Fortunately for Cofé, a few months later he managed to escape slavery in San Antonio and rejoin his family in Santa Rosa. Once back to safety, he made a formal complaint to the military juzgado (tribunal) against Coacoochee, and said that he had seen another black man in San Antonio whom the chief had sold to the whites.33 Such indiscretions on the part of Coacoochee would become part of Mascogo folklore. Years later

32 Treviño, Santa Rosa, to Vidaurri, July 22, 1856, C123, Militares AGENL. 33 Maldonado, Moral, to Juáregui, June 21, 1853, Ficha 2213 C21 F14 E123 8F, FCMO AGEC.

203 they would still tell stories about Coacoochee trying to trade the blacks who travelled with him to

Texas for whisky.34 Such treatment did little to ingratiate them to their Seminole neighbors.

It turns out that the military commanders in Coahuila had also threatened to sell the blacks to the Texans on at least one occasion. During the underfunded military campaign of early

1856, the Mascogo force wound up in a tight spot once they reached the desert under the subordinate captains José María Chisman and Tomás Santa Cruz. Separated from the main force under Francisco Treviño, the captains complained that Treviño had failed to provision them adequately and initiated a revolt against him. The Mascogos, however, refused to follow Captain

Chisman in his revolt, standing by their principal to fight only Indians and not other Mexicans.

John Horse informed Chisman—rather calmly it would seem—that his fate was tied to Treviño’s and he would remain loyal to the command. Chisman then made the ultimate threat against John

Horse: he threatened to expel the blacks who did not second his mutiny from Mexican territory.

The revolting captains would turn the blacks over to the authorities in Texas if they continued to support the “tyrannical government” of Treviño and Vidaurri.35

After this dire warning, the twenty-two Mexicans serving under Chisman and Santa Cruz left the Mascogos in the desert to fend for themselves. The captains’ revolt was not ultimately successful, but neither was it punished. The tribunal that investigated the revolt acquitted the insurgents of all charges. Santiago Vidaurri, commander in chief of the Northern presidial colonies and army, found that Treviño had, in fact, been very poorly provisioned for such a long expedition out into the desert and the insubordination of the officers had been justified on these grounds. Their threats against the Mascogos, although investigated by the tribunal, did not

34 Mulroy, 76. 35 Packet: Plaza de Monterrey, Causa instruida contra los capitanes de caballeria D. Tomás Santa Cruz y Don Jesús María Chisman, fs. 8-9, April 18, 1856, C121, Militares AGENL.

204 ultimately warrant any punishment.36 Perhaps there was no need to grandstand for the rights of blacks and their “promised liberty” when there were no Texans watching. In any case, this was the last expedition the Mascogos would undertake willingly for some time. Consequently,

Vidaurri showed a marked preference for Seminole and Caddo immigrants over blacks in the years to come.37

Further complicating matters, the African Americans runaways who continued streaming into Coahuila to live alongside the Mascogos were a discreet and troublesome group. They were not the most peaceable of migrants and they do not seem to have been absorbed fully into the colony either. They earned a special reputation for recklessness, robbery, and vagabondage since they most likely needed to participate in both the licit and illicit economies of the borderlands to scrape by; there were well-known horse thieves among the blacks; there were also well-known smugglers. Unless they belonged to the original group who migrated to Mexico, they were not entitled to any special rights or any grants from the Mexican authorities; and the Mascogos of

Florida lineage may not have shared any of their hard-earned land titles, tools, seed, and water rights with wandering runaways.38 These supplies were in short demand on the frontier anyways, and the Mascogos kept up a constant volley of requests to Juáregui and the governor just to satisfy their own tribe’s needs. Thus, the runaway slaves who joined the colony later stood somewhat apart from the original migrants—and they became a point of contention between the

Mascogos, the authorities, and neighboring vecinos.

As a result, the blacks in Coahuila did all sorts of work to get by. They sometimes worked on ranches, and even entered into sharecropping agreements with Mexican rancheros and

36 Packet: Plaza de Monterrey, Causa instruida contra los capitanes de caballeria D. Tomás Santa Cruz y Don Jesús María Chisman, f. 9, April 19, 1856, C121, Militares AGENL. 37 Vidaurri to Minister of development, colonization, industry and commerce, September 14, 1856, f. 108, LE 1596 SRE. 38 I owe this insight to a personal conversation with Paulina del Moral.

205 hacendados. But their involvement in the informal economy was most well known.39 Some blacks, especially those around the notorious rustler known as Francisco, dabbled in cattle theft.

Others worked alongside Mestizo rustlers. The authorities discovered one black man in 1852 working with the Mexican rustler Santiago Perales out of Morelos and they sent him along to stand before a juzgado.40 A few years later, the blacks earned the special indignation of the governor himself. Vidaurri was convinced that they were the ones responsible for a spate of recent thefts, and in 1856 he reprimanded the Mascogos for not controlling the runaway slaves who had joined them at Nacimiento de los Negros.41

The errancy of some of the blacks on the frontier reflected poorly on the Mascogos as a whole. Most often, the Mexican officials conflated the runaway slaves and the Mascogos, referring to the whole group as “negros.” Thus, the reputation of the whole group suffered due to the indiscretions of some of its members. Surely the blacks retained distinctions among themselves based upon farming ability, primary language, and facility with arms, but the conflation together that they experienced at the hands of clumsy Mexican bureaucrats probably had an effect. The following generation of Mascogos would differ markedly from their parents, and the majority would speak no language but English, revealing a remarkable ethnic makeover of the “tribe.”42

They were not the most welcome of migrants to Mexico. The vecinos and authorities suspected that the blacks stole and butchered animals from the neighboring ranches. In 1857, several “Mascogos” could be found languishing in the Monclova jail. Overall the reputation of

39 Pablo Espinosa to Alcalde de la Villa de Guerrero, April 18, 1859, C2 F10 E2 F1, FSXIX AGEC; Pablo Espinosa to the alcalde de la Villa de Guerrero, Morelos, May 27, 1859, C3 F4 E7 F1, FSXIX AGEC. 40 AGEC FCMO Ficha 1808 C17 F6 E52 3F Arredondo, Piedras Negras, to Juáregui, June 13, 1852. 41 Mulroy, 82. 42 An 1892 census of the Macogos conducted by the Secretaría de Fomento found that most Mascogos could only speak English and halting Spanish. Further, most were Baptists and had lost the “primitive” aspects of their culture: Gilberto Crespo y Martínez to Secretaría de Relaciones, February 29, 1892, fs. 32-33, SRE 44.12.60.

206 all blacks in Coahuila soured among the Mexicans during the 1850s. Some authorities were convinced that the blacks wanted a country where their “liberty was absolute.”43 Then, in 1858, the African Americans were involved in a particularly outrageous attack. A party comprised of thirty blacks and Indians attacked the mixed-race North American doctor Thomas Thompson after he encountered Dolores García from Rancho de Golondrinas in the company of several vaqueros. Thompson, who was likely familiar to the blacks and the target of the attack, barely escaped with his life. García did not have the same luck and died from the ambush. 44

Thus, as problematic as the Seminoles were in Coahuila, the Mascogos were even more troublesome. Their colony also fell within the crosshairs of Texas filibusters, which did little to improve their quickly-deteriorating situation. They were becoming increasingly burdensome to their Mexican protectors. Mexican bureaucrats with ties to the central governments liked to grandstand for their rights. This helped distinguish them from the Yankee imperialists to the

North. But once their protection became impractical it quickly dissipated.

Slave Hunters

The same geography that eased the runaways’ escape was the greatest problem that Texas slaveholders faced. A porous border existing arbitrarily at the territorial limits of slave country would always threaten their institution from the margins. They tried their best to keep their enslaved laborers in place, but the resources simply did not exist for either local or federal governments to lend them much assistance; and runaway slaves could count on the fact that the

43 SAlcalde de Músquiz to Secretary of the governor, September 6, 1857, September 18, and September 28, 1857 [Copy 1873], fs. 19-20, LE 1596 SRE. 44 Filiaciones de los Estrangeros, Monterrey, February 5, 1854, f. 19, Vol. 145, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN; Filiaciones, Monterrey, March 3, 1850, Vol. 86 f. 56, Monterrey, March 3, 1850, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN; Filiaciones, Monterrey, January 28 1855, f. 335, Vol. 162, Archivo Cartas de Seguridad, AGN. Thomas’ skin color is listed alternately as “red” or “trigueño.”

207 U.S. government did not have the means to beef up security along the frontier at the behest of slaveholders. Filibusterers lit upon their own solution to the problem, but further annexation of

Mexican territory would not have entirely solved this problem, it just pushed the frontier of liberty further west and brought even more despised Mexicanos within the orbit of U.S. governance. There was no practical and inexpensive way to make the border more effective.

Many Texans saw the drain of blacks into Coahuila as a failure on the part of the U.S. government. “The utter helplessness of expecting the federal government to effect an arrangement to protect slave property,” said one Texas newspaper editor, led some slaveholders in Texas to take the law into their own hands.45

The ambiguity of the border and the differing political, economic, and moral goals of either side brought on an extraordinarily violent period following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The institution of the border was intended to reduce cross-border violence. In fact, it may have had the opposite effect since it gave refugees a clear destination. Predictably, problems arose immediately. Some of the first notable filibusters south of the line invaded just four short months after the signing of the treaty. Volunteers who stayed behind in Nuevo León after the cease-fire that ended the North American Intervention attacked the villages of Sabinas Hidalgo, Aldama, and Bustamente in July of 1848. At least in Sabinas Hidalgo, the filibusterers’ reported mission was to recapture a runaway slave.46

Neither side would find the resolution that they had hoped for with the drawing of the boundary. Slave hunters would keep up their filibustering in Coahuila for the duration of the

1850s and a particularly bellicose set of newspaper editors in Texas would continue rattling their sabers. One of these newspapermen, John Salmon (“Old Rip”) Ford, was especially set upon

45 Indianola Bulletin, May 31, 1855. 46 Manuel Maldonado, Rio Grande, to the Ayuntamiento de la villa de Guerrero, September 26, 1851, C9, FSXIX AGEC; Declaration of the President of the Ayuntamiento of Guerrero, September 26, 1851, C9, FSXIX AGEC.

208 fanning the flames. He sometimes cited Mexico’s weak hold on the frontier as a justification for illegal raids, saying that Mexico was not “in possession of the real attributes of a sovereignty.”47

At other times, he justified filibustering since Mexicans would not return Texan slaves; they neither “had respect for themselves” or anyone else’s laws.48 Whatever the justification, illegal slave hunts in Mexico served Texan interests.

The violence of West Texas slavery could not be kept within the states’ geographical limits.

Vigilantes, bounty hunters, and volunteers engaged in diplomacy by other means when Mexico failed to halt border crossers. Deputized by aggrieved slaveholders to bring their bondsmen and women back, slave hunters ranged throughout the entire borderlands during the 1840s and 1850s attempting to interrupt the freedom that runaway slaves and Black Indians had found in Mexico.

This was not easy work; it demanded the steel reserve that only ex-Texas Rangers could muster.

Slaveholders acknowledged that bounty hunters’ jobs became even more difficult as they approached the border. Individual masters sometimes even advertised a scaled reward for the capture of their runaways, offering a larger sum the closer to Mexico the runaway was taken up.

One advertisement, for instance, offered a greater reward if the runaway slave, Gib, was recovered in the largely Hispanic towns that lay beyond the Colorado, and a greater sum still if the slave hunter actually went into Mexico to reclaim the slave. The reward was $200 west of the

San Antonio River and $300 in Mexico.49

Bounty hunters could count on broad support. Officials in both Indian Territory and

Texas sanctioned slave hunters along the border. Despite ranking General George F. Brooks’ insistence that the military not be involved with slave hunting, federal soldiers were sometimes complicit. Federal soldiers sometimes launched their own independent attacks. Over the course

47 Southwestern American, November 17, 1852; San Antonio Herald, February 25, 1859. 48 LaGrange Texas Monument, January 29, 1851. 49 LaGrange Texas Monument, Jan 29, 1851.

209 of the 1850s, Texan officials increasingly brought the full brunt of state power to bear against them. In September 1851 both governor Peter Bell and the sheriff of Bexar County deputized all citizens in the border region to lend help to slave hunters (most especially, Warren Adams) carrying out operations along the border.50 By the end of the decade the state government would become complicit in explicitly condoning cross-border slave raiding. In 1858, the Texas legislature passed a law that rewarded slave hunters capturing any “slaves escaping beyond the slave territories of the United States” with one-third the slave’s monetary value from the state treasury.51 Diplomatic efforts to resolve this issue had been stalled for nearly a decade by the point the Texas legislature made this offer and vigilantes had stood in as proxies for more regular diplomats on this issue for years.

Given the arbitrariness of the border between slavery and freedom, African Americans established near the Grande/Bravo lived lives of grave insecurity. Whenever unrest occurred along the border, African Americans found themselves within the crosshairs of Texan raiders who had little compunction about adding slave hunting to their military goals along the border.

During the months that witnessed the Carvajal disturbances, the presence of runaway slaves so close to the border caused several major crises. In February of 1851, the commander of Guerrero learned that a company of volunteers had been mustered out of service around the Leona River on the road from San Antonio to Eagle Pass. Hanging around the frontier in the hopes of joining

Carvajal, was a force of 400 men in total. Camped along the river with no real reason to be there, the Mexican authorities feared they would invade the frontier. The authorities even reported that they had the intention of kidnapping the blacks from the area around Monclova Viejo where, out of a population of four hundred and forty people, blacks likely comprised the majority at that

50 Directive from Peter Bell, September 17, 1851, Office of the Governor of Texas, Correspondence Concerning the Texas Rangers, Vol. 2 1851-1856, WPW CAH. 51 Campbell, 109.

210 point.52 Luckily for them, the force broke off and went back to West Texas when they could not join Carvajal.

As much as Mexico may have offered an alternative to the enslaved in Western Texas and Indian Territory, life in Mexico was not a very secure option. This was especially true as long as slave hunters lurked along the border and Texan politicians disrespected Mexico’s differences. Just a few months after the Mascogos’ arrival in Mexico, and while they were still stationed outside of Guerrero alongside the other Immigrant Tribes, John Horse began to look for a new home removed from the other refugees, the border, and slave hunters. John Horse headed up the Mascogos in Coahuila and he never for a second lost sight of the immense danger in which they lived. He lobbied for a piece of land deep in the interior of Nuevo León, and even met with several of the authorities in Monterrey to discuss his plans. Aware of the hazards that continued to hem in the lives of African Americans, even after they had crossed over into

Mexico, Horse proposed their removal primarily out of his concern for the safety of the blacks who continued to join them. He received a small allotment and a military escort to travel to

Monterrey to present his plan to the sympathetic inspector of the frontier, Antonio María

Juáregui, but as was so often the case, nothing ever came of his efforts.53

John Horse recognized the danger posed by the proximity of the blacks’ location at

Monclova Viejo to the border with Texas. He himself would fall victim to the insecurity of this location. The slave hunter Warren Adams kidnapped him alongside the Mascogo Hongo de

Agosto in September of 1851 in Eagle Pass, and he only returned to Mexico after his fellow

African Americans collected together two hundred allegedly blood-stained pesos to hand over to

Adams to obtain his release. The African Americans who ransomed him had, in fact, threatened

52 Emilio Langberg, Itinerario de la Espedicion [sic] San Carlos a Monclova el Viejo Hecha por el Coronel D. Emilio Langberg, (October 3, 1851): 30 Consulted at AGEC. 53 Maldonado, Piedras Negras, to Juáregui, January 2, 1851, f. 1038, Ficha 825 C8 F2 E27 F138, FCMO AGEC.

211 to invade Texas to free him if Maldonado did not succeed in negotiating his release. Maldonado could not convince the authorities in Texas to release John Horse, however, even after he forwarded them proof that Horse and his companion were free men. With negotiations stalled an open war almost broke out. In the end cooler heads prevailed and a major international confrontation between angry African Americans and Texans was averted. But even after his ransom Horse was still not safe. A year later another attempt was made to kidnap Horse at a dance in Piedras Negras by an accomplice of the mail carrier from Bexar. This time the authorities immediately set the kidnapper in irons, but he managed somehow to escape his captors and swim across the river to Texas.54

As a result of Texan complicity with slave hunters and the filibusterers’ absolute refusal to respect the new border, the authorities in Mexico at last acquiesced to the blacks’ demands to move them further inland, away from the border and the fields around Monclova Viejo. The

Immigrant Tribes and blacks received Nacimiento in 1852 after their assistance in defeating

Carvajal’s men at Cerralvo. Hacienda de Nacimiento, which was located close to Santa Rosa and a couple of leagues removed from the border, was unimproved land that had once belonged to the Sánchez Navarro latifundia in Coahuila. John Horse helped secure the transfer of the property from imminent domain, picking out two “sitios de ganado mayor” (10,000 acres of pasture) four miles removed from the main settlement of the Seminoles at the headwaters of the

54 Western Texian, November 18, 1852; For attempts made on John Horse in Coahuila see: Manuel Flores to the Governor’s Secretary, Coahuila, September 27, 1851, C9 E3 F5, FSIX AGEC; Juan Manuel Maldonado, Rio Grande, to Ayuntamiento de la Villa de Guerrero, February 23, 1851, C9 E3 F5, FSIX AGEC; José Antonio Arredondo, Piedras Negras, to the Commander at Fort Duncan, September 20, 1851, (copy certified by Maldonado, Rosas), Folder 25, Sept 1851, Governor’s Papers, TSA; Arredondo to Maldonado, September 21, 1851 (copy certified by Maldonado, Rosas), Folder 25, Sept 1851, Governor’s Papers, TSA; Mulroy, 75; Southwestern American, November 24, 1852; Arredondo to Juáregui, November 5, 1852, Ficha 2033, C20 F1 E9 1F, FCMO AGEC; Arredondo to Juáregui, November 5, 1852, Ficha 2033, C20 F1 E9 1F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado to Juáregui, September 27, 1852, Ficha 1575 C14 F10 E 142 1F, FCMO AGEC.

212 Río Sabinas to settle African Americans fugitives.55 Indeed, Nacimiento was at a remove of some twenty miles from the border, but the idea that this location would discourage slave hunters was mistaken. Just a few months earlier, Warren Adams had stolen an entire family of blacks under cover of night from Santa Rosa. Despite his distance from the border, he managed to escape with a National Guard unit of thirty-five men drawn from the citizens of that town close on his heels.56

Mexican authorities hoped that by “internalizing” the Mascogos and other blacks at

Nacimiento they would ease pressure on the border. Indeed, Mexico did experience a brief reprieve from attacks by Texan filibusterers following the move to Nacimiento, but this probably had more to do with the resolution of the Merchant Wars and the defeat of Carvajal. The Rangers who had mustered out of service had little reason to hang around the border once there was no revolutionary army to join. In any case, this halting peace would not last long. In 1854, another rumor surfaced that 500 Texans were preparing to raid Coahuila to abduct all the blacks outside of San Fernando and the surrounding ranches that employed the runaways.57 The attack never materialized, but it foreshadowed the Callahan Raid of October, 1855, which rocked frontier society to its core.

The Callahan Raid demonstrates just how closely linked together Indian punishment, slave raiding, and filibustering were on the frontier. All three were goals held in common by

Texas volunteers, which overlapped in an utter disregard for Mexico’s pretended sovereignty over its northern frontier. In 1855, the governor of Texas called up the wooly resident of the

Blanco River, James Callahan, to put together a force to chastise the Lipan Apaches in South

Texas who often sought refuge in Mexico. During their tour of duty Callahan’s Rangers

55 Mulroy, 73. 56 Langberg, 35. 57 Francisco Castañeda, Rio Grande, to secretary of governor, October 5, 1854, C8 F7 E9 3F, FSXIX AGEC.

213 managed to stay on their side of the Rio Grande and limit their activities to skirmishes with

Native Americans. But, just as they were mustering out of service, a panel of citizens from San

Antonio wrote to Coronel Emilio Langberg requesting entrance to Mexico. He was Vidaurri’s newly-appointed commander of the frontier, and the panel complained to him about the problem of runaways from West Texas and Bexar County in particular. The panel from San Antonio agreed to cover any debts that runaway slaves may have incurred in Mexico if Langberg would collect together all the African Americans he could gather and hand them over to a specially appointed posse who would await him on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. The men from Bexar even offered to round up all of the runaway peons who had taken up residency in San Antonio in exchange. Likely the posse that would await Langberg on the right bank of the Rio

Grande/Bravo was Callahan’s Rangers who de-mustered at the end of the summer. This offer must have come as quite a temptation for the cash-strapped commander, but the implied threat that the panel would authorize force to achieve their goal did not sit will with him.58 Further,

Langberg must have realized that such grandiose deportation schemes were impractical—not to mention inhumane.

The men from San Antonio’s offer was an attempt to settle the issue of runaway slaves through diplomatic channels, recently reopened with Texas by the new caudillo of the North,

Santiago Vidaurri. But despite the new governor’s popularity among the Texans, Vidaurri directed Langberg to refuse the panel from San Antonio’s offer. Not only did he intend to stand by national principals, but his decision not to assist the panel from San Antonio also reflected a popular anti-imperialism in the North of Mexico that specifically resented the bullying of Texans.

Vidaurri and Langberg realized that the last revolutionary in the North to accept advances made by the Texans, Carvajal, had lost most of his local support and had been labeled a traitor when he

58 El Siglo XIX, November 12, 1855; Langberg to Vidaurri, September 1, 1855, Vidaurri Correspondence, AGENL.

214 enlisted the help of Texan volunteers. As a result, Langsberg wrote that an invasion would be seen with “repugnance” by the vecinos. In fact, Vidaurri had taken a much more conciliatory approach with the Texans since seizing power and consolidating the states of Nuevo León and

Coahuila under his command the year before. But he refused to allow Texans to call the shots, and he routinely rejected their advances, or at least feigned ignorance of them.59

Langberg, for his part, wondered aloud in a letter to Vidaurri whether the African

Americans on the frontier were worth all of the protections guaranteed to them. They were a cause of great insecurity and a primary threat to Mexican sovereignty on the frontier. He also warned Vidaurri about the damages that runaway slaves in Coahuila caused, even claiming that the majority of the runaway slaves in Mexico were fleeing because they had committed crimes against their masters in Texas. He concluded thus: “it would be unfortunate indeed to expose the entire frontier to an invasion to defend these men when our own interests are hurt in this business.”60 He did not wish to trade security and sovereignty for lofty principals.

Further, the Texans had offered to return runaway peons from Texas if the commanders took a conciliatory approach. This offer earned the endorsement of no less an authority than

Secretary of State James Gadsden who wrote a remarkably tetchy and racist letter on the subject of the rejected extradition treaty to the Mexican foreign minister:

Don’t permit the two neighboring Republics to get into a war of…abstraction, on the relations of the Mexican Government to her Indian Peons and those of the United States to the Affrican [sic] Race entailed in their protection. Beware how you decline the opportunity, as one of the statesmen who Mexico looks to for instruction and protection, of excluding the serpent from your Eden if permitted or encouraged to get a foothold in your land. They [African Americans] cannot amalgamate and will, as they have done in our Southern Country and States, lead to the expulsion and final extermination of the Asteck [sic] Race from their

59 Southwestern American, December 29, 1852 and January 5, 1853; Vidaurri to J. Smith McMicken, September 8, 1856, Vidaurri Transcripts, 2A280, CAH; John Salmon Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, ed. Stephen B. Oates (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 205. 60 Langsberg to Vidaurri, September 1, 1855, Vidaurri Correspondence, AGENL.

215 Inheritances. Don’t encourage, but rather exclude the Affrican from intruding on your land of promise [unless] you wish to [add] it to your own inferior caste.61

Blatant racism of this sort did not resonate well in the racially fluid society of Mexico, even amongst the elite commanders who hoped to maintain some semblance of social peace on the frontier. Further, even though Langberg may have been right to see the contradiction in protecting runaway slaves but not reforming peonage, a semi-servile labor system subject to a great number of abuses, neither he nor his boss would concede to the bullying of the committee from San Antonio or the racism of their federally elected officials. As a result, they resolved, to

“meet force with force” if the citizens of Bexar entered Mexico to recover runaway blacks and stolen horses.62 (In fact Langberg entered into secret negotiations unbeknownst to Vidaurri.)

Given the heated atmosphere in San Antonio and the tacit support they received from politicians in Washington, the commanders did not have to wait long for Texan aggression to materialize. As Callahan’s volunteer force reached the end of its three-month assignment,

Callahan claimed that Emilio Langberg invited him to chase the Lipans into Mexico (a charge that would later be investigated).63 Thus, on October 5, 1855 a party of around twelve Texans serving under the Ranger Captains James Callahan and William Henry overpowered the Mexican skiff operators on the Texas side of the river. They then compelled them to carry their party two or three miles upriver where they met the rest of their army who had forded the river in advance.

All told, the Texans volunteers comprised around two hundred men, and they all hailed from the

61 James Gasdsen to de la Rosa, without date [1855], f. 42, SRE 6-18-42. 62 Manuel Menchaca, Piedras Negras, al Señor Comandante en Gefe de la seccion de Coahuila, October 6, 1855, fs. 15-17, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasion de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE; Secretary of governor of Nuevo León to Sr. Coronel Don Emilio Langberg, comandante en gefe [sic] de la sección del Norte de Coahuila s/f, f. 7, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasión de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE, 63 Governor Pease to Callahan July 5th, 1855, 2R291, Vol. 2 1851-1856, Correspondence Concerning the Texas Rangers, WPW CAH; Indianola Bulletin, July 13, 1855; Texas State Times, December 1, 1855.

216 western counties of Hays, Guadalupe and Bexar.64 The fact that the force came from these counties is not insignificant; they encompassed the furthest western extent of American slave country. Thus, while the primary goal of the filibusterers was likely to attack a Lipan camp near

San Fernando, there is very little doubt that the “special arrangement” Callahan referred to in a letter to Texas Ranger Ed Burlson was that the filibusterers would be allowed to capture any blacks they might encounter should the opportunity present itself. After all, any business filibusters conducted in Mexico was usually punctuated by a good deal of looting. And, given the fact that their reputed target was the town of San Fernando, there was very little chance that an opportunity to seize African Americans from the nearby Hacienda de Nacimiento would not materialize.65

Norteño Volunteers

Long before the Callahan Raid occurred, rebuffing Texan raiders arose as a patriotic duty in the states of Coahuila and Nuevo León. Slave hunters refused to respect the sovereignty of the

Mexican side of the new border. As a result, the meaning of the border as a line of liberty was a cause of violent contestation between norteños and Texans. Ultimately, such violence drew the entire frontier society of Northern Mexico into its orbit. Thus, as Texas slaveholders ramped up their raids in the west, norteño volunteers stepped in defend their country in a place where very little in the way of state apparatuses existed. For a brief period, volunteerism, defense of the patria, and defense of liberty intersected and justified the violence that norteños deployed against Texas raiders.

64 S. Burbank to Emilio Langberg, September 15, 1855, f. 17, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasión de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SER; Hubley Ashton, counsel of the United States, Piedras Negras Claims In the American and Mexican Joint Commission. Pedro Tauns and Others vs. the United States, Argument and Evidence for the United States. [found in AEMEUA Leg. 204 Exp. 6], pg. 2. 65 Callahan, camp Enchanted Rock, to Ed Burleson, August 31, 1855, 2B158, Burleson Papers, CAH.

217 As early as 1848, the advent of Texan raiders inspired some limited statecraft in the

North. During those years following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the volunteer militias of the National Guard would emerge as the primary institution for nation-building on the frontier.

These units were, in fact, a new idea in Mexico. In 1846, the central Mexican government had established the ground rules for National Guard units nationwide, even though these units did not come together in the North or anywhere else in time to make an impact in the war with the

United States.66 It was only in 1848 that the authorities in the North at last began to take seriously the national injunction to form both flying units (móbiles) and stationary units

(auxiliares) for the National Guard in each of the frontier towns.67

The National Guard intended to stake all men in the mutual defense of the frontier, building a force from the ground up that could rebuff foreign invaders. Hence, the new decree obliged every debt-free male over the age of 16 to enlist and provide his own horse and arms

(otherwise he would be forced to fight on foot with an antique musket issued from the armory to face the Texas Rangers’ rifles).68 Militia service would become the handmaiden of a masculine patriotism in the North as these men faced off against Texas raiders who disrespected Mexican sovereignty. But, despite the opportunity afforded by the National Guard to democratize the relationship between all men in the North, in reality, it continued to reflect the internal divisions that afflicted norteño society. In this sense, it was not unlike the U.S. militia in the 1820s in that it consisted of two tiers. Only propertied men could afford to enlist, and elites and middling sorts expected the deferential treatment they saw as their due when they entered the units. For instance, proud horseback vaqueros chafed when they were enlisted in the humble infantry and doled out

66 Luís Alberto García, Guerra y Frontera: El Ejército del Norte Entre 1855 y 1858 (Monterrey: Anuario del Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León, 2006), 32-33 67 Bóletin Oficial (Monterrey), August 3, 1848 and August 10, 1848. 68 Circular, José Maria Parás Governor of Nuevo León, July 29, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL

218 swords rather than firearms to fight raiders.69 And despite Arista’s importation of 15,000 muskets (fusiles) for the National Guard from Texas, there were still never enough weapons to arm the un-propertied.70

Lack of guns and mounts put service and participation in the most significant nation- building institution in the North out of reach for many impoverished vecinos. The crippled and peons were exclusively barred from service. Meanwhile, any jornalero (day laborer) who made less than 100 pesos a year was not allowed to enlist.71 Military authorities explicitly excluded peons as a reaction to the complaints of amos (masters) who feared that enlisted peons would default on their debt and take the opportunity to run away from their burdens while enlisted.72

Amos demanded that any peons or sharecroppers (alquilados) who still owed money actually pay off their debt before they enlist.73

In fact, the National Guard had a more democratizing effect than might be expected.

Despite the barriers to service enumerated above, given the utter lack of resources, labor, and men on the frontier, the commanders could not really discriminate or check the credentials of the enlistees too carefully when the alarm sounded. Indeed, some peons who served in the National

Guard units were afforded an opportunity to escape from their amos and enlist in the volunteer units whenever threat of a foreign invasion loomed large.74 Sometimes they took the opportunity to run off to a town where they would they not be recognized. Such was the case with one peon named Juan Alvarado from Salinas who entered service and then abandoned it once the National

69 Petition of Ramón Gutierrez, Francisco Benavides, Teodoro Gonzales and Pedro Agustín Martin, Vecinos de la Hacienda de Ramos, July 29, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL 70 Arista to Sr. Comandante de Nuevo León, July 11, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL 71 Boletín Oficial, July 20 1848 72 Dionisio Gonzales, Abasolo, to Governor Nuevo León, July 11, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL. 73 Perfecto [sic] Barbosa, Montemorelos, to Parás, August 22, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL; Parás to Barbosa, August 23, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL. 74 Secretary of governor, Monterrey, September 30, 1856, C126, Militares AGENL; Rafael Garza, García N.L., to secretaría de gobierno, March 5, 1856, C126, Militares AGENL.

219 Guard camped near Saltillo. Unfortunately for the peon, his amo was suspicious, and he sent on the runaway peons’ libro de cuentas to the authorities in Saltillo. They located Alvarado, stripped him of his arms, and returned him to his amo. Another runaway from the same master was recovered after he deserted the troop.75 If the authorities found that a runaway servant entered the volunteer lines illegally, the commanders would have to either return the runaway or the government would have to pay off his debt.76 All peons who were caught absconding from their masters and pressing into the military lines were told to return whatever arms the authorities may have issued them and return to the service of their debtholder.77 Not all peons serving illegally in the forces were looking to escape, however. Not being allowed to participate in the mostly manly and cofraternal institution in the North and defend their homes from rapacious foreign invaders must have taken a heavy toll on some peons captured absconding to the lines.

Others simply used the military lines as a cover to travel north to Texas.

In any case, the National Guard had its effect in the North. In the years to come, violence against frontier raiders of all sorts would form a pillar of the norteño identity and, indeed, masculinity.78 The Texan raids of July 1848 were just the spark the norteños needed to jumpstart the organization of units, and the outspoken alcalde of Bustamente led the way. As the vecinos in

Bustamente learned by rumor and happenstance what had transpired in the neighboring villages, they waited and prepared for the inevitable raid on their own town. They readied themselves as best they could and hid their most precious possession from the looters, an exalted image of the

Lord brought all the way to the frontier from Tlaxcala. Meanwhile, the alcalde loudly

75 Esteban Gutierrez, Oct. 16, 1850, C96, Militares AGENL; Sr. Comandante del Department de Coahuila, October 18, 1853, C96, Militares AGENL. 76 Secretaría de Gobierno, Monterrey, December 10, 1856, C127, Militares AGENL. 77 Secretary of governor to Mariano Escobedo, Monterrey, March 29, 1859, C125, Militares AGENL. 78 For the formation of frontier identities through violence in northern Mexico see Danile Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (University of Chicago: 1993) and Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press: 1994).

220 complained about the lack of patriotism in neighboring villages, which had failed to put up a united front against the raiders. Their failure to act—and save the village of Bustamente from a similar fate—had revealed a lack of manliness on their part, since the first obligation of “free men” was to “collect at the order of the authority to defend and sustain the general security of their neighbors with arms.” 79 The alcalde, for his part, put seventy men under arms in

Bustamente and fined anyone who failed to enlist in a National Guard unit 25 pesos.80

Unfortunately, it was too late. They later suffered a devastating attack at the hands of North

American volunteers where several men lost their lives.81

As these filibusters turned increasingly to slave raiding, volunteer militias would become, by coincidence, the guarantors of liberty in the borderlands. Over the course of the 1850s, slave hunts brought the volunteers out time and time again. Whether formally mustered into National

Guard units, or simply collected together into ad hoc volunteer forces, the Mexicans would increasingly respond to the menace of slave hunters by attempting to “meet force with force.”

A raid that took place outside of Guerrero in 1851 served as a particularly grizzly warning to would-be slave hunters about growing Mexican resolve and warned them not to filibuster in Mexico alone. The incident began innocently enough when a Mexican man approached an African American to ask him if the ranch that employed him had any meat for sale. The African American replied in the affirmative, but upon returning was set upon by an unseen white man who tied him up and fastened him to a horse. The African American struggled mightily, even managing to grab the American’s pistol and to shoot his Mexican accomplice in the wrist. But he still lost his freedom. The African American captive howled mightily as the men carried him away, protesting that he would rather be dead than captured in this way.

79 Alcalde de Bustamente, July 22, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL. 80 Juan Pérez y Saenz, Bustamente, to secretary of governor, July 19, 1848, C 48, Militares AGENL. 81 Alcalde de Bustamente, July 22, 1848, C48, Militares AGENL.

221 Luckily for the captive, a Mexican youth soon spotted the Texan raider, his Mexican accomplice, and their captive en route back towards the border. The youth alerted the officer

Manuel Flores, who set off with three other vecinos in pursuit of the slave hunter and his accomplice. Picking up the trail, they soon discovered the African American’s hat on the ground.

They then happened upon the camp that the kidnappers had made. Flores and his deputies quietly approached the men and, surprising them, the commander demanded that the slave hunter surrender. Instead, the Texan looked up with “swiftness and resolve” and reached for his holster.

Before he could reach his pistol, however, Flores and the vecinos who accompanied him fired upon the man felling him from his horse. The Texan raider, lying on the ground, shot in the lung and the arm and bleeding to death, still managed to draw his weapon “with his last breath,” but

Flores knocked it out of his hand. Shortly thereafter, a North American doctor living nearby came to the scene and pronounced him dead. (According to his report, the raider was neither breathing nor responding to his questions—and he evinced other “señales cadavericas”).82 A small military party in Coahuila comprised of three vecinos and a captain had done what nobody in neighboring Tamaulipas had ever been able to accomplish. They had arrested and executed a

Texan slave hunter filibustering in Mexico.

Quick to learn their lesson, subsequent attempts to loot and kidnap slaves made by Texan volunteers typically involved large and loosely organized parties of volunteers recently mustered out of the Texas Rangers. Despite the Mexicans’ success in overpowering this particular would- be slave hunter, the attempt clearly spooked Manuel Flores. He went on to report to his superiors that he had heard a rumor that slave hunters were gathering in a massive party, this time at the

Paso de Pacuache, to cross the river and perhaps avenge their fallen comrade. Flores, alarmed to

82 Testimony of Benjamin Thomas, Jesús Rodríguez, Vicente Garza, and Pedro Guerrero, witnesses Jesús Flores, A. Luís Benavides, J. Juan de la Garza, March 18, 1851, C3 F8 E8 7F, FSXIX AGEC.

222 learn of this large party sitting just opposite Guerrero, suggested that the African Americans in

Coahuila be collected together from the area around Monclova Viejo where they had congregated and be sent further into the interior.83 Instead, the authorities sought to take on slave hunters head on.

Henceforth, every few months a new rumor arose about large gangs of slave hunters stationed on the Texas side of the border. Since they had learned that they would meet resistance when they filibustered in the highly-militarized society of northern Coahuila, slave hunters organized themselves into large parties that were easier to spot camping around the Leona River in far western Texas. As a result, rumors that arose from dubious eyewitness accounts came to function as the main source of disseminating information on the frontier about potential attacks.

And even if the attack never materialized, as was the case in November of 1851, the rumors served as a pretext to gather vecinos together into militias made up of scores of men. Nor were authorities remiss in discovering and punishing the traitors in their midst who supplied the

Texans with information.84 Punishment for those citizens who betrayed the freedom of runaways in Mexico and the organization of volunteer units to rebuff slave raiders went a long way towards instilling the defense of liberty as a patriotic tenet amongst the vecinos.

The greatest threat to the sovereignty of the frontier came in the form of the Callahan

Raid in 1855, as mentioned in the introduction. Over two hundred de-mustered Rangers crossed the river that October en route to San Fernando believing that the Lipans were camped there sheltered by the Seminole Indians. As the vecinos of Piedras Negras took to the hills, commanders Manuel Menchaca and Miguel Patiño cobbled together what forces they could to meet the Texans. Menchaca mustered all the soldiers from the barracks of Piedras Negras and

83 Manuel Flores, Guerrero, to secretary of governor, Coahuila, June 27, 1851, C6 F6 E3 2F, FSXIX AGEC. 84 El Constitutional (Mexico City), December 6, 1851.

223 Guerrero and put them under Evaristo Madero. He also called up for duty a company of vecinos from Morelos under Pablo Espinosa. Finally, all of the vecinos from San Fernando and an auxiliary force of Seminoles and Mascogos from Nacimiento mustered in. Once Menchaca met up with Miguel Patiño’s military colonists, this militia numbered well over two hundred men and was comprised in its largest part of volunteers.85

While en route to Piedras Negras, the Mexican force stumbled upon the Texans at the Rio

Escondido. They lost the advantage of surprise, but they roundly defeated the Texans nevertheless, killing five, and reportedly wounding thirty more before retiring to San Fernando to replenish their gunpowder. The Texans, meanwhile, retreated to Piedras Negras claiming that the

Mexicans had 750 men in their militia and exaggerating the number of Indians involved in the fight. They also claimed victory despite their retreat and the large number of casualties they suffered.86 In spite of their claims to the contrary, they had lost to the superior resolve of a collection of Mexican vecinos determined to protect their national honor as well as the liberty of the migrants who had found new homes in Coahuila. The Texas volunteers continued to annoy the Mexicans in the events that followed their defeat. They looted Piedras Negras before burning it to the ground to cover their retreat under artillery fire from Fort Duncan.

Despite their lack of resources, and despite the tragedy that had befallen the hapless inhabitants of Piedras Negras, the Mexican forces had fulfilled their duties. Their “patriotism and valor” had achieved the most happy results. As Santiago Vidaurri would write, broadly praising the comportment of his subordinates:

Under the honorable name of México, the nation’s true sons had put aside every type of difference and presented themselves as a united body to punish the enemy severely and demand satisfaction for the injuries and offenses that have been

85 Siglo Diez y Nueve, November 13, 1855. 86 Galveston Weekly, October 17, 1855.

224 committed against her, and to test, in this manner, the love for the patria that can, more than anything else, overcome the hatred born of civil discord.

Vidaurri even considered calling off his attack on the Conservative forces in the plaza of

Matamoros after the attack, given the new patriotic atmosphere inspired by Menchaca and

Patiño’s defeat of the Texas volunteers.87 Such was the power to pull the disparate frontier together in the face of foreign threats.

Whether the raid had been intended primarily to punish Indians or hunt slaves can never be known for sure, but it was likely carried out with both ends in mind. Texans filibustered in

Mexico for a variety of reasons, and their goals often overlapped. Vidaurri, for his part, was certain that slave hunting had been the primary intention of the filibusterers. The burning and looting of Piedras Negras was the fulfillment of the threat made by the commission from San

Antonio to use force if their request to turn over the runaway slaves was not met. The raid was as an attempt to kidnap African Americans from the area around Rosas since he had refused to acquiesce to their demands. In his words, it was because Mexico “professed the principal of liberty of the slaves and the abolition of slavery ever since it became independent” that filibusters had scorned their laws. 88 He realized that the raid was also likely an attempt to punish the Lipans, but it was the slave-raiding aspect of the campaign that was most significant in his mind and had the most potential to glorify his victory. It was, after all, a more national affront.

The vecinos and presidial soldiers had dealt the Texans a decisive blow at the Rio Escondido of which they would be proud for years to come—and they had done this in defense of liberty.

87 Vidaurri to Ignacio Galindo, secretaría al señor comandante de la plaza de Matamoros, October 6, 1855, fs. 11-12, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasion de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte; Secretary of governor, Monterrey, October 8, 1855, fs. 11-12, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasion de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte. 88 El Siglo XIX, November 12, 1855.

225 Vidaurri’s victory may have reflected well upon his statecraft, but it did not do much to ensure the security of African Americans in Mexico. Despite the valor of the norteños, the raid had greatly threatened the integrity of Mexican territory. It may not have resulted in the eviction of runaway slaves living in Mexico, it did have some effect. Even though the vecinos had defeated the filibusterers, the raiders had laid bare the consequences of refusing to deal with the

Texans on the issue of runaway slaves. For their part, the mistreated vecinos of Piedras Negras were not slow in learning the lesson of Texan force majeure. The following month, a black man who had crossed the river was taken up and sent back to the U.S. side immediately by the population at Piedras Negras lest the Texans hazard another attack on the town.89 Likely, the volunteers had achieved through force what no government could accomplish—an arrangement with the vecinos of Piedras Negras regarding runaway slaves. Diplomacy that flowed from the barrel of a gun had resolved the issue of runaway slaves on Texan terms and posed a real limit to their liberty despite Mexican efforts to protect them.

As a result, after 1855, the trail of runaway slaves into Mexico became much colder.

There is an appreciable decrease in the number of advertisements for runaway slaves in Texas newspapers. In Mexico, meanwhile, there were no recorded instances of confrontations between forces of norteño and Texan slave hunters. In late 1858, there was even an item in a Texas newspaper encouraging Texas slaveholders who had lost slaves to Mexico to enter into negotiations with Santiago Vidaurri, who once again found his war chest depleted. 90 He was rumored to return slaves from Mexico for a cash reward. Probably the raid had taken some of the bite out of the Mexican promise of liberty and the proud rhetoric that surrounded it.

89 Texas State Times, November 17, 1855. 90 Matagorda Gazette, December 25, 1858.

226 The transition of power from a Centralist to a Federalist governor in Nuevo León also had an effect. Surely slaves continued to run to the (newly-annexed) state of Nuevo León y

Coahuila in the years that followed the Callahan Raid, but probably the two sides had decided to deal with the issue in a quieter manner lest they hazard another disastrous confrontation. As a result, a brief period of goodwill characterized relations along the border following the Callahan

Raid. Perhaps both sides had realized that using proxy militias to settle borderland issues only resulted in discord and increased violence. The Mexican massacre of the Lipan camp at Gracias a

Dios (discussed in the following chapter) likely had something to do with this about-face as well.

As long as runaways chose to search out freedom in Mexico, the issue would remain unresolved. By the end of the decade, runaways were again pushing the issue to the forefront.

Hence, in 1858, the Mexican authorities caught wind of another potential conspiracy, and they circulated these rumors in the newly-united states of Coahuila y Nuevo León.91 The following year, the Texan newspapers again called for a slave raid on Mexico loudly and openly. The editor of the San Antonio Herald even suggested that “some bold and enterprising men in our state [should] club together and go into Mexico and bring back the large number of likely runways, that now form a pretty respectable African colony there.”92 They would do just that. A month after this call for action, the authorities in Mexico discovered around 400 volunteers camped along the Presidio road near the headwaters of the Leona River. At the head of this large force was William Henry, Callahan’s second-in-command during the failed raid in 1855. The

Texans’ intention was to attack Músquiz and abduct all of the Mascogos and blacks who lived in the surrounding area. This time the authorities made no mistake about it; slave-hunting was the

91 Luís Villareal to secretaría del general de N. León y Coahuila, August 18, 1858, C133, Militares AGENL. 92 San Antonio Herald, February 25, 1859.

227 “principal object” of the raid. A German who had joined the volunteers informed Vidaurri’s agents of this fact explicitly.93

The vecinos on the Mexican side of the river reacted to the rumor of the raid swiftly.

They were now familiar with the drill, and the prefecture of Rio Grande was able to gather together all the men from Músquiz capable of carrying arms to form a sizeable National Guard unit to operate in unison with the force drawn from Monclova Viejo. These forces would once again protect Mexican “national honor” from the “arrogance” of the Texans. Despite the civil war raging in the North of Mexico, others quickly joined in the muster. 94 The little town of

Sabinas Hidalgo enrolled any man capable of bearing arms—even if he had a physical impairment—to take the place of the usual National Guardsmen who were currently on duty.

Ultimately the alcalde of Sabinas enlisted 109 men to join the muster, although characteristically they came up fifty guns and horses short.95

Perhaps these vecinos were intent on avenging the devastating attack the Texans had made on their town ten years before, and the large force of un-propertied men reflected a wide cross-section of the male population of the town. The neighboring village of Allende, meanwhile, mustered all men over sixteen years old, although they also had a serious shortage of horses and rifles. Their enthusiasm for the muster may have dimmed somewhat when several peons took the opportunity to run away after lining up for duty alongside their amos.96 Nevertheless, the defense of the country against U.S. slave raiders would be democratic, proud, and probably successful.

93 Miguel Blanco, Piedras Negras, to Gregorio Galinda, Morelos, February 7, 1859, f. 147, [copies 1873] LE 1595 SRE; Miguel Blanco, Piedras Negras, to Gregorio Galinda, s/f, f. 153, LE 1595 SRE; Jesús Garza Gonzales, secretary of governor, September 5, 1859, f. 158, LE 1595 SRE. 94 Miguel Patiño, Piedras Negras to Galindo, Morelos, February 7, 1859, f. 147, LE 1595 SRE [copies 1873]; Ignacio Galindo to sr. prefecto del partido de Rio Grande March 10, 1859, f. 149, LE 1595 SRE. 95 Roster Sabinas, March 23, 1859, C135, Militares AGENL. 96 Alcalde primer de la villa de Allende, s/f, f. 154, LE 1595 SRE.

228 Perhaps the Texans learned of the commanders’ preparations. No battle ever took place.

But the vecinos had once again comported themselves bravely and the threat of raids from Texas had clearly instilled a sense of patriotism that was so lacking at the frontier. But building this patriotism on the defense of liberty had serious consequences. First, it brought out the contradiction that norteños faced as long as they denied peons the right to participate in the life of the nation and its democratic institutions. Second, their resolve to meet Texans on the field of battle in defense of national honor failed to take into account the seriousness of the threat that slaveholders and their allies represented to the frontier. Slave raids had the potential to embroil

Mexico in yet another war that it could ill-afford.

The threat that slave hunters represented to Mexico at a moment of its own national crises overshadowed the issue of runaway slaves and guarantees made on liberty. Despite the mobilization of all of norteño society to prepare for the 1859 raid, the Texas volunteers still managed to keep up the pressure on this issue. In the meantime, the Mexican authorities responded to the latest peril by quietly preparing to move the African Americans again, this time to a spot near the old Hacienda de Hornos, which was located just outside of the town of Parras more than 300 miles to the South of Hacienda de Nacimiento. The maroon colony established in northern Coahuila as early as 1840 would henceforth cease to exist.

As soon as they collected their harvests in 1859, the blacks in Mexico were required to move inwards towards Parras. It was not only the Mascogos who were required to move; all blacks on the frontier were collected together from distant points and transported to the interior,

229 including the servants who worked on nearby ranches and haciendas. Even Evaristo Madero, who employed two black men, had to give up his help. Other ranchers had to do the same.97

The African Americans were thus transported to Parras so that the “serene relations that exist between the government of our Republic and the United States” could be maintained.98

Despite this movement, the Texans continued to deploy violence to police the boundary of slavery and freedom. The threat of another filibuster continued to loom as a serious threat, and

Texans would still cross into Mexico illegally when the situation demanded it. When a black man ran away to the frontier town of Ressureción in 1861, for instance, the entire town suffered a devastating retributive attack at the hands of Texan raiders in search of the fleeing slave.99

Thus, despite the mightiest proclamations of government officials against the arrogance of the Texans and in defense of the laws of Mexico that protected freedom, Mexico ultimately had to move the blacks away from Nacimeinto for their own protection. Despite the calls to the patriotism of the vecinos to enforce the sovereignty of Mexico over its northern frontier, they could not hold the line of liberty against Texas raiders and the border of slavery and freedom remained ambiguous and fraught. Certainly, the rise of volunteer militias had resulted in a stronger sense of nationalism and the volunteers had even scored a couple of victories against the

Texan slave hunters. But, in the end, the commanders realized that fighting Texans was entirely too risky an enterprise, especially given the civil discord that Mexico faced from 1855 onward.

As the threat of slave hunters in Mexico gradually diminished after the blacks were removed to

Parras, so too did one of the few things that held everything together on the frontier. The sense of

Mexicanidad instilled in northern vecinos through defending the nation against rapacious Texans

97 Pablo Espinosa to sr. alcalde primero de la villa de Guerrero, May 27, 1859, C3 F4 E7 F1, FSXIX AGEC; Pablo Espinosa to sr. alcalde primero de la villa de Guerrero, May 29, 1859, C3 F4 E9 1F, FSXIX AGEC; Pablo Espinosa Morelos, to alcalde de la Villa de Guerrero, September 12, 1859, C4 F1 E13 1F, FSXIX AGEC. 98 Jesús Garza Bonzales to Prefect of Partido of Rio Grande, Morelos, March 23, 1859, f. 151, LE 1595 SRE. 99 Boletín Oficial (Monterrey, N.L.), November 30, 1861. pg. 3 [in SRE 29.15.46, fs. 74-75].

230 evaporated. By the early 1860s, the National Guard and the military colonies themselves would also disappear.

Conclusion

When Mexicans proclaimed the lofty goals of emancipation in the late 1820s, they could not have foreseen what repercussions it would have in the borderlands of freedom and slavery.

Only U.S. emancipation in 1865 would ultimately resolve the ambiguity of a border that separated a free country from a slave country. The defeat of Texan slave hunters by norteño militias units had instilled a masculine sense of patriotism in the vecinos, but it was a short-lived glory. The pride instilled by volunteerism would be put to more local goals as Federalists and

Liberals took over governorship of the North in the coming years. Meanwhile, slave hunters continued to cross the line with impunity until emancipation in 1865.

Only the African Americans who continued to seek refuge in Mexico would contest the

Texans’ monopoly of violence in the borderlands of slavery and freedom in the years that followed. Despite the fact that Mexicans had soured to the African Americans in their midst, black refugees stayed in Coahuila and moved willingly when required. They may not have been the most ideal migrants in the eyes of frontier commanders. They were also the root cause of many Texan filibusters. And no clearer sign of Mexican ambivalence towards them—despite the loftiest of proclamations—could be discerned than the fact they were moved hundred of miles south to Parras at the behest of the embattled government of Nuevo León y Coahuila in order to avoid further confrontation with Texas.

But the Mexican government did its best to protect them, and while Texan raiders might have been the catalyst for the Mexicans’ ultimate decision to relocate the African Americans,

231 Texans were not successful in reversing the tide of freedom. The results of their raids, like so many things in the borderlands, were ambiguous. As for the African Americans, unlike the

Immigrant Tribes discussed in the former chapter, they did not have the option of negotiating with agents from the United States. They could not consider a move back to the United States in the face of Mexico’s dearth of resources and resolve. They were refugees more than “people-in- between.” And independence without security was still better than slavery.

232

The Borderlands of the Rio Grande/Bravo before 1848 from A Map of the Republic of Texas and the Adjacent Territories Indicating the Grants of Land Conceded Under the Empresario System of Mexico (C.E. Cheffens: Southampton, 1841).

233 Chapter 6

“Entre Las Fronteras de Ambos Países”: War and Peace in Lipan Apachería

Shortly after Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, the administrators of the new nation looked northward to take stock of the many nomads who still wandered the frontier.

Among the nomadic peoples they found there were the Lipan Apaches, a sizeable group capable of fielding upwards to 1,000 warriors.1 The Lipans were the quintessential “people-in-between.”

They were in control of the lower Rio Grande/Bravo borderlands before settlers and soldiers started to filter into their hunting grounds, and were soon at odds with these settlers. Raiding and trading comprised an essential component of Lipan political economy. This component of their culture would come under increasing fire as Anglo and Hispanic populations grew on both sides of the border.

But as long as Texas, Mexico, and the Comanches remained at odds, the Lipans adeptly played each side against the other. Cross-border mobility, refuge across frontiers, and shifting allegiances allowed the Lipans a degree of maneuverability unavailable to people who lived in

“bordered” lands. Unlike for the other refugees and migrants, mobility was not merely a means to an end for the Lipans. Rather, it was an essential part of their culture. Lipans could control their own destiny by retreating beyond the frontier of those who sought to hem them in. After

Mexico and the United States drew an international border along the Grande/Bravo, the Lipans

1 Santiago Vidaurri to Minister of Foreign Relations, January 12, 1856, fs, 95-97, LE 1595 SRE.

234 expertly deployed the border against both sides, raiding on the one side and then seeking asylum across the river.2

Constant unauthorized trans-frontier mobility exposed the artificiality of the newly- constructed international border. If, as sociologist David Ludden has suggested, ascendant nation states arrogate to themselves one definitive set of routes bounded by agreed-upon territorial boundaries, then to legitimate their borders all other routes must be suppressed by the state leviathan.3 But the Lipans did not succumb to new international boundaries willingly; instead they subverted the borders by continuing their old patterns of mobility. Just as was the case with runaway slaves, Immigrant Tribesmen and women, and Mexican peons, the Lipans transformed new borders into new lines of refuge, shelter, and opportunity. They pressed newly-invented dividing lines into service for their own cause and Mexican frontier commanders were hard- pressed to stop them. As long as raiding and nomadism remained essential components of Lipan culture, the Indians would conflate liberty and mobility.

As Mexico and Texas slowly came to the realization that the Lipans troubled each country’s territorial claims, they began to work together to quash the mobile people that lay in- between them. The Lipans resisted this assault on their mobility fiercely. As a result, their warrior class would be greatly reduced to a mere eighty-eight men by 1855.4 The old terms of peace between the Mexicans and Lipans would, at least briefly, give way to a war of no quarter when Mexicans agreed to Texas terms of warfare. Mexican officials sought to reduce the Lipans to “civilization” through the extermination of their warriors. This tactic represented an

2 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104:3 (June, 1999): 814-841. 3 David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 62:4 (November, 2003), 1057-1078. 4 Santiago Vidaurri to Minister of Foreign Relations, fs. 95-97, January 12, 1856, LE 1596 SRE.

235 evaporation of the old “middle ground” that Lipans and norteños had forged over the past century, when seasons of peace and warfare had alternated with predictable regularity.5

Mobile peoples in the borderlands tended to pit Mexicans and Texans against one another.

The greater liberality afforded on the other bank of the river, whether right (Mexican) or left

(Texan), helped the two ascendant states define themselves in opposition to one another.

However, in 1855 and 1856, Texans and Mexicans came together in an unprecedented act of cooperation. The new Liberal government in the Mexican North founded by Vidaurri in 1856 acquiesced to suppressing common enemies on Texan terms when faced with enormous pressure from that state. The new Liberal regime was interested in ending twenty years of intermittent warfare with Texas, something that could only be achieved through enforcing the sanctity of the new border. The Lipans’ freedom of movement stood in stark contrast to the fiction of territorial fixity proposed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. They would suffer because of it.

The Lipan Middle Ground

The Lipan Apaches were some of the oldest inhabitants of the Rio Grande/Bravo Valley.

They followed the buffalo southward during the 17th century alongside other Athapaskan- speaking peoples from the plains, and by 1700 their range included the valleys of the Bravo and the Pecos Rivers. This migration coincided with another even more significant development in the history of the Texas borderlands. To the west, Comanchería was on the rise. Ultimately, the

Indian deputies of the powerful “Comanche Empire” would sever the Lipan Apaches’ access to

Spanish goods and guns in New Mexico. And when the Comanches claimed the western plains of Texas, they cut the Lipans off from their Apache cousins, who moved further west and

5 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix-xi.

236 coalesced into the Mescalero, Gileño, and Chiricahua tribes. Isolated from brothers, cousins, and

Spanish markets, the Comanches did their best to destroy the Lipans. According to some sources, the Comanches dealt them a terrible blow in 1723 that forced them to retreat even further south and east.6

But by the mid-1700s it was clear that the Lipans had survived these assaults and were settling in rancherías on either side of the Rio Bravo and establishing summer camps in the valleys of the Brazos River, hundreds of miles north. These settlements may have been small in number, yet they were located in a highly strategic area in southeastern Tejas, between the contested borderlands of the Spanish, French and, later, North Americans. They were respected as great warriors and they were a thorn in the side to the Spanish as well as the Comanches in

Texas. In both the 1750s and 1780s, the Lipans expanded their power into Comanche Territory.

To push them back, the Comanches formed an alliance with neighboring Wichitas and, interestingly enough, Spanish officials in Texas.7

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Comanches had generally won the war for the western plains. They isolated the Lipan Apaches alongside Tonkawas and a few other smaller tribes in what would become southeastern Texas. The Comanches collected tribute in slaves, horses, and goods from Spanish colonists as well as any Indian tribes who inhabited the territory from the panhandle to as far south as the colony of Nuevo Santander.8 The Lipan tribes, collected together by the Spanish at Laredo and given free reign over the territory between the Nueces and

Rio Grande, were still well within the purview of Comanche raiders. Comanches killed many

Lipan warriors, and countless children and women of the tribe became captives and kin of the

6 Thomas A. Britten, The Lipan Apaches: People of Wind and Lightning (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 60-62. 7 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 129. 8 Ibid.,186-190.

237 Comanches. Thus, the Lipans were already in a precarious position when larger numbers of

Hispanos and Anglos began arriving in the lower Rio Grande Valley during the first third of the

19th century. With an enemy in common, the Spanish settlers and the Lipans co-existed as best they could. Then, in 1816, during the Mexican war for independence, the Lipans and Comanches entered into a rare peace treaty. As a result, the number of raids conducted on the right bank of the Rio Grande, where Hispanic vecinos had coalesced into a number of small villages, increased dramatically. The Spanish colonial administration could ill-afford to part with the resources necessary to meet the Indians’ challenge and fronterizos bore the brunt of Native power.

Fortunately for the Hispanos, the Spanish administrators were able to cajole a halting peace treaty from the Comanches that, at least briefly, ended their raids south of the Rio Grande. In a further stroke of luck for vecinos, the Lipan and Comanche peace dissolved after a hazy incident where the Lipans, seemingly without provocation, murdered several Comanche men who had married into the tribe.9

Once Mexico won its independence from Spain, Lipans were quick to recognize the sovereign power of the new Republic and treat with its new deputies. Indeed, with a disinterested central government overseeing things from far away, vecinos and frontier officials were largely on their own when dealing with the Lipans. They began entering into a series of peace treaties with the new alcaldes and governors on the right side of the river who replaced the old Spanish bureaucrats.10 Peace treaties were a seasonal frontier ritual that formalized the middle ground forged by Lipans and norteños, lending it a new legalistic language. Lipans would continue to raid Mexico in the summer, and raid in one state while in peace at another, but the peace treaties they entered into reflected a strange amalgam of norteño as well as Lipan goals. It was a

9 Ibid., 220. 10 Presidente de Rosas to Castañeda, (copy Moral June 21, 1853), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC.

238 common cultural (mis)understanding that Lipans could alternately raid and sue for peace, and somehow everybody on the frontier managed to live with it. In any case, Mexicans and Lipans were probably careful not to estrange each other too much; they needed each other when

Comanche threats loomed large.

Historian Martha Rodríguez has claimed that the truces were a “trick of war,” and that they served a practical purpose in the scarcely populated and resource-poor Northern frontier.

During the halting peace that followed a season of raiding, both sides understood that they could rebuild and prepare for the next round of attacks that would inevitably follow the disruption of peace. This method of alternating war and peace allowed both sides to make perpetual war over scarce resources. But alternating war and peace also allowed both sides in this sparsely populated country to avoid demographic collapse. The Lipans, after all, needed Mexican captives to replenish their dwindling numbers and they needed horses and longhorns to carry and feed them.

Hence, it would not do to exterminate the Hispano/a colonists. Ironically, villagers may have also sometimes welcomed Lipan raiders. Lipan men often carried plundered horses or domesticated mesteños for sale with them. Thus, following independence, the new Mexican authorities of Coahuila continued the old Spanish Imperial policy of “granting the peace”

(acordar la paz) to Indians on regular, almost seasonal, intervals to avoid the collapse of their colonies.11

Of course this was not the way the supreme government in Mexico City would have wanted it. They hoped to reduce the Indians in the North to sedentary de-ethnicized vecinos. But this was not a realistic option in the absence of immediate state power. Face-to-face negotiations comprised the bulk of communication and the sovereign government was a distant authority that little understood the compromises that made life in the borderlands manageable. In reality,

11 Rodriguez La Guerra, 140-141, 144

239 “granting the peace” revealed the powerlessness of the norteños in the face of borderlands nomads; truces allowed for a degree of coexistence and association. Granting the peace would never result in the reduction and assimilation of Lipan peoples into Northern peasant society.12 It did, however, regulate the economic activity of Lipan warriors to a degree.

The Lipans alternated their cycles of raiding, war, and peace not only according to season, but also among the different Mexican villages. While at peace with some villages they attacked other frontier pueblos, in effect farming the Mexican frontier for horses and captives in a staggered pattern. One frontier commander, who may not have seen the logic to their raiding patterns, complained about the fickleness of the Lipans in 1837. When the Lipans promised to attack the Comanches alongside the vecinos of one village, even receiving arms and munitions to outfit themselves, they instead turned their weapons against the vecinos of other frontier towns.

Their actions mystified frontier officials who saw that the Lipans were robust, healthy, and capable of being “civilized.” 13 But the Lipans did not see people who populated the frontier as one, unified, national people. They probably did not think that treaties made with one town extended to the others.

Their location made them into regional powerbrokers. While marginal to larger national entities, their home ranges cut through the heart of the borderlands. The Lipans lived spread through the Nueces Valley and beyond in many small bands that lie within the most contested strip of land between Mexico and Texas. In 1836, there were 900 Lipans in Texas, but there were many more in Mexico living near their old mission of San Lorenzo outside of San Fernando.14

12 Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972), 281; David Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846, The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1982), 152. 13 Atalya, Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, April 8, 1837 [found in AHMAT Hemeroteca C1 E2]. 14 Minister of Texas to John Forsyth, August 27, 1836, Roll 1 (T728), Vol. 1 July 18, 1836-July 5, 1842, Dispatches from U.S. Ministers to Texas, 1836-1845, NAW.

240 After the Texan victory at San Jacinto they were in a unique position to play the two sides off against one another and they saw the Texans as potential new allies. They were emboldened by the rebels’ example and eager to curry the favor of the newly-independent Republic of Texas in the late 1830s. Anglo Texans represented a new source for gifts, manufactures, and supplies.

Further, the Lipans were likely impressed with the superior equipment that the Anglos brought with them to Texas and the ready cash with which they rewarded the Lipans for plundered

Mexican livestock. As a result, Chief Cuelgas de Castro signed the first of many treaties with

Texas in 1838, accompanied by loud proclamations of friendship.15 It is doubtful that the Lipans were as enamored of the Texans as they professed. Much more likely, they were interested in being employed as scouts and receiving the goods that Texans could offer them. But whatever their reasons, they increasingly turned their raids against the Mexicans villages that lay near the

Rio Grande/Bravo, beyond the no-man’s land of the Nueces Strip. This “fickleness” represented a brutal realpolitik that promised plunder on one side if they joined up with the other.

They kept up their attacks on Mexico from safety in Texas for several years. 1840 witnessed a particularly devastating attack on the settlement of Aguas Leguas in Nuevo León.

The Lipans reportedly killed sixty in that town, wounded another sixty, took twenty-eight captives and stole 300 head of cattle. Neighboring San Nicolás Hidalgo suffered similar raids, losing by one estimate 3,300 horses to the Lipans in the years between 1840 and 1850. 16 The

Lipans were well-aware of the ongoing and undeclared war that Texas and Mexico were fighting against one another following San Jacinto, and they threw their lot in with the Texans. The

Lipans would ally with the Texans even as the Immigrant Tribes began wandering towards

Mexico. When the undeclared war between Texas and Mexico reached a critical moment in 1842,

15 “Treaty Between Texas and Lipan Indians,” January 8, 1838, pp. 2-3, Vol. 1, TIP. 16 Rodriguez, Historias de Resistencia y Exterminio: Los Indios de Coahuila Durante el Siglo XIX (Mexico, 1995), 71.

241 Cuelgas de Castro travelled to Corpus Christie with a small band to accompany the Texans as scouts. They pledged to serve in the Texans’ punitive mission against the Villas del Norte and punish their “old enemies—the Mexicans.”17 Castro, meanwhile, vowed his “eternal hatred to the

Mexicans and friendship for the Texians.” 18

The alliance of the Lipans with the Texans predictably outraged norteños. In January of

1843, shortly after the failed raid on Mier, the Mexicans captured a portion of the tribe under

Captain “Flacco” [sic], a leading chief among the bands of Lipans who lived in Texas. The

Mexican soldiers killed nearly all of the Lipans warriors they captured, although Flacco himself miraculously escaped. The chief then watched closely for an opportunity to avenge himself on the Mexicans.19 Two months later, however, Flacco was dead—murdered by white men or perhaps Cherokees in a case of mistaken identity. The Texans lost a close ally in Flacco, and at a critical moment as well. Despite their professed deep hatred for the Mexicans and eternal loyalty to the Texans, the Lipans had begun to raid in the Texan frontier settlements in the winter months of 1842-1843.20 The Texans, like their neighbors to the south, were slowly learning that the Lipans dictated the terms of peace. Unlike their neighbors to the South, however, Texans were not used to dealing with Natives on their own terms.

Peace with Texas had also allowed the Lipans to make war on their old enemies, the

Comanches. In the late 1830s, the Comanches went to war against the Texans over territorial limits. The Lipans joined with the Texans, serving as scouts.21 During this war, twelve (or perhaps sixteen) Lipans were involved in a blow that colonel John H. Moore and his sixty volunteers dealt to a Comanche ranchería, likely comprised of Yamparikas, which sat on a

17 Telegraph and Texas Ranger, June 29, 1842. 18 R.A. Iron to Samuel Houston, March 14, 1838, pp. 44-45, Vol. TIP. 19 Telegraph and Texas Ranger, January 11, 1843. 20 Telegraph and Texas Ranger, March 29, 1843. 21 Captain H. J. Moore to Albert Sidney Johnston, March 10, 1839, pp. 57-59, Vol. 1, TIP

242 tributary of the San Saba River. 22 Winning the initial victory, the Texans and their Lipan allies retreated to reload. When they renewed their attack, however, they found that scores, if not hundreds, of Comanches had arrived in the meantime to assist their companions. Emboldened by these reinforcements, the Comanches approached the Texans for reconciliation only to discover that the Lipans had already murdered all of the captives taken in the initial attack of the town.23

The Lipans would prove themselves worthy adversaries later in the campaign as well. After the so-called Texan “Victory at Plum Creek” the Lipans discovered another Comanche village for the Texans to attack, which resulted in the death of 128 Comanches and the capture of 34 others.24 The Lipans were gaining a reputation as particularly ruthless foes.

Despite all the bloodletting between the two peoples, the Texans were able to convince the Lipans to make peace with the Comanches in 1844. The Lipans even returned a couple of captives to the Comanches as a sign of good faith. In reality, the Texan captains were likely eager for the tribes to reconcile so that the Texas frontier might have peace during the ongoing war with Mexico.25 The Lipans respected this peace treaty as much as they respected any other.

They probably did not see it as absolute and applicable to all members of the tribe at all times.

For instance, the treaty carried a provision that the Lipans stay out of the settlements unless they carried a pass. Despite this injunction, the Lipans were a near-constant presence in Bastrop in

1844 and early 1845. They even rustled on occasion near that town.26 The Lipans did not understand why the Texans were so adamant that they remain outside of the settlements. In

Bastrop, the Lipans could trade and collect much-needed manufactures. And the men were

22 Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State or Recollections of Old Texas Days, (Austin: H.P.N. Gammel, 1900), 154. 23 Thomas Kavanagh, The Comacnhes: A History, 1706-1875 (Lincoln: Univeresity of Nebraska Press, 1996), 261- 262; Gary Clay Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 175-176. 24 Kavanagh 261-262; Anderson 189-191. 25 Treaty signed in Council at Tehuacana Creek, Ocober 9 1844 pp. 114-119, Vol. 2, TIP 26 C. Green, Agent to the Lipan and Tonkawa, to Major T. G. Western, December 14, 1844, pp. 150-151, Vol. 1, TIP.

243 reported to enjoy themselves immensely taking advantage of the rest and recreation that the town offered. The men stayed in town during the winter months while the women of the tribe contracted to gather cotton at nearby plantations.27 They had no intention of isolating themselves, having learned to incorporate new economic activities alongside their older ways.

Only in 1845 did the Lipan captain Dátil at last make a peace compact with the Mexicans, ending five years of particularly bloody warfare, raiding, and slaving on Mexico. Dátil agreed to turn in all captives and accede to the frontier officials’ demand that they only hunt within a demarcated range and cease their raiding on the Mexican villages.28 The Lipans kept these promises—for a while. But just as the Texas frontier readied for the invasion of Mexico in

January 1847, nearly the entire Lipan nation, reportedly 2,500 strong, returned to Texas. They settled along the Colorado and the tributaries of the Rio Puerco in villages not numbering more than thirty people each and prepared to make their corn.29 The Texans could ill-afford to remove these people from their state at this time. But the challenge that the Lipans’ trans-borderlands nomadism posed to the Texans as well as the Mexicans would be much more acute once the two sides agreed on a border at the Rio Grande/Bravo as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In-Between New Frontiers

In 1848 the Mexican and U.S. governments drew a line on the map between their respective nations at the Grande/Bravo, but it did not alter immediately the borderlands routes that plains raiders followed. The new boundary failed to discourage unauthorized crossings. Nor did top-down efforts to militarize the border net immediate results. Forts built along the border

27 Thomas G. Western to Robert S. Neighbors, February 12, 1845, Vol. 1, TIP. 28 Ibid,, This was apparently an old role for Dátil, who had made peace compacts as early as 1826 to plant tobacco in Mexico, see Alcalde de Músquiz, F. 2112, AMM PM C-19, L-3 E-6, F. 2, BEIN AM. 29 Texas Democrat, Jan 13, 1847.

244 on both sides were immobile, poorly-staffed, and short of horses. In Mexico they were also short of arms, and most soldiers carried only the crudest weapons and most antique firearms.

Meanwhile, the United States failed to enforce Article 11 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which explicitly charged its federal forces with the onerous task of halting cross-border raiders.

The Mexican commanders complained about the lack of faith on the part of the United States, but even they must have realized the monumental cost that enforcing Article 11 would have entailed. Raiders had another advantage as soldiers along the border were incapable of keeping up with horseback Indians who moved at the same speed, if not faster, than the soldiers did along routes Indians knew best.

The border may actually have benefited the Lipans’ autonomy in an ironic way. The new line did indeed restrict some movement, but not the kind that the United States and Mexico were trying to contain. Rather, it was the militias on both sides of the border who found that they could not cross over to the other side without permission. Certainly, some soldiers ignored the international treaty, especially Texas volunteers. But vecinos and citizens on both sides of the border complained about not being able to cross over to follow retreating raiders seeking asylum on the other side. Lipans, meanwhile took full advantage of the asylum that borders offered, often retreating to the other side (whether Texas or Mexico) just ahead of their pursuers.

The border could not contain unauthorized crossings and the Lipans continued to travel along their own routes, largely escaping the purview of the primitive state apparatus that existed along the border. Certainly they were aware of the new border, but as long as Texas and Mexico remained at odds the Lipans could play one side off the other and lend their own uses to the border. They were seasoned border-crossers who saw boundaries not only as potential lines of refuge, but also as means to their own strategic ends.

245 Hence, the Lipans had developed a sophisticated understanding of borders. This can be seen in the way the treated another boundary, the western one that separated the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila. In the year 1849, the Lipans (as well as the Comanches and

Mescaleros) were at peace in Chihuahua, but they continued to make war on the ranchos, haciendas, and villages of the valley of Santa Rosa in Coahuila. Taking advantage of the factionalism that separated the states of Northern Mexico from one another, the Lipans attacked in Coahuila and Nuevo León and then retreated to Chihuahua to take up the refuge offered by the governor of that state.30

Given the facility with which the Lipans could manipulate borders, they were bound to take advantage of the new international border. But it would not be too long until Anglos and

Hispanos realized that they were no longer working at cross-purposes—at least as far as the

Indian issue was concerned. Both sides had hopes that the border might quell some of the local unrest and protect “civilized” settlers on both sides. Indeed, this was the very spirit of the potentially reconciliatory Article 11. A line meant to separate people from one another had the unexpected effect of bringing them closer together. Hopeful that the Texans would join them in persecuting the Lipans, the authorities in Coahuila stopped according them peace. Mexicans also demonstrated a new military resolve that would only be augmented by the arrival of the

Immigrant Tribes and new military colonies. Forces from Coahuila caught up to the Lipans and managed to defeat them on at least one early occasion, despite their dire lack of horses and arms.

In December of 1849, Francisco Castañeda achieved a victory at La Ratita that resulted in the death of five warriors. The surviving warriors then escaped across the river to Texas.

The events that transpired following this battle set the course of Mexican diplomacy towards the Lipans for years to come. The victors began to try and engineer a cultural

30 Francisco Castañeda, Santa Rosa, to Juáregui, August 21, 1849, Ficha 284 C3 F4 E60 3F, FCMO AGEC.

246 transformation amongst the Lipans through selective extermination. At the battle of La Ratita,

Castañeda killed five warriors, and managed to capture a good number of women and children from the retreating Lipan band. The commander of the frontier, Antonio Juáregui, demanded that the prisoners be treated “justly.” But undoubtedly the Mexicans wanted to put the captives to work and assimilate them into Mexican sedentary society.31 The commanders hoped that the uncorrupted Lipan youth and their mothers could be turned into laboring and sedentary norteños.

Norteños had little use for the martial nomadic culture that transgressed borders to rob and take captives. Henceforth, the reduction of the Lipans would increasingly hinge on a question of gender. The middle ground receded as a result of growing Mexican resolve, and the terms of masculine violence between static colonists and mobile raiders grew increasingly incompatible.

As the Mexican commanders increasingly dominated the terms of peace, the Lipans had to acquiesce to norteño sedentary norms or face extermination. Unfortunately, the men of the tribe had little use for the civilization that the Mexicans were so keen on bringing them into.

Farming and perhaps even stock husbandry was a woman’s task in their culture, something done seasonally by the women in the weed prairies and river valleys of south central Texas. The men who lived by hunting herds and raiding would have little use in Mexican society, except for the occasional scouting contract. To come to terms with the Mexicans would make them largely irrelevant.

A year after the defeat at La Ratita, in 1850, the Lipans were still in Texas, licking their wounds and pondering their future. When Indian Agent Rollins visited their camp in Texas he found that the years of strife had already had a significant impact on the male population of the tribe. The Lipans did not number more than 250 warriors in total. Rollins also noticed that there

31 Mariano Arista, Mexico City, to Juáregui, January 19, 1850, C5 F2 E17 1F, FCMO AGEC; Arista, Mexico City, to governor of Coahuila, January 19, 1850, C5 F2 E18 2F, FCMO AGEC.

247 were a disproportionate number of children and elderly present at the camp. The number of warriors had decreased 75% since 1820 and their demographic decline reflected a growing reality. The near-constant raiding they had been involved with in Texas, Mexico, and amongst the Comanches and Tonkawas had taken a heavy toll on the warriors of the tribe. Lipan women, who accompanied the men on their expeditions and made camps for themselves at a remove from the action, had also suffered demographic decline. Given their wanderings alongside the warriors, many women likely become captives to the Mexicans after the death of their husbands on unsuccessful raids. In any case, Agent Rollins saw their way of life as doomed. He offered the opinion that their survival as a tribe was completely dependent on the shelter and resources that

Texas could offer them. They could no longer sustain their old pattern of life.32

The final blow to the old way of life came with the arrival of the Immigrant Tribes to

Coahuila in 1850. Indeed, the same treaty that allowed Papicua, Coacoochee, and John Horse to bring their disaffected tribes to Coahuila enumerated the tribes who could not and would not be admitted “de paz” in Coahuila. Included among these were the “barbarous” tribes, such as the

Lipans, who refused to take on the trappings of civilization and dedicate themselves to labor and sedentary agriculture.33 The Mexicans—at least according to their treaties—would no longer accept mere peaceable association with “barbarous” tribes. Only if they desisted in their wandering and raiding would they be granted peace. Otherwise they were subject to the punishment that Mexican and Immigrant Indian soldiers could inflict upon them.

With the arrival of Coacoochee, the balance of war tipped irreversibly in Mexico’s favor.

As a result, and conscious that their very existence as a people was in danger, Lipan captain Dátil

32 John H. Rollins, Austin, Texas, May 8, 1850, Texas Agency, letters received, 1847-1859, Reel 1, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, NAW; John H. Rollins, Austin, September 30, 1850, Texas Agency, letters received, 1847-1859, Reel 1, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, NAW. 33 La Patria, November 9, 1850 [copy of contract with Immigrant Tribes signed by the Mexican Minister of Foreign Relations]

248 appealed to the Mexicans for peace through a Mexican captive taken from the village of La

Zarca. The Sub-Inspector of the frontier, Manuel Maldonado, agreed to forward Dátil’s request for peace on to Mexico City and asked the Lipans to await the response patiently.34 Working behind the scenes in support of their application was none other than Coacoochee, the great

Seminole pan-Indianist. Undoubtedly, he hoped to add the Lipans to his expanding Indian colony then located at Monclova Viejo, and he insisted that the commanders grant the peace to the

Lipans, even vouching for the fastidiousness of their promise to settle down outside San

Fernando alongside the Immigrant Tribes.35

The Mexicans recognized, however, that the Lipans’ overtures towards peace were most often a “trick” that won them a reprieve while they regrouped. This time the Mexicans found the resolve to reject the Lipans’ offer, citing not only their “bad faith,” but also the fact that their request for peace had provoked considerable grumbling among the Mexican officers.36 In addition, the commanders were well-aware that some Lipan warriors had behaved errantly that summer, even as their application for peace was pending in Mexico City.37 Coacoochee, who had just returned from Indian Territory with 100 more Mascogo and Seminole immigrants, was instructed to deliver the negative decision to the Lipans. The minister of war also demanded that

Coacoochee cut off all communication with the Lipans.38 This must have come as a tremendous disappointment to Seminole pan-Indianist. Coacoochee had maintained good relations with the

34 La Patria, August 3, 1850 [San Fernando de las Rosas, July 20, 1850]; Arista, Mexico City, to Juáregui, September 6, 1850, Ficha 911, AGEC FCMO C9 F2 E20 2F, FCMO AGEC. 35 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Castañeda, captain of the colony of Rio Grande, September 9, 1850 (copy san Fernando September 9, 1850), Ficha 916 C9 F2 E25 4F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado to Galán, September 9, 1850 (Copy September 9, 1850), Ficha 916 C9 F2 E25 4F, FCMO AGEC. 36 Maldonado to Juáregui September 9, 1850; Ibid, Juáregui to Castañeda, September 9, 1850 (Copy San Fernando spet. 9, 1850), Ficha 916 C9 F2 E 25 4F, FCMO AGEC; Galán to Maldonado, September 9 ,1850 (copy San Fernando, Sept. 9, 1850), Ficha 916 C9 F2 E 25 4F, FCMO AGEC. 37 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, July 3, 1850, Ficha 784 C7 F9 E118 2F, FCMO AGEC. 38 Arista, Mexico City, to Juáregui, September 6, 1850, Ficha 911 C9 F2 E20 2F, FCMO AGEC; Robles to Juáregui, Mexico Feb 19, 1851, C11 FC10 E 80 1F, FCMO AGEC.

249 Lipans since his arrival, and he had even benefitted from a warning that they gave him of an eminent Comanche attack upon his supply train while he was in Texas. 39 He would now be required to fight the Lipans rather than add these very well-respected warriors to his colony.

The Lipans resorted to the only tool they had when diplomacy by regular means failed: they abjured compromise, truces, and middle grounds and began raiding Mexico again in the hopes that they could force them back to the table. Soon after, frontier officials caught wind of a

Lipan plan to attack Monclova Viejo—allegedly in union with the Comanches. They hastily pressed sixty vecinos into the troop to meet the challenge. The attack on Monclova Viejo never came, but the Lipans used the distraction the rumors had caused to attack other settlements that lay along the line that extended from Guerrero.40

Broadly reflective of their increasingly dire conditions, the Lipans began sporadically to attack the settlements on the Texas side as well as the Mexican side. They crossed the Rio

Grande/Bravo, stole or butchered whatever livestock they could carry away, and then they crossed back over, where they were out of the military authorities’ reach. In March, the Lipans fell upon the pastures of Fort Duncan, killing and butchering a number of vaccinated cattle and then driving even more across the river. The Lipans then made their camp so close to the river on the Mexican side that some of the animals actually waded across the river and back to the pastures at Fort Duncan.41 They were now making war in Texas just as they had in Mexico for decades; they stole from the Texas settlements and sold the goods to Mexicans across the river.42

The commander of Fort Duncan was eager to dispatch a force to punish the Lipan camp, but the Lipans’ superior understanding of the new border served them well. Manuel Maldonado,

39 Maldonado, Monclova Viejo, to Juáregui, January 9, 1851, C11 F2 E17 2F Ficha 1157, FCMO AGEC. 40 La Patria, May 10, 1851; Manuel Leal to Ayuntamiento de Guerrero, April 21 1851, Ficha 1358 C13 F7 E41 1F, FCMO AGEC; Robles, Mexico City, to Juáregui, May 19, 1851, Ficha 1414 C13 F13 E97 4F, FCMO AGEC. 41, Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui March 22, 1851, Ficha 1296 C12 F5 E58 2F, FCMO AGEC. 42 Castillos to sr. juez de paz, Musquiz, August 15, 1852, f. 118, LE 1596 SRE.

250 Sub-Inspector of the frontier, would not allow a force of North American troops on Mexican soil and he did not have the resources or men to put together a horseback unit himself. The lack of a treaty that allowed Texans and Mexicans to cross the border in pursuit of criminals again worked to the advantage of the Lipans. But, when the commander of Fort Duncan spoke of his desire “to punish this common enemy and remove him from the area” in reference to the Lipans, he expressed a conviction that was on the rise along both the left and right banks of the river.43 As we have seen in the former chapter, Mexican vecinos were extraordinarily reluctant to allow any

Texans onto their side of the river or enter into any kind of agreement with them. But as long as

Texas and Coahuila remained at odds, the Lipans could still plunder one side and seek out refuge on the other.

Thus, the Lipans continued the erratic pattern of raiding on both sides of the border that reflected their deteriorating situation. In the months that followed, they killed a civil colonist of

Guerrero and his servant. They also robbed whatever Kickapoos and Seminoles they could find straggling in small groups from their camp at Monclova Viejo. They even murdered a few

Kickapoos, a tribe with whom they would remain at odds for the rest of the century.44 After these attacks, they were rumored to have joined up with the Comanches—who were suffering a similar decline during the 1850s. The Mexicans sent out a force of military colonists and Immigrant

Tribesmen after them, but this was the expedition where the Kickapoos decided they had at last had enough of life in Mexico and abandoned the mission, causing it to fail.45

The Lipans may have escaped retribution on the Mexican side of the border this time, but they found that they were less and less welcome in Texas as they kept up their raids on that state.

43 Ibid. 44 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, April 10, 1851, Ficha 1335 C13 F4 E18 3F FCMO AGEC; Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, May 23, 1851, Ficha 1420, C13 F14 E103 7F, AGEC FCMO. 45 La Patria, August 9, 1851.

251 As officer Ramón Falcón opined, they were living among Americans “who wanted to kill them” and in an awful, wretched condition.46 Other than a handful of Lipans that the Texans hired as scouts, and a few collected at the forts where they doled out resources to the Indians, the Lipans had run afoul of the Texans and their demagogic newspaper editors. As a result of the growing bellicosity of Texans, the Lipans became increasingly desperate to enter into a permanent treaty with Mexico on whatever terms possible and to return to the “land where they were born.” In fact, they had inhabited the Nueces strip in the 18th century, only travelling to the presidio of San

Lorenzo outside of San Fernando at odd intervals. Nevertheless, they considered their history more closely tied to the Mexicans than the Texans who were lately in possession of their old hunting grounds. Accordingly, they again sued for peace with Coahuila in 1852.47

This time, the Lipans pulled out all the stops in their efforts to make a peace treaty with

Mexico. In their effort they resorted to a maneuver that showed a willingness to acquiesce to terms demanded by the Mexicans. That October, a newly-ascendant Lipan Chief, Coyote, dispatched the women Manuelita, Jesusa and Jaunita to visit San Fernando, seek out Manuel

Maldonado, and solicit peace. The meaning of the women’s presence was unmistakable; they were a symbol of peace, widely-understood by all fronterizos that had a genealogy dating back to early colonial times. Their presence also indicated that the Lipans were fully aware of the

Mexicans’ demand that the men lay down their arms permanently and instead nurture the feminine side of their culture, the one that tended towards permanence and subsistence. The

Lipans had deputized the women to negotiate in their stead and take charge of the destiny of the tribe. This female negotiation was an implicit acknowledgement of and acquiescence to the

Mexicans’ static model of civilization. Perhaps they sent women delegates (and would continue

46 Ramón Falcón to Maldonado (Rosas), Oct 19, 1852 [copy Maldonado, San Vicente, Oct. 21, 1852], Ficha 1969, C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC. 47 Maldonado to Júaregui, Rosas, September 22, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC.

252 to do so), since they saw that the negotiations hinged on questions of domesticity. The women embodied the very virtues to which they would have to acquiesce—agriculture, settlement, child- rearing, and permanent peace. If there were to be a new middle ground after the shift in power towards the Mexican side, it would be heavily-gendered on Mexican terms.48

In spite of the Lipans’ deft manipulation of the frontier’s oldest symbol of peace,

Maldonado was reluctant to recommend them. Mexicans, he opined, had a custom of pardoning

Indians for past indiscretions and it was because of this generosity that they had “learned many bitter lessons” in the past. Further, if the Lipans were admitted in peace, then Washington might see a reason to shirk the responsibilities laid out for them in Article 11. Maldonado was not even sure that the women represented the univocal desire of the tribe, and he pointed out that the

Lipans had recently “caused mischief” on the frontier. Even as the Lipan women were in conference with Maldonado at Santa Rosa, another band had butchered a cow near la Nava and kidnapped several youths from around Monclova Viejo and San Vicente. These attacks had already motivated a party of vecinos from Rio Grande and Guerrero to move against Coyote’s ranchería located just outside of San Vicente. Thus, even as the three women sued for peace in

San Fernando, Manuel Flores moved alongside a company of vecinos in pursuit of six Lipan men who were beating a hasty retreat towards the Grande/Bravo. They managed to cross the river before Flores’ poorly-mounted company could reach them.49 The errant Lipans justified their crimes by saying that they believed that the women who had visited San Fernando had been

48 On the role of women as harbingers of peace in earliest Spanish and Native contacts see Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 35-42. 49 Maldonado, San Vicente, to Juáregui, Oct 21, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC.

253 killed, but there is no reason to think that they truly believed this, unless the whole peace process had been a very elaborate ruse on the part of Mexican officials.50

Despite Maldonado’s misgivings and the recent attacks, the delegation of women persisted in their application for peace and the rest of the Lipans who accompanied them remained camped outside of San Vicente. A short while later, Coyote himself visited the town with three warriors and seventeen additional Indian women. The peaceful intent of Coyote could not have been clearer.51 The women represented the fact that the Lipans were earnest in their attempt for peace and had chosen to turn away from the path of war. Henceforth, negotiations between the two peoples would hinge on the role women and children would play after a truce.

Meanwhile, in an effort to gain the sympathy of the townspeople and to procure food for their families, the Lipan warriors visited Rosas and the other towns of the frontier with their wives and children. The men’s acquisition to the newly gendered terms of negotiation received a good deal of support from many of the townspeople they visited. Visiting the towns in family units demonstrated their new dedication to the terms of domesticity as laid out by the women who had visited Maldonado the winter before. Certainly, the vecinos had a complicated relationship with the tribe. On one hand they feared them, but on the other hand, many norteños had formed intimate relationships with the Lipans through commerce, co-existence, and probably even relationships of a more personal nature. As the commanders had no resources with which to force the tribe to stay put, the Lipans continued to move freely about the frontier of Coahuila

50 Maldonado, Rosas, to Júaregui, September 22, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado, Adjuntas, to Juaregui, September 30, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC; Maldonado, Nava, to Juáregui October 16, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC. 51 Pedro María de Anaya, Mexico City, to Jáuregui, November 9, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC.

254 visiting the vecinos and practicing a version of diplomacy intended to demonstrate their good will towards the inhabitants.52

In Rosas, the women were given an opportunity to plead their case directly with the

Mexican authorities and they demonstrated that they were willing to meet the terms of peace as dictated by the Mexicans in return for a home. Well-aware that they could not dictate the terms, the women were willing to accede to the Mexican’s call for the reduction of the tribe to civilization. The way the Lipan women saw it, they had no recourse but to place themselves willingly in the hands of the Mexicans. They would accept all the conditions the Mexicans had imposed if only they would heed the Lipans’ request and allow them to return to Mexico; they had resolved amongst themselves to die in Mexico. In addition, they signaled that they would even turn over their children and families to the Mexicans, “before they would leave the country in which they were born.”53 This was probably the greatest concession they could make, as the

Mexican commanders were especially interested in taking charge of the next generation of

Lipans before they were corrupted by the errant ways of their “bárbaro” ancestors. The commanders took this as a sign that the Lipans were at last ready to submit to their program of civilization and transform themselves into productive Mexicanos/as.

Mexicans still considered the softer-lined approach of incorporation and reduction tenable. And indeed the vecinos of Santa Rosa were sympathetic to the plight of these women and their request for peace. They likely saw in the desperation of the women the desire for a better life for their children, even if this meant they would grow up estranged from Lipan ways and their sons would be unable to achieve the manhood their fathers had attained. As far as the

Mexicans were concerned, if these women and children could be “civilized” they would offer an

52 Maldonado to Juáregui Guerrero Nov. 12, 1852, Ficha 1041 C20 F2 E17 2F, FCMO AGEC. 53 Maldonado, San Vicente, to Juáregui, October 21, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC.

255 advantage to the Northern populations and help nurture the growth of the scarce frontier population. Coyote’s effort towards peace represented an acquiescence to Mexican terms. He had even agreed to turn in his children to the vecinos if the authorities did not grant the peace to the

Lipans. Meanwhile, in the nearby settlements, other Lipans had begun to cross over the river and show up in the pueblos, unarmed and in search of peace.54 The new terms of peace between the

Mexicans and Lipans reflected a new reality to which the Lipans would have to adapt if they wanted to survive.

Coyote left the women and children of his tribe behind at Arroyo de “las Bacas” [sic], two leagues from San Vicente, as he awaited the response of the central government.55 The response was slow in coming, however, and the Indians retreated to their old camps in Texas as they waited.56 Finally, at the end of November, Maldonado received his answer from the central government—and it was a negative one. The Lipans would not be granted peace, and they were, instead, to be pursued “as if they were enemies of the Mexicans.” 57 The central Mexican government, headed up by the old Liberal norteño, Mariano Arista, did not believe that the

Lipans would ever shed their customs and take on the gendered norms of norteño life. Mexico

City called for their violent reduction if they did not leave the country immediately. Meanwhile, the colony of Rio Grande received orders to “finish them off” if they returned to Mexico.58 The old middle ground had fully receded and even the negotiations where Mexicans called the terms had netted nothing. The decks were stacked against the Lipans as long as a seasoned norteño remained in power in Mexico City.

54 Maldonado, San Vicente, to Jaúregui, October 21, 1852, Ficha 1969 C19 F4 E35 26F, FCMO AGEC. 55 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, November 12, 1852, Ficha 1041 C20 F2 E17 2F, FCMO AGEC. 56 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, November 24, 1852, ficha 2052C20 F3 E28 2F, FCMO AGEC. 57 Maldonado, Nava, to Juáregui, December 4, 1852, Ficha 2006 C20 F5 E42 2F, FCMO AGEC. 58 Maldonado, Guerrero, to Juáregui, November 12, 1852, Ficha 1041 C20 F2 E17 2F FCMO AGEC.

256 The Conservative Intervention

Luckily for the Lipans, a revolution was in the offing hundreds of miles south of the frontier. In Mexico City, Santa Anna’s ascent to his final term as president, this time under the title of “His Highest Serenity,” would allow the Lipans one final chance to sue for peace.

Probably the Lipans understood that Central and Conservative politicians were much more sympathetic to Indians than the Federalists and Liberals who occupied most positions of power in the North (with the notable exception of Matamoros) and ceded autonomy to municipal governments. Conservatives were also more resistant to any overtures made by Texas to settle borderland issues. Hence, with Santa Anna again in charge, relations with Texas would freeze over again and a middle ground could reassert itself and allow the Lipans their accustomed level of maneuverability. With Mexico and the U.S. at odds over Indian policy, northern liberals were not free in the north to follow Texas’ lead in dealing with the Lipans.

Thus, after the revolution, Coyote put in another application for peace. He again visited

Rosas later that April with two companions and seven women to inquire whether the Supreme government had yet reached a decision about their pending application. Governor Castañeda had to admit that the Lipans had displayed exemplary behavior while awaiting the government’s response, and indeed, he was predisposed towards granting the Lipans their request.59 Castañeda had allied with the Conservatives after Santa Anna’s latest coup and he reflected his patrons’ larger geo-political ideas. Conservatives and Centralists were less inclined to heed the demands of distant frontier vecinos when they called for the forcible reduction of Indians, and they most often continued the “soft” policies of association forged by their Bourbon Spanish forbears.

Further, just as we have seen with the issues surrounding runaway slaves, Centralists (and

59 Onofre Díaz, Inspector General de las Colonias Militares de Oriente, Monterrey, to Castañeda, March 26, 1853, Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC.

257 especially Santa Anna when he chose to be a Centralist) were always interested in demonstrating the amnesty that Mexico offered to persecuted peoples in a bold affront to the North Americans.

Things looked up for the Lipans for another reason too. Despite their traditional animosity towards both the central government and Indians, the vecinos of Coahuila were surprisingly supportive of Coyote’s request for peace. When Castañeda solicited the opinion of the alcaldes and presidents of the frontier municipalities on the subject of the Lipans, they condoned the tribes’ application for peace. Surely the soft diplomacy that the Lipans had engaged in lately, visiting the towns unarmed and accompanied by their families, had contributed to swaying the vecinos’ opinions in their favor. More important, however, was the vecinos’ belief in the impossibility of waging a successful war against the Lipans, who were so “astute and war- like.”60 They were tired of the recent bloodshed and robbery and willing to negotiate. For his part, the alcalde of Gigedo admitted that the only peace the frontier had known since 1813 had been during seasonal truces with the Lipans; when the vecinos and Lipans were at peace, the only attacks the pueblos suffered came from the Comanches.61 If the vecinos chose war with the

Lipans, another nearby alcalde opined, the immobile military colonies and vecinos could never catch up to this “audacious and fierce” enemy who knew how to ford the river to the other side quickly and effectively.62 Clearly the vecinos did not evince much faith in the commanders’ militarization of the border and the international cooperation promised by Article 11 of the

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to halt the Lipan raids.

60 Felix Gonzales, Músquiz, to Castañeda, May 27, 1853, (copy Castaneda June 21, 1853), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC; Castañeda, Moral, to Onofre Díaz, June 21, 1852, Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC. 61 Presidente Morelos to Castañeda (copy Moral June 21, 1853), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC; Matias Treviño, Allende, to Castañeda, June 11, 1853 [copy June 21, 1853 Moral], Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC; Santos Garcia, Gigedo, to Castañeda, May 31, 1853 (copy June 21, 1853 Castañeda), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC. 62 Presidente Morelos to Castañeda (copy Moral June 21, 1853), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC.

258 The vecinos were still suspicious of the Lipans, of course, but there were other ways to deal with them besides going to war with them. One alcalde even suggested an extreme form of vigilance over the tribe if they came to establish themselves in Coahuila permanently. He said that the Lipans could be issued their own brand and a uniform consisting of a red cloth and sombrero de palmeta to be worn at all times that would set them apart from the “barbarous”

Indians. Certainly, the “passage of time” would destroy the customs of the Lipans, but this was of secondary concern to the vecinos. Of more immediate concern, not only would peace end the raiding, it would also mean that the captive children would return home. 63

Only the towns of Nava and Guerrero maintained the tougher line that Maldonado had sought to enforce against the Lipans before the change in government. The municipal president of Nava thought that violently reducing them and putting them to work was the only way to win a meaningful peace with the Lipans.64 His counterpart in Guerrero was even more adamant, claiming they the Lipans routinely committed crimes while at peace and articles found in Lipan camps indicated that they had actually committed some of the raids pinned on the Comanches. In referring to past infractions, he called the Lipan application for peace an “engaño de la paz”

(trick of peace).65 Not surprisingly, these outlying towns lay closest to the new military colonies and had the most invested in them.

Notwithstanding the opinion of Guerrero and Nava, the Conservative central government granted the Lipans peace. Shortly thereafter, the Lipans crossed back into Mexico in early

January, 1854 leaving behind their camps on the Pecos river. They established themselves in the

63 Felix Conzales Musquiz May 27 1853 to Castaneda (cpy Castaneda June 21, 1853), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC; Castañeda to Onofre Diaz June 21, 1852 Moral, Coahuila, Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC. 64 José Maria de la Garza, Nava, to Castañeda, June 6, 1853 (copy June 21, 1853), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC. 65 José Andrés Cerera , Guerrero, to Castañeda, May 25, 1853 (copy Moral June 21, 1853), Ficha 2161 C21 F10 E71 32F, FCMO AGEC.

259 neighborhood of San Fernando, near the Seminole camp at El Nacimiento. General Jerónimo

Cardona, who took over as governor of Nuevo León in 1854, continued Pedro Ampudia’s policy of peace with the Lipans. 66 That August, a band of 15 Lipans attacked the Seminoles while they were out hunting. They were pursued by a party of vecinos, but to no avail.67

With peace won from Mexico, the herds and children of the towns on the Coahuiltecan frontier may have been spared, but another threat loomed large. Some Lipans immediately began making forays into Texas from their base in Mexico. Contrasting policies towards the Lipans across boundaries would once again lend them their accustomed degree of maneuverability.

Some Lipans moved into Texas to collect the food and supplies offered to them by the army officers at Fort Inge before returning to Mexico. A far more troubling band, meanwhile, were responsible for a spate of raids that occurred around Laredo in Webb County in the spring of

1854 just months after being granted peace by Mexico. 68

As the Lipans raids grew more frequent in this area, the Texans who lived on ranches along the left side the river began to swell Laredo in search of protection from roving bands of

Lipans. For their part, the Lipans continued their attacks, even expanding their operations to the

Nueces River. 69 Just outside of Laredo, the Lipans robbed a number on cartmen and attacked several nearby ranches, murdering seven people and stampeding 80 horses from one rancher.

They had stolen countless other animals from surrounding Webb County and put them up for sale in Mexico, possibly to the same vecinos in Coahuila who had just recommended the peace.

The commanders at Fort McIntosh heard the complaints of the ranchers and outfitted their soldiers against the Lipans. But, even though there were 500 soldiers stationed at McIntosh and

66 Vidaurri, Monterrey, to Pablo Espinsoa, March 11, 1856, f. 13 [copy March 12, Galindo], Folder 6-18-42, SRE. 67Alcalde Músquiz to sr. prefecto del distrito, August 14, 1854, f. 125, LE 1596 SRE. 68 E.J. Davis to E.M. Pease Laredo, March 13, 1854, pp. 159-163, Vol. 5, TIP. 69 Texas Ranger, March 30, 1854.

260 the neighboring forts, they were poorly-mounted and not up to the task of dealing with mobile raiders. Aware of the feebleness of the federal forces in Texas, the citizens of Webb county wrote to governor Pease with a request for a force of not less than 200 volunteers from Bexar,

Nueces, Star, Hidalgo, and Cameron Counties to muster into a company of Rangers to deal with the Lipans.70

Meanwhile, a leading merchant in Laredo asked governor Pease to prove the Lipans guilty so that they would be justified in their call to “exterminate the race.” 71 Their calls for ethnocide were loud and clear. The resolution made by the citizens of Cameron County was stated baldly in a letter fired off to the editor of the Victoria Advocate: “Will your citizens join us in exterminating the Lipans?” The citizens resolved that their insecurity justified the use of force, and that they would persecute the Lipans and make them cease the raids, as the Texas Ranger said, “even should it involve the destruction of the whole tribe.”72

The Lipans sealed their fate in Texas when they committed a particularly gruesome atrocity the following month. A handful of warriors, and likely at least one Indianized captive, attacked the farmer James Forrester and his family outside of Fredericksburg at the frontier of western settlement. They shot the farmer in the doorway of the house, raped and killed the two daughters, quashed the baby’s life from its body, and took the young boy captive. Somehow

Forrester’s wife managed to escape this evil and run all the way to Fredericksburg to alert the authorities. Acting on her information, the following morning a troupe of 100 soldiers were on the trail of the murderers, headed up by two Lipan scouts, one of whom was John Castro. Castro managed to discover who the culprits were before the troops did, however, and he hurried the

Lipans on to Mexico before the posse could catch up to them. The Lipans at Fort Inge did not

70 E.J. Davis to E.M. Pease Laredo, March 13, 1854, pp. 159-163, Vol. 5, TIP. 71 H.P Bee to E.M. Pease, Laredo March 13, 1854, pp. 164-165, Vol. 5, TIP. 72 Texas Ranger, March 30, 1854 (italics in original).

261 manage to escape, however. All were imprisoned as soon as the authorities learned of Castro’s desertion.73

Outraged by this most recent attack, Governor Pease heeded the settlers’ request for a force of volunteers to patrol the borderlands. He sent out none other than the Blanco River native

James Callahan at the head of six companies of Rangers charged with clearing the Blanco and

Colorado River of Indians that summer.74 Meanwhile, frontier Texans held yet another round of public meetings in San Antonio, Castroville, and Leona about the problems with the Lipans and the Seminoles who continued to raid under the shadow of the peace granted them in Mexico. The gathered Texans threatened to begin a vigilante war of extermination against the Lipans as the frontier was in such a “state of lamentable exposure.”75

Texan newspaper editors again led the charge against the Lipans. Instead of recognizing the independence of the Lipans’ actions, they accused Mexican officials of culpability with the tribe.76 Unbeknownst to the enraged Texans, however, it was only the authorities in Coahuila who had granted the peace to the Lipans. Across another boundary, the vecinos of Nuevo León,

Mexico were once again fighting the tribe. At peace in Coahuila, the Lipans raided in the state of

Nuevo León to procure the supplies the authorities had failed to issue them. In a reverberation of late occurrences in Texas, the owner of one large hacienda who had already fought the Lipans on a previous occasion volunteered to arm all of his employers and peons to go after them.77 Only

Conservative intransigence on the issue blocked the Texans and Mexicans from working together against the tribe.

73 Gonzales Inquirer, April 29, May 6, and May 13,1854. 74 E.M. Pease to J. H. Callahan, Austin, July 5, 1855, 2R291, Vol. 2 1851-1856, Correspondence Concerning the Texas Rangers, WPW CAH; E.M. Pease to Persifor F. Smith, September 5, 1855, 2R291, Vol. 2 1851-1856, Correspondence Concerning the Texas Rangers, WPW CAH; Texian Advocate, Sept. 23, 1854. 75 Seguin Mercury, Jun 3, 1855. 76 Texas State Times, Aug. 25, 1855; Gonzales Inquirer, May 13, 1854. 77 Siglo XIX, January 1, 1853; F. Xavier de Vidaurri to Ampudia, March 20, 1854 (copy April 9, 1854, Monterrey), C102, Militares AGENL.

262 The loudest complaints from Nuevo León came from one of the most influential political and military figures on the frontier, Juan Zuazua. He was a native of Lampazos, and he parlayed the reputation he had earned during the North American Intervention into a position as comandante municipal of his native town in the years that followed. But even though he was a respected figure, the authorities of Coahuila countered his accusations, pointing to a recent victory the Lipans had won against the Comanches as proof of their allegiance to Mexicans.78

They were even working alongside the Seminoles, despite their “natural aversion” to each other, and had taken up their old role as defenders of the frontier from “bárbaros” with a relish.79

According to the governor of Coahuila, the Lipans were hard at work and too deeply involved in their own chores to raid in neighboring country. He gave his ascent to watch over them but insisted that the Comanches were the real instigators of the attacks made in Nuevo León.80 It must have especially infuriated the Liberal-leaning Zuazua when none other than Su Altisima

Serenidad, General López de Santa Anna, intervened in this feud on the Lipans’ behalf.81

Unfortunately for the Lipans, His Highest Sereneness’ reign would end shortly, and the

Lipans would have to renegotiate their terms of peace with a new Liberal regime. In May of

1855, Santiago Vidaurri rallied the principle men of the northern Mexican states to the cause of the Revolution of Ayutla and captured the city of Monterrey. Two months later, he won the plaza of Saltillo. And then, the following month, the Liberal cause succeeded nationwide as Santa

Anna went into exile for the final time. Vidaurri’s rise to caudillo of the North also proved

78 Aguilar, Mexico City, to gobierno de Coahuila, August 4, 1854, C7 F2 C5 4F, FSXIX AGEC; Manuel de la Garza, Parras, to gobierno del deptartamento de N. Leon, June 23, 1854 [copy Mexico City, August 9, 1854], C7 F2 C5 4F, FSXIX AGEC. 79 Gobierno, Saltillo, to ministro de gobernación, August 17, 1854, C7 F7 E4 6F, FSXIX AGEC. 80 Gobierno, Saltillo, to ministro de gobernación, August 10, 1854, C7 F5 E4 4F, FSXIX AGEC. 81 Aguilar Mexico City, to gobierno de Coahuila, September (day missing), 1854, C7 F5 E4 4F, FSXIX AGEC; Gobierno, Satillo, to ministro de gobernación October 2, 1854, C7 F5 E4 4F, FSXIX AGEC.

263 extremely popular with Texans who roundly applauded the new Liberal government’s opposition to the Conservatives.82

And if the example of Vidaurri’s subordinate, Emilio Langberg, served as any indication of things to come, the new government of Nuevo León would be very friendly to Texas.

Langberg had recently visited San Antonio. During his time there, he immensely charmed the city’s upper set, even pulling out a violin at one point to entertain his hosts with some songs.

There is no doubt that he also invited some of the Texans he met there to join him in overthrowing the Conservative government. Hence, just a short time afterward, Langberg travelled from San Antonio at the head of a force of Texas volunteers who come to join the revolution. A very alarmed Vidaurri made Langsberg dismiss the Rangers immediately. He was even rumored to have arrested their leader, William Henry, when he requested a private conference with the caudillo. 83 But the disappointed volunteers must have extracted some sort of promise from Langberg before they removed from the frontier. In any case, Langberg tirelessly advocated for the Texans’ cause in the months to come. For one thing, he suggested that the commanders desist in their protection of runaway slaves and errant tribesmen like the

Lipans in order to end the “guerra sorda” (cold war) that existed between the two peoples.84

Langberg was not the only person in the borderlands to see the interests of Mexico and the United States as inextricably tied. Many Mexican authorities and even some Texan commanders, when addressing the problems that plagued both sides of the border, began to appeal to “la buena armonía” (harmony) and “la paz” (peace) that must reign between neighbors

82 El Republicano (1855-1856), Mexico City, September 18 and 25, 1855; Texas State Times, September 1, 1855. 83 Texas State Times, September 1, 1855. 84 Langberg to Vidaurri, August 16, 1855, Vidaurri Correspondence, AGENL.

264 and friendly nations.85 Such neatly turned phrases filled the missives that the commanders fired off to one another and heralded a new respect for the line drawn by Guadalupe Hidalgo. At least on the part of Mexican authorities and U.S. army officials.86 A mutually respected border would mark a major turning point in the relationship between the Mexican North and Texas, two countries that had been visiting violence upon one another for the past twenty years. No self- respecting caudillo in the North would completely acquiesce to U.S. terms, of course; but he ignored them at his own peril. The middle ground would again recede when Mexicans realized the costs of not cooperating with Texans.

The Road to Rio Escondido

The new cordiality ushered in by Vidaurri’s rise to power quickly faded in the wake of

Callahan’s defeat at Rio Escondido. The Lipan camp had been the explicit goal of the raiders, and the Texans assumed they had been ambushed. In fact, they had good reason to believe this.

For one thing, six or seven Lipans participated in the battle on the Mexican side, undetected by the commanders. In addition, the Texans believed they had received an invitation to enter

Mexico to chase the Lipans from Emilio Langberg. In the ensuing investigation of the Callahan

Raid, it turned out that the Texans’ supposed invitation to come into Mexico had either been treachery or a very ill-advised and elaborate ruse on the part of Langberg. But either way, any invitation extended to the former Rangers had not met with Vidaurri’s approval.87

85 See for example: Siglo XIX, September 15, 1855; Langberg to Marcy, July 5, 1855, Vol. 2 1851-1856, Office of the Governor of Texas, Executive Office, Austin, WPW CAH; Ignacio Galindo, Monterrey, to Langberg, September 28, 1855 (copy 1873), f. 11, C3 E5 Cuaderno 12, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE. 86 U.S. army officer and Indian Bureau agents had more pull in 1855 and 1856 than they would in the immediate pre-Civil War years. See Gary Clay Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 275-276. 87 Emilio Langberg to the Bejareño, San Antonio, October 19, 1855, C117, Militares AGENL.

265 As a result of his suspected collusion with the Texans, Langberg faced a military tribunal for his “anti-national” behavior the following year. The case against him hinged on several especially incriminating pieces of evidence. For one thing, he had abandoned his troops on the left bank of the river with a rancher while he travelled to Texas on private business accompanied only by a small entourage. For another, he was spotted conferring personally with Callahan and the officers at Fort Duncan in English. Most damning of all, however, a Mexican soldier had found a map in the defeated Texans’ camp that gave directions to San Fernando in both English and Spanish, and allegedly written in the colonel’s hand.88 Still, it is not certain that Langberg had acted treacherously. The Texans were certain that Langberg had double-crossed them, leading them into an ambush they could not resist.89 They may have been correct in this assertion, but in any case Langberg was reassigned to a post in central Mexico after his tribunal. (He would die a few years later after returning to the North to defend the cause of Emperor Maximiliano).90

After the defeat of the Rangers, as we have seen, Vidaurri crowed loudly, roundly congratulating his volunteer force for their unity and dedication to the tenets of nationalism and liberty. Privately, however, he conceded that the Texans had been at least partly justified in their attack. Certainly Mexico did not deserve “guerra y fuego” (war and fire) for granting the Lipans one final opportunity to settle peacefully in their country. But he also claimed that his

Conservative predecessor, Pedro Ampudia, had been mistaken in granting them the peace.

Vidaurri believed that the Lipans deserved to be punished and submitted to the yoke of the law—

88 Investigation of Langberg, testimony of Manuel Menchaca, f. 2, May 17, 1856, C122, Militares AGENL; Testimony of Florencio Rodríguez, fs. 11-12, June 4, 1856, C122, Militares AGENL. 89 Texas State Times, Dec. 1, 1855; For Langberg’s side: Emilio Langberg to the Bejareño, San Antonio, October 19, 1855, C117, Militares AGENL. 90 Harry P. Hewitt, "LANGBERG, EDVARD EMIL," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/flapv), accessed February 20, 2012. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

266 especially now that they had brought a foreign invasion upon the Mexicans.91 As the ensuing months would reveal, the hard diplomacy practiced by the Texan Rangers had achieved its object and had brought the Mexicans around to hard-line thinking on the Indians. They would at last agree to wage war against the Lipans, “until they [were] exterminated” if they did not stay within the demarcated boundaries for hunting.92 In light of the Texas raid Vidaurri explicitly said that, to make the Texans respect the border, it would be “absolutely necessary to either exterminate

[the Lipans] or civilize them.”93

The Mexicans forced the Lipans to remain in place to avoid any more confrontations with

Texans. Unable to raid, the Lipans suffered acutely from shortages on the frontier. In January of

1856, three months after being congregated together outside of San Fernando, they had still not received the oxen, seeds, and permanent land grant pledged to them. They also lacked the things that might have set them upon a path to “civilization” on Mexican terms—such as teachers to educate and catechize the Lipan children.94 As a result of these broken promises, the Lipans did not cease raiding. In February of 1856, Pablo Espinosa met the Lipan chief Perico and commanded the Lipans to construct 150 bows and quivers containing 60 arrows each for the chronically under-armed Mexican vecinos. Espinosa discovered when he visited the camp, however, that Perico only had twelve gandules (male warriors) with him. Much to his dismay, he found out that the rest of the warriors were in Nuevo León.95 Soon thereafter, the Lipans began

91 Vidaurri to Juan Alvarez, October 14, 1855, fs. 21-23, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasión de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE; Vidaurri to Marcy, October 18, 1855, fs. 25-29, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasión de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE. 92 Vidaurri to Langberg, October 16, 1855, Vidaurri Correspondence, AGENL. 93 Vidaurri to Juan Alvarez, October 14, 1855 (copy 1873), fs. 21-23, C3 E5 Cuaderno 10, Sobre la Invasión de Piedras Negras, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte, SRE. 94 Langberg, Allende, to Secretaría de la Guerra, Monterrey, Oct 22, 1855, C117, Militares AGENL; Vidaurri to Galindo, Minister of war, December 5, 1855, f. 100, LE 1596 SRE. 95 Espinosa, Morelos, to secretario de Guerra, Monterrey, February 26, 1856, C120 Militares AGENL.

267 launching forays against the ranches on the left bank of the river in Texas from the border in

Nuevo León.96

Both Mexican and Texan forces responded quickly to the renewed raiding, but the Lipans managed to stay ahead of the ensuing forces. Once they even led the soldiers from Fort Duncan on a very long and very unsuccessful foray into far western Texas before crossing back over the river into Mexico at Palafox.97 The raids on Texas continued unabated, and by the beginning of

March ranchers from around Laredo again complained loudly and threatened action against

Mexico. The Lipans had committed robberies on both sides of the river since the Callahan Raid, but in Texas they had also killed several people.98 The Texans began to talk loudly of invading

Mexico.

Gracias a Dios

Vidaurri was a popular figure among norteños and Texans alike after his Ejército de la

Restaurador de la Libertad (Army of the Restoration of Liberty) took command in Coahuila and

Nuevo León. Colonel Edward Jordan of Laredo wrote to the great caudillo, informing him that the fronterizos on both sides of the river were very well-disposed towards him. The new Liberal government of Nuevo León y Coahuila, (the caudillo united the two states in 1856) had broad support on both sides of the river. Texans were also quite fond of Vidaurri himself, as Jordan informed the chief.

96 J. E. Slaughter, lieutenant of artillery, to Ruggles, commander of Fort Mackintosh, Texas, March 3, 1856 [copy March 6, 1856], f. 20, Folder 6-18-42, SRE; Deposition of Mr. Hopfield before J.E. Slaughter, Fort Mackintosh, Laredo, Texas January 17, 1856 [copy March 16, 1856], f. 22, Folder 6-18-42, SRE 97 George Elliot to Ruggles, February, 23 1856 [copy March 16, 1856], f. 21, Folder 6-18-42, SRE. 98 Benito Garcia, Laredo, to Edward Jordan, March 2, 1856 [copy March 12, 1856 Ignacio Galindo], f. 15, Folder 6- 18-42, SRE; Vidaurri, Monterrey to Juan Zuazua, March 10, 1856 [copy March 11, 1856 Galindo], f. 17, Folder 6- 18-42, SRE.

268 But the time had arrived for him to champion their cause if the settlers on the Texas side of the river were going to respect the border and keep their volunteers in check. Jordan informed

Vidaurri that doing something would also endear him to his own countrymen in Mexico. “The

Mexicans on both sides, just like the Americans, are very displeased with these bichos [bugs],”

Jordan said, in reference to the Lipans.99 Shortly after Jordan’s letter, Daniel Ruggles from Fort

McIntosh also wrote to Vidaurri, asking if he would allow the U.S. military to send a force over the border to “exterminate” the Lipans in Mexico. He even asked him to join in the expedition, so that the “friendship” between the two governments might be confirmed.100 The pressure continued mounting on Vidaurri’s new government as the Lipans carried on terrorizing the peons at the larger ranches, including that of Santos Benavides.101 These attacks alarmed the new

Liberal government, which was struggling mightily to assert its legitimacy over the frontier.

Nothing would undo Vidaurri’s efforts faster than a successful filibuster from Texas.102

In the end, he sacrificed the Lipans to ensure that Mexico retained all of its territory and remain free from Texan invasion. He exculpated himself from the shelter given the Lipans the year before and explicitly blamed the “política mezquina” (short-sightedness) of his

Conservative predecessor, Jerónimo Cardona, for taking a conciliatory approach with the Lipans.

The Lipans had fooled the authorities too many times, he said, and “they are more pernicious when they live under the shadow of peace than when they are at war; they even make arrangements with other hostile tribes.” Indeed, Vidaurri continued, “it is not consistent with natural law that peaceful men be made the plaything of the Lipans’ barbarie.” Not only did the

99 Colonel Edward Jordan to Vidaurri, Laredo, March 2, 1856 [copy Monterrey, March 16, 856], f. 18, Folder 6-18- 42, SRE. 100 Ruggles, Fort McIntosh, to Vidaurri, March 3, 1856 [copy March 16 1856], f. 19, Folder 6-18-42, SRE. 101 Declaration of Victor Botello before J.E. Slaughter s/f [copy March 15, 1856, Galindo], f. 23, Folder 6-18-42, SRE. 102 Manuel Robles, Washington D.C., to Vidaurri, May 15, 1856, f. 8, Folder 6-18-42, SRE.

269 Lipans rob the frontier of its scarce fortune, they committed the even greater crime of hurting the nation’s pride when they instigated an attack from Texas the year before.103

Thus, Vidaurri bowed to Texan pressure in order to stabilize his government, the border, and international relations. Conceding to the Texans that the Lipans mocked the faith of their promises and lived only from “rapine, robbery, and blood,” he began to write openly of their

“extermination.” He concluded thus: to avoid the “repetition of the events at Rio Escondido and

Piedras Negras, [events that] had no other origin than the wickedness of the Lipans,” the Indians were to be removed from the frontier in order to fulfill a “debt imposed by humanity.” In this about-face Vidaurri saw a silver lining; if the Mexicans ended the Lipan raids into Texas, perhaps the North Americans could at last be pursuaded to end the Cayuga and Comanche raids into Mexico in the absence of Article 11, which Santa Anna had abrogated shortly before.104

Vidaurri even dreamed that the Texan authorities might crack down on arms dealers in their state who supplied weapons to Indians (and others) who raided in Mexico.105 Thus, rather than blame

Texas pirates and the diplomacy of force majeure for the instability of the border, Vidaurri placed the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the Lipan tribe.

Vidaurri readied his forces to strike against the Lipan camp. He put 200 men under Pablo

Espinosa, Emilio Langberg’s replacement as commander of the Northern frontier. This force would surprise the camp outside of Gigedo, Coahuila. Another force, headed up by Juan Zuazua, would strike at another Lipan camp in Nuevo León. He ordered the forces to surprise the Lipan camps and hold the Indians captive until they composed a list of all the captaincillos who were absent most frequently. These captaincillos would then be arrested and brought to Monterrey

103 [Vidaurri], Monterrey, March 22, 1856, C121, Militares, AGENL. 104 Vidaurri, Monterrey, to Juárez, March 16, 1856 [copy Juarez to Robles, April 7, 1856], f. 12, Folder 6-18-42, SRE. 105 Vidaurri, Monterrey, to Commander Fort Duncan, Paso del Aguila, March 16, 1856 [copy Escobedo, July 2, 1856], f. 31, Folder 6-18-42, SRE.

270 alongside their families to face a tribunal. If the Lipans would not comply and indict their war chiefs, he authorized Espinosa and Zuazua to use force and take the entire tribe captive.106

The plan did not work out quite the way that Vidaurri had hoped. Espinosa mustered 175 eager men into his force—25 short of the number Vidaurri had called for. The village of

Guerrero refused to participate, but it was a respectable number nonetheless. As the forces approached the Lipan camp near Gigedo, Espinosa encountered the captaincillos Lemus Castro and El Perico outside of the main settlement. He plied them with liquor and incorporated them into his company. They would not, however, give up the names of the Lipans who had raided in

Texas and Nuevo León. As a result, on the 19th of March at 8:00 in the morning, the Mexican forces took the Lipan camp by surprise. The militia gained the high ground over the camp quickly, and the Mexicans managed to disarm the warriors as they came out of their tents without firing a shot. Even though some warriors said it would be better to die than give up their arms, they were apprehended quickly. Espinosa accused the defeated Lipans of committing robberies in Texas, searched their tents, and found some of the articles plundered from the other side of the border. He then arrested the entire camp.107 All told, the force captured 20 warriors,

30 women, and nine children, as well as 104 horses and a good number of muskets.108 More prisoners would soon join them. Perhaps Lipan resistance had been unexpected, or maybe they found more articles in the camp than they thought they would; but in any case, Vidaurri called on the authorities of the nearby villages to arrest any Lipans who could be found that had escaped

106 Vidaurri, Monterrey, to Espinsoa, Piedras Negras, March 11, 1856 [copy March 12, Galindo], f. 13, Folder 6-18- 42, SRE 107 Espinosa to Vidaurri, March 25, 1856 [copy March 25, 1856], C121 Militares; Isidro Vizcaya Canales, Tierra de Guerra Viva: Incursiones de Indios y Otros Conflictos en el Noreste de México Durante el Sigo XIX, 1821-1885 (Monterrey: Academia de Investigaciones, 2001), 332-333. 108 Espinosa to Vidaurri, March 25, 1856 [copy March 25, 1856], C121, Militares AGENL; Viscaya, 332-333.

271 arrest—and to shoot any who resisted on the spot. The authorities soon apprehended renegade

Lipans in the towns of Rosas, Nava, and Allende.109

But the Lipans were not ready to give up completely. A party of troops from Espinosa’s command who volunteered to take the booty captured from the Lipan camp back to the town of

Allende encountered unexpected Lipan intransigence. As they were carting the goods towards town, a Lipan named Cojo approached the convoy in disguise. When he was within range of the carters, he suddenly pulled out a bow and arrow and fired it at them. He missed his mark, however, hitting the wheel of a wagon. The Mexican soldiers responded to his attack very quickly, shooting him dead on the spot. Cojo’s obstinacy nevertheless demonstrated for Espinosa the “imperative necessity of [the Lipans’] complete extermination.” They were prepared to fight to the death. And it was only the “civility” of the Mexican forces that held them back from killing all of the Lipans “as they deserved.” 110 For his part, Espinosa expressed the much harder-line the Liberal commanders and presidial soldiers had taken against the Indians ever since Guadalupe Hidalgo had offered a glimmer of hope in the war against the Indians. He hoped that the defeated prisoners would be conducted from Monterrey to San Juan de Úlua or some other island fortress where they would be forced to work to earn their living—and kept far, far away from Mexicans.111

With Texas and Mexico now working together to quash Lipan resistance, the Indians saw their options running out. They had lost the maneuverability that allowed them to play one side against the other. As prisoners, they also lost the option of mobility altogether. After being handed over to Miguel Patiño, the troops continued escorting the prisoners to the rendezvous point. But when the convoy arrived at the point known as “Gracias a Dios” something terrible

109 Gazeta de Saltillo, Año III no 19 Santiago del Saltillo Número Especial [found in AMS]. 110 Espinosa, Morelos, to Vidaurri, March 20, 1856, C121, Militares AGENL. 111 Viscaya, 332-333

272 happened. A soldier named Julian Salinas, who was in the vanguard and in charge of the prisoners, saw that the women prisoners had begun to mutiny. He made a horrific accusation, alleging that they were even cutting the throats of their own children. Salinas and the other troops tried to stop the women from performing this “horrible act,” but they said they had no choice but to open fire on the prisoners. They killed all of the men and 17 of the women prisoners, including a small girl—although Patiño claimed that the small girl had died at the hand of her own mother. In the end, only sixteen prisoners survived from the raid, all children.112

The great historian of Nuevo León, Isidro Viscaya Canales, has written briefly on the massacre at Gracias a Dios and has offered a plausible explanation for this tragedy. He believes that the justification offered up by Patiño for the slaughter—i.e. that the Lipan women were killing their own children—was merely a pretext for opening fire on the prisoners. Indeed, the troops had already shown a willingness to revenge themselves upon the Lipans, shoot first, and ask questions later. When a warrior and two women prisoners in the charge of captain José María

Flores attempted to escape the day before, the captain did not hesitate to shoot them dead on the spot.113 For their part, the Lipan women were sure that it was their children who the Mexicans were after. They had learned this in the stalled peace process a few years before, when Coyote had escorted so many women to Rosas to try and make peace with the Mexicans. Fully aware that the end goal of the Mexicans was to reduce the tribe to sedentary civilization, they may have threatened to kill the children if not released. In any case, even if the filicide was merely a threat, it resulted in a terrible tragedy. It did not take much to send the Indian-hating militia men over the edge.

112 Miguel Patiño, Corral Falso, to Vidaurri March 21, 1856 (Copy Monterrey, March 25, 1856), C121, Militares AGENL. 113 Viscaya, 333.

273 These tragic events repeated themselves further to the east. As this bungled operation was taking place outside of Gigedo, Juan Zuazua left Lampazos with a force of 160 men destined for the Sabinas River. Alongside the banks of this desert stream, an even larger band of Lipans had made their camp, likely with the intent of raiding in Texas. En route to the Sabinas, Zuazua’s men spotted 15 warriors running horses in the neighborhood surrounding the Hacienda del

Alamo. These warriors had already killed a shepherd in the nearby Hacienda of Realitos, but

Zuazua did his best to avoid detection by the warriors for the moment. Later that night, a party comprised mostly of Lipan women and children discovered Zuazua’s lines in the dark and turned themselves in before the planned attack.114

At dawn on the 22nd of March, a section of Zuazua’s forces marched into the camp. The

Lipan band was engaged in packing up their ranchería, about to head west into the desert, when

Zuazua’s army materialized in the early morning mist. The warriors ran out of their tiendas to see what was causing all of the commotion and Zuazua’s troops immediately set upon them, managing to disarm most of them. He had less luck than Espinosa in this regard, however.

Despite his best efforts, fifteen or twenty warriors still managed to escape and join the Indians who were running horses in the neighborhood. The Mexican force began to take the Lipan families into custody, but just as they collected the prisoners the escaped Indians emerged from a forest on the side of the camp. Like the women who were murdered at Gracias a Dios, the warriors realized what the end goal of the raiding army was, and they hoped to save the children from capture in one daring maneuver. They were unsuccessful in their gambit, but they still managed to escape. They reportedly resolved to die before becoming captives of the Mexicans.

Zuazua had not expected the degree of resistance he encountered. So great was the Lipans’ solidarity that he decided it was pointless to explain to them he only intended to apprehend the

114 Zuazua, Lampazos, to Vidaurri, March 27, 1856 (copy March 30, 1856), C121, Militares AGENL.

274 guilty. In his opinion, the entire camp was too concerned about losing their “liberty” to act rationally. But all things considered, Zuazua’s raid was a success, and he accompanied 94 prisoners to the rendezvous with Miguel Patiño en route to Monterrey.115

This would not be a peaceful convoy. The soldiers put in charge of the prisoners quickly found themselves subject to a great number of insults hurled by the Lipan captives. They raised a terrible ruckus, abusing the soldiers, crying, and protesting bitterly. They complained that they would only like the opportunity to take their own lives. God was clearly angry with the Lipans since He had not even allowed the handful of captured warriors to die an honorable death in defense of their children, women, and horses.

The captors had other problems, too; the escaped warriors remained at large and were harassing their rearguard. Zuazua responded by dispatching a Lipan captive to find the warriors and tell them that, if they did not surrender, the Mexicans would kill all of the women and children they had imprisoned. Hence, if the warriors did not turn themselves in at the Hacienda del Alamo, they would only have themselves to blame for the Lipan tribes’ extermination.

Instead, the warriors called Zuazua’s bluff, fully aware that the Mexicans intended to assimilate the captured children, not exterminate them. They remained apart, doing damage in the surrounding area, killing at least three people, and taking an eight-year old Mexican boy captive.

A day later, Zuazua’s troops stumbled upon the dead bodies of the captive’s parents in a

“disgraceful condition.” They looked upon this latest atrocity with revulsion and, almost certainly, growing hatred. The vecinos, who were mostly from Lampazos and were boon companions to Juan Zuazua, found very little compassion for their prisoners and were convinced that they were the same Indians who had robbed and killed their countrymen for years.116

115 Ibid. 116 Ibid.

275 Then, on the 23rd of March, under the cover of the night, several of the Lipans warriors who had escaped approached the camp with the greatest stealth. The prisoners quickly learned that they were near and several threw themselves upon the guards in an open revolt. The guards responded in kind and met force with force, opening fire on the entire line of prisoners. They killed 32 men and only two youths and a captive survived. Zuazua, who had been busy putting together a reconnaissance force when the revolt occurred, said that he could do nothing to avert the massacre. Further, he had learned that a large number of soldiers were “disgusted” with the tolerance the Mexicans had shown the Lipans in the past. Zuazua said that he could do little to control them, and they showed little restraint when putting down the rebellion. Two Mexican guards were shot and killed in the attack, but when the smoke cleared 36 Indians in total lay dead.

Despite the slaughter, Zuazua defended the vecinos’ actions. The Lipans would “give up anything before death” and the troops had comported themselves bravely, if perhaps a little overzealously. He went on to recommend the volunteers’ behavior throughout the campaign, singling some out for special praise.117 The massacre would not be punished.

Vidaurri regretted that so many had been killed. Perhaps he still held out hope that the warriors might have been reduced and inserted into the social life of the nation. But even the great caudillo had to concede that they possessed an “almost indomitable ferocity.” He was pleased, meanwhile, that so many of the children were being brought to him, and he was hopeful for their transformation, once they were removed from their relatives and surroundings. What to do with them remained something of an open question. Traditionally, Indian captives most often became servants (criados) in Mexican villages, but Vidaurri may have hoped to transform them into Hispano/as away from their homeland and memories of the bitter past. He wrote to Mexico

117 Zuazua, Lampazos, to Vidaurri March 27, 1856, (copy April s/f, 1856), C10, Correspondencia Alcaldes Primeros 1836-1859, AGENL.

276 City, asking if he could send the captured children to the Hospicios of Mexico and Gauadalajara.

Perhaps they would learn a trade and at last “become useful to themselves and society” if they sought to return to the North afterwards.118 Meanwhile, the children, women, and few captured warriors who were still alive remained imprisoned in Monterrey for months.

The small group of Lipans who had escaped Zuazua remained elusive and continued to cross the frontier with impunity, using the border for leverage. Daniel Ruggles, from Fort

McIintosh, proposed a joint venture to “exterminate” them and block them from crossing the river, but it never materialized .119 More than a month after the massacres, Patiño was still chasing the escaped warriors with vecinos from Morelos and Rosas. He once even caught up to their camp and learned that there were only fifteen or twenty warriors in the group. The majority of the fugitives were in fact women and children—an especially tempting target for the Mexicans who still hoped to reduce them. The band narrowly escaped from Patiño’s forces, but they had to abandon all their supplies.120 In the end, although both Vidaurri and Ruggles had agreed to the

“the most prompt extermination or reduction of these Indians,” Vidaurri had to concede that capturing the remainder would be impossible. He told Ruggles that he had done all he could.121

Thus, a large number of women, children, and captives remained aloof, travelling with the handful of warriors who had survived the Mexican ambush, crossing back and forth.

Nevertheless, the raid had shown that comprise between Mexico and Texas could work, force would be met with force, and crossing the border with impunity had real consequences.

Juan Long, an American who was married to a relative of Vidaurri’s wrote to the caudillo and

118 Vidaurri to Secretary of war and marine, Mexico, April 13, 1856 (Copy Escobedo July 2, 1856), f. 28, Folder 6- 18-42, SRE. 119 Miguel Patiño to Espinosa, April 6, 1856, (Copy April 20, 1856), C121, Militares AGENL; Ruggles to Francisco Treviño, April 5, 1856 (Copy Escobedo July 1, 1856), f. 39, Folder 6-18-42, SRE. 120 Espinosa, Morelos, to Vidaurri, April 27, 1856 (copy Escobedo July 2, 1850), f. 29, Folder 6-18-42, SRE. 121 Vidaurri to Ruggles, April 7, 1856 (copy Escobedo July 1, 1856), f. 29, Folder 6-18-42, SRE.

277 told him he was glad to see that the “nation was going in the right direction.” He even told

Vidaurri that the United States should follow the example of the Mexicans, and halt Comanche raids into Mexico once and for all. Vidaurri had also pleased his own paísanos. The citizens of

Ciénegas, Coahuila, wrote to Vidaurri to thank him for having allowed the fronterizos to avenge so many years of “spilled blood and shed tears.” The inhabitants of the region would remain eternally grateful.122 Not long before, they had thought that their only option with the Lipans was to agree to peace on their terms; this was no longer the case.

Then, one evening in May, the municipal president of Rosas received a visit from a Lipan named Manuel Rodríguez. He was in search of his family and learned that his mother and brother were among the prisoners in Monterrey. The Lipan offered, in exchange for their return, to move into the Villa of Rosas and settle peacefully among its vecinos, giving up his wandering life. He told the alcalde, that the rest of the drifting Lipans were likewise ready to present themselves so they could live in peace, work towards the greater good of their families, and subject themselves to live in society. Any robberies committed since the massacres in March,

Rodríguez claimed, had been the work of Tonkawas. Espinosa considered the Lipan’s request carefully. For one thing, the men would make good scouts. The idea of settling the remaining

Indians likewise enticed Vidaurri who still thought that these Lipans could become useful to frontier society if educated and catechized.123 After all, the frontier remained underdeveloped, prone to attacks from other Indians, and scarcely populated. Vidaurri chose the carrot over the stick, acceded to Rodríguez’s request, and the cycle played itself out again.

122 Viscaya, 335. 123 SRE 6-18-42, Espinosa, Morelos, to Vidaurri, May 16, 1856 (copy Escobedo Monterrey July 2, 1856), f. 34, Folder 6-18-42, SRE; Response of Vidaurri, May 16, 1856 (copy Escobedo Monterrey July 2, 1856), fs. 34-35, Folder 6-18-42, SRE.

278 The Lipans continued to cross the border with impunity and the cycles of war and peace repeated. Lipans raids in 1859 and 1861 again brought Texas Rangers into Mexico, which caused immense destruction in Coahuila and resulted in the enslavement of at least one African

American there.124 The Lipans also took advantage of the divided attention on both sides of the border as civil wars consumed both Mexico and Texas in the 1860s. But when the soldiers could at last regroup in 1868 and again focus their attention on the Lipans, they perpetrated another massacre occurred outside of San Fernando, now renamed Zaragoza. The great Lipan shaman and apostle of Peyote religion, Chevato, would witness this massacre before travelling with the other surviving Lipans to take up refuge with the Gileños in Arizona. This was the event that set

Chevato’s life in motion, and he would spend the rest of his days preaching a pan-Indian spirituality based on a plant native to the borderlands steppes.125 In the face of concerted

Mexican effort to reduce the warrior class, the Lipans had survived and even held on to their culture of mobility. But they did this at tremendous cost.

Conclusion

With maneuverability on their side, the Lipans kept up their seasonal raiding patterns and cultivated a class of warriors who were anathema to Mexican vecinos. Only when Texans and

Mexicans cooperated across the border could they cease the maneuverability that “people-in- between” like the Lipans commanded. Luckily for the Lipans, the Mexicans more often than not found themselves at odds with the Texans in the years before the Civil War. As a result, the

Mexicans in the North could never really effectively transform the mobile Apaches into

124 Jesús Garza Gonzales, Músquiz, to Vidaurri, July 9, 1859, f. 54, LE 1596, SRE; Juan José Martinez, Rosas, to Secretaría de Gobierno de Nuevo Leon y Coahuila, October 19, 1861, f. 115, LE 1596, SRE. 125 William Chebatah and Nancy McGown Minor, Chevato: The Story of the Apache Warrior Who Captured Herman Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 32-39.

279 “civilized” Hispanic peasants. Instead, the cycles of peace and violence, of extermination and tolerance, repeated themselves over and over again until at least the late 1860s as the Lipan continued to use the border to their best advangate.

It might seem odd to mention tolerance after discussing the violent repression of the

Lipans at Gracias a Dios. But in fact, massacres were just one part of the carrot and stick (or pan o palo) approach that Mexican administrators deployed against wayward Indians and citizens alike in the years to come. I would like to suggest that their tolerance of Lipan errancy was not only born out of a lack of resources with which to wage war against them. Mexicans also clearly demonstrated the lack of resolve that so many Texans evinced against Indians. When Mexicans conceded to draconian Texan terms the Lipans suffered violent reduction, but this was not a war of their choosing. A few months after Gracias a Dios Mexican officials were again considering

Lipan applications for peace.

Although the Mexicans could not control movement across their own territory, they did lend meaning to the border in another, equally significant way. Because of their greater tolerance, the Rio Grande/Bravo separated a society that still sought to include Indians on some terms from one that sought to exclude, quarantine, and even exterminate them. Certainly, there was significantly more violence against Indians in the North than in the center of Mexico. A century of warfare against Apaches and Comanches in the North had resulted in violent racism. But the

North was not quite Texas either; norteños were far more tolerant of Indians. As far as attitudes towards Indians were concerned, Northern Mexicans in Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo León were somewhere in-between. The Texas-Mexico borderlands were neither a frontier of inclusion or exclusion. They were a hybrid of the two.

280 Hence, Mexican territory would continue to offer sanctuary to roaming Indians in the years to come, much to the chagrin of Texans. A real cultural difference existed between norteños and Texans. A more open culture on the right bank of the river born out of centuries of mestizaje lent that territory an air of liberty for the repressed that set it apart from Texas. Indeed, the Mexican North may have been especially “far from God, and close to the United States” as

Porfirio Díaz quipped in the late 19th century, but it was not Texas. Despite twenty years of violence and unauthorized border crossings, northern Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas remained Mexico in both name and spirit. The Mexicans were of course capable of violence—as

Apaches of all types would discover in the 1860s and 1870s when Mexicans actively assisted the

U.S. Army in its war against those Indians. But Coahuila in particular would continue to offer refuge to Kickapoos, Mascogos, and a whole host of other refugees from the United States into the 1860s and beyond despite loud protests from Texans. This difference on the issue resulted in no small part from the markedly different way that governments on both sides dealt with unauthorized border crossers. It was also a function of a virulent anti-grinogism that would predominate among working people in Coahuila and Tamaulipas. Whatever the cause, mobile peoples had succeeded in transforming the meaning of the border.

281 Conclusion

Despite the fact that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the border through the shifting channels of the Rio Grande/Bravo in 1848, the new border failed to resolve cross border mobility, violence, conflict, and strife. Finally, in 1873, the U.S. government got around to addressing the many claims that Mexicans along the line had made against North Americans over the past twenty-five years. Alas, the federal government’s last foray into settling outstanding borderlands issues, the Treaty of Guadalupe’s infamous Article 11, had been an abject failure. But the nature of the U.S. government had changed significantly since that attempt; the newly enlarged and emboldened U.S. federal government—swollen by the recent

Union effort—at last attempted to bring some justice and peace to the war-torn border. This effort coincided with broader national aims. During Reconstruction the U.S. sought to incorporate its vast continental domain, and making some sense out of borderlands anarchy was part and parcel to this process. Accordingly, the government appointed a joint claims commission to work alongside Mexicans in addressing historical transgressions and structural fissures along the border.

The U.S. commission soon discovered that the majority of claims made by Mexican citizens against North Americans came from the borderlands of Texas and Mexico. A few reports filtered in to the joint commission from the borderlands of Arizona, California, and New

Mexico; but the more populated areas along the Texas-Mexico border had seen the lion’s share of conflict. Thousands of Mexican citizens made claims, feeling that only through paying damages could they be compensated for the many years of statelessness they had suffered along

282 the border. Among the many accusations against North American citizens that the commissioners sorted through were claims from hacendados who had lost animals and workers

(and more importantly their labor) to Comanche and Lipan raiders; there were also claims from norteños who had been robbed by filibusterers with impunity; finally, there were the ranchers who had watched helplessly as rustlers from the U.S. side of the border had driven their herds off into the interior of Texas.1 Citizens on the U.S. side had very similar complaints—indeed it had been a recent spike in cattle rustling in Texas that had inspired the investigation in the first place.

But upon investigating issues of rustling in Texas, the U.S. commissioners realized that the much greater number of complaints originated on the Mexican side.2

Rustling and Indian attacks aside, the largest number of individual claims against the U.S. government came from the town of Piedras Negras. There were 193 vecinos seeking compensation for the burning of the town in 1855. The U.S. commission must have been pleased to discover, however, that most of the claims were fraudulent. The mulatto and former servant of

General Sam Houston, Pedro Tauns, for instance, claimed $65,550 pesos for the scanty possessions he had lost in the conflagration. Those who knew him said that Tauns never had more than $100 to his name. Other vecinos claimed even greater sums, upwards of $120,000 in some cases; their claims were easily rejected based upon testimonials from local witnesses. One such witness, a Georgia-born seamstress from Eagle Pass named Adelaida Van, testified for the

United States. She drew attention to the poverty of the vecinos of Piedras Negras, and swore that with few exceptions the vecinos of Piedras Negras had all lived in badly dilapidated little houses

1 Examples of this fill the pages of the Comisión pesquisidora de la frontera del norte, Reports of the committee of investigation sent in 1873 by the Mexican government to the frontier of Texas. Translated from the official edition made in Mexico, (New York: Baker and Godwin, 1875); Original can be found in the SRE’s archives, Informe de la Comision Pesquisidora de la Frontera del Norte Al Ejecutvio de la Nacion (Mexico: Ignacio Cumplido, 1873), L71 E12, AEMEUA SRE. 2 Reports of the committee, 3.

283 (malanquitos), straw-thatched huts (chamacueros), and underground abodes (sotaterraneos) constructed from scarce nearby timber and grass. She claimed that even if their houses had been built in 1873, long after the local sources of timber and grass had been exhausted, the dwellings would not have cost more than thirty or forty dollars to construct.3

Thus, the U.S. commission had little difficulty dismissing the claims on the grounds of fraud, but they also discovered that there was no way to ascertain whether the claimants from

Piedras Negras were even proper citizens of Mexico. Many of the vecinos had either moved on to Texas or somewhere else since the raid and their lives, like so many others along the border, were marked by transience.4 Such abodes as Adelaida Vann described met the transient nature of the town and its inhabitants. New migrants arrived to the town everyday before the Callahan

Raid to work at odd jobs around Fort Duncan as muleteers, ditch diggers, and cartsmen, and only about ten people in the town were regularly employed on the Mexican side.5 Tauns, like so many of the other claimants, was typical in his tendency to wander. Since the invasion in 1855, he had moved on to Kinney County in Texas and could be found cooking lime and laying bricks at the fort while he waited to hear back from the commission about his and his relation’s claims. He was probably still plying his trade as a fiddler at local fandangos as well.6 The commission discovered that a great number of townsfolk from Piedras Negras making claims no longer lived within the immediate environs.

Having disqualified the Piedras Negras claims on these grounds, the U.S. commissioners turned to the raid itself in a vain attempt to understand what had caused it. They felt that perhaps

3 J. Hubley Ashton, Counsel of United States. Piedras Negras Claims in the American and Mexican Joint Commission. Pedro Tauns (No. 679) And Others Vs. The United States: Argument And Evidence for the United States, 8-9. 4 Ibid,, 7-10. 5 Ibid,, 5. 6 Ibid., 1-2.

284 they could justify the Texans’ actions if the raid had been a punitive action against a Lipan camp; they would have a more difficult time justifying a slave hunt. But despite their efforts, the real purpose of the October, 1855 raid would forever remain a mystery, espeically since those who had conceived it were no long around to question. James Callahan was dead, shot down in a family feud that turned violent in April of 1856. William Henry was also dead. He had met his end in a showdown with none other than the slave hunter Warren Adams at San Antonio’s “Fatal

Corner” in 1862. Adams and Henry had been embroiled in a bitter contest over who would serve as officer for the Confederate company raised from the region. It appears Adams won the contest.7

Thus, fraud, transience, and the inscrutability of local volunteer forces’ motives obscured the facts surrounding the raid, making it nearly impossible for the commissioners to make any sense out of it. Having acknowledged the impossibility of reconstructing events, the commissioners conceded their ignorance of local affairs. Hence, they washed their hands of the

Callahan Raid, claiming that the invasion had been an entirely Texan affair—a rather specious argument considering the fact that they were supposed to be the ultimate sovereigns in the area.

The way the commissioners figured it, ignorance in Washington disavowed the federal government from having any responsibility to the claimants. (In the end they would pay a small sum to the claimants as recompense, but this was considered mere charity.)8 Their admission of ignorance was a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that the federal government practiced very little authority in the borderlands.

7 Ernest C. Shearer, “The Callahan Expedition, 1855,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 54:4 (April, 1951), 450; Richard F. Selcer, Legendary Watering Holes: The Saloons that Made Texas Famous, (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2004), 55. 8 Ashley, 10.

285 This blindness at the margins pointed up a sobering reality to the government administrators who sought to incorporate America’s vast continental domain into one national network. The federal government had exerted virtually no control over the border in 1848 or afterwards and self-appointed regulators had served—poorly—in their place. Only in 1873, twenty-five years after the border was supposed to have ushered in an era of peace, was the government actively seeking to address the effects of its official myopia. But even at that late date, local arrangements and events still evaded comprehension. Unfortunately for the victims of violence along the border, the national government was the least able to see exactly where the greatest number of different cultures butted up against one another. The immense complexity of borderlands society and the movement that characterized it refused reduction.

In the borderlands of Texas and Mexico, the proximity of so many different peoples to one another was a significant cause of the violence. Another equally important cause for violence was the existence of different competing sovereignties so close to one another. These sovereignties typically defined themselves in stark opposition to the culture and beliefs of their neighbors, and different authorities tried to imbue their putative subjects with local values from the top downward. Political and cultural dissonance resulted in the riven borderlands, and in the years surrounding 1848 Mexicans and Texans alike dug in for a prolonged conflict on a number of important issues. A recalcitrant Mexico, its pride damaged by the Texan secession and the

North American Intervention, took a strong stand against slavery and brutality against Indians.

Texans, meanwhile, remained committed to the increasingly white supremacist policies forged in the slaveholding South. But no matter how far apart the two sides found each on such key issues, the landscape only registered continuity. The two sides had the geographical misfortune of cohabiting a space separated only by a thin borderland and a muddy river.

286 As a result of the ideological, cultural, and practical contradictions represented by the border and the competing sovereignties that existed alongside it, mobile humans flooded across the narrow frontier separating Mexico from Texas. During the years between Mexican

Independence and the U.S. Civil War, the borderlands witnessed thousands of international passages as runaway slaves, recalcitrant Indians, and indentured laborers crossed over to the other side in search of better things. They filed into the towns of the lower Rio Grande, the plains of Nuevo León, the deserts of Coahuila, and the growing cities of San Antonio and Austin in search of economic opportunity, liberal working conditions, and an exit from slavery and indenture. Without federal resources, neither Mexico nor Texas had much success damming up this inundation of runaways, refugees, and renegades into their boundaries. Nor could Mexico or the United States’ central governments make much sense of what was happening so far away. As a result, local officials, vecinos, and townsfolk were left to their own devices to deal with the problem as custom dictated.

Left to deal with the reality that the border did little to dam up human mobility, some pretended sovereigns in the borderlands sought to put this flow to their own needs. Mexican patriots in the North in particular sought to turn this human tide to their advantage. All of the refugees arriving in Mexico represented a moral victory against Yankee aggressors who, even after 1848, seemed intent on breaking off large sections of Mexico for their own. Further, refugees could be a practical addition to the scarcely-inhabited frontier. In the case of the “semi- civilized” Indians and some blacks, Mexicans stood to benefit from their labor. Hence, the handful of frontier officials performing the duties of the state on the Mexican side of the borderlands protected runaway slaves as best they could. They also offered “semi-civilized”

Indians asylum. In general, they espoused principals of liberty that flew in the face of the tenets

287 of the white Republicanism on the Texan side of the border. Nor did Mexicans performing the state at the frontier allow Texans to cross the border in search of fleeing slaves and Indians.

Slaves and others in Texas and Indian Territory shared this knowledge with one another—they knew that in Mexico they could free—and they took advantage of the border to escape slavery.

These policies put Mexicans at tremendous odds with the Texans across the Rio Grande/Bravo.

Nevertheless, generous anti-Texas policies towards refugees also had the effect of inspiring some nation building in Northern Mexico. Belligerent top-down polices meant to inspire love of the patria in the breasts of Mexican norteños in the face of Texan aggression had the potential to bring them closer to the Mexican national cause. Especially in Western Coahuila, militarized by a long and difficult war against Comanches, many everyday Mexican vecinos and their patrons turned against Texas in defense of their homes. Manly violence against filibusterers engendered an identity in Coahuila predicated in no small part upon abhorrence to Texas. Indeed, the further west one went, the more effectively this attempt to impart Mexicanidad upon the vecinos worked. During the 1860s, Saltillo and its environs remained Juarista strongholds— despite Vidaurri’s annexation of Coahuila to Nuevo León. A few years later, the vecinos of

Coahuila’s frontier complained loudly when U.S. troops illegally crossed over the border in search of marauding Indians.

But despite the best efforts of the central Mexican state to instill the patria in norteños, nation-building was an incomplete project in the North. The frontier was simply too rife with social contradictions. Merchants, to name just one class, wanted to move ahead and build common markets with the Texans rather than follow the dictates of a distant and uninformed central Mexican government. (Under Vidaurri, they would win a Zona Libre, free of tariffs on local trans-border goods.) Besides merchants, many everyday Mexicans in the North simply

288 wanted to live a life free from violence and sought accommodation with the Texans. Other cash- strapped vecinos had different interests, and they sometimes took advantage of the generous rewards that Texas slaveholders offered for runaways. Finally, plenty of Mexicans recognized the inherent contradiction in trying to keep laborers indentured on the Mexican side while, at the same time, professing the tenets of emancipation. Hence, if Conservatives like Santa Anna hoped to inspire an avowed anti-grinogism in the breasts of norteños by keeping up an ongoing war with Texas, they were only partly successful. Mexican fickleness on enforcing top-down directives meant to ensure the protection of refugees put real limits on the liberty of fugitives in the borderlands.

The fall of Centralism and decline of Conservatism in Mexico following the Revolution of Ayutla put further constraints upon the liberties of fugitives. Frontier commanders had always realized that warfare and strife along the border had the potential to consume the entire frontier.

Thus, when they were at last freed from central oversight in 1854, the new commanders made the sobering realization that they would have to work alongside the Texans if they wanted to stay in power and improve frontier conditions. Their reasons for accommodation were self-interested as well. Nothing could de-legitimize the power of the newly ascendant Liberals in the Mexican

Northeast quicker than a Texan invasion. Hence, antipathy towards Texas fell out of favor with the elite nation-builders who took command of Nuevo León in the 1850s. They would push their agenda westward into Coahuila and eastward into Tamaulipas, and they would energetically pursue it against marauding Indians. The Lipans learned of this shift the hard way when they were punished for their role in bringing on a Texan filibuster. The Lipans’ confusion on the issue is easy to understand; Northern Mexican attitudes towards the border were complex and denied easy resolution. Attitudes evolved on the frontier, and the very process of nation-building itself

289 changed to meet new directives. The Lipans found themselves caught in-between during this transition, inhabitants of a quickly receding middle ground.

The rise of a class of Liberal elites in the Mexican Northeast marks an important turning point in the social history of mobility in the borderlands since they differed from their predecessors in important ways. They were not veterans of the War of Independence, and likely they were not so enamored of the revolutionary color-blindness that so many espoused in Mexico

City. In this regard, the new class of Liberal elites differed from their Conservative predecessors significantly. Vidaurri and his subordinates realized that when norteños espoused centralist anti-

Yankee principals a “guerra sorda” had resulted, and this dirty war threatened to consume the entire Mexican frontier. Standing by controversial and dangerous “anti-Yanqui” principals put the very sovereignty of Mexico over its frontier in jeopardy, and Emilio Langberg and Vidaurri were very interested in ending this dirty war with the Texans fought over the issue of refugees.

The Lipans at Gracias a Dios were the sacrificial lambs who allowed peace to reign between

Texas and Mexico, however briefly.

Further research into the topic is necessary, but there may have been another reason that the Liberal elites who rose to power in the 1850s differed from their predecessors in their attitudes towards Americans. The North has long been recognized as the “whitest” part of

Mexico and some of the commanders who rose to power in the North during the War of Reform may have felt a certain kinship with the Texans. “Those who have fought alongside Vidaurri,” said an editor for Mexico City’s Siglo Diez y Nueve in 1862, “are purely Spanish.” The editor explained that there had never been mines for blacks to work in in the North (for the most part), or “civilized” Indians for Spaniards to mix with; hence the “Spaniards” of the North had

290 unmixed Castillian blood running through their veins.9 Perhaps the new Northeastern elites had a different racial self-understanding that brought them closer to the Texans.

I have concluded the dissertation with the ascension of Vidaurri to power during the War of Reform and his sacrifice of one group of mobile peoples on the altar of borderlands peace. But in fact, the patterns of mobility I have unearthed continued into the fractious 1860s. This decade witnessed the Cortina Wars in Texas, the Civil War in the United States, and the French

Intervention in Mexico. As war once again consumed the frontier, even more factions arose which mobile peoples could play off one another. Elites in the borderland remained fairly united across the border from the War of Reform onward, working together to secure labor and exclude

Indians in order to ensure mutual prosperity. But long-established patterns of mobility greatly impaired their efforts. Even while federal governments on both sides of the border were involved in all-consuming civil wars, Mexicans and Texans could only achieve their cooperative goals to a certain extent. The Rio Grande did not become a new Mississippi during the Civil War years.

A historical bloc of mobile peoples—African American, Indians, and Mexican “peons” later joined by other defectors from Confederate Texas—frustrated the autonomy sought by

Vidaurri and his Texan allies. The Cortina Wars were the first conflict to test the erstwhile alliance between elites, merchants, politicians, and planters on both sides of the border. During these “wars,” which predated Fort Sumter by a couple of years, borderlands elites from both sides worked together to cease the marauding of the “bandit” Juan Cortina and his roving armies

Mexican laborers. Cortina, a disaffected Tejano rancher, captured Brownsville in June, 1859 after a particularly egregious insult visited upon his countrymen by the merchants of that town.

An ardent Mexican patriot, Cortina rallied Mexican laborers to his cause and captured most towns along the Rio Grande/Bravo that summer. He would continue to be an important player in

9 Siglo Diez y Nueve, February 15, 1862.

291 the Civil War years, and he sought to enlarge his forces by attracting whatever mobile outsiders he could. Significantly, African Americans began to join his forces during the 1860s.10 Cortina was a slippery figure, but by and large he opposed Texan and Mexican elites alike, and sought to put the mobile people who continued crossing the borderlands to his advantage. In this respect, he followed the model of the Mexican state in the years before and immediately following the

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Runaway slaves and disaffected laborers knew that Cortina’s camps (and a paycheck) could be found on the other side of the border, and they frequently crossed the border to join Cortina.

Cortina’s resistance notwithstanding, relations between elite Mexicans and Texans reached a high point during the Civil War years, when they formed a political and commercial alliance (that has been covered in depth elsewhere.) During the Civil War Matamoros merchants and Texas cotton planters forged a new friendship based upon their mutual interest in getting

Confederate cotton out to global markets. A booming cotton trade centered in Matamoros resulted. So greatly did the interests of the Texan and Mexican elites coincide during these years that they could even resolve some other outstanding conflicts that remained from the antebellum years. For example, officials in Matamoros at last agreed to an extradition treaty for runaway slaves in violation of the federal constitution of 1857—an agreement that must have come as a tremendous disappointment to the growing community of runaway blacks in that town.11 Freed from central oversight, Santiago Vidaurri particularly enjoyed the informal alliance between

Texan planters and Mexicans since he stood to “feath[er] his nest quite snugly” from this arrangement. By charging exorbitant duties on the contraband cotton that passed through Piedras

10 Corpus Christi Ranchero, March 16, 1860 cited in John Gasden, “Runaway Slaves in Matamoros,” (Master’s Thesis, University of Texas Pan America, 1994), 67; Jerry Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2007), 152, 155, 160. 11 Ronnie C. Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” Journal of Negro History 57:1 (January, 1972), 11.

292 Negras, Vidaurri could assure the continued autonomy of the annexed state of Nuevo León y

Coahuila. During the years of the French Intervention and the Juarista struggle to reestablish home rule Vidaurri carved out a virtually autonomous fiefdom for himself. According to contemporary reports, his erstwhile partner in the cotton trade, General John B. Magruder, likewise profited personally from this commerce.12

Despite the attention that the cooperation between Texan Confederates and Vidaurri has received, there were in fact many other powers competing for authority in the borderlands during the 1860s. If anything, people disenfranchised by Vidaurri and the Confederacy were even more on the move during these years, attracted to a number of new opportunities that arose as a result of the wars. To name just one example, a large number of Kickapoos returned to Mexico rather than enlist in the Confederacy as their neighbors in Indian Territory did. They were likely aware of Vidaurri’s stance towards Texans and Indians, so instead of meeting with him they negotiated with the Liberal wartime government of Benito Juarez based out of El Paso. Juarez granted their return and in 1864 they could be found residing once again at Nacimiento, where a sizeable group of Kickapoos remains to this day.13

Other mobile peoples likewise frustrated the efforts of Northeastern Mexican elites to draw closer to the Texans. And once the Union Army established a beachhead on the

Grande/Bravo under Colonel E. J. Davis in 1862, a number of people began crossing the borderlands in earnest to escape Confederate Texas and join him. Shortly after arriving, Davis mustered a large number of Mexican laborers who had returned from Texas to Tamaulipas into

12 On elite cooperation see James W. Daddysman, The Matamoros Trade: Confederate Commerce, Diplomacy, and Intrigue (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984); Gerardo Gurza Lavalle, Una vecindad efímera: los Estados Confederados de América y su política exterior hacia México, 1861-1865 (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2001); Ronnie C. Tyler, Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1973); quote from New Orleans Era clipping enclosed in William H. Seward to Matías Romero, July 9, SRE 10.21.73 f. 18. 13 Alcalde de Músquiz to Gefe Político del Distrito, October 13, 1864 [copy 1873], LE 1596 f. 28.

293 his forces. Fighting alongside them were sundry German Free Thinkers who had sought refuge in

Mexico rather than swear allegiance to the Confederacy.14 In addition to these two blocs of newly mobilized people, a handful of runaway blacks from Texas, who sought both freedom and a paycheck in exchange for their service to the Union, could be found within Davis’ ranks. This motley crew of mobile people faced off against both John Salmon Ford and Santos Benavides on a number of occasions along the Grande/Bravo during the war.15

African Americans particularly became involved with the federal army presence in the borderlands. During the Civil War years, the first black federal troops along the border were garrisoned near Brownsville under the command of E. J. Davis. The 87th and 62nd Colored

Infantry Regiments fought in a number of battles along the river including the final confrontation of the Civil War, the Battle of Palmito Ranch, fought two weeks after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. But despite their bravery, the reputation of African Americans soldiers in Matamoros and its surroundings deteriorated quickly due to an indiscretion on their part. In early January of 1865, they perpetrated an attack on the port of Bagdad, Tamaulipas. The sacking of the town and the outrages they perpetrated upon its citizens of both sexes stuck in the mind of many lower Rio Grande vecinos for decades to come. In the sacking of Bagdad, the black soldiers had reproduced many of the evils committed by other filibusterers along the line in the years before. The French-language newspaper La Sociedad predictably characterized them as barbarians, and others called them “Juarista negro filibusterers.” Perhaps their choice of Bagdad had been strategic; it was, after all, a French stronghold and had prospered handsomely from the

Matamoros trade. Further, the black troops may have been aware that Maximilian had recently

14 El Prisma, 1861 sin fecha, [found in C3, Casamata Hemeroteca Historica] 15 Testimony of J.P. Kelley and Regino Ramón, Matamoros, December 13, 1872, fs. 46-48, C2, Sobre las relaciones de ambas fronteras y el espíritu que en ellos ha reinado, Fondo Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte SRE; Galveston Weekly News, November 18, 1863; John Salmon Ford, ed. Stephen B. Oates, Rip Ford’s Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 395-396.

294 permitted the expatriation of ex-Confederates and their slaves to Mexico. Nevertheless, the raid was a first step in a steady decline of the blacks’ fortunes along the lower Rio Grande. As a result of their deteriorating reputation, the existence of black soldiers in and around Brownsville would not be a particularly happy one for decades to come. Then in 1906 they would suffer the ultimate indignity when president Theodore Roosevelt dismissed 170 black soldiers for the killing of a white bartender in Brownsville.16

The turbulence of the 1860s ultimately gave way to a renewed effort on the part of

Mexico and the United States to impose some order on the borderlands in the following decade.

The Joint Claims Commission was just part of this effort. Beyond addressing the claims made by

Mexican citizens against the U.S. government, the United States federal government also flexed its newly-discovered muscles in the borderlands to try and get mobile peoples to at last settle down and stay in one place. Some mobile people received the carrot. The U.S. army commissioned a group of Mascogos as Black Seminole Scouts in Texas in 1868, adding to the growing number of black federal troops in the borderlands. After emancipation, Mascogos at last had the freedom to cross the border back and forth—a liberty that the Kickapoos, Lipans, and

Seminoles had long enjoyed. They found a steady employer in the federal army.17

Other mobile peoples, however, received the stick. Another major step the U.S. federal government took towards exerting sovereignty over the borderlands was the deployment of federal troops against marauding Kickapoos, Apaches, and what few Comanches remained in

16 On Bagdad raids see claims “Claims before the Joint Comission: Archivo de la Embajada Mexicano en los Estados Unidos de América “ L170 E4 and L 206 E2, AEMEUA SRE; La Sociedad (Mexico City), January 19, 21 and especially 26, 1866; Elliot Young, “Red Men, Princess Pocahontas, and George Washington: Harmonizing Race Relations in Laredo at the Turn of the Century,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Spring 1998): 48-85; Antonio N. Zaveleta, “Colored death: The tragedy of black troops on the Lower Rio Grande,” in Knopp, Antohny K. et. al, Studies in Rio Grande Valley History (Brownsville: University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, 2005); John D. Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970). 17 Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 107-133.

295 southwest Texas. After the Civil War, the U.S. Army had swollen to a size that allowed it to at last deal with cross-border Indians on its own terms. The era of the volunteer force massacring

Indian camps had ended; henceforth, massacre would be a duty of the federal army. Such was the case in 1873, when Ranald S. Mackenzie led a force of soldiers, including a few Mascogo scouts, to Remolino to deal a terrible blow against the Kickapoos for rustling in Texas. But despite the predictable outrage of Coahuiltecan vecinos at this grave violation of Mexican territory,

Mackenzie’s “filibuster” differed from earlier invasions made by Texan land pirates. His was a federal force, and the invasion represented a new willingness on the part of the U.S. government to appropriate the border-crossing practiced by mobile peoples who had long frustrated state efforts to assert sovereignty over the borderlands.18 Unlike volunteer forces, federal soldiers had always respected the line before. In the 1870s, the federal army was at last adapting to local practices, and this helped give it a foothold in the borderlands. For its part, Mexico’s federalization of the borderlands during the reign of Porfirio Díaz did not include mobile institutions. On the Mexican side, colonias—which were the primary military institution— remained static and significantly less effective than the U.S. army in warfare against Indians.

Either way, ceasing all border crossing required resources and effort that even the swollen post-Civil War army was unable to meet. After Mackenzie’s raid on Remolino, Indian mobility remained a problem. Kickapoos still crossed over from Nacimiento to raid in Texas.

Even more astounding, the Lipan Apaches, who had apparently survived all efforts aimed at eliminating them, were still crossing over from Mexico to steal horses in Texas and then seek refuge in Coahuila. In 1878, the Lipans even joined leagues with some Kickapoos and Mexicans to raid in Texas. Preliminary research suggests that ties between everyday vecinos, Kickapoos

18 Galveston Bay Weekly, May 23, 1873; On vecino and Kickapoo relations see, for an example the testimony of Julian López, fs. 34-35, C1 E7, Fondo Comisión Pesqisidora del Norte, SRE.

296 and Lipans strengthened in Coahuila in the 1860s and 1870s. This was likely a result of the commerce in stolen goods they conducted among themselves and perhaps also a result of the easing of anti-Indian attitudes that accompanied the final pacification of the Southern

Comanches, Chiricahuas, and Mescaleros in the Mexican North. This new empathy could also have resulted from a shared antipathy towards U.S. soldiers and their Black Seminole scouts.19

The United States and Mexico at last signed a treaty in 1882 that allowed federal militaries to cross the line in search of marauding Indians.20 But despite their best efforts, Indians like the Kickapoos continued to take advantage of local customs as well as black and white markets to thwart the state’s control over its borders. Other Indians would likewise see opportunities in borders as the decades of the 19th century wore one. In a reversal of the process described in the dissertation, the United States sometimes emerged as the place of refuge for

Indians who sought to escape the oppression and reduction of tribal lands that accompanied latifundismo (land grabs) in the North during the Porfiriato. To name but one famous example,

Yaqui Indians crossed over to work on U.S. railroad construction and then, after earning wages in Arizona, crossed back over to continue their war against federal forces in Mexico in and around the Yaqui Valley in Sonora.21

Besides Indians, African Americans continued to see opportunities in borders— even after emancipation. The Black Seminole Troops, descendants of the same group that fought off federal control in Florida and migrated to Coahuila with John Horse and Coacoochee in 1850, maintained their connections with Nacimiento. The Mexican government had allowed the blacks

19 Mexican legation in the United States to Minister of foreign relations, July 11, 1877 (copy August 1, 1877), f. 5, Folder 11-1-23, SRE; Legation to Romero, December 10, 1878, L89 E36 17F, SRE AEMEUA. 20 Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 58-59. 21 Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Peasant Rebellion in the Northwest: The Yaqui Indians of Sonora, 1740-1976,” in Friedrich Katz, ed. Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 141-176.

297 to return to Nacimiento from Parras following the U.S. Civil War, once the danger of Texan slave hunters had been removed. They then granted the Mascogos a firm title to the hacienda in

1882 after the federal government nullified the claims of the Sanchez-Navarros to the land as a punishment for their support of Maximilian’s regime during the years of the French

Intervention.22 In the years to come Nacimiento transformed into a floating colony for the

African Americans who lived in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Many Mascogos and Black

Seminole scouts alternated employment in the federal army with subsistence farming at

Nacimiento and, most likely, a good deal of rustling. So great had the interchange between the blacks of Nacimiento and other African Americans along the border become by the 1890s, that one alarmed Mexican bureaucrat from the department of development (fomento) commented that neither the Spanish language nor the Catholic religion was much in evidence at Nacimiento.23

Nevertheless, the Mascogos and runaway slaves who mobilized routes across Texas in search of freedom were the pioneers who laid down the roots in Mexico that fired the imagination of succeeding generations of African Americans. In the 1890s, just as Jim Crow crested on the political horizon, African Americans all over the South could imagine the border as a line that separated racial discrimination on the one hand from racial fluidity on the other.

Most famously, a colonization attempt in the 1890s organized by a charismatic black empresario named Elton Ellis brought black sharecroppers from Alabama to Durango.24 They actively

22 Ministro de Fomento Colonización, Industria, y Comercio, Mexico, to the governor of the state of Coahuila, April 18, 1882, Saltillo, C4 F1 E5, FSXIX AGEC. 23 Gilberto Crespo y Martínez to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, February 29, 1892, fs. 32-33, Folder 44-12-60, SRE. 24 Karl Jacoby, “Between North and South: The Alternative Borderlands of William H. Ellis and the African American Colony of 1895” in Eds. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S- Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke, 2004), 183-207; Sarah E. Cornell, “Americans in the U.S. South and Mexico: A Transnational History of Race, Slavery, and Freedom, 1810–1910” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2008); Delores Nason McBroome, “Harvests of Gold: African American Boosterism, Agriculture and Investment in Allensworth and Little Liberia,” in Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, & Quintard Taylor, eds., Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

298 sought to escape the stultifying conditions of the post-Reconstruction South. For a variety of reasons the project failed. But despite the failure of this attempt—and a similar one in Baja

California in the early 20th century—Mexico continued to play an important part in the African

American diasporic imagination as a place of relative liberty. Examples are plentiful: In the

1920s, boxer Jack Johnson opened a “coloreds-only” nightclub in Tijuana.25 In 1957, the same year Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to bar the integration of Little Rock schools, composer Charles Mingus took a riotous trip to Mexico. The native of Nogales wrote music to commemorate both events; compare the bitter scorn of “Fables of Faubus” with the sexual, cacophonous liberty of “Ysabel’s Table Dance” from New Tijuana Moods. To take an even more recent example, listen to Cassandra Wilson sing “We can go to Mexico” on her Thunderbird album.

African Americans and Indians aside, no group better represents the opportunities that mobile peoples see in borders than migrant Mexican laborers. Indeed, perhaps “opportunity” is not the best word when we consider the fact that crossing the border to work for American dollars has become not only a social pressure in villages throughout Mexico, but a financial necessity as well. Nevertheless, Mexican migrants continue to cross the border to seek out employment in the U.S. numbering in the hundreds of thousands—if not millions. As chapter two of this dissertation argued, this global phenomenon had its roots in the era of the U.S.-

Mexico War and resulted in no small part from drawing the border along the Rio Grande/Bravo.

The escape of peons and other laborers from Mexican penury to Texan free labor (and racism) continued well beyond the years outlined in this dissertation. In the late 1860s, Mexican “amos” were still complaining about the muleteer and cartmen “sirvientes” they had brought across the line with them abandoning them to San Antonio. A hundred miles south, as the Anglo ranching

25 St. John, 152.

299 frontier expanded in into old Lipan hunting grounds, an even greater migration was taking place.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexican “peons,” escaping their masters to seek out the anonymity offered by isolated Texan ranches manned the ranches that effected the ecological transformation of the Nueces Strip. 26 Mexican mobility across the Texas-Mexico borderland has an unbroken history that continues to this day.

Thus, the border between Mexico and the United States has never functioned as a hermetic seal between one country and another. Mobile peoples, outsiders wandering through a culture that is not of their own making, global capitalism’s losers, and the victims of apartheid have always seen opportunities in borders. As the case of contemporary Mexican migrant laborers makes abundantly clear, crossing borders might represent an opportunity. Mobility, however, is not a choice for many people; it is an economic imperative. This fact is made ever more bitter by the scorn that migrant laborers are constantly subjected to, wherever they find themselves in the world.

Given the mobility that characterizes the borderlands of the Rio Grande/Bravo, and probably most borders, the generalized historical trajectory from borderland to bordered land is overblown. Continuity more than change marks borderlands. Static institutions and mobility most often work in tandem, and there is nothing more static than a line drawn on a map. Mobility has characterized the social history of the borderlands of the lower Rio Grande/Bravo at least since the first Indian immigrants began to arrive there in the early 18th century—and probably for much longer.

The Rio Grande/Bravo sits at a continental crossroads. Ever since the Caribbean tectonic plate moved westward to begin the subduction of the Pacific plate, the steppes of the newly

26 Vice Consul of the Mexican Republic in Bexar, Texas to commanding general of the 5th military district, Austin, November 18, 1869, f. 630, L20 E1, AEMEUA SRE; Testimony of Andres Escamilla before the Claims Commission, 1873, f. 182, LE 1590, SRE.

300 emergent Sierra Madre were destined to become a borderland. Viewed from this geological scale, states have come and gone with mindboggling rapidity and regularity. Nevertheless, ephemerality has never stopped the boosters of any newly-emergent state from trying to assert some sort of domination over this mobile landscape. New Spain, The Texas Republic, Vidaurri’s fiefdom of Nuevo León y Coahuila, the Confederate state of Texas, the Comanche Empire—all of these states have dawned and dusked in the borderlands, but mobility remains. From this larger point of view, the signal event of borderlands history, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in

1848, is not really very central at all.

In the long durée, “bordering” has been something of an exercise in futility. The people whom history would seek to condescend have always known this, and they take advantage of the fact that the state’s reach vastly outstrips its grasp. Their mobility continues despite the pretensions of states and the deputies who perform its assumed prerogatives. For our narrow concerns, mobility defined the existence of many, many African Americans, Indians, and migrant Mexicans in the borderlands despite all attempts by those who presumed to have the power to stop them in their tracks. But these mobile outsiders knew—just like we do—that no matter how many fences we build, the border remains in flux, open to contestation and multiple meanings. The act of scratching a line across a map implicitly acknowledges this fact. We build borders because we want to stop flows across geographically remote places. But the mere act of drawing a line in the sand does very little to disabuse other peoples’ notions about borders. New boundaries even create contradictory opportunities. This is just as true today as it was on that sad day in October of 1855, when the poor transient townsfolk of Piedras Negras watched tragedy unfold from the nearby cliffs. The townsfolk knew that no line on a map would stop those terrible invaders from burning all of their homes to the ground.

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