Image of an early U.S.-Mexico border marker. From an article by Rachel St. John, whose book “Line in the Sand” is the recommended starting point for this history.
In the depths of the winter of 1819, three slaves fled a Louisiana plantation. Heading west, they sought freedom across the Sabine River, the border into Spanish Texas. The slave master James Kirkham followed quickly on their heels, hoping to convince Spanish officials to return the people he considered to be his property. Before crossing the Sabine, Kirkham stopped at a tavern, where he met a man named Moses Austin who was also travelling to Texas. Austin was headed to the same destination: San Antonio, where he planned to ask permission from Spanish authorities to settle American families in Texas. Austin believed such settlement would be profitable because the land was excellent for developing a slave-based cotton economy. The slave catcher at the tavern was exactly the kind of man Austin hoped would purchase land in his new settlements. The two men decided to make the long journey to San Antonio together.
Austin’s plans were connected to major events in world history. New technology coming out of the British Empire had recently allowed for the mass production of cheap cotton cloth, and the British had begun supplying a voracious global market with fabric that was lighter, softer, more durable, and easier to clean than anything most people had ever had access to. Cotton production quickly became one of the most profitable enterprises in the world. When the War of 1812 ended, hundreds of thousands of White Americans flocked to the territories that would become Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In one of the largest mass migrations in American history, they established the cotton plantations that soon provided the raw material for the British manufacturing industry. Slaves who had once grown rice and tobacco now worked in the cotton fields from before sunup to after sundown. As the profits to be reaped from slavery skyrocketed, America’s commitment to the institution strengthened beyond anything the American Revolutionaries a generation earlier could have imagined.
By 1819, the price of good cotton growing land in the South had become unaffordable to all but the wealthy. Across the Sabine River in Spanish Texas, however, was land as excellent for growing cotton as any in Mississippi: and it was cheap. If Austin could convince the Spanish officials of Texas to allow him to build American settlements, settlers would come. They would purchase the land from Austin, and he would become a wealthy man. Moses Austin, however, would soon be killed. And although his son Stephen would make his father’s dream a reality, it would not be in Spanish Texas, but in a newly independent Mexican nation that fiercely opposed slavery. Although Mexico, like Spain, invited American settlers into Texas, Mexico pushed back hard against Americans bringing their slaves. Tensions soon grew between American settlers fighting to expand slavery, and Mexicans fighting to abolish it. Those struggles would soon be at the heart of the Texan Revolution, Texan independence… and the acceptance of Texas as a new American slave state.
Indigenous Texas; Mexican Independence
When Moses Austin rode into Texas in 1819, the Mexican War of Independence had been raging for nearly a decade, and Mexico would soon emerge victorious. However, neither the Spanish nor the Mexicans had ever been the masters of Texas. That title belonged to the Comanches.
The Comanches had gained fantastic wealth and power by monopolizing the horse trade on the Great Plains, sweeping from Texas up to Canada. The northern plains were too cold to breed horses, and numerous indigenous peoples looked to the Comanches – the master horse breeders of the central plains – to supply them with enough horses to be successful in trade, travel, hunting, and war. The Comanche reach was vast, extending even beyond the indigenous plains: they supplied the British in Canada, and the French in Louisiana. Horses were vital, and the French and British were willing to offer the best weapons available in exchange… weaponry superior to Spanish arms. In addition to this wealth and firepower, Comanches were raised hunting and fighting on horseback. Their abilities in war were practically mythic. So was their ferocity. Spanish attempts at enticing Comanches into missions were, at best, a dismal failure.
Indeed, the Spanish Empire had only been able to maintain a presence in Texas by paying tribute to the Comanches… but when the Napoleonic Wars washed over Europe in 1803, Spain’s ability to pay such tribute was greatly diminished. When the Mexican War of Independence erupted in 1810, it disappeared entirely. Meanwhile, as Comanche relations with the Spanish deteriorated in Texas, Americans were pouring south and building a cotton empire that would surpass even India by 1820. The hundreds of thousands of American migrants required an endless stream of horses and mules to plow the fields, turn the cotton gins, and haul the cotton bales to the ships that would take them across the Atlantic. The Comanches responded to this vast new market, and to Spain’s failure to pay tribute, by decimating Spanish settlements and driving Spanish herds to American trade posts on the border of Texas. Comanche raids were massive: in 1817, a single, thousand-strong war party stole ten thousand horses and mules. Comanches systematically removed Spanish wealth and channeled it into American hands. In doing so, they played a crucial role in the rise of the American South as the primary supplier of cotton to the British Empire, and in the demise of Spanish power in the Southwest.
When Moses Austin arrived in San Antonio, the capital city was filled with refugees from the countryside, where Comanche raids had destroyed the ranches and haciendas. The Mexican War of Independence had also ravaged the city: many local Tejanos – as the Mexicans of Texas were called – had joined the rebellion, often because they were upset at the Spanish government’s inability to protect them from Comanches. The Spanish had crushed the rebellion in Texas, killing hundreds of rebels in San Antonio alone. Rebel families all across eastern Texas had fled into the vast territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Entire towns were depopulated overnight. With ranchers and farmers either fleeing the Comanches or the Spanish, San Antonio’s food supply vanished. Attempts at resupplying were intercepted by Comanches. The governor of Spanish Texas, Antonio Martínez, reported that soldiers were deserting because “they were dying of hunger.” So were their horses.
It was two days before Christmas in 1820 when Moses Austin and the slave catcher James Kirkham rode into San Antonio. At first, they were not received well: Governor Antonio Martínez distrusted Americans, who had refused to stop arming and paying Comanche raiders. However, Austin produced a Spanish passport, and explained that he was a former Spanish subject in the Louisiana Territory, before it was transferred to France, and then to the U.S. When these transfers were made, the King of Spain had declared that any Spanish subjects of the area could resettle in any part of New Spain. Austin requested resettlement in eastern Texas… and that he be allowed to start a settlement of 300 American families there, focused on the production of cotton. Austin promised that all settlers would become Spanish subjects.
The governor took a few days to discuss the matter with local Tejano leadership, as well as with the military commander of the Texas province, Joaquín de Arredondo. Arredondo had come to believe that there was no military solution to Comanche power in Texas, especially after the region’s near-total depopulation during the Mexican War of Independence. Texas could only be secured by building up the non-Native population and economy. Former attempts to entice settlers to the dangerous region had failed. With Spanish power collapsing in Texas, General Arredondo hoped that Austin’s settlement could entice a growing population to the region, as well as resources and industry. If the Americans helped a cotton economy take root, Tejanos could participate as well. Perhaps the opportunity would entice settlers from the rest of the Spanish New World. If the population grew, the Comanches could be forced to cease their raids. Ranches, haciendas and farms could be rebuilt. It was the best option the general could imagine. The rest of the Tejano leadership agreed. Moses Austin got his contract.
Kirkham did not get what he wanted: he was informed that his slaves had headed deeper into Mexico. There was nothing to be done. On the journey home, Kirkham made a deal to purchase some mules that had been smuggled from the royal corral. When he told Austin, the two men had an argument, with Austin believing that Kirkham’s actions would jeopardize his contract. In the middle of the night, Kirkham stole off with all the horses and supplies, leaving Moses Austin to trek on foot through a cold winter. He was gravely ill by the time he made it home, and died shortly after. For the moment, it appeared that the contract Moses Austin had made with the Spanish amounted to nothing.
Stephen Austin & the Struggle Over Slavery in the Mexican Constitution
Shortly before the Spanish defeat, a group of Tejanos rode into Louisiana, carrying with them Spanish pardons for all Tejano families who had rebelled and fled into American territory. The group also planned to meet Moses Austin, and travel with him back to Texas to help him choose the land for his settlement. Instead, Tejanos were greeted by his son, Stephen, who rode back with them as the inheritor of his father’s project. As the group approached San Antonio, they received news of Mexico’s victory. Governor Martínez assured Austin that nothing had changed: with or without the Spanish, the Tejano leadership supported his father’s settlement plans.
Austin went to work advertising his settlement in newspapers throughout the South. The ads described rich lands, perfect for growing cotton… and affordable to the average American. The advertisements made it clear that settlers would receive additional acreage if they brought a wife, additional acreage for each child, and additional acres for each slave. What Stephen Austin was offering was enticing. It was a chance for average White Americans who couldn’t afford good cotton lands to become landowners and cotton producers. The land was so cheap that an average farmer who could otherwise never afford to purchase slaves could do so with the money they saved. Austin was offering the average White southerner a chance to get ahead. And yet, many who found Austin’s plan enticing still had their doubts: for they saw Texas as a violent, lawless land, promising little certainty. It was too big a risk.
By the time Austin began running his advertisements, American newspapers had been reporting on Comanche raids and the Mexican War of Independence for a decade. They had also been reporting on the pirates who raided Spanish slave ships heading for Cuba, and who smuggled those slaves into the U.S. through Texas. In the eyes of many Americans, Texas was a haven for “bands of outlaws in arms, tribes of Cannibal Indians,” and “gangs of daring smugglers,” to quote one newspaper. Newspapers also reported that Tejanos were on the edge of starvation, “afraid,” one paper wrote, “to venture a mile on the account of the Indians.”
Texas was also viewed as a place that slaves escaped to… and a place without a legal structure to enforce their return. Americans reading Austin’s advertisements didn’t doubt that he was selling excellent land for a cheap price: but he needed to convince them that Mexico would be willing and able to protect them and their property… and especially their slaves. Austin was flooded with letters from potential settlers, asking him about Mexico’s stance on slavery, and if the new nation had given Austin assurances that slavery would be legally protected. Austin quickly realized that settlers would not take the risk of moving to Texas without such assurances. Governor Martínez urged him to travel to Mexico City: with officials busy creating a new government, Austin’s presence in the capital would be the only way to get their attention. And so, in the spring of 1822, Austin set off on the 2000-mile journey.
Austin was in luck. Following independence, Mexico had immediately formed a commission to study the security of the frontier states of California, New Mexico, and Texas. Mexican officials especially feared the enormous population imbalance at the Texan border. 400,000 Americans had just migrated to the cotton lands of the South, but in the wake of Comanche raids and the War of Independence, there were a mere 2,500 Mexicans living in Texas… most of them hundreds of miles from the border. Officials realized there was little they could do to prevent Americans from forcing their way into Texas. In the words of the commission: “The most important problem is the security of the Province of Texas . . . It would be an irreparable loss to the Empire if this beautiful province is lost. In order to save it there remains only one recourse – to populate it.” The commission issued a dire warning: “If we do not take the present opportunity to people Texas, day by day the strength of the United States will grow until they leave their center and annex Texas, Coahuila, Saltillo, and Nuevo Leon like the Goths, Visigoths, and other tribes assailed the Roman Empire.” Mexico, at its founding, foresaw its painful future.
When Austin arrived in Mexico City in April of 1822, all Mexican legislators agreed that settlement was necessary, and that Americans were realistically the only people who would migrate to Texas in large numbers. Mexican legislators also agreed, however, with something that would make Austin’s project impossible: they all wanted to abolish slavery. The ideals of the Mexican War of Independence had called for the equality of all peoples, and had been explicitly antislavery from its inception. Mexico now sought to craft legislation that was consistent with the principles of its independence struggle.
In August, the Mexican congress opened debates over Texas settlements. When it came to the issue of American settlers bringing slaves, some congressmen responded with calls for the immediate abolition of slavery throughout Mexico. Francisco Argandar, the representative from Michoacán, roared: “If they wish to come, they will do it under the condition that they will not have slaves! This will be the highest honor of the Mexican nation.” Others, however, sought a middle ground. Concerned that total abolition would make American settlement impossible, these legislators proposed allowing Americans to bring their slaves, and then gradually phasing out slavery once settlement in Texas had succeeded. Austin, understanding that no Mexican legislators were willing to take a hardcore proslavery stance, met with as many legislators as he could to try and at least lengthen the amount of time that slavery in Texas would be allowed to exist. When Congress began debating a plan to gradually abolish slavery over the next ten years, Austin tried to intervene, writing: “I am trying to have it amended so as to make them slaves for life and their children free at 21 years . . . but I do not think I shall succeed.”
On January 3, 1823, Mexico passed legislation allowing American settlers to bring slaves, while gradually phasing slavery out after settlements had been established. Austin’s settlement was also granted official recognition by the Mexican government. However, Austin still struggled to attract settlers, because new antislavery measures made it obvious that Mexico hoped to abolish slavery in the near future. In July of 1824, a national law was passed banning the slave trade: “Commerce and traffic in slaves,” read the bill, “proceeding from any country and under any flag whatsoever, is forever prohibited in the territory of the United Mexican States.” Any slaves brought into Mexico against this law would be freed by “the mere act of treading Mexican soil.” The language of the bill, however, left an opening for slaves to be brought into Mexico – just not sold there – leaving an opening for Americans to bring slaves who had been purchased in the U.S. However, for American settlers hoping to participate in the slave-based cotton economy, it made little sense to purchase land in a country where the support of slavery was clearly unstable… even if the land was cheap.
Austin pinned his hopes on the Mexican constitution being developed in 1824. The Texas representative, Erasmo Seguín, was a powerful ally of Austin’s settlement plans: in fact, Seguín had personally guided Austin into Texas. Seguín’s priority was creating safety and stability for Tejanos, which meant growing the population and developing the economy. If that meant allowing slavery in Texas, Seguín would accept it. As debates over the constitution raged, Austin wrote to Seguín: “There are two obstacles which slow down emigration to this province and the entire nation . . . One is the doubt that persists if slavery is permitted, the other is religion.” Austin knew that the matter of Catholicism was beyond his control, but he urged Seguín to do everything in his power to allow Americans to “bring and keep their slaves.” Seguín would have done this even without Austin’s constant pressure. Under his urging, and that of other Tejanos, Mexico’s constitution of 1824 made no mention of slavery: it left the divisive issue up to the states.
With the issue of slavery now under state control, most states immediately abolished it. Texas was the major outlier, but even there Austin’s plans encountered trouble. Because Texas did not have a large enough population to become a state, it was merged with the state of Coahuila… meaning that decisions about the Texas frontier would be made by the large population far to the west of Texas, and not by the Tejanos who supported American settlement. Austin and his Tejano allies thus turned their attention towards influencing the legislation coming out of Saltillo, the capital of the new state of Coahuila-Texas.
American Settlers Push Back on Mexican Abolition
As Austin worked to influence Mexican legislation in favor of American settlement, he also continued to build that settlement. He secured financial investments from major cotton merchants, promising massive returns for the cotton gins and equipment they provided. He petitioned Mexican officials for the right to build seaports, arguing that only direct cotton shipments to Europe would bring prosperity to Texas. In order to secure slavery in a nation that wished to abolish it, Austin drew up codes for extreme punishment to deter runaways. A White person aiding a runaway slave would be forced into hard labor and fined $1000 – a fantastic sum at the time. Slaves could receive 100 lashes merely for stealing. Such policies helped slave owners feel at least somewhat reassured that their human property would be safe in Austin’s settlement. Within a few years, slaves made up a quarter of the population, and Austin’s settlement was producing an annual 200,000 pounds of cotton. It was a start to Austin’s vision, but nowhere near the 45 million pounds produced yearly in Alabama.
Austin also developed militias to drive out local indigenous peoples. Referring to the local Karankawa tribe, Austin ordered the militia to “pursue and kill all those Indians wherever they are found.” The small and relatively powerless tribe was decimated. When it came to the larger Tonkawa tribe, Austin convinced them to move with a peace treaty, combined with the threat of violence. The Comanche, on the other hand, were untouchable… but they were good trading partners. The settlers in Austin’s colony continued to purchase horses from Comanches, just as they had done in the South… and the Comanches continued raiding Mexican settlements in order to provide those horses.
Tejanos had hoped that American settlement would help stop Comanche raids; instead, it just brought the American market closer. Still, Tejanos held out hope that a flourishing cotton economy would benefit them as well: Austin had doubled the non-native population by bringing in two thousand settlers and slaves within three years. Those two thousand bodies cleared rivers for navigation and trade, and began building a network of roads. Settlers initiated a robust trade between Texas and New Orleans. The infrastructure they created in a few years was greater than anything Spanish negligence had produced in the past century. And so, even when hundreds of Comanches ransacked San Antonio for six days in 1825, Tejanos held out hope. When Stephen Austin met his goal of settling 300 families that year, Tejanos granted him the right to build additional settlements.
Meanwhile, the state of Coahuila-Texas began writing its constitution. In June of 1826, Austin received a letter from Baron de Bastrop, the only representative of Texas at the state congress. Bastrop warned that the congress was preparing to insert an antislavery article into the state constitution: “If I cannot succeed in removing it, or at least modifying it,” he wrote, the American settlements “will be completely ruined.” Soon, Austin would see for himself what the antislavery threat was. The proposed Article 13 of the new Coahuila-Texas constitution read: “The state prohibits absolutely and for all time slavery in all its territory, and slaves that already reside in the state will be free from the day of the publication of the constitution in this capital.”
Liberal and conservative legislators in Coahuila had come together to support Article 13, with the liberals being ideologically opposed to slavery, and the conservatives seeing abolition as a way to destroy the growing American settlements that they viewed as a threat. Tejano leaders panicked. San Antonio’s town council sent an emergency appeal to the state congress, warning that the immediate abolition of slavery would be a “deathblow” to Texas. Austin followed their lead, sending a petition to congress warning that abolition would cause American settlers to quickly abandon the territory. The potential for economic development would be destroyed in Texas for many years to come, he wrote. Austin also sent his younger brother, James “Brown” Austin, to the state capital of Saltillo to work directly with Tejano leadership, and to keep him informed of developments.
Soon, rumors were swirling in Austin’s settlements that the slaves were about to be freed. Fears of slave rebellions spread: settlers worried that if slaves knew they would soon be free, they would worry about their owners rushing them back to the U.S., and would fight to prevent that. Settlers began turning against Austin, feeling that he had given them false assurances that Mexico would protect slavery. Some prepared to leave. As Austin struggled to keep his settlement from falling apart, the rumors that slavery was about to be ended in Texas spread through southern newspapers.
From the state capital, Brown Austin sought to buy time. If congress could put off emancipation for a few years, perhaps a different legislature would be more favorable. Hoping to pull at the heartstrings of antislavery legislators, Brown went so far as to argue that freeing slave children would actually hurt them. As long as they were slaves, children would be fed and sheltered, he argued… but if they were freed, they would become impoverished vagabonds, starving in the street, and forced into a life of crime. Brown argued that such children should continue to be enslaved at least until they were teenagers and able to support themselves. Meanwhile, Governor Blanco wrote to the congress, warning them that Austin’s settlers would probably rebel if slavery was immediately abolished. The governor urged them to forbid the importation of more slaves, while allowing the settlers to keep the slaves they already had.
Heeding the warning of a possible rebellion, the final version of Article 13 in the Coahuila-Texas constitution allowed American settlers to keep their slaves. It even gave them a six-month window in which to purchase new slaves. However, any children born of slaves would be born free, and slave children born before Article 13 would be freed when they became young adults. This meant that there would be no future generations of slaves in Texas. The new state constitution did not immediately abolish slavery, but it did put an end to the expansion of slavery in Texas and ensure slavery’s slow death.
Upon hearing the news, American settlers on their way to Texas stopped in their tracks and turned around: Article 13 was a deal-breaker for further settlement. And the antislavery measures didn’t stop there: after the six-month period allowing new slaves to be brought into Texas expired, Coahuila-Texas imposed an ongoing census of the enslaved population in Coahuila-Texas, to ensure that new slaves were not being brought in. A five hundred peso fine – the peso was equivalent to the dollar at the time – was imposed on anyone caught transporting a pregnant slave back to the U.S., where their children would be born into slavery. Finally, new legislation mandated that when a master died, a minimum of ten percent of their slaves must be freed. The American settlers and their Tejano allies responded to these laws by simply ignoring them, knowing that there was little the state congress could do to enforce the laws along the distant Texan frontier. Even so, the new antislavery laws had the effect of preventing further American immigration into Texas. Austin would have to do more than simply ignore the laws if he wanted to grow his settlements.
In March of 1828, roughly a year after the passage of Article 13, Austin called together a meeting of leading figures in his settlement to “seek a way around the problem of emancipation,” to use the words of historian Andrew Torget. The group came up with a scheme: they would ask the state legislature “for a law guaranteeing that all labor contracts signed in foreign countries would be honored in Mexico.” They would claim that this was an effort to bring in non-slave labor from the U.S., and that they needed such a law so that American workers could trust that contracts they signed in the U.S. would be honored in Texas. Once the law was in place, however, they would simply force slaves in the U.S. to sign official lifetime “contracts” before crossing into Texas. Tejano legislators quickly embraced the plan: they waited for a moment when the Coahuila-Texas government was overwhelmed by other issues, and pushed the bill through while the Congress was too distracted to examine it closely. Austin then contacted his cotton merchant allies in the U.S., who funded advertisements telling American settlers that all they had to do was obtain official work contracts for their slaves. With this loophole in place, Americans once again began migrating to Texas.
The abolitionist spirit in Mexico, however, remained a problem for Austin’s settlements. In 1829, Spain attempted to reconquer Mexico. In order to deal with the invasion, Congress granted President Vicente Guerrero emergency powers. Guerrero – a man of indigenous and African heritage – used these powers to circumvent the Mexican Constitution and declare the immediate abolition of slavery throughout Mexico. As the news of the presidential decree moved across Austin’s settlements, so did talk of revolution. Mexican military officials warned the Coahuila-Texas government that they did not have the power to suppress an uprising, and the government panicked: even those who despised slavery begged President Guerrero to exclude Texas from his antislavery decree in order to prevent an uprising they didn’t have the power to control. Fearing an American revolution in the north, Guerrero caved in and excluded Texas from his decree of abolition. Even if he hadn’t, however, it wouldn’t have mattered: Guerrero had abused his wartime powers, and was soon overthrown. All of his decrees were voided.
Rising Tensions: Mexico Pushes Back on American Settlement
Even though revolution had been averted in 1829, events in the early 1830s moved the American settlers quickly in that direction. When General Manuel de Mier y Terán was sent on an off-the-records mission to assess the American settlements, he issued a dire warning to Mexico City: American settlers greatly outnumbered Mexicans in the region. They had far more economic might and displayed no concern for Mexican laws. They traded almost exclusively with the U.S., as did their Tejano allies. The Texas settlement had essentially become an extension of the U.S. reaching into Mexico. General Terán warned Mexico City that it needed to take urgent steps to reassert Mexican authority in Texas by suspending any further U.S. immigration.
The events leading up to the Texas Revolution now unfolded rapidly. In order to encourage immigration to Texas, Mexico had originally granted Americans a tax-exempt status for seven years. In 1830, that period ended. Mexico’s new president, Anastasio Bustamante, heeded General Terán’s advice and used the new taxes gathered in Texas to build military outposts. Such outposts were often constructed at the mouths of major rivers where trade occurred, and were used to enforce tax collection. Congress also forbade any further American immigration to Texas.
All of this increased tensions with the American settlers, and none of it did anything to prevent further arrivals. Instead, in 1831 the global cotton market hit a new high. In order to take advantage of soaring profits, cotton production ramped up dramatically in the South, and thousands of Americans poured over the border into Texas to take advantage of the cheap cotton-growing land. They understood that the move to Mexico came with instability around the question of slavery, but the higher profits to be gained in the 1830s made the risk worth it to thousands of settlers. Indeed, between the time that Mexico forbade further American immigration in 1830 and the outbreak of the Texas Revolution in 1835, the American population more than doubled in Texas, from 10,000 to over 21,000.
In 1832 another event transpired that pushed the American settlements further towards revolution: the Coahuila-Texas government outlawed the use of the “work contracts” American settlers had been using to bring in slaves. In doing so, the last semi-legal means of bringing slaves into Texas was closed. American settlers and their Tejano allies responded by petitioning Mexico City for separate statehood from Coahuila, so that Texans could create their own laws. When that statehood was denied, Austin travelled to Mexico City himself, hoping to convince legislators in person. He got nowhere. In his frustration, Austin sent a letter to his Tejano allies urging them to form an independent state government even without Mexico City’s approval. The letter was intercepted, and Austin was thrown in jail for treason.
Meanwhile, Mexico was in turmoil: ever since its independence in 1821, the nation had been torn between the forces of federalism and centralism, or of greater state and local control versus a more powerful central government in Mexico City. As Austin languished in jail, Mexico’s new president, Santa Anna, made a move to totally centralize the nation: he abolished the constitution, decreed that the states would now be run by his own personal appointees, and set himself up as a dictator. This predictably led many states into open revolt, but because Santa Anna was famous as the general who had helped push back the recent attempt at Spanish reconquest, the military was deeply loyal to him and helped him crush the popular uprisings. Mexico thus slipped into a civil war with the centralists on one side, and the federalists on the other.
When Austin was released from jail in August of 1835, tensions were skyrocketing in Texas. Santa Anna had sent more military reinforcements to the newly constructed and widely hated fortresses. The greater military presence and recent attempts at collecting taxes from the American settlers had pushed many of the settlers to fiercely oppose Santa Anna. The settlers, of course, had always sought stronger independence, especially when it came to creating their own laws regarding slavery. That desire for Texan independence now led Texans to support the federalist cause in Mexico’s civil war.
The Texas Revolution
By October, violence was breaking out between American settlers and the Mexican soldiers stationed at the military outposts. Leaders amongst the settlers and the Tejanos, determined to form an independent Texas at long last, formed a General Council tasked with creating a new government. One of the very first laws they passed was to make it illegal for any free Black people to enter Texas. Furthermore, all Black people in the settlement who were free were to be immediately enslaved. The Council also appointed Sam Houston to be the general of the Texan army, and sent Austin to the U.S. to secure funds and generate public support for the revolution.
Austin’s deep connections to cotton merchants made him the ideal figure for this work, and it would indeed be these cotton merchants who funded the Texas Revolution. They also helped to circulate newspapers throughout the South filled with sensational stories framing the Texan independence struggle as a race war, with White American settlers being pitted against the racially inferior Mexican forces of Santa Anna, who was coming to incite slave revolts and murder the White population. Such newspaper accounts led thousands of White Southern men to rush to the defense of Texas: such men would make up a full 40 percent of the Texan rebel army. These reinforcements were badly needed, for slave revolts had begun breaking out in Texas as the potential promise of freedom approached in the form of Santa Anna’s army, and many of the settlers were more occupied with preventing slave uprisings than preparing for war. In one instance, a hundred slaves suspected of planning rebellion were rounded up, and either whipped nearly to death or hung.
The Texans waited in terrified expectation as news of Santa Anna’s ruthless crushing of revolts in Zacatecas and Coahuila reached them. Soon, Santa Anna’s forces approached the Alamo. The 150 defenders of the small fortress had been expecting reinforcements that had never arrived. They had been weakened by dysentery and were running low on food and water. Santa Anna knew this. His army was ten times larger than the forces at the Alamo. It was clearly only a matter of time before the Texan rebels would surrender, but on March 6, 1836, Santa Anna attacked anyway. After the attack, when Mexican soldiers took the few survivors as prisoners, Santa Anna ordered them to be hacked to death, and the bodies of the dead to be piled up, doused in oil, and burned. Shortly afterwards, when the town of Goliad was captured and 400 American soldiers had surrendered, Santa Anna ordered them to be massacred. When these atrocities were reported in the U.S., it set White American hearts aflame, and facilitated a deep anti-Mexican hatred that laid foundations for future war.
Texas declared its total independence from Mexico just days before the attack on the Alamo. Their declaration was deeply influenced by America’s Declaration of Independence, and the Texas Constitution that followed weeks later was also modeled on America’s. Although many leading American settlers and Tejanos had started the struggle for independence seeking separate statehood within a federalist Mexico, the White Americans who had recently flooded into Texas to take advantage of the cotton boom had no such interest. Neither did the White Southern men who had rushed to defend Texas in a “race war” against Mexicans and liberated slaves… and who made up nearly half of the rebel army. More than anything else, however, it was the knowledge that they were about to face the brutality of Santa Anna that led the more established American settlers like Austin to make the decisive break from Mexico.
As for the Tejano leadership: of the fifty-nine delegates making these decisions, only two Tejanos had been included. By the time of the Texas Revolution, Tejanos made up a mere fifteen percent on the non-Native population. If the Texans succeeded at independence, Tejanos would find themselves a small minority in a majority White nation. Furthermore, the Americans who flooded into Texas during the Revolution had been inspired by the fierce anti-Mexican rhetoric whipped up in the U.S., and the flood of recent American immigrants taking advantage of the cotton boom of the 1830s had none of the experience of working closely with Tejanos that earlier settlers had. The days of American settlers collaborating with Tejano leaders were fading fast.
As the Texas delegates rushed to create their new government, news of Santa Anna’s massacres burned their way across the Texas countryside. Thousands of Texans stopped whatever they were doing, leaving their tools in the fields and food at the table to flee for their lives. They not only feared the Mexican army, but the growing threat of slave rebellions as Santa Anna neared. The general had every intention of freeing the slaves, writing to his minister of war: “There is a considerable number of slaves in Texas also . . . who according to our laws should be free. Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of cast or color?” As Santa Anna neared Texan plantations, slaves began fleeing to his lines, and plantation owners began rounding up their slaves and driving them towards the U.S. in massive numbers. As they did, torrential rainstorms broke out, and thousands of Tejanos, American settlers, and slaves became trapped together as rivers flooded and blocked their path of escape.
Meanwhile, General Houston ordered the Texan army into a full retreat. Greatly outnumbered, his army threw their cannons into the Guadalupe River so they wouldn’t be slowed down, and burned any supplies they couldn’t carry to prevent Santa Anna’s forces from gaining access to them. Houston’s retreat was also strategic: he wanted to fight on more familiar ground closer to the American settlements, and in a more wooded terrain that gave his army an advantage over the Mexican cavalry.
As Santa Anna pursued Houston’s retreating army, he displayed his greatest weakness: Santa Anna was overly confident, and in his overconfidence he divided his forces to search for the retreating Texan army. Soon afterwards, Houston’s army had a moment of luck: they captured a messenger carrying Santa Anna’s plans and location. Realizing Santa Anna had divided his forces, Houston reversed his retreat. Once again displaying his overconfidence, Santa Anna had camped his men in a dangerous location: in the middle of a plain with a lake on one side, and a marsh on another. He also allowed his men to rest without establishing an adequate lookout, creating an opening for Houston’s forces to launch a devastating surprise attack. On April 21, 1836, the Texan rebels slaughtered Santa Anna’s forces. With shouts of “Remember the Alamo!”, they shot down Mexican soldiers as they tried desperately to retreat across an unforgiving marshy terrain. While the Americans buried their own, the Mexican dead were left to rot, leaving the landscape strewn with skeletons. Mexican prisoners of war were sold into slavery.
When Santa Anna was taken prisoner, the Texans negotiated with him: they would spare his life and allow him to return to Mexico City if the dictator ordered the rest of his army to retreat… and if he used his influence to urge the Mexican government to accept an independent Texas, with an expanded border at the Rio Grande rather than the traditional border at the Nueces River. Santa Anna agreed. As the Mexican army retreated, slaves fled to join their ranks. Santa Anna had also been forced to agree to return all such escapees. However, none of Santa Anna’s agreements held legitimacy in the eyes of the Mexican nation: they had been made by one man under threat of death, not by Congress or the people of Mexico. Santa Anna’s deals with the Texans were viewed as cowardly and disgraceful, and he was forced from power. Mexico did not accept Texan independence… and it would not return slaves. From this moment on, Mexico became widely seen as a southern sanctuary for those fleeing the horrors of Texan cotton plantations.
Texas: An Isolated Slave Nation in an Era of Global Abolition
In the summer of 1836, Sam Houston, hailed as the revolution’s great war hero, was elected president in a landslide. President Houston immediately began advocating that Texas join the United States: the vast majority of White settlers identified as Americans and desired Texas annexation, and becoming part of the U.S. could prevent Mexico from attempting to retake Texas. Statehood would also lead to further migration, and thus to greater wealth and development in Texas. President Andrew Jackson, however, refused to consider it… precisely because his own intelligence experts were telling him that reconquest by Mexico was likely. Jackson urged Congress not to consider Texas annexation, lest in embroil the U.S. in a larger war with Mexico.
Even more important than concerns over war with Mexico were concerns over the expansion of slavery. Tensions had been rising between the slave and the free states for over a decade by the time of the Texan Revolution, but there was a relative balance of power between the North and the South in Congress. Admitting Texas to the union would tip that balance towards the political interests of slavery, leading congressmen from the North to fiercely oppose annexation. Neither President Jackson nor his successor Martin Van Buren were willing to stoke the fires of the growing North/South divide. Annexation was thus off the table. However, President Jackson, recognizing the fierce support for annexation in the South, officially recognized Texan independence from Mexico on his last day in office.
In order to create more pressure for annexation, Stephen Austin, now the Texan Secretary of State, developed a plan. He warned American legislators that if Texas was not accepted as part of the U.S., that it would quickly emerge as a rival to American cotton interests. To make the threat real, Austin immediately sought direct trade relations with Europe… relations that Texas, if it were to remain independent, would certainly need. Before the revolution, nearly all of the cotton from Texas went to the cotton markets of the American South, from where they were shipped internationally. Under this system, the South profited, but Texans lost about half of their potential earnings paying American middlemen. If Texas was to survive as an independent nation, it would require more profitable, direct trade with Europe… and if that were to happen, Texas would indeed emerge as a rival to U.S. cotton. Austin, however, wouldn’t live to see if his attempts to pressure the U.S. into annexation would work: he caught a deadly case of pneumonia in the cold winter winds on 1836.
Meanwhile, Texas diplomats arrived in London, hoping to forge a relationship with the world’s greatest military and economic power, and its greatest consumer of cotton. Texas was completely broke after the revolution, and hoped to secure loans from Great Britain, as well as diplomatic recognition and direct trade. By the mid-1830s, however, Great Britain had adopted a strong anti-slavery stance. Texans hoped that the promise of a vast new source of cotton would tempt the British Empire to exclude Texas from its antislavery efforts, but this was not the case. The Empire had no interest in supporting a new nation founded on pro-slavery principles, and refused to recognize Texas as a legitimate nation at all. Unable to secure direct trade, loans, or even basic diplomatic recognition from the world’s greatest consumer of cotton, President Houston realized that Texas had no means to pressure the U.S. into accepting annexation. Texas would have to blaze its own, separate path.
In a world that was steadily moving towards abolitionism, Texas, rather than emerging as an influential cotton empire, found itself internationally isolated. Unable to secure loans from either the U.S. or Great Britain, Texas found itself with no revenue to form a government. Texas attempted to remedy the problem by taxing imports, but that only led to mass smuggling. Texas then attempted to tax its own citizens, but had no means to enforce such tax collecting. The new nation was unable to run a postal service, pay its government officials, and was even forced to dissolve the small navy it had built during the revolution… which led to even more smuggling, especially of slaves from Cuba. In what became a symbol of the struggles of independent Texas, the Texan Congress literally met in a barn.
Despite the Republic of Texas’s struggles with finances and international support, White Southerners poured into the new nation in greater numbers than ever before. The cotton economy was still booming, and as always, Southerners were attracted by cheap Texan land. And now that Texas was free from the laws of Mexico, it finally offered slave owners a secure investment. In fact, the Texan Constitution offered far stronger support for slavery than the U.S. Constitution did… and unlike in the U.S., there was no growing abolitionist movement or North/South divide to threaten the future of slavery. Indeed, one of the goals of Texas’s new constitution was to ensure White Southerners that the practice of slavery would be fiercely protected: according to the constitution, neither Congress nor slave owners themselves were allowed to emancipate slaves, or to place any limitations on the importation of slaves from the U.S. With such protections in place, both the White and the slave populations tripled in Texas between 1837 and 1840 alone. Almost all of these migrants wanted a part of the Texan slave-based cotton wealth: the crop made up 95 percent of the new nation’s exports.
Despite the enormous influx of American immigrants, Texas had failed in its quest for American statehood, failed at its need to secure international relations, and failed to become financially secure and even form a functioning government. Thus, when it came time for the next presidential election, the anti-Houston candidate Mirabeau Lamar won a landslide 96 percent of the vote. President Lamar cast aside the idea of annexation entirely. If Texas were to become an American state, he warned it would be subjected to the growing influence of abolitionism. It was better to remain independent, and to be a refuge for slaveholders as abolitionism grew in the U.S. Lamar envisioned an independent Texas that would grow in strength over time, and which would push westward, stretching “from the Sabine to the Pacific” as he put it in his inaugural address. As one article described Lamar’s dream: American slaveholders “will look to Texas as the Hebrews did to the Promised Land for a refuge and a home.”
Houston had also declined in popularity because of his attempts at making peace with indigenous groups rather than waging war on them. Houston’s indigenous policies were partly personal – he had been adopted by Cherokees during his youth – but primarily practical. Texas was in no position to take on a powerful indigenous nation like the Comanches. However, as settlers pushed further and further into indigenous territories, raids on Texan settlements became more common. Mirabeau Lamar promised Texans protection… in the form of explicitly exterminationist campaigns. In Lamar’s first message to Congress, he called for “an exterminating war” on indigenous warriors, “which will admit no compromise and have no termination except in their total extinction or total expulsion.” After decimating the small Indian populations in eastern Texas, Lamar authorized war on the powerful Comanches to the west, leading to mass violence. Although the Comanches did retreat into their vast territory, the western frontier of Texas was devastated in the process, and the struggling new nation was pushed further into bankruptcy.
Things did not get any easier from there. In 1839, a depression hit, and cotton profits were soon cut in half. With its economy based on a single crop, the nation teetered on the brink of economic collapse. Texas slashed its entire military budget and stopped all repayments on its vast national debt, ensuring that it would never receive the foreign loans it desperately needed. Then, storms in 1842 and 1843 destroyed much of the cotton crop. Immigration from the U.S. ceased. As Texas weakened, fears of slave revolts escalated. Many slaves escaped into Mexico during these years.
Mexico, of course, took note of all this. Although the nation was still locked in a state of continuous rebellions and coups between the forces of centralism and federalism, Mexicans of all political persuasions agreed that retaking Texas was vital. They also worried that time was running out. Many Mexicans worried that slaveholders in the U.S. were not only planning to annex Texas as soon as circumstances allowed… but were aiming to take other parts of Mexico as well in order to bring new slave states into the Union and tip American political power decisively in favor of slavery. In the words of Mexico’s minister to the U.S., Manuel Gorostiza: “The fundamental purpose of the plot is to take possession of the entire coast of Texas, reunite it with the United States, make Texas into four of five slave states, in order to obtain by means of the new senators and representatives that these states name the preponderance in the Congress in favor of the South, therefor to sacrifice the interests of the North to those of the South and to prepare for a separation from the North which sooner or later must happen, and is already believed to be near.” Although there was no such concerted plan, many Mexicans, like abolitionists in the United States, feared otherwise.
However, Mexico quite simply did not have the power to retake Texas, especially given the tripling of the Texan population since the revolution. Despite this fact, in March of 1842, 700 Mexican soldiers retook San Antonio, while separate forces took the towns of Goliad and Refugio. These small Mexican forces knew that they would not be able to fend off the far larger forces Texas was capable of mobilizing, but that was not the point. The Mexican army sought to gain the support of the now marginalized Tejano population and turn them against the Americans. And by holding the towns, the Mexicans had forced Texan men to abandon their cotton crops at the height of the planting season to join militias, thus threatening the year’s cotton harvest. The Mexican forces, having served their purpose, vanished before the Texans ever arrived. Then, in September, a Mexican army of 1200 took San Antonio again. President Houston – who had been re-elected after Lamar’s failures – ordered a Texan force of 700 into Mexico to retaliate. When the Texan army was captured, the weakness of the nation was further revealed.
Abolitionist Pressures From the British Empire & American Annexation
The world’s greatest consumer of cotton saw an opportunity in the chaos of Texas. Manufactured cotton products made up a full half of the British Empire’s monumental exports, and 82 percent of that raw cotton came from the southern United States. However, the British Empire had adopted an antislavery stance, abolishing the practice in its own colonies, and even using its immense navy to hunt down slave ships and pressure other countries to abandon slavery. The Empire was also seeking alternative sources of raw cotton that did not depend on slave labor. And although Texas was deeply committed to slavery, when Great Britain looked at the struggling new nation, they imagined that Texans might be open to abandoning slavery… in exchange for the support of the British Empire. British diplomats hoped that by funding a slave-free cotton empire in Texas, and by shifting British imports away from the American South and towards Texas, that they could create pressure on the American South to let go of slavery as well. British diplomats also imagined that a strong Texas, in alliance with the British Empire, could be one of the best ways to prevent further American westward expansion and the growing power that came with it.
Texans, however, had a deep distrust of the British. Ever since Texan independence, British abolitionists had heaped scorn on their society: one member of the British Parliament had even floated the idea of funding a colony for free Blacks in northern Mexico, in order to inspire more slaves to escape and thereby destabilize “the piratical society called the State of Texas.” Antislavery activists in London discussed plans to secretly send abolitionists to work in Texas. Although neither of these ideas ever got off the ground, they became attention-grabbing headlines throughout Texas and the American South and stirred deep anti-British sentiments. Such stories also created enough paranoia to fuel widespread conspiracy theories that the British Empire was going to fund the Mexican army to reconquer Texas, although there was no evidence for such plans.
Then, in the summer of 1843, British representatives openly discussed their desire to abolish slavery in Texas at the World Antislavery Convention. Although what was said at the convention did not represent the goals of the British government, the news that swept through Texas like fire did not make such distinctions. Texans, imagining an imminent threat from Great Britain, panicked. Even Texans like ex-President Mirabeau Lamar, who feared American abolitionism and who dreamed of building an independent, slave-based Texan empire extending to the Pacific, now embraced annexation to the United States as the best way to preserve slavery. The Houston administration made a renewed push for annexation, this time emphasizing how the collapsing Texan economy made it increasingly more vulnerable to the British.
During this time, American President John Tyler was receiving his own intelligence about the British desire to influence Texas in order to deal a blow to southern slavery and prevent westward expansion. In this context, the United States entered secret negotiations for Texas annexation in the fall of 1843. President Tyler was deeply concerned with preserving slavery, and saw the annexation of Texas as a means to strengthen slave interests in the U.S. However, in order to gain the support of northern Congressmen, his administration presented the issue as a national security concern: would they really allow the British Empire to develop a base of power just to the west of the U.S.? With the issue of annexation framed as preventing a British threat, support for annexation in Congress grew. To keep up the pressure, President Houston openly pursued a stronger relationship with the British Empire as the American Congress debated annexation.
Then, in February 1844, everything changed. The man who had built up support for annexation in the Senate – Secretary of State Abel Upshur – was killed in an explosion. His successor, John Calhoun, brashly championed annexation as a way to strengthen slave interests in the U.S. Overnight, the support that Secretary Upshur had built by framing annexation as a national security issue vanished. Northern senators were furious at the deception, and on June 8, 1844, annexation was soundly rejected in the Senate.
The issue of annexation, however, was not yet settled. In November, James Polk won the presidential election running on a platform of western expansion, including the annexation of Texas. In one of his last acts as president, John Tyler, arguing that the American public had voted in favor of annexation when they voted for Polk, was able to push an annexation deal through Congress. He did so using legally questionable means that required a bare majority vote rather than the traditional two-thirds. Texas immediately accepted the American offer of statehood, and officially joined the union on December 29, 1845.
Postlude: Towards the Confederacy
The American acceptance of Texas as its twenty-eighth state was a major act of aggression towards Mexico, quickly followed by another, in the form of the U.S.-Mexico War. During that war, Tejanos who had originally supported American settlements in a desperate hope to develop the area and gain protection from Comanche raids now fought the very settlers they had once tried to support. Amongst them was Juan Seguín, the son of Erasmo Seguín… the man who had originally guided Stephen Austin into Texas.
When the U.S.-Mexico War ended in 1848, vast amounts of conquered Mexican land was added to the United States. The following decade would be defined by struggles over the expansion of slavery into these territories… struggles that led directly to the Civil War. When that moment came, Texas joined the Confederacy, explaining that they opposed “the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color,” and thus left the U.S. as a means of “holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery.” The same ideology that had done so much to create Texas itself later drove it into the Confederacy. By that time, there were 182,000 slaves in Texas – making up a full third of its population – and Texas had turned itself into the dominant cotton-growing region in the U.S. It remains so today.
When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846, the soldiers who marched through what are today Mexico’s northern states encountered desolation. The U.S. Army marched down abandoned roads, past burned-out villages and through deserted ghost towns littered with corpses rotting in the sun. In the words of historian Pekka Hämäläinen, “It was as if northern Mexico had already been vanquished when the U.S. invasion got underway.”
And indeed, it had. The destruction of northern Mexico was the work of the indigenous masters of much of the Southwest: the Comanche. The Comanche had not only prevented the Spanish Empire from pushing further into what would become the United States… they had turned the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and Texas into virtual colonies of their own. Shortly after Mexico liberated itself from Spain, Comanche war bands pushed deep into the interior of the newly independent, but war-weakened country. They forged war trails a thousand miles long that pushed through Mexico’s deserts, mountains and jungles. Comanche warriors raided cities within a mere three-day ride of Mexico City itself. Because of the Comanche, the U.S. Army found the road to Mexico’s capital essentially wide open.
Why, and how, did the Comanche unleash such devastation in Mexico… and by doing so unintentionally lay foundations for American conquest? The story begins a century and half before the U.S.-Mexico War, when the Comanche began to forge an indigenous empire based on dominating the trade in horses and bison hides across the Great Plains, and beyond.
The Emergence of the Comanche
In 1680, the Pueblo Indians living in the Spanish colony of New Mexico revolted. They forced the Spanish out of the region, took control of an enormous number of Spanish horses, and began a lucrative horse trade. The trade in horses moved north from New Mexico, following well-worn indigenous trading routes that moved along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains at the point where the mountain region gradually melted into the Great Plains. Because horses were not found in the Americas before European contact, the indigenous peoples living in the middle of what would later become the United States had not yet encountered the animals. The introduction of horses was a revolutionary moment: tribes who gained access to horses gained immediate and profound advantages in their ability to travel great distances, engage in more extensive trade, hunt, and wage war.
Within a decade, this indigenous horse trade reached the Shoshone peoples living where the Great Plains sweep through modern-day Wyoming and Montana. Bison hunting was at the center of Shoshone life, and horses made the hunt far easier. However, trading in goods that came from Spanish territories also exposed the Shoshone to diseases that were widespread across the massive, interconnected landmasses of Africa, Europe, and Asia… but that had never existed before in the Americas and which Native Americans thus had no immunities to.
As Shoshones fell prey to the kind of contact-induced epidemics that killed millions of Native Americans, a large group splintered off and headed south along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains… following the flow of horses to its source in New Mexico. This group was probably seeking to escape the epidemic, but it also appears they were seeking to establish themselves within the horse trade that had such clear potential to revolutionize indigenous America. As they approached the source of horses in New Mexico, they formed an alliance with the Utes, after which Utah is named. The Utes had long raided horses from the Spanish – who had recently reconquered New Mexico – and they shared their expertise in how to use them in war, hunting, trade, and travel. Over the next generation, the two allied tribes raided so many horses from the Spanish in New Mexico that the settlers no longer had enough horses to mount a defense. The Spanish were soon cursing the new group from the north as “Comanches”… the Ute word for “enemy.”
Mastering the Southern Plains; Dominating the Horse and Bison Trade
Newly rich in horses and knowledge of the Spanish borderlands, in 1720 the Comanches headed east onto the Great Plains of the Southwest, where immense horse herds could be sustained on the seemingly infinite grasslands. Once on the plains, the Comanche herds grew rapidly. Their horses allowed them to hunt bison with great effectiveness, and the Comanche soon realized that if they focused all their energies on hunting bison and expanding their herds, that they could dominate the regional trade in horses, bison hides, and bison meat. Knowing that they could trade these goods for all the food they needed, the Comanche turned away from farming and foraging, in order to focus exclusively on horses and bison.
In their effort to monopolize the horse and bison trade and eliminate trade competition – especially for the food sources they relied on – the Comanches went to war against their main competitor on the southern plains: the Apache. The Apache had thrived on the plains as farmers, but once they were at war those farms became a military liability. Whereas the nomadic Comanche had no farms or villages to attack, the Apache had to defend the places where they were rooted and which they counted on for food and shelter. By sweeping into Apache villages in the dark of night, destroying their food storages, killing their livestock, burning their homes, and quickly disappearing into the night, the Comanche wore down their competitors on the plains. They combined this type of swift, guerilla style attack with massive frontal assaults that focused on killing as many Apache men and enslaving as many women and children as possible. Following a practice that was widespread amongst indigenous peoples in the region, some of these slaves were sold on the thriving New Mexican slave markets, while others were adopted or married into families and eventually became Comanches themselves. By 1740, the Apache had been forced out of the plains regions of modern day New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. Some fled further south onto the plains of Spanish Texas, while others moved to the Rio Grande area and the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border region.
After defeating the Apache, the Comanche emerged as the masters of the southern Great Plains… a land soon known as Comancheria. They quickly became the primary suppliers of horses and bison products in the region, and began building a massive trade network through which they were able to extend their reach far beyond their own territory. In the 1740s, when the French settlers of the Louisiana Territory sought horses and bison robes, the Comanches supplied them by using other indigenous groups as intermediaries between the two regions. In return, the Comanches received manufactured French products… including iron axes, metal tipped arrows and lances, and most importantly guns that were superior to anything made by the Spanish. The Comanche then used this superior firepower to raid Spanish-controlled New Mexico for horses, which they then sold to the French, who then gave them more weapons. By 1750, this cycle had created busy commercial routes connecting Comancheria and French Louisiana.
By 1750, the Comanche population had grown to fifteen thousand… and it was rapidly increasing. The main driver of their population boom was an abundant food supply, based on the Comanche’s ability to trade cherished horses and bison robes for plentiful and diverse foods. Their horse herds were probably upwards of thirty thousand, and that was rapidly expanding as well. By this time, Comanches had broken up into dozens of bands consisting of large extended families, so that their horses would have enough space to graze and find water. This rapid population growth, combined with the desire to acquire new markets, created pressures to expand into new territories. The Comanche bands to the south thus pushed into the vast plains of Spanish Texas, where a million wild horses roamed… and just as importantly, where isolated and vulnerable Spanish missions and presidios held abundant supplies of tamed horses ready for the taking. Because training wild horses was a high-skill task requiring weeks of labor, in their efforts to monopolize the region’s horse trade, Comanches sought out vulnerable and abundant supplies of domesticated horses that could immediately be traded. Over the following century, this would lead Comanches to constantly push into new raiding domains.
When the Comanche arrived on the southern plains of Spanish Texas, they encountered their old Apache competitors who they had forced south. Once again, they set themselves to forcing the Apache out of the region. This time, however, the Apaches were allied with the Spanish. The Comanche responded by forming an alliance of their own with the smaller indigenous groups of the region, who felt marginalized by the Apache/Spanish alliance. The Comanche-led alliance – which the Spanish referred to as the Norteños – attacked Spanish missions and presidios with indigenous armies that were up to two thousand warriors strong and armed with French guns. Reinforcement armies sent from Mexico City were defeated by well-armed Comanche warriors, who were by this time some of the best horseback riders on the continent. They were faster than the Spanish, could fight better on horseback than the Spanish, and used guerilla warfare tactics that the Spanish were unable to adjust to. The Comanche forced the Spanish to realize that they were not the strongest power in Texas. In an attempt to appease the Comanche, the Spanish severed their alliance with the Apache, who fled to the region of the current U.S.-Mexico border. Now completely forced out of the plains and alienated from the Spanish, the Apache initiated decades of systematic raids on the Spanish settlements of what is today northern Mexico.
In 1763, however, the Spanish saw their luck turn around… or so they thought. In that year, the French were forced to turn over the Louisiana Territory to Spain after suffering defeats in the Seven Years War. With the French gone, Spain assumed the Comanches would lose their access to guns, gunpowder, and ammunition. They assumed that Comanches would be forced to turn to the Spanish for European manufactured goods, and would be forced to cease their raiding in order to build better trade relations with Spanish territories in order to gain access to those goods. The Spanish further assumed that once the Comanches ceased their raids, that they would be able to strengthen their colonies in New Mexico, Texas, and Spanish Louisiana… thus hemming the Comanche in to the west, south, and east.
The Comanche, however, had other ideas. By this time, they had dominated the entire portion of the Great Plains that was suitable for breeding and raising horses. On the northern plains, the winters were too cold for baby horses to survive, which made breeding impossible. Even on the central plains just north of Comancheria, winter blizzards could sometimes freeze entire herds. The Comanches understood that their northern neighbors required an endless stream of new horses if they wished to survive economically and militarily… and Comanches set out to supply them.
By providing horses to the indigenous peoples of the northern plains who traded with British Canada, the Comanche also secured access to British markets… and British guns. Meanwhile, Spain found itself unable to control the borders of Spanish Louisiana, and French and British smugglers with an interest in weakening Spain pushed into the prime-trading region of the lower Mississippi. The Comanche were thus soon receiving mass amounts of guns from the north as well as the east – one record reveals seventeen horseloads of guns during a single trade deal. Whereas the Spanish had hoped to hem the Comanches in on three sides and cut off their access to guns in 1763, in 1767 a Spanish report warned that Comanches were better armed than Spanish troops.
By the 1770s, the Comanches were selling coveted British and French manufactured goods at trade fairs in New Mexico. Instead of the Comanches turning to the Spanish for manufactured goods, Spanish settlers now turned to the Comanche. However, such trade was not the Comanche’s top priority: that was providing horses to plains Indians, the French, and the British… and the New Mexicans had plenty of horses. Having freed themselves from any dependence on the Spanish markets of New Mexico, Comanches now sought to bend the Spanish colony to their own purposes. Over the course of the 1770s, Comanches launched over one hundred raids into New Mexico, stealing thousands of horses and trading them to the French, British, and the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.
Comanche raiding parties also sought to systematically weaken the Spanish colony by destroying ranches, farms, food storages, irrigation systems, and slaughtering entire herds of livestock. Their destruction was strategic: by depriving New Mexico of resources, food, and its ability to be productive, the Comanche made New Mexicans dependent on Comanche trade even as Comanches assaulted them. At the same time, they always made sure to leave ranches and farms with just enough resources to replenish their horse herds… so that they could be raided again in the future. Comanches also murdered hundreds of fighting-age New Mexican men during their raids and enslaved New Mexican women and children, some of whom were sold throughout the Comanche’s extensive trade network, and some of whom were used as a source of labor within Comancheria to tend the ever expanding herds of horses and tan the endless bison hides. Entire communities fled in fear. New Mexican settlements vanished from the map. By 1780, only the capital of Santa Fe remained untouched, but the city was overflowing with refugees. The Governor’s Palace had strings of dried Indian ears hanging above its portal to signify Spanish dominance over the region’s indigenous people, but indigenous peoples who had once feared the Spanish now gravitated towards Comanche alliances and markets and spoke more of the Comanche language than Spanish. Spanish officials had planned for the colony of New Mexico to ship surplus goods south into Mexico; instead those goods headed east into Comancheria. New Mexico had become a Spanish colony in name only.
Peace With the Spanish
By this time, the Comanche population had exploded to 40,000… more than the populations of Texas and New Mexico combined. Comancheria encompassed the vast southern plains. Comanches raided New Mexico to the west and Texas to the south at will, removing the resources and enslaving the inhabitants of those lands and channeling them to allies and trading partners to the north and the east. But in the late 1770s, they encountered major obstacles: the American Revolution cut off the supply of guns coming from the French and the British. Droughts forced former allies to migrate into Comancheria, leading to wars along once secure Comanche borders. And then in 1781, right at the height of their powers, a wave of smallpox swept through Comancheria. Half of the Comanche population was dead within two years. Comancheria descended into a realm of horror and sadness. In 1783, the greatly weakened Comanches made the pragmatic decision to open up peace talks with the Spanish. The Spanish, who were unaware at the extent of the epidemic, readily accepted: perhaps their colonies might survive after all.
The Comanche offer of peace came at the perfect time, for the Spanish had just decided to overhaul their relations with Native Americans. With the American revolutionaries victorious, the Spanish immediately foresaw the westward expansion of the United States… and they knew that if Native Americans were hostile to New Spain, that American settlers could ally with them, arm them, and push Spain out of the Americas. If, on the other hand, Spain built positive relations with Native Americans, their alliance could be the best way to prevent westward expansion. And the Comanches would be the most important allies to have when the time came.
The Spanish were serious enough about peace to back off their policies aimed at “civilizing” the Comanches and converting them to Catholicism. They even made efforts to build the new partnership around Comanche cultural norms. In Comanche culture, trade was viewed as a bond that signified mutual support, friendship, and even a sense of extended family. Trade that appeared to be based in greed or coercion had quickly destroyed former attempts at peace: for the Comanches, that included Spanish attempts to sell inferior products, inflate prices, or refuse to trade goods that they possessed in abundance. In their effort to maintain peace with the Comanches, Spanish officials went to great lengths to conform to these norms, and to engage in the generous giving of gifts that Comanches viewed as a sign of friendship. Realizing that Comanches believed that frequent personal and physical contact was critical for strong relations between peoples, Spanish officials journeyed into Comancheria, and welcomed Comanches into the very cities they had recently come close to destroying. There, the officials publicly embraced Comanche leaders for all to see.
The Comanches took the peace equally seriously: Comanches allowed the Spanish onto their plains to hunt for bison. A small group symbolically asked for baptism. And when a group of Comanches broke the peace by raiding into New Mexico, the famed Comanche chief Ecueracapa personally executed the leader of the raid. Ecueracapa later sent his own son to become the son of the New Mexican governor: the governor adopted him as his own and committed to instructing him in the language and ways of the Spanish. Trade flowed freely between Comancheria and Spanish Texas and New Mexico, and Comanches, Texans, and New Mexicans freely visited one another’s lands. It was a remarkable turnaround.
American Expansion; Spanish Collapse; and a Troubled Mexican Independence
American Westward expansion went into full swing in 1803, after President Thomas Jefferson facilitated the American purchase of the Louisiana Territory. Spain had been unable to prevent American settlers from pushing west into Spanish Louisiana, and had sold the territory back to France… which then quickly sold it to the United States. The purchase doubled the size of the young country. Whereas Spain had once hoped that Spanish Louisiana would act as a buffer that would prevent American expansion into the Southwest, they now hoped that a strong Comanche nation, allied with New Spain, would serve as that buffer. Comanches, the Spanish thought, would push back hard against encroaching American settlement.
The first Americans, however, did not come as settlers, but as traders… and the Comanches welcomed that trade. Already in the 1790s, American merchants had been evading Spanish officials to journey into Comancheria for the Comanche’s famous horses and bison hides. By that time, the Comanches had been organizing their society around horses for nearly a century, and had become the recognized masters of horse breeding and training. Just as so many peoples before them, the Americans gravitated towards the Comanche horse trade. Before the Louisiana Purchase had even been made, Americans had purchased thousands of horses from the Comanche. Now that the new American border went right up to the Comanche’s doorstep, trade boomed… especially because Congress, in an effort to break the Comanche away from its alliance with New Spain, sent emissaries to Comancheria to showcase America’s wealth and promise access to it.
The Spanish looked on in dismay as Comanches embraced American trade. By this time, Comanches had also repaired their relationships with the northern plains tribes they had been at war with. Comanche trade was once again orienting itself to the east and the north, leading the Spanish to fear a return to the days of Comanche conquest. And then, things got much worse for the Spanish. In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain, cutting off Spanish resources flowing to its possessions in the Americas. Generous trade with the Comanches became impossible. Then, in 1810, Mexico initiated its War of Independence. New Mexicans – many of whom spoke Comanche, had adopted aspects of Comanche culture, and were more a part of Comancheria than New Spain – embraced Comancheria when the war erupted, and were able to keep the peace with Comanches. Relations between the Comanches and Spanish Texas, however, quickly collapsed. Comanches responded by systematically raiding the Texan colony: using American guns, they removed much of the wealth of Texas and sold it to American merchants. They destroyed what they could not trade. Within the span of a few years, Texas had ceased to be a Spanish colony. It had become the realm of the Comanche.
Thus, when Mexico emerged as an independent nation in 1821, the entire northeastern section of the new country was Comanche-dominated. The Spanish had been unable to control the Comanches, and Mexico was even less able to do so: hundreds of thousands of Mexicans had died during the war for independence, and its economy was shattered. Mexico’s all-important silver mines – one of the great treasures of the Spanish Empire – had been destroyed. Part of Mexico’s postwar plan had been to develop the nation by taxing foreign trade, but high taxes simply led to smuggling and tax evasion. Mexico had expected to secure foreign investment in the wake of the war, but investors looked at Mexico and saw an economically risky environment. Investment didn’t come. In a state of desperation, Mexico took out enormous, high-interest loans from the U.S. and European powers: they quickly defaulted, leaving Mexico’s credit in shambles.
As Mexico’s economic turmoil descended into political chaos, officials were more concerned about internal rebellions closer to Mexico City – or even worse, the very real threat of reconquest by Spain – than they were about the Comanche. Even so, these officials viewed building peace with the Comanches as essential. Like the Spanish, the Mexicans saw American expansion into their territory on the horizon… and they viewed Texas and New Mexico as an important buffer zone between the United States and intrusion into the core of Mexico. In 1821, Mexican officials journeyed into Comancheria, where they spoke before a grand council attended by five thousand Comanche. After three days of deliberation, the council agreed to a truce with the Mexicans. The following year, a delegation of Comanche chiefs journeyed to Mexico City to attend the coronation of Agustín Iturbide as Emperor of Mexico, and to sign a formal peace treaty. The treaty promised generous trade with the Comanches. The Comanches – partly to show their strength to Mexico – promised to raise an army of twenty-seven thousand warriors to fight Spain if it sought to reconquer Mexico.
Political and economic turmoil in Mexico, however, meant that the new nation was unable to live up to the treaty it had signed with the Comanches. As trade with Mexico disintegrated, Comanches returned to raiding with a vengeance. Raiding parties began pushing south of the Rio Grande into present-day northern Mexico… and now, they took not only horses, but slaves. Comanches had been hit by new waves of smallpox in 1799, 1808, and 1816, and they turned to slave raiding to repopulate their dwindling numbers and keep up with the demand for horses and bison hides. Mexican men were usually considered too dangerous to enslave and were typically killed during raids unless they had specialized skills. Mexican boys, however, were put to work taking care of the Comanche’s immense horse herds and tanning the endless flow of bison hides. Mexican women were highly prized as slaves because they could give birth to Comanche children and help to regrow the Comanche population: light-skinned women were especially prized because they, and their children, were more resistant to the smallpox that continuously reduced the Comanche population. These slaves were gradually absorbed into the Comanche population, eventually being adopted into families, intermarrying with Comanches, and ceasing to be slaves… a process that fueled continuous slave raids to replace the slaves who had become Comanches. By the time that the U.S. invaded Mexico, most Comanche families had one or two Mexican slaves.
Trails of Tears; Rebellion in Texas; Slave Raiding in Mexico
While Comanches were turning northern Mexico into a vast slave-raiding domain, trade with the United States boomed. Comanches saw an almost inexhaustible demand in the U.S. for the horses and bison hides they offered, and the more that demand grew, the more of an incentive they had to enslave Mexicans to tend to their horses and tan their bison hides. Comanches also returned to using Texas as a vast horse-raiding territory. These ever-expanding raids led Mexico to make a fateful decision: desperate to populate Texas in order to drive the Comanches out of the region, in 1824 Mexico opened Texas to foreign immigration. Mexico even offered generous land grants and tax exemptions to encourage settlement… and loyalty. They would get one, but not the other.
Mexico had opened up floodgates it could not reverse. Americans began pouring into Texas, but they did not settle throughout the region as Mexico had hoped for. Rather, Americans settled in the east… away from the Comanche raiding territories of the southern plains, and close to the markets of Louisiana and New Orleans that they remained tied to. These Americans brought slaves with them, established cotton plantations, and quickly developed a flourishing cotton industry that was essentially an extension of the American South. Within ten years more than a dozen new urban centers had developed in American-settled eastern Texas. Rather than pushing Comanches out, however, these settlers provided yet another market for Comanches to sell horses to by systematically raiding the Mexican farms, ranches, and villages of western Texas and northern Mexico. Seeing that the plan to entice immigrants to settle Texas was not only a failure but a grave threat, Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, and banned any further immigration from the United States in 1830. The new laws simply propelled Americans in Texas towards a state of rebellion.
As rebellion simmered in Texas, another momentous event was unfolding: in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. The act led to the forced removal of Native Americans into designated “Indian Territory,” west of the Mississippi. The primary targets for removal were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, whom White Americans had deemed the “Five Civilized Tribes.” These tribes built permanent towns, practiced farming and raising livestock, and traded extensively with White settlers. They formed centralized governments and created written constitutions. Many adopted Christianity and intermarried with Whites. In their efforts to prove that Native Americans could be just as civilized as Whites – and thereby achieve security for their people – the Five Civilized Tribes also took up cotton cultivation, purchased Black slaves, and participated in the cotton trade that was at the center of the global economy.
By so fully assimilating, the Five Civilized Tribes discredited the primary excuse that White Americans used for stripping Native Americans of their land: the notion that Natives were incapable of “developing” the land and making the land “productive.” With this excuse for indigenous dispossession gone, all that was left was violent racism and greed. The Five Civilized Tribes lived on prime cotton-growing land in the Southeast, and the Cherokees had recently-discovered gold on their land. President Jackson agreed with White southerners that they, not indigenous peoples, deserved access to such wealth. The President saw only two solutions: the extermination or forced deportation of Native Americans.
Indian removal led to the infamous Trails of Tears… not one trail, but many, as numerous tribes were rounded up into unsanitary detention centers where they died in large numbers, were forced to march hundreds of miles through harsh winters during which they died of cold and starvation, or died during fierce battles to keep their territory. A full half of the Creeks died on their Trail of Tears, one third of the Cherokees did, and other tribes suffered similar losses. Indian Removal was nothing short of an ethnic cleansing campaign to ensure that the wealth of gold and cotton would remain the domain of Whites only. The Five Civilized Tribes – as well as many others – were pushed right up to the borders of Comancheria on their forced death marches… where they then all had to compete for resources the Comanche had long monopolized. Forced onto arid lands where they could not farm, these tribes pushed into Comancheria to hunt bison. The Comanche waged war on these desperate refugees for infringing on their territory. As the displaced tribes fought for their very survival as a people, the death toll climbed on all sides.
The warfare was unsustainable and disastrous for all. All sides desired peace and sought to find a way forward within their new circumstances. Within a few years, the wars shifted into alliances. The Comanches began hosting massive intertribal gatherings and trade fairs, calling the tribes together for communication and commerce. Many displaced tribes became intermediaries for the vast commercial operations of the Comanches. Like so many before them, the new arrivals turned to the Comanche for the horses they depended on for trade, travel, hunting, and war. They began adopting the Comanche language as the language of trade and intertribal diplomacy, and became deeply influenced by Comanche culture. As displaced tribes adapted to their new circumstances by building strong ties with Comanches, many of their members moved into Comancheria itself, intermarried with the Comanches, and even became Comanches themselves.
The tribes displaced by Indian Removal not only expanded the Comanche population and trade and alliance network, they also provided the Comanches with a massive slave market. The Five Civilized Tribes came from the Deep South, and arrived with 5000 Black slaves who they had brought with them on the Trail of Tears. They now sought slaves to help rebuild their nations in a new land… and to repopulate their decimated tribes, much as the Comanche had done in the wake of numerous smallpox epidemics. Comanches did not have a conception of race – anyone could become a Comanche as long as they adopted Comanche culture; but anyone could become a slave. Comanches had incorporated White renegades and refugees and escaped Black slaves into their tribe as well as Mexicans and numerous indigenous peoples… and, they also enslaved members of these groups. In response to the new market in slavery coming from their recently-made allies, Comanches were soon capturing Black runaway slaves and White settlers to trade to displaced tribes… who often kept the Black slaves, but ransomed back their White captives to White American communities, who were willing to pay high prices. Much more importantly, however, this new market led Comanches to escalate their slave raiding in northern Mexico.
Other factors pushed Comanches to raid deeper into northern Mexico as well: the development of widespread peace with surrounding tribes allowed large numbers of Comanche warriors who had previously focused on protecting Comancheria to instead make long raiding expeditions. Because bravery in battle and the generous distribution of goods taken during raids was an essential part of gaining access to prestige, sex, and marriage for young Comanche men, times of peace led to great eagerness amongst young men to prove themselves on raids. Finally, the massive indigenous trade fairs hosted by the Comanche attracted an increasing number of American merchants, leading Americans to build permanent trading posts along the eastern edges of Comancheria. The Americans had an unquenchable thirst for bison hides, and the trading posts allowed for massive amounts of hides to be stored. Endless streams of merchants came and went from the trading posts, taking bison hides to all corners of the United States. As Comanches supplied the endless flow of hides, more American weapons than ever before flowed into Comancheria. Although the Comanche had traded bison hides for generations, never before had they sought to meet the demands of such a massive market. Comanches once again deepened their slave raiding into northern Mexico: using American guns, they took Mexican slaves to tan the bison hides they sold to the Americans. Comanche profits and power soared. Bison herds started to wear thin.
Meanwhile, full-scale revolution in Texas had broken out. Calls for independence became widespread in Texas in 1835, shortly after General Santa Anna transformed the Mexican presidency into a dictatorship that was willing to use ruthless military force against all who resisted him. White American settlers saw this development as a grave threat to their land holdings and the practice of slavery on which they made their fortunes. Following White American skirmishes with Mexican soldiers, Santa Anna led his forces into Texas to crush the rebellion. After massacring the rebel force at the Alamo – despite their being on the verge of surrender – Santa Anna ordered the few prisoners of war to be hacked to death, and the hundreds of bodies piled up, doused in oil, and burned. Amongst the bodies was famed frontiersman Davy Crockett. The event was widely reported in the U.S. as a brutal episode in an unfolding race war between heroic White Texans and savage Mexicans. It set White American hearts aflame and facilitated anti-Mexican sentiments that in turn laid foundations for war.
Overly confident in his success, Santa Anna divided his forces as he pursued the fleeing rebel army. He then failed to establish a sufficient night watch, leading to his ambush and defeat. White American settlers claimed the independence of Texas, and although Mexico refused to recognize it, there was little they could do. By the time the U.S. invaded Mexico a decade later, there were 100,000 White Americans and 27,000 Black slaves living in Texas. The growing population discouraged Comanche raids within Texas, and gave Comanches an even further incentive to reorient their raids towards Mexico. White Texan officials, understanding that a weakened Mexico was good for an independent Texas, offered Comanches supplies and unrestricted travel through their lands on their way into Mexico.
The Destruction of Northern Mexico; Comanche Collapse
In the decade between Texan independence and the U.S.-Mexico War, Comanches unleashed raiding expeditions more massive than anything before in their history. Historian Brian DeLay documents a minimum of forty-four large raids into Mexico between 1834 and 1847: most had between two to four hundred warriors, but some were eight hundred to a thousand strong. These were highly organized expeditions that moved across multiple Mexican states. They proceeded according to carefully laid plans, moving from one target to the next, hitting ranches, haciendas, mining communities, and towns. Scouts and spies rode ahead to ensure effective attacks. Raiding parties not only took slaves and horses, but – as had long been their practice – murdered fighting-age men, destroyed food supplies, burned homes, and killed any livestock they themselves did not use for food during the course of the raid. To avoid being tracked, raiders scattered in many directions after their attacks, reconvening at planned locations. Each warrior often rode with three or four horses that were specially bred for war: such horses possessed superior speed and endurance and were not for sale, allowing Comanches to keep a military edge. When warriors were pursued they would ride a horse to exhaustion, abandon it, and switch to a fresh horse. Comanches nearly always outran their pursuers. These raiders removed a full million horses from Mexico in the years leading up to the U.S. invasion.
Northern Mexicans, of course, were not passive in the face of Comanche onslaught. They did what they could to develop local militias, and wealthy hacienda owners fortified their properties and hired small private armies. What they needed, however, was assistance from Mexico City in rebuilding the old Spanish presidio system and manning the frontier fortresses with fresh troops. Such support did not come: the federal government decided to use its meager resources to fight rebellions closer to the nation’s capital rather than protect its periphery. Because the farms, ranches, and towns of northern Mexico were isolated and sparsely populated, they were sitting ducks for expert guerrilla warriors like the Comanches. Although Mexican militia did sometimes succeed at ambushing and killing large numbers of Comanche, this only led Comanches to return and visit extreme retaliation. Comanche violence led to a mass exodus of farmers, ranchers, and rural Mexicans away from the countryside and into safer urban areas, leaving vast portions of northern Mexico unpopulated, unproductive, and open to assaults leading deeper into Mexico.
With Mexico City failing to assist its northern states and local militias woefully unable to fight the Comanche, states experimented with other solutions. In the late 1830s, the states of Durango, Sonora, and Chihuahua passed bills offering bounties for Indian scalps. Soon, scalp-hunting wars raged across northern Mexico, with squads of mercenaries typically ambushing Apaches… who had raided across northern Mexico for decades after being pushed out of the plains by the Comanche. Because Apaches lived in the north Mexican region, they were easier targets than the Comanche, who only travelled into Mexico in large raiding parties before departing again to Comancheria. Mercenaries almost never took Comanche scalps. Indeed, Comanches, seeing an opportunity to make a profit by attacking their old Apache enemies, joined the scalping wars and sold many Apache scalps themselves. The states of Chihuahua and Coahuila then decided to offer tribute to the Comanche – offering their goods freely in exchange for a cessation of raids. Paying tribute, however, continued to deprive those states of resources and simply pushed Comanche raiding parties into other states… especially those further south.
By the late 1830s, northern Mexicans were boiling with anger at their government’s inability and unwillingness to protect them. Starting in 1837, a wave of rebellions rippled across Mexico’s northern states: most wanted to withhold their taxes to the Mexican government so they could develop their own military forces and protect against raiding parties. Some rebels talked of secession. Whereas Mexico City had been unwilling to send military reinforcements to help push back the Comanche, they quickly sent the Mexican Army to defeat the uprisings. Mexicans were soon slaughtering each other instead of fighting the Comanche. By 1840, northern Mexico’s fighting forces had been decimated, leaving the region even more open to Comanche assault. It was at this moment, in the early 1840s, that Comanche war parties pushed all the way into states in central Mexico, including southern Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Jalisco. Comanche war trails now stretched one thousand miles long… through Mexico’s northern deserts and up into Central Mexico’s high mountains and jungles. Comanches raided cities a mere 135 miles from Mexico City itself.
The states Comanches now pushed into were not only closer to Mexico City, they were wealthier than Mexico’s impoverished north. When they cried out for support, the Mexican government responded as it never had to the poorer northern states. But it was too late. In 1845 the United States offered statehood to Texas, and soon afterwards launched a predatory war on Mexico that was about pure imperial land acquisition. Military and political officials were well aware of the devastation Comanches had unleashed in northern Mexico, and they sought to take advantage of it. When the U.S. Army marched across the Rio Grande, they encountered a Mexican cavalry riding weak, sickly horses… the only ones Comanches had left them. The cavalry simply withdrew, and the Americans proceeded deeper into Mexico without a fight.
To return to the quote from historian Pekka Hämäläinen with which this story began: “When U.S. troops pushed deeper into northern Mexico in the summer and fall of 1846, they entered the shatterbelt of Native American power. The U.S. Army marched south on abandoned roads littered with corpses, moving through a ghost landscape of ruined villages, decaying fields, horseless corrals, and deserted cattle herds . . . It was as if northern Mexico had already been vanquished when the U.S. invasion got underway.” Northern Mexicans felt little loyalty to Mexico City by the time the Americans arrived, and many hoped that the Americans would protect them against the Comanches given that their own country would not. Many cities in northern Mexico put up no fight at all: in fact, Mexican elites invited American military officials to dine with them, and residents sold the U.S. Army supplies and worked for them as guides. American violence soon changed this initial reception, but during the war there were important battles that clearly would have been won if Mexican forces had been just a little stronger. Northerners blamed Mexico’s defeat on the failure of Mexico City to protect the nation’s frontiers from Comanche onslaught.
First in Texas, and then in Mexico, Americans arrived – in the words of Hämäläinen – “to seize territories that had already been subjugated and weakened by Comanches.” The “stunning success of American imperialism in the Southwest can be understood only if placed in the context of the indigenous imperialism that preceded it.” The Comanche had unintentionally facilitated American Westward expansion and conquest, but it was not westward expansion that conquered the Comanche. During the same year that Texas joined the United States, a two-decade long drought hit Comancheria. Springs and creeks that were essential for life dried up. The luscious grasses that supported immense horse and bison herds turned to a crisp. Bison herds that had already been overhunted by Comanches and their indigenous allies for American markets collapsed into starvation; those bison that didn’t die migrated to the northern plains where there was more moisture. Comanche horses also starved, and Comanches began eating their herds to survive. Comanches had endured many short droughts, but nothing like this. In an astoundingly short time, Comanches lost their monopoly over the horse trade that had sustained their power for more than a century They lost their ability to provide bison furs to the vast American market. The bustling American trading posts on the borders of Comancheria closed down and moved elsewhere. Trade with indigenous peoples to the north dried up. Famine ravaged the Comanches during the 1850s. By the time the next wave of smallpox hit them in 1862, Comanches had already lost half their population. American westward expansion halted during the Civil War years. By the time it began again in the late 1860s, there were only 5000 Comanche survivors, against whom the U.S. waged total war.
Excluding the Downtrodden: European Border Crossers, and the Immigration Act of 1882
The year was 1882. The land borders of the United States had never been policed, but this was about to change. That year saw the passage of the federal government’s first comprehensive Immigration Act, and marked the beginning of an over forty-year effort by the federal government to create a framework for who should, and should not, be allowed into the country. The Immigration Act of 1882 began this process by forbidding the immigration of “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself.” Although the language of “any person unable to take care” of themselves was vague and open to interpretation, it was understood to refer to impoverished people, or “paupers.” What was less clear was whether it included people with chronic illnesses, or even the elderly. Further immigration acts would be more specific.
The point of these first restrictions was to prevent the immigration of anyone who might become a “public charge,” meaning anyone who was judged incapable of providing for themselves, and would instead rely on community charity, government assistance… or institutionalization in prisons or asylums. The context of America’s first Immigration Act was an economic depression that rocked the country from 1872 to 1878, followed by the mass displacement of millions of Europeans starting in the early 1880s, caused by the second industrial revolution. Economic anxieties combined with the sheer volume of new immigrants created political pressures to be selective in who was let into the U.S., and who was not. Ironically, the Immigration Act of 1882, targeting impoverished people and people with mental and physical disabilities, was passed just a few years before the Statue of Liberty was erected… and just one year before poet Emma Lazarus composed these familiar words: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses.”
Many immigrants immediately wondered if the Immigration Act would apply to them or the family members they travelled with. Who exactly would immigration officials judge to be an “idiot” or a “lunatic”? If younger immigrants were travelling with older parents, would those parents be deemed a “person unable to take care of himself or herself” because of their age? If immigrants arrived with few possessions, or were sick and disheveled after an arduous overseas journey, would they be judged as sickly and impoverished and potentially turned around?
Because of these fears, many European immigrants – mostly English and Irish at the time – began avoiding America’s seaports, and instead sailing for ports in southern Canada. From there, they simply crossed the border into Maine, Vermont or New York. Because the vast majority of immigrants came from overseas and landed in America’s seaports at the time, the language of the Immigration Act of 1882 referred to people who were “not a citizen of the United States who shall come by steam or sail vessel.” What this meant was that, technically and legally, immigrants who would have been excluded at America’s seaports could in fact cross legally over America’s land borders… for they were not entering the U.S. “by steam or sail vessel.” Furthermore, the Immigration Act of 1882 only called for the deportation of people with criminal records back to where they came from. All other excluded immigrants were allowed to sail to wherever they wished as long as it wasn’t the U.S. This led many immigrants who were turned away at America’s seaports to simply sail to Canada, and then cross into the United States.
Within a matter of months, articles were being published about European immigrants taking advantage of this loophole. For example, 11 months after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1882, the New York Times reported that 28 “helpless and starving” recent immigrants from Ireland had been found in the streets of Buffalo, New York, having just crossed from Canada. These immigrants, according to the article, were “destitute, having neither money nor friends, and . . . too feeble, by reason of age or infirmity, to support themselves.” These were exactly the sort of immigrants that America’s first comprehensive Immigration Act had sought to exclude.
Pressure mounted throughout the 1880s to revise the Immigration Act of 1882, so that it included America’s land borders. The Immigration Act of 1891 did exactly this: not only did it forbid excluded immigrants from crossing America’s land borders, it also called for the deportation of all excludable immigrants when they arrived at America’s seaports. This meant that not only criminals would be shipped back to the ports from which they came, but that all excluded immigrants would, depriving them of the opportunity to book passages north to Canada.
The Immigration Act of 1891 also added new categories of excludable immigrants, including “those convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude,” “people with loathsome or contagious diseases,” and polygamists. It also banned people “likely” to become impoverished, rather than just those who already were. This especially impacted women who were travelling alone, given the common assumption that women relied on men for financial support. In reality, immigration officials hardly had the resources to seriously enforce additional restrictions and the inspections they required. European immigrants, however, didn’t know that, and they often decided to play it safe. These further exclusions predictably convinced more Europeans that they should enter the U.S. by secretly crossing the Canadian border, despite the fact that the Immigration Act of 1891 had closed the previous loophole regarding “steam or sail” vessels, and made such crossings illegal.
With that loophole closed, immigration officials were suddenly tasked with policing America’s land borders. Understanding that this would be extremely expensive and enormously difficult, immigration officials at first looked for other alternatives. They reached out to Canadian steamship lines and negotiated a deal in which U.S. immigration authorities would inspect immigrants departing at Canadian ports, but who were bound for the U.S. The plan was a spectacular failure: departing immigrants simply had to state that their destination was Canada, and there was nothing that U.S. authorities could do. Immigration officials also made deals with Canadian railroads to inspect immigrants headed into the U.S., but immigrants easily avoided such inspections: they simply had to purchase round-trip tickets and claim they were merely visiting; have a non-immigrant purchase a ticket for them; or just take a train to a border town and walk over somewhere out of sight.
By 1898, immigration officials conceded that they had failed to prevent restricted European immigrants from entering the U.S. through Canada’s ports and railways. It was only at that point that they began calling for immigration inspection points directly along the Canadian border. By 1901, those border inspection points were in place. A veteran inspector named Robert Watchorn was charged with coordinating and training inspectors; by the summer of 1902 he reported that “not a train or boat or any railroad or regularly charted boat route enters the United States in this jurisdiction without being inspected.” Not a day passed, he wrote, “without one or more alien immigrants being removed from a train or boat and returned to Canada, or deported to Europe.” During that year, 4,985 European immigrants were inspected along the Canadian border, and 2,028 were turned around. In the words of historian Patrick Ettinger, “The era of direct border enforcement had begun.”
During these same years, landing at Canadian ports also became more difficult: between 1900 and 1902, Canada passed its own restrictive immigration bills, which mirrored those of the U.S. For restricted European immigrants, sailing to Canadian ports was thus no longer an easy option: this led them to turn towards Mexico. Border crossings through Mexico would soon lead to border policing along the southern border as well. And with both land borders policed, restricted immigrants would soon become more sophisticated and ingenious in their methods of crossing. Border policing would in turn evolve to meet that immigrant ingenuity.
Europeans, however, were not the first excluded immigrants seeking to cross into the U.S. via Canada, or Mexico. That would be the Chinese.
America’s First Undocumented Immigrants: Chinese Women, Sex Workers, and The Page Act of 1875
Although the Immigration Act of 1882 was the federal government’s first comprehensive immigration law – laying out broad categories for exclusion which applied to people of all races and nationalities – the government had passed earlier immigration laws targeting a specific ethnic group: the Chinese.
Although states had long passed their own immigration legislation, the very first federal immigration law in U.S. history – meaning the first that could have impacted the borders of the country as a whole, and how they were policed and who could cross them – was the Page Act of 1875. This act primarily aimed to exclude cheap Chinese labor and Chinese sex workers. White Americans had pushed to exclude Chinese immigrants since the early days of the Gold Rush, demonizing them as an inferior race and arguing that they created unfair competition. Although Chinese immigrants faced mob violence and laws were passed banning them from gold mining, they continued to arrive as a series of wars, rebellions, and natural disasters rocked their homeland. Desperate communities sent their young men abroad despite the prejudices they would face, hoping that they could send money home. Excluded from most forms of work, Chinese men took on the hardest, most low-paying and backbreaking forms of labor – including draining the swamps, digging the ditches, and building the irrigation channels and levees that allowed California to develop some of the richest farmland in the nation. In addition to laying the foundation for a multi billion-dollar agricultural industry, Chinese laborers built the railroads of the American West, which turned the region into an economic powerhouse.
The Page Act was aimed at excluding this “unfair labor competition.” It failed… partly because the act only forbid the importation of Chinese workers against their will. This represented a belief in Congress that many Chinese workers were part of an Asian slave trade, which had indeed been developed by Europeans after the abolition of the African slave trade in their empires. Although an Asian slave trade was taking place just below America’s borders in Cuba and the Caribbean Sea – something that had generated enormous media coverage during the buildup to the Civil War – the Chinese who ventured to America were not a part of it. Because they came voluntarily, the Page Act did not exclude them.
The exclusion of Chinese sex workers had a more painful impact… for following the Page Act, Chinese women travelling to the U.S. were assumed to be sex workers unless they could prove otherwise. This was often impossible, given that immigration officers had anti-Chinese sentiments and treated wedding certificates, photos, and other evidence of family ties as fraudulent. Wives and daughters who had risked everything to make an excruciating journey overseas were thus often shipped right back to China. The Page Act was portrayed as a bill cracking down on prostitution, which was indeed widespread in the almost entirely male Chinese immigrant community. However, California was a heavily male state populated by miners and sailors, and prostitution was widespread in general. By specifically targeting Asian sex workers for exclusion, and then using that as a means to exclude Asian women, the Page Act aimed, in part, to prevent the birth of Chinese babies on American soil, who could potentially claim citizenship rights.
Because the Page Act failed to exclude Chinese workers (due to the fact that they came voluntarily), it did not create an incentive for them to avoid America’s ports and to cross America’s land borders as undocumented immigrants. Although it did create such an incentive for Chinese sex workers and for Chinese women, there are no records of such undocumented crossings. Chinese sex workers – and the women who were accused of sex work – were, however, America’s first excluded immigrants, and those who found ways into the country would have been the first undocumented immigrants. If any of these women crossed into the U.S. over the Canadian or Mexican borders, however, their crossings remain invisible to history. The Page Act thus did not contribute to the history of border crossing and border policing.
America’s First Undocumented Border Crossers: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
On May 6, 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. By targeting all Chinese workers for exclusion – whether they engaged in skilled or unskilled labor – it succeeded where the Page Act had failed. The Chinese Exclusion Act continued to allow Chinese merchants, diplomats, students, teachers, and travellers to visit the United States. It also allowed Chinese who were residents before 1882 to remain, and to leave the United States and return… as long as they had certificates showing proof of residence.
Because there were so many exceptions to Chinese exclusion, the act created a market for forged documents – falsified papers proving residency, student status, etc. Many Chinese residents who were barred from reentry also successfully appealed their cases in court. Because most Chinese who would have been excluded either turned to the law or sought forged documentation, the Chinese Exclusion Act – like the Page Act – did not create the pressure and the incentive for large numbers of Chinese workers to avoid America’s ports and to instead cross the land borders. There was a major exception, however: Canada had been using Chinese labor as well, and Chinese railroad workers who were residents of the U.S. had travelled to Canada to help build the railroads there. Because they had left the U.S. before the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, they did not carry official certification of residency with them, and therefore could not legally return to their own homes. Although plenty of other Chinese workers in Canada also had a strong incentive to illegally cross the border into the U.S. to pursue work, that incentive would have been especially strong for literal U.S. residents who simply didn’t have their papers. Thus, whereas Chinese women and sex workers were the first undocumented immigrants to enter through America’s ports, it is likely that Chinese workers in Canada – and especially those simply attempting to return home – were America’s first undocumented immigrants to cross over America’s land borders.
That said, the Immigration Act of 1882 was pushing excluded European immigrants over the Canadian border from the east at precisely the same time. The Immigration Act of 1882 was passed on August 3, a mere three months after the Chinese Exclusion Act. Although passed three months later, because Europeans were being immediately turned around at America’s ports, they quickly sailed to Canada. This wasn’t the case with the Chinese, who sought either fraudulent documentation or to argue their cases in court as their means of entry. This fact, combined with the far greater immigration numbers of Europeans, means that the Immigration Act of 1882 pushed more Europeans across the border than the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 pushed Chinese.
The European border crossers, however, were not technically illegal: once again, the Immigration Act had assumed that immigrants would arrive at America’s seaports and thus only forbid their entry through those seaports. They would not technically be crossing illegally until the Immigration Act’s revision in 1891. Another major difference between the two groups of border crossers was race: even after 1891, the Whiteness of undocumented European immigrants allowed them to cross borders and live in American society with far less suspicion. Anyone who appeared to be Asian, on the other hand, was immediately suspected of crossing into the country, or being in the country, illegally. Undocumented Chinese immigrants had to take far more precautions when crossing the border. They also had to take on far greater expenses… and risks.
Undocumented Border Crossings Increase: The Scott Act of 1888
In 1888, Chinese exclusion was further strengthened by the Scott Act, which forbid Chinese workers in the United States from returning if they left… even if they had acquired official certificates of residency from immigration officials. 24,443 Chinese residents had travelled abroad after acquiring these documents at the time of the Scott Act’s passage. The sudden voiding of these official certificates meant they could not return home; it also meant that forgeries which might have previously been accepted as proof of residency would no longer be effective forms of entry. This predictably led to a spike in undocumented Chinese migration… and because immigrating through the ports was now more difficult, much of that migration began to flow over America’s land borders for the first time.
Because Chinese could still enter through Canadian ports, and because Chinese communities existed on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, entering through Canada made the most sense to many Chinese. After arriving in Canada, they found supportive Chinese communities who knew the geography of the borderlands well, and who could guide them to Chinese communities on the American side. Indigenous peoples were also sympathetic, and sometimes served as guides. Indeed, just as Chinese border crossers were guided into Chinese communities, they were also guided onto Native American reservations… where Chinese had settled, and on a few occasions even married into indigenous tribes.
Although some Chinese crossed the border by trekking through the heavily wooded and unpopulated Cascade Mountains in small groups, most chose to venture through the hundreds of small channels and islands of Puget Sound. Puget Sound’s geography led it to be known as a “smuggler’s paradise,” through which all manner of illicit goods – and especially opium – were brought into the U.S. Men in the business of smuggling saw an opportunity to make money off the Chinese Exclusion Act, and would have seen even more of an opportunity in the Scott Act. Crossing the border with them was dangerous, however. Smugglers along the Canadian border were primarily White American or Canadian men who brought Chinese across the border for profit, not some sense of solidarity. To avoid being caught in an illegal act, they were known to kill or throw their “human cargo” overboard. Undocumented immigration was extremely dangerous from its very beginning.
Although these crossings had been occurring since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it was only after the Scott Act of 1888 that they received substantial congressional attention. Border officials were soon reporting regularly on the smuggling of undocumented Chinese immigrants across the Canadian border. In 1890, one border official testifying before a congressional committee estimated that an average of 2500 undocumented Chinese were crossing the Canadian border annually. This was a miniscule number compared to the 455,302 immigrants who entered the country legally that year, but anti-Chinese racism made even small numbers loom large.
Although border officials familiarized themselves with the workings of smuggling operations, they felt that the odds were stacked against them. The length of the border and the difficulty of its geography made it impossible to adequately police. The fact that Chinese border crossers could simply blend into Chinese communities soon after their crossings made their capture almost impossible unless they were apprehended immediately. And the fact that the Chinese exclusion laws ordered that Chinese be deported to the “country from whence they came” meant that all that border officials could do if they captured Chinese crossing from Canada was send them back to Canada… where they could easily cross again. This was another incentive for Chinese to avoid entering through American ports, where being shipped back to the “country from whence they came” meant returning to China. In the congressional hearings of 1890, border officials urged that the language of the law be changed to allow for deportations to China, even if undocumented Chinese were crossing from Canada or Mexico. During this year, the House and the Senate also urged the President to negotiate with Mexico and Canada to pass their own Chinese exclusion laws, so that Chinese couldn’t simply enter through the ports of those nations and then cross into the U.S.
Although neither Mexico nor Canada agreed to exclude Chinese immigrants, in 1885, Canada had already imposed a $50 fee on Chinese seeking residency. This infuriated many anti-Chinese Americans, who felt that Canada was making money off of undocumented Chinese immigration into the U.S., given that many of the Chinese who paid the $50 immediately crossed the border. However, when Canada increased that fee to $100 in 1901 – roughly $3000 in today’s money – the cost became prohibitive. The smuggling rings that dealt in undocumented Chinese immigration organized for Chinese to land in Canadian ports, but once the fee increased, it began to make financial sense to find an alternative route. This became even more true in 1903, when Canada increased the fee to $500.
Thus by 1901, Chinese were excluded from American ports by law and from Canadian ports by exorbitant fees. Their alternative route was clear… as it had been for the Europeans who were excluded from entering Canadian ports by immigration laws passed between 1900 and 1902. Just as those Europeans had begun sailing for Mexican ports and had then crossed the Mexican border into the U.S., so too would the Chinese… at almost precisely the same time.
Away from the Canadian Border, and Towards the Mexican: A New Century Begins
Given growing anti-Chinese sentiment in Canada, smuggling rings had long predicted that it would become more difficult to smuggle Chinese immigrants across the Canadian border and into the United States. Throughout the 1890s, they had experimented with landing Chinese in small fishing villages along the coast of Mexico, and then guiding the migrants across the border. At around the same time, Chinese were arriving on the eastern Coast of Mexico from Cuba, where 142,000 Chinese had recently been enslaved… a full half of whom had been worked to death. When slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886, Mexico began recruiting Chinese labor from the island to help build Mexican railroads. When their work was completed in Mexico, many of these Chinese pursued work across the U.S.-Mexico border. Thus, although large numbers of undocumented Chinese immigrants only began crossing over the U.S.-Mexico border once crossing through Canada became too costly in 1901, they were hardly the first Chinese to take that route.
Chinese migration to Mexico escalated for another reason at this time. Mexican President Porfirio Diaz had dreams of industrializing his nation, and he had seen that both Canada and the U.S. had accomplished industrialization using the labor of immigrants. Although U.S. officials pushed for Mexico to pass its own Chinese exclusion laws, Diaz believed that Chinese immigrants could help build Mexico’s railroads, just as they had done in the U.S. and in Canada. President Diaz thus signed a treaty with China in 1899, creating direct steamship service between the two countries for the first time in order to bring Chinese labor into Mexico.
As Chinese workers flowed into Mexico, many of them found employment working in mines and building railroads in the sparsely populated U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Chinese communities quickly developed in Mexican border cities. Such communities already existed on the American side of the border, where Chinese labor had also been used in mines and on railroads. By the time that Chinese immigrant smuggling rings began turning away from Canada in 1901, Chinese communities already existed on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. These communities facilitated the crossings of undocumented Chinese immigrants, just as they had in Canada.
Thus, a number of factors led the U.S.-Mexico border to emerge as a major space of undocumented border crossing during the opening years of the twentieth century: Mexico began recruiting Chinese labor, much of which soon crossed into the United States. New Canadian laws pushed both Chinese and European immigrants towards Mexico. By 1900, these Europeans were arriving not only from the Northwest, but from Southern and Eastern Europe as well… “new” European immigrants who were racially stigmatized in the U.S. Finally, a rising anti-Japanese movement in the United States began pushing Japanese immigrants towards the Mexican border, and immigrants from current-day Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey were also joining the immigrant flow, fleeing persecution and war. These diverse immigrants all turned to the Mexican border for the same reasons: they all feared exclusion due to racial prejudice, or because of the poverty and physical ailments their home conditions had inflicted upon them. Immigrants from around the world feared exclusion precisely because they were the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
With More Border Policing Comes… More Sophisticated Smuggling: The Immigration Act of 1903
The opening years of the twentieth century were also the years in which the U.S.-Mexico border emerged as a major space of border policing. During congressional debates in 1902, immigration officials assured Congress that America’s land borders could be effectively controlled… as long as they were given enough manpower. Their testimonies convinced Congress to increase funding for enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. When the Immigration Act of 1903 was passed, it not only added new categories of excluded immigrants – anarchists, epileptics, prostitutes, and anyone associated with the business of prostitution – it also doubled the tax that immigrants paid to enter the country, which effectively doubled the funding for the Bureau of Immigration.
This increased funding was used to expand the number of official entry points along the U.S.-Mexico border – accompanied by new inspection stations and immigration inspectors – from a mere three before the Immigration Act of 1903 to twenty-one by 1909. The funding was also used to create a mounted unit of roughly seventy-five border officers to patrol the stretches between these official entry points on horseback. In the words of historian Patrick Ettinger, “the United States had begun drafting the outlines of a resource-intensive border enforcement policy,” which would lead to the founding on the Border Patrol two decades later. This increased border enforcement escalated the dynamic between border enforcement and border smuggling, in which smuggling became more sophisticated as policing became more sophisticated; and policing became more sophisticated as smuggling became more sophisticated.
Much of that smuggling originated in immigrant home countries, where organizations developed to guide potentially excluded countrymen and women towards safer lands. Once in Mexico, immigrants from around the world were guided to hotels and saloons where they would receive coaching on how to cross the border into the United States. Chinese smuggling rings dominated this scene: no surprise, given their two decades of experience with exclusion and undocumented entry by this time. Chinese communities on both sides of the border were often the backbone of local undocumented immigrant smuggling efforts, regardless of whether those being smuggled were Chinese, Japanese, European, or Middle Eastern.
By this time, border officials had already developed the strategy of focusing on the main entry points between Mexico and the United States, in order to push undocumented border crossers away from safer routes and towards harsh desert terrain. In the words of one federal official, the goal was to “at least make attempts to cross the border dangerous,” so that fewer immigrants would try to cross. One outcome of this policy was that people desperate to build a life in a safer land began dying in the desert. Another was that as the journey became more dangerous, more immigrants decided that they needed professional smugglers. These smugglers sought to avoid dangerous routes themselves, and instead sought ways to cross into the U.S. within just a few miles of border cities and their inspection points… or even right through them. By studying the practices and routines of the inspection points, border officers, and mounted patrol units, they developed ingenious methods of undocumented entry.
At this time, the vast majority of people crossing the border were Mexicans, who had always crossed freely to participate in work, trade, entertainment, and to visit friends and family. At busy points of entry, immigration inspectors couldn’t possibly inspect everyone: they would only stop someone if their appearance or behavior caused the inspector to suspect them of being an excludable immigrant. One of the major signs that someone might be an immigrant in the first place was that they were carrying luggage, but there was a simple way around this problem: because Mexicans crossed the border freely, smugglers simply hired local Mexicans to carry an immigrants luggage across the border for them. Another obvious sign that someone was from a foreign land was if they wore traditional clothing or hairstyles. These had to be abandoned if immigrants wished to blend in.
The ultimate way to blend in, however, was to appear Mexican. Passing as Mexican was a major strategy used by brown-skinned immigrants from around the world. Undocumented border crossers from Greece to the Middle East and especially China simply dressed as Mexican workers to move across the border. In order to blend in, these immigrants would often walk across with a group of local Mexicans who smugglers worked with. These Mexicans would talk to the immigrant as they walked, and the immigrant might nod or laugh in order to make it appear as if they understood Spanish. Smugglers sometimes took such acts farther by taking advantage of the racial stereotypes of border inspectors, such as the stereotype of the “drunken Mexican.” For example, one tactic to help an undocumented immigrant blend in was to teach them a Mexican song, and then have them stumble across the border with a group of Mexicans who were singing and acting drunk… and who would appear to border inspectors to simply be out for a good time. Complicating matters even further for border officers was the fact that there were a large number of actual Chinese Mexicans living in the borderlands by this time – Chinese who had settled in Mexico, married into Mexican families, spoke fluent Spanish, and dressed in Mexican clothing. Undocumented Chinese immigrants, if caught, could simply claim to be a member of this group… as long as they dressed the part, learned some Spanish, and developed a convincing story of their life in Mexico. Such strategies of racial passing and racial blurring would have been impossible in predominantly-White Canada.
Besides the strategy of racial passing, it was important for all immigrants seeking to cross the border – regardless the color of their skin – not to appear sickly or impoverished. Doctors specializing in how to make people appear healthy set up shop in border towns, and smugglers would sometimes provide immigrants with nice clothing and even “show money,” so that if they were stopped they would appear healthy and financially stable. The clothing and the money were, of course, returned shortly after crossing the border. Besides such appearances, bribery and corruption was widespread along the border, with everyone from train conductors to lawyers and even border inspectors and chiefs of police getting paid by smuggling rings to help undocumented immigrants cross the border. Such corruption was especially common in small border towns, where smuggling was an important and socially accepted part of the economy, and where everyone was connected and often willing to do one another favors. One final method of crossing right under the noses of border inspectors was to tunnel in: when old buildings in border towns were demolished, long tunnels leading under the border were sometimes discovered.
Border enforcement evolved to meet all of these different smuggling strategies… at least somewhat. Because it was easy for locals to do other locals favors in small border towns, it was later decided that border police and border inspectors should be hired from outside of the region in order to crack down on corruption. In order to discover the methods of immigrant smugglers, officers sometimes went undercover, posing as immigrants themselves. In an effort to defeat the “racial passing” technique, border inspectors began inspecting an increasing amount of Mexicans. One of the most effective forms of border enforcement, however, was the cultivation of informants: for the right price or under the right pressure, informants could offer valuable information on when and where undocumented immigrants would be crossing and who was helping them. Finally, in more remote areas, expert trackers were hired by the mounted patrol unit. In the on-going interplay between smuggling and policing, smugglers who chose those more dangerous routes through remote regions learned to travel over rockier terrain, where the signs of their passage were less visible.
Despite these early attempts at policing, excluded immigrants continued to find their way across the U.S.-Mexico border. Only the violence of the Mexican Revolution, followed by the total closure to European immigration during the First World War, would put an end to these first waves of undocumented border crossings. Those cataclysmic events would also create new waves of immigrants… and new forms of border crossing, and policing.
In the dark morning hours of March 9, 1916, the Mexican Revolutionary leader Pancho Villa rode his troops across the border into New Mexico. In revenge for President Wilson supporting Villa’s enemies in the Revolution, they burned portions of the city of Columbus to the ground. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Mexicans had already fled into the United States since the start of the Revolution in 1910 – a million would by the Revolution’s end – the attack on Columbus led to the first positioning of U.S. troops along the border.
The attack also led President Wilson to order military forces into Mexico itself, to hunt down Pancho Villa. These forces included a regiment of Black troops… the so-called Buffalo Soldiers stationed in the Southwest. Some of these Black troops justified their involvement by stressing how revolutionary nationalism in Mexico had caused Mexicans to turn on most foreigners, including the Black Americans who had fled to Mexico first to escape slavery, and at that time, Jim Crow. Indeed, Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism focused on glorifying Mexico’s indigenous heritage, but often did so in such a way that it portrayed blackness itself as something foreign that didn’t belong in Mexico. The American forces were also helped by Chinese immigrants in Mexico… communities that had either fled America’s Chinese Exclusion Acts and anti-Chinese violence, or who had been invited into Mexico directly from China to boost Mexico’s labor force. These Chinese communities suffered greatly during the Mexican Revolution: in one case, a nationalistic mob attacked a Mexican Chinatown and slaughtered 300 Chinese in a single day. More anti-Chinese murders took place during the Mexican Revolution than in the entire twentieth century United States. Chinese in Mexico thus had every reason to work as spies and saboteurs for the invading American forces… or the Punitive Expedition, as it came to be called.
Already, there are multiple stories here: the story of Chinese communities in Mexico; of Black Americans and of blackness in Mexico… and of Pancho Villa, who himself had Black ancestry and developed ties with Black American leaders even as he fiercely embraced expelling all Americans from Mexico, regardless of their race or ethnicity. But these are stories for some other time. This short story is about the little-known Japanese-Mexicans who became involved in the Punitive Expedition.
First it should be said that the Japanese in Mexico were a unique group that did not suffer from the same anti-foreigner sentiment as did other groups, due to the fact that Mexico looked at Japan as a potential foreign ally. Whereas China at the time had essentially been chopped up and divided amongst major European and American powers and was in a state of internal chaos, Japan had arisen as the single, powerful example on the global stage of a non-White nation holding its own in a world dominated by White supremacist notions of colonialism and control. Japan had not only not been colonized, it had defeated Russia in 1905 and was at the time making great imperial strides forward during WWI… although at the rest of Asia’s expense. Many Mexican revolutionaries looked up to the Japanese and certainly did not want to alienate Japan from Mexico. Indeed, many Japanese living in Mexico were trusted by Villa’s forces; some were considered to be valuable weapons smugglers.
The U.S. government soon became embarrassed at the Punitive Expedition’s inability to track down Pancho Villa. Month after month passed, but Villa and his troops evaded the American forces at every turn. As America faced the probability of entering the First World War, the nation’s inability to even locate – much less capture or kill – an underfunded, ragtag enemy right on their doorstep sent an uninspiring message to the American public and to allies abroad about U.S. military capabilities. American intelligence agents thus began reaching out to Japanese-Mexicans, partly because they had been embraced by Villa as potential allies, and partly in the hopes that they would not be as nationalistic as indigenous Mexicans, and might be more willing to become informers on Pancho Villa’s whereabouts and next moves. Intelligence agents soon contacted a man named Gemichi – or “Gustavo” – Tatematsu, who had been a servant of Pancho Villa and knew his family. Another Japanese-Mexican by the name of Lucas Hayakawa also knew the Villa family, and had already worked as an informer for the U.S. Army in the border city of El Paso. The Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) began employing these two Japanese-Mexicans three months into the Punitive Expedition, on June 14.
Before sending Tatematsu to gather information on Villa, the Bureau of Investigation sent him to California to gather intelligence about Japanese communities in America and their sympathies towards Mexico. The mission was a way of feeling out Tatematsu’s trustworthiness. The Bureau quickly came to believe that Tatematsu would not divulge anything that would hurt Japanese communities, but they decided to move forward with him regardless of their concern that he was holding back on them. Because Hayakawa had already been an informer, he didn’t need to be put through this period of testing. By July, the two men were considered ready for the mission, and were sent into the north Mexican state of Chihuahua with the cover story that they were delivering important letters to Pancho Villa. At the same time, the Bureau also sent another Japanese-Mexican, Hidekichi Tuschiya, to try and infiltrate Pancho Villa’s forces. Tuschiya worked independently of Tatematsu and Hayakawa partly so the Bureau of Investigation could compare and contrast their information and have a way to better judge the quality of their information.
Meanwhile, while the Bureau cultivated these Japanese-Mexican informants, General Pershing – who was leading the Punitive Expedition – cultivated a network of about sixty spies in Mexico. Although these spies included Mexicans, Americans, and Chinese, it was the Japanese-Mexicans who were given the most sensitive mission due to the greater ease with which they could enter Villa’s camps. In the words of the Punitive Expedition’s Intelligence Section: “The Japanese were utilized largely as confidential agents in enemy country as their relations with the de facto government and the Villistas were such that they could visit either camp with impunity.” The Army sent four Japanese-Mexicans to Chihuahua to search for Villa: men by the names of Fuzita and Suzuki focused on gathering intelligence, while two others named Dyo and Sato searched the mountains for Villa.
On June 28, Dyo and Sato made contact and were led into Villa’s encampment. The revolutionary leader recognized Dyo immediately and expressed joy that he had not been killed by the enemy Carrancista forces during a previous capture. Dyo and Sato were accepted as trusted allies and given a tour of the encampment, which held 700 soldiers. On June 30, Dyo and Sato accompanied this force when they smashed a 300 man Carrancista column, and watched as Villa took prisoners and had slices of their noses and ears chopped off, with the warning that if men who had been so marked were ever found supporting Carrancista again, they would be shot on the spot. The two Japanese-Mexican informers were soon incorporated into Villa’s personal staff. They were armed and accompanied him in another successful attack on the Carrancistas, after which Villa began making plans to take over a major mining center. During this time of planning and strategizing, Fuzita and Suzuki rejoined Dyo and Sato. Together, they plotted the best way to poison Pancho Villa.
The plotting assassins had been provided with poison tablets with no taste or smell, and had already successfully tested them on a dog. Their window of opportunity was July 12-14, before Villa’s encampments would be on the move again. The assassins were expected to administer the poison and stay with the encampment until Villa’s death was certain. Understanding the risks, they undertook a Japanese death farewell ceremony before proceeding. Dyo then took an opportunity to poison Villa’s coffee, but then watched as Villa – who understood he could be poisoned at any time – had one of his men drink half of the coffee first, and then watched for any reaction. Seeing none, Villa then drank the other half. The Japanese-Mexican agents, however, knew that this poison did not set in immediately and took three days to cause death. Worried that Villa would not die but would be made seriously ill and that they might become suspects, the men fled.
Just over a month later, on August 25, a strange article was published by the Associated Press, stating that “A Japanese physician by the name of Nodko claims to have brought about the death of Villa by slow poison given under the guise of medical treatment, according to the Chihuahua local papers today.” Two days later, the U.S. Army sent Dyo and Fuzita on a new mission to determine Villa’s actual state, but the answer became obvious when Villa staged a surprise attack two weeks after the article was published. It’s possible that the article was just being used by Villa as a way to keep his planned attack invisible and throw his enemies off guard. The fact that it highlights a Japanese assassination attempt – although a concocted one – seems like more than a coincidence, and it might have been a sign from Villa that he understood who had tried to kill him.
In a likely attempt to erase any evidence of this assassination plot, the reports on the activities of these Japanese-Mexican agents were deleted from the Punitive Expedition’s intelligence files. However, the Bureau of Investigation had also come into contact with the Japanese agents working for the Army, and had written a report about their activities which was sent to the Attorney General, who then sent it to the Secretary of War. An investigation ensued, and it is likely that General Pershing, who was in charge of the Punitive Expedition, ordered the files destroyed before the investigation could take place. Military authorities also requested that the Bureau of Investigation ensure that no word of the assassination plot reached reporters. The story did not see the light of day until the 1970s, when the combination of Vietnam and Watergate crushed White American’s faith in the trustworthiness of institutions they assumed operated according to basic principles of justice and fair-play… a delusion that few people of color had. It was only at that moment that the FBI and various military intelligence agencies were forced to begin opening their documentation to the public… to some extent at least. As for the Punitive Expedition, it was unable to ever track down Pancho Villa, and pulled out of Mexico in February of 1917, after almost a full year of futile searches.