By Prof. Ron Wilkins

In 1836 after the fall of the Alamo and its slave-owning or pro-slavery leaders, such as William Travis, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, Mexican forces were defeated and an independent Texas was eventually annexed by the United States.
    However, before the expulsion of Mexican forces from Texas, Brigadier General Jose Urrea evicted scores of illegally-settled plantation owners and liberated slaves, and in many instances, granted them on-the-spot titles to the land they had worked.
    Oddly enough, many black people call for “forty acres and a mule” — a reference to Union General Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 and General Howard’s Circular 13, which made some land available to former slaves.
    But what one never hears are references to Mexican General Jose Urrea and the land titles that he and his men granted to former Texas slaves a generation before the Civil War.
    Even after the loss of Texas, Mexican officials refused to formally acknowledge Texas independence on the grounds that it “would be equivalent to the sanction and recognition of slavery.” After Texas independence, the slave population mushroomed and the number of runaways across the Texas-Mexico border increased.
    In 1842 Mexico’s ConstituIntional Congress reasserted the nation’s commitment to fugitive slaves. In 1847 38,753 slaves and 102,961 whites were listed in the first official Texas census. In 1850 in a new treaty accord with the U.S., Mexico again refused to provide for the return of fugitive slaves.
    The slave institution in Texas was continuously undermined by defiant Tejanos (Mexicans in Texas) who took great risks and invested enormous resources toward facilitating the escape of enslaved Africans. The Texas-to-Mexico routes to freedom constituted major unacknowledged extensions of the Underground Railroad. Tejanos were variously accused of “tampering with slave property,” “consorting with blacks” and stirring up among the slave population “a spirit of insubordination.”
   Plantation owners in Central Texas adopted various resolutions aimed at preventing Mexicans from aiding the slave population. Whites in Guadalupe County prohibited Mexican “peons” from entering the county and anyone from conducting business or interacting with enslaved people without authorization from the owners. Bexar County whites suggested that “Mexican strangers entering from San Antonio register at the mayor’s office and give an account of themselves and their business.” Delegates to a convention in Gonzales resolved that “counties should organize vigilance committees to prosecute persons tampering with slaves,” and that all citizens and slaveholders were to endeavor to prevent Mexicans from communicating with blacks. Whites in Austin decreed that “all transient Mexicans should be warned to leave within 10 days, that all remaining should be forcibly expelled unless their good character and good behavior were substantiated by responsible American citizens” and that “Mexicans should no longer be employed and their presence in the area should be discouraged.”
   In Matagorda County, all Mexicans were driven out under the bogus claim that they were wandering, indigent sub-humans who “have no fixed domicile, but hang around the plantations, taking the likeliest negro girls for wives… they often steal horses, and these girls too, and endeavor to run them to Mexico.”
    By the year 1855, the estimates were that as many as 4,000 to 5,000 formerly enslaved Africans had escaped to Mexico. Slaveholders became so alarmed at this trend that they requested and received approximately one-fifth of the standing U.S. army, which was deployed along the Texas- Mexico border in a vain effort to stem the flow of runaways.
   Defiant Mexicans stood their ground, refused to return runaways, continued supporting slave uprisings and provided assistance to escaping slaves. In the words of Felix Haywood, a Texas slave whose experience is recalled in The Slave Narratives of Texas, “Sometimes someone would come along and try to get us to run up north and be free. We used to laugh at that. There was no reason to run up north. All we had to do was walk, but walk south and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande.”
   1857 was a year whose profound irony made it one of the most interesting. 1857 was the year that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott, an enslaved African who had sued for his freedom on the grounds that his owner had forfeited any claim to him after taking him into a free state. Ironically 1857 was the same year that the Mexican Congress adopted Article 13 declaring that an enslaved person was free the moment he or she set foot on Mexican soil.
   
    Next week, Part three.
    Wilkins is a professor in the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills and Western Regional Deputy Chairman of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition.
    He can be contacted at rwilkins@csudh.edu or through www.politicart.net.