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to the south and the raiding Comanches. The original three hundred families that Austin led to what was promised as the land of milk and honey soon multiplied. Prospects of free land lured thousands of whites across the Sabine and Red rivers. By 1823 at least 3,000 U.S. citizens had entered Texas illegally, along with 700 legitimate settlers.5 About the same time, the Austin Colony had established an unofficial capital at San Felipe de Austin, on the west bank of the Brazos River. Two years earlier, Austin was already expressing concern over what he perceived would become a major problem with the Mexican government and the colonists.

“The principal difficulty is slavery, this they will not admit—as the law is all slaves are to be free in ten years, but I am trying to have it amended so as to make them slaves for life and their children free at 21 years—but do not think I shall succeed in this point, and that the law will pass as it is now, that the slaves introduced by the settlers shall be free after 10 years,”6 Austin wrote in a dispatch from Mexico City in 1822.

Only five years later, the Austin Colony’s political and social hub of San Felipe was “still in swaddling clothes” when Noah Smithwick arrived. The feisty nineteen-year-old had a “strong aversion to tearing up God’s earth,” so took up blacksmithing instead of farming.7 Smithwick left behind one of the most accurate memoirs of the first Anglo settlement in Texas. He described pioneer doctors who devoted most of their practice to “dressing wounds and holding inquests,” running hounds after feral hogs in the river bottoms, trying to stay clear of a certain lawyer “who had a penchant for dueling,” and a poet whose verse so disturbed some San Felipeans that they gave him a “new suit of tar and feathers” and ran him out of town.8 The offending verse from the unnamed bard that resulted in his “poetical flight” read:

The United States, as we understand,

Took sick and did vomit the dregs of the land.

Her murderers, bankrupts and rogues you may see,

All congregated in San Felipe.

More importantly, Smithwick also wrote of the colonists’ true motives for moving into the province and their decision to take the land away from Mexico. According to Smithwick, many of his fellow settlers were social outcasts and deadbeat exiles from the Mississippi Valley and across the southern states eager to acquire cheap land or get a new lease on life. “Faulty statutes in the United states sent many a man to Texas,” he wrote.9

Smithwick also described wealthy landowners who established cotton plantations and imported large numbers of slaves. “Over on the Brazos…a planter from South Carolina…had over 100 slaves, with which force he set to work clearing ground and planting cotton and corn. He hired two men to kill game to feed them on, and the mustangs [wild horses] being the largest and easiest to kill…the negroes lived on horse meat till corn came in.”10

Slavery was indeed an important issue in the Texas war of rebellion, just as it would be a decade later in the Mexican-American War. Yet because slavery is antithetical to hero worship, often the subject has been noticeably absent in discussions of early Texas settlement by Anglo immigrants. The fact remains that by the late 1820s Mexico had a politically active and strong abolitionist movement. In 1829 a new Mexican constitution prohibited slavery, which so outraged the big landowners and speculators in Texas that a provision was drafted that permitted slavery under certain conditions. That was soon rescinded and a new policy put into place. It allowed all slaves currently residing in Texas to remain but banned the importation of additional slaves. It also decreed that children born to slaves in the territory would be free. At the same time, the Mexican government passed a law blocking any further American immigration into Texas. By 1830 there were more than 20,000 settlers and 2,000 slaves living in Texas, making Anglos more numerous than Mexicans.

The flood of immigrants was overwhelming, and brought even more problems.