"Mexico in his head": slavery and the Texas-Mexico border, 1810-1860.

In September 1851, six years after Texas was annexed by the United States and fifteen years after independence from Mexico, Guy M. Bryan, politician and slaveholder of Brazoria County, wrote his brother-in-law in response to a proposal to swap a tract of land for a slave. Bryan seems to have liked the idea and planned to inspect his brother-in-law's slave that evening, but a disturbing rumor prompted him to reconsider. "The negroe he has got Mexico in his head," he wrote, referring to the prospect of seeing the slave escape to the south, adding, "on this account I may not buy." The record is silent on whether Bryan went ahead with the deal, but his dilemma reveals something of the nature of slavery in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: enslaved residents of Texas invested the border with a set of meanings that formed the core of an oppositional culture, shaping numerous acts of resistance. (1)

Historians of Texas slavery have long recognized that Mexico attracted and harbored refugees from the state's plantations. But in chronicling the efforts of enslaved Texans to reach freedom in Mexico, scholars have overlooked two important issues. First, they have generally treated the border itself as an unproblematic given, ignoring not only the conflicts that resulted in the frequent redrawing of the boundary between the U.S., the Texas Republic, and Mexico/New Spain, but also the changing significance of the border that accompanied each shift. The issue warrants serious consideration. National boundaries delineated the scope of state power, which, through military support and the passage of slave codes, was vital to the maintenance of slavery. A second, and closely related issue is the ability of enslaved Texans to project a definition of the border. They did not simply react to the various redrawings of the border; in the crucible of their own interpretive communities they invested the border with liberationist significance, helping to set off a chain of events that resulted in Texas independence and the establishment of a slaveholding republic. Ironically though, the drawing of a clear border between slavery and non-slavery only inspired more flight toward the Rio Grande. (2)

If historians of Texas slavery have largely ignored the issue of borders and boundaries, historians of Mexico and the U.S. West certainly have not. The concept of a borderland has evolved considerably since Herbert Bolton first envisioned it in the early 20th century as the meeting place of rival European empires in western North America. (3) Cultural and literary critics, such as Gloria Anzaldua, have seen the borderlands as a "third country in-between" AngloAmerican and Mexican cultures, characterized by a high degree of hybridity and resistance. (4) Although most historians have embraced Anzaldua's concept of a cultural borderland, her tendency to treat it as continuous and timeless has generated calls for greater historical specificity. In response, Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron have proposed a three-part typology consisting of "frontiers," "borderlands," and "bordered lands," with each ideal type defined by the degree and nature of state control over the area in question. Frontiers, according to Adelman and Aron, are simply meeting places of peoples; borderlands are the meeting places of empires; bordered lands are the formally recognized meeting places of sovereign states. The succession of one form by the other, they argue, had important consequences for those "in between," presenting them with different sets of problems and opportunities. (5)

Anzaldua's emphasis on cultural creativity and resistance and Adelman and Aron's emphasis on change over time are not inherently incompatible; both resonate with themes in the history of slavery and African American culture. In Texas, slaves created different meanings for the border as it moved. We may divide the process by which the Mexican border became associated with non-slavery into four periods. In the first, which lasted until approximately 1820, the geographic boundary between the United States and New Spain (soon to be Mexico) was undetermined. Because slavery was legal in both areas, slaves did not attach any particular significance to the border, although some fled to Texas recognizing that it would be difficult for masters to pursue runaways into Spanish territory. The second period, approximately 1820 to 1829, saw the beginnings of plantation slavery, but as yet only a faint connection between Mexico and the idea of freedom. The third period, 1829 to 1845, saw tensions escalate between Anglo Texans and the Mexican government over a number of issues, including slavery, resulting in the establishment of an independent slaveholding republic and culminating in the annexation of Texas as a slave state, solidifying once and for all the linkage of Mexico with freedom. Thousands of slaves acted on this vision and fled across the Rio Grande. Finally, in the years after emancipation, the image of Mexico symbolized not only a collective history of resistance to slavery, but also served as a reminder that the racial hierarchies of the postwar South were by no means natural, inevitable, or just. (6)

Slavery in the Americas was not always limited by national or imperial boundaries. Until the Age of Revolution, slavery, though more prominent in some places than others, existed throughout the hemisphere. In Mexico, slavery was an institution of some consequence for more than a century after the Conquest. Epidemics in the sixteenth century had proven so devastating to the native population that Spanish landowners found it necessary to look abroad for laborers. In 1518, a year before Cortes made landfall on the Mexican coast, Spain contracted with Portugal to supply slaves to its New World colonies. For the next two centuries, enslaved laborers could be found in cities, mines, fields, and workshops throughout New Spain. By the eighteenth century, however, population growth among indios and mestizos in the colony had rendered importations of unfree laborers unnecessary, and slave prices, the best index of demand for slave labor, dropped by more than 50% from their early seventeenth-century peak. On the eve of independence in 1821, there were only about 3,000 slaves left in all of New Spain. Most of these worked as domestics and laborers in urban areas, although some toiled on rural farms and haciendas. Only a very small number of these lived in Coahuila-Texas, principally, it seems, in Saltillo, the provincial capital. A grand total of nine slaves lived in the mission settlements of San Antonio and La Bahia, Texas in 1819. (7)

The Mexican War for Independence, which began in 1810, altered the region's relationship with slavery in two ways. First, by bringing into existence a Mexican state, the war focused attention on the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Napoleon's sale of Louisiana in 1803 set off a round of claims and counter-claims between the United States and Spain. An 1819 treaty between Spain and the United States settled the matter two years before Mexican independence, and the newly created state accepted the boundary, which ran from the Gulf up the Sabine River, westward along the Red River, then through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Despite grousing from some Anglo-Americans who felt their claims had been ignored (and who mounted occasional filibustering expeditions), the border held. Coahuila-Texas had passed from "borderland" to "bordered land," to borrow Adelman and Aron's term. (8)

The creation of a Mexican state raised a second issue, which, combined with the newly drawn boundary, lent a special texture to slavery in the region. Though ultimately rather conservative, the Mexican state was forged in a revolutionary atmosphere hostile to slavery. Father Hidalgo's 1810 Grito de Dolores, traditionally seen as the catalyst independence movement, contained an explicit call for the institution's abolition. That same year, Jose Maria Morelos, Hidalgo's eventual successor, called for an end to slavery, along with the distinctions of indio, mestizo, and mulatto. As the Hidalgo movement lost momentum in the 1810s, the reluctance of some liberals to interfere with masters' property rights prevented decisive action against slavery. But with no Mexican slaveholding interest to register objection, antislavery rhetoric persisted into the 1820s, if for nothing more than symbolic reasons. (9) Statehood coincided precisely with the cotton revolution in the southern United States, and the convergence point for the two revolutions turned out to be a sparsely inhabited province in northeastern Mexico known as Coahuila y Tejas.

The region had existed as a classic borderland long before Mexican statehood. Spain had made several entradas into the area in the sixteenth century, but it was not until the late seventeenth century, when a French force under LaSalle established a beachhead on the Gulf Coast, that Spanish officials decided to establish a more permanent presence in the area. Throughout the eighteenth century, Franciscan friars and military men founded a series of missions and presidios, concentrated in San Antonio in South Texas, and Nacogdoches, located near French Louisiana. The purpose of these settlements was to protect the more valuable mining regions of northern Mexico from Indian raids and French encroachment. The area acquired all the earmarks of a New World borderland, as Indians used their position between empires to retain a measure of autonomy, even as missionization progressed. (10)

The situation changed after 1800 as cotton conquered the Carolina backcountry and began its march westward. By the second decade of the new century, Anglo planters and filibusters were already eyeing the rich river bottomlands of the Trinity, Brazos, Colorado, and Red Rivers. Officials in Mexico City recognized the threat of Anglo expansion. In 1821, they devised a policy they hoped would prevent the loss of the province by permitting foreign settlement and hopefully easing Anglo annexation pressure. Early the next year, Moses Austin applied to the new Mexican government for the right to settle Anglo families in Central Texas. In exchange he would receive "premium lands," which he would be allowed to alienate. Moses Austin died before he could begin settlement, but his son Stephen quickly succeeded his him as empresario. Between 1825 and 1832 at least twenty-four individuals, seventeen of whom were Anglo-Americans, negotiated contracts for the settlement of 8,000 families. (11)

New Spain had been a haven for fugitive U.S. slaves for some time before the establishment of a formal boundary with the United States. Even before the formalization of a U.S.-New Spain border in 1819, U.S. diplomats complained to Spanish officials that Mississippi Valley slaves were escaping to the region west of the Sabine River. In 1835, one traveler to Texas heard an echo of what seems to have been early contact between Comanches and African Americans in South Texas. While locating a site for a possible settlement, Mississippian Gideon Lincecum encountered a group of Comanches who "captured" him for a short time. "Not desiring to show any signs of uneasiness at the predicament into which I had so carelessly got myself," he soon "discovered that the one I had first spoken to was the only one who understood me so I asked him how that happened. He said the language you speak, is known amongst all the tribes as the 'slave tongue.' In every clan will be found a few who can speak it." With no Mexican state and no Mexican antislavery movement, it is unlikely that slaves would have attached any particular significance to Mexico. Instead, flight into the area was prompted by the sparseness of settlement, which would have made recapture difficult if not impossible. (12)

With the formalization of the border in 1819, followed two years later by Mexican statehood and Anglo/African-American colonization, the geographic logic of slave flight changed. Coahuila-Texas was now a slave-owning society. For runaways and those contemplating flight, the Sabine no longer constituted the practical limit of the slaveholders' reach. Two options emerged for fugitives. Some, it appears, sought freedom even further south in Coahuila or Tamaulipas, drawn perhaps by the lingering antislavery rhetoric of the Hidalgo movement and the war for independence. In the actions of these fugitives we can detect the early linkages between the image of Mexico and ideas of freedom, although not yet as strong as they would be in the 1830s. One Anglo resident recalled Jim, a slave on John McNeel's plantation in the 1820s, who "openly announced his determination to leave, and, acting on impulse, threw down his hoe and started away." McNeel's son, Pleasant, aimed his rifle at Jim and threatened to shoot him if he did not return to work. Jim continued on his way, and Pleasant McNeel promptly shot him dead, which undoubtedly strengthened whatever connection his slaves may have made between Mexico and antislavery. It can hardly be coincidental that when the mexican Army approached the Brazos in 1836, the McNeel family lost "a great many of there Negroes." (13)

Still, in the absence of a clear abolition decree, not all runaways in the 1820s headed straight for the Hispanic regions of Mexico. Some sought safe haven in the burgeoning slaveholding regions, which were for the moment sparsely settled. A letter written by Jose de la Pecochans of Nacogdoches to Stephen F. Austin in 1829 illustrates the ambiguous geographic logic of slave flight. Pecochans apparently wrote on behalf of a local slaveowner (although he mentioned having an "interest" in the slave as well), whose bondsman had disappeared a month earlier. "News has been received that he took the Brazos Road," Pecochans informed Austin, "it is certain that he is in the dwelling or control of John Williams, who earlier fled from 'Nechas.'" (14) The owner offered to cover any expenses involved in the slave's recapture and transportation back to Nacogdoches. Here was a slave who, after running several hundred miles, apparently chose to hide not in the Mexican interior, but in the Austin Colony. A few years later the choice would be much clearer: to enjoy permanent freedom, one must cross the Rio Grande.

The history of one early Texas slave community underscores the same point--Mexico was not the inevitable focal point of slave resistance in the 1820s that it would be in 1830s. Bernardo Plantation, founded by Alabamian Jared E. Groce, was the region's largest slave community. In 1822, Groce led a column of over 90 slaves to a site on the Brazos River in present-day Austin County. Although transporting that many slaves to a sparsely settled region with scant state presence might appear to be a risky enterprise, Groce actually managed to establish a profitable cotton plantation. A census taken in 1825 puts the enslaved population of Bernardo at 90. An inventory from 1831 reveals that it had increased to 117. Clearly the residents of Bernardo did not flee en masse to the south even though they entered Texas at a time when there was almost nobody to stop them from doing so. A likely reason, gleaned from the same inventory, is that all but one of the laborers at Bernardo lived in family units, which undoubtedly made them sensitive to the risks involved. (15)

Other factors may have shifted enslaved residents' attention away from the U.S.-Mexico border and toward a less concrete, but nevertheless important boundary--the ideological boundary between "civilization" and "savagery." There can be no doubt that Anglo migrants to Texas were extremely conscious of themselves as participants in a grand-scale drama, casting themselves as "redeemers" in a benighted "wilderness." It is far more difficult to determine whether African-Americans shared that attitude. On the one hand, enslaved Texans almost certainly did not entertain the same racist, triumphalist notions as their masters. On the other hand, despite the fact that some slaves sought refuge among indigenous residents of Texas, they did not always view Indians as their natural allies. In 1824, Stephen F. Austin waged a war of expulsion against the Karankawa people, who lived along the Gulf Coast. Among the participants were thirty unfree residents of Bernardo, mounted, armed, and riding as a self-contained cavalry troop. No more is known about the episode, but it does suggest that the region's slaves viewed their own communities as small outposts of civilization, regardless of their own legal status. That theme was revived in many of the state's WPA narratives. "We had a terrible time in Texas in them days," recalled Lizzie Atkins of the 1850s, "for the Indians would kill our stock and steal everything we had." (16)

Two developments altered the nature of slave resistance in Mexican Texas. First, the slave population in the river bottoms grew larger and more concentrated, until, by the mid-1830s, a majority resided in relatively densely settled plantation districts. With a critical mass of population, slaves were able to form not simply communities, but interpretive communities, capable of turning the ambiguities of Mexican politics to their advantage. (17) Although by most standards the Austin Colony was not densely populated in the 1830s, historians have overstated the sparseness of settlement by relying on aggregate statistics for the entire state or colony. But from the start, the slave population was not distributed evenly, a condition that facilitated community formation to a greater degree than most historians have appreciated. As early as 1825, at least three-fourths of the colony's slave population lived along the Brazos River, and two-thirds of those lived in an area that would later encompass only two counties, Fort Bend and Brazoria. In 1837, Brazoria County alone had over 1,100 slaves, most of whom lived near the river, with 75% residing on units larger than 10, and 50% living on holdings greater than 20. One in three Brazoria households contained slaves, and approximately half of the county's residents were black. (18)

The second development concerned the actions of the Mexican state. In return for the lands given to Anglo settlers, Mexico had imposed certain conditions, many of which were routinely evaded. First and foremost, colonists swore to abide by Mexican law, which obligated them to acknowledge the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. With little government oversight or pressure to conform, many settlers quietly adhered to their Protestant faiths. Other measures, such as trade restrictions designed to prevent the northern provinces from straying into the economic orbit of the United States, failed as well. Anglo settlers' evasions on the issue of slavery constituted yet another affront to Mexican sovereignty, and on April 6, 1830, Mexico placed a ban on further immigration from the United States. The action helped to galvanize an image among Anglos of Mexico as a power hostile to their interests. Later acts, such as the centralization of power under Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna in 1835, only confirmed the notion.

Although they left no direct evidence of their thoughts or reactions, Texas slaves undoubtedly took note of the ongoing conflict between the Mexican government and Anglo settlers on these issues, especially slavery. Ironically, the Mexican government's commitment to antislavery was inconsistent, and its antislavery measures frequently fell victim to the desire to populate Texas and make it profitable. Time and again, officials undercut their own antislavery policies by permitting exceptions and reinterpretations. What mattered, however, was not the government's stance on slavery per se, but how the slaves themselves interpreted the government's equivocations. (19)

And equivocations they were. The declarations of Hidalgo and Morelos, the strongest expressions of Mexican antislavery, were null and void after the collapse of their movement in the 1810s. The political struggles of the 1820s muddied the waters even further, as both state and federal governments steered an erratic and often-conflicting course on the issue of slavery. Disputes between federalists and centralists over the scope of the Mexican state made it difficult to know which jurisdiction took priority. Between 1823 and 1829, national authorities decreed the following: a prohibition of the foreign slave trade (1823); the emancipation of slave children under fourteen (1823); an extra grant of land to settlers who brought in large numbers of enslaved laborers (1823); a reconfirmation of the proslavery article in the national colonization law (1824); the abolition of the internal slave trade (1824); the abolition of slavery in Mexico (1829); and the subsequent exemption of Texas from the abolition decree (1829). The state government at Saltillo was equally erratic. Among its decrees were: a six-month period during which slaves could be brought into the state (1824); a six-month sunset period for slave importations (1827); a post-nati emancipation law (1827); a law providing for the emancipation of ten percent of the slaves on any estate undergoing sale or transfer (1827); and a contract labor law that allowed Anglo slaveowners to sign their bondsmen to ninety-nine year indentures, essentially undercutting all previous antislavery legislation (1827). (20)

Anglo slaveowners took advantage of the confusion to bring more slaves into Texas, but through its equivocations, the Mexican government had actually weakened slavery in a variety of ways. Most of the slave societies of the Western Hemisphere sought legitimization of the institution from the state in the form of a slave code. Nineteenth-century Anglo Southerners in particular were accustomed to a rather extensive body of statutory and case law that shaped all aspects of the master-slave relationship. If bondage were to be replicated in Texas, the obligations of the master-slave relationship would require legal definition. In addition, since slavery required community acquiescence, the relationships between the free members of society to each other's slaves needed to be spelled out. How, for example, would society treat interference by one free person with another's slaves when the law did not sanction the right of the first to hold slave property? An unambiguous body of slave law was economically essential since slaves represented not only labor, but capital as well. Could they be mortgaged in order to raise money? Were slaves real or personal property? How would the succession of titles proceed? Were there any limits on the domestic or international sale of slaves? Could slaves be seized and sold for debt? Did slave families have legal standing? Could slave children be separated from their mothers? Mexican law, while failing to abolish the institution outright, gave little support to the master-slave relationship. (21)

Mexican equivocation on slavery would have been inconsequential if the interpretive community of slaves had not endowed Mexico with special significance, one that helped inspire overt acts of resistance. Throughout the New World, slaves appropriated whatever language they encountered and turned it to their own ends. By reading the slaves' actions, we can discern what Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood have termed the process of "translation" and "appropriation" that lay at the heart of African-American culture. It was this tendency of slaves to reinterpret the pronouncements and political rhetoric issuing from distant sources that made Mexican rule intolerable to slaveowners. In the hands of slaves, the idea of Mexico was transformed into a symbol of non-slavery, much as Christianity and revolutionary France had been reinterpreted by enslaved Africans a generation before. (22)

There can be little doubt that the various pronouncements on slavery issuing from Saltillo and Mexico City led Texas slaveowners to view the Mexican state as a potential threat. Although the presence of the Mexican state was minimal in the Anglo regions of Texas, masters did all they could to shield their bondsmen from its influence. Such was the experience of a state expedition that traveled to Texas in 1828 amid fears of Anglo secessionism. That May, a small detachment led by General Manuel Mier y Teran happened past Bernardo Plantation, where, despite the sweltering May heat, its members received a frosty reception from Texas' first and wealthiest planter, the normally hospitable Jared Groce. After grudgingly giving the soldiers some corn for fodder, Groce refused the party food or shelter, leaving it to camp underneath some trees. Taking the hint, the interlopers left the following day. (23)

If masters increasingly viewed the Mexican state as a threat to their interests, slaves soon demonstrated that they saw it as an ally. In 1835-1836, the simmering tensions between Anglo settlers and the Mexican government boiled over. A number of issues, not the least of which was slavery, lay behind the rift. As the Mexican army approached the Austin Colony in 1836 to put down what had become an open rebellion, thousands of Anglos fled toward the U.S.-Mexico border at the Sabine River with their slaves, an event memorialized in Texas history (usually without any sense of irony) as the "Runaway Scrape." An unknown, but certainly sizable number of slaves ran the opposite direction. Ann Thomas, wife of slaveholder John Thomas, began her flight with nine slaves. Three were immediately seized by other Anglo settlers for her husband's debts, leaving her with six. Within a week, four of the men fled to the Mexican army, "being promised their freedom on doing so," as Ann Thomas surmised. The only slaves who remained were two women, who may have deemed the risks of camp life, including possible harassment and abuse, not worth taking. (24)

Slaves who reached Mexican lines did not always see their dreams of freedom realized. Some of the fugitives were freed and sent further south, as was the case with the fourteen families encountered by General Jose Urrea's forces in April 1836, whom he "sent free" to Victoria. Other commanders were not as liberal. According to Urrea, General Vicente Filisola returned several runaways, including a man who had served as his own coachman, to Anglo slaveholders as he retreated from Texas. Moreover, Filisola also seems to have permitted slaveholders to enter Mexican camps to recover stolen property, including slaves. As with Mexican legal support for slavery, actual military policy did not consistently grant freedom to the enslaved. Yet, as with the issue of legality, what mattered was not the actual policy, but the significance slaves attached to Mexican equivocation. To them, the Mexican Army was an army of liberation. (25)

The most dramatic expression of the linkage between the ideas of Mexico and freedom came in the form of a slave revolt in October 1835. As the army approached the fast-developing plantation district on the lower Brazos River, the enslaved population rebelled. Virtually all that is known about the incident is contained in a letter dated October 17 from B. J. White to Stephen F. Austin, which read in its entirety:

  I now have some unpleasant news to communicate, the [sic] negroes on
  Brazos [sic] made an attempt to rise. Majr Sutherland came on here for
  a few men to take back, he told me--John Davis returned from Brazoria
  bringing the news that near 100 had been taken up and many whipd
  nearly to death some hung etc. R.H. Williams has nearly Kild one of
  his.--The carancawa Indians is in the Navidad country killing
  (stealing) etc.
  [signed] B.J. White
  PS--The negroes above alluded to had devided [sic] all the cotton
  Farms, and [sic] they intended to ship the cotton to New Orleans and
  make the white men serve them in turn [sic]

The militia, it seems, managed to quell the disturbance without too much difficulty. But the incident again shows the potential power of the slaves' vision of Mexico. (26)

With the Brazos slave rebellion crushed and the Mexican army expelled, Anglo Texans established an independent, slave-holding republic. Delegates to a constitutional convention approved several proslavery clauses, guaranteeing the right to hold slave property, the right to import slaves from the United States, and forbidding free blacks to enter or reside in Texas without the special authorization of the legislature. Earlier legal ambiguities on the succession of slave property, the status of slave families, and other points of law soon vanished as the legislature and courts elaborated on the slave code. The border between the Texas Republic and Mexico, now drawn along the Rio Grande, finally became the unequivocal boundary between slavery and freedom that black Texans had imagined years earlier. In 1845 the United States Congress voted to annex Texas, then fought and won a war to put permanent rest to Mexican claims to the area between the Nueces the Rio Grande. Enslaved Texans would hardly have celebrated the consolidation of the new slave regime, but its very existence stemmed partly from Anglo fears that the institution could not exist under Mexican sovereignty. If slave flight during the U.S. Civil War presented U.S. authorities with the fait accompli of self-liberation, propelling Lincoln and Congress toward the revolutionary policy of emancipation, the flight of Texas slaves helped provoke the opposite sort of revolution in Texas--a proslavery one. (27)

Although the border between slavery and freedom was redrawn, it was not erased; Texas and Mexico were still "bordered lands." The boundary persisted on maps, in practice, and in the minds and memories of enslaved Texans. The most telling evidence is the stream of runaways that continued beyond independence and annexation and persisted through the antebellum period, aided at times by both Mexicans and Anglos. In 1844 a reputed horse thief named Jesse Blades and an accomplice named Robert Redding, alias Lascum, confessed plotting to "seduce" ten slaves from six different Brazoria County estates into paying $100 each for safe transport to Mexico. The effort failed "owing to the want of means to defray necessary expenses, and to the repentence and failure of some negroes." Nine of the ten were soon captured by authorities, and a tenth, a man named Dennis, was seized after hiding out for a week. (28)

The number of slaves who managed to survive the long and hazardous journey to the Rio Grande is almost certainly in the thousands. (29) On an 1854 visit to Piedras Negras, a small town on the Mexican side of the river, Frederick Law Olmsted reported seeing several former Texas slaves. One, a native of Virginia who had come to Texas with his master, spoke Spanish fluently, was a member of the Catholic Church, and had traveled throughout northern Mexico. The fugitive estimated that forty slaves had come through the town in the preceding three months. Some of the former slaves scattered and married into local families, but Olmsted also reported hearing of a community of runaways settling a few days outside Piedras Negras and comprising a virtual maroon colony. "The Mexican Government was very just to them," Olmsted quoted his informant, adding, "They could always have their rights as fully protected as if they were Mexicans born." (30)

Texas and U.S. officials understood that ignoring the southward hemorrhage of slaves deprived the state of valuable labor and destabilized its plantation system. Both the state and private individuals launched expeditions to recover fugitives but found that Mexican opposition limited their effectiveness. Among the failures was the expedition of James H. Callahan, who led Texas Rangers into Piedras Negras in 1855 in pursuit of a group of Lipan Apaches, with a second goal being the recapture of runaways. A Mexican force soon expelled Callahan, and his rangers burned the town of Piedras Negras as they left. State officials also pressed the United States government to negotiate an extradition treaty, but that effort failed as well. (31)

Flight was not the only form of border-oriented resistance to persist after annexation. In 1856, officials in Colorado County, in Central Texas, uncovered what they believed was a plot by 200 local slaves to kill all the white men and "make wives" of the women. A search reportedly turned up a stockpile of pistols, long guns, ammunition, and bowie knives. A vigilance committee hanged the three men accused of being the ringleaders, while the lives of the rest were spared. As with so many other incidents, the border figured prominently. According to county officials, the rebels had resolved to "fight their way to a 'free state' (Mexico)." In addition, officials claimed that every Mexican in the county, "without exception," was involved in the plot. One man in particular, known only as Frank, was reputed to be one of the leaders, prompting officials to conclude "that the lower class of the Mexican population are incendiaries in any country where slaves are held, and should be dealt with accordingly." This sentiment translated into the expulsion of all Mexicans from Colorado and several nearby counties. (32) Although it is difficult to say for certain how much of the plot was real and how much was a figment of Anglo imaginations, it demonstrates the continuing linkage of Mexico and antislavery in master-slave discourse.

The consequences of this linkage were felt in a variety of ways. In a simple economic sense, the loss of several thousand bondspeople was felt on the ledgers of the state's slaveowners. If we accept one contemporary estimate of 4,000 successful runaways by 1855, the aggregate loss works out to approximately 3.3% of the slave population. (33) If the true number of successful escapees were only half that, it would still represent a noticeable proportion of the labor force. Even recaptured fugitives temporarily deprived their owners of labor, further cutting into productivity and profits. One Bastrop County master paid slave catchers $200 to track two fugitives 750 miles to the Rio Grande, only to hear that the slaves had "escaped & not [been] found." It is easy to understand why planters like Guy M. Bryan, quoted at the beginning of this essay, thought twice before purchasing laborers who had "Mexico in their heads." Other planters undoubtedly shared Bryan's apprehensions and factored the possibility of flight into their economic calculations. (34)

The effects of flight to Mexico were not confined to the realm of economics, nor were they limited to the fugitives. For those who remained behind, Mexico appeared, rightly or not, as a republic built on a more inclusive model of citizenship. The image persisted in countless retellings of the slave experience, although with the end of slavery the meaning of the border shifted from one of freedom to one of racial equality. Almost seventy years after emancipation, Felix Haywood of San Antonio told a WPA interviewer, "In Mexico you could be free. They didn't care what color you was, black, white, yellow, or blue. Hundreds of slaves did get to Mexico and got on all right. We would hear about 'em and how they was goin' to be Mexicans." Coming from a man who had experienced not only slavery, but the stifling racism of the Jim Crow South, Haywood's Mexico was a perfect inversion of the world north of the border, a poignant critique of a nation that liked to see itself as more progressive and enlightened than its southern neighbor. (35)

The end of slavery in 1865 may have slowed, but it did not halt the flow of black Texans across the border, as the case of former slave Sallie Wroe's father demonstrates. During the Civil War, Wroe's father escaped by paddling a bale of cotton across the Rio Grande. He returned after the war, but finding his chances poor in post-emancipation Texas, he returned to Mexico, earned some money, and used it to buy clothing for his family on his return. Although the border no longer marked the spatial division between freedom and slavery, it could still be put to good use by those who understood how to manipulate it. (36)

Texas slaves were not unique in attaching liberationist significance to the world beyond the boundaries of their own. The tendency was especially pronounced during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as interpretive communities of slaves received, translated, and appropriated the language of liberty and freedom in settings ranging from Virginia, to Saint Domingue, to Bahia. None of this is to suggest that slave communities were incapable of generating subversive ideas internally; the history of New World slave resistance demonstrates clearly that they were. In fact, the very notion of interpretive community suggests that members drew on an internal and pre-existing collective experience in their encounters with metropolitan ideas and texts. Among these texts were political boundaries, not only the Mexican border, but the Haitian coast, the Mason-Dixon Line, the Ohio River, and eventually the picket lines of the Union Army. Slaves were among the world's most persistent border crossers.

ENDNOTES

The author would like to thank Vicki Howard, Robert Olwell, Mike Campbell, Mieko Nishida, and the members of the Susquehanna Seminar for their criticisms and suggestions.

1. Guy M. Bryan to James F. Perry, September 15, 1851, Perry Papers, Center for American History (CAH), University of Texas at Austin.

2. Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1989) is the standard work on Texas slavery. Other relevant works include Ronnie C. Tyler, "Fugitive Slaves in Mexico," Journal of Negro History 57 (January 1972): 1-12; Rosalie Schwartz, Across the Rio to Freedom: U.S. Negroes in Mexico (El Paso, 1975); William Dean Carrigan, "Slavery on the Frontier: The Peculiar Institution in Central Texas," Slavery and Abolition 20 (August 1999): 63-86.

3. For an introduction to Herbert Bolton's writings, see John Francis Bannon. ed., Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands (Norman, 1964). The work of David J. Weber has been most influential in recent years. See David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque, 1982); idem, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992). For a discussion of the historiography see David J. Weber, "Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands," American Historical Review 91 (February 1986): 66-81; idem, "The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography," OAH Magazine of History 14 (Summer 2000): 5-11.

4. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, 1987), 19. For a generally sympathetic critique and updating of Anzaldua, see Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson, Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (Minneapolis, 1997), especially the editors' essay, "Border Secrets: An Introduction," 1-39.

5. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 815-817. It is important to note that Adelman and Aron's typology has been criticized for reviving Frederick Jackson Turner's emphasis on process, for overstating the influence of the state, and for understating the agency of non-Europeans. While I agree with all of these critiques, I do appreciate Adelman and Aron's effort to show that it mattered how, where, and when the boundaries between states were drawn. See the responses in AHR 104 (October 1999): 1221-1239, especially John R. Wunder and Pekka Hamalainen, "Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays," 1229-1234. For a supporting view, see David J. Weber, "The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography," 9.

6. On interpretive communities, see Stanley Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, 1980). See also the Introduction for a general overview. For a classic application of the concept, see Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, 1984).

7. Colin A. Palmer, Servants of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Cambridge, 1976), 9, 65-83; Dennis N. Valdes, "The Decline of Slavery in Mexico," The Americas 44 (October 1987): 170-175, 168; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988), 367-372; Carlos Manuel Valdes and Ildefonso Davila, Esclavos Negros en Saltillo (Saltillo, 1990); Donald E. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 1519-1821 (Austin, 1992), 206-207.

8. David J. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 290-296.

9. Manuel Ferrer Munoz, La Cuestion de la Esclavitud en el Mexico Decimononico: Sus Repercusiones en las Etnias Indigenas (Colombia, 1998), 13-14.

10. David J. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 147-171.

11. David J. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 160-163.

12. Gideon Lincecum Autobiography, Typescript, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. It is also possible that "slave tongue" may have been introduced by Anglo-American captives who became "slaves" of the Comanches.

13. Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State, 24. I have corrected Smithwick's spelling of "McNeal" to "McNeel." For McNeel slaves fleeing to the Mexican army, see James F. Perry to Emily Perry, April 26, 1836, Perry Papers, CAH.

14. Jose de la Pecochans to Stephen F. Austin, February 18, 1829, Colonial Records, 1810-1832, Book A, Austin County Clerk, Bellville, Texas. The location of "Nechas" is unclear. It probably refers to the Neches River area, not far from Nacogdoches. Or, since slaves occasionally reached Texas from as far away as Mississippi, it may be a reference to Natchez. The identity of John Williams is also unknown, although it is likely that he was a criminal accomplice rather than a slave himself. On slavery among Native Americans see James Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002).

15. "Personal Recollections of Leonard Waller Groce, as related to his son, William Wharton Groce," Groce Family Papers, CAH; Austin Colony Census of 1826 (Taken in 1825), Texas General Land Office (GLO); Inventory of Slaves, Groce Family Papers. Special thanks to Galen Greaser of the GLO for bringing the Austin Colony Census of 1826 to my attention.

16. J.H. Kuykendall, "Reminiscences of Early Texans, A Collection from the Austin Papers: Recollections of Capt. Gibson Kuykendall," Texas Historical Association Quarterly 7 (July 1903): 35; Lizzie Atkins Narrative in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement Series 2, Texas Narratives, Part 1 (Westport, Conn., 1979), 93. For other examples, see Tyler, "Fugitive Slaves in Mexico," 3.

17. For an argument that higher population density channeled slave resistance away from flight and toward collective rebellion, see William Dean Carrigan, "Slavery on the Frontier." I find little evidence to support the notion that increased population density and the efforts of white Texans to stem the flow of refugees to Mexico actually resulted in lower levels of flight--if anything, flight seems to have increased. The history of New World slavery is replete with examples of densely populated, highly militarized societies in which flight and marronage were endemic. The main requirement seems to have been a place of refuge, as with Jamaica's interior mountains or the highlands of the Guianas. Also, although several alleged plots were "uncovered" in the 1850s, the largest, indeed only, slave rebellion in Texas occurred in 1835, during the "frontier" era. See below.

18. Austin Colony Census of 1826. The manuscript census does not break the colony down by locality. I was able to determine the locations of 235 out of 290 households by cross-checking the following sources: Lester G. Bugbee, "The Old Three Hundred: A List of Settlers in Austin's First Colony," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 1 (October 1897): 108-117; The Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/index.new.html (Austin, 1999-2003); County Land Grant Maps, General Land Office. Figures for 1837 come from Brazoria County Tax Rolls, 1837-1884, microfilm edition, Texas State Library and Archive. Randolph Campbell, Empire for Slavery, 264, reports that Brazoria County had 892 slaves in 1837. My own hand count places the number at about 1,100, give or take about ten, depending on how one interprets the handwriting in the original. The discrepancy between Campbell's figure and my own seems to be the result of the compiler's inconsistent method for recording slave children. Apparently slaveholders did not pay taxes on child slaves, hence the lower figure, although the children's presence was often noted on the rolls.

19. On slave communication networks during the Hatian Revolution, see Julius Sherrard Scott, III, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Hatian Revolution," Ph. D. diss., Duke University, 1986.

20. Campbell, Empire for Slavery, 16-25.

21. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1996); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 25-49; Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, 1998), 57-102; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baton Rouge, 1971), 81-112. A partial exception is Brazil, which did not have a comprehensive and distinct code, although the Portuguese crown occasionally weighed in on the topic. See Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Societ: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge, 1985), 260-262.

22. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 20; Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, 1979); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991), 49-51; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, 1990); James Sidbury, Plowshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810 (Cambridge, 1997), 39-43, discusses the meaning of "frenchness" among Virginia slaves.

23. Jose Maria Sanchez, "A Trip To Texas in 1828," Carlos E. Castaneda, ed. and trans., Southwestern Historical Quarterly 29 (April 1926): 274.

24. Richard King, ed., A Victorian Lady on the Texas Frontier: The Journal of Ann Raney Coleman (Norman, 1971), 93.

25. Jose Urrea, Diary of the Military Operations of the Division Which Under the Command of General Jose Urrea Campaigned in Texas (Victoria de Durango, 1838), reprinted in Carlos E. Castaneda, trans., The Mexican Side of the Texas Revolution, by the Chief Mexican Participants (Dallas, 1928), 238, 269-270. Urrea, it should be noted, published his diary to bolster his charge that Filisola had needlessly forfeited Texas. Filisola published a rebuttal to Urrea's charges, but it contained no specific denial of the charge that he returned slaves. See Vicente Filisola, Representation Addressed to the Supreme Government by General Vicente Filisola, in Defense of his Honor (Mexico, 1836), in Castaneda, ed., trans., The Mexican Side of the Texas Revolution, 160-203.

26. B. J. White to Stephen F. Austin, October 17, 1835, The Austin Papers vol. 3 (Washington, 1924-28), 190.

27. Recent accounts of the Texas Revolution include David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846, 242-255; Paul D. Lack, The Texas Revolutionary Experience: A Political and Social History (College Station, 1992); and Gregg Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. On slave agency and its effect on war aims in the Civil War, see the work of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, summarized in Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), esp. Ch. 1, pp. 3-76.

28. The Planter (Columbia, Tex.), May 31, 1844. For other examples see Tyler, "Fugitive Slaves in Mexico" and Carrigan, "Slavery on the Frontier."

29. John "Rip" Ford, a journalist, legislator, and filibuster, estimated the number at 3,000 in 1851 and 4,000 in 1855. See John Salmon Ford, Rip Ford's Texas, Edited and with an Introduction and Commentary by Stephen B. Oates (Austin, 1963), 196; Tyler, "Fugitive Slaves in Mexico," 6.

30. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas: Or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (Austin, 1978), 324-325.

31. Tyler, "Fugitive Slaves in Mexico," 7-12; Campbell, Empire for Slavery, 62-65.

32. Galveston Daily News, September 11, 1856 (parentheses in original.) See also Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997), 25.

33. The estimate for the slave population of 1855 is based on an interpolation of figures in J.D.B. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1854), 308-310 and U.S Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D. C., 1864), 483.

34. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999), 287-288.

35. Rawick, ed., The American Slave, Texas Narratives vol. 16, Part 4, 224.

36. Rawick, ed., The American Slave, Texas Narratives vol. 16, Part 2, 132.

By Sean Kelley

Hartwick College

Department of History

Oneonta, NY 13820