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Show ACQUISITION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 81 of farmland for 800 families. Contracts of the empresarios were to run for only 6 years and were to be cancelled if 100 families had not been settled within that length of time. In addition to its very liberal empresario system the Mexican Government permitted immigrants to purchase land by the league up to 11 leagues, at $100 per league for pastureland, $150 for nonirrigable farmland, and $250 for irrigable farmland. This was at the rate of 2.5 cents to 5.6 cents an acre. The United States had just reduced the price of its land from $2.00 to $1.25 an acre, which had to be paid in cash on the day of sale. Many westerners looking for land regarded the new price as still altogether too high, particularly in view of economic conditions of the time, the financial panic of 1819, the failure of many banks, the great letdown in the economy of the country, tight money, and unemployment. News of the extraordinarily generous terms being offered in Texas excited much attention, especially in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri. People left their occupations and swarmed to the new "el dorado." Fifteen men took on the role of empresario, contracted to settle 3,050 families, and became boosters for emigration to Texas.7 By 1830 there were 20,000 persons of American birth with their 1,000 slaves in Texas. Their disinclination to accept Mexican rule was causing Mexican officials deep concern and made them regret their invitation to Yankee immigrants. The Mexican Government tried to outlaw slavery, to compel membership in the Catholic Church, to centralize authority in the national government, and halt American immigration. All this produced opposition and finally, in 1835 and 1836, revolution. Fired by the tragedy at the Alamo, Texans fought to the finish, defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto, and compelled the recognition of their independence. To the astonishment of Texas, the United States was not ready to admit her into the Union and from 1836 to 1845 the newly independent state had to cool its heels outside. This unexpected development was due to a revival of the controversy over slavery. Antislavery forces had won a major victory in Congress in 1820 by inserting in the Enabling Act for the admission of Missouri a provision that no additional slave states north of the line 36°30', other than Missouri could be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase. By this act there seemed to be no opportunity for the creation of more than two additional slave states (Florida and Arkansas), whereas the North had opportunity for several new free states-present Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The acquisition of Texas, which claimed an area 46 times as large as Massachusetts and six times as large as New York, could greatly change the picture. Five or six states might be created out of it.8 Antislavery forces charged that it was an aggressive slavocracy that had planned, colonized, and won the independence of Texas to add it to the Union and to advance the cause of slavery. Jackson, fearing the effect such charges would have on the election of Van Buren to succeed him, cut off action on the request of Texas. Unwillingness to annex Texas for nearly 10 years, however, should not be regarded as an indication that the concept of Manifest Destiny, the expansionism of Jefferson, and the desire to press forward American claims to additional territory had come to a halt.9 Texas, like the Confederation after 1783, was hard put to carry its revolutionary war 7 Eugene C. Barker, Life. of Stephen F. Austin (Nashville, Tenn., 1925), pp. 62-72, 136-38. 8 I have borrowed the statistics from Public Land Statistics, 1964, pp. 3-4. Donaldson, The Public Domain, pp. 12, 124, makes the area of present day Texas to be 175,587,840 acres and the cession of 1850 to be 61,892,480, or a total of 237,480,320 acres. 9 Chauncey S. Boucher, "In Re that Aggressive Slavocracy," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, VIII (June 1921), 13-79. |