History of slavery in Texas
The use of slavery expanded in the mid-nineteenth century as White American settlers, primarily from the Southeastern United States, crossed the Sabine River and brought enslaved people with them.
The governors feared the growth in the Anglo-American population in Texas, and for various reasons, by the early 19th century, they and their superiors in Mexico City disapproved of expanding slavery.
Many worked in other parts of the state as cowboys herding cattle or migrated for better opportunities in the Midwest, California, or southward to Mexico.
[1] Estevanico accompanied his enslaver Captain Andrés Dorantes de Carranza on the Narváez expedition, which landed at present-day Tampa.
[6] Beginning in the 1740s in the Southwest, when Spanish settlers captured American Indian children, they often had them baptized and "adopted" into the homes of townspeople.
[10] When the United States purchased Louisiana in 1803, Spain declared that any enslaved person who crossed the Sabine River into Texas would be automatically freed.
[11] To encourage citizens to report unlawful activity, most southern states allowed anyone who informed on a slave trader to receive half of what the imported enslaved people would earn at auction.
[16] That year, the American Stephen F. Austin was granted permission by Mexican authorities to bring Anglo settlers into Texas.
[11] Under Austin's development scheme, each settler was allowed to purchase an additional 50 acres (20 ha) of land for each enslaved person he brought to the territory.
[11] By 1825, however, a census of Austin's Colony showed 1,347 Anglo-Americans and 443 people of African descent, including a small number of free blacks.
[18] Slaveholders trying to enter Mexico would force the people they enslaved to sign contracts claiming that they owed money and would work to pay the debt.
In August 1831, Juan Davis Bradburn, the military commander of the customs station on Upper Galveston Bay, gave asylum to two men who had escaped from slavery in Louisiana.
One of the resolutions challenged Bradburn for "advising and procuring servants to quit the service of their masters, and offering them protection; causing them to labor for his benefits, and refusing to compensate them for the same.
In the fall of 1835, a group of almost 100 enslaved people staged an uprising along the Brazos River after they heard rumors of approaching Mexican troops.
Most worked as house servants or on farms on the edges of towns, but others served as cooks and waiters in hotels, as teamsters or boatmen, or as coachmen and skilled artisans, such as blacksmiths, carpenters, and barbers.
In rural areas, counties often set up patrols to enforce restrictions on enslaved people traveling without passes from planter owners.
[41] White Texans were fearful about revolts, and as in other southern states, rumors of uprisings took hold rapidly, often in times of economic and social tension.
Several confessed to a plot by white abolitionists to avenge John Brown's execution by burning food supplies and poisoning slaveowners.
Many planters, however, lost part of their workforce temporarily to the Confederate Army, which impressed one-quarter of the enslaved on each plantation to construct defensive earthworks for the Texas coast and to drive military supply wagons.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger and over 2,000 federal troops arrived at Galveston Island to take possession of the state and enforce the two-year-old Emancipation Proclamation.
3" on the balcony of Ashton Villa: The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
[49] Throughout the summer, many East Texas newspapers continued to recommend that slaveholders oppose ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, in the hopes that emancipation could be gradually implemented.
Slavery had been theoretically abolished by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed, in 1863, that only those enslaved in territories that were in rebellion from the United States were free.
The eastern quarter of the state, where cotton production depended on thousands of slaves, is considered the westernmost extension of the Deep South.
In 1876 Texas adopted a new constitution requiring segregated schools and imposing a poll tax, which decreased the number of poor voters both black and white.
Texas did not, however, employ techniques common in other Southern states such as complex voter registration rules and literacy tests; even the "white primary" was not implemented statewide until 1923.
The white primary was another way to exclude African Americans from making electoral decisions, and it was not overturned by the Supreme Court until 1944 in Smith v. Allwright.
African Americans immediately started raising legal challenges to disfranchisement, but early Supreme Court cases, such as Giles v. Harris (1903), upheld the states.
Through organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), African Americans continued to work to regain their ability to exercise their civil and voting rights as citizens.
On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional,[55] a ruling which was shortly followed the implementation of voter ID laws in Texas.
