When Austin was eleven years old, his family sent him back East to be educated, first at the preparatory school of Bacon Academy in Colchester, Connecticut.

After purchasing the property, he learned the area was being considered as the location for the new territorial capital, which could make his land worth a great deal more.

He met and stayed with Joseph H. Hawkins, a New Orleans lawyer and former Kentucky congressman, and made arrangements to study law with him.

Although Austin was reluctant to carry on his father's Texas venture, he was persuaded to do so by a letter from his mother, written two days before Moses's death.

"[9] Austin led his party to travel 300 miles (480 km) in four weeks to San Antonio, with the intent of reauthorizing his father's grant; they arrived on August 12.

In December 1821, the first U.S. colonists crossed into the granted territory by land and sea on the Brazos River in present-day Brazoria County.

Governor Martínez informed Austin that the junta instituyente, the new rump congress of the government of Agustín de Iturbide of Mexico, refused to recognize the land grant authorized by Spain.

Austin traveled to Mexico City, where he persuaded the junta instituyente to approve the grant to his father and the law signed by the Mexican Emperor on January 3, 1823.

In 1824, the congress passed a new immigration law that allowed the individual states of Mexico to administer public lands and open them to settlement under certain conditions.

The law continued the system of empresarios and granted each married man a league of land, 4,428 acres (1,792 ha), stipulating that he must pay the state $30 within six years.

Austin sought an area for his colonists on the land near the mouth of the Colorado River (Texas) for a colony that could provide a good supply of clean, potable water.

[13] Austin was greeted by the native Karankawa inhabitants with the help of his Mexican scouts, they watched closely as the immigrants unloaded their goods, so that their two sloops could navigate safely up the shallows of the Colorado River.

[14] Later the same evening, Robert Brotherton was riding along a trail near Skull Creek when he was "met by the Indians, robbed of his guns and perceiving he was in danger of his life after making his escape, was wounded in the back with an arrow, very severely.

He had effective civil and military authority over the settlers, but he quickly introduced a semblance of American law – the Constitution of Coahuila y Tejas was agreed on in November 1827.

[20][page needed] He was active in promoting trade and currying the good favor of the Mexican authorities, aiding them in the suppression of the Fredonian Rebellion of Haden Edwards.

He grew particularly concerned following Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, stating: "I sometimes shudder at the consequences and think that a large part of America will be Santo Domingonized in 100, or 200 years.

It is in vain to tell a North American that the white population will be destroyed some fifty or eighty years hence by the negroes, and that his daughters will be violated and Butchered by them.

[47] He lobbied to help his colony elude president Vicente Guerrero's 1829 decree to emancipate enslaved people in the province legally and to bypass the government's effort to prohibit slavery when it passed the Law of April 6, 1830.

[34][48][49] In 1829, John Durst, a prominent landowner and politician, wrote about the president's emancipation of enslaved people, "We are ruined forever should this measure be adopted".

Stephen F. Austin replied, "I am the owner of one slave only, an old decrepit woman, not worth much, but in this matter I should feel that my constitutional rights as a Mexican were just as much infringed, as they would be if I had a thousand.

"[36]In May 1835, Austin's colonists learned that Mexico's tolerance for the evasions of enslavers was drawing to a close with its proposal of new abolition legislation.

Austin later gained U.S. Government support for his revolution when he wrote to Senator Lewis F. Linn and pleaded that Santa Anna planned to "exterminate" all of the colonists and fill Texas "with Indians and negroes [freed slaves]".

Following the success of Santa Anna, the colonists sought a compensatory reward, proclaimed at the Convention of 1832: resumption of immigration, tariff exemption, separation from Coahuila, and a new state government for Texas.

When they were repeated and extended at the Convention of 1833, Austin traveled to Mexico City on July 18, 1833, and met with Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías.

Believing that he was pushing for Texas independence and suspecting that he was trying to incite insurrection, the Mexican government arrested Austin in January 1834 in Saltillo.

After learning of the Disturbances at Anahuac and Velasco in the summer of 1835, an enraged Santa Anna made rapid preparations for the Mexican army to sweep Anglo settlers from Texas.

The Republic of Texas, created by a new constitution on March 2, 1836, won independence following a string of defeats with the dramatic turnabout victory at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, and the capture of Santa Anna the following morning.

On June 10, 1836, Austin was in New Orleans, where he received word of Santa Anna's defeat by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto.

"[54] Upon hearing of Austin's death, Houston ordered an official statement proclaiming: "The Father of Texas is no more; the first pioneer of the wilderness has departed.

[64] Accordingly, history records noteworthy social contributions in each generation of Stephen's family dating back to the early seventeenth century.