Patriota Tejano, II: Austin, Slavery, Constitution
U.S. West History | Latin American History
If Erasmo Seguín and Texas learned revolution could wear a mask, the arrival of Stephen F. Austin revealed something more corrosive: that Constitutions could do the same.
Stephen F. Austin arrived in Texas carrying both inheritance and obligation. His father, Moses Austin, had secured a contract to bring three hundred families into the province — a plan rooted in economic ambition and frontier logic and republican values. Moses died before he could complete it, and the burden passed to his son. Austin inherited not only land rights but also responsibility, and with it the necessity of navigating a political world itself in flux.
The Mexican government had its own reasons for permitting Anglo settlement. Texas was thinly populated, exposed to Comanche raids, and vulnerable to foreign encroachment. Colonization promised a buffer for the Spanish, now Mexican government in Mexico City. It also promised tax revenue. The arrangement was uneasy but mutually intelligible.
Tejanos, especially the most prominent landholders in San Antonio, treated the Anglo families “in the best manner possible.” Erasmo Seguín was the first to escort these Americans into Texas — a detail that reads as courtesy until its weight is understood. Seguín did not merely welcome the newcomers. He vouched for them.
In July of 1821, Seguín wrote to the governor:
“I am accompanied by 16 Americans from those who expect to settle on the Colorado. They are led by Stephen Austin, who, on account of the death of his father comes to fulfill his contract.”
Seguín had little fear of the new Anglo-American settlers. His impression was that they were of respectable stock. Given his office and his long experience as a frontier broker, he believed he could function as a political bridge — trusted by both Mexican authorities and Anglo-American settlers.
Austin moved quickly. Almost immediately, he entered into business with Seguín, seeking control of the Indian trade. Within days, he went on a mustang hunt — an excursion that helped bloom a friendship between the Seguín and Austin families. From the start, there was cultural exchange: language, economy, and ideas. Each family influenced the other, progressively becoming more liberal and republican in thought — and more staunch in ideas of independence.
The timing mattered. Mexico had just broken from Spain in 1821. Bexareños arrived in San Antonio, chanting "Viva la Independencia." Winds of change blew north. With La Bahía established, imports flowed through Texas and nearby regions, producing commerce and tax revenue by 1822. Texas was no longer merely a frontier. It was becoming economically useful.
Seguín’s role in this moment extended beyond hospitality. He represented Texas in the National Congress in 1823 and 1824 and served as Texas’s representative at the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution of 1824 — the Acta Constitutiva de la Federación Mexicana — sought to solve Mexico’s central problem: how to govern a vast, diverse nation without reproducing a monarchy or a direct democracy.
The Constitution strengthened legislatures and weakened executives — a republican style of government that mirrored aspects of the United States of North America. It abolished monarchy outright. These were not radical ideas to northern frontier families. They aligned with multi-generational skepticism of centralized authority — they, like others on the frontier, had felt the neglect of such a government. But the structure carried a fatal flaw. Strong legislatures required consensus. Consensus required leadership. And the executive was deliberately weak.
Seguín helped build this system. That made him central — and dangerous. Once rules are written, every future conflict becomes a referendum on legitimacy. The Constitution of 1824 did something else as well: it provided theoretical justification for future revolts framed as “defense of constitutional rights.”
Then came the issue that burned beneath everything: slavery.
Seguín supported colonization. He understood the economic logic. But he opposed measures that would further introduce slavery into Texas. On July 24, 1825, he wrote to Austin with clarity that balanced realism and principle:
“I agree with you that the great development of your colony, and the other colonies of Texas, depends… upon permitting their inhabitants to introduce slaves…. But, my friend… it was resolved that commerce and traffic in slaves should be forever extinguished in our republic that the introduction of slaves into our territory should not be permitted under any pretext.”
His disgust for the law did little to prevent its passage. But his position mattered. It may have planted the seed of doubt in the eyes of his Anglo friends — who measured loyalty in economic terms, and a “freedom” percieved in owning slaves. In Texas, moderation is often read as unreliability.
While slavery simmered, another force reshaped politics: Freemasonry.
York Rite Masonry — associated with republicanism, liberty, and federalism — was introduced to Mexico City in 1827 by Americans residing there. Lodges proliferated. Factions hardened. Yorkinos aligned with federalism and republican-style decentralization. Escoceses (or Scottish Rite Freemasonry) aligned with conservatism, hierarchy, and centralized authority — and in Mexico, where the Catholic Church controlled the land, souls, and labor of a substantial portion of the economy, they would have a say in governmental affairs.
Stephen F. Austin was a known member of the York Rite St. Louis Lodge No. 3 before moving to Texas. On February 11, 1828, he called a meeting at San Felipe to petition the Grand Lodge in Mexico City. Officers were elected. The frontier leaned toward organization. Mexico recoiled. By October 25, 1828, the Mexican government outlawed Freemasonry entirely. By 1829, Austin himself called it “impolitic and imprudent, at this time, to form Masonic lodges in Texas.”
In the same period, General Manuel de Mier y Terán surveyed Texas and delivered a diagnosis without a remedy. In his 1828 Report on Tejas, he wrote:
“The colonist murmur against the political disorganization of the frontier, and the Mexicans complain of the superiority and better education of the colonists; the colonists find it unendurable that they must go three hundred leagues to lodge a complaint against the petty pickpocketing they suffer from a venal and ignorant alcalde, and the Mexicans with no knowledge of the laws of their own country nor those regulating colonization, set themselves against the foreigners, deliberately setting nets to deprive them of the right of franchise and to exclude them from ayuntamiento… The whole population here is a mixture of strange and incoherent parts without parallel in our federation...colonists of another people, more progressive and better informed than the Mexican inhabitants, but also more shrewd and unruly.”
The lack of governmental control left the frontier susceptible to takeover.
Then came 1829.
Vicente Guerrero took office on April 1, overwhelmed by civil strife and financial collapse. Spain attempted a reconquest in the summer and collapsed in defeat by September 11, accelerated by yellow fever. Guerrero, a Yorkino and Grand Master of the York Rite, spoke in the language of popular sovereignty:
“The People have confided in me their destinies, and I will be everything for the people. One tear less: one ear of corn more: a shoot of a plant that has not been cultivated, that will be the maximum of my happiness.”
On September 15, 1829, Guerrero issued a decree abolishing slavery nationally.
In Texas, Ramón Músquiz received the news on October 16. He withheld it from publication to avoid inflaming tensions. The decree was not fully enforced, but it was a signal of instability, of distance, of a government capable of sudden sweeping change. Many feared Texas would not develop without slavery. Others understood that slavery made revolt inevitable.
The pressure was compounded by the Law of April 6, 1830, which restricted further American immigration into Mexican territory. Relations worsened.
Through it all, Seguín and Austin’s personal friendship endured. Austin stayed with Seguín’s family whenever near San Antonio. His brother lived with them for nearly two years. In 1833, Austin wrote:
“I owe something to Don Erasmo — he refused to receive pay for the time my brother [stayed there], and I have always [stayed there] in my visits to Bexar and he never would receive pay.”
The frontier still produced loyalty, even as politics hardened.
But Mexico’s center collapsed inward. Guerrero was executed in 1831. Antonio López de Santa Anna — once York Rite, later Scottish Rite, swinging with advantage — rose through factional violence. Elected in 1833 and assuming power in 1834, he declared himself a dictator. In 1835, he replaced the Constitution of 1824 with centralist rule, reduced militias, dissolved state legislatures, and ignited revolts across Mexico.
Texas, stripped of the constitutional protections it believed it had been promised, stood at the edge.
Seguín had helped build the constitutional order now being dismantled. He understood, before many others did, what that meant. The constitution had failed not because it was ignored, but because it had been hollowed out from the center.
Revolution, once again, was preparing to wear a mask.
Bibliography | Notes
Chabot, Frederick Charles. Genealogies of Early San Antonio Families. San Antonio, TX: Frederick Charles Chabot, 1937.
de la Teja, Jesús F. Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.
Rodríguez O., Jaime E. “We Are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Anna, Timothy E. Forging Mexico, 1821–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Campbell, Randolph B. An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Howren, Alleine. “Causes and Origin of the Decree of April 6, 1830.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (April 1913): 421–433.
Morritt, Robert D. The Lure of Texas. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.