For years and years the Southern slave holding states fought the federal government to enforce their ownership of slaves. William Travis was a lawyer that sued all of the time to return slaves to their masters. This was done after Anglo settlers made Texas a slave state in 1836. Anglo settlers at the Battle of the Alamo and San Jacinto fought Mexico in order to create a slave state. This is the true meaning of 1836 not one fake history that a buffoon state representative had in mind. Governor Greg Abbott went along with this outrageous legislation and it will surely haunt him the rest of his life. Abbott signed a ridiculous law that seeks to rewrite history by making people believe that the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 had nothing to do with slavery and white supremacy. It had everything to do with slavery and racism.
Texas, like the rest of slave owning states wanted to force free states to return runaway slaves to their owners. Therefore, in 1850 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Enslaved people could no longer escape to a free state and be guaranteed freedom. The United States made numerous attempts to force Mexico to agree to a fugitive slave treaty. Mexico rightfully refused to return any slave that made it to the Mexican border. If fact, the rule simply stated that any slave that stepped across the Rio Grande was freed from bondage.
San Antonio became the center of much of the Underground Railroad to Mexico. Mexican traders using oxcarts routinely hid away blacks under cotton and food supplies on the ox and mule train driven carts. Many of them were sympathetic to the plight of runaway slaves as their land was stolen by white settler slave owners. San Antonio County commissioners created slave catchers that were nothing more than marauding racist vigilantes. For the Texas legislature to try and remove the issue of slavery and the undemocratic racist regime created by Sam Houston and others is absurd. All sorts of falsehoods were generated as to the causes of the struggle for Texas independence. One of the most overlooked and erased from the narrative is the white supremacist dimension of immigrants Texans coming from the slave owning southern states.
Researcher Arnoldo De Leon reported that Sam Houston, in speaking to a crowd of supporters in 1835 commented, “The vigor of the descendants of the sturdy north will never mix with the phlegm of the indolent Mexicans . . . . no matter how long.” There is plenty of evidence to prove that the war in Texas was a racial conflict as Anglo immigrants, both legal and illegal, flooded the Texas frontier with slaves and a high proportion of racist culture long in existence in the United States. If Mexico could be conquered then the dreams of spreading slavery from east coast to west coast could be accomplished. Texas independence was underpinned by white supremacy and hardened by slave owner interests flooding the state.
A resolution was passed in March of 1836, by the Texas convention at Brazoria which said, “We have moreover been appraised of the horrid purpose of our treacherous and bloody enemy, to unite in his ranks, and as instruments of his unholy and savage work, the Negroes, whether slave or free, thus lighting the torch of war, in the bosoms of our domestic circles.” To provide proof that the Texas war for impendence was a racist war is quite easy when one looks at the historical documents.
