Slavery and the Texas Revolution

IF LANGUAGE SERVES AS A USEFUL GUIDE, THE MATTER OF SLAVERY OCcupied an important place in the minds of the leaders of the Texas Revolution. Their rhetoric brimmed with imagery depicting a struggle between freedom and bondage. In their view Mexico sought to enslave the only people in the land who still dared to defend the cause of liberty. A group of volunteers in October, 1835, labeled Mexican rule as "worse than Egyptian bondage"; the following June General Thomas J. Rusk sought to rally the people to the field against an enemy who intended "to make [them] the slaves of petty military commandants." The opposing soldiers thus became "menial slaves" of military despotism. However appealing Texans found this vision of themselves as sufferers "in the cause of Freedom and the Rights of Man," in candid moments they acknowledged that the conflict involved the issue of slavery in a manner far different from that portrayed in this propaganda.' Wars for independence had invariably subjected the institution of slavery to profound tensions since the time of the American Revolution. Throughout the new world in the subsequent half-century a variety of forces shook the foundations of bondage and led to its overthrow, by a combination of black revolution and state action, in Haiti, the British West Indies, and the South American republics. In all these slave societies radical ideologies, accompanied by sudden shifts in political, economic, and military power, emerged during times of crisis to undermine the old order. Wars--international, internal, or both-ac