What were some of the causes of Texass efforts to break away from Mexico?

When Mexico gained independence from Spain, the population in much of what is today Texas was dominated by Native Americans. Feeling threatened by the native groups, and worried that the United States would try to take Texas, the Mexican government moved to enact policies to move more settlers into the area to help implement control over the region.

The Mexican government worked with empresarios, who operated as land agents in Texas. Empresarios worked to bring settlers who would develop Texas for the Mexican government. In exchange, those settlers would receive title to land – a resource that was abundant.

Estevan F. Austin Signature

One of the most famous empresarios, Stephen F. Austin, brought 300 families to settle Texas – a group sometimes referred to as the “Old Three Hundred.” The tracts offered were vast – 4,605 acres for each family. As empresario, Austin would be compensated with an even larger parcel of land. He would also serve, in effect, as the government for his settlers. The records of Austin’s Colony still exist today, in the archives of the state’s General Land Office. They offer a very personal connection to some of the early settlers of Mexican Texas – mainly Anglo Americans who renounced their United States citizenship to move to Texas.

Most people who came to Austin’s settlement were southern cotton farmers from the United States who began to develop the rich bottomlands along the Colorado and Brazos Rivers. Many brought slaves with them, to work their new lands. Although the 1820s brought a series of laws abolishing slavery in Mexico, the government granted a temporary exception to the ban in Texas.

By the 1830s, both the Anglo and Tejano populations of Texas had increased significantly. However, despite becoming official citizens of Mexico, many settlers maintained their affinity for the United States. Texas became a breeding ground for distrust and differences between the US and Mexico. In an attempt to enforce control, the Mexican government tried to force the end of slavery in the region, impose taxes, and end immigration from the United States. Engaged in civil war, the Mexican government struggled to maintain power in the region. After several skirmishes against Mexican soldiers, and a failed attempt to form a separate Mexican state, war seemed inevitable for the settlers.

Relations between the Mexican government and the Texas settlers deteriorated considerably in 1834-35 as President Santa Anna abandoned the constitution under which the American settlers had agreed to live. In the summer of 1835, Santa Anna sent a small army to Texas to confront the rebellious Texans, which included many of the new Anglo American settlers as well as some native Tejanos unhappy with the direction of Santa Anna’s government.

Fearing violence from the settlers, Mexican military officials attempted to retrieve a cannon that had been given to the town of Gonzales for Indian defense. The successful resistance of Gonzales residents, who flew a flag with a picture of a cannon and the slogan “Come and Take It,” is traditionally considered the beginning of the Texas Revolution.

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

As the incursions of the earlier filibusters into Texas demonstrated, American expansionists had desired this area of Spain’s empire in America for many years. After the 1819 Adams-Onís treaty established the boundary between Mexico and the United States, more American expansionists began to move into the northern portion of Mexico’s province of Coahuila y Texas. Following Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, American settlers immigrated to Texas in even larger numbers, intent on taking the land from the new and vulnerable Mexican nation in order to create a new American slave state.

After the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty defined the U.S.-Mexico boundary, Spain began actively encouraging Americans to settle their northern province. Texas was sparsely settled, and the few Mexican farmers and ranchers who lived there were under constant threat of attack by hostile Indian tribes, especially the Comanche, who supplemented their hunting with raids in pursuit of horses and cattle.

To increase the non-Indian population in Texas and provide a buffer zone between its hostile tribes and the rest of Mexico, Spain began to recruit empresarios. An empresario was someone who brought settlers to the region in exchange for generous grants of land. Moses Austin, a once-prosperous entrepreneur reduced to poverty by the Panic of 1819, requested permission to settle three hundred English-speaking American residents in Texas. Spain agreed on the condition that the resettled people convert to Roman Catholicism.

On his deathbed in 1821, Austin asked his son Stephen to carry out his plans, and Mexico, which had won independence from Spain the same year, allowed Stephen to take control of his father’s grant. Like Spain, Mexico also wished to encourage settlement in the state of Coahuila y Texas and passed colonization laws to encourage immigration. Thousands of Americans, primarily from slave states, flocked to Texas and quickly came to outnumber the Tejanos, the Mexican residents of the region. The soil and climate offered good opportunities to expand slavery and the cotton kingdom. Land was plentiful and offered at generous terms. Unlike the U.S. government, Mexico allowed buyers to pay for their land in installments and did not require a minimum purchase. Furthermore, to many whites, it seemed not only their God-given right but also their patriotic duty to populate the lands beyond the Mississippi River, bringing with them American slavery, culture, laws, and political traditions ([link]).

By the early 1830s, all the lands east of the Mississippi River had been settled and admitted to the Union as states. The land west of the river, though in this contemporary map united with the settled areas in the body of an eagle symbolizing the territorial ambitions of the United States, remained largely unsettled by white Americans. Texas (just southwest of the bird’s tail feathers) remained outside the U.S. border.

Many Americans who migrated to Texas at the invitation of the Mexican government did not completely shed their identity or loyalty to the United States. They brought American traditions and expectations with them (including, for many, the right to own slaves). For instance, the majority of these new settlers were Protestant, and though they were not required to attend the Catholic mass, Mexico’s prohibition on the public practice of other religions upset them and they routinely ignored it.

Accustomed to representative democracy, jury trials, and the defendant’s right to appear before a judge, the Anglo-American settlers in Texas also disliked the Mexican legal system, which provided for an initial hearing by an alcalde, an administrator who often combined the duties of mayor, judge, and law enforcement officer. The alcalde sent a written record of the proceeding to a judge in Saltillo, the state capital, who decided the outcome. Settlers also resented that at most two Texas representatives were allowed in the state legislature.

Their greatest source of discontent, though, was the Mexican government’s 1829 abolition of slavery. Most American settlers were from southern states, and many had brought slaves with them. Mexico tried to accommodate them by maintaining the fiction that the slaves were indentured servants. But American slaveholders in Texas distrusted the Mexican government’s reluctant tolerance of slavery and wanted Texas to be a new U.S. slave state. Most also disliked Mexicans’ Roman Catholicism and regarded them as dishonest, ignorant, and backward. Belief in their own superiority inspired some Texans to try to undermine the power of the Mexican government.

What caused Texas to break away from Mexico?

What are three major reasons why Texas fought for independence from Mexico?

When did Texas break away from Mexico?

What caused tensions between Mexico and Texas settlers?