1
INTRODUCTION
“GLOBALIZING THE RIO GRANDE”
In April of 1837, the British vice consul at Tampico, Joseph Crawford, traveled north to
the Rio Grande to compile a report about the conditions and prospects of British trade at the port
of Matamoros. He noted that more than two-thirds of all the goods that entered Mexico at the Rio
Grande came from British manufacturers. The vice-consul believed Matamoros, with its location
inland, trade connections with Monterrey, and healthy climate, could become a significant center
for trade if foreigners had more guarantees for their property. The threats of indigenous attack
and corrupt government officials far from the center of Mexican authority restrained the
expansion of trade. However, those conditions applied to everyone in the region giving nobody a
sense of advantage. He did not know what the future held for the prospects of British commercial
interests on the Rio Grande, but there was a growing community of British merchants in the city
vying for the borderlands market. Crawford also knew that there was a British settlement that
had recently been founded upriver, as well as a growing number of British entrepreneurs taking
residence in towns all along the Rio Grande. He suggested that the British Foreign Office appoint
a consular agent at Matamoros to give British entrepreneurs in the region all the advantages to
succeed. "That our commercial interests and the residents would be bettered by having a prudent
consular agent here, there is no doubt."
1
Crawford believed that a British state agent on the Rio
1
Joseph Crawford report to the British Foreign Office, April 1837, FO 50/109, The National Archives of the United
Kingdom (hereafter cited as TNA).
2
Grande could spur trade and influence Mexican authorities to protect British commerce. He
imagined the Rio Grande becoming an important center of trade and wanted to ensure a strong
British state presence there.
The British were not alone in their examination of the future prospects of the Rio Grande.
Europeans' interest in expanding their footprint in the region was not new in 1837. Spain and its
indigenous allies made the first incursions in 1747. Led by a military officer with commercial
designs for the region, the Spanish project for settlement promoted the borderlands' economic
potential. Spain succeeded in founding six villas on the Lower Rio Grande. The enterprise
proved short-lived and stagnated as political and economic decline wracked the Spanish Empire
at the turn of the century. After Mexico achieved its independence in 1821, the region was
contested among Indians, Mexicans, Americans, and Europeans.
2
Those Europeans, primarily
from England, France, and German principalities, attempted to extend formal control to parts of
the borderlands in hopes of exploiting an untapped market.
3
British entrepreneurs tried and failed
to establish settlements on the Rio Grande in the 1830s and 1840s. French entrepreneurs
attempted similar projects in the 1840s, drawing German-speaking investors and emigrants into
their schemes.
4
What opportunities did all of these Europeans imagine finding in the borderlands
2
A note on terms: when I use the term "European," I mean individuals born in Europe. I often default to "European-
born" to make that fact explicit. I use "Mexican" to define individuals born in Mexico. This extends past the U.S.-
Mexico War to those who may have been born in Mexican Texas but found themselves in the United States after the
war. Finally, I utilize "American" to denote individuals born in the United States. I understand the complications of
this term, but I find it much more agreeable than "Anglo-American." When Herbert Bolton used Anglo-American in
The Spanish Borderlands, he did so with the notion that American conquerors of the Southwest succeeded because
of the traits of industriousness they inherited from the English. I am explicitly attempting to unhook that association.
3
The Spanish dealt with various Mexican attempts to expel Spaniards from Mexico. See: Harold Sims, The
Expulsion of Mexico’s Spaniards, 1821-1836 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
4
Graham Davis, Land! Irish Pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas (College Station, Tex: Texas A&M
Univ. Press, 2002); Stuart Reid, The Secret War for Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007);
Bobby D. Weaver, Castro’s Colony: Empresario Development in Texas, 1842-1865, (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1985); Rudolph Leopold Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas, 1831-1861
(Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930); Milo Kearney and Anthony K. Knopp, Boom and Bust: The Historical
3
and how did reality undermine their imaginations? What did these various incarnations of
settlement-building look like? How did they support or threaten Spanish, then Mexican and
United States state-building?
Historians tend to view the U.S.-Mexico War as the moment when the United States
successfully expanded its mastery over the region using military force.
5
However, when the
United States annexed Texas and declared war with Mexico over the Nueces Strip, European
presence in the region actually expanded. Building on small mercantile communities that
developed in Matamoros, merchants and clerks from all over Western Europe poured into the
broader borderlands region to extract natural resources and exploit its trading potential. They
constructed vast networks that connected the Rio Grande to ports all over the Atlantic. Openly
competing with Americans in the borderlands, European-born entrepreneurs, on occasion,
undermined American commercial domination of the region. Off the battlefield, how much
control did the United States have over the Rio Grande borderlands? What actions did European-
born entrepreneurs take to seize and maintain their hold on the market in the Rio Grande
borderlands? Most significantly, how does shifting the perspective from the American point of
view change the way we look at the borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century?
This dissertation tackles these questions and more. It argues that the Rio Grande
borderlands has been a crossroads of trade since the era of Spanish colonization and that after
Mexico won its independence from Spain, the region became the focus of intense commercial
Cycles of Matamoros and Brownsville (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1991); Leroy P. Graf, “The Economic History of
the Lower Rio Grande Valley 1820-1875” (PhD Diss, Harvard University, 1942).
5
John A. Adams, Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande: Laredo, 1755-1955 (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2008), 70-75; David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1987), 20.
One book recognizes that the U.S.-Mexico War created an opening for significant European migration to the Rio
Grande borderlands, though it focuses on American-Mexican relations: Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope:
Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 134-175.
4
modernization projects initiated by both state agents and individual businessmen from all over
Western Europe. These entrepreneurs wanted to transform the Rio Grande borderlands from a
regional crossroads into a hub of the Atlantic economy. However, their efforts to create rapid
change were often stymied by roadblocks, including the region’s environmental conditions,
notions of ethnic and cultural superiority, and continual eruptions of violent conflict. European-
born entrepreneurs met success in their ventures on occasion, but, overall, most of the ventures
they set out to establish ended in loss, a subsequent migration, or a complete shift in business
model.
By elucidating the many failed attempts by European-born entrepreneurs to reform the
Rio Grande borderlands into the commercial utopia they imagined, I hope to ultimately show just
how contingent American imperial expansion remained in the nineteenth century. Europeans'
consistent and evolving approaches preempted American efforts and sometimes worked to
actively undermine American designs. Their persistent presence, relationships with European
governments, and open competition with American projects reveal that European-born
entrepreneurs pushed against American expansion into the borderlands.
6
*****
European-born entrepreneurs had a consistent presence in the Rio Grande borderlands.
From the era of Spanish settlement in the mid-eighteenth century through the early Mexican
period, European colonizers encouraged European-born migrants to move to the region and
succeeded in drawing in hundreds of entrepreneurial immigrants in each of their successive
6
For more on how American perceptions about the British presence in Texas impacted American imperial
expansion, see: Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
5
attempts.
7
By 1860, the European-born population of the U.S. counties on the northern bank of
the Rio Grande totaled 6.5% of the total population. In comparison, U.S. born residents
comprised about 15% while Mexican-born inhabitants occupied an almost 80% majority. Even
as they made up a significant portion of the non-Mexican population, European denizens of the
Rio Grande borderlands dominated skilled labor positions within society. Almost half of the
entire European-born community partook in mercantile activity either as merchants or clerks.
This quick demographic overview confirms the significant numbers of Europeans in the
borderlands.
8
After traveling to the borderlands, entrepreneurial migrants faced political, cultural, and
economic conditions that diverged from their European understandings of hierarchies of power,
interethnic social interactions, and systems of exchange and ownership. They entered the
borderlands with expectations that there existed an impersonal governing system like those they
left in Europe. Often, they found very limited or even no government authority. They expected a
centralized state and found a space dominated by local rulers. European-born entrepreneurs
quickly realized that Native Americans tended to wield the most power and controlled the most
territory. Powerful Native American groups had vastly different conceptions of exchange than
7
Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734-1900, 1st ed (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 27-36; Lawrence Francis Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of
Nuevo Santander, a Study in Spanish Colonization, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1926); Patricia Osante,
Orígenes Del Nuevo Santander (1748-1772), 1. ed, Serie Historia Novohispana 59 (México : [Ciudad Victoria]:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas ; Universidad Autónoma de
Tamaulipas, 1997); Davis, Land!; Leroy P. Graf, “Colonizing Projects in Texas South of the Nueces, 1820-1845,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (April 1947): 431–448; Mary Virginia Henderson, “Minor Empresario
Contracts for the Colonization of Texas, 1825-1834,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 31, no. 4 (April 1928):
295–324; Louis E. Brister, “Eduard Ludecus’s Journey to the Texas Frontier: A Critical Account of Beales’s Rio
Grande Colony,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 108, no. 3 (Jan. 2005): 368–85.
8
Ancestry.com, “1860 United States Federal Census”, Online Database, accessed November 22, 2016; Arnoldo
DeLeon & Kenneth L. Stewart, Tejanos and the Numbers Game: A Socio-Historical Interpretation from the Federal
Censuses, 1850-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). For my census data, I aggregated the
totals for Webb, Cameron and Starr counties.
6
European understandings of ownership and transactions. Additionally, the new markets they
sought to exploit contained Mexicans who were often more interested in maintaining the
lifestyles they developed under the Spanish regime than speculating for profits. Furthermore,
Americans steeped in Jacksonian democracy defied European notions of hierarchy and propriety.
These diverse worldviews mixed through porous ethnic boundaries in the Rio Grande
borderlands challenging Europeans to react in individual ways.
9
Studying European-born entrepreneurs who moved to the Rio Grande borderlands offers
a new lens through which to analyze the rapid changes that affected the region in the nineteenth
century. Primarily, they provide a perspective of individuals who moved to a new place and
actively tried to understand it so that they might better succeed in their ventures. In that
acclimation process, some became frustrated with the social, cultural, and political conditions in
the borderlands such that they attempted to reshape their localities to meet their own ends. Others
adapted quickly to the conditions they faced and entered into kinship relationships with
borderlanders. Still others became so disillusioned that they fled the borderlands altogether. All
of their accounts demonstrate how individual Europeans actively tried to impose their notions of
modernity on this region of the world.
10
While it is true that studying such a broad group of people like European-born
entrepreneurs presents certain complications, I argue that their shared European mindset and
entrepreneurial spirit make them an ideal slice of borderlands society to investigate. By the end
9
David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-
Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2008); Sam W Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British
World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope; Andrew J. Torget,
Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
10
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 2-3.
7
of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of Western Europeans decided that they were
modern and living in modern societies. Entrepreneurs were particularly enmeshed in processes of
emulating and spreading modern notions that included freedom of commerce and creating
uniformity. European-born entrepreneurs all also shared the entrepreneurial anxieties of taking
on tremendous financial and personal risks in ventures half a world away from their European
homes in the American borderland. Their shared mindset, experiences, and goals allow for
seemingly diverse peoples to be grouped.
11
Most historians approach the history of the Rio Grande borderlands from the perspective
of Americans, Mexicans, or Native Americans. David Montejano's Anglos and Mexicans in the
Making of Texas,1836-1986 argues that in the first three decades after the U.S.-Mexico War, an
American merchant elite overlaid itself upon the already established Mexican hierarchy in order
to assert its control. Within this “rivalship of peace,” as Montejano calls it, both American and
Mexican elites retained enough power to continue in a state of détente until the railroads brought
changes to the market and caused massive displacement of Mexicans living in Texas.
12
Building
on Montejano’s argument, Miguel González-Quiroga emphasizes the interethnic cooperation
along the Rio Grande and the relationships that developed there.
13
Other historians examine the
11
Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 9-10; Davis, Land! Irish Pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas, 6,
238-239.
12
David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1987), 24-75. For more on the Hispanic heritage of the Rio Grande borderlands see: Rodolfo F. Acuna, Occupied
America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1972); Carey McWilliams,
North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1948).
Some other notable works relevant to the Rio Grande borderlands that have come out of the Chicano movement
include Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South
Texas, 1734-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998);Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope; Timothy
Paul Bowman, Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2016).
13
Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2020).
8
role Native Americans played in borderlands development. Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand
Deserts and Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire place Indians at the center of their
narratives and render them the primary actors in borderlands evolution. By doing so they reframe
the borderlands as a place of conflict and contestation among Indians, Mexicans, and
Americans.
14
I instead explore how European norms and institutions transferred to and changed
within the borderlands context, working partly on the model offered by Graham Davis’s Land!:
Irish Pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas.
15
European-born entrepreneurs helped
maintain Montejano's “rivalship of peace” because their presence opened space for the Mexican
elite to maneuver around American elites. Additionally, Indians, Mexicans, and Americans all
used Europeans in the region to their own benefit, mobilizing strategies that ranged from
peaceful trade to violent raids. The Rio Grande borderlands was a competitive space where
parties played off one another in the hopes of attaining their own goals of regional dominance.
16
Furthermore, this study contributes to the history of the political economy of the U.S.-
Mexico borderlands. The most thorough and cited work in English on the economic history of
the Rio Grande borderlands is an unpublished dissertation written during World War II.
17
Historians of Northern Mexico have produced excellent economic studies of the region, but their
breakthroughs have not had significant impact on the broader historiography.
18
Others have
14
DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts, xiii-xxi; Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 1-17.
15
Davis, Land! Irish Pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas, 3-8.
16
In this context, I am borrowing from Richard White's notion of the new Middle Ground that opened up after the
English and Americans successfully entered the Great Lakes region to undermine the French and complicate power
relations with the Algonquin through trade, violence, and diplomacy. See: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires,
and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 269-515.
17
Leroy P. Graf, “The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley 1820-1875” (PhD Diss, Harvard
University, 1942).
18
Mario Cerutti, Burguesía, capitales e industria en el norte de México: Monterrey y su ámbito regional (1850 -
1910) (México, D.F: Alianza Ed, 1992); Mario Cerutti and Miguel A. González Quiroga, El Norte de México y
Texas, 1848-1880: Comercio, Capitales y Trabajadores En Una Economía de Frontera, 1. ed (San Juan, Mixcoac,
México, D.F: Instituto Mora, 1999); Mario Cerutti and Miguel Gonzalez-Quiroga, “Guerra y Comercio En Torno al
9
focused on the expansion of the borderlands economy after the introduction of railroads.
19
This
work attempts to update the field by incorporating ideas from the new history of American
capitalism to place the region in a global framework and situate the Rio Grande borderlands as a
contested global space from the moment of Spanish settlement.
20
In doing so, I focus on the
significance of individual networks to demonstrate how their associations came to connect the
Rio Grande to the broader Atlantic world.
21
The English, French, and Spanish all maintained significant interests in the Gulf of
Mexico throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the main ports at New Orleans, Havana,
and Matamoros; and most of that interest centered on the textile economy. The European trade in
cotton and animal hide tied the entire globe into a complex commercial web. In the Rio Grande
borderlands, Europeans adopted both formal and informal strategies through settlement projects
and mercantile competition, upsetting the expectations of the American commercial elite who
assumed the Rio Grande would become a part of the American market with only Mexico as a
competitor.
22
While much of the history of the Rio Grande borderlands seems to divide nicely between
the colonial and national periods, European attempts to extend their influence in the borderlands
did not end with Mexico’s independence in 1821. Though New Spain unhooked itself from
Iberia, the English and the French continued to try to establish formal settler colonies in the Rio
Río Bravo (1855-1867). Línea Fronteriza, Espacio Económico Común,” Historia Mexicana 40, no. 2 (Winter 1990):
217–97.
19
Alicia M. Dewey, Pesos and Dollars: Entrepreneurs in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1940 (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014).
20
Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2018).
21
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
22
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).
10
Grande borderlands into the 1850s.
23
By examining the region through the perspective of
European-born entrepreneurs over the longue durée, I hope to complicate the distinct
periodization of the borderlands.
24
The evidence base demonstrating the significance of European-born entrepreneurs in the
Rio Grande borderlands over this long period is quite broad. This study relies on family and
personal papers, travelogues and journals, business records, government documents, and political
and commercial correspondence.
25
Personal papers show what impact European-born
entrepreneurs had on the region and offer insights into ventures and projects that failed or
succeeded. They document colonizing schemes and mercantile enterprises from their inception to
the point when they floundered demonstrating interconnectedness and change over time.
Successive entrepreneurs used their forbears' records to inform them on their next venture. I also
utilize government documents from the United States, Mexico, Spain, England, and France.
26
Government documents reveal how state agents viewed the Rio Grande borderlands and the
European-born entrepreneurs working there. Using customs records, foreign office dispatches,
broadsides, and congressional investigations, I piece together the economic and political
23
As I will demonstrate in chapters 2 and 3, European-born entrepreneurs and state agents took advantage of
Mexican and Texan land policies to attempt to extend European control to the Rio Grande borderlands.
24
Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 14-38;
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1972).
25
Some of the key collections to my research include: José San Román Papers, 1823-1934, Dolph Briscoe Center
for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; John Charles Beales Papers, 1832-1855, Dolph Briscoe
Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; Bustillo Family Papers, 1772-1936, Col 879,
Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, San Antonio, Texas; Charles Stillman Business Papers, 1847-1884 (MS
Am 800.27). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
26
The most important government document collections include: Archivo General de Mexico, 1538-1849, Dolph
Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; Despatches from United States Consuls in
Matamoros, Mexico, 1826-1906, Microfilm Mf79.01, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University; Ephraim
Douglas Adams, British Diplomatic Correspondence Concerning the Republic of Texas, 1838-1846 (Austin: The
Texas State Historical Association, 1918); Nancy Nichols Barker and A. Dubois de Saligny, The French Legation in
Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971); Foreign Office: General Correspondence before 1906, The
National Archives, Kew-Foreign Office.
11
connections among European-born entrepreneurs, their social and business networks, and the
goals European states had for the region.
27
I begin in 1749 when Spanish entrepreneurs took advantage of the Bourbon Reforms to
strike out into the Rio Grande borderlands to settle it in the name of Spain and profit on a
previously untapped part of the colony of New Spain. These Spanish entrepreneurs created a
foundation for the region's political economy that persisted well into the Mexican national
period. Since a key part of this project is interested in exploring how European-born
entrepreneurs impacted the borderland between the United States and Mexico, a majority of the
dissertation focuses on the national period, with specific chapters on Northern Mexico, the era of
the Republic of Texas, and the time period after the U.S.-Mexico War. The study ends in 1881,
the year the Texas-Mexican Railway tied the region more firmly to North American markets,
cutting out the profits and importance of transatlantic shipping to the Lower Rio Grande. The
Texas-Mexican Railway was also the product of an American business network that worked to
destroy a similar rail project, the Rio Grande Railroad, initiated by European-born entrepreneurs
trying to use railroads to integrate the region more firmly in the Atlantic market.
My analysis proceeds along three interrelated geographic levels within which Europeans
operated. At the broadest level is the portion of the Atlantic World spanning Europe, North
America, the Caribbean, and especially the Gulf of Mexico. Regionally, the Rio Grande
borderlands is the space where European-born entrepreneurs focused the intensity of their
programs. The region is bounded in the north by San Antonio, in the southeast by Corpus Christi,
the south by Brownsville/Matamoros, in the southwest by Monterrey, and in the west by Piedras
27
The ability to read and write, purchase paper, and engage in mercantile activity was reserved to the wealthier
families in the borderlands. Therefore, their voices take prominence in the narrative. However, they did employ a
significant number of laborers, whose lives these entrepreneurs attempted to change.
12
Negras/Eagle Pass, and includes Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, Roma, Camargo, Reynosa, and other
borderland communities. Mexican historians have long argued in favor of the study of the
geographic region between San Antonio and Monterrey.
28
Finally, the local cities, towns, and
villas mark the narrowest of my geographic focus.
29
Figure 1 Map of the Rio Grande Borderlands
28
Mario Cerutti, Burguesía, capitales e industria en el norte de México: Monterrey y su ámbito regional (1850 –
1910) (México, D.F: Alianza Ed, 1992), 51-61; Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga, "Conflict and Cooperation in the
Making of Texas-Mexico Border Society, 1840-1880," in Benjamin Heber Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds.,
Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010), 33-52.
29
Contemporaries conceived of the regional market within similar geographic terms. An advertisement for a new
transportation line in 1849 makes the market boundaries clear. Three American investors sought to establish routes
connecting Corpus Christi to San Antonio and Mier. From Mier, the new company assured traders would have
access to the "Mexican market," which basically meant Monterrey. Other advertisers on the very same page
privilege Matamoros or Laredo, but all seem to have the same basic understanding of the region in which they
worked. See: The Corpus Christi Star. (Corpus Christi, Tex.), Vol. 1, No. 51, Ed. 1, Saturday, September 8, 1849,
newspaper, Corpus Christi, Texas.
13
I conceive of the region as a borderland from 1749-1881 for several reasons. Until the
end of the U.S.-Mexico War in 1848, the Rio Grande borderland was contested among several
imperial powers, including Spain, Mexico, the United States, the Comanche Empire, Britain, and
France. Their failures to extend permanent authority over the region allowed for local freedom of
social and economic movement. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Rio Grande
borderlands became a bordered land on paper. The United States and Mexico had treaties and
maps that showed their respective states' control extended to the Rio Grande. For the most part,
that control was illusory. Individuals in the borderland still had an incredible amount of local
freedom of social and economic movement. Though the language changed to define commercial
movement across the boundary at the Rio Grande as "illicit trade" or "smuggling," state agents
had little recourse to stop it. Attempts to control the movement of people across the national
boundary were virtually non-existent. Geographic distance from government centers, the
continued presence of powerful indigenous groups, and the significant power of strong local
elites severely limited centralized state authority. European-born entrepreneurs in the region
mark one of the many multicultural subjects who took advantage of the fluidity of the region to
implement their own schemes. Until the railroads obliterated the distance between state centers
and the Rio Grande, the region remained a borderland.
30
The dissertation is divided into five chapters that analyze particular events to illustrate
how European-born entrepreneurs and state agents attempted to make the Rio Grande
30
Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in
between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 816; P. Hämäläinen
and S. Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 1, 2011), 345-354; Sabri Ateş,
The Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 1-4; Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), 4-7.
14
borderlands a modern hub of Atlantic trade. Chapter 1 examines how José de Escandón settled
the region in the name of Spain. It focuses on the blended networks of indigenous and Spanish
colonists who worked together to carve out an existence in the harsh climate of the Lower Rio
Grande and how Escandón utilized commerce to settle the region. Chapter 2 connects the
Mexican state to growing interest in Western Europe for Northern Mexican lands and markets in
the 1820s. Mexico encouraged Europeans to move to its northern frontier with favorable land
and immigration policies. However, nearly every political and economic strategy Mexican
officials and European entrepreneurs employed seemed to fail in the face of the rising power of
the Comanche and American empires. By examining one single European-led colonization
venture, Englishman John Charles Beales's colony at Dolores, I argue that expectations for the
Rio Grande borderlands were so unrealistic that the colony lasted only a few years. Chapter 3
examines the role of European states and state agents, many of whom earned land grant contracts
from the government of the Republic of Texas. They actively attempted to harness the power and
authority of European states to build settlements for European-born immigrants in the Rio
Grande borderlands.
The second half of the dissertation examines the more informal ways that European-born
entrepreneurs attempted to extend their control of the Rio Grande borderlands. Chapter 4
compares how two different European mercantile networks worked to gain a foothold in the
region after the U.S.-Mexico War. Chapter 5 examines the role of European-born entrepreneurs
in the cotton trade during the U.S. Civil War. The outbreak of the Civil War created new tensions
as rapid political change forced entrepreneurs to compromise their loyalties and moral principles
to earn the profits and power they desired. The epilogue explores the competition between
American railroad development and Europeans who wanted their own railroad lines. By 1881,
15
Americans were able to harness the full power of the United States and Mexican governments to
crush their European competition and embark on an era of American domination that effectively
erased the remnants – and the history – of their European-born competitors.
16
CHAPTER 1
"PARTIALLY CONSTRUCTED: BUILDING THE RIO GRANDE BORDERLANDS, 1749-
1821"
In the spring of 1747, a small hunting party of Comecrudos Indians spotted a group of
riders on horseback meandering down a plateau toward the wide Rio Grande Valley. At first, the
Comecrudos could not tell if the riders were a raiding party seeking plunder and captives. The
intruders’ plodding pace suggested otherwise. These were Europeans who had come from central
New Spain on a diplomatic mission. The Comecrudos hunters worried about what they wanted.
Spaniards on horseback had been coming to the Rio Grande since the sixteenth century to
capture Indians and enslave them in the silver mines or on large agricultural plantations.
1
The
hunting party likely sent runners back to their families to warn about the invading Europeans.
The rest of them moved to meet the Spanish riders to investigate their purpose for coming to the
Rio Grande.
A single member of the Comecrudos hunting party, a man the Spaniards called Santiago,
continually asked probing questions and received direct answers from the Spanish leader, José de
Escandón. The Spanish recruited Coahuiltecan-speaking interpreters for the expedition and used
them to communicate with Santiago, as the Comecrudos spoke a dialect of Coahuiltecan. During
1
The silver mines of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí demanded an incredible amount labor. Agricultural labor, too,
became scarce with the passage of the New Laws in 1553 limiting the power of encomenderos, or large landowners.
Mine owners and landowners supported entrepreneurial individuals willing to trek into the borderlands to take
indigenous slaves outside of the view of the Spanish Crown. For more information on the demands for indigenous
slave labor see Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).
17
his questioning, Santiago learned that the Spanish wanted to bring more settlers from the south to
build homes near the Rio Grande and they wanted help from people like the Comecrudos to do it.
In return, the Spanish promised an unending flow of supplies and peace among the Coahuiltecan
people who lived in the Rio Grande borderlands. The deal sounded okay, but Santiago wanted
proof the Spanish would follow through on their promises. He invited Escandón and his men to
the Comecrudos village to meet the nearly 400 hundred families who lived there and to show
their goodwill. Indeed, the Spanish soldiers provided food and tobacco in abundance to anyone
who approached them. Before they parted ways, Santiago agreed to welcome new people from
the south if Escandón promised that all of the Comecrudos lands would remain secure and none
of the people would be relocated. With their agreement struck, the Spaniards continued on,
leaving Santiago to imagine how much life in the Rio Grande borderlands might change.
2
*****
As one of the first European-born entrepreneurs to seek his fortune in the Rio Grande
borderlands, José de Escandón fundamentally changed the way Spain interacted with the region.
His primary goal, to create settled towns in a region that had been largely occupied by mobile
indigenous people for centuries, meant to satisfy his superiors in the government of New Spain
who wanted the indios bárbaros Christianized and congregated for productive labor.
3
Achieving
his goal would also provide Escandón personal opportunities for agricultural and commercial
wealth heretofore unavailable on New Spain’s northern frontier. He sought to capitalize by
acquiring large tracts of arable land and creating a mercantile monopoly through implementing
2
Debbie S. Cunningham, "The Exploration and Preliminary Colonization the Seno Mexicano under Don José de
Escandón (1747-1749): An Analysis based on Primary Spanish Manuscripts," (PhD Diss, Texas A&M University,
2010), 69-70, 78-79; Guy Stresser-Péan, San Antonio Nogalar: La Sierra de Tamaulipas y la Frontera Noreste de
Mesoamérica (Victoria: Universdad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, 2000), 566-567.
3
Indios bárbaros was a term the Spanish in the Americas often used to describe indigenous people who they
perceived as wild, ignorant, heathen, or savage. David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age
of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 14-15.
18
new, modern policies outlined in Bourbon Spain’s imperial reforms. Escandón’s initial efforts to
build the region through diplomatic, commercial, and military force marked the first in a series
of transformational efforts led by Europeans in the Rio Grande borderlands.
When José de Escandón set out on reconnaissance of the Rio Grande borderlands in the
mid-eighteenth century, he knew that Spanish expansion to the Rio Grande borderlands required
that settlers build alliances with indigenous people. By 1749, incorporating Indians into the
Spanish imperial project had become an important institution for how the empire expanded. The
Bourbon reforms that swept through New Spain in the eighteenth century shifted the focus of
imperial expansion from conquest and exploitation to settlement and cooperation. The Bourbons
wanted to defend the empire cheaply and efficiently. Creating indigenous allies to build frontier
populations and aid in defense thus served their administrative goals.
4
Comercio libre, or free trade, was also a key piece of reform designed to tie the empire
more tightly together. Not only did the networks built between Spanish and Indians help create
Spanish legitimacy on its frontiers, it also formed the foundations of important infrastructures
that allowed Spain to expand. Seeking personal wealth and promoting imperial expansion,
Escandón sought to merge Spanish and indigenous institutions and infrastructures through trade
and exchange to settle the Rio Grande borderlands.
5
Competing interests tempered Escandón's successes in transforming the borderlands. His
military subordinates chafed at his leadership decisions and the power he wielded. Spanish
settlers challenged his land policies and agreements to cooperate with indigenous people.
4
David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2005), 5-8.
5
Allan J Kuethe and Kenneth J Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the
Bourbon Reforms, 1713-1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17, 335-336; Brian R. Hamnett,
“Mercantile Rivalry and Peninsular Division: The Consulados of New Spain and the Impact of the Bourbon
Reforms, 1789-1824,” Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv 2, no. 4 (1976): 273–305.
19
Religious orders, threatened by Escandón's trust in secular institutions, lobbied to have him
replaced. All of these groups came together to successfully undermine Escandón's program,
ensuring his plan was only partially implemented.
This chapter argues that, although Escandón was a military leader, he was also an
entrepreneur. He convinced indigenous groups in New Spain to join his venture and utilized his
network of well-positioned allies in the Spanish Empire who wanted to extend the liberal trade
policies of the Bourbon reforms to New Spain's northern frontier. Escandón simultaneously
worked to expand Spain's control of the borderlands and enrich himself by combining his
diplomatic skills, military prowess, and commercial acumen. Under the liberalizing Bourbon
reforms, Escandón represented a new kind of imperial official whose job was to advance
commercial development which, in turn, meant a new fuzzy line between his public duties and
private interests. In the first decade, he executed his plans with significant success. However,
internal strife and backlash from powerful conservative groups undermined Escandón's project.
Growing imperial problems within the Spanish Empire further caused the Rio Grande colonies to
stagnate and become more isolated, leaving the borderlands partially constructed. Regardless,
Escandón's project marks the first of many European attempts to remake the Rio Grande
borderlands into an imagined commercial utopia.
*****
Escandón had a clear model for blending Indians into European settlements. Constructing
alliances with indigenous people had its roots in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Hernán Cortés
did not conquer the Aztec Empire with only 500 Spanish warriors and a dozen horses. He
succeeded because he created alliances with Nahuatl speaking indigenous nations who lived on
the periphery of the Aztec Empire and loathed the constant demand for tribute from the imperial
20
capital, Tenochtitlan. Often, those alliances were built by creating kinship bonds. Spanish men,
including Cortés, engaged in relationships with indigenous women. Their offspring theoretically
became the children of New Spain, as Spaniards, mestizos, and their Indian allies moved outward
from Tenochtitlan to settle the colony.
6
One of the most important alliances Cortés made was with the Tlaxcalans. After a brief
battle on first contact, the Tlaxcalans invited the Spanish into their lands where they received
Cortés with a welcoming ceremony and offered his men lodging. The Tlaxcalan leaders offered
female slaves to the Spanish men creating a basis for kinship bonds between Spaniard and
Tlaxcalan. From their first reception onward, the Tlaxcalans not only aided the Spanish in the
conquest of the Aztecs, but they quickly adapted to and adopted Spanish norms in order to
maintain Tlaxcalan ways of life. As a people who had constantly challenged the Aztec Empire
for autonomy, they simply mobilized the strategies they utilized under one empire and applied
them to another. For Nahuatl speaking people like the Tlaxcalans, the imperial structure itself
changed very little. Spain merely overlaid itself upon the model the Aztecs had implemented.
Administrative districts, town organizations, and even the encomienda system were familiar to
both the Spanish and indigenous people.
7
After the Tlaxcalans aided Cortés in his capture of
Tenochtitlan, they helped build a composite Spanish-indigenous society that slowly spread
northward into non-Nahuatl speaking lands.
8
6
Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 6th ed (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008); David L. Frye, Indians into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town, 1st ed (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1996); Colin M. Maclachlan, Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Sean F. McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the
Foundations, 1560-1840 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
7
The encomienda were large land grants given to prominent Spaniards who exacted tribute in labor and the products
of labor from the native peoples who resided there.
8
Diego Muñoz y Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala (Barcelona: Digitalia, 2001) 97-101; Susan Schroeader, Stephanie
Wood, and Robert Haskett, Indian Women of Early Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 87-92;
James Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill:
21
Though the Tlaxcalans adapted to the imposition of the Spanish Empire in central New
Spain, they had to cope with the destruction of the Aztec Empire and the imposition of European
colonialism. The Spanish inflicted horrifying violence upon much of the indigenous population.
Cortés’s takeover of Tenochtitlan was an incredibly violent affair and though the Tlaxcalans
aided the Spanish in Moctezuma’s overthrow, they were not exempt from the political, social,
and cultural warfare Spain directed at its new colony, not to mention the devastating results of
communicable diseases. The best way indigenous people had to cope with the disaster of the
disintegrated Aztec Empire was to continue with life as they knew it. Most indigenous people
just incorporated the new Spanish agenda into their daily norms. For example, Spain sent
missionaries to convert their new subjects to Catholicism. Priests performed mass baptisms
declaring all those they baptized to be practicing Christians. Indigenous people had little
understanding what that meant. They just adapted the European god and the saints to their own
pantheon. Nahuatl notions of religion evolved to become a hybrid of their past beliefs and the
new strictures the Spanish foisted upon them with no concrete idea of what they might become in
the future. It was a cultural violence with no clear end to the victims.
9
One area in which the Nahuatl successfully acknowledged and resisted Spanish violence
was through language. By 1550, only thirty years after Cortés conquered Tenochtitlan, speakers
of the Nahuatl language, including the Tlaxcalans, conformed Nahuatl to the Latin script and
University of North Carolina Press, 2002) 1-40. Doña Marina remains a contentious figure in Mexican
historiography. For more on the various interpretations of her see: Cristina González Hernández, Doña Marina (la
Malinche) y la Formación de la Identidad Mexicana, (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2002), 11-14; Frances
Karttunen, "Rethinking Malinche," in Indian Women: Gender Differences and Identity in Early Mexico (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press 1993), 291-312.
James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico,
Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 3-5.
9
Patricia Lopes Don, Bonfires of Culture: Franciscans, Indigenous Leaders, and Inquisition in Early Mexico, 1523-
1540 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010); Maclachlan, Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture;
Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).
22
crafted documents to maintain indigenous records. They also adopted Spanish writing in order to
defend their place within the Spanish bureaucracy. By turning their language into European
script and adapting it to Spanish bureaucratic norms, the Tlaxcalans maintained an ever-present
existence in the Spanish Empire. They flourished in central New Spain during the early years of
Spanish dominance and spread throughout Northern Mexico as Spanish settlement crept
northward. Nahuatl speaking people became key to Escandón's project in the eighteenth century
as they made up a significant portion of the settlers who moved into the Rio Grande
borderlands.
10
*****
As Spaniards and their indigenous allies slowly pushed the frontiers of New Spain
northward, the Spanish Empire went through a series of reform movements. The most important
imperial reorganization for the Rio Grande borderlands was the Bourbon reforms. Born out of
constant warfare in Europe and indigenous revolts in the Americas, the Bourbon reforms began
in the early eighteenth century with the goals of modernizing the empire through efficient and
pragmatic policies that included reorganizing the imperial army and divesting religious orders of
rural indigenous parishes. The Bourbon reforms also sought to curb smuggling by loosening
trade restrictions to utilize market transactions for imperial gain. The settlement of the Rio
Grande borderlands reflected the changes in the modern, reform oriented Spanish Empire.
11
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Bourbon appointed leadership in New Spain sought to
settle the land adjacent to the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, a region called the Seno Mexicano.
10
James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico,
Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 3-5; James Lockhart, Nahuas
and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991);
McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico, 123-125.
11
Kuethe and Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century, 1-28.
23
A vast swath of land, the Seno Mexicano ranged from the Nueces River in the north all the way
south to the northeastern boundaries of Querétaro. Due to its size, varied topography, and
unpredictable climate, Spain left the area virtually unsettled until the region posed significant
security issues for its empire. Primarily, France and England had begun to make probing inroads
along the Gulf Coast. Spain feared that if either of those competing empires gained a foothold, it
would lose the region. Additionally, the Seno Mexicano had become a refuge for indios bárbaros
and apostates who chose to flee from Spanish priests and soldiers who occupied the northern
frontier. Leaders believed the region could be a proving ground for the modernizing principles of
the Bourbon reforms.
12
Before the Bourbons took over the Spanish imperial project, there remained two
institutional frameworks on Spain's northern frontier that preceded Escandón's mixed
colonization scheme: the mission and presidio system. Missions marked the first institution to
expand northward because they were cost-effective and maintained the goal of acculturating
indigenous populations to make them productive Spanish subjects who would defend the empire.
Using missions also helped Spanish authorities justify their conquest by claiming they were
spreading the gospel. Andrés de Olmos led the first mission to the Seno Mexicano in the mid-
sixteenth century. A scholar of indigenous languages, Olmos brought Nahuatl-speaking people to
the region around Tampico where he began studying the languages of nearby people to attempt
to Christianize and Hispanicize the nomadic Coahuiltecans. Though he died of illness in
Tampico without making significant inroads with the people along the Rio Grande, his effort
12
Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 358-368.
24
provided an example of utilizing indigenous allies to expand imperial control through
missionaries.
13
Figure 2 Mapa de la Sierra Gorda, 1792, Archival Map Collection, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Library.
It took over a century after Olmos died for the Franciscans to return their attention to the
Rio Grande borderlands as incidents of indigenous violence exploded on New Spain's frontier.
Drought and Comanche expansion pushed the Lipan Apache from eastern New Mexico and the
Texas Plains down to the Rio Grande and below. Poor rainfall accumulations drove the Lipanes
13
Juanita Elizondo Garza, “Indian and Spanish-Mexican Cultural Influence in the Lower Rio Grande Valley,” M.A.
Thesis, Pan American University, Edinburg, 1984, 29-32.
25
to seek lands with better access to freshwater. Additionally, the Comanche began to exert
increasing power on the Southern Plains by the end of the seventeenth century, pushing
southward into Apache territories. As the Lipan Apache moved to seek well-watered land and to
avoid the Comanche onslaught, they challenged the Coahuiltecans for the limited resources in
the Rio Grande borderlands. To stem the violence that creeped southward, missionaries from
Querétaro set out to proselytize and turn the raiding Indians into settled agriculturalists. The first
mission to take hold in the Seno Mexicano opened at San Juan Bautista on the southern bank of
the Rio Grande in 1699.
14
The friars at San Juan Bautista quickly realized that their Christian zeal could not soothe
the turmoil in the borderlands and requested military assistance. Help came in the form of the
presidios, a highly developed defense network of stone forts connected by troops on horseback.
The presidio system became a key part of Spain's strategy to defend the empire's outer
boundaries, stifle indigenous violence, and stem incursions into Spanish territory from
competing European empires. To help presidios achieve success, soldiers came from frontier
populations who had an interest in their own defense. Having a stake in the place they defended
helped ensure that the soldiers would commit to protecting the frontier. Through the mission and
presidio, the Spanish Crown sought to strengthen its hold on the periphery of its empire.
15
The plan of using missions and presidios to hold the frontier did not always work, as can
be seen through the exploits of French merchant Louis Saint-Denis. In 1713, Saint-Denis and a
small band of French explorers traveled through Northern New Spain building alliances and
14
Robert S. Weddle, San Juan Bautista: Gateway to Spanish Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 3-28;
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 32-40, 129; W. W.
Newcomb, Jr., The Indians of Texas from Prehistoric to Modern Times (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961),
102-109.
15
Max L. Moorehead, The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1975).
26
opening trade connections with Karankawa bands and other Indian groups along the Gulf Coast.
They also navigated a large portion of the Lower Rio Grande and moved south of the river
before the captain at the presidio San Juan Bautista found out about it. Saint-Denis eluded
presidio scouts for months while he explored the Rio Grande, gained intelligence about the
Spanish frontier, and made essential commercial contacts with indigenous people. Spanish
officials responded by filing reports that the French had colonial designs on Spanish territory.
"The French entered under the pretext of seeking cattle…but it has been concluded that they are
investigating the land for Louisiana."
16
They believed Saint-Denis was only the first of a wave of
French settlers to overtake the Gulf Coast. Some even worried the French might drive all the way
from the Gulf to New Mexico. The newly installed Bourbon leadership rapidly reconsidered
Spanish policies regarding the Seno Mexicano.
17
Saint-Denis revealed the limitations of the mission and presidio systems to secure the
frontier from imperial incursions. His mercantile operations demonstrated that the French had
commercial advantages over Spain and that trade could successfully penetrate Spain's frontier
line. French traders ingratiated themselves into Indian customs, learned indigenous languages,
and generally engaged in trade as level partners. French merchants accepted the importance of
building kinship relationships with indigenous people all over their imperial claims in North
America and Saint-Denis's expedition applied French knowledge of Indian trade when it entered
Texas. Most importantly, the French did not have the same restrictions on Indian trade that Spain
did. The Spanish actively avoided trading guns or ammunition to Indians in fear of those
16
Report of the Junta de Guerra y Hacienda to the Viceroy, December 2, 1716, Box 2Q177, Volume 27, 157-159,
Archivo General de Mexico, 1538-1849, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at
Austin, (Hereafter cited DBCAH).
17
David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 160-162.
27
weapons being turned on them. The fact that the French willingly exchanged weapons made
them attractive trade partners for indigenous people. The frustrations and fears of French
commercial expansion influenced Spanish policy in the Seno Mexicano.
18
Saint-Denis’s expedition also coincided with a new monarchy in Spain. The Bourbon
government emerged victorious in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 and took over the
Spanish Crown from the Hapsburgs. The Bourbon regime sought to modernize the Spanish
imperial structure, including military commitments and economic growth. The mission and
presidio represented the outdated methods of the old regime. Bourbon administrators wanted to
tighten Spain’s trade system to make New Spain more profitable for the empire. Administrators
believed that by cutting military expenditures, creating bureaucratic oversight and encouraging
internal trade, Spain’s American colonies would produce considerably more wealth than before.
The margin of the empire along the Rio Grande seemed to be a perfect place to implement new
imperial changes. The Bourbon regime just had to find an agent to execute the new course of
action.
19
*****
After years of deliberation and politicking, the job of settling the Seno Mexicano
eventually fell to Colonel José de Escandón. Born in Santander in Spain, Escandón made his
home in Querétaro, the center of New Spain's commercial society. The Marqués de Altamira
handpicked Escandón for the job because of the colonel's previous accomplishments in pacifying
the Sierra Gorda. Another reason Escandón received his commission was that he spurned both
18
David La Vere, "The Caddo Chiefdoms of Texas," in Sam W. Haynes & Cary D. Wintz, Major Problems in Texas
History: Documents and Essays, 2nd ed., (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2017), 41-46; Weber, Spanish Frontier, 172-
186.
19
John Huxtable Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492 – 1830 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 229-234.
28
the mission and presidio systems as turgid, believing that commerce and settled agriculture were
the keys to long-term success. Escandón embraced the notion that open trade would lead to the
permanent settlement of the Seno Mexicano but had the martial ability to use force in case
commerce failed to bring peace.
20
Seeing the success of French commercial expeditions into the Rio Grande borderlands
spurred Bourbon officials to embrace the notion that commerce would better secure the frontier
than missions or presidios. For example, the Marqués de Altamira noted in a letter to the viceroy
of New Spain that if the Seno Mexicano was settled with large communities instead of presidios
or missions, trade would naturally expand between Texas, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon. All the
people on the frontier would benefit, which would result in a population dedicated to conserving
the Spanish presence in the region. The Marqués de Altamira also believed that commerce would
pacify the indigenous population of the Seno Mexicano. "The souls of the Gentiles and the
apostates to the security and extension, not only of those borders, but all those who have plots of
land, will be free with the open traffic of trade."
21
Prominent members of the Spanish Empire
were pushing to expand internal trade as a key to solving the frontier problem.
Bourbon policymakers listened to men like the Marqués de Altamira. Rather than send
out more missionaries or build more presidios, the Bourbon reformers opted to acculturate indios
barbaros into Spanish society through market mechanisms. By mobilizing the wage system,
reformers hoped to utilize indigenous labor and Europeanize Indians. In practice, the wage
system turned into debt peonage in which Indians were advanced wages and spent years working
20
Patricia Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 1748-1772 (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas; Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, 1997), 102-107; John Tutino,
Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2011), 7; Chipman & Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 127-133.
21
Report of El Marquess de Altamira, Archivo General de Mexico, 1538-1849, Box 2Q213, Volume 179, Part II,
531, DBCAH.
29
off the interest. For those Indians who failed to embrace Spain's enticements of peace, trade,
work, and economic growth, the Crown endowed the military with the power to eradicate them
through whatever means necessary. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Seno Mexicano became
the focus for Spain's new colonization program.
22
Escandón got the job because of his military success, family connections, and business
acumen. As a young man, Escandón made a name for himself in the Sierra Gordas as an Indian
fighter and built a reputation within the frontier elite. He parlayed that into successful marriage
proposals. His first wife, María Antonia de Ocío y Ocampo, came from an enterprising family in
Querétaro. He invested the dowry he received from the marriage into the burgeoning local textile
industry and began to identify himself as a mercador, or merchant. Tragically, Maria Antonia
died in 1736 leaving Escandón with two small children. The next year, he married María Josefa
Llera y Baises of a politically powerful family. Her father, Santiago de Llera Ruvalcuva, was a
city councilman in Querétaro. Escandón's marriage and family network put him in contact with
influential individuals in the Spanish bureaucratic chain. When Spanish leadership pushed to
colonize the Seno Mexicano, the Marqués de Altamira knew of Escandón and persuaded the
viceroy of New Spain to appoint the captain to fulfill the mission.
23
Escandón had the challenge of implementing the dual Bourbon reform policy of the
velvet glove backed by the iron fist. Civilian villas rather than military establishments lay at the
heart of Escandón's strategy, making the settlers the most important group of the entire project.
22
Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 238; David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of
Enlightenment, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) 105-107; Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 229-230.
23
Weber, Bárbaros, 105; Tutino, Making a New World, 192-209; Mario Alberto Cardenas, “José De Escandón, the
Last Spanish Conquistador: A Study of Royal Service and Personal Achievement in 18th Century New Spain”
(Thesis, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, 1999), 50-55, 66.
The Marqués de Altamira's brother-in-law, Domingo de Trespalacios y Escandón, may have also been related to
José de Escandón. See: María del Carmen Velázquez, El marqués de Altamira y las provincias internas de Nueva
España (Mexico: Colegio de Mexico, 1976), 26.
30
They needed to be convinced to leave their homes, trek hundreds of miles across largely
unmapped and rugged landscape to build towns from the ground up in a territory they knew to be
inhabited by Indians who might violently defend against incursions. Escandón and the Spanish
state had to build value into the venture in order to get enough volunteers who would be willing
to exert such efforts. The first key to recruiting settlers was to draw them from the northern
territories around Coahuila, Nuevo León, Texas, and Potosí so they were already familiar with
the land and living at considerable distance from central New Spain. Escandón and the Marqués
de Altamira demanded support from the authorities of those provinces to ensure settlers had
access to the supplies needed to settle in the borderlands.
24
Tlaxcalans made up a significant portion of the settled population in New Spain’s far
north. From the end of the sixteenth century, Tlaxcalans and other Nahuatl speaking people aided
Spain in settling its northern frontier. Nearly half of the towns and villas established in Nuevo
Leon were founded by Tlaxcalan migrants. Many of the settlers that Escandón recruited came
from the former Tlaxcalan settlements. Largely Hispanicized, the Tlaxcalans furthered the
Spanish goal of Europeanizing the frontier.
25
Potential settlers, Tlaxcalan or not, needed material encouragement to leave the relative
security of the settled frontier to enter the unsettled borderlands. Escandón offered settlers who
traveled to the Rio Grande borderlands promises of land allotments for both farming and
pasturing that exceeded anything they could attain farther south. Each family who decided to join
the expedition received up to two hundred pesos to purchase supplies and offset the costs that
would burden potential settlers. Escandón combined initial cash payments alongside future
prospects in land and property to convince people to settle on the frontier. With these
24
Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 107-108.
25
McEnroe, From Colony to Nationhood, 21-56, 123-125.
31
inducements, the first two settlements on the Rio Grande, Camargo and Reynosa, began with
more than forty families apiece in the spring of 1749.
26
With town sites established, Escandón turned his attention to commerce and the potential
for lucrative personal profits. In his report to the viceroy of New Spain, Escandón made a point
to highlight the commercial advantages of the Rio Grande borderlands. All the salt lagoons that
dotted the areas north and south of the Rio Grande drew his attention. Downplaying the lack of
freshwater, he focused on the quality of the salt that the lagoons produced and the ease of
extracting it in copious quantities. Enterprising individuals in Nuevo León already made semi-
annual trips to the region to gather salt to sell in the south, but Escandón saw that the trade in salt
from the Rio Grande borderlands could be expanded significantly and with remarkable success.
27
Salt was one of the most important commodities in the world in the eighteenth century.
Salt preserved food, aided in the domestication of cattle, and remained an essential ingredient to
silver mining. From before 2000 BCE, humans have used salt to cure and preserve fish and meat.
Having huge salt deposits in the Rio Grande borderlands meant that potential settlers would be
able to keep proteins in storage for lean times. With the region's lack of freshwater and semi-arid
climate, Escandón likely envisioned that the people would encounter times of drought in which
they would have to rely on salted food to get through.
28
The Rio Grande's abundance of salt lagoons and rolling grasslands would contribute to
the creation of a successful cattle industry. Describing the terrain around the Rio Grande as,
26
Florence Johnson Scott, Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande: A Historical Record of Spanish
Exploration, Subjugation and Colonization of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the Activities of José Escandón,
Count of Sierra Gorda together with the Development of Towns and Ranches Under Spanish, Mexican and Texas
Sovereignties 1747-1848 (Rio Grande City: La Retama Press, 1965), 18-30.
27
Cunningham, "The Exploration and Preliminary Colonization the Seno Mexicano under Don José de Escandón,"
72-74, 90.
28
Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 6-8.
32
"very flat, with the exception of some low rolling hills and it is of beautiful quality for all kinds
of planting and raising livestock due to producing the best pasturage I have ever seen in as far as
I have traveled," Escandón clearly anticipated the ranching culture that would develop around
the river.
29
Settlers who chose the area could produce enough livestock to not only sustain
themselves, but to export beef on the hoof, wool, and hide in great quantity. Established
saltworks from Rio Grande lagoons would allow for the long-term storage of surplus meat and
the production of quality, exportable hide. The sheer amount of salt in the Rio Grande
borderlands offered the possibility of a sprawling cattle industry for New Spain's frontier.
30
Salt deposits in the Rio Grande borderlands also meant that the region had a ready export
commodity to ship south in exchange for necessary finished goods and hard currency. By the
mid-eighteenth century, Spanish silver drove the entire Atlantic economy. Potosí and Zacatecas
had grown into key producers of silver for Spain and the entire western world, but silver
production relied upon the patio process for extracting silver from its ore. The patio process
required significant quantities of salt mixed with mercury and copper sulfate to create the
chemical reaction to free silver from its compounds. For decades, the Spanish had to ship tons of
salt from Guadalajara or even the Yucatán to Potosí and Zacatecas. If the Rio Grande
borderlands could produce efficient salt works, it would make the mining ventures more
profitable and add to the economic stability of the new borderland settlements.
31
The biggest problem Escandón saw for the commercial success of the Rio Grande
borderlands was the lack of roads and ports necessary to ship goods into and out of the region.
29
Cunningham, "The Exploration and Preliminary Colonization of the Seno Mexicano under Don José de
Escandón," 77.
30
Kurlansky, Salt, 10-12.
31
Kurlansky, Salt, 206-207; Carlos Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars between Spain,
Britain, and France, 1760-1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Anne Staples, "Mexican Mining
and Independence: The Saga of Enticing Opportunities," in Christon I. Archer, ed., The Birth of Modern Mexico,
1780-1824 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc, 2003), 151-153.
33
The development of transportation infrastructure became key to his mission to settle the Seno
Mexicano. Escandón called for roads to be constructed from every settlement in the borderlands
that would build upon the already existing system of indigenous pathways and connect with the
key thoroughfares developed in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon. The idea was to shorten distances
between way stations to make it more difficult for Indian raiding parties to plunder trading
caravans. New roads would also allow for the rapid movement of Spanish troops to counter the
speed of indigenous attacks. Commercially, the road system expanded communications on New
Spain's northern frontier allowing for greater interconnectedness among the villas to build a
regional market. Escandón set his entire enterprise to building roads to quash indigenous unrest
and quickly jumpstart commerce in the borderlands.
32
The Nueces Strip, an area of land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, became
a consistent frustration for Escandón. It proved to be a northern boundary for his road building
project. Due to the desert-like conditions there and the power the Apache wielded near the
Nueces's headwaters, the costs of building additional roads from the Rio Grande villas to San
Antonio de Béxar outweighed the benefits. Reynosa and Camargo became the primary northern
way stations. Travel to Texas remained limited to the Camino Real, a highway that connected
Monterrey and Béxar. However, he pushed his subordinates to found a villa near the Nueces
delta and develop a safe road connecting the Nueces to the Rio Grande that included stops with
access to freshwater. The man he put in charge, Captain Pedro Paredes, set out with fifty families
to accomplish the mission. Paredes found his task impossible as there was just not enough water
between the Nueces and Rio Grande. Indigenous pathways provided better access to freshwater
32
Lawrence Francis Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of Nuevo Santander, A Study in Spanish Colonization
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1926), 75; Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 194-196; P. Koujianou
Goldberg and R. Hellerstein, “A Structural Approach to Identifying the Sources of Local Currency Price Stability,”
The Review of Economic Studies 80, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 175–210.
34
than any road the Spanish could build. He informed Escandón as much and abandoned the
venture. Eventually, a small community named Dolores developed in the Nueces Strip about
twenty miles north of the Rio Grande, but it collapsed within a decade. Escandón could not crack
the Nueces Strip.
33
Figure 3 Rigobert Bonne, Carte du Mexique ou de la N[ouve]lle Espagne contenant aussi le
Nouveau Mexique, la Californie, avec une partie des pays adjacents, engraving with applied
coloring on paper, 28 x 40 cm. (Paris: chez Lattre, 1771). This map narrows the Nueces Strip and
includes lakes to make it seem less of a barrier to settlement.
33
Cunningham, "The Exploration and Preliminary Colonization of the Seno Mexicano under Don José de
Escandón," 52. 95-96, 189, 199; Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 194-195. Handbook of Texas Online, John
Hazelton, "NUESTRA SENORA DE LOS DOLORES HACIENDA," accessed June 03, 2019,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/uen02.
35
With the Nueces Strip cutting off northern extensions, Escandón wanted to open as many
connections with the population centers in central New Spain as he could. He became
increasingly preoccupied with establishing ports to connect the coast of the Seno Mexicano to the
bustling port of Veracruz. However, barrier islands, shallow estuaries, and constantly shifting
sandbars made the Gulf Coast of the Rio Grande borderlands a treacherous place for ships. He
took his time to explore the coast to choose the best possible location for portage. Eventually,
Escandón and his advisors decided the area near modern day Soto la Marina to be the most
favorable. Though it could only accommodate galleys and smaller ships, it remained the most
sensible location for a port in all the Seno Mexicano. As early as 1609, leaders in Coahuila and
Nuevo Leon had looked to the area around Soto la Marina to build a port. They just had trouble
covering the overland distance to the coast. Escandón's road projects eliminated that problem.
The harbor at Soto la Marina remained imperfect, though. Deposits from the delta of Río Soto la
Marina constantly pushed water from the harbor into inland lagoons decreasing the depth of the
channel. Without regular maintenance, only shallow draft boats could use the port. Escandón's
personal galley, the Conquistadora, was perfectly designed for the shallow harbor. With his
small ship, Escandón brought much needed supplies into the borderlands at a speed that could
not be matched by mule trains traveling overland, although he could not move goods in the bulk
quantities the settlers needed.
34
José de Escandón combined his commercial and military prowess to build the Rio Grande
borderlands. In just a few years, he settled more than six thousand colonists in the Seno
34
Cunningham, "The Exploration and Preliminary Colonization of the Seno Mexicano under Don José de
Escandón," 51; Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018),
ebook; Osante, Orígenes Del Nuevo Santander, 191-194. Hill, José de Escandón,111.
36
Mexicano. Funded mostly by himself and his network of supporters, including the Marques de
Altamira, he seemed to be on the brink of reaping the personal profits from all the individual risk
he took on.
35
*****
By 1757, Escandón had finished the first stage of his plan to settle the Seno Mexicano.
The region became the internal province of Nuevo Santander of which Escandón was named
governor. In the decade after the establishment of the first settlements along the Rio Grande, the
Spanish and their indigenous partners created a total of twenty towns in Nuevo Santander. The
new road system and small port led to an upsurge of productivity. As Escandón anticipated, salt
exports and cattle raising became the primary economic activities for the settlers. His plan to
settle the region through commerce had come to fruition without significant complications.
36
After eight years of allowing Escandón the freedom to do as he saw fit on the frontier, the
viceroy of New Spain decided that he needed to assess Escandón's progress. The Marqués de las
Amarillas sent an envoy to investigate the settlements in Nuevo Santander in 1757. Following
instructions, the leader of the inspection team, José Tienda de Cuervo, focused on Nuevo
Santander's demographics, subsistence, transportation, and mineral wealth. All of his
investigations and depositions painted a picture of an isolated colony that was growing rapidly
but needed sustained trade with other regions and land reform in order to survive and prosper.
37
The frontier's burgeoning population struck Tienda de Cuervo as he toured the region.
The population growth in the Rio Grande borderlands occurred for several reasons. One key
source of growth was natural increase. For example, in Camargo's first year of existence, the
35
Weber, Bárbaros, 105-106.
36
Chipman & Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 142-149.
37
Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of Nuevo Santander, 106-139.
37
census of the town showed that seventy-two families settled there with twenty percent of the
heads of household listed as indio or mestizo.
38
By 1757, during the time of Tienda de Cuervo's
visit, the population had grown by seventeen families with most of those created through
intermarriage. Many of the older children of the original settlers married one another to help
build a tight knit, highly networked community. Indio and mestizo families blended in Camargo
helping it to grow to one of the most stable settlements in the Rio Grande borderlands.
39
Other contributors to the rapid population increase included in-migration of entrepreneurs
from neighboring Nuevo Leon and Coahuila. Revilla and Mier drew hundreds of migrants from
Monterrey and Saltillo who sought to take advantage of the land for cattle and the salt deposits
nearby. The first settlers of both towns came from Monterrey and they recruited heavily in their
former hometowns to bring more settlers to their slice of the frontier. Also, being the closest Rio
Grande settlements to Coahuila and Nuevo Leon made Revilla and Mier more attractive to
potential migrants.
40
A final source of early population growth came from nearby Indians trickling into the
new towns. The towns offered better protection from the intermittent raiding that still occurred in
the region. During the 1750s and 1760s, the Comanche on the Texas plains were going through a
political evolution. Several bands of the Eastern Comanche broke away from the main body to
push their territory further south and east. Initially, this aided the formation of Spanish villas near
the Lower Rio Grande because the Comanche avoided attacking settlements that might result in
38
Provincias Internas, Archivo General de Mexico, 1538-1849, Box 2Q213, Volume 180, 4-25, (DBCAH).
39
Sección de Historia, Villa de Camargo, Archivo General de Mexico, 1538-1849, Box 2Q180, Volume 56, 297-
341, (DBCAH).
40
Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of Nuevo Santander, 97-99.
38
casualties. While that would change in the 1770s and 1780s, the division of the Eastern
Comanche gave the Spanish an era of respite from concentrated raids.
41
The area around Mier was particularly attractive to Indians who lived near the Rio
Grande because of its location near an important ford in the river. However, some of the Indian
families may not have chosen to settle in Mier voluntarily. With the growing saltworks near the
town, owners needed labor to mine it and transport it. It is probable that town leaders forcibly
congregated indigenous families to exploit their labor. The need for labor often resulted in
settlers of the villas using debt or even physical captivity to draw local indigenous workers, in
contrast to the agreements Escandón made with people like the Comecrudos. In two years,
between 1755-1757, seven Indian families moved to and settled in Mier. The total population of
the town grew by 106 people during those same two years. Indigenous migration combined with
natural increase to create a steady growth rate in the population of the Rio Grande borderlands.
42
The growing population on the frontier needed greater access to trade and markets.
Tienda de Cuervo focused a significant portion of his time trying to find a better harbor to open
Nuevo Santander to trade within the Spanish Gulf of Mexico but failed to find anything that met
with his satisfaction. He interviewed Escandón and the governor's most trusted helmsman,
Bernardo Vidal Buzcarrones, about the best possible place to construct a new and bustling port.
Both men suggested investing in improving Soto la Marina, but Tienda de Cuervo found the
location to be wanting with too many sandbars and too shallow shipping lanes. He
commandeered Escandón's galley and had Buzcarrones take him up and down the coast for a
week looking for a better harbor. When he found none, he classified the coast as too expensive to
41
Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 104-106.
42
Gilberto Miguel Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition: Laredo, 1755-1870, (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1983), 3-17; Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of Nuevo Santander, 99-100; Osante,
Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 143; Weber, Bárbaros, 105-107.
39
trouble with. Tienda de Cuervo concluded that founding a sustainable port on the Seno Mexicano
was going to require dredging and constant maintenance. The inspector left Escandón with his
small dock and lone galley at Soto la Marina without recommending royal support for port
construction.
43
Even though Tienda de Cuervo could not find a suitable harbor to expand sea trade to the
borderlands, he recognized that Spain had to open more effective trade routes to the Rio Grande
borderlands if Escandón's experiment was going to succeed. Cattle raising had quickly become
the primary subsistence activity on the frontier because of the excellent pasturage and salt
deposits. Cattle also reigned because, contrary to Escandón's initial reports, it was nearly
impossible to grow surplus crops in the region. Rains came sporadically, often in monsoon
conditions, leaving sown fields either flooded or dried out with drought. The settlers recognized
that creating irrigation canals from the Rio Grande would require changing the entire landscape.
The depth of the riverbed was so low that water only ever rose to the level of the surrounding
land in times of flood. No irrigating canal dug by hand could be constructed from the river to
water surrounding lands. This meant that when the borderlanders needed produce, they had to
trade for it. At Mier, buyers from Monterrey exchanged their surplus maize for mules, wool,
hides, and salt. The same trade occurred at Camargo, Reynosa, and Revilla with agricultural
settlements farther south.
44
The soaring demand for essentials like corn and flour combined with arduous overland
travel to the centers of exchange deflated the value of the goods produced in the borderlands.
Even with Escandón's expanded road system, caravan transport remained costly, leaving the
people in the Rio Grande borderlands to live at a deficit in the 1750s. Salt became the most
43
Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of Nuevo Santander, 110-111.
44
Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of Nuevo Santander, 110-111.
40
important form of exchange for borderlanders. In the best of market conditions, two fanegas of
salt bought a fanega of corn.
45
In years of extended drought conditions, the price of corn might
rise to be sixteen times more than salt. Tienda de Cuervo recognized that further integrating the
borderlands into the greater market of New Spain would lower costs and improve the lives of the
settlers.
46
The inspector looked to the last settlement established under Escandón as a model for
how to better integrate the borderlands. Laredo originated with complete knowledge and
acceptance that acquiring crops would have to come through overland trade. Laredo's founder,
Tomás Sanchez, chose a location near the Camino Real that connected San Antonio de Béxar to
Nuevo León and Coahuila. He and the Laredo settlers relied on the road to acquire the necessary
foodstuffs to supplement their ranching subsistence, connecting to trade centers both north and
south. Tienda de Cuervo found the entire system self-sustaining and applauded it for not costing
the Crown anything. However, he still believed trade to be too isolated among just the
townspeople and encouraged more use of the Camino Real. The people of the Rio Grande
borderlands needed to market their goods in as many places as possible.
47
In response to Tienda de Cuervo’s report, Escandón set to work building more
infrastructures to allow Nuevo Santander to continue its growth. The most labor-intensive task he
set was to construct a new road from Tampico to Monterrey. With this new east-west highway,
villas to the north and south could more quickly move their products to either offload in the
growing commercial center of Monterrey or transport north or south along the Camino Real.
45
A fanega was a measure of volume that is roughly equivalent to 56 liters.
46
Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 197-198.
47
Hill, José de Escandón and the Founding of Nuevo Santander, 128-139; Herbert Eugene Bolton, "Tienda de
Cuervo's Ynspeccion of Laredo, 1757" in The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 3, (January
1903), 194, 198-203.
41
Escandón acknowledged the wisdom inherent in Tienda de Cuervo's report and took initiative to
turn the report into a plan of action.
48
*****
Parts of Tienda de Cuervo's report foreshadowed some of the problems that would grow
to undermine the new province. Political maneuverings and disputes over land began to erode the
delicate bonds Escandón built on the frontier that connected him to his military subordinates and
the settlers. A member of the initial expedition to the Seno Mexicano wrote a scathing critique of
Escandón's leadership and the founding of Nuevo Santander. Shortly after the province officially
came into existence, Escandón removed sergeant major Antonio Ladrón de Guevara from his
post as captain of the town of Santander for "reasons of health." Furious for his removal and
jealous of Escandón's power in the colony, Ladrón de Guevara wrote his own report to Tienda de
Cuervo criticizing the placement of each settlement in the colony. He argued that a key
component to the failure of the Rio Grande towns to be agriculturally self-sufficient came from
Escandón's poor decision-making and pursuit of personal profit. According to one of his
subordinates, blame for the borderlands' isolation rested solely on Escandón and his
entrepreneurial activities.
49
The settlers began to turn on Escandón in the second decade of Nuevo Santander's
existence, too. Politics, defense, and questions over land combined to lead the settlers to protest
the governor's rule. Politically, Escandón had appointed his most capable military officers to
leadership positions in each newfound town. Initially, this proved appropriate because all of the
townspeople were in charge of their own defense and it made sense to make a military leader
48
Chipman & Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 142-143.
49
Patricia Osante, "Un Proyecto de Antonio Ladrón de Guevara para las poblaciones de Nuevo Santander, 1767"
Estudios de Historia Novohispana 49, no. 1, (2013), 170-191.
42
also the civic leader in the early years of establishment. The military officer in charge could
quickly mobilize a militia and strategize with confidence to defend against attack from indios
barbaros. As the roots of the colony took hold, the settled families began to challenge the
military leadership. Not only did they want to hold the political power in their villas and not
remain beholden to military control, but indigenous attacks had grown more numerous. As the
eastern branch of the Comanche Empire consolidated and expanded, the Comanche increased
raiding on settlements south of the Rio Grande. The military leaders in charge of the villas failed
to provide adequate defense.
50
The settlers also grew restless about their land grants. From the commencement of
Escandón’s venture, settlers were promised grants for personal ownership of land. Even so, until
1767, most lands remained in common, or ejido. Individual families were allotted parcels on
which to graze their cattle, but the land remained collective. Since Escandón refused to distribute
title to individual owners, the land remained unsaleable. He argued that if he assigned individual
titles, the colonists would leave the towns deserted to live on their own land. Without title, the
settlers argued, no individuals could profit on the improvements they made to the land. Tienda de
Cuervo received complaints about the practice of collective land use in 1757 and tensions grew
to the boiling point a decade later, particularly in Camargo. There, the population had grown
significantly since 1749. The original families worried that their promised grants would be
parceled off to the newcomers instead of awarded to them. The first families felt entitled to the
land Spain had promised and turned against their governor, Escandón, as the representative of a
policy that hindered economic development. With the growing complaints about land
50
David M. Vigness, ed., trans., "Nuevo Santander in 1795: A Provincial Inspection by Félix Calleja" The
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 75, no. 4, (April 1972), 462-467; Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 219-232.
43
distribution and political leadership, the viceroy recalled Escandón and sent a new inspection
team to Nuevo Santander to attempt to satisfy the settlers.
51
The Crown stepped in to assert its power in the Rio Grande borderlands in 1767 with a
royal commission headed by Juan Armando de Palacio and José de Ossorio de Llamas.
Primarily, the commission was sent to rectify complaints about Escandón's failure to distribute
lands to private owners. Palacio and Ossorio organized, surveyed, and distributed land to the
settlers for private use and ownership. Sizes of the allotments were determined by how long a
settler or his family had been living in Nuevo Santander. Those who lived there longer than six
years received two leagues of pastureland and twelve caballerías of farmland.
52
Those who lived
there between two and six years also got two leagues of pastureland but only six caballerías.
Finally, new migrants to the region only gained the two leagues of pasture without any farmland.
In a decade, from 1767-1777, nearly all the land in the Rio Grande borderlands shifted from
communal to private ownership.
53
As egalitarian as this land distribution seemed on paper, landownership consolidated
quite quickly to the most wealthy and powerful families while indigenous people tended to be
exploited. The best illustration of this can be seen at Reynosa where two families emerged to
develop huge ranches and consolidate political and economic power. When New Spain
announced it would grant title to individual landowners, Captain Juan Hinojosa and his son-in-
law, José María de Ballí, applied for their portion of land north of the Rio Grande. Moreover,
realizing the extent of lands to the north, both men made claims farther east where no other
51
Scott, Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande, 60-64; Chipman & Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 142-
143.
52
One league was about 4428 acres; one caballeria was approximately 108 acres.
53
Scott, Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande, 64.
44
colonists had applied. Using Hinojosa’s familiarity with the Spanish bureaucratic system through
his service in the army, he and Ballí acquired title to thirty-seven leagues of land beyond the
standard allotment for first families.
54
Most of the lands they acquired had been seasonal
gathering grounds for Coahuiltecans. The cattle the Hinojosas and Ballís set loose would disrupt
the ecology and make gathering nearly impossible. The consolidation of private landholdings
marked another point where settlers broke initial agreements with indigenous people.
55
Both the Ballís and Hinojosas continued to intermarry, developed strong ties to one
another, and created one of the most influential family networks on the Rio Grande. Through
claims issued to the Crown, purchases, and further marriage consolidation, the Hinojosas and
Ballís came to hold a majority of the best lands around Reynosa, cutting out indigenous people
and small holders. Similar processes occurred throughout the Rio Grande borderlands, as close
family networks and vast landholdings came to replace association with Escandón as markers of
local power. Families like the Hinojosas and Ballí’s undermined Escandón's authority through
their accumulation of wealth and power. They also maintained their power in the region for
generations.
56
The clergy stationed in the Rio Grande borderlands also challenged Escandón's rule as
governor. They argued that the missions retained very little power in the region. In fact, few of
the settlements along the Rio Grande actually had a priest. The priest at Camargo had to travel to
nearby parishes to perform baptisms, marriages, and funerals. In order to get attention for their
54
That is an extra 164,000 acres.
55
Chipman & Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 142-143; Scott, Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande, 101-
109.
56
Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, “Neglected Citizens and Willing Traders: The Villas Del Norte (Tamaulipas) in
Mexico’s Northern Borderlands, 1749–1846,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 18, no. 2 (August 2002): 255;
Scott, Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande, 101-109.
45
plight, the priests argued that they could not effectively evangelize the "yndios bárbaros."
57
They
claimed that Escandón had worked against the church at every turn in favor of his fanaticism for
civilian settlement and promotion of commerce. An avalanche of complaints from borderlands
soldiers, settlers, and clergy led to a full imperial investigation of Escandón .
58
*****
In 1769, Escandón faced inquiry and trial about his conduct in Nuevo Santander. His
private business dealings became the central focus of Spain’s investigation into the governor. He
had received forty thousand pesos from Mexico City each year to ensure the smooth functioning
of the colony. This amount was supposed to be spread across the colony to pay soldiers, supply
the garrisons, build roads, and generally improve the colony. Testimony from clergy, soldiers,
and civilians indicated Escandón improperly used the Crown's funds. They claimed that the
governor embezzled the money to increase his own personal wealth at the expense of the
province. Escandón had to defend himself by showing exactly how he distributed the funds.
Because he was practically the sole merchant in the region importing goods through Soto la
Marina, all those who earned their wages eventually purchased goods from Escandón with those
same wages. He distributed the funds every year and, throughout the year, much of the money
returned to Escandón through trade. Rather than embezzlement, Escandón argued it was
legitimate business transactions that contributed to his wealth. Though he died before the
conclusion of the trial, his son satisfactorily proved that his father's business was legitimate, and
that the governor utilized the funds as the state intended him to. The man Spain sent to the
borderlands to encourage civilian-centered commercial expansion became the scapegoat of
57
Colegio Apostólico de Propaganda Fide de San Fernando, "Informe a el Rey nro. sr. en su el consejo de indias,
cerca de las misnes del seno mexicano," December 3, 1749, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.
58
Chipman & Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 143-144.
46
military, clerical, and civilian leaders who felt threatened by Escandón’s agenda. The personal
risk he assumed for the commercial settlement of the Rio Grande borderlands proved to be his
undoing.
59
Concurrently with the movement against Escandón, New Spain's frontier along the
Lower Rio Grande faced increased indigenous raiding. Rather than sending salt, beef, and leather
southward, borderlanders increasingly sent reports of the destruction of Spanish salt works and
ranches. The Bourbon leadership adhered to the policies of using trade to try to draw the
Comanche into the Spanish Empire. However, the policy relied heavily on the act of gift-giving.
The Rio Grande borderlands lacked the resources to satisfy the powerful indigenous groups who
resided in the region. With the Spanish being able to offer material incentive, raiding increased
drastically. The increase in raiding further disrupted trade creating a violent cycle of economic
decline. By the 1780s, the colony became noticeably isolated from central New Spain. The
region lost its most important merchant. Roadways flooded out or became overgrown because
travelers feared indigenous attack. The small port at Soto la Marina sat largely unused because
no commercially minded successor replaced Escandón. Trade floundered because travel was so
difficult.
60
The viceroy of New Spain sent yet another inspection team to assess the situation. Led by
Félix María Calleja, the investigation recognized that a major shift in power took place on New
Spain's northern frontier. The eastern half of the Comanche Empire had spread down to the Rio
Grande, challenging the Spanish for supremacy in the region. The standard practices of trade and
gift-giving that the Spanish used to achieve relative peace with the Coahuiltecans and Apaches
59
Minnie Gilbert, "The Valley's Earliest Pioneers," in Roots by the River (Canyon, Texas: Staked Plains Press,
1978), 9-14.
60
Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 137-138; Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 273-275; Weber, The
Spanish Frontier, 227-235.
47
failed to assuage Comanche raiding parties. In addition to stealing cattle to grow their own herds,
the Comanche destroyed ranches to assert their own power over the region. The Comanche
forced New Spain to consider a new strategy in the Rio Grande borderlands.
61
Calleja formed a new plan for New Spain based on the results of his inspection. He
traveled throughout the Rio Grande borderlands taking oral histories from the residents and
trying to figure out exactly how life on the frontier worked. The inspector used all the evidence
he acquired to produce a two-part report, one that focused on the economic conditions of Nuevo
Santander and another that outlined the territory's military conditions. Calleja’s report vindicated
Escandón by approving the founder's economic methodology. Expanding commerce and
improving transportation infrastructure remained central to Calleja’s strategy for reinvigorating
the borderlands. Additionally, he offered radical suggestions for combating the powerful new
Indians in the region.
62
Changing how borderlanders interacted with Indians became the central focus for Calleja.
Essentially, Calleja wanted to blockade the Comanche to keep them from getting any
manufactured products, thus crippling their ability to make war. He believed that cutting off
supply would create such a demand among the Indians for European goods that they would
change their lifestyle. Calleja wrote in his report, "The effect of the generous policy has been to
convert the gifts into necessities of life, multiplying the robberies to satisfy the new demands.
We would do better to guide them in the road to fulfilling those demands without crime."
63
He
believed that by forcing Indians to engage in regular European-style market transactions they
would change their warlike nature to become allies rather than enemies.
61
Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 79; Vigness, ed., trans., "Nuevo Santander in 1795," 466.
62
Vigness, ed., trans., "Nuevo Santander in 1795"
63
Vigness, ed., trans., "Nuevo Santander in 1795," 494-495.
48
In order to achieve his goal of Europeanizing the Comanche, Calleja proposed further
market integration between the frontier and Mexico City. Trade had to be expanded and given
priority. The best way to expand commerce in the borderlands was to build more roads.
Transportation infrastructure had declined significantly in the two decades since Escandón's
death. The road network Escandón worked so diligently to build had been devastated by the
annual monsoon cycle. Water erosion washed out tracks and made transportation of goods
impossible in spots. With improved roads, Calleja believed that more merchants would venture
into the borderlands to exploit a waiting market, thus lowering prices and facilitating the
movement of goods.
64
Good portage again became an issue because it had largely gone unresolved since the
province’s founding. Calleja called for a free and open port to be constructed on the Gulf Coast.
The new port would be a hub for Atlantic goods to be imported on the cheap and transferred to
Spanish merchants who would control the distribution to Indians in market transactions. A free
and open port would also lead to an explosion of settlement, something Calleja desperately
wanted. If the borderlands were peopled with more Europeans, marauding Indians would be
overwhelmed into changing their lifestyle to match the majority population in the region.
65
*****
The Spanish never had the opportunity to open a reliable port, improve roads, or expand
commerce in the Rio Grande borderlands. The Mexican War of Independence broke out a few
years after Calleja's report. Road systems remained the life blood of the borderlands’ subsistence
but often fell into horrible disrepair. For example, one of the roads from the Rio Grande delta to
Monterrey became known as the camino de viborero because rattlesnakes and other vipers were
64
Vigness, ed., trans., "Nuevo Santander in 1795," 479.
65
Vigness, ed., trans., "Nuevo Santander in 1795," 480.
49
regularly encountered along the highway. Rather than beat back the snakes and use this faster
route, travelers chose to adhere to river road that ran through Reynosa and Camargo. Lack of use
and constant flooding led to parts of the snake road being submerged in marshland and left
impassible. Missing ports and inconsistent road maintenance demonstrate how Spain left the
construction of commerce in the Rio Grande borderlands incomplete.
66
As indigenous power increased, the settled people of the Rio Grande borderlands turned
away from the blending of indigenous and Spanish. With the lack of ports and deteriorating
roads, the population of the region stagnated. If residents wanted to expand their families, they
had to look inward. Prominent Spanish families tended to only marry other prominent families.
Families who owned large tracts of land wanted to consolidate their wealth. Limiting marriage to
other wealthy families remained the easiest way to achieve that end. Indians became more
segregated and separated. In 1789, Laredo and other Rio Grande towns developed a separate and
distinct Indian census. This shift from inclusion to exclusion made building kinship bonds with
the right families essential to any outsider who moved to the region.
67
The strength of the Comanche also inhibited the blending of Spanish and indigenous
people on Spanish terms. Comanche bands in Texas built alliances with Tenewas, Kiowas, and
Tawakonis. Former threats to Comanche power became threats to the Spanish and their allies.
The Comanche became so powerful that they could control negotiations with New Spaniards.
Borderlanders had to adjust to a Comanche way of life or risk destruction. Many on the frontier
were taken captive and incorporated into Comanche bands. During the Mexican War of
66
Jean Louis Berlandier, Journey to Mexico during the Years 1826-1834, vol, 2 (Austin: Texas State Historical
Association and Centre for Studies in Texas History, 1980), 460.
67
Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition, 18-20.
50
Independence, New Spain's frontier became even weaker allowing the Comanche to further
solidify their power.
68
The era of promise brought about through Escandón's calculated settlement program
quickly faded. The rapid rise of the Comanche Empire in Texas combined with local elites
interested in maintaining their regional authority contributed to a period of stagnation. The
political crises that wracked the Spanish Empire in the nineteenth century further isolated the
region. The mission to create vibrant and sustained commercial activity on New Spain's
northeastern frontier stalled. However, the example highlights important conditions for building
commerce in the Rio Grande borderlands. Primarily, it required the full support of state agents
and the backing of military forces. Escandón's biggest accomplishments came when he had the
backing of New Spain's leadership and his military subordinates. His enterprise essentially
disappeared when he lost their support. Additionally, any commercial venture had to account for
indigenous power. Making connections with indigenous people and building bonds produced
peace and encouraged exchange. Finally, the environmental aspects of the region created risk.
Facilitating agriculture and maintaining transportation infrastructure had to be pursued with full
knowledge of the area's drought and monsoon cycles. Disregarding any of these vital conditions
opened entrepreneurial activity to failure.
After achieving its independence, Mexico inherited all of the problems Calleja outlined in
his report on the northern frontier. Mexico also inherited a significant amount of debt from the
colonial era. Taken together, Mexican officials had to creatively figure out how to grow the
settled population of its borderlands without investing much money in defense or infrastructure
68
James Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 180-193; DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts, 48-59; Hämäläinen, The
Comanche Empire, 186-189.
51
projects. Instead of looking to the indigenous population like the Spanish had, Mexico turned to
the aid of foreigners, American and European, to invest in the Mexican frontier to finish building
the Rio Grande borderlands.
52
CHAPTER 2
"UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS: THE BEALES COLONY AT THE INTERSECTION OF
MEXICAN IMMIGRATION POLICY, AMERICAN INVESTMENT, AND EUROPEAN
ENTREPRENEURSHIP, 1821-1836"
In late October 1833, Eduard Ludecus sat in a boarding house off Broadway in New York
listening to Americans argue over business and politics. The German-speaking migrant had not
gotten used to the rough American accent or the directness of their conversation. Just as he was
beginning to question the wisdom of his move across the Atlantic, he heard the melodic baritone
of an Englishman regaling another immigrant family about the bountiful opportunities that
Mexico offered. Dr. John Charles Beales told anyone who would listen that he was the steward
to an area of land of nearly eight million acres between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. He
just needed industrious Europeans willing to put in the work to transform all that arable land into
a paradise. Through his personal charisma and storytelling abilities, Beales recruited migrants
like Ludecus who were looking for opportunity and unsure if they would find it in the United
States. The English surgeon pieced together a motley group of fifty-nine English, Irish, and
German travelers willing to attempt an expedition that would take them another two thousand
miles by sea and then more than two hundred miles overland in the wet, cold winter.
1
Beales successfully recruited colonists to travel with him to the Rio Grande borderlands
because he was able to claim legal support from Mexico, financial support from an American
1
Eduard Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony: Letters by Eduard Ludecus, a German Colonist, to
Friends in Germany in 1833-1834, Recounting his Journey, Trials, and Observations in Early Texas, trans.
Louis E. Brister, (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2008), 46;
53
investment group, and the potential for economic success. Beales carried with him a contract he
signed with the state of Coahuila y Texas that described the land in which the colonists would
settle and promised that the Mexican government would regulate the colony.
2
He also held
$4000 he received in New York from a recently formed land company and promised as much
funding as the colony needed to succeed.
3
Finally, Beales offered huge swaths of land to
prospective colonists in a region that he described to be prime for agricultural development.
4
The
prospective colonists took Beales at his word because of the evidence he produced in the forms
of contracts and cash. The entire project seemed a legitimate enterprise.
When the English doctor and his troupe of migrants from Europe entered Northern
Mexico, they found themselves wholly unprepared for the rigors of life in the borderlands. The
colony, named Dolores, was located about eighteen miles north of the Rio Grande on Las Moras
Creek in the western corner of the Rio Grande borderlands. The big, bulky carts the colonists
used to transport their meagre belongings from the Gulf to the foothills of the Sierra Gorda
proved ill-fitted to the terrain and much of what they brought was lost on the road. The colonists
were also surprised to learn of the threat Indians posed to their venture. Unknowingly entering
Comanche and Apache lands until they actually arrived, fear of attack became a constant worry
for all Beales’s recruits. Though they built limited defenses and hired what few Mexican soldiers
were willing to tag along, a catastrophic Indian raid remained both a real and imagined threat
that undermined the settlers’ morale. Furthermore, the fortunes of the venture rested on the
2
John Woodward, An Abstract of the Constitutions, Laws, and Other Documents Having Reference to and Including
the Empresario Grants and Contracts Made by the State of Coahuila y Texas to and with John Charles Beales;
Also Deeds of the Same from Him to John Woodward; to which is Appended and Argument Sustaining the Rights
and Titles of John Woodward (New York: Narine and Co, 1842) “Deeds,” 28-31.
3
Carl Coke Rister, Comanche Bondage: Dr. John Charles Beales’s Settlement of La Villa de Dolores on Las Moras
Creek in Southern Texas of the 1830’s (Glendale, CA: A.H. Clark Co., 1955), 26-30.
4
E. House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, and her Two Children, with Mrs. Harris, by the Camanche
Indians, after they had Murdered their Husbands and Traveling Companions (St. Louis: C Keemle, 1839), 6-8.
54
shoulders of Beales's ability to lead the construction of a brand-new settlement in the arid
wilderness of Northern Mexico. Underfunded with limited supplies, little in the way of defense,
and poor management, it is little surprise that the colony failed.
5
Beales's case marks an excellent example of where Mexican state interests intersected
with European entrepreneurship and American land speculation in the Rio Grande borderlands.
For Mexican officials, Beales brought European colonists to Northern Mexico. Whether they
settled in Beales’s colony or anywhere else in the vast borderlands proved a win for the Mexican
policy of peopling the region with settlers who had no allegiance to the United States and who
might “Europeanize” the few Mexicans living there. Mexico also hoped the European settlers
would combat Comanche and Apache raiding in Northern Mexico. For European-born
entrepreneurs, the venture brought them to the borderlands for relatively little expense. American
speculators funded Beales’s project hoping to use Beales to regain access to Texas land after the
Law of April 6, 1830 closed American migration to Northern Mexico. At these intersections
among Mexican government policies, American speculations, and European entrepreneurial
interests, Indians expressed their authority through trade and violence that sometimes
undermined and sometimes provided new opportunities for gain for all involved. Taken together,
the three-year lifespan of Beales's colony provides insight into how politicians and entrepreneurs
across the Atlantic world imagined they could modernize and capitalize on the Rio Grande
borderlands.
6
5
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, ix-xvii; Mary Virginia Henderson, “Minor Empresario
Contracts for the Colonization of Texas, 1825-1834, II,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (July
1928): 1–28; Lucy Lee Dickson, "Speculation of John Charles Beales in Texas Lands" (M.A. thesis, University
of Texas, 1941).
6
There have been some excellent studies on the transnational characteristics of the Rio Grande borderlands in the
era of Mexican Texas. For example: Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and
New Mexico, 1800-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, River of
Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
55
Beales and his colonists were part of a growing group of non-Spanish Europeans to move
into the Rio Grande borderlands. Increasing numbers of merchants from Western Europe moved
into Matamoros seeking to profit on the new Mexican port city. Their respective states tracked
the progress of foreign merchants through various mechanisms. For example, a key goal for vice
consul Crawford when he traveled from Tampico to Matamoros was to assess the British
mercantile impact on the Rio Grande. Were conditions in the region such that Britain should
invest in expanding its state presence there? It was a question Crawford investigated for weeks
and responded in the affirmative. By the end of the 1830s, Britain and other European states
established consular agents along the Rio Grande who encouraged their expatriates to implement
modernizing principles. Beales colony coincided with the growing European presence in the
borderlands and the European tendency to want to transform people and place into a legible,
uniform space.
7
Deeper inspection into Beales's example also provides valuable insight into the
conditions of settling the Rio Grande borderlands during the Mexican period. Beales's failure
highlights the contingencies of settling the borderlands by contrasting it with American,
Mexican, and even other European empresarios who established and maintained settlements in
Texas. The conditions of their empresario grants and the decisions they made demonstrate key
differences with Beales. Namely, they highlight the importance of geography and making local
connections.
8
For a study that highlights the transatlantic connections during this era see: Graham Davis, Land! Irish Pioneers in
Mexican and Revolutionary Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002).
7
Joseph Crawford report to the British Foreign Office, April 1837, FO 50/109, TNA; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the
Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004),
1-12; Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the Present (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), x-xi, 4.
8
Gregg Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Davis, Land!;
A.B.J. Hammett, The Empresario: Don Martin DeLeon (Kerrville: Braswell Printing Co., 1971).
56
This chapter argues that European-born colonists, Mexican government officials, and
American speculators all had expectations that wildly diverged from reality regarding Beales's
enterprise. The promise of free land and cheap access to developing markets drew European-
born entrepreneurs to Northern Mexico, although they found the land to be arid and markets
inaccessible. Mexican government officials believed European industriousness would reform the
nation's northern frontier. American speculators thought the European colonists would improve
the land and transfer it from Mexican stewardship to American private ownership. In practice,
the entrepreneurial Europeans struggled mightily to make the colony succeed. As the colony
broke down and the joint venture dissolved, the colonists had to rely on themselves to avert
complete disaster as the Mexican government and American investors abandoned them to
indigenous authority.
There remain only a few publications that focus on the Rio Grande colony.
9
However,
Beales’s enterprise deserves more attention because of its timing and placement. Mexico granted
Beales his contract in a time when Mexico sought to eliminate American immigration. Mexican
officials believed Europeans to be more desirable as colonists and Beales’s venture represents
the result of that belief. Further, the colony was founded in a place that would become highly
contested between Mexicans and Americans in the Nueces Strip. Entrepreneurs on both sides of
the Atlantic believed the Rio Grande to be the next great waterway in the Americas, one that
would rival the Mississippi River. Beales and his colonists were part of expanding European
9
Louis Brister, “Eduard Ludecus’s Journey to the Texas Frontier: A Critical Account of Beales’s Rio Grande
Colony,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 108, no.3, (January 2005), 369-385; Ludecus, John Charles
Beales’s Rio Grande Colony; Dickson, “Speculation of John Charles Beales in Texas Lands;” Carl Coke Rister,
Comanche Bondage.
57
efforts to create rapid change by exploiting the Rio Grande’s imagined potential to connect it
with modern global markets.
10
*****
At the dawn of Mexican independence in the 1820s, much of the Rio Grande borderlands
remained virtually unknown to Mexicans, Americans, and Europeans. Though Mexico laid claim
to the entire territory, lands north and west of Laredo fell within the Comanche Empire and the
Comanches defended incursions into their space with ruthless tenacity. In fact, Comanches
proved to be one of the biggest concerns for Mexico as the state attempted to consolidate its
inhabitants into citizens. Declaring all the settled people of Mexico as citizens regardless of
European or indigenous ethnicity, Mexican leaders hoped to convert the highly mobile
Comanche bands into settled people who would both defend and develop the nation’s northern
frontier, or at least bring an end to the regular conflict and hostilities that marked the borderland.
The Comanche and their allies clearly understood that they held all of the power on the plains
north of the Rio Grande and continued to live the way saw fit, raiding Rio Grande settlements for
horses, cattle, and captives to sell in Santa Fe or San Antonio.
11
Mexico’s leadership needed a secondary method to bring its notion of sedentary
productive agriculture and commerce to a reality and it harnessed a scheme that Spain initiated in
the waning days of its empire: the empresario system. The empresario system was a contractor
program in which individuals would promote settlement of certain regions in exchange for land.
This arrangement delegated the work of marketing and settling Northern Mexico to
entrepreneurs, called empresarios, willing to undertake such hardships for the prospect of future
10
Pat Kelley, River of Lost Dreams: Navigation on the Rio Grande (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986),
ix, 7-8, 29-30.
11
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Brian DeLay, War of a
Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
58
rewards in the choicest and most profitable tracts they could acquire. While the empresario
system remained imperfect in many ways, it succeeded in drawing hundreds of families to settle
Mexican lands.
12
For the individual accepting the contract, the process of colonization proved expensive,
time consuming, and arduous. The most successful and famous empresario was Stephen F.
Austin. Austin inherited his empresario contract from his father, Moses, and proceeded to
colonize the region around the Brazos River. He diligently surveyed, mapped, and dispensed
legal title to all the colonists who entered the lands upon which he was contracted to settle. He
fully committed to the project, investing everything he had into it and settled in the colony
himself to oversee its development. Importantly, he made key connections within Mexican towns
with prominent families. In doing so, Austin hooked his colony into well-established trade and
communication networks that allowed for its proliferation. His success earned him several
leagues of quality, arable land to do with what he would. Notably, he became famous for his
achievements as a Mexican empresario in both the United States and Europe, providing hope and
unrealistic perceptions about an individual's prospects in the borderlands.
13
From the Mexican perspective, the growing number of Americans who resisted Mexican
laws and declarations became a primary drawback of the empresario system. One of the earliest
12
H.P.N. Gammel (comp.), The Laws of Texas, 1822-1897, I, (Austin: The Gammel Book Company, 1898), 95-107.
13
Travel accounts of Texas became quite popular in Europe. One of the Beales colonists carried a copy of Mary
Austin Holley’s book with him. There also existed accounts from German travelers about Texas: Mary Austin
Holley, Texas: Observations, Historical, Geographical and Descriptive, in a Series of Letters (Baltimore:
Armstong & Plaskitt, 1833); J. Valentin Hecke, Reise Durch Die Vereinigten Staaten Von Nord-Amerika in Den
Jahren 1818 Und 1819: Nebst Einer Kurzen Uebersicht Der Neuesten Ereignisse Auf Dem. Und West-Indien
(Berlin: H. Ph. Petri, 1821).
For more on Austin’s colony see: Eugene C. Barker, The Life of Stephen F. Austin, Founder of Texas, 1793-1836 : A
Chapter in the Westward Movement of the Anglo-American People (Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1925); Greg
Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Andrew Torget,
Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Sarah K.M. Rodriguez, “‘The Greatest Nation on Earth’: The Politics
and Patriotism of the First Anglo American Immigrants to Mexican Texas, 1820–1824,” Pacific Historical
Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 50–83.
59
causes for Mexican anxiety over American colonization in Texas came out of Nacogdoches in
1826. Haden Edwards, an empresario with a grant that covered a large portion of East Texas,
attempted to evict longstanding Mexican inhabitants of his grant if they did not pay him $520 for
title to their lands. Confused at their predicament, the Mexican families residing in East Texas
appealed to the state of Coahuila y Texas for relief. After a long series of correspondence,
Mexico cancelled Edwards’s contract and expelled him from Texas. Infuriated, Edwards
declared his colony in revolt naming it the independent Fredonian Republic. He and his brother
Benjamin Edwards initiated a voluminous propaganda campaign to recruit Cherokees and other
Americans to their cause. They failed in their recruiting mission and fled to Louisiana when a
militia approached Nacogdoches. However, Edwards’s campaigning rang loud in Mexico
spurring worry in Mexico City.
14
Leaders in Mexico City wanted a clearer understanding about what was happening in
Texas. In 1827, Mexican general Manuel Mier y Terán headed a commission of scientists and
artists from Mexico and Europe to survey the northern boundary of Mexico that the United
States and Spain had agreed upon in the 1819 Adams-Onís treaty. The commission was also
tasked to explore the northern territories and report on conditions, therein. While there, the
general witnessed the problems caused by the American population that dominated the area. He
found that many of those who resided in Texas loathed the Mexican government and believed it
was a “...republic that consists only of ignorant mulattoes and Indians.”
15
He wrote extensively to
Mexico City explaining the American problem in Texas and suggested policy shifts to achieve
greater Mexican authority in that territory. One of his suggestions included expanding European
14
Barker Eugene C., Mexico and Texas, 1821-1835 (Dallas: P.L. Turner Company, 1928), 49-51; Cantrell, Stephen
F. Austin, 179-188.
15
Manuel Mier y Terán to the Governor of Coahuila y Texas, June 24, 1828, in Texas by Terán, ed. Jack Jackson,
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 96.
60
colonization in Texas to offset American colonization. Mier y Terán's complaints and
suggestions regarding the northern territories resulted in changes to the empresario system in
1830.
16
Mier y Terán’s report of conditions in Texas brought action from leadership in Mexico
City in the form of an executive decree. Known as the Law of April 6, 1830, the decree most
famously banned further immigration into Mexico from the United States. It also suspended
empresario contracts not already fulfilled and declared an end to the importation of slaves into
Mexico. Most importantly for Beales, the decree encouraged further colonization of Northern
Mexico by Mexicans and Europeans.
17
Officials in Mexico City deemed European immigration preferable as they noticed the
positive outcomes of European colonization in Texas. Four Irish empresarios had received
contracts to populate lands along the Nueces River and two Irish colonies emerged. Refugio
developed under the partnership of James Power and James Hewetson, while San Patricio grew
under the guidance of John McMullen and James McGloin. The Irish proved to be exactly what
Mexico wanted for its northern frontier: pioneering Europeans who worked through astounding
obstacles to develop settled agriculture in an otherwise sparsely populated sector of Mexico’s
northern frontier. To further satisfy Mexico, most of the Irish colonists were practicing Catholics
whom Mexican officials believed would act as a buffer against Protestant American expansion
into the Rio Grande borderlands. The gambit paid off as most of the Irish colonists embraced
16
Mier y Terán to the President of Mexico, June 30, 1828; Mier y Terán to the Secretary of Foreign Relations, July
7, 1828, in ibid, 96-101, 104-105.
17
Decreto de 6 de Abril de 1830, April 6, 1830, Broadside Collection, The Briscoe Center for American History,
The University of Texas at Austin; Eugene C. Barker, The Life of Stephen F. Austin, 256-284. Randolph B.
Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1989), 35-37.
61
Mexican culture, married Mexican spouses, adopted the Spanish language, and opened new trade
routes between the trans-Nueces and the rest of Mexico. The early successes of the Irish colonies
drove Mexico to seek more Europeans willing to take empresario contracts in the Rio Grande
borderlands.
18
With Mexico searching for new European-born empresarios, John Charles Beales found
himself swept into three separate empresario contracts. The first contract Beales received came
from his wife, María Dolores Soto y Saldaña. Soto y Saldaña came from a prominent family in
Michoacán.
19
She had been recently widowed when she met Beales. Her dead husband, Richard
Exter, had been a successful merchant and speculator. He earned an empresario contract to
populate the western plains of Texas, which he set out to do. Exter, also born in England,
organized a land company with a partner in Baltimore that raised nearly $400,000 in investments
before he perished at sea in 1829. After Exter’s death, the contract transferred to his widow, Soto
y Saldaña, who encouraged her new husband, Beales, to execute it.
20
When Beales went to have the Exter contract transferred to his name, he found an entire
network of Mexican speculators attempting to take over suspended contracts from American
empresarios. He also engaged a ready partner in his brother-in-law, Fortunato Soto, whose
position as a captain in the Mexican army lent more credence to Beales's appeals for contracts.
18
Davis, Land!, 3-9; 72-106; Jackson (ed.), Texas by Terán, 2.
19
The Soto y Saldaña family name carried a modicum of weight in the region as just a generation earlier, José
Antonio Soto y Saldaña, a prominent licenciado, held an important position in the Valladolid Conspiracy in
Michoacán in 1809 making the family publicly known as trustworthy patriots in independent Mexico. That trust
allowed María Dolores Soto y Saldaña to retain her first husband’s contract after his death and transfer it to her
second husband after their marriage. For more on the Valladolid Conspiracy see: Margaret Chowning, Wealth and
Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacán from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999) 76-81; Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “We Are Now the True Spaniards:” Sovereignty, Revolution,
Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808-1824 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2012) 91-96.
20
Raymond Estep, "EXTER, RICHARD," The Handbook of Texas Online,
<http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fex03> [Accessed September 07, 2018].
62
Beales and Soto joined a network of Mexicans to acquire the contract for Benjamin Milam’s
grant that abutted the western portion of Austin’s lands. Though more accessible than Exter’s
grant, these lands also remained isolated and largely unexplored. The mixed company of
Mexican and English empresarios failed to introduce any colonists into either of Beales’s first
two contracts, but their failure put him on track to his Rio Grande grant. Trial and error became a
theme for Beales as an empresario.
21
The last grant Beales received drove him to make the effort to settle it with European-
born colonists. On a map, his third empresario contract looked to be the most lucrative. Bound
north and south by the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, respectively, the lands looked
seemingly well-watered with river access to the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the possibility of
river transport, the old Camino Real that connected San Antonio de Béxar to Mexico City ran
through the grant offering the prospect of access to markets both north and south. Further, Beales
entered into his Rio Grande contract with another European-born partner, a Scotsman named
James Grant. Though Fortunato Soto remained an important partner for his enterprise on the Rio
Grande, Beales chose to abandon the Mexican speculation group in favor of a more European
one.
22
James Grant had made a somewhat successful name for himself in Northern Mexico
before his partnership with Beales. In the late 1820s, he settled in Parras, Coahuila, married a
Mexican woman, María Guadalupe Reyes, and declared himself a Mexican citizen. While there,
Grant acted as an agent for a British mining company and established his own furnace and cotton
mill on his land hoping to capitalize on the region’s iron ore deposits. His successful ventures
21
John Woodward, An Abstract of the Constitutions, Laws, and Other Documents, “Deeds,” 14-15.
22
James Grant and John Charles Beales Petition for Empresario Contract, October 9, 1832, John Charles Beales
Papers, Box 2E95, (DBCAH); Rio Grande and Texas Land Company Scrip, August 21, 1834, John Charles
Beales Papers, Box BC OB 1830-1835, (DBCAH).
63
earned him a positive reputation in the state of Coahuila as a “man of progress” and one who
might succeed as an empresario. Mexican officials hoped Grant would bring his modernizing
principles and industrious attitude into the empresario system.
23
Beales and Grant shared important parallels. Both men left the British Isles to seek their
future in Mexico, both married into Mexican families, and both sought opportunity in Mexico’s
vast northern lands through the state-sponsored empresario program. These men not only
speculated on real estate, they took a chance on the Mexican state leading them to profit. They
represented a growing group of European-born entrepreneurs turning to Northern Mexico as the
future for rapid economic growth.
24
Both Grant and Beales hoped to turn their empresario grant
into a center for European settlement and incorporation into the modern Atlantic economy.
Furthermore, Grant's involvement suggests the possibility that the Rio Grande empresario
enterprise was more than a simple profit-making scheme. Grant was an agent of the British
Empire tasked with impeding American continental expansion. Beales may have been drawn into
making his empresario contracts part of that British foreign policy agenda. While in Mexico
City, the Beales performed research for the British Foreign Office and played on the same cricket
club as the British consul general, Charles O'Gorman.
25
O'Gorman loathed American textile
smuggling into Mexico because it cut into demand for British imports. He turned his focus to
northern Mexico by 1830, encouraging the Foreign Office to expand consular activities in
California and Tamaulipas.
26
His office was responsible for sending vice consul Joseph
23
Stuart Reid, The Secret War for Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 24-25.
24
Michael P. Costeloe, Bonds and Bondholders: British Investors and Mexico’s Foreign Debt, 1824-1888
(Westport: Praeger, 2003).
25
Michael P. Costeloe, “To Bowl a Mexican Maiden Over: Cricket in Mexico, 1827–1900,” Bulletin of Latin
American Research 26 (January 2007): 112–124; Charles O'Gorman to His British Majesty's Foreign Office, Sep.
17, 1829, FO 50/57 (UK National Archives, Kew; hereafter cited as TNA).
26
O'Gorman to Richard Pakenham, Oct. 24, 1829, FO 50/57, (TNA).
64
Crawford to investigate Matamoros. It remains probable that O’Gorman urged Beales to pursue
colonization in the borderlands to stem American smuggling. Creating a European colony on the
Rio Grande would help achieve O'Gorman's goal of keeping illicit American goods out of
Mexico.
27
Once they acquired the Rio Grande contract, Beales and Grant set out to have it explored
so that a suitable town could be established for them to boost and sell to prospective colonists.
By the terms of the contract, the empresarios only had four years to settle eight hundred families
on their prescribed grant in order to receive their rewards in surplus lands. They hired Beales’s
close friend and fellow Englishman, William Henry Egerton, into the partnership to organize a
party to quickly survey the land for settlement.
28
The exploration sapped most of the
empresarios' monetary resources since it required a military escort and at least one engineering
specialist to properly choose a site that would sustain a rapidly growing population. Egerton
chose a location on Las Moras Creek about eighteen miles north of where it spilled into the Rio
Grande. He hurriedly relayed a message to Beales that a suitable town site existed.
29
Egerton’s report included subtle details about Beales’s grant that presaged the problems
inherent in colonizing the arid land between the Nueces River and Rio Grande. In his
investigation, Egerton found that the land in the Nueces Strip lacked water. He seemed worried
that there were no streams or rivers in the area. Even the banks of the Rio Grande provided little
optimism, as bad soil and limited access to water presented a problematic situation for colonists.
27
Reid, The Secret War for Texas, 4–5; Walther L. Bernecker, “Between European and American Dominance:
Mexican Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Itinerario 21 (November 1997): 115–141.
28
Grant from government of Coahuila and Texas to John C. Beales with Grant to him in fee of several leagues Also
grant from Mr. Beales to Thomas E. Davis Es., November 3, 1833, John Charles Beales Papers, Box 2E95,
(DBCAH).
29
Woodward, An Abstract of the Constitutions, Laws, and Other Documents, 28-31; Carl Coke Rister, Comanche
Bondage, 26-27.
65
However, Egerton produced a glowing report about the lands around Las Moras Creek. There,
the water seemed perpetual and the soil a rich dark loam. He thought that "if a commercial town
were established between Las Moras and Piedras Pintas, it would never fail of abundant supplies
from the fertile lands of these streams."
30
Egerton’s ambiguous report cooled Grant’s enthusiasm
for the project. He pursued other opportunities in Texas and left the work to fulfill the contract to
Beales. With new insecurities and rapidly depleting cash reserves, the venture threatened to fail
before it even began.
31
Beales took the initiative and got creative. Likely building upon the model Richard Exter
left behind with his conglomeration of investors in Baltimore, Beales sailed for New York to find
financial backers for the Rio Grande colony. It did not take him long. Western lands were a hot
commodity in the financial centers of the United States prior to the Panic of 1837, with investors
dumping thousands of dollars on lands they would never see.
32
With empresario contracts
offering millions of free acres of land for merely enticing colonists to the area, Northern Mexico
became a speculator’s dream world. The primary driver for the demand in southwestern lands
was the growing Atlantic cotton economy. Between 1829 and 1835, due to the explosion of
textile manufacturing in Northwest England, the price of cotton nearly doubled, driving more
planters to seek more land. Many Southern planters were willing to expand beyond the borders
of the United States to find whatever lands they could for cotton production. The Rio Grande
borderlands were directly in the pathway of the great land rush that was overtaking the U.S.
30
William Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress and Prospects of the Republic of Texas, vol. I, 2nd ed, (London: R.
Hastings, 1841) 18, 175-178. Kennedy copied entire sections from Egerton’s report and Beales journal for his
history of Texas. He eventually became an empresario for the Republic of Texas and earned a contract for the
area of land that basically encircled the same grant as Beales which I analyze in chapter 3.
31
Rister, Comanche Bondage, 26-27; Reid, The Secret War for Texas, 27-33.
32
Eugene C. Barker, “Land Speculation as a Cause of the Texas Revolution,” The Quarterly of the Texas State
Historical Association 10, no. 1 (1906): 76–95.
66
South.
33
However, the Mexican government had just blocked American migration into Northern
Mexico with the Law of April 6, 1830. Savvy speculators in New York recognized an
opportunity to invest huge amounts of capital to get ahead of Southern planters to profit on the
land boom. Beales appearance in New York came at the perfect time for him to convince several
investors to consider his project.
34
Beales enticed his investors by offering up to 5/8ths of all the land he acquired, which
drew the interest of many monied land men. The most infamous speculator to invest in Beales's
land company scheme was Samuel Swartwout, a New York merchant who was Aaron Burr’s
personal assistant during the Burr Conspiracy. Part of his responsibility in the conspiracy
included seeking British assistance in a scheme to create an independent government in Mexico.
Swartwout had contacts in the British foreign ministry and one of his close associates, Charles
Williamson, worked as a land agent for a group of powerful British investors.
35
Williamson
shared his strategies for land speculation with anyone who seemed interested. It is likely that
Swartwout saw the future of land speculation in Northern Mexico and learned the business from
Williamson. Swartwout continually invested in Texas land projects including the Galveston Bay
33
This chapter is primarily concerned with land speculators in the U.S. Northeast. For more on Southern land
speculation in Texas see: Edward L. Miller, New Orleans and the Texas Revolution (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 2004); Torget, Seeds of Empire; Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 158-178.
34
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York:
Basic Books, 2014), 257-259; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2014), 103-114; Torget, Seeds of Empire, 157-161.
35
Terms of indenture, John C. Beales to Thomas E. Davis, October 26, 1833, John Charles Beales Papers, Box
2E95, (DBCAH); Joseph Alfred Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York City, vol.4, (New York: Thomas R.
Knox & Co. 1885), 251-257; George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 5th ed
(New York: Norton, 1999), 385-387; James E. Lewis Jr., The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an
Early American Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 185-190; 443.
67
and Texas Land Company and Beales's Rio Grande and Texas Land Company, of which he took
out a full 1/8th stake.
36
Swartwout was one of many New York speculators who invested in Beales’s grant. Other
prominent names and powerful New York landmen included Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, Francis
Salmon, and William Burrowe.
37
These men, from distinguished New York families, looked to
Northern Mexico as a haven for investment. Decades before the boom in railroad investment,
monied businessmen in the United States’ Eastern financial centers saw the future in the
expansion of the cotton economy westward. They all believed the land in Beales's grant would
yield exponential profits on their investments. Having done no investigation of the Nueces Strip
nor creating a detailed plan for settlement, they were sure to be disappointed.
38
After spending only a few months in New York City, Beales became the principle agent
of the Rio Grande and Texas Land Company, a brand-new consortium whose directors
contracted a ship and placed advertisements for prospective colonists in New York, South
Carolina, and England.
39
The company also laid out $4000 for Beales to utilize in setting up the
colony’s first town. To make sure the empresario did not take too much latitude with the
company's finances, the executive board of directors placed Irish-born Thomas A. Power as their
36
Helen I. Cowan, “Charles Williamson and the Southern Entrance to the Genesee Country,” New York History 23,
no. 3 (July 1942): 260–74; Charles E Brooks, Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution: The Holland Land
Purchase (Ithaca: Fall Creek Books, 2012), 18-20; 107.
37
Terms of indenture, John C. Beales to Thomas E. Davis, October 26, 1833, John Charles Beales Papers, Box
2E95, (DBCAH).
38
For an overview of investment from the East Coast into Western lands, see: John D. Haeger, The Investment
Frontier: New York Businessmen and the Economic Development of the Old Northwest (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1981).
39
Charles Edwards, "Colony of the Rio Grande and Texas Land Company," New York Commercial Advertiser,
October 24, 1834; Charles Edwards, "Colony of the Rio Grande and Texas Land Company, To Emigrants and
Others," The Charleston Courier, October 25, 1834.
68
own agent to catalogue the colony’s progress and track Beales’s spending. With this newfound
financial support, the empresario began recruiting immediately.
40
The formation of the Rio Grande and Texas Land Company added a complicated layer to
Beales’s venture. By Mexican law and the terms of his contract, American colonists were
unacceptable targets for populating the grant, but the law said nothing about American dollars. It
seemed that if American investors profited from the sale of lands to European or Mexican
tenants, then everybody got what they wanted. Mexico colonized its northern frontier with more
European colonists; European-born entrepreneurs earned cheap land near the Rio Grande for new
farms and businesses; and American land speculators regained access to the market in Mexican
land. With his cash reserves and nearly sixty European-born recruits taken from New York
boarding houses, Beales set out for the Rio Grande.
*****
Two of the colonists, Eduard Ludecus and Sarah Horn, provided records of their
experiences. When combined with Beales’s company journal, they reveal keen insights into the
ordeal of attempting to form a settlement in the Rio Grande borderlands far away from New
York or Mexico City. They also show how drastically expectations differed from reality.
Ludecus, a twenty-seven-year-old from the Saxe-Weimar duchy who quit a mercantile business
to homestead on the Missouri River in the United States, joined up with Beales. He wrote a
running narrative of letters home that his family had published and distributed throughout the
German principalities.
41
Additionally, Sarah Horn, a poor Englishwoman who married a small-
40
Rister, Comanche Bondage, 26-30.
41
Eduard Ludecus, Reise durch di Mexikanischen Provinzen Tumalipas, Cohahuila und Texas im Jahre 1834
(Leipzig: Johan Friedrich Hartknoch, 1837). Louis Brister has translated this work into English: Ludecus, John
Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony.
69
time commission merchant before traveling across the Atlantic with their family, related a
gripping tale about her harrowing experience in the Rio Grande borderlands.
42
The narratives
provided by the Horns and Ludecus reveal the entrepreneurial nature of the colonists and the
shock they experienced when they entered the borderlands.
Recruiting Ludecus as a colonist proved a significant victory for Beales. The former
German merchant came with a mark of upper middle-class social standing. Eduard’s father,
Wilhelm, was the ducal court secretary to Karl August, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, which
provided the family with enough money and clout to have Eduard educated at the Wilhelm-
Ernst-Gymnasium to prepare him for a career in commerce. From there, Eduard Ludecus landed
a job with a commercial firm in Braunschweig under the guidance of an Herr Becher. Apparently
bored by buying and selling of wool, Ludecus kept up on his study of English and saved his
money to set out on his own adventure to America, but he did so without ever burning any
bridges. Becher provided Ludecus letters of introduction to all the merchants he knew in
America, including the German consul in New York City and a relative, F.M. Becker from
which Ludecus procured further letters to commercial contacts in New Orleans and Matamoros.
In Ludecus, Beales found a man he could view as a social equal, communicate with both the
German and English-speaking colonists, and possibly exploit with his network of well-funded
merchants who might invest in the venture to ensure its success. He just had to commit to
keeping Ludecus happy.
43
Recruiting Sarah Horn and her family provided a different benefit for Beales. Since he
focused his recruiting on boarding houses, most of those he convinced to travel to the
42
E. House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, and her Two Children, with Mrs. Harris, by the Camanche
Indians, after they had Murdered their Husbands and Traveling Companions, (St. Louis: C Keemle, 1839).
43
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 42.
70
borderlands were single men and women. The Horns, on the other hand, remained a fully intact
family of four. By the terms of his empresario contract, the Mexican government sought
settlement of families, specifically. Having the Horns and a couple other families like them
would boost his numbers and make it easier to claim his bounty from Mexico to pay off his
investors. Additionally, Mr. Horn had mercantile experience that he could contribute to making
Dolores a trading center. Both the Horns and Ludecus could help Beales build trade in the Rio
Grande borderlands.
44
Beales had become a talented salesman of the land on the Rio Grande he had never seen.
The promise of free land became his strongest pitch. To Ludecus, Beales promised one hundred
seventy-seven acres of farmland and an additional lot in town for the German to build his home.
He also promised regular steamboat arrivals from New Orleans to the colony through
Matamoros. To crank the pressure up, Beales made the offer time dependent. Ludecus only had
one day to decide if he would accept or miss the boat to the Rio Grande. Even though he thought
it might be too good to be true, Ludecus took the offer. Similarly, Sarah Horn's husband, John
Horn, became enticed by Beales offer of land and regular steamboat traffic on the Rio Grande.
As a failing commission merchant who had taken a job clerking in New York, John Horn almost
certainly found Beales's offer to be exactly what he was looking for when he and his family
moved to America. The Horns and Ludecus would soon find that the sales pitch did not match
the reality of Beales's colony.
45
Furthermore, both Ludecus and the Horns believed that the colony was well-funded and
had the full backing of the Mexican government. Beales captivated Ludecus's attention with his
44
Beales Empresario Contract with Mexico, 1833, John Charles Beales Papers, Box 2S165, (DBCAH).
45
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 46-47; E. House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn,
6-8.
71
explanation of the creation of the land company and the financial layouts he claimed to have.
According to Ludecus, Beales said that, "an association of wealthy people was formed, to whom
he assigned his grant for fifty thousand dollars."
46
Ludecus believed that Beales set out to
establish a colony with a small fortune. Correspondingly, Sarah Horn believed the Mexican
government would have more of a presence in the construction of the colony. In her account, she
cited Beales's contract and the urgency with which he undertook to fulfill it because Mexico was
tracking the colony's development.
47
Advertising his colony with the lure of free land, financial
stability, and government support, Beales took his first wave of colonists to set sail for the Texas
coast. All the colonists had confidence that their prospects in Northern Mexico were limitless.
*****
Problems arose as soon as the colonists were on the boat as tensions about supplies
bubbled to the surface. Beales had promised to provision and transport a team of German-
speaking laborers to the borderlands in exchange for six-months of work for the colony. The
Englishman in charge of distributing food aboard ship unevenly distributed rations in favor of the
English passengers, often taking far more than needed and depleting necessary supplies. Before
the enterprise even reached the Texas coast, the people Beales put in charge created tensions and
caused shortages that increased costs on what Beales would find to be an extremely limited
budget.
48
When the ship reached the Texas coast at Aransas Bay in early December 1833, the
passengers were surprised to see no permanent settlements or even anyone to help them unload
46
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 46.
The approximate value of $50,000 in 1833 relative to today would come out to about $1.5 million. For more on
historical relative values, see: Samuel H. Williamson, "Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S.
Dollar Amount, 1774 to present,"<http:// www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/> [Accessed March 08, 2019].
47
E. House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, 6.
48
Brister, “Eduard Ludecus’s Journey to the Texas Frontier," 371-372; Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande
Colony, 57.
72
the ship. The captain and crew merely lowered their goods into the shallows and left the
colonists with Beales and Power as their only guides through the wilderness. Having no real
means to travel overland other than the carts and wagons they brought from New York, they first
had to procure oxen and mules to carry their goods, which took a full two weeks. While a few
men traveled to Goliad to replenish supplies and buy the proper beasts of burden, the colonists
were left to sleep in tents on the cold, wet, windy beaches.
49
When they finally left the coast, their entrepreneurial morale sunk significantly, as did
their carts and wagons in the mud. Two carts broke on the very first day they had taken to the
road. To make matters worse, the colonists had just been informed that Indians controlled most
parts of the country and they would have to defend themselves with only the few hunting rifles
and pistols they had carried with them. However, they had no idea how to differentiate between
friendly and aggressive Indians. Colonists, like Sarah Horn, began to fear anyone they met on the
road. Trust in the venture began to evaporate as everyone realized how unprepared they were for
the rigors of the borderlands.
50
Conditions did not improve when the party reached San Antonio as the lack of supplies,
financial strains, and indigenous power became obvious. The provisions Beales brought to Texas
had been nearly wiped out. The road from the coast had also worn out the oxen and carts they
had to purchase back at Goliad. In fact, the colonists lost four horses and twenty oxen in the 150
miles they traveled. Beales spent the last of the money he had hiring teamsters in San Antonio to
escort them the remainder of the journey to the Rio Grande to avoid the same losses. He also
49
E. House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, 6-8.
50
E. House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, 6-8.
73
took out an additional loan of a thousand pesos so that they would have at least some money
while on the road.
51
Figure 4 Thomas G. Bradford, Texas, (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Co, 1838), David Rumsey Collection. Inset view of Aransas
Bay to San Antonio.
To further decrease morale, the party found a man about five miles outside of San
Antonio who had been attacked by Indians. Beaten and shot several times, he was attempting to
crawl back to San Antonio to report his attack. In the mid-1830s, Mexico's relations with the
Lipan Apache was at a nadir. In order to avoid continuing hostilities with the Comanche,
Northern Mexicans chose to make war on the Lipanes throughout the 1820s. While this opened a
51
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 100; House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, 9-10.
74
brief time of peace with the Comanche, travelers in Northern Mexico became open targets for
Lipan Apache violence. It also did not ensure full protection from Comanche bands who still
took advantage of the opportunity in vulnerable people on the road. Seeing this man's condition
outside San Antonio draped a pall of foreboding over the colonists about their fortunes.
52
*****
In March 1834, after nearly four months in Texas, the expedition finally reached the Rio
Grande. The disappointment among the colonists was palpable. As Ludecus approached the
river, he recognized the dismal state of the land and described the area in elegant detail: “We
were still doubtful that there was a river in our vicinity when we saw it hardly a hundred paces in
front of us. The sight of it, its murky, sandy water and its bare banks with only fifteen- to twenty-
foot high cane and willows growing there made a very depressing impression on me and on all
the others too. Everything is bleak and dead in its vicinity. Nature seemed to have died there.”
53
All of the entrepreneurs in the party also realized at first look at the Rio Grande that it was not
likely a navigable waterway. The dream that Beales sold to the colonists of growing bountiful
crops on cheap lands to transport downriver shriveled on the dusty banks of the Rio Grande. Life
in the borderlands was going to be harder than any of them had imagined.
Shortly after they found the Rio Grande and turned toward the prospective town-site,
Beales and the colonists came into a small camp of Shawnee hunters trapping animals along the
river. Finding a Scotsman among them, Beales and several of the English colonists tried to
engage the Shawnee in trade. They quickly shifted from colonists worried about their own
survival to fur traders looking to strike up business connections among the local indigenous
populations. Beales and the Shawnee struck a deal. The Shawnee would trade some of their furs
52
DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts, 54-56; House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, 9-10;
53
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 118.
75
to Beales and the other mercantile minded Europeans, but the colonists had to agree to allow the
Shawnee to accompany the traveling party to Las Moras. The offer proved mutually beneficial as
the Indians would join into a larger group to be able to hunt farther north, taking them deeper
into Comanche lands. The colonists gained their local knowledge in finding the best ford across
the Rio Grande and indigenous allies in a place where they had none. Their pioneering attitude
allowed for them to build local connections with a small band of Shawnee. They needed to make
more connections with indigenous people in this place where Indian power reigned, and Mexican
state power was extremely limited.
54
The limitations of Mexican state power can be seen in the militia Beales had to hire in
order to protect colonists as they founded their first town. Mexico would not pay for the
necessary troops to escort the enterprise from the Rio Grande to the town site. Instead, Beales
had to sacrifice purchasing more food supplies at Presidio del Rio Grande in order to pay for the
guards to see after the security of the town. Short on corn and out of flour, Beales presumed they
would all subsist through individual gardens and hunting wild game. However, they still had
seventy miles to cover to reach the place Egerton had scouted. The town site was quite isolated
as the nearest Mexican settlement, San Fernando, was almost thirty-five miles south and required
fording the Rio Grande to get there. Though Las Moras Creek produced more trees and
vegetation than around the Rio Grande, the colonists were forced to use grass and cane to build
their shelters. They also relied on thistle and branches to build their defenses against the
possibility of a Comanche raid. Other than the assurance that the creek was fed from a spring not
likely to dry up, the colonists faced mean conditions from the beginning.
55
54
Kennedy, Texas, II, 46-51. Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 122-123; 126.
It was unusual for the Shawnee to have migrated so far south as the Rio Grande, but not unlikely. Both Beales and
Ludecus described their short-term allies as Shawnee.
55
Rister, Comanche Bondage, 44-46; Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 127.
76
Figure 5 Inset taken from Konen Marché, Map of Texas (Brussels: K. Marché, 1835), UTA Map Collection.
When Beales, his colonists, their escort of soldiers, and the Shawnee band reached the
town site, which Beales named Dolores after his wife, they all set to work building a means for
subsistence. For the Europeans, that meant trying to scratch out productive farms out of arid
land. As noted in Egerton’s report on the grant, water proved a significant demand for all the
colonists. The colonists at Dolores threw all available labor at digging a ditch from Las Moras
Creek in order to begin irrigating gardens, though Ludecus noted that the company planned on
charging everyone a fee to draw from the creek to water their lots. The unrelenting sun
compounded the lack of water. All of their initial crops shriveled and turned yellow after
sprouting. None of the colonists knew the techniques of dryland farming. They all brought their
notions of farming from Northern Europe where rainfall was rarely scarce. The colonists lost an
77
entire year’s worth of crop because they lacked the essential knowledge of the region’s growing
conditions.
56
In the face of crop failures, diminishing supplies, and excruciating labor, the town
fractured quickly along class and ethnic lines. Physically, the town lots were distributed
according to wealth and social standing. The best lots had water access to Las Moras Creek
while the less desirable holdings required long trips to get water or significant irrigation ditches
to draw water to their lands. Beales claimed the finest location with the most fertile looking soil
that seemed to irrigate itself. He had contracted with German and Irish carpenters prior to the
expedition to build his home and demanded it be constructed with stone which was undertaken
with great effort. The next best lots went to Egerton and the other Englishmen of high social
standing who Beales brought with him. Ludecus, another German, Power, and Captain Soto were
the only non-English settlers to receive lots on the creek. Other than Soto, none of the Mexican
soldiers seem to have been granted land.
57
Politically, Dolores split along ethnic lines. By law, the colonists had to elect an
ayuntamiento, or town council, with four official posts in order to gain recognition from Mexico
as a legitimate settlement. Beales, naturally, pursued the position of alcalde, or town mayor,
because of his status as empresario. Though the colonists had begun to turn on Beales for
misleading them, no other challenger rose with enough support to assert a claim to the position.
The colonists elected Egerton as regidor, or first officer under the alcalde, and another
Englishman, Victor Pepin, as regidor segundo. The last position, syndico, went to Ludecus as the
56
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 147-154; House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn,
12; John Opie, Char Miller, and Kenna Lang Archer, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land, Third edition (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 1-44.
57
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 131.
78
Germans got one of their own into an official position. As any problems crept up in town,
individuals turned to their own ethnic representatives to settle disputes creating an atmosphere of
distrust and resentment.
58
Aside from ethnic tensions, the biggest problem in town was clearly its economic woes.
Beales had blown through the $4000 the Rio Grande Land Company had allotted before the
party had even gotten to San Antonio de Béxar. There, in order to purchase extra supplies, oxen,
and repair broken carts, he took out an additional $1000 loan on the company’s credit just to get
to the Rio Grande. Still thinking that Mexico would provide easy credit to its empresarios, he
sent Captain Soto to Monclova with promissory notes to acquire a loan from the Coahuila y
Texas state government, but Soto returned with only an official letter welcoming the colonists to
the state. Thus, when the colonists began building Beales’s house, he had no money to provision
them.
59
To remedy the supply problem, Beales made the most fateful decision for the future of
Dolores: he left. After being elected alcalde and distributing written title to lands to all the
colonists, he announced he was traveling to Matamoros to draw another loan after only residing
in the colony for two weeks. He planned to have an agent return to Dolores with the money
while he sailed back to New York to restart the settlement process again with a new contingent
of colonists. It was up to Egerton to oversee the building of the colony until Beales returned.
60
Beales’s decision to leave demonstrated to the colonists that the empresario cared more
about satisfying his investors than the people he convinced to move to the Rio Grande
58
L.P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England, (New York: New York
University Press, 1968); Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony 134-136.
59
Brister, “Eduard Ludecus’s Journey to the Texas Frontier," 378; Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande
Colony, 102.
60
Kennedy, Texas, II, 51-56.
79
borderlands. Beales met the bare necessities of his contract by ensuring the colonists made it to
his grant and providing them title to their lands. Unlike Stephen F. Austin, Beales made little
individual effort to build connections with nearby Mexican towns or establish any sense of
community among the people of his colony. He left the colonists to fend for themselves; which
they did, making decisions that would benefit them individually regardless of the fate of Dolores.
Further, by prioritizing recruiting efforts over the foundational maintenance of the town, Beales
sought to reach the goals of the contract in order to receive his reward in land. Only through that
reward would the Rio Grande and Texas Land Company become profitable. Beales was more
incentivized to inflate the population in his grant than to oversee the successful settlement of it.
Beales's colonists expected him to assist and oversee the settlement. When he left, he completely
shattered their belief in the colony.
61
With the colony clearly failing and the sense of community fracturing, individuals began
seeking their own entrepreneurial gains. Seeing an opportunity in the town's economic hardships,
Soto took all the saleable items he owned, including his wagon, oxen, and horses, and pawned
them in San Fernando for food goods and basic supplies. He then opened a small mercantile
house in Dolores to sell these necessary items to the colonists for exorbitant prices. He took
promissory notes that Egerton distributed to prop up the town's economy at face value because
he knew that they would be redeemable through his brother-in-law and the Rio Grande Land
Company. While he did make a neat profit for himself, Soto’s venture was much more successful
at breeding unrest and resentment among the colonists.
62
As weeks went by without any infusion of supplies or hard currency, the laborers of the
Dolores quit working. Furious, Egerton tried to hold them to the job based on contracts they
61
Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin, 135.
62
Brister, “Eduard Ludecus’s Journey to the Texas Frontier," 378-379.
80
signed with Beales. Ludecus intervened, claiming that Beales broke the contract first by not
providing adequate supplies. To further complicate the issue, the few Mexican militiamen Beales
hired to guard the town became restless from not receiving additional pay. Fear of an Indian raid,
deteriorating defenses, and declining foodstuffs put everyone on edge. After days of bickering
and hard feelings, many of the Germans, including Ludecus, Power and other Irish laborers
packed up and left. Ludecus traveled downriver to Matamoros to get out of the borderlands.
Others resettled in nearby towns to try to continue their entrepreneurial dreams on the Mexican
frontier.
63
*****
A short while after Ludecus boarded a ship in Matamoros to leave Northern Mexico for
good, the Horn family prepared to leave Dolores. Unlike the Germans who left due to ethnic and
economic complaints, the Horns and other English colonists fled out of fear of Indian power.
About forty miles from Dolores, a party of Comanche warriors descended on a rancho killing
everyone and burning all the buildings. When news of the attack reached Dolores, the Horns
panicked. The town was largely defenseless and if Comanche bands ranged as close as forty
miles, it seemed only a matter of time before they raided the failing settlement. Sarah, her
husband John, and their two sons left with a group of about ten other English to make for
Matamoros. They never made it. Rather than take the road that ran along the Rio Grande, the
English party traveled northeast to the Nueces hoping to avoid Mexican troops heard to have
been gathering on the Rio Grande. This fateful decision led them directly to a Comanche raiding
camp. The Horns and their party were attacked, all the men killed, and the women and children
taken captive.
64
63
Ludecus, John Charles Beales’s Rio Grande Colony, 155-174.
64
E. House, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, 14-19.
81
When the Horns left Dolores, the indigenous politics of the Rio Grande borderlands had
shifted considerably from when the Horns landed on the Texas coast. The tenuous peace between
the Comanche and Northern Mexicans fell apart. The Lipan Apaches no longer posed a threat to
Comanche power, meaning the Comanche no longer needed Northern Mexicans to fight them.
Further, the influx of Americans into East Texas brought more American goods into Texas. The
Comanche began to openly trade with Americans for everything they needed, including rifles
and ammunition. The Comanche had few reasons to remain at peace with Mexico. Mexican
ranches and small settlements in the Rio Grande borderlands became raiding targets. The rancho
destroyed forty miles from Dolores marked only one of several raids in the region that year. The
Comanche would eventually lay waste to the abandoned remnants of Dolores.
65
*****
By 1836, rebellion erupted in Northern Mexico as Zacatecas and Coahuila y Texas
pronounced against the Mexican central government drawing the ire of President Santa Anna and
the Mexican Army. With Mexican troops marching through the borderlands to fight the
Americans who had declared Texas independent, all empresario contracts went on hold. The few
remaining Dolores colonists evacuated, leaving the town to wither and die under the desert sun.
However, Beales’s colony offers a significant and unique transnational perspective of the
political economy of Northern Mexico broadly in the 1830s and the Mexican empresario system
more specifically. Most empresario contracts assigned after 1830 were granted to Europeans and
Mexicans who, to varying degrees, attempted to settle their lands with other Europeans and
Mexicans. They took on government contracts with notions of huge rewards in land in the future
only to find that the government with which they contracted needed them to extend its power in a
65
DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts, 62-70.
82
region in which it was essentially powerless. The Mexican federal government remained
essentially bankrupt throughout the 1830s and its resources were already spread thin. Using
foreigners with foreign money to colonize its northern territories made sense to Mexican
lawmakers considering the nation's financial predicament. The imaginations and realities of both
the lawmakers who granted the contracts and the empresarios who undertook to complete them
diverged dramatically. Officials believed that empresarios would complete their contracts
independent of state assistance, while European empresarios like Beales, used to a state
apparatus with more capacity, accepted contracts assuming some sort of state or military
protection. These diverging assumptions assured that many empresario contracts would fail.
66
Those failures never discouraged Americans from investing in Mexico's lands. From the
moment of Mexico's independence from Spain, Americans tried to buy up as much Texas land as
they could in the hopes of reselling it at great profit. Historians tend to focus on Southern
investment in Texas land, but examples like Beales's Rio Grande and Texas Land Company
demonstrate that speculators in the United States Northeast were just as interested in profiting on
Texas lands as their Southern compatriots.
67
Northern Mexico captured the imaginations of
monied land men throughout the United States.
In the case of Beales's colony, European-born entrepreneurs found themselves caught
between Mexico's need to colonize its northern frontier and American greed for Mexican land.
Thinking they were taking advantage of Mexico's generous land policies and the financial
windfalls that American investment brought, European colonists undertook the task of building a
66
Deposition of Thomas Herbert O'Sullivan Addicks, Nov. 18, 1839, John Charles Beales Papers, Box 2E95,
(DBCAH); Graham Davis, Land!, 5-6; Carlos Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars
between Spain, Britain, and France, 1760-1810, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
67
Jesús F. de la Teja, Paula Mitchell Marks, and Ronnie C. Tyler, Texas: Crossroads of North America (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co, 2004), 230; Edward L. Miller, New Orleans and the Texas Revolution (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 53-54; Elgin Williams, The Animating Pursuits of Speculation: Land
Traffic in the Annexation of Texas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 1-37.
83
colony on the very edges of the borderlands. There, they found indigenous power dominated any
support they might receive from Mexico or the United States. Regardless of what Mexicans,
Americans, or Europeans wanted the Rio Grande borderlands to be, the Comanche had the power
to make the region in their image.
Furthermore, the failure at Dolores shows how European-born entrepreneurs came
together to bring their modern European notions of settlement and trade to the Nueces Strip, an
area of land that remained largely unsettled through the entire Spanish period. Everyone involved
believed that with their American resources and European industriousness, the hazards of the
place would be easily surmountable. The obstacles they dismissed proved to be too powerful to
overcome.
The Beales colony was not the last time European-born entrepreneurs attempted to settle
the Rio Grande borderlands with migrants from Europe. When the Republic of Texas proclaimed
its independence, its leaders fell back on the empresario system to populate its frontier. The
French took particular interest in the Rio Grande borderlands to compete with the English and
American empires in North America. This led European imperial agents to take a more active
role in expanding European presence the region.
84
CHAPTER 3
"THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND PROSPECTS OF EUROPEAN-BORN ENTREPRENEURS IN
THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS, 1836-1845"
The death of the Dolores colony did not spell the end of the empresario system nor did it
conclude attempts by European-born entrepreneurs to create European settlements in the Rio
Grande borderlands. As the Republic of Texas attempted to maintain its independence in the face
of dire economic conditions, it, like Mexico before, turned to the empresario system as a strategy
to boost its population and entice investment from Europe and the United States. The new
republic also needed to continue to defend its claim to independence from Mexico, which never
recognized Texas as a legitimate nation-state. Furthermore, Texas needed to stem Comanche
expansion from the western plains into the east. By trying to settle Europeans in the Rio Grande
borderlands between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, Texas attempted to draw in European
finance and create a buffer zone in the Nueces Strip between itself, Mexico and the Comanche
Empire.
1
When Texas made the announcement that it would grant empresario contracts in the Rio
Grande borderlands, European-born entrepreneurs scrambled to get one. Speculators from
Britain, France, the German-speaking territories, and Belgium accepted empresario contracts to
settle European colonists. A diverse set of empresarios from all over Northern Europe wanted to
1
Bobby D. Weaver, Castro’s Colony: Empresario Development in Texas, 1842-1865, (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1985), xi-xiv; 109-111; Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the
Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015),
209-215.
85
colonize the Rio Grande borderlands and profit from their ventures. The British and French
particularly took interest in acquiring contracts to grants between the Nueces River and the Rio
Grande. They viewed the Rio Grande borderlands as a place with the potential to provide
entrepreneurial success and support political ends for their imperial states.
2
The political ramifications of the Texas Revolution reinvigorated the imaginations of
European-born entrepreneurs who conceived of taking advantage of the newly altered
borderland. Not only did they carry the same unrealistic dreams of people like Egerton and
Beales that the Rio Grande borderlands would become an agricultural utopia on par with the
Mississippi Valley, but added a new wrinkle in that they actively attempted to harness the power
and authority of their own states rather than trusting the North American states in which they
decided to invest. The Beales example revealed that the Mexican state and American financiers
were fickle allies. As British and French entrepreneurs became interested in the Rio Grande
borderlands, their governments' presence in the region also grew as state agents encouraged
European-born entrepreneurs to seek empresario contracts from the government of the Republic
of Texas. Conditions in the Rio Grande borderlands during the era of the Republic of Texas
allowed European-born entrepreneurs to play the politics of diplomacy to try to attain land and
personal wealth.
3
This chapter covers two case studies: one involving French empresarios Alexander
Bourgeois d'Orvanne and Armand Ducos and another involving the British empresario William
2
The French did have a successful empresario under the Republic of Texas, Henri Castro. His example has been
written about extensively. See: Weaver, Castro's Colony; Cornelia E. Crook, Henry Castro (San Antonio: St. Mary's
University Press, 1988); Julia Nott Waugh, Castro-Ville and Henry Castro, Empresario (San Antonio: Standard
Press, 1934).
3
Ephraim Douglas Adams, British Diplomatic Correspondence Concerning the Republic of Texas, 1838-1846
(Austin: The Texas State Historical Association, 1918); Nancy Nichols Barker and A. Dubois de Saligny, The
French Legation in Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971); Rudolph Leopold Biesele, The History
of the German Settlements in Texas, 1831-1861 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930); William Bollaert, William
Bollaert’s Texas, ed. W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth Lapham Butler (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956).
86
Kennedy. I argue that Bourgeois, Ducos, and Kennedy utilized their respective states
bureaucracies to profit on speculation ventures in the Nueces Strip. Though they did their
research to learn from previous mistakes, namely the Beales colony disaster, these European-
born empresarios of the Texas Republic also failed to complete their contracts. Their projects
foundered because they often accepted misinformation as fact and tied the prospects of their
ventures to the geopolitics of the Atlantic world. Because they were agents of their respective
states, Bourgeois, Ducos, and Kennedy could not disconnect their political and economic
agendas. However, due to their abilities to draw European interest into the region, these
entrepreneurs demonstrate exactly how Europeans tried and failed to make the Rio Grande
borderlands a center for modernization and trade during the lifespan of the Republic of Texas.
*****
After the battle of San Jacinto in April 1836, Texas nominally became an independent
state. Mexico continued to assert its sovereignty and threatened military action, but the capture of
Santa Anna assured the American Texans
4
that, for a time, they could act independently. Almost
immediately, Texas sought annexation to the United States. By September, the people of Texas
voted overwhelmingly to enter the United States. However, they were rebuffed. Texas's
adherence to chattel slavery and the rapidly spreading crisis of the Panic of 1837 cooled support
for annexation in the United States Congress. Amid the threat of Mexican reconquest and the
economic decline the Panic of 1837, Texas leaders, particularly Sam Houston, looked to Europe
for political and financial support.
5
4
I use the construction "American Texans" throughout this chapter to denote U.S.-born people in Texas. I
intentionally eschew terms like "Anglo-Texan" and "Anglo-American" because of the notions of white supremacy
wrapped in both terms.
5
Eugene C. Barker, “The Annexation of Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1946): 49–74.
Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of
1837 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 176-179; Torget, Seeds of Empire, 179-191.
87
During the same span after San Jacinto, the British and French had become disillusioned
with Mexico. Still saddled with millions of dollars of debt and constant political unrest in a time
of global economic slowdown, Mexico failed to live up to the lofty economic expectations
Europeans had for it. For example, two-thirds of the Mexican mining companies formed in
London after Mexico's independence collapsed by 1830. Additionally, millions of pounds
invested in Mexico yielded no return. French entrepreneurs had similar experiences and both the
British and French came to feel duped by Mexican promoters and government officials. To
compound European disappointment, the successful Texas rebellion ripped away a huge chunk
of Northern Mexico and put it in the hands of Americans who sought to create their own
slaveholders' republic on the Gulf of Mexico. Both the British and the French had adopted
policies against chattel slavery and neither empire wanted to see the spread of the United States
into Texas. Rather than stand by and watch Americans reap all of Texas's economic benefits, the
British and French tried to capitalize on the disruption that Texas independence caused. They
moved to gain influence in Texas to open economic inroads and political discussions about
slavery.
6
Texas courted any European diplomat or merchant interested in the new Texas Republic.
Texas leaders understood that population growth was essential to the Texas Republic's success.
More people in Texas increased the value of Texas's most abundant resource: land. While the
Panic of 1837 spurred thousands of Americans to migrate to Texas, few settled in the Rio Grande
borderlands. The Texas Congress created a new empresario program that gave the president the
power to designate empresarios to both encourage and target migration. Sam Houston offered
6
Michael P. Costeloe, “William Bullock and the Mexican Connection,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 22,
no. 2 (August 2006): 275–309; Torget, Seeds of Empire, 202-210; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery:
The Peculiar Institution in Texas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 35-50.
88
grants to European contractors to recruit European colonists to settle hundreds of families within
their granted lands. A significant portion of the land the Republic of Texas granted to European
empresarios lay in the Rio Grande borderlands and, more specifically, within the Nueces Strip.
For basically the same reasons Mexico wanted Beales's colony to succeed, Texas promoted land
in the Rio Grande borderlands to Europeans.
7
Problematically, Texas had a spurious claim to the lands between the Nueces River and
Rio Grande. The administrative territory of Texas since the Spanish era had only reached as far
south as the Nueces River. After the Battle of San Jacinto, when Texas forces captured President
Santa Anna, the Texas revolutionary government forced the Mexican leader to sign a secret
treaty at Velasco recognizing Texas independence with the boundary at the Rio Grande. Mexico
never recognized the treaty and continued to claim sovereignty over Texas. The Nueces Strip
became a no-man's-land where Texas and Mexico both tried to assert their rights, but which
neither could physically control.
8
European-born entrepreneurs and state agents, though, accepted grants in the Nueces
Strip believing that their respective governments would support Texas claims down to the Rio
Grande. It was no secret that both the British and French wanted the Texas boundary to be the
Rio Grande. A British commissioner tasked with suppressing the slave trade wrote matter-of-
7
Eugene C. Barker, “Land Speculation as a Cause of the Texas Revolution,” The Quarterly of the Texas State
Historical Association 10, no. 1 (1906): 76–95. George J. Morgenthaler, Promised Land: Solms, Castro, and Sam
Houston’s Colonization Contracts, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009); Jesús F. de la Teja, Paula
Mitchell Marks, and Ronnie C. Tyler, Texas: Crossroads of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2004),
227-233; Weaver, Castro’s Colony. For more on German colonization in Texas see: Julia Akinyi Brookins,
“Immigrant Settlers and Frontier Citizens: German Texas in the American Empire, 1835--1890.” PhD diss.
(Chicago: Unviersity of Chicago, 2013).
8
Randolph B. Campbell, Sam Houston: And the American Southwest, 3rd ed, (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007),
89-90; 123; David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest under Mexico
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 251.
89
factly that the southern boundary of Texas was the Rio Grande.
9
The French knew that the
British wanted the Texas southern boundary to be the Rio Grande based on a supposed British
offer to supply a loan to the Republic of Texas for the purchase of the Nueces Strip from
Mexico.
10
The French recognized that if they did not accept the Rio Grande boundary they might
lose access to the Texas market. European-born entrepreneurs would be able to take whatever
opportunities they could muster in the Nueces Strip knowing they would come with at least tacit
approval from their respective governments.
Mexicans did not recognize any of these boundary assertions and continued to act within
the Rio Grande borderlands with their own motivations. Some residents of the borderlands even
tried to claim the region as a separate territory. A contention developed between regionalist
Northern Mexicans and those who supported the national power in Mexico City. In a
pronunciamiento declared in November 1838, the Plan del Rancho de Puntiagudo, leaders from
six towns along the Rio Grande claimed the Mexican central government incompetent and
unable to defend its people from "the continuous hostilities of the barbarians."
11
Clearly, for
federalist Northern Mexicans the expanding Comanche Empire proved to be a far more
important issue than the emergence of the Republic of Texas or the increasing presence of
Europeans. In the face of devastation and loss at the hands of indigenous power, the federalist
representatives of the Mexican people of the Rio Grande announced that they would take care of
themselves, disregard all national taxes, and seek justice for their region. Led by Antonio
9
James Hook to Lord Viscount Palmerston, April 30, 1841, in Ephraim Douglas Adams, ed. British Diplomatic
Correspondence Concerning the Republic of Texas, 1838-1846, (Austin: The Texas State Historical Association,
1918), 31.
10
Dubois de Saligny to Thiers, October 30, 1840, in Nancy Nichols Barker and A. Dubois de Saligny, in The French
Legation in Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971), 167.
11
"Plan del Rancho de Puntiagudo," November 22, 1838, retrieved from The Pronunciamiento in Independent
Mexico, 1821-1876, University of St. Andrews, https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/pronunciamientos/index.php, (accessed
October 17, 2017). Laredo, Guerrero, Mier, Camargo, Reynosa, and Matamoros represented the six towns.
90
Canales, this pronunciamiento became the basis for the Frontera del Norte, an attempt to create a
single political body out of a huge swath of the Rio Grande borderlands.
12
Conspicuously, the Frontera del Norte had no design for raising troops, funding, or
governing the region. It only declared unity among the Rio Grande villas against central
government forces. The rebellious and disorganized Northern Mexicans engaged in several
skirmishes against centralist Mexican troops in the Rio Grande borderlands, turning the region
into a dangerous warzone. Instead of fighting Comanche, Mexicans killed each other over the
issue of how to protect the frontier. After a year of campaigning with limited resources, Canales
and leaders from Laredo, Mier, and Reynosa met at Ciudad Guerrero to try to form a provisional
government. In hopes of gaining recognition, as well as troops, supplies, and funding, the new
government immediately sent an envoy to the Republic of Texas. Although Texas president
Mirabeau Lamar declined to help, the envoy convinced a couple hundred Mexicans and
Americans in Texas to join the fight. Canales and his small army fought until the end of 1840,
resigned to defeat after failing to even control the small territory they claimed as the Frontera del
Norte.
13
European diplomats in Texas and Mexico had confused notions about the Frontera del
Norte. The British remained relatively ignorant of the situation due to misinformation and
12
"Plan del Rancho de Puntiagudo," November 22, 1838.
In this chapter I will exclusively use the term "Frontera del Norte." Another popular name for the movement is the
"Republic of the Rio Grande." In large part, this term was created by American newspaper men during the U.S.-
Mexico War. For more on this brief and failed movement see:
12
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “La Supuesta República
Del Río Grande,” Historia Mexicana 36, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 49–80; Beatriz Eugenia De La Garza, From the
Fontera del Norte: A Personal History of the Place and the People, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013) 1-23;
Milton Lindheim, The Fontera del Norte, (Waco: W.M. Morrison, 1964) 5-10; Fleeson & Dryden, Republic of Rio
Grande. And Friend of the People, (Brownsville, Tex.), Vol. 1, No. 4, Ed. 1 Tuesday, June 16, 1846, June 16, 1846.
(accessed October 18, 2017), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, texashistory.unt.edu;
crediting Abilene Library Consortium.
13
De La Garza, From the Fontera del Norte, 1-23; Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the
U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 177-182; Lindheim, The Fontera del Norte, 5-10.
91
wishful thinking. Nicholas Maillard, an abolitionist writer who loathed the new slaveholders'
republic in Texas, wrote the British Lord Viscount Palmerston explaining that the Republic of
Texas ceded the territory southwest of the Nueces River to the Frontera del Norte so that a free
and independent federalist republic could be created there. Maillard willed the Frontera del Norte
into permanent existence so that it would repel Texas expanding slavery into the Rio Grande
borderlands.
14
The French legation in Texas, headed by Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois de Saligny,
viewed the Frontera del Norte as a small political disagreement between Mexican federalists and
centralists. In June of 1840, Canales, the Frontera's military leader, traveled to Galveston to
appeal to politicians and merchants for support of his scheme to create a federalist republic on
the Rio Grande. Dubois de Saligny described Canales as a terrible military leader and thought his
movement to be doomed. The French diplomat harbored deep anti-Mexican feelings and did not
give Canales's movement to break away from Mexico serious consideration. Neither the British
nor French understood the true power of the Comanche Empire as it disrupted unity among
Mexicans along the Rio Grande.
15
Despite the increase in Comanche raiding and the fighting between centralists and
federalists in the region, Dubois de Saligny saw great potential in the Rio Grande borderlands for
France. Based on conversations he had with merchants in Galveston, Dubois de Saligny believed
the Rio Grande to be navigable all the way to Santa Fe. He imagined Santa Fe to be the center of
a vast New Mexican mining industry primed for French exploitation. French commercial agents
14
Nicholas Maillard to Lord Viscount Palmerston, September 15, 1840, in Ephraim Douglas Adams, ed. British
Diplomatic Correspondence Concerning the Republic of Texas, 1838-1846, (Austin: The Texas State Historical
Association, 1918), 27-29.
15
Dubois de Saligny to Thiers, June 26, 1840, in Nancy Nichols Barker and A. Dubois de Saligny, in The French
Legation in Texas, (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971), 149-152.
92
had long desired access to Santa Fe, but French loss of territorial claims in North America after
the Seven Years' War ended the movement of French merchants to New Mexico. If the French
could develop a colony on the Rio Grande, Dubois de Saligny believed he could be the one to
finally give France the full access to Santa Fe it had always desired. Through his networks within
the Republic of Texas and French diplomatic agents, Dubois de Saligny inquired about land
grants along the Rio Grande in order to establish a strong French presence in a place that he
viewed to be on the precipice of an economic explosion.
16
Before he could establish a French presence in the Rio Grande borderlands, Dubois de
Saligny, as representative of France, had to work to make an excellent impression on the
American Texans for the July Monarchy. The July Monarchy was born out of a highly
fragmented French society in July 1830. An entrepreneurial group of French journalists, bankers,
businessmen, and lawyers harnessed the power of newspapers to overthrow the conservative
Charles X and install the more liberal Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, to the throne.
17
The liberal,
middle-class, government that took power lasted eighteen years. It produced a rapid, if uneven,
industrialization in France and increased competition with Britain for markets and imperial
power overseas. With its new industrial output and evolving policy to undermine Britain, French
foreign ministers sought Texas as a place to sell its products and establish a new imperial
16
Nancy Nichols Barker and A. Dubois de Saligny, in The French Legation in Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical
Association, 1971), 27-28; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992), 196-198.
17
By "liberal," I mean in the classical sense. They believed in free-trade and state-subsidized infrastructure to
support entrepreneurial growth. Leaders also believed themselves to be men of modern thought and sought to make
France a modern imperial nation. All of these characteristics tended to translate to France's relationship with Texas
and its attempts to colonize the Rio Grande borderlands.
93
presence in the Americas. The July Monarchy sent diplomats and operatives to Texas to
investigate the new republic on the Gulf of Mexico.
18
In 1842, French merchant Alexander Bourgeois d'Orvanne, along with his partner,
Armand Ducos, became key agents for France regarding the Rio Grande borderlands. The former
mayor of Clichy-la-Garenne, Bourgeois had networks at the intersections between business and
politics in France.
19
In fact, the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, Laurent Cunin-Gridaine,
sent Bourgeois to the Texas territory to semi-officially pursue reconnaissance and provide his
judgement on the economic prospects Texas presented to France. Ducos also had important ties
in French political circles, including the Minister of Finance, Jean Lacave-Laplagne. Ducos went
to Texas to investigate a property claim from a French expatriate Joseph Barthet. Bourgeois and
Ducos, both agents of the French government, traveled across the Atlantic to Galveston where
they sought to make inroads for France in the borderlands.
20
While Bourgeois traveled to Texas with the singular mission of information gathering,
Ducos had multiple responsibilities. Primarily, Ducos was in Texas to investigate the Barthet
claim and seek reparations on behalf of France. Joseph Barthet, a Frenchman who worked as
president of the Improvement and Banking Company out of New Orleans, made a claim on
James Grant's estate in 1838. Grant, the former empresario who was a partner with John Beales,
died during the Texas rebellion against Mexico. He actually helped lead a misguided attack on
Matamoros that ended in an absolute disaster for him and those under his command.
21
Grant had
taken a loan out from Barthet's bank and the Frenchman sought relief from Grant's estate. Barthet
18
For an excellent overview of the July Monarchy, see: H. A. C. Collingham and R. S. Alexander, The July
Monarchy: A Political History of France, 1830-1848 (New York: Longman, 1988).
19
The politics of the July Monarchy was constantly intersected with business interests.
20
Dubois de Saligny to Guizot, June 1, 1842, June 8, 1842, and June 15, 1842, in Nancy Nichols Barker and A.
Dubois de Saligny, in The French Legation in Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971) 334-338.
21
Stuart Reid, The Secret War for Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007).
94
had first contracted with Adolphus Sterne to investigate Grant's estate and file a claim against it
on Barthet's behalf. Sterne, a merchant and lawyer from Cologne, smuggled guns for New
Orleans volunteers during the Texas rebellion. His connections between New Orleans and Texas,
alongside his European background, made him a perfect agent for Barthet to hire to make his
claim. However, Sterne failed to get relief, leading Barthet to seek assistance from his home
nation, France.
22
Ducos met with about as much success on the Barthet claim as Sterne, a mission Dubois
de Saligny described as hopeless. In order to gain some relief for Barthet, Ducos partnered with
Bourgeois and engaged the Texas government for two empresario grants. The wording of the
contracts allowed Barthet the right to an equal share on both grants. Ducos may not have fully
succeeded on his mission, but he got his client at least the prospect of recuperating his losses
through acquisition of Texas land.
23
Dubois de Saligny became quite interested in Bourgeois and Ducos when they informed
him that they were pursuing empresario grants from the Texas government. He immediately
jumped to work to aid them in their quest. If they acquired land grants, he wanted to be involved
to ensure France's imperial and speculative goals. Dubois de Saligny had become a staunch
supporter of Sam Houston and his policies, giving him access to a powerful political network in
Texas when Houston was president. Through Dubois de Saligny's networks, Bourgeois and
Ducos obtained two separate empresario contracts from the Texas executive, one on the Medina
22
Dubois de Saligny to Guizot, June 15, 1842, in The French Legation in Texas, 337; Harriet Smither and Adolphus
Sterne, “Diary of Adolphus Sterne,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1926), 146-150; "Public
Documents Printed by the Order of the Senate of the United States, Third Session of the Twenty-Fifth Congress,
December 3, 1838," Vol. IV, (Washington: Blair and Rives, 1839), 411; Edward L. Miller, New Orleans and the
Texas Revolution, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 37-41;
23
Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas, 62-70; Handbook of Texas Online, Rudolph L. Biesele,
"DUCOS, ARMAND," accessed November 19, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdu04.
95
River outside San Antonio and the other on the Rio Grande. Excited for the success of his
compatriots, the French diplomat rushed a missive to his confidant, the French Minister of
Foreign Affairs, François Guizot: "these two concessions cannot fail to expand our interests and
influence in Texas."
24
As much as Dubois de Saligny expected his work to produce great strides for himself and
France, Bourgeois and Ducos had their own interests. They had to settle at least five hundred
families on their contracted lands to receive any benefit from the Texas government. The
partners needed to quickly finish their business in Texas and head back across the Atlantic to
recruit colonists to settle in the Rio Grande borderlands.
25
Even with empresario contracts in hand, Bourgeois still had work to do to put together his
report for the French Minister of Commerce. He found his job to be quite difficult because of all
the threats that bore upon Texas. Initially, he thought the best route to be through the archives of
Texas that had recently been installed in Austin. That proved to be a dead-end as the people of
Austin buried the archives out of fear of a colossal Indian attack. This fear and the responses to it
forced Bourgeois to have to travel throughout Texas and the Rio Grande borderlands to assess
the commercial viability of the region through oral interviews.
26
In 1840, the Comanche Empire expanded to one of its largest iterations as raiding
threatened areas as far east as Matamoros and south all the way to San Luis Potosí. One
Comanche band attacked Linville on Lavaca Bay, pillaging and burning the town. News of the
violence that Comanche raiders inflicted on their targets spread fears that transcended ethnicity
as Mexican, Texan, and European alike prepared to defend against an attack that may or may
24
Dubois de Saligny to Guizot, June 15, 1842, in The French Legation in Texas, 337-338.
25
Handbook of Texas Online, Nancy N. Barker, "DUBOIS DE SALIGNY," accessed May 30, 2019,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdu02.
26
Bourgeois d'Orvanne to the Minister of Commerce, May 26, 1842, in The French Legation in Texas, 332-333.
96
never come. The Comanche and other indigenous groups remained the dominant power in the
Rio Grande borderlands regardless of whatever claims American Texans, Mexicans, or
Europeans made.
27
Bourgeois completed his reconnaissance without meeting any Comanche warriors. His
report provides considerable insight into how the French viewed the Rio Grande borderlands.
One of the overarching themes of Bourgeois's report was that the Nueces Strip could become the
place where France would stem the tide of American and British expansion. He believed that
American ideas in the Texas population had become a groundswell that threatened to sweep
beyond the Rio Grande. In order to combat it, Bourgeois suggested the French subsidize the
continued presence of Catholic clergy in the region. In addition to stopping the spread of the
United States, the French needed to openly compete with the British in terms of both formal
colonization and commercial expansion. In his travels, Bourgeois noticed an influx of British
immigrants in the Texas territory and worried that their presence would influence the political
views of the Texas government. Also, British goods imported to Texas were of a significantly
higher quality than what the French were sending across the Atlantic. Much to his chagrin,
Bourgeois noticed that unscrupulous French merchants passed off fermented American grapes as
wines from Bordeaux or Burgundy. He worried actions like this injured the national reputation of
French industry. Bourgeois's concerns demonstrate how preoccupied the French were with U.S.
continental expansion and British global influence.
28
27
DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts, 80-85; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008), 221-223; Cruger & Moore, Telegraph and Texas Register (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 6, No. 15,
Ed. 1, Wednesday, March 3, 1841, newspaper, March 3, 1841; Houston, Texas.
(https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth48124/: accessed April 26, 2019), University of North Texas
Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Dolph Briscoe Center for
American History.
28
Bourgeois D'Orvanne to the Minister of Commerce, July 4, 1842, in The French Legation in Texas, 344-348.
97
In order to reap the benefits that everyone seemed to believe the future of the borderlands
offered, Bourgeois provided a list of recommendations that the French Minister of Commerce
should consider. Primarily, he wanted France to quickly pursue the creation of firm boundaries
between Texas, the United States, and Mexico. He believed the permeable frontiers created
constant hostility between Texas and Mexico, as well as opened Texas to annexation by the
United States. Both situations were harmful to French interests and commercial hopes. He also
imagined that established borders would end Indian raiding. Bourgeois inherited French notions
of modernity. For the Frenchman, the idea of nation and territory were inextricable. Bourgeois
did not recognize the legitimacy of the Comanche in the borderlands because they made no
formal boundary claims. The Republic of Texas needed to have an internationally recognized
politicized boundary line to be a legitimate nation-state. Anything less would mark Texas as
being as backward as Mexico and that it teetered precariously on the verge of savagery.
29
To ensure the best outcome for France, Bourgeois suggested that the state should sponsor
an emigration program to the Rio Grande borderlands so that French citizens "would carry with
them our tastes, our customs, our needs, our principles, and the memory of their native land."
30
The best way to orient the Rio Grande borderlands toward France was to have French citizens
populate the region. European emigration took a rapid uptick in the 1840s and Bourgeois wanted
to capitalize on it. Most French migrants up to 1842 moved to Algeria, which had come under
French domain in 1830. Bourgeois hoped to redirect emigrants to the Rio Grande borderlands so
that they may modernize the region according to French precepts.
31
29
Bourgeois D'Orvanne to the Minister of Commerce, July 4, 1842, in The French Legation in Texas, 344-348;
Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of the Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1997), 16; Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991), 7.
30
Bourgeois D'Orvanne to the Minister of Commerce, July 4, 1842, in The French Legation in Texas, 348.
31
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 112-134.
98
Finally, Bourgeois wanted to ensure French access to the Rio Grande. Like most
Europeans in the 1840s, Bourgeois believed the Rio Grande to be an essential waterway for
inland shipping. French smugglers like Jean Lafitte and Ramon LaFon made substantial profits
moving goods up the Rio Grande during the late Spanish era. Since Mexico's independence, the
population of French merchants in Matamoros had increased. One of the most prolific European
scientists in the borderlands, Jean-Louis Berlandier, published his calculations about how far
various sized boats could travel upriver. He supposed flat-bottomed boats could cruise hundreds
of miles inland. Bourgeois, collecting all this information, believed the best route to exploit such
a promising new market would be through the concession of Point Isabel to France. At the mouth
of the river, Point Isabel acted like a Gibraltar for the Rio Grande. Bourgeois concluded that the
concession, along with the establishment of a state-supported French company in the region,
would divert the Santa Fe trade to France.
32
When Bourgeois had acquired enough information to file his report, he departed the
borderlands to join Ducos in recruiting colonists. In fact, he wrote the report on the ship
returning to France. The report's focus on the Rio Grande and the issue of French emigration
suggests that Bourgeois included his own interests while seeking to acquire the aid of the French
government for his colonization scheme. In some ways, it worked. While he and Ducos were in
eastern France recruiting farmers to colonize their grants, the French Minister of Interior became
concerned about their actions and threatened to shut it down, fearing that the prospective
colonists would be exploited. The July Monarchy was always in a tenuous state and most
ministers avoided actions that might spur popular resentment among the poor.
33
However, other
32
Bourgeois D'Orvanne to the Minister of Commerce, July 4, 1842, in The French Legation in Texas, 348; Pat
Kelley, River of Lost Dreams: Navigation on the Rio Grande (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 24-25.
33
Collingham, The July Monarchy, 19-21.
99
members of the French diplomatic community came to their aid. The Minister of Foreign Affairs,
François Guizot, wrote the French Minister of Interior to settle his concerns. He claimed that
Bourgeois and Ducos "present no suspicion of improper conduct or fraudulent speculation."
34
Guizot apparently agreed with Bourgeois' report and recognized that colonizing the Rio Grande
borderlands with French citizens would give the French significant advantages, regardless of
what might happen to the emigrants.
Even with the support of the French government, Bourgeois and Ducos failed to recruit
enough French migrants to settle on their grants. Ducos essentially gave up on the venture in
1843 as the deadline to settle at least one-third of the total number of colonists came up on
December 3rd of that year. Bourgeois, though, pressed eastward across the Rhine River to entice
German-speaking people to settle in the Rio Grande borderlands. He made positive connections
with German princes and became associated with an organization that called itself the Society for
the Protection of German Immigrants.
35
The German principalities sought space for their people overseas in the 1840s as one
strategy to offset the economic and social crises that affected agricultural regions throughout
Europe. The U.S. Panic of 1837 was part of a larger global economic downturn that gripped
Europe for most of the 1840s. Further, industrialization in the Rhineland took a heavy toll on the
people in the southwest of the German-speaking territories, particularly Baden and Bavaria.
Artisans were hit hard as industrial production displaced their work and contributed to a glut in
labor supply. Pauperism became a serious problem for the German principalities to deal with.
The 1840s also witnessed an explosion in the population of the German-speaking territories
34
Guizot to the Minister of Interior, February 16, 1843, in The French Legation in Texas, 413.
35
Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas, 71-76. In German the Society was called Verein zum
Schutze Deutscher Einwanderer.
100
creating land and food pressure on top of the rampant pauperism. Rather than risk this volatile
mix of poverty and desperation leading to violent revolt, German leaders turned to emigration as
a method to ease the pressure. The Society for the Protection of German Immigrants was part of
that program.
36
Bourgeois saw the benefit of the Society and the wealth of the twenty-one German
noblemen who backed it and jumped at the opportunity. Regardless of his report about settling
his grant with French citizens to expand French influence, he wanted to meet the terms of his
contract to receive his bonus of title to the choicest lands in his grant. He recognized that the
Society was serious about German emigration and sought to capitalize on the Society's vigor.
37
Bourgeois made two key decisions when he engaged the German society. First, he
decided to abandon one of his empresario grants, giving up on the Rio Grande grant to focus on
the Medina grant. He likely made this decision because his lands on the Rio Grande were more
precarious than those on the Medina. Mexican army personnel crossed the Rio Grande and
occupied parts of Bourgeois's grant twice in 1842. Additionally, Mexican landowners had
documented title to most of the land in Bourgeois's grant that ran back to the days of Escandón.
38
Finally, the Nueces Strip proved to be an undesirable place for Europeans who saw it. One Swiss
traveler wrote of the land north of the Rio Grande, "the most dreadful monotony seems to
augment the ennui which one breathes here."
39
The Medina grant also offered certain benefits.
36
David E. Barclay, "Political Trends and Movements, 1830-1850: The Vormärz and the Revolutions of 1848-
1849," in Jonathan Sperber, ed. Germany 1800-1870, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46-68; Bayly, Birth
of the Modern World, 158-160.
37
Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas, 1-6; Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration
from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 3-42.
38
Florence Johnson Scott, Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande; a Historical Record of Spanish
Exploration, Subjugation and Colonization of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the Activities of José Escandón,
Count of Sierra Gorda, (Rio Grande City: La Retama Press, 1970).
39
Jean Louis Berlandier, Journey to Mexico during the Years 1826-to 1834, vol. 2, (Austin: Texas State Historical
Association in cooperation with the Center for Studies in Texas History, University of Texas at Austin, 1980), 422.
101
There was already a considerable and growing population of German-speaking immigrants in the
area around San Antonio de Béxar and the Medina grant lay only about sixty miles west of the
town. All of these conditions likely led Bourgeois to abandon his claim to the Rio Grande grant.
The second key decision he made was to attempt to inextricably tie the Society for the
Protection of German Immigrants to the Republic of Texas through financial agreements to keep
Texas attached to Europe and gain an extension for his empresario contracts. In the spring of
1843, he opened and managed negotiations between Ashbel Smith, the ambassador of the
Republic of Texas to France, and the Society. He convinced the Society to offer a loan to the
Republic of Texas for one million dollars to ensure the republic remained in existence through
the Society's colonization process. Smith conferred with Bourgeois about the terms of the loan,
then submitted it to the Texas Secretary of State, Anson Jones. Other than a stipulation that gave
the Society remission of tariffs of up $200,000 a year for ten years, Smith found it an excellent
agreement and encouraged his superiors to consider it.
40
The loan and Bourgeois' relationship with the Society soon dissolved. The American
Texans and the Germans could not agree on the tariff details of the loan and Bourgeois proved an
inadequate middleman to fulfill the needs of both sides. They decided to adjourn discussions
until June 1844.
41
That timeframe extended beyond his contract's deadline. Bourgeois
desperately needed Texas to renew his contract and kept at the topic. However, by the time
Bourgeois could renew discussions between the Germans and American Texans, the Society
removed Bourgeois from its association. Prince Carl of Solms, a key investor in the Society,
traveled to Texas with Bourgeois to investigate the lands within his Medina grant. Solms found
40
Smith to Jones, October 14, 1843, in George P. Garrison, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the Republic of
Texas, vol. 2, part 3, (Washington: Government Printing Press, 1911), 1467-1468.
41
Bourgeois to Anson Jones, April 20, 1844, in Diplomatic Correspondence of the Republic of Texas, vol. 2, part 3,
1561-1562.
102
that most of the grant was bad land and hilly country. Solms considered it a positive turn of
events for the Society that the loan through Bourgeois never came to fruition to allow for the
renewal of his grant. Bourgeois's shell game was over.
42
The entire project failed before Bourgeois could settle a single colonist on his grants, but
that should not preclude his colonization venture from study. In his entrepreneurial
maneuverings to acquire title for Texas lands in the Rio Grande borderlands, Bourgeois
encouraged the French government to seriously consider direct colonization of Texas, decided to
colonize with German-speaking families instead of French, shrugged the responsibility of
colonization onto German nobles, and convinced the Texas foreign office that they could acquire
a one million dollar loan from the same German nobility in order to extend his contracts with the
Texas government. Though he ultimately failed in his speculative scheme, Bourgeois's example
provides insight into how European-born entrepreneurs could utilize states for their own ends
and how these speculators imagined the future commercial success of the Rio Grande
borderlands to be tied to Europe. Moving people from Europe to the borderlands, having them
impose their culture on the region, and then selling those migrants goods from Europe remained
a central pillar of their strategies.
*****
42
Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas, 75-76.
103
Figure 6 Map of the Rio Grande Borderlands Empresario Grants, Republic of Texas
The British sought many of the same goals as the French, and British entrepreneurs
proved just as eager to attain state assistance. One particularly gifted individual was William
Kennedy. Kennedy, born in Scotland and raised in Ireland, became a journalist interested in how
the British Empire functioned. In 1838, he accompanied the Earl of Durham to Canada as a
104
minor diplomat. Afterward, Kennedy stayed in North America to explore the United States and
investigate its state legislatures. He wanted to know how the legislatures worked in order to
suggest applications of their functions of local rule in Ireland. When he learned of the new
republic formed in Texas, he traveled there and saw opportunity in both land and politics.
43
In order to gain access to Texas land and politics, Kennedy fell back on his journalistic
abilities. While in Texas, he collected data about its history and how its government functioned.
He used that data to publish a book, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Republic of
Texas. Kennedy's goal for Texas was to help build diplomatic ties between Texas and Britain by
highlighting a shared Anglo heritage. He learned through his travels in the United States that
Americans tended to hold the British in contempt and wanted American Texans to feel otherwise
about his compatriots. The book became an idealized description of Texas and American Texans,
lauding the land, climate, and hearty nature of the American colonists who migrated there. At the
same time, it denigrated Mexico as a "mixed population which, under the general name of
Mexican, lay scattered within and adjacent to the Tropic."
44
Kennedy's Texas sought to connect
the British and American Texans by painting Mexicans as being unable to properly develop the
area because of their racial inferiority.
His second goal was to spark greater interest in Europe for Texas. The epigraph he chose
for the book, from French diplomat Francois Barbé-Marbois, hints at the strategic thrust to bring
Texas and Britain together: "Texas is one of the finest countries in the world; and yet the
Europeans, eager as they have been to make conquests in America, have seemed, almost to the
43
Adams, British Diplomatic Correspondence, footnote, 43.
44
William Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Republic of Texas, Reprinted from the second
edition in one volume, (Fort Worth, Texas: The Molyneaux Craftsmen, Inc, 1925), xix.
105
present day, ignorant of its existence."
45
The book tried to build connections to the "Anglo-
American"
46
Texans for the British reader and explain how beautiful the land would be for a
British emigrant.
Kennedy spent a significant portion of his book discussing the Nueces Strip, in part
because he acquired much documentation from Beales's Rio Grande and Texas Land Company.
His two most important documents related to the Rio Grande borderlands were William
Egerton's investigative notes and John Beales's journal of the Dolores colony's settlement.
Kennedy plucked the most positive details from their writings in order highlight all the beneficial
aspects of Texas. Early in the book, Kennedy describes the land between the Nueces and the Rio
Grande as "well adapted to farming" and "not to be surpassed for the raising of stock."
47
He goes
on to compare the Rio Grande to the Mississippi and Orinoco rivers.
48
Similarly, Kennedy
regurgitates Egerton's belief that Matamoros would become the next New Orleans, a vast port
city to connect the Rio Grande borderlands with the entire Atlantic World. Whole sections of his
book look almost like advertisements for Europeans to choose the Rio Grande borderlands for
their future homes.
49
Texas gave the British writer access to many Texas leaders, including Sam Houston.
Houston had read Kennedy's book and met him personally. The Texas president found Kennedy
quite charming.
50
He also thought Kennedy might further Texas's standing within the British
45
Kennedy, Texas. The quote was placed on the title page of the second edition of the book.
46
Kennedy intentionally used the term Anglo-American to connect American Texans to England.
47
Kennedy, Texas, 17-18. The passages Kennedy used to describe the Rio Grande early in the book were cribbed
directly from Egerton's report on the region.
48
Both rivers were the most recognizable rivers in the Americas. They remain two of the longest rivers in the
Americas and both are navigable for most of their lengths. The Rio Grande was definitely not navigable for its entire
length. In fact, steamships rarely made it farther upriver than Laredo, and even then, only in times of very high
water. Egerton, however, promoted the navigability of the Rio Grande in his report. See: Kennedy, Texas, 53-60.
49
Kennedy, Texas, 53-60.
50
Sam Houston to William Kennedy, January 28, 1842, in Sam Houston & Eugene C. Barker, The Writings of Sam
Houston, 1813-1963, vol. 2, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1939), 450.
106
government. Kennedy, for his own part, accepted that role, but strove to make personal gains
from his relationship with Texas leadership. In their conversations, Kennedy found that Houston
and others were particularly interested in promoting European immigration to Texas. Since
Kennedy's book was essentially a device designed to do just that, he received empresario
contracts near where Beales's contract had been. He also earned an official position as Consul
General of Texas to Great Britain. Like he had done with Bourgeois, and Ducos, Houston gave
Kennedy the political means and economic incentive to convince European emigrants to move to
the Rio Grande borderlands. Kennedy had the opportunity to succeed where Beales had failed in
creating a British-led colony on the Rio Grande.
51
Like his French counterparts, Kennedy tried to take advantage of every situation to sell
the idea of populating his empresario contract with European emigrants to European state agents.
By the time he got to Austin in early 1842, the economic situation in Texas had become dire.
Kennedy noticed in his travels through New Orleans to Galveston that the financial situation in
North America had reached desperate levels as the economic fallout of the Panic of 1837
continued. However, the depression kept the United States and Mexico from taking over Texas,
leaving a prime opportunity for Britain. He wrote to George Hamilton-Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen
and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, that if Texas remained an independent state, a British
colony could be developed in Texas. The colony "would render her prosperous and populous
supplying to British Emigrants a new field for their industry, and to our Manufacturers a
profitable Market for their goods."
52
Not only would a colony be profitable for Kennedy, but for
all of Britain. He connected his own entrepreneurial success with the health of the British
Empire.
51
Weaver, Castro’s Colony, 14-16.
52
Kennedy to Aberdeen, Jan. 10, 1842, in British Diplomatic Correspondence, 56.
107
Kennedy did not tarry after he received his appointment as consul and his empresario
contracts. In only a few months he built up a number of investors for his colonization program,
two of whom were Scottish born. James H. Grieve, a lawyer, speculator and explorer, joined
Kennedy because of his interest in lands in southwest Texas. In his travels, Grieve built positive
relationships with Indian groups and became an important transmitter of information regarding
Indian movements and motivations for the prospects of Kennedy's colony.
53
Kennedy hoped that
Grieve would act as diplomat with the Comanche to stem the potential of a Comanche attack that
the Beales colony always faced. Additionally, Robert Robson, a Scotsman from Dumfries who
became a colonel in the Texas army, invested in Kennedy's enterprise. He gained vast wealth
through slave labor and owned two separate plantations in Texas that produced cotton for export.
Hoping to expand his holdings southwest, Robson invested a considerable amount of money on
Kennedy's venture and even housed and supplied the survey crews tasked with plotting the land
in the contracted grants.
54
It is likely that Grieve and Robson encouraged Kennedy to enlist
Scottish colonists to settle in his grant. By the summer of 1842, Kennedy made straight for
Scotland to begin recruiting colonists to make good on his contract.
While only tacitly acting as a consular official between Texas and Britain, Kennedy
focused on populating his empresario grant. He claimed to Lord Aberdeen that he was in
Scotland to visit old friends and new acquaintances; though he made a point to mention that he
thought organizations like the Engineers Association of Scotland would make excellent sources
to recruit unemployed workmen to emigrate to the Rio Grande borderlands. Kennedy, the savvy
53
Carl Solms-Braunfels et al., Voyage to North America, 1844-45: Prince Carl of Solms’s Texas Diary of People,
Places, and Events (Denton: German-Texan Heritage Society and University of North Texas Press, 2000), 35;
William Bollaert, William Bollaert’s Texas, ed. W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth Lapham Butler (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1956), 331.
54
Bollaert, William Bollaert’s Texas, 242-243.
108
journalist, used his writing skills to make subtle suggestions to the British Secretary of Foreign
Affairs to benefit his empresario venture.
55
In addition to powerful government agents like Lord Aberdeen, Kennedy could count on
approval from Parliament to help him recruit emigrants from Scotland. By 1842, Scottish
industrialization had taken off and, for the first half of the nineteenth century, Glasgow often
outpaced Manchester for output of textile products. Scottish success to rapidly industrialize
compounded serious demographic displacements. Advances in agricultural production
worldwide led to a drop in prices of the grains and oats Scottish farms produced in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries. Landowners turned to more profitable products like sheep and cattle,
displacing tenant farmers who migrated to urban areas to seek work. Additionally, because
Scottish industry grew so quickly and efficiently, it drew labor migrants from England, Wales,
and Ireland resulting in a broad and diverse group of extremely poor laborers in Scottish cities.
While many members of Parliament agreed that the situation of the poor in Scotland needed to
be rectified, few agreed on the means to do it.
56
One method Parliament considered in rectifying the situation of the poor in Scotland was
emigration. Members of the House of Commons became aware in 1842 that the Poor Laws
enacted for Scotland had done little to ease conditions there as the number of those living in
abject poverty increased daily. Edward Ellice, a Scottish politician and member of the Liberal
Party, proposed changes to the Scottish Poor Law to allow for using public funds to assist the
poor in Scotland to emigrate out of the country. He believed that publicly supported emigration
policies needed to be backed with other funding to ensure that those left behind would not suffer
55
Kennedy to Aberdeen, August 01, 1842, in British Diplomatic Correspondence, 93.
56
Sir George Nicholls, A History of the Scotch Poor Law, in Connexion with The Condition of the People (London:
Knight & Co.: 1856), 205; I.G.C. Hutchison, "Workshop of Empire: The Nineteenth Century," in Jenny Wormald,
ed., Scotland: A History (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 207-240.
109
greater destitution than before their relatives left the country. He worried deeply that the situation
within the urbanized lowlands may turn "fatal to the health and tranquility of the people."
Emigration along with general poor relief remained a serious option.
57
That Ellice brought the notion of publicly funded Scottish emigration to the floor of
Parliament in the summer of 1842 might not have been a coincidence. Ellice and Kennedy knew
each other, as both worked on Secretary Lord Durham's diplomatic team for a year in Canada.
They clearly interacted in the same social networks that revolved around Lord Durham. Kennedy
probably knew that Ellice's family owned large tracts of land in both Scotland and Canada and
that Ellice would be attracted to acquiring more landholdings in the Americas. It is quite possible
that when Kennedy traveled to Scotland to recruit colonists, he contacted his old colleague, now
seated in the House of Commons, to see what he could do to make the movement of Scottish
colonists to Texas easier.
58
Kennedy's hard work to promote his Texas lands in Scotland did not achieve the success
he desired. Conflict in the Nueces Strip caused Kennedy and Lord Aberdeen significant
vexation. Mexican military forces engaged in strategic raids on San Antonio and the Nueces
Strip. In March 1842, General Rafael Vásquez crossed the Rio Grande and drove straight to San
Antonio. The surprise attack succeeded, and he quickly took the city. Before Texas could
organize a counterattack, Vásquez retreated back south of the Rio Grande, taking over a hundred
prisoners with him. His attack demonstrated to Texas, and Europeans watching events, that the
Rio Grande proved a highly permeable boundary.
59
57
Hansard Parliamentary Debates, "Poor Law (Scottish)," HC June 17, 1842, v. 64, http://hansard.parliament.uk
(accessed December 3, 2018).
58
Jonathan Spain, "Ellice, Edward (1810–1880)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-
9780198614128-e-8651 (accessed December 06, 2018).
59
Campbell, Sam Houston, 120-121.
110
Six months later, Mexico drove home the point that the Rio Grande remained an insecure
border. General Adrián Woll, who grew up in France and became an officer in the Mexican
army, led a new assault against San Antonio in September 1842. Woll successfully captured the
city, marking the second time in a year that Mexican troops occupied San Antonio. Texas
volunteers quickly reacted and engaged Woll's troops in a pitched battle at Salado Creek outside
the city. The American Texans prevailed and Woll retreated back across the Rio Grande. Texas,
then, took the initiative and launched an offensive on Mexican towns located south of the Rio
Grande. Divided and poorly led, the Texas campaign fizzled at Mier by the end of the year. All
of the fighting in the Rio Grande borderlands in 1842 showed Europeans the instability of the
region.
60
By the time of Woll's invasion in September 1842, Kennedy understood that he could not
settle colonists in a land wracked with constant warfare. Aberdeen noticed the same and wanted
a stronger British voice in both Mexico and Texas to help alleviate the violence. Rather than use
Kennedy as a tool to promote British colonization to Texas, Lord Aberdeen appointed Kennedy
to be the British consul-general to Texas at Galveston. Aberdeen wanted Kennedy to use the
clout his book created in Texas to advance a British oriented agenda in Texas. Namely, Kennedy
was to promote greater trade between Texas and Britain and encourage Texas to adopt policies to
abolish chattel slavery. Within a year, Kennedy shifted positions from journalist to author to
empresario to Texas consul in London to British consul in Galveston. Kennedy jumped into his
new post with vigor. However, he had to rearrange his affairs as an empresario in Texas.
61
60
Sam W. Haynes, Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Expeditions (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1997); Campbell, Sam Houston, 122-124.
61
Kennedy to Aberdeen, May 22, 1843, in British Diplomatic Correspondence, 195-196; Torget, Seeds of Empire,
239-242.
111
When he acquired his post as consul at Galveston, Kennedy sold his rights to his
empresario contracts, but did not surrender his interests in colonizing the Rio Grande
borderlands. He helped negotiate a new contract with the Texas government that put his most
trusted associate and agent in London, William Pringle, as the primary empresario of record on a
new conglomeration of investors interested in settling British colonists in the borderlands.
William Pringle was the son of Thomas Pringle, a Scottish poet who Kennedy admired. After his
death, Kennedy wrote the epitaph for the elder Pringle's tombstone.
62
Through all the time he
spent exploring the Americas, Kennedy relied on William Pringle to handle his affairs in Britain.
The new empresario contract was both a reward for Pringle's service and a way for Kennedy to
remain a part of the venture. According to Lord Aberdeen, Kennedy had to contain all of his
business activities within the Galveston area. Wanting to retain his hold on a potentially lucrative
government position, Kennedy told Lord Aberdeen that he sold all of his interests in lands in the
Rio Grande borderlands and would confine himself to act only in the capacity as an agent of the
British government.
63
Pringle, on the other hand, could act any way he pleased regarding the
lands near the Rio Grande. Pringle's contract, signed November 1, 1843, was almost identical to
Kennedy's contract along the Nueces River. Only the names changed. Pringle, James Grieve, and
Associates agreed to take on the responsibility to introduce six hundred families into the Rio
Grande borderlands within three years' time.
64
The new company executed its contract with a two-pronged strategy. Pringle handled the
European operations, trying to recruit colonists to travel across the Atlantic and mobilize
political forces in London to make the process as easy as possible. Grieve had the responsibility
62
Sidney Lee, ed., Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XLVI, (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1896), 389-390.
63
Kennedy to Aberdeen, October 24, 1842, in British Diplomatic Correspondence, 120.
64
"Colonization Contract Between the Republic of Texas and William Pringle, James Grieve, and Associates,"
Copy, November 1, 1843, reprinted in William Bollaert's Texas, 380-384.
112
of surveying and mapping the lands in order to effectively be able to distribute title to the
colonists who arrived. Grieve's survey team included William Bollaert, a British chemist, who
kept a journal of his explorations of the Kennedy grant that illustratively contrasts the company's
expectations for the Rio Grande borderlands with the reality of the region.
65
Foremost among the company's expectations was that the Rio Grande was navigable.
What the survey team found on their travels never challenged their notions. Based entirely on
hearsay and legend, Bollaert accepted the fact that an American navigated the river from Santa
Fe to the Gulf of Mexico.
66
The survey crew never traveled far enough south to confirm or deny
the legend. They remained almost entirely within the granted lands located along the Nueces
River. Though Bollaert noted the severe lack of water in the region as well as descriptions of the
ease with which Mexicans forded the Rio Grande, he never once questioned in his journal
whether or not colonists could use the river to ship their goods to Matamoros.
The survey party's notions of the benefits of the Rio Grande played into other
expectations the British surveyors had for the colony. Primarily, they believed that the
settlements they built would replace San Antonio as the centers of trade in the Rio Grande
borderlands. With a flare of haughtiness, Bollaert described San Antonio as a town filled with
German and French merchants who he saw as contaminated by indolence and delay. He could
not believe them able to compete with a well-established British colony. He imagined that, upon
the land he described as poorly watered and filled with skunks and rattlesnakes, a thriving British
town would rise to intercept the trade from throughout the Rio Grande borderlands and even
65
Bollaert still called it the Kennedy grant even after Kennedy withdrew for the Galveston consulship.
66
Bollaert, William Bollaert's Texas, 334.
113
draw in more of the market from Chihuahua. He basically ignored everything he saw about the
country around him in favor of bad research and British industriousness.
67
The conclusion of Bollaert and Grieve's investigation of the Kennedy grant coincided
with a reinvigoration of popular movements in the United States and Texas for annexation. This
news riled British merchants in Texas who organized to craft a petition to Lord Aberdeen that
should the United States annex Texas, Americans would gain a monopoly of trade in North
America cutting out all opportunities for European traders. Kennedy received the petition, had
Bollaert and Grieve sign it, and forwarded it to Aberdeen. Annexation would be a total disaster
for his goals in Texas. He needed Britain to do whatever in its power to prevent it.
68
Shortly after signing the petition, Bollaert left Texas. He never had the opportunity to
return to fulfill the contract or acquire the lands he desired. Within a few weeks, the project had
been shelved indefinitely. One reason the venture was put on hold was that Kennedy intensely
feared U.S. expansion in North America. By the fall of 1844, Kennedy recognized the
precariousness of his grant in the path of American expansion. The piece of evidence that really
spooked him was the "Raleigh Letter" that Henry Clay had published in the National
Intelligencer in April 1844. Within, Clay outlined how the American people should temper their
stance toward Texas. The United States had made binding international agreements to exclude
Texas from its national body and should adhere to those agreements. However, Clay claimed that
if any European nation attempted to colonize Texas lands, the United States should swiftly
interfere. He declared for a full call to arms to prevent foreign powers from subjugating Texas.
69
67
Bollaert, William Bollaert's Texas, 350.
68
Ephraim Douglass Adams, "British Correspondence concerning Texas, XV" in The Southwestern Historical
Quarterly 19, no. 1, (July 1915) 91-93.
69
Henry Clay and Calvin Colton, ed., The Works of Henry Clay Comprising his Life, Correspondence and Speeches,
vol 3, (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 25-30.
114
Clay, who everyone understood to be against Texas annexation, would compromise his stance if
it meant keeping Europeans, particularly the British, out of the Americas to forward his
American System of building a strong domestic American market.
70
After reading Clay’s speech, Kennedy distanced himself and the British government from
the Texas empresario program. As the British consul-general to Texas, Kennedy had far more
invested in Texas than just his empresario grant. His entire diplomatic career revolved around an
open relationship between Texas and Britain. The last thing he wanted to do was be responsible
for turning one of the most powerful men in the United States into a proponent for U.S.
expansion into Texas. Kennedy turned his attention to the possibility of expanding sugar
production in Texas, hoping to encourage American Texans to remain independent from the
United States with offers of low tariff rates on both cotton and sugar. Because Kennedy blended
his political goals with his economic speculations, a threat to one proved a threat to both.
71
Kennedy’s hopes for Texas died when the United States Congress passed the annexation
bill on the last day of February of 1845. All Texas empresario contracts were put on notice for
termination. The Texas state constitution soon after made it official, suspending all colonization
contracts made by the Republic of Texas. Colonists who had settled retained their rights to the
land, but contractors would have to pursue legal recourse with the state of Texas to receive any
indemnity. Texas was to become a part of the United States. The geopolitics of the Atlantic
world turned against Kennedy's colonization venture.
72
*****
70
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 270-275.
71
Kennedy to Aberdeen, February 26, 1845, in British Diplomatic Correspondence, 451-453.
72
William F. Weeks, Debates of the Texas Convention, (Houston: J.W. Cruger, 1846), 35.
115
Bourgeois, Ducos, and Kennedy failed to fulfill their empresario contracts and attain
wealth through vast tracts of Texas land. Bourgeois and Ducos manipulated powerful French and
German leaders to support their settlement scheme. Bourgeois particularly became trapped
within his own web of misrepresentation. Kennedy's failure proved even more disastrous for him
because he lost his empresario grant and blundered his primary agenda as consul-general to
Texas. Kennedy gambled on the geopolitics of expanding settlement in the Rio Grande
borderlands and lost to American expansionism. However, all of their schemes reveal the manner
by which Europeans sought to modernize the Rio Grande into a new center for European
marketing. Bourgeois and Ducos anticipated the importance of Point Isabel to the Rio Grande.
Though settlement never materialized on their Rio Grande grant, they sought to build a
significant French presence where Atlantic shipping would come into the Rio Grande
borderlands. Kennedy utilized his publications to both generate interest in the region and
promote modernization through English industriousness. The imposition of the English culture of
hard work would reform the borderlands into a center for Atlantic trade. Bollaert essentially
repeated the same mentality in his survey journal. Their failures expose the way European-born
entrepreneurs envisioned their place in the future of the borderlands.
From the time of José de Escandón's mixed colonies to William Kennedy's frustrations,
European-born entrepreneurs viewed the Rio Grande borderlands as a place of great potential
that needed European settlement to make it into an integral source of natural resources and a
market for European products. Problematically for the entrepreneurs who undertook the risk,
formal colonization schemes only met with limited success and resulted in lots of failure. While
not successful, the colonization strategies maintained European interest and presence in the
region. The failed colonization projects coincided with a growing community of European-born
116
entrepreneurial merchants in the already established borderlands towns. These merchants became
the primary medium for other attempts at reorienting the borderlands toward the Atlantic
economy.
117
CHAPTER 4
"TRANSNATIONAL MERCANTILE NETWORKS IN THE RIO GRANDE
BORDERLANDS"
The United States annexation of Texas ended William Kennedy's dream of creating a
British colony in the Rio Grande borderlands. The subsequent U.S.-Mexico War went further to
drive home the point to the entire world that Americans were going to control all of the territory
down to the Rio Grande. In addition to driving British influence out of Texas, Americans also
wanted to push the U.S. market southwest to the Rio Grande to exclusively sell American-made
manufactures in the borderlands. American merchants followed U.S. troops to the Rio Grande
borderlands. Together, the U.S. army and a growing American merchant elite set to making the
region into an American space.
1
With Americans taking over the Nueces Strip, European-born entrepreneurs had to adapt
to the changed political economy of the Rio Grande borderlands. Rather than focus on
settlement, European-born entrepreneurs who wanted to exploit the perceived wealth of the
borderlands concentrated on commercial competition. They adopted strategies to tie the Rio
Grande to the Atlantic World through vast interlocking, multiethnic networks that combined
1
Amy S Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2012); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with
Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), 23-26; Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Manufacturing Advantage:
War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2019), 135-137.
118
family, state, and business connections which contributed significantly to the globalization of the
Rio Grande.
2
Mercantile networks became so essential to the borderlands in the 1850s because
commercial competition came to dominate life. European migrants who moved to the region at
the time wrote home trying to explain conditions in the borderlands to their peers: "An enormous
rudeness is generally prevalent in this country. Nobody cares about enlightenment and education.
Nobody lives intellectually. Everybody strives for money and for money only. Money is the idol
that is worshipped."
3
The American goal to push their manufactures in the region created an
atmosphere where success meant seeking trade for profit.
4
European-born entrepreneurs found space between the encroaching American merchant
elite and the already established Mexican hierarchy in the borderlands. The Mexican elite
flexibly responded to the changing circumstances of war and conquest. They utilized many
strategies to increase their opportunities for prosperity, including engaging partnerships with
Europeans who migrated to the region. The encroaching American merchants pursued schemes
to acquire wealth, land, and power from established Mexican families. They also sought to
monopolize trade and cut out their competition. European-born entrepreneurs built strong
networks among themselves that often included Mexican elites and small-time American
commission merchants. Since there was no clear blueprint for building a successful venture in
the newly bordered land, individuals brought their own experiences and strategies to bear upon
2
Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in
Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review, (June 1999), 816.
3
Henry Baumberger, San Antonio, Texas, to Father, beloved brothers and sisters, brothers-in-law, and friends,
October 13, 1856, Henry Baumberger Letters, 1856-1867, Doc 5171, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library,
San Antonio, Texas.
4
Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2013), 139-144.
119
the puzzle and often built outward from already established family and ethnic networks. They
also maintained connections with their states and state agents.
5
This chapter examines two different networks established on the Rio Grande. The first,
centered in Matamoros and Brownsville, became one of the vastest mercantile networks in the
entire borderlands. Spanish-born José San Román began by creating transatlantic connections
within his extended family and then tying them into local networks he built in an ad hoc basis.
His Atlantic connections provided him with the material for exchange in the local market. Often,
he sold his inventories through credit mechanisms that drew smaller merchants into his sphere of
influence. He globalized business on the Rio Grande by drawing Americans, Mexicans, and
Europeans into his systems of credit and material exchange.
Another, much smaller network in Laredo highlights the essential contributions of tightly
knit multiethnic family connections in constructing a transnational business in the borderlands.
The German-speaking John Z. Leyendecker pieced together his mercantile operation through
marriage and family connections. He began locally by entering into the trust of Mexican elites in
Laredo and then sought to tap into broader American and European networks. Both examples
show how European-born entrepreneurs used multi-layered, interconnected systems to profitably
5
Janet T. Landa, Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic Trading
Networks, Contract Law, and Gift-Exchange (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); David Montejano,
Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 24-75; Valerio-
Jiménez, River of Hope, 139-151; 238; Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga, "Conflict and Cooperation in the Making
of Texas-Mexico Border Society, 1840-1880," in Benjamin Heber Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Bridging
National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 33-52; Alicia M. Dewey, Pesos and Dollars: Entrepreneurs in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1940
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 36-37; John M. Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans
in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1-5; 21-31.
120
connect Europeans, Americans, and Mexicans together and make the Rio Grande borderlands a
center of Atlantic trade.
6
I argue that, through their alliances, European-born entrepreneurs tied Mexicans and
Americans together and served as an alternative to the American merchant elite, pushing back
against U.S. expansion. Both San Román and Leyendecker made connections as local as their
neighbors and as global as merchants in Paris and Amsterdam. They also utilized their
connections within American and European states to support their businesses. San Román and
Leyendecker pursued and offered opportunities for those disillusioned with the new American
commercial order to seek different pathways for exchange.
*****
The U.S.-Mexico War dramatically reshaped the Rio Grande borderlands, particularly
Laredo and Matamoros where Leyendecker and San Román began their respective businesses.
The American occupation of Northern Mexico resulted in the establishment of permanent U.S.
military garrisons, turned the river itself into a national boundary, and reorganized trade patterns.
In Laredo, the U.S. army built Camp Crawford on the western outskirts of the town, which
became the permanent site for Fort McIntosh. The camp and subsequent fort gave Laredo
ranchers and merchants a ready local market for goods they never had before. Rather than having
to ship everything north and south along the former Camino Real, which the army rebuilt as the
6
I chose to focus on San Román and Leyendecker in this chapter for several reasons. Primarily, there is a degree of
separation between the two. They created their own networks without influence from one another. Also, they are
geographically removed from each other but also within the same regional market allowing for a more effective
compare and contrast analysis. Finally, they are both European born, but from very different backgrounds. Their
examples show that, regardless of many other factors, European-born entrepreneurs turned to forms of human
networking to develop their businesses on the Rio Grande and connect to larger markets after the U.S.-Mexico War.
121
San Antonio Road, Laredoans could produce and sell goods in their own neighborhood. The
army brought a considerable boon to the local economy.
7
Matamoros experienced the U.S. military occupation differently. The army constructed
more efficient roads that cut travel times significantly. Soldier-laborers built new paths from
Matamoros to San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Monterrey. Wagon trains could move goods
more quickly and safely inland than ever before. Furthermore, Matamoros merchants benefitted
directly from American military occupation as they could sell to American military personnel.
When Mexican customs houses closed after U.S. forces captured the city, goods imported from
the United States and Europe entered the Mexican port duty-free for more than an entire year.
Merchants fortified trade connections with ports all over the Atlantic at virtually tariff-free rates
making Matamoros a popular entrepot for goods going into Mexico.
8
For the Rio Grande borderlands, the most important results of the war came with the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the treaty, the United States and Mexico agreed to use the Rio
Grande as a boundary between the two nation-states, which meant that Laredo fell into the
United States while Matamoros remained in Mexico. However, the river remained a permeable
fixture, as goods and people moved back and forth across it regardless of nationality. The
boundary was too big and the need for goods and labor too strong. Instead of suppressing trade,
the imposition of the border stimulated a rapid commercial increase because it encouraged
7
John A. Adams, Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande: Laredo, 1755-1955 (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2008) 82-85
8
Milo Kearney and Anthony K. Knopp, Boom and Bust: The Historical Cycles of Matamoros and Brownsville,
(Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1991), 64-66; Adams, Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande: Laredo, 82-83;
"Testimony taken by the Special Committee on Texas Frontier Troubles," Resolution of the House of
Representatives, Report no. 343, January 6, 1876, 38-39.
122
construction developments, sparked transnational trade, and ensured greater protections against
indigenous raiding.
9
The imposition of the border set off a construction boom as people along the river began
to build sister cities for those across the border. For example, former Mexican leaders in Laredo
expanded upon parts of the city built south of the Rio Grande and dubbed the town Nuevo
Laredo. North of Matamoros, entrepreneurial Americans began constructing the town of
Brownsville as an American port to compete with Matamoros. Similar towns popped up all along
the Lower Rio Grande in response to the new boundary. Each new town required significant
material imports to survive and relied on regional merchants to provide for them.
10
Another key element of the treaty was that it encouraged commerce between the U.S. and
Mexico by cancelling all Mexican debts to the United States and reinstating the Treaty of Amity,
Commerce, and Navigation between the U.S. and Mexico for eight years. Respect for trade,
protections of property, and liberty of mobility between both nations became hallmarks of the
peace agreement that proved difficult to change. When the United States or Mexico attempted to
impose broad tariffs, merchants turned to smuggling to ensure continued movement of goods.
9
Consul Peter Seuzeneau to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, April 04, 1858, “Despatches from United States Consuls
in Matamoros, Mexico, 1826-1906,” Microfilm Mf79.01, reel 4, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University;
Leroy P. Graf, “The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley 1820-1875” (PhD Diss, Harvard University,
1942), 235-236.
10
Daniel D. Arreola and James R. Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 13-20.
Other important sister-cities to develop in this era besides Nuevo Laredo and Brownsville were Roma across from
Mier and Rio Grande City north from Camargo.
123
European-born entrepreneurs in both the United States and Mexico took advantage of the
permeable border to move their products as the market demanded.
11
Figure 7 Map of disputed territory during US-Mexico War, 1846-1848, taken from:
https://history.army.mil/brochures/Resaca%20de%20la%20Palma/Palo%20Alto.htm
Finally, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established that the United States would
restrain and punish indigenous incursions into Mexico. This article of the treaty ensured a
prolonged U.S. military presence along the border. It also promised merchants a feeling of
security in opening trading relationships with indigenous people. The Comanche, still an
11
Hamilton Fish, Treaties and Conventions Concluded between the United States of America and Other Powers
since 1776 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1871), 544-556; Adams, Conflict and Commerce on the Rio
Grande,74; George T. Diaz, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2015), 13-36
124
extremely powerful society in the borderlands in the 1850s, held tremendous wealth in horses
and cattle. European-born entrepreneurs built and maintained trading connections with Plains
Indians in the shadows of U.S. army forts.
12
The war and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transformed the political economy of the
borderlands in significant ways. It established U.S. sovereignty down to the Rio Grande, ensured
a constant presence of American military personnel, and encouraged a broad class of American
merchants to migrate to the region to capitalize on the nation's post-war expansion. Yet, the
imposition of the border provided economic opportunity for those living south of the Rio
Grande. Thousands of Mexican migrants moved to the border region to take advantage of the
economic boom. Mexican merchants benefited from the expansion of trade, legal and illegal,
along the Rio Grande. European-born entrepreneurs who migrated to the region had to find the
best way to succeed within the newly bordered land. Some turned to constructing commercial
alliances to compete with Americans. Others sought marriage and kinship relationships among
the Mexican elite to establish themselves. Regardless of strategy, Europeans formed a significant
portion of the population and had to find a way to flourish on the Rio Grande.
13
*****
Spanish entrepreneur José San Román was born in Bilbao in 1822. Bilbao, in the Basque
region of Spain, was one of Spain's most important trade centers. Merchants of the city had long
participated in the coastal trade with France and developed strong connections with British
exporters. Marked by constant conflict during San Román's childhood, Bilbao was laid under
12
Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2008), xiii-xv.
13
González-Quiroga, "Conflict and Cooperation," 44-48; Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, 3-4.
125
siege four separate times during the Carlist wars between 1833-1839. San Román left the
violence of his birthplace to seek opportunity in North America.
14
The Spaniard moved to New Orleans in the late 1830s to apprentice with an English
merchandising firm, Thorn & McGrath. His apprenticeship reached maturation just as the U.S.-
Mexico War broke out. Thorn & McGrath wanted an agent of its own on the Rio Grande to
capitalize on the conflict. Soldiers carried money and wanted to spend it. The Anglo New
Orleans company was more than willing to offer its dry goods stock on consignment to San
Román knowing the Spaniard was multilingual with contacts at the Spanish consulate in
Matamoros. Fluent in Spanish, English, and French, he could communicate to sell to Mexican
and American troops.
15
R.H. Thorn was personally excited to give San Román the opportunity to
figure out how best to capitalize on the American war with Mexico to make them a fine return on
their investment.
16
San Román, who came from a border region in Europe, quickly learned how to be a
successful merchant in the American borderlands. He observed that Matamoros was an itinerant
town. Soldiers, merchants, journalists, speculators, and adventurers all came through the port
during the war years. They needed a place to stay and somewhere to resupply. Within his first
year there, he moved his store from near the river, where Thorn & McGrath suggested, to Calle
Comercial, right across from the Exchange Hotel. He also became more assertive about the stock
his patrons sent him by letting his them know “what kinds of goods will pay best.”
17
He ordered
14
Raymond Carr, ed., Spain: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203-209; Handbook of Texas
Online, Roberto Mario Salmón, "SAN ROMAN, JOSE," accessed August 26, 2019,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsa16; William A. Douglass and Jon Bilbao, Amerikanuak:
Basques in the New World (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1975), 9-20.
15
He could also communicate in German.
16
Thorn & McGrath to San Román, December 14, 1846, Box 2G41, José San Román Papers, 1823-1934,
(DBCAH); The Daily Picayune, (New Orleans, La.), Advertisement, January 13, 1852.
17
Thorn & McGrath to San Román, December 14, 1846, Box 2G41, José San Román Papers, 1823-1934,
(DBCAH).
126
cotton shirts and pants, cloth caps, parasols, and other products that made sense for Northern
Mexico's climate and the market to which he catered. Lastly, he learned the value of credit.
Completely ignoring an explicit warning from Thorn & McGrath to trade only in hard currency,
San Román extended credit to clients who seemed reliable. He quickly found that being a node
in the movement of debt around the borderlands proved to be profitable and enlightening. In just
his brief few months in town in 1846, he managed to sell $3524.89 in goods on credit which he
charged a reasonable 5% interest. Meaning, in addition to his commission for selling goods as an
agent of Thorn & McGrath for that year, he netted himself an extra $176.25.
18
Through his
network of debtors, he learned which markets were growing the fastest in the Rio Grande
borderlands. With his extra profits and knowledge of the region, the Spaniard got out from under
his first commission in little over a year and looked to expand beyond Matamoros.
19
San Román first recognized the new market growing right across the river in Brownsville
and moved to capitalize on it. Initially, he tried to hire a reliable commission merchant to take his
goods on consignment to open shop in Brownsville. This way, someone else would do all the
work of founding a new store while San Román reaped the profit. However, he found nobody he
could trust to complete the expansion for him and decided to open a Brownsville store himself.
By January 1850, San Román owned storefronts in both Matamoros and Brownsville.
20
18
According to MeasuringWorth.com, a tool created by the Organization of Economic Historians, $176 in 1846
translates to approximately $5000 in 2016.
19
Fleeson & Palmer, American Flag. (Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico), Vol. 2, No. 110, Ed. 1 Saturday, June 26,
1847; (accessed October 20, 2017), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History,
texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Abilene Library Consortium; Invoice of goods shipped by Thorn & McGrath,
January 22, 1847, Box 2G41, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); Ledgers November 1846-January 1849, Box
2G129, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
20
Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 42-43; American Flag, Cameron County and
Matamoros Advertiser. (Brownsville, Tex.), Vol. 3, No. 235, Ed. 1 Wednesday, November 22, 1848, (accessed
October 24, 2017), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, texashistory.unt.edu; crediting
Abilene Library Consortium; Centinela del Rio Grande. (Brownsville, Tex.), Vol. 1, No. 11, Ed. 1 Wednesday,
March 13, 1850, (accessed October 24, 2017), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History,
texashistory.unt.edu; crediting San Jacinto Museum of History.
127
Having commercial houses in both Matamoros and Brownsville put San Román in direct
competition with the most dominant members of the American merchant elite in the Rio Grande
borderlands. Charles Stillman and Miflin Kenedy formed the center of a commercial network
that sought to monopolize trade on the Lower Rio Grande and cut out all other competitors.
Connecticut merchant Charles Stillman founded Brownsville to draw trade away from
Matamoros into an American port. He helped fund Mexican entrepreneur Francisco Yturria to
open one of the first successful banks in Brownsville to capitalize on the dual-currency nature of
the borderlands. Kenedy earned nearly every U.S. army transportation contract and purchased
majority stakes in all of the steamships that plied the Lower Rio Grande until he and his partners
controlled the means of travel from the Gulf of Mexico to the ports at Matamoros and
Brownsville and beyond. Stillman and his associates developed a trade nexus in the Rio Grande
delta that spread throughout the United States and Mexico. San Román had to connect with
Europeans and other Mexicans and Americans to compete. San Román’s efforts allowed him to
position himself to push back against American economic domination of the borderlands.
21
The Spanish-born entrepreneur realized his advantage lay in his transatlantic connections.
San Román pushed himself to look outward from the Rio Grande delta to tap into his family
networks and connections through Thorn & McGrath. He first utilized the mobility and expertise
of his cousin, Augustin San Román, to integrate his firm more deeply into the Atlantic trade.
Augustin San Román had followed José into an apprenticeship in New Orleans with a Spanish
merchant house, Caballero & Company. Afterward, they partnered to connect the Rio Grande
stores with some of the biggest markets in the western hemisphere. Augustin traveled to New
York, Monterrey, and Paris to find suppliers for the goods most in demand on the Rio Grande,
21
Hart, Empire and Revolution, 22-26; Kearny & Knopp, Boom and Bust, 70-84; Leroy P. Graf, “The Economic
History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley 1820-1875” (PhD Diss, Harvard University, 1942), 227-241.
128
namely British textiles, Mexican silver, and French wine. Through the connections Augustin
built, José San Román was able to market the most popular products at some of the best prices.
22
José San Román also had a close family friend starting commercial activities in Havana.
Simón Celaya traveled from New Orleans to Cuba as a commission merchant for Thorn &
McGrath around the same time San Román went to the Rio Grande.
23
Celaya and San Román
found that both their ventures became more profitable when they worked together. Celaya sold
his stock for as much tobacco as he could get and shipped that across the Gulf of Mexico for San
Román to sell at higher margins in Matamoros. They ran their tobacco scheme for several years
until San Román's storefronts in Matamoros and Brownsville grew too large for him to manage
alone. By the end of the 1850s, Celaya moved to the Rio Grande to manage one of San Román's
stores. That did not end his connections with Havana, though. Celaya continued to import Cuban
tobacco to sell in San Román's stores at cut rate prices. The San Román merchant house became
a popular supplier of clothing, tobacco, and alcohol. His family and kinship networks paid
dividends.
24
Maintaining his connections to Thorn & McGrath also proved to be a boon to San
Román's growing mercantile operation. When he finished paying off his initial commission, the
Spaniard could have gone his own way and cut ties with his former bosses. By remaining in
communication and continuing to order supply from them, San Román benefited when Michael
McGrath expanded to New York City. He opened a clothing firm with Scottish entrepreneur
Robert Tweed. When their business expanded to New York from New Orleans, San Román
22
Augustin San Román to José San Román, May 16, 1855, Box 2G47, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
23
Simón Celaya to José San Román, November 29, 1847, Box 2G41, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
24
Simón Celaya Account, July 14, 1855, Box 2G48, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); Jorgé Romano to Simón
Celaya, June 6, 1858, Box 2G54, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH). They were paying about 2.5¢ for each Cuban
cigar they imported. That worked out to be about 30% cheaper than the average price of a cigar in the United States.
See: Carroll D. Wright, Comparative Wages, Prices, and Cost of Living (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co.,
1889), 149.
129
gained access to partners he could trust in two of the largest markets in the United States. Both
McGrath and Tweed also had connections with Anglo firms in London, Liverpool, and
Manchester that the Spaniard could exploit. His family and business connections to the Atlantic
market gave him an edge he needed to compete with the Stillman syndicate in the Rio Grande
borderlands.
25
As San Román built the foundations of his Atlantic commercial networks in the years
following the U.S.-Mexico War, American elites, including the Charles Stillman business group,
worked to solidify their political and economic hold, locally. They moved into positions of local
government, helped impose the American judicial system, and controlled law enforcement. The
Stillman syndicate became deeply integrated with the new American political elite through the
practice of lawyers who ensured their land investments and privileged trading status remained
intact. The founder of Brownsville sought to make the town he created the seat of a regional
commercial empire. Stillman and his allies' local power grew steadily after the war, often
crushing outsiders and upstart merchants before they became a threat.
26
San Román needed to develop his network within the Rio Grande borderlands to build on
his customer base and remain tapped into local information flows. His transatlantic connections
were meaningless without local allies. He exerted great effort to link with other European-born
entrepreneurs he could trust to create an organization to counter Stillman. Utilizing his
multilingual skills and ability to manage credit, San Román connected with British, French, and
Spanish merchants in the region. In doing so, he pushed against the American merchant elite. By
25
McGrath, Tweed, & Co. invoice to José San Román, May 30, 1855, Box 2G47, José San Román Papers,
(DBCAH); H. Wilson, Trow's New York City Directory (New York: John F. Trow, 1859), 512.
26
Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 34-47; Hart, Empire and Revolution, 22-31.
130
the end of the 1850s, San Román sat in the center of a web of commercial activity in the Rio
Grande borderlands.
The Basque entrepreneur believed the river transportation business to be the best
foundation from which to organize Europeans in the borderlands to launch a counter to the
Stillman syndicate. San Román initially allied with an American ship captain, James. B.
Armstrong, who won a U.S. army contract over Kenedy's company. The Armstrong contract
provided the sliver of hope for breaking down the Stillman syndicate's transportation monopoly.
Armstrong earned the right to pilot boats loaded with goods to provide for the U.S. forts on the
Rio Grande. He and San Román put together an investment group of European-born
entrepreneurs, including French merchant Theophile Delmas, the Spanish de la Vegas brothers
and the Scottish John Young, to purchase the ships Swan and Guadalupe. Those two steamships'
physical presence on the Rio Grande represented an open challenge to the American merchant
elite. They also offered an alternative to the American shipping monopoly.
27
John Young proved to be an important early ally for San Román's steamship scheme.
Young moved to the Rio Grande borderlands before the U.S.-Mexico War and bought land north
of Matamoros. He built positive relationships with members of the Ballí family. The Ballí's
remained one of the most powerful families in the Rio Grande borderlands since the days of
Escandón, primarily through their ability to acquire and exploit land. Young ingratiated himself
to the Ballí family and married Salomé Ballí. The marriage proved mutually beneficial. Through
27
Pat Kelley, River of Lost Dreams: Navigation on the Rio Grande (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986),
55-71; Jane Clements Monday and Frances Brannen Vick, Petra’s Legacy: The South Texas Ranching Empire of
Petra Vela and Mifflin Kenedy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 55.
James Grogan, an important partner in the group, has no identifiable birthplace on record. He may have been
American or Irish. I cannot confirm. For a full list of investors, see: Joseph San Romons and William Armstrong,
Administrators of James B. Armstrong vs. The United States, December 18, 1860, in Congressional series of United
States public documents, Volume 1109 of United States Congressional serial set, (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1861).
131
building kinship ties with a prominent and long-established Mexican family, Young expanded
his land acquisitions. Intermarriage with European-born entrepreneurs like Young provided a
protection for the Ballís to retain their land and social status in the face of American
encroachment. Rather than rest on their already vast landholdings, Salomé and John Young
continued to purchase land under U.S. jurisdiction, acquiring land titles sealed by the state of
Texas to avoid any American attempts to usurp their land.
28
In addition to his landholdings, Young ran a small trade route along the Rio Grande and
tried to construct a town northwest of Brownsville. The Stillman syndicate's monopoly on Rio
Grande steamboat transportation caused him considerable vexation. Kenedy's shipping company
charged exorbitant prices to ship to Young's landing on the Rio Grande. Kenedy's and Stillman's
interests centered in Brownsville and another nearby town would undermine their plans. By
1855, Young, with the Ballí's backing, sought entry into the river transportation market. He
engaged San Román and became a primary investor in his fledgling steamship company.
Together, they offered legitimate competition to the Stillman syndicate for river transport .
29
With their own steamships plying the river, San Román, John Young, and their network
of investors served the demands of the American army and became key providers of essential
goods for the Lower Rio Grande. Armstrong used San Román's boats to supply the
28
Mary Margaret McAllen Amberson, James A. McAllen, and Margaret H. McAllen, I Would Rather Sleep in
Texas: A History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the People of the Santa Anita Land Grant (Austin, TX: Texas
State Historical Association, 2003), 126-127. Florence Johnson Scott, Royal Land Grants North of the Río Grande,
1777-1821: Early History of Large Grants Made by Spain to Families in Jurisdiction of Reynosa Which Became a
Part of Texas After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848 (Rio Grande City: La Retama Press, 1969), 64.
For more on Americans dispossessing Mexican-owned land, see: Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros
and Settlers in South Texas, 1734-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 146-178; Valerio-
Jiménez, River of Hope, 180; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 59-74.
29
Amberson, et. al., I Would Rather Sleep in Texas, 7; 66-67; 155-158; Florence Johnson Scott, Royal Land Grants
North of the Río Grande, 1777-1821: Early History of Large Grants Made by Spain to Families in Jurisdiction of
Reynosa Which Became a Part of Texas After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848 (Rio Grande City: La Retama
Press, 1969), 64.
132
quartermasters at Fort Brown and Fort Ringgold outside of Rio Grande City with all the matériel
to maintain their troop numbers. They also shipped goods to civilian customers. A key item for
their freight business included lumber. The Rio Grande borderlands lacked significant tree
sources other than mesquite, driving builders who wanted European-style buildings to import
most of their lumber. Demand was such that San Román's boats pulled in about $350 a month
just shipping lumber upriver.
30
Stillman and Kenedy pushed back against San Román's European-owned steamship
company. They went directly to the Quartermaster Department of the U.S. army to get
Armstrong's contract transferred to the Kenedy company. Through outright bribes, Kenedy
convinced the officers at Fort Brown to draw up orders to have San Román's ships inspected.
The inspectors declared the boats to be unsuitable and recommended cancelling Armstrong's
contract. In response, San Román sued both Kenedy's company and the Quartermaster
Department. He and his investors earned $17,000 from the U.S. government and, after a
settlement, a 12% share in the Kenedy shipping company.
31
San Román's venture into the river transport business demonstrated that European-born
entrepreneurs in the Rio Grande could challenge Americans' push to dominate the region.
Though San Román's steamship company ultimately dissolved, it won recognition from the U.S.
government and cut into the Stillman syndicate's profits. San Román and his investors earned a
monthly income from Kenedy's ships. The results of the settlement also drew Stillman and San
Román into cooperative agreements. Rather than destructive competition and costly court battles,
30
Swan Wood Book, 1857, Box 2G131, JSR Papers; Joseph San Romons and William Armstrong, Administrators of
James B. Armstrong vs. The United States, December 18, 1860, in Congressional series of United States public
documents, Volume 1109 of United States Congressional serial set, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1861).
31
Amberson, et. al., I Would Rather Sleep in Texas, 158-159; Kelly, River of Lost Dreams, 65-71.
133
the two sides entered a period of détente that lasted until the end of the U.S. Civil War. Further,
San Román's brief stint as a riverboat owner put him in contact with European-born
entrepreneurs upriver who became prospective connections to build his local network.
One of his most profitable upriver contacts was French-born John Decker. Decker
migrated to the region as a baker but transitioned into a merchant by the mid-1850s. He moved to
the newly founded town of Rio Grande City and, like Young, married a Mexican woman. By
marrying into a local family, Decker was able to offset some of the risks of his entrepreneurship
through the ready-made local network his wife’s family offered. Using his wife's family contacts,
Decker deeply integrated himself into the Mexican community around Rio Grande City and
Camargo. Decker’s new family connections also likely provided integral support in dividing
responsibilities and decision-making for his business. The Frenchman found a rich market in
Camargo for textiles and chose to push his family business toward selling cloth and finished
clothing. However, he needed additional startup funding to turn a real profit. He turned to San
Román to provide goods and credit to get his enterprise off the ground.
32
Credit became an essential resource in the borderlands in the 1850s. The end of the war
and the gold rush in California slowed the movement of currency into the borderlands. The
Commercial and Agricultural Bank of Galveston was one of the only American bank branches
on the Rio Grande in the 1850s and it folded in 1858. There were banks in San Antonio and
Monterrey, but they tended to refuse to loan to clients on the Rio Grande fearing their investment
32
Ancestry.com, “1860 United States Federal Census”, Online Database, accessed November 22, 2016; Montejano,
Anglos and Mexicans, 37; John Decker to José San Román, June 6, 1858, Box 2G54, JSR Papers; W. Gibb Dyer Jr.
and Wendy Handler, “Entrepreneurship and Family Business: Exploring the Connections,” Entrepreneurship:
Theory and Practice, (1994), Business Insights: Global; Manju Puri and David T. Robinson, “The Economic
Psychology of Entrepreneurship and Family Business,” Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 22, no. 2
(June 2013): 423–44.
134
would disappear. Thus, the control of credit fell into the hands of local merchants like San
Román or Charles Stillman. To get a loan, an individual had to be a known entity, someone the
merchant-lender could trust. Often, gaining that trust meant finding access to the merchant's
network.
33
San Román had grown careful about whom he lent money. Though he always needed to
make positive connections in the borderlands to remain competitive, he needed every connection
to pay off. Decker worked hard to gain the Spaniard's trust and made several maneuvers to enter
San Román's network. First, he found a partner in fellow Frenchman Francois Bichotte. Bichotte
had experience as a barkeep and grocer. They combined their acumen to open a store in Rio
Grande City. The new partners got started through micro loans from small merchants in
Brownsville, like the German Conrad Bloom and fellow Frenchman Victor Hasslauer. Both
Bloom and Hasslauer had accounts with San Román. Rather than pay Bloom and Hasslauer back
directly, they remitted payment to San Román to have him apply the credits to their accounts.
Their payments demonstrated to San Román their reliability. Further, they showed the success of
the business when they sold over $1700 worth of goods to the Mexican consul in Brownsville,
Manuel Treviño, who also had an open account with San Román. The Treviño sale earned
Decker and Bichotte a line of credit.
34
Incorporating Decker into his network of European-born entrepreneurs proved to be
extremely profitable for San Román. Decker's small mercantile house struck it rich during the
United States Civil War buying and selling cotton at an important crossroads in the Confederate
33
Dewey, Pesos and Dollars, 33; John M. Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 111.
34
Francois Bichotte to José San Román, January 16, 1858, Box 2G54 José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); John
Decker to José San Román, September 21, 1858, Box 2G54, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); José San Román
Cash Book Journal, May 1858-May 1865, Box 2G131, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); Ancestry.com, “1860
United States Federal Census”, Online Database, accessed November 22, 2016
135
cotton trade. Decker took his cotton profits and invested in expanding his stores and buying land.
By 1874, he was considered by one of the leading providers of commercial data in North
America as the richest merchant in Rio Grande City. Decker became a lasting and powerful node
in San Román's network in the Rio Grande borderlands.
35
In addition to his British and French associates, San Román made sure to connect with
his fellow Spanish expats within the borderlands. Entrepreneurial Spaniards set up houses in
most of the major cities in Northern Mexico. Vicente Lauregue in Montemorelos took a line of
credit from San Román of over $1700.
36
Additionally, Manuel Dosal in Ciudad Victoria engaged
San Román to make sure that debtors throughout the Rio Grande borderlands paid their bills. He
and San Román helped each other track individuals and their whereabouts. The Spaniards in the
borderlands stuck together, shared information, and lent money. Their shared national origin
contributed to a foundation for trust in trade. The Spanish-born network served an important role
drawing Mexicans and Americans together in trade relations.
37
Most of San Román's Spanish contacts in Mexico were based in Monterrey. The historic
crossroads of New Spain's northern road system, Monterrey benefitted most from the imposition
of the border at the Rio Grande. Primarily, it liberated merchants in the city from the customs
duties imposed at Matamoros as more American and Mexican smugglers forded goods across the
river for trade in Monterrey. A trio of Spaniards, Mariano Hernandez, Valentín Rivero, and
Francisco Armendaiz, took advantage of the rampant smuggling market. They found a mutually
beneficial relationship with American cotton growers in Texas by founding a textile factory in
35
Dewey, Pesos and Dollars, 31.
36
Vicente Lauregue to San Román, April 27, 1858, Box 2G54, JSR Papers.
37
Manuel Dosal to San Román, April 27, 1858, Box 2G54, JSR Papers; Landa, Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity, xi.
136
Monterrey. Planters made a little extra shipping their product tariff-free and the Monterrey
merchants saved significantly on both the raw cotton and exporting the finished textiles.
38
Smuggling became big business along the border in the 1850s. Mexico, in dire financial
straits after the U.S.-Mexico War, began imposing high tariffs as early as 1849. To ensure
merchants paid their duties, the Mexican central government also introduced a permit system that
required all freighters to announce the precise route of their shipments and carry a permit that
indicated they had done so. The burdensome cost of tariffs and the risk of highway robbery with
the permit system encouraged smuggling. As more robberies were reported on the roadways,
fewer Europeans applied for permits.
39
Moving goods illegally came at much less cost. The illicit
trade became so profitable during the 1850s that it underpinned the successful development of
the towns of Roma and Rio Grande City in Texas. Often, European-born entrepreneurs,
particularly in Monterrey, facilitated the illegal trade across the Rio Grande as overland routes
led to that central city.
40
Problematically, the smuggling networks that ran to Monterrey often bypassed
Matamoros/Brownsville.
41
San Román remained connected to the Monterrey trade by moving
goods upriver then having them smuggled across the border. In one case, Mariano Hernandez
38
Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 29-36; Alex M
Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite and the Mexican State, 1880-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 42-51.
39
C. Broyda y Cia. en Matamoros, un manifestor de efectos robados, December 08, 1851; C. Solis en Matamoros,
un relación de prendas robadas por asaltantes, December 08, 1851; Pedro Hale en Matamoros, una relación de
perdidas sufridas, December 06, 1851, Spanish Material from Various Sources, Matamoros Archives, vol LXII, Box
2Q281, (DBCAH).
40
Graf, "The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande," 286-290; Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, 144-147;
George T Diaz, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2015).
41
Plenty of smuggling occurred around the area of Matamoros/Brownsville. However, Mexican and American
officials made more successful efforts to clamp down on the illicit trade in the delta region than upriver. The success
of Mexican authorities to exact tariffs at Matamoros led to an outbreak of violence called "The Merchant's War" in
which the American merchants of Matamoros/Brownsville funded a Mexican federalist revolt against the Mexican
army stationed in Northern Mexico. See: Graf, "The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande," 320-332;
Kearney and Knopp, Boom and Bust, 82-83; Amberson, et. al, I Would Rather Sleep in Texas, 133-141.
137
was quite specific about how he wanted an order of dry goods shipped. He demanded San
Román ship his goods via the carrier Don Fernandez who would move the shipment up to Roma.
From there, Hernandez was confident that "in Mier there is a safe person to do the
importation."
42
The border and national tariffs gave San Román incentive to inefficiently move
goods northwest from Brownsville to cross the Rio Grande at Mier in order to reach the final
destination to the southwest in Monterrey. Maintaining his regional networks forced him to
embrace inefficiency.
The Basque trader from Bilbao probably had few qualms about smuggling and had
learned tricks for the illicit trade back home. The smuggling of goods had been a part of Basque
culture since the establishment of the Spanish-French border in 1512. The Basques developed
strategies for continuing the smuggling trade in the face of increased state presence. For the most
part, San Román tried to appear to adhere to the letter of the law and pay his taxes. He kept
detailed records of the Mexican tariff schedules and went through legal means to petition unfair
rates.
43
He also legitimately shipped tobacco, an item that Mexico highly regulated, to Monterrey
straight from Matamoros.
44
San Román's penchant for making the illicit trade look legal helped
him build a positive reputation among state agents and other merchants.
45
In an effort to stem the contraband trade, the state of Tamaulipas declared a free trade
zone (zona libre) in 1858 along the portion of the south bank of the Rio Grande from Laredo
down to the delta. Minus a small municipal tax that importers had to pay to local governments,
42
Mariano Hernandez to José San Román, August 11, 1855, Box 2G48, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
43
Joseph San Roman, et al. to F. Gauties, Consul of France in Matamoros, September 20th, 1850, “Despatches from
United States Consuls in Matamoros, Mexico, 1826-1906,” Microfilm Mf79.01, DeGolyer Library, Southern
Methodist University; "Protest of the Merchants and Residents of the City of Matamoros, Mexico against the acts of
the Government of the United States and its representatives," January 16, 1866, Box 2.325/C113c, José San Román
Papers, (DBCAH); Tarifa General de la Republica Mexicana, Box 2G41, JSR Papers.
44
Bill of lading to Valentin Romero, November 16, 1855, Box 2G48, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); Valentín
Rivero to San Román, July 26, 1858, Box 2G54, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
45
Douglass & Bilbao, Amerikanuak, 13.
138
merchants could move their goods freely into Northern Mexico. Many merchants took
advantage. San Román moved entire inventories he had stored in Brownsville across to
Matamoros. He also imported all of his stock straight to the Matamoros store and likely
smuggled the merchandise he needed in Brownsville across the river. The free trade zone shifted
the flows of contraband trade from south to north. However, smuggling still worked to connect
Americans and Mexicans together rather than draw them apart.
46
By the end of the 1850s, San Román had solidified his commercial position in the region.
He constructed a vast network that connected Europeans, Mexicans, and Americans in a web of
exchange. He began by bringing his Atlantic connections to the borderlands then branching out
locally. His networks helped him harness the powers of credit and lower his transportation costs
through direct competition with the Stillman syndicate and smuggling. Though always aware of
his position in the relationships he built, San Román slowly included a diverse group of
individuals into his systems of credit and exchange.
*****
John Z. Leyendecker represents how a European-born entrepreneur used marriage and the
construction of local kinship networks to build a transnational business in the Rio Grande
borderlands in the 1850s. Kinship ties were critical in Laredo because of its relative isolation and
characteristic self-sufficiency until the U.S.-Mexico War. Newcomers who wanted to succeed in
the local market needed to connect to established families to be trusted. Leyendecker worked
within the traditional kinship structures and ingratiated himself to the Benavides family and other
prominent members of the community. With the family’s economic resources, social connections
46
Adams, Conflict and Commerce, 85-88; Graf, "The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande," 656-680; Mario
Cerutti, Burguesía, capitales e industria en el norte de México: Monterrey y su ámbito regional (1850 - 1910)
(México, D.F: Alianza Ed, 1992), 47-51.
139
and political clout behind him, Leyendecker grew his business and connected it firmly to
international markets.
47
Figure 8 San Román's network in 1859. Map made in Palladio. http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/
Figure 9 San Román's network in the Gulf of Mexico, 1859. Map made in Palladio.
http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/
47
Gilberto Miguel Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition Laredo, 1755-1870 (College Station: Texas A & M
University Press, 1983); Alexander Mendoza, “‘For Our Own Best Interests’: Nineteenth-Century Laredo Tejanos,
Military Service, and the Development of American Nationalism,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 115, no.
2 (October 2011): 125–52; Jerry D. Thompson, Warm Weather & Bad Whiskey: The 1886 Laredo Election Riot (El
Paso: Texas Western Press, 1991); Jerry D. Thompson, Tejano Tiger: José de Los Santos Benavides and the Texas-
Mexico Borderlands, 1823-1891 (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2017).
140
Laredo's geographic placement forced it to be self-sufficient and made the town
vulnerable to the constant threat of Indian attack. The town originated far from the rest of José de
Escandón's original settlements. Tomás Sanchez founded Laredo north of the Rio Grande and far
from the Gulf of Mexico. Its isolation bred a tendency among its residents to eschew outside
influence, which carried over through the Mexican period and into the 1850s. Consistent Indian
raids also increased Laredo's penchant for isolation. Comanche and Apache raiding parties
ranged into the settlement stealing horses and cattle. Sometimes, they even captured Laredoans
to kill, enslave, or trade. Indian raiding created a demand for trust networks and wariness of
strangers. Laredo's history of self-sufficiency and Indian raiding forced its families to remain
close to one another.
48
Even though the U.S. military occupation brought a modicum of economic integration
and protection from Indians, Laredo faced new challenges heading into the 1850s. Laredo
attracted newcomers willing to take advantage of the economic growth Fort McIntosh brought,
which made the local population nervous. Leaders in the town quickly tried to stem the tide of
strangers entering and leaving the town for fear of theft and violence. The board of aldermen
passed a resolution in 1850 requiring all strangers in town to register with city officials. By 1854,
the push to limit strangers in Laredo turned into full-blown vagrancy laws that led to indefinite
incarceration of strangers until town leaders could ascertain their honesty. Unlike Matamoros,
which had become a cosmopolitan port city that embraced Atlantic trade, Laredo was generally
not a welcoming place to outsiders.
49
48
Herbert Eugene Bolton, "Tienda de Cuervo's Ynspeccion of Laredo, 1757" in The Quarterly of the Texas State
Historical Association 6, no. 3, (January 1903), 194, 198-203; Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 220-221;
Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition, 14.
49
Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition, 70.
141
Laredo's isolation and cold embrace of migrants helped prevent a Stillman-like rise of an
American merchant monopoly. Most of the Americans to settle in Laredo after the U.S.-Mexico
War came from the ranks of the army. Few others saw the same opportunities in Laredo as those
in Brownsville. Some opened small mercantile operations, but those targeted supplying Fort
McIntosh. Most Americans in Laredo pursued political rather than economic power. To attain it,
they had to win over the majority Mexican populace. As one historian of Laredo concluded,
"They (Americans) often appeared more Mexicanized than mexicanos appeared
Americanized."
50
Laredo resisted rapid shifts to the American commercial and political order.
51
John Z. Leyendecker, born in the Duchy of Nassau in modern-day Germany in 1827,
chose to make Laredo the home of his budding mercantile enterprise. His family moved to
Fredericksburg, Texas in 1845. At the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexico War, he executed an
effective endeavor on the Texas Plains outside of the U.S. Fort Chadbourne at Oak Creek. Built
with another European-born entrepreneur, Anton Wulff in San Antonio, the Oak Creek store
profited through trade with the U.S. army and Plains Indians. Though he described them as
Chichimecas in his account books, the location of Leyendecker's store likely served Comanche
and Kiowa bands. Indians sought out goods like food, bridles, and umbrellas for which they
traded horses and animal hide. When he could get away with it, Leyendecker sold beer and
whiskey to his Native American customers. That type of trade, though, could get his store
shuttered as the U.S. army discouraged Indian drunkenness. Leyendecker received a stern letter
from the commander at Fort Chadbourne to cease sale of any alcohol to Indians. “The laws of the
United States regulating the intercourse of trade with Indians forbids the selling or trading of
50
Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition, 71.
51
Adams, Conflict and Commerce, 76-79.
142
whiskey, or any ardent spirits…”
52
In order to keep his business with the personnel at the fort, he
did as he was told. For the most part, the Oak Creek store engaged in legitimate exchange with
Indians and soldiers on the far west Texas frontier.
53
Leyendecker had to work through a cost-benefit analysis of moving to Laredo in 1854.
The Oak Creek store broke even in 1853 and showed the possibility of profiting the next year.
The price for animal skins was on the rise and his customer base already established. However,
the store retained a low profit ceiling. Fort Chadbourne sometimes only held as few as fifty men
and the Plains Indians' migration patterns shifted regularly. Fort McIntosh outside Laredo
maintained higher troop rolls than Fort Chadbourne and Leyendecker could still trade with
indigenous people around Laredo. The additional benefits of being nearer settled populations and
the Rio Grande proved enticing. Leyendecker could also bring the full benefits of his
multilingual upbringing to the Rio Grande. He was fluent in German, English, Spanish, and
French. Wulff, who invested in Leyendecker and trusted him after the semi-successful venture at
Oak Creek, encouraged the move south. Together, the European-born entrepreneurs would try
their luck in the Rio Grande borderlands.
54
When Leyendecker arrived in Laredo, he realized opening a successful store there would
be much more difficult than his Oak Creek venture. Americans already cornered the market to
supply Fort McIntosh. The best opportunity he saw was marketing to the local populace. To do
so, he had to ingratiate himself to the local elite. Initially, he rented a house from Josefa Treviño,
52
Fort Chadbourne Circular to Leyendecker, October 20, 1854, General Correspondence Box 2m315, John Zirvas
Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH)
53
Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 217-221; Indian Account Book, 1854, Oak Creek Store, Box 2m316, John
Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, 1842-1979, (DBCAH).
54
Account for Oak Creek, 1853, Oak Creek Store, Box 2M316, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH);
Handbook of Texas Online, Charles G. Davis, "FORT CHADBOURNE," accessed June 21, 2019,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qbf08.
143
who explained to him the politics of the town.
55
The Treviños had been in Laredo since the days
of Escandón and carried significant political clout. The family worked to maintain its role in
town after the American occupation as Tomás Treviño was mayor and Albino Treviño held the
position of Justice of the Peace through the 1850s.
56
The Treviños and the Benavideses remained close. Santos Benavides regularly had lunch
with Andres Treviño, which likely helped facilitate Leyendecker’s relationship with Santos.
Benavides did not like the way other merchants in town did business and sought another outlet to
buy the goods he needed. Trust meant as much to Benavides as it did to the rest of the Laredo
inhabitants. Leyendecker’s relationship with the Treviño’s likely put him in contact with Santos
Benavides and gave him a character reference.
57
Leyendecker’s Catholicism further aided his character reference. He made his
Catholicism a part of his personal record. His family kept documentation of his baptism, first
communion, and confirmation. Additionally, in his memorandum book, he cataloged these early
steps of Catholic ritual by defining which churches, priests, and sponsors were associated with
his ascent to full Church membership. The German’s religious background also helped him make
business connections in town outside the Benavides family. Benito García commented that he
appreciated Leyendecker’s religion as a part of their pleasant relationship. “I am confident we
can mediate any mistrust in our relationship through the good feelings of religion.”
58
Since all of
55
Leyendecker rented his room and store from the Treviňos for twenty pesos a month, which he usually paid out
three months at a time. Leyendecker always made sure to pay his rent on time or early in order to make a good
impression on the prominent Laredo family. See: Rent Receipts, 1855-1859, J.Z. Miscellaneous Receipts, Box
2M317, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH).
56
Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 191; Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition, 73.
57
S. Benavides to Leyendecker, March 26, 1857, Benavides Letters, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers,
(DBCAH).
58
Benito García to Leyendecker, April 4, 1858, General Correspondence, Box 2M315, John Zirvas Leyendecker
Papers, (DBCAH).
144
the original families who settled Laredo practiced Catholicism, Leyendecker’s own religious
affiliation likely contributed to his inclusion.
59
For Santos and the rest of the Benavides family, kinship cemented trust. Creating kinship
ties through marriage became essential to the perseverance of Laredoans because of the town’s
isolation and the people’s fear of outsiders. Santos’s grandfather, José Benavides, moved to
Laredo as an outsider near the end of the eighteenth century. In order to become a part of the
town, he had to become a member of one of the trusted families. The elder Benavides married
Tomás Sánchez’s granddaughter, Petra Sánchez, creating a permanent kinship network with an
elite local family. Leyendecker needed to do more than be Catholic and a good merchant to earn
Santos Benavides's trust.
60
Overall, it made practical sense for Leyendecker to pursue marriage with a Benavides,
but it helped that Leyendecker was smitten with Santos's younger sister. Leyendecker began
courting María Andrea Benavides in late 1856. They apparently got along rather well. It seems
that Leyendecker mentioned her often in his letters to his business partners who encouraged the
German to have a "short court."
61
59
Leyendecker Memorandum Book, November 11, 1886, Genealogy, Box 2M317, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers,
(DBCAH); Carlos E. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1519-1936 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones
Company, 1936).
60
Benavides Family Tree, Genealogy, Box 2M317, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH). Tomás Sánchez
was the founder of Laredo.
61
Bart J. DeWitt to Leyendecker, January 8, 1857, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH).
145
Figure 10 Benavides-Leyendecker Family Tree, in Felix Garcia, The Children of John Z. Leyendecker, 11
María Andrea Benavides was born November 10, 1835. She was the first daughter to José
and María Tomasa Benavides and was eight years younger than Leyendecker. She received a
Catholic education in Galveston under the tutelage of Jean-Marie Odin, the first Catholic bishop
in Texas. She was smart, well cultured, and loyal to her family. She fell deeply in love with
Leyendecker as their relationship progressed and wrote him often when he was away on
business, encouraging him to return home as soon as possible to be with her. “I really miss you.
146
You know there is no other person that I have more confidence in taking care of me.”
62
The
courting period only lasted about six months, as Leyendecker and María Andrea Benavides wed
in June of 1857. The marriage solidified Leyendecker's inclusion into the Benavides family and
Laredo networks through kinship.
63
Their marriage declared the union to the entire town and was also meant to tie the
Leyendeckers of Fredericksburg with the Benavideses in Laredo. They were wed at three o’clock
in the morning on Pentecost Monday in the parish church in Laredo with Santos Benavides and
his wife as sponsors and Leyendecker’s pastor from Fredicksburg as a witness. Pentecost
Sunday, or Whitsunday, is a festival event for the Catholic Church that commemorates the
descent of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles. Pentecost Sunday marks such an important day, that
the day after, Whitmonday, is devoted as an “Order of Worship." Whitmonday has been
especially important for Germans, as that day still remains an official holiday in Germany. The
wedding day and time show that the families wanted the union on a particularly holy day and, by
holding the ceremony on Whitmonday, recognized the inclusion of the German Catholic heritage
into the Benavides’s Spanish Catholic tradition.
64
María Andrea moved into the house Leyendecker leased from Josefa Treviño and helped
him with his business. She received and organized his letters and communications and worked as
a go-between for her husband and her family when Leyendecker traveled for business. With the
help of her younger brother Cristóbal Benavides, María Andrea Leyendecker kept the
62
María Andrea Leyendecker to John Leyendecker, October 23, 1859, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker
Papers, (DBCAH).
63
Leyendecker Memorandum Book, November 11, 1886, Box 2M317, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH);
María Andrea Leyendecker to John Leyendecker, October 16, 1859, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers,
(DBCAH); María Andrea Leyendecker to John Leyendecker, October 23, 1859, Box 2M314, JZL Papers.
64
Leyendecker Memorandum Book, November 11, 1886, Box 2M317, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH);
T., “The Church Calendar,” Messenger, (May 31, 1876) p. 5; “Whit Monday. (News),” The Christian Century 21,
no. 13, (2003), 17.
147
Leyendecker merchant house in operation. She was particular about the account books and
tracked when customers who owed them debt came into town. In addition to raising her new
family and keeping it connected to her old one, María Andrea played an essential role in running
John Leyendecker's business.
65
The importance of family connections to Leyendecker’s business went beyond his ties to
the Benavideses. When he and Wulff decided to move their business to Laredo, they knew they
needed an additional investor to ensure they could get their store established. They brought in a
new partner, Bart DeWitt. However, DeWitt was not independently wealthy. His mother held the
family’s wealth and she lent the money to Leyendecker on condition that Bart be a partner and
Leyendecker pay her back directly. Catherine DeWitt lived in Baltimore and initially mistrusted
Leyendecker and her son’s venture in Texas. She much preferred the path Bart’s brother took in
going to Philadelphia and becoming a lawyer. By January of 1857, Leyendecker paid off his debt
to Catherine DeWitt and her letters to him became far more cordial. Catherine was assured that
her son’s business partner met his obligations and that their store in Laredo could succeed. In her
last letter to Leyendecker, Catherine suggested that the German make the trip to visit her in
Baltimore. He was always welcome in her home. They were practically family. Leyendecker had
established another important kinship connection to his mercantile network, this time through the
American DeWitt family.
66
What Catherine DeWitt did not know was that the Laredo store suffered under a crushing
amount of debt in 1857. Leyendecker had spent the hard currency he and Wulff had from Oak
65
María Andrea Leyendecker to John Leyendecker, October 23, 1859, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker
Papers, (DBCAH).
66
Catherine DeWitt to Leyendecker, February 7, 1856, B.J. DeWitt Letters, Box 2m314, John Zirvas Leyendecker
Papers, (DBCAH); Catherine DeWitt to Leyendecker, January 9, 1857, B.J. DeWitt Letters, Box 2m314, John
Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH).
148
Creek and DeWitt’s loan on relocating to Laredo. He made good on his rent and impressed the
Treviños with timely cash payments. However, they did not have the finances to stock their
store. Wulff contracted a consignment agreement with Francois Guilbeau’s merchant house in
San Antonio. Guilbeau set the terms of the consignment, placing Wulff and Leyendecker in a
subordinate position.
67
Francois Guilbeau had moved to San Antonio in 1839 to serve as the French consul for
the region where he leveraged his diplomatic position into a flourishing commercial enterprise.
As consul, he had the advantage of being privy to international information, close ties to the
French and Texas governments, and the ability to import high demand goods cheaply. Guilbeau
thrived as an import grocer, bringing in fruits and wines that sold at high margins. He was so
successful that by the mid-1850s, he had built one of the most elegant homes in San Antonio that
doubled as the French consulate during the U.S. Civil War.
68
For Guilbeau, the business relationship with Leyendecker and Wulff made sense. He
could expand his business from San Antonio 150 miles south into the markets along the Rio
Grande. It also allowed him to diversify outside of grocery items, as the Laredo store dealt in
general merchandise. If Leyendecker and Wulff succeeded in their venture, he would continually
profit as their middleman, providing goods on loan and making gains through interest. If the
venture failed, he could take over and convert the Laredo store into a satellite to his San Antonio
holdings or simply let the firm die. Together, Leyendecker and Guilbeau established a credit
system that sent dry goods to Laredo in exchange for agricultural products shipped to San
67
John Z. Leyendecker Account with Francois Guilbeau, 1857, Business Records, Box 2M316, John Zirvas
Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH).
68
Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001), 366; Nancy Nichols Barker and A. Dubois de Saligny, The French Legation in Texas
(Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971), 339.
149
Antonio. Guilbeau accepted bushels of corn at a price of $1 a bushel and hides at the market
price in New York City. Whatever the French consul fetched for the hides on the New York
market, he would apply half of the profit to Leyendecker’s account. With their agreement,
another European network began to develop in the Rio Grande borderlands.
69
1857 turned out to be a bad year for Leyendecker to rely on the hide trade in the United
States. The Panic of 1857 hit New York and spread throughout the manufacturing centers in the
American Northeast. Banks suspended operations and called in their securities. As a result,
factories began to shut their doors, putting laborers out of work and ceasing demand for raw
materials, including Rio Grande hides. The price of dried hides going into New York from the
Rio Grande dropped to 36¢ a piece which meant that Leyendecker only earned 18¢ per hide he
sent to Guilbeau. Considering the Laredo store owed Guilbeau $2730 in debt, Leyendecker
needed to make swift business in order avoid falling behind the interest.
70
To make up the shortfall, Leyendecker fell back on corn as a means to offset the drop in
hide prices. A bushel of corn was worth more than five hides to Leyendecker. A month after he
agreed to terms with Guilbeau, the German collected 336 bushels of corn from Nuevo Laredo
alone. He shipped hundreds of those up to San Antonio to pay Guilbeau, which left the
Frenchman flabbergasted. He sent a curt letter to Leyendecker telling him their arrangement had
changed, “According to the fall of prices of hides at New York I advice (sic) you I cannot take
69
Guilbeau to Leyendecker, January 4, 1857 General Correspondence, 2M315, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers,
(DBCAH).
70
Charles W. Calomiris and Larry Schweikart, “The Panic of 1857: Origins, Transmission, and Containment,” The
Journal of Economic History 51, no. 4 (December 1991): 807–34; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The
Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 24-25;
“Market Report: Markets,” New York Daily Times (1851-1857), March 24, 1857; Proquest Historical Newspapers:
The New York Times, 2.
150
them at the same price offered to you. Also, I will not buy more corn."
71
In a month, the business
plan Leyendecker envisioned and enacted fell apart around him.
72
Leyendecker was desperate and he did what many desperate businessmen do; he took on
more debt. Leyendecker recognized he was geographically removed from all of his creditors. He
left Wulff and Bart DeWitt to take the heat from Guilbeau in San Antonio and contracted a new
commission agreement with Preau & Couturie Co. Preau and Couturie marked Leyendecker’s
last shot to make the Laredo store work. Jean Preau, a French creole born in Louisiana, partnered
with the Dutch consul attached to New Orleans, Amedee Couturie, and established a profitable
import business in the Crescent City. They made their fortune in much the same way as
Guilbeau, cheaply importing wine and liquor from Europe. The difference for Leyendecker was
that Couturie would sell his Rio Grande hides in Europe directly, avoiding the tumultuous U.S.
market.
73
Leyendecker commissioned to sell hides to Preau and Couturie for goods and cash. At the
same time that Guilbeau offered Leyendecker 18¢ per hide, his new commission paid 23½¢.
Unlike Guilbeau, Preau and Couturie had no interest expanding their business to Laredo. They
just wanted a steady stream of hides to exchange on the market for the cheap booze that made
them so much money. Further, his relationship with Preau and Couturie put him in a more
enviable position. He personally negotiated their terms of exchange rather than leaving it up to
the whims of the markets and merchants around him. By signing on with Preau and Couturie,
71
Guilbeau to Leyendecker, February 14, 1857, General Correspondence, 2M315, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers,
(DBCAH).
72
U.S. Department of the Treasury, Impost Books, Laredo, 1851-1914, vol. 1, National Archives, Fort Worth,
Texas, 2791232.
73
Martin Ruef, Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014), 144; Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making
of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 381; George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A
Narrative History, 5th ed (New York: Norton, 1999); 707-708.
151
Leyendecker gave the Benavides family and other suppliers in his network greater access to the
European market for their goods.
74
Leyendecker grew significant connections in Mexico for the goods he sold in San
Antonio, New Orleans, or Europe. One of his most important contacts was the governor of
Nuevo Leon, Santiago Vidaurri. Vidaurri trusted the Benavideses and even stayed with them on
his travels to the United States. Vidaurri's son-in-law, Irish-born Patricio Milmo, owned one of
the largest mercantile houses in Monterrey. Another Monterrey merchant, Evaristo Madero, built
a strong relationship with Leyendecker in the corn and hide trade. The German provided Madero
an outlet for his goods in Texas and returned horses, mules, and European goods to Monterrey
for Madero to resell for more grain and hide. Leyendecker's Mexican connections proved
beneficial for all involved. Leyendecker was tying Mexicans into European networks so they had
more access to global markets.
75
Throughout 1857, Leyendecker shipped Mexican hides from Laredo to San Antonio and
New Orleans through Corpus Christi. He and his brother-in-law Cristóbal Benavides moved at
least four hundred hides from Mexico across the Rio Grande and out into the international
market.
76
He also took whatever else his customers were willing to pay for his goods. In one
instance, he shipped nearly three tons of flour and beans to Guilbeau in San Antonio. The French
merchant was not happy to be so overwhelmed with food goods, but credited Leyendecker
several hundred dollars to his account for the effort.
77
74
Preau & Couturie to Leyendecker, February 21, 1857, General Correspondence, 2M315, John Zirvas Leyendecker
Papers, (DBCAH).
75
Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 66-78; González-Quiroga, "Conflict and Cooperation," 44-48.
76
U.S. Department of the Treasury, Impost Books, Laredo, 1851-1914, vol. 1, National Archives, Fort Worth,
Texas, 2791232.
77
John Leyendecker account with Francois Guilbeau, 1857, Box 2M316, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers,
(DBCAH).
152
Leyendecker worked constantly in 1857 to get out of debt. He even picked up additional
work outside of his commercial enterprise. Leyendecker took advantage of the United States'
expansion to the Rio Grande by taking on employment working for the state. He accepted part-
time work as a U.S. customs agent for the port of Laredo. He was able to make a little extra
money in that position and it facilitated his ability to import goods more effectively from Nuevo
Laredo. Most of the agricultural products he shipped to Guilbeau came across the Rio Grande
from Mexico upon which Leyendecker paid his duties. His position gave him a modicum of local
control on the duties he would pay as he had negotiating power with his fellow customs agents
on the border. There were certainly times he paid no duty at all. As a customs agent, he found an
opportunity to merge his commercial interests with those of the state.
78
Leyendecker also became the postmaster for Laredo in 1858 allowing him access to price
news, franking privileges, and further raised his standing in the community. Leyendecker's
biggest shortcoming as a merchant in Laredo was that he entered agreements with his creditors in
which they set the prices. He fell into so much debt with Guilbeau because the French merchant
set the prices he would pay for hides and corn. Leyendecker needed up the minute pricing
notices so that he would always know the value of the goods he exchanged. Being the postmaster
placed him at the center of commercial communications in the Rio Grande borderlands.
Additionally, he could send mail without paying postage. He took advantage of the regular mail
coach between Laredo and Corpus Christi to ship his inventories at little to no cost. His partner,
Santos Benavides, obtained a contract in the same year to run the mail coach from Laredo to
78
U.S. Department of the Treasury, Impost Books, Laredo, 1851-1914, vol. 1, National Archives, Fort Worth,
Texas, 2791232; Diaz, Border Contraband, 18-22, 178; Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the
Making of the American State (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1-14.
153
Corpus Christi. Together, their family network dominated the communications of a large swath
of the borderlands making them essential members of the community.
79
Importantly, the Leyendecker and Benavides partnership helped solidify a strong
connection between Laredo and Corpus Christi. The U.S. army had rebuilt the road during the
U.S.-Mexico War to bring most of the supplies to Fort McIntosh from New Orleans through the
port at Corpus Christi. However, traders avoided using the road in the early 1850s because of the
threat of Indian raids and highwaymen. It was a risky venture for Benavides to take over the mail
coach. That he and Leyendecker built it into the most important pipeline for Laredo's
communications, imports, and exports speaks to the significant impact of their partnership on the
Rio Grande borderlands.
80
By the end of the decade, Leyendecker worked off most of his debts and was becoming a
prominent member of the Laredo community. The last invoice Guilbeau sent him recorded a
total balance of only $35. The German-speaking entrepreneur also sought to diversify his
inventory that same year and placed a large order for textiles with another European-owned
mercantile outlet in Roma, Texas. The end of the 1850s brought the promise of profits and
success to Leyendecker's business. The local kinship ties he built combined with his network
connections in the borderlands and beyond gave him an optimistic projection for the future.
Together, Leyendecker and Benavides connected Laredo more deeply into the regional market
79
D. D. T. Leech, List of the Post-Offices in the United States: With the Names of the Postmasters on the 1st of
April, 1859 ; Also, the Laws and Regulations of the Post Office Department with an Appendix Containing the Names
of the Post Offices Arranged by States and Counties (Washington: John C. Rives, 1859), 83; David M. Henkin, The
Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University Of
Chicago Press, 2006), 19-20; Richard R John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to
Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 115-124; Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 63-64.
80
Adams, Conflict and Commerce, 80-82; Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 63-64.
154
through kinship and trade and helped globalize Laredo by exporting hides to Europe and
strengthening ties with growing port at Corpus Christi. They nudged Laredo out of its isolation.
81
Figure 11 Leyendecker's network in 1859. Map made in Palladio. http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/
*****
José San Román and John Leyendecker built their networks around family, business
connections, and the state. Because the social and commercial conditions in
Matamoros/Brownsville were unlike those in Nuevo Laredo/Laredo, both merchants utilized
different strategies to achieve their goals of creating profitable enterprises on the Rio Grande.
81
Guilbeau Invoice, 1858, Business Records, Box 2M316, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH); Stadeker,
Mecklenburger, y Cox Invoice, Nov. 19, 1858, Business Records, Box 2M316, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers,
(DBCAH).
155
Regardless of strategy, they both created systems of exchange that tied the Rio Grande
borderlands to global trade.
Prominent Americans recognized the powerful position of European-born merchants by
the end of the 1850s. In the spring of 1859, the fiery South Carolina Democrat and U.S. consul in
Matamoros, Richard Fitzpatrick, penned a letter to Secretary of State Lewis Cass complaining
that few American cargoes entered the port at the Rio Grande and that most goods entering the
city came from English manufacturers shipped on foreign vessels. Fitzpatrick went on to note
that "the whole of the principal merchants in the trade are foreigners and have no sympathy for
American interests."
82
By foreigners, the consul meant Europeans, namely Spanish, French,
German, and English traders who dominated the market in the U.S.-Mexico borderland. He
loathed the idea that foreigners controlled the Rio Grande trade. Fitzpatrick believed that
Matamoros should be an American port and the Rio Grande borderlands an American market.
He was furious that European-born entrepreneurs not only competed with American dominance
in the region, but that they had also become successful.
Fitzpatrick's letters reveal that American state agents worried that the United States'
colonization project in the Rio Grande borderlands might fail. The American consul noted that
most cargoes bypassed American settlements on the Rio Grande in favor of transport toward
Monterrey. Those goods that did come into the U.S. were often smuggled to avoid paying
American tariffs. The United States demonstrated very little control in the borderlands.
Fitzpatrick feared that if Europeans continued to dominate the Rio Grande trade, the American
towns would wither and die out.
83
82
See, for example, Richard Fitzpatrick to Lewis Cass, April 4, 1859, “Despatches from United States Consuls in
Matamoros, Mexico, 1826-1906,” Microfilm Mf79.01, reel 4, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.
83
Fitzpatrick to Cass, October 01, 1859, “Despatches from United States Consuls in Matamoros, Mexico, 1826-
1906,” Microfilm Mf79.01, reel 4, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.
156
Fitzpatrick did not have time to change the commercial conditions of the borderlands.
The United States ran headlong toward civil war by the end of 1860 and the consul left his
position in support of the Confederacy. The French invasion of Mexico in 1861 brought further
conflict and disruption to the region. The mercantile networks that European-born entrepreneurs
built in the Rio Grande borderlands became essential to the region because of their stability.
They also drove Atlantic commerce in a time of intense violence.
157
CHAPTER 5
"WALKING IN TALL COTTON: EUROPEAN-BORN ENTREPRENEURS AND THE BOON
OF THE ILLICIT COTTON TRADE, 1860-1872"
In 1862, English-born Joseph Morell was anxious all the time. From his store in
Monterrey, he worried that the French would invade the city and kill him;
1
he believed
Tamaulipas would go to war with Nuevo Leon leaving Northern Mexico in ruin;
2
he fretted his
paper currency would become worthless;
3
he suspected his partners were cheating him;
4
he
always thought some accident would befall his shipments.
5
Most of all, he feared that the Union
army would invade Texas and block the flow of cotton through the Rio Grande borderlands. The
cotton trade became his most dependable source of income. He wrote Charles Stillman in
Brownsville that he hoped "the Yankees will not stop our little business in Texas the only thing
that keeps us alive."
6
All of Morell's livelihood narrowed to one central product and it was
threatened by so many factors beyond his control that he could barely cope.
The cotton textile industry had become the most important segment of the global
economy as early as 1790. It was at the center of industrial and economic growth on both sides
1
Joseph Morell to Charles Stillman, Nov. 18, 1861, Letters from various others to Charles Stillman, November
1861, Charles Stillman business papers, MS Am 800.27, (25), Houghton Library, Harvard College Library,
https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/hou02358c00065/catalog Accessed September 12, 2019, (Hereafter cited as HLHCL)
2
Morell to Stillman, July 29, 1861, Letters from various others to Charles Stillman, July 1861, Charles Stillman
business papers (HLHCL).
3
Morell to Stillman, Feb. 25, 1862, Letters from various others to Charles Stillman, February 1862, Charles
Stillman business papers, (HLHCL).
4
Morell to Stillman, July 27, 1862, Letters from various others to Charles Stillman, July 1862, Charles Stillman
business papers, (HLHCL).
5
Morell to Stillman, Feb. 16, 1862, Letters from various others to Charles Stillman, February 1862, Charles
Stillman business papers, (HLHCL).
6
Morell to Stillman, Nov. 27, 1862, Letters from various others to Charles Stillman, November 1862, Charles
Stillman business papers, (HLHCL).
158
of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. By 1860, the cotton textile industry became Britain's
largest employer, the United States' single biggest industry, and had similar importance in France
and Spain. All that industrial production relied on the availability of vast amounts of raw cotton
and most of the cotton for global production came from the United States South. Enslaved people
underpinned the South's cotton exports. The entire southern economy was founded on the
capacity of the slave system to generate and distribute wealth. Entrepreneurial southerners
utilized slave labor to acquire riches and compete in the market. They also invested in biological
innovations to produce superior cotton varieties to increase the efficiency of slave labor. In
conjunction with their prosperity, slaveholders retained significant political power which they
wielded to push for U.S. territorial expansion and protection of the domestic slave trade.
Enslaved people and the southern elites who mobilized slave labor contributed to the U.S. South,
of which Texas was a part, being the leading global cotton producer.
7
By the end of the 1850s, the free labor North openly challenged slavery's expansion,
setting the North and South on a collision course toward civil war. Unified by resentment of
southern power, devotion to the Union, and free labor ideology, northerners became determined
7
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, (New York: Vintage Books, 2014) ix-xxii, 242-246; Philip
Leigh, Trading with the Enemy: The Covert Economy during the American Civil War (Yardley: Westholme, 2014),
1-14; James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, (New York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc., 1982),
xi-xiii, 225-227; Edward E. Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism, (New York: Basic Books, 2014), xvi-xxvii; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul Webb Rhode, Creating
Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 98-133.
For more on the history of slavery and capitalism in the United States, see Robert William Fogel & Stanley L.
Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1974);
Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth
Century, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave
Market, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and
the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Seth Rockman, Scraping by: Wage
Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library
Company of Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business
of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
159
to stop any further expansion of slavery. In the face of mounting northern demands, southern
elites made the decision to secede. They imagined a partnership with Britain and other European
powers that was unbreakably stitched together through the cotton trade. Even with the threat of
full-scale war, secessionists remained uncompromising because they believed their importance to
the global economy irreplaceable. Cotton weakened the connections between the North and
South as northerners grew to revile slave power and southerners felt free to divest from the
United States.
8
The United States Civil War threatened American cotton exports to Europe. One of the
earliest strategies for the Union was to blockade the Confederacy to prevent any cotton
shipments leaving or munitions entering the South. The Union navy blockaded a thousand-mile
coastline from Florida to the Rio Grande delta. However, due to the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo, Law of Nations, and northern tolerance, the Union navy was mostly powerless to stop
the movement of cotton out of Mexico on ships flying neutral flags. Further, tons of cotton
flowed overland across the Rio Grande to Monterrey and other trading centers in Mexico. The
Confederacy desperately needed to export cotton to fund its war effort and Europe required the
fiber to keep the Atlantic textile industry running. The Rio Grande borderlands became the
center of the movement of Confederate cotton to the Atlantic market.
9
8
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), ix-xxxix, 310; Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal
Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 201-259.
9
Robert M. Jr Browning, Lincoln’s Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron during the Civil War (Tuscaloosa:
The University of Alabama Press, 2014); James W. Daddysman, The Matamoros Trade: Confederate Commerce,
Diplomacy, and Intrigue (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984); James A. Irby, Backdoor at Bagdad: The
Civil War on the Rio Grande (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1977). William Diamond, “Imports of the Confederate
Government from Europe and Mexico,” The Journal of Southern History 6, no. 4 (November 1940): 470-503; Philip
Leigh, Trading with the Enemy: The Covert Economy during the American Civil War (Yardley: Westholme, 2014);
Mitchell Smith, “The ‘Neutral’ Matamoros Trade, 1861-1865,” The Southwest Review 37, no. 4 (Autumn 1952):
319–24.
160
Unfortunately for those involved in the cotton trade, the Rio Grande borderlands
remained incredibly unstable in the 1860s. The United States Civil War was only one of many
conflicts that intersected the region. In Mexico, the War of Reform, a civil war between Mexican
Liberals and Conservatives, reached its conclusion, but the Conservative losers immediately
began courting French support to overthrow the Liberals and install a European monarch.
Regional strongmen, like Santiago Vidaurri in Nuevo Leon, took advantage of the political
instability to solidify their power. The extended Mexican civil wars and French Intervention also
created power vacuums, like in Tamaulipas where an election to replace the governor devolved
into a protracted battle between two factions that spilled into violence on the streets of
Matamoros. Conditions were not any more stable north of the Rio Grande in Texas. Juan
Nepomuceno Cortina published proclamations against American land appropriations and settler
encroachment on the Rio Grande. He called on Mexicans on both sides of the river to rally and
attack white landowners. Cortina and his men raided Brownsville and wreaked havoc on the
countryside up and down the Rio Grande. Finally, the civil wars in the Rio Grande borderlands
reinvigorated Comanche raiders who targeted ranches on the exposed frontier for horses and
cattle. Soldiers, guerillas, brigands, rustlers, and raiders all ranged throughout the region making
it an extremely dangerous place to move one of the most valuable products in the world.
10
European-born entrepreneurs in the Rio Grande borderlands took on the dangers to
position themselves as essential factors for the continued movement of cotton out of the U.S.
South. They mobilized and expanded their networks to profit on the North American crises. San
10
Mark Wasserman, Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 106-135; Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican
Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); 41-51; Kearney & Knopp, Boom and Bust, 122-125; Jerry
Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013);
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); 313-319; Ronnie C. Tyler,
Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1973), 13-41.
161
Antonio, Monterrey, and Matamoros became central sites for cotton distribution. Entrepreneurial
middlemen received support from European, Mexican, and American states. European consulate
agencies encouraged the trade and tried to protect against seizures. Mexican officials tended to
favor European-born merchants, particularly after the French invasion and the installation of
Maximilian as emperor. Additionally, Confederate and even Union bureaucrats supported
European participation in the cotton trade because of their own personal interests in the textile
industry. The economic and political conditions in the Rio Grande borderlands offered the
possibility for European-born entrepreneurs to rapidly acquire wealth if they were able to take
advantage of favorable circumstances and avoid an ever-present catastrophe.
11
In addition to material profits, merchants in the borderlands hoped the explosion of the
cotton trade would help them impose their notions of western modernity on the region. Across
the globe in the nineteenth century, the cotton and textile industry facilitated freedom of
commerce and a trend toward uniformity. If those conditions existed in the borderlands,
merchants would have a more intelligible market in which they could more easily predict
demands. European-born entrepreneurs believed the cotton trade could help them transform the
borderlands into a modern global trading center.
12
Even with the market opportunities and state support, obstacles contributed to many
individual failures. Eruptions of violence destroyed lives and inventories, ethnic tensions flared,
anti-Semitism ran virtually unchecked, and state policies forced individuals into positions of
11
Matamoros Seizures (1863-1869), vols. 1-5, FO 5/1181-1185, The National Archives of the UK; Compañía
Anónima de Navegación del Lago de Chapala y Río Grande documents, 1866-1867, BANC MSS M-M 1809,
University of California Berkeley, Bancroft Library; Mark Wasserman, Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth
Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 112-132; Leigh,
Trading with the Enemy, ix-xvii.
12
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, The Blackwell
History of the World (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1-3; Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the
Present (Malden: Polity, 2012), 4-6
162
vulnerability. Even successful merchants knew that the boom could bust at any minute for any
reason. Though the conflicts of the U.S. Civil War and the French Intervention in Mexico offered
significant opportunities for European-born entrepreneurs to make economic gains, they also
turned many lives upside down. Joseph Morell was correct to balance his optimism in the
fortuitous cotton trade with the wariness that it could end at any minute.
13
This chapter argues that the European demand for cotton and the political instability in
the borderlands brought on by civil and international conflict remade the Rio Grande borderlands
into a center of Atlantic trade in which European-born entrepreneurs rose to play a dominant
role. Those who succeeded blended their already existing networks to connect nearly everyone
engaged in the cotton trade. After the U.S. Civil War, those massive networks splintered. A
group of European-born businessmen and a few American and Mexican allies reinvested their
profits from the cotton trade in railroad transportation to modernize and try to keep the Rio
Grande borderlands as a center for Atlantic trade. Their maneuvers put them on a collision
course with Americans who imagined returning the region to a crossroads of North American
trade.
*****
The European demand for raw cotton in the mid-nineteenth century was insatiable which
made the market for cotton incredibly stable. Between the economically tumultuous years of
1855-1860, prices of cotton exported from Galveston, Texas varied only $4 per hundred pounds.
In contrast, prices for corn and animal hides fluctuated wildly. For example, in 1855, the price of
corn dropped 66% in the second half of the year from $9 to $4 per bushel. Hide prices saw and
13
John M. Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 25-31; Omar Santiago Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the
Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 247-260; Pat Kelley, River of Lost Dreams:
Navigation on the Rio Grande (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 72-78.
163
even more dramatic change in 1857 when prices dropped from $18 to $6 per hundred pounds.
Even with the Panic of 1857 in full swing, cotton prices per hundred pounds only dropped from
$13 to $9 and recovered quickly, thereafter. The stability of the cotton market seemed to
guarantee a return on investment for all involved.
14
The outbreak of the U.S. Civil War made the future of the cotton market far more
insecure. In an attempt to force European nations to recognize its independence, the South
banned all cotton exports. However, none of the European powers wanted to recognize the
Confederacy and risk war with the United States. By the time southern leaders realized the folly
of their policy, the Union naval blockade was in place. Thousands of bales of southern cotton sat
waiting to rot. Southern growers and European manufacturers needed to find a solution to their
supply problems. Both turned to the Rio Grande borderlands as a possible answer.
15
Northern Mexico proved an enticing place to move cotton out of the Confederacy and
place in the hands of European textile manufacturers. Union forces could do little about the
transnational cotton trade across the Rio Grande because the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
declared the river neutral. Cotton traders capitalized on the river's neutrality by flying Mexican
or European flags to avoid capture. As a result, Matamoros and Monterrey drew in tons of cotton
during the 1860s. Matamoros became the key outlet for cotton exports. Total exports amounted
to approximately $4 million a month between 1863-1865. Monterrey faired nearly as well,
solidifying its position as a Mexican center for textile manufacturing and for exporting necessary
military supplies to the Confederate war effort. Furthermore, the mercantile networks that
14
Annual reports on shipping and navigation, trade and commerce, agriculture, and population and industries from
the port of Galveston, pp. 48-83, FO 701/28, (TNA).
15
Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 246-248; John D. Pelzer, “Liverpool and the American Civil War,” History Today 40
(March 1990): 46–52.
164
already existed in the Rio Grande borderlands had adopted a smuggling culture that matured for
more than a decade before the expansion of the cotton trade. Borderlands entrepreneurs were
well-prepared to capitalize on the illicit commodity exchange.
16
Traders developed two key cotton roads that coursed from the Deep South, through Texas
and into Mexico. They ran parallel to one another in order to avoid capture of a single route. The
northern route moved through the Arkansas-Louisiana border, into Central Texas, down to San
Antonio and across the Rio Grande at the ports of Nuevo Laredo or Piedras Negras. From there,
the cotton could be hauled downriver along the Mexican river road or shipped to Monterrey. The
southern highway began in Alleyton, Texas at the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and
Colorado Railway. It tracked southwest, passing through Victoria and angling toward the Lower
Rio Grande Valley into Brownsville and Matamoros. Because of the volume of traffic on the two
thoroughfares, Alleyton and San Antonio became crammed with bales of cotton waiting for
cartmen to carry it south.
17
The demand to move all of that cotton touched the lives of nearly everyone who lived in
Texas and Northern Mexico. Enslaved people were forced to plant, pick, and haul cotton.
Mexican, European, and American laborers were drawn into packing, shipping, and handling
bales. Women took on even more responsibility in labor and finance as they became heads of
households with men conscripted to the war effort. Indigenous people also participated in the
cotton times in various ways. The Comanche found opportunities to raid trading caravans and
16
Daddysman, The Matamoros Trade, 22-25, 30-33; Rodman L. Underwood, Waters of Discord: The Union
Blockade of Texas during the Civil War (Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2003), 63-65; Cerutti, Burguesía, capitales e
industria en el norte de México, 74-87; Mario Cerutti and Miguel Gonzalez-Quiroga, “Guerra y Comercio En Torno
al Río Bravo (1855-1867). Línea Fronteriza, Espacio Económico Común,” Historia Mexicana 40, no. 2 (Winter
1990), 217–97; Mario Cerutti and Miguel A. González Quiroga, El Norte de México y Texas, 1848-1880: Comercio,
Capitales y Trabajadores En Una Economía de Frontera (México, D.F: Instituto Mora, 1999), 51-75, 134-142.
17
Daddysman, Matamoros Trade, 107-109; Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 139-141; Mary Margaret McAllen Amberson,
James A. McAllen, and Margaret H. McAllen, I Would Rather Sleep in Texas: A History of the Lower Rio Grande
Valley and the People of the Santa Anita Land Grant (Austin, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2003),
165
ranches depopulated due to the demands of war. The Choctaw participated directly in the Texas
trade. They had their own cotton factor in San Antonio who negotiated prices of indigenous
grown cotton and organized shipment to Mexico. The transnational cotton trade through Texas
and Northern Mexico in the 1860s dramatically affected the lives of the borderlanders in various
ways.
18
One of the most dramatic effects came through conscription into the war effort. The
Confederacy conscripted Americans, Mexicans, and Europeans living in Texas to man the carts
to haul cotton to Mexico. Henry Baumberger, a brewer and shipping agent from Switzerland, had
his life and business completely disrupted by the Confederacy. The government gave him an
ultimatum to turn his shipping business to exclusively ship cotton to Mexico or face life as a
soldier. Baumberger came to hate his "ruling lords" and wished "this damned war and all those
who are to blame for it would go to hell."
19
Baumberger was not alone, as many carters who
crossed the desert of the Nueces Strip did so against their will.
20
To make matters worse, teamsters in the cotton trade lived a dangerous life. Comanche
scouts realized the frequency and vulnerability of so much material moving across the open
plains into their territory. Comanche attacks on cotton trains grew more frequent on the roads to
the Rio Grande. Cart men like Baumberger constantly worried they would "fall a prey to the
cruelty of the Indians."
21
Other threats included guerrilla Union supporters who ranged
18
Debbie M. Liles and Angela Boswell, eds., Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-
Mississippi (Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 2016).Clara Sue Kidwell, The Choctaws in Oklahoma:
From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 32, 47, 57-58; Mario Cerutti and
Miguel Gonzalez-Quiroga, “Guerra y Comercio En Torno al Río Bravo (1855-1867). Línea Fronteriza, Espacio
Económico Común,” Historia Mexicana 40, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 383
19
Henry Baumberger to Dearest Relatives and Friends, Aug. 24, 1863, Folder 7, Henry Baumberger Letters, 1856-
1867, Doc 5171, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, San Antonio, Texas.
20
Amberson, et. al., I Would Rather Sleep in Texas, 199.
21
Henry Baumberger to Dear Relatives and Friends, Jan. 23, 1861, Folder 6, Henry Baumberger Letters, 1856-1867,
Doc 5171, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, San Antonio, Texas
166
throughout South Texas. Juan Cortina, who began his uprising in 1859, continued his raiding
into the 1860s. Cortinistas adopted positions against Confederate leaders in Texas and claimed
support for the Union. The most successful of these Mexican-born Union guerrillas, Octaviano
Zapata, recruited a militia of up to eighty men and attacked Confederate supply wagons near the
Rio Grande killing most of the teamsters.
22
They even hanged a Confederate judge as a public
display of their power. Travel in the Rio Grande borderlands was dangerous business.
23
Eruptions of violence all along the Rio Grande had the potential to destroy entire business
ventures before they had a chance to prosper. For example, one night near Christmas in 1861, a
militia made up of Mexican soldiers and American mercenaries broke into an Austrian Jewish
merchant family's dry goods store in Matamoros. With rifles and bayonets, the militia forced the
Schlinger family out of their home, “without permitting them to take sufficient clothing to cover
their nakendness,” and into the road.
24
The men plundered the store and took all the clothing and
goods they could carry. The soldiers verbally harassed the family who stood embarrassed and
vulnerable in the middle of the commercial district of one of the busiest trade cities in North
America. No one came to the Schlinger's aid and no punishment ever reached the responsible
party. The Mexican government and the State of Tamaulipas tacitly admitted some fault and later
awarded the family compensation for their injuries and losses, but the family had little recourse
for the justice they desired.
25
22
Cushing, E. H. The Tri-Weekly Telegraph (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 29, No. 26, Ed. 1 Friday, May 15, 1863,
newspaper, May 15, 1863; Houston, Texas, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History,
https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, (Accessed October 15, 2019)
23
Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 123-124.
24
Lucius Avery, U.S. Vice Consul Matamoros, “Memorial of Leopold Schlinger, September 26, 1869, Box
2.35/A72b, Leopold Schlinger Family Papers, 1833-1877, (DBCAH).
25
Erhard Deposition, March 17, 1869, Santos Coy Deposition, September 24, 1869, Schlinger Deposition, April 2,
1862, Box 2.35/A72b, Leopold Schlinger Family Papers, 1833-1877, (DBCAH).
167
Figure 12 Map of the Rio Grande Borderlands Cotton Road, 1861-1865
The plight of the Schlingers was part of increasing political turmoil in Northern Mexico
and anti-Semitism among merchants in the borderlands. In the fall of 1861, the election for
governor of Tamaulipas became hotly contested. The liberal candidate, Jesús de la Serna, eked
out a victory and received certification from the Juarez administration in Mexico City. His
challenger, the conservative candidate, Cipriano Guerrero, declared a pronunciamiento against
de la Serna and claimed victory for himself. Supporters of both sides clashed in cities throughout
168
Tamaulipas. A fight in Reynosa in October led to 5 killed. By November, the conservative mayor
of Matamoros, with the support the local Mexican military commander, declared martial law
within his city. The liberals in Matamoros called for support and received it in the form of
General José María Jesús Carvajal and his mix of filibusters from Texas. Carvajal’s troops
combined with liberal resistance fighters and put Matamoros under siege. From November 1861
to March 1862, Matamoros remained in a state of civil warfare.
26
Individuals used the conflict in Matamoros as a means to inflict damage on political,
economic, and social opponents. Those perceived as foreigners were especially at risk. The
French had just revealed their ambition to conquer Mexico after the capture of Campeche.
French expatriates faced reactionary violence all over Mexico, but particularly in Matamoros.
Additionally, Matamoros was overcrowded with refugees and Union sympathizers fleeing the
Confederacy. Carvajal declared that foreigners remained in Matamoros at their own risk and that
he and his men “...would not be responsible for the lives or properties of foreigners remaining in
the town.”
27
They backed up their words. Frenchmen and Jewish merchants became the most
frequent targets. In the first few weeks of Carvajal's siege, three French merchants died as a
result of violence from one side or the other. It was Carvajal's men who invaded the Schlingers’
home and robbed their store.
28
The attack on the Schlingers was also part of growing anti-Jewish feeling among the
borderlands' population and European-born merchants were no exception. In addition to the fact
26
The Weekly Telegraph (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 27, No. 35, Ed. 1 Wednesday, November 13, 1861; Joseph E.
Chance, José María de Jesús Carvajal: The Life and Times of a Mexican Revolutionary (San Antonio: Trinity
University Press, 2006), 173, 177-180; Kearney and Knopp, Boom and Bust, 120-123.
27
Daily True Delta, published as The Daily True Delta (New Orleans, Louisiana), Vol. 25, no. 21, December 12,
1861.
28
The Weekly Telegraph, (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 27, No. 39, Ed. 1 Wednesday, December 11, 1861.
169
that nobody came to the aid of the Schlingers during their public humiliation, mercantile
correspondence regularly included comments regarding the Jewish community. Swedish-born
John Vale explained to Charles Stillman that he did not associate with Sanders & Co. in Roma
"on account of his mean, Jewish & lying principles."
29
Joseph Morell was just as direct in his
opinions about Jewish traders. He believed their mere presence cut into his profits. "All kinds of
goods are bound to go down, so many Jews are coming up to spoil trade as usual."
30
Jew-hatred
was not restricted to the American borderlands. It became a growing trend in societies across
Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Upwardly mobile Jewish families, like the
Schlingers, became the most likely targets. Jewish entrepreneurs may have moved to the
borderlands seeking what they hoped to be a pluralistic society. They found a population divided
between Catholics and Protestants, though rigidly Christian and anti-Jewish. Protestant
European-born entrepreneurs brought their anti-Jewish notions across the Atlantic with them.
The Schlingers and others remained outside established networks and vulnerable to attack.
31
Leopold Schlinger had developed very few local connections. Most of his cloth was
imported from New Orleans and he and his wife, Regine, manufactured it in house into clothing,
so they were not tied into the credit or labor networks in and around Matamoros. Additionally,
since the Schlingers came to the borderlands as a single-family unit, there was no opportunity for
intermarriage in order to build kinship relations until their child, Louis, reached maturity.
Finally, since the Schlingers were Jewish, they did not make the same basic local connections
29
Vale to Stillman, April 11, 1863, Charles Stillman business papers, MS Am 800.27 (21)-(39). (HLHCL).
30
Morell to Stillman, May 27, 1861, Letters from various others to Charles Stillman, February 1862, Charles
Stillman business papers, (HLHCL).
31
Steven Beller, Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction, Second edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
1-8; Esra Bennathan, “The German Jews at the Start of Industrialisation, A Comment,” in Werner Eugen Mosse,
Arnold Paucker, and Reinhard Rürup, eds., Revolution and Evolution, 1848 in German-Jewish History,
Schriftenreihe Wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen Des Leo Baeck Instituts 39 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981), 151-155;
Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany & Austria, Revised edition, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1988), xviii-xxiii; Dewey, Pesos and Dollars, 121-131.
170
with the predominantly Catholic and Protestant population in the region. Their position was on
the fringe of every network. When a period of crisis struck Matamoros, the Schlingers held a
relatively weak position that made them particularly vulnerable for attack, which highlights the
point that divisions in Rio Grande borderlands went beyond Indian, Mexican, and American.
*****
For those who avoided the violence in the Rio Grande borderlands or being rendered an
outcast, the focus remained on profiting on cotton. Building broad, overlapping networks was
essential to keep up with the cotton trade. With everyone working to profit on the same product
and protect themselves from violent disturbances, a tendency toward cooperation slowly replaced
competition. Most entrepreneurs aligned themselves with the Confederacy to ensure access to
cotton supplies. They also supported Mexican leaders who would ensure the flow of cotton
across the Rio Grande. Confederate Texas and Governor Santiago Vidaurri became part of the
political glue that held together the mercantile networks that drove the cotton trade.
John Leyendecker and his family, including Santos Benavides, were tasked with
protecting the cotton roads and ensuring Confederate cotton reached Mexico to be taxed to fund
Vidaurri's regional empire. The networks that Benavides and Leyendecker built in the 1850s
drew them into defending the cotton trade. By protecting the cotton road and facilitating cotton
transport through Laredo, the Leyendecker-Benavides family network solidified into one of the
strongest commercial entities in the region.
32
32
John A. Adams, Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande: Laredo, 1755-1955 (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2008), 89-94; Félix García, The Children of John Z. Leyendecker : A Brief Genealogical Sketch,
1984; 23-28; Stanley Green, Border Biographies, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Laredo: Texas A&M International University
Border Studies Center, 1993), 7-13; Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 84-207; Jerry D Thompson, Warm Weather & Bad
Whiskey: The 1886 Laredo Election Riot (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1991), 14-29; Mario Cerutti and Miguel
Gonzalez-Quiroga, “Guerra y Comercio En Torno al Río Bravo,” 291-294.
171
The Leyendecker-Benavides network became inextricably tied to the Confederate cause
for practical and business reasons. Practically, Laredo required a new defense structure. The
Texas declaration of secession in February 1861 led to the removal of United States federal
troops garrisoned in Texas forts. Major C.C. Sibley hastily moved his troops out of Fort
McIntosh leaving Laredo without its most effective defense against Indians.
33
In less than a
month, the Comanches took advantage. A party of over forty raiders attacked the ranches on the
outskirts of Laredo killing at least sixteen men and capturing a number of women and children.
The removal of federal troops offered the Comanche an opportunity to push back against
American settlement and to boost their population through captives. Santos Benavides raised a
militia of about sixty volunteers from up and down the Rio Grande to launch a counterattack
against the raiding Comanche band. They caught half the band at a place called Paraje del Gato
where a breakneck fight on horseback took place. Four Comanche and one of the militia fighters
died in the battle. Significantly, newspapers across Texas picked up the story, noting Benavides's
success at raising an effective militia so quickly. This led Texas to continuously call on Santos
Benavides, along with his brothers Refugio and Cristóbal, to raise troops for the Confederate
cause.
34
Santos Benavides and John Leyendecker both protected and profited from the business of
civil war. Benavides did most of his work in uniform. He tracked down and snuffed out threats to
33
Major C.C. Sibley to Major F.J. Porter, March 11, 1861, in Russel A. Alger, ed. The War of the Rebellion: A
Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies vol. LII (Washington: Government
Printing Office, 1898), 134.
34
The Civilian and Gazette Weekly, (Galveston, Tex.), Vol. 23, No. 52, Ed. 1 Tuesday, April 2, 1861, newspaper,
April 2, 1861, Galveston, Texas, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History,
https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (accessed October 16, 2019);
Charles DeMorse, The Standard, (Clarksville, Tex.), Vol. 18, No. 13, Ed. 1 Saturday, April 13, 1861, newspaper,
April 13, 1861, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu;
crediting The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (accessed October 16, 2019); Thompson, Tejano Tiger,
78.
172
the cotton trade. He chased Cortinistas and Union guerrillas all over the Rio Grande borderlands,
ignoring the national boundary altogether. Union forces captured Brownsville in November 1863
and marched upriver to attempt to block the cotton trade through Texas. With Brownsville
captured, Laredo quickly became the most important port for Confederate cotton and Benavides
was tasked with defending it. The limited Union forces in Texas committed to three attacks on
Laredo. Benavides and the militia under his command repelled all three, ensuring the continued
movement of cotton across the Rio Grande from his hometown. Benavides's success solidified
his command of the Rio Grande during the Civil War era.
35
Benavides military achievements coincided with commercial benefits. His family
acquired military contracts to handle Confederate supplies at Fort McIntosh and elsewhere in
Texas. He also assumed control of cotton shipments when he needed to. As the war dragged on
and his men ran low on ammunition, Benavides captured wagon trains of cotton at Laredo that
he sold for supplies for his men. While he contributed significantly to the Confederate war effort,
Benavides concentrated on using the conflict to build his commercial holdings and local
standing. His time in the Confederate army expanded his network and the prominence of his
position in it.
36
As Benavides used his military position to grow the family's social currency,
Leyendecker utilized the conflict to continue to expand his commercial network. His pre-war
business partner, Bart DeWitt, joined the war effort to avoid conscription. DeWitt eventually
went to work with the Texas Cotton Bureau, an organization designed to manage the cotton trade
to snuff out corruption and guide cotton profits toward war materiel. The men who worked for
the Cotton Bureau found ways to make themselves wealthy. Namely, the state purchased cotton
35
Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 123-134; Adams, Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande, 89-93.
36
Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 113, 187-188.
173
from planters using Confederate dollars then exchanged the cotton with Rio Grande merchants
for hard currency. The rapidly inflating Confederate currency meant that Cotton Bureau agents
could easily skim personal incomes off the top of cotton sales by turning worthless Confederate
paper into gold and silver. One such entrepreneurial agent was Jean B. Lacoste from Gascony,
France. DeWitt linked Leyendecker and Lacoste hoping the two could find a mutually beneficial
relationship.
37
Carts formed the linchpin of the Leyendecker-Lacoste relationship. As Henry
Baumberger could attest, Confederate Texas was at a constant shortage of wagons and carts to
ship all of the cotton to Mexico and war materiel to Texas. Thanks to his family's connections to
Vidaurri and Leyendecker's pre-war business of shipping agricultural goods to San Antonio,
Leyendecker received regular shipments from Nuevo Leon by Mexican cartmen who could not
be conscripted into Confederate service.
38
Lacoste in Matamoros knew that at least 600 bales of
cotton lay stacked in Alleyton waiting for someone to pick it up and bring it to him. He had
English merchants in Matamoros willing to pay almost 100% more per pound than the bureau
paid the farmers. DeWitt told Leyendecker to "find all the carts you can" and make a trip
downriver where he could "make a bargain."
39
Leyendecker jumped at the opportunity and
mobilized at least forty Mexican cartmen to ship cotton in Texas. Leyendecker pulled in
thousands of dollars in hard currency, the cartmen earned hundreds of dollars more than they
37
DeWitt actually wrote a letter to Leyendecker on a Sweet & Lacoste Co. flyer: Bart J. DeWitt to John Z.
Leyendecker, April 24, 1863, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH); Roseann Bacha-Garza et
al., eds., The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846-1876 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019), 165;
Charles R Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water: Early Development in San Antonio (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2011), 102; Ralph A. Wooster, Civil War Texas: A History and a Guide (Austin: Texas State
Historical Association, 1999), 33-34.
38
David Montejano, "Mexican Merchants and Teamsters on the Texas Cotton Road, 1862-1865" in John Tutino, ed.
Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 163-164.
39
DeWitt to Leyendecker, July 24, 1863, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH).
174
would have in Mexico, and Lacoste became a longtime business partner for the Leyendecker-
Benavides commercial network during and after the conflict ridden 1860s. Leyndecker actively
worked in the remaking of the Rio Grande borderlands into a hub of Atlantic cotton exchange.
40
Leyendecker's position as a successful shipping magnate in Laredo drew attention of old
acquaintances interested in the booming Rio Grande trade. Charles Lege, a fellow German-
speaking Confederate Quartermaster, wrote Leyendecker after nearly a decade of silence to tell
him that Lege planned on visiting Laredo "to make some money."
41
Lege openly admitted that he
meant to presume on his old friendship to pump Leyendecker for information on how to succeed
in business in the Rio Grande borderlands. Lege's imposition turned out to be a boon for
Leyendecker as Lege became an agent for Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy and set up shop in
Camargo. As the Union continued to threaten shipments from Alleyton to Brownsville from the
coast, King and Kenedy redirected their cotton southwest to Laredo then down to Matamoros
through their agents in Camargo. Leyendecker got to charge for his services of inspecting the
cotton in Laredo and transferring it across the Rio Grande to his trusted cartmen in Nuevo
Laredo. He was also given leave to draw on Kenedy's account in Matamoros if he needed to.
Through Lege, Leyendecker gained access to the most prominent American businessmen in the
Rio Grande borderlands which pushed him closer to the American network.
42
As significant as his networks north of the Rio Grande had become, Leyendecker's
connections in Nuevo Leon proved to be just as profitable. In addition to his organization at
employing Mexican cartmen in the cotton trade, he also had mercantile connections that paid
40
Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 102; Miguel Gonzalez Quiroga, “Los Inicios de la Migración Laboral
Mexicana a Texas (1850-1880)”, in Ramirez M. Ceballos ed., Encuentro en la Frontera: Mexicanos y
Norteamericanos en un Espacio Común (Mexico: COLEF, 2001), 357-358.
41
Charles Lege to Leyendecker, July 6, 1864, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH);
42
Jockusch & Co. to Leyendecker, May 31, 1865, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH); Lege
to Leyendecker, May 31, 1865, Box 2M314, John Zirvas Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH).
175
dividends. Much of the agricultural products Leyendecker dealt in prior to the war came from
Evaristo Madero in Monterrey. Leyendecker kept importing grains from Madero, but also
worked with him in the cotton trade. Additionally, the Benavides association with Vidaurri put
Leyendecker in contact with the largest handler of Mexican cotton in the 1860s, Milmo & Co.
Vidaurri's son-in-law, Irish-born entrepreneur Patricio Milmo, rose to become one of the
wealthiest merchants in the Rio Grande borderlands as a result of the illicit cotton trade. Milmo
and Madero combined to supply the Confederacy with Mexican flour which they exchanged for
thousands of bales of cotton. Leyendecker often handled the transfer of those goods across the
Rio Grande. By inserting himself in the Mexican trade and connecting with the most powerful
merchants and political leaders in Monterrey, Leyendecker was able to thrust Laredo and the
surrounding region into the global cotton trade.
43
Leyendecker became an essential middleman for the cotton trade. When Milmo partnered
with Lacoste to sell and export cotton out of Matamoros, a trusted partner like Leyendecker
received it and transferred it to Matamoros where Lacoste shipped it to his English partner,
Henry Attrill, for specie, blankets, harnesses, saddles, and gray wool that Lacoste shipped back
to Monterrey through Milmo and up into Texas to supply Confederate soldiers. Near the end of
the war, Leyendecker became an Assistant Quartermaster. From that position, he organized
purchases from Milmo and Madero for Confederate supplies that he distributed to Fort McIntosh
and other military stations on the Rio Grande. Leyendecker used his position to more firmly tie
the Confederate demand for supplies to the borderlands.
44
43
Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border, 50; Adams, Conflict and Commerce, 92-93; Thompson, Tejano
Tiger, 164-166; Tyler, 122-127.
44
Arthur J. Mayer, “San Antonio, Frontier Entrepot” (PhD diss, The University of Texas at Austin, 1976), 477-483;
Confederate States of America Quartermaster's Department records for Laredo, Box 2M318, John Zirvas
Leyendecker Papers, (DBCAH).
176
Leyendecker and Benavides played key roles on the cotton road ensuring Confederate
cotton made its way into Mexico and essential supplies came into Confederate Texas. In doing
so, their network solidified locally and expanded regionally to include some of the most
powerful businessmen of the era. Together, Leyendecker and Benavides made Laredo and its
surroundings a key crossroads of the cotton trade between San Antonio, Monterrey, and
Matamoros, facilitating the borderlands’ role in the global economy.
*****
Confederate cotton and the increasing power of Monterrey in the region proved fortuitous
for Matamoros. The need to move cotton out of Mexico and heightened demand for war supplies
combined to create an economic upsurge on the Rio Grande Delta. Entrepreneurs with already
established mercantile networks were best able to take advantage of the boom time. They
harnessed their networks to ensure cotton made it to port and expanded their networks in order to
ship cotton across the Atlantic. Those networks helped offset losses to the Union blockade that
still seized ships regardless of the legal loopholes surrounding the borderland. Merchants in
Matamoros and its surroundings aspired to make their city a new center of Atlantic trade.
Matamoros and the small fishing village of Bagdad, directly downriver from Matamoros
on the Mexican side of the mouth of the Rio Grande, burst into boom towns. Entrepreneurs
moved there in mass making retail space a premium. Rents in Matamoros jumped 1000%
between 1858-1863. The population of Bagdad exploded from maybe 100 people up to 15,000.
The cotton trade created a space for expansion of other industries in the area. Nearby ranchers
had a ready local demand for beef, carpenters and engineers had endless contracts to construct
new buildings, saloon owners did not have enough space to sustain demand. Store owners could
177
barely keep enough beer, wine, and tobacco in stock. The cotton times offered a look into how
Matamoros and its surroundings might look as an essential cog in the Atlantic trade machine.
45
José San Román, who accounted for more than 6% of the total amount of cotton exported
from Matamoros between 1862-1865, built one of the largest mercantile networks in the
borderlands at the time. The Basque trader's connections in Monterrey and other parts of Mexico
helped facilitate the transformation of the Rio Grande borderlands to a center of global trade.
46
Monterrey became an important transfer post for Mexican cotton. Monterrey's position
resulted from Santiago Viduarri's alignment with Confederacy, the already established merchant
elite in the city, and shifting patterns of violence in Northern Mexico. Vidaurri and his son-in-
law, Patricio Milmo, benefited from the high tariffs they could place on cotton crossing the Rio
Grande and the war materiel and supplies they shipped to Texas. In addition to Milmo, there
already existed a powerful group of European-born merchants in Monterrey who could handle
the rapid influx of trade and population. While Matamoros remained the most important point of
ingress and egress of goods and raw cotton, respectively, internal fighting and foreign invasions
disrupted shipping. During the various Cortinista raids, civil violence in Matamoros, the Union
invasion of Brownsville, and the French invasion of Matamoros, shipments needed to be stored
safely. Monterrey became a key warehousing center. San Román utilized every connection he
had in Monterrey to navigate the instability of the Rio Grande borderlands during the cotton
times.
47
San Román's network of Spanish-born contacts in Monterrey gave him access to the city's
resources. Mariano Hernández had a head start on the cotton trade through his textile
45
Leroy P. Graf, “The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley 1820-1875” (PhD Diss, Harvard
University, 1942), 489-490; Irby, Backdoor at Bagdad, 5-7.
46
Montejano, "Mexican Merchants and Teamsters on the Texas Cotton Road, 1862-1865," 159-166.
47
Cerutti, Burguesía, capitales e industria en el norte de México, 74-87; Tyler, Santiago Vidaurri, 50-51.
178
manufacturing investments. He already had direct lines to Texas cotton and the means to store
surplus stock. He also expanded to open a Hernández y Hermanos storefront and warehouse in
Matamoros that worked closely with San Román.
48
Valentín Rivero played an even larger role in
San Román's cotton operation. Not only did he help facilitate the cotton trade, but Rivero
managed important silver shipments to Matamoros ensuring San Román remained flush with
hard currency to pay cart men and other cotton brokers. San Román's access to silver also
allowed him to turn more of his attention to finance. Credit was his pathway to power. San
Román became one of the most prominent lenders in the Rio Grande borderlands during the
Civil War era. As smaller merchants turned to him for loans, he solidified his centrality to the
cotton trade.
49
San Román's Spanish contacts helped him build stronger connections with English-born
traders in Monterrey. C.W. Whitis specialized in brokering trade between Confederate Cotton
Bureau agents and Liverpool cotton importers. Whitis's business partner, Asa Pullen, worked in
Piedras Negras to ensure that shipments made it across the Rio Grande to be transported to
Monterrey. The only missing link in Whitis's chain was a reliable facilitator in Matamoros to
ensure his bales of cotton made it onto ships to cross the Atlantic. Rivero likely suggested Whitis
seek out San Román to fill the gap in his supply chain.
50
Not only did San Román ensure cotton safely made it aboard ships bound for Liverpool,
but he acted as a banker for Whitis and Pullen. When a client like Whitis shipped his cotton to
48
After the Civil War, San Román took over the Hernández Hermanos holdings in Matamoros: Ledger for
Hernández Hermanos, Matamoros, January-August 1864, Box 2G133, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
49
Mora, The Making of the Mexican Border, 33-34, 92-93; Cerutti & González Quiroga, "Guerra y comercio en
torno al río Bravo (1855-1867)," 245-247, 264-273.
50
Asa Pullen to José San Román, July 2, 1865, Box 2G73, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); E.M. Wheelock,
Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the State of Texas During the Latter Part of the
Second Annual Session of the Court, Commencing the First Monday of December, 1871 XXXVI, (St. Louis: Gilbert
Book Company: 1882), 602-618.
179
Matamoros, San Román usually covered the freight costs on delivery, inspected the goods,
arranged transport further downriver to Bagdad, and contracted loading onto transatlantic ships.
After he took out his own expenses, he logged the remaining value into Whitis's account in his
books. If a client like Whitis needed money right away, he could request a letter of advice which
the client could take to a local firm, like Rivero & Cia., to withdraw sums from their account.
The account transfers, of course, garnered their own fees making men like San Román all the
wealthier. They also made the cotton trade work more effectively by ensuring people got paid.
No matter where his business took him, if Whitis could get a message to San Román, he could
get his money. Handling financial accounts quickly became one of San Román's most profitable
roles. He was a key mover of both cotton and currency in this era.
51
Joseph Morell's dealings with San Román brings the interconnectivity of the Rio Grande
borderlands and the region's brief period as a center of Atlantic trade into perspective. The
English-born merchant had been in Monterrey since the U.S.-Mexico War and formed a
partnership with Charles Stillman and his company in Brownsville. Morell traded in various
goods, but primarily bought and sold military supply. He likely supplied Carvajal's troops during
the Merchant War and sold shot and powder to all sides during the Mexican Reform War.
52
To
stay in business, he paid regular tithes to Santiago Vidaurri and supported the governor
throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Though his business often went beyond dubious into the realm
51
Pullen to San Román, July 2, 1865, Box 2G73, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); C.W. Whitis to San Román,
Sep. 15, 1864, Box 2G73, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); José San Román Cash Book, May 1, 1858-May 31,
1865, p. 447, Box 2G131, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
52
Morell to Stillman, Feb. 26, 1862, Charles Stillman business papers, MS Am 800.27 (21)-(39), (HLHCL).
180
of outright malfeasance, his dealings connected Northern Mexico to the United States, Britain,
and beyond.
53
Morell was a Stillman man, but the cotton trade was so vast and complex that he needed
San Román to ensure his exports. San Román had earned a reputation as a trustworthy partner
throughout the 1850s. It made sense for Morell to seek out the Spaniard in a time of need.
Stillman sold much of the cotton he traded during the war in New York City. Problematically,
Stillman's name was tied to the contraband cotton trade. Any cotton he landed in New York
under his name risked confiscation. Morell helped fix that problem. He shipped Stillman cotton
out of Matamoros under the title "José Morell, Monterrey" to avoid suspicion. During times he
could not see to the export himself or he felt his identity compromised, he contracted San Román
to do it. Though the Spaniard was a longtime Stillman competitor, the cotton trade pushed them
all together.
54
The threat of a Union invasion and the naval blockade also helped draw mercantile
networks together. San Román, Morell, Milmo, and other merchants in the cotton trade had to
constantly be wary of the Union blockade. The easiest strategy was to make sure to transfer their
goods in and out at Bagdad south of the mouth of the Rio Grande to avoid Union ships. San
Román had a special agent in Bagdad, French-born Joseph Kleiber, to make sure his shipments
remained on the Mexican side of the border safe from capture. Regardless, failure was common
as American naval commanders stopped and searched European ships in neutral waters
53
John M. Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 23-25; John M. Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 110-123; Mario Cerutti and Miguel Gonzalez-Quiroga,
“Guerra y Comercio En Torno al Río Bravo (1855-1867). Línea Fronteriza, Espacio Económico Común,” Historia
Mexicana 40, no. 2 (Winter 1990), 255-271.
54
Morell to San Román, Jan. 07, 1862, Box 2G61, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); Hart, Revolutionary Mexico,
110-115; Marilyn McAdams Sibley, “Charles Stillman: A Case Study of Entrepreneurship on the Rio Grande, 1861
- 1865,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (1973): 227–40; Montejano, "Mexican Merchants and
Teamsters on the Texas Cotton Road, 1862-1865," 141-170.
181
throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. In 1863, Union sailors boarded five British
merchant ships in Mexican waters off the coast of Matamoros. The Sir William Peel, Volant,
Matamoros, Science, and Dashing Wave were all impounded for carrying contraband. Since all
the impounded ships were connected in some way to European-born entrepreneurs in the Rio
Grande borderlands, the paperwork that impounds produced demonstrate the growing
interconnectivity of the borderlands and importance of the borderlands in the global cotton
trade.
55
Milmo and Lacoste relied heavily on the Sir William Peel for their cotton exports.
Partially owned by Lacoste's partner, Henry Attrill, the Sir William Peel had over 1000 bales of
cotton aboard when it was seized and sent to New Orleans for investigation. Certainly, John
Leyendecker's cartmen had shipped the cotton to port to be loaded on the Sir William Peel.
Union naval officers concluded to impound the ship because they found eleven guns on board
and believed them to be contraband of war. Outraged, the British consul in Matamoros fired off
letters of protest to the British foreign office that the cotton, shipped by Milmo & Co., was
certified by the U.S. consul in Matamoros. It should never have faced seizure. The situation
created a firestorm of controversy between the United States and Britain that lasted nearly a
decade.
56
The seizure of the Dashing Wave interrupted San Román's shipments from Britain. The
Spaniard had previously avoided using the Dashing Wave in his transatlantic trade. He had
Joseph Railton & Sons of Manchester transfer his shipments of dry goods and other items off the
55
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 5th ed (New York: Norton, 1999), 766;
Daddysman, The Matamoros Trade, 165-168; Alger, ed. The War of the Rebellion, 228-229;
56
G. Coppell to Lord Lyons, Nov. 16, 1863, Matamoros Seizures, FO 5/1181, TNA; Henry Howard, Report by Her
Majesty's Agent of the Proceedings and Awards of the Mixed Commission on British and American Claims (London:
Harrison and Sons, 1874), 102-118.
182
Dashing Wave in August 1862 because San Román knew the ship had a reputation for breakage
and loss. Railton was happy to oblige, for a fee, because he was able to take advantage of San
Román for two profitable commodities from Mexico: silver and cotton. The Dashing Wave lost
the commission to ship £30,500 of goods from Liverpool to Matamoros. San Román chose to
pay to have his goods shipped via two separate ships with additional costs rather than the
Dashing Wave.
57
When San Román learned of the Dashing Wave's seizure a year later, he could probably
only shrug and sigh at his luck with that ship. This time his business associate was the massive
transnational Lizardi company. The Lizardi company had a long history with the transatlantic
cotton trade. The merchant family first opened business in Veracruz in the 1750s and quickly
grew into one of the largest firms working in the Gulf of Mexico. By the time of Mexico's
independence in 1821, Lizardi owned mercantile houses in New Orleans, Paris, and London.
Francisco de Lizardi and Co., the London house, worked in tandem with Manuel de Lizardi and
Co., the New Orleans house and prominent cotton factor, to export cotton from New Orleans to
Liverpool in the 1840s. Problematically for the Lizardi company, the Union blockade
concentrated on New Orleans, severing the tie between the two Lizardi firms. F. de Lizardi and
Co. had to find a replacement cotton factor. The firm sought inroads to the Matamoros trade.
58
F. de Lizardi and Co. found José San Román through one of San Román's business
partners. Speculator H.N. Caldwell called on F. de Lizardi and Co. to jointly purchase cotton in
Matamoros. Caldwell had £3000 in hand with £4000 on credit with San Román in Matamoros.
57
Montejano, Mexican Merchants and Teamsters, 160; Joseph Railton to San Román, September 01, 1862, Box
2G61, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
58
Linda K Salvucci and Richard J. Salvucci, “The Lizardi Brothers: A Mexican Family Business and the Expansion
of New Orleans, 1825-1846,” The Journal of Southern History 82, no. 4 (November 2016): 759–788; Thomas
Courtland Manning, Francois-Xavier Martin, and Merritt M. Robinson, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in
the Supreme Court of Louisiana and in the Superior Court of the Territory of Louisiana. [1809-1896]: 1846-1847,
vol. 21 (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1910), 281-291.
183
He wanted F. de Lizardi and Co. to put up another £5000 so they could get a huge bulk of cotton
out of Matamoros in one transaction. Both Caldwell and Lizardi wanted San Román to handle
the purchase. They shipped 12,000 gold sovereign coins to San Román via the Dashing Wave
with detailed instructions on how San Román was to purchase the cotton, inspect it, and ship it to
Britain. They gave San Román discretionary power to purchase from £7000 up to the full
£12,000 depending on the market and quality of the product. Caldwell was sent personally to
deliver the gold sovereigns and the instructions. When the Union navy seized the Dashing Wave,
the gold disappeared. Caldwell fled the ship during its seizure and probably took the gold with
him. All F. de Lizardi and Co. had to make its case against the United States was a bill of lading.
After the incident with the Dashing Wave, San Román added a deposit in his cash book from
Caldwell's company for £10,000. Though the seizure cost him a ship full of goods, a majority of
the gold coins may have made their way into San Román's hands.
59
The examples of the Sir William Peel the Dashing Wave give insight into the growing
interconnectedness of the mercantile networks in the Rio Grande borderlands. No matter how
large the British firm importing cotton from the Rio Grande, be it Henry Attrill's company or the
Lizardis, they needed middlemen who worked locally to ensure shipments. Their money could
only go so far without the expertise and local networks of merchants like San Román and
Patricio Milmo. Their local connections made it so that they knew when the high and low times
would come. They also knew how to boost the value of goods to exchange them at the highest
59
H.N. Caldwell to F. Lizardi and Co, Aug. 17, 1863; F. Lizardi and Co. to H.N. Caldwell, Aug. 18, 1863; F.
Lizardi and Co to José San Román, Aug 21, 1863 in Matamoros Seizures August 1864-November 1865 FO 5/1184,
(TNA); José San Román Cash Book, May 1, 1858-May 31, 1865, p. 333, Box 2G131, José San Román Papers,
(DBCAH); "Brig Dashing Wave v. The United States," in Stephen K. Williams, Cases Argued and Decided in the
Supreme Court of the United States, December Terms, 1865-1867 (Rochester: The Lawyers' Cooperative Publishing
Company, 1901), 621-625.
184
margins. Together, huge European firms and knowledgeable local middlemen made the illicit
cotton trade function. Even with the failure and suspicion surrounding the Dashing Wave, F. de
Lizard and Co. continued to do business with San Román because it was profitable in the long
run.
60
San Román became such an important node in the transatlantic cotton trade because of
his network of Europeans in the borderlands who directed cotton shipments down the Rio
Grande to San Román's warehouses in Matamoros. John Decker in Rio Grande City and
Camargo proved to be an important ally. San Román's budding relationship with Decker in the
1850s blossomed into an incredibly profitable partnership during the U.S. Civil War. Decker's
company accepted tons of Confederate cotton at Rio Grande City, sorted it, transferred it across
the border to Camargo, and shipped the prime cotton downriver to San Román. Decker sold the
damaged and subpar cotton to other merchants. In exchange for sending San Román only the
best cotton, Decker asked for small perks in addition to payment, like fine clothing. Their
relationship proved mutually beneficial.
61
Similar to Leyendecker, Decker's connections in Mexico gave him access to Mexican
cartmen. Decker's wife, Antonia Morales, helped boost his standing in Camargo. Though not one
of the original families to settle Camargo, the Morales family became important in Camargo
politics after Mexico's independence from Spain. Decker opened a store in Camargo and the
family had a home there. It is likely John Decker met Antonia Morales through local social and
trade networks. When their daughter, Cecilia Decker, wed, they had the wedding in Camargo.
John Decker had standing and connections in Camargo which helped him when he needed to hire
60
Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 149; Daddysman, The Matamoros Trade, 156; Bill of Lading for the Joven Rafael,
Oct. 14, 1864 and Bill of Lading for the Angelita, Oct. 15, 1864, Box 2G73 José San Román Papers, (DBCAH).
61
John Decker to San Román, Oct. 4, 1864, Box 2G73, JSR Papers.
185
Mexican cartmen to move tons of cotton. He had his best teamsters carry San Román's cotton in
shipments that often exceeded four tons. Local family connections up and down the Rio Grande
remained essential the movement of cotton and other goods during the era of globalization in the
borderlands.
62
In Nuevo Laredo, another European who married into a Mexican family worked to make
sure San Román's cotton made it to Matamoros. English-born Henry Redmond spent the 1850s
trying to establish himself as one of the most powerful people on the stretch of the Rio Grande
between Laredo and Rio Grande City. He married Refugio Diaz, daughter of Agapita and
Teodoro Cuellar Diaz of Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas. The Cuellars were one of the founding
families of Guerrero and his wife's family allowed Redmond access to networks of power in the
regional Mexican elite.
63
With the help of his new family and others, Redmond aided in the
creation of Zapata County in Texas. He consolidated his political power in the county by holding
the positions of postmaster, customs collector, justice of the peace, and county judge. He also
controlled a virtual mercantile monopoly in the area. Redmond's power grabs made him enemies
among Mexican ranchers and laborers in and around Zapata County. When the county had to
submit its vote for secession, it set off a revolt. The county leadership, including Redmond,
announced that anyone who failed to vote in favor of secession would be fined fifty cents.
Dissidents who failed to submit a ballot were later ordered arrested, sparking rancher Antonio
Ochoa to declare a pronunciamiento in favor of Juan Cortina's uprising and the Union cause.
62
The Laredo Archives, 1749-1838, reel 1, p.3, DeGolyer Library Microfilm, Southern Methodist University;
Camargo Church Marriage Records 1764-1913, Grooms, Second Revision, (Corpus Christi: Spanish American
Genealogical Association, 1995), 52; John Decker to San Román, Oct. 12, 1864, Box 2G73, José San Román
Papers, (DBCAH).
63
Before Mexico's independence, the Spanish called the town Revilla: Historia vol. 56, Nuevo Santander, Villa de
Revilla, 410-423, Archivo General de Mexico, 1538-1849, (DBCAH).
186
Ochoa and over forty Cortinistas took over southeastern Zapata County and attacked Redmond's
ranch.
64
Redmond's time in Zapata County was up. He closed shop and moved in with his wife's
family in Ciudad Guerrero. He concluded a letter to Charles Stillman with an ominous statement,
"We are living in very serious times."
65
From the relative safety of Guerrero, Redmond had to
figure out how to provide for his family. He traveled upriver to Nuevo Laredo to start a new
mercantile business where he had a couple friends and fewer enemies. One his most prominent
contacts in the area was Santos Benavides, who had ridden south to defend Redmond's ranch
when the Cortinistas attacked it.
66
From Nuevo Laredo, Redmond initially worked in the hide trade until the cotton market
exploded. He utilized his experience with local government and the Mexican elite to his benefit.
He paid the alcalde of Nuevo Laredo a percentage of each cotton shipment over the river and
openly recorded payments of the municipal and federal tax.
67
He wanted to maintain Mexican
support for his business in town. Redmond also gained support from the Brazos Manufacturing
Company. Organized by planters in Brazoria County to build a textile mill using Texas state
subsidies and cotton sales, the Brazos Manufacturing Company hired Redmond to broker sales of
their cotton. He turned to José San Román to buy bulk shipments. In one transaction he sent over
103 bales to San Román in Matamoros.
68
Through the cotton trade in Mexico, Redmond rebuilt
64
Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 85-87.
65
Henry Redmond to Charles Stillman, May 7, 1861, Charles Stillman business papers, MS Am 800.27 (4-20)
(HLHCL).
66
Thompson, Tejano Tiger, 91-94; Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek, and Roseann Bacha-Garza, Blue
and Gray on the Border: The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
2018), 137.
67
Henry Redmond to José San Román, Sep. 05, 1864, Box 2G73, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); U.S.
Department of the Treasury, Impost Books, Laredo, 1851-1914, vol. 1, National Archives, Fort Worth, Texas,
2791232
68
Henry Redmond to José San Román, Sep. 18, 1864, Box 2G73, José San Román Papers, (DBCAH); Norman L.
McCarver, Hearne on the Brazos (San Antonio: Century Press of Texas, 1958), 22-23.
187
his mercantile business in the face of catastrophe. He also made sure that San Román received
the cotton he needed from Texas.
During the cotton times in the Rio Grande borderlands, mercantile networks expanded,
intersected, and melded together. As the cases of Leyendecker and San Román demonstrate,
regional networks were essential to the movement of cotton out of Texas and into the Atlantic
market. Individuals who had already crafted relationships of trade and trust took most advantage
of the economic explosion that came with the political and social disruptions of civil war and
foreign invasion. Because of the sheer volume of trade, former competitors had to work
alongside one another to keep up. The violent factors that constantly threatened the trade forced
them to work in tandem. Global forces came together to make the borderlands one of the most
important regions for economic exchange between 1861-1867 and the people who lived there
took advantage of the opportunity. Those who did hoped to retain the significance of the region
in the decade that followed.
*****
The end of the U.S. Civil War and decline of the cotton trade in the Rio Grande
borderlands caused the vast regional networks to splinter. American and European networks
aligned against one another, with new variations. And like in the 1850s, the fight was over
transportation. Mifflin Kenedy and his partner Richard King still held the monopoly over
steamship transport on the Rio Grande. However, the cotton times offered new possibilities for
the movement of goods. By necessity, overland shipping became more effective. Merchants had
mobilized shipping companies who improved the roadways. As roadways improved, the Rio
Grande became less reliable. The volume of water in the river channel began to decrease
considerably after the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War due to increased irrigation in Colorado
188
and New Mexico. Additionally, to further weaken the Kenedy and King monopoly, their partner
Charles Stillman suffered a stroke in 1866 that affected the entire left side of his body and
weakened his enterprising spirit. The time was ripe for San Román and others who wanted to
overthrow the power of the Stillman syndicate on the Rio Grande.
69
More effective roads and competitive shipping threatened the Kenedy and King
steamship monopoly. The cotton roads through Texas and Mexico were notoriously bad in the
first years of the explosion of the cotton trade. In one instance, a wagon team left Pittsburg,
Texas in September 1862 and arrived in Brownsville in July of the next year because of
treacherous road conditions. By 1866, conditions improved as military and private companies
worked on trouble areas to make them more passable. The expansion of Mexican shipping
companies also threatened the river trade. After the war, all those companies had to compete for
fewer transportation contracts lowering the cost of overland transport. Cart teams could be
purchased on the cheap to bypass high steamship rates.
70
Natural and manmade changes had significant effect on the steamship business on the
Lower Rio Grande. In October 1867, a major hurricane whipped through the Gulf of Mexico,
skirting the Yucatan Peninsula and following the Gulf Stream to make landfall at the mouth of
the Rio Grande. The storm completely destroyed Bagdad and caused considerable damage in
Brownsville and Matamoros, ripping off the roof of the building that housed Kenedy and King's
headquarters. The company also lost four ships in the tempest. What ships remained had less and
69
Kelley, River of Lost Dreams, 72-85; Kearney and Knopp, Boom and Bust, 143-159; Amberson, et. al., I Would
Rather Sleep in Texas, 279, 291-347; Sibley, "Charles Stillman," 239-240; Montejano, "Mexican Merchants and
Teamsters on the Texas Cotton Road," 141-170; Jane Clements Monday and Frances Brannen Vick, Petra’s Legacy:
The South Texas Ranching Empire of Petra Vela and Mifflin Kenedy (College Station: Texas A&M University
Press, 2007), 141-171;
70
Montejano, "Mexican Merchants and Teamsters on the Texas Cotton Road," 145-151; Miguel Gonzalez Quiroga,
"Mexicanos in Texas During the Civil War," in Emilio Zamora et al., eds., Mexican Americans in Texas History:
Selected Essays (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), 57-62.
189
less water in which to ply their trade. From 1850 to 1870, the number of acreages using the Rio
Grande for irrigation more than doubled. With each acre of cultivated land requiring
approximately 900,000 gallons of water, the amount of water flowing through Northern Mexico
and South Texas decreased considerably. New shoals appeared near Roma and Mier that blocked
passage upriver. Natural conditions limited the value of steamboat transport.
71
Charles Stillman's stroke further hamstrung Kenedy and King's transport monopoly.
Stillman withdrew from the from the partnership and returned to New England. He left the
management of most his Texas businesses to his brother, Cornelius. He and his son, James
Stillman, reinvested most of his fortune in the National City Bank of New York. At the same
time, both Kenedy and King were investing their cotton profits in land acquisitions north in
Nueces County. Stillman never returned to the Rio Grande and Kenedy and King lost their focus
on maintaining their transportation empire.
72
With their cotton profits and a weakened Stillman syndicate, European-born
entrepreneurs like José San Román and his allies saw that the time was ripe to solidify the Rio
Grande borderlands as a center of Atlantic trade from which they would reap the gains. A main
railroad trunk line that ran along the river with spurs that ranged north to connect with the
transcontinental lines and south to incorporate Mexican trade centers would make the towns
along the river essential hubs, especially Brownsville and Matamoros since those towns would
handle the imports and exports via the Atlantic trade. The railroad epitomized progress and
modernity in postbellum America. Nearly every major rail line in the United States was built by
71
Kelley, River of Lost Dreams, 77; W. Armstrong Price, "Hurricanes Affecting the Coast of Texas from Galveston
to Rio Grande," Technical Memorandum no. 78, Army Corps of Engineers, (March 1956), A22-A23; Monday and
Brannen, Petra's Legacy, 155-160.
72
Sibley, "Charles Stillman," 239-240; Amberson, et. al., I Would Rather Sleep in Texas, 279; Monday and
Brannen, Petra's Legacy, 145.
190
networks of friends who pooled finances, sold bonds, fought over congressmen, and manipulated
newspapermen. They lobbied to gain allies through promises of profit and outright bribes. The
notion of friendship masked their corruption. It also enabled them to compete with the corruption
of their opponents. Being the first to claim a rail line to replace steamboats would give San
Román and his partners the monopoly on transportation which they could use to leverage their
competition out of business. It took time, patience, and political manipulation but San Román
and his predominately European-born network used railroads to take control of the Rio Grande
borderlands.
73
The skeleton for a rail line already existed along the river. During the Union occupation
of Brownsville, soldiers hastily put down track from the town down to the Gulf in 1865 to ensure
their supply line. Union steamships could take days to navigate the winding pathway of the Rio
Grande just to cover the twenty-five miles from Fort Brown to the coast.
74
The federal
government put the rinky-dink line up for sale after the war. Kenedy and King tried to make the
purchase but were outbid by a silent owner. That fact became moot after the hurricane in 1867
washed away most of the track.
75
With the old line rendered derelict by the storm, Kenedy and King pushed the state of
Texas to grant them the charter to construct a permanent railroad from the coast to Brownsville.
They won the charter and proceeded to do nothing. They were not motivated to actually lay any
track. Merchants in Brownsville and Matamoros knew the moment the King, Kenedy, &
Company got the charter that they never intended to build the road.
76
People along the Rio
73
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton
& Co, 2011), 93-130.
74
Time book of the Mustang, 1864, Folder 6, Theodore M. Warner collection, Margaret H. McAllen Memorial
Archives, Museum of South Texas History, Edinburg, TX.
75
Kearney and Knopp, Boom and Bust, 142-143, 157-159.
76
Joseph Kleiber to Simon Mussina, May 13, 1870, Letter book, Box 2E293, Joseph Kleiber Papers, 1860-1877,
(DBCAH)
191
Grande still had to pay their steamship company or cartmen to ensure their supplies. Their high
rates and preferential treatment of American merchants impeded the expansion of Atlantic trade
on the Rio Grande.
An entire movement to transfer the charter to an organization that would build a rail line
developed in secret. Any businessperson who wanted to support the transfer of the rail charter
had to do so quietly to avoid financial ruin. For example, H.E. Woodhouse, a partner in the
Stillman syndicate since 1854, wanted the convenience and speed a railroad would provide to the
Rio Grande trade. Woodhouse was even willing to finance a majority of its construction. He
organized with San Román through an intermediary, French-born Joseph Kleiber, who was a
partner in San Román's mercantile network. Working against Kenedy and King threatened all of
Woodhouse's investments in the Rio Grande borderlands. One of his partners claimed that “if the
steamboat people knew that he connived (to build the railroad), they could and would injure him
seriously in many ways.”
77
However, he believed a rail line would at least double his business. It
was worth the risk.
78
Though Woodhouse became the principle financial backer of the new Rio Grande
Railroad Company, he was not the only prominent member of the old Stillman syndicate to break
ranks. Francisco Yturria, the Stillman group's banker, also supported the new rail line. They both
saw the future in using the railroad to reorient all the borderlands trade into and out of
Brownsville/Matamoros. Yturria even tried to convince Charles Stillman's son, James Stillman,
to invest in the project. Additionally, Irish-born Jeremiah Galvan, who worked with the Stillman
syndicate as a front to ship Confederate cotton to New York, supported the Rio Grande Railroad
77
Kleiber to Mussina, May 13, 1870, Letter book, Box 2E293, Joseph Kleiber Papers, (DBCAH).
78
W.H. Chatfield, The Twin Cities of the Border and the Country of the Lower Rio Grande (New Orleans: E.P.
Brandao, 1893), 21; Kearney and Knopp, Boom and Bust, 157-159.
192
Company's construction in spite of Kenedy and King in exchange for the company's endorsement
for Galvan's run as state representative. A majority of the powerful business owners on the
Lower Rio Grande turned against Kenedy and King in favor of actually constructing the
railroad.
79
Though the organization of investors Kleiber recruited had the funds to ensure the road
would be built, they still had to earn the official charter from the state of Texas. The Rio Grande
Railroad Company began engaging politicians from the governor's office to the House of
Representatives. Republican Edmund J. Davis spent the majority of the Civil War in Matamoros
conspiring to bring down the Confederacy. He returned to Texas to win election to governor in
1870. He worked to get Democrats out of office and replace them with Republicans. In Cameron
county, his choice was Ferdinand Schlickum, a book seller from Bergen. With Kleiber's
encouragement, and probably some corrupt funding from San Román and Woodhouse,
Schlickum introduced the bill to incorporate the company and carried it through to be passed.
The Rio Grande Company took advantage of the era of Reconstruction and Republican rule to
gain the political upper hand over the remains of the Stillman syndicate.
80
In all of the recruiting and politicking, San Román remained in the background. His old
share of the King and Kenedy company was substantial and he did not want to threaten a
mainstay of his income. However, his interest in the Rio Grande Railroad Company became
obvious when the company's board of directors became public. San Román's closest partner,
Simón Celaya, led the company as president. Under Celaya's guidance and the quiet funding
79
Frank Daniel Yturria, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Extraordinary Times of Francisco Yturria
(Brownsville.: University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, 2006), 243-245; Monday and
Vick, Petra's Legacy, 50, 145; Amberson, et al., I Would Rather Sleep in Texas, 356.
80
Kleiber to F. Schlickum, June 24, 1870 and Kleiber to Schlickum, Sep 03, 1870, Letter book, Box 2E293, Joseph
Kleiber Papers, (DBCAH); Monday and Vick, Petra's Legacy, 183; Friedrich R Wollmershäuser, Passengers Listed
in the Allgemeine Auswanderungs-Zeitung, 1848-1869 = Allgemeine Auswanderungs-Zeitung: Einträge Zu
Passagieren, 1848-1869 (Morgantown: Masthof Press, 2014), 465;
193
from San Román, Woodhouse, and Yturria, the Rio Grande Railroad became a reality. Beaten,
Kenedy and King sold the remains of their steamship company to Celaya, San Román, and their
associates. For a brief moment in time, San Román and his network of predominantly European-
born entrepreneurs took control of the Rio Grande market and focused on remaking it a center of
Atlantic trade.
81
*****
In 1871, European-born entrepreneurs and their networks in the Rio Grande borderlands
seemingly controlled the future of the political economy of the region. They held vast wealth, a
transportation monopoly, and had sympathetic politicians in both Texas and Northern Mexico
working to ensure their interests. Individuals like Joseph Kleiber assessed the situation with deep
optimism about the transnational market he was helping to create. “Nearly all the Bridge material
is up and the piling nearly finished. The water is very low and the weather magnificent…The
telegraph began to work yesterday.”
82
His excitement about the bringing the railroad and
telegraph to the Rio Grande was palpable. He believed he was contributing to the modernization
the Rio Grande.
Kleiber, San Román, and their partners also understood that they stood to lose it all with
one wrong misstep. “I am sorry to say that there is some truth about the report of the road having
been washed away but not to such an extent as was represented.”
83
Circumstances beyond their
control constantly threatened their most important project. These entrepreneurs had to gird
themselves for the possibility that things would fall apart.
81
Kearney and Knopp, Boom and Bust, 157-159; Yturria, The Patriarch, 243.
82
Kleiber to Woodhouse, Jan. 21, 1873, Letter book, Box 2E293, Joseph Kleiber Papers, (DBCAH).
83
Kleiber to Woodhouse, Jan. 21, 1873, Letter book, Box 2E293, Joseph Kleiber Papers, (DBCAH).
194
During San Román and his network's rise to success, many other European-born
entrepreneurs met disaster due to outbreaks of violence, state intervention, and anti-Jewish
feelings. Comanche raiders, Union guerrillas, Mexican Liberal soldiers, Confederate troops, and
others attacked ranches, sacked stores, robbed teamsters, and killed perceived enemies. Just
being French born in Matamoros at the end of 1861 could be a death sentence. Others, like
Henry Baumberger, faced the unsavory decision of being sent to the Confederate front lines or
haul cotton across the desert. Jewish entrepreneurs often faced the brunt of random acts of
violence, negative impacts of state intervention, and broad-based anti-Jewish sentiment like the
Schlinger family did in Matamoros. While a few European-born mercantile networks rose to
prominence, many failed.
For those European-born entrepreneurs lucky to persevere, it took nearly two decades to
outmaneuver Americans. They did it through networking among themselves, using their
networks to take advantage of the cotton trade, and reinvesting their wealth in railroads in the
hopes of making the Rio Grande borderlands a hub of Atlantic trade. San Román, Celaya,
Decker, and others in the San Román network executed their plan to undermine the Stillman
syndicate and takeover the market. Using the railroad as an engine for change, they continued to
push for the Rio Grande borderlands becoming a permanent center for Atlantic trade.
195
EPILOGUE
“AMERICANIZING THE RIO GRANDE”
The remnants of the American Stillman syndicate did not sit idly by waiting for
Europeans to push them out of the Rio Grande borderlands market. On a Sunday evening in the
spring of 1872, Mifflin Kenedy accosted José San Román in Brownsville. The steamship baron
was furious that the Spanish-born entrepreneur challenged his shipping enterprise. He told San
Roman that “he meant to make war to the knife.”
1
Though their business tottered on the
precipice of failure, Kenedy and his partner Richard King repositioned themselves further north
in Corpus Christi and enacted a plan to create their own railroad to cut the Lower Rio Grande out
of the borderlands market. They utilized geography, the changing Texas legislature, and the
generosity Mexican President Porfirio Díaz showed to American businessmen to recapture their
power and cut out their European competition once and for all.
After they sold their steamship business, Kenedy and King refocused their business
activities on ranching and removed their headquarters to Corpus Christi where they engaged the
partnership of Texas railroad mogul Uriah Lott. Lott had worked as a shipping agent for King,
Kenedy, and Co. in Brownsville in the 1860s. He moved to Corpus Christi and sunk all of his
finances into building a rail line to Laredo in 1874. When Kenedy and King learned of Lott’s
plans, they invested heavily and became primary shareholders in the company. They dumped
1
Joseph Kleiber to H.E. Woodhouse, May 13, 1872, Box 2E293, Typescript of letter book. Joseph Kleiber Papers,
(DBCAH).
196
tens of thousands of dollars into Lott’s Corpus Christi, San Diego, and Rio Grande Narrow
Gauge Railroad Company to ensure its completion. Kenedy and King had to see the construction
of a railway to cut out European dominated Brownsville and Matamoros from the North
American trade.
2
In the process of building the Corpus Christi to Laredo railway, Lott, Kenedy and King
gained the support of the state of Texas. Initially, they pursued a bond plan that included an
attempt to extort $300,000 from Duval and Nueces counties. Voters in Corpus Christi interpreted
it as another railroad scam and the bond election failed. The public had just learned in 1873 of
the levels of corruption railroad owners were willing to go to after the publication of the Crédit
Mobilier scandal.
3
Duval and Nueces counties did not want to be the next dupes of men in
octopus suits. Not to be deterred, the Corpus Christi railroad group found another way to gain
public support. Once a railroad line in Texas reached a distance of twenty-five miles of
completed track, it qualified for state land bonuses. Kenedy and King lent the financial support
for Lott to get to the twenty-five-mile threshold then petitioned Austin for land grants. In total,
Texas granted 855,680 acres to the Corpus Christi, San Diego, and Rio Grande Narrow Gauge
Railroad Company. Much of the excess land ended up becoming a part of the King Ranch.
4
The next boon to Kenedy and King’s railroad project came from Mexico. In 1880, the
Mexican government granted a concession to build the Mexican National railroad from Laredo
to Mexico City. Porfirio Díaz, a Mexican general who ascended to president in 1877 by
2
Bruce Cheeseman, Perfectly Exhausted with Pleasure: The 1881 King-Kenedy Excursion Train to Laredo (Austin:
The Book Club of Texas, 1992), 11-35; J. L. Allhands, Railroads to the Rio (Salado: Anson Jones Press, 1960), 17-
32.
3
The Crédit Mobilier construction company used its position in the Union Pacific Railroad company to steer
fraudulent contracts to their company, bilking millions in taxpayer dollars. See: Allen Brinkley, The Unfinished
Nation, A Concise History of the American People, 7th ed, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014), 360.
4
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton
& Co, 2011), 62-87, 230; Cheeseman, Perfectly Exhausted with Pleasure, 21-22.
197
overthrowing a constitutional government, allocated millions of dollars in subsidies for
American railroad development in Mexico. The Stillman family provided significant funding for
Díaz’s campaign which gave it the power to suggest that the Mexican National Railroad should
run to Laredo, the southern terminus for the Corpus Christi, San Diego, and Rio Grande Narrow
Gauge Railroad Company, owned by Stillman’s former partners, King and Kenedy. When news
spread that the Mexican National would be built to Laredo, Kenedy and King’s railroad became
one of the most valuable projects in the United States. They sold their rail line as quickly as
possible. Kenedy and King managed to earn $5 million for their unfinished narrow-gauge line
from Corpus Christi to Laredo and essentially had a guarantee that somebody else would do the
work to complete it for them.
5
San Román, Celaya, and other members of the Rio Grande Railroad worked to avoid
being cut out of the North American trade between Mexico and the United States. They also
sought new partners for investment and state assistance. Francisco Yturria contacted Charles
Stillman’s son to probe the notion of Stillman financing the expansion of the Rio Grande
Railroad. Stillman, with his goals wrapped up in the Mexican National, declined to invest. In
fact, he wrote Yturria that he did not want to contribute to a rail line that would put Brownsville
in “the hands of Woodhouse and the Spaniards.”
6
Further, Simón Celaya, the general manager of
the Rio Grande Railroad Company, used his position as the Spanish vice consul in Brownsville
to encourage European investment and expanded trade through Brownsville and Matamoros. It
all amounted to very little. The Rio Grande Railroad was dying.
7
5
John M. Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 104-130; White, Railroaded, 215-216; Cheeseman, Perfectly Exhausted with Pleasure, 27.
6
Quoted in Frank Daniel Yturria, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Extraordinary Times of Francisco
Yturria (Brownsville: University of Texas at Brownsville: Texas Southmost College, 2006), 245.
7
J. L. Allhands, Gringo Builders (Dallas: J.L. Allhands, 1931), 110-112.
198
From 1881, the Rio Grande Railroad began a steep decline in carriage. A decade later, it
was wrecked and robbed of nearly $60,000 worth of silver. The company eventually defaulted
and was reorganized under American ownership in 1910. Kenedy had declared war on San
Román 1872. It took a little over two decades, but he successfully destroyed his European
competitors on the Rio Grande.
8
*****
On reflection of the era of brief European dominance of the Lower Rio Grande, Mifflin
Kenedy glossed over his failures and the nearness he came to ruin. In an interview he gave about
his life, Kenedy claimed he gave up his steamboat business because he became interested in
railroads.
9
In his memory, Miflin Kenedy's decision to sink his wealth in railroad-building came
from personal curiosity and an entrepreneurial spirit. Lost in his narrative is the anger he felt at
being outmaneuvered and the anxiety of knowing that the steamship conglomerate he helped
build on the Rio Grande collapsed. In hindsight, the early 1870s merely marked a time of
transition from steamships to locomotives. Kenedy's selective memory helped obscure and
eliminate his European competitors from history.
Another contributing factor to European competition with American business in the
borderlands being forgotten is that many of the Europeans involved often left the borderlands or
melded into American networks. When the Dolores colony collapsed, Beales moved his family
to New York City where he returned to his professional calling as a surgeon. He made claims to
the Republic of Texas for the return of his grant but received little support. With the British
consul-general William Kennedy interested in his same lands, Beales gave up his claims in
8
Allhands, Gringo Builders, 112-113.
9
Dictation from Mifflin Kenedy, Corpus Christi, Nueces County: 1889, BANC MSS P-O 133:9, Bancroft Library,
University of California.
199
Texas by 1843.
10
Not long after his own failures to create a British settlement in Texas, William
Kennedy returned to England and fell back on his journalistic talents, living as a writer in both
London and Paris.
11
After the collapse of the Rio Grande Railroad, José San Román left
Brownsville/Matamoros and returned to Bilbao. He sold most of his holdings to Simón Celaya
and other partners. Though he retired to his home in Northern Spain with a significant fortune,
San Román had to cope with the knowledge that he briefly made the Rio Grande borderlands a
center of Atlantic trade only to see that dream go unfulfilled in only a few years.
12
Joseph
Kleiber also left the borderlands after the Rio Grande Railroad began its decline. He left the
mercantile life altogether, moving north of Austin to try his hand in land and cattle.
13
By leaving,
entrepreneurs like Beales, Kennedy, San Román and Kleiber admitted defeat in the borderlands.
Though they all left significant archives of documents behind them, their stories became
subsumed in the narrative of American domination.
Other European-born entrepreneurs simply accepted American commercial domination
and joined into American networks. With the new railroads running through Laredo, John
Leyendecker capitalized on his connections to Corpus Christi with King and Kenedy to support
Laredo becoming a crossroads of North American trade. He and the Benavides family committed
to the Texas Democratic Party and worked toward Americanizing Laredo. They maintained
business and political connections with Americans in Corpus Christi seeking to promote the
interests of American trade with local power politics. In consequence, Leyendecker is less
10
Lucy Lee Dickson, “Speculations of John Charles Beales in Texas Lands” (Thesis, University of Texas Austin,
1941), 122-123.
11
Handbook of Texas Online, Claudia Hazlewood, "Kennedy, William," accessed March 13, 2020,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fke25.
12
Handbook of Texas Online, Roberto Mario Salmón, "San Roman, Jose," accessed March 12, 2020,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsa16.
13
Kleiber to Joseph San Roman, Aug. 08, 1874, Box 2E293, Typescript of letter book, Joseph Kleiber Papers,
(DBCAH); Handbook of Texas Online, John H. Hunter, "Kleiber, Joseph," accessed March 12, 2020,
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fkl08.
200
remembered for his contribution in tying Laredo to the Atlantic cotton trade and more for
Americanizing the town. His descendants know him for his positions as Postmaster General of
Webb County and acting as both secretary and treasurer of Laredo. Indeed, Laredo opened John
Z. Leyendecker elementary school in 1953, an institution designed to turn Laredo children into
productive American citizens. Leyendecker is not remembered as a European-born entrepreneur
who tried to modernize the Rio Grande borderlands and connect it to the Atlantic world. Instead,
he was a German immigrant who achieved the American dream. Leyendecker’s position as a
European-born entrepreneur changed over time.
14
*****
Other significant European entrepreneurial failures in the borderlands have similarly been
forgotten. French entrepreneurs made several attempts to establish mining companies and
colonies in Northern Sonora. One notable example, in 1852, Lepine de Sigondis led up to eighty
miner/colonists into the Santa Cruz Valley in modern day Arizona. The venture disbanded rather
quickly, but Sigondis was provided French state support and resources through the French
consulate in California.
15
Meanwhile, a group of English and Canadian entrepreneurs tried a
similar venture north of Austin, Texas. The United States Land Company, an organization of
English investors, promoted their lands in Texas with the prospects of mining gold and copper.
The company even hired George Catlin, the famous painter of the American West, to write a
pamphlet to promote the colony of New Britain. The venture ended in absolute disaster and
Catlin lost his entire gallery to creditors. These failures mark other attempts by Europeans to
14
Jerry D Thompson, Warm Weather & Bad Whiskey: The 1886 Laredo Election Riot (El Paso: Texas Western
Press, 1991), 1-12, 29, 33-42; Félix García, The Children of John Z. Leyendecker: A Brief Genealogical Sketch
(Laredo: Felix Garcia, 1984), 32; leyendeckeres.elisd.org.
15
Rufus Kay Wyllys, “The French of California and Sonora,” Pacific Historical Review 1, no. 3 (1932): 351-353
201
leave their footprint in the borderlands and shows how persistent they were in establishing a
European presence on the American frontier.
16
Even through their failures and the imposition of American mercantile domination of the
borderlands, European-born entrepreneurs did leave a significant mark on the region. José de
Escandón’s original settlements persist along the Rio Grande. John Beales’s legacy of
mismanagement informed William Kennedy and formed the basis of Kennedy’s information
about the borderlands. Kennedy, who actively sought to push against American expansion, may
have actually helped expedite American intervention in the Rio Grande borderlands through his
politicking in Texas. Alexander Bourgeois spurred the the most powerful German-speaking
emigration network to focus on settling in Texas. The networks that Leyendecker and San
Román built affected the entire transportation infrastructure between Northern Mexico and South
Texas. Laredo would likely not have been the northern terminus of Mexican National Railway
had San Román not succeeded in building the Rio Grande Railroad or had Leyendecker not
already established connections between Laredo and Corpus Christi. All the European
entrepreneurs in this study impacted the historical trajectory of the Rio Grande borderlands.
Furthermore, European-born entrepreneurs’ consistent actions to move the Rio Grande
borderlands into being an integral hub of the Atlantic economy through settlement projects and
mercantile networks left an indelible impact on the European imagination. Even after King and
Kenedy’s triumph, European-born entrepreneurs continued to move to the Rio Grande
borderlands. However, instead of trying to reorient the region toward Europe, the immigrants of
the late nineteenth century were searching for the American dream and engaged in reforming
16
George Catlin, “Notes for the Emigrant to America to Accompany…the United States Land Company,” Galveston
Correspondence with Foreign Office, FO 701/30, (TNA); Richard H. Ribb, "CATLIN, GEORGE," The Handbook
of Texas Online, accessed March 04, 2020, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fca94.
202
notions of American identity in the borderlands. Though they failed to globalize and modernize
the Rio Grande in the ways they set out to, European-born entrepreneurs added to the diversity
and complexity of borderlands society.
17
17
Alicia M. Dewey, Pesos and Dollars: Entrepreneurs in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1940 (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 115-121; Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope: Forging Identity
and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 269-274.
