What if Paul Cuffee and the ACS made a deal to plant colonies in Mexican Texas instead of W. Africa?

raharris1973

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cuffee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society

What if the Mexican government in the 1820s, concerned about populating its northern frontier, and advocates of colonizing free blacks like Paul Cuffee and the American Colonization Society, met each other in the early 1820s and decided to collaborate.

What the Mexicans get out of it - willing colonists who know how to cultivate the soils of east Texas, but who have a vested interest in being outside of U.S. law and jurisdiction and under Mexican law banning slavery. The Mexican motive could be that they anticipate that white Anglo settlers would infiltrate, get beyond control and try to join the US, like Anglos did in West Florida. What the Mexican government loses by favoring free blacks over white Anglos is settlers with a relatively high degree of capital and education.

What the colonization movement gets out of it. - It gets free blacks outside of US jurisdiction, into territory some American may aspire to, but which the U.S. formally ceded by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819. The colonization project sets up free blacks who grew up and worked in America with land where the southern U.S. crop package they know, both for subsistence and export, works. The shipping costs are also much, much lower than to West Africa. Not quite understood, but disease casualties should be much less. What the U.S. loses is a clear path to expansion into Texas, and, for slave states in the then southwest like Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, they get a "bad example" of a freemen's colony likely to harbor fugitives.

Unless white Anglo colonists are present in Texas in force already by the time freedmen colonization begins, they will not be in a great position to drive off the freedmen colonizers and set up a functioning slave economy soon.

The Comanche raids are problem. They may not rule out all of east Texas, but do limit the expansion of any Texas settlement block. On the other hand, I do not know how capitalized the ACS was and how its resources compared to the size of the prior Spanish tribute payments to keep the Comanche quiescent effectively for several decades before Mexican independence. So maybe payoffs to the Comanche are part of the arrangement.

As a sweetener to the Americans the Mexicans could also agree to take in any troublesome seminole or fugitive or hispanophones in Florida who are chafing against the new American regime there.

How would the Monroe, then Adams, then Jackson, Harrison and Tyler administrations react to this?

I imagine there would be a clamor in the old southwest to eventually squash Texas, end the bad example, and open the area to settlement under a system of anglo migration, white supremacy and slavery.

However, expansion with that as an obvious motive would be controversial outside the south I think. Sectionalism was already an interregional issue as early as 1820, with both north and south concerned about the balance between slave and free states, which forced the Missouri Compromise.

So, I think there's a chance that despite the south's power over the federal government, the House may not fund any wars to subdue and take over Texas.

What do you think?
 
The problem is the same one that produced Bleeding Kansas OTL. Like the Missouri-Kansas frontier, the lands of eastern Texas are for the most part the same as western Arkansas and non-bayou Louisiana. Anglo settlers will, in due course, come in great numbers due to the availability of cheap land (if they pay for it) or the chance to homestead the same without the authorities' consent due to the weakness of Mexican control on the frontier. They will also be well-armed and, if push comes to shove, more than willing to use those guns to secure their own "liberty", as they did define it. There just aren't enough potential colonists for a negro colony west of the Sabine River to stop that dynamic. Eventually, there will be a Texan revolt against Mexico, probably on something like OTL's timeline of the mid-1830s, over the gaping cultural chasm between the Anglos and the Mexican authorities barring significantly more competent governance emanating from Mexico City.

That said, the numbers we're dealing with by the time of the Texan War of Independence are tiny (demographically): The number of people in all of Tejas at the time were in tens of thousands at the very most, after all, so the addition of a thousand or two negro colonists might be all that it takes to produce a different Texan War of Independence. Whether that's a good thing for Mexico, though, is a different question. As there's no guarantee that the freeman colonists will fall into rank for the central government: While the slavery issue certainly would indicate so, they would be just as alienated by the metropole's language, religion, and hacienda culture as the Anglo settlers were. There might even be an interesting story to tell about the civil war in the negro colony between pro- and anti-revolutionary factions and what role a black pro-revolutionary faction may or may not have on the institution of slavery in a victorious Republic of Texas.
 
I’d be very interested to see what a sizable percentage of the Texan population beingg free blacks would have on their revolution, assuming it still happens. Assuming not much else changes, could this Texas enter as a Free State?
 

raharris1973

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There just aren't enough potential colonists for a negro colony west of the Sabine River to stop that dynamic.

I admit, I just don't know what the upper limit of plausible free black colonist/migrants would be. I imagine the upper limit of those willing and able would be higher than for Liberia, and the ability of them to survive natural hazards of disease and animals would certainly be higher than Liberia, but I do not know by how much.

I wonder how much we could boost up the numbers by inviting non-slaveholding members of the 5 civilized tribes during the era of the Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears. Said invitation to take these nations off the hands of the U.S. might be enough of a sweetener that even President Jackson decides to overlook the dangerous precedent of a multi-racial non white supremacist block just west of the US-Mexico border

That said, the numbers we're dealing with by the time of the Texan War of Independence are tiny (demographically): The number of people in all of Tejas at the time were in tens of thousands at the very most, after all, so the addition of a thousand or two negro colonists might be all that it takes to produce a different Texan War of Independence. Whether that's a good thing for Mexico, though, is a different question. As there's no guarantee that the freeman colonists will fall into rank for the central government: While the slavery issue certainly would indicate so, they would be just as alienated by the metropole's language, religion, and hacienda culture as the Anglo settlers were. There might even be an interesting story to tell about the civil war in the negro colony between pro- and anti-revolutionary factions and what role a black pro-revolutionary faction may or may not have on the institution of slavery in a victorious Republic of Texas.

You do bring up interesting points and possibilities here. Another possibility is that the main reaction of free blacks to encroaching white settlement, seizure of political power and installation of white supremacy would be to head for the hills, ie up to Santa Fe and the Rio Grande Valley and even California.
 
I admit, I just don't know what the upper limit of plausible free black colonist/migrants would be. I imagine the upper limit of those willing and able would be higher than for Liberia, and the ability of them to survive natural hazards of disease and animals would certainly be higher than Liberia, but I do not know by how much.

The upper limit is almost certainly higher than what the ACS could do with Liberia, but the unknown-unknowns quickly swamp any kind of attempt to be logical. Something on the order of 4,500 freeman made the passage to Liberia between 1820 and 1843; that seems a reasonable upper limit that might find their way to a settlement west of the Sabine River between, say, 1825 and 1835, when the Texas Revolution may or may not kick off on schedule. Practically speaking, I'd say a more reasonable number is a third-to-half of that, which would (probably) be in line with what the ACS actually did send to Liberia between 1825 and 1835. As while the disease threat is much lower compared to Liberia, there're still the substantial threats to life-and-limb afforded by remoteness of most of the potential settlement areas and the very real possibility of tangling with antagonistic Amerindians. (After all, the Erie Canal will only open in 1825, and that's what really kicks the Transportation Revolution into high gear.)

I wonder how much we could boost up the numbers by inviting non-slaveholding members of the 5 civilized tribes during the era of the Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears. Said invitation to take these nations off the hands of the U.S. might be enough of a sweetener that even President Jackson decides to overlook the dangerous precedent of a multi-racial non white supremacist block just west of the US-Mexico border

It's an interesting idea, but there's also the fact that some of the Five Civilized Tribes practiced chattel slavery of negroes. Certainly a focal point to build a timeline around, if nothing else. I'd give it a read!
 
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