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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?
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