WAS TEXAS INDEPENDENCE FREEDOM OR SUBVERSION?

From The Mexican Spy Company: United States Covert Operations in Mexico, 1845-1848
By A. Brooke Caruso
McFarland & Company Publishers
Copyright 1991
Donated to the Brownsville Public Library System
"In Memory of Judge Fidencio Garza by A.C. Nelson"

"When Mexico won her independence from Spain in 1821, she was a huge country, stretching from the Sabine River to the Pacific Ocean, from 15 degrees North altitude to 42 degrees North altitude, an areas of over 1,600,000 square miles.
By 1848 the United States of America had acquired more than half (900,000 square miles) of this newly independent nation. Mexico knew she had problems when President John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) attempted to acquire all or as much of the northern Mexican province of Texas as he could. Just his interest in this territory was enough to cause alarm in Mexico.
During his presidency, Adams made no less than three attempts to induce Mexico to sell this land to the United States with no success. The Mexican people were so against selling vast portions of their homeland that Joel Poinsett, the United States minister to Mexico did not even carry out his instructions for submitting the last  proposition.

President Andrew Jackson (1827-1837) had disagreed with Adams on many issues, but was in complete agreement with him on buying the Mexican province of Texas. Jackson continued his effort to purchase Texas from Mexico over a period of several years and under great secrecy. But Jackson was not the only interested in the province of Texas, he was the first American president to make the Mexican ports of Monterrey and San Francisco objects of American continental acquisition.
It was Jackson's dream of an empire that would someday expand over 'all of Spanish North America.' Andrew Jackson, whether in or out of office, for the next two decades would be a continuous threat to the security of Mexico.
Two American presidents making numerous offers to purchase their land disturbed and offended the people of Mexico. This emerging giant that was their northern neighbor was a frightening reality to the newly independent country. In 1830 the Mexican government enacted a decree forbidding entrance to Mexico from the north without a Mexican passport, forbidding the introduction of slaves into Mexico, and from a practical point of view, forbidding all American colonization in Texas.
The Mexican decree did not stop Americans from crossing the border into Mexico, nor did the United States government do anything to hamper this movement. As these people were illegal aliens and had no rights, it was in their best interest to push for a change in government. The only way they could establish their position was to provoke a revolution. Even the legal American settlers had little empathy with the Mexican people. The United States minister to Mexico reported to President Jackson in 1833 that Stephen F. Austin told him all the American settlers anticipated a separation from Mexico at some future time...
(Sam) Houston went to Texas in 1833 (after his failed marriage and governorship of Tennessee) because he thought it was the land of opportunity for Americans, and he stayed. The stage was set, and the players were taking their places for the Mexican-American confrontation. The Mexicans were proud people who had no intention of giving up their land. . On the other side of the border, the Americans considered the continent theirs by special self-ordained rights and could not understand the Mexican arrogance.
As the number of illegal American aliens in Mexico grew, the inevitable Mexican-American confrontation drew closer. It came in 1836, when the Mexican army was ordered to restore Mexican control of the province. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna sought and obtained from the Mexican Congress a decree directing that all foreigners taken in arms against the government should be treated as pirates and shot. General Santa Anna laid siege to the Alamo on Feb. 23, 1836, and General Don Jose Urrea captured the settlement of San Patricio on 27 February 1836. The Mexican army was on the move as a killing machine; no foreigners were to survive in Texas.
Washington-on-the-Brazos, a small town of five to six thousand people, 150 miles northeast of San Antonio, was the birthplace of the Texas Republic. The Americans met here in an unfinished loft over a barroom on 1 March 1836 and drafted a declaration of independence. They used Thomas Jefferson's declaration, changing the words and details to fit the time and place. The next day the Mexican province of Texas was declared an independent republic. The Americans knew this was a war of survival or extermination. The immediate danger prompted quick action...
At the Battle of San Jacinto...the combined American and Mexican forces only totaled approximately two thousand men. Nevertheless, the victory was the turning point in the balance of power in the west. The road was open for the march to the Pacific Ocean...
American revolutionaries declared Texas independent on March 1836, and by June 1836 they had won de facto independence. Mexico would not recognize the Republic of Texas or even admit it existed, but Mexico was powerless to change the fact of its existence...
Depending on your point of view, the separation of Texas from Mexico was either an excellent example of the Jeffersonian pattern of expansion or a very successful covert operation. The Jeffersonian pattern of expansion envisioned a colony of Americans, panted on vacant though alien soil, which emerges into a free and independent republic.
As a covert operation the migration of Americans into Mexico would be described as one of the most successful examples in all history of what might today be called 'infiltration and subversion.'"