JUST LIKE THE U.S., TEXAS HAD IT'S OWN MANIFEST DESTINY

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Most history buffs can recite that the United States was driven to territorial conquest over Mexico based on the doctrine that Americans had been given a "manifest destiny" by Providence to seize the entire continent and spread it's superior "civilization" over the unworthy races and natives who inhabited it then. 

But what many don't realize is that even after the U.S. had initiated the Mexican-American War in 1846 and taken over half of Mexico in 1848, Texans like Sam Houston and John "Rip" Ford continued to harbor notions of further territorial conquest that included establishing a protectorate over large parts of northern Mexican states and over all of all of Mexico.

Some filibusters even wanted to take over not only all of Mexico, but of Central America, and perhaps the entire continent to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.

From the declaration of independence of the Texas Republic from Mexico in 1836, boundary disputes had existed between Mexico and the new country. Texas – even though there were no Texan settlements between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers – claimed the land between both rivers as part of their new republic.

Michael G. Webster, in his doctoral dissertation "Texan Manifest Destiny and the Mexican Border Conflict, 1865-1880" for the University of Indiana, wrote that "The hatreds produced by the Texas Revolution, the unfulfilled desire of the Texans to incorporate large portions of Mexican territory into the United States, and the repeated eruptions of frontier warfare by both Indians and filibusters, the relationship between Texas and Mexico took on a special character that made the Rio Grande frontier a tinderbox of emotion and intrigue. In particular Anglo-Americans were intensely prejudiced against the inferior races' of Mexico and the 'tyranny' of the Catholic Church in that country. And the most prejudiced Americans were the Texans."

Webster goes on to say that "Texans deprecated the backwardness and ignorance of Mexico and forecast the triumph of Anglo-Saxon culture and the eventual absorption of that nation. Among Anglos the popular image of Mexico was a country inhabited by an inferior race of mixed-bloods, a people weakened by union with the 'ignorant savage' and the 'degenerate' Negro."

Mary Austin Holley, cousin of Stephen F. Austin, proclaimed that Texas should never again be dominated by "the tyranny and anarchy, the rapine and violence of Mexican misrule. The Anglo-Saxon race are destined to be forever the proprietors of this land of promise and fulfillment." 

But the onward thrust of the Anglo-Saxon would not stop with Texas. Holley and others claimed that  there seemed "to be a destiny in the womb of time which marks her (the United States) southern boundary at the extremity of the north continent. Should the United States fail to seize the boon as offered, Texas would."

In 1841 – four years before Texas was annexed into the United States – a filibuster group claimed New Mexico and set out in an expedition to Santa Fe to lay claim to it as part of their new republic. That failed, also, but the plan to extend the boundary to the Sierra Madre in the interior of Mexico reappeared time after time until the late 1870s known as the "Republic of the Sierra Madre."

And we all know of the failed Mier expedition, an unsuccessful military operation launched in November 1842 by a Texian militia against northern Mexican border settlements that ended in the execution of some of the raiders and the imprisonment of the rest.

Texans weren't even dissuaded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed in 1848 that established the boundary between the two nations at the Rio Grande.

In September 1851 – Webster writes – that opportunity presented itself in the revolution of La Loba led by Jose Maria Jesus Carvajal. Texas expansionists flocked to Carvajal's revolt.

Among them was Ford, who brought his Texas Ranger company with him. Although the excuse for the uprising had been the Mexican tariff of 1851, its promoters really intended to make northeastern Mexico a separate nation where slavery would be permitted (and runaway slaves be returned to their owners) which would then be annexed by the United States.  Richard King, Charles Stillman,  and Mifflin Kenedy lent their support to Carvajal, and Kenedy even contributed money and supplies. That also failed. 

Yet, even as late as 1858, Sam Houston was proposing in the United States Senate that a protectorate be established over Mexico. At first, Houston had suggested that the protectorate encompass Mexico and Central America, but he later restricted the area to Mexico. The U.S. Congress nixed the plan.

Webster's dissertation notes that: "Repeatedly after the Civil War the subject of a Sierra Madre boundary or a protectorate was revived. As late as 1877 the San Antonio Daily Express was seriously discussing the need to establish the Texas boundary along the Sierra Madre and, if necessary, impose a protectorate over all Mexico. Long after Manifest Destiny had waned in the rest of the United States, Texans still believed it was part of their Manifest Destiny to incorporate the northern states of Mexico."