currents underway in the Mexican interior where the Centralist and Federalist parties had since 1821 vied for political control. Anglo Texans and leading Tejanos (several from the San Antonio area) favored federalist republican principles. The Federalists advocated state sovereignty, defended individual liberty, pledged protection of private property ownership, and actively promoted economic progress. Anglo Texans and their Tejano allies perceived Mexico’s Centralists, on the other hand, as threats to these convictions, and the consistent discriminatory attitude the Centralists had taken against the Texans, and ultimately their abolishment of the Constitution of 1824, sparked the movement for independence.
A related premise broadens the conflict between Centralists and Federalists by placing it in a global context. This scholarly assessment contends that the worldwide revolution in cotton framed the manner in which Centralists and Federalists confronted each other over which system of governance best determined the destiny of Texas. For the Centralists, the cotton revolution and slavery had led to great influx of Anglos into Texas, and only strong Centralist control would curb increased immigration, abolish slavery, and halt possible secession. But these were subversive policies to Anglos and Tejano oligarchs. They saw in federalism, on the other hand, a shield from Centralist policies and protection from threats that potentially sabotaged slavery, arrested immigration, and interrupted the further development of the cotton economy. Cotton and slavery mixed in shaping the approach each side took in dealing with the other. The disagreement between Mexico’s Centralists to check immigration and undermine the institution that undergirded cotton in Texas, and the conviction of Texans and Tejanos that federalism as a method of governance best served their aim in defending the agricultural revolution, caused the Texas war for independence.
Another alternative view asserts that economic incentives, such as land speculation, underlay the revolt. The land‐trafficking thesis sees several of the influential men in Anglo Texas having migrated from the United States to the Mexican north with the intention of turning a profit in land transactions. This argument links these individuals to speculators in Texas, Coahuila, and Mexico City, as well as to financial centers in New York and Philadelphia. When Mexico moved against Texas in 1835, the leading men in the colony threw their influence behind rebellion in an effort to maintain opportunities in land speculation.
Other historians attribute more subtle economic reasons for the uprising, seeing the rebellion as one launched by Texans to preserve recently achieved economic gains. For years, Anglos had lived under the auspicious climate created by the Constitution of 1824–federalism had fostered further immigration, slavery, and economic progress. In eastern Texas, Anglo Texans had benefited favorably from cotton production, finding markets for the staple in US markets. Santa Anna’s effort in 1835–36 to impose stricter rule over the province threatened the Texans’ notions of an individual’s right to make a living through inventive entrepreneurship. The rebellion, then, intended to protect the agricultural and commercial advances Anglos had made in Texas, as well as slavery.
Still other historians focus on Anglo American contempt for Mexico’s rule. According to this view, Anglo Americans throughout the 1820s and up to the outbreak of the war faulted the Mexican character for a number of defects, among them the Mexicans’ unenlightened politics: they tolerated military intervention in government, centralist rule, and the violation of individual and states’ rights, and seemed unenlightened on such fundamental republican tenets as the right to due process. In short, the Anglos scornfully viewed Mexicans as a politically and culturally inferior people, one incapable of governing Texas and thus undeserving of the province.
Similarly contemptible, they contended, was Mexico’s cowardly policy toward the indios bárbaros; Anglos grieved that politicians preferred retrenchment against the Comanches instead of a manly resistance to them in the American manner. This allegation, however, conveniently ignored several realities. First, Spaniards and Mexicans had not timidly retreated from openly engaging the Indians. Spain and subsequently Mexico saw Texas as a region designed to buffer and protect the wealthier northern states from foreign interlopers (including those from the United States by the 1820s); fighting Indians in Texas simply had held low priority. Nor had Anglo communities been any more successful in restraining the powerful Comanche nation from attacks on the province. It was myth, of course, to maintain that the United States produced a more courageous breed of men than did Spain or Mexico; in point of fact, Anglo men launched no major offensives against the Comanches, as Anglo settlements up until the mid‐1830s were situated in eastern Texas, remote from the bison‐hunting grounds of Plains Indians.
It follows, therefore, that ethnocentrism or racism as a cause of the conflict has also received attention from scholars, with some arguing strongly that racial prejudice acted as a guiding force (though not the sole one) in the break with Mexico; others adamantly contest this analysis. The first school would note that Anglo Americans arrived in Texas already conditioned to think negatively of Mexican people: the Mexicans’ darker skin and adherence to Catholicism helped Protestant, racially biased Anglos view Mexicans as biologically inferior and morally flawed. Believing, as past generations of Anglos did (and future ones would) that the United States had a special purpose in the world (a “Manifest Destiny” to bring order and discipline to “untamed” and “uncivilized” hinterlands), they arrived in Texas bent on “rescuing” the underdeveloped region from a backward people and an unstable government.
Critics of such an interpretation argue that racism truly was not manifest in Texas before 1836, and thus should be discounted as a primary cause in the independence movement. In fact, Anglos and Tejanos coexisted fairly well, sharing similar economic and political interests. Frontier settlements were so remote that large‐scale contact between the two peoples hardly aroused ill feelings. But once it started, the war itself, one group of scholars observes, spurred anti‐Mexican prejudice. During the conflict, Anglos came to see Mexicans as decadent, brutal, and subhuman, the reality of the events that transpired during it hardening such perceptions. Still other scholars note that not until after 1836, when new factors emerged, among them a desire to turn Mexicans into a controllable labor force and stepped‐up competition for land, did feelings that may be classified as racist develop. Prejudice evolved from a need to justify the violent domination of the Tejanos, in short, from anxiety, distrust, fear, conflict, and competition.
Scholars also find the United States economy a contributing factor leading to the breakup of Texas with Mexico. Anglo American immigrants had facilitated closer economic ties between Texas (and other parts of the Far North for that matter) and the United States, so that by the 1830s, even Tejanos (both oligarchs and some plain folks) and entrepreneurs in Coahuila were forging connections to US commerce. When events pushed Texas toward separation from Mexico, many Texans (both Anglos and Mexicans)–driven by the human instinct for survival–sided with rebellion, seeing greater opportunity in an independent Texas tied to the robust economy of the United States.
Finally, after decades of relative neglect, the Revolution has come under the examination of historians from Mexico. Writing from a nationalistic perspective, they have tended to view the conflict as an expression of US imperialism–a shameless American land grab perpetrated against a weaker neighbor. In this view, the Texas War for Independence was simply the first step in the United States’ acquisition of Mexico’s northern territories, a process that started in Texas and then culminated in the US‐Mexican War of 1846–48. The Texas rebels, in other words, were simply surrogates for the US government, fully intending to detach Texas from Mexico and add it to the United States.
Whatever the immediate causes of the Texas War for Independence, the conflict must be considered in the larger social, political, and economic context of Mexican and American history. Texas by the 1830s was an isolated, peripheral region of the weak, incompletely formed Mexican nation. The events of the 1820s and 1830s had drawn Texas increasingly into the dynamic, rapidly expanding capitalist economic system of the United States, and those ties proved stronger than all of Mexico’s inadequate attempts to foster a Mexican identity and bind the northern frontier province more tightly to the national core. Shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, Stephen F. Austin had described Texas as “a ripe peach”
