Statue of Emily D. West (Morgan) by Veryl Goodnight in Houston. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Fair Use law.
Slavery in the West
Africans on the North American Frontier, 1501-1848
Traditional interpretations of the American West often portrayed the region as a frontier defined by opportunity, mobility, and free labor. Within this framework, scholars and popular culture producers frequently assumed that African Americans were largely absent from the West and, consequently, that slavery was also absent from the frontier. This interpretation is historically inaccurate.
The American West was not an innocent frontier removed from the institution of slavery. Rather, slavery accompanied western expansion and was embedded in the political, economic, and social development of the region.
During the antebellum era, slavery spread alongside Anglo-American conquest and settlement across territories acquired from Spain and Mexico. Its expansion was limited not by climate, geography, or so-called “natural limits,” but by political decisions such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the adoption of antislavery constitutions in states like California and Oregon.
Before 1861, slavery was legal in Texas, Utah Territory, Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and Kansas Territory, and efforts to legalize it in California were narrowly defeated. The history of the West therefore cannot be separated from the history of slavery.
The relationship between western expansion and slavery is particularly evident in Texas. Before large-scale Anglo-American settlement, many Black people prospered in Mexico’s northern territories because African slavery never became a foundational institution of Mexican society. Instead, regional elites relied primarily on modified forms of the Spanish encomienda system, including debt peonage and wage labor, which drew heavily upon Indigenous workers.
According to historian Richard Campbell, “Free blacks came to Texas because there was greater opportunity and much less racial prejudice under Spanish and Mexican governments than in the United States.” Free Black Texans such as Samuel H. Hardin, William Goyens, and the Ashworth brothers accumulated substantial property and wealth through homestead and headright grants. By the time of his death in 1856, Goyens had acquired nearly 1,300 acres of land, while the Ashworth family amassed approximately 2,000 acres and extensive cattle holdings. For these Afro-Tejanos, land ownership represented both economic success and a tangible claim to citizenship.
Afro-Tejanos also played a vital role in the economy of Mexican Texas between 1821 and 1836. They worked as agricultural laborers, domestic servants, artisans, skilled tradesmen, and cattle raisers, drawing on ranching traditions that many traced to West Africa’s Senegambia region.
West Texas, with its ranching economy and relatively fluid social structure, attracted runaway slaves, Seminole Maroons, and abolitionists such as the Quaker reformer Benjamin Lundy. Yet the conditions that had enabled Black prosperity began to change dramatically after 1821, when Moses Austin and his son Stephen F. Austin secured permission to establish the first major Anglo-American colony in Texas.
The Austin colony was founded along the fertile river valleys between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers. Nearly all of the approximately 300 settlers who followed Austin either brought enslaved people with them or strongly supported slavery. Their actions directly challenged Mexican laws restricting the institution. Although Mexico repeatedly attempted to limit slavery through legislation enacted in 1824, 1827, 1829, and 1830, these laws were only sporadically enforced because officials feared provoking political unrest among Anglo immigrants. As a result, slavery expanded rapidly.
By 1834, Texas contained approximately 30,000 Anglo-American settlers compared to only 7,800 Tejanos. In Austin’s colony alone, the enslaved population grew from 443 people in 1825 to roughly 5,000 by 1836. Enslaved Africans entered Texas through markets in Galveston and Houston and arrived by coastal shipping routes from New Orleans, river transport along the Red River, and overland migration. The dramatic growth of slavery in Texas demonstrates that its expansion was not constrained by environmental conditions; it was driven by settlers determined to reproduce the plantation economy of the American South.
The struggle over slavery also contributed to growing tensions between Mexico and Anglo settlers. Mexican officials viewed free people of African descent as essential participants in frontier defense and regional development. Historian Paul Lack argues that Afro-Tejanos served critical roles as soldiers and laborers in preserving Mexican authority in Coahuila y Tejas.
Many Anglo settlers, however, sought to extend the racial hierarchy and slave system of the antebellum South into Texas. As Mexico increasingly resisted these efforts, conflicts over slavery became intertwined with broader disputes about political authority and statehood.
By 1833, tensions intensified when residents of Texas were denied separate statehood within the Mexican federation. President Antonio López de Santa Anna interpreted demands for greater autonomy as a threat to national unity, while many Anglo settlers viewed Mexican resistance as an assault on their rights to self-government and property ownership.
Although the language of the Texas independence movement drew heavily on the ideals of liberty and self-determination associated with the American Revolution, its leaders also sought to protect slavery from Mexican interference. Thus, the Texas Revolution was not simply a struggle for political independence; it was also a conflict over the future of slavery in the region.
The popular legend of Emily D. West, later romanticized as the “Yellow Rose of Texas,” illustrates the complicated place of African-descended people within the revolutionary narrative. Contrary to later folklore portraying her as an enslaved woman, West was a free Black woman from Connecticut. According to the legend, she distracted General Antonio López de Santa Anna during the Battle of San Jacinto, enabling Sam Houston’s forces to achieve their decisive victory on April 21, 1836. Whether fact or myth, the story highlights the often-overlooked presence of Black people in the history of Texas independence.
The consequences of that independence were profound. Following the establishment of the Republic of Texas in 1836, the protections previously available to many Black residents under Mexican law were dismantled. The new government explicitly safeguarded slavery, declaring that “all persons of color who are now in bondage shall remain in the like state of servitude.” At the same time, free Black residents lost many of the rights they had previously enjoyed. The creation of the Republic of Texas therefore marked not the expansion of liberty for all inhabitants, but the triumph of a political order committed to slavery and white supremacy. Far from existing outside the institution of slavery, the American West—and Texas in particular—was shaped by its expansion, defense, and entrenchment.
Source: Bibliography
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