Slavery for the day

Rico's friend Kema (she of the Slavery Museum) forwards this article by Daina Ramey Berry of the San Antonio Express-News:

When most Americans think about slavery, they imagine large cotton plantations filled with hundreds of slaves working from sunup to sundown. People talk about the Deep South and the enslaved being traded to large markets in places such as Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, with Texas often excluded. In fact, some of my professors suggested Texas slavery was not significant because it “only lasted twenty years.”
At the time, I was writing a dissertation on Georgia. After all, Georgia was the only American colony that had a ban on slavery for nearly two decades. However, when I moved to Texas a few years ago, I thought about the nearly complete dismissal of slavery in Texas. I began studying the history of slavery in the Lone Star State.
Texas’ slave history stands out because it involves Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Depending on who was in charge, there was always a mix of pro-slavery and anti-slavery activists in Texas, leading to a contentious and confusing struggle for land acquisition, labor practices and race relations.
Looking at Texas through selected historical periods and from the voices of the enslaved, we see the contours of Anglo-American chattel slavery evolve:

Age of Contact (1528-1690): This period marks contact between indigenous people who lived in this region well before European explorers arrived in 1528. As cultures clashed, certain groups became servants to others, but there was no official policy on slavery.
Spanish Colonial (1690-1821): Spain settled the region by establishing missions and presidios. The Spanish viceroy allowed slavery in New Spain, which included present-day Central America north of Panama; Mexico; the American Southwest; and parts of the Philippines and some Caribbean islands. However, the institution did not grow to the level of plantation slavery, as we know it. By the late eighteenth century, Spanish Texas’ enslaved population was less than one percent.
Mexican National (1821-1836): This represents the greatest shift in the early history of slavery in Texas, as Mexico claimed the territory from Spain. This and a host of other conditions, such as soil exhaustion elsewhere and land incentives encouraging settlement, fueled slaveholders from other parts of the Deep South to move to Texas, bringing captive laborers.
Stephen F. Austin, the first Anglo-American settler, worked with officials in Mexico City to create a policy regarding slavery that initially offered Anglo settlers fifty acres, and later eighty, for each enslaved person brought to the region. Most settled in East Texas between Nacogdoches and the Louisiana state line. During these years, Anglo Texans battled with Mexican authorities over slavery, because there was a strong anti-slavery sentiment in Mexico. This was evident in 1829, when Mexico outlawed slavery. However, as historian Randolph Campbell explains: “Mexican leaders showed disapproval of slavery, but did nothing effective to abolish it.”
Republic (1836-1845): Slavery remained controversial even after Texas won independence from Mexico. Southern slaveholders continued to populate the region. The removal of Native Americans and the devastation wrought by the Trail of Tears meant the arrival of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and other indigenous groups. It also meant cultural clashes that involved slaves who were sometimes enslaved by, married to, or had run away with Native Americans.
Texas had about five thousand slaves at the time of its revolution in 1836, but, by 1845, when the state was annexed to the United States, this grew to thirty thousand.
Statehood and Slavery (1845-1865): Texas applied for statehood just sixteen years before the Civil War, and was admitted to the Union in 1845 as a slave state. The period of statehood and Anglo-American slavery lasted twenty years and reflects the reason why people identify Texas as having a short slave history. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the enslaved population was thirty percent of the state’s population, nearly two hundred thousand people.

Although many enslaved people migrated to Texas with their enslavers, some were born here, such as Willis Easter, born near Nacogdoches about ten years before the Civil War. His mother was “de bes’ cook in de county and a master hand at spinnin’ and weavin’,” according to Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. Texas Narratives, Part 2.
Most women like Easter’s mother worked in the fields or homes of their slaveowners. A large group of bondwomen served as cooks. Their days began at 3 am, when they gathered wood and boiled water to make coffee. Field hands ate before dawn, and the planter family had a large breakfast when they rose. Enslaved laborers ate beans, cornmeal, and salt pork and peas. Field workers produced cotton, and those along the Brazos River, sugar. Enslaved men also worked in the fields on cotton and sugar plantations, and on ranches and small farms raising cattle and corn.
To keep pace with the demands of the crop, they sang songs, such as this one remembered by Pauline Grace nearly fifty years after slavery ended:

“Old cotton, old corn, see you every morn. Old cotton, old corn, see you since I’s born. Old cotton, old corn, hoe you till dawn. Old cotton, old corn, what for you born?”

One in four Texas families owned slaves; slaveholdings were typically small, as most enslavers owned fewer than ten people. The largest slaveholder in 1860 was Robert Mills, who, along with his brother D.G. Mills, had more than three hundred slaves. Large cotton plantations populated Fort Bend, Brazoria, Wharton, and Matagorda counties.
It is my hope that the teaching of US history and slavery includes Texas, as our story differs starkly from other Southern regions because of the Spanish and Mexican influence. To simplify it would ignore the movement to prohibit slavery and limit importation during the Colonial era, overlook the battles during the Mexican National period and assume enslavement in Texas lasted only a few years.
After all, enslaved people recall being “brung to Texas” and working in communities that had a presence of Anglo-Americans, Spanish, Native Americans, and Mexican people. They established relationships that make Texas’ slave story unique.

Rico says everybody wants to forget they held slaves...