Comment by AlotOfReading
8 days ago
This is pretty revisionist. Slavery wasn't some ancillary factor that just happened to exist in Texas. It was core to the anglo side of the Texas revolution. The War Party was strongly proslavery and the increasing (Mexican) federal push towards abolition was a key point for them. They especially hated a Mexican predecessor to the Emancipation Proclamation called the Guerrero decree that (attempted to) free most slaves in the northern states. After independence, they wrote slavery into the constitution and some of the first laws passed prohibited slaveowners from freeing slaves without government approval. The events in Texas were just one of half a dozen revolutions opposed to Mexican federal centralization around the same time.
None of this was politically palatable after the American Civil War and people certainly weren't going to focus on the non-anglo sides of the revolution that weren't so deeply proslavery, so the narrative that's taught in schools was sanitized.
As someone who went to public school in Texas, the textbooks in Texas are vetted by revisionists who still claim the Civil War was about states rights and not slavery, my civic teacher argued this repeatedly in the 1980s. A lot of kids are indoctrinated with the BS that downplay the slavery aspect, it's like the Big Lie of the south.
One of the nice things about growing up in Texas is that I 100% know what being the target of state-sponsored propaganda feels like. The extra cool thing is that almost all the propaganda is pretty easy to refute and it is easy to access alternative (and IME more historically correct points of views) which aren't supressed by the state.
That makes it a lot easier to understand the claim that folks often make, that any system is "propaganda free" when disagreements can be publicly stated with no governmental reprisal, is trivially false.
At the same time, it's been pleasantly horrific to look at how objectively bad the reflexive assumptions most of my cohort hold about the world and then try to draw conclusions about how terrible and mistaken my own views have and probably continue to be.
Thanks, Texas!
I went to school in Texas and slavery was absolutely taught as the primary issue leading to the civil war.
It was both. The succession was only about slavery. The economic motivation was only about slavery. The political motivation, after slavery, really was about states rights and that directly influenced all other factors even contributing to a weaker, fragmented, and less well funded military.
The name for post civil war revisionism is the Lost Cause Movement, by the way.
I too attended Texas public schools during that period and did not encounter any such revisionism. It was there that I learned succession started by 14 planters in South Carolina and spread to other states. I have since completed a history minor in college and completed book reports on the subject for military education professional development. Looking back the slant you speak of wasn’t there for me.
The political slant I do remember, though, is that the American Revolution was all about freedom. Not wanting to pay taxes hardly came up.
I agree with most of your comment, but a bit more nuance with the last statement.
The taxes were core to supporting freedom among the colonists. These were not ordinary taxes. The Boston Tea Party, where they tossed the tea into the ocean as a mostly non-violent act of protest, was directly related to the Tea Act which followed the Stamp Act and other Acts that not just directly levied taxes onto the colonists, but actually made other sources of tea that weren't purchased from the British East India Company illegal.
Even worse, the colonists had no representation at all in Parliament or in England at all (hence the cry, "no taxation without representation"). Those accused of even heinous crimes or abuse in the colonies would simply be sent back to England to stand trial rather than by 'a jury of their peers'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act
This was in 1773, more than three years before the Declaration of Independence, and it marked a crucial turning point in the colonists' reaction to the Crown's acts against them, which had been ongoing for more than a decade at that point.
This was followed by the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which you should read in its entirety (it's only a few pages), because it again predated by a year the final straw -- the "Declaration of Independence" in 1776.
The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, written by Thomas Jefferson, is a crucial document that is often overlooked. In it, the colonists again gave the Crown multiple warnings that they were not going to be abused like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Causes_and_...
Why did the King ignore it? He led the most powerful empire in the world, and probably the most powerful war machine that had ever been seen in history until that point. He was, literally, almost invincible. What did colonists thousands of miles away really think they could do to him? Why would he pay any attention?
That document is quite explicit as to exactly what crimes the Crown supported or directly undertook against the colonists (a bit old English and hard to read, but worth the read). And, unlike many other British colonies and subjugates such as India itself, the colonists were armed and they could make their own guns, which they did, beginning in the Connecticut River valley, in which could properly be understood as the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The founding fathers recognized that guns in the hands of ordinary citizens were a bulwark against tyranny, which directly led to the drafting of the Second Amendment less than 15 years later (easily ratified in 1791).
Not coincidentally, the banning and seizing of small arms during the American Revolution were also what helped foment the Texas War for Independence as well, many decades later, and which led to the "Come and Take It" from Gonzales in 1831 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_take_it) and finally led to the Alamo and the Goliad Massacre in 1836 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliad_massacre), where the Mexican Army executed, en masse, the defeated Texian Army.
There is indeed a lot of revisionism going on, so the best way to resolve that is to actually read the contemporary documents from that time period and understand what people actually thought (or at least what they were brave enough to write down!)
Thanks for reading, even if you disagree.
1984 / George Orwell: 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'