Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes Andrew F. Lang Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas. By Sam W. Haynes. (New York: Basic Books, 2022. Pp. xii, 446. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-5416-4541-7.) Our current cultural moment features a critical reckoning with racial conflict in American history. Intellectuals and pundits alike have challenged triumphalist narratives of national progress with narratives of inexorable, structural oppression. Into this conversation enters Sam W. Haynes’s striking reappraisal of the Texas Revolution. Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas does not recite the tired myths of the Alamo or rehearse a romantic struggle for Anglo freedom against Mexican oppression. Instead, Haynes exposes a vicious, racialized past long obscured by white, chauvinistic fantasy. His valuable contribution reminds us that history cannot be ceded to propagandists who, in the vein of the Confederate Lost Cause, spin fables for impressionable minds. Haynes guides us on a compelling tour of northern Mexico, a dynamic region in which Native peoples, Mexicans, creoles, Anglos, and both enslaved and free people of color all competed for political authority, economic power, and individual autonomy. Non-Anglo actors did not perform on the margins of an otherwise white liberationist drama. Any group at any moment could have emerged as the dominant faction. Haynes resists the temptation, so endemic in some histories, to narrate a tale of preordained Anglo dominance. We instead witness the contingent ways in which some groups forfeited their freedom during an era when events might well have turned out differently. When Texas severed itself from Mexico in 1836, “A multiracial nation had lost control of a vast swath of its territory to a people with a very narrow definition of citizenship and liberty” (p. 211). While Haynes largely evades the siren call of inevitability, a subtle degree of teleology creeps into his account. From the moment that Anglos settled Stephen F. Austin’s colony in 1821 and disrupted Native life, to the viral spread of plantation slavery in defiance of a Mexican decree, to the establishment of a white-dominated Texas Republic in 1836, the story follows a straight-line path with the ending we know top of mind. Readers are left pondering a perhaps unanswerable question: how are outmoded narratives of superficial triumph any different from narratives of blunt tragedy, especially if both approaches fuel the desires of respective presents? Haynes nevertheless paints a vivid portrait of the “Americanization of Texas” (p. 107). He chronicles the gripping story of Mexico’s crisis of sovereignty, an affliction sustained by myriad nineteenth-century republics. Besieged by threats to its territorial integrity and governing legitimacy, Mexico aimed to appease irreconcilable groups. Native peoples sought legal autonomy. Mexican politicos sought but never achieved a consensus to manage the nation’s sprawling colonial holdings. Anglos sought unchecked access [End Page 355] to cheap, abundant land and protections for slave labor. Riddled with political turmoil, the northern Mexican frontier was hardly a static backwater anticipating Anglo organization. The region instead was a “vortex of violent conflict” that could only be settled through the exercise of raw power (p. 211). As Texas started to resemble the expansive cotton lands of the American South, radical secessionists exploited Mexican instability. A swift rebellion yielded an independent Texas, the world’s newest slaveholding nation. Armed with a masterful sense of paradox, Haynes depicts the Republic of Texas as the very kind of weak and unstable nation against which Anglos had rebelled. Texas’s inability to maintain its territorial independence against repeated Mexican incursions “made a mockery of the republic’s pretensions as a new American empire in the West” (p. 328). Though “utterly dysfunctional,” the republic excelled only at the “ethnic cleansing” of Indigenous people (pp. 343, 5). Meanwhile, Anglo elites clambered to append their fledgling nation to the powerful slaveholding American Union. The fleeting years of independence hurled Texas into the waiting arms of the United States, whose voracious powerbrokers tightened their continental grip. Two decades of Anglo settlement had indeed “unsettled” Texas, soaking the region in blood, binding its laborers to the land, and displacing alleged “savages” (p...