Читать книгу The History of Texas - Robert A. Calvert - Страница 58

Negotiations for land titles under the State Colonization Law could be handled individually or through immigration agents, or empresarios, who acted on behalf of the state government to select colonists, allocate land, and see to the enforcement of the laws in the colonies they helped to found. As compensation for their work, empresarios qualified personally to receive five leagues and five labores (a total of 23,027.5 acres) for each 100 families they settled in Texas.

As of 1835, a total of forty‐one empresario contracts had been signed, both under the National Colonization Law of 1824 and the State Colonization Law of 1825, permitting some 13,500 families to come to Texas. Anglo Americans from the United States entered into most of these contracts.

By 1825, Stephen F. Austin had nearly completed the terms of his first contract, and that year the government made a second agreement with him to settle 500 families. Two years later, he negotiated to locate another one hundred families in what are today Bastrop and Travis counties. In 1828, Austin obtained another land deal, and in 1831 he received his last contract. Actually, Austin only complied fully with his first contract and never came close to meeting his obligations on the other four. He used part of his grants for speculating purposes, profiting by selling parcels of his property to new arrivals. But for that matter, so did the other land agents (and even some settlers) part with portions of their holdings, thus gaining financially from the Mexican government's generosity.

To the west of Austin’s original lands, between the Guadalupe and Lavaca rivers, Green DeWitt planted a colony with its center at Gonzales. This contract expired in 1831, however, by which time DeWitt had settled only about one‐third of the 400 families he had pledged to bring. Bordering the DeWitt colony to the southeast lay the tract belonging to the rancher Martín de León. Issued at San Antonio in 1824 (even before the enactment of the Colonization Law of 1825), this grant had ill‐defined boundaries, which caused some disputes between de León’s and DeWitt’s settlers, at least until DeWitt’s land became part of the public domain in 1832. De León’s colony, with its principal settlement at Victoria, remained small, though titles had been issued to 162 families by 1835. Figure 3.2 shows the extent of the empresario contracts in the region.

Most other empresarial colonies achieved only moderate success in the 1820s. In 1825, Robert Leftwich received (on behalf of a cooperative venture called the Texas Association of Nashville, Tennessee) a contract to settle lands situated northwest of Austin’s lands, but no one colonized them until the early 1830s, when a Tennessean named Sterling C. Robertson took over as empresario for the Texas Association. Farther east, Haden Edwards’s colonization contract called for 800 families to settle around the Nacogdoches region, but following his armed uprising in 1826 against government officials (the so‐called Fredonian Rebellion, discussed later) his vacated land reverted to the state. Part of Edwards’s tract went to David G. Burnet, and another portion of it went to a German merchant named Joseph Vehlein in 1826. Lorenzo de Zavala, one of the framers of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, received land along the Sabine River in 1829, but he never colonized it.

Figure 3.2 Empresario contracts.