Читать книгу The History of Texas - Robert A. Calvert - Страница 63

In January 1833, Santa Anna ushered in a brief liberal era in Mexican politics when he was elected president as a Federalist. Back in favor, the liberals in Coahuila y Tejas and the Viesca brothers immediately arranged for the state legislature to petition the national government for the repeal of the Law of April 6, 1830. Now they had more helpful allies in Mexico City, among them Gómez Farías, whom Santa Anna appointed as his acting president before retreating to his hacienda in Vera Cruz, and Lorenzo de Zavala (Figure 3.4), the legislator from Yucatán who still held interests in Texas lands for which he sought settlers from the United States. Working alongside the Federalists in Mexico City was Stephen F. Austin, who had arrived there following the consultation of April 1833. Ultimately, effective May 1834, Mexico’s senate revoked the section in the Law of April 6, 1830, that had curtailed the immigration of Anglos into the Mexican nation.

Figure 3.4 Lorenzo de Zavala. University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio (MS 362: 76‐31).

Austin failed, however, to gain the separation of Coahuila and Texas. And when officials discovered letters between him and the San Antonio ayuntamiento encouraging Texas’s separation from Coahuila, they threw Austin in prison (early in 1834). Nonetheless, the state and national governments abided by their previous stand on colonization, and liberal legislation continued to emanate from Coahuila. New acts recognized the acceptance of English as a legal language of the state, permitted the extension of empresario contracts, expanded the number of local courts, and provided for trial by jury. The Coahuilan legislature also raised Texas’s representation in the state congress and increased the number of departments in Texas to three. Actually, the district of Nacogdoches, which extended from the watershed between the Brazos and the Trinity rivers to the Sabine, had been created in 1831 to accommodate the rise in the Anglo population. In order to allow more self‐autonomy in the province, the legislature in 1834 established the Department of Brazos, with its capital at San Felipe de Austin, which extended from the Nacogdoches district to a north‐south line from the coast to the Red River, just east of the Béxar and Goliad settlements. The third zone, the Department of Béxar, included San Antonio and extended to the Nueces River.