Читать книгу The History of Texas - Robert A. Calvert - Страница 64

These changes point starkly to the ineffectiveness of the Law of April 6, 1830. Because Mexican officials had not been strict in interpreting the provisions of the decree, Anglos had continued to come into those colonies whose empresarios had imported the minimum one hundred families by the time the Centralists enacted the law. In addition, two empresario groups from Ireland persisted in their efforts to complete contracts they had acquired in the late 1820s; Centralists, after all, looked favorably upon European immigration as a way to people Texas. James McGloin and John McMullen brought several Irish families to the Nueces River area and founded San Patricio in 1831. Three years later, James Power and James Hewetson located colonists in the place that became modern‐day Refugio, Texas.

At the same time, the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, a land‐speculating corporation from the eastern United States that the empresarios Vehlein, Burnet, and de Zavala had commissioned to complete their contracts, continued to advertise the availability of its properties in Texas, even though the Law of April 6, 1830, had prohibited the further disposal of such lands. Thus, the company sold invalid land certificates to buyers. Despite the company’s fraudulent activities, it brought several European families into Texas in the early 1830s. Because the new arrivals were not Americans, Mexican officials ultimately accepted and resettled them elsewhere in Texas.

For his part, Sterling C. Robertson continued to claim ownership of the original Leftwich/Texas Association contract. Though Stephen F. Austin contested the contract, convincing the legislature at one point that the Robertson contract was invalid and that it should therefore be allotted to himself, Robertson persuaded the authorities in 1834 that he had brought to Texas the required one hundred families before the Law of April 6, 1830, had been effected. Despite the dispute, Robertson successfully settled numerous families while the Centralists remained in power.

Finally, many immigrants had arrived in Texas illegally during the early 1830s, hoping to start afresh as merchants, lawyers, land speculators, politicians, squatters, trappers, miners, artisans, smugglers, or jacks‐of‐all trades. But with the dilution of the Law of April 6, 1830, the stream of Anglo American immigration into Texas became a torrent. By 1834, it is estimated that the number of Anglo Americans and their slaves exceeded 20,700. This figure might well have represented the doubling of the number of Americans in Texas just since 1830.