Unlock the Power of Digital Signature Legitimateness for Promotion Announcement in Mexico

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[Music] thank you so much john for organizing this event and saving the day technologically hopefully this will load i also wanted to say thank you to juan galvan rodriguez who is the person who invited me today and finally i wanted to thank all of you for joining and i know that it's month 11 for me right now in uh being fully online and at the end of the day i feel like the last thing i usually want to do is be on a screen and so i really appreciate you taking the time right now to be able to listen to this talk and hopefully this will there it is oh good excellent i have to admit that i never really expected to write this book in the summer of 2012 i was doing research in northeastern mexico about a different topic about violence on the u.s mexico border in the mid-19th century and i kept coming across evidence of slaveholders from the united states going to mexico to try to kidnap their fugitive slaves and then facing resistance from local mexican citizens and officials and that really surprised me i really didn't expect mexican officials to at some times risk their lives to protect fugitive slaves i didn't even know that fugitive slaves were escaping to mexico this escape route is something that historians have i would say largely overlooked there have been a couple of articles about it and i say there are two reasons for why that might be slide please you might have to click it twice one reason of course is that it requires in-depth research on both sides of the border i went to a lot of different archives as john mentioned some of which were so out of the way that i was actually written up in the local newspaper for having gone to them slide this usually doesn't happen usually no one cares when i'm going to an archive but i think the main reason that this story has been overlooked is the fact that u.s historians have long assumed that mexico's government wasn't really committed to anti-slavery policies and that as a result those anti-slavery policies buckled easily under pressure from the united states the problem with that assumption as i learned over the course of my research is that it's just not true mexico abolished slavery in 1837 and it didn't stop there 20 years later it adopted a constitution that not only promised to free all enslaved people within mexico but it also promised freedom to enslave people from other countries from the moment they set foot on mexican soil a promise known in the 19th century as the freedom principle slide this was incredibly radical more radical indeed than many of the anti-slavery laws with which were most familiar slide i think everyone who grew up in the united states probably learned about the anti-slavery laws passed by the northern states in the wake of the american revolution and it's true that these northern states had either abolished slavery outright or passed gradual emancipation laws that would end slavery within a generation or two but they did not promise to free enslaved people who escaped from the holding states they couldn't because of the fugitive slave clause of the constitution which promised to return enslaved people who escaped across state orders and the same was really true in canada canada along with the rest of the british empire abolished slavery in 1833 but it continued to extradite criminals to the united states criminals who sometimes happen to be fugitive slaves as in the case of one runaway in 1842 who was returned to arkansas for having stolen a gold watch and a racing mirror while escaping to canada slide please the only country in the americas that had anti-slavery policies as radical as mexico's was the former french colony of saint domingue which revolted against french rule in 1791 and established the republic of haiti haiti abolished slavery in 1804 and it adopted the freedom principle in its constitution in 1816. and historians have done a lot of really important work over the past decades showing just how important haitian abolition was not just to destabilizing slavery in the nearby islands of cuba and jamaica but also by striking fear in the hearts of slaveholders in the united states but haiti lay 500 miles by sea from the southernmost tip of florida slide mexico by contrast directly bordered the u.s south and not just any part of the u.s south texas and louisiana where slavery was expanding at really rapid rates in the 19th century and this proximity of mexico to these spaces of mass chattel slavery meant that its anti-slavery policies would have profound significance for the united states mexico's laws are in other words a small window into a much larger story slide about why mexico became this anti-slavery republic side how mexican abolition contributed to the sectional controversy in the united states slide and finally how enslaved people shaped and were shaped by these laws slide sorry john i'm really making you work here no this is uh i've been looking at this uh so i'm i know that i know the presentation i feel good we're doing great so we don't often think of mexico as a place that has a history of slavery but in fact slavery took route and route in the united in new spain as mexico was known during the colonial period at the end of the 16th century after a series of epidemics decimated the indigenous population slide please between 1580 and 1640 new spain imported more african slaves than any other colony in the western hemisphere except brazil and we can see that huge influx of enslaved people on this graph showing the slave population in new spain but the recovery of the indigenous population put black slavery on a path of decline and by the time that mexicans took up arms against spain in 1810 black slaves numbered only about nine to ten thousand eleven years later in 1821 mexico secured its independence from spain and anti-slavery sentiment was on the rise slide please there are three factors that are important to understanding why anti-slavery is surging in post-independence mexico the first reason slide is that the war against spain forged a link in the popular imagination between slavery and colonialism between personal emancipation and national independence this was furthered by independence leaders like father idalgo who tried to abolish slavery when they were in charge of the independence movement and it was confirmed and reinforced by enslaved people in the 1820s who petitioned for their freedom in mexican courts on the grounds that their enslavement was incompatible with the principles of equality upon which mexico had declared its independence and this is just one of many examples throughout the presentation particularly in the book where i hope you'll see the ways in which the actions of enslaved people themselves are shaping these larger political trends that we're discussing slide the second reason why we see the surge in anti-slavery sentiment is that it helps to differentiate mexico from spain which of course continue to allow slavery in its colonial possessions particularly the island of cuba by adopting an anti-slavery stance mexico helped to cast itself in a different and more enlightened mold than spain side please and the third reason why we're seeing anti-slavery sentiment on the rise is that it helps to differentiate mexico's independence movement from its more renowned forebear the american revolution mexican politicians in the 1820s and 1830s love to point out the contradiction between us ideals liberty and the reality that human bondage continued in the united states slide please the anti-slavery sentiment in mexico manifested itself most clearly on the state level in much the same way that it did in the united states from 1821 to 1827 seven states abolished slavery which you can see highlighted here and the borders of mexico states aren't weren't the same in the 19th century as they are now but my map making skills are limited so i've used this contemporary map to give you a sense of where those states are located slide please during the same period nine states adopted free wound laws laws that promised freedom to the children born to enslave people after those laws had passed these laws were very similar to the laws passed in states like pennsylvania and new york those gradual emancipation laws that we learned so much about in most of our history classes the national government was also making inroads against slavery applied in 1821 the mexican government abolished all distinctions of past which certainly didn't end racism in mexico by any means but it was a significant development because of the very complex past system that had developed in new spain during the colonial period and you can see this 16 category racial categories that were used to define people in new spain all of that at least officially was gone and in 1824 slide the mexican government banned the slave trade to mexico and promised freedom to all enslaved people who were imported illegally to mexico for those of you who study u.s history you'll probably recognize that this is similar to the law passed in 1808 by the united states banning the international slave trade but mexico's ban on the international slave trade is going to be a pose a bigger threat to slavery in mexico than the similar ban did in the united states and the reason for that thinking back to our graph of the enslaved population of mexico is the fact that mexico's enslaved population was about 1 of the enslaved population of the united states in 1808 when it passed that ban on the slave trade and the theory was at least in mexico was that by banning the slave trade given the small state population in mexico that eventually that population wouldn't be able to sustain itself and it would contribute to the end of slavery although slavery was declining nationally the mexican government was a weary of abolishing slavery outright and the reason for that was that slavery remained important in two regions first region was the sugar producing south and the second region which should be very familiar to those of you in texas was the cotton growing region in the mexican province of tejas which was then a part of the mexican state of coahuila this ban on the importation of slaves is going to be very concerning to those anglo-american colonists who are trying to come into tejas to start potent plantations and the mexican government was afraid that taking any more radical measures against slavery like outright abolition would cause a revolution in these two regions slide please that risk was not at all overblown as would become apparent on september 16 1829 when president vicente guerrero himself the descendant of african slaves abolished slavery by executive decree the outcry against this this decree was immediate i said please slaveholders in chiapas and if you click again that would be great demanded compensation for their emancipated property the town council of cordoba veracruz clicked again please warned that quote this decree would cause the ruin of this population that labors exclusively in the cane fields slide meanwhile yucatan seceded from the mexican confederation on the grounds of the national government had assumed powers that rightly belonged to the state among yucathan's grievances was the abolition of slavery side which they called quote unquote a cour cruel attack on property close quote that they claimed disadvantaged yukatan more than any other state slide please of course as you might expect the sleep holders and pejas begged to differ they claimed that they were the ones most disadvantaged by this law and they threatened to revolt against it so much so that president gereto decided to revo or exempt the province from his decree and all of this resistance to guerrero's decree had its attended intended effect in 1831 when mexico's congress overturned mexico's or ghetto's trees including the decree abolishing slavery so if you had heard that mexico abolished slavery in 1829 the fact that that decree was overturned should i think give us reason to think that that's not in fact the correct date slide please although the mexican government overturned that decree it remained committed to bringing slavery to an eventual end and in fact the resistance from those two regions to get its decree gave them every even more reason to do so because the threat of a revolt from the common growing north and the slave growing or the slave growing the common growing set or the sugar growing itself threatened the national sovereignty of mexico threatened to dismember the republic and they thought that by ending slavery they would be able to maintain the territorial integrity of mexico and so in the 1830s we really see the mexican government doubling down on its enforcement of its existing gradual emancipation laws one of those laws was the law of april 6 1830 which anyone who's taken a texas history class probably remembers as the law that banned the immigration of u.s citizens to texas it was you know sort of what the stamp act was to the american revolution this this really is important to understand the coming of the texas revolution slide please but the law of april 6 1830 was also very concerning to texas slaveholders because of this article article 10 which reiterated the ban on the introduction of slaves texas slave holders or aspiring um texans at any rate decided to avoid this law by importing enslaved people as indentured servants they just forced enslaved people to sign indenture contracts that would extend for 80 90 years the entire life of the enslaved person and the legislature of kauilai as they learned that the texans were doing this decided to crack down they passed a law that limited the terms of any labor contract to no more than 10 years and in the wake of passing that law we see enslaved people escaping to places like san antonio and claiming their freedom for having been imported illegally the mexican government knows about these enslaved people coming and they want to encourage that enslaved people claiming their liberty for because their their owners had violated the law please in 1834 the mexican government even went so far as to send an agent to texas with secret instructions to quote seek by every possible and prudent means to make it known to the slaves who have been brought into the republic in circumvention of the law that the law gives them freedom by the mere act of stepping on the territory of the republic all of these efforts by the mexican government to enforce these laws helped to prove what those anglo-american colonists and tejas had long suspected that their property was never going to be safe under mexican rule and their concern only increased when president mexico's president antonio lopez santa anna overturned mexico's federalist constitution in favor of a more centralist system which further undermined the anglo-american colonists ability to avoid adverse legislation in 1835 the anglo-american colonists and texas revolt and in 1836 they declare their independence slide please less than a year after the texas revolution slide again mexico's congress voted to abolish slavery across mexico and the timing here is really no coincidence the secession of texas had eliminated one of the largest slave holding regions from the mexican confederation so the the costs of implementing abolition seemed to be less and the benefits appeared greater slide please defending liberty acted on a popular anti-slavery sentiment in mexico which had only continued to grow since the 1820s and we can see that anti-slavery sentiment in this play for la cabana le tio thomas i don't even think you need to speak spanish to guess that that is a spanish version of a play of harry beecher stove's famous anti-slavery novel uncle tom's cabin anti-slavery was very important in the wake of the texas revolution because it helped mexicans to find victory and in defeat that even though they had been defeated by the texans they claimed that they were you know better than the texans because texans for all their talk of liberty and rights of man were in fact ing to many mexicans destroying the true humanity or the true liberty of humanity by enslaving black people slide please mexico's abolition policy also helped to galvanize international support from mexico abolitionists in the united states had seen the texas revolution as a slaveholder revolt and the fact that mexico had abolished slavery only seemed to confirm that view and we can see that here in this anti-slavery handbill showing the free eagle of mexico grappling with the cold-blooded viper tyranny or texas from edinburgh scotland to westchester new york anti-slavery societies condemned texas as a quote-unquote loathsome republic that had exercised its political liberty in defense of slavery and perhaps more significantly this posture made it a little bit more difficult for countries like england to recognize the independence of texas because of this redefinition of the the lines between a slave holding texas and a non-safe holding mexico slide please the abolition of slavery in mexico also served a larger geopolitical purpose we've already talked about the various times in which enslaved people were already escaping to mexico to claim the law to claim freedom under their laws and as news of mexico's abolition policies spread this movement this flight only increased texans complained that their enslaved people were displaying quote a very refractory disposition close quote and they blamed the mexican government as you can see in this article for sending emissaries quote to excite an insurrection the mexican government recognized that by revolt or escape enslaved people had the power to destroy the fledgling republic of texas when it most needed to gain the respect of the international community now obviously a slave revolt didn't destroy the republic of texas and restore it to the mexican confederation but this plan isn't really as crazy as it might seem because as those of you who study texas history know the republic of texas was in tremendous debt and its independence was uncertain as a result and if there had been a slave revolt perhaps it would not the history would look a lot different slide mexico's anti-slavery policies were a powerful weapon in the hands of government they weren't overtly belligerent the northern states and canada had also abolished slavery but these policies slide boosted morale slide attracted international support slide and encourage enslaved people in texas to revolt or escape and hopefully undermine the independence of texas these laws in the words of one mexican diplomat were quote the rock that could shatter the clay foot of the republic of texas and the country that seemed most likely to annex it the united states slide you just click once more and yeah there we go okay mexican abolition was going to have really profound consequences for the united states when it annexed the republic of texas in 1845 and provoked a war with mexico a year later james k polk who is president of the united states at the time made clear that he intended to make mexico pay for this war by seizing territories from mexico and the question soon became what the status of slavery in those conquered territories would be side please on august 8 1846 several months after the start of the mexican-american war a u.s congressman from pennsylvania you can click again please name david wilmot i guess it's it's you're missing a photo of david walmart but that's okay uh he proposed that slavery be excluded from any territory that the united states might acquire from mexico the so-called wilmot proviso threw the issue of slavery into the very center of the political arena causing historians to argue that this was the event in u.s history that seemed to lead almost inevitably to sectional controversy in civil war despite its significance the wilmot proviso remained something of a puzzle because david wilmot was a democrat and in 1846 democrats championed a jeffersonian ideal of admitted government they were opposed to federal funding for internal improvements the 19th century term for infrastructure they were opposed to a national bank and they were opposed to any federal interference with slavery in acquired territories and david wilmot had espoused these views so completely that in 1845 he had voted in favor of annexing texas as a slave state and so it comes as a surprise that in 1846 he would be proposing this amendment to prohibit slavery in whatever territories the united states acquired from mexico historians have proposed a number of different explanations for why wilmot did this political 180 but i think none of those explanations are as convincing as the argument that david wilmot himself made which was that the federal government had no power to interfere with slavery where it existed this was democratic doctrine and it was for that reason david walman argued that he had voted for the annexation of texas as a slave state because as he put it slavery already existed there close quote but if the federal government lacked the power under the constitution to interfere with slavery where it existed then wilmot argued that it also lacked the power to establish slavery where it had been abolished and since the mexican government had abolished slavery in 1837 wilma argued that any land ceded to the united states after the mexican-american war would enter the union as free territories wilmot insisted that he wasn't doing a political 180 but instead his proviso was in fact upholding democratic principles quote to let slavery alone close quick southern congressmen were up in arms about this proviso because it's threatened to upset the balance of power between north and south as we can see in this map there were 15 slave states and 15 free states in 1846 and the territories seeded from mexico were organized as free territories and then became free states that balance of power would be destroyed the conquest of territories from mexico territories where slavery was explicitly abolished those threatened to destroy the balance of power between north and south in the united states southern politicians spent the next decade or so trying to avert that loss of power that the mexican-american war had set into motion their efforts led to the failed annexation of cuba the overturning of the missouri compromise the outbreak of violence in kansas and the birth of a new political party the republican party whose success in the election of 1860 led to the succession of 11 southern states in the formation of the confederacy side please i don't want to lose sight though of a really important part of this story which is the significance of mexican anti-slavery slide please oh slide again two enslaved people themselves uh there we go after mexico abolished slavery enslaved people responded by escaping in increasing numbers across the rio grande and two options awaited most runaways in mexico side the first was to join mexico's military colonies a series of forts along the northern frontier which helped defend mexico's north against native peoples and foreign invaders the military service of runaways who joined these military colonies earned them the respect of the mexican authorities but it also obviously came at a cost risk to one's life in the heat of battle and participation in mexico's brutal campaign against native peoples but not every runaway joined the colonies some sought work in cities like matamoros which had a growing black population hailing from haiti the british caribbean in the united states where then they were able to find jobs in madamoros as merchants carbon carpenters bricklayers manual laborers the works others hired themselves out to local landowners in more rural areas those landowners were in need of constant or constant need of extra hands the runaways who joined mexico's labor force encountered a different set of challenges from the ones who joined the military colonies those who worked on haciendas and in households were often the only people of african descent on the payroll leaving them no choice but to assimilate into their new communities most learned spanish many changed their names they also encountered coercive labor practices in southern mexico overseers meted out corporal punishments as harsh as any on plantations in the united states also in southern mexico debt tied laborers plantation to plantations as effectively as violence and debt mounted to the point where laborers could not hope to pay those debts off within their lifetime but for those of you who study in mexico as for those of you who started new mexico no there's tremendous variation within mexican regions about how labor practices work and in other parts of mexico particularly northeastern mexico where most enslaved people escaped from the united states landowners persuaded laborers to work by means of voluntary incentives rather than outright violence and i don't want to minimize the coercion that was inherent to these labor systems hacienda owners in northern mexico also enjoyed the right to physically punish their employees and they often had no choice but to work on these haciendas because the alternatives were far worse but it's really worth emphasizing i think that these labor systems were coercive but that the mechanism of coercion was economic necessity rather than physical virus violence despite these difficulties that enslaved people faced in mexico really the greatest threat that they faced was not their new employers but their former owners on august 20 1850 manuel luis del fierro stepped outside his house in reynos's demolition a town just across the border from mcgowan texas side please the night was hot and a band was playing in the plaza it click again there we go which you can see here from a photograph from a slightly later date the fedo refused the invitation from these foreigners to or i think i skipped ahead here as he stood listening two foreigners approached el piedo and invited him to go listen to the concert in the plaza he refused their invitation and didn't really give the incident much thought until later that night when he woke to the sound of a woman screaming hurried towards the commotion and in one of the rooms of the house he came across those same two foreigners one waving a pistol at his maid matilda hennis who del fierro later testified quote had been held as a slave in the united states hennis had belonged to a planter named william chaney slide please who owned a plantation near chaneyville louisiana a town 150 miles northwest of new orleans and you can see cheneyville marked on this map here when solomon northrup a free black man who was kidnapped from the north and sold into slavery arrived at a plantation in a neighboring parish he heard that several enslaved people had been hanged in the area for planning a crusade to mexico close quote as northup recalled in his memoir 12 years a slave the plot was quote a subject of general and unfailing interest in every slave hut on the bayou close quote from your working on chinese plantation must have known that mexico's laws would at least give her a claim to freedom and at some point although when or how is unclear tennis acted on that knowledge escaping from cheneyville making her way to reynosa and finding work in manuel alice de fierro's household tu del firo mattilajenis was not just a runaway as a servant she was a member of his household and he and his wife attempted to help her del fiero threatened the kidnappers with his gun his wife called for help from the balcony one of the cadavers escaped for the other kidnapper was arrested and he turned out to be hannes's former owner william chaney in mexico cheney found that he could not treat people of african descent with impunity that slaveholders often did in the united states kenny was thrown into prison and judge justo of the district of northern tamaulipas began an investigation into this attempted kidnapping i think what's most remarkable about this story is that it wasn't at all unusual in 1851 the townspeople of a small village in northern coaguila which is the state kind of uh in northern northeastern mexico these towns people took up arms to stop a slave capture and warn adams from kidnapping a black family later that year the mexican army posted a sizable force and two field artillery pieces on the rio grande to stop a group of 200 americans from crossing the river likely to seize fugitive slaves in 1852 and this is probably my favorite archival find of all of my research four towns people from guerrero collila chased after a slaveholder from the united states who had kidnapped a black man from their colony the town's people found the slaveholder in a clearing the slaveholder pulled out a sixth shooter but one of those four townspeople drew faster and they killed the man they were of course unable to bring the kidnapper to court and so they instead brought his corpse to the judge in guerrero who certified that the man was in fact dead for not having responded when spoken to in other cadaverous signs close quote the protection that mexican citizens provided or helped to provide to enslaved people was significant because the national authorities in mexico city didn't have the resources to enforce many of the country's policies and the same was true in the united states mexico's anti-slavery laws might have been a dead letter if not for those ordinary people of all races who risked their lives to help protect fugitive slaves as mexico became known as a refuge for runaways the landscape of slavery in the south central united states began to shift although texas was a slave state slaveholders were afraid to bring their enslaved people into south texas anywhere near mexico and those fears were quite justified side please we can see that perhaps most clearly in the census from 1860 from brownsville texas there are only seven enslaved people who are reported as being um or living in brownsville texas with a pretty small number and it is really indicating how fearful slaveholders of bringing units like people anywhere near mexico and that fear of course was quite justified because in column six of the census that lists the fugitives from the state and if you count those tick marks it shows that four of the seven enslaved people in brownsville texas were fugitives from the state in 1860 a pretty uh profound number slide please the fact that these enslaved people were escaping and that the federal government of the united states failed in 1850 1853 1854 and 1857 to negotiate a max an extradition treaty with mexico to return fugitive slaves this was one of the reasons why texans were arguing that maybe they should leave the united states from as early as 1858 when we see this address to the people of texas um being given in texas um that this was a cause of great concern among slave holders in texas slide please all right it's easy to do sorry about that oh no that's okay we can actually we can quit out um i'm just including here but it's really easy to discount mexico's anti-slavery stance given all of the ways in which coercion continued in mexico but mexico's policies with respect to slavery had serious implications for human bondage in the united states mexico bordered the us south and enslaved people escaped to mexico with such frequency that texas seemed to have more in common with the states that bordered the mason-dixon line than with other states in the deep south samuel houston then the governor of texas made the stakes clear on the eve of the civil war he wrote in 1860 quote texas is a border state mexico renders and secure entire western boundary close quote in fact mexico's laws rendered slavery insecure not just in texas and louisiana but in the very heart of the union the land seized from mexico at the close of the mexican-american war in 1848 was free territory and when southern politicians tried to re-establish slavery in those territories to restore the sectional balance between north and south they helped to ignite a sectional controversy that would eventually lead to the u.s civil war thank you so much for listening and i would be happy to answer any questions all right great thank you and uh i think we handled the uh technical problems as well as we could have so thank you yeah yeah so i'll start by asking a question and then i think people will uh be putting some in there in the chat box um so we'll give them some time to do that but i want to i want to clarify for the audience something i think that you're arguing that not everybody might be aware of that you're arguing for the idea that slavery played a bigger role in the texas revolution than other historians have claimed and so i assume that is part of what you're saying i think so could you elaborate on that a little bit more because there's a you know there's a uh there is a mythology that that you know the revolution was about other things not about defending slavery and so you seem to be challenging that viewpoint so yes thank you for pointing that out i think that many historians because mexico's anti-slavery laws are confusing that geneto's decree is issued and then it's revoked that the consensus view i think up to or that i'm arguing against is that mexico hadn't really passed anti-slavery legislation in the years leading up to the texas revolution and therefore that anti-slavery really wasn't at the forefront of texans minds when they took up arms against mexico but i think that that actually is just ignoring the ways in which mexico was trying to enforce its gradual emancipation laws another thing that i noticed in the scholarship is historians kind of pooh-poohing those gradual emancipation laws because they fell short of outright abolition and that's true gradual emancipation laws worked at a much slower rate but in the same way that those graphical emancipation laws ultimately doomed slavery in places like pennsylvania they would have doomed slavery in places like the mexican province of texas they really did pose a threat to the enterprise of those slave holders and you know andrew target and university of north texas i think has a great book that is also making a similar point about the importance of slavery to the texas revolution and he points out that we can see the importance of slavery to the texans just by virtue of the constitution that they passed for their new republic which made it impossible for anyone not texas's congress not texas's president to interfere with slavery at all so i think it in the same way that historians have been reconsidering over the past you know many decades the causes of the civil war that is not slave or it's less states rights than slavery that i think we're seeing a surge of scholarship that's really challenging the idea that slavery really wasn't important to the texas revolution yeah one final point and i'll just turn it over to the audience is just it also your book it seems to me helps you helps us understand in a way why texas had almost had to secede once the republican party had won the presidency because they're going to be surrounded by free territory to their west to their north at least in the panhandle and to their south and uh that's i think from the perspective of a slaveholder or an enslaver that is an existential uh threat to their very their property their wealth okay so the first question uh alice is um could you talk a little this person david wants to know about how was the mexican how was mexican abolition used by slaveholders in the antebellum south as a kind of as a warning can you talk a little bit about that so slaveholders in the u.s south had this sort of strange approach to mexican anti-slavery on the one hand they constantly dismissed it as unimportant and you can see that in texas newspapers and newspapers from other southern states where they're saying mexico hasn't really abolished slavery there are all of these corpses of labor practices that are worse than slavery so they're really saying the promise of freedom in mexico is illusory and they have kind of obvious reasons for doing that because it they're hoping i think to dissuade enslaved people from taking a risky escape through you very arid territory to reach to mexico at the same time you have slave ad after not safehead runaway ad after runaway ad where slaveholders are admitting my enslaved people are escaping to mexico and the census that i showed is another example of that that uh the reality is that enslaved people are escaping and slave holders recognize that when they are uh demanding that the us government negotiate an extradition treaty with mexico so there's this um the way that southern slave holders respond to mexican abolition is this um really kind of um what's the word i'm looking for they they deal with it in in very complex and sometimes contradictory ways yeah disjointed okay this next question is from kim kim and she says were texians making any progress towards meeting their 1824 obligations like converting to catholicism time santa ana took over in 1833 was there any legitimate possibility of texas becoming an independent mexican state um oh that's a good question in response to the first whether texians were actually converting to catholicism and obey or complying with the terms of their land grants i think the evidence suggests overwhelmingly that they weren't they were able to forge a society in east texas that was they ran it themselves then they did what they pleased the mexi or the taxi texans were advocating for becoming an independent state so they wouldn't behold be beholden to the desires of coawila would that have solved the problem i don't think so because the mexican government was trying to enforce that law prohibiting the introduction of slaves and so long as the mexican government was trying to do that i think that it would have been very hard for the slaveholders in texas to accept mexican rule even as an independent state okay all right this is uh the next question is from steve and steve wants you to talk some about why confederates after the civil war fled to mexico or considered doing so well after the civil war okay i misread it yeah so why did confederates flee to mexico after the civil war after their defeat yeah it's a it's a really fascinating story or history i should say that in the midst of the us civil war the french emperor um louis napoleon invades mexico and installs an archer an austrian archduke named maximilian on the mexican throne they want to establish this mexican empire which would be sort of the toll hold for the french empire to re-establish itself in the americas and they're taking advantage of the u.s civil war to do that because obvious this is a blatant violation of the monroe doctrine emperor maximilian styles himself as a liberal prince he insists on taking control over mexico um he wants to believe that he's acting on the wishes of the mexican people themselves napoleon is able to you know furnish him some evidence of that it's really not true and he passes a law that a colonization law that allows for indenture or that recognizes a labor contract signed in other countries and dentured contracts and slaveholders in confederate states who are seeing the tide of war turning against the confederacy see that law and they interpret it as an invitation to them to come to mexico and there are confederate um emissaries who are in mexico trying to convince emperor maximilian to re-establish labor i think that there's really not that good evidence that emperor maximilian wanted to do that he passed another law a couple months before that colonization law that that uh abolished you know indentured really coercive types of indentured servitude and his liberal lenience suggests that he wouldn't have been in favor of slavery um but confederates nonetheless perhaps out of desperation perhaps out of misunderstanding of what maximilian was going to do um decided to take many of their enslaved people to mexico in the hopes that that could be sort of a slaveholder's readout uh they are ultimately disappointed not just by maximilian but by the fact that maximilian is uh executed by the forces of benito juarez who is the mexican republican who leads the mexican republican forces next question is from john could you talk a little bit about benito juarez and his role in the in during the civil war in mexico so juarez claims to be the rightful legitimate president of mexico and he sends his own diplomat to washington d.c matia romero who has left this amazing and they're they're available you can you can find them in a library they're printed uh amazing record of his time in washington dc and he is trying to convince the lincoln administration not just to not recognize maximilian's rule which the lincoln administration probably wasn't going to do anyways but to actively recognize benito juarez's government and to support benito juarez's movement to oust emperor maximilian and actually one of the ways in which matthias romeros tries to do that is by fomenting this rumor that the mexican or the the emperor maximilian was going to re-establish slavery so he is actually he's he's an amazing um amazing person so that's just one example of the ways in which juarez juarez's um government is trying to get the united states to help them out and it really takes until after the civil war the assassination of lincoln for the united states to take a more um a firmer stance against uh emperor maximilian um for re you know secretary of state seward is kind of favorable to france and there are always complicated machinations but ultimately they they do start to argue and start to see the french intervention in mexico as this was known as an extension of the civil war and they argued you know us grant famously argued that the civil war would not be over until the french were removed from mexico and part of that was because thanks to matthias romero in large part uh this belief that the maximilian's government was going to be this this safeholding government yeah we had a historian uh david hayes batista who i think is at ucla don't hold that against him but uh now that uh he was on campus a few years back talking about cinco de mayo uh as an american holiday but also was a as a civil war event it was a it was quite interesting um okay here's a more complicated question i'm just going to leave the name out how should we retell the story of the alamo then well i try to do that in in the book you do yeah you do um i mean i think that one of the questions about the alamo at the time was whether or not to defend it in the first place that sam houston thought it wasn't worth defending but the defenders of the alamo thought it was worth defending and they say it's to stop the mexican army from getting anywhere near the centers of population this the plantations in eastern texas and i think that that slavery helps us to understand why they felt like the lmo was an important objective to um to defend because they didn't want the mexican government this or the mexican army which was committed to anti-slavery getting anywhere near their enslaved people perhaps you know causing them to escape or to revolt against them so i think that that is important to understanding the decision to defend the alamo and then in the book i tell the story of the alamo from the perspective of william barrett travis's slave joe of relying on a really wonderful book about joe um to help me tell that story but i think that when we when we think about the alamo from their perspective slave man who was forced to fight um alongside his master that we start to see the alamona in a different light okay we have two more questions and thank you for taking the time with us tonight the first one is from my colleague at houston community college nick cox and he wants to know if there's examples or what evidence is there of maroon colonies in northern mexico uh is there anything like that um and did they hispanicize or acculturate relatively quickly if so so the descendants of enslaved people who joined a military colony in northeastern mexico that was settled primarily by seminoles and and black seminals they are still their descendants are still in a predominantly black town called nacimiento de los negros in northeastern kohila so there were these uh communities of runaway slaves um allied with indigenous peoples in northern mexico and we still see that today the runaway slaves who joined who got jobs in mexico generally integrated much more fully and they're much harder to track in the records as i mentioned mexico had abolished or abolished all distinctions of past in 1821 and that meant that all of the official censuses that were being taken in these towns in northeastern mexico didn't include any any information about someone's race much less whether or not they came from the united states or not and so it's really hard to track those people yeah um so it's i guess it's both yes and no there are are some um what we might call maroon colonies and there are a lot of enslaved people who um really assimilated i think into into mexican society okay real quick on and then we'll get to the last question nick also had a follow-up did any of them return back home to their gulf states once the war was over do you know have any evidence of that yeah it's so my research ended in 1867 so i don't go far enough back but i've actually heard from people who've read the book who had um descendant or who were descended from african americans who either went to mexico after reconstruction or in one case uh someone who who's descendant apparently escaped to mexico in the in the 1850s and then decided to come back afterwards so i think that they're it's another this is this is such a huge topic it's another it's another topic that i think uh is really worthy of further research but just the fact that they were in runaway slaves from the north and canada who returned to the south my my i suspect that um some returned from mexico as well okay before we get to the very last question i'm just going to hold up i don't know if you can see it or not but the book is called south freedom uh and it is absolutely fantastic so i want everyone to go to amazon to get that tonight and then read it the very last question alice is from jose angel hernandez and he has he wants to know how you came up with the topic and what might you be working on next uh well i came up with the topic by accident um that it really was working in northeastern mexican archives which are amazing the archivists there are so incredible they've done amazing work organizing these sources and just coming across legal or legal documents like the one i talked about about manuel luis de fierro and william cheney finding those documents and i was working on a different topic about about violence on the u.s mexico cougar and i found those documents and i went down this rabbit hole that resulted in this book so that was how i came across this really by uh by following my nose and working in the archives and as for what's next i don't know yet and part of the reason is that archives are closed and i feel like i have always come up with research topics by i'm an archive rat i love being there it's like it's almost like it's gambling for me where i'm just looking for the next thing that's interesting and so without that i'm having having a little trouble finding exactly what the next the next thing will be but i'm hoping that we can all get vaccinated and see each other in person soon and get back to the archives that's a good lesson for all of us so you never know what you might find to get you interested and uh this has been a a great evening we're so uh grateful to you for taking the time to talk with us this evening i'd like to thank the audience for their questions and the audience for your attention and uh say goodbye everybody and alice just stay on for a bit and i'll go over a couple of things with you so have a good evening everyone be sure to follow us on social media at facebook twitter and instagram like this video leave a comment and hit that subscribe button to be notified about our latest content