Lone Star Nation Read Free Page B

prospects improved when a chastened Jefferson and Congress rescinded the embargo, but the War of 1812 (against Britain), after briefly driving prices up, produced another collapse. British warships strangled American trade, and men and money fled Upper Louisiana for the theaters and markets of the war. Moses Austin tried to solve his manpower shortage by leasing a small regiment of slaves, and to augment the local money supply by helping establish a St. Louis bank. Yet the slaves required more upkeep than he had reckoned, and his bank ran into liquidity troubles. The result was that Austin’s debt simply grew deeper. By 1818 he was compelled to put the Mine à Breton up for sale. “Would to God my business was closed,” he lamented. “I would leave this country in a week.”
    Potential buyers, however, guessed that if Moses Austin couldn’t make lead pay, neither could they, and the mine went begging. Austin’s debts continued to grow even as his ability to repay them diminished. The end—or what certainly seemed the end—came in March 1820 when the sheriff arrested and jailed him for nonpayment. Once the greatest man in the district, Austin now shared quarters with drunks and common criminals. The fall would have broken the spirit of most men, and it came close to breaking Austin’s. He pleaded with his daughter’s husband to hasten to his rescue lest the sheriff auction the lead works to pay down the debts. His plea failed, and the richest mine in the North American heartland was hammered away for pennies on Austin’s dollars.
    Austin won his freedom, but it held no pleasure for him. He refused to live a pauper where he had been a prince. “To remain in a country where I had enjoyed wealth, in a state of poverty, I could not submit to,” he recalled. Two decades earlier, Moses Austin had started a new life in a new country; he was convinced he must do so again.
    Yet there was a difference to the moving this time. The trek to Spanish Louisiana had been a hopeful journey by a young man in the prime of confidence and energy; this move was the desperate act of a man drowning in failure and debt, a fifty-eight-year-old with no margin for further failure and nothing to fall back on should this last scheme go awry.

    The region to which he pinned his hopes was Texas. Moses Austin knew little of Texas beyond that it was Spanish—a fact crucial to his plans. A treaty concluded just several months earlier had apparently marked the end of a decade and a half of bickering between the United States and Spain over the border between their respective territories. Jefferson had asserted that the southwestern boundary of America’s Louisiana Purchase was the Rio Grande, but he did little to defend this interpretation, having his hands full with the British and the French on the high seas. His successor, James Madison, had even more trouble with the British, culminating in the War of 1812 (which didn’t end before the redcoats chased the president from the White House and burned the mansion and the Capitol). Meanwhile, American friction with Spain focused on Florida, which General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the military hero of the war and a rising political force in the West, and many others demanded be added to the American domain. By 1819 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was willing to surrender whatever claim the United States might have had to Texas in exchange for a tidying up of the Florida question (in America’s favor) and other details between the United States and Spain.
    Moses Austin was that rare American west of the Mississippi who wanted Spain to keep Texas. By this time it was becoming an item of the American gospel—at least as that gospel was preached in the West—that American sovereignty must chase the setting sun. Westerners denounced the abandonment of Texas to Spain as a sellout of their region by New England (Adams was from