Monday, April 18, 2016

WAS THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS CREATED FOR SLAVERY?



...Enough of Austin's original 300 families brought slaves with them that a census of his colony in 1825 showed 443 in a total population of 1,800. The independence of Mexico cast doubt on the future of the institution in Texas. From 1821 until 1836 both the national government in Mexico City and the state government of Coahuila and Texas threatened to restrict or destroy black servitude. Neither government adopted any consistent or effective policy to prevent slavery in Texas; nevertheless, their threats worried slaveholders and possibly retarded the immigration of planters from the Old South. In 1836 Texas had an estimated population of 38,470, only 5,000 of whom were slaves. The Texas Revolution assured slaveholders of the future of their institution. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas (1836) provided that slaves would remain the property of their owners, that the Texas Congress could not prohibit the immigration of slaveholders bringing their property, and that slaves could be imported from the United States (although not from Africa). Given those protections, slavery expanded rapidly during the period of the republic. By 1845, when Texas joined the United States, the state was home to at least 30,000 slaves. After statehood, in antebellum Texas, slavery grew even more rapidly. The census of 1850 reported 58,161 slaves, 27.4 percent of the 212,592 people in Texas, and the census of 1860 enumerated 182,566 slaves, 30.2 percent of the total population. Slaves were increasing faster than the population as a whole.

[source : Slavery, Texas State Historical Association, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/yps01, Accessed: 18th April 2016]

I wonder what role Alex Jones' family played in all this, considering that his ancestors were colonels and generals in the Confederate Army, and that he himself is showing transparent signs of neo-Confederacy, claiming that the US Civil War was all about tariffs when all contemporary documents from the time state the primary reason was the protection of slavery in the Confederate states, and also allowing other 'Libertarian' writers to state the same. And then there is also Jones' love of the slaveholding, slavery-loving, backstabbing traitor President Andrew Jackson.

It's high time for Jones to 'fess: who were his Confederate ancestors, and has that Confederacy been passed down from generation to generation within the Jones family?

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