“Destined by Divine Providence”: Reconsidering Anglo-American Immigration to Mexican Texas and the Geopolitics of Nineteenth-Century North America

This presentation will examine the Anglo-American colonists who settled in Mexican Texas in the 1820s and early 1830s.  Against traditional interpretations of these migrants as forebears of American Manifest Destiny, their decision to become Mexican citizens and their testaments of loyalty to that country were sincere, as they were genuinely interested in becoming a part of the Mexican political process. The fact that they came to have more interests in common with their northern Mexican neighbors than with political and economic elites in the United States of the North posed a geopolitical possibility very different from the one that ultimately emerged. Their eventual decision to secede from Mexico in a bloody revolution was a prolonged and reluctant one, made in response to that country’s sharp turn towards centralism, and is not, as has been thought, hard evidence of any desire to rejoin the United States. Ironically, however, their actions would convince North American politicians of their own political, cultural and martial superiority, thereby justifying U.S. imperialism for generations to come.