Settlers, Slaves, and Natives: Labor and Settler Colonialism in the Texas Borderlands

The concept of settler colonialism has swept the field of Indigenous history. Scholars have convincingly argued that white “settlers” in a range of geographical locales aimed to supplant Indigenous populations as part of a process of replicating their own societies. But analyses of the enslaved Black people who forcibly accompanied these white settlers are lacking. Existing scholarship on settler colonialism gives little consideration to the concept of forced actions­­, like the labor of enslaved people, rendering the concept of coercion as essentially irrelevant. If a settler/native divide sits at the heart of the idea of settler colonialism, how should enslaved people be categorized? Is such a categorization, settler or not, even useful for the study of enslaved African Americans? This paper offers Texas as a test case. Texas stood at the western extent of the cotton South during the antebellum period. By the outbreak of the Civil War, nearly 600,000 white settlers enslaved almost 200,000 Black people on land violently appropriated from Indigenous inhabitants. Enslaved people regularly encountered Indigenous Texans, especially during their forced labor, which included a number of activities that served the interests of the settler state, like clearing the land Indigenous people relied upon for subsistence and, occasionally, defending the property of their enslavers from Indigenous raiding parties. Force––forced movement, forced separation, and forced labor––built the antebellum Texas slave society. This paper argues that without taking that force into account, arguing that enslaved people were “settlers” will unjustly conflate the experience of enslaved people in Native spaces with their free white enslavers.