Free Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands Page A

lawyer, Moses was winning approval for his Texas scheme, and catching pneumonia. In May 1821 Moses wrote to Stephen from his sickbed, relating his success with the Spanish government and urging his son to join him in what would be a crowning achievement. “I now can go forward with confidence,” Moses said, “and I hope and pray you will discharge your doubts as to the enterprise and, if any means can be commanded, use your utmost to have every thing brought into motion. . . . Times are changing. A new chance presents itself. Nothing is wanting but concert and firmness.” Less than a month after receiving this letter, Stephen learned that Moses had died, in the letter in which Maria related Moses’ final request.
    Whether filial obligation alone would have deflected Stephen from his path toward law is hard to say; in any event, Joseph Hawkins seconded Moses’ advice about looking to Texas for salvation. Hawkins seems to have had the best interests of his protégé at heart—“our intercourse has resulted in mutually warm and I trust lasting attachment,” Hawkins assured Maria—but like nearly everyone else in the West, he couldn’t resist a promising speculation in land. Moses had cut Hawkins in on the deal, and though Hawkins disliked losing a bright young assistant, he essentially pushed Stephen out the door toward Texas. He also put up the cash for the first stage of the colonization. “I have advanced Stephen all the funds he desired for the expedition,” Hawkins wrote Maria, “and have promised to furnish more as he requires them.”
    A more forceful person might have resisted the pressure impelling him west, but not Stephen Austin. His legal career cut short, his family in debt, his father giving orders from beyond the grave, he put down his books and headed for Texas.

    Austin’s timing in launching the Texas venture could hardly have been better. In the aftermath of the War of 1812 with Britain and the 1819 treaty with Spain, American affairs relating to the West were at once settled and uncertain. The British war had demonstrated that the United States was not going to acquire Canada, having tried and failed three times to do so during the course of that conflict. The Spanish treaty gave the United States Florida, rounding out American holdings east of the Mississippi. It also declared Texas definitively part of New Spain.
    Yet mere declarations could never be definitive in the face of America’s hunger for land. The Canada question had been settled by force of British arms, the Florida question by force of American arms. And the settlement of those two questions channeled American expansionist energies toward Texas, where neither Spanish arms nor American—nor Comanche, for that matter—had established a decisive advantage. It didn’t take much imagination to guess that Texas would be fought over before its fate was settled.
    But the fighting developed differently than most imagined. The critical event of the second decade of the nineteenth century for the future of Texas was not the war with Britain nor the treaty with Spain, but the implosion of the American economy. Stephen Austin, sitting impatiently with his cargo of lead in New Orleans in 1812, might have been forgiven for thinking wars the principal cause of financial distress in the United States. In fact, peace was often harder on the economy. American money in those days consisted primarily of paper notes issued by scores of banks scattered across the several states, and because these banks, like all banks, owed more (to depositors) than they kept in their vaults, the slightest financial disturbance could set off a chain of failures, which might result in a strangling contraction of the money supply. Such a series of events produced the Panic of 1819, with prices plunging, debtors defaulting, mortgage holders foreclosing, and thousands of families losing their land. The