 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Price. This lecture will look at Manifest Destiny and its relationship to the instability in Mexico when the Mexican government broke its ties with New Spain, the Mexican Independence Movement. And what we'll look at today is the efforts by Americans to claim land in New Spain's northwestern frontier. We're going to identify the effects of the cotton market on Manifest Destiny. And we're going to look at the effects that Mexican Independence had in allowing immigration from the United States. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson, the president at the time, authorized the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. This is the purple area that you see here in front of you. And after he acquired this territory, we really didn't know how much land we had. So, Jefferson still was looking for several things. The northwest passage. This was this fabled idea that there was a water route to the Pacific Ocean. Now, he did hope to find a river route into Santa Fe, New Mexico, into that region. And he did want to also curry favor with the Native American people living in the region. And he wanted to establish and understand what were the boundaries of this territory that he had bought. Nobody really knew what the Louisiana Purchase included. We just knew that it was the Mississippi River watershed. But we didn't know exactly where that was or what that meant. And so, the most famous expedition was that of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, which from 1804 to about 1806 explored that territory that you see, that line that you see in green along the northern part of the map there. There was also another expedition that of Zebulon Pike. And you see that in red there, which is another famous expedition looking for the source of the red and the Arkansas rivers. And finally, there was another expedition that's not listed here. And that was the Freeman and Custis expedition along the Red River. This is that northern river of Texas. And again, Jefferson was looking for a route to the Pacific and hopefully going by Santa Fe. But a curious thing happened that Spanish government had gotten wind from our Vice President Aaron Burr. And so, they were ready to meet these interlopers into their territory and Freeman and Custis were turned back relatively quickly. There were other expeditions as well. James Wilkinson was a general with the US military. And one of his associates, a man named Phillip Nolan, had gotten permission as early as the 1790s to come into New Spain in what is today Texas and round up horses that he could sell later on. He built a fort near Waco in about the year 1800. However, he ran afoul of the Spanish government and either he had overstayed his welcome or it exceeded his visa. I'm not sure what, but he was arrested by Spanish troops. And in route after he was arrested, he was somehow killed while trying to escape. And so there is some thought that he was trying to maybe gather land for himself, maybe to acquire territory and steal it from the US. And it's interesting that he was an associate of James Wilkinson because General Wilkinson was also involved in other plots to take land. In fact, Aaron Burr, who was vice president at the time and is noted for killing Alexander Hamilton, had wanted an American empire of his own in the American Southwest. And he did plot to seize Spain's northern colonies. Now we know about this because during Burr's trial, James Wilkinson turned on his old ally while he was being tried for treason. And that's how we discovered Burr and Wilkinson were in league together to try to take some of New Spain's land. There was also the Gutierrez-Migui expedition of 1812. And this was another ill-fated expedition coming out of Nacodotus and down into what is today Goliad in that region and further towards San Antonio to take land away from New Spain. And this was put down although they did kill the Mexican general in San Antonio, governor in San Antonio. Around 1808, Napoleon gained control of Spain. I mentioned this in the previous lecture and he put his brother on the throne. In 1808, in Mexico, the viceroy was Jose de Ithugari and he was trying to run the province of New Spain. But at 1810, there was enough opposition and people upset over what was going on with the new Spanish rule that this priest, and this is a portrait of him on the right. Father Miguel Hidalgo issued the famous Grito de Dolores, which was a call for independent Mexico. And although Hidalgo was executed, the revolutionary activities continued and Gutierrez-Migui expedition was sometimes associated with that, but it continued on for several years. In the midst of all this, the United States and Spain, New Spain, come to agreement on this territory that you see here in Peach and in Tan. And this was the Neutral Ground Treaty. Wilkinson, again he was a general for the US government, a Spanish governor, Lieutenant Colonel Simon de Herrera, agreed that this territory here, this pale-colored territory between Texas and Louisiana, would be the Neutral Ground, that nobody would be allowed to settle there and every once in a while they would send in military expeditions to run people out. In the meantime, further north along the Red River, there were other US establishments, sometimes forts, trading villages, interacting with Native Americans when one was Jonesboro and another was Pecan Point. Finally, just outside of Trinity Bayou, in a little place around Liberty, Texas, was a French refugee's resettlement plan and this was Chompe d'Isle. And Chompe d'Isle was supposedly a refugee for people who had been supportive of Napoleon Bonaparte and after he fell from power and was ousted, they fled to the United States and to Texas in particularly. Spanish troops eventually routed them out but this was another attempt to take advantage of this land that was between the Sabine in Texas, New Spain and the United States. Finally in 1819, because Andrew Jackson after the War of 1812, he was assigned to patrol the Georgia-Florida border and he invaded Florida, which was at that time owned by New Spain, executed a couple of British citizens. So this had all the makings of an international war. And so in order to kind of quell the situation down, the American Secretary of State John Quincy Adams went to Spain and said, look, you cannot control Florida. We'll buy it from you. And so the United States bought that territory that runs from Florida all the way to Louisiana. And we got control of that. However, we also established this treaty line that went up from the Sabine River, the Red River, up to the Arkansas River and then up to the 49th parallel. And this was the Intercontinental Treaty Line, sometimes called the Spanish Treaty Line, the Adam's Ones Treaty Line. It was the border between U.S. interests and Spanish territory. However, on June 23rd of 1819, another expedition, this by James Long, was upset over this treaty line. Many people thought the Sabine River had given too much to Spain. And James Long was one of these. And he left from nature's Mississippi. He went to Nacodotius in East Texas, declared the independent state of Texas, said that Galveston would be their port, put the pirate John Lafitte in charge as governor of Bolivar point there. In November, however, they were routed and Long was able to escape. And he's eventually arrested and killed in Mexico City. But again, these continued efforts by U.S. citizens and others to claim land in New Spain's Northwest Territory was a real threat. Another threat occurred with the development of the cotton gin. And this is a picture of Eli Whitney's little device that helped to separate cotton fiber from cotton seed. And it was especially important around the cotton about the cotton plant that grew in the southern Gulf Coast region from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama over Louisiana. That was a different type of cotton than grew in places like North Carolina and the Virginias. And it was harder to clean this cotton. And most cotton was being cleaned by simply picking the seeds and dirt and trash out by hand. Eli Whitney's cotton machine, cotton engine, or cotton gin would cut that time by over half. And so it became more profitable to grow cotton, even cotton that was not so easily cleaned because the machine could do it. And so here is how cotton spread from 1820. And we look now at 1860. On the eve of the Civil War, this is how the cotton crop and slavery going along with it spread as a result of the profitability of cotton. So cotton became king. It became the dominant cash crop of the American South, and it accounted for one half of the American gross national product. And with cotton went slavery. And also one of the things that went along with cotton is that cotton land was easily depleted. The cotton growing depleted the nutrients out of the soil. And so you couldn't grow cotton very long on the land. You needed more land. And if you were a cotton planter, a plantation owner, you wanted more land. And with it, you needed more people to work the land. So cotton and slavery were tied together in the American South. Now, if we look at how much land you could get in the United States on the right hand side here, in 1820, there was a land act passed. And this reduced the price of land per acre to $1.25. Now, that doesn't sound like very much, but you had to buy at least 80 acres. And that was a reduction from 160 acres. That's a reduction of $320 down to $100 to buy that land. Now, that sounds dirt cheap to us. Pardon the pun. But at that time, because money was so hard to come by, and money was so tight, it was very difficult for people to buy land at those prices and at those restrictions, especially when you had to pay up front. However, in Mexico, they passed a law to allow immigration. We'll talk about that here in a second. And if you were a farmer and a cattleman, you could move into Texas and get 4,000 acres of land and a league of land, a sito and a league for farmers and cattlemen. If you were an empresario, this was somebody who was like a land developer, you would get in thousands of acres of land if you brought in as few as 200 families. And so there was great incentive to get the land in Northern Mexico because there was no charge for it. And one person who helped to take advantage of this was a person named Moses Austin. Now, when Spain began allowing foreign settlement, Moses Austin came down and he agreed to bring in 300 settlers. However, he died soon after he signed the contract, which passed to his son. At the same time, Mexico is finally getting its independence. The king of Spain returns to the throne, but he is a tyrant and the Spanish government, who had been doing pretty well without him, now decided they didn't need him. They had established their own constitution. And so there was an attempt to get rid of this king. And this also filtered down to what's going on in the New World, in New Spain. In the plan de Aguada of 1821, Augustine of Dorbide and Vicente Guerrero both launched a coup against the Spanish government and proclaimed themselves the independent state of Mexico. A constitution was drawn up. Augustine Dorbide, although he was one of the revolutionaries at the time, a military soldier, he soon made himself emperor and the Mexican people did not want an emperor, so they got rid of him. Meanwhile, back in the United States, Stephen F. Austin is taking over his father's contract and trying to bring settlers into this territory of Texas. And he does bring the first one in. However, the problem is, is this impresario grant that he has is not recognized by the new government. So he has to go into Mexico City and urge them to pass a new colonization law, which will basically allow him to do what he had agreed to do in the first place. It was a law basically written for Austin. In the Mexican Constitution of 1824, which was largely based on the U.S. Constitution, it outlined how colonial activity in the land of Texas would be set up. It established a national colonization law. The state of Cahuilla y Tejas established their own colonization law the next year. And it said that if you were going to move in, you had to become a Catholic that you wouldn't pay taxes for seven years. And this proved very attractive to settlers who already knew they could get a lot of land for free. In the end, Austin was granted several other contracts. And he becomes the most successful of these impresarios under the new Mexican system. There were others. And I have their names here, Martín de Leon, Greene de Witt. There were about 30 of them. They brought in some 9,000 settlers. They weren't all from the United States. Some were from Ireland. Some were from other areas. Some were from Mexico. So it wasn't just Americans, U.S. citizens who were settling here, but it was open to international people. And so if we want to look again at what's going on and the efforts by Americans to claim land in New Spain's Northwestern frontier, it was a desire to acquire more land that drove citizens to move to the West. And in 1819, when the United States and Spain agreed on the international treaty line, it was the Sabine River that drew a lot of ire because many U.S. citizens thought we had not taken enough land. And they wanted more of that land, largely because of cotton and its effects on the market. Cotton and the cotton gin and slavery went hand in hand and they both demanded more land. And so the expansion into Texas was one way of getting more land. And it was Mexican independence and the political instability that followed that allowed Mexico to see settlers from the United States and other areas as a way of holding on to that territory. If they moved there and if they became good Mexican citizens, they would be beholden to Mexico. It was believed and would form allegiances with Mexico. It was believed. However, that is not what happened. And many of the people who began migrating to Texas had no intention of becoming Mexican citizens, but instead looked to bring that land into the United States. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you very soon.