 Next, I want to look at filibusters. Filibusters are basically land pirates. Today we use the term in the Senate when the Senate wants to filibuster or take control of the podium so that business doesn't proceed in the Senate. But filibusters likewise in the olden times, this was the term used for people who wanted to take control of the land. And so we're going to look at some of these people who intruded into Spain's northern colonies. These were mostly Americans, 1800 to 1819. American had been interested in Spain's frontier. And even before the period I'm talking about, 1790s, 1800s, you have some early explorers like Philip Nolan. He is associated with James Wilkinson, who's an American general. Nolan was a horse trader. And he wanted to come in and get some of these wild horses that the Spanish had brought in, or that were offsprings of the Spanish horses that had been there since the 1500s. So he wanted to get them. So he had established some relations with the Spanish government, but he overstayed his visa, overstayed his welcome, and he's later on arrested by Spanish troops and is murdered. In 1806, a few years later, after the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson sends a series of expeditions into the territory in order to map it out. We think about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and certainly that is one of the three. Another one was the Freeman and Custis Expedition. They came in around the Red River in what's today the northern part of Texas. They came in at the Red River and were going to go up to determine what the Louisiana Boundary Purchase was, to determine where the river went. They thought it may go to the Pacific, and that would be a passageway to the Pacific. And they went to find out who were living there, the Native American peoples, and to win their favor. But instead, they were intercepted, and it turns out that the Spanish were waiting for them because Aaron Burr, the vice president of the United States, had warned Spain that they were going to go on that expedition. Freeman and Custis returned around and returned without completing their goal. Another one of Jefferson's expeditions was the Zebulon Pike Expedition. You see in red on the map, Pike's Route. I mean, Colorado outside of Denver is Pike's Peak. That's the mountain named after him that he named. He was looking for the source of the Red and the Arkansas rivers. In 1807, he's arrested in Santa Fe and taken to Chihuahua in Mexico, and later on returned to Texas via Nagadoches. In the last lecture, we looked at the very end of a picture of Caddo and Mounds, and Pike was returned, and he's the one who told us about Caddo and Mounds. He wrote it down in his diary. Aaron Burr, again, was the vice president. You may know him because he's the man who killed Alexander Hamilton. Aaron Burr had plans to seize and create for himself an American empire. And there were many plots, of course, to seize Spain's northern colonies. What Burr tried to do was he wanted to have a war with Spain, and he and his friend James Wilkinson, who I mentioned earlier, had plotted together. Well, later on, after Burr is on trial for killing Alexander Hamilton, Wilkinson is the United States witness. And he talks about Burr and all of his bad plans and has tried for treason. But because Wilkinson, who is already unreliable, isn't a very good witness, and so all the charges against him were dropped. However, in 1806, because of these fear of American encroachment, there is the so-called neutral ground treaty in yellow on the map. You see the area that was the neutral ground. This was a demilitarized zone. People weren't allowed to bring weapons in here for fear that they were going to try to take Spain's property in what's today Texas. And this was Wilkinson and a Spanish general named Simon de Herrera, who were responsible for negotiating this treaty. And they said that there would be no settlement in this yellow zone. In 1810 and 1812, there were some joint military expeditions between Spanish and American soldiers against outlaws and people who had lived in there and came into settle. But in 1815, there were already two settlements in northeast Texas at Jonesboro and Pecan Point, which were very close to each other. And these are sometimes called the first Anglo-American settlements in Texas. They were essentially trading villages. In 1818, after Napoleon was defeated, some of his followers came to the New World and settled in Texas. Actually, just outside of what's today Liberty, Texas, was one of Napoleon's followers, Charles Lalaman, the Champ de Isle was the name of the settlement. And this was a refuge for Napoleon supporters. In 1819, in an effort to solidify the boundary between the two nations, the Adams Zone East Treaty was signed. And this, you see in pink, the boundary of the Adams Zone East Treaty that goes from the Sabine River up to the Red, up to the Arkansas, and then over to what's today the treaty line all the way to the Pacific. And this was in response to Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida, because he couldn't be prevented. Adams, who was then the minister, the foreign affairs minister, signs this treaty with Spain to give the United States with the Western territory in Florida up to the Sabine River. And by giving up all claims to Texas, many Americans were upset and thought that Adams had sold them out. And so they wanted that land. In 1819, also the second bank of the United States called in loans from state banks and it caused a panic. As this economic collapse spread across the United States, many people blamed the second bank of the United States for the economic disaster, even though it was really due to a number of other causes. But this caused people to seek land and to seek it cheaply. In 1819, that same year, James Long, out of Nature's Mississippi, traveled with some companions to Nacodoges and declared the independent state of Texas. Later on they moved down to Galveston. They adopted Galveston as a port named the pirate John Lafitte as governor. And they didn't last very long. By November, the Spanish had routed them and kicked them out. Long went to New Orleans and he's later arrested and killed in Mexico City. Another noticeable event that occurred that directly affected Texas was the development of the cotton gin in the early 1800s. And this is the plan for the cotton gin, the patent for the cotton gin. The cotton gin changes the way cotton is produced and also what types of cotton are marketable. Later in 1820 you see how cotton has spread across the United States and where it was being grown and it was basically the type of cotton that grew along the eastern seaboard around the Virginia and the Carolinas and the Georgia region. There was some of that cotton in Texas and in Louisiana. However, with the development of the cotton gin, different varieties of cotton were now marketable because it could clean the cotton much easier. And so cotton that grew along the black belt, that black area of dirt, that area of black dirt that stretched from the Georges to into Texas now becomes more profitable for cotton production. You can see how between 1820 and 1860 the amount of cotton changes. This is now the amount of acreage in cotton by the start of the Civil War. So you can see that the spread of cotton increased dramatically as a result of the cotton gin. King cotton, it's sometimes called. Cotton becomes the dominant cash crop. And this of course leads to slave labor and the slave labor system that spread across the South. It also led to the need for more land because cotton wore out the land so quickly you had to have enough land to rotate crops. And so you needed more and more land if you grew more and more cotton. Between 1790 and 1860 you see the slave population increasing in the United States as a result of the need for cotton workers. And also the price of slaves increased. So labor becomes more expensive. But if we look at the land, if you are a southern cotton grower, a plantation owner, and you needed more land to support increased labor and the additional costs of planning and taking care of more land, look at what you could get if you went to Mexico. You could get almost 4,000 acres of land and almost an additional 200 on top of that. If you were an impresario, the land broker, you could get thousands and thousands of acres of land. However in the United States in 1820 they revised the land act but it was still expensive to get land. Land was selling at $1.25 an acre. It had been $2. You could buy less land so it would be less expensive. At first you had to buy a minimum of 160 acres. Now you could buy a minimum of 80 acres. So it cut the price in half even though it was still a lot of money. And you had to pay right away. In Mexico you didn't. And so if you were comparing the land options, Mexico seemed like a good choice. And so it's no wonder that people were willing to go down there after 1820. In 1820, Moses Austin, a Missouri land broker who loses a lot of money in the panic of 1819 goes to San Antonio to negotiate with the Spanish government there plans for bringing in settlers from the United States to take in land. Because of all the problems that Mexico, well that Spain had had, it was willing to give him a fair shake and to listen to his opportunity and to allow him the rights to bring in families into Texas. Because they hoped that by making these families come to Texas, take an oath of citizenship, practice Catholicism that they would be good Spanish citizens who would keep out these other people coming in and trying to like land by force.