Just a quick update on the status of my book. A&M press has put it on the calendar for NEXT year, so it probably won't appear until mid-late 2023. This is unfortunate, but given all the disruptions to the industry from COVID, etc. and the nature of publishing, it's not entirely unexpected. Nonetheless, I'm excited for the opportunity. Another University, which has established and sponsored a book series, has chosen to include it in their series, which should give it a little more wide play. The extra delay won't change the book. I'm done with research and editing.

Once again, for those who are interested, you can sign up for a mailing list which will provide updates about the book. That can be done at my website: The Lost War for Texas The site doesn't have too much info now, I threw it up there quickly because I was doing some speaking engagements. I'll try to put more of a teaser up there soon.

I'm now moving on to my next projects, which include a biography of a person from that era that I'm doing in tandem with another historian and another project of my own. The latter will be a book on all the non-Spanish settlers in early Texas. This is another era of which most people - including me until relatively recently - were unaware.

The traditional Texas myth involves the "Mother of Texas" Jane Long bearing the first Anglo child in Texas in 1819 and the "Father of Texas" Stephen F. Austin bringing the first Anglo settlers in the 1820s. Both claims are substantively false. While it is true that Austin came to Texas and found everything outside of Bexar and LaBahia a mostly-empty "howling wilderness" (as he called it), it was not always so. This emptiness was a direct result of the 1811-13 revolution I discuss in my book.

There were foreigners in Texas VERY early. The first I've identified is a Frenchman who settled in Texas in 1759. The earliest Americans came in the 1780s. These are not merely transients like Phillip Nolan, but settlers. They lived in Texas, raised crops and livestock, had families - and children - when Austin was a child and Jane Long wasn't even born.

Now, in a lot of the traditional history, all Anglos are seen as some kind of harbingers of sneaky American infiltration and conquest. But that really breaks down when you look at these people. In The Lost War, I found this was true of my volunteers, and as some of them were also early Texas settlers, and for other reasons, it seems logical to make the same conclusion for them.

A key point is timing. In the Lost War, I argue that nobody can be called a "southern expansionist" (seeking to promote the expansion of slavery) before 1820 because slavery is not yet constrained. Furthermore, expansion was general during the War of 1812. At the same time that westerners are expanding on their end, northern interests are seeking to conquer Canada. People in the middle west are pushing into Missouri. During the 1811-13 War in Texas, two sides are competing for a province in which slavery is already legal, so even if America did seize it, it wouldn't change any fact on the ground, other than the type of slavery (Spanish slavery being mostly domestic). Slavery was simply taken for granted that it would go wherever the Americans went, and because the Compromise of 1820 hadn't set a limit on that, the Southerners were not expanding for the South's political needs, but just for a more general interest in new lands.

A bit of a digression, so I'll get back to my early settlers. What this means is that the further you go back, the more murky the reasons and the more impossible it is to attribute to traditional manifest destiny. Some of these people came before the U.S. Constitution was signed, or shortly after it - and most came through Louisiana, meaning they had been there for some time before coming to Texas. Thus, even the Spanish typically call them English as frequently as they call them American. Some indeed may have been British loyalists. Many were Catholics, suggesting that they certainly felt more at peace in Spanish lands than in Protestant America. The point being that there simply isn't a traditional historical context that describes them.

Now, the number of English/Americans is actually about half of that of Frenchmen coming into Texas, and it should be noted that the Spanish were originally even more wary of them, even though most (also coming from Louisiana) had been Spanish subjects for years, and virutually all of them were Catholic. After the French Revolution, the Spanish become virtually paranoid about them.

There are also other ethnicities in Texas: Irish, Italians and Germans, prior to 1800. I am on a German-Texan history facebook page and laugh all the time when people say their ancestor was one of the first Germans in Texas in the 1840s. One of the early German immigrants I discovered was basically a Hessian deserter who joined the Spanish at the seige of Pensacola in 1781, settled in Louisiana and then came to Texas in either the late 1780s or early 1790s.

There has only been one book on this topic, Mattie Austin Hatcher's 1925 "The Introduction of Foreigners into Texas." It's good for it's era, but hopelessly outdated. When she did it, the Bexar Archives was still all handwritten documents, and she had to puzzle her way through the originals. From the 1930s to 1960s, Robert Bruce Blake transcribed, typed out, then translated much of the archives. The Land Office has since been doing what he missed. His version (in both English and Spanish) is now available as keyword-searchable PDFs, which means I can find a name in one document, put it in my spreadsheet, then search for all occasions. There is also the vast wealth of digitized archival sources and genealogical databases that aid in research. So I can learn more about these people in minutes than Hatcher would learn in a lifetime.

I'm hoping to make good progress on this book (and the bio) while I wait for my first one to publish, and release them shortly thereafter.

My 8XGF a French-Canadian was passing through Texas from Louisiana on his way to Mexico in 1714.

I don't gloss over it. But the key and very relevant point is that expansion was not for slavery per se in these early eras. Certainly none of the southerners were going to move to new lands without their slaves, but the political dimension of the expansionism was very different. A few points:

1. In the first decade and a half of the 1800s, King Cotton was not yet king. The Cotton Gin was only 10 years old and while it was transforming slavery, it was still an evolving process. Many people from the founding generation thought slavery would die a natural death.

2. The North still had slaves.

This is an interesting blog. . The guy's wrong on a key point: He counts Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Missouiri and Kentucky as "the North" when they are border states, technically in the South, just not among the states that sceded. But controlling for that and just looking at the numbers from Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, you get 27,510 slaves in 1810 and 19,108 in 1820.

Most of these states had adopted gradual emancipation. Even where slavery was eliminated and dying, anti-slavery sentiment was not very strong. That was a generational change, and even in the 1850s, emancipationists were considered out of the political mainstream. In the 1820s, they were considered extremely radical. The moderate (or milquetoast view) form that manifested itself as blocking slavery's expansionism, didn't even rear its head until after the War of 1812, and culminated in the Compromise of 1820.

3. Before this event, no one in the south thought about expanding FOR slavery. They certainly expected to bring slaves when they moved west, but it never occurred to them that the US government would prevent them from doing so. First of all, only a very few people were thinking 2-3 steps ahead. The term "manifest destiny" was not even coined. No one even thought that a republic could grow so large. On the level of the individual farmer, you just knew that your lands were exhausting and you heard there were fresh lands one county or two counties west and you moved. You didn't sit around formulating a desire to move on behalf of the south, or to get extra senators.

4. As a though experiment - and it's just that, we're not doing moral equivalents here - imagine if you wanted to move to another state today, but a moral crusade develops around global warming and people demand the banning of cars in that state. Prior to that news, you weren't planning to move on behalf of your car, or to expand the realm of car ownership. You just knew that a car was essential (so you believe) to your livelihood and you planned to take your car with you. Until you got this news, you weren't moving there specifically to benefit car ownership any more than you were doing so to secure the right to own your kitchen table and chairs. But AFTER that decision, then your movement becomes inherently connected to the car debate.

Now, it's a silly thought experiment, and yes, people knew human bondage was different, but it wasn't nearly as morally repugnant to them at that time. Before 1807, the only country in the world that had banned slavery was Haiti. So if you're moving, say to Louisiana in 1804 after the purchase, you're not cognizant of committing a great moral crime by heading west, and you're certainly not doing it for the obscure question of what the balance of US Senators in Washington is.

All of this happens, of course, but it happens over a period of time, and the relationship of slavery and expansion (or more appropriate the causation rather than relationship) is not binary - one day it doesn't exist and the next it does. It evolves gradually. In 1790, there is pretty much zero causation. By 1840, it's pretty strong. But even along this timeline, you have to realize you're dealing with individuals, who are risking their lives, limbs, family and pretty much everything for their own personal reasons, not for political questions. My point is that we have to recognize that complexity as we talk about history, and we have to recognize how long this period is. The period from the War of 1812 to the Mexican American War is twice as long as the period of the "Old West" that we have sunk so much of our pop culture attention into. It is complex and generational, and we do violence to truth when we see it merely with Civil War tinted glasses, retroactively.