LIKE MOST FABLES, the story that Ellis told about his origins said as much about its time and place as it did about its main character. Gilded Age Americans, living amid increasingly concentrated wealth and economic power, teeming cities, and labor unrest, sought refuge in reassuring tales of rugged frontier manhood and hard work rewarded. On the popular level, these impulses found expression in the burgeoning dime-novel market, cheap newsprint filled with Wild West adventures and the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger and his imitators. For those with a more serious bent, there were the directories of prominent individuals churned out by numerous publishers. Bearing titles such as The Successful American, One Thousand American Men of Mark of To-Day, and Builders of our Nation, these works brought together in a single volume illustrative biographies of “America’s foremost leaders”: well-known, respected individuals whose life stories offered valuable lessons as to what could be achieved through “industry, energy or cleverness.” As the editors of One Thousand American Men of Mark of To-Day promised their readers, “The careers herein described will be found stimulating to patriotism; and a potent factor in cheering and inspiring the efforts of rising generations.”
Those who consulted such volumes seeking more information about the man known alternatively as William Henry Ellis, Guillermo Ellis, and Guillermo Enrique Eliseo would have found numerous entries, all painting a remarkably consistent portrait of their subject. The present-day “Banker, Broker and Miner,” readers learned, had been born June 15, 1864, “on the Mexican frontier” to a rancher named Carlos Eliseo and his wife, Marguerita Nelsonia Eliseo. Eliseo’s lineage could be traced back to Cuba, his maternal grandfather having lived on the island before relocating to Mexico. After being educated at “schools in Mexico,” Eliseo, as befitted the son of a humble Mexican ranchero, “spent his early days as [a] cowboy on cattle ranches.” Beginning modestly, “trading horses, cattle, etc., between Texas and Mexico,” he went on to “pioneer . . . [the] cotton industry in Mexico” and achieve a string of remarkable successes developing mines and haciendas south of the border. Before long, Eliseo, having Anglicized his name to Ellis for the ease of his new English-speaking acquaintances, could be found mingling in the upper reaches of Manhattan’s financial and social circles. “Mr. Ellis upon his arrival in New York was an utter stranger,” explained the Successful American. “But with letters of introduction from and to some of the very best people in the city, and, through the kindness of [railroad tycoon] Collis P. Huntington and through his recommendations has been able to build up quite a business.”
The directories listing Ellis’s biography aspired “to present facts only,” all the better to illustrate for their readers the “subtle influences which . . . go far in the determination of characters that are successful.” Through such veracity, the guides transformed “utter strangers” like Ellis into individuals with known pedigrees. Yet in Ellis’s case, the entries borrowed from the era’s pulp fiction far more than the editors cared to acknowledge. His public biography blurred together the Wild West story and the Horatio Alger novel into a peculiar concoction, one part frontier heroics and two parts moral exemplar, in which Ellis, the proverbial young man from the provinces, managed through perseverance and strength of character to impress a powerful benefactor and climb up the social ladder.
To be convincing, however, Ellis’s story could not be a complete invention: it needed to contain enough veracity to lend his performance the aura of truth. His parents’ given names thus bore a close resemblance to the ones he listed in his biography. And he was not lying when he asserted that he had grown up amid peoples of Mexican ethnicity, spoke fluent Spanish, possessed a familiarity with ranching and cotton cultivation, and had gotten his start as a transborder merchant. But in each of these instances, Ellis rearranged key features of his upbringing to make the narrative of his life align more closely with what his audiences wanted to hear about his role in advancing what the editors of Twentieth-Century Successful Americans termed the Gilded Age’s “moral, spiritual and material prosperity.”
There was one detail that Ellis erased altogether in this chameleon-like process of shapeshifting. This fact was not some minor facet of his life story but one essential to understanding who he was and where he came from—and even how he acquired his light skin and ethnically ambiguous appearance. What had brought his mother and father to South Texas was not the story of burgeoning independence along the frontier so celebrated in American culture—the very narrative that Ellis invoked by wrapping himself in the image of the cowboy. To the extent that Ellis’s parents were pioneers, they were unwilling ones, brought to Texas in chains by one of the preeminent relocations of the antebellum era: the “Second Middle Passage” that uprooted over a million enslaved African Americans from slavery’s original home along the Atlantic seaboard and transported them deep into the continent’s interior. Unlike the era’s other great relocations—the removal of the Cherokee and the other “civilized tribes” into Indian Territory or the migration of Mormons to the Great Salt Lake—the westward movement of slaves and slave owners unfolded according to no grand plan. Yet the lure of new lands on which to cultivate cotton for a seemingly inexhaustible world market was so enticing that throughout the 1850s, long files of enslaved African Americans—“mud-incrusted, wrapped in old blankets or gunny bags,” in the words of one onlooker—could be found shuffling in chains down the rutted dirt roads leading to Texas.
Among those caught up in this river of enslaved humanity were a woman in her early thirties named Mary and her two sons: Charles, about ten, and William, some two years younger. As slaves—property rather than people—they left but the slightest of traces in the historical record, writing no letters, keeping no diaries, their names unlisted in antebellum censuses. Instead, most of what we can reconstruct of their lives comes by tracking the family who in the 1850s claimed Mary, Charles, and William as their human chattel: the Weisigers of Kentucky, headed at the time by a prosperous physician named Joseph. The Weisigers had possessed slaves for generations (although, in an effort to put a benevolent face on the “peculiar institution,” Southern whites rarely uttered the word “slave”: “They speak of their servants, their boy, their negroes, but never their slaves,” reported one visitor). At the time of his death in 1823, Joseph Weisiger’s father, Daniel, was the third-largest slave owner in Frankfort. By 1850, Joseph, who in addition to practicing medicine owned a plantation in the heart of Kentucky’s Bluegrass region, presided over a household containing twenty-three slaves, the oldest a sixty-year-old man, the youngest a girl only one year old. Joseph’s brother-in-law, who dwelled nearby, owned twenty-two people similarly spanning the range from toddlers to middle-aged. Even Joseph’s aged mother, Lucy, near eighty years old, held seven enslaved African Americans.
In 1852, at the unlikely age of fifty-eight, Joseph Weisiger elected to abandon his Kentucky homestead for the new territory, more than a thousand miles away, opened up by the United States’ annexation of Texas. The doctor’s enthusiasm for fresh horizons may have been prompted by the death of his wife, Isabella, only a few months earlier—the second time Joseph had outlived his spouse, and no doubt a potent reason for seeking a locale with fewer painful memories. Even more, it reflected the era’s mania for cotton, a crop that grew poorly in Upper South states like Kentucky but flourished in Texas. “There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever,” recalled one slave. “Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell.”
Weisiger’s status as a slave owner meant that his bout with “cotton fever” would have consequences far beyond his immediate household. Not only did it affect his youngest children, his new wife, whom he wooed when she came to Kentucky to sell slaves from her Alabama plantation, and even his widowed mother, who joined her son’s journey to the Lone Star State; it radiated out to the more than fifty African Americans bound to the Weisigers through the institution of slavery.
For Weisiger, the move to Texas represented new opportunities. But for his slaves, it inspired terror. Enslaved spouses and children, their relations not recognized by law, risked separation across impossibly vast distances whenever plantation owners headed for new lands. As a result, observed one planter, there was “a very great aversion amongst our Negroes to be carried to distant parts, & particularly to our new countries.” Mary, Charles, and William had the good fortune to remain together during the move to Texas, but they could have just as easily been torn from one another forever. And the move may have involved a sundering of ties with grandparents, cousins, or siblings on nearby plantations—rendering these family connections all but irretrievable given the incompleteness of the historic record.
Relocating to Texas produced at least one identifiable separation for Mary and her children. As slaves, Mary, Charles, and William were not afforded the privilege of surnames, a situation that did not change until slavery’s collapse amid the bloody chaos of the Civil War. Yet when Mary, Charles, and William chose legal last names for the first time in 1865, they did not, unlike many other ex-slaves, select the surname of the family owning them. In place of Weisiger, Mary and her sons opted for Ellis—which happened to be the surname of Hezekiah Ellis, the white overseer who had once worked for Lucy Weisiger in Frankfort. A hired hand, Hezekiah remained in Kentucky rather than joining the Weisigers and their slaves for the journey to Texas. But even two decades later, Mary retained memories—the full nature of which we can only imagine—of the white man who apparently impregnated her with at least two children when she was in her early twenties.
The Ellis surname that Charles’s son, William Henry Ellis, would later transform into the Spanish-sounding Eliseo thus linked him not to Mexico or Cuba but instead to one of antebellum slavery’s most brutal realities: the sexual exploitation of black women by white men. Such behavior had left its traces across multiple generations of the Ellis family; not only did Charles and his brother, William, appear in documents after the Civil War as mulattoes, but so, too, did Mary herself, meaning that her mother most likely was also a victim of sexual predation. This dark truth bequeathed to William Henry Ellis the light skin and ethnically ambiguous appearance that facilitated his passing as Guillermo Enrique Eliseo. But this opportunity was only available to him because of the abuse across the race line that his grandmother and great-grandmother—and no doubt other females in his family as well—had endured during generations of enslavement.
IN RELOCATING HIS plantation from the Upper South, Joseph Weisiger became a small player in a big process: the transformation of Texas into a landscape dominated by cotton and slaves. In 1845, when the United States annexed Texas, the number of slaves within the rogue nation that Mexico still claimed as a rebellious province totaled a mere 27,000. Following admission to the United States, however, Texas’s slave population soared, reaching 180,000 by 1860. Even so, Texas legislators continued to insist on the necessity of more “slave labor to meet the wants of the State in reducing its almost unlimited acres of sugar and cotton land to cultivation,” and Texas newspapers proclaimed, “We want more slaves. We need them.”
For many Americans, this explosive growth underscored an unmistakable fact: slavery’s destiny lay along the border. Most immediately, that future meant the newly cultivated cotton fields of Texas. But just as Texas had slipped out of Mexican control in 1836, so, too, did it seem that other sections of the continent would soon fall into the American grasp, as California, New Mexico, and Arizona had in 1848. Many saw no reason why Mexico should not relinquish more territory in the near future, or why the tropical isle of Cuba, so suited to slave agriculture and so close to US shores, should not become another state. Expansionists thrilled to the prospect of transforming the entire Gulf of Mexico into a basin ringed with US territories: a “great American lake.” “I want Cuba,” enthused Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi. “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two more Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery.”
Joseph Weisiger’s move brought his family and slaves to the very outer limit of this expanding Cotton Kingdom: the onetime Mexican village of Villa de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Victoria Nombre de Jesús, known to most in the 1850s simply as Victoria, Texas. Here Dr. Weisiger, patriarch from Kentucky, encountered Doña Luz Escalera De León, matriarch of Victoria’s leading Tejano family, from whom he purchased one of the town’s signature properties, Rancho Escondido, for $13,284. (“Tejano” was the term most Texans of ethnic Mexican descent used to describe themselves at the time; their Anglo-American counterparts in turn adopted the term “Texian” for themselves.) In return, the doctor received not only some 4,400 acres of land but also a ranch house, barns, and outbuildings, all located along the bank of the Guadalupe River, amid the tall-grass prairies and live-oak forests that spread inland from the coast.
Joseph Weisiger was far from the only newcomer to Victoria with dreams of transforming a Tejano cattle ranch into a Texian cotton plantation. Scores of other transplants from the Upper South likewise moved to this farthest periphery of slave society during the 1840s and 1850s, chasing the fertile soils and humid conditions favored by the cotton plant. A town with only 3 slaves within its boundaries in 1838, Victoria could by 1860 boast of 1,533 slaves laboring in fields that, not so long before, had been open grasslands, grazed by long-horned Mexican cattle.
Ecological boundaries as much as political ones situated Victoria on the frontier of the Cotton Kingdom. The cotton plant grows best when it receives twenty to twenty-five inches of rainfall annually, with few dry spells or sharp swings in temperature—conditions that trail off amid the arid chaparral to the south and west of the Guadalupe River. In contrast, the broad plain leading from the coast inland to Victoria—“almost Belgic in its level and rich repose,” in the words of one newcomer—was well watered and abounded in the loamy soils in which the cotton plant thrived.
But it was not only access to the rich, untapped soil beneath Victoria’s prairies that attracted the Weisigers and other slave owners to Texas. The journey to Texas also promised greater security for slave owners’ human property. To Americans at the time, Kentucky was a border state: for some six hundred miles, all that separated the slave plantations of Kentucky from the free communities of the North was the wide, slow-moving waters of the Ohio River. In cold winters, the river froze, and enslaved African Americans could escape simply by walking across the ice—a scenario Harriet Beecher Stowe dramatized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published the very year the Weisigers departed for Victoria.
Those slave owners who relocated to Texas, however, soon came to an unwelcome realization: slavery was if anything more vulnerable in the Lone Star State than in the Upper South. Newcomers like the Weisigers had anticipated Texas would be just the next step in an ever-expanding Cotton Kingdom. But when further annexations of Mexican territory stalled, slave owners found themselves once more along a border. This time, though, they faced not the Mason-Dixon line between regions but rather the boundary line between nations. Moreover, while in the United States the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 enabled slave owners to reach into the North and recapture escaped slaves, Mexico’s status as an independent country meant that enslaved peoples who reached Mexico were beyond official recovery. As a result, explained the Galveston Weekly News, slave labor was “not safe” throughout much of Texas “because the Mexicans steel [sic] them. Mexico is a storehouse for the thieves, and Mexican laws shield the offenders.”
Most slaves, of course, did not need to be “stolen” to recognize the opportunities that flight across the border presented. Runaway ads in antebellum Texan newspapers document the steady flow of slaves across the border, each notice a miniature portrait of sorts. Many fugitives, judging by their descriptions, bore traces of the omnipresent physical violence of slavery (“His right ear has been cropped . . . and an upper nick out of the left”; “has lost some of his front teeth”; “his first finger on the right hand is off at the first joint”; “bears the marks of the whip on his back. . . . His right arm has been broken”). Almost all were young men, as in the ad that appeared under the title “Stop the Runaways” in the Victoria Advocate just before the Weisigers’ and Ellises’ joint arrival in town. P. D. McNeel promised a “liberal reward” for anyone who apprehended the three slaves who had fled from his plantation armed with a rifle and two double-barreled shotguns: Sam (“yellow complexion, about twenty two or three years old, kinky head, thick lips”), Frank (“coal black, white eyes, thick lips, trim made . . . about twenty years old”), and John (“about twenty seven or eight years old . . . hair tolerably straight, a scar in the corner of his eye”). “I have no doubt they are aiming for Mexico,” opined McNeel.
If Sam, Frank, and John evaded the omnipresent “nigger dogs” that plantation owners in Victoria and elsewhere used to hunt runaways, they would have joined an estimated four thousand slaves who fled from the United States into Mexico prior to the Civil War. The sheer number of escapees across the international border reoriented the vector of freedom for enslaved persons throughout the Deep South, for whom Mexico became the newest and closest refuge. “’Round our part of the country,” explained one former Texas slave, “iffen a nigger want to run away, he’d light out for old Mexico. That was nigger heaven them days.” “Sometimes someone would come ’long and try to get us to run up North and be free,” remembered another former Texas slave, Felix Haywood. “We used to laugh at that. There wasn’t no reason to run up North. All we had to do was to walk, but walk South, and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. . . . Hundreds of slaves did go to Mexico and got on all right,” added Haywood. “We would hear about ’em and how they was goin’ to be Mexicans.” As one Texas plantation owner summarized in 1851: “The negroe he has got Mexico in his head.”
The destinations for such runaways were the isolated villages dotting the border states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas. In 1849, in a rare act of three generations fleeing together, a slave named David Thomas made his way from Texas to the Mexican town of Allende with his daughter and three grandchildren, freeing his entire family from bondage. In 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, as well known at the time for his antislavery writings as for his landscape architecture, visited Piedras Negras, the next village over from Allende. Located just across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas, Piedras Negras was a favorite gateway for fugitive slaves fleeing into Mexico. Olmsted encountered several runaways in the settlement and noted that escaped slaves “were constantly arriving” in Mexican border towns, with forty or more having made their way to Piedras Negras alone in the past three months.
One fugitive in Piedras Negras reported to Olmsted that “the Mexican government was very just to them, they could always have their rights as fully protected as if they were Mexicans born.” But runaways in Mexico in fact occupied a legal gray zone. Under Mexican law, all male foreigners had to carry a visa from their home country, a statute that applied even to escaped slaves. (Female foreigners, assumed to have a husband, father, or other male guardian accompanying them, did not face the same requirement.) US consuls in Mexico, however, refused to grant fugitive slaves the necessary carta de seguridad. This denial left runaways in legal limbo, neither Mexican nor American, and vulnerable to arrest and fine or imprisonment. Unlike maroons elsewhere in the Americas, who tended to establish self-sufficient communities, fugitive slaves in Mexico tried instead to insert themselves into as many institutions of their host nation as possible. Marriage into a Mexican family, conversion to Catholicism, militia service: all were eagerly sought by runaways to demonstrate their usefulness to Mexico and to earn the tolerance of local authorities, who could enforce the law as they saw fit. When the fugitive slave Peter Towns reached Piedras Negras, for instance, he transformed his name into Pedro Tauns, started a family with a Mexican woman, found employment as a mason, and entertained with his fiddle at local fandangos. The calculus behind such actions, however, eluded outraged US slave owners, among whom Mexico became known as simply a “paradise of runaway slaves.”
IN ESCAPING FROM Texas into Mexico, slaves also engaged in a flight from history that obscured Mexico’s deep connections to chattel slavery. For much of its existence, Mexico had, like the United States—indeed, most of the Americas—been a slaveholding society. African slavery existed in Mexico as early as 1519, a full century before the arrival of the first documented slave ship at Jamestown, and during the colonial era, over two hundred thousand enslaved Africans landed in New Spain, exceeding the number of immigrants from Europe to reach Mexican shores during these same years. Eighteenth-century Mexican newspapers sported runaway notices with more than a passing resemblance to those that later appeared in Texas: “Joseph Polomo Urrutia, slave, native of the town of Aguas Calientes, fled from the Capital on the 12th of this month: regular build, brown [cocho] color, one eye cloudy, normal hair: his clothing leather pants, linen shirt, shoes, black hat, and he may be in possession of the two gray blankets [fresadas cenicientas] with which he ran away.”
Most slaves labored in plantations along Mexico’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but the institution even permeated the colony’s far north. The 1783 census of the province of Texas revealed the presence of some 36 enslaved peoples of African descent, as well as 404 peoples “de Color Quebrado” (a category meaning “broken color” into which mulattoes were typically slotted), constituting 1.3 percent and 14.5 percent of the population of the province, respectively. A census at the same time of Saltillo, capital of the neighboring province of Coahuila, tallied 82 slaves of African descent, most working as domestic servants in elite households.
If Anglo-Americans were not the first to introduce African slavery to Texas soil, they embraced it on a scale that dwarfed their Spanish predecessors. Even so, Mexico’s response when slave-owning Anglo colonists began to settle the newly merged state of Coahuila y Tejas in the 1820s manifested considerable ambiguity. Mexico’s decade-long war of independence from Spain had assumed an abolitionist tinge, with insurrectionist leaders such as Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos issuing edicts calling for an end to slavery. After independence in 1821, Mexico took steps to prohibit the slave trade and to emancipate all slave children under fourteen. But contradictorily it also issued a law in 1823 granting extra land to colonists who brought large numbers of slaves with them to Mexico, designed to encourage Americans from the southern United States to settle in Coahuila y Tejas as a barrier to the powerful Comanche and Apache raiding parties devastating the new republic’s northern frontier. Even after Morelos’s onetime lieutenant-turned-president, Vicente Guerrero, issued a proclamation in 1829 abolishing slavery, he followed it up two months later with a measure excepting Coahuila y Tejas from the new law. The state government in Coahuila y Tejas was similarly erratic, enacting several statutes in the 1820s designed to bring about slavery’s decline but also establishing a new contract law in 1827 that permitted masters to sign their slaves to ninety-nine-year contracts of indenture, a legal fiction that preserved slavery in everything but name.
Far less equivocal were the new republic’s efforts to undo the complicated casta system. During the Spanish colonial period, peoples had been divided into a complex hierarchy of racial categories, arranged with European criollos at the top and mulatos, pardos, morenos, and negros—all terms for individuals with some degree of African ancestry—clustered at the bottom. After independence, however, Mexico attempted to erase the vestiges of Spanish colonialism. Mexican government documents no longer tracked people by race and, unlike in the United States, Indians were made full citizens of the new nation.
The disappearance of official racial categories did not necessarily mean the disappearance of the idea of race. But even before Independence, one outgrowth of the casta system’s efforts to delineate the precise proportions of an individual’s white, black, and Indian ancestry had been the erection of a bewildering thicket of racial identities. Because of their arbitrariness, these definitions had ironically facilitated movement from one category to another, with individuals ascending or descending the racial hierarchy as they moved up or down the socioeconomic ladder. During the struggle for independence, this dynamic allowed some individuals of Afro-Mexican descent, such as Presidents Morelos and Guerrero, to attain positions of prominence with little public comment, even as the idea of blackness and black peoples themselves (almost a tenth of Mexico’s population in the early 1800s) began to evaporate from the Mexican national consciousness.
THE INTERTWINED WEISIGER and Ellis families arrived in Victoria at the moment when the paradoxes of Texas slavery were at their most pronounced. By all objective measures, the annexation of Mexican territory had infused the Cotton Kingdom with renewed vigor. A prime field hand in Texas (the term a telling reminder of the extent to which slavery reduced the enslaved to mere collections of useful body parts) might be worth as much as $1,800 in the 1850s (over $50,000 in current dollars)—a sum that explains the steady sale of surplus slaves from the Upper South to Texas as well as the outrage of Texian slave owners at their loss of capital when slaves escaped across the border into Mexico. In Victoria, Texas’s cotton boom spurred the construction of a railroad to Port Lavaca, some thirty miles away. Local merchants did a thriving business supplying nearby plantations with everything from hoes, shovels, and padlocks to cheap goods for slaves (“negro blankets,” “negro clothing of all kinds”). As a result of the prosperity brought by cotton, land in Victoria doubled in value by 1853, the year of the Wesigers’ and Ellises’ arrival.
Yet even amid this boom, many Texians had grown apprehensive about slavery’s future. The same persons who envisioned themselves plantation masters also imagined themselves the victims of the dangerous currents swirling around slavery along the border. Since Texians believed slavery to be a benign institution—slaves, according to the Texas legislature, offered “the white man . . . willing obedience and affection”—it followed that any threat to slavery had to be external. By far the leading source of outside provocation was the neighboring nation of Mexico. Not only did the Mexican republic refuse to cede more of its northern territory to American slave owners; it had repeatedly declined to negotiate a treaty allowing for the return of fugitive slaves to their US owners.
Having already lost half its national territory to the United States, Mexico had good reason to be wary of the expansive republic to its north. Throughout the 1850s, the United States would press repeatedly for further sales of Mexican land. In the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, Mexico conceded a narrow strip of what became southern Arizona for a transcontinental railroad line. But American negotiators had been authorized to purchase much, much more—the northern states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Baja California, Sonora, and Chihuahua—and in the years following, Americans would periodically clamber for further land acquisitions from Mexico. For those unwilling to await a negotiated purchase, the 1850s proved the heyday of filibustering, with US-based adventurers launching periodic invasions of Mexico, Cuba, and Central America in the hopes of creating new slave states along the Cotton Kingdom’s outer fringes.
Faced with such pressures, Mexico saw little incentive to return escaped slaves. Such a policy would only strengthen the American threat along the republic’s northern border while depriving the sparsely populated Mexican North of potentially useful inhabitants. In 1850, in a further effort to people its outer periphery at the United States’ expense, Mexico entered into an agreement with some bands of Seminole Indians led by Wild Cat (“Gato del Monte” to his new Mexican allies), who relocated from Indian Territory to the border state of Coahuila. These peoples, whom the Mexicans termed Mascogos, settled around Nacimiento, El Moral, and San Fernando de Rosas and served as Mexican Army auxiliaries along the republic’s northern frontera. To Texians, however, the “black Seminoles,” who had incorporated large numbers of fugitive slaves when they inhabited their original homeland in the Everglades, represented one more unnerving facet of the borderlands—an armed maroon band that would only encourage more slaves to flee into Mexico. It did little to help matters that one of the most visible members of Wild Cat’s band, his English-language translator, was a “full-blooded negro” and escaped slave nicknamed “Gopher John.”
The perception that Mexico not only tolerated but encouraged the flight of fugitive slaves precipitated numerous Texian attempts to cross the international boundary and take the law into their own hands. In 1851, outside the border village of Guerrero, Coahuila, locals stumbled across a Texian who had seized a fugitive slave living in town and tied him to his saddle, apparently as a prelude to forcing the man back across the border to Texas. The mayor of Guerrero ordered the Texian to release his captive, triggering a shootout that ended in the would-be slave catcher’s death. Four years later, a force of some two hundred Texians, demanding the return of fugitive slaves, crossed the border into Mexico. Pushed back by Mexican troops and their Mascogo allies, the invaders burned Piedras Negras to the ground before returning to the United States.
Not everyone in northern Mexico welcomed the slaves fleeing across the border. Not only did their presence invite Texian intrusion; desperate runaways occasionally stole supplies from Mexican homesteads. As the Mexican Army officer Emilio Langberg observed in 1855, “In all the settlements along this frontier, I have found among their inhabitants the best disposition not to accept any negroes, who, far from being useful, are very burdensome.” Cross-border attacks like the ones in Guerrero or Piedras Negras, however, diminished what little sympathy existed for American slave owners, leading the US consul in Matamoros to observe that Mexicans along the border were “deadly hostile to every American, unless he is a Negro or mulatto.”
As tensions along the border increased, Mexico embraced the notion of itself as the United States’ opposite: a society where slavery not only did not exist but was unthinkable. When it came time for Mexico to rewrite its constitution in 1857, delegates opened the document with the statement that the “rights of man are the foundation and the objective of all social institutions.” The constitution’s next article reaffirmed Mexico’s prohibition on slavery and added that all “slaves that set foot on national territory recover their liberty by this fact alone.” Since the only contiguous territory from which slaves might enter into Mexico was the United States, this measure represented a clear rebuke to the republic’s northern neighbor.
To Mexicans, such resistance to slavery became a source of national pride, confirming the emancipationist legacy of Hidalgo and Morelos. Mexicans celebrated incidents such as the one that took place in 1858, when a US ship carrying slaves ran aground at Cabo Rojo near Veracruz, requiring the captain to land all his passengers to repair the ship. Shortly afterward, Mexican officials showed up to proclaim that the slaves on the ship were now free because of their presence on Mexican soil. Manuel Rejon, military commander along the US-Mexico border, employed similar logic in 1862 to deny yet another Texan attempt to reclaim slaves in northern Mexico, stating to his American counterpart that “according to the laws of the Republic they [slaves] are considered free as soon as they step on Mexican territory.”
To Texians, in contrast, Mexico’s new constitution was “too outrageous . . . to bear.” “So you see that our neighbors, if we may dare to call them such, are doing all they can to injure the Texians’ cause: striving to break down our slave institutions by holding the false banner of liberty to our slaves,” contended plantation owner H. M’Bride Pridgen, one of the Weisigers’ new neighbors in Victoria. Hundreds of furious Texians signed petitions to Congress, calling for the United States to negotiate an extradition treaty with Mexico—or, failing this, to “wage war to the cannon’s mouth” with Mexico until it returned fugitive slaves.
It did not take much for this ire at the Mexican government to bleed over into suspicion of Texas’s ethnic Mexicans. Many Tejanos, having supported the Texan revolt in the 1830s or having fled peonage or military service in northern Mexico in the years hence, had their own disagreements with the Mexican government. Nonetheless, Texians erased such distinctions, rendering all persons of Mexican descent, whatever their citizenship or past behavior, plotters conspiring to undermine slavery. Opined one Texian, “For five dollars you can hire the Mexican to murder his next-door neighbor; but all the gold in the Southwest would not hire him to return a fugitive slave.”
Even had Mexico not pursued policies detrimental to US slavery, Tejanos by their very presence posed a problem for slaveholding Texians. Proslavery ideology in the United States pivoted on maintaining a sharp dichotomy between white and black, free and slave, each category separate and immutable. In the words of an 1857 report from the Texas House of Representatives: “All experience hath shown that while an inferior being, the negro is indisputably adapted by nature, to the condition of servitude to the white man.” In most other slave states, the absence of any significant population outside the black/white racial divide allowed such logic to go unquestioned. But this was impossible in Texas, which had more than twenty-five thousand Tejanos within its boundaries in 1850.
As peoples who were free but not necessarily white, Tejanos confounded the binaries at the heart of the proslavery defense. Ethnic Mexicans, in the words of one Texian, could be “as black as niggers”; nonetheless, they annoyingly considered “themselves just as good as white men.” Editorialized the San Antonio Standard: “A peon Mexican can claim the political and civil privileges of a white man and may thus become instrumental to much mischief.” Anglo anxieties about Tejanos’ uncertain racial status manifested itself in the widespread use of the epithet “greaser,” with its connotations of indeterminate color. “A ‘greaser,’” explained one Texian, “was a Mexican—originating in the filthy, greasy appearance of the natives.” Embedded within these allusions to hygiene were deeper Anglo obsessions with racial mixing. Spanish colonialism had created in Mexico a population that combined European, African, and native backgrounds; by the end of the eighteenth century, in fact, some 80 percent of Mexicans possessed some degree of African or indigenous ancestry.
Racial mixing had also taken place in the United States, of course. Of the eleven slaves in Joseph Weisiger’s household at the time of the 1860 census, more than half, like Mary, Charles, and William, were described as mulattoes. And, although the fact was deeply obscured for obvious reasons, there were those whites whose forebears included Native Americans or blacks. But as proslavery thinkers increasingly turned to the idea of racial difference to justify the enslavement of African Americans, mixing across racial lines became an anathema, abhorred because it demonstrated that the races were not, in fact, so separate after all. Slavery’s defenders might assert that black-white offspring were like mules, the product of the sexual congress of two different species and destined not to reproduce themselves—the mulatto “cannot extend his race for he has no race,” insisted one proslavery writer; “there is no place for him in nature.” But a quick stroll through any slave quarter or plantation kitchen told a quite different story.
As if their racial indeterminacy were not problem enough, “greasers” also blurred slavery’s social boundaries. Texians responded with alarm to scenes of “Peons and slaves [together] . . . playing at monte, smoking cigars, and drinking liquor.” Not only did such familiarity instill an unhealthy sense of freedom in the Texians’ property; it also was thought to encourage Mexicans to guide their newfound acquaintances across the border. “It is notorious everywhere,” editorialized the Colorado Citizen, “that the peons or greasers—forming about nine-tenths of the Mexicans—consort with negroes and continually incite them to murder their masters and escape into Mexico.” Tejanos, concluded another Texas slave owner, encouraged slaves “in all their bad habits, married them . . . and ran them off every day to Mexico.”
Above all, Tejanos posed the most basic challenge any racial order confronted: how to differentiate so-called races from one another. Newspaper accounts from the 1850s hint at the uncertainties of distinguishing blacks from Mexicans (a good number of whom, of course, possessed some African ancestry, however forgotten by Americans and Mexicans alike): horse thieves described as a “Mexican or a Mulatto”; runaway slaves who, it was warned, might “attempt to pass . . . as a Mexican” or who in “form and color . . . [could] well [be] taken for a Mexican Greaser.”
Not only could physical appearance be ambivalent; so, too, could cultural markers. Runaway ads often noted slaves who were familiar with Spanish, as in an 1851 ad for “Jim,” who reportedly “speaks a few words of Spanish.” For a few of these slaves, Spanish may even have been their native tongue: during Texas’s near decade-long interlude as an independent nation, planters regularly smuggled in slaves from nearby Cuba. But in other cases, the acquisition of Spanish speaks to the intimacy of interactions between slaves and Tejanos. “One of my grandfadders [was] a old Mexican man call[ed] Old Man Caesar [César],” explained former slave Virginia Newman. Another Texas ex-slave attributed his wife’s light appearance to the fact that “her papa’s name was Juan and he was a Mexican.”
In antebellum Texas, of course, the stakes in differentiating African Americans from Mexicans remained profound, as a peculiar court case from the 1850s illustrates. In October 1857, the San Antonio sheriff arrested a woman named Dolores Brown on the suspicion that she was a runaway slave. At first glance, the evidence against Brown appeared overwhelming. Not only did she have an Anglo surname and “associate . . . with negroes”; local Tejanos “said she was not a Mexican.” Brown, however, contended that none of these findings constituted proof that she was a fugitive slave and filed for habeas corpus. In court, she offered up the story that she had been born near Victoria “upon the Guadalupe River, of Mexican parents.” As a young girl, she had traveled through Georgia and Alabama with a man named Brown, whose last name she adopted. When no one stepped forward in court to identify her as having escaped from their plantation, and with some witnesses deciding upon closer examination that Brown had “none of the features of a negro,” the court ruled “in favor of freedom.” Brown was, it concluded, “a free person of Mexican descent” and to be “discharged by the sheriff from further imprisonment.” As this ruling highlighted, as ambivalent as the racial identity of Mexicans might be, only blacks could be slaves in Texas—a judgment that opened up a space for at least a few African Americans to escape slavery by fleeing not to Mexico but to an ethnic Mexican identity instead.
Unable to resolve the challenges of racial classification that Tejanos represented, Texians opted instead to eliminate them. Beginning in the 1840s and with gathering fury in the 1850s, Anglo Texans expelled Tejanos from scores of communities. One of the earliest expulsions took place in Gonzales County in 1845, after an ill-fated Mexican, accused of assisting a slave to escape, was given one hundred and fifty lashes and then branded on the forehead with the letter T for thief. Nine years later, the movement spread to Austin. An influx of Mexican laborers into the state capital triggered a mass meeting chaired by the city’s mayor. Claiming that “we have among us a Mexican population who continually associate with our slaves, and instill into their minds false notions of freedom, and make them discontented and insubordinate,” those gathered vowed to expel all of Travis County’s Mexicans, save those “vouched for by some responsible American citizen.” That same year, Seguin County, too, expelled its Mexican “peons.” Matagorda and Colorado Counties followed in 1856, and Uvalde in 1857, the latter adding for good measure that “no Mexican should pass through that county without a pass from some reliable white man.” The result was a piecemeal policy of ethnic cleansing that inhibited African American contact with Tejanos across a substantial portion of the state.
The same fears behind the expulsion of ethnic Mexicans also breathed life into one of the greatest terrors of any slave-owning society: an uprising of the enslaved. In the 1850s, repeated rumors of rebellion and flight to Mexico roiled Texas. In September 1856, in Colorado County, several slaves were accused of hiding guns and ammunition in a creek bottom with the intention to launch an uprising and “fight their way to Mexico.” The county’s Vigilance Committee whipped two supposed ringleaders to death before turning on the local Mexican population. The committee charged “every Mexican in the county” with being connected to the plot, even contending that one Tejano had served as the revolt’s “prime mover.” Committee members demanded that all the Mexican residents of Colorado County leave, never to return, upon pain of death.
The following month, the panic reached the Weisiger plantation. In October 1856, Anglos in Lavaca, DeWitt, and Victoria Counties unearthed a seemingly vast conspiracy: hundreds of slaves who planned to seize weapons and fight their way to Mexico. It was even said that the slaves had taken the precaution of “kill[ing] off all the dogs” so the canines could not warn whites when the slaves launched their attack. Unlike in nearby Colorado County, however, in Victoria these fears of a supposed slave insurrection did not transform into a vendetta against the ethnic Mexican community. Texians remained convinced that any uprising among their otherwise contented slaves required an outside agitator. But in Victoria, this role fell not to Tejanos but instead to a local white: the supposed ringleader of the slave revolt, he was “severely horsewhipped” before being ordered to leave the county.
This deviation from the usual script underscores the unique conditions prevailing in the Weisigers’ and Ellises’ new home. Scholars have observed that Texas represented a crossroads where the Mexican North and the American South bled into one another. But within the state itself, the spaces where the two regions overlapped were, in fact, quite small. Eastern Texas had been settled primarily by Southern whites and enslaved blacks, beginning with Stephen Austin’s first colonization grant in 1821. The vast swath of western Texas between the Nueces and the Rio Grande Rivers, a perilous no-man’s-land during the 1840s when it had been claimed by both Mexico and the United States and plagued by Comanche raids, remained predominantly Tejano, with ethnic Mexicans outnumbering Anglos almost nine to one in the 1850s. Only in a small portion of central Texas did Anglo Americans, African Americans, and Tejanos overlap with one another to any appreciable extent—and this section shrank considerably in the 1850s, as many counties expelled their Tejano communities.
At the heart of these intersecting regions lay Victoria. The town had begun its life as the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas. On April 13, 1824, the former military officer Martín De León obtained a grant from the Mexican government to settle with forty-one followers on the lower Guadalupe River. As the grant’s empresario, De León was empowered not only to plot the new town’s central plaza and streets, for which he selected a wooded bluff overlooking the Guadalupe, but also to distribute land to the colonists. Since many of those accompanying De León were his family members, including his wife and ten children, the result of Martín’s contract was, as he no doubt intended, to convert his clan into the town’s largest property holders.
Not all of the required forty-one colonists accompanied De León from Tamaulipas, however, so Martín ended up filling his quota with outsiders from Ireland, France, Germany, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere who had drifted into the region. This move drew the ire of Mexican officials, who preferred to settle De León’s grant exclusively with Mexicans as a buffer against the growing Anglo colonies of Austin and others, but Martín’s open-handed policy ended up serving his family well. After the Texan Revolution of 1835, many Tejanos lost their holdings as newly ascendant Anglos used everything from cash purchases to physical violence to wrest land from ethnic Mexicans. In contrast, Fernando De León, Martín’s oldest son, successfully waged a series of lawsuits that removed scores of Anglo squatters from the family’s property. Key courtroom testimony supporting Fernando was provided courtesy of Victoria’s early non-Mexican colonists, such as the Irish-born John “Juan” Linn, a former business partner of Martín’s turned state senator, and Linn’s brother, Edward, a local surveyor.
Fernando’s legal triumph ensured that the De León family would remain one of Victoria’s largest landowners for much of the nineteenth century. With property came other rewards. In a region where interactions between Texians and Tejanos could be rigidly circumscribed—only a handful of possible intermarriages between Anglos and ethnic Mexicans show up in Victoria’s 1860 census, for instance—the De Leóns enjoyed a rare social acceptance. They were treated less as Tejanos and more as one of the town’s “old Spanish families.” Younger male members of the family adopted Anglo nicknames, with Francisco De León, Fernando’s adopted son, becoming “Frank” and his cousin Silvestre De León being known as “Sil,” and both socialized and did business with Anglo partners. Tejanos and Texians alike addressed older members of the family as “Don” and “Doña.”
The De León family’s tenacity in retaining its lands played a pivotal role in making Victoria the point at which the Anglo-dominated plantation belt in Texas transitioned to the Mexican-dominated ranching zone. The 1860 census captured this divide with great clarity. Census tallies showed slaves representing 34 percent of the population in Victoria. To the east, in the heart of the Anglo-dominated plantation zone, Wharton and Brazoria Counties recorded slave populations as high as 80 percent—rates that were among the highest in the nation. But to the west, between Victoria and the border, percentages plummeted. Only nearby San Patricio had any appreciable population of slaves (15 percent of the population). Many counties along the Rio Grande had few slaves or none at all.
The overlap in Victoria between Anglo plantation slavery and Mexican ranching produced a number of curious juxtapositions. Although census data record no Tejanos serving as overseers—a position instead dominated by white men from the Deep South, possessing little property but skilled with a whip or club—there existed a handful of ethnic Mexican slave owners. For years, the patriarch of the De León family, Fernando, had a black manservant, purchased during a trip to New Orleans. According to the 1860 census, Fernando’s widow, Luz, owned a twenty-three-year-old mulatto woman, while Carlos De La Garza, Frank De León’s neighbor, owned three slaves.
For their part, some Anglos incorporated the ranching lifestyle of their Tejano neighbors. As one early county history noted, although cotton was Victoria’s “chief agricultural export,” many of the “principal planters,” including the Weisigers, were also involved in ranching. Joseph and Daniel registered a brand for their cattle in June 1854, not long after their arrival in Victoria, and Joseph Weisiger appears in the 1860 census as the proud possessor of one of the town’s largest herds: 1,600 cattle and 60 sheep. Many plantations in the area became hybrid operations, mixing cotton cultivation and ranching together, and relying upon a labor force that combined both slaves and Mexican ranch hands. During his 1854 trip to Texas, which included several stops in Victoria, Frederick Law Olmsted noted slaves “working indiscriminately with hired Mexicans” in the region’s cotton fields.
When Ellis later depicted his birthplace in works such as Herringshaw’s American Blue-Book of Biography as “the Mexican frontier,” he was engaged in an obvious attempt at obfuscation, designed to conjure up a background more acceptable than the slave quarters of a Texas cotton plantation. But it nonetheless contained a grain of truth. Victoria did, in fact, demarcate a significant boundary point. In theory, the post-1848 Mexico-US border was located some two hundred miles to Victoria’s southwest. In practice, however, it was Victoria rather than the international boundary where many of the era’s most prominent fault lines evinced themselves: the demographic transition from a predominantly English-speaking Anglo-American and African American population to one that was Spanish speaking and ethnically Mexican; and the economic shift from cotton cultivation and plantation slavery to cattle ranching and haciendas.
JOSEPH WEISIGER AND his slaves experienced Victoria’s cotton boom in profoundly different ways. For the doctor, moving to Texas allowed him to capitalize on a seemingly insatiable global demand for cotton fiber. It fell to the Ellis family, however, to perform the backbreaking labor of transforming acre upon acre of tall-grass prairie into a monoculture of densely packed cotton plants. Cotton flourished in river bottoms that ran through the Weisiger plantation, where frequent floods left behind rich layers of silt. But there was only so much bottomland available, and such terrain could be irregular and difficult to till. To plant cotton on a large scale, it was necessary to cultivate the plains as well—and to do so, one had first to rip up the thick mat of roots binding together the head-high grasses that grew there, so that one could reach the topsoil beneath. Although this was occasionally done through the simple human labor of digging with a shovel, more often sod busters used a powerful wrought-iron plow drawn by several yokes of oxen, one of the few animals with the strength to tear through the dense roots underlying the prairies.
Once the soil hidden under the prairie grass had been uncovered, it was transformed into the base for a new ecosystem, one devoted exclusively to the cotton plant. Most plantations began the yearly cotton cycle in February and March, when seeds were selected and planted. The young cotton plants that sprouted soon afterward needed to be “chopped” periodically. Gangs of slaves would move along the rows, using heavy hoes to uproot (“chop”) any weeds growing among the cotton seedlings. Chopping dominated most of the hot summer months: as the cotton plants grew in the Texas sun, so, too, did the cotton’s competitors for soil and light. The cotton plants bloomed in August, a creamy white blossom that soon darkened to a deep red. As the petals dropped off, they left behind pods nestled in a dense cluster of cellulose fibers. Over time, these seedpods opened into bolls, exposing the fibers within. At this point, labor on the plantation transitioned to the all-important task of picking. Toting baskets or dragging long sacks, slaves walked between the rows of cotton plants for as long as there was light to see, selecting by hand the ripe bolls for transportation to the ginning house, where the cotton fibers would be mechanically separated from the seeds via a cotton gin. The resulting “lint” would then be packed into bales using an enormous screw press, which generated bales of some 400 to 500 pounds. Since bolls matured unevenly, picking lasted well into winter, as slaves took multiple passes over the same rows of cotton plants.
When conditions were right—when there was enough rain but not too much, when frost did not come too early and the sun did not shine too hot, when the insects and other pests that flourished in monocultures did not damage too much of the crop—a cotton plantation could generate extraordinary returns. In 1860 alone, the Weisiger plantation produced ninety bales of cotton, worth approximately $4,000 (over $115,000 today). Just one fragment of the Lone Star State’s total output of 431,000 bales, the Weisigers’ harvest, like those on neighboring plantations, was destined for the booming textile mills of New England and Great Britain. Every almost weightless boll of cellulose consumed by the cotton industry, however, reflected the vast input of human labor essential to sustaining an unnaturally simplified ecosystem devoted to the cultivation of a single plant—labor provided overwhelmingly by enslaved peoples like Mary and her sons, Charles and William.
Any hope of escaping the Cotton Kingdom by running to Mexico faced daunting obstacles. After Victoria’s supposed slave revolt in 1856, Texians tightened their surveillance of local slaves. Every night at 9 p.m., watchmen rang the town bell, after which, according to Victoria’s curfew law, “all slaves, or persons of color, Mexicans excepted, [were] required to be at their respective houses.” Any slave violating the curfew was subject to five to twenty lashes. To enforce these measures, Victoria created a patrol to “discipline . . . our colored community” and exercise “special vigilance” over interactions between slaves and Tejanos.
Family circumstances further constrained the Ellises. The most likely slaves to hazard a dash for the border were young men like Charles and William. But fleeing would have meant leaving behind their mother, Mary, perhaps the sole family member from Kentucky with whom they retained a connection. Moreover, after 1858, Charles had a new commitment to consider: he had fathered a daughter, Elizabeth, with one of the other slaves on the Weisiger plantation, a young woman named Margaret Nelson (later, her son William would rework her name into the more Mexican-sounding Marguerita Nelsonia). Recognizing that eluding patrollers and bloodhounds across the miles of forbidding chaparral between Victoria and the border with an infant child in tow was next to impossible, Charles and Margaret settled for a more discreet form of resistance: giving their new-born daughter the middle name Reina, Spanish for “queen,” subversively suggesting both forbidden contact with ethnic Mexicans and the elevation of a slave to nobility.
As the Ellises looked to Mexico as a potential escape, the Weisigers glanced longingly to the south as well. Gossypium hirsutum, the cotton cultivated in the Southern states, was a hybrid created in the 1820s through the introduction of seed from Mexico. Resistant to rot and quick growing, so-called Mexican cotton was prized above all for the size of its pods. “The superiority of the Mexican,” explained the Year-book of Agriculture in 1856, “consists in . . . the size of the boll . . . affording a facility for gathering by which three times the quantity above any other cotton can be picked in a given time.” As a result, all other varieties in the US South had by the 1840s “given way to the Mexican,” and newspapers in Texas regularly advertised the availability of “White Mexican Cotton Seed.”
For Texians, planting “Mexican cotton” on land that not so long ago had been part of Mexico underscored the Cotton Kingdom’s expansive possibilities. As observers in the 1850s pointed out, “about one-half of Mexico lies within the tropics,” the same zone that was the natural home of the cotton plant and African peoples. If cotton was a “native of the tropics,” so, too, was the Negro, “and the instinct of his nature prompts . . . him onward to his original and final home.” The cotton plant, the slaves who cultivated it, and the masters who oversaw them: all seemed destined by nature itself to spread across the continent together.
Yet if Texian planters envisioned expansion as a natural process, ethnic Mexicans saw it as an all-too-human grasp for land. These pressures operated not only across the border, with many Anglo-Americans openly desiring more of northern Mexico, but also within Texas itself, where Texians continued to displace Tejanos from their property. In 1859, these tensions erupted into open conflict when a Tejano rancher named Juan Cortina organized an armed group that briefly occupied the border town of Brownsville in protest against Anglo attacks on Tejano landowning. “Many of you have been robbed of your property, incarcerated, chased, murdered, and hunted like wild beasts, because your labor was fruitful, and because your industry excited . . . vile avarice,” Cortina told his fellow ethnic Mexicans. “Our personal enemies shall not possess our lands.”
To Texians, Cortina, who soon sought refuge across the border in Mexico, was little more than a simple “robber.” Nevertheless, his actions seemed to risk spiraling beyond mere banditry into a plot, in the words of one Texian, to “reconquer our country as far as the Colorado River” and ignite a new war between the United States and Mexico. “Events have carried us forward,” editorialized San Antonio’s Ledger and Texan, “until what commenced in a foray of banditti, is now become a war of races, and is becoming a war of nations.” Within a matter of months, US Army troops—including a then-obscure lieutenant colonel named Robert E. Lee—would be venturing across the border into Tamaulipas in search of Cortina, where they hazarded colliding with elements of Mexico’s National Guard.
When war came, however, it was not between the United States and Mexico. Rather, internal instead of external conflicts tore each nation apart. North of the border, the United States’ westward expansion into areas once belonging to Mexico exposed deep tensions over slavery that erupted into the Civil War. South of the border, the national contraction that followed defeat at the hands of the United States resulted in the War of Reform, pitting Mexican liberals and conservatives against one another as both sought to rebuild Mexico along competing models. Usually thought of as distinct defining traumas, these events might better be approached as simultaneous civil wars (or, if one prefers, simultaneous wars of reform). For all the issues distinguishing the two conflicts—the role of the Catholic Church in Mexico, the existence of slavery in the United States—they were linked by shared tensions over the meaning of citizenship and the question of how to create a national government that struck the appropriate balance between federal and local power.
Mexico’s war came first. The Revolution of Ayutla deposed the dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1854; armed conflict between liberals and conservatives soon followed. North of the border, hostilities came in 1861 after Texas and ten other Southern states left the Union and created the Confederate States of America. In its formal declaration of secession, Texas not only decried the prospect that the Northern states might tamper with the “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery” but also pointed to its vulnerable condition as a border state. Mexico had long harbored an alarming mix of escaped slaves, Mascogos, followers of Juan Cortina, and Comanche Indians. Yet the federal government, charged Texas’s Secession Convention, had “almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico.”
Victoria voted overwhelmingly in favor of secession (313 in favor versus 88 opposed), and many of the town’s young Texians enlisted in the Confederate Army. Dr. Joseph Weisiger’s son Robert served as aide de camp for General Arthur P. Bagby of the 7th Regiment of Texas Mounted Volunteers. Another son, William, raised a company of mounted men for “Special Service on the Western frontier.” In contrast, most of Victoria’s Tejanos, viewing the great contest between North and South as an alien affair, enrolled not in the regular Confederate Army but instead in units like the Victoria Cavalry Company, a militia dedicated to defending the nearby coast. There were exceptions, however. As befitted his closer contacts with the Texian community, “Sil” De León volunteered for the same cavalry unit as Robert Weisiger and saw service in the bloody Louisiana campaign before being captured by Union forces and spending the rest of the conflict in a prisoner of war camp.
The departure and, in some cases, death of Victoria’s young men was not the only change war brought. The Union naval blockade of the Texas coast made the previous practice of shipping cotton via Port Lavaca impossible. Many planters turned to the only remaining option—the overland route to Mexico—dispatching long convoys of oxcarts south toward the border. The lone sea outlet not just for neighboring Texas but for the entire Confederacy, the border port of Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, soon became one of the most commercially vibrant locales in all of Mexico—a bustling hub of intrigue, awash in all manner of refugees and hustlers: Southern deserters, Texan unionists, Union and Confederate agents, runaway slaves, and European dealers in cotton, armaments, and other supplies.
Matamoros served as an important entrepôt, too, for Mexico. In 1862, the War of Reform gave way to foreign intervention. Under the pretext of forcing Mexico to repay the debts incurred during its recent conflict, the French invaded and installed an Austro-Hungarian noble named Maximilian as the “emperor” of Mexico. President Benito Juárez and his supporters retreated to the Mexican North, where Juan Cortina, now the governor of Tamaulipas and a general in the Mexican Army, oversaw the flow of customs fees and foreign arms into Matamoros.
IN JUNE 1864, the conflicts in the United States and Mexico were grinding through another year of bloodshed. The massed armies of Grant and Lee were engaged in brutal siege warfare to the north of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. In Mexico, Emperor Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, had just arrived in that nation’s capital to assume their short-lived throne, while Juárez collected his forces along the US-Mexico border in Chihuahua. Not far across the boundary line, in Victoria, Margaret, then about nineteen, had begun to feel the swelling abdomen and faint, first kicks that revealed that she was pregnant with her and Charles’s second child. This time, the infant would be a boy, named William Henry Ellis after his uncle.
A slave born to slaves, Margaret’s newborn possessed no birth certificate recording his exact birthday. Later accounts would give varying dates, from June 10 to June 15 to June 24. But whatever the precise day, because of luck or fate or some other reason, his birth took place at a moment when the old order was beginning to collapse around him and the new had yet to take shape. As his parents cradled their newborn son in their arms amid the crude slave cabins on the Weisiger plantation and imagined what his future might hold, they had no way of knowing that in a little more than a year, the centuries-old institution of slavery would collapse in the United States, bringing to an end the largest and most profitable slave society in the Western Hemisphere. Nor could they have known that after decades of political tumult, Mexico would establish a new regime that would invite renewed US involvement in its affairs. A child born along the fault line where the United States and Mexico merged into one another, where black blended with white, where slavery was in its death throes but where its replacement remained uncertain, the infant William would find himself inhabiting a world filled with pressing questions as he grew to adulthood. If he was not to remain a slave, what was he to become? What race should he identify with given his mixed background and ambiguous appearance? Did his future lie in the United States—or across the border in Mexico?