• Episode 54 – Antebellum Texas – Ready To Secede

  • Nov 16 2024
  • Length: 21 mins
  • Podcast

Episode 54 – Antebellum Texas – Ready To Secede

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  • This is Episode 54 - Antebellum Texas - Ready to Secede. – the state and stage is set for secession. We are getting closer to Civil War. In the previous episode I discussed how important slaves and slavery was to the economic engine of Texas during the antebellum period. However, it is interesting to note that the majority of Texans did not own slaves and had no participation in the cotton or cash-crop industries. It’s estimated that about only one in four families actually had even a single slave and most had fewer than five. The planters who owned more than ten slaves actually held over half of all those people that were held in bondage in the state. A percentage of these people also made large profits from their investments in land, labor, and cotton and they played a major role in driving the Texas economy. Antebellum Texas gave birth to what would become agricultural Texas. Agriculture began to develop quickly and steadily with an ever-increasing number of farms being established. Those farmers worked hard to expand the land that was tillable, which in turn helped to increase the value of their livestock and the total yield of their crops. Of course, slave labor was an important asset and contributor to that economic growth. Unfortunately, during this same time period, industry, finance, and urban growth stagnated. During the decade of the 1850s approximately 1 percent of the heads of households in Texas worked in manufacturing. In 1860, Texas industries produced a meager 6.5 million dollars’ worth of goods, as opposed to the northern state of Wisconsin which produced close to 28 million dollars’ worth of manufactured goods. Due to the Texas constitutional prohibition on banking, the finance or commerce industry also lagged behind other states and less than 5 percent of the citizens worked in it. Due to the limitations on industry and commerce, the urban areas of Texas were sparsely populated and in 1860 only San Antonio, Galveston, Houston, and Austin could actually be considered cities. Their combined populations of about 23,000 was less than Milwaukee’s. When we look at antebellum Texas and wonder why there was a failure to create a more diversified economy we find several valid reasons. Geography is one, Texas has a great climate and in both Central and East Texas the soil is very suitable for crop production. The continued reliance on slaves also served to slow down the growth of any type of manufacturing, since plantation production was much more profitable due to lower labor costs. With the plantations being profitable there was no real incentive to expand outside of agriculture. Because the plantation owners were some of the richest most powerful people in Texas, they would have had to lead Texas in any move to diversify the economy. They could see no possible return on their investment that would make them more money than their current system, so they made no effort to change. The one part of the Texas experience the plantation owners did have a vested interest in seeing improved was transportation. The early settlers of Texas had always used the rivers as their primary transportation routes. While the rivers could be an excellent way to travel during most of the year, heavy rains, or the opposite drought and low levels which helped to expose sand bars, made the rivers very unreliable. The roads, which were nothing but dirt trails turned into massive mud pits during the rainy season, (even now they still become that way in some parts of Texas) and so wagon transportation was slow and cumbersome. In fact, I was often told of how my great-grandfather William Ollie Wilson who was born in 1860 and drove a freight wagon in the 1880s, would normally make the trip from Johnson City Texas to Marble Falls Texas in about 3 days, yet in the rainy season it could easily take him more than a week to cover the same 23 miles. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).
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