Stephen Fuller Austin Built Texas Self-Government Before He Fought for It

Stephen Fuller Austin was born on November 3, 1793, at the lead mines of southwestern Virginia. Texans remember him as the Father of Texas for the settlers he brought. Less remembered is what he built for them: local elections, courts, a written code and a land record, all running in Mexican Texas more than a decade before independence.

From Potosi to San Felipe

Austin grew up in Potosi, Missouri, where his father, Moses Austin, mined and smelted lead. He studied for two years at Transylvania University in Kentucky, ran much of the family business and served several years in the Missouri territorial legislature. When the business failed, he moved to Arkansas, where the territorial governor named him a circuit judge in 1820. By December he was in New Orleans studying law.

Moses Austin had meanwhile won permission to settle 300 families in Texas, then died before he could start. His son took up the grant and reached San Antonio in August 1821. Governor Antonio Maria Martinez warned him that the government was not ready to administer the colonists and that Austin himself would answer for their conduct. The first settlers arrived that December.

The first colony came to 307 land titles for 297 grantees along the Brazos, Colorado and San Bernard rivers. Only seven grants were forfeited.

A government before there was one

With almost no state presence to lean on, Austin supplied one. He let the colonists elect their militia officers and their alcaldes, local judges much like justices of the peace. He drew up court forms and a simple civil and criminal code so the alcaldes ruled alike. When appeals from single alcaldes piled up, he set up an appellate court made of all of them, seven in the end.

He also fixed the land system. Mexican practice issued titles on loose sheets with no permanent record, so Austin won permission to record every title in a bound volume that carried the force of the original.

He pushed the state legislature to protect settlers who had fled debts in the United States. The law he secured closed the courts for 12 years to creditors seeking those debts and permanently shielded land, tools and implements of a man’s trade from seizure. The Handbook of Texas calls it “a sweeping homestead exemption law.”

Play the turtle

Austin’s rule for years was to stay out of Mexico’s political fights. “Play the turtle,” he told the colonists, “head and feet within our own shells.” He defended the policy in a letter in 1832: “There is no degradation in prudence and a well tempered and well timed moderation.”

By 1832 his colonies held 8,000 people, and Mexico City had grown anxious. The Law of April 6, 1830, aimed to stop settlement from the United States. Austin carried the colonists’ petitions to Mexico City in 1833 and won the law’s repeal. On his way home he was arrested in Saltillo in January 1834. He was held without charges, moved from prison to prison, and did not return to Texas until the end of August 1835, after 28 months away.

Back in Texas, he changed course. In a speech at Brazoria on September 8 he endorsed the call for a Consultation of Texas delegates. When fighting began at Gonzales, the volunteers there elected him to command, and he led them against the Mexican army at San Antonio.

He turned 42 in the field while delegates gathered at San Felipe. The Consultation chose Henry Smith over Austin for governor, 30 to 22. That November the provisional government named Austin a commissioner to the United States to raise loans and volunteers.

He lost the presidential election of September 1836 to Sam Houston and served as his secretary of state. He died in office on December 27, 1836, at 43.

In July 1836 he had written: “The prosperity of Texas has been the object of my labors, the idol of my existence.”