Explain the role of slavery in the Texas economy.
Answers
Answer:
Americans of European extraction and slaves contributed greatly to the population growth in the Republic and State of Texas. Settlements grew and developed more land under cultivation in cotton and other commodities. The cotton industry flourished in East Texas, where enslaved labor became most widely used.
Answer:Since the Spanish landed in Texas in the seventeenth century (1600s) slavery has been a part of Texas history. In the beginning, slavery did not have deep roots in Texas, as the Spanish, and then the Mexican governments, attempted to settle the vast expanses of Texas. With the coming of the first Anglo-American settlers (mostly from the Southern United States) in the 1820s, slavery became a much more entrenched part of Texas society, namely due to the increased production of cotton in the region.
Slavery quickly became a contentious issue between Anglo settlers and the Mexican government, and contributed to the coming of the Texas Revolution in the fall of 1835. Upon earning its independence from Mexico in the spring of 1836, government officials of the newly founded Republic of Texas cemented the existence of slavery forever in the young nation's constitution. During the Republic period (1836-1845), the slave population in Texas continued to grow despite the new country's inability to establish a stable government or economy. Out of the Republic's estimated population of 38,470 in 1836, 5,000 were slaves. By 1845, 30,000 slaves resided in Texas.
After the annexation of Texas to the United States in 1845, the slave population of Texas boomed as tens of thousands of settlers flooded into Texas. By 1850, the slave population had jumped to 58,161. This boom was in part due to the state's vast expanse of cheap and fertile land, and new settlers saw an opportunity to create a cotton empire in Texas, and the use of slave labor played a central role in this vision. According to the 1860 census, the slave population had risen to 182,566, thus reflecting the importance of slave labor to the development of the Texas cotton economy. Texas in this period quickly became a point of tension in the growing sectional debates concerning slavery in the United States by 1850. The free states of the North feared the expansion of slavery into newly acquired lands in the West, while the slave states of the South feared for the continued existence of their "peculiar institution" if slavery could not expand westwarde.
This growing tension over the spread of slavery reached its zenith with the election of the Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and the secession of South Carolina from the Union in December of 1860. Texas officially seceded from the Union in February 1861, and joined the Southern Confederacy to protect slavery from "black Republicans" and abolitionists. Though slavery persisted in Texas relatively unscathed during the war, the crumbling of the Confederacy in 1865 brought an end to American slavery forever. On June 19, 1865, all the slaves of Texas received their freedom, bringing an end to two centuries of slavery in Texas.
Explanation: