*yawn*
The "hicks" in the 13 Colonies were on British soil. So what's your point?
Got jilted by a Texas Big-Haired gal, did ya? ;-)
Yes, the truth does matter, so I guess I'd better police up your pack of lies and innuendo.
1. The "hicks" (superfluous abuse noted, for handling later) in Texas were on Spanish soil, with any number of mercedes, labores, and leguas, also called sitios, granted by the Spanish crown. The persons responsible for issuing the mercedes were in the first place the King of Spain, then Viceroy Apodaca in Mexico City, to whom answered General Joaquin de Arredondo, Commandant of the Interior. Governor Antonio Martinez of Texas reported to Arredondo, and Commissioners Juan de Veramendi and Erasmo Seguin reported to him. The commissioners dealt directly, and Martinez by correspondence from San Antonio de Bexar, with the empresarios Moses and Stephen F. Austin and Felipe Neri, Baron de Bastrop, who served as Austin's land commissioner. Other empresarios active in Texas in the first four or five years included Green DeWitt, another Missourian and former Spanish subject (as both Austins and Bastrop had been), who was commissioned by the governor of Coahuila, and Martin de Leon, who was commissioned in San Antonio. There were others, who were mostly failures and latecomers. Both the Spanish and Mexican governments permitted immigration from the United States until 1830, when there was a four-year hiatus.
Now that the picture is starting to clarify, are you beginning to back up any?
The settlers were required to swear and sign an oath of fealty to the Spanish Crown in return for the right to settle. The oath that they swore, changed only very slightly after Mexican independence in 1823, was as this example virtually word for word:
"In the name of God, Amen. In the Town of Nacogdoches before me, Don Jose' Maria Guadiana, appeared Don Samuel Davenport and Don William Barr, residents of this place, and took a solemn oath of fidelity to our Sovereign, and to reside forever in his Royal Dominions; and to manifest this more fully, put their right hands upon the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be faithful vassals of His Most Catholic Majesty, to act in obedience to all laws of Spain and the Indies, henceforth adjuring [sic] all other allegiance to any other Prince or Potentate, and to hold no correspondence with any other foreign power without permission from a lawful magistrate, and to inform against such as may do so, or use seditious language unbecoming a good subject of Spain."
Backing up yet?
Furthermore, Stephen F. Austin's own commission from Governor Martinez had a special codicil, written by Martinez himself, which read as follows:
" I shall also expect from the prudence which your actions demonstrate, and for your own peace and prosperity, that all the families you introduce shall be honest and industrious, in order that idleness and vice may not pervert the good and meritorious who are worthy of Spanish esteem and the protection of this government, which will be extended to them in proportion to the moral virtue displayed by them." [Emphasis added]
Stephen F. Austin responded by excluding mountain men, frontiersmen, "leatherstockings", gamblers, professional hunters, and drunkards. He drove out a number of families which didn't measure up, and even had some men publicly flogged before expulsion. Only four persons out of Austin's original Old Three Hundred were functionally illiterate. Persons who showed substance, or brought capital or livestock to the colony, were extended additionial sitios.
They refused to accept Mexican authority and started the war in 1835.
Totally, irresponsibly false. The war began in April, 1834, when President Santa Anna took over the Mexican government, denounced liberalism, voided the liberal laws that had been passed under the Constitution of 1824, and sent his brother-in-law, General Martin Perfecto de Cos, to crush the 5000 constitutionalist militia which refused to stand down in Zacatecas. General Cos crushed the militia, took no prisoners, and then allowed his army to plunder and rape the state capital.
Stephen F. Austin was in jail and so was unavailable to act as a lubricant while the central government voided the liberal laws of the legislature of Coahuila at Saltillo, to which Texas answered, and sent General Cos north to suppress the recalcitrant liberals there. Texans really noticed when a bloodstained Mexican army arrived on the Rio Grande and started stepping on people. They noticed just a whole lot when General Cos finally said the magic word, that maybe it was time to clean out Texas. Wrong word.
If you want to read the entire story of the war for Texas independence, and how matters went from 1833, when Col. Juan Almonte, on a special presidential mission to Texas to measure treasonous sentiment, found none, but instead a lot of goodwill, President Gomez Farias having restored the liberal constitution and laws, to open blows in 1835, then I suggest the standard manual of Texas history, T. R. Fehrenbach's Lone Star, A History of Texas and the Texans. Read it, and you won't embarrass yourself like that in public any more.
Indeed it does. So let's correct the historical inaccuracies in your post:
The hicks in the nacent Texan Republic were on Mexican soil.
Indeed they were, as they had settled there on Mexico's invitation under the Mexican government established by the 1824 Constitution.
They refused to accept Mexican authority and started the war in 1835.
Incorrect. The war began as a direct result of the usurpation of power in the Mexican government by Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana. Santa Ana operated as a dictator upon coming to power, and in doing so used force to dismantle opposition party factions in the Mexican government, including those in which the people of Texas had been allied. As a result of Santa Ana's dictatorship, Texan representation in the government of Mexico was basically eliminated, its home rule shifted hundreds of miles south, and its envoys to Mexico City imprisoned without reason. Military presence was then implemented to combat dissent, and in fact the first battle of the revolution occurred when Santa Ana's troops arrived at a frontier town to forcefully confiscate their cannon. It is further historical fact that the defenders of the Alamo flew the Mexican tri-color flag bearing the date 1824 signifying support for the legitimate constitution Santa Ana had trampled upon.
Their great contribution to geopolitical history, apart from the fact that John Wayne was one of them, seems to have been an unremitting insistence on the perpetuation of slavery.
Oh really? While it is true that Texas was a slave state, I seem to remember a census figure from a few decades after the revolution just prior to the war showing that slave holders in Texas constituted something less than 5% of the state's population - hardly what one would expect from the picture you paint. It is also true that the state's greatest hero, senator, and governor Sam Houston was a unionist opposed to the war.
Which Mexico didn't practice, BTW.
Untrue. While Mexico did not have institutionalized slavery, Santa Ana definately did practice enslavement of Mexico's peasantry in uncompensated forced servitude of his armies and himself.
The outcome, of course, was that the U.S. annexed Texas in 1846, starting the deeply unpopular Mexican-American War.
You mean the same "unpopular" war that propelled its greatest hero, Zachary Taylor, into the office of President of the United States?
While Thoreau and his yankee friends may have concurred with your sentiments about the war's purpose, in actuality the Mexican war came about as a result of Santa Ana's failure to honor the written terms of settlement at the conclusion of the Texas revolution along with the specified boundaries contained therein. Instead he and other Mexican forces had been waging open warfare inside the borders of Texas for the better part of the decade following its establishment as an independent republic in 1836.