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accustomed to. But while each empresario acted as a one-man government, settling disputes and organizing militia and issuing rules and laws when necessary, the level of freedom enjoyed was extraordinarily high. No effort was made to enforce the Catholic religion, conscript soldiers, or levy taxes, even after the seven-year grace period had elapsed. The colonists were left alone to handle virtually every aspect of their lives. For most of them, the situation was more than tolerable.
    But events several hundred miles to the south would change everything.
    A FTER THE M EXICANS HAD OVERTHROWN their Spanish oppressors, they adopted a republican form of government in 1824 that was in some ways more liberal and federalistic than that of the United States. Battered by the country’s weak economy and inexperience with democracy, Mexico went through several leaders and coups d’état in the ensuing years, until one leader, the conservative Anastasio Bustamante, executed his predecessor. When his centralist party, desirous of curtailing states’ rights, extending privileges to the military and the Church, and effecting a regime headquartered in Mexico City, came to power in the early 1830s, things began to change—especially with respect to the nation’s most distant territory. Mexico regarded its neighbor to the north with great suspicion, convinced that the United States hungered after Texas. (In fact, the U.S. government had made several overtures about buying the area, and had tendered several offers for it, from the Adams administration onward.) Spurred by a detailed report that vividly described a plethora of industrious, thriving Anglos eager to re-create their United States on Mexican soil, the new regime decided to take action. A law passed in April 1830 provided for military occupation of Texas, in the form of garrisons in the larger municipalities, and called for customs houses to be erected in several towns, which would act as ports of entry and would collect duties on imports. Worst of all, any further American immigration was prohibited.
    The diplomatic Stephen Austin managed to obtain a temporary exemption from the immigration ban, but as troops—largely unschooled peasants pressed from the fields—began to march into Texas, the colonists’ dissatisfaction with the new regime continued to escalate. And with thousands of Americans each year illegally entering Texas across the Red River to the north and the Sabine to the east—many of them rough elements and squatters who felt less loyalty to Mexico than those who had received land grants—rumors of an American invasion, whether government-sponsored or fostered through independent filibustering schemes, increased, and Mexican distrust and jealousy kept pace.
    After another round of political maneuvers in Mexico City, an ambitious military hero of the revolution named Antonio López de Santa Anna—a tall, charismatic criollo hailed as the savior of Tampico, the coastal city where he had driven off an invading Spanish force—swept into power in late 1832. Since he fought on the federalist side, with those favoring the liberal constitution of 1824 and stronger states’ rights, Texians eager for separate statehood hailed the general’s victory and looked forward to his support. Bored with the actual work of running a country, and aware that the capital was a hotbed of centralists, the new president retired to his extensive hacienda in Jalapa, in the state of Veracruz, and left his liberal vice president, a former physician and professor named Valentín Gómez Farías, in Mexico City to run the country. But he kept his finger to the wind.
    A change in its direction was not long in coming. Farías initiated several expansive reforms, most of which reduced the power of the Church and the military, but resistance from those two institutions and the landed gentry pushed Mexico deeper into political chaos and potential civil war. Representatives of those three classes