This is Episode 48 – Slaves and Slavery in Texas Part 1 the early years - I’m your host and guide Hank Wilson. And as always, brought to you by Ashby Navis and Tennyson Media Publishers, producers of a comprehensive catalog of audiobooks and high-quality games, productivity, and mental health apps. Visit AshbyNavis.com for more information.
In this episode I’m going to talk about something that might make some folks a tad uncomfortable and that’s because this will be the 1st of 2 parts where I’m going to talk about slaves and slavery in Texas.
Slaves and slavery is a historical reality, not only in Texas but around the world. This program is focused on the history of Texas, so I won’t go into the world-wide history of slavery, or the fact that it still takes place around the world. I will also not discuss how the indigenous people who were on the continent before the Spanish bumped into it also made slaves out of their conquered enemies. That is for another episode that is in the planning stage that I’m working on about the history of the Americas before they became the Americas. No in this episode I will concentrate on the issue of the slaves and slavery of African people’s first by the Spanish, Portuguese, and English, and in the next episode I’ll discuss the issue as it took place under the Anglos who took over Texas.
The first slaves brought into what the Spanish called New Spain, now Mexico were in fact Africans taken from their homelands and brought to the continent as part of the 1519 invasion led by Hernán Cortés. After Cortes opened the door, after 1580 there was a steady stream of African slaves that were brought over because Portugal gave Spain easy access to the Portuguese slave network. By 1640 more that 275,000 Africans had been taken from their homelands and sent to New Spain. Since the slaves were considered commodities once it became less profitable the importing almost completely came to an end. By 1646, in a total population of over 1.7 million, New Spain’s African population, both native born and those born in New Spain, outnumbered Europeans 35,089 to 13,830. That’s enough about what happened in Mexico now let’s talk about Texas.
The first slave brought into Texas was Esteban, or Estevanico. He was one of four survivors of the failed Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to Florida, remember from earlier broadcasts, they were heading to Florida but took left instead of a right and ended up wrecking on the Texas coast in 1528. Estaban was the slave of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and was described by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who kept track of what happened to the survivors’ as they traveled through Texas and the Southwest, as a “Black Arab from Azamor.” Azamor is a Moroccan town on the coast that had been captured by the Portuguese in 1513....
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