In cinematic prose, Sam Haynes’s Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas (Basic Books) tells the story of Texas’s origins as a multi-ethnic, cultural mélange of Anglo-American colonists allied with Indigenous peoples, Hispanic landowners, free African-American merchants and English, Irish and German migrants.
All contributed to the Mexican province of Tejas y Coahuila’s revolt against Santa Anna led by Stephen Austin and Sam Houston in 1836 to establish a Texas Republic. As Haynes notes: “On the eve of the rebellion, Texas was region of extraordinary ethnic diversity, having been a place of convergence for the peoples of North American from more than a century.”
However, after the revolution, the practice of chattel slavery outlawed in 1829 (though not completely enforced) by the Mexican Constitution flooded the eastern Blackland prairies of the new republic. In 1845 “King Cotton” aided the state’s annexation into the United States as a slave territory (and later part of the Confederacy in the Civil War) instituting the evils of white supremacy in governmental, commercial and educational sectors, which linger to this day.
Unsettled Land reads like a piece of literary historical fiction, each chapter a short-story vignette (with punchy and picaresque titles such as An Elysium of Rogues) that retells Texas history as an ensemble chorus of multicultural voices belying the state’s ossified, and hyper-masculine Siege of the Alamo, Goliad Massacre, and Battle of San Jacinto origin myths (and respective John Wayne, and Billy Bob Thornton cinematic versions and Amazon Prime televisual Texas Rising rendering.)
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The story of Texas is certainly more than Davy Crockett, William Barrett Travis and James Bowie’s to tell and has become contested ground, due in part to shift in the state’s 21st-century demographics. Unsettled Land enters into this fray and counters the recent “Texas nationalist’' 1836 Project to promote a sanitised version of the state’s history. Haynes’ book also underscores the danger of republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s promotion of a Texas Legislature bill to deny tenure to university lecturers teaching “woke” perspectives, and dog-whistle touting of Texas in political ads as the “last great hope of the United States.” In the end, Haynes’ work offers a critical history of Texas, delivered like a collection of incisive and colourful campfire yarns.
Charles Travis lectures at University of Texas, Arlington and Trinity College Dublin
