Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas

by Gregg Cantrell

Overview

Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas," has long been enshrined in the public imagination as an authentic American hero, but one who was colorless and rather remote. This book, the first major biography in more than seventy years, brings Austin's private life, motives, personality, and character into sharp focus, revealing a driven man who successfully mixed effort and cunning, idealism and pragmatism to build an illustrious career. Gregg Cantrell traces Austin's early life from his privileged boyhood as the son of the Missouri mining baron Moses Austin to his family's humiliating financial downfall after the War of 1812. He tells how in 1821 Stephen Austin inherited his father's daring plan to colonize Spanish Texas. Over the next fifteen years Austin carried out this plan with dazzling success, becoming a consummate manager, exhorter, politician, and diplomat, and playing a central role in the events that led to the Texas Revolution and the establishment of the Lone Star Republic. Within a generation, as a result largely of forces that he helped set in motion, the United States completed its drive for mastery over the North American continent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300090932
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	08/11/2001
Series:	Lamar Series in Western History Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	510
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

GREGG CANTRELL received his PhD in history from Texas A&M University.  He holds the Erma and Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History at Texas Christian University, is a past president of the Texas State Historical Association, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Table of Contents

Author's Preface to the Reprint Edition ix

Acknowledgments xiii

A Note on Spelling, Punctuation, and Usage xvii

Introduction 1

1 A Foundation for Greatness, 1793-1810 15

2 Successes and Failures, 1810-1818 43

3 New Beginnings, 1819-1820 63

4 Texas, 1820-1821 80

5 Mexico, 1821-1823 104

6 Empresario Estevan F. Austin, 1823-1825 132

7 Staying the Course, 1825-1827 171

8 Crises, Personal and Political, 1828-1830 202

9 We Will Be Happy, 1830-1831 222

10 The Call of Duty, 1832-1833 247

11 Prison, 1833-1834 267

12 War Is Our Only Resource, 1835 297

13 The Road to Independence, 1835-1836 329

14 Home, 1836 348

Epilogue: The Father of Texas: Stephen F. Austin in Retrospect 365

Appendix 381

Notes 385

An Essay on Sources 452

Index 468

Interviews

Fort Worth, Texas 

Editorial Reviews

A penetrating look into the life of one of the greatest men in Texas history.

Laura Bush

An elegantly researched and reasoned portrait. —New York Times Book Review

Paula Mitchell Marks

Reads like a novel. . . . A fine book. —Houston Chronicle

Margaret Swett Henson

A splendid and long overdue new life of the acknowledged Father of (Anglo Texas. —San Antonio Express-News

T.R. Fehrenbach

[An] engrossing story. . . . Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas is a rewarding trip through history, a revealing account of one man's transformation from a businessman into a world-class statesman.
—Dallas Morning News

Robert Nash

Cantrell (history, Hardin-Simmons Univ.) has written the first major biography of Austin, the "Father of Texas," since Eugene C. Barker's Life of Stephen F. Austin (1925). Unlike his predecessor, who gave readers a sterile rendering of Austin, Cantrell seeks to understand this complex individual. The result is a biography in the truest sense as it follows Austin from his childhood to his death. Cantrell examines Austin in the context of his time and place but does not get distracted by the multiplicity of events surrounding the subject of his research. Cantrell's prose is lively and engaging, but ever the historian, he makes excellent use of primary sources in the United States and Mexico. While not all may agree with the conclusions Cantrell draws, e.g., that Austin offered lukewarm support to slavery, this remains a compelling and engaging account that will appeal both to the lay reader and scholar. Highly recommended.--Daniel D. Liestman, Kansas State Univ. Lib., Manhattan Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The first critical study in 75 years of the founder of Anglo-American Texas—an appealing figure who here has gained a shrewd and skilled biographer. Stephen Austin was born in the trans-Mississippi West and schooled in Connecticut, but he has forever been associated with the territory, then a part of Mexico, to which, in 1821, he led the first organized group of American colonists. Fifteen years later, Texas became an independent nation. As Cantrell (Hardin-Simmons Univ.) makes clear in this nuanced work, there could scarcely have been a more apt leader for so devilishly difficult a project. Austin mastered both the language and politics of independent Mexico and might have kept Texas part of that nation but for its leaders' ineptitude. Respecting to the limits of his considerable powers of understanding the ways of northern Spanish America, he tried, as Cantrell makes amply evident, to steer his growing colony loyally within the Mexican empire. But gradually Austin came to believe—to the point of being jailed briefly for treason—that independence was essential if his fellow colonists were to flourish and succeed. Yet despite his indispensable leadership, when independence came, his fellow colonists turned instead to San Houston to be the republic's first president. But Austin has remained in popular estimation ever since the "patriarch" of the Lone Star State, and Cantrell firmly keeps him there. This readable, always compelling, learned biography takes us deep into Mexican history and throws much light on the 19th-century American southwest. But most important, it also brings alive this complex, honorable, politically savvy loner who, haltered to the values andaspirations of his overbearing father, transformed parental expectations into a historically enduring project. A solid achievement of biographical art and modern western history that substitutes new evidence and current scholarship where myth and romance have long held sway.

Kirkus Reviews

"This book should be in every Texana library."—T. R. Fehrenbach 


“Stripping away the myths that have long surrounded (and shrouded) Stephen Austin, Gregg Cantrell has written a first-rate biography that gives readers a balanced—and better—appreciation of a man who did so much to shape the history of Texas, Mexico, and the United States.”—Stephen Aron

From the Publisher