Fresh off the Scanner — The Nacogdoches Copy Books Bound Volumes
Note: This post was originally published on January 24, 2018.
The bulk of the records that make up the Spanish Collection at the Texas General Land Office — including the more than 4,000 titles from the Spanish and Mexican periods — are housed in acid-free folders and archival boxes. But a number of important Spanish Collection records are found in bound volumes — books in which officials like surveyors, empresarios, and alcaldes (mayors, or more often, their secretaries) recorded their day-to-day activities.
The GLO’s most famous bound volumes from the Spanish Collection, without doubt, are two books related to Stephen F. Austin’s colony in Texas: the “Register of Families” and Austin’s “Registro” (a compilation of hand-copied land records from his first colony). However, there are dozens of other rare books in the Spanish Collection that deserve careful study as well.
The so-called “Nacogdoches Copy Books” — which have been digitized and are now available as complete PDF downloads on the GLO’s Map Store website — offer a particularly rich example. The copy books are essentially registers of the outgoing correspondence of the jefe político (or political chief) of Nacogdoches. Just as people today keep track of their outgoing email in a “sent” folder, the office of the political chief of Nacogdoches kept track of the letters he sent in bound books consisting of short, numbered entries organized by date.
In Mexican Texas, a political chief was an official appointed by the state governor to oversee a jurisdiction called a “department,” which itself contained various municipalities. Political chiefs thus stood between the governor and the members of elected ayuntamientos, or municipal councils, helping the governor to more efficiently administer the extensive territory of the state of Coahuila y Texas and bringing state officials closer to the populations they governed.[1] Originally, Texas had just one department — the Department of Béxar — and one political chief. In 1834, however, state officials created the Departments of Nacogdoches and Brazos in response to rapid population growth among the Anglo colonists of central and eastern Texas.
The three Nacogdoches copy books in the GLO’s archive, which collectively cover the period from August 1834 to December 1835, offer a window into the day-to-day business of this pivotal official, as well as a unique vantage point for studying the momentous events of the mid-1830s.
The three copy books are organized by the receiving entity or person: one book was kept for correspondence with the local ayuntamiento of Nacogdoches, one for letters sent to the secretary of the state government in Monclova, and one for communication with “various people,” including land commissioners, state and national officials, and even U.S. diplomats. The letters referenced were written by three men who held the office during 1834 and 1835 — Vital Flores (interim), Henry Rueg, and Radford Berry (interim).
The first of these books, Correspondence between the Political Chief of Nacogdoches and the Ayuntamiento (or CPCNA) reveals the extent of the political chief’s local power. The political chief intervened in judicial matters, administered elections, oversaw the creation of a civic militia, addressed issues of public security, and passed down decrees and orders from the state government. Many of the entries in the copy book give us an intimate glimpse into the conflicts and perils of life on Mexico’s far northeastern frontier.
In one entry from March 1835, Rueg informed the alcalde of Nacogdoches that he had received reports that the town’s Catholic church had been vandalized (perhaps by Protestants unhappy with Catholicism’s status as the state religion of Mexico). Rueg ordered that inquiries be made and punishments meted out. In another entry from the following month, Rueg passed down word from the state governor that citizens would be expected to contribute to civic defense in the face of an impending war with the Comanche.[2] Another entry from October 1835 shows that political chief ordered the alcalde of Nacogdoches not to issue any permits for public dances, “in view of the general unrest” of the time.
The second copy book, Political Chief of Nacogdoches to Secretary of State Government (PCNSS) gives researchers insight into the difficulties of governing the frontier territory surrounding Nacogdoches. Land conflicts — among colonists, American Indians, illegal squatters, and empresarios — appear often in the political chief’s letters. In March 1835, for example, Rueg informed the state government of an illegal American settlement on the Red River. In another entry from April 1835, he complained that an agent of the Galveston Bay & Texas Land Co. had disobeyed his order to respect the land claims of Cherokees and was committing “other abuses.”[3]
The entries also offer researchers a glimpse of the high political drama of 1835 from the political chief’s perspective. In April 1835, for example, Rueg informed the secretary of state of rumors that a customs office had been established at Anáhuac and requested that the governor be informed. Customs duties, of course, were at the root of the “Anáhuac Disturbances” later that summer — events that led Texas toward revolt against Mexico.
The third copy book, Political Chief Correspondence with Various People (PCNVP) covers letters sent to other parties at the local, state, national, and international levels. The political chief corresponded with a diverse array of interlocutors (Cherokee Chief Richard Bowles, U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth, acting Béxar political chief Juan N. Seguin, etc.) and the topics of the letters are likewise highly varied. In early 1835, for example, Rueg sent a letter to the Bishopric of Linares (in Monterrey) informing it of the death of Fray José Antonio Díaz de León and requesting the appointment of another priest — thus providing a vivid example of the entanglement of Church and state in Mexican Texas. The political chief also corresponded with General Martín Perfecto de Cos about the government’s response to the Anáhuac Disturbances in August 1835, and he wrote to (future Vice President of the Republic of Texas) Lorenzo de Zavala about the Santa Anna government’s order to apprehend him.[4]
All told, the Nacogdoches Copy Books paint a rich portrait of a frontier region of Texas at the end of the Mexican period, and the full PDF scans available now in the Map Store put them at researcher’s fingertips. The volumes are mostly recorded in Spanish, with no English translations available at this time; however a detailed description of each of the entries can be found in the Catalogue of the Spanish Collection, Part 2, pp. 147–178.
[1] David Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), pp. 26–27.
[2] Political Chief to Alcalde of Nacogdoches, April 3, 1835, CPCNA, p. 34, Records of the Spanish Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[3] Political Chief of Nacogdoches to Secretary of State Government, April 7, 1835, PCNSS, p. 49, Records of the Spanish Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
[4] Political Chief of Nacogdoches to Lorenzo de Zavala, August 20, 1835, PCNVP, p. 35. For more on efforts to capture De Zavala in Texas, see Margaret Swett Henson, Lorenzo de Zavala: The Pragmatic Idealist (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996), pp. 82–86.