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Peters
(Peters') colony was the name commonly applied to a North Texas
empresario grant made in 1841 by the Republic of Texas to twenty
American and English investors led by William S. Peters, an English
musician and businessman who immigrated to the United States in 1827
and settled in Blairsville and then Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Peters
viewed the colony primarily as a business venture. But, influenced
by his studies of the philanthropic ideas of William Godwin and
Thomas Paine, he may also have envisioned the colony as providing
new opportunities for the English industrial middle class. Half of
the investors were residents of England, and the other half were
residents of the United States. Of the Americans six were probably
related to Peters-three sons and three sons-in-law. All of the
original investors, except possibly one or two, were native
Englishmen. The headquarters of the Peters colony was in Louisville,
Kentucky, where Peters's son William C. operated a successful music
store. From this music store W. S. Peters and Samuel Browning,
Peters's son-in-law, departed in June 1839 to seek English support
for the colony. This was the first of several trips Peters made to
England and France on behalf of the colony. He returned from England
in July 1841 with news from the London investors, and in Austin on
August 30, 1841, Browning signed the first of four contracts with
the Republic of Texas.
The first contract established the boundaries of the colony as
beginning on the Red River at the mouth of Big Mineral Creek,
running south for sixty miles, then west for twenty-two miles, north
to the Red River and then east with the river to the point of
origin. According to the terms of the contract the empresarios had
to recruit settlers from outside the republic at a rate of 200
families in three years. In return the colonists were to be granted
320 acres per single man and a maximum of 640 acres per family. The
empresarios were allowed to retain up to one-half of a colonist's
grant as payment for services rendered, including land surveys and
title applications. The empresarios provided powder, shot, and seed
and in some cases built settlers' cabins. The empresarios also
received ten sections of premium land from the republic for each 100
families.
Insufficient unappropriated land within the boundary of the colony
led to a request for an extension of the boundary, which was granted
in a second contract, signed on November 9, 1841. This contract
extended the boundaries of the colony forty miles southward, but
also increased the number of required colonists to 800. On November
20 the Texas Agricultural, Commercial, and Manufacturing Company was
formed in Louisville, with the addition of seven Louisville
associates, to help offset the absence of financial backing from the
London investors. The new company sent the first group of immigrants
to the Cross Timbers area of Texas by steamboat as early as December
1841, but difficulties in attracting and keeping people in the
colony caused the company to request an extension of time and
another adjustment of the boundaries. By terms of a third contract,
signed by Sam Houston for the republic on July 26, 1842, the company
was given a six-month extension for the introduction of the first
third of the colonists, and the boundary was extended to enclose a
ten-mile-wide strip on the west and a twelve-mile-wide strip on the
east. In return for these concessions, however, the republic
reserved for itself each alternate section of land.
On October 3, 1842, the English investors transferred their
interests to three other Englishmen and three Americans who were
each scheming for control of the colony: Daniel J. Carroll, Sherman
Converse, and Charles Fenton Mercer. Converse, after persuading the
Louisville group to assign their rights to him, obtained a fourth
contract with the Republic of Texas on January 20, 1843. It gave a
five-year extension, to July 1, 1848, to fulfill the contract and
added over ten million acres to the west of the colony. When the
promises that Converse had made were not fulfilled, the Louisville
group, thinking themselves deceived, found additional investors and
reorganized as the Texas Emigration and Land Company on October 15,
1844. Under the leadership of
Willis Stewart,
an astute Louisville businessman and one of the new investors, the
company made good its claim to be the true owners of the Peters
colony. The confusion over ownership, however, discouraged
immigration to the colony, and by July 1, 1844, according to the
company's own agent, Ralph H. Barksdale, there were only 197
families and 184 single men in the colony. The company was further
hampered in its attempts to attract settlers by an ordinance passed
by the Convention of 1845 that required an investigation of all
colony contracts on the assumption that they were unconstitutional.
The company increased its problems by employing as its agent in 1845
the London-born Henry O. Hedgcoxe, whose foreign and officious
manners irritated the colonists and reinforced a commonly held
suspicion that the contractors were mere land speculators. An influx
of squatters into the colony also complicated the company's task of
administrating the colony.
Expiration of the contract on July 1, 1848, did not end the
company's difficulties. Land within the colony was now legally open
for the free laying of certificates that permitted new settlers to
obtain grants of 640 acres from the state. Many of the old settlers
thought that the company's claim to up to half of what they
considered their land was intolerable. The settlers demanded that
the legislature rectify an unjust situation. Their protest took the
form of mass meetings, petitions, and a colony convention, held in
Dallas on May 21, 1849. During the controversy John H. Reagan and
James W. Throckmorton, neither of whom were colonists, emerged as
leaders in the protest movement. In January 1850 the legislature
attempted to end the controversy by passing a law to secure the
colonists' claims. The legislation, which was detrimental to the
empresario company's interests, angered the stockholders of the
Texas Emigration and Land Company and led to litigation. A
compromise was reached on February 10, 1852, when the legislature
passed an act granting 1,700 sections of land in floating
certificates to the company. The colonists would have until July 1,
1852, to establish their claims, and the company would have 2˝ years
from that date to lay its certificates. The colonists immediately
opposed the compromise law and resolved to continue their fight. On
July 12, 1852, a citizens' committee forced its way into Hedgcoxe's
office in Collin County to investigate the Englishman's records. At
a mass meeting in Dallas on July 15, 1852, the committee issued an
unfavorable report on Hedgcoxe. On July 16, 1852, a contingent of
armed men from the Dallas meeting attacked Hedgcoxe's office and
drove him from the county in an incident that became known as the
Hedgcoxe War. A settlement was eventually reached, and the
compromise law was amended to extend the deadline for colonists to
file their claims to May 7, 1853. But it took nearly ten legislative
enactments over nearly twenty years to bring final settlement of the
land titles. The colony that helped settle North Texas brought
little if any profit to the investors and much disgruntlement among
the settlers. |
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Seymour V. Connor, The Peters Colony of Texas: A
History and Biographical Sketches of the Early Settlers (Austin:
Texas State Historical Association, 1959). Hans Peter Nielsen Gammel,
comp., Laws of Texas, 1822-1897 (10 vols., Austin: Gammel,
1898). William G. Hale Papers, Barker Texas History Center,
University of Texas at Austin. Peters Colony File, Texas State
Archives, Austin. Peters Colony Scrapbook, Barker Texas History
Center, University of Texas at Austin. Jules Jean Prudhommeaux,
Icarie et son fondateur, Étienne Cabet (Paris: Cornély, 1907;
rpt., Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1972). Vertical Files, Barker Texas
History Center, University of Texas at Austin (William S. Peters,
Peters Colony).
Harry E. Wade |
