Texas, in the short space of 15 years—1821 to 1836— became, and has remained, Anglo-American.

Certainly, this change came about because of military conquest, but only in part. The Texan victory at San Jacinto in April of 1836 was decisive not only for Texas but also for all of North America. Yet the battle was only a part of a settlement story.

In three centuries of rule, Spain had been able to place only some 4,000 settlers in the Texas province. And in 1821 Spain opened the land even to United States immigration. More than 30,000 Anglo-Americans arrived by 1836, many legally. The cultural revolution was largely over before military operations had begun.

The “Anglos” were not, and are not, a uniform group. They were largely English and Scottish and Welsh with liberal additions of Irish, Dutch, Danish, and German. The “English” themselves were a highly mixed Nordic-Germanic-Celtic stock. And many United States census counts accepted as Anglo-American anyone who said they were Anglo—or Caucasian or white, in some decades. Most individuals who came to Texas with this widely varied background had been living in the United States just long enough for accurate lineage to have slipped from mind...and from importance. Many were from the southeastern part of the United States, and all could have been called “United Statesians.”

Some traits were fairly common. These Anglos came to Texas with more accumulated frontiering experience than most; they were intensely individualistic and had first-hand knowledge of revolution and the peculiar experiment of self-government; and they regarded land as an exploitable, nearly consumable commodity.

Southern European traditions, at the time, held different and less competitive ideas.

Although some Anglo-American individuals are known to have been in Spanish Texas with permission—Peter Davenport was a Nacogdoches merchant by 1794—few arrived before 1821. In 1820 Jane Wilkinson Long followed her revolutionary husband, Dr. John Long, to Bolivar Point. Left there during an agonizing winter while her husband failed in his filibustering efforts, she gave birth to a third daughter, the first Anglo child known to have been born in Texas. Jane Long became a permanent Texas resident.

And many Anglos came to Texas with the idea that, Spanish or Mexican or whatever, Texas (and most of North America) was destined to be Anglo (and within the United States). They defined the destiny.

Anglo-Saxons, ever since their shift from north central Europe into Britain more than 1,400 years ago—creating new cultures and mixed races even then—have moved west as rulers and conquerors. The tiny battle of San Jacinto is thus the confirmation of an Anglo-American Republic of Texas and the end of southern European rule in most of North America.

Not that the revolutionary story is one-sided in terms of provocation. In 1824 the young Mexican government adopted a new constitution, which pleased many Anglo-American settlers in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas because of its similarities to the laws of their homeland. When Santa Anna abolished this constitution in his rise to absolute power, he directly incited revolution—not only among Anglos.

Thus, many of the Anglos beginning the insurrection later known as the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836, first fought as Mexican citizens against a hated tyrant. But the illegal government they set up was unquestionably revolutionary. The first Anglo governor, Henry Smith, spoke strongly for independence, as did Robert McAlpin Williamson, who was quickly known as “the Patrick Henry of the Texas Revolution.” He was proud of the title.

Even Anglos who had ties with the Spanish and Mexican governments and peoples were swayed. Erastus Smith, married into a local family and with no argument against Mexico, changed sides. He had been stopped by Mexican soldiers and not allowed to rejoin his family in San Antonio. James Bowie had been in Texas since 1828 and, like Smith, had married locally. Yet, after the loss of his wife, Ursula Veramendi, to cholera, he changed sides.

But most Anglo-American Texans on the side of independence, called Texians (and for a short while, Texicans), were newcomers. Only ten of the 59 delegates to the Convention of 1836 who signed the Declaration of Independence had been in Texas longer than six years. All but seven had been born in the United States.

Two of the signers were born in Mexico (as Spanish citizens in San Antonio de Béxar). One each was born in Scotland, Ireland, and England; one in Yucatán, Mexico; and one was French Canadian. But the other 52 were born in the United States and their parentage—however mixed—was northern European in heritage. They were Anglos.

In the wake of revolution and during the Mexican War that followed, many Mexican families departed or were driven south to what was left of Mexico. Even the architecture of the most significant Spanish town in Texas, San Antonio, changed to Anglo design. Little more than mission walls, dusty acequias, and the ghosts of the plazas remained.

Not until the Mexican Revolution, 80 years later, did immigration from Mexico again reshape the South and Central Texas population.

Thus, Anglo-American individuals, men and women alike, literally became the significant majority culture of the Republic and the State of Texas. This culture established English (in several dialects) as the language in use, the major economic patterns, many social customs, dominant forms of settlement and land use, and most laws and forms of political organization.

Many of the images of Texas—cotton, corn, cattle, and oil—were largely developed by, if not brought by, Anglos. Naturally, the Anglos learned from the range cattle operations of the Spanish; they absorbed Spanish language terms; they altered European law to fit the land; they used worldwide, and former, talents to exploit Texas's natural oil; and they did not raise cotton in Texas before the natives or the Spanish but did raise it on their own terms. In an economic sense, they improved on all.

Over the course of their story, Anglos became the stereotypical Texans in the world's eyes. Fortunately and unfortunately, stereotypes contain many falsehoods but also much truth.