Plantations in Texas: Slavery, Owners, and Emancipation

Plantations in Texas were large agricultural estates that produced cotton and sugar using the forced labor of enslaved people, operating from the early 1820s through the end of the Civil War in 1865. They clustered along the fertile river bottoms of southeast Texas, made a small class of slaveholders spectacularly wealthy, and set the political course that carried Texas into secession. Their land, their buildings, and in some cases their labor arrangements outlived emancipation by decades.

Where and When They Existed

The plantation economy took hold almost as soon as Anglo-American colonization began. Stephen F. Austin’s land contracts in the early 1820s granted settlers 80 acres for each enslaved person they brought into the colony.¹ By the fall of 1825, 69 families in the colony owned 443 enslaved people out of a total population of roughly 1,790.² Jared Ellison Groce arrived in January 1822 with about ninety enslaved people and fifty wagons, founded Bernardo Plantation on the Brazos, and grew what may have been the first cotton crop in the colony.³

Austin himself put the economic logic plainly in 1824, writing that “the principal product that will elevate us from poverty is cotton, and we cannot do this without the help of slaves.”¹ Mexico tried repeatedly to restrict slavery in the 1820s and 1830s, including a general abolition in 1829 under President Vicente Guerrero that carved out an exemption for Texas. Settlers found workarounds when needed, and the friction over slavery became one of the underlying forces behind the Texas Revolution of 1836.

The plantations themselves followed the rivers. By 1860 slavery had spread across the eastern two-fifths of the state, but the biggest operations sat along the lower Brazos and Colorado in Brazoria, Matagorda, Fort Bend, and Wharton counties, a region known as the Sugar Bowl of Texas.¹⁴ Brazoria County was the center of that world. Between 1850 and 1860 it contained at least 46 plantations and was the wealthiest county in Texas, and by 1860 enslaved people made up 72 percent of its population.⁵ Farther east, in the piney woods of counties like Rusk, medium-sized cotton plantations operated alongside smaller farms.⁶

Cotton dominated the state, and its production exploded during the 1850s, rising from 60,000 bales in 1850 to 400,000 bales in 1860.⁷ Sugar was the other major cash crop, concentrated along the lower Brazos. In 1852 Texas plantations reached an antebellum peak of over 11,000 hogsheads of sugar, with Brazoria County alone producing roughly 75 percent of the total.⁸

The Enslaved Population and Daily Life

The enslaved population grew rapidly. From roughly 5,000 people at the time of the Texas Revolution, the number climbed to about 30,000 at annexation in 1845, then to 58,161 in 1850, and finally to 182,566 by 1860, over 30 percent of the state’s total population. The vast majority lived on large cotton plantations in East Texas.⁹ By the last decades before the war, more than half of enslaved people lived in holdings of ten or more, and roughly a quarter of slaveholders controlled more than 60 percent of all enslaved individuals in the state.⁷

Most enslaved adults worked as field hands from sunrise to sunset, five full days a week and half a day on Saturday. A smaller number worked as house servants, cooks, seamstresses, livestock handlers, or skilled craftsmen such as blacksmiths and carpenters.¹ On sugar plantations, enslaved workers built the mills, gins, and plantation houses themselves, often hand-hewing timber and making bricks on-site.⁸

Prices for enslaved people rose sharply through the 1850s. A prime male field hand averaged about $1,200, a skilled blacksmith could be valued at over $2,000, and the average price nearly doubled from around $400 in 1850 to $800 by 1860. Prime cotton land, by comparison, sold for as little as $6 an acre.¹

The Largest Plantations and Their Owners

The Mills Brothers

Robert and David Graham Mills were the largest slaveholders in Texas. By 1860 the brothers operated four sugar and cotton plantations in Brazoria County (Low Wood, Bynum, Palo Alto, and Warren), cultivating roughly 3,300 acres, and they held another 200,000 acres of unimproved land and enslaved approximately 800 people.¹⁰ Robert Mills, known as the Duke of Brazoria, was reported to be worth between $3 million and $5 million before the war. He built the first cotton compress in Texas, helped finance the Texas Navy, and operated merchant ships that carried Texas commodities overseas.¹¹ In 1852, two of their plantations produced more sugar than any other operation in the state.¹² After emancipation the brothers went bankrupt by 1873. Low Wood was later folded into the Clemens State Prison Farm, and Palo Alto became part of the Ramsey State Prison Farm.

The Groce Family

Jared Ellison Groce’s Bernardo Plantation made him the wealthiest settler in Austin’s colony. His descendants built Eagle Island, Pleasant Hill, and Liendo.¹³ In 1824 Groce chaired a committee petitioning the Mexican Congress for the “protection of slave property in Texas.”³ During the Texas Revolution, Bernardo served as a staging ground for Sam Houston’s army before San Jacinto, with Groce supplying his ferry, wagons, and enslaved laborers.¹⁴

Eagle Island Plantation, established in 1826 on land Groce gave his daughter Sarah Ann upon her marriage to William Harris Wharton, grew to 16,000 acres. By 1860 it was worked by 133 enslaved people and produced 185 hogsheads of sugar alongside 100 bales of cotton.¹⁵ Liendo Plantation, completed in 1853 by Leonard Waller Groce using enslaved labor, is the only surviving Groce family mansion. At its peak some 300 enslaved people worked the property, generating annual revenues estimated at $80,000 to $100,000.¹⁶ The Greek Revival house is a National Register property and a Texas historic landmark, but it closed permanently to public tours in 2020 and now serves as a private residence and cattle ranch.¹⁷

Lake Jackson

Virginia planter Abner Jackson built his sugar plantation in Brazoria County between 1842 and 1845, including a twelve-room house and a state-of-the-art sugar mill. By 1860 he was the second-largest slaveholder in Texas, with 285 enslaved people, and the plantation had produced 295 hogsheads of sugar in 1852.¹⁸ After Jackson’s death in 1861 the property passed through multiple owners and transitioned to convict labor before being devastated by the 1900 hurricane. The modern city of Lake Jackson, named for Abner Jackson, was built on the plantation site after Dow Chemical Company purchased the land in 1942.¹⁹

The Law That Made It Possible

Once Texas declared independence in 1836, the new republic’s constitution embedded slavery in its foundational law. Article VI, Section 9 declared that people enslaved before emigrating to Texas “shall remain in the like state of servitude,” prohibited Congress from passing any law preventing settlers from bringing enslaved property into the republic, and stripped Congress of any power to emancipate.²⁰ Individual slaveholders could not free their own enslaved people without congressional consent unless the freedpeople were sent out of the republic.

Texas law classified enslaved people as chattel: personal, moveable property that could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or hired out. Enslaved people had no property rights, no legal recognition of marriage or family, and could not testify against white people in court. Statutes technically prohibited punishment resulting in loss of life or limb and guaranteed a right to trial by jury for serious offenses, but the ban on Black testimony against whites made those protections effectively unenforceable.¹

Political Power and Secession

Only one in four Texas families owned enslaved people, but slaveholders held 60 to 70 percent of the state’s wealth on the eve of the Civil War and dominated public offices at every level.²¹ When Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 threatened the future of slavery, secession moved quickly. Governor Sam Houston refused to call a convention, so Chief Justice Oran M. Roberts and other pro-secession leaders organized one themselves. It convened in Austin on January 28, 1861. Seventy percent of delegates were slaveholders and 40 percent were lawyers.²² On February 1, delegates voted 166 to 8 to secede, and a popular referendum on February 23 ratified the decision with 76 percent in favor.

The convention’s “Declaration of Causes” left no ambiguity about what was at stake. It stated that Texas had been admitted to the Union as a state “maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery,” accused Northern states of conspiring to destroy it, and characterized the institution as “authorized and justified by… the revealed will of the Almighty Creator.”²³ When Houston refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy, the convention declared his office vacant and installed Lieutenant Governor Edward Clark.²²

Emancipation, Sharecropping, and Convict Leasing

Slavery in Texas ended on June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3, informing roughly 250,000 enslaved people that they were free. The order redefined the relationship between former masters and former slaves as one “between employer and hired labor” and advised freed people to “remain at their present homes, and work for wages.”²⁴ The Emancipation Proclamation had technically applied to Texas since January 1, 1863, but with almost no Union troops in the state, it had gone unenforced for over two years. The date became the basis for Juneteenth, made a Texas state holiday in 1979 and a federal holiday in 2021.²⁵

The transition out of slavery was brutal in its own right. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in March 1865, oversaw annual labor contracts between landowners and Black workers. Under those agreements, workers typically received about one-third of the crop, minus debts for supplies advanced by the employer, a system that trapped many formerly enslaved people in cycles of poverty and dependency.²⁶ At the Levi Jordan Plantation, enslaved people who had worked the land until 1865 remained there as sharecroppers until 1892.⁸

Beginning in 1867, Texas leased convicts, most of them African American, to private companies that put them to work on the same plantation lands where slavery had recently ended. In 1878, Confederate veterans Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry A. Ellis signed a contract with the state to lease the entire Texas prison population, deploying them on sugar plantations along the Brazos. Beatings, mosquito-borne epidemics, and a three percent annual mortality rate earned the operation a nickname: the “Hellhole on the Brazos.”²⁷

At the Varner-Hogg Plantation, convict labor replaced enslaved labor directly after the war. An 1875 state investigation documented extreme cruelty, including a case where a single convict received 604 lashes, and the convict program at that site was terminated in favor of sharecropping.²⁸ Similar patterns were documented at Lake Jackson.¹⁸ The Cunningham and Ellis operations eventually gave rise to the Imperial Sugar Company of Sugar Land, and plantation infrastructure was absorbed into the state prison system. The Imperial State Prison Farm opened in 1909 on former Imperial Sugar plantation lands.²⁹

The Texas Legislature ended convict leasing in 1910, and by 1914 the state had reassumed direct control of all prisoners.²⁷ But the physical continuity between plantation and prison remained. Multiple Texas prisons still operate on former plantation land, and several were named after slaveholders and convict-leasing figures, including the Darrington, Eastham, and Goree units.³⁰ After investigative reporting drew attention to those connections, several were renamed. In 2018, contractors building a school for Fort Bend Independent School District in Sugar Land uncovered 95 unmarked graves. The remains were identified as African American males, ages 14 to over 70, who had been part of the convict leasing system.²⁹

What Survives, and How We Know

Most of what is known about the daily lives of enslaved Texans comes from archaeology, because the written record was produced almost entirely by slaveholders. At the Levi Jordan Plantation in Brazoria County, excavations of slave and tenant cabins identified occupants with distinct community roles: a blacksmith, a political leader, a curer or conjurer, and a shell and bone carver. A fly whisk recovered from one cabin resembles West African symbols of authority, and a shell carving from another matches the Kongo cosmogram, tangible evidence that enslaved people maintained African cultural traditions.³¹

In Rusk County, excavations at the Hendrick and Ware plantations between 2008 and 2018 recovered over 39,000 artifacts from 11 building locations.⁶ At the Hendrick site, archaeologists documented five log cabins on poor ground about 160 feet from the main house, roughly 16-by-16 feet each, with mud-and-stick chimneys and sandstone hearths. Artifacts pointed to sewing, tool maintenance, hunting with firearms, music-making with mouth harps, and children’s play. A metal can buried behind a cabin held a nail and two chicken bones, and other finds (a lead star, a piece of stalactite, worn coins) suggest ritual practices carried on outside the sight of slaveholders.³²

Of the more than fifty enslaved people who lived at Hendrick over its history, only one is known by name from the archives: Littleton Watters, purchased at a public auction in Henderson, Texas, in 1860 for $1,160. After emancipation Watters became literate, registered to vote, and by 1870 was farming his own land in Rusk County.³²

The Texas Historical Commission manages two plantation state historic sites in Brazoria County. Varner-Hogg Plantation, near West Columbia, sits on land originally granted to Martin Varner in 1824. Under Columbus R. Patton, who purchased it in 1834, it became a large sugarcane operation worked by 40 to 100 enslaved people, producing 275,000 pounds of sugar and 22,000 gallons of molasses in 1849.²⁸ Former Governor James Stephen Hogg bought the property in 1901, correctly anticipating oil underneath, and his daughter Ima Hogg donated the site to the state in 1958. A two-story Greek Revival house, a family cemetery, and the ruins of a sugar mill foundation remain on the 65-acre site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.³³

The Levi Jordan Plantation, established in 1848 on a 2,214-acre tract, is considered one of the best-preserved archaeological properties associated with African Americans in Texas. The site retains 92 of its original acres and features a Greek Revival house, and an archaeological lab and learning center has been under construction to support ongoing public archaeology.⁸ Both sites are open Wednesday through Sunday and offer Juneteenth guided tours focused on the experiences of enslaved people.³⁴ The THC’s current interpretive approach emphasizes that the prosperity of southeast Texas was “built by enslaved men and women” and that for many of those individuals, the structures and objects they created are the only surviving evidence of their existence.

1
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2
Texas State Historical Association. Old Three Hundred
3
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4
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5
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6
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9
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10
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11
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12
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13
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14
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15
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16
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
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25
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26
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27
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28
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29
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30
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31
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32
Texas Beyond History. The Enslaved Community at Hendrick and Ware Plantations
33
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34
Texas Historical Commission. Varner-Hogg Plantation