Cart War

During the 1850s, the road that led westward from Indianola, a port city, to San Antonio and beyond to Chihuahua, Mexico, was heavily traveled by freight haulers transporting goods into the interior of Texas and Mexico. The Old Cart Road, so named for the ox carts the drivers used, became the setting for large-scale violence known as the Cart War. In July 1857, Anglo teamsters, angered by what they believed was unfair competition, attacked Mexican and Tejano (Texans of Mexican descent) carters, destroying carts and wounding or killing drivers. Hostilities continued until protests from the Mexican government to Lewis Cass, U.S. secretary of state, resulted in federal pressure on Texas to protect the Mexican carters. Texas appropriated funds for a special militia, and armed escorts ended the attacks by December 1857.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked the official end to the Mexican-American War in 1848, but isolated outbreaks of ethnic and racial hostilities between Mexicans and Texans continued. The hostilities were exacerbated by white anger over Mexican sympathy for slaves and by the rise of the Know-Nothings in Texas politics. Officially known as the Native American Party, the Know-Nothings were committed to stopping the influence of persons of foreign birth in economic and political affairs of the United States. Although the party emerged first in the east in 1853 in response to the influx of Catholics from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s and 1850s, by 1855, the Know-Nothings were challenging the Democrats in Texas, winning elections in Austin and Galveston.

Heightened racial tensions ignited Anglo teamsters’ anger. Moving freight from Mexico and the Texas coast was a lucrative business in 1857. One expert estimates the total at $2 million. One San Antonio newspaper credited the Tejano cart men, most of them with 10 to 12 teams of mules, with hauling double the freight in half the time at half the price charged by their Anglo, mostly German, competition, who were using five to six teams of oxen. One cart driver from Karnes County placed the number of carts owned by the Mexicans at 2,000. Hundreds of carts were traveling the route on any given day.

An early attack on Mexican carters occurred that same year near Seguin, but it was two years later when sustained violence began. Goliad was one site where masked gangs of Texans attacked the Mexican and Tejano cart men, destroying their carts and hanging some of the drivers from the town's hanging tree. Some accounts place the number of deaths as high as 75, although 21st-century historians question the accuracy of so high a number. Regardless of numbers, town authorities responded to the attacks with indifference. Karnes County was another chief site of the attacks. In a public meeting held in the county seat on December 4, 1857, the citizens of the county adopted a resolution that described the Mexican carreteros as an “intolerable nuisance” and charged the citizens of San Antonio to hire only Texans. Residents of Goliad and Karnes wrote letters to editors of local newspapers and to local and state leaders expressing their anger and prejudice.

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