Operation Lone Star, Gov. Greg Abbott’s initiative to stem the flow of immigrants across the Rio Grande, isn’t the first time that the state of Texas has involved itself in immigrant matters.

In 1869, as part of the state’s post-Civil War effort to rejoin the Union, writers of a Texas constitution created the Bureau of Immigration, an agency whose job it was to sponsor and fund a new stream of foreign labor to replace the black slavery which was now outlawed. But it was a certain kind of immigrant that was sought.

As William J. Chriss, author of “Six Constitutions Over Texas, Texas’ Political Identity, 1830-1900” (Texas A&M University Press) notes in his sweeping look at the six documents that formed the state’s legal framework, the bureau was part of an effort to improve the state’s human capital. Why not just import a better class of worker? They knew who they wanted: Northern Europeans and specifically Scandinavians and Germans.

These Norwegians, Swedes and Germans would be loyal to the Union, asserted the chief sponsor of the provision, and it would relieve the white planters from “the harsh contact with their former slaves whom they never can forgive – that from property they have become their equals at the ballot box.”

Chriss is a Corpus Christi lawyer with the credentials of a historian. He has taught American history, Texas history, constitutional law and political theory at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He has appeared as a political analyst on local television.

Some writers of the six constitutions that span the years from independence from Mexico to the cusp of modernity no doubt were spurred by the classic ideals of representative democracy, but, as Chriss details, the need for Anglo supremacy at the ballot box, in the market place and on the social scales permeated through the six constitutional conventions.

As early as the 1830s and 1840s, who was a Texan and who wasn’t was clearly defined: Certainly not black men, absolutely not any member of an Indian tribe and by extension, no Mexican or Texas-born Mexican, a Tejano.

This Texan community “amalgamated slaves, Indians and Mexicans as dangerously savage and inter-connected enemies within Anglo-Texian consciousness,” Chriss writes. “No historical account of nineteenth-century Texas should ignore this fundamental psychological and ideological reality.”

There is a divide among Texas historians between those who cherish the Texas myth, the story that makes the state’s chronology a story of exceptionalism and patriotism, and those who want to write history with warts and all. Chriss’ book puts him in the warts-and-all camp.

Thus when we think of the Texas revolution we might think of Davy Crockett/John Wayne on the walls of the Alamo fighting off hordes of Mexican soldiers in defense of liberty and against despotism. But there was something more visceral at work, too.

“Texans’ deepest fear was that the newly centralized Mexican government would emancipate the thousands of slaves already in Texas and, if resisted by Anglo settlers, would ally with Tejanos, blacks and Indians to expel them,” Chriss writes.

It might pain those who cherish Texas history as long taught to think of William Travis, commander of the Alamo, and Stephen F. Austin, the original Anglo colonist leader, as defenders of human slavery. But as Chriss notes in his introduction, “history is human, contingent, and complex.”

Such complexity means the worst of partisanship and suppression of human rights thrived alongside constitutional provisions that enrich us today. Among those are free public education and creating and funding universities of the first rank. The doctrine of community property and enshrining the right of women to hold property and wealth under their own names grew from Spanish law but, amazingly, was adopted by this all-male corps.

All these principles were long-held. Free public education, for instance, was a desire that the constitutional writers included in every document, from 1836 at independence to U.S. statehood in 1845 to secession in 1861 to unremorseful defeat in 1866 to 1869’s document written under military occupation to the 1876 effort we live under today. The last we have now amended more than 500 times.

Nick Jimenez is Editorial Page Editor Emeritus

This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Local author writes of 6 constitutions over Texas – virtues and warts