Part 1, Note 7

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Ernest William Winkler, ed., Manuscript Letters and Documents of Early Texians 1821-1845 (Austin: The Steck Company, 1937), pp. 18-22. On January 4, 1823, the Mexican national government enacted legislation which prevented the sale or purchase of slaves within the empire, and declared that children of slaves who were thereafter born in the empire would be freed at age fourteen. The government which enacted that law, however, was shortly afterward overthrown, and the law was subsequently annulled (see Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 15-16). Still, the fact that the law had been passed may explain why no slaves were listed as such on the March 4, 1823 census.