That's a pointless point, ichmichael. Slavery is a legal definition of ownership of human beings, not a definition of the comparative political freedoms of a society. A slave was a human being who was purchased like an animal...just like buying a cow or a goat...and who was used to perform various types of manual labour like a beast of burden for the rest of his life by his owner.

Mexicans were not slaves. They did not see themselves as slaves, they were proud people who saw themselves as free men. When they worked, they got paid for it. The people they worked for did not own them (though it got fairly close to that on some of the big agricultural haciendas run by the rich).

Slavery was already illegal in most of the rest of the Europeanized world when the battle for Texas occurred, but it was still entirely legal in the USA. Those were pre-civil War days.

That's all I was saying. I was not defending Santa Ana's government which was just one more example of a corrupt dictatorship in Mexico. Yes, he was a very corrupt dictator, but Mexicans were not slaves and they did not practice the buying and selling of human beings as was done in the southern USA.

The Texans, in my view, were right to rebell against Santa Ana, and the other Mexican states who rebelled against him were also right to do so. I was not trying to defend Santa Ana in any way by saying slavery was illegal in Mexico, I was just stating a fact.

You must remember that the Texans were not perfect either. They were not saints. They were people who were the product of their own time and culture and who had moral imperfections of their own...as did the Mexicans too...and they were doing what they felt was in their own best interest.

People have a way of turning one side into saints and the other into evil people after a historical thing like that Texan war happens. The real truth is that most of them were neither saints nor evil people...they were just ordinary people trying to earn a living, survive, and get by. This was as true of the common Mexican soldier as it was of the Texans and Mexicans who fought against those soldiers.

If you think that people living under a dictatorship are thereby defined as "slaves"...I suggest you go down to any one of a number of military dictatorships which are presently longstanding good allies and friends of the USA...walk up to some man there on the street or in a bar and tell him: "You're a slave."

See what happens...you may not survive too long that way, but you'll learn something.