The Mexican Slave Catcher

The most explosive incident involving runaway slaves in Laredo came ... on November 5, 1860. In a letter written to Henry and William Maltby's secessionist pro-slavery Corpus Christi Daily Ranchero, a forty-one-year-old Irish-born clerk named Michael Lidwell, a political ally of Santos [Benavides] who was living in Laredo at the time, said that a black man claiming to be a "free Negro" had arrived at Laredo with two dun horses and persuaded the ferryman to allow him passage to Nuevo Laredo. After the news was quickly passed along to Santos that the man was probably a runaway slave, he gathered ten vigilantes armed with rifles and pistols and at eight that evening crossed to Nuevo Laredo. "In the face of the entire population of the place," Santos was said to have "seized the negro" and succeeded in "making good his retreat [with] his men to the boat." ... Reaching the north bank of the river, the men dragged the wounded Mussett along with the runaway slave up the steep bank and scurried off to the safety of the town, where their captive was lodged in the city jail.

The Ranchero went out of its way to praise Santos for being "foremost in confronting danger in support of the laws and institutions of Texas." It was not the first time Santos had "distinguished himself in restoring runaway slaves to their owners," the Ranchero went on to say. The newspaper also praised him for his refusal to "receive any recompense for his exertions." The writers hoped that Santos, through his actions, had gone a long way toward alleviating the widely held idea in Texas that people of "Mexican origin" were not loyal to the state. His daring actions had proven that citizens on the Rio Grande frontier were as committed as the most "rabid orator." In a few comments on November 17, 1860, the Ranchero again praised Santos for daringly crossing into Mexico to retrieve the runaway slave."

Jerry D. Thompson. Tejano Tiger: José de los Santos Benavides and the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1823-1891. The Texas Biography Series. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2017.