Bruce W. Clavey epub INQUISITION OF STEPHEN F AUSTI

The era of New Spain was over, and empresario Stephen F. Austin of San Felipe, Texas was in bitter trouble in Mexico. The centuries-old Holy Inquisition had recently ended, and Dominican priests had ceased the unsavory torture of citizens for religious crimes and the prosecuting of their own Jesuit brethren for advocating independence. Nevertheless, when Austin was arrested in 1834 on suspicion of sedition, he was jailed at the mother of Inquisition prisons in the capital city and forced to reckon with a legal system that still lay deep in its shadow. Austin's dungeon habitat faded over time from Texas memory, but a description of his primitive quarters in his own words would provide the means for the recovery of its location. The Inquisition of Stephen F. Austin revisits how details from royal treasury records, civil engineer accounts, and eyewitness journalist articles, as unlocked by clues from his prison writings, were what led ultimately to the author's rediscovery of his dungeon keep in the famed Palace of the Inquisition in 2017.