Empresario in the context of Slavery in Mexico

David Gouverneur Burnet (April 14, 1788 – December 5, 1870) was an early politician within the Republic of Texas, serving as the interim president of Texas in 1836, the second vice president of the Republic of Texas (1839–1841), and the secretary of state (1846) for the new state of Texas after it was annexed to the United States. Burnet was born in Newark, New Jersey, and attended law school in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a young man, he lived with a Comanche tribe for a year before he returned to Ohio.

In 1806, Burnet volunteered to serve the unsuccessful filibustering expeditions led by General Francisco de Miranda for the independence of Venezuela from Spain. He fought in Chile in 1807 and in Venezuela in 1808. After Miranda broke with Simon Bolivar, Burnet returned to the United States in 1812. In 1826, he moved to Stephen F. Austin's colony in Mexican Texas. He received a land grant as an empresario but was forced to sell the land after he had failed to attract enough settlers to his colony, and he later lost his right to operate a sawmill after he refused to convert to Roman Catholicism.

Peters Colony (Peters' Colony) is a name applied to four empresario land grant contracts first by the Republic of Texas and then the State of Texas for settlement in North Texas. The contracts were signed by groups of American and English investors originally headed by William Smalling Peters. Samuel Browning, Peters' son-in-law signed the first contract with the Republic of Texas in Austin on August 30, 1841. Ownership of the empresario company changed many times during the life of the contracts.

The original boundary of Peters Colony started on the Red River at the mouth of Big Mineral Creek, currently in western Grayson County, running south 60 miles, then west 22 miles, then back north to the Red River, and then east along the Red River to the point of origin at Big Mineral Creek. According to the contract, the empresarios were required to recruit 200 families from outside the Republic in three years. Each single man could be granted 320 acres or each family 640 acres. The empresarios were allowed to keep up to half of the settler's grants for services rendered. These services included surveying, title documents, shot, powder, seed, and in some cases a log cabin. The terms of the contract involving titles and the retention of property by the company led to problems between settlers and the company for many years. The Hedgcoxe War was an armed rebellion against the land company's agent Henry Oliver Hedgcoxe on July 16, 1852, in which company records were seized and taken to the Dallas County Courthouse. These problems required additional legislation by the Congress of the Republic of Texas and the Texas Legislature.

Stephen Fuller Austin (November 3, 1793 – December 27, 1836) was an American-born empresario, i.e. a person granted the right to settle on land in exchange for recruiting and taking responsibility for settling the eastern areas of the Tejas region of Mexico in the early nineteenth century. Known as the "Father of Texas" and the founder of Anglo Texas, he led the second and, ultimately, the successful colonization of the region by bringing 300 families and their slaves from the United States in 1825.

Born in Virginia and raised in southeastern Missouri, Austin served in the Missouri territorial legislature. He moved to Arkansas Territory and later to Louisiana. His father, Moses Austin, received an empresario grant from Spain to settle Texas. After Moses Austin died in 1821, Stephen Austin won recognition of the empresario grant from the newly independent nation of Mexico.

The "Old Three Hundred" were 297 grantees who purchased 307 parcels of land from Stephen Fuller Austin in Mexican Texas. Each grantee was head of a household, or in some cases, a partnership of unmarried men. Austin was an American approved in 1822 by Mexico as an empresario for this effort, after the nation had gained independence from Spain. By 1825, the colony had a population of 1,790, including 443 enslaved African Americans. Because the Americans believed they needed enslaved workers, Austin negotiated with the Mexican government to gain approval, as the new nation was opposed to slavery. Mexico abolished it in 1829.

The colony encompassed an area that ran from the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to near present-day Jones Creek in Brazoria County, Brenham in Washington County, Navasota in Grimes County, and La Grange in Fayette County. It was the first authorized colony of Anglo-American settlers and enslaved African Americans in Mexico.

Green DeWitt (February 12, 1787 – May 18, 1835) was an empresario in Mexican Texas. He brought families from the United States to what is now South-central Texas and founded the DeWitt Colony.