William Goyens was born in 1794 in Moore County, North Carolina, the son of a free man of color, William Goings, and a white woman. He came to Texas in 1820 and lived in Nacogdoches for the rest of his life. He was a blacksmith and wagonmaker, hauled freight from Natchitoches and kept an inn at his home. In 1826 on a trip to Louisiana he was seized by William English, who meant to sell him into slavery. To get free he signed a note agreeing to peonage and handed over an enslaved woman he held. Back in Nacogdoches he sued and had both obligations annulled.
A trusted man in a hard country
Under Mexico he settled lawsuits as a conciliator and negotiated treaties with the Comanches and other nations, trusted, the Handbook of Texas says, by Mexicans, Anglo-Americans and Indians alike. During the Texas Revolution he worked to keep the Cherokees friendly and interpreted for Sam Houston at the 1836 treaty talks. He bought a hill four miles west of town, later called Goyens' Hill.
The petition
On May 5, 1838, Goyens wrote to the Congress of the Republic asking for a league and labor of land as head of a family. He began by saying he was "a man of colour" whose rights were not protected as other men's were, that though born free he had almost been compelled twice to buy his freedom with his labor, that he had served two years as the regular Indian agent to the Cherokees, and that he had supplied horses, provisions and money in the war. He had never applied before, he said, because he feared the land law would reject him. The petition was rejected.
In February 1840 the Republic ordered free Black residents to leave within two years or be sold into slavery. Fifty-five Nacogdoches citizens petitioned that Goyens, "an honest industrious citizen," be exempted. On November 10 an attempt to add his name to a bill for another family, backed by Thomas J. Rusk, lost. The Ashworth Act, passed December 12, covered all free people of color who had been in Texas on the day of the Declaration of Independence, and the Digital Library on American Slavery lists the Nacogdoches petition as "provided for by law."
What he built
By 1841 Goyens held 4,160 acres, town lots and nine enslaved people. He built a two-story house with a sawmill and gristmill on Moral Creek. By 1856 he owned 12,423 acres, 4,428 of them in Angelina County, while his white neighbors, in the Handbook's words, kept trying to take what he gathered. He hired the best lawyers in town, Rusk among them, and mostly won. He died on June 20, 1856, soon after his wife.
His 1936 centennial marker, now on the courthouse grounds, says he was born a slave in South Carolina and escaped to Texas. The Handbook, citing R. B. Blake's research, says he was born free in North Carolina, and adds that in Nacogdoches it is hard to tell the man from the traditions.
The Old Stone Fort Museum on the Stephen F. Austin State University campus keeps the pre-1900 history of the town he lived in.