In 1821 Mexico won its independence from Spain. Texas was a part of Mexico at the time, but it was a thinly settled frontier that had long been neglected by the Spanish government. In an effort to increase the population of Texas and make it more economically viable, the Mexican government offered incentives to American citizens to settle there. Stephen Austin (1793–1836), one of those settlers, brought with him a party of around 300 families. These were the vanguard for a wave of migrating Americans, often from the slave-holding American South. Between the 1820s and 1830s, many more American citizens arrived in Texas. Political disagreements between these American settlers and the distant and unstable Mexican central government sparked a revolutionary movement, which erupted into an armed rebellion in the mid-1830s. The Texians (Anglo-American inhabitants of Texas before it became a part of the United States) rebelled and declared their independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836.