One phenomenon, inevitable where the facade of political democracy had to be observed among a population who had no understanding of it, was the birth of genuine machine politics. The Americans quickly organized the Mexican citizenry into "cross-mark patriots," as they laughingly were called. These "patriots," who had only the vaguest notions of the practices or principles of representative government but were American citizens, were dragooned into political factions, the Reds and the Blues, and expected to X the ballots of their party. The colored ribbons symbolized the two parties, and they were selected specifically for an illiterate electorate. Both the leaders of the Reds and Blues were Anglos, and usually prominent, wealthy men. The Blue leader, Stephen Powers, was a friend of Martin Van Buren; but the Reds, who included Charles Stillman (the financier and father of the New York banker, James Stillman, who was born at Brownsville), Samuel Belden, Richard King, and Mifflin Kenedy, usually won control.
At election time, extravagant promises were made to the Mexican voters, almost none of which were ever kept. Elections, as an observer wrote, were a "combination of force, fraud, and farce."
This would have been supportable, as it was supportable in other areas of the nation, except for the double standard imposed by race and caste. The evidence is that the new dominant classes were in no way improved by being approached by the humble in the Mexican fashion, hat in hand. Walter Prescott Webb, who cannot be accused of favoritism for Mexicans, put it bluntly: "One law applied to them [Mexicans], and another, far less rigorous, to the political leaders and to the prominent Americans." A Texas Mexican who injured an American faced hanging. The injury or even the death of a Mexican by a white man—in this part of Texas Mexicans of the ordinary class, with Indian blood, were never referred to as "white"—was usually discovered to be justifiable under the law.
The law added injury to insult, because it failed to protect the Mexicans and actually was the chief instrument of their dispossession. Americans who never understood the almost universal denigration of the law and lawyers on the old frontier never understood the enormous distance between "justice under the law" and justice as the frontiersmen saw it. When ethicality began to wane in the United States of the 1830s, lawyers were not and could not be immune. A horde of lawyers arrived in Texas, and in few regions did they find conditions so inviting. The dispossession of frontiersmen by tricks of law was hardly new—Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark were both despoiled of land they had won with their blood—but in Texas, where there was a confusion of Spanish, Mexican, Republican, and Anglo-Saxon common law, and where land titles and surveys had always been rather vague and usually conflicting, the clever lawyer came into his own. There is some truth that many Mexican landowners, especially the small ones, were robbed in south Texas by force, intimidation, or chicanery. But what is usually ignored is the fact that the hacendado class, as a class, was stripped of property perfectly legally, according to the highest traditions of U.S. law.
There was certainly ignorance on one side, and chicanery on the other, but the real problem stemmed from a continual change in sovereignty in this region: Spain to Mexico, and Mexico to Texas and then, to the United States. The English common law and Hispanic law conflicted, particularly on such matters as taxation, use and wont, and holdings in common, or ejidos. Two cases, out of a horrendous total of litigation, stand out. One, concerning the Sal del Rey, or the King's Salt, in the San Salvador de Tule grant to Don Juan José Ballí, was in litigation for fifty years, before the property became part of the King Ranch. This case was particularly important because it led to the constitutional amendment in Texas that established the state's law on mineral rights. The other was Shannon v. Cavazos, which led to a border war.
In 1782, Don José Salvador de la Garza received the Espíritu Santo merced of 260,000 acres, along the north bank of the Rio Grande. Lands and titles passed, with some confusion, to children and heirs, with much splitting, according to the Spanish custom. The part including the area on which Major Brown built his fort in 1846 came into the hands of members of the Cavazos family. One of the principal heirs was Doña Estéfana Goseascochea, a granddaughter of the grantee, who first married Don Francisco Cavazos, then, widowed, married the alcalde of Camargo, Trinidad Cortinas.
In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed all Mexican land titles in principle but could not guarantee them in practice. A horde of American businessmen, squatters, and ex-soldiers arrived on Espíritu Santo lands; many bore headrights, bounty warrants, and Texas veterans' land certificates. There was a general claiming that the land around Brownsville was "vacant," or national land, and thus public land under Texas law by right of conquest. A swarm of claims were filed, and a swarm of lawyers found employment. As Texas historian Frank Cushman Pierce wrote, three square leagues were "exacted to straighten out the titles" from the old landowners by American lawyers: Doña Estéfana, again widowed, conveyed some 4,000 acres of her inheritance to a firm of lawyers in order to get them to secure her title to the rest.
Meanwhile, the merchant Charles Stillman laid out the Brownsville Town Company and founded the city of Brownsville on 1,500 acres of the de la Garza grant. Title was unclear, and Stillman apparently purchased his rights from Mexicans who claimed to own it. Litigation was carried to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction. Finally, a ruling was secured in favor of the heirs; however, the 1,500 acres in question ended up in the hands of an American law firm, who sold it to Charles Stillman for a fraction of the appraised value. As Pierce mentioned, "The Mexican owners suspected foul play."
The imposition of American law infuriated most Mexican landowners. They had to defend their ancient titles in court, and they lost either way, either to their own lawyers or to the claimants. In these years the humbler classes of Mexicans were finding that they were treated with contempt, and that the American law would not protect their persons; now the upper class felt that American courts were not upholding their ancient rights. The soil of the lower Rio Grande Valley was becoming ripe for revolution.
One particularly angry member of the upper class was Juan Nepomuceno Cortinas, who saw his mother surrender a square league of her patrimony in order to keep the rest. The elder Cortinas had been an undistinguished ranchero, probably illiterate, but his wife had the blood of both the Garzas and Falcóns, the bluest of the blue. Cheno Cortinas, born in 1824, however, failed to grow up with the gentility his half-brothers and his brothers and sister displayed. He was wild. He was of average size for Spanish stock, with brown hair, gray-green eyes, and a reddish beard. He had the manners of a gentleman, but he was uneducated by choice, and a vaquero, rather than a border aristocrat, by personal taste. Cortinas liked to ride with a roistering crowd of lowly cowmen.
As history proved, Cortinas had certain qualities his solid-citizen relatives lacked. He was intelligent, with a native cunning and deft political sense for the feelings of his own people; he was a fearless gambler, and certainly possessed a fearless manner. He was to be called the "Red Robber of the Rio
Grande," and Richardson passed him off briefly as a bandit, but then all Mexican men of destiny, from Santa Anna to Zapata, have appeared to be bandits in North American eyes.
Cortinas apparently fought in Arista's command at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, though without distinction. He did not enjoy the outcome of the war, naturally, and apparently was mistreated afterward by a wagon master in Taylor's army. He was involved in a cattle-stealing incident, and arrested by Adolphus Glavaecke, a neighboring rancher, but the record here is most unclear, because Glavaecke apparently was engaged in stock-stealing himself, and was so indicted. Above all, however, Cheno Cortinas carried a grudge against Americans, and was bitter about the American conquest of his native land. In 1859 he was living at his mother's ranch on the Texas side about nine miles northwest of Brownsville, and he was a fuse waiting to be lit.
Each morning Cortinas liked to canter into the town to sit at a café and sip coffee with h
is friends. On the morning of July 13, 1859, the city marshal, Robert Shears, whom Cortinas called "the squint-eyed sheriff," arrested a drunken Mexican on the streets. This man had once been a Cortinas servant. The marshal, all accounts agree, was unnecessarily brutal; he gave the drunken Mexican the standard treatment. Cortinas protested, apparently reasonably, and was rewarded with an insult no caballero could take. Guns were drawn; the marshal fell with a bullet in his shoulder, and Cheno Cortinas put his rescued servant up behind his saddle and galloped out of town.
In such ways revolutions are made. It was an irresistible act: the hated gringo law humbled; the humblest of an oppressed race saved on horseback by one of the old and exalted families. The Americanos now made an immense mistake. No one wanted to go after Cheno Cortinas, and he was allowed to stay among his vaqueros for some days, passing freely in and out of Mexico. It must be remembered that Cortinas was recognized as a Mexican citizen south of the river, just as his half-brother could serve both as a Cameron county official and a field officer in the Mexican army. Mexican officers, including one of his cousins, knew he was planning trouble, but could not persuade him to go on an extended trip elsewhere.
On September 28, at 3 a.m., Cortinas rode back into Brownsville with a hundred men. There had been a gala ball in Matamoros the night before, which most of the Brownsville society attended; drunken parties had been coming across the river all night, and at first few citizens noticed the shooting and the noise. Only gradually did awakening people understand what the mob outside was screaming: "Viva Cortinas! Mueran los gringos! Viva México!"
By daylight, Cortinas had treed the town. He stated he had come to kill his enemies, the "Pole" Adolphus Glavaecke and the "squinting sheriff." These got away, so he shot and killed three other Americans, "notorious for their misdeeds among the people." He shot a Mexican, for trying to shield a gringo friend. The jail was opened, and all the prisoners let out. The Mexican flag was hoisted over Fort Brown, which had recently been evacuated by the Army on orders from Washington; but Cortinas's vaqueros did not have the technical skill to keep it flying from its pole. The band roamed the town, shooting and shouting. During this time, apparently not a single citizen showed up on the streets. Brownsville was not a frontier but a mercantile town, and the leaders of neither the Reds nor Blues were warriors. "Thus," wrote Major S. P. Heintzelman of the U.S. Army to Colonel Robert E. Lee, "was a city of from two or three thousand inhabitants occupied by a band of armed bandits, a thing till now unheard of in the United States."
Ironically, two Mexican officers, Miguel Tijerina, who was Cortinas's cousin, and General Carvajal, who commanded in Matamoros, crossed over and liberated the town.
Cortinas rode back to his mother's place, the Rancho del Carmen. Here, he seems to have issued his first pronunciamento, attacking all American lawyers and politicos: "Our personal enemies shall not possess our lands until they have fattened it with their own gore. . . ." Suddenly, hundreds of Mexicans, from both sides of the river, were riding, cheering, to Cortinas's camp.
It can only be recorded that the citizenry of Brownsville were in a panic. They sent calls to San Antonio, to Governor Runnels in Austin, and to President Buchanan. They begged Carvajal for help, and, to quote Webb, "American citizens witnessed the sorry spectacle of seeing themselves protected on their own soil by Mexican soldiers quartered in a United States fort."
Twenty-five men were raised to protect the town and patrol the streets, because Carvajal soon withdrew. Meanwhile, one citizen wrote a letter to the New Orleans Daily Picayune: "For God's sake urge the government to send us relief. Let the great guns again watch over our dear sister Matamoros, and the soldiers of Uncle Samuel keep marauders here in check, or practically the boundary . . . must be moved back to the Nueces."
At this time, Cortinas does not seem to have decided on his course; he was riding the wind, trying to feel its direction. The lower Rio Grande Valley was remote from Texas; he had time to wait. During these weeks Cortinas passed back and forth from being lionized in Matamoros to haranguing his bravos at the ranch. Then, the citizenry of Brownsville made an effort to attack him.
About two score Americans formed the "Brownsville Tigers," under W. B. Thompson. They allowed about forty more Mexican-Americans to join as auxiliaries. The Tigers had two small cannon, one sent over from Matamoros, and in these this militia set great store.
Thompson moved cautiously on Rancho del Carmen, so cautiously that later a devastating description of the whole episode appeared in the Evening Ranchero, a Texas newspaper. The Brownsville Tigers took four days to reach Glavaecke's ranch, three miles out of town. When they finally encountered a few vaqueros in the brush at Santa Rita, and some firing began, the whole troop "made a desperate charge—for home." They left their two brass cannon behind and made far better time returning than in going out. The official report reads differently, but both agree on one thing: nothing whatever was accomplished. The official report, perhaps with unconscious humor, says the retreat became general, with all being anxious to reach Brownsville first, and that the Mexican-Americans brought up the rear. The merchants and citizens of Brownsville were not gunmen; most of them had never seen an Indian or killed a man, and they could not be compared to the borderers who lived further north along the Colorado-Brazos frontier.
Cortinas had won prestige at little cost. Now, he fired a salute each morning from the captured cannon to wake the town. He intercepted the mail, and held an American named Campbell prisoner to read it to him. But although his men were now raiding throughout the country, Cortinas acted with enormous restraint. Nobody was killed, and even the perused mail was returned, resealed. On one occasion, his men took beeves belonging to a professed friend, James Browne. Cortinas returned most of these, and penned Browne a due bill for the few he butchered.
Then, the war took a new turn. A company of Rangers under Captain W. G. Tobin of San Antonio arrived in the valley. Webb wrote that Tobin and his men were a sorry lot. The Brownsville historian Davenport went further: that Tobin had one good man, but that he unfortunately fell off a carriage and broke his neck on arrival.
These men again were the street sweepings that so often were the first to join an expedition to the Rio Grande. With good leadership, they might have been effective; they did not have it. Their first official act in Brownsville was to storm the jail and lynch a captured sixty-five-year-old Cortinista, Tomás Cabrera; Heintzelman hinted at this, but Ford stated it bluntly, in his later report.
In retaliation, Cortinas ambushed a squad of Tobin's Rangers on the Palo Alto and killed three men. Tobin then led the reorganized Brownsville Tigers and his own troops against Santa Rita, where Cortinas openly waited. Mifflin Kenedy now led the Brownsville contingent, which had acquired another 24-pound howitzer. The results of this expedition are better not examined, but Tobin's Rangers did prove to be superior artillerists, because in the general rout they did bring the cannon back. Tobin fell back on Brownsville on November 25, 1859, and U.S. Army reports state simply that his decision to run was wise—his Rangers were so demoralized they would have been slaughtered had they stood.
Now, as Heintzelman wrote, Cortinas was a great man. He had defeated the gringos twice; he made Mexicans wonder how the gringos had ever got to the Rio Bravo in the first place. Over his camp he now hoisted the flag of the Mexican Republic, the red, white, and green. When he crossed over into Mexico, great throngs assembled and cheered him, bugles blew and music thundered; he rode his horse into the city squares like a conquering hero. He was the champion of his people, who would right all wrongs. In Matamoros there was open discussion of rolling the border back to the Nueces; some ardent spirits held out for the Sabine.
Cortinas does not seem to have entertained any such dreams. He issued inflammatory proclamations, calling upon Mexicans to fight for their rights against the American bloodsuckers and vampires, but nothing in his proclamations indicated a plan for a separate Mexican state, or a reversion to Mexico. He flew the Mexican f
lag, but this was to attract recruits from south of the river. Cortinas expressed great confidence in Sam Houston, the Texas governor-elect; he said Houston would see that Texas Mexicans were protected. Cortinas did not know that Houston was seriously planning the establishment of a protectorate over Mexico itself at this time. Probably, Cortinas had no plan at all; he had accidentally started a small revolution, and being a daring gambler, he rode with it to see where destiny might take him.
His uprising, however, had already failed, because the Texas Mexicans did not flock to his standard. Significantly, his own family did not support him. His mother and brothers remained loyal to the state, and none of the great families joined Cortinas. The vast majority of the humbler class remained inert. Beyond all question, the great majority of Cortinas's fighting men crossed the Rio Bravo from Mexico. If the Tobin Rangers were mostly border scum, a similar breed in Mexico smelled plunder. Santos Cadena brought forty thieves from Nuevo León. Sixty escaped convicts from Victoria in Tamaulipas showed their patriotism by joining Cortinas and plundering gringos. The charge of banditry was true, and it clung; but as most Texas histories deliberately ignore, there was more to the Cortinas uprising than that.
Finally, on December 5, 1859, Major S. P. Heintzelman arrived on the Rio Grande with 165 U.S. Army troops. Heintzelman immediately led his force, combined with Tobin's Rangers, on a sweep toward Cortinas. The Rangers showed a great reluctance to fight, but Heintzelman met Cortinas at a place called the Ebonal, and forced the rebel to retreat with a loss of eight men.
Meanwhile, a short time before, Governor Runnels of Texas received reports that all south Texas, to the Nueces, was aflame with a Mexican war. Runnels found Rip Ford walking the streets of Austin and seized him by the arm. "Ford, you must go!" Runnels exclaimed. Ford left the next day, with a commission as major in command of all state forces on the border.
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