Three Roads to the Alamo
Page 56
During the next several days other matters diverted Travis's attention momentarily. On June 9 he got a report that Austin was finally released and expected to have left Mexico on May 25. Williams, Johnson and the rest had been arrested when General Cós and the Saltillo forces dispersed the Monclova faction and cracked down on the speculators, and the Monclova legislators themselves tried unsuccessfully to move their capital to Béxar. Meanwhile, Travis turned his hand to an attempt to publish the laws of Texas and Coahuila in a combined English and Spanish edition, no doubt assuming that it would be useful in future attempts to justify the actions of himself and his discontented countrymen, though he warily tried to keep his own involvement with the project from being known.16
“Let us wait with patience, the issue of things,” he counseled Smith on June 9. “The time will come when we shall be called upon to act.”17 It came soon enough. Travis did not need to be told by his friend Wilson that “Santa Ana is not our friend”—he knew that already—but the warning to “look well to windward and see he does not surprise the Boys” was well timed.18 Wilson's partner Harris came to Anahuac June 10 to buy goods from Briscoe, and in a confused incident that evening a Mexican soldier shot a Texian, and Tenorio arrested Briscoe and Harris. Briscoe remained in custody, but the Mexicans released Harris the next morning, and he raced back to Harrisburg, sending word of the affair to Travis in San Felipe. Then, on June 21, a Mexican courier carrying dispatches for Tenorio came to San Felipe and indiscreetly let his mission be known, the result being that the Texians seized his letters and in them read news that strong reinforcements were to be sent from Mexico to enforce the customs laws. There was also word that Governor Viesca had been arrested.
In sum, the political situation seemed to disintegrate precipitately, and political chief J. B. Miller had already called a meeting of delegates in San Felipe for June 22 to take some action. Unfortunately the majority could decide on nothing more than doing nothing, and Travis and others stamped the streets in outrage. That same evening, those about to be dubbed the war party gathered again, and with Miller in the chair they resolved that “feeling the necessity of disarming the military of Anahuac,” they pledged to meet on June 27 to form themselves into an armed militia company, elect officers, and march on Anahuac. Travis was the second to sign the resolution, directly beneath Miller, a sign of the prominent role he played in the meeting.19
Travis himself left for Harrisburg June 25, probably shortly after Bowie's note to Miller arrived, detailing his escape from Matamoros and warning of three thousand or more Mexicans marching north past Saltillo. That only heightened the sense of emergency. David Harris there owned the sloop Ohio, then sailing the bay, and with the help of a few men and some borrowed wheel trucks from the Wilson mill, they loaded a small cannon aboard the vessel. By June 28 the Ohio sat moored at Lynch's Ferry at the northwestern tip of Galveston Bay, and there Travis and his friend David Burnet awaited. Some twenty armed volunteers assembled in the following several hours, and they promptly elected Travis their commander. The next day the Ohio convoyed them across the bay to Anahuac but ran aground half a mile from the shore. Travis ordered a shot from the deck gun fired to alert Tenorio to their coming, an imprudent move perhaps, and as a prelude to his demand for a surrender, and then his small company lowered the cannon into one of two small boats and rowed ashore, Travis himself in the bow of the lead boat.
As they approached the shore about 3 P.M., Travis saw the bank lined with men, and at first was uncertain if they were friends or Mexicans but soon found them to be sympathetic villagers. When Travis stepped out of the boat he received a note from Tenorio demanding to know his intentions and immediately sent back a demand for surrender. The Mexican commander asked for a delay until the next morning for his response, but Travis, conscious that he was outnumbered and fearful that Tenorio might use the time to good advantage, refused. He promised a grace of only one hour before he attacked. Even at that Travis decided not to let the full hour elapse. Rather than have the time expire after darkness fell, he launched an advance, placing six men in front as skirmishers, and then himself leading the main line with the cannon back on the wheel trucks. In the gathering twilight, they lit their way with a blazing torch, but on reaching the Mexican quarters found them deserted. Tenorio had taken to the woods some two hundred yards or more distant. Travis immediately ordered the cannon fired into the trees to intimidate the Mexicans, and soon enough Tenorio sent another note, this time asking to meet Travis at the water's edge to discuss terms for a surrender. Not entirely trusting the captain, Travis agreed, but had three of his volunteers follow him out of sight, ready to act if they saw any sign of treachery.
Travis stepped to the shore, bathed now in moonlight, and called out in Spanish for Tenorio, only to hear him answer from a clump of trees, for he was equally fearful of coming to harm. Travis himself walked to the spot where he heard the voice, and in a few minutes' conversation again refused Tenorio's request to take until morning to give an answer. Going considerably beyond the case of the moment, Travis apparently said that this was only the beginning, that the Texian colonists intended to force the release of Viesca, and set up the Monclova legislature once more either at San Felipe or some other spot in the Texas interior safe from Mexican invasion. Travis may only have been boasting, though every point was one with which he was in accord, but he had neither the authority nor the power to make any of that happen.
He had twenty men and a small cannon, and when it came to the business at hand, he only gave Tenorio fifteen minutes and then, in an attempt to bluff the Mexican, threatened that after the time expired he would “put every man to the sword.” The Mexican commander put the proposition to his officers and shortly returned to Travis with his assent. Travis also demanded the surrender of all public property, and that Tenorio and his command should leave Texas and never return again. It was a bloodless beginning to a bloody revolution. Yet one matter was troubling. Even if only a bluff, Travis's threat to take no prisoners was unusually bloodthirsty for a group of citizens supposedly just making a stand for constitutional rights. It might come back to haunt him.20
The next day Tenorio signed the formal surrender, and Travis loaded his own party and the Mexicans into the Ohio and took them back to Harrisburg. On the approach to the town he imposed the rather evocative password “Victory or death” in approaching the town, no doubt to make certain no one mistook the large party of Mexican soldiers as hostile.21 If there was any doubt that William Travis now stood as a leader in the War Party faction, his arrival in Harrisburg with these trophies of war removed all question. He stood now on a par with Bowie, Frank Johnson, and the few others regarded as being ahead of the rest in the dispute with Mexico.22
He was not prepared for the degree to which Texians did not want to be led in that direction just yet. When Travis got back to San Felipe late on July 5, he sent Smith a quick account of what happened, adding that “this act has been done with the most patriotic motives, and I hope you and my fellow citizens will approve it, or excuse it,” and then apparently tried to return to his legal work as if nothing had happened.23“Excuse” was more like it, for just as he noted the dissension in town over how to react to the wholesale arrests of the government officials, now he found people sharply divided on his action. There and elsewhere people who saw in his expedition an attempt to foment a revolution against Mexico reacted sharply, passing community resolutions condemning his action. “He was headstrong and precipitated the war with Mexico,” his friend Dilue Harris believed.24 Leaders of the Peace Party excoriated Travis, as well as Bowie and Williams and others seen as too radical, and James H. C. Miller, a leading Peace Party member, gleefully noted that “Travis is in a peck of troubles.”25 In a public proclamation another member of the peace faction warned the people of San Felipe to “listen not to men who have no home, who have no family, who have nothing to lose in case of civil war.”26 James B. Miller, the political chief, publicly disavowed Travis's acti
on, saying that the meeting of June 22 that produced the resolutions for volunteers to gather had no such object in mind, though that was a trimming protest at best. “The war and speculating parties are entirely put down,” James H. C. Miller declared, and went on to suggest that the ayuntamientos should put out arrest orders for Travis and the other leading War Party men. “Till they are dealt with,” he said, “Texas will never be at quiet.”27
So shocked was Travis by this response that on July 18 he issued a notice in the Brazoria Texas Republican asking “a suspension of public opinion in regard to the Capture of the Fort of Anahuac” until he could publish his own account and an explanation.28 He asked too late. Besides, the matter was not in the hands of the people, but at the moment in control of the War Party. On July 25 James H. C. Miller suggested that Travis be arrested, along with Johnson, Williamson, Lorenzo Zavala, and their fellow radical Moseley Baker, and called for alcaldes in other jurisdictions to do so. There was some wisdom in this, for if the Texians themselves arrested the troublemakers, then it might forestall General Cós from sending troops into Texas.29
Travis himself did not see the arrest order coming. On July 26 he worked peacefully in his San Felipe office, finishing the draft of his defense, which he sent to Henry Smith asking him to go over it and then see to its printing. Indeed, noting that the Peace Party seemed fully in sway, he only added that “there is no news of importance stirring.”30 He realized by now that any general popular uprising was out of the question, and on July 30 sent a letter to Bowie, most recently known to be in Nacogdoches after himself helping to disarm a Mexican garrison and send it on its way home. “The truth is, the people are much divided here,” he told Bowie, whom he must now have regarded as a kindred spirit. The Peace Party was ascendant, and “unless we could be united, had we better not settle down and be quiet for a while,” he asked. “God knows what we are to do! I am determined, for one, to go with my countrymen; ‘right or wrong, sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish,’ I am with them.”31 Despite the peaceful tenor of his advice to Bowie, there was no question of Travis having given up. Already he counseled Henry Smith on how they should conduct themselves when the final break came. “Let us be firm and united in defending Texas to the last extremity,” he told him. “In offensive war we can do nothing, in defensive everything.”32 He resolved now only to go quiet while waiting for events and opinion to catch up with him.
Meanwhile Tenorio remained in San Felipe before taking his men back to Mexico, and now he peppered his superiors with requests to get back his weapons, only keeping alive the insult to Mexican arms.33 Travis himself tried to calm the Mexicans' unrest by addressing a letter to Ugartechea the day after he wrote Bowie, reminding the colonel of their brief acquaintance—at Anahuac, ironically—three years before. He wrote in English, protesting disingenuously that “I do not know how to express myself” in Spanish, even though he had been translating documents for the ayuntamiento for all of the previous year. “I am confident that I have acted from pure motives,” he said. All the statements about him being a revolutionary were untrue, and he wanted now to make a full statement of the case to the governor, if only Ugartechea would counsel him on how to go about it. “I am extremely anxious to bring all our difficulties to a happy and peaceable termination,” he went on. He wanted a firm government established, and did not care what form of government Mexico should adopt “so that we are guaranteed in the security of person and property.” He even offered to help in bringing about such an end, and bordered on obsequiousness when he begged that Ugartechea would “condescend to open a correspondence with me.”34 Ugartechea never replied.
Travis obviously lied in the hope of buying time, time to calm the outrage at his act, and time for the Mexicans to cool down short of starting arrests. His contrition came too late. On August 1 General Cós issued an order from Matamoros to the political chief Miller to arrest Travis, and at the same time followed it with a similar order to Ugartechea, then in Béxar. They were to detain “the ungrateful and bad citizen W. B. Travis who headed the revolutionary party,” and bring him to Béxar. His excesses had been tolerated long enough, said Cós. “He ought to have been punished long since.”35
Travis did not yet know it, but now he was in considerable danger of becoming yet another indefinite prisoner like Austin. Ugartechea received Cós's order on August 4, and immediately sent it on to San Felipe, where it could not arrive until two days later.36 Meanwhile, on August 5 Travis was still in San Felipe, and now regretting that he must make a public explanation. He drafted a document, did not like it, rewrote it, then gave it to Wharton to work over, and in fact it was Wharton who published the promise of an explanation in the first place, apparently without Travis's permission. He felt as resolute as ever in his rectitude in the Anahuac affair. “I know my motives were pure,” he said. “I know I acted by the consent & approbation of the political authorities. I know that the people here all favored the measure.” He had been but one actor on the stage, and never solicited command of the volunteers. “Most men in this part of the country are satisfied with my course,” he went on. “Conscious that I have not intentionally erred, I bid defiance to any who may be disposed to persecute me.” As for his explanation of his conduct, he still preferred that it not be published, but left that in Smith's hands, only insisting that it be short “& not in the tone of apology, as I feel like I have none to offer.”37
It may only have been hours later that he learned he was to be taken into custody. Rather than suffer that, he and his friend Three-Legged Willie Williamson stole out of town and rode north to Horatio Chriesman's place on the La Bahía Trace, near Washington. They remained there for several days and then moved on, and thus were not there when riders came to Chriesman's to tell them it was safe to return.38 In a marvelous reversal of fortune, the mobilization of opinion that Travis could not achieve by his own act, Cós and Ugartechea brought about by trying to arrest him. Whatever even men of the Peace Party felt about Travis's actions, they did not want to see another Texian political prisoner languish indefinitely in a Mexican jail. When they learned moreover that Santa Anna intended to establish larger military garrisons in Texas, their civil authorities openly refused to cooperate with the arrest orders.39 Indeed, Moseley Baker believed that “this military order may justly be regarded as the final success of the war party.”40
For the rest of August, Ugartechea and Cós continued to try to have Travis arrested, and the commander of a Mexican ship at Anahuac even offered a thousand-dollar reward, promising that he “would swing said Travis at his yard arm in less than half an hour after his delivery.”41 But Texian political authorities only stalled and delayed.42 Then outraged citizens held meetings in places like Columbia, calling for a consultation of delegates from all of Texas as “indispensable” and setting up committees of safety and correspondence.43 Soon it became clear to Travis that he had nothing to fear and could return to San Felipe, and when he did he came in triumph. “Huzza for Texas!” he crowed. “Huzza for Liberty, and the rights of man!”44 The word of the call for a consultation delighted him. Weeks before he pleaded for unity of action, believing that a consensus of all the people in Texas needed to determine their course, and now that seemed about to be realized.45 To encourage matters, he began writing articles for publication in the press though, wary thanks to his recent experience, he wanted their authorship kept secret lest his name cause a backlash with those so recently won over from the Peace Party. That they must act, and quickly, he never doubted, especially if Santa Anna sent troops to places like Béxar and San Felipe. “Let the towns be once garrisoned,” he warned, “and we are slaves.”46
In his elation at the turnaround of events, Travis spent almost the entire day August 31 writing letters to such friends as Briscoe, Henry Smith, Burnet, and more, bristling with renewed pride and defiance. “Principle has triumphed over prejudice,” he proclaimed. “Texas is herself again.” He crowed over the withering of the Peace Party in San Fel
ipe in such a short time. “They are routed horse and foot,” he declared. “I feel the triumph we have gained, and I glory in it.” With the convention scheduled for September 12, he urged everyone who could to attend. “The Tories are dying a violent death, and their last expiring struggle will be made on that day.” Fortune favored the brave, he exhorted them, “and now let Tories, submission men, and Spanish invaders look out.” Even as Travis finished his letters, a messenger arrived in San Felipe with news that the Mexicans intended to have two hundred soldiers garrisoning the town by mid-September. “We shall give them hell if they come here. Keep a bright lookout to sea,” he continued. “Secure all the powder and lead. Remember that war is not to be waged without means. Let us be men and Texas will triumph.” There were rough waters ahead, of that he was certain. “It is time to be on the qui vive.” They must of necessity act defensively, as he told Smith weeks before, and be prepared “for the scenes that are to be enacted.” “If we are encroached upon, let us resist until our bodies & our property lie in one common ruin, ere we submit to tyranny.”47
Already starting anew to act as publicist of the revolution, Travis turned his attention to another weapon in the Texian arsenal that needed honing. He recognized the power of religion in molding and sustaining public spirit, and knew as well the longtime resentment at the enforcement of Catholicism on the colonists. Now that Texians might be about to meet Santa Anna with rifles and muskets, they should confront him with ideology as well. Back in August, when still in danger of arrest, he had written to New York to subscribe to the Christian Advocate and Journal, and informed the publishers that Texas stood almost destitute of proper religious instruction. Texians had few preachers, and some denominations such as the Methodists, known for their itinerant preachers, like Lorenzo Dow and his own uncle Alexander, neglected the country entirely. He wanted the journal to publicize their need in the hope that it would stimulate preachers to cross the Sabine. “In sending your heralds to the four corners of the Earth,” he implored, “remember Texas.”48