Lone Star Nation

by H. W. Brands

  This was strong stuff, amounting to an ultimatum. Austin shouldn’t have been surprised if Gómez Farías had thrown him out of his office. In fact, on another occasion the vice president did respond angrily. “I told the vice president the other day that Texas must be made a state by the Government or she would make herself one,” Austin wrote to James Perry. “This he took as a threat and became very much enraged.” Austin tried to mollify Gómez Farías by explaining that he intended no threat but was merely describing the mood in Texas. “When he understood that my object was only to state a positive fact which it was my duty to state, he was reconciled.” (This wasn’t quite true, as Austin would discover.)

  Even while pressing the Mexican government on Texas statehood, Austin attempted—from a distance—to restrain the radicals in Texas, knowing that another outbreak of anti-government violence would make his difficult task impossible. He wrote home putting the best face on his discussions with Gómez Farías and the other officials. Following one interview, which he characterized as “long and frank,” he declared, “I believe that Texas will be a state of this Confederation with the approbation of this Government before long.” Austin urged the Texans to show resolve but avoid provocation. Under no circumstances should they speak of anything other than statehood within the Mexican union. “Should our application be refused, Texas ought to organize a local government with as little delay as possible—but always on the basis that it is a part of the Mexican Confederation, a younger sister who adopts this mode of entering upon her rights, now that she is of age, because unnecessary embarrassments are interposed which are unconstitutional, unjust, inexpedient and ruinous.”

  Austin himself, however, in moments of exasperation, sometimes spoke of an alternative to a Mexican connection. Not long after reaching Mexico City, he wrote to settler and friend John Austin (perhaps a distant relative) that he supposed that the Mexican congress, when it reconvened, would vote in favor of statehood for Texas, but that the legislature would then ask the other states for their approval. This would cause additional delay and cast the whole statehood issue into doubt. Austin wasn’t sure he could stand it. “I have had a hard trip so far and more difficulties to work through here than you can well form an idea of. But I hope to get along and that Texas will be a State of this, or the U.S., republic before another year, for I am so weary that life is hardly worth having, situated as we are now.”

  Had Mexican officials read this letter, they would have doubted Austin’s integrity even more than they did. As it happened, they read other letters he wrote, with precisely that result. In October he sent a letter to the ayuntamiento (town council) of San Antonio de Béxar, urging the members to coordinate with the other town councils of Texas in preparing to move unilaterally toward Texas statehood. Between the cholera and the ongoing political struggles of the capital, he explained, nothing had been done on Texas. “And in my opinion, nothing is going to be done.” He said he would play out his hand in Mexico City, but in the likely event he failed to get what he came for, the inhabitants of Texas must act together. “And so I hope that you will not lose a single moment in directing a communication to all the Ayuntamientos of Texas, urging them to unite in a measure to organize a local government independent of Coahuila, even though the general government should withhold its consent.” To underline his resolve, Austin replaced the standard closing in the correspondence of revolutionary Mexico—“God and Liberty”—with a new coinage: “God and Texas.”

  Had Austin been writing to friends or allies, this encouragement to sedition might never have reached the eyes of the Mexican authorities. But many of the (mostly Mexican) inhabitants of San Antonio feared that a separate state of Texas, even one attached to Mexico, would be dominated by Americans, and the town’s ayuntamiento included persons who were as skeptical of Austin as any ministers in Mexico City. They passed his letter on to the government of Coahuila y Texas, which, delighted at receiving such damning information on the insurgent empresario, forwarded the letter to the federal government.

  This took time, which the unsuspecting Austin put to use. Though (sanctioned) statehood appeared a lost cause for the present, other progress seemed possible. Austin hammered against the ban on American immigration and finally succeeded in winning its repeal. This was no small feat, and Austin thought it augured well—at least well enough to warrant continued patience. “Texas matters are all right. Nothing is wanted there but quiet,” he wrote. It also warranted his return to Texas, to ensure the quiet. “I shall be at home soon,” he predicted on November 26.

  Austin’s trip north went smoothly until he reached Saltillo in January 1834. He had ridden hard to catch the newly appointed commandant general for the northern district, Pedro Lemus, so that the two might travel together. To his amazement, when he presented himself to Lemus, the general arrested him. Lemus explained that he had received an order from the war ministry to capture Austin and return him to the capital to answer charges raised by the state government of Coahuila y Texas.

  Austin was hurt and dismayed. “All I can be accused of is that I have labored arduously, faithfully, and perhaps, at particular moments, passionately and with more impatience and irritation than I ought to have shewn, to have Texas made a State of the Mexican Confederation separate from Coahuila,” he wrote to Sam Williams. “This is all, and this is no crime.” If he had erred in writing frankly to the people of San Antonio—Austin guessed the source of the complaint against him—he had done so from honorable motives. “I considered that very great respect and deference was justly due to them as native Mexicans, as the capital of Texas, and as the oldest and most populous town in the country. And I knew the importance of getting them to take the lead in all the politics of Texas. Besides this, I was personally attached to those people as a sincere friend and wished to act in concert with them.” But they had betrayed his confidence—which was all the more hurtful given that events were tearing Texas apart and no one else was trying to mend it. “My object was to smother the party spirit and violent and ruinous divisions which I saw brewing in the colony.”

  General Lemus appreciated Austin’s plight and transported him south in his own carriage. But the kindness ended when Austin reached Mexico City. On February 13, 1834, he was placed in a prison that once had held victims of the Inquisition. He spoke briefly with a prosecutor a few days later, but beyond this he received no information regarding the charges against him or his prospects of coming to trial. He had no cellmate and no visitors except Padre Miguel Muldoon, an Irish cleric he had met earlier. “Time drags on heavily,” Austin wrote in a diary he kept during his detention. “What a horrible punishment is solitary confinement, shut up in a dungeon with scarcely enough light to distinguish anything.”

  The lonely days facilitated reflection. He asked himself what the “true interest of Texas” was, and answered, “It is to have a local government to cement and strengthen its union with Mexico instead of weakening or breaking it. What Texas wants is an organization of a local government, and it is of little consequence whether it be part of Coahuila or as a separate state or territory, provided the organization be a suitable one.” As this conclusion was more moderate than the line he took with Gómez Farías, one suspects that either Austin had learned the lesson his imprisonment presumably was supposed to teach him—that Texas must forever remain a part of Mexico—or he thought someone would be reading his journal. His musings often sound like the defense he would make at trial, should he ever get one. “My intentions were pure and correct. I desired to cement the union of Texas with Mexico, and to promote the welfare and advancement of my adopted country, by populating the northern and eastern frontier. I have been impatient, and have allowed myself to be compromised and ensnared by the political events of last year, and by the excitement caused by them in Texas.” But he had committed no crime. “My conscience acquits me of anything wrong, except impatience and imprudence.”

  Yet if Austin was defending himself to a potential prosecutor
, he was also defending himself to himself. In prison the Mexican republic assumed a solidity it had often seemed to lack on the outside, where the roils of revolution left everyone—Austin included—wondering whether the government could hold itself together, let alone hold the country together. If Mexico was falling to pieces, simple self-preservation dictated that the Texans look to their own security. In prison, however, the view changed. The stone walls of his cell had stood longer than the republic of the North, and they gave every indication of standing for a long time to come. Under the circumstances, it was easy for Austin to revert to his earlier thinking about Texas and Mexico, and to conclude—again—that the future of his adopted province lay within the embrace of his adopted country.

  But there were things about Mexico that had to change, starting with a legal code that could lock a prisoner away with no means to defend himself. “What a system of jurisprudence is this of confining those accused or suspected without permitting them to take any steps to make manifest their innocence or to procure proofs for their trial? They can neither consult with counsel, lawyer, friend or anybody. I do not know of what I am accused; how can I prepare my defense? . . . This system may be in conformity with law, but I am ignorant of which law. . . . It is very certain that such a system is in no wise in conformity with justice, reason or common sense.”

  After three months in prison, Austin spied a glimmer of hope, in the person of Santa Anna. The hero of Tampico had been elected president the previous March, despite continuing illness, which, he said, prevented his attending his own inauguration. “I am in such a condition that I cannot even put on my shoes,” he told Gómez Farías, who became acting president.

  Gómez Farías happened to be a physician, but he didn’t require a medical degree to know that Santa Anna’s illness was political, an allergic reaction to responsibility for the liberal reforms the progressive vice president and a similarly inclined congress began to put in place. Santa Anna was allowing the liberals their moment, yet he was hedging his bets by distancing himself from the reforms. The losers in the latest round of the revolution—a group that included some of the wealthiest and most influential persons in the country—had yet to formulate a response to the government’s program, and Santa Anna didn’t want to commit himself before they did. If the reforms proved popular, Santa Anna would claim credit; if they failed, he’d let Gómez Farías take the blame.

  Santa Anna’s health recovered sufficiently for him to visit the capital at the end of May; while there he reaffirmed his devotion to the revolution and the constitution of 1824. A conservative alliance of bishops and generals had called for Santa Anna to assume emergency powers against the liberals; the president condemned the very thought. “I swear to you,” he told the Mexican people, “that I oppose all efforts aimed at the destruction of the constitution and that I would die before accepting any other power than that designated by it. . . . My firmest determination is to defend without the slightest hesitation the constitution as our representatives gave it to us in 1824.”

  Yet during the subsequent several months Santa Anna reconsidered his attachment to the 1824 charter. The bishops and generals, joined by the landed gentry, descended upon Santa Anna’s hacienda and implored him to move against the liberals. They argued that the revolution had gone awry, that the Mexican masses weren’t ready for republicanism, that progress for Mexico required stronger leadership than the current system could deliver.

  Santa Anna allowed himself to be persuaded. Having observed the congress flail haplessly at the numerous problems facing Mexico, and having watched one set of politicians fall out murderously with the next, the general decided that he alone—ruling alone—held the key to Mexico’s salvation. To many observers, this turnabout was nothing less than a betrayal of the republic and the revolution. A former American minister to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, charged the president with abandoning his liberal convictions. Santa Anna replied in measured tones. “Say to Mr. Poinsett that it is very true that I threw up my cap for liberty with great ardor, and perfect sincerity, but very soon found the folly of it. A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them.”

  Despotism was what Santa Anna began to provide the Mexican people in the spring of 1834. “When I returned to the capital,” he explained, by way of justifying what happened next, “I encountered stormy sessions of the Congress. One faction was endeavoring to confiscate the property of the church and to deny to the clergy its rights and ancient privileges. The public was dismayed by these actions and opposed violently any usurpation of the clergy’s rights. Obeying the dictates of my conscience and hoping to quell a revolution, I declined to approve the necessary decree to put these edicts into law.”

  He did more than that. He sent the congress home, expressing confidence that he could govern quite well without the legislature. He chased off Gómez Farías (who fled to New Orleans) and unilaterally repealed most of the liberal reforms. The wealthy sighed in relief; the generals rallied to their old commander; the bishops offered benedictions. “We were perishing,” one of the churchmen explained, “but God mercifully turned over a blessed leaf for us and had mercy on our sufferings. At the end of last April there appeared unexpectedly a brilliant star, whose beauty, clarity and splendor announced to us, as in other times to the three Wise Men, that justice and peace were drawing near and were already in our land.” The star, of course, was “the Most Excellent Señor President Don Antonio López de Santa Anna . . . whose religious and patriotic sentiments qualify him eternally as a hero of the love and recognition of the nation.”

  Stephen Austin wasn’t quite so enthusiastic, but from the pinched perspective of his cell he accounted Santa Anna’s assumption of sweeping power a good thing. For one thing, Santa Anna eased the conditions of Austin’s imprisonment. Not long after the general reached Mexico City, Austin was allowed the run of the Inquisition prison. “Our doors are now open from sun rise to 9 o’clock at night,” Austin wrote James Perry. “We have the free use of the patio and can visit another extensive range of dungeons in the 2nd story of the main building. . . . From this range there is a passage onto the asotea or roof of our range of dungeons, which is so flat that we can walk over our dungeons and all around our patio and have sufficient room for exercise.” The loosening of his bonds, which shortly followed the dismissal of Gómez Farías, suggested to Austin that the acting president had been responsible for his incarceration, and he hoped that Santa Anna’s return would set things right.

  In any event, the weeks dragged on with Austin still in custody. He was transferred to a less austere prison in the suburbs, where visitors could come and go freely. One visitor, an American businessman who admired Austin’s determination, offered to help him escape. But Austin declined, putting his faith in Santa Anna. “I have no doubt that the political intentions of the President General Santa Anna are sound and patriotic,” he wrote in August. As for his own prospects and those of Texas, Austin had every confidence in Mexico’s supreme leader. “President Santa Anna is friendly to Texas and to me,” he said. “Of this I have no doubt.”

  P A R T T H R E E

  Blood on

  the Sand

  (1835–1836)

  C h a p t e r 1 1

  The Sword Is Drawn

  When Sam Houston read the letter Austin wrote from Mexico City in August 1834, he thought the prisoner had gone mad. For Austin to place his trust in Santa Anna, and to ask others to do the same, seemed to Houston to raise serious doubt about Austin’s sanity—or his integrity. “It awakened no other emotion in my breast than pity mingled with contempt,” Houston told a contemporary. “He showed the disposition of the viper without its fangs. The first was very imprudent, the second pusillanimous.”

  Beyond what he perceived to be Austin’s woeful misunderstanding of Santa Anna, Houston took personal offense at aspersion
s Austin cast on his good faith and that of others in Texas who were less sanguine than he—Austin—regarding the prospects of continued attachment to Mexico. In his August letter, Austin hinted darkly at machinations by his enemies in Texas to keep him imprisoned. “I have even been told,” Austin wrote, “that if I am not imprisoned for life and totally ruined in property and reputation, it will not be for the want of exertions or industry on the part of some of my countrymen who live in Texas.” Austin had gone on to say, “Whether all this be true or not, I do not know. I am unwilling to believe it.” But then he proceeded—twice—to repeat the charge, only to reiterate—twice—that he couldn’t believe it. And he asserted that Santa Anna was a better friend of Texas than were those insisting on greater rights for Texans. The rambling recitation was enough to drive Houston to distraction, and to conclude that prison had addled Austin’s brain.

  Or perhaps interest had corrupted his soul. It was well known, even to Texas newcomers, that Austin owed his position in Texas to the government of Mexico. Mexico had made him an empresario, had conferred on him the authority to assign lands in Texas to colonists and to establish and enforce laws in the colony. If Texas remained part of Mexico, Austin would remain a great man in Texas. But if Texas became independent of Mexico, Austin would be . . . what?