by Bruce Olds
This, it before long became apparent, was tantamount not only to inviting a skulk of foxes into the henhouse, but, owing to the natural rapacity of the species, of serving it chicken dinner upon a well-burnished platter.
Nonetheless, in the United States, the 1819 treaty remained an object of widespread scorn and derision. Not only did such prominent slave-owning senators as Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton bitterly denounce it while lobbying for its abrogation, but the Federal Surveyor, William Darby, characterized it as “a monumental and egregious blunder worse than folly,” predicting with uncanny prescience (in the Nashville Clarion & Tennessee State Gazette; 4/6/19) that:
“No artificial lines will operate to stem the torrent of western emigration. The laws of nature will be neither arrested nor thwarted by a roll of parchment. The increasing and restless men of the west will follow on regardless of future consequences. Why the United States should relinquish a part of its domain, I cannot see, and still less can I see the sense or policy of adopting an order of things which inevitably must produce savage war.”
By the time William Barret Travis entered the territory a dozen years later, that savagery waited only upon heedless hap to erupt with all the force of bayonets.
Such, then, the frame, ground and context.
Anahuac
I do not wish to dwell upon my Anahuac Experience. Pointless, not to say distasteful, it involved a matter, a decidedly unpleasant matter, that until now I have been reluctant to discuss.
Notwithstanding, in the name of fair, frank and full disclosure, I feel honor-bound now—for if not now, when?—to place upon the record to the best of my recollection certain facts as I, and I alone, was privy to them. However painful and humiliating to me they may have been and continue to be, the version of the story that I have vowed to tell renders the registering of those facts not only necessary, but of the utmost moment.
It has been said, or perhaps I am the one to say it, that a passion for the inevitable is the last honor of defeat. And this, on the face of it, is a noble sentiment, one that as a Southerner and a soldier makes to me not only perfect sense, but resonates to my soul. In this instance, however, this Anahuac instance, as well as all that followed and continues to follow therefrom, there necessarily is more, much more, that shouts for its saying; it is that which I intend to say here.
Now, as singularly down at the heel as I had found San Felipe, Austin’s colonial capital was by comparison to what I discovered at Anahuac, a veritable clinquant city on a hill. Even as I approached on horseback, while still a good mile from town, I was slapped full-brunt across the face by a wave of air so noxiously thick, high and sharp that my eyes began uncontrollably to water. (Can eyes bristle? Air fester? Can an odor, a malodor, claw?) So much so, in fact, that I was obliged to brush away the blur of tears with the back of a wrist while yanking my kerchief up over my mouth and nose clean to its bridge.
It was, I learned soon enough, a stank that emanated in part from the neighborhood’s interlocking maze of raw sewage sinks, coupled with the rankish rot off the seagrass-meadowed bay, the inordinately shallow Trinity Bay with its oystershell-middened shoreline littered with tens of thousands of dead fish (cat, drum, gar, skate, bowfin, mullet) and hundreds of diamondback terrapins broiling belly up in the sun, the lot apparently churned and chucked there by the hurricane that had rip-sawed through the country from Galveston but a fortnight past.
The only inn in town, as Austin had advised—if a crazy-quilt of thatch-roof, wattle-and-daub jacales and a cannon-heavy, brick masonry presidio perched atop a 30-foot-high pigsoil bluff overlooking the bay merits the descriptor “town”—was J.W. Hardin’s. (The proprietor, so the rumor, was the same who had murdered a man back in Maury County, Tennessee; such rumors, such being the unspoken local custom, destined to remain rumors). So it was there, at the heart of what I was to learn was called El barrio norteamericano, the American Quarter, that I put up for the duration in a draughty, windowless, if not uncapacious room that I did my best to makeshift that it might double for a serviceable office space.
Most of the 50 or so Anglos living in the Quarter, despite the insularity of their often clashing political allegiances—some few, I discovered, were for Texas independence at once; significantly more were for it at some unspecified point further down the road; a fair number were content to abide if not embrace the status quo (“Live quietly and go about your labors in peace, harmony and concord” being the prevailing wisdom among these “Tories”); some, most perhaps, were a middling muddle of mixed feelings and conflicted convictions—were possessed of a legal status not unakin to my own.
Among their number was a name that, along with a letter of introduction, Austin had back in San Felipe been so generous as to furnish me, and so my immediate order of business was to track down one Patrick Churchill Jack who, excluding myself, was the only lawyer then on premises. Bespectacled, bacon-faced, the bandylegged Paddy C was, as Austin had described him, a “bantam rooster of a man,” a short-tempered, brashly outspoken, native Georgian less than a year my senior who long since had ceased being in the least self-conscious about the nevus flammeus—the size of a fighter’s fist—that laid, wine-dark, along his lower jaw.
Having been directed to and finding him in his rooms a scant street or two over from Hardin’s, I was immediately warm-welcomed inside where Paddy poured us each two fingers of rye whiskey—I am not partial to spirits, but thought it only neighborly in this instance not to spurn the gesture—before easing around to what he referred to as “certain matters of imminent moment.”
As he related to me, it had been but a few months prior to my arrival that Paddy apparently had run afoul of the town’s Mexican commander—the same Austin had admonished me to steer well clear of owing to his being “perfectly incompetent to such a post, too much of a jackass to be governed by reason or judgment, and when not half-crazy, a consummate fool”—when he too openly sought to raise what he called The People’s Committee of Civilian Self-defense, Safety & Protection, a sort of ragtag, Anglo-only militia unit “armed and minute-ready.”
“We had to do something,” Paddy explained. “It is no secret, though none could in good conscience, Travis, fault you for questioning its credulity, that half the 200 Mex soldados here, these so-called presidiales, are convicted felons, not a few of them rapists. Indeed, one of them, a black-hearted murdering swine named García-Ugarte, is the commander’s own personal secretary. Shocking, is it not? No! What is shocking, is that here, in Anahuac, it is not—shocking. Not shocking in the least.
“There is a document, official document, I own a copy—nor was it, you may believe, come by cheaply—that it would benefit you to familiarize yourself with sooner than later. Entitled Reglamento de Presidios, the ‘Regulations for Presidios,’ it contains the clause, I quote, ‘Regular garrison forces shall be composed of vagrants and other disorderly and disreputable persons who shall be recruited by entrapment and decoy.’
“Appalling, is it not? That such a practice should be the official policy of the government, any government? What is more appalling still is that such scum not only is permitted to roam the town here at drunken, carousing will, subjecting the good citizens of this community, including our women, especially our women, to the most profane verbal abuse and intimidating physical harassment, but that despite our repeatedly bringing such wanton outrages to the attention of the ranking officer, no finger is lifted effectively to remedy or so much as curb or mitigate them.”
Targeted as cabecilla, Anglo ringleader, Paddy had been arrested—it would not be the last time—before being hurled, hooded and Lilly-cuffed, into the brig of a Mex schooner anchored in the bay. There, it was duly explained to him that: one, the assembling of such an independent armed militia as he had organized expressly contravened Mexican law—“a fact,” said Paddy, “that being neither illiterate nor entirely unversed in their language I knew damn well, it being so stated under their fucking Article 26 of their fucking so-called
Military Law”—and two, as matters of defense “are strictly the prerogative of the commander of this garrison and no one else, you will in the future abstain from all such traitorous activity while bowing to his legally constituted authority short of which not only will you find yourself confined aboard a ship bound for Matamoros where the Commandant General will dispose of your fate, but your fugitive rabble will find its collective neck bent beneath the imposition of the harshest strictures of a stern and unforgiving martial law,” including curfews, detentions, weapons confiscations, search-and-seizures, 24-hour street patrollings, &c.”
“The commanding officer here…?” I began.
“Bradburn. The worst sort of tyrant. Sees enemies and conspirators everywhere—or contrives them wholecloth. Hallucinates saboteurs; conjures provocateurs, outside agitators, infiltrators, instigators and trouble-makers; imagines agents deployed sub rosa to frustrate and undermine his every decision. Conceives of anyone who would dare raise a whisper to question his judgment or protest his authority, much less lift a hand actively to oppose or resist it, ‘un enemigo del estado,’ an enemy of the state.
“Guilty. We, all of us here—now yourself as well, Travis, you would be wise to understand—are in his eyes guilty. Of what? Who knows? Of our presence I reckon. Of having the temerity to walk with him the same earth and breathe the same air, acts which he construes as an affront to his imperial authority, an authority he is authorized by his superiors to exercise unchecked. Welcome to Anahuac, Buck.”
“I see. But the civil law here…”
“Takes a backseat to the military. Defers to the military. Is superseded by the military, or rather, by its principle of fuero militar, which renders it exempt from all civic authority. Not that it matters. The ass refuses to recognize our right to practice it, much less to contest its particulars in court, at least the ones that might apply to him and his thug command. Calls us cornstalkers, canebreakers.”
“Pardon? Cane…”
“Lawyers absent legitimate legal standing. That we practice without una licencia valida, a valid license, one that only Mexico City can confer, but never has, not to a non-native born applicant. Ever. No, as far as the law is concerned here, Bradburn is lord, master and sole sovereign executioner, and we are but his geldings.”
Removing his eyeglasses, Paddy fished a handkerchief from his breast pocket, flapped it free, and fell to polishing what I previously could not help but notice were their uncommonly thick lenses.
“Have you,” I ventured, “thought to appeal to Austin? Could he not be persuaded to intercede on our…”
“That was done. That occurred. A meeting did take place during which Austin voiced our concerns, as he likewise advocated suspension of all these ridiculously onerous tariffs and excessive custom duties the Mex slap on our American cargo vessels. In response, so Austin assured me, Bradburn vowed both to more conscientiously respect the civil authority here and more assiduously monitor the behavior of his troops. Instead, the scoundrel continues to recognize no authority save that of his military superiors in Matamoros and Mexico City while the depraved effrontery of his men grows daily only bolder and more widespread.
“Anahuac is not San Felipe, sir. As it lies outside the boundaries of his colony, any influence Austin may wield here, any pressure on our behalf he may bring to bear can be effective only as it stems from his status, reputation and genius for diplomatic suasion.
“Which is to say, it is not binding. It perforce lacks tooth. And nothing could be clearer than that such tooth, sharp tooth, colmillo, fang, sir, is what is most sorely required.”
Fishhooking the templetips of his rimless spectacles one behind each ear, he rose from his chair and crossed over to the Congo African Grey squawking on its perch, withdrew what appeared to me an unshelled palm nut from his weskit’s pocket, and relinquished it palm up to the parrot’s talon-grip upon which it, the bird, fell instantly more silent than a birdless sky.
“No, it is all on us, Buck, and us alone. We are endowed with our certain godgiven rights, and whether Bradburn and Mexico City choose to acknowledge them, they are inalienable. Should we fail to defend them in the face of those who would dare trample them to dust, we shall only deserve that which we are bounden to reap.”
I must have known it was coming. Yet when it came, the vise-crunch of that psittacine beak, cracking the nut like a gunshot, I must confess that I started and ducked while Paddy roared with delight until the tears flowed, his glasses fogged, and I cursed a streak so blasphemously blue, I dasn’t repeat it here.
When you know a language, you know a people, and when you know a people, you know their world, at least as much of it as may be knowable, and such knowledge, while a guarantor of nothing, offers the possibility, slim as it may be, of shedding some available light towards illuminating a beginning. A place to begin. To be. Some common ground. A way, perhaps, to wedge a way in. To have a haven. Even inhabit a home.
And so, in the weeks, then months to follow, there was the challenge of la lengua, el Español, an impediment that, as Austin had counseled, I undertook with Paddy’s help to overcome, if never entirely to master. His willingness to share with me both his Spanish to English translations of certain articles, clauses and sub-clauses of Mexican civil and military law, as well as his running compilation of a number of the more commonly used Spanish idioms, idiolects and colloquialisms, and his incessant pounding of the vowel sounds—a=ah, e=eh, i=ee, o=oh, u=ooh—was at the time nothing short of invaluable.
In time, I would find myself wondering whether had such bi-lingualism been the shared verbal coin of the realm, had each “side” in the conflict to come only better grasped the nuances, inflections, and modulations, oblique allusions, abstruse meanings and opacities, implicit subtexts, leitmotivs and tropes employed by the other, whether events might have evolved somewhat…differently. For certainly, when one is deprived of the capacity to express oneself with a sufficient degree of clarity, when one cannot rely upon the existence of a reciprocal, mutual verbal and written understanding, one cannot help but feel—as was the case with myself until I had acquired a sufficient working knowledge of “the tongue”—at sea, a mar, a pescado out of water where not a ballena beached upon a far-flung foreign shore.
Not to make more of it than it may merit, but if knowledge is power, and obtaining that knowledge depends in large part upon possessing and controlling the language, then to have limited or imperfect or no access to that language, is to be rendered less empowered, even emasculated. And when one feels that way, one may in consequence feel not only vulnerable, but conjure threats that, however baseless or misapprehended, too often are met with expressions and gestures of a certain hostility.
I am not suggesting, please, that all differences, fractious as they were, toxic as they were, could have been peaceably adjudicated or harmoniously reconciled if only. Some of those differences, as I was coming gradually to understand, were too deeply entrenched, too ingrained ever to be resolved short of some measure of coercive nastiness.
The slavery issue, for example. Mexico’s having legislated the abolition of the practice two years before not only had been a brazen assault upon our property rights—the market value of a decent chattel typically fell between $500 and $1,000; for most, a lavish, even exorbitant sum—but posed a mortal threat to our economic future, our cotton, cane and tobacco planting future. Which bore, in turn, upon the very reason so many had expatriated to Tejas in the first place: land. Cheap, affordable, arable land, and lots of it.
At a time when the going rate back in the States was $1.25 an acre, here it was 12½ cents. The price was irresistible, and in most it fed a hunger so rapacious that, as Stephen Austin later would remark to me, “It is with land as it is with religion, Buck. It throws otherwise perfectly sane people into all sorts of convulsions.” (And speaking of religion, while Mexico City’s demand that we were as émigrés legally bound to swear fealty to its papist church aroused its share of resentment, owing to th
e policy so seldom being enforced, most of us simply chose to ignore it. Still, it rankled.)
While I cannot say that I ever was so land-fevered myself, I certainly had my share of professional doings with those, James Bowie chief among them, who were. Indeed in my experience the attitude of the typical Texian émigré was that he would by fair means or foul acquire for himself grant title to as much of the country as he could persuade his lawyer to finagle, a predatory, unapologetically avaricious attitude that did little to endear him to his hosts.
Such thornier issues aside, there were, in my estimation, any number of others that might at least have had a fighting chance of being hashed out, sorted through and settled to one degree or another, absent the indiscriminate bloodletting that so regrettably ensued.
Often, not always—I am perfectly aware of the pitfalls—but often enough it is the disgruntlements and differences, even the deep disagreements and disparities, the rifts that are possessed of the potential, given time enough and world, to foster mutual understanding, if not eye to eye agreement.
What, after all, was the argument against getting to know one another at least a little better, somewhat better, before we started annihilating each other?
I heard screaming, but I was too late. I happened upon the outrage too late.
I was on the return leg of my nightly circumambulation about the Quarter, shillelagh in hand, when her shrieking, then her moaning and whimpering, as well as the growling in Spanish, drew my notice to a lonely, moonlit-stippled side lane where with some difficulty I was able to delineate the silhouette of a figure crouched over one significantly smaller sprawled upon the ground.
