“And when war comes to Texas, when Lincoln’s armies reach our borders …” Houston frowned, “our men will die then, too, Rip. This you know as well as I do.”
“Yes, sir. But they’ll die defending our state, sir. We won’t be the invaders.” He found his hat, held it against his trousers, and shook his head.
“I can lead my boys against an army attacking us, General Houston. But I won’t lead them as invaders. You understand that, sir?”
* * * * *
Rip Ford had rejected him. Well, so had Robert E. Lee. Yet Houston had piqued McCulloch’s interest—for the right price—so Houston persisted. He could put Edward Burleson, the Reverend Rufus Burleson’s cousin, in charge, ask him to raise more than just Mexican scouts and interpreters. He worked through the afternoon until Margaret entered the study, and even then, she had to call his name twice before he looked up.
“Sam Houston.” Margaret placed both hands on her hips. “Lewis has twice called you to supper, and twice you told him you were coming. It is growing cold, sir, and the family awaits.”
Houston frowned. He did not even remember the slave coming into the library.
Excitement, however, bubbled over him, and he called her to the desk. Standing, he moved to the maps, and pointed. “I have it all figured out, Margaret,” he said with the enthusiasm he remembered having as a boy hunting and fishing in the Tennessee hills. “A new country!” He tapped the map with one of his scarred, massive fingers.
“New.” Margaret shook her head. “That’s Mexico, darling.”
“But not after we reclaim it.”
She looked up, concern etched in her features. “Reclaim?”
“It will save us, at least part of Texas, from the civil war that shall consume us,” he explained. “A new republic. Ben McCulloch says it will be my crowning moment, and, by Jehovah, he is right.”
She backed up a few steps, her mouth hanging open, and studied him. He sang out a few of his ideas until she stamped her foot on the floor, silencing him.
“You …” She had to shake her head, gather her thoughts. “You go to war … to prevent a war?”
“Yes, damn it!” he roared, thinking she mocked him.
“And what shall we name this new republic?” Margaret asked.
He had not thought of a name. The Order of the Lone Star of the West sounded far too lengthy.
Margaret suggested, “Houstonia?”
He blinked. He stared. He watched her walk out of the library. The door slammed so hard, the map toppled off its perch and dropped to the floor.
* * * * *
Timidly, he entered the bedchambers late that evening. His stomach growled, for his supper had gone uneaten while he dashed off letters to Rip Ford, Ben McCulloch, Edward Burleson, and foreigners—one French, one English—staying in hotels in Nacogdoches and Austin.
Margaret sat on her side of the bed, the candle fluttering as she read the Bible.
She did not speak as Houston undressed and put on his nightshirt. He picked up his own Bible, laid it on the bedside table, then took his candle and walked over to Margaret, where he used the flame in Margaret’s candle to light his own. There, he waited for her to look up. When she did not, he started talking anyway.
“My foible has been vainglory. A worse weakness than whiskey, I fear. It can consume me.” His head shook and he let out a chuckle that had no mirth. “You won’t believe me, but I actually thought I could save Sam Junior from war by leading him into war.” He sighed, and she lifted her gaze toward his blue eyes. “You have always brought my flaws to my attention,” he continued, “and you have saved me countless times from my own imperfections, decisions, ideas, things that would have ruined me. Ruined us. I am sorry.”
“You would have reasoned everything out eventually.” She closed her Bible. “Eventually. You are an honorable man, Samuel Houston. Now come to bed.”
Relieved, he crossed the room, set the candle down, and slipped underneath the covers. She extinguished her candle. He sat up and opened the Bible.
Through the open window, he smelled salt air as he read Matthew, finding the verse he knew he wanted to close on: And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
Bible returned to the nightstand, he settled into the bed after blowing out his candle.
“I have not seen you so furious,” he said in the darkness, “since the night you caught me dancing.”
He heard her shift, rise, and then felt her above his face.
“That was because,” Margaret said, “you were not dancing with me.”
Her lips found his.
Chapter Fourteen
July 4, 1861
That morning, Jeff rode with him to Houston City. Over protests from the slave, Margaret, and Sam Junior, Houston insisted on riding his gray stallion, and not “in that damned carriage.” When in one of those moods, they knew better than to argue too much, so they let him go, with Jeff accompanying him on a sorrel gelding.
“Now you see why I made us ride horses,” Houston said with a smirk when they entered his namesake city.
Rains had flooded the Texas coast for several days, turning the city’s streets into swampy bogs. Wagons along Main Street had sunk to their beds, and muddy tracks hid even the cobblestones of the few paved streets.
As they dismounted in front of a hitching rail, a skinny soldier in a coat of butternut and tan trousers stained with mud called out, “Sir, I must see your passes.”
Houston finished tethering the stallion before he stared at the teen.
“I beg your pardon,” Houston said.
“Your passes, sir. The city is under martial law. You cannot travel without a pass.”
Face reddening, Houston stepped around the rail and onto the warped boardwalk, stretching out his frame until he towered over the slight soldier. He leaned forward, scowled, and his voice made the youngster shiver.
“Go to San Jacinto, and there learn my right to travel in Texas.”
The kid practically dropped his fowling piece.
“At ease, soldier,” a voice called from a mercantile doorway. “Let General Houston pass.”
Holding a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, Dr. Ashbel Smith stepped onto the boardwalk. His hair was graying, thinning on top, and his mustache and goatee had already lost all of their brown, but his eyes sparkled with humor. He wore a neat shell jacket with French braid on the sleeves, gray trousers, tall boots, and, rather than carrying a doctor’s satchel, he wore a holstered revolver and sheathed saber.
Once he shifted the package, he offered his hand, which Houston gladly accepted.
“I have a hankering for some of Murdoch Lind’s chicory and a lemon tart,” the doctor said. “Would you care to join me, sir?”
“A pleasure.”
As they walked, Jeff following behind them, Houston asked: “A pass? Martial law?”
“The Yankees have begun their blockade,” Smith explained.
Yes, but Houston had seen no signs of a Yankee invasion. And you declare martial law … so soon?
“Our foolish governor fears invasion,” Smith said. “But that’s Governor Clark for us. The Union ships will not stop our runners. They have not enough ships.”
For now, Houston thought. Bales of cotton almost reached the roof of a warehouse. Had rains delayed those being loaded onto ships for export, or were Federal ships responsible?
They waited for a woman to cross the plank laid across a street, bowed politely, before Smith changed the subject. “What brings you to town, Sam?”
Houston said, “Do not you know what day it is, Doctor?”
Smith laughed. “But of course, Sam. It is Thursday.”
The doctor stopped as a man staggered in front of him and through the doors of a saloo
n. He pointed across the street. “There is your Independence Day celebration, Sam.”
Houston watched another man weaving in front of a gambling hall, waving a bottle in one hand and yelling, “Hurrah! Hurrah for Jeff Davis. Down with all the Yanks. Damn all the Yanks!”
“Jeff Davis is as ambitious as Lucifer and as cold as a lizard,” Houston said.
With a chuckle, Smith resumed his walk, but Houston had stopped, staring at a board nailed onto the wall of a saloon. Smith returned to join Houston and Jeff for a closer look.
The whitewashed board, about eighteen by twenty-four inches, appeared to be some type of chart. Houston turned his head, trying to make sense of it.
“Too wet to race horses,” Smith explained. “And not everybody plays cards.” The doctor tapped the board with his index finger. “So, they’ve been betting on shootings. Well, actually, killings. You can bet on the day, but most prefer to wager on the weekly total.”
Houston frowned. “I am distressed to find my namesake city unable to compete with Hempstead and Richmond.”
He said it as a joke, and Smith grinned, but Sam Houston did not know what to think about a city named after him, being known for blasphemers, gamesters, drunkards, liars, and slanderers. Then again, perhaps men of such ilk fit Houston City better than anyone else.
* * * * *
Jeff waited on the bench outside of Lind’s coffee shop as Houston and Smith sipped New Orleans brew and reminisced.
James Pinckney Henderson had talked Smith into leaving North Carolina back in 1837, and Houston could not count the number of lives the doctor had saved from yellow fever, cholera, gunshots. The uniform he wore now, though, made Houston frown.
“Are all your soldiers as sound as the young man who demanded to see my passport, Doctor?”
“The Bayland Guards will be a credit to Texas, and to the Confederacy, Sam.” He gestured in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico. “The Yankees do not know it, but the blockade will fire up the young men in our area. I may have more than a company in a few weeks, Sam. I may command a full regiment.”
Houston frowned. He thought of Sam Junior.
“‘We are not enemies, but friends,’” Houston said. “‘We must not be enemies.’”
Smith stirred milk into his coffee. “Sound words. Yours, or Andy Jackson’s?”
“Abraham Lincoln’s,” Houston said. “From his inaugural address.”
“Ah.” Smith sighed. “Alas, it is too late for that.”
“Yes,” Houston lamented. “Fort Sumter has …”
“No.” Houston saw the gravity in the surgeon’s face. “Not Fort Sumner, Sam.” The doctor pushed his coffee cup across the table. “I have heard reports of some small skirmishes … artillery … gunboats … along the Virginia coast, but nothing definite. Yet a courier brought word last week of an engagement in Missouri.”
“Missouri?” Virginia, Houston could understand. Yet to hear of fighting already beginning this far west chilled Houston. Besides, from what Houston had read, the state of Missouri was attempting to stay out of the war—more or less—refusing to join the Confederacy, yet also not quite adopting the cause of the Union.
“The courier made the engagement seem like Waterloo,” Smith said, “but you know how these reports are. After he calmed down, I determined that it was no … well … a far cry from San Jacinto.” He tilted his head toward the street. “Likely, Hempstead, Richmond, and our fair city will see more casualties by Sunday than whatever actually happened at Boonville.” He forced a smile, lifted his cup, and drank. “The war will be over in six months, Sam.”
“No,” Houston said. “It won’t, Doctor. It won’t be over for a damned long time.”
* * * * *
He did not return to Cedar Point directly, but rode east with Jeff, following the narrow path along Buffalo Bayou until the sun began setting. Jeff let out a horrified yelp when Houston spurred the gray stallion into the water, and crossed the flooding marsh.
“Master Sam!” Jeff called. “Master Sam!”
Paying no attention, Houston rode on. Jeff said a prayer before he eased the sorrel into the murky, stinking water. He could not swim, and he closed his eyes and did not open them until he felt the horse coming out of the water. Then he kicked the gelding into a trot to catch up with Houston.
Insects swarmed in the fading light, and the trees turned ghostlike. Houston paid no attention but charged forward with unannounced purpose. He rode, not speaking, but looking this way and that. Jeff trembled. He did not know this country, but he feared it. To the young slave, this place felt like a graveyard.
Bull bats began feasting on the insects as the night darkened, and, eventually, Houston reined in the gray, and swung out of the saddle, handing the reins to Jeff.
Jeff could just make out a big oak tree and watched Houston cross the wet ground. The tree was big, but certainly not like the Treaty Oak back in Austin. Yet again, Houston walked around it. After a few circles, he sat underneath the tree, bracing his back against the trunk. He sat there until the moon rose.
By then, Jeff feared his master dead, so he swallowed, dismounted, and led the two horses to the oak. Houston lifted his head, and Jeff thanked God that the big man had not died.
“Do you know where we are, Jeff?” Houston asked.
“No, sir.”
“San Jacinto,” Houston said.
“Where you whupped Santa Anna?”
“Yes.” He raised his right arm. “Under this very tree I lay wounded, my ankle a bloody mess. Under this tree they brought Santa Anna to me. My boys wanted me to execute him, and if any man deserved the sentence of death, it was that …” he laughed, “Napoleon of the West. I told them that living, Santa Anna would be of incalculable benefit to Texas, but that dead, he would be just another dead Mexican.”
Jeff’s head bobbed.
“There were enough dead Mexicans here by then, Jeff.”
Jeff’s heart pounded.
“Hundreds of dead,” Houston said. “We butchered them like hogs in the fall. ‘Remember the Alamo,’ my boys cried. ‘Remember Goliad.’ Oh, how well they remembered. We could not stop the slaughter. The bloodlust could not be slaked.” He pointed toward the water. “Some tried to swim, only to be shot down. Some cried … ‘Me no Alamo. Me no Goliad.’ They were murdered, too. It was a brutal day, Jeff. War does that to men. We tell our young men to kill, that they must kill, and then it can become damned impossible to stop them from killing.”
“Shouldn’t we be goin’, Master Sam?” Jeff pleaded.
Houston grinned.
“Whilst I lay here after that battle, I noticed that at dark, when the moon rose, just about midnight …” Frowning, he stopped. He had planned on playing a joke on the young slave, telling him about the ghosts of dead Mexican soldiers coming toward him, the spirits howling at him. He had envisioned himself laughing at Jeff’s expense, but now he felt ashamed. To play a joke on a young slave wasn’t funny. And Sam Houston had seen enough ghosts recently.
“Help me up, Jeff,” he said. “There is a ferry we can use to cross. We cannot make it back home tonight, but we can be far from here at the least.”
So, they crossed Burnet Bay on a ramshackle ferry, leaving the ghosts of Mexican soldiers behind. They camped that night along Cedar Bayou.
Once Jeff had fallen asleep, tossing and turning, Houston jumped at the croaks of frogs, the jumping of fish. Coming through San Jacinto had been a tactical error. Ghosts. Another ghost was sure to visit him, and this one would be a Mexican soldier murdered at San Jacinto.
It was not.
Chapter Fifteen
Jackson
“I asked you to get Texas for me. You went and got it for yourself.”
Houston throws off his blanket and sits up, finding Andrew Jackson squatting by the coals of the campfire, stirring them with a sti
ck in his right hand. His left arm is bent across his thigh. A bullet fired by one of the Benton brothers had always troubled that arm, even after the lead had finally been cut out twenty years after the injury. Old Hickory, his face bathed by moonlight, stops toying with the fire and stares at Houston. “By the eternal, it shall serve you right to see you lose it, too.”
The false teeth give Jackson no impediment this evening.
Moonlight, quickly closing in on a new moon, and dying coals provide the only light this evening, yet Houston sees Jackson as clearly as though at Horseshoe Bend … the hermitage outside of Nashville in the summer … in Washington City. Six-feet-one but hauntingly thin, the gray hair unruly, blue eyes as cold as steel. A Tennessean by way of South Carolina, a backwoodsman like Houston himself, Jackson is dressed in resplendent fashion—or what would have been thirty years ago: a double-breasted redingote, calf-length, of green wool with black velvet trim, with matching, double-breasted waistcoat with a rolled shawl collar; black trousers that cover all but the polished patent leather of his boots; and a black Dollman hat at his side, crown down, but not flattened, resting next to his walking cane.
“I would not expect you to visit me … here,” Houston tells him.
After spitting onto the coals, Jackson watches the sizzle. The glow reflects in his brutal eyes, like some wild animal’s in the dead of night.
“You would not be in Texas, my boy, were it not for me. Remember?”
Houston frowns. Andrew Jackson had been more of a father to him than Major Houston had, but death had robbed the major of that chance, and, well, there had been four sons born to the Houston home before Sam came along. Yet, Jackson had never been the father that Oo-loo-te-ka had been, either.
“I groomed you to be the president, Sam. You were governor of Tennessee, married to this pretty young thing. Who absolutely despised your guts. She broke your heart, and you ran off. Left Tennessee. Moved in with those heathen friends of yours. Turned your back on your own kind. By the eternal, you always were more Indian than white.”
Houston frowns. “I found them to be more honorable than white men,” he says.
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