By Christmas Eve, Houston became a Texas landowner. For $375 and an American horse, he took ownership of a league of land along the Gulf Coast, a plat of some 4,428 acres. Houston’s status as a full-fledged Texian was further affirmed when, on his return to Nacogdoches, he learned that the townspeople had chosen him as a delegate to a convention of Texians. Houston’s fame had preceded him, and the Texians had decided they needed his political expertise for the challenge facing them.
The purpose of the convention was to petition that the Mexican government grant Texas statehood status in the Mexican federation, separating it from another Mexican state, Coahuila. Houston and a committee of other settlers would soon draft a constitution for such a new Mexican state, one based on the 1780 charter of Massachusetts. Texians were unhappy at Mexico’s restrictions on immigration; even if they had little impact, they felt like an infringement. The linkage to Coahuila felt alien; while Texas was strongly Anglo, the province to the south and west was predominantly Tejano. But the biggest source of concern was actually a single man, a dangerous man, with what appeared to be an insatiable lust for power and wealth.
EL PRESIDENTE SANTA ANNA
Mexico’s president seemed to believe that cruelty was usually the best strategy.
General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s life story was, in some ways, not so different from Sam Houston’s. At about the same time that twenty-one-year-old Houston was defending American independence by fighting the Red Sticks, Santa Anna, one year younger, had also been at war. Unlike Sam Houston, though, he was fighting against his country’s independence. In 1813, the young warrior was serving under General Arredondo, a general in the Royal Spanish Army, seeking to put down a rebellion against Spain’s control of Mexico.
Like Houston, Santa Anna had risen rapidly in the ranks. Born into a well-to-do family, he had joined the military at age sixteen as a “gentleman cadet.” Also like Houston, he sustained an arrow wound early, during a skirmish with the Indians in the Sierra Madre. And, like Houston, his early war experience had formed him.
Where Houston had learned that bravery must be tempered with prudence, Santa Anna had recognized an appreciation of the power of pure brutality. Serving under Arredondo at the Battle of Medina, he was part of the Royal Army that had executed 112 rebels after they surrendered. They pursued more men who fled toward eastern Texas and the United States, putting to death any that they captured. In the end, they killed over a thousand men; only ninety-three managed to escape.
The brutality effectively ended resistance to the oppressive royalist government, but the Mexican desire for freedom from Spain was too strong to stay down forever. Just a few years later, Mexico saw another fight for independence, this time with Santa Anna, a man who could read which way the wind was blowing, on the side of the rebels.
In 1821, sensing a power shift, Lieutenant Colonel Santa Anna switched sides, leaving service to the Spanish king to join the insurgents seeking freedom from Spain. After Mexico gained her independence, Santa Anna’s successes helped make him one of the new nation’s most powerful military men. In the turbulent years that followed, his power grew. He helped fight off a Spanish invasion in 1829, an attempt by the mother country to recapture its former colony. In the decisive Battle of Tampico, Santa Anna defeated the invaders just as Andrew Jackson had beaten the British at New Orleans, and he was celebrated as the nation’s savior and even many in Texas supported him. However, in early 1833, he became more than a general: He was elected president of Mexico. He possessed not only military prowess but the shrewd instinct of a political gamesman and a gift for self-promotion. He did not demure when his admirers described him as the “Napoleon of the West.”
Once in control of Mexico, the ambitious Santa Anna consolidated his hold on power. He eliminated all constitutional restraints on his dictatorial authority, explaining that it was foolish to allow the Mexican people to be free. “A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty,” he told the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. “They do not know . . . unenlightened as they are [that] despotism is the proper government for them.”6 He thought of his people as children; he believed they needed him to be the adult, to make decisions for them. To Santa Anna, the Texians were ungrateful foreign immigrants.
This was the man who was making decisions about Texas now. His words didn’t sit well with all Mexicans—and they certainly didn’t sit well with the English-speaking Texians who had come to Texas seeking liberty. Among the newest of those, Sam Houston brought both long experience in reading shifting political tides and a continuing obligation to Andrew Jackson.
Houston soon sent a letter to Washington. He reported on his meeting with the Comanche, but he knew his official duties in regard to tribal affairs would interest his old commander less than an assessment of what he had seen and heard in the heart of Anglo Texas.
“I have travelled near five hundred miles across Texas,” he wrote. “It is the finest country to its extent upon the globe,” he assured General Jackson, “. . . richer and more healthy, in my opinion, than west Tennessee.” He imagined a bright future. “There can be no doubt, but the country East of [the Rio Grande] would sustain a population of ten millions of souls.”
The gregarious Houston, in visiting Nacogdoches, San Felipe, San Antonio, and parts in between, in getting acquainted with Bowie and Austin and others, had taken their temperature on independence. “I am in possession of some information,” he confided in Jackson, “[that] may be calculated to forward your views, if you should entertain any, touching the acquisition of Texas, by the government of the United States.”
That news, too, was excellent. “That such a measure is desirable by nineteen twentieths of the population of the Province,” Houston assured Jackson, “I can not doubt.”7
THREE
“Come and Take It”
We must rely on ourselves, and prepare for the worst.
—STEPHEN AUSTIN, AUGUST 31, 1835
Stephen Austin did everything he could to prevent an uprising. He had gone to Mexico City in the spring of 1833, but, despite his measured manner—and more than a decade of cooperation with the Mexican government—his mission had gone very wrong.
He carried a petition seeking for Texas the status of a state separate from Coahuila, but his firm but reasonable words produced only months of delays and no progress. Austin had despaired. “Nothing is going to be done,” he wrote home, his patience exhausted, on October 2, 1833. Unfortunately for Austin, his pen didn’t stop there.
Weary and frustrated, he urged the town council of San Antonio to act together with other towns. They should, he wrote, “unite in organizing a local government . . . even though the general government refuses its consent.”1 The runaround he’d faced in Mexico had done nothing to alleviate his worries concerning the future infringement of Texian rights; he knew that his fellow Texians, most of whom had been raised on the principles their fathers and grandfathers had fought for in the American Revolution, were with him.
When Santa Anna’s Mexican government got wind of the letter, they arrested Austin. They accused him of sedition and threw him into the Inquisition prison. For a year he would remain in a cell, then he spent more months under house arrest, forbidden to leave Mexico City. He felt lucky when, in late July 1835, he was finally permitted to head home to Texas.
During those same months, Sam Houston kept a low profile, traveling around Texas and, in April 1834, visited Washington—and, undoubtedly, President Jackson. Neither man wanted Texas any less, but they chose to wait and to react as events unfolded—which they soon did.
Once more a free man, Austin made his way north, in the summer of 1835, stopping in New Orleans, where he confided in his cousin Mary Austin Holley, “It is very evident that Texas should be effectually, and fully, Americanized.” One way or another, a philosophical Austin told Mary, independence would come, just “as a gentle breeze shakes off a ripe peach.”2
Yet the peaceable Austin still hoped that Santa Anna might listen to reason. Austin feared the odds: After his many months in Mexico City, he fully grasped the size of the enemy; he and his thirty thousand Texian settlers faced a fight with a nation of some eight million.
He wanted to believe Santa Anna might be an ally. After all, thought Austin, the man had helped secure his release. His cautious optimism was also fed by a promise Santa Anna had made—“General Santa Anna told me he should visit Texas next March—as a friend.” On the other hand, Austin knew that such hopes flew in the face of other actions of El Presidente.3
Santa Anna had decreed the Mexican congress powerless and undone earlier liberal reforms. He intimidated his people. When the state of Zacatecas resisted the president’s orders to give up their weapons, Santa Anna led the army into the region. In May of that very year, the rebels surrendered, but, according to rumors around the capital, the president permitted his soldiers to run wild, setting fires and pillaging. In fact, more than two thousand civilians in the town had been slaughtered, among them hundreds of women and children. Santa Anna’s message was clear: He would be merciless in putting down any who opposed him.
Few doubted that that included Texians and even the United States. In the presence of French and British diplomats, he issued an unmistakable warning. As reported by Jackson’s man in Mexico City, he promised he “would in due Season Chastise” the United States. He went further, warning that, as the British had done in 1814, “I will march to the Capital, I will lay Washington City in ashes.”4
Despite Santa Anna’s threats, Stephen Austin still wanted to believe he might agree to a solution to pacify the unruly Texians. A strikingly handsome man with deep brown eyes, Santa Anna’s quiet willingness to listen had impressed Austin, leading him to hope that, somehow, he could secure the future of his colony without a violent uprising and a bloody fight with Santa Anna. But on returning to America, he wrote from New Orleans to his cousin, admitting that he now could see Santa Anna had no respect for the Texians, that he wanted to make them Mexicans. He wanted to make them bow to Mexicans, to Mexico, and above all to him. What made that suddenly and undeniably clear to Austin was news that Santa Anna had ordered five hundred Mexican troops, commanded by General Martín Perfecto de Cos, onto Texas soil. Santa Anna had decided it was time to teach the Texian rebels a lesson.
Cos and his men, coming from Coahuila, would land at the Texian port of Copano on the Gulf of Mexico. They had been sent to preempt Texian resistance. They would disarm the Texians, peaceably or by force—that didn’t matter to Santa Anna. But both sides could see that, with committees of safety springing up in every town—volunteer militias, ready to fight—armed conflict was growing more likely by the day.
The shock of all this, added to his two years in Mexico, altered Stephen Austin’s views of Texas’s future. Never large or hearty, he looked thin and wan, but the change was deeper. The man who’d departed with an honest allegiance to Mexico had been forced to rethink; now, in a matter of a few September days, Austin would finally abandon his long-held faith in Mexico and in Santa Anna, the man he wanted to believe was an ally to Texas. Like many of the so-called Three Hundred, the first families of Texas, he was reluctant to rebel; he would have been content if Texas were to become an independent state under Mexican authority. But he also wanted the rights restored that Santa Anna’s strongman rule had taken away. Now, however, along with the flood of new arrivals who had little patience for the Mexican regime, Austin recognized that war was inevitable. If Texas was to achieve its destiny, the Texians must be united in their resolve.
Returning after so many months to his colony at San Felipe de Austin, Austin accepted the chairmanship of the town’s Committee of Safety, a volunteer company of rebels mustered in this moment of need, just as the Minutemen in Massachusetts had done in the revolutionary era. On almost the same day, the Committee of Public Safety in Nacogdoches put Sam Houston in charge of its militia. But it was Austin, in San Felipe, who issued a proclamation.
“There must now be no half way measures,” Austin decreed as he worried about Cos’s march north along the San Antonio River toward San Antonio. It must be, Austin added, “war in full. The sword is drawn and the scabbard must be put on one side until the [Mexican] military are all driven out of Texas.”5
Little did he know that the war would soon begin a mere seventy-five miles away in the little town of Gonzales.
THE GUN AT GONZALES
When Gonzales had needed protection from Comanche attacks, the Mexican commandant at the nearby and larger San Antonio had loaned the town a small cannon to frighten off the Indians. Now, four years later, in 1835, with rumors of rebellion spreading fast, the Mexican military was eager to disarm any and all disgruntled Texians. As part of Cos’s campaign, it was time to take the gun back.
The sleepy settlement of roughly two dozen families settled along the Guadalupe River posed no real threat to anyone. Nor did the half-forgotten little cannon, dismounted from its carriage with no ammunition available. But the Mexicans were determined to squash any opportunities for rebellion before they started, and as the sun-drenched days of September drew to a close, five Mexican soldiers marched into Gonzales to demand the return of the weapon.
The people of the isolated little town had been hearing whispers of Mexican efforts to disarm Texians. A rumor had recently gone around that soon only one man in ten would be permitted to carry a firearm. General Cos and five hundred Mexican troops were said to be coming to Texas to put down any unrest. And President Santa Anna loomed, far away but all-powerful and intimidating, an autocrat who ruled with an iron fist and whose goal of centralizing power and limiting democratic freedom was now clear to all. But whether any of the trouble would reach Gonzales had seemed less sure until the appearance of soldiers ready to confiscate Gonzales’s only defensive weapon. Now the larger worries of Texas seemed very local.
Quickly convening a meeting to discuss the demands, the townspeople agreed that the order to hand over the gun made no sense if the Mexicans were looking out for Texian interests. San Antonio possessed at least eighteen better guns to protect it, and now Gonzales would have none. Never mind that they hadn’t needed it to drive away Comanche in quite some time—the people of Gonzales correctly discerned that this was a move designed to weaken Texian defenses and destroy Texian morale. They decided to refuse to hand over the cannon. Mayor Andrew Ponton ordered the Mexican soldiers escorted out of town, the oxcart they had brought to carry the cannon left empty.
Their return cargo consisted of only a handwritten note, a message for the Mexican commandant at San Antonio. “The dangers which existed at the time we received this cannon still exist,” Ponton wrote. “It is still needed here.”6 His words were half-true. Certainly, a threat remained—only now the biggest danger was not the Comanche, but men in Mexican army uniforms.
Though Ponton had politely offered a seemingly innocent excuse for defiance, it was defiance nonetheless. Everyone understood this would be a temporary standoff. No soldier in Santa Anna’s army could let such evident insolence go unpunished. It was only a matter of time before a larger contingent of Mexican soldiers arrived to take the cannon by force.
Ponton looked around him: With just eighteen armed men ready to fight, Gonzales needed reinforcements—and fast. San Antonio was two days’ ride away. If the Mexicans responded quickly, their avenging force could arrive in as little as four days, and eighteen Gonzales men would not be enough to fight them off. Desperate for help, one messenger galloped off for nearby Mina, another toward the Colorado River, passing the word to other Texian towns that Gonzales faced grave danger.
THE “OLD EIGHTEEN”
While the messengers were off rallying their fellow Texians, the men of Gonzales prepared to fight.* First, they evacuated the women and children. Some hid in the nearby forest, and others made their way to settlements along the Colorado River.
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It was hard for twenty-five-year-old Almeron Dickinson to send away his wife, Susanna. The two of them, though they had been born in Tennessee, had adopted Texas as their native land four years before, settling in Gonzales in 1831. Dickinson tended their farm along the San Marcos River, and just a year earlier he and Susanna had welcomed their first child, a girl they named Angelina Elizabeth. But evacuation was the only sensible option for women and children, and, with Susanna and Angelina safely gone, Dickinson turned his energy toward defending the home he’d come to love.
The first order of business was repairing the cannon—the truth was that the weapon the Texians were refusing to give up was not in good shape. Fortunately, as a U.S. Army veteran trained as an artilleryman, Dickinson knew a good deal about such guns. As a blacksmith, he knew how to repair them, too.
Dickinson fashioned a new carriage, making rough wheels of tree trunk rounds and inserting wooden axles through holes in their centers. He swabbed and cleaned the gun, and soon it was mounted and capable of being fired. But it really wasn’t much of a weapon, Dickinson had to admit, since the cannon had been spiked to disable it years before by a retreating Mexican force. When the nail driven into its touchhole had been drilled out, the operation left an opening the size of a man’s thumb. Dickinson did what he could to narrow the hole, but nothing would get this gun into top condition.
With no cannonballs to fire, ammunition had to be prepared. Dickinson and a second blacksmith set about hammering slugs of iron bar into crude balls that, together with pieces of chain and cut-up horseshoes, could be used as grapeshot.
Captain Albert Martin, Dickinson’s neighbor, took charge of other preparations. He drilled his little band of men and talked strategy. Their best defense was the Guadalupe River, temporarily swollen by recent rain, which could function like a castle moat between them and enemies approaching from San Antonio in the west. Martin had the newly battle-ready cannon installed in a temporary fortification overlooking the river, and he ordered the ferryboat used for crossing the Guadalupe be moored well out of sight in a backwater hidden by trees upstream. The few remaining boats, too, were tied up on the east bank of the river, out of the reach of any Mexican soldiers.
Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers Page 3
