When STEPHEN F. AUSTIN died on December 27, 1836, President Houston proclaimed, “The Father of Texas is no more! The first pioneer of the wilderness has departed.” He ordered a twenty-three-gun salute (one for each county in the republic), to be fired at all posts, garrisons, and detachments “as soon as information is received of this melancholy event.”1 The empresario was destined to be remembered as the William Bradford of Texas; his “Three Hundred” as the Texas pilgrims. When the Texas capital was relocated to a place called Waterloo on the Colorado River, the name was changed to Austin in his honor.
ERASTUS (DEAF) SMITH played an incalculably large role in the Texas Revolution. His intelligence gathering looms large in the narrative that led to the Battle of San Jacinto. His destruction of the bridge at Vince’s Bayou meant a great deal after the battle; its destruction prevented Santa Anna’s escape on the afternoon of April 21. If he had gotten away, His Excellency might have rejoined the rest of his army and engaged in further fights with the Texians. In the long list of historical what-ifs, one can only wonder.
After the war, Deaf Smith returned to San Antonio and his Tejana wife, Guadalupe. He remained in the army of the Texas republic, and after Sam Houston became president, the new chief executive commissioned a portrait of Smith from the same artist, T. Jefferson Wright, who would paint two of Houston. But Smith would die, at age fifty, just nine months after the Battle of San Jacinto. The cause of death was a lung ailment, quite likely consumption (tuberculosis), a condition no doubt worsened by his months of service to the Texian cause.
MIRABEAU BUONAPARTE LAMAR succeeded Houston, becoming the second president of Texas and Houston’s chief political rival; DAVID G. BURNET served as Lamar’s vice president. JAMES SYLVESTER returned to his first career and found work as a printer at the New Orleans Picayune. MOSELEY BAKER became a Methodist minister. JAMES COLLINSWORTH served as the republic’s first chief justice (in 1836) before committing suicide (in 1838).
Although JIM BOWIE and DAVID CROCKETT died at the Alamo, both men gained the status of legend in Texas and beyond. Disputed mythologies emerged, with contradictory accounts of their actions and where and how each man died. Whatever the actual facts of their deaths, they did the opposite of slide into obscurity. Crockett became the ultimate symbol of the plain-speaking frontiersman—a man-versus-nature character uniquely equipped to confront the unknown, a man willing to fight for what he believed regardless of personal cost. Bowie stands as the ultimate fighter, a man as tough as he was resourceful, his fame only enhanced by the weapon that bore his name.
In military annals, the heroic lines of wordsmith WILLIAM BARRET TRAVIS—“I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country”—still ring as raw and powerful as any prayer.
Many survivors of the Texas War of Independence went on to record their recollections in books, essays, and interviews. To name just a few . . . after his adventures with the New Orleans Greys—which involved escaping alive from Goliad—HERMAN EHRENBERG returned to his native Germany and wrote a book, Texas und seine Revolution (1843). It didn’t appear in an English translation until 1935, when it was released bearing the title With Milam and Fannin: Adventures of a German Boy in Texas’ Revolution. NOAH SMITHWICK, by then old and blind, dictated his memoirs to his daughter; though he died in 1899, she oversaw publication the following year. Drs. Barnard and Labadie wrote invaluable narratives of what happened at Goliad and San Jacinto, respectively. Perhaps the last of the survivors to die was Enrique Esparza, just twelve years old when the Alamo fell. As an old man, the Tejano was still telling the story into the early years of the twentieth century.
On the Mexican side, a number of officers also recorded their version of events, including Vicente Filisola, Pedro Delgado, and José Enrique de la Peña.
SUSANNA DICKINSON’s life grew no less complicated. She would marry a total of five times; one soon-to-be ex-husband accused her of taking up residence in a “house of ill fame.” But she lived until 1883, having spent the last quarter century married to a prosperous businessman and undertaker. Almeron and Susanna’s daughter, Angelina, died less happily, of a hemorrhaging uterus, at age thirty-four, after a checkered life involving three abandoned children, three marriages, and years of working as a prostitute during the Civil War.
THE ALAMO itself assumed a place in the history and the mythology of Texas. The narrative is irresistible: Brave men fighting for freedom and democracy are crushed by a brutal autocrat and then avenged. It is a tale of good and evil, with the democratic future taking on a dictatorial regime that had robbed the people of their rights. The men at the Alamo lost both the battle and their lives, but they gained immortality in the epic of Texas.
On his return to Mexico, in February 1837, ANTONIO LÓPEZ DE SANTA ANNA, his reputation tarnished by the defeat at San Jacinto, went into retirement. A year later, however, he resumed military service and helped repel a French assault on Vera Cruz. After losing a leg in the engagement, his reputation rose to nearly its previous heights—the leg was given a state funeral—and, for a time in the early 1840s, he resumed power as president. He served as Mexico’s provisional president during the war with the United States (1846–48), during which his army was defeated twice on the field of battle by American troops. He lived a long life, in and out of power, exiled for periods to Jamaica, Venezuela, Cuba, and even, in 1867, the United States. He completed his memoirs in 1874 and died two years later, lame, bitter, and senile, in Mexico City, aged eighty.
Santa Anna’s role in the Texas Revolution would be debated over the decades. Even some of his own officers judged him a butcher, and within months of the events of early 1836, a Mexican officer wrote a memoir describing the “infamies that have occurred in this campaign, infamies that must have horrified the civility world.” But his superiors suppressed the book; it would not be published until late in the twentieth century.2 Military historians on all sides agree that the great Texian victory at San Jacinto was made possible in part by Santa Anna’s tactical errors: He permitted too great a distance to separate him from reinforcements and his sources of supply and, even more important, he made his San Jacinto camp in a vulnerable location, with bodies of water on three sides and nearby piney woods and oak groves that provided cover for Houston and undercut the advantages of the Mexican cavalry.
THE STATE OF TEXAS
In 1838, forbidden by the Texas Constitution to serve consecutive terms, President SAM HOUSTON left office. He spent much of the following summer in Nashville, visiting Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage. In 1840, he remarried; his new wife, Margaret Lea, had first laid her violet eyes on him in New Orleans when the wounded General Houston could barely stand.
His wife was twenty-six years his junior but convinced the man once known as “the Big Drunk” to stop drinking. (Several years later at a public event he made a “Big Speech” before a barbecue that one in attendance described as “a cold water doins. The Old Chief did not touch or taste or handle the smallest drop of the ardent.”3) Margaret would bear eight children, among them a son, Andrew Jackson Houston, who wrote a fine book about the Texas Revolution, published a century after the Battle of San Jacinto.
In 1841, Houston won reelection as president of a prosperous Texas (its population had more than doubled). As his three-year term grew to a close, he once again enlisted Andrew Jackson in a campaign to fulfill their shared wish for Texas, the immediate annexation into the Union.
By then the great Jackson suffered from many ailments; a hard life had taken a toll and he surely neared the end. But he immediately rose to Houston’s challenge. The task proved sustaining for Jackson. He and his old Washington operatives made the case to congressional cohorts. It was Jackson’s last great cause, and he fought for it against the determined opposition of two other great men of the time, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay.
Houston and Jackson�
�and the Texans, as they soon became generally known—were rewarded with the passage of the annexation resolution. The great, unruly Texas would become the twenty-eighth American state, although Mexico, having never formally recognized the Republic of Texas, would not abandon its claims on Texas until after the Mexican-American War, with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
Although Jackson died within a few months, Sam Houston would, along with THOMAS JEFFERSON RUSK, represent Texas in the U.S. Senate. (Rusk would, however, take his own life in 1857, in his grief at the death of his wife.) Houston regularly found himself in the crossfire of controversy both during his two terms in the Senate and when, in 1859, he won yet another term as Texas’s chief executive, this time as governor of the state of Texas. During the waning days of his public service, as the Civil War approached, he angered many by opposing secession. He nearly ran for president of the United States but remained governor until, after a Texas convention voted to secede, he refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy and was removed from office.
The deposed Houston, guided by common sense and an uncommon ability to see the future, told his fellow citizens, “the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South.”4 Though his father at first discouraged him, Sam Houston Jr. would serve in the army of the Confederate States of America and be wounded at the Battle of Shiloh.
Sam Houston died on July 26, 1863. According to his fifteen-year-old daughter Maggie, among the last words he spoke were “Texas! Texas!”5
Nor did the debates that always swirled around Houston end with his death. No two biographers or military historians agreed about Houston’s war, his politics, his character, or his life. In no instance is that more true than his role as Texas’s commander in chief in early 1836.
As early as July 1837 a pamphlet appeared attacking his conduct of the war, asserting that the men in his command forced him to fight.6 The debate endures to the present day concerning his willingness (or lack of willingness) to fight Santa Anna’s army. The long retreat (the “Runaway Scrape”—the origins of the name remain obscure, but not its unflattering meaning); the turn south at the “Which-Way Tree”; and the final decision to attack on April 21 are all subject to disagreement. On the one hand, his detractors regarded him as a coward; among them were officers who had served him, including Moseley Baker, who in 1837 attempted to impeach Houston, who was then serving as president of Texas.
Houston defended himself, sometimes in the second person. Houston wasn’t bashful about defending his “glorious victory” at San Jacinto. “Here was born, in the throes of revolution and amid the strike on contending legions, the infant of Texas independence!” he once said. “Here that latest scourge of mankind, the arrogantly self-styled ‘Napoleon of the West,’ met his fate.”7 Sam Houston, through some mix of luck, instinct, fortuitous timing, and the good counsel—and bravery—of the men around him, did something remarkable. He and his army of farmers and shopkeepers, men distracted by the plight of their families and friends, who had become homeless wanderers fleeing for their lives, faced off with a large professional army, one amply supplied with guns, artillery, and munitions. And won a stunning, one-sided victory.
In the days after that battle, he quickly emerged as a Texas icon, indispensable, the man most often credited with winning Texas her independence. And the flood of American citizens that poured into Texas thought of him as the founder.
Often he let other people speak to his character; for one, he gave Henderson King Yoakum, a lawyer friend, access to his closely held papers to write a history of early Texas, in which Houston was cast in favorable light (Yoakum’s two-volume history of Texas’s early days was published in 1846). Houston himself produced a remarkable memoir, The Life of Sam Houston, with the memorable subtitle The Only Authentic Memoir of Him Ever Published.
Sam Houston, a lover of books since childhood, recognized the power of the printed word.
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IN THE END, this isn’t a story of politics, local or geopolitical. The brief war of independence is a story of redemption: The slaughter at the Alamo was avenged with the stunning victory at San Jacinto. An unlikely hero emerged in the process and, schooled by Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston performed the role of Texas’s George Washington.
In a larger context, the devastating losses and the remarkable outcome of the war helped shape the character of a new nation, one destined to flower only briefly before binding its destiny to that of the United States. Taken together, the events of spring 1836 were a defining moment in the formation of the larger American character.
In the American memory the Alamo defenders became martyrs to liberty. That’s why we remember them and the place where they fell.
A wise man once observed, “Quarter hours decide the destinies of nations.” The words have been credited to Napoléon, but whether he said them or not, he would undoubtedly have agreed that San Jacinto’s eighteen minutes amounts to a textbook example. The fight at the Alamo remains the best-remembered event of the war, but in military and even political terms, the battle on April 21, 1836, at San Jacinto stands higher. Sam Houston’s greatest day not only secured independence for what would be the Republic of Texas, but it also made possible the fulfillment of his and Jackon’s dream. Thanks to Houston, Texas could now one day become part of the great American story. And thanks to Texas, America could one day spread from sea to shining sea.
Serving under General Andrew Jackson at the Battle at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, Sam Houston famously ordered another officer to pull a Creek arrow from his thigh. Jackson’s army won the battle, but hundreds of lives were lost—and Houston paid a high price for his drive to win.
General Andrew Jackson was a mentor and father figure to young Houston. Even after Jackson’s victory at New Orleans ended America’s years-long war with Britain, he remained a mentor to Houston, encouraging him in his quest for Texas.
When President Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, he thought Texas was part of the deal. He later predicted, “The province of Te[x]as will be the richest state of our Union.”
John Quincy Adams was the man who, in Andrew Jackson’s judgment, gave away Texas.
Sam Houston spent some of his childhood years with the Cherokee nation, and he found refuge with them again as an adult when he fell from grace in Washington. To his Indian friends, he was known by the name Co-lon-neh (“the Raven”), and he is shown here wearing a turban after the Cherokee custom.
When Houston first arrived in Texas in the hopes of winning it for America, he knew he had to meet Stephen F. Austin, the “Father of Texas.” In this mural, which is now unfortunately destroyed, Austin is shown distributing land deeds to new, ambitious Texas settlers from the United States.
William Howard painted Stephen F. Austin, in 1833, as a settler, Empresario, hunter, and statesman. The open book at Austin’s feet is a copy of the Law of Mexico.
Mexican general Antonio Lópes de Santa Anna liked to be thought of as the “Napoleon of the West,” and his attempt to consolidate his power once he rose to prominence in Mexico was partially responsible for the Texians’ rebellion.
General Martín Perfecto de Cos, as pictured in this contemporary woodcut, was one of the first of Santa Anna’s commanders to attempt to suppress the Texian rebels. After hearing that Santa Anna had dispatched Cos and his army of 500 to march along the San Antonio River to preempt Texian resistance, Stephen Austin declared “war in full.”
The Texas Revolution’s “Lexington and Concord” moment took place at Gonzales, as pictured here in a modern reimagining. During this firs
t battle of the Texas Revolution, the Texian army collected the few guns they had and hung a six-foot flag large enough to be seen from enemy lines that read, “COME AND TAKE IT.” Even though outnumbered and outgunned, the Texians won their first victory over the Mexicans at Gonzales.
A major landholder and a man with nearly the status of Stephen Austin, brave Ben Milam had a long history in Texas. When he heard that the Texian rebellion had finally begun, “his heart was full” at the thought of a band of volunteers working together to fight off the Mexicans. His life ended prematurely at the Siege of San Antonio.
Like Houston, James Bowie was a “second chance man” who came to Texas searching for a new life. Known for his knife-fighting and alligator-riding abilities, Bowie led his men to victory at Concepción, but perished at the Battle of the Alamo.
William Barrett Travis, commander of the Alamo, pictured here as sketched by fellow soldier Wiley Martin in December 1835, also perished at the Battle of the Alamo—after pledging to fight until the very end.
Known as “Deaf,” Erastus Smith was a resident of San Antonio before proving invaluable to Sam Houston as a spy and messenger. After he became president of Texas, Houston acknowledged Smith’s contribution, commissioning T. Jefferson Wright to paint this portrait.
For Colonel James W. Fannin, a West Point dropout, Texas held the promise of a new life—one where he could pay off his debts and renew his reputation. As commander at Goliad, he displayed his bravery and conviction for the cause of Texian independence—but also a lack of decisiveness that would have a deadly cost. Here, Fannin poses for a portrait that was likely painted during his days at West Point.
Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers Page 21
