Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Magee soon raised a remarkable army of drifters, borderers, idealists, and men of good family. He enlisted a large number of the men he had driven out of the old Neutral Ground, and even some Indians. But this was not a desperado army in the main; almost all Americans passionately believed that Texas rightfully belonged to the United States, like Louisiana, and they were opposed to the ruthless oppressions of the King of Spain. Most of Magee's recruits were adventurers, but, as they thought, in a good cause. To those who needed further motivation, Magee offered forty dollars per month, and a league of Texas soil.

  This conglomerate republican army of Americans, Louisiana French, Mexican rebels, and Indians went across the river to Nacogdoches in August 1812. The Spanish soldiery fled. The population, the descendants of Gil Ybarbo's people, met the liberators with a procession. With Nacogdoches secured, the army moved on, about eight hundred strong, with Gutiérrez in nominal command, but with Magee in actual control. Almost all Magee's officers—Kemper, Lockett, Perry, Ross, and Gaines—were American.

  The invaders marched south, toward La Bahía. Here Governor Salcedo stationed about 1,500 troops and planned to hold Magee and Gutiérrez north of the Guadalupe. Magee, however, skillfully flanked and bypassed the waiting Spanish army, struck La Bahía by surprise, and captured the presidio with its stores and cannon. Inside, Magee also found the Spanish army's commissary and military chest. Magee was paying his motley forces in good silver when Salcedo and the enraged Spanish raced back to besiege him.

  The filibusters, secure behind the walls of La Bahia, with food and artillery, laughed at Salcedo's demands for surrender. A four months' siege ensued. During this time, in February 1813, Magee died. There are several versions (as with almost every event in Texas history for the next generation) how this happened, because the veterans of these gaudy times widely embellished or told different tales. It is possible he committed suicide, but the most accepted version is that Magee died of disease. Samuel Kemper, his second in command, assumed the rank of colonel and took command of the so-called American Volunteers.

  Salcedo, desperate, now ordered an attack on La Bahía. Kemper repulsed this with heavy casualties to the Spanish, and, in March 1813, Salcedo retreated northwest toward San Antonio. The news of this victory spread across Louisiana and jumped the Mississippi. Americans in the Southwest spoke glowingly of the glorious deeds of the American Volunteers fighting for Texas liberty. Dozens of young men, among them the son of General Wilkinson, rode south to participate in these great events. It was firmly held that Kemper's Volunteers were fighting not only for freedom, but to destroy the outmoded claims of a polite, but quite inferior, race.

  Reinforced, Kemper followed Salcedo to San Antonio. In another sharp battle, the garrison at the Alamo was driven back. Salcedo asked for terms, and Kemper gave them: if the Spanish surrendered, all the soldiers would be merely disbanded, and the Royalist officers released on their own parole. The Royalists surrendered approximately 1,200 men. The Republican Army of the North, or Ejército del Norte, marched into Béxar, "took possession of all treasures, rewarded all soldiers, and released all prisoners found in San Antonio."

  This was enormous success. All Royalist forces in Texas were now destroyed, and the Mexican population was coming over to the Republican revolution. The American Volunteers, on April 6, 1813, issued a "Declaration of Independence of the State of Texas"—a document that drew its inspiration almost entirely from the American Declaration of Independence, and which incorporated the liberties Anglo-Americans now took to be self-evident. Kemper and Major Lockett, his principal officer, kept their troops in good control and discussed the imminent possibility of Texas joining the United States.

  Now, however, there was trouble. With the destruction of the military danger, Bernardo Gutiérrez and his group of political leaders demanded full control. They informed Kemper the American Volunteers were on Mexican soil, and the Mexicans proceeded to draw up a Texas constitution that Kemper and his officers considered a vicious burlesque of republican liberalism. It followed the ancient Spanish pattern of government slavishly—quite logically, since Gutiérrez knew nothing else—but substituted a governor and a ruling junta for the King, with dictatorial powers. The junta was not elective, nor was it to be responsible to any people. Loyal revolutionaries filled all the posts.

  The Anglo-Americans were particularly stunned with a clause in this constitution: the State of Texas forms a part of the Mexican Republic, to which it remains inviolably joined. Since Gutiérrez de Lara and all his principal associates were citizens of Mexico, not Texas, this was inevitable, but it showed that communication, somewhere, had broken down.

  Then, the terrible pattern of social revolution that had begun in Mexico, with atrocity and retaliation, could not be damped in Texas. One of Gutiérrez's officers, Capitán Delgado, begged his chief for revenge against Governor Salcedo, who had ordered Delgado's father executed some time before. Whatever his personal feelings, Gutiérrez entered into a plot with Delgado. He told the American Volunteers that the captured Governor and his Spanish officers should be sent to New Orleans to be paroled. Kemper acquiesced.

  The Governor and his officers who refused to join the revolution were dispatched toward the coast, guarded by a file of Mexican soldiers under Delgado. A few miles outside of Béxar, he stopped the march, told Salcedo to "expect death," and had all the prisoners bound hand and foot. Then, with great cruelty, Delgado cut their throats.

  This murder was quickly discovered. In the uproar, Gutiérrez was deprived of his command. Kemper and Lockett were enraged because their word of honor had been violated, and the high-minded Americans among the Volunteers were sickened. They regarded the attachment of Texas to the United States an act of duty, if not piety, but the callous murder of Royalists was too much. Kemper, Lockett, and most of the idealistic adventurers deserted the revolution and returned to the United States. General Simón Herrera and twelve other Spanish officers who had joined the revolt went with them. These facts, and some of the events that followed, are still controversial among Texas historians.

  A man named Henry Perry assumed Magee's old command, and a Spaniard, José Álvarez de Toledo, took Gutiérrez's place. Most of the Americans who remained seem to have been common cutthroats, and while Toledo was an idealist, he had some of this breed among the Spanish.

  The Americans were now reduced to freebooters, and the leadership of Toledo created problems among the Mexicans. Don José was a Republican, banished from New Spain, but he was also born in the Indies to an aristocratic family of the pure Spanish race. He was a gachupín, and the ordinary Texas Mexican citizenry hated gachupines, whatever their liberal political views. Although the Army of the North had now swelled to 3,000, there was dissension in the ranks. However, Perry was able to defeat the Spanish General Elizondo at Alazán Creek, near Béxar, in June 1813.

  The defeat of Elizondo resulted in the march northward of General Joaquín de Arredondo, who was both an experienced and a clever commander. Arredondo gathered up the remnants of Elizondo's force, and made a camp some six miles south of the Medina River, in the oak forests about fifteen miles from Béxar.

  There was a great deal of argument in the revolutionary camp. Toledo insisted on taking full command. Perry's Americans refused to obey his orders in battle; they also demanded a fight. Toledo wanted to hold the north bank of the Medina and make the Royalists come to him, but the Volunteers pushed him into crossing the river and falling on Arredondo's lines. On August 18, 1813, the Army of the North crossed the Medina and tried to take Arredondo in the flank.

  What was repeated was a version of Senlac Hill, in reverse. When the revolutionary vanguard charged, whooping and yelling, the Spanish general, on prearranged orders, had several companies fall back, apparently in disorder. The American Volunteers broke into a run, and immediately ran into a trap. Arredondo's forces opened into an enormous V, with the Americans in the middle, enfiladed from each side.

  Toledo gave an order to
retreat. The Mexicans and most of the Indians in the force obeyed. The other wing, all American, of his army, emotionally stood its ground. Someone shouted: "Goddamit, we never retreat!" There was a great roar of approval, and in this way the fate of 850 American Volunteers was sealed.

  At that, the frontier rifles among the Americans almost counterbalanced Arredondo's cunning and the regulars' discipline. The Volunteers inflicted heavy losses on Arredondo's 2,000 men, until disorder and a lack of ammunition broke their ranks. Slaughter followed. Only ninety-three Americans of the entire Volunteer force survived; these escaped into the woods and straggled back across the Medina. Colonel Perry was one who got away.

  Toledo, who was badly wounded in the battle, eventually made his way to Louisiana. Finally, he took an oath of allegiance to the Spanish King, and was made Ambassador to the Court of Naples. Ever afterward, he retained, as he said, an awe of American irregulars. If he'd had 2,000 at the Medina, he claimed, he would have conquered all Mexico.

  Now, atrocity bred atrocity. Knowing the fate of the Spanish Royalists the Army of the North had captured, Arredondo ordered no prisoners be taken. The broken elements of the Republicans were hunted through the woods. About eighty men surrendered at a place called Spanish Bluff. These men were marched, hands bound, in groups of ten to a cypress tree lying across a huge mass grave. Among those shot here was the bloodthirsty Capitán Delgado.

  The battle at the Medina effectively destroyed the Republican cause in Texas. Arredondo and Elizondo, veterans of the social wars in Mexico, followed up the victory with the determination to stamp out rebellion forever. The Royalist soldiery swept the whole province, executing any citizen who was suspect.

  In San Antonio de Béxar, the rebel capital, Arredondo arrested three hundred townsmen who had supported the revolution. They were crowded into a single adobe building overnight in August, and eighteen died of suffocation. The next morning most of the survivors were shot without trial. About five hundred of the wives, daughters, and other female relatives of these traitors were rounded up and put to work for the Royalist army, making thousands of tortillas, or Mexican corn cakes, daily for the soldiers. General Elizondo pursued refugees from Béxar as far as the Trinity River, and returned with a large number of women and children captives on foot. The property of suspected Republicans was confiscated. Afterward, Nacogdoches suffered a similar fate. Some hundreds of Texas residents fled across the Sabine to the United States. Although Arredondo had pledged to kill every Anglo-Saxon found on Spanish soil, a few Americans flushed out later were merely deported. No similar mercy was shown native rebels.

  Outside of Béxar, Texas was virtually depopulated by the purge, and San Antonio itself was reduced to the population of some twenty years before. In fact, as Arredondo wrote dryly, when the new, liberal Spanish Constitution of 1812 was received in Texas (and became law), he was unable to fill any of the offices because there were not enough "suitable" persons left.

  Simón Hererra and a few Republicans were able to survive on Galveston Island. This island, off the north Texas coast, had been named for the Conde de Gálvez, the former Governor of Louisiana, and it was still the haunt of some Karankawa Indians. Hererra, with his aides Aury and Mina and joined by Colonel Perry, organized a miniature "Republic of Mexico" and chartered a few dubious ship captains to sail against Spanish commerce as privateers.

  At first, this venture was surprisingly successful; several rich Spanish ships were taken. However, the Republicans made two mistakes. They attacked other than Spanish ships in a couple of cases, and one of the leaders, apparently Perry, engaged in the slave trade. By this time the United States Navy was beginning to dominate the Gulf and Caribbean, pledged both to destroy piracy and the now illegal importation of Negroes into America. In 1817, to avoid a war with the United States, Hererra and Perry decided upon a descent on the Central American coast. The buildings they had erected on Galveston Island were burned, and the Republic of Mexico took ship for the south. Neither it nor Perry survived this filibuster.

  A new buccaneer took over: the legendary Jean Lafitte. Lafitte was born in France, emigrated to New Orleans, and became a blacksmith. He first entered history in 1807, when he became the known agent for smugglers violating the U.S. Embargo Act on the Louisiana coast. A dozen legends exist about his early past—including his dispossession and the rape of his wife by officers of Spain, romantic duels, and the like—but only one thing is certain: he had and held a hatred for the King of Spain. He always insisted he was not a pirate, but a buccaneer in the style of L'Ollonois, Louis le Golif, Montbars, and Pierre le Grand; it is a claim his adopted countrymen, the Americans, have sentimentally granted.

  But Lafitte was not, in his early career, an American hero. He established a base at Grand Terre, or Barataria, about sixty miles from the Mississippi, and from this directed the smuggling operations on the coast. This caused the U.S. Governor of Louisiana, William C. C. Claiborne, to offer $500 for his head. With the flair all successful rogues must have, Lafitte made the Governor a laughingstock by offering $15,000 for Claiborne's capture in return.

  Considerably more humiliating, Lafitte surrounded and captured a party of armed revenue agents in the swamps, then turned them loose with rich gifts. However, this provoked the U.S. Navy to bombard Barataria severely, and for a few years Lafitte quietly dropped from sight.

  The British, in a diplomatic blunder, revived him. In 1814, when the British were preparing to invade Louisiana and take the mouth of the Mississippi from the United States, they approached Lafitte for aid. They promised him British citizenship, the command of a Royal Navy frigate with the rank of post captain, and £30,000 to make war against the United States. Lafitte, who always maintained that while he broke its laws he was a loyal "citizen" of the United States, sent documentary proof of this offer, and an offer of assistance, to the State of Louisiana. He was at once romantically received by New Orleans society, and he and his crew joined Jackson at the battle of New Orleans. For this, Lafitte received a full pardon for all crimes, signed by the President of the United States.

  His smuggling and his agenting for pirates, meanwhile, had suffered. Inspired by Hererra's example, Lafitte secured letters of marque from the rebel regime in Venezuela to sail against the Spanish, and, in April 1817, moved to Galveston Island and founded a town he called Campeachy. Within a few months he attracted a thousand men. To strengthen the legality of his position, Lafitte also organized a "Republic of Mexico" on the island, created a titular government, and forced his men and all newcomers to Campeachy to take an oath of allegiance to it. He professed it a matter of great disappointment when American newspapers, detailing his activities on the Spanish Main, labeled him the "Pirate of the Gulf."

  Lafitte was a man of splendid appearance and considerable courtesy and dignity. He built a fine home at Campeachy, lived in baronial style, and entertained visitors royally. A very significant number of men prominent in the Gulf region visited him at one time or another. Lafitte continually professed that the United States was his adopted country, and let it be known that his privateers had strict orders not to molest American shipping, only Spanish. Some of the sea wolves sailing under his commission, however, were not scrupulous in their choice of victims. Lafitte did great damage to Spanish and other shipping on the Gulf of Mexico, and a considerable store of treasure was brought back to Galveston Island. From one such "haul" Lafitte garnered the chain and seal of a Mexican bishop, robbed on his way to Rome. This prize was given as a present to Rezin Bowie, a member of the Louisiana family deeply engaged in the smuggling and slave-running trade.

  The continuing tension between the American and Spanish governments had not been eased by the succession of filibusters originating in the United States. So long as Washington maintained an official claim to Texas, each entry of American "volunteers" seemed part of an official conspiracy. While the United States government itself did not conspire against Spain, the activities of officers and men like Wilkinson, Magee, and ev
en the buccaneer Lafitte made Spanish officials quite confused over where public policy ended and private enterprise began. Washington's protests that it had little control over the filibusters was politely disbelieved. Finally, after years of wrangling, both governments reached agreement. The United States purchased Florida, and as part of the treaty the Neutral Ground became Louisiana territory and the American claim to Texas was abandoned. This treaty was signed in 1819 and soon afterward ratified, but only over great opposition in the American Southwest.

  It was vehemently held along the Mississippi that Congress had no right, or power, to sell, exchange, or relinquish an "American possession." Hundreds of angry letters were mailed to Washington. Dinner talk on the subject was violent, and there were a number of protest meetings, which were attended by prominent men. One center of opposition was the frontier town of Natchez, Mississippi.

  In the spring of 1819, the people of Natchez organized and equipped an expedition, "to invade Texas and establish a Republic." Dr. James Long, who had gained a reputation fighting at New Orleans, was a favorite of Andrew Jackson, and had married a niece of James Wilkinson, was elected to lead this filibuster. Dr. Long, taking along his lovely young wife and infant child, marched west from Natchez for Nacogdoches in June 1819, with eighty men. By the time he reached the Texas border, his force had swelled to three hundred, and among these was the old revolutionary, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara.

  Long easily took Nacogdoches, which was almost deserted after the earlier revolution and Royalist counterrevolution. Here a solemn convention was held. Texas was declared a free and independent republic and Dr. Long was elected its President. Long then offered Texas's public lands put up for sale on generous terms, and sent men to establish posts on the Brazos and the Trinity.