Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Much as he might admire the wildlife and enjoy the edible bounty, what brought Travis to Anahuac was its establishment as one of the customs points of entry for Texas. It began in 1821 as a port for settlers, and late in 1830 the Mexican government sent a garrison there in the wake of the April 6 decree to collect excise and prevent smuggling. Customs meant paperwork, and that meant work for lawyers. Moreover, in the wider area around Anahuac—communities like Liberty and even Harrisburg—attorneys were in short supply just then. A visitor noted that “the country needs more professional men. It opens a fine field for enterprising men in any profession.”9 There was only one other lawyer in Anahuac, William Jack's brother Patrick, and he may actually have arrived with Travis, who was just a year his junior. Together they boarded at William Hardin's inn, where they found a warm welcome, as they received from the other fifty norteamericanos living in the village.

  There was much to do, but it always suited Travis to immerse himself in work and challenge. He soon learned that though court transactions might be done in English, all the land records were written in Spanish, and so he set about teaching himself the language, and at the same time began studying Mexican law.10 Then he had to get acquainted with the rest of the bar. Jack he already knew, a Georgian with whom he found much in common, and who had himself moved from Alabama to Texas only the year before. Then there was James Woods, an attorney living in Liberty, some ten miles up the Trinity. In fact this area was known as the Liberty District, and though Travis kept his rude office in Anahuac, most of the legal practice would be in Wood's village. In time Travis's growing practice required him to look beyond the immediate vicinity to engage cocounsel, acquainting him with other ambitious men, such as lawyer and entrepreneur David Burnet.11

  When he went to Liberty for court, Travis often stayed at the Hugh Johnson home outside town on the Nacogdoches road. There was no courthouse, but the weather was usually fine, and Travis and the other attorneys handling cases generally met under the shade of a large live oak that served as well as public meeting hall and polling place.12 And before many months in Anahuac, Travis began to find the kind of standing that had been denied him in Claiborne. John Linn at Lavaca Bay, some distance along the Gulf Coast, became acquainted with Travis at Anahuac, and found that he “enjoyed the respect, confidence, and love of the colonists in general.”13

  While “love” may have been a bit extravagant for this abrupt and sometimes difficult young lawyer, certainly the community did come to respect him, and at least some of his closer friends called him by the nickname “Buck.”14 By the fall of 1831 people spoke favorably of Travis to Austin, testifying to their respect and esteem. And certainly Travis wasted no time in trying to advance himself. The United States maintained a consulate at Brazoria, where most of the business with Texas was conducted, but Austin believed that establishing a consulate at Galveston Bay would serve both American and Texian interests, and in November he recommended Travis after learning that the attorney expected to apply for such a position.15 In the event, Travis never received the appointment, and perhaps thought better of applying, but without doubt he was not letting the prairie grass grow beneath his feet as he sought to rebuild his hopes for a career in this new land.

  The only source of friction seemed to be another building in Anahuac. When Mexico City decided to enforce the customs laws, it sent a garrison to build a barracks and enforce the duties. To command it sent none other than Bowie's old comrade in arms John Davis Bradburn, now a colonel in the Mexican army and called Juan. Having helped Mexico secure its independence, his reward was this outpost in Texas, though when first he arrived in late October 1830 the Brazoria Texas Gazette met the news with “great pleasure.”16 Perhaps the editor felt that Bradburn, being a Virginian by birth, would be a sympathetic commander. If so, he proved to be mistaken, for Bradburn took his oath and uniform very seriously, and his brusque, condescending, and occasionally brutal manner often put him at odds with the locals. He told the land agents that they must leave the country in the wake of the decree, and though he continued to be kind and courteous to arriving would-be immigrants who came ignorant of the prohibition, still he was adamant in not allowing them to go inland. Instead, they stayed on their ships, lived in small tent camps, or went back to New Orleans. To enforce his presence, and protect his small garrison, Bradburn set the command to work building a stone barracks 150 feet long by 20 feet wide, with his own quarters at one end and a guardhouse at the other.17

  By the time Travis settled there, Bradburn was all but shunned, and his soldados the more so. “The common soldiers at this post were men of a most depraved character,” wrote a visitor in 1831, “while they were believed to be as cowardly as they were wicked and ignorant.” Many were convicts who had been given the option of enlisting in the army or going to prison. And when an epidemic struck Anahuac, killing a dozen or more citizens, rumor said that Bradburn personally seized the effects of the dead and sold them at auction for the benefit of his garrison or the government.18 Any lawyer was almost destined to come to a confrontation with Bradburn, and Travis and Jack certainly did.19 Travis, priggish where his concept of rights and civil liberties were concerned, found himself in one confrontation after another. The chief causes of conflict between Bradburn and Travis were slavery, land, and customs, but just as likely any issue would have served to put two such antagonistic personalities in collision. In fact Travis evidenced no difficulty with Mexicans in their own right, and little if any of the prevailing prejudice against them. He even established at least formally cordial relations with Bradburn's executive officer, Col. Domingo Ugartechea, in the spring of 1832. But Bradburn's attitude, especially where rights of property and person were concerned, naturally raised his ire. When it achieved its independence from Spain, Mexico stopped just short of a positive prohibition of slavery in its constitution, but still by edict it prohibited the practice of black servitude for life. In opening Texas to settlers from the United States, however, the authorities in Mexico City had to recognize that there were already many in Austin's colony who had come there with their slaves before the abolition. The owners thereafter got around the prohibition by claiming that their blacks were not slaves but “lifetime indentures,” presumably being paid a pittance in return for a ninety-nine-year labor commitment, a slippery semantic trick that fooled few, but with which Mexico City seemed able to live equably. As more settlers came into Austin's colony, up to the time of the April 6 law, they continued to bring their “indentures” with them, and by 1832 the flaunting of the prohibition was becoming simply too flagrant.

  Bradburn, meanwhile, refused to recognize the practice, since Anahuac and Liberty were outside Austin's colony. An especially nagging problem arose when Louisiana slaves ran away from their masters, as Bowie's young man William fled from him. Anahuac sat a mere forty miles from the Sabine, and inevitably slaves fleeing Louisiana ended up in Bradburn's hands seeking sanctuary. Bradburn, in fact, used them as laborers on his barracks and the masonry fort he started to build that spring. Travis came into the equation when the owners engaged him or Jack to file claims for the return of the runaways. Anahuac being a port, there were more of these cases there than in most of Texas, and Bradburn's refusal to return blacks to masters quickly offended the lawyers' senses of justice and property rights.20 During Gen. José Manuel Mier y Terán's visit the previous fall to enforce collection of customs and other Mexican law, a William Logan from Louisiana appeared to claim two of his runaways, and Mier y Terán told him he would have to apply through the Mexican embassy in Washington. The owner hired Travis to try to settle the situation, but after Mier y Terán's departure, Bradburn proved even more prickly in the matter, and told Travis that the blacks had enlisted in his command and applied for Mexican citizenship.21

  That alone would have been enough to outrage the lawyer. Travis had kept his politics to himself until then, but there was no question that he came from a family that believed in and practiced slavery, and which rega
rded slaves as property, recognized as such by the Constitution. In Claiborne he had held slaves himself, though they may have been hired or on loan. The coming fall his father, Mark Travis, would be a firm supporter of South Carolina's attempt to nullify a federal tariff that it felt violated its rights of property and sovereignty. In the pages of his own Herald he had editorialized against government interference with the rights and business of the people, even to such things as a ban on carrying the mail on the Sabbath.22 What Bradburn was doing violated a sacred right of property, and in common with most other Texians, Travis either did not recognize—or refused to recognize—that the Constitution of the United States meant nothing on Mexican soil.

  As for the land problems, Anahuac became a visible bottleneck in the Mexican land policy in Texas. The number of immigrants stalled there continued to grow, while even those who had secured their grants prior to the April 6 law were still awaiting the necessary surveys before they could claim their titles. Bradburn interpreted his instructions to prohibit even the latter, which only further outraged new Texians, and then went beyond that to try to interfere in local Texian ayuntamiento politics. Being a highhanded martinet was not the way to deal with these volatile immigrants, especially thanks to events in Mexico at the moment. A power struggle was under way between the ruling faction, the centralists, who sought to concentrate and hold power in Mexico City, and a growing group of liberal federalists coalescing around former general Antonio López de Santa Anna, urging national reform and greater local autonomy in the several states. Such unrest only seemed to undermine the centralist Bradburn's backing. At the same time that he looked ever more autocratic, he also looked that much weaker and more vulnerable.

  Meanwhile some of his soldados outraged the citizenry, getting drunk, insulting the citizens, and even assaulting them, including one rumored rape. A Texian witnessing the last assault refused to come to the victim's assistance, and his fellow Texians were so outraged that on April 26 they tarred and feathered him and paraded him through Anahuac until Bradburn sent soldados to stop the disturbance. As such things do, the confrontation escalated until Bradburn had a good portion of his garrison trying to quell a small riot. Gunshots rang out, men struck each other, and in the end the citizens backed away, leaving the punished Texian in Bradburn's protection. Bradburn determined to arrest those he thought to be behind it all, and he immediately suspected Pat Jack and Buck Travis.23

  Bradburn already harbored a festering grievance against Travis. On May 1 the citizens in Anahuac met to organize a local militia, even though they knew that Mexican law prohibited any such organizations. They declared that the fear of raids from the Comanche and Tawakoni and other bands required that they organize for their own defense, but Bradburn easily saw through the guise. The nearest hostile natives were a good two hundred miles north, and would never raid as far south as the Gulf Coast. The militia was intended to protect the colonists from Bradburn and his soldados, especially after the result of the riot, and its members chose Pat Jack as its captain. With Santa Anna leading his uprising in Mexico, Bradburn and other Mexican commanders in Texas felt very vulnerable, fearing that colonists would take the opportunity—as they did—to identify themselves with the santanistas and move against the garrisons. Bradburn immediately arrested Jack. In the days ahead he received repeated calls from Jack's friends, especially the lawyer Robert M. Williamson and undoubtedly Travis, and though Bradburn soon released him, he marked Jack down as a leading troublemaker, and anything involving Jack surely had Travis behind it.24

  Then came the last insult. Despite Travis's repeated entreaties, Bradburn remained adamant about not releasing the two runaway slaves. Suddenly there came to his ears rumors that armed slaveowners from Louisiana were gathering at the Sabine, their purpose to raid Anahuac and take the runaways by force. The colonel immediately put his garrison in readiness to be attacked, and when he learned that the rumor was untrue, he continued to keep the garrison on the alert just the same. Then one night, under cover of darkness and rain, a “tall man, wrapped in a big cloak,” approached one of Bradburn's sentries. “Quien es?” asked the sentry, wanting to know who was there. “Amigo,” came the reply. When the sentry allowed the cloaked man to approach, the stranger handed him two letters, then disappeared. The letters were for Bradburn, and when he read them he found a renewed warning that one hundred men on the Sabine were coming to take the runaways by force. One letter was simply signed “McLaughlin” and the other “Billew,” but having been fooled by such a rumor once, Bradburn immediately suspected a hoax. In his current state of agitation, he decided to make an arrest, and given his suspicions with regard to the recent riot, as well as the steady agitation over the slaves from a certain Anahuac lawyer, Bradburn decided that Travis was behind the trick.25

  On May 17 Travis and Jack were together in their office when a noncommissioned officer and a dozen soldados halted before their door and demanded that Travis surrender himself for arrest.26 Suddenly it was no longer a prank. Jack joined him for the walk to Bradburn's office in the barracks, and once there got into a heated argument with Bradburn over the arrest, which only resulted in the colonel arresting him too, not forgetting his suspicions about who lay behind the April 26 incident. Bradburn ordered the two of them confined in the guard-house at the end of the barracks building.

  Suddenly Travis found himself in something deadly earnest, but given his temperament, by now almost certainly he had already crossed an inner line. The almost certain arrest that he fled in Claiborne would have been an ultimate humiliation. This arrest in Anahuac, however, cemented his standing as a respected member of the community, a spokesman for the rights of Texians, and perhaps even a martyr—if only figuratively—in the struggle against Bradburn's tyranny. It hardly mattered if the issues involved were a teapot tempest. Very small things could become very big in a village like Anahuac. Yet he and his friends saw beyond their parochial concerns, a vision that placed them in the immensely wider context of the Texian struggle for justice from its rulers, and the santanista revolution in Mexico itself. Widely read as he was, Travis knew that sometimes great movements emerged from just such minor events as this.

  For the next fifty days Travis had little choice but to wait while events unfolded around him. At first the arrest proved not too onerous, and despite Bradburn's orders he and Jack were able to communicate with the outside. On their first or second day of confinement Travis managed to speak to a friend through a window in their cell, but the punishment of the guard on duty put an end to that. Bradburn did allow them clean clothes, though, and their friend Monroe Edwards soon had a slave named Hannah collecting their soiled linen, and bringing letters from Edwards to them in the clean laundry. Shortly after his arrest Travis “by great efforts” tried to get a message to his friend—and leading dissident—David Burnet on the San Jacinto, but a guard found the missive and gave it to Bradburn, who read in it their plea to the people of Austin's colony to “come and rescue them from the claws of thirsty, ra[s]cally and convict soldiers.”27

  Nevertheless Bradburn allowed the laundry run to continue until a week later, when in the outgoing clothing a guard found another letter addressed simply “O.P.Q.” In the previous week Travis and Jack had found a way to get themselves out of their confinement, either by bribing a guard or perhaps by breaking through the door. In either case they had decided not to risk Mexican military justice. Edwards knew, and could have informed them, that Bradburn, “a damned insignificent Military despot,” intended to send them to Matamoros for trial.28 They may also have known by then that Bradburn's judge advocate believed that they planned to foment a separation of Texas from Mexico.29 Bradburn was taking depositions from his soldiers and some unfriendly citizens without their being able to question or confront the deponents themselves. They even believed that he was suborning and intimidating perjured testimony, and that “all sorts of villainy has been practiced” to condemn them. They could hardly afford to remain there idle, to be sent s
outh into what they expected would be a rigged trial and perhaps indefinite imprisonment. Already they had gotten out to Edwards a plea for him to send word of their plight to Austin's colony and entreat friends to come to their aid. No succor had appeared, however, and now they must act on their own. The “O.P.Q.” letter asked Edwards to have a horse ready for them at an appointed hour on the next Thursday night.30

  When Bradburn saw the letter, he suddenly anticipated anew that a small army of colonists would come to release the prisoners. At that very moment Bradburn's men were in the process of building a small masonry fortress mounting two cannon, and the kiln they had used to make the bricks sat empty. To make certain there would be no break-out, he decided to move Travis and Jack to the kiln, then train his cannon on the approaches to the new calabozo.31 The entire garrison mustered in line on the day that Travis and Jack emerged from the guardroom and walked under heavy escort to the kiln. A few citizens gathered to watch, and Travis recognized the local physician, Nicholas D. Labadie, standing on a fence waving to him. He heard Labadie bid him to stay cheerful, that help would soon come. Travis managed a brief bow in response before being hurried onward.32