During the day Bowie heard four cannon shots fired at Austin's position above town, nothing more than an annoyance, really; then that evening came word from Austin, who somewhat defensively explained that the division of forces between them was not as unequal as Bowie thought. He had to send Travis out with his cavalry company, and send Hall with a detachment to occupy another position between the two divisions. He had to detail soldiers to guard the growing number of Mexican prisoners they had taken in the past few days, many men were down sick, and Austin expected to occupy one or two other spots on the periphery of San Antonio, all requiring men. Still, he promised to try to send some reinforcement “compatible with the service,” saying that “everything shall be done on our part possible for the service & to keep up harmony.” It was not so much a communication from a commander to a subordinate as a negotiation between rivals. Austin may well have felt that Bowie was trying to undercut him and assume de facto command of the army. Certainly, in the face of Austin's ill health and indecision, Bowie had no question as to which of them was better suited to the task.12
The next morning, by now unwilling or unable to take a decision without a vote, Austin held a council with his officers on the question of storming Béxar or laying siege, and the majority opted for the latter. Within an hour Bowie read Austin's message with the result, asking him to hold the same vote among his own officers. He had four companies with him, Fannin's, Briscoe's, Robert Coleman's, and the recently arrived company led by Thomas J. Rusk, along with a small artillery company. Bowie called all their officers—twenty in all—together, and put Fannin in charge of holding the council. In the end only two voted for an immediate attack, and the rest for a siege. Bowie himself did not vote.13
In fact he had resigned. Several factors may have influenced his decision. His growing impatience with Austin's indecisiveness had been apparent for several days. The implied censure of the general order about officers disobeying orders must have stung. Or he may have found Austin's other suggestion that morning so stunning that he wanted to disassociate himself completely from the scheme. The commanding general proposed that the two divisions divide themselves into some twenty or more small groups of twenty to twenty-five men each, and then start circulating the parties around the periphery of San Antonio, having them sleep on alternate nights either above or below the town, though he failed to explain what purpose that was to serve other than to spot any foragers or reinforcements.14
Yet, far more likely, Bowie simply saw that his command would evaporate away from him. In addition to voting on the attack or siege question, his officers also balloted by a 2 to 1 majority to unite their division with Austin's above the town, deeming it necessary for security and morale. Bowie wholeheartedly endorsed that idea. However, he knew full well that there was no formal organizational structure in Austin's army. There were just eleven independent volunteer companies, and two of artillery, all commanded by captains who reported directly to Austin. Bowie held no command of his own, for his old Nacogdoches militia was not there. His leadership of the “First Division” was a temporary expedient, an assignment given him by Austin as an aide, to exercise while those companies were separated from the main army. But once the army was united again, as it was now to be, Austin would likely exercise direct overall control again as he had before. Thus Bowie would be superfluous, with not even his own company to command. He would still be an aide on Austin's staff, but the idea of being a headquarters functionary or errand boy held no charms for him. Consequently he quite courteously wrote to Austin a “resignation of the nominal command I hold in the army,” and expressed the hope that the general would appoint someone more suited to a staff position in his stead.15
Later that day or the next morning Bowie went to Austin and discussed with him in person his reasons for the resignation, yet there is nothing to suggest that Austin found anything objectionable in Bowie's motives, or that the interview did not end amicably—at least, as amicably as it could be, given these two very different men, with quite divergent attitudes toward land speculation.16 By November 4, however, a rumor did come out of the Texian camps and find its way into Béxar that Austin and Bowie were at odds, part of a wider unrest in the army.17 Certainly there was trouble in the ranks. The bivouac presented more the aspect of a mob than an army. When drums called the morning muster, the volunteers either stumbled out of their tents and huts half dressed or simply stayed in their blankets, while those at the roll call often as not continued eating their morning meal with not even the show of an attempt to stand at attention. During the day they wandered about the countryside, often venturing toward Béxar to a redoubt where two field pieces occasionally fired at the town.18 Discipline was utterly lacking, and poor Austin simply had neither the health, the personality, nor the experience to whip an assembly of volunteers into an army.
Bowie, on the other hand, for all his faults, personified the leader. Men instinctively followed his standard. Austin would not have been human if he did not feel some tinge of resentment at that, the more so since some no doubt lionized Bowie as the hero of Concepción. Already Bowie's name appeared in the press as the victor, and on November 3, in the very first act of the newly convened consultation, Houston read a brief account of Bowie and Fannin's fight and offered a resolution giving the thanks of the convention to them both, as well as to Austin.19 Then, too, Austin had to resent Bowie's presumption, and there was no secret of the good relations Bowie enjoyed with Houston, fast becoming an archrival of Austin's. Moses Bryan, traveling with Austin, saw more than once how Bowie managed to overawe the general. “I have seen him yield his own opinions and adopt those of the impetuous Bowie and others,” said Bryan, “for the sake of order and to prevent agitation.” Bryan himself regarded Bowie as one of several “ambitious, self asserting men among them, each believing himself capable of commanding.”20 Bryan was not alone in his view, even some civilians not with the army sensing the exploding ambition of a few. “Every man seemed to think he could command an army,” one of them lamented, and there is no reason to doubt that Bowie believed he could, certainly more ably than Stephen F. Austin.21
It is just possible that land had something to do with Bowie's resignation beyond the immediate military situation. By November he may well have heard that on October 27 the permanent council had passed a resolution closing all the land offices in Texas during the emergency, their express object being to halt sales of land in the Mason and similar Monclova grants.22 That was not good news for Bowie, certainly, and he may have thought to leave the army at once and return to San Felipe in hopes of influencing the council to reconsider. A man who would go to Washington, D.C., to beard cabinet officers and congressmen, would not be put off by a few rustics in a drafty log meeting hall.
Bowie remained with the army, however, though he spent November 3 and 4 in a private capacity until November 5, when Warren Hall left for San Felipe and Austin appointed Bowie temporary adjutant general in Hall's absence.23 Yet that was to Bowie's temperament a pointless position, involving nothing more than acting as a conduit of orders from general to army, a clerk's job at best. Meanwhile the unrest throughout the army reached such a stage that Fannin doubted that all of the men would voluntarily remain, and Frank Johnson and some of the other captains sent petitions to Austin in protest at some actions. William Wharton had a grievance with the general that he rather ostentatiously settled that same day with a public letter, indicating that Austin had in some manner backed down, and Travis submitted his resignation in response to grumblings in his command and a possible implied slight from Austin.24
It seemed to Austin that everything was collapsing around him, and in his physical and mental state he could not face remaining any longer. On November 5 he issued orders through Bowie as adjutant that all the companies then in the army form on review at dawn the next morning, though he did not immediately reveal his intent. When he faced them he announced that he would resign his command, or at least intimated an intention to do so,
and said he would take those who no longer wished to remain back to San Felipe. Those choosing to stay and continue the siege were to be organized into a regiment and choose their own regimental commander, though he would leave Bowie behind as his representative in overall command with orders to collect as much provender as they could, burn the grass in the area to prevent the Mexicans grazing their horses, and then retire toward the Rio Grande, burning the grass along the way, whenever Cós should force him to retreat. He was giving up on the siege.25
In the balloting that day the 517 men volunteering to remain overwhelmingly chose Edward Burleson as their colonel. Five men were mentioned in all in the voting, with Bowie himself polling last at a mere five votes. There seems to have been no “campaigning,” and it is possible that nominations were not even put forth. The soldiers simply voted spontaneously, naturally choosing from among the more outstanding leaders in the army, including Fannin, Joseph Wallace, and Frank Johnson. Yet Bowie's showing of a paltry five votes, all in John Bird's company, is still surprising given his prominence in the field thus far. Despite what appears to be Bowie's dominance over Fannin in their joint command, it is possible that in the army as a whole the perception prevailed that Fannin was really in charge. Wallace had jointly led the forces that expelled the Mexicans from Gonzales, and had a large following, and even Johnson at least held an elected command as a company captain. By contrast Bowie still wore no real rank other than his informal appointment as colonel by Austin, and now on November 6 was a mere adjutant. He had no constituency since he did not have a company of his own as did Fannin and Johnson, and on top of that, news of his resignation a few days before may have persuaded the men in the ranks that he would be leaving, making votes for him pointless.26
But then Austin changed his mind and decided to stay with the army after all.27 In fact, it may all have been a clever ruse to quell the dissatisfaction while still saving face. He would let Burleson exercise operational command, thus removing himself from having to have routine dealings with the company commanders, while at the same time his announcement of his own resignation had initiated those of others he might just as soon be rid of. His nephew Moses Bryan, who noted the “aspiring men” his uncle had to deal with, found the day after the election that the situation was dramatically better at headquarters and in the army.28
And so Bowie thought he was to have the army command, even if only for a short time, and perhaps of a depleted army at that; but then, considering what he did with only 92 men at Concepción, the 517 men remaining would still be a lot. The news that Austin changed his mind proved simply too much disappointment, and not just to Bowie. Soon after learning of Austin's reversal, Warren Hall sent his own resignation as adjutant, obviously unhappy, and quite possibly because he had been counting on his friend Bowie having the army command.29 Wallace decided to leave, as did William Wharton. That same November 6 Bowie resigned again, and this time with evident temper, out of pique at losing his chance at army command, as well as chagrin at his miserable showing in the vote for regimental colonel. “I have declined farther action under the appointment given to me by yourself,” he notified Austin. “I will be found in Captn Fannins Company where my duty to my country and the principles of human rights shall be discharged on my part to the extent of my abilities as a private.”30
That resolution to serve with Fannin lasted scarcely thirty-six hours, for almost immediately he decided to leave the army and go to San Felipe as soon as Frank Johnson could replace him as adjutant. Bowie departed on November 8, along with other disaffected men like Wharton and Wallace, and accompanied by Alexander Hotchkiss and Richardson, who bore dispatches from Austin to the consultation.31 Bowie could not have reached San Felipe before late on November 13, with nothing to indicate why a three-day trip had taken him five, though he may have made a detour by way of the mission Refugio near Capano, to move some four hundred head of cattle, one of his few genuine assets, to the old rancho of Veramendi, combining them with the Veramendi stock so that they would appear to be part of his late father-in-law's herd, and thus secure from confiscation by Mexican forces.32
When Bowie did reach San Felipe, Houston startled him at first by congratulating him on taking command of the army at San Antonio. A letter had come in a day or two earlier with the now obsolete news of Austin's resignation and Bowie's elevation, but Bowie soon brought Houston up to date on affairs in Austin's camps.33
A lot had happened in San Felipe. A week earlier the consultation by a heavy majority declared its adherence to the constitution of 1824, and defeated a motion to make a declaration of independence. However, they definitely chose to separate themselves from Coahuila, and formed a provisional government, choosing Henry Smith as governor and James Robinson as lieutenant governor. They elected Houston major general to command their “army,” and decided that Austin should go to the United States as an emissary to seek assistance. They also decreed that all empresarios and land commissioners such as Bowie were to cease operations immediately. Then on November 14, just hours after Bowie's arrival, the consultation adjourned until March 1, 1836, having created an advisory council to sit indefinitely to oversee the continuing formation of the army and government.34 That same day Bowie saw a little bit of celebrity come his way when the local Telegraph and Texas Register published the report of the Concepción fight jointly submitted by himself and Fannin.
Bowie and Houston undoubtedly met during the day on November 14, and among other things Houston gave Bowie the news that Austin was being sent to the United States. That would finally leave his army without a commander. Houston himself had to remain in San Felipe and thereabouts to organize the raising of volunteers and the creation of several forces to defend vital points from invasion. He could not go to that army, and therefore it would be up to the soldiers there to elect a new commander for themselves. Suddenly Bowie's prospects brightened. If he were present, and especially if he came with Houston's blessing, he might stand a chance of winning the ballot, and it is apparent that Houston preferred him to have the command. Sam Houston did not forget that Bowie may have saved his life—and his future—just a few weeks before.
To have a chance at election Bowie needed to return to the army. Houston told him that clerks were even then preparing copies of dispatches from the consultation for Austin, including notification of his ambassadorial appointment. Bowie could return to San Antonio with the couriers. He passed the rest of the afternoon and evening at Peyton's inn, where the family of the proprietor usually found him “refined and courteous.”35 Unfortunately on this occasion he had considerably too much to drink. Anson Jones arrived in San Felipe that evening and, on being introduced to Bowie, found him “dead drunk” and talking loudly with Houston and abusing Austin mercilessly in their drunken chatter.36 Thus when the packet of letters was finally ready around midnight, the couriers had to wait with horses saddled for an hour before Houston could get Bowie outside, and then it took help to mount him on his horse. Turning to one of the other riders, George Patrick, Bowie good-humoredly said, “now Patrick you have been kind enough to wait for me and I guarantee to make up the lost time.” Riding hard through the night, they changed horses at DeWees' Crossing on the Colorado, and pressed on. “Good as his promise,” said Patrick, “he made things quite lively enough for me.”37
They reached Austin's camps above San Antonio early in the afternoon of November 18 and immediately turned over the dispatches to Austin, who may have been a bit suspicious to see Bowie return.38 Certainly Patrick thought he understood his riding companion's motive. “Col. Jas. Bowie wanted to be in Camps, yea and present when Genl. Austin resigned the command of the army,” he said later. The unrest had broken out again after Bowie's departure, and Austin finally had to combine the two wings of the army, which he delayed doing in spite of the vote on November 6.39 As a result he did not feel that he could leave the army immediately, for fear the discord would make it disintegrate in his wake. It was a wise decision, for even Fannin feared
the “depressed feelings & ardour of the men” might lead to a dissolution. Having seen far too much of indecision, he wrote to Houston with the recommendation that there be more decisions and fewer councils of war. Warren Hall wrote to Austin resigning his position as adjutant general for much the same cause, and the only good news was that Travis, rethinking his resignation, had actually captured the Mexican caballado. When Austin tried to order an assault on Béxar for the morning of November 22, no doubt thinking it would inspire the men, his commanders reported to him that the volunteers declared themselves unwilling to make the attempt, and that same day Fannin asked for a discharge to leave the army. Concluding that “this army has always been composed of discordant materials,” Austin decided on November 22 that he himself should stay no longer.40
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