by H. W. Brands
Houston wouldn’t have come to Texas if he hadn’t believed that independence—from Mexico, if not necessarily from the United States—was the proper and likely future of Texas. He had no desire to spend his days as a Mexican citizen, and if he nodded in that direction—by nominal conversion to Catholicism, for instance—it was only to further his larger aim. Whether Austin would contribute to that larger aim was up to Austin. On current evidence—on the evidence of his enthusiasm for Santa Anna and his suspicion of those willing to press for the rights of Texans—he would hinder rather than help.
While Austin languished in prison, Houston traveled around Texas and back to the United States. He didn’t publicize his whereabouts, and for months he dropped from sight. He was in Washington in April 1834, where he encountered David Crockett. Crockett’s alienation from Jackson must have made the conversation uncomfortable—but only momentarily, as Houston and Crockett “took a horn” and shared memories of old times in Tennessee. Crockett doubtless plied Houston for news about Texas, and as the purpose of Houston’s visit was to prime American interest in Texas, he surely told Crockett as much as the congressman wanted to hear. In Washington, Houston must also have met with Jackson, although the meeting was so discreet as to leave no record. Houston talked Texas with enough other political figures to discover that acquisition of Texas by the United States was improbable, given the bitterness of the minority opposition to Jackson, and given the clause of the Constitution that allowed a third of the Senate to veto any treaty. This meant that the Texans would have to look to themselves—which wasn’t a bad thing, in Houston’s view. “As to Texas, I will give you my candid impressions,” Houston wrote James Prentiss. “I do not think that it will be acquired by the United States. I do think within one year it will be a sovereign state and acting in all things as such. Within three years I think it will be separated from the Mexican confederacy, and remain so forever.” As for Santa Anna, in whom Austin placed such faith: “I assure you that Santa Anna aspires to the purple, and should he assume it, you know Texas is off from them and so to remain.”
Sightings of Houston were rare and sketchy during the next several months. He was reported to be traveling with a band of Indians in the Arkansas district. A British traveler, G. W. Featherstonhaugh, told of stopping over at Washington, Arkansas, in late 1834:
General Houston was here, leading a mysterious sort of life, shut up in a small tavern, seeing nobody by day and sitting up all night. The world gave him credit for passing his waking hours in the study of trente et quarante and sept à lever; but I had been in communication with too many persons of late, and had seen too much passing before my eyes, to be ignorant that this little place was the rendezvous where a much deeper game than faro or rouge-et-noir was playing. There were many persons at this time in the village from the states lying adjacent to the Mississippi, under the pretence of purchasing government lands, but whose real object was to encourage the settlers in Texas to throw off their allegiance to the Mexican government.
Featherstonhaugh wanted to learn more, but, perceiving that curiosity might be mistaken by the conspirators (“The longer I staid the more they would find reason to suppose I was a spy”), he declined to ask.
By early 1835 Houston was back in Texas. He settled in Nacogdoches, where he resumed the practice of law. (It was his desire to join the bar that prompted his Catholic baptism, which entailed his assumption of the saint’s name—Paul, or Pablo—that he now included in signing documents intended for the courts.) He observed the growing tension between the Texans and the Mexican government, and awaited his opportunity.
While Houston watched and waited, Santa Anna tightened his grip on the Mexican government. One by one he dismantled the institutions of federalism, dissolving the state legislatures, disbanding the state militias, and finally doing away with the states altogether, demoting them to mere departments of the national government. Meanwhile he made the national government an instrument of his own authority. He repealed the liberal reforms of Gómez Farías and engineered elections that transformed the congress into his rubber stamp.
The changes provoked resistance in various parts of the country. Federalists in Zacatecas, northwest of Mexico City, refused to comply with the order to disband the militia, insisting on retaining this last defense of states’ rights. Santa Anna thereupon determined to teach the Zacatecans a lesson—the lesson he had learned from General Arredondo years earlier in Texas. He personally led an army against Zacatecas, crushing the militia before turning his men loose on the populace at large to make a brutal example of what insurgents could expect from him. The slaughter exceeded that of the Medina, and it included hundreds of women and children. The message was unmistakable: all who opposed the will of the president-general should expect no mercy if their opposition failed.
As part of his plan to restore order to the northern frontier, Santa Anna dispatched his brother-in-law, General Martín Perfecto de Cos, to Texas with several hundred men. Cos’s orders were to accomplish in Texas what had been accomplished in Zacatecas—the disarming of the citizenry and the preemption of future resistance. Cos was not an evil man; he doubtless preferred that the disarming take place peacefully. But he had his orders, and he had the example of Zacatecas. If peaceful methods didn’t suffice, the Texans should expect the sword, wielded as harshly as necessary. Nor would Cos be lulled by Texan protests of adherence to the Mexican constitution. “The plans of the revolutionists of Texas are well known to this commandancy,” Cos announced. “And it is quite useless and vain to cover them with a hypocritical adherence to the federal constitution. The constitution by which all Mexicans may be governed is the constitution which the colonists of Texas must obey, no matter on what principles it may be formed.”
William Travis, as a lawyer, might have argued this point with Cos on constitutional grounds, but circumstance and temperament took him in a different direction. After the 1832 fight at Anahuac, Travis had moved to San Felipe, where he got to know Stephen Austin and the early settlers, enrolled some of them as law clients, and gained a greater appreciation of their concern lest rash action jeopardize all they had accomplished since coming to Texas. Meanwhile Travis himself acquired a stake in the status quo when he earned appointment as secretary to the San Felipe ayuntamiento.
Something else toned down the rebelliousness that marked Travis’s early manhood: he fell in love. For many months after reaching Texas, Travis sowed wild oats with reckless abandon. A diary he kept during this period recorded his conquests. “Chingaba una mujer que es cincuenta y seis en mi vida,” he wrote on September 26, 1833, in the Spanish he reserved for matters romantic. “I fucked a woman that is the fifty-sixth in my life.” His exhausting pace occasionally caught up with him. “No pudiera,” he wrote regarding the night of February 21, 1834. “I could not.” Another night, with a prostitute (“Pagaba un peso,” he wrote: “I paid one peso”) proved “malo.” Worse than impotence was infection. “Venereo mala,” he lamented on March 28.
But a case of the clap—which he medicated with mercury—didn’t prevent the frontier Lothario from maintaining the chase. What did slow him down was love, as opposed to mere sex. Travis met Rebecca Cummings during the winter of 1833–34. She was the sister of an innkeeper whose Mill Creek premises Travis frequented, and after catching the young lawyer’s eye she captured his heart. By mid-February he had told her how he felt, and she reciprocated. “Proposals &c agreeably received,” he wrote triumphantly on February 16. During the following weeks he devoted every spare moment to Rebecca. “Spent day pleasantly in la sociedad de mi inamorata,” he wrote on March 21. When work or bad weather derailed a rendezvous, he cursed his bad luck. “Started to Mill Creek; waters all swimming & prairie so boggy,” he wrote one rainy night. “Could not go. The first time I ever turned back in my life.”
The couple agreed to wed, assuming certain difficulties could be resolved. The first was Travis’s reluctance to leave off with the prostitutes, whom he continued t
o visit while courting Rebecca. The second was his previous—and persisting—marriage to Rosanna. Precisely how Travis explained Rosanna to Rebecca is unclear; doubtless his version of their separation favored his current case. Rebecca wasn’t easily persuaded, but his passion wore down her resistance. “Reception cold, but conclusion very hot,” he recorded on April 1. The next day they reached “a simple understanding”—apparently that they would be married as soon as Travis could divorce Rosanna. This would take time, as Rosanna had to petition the Alabama legislature for a special bill dissolving the marriage, and because the likeliest ground for the action was abandonment, which legally required three years of absence and nonsupport. As things happened, Rosanna herself found someone else, and in her new suitor discovered cause to hasten her release from Travis. But the Alabama legislature could not be hurried, and though the process moved forward in late 1834 and early 1835, it did so with southern deliberation.
If Travis wasn’t the reflexive rebel he had been at twenty-two (he turned twenty-six in 1835), he remained touchy on the issue of Texan rights. In the spring of 1835 trouble again developed at Anahuac, and again over import taxes. Since 1832 the collection of the duties had been intermittent and haphazard; those importers who seriously objected to paying resorted to smuggling, with little worry about legal sanction. But as part of Santa Anna’s campaign for law and order in Texas, a new contingent of troops was sent to Anahuac to ensure collection of the customs duties. This irked the merchants there, one of whom, Andrew Briscoe, sputtered his exasperation:
I landed at this place near 4 weeks. Since, I have had some damned rough usage, having my goods landed against my will by military force. The people would calmly stand by and see me lose all. God damn them. I went to Miloska to get justice but failed. The roughest affair and most dangerous exertions implied. My business has been delayed. My provisions and groceries have been [confiscated] as contraband, and the whole duties claimed on balance and the goods withheld till the duties shall be paid. And all this by deputy collector and 40 soldiers!!!
The merchants’ annoyance prompted acts of sabotage and evasion, which provoked a further crackdown. When a cargo of lumber consigned to the government and landed at Anahuac mysteriously caught fire, the authorities stepped up patrols and confiscations. When passengers aboard a schooner belonging to one of Travis’s clients were discovered without passports, the schooner was seized and its cargo impounded. The boat, with the offending passengers as prisoners, was taken to Veracruz.
Nearly every American in Texas knew—and the few who didn’t were quickly informed—that precisely such actions had triggered the American Revolution, which started with disputes over import taxes and escalated when offenders were hauled off to Britain for trial. Travis appreciated the parallel, and the fact that his friends and clients were among the victims of the new crackdown gave him additional reason to get involved. In June, Andrew Briscoe and another man tussled with some Mexican soldiers enforcing the customs rules; the two men were arrested. Although the second man was soon released, Briscoe remained in custody. The news of the arrest reached San Felipe roughly coincident with word of the approach of General Cos, and with the publication of an intercepted letter written by Colonel Domingo Ugartechea, the Mexican commander in Texas, predicting, “In a very short time the affairs of Texas will be definitely settled. . . . These revolutionaries will be ground down.”
This was more than Travis could bear. He organized a band of volunteer soldiers, who elected him captain. They rode to Anahuac, where, supported by a boat bearing a small cannon, Travis ordered the Mexican commander to surrender his post. When the commander demurred, Travis threatened to kill every member of the garrison. Unsure how large the rebel force was, and how committed his own men were to holding the fort, the commander put the question to his officers, who voted for discretion over unthinking valor. Upon receiving assurances that they wouldn’t be harmed if they complied with Travis’s ultimatum, the Mexicans evacuated Anahuac and rode off toward the Rio Grande.
Travis was understandably proud of himself for facing down those he deemed the minions of the tyrant Santa Anna, but not everyone in Texas shared his pleasure. Most of the established property owners continued to hope the current troubles would blow over, and they feared anything that might bring Santa Anna’s wrath upon them. They muttered against Travis and considered how to rein him in.
Travis grew more popular when Cos ordered his arrest. “As it is impossible that the attack made upon the garrison of Anahuac should pass with impunity,” Cos wrote to Colonel Ugartechea, “I require and stimulate the patriotism of your honor to proceed immediately and without excuse to the apprehension of the ungrateful and bad citizen, Juliano Barret Travis, who headed the revolutionary party. . . . He ought to have been punished long since.”
The old settlers worried more than ever at this escalation of events, but among the newcomers Travis again became a hero. The local authorities refused to carry out the arrest orders, and by their refusal joined the resistance to Santa Anna. When the Mexican government placed a thousand-dollar bounty on Travis’s head, his reputation was ensured.
Travis was delighted. “I discharged what I conceived to be my duty to my country to the best of my ability,” he said, as modestly as he could. Lowering his reserve, he added, “Thank God! Principle has triumphed over prejudice, passion, cowardice, and slavery. Texas is herself again. . . . I feel the victory we have gained, and I glory in it.”
Arrest did even more for James Bowie than for William Travis. The two years till 1835 were the most difficult in Bowie’s life: hard on his reputation and hard on him personally. His personal troubles began with the cholera outbreak that had coincided with Austin’s departure for Mexico City. Bowie was traveling in the United States at the time, and Juan Veramendi evacuated himself and his family, including Bowie’s bride, Ursula, to Coahuila to escape the infection. But the epidemic outpaced them, and first Veramendi’s wife, then the governor himself, then Ursula succumbed to the disease. As it happened, Bowie, at Natchez, Mississippi, fell gravely ill with malaria at about the same time, and though he managed to beat back the parasites that infested his bloodstream, the news of Ursula’s death provoked a relapse. Bowie’s marriage had begun in part as a match of (his) convenience, but it had grown into much more, and with Ursula’s passing he wondered whether his own life was worth living. For months he could think of little besides his loss. “Strong man that he was,” said Noah Smithwick, who had known Bowie before and reencountered him in the wake of Ursula’s death, “I have seen the tears course down his cheeks while lamenting her untimely death.”
But Bowie had survived bullets and arrows and infectious disease, and he survived his broken heart. He returned to Texas to settle the Veramendi estate (thereby letting himself off the hook he had fashioned by his exaggerated claims of prenuptial wealth). And notwithstanding his mourning, his old feistiness reemerged. After a brawl in San Antonio, he complained that a friend had witnessed the fight without coming to his aid. “Why, Jim,” the friend said (according to the recollection of a third party), “you were in the wrong.” Bowie replied, “Don’t you suppose I know that as well as you do? That’s just why I needed a friend. If I had been in the right, I would have had plenty of them.”
The speculative instinct also resurfaced. For several years the residents, merchants, and politicians of Monclova, the historic capital of Coahuila, had been trying to recapture the state government of Coahuila y Texas from Saltillo, the seat of government of the dual state since 1824. In 1833 the Monclovans succeeded. But the Saltillans contested the transfer, and the turmoil surrounding the fight produced unusual opportunities for turning state power to private purposes. Among the opportunists were speculators who persuaded the Monclova government to sell them public land in Texas for a small fraction of its market value. Samuel Williams, Austin’s partner, was one of this clique, as was Bowie, who wound up with title to more than a half million acres near Nacogdoches. When word
of the deal surfaced, Williams’s reputation for probity was ruined among the Texans (as was his relationship with Austin, who furiously distanced himself from Williams and the sweetheart deal). Bowie’s reputation suffered less damage, on account of having less far to fall. But to those who had hoped his connection to the Veramendis might make an honest man of him, the reeking scandal suggested a dismaying reversion to form.
Luckily for Bowie, he was arrested by General Cos’s soldiers while heading from Monclova toward the Rio Grande. Cos wasn’t after land jobbers but rather the Monclova officials with whom Bowie was traveling. And in fact the general lowered his guard long enough for Bowie to escape after two weeks in captivity. Yet in fleeing to the American settlements with word that Cos was right behind, Bowie became something of a Texan Paul Revere, and his speculative excesses were largely forgotten.
Bowie’s reputation rose further in the weeks that followed. The alarm at the approach of the Mexican army spurred the spontaneous gathering of militia units, one of which, at Nacogdoches, elected Bowie its colonel. Seizing the moment, Bowie led his men to the local Mexican armory, where they helped themselves to its contents while the overwhelmed Mexican commander stood by speechless. With his men now armed, Bowie directed a flying squadron to intercept some dispatches addressed to the Mexican consul at New Orleans. When these were read in the town square at Nacogdoches, they confirmed the growing feeling that the Mexican government was engaged in a nefarious plot to subvert the rights and freedoms of the people of Texas.
While Bowie, Travis, and Houston were doing their best to start a war, Stephen Austin was trying just as hard to stop it. Part of Austin’s pacifism was, as Houston and the others surmised, a reflection of the empresario’s self-interest in maintaining his ties to the Mexican government. Another part of Austin’s hesitancy reflected his stubborn belief that Santa Anna had the best interests of Texas at heart. And a final part reflected the simple weariness of a man imprisoned for many months very far from home. “You must look upon me as dead, for a long time to come,” Austin wrote James Perry in October 1834. “My innocence will avail me nothing. There seems to be a net wove around me which I cannot understand, and of course cannot resist. . . . A foreigner and a North American by birth, shut up in prison, almost destitute of friends and money, far removed from all resources, and in the midst of enemies . . . what have I reasonably to expect except a long imprisonment and perhaps total ruin?” Prison wore a man down, and for one whose health had never been robust—and who had been ill before entering prison—a lengthy sentence might be a death sentence. Had Austin been wealthier, he might have hoped for early release. “It has been hinted to me more than once that a sum of money, say $50,000, would stop my enemies and set me at liberty,” he remarked. As it was, his prison time cost him dearly. Inmates were expected to pay for their upkeep; Austin reckoned his out-of-pocket expenses at $10,000, beyond his pain, suffering, and lost time.