Lone Star Nation

by H. W. Brands

  The irony of his situation, as he saw it, was that he was being punished for being too loyal to his adopted country. “I have been much more faithful to the Government of my adopted country . . . than this Government deserved. What a recompense am I now receiving for all my fidelity to Mexico, all my labors to advance its prosperity, to settle its wilderness, to keep peace and tranquility in Texas? Do I deserve such treatment? No. In place of imprisonment I deserve rewards from the Government.”

  Austin’s one hope, he believed, remained Santa Anna. From prison Austin observed and applauded the developments that were delivering more and more power to Santa Anna, and he hoped that an expected reorganization of the government would make Santa Anna even less answerable to others. “If that change gives Santa Anna absolute power, or extra facultades [powers], I shall be set at liberty. He is my friend, and he is an honest man as well as an able one.”

  More-wishful words were rarely written. Santa Anna indeed acquired more power, but Austin remained at the mercy of the Mexican system of justice. Although he was released from prison after posting bail and promising not to leave the capital, his case moved no faster during the first months of 1835 than it had during the previous year. Austin inferred that with Zacatecas and other states in revolt against the central government, Santa Anna was reluctant to intervene on behalf of one accused of separatism. But Austin didn’t lose faith in the president-general. “Santa Anna leaves in three days for the interior (Zacatecas),” he wrote in April. “He informed me yesterday that he should visit Texas and take me with him, after these other matters are settled. He is very friendly to Texas and it would be an advantage to that country if he would pay it a visit.”

  Awaiting Santa Anna’s mercy, Austin continued to monitor Mexican politics. He learned of a mutiny in Veracruz and wondered what it meant. “All the rest of the country is quiet,” he observed. “To say how long it will remain so would be the same as to say when Vesuvius will or will not explode.” The affairs of his adopted country were more puzzling than ever. “I do not understand those of the day—who does?” Rumors about Texas were rife in the capital. “I believe that the most of them originate with persons who wish the Government to send the most of the army there so as to leave an open field for revolution here.”

  Finally, in August 1835, Austin was allowed to leave Mexico City, no wiser regarding the charges against him than he had been at the start of his detention. Preferring the perils of the deep to the risk of re-arrest, he traveled by boat from Veracruz to New Orleans, where he could catch another boat to Texas.

  At New Orleans, Austin began to realize that the Texas he was returning to in 1835 wasn’t the Texas he had left in 1833. The Crescent City was the jumping-off point for most of the thousand or so immigrants who were pouring into Texas each month, in most cases asking leave of neither empresarios nor the Mexican government. Although no one knew just how many Americans there were in Texas at this time, the total was probably about thirty thousand (compared to perhaps three thousand Mexicans and a smaller, and even more approximate, number of Indians). The Mexican government had utterly lost control of the border of Texas. But so had Austin and the empresarios.

  It was a sobering hour for Austin, for the uncontrolled immigration threatened everything he had worked for in Texas. Austin’s Texas was designed to be part of Mexico; his Texas colony was to be filled with law-abiding citizens of Mexico. Many of the newcomers weren’t law-abiding, and almost none had any desire to become Mexican citizens. Against Austin’s expectation and desire, Texas was being Americanized. In 1822 Austin had faced a choice between the United States and Mexico, and had chosen Mexico. Now he faced another choice, between Mexico and Texas. He had sworn allegiance to the former and had served it loyally for most of his adult life. But he had fathered the latter and guided it from infancy to its current raging adolescence.

  There was never really any question as to which he would choose. Texas came before all else. Yet that didn’t mean the choice would be painless. Sam Houston and many of the other newcomers were already a headache; more to the point—and far more serious—Santa Anna and Mexico could hardly be expected to let Texas go without a fight.

  Considering the momentous nature of Austin’s decision, he accepted its consequences with surprising equanimity. “It is well known that my object has always been to fill up Texas with a North American population,” he told Mary Holley. This object was being realized, in spades. The Mexican government might try again to stem the tide, but it was too late; the Americans in Texas would refuse to let that happen. “It may become a question of to be, or not to be. And in that event, the great law of nature—self-preservation—operates and supersedes all other laws.” Austin wouldn’t have said so just weeks before, but he now asserted that the large immigration was a good thing. “The cause of philanthropy, and liberty also, will be promoted by Americanizing Texas.” Indeed, against everything he had affirmed since arriving in Texas, he now endorsed the logical conclusion of the large American immigration: “The fact is, we must and ought to become a part of the United States.” Austin judged that this would be good for the United States, which would then have Texas as a western outpost. It would be good for the western world as a whole, in that it would expand the area of liberty and democracy. “The political importance of Texas to the great Western world . . . is so great that it can not fail to have due weight on all reflecting men.” And it would be good for Texas, which would benefit from the protection and stability afforded by American arms and institutions.

  Austin wasn’t ready to call for a break from Mexico. But the break would come, whether he called for it or not. “A gentle breeze shakes off a ripe peach. Can it be supposed that the violent political convulsions of Mexico will not shake off Texas so soon as it is ripe enough to fall?”

  Regarding Santa Anna, who had beguiled him so long, Austin felt the scales falling from his eyes. At New Orleans he learned of the latest Anahuac troubles and of the approach of General Cos. Austin wasn’t willing to write Santa Anna off entirely, if only because he had staked so much on the president-general. But he no longer placed any confidence in Santa Anna’s promises. “General Santa Anna told me he should visit Texas next month—as a friend,” Austin wrote. “His visit is uncertain, his friendship much more so.” This left the fate of Texas in the hands of the Texans. “We must rely on ourselves, and prepare for the worst.”

  From New Orleans, Austin sailed for Texas, arriving on September 1 at the mouth of the Brazos, where he observed firsthand the tension between the colonists and the Mexican government. His boat entered the Brazos estuary amid a naval battle between a Mexican warship and two merchant vessels, one American and one Texan. The American ship was smuggling a cargo of trade goods when the Mexican gunboat tried to seize it; shortly after the shooting started, the Texan craft—a steamboat—came chugging to the Americans’ aid. As it happened, Austin’s nephew William Joel Bryan was aboard the Texas steamboat, and when he and a shipmate recognized Austin on the arriving boat, they broke off their engagement with the Mexicans to greet the returning empresario. Austin was pleased at their consideration but alarmed at the degree to which violent resistance to Mexican authority had apparently become an everyday affair.

  His homecoming elicited a tremendous celebration. “A grand dinner and ball were got up for the occasion on two days’ notice,” Henry Austin reported to Mary Holley. No expense was spared—though Henry thought it could have been. “The only thing I did not like was seven dollars a head for ball and supper, and thirty more for a decent suit of clothes, which I had not and could have done without.” Yet Henry handed over the money, as did many others. “There were sixty covers, and despite the short notice the table was three times filled by men alone. In the evening the long room was filled to a jam. At least sixty or eighty ladies . . . danced the sun up. And the Oyster Creek girls would not have quit then had not the room been wanted for breakfast. You never saw such enthusiasm.”

  The dinner ha
d a purpose beyond welcoming the exile home. Though the recent events had heightened popular concern about the intentions of Santa Anna toward Texas, opinion remained deeply divided on the appropriate response. On one side were the newcomers, with little to lose, who advocated immediate independence from Mexico, accomplished by war if necessary. On the other were the old settlers, with much to lose, who hoped for a peaceful resolution of the current difficulties, perhaps by a restoration of the Mexican constitution of 1824, perhaps by legal transfer of Texas to the United States. The war party wanted to ratchet up tension with Mexico, to bring the issue to a head; the peace party prayed for calm, to let matters subside. And now that Austin was back, each party looked to him to furnish the leadership and guidance that no one else, to date, had been able to deliver. “His arrival unites all parties,” Henry Austin told Mary Holley, adding, “United we have nothing to fear.”

  Austin understood what was expected of him, and after the toasts in his honor, he rose to speak. He mentioned only briefly his ordeal in prison: “My efforts to serve Texas involved me in the labyrinth of Mexican politics. I was arrested, and have suffered a long persecution and imprisonment.” He concentrated instead on the challenges facing Texas upon his release and return.

  I fully hoped to have found Texas at peace and in tranquility, but regret to find it in commotion, all disorganized, all in anarchy, and threatened with immediate hostilities. This state of things is deeply to be lamented; it is a great misfortune, but it is one which has not been produced by any acts of the people of this country. On the contrary it is the natural and inevitable consequence of the revolution that has spread all over Mexico, and of the imprudent and impolitic measures of both the general and state governments, with respect to Texas.

  The people of Texas were not to blame, Austin said. “They are farmers, cultivators of the soil, and are pacific from interest, from occupation, and from inclination. They have uniformly endeavored to sustain the constitution and the public peace by pacific means, and have never deviated from their duty as Mexican citizens.” Perhaps a few individuals had acted rashly, but such actions resulted from the anarchic conditions of Mexican politics and the lack of local government in Texas.

  The Mexican revolution had entered a new and alarming phase, Austin said. “The federal constitution of 1824 is about to be destroyed, the system of government changed, and a central or consolidated one established.” The omens were dire. Reports from the south indicated that General Cos was moving toward Texas with thousands of troops; he was said to be planning to burn the houses of leading Texans and incite the slaves to rebellion. How should Texans respond?

  On this public occasion, just days after his return, Austin wasn’t ready to go beyond recommending another convention—a “consultation”—of the people of Texas. This was the crucial prerequisite to anything that might follow, for it would allow Texans to speak with a single voice and to act with a common will. “Let all personalities, or divisions, or excitements, or passion, or violence, be banished from among us. Let a general consultation of people of Texas be convened as speedily as possible, to be composed of the best, and most calm, and intelligent, and firm men in the country, and let them decide what representations ought to be made to the general government, and what ought to be done in the future.”

  Caution came naturally to Austin; no one who knew him was surprised to hear him try to banish passion from the affairs of Texas. The peace party went home from the dinner happy, the war party with indigestion.

  But events soon took a turn that made caution appear dangerous and passion patriotic. Eschewing the long march overland, General Cos loaded his five hundred men (not the rumored thousands) on ships and sailed for Texas. Within two weeks of Austin’s homecoming the Mexican troops were upon the Texas coast. The fate of Zacatecas was notorious throughout Texas; Cos, as Santa Anna’s brother-in-law, was assumed to share the dictator’s view of the appropriate treatment of rebels.

  Austin was stunned. “Things have come on us much sooner than I expected,” he wrote. Committees of safety were hastily organized; Austin headed San Felipe’s. He circulated a letter to other towns, sharing the latest information regarding the current crisis. “The substance of this information is that General Cos was expected at Béxar on the 16th of this month with more troops, that he intended to make an immediate attack on the colonies, that there was a plan to try and foment divisions and discord among the people, so as to use one part against the other, and prevent preparation—and that the real object is to destroy and break up the foreign settlements in Texas.” Urging every community to mobilize and drill, Austin extinguished the hopes of the peace party that he would continue to counsel restraint. “All kind of conciliatory measures with General Cos and the military at Béxar are hopeless. . . . Nothing but ruin to Texas can be expected from any such measures. They have already and very properly been resorted to, without effect.”

  Doubtless cursing his folly for having trusted Santa Anna so long, Austin now determined to meet the president-general on the ground he had chosen. “War is upon us,” he declared. “There is no remedy.” Cos, speaking for Santa Anna, was demanding abject surrender. “The people must unconditionally submit to whatever the government chooses to do for them; he lays down the principle that General Government have the right to force us to submit to any reform or amendments or alterations that congress may make in the consitution, &c.” Texans would do better to abandon the country than to accept such demands, “for we shall be, under Cos’ doctrine, without any rights or guarantees of any kind.” But Texans would not abandon the country, and they would not submit to dictation. “War is inevitable.”

  The duty of Texans was inescapable. “There must now be no half way measures—war in full. The sword is drawn and the scabbard must be put on one side until the military are all driven out of Texas.”

  C h a p t e r 1 2

  Lexington on the Guadalupe

  Noah Smithwick was the kind of immigrant Austin had always sought to exclude from Texas. He was irreverent, impatient of authority, and openly disdainful of Mexico and Mexicans. A North Carolinian by birth, a Tennesseean by youth, and a gunsmith by vocation, Smithwick was living in Kentucky in 1826 when Sterling Robertson, an empresario with a grant north of Austin’s colony, came to the bluegrass to recruit colonists. “The glowing terms in which he descanted on the advantages to be gained by emigration were well-calculated to further his scheme,” Smithwick recalled. Like Austin, Robertson offered a league of grazing land and a labor for crops; beyond that he extolled the exemption from tariffs and other taxes, the abundance of game, the fertility of the soil, the healthfulness of the climate in Texas. “In short, there the primitive curse was set at defiance.” Smithwick was eighteen; with his brothers he talked of emigrating to this new Eden. One thing and another distracted his siblings. “But it had taken complete possession of me, so early in the following year, 1827, I started out from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with all my worldly possessions, consisting of a few dollars in money, a change of clothes, and a gun, of course, to seek my fortune in this lazy man’s paradise.”

  Smithwick arrived in Texas to discover that though it resembled paradise in some respects, it was no place for a lazy man. Land was plentiful, all right, but that simply meant that it was worth very little, at least to one like himself with no desire to become a farmer. “I had a strong aversion to tearing up God’s earth,” he said, adding, “A league of land those days was of less consequence than a horse.” He bounced about for a few years, servicing the guns of the settlers and learning about life in this curious land. As a southerner, Smithwick was no stranger to slavery, but the anomalous status of the institution in Texas made it especially peculiar. A slave-holding settler named Thompson, a generally good-hearted man, was on the verge of returning to the United States, where his property interest in his servants would be legally secure; one of those servants decided to flee for Mexico proper rather than go back. “But he soon wearied of ‘husks’ [ta
males], and, returning voluntarily, surrendered himself to his old master, preferring slavery under Thompson’s lenient rule to freedom in Mexico.” Smithwick believed that by the end of the 1820s most slaves in Texas were aware that slavery was illegal on Mexican soil; it was the strangeness of Mexican culture that kept them from insisting on their freedom. Sometimes, though, violence was involved, as the case of a slaveholder with the ironic name of “Pleasant” McNeal demonstrated. “Jim, one of McNeal’s slaves, openly announced his determination to leave, and, acting on the impulse, threw down his hoe and started away. Pleasant McNeal, to whom he communicated his intention, ordered him to return to work, but Jim went on, whereupon Pleasant raised his rifle. ‘Jim,’ said he, ‘if you don’t come back, I’ll shoot you!’ Jim, however, kept on, and, true to his threat, McNeal shot him dead.”