by H. W. Brands
The grumbling grew louder once the march began. The Chihuahuan desert was never an easy passage, as Stephen Austin and everyone else who had crossed that stretch of northern Mexico discovered. But winter presented special challenges, especially for an army, with its large retinue of draft animals. Their forage—or what would have been their forage—had withered the previous summer and hadn’t yet grown back (which was why travelers tried to cross in the spring). Water was marginally more available than it would be later, but in this arid zone that margin couldn’t quench the thirst of an army. The weather, though often mild, could turn bitterly cold within hours, freezing the sweat of the men and animals on their skin and chilling their bones. And the distance was daunting, some eight hundred miles from San Luis Potosí to San Antonio de Béxar.
Napoleon knew that an army travels on its stomach; if the Napoleon of the West knew that, he apparently forgot. Midway through the march, he ordered the five thousand men of the army placed on half rations. “I have been unable to find out the reason for this unjust and mysterious order,” wrote Ramón Martínez Caro, Santa Anna’s secretary for the campaign. Martínez Caro called the order unjust “because it marks the beginning of the privations of the soldiers, just as they set out on their long journey over deserts, in the middle of the winters, which is very severe in those regions, without sufficient clothes, particularly among the wretched recruits who in the main were conscripts and were practically naked.” The order was mysterious in that sufficient provisions and supplies to feed the men had been made available to the commissary general of the army, a man who happened to be Santa Anna’s brother-in-law. “What became of these provisions and supplies?” Martínez Caro wondered.
José Enrique de la Peña, a lieutenant colonel of engineers, thought the expedition poorly conceived. “In an immense, open, and uninhabited country, it was necessary to take everything along, and to proceed in a manner heretofore unknown,” de la Peña said. “The Texas expedition should have been considered as a fleet taking to the high seas or, more strictly speaking, as a colonial enterprise. It was necessary to select the season, to assemble foodstuff beforehand, and to provide adequate means of transportation of all descriptions. The presence of good surgeons and well-equipped ambulatory hospitals was indispensable, not only for the wounded but also for the many illnesses caused by prolonged and difficult marches.” The troops needed tents lest they fall ill; their weapons and powder needed protection lest they become damp and useless. The expedition required intelligence and special expertise. “It was necessary to know the depth of the rivers, their width, and the steepness of their slopes, as well as the force of their currents and the advantages and disadvantages of the woods surrounding them.”
De la Peña was only twenty-eight, but he had been in the Mexican military long enough to see the damage the interminable revolution had done to the institution of arms in his country. “The army had been infiltrated by a demoralizing force, which unfortunately was present in all classes. . . . It had been destroyed during the civil war, particularly during the years of 1832, 1833, and 1834. The flower of our veterans had perished without glory, killing each other, at times to uphold freedom, at others abuses. . . . Its losses were filled by recruits snatched away from the crafts and from agriculture, by heads of families, who usually do not make good soldiers, by men in cells awaiting the punishment of their crimes, at times by men condemned by one corps yet finding themselves as part of another.” With so many reluctant soldiers, Santa Anna felt obliged to order deserters shot, yet the very reluctance of the soldiers made them resent such harsh treatment the more.
De la Peña, originally a navy man, thought Santa Anna could have avoided many problems by transporting his army north by ship, as Cos had done. The troops would have arrived in Texas sooner, fresher, and at less expense. Ships could have carried their provisions far more easily than did the pack mules and oxcarts they drove overland; traveling by sea, the expedition would have been able to leave at home the retinue of wives, mistresses, and children that invariably followed Mexican armies in the field.
Santa Anna wasn’t ignorant of the difficulties he faced, yet, like Bonaparte, he believed they simply promised larger glory. “The great problem I had to solve,” he said, “was to reconquer Texas and to accomplish this in the shortest time possible, at whatever cost.” Mexico remained vulnerable to other insurgencies, and for the army to spend many months subduing Texas would lay the rest of the country open to intolerable danger. “A long campaign would have undoubtedly consumed our resources and we would have been unable to renew them.” Time was of the essence. “If the only four favorable months of the year were not taken advantage of, the army, in the midst of the hardships of a campaign, would perish of hunger and of the effects of the climate. . . . In order that the soldier, by means of repeated marches and frequent battles, should forget the immense distance which separated him from his family and home comforts; in order that his courage might not fail; and, in short, to maintain the morale which an army obtains from its activity and operations, it was of the utmost importance to prevent the enemy from strengthening its position or receiving the reinforcements that the papers from the North asserted were very numerous.” Critics might carp at this or that aspect of the campaign, but they weren’t the ones responsible. Mexico had chosen Santa Anna. “It left everything to my genius.”
Sam Houston longed for such freedom of action. The bane of Houston’s existence during the final weeks of 1835 was his lack of authority commensurate with the responsibility he bore. As general in chief he was supposed to defend Texas from Santa Anna, but in fact he commanded few of the instruments required for the defense. Almost alone among the Texans, Houston had a sound grasp of military strategy. Others were as good on tactics—on the details of attacking this town or holding that fort—but no one else so appreciated how the pieces of the puzzle of Texan defense ought to fit together. “I propose placing a field officer in command of San Antonio de Bexar with a sufficient number of troops for the defence of the station,” he explained a week after the capture of the town. “I also design the employment of an engineer, and to have the fortifications and defences of the place improved. La Bahia must be occupied by a force amounting to from 50 to 100 men, and commanded by a competent officer. The main force will be placed where it can command the port of Copano. Refugio Mission will probably be the best situation for a force to be stationed. San Patricio will also be within the range of the cordon of posts to be established for the purpose of the reception of troops until the campaign of the spring will open.”
It was one thing to devise strategy, however, and another to effect it. The provisional government was no help. Indeed, the meddling of the politicians made Houston’s task doubly difficult. The government ordered that the headquarters of the army be established at Washington, the new town on the Brazos River whose chief recommendation was that its promoters wanted the business and had pull with the general council. “It will give me great pleasure to obey the order at the earliest possible moment,” Houston told Henry Smith sarcastically. The meddling only grew worse. “It is extremely painful to me to feel what I am compelled to experience, and believe to exist,” Houston wrote Smith. “I have never failed to render any information when called on by the chairman of the military committee”—Wyatt Hanks of the Bevil District of eastern Texas—“and to furnish such books as he wished for his instruction. Yet I am constrained to believe that he has interposed every obstacle to the organization of the army and, so far as I am identified with it, to delay the placing of Texas in a proper state of defence.”
Houston’s most consistent complaint was lack of funds. He was supposed to raise an army but wasn’t given the money to do so. He couldn’t hire recruiting officers, nor even provision those men who came to his camp on their own. And when monies were appropriated, they found their way into the pockets of jobbers and speculators. “The brave men who have been wounded in the battles of Texas, and the sick from exposure in
her cause, without blankets or supplies, are left neglected in her hospitals,” Houston told Smith during the first week of 1836, “while the needful stores and supplies are diverted from them, without authority and by self-created officers, who do not acknowledge the only government known to Texas and the world.” Houston implored Smith to rectify the situation. “No language can express my anguish of soul. Oh, save our poor country! Send supplies to the wounded, the sick, the naked, and the hungry, for God’s sake!”
Lack of money wasn’t Houston’s sole problem. Although he was the commanding general, most of those fighting in Texas had taken no oath of allegiance to his army, to the Texas government, or to anything else. They acted as free agents, sometimes subject to the authority of their elected officers, often not even to that. They decided when they would fight and when they wouldn’t, as Stephen Austin and then Edward Burleson discovered at San Antonio. Many of the recently arrived Americans had been motivated to come by a love of liberty and a feeling of solidarity with the Texans, but even these expected to get something tangible for their pains.
James Grant was a native of Scotland who emigrated to Texas in 1823. Although a physician by training, he became interested in the politics of his new home, and was elected to the legislature of Coahuila y Texas. In the spring of 1835 he was secretary of the Monclova assembly that delivered the hundreds of leagues of Texas land to James Bowie and the other speculators, among whom Grant contrived to include himself. Shortly thereafter he fled Monclova with the rest of the government Santa Anna dispersed. Grant might well have opposed Santa Anna on constitutional grounds alone; that the dictator was trying to deprive him of a prospective fortune in land gave him a second reason to join the Texas rebels, which he did. He participated in the siege of San Antonio in the autumn of 1835 and spoke loudly for Texan rights. Yet Grant’s Coahuila connection distanced him from such as Stephen Austin and Sam Houston, and where they were moving—more slowly in the first case than in the second—toward independence, Grant opposed the break. Most Texans considered the Monclova deal a blatantly corrupt speculation; there seemed little chance that an independent Texas would honor the backroom bargain. For this reason, perhaps among others, Grant embraced the 1824 constitution, rather than independence. And he argued that the Texans ought to try to get other states and districts of Mexico, starting with Coahuila, to join the revolt. As a first step, he proposed an attack on Matamoros, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. By taking the fight south, he contended, the Texas rebels would give heart to opponents of Santa Anna in Coahuila and force the dictator to defend that district. If nothing else, control of the customs house at Matamoros would yield revenue the rebels could devote to the defense of Texas.
His personal stake aside, there was logic to Grant’s argument, but there was sounder logic against it. The shady dealings of the late Monclova legislature were no secret; their existence, and the fact that the beneficiaries included, besides Grant and Bowie, such other rebel leaders as Ben Milam and Frank Johnson lent credence to Santa Anna’s claim that the rebels were merely pirates bent on looting Mexico’s patrimony. As for their goal of seizing the Matamoros customs, this was the sort of thing brigands had been doing for centuries. Finally, the idea that an attack on Matamoros might ignite a rebellion elsewhere in Mexico was problematic, to say the least. The opposite result—that Mexicans would rally around the flag—was equally likely. Several weeks earlier, a band of anti-Santanistas recruited in New Orleans by José Antonio Mexía (and including the Tampico Blues of Herman Ehrenberg’s acquaintance) had landed at Tampico, hoping to ignite local opposition to the dictator. The expedition turned out to be a fiasco: the schooner carrying the rebels ran aground, and Santa Anna’s loyalists were waiting for them when they struggled ashore. Mexía managed to escape, but thirty-one of his men were left behind. Three died of wounds incurred in the operation; the others were executed for piracy.
Houston opposed the Matamoros expedition, but he lacked the authority to stop it. He had tried to persuade the San Felipe consultation to nullify the Monclova grants in order to demonstrate the bona fides of the rebels. He had failed then, for the same reason he failed now to forestall the Matamoros expedition: influential members of the consultation, and now of the provisional government, had interests in the speculation. Henry Smith joined Houston in opposition, but he couldn’t control the general council, which proceeded to overrule him and Houston. When Houston discovered that the expedition was going to go forward, he bowed to the inevitable yet still tried to shape it. He ordered James Bowie to take charge. “In the event you can obtain the services of a sufficient number of men for the purpose,” Houston wrote Bowie, “you will forthwith proceed on the route to Matamoros, and, if possible reduce the place and retain possession until further orders.” Better Bowie, Houston reasoned, than Grant or Johnson or someone he didn’t know. “Should you not find it within your power to attain an object so desirable as the reduction of Matamoros, you will, by all possible means, conformably to the rules of civilized warfare, annoy the troops of the central army, and reduce and keep possession of the most eligible position on the frontier, using the precaution which characterizes your mode of warfare. You will conduct the campaign. Much is referred to your discretion.” Houston directed Bowie to apprise the provisional government of his actions by reporting “through the commander-in-chief of the army.” And he added, in a non sequitur that was significant precisely for not following from what came before, “Under any circumstances, the port of Copano is important.”
Bowie was pleased at the prospect of action, even a prospect as clouded as the Matamoros expedition. After the rousing tussle at Concepción, things had turned in a decidedly unsatisfactory direction for him. The “Grass Fight” won no one any glory, and by bad luck Bowie missed the battle for San Antonio. Impatient at the (pre-Milam) refusal of his comrades to attack the town, he accepted an assignment to ride to Goliad and assess the state of that town’s defenses. What he discovered was not encouraging, and he headed back to San Antonio to report the bleak news. By the time he got there the rebels had taken the town, and things were as dull as ever, if less frustrating.
The dullness disposed many of the victors, including Herman Ehrenberg and the New Orleans Greys, to join James Grant and Frank Johnson in the expedition to Matamoros. Bowie was inclined to go, too—which was why Sam Houston appointed him to head the affair.
Houston’s rivals, however, had other ideas. His reasoning in naming Bowie to head the Matamoros expedition was translucent, if not quite transparent; the council accordingly denied Houston’s authority to appoint Bowie, and appointed Johnson in his place. Johnson initially accepted the appointment but changed his mind when the council overruled some of his choices for junior officers, whereupon the council put James Fannin, Bowie’s comrade from Concepción, in charge. The situation grew more confusing when the political skirmishing between Governor Smith and the council erupted into open warfare. Smith tried to dissolve the council and send the members home; the council, likening Smith to Santa Anna, called for the governor’s impeachment. Meanwhile Johnson changed his mind again and joined Grant in assuming—with the approval of neither council nor governor—command of the Matamoros expedition, for which they began recruiting volunteers.
Bowie was in no mood to sort out the mess, and when Houston, acknowledging defeat in this part of the affair, offered him another assignment, he gladly accepted. What Houston disgustedly called the “Matamoros rage” had stripped the garrison left to guard San Antonio, till it was a shadow of the force that had conquered it. Houston had never considered the town strategically important, and its weakness—and the distraction provided by the Matamoros fever—supplied him an excuse to arrange its evacuation. Bowie, he decided, was just the man for the job. “Colonel Bowie will leave here in a few hours for Bexar with a detachment of from thirty to forty men,” Houston wrote Smith on January 17. “I have ordered the fortifications in the town of Bexar to be demolished, and if you should think wel
l of it, I will remove all the cannon and other munitions of war to Gonzales and Copano, blow up the Alamo and abandon the place.”
While remedying—he thought—the weakness on his western flank, Houston turned his attention south. The Matamoros expeditionaries were gathered at Goliad, eager for another try at the Mexicans and a first chance at some real booty. “Our party now mustered six hundred men,” Herman Ehrenberg explained, “and only the lack of food and ammunition kept us idle.” The troops initially accepted the delay as an inevitable aspect of campaigning. “But as time went by without bringing the stores we needed, our inactivity grew more irksome. . . . It enraged us to think that if we had been provided at once with powder and lead, we should by now have already stormed and captured Matamoros. As it was, the procrastination of the Government helped the enemy and diminished our chances, for the Mexicans, aware of our plans, were strengthening the defenses of their city and every day making it more nearly impregnable.” The delay discouraged the most impatient members, who abandoned the project and headed for their homes back in the States. Before long the ranks had dwindled to 450. To keep the remainder from following, Grant and Johnson decided to start south, hoping the promised supplies would overtake them on the road.
At Refugio the expedition rested several days, albeit more for the purpose of delay than recuperation. They were ready to resume the march for Matamoros, 150 miles farther on, when Houston rode into their camp. “Tenseness and excitement prevailed in our ranks,” Ehrenberg recalled, “for Sam Houston was the most famous and popular leader of the Texans. The vigor of his patriotism, the sincerity of his democratic faith, the liberal tenor of his conduct had won him the love and confidence of all his fellow-citizens.” In this latter sentence, Ehrenberg spoke more for the rank and file than for the politically ambitious, but even Houston’s rivals had to acknowledge the man’s gifts of leadership, which were put here to the test. “The eminent commander had now a delicate mission to perform,” Ehrenberg said, “for he came to allay the suspicions, calm the impatience, and restore the satisfaction of the restless, discontented troops. Nor was this all. The army was at present broken up, and the concentration of its forces at some point was as urgently needed as it would be difficult to achieve.”