Lone Star Nation

by H. W. Brands

  Miraculously, only two men were wounded in this escapade, besides several horses killed. Thomas Rusk had a narrow escape, made possible by the timely intervention of a late recruit, Mirabeau Lamar, who rode down a Mexican dragoon about to dispatch the secretary of war. Lamar also rescued a teenage Irish volunteer dazed in falling from his mount. So daring were Lamar’s horseback exploits that some of the Mexican cavalrymen spontaneously burst into applause.

  If Houston expected Sherman to be chagrined at having hazarded several dozen men to no good purpose, he was mistaken. Sherman showed not the least repentance but rather berated Houston for not throwing the entire army into the battle and having it out with the Mexicans then and there. Houston tongue-lashed Sherman for stupidity and insubordination, but the rebuke had little effect beyond embittering Sherman against Houston permanently.

  As night fell, Houston worried about the day ahead. Santa Anna was precisely where Houston wanted him, and the Texan troops were itching to take on the Mexicans. But almost none of the Texans had seen genuine battle, and their lack of discipline—meaning not just their willingness to withstand fire but their ability to follow orders under pressure and act in unison—was frightening. They could probably skirmish with the best of irregulars, but could they stand up to regular soldiers in a pitched fight? General Gaines’s men presumably could, which had been one of their attractions all along. Houston wondered, even now, whether he should have continued to retreat. But the decision had been made, and soon he would discover whether it was the wrong one. He wasn’t sure his men could win the war in a day; there were thousands of Mexican troops besides Santa Anna’s in the field. But because these were the only troops Texas had, a day might suffice to lose the war.

  Exhausted from worry and exertion, Houston was still sleeping the next morning when General Cos unexpectedly arrived at Santa Anna’s camp with a contingent that doubled the Mexican force. Many of Houston’s officers and men took this as additional evidence of their commander’s incapacity to lead. If the battle had been the day before, they could have fought Santa Anna and Cos separately; now they would have to fight the two Mexican generals together.

  Houston had been reluctant to attack before Cos’s arrival, and he was more reluctant after. He liked his position and preferred to let Santa Anna assume the danger of the initiative. As John Swisher recalled, the Texans’ position had much to recommend it.

  It would be difficult to select anywhere better ground for an impregnable camp than that now occupied by our army. It was about two or three feet above the water’s edge and ran back from fifty to one hundred yards on a level, covered with trees, but with little or no undergrowth, to a second bank about ten feet high. This last bank was not so steep that the troops could not easily walk to the top, deliver their fire, fall back, load, advance and fire again.

  The Mexican position was far less attractive. “We had the enemy on our right, within a wood, at long musket range,” Pedro Delgado explained. “Our front, although level, was exposed to the fire of the enemy, who could keep it up with impunity from his sheltered position. Retreat was easy for him on his rear and right, while our own troops had no space for maneuvering. We had in our rear a small grove, reaching to the bay shore, which extended to our right as far as New Washington. What ground had we to retreat upon in case of a reverse? From sad experience, I answered: None!”

  Delgado related his fears to General Castrillón, who shared them. “What can I do, my friend?” Castrillón said. “I know it well, but I cannot help it. You know that nothing avails here against the caprice, arbitrary will and ignorance of that man.” The reference, of course, was to Santa Anna, for whose ears Castrillón intended his criticism. “This was said in an impassioned voice,” Delgado remarked, “and in close proximity to His Excellency’s tent.”

  Yet His Excellency saw merit in the Mexican position. “I shut the enemy up in the low marshy angle of the country where its retreat was cut off by Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto,” Santa Anna said. “Their left was opposed by our right, protected by the woods on the banks of the bayou; their right covered by our six-pounder and my cavalry; and I myself occupied the highest part of the terrain.”

  Whoever had the better of the terrain, Santa Anna now had the edge in numbers. But the troops that came with Cos weren’t ready for battle. They had been on the road all night and required food and rest. Santa Anna assumed that if the rebels were going to attack, they would have done so at dawn; since they hadn’t, he didn’t think they would before the next day. He ordered the new arrivals to stack their arms and take a nap in the grove by the bayou. As he himself had gone without sleep while supervising the erection of breastworks, he too lay down to rest.

  Santa Anna’s assumption might have been right as it related to Houston. The Texan general remained cautious and wouldn’t lightly abandon his strong defensive position for the hazards of an assault across open ground. But Santa Anna’s assumption didn’t apply to Houston’s men, who again forced their commander’s hand. Accounts differ regarding the degree of unrest in the Texan camp. Nicholas Labadie portrayed Houston as continuing to dither till John Wharton (the brother of Stephen Austin’s fellow envoy to the United States) brought the issue to a head. “Col. Wharton visited every mess in camp,” Labadie said, “and slapping his hands together, he spoke loud and quick: ‘Boys, there is no other word today but fight, fight! Now is the time!’ Every man was eager for it, but all feared another disappointment, as the commander still showed no disposition whatever to lead the men out.” Wharton persisted, and the men began to respond, till finally Houston declared, “Fight, and be damned!”

  Houston remembered things otherwise. He said that at a noontime war council the demands to attack were confined to two junior officers. Their four seniors—not including Houston but including Rusk—cautioned against ordering the untested Texan troops across an open field against the Mexican defenses. Better to let the enemy do the attacking. “Our situation is strong; in it we can whip all Mexico,” Houston paraphrased the majority.

  If the two versions reveal a difference, it was chiefly about timing. Houston knew he couldn’t delay long, given the belligerence of his troops and the inevitable approach of the rest of the Mexican army (which he tried to slow by ordering the destruction of the bridge over which Cos had come). The Texan commander might wait a day, maybe two, but he couldn’t wait longer than that without losing all hope of victory.

  In fact he didn’t wait even a day. Driven for years by his ambition, goaded for weeks by his men, presented just now by Santa Anna with an unprecedented opportunity, Houston on the afternoon of April 21 took the fateful step. At three-thirty he ordered the Texans to form up. “Our troops paraded with alacrity and spirit, and were anxious for the contest,” he recalled, in what was a substantial understatement. Though less than a mile from the Mexican camp, the Texans moved forward undetected, concealed by a small hill, by tall grass, by the Mexicans’ fatigue, and by Santa Anna’s conclusion that the rebels wouldn’t attack that day.

  As he sent the men into battle, Houston still worried that their ranks would splinter under fire. He was right to worry. “Our regiments were volunteers, and knew nothing whatever about drilling,” Frank Sparks admitted. If they could keep one thought in mind, to hold their fire as long as possible, Houston would be lucky. “We were ordered not to fire until we could see the whites of the enemies’ eyes,” Sparks said.

  The advance proceeded quietly until the Texans were within a quarter mile of the Mexican camp. Two columns of infantry, totaling some six hundred men, pushed ahead of the artillery, which consisted chiefly of the Twin Sisters. The Texan cavalry—a few dozen mounted riflemen under the newly promoted Mirabeau Lamar—circled to the Mexican left. Houston, astride a white stallion acquired for the occasion, rode amid and around the troops. At his order the cannons opened fire with grape and canister, the cavalry galloped forward, and the infantry charged, screaming, “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!”

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nbsp; The surprise attack stunned Santa Anna and the Mexicans. “I was in a deep sleep when I was awakened by the firing and noise,” Santa Anna said. “I immediately perceived we were attacked, and had fallen into frightful disorder.” The disorder deepened as the Texans surged forward. “The utmost confusion prevailed,” Pedro Delgado remembered. “General Castrillón shouted on one side; on another, Colonel Almonte was giving orders; some cried out to commence firing; others, to lie down to avoid grape shots. . . . I saw our men flying in small groups, terrified, and sheltering themselves behind large trees. I endeavored to force some of them to fight, but all efforts were in vain—the evil was beyond remedy: they were a bewildered and panic-stricken herd.”

  The Mexican officers were unable to stem the panic. Delgado remembered that Santa Anna was completely nonplussed. “I saw His Excellency running about in the utmost excitement, wringing his hands, and unable to give an order.” Other officers were incapacitated by the enemy fire. “General Castrillón was stretched on the ground, wounded in the leg. Colonel Treviño was killed, and Colonel Marcial Aguirre was severely injured.” With the officers down or undone, the rank and file—reluctant conscripts, hungry and far from home—were a lost cause.

  Confusion turned to rout. “On the left, and about a musket-shot distance from our camp, was a small grove, on the bay shore,” Delgado wrote. “Our disbanded herd rushed for it, to obtain shelter from the horrid slaughter carried on all over the prairie by the blood-thirsty usurpers.” The Mexican troops fled for their lives, only to be pinned at the edge of the bayou. “The men, on reaching it, would helplessly crowd together, and were shot down by the enemy, who was close enough not to miss his aim. It was there that the greatest carnage took place.”

  All accounts of the battle agree that the carnage was indeed very great. The anger that had been building among the Texans since the Alamo and Goliad burst forth in a bloodbath that matched the former for ferocity and the latter for numbers killed. Frank Sparks left one of the less gruesome accounts. “We charged with such fury that the Mexicans fled in a very short time,” he said. “The rout was general and a great slaughter of Mexicans took place within four hundred yards of their breastworks. . . . About ten acres of ground was literally covered with their dead bodies.” Ramón Martínez Caro, Santa Anna’s secretary, surveyed the field after the battle under the guard of one of Houston’s lieutenants. “He led me to the entrance of the road taken by our troops in their flight,” Martínez Caro wrote, “and there I saw, both to the right and to the left, as far as the eye could see, a double file of corpses, all men from our force. Moved by this sad spectacle—would that it had been the last—I still had the more bitter sorrow of being conducted a short distance to the left, where there was a small creek, at the edge of the woods, where the bodies were so thickly piled upon each other that they formed a bridge across it.”

  Most of the killing occurred in the battle proper. Martínez Caro’s guide, pointing to the bridge of bodies, explained, “At this place, they rushed in such confusion and in such numbers that they converted the crossing into a mud hole, obstructing the way, and our soldiers in the heat of battle massacred them.” The Texans shot hundreds of the Mexicans. “It was nothing but a slaughter,” said W. C. Swearingen, regarding the scene at the bayou. “They at first attempted to swim the bayou but they were surrounded by our men and they shot every one that attempted to swim the bayou as soon as he took the water, and them that remained they killed as fast as they could load and shoot them until they surrendered.”

  Yet surrender didn’t end the killing. Nicholas Labadie described the execution of a prisoner.

  I pursued a fresh trail into the marsh, and came upon Col. Bertrand, who had bogged, and on his knees he begged for his life. Supposing myself alone, I extended my left hand to raise him up, but was surprised to hear a voice behind me saying, “Oh! I know him; he is Col. Bertrand of San Antonio de Bexar. General Teran made him colonel.” This was said by one Sanchez, a Mexican, in Capt. Seguin’s company, composed of some thirty Mexicans [Tejanos] fighting on our side. He had scarcely done speaking when I observed three others coming up with levelled guns. I cried out to them: “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot; I have taken him prisoner.” These words were hardly spoken, when bang goes a gun, the ball entering the forehead of poor Bertrand, and my hand and clothes are spattered with his brains, as he falls dead at my feet.

  Dismay at the actions of his comrades caused Labadie to draw a curtain at this point in his narrative; he added only that he “shortly after witnessed acts of cruelty which I forbear to recount.”

  Moses Bryan, nephew of Stephen Austin, told a similar tale.

  The most awful slaughter I ever saw was when the Texans pursued the retreating Mexicans, killing on all sides, even the wounded. . . . I came upon a young Mexican boy (a drummer, I suppose) lying on his face. One of the volunteers brought to Texas by Colonel Sherman pricked the boy with his bayonet. The boy grasped the man around the legs and called in Spanish: “Ave Maria purissima, por Diós salva me vida!” [“Hail Mary most pure, for God’s sake, save my life!”]. I begged the man to spare him, both of his legs being broken already. The man looked at me and put his hand on his pistol, so I passed on. Just as I did, he blew out the boy’s brains.

  The murdering frenzy almost claimed some of the Texans’ own wounded. Nineteen-year-old Alphonso Steele had been shot in the head, but not fatally. Yet the blood ran down in his eyes and nearly blinded him.

  I could hardly see anything and I sat down on a dead Mexican. While I was sitting there some of Millard’s regulars, who’d stayed at the breastworks and were busy sticking their bayonets through wounded Mexicans, came along. And one of them had his bayonet drawed back to stick through me when Tom Green of our artillery corps stopped the regular from killing me.

  Houston made a halfhearted effort to stanch the bloodletting, but the men obeyed as poorly now as before the battle. Nicholas Labadie encountered the Texan commander as the Mexican resistance was ending and the slaughter was beginning. Houston had been in the thick of things from the start, and showed it.

  I observed Gen. Houston on a bay pony, with his leg over the pommel of the saddle. “Doctor,” said he, “I am glad to see you; are you hurt?” “Not at all,” said I. “Well,” he rejoined, “I have had two horses shot under me, and have received a ball in my ankle, but am not badly hurt.” “Do you wish to have it dressed?” said I. “Oh, no, not now, but I will when I get back to the camp. I can stand it well enough till then.”

  He then faces his horse about, and orders the drum to beat a retreat. But the men, paying no attention to the order, shouted with expressions of exultation over the glorious victory, and it was difficult to hear anything distinctly. . . . Then while I was within ten feet of him, he cries out, as loud as he could raise his voice: “Parade, men, parade!” But the shouts and halloing were too long and loud; and Houston, seeing he could not restore order, cries at the top of his voice: “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Gentlemen! (a momentary stillness ensues) Gentlemen! I applaud your bravery but damn your manners.”

  Robert Hunter observed a more specific reaction to Houston’s entreaties. “General Houston gave orders not to kill any more but to take prisoners,” Hunter recalled. “Capt. Easlen said, ‘Boys, take prisoners—you know how to take prisoners. Take them with the butt of your guns, club guns,’ and said, ‘Remember the Alamo, remember La Bahía [Goliad], and club guns, right and left, and knock their brains out.’” Hunter added, “The Mexicans would fall down on their knees and say, ‘Me no Alamo, me no La Bahía.’” But it did them little good. Many ran for a lagoon behind the battlefield. “Man and horse went in head and ears to the bottom. . . . That lagoon was full of men and horses for about twenty or thirty feet up and down it, and none of them ever got out. I think their bones are laying there yet.”

  P A R T F O U R

  Lone Star

  and Union

  (1836–1865)

  C h a p t e r 1 9

 
Victors and Vanquished

  On the day after the battle, Sam Houston and Santa Anna met for the first time. Houston had spent the night in pain from his ankle injury, but otherwise he blessed his good fortune and congratulated his comrades in arms. Santa Anna’s wounds were to pride and ambition, and he cursed his evil fate and the incompetents who had failed him at what should have been his hour of triumph. The Mexican general’s escape from the battlefield was hardly the stuff of honor and glory; rather than rally the troops or attempt a surrender, he flew from the fighting with personal safety first in mind. Doubtless he rationalized that no one was more important to Mexico than he, holding the highest offices his country could bestow, and that the national interest required that he not be killed or captured. Probably he inferred from the slaughter around him that capture might not have been an option till the Texans satisfied their blood lust. In any event, he seized a horse from an aide and galloped west, in the direction of General Filisola and the main body of the Army of Operations. He shortly saw that the Texans had destroyed the bridge over Buffalo Bayou that was to be his escape route. Confused, disoriented, and in understandable fear for his life, he floundered in the mud along the bayou till night fell, whereupon he took shelter among the pines that bordered the stream. At daybreak he discovered a cabin, empty of inhabitants but containing some civilian clothes; partly for comfort but equally for disguise, he exchanged his soaking, soiled general’s uniform for a pair of plain trousers and a blue cotton jacket. He struck off again, on foot now, and managed a few miles before being sighted by a band of Texans hunting for Mexicans who had somehow escaped the killing of the previous day. He tried to hide but to no avail, and the Texas horsemen surrounded him.

  They had no idea who he was, and he didn’t enlighten them. They took him prisoner and continued their mission. Only one of the Texans, Joel Robison, spoke much Spanish. Robison asked the prisoner if he knew where Santa Anna and Cos were. “He said he presumed they had gone to the Brazos,” Robison recalled. Robison accepted the answer, and the group moved on, with the Texans riding and the prisoner walking. Santa Anna wasn’t used to walking; he tired and asked to rest. Some of the Texans, assuming he was harmless, proposed to let him find his own way to the camp of prisoners. But one said he’d shoot him before he’d let him go. So Robison hauled Santa Anna up behind him on his horse. The young rebel and the defeated general conversed about the battle. Santa Anna asked how many soldiers the Texans had. Less than eight hundred, Robison answered. “He said that I was certainly mistaken, that our force was surely much larger.” Robison affirmed that the number was correct, embarrassing Santa Anna into reflective silence. The group reached the camp of prisoners, where, to the astonishment of Robison and the others, the Mexicans greeted the new arrival with shouts of “El Presidente! El Presidente!”