by H. W. Brands
The vulnerability of Texas to Indian attack from the north was mirrored by its vulnerability to Mexican attack from the south. Mexico’s long revolution, which had begun in 1810 and lately spun off the Texas revolution, continued to convulse the country. During Santa Anna’s detention in Texas, his rivals quarreled for primacy in Mexico City, while federalists in various provinces agitated for local autonomy. The government lacked resources to pay its debts or defend the country from those foreigners who insisted on collecting what was owed to them. The French exploited an incident in which one of their nationals saw his bakery burned, and launched what was called “la guerra de los pasteles” (the Pastry War), ultimately landing French marines at Veracruz.
Santa Anna had retired to his hacienda after returning from the north, but he recognized an opportunity to reprise his role at Tampico nine years before. He rushed to the coast to defend Mexico’s honor. Although he succeeded in repulsing the invaders, his leg was badly injured by French cannon fire. Doctors debated treatment, leaving the general to issue a poignant message to his countrymen: “Probably this will be the last victory that I shall offer my native land. . . . From this day forward the most unjust of Mexican enemies shall not dare to place their feet on our soil. . . . May all Mexicans, forgetting my political mistakes, not deny me the only title which I wish to leave my children, that of a good Mexican.”
Santa Anna’s dying request was published as a poster that circulated throughout the country. When its publication was followed by news that the hero hadn’t died after all, but survived a grim amputation, his reputation was remade. He traveled slowly to Mexico City, reveling in his popularity and worrying his rivals. He might have seized power upon reaching the capital, but he contented himself with the title of interim president, bestowed by a grateful congress, and retired to his hacienda once more, to allow matters to ripen further. They soon did, and when he returned again to the capital, in the autumn of 1841, it was as though his troubles in Texas had never occurred.
Indeed, he soon turned those troubles to his own benefit. Ignoring everything he had told the Texans and the Americans about Texas being lost to Mexico, Santa Anna distracted his compatriots from their domestic problems by reopening the Texas war. In the spring of 1842 he sent General Rafael Vásquez against San Antonio with seven hundred men. Vásquez captured the town with little difficulty, but he remained only a few days before returning south with such valuables as could be readily carried. Several months later a more serious offensive, under General Adrian Woll, took San Antonio again. Woll lingered to tangle with a force dispatched by Sam Houston, who had been elected president once more; in the clash some hundred soldiers, counting both sides, were killed. Woll retreated toward the Rio Grande with the Texans in pursuit. The Texans chased Woll across the river, but then three hundred of them—forgetful of the fate of the Matamoros expedition of 1836—descended on the Mexican town of Mier, seeking booty. They were captured after sharp fighting and were sent south as prisoners. On the road they escaped and fled into the mountains. Some starved there, and some found their way back to Texas, but the majority were retaken. Santa Anna ordered that every tenth prisoner be shot. A jar of beans was passed among them, containing black and white beans in the ratio of one to ten. The prisoners blindly drew the beans, and the seventeen with black were executed.
C h a p t e r 2 1
Andrew Jackson Dies Happy
Had the Texas republic otherwise thrived, it might have weathered the Indian wars and Mexican invasions with little damage to the collective psyche. But the hard times that hit the United States with the Panic of 1837 spilled across the Sabine, complicating the creation of all the institutions of government and society the new country required. Texas finance was a bad joke. Until the panic summer, bank notes issued in Louisiana and Mississippi circulated in Texas, albeit discounted for distance from the banks of issue. Specie—gold and silver—immigrated in the pockets of the people who came. But as the banks behind the paper crumbled, the metal money went into hiding and Texans were reduced to barter. “Horses were generally considered legal tender,” Noah Smithwick recalled. “But owing to the constant drain on the public treasury by the horse-loving Indian, that kind of currency became scarce, so we settled on the cow as the least liable to fluctuation.”
Land scrip and government promissories served as a substitute for money. Yet these inspired speculation, with strapped holders selling them at far below face value to persons willing to bet on the rise. A visitor to the town of Houston, which sprang up on Buffalo Bayou not far from the San Jacinto battle site, described how speculators turned distress to profit.
Some were engaged in purchasing the discharges of the soldiers, each of whom is entitled, beyond his pay of eight dollars a month in government paper, to six hundred and forty acres of land for each six months’ service and in proportion for a less period. For this he gets a certificate from the government. The discharged soldier comes to Houston, hungry and next to naked, with nothing but his claims upon the government, which his situation compels him to sell. If he gets ten per cent for his money scrip and fifty dollars for a six months’ discharge, he receives quite as much as these claims were selling for during the summer.
Beyond the effects of such transactions on the economy, they badly sapped morale. “When the storm beaten soldier thus sees the reward of all his sufferings reduced to a few dollars, he has too much reason to lament over the time which he has worse than thrown away and often in despair gives himself up to total abandonment.”
In time the government issued proper currency to redeem the warrants. This suited the speculators but, because nothing substantial backed the currency, merely deferred the day of reckoning. Smithwick described the system in action.
When the first issue of treasury notes came to take the place of the land scrip and military scrip, the sporting fraternity hailed the change with delight; but, when . . . the treasury notes ran down till it took a mountain of them to represent a small stake, the gamblers grew discontented. Their distress was relieved when the exchequer bills replaced the dishonored redbacks, as the treasury notes were called. But again the currency depreciated till a small jack-pot could not accommodate the bulk of paper. Then they began talking about the advisability of “a new ish” [issue], and, that hope of relief failing, some of them went off and joined the army. Sowell tells of one who drew a black bean [after the Mier debacle] and went to his death with a smile. I have heard the story often.
The financial woes of the republic reflected the lack of experience of its leaders and their democratic distrust of banks and bankers. Andrew Jackson had killed the Bank of the United States (and in doing so helped touch off the Panic of ’37), and Sam Houston wasn’t about to saddle Texas with anything similar. But a deeper problem was the underlying insecurity of the republic. As long as Mexico refused to recognize Texan independence, and as long as it could send troops across the Rio Grande, even if only sporadically, Texas had to prepare for war. This bled the treasury and discouraged the investment that would have put Texas on a more solid fiscal footing.
It also gave life in republican Texas a peculiar air. Soldierly types—young men looking for trouble, with time on their hands—were overrepresented in the Texas population. They frequented saloons and gambling houses, astonishing visitors with their capacity for drink and riotous behavior. A traveler from Ohio was told that the Texas climate required regular consumption of alcohol. He wasn’t convinced but couldn’t deny the prevalence of the view. “While I hesitate to admit that there is something relaxing in the climate that makes it necessary for all to indulge in the use of some kind of stimulus to some extent to keep up the spirits, I must acknowledge that there were few who did not give ear to the doctrine.” The Texans crowded the saloons every day of the week and most nights, striving to satisfy their insatiable thirst. “The extent to which this vice was carried on exceeded all belief. It appeared to be the business of the great mass of the people to collect around these ce
nters of vice and hold their drunken orgies, without seeming to know that the Sabbath was made for more serious purposes and night for rest. Drinking was reduced to a system and had its own laws and regulations. Nothing was regarded as a greater violation of established etiquette than for one who was going to drink not to invite all within a reasonable distance to partake, so that the Texians being entirely a military people not only fought but drank in platoons.”
The Texans gambled even more than they drank. So egregious did the gaming become that the legislature felt obliged to curb the cards and dice. “But as those who passed the law were the most active in breaking it,” the Ohio traveler noted, “the law itself was of little consequence any further than it afforded the gambler the double satisfaction of knowing that he was breaking the laws of God and those of man at the same time.”
Drinking and gambling naturally gave rise to fighting. “Some of the disturbances which took place during my stay at Houston were of the most revolting description,” the Ohioan said, “and one or two encounters occurred which were attended with mortal consequences, under circumstances of peculiar horror. Some of the scenes which took place in the streets exceeded description and afforded a melancholy proof to what a point of degradation human nature may descend.”
As in many frontier societies, the institutions of public order lagged behind the causes of social disorder. The problem was aggravated in Texas by the continuing state of war, with its expense and its appeal to the violence-prone. During the whole period of the republic, crime—lethal and lesser—was a major problem. In 1843 a minister at Houston devoted a sermon to the subject:
God has said, Thou shalt do no murder. This people have reversed the command. I do not here speak of that fashionable mode of taking life, according to an imperious code of self-styled honor [dueling deserved a separate sermon, being a plague unto itself]. But I speak of wanton, barbarous outrages, in violation of all law human and divine, which find among this people, not simply apologists, but everywhere bold defenders. Go through this land, and point me to a single town which has not been the scene of some deadly affray . . . and then tell me of an instance where the murderer has been arraigned by the proper authorities and made to suffer the penalty due to his crime. Nay, men swear each other’s death, and that too openly—and from day to day walk the streets with deadly weapons, and no effort is made to put a stop to their murderous intentions—and when at last one has fallen, how often is heard the comment—“It is all right, he ought to have died long ago.”
In parts of the republic, individual crime escalated to irregular warfare. The Redlands of East Texas were as lawless as in the bad old days of the Neutral Ground; rival gangs of land cheats, extortionists, arsonists, and horse thieves organized themselves as “Regulators” and “Moderators” and intimidated or enrolled local officials. Dozens of people died, and for years the region raged beyond the control of the government of the republic.
Yet the troubles in Texas didn’t prevent people from wanting to move there. On the contrary, Texas was even more desirable as a destination than it had been before the revolution. Land remained cheaply available, and immigrants no longer had to worry about restrictions on religion or slavery. Being a separate country from the United States, it continued to attract those who wished to leave wives, debts, and indictments behind. As the ruckus in the Redlands and on the streets of most Texas towns demonstrated, not all the immigrants became upstanding citizens on arrival. But even if they had, the sheer numbers of the immigrants—the population of Texas more than doubled during the years of the republic, from about 50,000 to around 125,000—would have tested the ability of the new country to absorb them. An orderly immigration would have strengthened the republic; the disorderly immigration it actually experienced made things more unsettled than ever.
Texans weren’t the kind to worry excessively. Most accepted a certain chaos as a cost of living in the new land. But amid the Indian attacks, the Mexican invasions, the financial implosion, and the spontaneous and organized crime, even the optimistic wondered what was becoming of Texas. “A general gloom seems to rest over every section of the Republic,” a widely read newspaper observed in 1842, “and doubt and sorrow are depicted on almost every brow.”
The republic required help, which certain foreign governments were willing to provide. As France’s meddling in Mexico suggested, the French government saw opportunity in the troubles surrounding the Texas revolution. French merchants coveted access to Texas markets, French spinners to Texas cotton. King Louis-Philippe wanted to reclaim a role for France in the New World and thought the contested coast of the Gulf of Mexico a likely place to start. France recognized the independence of Texas in 1839 and spent the next several years inflating Texan egos and ambitions, especially vis-à-vis the United States.
But it was Britain that caught the eye of Texans. Where France dreamed of a New World sphere of influence, Britain already had one. In the quarter century since Spain’s Latin American empire had fallen apart, the British had been busy reconfiguring the pieces into a Latin American empire of their own. This British empire mostly lacked formal trappings, being a realm in which trade rather than territory was the goal. British diplomats and merchants negotiated and exploited pacts that opened markets throughout Spain’s former realm to British commerce and investment. In exchange, Britain’s own markets were made available to Latin American exports—at a time when most other countries, including the United States, restricted goods from abroad. The British navy kept competitors away from Britain’s new friends.
From the start of the Texas troubles, Britain registered interest in the emergence of another republic from the Spanish ruins. By the 1830s British textile mills had grown alarmingly dependent on American cotton; Texas offered a separate source of the fluffy stuff. That an independent Texas might block the expansion of the United States to the southwest made the prospect still more appealing. Britain had fought two wars with the United States since 1776, and sufficient points of friction remained—along the border with Canada, for instance, and in the Oregon country—that a third conflict (as John Quincy Adams warned) was hardly inconceivable. Whatever impeded American expansion suited Britain.
One small matter, however, limited British enthusiasm for Texas independence. Having decided that slavery was bad for themselves and their empire, the British concluded—from a mix of altruism and competitiveness—that it was bad for the world. They sought to suppress the slave trade and avoided consorting conspicuously with governments that hadn’t seen the light that dawned on Britain in 1833.
Yet British leaders believed that the purposes of humanity and Britannia alike could be served by adept diplomacy toward Texas. The Texans might be moved to emancipate their slaves, perhaps in exchange for a British loan to rescue their failing treasury. Or the British government might simply buy all the Texas slaves and manumit them. Either way, Texas would grow closer to heaven and to Britain.
But the prerequisite for any such plan was that Texas remain distinct from the United States. An independent Texas might yield to British blandishments; a Texas attached to the United States would never do so. From the moment of Texas independence, British leaders did their best to frustrate American annexation. British foreign minister Lord Palmerston, with the sort of understatement on which the British ruling classes prided themselves, told the House of Commons in August 1836 that the prospect of American annexation “would be a subject which ought seriously to engage the attention of that House and of the British public.”
For the first few years of independence the Texans kept their distance from Britain. Sam Houston and other veterans of the War of 1812 had difficulty seeing the British as other than enemies; nearly all Texans preferred, and many still hoped for, the embrace of the United States.
But when that embrace was slow in coming, and when the Mexican attacks of 1842 underscored the vulnerability of the Lone Star republic, British protection appeared more promising. In November 1842 Houston wrote
to the British chargé d’affaires in Texas, Charles Elliot, describing his “intense anxiety for peace with Mexico” and suggesting that the British diplomat might facilitate it. “I know of no gentleman whose agency, in my estimation, would go farther in the attainment of the object than your own.” After this first feeler elicited little response, Houston put the point more directly. “If England produces a pacification between this country and Mexico, she will thereby secure a friend on the gulf whose contiguity to the United States, in the event of war, would not be desirable to that country.” Houston acknowledged that his offer—to side with England in a conflict against the United States—marked a reversal of long-standing attitudes in Texas. But the United States had brought the shift on itself. “Texas once evinced a willingness, amounting to unexampled unanimity, to become annexed to the United States. We sought the boon with humble supplications. In this posture we remained on the outer porch of their Capital for many months. Our solicitations were heard with apathy. Our urgency was responded to with politic indifference.” So now Texas was looking elsewhere.