ALSO BY BRIAN KILMEADE
George Washington’s Secret Six
Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates
Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans
SENTINEL
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Copyright © 2019 by Brian Kilmeade
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kilmeade, Brian, author.
Title: Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers : The Texas Victory That Changed American History / Brian Kilmeade.
Other titles: Texas victory that changed American history
Description: [New York] : Sentinel, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019022817 (print) | LCCN 2019022818 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525540533 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525540564 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Houston, Sam, 1793–1863. | Texas—History—Revolution, 1835–1836. | Alamo (San Antonio, Tex.)—Siege, 1836. | Governors—Texas—Biography. | Legislators—United States—Biography. | Texas—History—To 1846.
Classification: LCC F390.H84 K55 2019 (print) | LCC F390.H84 (ebook) | DDC 976.4/04092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022817
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022818
MAPS BY DANIEL LAGIN
Cover design: Catherine Casalino
Cover images: (Alamo battle) Kean Collection / Getty Images; (American flag) Jacob Termansen and Pia Marie Molbech / Dorling Kindersley / Getty Images; (Portrait of Sam Houston) The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Version_1
To my mother, my greatest supporter, defender, and inspiration. May her legacy of toughness, kindness, and loyalty live on in all those who were lucky enough to know her.
My son, take this musket and never disgrace it; for remember, I had rather all my sons should fill one honorable grave, than that one of them should turn his back to save his life. Go, and remember, too, that while the door of my cottage is open to brave men, it is eternally shut against cowards.
—ELIZABETH HOUSTON
CONTENTS
Also by Brian Kilmeade
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: The Lessons of Battle
CHAPTER 1
General Jackson’s Protégé
CHAPTER 2
Gone to Texas
CHAPTER 3
“Come and Take It”
CHAPTER 4
Concepción
CHAPTER 5
A Slow Siege at the Alamo
CHAPTER 6
The Defenders
CHAPTER 7
Twelve Days of Uncertainty
CHAPTER 8
The Massacre
CHAPTER 9
Bring Out the Dead
CHAPTER 10
Houston Hears the News
CHAPTER 11
Fort Defiance
CHAPTER 12
The Texian Exodus
CHAPTER 13
An Army Assembles
CHAPTER 14
The Battle at San Jacinto
CHAPTER 15
“Remember the Alamo!”
CHAPTER 16
Old San Jacinto
CHAPTER 17
President Sam Houston
EPILOGUE
The Founding and the Founders of Texas
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
For Further Reading
Notes
Image Credits
Index
About the Author
PROLOGUE
The Lessons of Battle
Experience is the teacher of all things.
—JULIUS CAESAR
No small target at six-foot-two, young Sam Houston wasn’t thinking about getting hit. He was thinking about getting even. Running through a hail of musket balls, spears, and arrows, he and his fellow soldiers sprinted toward an eight-foot-tall barricade. Behind it was an army of Red Stick Creek American Indians who had massacred three hundred men, women, and children at a Mississippi Territory stockade town called Fort Mims seven months earlier. For months Houston and his fellow soldiers serving under General Andrew Jackson had been attempting to retaliate, only to have the Red Sticks escape them time and time again. But now Jackson and his men had discovered their main camp, here at Horseshoe Bend, and they were not leaving without revenge.
The first man over the barricade took a bullet to the skull and fell back lifeless. Just behind him, Sam Houston never wavered.
On enlisting a year earlier as a private, Houston had immediately attracted notice. Tall and strong, his eyes a piercing blue, he looked every inch a leader. Promoted to drill sergeant, Houston’s deep voice rang with authority; in a matter of months, he was promoted twice more. His superiors saw him as “soldierly [and] ready to do, or to suffer, whatever the obligation of . . . military duty imposed.”1 Now that resolution would be tested.
As the second man to top the wall, Houston did not hesitate. Waving his sword, he called for his men to follow. He immediately drew enemy fire, and he leapt to the ground inside the Red Stick fort, an arrow plunged deep into his upper thigh.
Houston refused to be turned aside. Despite the pain, he remained standing, fighting on with the shaft of the arrow protruding from his leg. His platoon, joined by reinforcements, soon drove the Red Sticks back. Only then did Houston look to his wound.
At Sam Houston’s order, another lieutenant tried—but failed—to pull the arrow from his thigh. At Houston’s insistence, the officer yanked a second time, but still the arrow refused to budge. Houston, sword in hand, demanded a third attempt, saying, “Try again and, if you fail this time, I will smite you to the earth.”2 This time the barbed arrowhead tore free, releasing a gush of blood and opening a deep gash.
Most men would have been done for the day and, after a surgeon field dressed his gaping wound, Houston rested. When General Jackson came to check the wounded, he recognized the young man who had helped lead the charge and honored him for his bravery—but he also ordered Houston out of the fight. Houston objected, but Jackson was firm.
Houston admired Jackson as the sort of father he’d always wanted, but he wasn’t about to be kept out of the battle by anyone or anything. A short time later, when Jackson called for volunteers to storm a last Red Stick stronghold built into a ravine, Houston got to his feet and grabbed a musket. Limping and bloodied, he charged. When he stopped to level his gun, musket balls smashed into his right shoulder and upper arm, and his shattered limb fell to his side. Houston barely managed to make his way out of the range of fire before collapsing to the earth.
In the hours that followed, the Red Sticks were finally routed; hundreds of fighters lay dead. Fort Mims had been avenged, and the British deprived of a key ally in their attempt to destroy the young United States.
But Houston had paid a
high price for his part in this victory, and he was about to learn that perhaps his drive to be in the action at any cost was not the best way to serve his country.
After Houston was carried from the field, a surgeon removed one of the musket balls but halted the procedure before digging deeper to extract the second lead projectile. In the cold triage of the battlefield, he saw no reason to inflict more suffering. In his judgment, this man would not survive the night. Houston would spend “the darkest night of [my] life” on the damp ground, alone and “racked with the keen torture of . . . many wounds.”3 But he lived to see the dawn.
Houston would carry to his grave the musket ball fragments in his shoulder, and the wound on his thigh never entirely healed. And just a few months later, the wounds tortured him in a different way when, upon arriving in Washington, D.C., he experienced a moment of horror. The British had burned the Capitol and the president’s house shortly before. As he looked upon the ruins, he later remembered, “My blood boiled and I experienced one of the keenest pangs of my life in the thought that my right arm should be disabled at such a moment, and while the foe was still prowling through the country.”4
The wounded and wiser Sam Houston came face-to-face with the limits of bravery. Eager to be a hero at any cost, he had instead become a casualty in a bloody battle, with wounds that left him unable to defend his young country from an even bigger threat. He had recognized how fragile both his own life and the American project were. And he learned a key lesson about war: Courage must be calculated, because courage without calculation could get you killed.
ONE
General Jackson’s Protégé
Poor Houston rose like a rocket and fell like a stick.
—GOVERNOR WILLIAM CARROLL
Sam Houston’s wounds healed slowly. He underwent several surgeries to repair his arm and thigh. But the young soldier’s subsequent rise to power and prominence was surprisingly swift.
By the time Houston returned to active duty in the infantry, General Jackson and his army had won a stunning victory at the Battle of New Orleans, in January 1815, ending once and for all American battles with the British. But even as the war came to a close, Houston’s relationship with Jackson continued to grow. Houston became Jackson’s protégé—and more, almost a son to Old Hickory—after the twenty-two-year-old, at Andrew Jackson’s personal request, was assigned to the general’s staff in Nashville, Tennessee.
And Houston needed a father. His own had died when he was thirteen, and he had spent his early teens in frontier Tennessee, with a rocky relationship with his mother. Finally at age sixteen, unhappy with life on his mother’s farm, he ran away, finding a home with Chief Oo-Loo-Te-Ka of the Cherokee nation. Houston embraced life with the Cherokee, since he liked “the wild liberty of the Red Men better than the tyranny of his own brothers.”1
The Cherokee had trained the restless young man, equipping him for a life of war. Now Houston wanted to be equipped for a life of politics, and he needed someone from his own culture to take him under his wing. Jackson, perhaps perceiving Houston’s need and remembering his own fatherless youth, became that man.
When Houston resigned his commission, in 1818, to start a legal career, Jackson continued to support him. Thanks to his mentoring, Houston gained an insider’s view of the intricacies of Tennessee politics and was appointed general of the Tennessee militia, a post Jackson once held. And he became a regular visitor to Jackson’s beloved plantation home, the Hermitage, where not only Andrew Jackson, but his wife, Rachel, continued to embrace him as if he were a son.
Supported by Jackson, Houston flourished, eventually running, with Jackson’s encouragement, to represent Tennessee in Congress. Jackson became a U.S. senator in the same election cycle, and the two men together headed for Washington. Houston’s rise didn’t stop there. Five years later, he was back in Tennessee as governor and seemed destined for a long and prosperous political career. America was young and growing, and there was much a young man with courage and ambition could do. It seemed that a fatherless child raised in poverty and then by Cherokee was going to make it to the top.
Seeming to cap his success was his luck in love. On January 22, 1829, the thirty-five-year-old Houston and lovely Eliza Allen exchanged marriage vows, by candlelight, in her father’s sprawling plantation house. The best of Nashville society toasted to the couple’s happiness and to the groom’s rise to ever-greater political success.
But the marriage was the turning point in Houston’s luck. Just three months later, Eliza abruptly left her husband to return to her father’s house. Houston had questioned her faithfulness, and whispers and rumors blossomed into a full-blown scandal. Few details surfaced, but it seems Eliza was vindicated, suggesting Houston to be in the wrong. He disclaimed any accusation, but their relationship was ruined and so was his political career. By allegedly insulting her honor, Houston had violated the social code of the day, leaving him no choice but to resign as governor. As his predecessor, Governor Billy Carroll, observed, “Poor Houston rose like a rocket and fell like a stick.”2
Houston left Tennessee. He found refuge with the Cherokee once again. Nearly twenty years after he had first asked them for help, the chief welcomed Houston’s return.
The man who only weeks before had seemed destined to be president of the United States disappeared entirely from American political life. Tortured, he did all he could to forget his former world. He abandoned his city clothes, the English language, and his birth name, once again becoming known in Cherokee as Co-lon-neh (“the Raven”). For months, he attempted to numb his pain with alcohol, admitting later that he “buried his sorrows in the flowing bowl.”3 His huge liquor consumption soon earned him a second name, Oo-tse-tee Ar-dee-tah-skee—Cherokee for “the Big Drunk.”4
TEXAS LOST
Sam Houston’s fall from grace was far from President Jackson’s only concern. While his protégé was off drowning his sorrows with the Cherokee, Jackson worked hard to undo what he saw as one of the biggest mistakes of the previous occupant of the White House, John Quincy Adams.
To put it bluntly, Jackson hated Adams. First of all, he hated him for having beaten him in the presidential election of 1824. Although Jackson won the popular vote by a solid margin, he got less than the required majority of electoral votes. The House of Representatives had decided in Adams’s favor, thanks to the support of Henry Clay. Adams rewarded Clay by naming him secretary of state,* and Jackson accused Adams of making a “corrupt bargain” in accepting “thirty pieces of silver” from Clay, whom Jackson called the “Judas of the West.” Despite the outcry from Jackson and others, Adams took possession of the president’s house.
But Jackson’s dislike of Adams went back further and deeper than the presidential defeat. He thought that the New Englander fundamentally misunderstood the needs of the frontier—and that he had given away land necessary to America’s future. Years before, in May 1818, General Jackson and his army, as part of a campaign to protect his fellow citizens from the Seminole Indians, captured the port city of Pensacola in Spanish Florida. The next year Spain agreed to cede Florida to the United States in a treaty negotiated by none other than John Quincy Adams, then serving as James Monroe’s secretary of state. This would have been good news for Jackson, had it not been for what Adams gave up in return for Florida.
President Thomas Jefferson had believed Texas to be part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. It was a link to the expanse of territory extending to the Pacific, as well as a buffer with Spain’s colony, Mexico, to the south. Jefferson had also understood the region’s potential value: “The province of Techas will be the richest state of our Union,” he told James Monroe.5 But in negotiating with Spain, Adams agreed to make the Sabine River—rather than the Rio Grande—the new border between American territory and Spanish, effectively handing over all of Texas to Spain.
In Andrew Jackson’s mind, that left him with two Adams wrongs to right: The firs
t he corrected, in 1828, when he became president, defeating the incumbent Adams in a landslide. The second—the giveaway of Texas—would take longer to fix.
For one thing, the players had changed. Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1821. Then, three years later, the new nation south of the border adopted a federal constitution that echoed on the U.S. Constitution. Instead of freeing Texas from a European colonial power, Jackson would now have to coax it away from a democratic republic that had also recently won its freedom. And that was exactly what he hoped to do, sending an emissary to Mexico just a few months after his election.
Jackson wasn’t the only U.S. citizen with an interest in Texas: By the thousands, American settlers were flooding over the Louisiana line to homestead in the rich farmland of Texas, which Mexico was making available cheaply to any who wanted it.
Earlier in the century, Americans looking to settle the frontier had been able to buy land on credit. But in 1820, Congress passed a new land act, which made it much, much harder for the average settler to afford it. Now settlers were required to buy a minimum of eighty acres, to be paid for in gold or silver, for $1.25 per acre. That hundred-dollar entrance fee closed the door to lots of people—when, just over the border, a settler could buy land for 12½¢ per acre. For those lacking the cash, the government in Mexico City extended credit, thinking they would have a firmer hold on Texas if they had more people residing in its largely empty expanse. As a result, Americans who wanted a fresh start poured over the border with the blessing of Mexico.
To Jackson, restoring Texas—where his countrymen had rapidly become a majority—to American ownership only made sense, but he knew the bargaining for it would be tough. On Jackson’s orders, Colonel Anthony Butler made the Mexicans an offer. The United States would pay $5 million in return for the territory framed by the Sabine River on the east and the Rio Grande to the southwest. Though the Mexicans refused Jackson’s proposal, the two nations continued the diplomatic conversation, and Americans continued to move. But with the leadership of Mexico shifting from one election to the next, there was little progress to be made. Jackson’s dream was foiled for the moment. Jackson bided his time.
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