Lone Star Nation (33 page)

Sam Houston was egotistical enough to believe he would make a better commander in chief of Texan forces than Stephen Austin, and tactful enough not to say so. Houston had more military experience than Austin, more political experience, and greater ambition to be the liberator of Texas. His military experience made him respect the capacity of Mexican forces to inflict damage on the Texans. The Texans might be brave, but they were unorganized and undisciplined; the rank and file of the Mexicans might feel little stake in the future of Texas, but they had been trained to obey orders, a habit that could count for everything in pitched battles, as opposed to the skirmishes that had constituted the fighting thus far. Houston's political experience caused him to see the necessity of grounding the Texas rebellion in a democratic consensus. Austin, the patriarch, could lead the rebellion only so far. His command of the army—such as it was—rested on nothing more substantial than the whim of the officers and men. What they had given easily they might as easily take away. A war against Santa Anna—and Houston had no doubt that it would be a war, not a mere battle or two—required solid leadership based on genuine authority.

As to Houston's ambition, the man who had been the rising son of Tennessee, the heir apparent of Andrew Jackson, sought redemption in Texas. He had tried to drown his love-broken ambition in drink and bury it in the wilderness, but it refused to die. He had been a great man; he must be a great man. Destiny had called him before, and he had bungled his opportunity. It called again. It wouldn't call a third time.

While Austin's obvious constituency was Texas, Houston's was the world beyond the Sabine. In a summons sent to newspapers in the United States, Houston implored liberty-minded men to join the Texans in their struggle.
“War in defense of our rights, our oaths, and our constitutions is inevitable in Texas!”
he declared.

If
volunteers
from the United States will join their brethren in this section, they will receive liberal bounties of land. We have millions of acres of our best lands unchosen and unappropriated.

Let each man come with a good rifle, and one hundred rounds of ammunition, and come soon.

Our war-cry is “Liberty or death.”

Our principles are to support the constitution, and
down with the Usurper
!!!

On the day he wrote this—October 5—Houston spoke with scant authority beyond his own. He certainly had no right to offer land to volunteers from the United States. Besides, any prospective American volunteer must have hesitated to enlist on behalf of the Mexican constitution. Wasn't that the weak reed that had led to all this trouble in the first place?

Houston recognized the contradictions within his appeal, but until the consultation met—whenever that might be—he couldn't avow what had been his design all along: to detach Texas from Mexico and make it part of the United States. Till then he spoke ambiguously, hoping his listeners and readers in America would understand.

On the day after he issued his summons for volunteers, Houston gained a bit more authority. The Nacogdoches militia elected him commander in chief for their district, “with full powers to raise troops, organize the forces . . . and to do all things in his power to sustain the principles of the constitution of 1824.” This last clause afforded some leeway, in that the
principles
of the constitution might differ from the constitution itself. Houston, in his first proclamation as Nacogdoches commander, still cited the constitution but placed more emphasis on rights and liberty:

The time has arrived when the revolutions in the interior of Mexico have resulted in the creation of a dictator, and Texas is compelled to assume an attitude defensive of her rights. . . . War is our only alternative!
War, in defense of our rights,
must be our motto! . . . The morning of glory is dawning upon us. The work of liberty has begun. Our actions are to become a part of the history of mankind. Patriotic millions will sympathize in our struggles, while nations will admire our achievements. . . . Our only ambition is the attainment of rational liberty—the freedom of religious opinion, and just laws. To acquire these blessings, we solemnly pledge our persons, our property, and our lives.

Such was Houston's public policy. Meanwhile he pursued a second agenda, one aimed at tying the interests of the United States to the future of Texas. Several weeks earlier Houston (and several other members of a Nacogdoches “committee of vigilance and safety”) had written to Andrew Jackson regarding “a subject of grave and serious importance” to the people of Texas. An army of five thousand Creek Indians, Houston's committee said, was being raised in the western territories of the United States for an invasion of Texas. Houston and the others implored Jackson to prevent the invasion and thereby preserve “a sparse and comparatively defenseless population . . . from the evils which were so tragically manifested on the frontiers of Georgia and Alabama, evils which can only be remedied by the skill and generalship of a Jackson.”

On its face, this request to Jackson was odd. Why should the chief executive of the United States assume responsibility for the defense of the residents of a foreign country, especially when most of those residents were Americans who had turned their backs on their homeland? And even supposing Jackson did feel for the safety of his former compatriots, Houston offered no evidence to support his claim that the Creeks were massing on the American side of the Sabine to swoop down on Nacogdoches and the Texas settlements. There was a good reason for Houston's failure to do so: he had no such evidence, because there was no such threat.

Yet if Houston's request for troops lacked evidence, it didn't lack purpose. In his private talks with Jackson at Washington and Nashville, the president and his protégé must have discussed pretexts by which the United States could intervene in the Texas troubles. Jackson himself had employed the Indian threat—perhaps significantly, from the Creeks—to detach Florida from Spain; he and Houston doubtless reasoned that the same rationale might be used to sever Texas from Mexico. The purpose of Houston's request was to give Jackson an excuse to gather U.S. forces in western Louisiana; once there they could find cause to cross over into Texas, where their presence might be very useful to the Texas rebels.

While Austin and Houston worried about the strategy of the war with Mexico, James Bowie focused on tactics—to wit, on fighting Mexicans. Bowie was in Nacogdoches when news of the Gonzales battle arrived, and he might have enlisted under the command of Houston. But enlistment wasn't Bowie's style; a free lance by spirit and now by choice, he headed straight for the front. Austin, as commander in chief, had ordered an advance against San Antonio de Béxar, to corner and capture Cos. Bowie caught up with Austin's army, which was growing by scores of volunteers a day, on Cibolo Creek, a half day's ride east of San Antonio.

Anyone other than a frontier veteran might have been alarmed at the ragged appearance of the army of Texas. “It certainly bore little resemblance to the army of my childhood dreams,” Noah Smithwick recalled.

Buckskin breeches were the nearest approach to uniform, and there was wide diversity even there, some being new and soft and yellow, while others, from long familiarity with rain and grease and dirt, had become hard and black and shiny. Some, having passed through the process of wetting and drying on the wearer while he sat on the ground or a chunk before the camp fire, with his knees elevated at an angle of eighty-five degrees, had assumed an advanced position at the knee, followed by a corresponding shortening of the lower front leg, exposing shins. . . . Boots being an unknown quantity, some wore shoes and some moccasins. Here a broad-brimmed sombrero overshadowed the military cap at its side; there a tall “beegum” rode familiarly beside a coonskin cap, with the tail hanging down behind, as all well regulated tails should do. Here a big American horse loomed up above the nimble Spanish pony ranged beside him; there a half-broke mustang pranced beside a sober, methodical mule. Here a bulky roll of bed quilts jostled a pair of “store” blankets; there the shaggy brown buffalo robe contrasted with a gaily checkered counterpane on which the manufacturer had lavished all the skill of dye and weave known to the art—mayhap it was part of the dowry a wife brought her husband on her wedding day, and surely the day-dreams she wove into its ample folds held in them no shadow of a presentiment that it might be his winding sheet.

Bowie fit right in, as did some Louisiana friends who accompanied him to the Cibolo—“all spoiling for a fight,” as Smithwick observed. Smithwick added, “Bowie's prowess as a fighter made him doubly welcome, and Austin at once placed him on his staff.” Austin's reliance on Bowie indicated the degree to which the rowdies were coming to the fore; the hero of the Sandbar and the San Sabá might not have made a good settler, but he could fight like the devil, and fighters were what Texas needed now. Austin handed Bowie and James Fannin—a West Point dropout from Georgia who had arrived in Texas a year earlier—responsibility for reconnoitering around San Antonio: for determining how the town could be sealed off from the outside, how it was being fortified, how it might be taken.

As one of the few former residents of San Antonio among the Americans, Bowie retained contacts in the town, including Antonio Menchaca, a Béxar native and father of four. Bowie smuggled a letter to Menchaca, who sympathized with the rebels and relayed Bowie's letter to like-thinking townsmen. Within days dozens of
bexareños
slipped out of the town and joined the rebels, bringing intelligence about the Mexican defenses and adding to the ranks of the Tejanos in the rebellion. On October 22, Bowie and Fannin reported to Austin from the Espada mission, nine miles below San Antonio:

A large number of the citizens of Bexar and of this place are now laying out, to prevent being forced to perform the most servile duties. . . . Great consternation was manifested there when our approach to this point was made known. . . . They have 8 pieces (4 lb.) [i.e., cannon] mounted, and one of larger size preparing for us. They have none on the Church, but have removed all their ammunition to it, and enclosed it by a wall, made of wood, six feet apart and six feet high, filled in with dirt, extending from the corners to the ditch, say sixty yards in length.

Bowie and Fannin went on to explain that provisions in the town were running low. “The men with whom we have conversed are decidedly of the opinion that in
five days
they can be
starved
out.”

Bowie and Fannin recommended raising the pressure on Cos by approaching the town from two directions at once; when Austin ignored their recommendation, they repeated it. “Permit us to again suggest—nay
urge
—the propriety, the necessity of some movement which will bring us
nearer together and shut in the enemy,
and either starve them out, whip them out, or dishearten and beat them in small parties, in all of which our
two parties may agree on an hour
and cooperate with each other, and never fail of success.”

Austin reluctantly consented to move forward, but too slowly to suit Bowie and Fannin. On October 27 they led some ninety men through the trees along the San Antonio River to the Concepción mission, scarcely a mile from the town. There, in a bend of the river, they established a position—in defiance of Austin's orders to reconnoiter and return. With reason, Austin feared that sentries or spies from the town would learn that the rebel force had been divided, and that Cos would exploit the opportunity and attack. Moreover, although the position Bowie and Fannin established had the advantage of putting the river around and behind them, so they needn't fear assault from the sides or rear, it had the same disadvantage, making retreat difficult or impossible.

When Austin learned what the headstrong officers had done, he ordered the rest of the army forward to reinforce them. But before the additional troops arrived, the battle began. Cos had indeed learned of the rebels' exposure, and dispatched a force to exploit it. A heavy fog fell on the river during the night of October 27; in the mist the next morning the Mexicans and Texans stumbled onto one another. Initial shots were exchanged, but aiming was useless in the fog, and Bowie ordered his men to hold their fire. Gradually the mist parted, revealing that Cos had outmaneuvered the rebels, crossing the river below their position and threatening to tie the noose of the river loop, with them inside.