Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
In failing to comprehend, or in rejecting, the fact that Anglo-Texans were loyal only so long as they were left to themselves, the Mexican government was hardly unique. A British ministry had made a similar error two generations before.
The Edict of April 6, 1830, was received with consternation in Anglo-Texas. It was seen, correctly, as a calamity. The colony was now really beginning to grow, and the prosperity of many of its citizens was based on growth. Immigration meant more towns—there were already thirteen municipalities, predominantly Anglo—more stores, more cotton ginned, more commerce and increasing values of every kind. The whole Anglo ethos centered around this growth, this tearing down the wilderness and planting more producing, consuming people. The end of immigration meant the stagnation of Texas. Worse, it separated families, denying entry to some who planned to come. Finally, the Texans regarded it as all immigrants would—a gratuitous insult to their kind.
Meetings were called, protests were issued. Understandably, the Mexican authorities at San Antonio and other places saw these as seditious, because peaceful assembly had never been an Hispanic trait.
But if the cessation of immigration stunned Texas (Austin and De Witt, cleverly, were able to get around the law on a technicality for two years), the other actions of the central government began to infuriate the Texans.
The settlement of convicts and deserters among them was never successful—Mexico could not make even this kind of people pioneer—but the idea rankled among Austin's peaceful planters. Mexico did send special battalions of convict soldiers, however, to the far frontier, with eventually disastrous results.
The time allowed for freedom from customs duties and taxes now expired. Taxes were levied on Texas, and customs houses built. These in themselves were not unreasonable, nor unfair. While there was a certain element in Texas—as in every country—determined to ignore these levies and to bring in luxuries duty-free, the evidence is clear that Austin and most substantial citizens counseled compliance with the law. But the methods the government used to enforce its rules were regarded by all Anglo-Texans as humiliating. Old Mexico itself, in these days, was rapidly coming under military dictatorship. Vicente Guerrero failed to gain reelection in 1828; he raised the standard of revolt, took the government away from Gómez Pedraza, the legally elected President, and was inaugurated in 1829. Nine months after assuming office, Guerrero was deposed and executed by his own Vice President, Anastasio Bustamante. Then, Gómez was restored through the efforts of a popular military hero, Don Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had repulsed an attack on Tampico by Spain. The Constitution of 1824 was hanging now in shreds, as
yorkinos
and
escoceses
, Federalist liberals and conservative Centralists, battled with armies for control. The armies, and their leaders, were the only winners, and generalship had become synonymous with government.
The collapse of Mexico into political anarchy and
caudillaje
, with military rule imposed everywhere by garrisons, caused a dangerous situation in Texas. Instinctively, the ruling authorities sent army garrisons north of the Bravo, twelve in all, to hold the province under the central government. Texas was
not
being especially subjected to military domination; the army garrison was becoming the real power structure everywhere in Mexico.
Texas was placed under the command of the able, scholarly, and American-hating Don Manuel Mier y Terán. Colonel Don José de las Piedras and 350 soldiers were stationed at Nacogdoches. Captain Juan Bradburn with 150 men built a post at Anáhuac, on Galveston Bay. Under Colonel Don Domingo de Ugartechea, another 100 garrisoned Velasco, at the mouth of the Brazos. There were smaller forces at the Presidio of Terán, on the Neches, and at La Bahía, which was now renamed Goliad, an anagram of the revolutionary priest Hidalgo's name. The standing troops at San Antonio (which the Anglos still called Béxar) were increased. This was, as every Anglo-American immigrant believed from his own folk-history, a "martial array." And in William Barret (Buck) Travis, a young firebrand lawyer from Alabama, Texas was to find its Patrick Henry.
No people on earth were less amenable to military rule at this time than Anglo-Americans. They would have detested any soldiery placed over them, but they detested this "foreign" soldiery particularly. The commanding officers were imperious dons, and the rag-tag ranks were dark-skinned and culled from the lowest classes. Knowing they were the balance of power, the troops swaggered about obnoxiously; the commandants arrested civilians or declared martial law under the flimsiest pretexts. All this had become the practice in revolt-torn Mexico, and Mexican law allowed imprisonment without specific charges. But Anglo sensibilities and morality were outraged.
Trouble flared in late 1831. In this year, the state government in Coahuila changed; the new governor, Letona, reopened settlement under the old colonization law of 1825 to Americans who were already in Texas by 1830—thus setting aside some provisions of the 1830 Decree. With Letona's approval, a number of latecomers were granted land titles in east Texas, and organized the town of Liberty, not far from the military garrison at Anahuac.
General Mier y Terán was outraged. Asserting military authority, he ordered Captain Bradburn to arrest the Coahuilan land officials responsible for issuing the new titles. Bradburn, a peculiarly arrogant officer, went even further than his orders. He marched troops into Liberty, officially abolished the community, ignored all civil authority in the region, and redistributed the land grants himself. He treated all civilians, Mexican and Anglo alike, with contempt. Bradburn was especially detested by the settlers, for three reasons. He was the most arbitrary of all Mexican officers, utterly lacking in tact or courtesy; his main duty was enforcing customs regulations on the coast; and he was an American, a Kentuckian, by birth. Anglos considered him a turncoat, a racial traitor.
The action against Liberty caused a public complaint within the municipality. Bradburn answered this by ordering all the ports except Anáhuac closed. A group of colonists assembled at Brazoria on December 31, 1831, and vowed not to submit to such tyranny. Although Bradburn reopened the ports, relations between him and the local citizens deteriorated rapidly.
In May 1832, Bradburn suddenly declared ten leagues of the coast under martial law and arrested several civilians, including William B. Travis and one Patrick Jack. The prisoners were jailed in an old brick kiln; no charges were filed; and Bradburn refused to turn them over to the civil law. There is no question that Travis and Jack had been making trouble for Bradburn. They had passed insulting remarks, and while not openly treasonous, they had apparently manufactured spurious messages concerning plots and armed revolts and sent these on to Bradburn, probably hoping to goad him into some ill-considered action. They succeeded. But almost every Anglo-Texan felt that their punishment by imprisonment was extreme.
Patrick Jack had a brother, William. When William Jack was unable to secure a release, he rode angrily to San Felipe. Here he found that Stephen Austin was in Saltillo on some official business, and there was no one else in authority who could help. Jack began walking the streets of San Felipe, bitterly telling everyone about his brother's plight.
By this time, there had arisen a distinct new element in Anglo-Texas. The Decree of April 6, 1830, had created a large group of late immigrants who had failed to get lands; some of these were legitimate colonists frustrated by circumstance, others merely border drifters who had wandered to the Brazos. Their status was ambiguous, and many were actually now classed as illegal immigrants. Further, the new restrictions put into effect in 1830 had created great hardships for Anglo lawyers and merchants newly arrived in Texas. Most of these people now had no legal right to work in Texas; Travis himself was one of these. All these men, frustrated or balked in various ways, formed a potential unruly element. Bradburn's tyranny gave their resentment a focal point. When William Jack harangued crowds on the streets of San Felipe, rebellion suddenly burst.
Jack shouted that he intended to return to Anáhuac to free his brother, and asked the citizenry to join him. Dozens of armed men fell in behind him, openly urging an attack on Bradburn's fort. Then, a larger assembly was held at the site of the abolished town of Liberty. Here, most of the people were aggrieved. Both honest farmers and drifters began to appear with their rifles.
Riders spurred through the settlements, spreading rumors and resentment. Everyone hated Bradburn, and although a majority of the older colonists considered Travis and Jack troublemakers, feelings ran high. John Austin, no relation to the empresario but a former member of Dr. Long's filibuster, gathered 90 men at Brazoria and marched to Liberty. He sent for cannon, of which there were several along the coast.
Actual insurrection was beginning.
While John Austin and his men were seeking the cannon, Colonel José de las Piedras arrived at Liberty with a handful of men. The Nacogdoches commandant realized the situation was volatile. Things were much worse than he had thought; his small force was outnumbered. Piedras, with considerable courtesy and skill, offered to negotiate. He promised to hear all grievances, and said he would require Bradburn's prisoners to be remanded to the civil law, and would review the land disposals the Kentuckian had made, and even ask to have Bradburn removed. This mollified the Liberty residents, although it enraged Bradburn. He resigned.
The rebellion at Liberty was damped, and, shortly afterward, the Anáhuac garrison was called away. They were needed for a new revolution in Mexico, this one begun by General Antonio López de Santa Anna against the supreme government.
However, most of the real troublemakers had gone to Brazoria with John Austin. This group of about 160 Anglos was unaware that Piedras was negotiating. They loaded three small cannon on a ship, then sailed down the Brazos to attack Anáhuac from Galveston Bay. However, the fort at Velasco blocked the armed schooner's passage downriver.
At Velasco, Colonel de Ugartechea stood to arms, and when Austin demanded that the Mexicans stand aside, the Colonel refused. John Austin ordered an attack to reduce Velasco. It was to be a two-pronged affair; the schooner would engage from the river, while riflemen dug themselves in close around Velasco's walls.
The Texas schooner stood off the fort, firing its cannon, while riflemen along its deck, sheltered by cotton bales, took aim at the Mexican gunners manning the fort's heavy artillery. At the same time, the land party poured a blistering fire upon Velasco's ramparts. This deadly rifle fire was decisive.
Velasco had been built so that its cannon commanded the river, but it had not been planned to withstand a land attack. Ugartechea's gun positions were exposed to the Texan ground fire. The Texan sniping knocked down gunner after gunner; men were killed by balls through the head, or staggered back to cover screaming with smashed arms or wrists. The Mexican soldiers, unable to retaliate, at last refused to work the guns. Although Don Domingo de Ugartechea himself gallantly loaded and fired one cannon several times, he was forced to capitulate.
In a short but blazing firefight, he had lost a large part of his men.
John Austin triumphantly granted the Mexicans the honors of war; the garrison was allowed to march out on a promise to return to Matamoros, across the border of Mexico. Then, just as Austin was marshalling his force to move on against Bradburn at Anáhuac, word arrived that the crisis there had been negotiated and ended peacefully by Colonel Piedras. Austin's army melted away; the Anáhuac war, as it was called, was over. Shortly afterward, John Austin died from illness; he never again figured in Texas history.
The sudden rebellion against Anáhuac showed that a strong wind of resistance to Mexican authority was blowing along the Texas coast. Now, both Anglo-American and Mexican blood had been shed on Texas soil. The seeds of anger had been sown; and there was much talk in the colony that every Mexican garrison must be removed, by force if necessary. Colonel Piedras, understanding the ticklish situation, evacuated Nacogdoches; and the presidio at Tenoxtitlán on the upper Brazos was also abandoned. Since Anáhuac and Velasco had already been evacuated, this left no Mexican soldiers in Anglo-Texas.
In the summer of 1832, it seemed certain that all Anglo-Texas would pass into a state of rebellion and open war, just as the American colonies had passed from scattered resistance to open rebellion in 1775. Logically, the Supreme Government of Mexico would react harshly to this rebellion and ouster of its troops, and the issue would be joined.
But this did not happen in 1832; the final crisis was delayed. There were two reasons. The first was that the Great Empresario made his last strenuous, valiant efforts to keep the peace. More important, certainly, was the fact that events in Mexico paralyzed the struggle and confused the issues for three more years.
Chapter 11
REVOLUTION
The plans of the revolutionaries of Texas are well known to this commandancy, and it is quite useless and vain to cover them with a hypocritical adherence to the Federal Constitution. The constitution by which all Mexicans may be governed is the constitution which the colonists of Texas must obey, no matter on what principles it may be formed.
GENERAL DON MARTÍN PERFECTO DE CÓS, MILITARY COMMANDANT OF COAHUILA-TEXAS, TO THE JEFE POLÍTICO AT NACOGDOCHES, AUGUST 1835