Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
All these were honest attempts by Coahuila to satisfy its unwilling partner. But at the same time, greatly to the disgust of substantial men in Texas, the state opened land speculation. Thousands of leagues of land were granted to various promoters, both Mexican and American. One grant was in return for 1,000 soldiers being raised to fight Indians. Not a single soldier was armed, but many men grew rich. Liberalism had its drawbacks; speculators and promoters flocked to Saltillo, and land scrip was sold wildly in Texas and the United States. During this period some thousands of Americans crossed over into Texas. Some were honest land seekers. Others were drawn by the scent of opportunity.
Then, in April 1834, Santa Anna took over the government at the capital. Gómez Farías was ousted for the last time. But this was a new Santa Anna, who now thought he knew the heart of Mexico. He repudiated liberalism publicly and dissolved the republican Congress. He dismissed all cabinet ministers but one, and by decree, abolished all local legislatures and
ayuntamientos
in the nation. The laws confining the clergy were declared void. This was a new Napoleon, indeed. Lorenzo de Zavala fled to Texas.
A new and subservient Congress one by one legalized all Santa Anna's acts. Finally, in October 1835, the Constitution of 1824 was officially voided. Something identical to the old Spanish system of government replaced it.
Mexico was declared a centralist state, in which the President and the national Congress held absolute powers. But this was only official recognition of what had already taken place, in 1834—Santa Anna already appointed every governor and official in the land. He was king, and more than a king, since he owed responsibility neither to the people nor God. There is much evidence that the mass of the population, although they did not approve of every whim of the General, breathed easier under the old system than under a federal republic no one could make work, and which only a few imported intellectuals understood.
The people of Zacatecas, a state where liberalism had a strong hold, revolted when the regional militias were reduced in favor of the standing army. Santa Anna's regulars defeated and destroyed a Zacatecan force of 5,000. Then, as he had learned in his days with Arredondo, Santa Anna disdained to be burdened with prisoners and permitted his troops to rape and plunder the state capital.
Word of these events reached Texas, but very little of what was happening was understood. Santa Anna still had a good reputation. Much progress had been made during 1833–34, and the compromising party was now ascendant. The hint of trouble crossed the Rio Grande only in April 1835, when Santa Anna sent an army to reduce Coahuila.
Coahuila, under the federal system, had fallen into chaos. Self-government here had turned into confusion. After passing a number of liberal acts affecting Texas, the legislature had begun to fight among itself, over the issues of location of the state capital and the question of land speculation. The Governor and certain other officers seemed mainly concerned with becoming rich. The official capital was removed to Monclova from Saltillo, but the citizens of Saltillo erected a rival government. The issue provoked a small civil war.
Santa Anna entered the quarrel and decreed the capital should remain at Monclova. In April 1835, the legislature issued a bitter criticism of this interference in their war. Under his new system of centralism, Santa Anna sent his brother-in-law, General Martín Perfecto de Cós, to break up the local government and render it obedient to the President. Governor Viesca was arrested, and a few state officials along with a "swarm of land speculators" dashed for safety north of the Rio Bravo. Once again, as in the troubles of 1810, Texas was becoming the refuge for Mexicans with antigovernment sentiments.
In Texas, the events of the crucial year 1835 somewhat resembled the troubles of 1832. In January, the central government once again sent customs officers to Anáhuac and Velasco on the coast. Once again there was trouble, shots were fired, and two prominent citizens jailed. General Cós, mopping up in Coahuila, got word of this. He determined to reinforce the Texas garrisons and sent a dispatch rider north to Captain Don Antonio Tenorio at Anáhuac to stand firm and "be of good cheer"—the Mexicans were coming.
In these weeks the war party in Texas again came to life. These were men who for a great variety of reasons felt that life under the rule of Mexicans was unendurable. Again, these people were mostly newcomers who had failed to get land grants, merchants who found it impossible to operate under Mexican law, and lawyers who were particularly outraged by the non-Anglo-Saxon features of Hispanic codes, such as jailing citizens without trial. The great majority of the farmers and planters were busy with their crops and unconcerned with revolution. When the war clique or party seized the saddlebags of General Cós's courier at San Felipe and intercepted his message to Tenorio, most Texans condemned this act. But the nature of Cós's correspondence drove the war group into even more drastic action.
A group met, elected J. B. Miller, the political chief of the Department of the Brazos, as chairman and passed a resolution that authorized the hotspur William Barret Travis to capture Anáhuac. Buck Travis was not only willing but eager. He gathered about two dozen followers, mounted a small brass cannon on a sawmill truck, deployed in front of the fort of Anáhuac, and demanded its surrender. On June 30 Captain Tenorio, although he commanded forty-four Mexican soldiers, complied. Travis immediately paroled these men, and there was no violence.
This seemingly senseless attack aroused enormous opposition throughout the colony. Travis was denounced as a fool, a traitor, and a dangerous idiot. Seven Texas communities passed formal resolutions to the effect that they did not require their rights defended in this manner. During the entire month of July 1835, a definite majority of the settlers expressed loyalty to Mexico, denounced the notion of conflict with the central government, and even J. B. Miller, who had headed the radicals in June, sent a conciliatory letter to General Cós, who was now poised at Matamoros. Several "peace commissioners" were elected from the communities in a meeting at San Felipe and sent south to confer about the recent trouble with Santa Anna's brother-in-law.
General Cós, however, was not in a conciliatory mood. He had several demands on the colonists before he would consent to treat with them: the arrest of Lorenzo de Zavala, the former cabinet minister who was somewhere in Texas, and the arrest and submission to the military of a group of prominent men of the radical or war clique. In an episode Texans later preferred not to talk about, some of the extreme conciliatory or peace party had handed Colonel Ugartechea, now commanding at San Antonio, a list of names. These included Travis, F. W. Johnson, a notorious land speculator, Robert Williamson, who was known as "Three-Legged Willie" and was like Travis a Patrick Henry of this revolution, and Sam Williams. The peace party felt that if these men were removed, the trouble would subside, and they were willing to sell the hotspurs to the Mexican government in return for peace.
Now, an ironic but perfectly logical turnabout occurred: Cós's demand for these men to be arrested by their own kind and turned over to him shocked and angered the majority that had been, in meeting after meeting, condemning them. There was considerable understanding in Texas of Mexican military tribunals; the Mexican authorities played their politics in different ways from Anglo-Americans. No matter what Travis had done, no Anglo-Texan was prepared to see him put before a military court and shot. Cós, who had good intelligence and monitored the sentiments of the colony, felt his suspicions grimly confirmed by this sentiment. These people, who kept professing loyalty to the Mexican Constitution, were not really loyal to the Mexican nation or people. He made his famous statement, which summed up the Mexican attitude perfectly, and which was perfectly logical: that the Texans were citizens of Mexico, and they must submit to the government of Mexico, no matter on what principles the Constitution might be construed from day to day.
Given the attitudes, prejudices, and folkways of the Anglo-Texans, this was impossible. They thought of themselves as free men, only minimally subject to any government, and if the central authority construed this as insurrection or anarchy, a large party of them were prepared to defend their position with arms. Thus, as Richardson wrote, did the season for conciliation pass.
A few committees of correspondence, in the manner of 1774, had already been formed. Now, in the summer of 1835, these proliferated, with Cós and his army standing just below the Rio Grande. Call after call for a general convention to "discuss the public safety" went out. On August 15, William H. Wharton, who was openly calling for action, presided over a meeting at Columbia, which sent out a call for a consultation of all Texas citizens. A great convention was planned for Washington-on-the-Brazos for October 15. This message stated that the aim of the convention was to secure peace
if it could be obtained on constitutional terms
, and if not, to prepare for an inevitable war.
While the planters were busy harvesting their cotton, the towns and municipalities were buzzing with talk of war. Significantly, the newest towns and communities in Anglo-Texas no longer took the names of Mexican officials; there were no more Goliads, Victorias, and Mexías, but Columbias, Libertys, and Washingtons. During this period, the last great inrush of immigration unquestionably heightened tensions. Perhaps 10,000 Anglo-Americans passed over into Texas after 1830, making the population approximately 30,000, with not more than 10 percent of this Negro slaves. The older planters still had memories of a "munificent and liberal" Mexico; the new men were fresh from the ways and ideals of the United States. There is no question that many men, frontiersmen, now came with the idea that a war was brewing, and that Texas would soon become a part of the United States. In the Southwest the old dream never died.
One great question in the legitimate settlers' minds was, what did Colonel Austin think? Austin had not ruled Anglo-Texas since 1828, but he had represented the region at Saltillo, and his influence with the older faction was still very great. What Austin would or could have done during the hot summer of 1835 can only be conjecture, because he was still held
incomunicado
in a Mexico jail. His arrest, in fact, was a large factor making the planter group uneasy. This imprisonment, on specious charges and without being brought to trial, violated all Anglo-American notions of justice.
Nothing was more indicative of the state of Mexican law and justice in these years than the fact that although Gómez Farías fell from power in April 1834, Austin was still held more than a year later. No Mexican court or Mexican judge would accept responsibility, either for freeing him or shooting him. Finally, on July 13, 1835, Austin was released under a general amnesty—one of those peculiarities of Hispanic justice no American could understand. He was neither pardoned nor cleared, but set free with an assortment of prisoners and criminals of every kind. Before he could quit the country, he was forced to travel to Jalapa and seek Santa Anna's permission. The dictator gave it, apparently on the assumption that the former empresario would be a temporizing factor with the colonists; at this time Santa Anna did not know how far revolutionary sentiment in Texas had gone. Austin was given a passport to take ship to New Orleans. He left the country fully aware of the radical changes the Napoleon of the West was making, and with his trust in the Mexican President completely destroyed.
At New Orleans, Austin wrote a revealing letter to his cousin, Mrs. Holley. During eighteen months in prison, while constitutionalism in Mexico was extirpated, Austin's sense of ethnic Americanism was enormously enhanced. His ideas of a pluralistic commonwealth under the Mexican flag were dead. He was now utterly convinced that Texas must separate from Mexico.
In his letter Austin stated that Texas must be fully Americanized, remain a slave country, and hinted it should come under the American flag. He indicated that he was going to continue to keep up appearances, not to "become a very Mexican politician in hypocrisy" but because such a course was prudent. He felt that Santa Anna would move against Texas in the coming spring or summer. He could not, of course, know that events were moving much more rapidly. He wrote that the "great law of nature—self-preservation—operates, and supersedes all other laws . . . in all countries, one way or another, a few men rule society," and he was out to convince those men, in Texas and the United States, of the great benefits that would "result to the Western world by
Americanizing
Texas." His aim was to keep the trouble damped and the Mexicans unsuspicious, while a hoped-for massive immigration of Americans flooded Texas:
A great immigration from Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., each man with his rifle . . . would be of great use to us—very great indeed . . . I wish a great immigration this fall and winter from Kentucky, Tennessee, everywhere; passports or no passports, anyhow. For fourteen years I have had a hard time of it, but nothing shall daunt my courage or abate my exertions to complete the main object of my labors to Americanize Texas. This fall and winter will fix our fate—a great immigration will settle the question.
With enough Kentucky and Tennessee rifles in Texas, Austin had no fear of Santa Anna and his Mexicans.
Mexican historians took this letter as proof that Austin from the first planned the basest treason against his adopted country. This view ignores Austin's arbitrary and illegal imprisonment, the bald pronouncements by the Mexican military that Texans would have to endure whatever kind of government the central regime decreed, and the bloody record of Santanista duplicity. The very adoption of the title "Napoleon of the West" was ominous to Texans, because Napoleon, in all English-speaking lands, was never looked upon as a great lawgiver, but only a military tyrant of the bloodiest and most maniacal kind. The dominant Mexican view was legalistic, and in point of fact, entirely legal under international or any other kind of law—Texas was recognized Mexican soil, and the Mexican nation had the right to impose any kind of government it chose. This fact was recognized, however reluctantly, even by President Andrew Jackson of the United States. But the Mexican outlook completely ignored not only Santa Anna's tyranny, but the fact that every Anglo-Texan was born with the notion he possessed inalienable rights. He could not give these up simply by taking Mexican citizenship or slough them off at the Sabine. Americans of the 19th century frequently were wrong, but very few had any moral doubts. Austin himself had none. He had created an Anglo-Saxon society in Texas, and as he wrote, the first duty of any society was to survive.