Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Words are inadequate to convey an impression of the appearance of the first Texas army as it formed in marching order . . . it certainly bore little resemblance to the army of my childhood dreams. 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. . . . Boots being an unknown quantity, some wore shoes and some moccasins. Here a broad-brimmed sombrero overshadowed the military cap at its side; there the 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 above the nimble Spanish pony . . . there a half-broke mustang pranced beside a sober, methodical mule . . . in lieu of a canteen each man carried a Spanish gourd . . . A fantastic military array to a casual observer, but the one great purpose animating every heart clothed us in a uniform more perfect in our eyes than was ever donned by regulars on dress parade.
In this army the frontier element predominated; they did not look like an army, but they were grimly and deadly efficient for all of that. Each man carried his long rifle, made in the United States, and these were the grandsons of the men who had fought at King's Mountain, and broke over the Cumberlands into Kentucky and Tennessee. They were not soldiers in any accepted sense, but they were the deadliest and most efficient predators the continent had ever known.
The army moved slowly up the road to Béxar. The famed Gonzales cannon did not make it; the wheels broke down and it was abandoned at a place called Sandy Creek. Texas roads were unfit for artillery, and cannon, or the lack of it, was to play a great role in this war.
The Army of the People started with about three hundred, but on the way it picked up more and more. Armed men from the region above the Brazos now came in. The Texans reached San Antonio, and flowed around the villa like a horde of hungry soldier ants. Whatever advantage the Mexicans had was surrendered by General Cós. His regulars could best have met the Texans in the open fields, on the march to San Antonio. Here regulars were at their best, and frontiersmen at their worst, since they fought as individuals, without any real notion of command or discipline. But Cós was cautious; he pulled his men into San Antonio, and begged for reinforcements. Ugartechea, whose personal courage is unquestionable, had seen his troops punished by rifle fire at Velasco. Neither officer desired to risk a full-scale clash. In the town, the Mexican army rapidly ate up its provisions, and worse, its morale steadily sank.
At the same time, the Texan army, camped outside the town, sank into its own form of confusion. Austin wanted to treat with the enemy and negotiate Cós out of Texas; others wanted to fight; no one had much command or control. The Texas militia had marched to Gonzales and San Antonio at a propitious time; the crops were in, and the farmers had nothing else to do, and they were as content hunting Mexicans as squirrels and bear. But the call of service had only been for two months, and after half the time expired, some where already restless; by early December they were thinking of spring planting. Austin, who understood the deficiencies of his army, tried to improve things but without much success. Austin was a diplomat, not a field commander. On one occasion, when he ordered an attack on San Antonio, there was no response.
When Austin was relieved by the Consultation that meanwhile met at San Felipe, with orders to proceed to the United States to seek American aid, there is evidence that both he and the army were pleased. Austin left on November 25. The troops held an election, and passed the command to Colonel Edward Burleson.
Despite the fact that on November 26, in a sharp exchange called the "grass fight," some fifty foragers sent out by Cós for desperately needed hay were killed, vast discouragement pervaded the Texan army. They lacked artillery, and most of the officers were reluctant to assault San Antonio and the presidio of the Alamo without artillery support. Significantly, many of the Americans with military training, notably Sam Houston, tried to stop the San Antonio expedition altogether. When the weather in late fall turned bad, conditions in the Texan camp became miserable. There was insufficient clothing; most of the men who turned out in late summer had not even brought coats with them; and food was not only poor but irregular. There was no organized commissary or service support of any kind. The "army," irregular enough at the start, was rapidly degenerating into a grousing mob.
Its composition was changing also. The Texan farmers and planters began to dribble away, back to families, warm homes, and their more pressing affairs. By December, most of the Texas militia had deserted the siege—a siege being probably the most difficult operation of all for a purely amateur army to conduct. But in these weeks, a new element of reinforcement swelled the Texas ranks. Hundreds of men were pouring into the region from the southwestern United States.
The news of war had reached New Orleans and traveled up the Mississippi. Adventure and fighting in Texas appealed strongly to many men along the American frontier. In small groups, sometimes singly, they began to drift across the Sabine. Formal volunteer units were quickly organized in several southern states. One of these, the smartly turned-out New Orleans Grays, sailed to the Texas coast and marched inland from Goliad.
Austin's wish for a great immigration from Kentucky, Tennessee, "everywhere," with their rifles, was in part coming true. These men came for every motive in the world: adventure, idealism (because many Americans thought the conflict in Texas was "their" war), and the sheer love of violence. No matter how many historians prefer to gloss over the fact, the first Trans-Appalachian-born or -bred generation was an extremely tough and violent race. Texas was where the action was. It became a lodestar, pulling an enormous number of the men—Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and others—who were already in some way legends on the old frontier. As one historian wrote, Texas seemed to cast some sort of spell, to make men who were cold, pragmatic, and opportunist in the main, want to go and die.
At first, the American increments pouring into San Antonio increased the Texan army to considerably more than Cós's. Then, when the Texans began to leave, this force shrank. By December 3, the Americans outnumbered the native fighters, and the whole army numbered somewhere between three and five hundred. Nobody kept an accurate roll.
A consultation of officers held by Burleson agreed to abandon the siege, although some men argued this would destroy the entire Texas army. The goal of San Antonio was all that held it together. The men were paraded on December 4, and orders issued for a retreat to Gonzales. It was not received with great enthusiasm in the ranks—many men, miserable as they were, had come to Béxar to fight.
The baggage wagons were already loaded when a random spark reignited the war. A Mexican officer, a deserter, passed into the Texan lines. Burleson was forced to conduct his interrogation of this man in front of the whole army, and wild excitement spread. The Mexican lieutenant advised that Cós's army was disheartened, hungry, and that San Antonio could be easily seized. Colonel Frank Johnson, the adjutant general, the one officer who had held out for continuing the siege, remarked to Colonel Ben Milam, standing beside him, that perhaps a call should be raised for volunteers.
Ben Milam, an old empresario agent, whom bad luck had dogged all his life and who had barely escaped with his life from Cós's conquest of Coahuila—where he had been best known as one of the biggest land speculators—suddenly raised a shout: "Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio? Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?"
A great cry went up. "Then fall in line!" Milam roared. Two hundred men stepped forward. There was nothing Burleson could do but go along. He agreed to hold the rest of the army outside the gates, while Milam's volunteers assaulted San Antonio. But when Milam assembled his troops at an old mill, just outside of town, he counted three hundred and one. Milam had the heart and the command of the army, and his part to play in history.
Instead of putting his troops entirely in the old presidio, with its strong fortifications, Cós had divided his command into two divisions. One held the Alamo, east of the San Antonio River. The other was quartered in the town to the west, and strongly entrenched in the two plazas with their stone buildings. Both divisions had artillery.
Milam's assault began at three in the morning, December 5. His men broke through the Mexican pickets and filtered into San Antonio. Now, house to house, a hot and bloody battle began. It was small-unit fighting, house to house and man to man. It was the kind of warfare that American frontiersmen, taught to take cover and shoot to kill, loved best. It was one in which Mexican regulars, who like most Latin troops were better in the assault than defense, were nibbled to death. House after house, plaza after plaza, were cleared by deadly sniping; the Mexicans fell back, and Cós began to panic.
On the third day of this bitter, close-in fighting, old Ben Milam, who for these hours had been a colonel indeed, exposing himself and leading the bloody advance from house to house, was shot dead. The Masons in the army, with ceremony, buried his body in the courtyard of the Veramendi house, almost where it fell. Milam was now immortal, the first in a long pantheon of Texas heroes.
Then, amid the flat crack of American rifles and the duller boom of the Mexican
escopetas
, or flintlock muskets, another election was held. Johnson was chosen commander, with Major Morris of the New Orleans Grays as his second in command. The assault went on. Some houses were reduced room by room. Battering rams, made of logs brought in from the sawmill, knocked down doors, and rifle butts smashed in Mexican faces. The Mexicans responded with heavy cannonades, which knocked down walls but killed few Texans. Although on December 8, Cós was heavily reinforced, with about six hundred men from the south, his nerve was gone. One hundred and seventy-nine men, with six officers, deserted and fled toward the Rio Grande. On December 10, 1835, Cós surrendered eleven hundred and five officers and men, and his fortress, the Alamo.
By any standard, this victory of a force that never numbered more than 350 over three times its number entrenched in defensive positions, with artillery support, was a brilliant achievement. It was hailed with rejoicing back along the Brazos. But it was to be almost fatal to the Texas cause; it convinced many men the war was over and made them hold the Mexican army in far too much contempt.
Burleson, who took command again as the shooting ended, gave Cós the honors of war. Cós signed a covenant of surrender, in which he pledged that he would never fight again against the colonists, or the Constitution of 1824. He was allowed to march out toward Monclova, south of the Rio Grande.
Now, in the chill December sunlight, the Texas army held both Goliad and the Alamo at Béxar—two strong presidios on the San Antonio River guarding Anglo-Texas from southern attack. Texas was completely cleared of Mexican soldiers. Convinced the war was over at least till the coming summer, the Texas residents in the army drifted away, back to farms and homes. Even Colonel Edward Burleson left his command, passing it on to Johnson.
To understand the approaching tragedy, this victory euphoria and the failure of the Texans to create a strong government must be understood.
Until this time, self-government in Texas had really meant the absence of government. In a province where everyone had land and there was little crime, no government was needed to clear the wilderness and plant cotton. Texans had three great disadvantages now in trying to form a viable government for the whole state: Texas society was a society of relative newcomers, in which, since no Anglo-Texan was allowed to hold higher than a municipal office, no political experience or leadership had developed. Although Anglo-Texas was ethnically solid—Mexican settlement did not exist north of the San Antonio River, and the old Spanish colony at Nacogdoches was already beginning to speak English—the various grants and districts did not form any kind of commercial or political entity. Austin's and DeWitt's colonies had had only the sketchiest relations, and both were remote from deep East Texas. Finally, there was a strong streak of independence and opportunism in almost every man who had braved the Sabine. An enormously self-reliant group had colonized Texas; now, that very self-reliance made it hard for these men to cooperate easily. The average Texas was determined to take no orders from Mexicans, but he also took few willingly from his own kind.
In an atmosphere without political parties or political traditions, politics rapidly coalesced around personalities, with explosive and tragic effects.
The first state government was the so-called Permanent Council, which organized at San Felipe in October 1835. This was a rump regime, but so far as it could go, it organized well. This Council elected Richard Royall of Matagorda as its president, commissioned privateers, sent some supplies to San Antonio, set up a postal system, and halted all land surveying and speculation. It also authorized one Thomas McKinney to go to the United States and borrow $100,000.
On November 3 the Permanent Council was dissolved because the planned general consultation of all the districts convened. Delegates to this were elected by twelve municipalities and two departments. The convention was immediately badly divided; the question was the nature of the war, and how it should be conducted. What were Anglo-Texans fighting for? In defense of their rights as Mexican citizens under the Constitution of 1824, or for independence from a corrupt Mexico?