Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Santa Anna intended to start a panic, to drive the colonists across the U.S. frontier. He was successful. The next few weeks in Texas were to be known, half-ashamedly, as the "Runaway Scrape." The entire population of Anglo-Texas, frightened and horrified by the tales of Mexican atrocities, deserted the countryside ahead of the Mexican army. Most able-bodied Texas men, including many boys, had joined Sam Houston's army; the women, children, and old men on the land were left to fend for themselves. In a space of days, the colony that Austin built crumbled away. With wagons pulled by straining oxen, on horseback, or pitifully on foot, carrying what treasured possessions they could, the Texas women herded their families east. Soon, a pathetic litter lay along the trails.
This was the rainy season in east Texas. The rivers were up, and soon the ferries were jammed. One refugee, Dilue Rose Harris, wrote afterward that when she and her family reached the San Jacinto River at Lynch's Ferry on April 10, 5,000 frantic people were swarming at that point. Any flight of refugees from war is attended by misery, tragedy, and terror. There were hundreds of tales of heroism and self-reliance, as the women struggled over the muddy roads toward the Sabine, without their men, abandoning their homes and the labor of years, with the smoke of the Mexican swath of destruction rising behind them. Soon, there was hunger; fever and sickness spread, babies began to die. There was worse: looters began to appear. There were men who galloped into settlements far ahead of the invading army, shouting, "The Mexicans are coming!"—then stole horses, silver, anything, when the panicking inhabitants fled.
Sam Houston's retreat to the Brazos, and the movement of the government east, spurred the flight as much as rumors of Santanista terror. Desperately, the columns of women and children clogging the frightful roads tried to keep up, behind the Texas army. The struggling, sodden stream of pitiful humanity poured past Houston's encampment at San Felipe on the Brazos; watching it, one of Houston's captains, Moseley Baker, broke down and cried.
The government moved east of the Brazos, to Harrisburg on Buffalo Bayou, near Galveston Bay. President Burnet was in agony over Houston's apparent dalliance. He wrote: "The enemy are laughing you to scorn. You must fight them. You must retreat no farther. The country expects you to fight. The salvation of the country depends on you doing so."
General Houston wrote back laconically to Rusk, the Secretary of War, that he was holding no councils and consulting no one. If he erred, the blame was his. At Groce's, Houston was desperately trying to instill some discipline into his motley forces, which had grown to more than 1,400 men. No one, except Houston and a few officers, had ever fought in formal warfare before. The Texas men knew nothing of forming columns, or fighting in line, or even obeying the commands of their company officers. During these weeks, it was not Major General Houston of the Tennessee Militia but a former junior officer of the 39th United States Infantry whose mind ruled the army. Houston did not make the mistake of despising the enemy too much. He knew what disciplined troops, on open ground, could do to his ragged horde. But his drilling became increasingly impossible. The vast majority of his army were now Texas men, whose homes were being put to the torch, and whose women and children were fleeing forlorn and hungry to the east. Houston was faced by a hostile army that demanded to fight.
When Houston retreated down the Brazos past San Felipe and ordered the town burned, Captains Moseley Baker and Martin of the Texans refused a further retreat. Houston left them to hold the crossings over the Brazos, while he and the bulk of the army went across the river on the steamboat
Yellowstone
.
Houston had no real battle plan. He was faced with superior numbers and a superior force. His only hope was to bring Santa Anna to battle on his own terms. He fell back, and back, waiting for the enemy to make a mistake.
Santa Anna, who joined with Sesma's troops, reached the Brazos at San Felipe. Here he found the fords covered by Moseley Baker's sharpshooters. He shunted south, and seized the ferry at Fort Bend. He heard the Texas government was at Harrisburg, about 30 miles away, and he marched to capture it. Burnet, Zavala, and the others barely got away; the Mexicans pursued them to Morgan's Point, overlooking Galveston Bay.
In this column Santa Anna had 700 to 800 troops. The other Mexican columns were many miles away, except for Cós, who had been absolved of his pledge and was again leading troops in Texas. Santa Anna burned Harrisburg to the ground. He proceeded to the town of New Washington, on the bay, then swung back northwest to the San Jacinto River. Here, he trapped Sam Houston, who had marched from the Brazos to Harrisburg, left his sick and disabled in the ruins, then coiled into a position between the San Jacinto and Buffalo Bayou.
Houston deliberately let himself run out of territory, because he was running out of time. Hundreds of his men had left, gone to find and help their fleeing families, disgusted with this strange commander who would not fight. But it was the Napoleon of the West, not the ex–U.S. lieutenant, who made the crucial mistake. Santa Anna had at last placed an inferior force in front of Houston, on terrain where neither army could easily retreat. The hard-riding Deaf Smith had taken a Mexican courier on April 18. The dispatches revealed Santa Anna's planned movements. Houston let himself be "trapped."
He turned toward the Mexican column and took a position with his back to the river and bayou. The evidence is that if he had turned away from the enemy at this time, the army would have revolted. The Texans were at perfect pitch. They were tired but not exhausted, angry, and murderous. Their enthusiasm was worn away, but so was any nervousness or fear. Houston had marched and drilled his army just enough. Now, Houston placed his cannon (the Twin Sisters, which were a gift of the city of Cincinnati, Ohio) and threw his small cavalry force on the open prairie to his right. He was ready to fight.
On April 20 Santa Anna found and fixed him, with a light skirmish that neither side tried to press home. Santa Anna did not want to attack, since he was waiting reinforcement. Why Houston did not attack on the morning of the 21st has never been explained. He allowed Cós to march into Santa Anna's camp with an additional 400 men; now, the Mexican forces outnumbered him. Houston had reached the San Jacinto with only 918.
Santa Anna had indeed grown contemptuous of Sam Houston, as Burnet had charged. The Mexican President felt there was no hurry. He camped about three-quarters of a mile from Houston's army, behind hasty fortifications made of saddlebags and brush breastworks. A swell in the ground in front of this camp protected the Mexicans from Houston's field pieces. It also hid the Texas army from Mexican view.
Houston held his war council at noon on April 21. He had planned to attack on the morning of the 22nd, and to this the majority of his officers agreed. But the rank and file were impatient and rebellious; they voted, company by company, to fight immediately. Houston shrewdly acquiesced.
The problem with a proper army was that it was usually predictable. Santa Anna's veterans were getting all the rest they could, for the morrow's battle. The afternoon, in the humid April warmth along the bayou, was devoted to
siesta
. Santa Anna himself had retired; most of the officers dozed under trees.
Certain details, such as the exact size of the Mexican army of approximately 1,200, are still unclear; and it is unclear how the Texas army of almost 1,000 at midafternoon of a bright, sunny day could walk across almost a mile of open grassland and take a veteran force by complete surprise. It happened. Santa Anna had made his last, and fatal, mistake in Texas.
Houston sent Deaf Smith and a few trusted men to demolish Vince's Bridge across the Brazos, some miles away. This had a double purpose. It cut off the Mexican retreat—but also trapped the Texans, if they should lose. Houston was not the first commander to burn his bridges behind him; now, like Cortés's men in Mexico when their ships were burned, the Texans could only conquer or die.
In this army were men and leaders whose loyalty Houston had held by a thread: Sherman, Somervell, Lamar, and Wharton. Wiley Martin and the colonist lawyer, Moseley Baker, would follow him if he fought. There were also his backers, who included Millard, Wells, Burleson, and Tom Rusk. But now, for the first time since it began, the Texas army was united.
Houston formed them at three in the afternoon. Sixty horsemen mounted on the right, under the courtly Georgian fire-eater, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. Lamar's orders: keep the Mexicans from breaking across the prairie. Next came the two small companies of the Texas "Regular" Army, paced by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Millard. Beside the regular infantry stood the Twin Sisters, ready to roll under Hockley (Neill, the senior artillery officer, was injured). One gun would support each wing.
Then, Burleson's First Regiment, the Texas backbone of the army, took its place in line, then Moseley Baker's riflemen, and Sidney Sherman's Second, with its Kentucky core. On each flank was water, the deep and black bayous.
Houston formed a line of infantry, one man deep, that spread a thousand yards. Columns were for armies that attacked with the bayonet. The Texans had only rifles, tomahawks, and Bowie knives. In the center floated the Republic's flag: plain white silk, with five-point azure star, and the motto
Ubi Libertas Habitat Ibi Nostra Patria Est
—"where liberty lives, there is our homeland." Beside the flag, Houston rode his huge white stallion, Saracen. A thousand men were in this army, and this afternoon a thousand separate legends were being made. Posterity could take its choice of them. Only the bodies and blood on the field of San Jacinto remained ever afterward undisputed.
Field music was found, a German who could play the fife, and a Negro freedman who could beat a drum. Two other musicians volunteered. But this combo of four did not know "Yankee Doodle" or any other martial air. They knew only popular music of the day. Grinning, General Houston told the field band to strike up "Come to the Bower," a tune regarded as quite risqué. Houston made no speech; he had none of Travis's impassioned rhetoric. He had not liked Travis, but on this day he missed the cold-eyed, deadly competent Bowie. He said something like, Hold your fire until you make it count. Forward—Texas! Only a part of the line could hear him. All saw him draw his sword, and all heard the field music screech into the air:
Will you come to the bow'r I have shaded for you?
Our bed shall be roses all spangled with dew.
There under the bow'r on roses you'll lie
With a blush on your cheek but a smile in your eye!
Tired, dirty, bearded, hungry, angry—terrible—the army leveled its long rifles and went forward across the open plain. A Georgian Huguenot on the right, a Kentucky colonel on the left, at the head a Scotch-Irish agent of destiny from Tennessee, paced by a German fifer and a Negro beating on a drum, the Texans marched across the grass, up the swell, and down upon a dozing Mexican camp.
They were seen. Sentries' muskets thudded, but incredibly, Santa Anna had had no pickets, nor any scouts watching the Texan camp. The line of the army, beginning to wave and break now, was in rifle range of the Mexican barricade before the shrieking, discordant notes of the "
Centinela Alerto
" went up. The bugles were too late. So was the Mexican cannon—the big Golden Standard was fired too quickly, too high. Its grape screamed uselessly over the Texans' heads.
Incredibly, using the muscles of thirty men, Hockley had the Twin Sisters poised in front of the piled saddles and brush. He blew a tremendous hole, Cincinnati's gift to Texas, at a most proper time. The line kept walking forward, under fire now, but the main body of Mexicans was trying to assemble into disciplined order under shout and bugle call. Without that order, it was as doomed as Hessians on the Delaware. Mexicans, like Europeans of the time, were not trained to fight as individuals, without commands.
In the Texan line, it was inevitable that the shout arose. Colonel Sidney Sherman, on the left, apparently yelled it first: "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad! Remember the Alamo!" The line dissolved, but it was running screaming at the enemy. Moseley Baker, who wept at the Brazos, took a bullet. Dr. William Mottley stumbled and went down. Texans later could name them individually, because on this day they were so few. Saracen, Houston's great horse, shrieked and crashed to earth. The General seized another mount from his aides. Houston, trotting ahead of the line, pointing ahead with his sword, his heart thudding in a tremendous passion, coolly, coolly, with his soldier's brain knowing no power on earth was going to stop this headlong charge.
At something like twenty yards the Texas rifles began to blaze, a tremendous staccato roar. The barricades were swept clear. Burleson's regiment went into the position headlong and tore the fragile fortification apart. Sherman's line came leaping at it from the flank. Eight hundred rifles had left gray-uniformed dead and dying scattered all across the trampled ground. The Mexicans could not reload, could not form, could not wield the bayonet. The Texans went into them with rifle butt and long-bladed knife. They died.
The battle lasted only a few minutes. The slaughter took longer. Santa Anna, General of Brigade Castrillón, and a dozen colonels of various degrees ran about, shouting conflicting orders: fire, form up, lie down to avoid the enemy fire. Some of the confused soldiery stopped fighting and threw down their arms, begging for mercy. The rest fled. Houston had his second horse shot from under him at the barricade, and this time his ankle caught a copper musket ball. Reeling, giddy, Houston bellowed for his men to Parade, and get back in order. He went unheard.