Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
White settlers, after 1836, were rapidly spreading up the Brazos and Colorado, and a steady stream of immigration was demolishing the wilderness across the northern part of the country. This movement was impinging on the settled Texas Indians: the remnants of the Caddoans, now a border tribe, the Wichitas, Tonkawas, and the Cherokees, Kickapoos, and others who had been pushed into Texas by being driven out of the United States. The Cherokees, a powerful tribe, were particularly restless and frightened. They had been pushed all the way from the mountains of Carolina and Tennessee, and now they, a forest and mountain people, were up against the Great Plains with nowhere to go. Whites were chopping the woods down and building cabins on the edges of their last refuge; Mexican agents went among them, talking war against the hated Americans. Houston was worried about this imminent Indian war. He submitted a bill that would have guaranteed the Cherokees title to their Texas lands. The Texas Congress angrily rejected it, but Houston, keeping state forces out of Indian country, was able to avert a serious war. The Kickapoos, aided by some Mexicans, took the warpath in the summer of 1838 under a Mexican agent, Vicente Córdova. Tom Rusk stamped this rebellion out with a force of hastily raised volunteers, while the Cherokees held aloof. The Cherokees' self-restraint did them no good; although they were a remarkably peaceful and civilized tribe of Amerinds, in Texans' minds they were merely marauding red men, standing in the way of rightful, Anglo-American progress. Houston, who had lived among Cherokees, wanted to protect them, but rather sadly, he knew the Indians' days were numbered. All he could do was hold off bloodshed so long as he was President.
Despite Houston's innate conservatism, the government went further and further in debt. Houston was forced to spend some $2,000,000, and revenues in no way matched this. Texas's only productive tax was a tariff, ranging from 1 percent on bread and flour to 50 percent on luxuries like silk. Such levies as tonnage fees, the poll tax, business taxes, and license or land fees raised only small amounts; the direct property tax was virtually uncollectable. Texans did not like taxes. Even much of the taxes or fees collected were returned as audited drafts or canceled claims against the government, so Henry Smith's Treasury stayed bare. The only substantial money that arrived was a loan of $457,380 from the Bank of the United States in Pennsylvania; efforts to borrow the $5,000,000 Houston needed were fruitless. In the end, Houston did what every government in such a situation did, although everyone knew the solution's inherent folly. The Government of Texas in 1837 started printing paper money, in the form of promissory notes. At first, these notes held their value very well, but with the second issue, in 1838, they depreciated to about seventy cents on the dollar.
Besides keeping the war with Mexico damped and the Indians quiet, Houston's foreign policy was to continue to seek annexation by the United States. Memucan Hunt, Minister to Washington, was ordered to press the matter, and on August 4, 1837, Hunt formally approached the government of the United States. Forsyth, still Secretary of State, made it clear he felt treaty obligations with Mexico, by which Texas had been forever renounced, prevented any such act. Still, a bill was introduced in Congress in early 1838. The matter was brought to a boil, while Van Buren, lacking both Jackson's powers and skills, seemed to hope it would go away. John Quincy Adams made himself Texas's foremost villain, by speaking against annexation every morning session of Congress from June 16 to July 7, 1838. Congress finally adjourned without action. Houston, now realizing that the honor of Texas as a sovereign nation was at stake, ordered Dr. Anson Jones, Hunt's successor, formally to withdraw the petitition of annexation. This was done, ratified by the Texas Congress, and the matter died. This rejection meanwhile built an increasingly powerful anti-American party in Texas, now headed by Mirabeau B. Lamar.
Lamar began to talk of Texas building its own empire in the West, if need be, in enmity and opposition to the United States. There were discussions among ambitious, burning-eyed men along the Brazos. If the United States was going to let the slavery question halt it at the Sabine, then the far Pacific might fall to another, more vigorous American Republic rising in the West. Sam Houston despised this talk. But under the constitution he could not succeed himself, nor could he find any Texas politician of sufficient stature to oppose Lamar. Houston's choice to succeed himself in the election of 1838 was Peter Grayson, but Grayson committed suicide before election day. Lamar ran on a platform of Texan greatness and future glory. He was elected President almost unanimously and carried the Congress along with him.
There were no true political parties in Texas, but the old division between the conservative planters, the Peace party, and the more warlike radicals, the War party, continued. Houston had selected his cabinet to bridge the split, with Austin, a conservative, as Secretary of State, and Smith, a radical, his Secretary of the Treasury. But Austin died in December 1836, worn out at the age of forty-three. This left Houston supported by almost no one of stature. The planter group in Texas was far less interested in national politics, on the whole, than the adventurous lawyers pouring in from the United States. The radical, or expansionist group, increased daily.
Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was inaugurated as President of Texas in December 1838. In his first speech, he revealed a new policy: no more of Houston's pennypinching and conservative caution, no more of Houston's wheedling after the United States. Lamar inherited a basically unstable situation: increasingly restive Indians on the edges of Anglo-Texas, a smolderingly hostile Mexico that refused to end hostilities to the south. Houston had let these problems hang fire, trying to avoid further bloodshed with Mexico and making promises to the Indians he could not keep. His assumption and hope was that when Texas fulfilled its destiny as he saw it and became part of the United States, Washington, not the straggling, bankrupt Republic between the Brazos and the Colorado, would deal with the Indians and Mexico.
In contrast, Lamar considered his own programs much more realistic. They were, in simplest terms, based on the idea that Texas had to fend for itself. He felt that the Mexican government should be given a full chance to negotiate a boundary and a peace with Texas, and if it did not, then the Mexicans should be brought to their senses by knocking them to their knees. The Indians Lamar considered merely trespassing vermin on Texas soil. Because of his outright hostility to Indians, Lamar has been often harshly regarded by American historians. But Lamar invented nothing—the notion that Indians were tenants at will, without inherent title to American soil, and that white men might dispossess them without formal legal action was already imbedded in American thought and practice. They were policies that already had acquired the legitimacy of two hundred years. Lamar, with the full agreement of his Secretary of War, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Indian commissioner, Bonnell, merely enunciated them without hypocrisy.
It had been established again and again in American history that the government had no powers to prevent white encroachment on Indian lands, and if the Indians resisted, the government owed the settlers protection. Sam
Houston was one of the few great Americans who tried, not to give the Amerinds a reservation or treaty lands, but a legal title to their soil under Anglo-Saxon common law.
The attitudes of the majority of Texans, who violently opposed this, were essentially no different from the attitudes of the men who earlier conquered Massachusetts. Many of the people who denounced Mirabeau Lamar stood on ground where the bones of their forefathers' Indian victims had long moldered; only time had given that conquest its legitimacy.
"If peace can be obtained only by the sword, let the sword do its work," Lamar stated in his inaugural address, to thunderous applause. It was an American philosophy that neither began nor ended with Texas's President Lamar.
Lamar advocated pressure against the Mexicans, war against the Indians, and, sometimes overlooked because it was not implemented, a policy of education and development within the state. Lamar did not look to Washington, and if his programs were impossibly ambitious, he caught a part of every Texan's heart.
Here, in the third year of the Republic, Texas history took its essential 19th-century pattern, and it also began to fragment. It could no longer be followed as a steady stream. The pattern of immigration into and consolidation of Anglo-Texas continued, but meanwhile, Anglo-Texas began to expand along a genuine frontier of war, against the Indian west and against the Mexican south. Virtually all Texan historians have seen Texas history in terms of a long, three-cornered conflict. The folkloric historians, such as Walter Prescott Webb, have seen this most clearly of all: Anglo-Texas, marching out of its mild, rich-soil Brazos bottoms and southern, watered forests, was at continual war with a hostile civilization in the savannahs of the south; in savage conflict with the most formidable Amerinds Americans had yet faced; finally, though not least, locked in an endless struggle against a rough and arid and blazing land such as no Anglo-American had tried to settle before. Each mile toward the Rio Grande, each step up the endless rocky plateaus, Texans left their blood, bones, and blasted dreams.
Similar dramas were enacted in other parts of America. But nowhere else was the fight so vicious, nor did it last so long. In every other state, the true frontier was ephemeral. In most, there were water and wood, and the dangerous Amerinds were removed before real settlement began. Even the brutal Kentucky frontier was of short duration, though it put a lasting mark on the men who continued westward. The savage years lasted hardly a decade; what was called the "frontier years" was really a period of settlement and development—cutting the country down to size, implanting American law and civilization.
In Texas the slow, steady advance of the farmer and the homesteader struck up against a land where the Amerinds rode horseback and the rain ran out. Here, for two full generations, the frontier wavered, now forward, now back, locked in bitter battle. Equally dangerous Amerinds were engaged in distant areas, such as the Dakotas and Arizona, but there was one enormous difference. No Americans farmed, or took their families by the thousands into those territories until the army had pacified or driven the Indians out. In Texas, solely, was there a clash of cultures between the English- and Spanish-speaking peoples, which in Texas enhanced the consciousness of race. In Texas, in the 1830s and 1840s, when the great bulk of the American people were still east of the Mississippi, the Anglo-American Far West began. Here, Americans first adapted to a new land, and eventually carried newly learned values, whether toward Mexicans or toward cattle, to New Mexico and other states. Here, the Anglo-Celt vanguard fought some of its greatest battles and formed its last great enclave, with its value system adapted to a broader frontier but otherwise intact.
The human hallmarks of most true frontiers, the armed society with its almost theatrical codes and courtesies, its incipient feudalism, its touchy independence and determined self-reliance, its—exaggerated as it seemed to more crowded cultures—individual self-importance, and its tribal territoriality, not only flourished but became a way of life. The Texans came closest to creating, in America, not a society but a people, like the peoples who had come before them.
It was always a mistake to ascribe the notorious Texas chauvinism, so misunderstood and laughed at in other parts of America, to the brief ten-year flying of the Lone Star flag. Neither the Republic nor the Confederacy nor even the Union totally captured the 19th-century Texas mind. Governments came and went; some hindered, some helped. But Texan patriotism was never based on concepts of government or on ideas. It grew out of the terrible struggle for the land. Significantly, Hispanic and European observers have continually called the true Texan—the descendant and inheritor of the frontier experience—the most "European," or territorial, of Americans. The Texan's attitudes, his inherent chauvinism and the seeds of his belligerence, sprouted from his conscious effort to take and hold his land. It was the reaction of essentially civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies they despised. The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel, born in blood in another primordial land.
The territoriality of Texans—the feeling for place and tribe—and the attitudes this engendered have sometimes been misinterpreted by other Americans, probably for psychological reasons. The Texans in the 19th century did not create a "usable past," or one that buttressed 20th-century American mainstream thought. The Texans emerged with a "blood memory," in the Texan writer Katherine Anne Porter's memorable phrase.
The ceremonial flying of six flags—Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, Confederate, and American—over modern Texas, so puzzling to visitors, is an almost conscious symbolism: flags change, the land remains. If the American Manhattanite has almost forgotten he lives on soil, has shed his history, and is shaped more by social pressures than a sense of territory, the Texan can never, even in his cities, forget or be free of the brooding immensity of his land. His national myths were more influenced by the Alamo and the burden of a century of a wild frontier than concepts conceived at Philadelphia. Tragically, next to memories of the struggle for freedom from Mexico are the smoldering memories of a long and losing struggle against the encroachments of cultures from other regions of the United States. If the Texan became the most "European" of Americans, it was because in his history he has been both a conscious conqueror, and a member of a vanquished race.