Lone Star Nation (17 page)

When Jackson won the presidency the following year—at the age of sixty-one, making him the oldest man thus far to assume the nation's highest office—the political classes at once began speculating as to his successor in the White House. Tennessee appeared the obvious place to look, and among Tennesseeans none had more courage, more presence, more dash, more of everything that made Jackson popular than Sam Houston. The one thing missing from the Houston resumé was a wife. His interest in the fair sex was not in question, nor that of the fair sex in him. His presence at parties and receptions drew regular throngs of young ladies. But like Stephen Austin, he wanted to establish himself before he took a spouse. “I will not court any of the dear girls before I make a fortune,” he declared in 1815, “and if I come to no better speed than I have done heretofore, it will be some time.” For a decade ambition outpaced romance. “I am making myself less frequent in the lady world than I have been,” he wrote in 1826. “I must keep up my dignity, or rather I must attend more to politics and less to love.” But after he became governor, attending to politics seemed to require attending to love, and he began looking for a wife.

He found one in Eliza Allen, the daughter of Colonel and Mrs. John Allen of Gallatin, Tennessee. The match seemed ideal on both sides. Nineteen-year-old Eliza had blond hair, blue eyes, and a figure that turned heads and broke hearts throughout the Cumberland Valley; the handsome Governor Houston had a past to boast of and a future to bank on. The wedding was the social event of the season; the newlyweds' progress to Nashville was reported in all the papers; the state rejoiced to claim such a glamorous First Couple. Sam Houston's star had never shone brighter, nor seemed more certain to climb still higher.

And then, with a suddenness that stunned the city of Nashville, shocked the state of Tennessee, and amazed that appreciable part of America that had been following the Houston story, the marriage and the governor's life fell spectacularly apart. Word circulated that Eliza, after less than three months of marriage, had left Houston and returned to her parents' house. This was no sooner confirmed than Houston sent the speaker of the Tennessee senate a letter announcing his resignation from the office of governor. The only explanation he offered was a reference to being “overwhelmed by sudden calamities,” which he declined to detail. Nor did he ever detail them publicly as long as he lived.

His silence, of course, gave rise to rumors of every sort. Most involved the wedding night and what one or the other spouse had discovered then. From such conjectures to aspersions on Eliza's virtue was an easy step for the gossips. Houston, obviously suffering, broke his silence only long enough to direct a delegation of visitors to “publish in the Nashville papers that if any wretch ever dares to utter a word against the purity of Mrs. Houston I will come back and write the libel in his heart's blood.”

The most probable explanation of what happened is that Eliza loved not Houston but another, whom her family considered a less desirable match. Against her inclination she acceded to parental pressure and married Houston, only to experience wedding-night remorse. She couldn't, or wouldn't, hide her feelings any longer, and she thereby put Houston in the position of the spurned lover—except that he was married to the one who spurned him. A Houston friend asserted, years later, that this was essentially the story Houston told him, in confidence. “About one o'clock in the morning I was waiting and smoking as he staggered into the room,” the friend declared. “His face was rigid. His eyes had a strange stare. He looked like some magnificent ruin. He sat upright in his chair finally, and running his fingers through his hair said, ‘It was so infamous, so cruel, so vile. . . . Cursed be the human fiends who force a woman to live with a man whom she does not love. Just think of it, the unending torture. . . . She has never loved me; her parents forced her to marry me. She loved another from the first.' ”

Houston might have insisted that Eliza remain with him; she was hardly the first to marry other than for love. And he did implore her to consider whether her feelings might change. But once he was convinced he would never have her heart—and by her coldness she made this clear enough—he agreed to let her go. From some combination of honor and self-pride he refused to make any public explanation beyond his vow to kill whoever breathed a word against her. And from a similar welter of emotions, he decided he couldn't carry on as Tennessee governor. Heartbroken and humiliated, he threw over everything he had worked so hard to obtain.

And in April 1829, as Andrew Jackson was settling into the White House at Washington, Sam Houston fled Nashville on a Cumberland steamer and disappeared into the West.

C h a p t e r   7

To Defend the Revolution

A
ntonio López de Santa Anna married for much the same reason Sam Houston did. The governor of Yucatán had reached the age—he was just several months younger than Houston and Stephen Austin—where the lack of a wife was becoming a political liability. Moreover, matrimony provided a means of forging ties with influential individuals who could further the general's career. Doña Inés García was no beauty, being tall and thin in a time and place when those attributes weren't generally welcomed, but she brought to the marriage a handsome dowry: some six thousand pesos in real estate. And, unlike Eliza Allen Houston, she accepted her role as wife and mother, eventually bearing Santa Anna five children.

Yet if his marriage turned out better than Houston's, Santa Anna's career was no less tumultuous. Upon assuming the governorship of Yucatán in the spring of 1824, he discovered that the merchants of that peninsular province—reachable, to all intents and purposes, from the rest of Mexico only by sea—identified commercially and politically with Cuba, which remained attached to Spain. The Yucatán merchants wished to undo the Mexican revolution as it applied to them and either rejoin the Spanish empire or fashion an independent but effectively pro-Cuban, pro-Spanish republic.

Sizing up the situation, Santa Anna conceived an audacious answer to Yucatecan separatism: a filibustering expedition against Cuba. By springing Cuba from Spanish rule—to become independent or part of the Mexican republic—he would permit the merchants to continue their Cuban trade without jeopardizing Mexican integrity or independence. In the process, Santa Anna would become a hero: of Cuba or Mexico or both.

The government in Mexico City learned of Santa Anna's project and allowed him to proceed with the plans. A political struggle had broken out in Mexico over the remnants of Spanish rule; the leading government ministers believed that a blow against Spain in Cuba might simultaneously weaken the pro-Spanish elements in Mexico. During the summer of 1824 Santa Anna gathered an invading force of some five hundred soldiers and readied them to sail.

At the last moment, however, Mexico City flinched. The government had come under diplomatic pressure from Britain and the United States to avoid disrupting the status quo in the Caribbean. The two English-speaking powers reached this common conclusion by separate routes: the United States believed that a non-Spanish Cuba ought to become American, while the British believed that it should not but probably would. Lest they have to fight over the island, Washington and London preferred to leave it as it was.

The Mexican government thereupon ordered Santa Anna to stand down and disavowed foreknowledge of the invasion plans. “General Santa Anna acted without instructions or orders whatever and strictly upon his own authority,” the foreign ministry explained to the American government. Santa Anna was relieved of his command of military forces in Yucatán and was ordered to appear before a court-martial. But the scapegoating went only so far: the court never convened, and Santa Anna was allowed to resign the governorship of Yucatán without sanction.

The period after his resignation was a convenient time to be out of Mexican politics. The 1824 constitution had been a victory for Mexican federalists—who tended to be liberal, secular, and anti-elitist—but only an interim one, as the centralists—chiefly conservative, religious elitists—soon fought back. The contest took place in the columns of Mexican newspapers, in the chambers of the Mexican congress, and, after a disputed election in 1828, on the field of battle.

Santa Anna reentered the fray by siding with Vicente Guerrero, an old rebel who lost the 1828 election to the conservative candidate but engineered a coup that made him president. “My beloved friend and companion,” Santa Anna wrote Guerrero, “what thing can be asked of me in the name of my country and by my worthy friend, the patriot Vicente Guerrero, that I will not do?”

Guerrero appreciated the sentiment but distrusted its author. Knowing Santa Anna's history, Guerrero preferred that he remain in retirement. Yet when Santa Anna made clear that retirement no longer suited him, and that he would take up arms either for Guerrero or against him, the president appointed him governor of Veracruz.

This appointment proved inspired, if accidentally so, for it placed Mexico's most able officer at what turned out to be the country's point of greatest danger. During the summer of 1829 the Spanish launched a long-anticipated attempt to reconquer Mexico. From Cuba they embarked three thousand troops for the Mexican coast; these landed at Cabo Rojo, south of Tampico, and marched overland toward that city.

The Spanish invasion of Mexico bore striking similarities to the British invasion of the United States during the War of 1812. In each case a vengeful imperial power tried to reclaim its erstwhile territory. And Santa Anna's defense of Tampico was remarkably akin to Andrew Jackson's defense of New Orleans. Santa Anna raced to Tampico, where by force of charm and will he prepared the city for the attack. He commandeered every useful vessel in the harbor (including some British and American craft) and compelled the merchants of the city to lend him money to mount his defense. Santa Anna exceeded his authority in much of this, risking reprimand but guessing that victory would absolve him.

The fighting lasted three weeks, beginning with a sharp attack by Santa Anna's troops on August 21, which stunned the Spaniards with its energy and coherence, and ending with a nighttime battle on September 10, which killed nine hundred Spaniards and persuaded the Spanish commander to sue for peace. Santa Anna took the Spaniards' arms and provisions and let them leave the country for Cuba.

The victory had much the same electrifying effect in Mexico that Jackson's victory had in America. All of Mexico hailed Santa Anna as the vindicator of the republic and the savior of the revolution. The skeptical Guerrero was compelled to acknowledge his rival's greatness. “I am going to send him this general's belt which I am wearing, in order that he shall put it on with all solemnity as a just reward in his camp and before his soldiers,” Guerrero said. The city of Tampico renamed itself Santa Anna de Tamaulipas in honor of its defender; the city of Veracruz threw a weeklong party for the province's favorite son.

The brilliance of Santa Anna's triumph was so dazzling that many in Mexico didn't notice the officer at his side during the defense of Tampico. General Manuel de Mier y Terán was one of the most accomplished men in Mexico, having fought in the revolution beside the original nationalists and served as a member of congress and in assorted ministries. He was also a trained scientist and engineer, and had recently headed an exhaustive survey of the Texas frontier. As it happened, Terán was returning from Texas when he learned of the Spanish landing below Tampico; rushing to the scene, he directed the artillery bombardment that sealed Santa Anna's triumph. Yet unlike Santa Anna, Terán had no taste for fame, and he was content to let his superior bask in the glory of the moment. Besides, as gratified as he was that the Spaniards were beaten, he couldn't escape the feeling that their invasion was less significant and threatening than an invasion that was taking place farther north, in Texas.

The group Terán had led to Texas was called the Comisión de Límites, or Boundary Commission, and it was charged with surveying and marking the northeastern border of Mexico. That border had been specified in the 1819 treaty between the United States and Spain, but it had never been fixed on the ground. The Terán expedition was to do so.

Yet the expedition had a deeper, less public purpose. In the wake of the Fredonian rebellion, the Mexican government desired to investigate the circumstances that had spawned the revolt. Texas had always been far from the center of Mexican affairs, and in the decade and a half since the outbreak of the revolution it had grown even further. Governments in Mexico City had more pressing matters closer to home—armed uprisings, military coups, foreign invasion—with the result that even when the Mexican imagination turned to Texas, as it infrequently did, Mexican intelligence regarding that distant province was spotty and confused. To remedy the deficiency the government organized the Terán expedition. Terán was to assess the situation in Texas: the size, strength, and attitudes of the settler colonies; the condition and prospects of the Indians; the extent and value of the natural resources. And he was to recommend measures to keep Texas Mexican.

Terán's expedition left Mexico City in November 1827. Besides the engineers who would do the actual surveying, it included a draftsman and artist, José María Sánchez y Tapia; a biologist, Jean-Louis Berlandier (a French national); and a military escort. The group moved slowly north, reaching the Rio Grande at Laredo in February 1828 and San Antonio de Béxar in March.

Mexico's Texas problems were apparent even at Béxar, which presented a shabby face to the world. “The buildings, though many are of stone, show no beauty, nor do they have any conveniences,” Sánchez reported. “There are two squares, almost joined together, being divided merely by the space occupied by the parochial church, but neither one is worthy of notice.” Berlandier said that “Ciudad de Béxar resembles a large village more than the municipal seat of a department.”

The sad state of the town seemed the result of neglect, both personal and public. Sánchez might have been expected to feel a certain sympathy for his countrymen, but in fact residents of central Mexico, especially Mexico City, often felt as little kinship for their frontier compatriots as the residents of Boston or Philadelphia did for the backwoodsmen of Kentucky or the Cajuns of Louisiana. Sánchez observed wryly, “The character of the people is care-free; they are enthusiastic dancers, very fond of luxury, and the worst punishment that can be inflicted upon them is work.”

The prevailing distaste toward work wasn't entirely a deficiency of character; circumstances conspired to prevent work from being rewarded. Most of the families at Béxar were connected to the army, and their military obligations precluded regular farming. Other deterrents to agriculture were hostile Indians, who threatened anyone venturing far from the town, and the lack of reliable rain, which made cultivation chancy—even as the Indian threat made digging irrigation ditches unacceptably dangerous.

But the main reason Béxar failed to thrive, Sánchez and Berlandier agreed, was that maladministration and corruption had demoralized the inhabitants. “For months, and even years at times,” Sánchez said, “these troops have gone without salary or supplies, constantly in active service against the Indians, dependent for their subsistence on buffalo meat, deer, and other game they may be able to secure with great difficulty. . . . If any money arrives, it disappears instantly, for infamous hands are not lacking to take it and give the poor soldiers goods at double their normal value in exchange for what they have earned, suffering the inclemencies of the weather while these inhuman tyrants slept peacefully in their beds.” Berlandier condemned the local administration and wished Mexico City would, too. “I have witnessed actions,” he said, “which, under a well-regulated government, ought to lead their perpetrators to the gallows.”