Lone Star Nation (60 page)

And to the Texans themselves. Spurned by the United States, still claimed by Mexico, Texas reluctantly embarked on a career as independent republic. Though hindsight would hallow the years of Texas nationhood—Texas schoolchildren would be taught to cherish the fact that their state, alone of the eventual fifty, had once been a separate republic—to those who lived through them, they were fraught with danger and confusion.

The gravest danger was the one that had prompted Spain and then Mexico to grant Moses and then Stephen Austin permission to found their colony. If anything, the threat from the Comanches and other Indian tribes grew during the Texas revolution. The Texas rebels broke Mexico's power without replacing it with their own, and the Indians lost no time in taking advantage of their opportunity. “Bastrop county suffered more from Indians during the year 1836 than for any other year of its history,” Noah Smithwick remembered. “I could mention numbers of its best men who were killed during that year.” Bastrop County served as an instructive example of the Indian troubles, and Smithwick was an informed witness. At the northern edge of Austin's colony, Bastrop bordered the region the Comanches still claimed for their own, and with many of the American men gone to fight the Mexicans, the Indians raided far down into the colony. Smithwick took leave of the anti-Mexican army to enlist in a ranger company established to hold the northern frontier against the native warriors. From January 1836 he rode up and down the Colorado River chasing Indians, recapturing livestock, reclaiming captives, and generally conducting a war that paralleled the war against Mexico. The casualties in this war were fewer than those in the struggle against Mexico, but the engagements were no less brutal in their smaller way. Raid and reprisal, stalking and ambush, scalping and mutilation characterized the tactics of both sides. The fighting continued long past San Jacinto and the withdrawal of Mexican forces from Texas, with neither Indians nor Anglos having a clear advantage.

Upon his inauguration as Texas president, Sam Houston tried to end the Indian war. This suited Smithwick and most of those he knew. “The white people, weary of the perpetual warfare which compelled them to live in forts and make a subsistence as best they might, hailed the proposition for a treaty with delight,” Smithwick wrote. The Comanches along the Colorado were also tired of the fighting, and they agreed to negotiate. They spoke no English, and the Anglos no Comanche, but the Indians knew some Spanish, as did Smithwick, who accordingly became a treaty commissioner for the Texans. The Comanches insisted that Smithwick travel to their camp, to negotiate on their own turf. His comrades warned him not to go, but he decided to chance it. “Knowing that there is a degree of honor even among Indians touching those who voluntarily become their guests, I yielded to the stress of circumstances and agreed to accompany them back to their camp.”

Along with nearly every other Anglo in Texas, Smithwick considered the Indians savages, and as a ranger he had battled them fiercely. But he appreciated their better points, and he approached their camp with a relatively open mind. First to catch his eye were the captives: one Anglo woman and two Anglo boys, and one Mexican woman and two Mexican boys. Of the six, the Mexican woman was the only one who indicated any desire to leave the Comanches. She had been captured as a grown woman and was homesick. But the others had been taken young, had grown up among the Comanches, and considered themselves Comanches. One, an Anglo lad of about eighteen, in fact had been captured twice by Smithwick's rangers, but each time escaped and returned to his adoptive people. The Comanches also had a captured Waco child. One of Smithwick's hosts, Chief Quinaseico, explained that his band of Comanches had surprised a camp of Wacos and killed them all, except that one boy. “After the fight was over I went into a lodge and found this boy, about two years old, sitting beside its dead mother crying,” Quinaseico explained to Smithwick. “My heart was sorry for him, and I took him up in my arms and brought him home to my lodge and my wife took him to her bosom, and fed him, and he is mine now.”

Smithwick spent several weeks with the Comanches. Various aspects of their lives and customs struck him as noteworthy. They were entirely carnivorous, subsisting on buffalo and other game. This gave them an advantage over tribes that grew corn and squash or gathered pecans and tubers, for they had no particular territory they had to defend. Unlike most tribes, the Comanches eschewed alcohol, which gave them another advantage, especially in dealings with whites, who relied on liquor in Indian diplomacy. Though terrible against their enemies, the Comanches were quite orderly among themselves. “They were the most peaceable community I ever lived in,” Smithwick said. “Their criminal laws were as inexorable as those of the Medes and Persians, and the code was so simply worded there was no excuse for ignorance. It was simply the old Mosaic law, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' . . . In cases of dispute, a council of the old men decided it, and from their decision there was no appeal.” While the Comanches merrily tortured enemies who fell alive into their hands, they treated each other with kindness and respect. “I never saw a woman or a child abused. The women, as in all savage tribes, were abject slaves, but their inferiority was their protection from the chastisement which ‘civilized' husbands sometimes visit on their wives. An Indian brave would have felt it a burning disgrace to strike a woman.”

Smithwick's sojourn included conversations about the relative claims of Indians and Anglos to Texas. “I had many long, earnest talks with those old Comanche chiefs, and I could not but admit the justice of their contention,” Smithwick said. “The country they considered theirs by right of inheritance; the game had been placed there for their food.” A chief named Muguara put the aboriginal case most succinctly:

We have set up our lodges in these groves and swung our children from these boughs from time immemorial. When game beats away from us we pull down our lodges and move away, leaving no trace to frighten it, and in a little while it comes back. But the white man comes and cuts down the trees, building houses and fences, and the buffaloes get frightened and leave and never come back, and the Indians are left to starve, or, if we follow the game, we trespass on the hunting ground of other tribes and war ensues.

Smithwick asked if the Comanches would agree to settle down and become farmers. “No,” Muguara answered, “the Indians were not made to work. If they build houses and try to live like white men they will all die.” So what
was
the solution? Muguara put it simply: “If the white men would draw a line defining their claims and keep on their side of it, the red men would not molest them.”

Smithwick thought this a good idea, and he took it to Sam Houston. The Texas president agreed in principle. But he discovered that the Texas legislature, like Texans generally, held a different view. Houston had negotiated a treaty with his old friends the Cherokees, designed to secure their rights in the new republic, only to have the legislature reject it. Houston was fairly certain that what was withheld from the Cherokees would never be offered to the more warlike Comanches. As he sadly told Smithwick, “If I could build a wall from the Red River to the Rio Grande, so high that no Indian could scale it, the white people would go crazy trying to devise means to get beyond it.”

Houston was right, as his successor demonstrated. The Texas constitution forbade consecutive terms for president, and Houston was followed in 1838 by Mirabeau Lamar, the dashing horseman of San Jacinto (who won election by default after both his principal rivals committed suicide). Lamar launched an aggressive campaign to drive the Comanches north of the Red River. The bloody symbol of Lamar's approach was the “Council House fight,” an 1840 incident in which a large delegation of Comanches visiting San Antonio to arrange a peace settlement was seized by Texas authorities, triggering gunfire that killed thirty-five Comanches, including a dozen chiefs and several women and children, and seven Texans. The affair sparked a summer of raids and reprisals that reciprocally ravaged Texas towns and Comanche villages, killed scores of fighters and noncombatants on both sides, and thoroughly unsettled the frontier. At great and unsustainable expense, the Texans forced the Comanches north. But only the wishful among the Texans imagined that the Comanches' tactical retreat terminated the historic contest for control of the vast Texas plains.

The vulnerability of Texas to Indian attack from the north was mirrored by its vulnerability to Mexican attack from the south. Mexico's long revolution, which had begun in 1810 and lately spun off the Texas revolution, continued to convulse the country. During Santa Anna's detention in Texas, his rivals quarreled for primacy in Mexico City, while federalists in various provinces agitated for local autonomy. The government lacked resources to pay its debts or defend the country from those foreigners who insisted on collecting what was owed to them. The French exploited an incident in which one of their nationals saw his bakery burned, and launched what was called “la guerra de los pasteles” (the Pastry War), ultimately landing French marines at Veracruz.

Santa Anna had retired to his hacienda after returning from the north, but he recognized an opportunity to reprise his role at Tampico nine years before. He rushed to the coast to defend Mexico's honor. Although he succeeded in repulsing the invaders, his leg was badly injured by French cannon fire. Doctors debated treatment, leaving the general to issue a poignant message to his countrymen: “Probably this will be the last victory that I shall offer my native land. . . . From this day forward the most unjust of Mexican enemies shall not dare to place their feet on our soil. . . . May all Mexicans, forgetting my political mistakes, not deny me the only title which I wish to leave my children, that of a good Mexican.”

Santa Anna's dying request was published as a poster that circulated throughout the country. When its publication was followed by news that the hero hadn't died after all, but survived a grim amputation, his reputation was remade. He traveled slowly to Mexico City, reveling in his popularity and worrying his rivals. He might have seized power upon reaching the capital, but he contented himself with the title of interim president, bestowed by a grateful congress, and retired to his hacienda once more, to allow matters to ripen further. They soon did, and when he returned again to the capital, in the autumn of 1841, it was as though his troubles in Texas had never occurred.

Indeed, he soon turned those troubles to his own benefit. Ignoring everything he had told the Texans and the Americans about Texas being lost to Mexico, Santa Anna distracted his compatriots from their domestic problems by reopening the Texas war. In the spring of 1842 he sent General Rafael Vásquez against San Antonio with seven hundred men. Vásquez captured the town with little difficulty, but he remained only a few days before returning south with such valuables as could be readily carried. Several months later a more serious offensive, under General Adrian Woll, took San Antonio again. Woll lingered to tangle with a force dispatched by Sam Houston, who had been elected president once more; in the clash some hundred soldiers, counting both sides, were killed. Woll retreated toward the Rio Grande with the Texans in pursuit. The Texans chased Woll across the river, but then three hundred of them—forgetful of the fate of the Matamoros expedition of 1836—descended on the Mexican town of Mier, seeking booty. They were captured after sharp fighting and were sent south as prisoners. On the road they escaped and fled into the mountains. Some starved there, and some found their way back to Texas, but the majority were retaken. Santa Anna ordered that every tenth prisoner be shot. A jar of beans was passed among them, containing black and white beans in the ratio of one to ten. The prisoners blindly drew the beans, and the seventeen with black were executed.

C h a p t e r   2 1

Andrew Jackson Dies Happy

H
ad the Texas republic otherwise thrived, it might have weathered the Indian wars and Mexican invasions with little damage to the collective psyche. But the hard times that hit the United States with the Panic of 1837 spilled across the Sabine, complicating the creation of all the institutions of government and society the new country required. Texas finance was a bad joke. Until the panic summer, bank notes issued in Louisiana and Mississippi circulated in Texas, albeit discounted for distance from the banks of issue. Specie—gold and silver—immigrated in the pockets of the people who came. But as the banks behind the paper crumbled, the metal money went into hiding and Texans were reduced to barter. “Horses were generally considered legal tender,” Noah Smithwick recalled. “But owing to the constant drain on the public treasury by the horse-loving Indian, that kind of currency became scarce, so we settled on the cow as the least liable to fluctuation.”

Land scrip and government promissories served as a substitute for money. Yet these inspired speculation, with strapped holders selling them at far below face value to persons willing to bet on the rise. A visitor to the town of Houston, which sprang up on Buffalo Bayou not far from the San Jacinto battle site, described how speculators turned distress to profit.

Some were engaged in purchasing the discharges of the soldiers, each of whom is entitled, beyond his pay of eight dollars a month in government paper, to six hundred and forty acres of land for each six months' service and in proportion for a less period. For this he gets a certificate from the government. The discharged soldier comes to Houston, hungry and next to naked, with nothing but his claims upon the government, which his situation compels him to sell. If he gets ten per cent for his money scrip and fifty dollars for a six months' discharge, he receives quite as much as these claims were selling for during the summer.

Beyond the effects of such transactions on the economy, they badly sapped morale. “When the storm beaten soldier thus sees the reward of all his sufferings reduced to a few dollars, he has too much reason to lament over the time which he has worse than thrown away and often in despair gives himself up to total abandonment.”

In time the government issued proper currency to redeem the warrants. This suited the speculators but, because nothing substantial backed the currency, merely deferred the day of reckoning. Smithwick described the system in action.

When the first issue of treasury notes came to take the place of the land scrip and military scrip, the sporting fraternity hailed the change with delight; but, when . . . the treasury notes ran down till it took a mountain of them to represent a small stake, the gamblers grew discontented. Their distress was relieved when the exchequer bills replaced the dishonored redbacks, as the treasury notes were called. But again the currency depreciated till a small jack-pot could not accommodate the bulk of paper. Then they began talking about the advisability of “a new ish” [issue], and, that hope of relief failing, some of them went off and joined the army. Sowell tells of one who drew a black bean [after the Mier debacle] and went to his death with a smile. I have heard the story often.

The financial woes of the republic reflected the lack of experience of its leaders and their democratic distrust of banks and bankers. Andrew Jackson had killed the Bank of the United States (and in doing so helped touch off the Panic of '37), and Sam Houston wasn't about to saddle Texas with anything similar. But a deeper problem was the underlying insecurity of the republic. As long as Mexico refused to recognize Texan independence, and as long as it could send troops across the Rio Grande, even if only sporadically, Texas had to prepare for war. This bled the treasury and discouraged the investment that would have put Texas on a more solid fiscal footing.

It also gave life in republican Texas a peculiar air. Soldierly types—young men looking for trouble, with time on their hands—were overrepresented in the Texas population. They frequented saloons and gambling houses, astonishing visitors with their capacity for drink and riotous behavior. A traveler from Ohio was told that the Texas climate required regular consumption of alcohol. He wasn't convinced but couldn't deny the prevalence of the view. “While I hesitate to admit that there is something relaxing in the climate that makes it necessary for all to indulge in the use of some kind of stimulus to some extent to keep up the spirits, I must acknowledge that there were few who did not give ear to the doctrine.” The Texans crowded the saloons every day of the week and most nights, striving to satisfy their insatiable thirst. “The extent to which this vice was carried on exceeded all belief. It appeared to be the business of the great mass of the people to collect around these centers of vice and hold their drunken orgies, without seeming to know that the Sabbath was made for more serious purposes and night for rest. Drinking was reduced to a system and had its own laws and regulations. Nothing was regarded as a greater violation of established etiquette than for one who was going to drink not to invite all within a reasonable distance to partake, so that the Texians being entirely a military people not only fought but drank in platoons.”

The Texans gambled even more than they drank. So egregious did the gaming become that the legislature felt obliged to curb the cards and dice. “But as those who passed the law were the most active in breaking it,” the Ohio traveler noted, “the law itself was of little consequence any further than it afforded the gambler the double satisfaction of knowing that he was breaking the laws of God and those of man at the same time.”

Drinking and gambling naturally gave rise to fighting. “Some of the disturbances which took place during my stay at Houston were of the most revolting description,” the Ohioan said, “and one or two encounters occurred which were attended with mortal consequences, under circumstances of peculiar horror. Some of the scenes which took place in the streets exceeded description and afforded a melancholy proof to what a point of degradation human nature may descend.”

As in many frontier societies, the institutions of public order lagged behind the causes of social disorder. The problem was aggravated in Texas by the continuing state of war, with its expense and its appeal to the violence-prone. During the whole period of the republic, crime—lethal and lesser—was a major problem. In 1843 a minister at Houston devoted a sermon to the subject:

God has said,
Thou shalt do no murder
. This people have reversed the command. I do not here speak of that fashionable mode of taking life, according to an imperious code of
self-styled
honor [dueling deserved a separate sermon, being a plague unto itself]. But I speak of
wanton, barbarous outrages,
in violation of all law human and divine, which find among this people, not simply apologists, but everywhere bold defenders. Go through this land, and point me to a single town which has not been the scene of some deadly affray . . . and then tell me of an instance where the murderer has been arraigned by the proper authorities and made to suffer the penalty due to his crime. Nay, men swear each other's death, and that too openly—and from day to day walk the streets with deadly weapons, and no effort is made to put a stop to their murderous intentions—and when at last one has fallen, how often is heard the comment—“It is all right, he ought to have died long ago.”

In parts of the republic, individual crime escalated to irregular warfare. The Redlands of East Texas were as lawless as in the bad old days of the Neutral Ground; rival gangs of land cheats, extortionists, arsonists, and horse thieves organized themselves as “Regulators” and “Moderators” and intimidated or enrolled local officials. Dozens of people died, and for years the region raged beyond the control of the government of the republic.

Yet the troubles in Texas didn't prevent people from wanting to move there. On the contrary, Texas was even more desirable as a destination than it had been before the revolution. Land remained cheaply available, and immigrants no longer had to worry about restrictions on religion or slavery. Being a separate country from the United States, it continued to attract those who wished to leave wives, debts, and indictments behind. As the ruckus in the Redlands and on the streets of most Texas towns demonstrated, not all the immigrants became upstanding citizens on arrival. But even if they had, the sheer numbers of the immigrants—the population of Texas more than doubled during the years of the republic, from about 50,000 to around 125,000—would have tested the ability of the new country to absorb them. An orderly immigration would have strengthened the republic; the disorderly immigration it actually experienced made things more unsettled than ever.

Texans weren't the kind to worry excessively. Most accepted a certain chaos as a cost of living in the new land. But amid the Indian attacks, the Mexican invasions, the financial implosion, and the spontaneous and organized crime, even the optimistic wondered what was becoming of Texas. “A general gloom seems to rest over every section of the Republic,” a widely read newspaper observed in 1842, “and doubt and sorrow are depicted on almost every brow.”

The republic required help, which certain foreign governments were willing to provide. As France's meddling in Mexico suggested, the French government saw opportunity in the troubles surrounding the Texas revolution. French merchants coveted access to Texas markets, French spinners to Texas cotton. King Louis-Philippe wanted to reclaim a role for France in the New World and thought the contested coast of the Gulf of Mexico a likely place to start. France recognized the independence of Texas in 1839 and spent the next several years inflating Texan egos and ambitions, especially vis-à-vis the United States.

But it was Britain that caught the eye of Texans. Where France dreamed of a New World sphere of influence, Britain already had one. In the quarter century since Spain's Latin American empire had fallen apart, the British had been busy reconfiguring the pieces into a Latin American empire of their own. This British empire mostly lacked formal trappings, being a realm in which trade rather than territory was the goal. British diplomats and merchants negotiated and exploited pacts that opened markets throughout Spain's former realm to British commerce and investment. In exchange, Britain's own markets were made available to Latin American exports—at a time when most other countries, including the United States, restricted goods from abroad. The British navy kept competitors away from Britain's new friends.

From the start of the Texas troubles, Britain registered interest in the emergence of another republic from the Spanish ruins. By the 1830s British textile mills had grown alarmingly dependent on American cotton; Texas offered a separate source of the fluffy stuff. That an independent Texas might block the expansion of the United States to the southwest made the prospect still more appealing. Britain had fought two wars with the United States since 1776, and sufficient points of friction remained—along the border with Canada, for instance, and in the Oregon country—that a third conflict (as John Quincy Adams warned) was hardly inconceivable. Whatever impeded American expansion suited Britain.

One small matter, however, limited British enthusiasm for Texas independence. Having decided that slavery was bad for themselves and their empire, the British concluded—from a mix of altruism and competitiveness—that it was bad for the world. They sought to suppress the slave trade and avoided consorting conspicuously with governments that hadn't seen the light that dawned on Britain in 1833.

Yet British leaders believed that the purposes of humanity and Britannia alike could be served by adept diplomacy toward Texas. The Texans might be moved to emancipate their slaves, perhaps in exchange for a British loan to rescue their failing treasury. Or the British government might simply buy all the Texas slaves and manumit them. Either way, Texas would grow closer to heaven and to Britain.

But the prerequisite for any such plan was that Texas remain distinct from the United States. An independent Texas might yield to British blandishments; a Texas attached to the United States would never do so. From the moment of Texas independence, British leaders did their best to frustrate American annexation. British foreign minister Lord Palmerston, with the sort of understatement on which the British ruling classes prided themselves, told the House of Commons in August 1836 that the prospect of American annexation “would be a subject which ought seriously to engage the attention of that House and of the British public.”

For the first few years of independence the Texans kept their distance from Britain. Sam Houston and other veterans of the War of 1812 had difficulty seeing the British as other than enemies; nearly all Texans preferred, and many still hoped for, the embrace of the United States.