Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
Another soldier was also fortunate enough to enjoy the company of his family. One night in early November, artillery lieutenant Almeron Dickinson’s dark-haired young wife, Susanna, had been asleep at their home in Gonzales when a group of renegade volunteers from Louisiana passing through the village broke into her house—as they had broken into every other house in town. She and her year-old daughter, Angelina, had escaped serious injury, but when the news reached Dickinson he rode east as soon as he could and brought them to Béxar. She left behind three feather beds, her fifty-piece china set, and most of their household goods—even their cows and oxen. In Béxar they boarded at the home of Ramón Músquiz, the town’s former political chief and still a staunch centralist, on the northeast corner of Main Plaza. Despite her husband’s allegiances, Mrs. Músquiz took a shine to Susanna and her blue-eyed daughter.
These few remaining residents were among the exceptions, however. Béxar, for the most part, was voting with its feet.
When Neill saw the families leaving town, he sent expresses to Sam Houston, in Goliad, and the governor and General Council in San Felipe. To the provisional government he once again pleaded his case. “Unless we are reinforced and victualled, we must become easy prey to the enemy,” he wrote, and in disgust ended with: “I shall not make again application for aid, considering it superfluous but wait the result of either receiving aid or an attack before it should arrive, in which case I will do the best I can with the small force I have.” His letter to Houston was even more desperate:
The men in my command have been in the field for four months, they are almost naked, and this day they were to receive pay for the first month of their enlistment, and almost every one of them speaks of going home, and not less then twenty will leave tomorrow, and leave here only about 80 men under my command, and there are at Laredo Three Thousand men under the command of General Rameriz, and two other generals and it appears by a letter received here last night, one thousand of them are destined for this place and two thousand for Matamoros, we are in a torpid defenseless situation, we have not and cannot get from all the citizens here Horses enough since Johnson and Grant left, to send out a patrol or spy company…. I hope we shall be reinforced in 8 days or we shall be overrun by the enemy, but if I have only one Hundred men, I will fight one thousand as long as I can; and then not surrender—
The government for the most part ceased to function, though each group continued to issue competing and sometimes conflicting orders. The four-man advisory committee sometimes dwindled to two members, but still issued occasional recommendations to the governor; some were implemented, some were not. Just when Texas most needed guidance and organization, infighting between its political leaders had rendered its governing body ineffectual and unfocused. The military, most in need of attention at this time, split into ever-smaller units instead of concentrating its forces. And the government proved incapable of supplying the most basic needs of an army, even one as small as this. Texas slowly fell into a state of chaos and apathy that was apparent to all. “That our government is bad,” San Felipe’s
Telegraph and Texas Register
editorialized, “all acknowledge, and no one will deny.”
On January 19, the arrival of a small reinforcement cheered Neill’s bedraggled garrison. It was only a force of about thirty volunteers, but the man leading them could inspire even the most apathetic soldier.
James Bowie had been the first choice of Houston and Smith to lead the Matamoros expedition—back when those two had been enthusiastic about it, and before they realized its many weaknesses—and Houston had issued orders to that effect on December 17. But Bowie, as usual, was on the move, and it took more than a week for the directive to reach him. Bowie rode to San Felipe, and on December 28 appeared before the General Council and outlined his plan for the expedition; the next day the council’s military affairs committee passed a resolution supporting the appointment. But before a decision could be made by the General Council as a whole, a comedy of orders ensued. When Frank Johnson arrived in San Felipe on January 3 to report that he had already sent James Grant with volunteers toward Matamoros, the council dropped Bowie and authorized Johnson to assume command of the operation. Johnson bowed out three days later over the council’s refusal to approve his officer recommendations, which led to James Fannin’s appointment as expedition commander the next day—this despite the fact that he was an officer in the regular army and thus required to take his orders from his commanding officer, General Houston, who had ordered him to Matagorda, on the coast, to begin enlisting and training recruits.
When Johnson changed his mind the following day, he was reinstated, though Fannin was not relieved of command. That made three leaders of the excursion—four if the actual leader in the field, Grant, was included, particularly since he declared himself the acting commander in chief of the federal army. The General Council’s failure to muster a quorum and its corresponding lack of authority further muddied the question of command. For his part, Houston was informed of none of these developments, some of them directly undermining his authority. Such was the near-total dysfunction that characterized the Texian cause.
The legitimacy of the Matamoros expedition and its leaders was further undermined when Fannin issued a proclamation to his men that “the troops should be paid out of the first spoils taken from the enemy.” Houston was aghast when he read it. The statement, he told Smith, “divests the campaign of any character save that of a piratical or predatory war,” rather than characterizing it as one in defense of principles and civil and political rights. What, he wondered, would be the reaction of the civilized world? And the proclamation would surely have an adverse effect on the heretofore friendly residents of Matamoros, whose possessions were no doubt the spoils referred to.
Meanwhile, Bowie—acting on direct orders from his good friend Houston—left to meet Grant and the volunteers at Goliad, determined to take control of the expedition. He reached the small town on the lower San Antonio River on January 11 to find Grant organizing his forces with complete disregard for Bowie’s orders from Houston. That same day, the General Council issued a statement that it did not recognize Bowie as an officer in the Texian army, further sabotaging his authority to lead the expedition. Since Bowie, in truth, had no formal commission—his rank of colonel was only an honorary one, bestowed upon his election as leader of the Nacogdoches militia the previous year—there was little he could do but wait for Houston to show up and sort things out if possible.
Houston arrived on January 14 and proceeded delicately. Since he had no official say over the volunteer army, any control he had over its officers was based on his charisma, their familiarity with him, and their loyalty to him or to Smith. Houston attempted to dissuade volunteers from embarking on what increasingly appeared to be a foolhardy venture, citing the serious lack of supplies and the difficulties of attacking a well-fortified city of twelve thousand after a two-hundred-mile journey. A few days later, when Grant led his men to the town of Refugio, twenty-five miles to the south, Houston accompanied the expedition.
Houston had been an effective orator during his political career, and he used all his powers now in speeches and asides to large and small groups of volunteers. By the time he left for San Felipe on January 28, he had managed to talk most of the men out of participating, though Grant and Johnson, who joined the army at Refugio, seemed determined to continue, and rode ahead to San Patricio, a small town on the Nueces River, then the southern border of Texas. The remainder of the volunteers decided to remain in Refugio, and when James Fannin arrived with two hundred more men, they threw their lot in with him.
While awaiting supplies, Fannin received word on February 7 that General José Urrea had reinforced Matamoros with six hundred men. Fannin switched plans and took his men to Goliad to regarrison the presidio there, despite word from Johnson that if Fannin marched to Matamoros immediately, he would be joined by an army of eight hundred unhappy Mexican troops from the border state of Tamaulipas.
The chaos continued. Only sixty-five men had followed Grant and Johnson out of Refugio. They rode south to San Patricio, where they headquartered and spent the next few weeks rounding up horses in the area for the army of volunteers they still expected. Near the end of February, Grant rode south on a foraging expedition with twenty-six men while Johnson and thirty-four volunteers remained in town. In the cold and rainy predawn hours of February 27, Johnson’s detachment was surprised by a forward unit of the Mexican invasion column moving up the coast into Texas under Urrea, Santa Anna’s best commander. Only Johnson and four others escaped alive. Three days later and twenty-five miles south, at Agua Dulce Creek, Urrea ambushed Grant’s company and killed all but a few. The Scotsman might well have escaped, but he rode back to aid his trapped comrades and fell with them. That was the end of the ill-fated Matamoros expedition.
By then, Houston had received Neill’s missive regarding the deplorable conditions at Béxar, and the news that a thousand Mexican soldiers were on the march to the town. He had long wanted to send a capable commander there with reinforcements. His options at the time were weak, since few of the men or their officers recognized his authority. In desperation, he asked Bowie to raise a company of volunteers and go to Neill’s aid. Bowie agreed to Houston’s request—as always, he was ready and willing to ride to the place where the action was likeliest. Besides, Béxar was a home of sorts, albeit one somewhat haunted by memories of his young wife, Ursula, and the Veramendi house, where they had lived for a while.
“He met my request with his usual promptitude and manliness,” Houston wrote later, adding, “There is no man on whose forecast, prudence, and valor, I place a higher estimate.” On January 17, Houston wrote to Governor Smith:
Colonel Bowie will leave here in a few hours for Bexar, with a detachment of from thirty to fifty men. Capt. Patton’s company, it is believed, are there now. I have ordered the fortifications of Bexar demolished, and if you should think well of it, I will remove the cannon and other munitions of war to Gonzales and Copano, blow up the Alamo, and abandon the place, as it will be impossible to keep up the Station with volunteers. The sooner I can be authorized the better it will be for the country.
Copano, a small town on the Texas coast about thirty-five miles south of Goliad, was vital to supplying that post as well as Béxar. To Houston, the thought of detachments of his meager army holed up in forts eventually to be besieged by a Mexican force numbering in the thousands was intolerable. He much preferred the strategy of repairing eastward to Gonzales—on the other side of the ample Guadalupe River, where the terrain favored his irregulars—rather than defending his territory on the more open plains, where the well-drilled Mexican
soldados
and lancers owned the advantage. But Houston had no official control over volunteers, so such orders had to come from the governor and the General Council. Due to the fractured government’s relentless squabbling, Houston would not receive the authorization he craved. Worse, his authority as commander in chief would be undermined.
In the meantime, he understood the dangers faced by the force at Béxar, and was doing what he could to bolster the garrison there. Besides the reinforcements of Bowie and those of Captain William Patton, one of Houston’s recent appointments, he had sent an express to Captain Dimitt on the coast, asking him to raise a hundred men and march to the Alamo as soon as possible.
Bowie finally gathered a company of about thirty men—at the low end of Houston’s cautious estimate—mostly from Captain John Chenoweth’s Invincibles, and rode hard up the Béxar road, ninety-five miles north along the San Antonio River. He arrived in town on January 19, two days later, to find the garrison in bad shape, and still sorely lacking just about everything, from clothing and shoes to medical supplies and money. On the positive side, morale and discipline had recently improved, the news of one thousand Mexican soldiers on the march to Béxar proving to be a great motivator.
With Bowie was James Bonham, a tall, darkly attractive lawyer from South Carolina recently arrived in Texas. He and William Travis had been neighbors as boys in the farm country of Edgefield County, separated by just a couple of years in age and five miles in distance, and they had attended the same country schools. Whether they were acquainted at the time is unknown, though they may have encountered each other in the classroom or on the playground. Regardless, they definitely ran into each other in San Felipe in the fall of 1835.
Bonham’s blood fairly dripped rebellion: both his grandfathers and his father had fought in the Revolutionary War, and his overactive passion for the then-current nullification and secession movements had gotten him expelled from South Carolina College in his senior year. After passing the bar in 1830, he had been named colonel in command of an artillery company in Charleston. He was also a favorite of the ladies, who admired him for his courtroom caning of an opposing lawyer who, Bonham claimed, had insulted his female client. After Bonham was sentenced to ninety days for contempt of court, his female fans brought him flowers and food during his stay in jail. In Mobile, in the fall of 1835, he helped organize a Texas volunteer group dubbed the Mobile Greys. Soon after arriving in Texas in November, he wrote to Houston volunteering his services without compensation: “I shall receive nothing,” he insisted, “either in the form of service pay, or lands, or rations.” Though he had announced plans to open a law office in Brazoria, he proceeded to Béxar and arrived a few days after Cós’s surrender. He accompanied the rest of the Greys when they left with Grant for Goliad, but remained loyal to Smith and Houston. After Houston gave him a commission as second lieutenant in the cavalry, he had decided to return with Bowie to the Alamo, where Travis and his cavalry legion had been ordered. Bonham was also a friend of James Fannin, who had recommended him highly, as had Houston: “His influence in the army is great,” Houston had written to Lieutenant Governor James Robinson before the General Council split, “more so than some who
‘would be generals’ ”
—a thinly veiled put-down of Fannin.