Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
Santa Anna arrived in New Washington at noon the next day, April 18, to hear disappointing news from Almonte. The colonel had galloped down to the beach to see Burnet and other cabinet members in a skiff about forty yards away, pulling for a steamer out in the bay. They were still within rifle range, and the dragoons took aim, but Almonte pushed one carbine to the side and ordered his men to hold their fire—the gallant colonel had seen a woman aboard. The cabinet, Almonte reported, was likely safe on Galveston Island at that moment.
On the morning of April 20, after looting and burning the town, Santa Anna’s division marched up the bayou toward Lynch’s Ferry. When advance scouts galloped back to report a large force of rebels up ahead, he was momentarily panicked. But he recovered his composure and continued north toward the ferry. Before noon, they came within sight of the enemy, on the far end of an empty plain almost a mile wide, in front of the road that led to the crossing. Thick woods and marsh surrounded the field of knee-high grass.
Houston had beaten him to Lynch’s Ferry, but no matter—Santa Anna was confident that his 750 elite troops, most of them seasoned veterans of the actions at the Alamo, or against Fannin at Coleto Creek, could defeat a rebel army of equal size composed of unruly, untrained farmers and frontiersmen. The imminent arrival of Cós’s five hundred
soldados
would guarantee it. Santa Anna posted his troops at the opposite end of the plain from the rebels, on a slight rise at the edge of a small thicket; five hundred yards to their rear lay a boggy marsh and a good-size body of water known as Peggy Lake. He noticed with some satisfaction that Houston was trapped, with his back against Buffalo Bayou—forced either to fight or go into the water behind him on the other side of the road.
Once his men had settled in, Santa Anna ordered a sally against the rebel position—perhaps he could draw the enemy out onto the open prairie between them. His gunners wheeled out their only fieldpiece, a brass nine-pounder that had been hell to drag through the boggy roads from the Brazos, and began blasting away. Two rebel six-pounders in the far-off trees along the road answered in kind. A few men were injured on each side, including Colonel James Neill, who sustained a serious hip wound. He was evacuated to a nearby house and would see no more action on this field of battle.
Near sunset, after a skirmish between Mexican dragoons and Texian cavalrymen that ended with a rebel retreat, both sides retired for the evening. Santa Anna ordered breastworks built, so
soldados
worked into the night erecting a four-foot wall of pack saddles, sacks of flour and corn, supply boxes, and other baggage. He was content with his army’s position, but he found it difficult to sleep. He had nothing but contempt for the colonists—minister of war Tornel had described them as “ignorant of the art of war, incapable of discipline, and renowned for insubordination,” and Santa Anna agreed with that assessment—but the rebels’ restraint during the cannonade, and their daring mounted attack, had surprised him.
G
ENERAL
H
OUSTON HAD GIVEN ORDERS
to his “ignorant” rabble not to awaken him until eight a.m. It was his first good night’s sleep in weeks, and he arose a few minutes before the hour to find the morning clear and the air cool. Reveille for his troops had consisted of a steady tapping on a drum at four a.m., and by the time their commander awoke, they were excited and eager to fight: “Let us attack the enemy and give them hell at once” was frequently heard. Houston was told that five hundred Mexican reinforcements were arriving. He had been expecting them, thanks to the intelligence acquired from the captured courier.
About noon, Houston called six of his senior officers to a council of war to discuss one question: Should they assault the enemy themselves, or await his attack? The subject was put to a vote, which yielded a surprising result, considering the troops’ eagerness to fight—all but two were in favor of waiting for the Mexicans to make the first move. One officer was leery of marching across the mile-wide prairie without bayonets; few of the men carried military-issue arms. The other three pointed out the strength of their position and the advantages of defending it.
Houston dismissed his council, then dispatched Deaf Smith with six horsemen to tear down the small bridge over Vince’s Bayou. Eight miles southwest down the Harrisburg Road, it constituted the only escape route from the battlefield save for the route to New Washington—and was also the most likely route for any more Mexican reinforcements. He advised Smith to hurry if he wanted to participate in the upcoming battle. The scout rode off with six volunteers and a few axes.
As Smith galloped away, Houston walked among his men, asking if they were ready to fight. The resounding affirmatives were all he needed. “Very well, get your dinners and I will lead you into the fight,” he told them. “And if you whip them, every one of you shall be a captain.” He conferred with his officers again, who had talked to their men and reported them raring to go. And some Texians who had climbed trees reported no activity in the Mexican camp and no sentries along its perimeter.
At three p.m., Houston ordered his troops paraded for attack in a line a thousand yards long. The men were overjoyed—they were finally going to fight. Houston did not know it, but some of his top officers had made a pledge the night before: they would fight the next day, with or without him. As the men lined up in formation in front of the trees, any thoughts of mutiny disappeared.
Within half an hour they had fanned out into four divisions facing the open prairie, with the Twin Sisters placed in the center. Houston, on a fine-looking light gray stallion named Saracen, rode down the length of the line. As he passed by, one company commander reminded his men that Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and their companions had fought bravely against an enemy force twenty times their number (the number of Mexican troops at the Alamo having been exaggerated in reports). Juan Seguín, who had left those worthies during the siege of the Alamo, stood not far away. He would lead a company of two dozen Tejano infantrymen against their killers.
About an hour later, Houston, in a low but clear voice, gave the order—“Trail arms! Forward!”—and his 930 men began marching quietly through the tall grass with their rifles held low by their sides. The regiment on the left used a line of oaks lining the field to screen their advance. Captains reminded their companies to hold their fire until within fifty yards of the enemy.
Unknown to the Texians, Cós’s four hundred
soldados
—he had been forced to leave a hundred men behind to deal with baggage carts bogged down in the mud—had force-marched almost twenty-four hours straight and had not eaten or slept the entire time. They were exhausted and hungry, and, worse, most of them were recent recruits with little experience. Once they had settled in and stacked their arms, Cós asked that his battalion be allowed to eat and rest. Santa Anna was not happy with the quality of the troops, but he granted the request, and as Cós’s men and most of the others prepared and ate their midday meals and then relaxed and indulged in their traditional midafternoon siesta, His Excellency followed suit. He lay down to rest in the shade of a tree—he had slept little the night before, and had spent much of the morning on horseback, examining the enemy lines through a spyglass—and was soon asleep. He and his army were stunningly unprepared.
A slight depression running through the field that led up to a low ridge in the middle of the prairie helped shield the Texians from sight as they advanced in two parallel lines under the warm sun. Neill’s eighteen-man artillery company used leather straps to pull the two cannon up the slope. Only one company, consisting of Kentucky riflemen, wore anything resembling a proper uniform. The rest of the rebels were dressed in dirty, ragged citizens’ clothes, from buckskins to frock coats, mostly dark or gray or brown, more mud-colored than anything else; some in boots, some in shoes, some in moccasins, almost all unshaven, sporting long hair and matted beards, looking more like a band of savages than a proper army. They were two hundred yards from the Mexican lines when the Twin Sisters roared to life and Houston galloped down the line, yelling, “No reinforcements! No reinforcements!”—Deaf Smith had just returned to tell him that the bridge at Vince’s Bayou was down. As the men broke into a run, a motley band of four fifers and two drummers began playing a popular and somewhat salacious ballad entitled “Will You Come to the Bower?” and then jumped into “Yankee Doodle,” and the attack was on.
Many of the men yelled, “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember La Bahía!” Others roared, “Remember Fannin!” or “Remember Goliad!” A Mexican bugler finally sounded the alarm, and
soldados
began to jump up and grab their rifles and muskets, but it was too late. The rebels poured over and through the makeshift breastworks and into the Mexican lines. Texian officers ordered their men to “Halt! Fire! And then charge!” but after one shot, few bothered to reload, instead turning their rifles into war clubs and unsheathing Bowie knives. Many of the
soldados
yelled, “Me no Alamo! Me no Goliad!” before they were slaughtered. Some stood and fought, but most turned and ran, panic-stricken. Cós and Almonte, on the right side of the Mexican lines, tried without success to keep their men from breaking—but the Texian assault could not be withstood.
One officer refused to retreat and stood his ground, directing the fire of the Mexican nine-pounder. As rebel fire dropped his gunners and the rest of his men ran for their lives, General Manuel Fernández Castrillón stood on an ammunition box and tried to rally his troops. Moments later he was alone, and he folded his arms and faced forward. A slug ripped into him, then another, then another, and he fell to the ground, lifeless.
The battle itself lasted no more than eighteen minutes, but carnage on a grand scale followed for another hour as the Texians’ tenuous discipline gave way to blind bloodlust. Retreating Mexicans reached Peggy Lake and splashed in, attempting to reach the far side, several hundred yards away. Rebels ran up and lined the edges of the water and shot them until the lake ran red; others followed the Mexicans in and took revenge with knives and hatchets. Some two hundred
soldados
died there.
Houston, on his third horse of the day and suffering from a left ankle shattered by a Mexican musket ball, tried to stop the bloodletting, as did other officers. It was no use. All across the field, their men were uncontrollable in their vengefulness. Santa Anna’s troops had shown no quarter to the rebels at the Alamo and Goliad. They would receive the same treatment now. “We followed the enemy,” remembered one captain, “shooting and killing them, for more than a mile.”
By day’s end, Texian casualties included seven deaths and more than thirty wounded—four of these so badly that they would die later. At least six hundred Mexicans lay dead on the field, and hundreds had been captured. Only a handful escaped. But the man the rebels wanted most—dead or alive—was nowhere to be found.
W
HEN THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE
and the roar of cannon awakened Santa Anna from a deep sleep, he leaped to his feet. He made a halfhearted attempt to organize the troops around him, but when a servant offered him a horse, he mounted and fled the battlefield eastward, accompanied by his secretary, Ramón Caro. Sanctuary, and perhaps even victory, was forty-odd miles away, where Filisola and the bulk of his army awaited. Finding the bridge at Vince’s Bayou down, and terrified of deep water, His Excellency retreated to a nearby thicket and became separated from Caro. He hid in some brush all night. At daybreak, he exchanged his gaudy clothes for some old slave duds he found in an abandoned shack. Around three p.m., a Texian search party found him hiding in tall grass; ignorant of his identity, they took him to camp. Only when Mexican prisoners began repeating his name as he passed by did his captors realize who he was. They escorted him to Houston, who was lying on a blanket under a tree with his injured leg propped up. Santa Anna grabbed Houston’s hand and introduced himself. Then the self-styled Napoleon of the West, the man who bragged that he asked for no quarter and gave none, pleaded that he “be treated as a general should when a prisoner of war.”
Hundreds of furious Texians gathered around the two generals, shouting, “Shoot him!” and “Hang him!” But Houston knew what he had: the biggest bargaining chip in Texas, if he could be kept alive. Thousands of Mexican troops were known to be on the Brazos River, or even closer, and an attack in the next few days might be too much even for his ferocious fighters. He ignored his troops’ demands for Santa Anna’s head, and told him what he needed to do if he wished to live. After two hours of intense negotiation, Houston had Ramón Caro—who had also been found—draft letters from the dictator to General Filisola at Fort Bend, ordering him to withdraw his divisions back to Béxar and Victoria. Three days later, a second message would be sent directing the Army of Operations to continue retreating to the Rio Grande.
When Santa Anna’s orders reached Filisola’s headquarters, several of Santa Anna’s high commanders objected. As a prisoner under duress, he had no authority to issue such orders, they claimed, and Filisola was under no obligation to obey them. Some of them claimed that the war could still be won—they outnumbered Houston’s army three or four to one, and in two marches they could reach Lynchburg and bring him to battle. But Filisola was adamant. The army was in no shape to continue a campaign in a hostile country. His men’s clothes were reduced to rags, most were barefoot, and their health was poor—many were suffering from dysentery and incapable of battle; provisions, supplies, and ammunition were running out, and their supply lines had dried up; the constant rains had rendered movement in any direction almost impossible. Just as important, all these factors—and the news of His Excellency’s defeat and capture—had completely demoralized the troops. Filisola pointed out that the only way to protect their commanding general and the six hundred Mexican prisoners was to withdraw.