This Day in Texas History (Independence Won at San Jacinto)

April 21, 1836--For a fight whose great rallying cry was “Remember the Alamo!”, the Battle of San Jacinto did not gain anywhere near the same amount of ink--not to mention screen time, or encrusted myths--as the desperate struggle that took the lives of William Barret Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and their small band of Texans.

But Sam Houston’s victory over the Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna—an almost exact reversal reversal of the results in San Antonio six weeks earlier--was arguably more momentous than the earlier battle. It lifted Houston--who had suddenly resigned in 1829 as governor of Tennessee, in a mystery that reeked of scandal and sent him into an alcoholic tailspin and exile among Indians--higher than he had ever risen previously. Over the next two and a half decades, he would not only occupy the most important posts of the republic and state of Texas, but even be discussed plausibly as a potential Presidential candidate.

More important, the win by the norteamericanos marked the opening salvo in the trans-Mississippi region of manifest destiny--the belief that it was the mission of the United States to become, in the Jeffersonian phrase, an “empire of liberty” from sea to sea. In the deepest of ironies, the anglos who settled in Texas and claimed to be fighting for freedom introduced slavery into a region where it had been banned by the young nation of Mexico. The United States, once (mostly) content to expand by treaty or annexation, would now do so increasingly through conquest--first of Mexicans, then of Native-Americans.

In certain ways, Houston’s victory over Santa Anna can be likened to British general James Wolfe’s over France’s Louis Montcalm at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 (discussed in this prior post of mine):

* Both losing armies were surprised--the French, discovering at dawn that the British had managed to scale the seemingly impregnable cliff in the way of Quebec; the Mexicans, by an assault during their mid-afternoon siesta.

* Both losing generals committed grave mistakes bred by overconfidence: Montcalm, in believing that “We need not believe the enemy has wings!”; Santa Anna, by dividing, in the days before battle, his force, contemptuously dismissing Texans that not only had been retreating for the past month, but whose compatriots he had already defeated at the Alamo and Goliad.

* Both battles were decided within a half hour.

* Both victorious generals were wounded: Houston, in his ankle; Wolfe, three times, the last fatally in the chest.

* Both battles sharply reduced the territories under the sway of the non-Anglo losers. France lost Canada to Great Britain and would never get it back, even after it helped America win its independence. Similarly, Mexico not only lost Texas but, in a war fought a decade later over unresolved tensions from the Texas War of Independence, it would also lose what is now the American Southwest.

* Both Anglo victorious forces might, in hindsight, have wondered if the results of the battle really justified what happened. Having expended blood and fortune to secure an overseas empire, the British were astonished when their American colonists rebelled at shouldering the fiscal costs. What followed was a fratricidal conflict. Six decades later, many Southerners, emboldened by the win at San Jacinto, began to push for the expansion of slavery elsewhere--not just in Texas or even in the American Southwest, but also in Cuba, even as far south as Costa Rica and Nicaragua, both of which fought off attempts by the American filibuster William Walker to seize them by force in the hope of turning them into slave states. That insatiable desire to spread slavery proved to be the last straw for the great mass of Northerners who might not have been sympathetic to the horrifying plight of African-American slaves, but who very much feared the undermining of their own free labor by the “peculiar institution.” The result--the Civil War--was an even bloodier, more fratricidal conflict than the American Revolution.

After all this, you might regard me as a revisionist when it comes to American history--someone like historian-novelist Jeff Long, who, in his account of the Alamo, Duel of Eagles, saw San Jacinto as an atrocity story. (The Texans continued to kill the Mexicans even after the battle was over. )

But I reject the term “revisionist” for myself, and not simply because I resist labeling. History might not be entirely black and white, but neither is it a matter of moral relativism.

Texans might not have been the simple freedom fighters of legend, but their cause and methods were still better than the man who sought to crush them. Santa Anna, who liked to see himself as the “Napoleon of the West,” was in fact a pioneering caudillo, the kind of strongman who has seized and held power throughout much of Latin America for decades. He could have been the George Washington of his country, setting it on a path of stability and continuing improvement. Instead, his greed and lust for power sent Mexico hurtling back and forth, across the decades, between anarchy and dictatorship.

In contrast, Santa Anna’s opponent grew in stature and greatness over time. Houston could have had his foe put to death, the way the cruel Santa Anna had done at the Goliad Massacre and after the last few defenders of the Alamo had surrendered. He did not.

Moreover, Houston not only learned to conquer his own temptation toward alcohol, but voiced dismay to his fellow Texans about the dangers of yielding to their own temptation: expansion that inflamed relations with Native-Americans and Northerners. The history of his state and his country would have been altogether different if his advice had been heeded.

This Day in Texas History (Sam Houston Defies Secessionists)

March 16, 1861—Twenty-five years to the day that the republic he helped establish approved a constitution, Sam Houston, now governor of the state of Texas, made the last great stand of his long, stormy public career, defying secessionist sentiment by refusing to join the Confederate States of America.

Like another Andrew Jackson protégé, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Houston was a slaveholder who, for the last decade, had found himself on increasingly thin political ice for not backing unlimited expansion of slavery into Western territories. The victorious commander in the successful Texas War of Independence was now watching a large segment of the state turn its back on him.

Perhaps because he had seen so much bloodshed in his life—first as an Indian fighter under Jackson, then in his win over Mexican dictator Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto—Houston was prescient about the cost of secession. “I see only gloom before me,” he observed in rejecting calls to link up with other states breaking out of the Union.

In a prior post, I touched on Houston’s improbably victorious campaign for governor in 1859, only three months after he had been unceremoniously turned out of the U.S. Senate. Why talk about him again?

Because he was a colossus—a man whose virtues and failings (including alcoholism for much of his life) were as large as his frame. Because his life and career were filled with one surprising and dramatic turn after another (e.g., adoption by Cherokees, then becoming an Indian fighter several years later).

And because the current occupant of the governor’s mansion in Austin, Rick Perry, has made his outsized predecessor all too relevant. By paying heed to the loudest calls in his state—i.e., those who insist there can be no compromise with those who see any form of constructive role for the federal government—Perry is deviating from the wise example of Houston, who sought to conciliate factions.

Last year, the Dallas Morning News speculated that Perry’s invocation of “states’ rights” posed problems for voters who associated the term with segregation. But the term had an even longer, and equally problematic, association: with the agitation that led to the Civil War.

Houston correctly foresaw that passage of Stephen Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Act--in particular, its advocacy of “popular sovereignty,” enabling residents of a territory to choose whether they wanted slavery or not--would open up unparalleled agitation concerning “the peculiar institution.” His delicate balancing act in the 1850s--denouncing abolitionists and “fire-eaters” alike--failed to placate the latter, who increasingly--and correctly--saw him as their foe.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 put Houston on the spot as no other event did. He stalled on holding a special legislative session just before the state’s secession convention, then yielded when he thought he could influence the vote. (Even then, he didn’t make any secret where his sympathies lay. Working on the first floor of the Capitol building, he referred to the delegates convening on the floor above as “the mob upstairs.”)

He was mistaken about his ability to sway events. On February 1, 1861, only four days after delegates began to convene in Austin, they voted in favor of the Texas Ordinance of Secession, 166-8. A downcast Houston, seeing another opening, said he could abide by the vote if the people endorsed it. Though this vote was less lopsided than the first, it was just as decisive, 44,317 to 13,020.

Now Houston tried to argue that, though the voters wanted secession for the state, it wasn’t as part of the Confederacy. Rather, it was as an independent republic--the kind he’d brought into being a quarter century before.

The last maneuver Houston could summon against the secessionists--securing the federal arsenal at San Antonio by calling on Texas Rangers supporting him--likewise failed. With the Confederacy calling on all state officeholders to swear allegiance to the new provisional government forming in Montgomery, Ala., all escape routes out of his dilemma were closed off.

No matter how much he might have talked about supporting states’ rights over the years, people sensed where Houston’s heart really was. It undoubtedly related to sentiments like this, voiced at the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act: "Mark me, the day that produces a dissolution of this [Union] will be written in the blood of humanity."

It was undoubtedly because he feared that “blood” that Houston refused to take the one active step that would have enabled him to stay in office while keeping Texas in the Union. Abraham Lincoln offered him 50,000 troops and the rank of major general if he would put down the rebellion in the state. But Houston couldn’t fire on his own people--and, after five decades of military conflict, had grown too tired of the tumult.

Instead, Houston opted for a defiant act of resignation. On March 16, the bluff-speaking 68-year-old wrote a letter to the people of Texas that repeatedly cried out his opposition:

“Fellow-citizens, in the name of our rights and liberties, which I believe have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by this convention, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the Constitution of Texas, which has been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath.”

The post of governor being declared vacant, Houston retired to his farm in Huntsville. His last two years alive were spent in fear of the calamity he was certain would strike the state--and that did, in fact, hit his family. A year after his warning of bloodshed, his firstborn son with wife Margaret, 18-year-old Sam Houston Jr., was so badly wounded at the Battle of Shiloh fighting for the Confederacy that he was left for dead. It took him months under the care of his mother before he recovered.

In July 1863, Houston himself died. Not long before the end, he confided his torment about and love for his state to friend Ashbel Smith:

“It is my misfortune to be a prophet like Cassandra, for my warnings are disbelieved. This war will be disastrous to the South and to Texas. The Northern armies will cut the Confederacy asunder. But while forecasting the perils and woes of Texas, I love her. Texas may spurn my counsels; Texas may cast me off, but in my abiding love for Texas, her fortunes are my fortunes; I shall lay my bones to repose in her bosom, I shall leave my blessings on her.”

This Day in Texas History (Sam Houston in Last Campaign for Office—and the Union)

June 3, 1859—Just three months to the day after he left the Senate, rejected by the voters of the state he had helped bring into being, Sam Houston announced his intention to run for governor—throwing the entire political applecart of Texas out of whack by taking on the secessionist who’d defeated him for the office two years before.

In a sprawling state filled, then as now, with characters that yearn to fill every inch of their vast space, nobody has ever loomed larger, I would argue, than Houston—certainly not Bush I and II, and not even Lyndon B. Johnson. Houston trumped them all—in military service, charisma, faults, and, finally, passion for his state and country alike.

The odds facing Houston as he strove to re-enter public life were enormous in June 1859, and it was barely a consolation that he’d faced equally stiff challenges throughout his life: life-threatening (and unhealed) battle wounds, divorce and scandal, fall from public office, naysayers in the Texas independence movement, and alcoholism.

This time, the 66-year-old Houston—a longtime Jacksonian Democrat who, at least for a decade, had been prominently and credibly mentioned as a Presidential candidate—found himself without the backing of any political party, any newspaper, or even any organization. What he did have in his favor was the man who beat him previously, Hardin Runnels, whose lackluster record as governor included unsuccessful attempts at reopening the African slave trade and quelling Native-American unrest.

Six days after announcing his intentions, Houston made his only speech of the campaign. Hating longwinded oratory, he liked to whittle toys for his own and other children while listening to preachers or Capitol Hill politicians. But when he spoke, he made every word count—and sting, if necessary. Senator Louis Wigfall became better known as “Wigtail.” As for one unfortunate soul who he felt had betrayed him, Houston held off an angry crowd with these words: “Don’t be too hard on him. I was always fond of dogs, and he has all the virtues of a dog except his fidelity.”

Two months after throwing his hat into the ring, Houston reversed the results of his prior loss by beating Runnels by 10,000 votes. He now proceeded to take on the state political power brokers by pulling a Jacksonian move: holding his inauguration on the steps of the Capitol, where the people could see him directly, rather than at a joint session of the legislature.

Houston would tangle with secessionists throughout the next two years. As recklessly as he had once charged into the line of fire, despite an already gaping wound in the thigh, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (an action that quickly caught the eye of General Andrew Jackson), Houston now attempted to quell rising Confederate sentiment (albeit balancing heated attacks on secessionists with equally annoyed urgings of abolitionists to stop stirring things up with their agitation).

The nomination of Abraham Lincoln at the Republican Convention, along with scattered unsolicited votes for Houston on that occasion, gave the secessionist “fire-eaters” a field day and increasingly isolated the governor. Immediately after one of his anti-secessionist denunciations, a powderkeg blew up behind the hotel where he stayed. After an ordinance of secession was adopted, he criss-crossed the state in an unsuccessful attempt to bring the voters to their senses, warning correctly of the North’s determination to keep the Union intact and the bloodshed that would follow.

When the secessionist movement proved too strong, the aging hero of San Jacinto refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new Confederate government, but also refused to order military action against the citizens he had served for nearly 30 years. He withdrew from his office—the first official ever to be forced out of the governor’s office in two different states (he’d resigned as governor of Tennessee in 1829 when, for unexplained reasons, his marriage to a 19-year-old woman collapsed almost immediately after the marriage).

Why hasn’t some movie actor put a script into development on Houston’s life? Think of all the stage business involved with this hugely colorful politico: a man who wore a huge sombrero and Mexican blanket, even into the most formal settings of our nation’s government; whose six-foot-plus height, lean frame, helmet of white hair, and sometimes crude manners made him an unlikely amalgam of ancient Roman senator, Cherokee Indian (which, of course, he was, in adolescence and in his post-first-marriage, middle-age-crazy period) and what one observer called "a magnificent barbarian"; and a figure who contained all the promise and contradictions of a Hamlet.

Well, someone did realize his dramatic possibilities: then-Senator John F. Kennedy, who made him one of the half-dozen figures from his chamber on Capitol Hill that he profiled in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage.

But, aside from Houston’s relatively tangential part in the Alamo drama (he actually ordered the doomed fort abandoned), this amazing figure has seldom, if ever, been depicted on the big screen. When he has dramatized, it’s been on TV, in the following now-almost-forgotten fare:

* Profiles in Courage, a TV series that ran in the 1964-65 season, based on Kennedy’s bestseller, included an episode on Houston, starring J.D. Cannon as the Texan;

* The Honorable Sam Houston (1975), a TV movie starring Robert Stack ;
* Houston: The Legend of Texas (1986), starring Sam Elliott.

When is a major studio going to give Houston’s life the treatment it deserves? Or, if Hollywood won’t go that route, why doesn’t a cable TV network offer a mini-series on his life instead of a relatively short TV film? This colorful but endlessly complicated Texan deserves at least this much.