Lone Star Nation (27 page)

Mexico City was no better. Cholera was rampant in the capital. “There were 43,000 sick here at one time,” Austin wrote. “The deaths, I believe, have been about 18,000. I have never witnessed such a horrible scene of distress and death.” The epidemic carried off many government officials and frightened the rest, many of whom fled the capital till cooler weather should stem the disease.

Despite the difficulties (including another unnerving round of symptoms in himself), Austin devoted all his energies to lobbying for Texas statehood. “I explained at large and with some detail the situation of Texas and the necessity of erecting it into a state,” he reported to a standing committee of the San Felipe convention, after at length he obtained a meeting with Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías and several cabinet ministers. Austin said he had anchored his argument for statehood to several points: the desire of the people of Texas to govern themselves, their separate identity from that of Mexicans, an 1824 law that anticipated a separate government for Texas, the stronger ties that would develop between Texas and Mexico without Coahuila in the way, and “the right and duty of every people to save themselves from anarchy and ruin!” Austin explained to San Felipe: “On this last point I enlarged very much. I distinctly stated as my opinion that self-preservation would compel the people of Texas to organize a local government, with or without the approbation of the General Government—that this measure would not proceed from any hostile views to the permanent union of Texas with Mexico, but from absolute necessity, to save themselves from anarchy and total ruin. How such a measure would affect the union of Texas with Mexico, or where it would end, were matters worthy of serious reflection.”

This was strong stuff, amounting to an ultimatum. Austin shouldn't have been surprised if Gómez Farías had thrown him out of his office. In fact, on another occasion the vice president did respond angrily. “I told the vice president the other day that Texas must be made a state by the Government or she would make herself one,” Austin wrote to James Perry. “This he took as a threat and became very much enraged.” Austin tried to mollify Gómez Farías by explaining that he intended no threat but was merely describing the mood in Texas. “When he understood that my object was only to state a positive fact which it was my duty to state, he was reconciled.” (This wasn't quite true, as Austin would discover.)

Even while pressing the Mexican government on Texas statehood, Austin attempted—from a distance—to restrain the radicals in Texas, knowing that another outbreak of anti-government violence would make his difficult task impossible. He wrote home putting the best face on his discussions with Gómez Farías and the other officials. Following one interview, which he characterized as “long and frank,” he declared, “I believe that Texas will be a state of this Confederation with the approbation of this Government before long.” Austin urged the Texans to show resolve but avoid provocation. Under no circumstances should they speak of anything other than statehood within the Mexican union. “Should our application be refused, Texas ought to organize a local government with as little delay as possible—but always on the basis that it is a part of the Mexican Confederation, a younger sister who adopts this mode of entering upon her rights, now that she is of age, because unnecessary embarrassments are interposed which are unconstitutional, unjust, inexpedient and ruinous.”

Austin himself, however, in moments of exasperation, sometimes spoke of an alternative to a Mexican connection. Not long after reaching Mexico City, he wrote to settler and friend John Austin (perhaps a distant relative) that he supposed that the Mexican congress, when it reconvened, would vote in favor of statehood for Texas, but that the legislature would then ask the other states for their approval. This would cause additional delay and cast the whole statehood issue into doubt. Austin wasn't sure he could stand it. “I have had a hard trip so far and more difficulties to work through here than you can well form an idea of. But I hope to get along and that Texas will be a State of
this
, or the
U.S.
, republic before another year, for I am so weary that life is hardly worth having, situated as we are now.”

Had Mexican officials read this letter, they would have doubted Austin's integrity even more than they did. As it happened, they read other letters he wrote, with precisely that result. In October he sent a letter to the
ayuntamiento
(town council) of San Antonio de Béxar, urging the members to coordinate with the other town councils of Texas in preparing to move unilaterally toward Texas statehood. Between the cholera and the ongoing political struggles of the capital, he explained, nothing had been done on Texas. “And in my opinion, nothing is going to be done.” He said he would play out his hand in Mexico City, but in the likely event he failed to get what he came for, the inhabitants of Texas must act together. “And so I hope that you will not lose a single moment in directing a communication to all the Ayuntamientos of Texas, urging them to unite in a measure to organize a local government independent of Coahuila, even though the general government should withhold its consent.” To underline his resolve, Austin replaced the standard closing in the correspondence of revolutionary Mexico—“God and Liberty”—with a new coinage: “God and Texas.”

Had Austin been writing to friends or allies, this encouragement to sedition might never have reached the eyes of the Mexican authorities. But many of the (mostly Mexican) inhabitants of San Antonio feared that a separate state of Texas, even one attached to Mexico, would be dominated by Americans, and the town's ayuntamiento included persons who were as skeptical of Austin as any ministers in Mexico City. They passed his letter on to the government of Coahuila y Texas, which, delighted at receiving such damning information on the insurgent empresario, forwarded the letter to the federal government.

This took time, which the unsuspecting Austin put to use. Though (sanctioned) statehood appeared a lost cause for the present, other progress seemed possible. Austin hammered against the ban on American immigration and finally succeeded in winning its repeal. This was no small feat, and Austin thought it augured well—at least well enough to warrant continued patience. “Texas matters are all right. Nothing is wanted there but
quiet,
” he wrote. It also warranted his return to Texas, to ensure the quiet. “I shall be at home soon,” he predicted on November 26.

Austin's trip north went smoothly until he reached Saltillo in January 1834. He had ridden hard to catch the newly appointed commandant general for the northern district, Pedro Lemus, so that the two might travel together. To his amazement, when he presented himself to Lemus, the general arrested him. Lemus explained that he had received an order from the war ministry to capture Austin and return him to the capital to answer charges raised by the state government of Coahuila y Texas.

Austin was hurt and dismayed. “All I can be accused of is that I have labored arduously, faithfully, and perhaps, at particular moments, passionately and with more impatience and irritation than I ought to have shewn, to have Texas made a State of the Mexican Confederation separate from Coahuila,” he wrote to Sam Williams. “This is all, and this is no crime.” If he had erred in writing frankly to the people of San Antonio—Austin guessed the source of the complaint against him—he had done so from honorable motives. “I considered that very great respect and deference was justly due to them as native Mexicans, as the capital of Texas, and as the oldest and most populous town in the country. And I knew the importance of getting them to take the lead in all the politics of Texas. Besides this, I was personally attached to those people as a sincere friend and wished to act in concert with them.” But they had betrayed his confidence—which was all the more hurtful given that events were tearing Texas apart and no one else was trying to mend it. “My object was to smother the party spirit and violent and ruinous divisions which I saw brewing in the colony.”

General Lemus appreciated Austin's plight and transported him south in his own carriage. But the kindness ended when Austin reached Mexico City. On February 13, 1834, he was placed in a prison that once had held victims of the Inquisition. He spoke briefly with a prosecutor a few days later, but beyond this he received no information regarding the charges against him or his prospects of coming to trial. He had no cellmate and no visitors except Padre Miguel Muldoon, an Irish cleric he had met earlier. “Time drags on heavily,” Austin wrote in a diary he kept during his detention. “What a horrible punishment is solitary confinement, shut up in a dungeon with scarcely enough light to distinguish anything.”

The lonely days facilitated reflection. He asked himself what the “true interest of Texas” was, and answered, “It is to have a local government to cement and strengthen its union with Mexico instead of weakening or breaking it. What Texas wants is an organization of a local government, and it is of little consequence whether it be part of Coahuila or as a separate state or territory, provided the organization be a suitable one.” As this conclusion was more moderate than the line he took with Gómez Farías, one suspects that either Austin had learned the lesson his imprisonment presumably was supposed to teach him—that Texas must forever remain a part of Mexico—or he thought someone would be reading his journal. His musings often sound like the defense he would make at trial, should he ever get one. “My intentions were pure and correct. I desired to cement the union of Texas with Mexico, and to promote the welfare and advancement of my adopted country, by populating the northern and eastern frontier. I have been impatient, and have allowed myself to be compromised and ensnared by the political events of last year, and by the excitement caused by them in Texas.” But he had committed no crime. “My conscience acquits me of anything wrong, except impatience and imprudence.”

Yet if Austin was defending himself to a potential prosecutor, he was also defending himself to himself. In prison the Mexican republic assumed a solidity it had often seemed to lack on the outside, where the roils of revolution left everyone—Austin included—wondering whether the government could hold itself together, let alone hold the country together. If Mexico was falling to pieces, simple self-preservation dictated that the Texans look to their own security. In prison, however, the view changed. The stone walls of his cell had stood longer than the republic of the North, and they gave every indication of standing for a long time to come. Under the circumstances, it was easy for Austin to revert to his earlier thinking about Texas and Mexico, and to conclude—again—that the future of his adopted province lay within the embrace of his adopted country.

But there were things about Mexico that had to change, starting with a legal code that could lock a prisoner away with no means to defend himself. “What a system of jurisprudence is this of confining those accused or suspected without permitting them to take any steps to make manifest their innocence or to procure proofs for their trial? They can neither consult with counsel, lawyer, friend or anybody. I do not know of what I am accused; how can I prepare my defense? . . . This system may be in conformity with law, but I am ignorant of which law. . . . It is very certain that such a system is in no wise in conformity with justice, reason or common sense.”

After three months in prison, Austin spied a glimmer of hope, in the person of Santa Anna. The hero of Tampico had been elected president the previous March, despite continuing illness, which, he said, prevented his attending his own inauguration. “I am in such a condition that I cannot even put on my shoes,” he told Gómez Farías, who became acting president.

Gómez Farías happened to be a physician, but he didn't require a medical degree to know that Santa Anna's illness was political, an allergic reaction to responsibility for the liberal reforms the progressive vice president and a similarly inclined congress began to put in place. Santa Anna was allowing the liberals their moment, yet he was hedging his bets by distancing himself from the reforms. The losers in the latest round of the revolution—a group that included some of the wealthiest and most influential persons in the country—had yet to formulate a response to the government's program, and Santa Anna didn't want to commit himself before they did. If the reforms proved popular, Santa Anna would claim credit; if they failed, he'd let Gómez Farías take the blame.