Lone Star Nation (28 page)

Santa Anna's health recovered sufficiently for him to visit the capital at the end of May; while there he reaffirmed his devotion to the revolution and the constitution of 1824. A conservative alliance of bishops and generals had called for Santa Anna to assume emergency powers against the liberals; the president condemned the very thought. “I swear to you,” he told the Mexican people, “that I oppose all efforts aimed at the destruction of the constitution and that I would die before accepting any other power than that designated by it. . . . My firmest determination is to defend without the slightest hesitation the constitution as our representatives gave it to us in 1824.”

Yet during the subsequent several months Santa Anna reconsidered his attachment to the 1824 charter. The bishops and generals, joined by the landed gentry, descended upon Santa Anna's hacienda and implored him to move against the liberals. They argued that the revolution had gone awry, that the Mexican masses weren't ready for republicanism, that progress for Mexico required stronger leadership than the current system could deliver.

Santa Anna allowed himself to be persuaded. Having observed the congress flail haplessly at the numerous problems facing Mexico, and having watched one set of politicians fall out murderously with the next, the general decided that he alone—ruling alone—held the key to Mexico's salvation. To many observers, this turnabout was nothing less than a betrayal of the republic and the revolution. A former American minister to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, charged the president with abandoning his liberal convictions. Santa Anna replied in measured tones. “Say to Mr. Poinsett that it is very true that I threw up my cap for liberty with great ardor, and perfect sincerity, but very soon found the folly of it. A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them.”

Despotism was what Santa Anna began to provide the Mexican people in the spring of 1834. “When I returned to the capital,” he explained, by way of justifying what happened next, “I encountered stormy sessions of the Congress. One faction was endeavoring to confiscate the property of the church and to deny to the clergy its rights and ancient privileges. The public was dismayed by these actions and opposed violently any usurpation of the clergy's rights. Obeying the dictates of my conscience and hoping to quell a revolution, I declined to approve the necessary decree to put these edicts into law.”

He did more than that. He sent the congress home, expressing confidence that he could govern quite well without the legislature. He chased off Gómez Farías (who fled to New Orleans) and unilaterally repealed most of the liberal reforms. The wealthy sighed in relief; the generals rallied to their old commander; the bishops offered benedictions. “We were perishing,” one of the churchmen explained, “but God mercifully turned over a blessed leaf for us and had mercy on our sufferings. At the end of last April there appeared unexpectedly a brilliant star, whose beauty, clarity and splendor announced to us, as in other times to the three Wise Men, that justice and peace were drawing near and were already in our land.” The star, of course, was “the Most Excellent Señor President Don Antonio López de Santa Anna . . . whose religious and patriotic sentiments qualify him eternally as a hero of the love and recognition of the nation.”

Stephen Austin wasn't quite so enthusiastic, but from the pinched perspective of his cell he accounted Santa Anna's assumption of sweeping power a good thing. For one thing, Santa Anna eased the conditions of Austin's imprisonment. Not long after the general reached Mexico City, Austin was allowed the run of the Inquisition prison. “Our doors are now open from sun rise to 9 o'clock at night,” Austin wrote James Perry. “We have the free use of the
patio
and can visit another extensive range of dungeons in the 2nd story of the main building. . . . From this range there is a passage onto the
asotea
or roof of our range of dungeons, which is so flat that we can walk over our dungeons and all around our patio and have sufficient room for exercise.” The loosening of his bonds, which shortly followed the dismissal of Gómez Farías, suggested to Austin that the acting president had been responsible for his incarceration, and he hoped that Santa Anna's return would set things right.

In any event, the weeks dragged on with Austin still in custody. He was transferred to a less austere prison in the suburbs, where visitors could come and go freely. One visitor, an American businessman who admired Austin's determination, offered to help him escape. But Austin declined, putting his faith in Santa Anna. “I have no doubt that the political intentions of the President General Santa Anna are sound and patriotic,” he wrote in August. As for his own prospects and those of Texas, Austin had every confidence in Mexico's supreme leader. “President Santa Anna is friendly to Texas and to me,” he said. “Of this I have no doubt.”

 P A R T   T H R E E 

Blood on
the Sand
 (1835–1836)

C h a p t e r   1 1

The Sword Is Drawn

W
hen Sam Houston read the letter Austin wrote from Mexico City in August 1834, he thought the prisoner had gone mad. For Austin to place his trust in Santa Anna, and to ask others to do the same, seemed to Houston to raise serious doubt about Austin's sanity—or his integrity. “It awakened no other emotion in my breast than pity mingled with contempt,” Houston told a contemporary. “He showed the disposition of the viper without its fangs. The first was very imprudent, the second pusillanimous.”

Beyond what he perceived to be Austin's woeful misunderstanding of Santa Anna, Houston took personal offense at aspersions Austin cast on his good faith and that of others in Texas who were less sanguine than he—Austin—regarding the prospects of continued attachment to Mexico. In his August letter, Austin hinted darkly at machinations by his enemies in Texas to keep him imprisoned. “I have even been told,” Austin wrote, “that if I am not imprisoned for life and totally ruined in property and reputation, it will not be for the want of exertions or industry on the part of some of my countrymen who live in Texas.” Austin had gone on to say, “Whether all this be true or not, I do not know. I am unwilling to believe it.” But then he proceeded—twice—to repeat the charge, only to reiterate—twice—that he couldn't believe it. And he asserted that Santa Anna was a better friend of Texas than were those insisting on greater rights for Texans. The rambling recitation was enough to drive Houston to distraction, and to conclude that prison had addled Austin's brain.

Or perhaps interest had corrupted his soul. It was well known, even to Texas newcomers, that Austin owed his position in Texas to the government of Mexico. Mexico had made him an empresario, had conferred on him the authority to assign lands in Texas to colonists and to establish and enforce laws in the colony. If Texas remained part of Mexico, Austin would remain a great man in Texas. But if Texas became independent of Mexico, Austin would be . . . what?

Houston wouldn't have come to Texas if he hadn't believed that independence—from Mexico, if not necessarily from the United States—was the proper and likely future of Texas. He had no desire to spend his days as a Mexican citizen, and if he nodded in that direction—by nominal conversion to Catholicism, for instance—it was only to further his larger aim. Whether Austin would contribute to that larger aim was up to Austin. On current evidence—on the evidence of his enthusiasm for Santa Anna and his suspicion of those willing to press for the rights of Texans—he would hinder rather than help.

While Austin languished in prison, Houston traveled around Texas and back to the United States. He didn't publicize his whereabouts, and for months he dropped from sight. He was in Washington in April 1834, where he encountered David Crockett. Crockett's alienation from Jackson must have made the conversation uncomfortable—but only momentarily, as Houston and Crockett “took a horn” and shared memories of old times in Tennessee. Crockett doubtless plied Houston for news about Texas, and as the purpose of Houston's visit was to prime American interest in Texas, he surely told Crockett as much as the congressman wanted to hear. In Washington, Houston must also have met with Jackson, although the meeting was so discreet as to leave no record. Houston talked Texas with enough other political figures to discover that acquisition of Texas by the United States was improbable, given the bitterness of the minority opposition to Jackson, and given the clause of the Constitution that allowed a third of the Senate to veto any treaty. This meant that the Texans would have to look to themselves—which wasn't a bad thing, in Houston's view. “As to Texas, I will give you my candid impressions,” Houston wrote James Prentiss. “I do not think that it will be acquired by the United States. I do think within one year it will be a sovereign state and acting in all things as such. Within three years I think it will be separated from the Mexican confederacy, and remain so forever.” As for Santa Anna, in whom Austin placed such faith: “I assure you that Santa Anna aspires to the
purple,
and should he assume it, you know Texas is off from them and so to remain.”

Sightings of Houston were rare and sketchy during the next several months. He was reported to be traveling with a band of Indians in the Arkansas district. A British traveler, G. W. Featherstonhaugh, told of stopping over at Washington, Arkansas, in late 1834:

General Houston was here, leading a mysterious sort of life, shut up in a small tavern, seeing nobody by day and sitting up all night. The world gave him credit for passing his waking hours in the study of
trente et quarante
and
sept à lever
; but I had been in communication with too many persons of late, and had seen too much passing before my eyes, to be ignorant that this little place was the rendezvous where a much deeper game than faro or rouge-et-noir was playing. There were many persons at this time in the village from the states lying adjacent to the Mississippi, under the pretence of purchasing government lands, but whose real object was to encourage the settlers in Texas to throw off their allegiance to the Mexican government.

Featherstonhaugh wanted to learn more, but, perceiving that curiosity might be mistaken by the conspirators (“The longer I staid the more they would find reason to suppose I was a spy”), he declined to ask.

By early 1835 Houston was back in Texas. He settled in Nacogdoches, where he resumed the practice of law. (It was his desire to join the bar that prompted his Catholic baptism, which entailed his assumption of the saint's name—Paul, or Pablo—that he now included in signing documents intended for the courts.) He observed the growing tension between the Texans and the Mexican government, and awaited his opportunity.

While Houston watched and waited, Santa Anna tightened his grip on the Mexican government. One by one he dismantled the institutions of federalism, dissolving the state legislatures, disbanding the state militias, and finally doing away with the states altogether, demoting them to mere departments of the national government. Meanwhile he made the national government an instrument of his own authority. He repealed the liberal reforms of Gómez Farías and engineered elections that transformed the congress into his rubber stamp.

The changes provoked resistance in various parts of the country. Federalists in Zacatecas, northwest of Mexico City, refused to comply with the order to disband the militia, insisting on retaining this last defense of states' rights. Santa Anna thereupon determined to teach the Zacatecans a lesson—the lesson he had learned from General Arredondo years earlier in Texas. He personally led an army against Zacatecas, crushing the militia before turning his men loose on the populace at large to make a brutal example of what insurgents could expect from him. The slaughter exceeded that of the Medina, and it included hundreds of women and children. The message was unmistakable: all who opposed the will of the president-general should expect no mercy if their opposition failed.

As part of his plan to restore order to the northern frontier, Santa Anna dispatched his brother-in-law, General Martín Perfecto de Cos, to Texas with several hundred men. Cos's orders were to accomplish in Texas what had been accomplished in Zacatecas—the disarming of the citizenry and the preemption of future resistance. Cos was not an evil man; he doubtless preferred that the disarming take place peacefully. But he had his orders, and he had the example of Zacatecas. If peaceful methods didn't suffice, the Texans should expect the sword, wielded as harshly as necessary. Nor would Cos be lulled by Texan protests of adherence to the Mexican constitution. “The plans of the revolutionists of Texas are well known to this commandancy,” Cos announced. “And it is quite useless and vain to cover them with a hypocritical adherence to the federal constitution. The constitution by which all Mexicans may be governed is the constitution which the colonists of Texas must obey, no matter on what principles it may be formed.”

William Travis, as a lawyer, might have argued this point with Cos on constitutional grounds, but circumstance and temperament took him in a different direction. After the 1832 fight at Anahuac, Travis had moved to San Felipe, where he got to know Stephen Austin and the early settlers, enrolled some of them as law clients, and gained a greater appreciation of their concern lest rash action jeopardize all they had accomplished since coming to Texas. Meanwhile Travis himself acquired a stake in the status quo when he earned appointment as secretary to the San Felipe ayuntamiento.

Something else toned down the rebelliousness that marked Travis's early manhood: he fell in love. For many months after reaching Texas, Travis sowed wild oats with reckless abandon. A diary he kept during this period recorded his conquests. “Chingaba una mujer que es cincuenta y seis en mi vida,” he wrote on September 26, 1833, in the Spanish he reserved for matters romantic. “I fucked a woman that is the fifty-sixth in my life.” His exhausting pace occasionally caught up with him. “No pudiera,” he wrote regarding the night of February 21, 1834. “I could not.” Another night, with a prostitute (“Pagaba un peso,” he wrote: “I paid one peso”) proved “malo.” Worse than impotence was infection. “Venereo mala,” he lamented on March 28.

But a case of the clap—which he medicated with mercury—didn't prevent the frontier Lothario from maintaining the chase. What
did
slow him down was love, as opposed to mere sex. Travis met Rebecca Cummings during the winter of 1833–34. She was the sister of an innkeeper whose Mill Creek premises Travis frequented, and after catching the young lawyer's eye she captured his heart. By mid-February he had told her how he felt, and she reciprocated. “Proposals &c agreeably received,” he wrote triumphantly on February 16. During the following weeks he devoted every spare moment to Rebecca. “Spent day pleasantly in la sociedad de mi inamorata,” he wrote on March 21. When work or bad weather derailed a rendezvous, he cursed his bad luck. “Started to Mill Creek; waters all swimming & prairie so boggy,” he wrote one rainy night. “Could not go.
The first time I ever turned back in my life
.”

The couple agreed to wed, assuming certain difficulties could be resolved. The first was Travis's reluctance to leave off with the prostitutes, whom he continued to visit while courting Rebecca. The second was his previous—and persisting—marriage to Rosanna. Precisely how Travis explained Rosanna to Rebecca is unclear; doubtless his version of their separation favored his current case. Rebecca wasn't easily persuaded, but his passion wore down her resistance. “Reception cold, but conclusion very hot,” he recorded on April 1. The next day they reached “a simple understanding”—apparently that they would be married as soon as Travis could divorce Rosanna. This would take time, as Rosanna had to petition the Alabama legislature for a special bill dissolving the marriage, and because the likeliest ground for the action was abandonment, which legally required three years of absence and nonsupport. As things happened, Rosanna herself found someone else, and in her new suitor discovered cause to hasten her release from Travis. But the Alabama legislature could not be hurried, and though the process moved forward in late 1834 and early 1835, it did so with southern deliberation.