Lone Star Nation (31 page)

Doubtless cursing his folly for having trusted Santa Anna so long, Austin now determined to meet the president-general on the ground he had chosen. “War is upon us,” he declared. “There is no remedy.” Cos, speaking for Santa Anna, was demanding abject surrender. “The people must unconditionally submit to whatever the government chooses to do for them; he lays down the principle that General Government have the right to force us to submit to any reform or amendments or alterations that congress may make in the consitution, &c.” Texans would do better to abandon the country than to accept such demands, “for we shall be, under Cos' doctrine, without any rights or guarantees of any kind.” But Texans would not abandon the country, and they would not submit to dictation. “War is inevitable.”

The duty of Texans was inescapable. “There must now be no half way measures—war in full. The sword is drawn and the scabbard must be put on one side until the military are all driven out of Texas.”

C h a p t e r   1 2

Lexington on the Guadalupe

N
oah Smithwick was the kind of immigrant Austin had always sought to exclude from Texas. He was irreverent, impatient of authority, and openly disdainful of Mexico and Mexicans. A North Carolinian by birth, a Tennesseean by youth, and a gunsmith by vocation, Smithwick was living in Kentucky in 1826 when Sterling Robertson, an empresario with a grant north of Austin's colony, came to the bluegrass to recruit colonists. “The glowing terms in which he descanted on the advantages to be gained by emigration were well-calculated to further his scheme,” Smithwick recalled. Like Austin, Robertson offered a league of grazing land and a
labor
for crops; beyond that he extolled the exemption from tariffs and other taxes, the abundance of game, the fertility of the soil, the healthfulness of the climate in Texas. “In short, there the primitive curse was set at defiance.” Smithwick was eighteen; with his brothers he talked of emigrating to this new Eden. One thing and another distracted his siblings. “But it had taken complete possession of me, so early in the following year, 1827, I started out from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with all my worldly possessions, consisting of a few dollars in money, a change of clothes, and a gun, of course, to seek my fortune in this lazy man's paradise.”

Smithwick arrived in Texas to discover that though it resembled paradise in some respects, it was no place for a lazy man. Land was plentiful, all right, but that simply meant that it was worth very little, at least to one like himself with no desire to become a farmer. “I had a strong aversion to tearing up God's earth,” he said, adding, “A league of land those days was of less consequence than a horse.” He bounced about for a few years, servicing the guns of the settlers and learning about life in this curious land. As a southerner, Smithwick was no stranger to slavery, but the anomalous status of the institution in Texas made it especially peculiar. A slave-holding settler named Thompson, a generally good-hearted man, was on the verge of returning to the United States, where his property interest in his servants would be legally secure; one of those servants decided to flee for Mexico proper rather than go back. “But he soon wearied of ‘husks' [tamales], and, returning voluntarily, surrendered himself to his old master, preferring slavery under Thompson's lenient rule to freedom in Mexico.” Smithwick believed that by the end of the 1820s most slaves in Texas were aware that slavery was illegal on Mexican soil; it was the strangeness of Mexican culture that kept them from insisting on their freedom. Sometimes, though, violence was involved, as the case of a slaveholder with the ironic name of “Pleasant” McNeal demonstrated. “Jim, one of McNeal's slaves, openly announced his determination to leave, and, acting on the impulse, threw down his hoe and started away. Pleasant McNeal, to whom he communicated his intention, ordered him to return to work, but Jim went on, whereupon Pleasant raised his rifle. ‘Jim,' said he, ‘if you don't come back, I'll shoot you!' Jim, however, kept on, and, true to his threat, McNeal shot him dead.”

Smithwick discovered that the Mexican insistence on Catholic conversion had an odd effect on certain social practices. For weddings to be legal, they had to be solemnized by a priest. But priests were rare, and young lovers often couldn't wait. So they had the local alcalde officiate at a ceremony in which they exchanged promises and put their signatures to a bond saying they would find a priest to finish the job at first opportunity. Yet such were the vagaries of love that the newlyweds might fall out before the priest appeared, in which case they would simply reclaim their bond from the alcalde, tear it up, and resume their single lives.

The priests who
were
present were often no recommendation for their faith. Miguel Muldoon, the cleric who visited Austin in the Mexico City prison, was a regular at San Felipe (where he reverted to Michael). “Padre Muldoon was a bigoted old Irishman, with an unlimited capacity for drink,” Smithwick declared. One day Muldoon and a fellow convivialist were making the rounds of San Felipe's watering holes when the pair wandered into the grocery store of Frank Adams, where a group of townsfolk were already at work on a bottle. “Frank politely invited the newcomers to join them. Old Muldoon elevated his nose. ‘No, I never drink with any but gentlemen,' said he. Adams promptly drew back and dealt the Padre a blow between the eyes which had the effect of considerably modifying his ideas of gentility.” Stephen Austin, knowing the respect in which priests were held by most Mexicans, and fearing repercussions from the government, attempted to persuade Adams to make amends. “But the sympathy of the populace was with Adams, regardless of consequences. Muldoon, who was no fool, seeing that he had few friends, apologized for his offensive language and accepted the proffered drink to assist him in swallowing his medicine.”

Another regular at San Felipe prompted Smithwick to reflect on what brought people to Texas. This person, a man named Clay, was highly intelligent and of good family and means. Although he drank heavily, his brilliance shone more clearly the drunker he got. “I have seen him sit and talk politics when he could not rise from his seat, and not a man among us could begin to hold his own against him.” His evident gifts made Smithwick wonder why he had come to Texas. “There was nothing whatever to indicate that Clay's emigration had been compulsory, but with a family educated and refined, and ample means, it was difficult to account for his presence in the colony on any other hypothesis.”

Smithwick's emigration to Texas hadn't been compulsory, but his emigration
from
Texas was. Weary of smithing, he ventured into smuggling: of tobacco southwest across the Rio Grande. He managed to avoid arrest, but the overhead of the operation consumed nearly all the profits. He briefly hunted for silver in the Mexican mountains, but that yielded even less return. He traveled to Nacogdoches, which he found to be a “gamblers' heaven” with “a regular organization for roping in the greenhorn and relieving him of his cash.” (Smithwick added, in hindsight: “Several of its members afterward took an active part in the revolution, one at least being a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”) Smithwick ultimately returned to San Felipe, where he nearly killed a man he had hired to cut wood for his forge, but who had drunk away his advance wages without delivering any wood. “I told him I would give him no more till he cut wood enough to pay for what he had already. Upon that he grasped his ax in both hands and, raising it above his head, came at me. I was working at the anvil with a heavy hammer, and, being quicker than my assailant, planted it between his eyes, felling him senseless to the ground.” Blood burst from the man's nose and mouth, and he lay as one dead. But he eventually came to, and the authorities accepted Smithwick's argument that he was merely defending himself.

They were less accepting of his part in another act of violence. An acquaintance of Smithwick murdered the alcalde of Gonzales, and despite a common feeling in Gonzales that the alcalde (“an overbearing man,” Smithwick said) deserved killing, the murderer fled to San Felipe, where he thought he'd have a better chance at trial. The authorities in San Felipe, however, said he'd have to be sent to Saltillo for a crime such as this, and they asked Smithwick to fashion shackles for the prisoner. Along with many other Americans in Texas, Smithwick questioned Mexican justice and was reluctant to see the man sent so far away for trial. “The prisoner was a friend of mine, and, becoming incensed at the treatment to which he was subjected, I gave him a file to cut his irons off, also providing him with a gun and other essentials with which to leave the country.” Smithwick's good deed backfired when the escaped prisoner, instead of departing, loitered about the town. In time he was shot and killed—with Smithwick's gun in his possession. For his complicity in the escape, Smithwick was banished from San Felipe and Texas. As he was being taken from the town, a friend approached him with a bottle and a glass and asked if he wanted to deliver a final toast to the community. Raising his glass, Smithwick said, “If there is an honest man in the place, may he be conducted to a place of safety, and then may fire and brimstone be rained down upon this iniquitous town.”

Smithwick's exile from Texas lasted four years, which he spent in western Louisiana, where he got to know James Bowie and others who wandered back and forth between Mexican territory and American. He returned to Texas in 1835, “just at the time the growing dissension between Mexico and the colonists began to assume warlike proportions,” as he put it—and at a time when Austin and the respectable element in Texas might be willing to overlook his past indiscretions. With war approaching, Austin recognized the virtue in the kind of unruliness he had previously tried to bar from the province. Smithwick's contempt for authority, troublesome when Austin sided with authority, became useful when Austin opposed it.

Smithwick discovered that though the Texans were increasingly willing to fight against Santa Anna, they couldn't agree on what they were fighting
for
. “Some were for independence; some for the constitution of 1824; and some for anything, just so it was a row,” he remembered. “But we were all ready to fight.”

Smithwick also discovered how ignorant the Texans were of what a war against Mexico would entail, and how unprepared they were for it.

Our whole available force could not have amounted to more than 250 men, while Mexico had an organized army of several thousand, and there were thousands of Indians eagerly watching for an opportunity to swoop down on us and wipe us from the face of the earth and thus regain their lost hunting grounds, which they had always been able to maintain against the Mexicans. . . . Our only arms were Bowie knives and long, single-barreled, muzzle-loading flintlock rifles, the same that our fathers won their independence with, and that the famous Kentucky brigade used with such telling effect in the battle of New Orleans.

What the Texans did know of the Mexicans inclined them to anticipate success.

The Mexican soldiers had not shown themselves brave, the army, indeed, being largely composed of peons and convicts—men who had no incentive to patriotism or bravery, and over whom it was necessary to keep a strong guard to prevent them from deserting. Then, too, the seat of war was a long way from the Mexican base of supplies, a weary waste of desert infested by hostile Indians intervening, and no means of communication except by courier. Perhaps, too, we unconsciously relied on the active sympathy of the United States, whose offspring we were; still, as a rule, I do not think we apprehended the remotest possibility of such assistance being necessary.

The self-confidence of the Texans rose on the first battle of the war. Actually, the clash at Gonzales in early October 1835 was hardly more than a skirmish. A few years earlier, Green DeWitt, the empresario whose Guadalupe River colony included Gonzales, had requested a cannon from the Mexican authorities at San Antonio to defend the town against Indians. The government complied, sending a small bronze cannon, which was installed in a blockhouse at Gonzales. In September 1835, as part of the campaign by General Cos to disarm the Texans, Colonel Ugartechea of San Antonio requested the cannon's return, and sent several soldiers to retrieve it. As Ugartechea's bad luck would have it, a Mexican soldier had recently got in a fight with a Gonzales townsman, leaving the townsman injured and community feelings bruised. With Santa Anna obviously determined to suppress Texas liberties, many in the formerly loyal DeWitt colony experienced a change of heart, becoming suspicious of Mexican motives. Their suspicion prompted the alcalde and other town leaders to refuse Ugartechea's request that they return the cannon. To underline their point, they seized the soldiers sent to retrieve it.

Ugartechea responded by dispatching a much larger force—some hundred dragoons—to Gonzales to insist on the cannon's return. But by now the word had spread that trouble was brewing, and volunteers began arriving by the score. Late-summer rains had swollen the Guadalupe River, and the defenders of Gonzales had removed the ferry to the east bank of the river, beyond the reach of the arriving Mexican troops. When the Mexicans got to the west bank, their commander, Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda, was forced to shout across the stream that he had a message for the alcalde. The defenders of Gonzales replied, similarly shouting over the rush of the river, that the alcalde was absent. Castañeda, whose orders from Ugartechea were to avoid violence if possible, said he'd wait for the alcalde to return. He had his men pitch camp on the west bank of the river, opposite the town.

While Castañeda waited, more volunteers arrived at Gonzales, until they substantially outnumbered the Mexicans. Following the frontier tradition, they elected officers, including John Moore as colonel. During the night of October 1, the Texans crossed the river, carrying with them the controversial cannon, mounted on a makeshift carriage. Their plan was to attack and disperse the Mexican force at first light. But a heavy fog developed before dawn, obscuring the vision of both sides and casting confusion over the whole scene. Nonetheless, on the morning of October 2, the Texans, approaching the Mexicans in the mist, opened fire.