1836: SAM HOUSTON BATTLES SANTA ANNA
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During an extraordinary eighteen minutes on an April afternoon
in 1836, a battle took place just east of what is today the city limits
of Houston, Texas. With that clash, a crucial phase of the westward
expansion of the United States began. That single, swift, and shocking
confrontation set Texas free from Mexico. It also led to the shaping of
much of the American West as we know it today.
At dusk on March 11, 1836, the first rumors of disaster reached
General Sam Houston. He was at Gonzales on the Guadalupe River,
seventy miles east of San Antonio. With him were less than 400 men,
and the Alamo had fallen. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, chief
of Mexico’s army, an elected president turned dictator, had marched
5,500 polished troops into Texas – then part of the huge Mexican state
of Coahuila y Texas – to punish rebellious Mexican and American
settlers.
Houston viewed the Alamo as a death trap. He had ordered its
defenders out, but they stayed anyway, 189 men facing thirty times
their number. By March 11, the Mexican guns that pounded the
Alamo’s walls had been silent for nearly a week. Houston pondered
the few options now open to his own tiny, untrained army. The Texans
were settlers, Indian fighters, ferocious when roused but absent any
glimmer of military discipline or skill. These men, another 400 some
fifty-five miles to the south at Goliad, plus the men in the Alamo, if
they still lived – call it a thousand – were now on hand hoping to drive
Santa Anna from Texas.
Scouts brought in Mrs. Susannah Dickinson, twenty-one years
old, clasping a sleeping child in her arms. She told how Mexican
soldiers had poured over the Alamo’s walls in blue waves, killing
every man they encountered. All 189 were dead, their bodies burned.
Santa Anna had summoned the young Mrs. Dickson and sent her east
with a message: This was what all rebellious Texans could expect.
And, she warned, the Mexican general was already on his way.
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1836: SAM HOUSTON BATTLES SANTA ANNA
After listening to this, the Texans were bursting with fury,
sharpening their knives, tamping fresh loads into long rifles. They
would smash Santa Anna or die trying. Houston, meanwhile, walked
the camp, saying little, his roll of maps under his arm. That night, he
ordered his men to break camp and march east. East? Away from the
enemy? Retreat? Turn tail and run from the killers?
Suspicion took hold, suspicion that would grow to a furious
conviction: They were marching under a coward or a traitor. Who was
this man who had been elected to command them?
Above all, Sam Houston wasn’t like them. He was a soldier
among amateurs, a sophisticate, at home in taverns or drawing rooms
as well as among Indians and settlers whose horizons reached not far
beyond their own farms. He was a striking figure, his height, six feet
two inches, habitually exaggerated in recollection. He wasn’t like them
in another way, too, a man who held himself aloof so that even close
friends found him unpredictable. This was partly political skill, the
shielding of intentions to keep options open, but it went far beyond
calculation, a sign of some inner gravity.
Some of his quality grew from the pain of a bruised heart. The
bruises mattered, for he was a changed man after the disaster that
brought him to Texas back in 1832. Before he had earned General
Andrew Jackson’s affection as a courageous young Army officer, then
switched to law and a career in Tennessee politics – where he was
elected major general of the militia, then congressman, then governor.
His relationship to Jackson was almost like family.
But when he was thirty-five, standing for a second term as
governor, Houston’s marriage collapsed. For reasons neither of them
revealed, his wife fled to her parents in a very public way. Divorce
was almost unknown then, and her actions produced a roaring scandal.
Everyone agreed some great marital crime lay behind it – but was
husband or wife guilty?
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Houston refused all explanations, resigned, and left Tennessee.
Early in life, he had lived with the Cherokee chief Oo-loo-te-ka and
become his adopted son. Now he joined his Cherokee family, which
was then subsisting on the Arkansas frontier. For the next few years he
dropped from sight.
But in 1832, just shy of forty, he rode into Texas. It was a
natural move, Texas in the 1830s being a lodestar for the American
imagination. It was the place to go for a new start when your heart was
broken or your purse was empty or the law was asking questions.
The colonies there were well established. Soon after 1821, when
it won independence from Spain, Mexico was accepting American
immigrants to parts of Texas that neither it nor Spain had managed
to settle fully. Thereafter, the Mexican government was too busy with
post-revolutionary turmoil to notice growth in Texas. When the
Mexicans awakened, they discovered more than 20,000 Americans
who felt they owned the place and who also practiced slavery –
something Mexican law prohibited. Texans were outraged when
Mexico tried to limited further growth. In a series of skirmishes,
settlers defeated weak garrison troops. But a new figure was rising in
Mexico, slowing consolidating power.
As the experienced commander of Mexico’s army, Antonio
Lopez de Santa Anna had made himself a national hero when he routed
a final Spanish attempt to regain control and then ejected a dictator
who had seized the new national government. Santa Anna posed as an
ardent democrat, and a grateful nation swept him into the presidency.
Then his true nature began to emerge.
A tall, broad-shouldered, handsome man a year younger than
Houston, as adept at politics as at war, Santa Anna was a devious
libertine with a well-developed taste for women, pomp, and murderous
intrigue. He liked opium, too, but his real addiction, far more
dangerous, was power. “If they could make me God,” he once cried, “I
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