The Texas Revolution

Begin in 1821, on the plaza of San Antonio de Béxar. This stone house, now called the Spanish Governor's Palace, was really the comandancia, the home and office of the captain of the town's… Read more presidio; the keystone over its door says it was finished in 1749. In 1821 Mexico won its independence from Spain, and Béxar, a town of about two and a half thousand Tejano ranchers, soldiers and families, became the heart of a vast Mexican province with only a few thousand settlers in all of it.

The land belonged in practice to the peoples who had long held it. Comanche raiders rode down from the plains to the north and west. The Lipan Apache, the Wichita and the Tonkawa ranged the hill country and the prairies, the Karankawa the coast, the Caddo the eastern forests. Spain had never filled Texas with settlers, and Mexico had none to spare.

So the new nation took a gamble. It would open Texas to colonists from the United States, give them land almost for free, and ask in return that they become Mexican citizens and Catholics, and a buffer between the Comanche and everyone else. Under the Constitution of 1824, Texas was joined to Coahuila as a single state, governed from Saltillo, hundreds of miles to the south. The Tejanos of Béxar would watch what came next more closely than anyone.

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Moses Austin won permission in January 1821 to settle three hundred American families in Texas, and died that June before he could bring one. Read more His son Stephen, twenty-seven, took up the grant and carried it through Mexico's change of government. The settlers who took land under it are remembered as the Old Three Hundred, and in 1824 Austin founded their capital here, at a ferry crossing on the Brazos.

San Felipe became the capital of Anglo Texas in all but name, with a land office, courts, and from 1829 a newspaper. The newcomers called themselves Texians. They came for land at a fraction of American prices, and many brought enslaved people to clear it and grow cotton: in 1825 the colony counted 443 enslaved people among 1,790 residents, nearly a quarter. When Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, the decree was simply never put into effect in Texas. It was a fault line from the start.

The colony grew faster than anyone in Mexico City had planned. By 1834 there were somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand Anglo settlers in Texas, against fewer than eight thousand Tejanos. And they were starting to ask for things: a state of their own, lower duties, and the right to keep on coming.

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The first rising against Mexico in Texas came from the east, where the old royal road brought Americans in from Louisiana. Read more In 1825 the empresario Haden Edwards received a grant around Nacogdoches and ordered the families already living there, many of them Tejanos who had held their land for generations, to prove their titles or lose them. Mexico revoked his contract. On December 21, 1826, his followers declared the Republic of Fredonia, and hung its flag from the Old Stone Fort, the town's great stone house. A replica stands here on the university campus.

Fredonia's allies were to be Cherokee. Their leaders Richard Fields and John Dunn Hunter had spent years seeking Mexican title to their lands, and signed a treaty to split Texas with the rebels. The rest of the Cherokee would not follow; their council had Fields and Hunter executed. Stephen F. Austin, calling the rebels infatuated madmen, sent his own militia to march with the Mexican army, and on January 31, 1827, they reached a Nacogdoches the Fredonians had already abandoned.

Mexico drew its own lesson: Americans in Texas might not stay Mexican. As for the Cherokee under Chief Bowl, Sam Houston would sign a treaty in February 1836 that kept them out of the revolution. The Republic never ratified it, and in 1839 its army drove them from Texas and killed Bowl on the field.

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Mexico's answer came in the Law of April 6, 1830: no more settlers from the United States, and soldiers to collect customs at the ports. This bluff above Trinity Bay was one of the places they went. Read more Colonel Juan Davis Bradburn, a Virginian in Mexican service, built a brick fort here with settlers' labor and supplies, sheltered runaway slaves from Louisiana, and made himself the most hated man in Texas.

In May 1832 he arrested a young lawyer named William Barret Travis, and held him and Patrick Jack in an empty brick kiln. Some two hundred armed colonists gathered, and at Turtle Bayou they signed resolutions insisting that they were not rebels at all, but supporters of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, then fighting the government in the name of Mexico's federal Constitution of 1824. Colonists bringing cannon from the Brazos fought the Mexican garrison at Velasco, the first blood of the quarrel. Bradburn was removed, and Travis walked free.

Then the ground shifted. Austin carried the colonists' petitions to Mexico City in 1833, and was arrested on his way home and held for a year and a half without charge. Santa Anna, now president, turned on the federalists he had led. In June 1835 Travis came back to Anahuac with about two dozen men, and the garrison surrendered to him. Most Texians thought he had gone too far. Within months they would be where he was.

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By the late summer of 1835 Santa Anna had torn up the Constitution of 1824, and troops were coming north to bring Texas to heel. Read more Stephen F. Austin came home at the end of August, after a year and a half as a prisoner, no longer counselling patience.

In 1831 the town of Gonzales, the westernmost Anglo settlement, had been lent a small cannon to defend itself against Comanche raids. At the end of September the commander at Béxar sent Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda and about a hundred dragoons to take it back. Eighteen men held the river crossing against him, buried the gun, and sent riders for help. Within days there were about a hundred and forty.

They dug the cannon up, mounted it on cart wheels, and in the fog before dawn on October 2 they crossed the Guadalupe and fired on Castañeda's camp, here on the river above town, under a white flag painted with a black cannon and the words Come and Take It. At a parley their commander told Castañeda they were fighting for the Constitution of 1824. Castañeda said he was a federalist himself, but a soldier under orders, and those orders were to avoid a fight. He withdrew. Two of his men had been killed. The only Texian hurt got a bloody nose when his horse threw him. Two days later Austin wrote: War is declared.

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Volunteers poured into Gonzales, chose Austin as their commander, and marched on San Antonio, where General Martín Perfecto de Cos, Santa Anna's brother-in-law, held the town with several hundred soldiers. Read more On the way, a party of Texians broke into the presidio at Goliad with borrowed axes and took it.

On October 27 Austin sent James Bowie and James Fannin ahead with ninety men to find a campsite. They settled for the night in a wooded bend of the San Antonio River beside this mission, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, whose church had already stood for eighty years. In the fog of the next morning Cos sent about 275 men and two cannon against them.

The Texians held the riverbank below the bluff and picked off the gun crews with their long rifles. Three charges broke in about half an hour, and the Texians turned a captured cannon on the retreating troops. Mexican dead are counted anywhere from fourteen to seventy-six. The Texians lost one man, Richard Andrews, hit by grapeshot. It taught both sides the wrong lesson: the Texians decided Mexican soldiers could not stand against them. Meanwhile, at San Felipe, delegates to a Consultation voted 33 to 14 that they were fighting for the Constitution of 1824, not for independence. Not yet.

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Then the siege of Béxar stalled. Through November the Texian army sat outside town, cold and bored and slowly going home. Austin left to seek help in the United States. Read more Juan Seguín, from one of Béxar's leading families, rode with the Texians at the head of a company of thirty-seven Tejanos. A skirmish over what the Texians hoped was a Mexican silver train turned out to be a fight over bags of grass for horses. By December the officers were talking about winter quarters.

Ben Milam would not hear of it. A forty-seven-year-old Kentuckian, an empresario who had escaped from a Mexican prison only that autumn, he stepped out in front of the camp and called out: Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio? About three hundred men said they would. At dawn on December 5 they broke into town and fought forward house by house.

On December 7, near the Veramendi house, Milam was looking at the church tower through a telescope when a Mexican rifleman shot him in the head. He is buried here, in the park that bears his name. Two days later Cos asked for terms, and his army marched south across the Rio Grande. By Christmas 1835 there was no Mexican army in Texas, and most of the volunteers went home, sure the war was won.

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It was not won. Santa Anna came north himself through the winter, and on the afternoon of February 23, 1836, the bell rang in this church's tower, where Travis had posted a lookout. Read more Mexican cavalry was in sight. The Texians had not believed he could come so soon. They drove what cattle they could find into the old mission across the river they had fortified, the Alamo, and shut the gate.

About fifteen hundred Mexican soldiers marched into Béxar, and from the tower of San Fernando, the highest point in town, they raised a blood-red flag. Everyone understood it. It meant no quarter: surrender now, or when the fort fell no one inside would be spared. A bugle asked for a parley. Travis answered with a shot from the Alamo's eighteen-pounder.

The church was begun in the late 1730s for the Canary Islanders who had founded the town, and dedicated in 1755. The old tower is gone, pulled down when the cathedral was rebuilt in 1868, but the sanctuary of the church that saw the red flag still stands inside it. That same day, far to the east, Sam Houston signed his treaty with the Cherokee. The siege of the Alamo had begun. It would last thirteen days.

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Inside the walls were about a hundred and fifty men fit to fight, under two commanders who did not like each other: William Barret Travis, twenty-six, for the regulars, and Jim Bowie for the volunteers. Read more On the second day Bowie collapsed with illness, and command passed to Travis alone.

That day, February 24, Travis wrote the letter that made him immortal, addressed To the People of Texas and All Americans in the World. I am besieged, he wrote, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. He called for help in the name of liberty, of patriotism, and everything dear to the American character, and signed it: Victory or Death.

Couriers slipped out through the lines. Juan Seguín rode out at night on Bowie's horse, chosen because a Spanish speaker stood the best chance of getting past Mexican patrols. Almost no help came. At three in the morning on March 1, thirty-two men from Gonzales, the town that had fired the first shot, got through the lines and into the fort. They were the only reinforcements the Alamo ever received. The story that Travis drew a line in the sand and asked who would stay was first printed thirty-five years later, and has never been confirmed.

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While the Alamo held out, delegates from across Texas were riding into a raw little town on the Brazos. Read more On March 1 they met in near-freezing weather in an unfinished building whose rent, it seems, was never paid.

The next day, March 2, 1836, they adopted a Declaration of Independence, drafted by a committee under George Childress, and it was signed by fifty-nine delegates. Three were born in Mexico: José Antonio Navarro and his uncle José Francisco Ruiz, both of Béxar, and Lorenzo de Zavala, a liberal who had broken with Santa Anna. The fight was no longer for the Constitution of 1824. Texas was a nation, or claimed to be.

On March 6 a letter from Travis arrived, and one delegate moved that the whole convention march to the Alamo. Sam Houston, named commander of the army, talked them out of it and rode west to Gonzales to take command. The delegates stayed to write a constitution, and in the small hours of March 17 they elected David G. Burnet president. Then, with Santa Anna's armies moving east, they scattered. The hall on this spot is a replica, built after the state bought the site in 1916.

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But the Alamo had already fallen. Before dawn on Sunday, March 6, around eighteen hundred Mexican soldiers who had lain on the cold ground half the night rose and went at the walls. Read more Twice the columns fell back. On the third try they came over the north wall, where Travis was among the first to die, and the fight broke into the rooms, the long barrack, and finally the church.

It was over in about an hour and a half. Every defender who fought was killed, somewhere between about 180 and 250 men; the count has never been settled. Bowie most likely died in his bed. How David Crockett died, fighting or executed after capture, is still argued. The Mexican army lost perhaps four to six hundred killed and wounded. Santa Anna had the defenders' bodies stacked and burned.

Some were spared: Susanna Dickinson, an artilleryman's wife, and her baby daughter Angelina; Travis's enslaved man, Joe; and Tejano women and children, among them Juana Navarro Alsbury and the Esparza family. Santa Anna gave each woman a blanket and two silver dollars, and sent Susanna Dickinson east with a warning for the rest of Texas.

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Sam Houston reached Gonzales on March 11 and found about 370 volunteers waiting for him. That same day two of Seguín's Tejano riders came in with word that the Alamo had fallen. Read more Then Susanna Dickinson arrived with her baby, escorted by Joe and by Santa Anna's letter of warning, and there was no more doubt. Gonzales had sent thirty-two men into the Alamo, and they were all dead.

Houston ordered an immediate retreat. On the night of March 13 the army and every family in Gonzales left for the east, and the town was burned behind them so that nothing would be left to Santa Anna. It was the beginning of what came to be called the Runaway Scrape: thousands of settlers, Anglo and Tejano and enslaved, fleeing toward Louisiana on flooded roads through a cold, wet spring, the Mexican army somewhere behind them. Many died on the way, and were buried where they fell.

The memorial to the Gonzales thirty-two stands here in the town that was rebuilt.

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The largest Texian force still in the field sat at Goliad under James Fannin, who had renamed the old presidio Fort Defiance. Read more Travis had begged him for help, and Fannin had started toward the Alamo and turned back. Now Houston ordered him to fall back to Victoria. Fannin waited, for men he had sent to Refugio who never returned.

He finally marched on the morning of March 19, in fog, with about three hundred men, nine cannon, and slow oxen that stopped to graze. General José de Urrea's cavalry caught him in open prairie here, two miles short of the timber along Coleto Creek and the water it promised. The Texians formed a hollow square three ranks deep and threw back the attacks until dark. Urrea himself wrote of their withering fire. But in the night Mexican reinforcements and artillery came up, and the Texians had no water for the wounded or to cool the guns.

On the morning of March 20 Fannin surrendered. The paper he signed put his men at the disposition of the Mexican government, but they believed they would be sent home to the United States. In eight days, a Mexican officer told them, home and liberty. They were marched back to Goliad.

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For a week the prisoners were held in the presidio of La Bahía, whose chapel has stood almost unchanged since 1749. Urrea wrote asking for leniency. Read more Santa Anna's orders, resting on a Mexican decree that armed foreigners were to be treated as pirates, were that they be shot. The officer in command received both letters on the same evening, and obeyed Santa Anna. That night, not knowing, the prisoners sang Home, Sweet Home.

On the morning of Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, the prisoners who could walk were marched out in three columns along three roads and shot less than a mile from the walls. The wounded were killed inside the fort. Fannin was taken out last and shot in the courtyard. By the Handbook of Texas's count of names 342 men died; other counts run past four hundred. Twenty-eight ran for the river in the smoke and escaped, and about twenty were spared to work as doctors, interpreters and mechanics.

Others were saved by Francita Alavez, who had come north with a Mexican officer, and whom the survivors remembered as the Angel of Goliad. The bodies were burned and left in the open until June. Goliad, even more than the Alamo, turned the war into a war for revenge.

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Houston kept retreating, and his army and his government began to despise him for it. He fell back across the Colorado, burning the ferry behind him, and then to the Brazos. Read more At the end of March he turned north up the river, and Captain Moseley Baker, commanding the largest company in the army, stayed behind to hold the crossing here at San Felipe.

On March 30, on a scout's report that the Mexican army was near, Baker's men set the town alight. It was a false alarm, and for the rest of their lives the two men argued about it: Houston said the residents had burned their own homes. Either way, Austin's town, the capital of Anglo Texas for more than a decade, was gone in a night.

East of the river the refugee roads ran toward the Trinity and the Sabine, jammed with carts and families and livestock, and town after town stood empty behind them. Stephen F. Austin was not among them. He was in the United States, trying to raise money and men for a war that, from this riverbank, looked lost.

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For two weeks from the end of March the army of Texas camped in the Brazos bottoms here, across the river from Bernardo, the plantation of the Groce family, the first great planters in Texas. It rained. Read more Men sickened. The plantation filled with refugees and a hospital, and Jared Groce melted down his lead pipes for bullets. Houston drilled his men, kept his plans to himself, and ignored a letter from President Burnet that told him the enemy was laughing at him, and that he must fight.

Two things came up the river that mattered. On April 11 a pair of iron cannon arrived, bought by the people of Cincinnati and shipped by way of New Orleans: the Twin Sisters. And the steamboat Yellow Stone, caught loading cotton at Groce's Landing, was pressed into service. Houston later wrote that she enabled him to cross the Brazos and save Texas. Over April 12 and 13 she ferried the army to the east bank in seven trips.

It was moving at last, and nobody but Houston knew whether it was going toward the safety of the Louisiana border, or toward Santa Anna.

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Santa Anna had divided his army and ridden ahead with about seven hundred men, hoping to catch the Texas government. Read more On April 15 he reached Harrisburg, the little town on Buffalo Bayou where Burnet's cabinet had been working, and found it empty. The government had gone down the bayou to New Washington. He burned the town, all but one house, and sent cavalry after them. At New Washington Colonel Juan Almonte's riders reached the shore just as Burnet's rowboat pulled away, and Almonte held his fire because Burnet's family was aboard.

Somewhere north of here, at a fork near present-day Tomball, the Texian army took the road to Harrisburg, not the road east toward Louisiana. Whether Houston chose it or the men at the head of the column chose it for him is still argued. On April 18 the army reached the ashes of Harrisburg, and Deaf Smith and Henry Karnes, its best scouts, captured a Mexican courier. His dispatches told Houston exactly where every Mexican army in Texas was, and that Santa Anna himself was just ahead with a small part of his.

On the 19th Houston left his sick and his baggage behind and crossed Buffalo Bayou toward him.

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On April 20 the two armies found each other on the prairie where Buffalo Bayou meets the San Jacinto River, with marsh and water behind them both. Read more The Twin Sisters fired their first shots, and cavalry skirmished in the afternoon. The Mexican army threw up a barricade of packs and saddles.

At about nine the next morning, General Cos came in over the bridge across Vince's Bayou with some five hundred and forty men, bringing Santa Anna's army to about twelve hundred. Houston sent Deaf Smith with axes to cut the bridge down and burn it. The idea was later claimed by both men. Its purpose, Houston wrote, was cutting off all possibility of escape. No more reinforcements could reach Santa Anna, and whichever army lost the coming fight would have nowhere to run but the marsh.

That evening a lone Mexican horseman fleeing the battle would reach the burned bridge, find no way across, and turn back to hide in the grass.

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Santa Anna expected an attack at dawn on the 21st. When none came, his tired army, and Cos's men who had marched through the night without food, settled into an afternoon rest. Read more Across the field, screened by a rise in the prairie, something between eight and nine hundred Texians formed a line in mid-afternoon: Burleson's regiment in the center, Sherman's on the left with Juan Seguín's Tejano company, who wore playing cards in their hats so they would not be taken for the enemy.

At about half past four the Twin Sisters opened fire and the line went forward, the army's few musicians playing a popular love song, Will You Come to the Bower. Then they were running, shouting Remember the Alamo, Remember Goliad. The Mexican camp broke almost at once.

The battle lasted eighteen minutes. The killing lasted much longer, as Texians ran down soldiers in the marsh and the bayou and officers who tried to stop it were ignored. Houston's report counted 630 Mexican dead and 730 prisoners; the Texians lost nine killed or mortally wounded, eleven by some counts. Houston's horse was shot under him, and a musket ball shattered his ankle.

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Santa Anna was not among the dead or the prisoners. On April 22 a search party found a man hiding in the grass, wet and filthy and dressed as a common soldier, and brought him into camp as one more prisoner. Read more Then the Mexican prisoners saw him, and began to call out: El Presidente.

He was taken to Sam Houston, who lay wounded on the field, while Texians around them shouted for a rope. Houston understood that alive, the President of Mexico was worth more than an army. Santa Anna wrote to his second in command, General Vicente Filisola, whose forces still outnumbered the whole Texian army, reporting an unfortunate encounter and ordering a retreat. Filisola obeyed, and the Mexican armies turned south.

The San Jacinto Monument rises over the battlefield now: 567 feet from its base to the tip of its thirty-four-foot star, a dozen feet taller than the Washington Monument, as Texans rarely fail to mention. It was dedicated on April 21, 1939, the battle's one hundred and third anniversary.

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The story ends where the first blood was shed, at the old port of Velasco on the mouth of the Brazos. In June 1832, colonists carrying cannon to Anahuac had fought the Mexican garrison here. Read more Now the town was the government's temporary seat, and its prisoner was the President of Mexico.

On May 14, 1836, Santa Anna and President Burnet signed two treaties here. The public one ended the war, sent the Mexican army south of the Rio Grande, and promised prisoners would be exchanged. The secret one promised Santa Anna his freedom in exchange for working for recognition of Texas independence. Mexico's government declared everything he had signed as a captive void, and did not accept the loss of Texas until 1848, after another war. But the Mexican army was gone, and it did not come back to stay.

In the fall Texans elected Sam Houston president of a new republic. The revolution had been won by Texians and Tejanos together, and yet the Republic would drive many Tejano families off their land, and Juan Seguín himself into exile. It would push the Cherokee out of Texas, fight the Comanche for decades, and write slavery into its constitution. That is the rest of the story, and it starts here.

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