Lone Star Nation (20 page)

Travis did rate notice for his ambition. Despite his failure at the bar back home, he intended to practice law in Texas and make the name for himself he had failed to earn in Claiborne. San Felipe had more attorneys than it needed, so Travis headed south to Anahuac, near the mouth of the Trinity River at the head of Galveston Bay. Formerly Perry's Point, the town had been rechristened when the Mexican government, following the recommendation of General Terán, established a garrison there. The function of the garrison was to prevent illegal immigration from the United States, to ensure collection of the customs duties owed on imports, and to remind inhabitants and visitors that Texas belonged to Mexico. Customs houses generate work for lawyers, as merchants and collectors haggle over what is subject to tariffs and at what rates; Travis thought he could break into the Texas bar at Anahuac.

He had bigger plans as well. Hardly had he discovered a place to live in Anahuac than he decided he wanted to be the American consul there. As this required support from influential politicians in Washington, Travis asked Austin to recommend him to Thomas Hart Benton, Sam Houston's old friend and now a senator from Missouri. Austin had to confess to Benton that “my personal acquaintance with Mr. T. is very short and limited,” but Travis seemed a capable fellow. “He has been recommended to me by persons of respectability, and I can with full confidence say that he has acquired the esteem and respect of the better part of the people in the section of the country where he resides. . . . I have my self no hesitation in recommending him.”

But before Benton and the American Congress could act on Austin's recommendation, Travis was distracted by local politics. As the sharpest point of contact between the Mexican government and the immigrants to Texas, Anahuac became a focus of immigrant discontent. Austin's original grant had exempted his colony from customs duties for seven years; during that period the Texans grew used to a customs-less life, and many expected their exemption to be made permanent. The Mexican government had other ideas, especially in the mood that produced the April 6 law, and it insisted on payment after the exemption ran out. The colonists, and the merchants who supplied their wants, responded with the age-old tactic of customs resisters: smuggling. This raised the stakes for both sides, as government agents seized ships and cargoes, and the smugglers bribed and occasionally shot their way past the revenuers.

To instill respect for Mexican authority, the government appointed Colonel Juan Bradburn to head the garrison at Anahuac. There was logic to the appointment, as Bradburn was an American (born John Bradburn in Virginia) who had become even more Mexicanized than Stephen Austin. Bradburn fought during the Mexican war of independence on the side of the rebels; when the rebels won he joined the Mexican army and married a Mexican heiress. In 1831 he remained a devoted Mexican patriot. This was what annoyed the Americans with whom he had to deal at Anahuac—this and the fact that he was an intemperate, belligerent man. (The Mexican patriotism of Austin bothered many of the Americans, too, but Austin had compensating gifts of tact and patience, besides being the one who distributed the land.) When Bradburn showed that he would be even tougher on the Americans than Mexican-born officers like Terán, trouble developed.

Travis was in the thick of it. One of his first clients was a Louisiana slaveholder named Logan, two of whose slaves had escaped to Texas. Logan hired Travis to recover them. In the 1850s the question of escaped slaves would be a rock on which the American union broke; in the 1830s the same question commenced the fracturing of the Mexican federation. Though slavery was illegal in Mexico, the state and federal governments tolerated a subterfuge by which immigrants from the United States, before entering Texas, compelled their slaves to sign long-term indentures. The affected blacks—many of whom had no idea what they were signing, or even that the laws in Mexico were different from those in the United States—were technically not slaves but in practice were as bound as ever. The fact that Mexico City was far away abetted the Texas slaveholders in their fraud, as did the fact that, in this form, the bound service of blacks didn't differ much from the bound service of Mexico's many (largely Indian) peons. The result was a flourishing slave system in everything but name—and often even in name. A traveler to Texas in 1831 was surprised at how openly slavery was practiced. Describing visits to various houses between Brazoria and San Felipe, he wrote, “At some of these houses, as in many of those in Texas generally, we found one or more negroes, held as slaves, although the laws of Mexico forbid it. The blacks are ignorant; the whites are generally in favor of slavery and ready to sustain the master in his usurped authority; the province is so distant from the capital, and had been for some time so little attended to by the government, that the laws on this subject were ineffectual. Negroes are even publicly sold.”

Juan Bradburn, despite his Virginia roots, took the Mexican ban on slavery seriously and attempted to enforce it. But what the ban meant for runaways from the United States was uncertain, which was why Logan had engaged Travis. Travis applied to Bradburn to recover the two slaves, claiming they were contraband to whom the Mexican law didn't apply. Bradburn rejected the application. The runaways, he said, weren't contraband but free men. Besides, he added, they had joined the Mexican army and requested Mexican citizenship.

Had Bradburn been more diplomatic, he might not have provoked the reaction he did. But had he been more diplomatic, he wouldn't have been commanding a hardship post on a lonely frontier. His troops didn't want to be there, either; many were convicts sent to Texas to serve out their time. When they behaved the way convicts, not to mention conscripts generally, often do—they became drunk, insulted civilians, started fights, and reportedly raped at least one woman—Bradburn refused to rein them in, adopting the attitude that the Americans got no worse than they deserved. Needless to say, the Americans detested him all the more.

Travis caught on to how unpopular Bradburn was, and he pushed the bounds of legal propriety. He spread a rumor that a band of Louisiana vigilantes was coming to Anahuac to recapture the runaways. Bradburn summoned the garrison to repel the assault, and held the troops in readiness for several days, only to discover—to his chagrin and anger—that there were no vigilantes and no threat. Apparently Travis laughed too hard and gave himself away; Bradburn ordered him arrested.

By the mere fact of his arrest, Travis became a celebrity among the many Americans who deemed Bradburn a despot. A man who shared Travis's cell, Patrick Jack, had been arrested for raising an unauthorized militia, ostensibly against Indians but actually against Bradburn. Bradburn feared that the militia would attempt to free the prisoners, so he moved them from the ordinary guardhouse to an empty brick kiln. Word of their plight spread through Anahuac and north toward San Felipe and Nacogdoches. Bradburn tried to intimidate sympathizers by making additional arrests, but these merely caused the popular anger to spread even faster. A company of thirty armed colonists from Brazoria rode toward Anahuac to free the prisoners; by the time they reached the garrison town they numbered more than a hundred.

Bradburn reinforced the kiln-prison with cannons and threatened to shoot Travis and Jack in the event of attack. Travis for the first time felt the thrill of mortal danger, and discovered in himself a willingness to risk death for principle and glory. A witness recalled him shouting from captivity that the attackers should blaze away with no care for him.

But the crisis took a different turn. A band of soldiers sent out by Bradburn was captured by the insurgents, who used these hostages to bargain for the release of Bradburn's prisoners. Bradburn agreed to the deal but reneged after getting his soldiers back, leaving Travis and Jack in chains (and shooting up the American part of Anahuac to underscore his disdain). Meanwhile some of the insurgents went to Brazoria for a pair of cannons dumped there by a ship that got stuck in the sand; while bringing them out, the insurgents traded fatal fire with Mexican troops.

This escalation alarmed the Mexican commander at Nacogdoches, who hurried south to prevent the rebellion from becoming a revolution. Appraising the strength of the insurgents, he acceded to their central demands. He persuaded Bradburn to release Travis and the others to the civil court system, and then got Bradburn to relinquish his command to a replacement who had yet to alienate the locals.

At the time of his arrest, Travis had been merely another lawyer and speculator, younger and greener than most; two months later he emerged from jail a hero among the Texas rebels. Exploiting his opportunity, he wrote up his ordeal for publication. “Mexicans have learned a lesson,” he declared. “
Americans know their rights and will assert and protect them
.” Virtue and honor had triumphed, and would continue to do so. “The Americans have gained every thing which they claimed. There is every prospect that this happy state of things will have a long and prosperous duration.”

James Bowie was never a lawyer, largely because his other occupations kept him busy, often breaking the law. Bowie was a fighter (who killed at least one man in close combat), a speculator (with a particular gift for land fraud), a slaver (who made a fortune buying and selling human flesh), a smuggler (of slaves, mostly), a consorter with pirates (including the Laffite brothers), and a spinner of tales (which often ended by separating listeners from their money). Not least on account of his skill at tale telling, Bowie won the heart and hand of one of Texas's fairest maidens.

Bowie was born in Kentucky, in the bend of the Cumberland River, in 1776, two years before Moses Austin moved his family from Virginia to Spanish Louisiana. Rezin Bowie, James's father, was a farmer rather than a miner, but before long he too discerned possibilities in expatriation, and he likewise transported his clan across the Mississippi. The Bowies spent a couple of years in what would become Missouri, downriver from the Austins, but Rezin then relocated them farther south, to the bayou country of Louisiana. Like the Austins, the Bowies were repatriated when Jefferson purchased Louisiana.

James Bowie was eighteen when the War of 1812 came to Louisiana, and with his elder brother Rezin he enlisted for service under Andrew Jackson. But their enlistment was too late to win them any glory, for they hadn't found their way to the front by the time the British were beaten and the war ended. All the same, the militia stint got the Bowie boys off the farm and into the wider world, and the experience awakened in James a desire to be a man of his own. With twenty dollars in muster-out money, he set off to seek his fortune.

The first place he looked was along Bayou Boeuf, midway between New Orleans and Natchitoches. Without bothering to purchase the land or inform the owner, he took up residence on a parcel of property and commenced cutting cypress timber, which he floated to market. Between the proceeds from the wood sales and his willingness to live on venison and other game, he saved enough money to acquire the property honestly. He also bought a handful of slaves. With these he continued to work and buy, expanding his domain tract by tract.

But even as his industry was rewarded, Bowie felt the pull of something larger. “He was young, proud, poor, and ambitious,” recalled his brother John, who went on to describe James's appearance and character.

After reaching the age of maturity he was a stout, rather raw-boned man, of six feet height, weight 180 pounds, and about as well made as any man I ever saw. His hair was light-colored, not quite red; his eyes were gray, rather deep-set in his head, very keen and penetrating in their glance; his complexion was fair, and his cheekbones rather high. Taken altogether, he was a manly, fine-looking person, and by many of the fair ones he was called handsome. He was possessed of an open, frank disposition, with rather a good temper, unless aroused by some insult, when the displays of his anger were terrible, and frequently terminated in some tragical scene. . . . He loved his friends with all the ardor of youth, and hated his enemies and their friends with all the rancor of the Indian.

He also exhibited a wild streak. “He was fond of fishing and hunting,” John said, “and often afforded rare sport to his neighbors by his daring exploits in roping and capturing wild deer in the woods, or catching and riding wild unmanageable horses. He has been even known to rope and ride alligators.”

In the bayou country Bowie met Jean Laffite. The pirate and smuggler was working from bases along the Louisiana and Texas coast, and had developed a large trade in slaves. Although slavery remained perfectly legal in the southern United States, and with it the domestic slave trade, the import of slaves from outside the country had been banned since 1808. In the East this presented no serious problem, as American slaves reproduced fast enough to meet demand. But in the Gulf states, where planters were rapidly expanding their cotton fields, the demand for slaves outstripped the local supply. Many slaves came legally (but unhappily, given the hard life that awaited them) down the Mississippi (hence the melancholy phrase “sold down the river”); others came illegally up from the Gulf. Jean and Pierre Laffite were procurers. Acquiring slaves from the flush markets of the Caribbean, they sold them to brokers who transported the unfortunate Africans to the Mississippi and unloaded them to planters there.