Lone Star Nation (32 page)

Castañeda wanted neither to start a war nor to see his troops decimated, and so, after retreating to a more defensible position, he offered to parley with the Texans. A participant on the Texas side left an account of the discussion:

The Mexican commander, Castañeda, demanded of Colonel Moore the cause of our troops attacking him, to which Colonel Moore replied that he had made a demand of our cannon, and threatened, in case of refusal to give it up, that he would take it by force; that this cannon had been presented to the citizens of Gonzales for the defense of themselves and of the Constitution and laws of the country; that he, Castañeda, was acting under the orders of the tyrant Santa Anna, who had broken down and trampled underfoot all the state and federal constitutions in Mexico, excepting that of Texas, and that we were determined to fight for our rights under the Constitution of 1824 until the last gasp.

Castañeda replied that he himself was a republican . . . that he did not wish to fight the Anglo-Americans of Texas; that his orders from his commander were simply to demand the cannon, and if refused, to take up a position near Gonzales until further orders.

Colonel Moore then demanded him to surrender with the troops under his command, or join our side, stating to him that he would be received with open arms, and that he might retain his rank, pay, and emoluments; or that he must fight instantly.

Castañeda answered that he would obey orders.

Castañeda was obviously surprised at the aggressiveness of the Texans, although perhaps he shouldn't have been. Their attitude reflected both the alarm they felt at the recent political developments and the entirely practical consideration that they weren't regular soldiers and had farms and ranches to tend to. Castañeda might enjoy the luxury of patience, of awaiting further orders, but they did not—and anyway, acknowledging no higher authority than themselves, they had no one to await orders from. In coming to Gonzales, the Texans had left their homes unguarded; for all they knew, Indians even at that moment might be taking advantage of their absence and wreaking havoc on their families and homesteads. Under the circumstances, prudence dictated a forward defense of their rights against Santa Anna.

By this time some of the Texans had raised a banner beside the disputed cannon, with black letters on a white field issuing a challenge: “C
OME AND
T
AKE
I
T
.” As soon as Moore returned to the Texan lines, the cannon roared a challenge of its own, firing a charge of metal scraps toward the Mexicans. The Kentucky rifles of the Texans threatened more actual damage as the Texans advanced. But neither the cannon nor the rifles in fact inflicted much harm, for Castañeda quickly abandoned the field and headed for San Antonio. “Your Lordship's orders were for me to retire without compromising the honor of Mexican arms,” he reminded Ugartechea, by way of explanation.

The casualties from this first clash were light: a handful on the Mexican side, and even fewer among the Texans. Yet the Texans accounted it a stirring victory and a fateful step, as Noah Smithwick explained (in simultaneously tallying its cost): “It was our Lexington, though a bloodless one, save that a member of the ‘awkward squad' took a header from his horse, thereby bringing his nasal appendage into such intimate association with Mother Earth as to draw forth a copious stream of the sanguinary fluid. But the fight was on. Not a man of us thought of receding from the position in which this bold act had placed us.”

Like Lexington in April 1775, Gonzales in October 1835 signaled a transformation in the troubles between the insurgents and the government they opposed. In each case the insurgents had previously engaged in violence against the government (the Stamp Act riots and the Boston Tea Party in the first instance, the Anahuac and Nacogdoches disturbances in the second), but in each case the violence had been sporadic, more or less spontaneous, and inspired by particular, remediable grievances. At Lexington, and again at Gonzales, the insurgency became more deliberate, better organized, and more purposeful. In short, insurgency became rebellion—which would become revolution.

Before long the rhetoric of the American Revolution would trip off the tongues of the Texas rebels. Indeed, the parallels were already being drawn: the defenders of Gonzales rode into battle after hearing a sermon by a local Methodist preacher that perorated: “The same blood that animated the hearts of our ancestors in '76 still flows in our veins.” But just as the American rebels of the 1770s required time to determine the ultimate objectives of their struggle against King George, so the Texas rebels of the 1830s had to argue about what their fight against Santa Anna should yield. As of the battle of Gonzales, there was no body that could speak for all the Texans—or even for the American majority. In other words, Texas lacked its Continental Congress. Stephen Austin and others were trying to remedy this deficiency, by means of the consultation Austin had endorsed at his welcome-home dinner. But as late as September, even this comparatively innocuous undertaking continued to meet resistance from those who hoped to avoid provoking Santa Anna. By backing the consultation, Austin increased the likelihood that it would take place, and the landing of General Cos made the consultation more likely still. With the outbreak of fighting at Gonzales, the question was no longer whether it would meet, but whether it could meet soon enough. Ironically, though, the fighting delayed the gathering by drawing many of the potential delegates to the front. Given a choice between fighting and talking about fighting, most Texans preferred the real thing. An October call to the delegates failed to achieve a quorum, which wasn't attained till early November.

Yet the campaign against Cos and the Mexicans required some kind of organization, and the Texas rebels supplied it in their typical ad hoc mode. The various communities raised companies of volunteers, which elected their own commanders (with Gonzales choosing John Moore, San Felipe Stephen Austin, and Nacogdoches Sam Houston). As the companies coalesced after Gonzales, their officers recognized the need for a commander in chief. Several budding George Washingtons thought they fit the bill; unable to choose among them, the group offered the post to Austin, who accepted.

From the standpoint of politics, the choice was logical enough. Austin remained the most unifying figure in Texas. Although committed by now to independence, he appreciated the need to bring the diffident along slowly. “No more doubts, no submission,” he wrote privately. “
I hope to see Texas forever free from Mexican domination of any kind
.” He added, however, “It is yet too soon to say this publicly. . . . That is the point we shall aim at, and it is the one I am aiming at. But we must arrive at it by
steps,
and not all at one jump.”

Austin discerned a tactical advantage in appealing to Mexican federalists, who resented Santa Anna's usurpation and might cooperate in his overthrow. One group of federalists was known to be in New Orleans, organizing an expedition against central Mexico. Austin and Texas were in no position to offer anything other than moral support to this venture, but to the extent it even began to succeed, it would distract Santa Anna and perhaps require him to pull Cos and his troops south. And this—the expulsion of Mexican forces from Texas—was the primary goal at present.

Austin, moreover, hoped to bring aboard as many Mexican Texans as possible. At this point, with the Americans in Texas outnumbering the Tejanos by about ten to one, many of the Americans were speaking of the struggle against Santa Anna as a contest of cultures or races. Noah Smithwick put this view quite baldly. “It is not in the nature of things for the superior race to long remain under the domination of the inferior,” he said. The Mexicans had had their chance to conquer Texas and subdue the Indians there, and had failed. “And it was mainly because of Mexico's inability to hold the territory against them that it was thrown open to the Anglo-American. It was he who beat back the savage and converted the wilderness into civilized homes. Why then should he not control its destiny?”

Austin wasn't immune to such reasoning; almost no American, in an age that thought in racial terms, was. (Most upper-class Mexicans, including the late Mier y Terán, held comparably hierarchical attitudes, distinguishing between themselves and the lower castes and classes of Mexico.) But Austin realized that it would be counterproductive to treat Texas's struggle as a contest of civilizations so long as there were Tejanos willing to join the fight against Santa Anna. Juan Seguín, the son of Erasmo Seguín, was a devoted federalist; Austin had hardly taken over as commander in chief before the younger Seguín arrived at San Felipe leading a company of Tejanos from the district below San Antonio de Béxar who were as eager to defend the rights of Texas as any of the Americans. How ardent they would be for independence was another matter, given that the Americans so greatly outnumbered them; consequently Austin did what he could to keep the independence issue quiet.

Even more believable as a Mexican federalist was a man who shared living quarters with Austin during this period. Lorenzo de Zavala, formerly a Mexican senator from Yucatán, governor of the state of Mexico, and federal Treasury secretary, was high on Santa Anna's enemies list; having fled central Mexico, he took refuge in Texas among the rebels there. Zavala's presence gave credibility to the argument that the Texans were simply insisting on their constitutional rights vis-à-vis the government of Mexico. Whether he would endorse independence, and whether, in doing so, he would maintain his credibility, were open questions.

Amid the excitement at Gonzales, General Cos marched from the coast toward San Antonio. A company of Texans in the vicinity of Matagorda, inspired by the revolutionary spirit, determined to give chase. The Texans were also inspired by rumors that Cos was carrying tens of thousands of dollars in silver to pay the troops and otherwise fund the suppression of Texan liberties. The rebels guessed that they could find much better uses for the silver. Some hoped, in addition, to capture Cos himself; as kin (if only by marriage) to Santa Anna, he ought to be a valuable hostage.

But Cos moved quickly, and by the time the company, headed by George Collinsworth (lately of Mississippi), hit the road, the Mexican general was out of reach. Rather than retire empty-handed, the company—numbering more than a hundred, including some thirty Tejanos—marched to La Bahía, or Goliad, as it had come to be called. The town's garrison consisted of a handful of officers and perhaps fifty men, none of whom were eager to risk their lives in defense of the post. Collinsworth sent a message to the largely Tejano civil authorities of the town, demanding that they surrender and encouraging them to join the rebellion. The civil leaders weren't any more eager than the soldiers to tangle with the rebels, but neither were they sufficiently convinced of the rebels' staying power to risk taking their part, despite the Texans' assurance that they were fighting not for independence but for the constitution of 1824.

As a result, Collinsworth and the Texans decided to storm the town. The attack took place on the morning of October 10, and was over in less than half an hour. The Mexican resistance was mostly perfunctory, so that the commander could say he had surrendered to superior force. The Texans captured an arsenal of small arms, including, in the words of a post-action inventory that partly explained the Mexicans' reluctance to fight: “200 stands of muskets and carbines, some of which might be made serviceable by small repairs but the greater part are broken and entirely useless.”

More important than the Goliad arsenal was the location of the town, astride the main route from San Antonio to the sea. Cos might have traveled up the San Antonio River without a fight, but he wouldn't travel back down without one. Even more to the point, he wouldn't be reinforced except overland, across the hundreds of empty miles that had always made travel between Saltillo and San Antonio such a challenge. Cos held San Antonio, but San Antonio simultaneously held Cos.