Lone Star Nation (35 page)

While pressing the provisional government as hard as he could, Houston appealed, in even more impassioned terms, to Texans at large.

Citizens of Texas, your rights must be defended. The oppressors must be driven from our soil. . . . Union among ourselves will render us invincible; subordination and discipline in our army will guarantee us victory and renown. Our invader has sworn to extinguish us, or sweep us from the soil. He is vigilant in his work of oppression, and has ordered to Texas ten thousand men to enforce the unhallowed purposes of his ambition. . . . The hopes of the usurper were inspired by a belief that the citizens of Texas were disunited and divided in opinion. . . . That alone has been the cause of the present invasion of our rights. He shall realize the fallacy of his hopes, in the union of her citizens, and their ETERNAL RESISTANCE to his plans against constitutional liberty. We will enjoy our birth-right, or perish in its defense.

The irregulars before San Antonio seemed bent on confirming every bad thing Houston said about militias. They defied Stephen Austin until the moment he gave up the command. Austin repeatedly tried to organize an assault on the town, but neither orders nor pleas availed. “I have at various times submitted the question of storming the fortifications to a council of officers,” Austin wrote James Perry, “and they have uniformly decided against it. Yesterday I was in hopes the Army was prepared to do it, and I issued a positive order to storm at daylight this morning; but on trial I found it impossible to get half the men willing for the measure, and it was abandoned from necessity.” Austin's frustration, as much as his poor health, made him happy to turn the problem of the army over to Houston. “I have done the best I could. This army has always been composed of discordant elements, and is without proper organization. The volunteer system will not do for such a service.”

Although Houston agreed with Austin that the volunteer system would never do, he agreed with the militia that an assault on San Antonio was unwise. In fact, he went further, arguing that if an assault didn't make sense, neither did a siege. In the Creek campaign with Jackson in Tennessee, Houston had seen militia melt away when there was no active fighting to be done, and he now concluded that it would be better to withdraw in good order from San Antonio than to have the army disintegrate.

Yet having reached this conclusion, he appreciated that such influence as he could exert on the volunteers at Béxar would be by persuasion only. No more than Austin could he enforce obedience. Consequently he wrote to James Fannin, asking the captain to reconsider the siege, especially as it was less than complete. “Would it not be best to raise a
nominal
siege—fall back to La Bahía and Gonzales, leaving a sufficient force for the protection of the frontier (which, by the bye, will not be invaded), furlough the balance of the army to comfortable homes, and when the artillery is in readiness, march to the combat with sufficient force and at once reduce San Antonio?” Artillery, Houston judged, was the key to driving the Mexicans from their fortified position at the Alamo and in the town. He had sent an agent to New Orleans to acquire cannon, but they wouldn't arrive for weeks or months. Till then, the army should husband its resources. “Remember one maxim: it is better to do well late, than
never!
The army without means ought never to have passed the Guadalupe without the proper munitions of war to reduce San Antonio. Therefore the error cannot be in falling back to an eligible position.”

Talk of retreat, however reasonable, inevitably struck some of the Texans as defeatist. The conspiracy-minded had previously sensed a plot by Houston to take over the army. Two settlers from the DeWitt colony warned the provisional council against “the insidious attempts of designing and ambitious men who have an eye to their own ambitious projects rather than to the good of the country.” Foremost among these “traitors in the ranks,” they said, was Houston: “a vain, ambitious, envious, disappointed, discontented man who desires the defeat of our army, that he may be appointed to the command of the next.” When Houston did indeed gain command of the regular army—notional though it was as yet—the plot appeared to have succeeded.

There was something to the arguments of the conspiracy theorists. Houston was almost everything they said of him: vain, ambitious, envious, disappointed, and discontented. And he certainly believed he'd make a better general than Austin—which was true enough, as Austin himself essentially admitted. But to say that Houston desired the defeat of the army was absurd. The army was Houston's protection as much as anyone else's; if the rebellion failed, he'd be lucky to reach the Sabine alive. And with his last chance of rehabilitation shattered, he wouldn't have much to live for.

More to the point, Houston was right in arguing that San Antonio wasn't essential to the Texan cause. It was too far from the American settlements, too close to the rest of Mexico, too hard to defend. The war would never be won at San Antonio, but it might be lost there. The proper line of defense was the Guadalupe.

Had anyone actually commanded the troops at San Antonio, Houston's argument might have taken hold. But the army had a mind of its own—many minds, in fact, and they kept changing. After weeks of refusing to attack the town, the volunteers suddenly decided that an attack was precisely what was called for. The catalyst for the decision was a report that a Mexican relief column was approaching from the Rio Grande. Somehow a rumor arose that the column was carrying a large quantity of silver. Many of the rebels were bored with the siege and intrigued by the thought of booty, and they determined to capture the column and claim its prize. To lend a semblance of order to the expedition, Edward Burleson, who had been elected by the volunteers at the front to replace Austin (by which election the volunteers spat in Houston's face), ordered James Bowie to lead the group.

Bowie and about forty men intercepted the Mexican column a mile from Béxar but still within sight of the town, across the open plains that surrounded it. Although outnumbered three or four to one, the Texans hardly hesitated before galloping against the Mexican train. The surprised Mexicans fought their way to an arroyo, where they dug in. Meanwhile General Cos, hearing the shooting and seeing the predicament of the relief column, dispatched a contingent from the town. At this, the Texans took cover in an arroyo close by the one that held the Mexicans.

The two sides traded fire. The Mexicans, hoping to capitalize on their greater numbers, charged the Texan line, only to be forced back by the rebels' rifles. The battle raged for some time, till Texan reinforcements—additional volunteers, who refused to stay in camp while Bowie's group seized all the silver—reached the scene. Their arrival prompted the Mexicans to make a dash for the safety of the town, covered by artillery Cos had ordered out for that purpose. With the cannons holding the Texans off, the Mexicans escaped, although they left their baggage behind.

The Texans approached their prize with plunder foremost in mind. To their dismay and chagrin, all they found was fodder: grass the Mexican soldiers had cut in the meadows outside San Antonio and were taking to feed the horses and mules there. This was no relief column but a foraging party; its booty was nothing the Texans couldn't have gathered peacefully on their own.

The ludicrous affair acquired the derisive label “Grass Fight,” and it increased the restiveness of the Texas troops. Many had already gone home; others threatened to do so imminently. A rambunctious few, with perhaps no homes to go to, decided to carry the fight to Mexico, via an attack on Matamoros. Though they claimed patriotism as their motive, many apparently hoped to find more worth seizing there than they had discovered in Texas.

Edward Burleson, unable to keep the men in camp by orders or threats, resorted to promises—of an attack on San Antonio. As luck would have it, Cos released three Americans lately held prisoner in the town; arriving in the Texan camp, they reported that the garrison was more vulnerable than Burleson and the rebels had believed. Burleson announced that an assault would begin the next morning, December 2.

But again the broken—or nonexistent—chain of command fouled the operation. Polling their men, the company captains told Burleson they wouldn't attack. Burleson, like Austin earlier, had no choice but to acquiesce in what in any normal army would have been mutiny.

The double reversal profoundly discouraged the troops—many of whom, it turned out, were quite ready to fight. Hundreds more abandoned the camp, on grounds that if they weren't going to fight Mexicans, there was no reason to remain. “All day we get more and more dejected,” wrote Samuel Maverick, one of the dwindling faithful. “The general [Burleson] mustered the remaining men and begged them to not all go, but some stay and retreat with the cannon to La Bahía. A retreat seems our only recourse. The spectacle becomes appalling.”

Herman Ehrenberg was the son of a Prussian official of the court of Frederick William III, which made the lad's liberal leanings a problem for both himself and his father, not to mention the court. In his student years at Jena in the early 1830s, young Herman practiced the kind of demonstrative politics that spilled from the campus onto the streets of the city and landed many of the student leaders in jail. But Ehrenberg seems to have been comparatively unimportant or particularly clever, for he eluded the Prussian police until he decided, sometime around his seventeenth birthday, to flee the country for America.

New York, the first stop for most immigrants from Europe then and later, didn't suit him, for reasons unclear. After assorted adventures he found himself in New Orleans in October 1835, as news of the incipient revolution in Texas crossed the Sabine and floated down the Red and Mississippi Rivers. “Reports of the events in Texas filled the newspapers of the city, and the whole press, indifferent for once to party politics, supported the colonists in their rising,” Ehrenberg remembered. “Democratic as well as Whig and Independent papers vied with each other in their efforts to arouse public interest in the cause of the rebellious settlers. The success of this propaganda was complete, for all the citizens of New Orleans, native-born Americans as well as immigrants from Europe, Protestants as well as Catholics, were ready to help the brave men who were fighting against Mexican oppression.”

A group calling itself the Committee for Texas, organized by Adolphus Sterne—who happened to be the landlord of Sam Houston in Nacogdoches—announced a rally to be held at eight o'clock in the evening of October 11. On every corner of New Orleans placards two feet high called lovers of liberty to the cause of their Texas neighbors. Ehrenberg, inclined to be indignant toward any trespass on personal freedom, and not gainfully employed at the moment, couldn't resist the invitation.

While the cathedral clock slowly tolled its eight strokes, crowds of men poured into the coffee-house of the Arcade. This place was soon packed, and a deafening din prevailed until the appearance of the first speaker on the platform. Uproarious cheers greeted his arrival, then a deep silence fell upon the assembly; for everyone was eager to hear the message of the colonists, whose delegates and friends now came forward to explain the cause of the rebellion and to ask for support and sympathy. But these official representatives were not the only speakers who addressed the public; several citizens, carried away by the excitement of the moment, stood up and in a fervid if informal manner expressed their wishes and hopes in behalf of Texas. These short, spontaneous speeches roused the enthusiasm of their hearers to the highest pitch.

As the orations wound down, a subscription was taken up. Within minutes the committee collected ten thousand dollars for the Texas fighters. A second list circulated, for those who would join the rebel ranks. “A Kentuckian, six feet tall, mounted the now empty platform and wrote his name at the head of the list, while the spectators boisterously clapped their hands,” Ehrenberg recorded. “Old Kentucky was as ready as ever to fight for a just cause!”