Lone Star Nation (5 page)

Imprudently but unavoidably, La Salle left the settlement for months at a time, trying to figure out where he was. He traveled far to the west, perhaps reaching the Rio Grande. He traveled east, to the land of the Hasinai, or Tejas, Indians (who subsequently gave their name—rendered in English as Texas—to the region). Eventually he discovered his navigational mistake and struck out overland for the fort—St. Louis—he had previously established near the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. En route several of his men, exasperated beyond endurance by his despotic behavior, murdered him and his few remaining loyalists.

Those left at La Salle's settlement tried to make peace with the local Karankawa Indians. But after the natives realized that La Salle wasn't coming back, they descended on the fort and killed everyone there, except five children who were taken captive and forcibly adopted into the tribe.

The adoption, as it turned out, was temporary, for when the Spanish learned that La Salle had penetrated their private sea, they commenced a manhunt for the French explorer. He proved to be even harder for them to find than the mouth of the Mississippi had been for him; six overland expeditions and five seaborne searches canvassed the Gulf coast before the last uncovered the ruins of the French settlement (and redeemed the captive children, who had mixed emotions about being torn from their new families and hauled off to live among the Spanish in Mexico).

Besides prompting this fresh wave of exploration, La Salle's doomed experiment inspired the Spanish to fortify Texas as a buffer against further foreign incursions. They began establishing missions along a route—
el camino real,
or “the king's highway”—stretching from the Rio Grande to East Texas (and briefly beyond the Sabine River into Louisiana). The most important and durable of the missions were clustered about the upper San Antonio River. The mission of San Antonio de Valero, senior among the cluster, was founded in 1718 with seventy men, women, and children and nearly two thousand sheep, cattle, horses, and oxen. The adjacent presidio, or fort, of San Antonio de Béxar was established at the same time. Competition among the missions—and especially among the missionaries—hampered the growth of the community, but reinforcements arrived in 1731 in the persons of fifty immigrants from the Spanish Canary Islands. Gradually the community coalesced into a regular, if not exactly thriving, town. By the 1770s, when it became the capital of Spanish Texas, it had a population of about two thousand.

The Franciscan order staffed the missions, which, like all Spanish missions, received the dual mandate of spreading the gospel of the Lord and the power of the Spanish crown. The soldiers attached to the missions similarly doubled up, protecting the friars and others at the missions from hostile Indians (and from any Frenchmen who might appear) and encouraging the less bellicose natives to heed the words of the friars.

The missions were expensive and only intermittently successful. Some of the Indians who accepted baptism were evidently sincere in their adopted faith; others simply preferred their prospects under the Spanish to the depredations of Apache and Comanche raiders. Troubles between church and state in both old Spain and New Spain spilled over onto the frontier, and the commitment of the government to the missions rose and fell on the fall and rise in relations with France: when France seemed a threat, Texas appeared important; when France was friendly, Texas diminished. After France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762 (lest it be taken by the British, to whom the French were losing the Seven Years' War), the Texas missions lost nearly all their strategic value. The more distant ones, in East Texas, were abandoned and their personnel withdrawn along the Camino Real to San Antonio de Béxar and points south.

During the half century after 1770, Spain felt peculiarly vulnerable to foreign incursion. The war that began in Boston in 1775 between Britain and her North American colonies spread by the end of the decade to include France (allied directly to the Americans) and Spain (allied to France). The American-French-Spanish side won, but the victory was a mixed blessing for the Americans' European partners. Spain found itself confronting the Americans as neighbors across the Mississippi. More threatening, the success of the American Revolution set the spirit of republicanism loose upon the world. Every throne of Europe felt the ground rumble beneath its feet; within a decade of the war's end, the most glorious throne—that occupied by the Sun King of France and his heirs—was swallowed by the earthquake the Americans started.

In the wake of the revolution in France, Napoleon Bonaparte erected a new empire on the rubble of the
ancien régime
. Bonaparte's empire briefly reached to North America, after the Corsican wrested what was left of Louisiana—that is, the part of Louisiana that didn't belong to the United States—back from Spain. Napoleon envisioned reopening the American front in France's centuries-old struggle against Britain, but after he lost an army to yellow fever in St. Domingue (Haiti), he reconsidered and in 1803 sold Louisiana to the surprised Thomas Jefferson, who had sent envoys to Paris to purchase merely New Orleans. At the time, the confusion that had started with La Salle still surrounded the southwestern border of Louisiana, and neither Napoleon nor his foreign minister, Talleyrand, did anything to dispel it. “If an obscurity did not already exist,” Napoleon remarked to an aide, “it would perhaps be good policy to put one there.” Talleyrand enigmatically congratulated his American interlocutors: “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it.”

In fact, the American government made less of the Louisiana bargain, as it touched Texas, than did certain Americans acting on their own. Aaron Burr, already notorious for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel on the New Jersey shore, compounded his notoriety by fleeing west and conniving to become master of some portion of the land between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande. Over whiskey and maps, Burr and James Wilkinson, Moses Austin's bête noire, evidently discussed detaching portions of Louisiana and Texas from the United States and Mexico to create an empire of the Southwest. Burr had little difficulty finding followers among the land-hungry, Indian-fighting populations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, where Hamilton's death was generally applauded. Andrew Jackson, a veteran duelist himself, contributed cash and moral support to the Burr cause; men of lesser means signed on for the prospect of winning farms and plantations in Louisiana and Texas.

During the summer of 1806 the West bubbled with Burr's plotting. Volunteers mustered along the Ohio; boats were secured and supplies purchased for the journey to the front. But the plotting got away from Burr. Newspapers picked up the story and circulated it east. Federalists demanded that Jefferson act to suppress the patent separatism; a Federalist prosecutor in Kentucky charged Burr with treason. He dodged this charge but in the process lost whatever cover his conspiracy had retained. He was arrested by federal agents in Mississippi territory, then jumped bail and fled toward Spanish Florida. He was rearrested in Alabama territory and dispatched to Virginia for trial.

The case became a landmark in American legal history when Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall defied Jefferson and held the court to the strict constitutional standard of proof of treasonous acts, and Burr was acquitted. But the enthusiasm with which American frontiersmen had embraced the idea of invading Texas and making it their own augured ill for the tranquillity of New Spain's northeastern province.

What augured worse was the continuing weakness of Spain itself, which was the reason the Spanish had lost Louisiana to the French in the first place. Historically an ally of France, Spain became Napoleon's pawn in the wars that convulsed Europe during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century. The wars bled Spain financially, and as part of their effort to raise money, Spanish authorities extorted loans from landholders in New Spain. The loans forced the sale of holdings among elites who had been a mainstay of loyalty to the Spanish crown; many of these elites, observing the prosperity of the United States after thirty years of independence, pondered whether independence might suit them too.

Dissatisfaction grew after the French invasion of Spain in 1808, which led to the deposing of King Ferdinand VII in favor of Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte. As Spain rose in rebellion against the usurper and demanded restoration of the lawful monarch, Spanish America did likewise, although the sentiment
against
France was stronger than sentiment
for
Ferdinand. In 1810 a priest in the Bajío district northwest of Mexico City, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a creole (American-born) son of Spanish parents, raised the cry—or
grito
—of revolt in the village of Dolores. A large crowd responded, seizing Spanish officials, releasing prisoners from jail, and for the first time taking power into their own hands.

The revolt in Dolores ignited similar passions elsewhere in Mexico and gravely upset the status quo. A bitter and bloody three-way struggle developed among royalists, who adhered to the existing government of Spain; conservative nationalists, who advocated independence short of revolution; and revolutionaries, who intended for independence to yield a thorough restructuring of Mexican society and politics. Resentments that had accrued over centuries among Indians and their mestizo (mixed-race) offspring gave rise to demands for land and to mass killings of those who opposed them. Fear among the European-born and their creole children fueled reprisals that matched in ferocity the attacks of the rebels.

The advocates of independence sought help, with many looking to the United States. The Americans' successful struggle for freedom provided a tested philosophy of republicanism that appeared adaptable to Mexico's case, and the American people and government might reasonably be expected to support a similar struggle by their hemispheric neighbors—especially if that struggle had the effect of weakening imperial Spain. More concretely, American markets at New Orleans and elsewhere were the logical places for the Mexican rebels to seek the weapons they needed to offset Spain's advantage in arms. Hidalgo dispatched an envoy toward Washington to negotiate treaties of alliance and commerce akin to those the fledgling United States had signed with France in the 1770s; he also sent an agent north bearing silver seized from the royalists, which was to be used to underwrite the arsenal of freedom. The envoy, however, was arrested by the royalists before reaching the Gulf coast, and the agent was captured at San Antonio de Béxar.

But another rebel, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, carrying more silver, did manage to make his way across Texas to Natchitoches, where, among the marginal and often criminal elements that frequented the Neutral Ground (as the border region was designated prior to the 1819 treaty), he recruited an insurgent army, before continuing to Washington to solicit aid from the Madison administration. Gutiérrez got nothing formal from Madison, who was on the verge of asking Congress for a declaration of war against Britain, but Madison's secretary of state, James Monroe, offered moral support and apparently some money, and intimations of further assistance should the rebels' efforts prosper.