Lone Star Nation (54 page)

Houston shared the hardships and annoyances that vexed the army. When mud bogged the wagons, he waded in with the others and heaved harder than most. One night he wandered out past the picket lines; on returning he was stopped by a sentry, a recruit who hadn't met the general. Houston explained who he was, but the sentry replied that he had orders to let no one pass without authorization. Houston answered that orders were orders, and he waited patiently till another officer arrived and confirmed his identity.

Although he stressed the need for discipline, Houston occasionally collaborated in rule bending. He commandeered cattle from farms along the route but gave strict orders for the men not to touch pigs and chickens, which, unlike the wild bovines, were the cherished personal property of families. Frank Sparks wanted a break from beef and, discovering an abandoned barnyard full of chickens and hogs and a smokehouse packed with bacon, told several friends he was going to cook a regular dinner. They warned that Houston would punish them; he responded that he'd accept the blame.

I went to work and killed twelve grown chickens, dressed them, and put them in a large wash pot. I also put in some sliced bacon. I then made an oven and a large skillet of cornbread. I took six of the chickens and put them in a dinner pot, with at least half a gallon of rich gravy, and set it away, together with the oven of bread. . . . I called the men to come to dinner. The yard was covered with feathers, and the men said to me, “Ain't you afraid Houston will punish you if you don't take those feathers away?” I said, “No.” Well, we all did justice to that dinner.

The commander in chief and several other officers, including Thomas Rusk (who had joined the army), rode up not long after the men finally put down their knives. Sparks was sitting on a rail fence in the yard.

I opened the gate and said, “Gentlemen officers, I wish to see you in the house.” I led the way, and they all followed me in. I saw Houston knit his brows when he saw the feathers in the yard. When they were all in, I closed the door, and addressed General Houston in the following way: “General Houston, I have disobeyed orders. When we arrived here, I found everything deserted and we were hungry, for we have had nothing to eat except beef; so I killed some chickens and baked some bread, and we had a good dinner.”

He looked at me as if he were looking through me, and said, “Sparks, I will have to punish you. You knew it was against orders; I will have to punish you.”

I said, “General, I saved you some.” And I took the lids off the vessels that contained the chicken and the bread, and told them to help themselves. Rusk drew his knife first, and all the others followed suit, except Houston, who had not taken his eyes off me all this time. Finally he said, “Sparks, I hate to punish you. You have been a good soldier, never shirking your duty. But I will have to punish you.”

I said, “General, I will submit to whatever you put upon me.”

Rusk said, “General, if you don't come on we'll eat all the dinner. . . . Sparks is a good cook.”

Then the general drew his knife and attacked the dinner. After he had eaten a short time, General Rusk said, “General Houston, it is a maxim in law that ‘he who partakes of stolen property, knowing it to be such, is guilty with the thief.' ”

General Houston replied, “No one wants any of your law phrases.”

After the meal, General Houston said, “Sparks, I'll not punish you for this offense, but if you are guilty of it the second time I'll double the punishment.”

Santa Anna's flying regiment reached Harrisburg thirty hours after setting out. But the news of his coming had traveled even faster. “I entered Harrisburg the night of the 15th, lighted by the glare of several houses that were burning, and found only a Frenchman and two North Americans working in a print shop,” the president-general wrote. These laggards explained that the rebel leaders had fled for Galveston Bay. Santa Anna resumed the chase, which ended, for the moment, at New Washington, on the shore of the bay, just moments after David Burnet and other Texas officials cast off in rowboats from the shore. In one of the rare displays of gallantry in all the bitter war, the Mexican vanguard held its fire upon the insurgent boats on account of women aboard. Though Santa Anna was disappointed at having failed again to capture the rebel chiefs, he took solace from having driven them off the mainland, to Galveston Island. Containing the rebels there, and eventually eliminating them or expelling them from the country, would be no great chore.

Houston, however, remained at large. Santa Anna's spies informed him of the movements of the rebel army. “Due to the reports which I have gathered at this point,” he told General Filisola, “I have no doubts that the entitled General Houston, who was at Groce's Crossing with a force of five to six hundred men, has moved toward Nacogdoches and should have left yesterday in that direction.” Santa Anna wasn't worried about Houston's head start toward the border. “Since he is escorting families and supplies in ox-drawn wagons, his march is slow. The Trinity River, moreover, should detain him many days.” Santa Anna expected to catch Houston at the Trinity and to destroy his army before it reached the contested region between the Neches and the Sabine.

Everything in Houston's actions till mid-April suggested that Santa Anna was right: that the rebel general intended to continue east to the Trinity and beyond. If he had wanted to fight he would have done so at the Guadalupe or the Colorado or the Brazos. Any one of those rivers, especially with spring's high water, would have helped even the odds between the rebels and the Army of Operations. And had Houston made a stand, he would have rallied the settlers behind him, evening the odds still more. But he chose to retreat, to draw Santa Anna closer and closer to the trap he had laid with Jackson and General Gaines.

And then, suddenly, he changed his mind. Santa Anna contributed to Houston's new thinking, but Houston's men contributed more. Not least because Houston's route toward the Trinity traced the road Santa Anna had already followed to Harrisburg, the rebel general learned of Santa Anna's gamble shortly after the Mexican chief rolled the dice. Houston couldn't tell just how many troops Santa Anna had taken to Harrisburg, but the number was obviously far smaller than the Mexican total. After being outnumbered all spring, Houston discovered to his surprise that he now commanded a larger force than his rival. And after weeks of being scolded from above and taunted from below for his failure to fight, he now had a chance to prove his critics wrong.

Perhaps he would have seized the chance unaided, but his men ensured that he did not let it slip. There were few secrets in the rebel camp; the officers and men learned of Santa Anna's isolation from the rest of the Mexican army about the same time Houston did. This knowledge made mutiny all but inevitable should Houston stick to his strategy of retreat.

During the course of the march from the Guadalupe, Houston had cited the Mexican superiority in artillery as a reason for avoiding a clash. Before leaving Groce's, the army received two cannons, sent from Cincinnati via New Orleans and Galveston and dubbed the “Twin Sisters” after the twin daughters of a Texas immigrant on the same ship. Many of the rebels took the cannons' arrival as reason to attack, and when Houston gave no sign of doing so, their former restiveness resurfaced. Wiley Martin's company deserted en masse. “General, I have brought but my sword,” Nicholas Labadie recalled Martin saying. “My company has disbanded. On hearing that you were retreating to Nacogdoches, they declared they would no longer bear arms, but would protect their families, and they have therefore all dispersed.” Mosely Baker, likewise returned to the main column, swore he'd retreat no further. Labadie related: “I was then standing within four or five steps of Gen. Houston, and I asked Capt. Baker if his company was on the road to Robbins' Ferry”—the Trinity crossing. “‘They are on that road,' said he. ‘But,' said I, ‘are you and your men willing to retreat there?' . . . ‘No, never! never!' said he, ‘for if Gen. Houston will not take us to meet the enemy, we will elect a commander who will.' ”

Houston got the message. Tempted by Santa Anna's gamble, he let the men have their way. The road to the Trinity and the road to Harrisburg coincided as far as the farm of a man named Roberts; there it forked, with the left branch leading to the Trinity and the right to Harrisburg. As the column approached the fork, everyone wondered which branch they would take. Farmer Roberts had his own view on the subject, and when Houston drew near, Roberts pointed to the right and shouted so loudly that none could not hear: “That right hand road will carry you to Harrisburg just as straight as a compass.” The marching men took up the cry: “To the right, boys, to the right!” And all proceeded to the right, with Houston saying not a word.

In no regular army could such a critical decision have been made by what amounted to a vote of the rank and file. But the Texan army—as Stephen Austin and Edward Burleson and Sam Houston long before now had learned—was no regular army. It was an oxymoron: a democratic army, one that indeed made its own decisions. Houston's insight, at the crucial moment, was to recognize this fact, and put it to use.

“This morning we are in preparation to meet Santa Anna,” Houston wrote a friend on April 19. “It is the only chance of saving Texas.” He lamented that the country hadn't rallied to the cause more enthusiastically. “Texas could have started at least four thousand men. We will only have about seven hundred men to march with, besides the campguard.” In an allusion to the troops' role in his decision for battle, Houston said, “It is wisdom growing out of necessity to meet the enemy now. No previous occasion would justify it.” He still wasn't sure it was a good idea. “The odds are greatly against us.” But he was willing to take a gamble himself. “The troops are in fine spirits, and now is the time for action. . . . We go to conquer.”

The Texan army crossed Buffalo Bayou to pin Santa Anna in the triangle between the bayou and the San Jacinto River. The crossing, accomplished on a makeshift raft and a flimsy rowboat, filled most of the day. Houston then ordered a march south and kept the men moving till midnight, when he finally allowed them to slump by the road. Only a few hours later he rolled them out and drove them hard again, to Lynch's Ferry, near the confluence of Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto, to prevent Santa Anna's slipping away. They reached the ferry in the late morning and deployed among the dense oaks that lined the banks of the bayou.

Santa Anna didn't intend to slip away. He was more eager to fight than Houston, and as soon as he learned that the rebels were bound not for the Trinity but for him, his excitement got the better of him—and, in a different manner, of his troops. “At about eight o'clock
A
.
M
., everything was ready for the march,” wrote Pedro Delgado, a colonel of artillery, regarding the Mexican departure from New Washington. “We had burnt a fine warehouse on the wharf, and all the warehouses in the town, when Captain Barragan rushed in at full speed, reporting that Houston was close on our rear.” The troops had begun filing up a narrow lane that led through a wood; Santa Anna was still in his tent. “Upon hearing Barragan's report, he leaped on his horse and galloped off at full speed for the lane, which, being crowded with men and mules, did not afford him as prompt an exit as he wished. However, knocking down one and riding over another, he overcame the obstacles, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘The enemy are coming! The enemy are coming!' The excitement of the General-in-chief had such a terrifying effect upon the troops that every face turned pale, order could no longer be preserved, and every man thought of flight or of finding a hiding place, and gave up all idea of fighting.” (Santa Anna remembered things differently: “All of the members of the division heard of the approach of the enemy with joy, and in the highest spirits continued the march.”) Reining in their fear (or their joy), the Mexican troops formed an attack column and proceeded toward the juncture of Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto.