SAM HOUSTON DID HIS BEST TO ENSURE THAT TEXAS WOULD be lost. Houston made it his life’s work to separate Texas from Mexico. At least he did so after his other life’s work failed. Born in Virginia, like Stephen Austin (and Joe Meek and Meriwether Lewis and William Clark: there was something in Virginia’s soil that propelled her sons in a westerly direction), Houston moved to Tennessee with his mother and eight siblings after his father’s death. Houston was fourteen. A tattered copy of the Iliad fell into his hands, inspiring romantic notions of great deeds. When romance collided with the reality of life behind a plow, Houston ran away from home and took up with a band of Cherokees. The leader of the band became his surrogate father; the Cherokee word for Raven became his adopted name.
After a few years he returned to white society. America was going to war against Britain, and the country needed soldiers. Houston, a strapping fellow with a head and mane like a lion’s, answered the call, albeit as much for the pay, to retire some debts, as from patriotism. Yet he served with conspicuous courage, especially in the 1814 battle of Horseshoe Bend, where an army under Andrew Jackson defeated a faction of Creek Indians that had lately massacred hundreds of whites, including women and children, at Fort Mims in Mississippi Territory. Houston led a charge over a well-defended Creek rampart and was so badly wounded that the medics gave him up for dead and left him lying on the battlefield. Yet he survived, and crawled into camp the next day, to the amazement and chagrin of the medics. Andrew Jackson was impressed.
Houston was recuperating when Jackson defeated a British army at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. The British, propelled by the momentum of having sacked Washington, D.C., and burned the Capitol and the White House, aimed to drive up the Mississippi River and split America’s West from its East. The former—essentially the Louisiana Purchase—would be taken by Britain directly or made into a Britain-friendly Indian territory. In either event, America’s westward expansion would be blocked and its future cast into serious doubt.
Jackson’s astonishing victory—his army inflicted losses of more than two thousand on the British while itself suffering fewer than one hundred—thwarted the British plan. News of the feat reached Washington and New York just ahead of word that a peace agreement had been reached in Ghent, in modern Belgium, two weeks ahead of the battle. Whether the agreement would have nullified a British victory at New Orleans, few Americans much cared to debate; the overwhelming interpretation was that Jackson had saved the West and thereby America. At once he was hailed as the reincarnation of George Washington, with New Orleans called the counterpart to Yorktown. And just as Washington had been rewarded with the presidency, so should Jackson, in due course.
Sam Houston watched all this and concluded that it was Jackson, in fact, who was the second father he had been looking for. Jackson, meanwhile, lacking a natural son and recalling Houston’s heroics at Horseshoe Bend, began thinking of Houston as a surrogate son. Houston followed Jackson into the practice of law in Nashville; with Jackson’s help he was elected to Congress, where he became a driving force in a campaign to draft Jackson for the presidency.
By the time Jackson was elected in 1828, Houston, again with Jackson’s help, had become governor of Tennessee. In his early thirties, he seemed a likely successor to Jackson in the White House—Young Hickory to Old Hickory.
But Houston’s résumé lacked a crucial entry: a wife. Voters then, as later, liked their candidates married: marriage showed an ability to make and sustain commitments of the kind crucial to the lives of most Americans. Houston decided to remedy his lack. He let out that his bachelor days were over; he was looking for a wife.
Many of Tennessee’s maidens showed interest; their parents showed even more. Houston was handsome, brave, successful. Who wouldn’t want to marry him, or want him to marry their daughter?
Eliza Allen, a nineteen-year-old beauty, caught Houston’s eye and won his heart. Their wedding was the event of the social season in central Tennessee; the gaze of their family, friends and admirers turned discreetly aside as the couple embarked on their honeymoon.
And then something happened that changed the course of history. No one at the time besides Houston and Eliza knew for sure what that something was. No one afterward definitively figured it out. But the marriage fell apart, suddenly and spectacularly. Eliza went home to her parents and never returned to Houston’s house. Tongues wagged, tracing the troubles to the wedding night. Houston’s allies blamed Eliza, whispering that perhaps she had come to his bed less than a virgin. Eliza’s friends suggested that Houston, on account of his battle wounds, was unable to perform his husbandly duties.
Houston ignored the libels against him and vowed to punish those against Eliza. As he left Nashville in mortification, having resigned the governorship, he made a grim promise: “If any wretch ever dares to utter a word against the purity of Mrs. Houston I will come back and write the libel in his heart’s blood.”
Years later a friend of Houston’s claimed to have heard the true story of the ill-fated wedding night from Houston himself. “About one o’clock in the morning I was waiting and smoking as he staggered into the room,” the friend said. “His face was rigid. His eyes had a strange stare. He looked like some magnificent ruin. He sat upright in his chair finally, and running his fingers through his hair said, ‘It was so infamous, so cruel, so vile.… Cursed be the human fiends who force a woman to live with a man whom she does not love. Just think of it, the unending torture.… She has never loved me; her parents forced her to marry me. She loved another from the first.’”
HEARTSICK AND HUMILIATED, SUDDENLY WITHOUT A FUTURE, Houston sought refuge among his Cherokee friends, who had moved under duress to the Indian Territory in what would become Arkansas and Oklahoma. He drowned his sorrows in alcohol, to the point that the Cherokees retired his old name, Raven, and replaced it with Big Drunk. The import of liquor for resale was forbidden in the Indian Territory; Houston, caught with nine barrels in his possession, beat the rap by explaining, convincingly, that the stock was for his personal consumption.
Houston’s admirers wondered what had become of him. “I have this moment heard a rumor of poor Houston’s disgrace,” Andrew Jackson wrote when the news reached Washington. “My God, is the man mad?”
He often seemed mad, not least when he began to ramble about a project that would regain for him the reputation he had lost. Houston had never been to Texas, but he knew that many Tennesseans were going there. Some went honestly, intending to become loyal citizens of Mexico like Stephen Austin. But increasing numbers went illegally and with the idea that Texas should become American. Houston determined to take the lead of this group and do something no American had ever done before: conquer territory to add to the American domain.
He thought Andrew Jackson would approve. Jackson was known to covet Texas, and Houston proposed to deliver it. But Jackson at first wanted nothing to do with someone who had so badly lost his bearings. Besides, Jackson just then was trying to purchase Texas from Mexico, and anything like what Houston proposed would blow up the negotiations. Jackson froze Houston in his tracks. “It has been communicated to me that you had the illegal enterprise in view of conquering Texas,” Jackson wrote Houston. “I must really have thought you deranged to have believed you had so wild a scheme in contemplation.” Jackson insisted that Houston pledge to do no such thing.
Houston gave the pledge, but he didn’t give up the idea. Jackson’s effort to acquire Texas by peaceful means went nowhere. Mexican officials had read the report of General Terán, and his warning that Mexico was losing Texas to illegal American immigrants made them loath to legitimize the operation by sale.
Houston approached Jackson again. During the summer of 1832 he visited the president at the Hermitage, Jackson’s home outside Nashville. The meeting was private, and neither man ever related what was said. But shortly thereafter Houston obtained a passport from U.S. army officers in Arkansas authorizing his travel as a federal agent investigating relations with various Indian tribes. Some of the tribes Houston could meet on American soil, in the Indian Territory, but others would require him to go to Texas.
With this diplomatic cover, Houston entered Texas from the north, across the Red River. He traveled throughout the eastern half of Texas, where the Americans lived. He asked about the Indians, per his job description. At San Antonio he even met some Comanches, from a band that was momentarily friendly. But he spent most of his time surreptitiously measuring the support of the Americans in Texas for the breakaway he had in mind.
They told him what he wanted to hear. Or so he portrayed their response in his report to Jackson. The vast majority—“nineteen twentieths of the population”—wanted to see Texas detached from Mexico and annexed to the United States, Houston said. They were sick and tired of Mexican misrule. “They are now without laws to govern or protect them.” The rights of the Americans were repeatedly trampled. “The government is essentially despotic and must be so for years to come.”
HOUSTON’S LETTER EXAGGERATED THE PROPORTION OF AMERICANS wishing to exchange Mexican rule for American. And his description of their complaints was misleading. What the Americans in Texas feared was not the failure of Mexican officials to enforce the law, but the possibility that they would enforce the law—in particular that portion of Mexican law forbidding slavery.
Slavery had been part of the American experience in Texas from the start. It was built into Stephen Austin’s business model. Americans would come to his Texas colony to establish homesteads, but those homesteads would also be commercial farms. The eastern part of Texas was an extension of the Gulf Coast Plain on which cotton culture was booming. Austin intended his colony to be part of the boom. Especially in the difficult early days of his colony, Austin looked to cotton for deliverance. “The primary product that will elevate us from poverty is cotton,” he declared. As on the America side of the border, cultivating cotton required bound labor. “We cannot do this without the help of slaves,” Austin said.
The settlers came, and they brought their slaves. But while they were doing so, the Mexican government was taking measures to abolish slavery, which grated on the republican conscience of the newly independent country. Loopholes and lax enforcement allowed the Texans to continue the practice, sometimes disguised as indentured servitude. But above the heads of the Texas planters always loomed the possibility that their slaves would be taken from them. As much as anything else, this was what caused the restiveness of the Texas Americans that Houston misleadingly described.
Whatever its source, Houston determined to exploit the Americans’ dissatisfaction. He moved to Texas, nominally to start a law practice, but in fact to foment an uprising against Mexico. And he ran squarely into Stephen Austin. More than a decade after his arrival in Texas, Austin was the indispensable man in his adopted home. The Americans in Texas needed Austin to manage their affairs with the Mexican government. It was Austin who arranged the loopholes and the laxness that let slavery flourish in a corner of a country where it was nominally banned. For its part, the Mexican government needed Austin to keep the Americans in line. So long as Texas remained part of Mexico, Austin would continue to be the indispensable man. But if Sam Houston led Texas out of Mexico, he would become the hero. He would be the George Washington of Texas. Stephen Austin would be forgotten, if not trampled.
Each man had his supporters. Austin’s were the old settlers, the legal immigrants who owed their land titles to him and to the existing network of Mexican laws. Houston’s were the recent arrivals, often illegal, who had no stake in Mexican law and were temperamentally inclined to give the status quo a violent shaking.
The balance tipped in Houston’s favor when Antonio López de Santa Anna, a charismatic soldier and politician, nullified the Mexican constitution and established himself as an autocrat. His actions alienated Mexicans in several parts of the country. Republicans in the state of Zacatecas raised arms to resist the dictator, and were promptly crushed. Santa Anna let his troops loot the city of Zacatecas as warning to anyone else considering resistance.
Americans in Texas took the warning, but not as Santa Anna intended. They decided they needed to make their break before he got stronger. Even Austin reluctantly agreed, concluding that Santa Anna’s usurpation had shattered any hope of a happy, prosperous Texas within Mexico. Suddenly Houston, the latecomer to Texas, was the man of the hour.