Santa Anna’s generals led their troops onward to wipe the American settlements off the map of Texas. By March 14, the town of Refugio was taken. Stephen Austin could find no help in the United States except for a few volunteers. In those dark days, the Texan cause seemed all but lost. General Sam Houston, in desperate haste, was organizing and drilling an army. Colonel Fannin still held Goliad with over 400 men from the stalled Matamoros expedition.

Other members of the expedition had stopped at San Patricio, Texas, and Santa Anna had dispatched General José Urrea to destroy them. They were wiped out on March 2. Urrea moved on toward Goliad. Fannin was determined not to be caught in the fort and overwhelmed as the men at San Patricio and the defenders of the Alamo had been. With the enemy following, he marched out on March 19, 1836. In the open prairie, he ordered a halt for rest. His officers urged him to go on. Only two and one-half miles farther was a creek which would assure an ample supply of water. Fannin, contemptuous of Mexicans as fighters, curtly refused to stir.

Seven hundred of General Urrea’s Mexican dragoons swooped down at a gallop. Twelve hundred infantrymen surrounded the halted column. Distant dust on the prairie signaled the approach of still more - 500 reinforcements with artillery, fresh from triumph at the Battle of the Alamo.

The Texans formed their wagon train into a hollow square, cannons at each corner. All day riflemen and gunners beat back repeated onslaughts. Fannin, though early wounded in the thigh, carried on a stubborn defense, but water soon gave out, and now the Texans could not reach the creek. His men were tortured by thirst. There was no water to swab and cool the bores of the cannons, so hot from firing that new powder charges would have exploded during loading. The artillery ceased fire, and the rifles alone held off enemy charges till night darkened the field.

On the morning of March 20, 1836, Fannin surrendered on condition that his men would be treated as prisoners of war. They were herded back to Goliad where Urrea received orders from Santa Anna to ignore the surrender terms and shoot the prisoners.

A week later, on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, unwounded men, mostly volunteers who had come from the United States in January, were marched out of town believing they were being sent back to the United States. Suddenly their guards wheeled and leveled their muskets. An American cried out, “Boys, they are going to shoot us!” Volleys flashed. Three hundred and thirty-three soldiers, including three companies from Alabama, three from Georgia, and two from Kentucky, lay dead. Back in Goliad, eighty-eight had been set aside to be spared, including surgeons to treat the Mexican wounded, but the Texans wounded from the fight on the prairie were slaughtered. Fannin was the last to die, facing his executioners with courage. Only twenty-seven men had managed to escape.

Many settlers abandoned their homes and hurried their families toward the safety of Louisiana. Their only remaining protection was Houston’s little army of 800 men, and they too were retreating northeastward toward Louisiana. Santa Anna and his army pursued them, burning towns on the march.

General Sam Houston did not retreat for long. He doubled back and moved quietly forward toward a pleasant, tree-fringed plain where the San Jacinto River flows into a great arm of Galveston Bay. There the Mexicans were resting behind a barricade they had raised, never suspecting that the Texans had approached. Houston kept his men hidden in the woods and did not attack Santa Anna’s 910 soldiers but let them be joined by 500 more. Meanwhile, he sent “Deaf” Smith and a detail to burn a bridge that would cut off the Mexicans’ retreat to the southwest. Marshes and bayous would block them in other directions.

The stage was set for the crucial Battle of San Jacinto. On that afternoon of April 21, 1836, Houston led his army out onto the plain - cavalry on the right, artillery in the center of the infantry line. “Trail arms. Forward!” the General shouted. Sam Houston rode ahead on his big white stallion, Saracen. Close behind were dragged the cannons, two of them called “the Twin Sisters.” Swung around, they opened a furious fire, using broken horseshoes in their loads when their regular ammunition gave out.

The Mexicans, completely surprised, ran from camp to man the barricade. Crimson volleys blazed along its length. Not a single shot in reply was fired by the Texas infantry. They came on steadily. At forty yards, they poured a deadly fusillade into the closely packed enemy ranks.

Above the roar of battle rose the war cries that here became famous: “Remember the Alamo!” “Remember Goliad!” The Texans fired again, point-blank now, full in the face of the enemy. They burst through the barricade, parrying bayonet thrusts with rifle barrels, jabbing with butts and stabbing with bowie knives, for they had no bayonets of their own.

Five bullets thudded into Saracen. As the white stallion dropped, Houston jumped clear. Somebody brought him another horse but scarcely had the General mounted when he was painfully wounded in one ankle. He charged on with his men through the Mexican tents where his second horse was shot. Raging Texans slaughtered the enemy as relentlessly as their comrades had been cut down at the Alamo. Mexican pleas for mercy went unheeded. Here and there Texan officers knocked aside revengeful rifles and urged their men to take prisoners.

It was all over in twenty minutes. Almost the whole Mexican army of 1,400 men had been killed or captured, with the Texans’ loss only six killed and twenty-five wounded.

One of the few to escape was Santa Anna. When he saw the day was lost, he galloped off on a fast horse until he reached the marshes. There he abandoned his mount and stole away under cover of the tall grass, where he hid during the night. The next day, three Texan riders spotted him. Santa Anna, who had managed to change from his glittering uniform into a plain one, declared he was only a cavalry trooper. One of his captors wanted to shoot him. The other men, more kind-hearted, insisted on taking him back unharmed to camp. He was recognized when Mexican soldiers jumped up to salute, exclaiming, “El Presidente!”

Santa Anna’s life hung by a thread. Let him face a firing squad, Texans demanded - this butcher who had ordered no quarter at the Alamo and the massacre of the Goliad prisoners. Santa Anna protested that he had only been obeying a decree of the Mexican Congress. It was Houston who spared him in the belief he would be valuable as a hostage to prevent further attacks on Texas. Santa Anna signed a treaty with Houston recognizing the Republic of Texas. The Presidente was then sent, as a hostage, with a Texan delegation to Washington, D.C., to negotiate with Andrew Jackson’s administration and bring about annexation, or at least American recognition of Texas. After futile discussions, Jackson had him put aboard an American warship and sent back to Mexico. The treaty Santa Anna had signed with Houston was repudiated by Mexico, and for a little while he was in disgrace. But it was not long before he was back in power.

He helped defend Veracruz when French warships bombarded it in 1838 to punish Mexico for damages to French property sustained in Mexico’s revolution. Santa Anna’s loss of a leg in the fight made him a hero. He managed to make himself a general again, and in 1841, was re-elected president of Mexico. Only ten years after the Battle of San Jacinto, Americans would have to reckon with him once more.

San Jacinto was a decisive victory. It changed the whole spirit of Texas from near-despair to bright hope. Remaining Mexican armies marched away with trailing banners. On the first Monday in September 1836, the first elections were held in the new Republic of Texas. Sam Houston was elected president for the first of two terms. Stephen Austin - one of Houston’s opponents - only polled 587 votes to the war hero’s 5,119. Houston at once appointed Austin to serve as secretary of state.

In Washington, President Jackson was testing the opinion of the Senate and the public on annexation of Texas. Strong forces in the Whig party, led by Henry Clay, were against such a dangerous move at that time, especially in view of criticism from abroad that annexation would amount to an out-and-out land-grab. Mexico, refusing to recognize either Santa Anna’s peace treaty or the new republic, threatened war with the United States if Texas were annexed as a state of the Union. In the face of a coming election, Jackson hedged on the question until Martin Van Buren, his Democratic political heir, had been safely elected. Once the election was won, Jackson was willing to recognize the Republic of Texas on March 3, 1837, but he did not press for annexation.

Most of the people of the new republic were eager for its annexation to the United States. At any time from that year on, the United States had only to stretch out its hand to add a big state to the Union.

Fear of war with Mexico was not the only factor that delayed Texas’s entry. There were 5,000 slaves in Texas. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise, by adding one slave state (Missouri) and one free state (Maine) to the Union, had kept the all-important balance of free and slave states in the Senate, where the two groups were exactly divided.

In 1837, Elijah Lovejoy, a prominent abolitionist (or antislavery agitator) was murdered by a mob in Illinois. At once, the abolitionists set upon the whole proslavery faction, and the cause for Texas’s annexation suffered.

A rumor was started that a plan was afoot to annex Texas not as one state but as “five or six more slaveholding states to this Union.” The furor was so great that no politician dared take a stand on Texas again until 1844.

Meanwhile, more settlers poured into Texas until, in 1836, the population exceeded 30,000. Both England and France were maneuvering for treaties with the new republic. Even in the face of international interference, there were many Americans who believed it would be wrong to go to war with Mexico over Texas. Furthermore, although the United States was far wealthier and more highly populated, there were more trained soldiers in the Mexican army than in the American. Mexican cavalry was rated better than that of the United States by European observers, and cavalry would be important in the theater of warfare across the border.

But the tide of opinion slowly began to turn toward war when United States relations with Mexico were disturbed by a series of incidents of mistreatment of Americans in Mexican territory. United States ships, visiting Mexican ports on legitimate errands, were delayed and their officers insulted. In April 1840, numbers of Americans and other foreigners living in California were suddenly arrested, beaten, and thrown into prison. Then they were - as Mexican authorities admitted - expelled from the province illegally. American and Texan traders were sent by Texas’s president, Mirabeau Lamar, to Santa Fe where they were seized by the Mexican government in June 1841. They were ordered on a barbaric forced march through the New Mexican desert, where many of them died. The survivors spent months in Santa Anna’s prisons in Mexico City. Such harsh and brutal treatment roused intense feeling against Mexico.

Then there were long-standing claims for damages against Mexico by American citizens for property losses suffered in Mexico’s revolution. Both nations agreed to settle the matter by an international commission, headed by the King of Prussia, which began investigations in 1841. (In 1843, an award of $2 million was made to the United States. Mexico paid three installments out of twenty and let the rest lapse.)

In December 1841, Houston was elected president of Texas for his second term. News that he was negotiating a treaty with England alarmed Washington, for England was trying to persuade Mexico to recognize the Republic of Texas, if Texas would promise never to join the Union. Annexation pressure was revived in Congress, as Houston no doubt intended that it should be. But Santa Anna, again president of Mexico, notified the United States in 1843 that Mexico would consider annexation “equivalent to a declaration of war.”

By 1844, the old dispute over the conflicting claims of England and the United States to the Oregon territory had flared up again. The temper of the United States was changing; there was talk of war over the Oregon boundary: “Fifty-four forty or fight!” would soon be a Democratic slogan. Fear that the old enemy, England, was pressing from the north in Oregon and from the south in Texas, caused a new demand for expansion to sweep the country. In June, President Tyler made a strong attempt to annex Texas, but a hostile Senate - unsure of public opinion - refused him.

A new presidential election was at hand. Henry Clay, the Whig candidate, and Martin Van Buren, who expected to be the Democratic candidate, also failed to read national opinion when they made a public pact to keep the Texas question out of the election. Ex-President Jackson, in retirement at his Tennessee home, The Hermitage, was more astute. He called for another of his Democratic protégés, James K. Polk, and told him that he could win the Democratic nomination, and the election, if he promised the country “All of Oregon, all of Texas” - for such a promise would please both the North and the South. Polk took Jackson’s advice and won the election of 1844. After nine years, Houston and Texas had helped make a President.

By joint resolution on March 1, 1845, Congress invited Texas to become a state of the Union - Tyler’s last act as President. On March 4, James K. Polk took office. Three weeks after his inauguration Mexico broke off relations with the United States.

Preparations for war on a grand scale commenced in Mexico. President Polk, with the Oregon dispute still unsettled, and with war with England a dangerous possibility, countered by ordering General Zachary Taylor with 1,400 troops to Corpus Christi on the Texas coast, where he arrived on July 31, 1845. Eight months later, in March 1846, Taylor sent troops from Corpus Christi south to the mouth of the Rio Grande.

An attempt at a peaceful settlement was made by Polk in November 1845, when he sent John Slidell to Mexico City to try to buy California and New Mexico for $30 million. His mission failed.

By December, the slogan from an expansionist magazine that it was America’s “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent,” was being heard all over the country.

On May 13, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico.