Texas Independence - Part I

When you're in a war, time flows differently. When it comes to your job, it shoots forward, turning you from a novice to a veteran in a mere matter of weeks. When your thoughts wander back home, it slows to a crawl and you realize just how long it's been since you were back there, and all the people you miss.

Most actual dates and their significance melts away, but the important holidays, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, gain even more meaning. Dates with patriotic meaning are even more perceptively felt. I arrived here in Iraq on Sep. 11. If all goes according to plan, I might be going home on the 4th of July.

O.K. Call me strange, but I'm an 8th Generation Texan, and for me, July 4 is the second most important Independence Day on the calendar. An equally - perhaps more important - date is March 2 - Texas Independence day.

In honor of the actions it commemorates, I continue a tradition I have performed for over 10 years now: the annual Texas Independence Day message. It's a long post, so I'm going to break it up over the next couple of days. So Happy Birthday, Texas!


The Beginning of a New Nation

On March 2, 1836, 52 men crowded into a bitter cold, half-finished wooden house in the tiny town of Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas. There was no glass in the windows and strips of cloth stretched across them did little to block the wind, much less the cold. The men had come to Washington to debate their futures and break from their past. Before the day was over, they would debate the crucial question of independence from Mexico, and sign a document, which like the declaration of Independence 60 years before, would bind up their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the defense of freedom.

It had been a long, hard road to reach this point. For some, independence had been a dream for years. For many, it had only recently become thinkable. For most, however, it was a necessary but tragic step they had hoped to avoid. To fully appreciate what it was that had brought those 52 men to assemble in 1836, you have to go way back to the obscure origins of Texas and trace the history of how this wilderness was tamed by a series of rugged individualists who seemed to transcend ethnicity and pull their hardened character directly from the soil that surrounded them.

Early Texas history.

The early explorers of Texas were a hardy lot: There was Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who survived shipwreck on a hostile coast amid a very hostile Indian population, who trekked across thousands of miles of uncharted wilderness to return to safety in Mexico. Then there was Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, a Frenchman who planted an ill-fated colony on the Texas coast only to be betrayed and murdered by his own men. Finally, there was Francisco Coronado who came looking for gold, silver and fortune, but found only hostile Indians, hailstorms and rattlesnakes.

Their passing left little more than vanished footprints, but set the stage for a plethora of bold and audacious men to follow. Without knowing the name that this land would one day bear, they nonetheless won immortality as the first Texans.

Spain laid claim to the land, but then what did that mean anyway? Spain pretty much claimed all of North and South America, and except for a bit of jungle called Brazil that the Catholic Church allotted to Portugal, Spain pretty much got papal sanction for unlimited empire. Their claim was neither more honest, nor more deceitful than any others in Europe. In the process of empire, they both crushed brilliant, heroic civilizations and extinguished brutal barbarian tyrannies which enslaved millions of Indians to cruel human sacrifice.

The early history of Spanish colonization in Texas, however, was of sparse success. Attracting civilized immigrants was next to impossible. Unlike Mexico, which had an urban civilization to build on, Texas was a wilderness, and the reports of Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado didn't give prospective settlers much inspiration. The native Indians varied from the docile northeastern Caddo (whose word Tejas or "friend," gave the state its name) to the violent Karankawas on the coast, to the determined Huaco (or Waco) Indians of Central Texas, to the Coahilitecans of South Texas.

Far more concerning to the Spanish, however, were the new tribes moving into the region. In a war that had very little to do with Europeans, the Comanches and Apaches of the central North American plains fought a brutal contest for dominance. The Comanches got the worst of it and were pushed south into Texas. Some Apaches followed them as well, and the bitter rivalry and hostile nature of both tribes became an endless source of pain for the successors of the Conquistadores, who made their home in the brilliant new palaces of Mexico City.

Nonetheless, where the Spanish did try to settle, they did so among the docile tribes of the Northeast and South, seeking to convert them to Christianity and turn the Indians into a new population which would redeem the land from its primitive state. When no takers from Spain came (it was never as over-populated as England), settlers were brought in from the Canary Islands and dropped among the Indians.

But even the immigrants were never immigrants of choice, and they never had the freedom to own land, move, or even defend themselves outside of Spanish rules. When the early residents of Nacogdoches, Texas were forcibly evicted from that town and forcibly resettled further to the North, they complained bitterly, and some quietly slipped back to Nacogdoches. New settlers were not free to start up certain businesses, nor were they able to trade with the French in Louisiana - only 30 miles away from the nearest Texas outposts. Instead, they were only allowed to trade with Mexico City - over 1,000 miles away.Ultimately, the lack of freedom granted to settlers and the limitations forced on them by hostile Indians, made Spanish settlement in Texas a bust. But the climactic moment in the collapse of Spanish Texas came as a result of revolution - and war.

The Mexican Revolution and the Gutierrez Magee Expedition.

On Sep. 16, 1810 - one of those glorious days of freedom all lovers of Democracy should celebrate - deep in Mexico, Father Hidalgo issued his "grito" or "call to freedom" and unleashed the Mexican Revolution. Far to the north in Texas, the call was heard and the Citizens of Bexar (today's San Antonio) were eager to join in.

But these isolated frontiersmen, who by now called themselves "Tejanos" had no military force, and civilians were denied the right in many cases to own weapons. While revolution spread quickly across Mexico proper, Texas remained in the grip of Spanish authorities. The Mexican revolutionaries hatched a plot to seek aid from their neighbors to the north, and a revolutionary leader named Gutierrez travelled to America to raise an army.

For the United States, which had just gained Louisiana a few years before and sought to clear up its titles to the west and open new trading routes to the South, Mexican independence was also a long-standing dream. Add to that fact the fear of a potential alliance between Spain and England - with whom the U.S. would very shortly be at war with once again.

Under Gutierrez and an American West Point graduate, Augustus Magee, a group of American volunteers assembled in New Orleans and crossed over into Texas. Joining together with locals, they first drove the Spanish out of Nacogdoches, then La Bahia, then moved to Bexar, where they easily defeated the few remaining Spanish troops.

The American goal was never to steal Texas, although there were certainly some who hoped to buy it. Nonetheless, at least part of Texas was thought to lie within the territory gained from France as part of the Louisiana purchase, a border which had never been surveyed and lay in dangerous obscurity. America hoped to settle the claim with a friendly cash-strapped Mexico, rather than a brusque, tyrannical Spain.

At the time, the U.S. Secretary of State was James Monroe, whose fierce opposition to European meddling in the Western Hemisphere would eventually become known as the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe and President James Madison wanted nothing less than to see Spain evicted from the continent and democracy spread. Although official support of the Mexican rebels was out of the question, a shadowy State Department official joined the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition as an advisor.

After expelling the Spanish, the Tejanos declared Texas to be independent - pending success of the revolution elsewhere in Mexico. Texas, they announced, would join Mexico when the war was won. But the war was far from won in Mexico or in Texas. As time went by, the Gutierrez-Magee's impressive forces, bored by lack of action, dwindled. Controversy arose after the citizens of Bexar executed the Spanish governor by decapitation. Furthermore, many Americans, finding their own country now at war with England in the War of 1812, went home.

Thus, the rebellion was in a state of disarray in August, 1813 when the Spanish came back in force. A punitive Spanish force led by Joaquin de Arredondo surprised the revolutionaries just south of Bexar, in the Battle of Medina (August 18, 1813) - the bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas. It was a rout. The mixed army of 1,400 Tejanos, Americans and Indians was wiped out - fewer than 100 escaped alive.

The Battle of Medina - August 18, 1813

The result for Texas was even more calamitous. The Spanish opened up a brutal campaign of reprisal against the colony in anger for the murder of its governor. Bexar was pillaged. Towns to the North were burned. Overnight, the scarce progress that the frontier colony had made in 220 years of development, was reversed. Spain soon realized the error of their ways. Their punitive raid on Texas had broken the defense of the colony, and the Indians swarmed over the borders. Without civilized men tied to the land, the region would soon be lost.

Texas was probably lost from that day on, but Spain would grasp at one last option to hold onto what it could not control by itself. To do this, it took a risky gamble that was doomed to fail, but changed the nature of Texas forever.

But that story is best left for another day...