God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(16)

Just inside the doors of the capitol building stand the marble statues of Stephen F. Austin, the entrepreneur who brought the first Anglo colonists to Texas, and Sam Houston, the first elected president of the republic. Both men were slaveholders, despite their stated opposition to the institution. Austin inherited the Texas project from his father, Moses Austin, who died of pneumonia shortly after gaining a grant to settle three hundred families in the portion of Mexican territory that was still mostly Indian country. Stephen was an unlikely frontiersman; he was short and slight, with curly hair and a fair complexion. He was better suited as a diplomat, and had it been up to him, Texas would have remained part of the Mexican nation. Although he was initially opposed to slavery, most of his colonists came from the South, and they insisted on the need for bondage. “The idea of seeing such a country as this overrun by a slave population almost makes me weep,” Austin remarked. The colonists got around the fact that slavery was illegal in Mexico by having their slaves sign a document, before entering Texas, that they were indentured servants. They remained slaves in all but the law.

The statue of Houston looks like a Roman emperor, in buckskin, gazing into the middle distance, where destiny awaits. I much prefer the gargantuan version outside Huntsville, which is sixty-seven feet tall, depicting the old soldier with a cane, staring out at I-45. Inscribed on the bronze plaque is Houston’s admonition to future Texas leaders that they should “govern wisely, and as little as possible.”



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ONE SPRING DAY I walked around Sam Houston Park, in Huntsville, with a group of rambunctious seventh graders from The Woodlands, who were on a field trip for their mandatory Texas history class. We peeked through the window of the “Steamboat House” at the bed where Houston died, on the evening of July 26, 1863, spurned by the Texas he had created after laboring to spare it the fate that secession would inevitably impose. The clock on the mantel had been stopped at 6:15 p.m., the hour of his death. The kids groaned when the docent explained the function of the chamber pot next to the bed.

Houston was a product of the populist revolt in America in the 1820s, a period that in many respects resembles our current era. A protégé of fellow Tennessean Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, Houston was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1823, the same year that Jackson went to the Senate. Four years later, Houston was elected governor of Tennessee. He was a political star, ruled by the populist credo that the people are always right. At this point, one could easily have imagined a different path for him, one that would have led directly to the White House, following in Jackson’s footsteps; certainly, many people expected as much from him. But a disastrous romance would change the course of Houston’s life, and that of the nation.

A friend of mine, historian H. W. Brands, maintains that the founding of Texas was largely the result of the shocking divorce between Houston and his first wife, Eliza Allen, whom he had married in 1829. Houston was thirty-five, tall, handsome, vain, and powerful. Eliza was nineteen, refined, fashionable, and delicate. Eleven weeks after their wedding, Eliza returned without explanation to her parents’ house. Houston resigned as governor, citing “sudden calamities.” The mystery of their estrangement has never been solved. Houston threatened violence against anyone who cast doubt on Eliza’s virtue. He is said to have told a friend that Eliza’s parents had pushed her into the marriage, although she actually loved another man. “Cursed be the human fiends who force a woman to live with a man whom she does not love,” Houston supposedly remarked.

Another theory suggests that Eliza recoiled at the sight of Houston’s disfigured body, which bore three nearly mortal wounds that he sustained in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, as part of General Jackson’s war against the Upper Creek Indians. Early in the battle, an arrow struck Houston in the thigh. He demanded that another soldier rip out the barbed shaft, which created a gaping hole. Jackson ordered him out of the fight, but Houston stumbled to his feet and assaulted the Indian breastworks, only to be shot twice, in the right shoulder and arm. The doctors decided he was certain to die, so they turned their attention to possible survivors. The next morning, when he was found still alive, the surprised surgeons finally treated him. The massive shoulder wound never actually healed, continuing to drain throughout his life.

After his marriage dissolved, Houston fled into Indian country to live with the Cherokees. They called him the Big Drunk. He became a Cherokee citizen and took a native wife. In 1832, like so many with shipwrecked ambitions, he headed to the Mexican colony of Texas to make a new start. Soon he found himself leading a kind of rebel mob that called itself an army. There was little chance that Houston’s forces could defeat the larger, well-trained Mexican forces; but in April 1836, weeks after the Alamo fell, Houston caught the Mexicans napping at San Jacinto.

There is a painting in the Texas capitol of the surrender of Antonio López de Santa Anna. Houston is shown lying on the ground, leaning against a moss-draped live oak, his right ankle bandaged from a stray bullet wound that would render him permanently lame. The camp surgeon sits on his medical box at Houston’s feet. Santa Anna, the greatest general in Mexico’s history, and the most dominant political figure in his country (he would serve eleven terms as president), stands before Houston, hat in hand. He had fled the battle, carrying a box of chocolates, but somehow got unhorsed and was discovered the next day hiding in the grass, wearing the uniform of a private. Behind the dignitaries in the painting stands a white flag with a lone star in its center. That star would become a symbol of the Republic of Texas, and then of the state, representing its defiant sovereignty. The Texian soldiers, without uniforms, wear the rough clothes of frontiersmen. Some of them look ready to lynch the Mexican leader; indeed, one of them has a length of rope. The slaughter at the Alamo had been followed, three weeks later, by the execution of more than four hundred prisoners in Goliad, on Santa Anna’s orders. “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” was the cry of Houston’s bedraggled army as they massacred the Mexicans in turn at San Jacinto. It was all over in eighteen minutes.