Sam Houston, Warts and All
Texas was the end of the line for Sam Houston, an adventurer with boundless energies, deep depressions, and a mysterious past, the sort of man who could have faced down LBJ.
(Page 3 of 3)
Minor matters? Thirty-one years later Horace Greeley wrote that Houston had been sent to Texas by Andrew Jackson to foment revolution, expel the Mexican authorities, and prepare the region for speedy annexation to the United States. Abolitionists believed this, thought it was an attempt to expand the slave states' empire, and so did some of the Texas colonists who wanted their own Republic. Well, I think it was the other way around, that Houston, not Jackson, was the proponent of open rebellion. Jackson kept agents busy in Mexico City trying to buy Texas, though of course by this time he would have taken it as a gift from adventurers. (Which is what he, or rather his successors, Martin Van Buren and John Tyler, ultimately did.) Before Houston ever crossed the Red River, he told a Baptist preacher that he was going out to Texas to live with the Cherokees and "establish a little two-horse republic, of which I will be the first president."
Lawyer and speculator Houston's best client was the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, whose offices included New Yorkers James Prentiss and Samuel Swartout. Were these the two capitalists to which Houston referred in his letter to his brother? The two Sams seemed the friendlier of the trio, exchanging warm and encouraging notes about personal matters as well as business. Swartout was also the Collector of the Port of New York. His sticky fingers were to bring about the foulest scandal of the Jackson administration, and we now know that the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company sold some fraudulent land script. The good stuff Sam Houston sold to some of his Creek Indian friends, to lure them to Texas to fight if they were needed.
In 1835, two events happened that pushed Texas to secession and war with the mother country. President Santa Anna proclaimed a unified constitution for all of Mexico, which made a clean sweep of state rights, and Stephen F. Austin returned home. After two years of observing Santa Anna, he concluded that Texas' only choice was to take up arms. Sam Houston's time in Texas up to this point is not a pretty picture. But in the crises that followed, he alone in Texas seemed to have kept a cool head and a masterful hand. The factionalism between the provisional government and the militia did more damage than the Mexican army, and at one point, during the skirmishes, Houston found himself deposed as commander-in-chief. He was so sick of the mess he thought seriously of chucking it and heading for the Rocky Mountains, where he had also dreamed that destiny might lead him. Instead he retreated to the Texas plains and the council of the Cherokees. He wasn't there long. The convention called him back, in his rightful place at the head of the army, such as it was, and he rode into history a hero.
And yet there was even a question about that. No discerning man on the continent, friend or foe, had ever questioned Sam Houston's courage until his own men did it at San Jacinto during his hour of greatest triumph. His victory over Santa Anna left Anglo-Saxon America spellbound. Thomas Hart Benton arose in the United States Senate to call him another Mark Antony, Texans elected him president of their rebellious republic over a crestfallen Stephen F. Austin, and yet for years veterans of the battle of Buffalo Bayou went about shaking their heads. To them the general had acted like a damned coward, retreating and hemming and hawing around until they and their junior officers almost mutinied him into attack.
For all the glory and honor that followed, Sam Houston still seemed a troubled man, "towering in a bright blanket, grand, gloomy and peculiar, brooding and drinking." His problem was a little Nacogdoches belle named Anna Raquet. She lost interest. And that was another contradiction in the man. As fine a figure as he cut in public, turning the ladies heads and men's hearts to envy, he couldn't make it with the women he really wanted. Sam Houston was spurned by every woman he seriously pursued until, at the age of 47, he married the resourceful and enduring Margaret Lea. But that was to come later.
Erasmus Mumford, the historian, visited the new capitol, named after its bachelor champion, and observed that Houston City was "a moral desert, a hell on earth where vice of most every name and grade reigned triumphantly." Let us not overlook the dirty old man in all this halo-ing. Mumford was talking about the salons of Mrs. Mann and Madame Raimon, to which the president of the republic and other heads of state were prone to repair. Mumford continued: "The general and new president, Old Sam Jacinto as they called him, lived in a log cabin. He is a good talker but an awful swearer."
A family friend wrote in 1838:
"Whilst I remained in Houston, I called on the president, found him in good health and perfectly sober. He told me he had resolved and was determined to stand to it; not to touch, taste or handle the unclean thing, until the first of January next. I am in hopes he will refrain from intoxication for the short term of one year, which will do credit to himself, and be a fine thing for the Republic of Texas."
The finest thing Houston did for the republic was to marry Margaret Lea. She sobered him up and settled him down in a way that was loving but not possessive and restrictive. They had eight children, the last coming when Houston was 67, and he took great pride and attention in them.
It was in those days after he found Margaret that Sam Houston matured into the kind of man many would have liked in the White House. He was the best chief executive Texas ever had, and under trying circumstances. What would he have done as President? I think that if he had been elected early enough he might have been able to soften the growing antagonism between North and South. In that time we had several Northern presidents who were sympathetic to the South, but only one Southerner who was sympathetic to the North. That was James Polk, and he helped cool the country's passion for the slavery issue by pursuing a vigorous expansionist program, even though it brought war with Mexico and the threat of war with Britain.
I see Sam Houston doing much the same thing, only in a bigger way than even Polk, who had increased the size of the United States more than any president since Jefferson. In the war with Mexico, Houston would have gone to the capital and conquered the whole country, kept us so busy expanding that we wouldn't have had time to fight among ourselves. Like Lincoln, he would have allowed slave states and free states. Oh yes, Lincoln would have preferred that to secession and civil war. And Houston might have made it a little easier for the Indians to bear up under all that manifest destiny.
But it didn't happen. Texas proved to be the wrong way to go for any larger ambition, and let's not fool ourselves about the man's modesty—he wanted to be president of more than his little "two horse republic."
Except for his now and then eloquence in defense of Indians, and his stand against secession and civil war, Sam Houston's later years in Washington as the senator from Texas were somewhat pathetic. He was like an old, molty lion who had waited a little too long to make his move, and now lesser but younger appetites were beating him to their fill.
It was as if the fates, realizing this, took him back to Texas, to his trusty theater where, as the deposed governor standing alone against a willful people, he could make an exit worthy of the profile in courage the late President Kennedy gave him.
He refused an oath to the Confederacy, and he refused arms of the nation.
"The time has come," he wrote, "When a man's section is his country. I stand by mine. All my hopes, my fortunes, are centered in the South. When I see the land for whose defense my blood has been spilt, and the people whose fotunes have been mine through a quarter of a century of toil, threatened with invasion, I can but cast by lot with theirs and await the issue."
Two years later he was dead.
He left to his widow and children: the house at Huntsville, five
horses, four cows, a rifle, a pistol, and his San Jacinto sword. He left 12 slaves, the oldest a
55-year-old man named Lewis, valued at $400, the youngest a four-year-old girl named Lotte, also
valued at $400. The most valuable slave was a 35-year-old man named Joshua. He sold for $2000. He
left to Margaret and the children 17,873 acres of Texas—all this, the house, the slaves, the
animals and land, all this worth in those times about $89,000. All that he left to his family. And
to us he left Texas.
My Library
