Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands Read Free Book Online Page A

growing into an irresistible torrent that will sweep away the crazy remains of Spanish Government from the Internal Provinces [Texas and its neighbors], and open Mexico to the political influence of the U.S. and to the talents and enterprise of our citizens.”
    The expeditionary force rolled toward San Antonio, picking up additional volunteers among the Tejanos (Mexican Texans) and even various Indian tribes. It captured La Bahía in November 1812 without a struggle—which disappointed the bellicose Magee. “They are a rascally set of treacherous cowards,” he said of the Spanish soldiers. Although Magee fell ill and died, the invasion continued under Gutiérrez and Samuel Kemper, a Virginia carpenter who had come west in search of adventure and booty. The royalist forces counterattacked outside San Antonio, but the rebels soon put them to flight. Gutiérrez and the others camped outside the Alamo—a mission compound that had been converted to a fortress—while several hundred officers and men of the royalist army switched sides and joined them. On April 6, 1813, the victors, claiming to speak for “the People of the Province of Texas,” declared that “the chains which bound us under the domination of European Spain are forever dissolved. . . . We are free and independent.”
    Born of the Mexican revolution, the fighting in Texas reflected the ferocity of that larger upheaval. After the conquest of San Antonio, several captured Spanish officers were executed, apparently with the approval of Gutiérrez. This offended and alarmed some of the Americans, who headed back to Louisiana. It also provoked quarreling among the remaining rebels, many of whom objected to the high-handedness of Gutiérrez in making himself “governor” and then “president protector” of the nascent Texas republic. More of his soldiers drifted away, leaving the rest unready to defend themselves against a fresh royalist army under General Joaquín Arredondo.
    At the battle of the Medina River, south of San Antonio, Arredondo and the royalists crushed the rebels in the bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas. Of perhaps fourteen hundred rebels, including Americans, Tejanos, and various Indians, fewer than a hundred survived the battle and its aftermath. No quarter was given by the royalists; rebels captured were summarily executed, and those who fled were hunted down and likewise dispatched. The bodies of the vanquished were left unburied on the field as a lesson to any who might be tempted toward independence in the future.

    Taking note of Arredondo’s strategy was a slight young lieutenant of the royalist army, a nineteen-year-old with soft but penetrating brown eyes, curly dark hair, a rather sallow complexion for one who spent so much time out of doors, and a resigned, melancholic expression at odds with the martial career he had chosen. It was this last aspect that made Antonio López de Santa Anna irresistible to nearly all the women and many of the men he met—“decidedly the best looking and most interesting figure of the group,” said a later female visitor who singled him out of a crowd. This visitor, benefiting from some history, went on to say, “It is strange, and a fact worthy of notice in natural history, how frequently this expression of philosophic resignation, of placid sadness, is to be remarked on the countenances of the most cunning, the deepest, most ambitious, most designing and most dangerous statesmen.”
    Santa Anna’s cunning would take years to perfect, but his ambition was evident early. A creole from Veracruz province, the young man ached to achieve distinction beyond his family’s modest station; to this end he joined the army, that traditional vehicle of advancement for those not born to privilege. His infantry regiment, commanded by Arredondo, fought Indians on the northern frontier until the revolution broke out, whereupon it