The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
Cós. In mid‐November Austin was sent on a diplomatic mission to the United States, and the men elected Edward Burleson to command the army. Burleson decided to abandon the siege for the winter, but Ben Milam convinced him to allow volunteers to attempt to take the town. On December 5, some 300 men (several of whom were Texas‐Mexicans) led by Milam and Frank Johnson attacked. Isolated from reinforcements and re‐supply for his army, Cós, having tried to defend Béxar in door‐to‐door combat, succumbed to the assault on December 11. Now the attackers, less Ben Milam, who had been killed by a Mexican sharpshooter, forced Cós to promise to respect the Constitution of 1824 and begin a retreat into the interior of Mexico.
Meanwhile, fifty‐eight delegates from a dozen Texas communities had assembled in what is called the Consultation of 1835 at San Felipe de Austin. Meeting between November 3 and November 14, they elected Branch T. Archer president of the Consultation and, after lengthy discussion, declared their commitment to federalism as embodied in the Constitution of 1824. By this strategy, the delegates hoped to win support from liberals in Mexico and gain time in which to acquire assistance from the United States; in fact, Texans already wanted independence from Mexico, as did the corps of Tejano oligarchs who had seen advantages in Anglo immigration early. Delegates further created a provisional government and elected Henry Smith as governor, James W. Robinson as lieutenant governor, and established a general council (a legislative body like a parliament) to be composed of representatives from the various settlements. Among other things, the Consultation empowered the new government to seek funds to finance the expected war (to that end, it dispatched Austin, Archer, and William H. Wharton to the United States) and selected Sam Houston as commander of the regular army.
By early 1836, President Santa Anna himself was on the move toward Texas to crush the rebellion. In February the Mexican army, consisting of some 6000 soldiers, among them trained infantrymen and cavalrymen but many others conscripted for the Texas campaign, crossed the Rio Grande. Draftees included farm and ranch hands, poverty‐stricken city dwellers, heads of families more concerned with the safety of their loved ones than a distant war, and political opponents of the Centralists.
Texas troops in the field, meantime, proved difficult to manage. Officers faced problems imposing order and discipline. Enlisted men tended to show more allegiance to their immediate leaders, as opposed to those higher up the chain of command. For the most part, the Texan army consisted of volunteers willing to fight when needed but ready to leave the ranks in order to care for their families and property once an immediate crisis had passed. It soon became apparent that the Consultation had blundered badly in not giving Sam Houston (who commanded the mostly nonexistent regular army) command over the volunteers as well.
The disorder in the military was symptomatic of problems besetting Texans in general, for into the winter of 1835–36 they still faced much political division. Their own individualism inhibited agreement on the best path to pursue toward independence. Some still held conflicting feelings about their relationship to Mexico and agonized over whether to join the peace or the war party. Others took issue with their fellow Texans over land claims or denounced them for shirking military duty.
As to the government, it faced such confusion and dissension that in December 1835, the general council called for the election of men to meet in early March 1836 for the purpose of adopting an ad interim government and framing a new constitution. Before the convention could meet, however, the government virtually collapsed. In January Governor Smith suspended the general council, which retaliated by removing Smith from office. Neither recognized the legality of the other’s action, and for all practical purposes Texas ceased to have a government. When delegates to the convention convened at Washington‐on‐the‐Brazos (a townsite located a few miles from Austin’s head center at San Felipe) on March 1, sentiment had crystallized in favor of independence from Mexico. On March 2, the delegates endorsed a committee document, a declaration of independence, stating that Santa Anna had overthrown the Constitution of 1824 and substituted it with tyranny, that the Mexican government had subjugated Texas to Coahuila and thereby had diminished the voice of the people of Texas, that it had denied them the right to trial by jury, the right to religious freedom, and the right to bear arms, and that Mexico had failed to establish a system of education. It further denounced Santa Anna’s regime for employing the military to enforce the law instead of utilizing civilian justice, for inciting the Indians against the colonies, and for mustering an army of mercenaries which was even then on its way to exterminate the colonists. All fifty‐nine delegates to the convention signed the document, among them three Mexicans: Lorenzo de Zavala and the Tejanos José Antonio Navarro and José Francisco Ruiz, the latter two belonging to that group of Coahuiltejano capitalists who had profited from Anglo American colonization.
The War for Texas Independence
Causes
How can this move for independence be explained when, just fifteen years earlier, Anglo American immigrants to Texas had pledged their loyalty to Mexico and agreed to conform to Mexican custom? Traditionally, historians viewed the Texas rebellion as a courageous act of liberty‐loving Anglo Texans against the intolerant and undemocratic government of Mexico: in this light, Anglos were simply following in the footsteps of their ancestors who had rebelled against the autocratic British. Over time, other interpretations gained acceptance. One depicted the Texas rebellion as part of a conspiracy of southern slaveholders to take control of Texas. Another cited collusion between President Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston. Nevertheless, the original democracy versus tyranny thesis remained the most tenacious.
Recent interpretations, however, depart from the earlier explanations. One analytical viewpoint places the uprising within historical currents underway in the Mexican interior where the Centralist and Federalist parties had since 1821 vied for political control. Anglo Texans and leading Tejanos (several from the San Antonio area) favored federalist republican principles. The Federalists advocated state sovereignty, defended individual liberty, pledged protection of private property ownership, and actively promoted economic progress. Anglo Texans and their Tejano allies perceived Mexico’s Centralists, on the other hand, as threats to these convictions, and the consistent discriminatory attitude the Centralists had taken against the Texans, and ultimately their abolishment of the Constitution of 1824, sparked the movement for independence.
A related premise broadens the conflict between Centralists and Federalists by placing it in a global context. This scholarly assessment contends that the worldwide revolution in cotton framed the manner in which Centralists and Federalists confronted each other over which system of governance best determined the destiny of Texas. For the Centralists, the cotton revolution and slavery had led to great influx of Anglos into Texas, and only strong Centralist control would curb increased immigration, abolish slavery, and halt possible secession. But these were subversive policies to Anglos and Tejano oligarchs. They saw in federalism, on the other hand, a shield from Centralist policies and protection from threats that potentially sabotaged slavery, arrested immigration, and interrupted the further development of the cotton economy. Cotton and slavery mixed in shaping the approach each side took in dealing with the other. The disagreement between Mexico’s Centralists to check immigration and undermine the institution that undergirded cotton in Texas, and the conviction of Texans and Tejanos that federalism as a method of governance best served their aim in defending the agricultural revolution, caused the Texas war for independence.
Another alternative view asserts that economic incentives, such as land speculation, underlay the revolt. The land‐trafficking thesis sees several of the influential men in Anglo Texas having migrated from the United States to the Mexican north with the intention of turning a profit in land transactions. This argument links these individuals to speculators in Texas, Coahuila, and Mexico City, as well as to financial centers in New York and Philadelphia. When Mexico moved against Texas in 1835, the leading men in the colony threw their influence behind rebellion in an effort to maintain opportunities in land speculation.
Other historians attribute more subtle economic reasons for the uprising, seeing the rebellion as one launched by Texans to preserve recently achieved economic gains. For years, Anglos had lived under the auspicious climate created by the Constitution of