File under ‘Might Have Been.‘ Sam Houston (1793-1863) might have been the 16th President of the United States. So the dream goes, a President Houston would have held the South to the Constitution while defending states rights, and yet found a way to satisfy the demands of the North, economic, political, and moral. With such a president there would have been no Civil War. As it is, he is in fact an American president though not of the United States but of Texas. (The 16th President was Abraham Lincoln, Class!)
Houston was a man of many parts: A staunch unionist, a Southern with unimpeachable qualifications, a hero in three wars, hand picked once by Andrew Jackson that champion of the west, known through the northeast coast as an informative and entertaining speaker, a vigorous opponent of the slave trade, an avowed proponent of states rights, a blood brother to Cherokee Indians, a man who read himself to sleep with the Odyssey and Cicero’s Offices.
Some indication of his political career can be seen in the elected offices he held. He was born in Virginia and went to the wilds of east Tennessee as a young man.
1819 elected Tennessee Attorney-General
1823 elected to the U.S. House of Representative from Tennessee
1827 elected Governor of Tennessee
1836 Elected first President of the Republic of Texas
1841 Re-elected President of the Republic of Texas
1846 Elected to US Senate from Texas and twice re-elected
1859 Elected Governor of Texas
Few are the curriculum vitae that can match that. Then there is his military service.
The list conceals as much as it reveals. The gap between 1827 and 1836 includes three years in the wilderness where he lived among Indians. He resigned as Governor of Tennessee when his bride of one-day rejected him and her relatives thereafter and for years heaped calumny on him. Bound by the code of a Southern gentleman, Houston made no reply. He gained himself in one day a lifelong reputation as a ravisher of women though it is plain he never touched his bride, and in the following three years he earned an equally enduring reputation as an alcoholic. He certainly deserved that for a time. He also found solace in an Indian woman, while still married to that bride.
What chance for such a man in civilized society? A ravisher. An alcoholic. An Indian lover?
What a fall from Attorney-General, U.S. Representative, and state Governor to pitiful wretch living on the charity of impoverished Indians.
Yet the frontier gave him another chance and by dint of his own hands he took it. GTT was the slogan of the day in the 1830s and so Go To Texas he did. There he tried to farm and developed a lifetime interest in agronomy and stock breeding. Having at the third try secured a divorce from his long estranged wife, he married a woman who swore him off the bottle, and he kept that oath. In fact, he became a national temperance speaker. He was completely devoted to his wife, Margaret. Yet he sacrificed everything for Texas, and at one point sold the family home to pay some Texas debts that were in his name.
When the convolutions of Mexican politics produced Santa Anna the Texas War started. Houston had fought in Indian Wars in Tennessee and in the War of 1812 against Great Britain. He was wounded in both and with medicine as it was, the wounds never healed properly. Indeed it is said that on his deathbed in 1863 his old groin wound opened.
He was a temporizer, having seen enthusiastic militia get themselves killed in earlier wars he advocated and practiced restraint and preparation. The Texas Revolutionary Council made him a General and he recruited troops, secured weapons, and trained the men. All of this was ridiculed by the hot heads who urged immediate action. To make matters worse when Santa Anna’s army approached, Houston retreated for he had read much of Napoleon’s destruction in Russia and thought the distances and heat of Texas might reduce the European trained and equipped Mexican Army.
When the armies at last met, he feigned confusion and fear, and this emboldened Santa Anna into several tactical blunders. The Texans prevailed at San Jacinto where Houston was wounded again.
There is much more to the story but let that suffice as a sample.
Houston was Governor when Texas seceded from the Union. He stalled this eventuality as long as he could, finally sitting at his desk while the secessionists acted in the room next door. When they demanded he take an oath of allegiance to the cause of secession, he refused and they declared the office void. At 67 he accepted this turn of events and went into retirement. He died in July 1863.
Between 1861 and 1863 his only forays into politics were to advocate the relief of the conditions of Union prisoners of war in Galveston, and to council dealing honourably with the Cherokees. The former was the more successful of the two.
Note, Houston wore an Indian blanket as a cloak when he took his place in the Senate and spoke there more than once on the terrible record of deceit and perfidy that the United States had visited on Indians. That cloak sent John C. Calhoun into one of his many rages. I rather think Calhoun was the intended audience for the gesture. To find out why, read the book.
The book is brilliantly conceived and written, starting with the Preface that explains why we need to know about Sam Houston and why this book is the one to tell us. It totals 500 plus pages and surveys the previous sixty biographies of Houston and plunges into the original source material. It is the product of fifteen years of research, writes the author. He has no university affiliation and I rather doubt a university would indulge such a project today. The demands of a three-year performance review, the imperative to secure a research grant whether needed or not, the premium on counting publications, and much more combine to make short-terms achievement the path to tenure and promotion.
My only knowledge of Sam Houston before reading this book, apart from schoolboy apocrypha, was the short chapter on Houston in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1955) that likened Houston to an actor standing just out of the spotlight. He was involved in great deeds but it was never quite clear what he was doing or why or how. That seems right in light of this volume.
Houston was capable of working on several levels at once, always had Plan B, C, and D in train if A did not progress. He knew the power of words to focus attention. He tried always to keep his word so that he could trade on it. Even when political difference divided him from friends, he tried to keep the personal relationship alive by letter and succeeded in many cases in retaining the personal friendship of sworn political enemies.
In death he is now more acceptable to Texans. Check this on You Tube
Cut-and-paste because hyperlink insertion does not work.
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