The Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition: January 2017

Monday, January 16, 2017

The Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition

One year after the army first set foot on Texas soil, a Spanish army under General Joaquín de Arredondo crushed the rebels at the decisive Battle of Medina on August 18, 1813, restoring royalist control in the province for another eight years. The revolt, begun by an American volunteer invasion force and completed by a mixed, but mostly native Mexican army, failed in its objective to republicanize Texas. Nonetheless, the war and aftermath ultimately sealed the fate of Spanish, and eventually Mexican, Texas. If an American demographic conquest was still uncertain before 1812, it became inevitable afterwards.

This page will feature some of my original research into the expedition that I conducted for my master's thesis, Origins and Motivations of the Gutiérrez-Magee Filibusters. Departing from the well-worn path of chronology of the expedition, I focused specifically on the men who made it up. Historians heretofore have ignored these men on the ground with musket in hand, but a careful analysis of these men tells us much about the inspiration for the expedition that nearly succeeded in freeing Texas from Spanish authority.

Origins and Motivations of the Gutiérrez-Magee Filibusters

By James Bernsen

I. INTRODUCTION

The Spanish Imperial Crisis

American Westward Migration

The First Filibusters

A Short History of the Expedition

II. PRELUDE TO INVASION

Traders and Settlers

The Pull from Within

French Settlers in Texas

The “Neutralians”

The Veteran Filibusters

III. THE EXPEDITION ENTERS TEXAS

The Military Men

The Enlisted Soldier

Doctors and Lawyers

Toledo and the Idealists

IV. DEFEAT AND AFTERMATH

Return of the Filibusters

Independence and the Search for Pensions

Return to Texas

Other Gutiérrez-MageeParticipants

V. CONCLUSIONS

The Roles of Generals Wilkinson and Adair

Republican Tradition and Universality

Embracing Mexico and Settling the Land

The Legacy of the Expedition

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

On August 8, 1812, an army of approximately 130 men, mostly Americans, crossed the Sabine River into the Spanish province of Texas under a green flag and a lofty name, the Republican Army of the North, to make common cause with the revolutionary movement in New Spain. The Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition, the largest of all American private military incursions in Spanish territory, dramatically wrested parts of Texas from the clutches of Spanish royalists for nearly a year before collapsing amid recriminations and a royalist counteroffensive. One year after the army first set foot on Texas soil, a Spanish army under General Joaquín de Arredondo crushed the rebels at the decisive Battle of Medina on August 18, 1813, restoring royalist control in the province for another eight years. The revolt, begun by an American volunteer invasion force and completed by a mixed, but mostly native Mexican army, failed in its objective to republicanize Texas. Nonetheless, the war and aftermath ultimately sealed the fate of Spanish, and eventually Mexican, Texas. If an American demographic conquest was still uncertain before 1812, it became inevitable afterwards. That sense of inevitability, however, encourages a problematical backwards-looking historical perspective on the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition. Historians invariably either dismiss the venture for its failure, or interpret it through a lens colored by the later revolution of 1836. Several volumes have traced the course of the war and numerous works have investigated the diplomatic maneuvers of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Generally, debate centers on the level of American government culpability in the enterprise and whether or not the raid was a deliberate ploy to further expansionist goals.

The goal of this study is not to argue this point, but to investigate a crucial piece of evidence that has been virtually ignored in the debate: the men of the expedition themselves. Historians have often glossed over these individuals to focus the discussion of motivation to grander targets: U.S. presidents, American expansionist philosophy, or the spread of cotton and slavery. This thesis seeks to fill a critical gap by tracing the histories, agendas, and ambitions of the Americans on the ground with rifle in hand who actually made history. This work will demonstrate that the fighters who came to volunteer in the expedition did so for a variety of individual reasons. While these interests may have coincided with the goals of administrations, aristocracies, or other outside players, the American participants in the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition were certainly not puppets. By looking closely at the personal histories and experiences of these men, we get a glimpse into their minds and can demonstrate how particular goals, grievances, or ideals drove them. They were not, as two historians dismissively referred to them, “nameless frontiersmen or adventurers seeking new lands” who were unwitting pawns of expansionist presidents.[1] They did indeed have names and histories that we can trace and were, in fact, active agents in the revolution in their own right and on their own terms.

Studying obscure individuals provides deeper insight into a historical event that was very much bottom-up, and can shed new light on the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition in particular because most studies of the episode rely on the same very limited sources, particularly the José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara diary and William Shaler papers. While valuable, these are old, thoroughly exhausted, and unlikely to open new avenues of inquiry on their own. This paper hopefully provides an end-run around this research bottleneck. The approach attempted here has heretofore been virtually impossible, but can be done now due to the wide range of resources that have been made available on the Internet in recent years, including genealogical information, obscure books, and primary sources.

Where does the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition fit in historically? Historians work in boxes, which allows for classification of an event within a genre, for example, Texas History, Louisiana History or Mexican history. The Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition crosses these boundaries, and hence calls for a more nuanced approach. One could certainly place it in the broader box of “Southwestern” or border history, but this runs the risk of losing sight of its primary relation to the Texas story. The fault of many histories of Texas, however, is not including the expedition at all within the broader narrative, leaving it as a historiographical orphan outside of that box. Anglo Texas History, we are traditionally told, begins with the arrival of Stephen F. Austin, and its central event is the revolution of 1835-36. But as I will show, the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition is an important precursor to these events and thus belongs in – and, properly understood, reshapes – that Texas history box. Moreover, to put the expedition into context necessitates drawing comparisons with the future period to draw on the wide range of scholarship which has examined that time, and thereby shortcut the lack of scholarship on the earlier, failed revolution of 1812. Hence this study will occasionally appropriate observations from the second Texas Revolution of 1835-36, showing, on a case-by-case basis, their applicability, or inapplicability, as the facts may warrant, to circumstances of 1812-13.

[1] Frank L. Owsley and Gene A. Smith. Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800-1821 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), ix.

The Spanish Imperial Crisis

The occupation of Spain by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808 and his enthroning of his brother Joseph in Madrid created a crisis throughout Spain’s vast empire in America that deepened over the ensuing years. In many Spanish provinces, local juntas asserted power in the name of the king, but as the chaos dragged on, these began to assume a more revolutionary character. Many of their leaders saw the United States as an inspiration and, they hoped, as a source of money, arms, and diplomatic muscle to further their rebellions. Agents were soon dispatched to the United States to seek support, including José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, a Mexican revolutionary, and, separately, José Álvarez de Toledo y Dubois, a Cuban rebel who would in time redirect his efforts to Texas.[1] On the American side, President James Madison was convinced by 1810 that the Spanish regime and its empire would collapse entirely and therefore dispatched a number of agents of his own to the various centers of revolt to observe and report.[2] In the case of Mexico, Secretary of State Robert Smith tapped Connecticut merchant William Shaler for the job, and ordered him to Mexico via Cuba. Meanwhile, in Washington, Gutiérrez met with Secretary of State James Monroe and received encouragement but only vague and conditional offers of support.

Sec. of State Robert Smith's instructions to William Shaler, special agent.
(Courtesy of the Historical Society of Philadelphia)

What weighed on the minds of the administration – and many Americans – was the danger that the Spanish borderlands were a fruit ripe for the plucking in the ongoing struggle between European powers. Texas, a coastal frontier province of hundreds of thousands of square miles with a Spanish population of approximately 3,000 facing five times that number of autonomous Indians, was one of the weakest links in the Spanish chain. And no one knew just how weak it was better than the thousands of Americans who had poured into the Western territories in the previous twenty years.

[1] Gordon S. Brown, Latin American Rebels and the United States, 1806-1822 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2015), 45.

[2] J.C.A. Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776-1821 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 79.

American Westward Migration

The end of the American Revolution unleased a rush to the frontier of staggering proportions. More so than even the migrations of the 1870s and 80s, Americans in the 1780s and 1790s were on the move. The population of Kentucky, for instance, rose from 12,000 in 1783 to 210,000 by 1800.[1]

Daniel Boone leading settlers into Kentucky.

As Joyce Appleby notes, Americans in the generation after independence pushed westward in nearly continuous chains of wagons, seeking new lands. They were mostly poor farmers, but were confident and aggressive; long before the term “manifest destiny” was coined, they were making it a reality, and justifying it with a moral imperative. “Westward migrating families viewed their taking up of land in the national domain as a movement to spread democratic institutions across the continent,” Appleby writes.[2] As a traveling British naval officer and writer, Frederick Marryat would later say of these Americans that “wandering about seems engrafted in their nature…. They forever imagine that the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.”[3]

The migrants to the frontier between the Revolution and the War of 1812 were a mix of Southerners and Pennsylvania residents, but they were drawn almost exclusively from the western portions of those states, and the distinction is important. As Frederick Jackson Turner notes in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, before the spread of cotton into the interior of the country, the distinction from Pennsylvania southwards was less North vs. South, but tidewater vs. interior.[4] The mostly poor Westerners chafed at continued political control from the coasts, where many of them had once been indentured servants or had been forced onto marginal land as wealthy landowners had monopolized the best. “The West was not conservative: buoyant, self-confidence and self-assertion were distinguishing traits in its composition,” wrote Turner. The western frontiersman, he added “had little patience with finely drawn distinctions or scruples of method.” He further wrote: “It followed from the lack of organized political life, from the atomic conditions of the backwoods society, that the individual was exalted and given free play. The West was another name for opportunity. Here were mines to be seized; fertile valleys to be pre-empted, all the natural resources open to the shrewdest and the boldest.”[5]

Although Turner’s overall thesis has been successfully challenged on a number of fronts since its appearance, he very correctly stated the frontier belief in opportunity that lay just over the horizon for most settlers. The political allegiance that this opportunity would flower under was, at least in early years, negotiable. As this westward push moved into Kentucky and Tennessee, it was spreading Americans and their traditions, but not inherently spreading American authority. Under the Articles of Confederation, and for some time after the new constitution was adopted, the American identity, like its government, was fragile, contentious, and uncertain. The same forces that unleashed the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791 were pushing migrants further away from their government in space and mind. Some, like Daniel Boone and Moses Austin, crossed into Spanish territory and took that nation’s citizenship. Others flirted with a variety of secessionist movements. Kentucky itself was born as a secession from coastal Virginia. To its restless citizens, who longed for the right to navigate the Mississippi River, if the United States could not provide them with it, they were willing to join any country – or create one if necessary – that could do so.[6]

The Mississippi Valley, showing the inherent unity of the river basin versus Eastern territories.
It was this geographic reality which led Westerners to see themselves as separate from the coastal regions and,
prior to the Louisiana Purchase, to flirt with separatism.

This was inherently dangerous for the young republic, and was brought home to Americans by the actions of French envoy/provocateur Edmond-Charles Genêt, who sought to dismember the United States from the outside and Senator William Blount, who sought to do so from the inside. Long before there was a plot among Americans to carve up Spanish territory, there was a “Spanish Conspiracy” to do the same to the young Republic. As Gordon Brown notes, “Separatism was in the air, encouraged by the British from Canada and the French and Spanish from Louisiana and Florida, all of whom wished – regardless of their own bitter rivalry – to limit the power of the new American Republic in the region west of the Appalachians.”[7]

There was an alternative to separatism that naturally found more appeal: Western settlers who wanted access to the Mississippi could get it by attacking Spain directly. Spain was a convenient enemy for a number of reasons. Philosophically, Americans saw themselves as inheritors of all European dominions in North America, and for this reason, northern interests coveted Quebec for the same reason that western interests coveted Spanish territory. But Spain in particular was also hated. Americans were Protestant, but Westerners even more so. Americans in large numbers subscribed to a bias known as the “Black Legend” of Spain. “In the popular imagination,” explains Gordon Brown, “Spaniards generally came to be characterized as cruel, tyrannical, superstitious, intolerant or corrupt – or even all of these.”[8] Unlike Canada, moreover, Spain was extremely weak, with an over-extended empire stretching from the borders of Louisiana to Tierra del Fuego, and while its population was large, those provinces closest to America were mostly empty and weakly defended.

George Rogers Clark

In 1790, Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark and James O’Fallon signed up thousands of men from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Kentucky for a filibuster into Spanish Louisiana. The operation was so open that advertisements were printed in Kentucky newspapers.[9] Three years later, Clark, working with Genêt, envisioned another scheme, which was suppressed by President George Washington. The 1794 Neutrality Act banned such expeditions, and to further halt them, Washington engaged in a policy of appointing influential Westerners to public jobs that tied them to the government.[10] In 1795, the Treaty of San Lorenzo opened the Mississippi to U.S. trade and briefly took away the major source of controversy. In 1798, however, Spain revoked the privilege, once again raising the specter of western settlers taking action on their own or doing so with the help of a foreign power. For Thomas Jefferson, elected to the presidency in 1800, the idea of separatism was not concerning, so long as it was multiple American republics living side-by-side in harmony.[11] Nonetheless, the prospect of a European power taking advantage of such discontent to create a colony or client state on American borders was very troubling, and became one of his prime motivations for the Louisiana Purchase, which he effected in 1803.[12]

The Louisiana Purchase, 1803

When news of the purchase arrived in the west, it was embraced enthusiastically, but even this did not sap enthusiasm for a Western action against Spain. The Spanish, who still controlled the territory– the French having not taken possession of it – were obstructing American takeover of the territory. In 1804, Aaron Burr conspired to attack Spain, but his plot was uncovered after his scheming partner, Gen. James Wilkinson, got cold feet. Furthermore, while settlers along the Mississippi River had secured their treasured goal of river access to the coast to ship their produce, other Americans in the Eastern Mississippi Territory were still blocked by Spanish possession of West Florida, which controlled the rivers that linked those American lands with the ocean. This situation led to a filibuster into Spanish territory east of Louisiana, which would ultimately have major implications for the later Gutiérrez-Magee incursion in the west.

[1] Laurie Winn Carlson, Seduced by the West: Jefferson’s America and the Lure of the Land Beyond the Mississippi (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 23.

[2] Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2001), 53.

[3] Appleby, 7.

[4] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 28.

[5] Turner, 21.

[6] Stagg, 28.

[7] Brown, 19.

[8] Brown, 21.

[9] Carlson, 44.

[10] Ibid., 52.

[11] Carlson, 136.

[12] Brown, 11.