The cause of independence in
Spanish America was embraced widely in the United States, especially in the
West. Europe was in the throes of a revolution against monarchy under
Bonaparte, and for westerners who were generally of republican and pro-French
leaning, it was perhaps difficult to watch from the sidelines as cheerleaders.
A Spanish filibuster was a way to be a part of the great crusade for
republicanism. It was also a way to live up to the example of the American
revolutionary generation and embrace that laurel-covered tradition. These men
lived daily in the shadow of this greatest generation, whom they saw as
patterns of emulation, as Cogswell’s Fourth of July oration demonstrates. A
historian of the later Texas Revolution would cite such hero-worship in that
contest as a strong motivation. “Far from serving as a form of rhetorical
window-dressing, their frequent allusions to the past reveal a fundamental
connection between the political crisis in Texas and the American revolutionary
experience,” asserts Sam W. Haynes.[1]
As strong as this impulse was in that third generation of 1836, it was as
powerful if not more so in the second generation of 1812, for whom the American
revolutionary generation were not mythical heroes, but beloved parents,
mentors, and in a few cases comrades-in-arms. At least four members of the
expedition were veterans of the American Revolution, although there are others
who may have been as well. Benjamin
Allen, as we have seen, fought in the revolution. Peter Sides was born in 1750 in North Carolina. He served in that
state’s regiment as an ensign before moving west to Tennessee after the war,
then south to New Orleans. He was killed at the Battle of Medina. Edmund Quirk also fought in the war,
serving in the Virginia militia. Bernard
D’Ortolon, a French Louisianan, fought in the war as a French ally, and
remained in Louisiana afterwards.[2]
Far more of the participants had fathers, uncles, or other close relatives who
fought in the American Revolution, including Augustus Magee’s privateer father James.
The drive to live up to the
legacy of the founders and spread democracy was not incompatible with serving
and settling in a foreign nation. Westerners very easily and naturally embraced
the change in citizenship because in an era when few had contact with their
government on a daily basis, the nation itself was a nebulous concept. Changing
allegiance was rarely objectionable, as long as the new nation to which
allegiance was given was still democratic. In a New York newspaper in 1798, a
writer suggested a sentiment not uncommon, especially among those farthest from
America’s very small governmental power. “When one deliberately quits a
society, without having transgressed its laws, his subjugation to them ceases and
his connection with, in the aggregate, is dissolved.” This concept is nothing
less than the Declaration of Independence on a personal level.[3]
This sentiment was still alive and well 35 years later, even after attachment
to America had ostensibly grown among its people. As later Mexican Texas
resident Asa Brigham wrote a relative in 1832, “You may ask why we leave the
United States of America, for that of the United States of Mexico – in answer,
I can only say, that it was through choice, with a view of bettering my
fortune.”[4]
Historian Erich Schlereth, in an essay entitled Voluntary Mexicans, notes that among Americans who moved to Mexico
before 1836, this attitude was common. There is no reason to suggest that such
transitory nationalism was new. The men of the frontier in 1812 were, in the
words of their hero Wilkinson, free to move wherever their own notion of
patriotism took them, and that did not require them to “remain fixed like a
vegetable.” Mexico was merely fresh territory for an every-migrating class of
frontiersmen.[5]
But even for participants
who felt more attached to America, fighting for Mexico was not inconsistent
with that goal. If nothing else came from the fight, a sister republic was a
good thing. McLanahan’s letter quoting Madison is a case in point. The collapse
of the Spanish Empire would roll back the Old World’s hold on the new, Madison
was saying, and McLanahan felt it patriotic to speed up the process. As the
older Bullard, writing his anonymous history of Texas, would recall, many westerners
were motivated by the belief that Texas, like West Florida was part of the
Louisiana Purchase, and rightfully American. Imperial Spain, which had stymied
America at every chance in Louisiana and Florida, would never give it up. An
impoverished and dependent Mexico might do so, or at least would negotiate “honorably”,
which most understood to mean Mexico would accept the presumed clear case for
the American claims on its border. This might have encompassed Texas to the
Trinity, Nueces or Colorado rivers, any of which was preferable to the Arroyo
Hondo or Sabine. And if Mexico could not agree on the border, certainly the new
impoverished nation would sell, as Napoleon had. Alternatively, if the
revolution failed in Mexico proper, but succeeded in its northern provinces,
these would be incapable of standing on their own, and might sue for America to
annex them, as Gutiérrez actually did when failure seemed likely without
American government aid at La Bahía.
[1] Sam W. Haynes, “‘Imitating the
Example of Our Forefathers’: The Texas Revolution as Historical Reenactment,”
in Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon, eds., Contested
Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2015), 44.
[2] “American Revolutionary War
Patriots Buried in Texas,” Texas Society
Sons of the American Revolution, www.txssar.org/buried.htm (accessed Sep. 29, 2016).
[3] Eric R. Schlereth, “Voluntary
Mexicans: Allegiance and the Origins of the Texas Revolution,” in Sam W. Haynes
and Gerald D. Saxon, 13.
[4] Ibid., 11.
[5] Schlereth, 15.
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