Lone Star Rising : The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic

by William C. Davis

• ISBN13: 9780684865102
• ISBN10: 0684865106
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-12-30
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

In the whirlwind of revolutions in the Americas, the Texas Revolution stands at the confluence of northern and southern traditions. On the battlefield and in the political aftermath, settlers from the United States struggled with those who brought revolutionary ideas from Latin America and arms from Mexico. In the midst of the conflict stood the Tejanos who had made Texas home for generations. This masterpiece of narrative and analysis, first published in hardback in 2004, brings the latest scholarship to bear on the oldest questions. Well-known characters such as Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin, and General Santa Anna--and the cultures they represented--are etched in sharp and very human relief as they carve out the republic whose Lone Star rose in 1836 and changed the course of a continent.

Author Biography

William C. Davis was for more than twenty years a magazine and book publishing executive and a prolific historian. He is the author or editor of more than forty books, including Three Roads to the Alamo and, most recently, Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America. Davis has lectured widely in the United States and abroad on nineteenth-century American history and is currently Director of Programs at Virginia Tech's Center for Civil War Studies.

Table of Contents

Contents

Chronology
Introduction: An Immigrant Land

One: "Cast in a Contentious Crowd"

Two: Bad Causes and Bad Men

Three: "The Labyrinth of Trouble and Vexation"

Four: "What Will Become of Texas?"

Five: "Confusion Doubly Confounded"

Six: "We Shall Give Them Hell If They Come Here"

Seven: "Smoke Forced into a Bee Hive"

Eight: Dark Schemes

Nine: "Victory or Death"

Ten: Atmosphere Devilish Dark

Eleven: "Do You Feel Like Fighting?"

Twelve: "The Utmost Confusion and Rebellion"

Epilogue: "Our Course Is Onward"

Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Excerpts

Chapter One: "Cast in a Contentious Crowd" There seemed to be something inevitable about Texas and revolution. It lay near the center of a hemisphere called the New World, bracketed by revolutions above and below. It experienced the last in a series of revolutions, and the most sudden and yet briefest of all, as if the men and women involved sought to accelerate the process in order to catch up to history. Texas became almost a compulsion, not just for isolated men, but in the personality of a whole generation. Hiram Taylor, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, confessed himself caught in the irresistible gravity of the idea of Texas when he complained of "the inexorable will of providence" that had "impelled me onward to the verge of poverty, ruin and contempt." Abandoning even wife and children, his mind chafed "nearly to a PHRENZY," he gave in to magnetic forces beyond his control. "In a moment of enthusiasm I agreed to join the expedition to Texas," he shamefully confessed to the wife he left behind. "I have now cast myself in a contentious crowd; I have to struggle for the palm with thousands, to obtain the wayward and far spreading renown which rends the air with the loud huzza of praise."That compulsion, those contentious crowds, threw the New World into a revolutionary soup just coming to the boil when a new century dawned in 1800. The uprising in Britain's colonies that became a revolution, then spawned a new and independent nation, shook the American hemisphere and the Western World both to their foundations. Almost inevitably Spain's American colonies soon followed the path of revolt against their European overlords, for colonialism had brought with it, in human nature, the seeds of its own disruption. First, it guaranteed that its chief victims, the native peoples of the new continents, finding themselves exploited and dispossessed of their homes and the worlds they had known, even of their religion, must naturally harbor bitter resentments that only force and fear contained. Whole peoples were eliminated in the process, the once mighty Inca and Aztecs and their own empires brought down and reduced to penury, if not slavery. For centuries in the Spanish colonies they lived at the bottom order of a new social scale imposed from afar, one in which the peninsulares, men from Spain, came and ruled over all, while beneath them served the creoles, men of Spanish blood born in the New World who could rise and succeed but never achieve the top rungs of a ladder controlled by Madrid and its New World capital at Havana. Below them were the mestizos, the half-breed products of Spanish interbreeding with the native peoples, and finally at the bottom of the pile were those natives themselves, some of whom descended from the once-exalted ruling class of the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. It was a system destined to generate multiple and overlapping levels of resentment and unrest. Some of the peninsulares in time resented being ordered about by masters in Havana and Madrid. Some of the creoles resented being denied access to the social and political strata reserved for the peninsulares, and the inability to determine for themselves their own affairs in a world that they themselves helped to carve from the wilderness. The mestizos felt some common cause with the creoles as they managed to grasp some position and prosperity in their world, limited though it was by their blood, while the Indians, of course, were well entitled to resent everyone. Several things kept the system in place and restive forces in check, starting with the habits of centuries. Spain, England, France, and the rest had been relatively well-ordered feudal then aristocratic cultures for half a millennium by the time they began colonizing the New World. People were born into a social caste and knew to keep their place and be satisfied with it unquestioningly, making pe