INDEPENDENCE
Mexico’s Santa Anna surrendered to a ragtag army led by Houston
A ragtag army of Texians, led by General Sam Houston, defeated Santa Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto.
On the San Jacinto plain between Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River, at about 3 p.m. on April 21, 1836, Gen. Sam Houston began forming his army for a long-awaited assault on the superior forces of Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Earlier in the day, Houston had sent his scout Erastus “Deaf” Smith to destroy the bridge over Vince’s Bayou, thereby cutting off the Mexican Army’s retreat and the path for additional reinforcements.
After weeks of humiliating retreat, after trying to absorb the shocking news of the Alamo massacre and the slaughter of 300 men at Goliad (on Palm Sunday), the ragtag army of Texans, totaling about 900 men, was frustrated, angry (at Houston) and seething. At last they would face the foe intent on either killing or driving out every American colonist in the newly declared independent republic. On this field, on this spring afternoon, the fate of the place known as Texas would be determined.
The center column of the Texan force was flanked by a left and right wing, with the infantry on the right of the artillery and the cavalry under Mirabeau B. Lamar deployed on the extreme right. About 4 o’clock, the army quietly wheeled its Twin Sisters cannon, a gift from the people of Gonzales, onto the prairie. And then, in a thin line 1,000 yards across, they began to stride through the tall grass, hidden from Mexican view by trees and a rising swale of ground. Two hundred yards from Santa Anna’s barricades, they realized their foe was unaware. Gen. Martin Cos’ men, some 500 reinforcements, had arrived the night before and were exhausted by their forced march. The sol- diers who worked through the night to erect flimsy barricades of trunks, baggage and packsaddles also were exhausted, and the Mexicans had failed to set pickets out. Houston attacked during the Mexican Army’s siesta.
As the line of men surged across the plain, three scraggly fifers played the only tune all three knew, a risque barroom ballad called “Will You Come to the Bower?” Back and forth across the long line, Houston rode his white stallion Saracen. A flag featuring a bare-breasted Liberty led them into battle, its flagstaff topped with the dainty white glove of a Kentucky lieutenant’s sweetheart.
Within 200 yards of the Mexican camp, the Texans began to fire. Their two cannons, loaded with chopped horseshoes, slammed into barely awake Mexican soldiers.
“We were all firing as rapidly as we could,” said Private Alfonso Steele (quoted in Jeff Long’s “Duel of Eagles”). “And as soon as we fired every man went to reloading, and he who first got his gun reloaded moved on, not waiting for orders.”
The Mexican camp erupted into chaos, with some soldiers scrambling for their weapons, others trying to shelter themselves behind large trees. Still others hunkered down to the ground, trying to avoid the rain of deadly grapeshot. One of Santa Anna’s most experienced officers climbed atop ammunition crates to survey the frantic scene. He stood there, in disgust and despair, until he was cut down by a rebel soldier, a soldier no doubt howling and shouting “Remember Goliad! Remember the Alamo!”
According to Houston’s estimate, the battle was over in 18 minutes, although the killing continued until after dark. Along the bayou and across the prairie, wounded Mexican boys pleading for their lives were clubbed or shot or knifed to death. Pleading “Me no Alamo,” Mexican soldiers clutched at Texan ankles and begged to surrender, to no avail. Fleeing Mexican troops who made it as far as a nearby marshy lake were picked off like sitting ducks in the water. Bodies piled up in the water.
With the battle won, Houston repeatedly tried to get his men to regroup, in case Mexican reinforcements showed up. He and his officers ordered them to
Sam Houston had three horses shot from under him, and an ankle was shattered by a musket ball.
take prisoners, again to no avail. John Wharton tried to obey, only to hear one of his men respond, “Colonel Wharton, if Jesus Christ were to come down from heaven and order me to quit shooting Santanistas, I wouldn’t do it, sir!” Moses Austin Bryan, the empresario’s nephew, saw Wharton draw his sword, but the soldier cocked his rifle, and Wharton, “very discreetly (I always thought), turned on his horse and left.”
The slaughter went on for hours. When it finally ended, 630 Mexican soldiers were dead and some 730 had been taken prisoner. Eight Texans were killed; a couple of dozen were wounded.
Houston had three horses shot out from under him and had his left ankle shattered by a musket ball. As the afternoon turned to evening, the Texans led columns of Mexican prisoners into camp, but there was no sign of Santa Anna. Early the next day, a Texan detail in search of additional prisoners discovered him hiding in tall grass. Dirty and wet, he was wearing a Mexican private’s blouse, but Mexican prisoners recognized him as he was led to where the wounded Texas general was lying at the base of a large live oak, in considerable pain from his ankle. “El Presidente!” they gasped as the dictator passed by.
Waking from an opiated nap, Houston raised up on one elbow and greeted Santa Anna courteously. The general took a seat on a black box and asked for a bit of opium for himself. The two men chatted the rest of the afternoon. “Pleasantly teased by their hits of opium,” historian Long writes, “the Anglo-Saxon chieftain and the Hispanic caudillo set up the continental chessboard in positions that would still be playing out a century and a half later.”
On May 14, the Mexican dictator signed the so-called Velasco Treaties, one public and one private. The public treaty provided for a cease-fire; repatriation of prisoners, including Santa Anna; restoration of Texas property taken by Mexico; and safe conduct for the Mexican armies as they withdrew beyond the Rio Grande. The secret treaty gave Santa Anna freedom immediately, in exchange for his influence in securing the agreement of the rest of the Mexican government to recognize an independent Texas, with the Rio Grande and not the Nueces River as its boundary.
“Measured purely by its subsequent historical impact, the Battle of San Jacinto was one of the most pivotal in history,” historian James Haley has observed. The birth of an independent Texas led to its annexation to the United States nearly a decade later and then to the Mexican War, which transformed the United States into a continental power. As 1 of 8 inscriptions on the exterior base of the San Jacinto Monument notes, “Almost one-third of the present area of the American nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty.”