San Jacinto Day
With help from Louisiana, the battle was a turning point for Texas’ independence.
On this momentous day in Texas history, the day 180 years ago when Texans secured their independence on the San Jacinto plain, we turn our eyes eastward and salute our Louisiana neighbors. Safety beyond the Sabine is where panicked Texas settlers were headed as they fled Santa Anna’s army during that wet and miserable spring, in what came to be known as “the runaway scrape.” New Orleans is where Stephen F. Austin and two colleagues journeyed as designated Texas commissioners seeking loans to finance the Revolution.
On Jan. 6, 1836, Austin, William H. Wharton and Robert Triplett took turns addressing a crowd of local businessmen, hotel guests and financiers in the bar at Bishop’s City Hotel on Camp Street near the French Quarter. The three Texans made “earnest and labored appeals to the feelings and sympathies of the United States,” an attendee noted later.
However sympathetic those in attendance might have been, they had their reservations about lending money to a makeshift government relying on a rag-tag army to mount a revolution against an established nation. “After all, Texas was not even an accredited government,” local historian James P. Bevill has written. “It was well known in New Orleans that Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had pledged to crush the rebellion and treat all those who took up arms against the government as pirates. Any remaining Anglos would be driven across the Sabine River at the point of a bayonet.”
Our salute to our neighbors to the east is prompted in part by a fascinating article in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled “A New Map for America.” The writer, Parag Khanna, argues that the nation is shifting from “an antiquated political structure of 50 distinct states” toward “looser metropolitan and regional formations, anchored by the great cities and urban archipelagos that already lead economic circuits.”
These regional structures are made up of seven mega-regions, among them a geographic arc stretching along the Gulf Coast from Brownsville to Tampa, Fla., including Houston. “The ports of Corpus Christi and Tampa” Khanna writes, “both received federal foreign trade zone status in the early 1980s and have been raising bridges and expanding terminals to prepare for larger ships coming through the Panama Canal — and their modernization also means accelerated export of food, oil and cars from America’s heartland. Their fates are more intertwined than Tampa’s is with Tallahassee or Corpus Christi’s is with Austin, even though they’re in the same state — and yet building out their infrastructure depends largely on the political whims of their respective state capitals.”
Khanna, a senior fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, maintains that it makes more sense, economically and otherwise, for planners and politicians to think regionally, most likely through quasi-government entities like the National Governors Association rather than a politically sclerotic Congress. There is historic precedent, along the Gulf Coast. Texas and Louisiana were thinking regionally nearly two centuries ago. As historian Bevill notes, Louisiana came through for Texas, enthusiastically so when would-be investors realized that Austin and his colleagues were talking about land as well as money. The Texas commissioners worked out the terms of a $200,000 loan to finance their revolution: five years at 8 percent interest to be repaid in land at 50 cents an acre. The Texans agreed to withhold all public land from sale until the lenders made their selection.
As residents of both states are well aware, Louisiana-Texas intertwinings have continued through the years, particularly in Southeast Texas. Notice our architecture, our cuisine; listen to the accents; remember post-Katrina Houstonians. And then travel over to New Orleans and listen for the Texas twang on Bourbon Street or during brunch at Commander’s Palace, not to mention the high-rise office conversations about oil prices and Saudi Arabian cartel shenanigans.
A final thought prompted by our Louisiana focus: Revolutions are won not only on the battlefield, but also in board rooms and, in New Orleans, it seems, in bar rooms. Austin, Wharton, Triplett and other schemers, planners and money men (accountants and auditors included) were just as vital to the effort as the Texans who wielded muskets, swords and Bowie knives on the battle field 180 years ago today.
Remember the Alamo. Remember Goliad. Remember San Jacinto. And New Orleans.