Booknotes: Life Stories: Notable Biographers on the People Who Shaped America

Book by Lamb Brian

Sword of San Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston was published by Random House in 1993 as a bicentennial birthday tribute to Sam Houston. Houston (1793-1863) died a hero of the Texas Revolution, having served as congressman, senator, president of the Texas Republic, and governor of the states of Tennessee and Texas. Author Marshall DeBruhl detailed Houston's life in a Booknotes program that aired on May 2, 1993.

Sam houston was this great national figure. That's what one has to keep in mind, that he was this extraordinary Virginian who was born in the eighteenth century . . . but who did his great work and achieved his great fame much farther afield than those who went to Philadelphia or Washington. He had two great political careers: one in Tennessee, where he was an attorney general, major general of the militia, a two-term congressman, and then governor--all before he was thirty-four years old, and then he had another career in Texas and in the United States Senate.

houston loved to drink and run around with older men, but he always married young women. All of his male friends were much older than he and were mentors, really. But he always was attracted to young, very, very young women.

His first wife was a young woman from Gallatin, Tennessee, named Eliza Allen. She was the daughter of a prominent Tennessee family. Houston was thirty-six years old; she was twenty. It was an arranged marriage. The family was very ambitious for their daughter. Remember, he was pretty much on the road to being president of the United States at that point. He was a young governor of Tennessee, had already served in the Congress of the United States. He was Andrew Jackson's protégé. There was a very good chance, if this marriage hadn't derailed his political career in Tennessee, that he could have gone on . . . to be president of the United States. . . .

He married her on January 22, 1829. They were married for eleven weeks. Jackson had just been [elected] president and was on his way to Washington to be inaugurated. Houston stayed behind to marry in Gallatin, but the marriage collapsed almost immediately, and she left him in April of that year.

He resigned the governorship. He spent a week or so drinking in the Nashville Inn, where he was living, and then wrote an eloquent and brilliant letter to the people of Tennessee resigning the office. [Then he moved] to the West to rejoin his Indian friends in the Arkansas territory, which is now Oklahoma. He spent the next three years alternately in and out of Arkansas and Washington, drinking; he married the niece of the Cherokee chief Ooleteka. That was his second wife, Tiana Rogers.

He had met her earlier when they lived in east Tennessee, before the Indian removal to the West, . . . and he knew her father and her brothers. They were great friends of Houston's. . . . As a teenager, he had run away from home and lived with the Cherokees. So he just simply picked up with them again when he moved to the West. They lived together as man and wife near Fort Gibson in what is now Oklahoma . . . for almost three years, from 1829 to 1832.

His third wife, Margaret Moffette Lea, was an Alabama belle from Marion, Alabama. When Houston was wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto and was taken to New Orleans for medical treatment, he arrived with this very dramatic entrance. . . . This young girl--she was seventeen then--was on the pier in New Orleans. She was visiting family in New Orleans. She saw him and was taken with him. Then three years later, she met him and married him in Alabama when he was visiting there. He was forty-six and she was twenty. . . .

It was obviously a great love match. You read their letters--there are hundreds of letters. They had eight children, the youngest of whom, Temple Lea Houston, was only two when Houston died at age seventy. She was clearly in love with her husband. She was a very beautiful young woman and very religious--extremely religious Baptist and certainly a teetotaler.

He was a heavy drinker. It was a serious problem. Presumably his third wife sobered him up, but I'm not convinced of that. He drank bitters and it's eighty proof. It's the equivalent of bourbon, really. . . . [He drank] up until maybe his last ten years, when he became sort of the darling of the temperance movement. That was one of those things that swept the country for a while. He made speeches on behalf of temperance later, but that was when he was sixty years old.

there was a . . . great scandal when he beat up a congressman, Stanbery, from Ohio, who had libeled him on the floor of the House of Representatives. Houston beat him up on Pennsylvania Avenue and crippled him, really. They brought charges against him and Houston was arrested and tried before the House of Representatives. . . . Jackson's famous comment when he'd heard what Houston had done [was that] he wished he had more Houstons to cudgel the brains of Congress. . . .

The great trial in the House of Representatives became almost like the Oliver North hearings; it just transfixed the country. Dispatches went out everywhere, and all the papers were covering it. . . . Houston was [found] guilty. The night before he had been drinking with the Speaker of the House, who was a friend of his, and James K. Polk, and Daniel Webster, and various other people who were all his pals. . . . [He received] just a minor reprimand. But then he was taken before a judge in Washington and fined five hundred dollars. Later Jackson remitted the fine and pardoned Houston. . . . He had friends in high places.

There are several theories [as to why Houston went to Texas]. Americans love conspiracy theories. One theory is that he was dispatched by Andrew Jackson to separate Texas from Mexico. Jackson always assumed that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase and that it belonged to the United States. He thought [the border] extended all the way to the Rio Grande or the Nueces, really. . . .

Llerena Friend, who wrote another biography of Houston years ago [had another theory]: Why was Houston in Texas? To make a living. . . . He had his whole political career collapse in America with the dissolution of his first marriage and the great scandal. He had no future left in Tennessee--or even in Arkansas, for that matter, where he had moved. His future lay somewhere else, and Texas was the place to go.

the beginning of the texas revolution was when . . . Mexico gained its independence from Spain; the trouble began right there. This area called Texas or Tejas was not inhabited. There weren't very many people there, so the Mexican government had a policy of encouraging immigration from the United States. Stephen Austin or his father, Moses Austin, began this enormous land grant in Texas of hundreds of thousands of acres--millions of acres, really--and then recruited colonists to come down there. The seeds were sown then for revolution because you ran head-on into an autocratic government of Mexico and these people who were basically libertarians from the north.

The trouble began in the 1820s when the first colonists arrived. . . . Mexico became more and more despotic under a succession of people, but chiefly under Antonio López de Santa Anna. . . . He decided that this colonization should stop from the north; he was going to tighten the screws on these colonists who were causing him some trouble. But these people were from America and weren't going to put up with it. One thing led to another, and the whole situation rapidly unraveled.

Houston arrived there in 1832 . . . from the Arkansas Territory, where he was living. . . . He crossed the Red River into Texas, went on to Nacogdoches, and then joined up with Stephen Austin's colony in a place called San Felipe de Austin, where Austin's headquarters were. He was given his land grant and set up a law practice in Texas.

Later, when the revolution was heating up, Austin went to Mexico to negotiate with Santa Anna for more civil rights and liberties for the Anglo settlers of Texas. Austin was thrown into prison. He spent over two years in the Mexican jail. When he came back . . . the course had been set for a full-scale war against Mexico. Sam Houston was there and since he'd had all this military experience, he was made commander in chief of the Texas army . . . in late 1835. The revolution was very short; it lasted only a few months. The Battle of San Jacinto was only eighteen minutes.

the battle of the alamo happened in March of 1836. Houston had sent James Bowie and James Bonham there to tell them to blow up the place and abandon the Alamo. It was in San Antonio, Texas. There are five missions, and the Alamo was one of them. The Mexican church had established the missions for pacification of the Indians and to assimilate the Indian tribes. . . . It had been closed down. It was in ruins, really. There was a small fort built around it. The Texans had decided to fortify this place and hold it against the advancing Mexican troops.

But Houston had told them to get out of there, then to blow it up and bring the available ammunition and horses to join his army in the east. He was trying to organize a full-scale army, you see. Well, Bowie and Bonham got to the Alamo and [Commander William B.] Travis and they decided that they would hold it; that they would defend it against the Mexicans, which was folly. It led to this terrible disaster . . . 180 men were killed at the Alamo and . . . 340 men killed at Goliad. That's quite a number of able-bodied men shot down. Houston would have had that force, plus their ammunition and their armaments for his army. But it was lost to him because of this folly.

his enemy santa anna called himself the "Napoleon of the West." He had, indeed, had great successes as a soldier in Mexico against the Spanish forces for the revolution against Spain. Then his march across Texas was one victory after another. He won the battles and then he shot everybody afterward. . . . At the Alamo, after they had surrendered, he executed people--there were a few survivors, includin...