See our Q&A with Sam W. Haynes, author of new book ‘Unsettled Land’
Don’t trust anyone who tells you that they know all the answers to Texas history.
Especially not about the era before, during and after the Texas Revolution of the 1830s.
After all the reverential myth-making and sensationalistic myth-busting, Texas in the early 19th century still comes off as a scene of absolute anarchy.
Hundreds of significant players changed sides among dozens of different causes. Most had no idea what others were thinking or doing because the distances were so wide and land routes so rough.
One book that captures this rough tumult with all its cacophony is Sam W. Haynes’ “Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic; The Struggle for Texas,” due out from Basic Books on May 3.
The reader comes away with the sense that there was no single proximate cause for the Texas Revolution. Yet the conflict had a profound effect on an informally multiracial society that became increasingly dominated by the Anglo classes.
We chatted with Haynes, who is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies there.
American-Statesman: You make the case that Texas during the first half of the 19th century was utter chaos. How did you arrive at this point of view?
Sam W. Haynes: I’m not sure it could have been otherwise, given the region’s extraordinary ethnic diversity. I describe Texas as a place of convergence for the peoples of North America, which in the 1700s saw the arrival of the Spanish and the influx of nomadic tribes following the buffalo herds that came down off the High Plains.
In the early 1800s, the flow of migrants included Europeans, Native American refugees from the United States and Anglo-Americans who brought with them enslaved men and women of African descent. Together they created a patchwork of overlapping borderlands and ethnic enclaves on Mexico’s northern frontier, with each group trying to navigate and make sense of the turbulent world in which they found themselves.
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The region’s unique multiracial character is not, of course, what usually comes to mind when one thinks of Texas during this period. The traditional narrative of the revolution is a gripping saga in which outsized figures, all white males — Houston, Crockett, Travis, et al — crowd the stage, elbowing aside everyone and everything else.
But the birth of early modern Texas is a complex story, with a great many moving parts.
The major players changed constantly, and they changed sides over and over again. Which among them stand out and why?
I use the lives of a dozen or so Texans as a narrative framework for the book, some of whom readers will undoubtedly be familiar with, like Sam Houston. But I also wanted to draw upon the stories of lesser-known men and women to highlight the book’s major themes.
White men of the Jacksonian period often exhibited an almost manic disregard for authority, and one of my favorite characters is the soldier-adventurer Thomas Jefferson Green, an incorrigible self-promoter and blowhard who was a lightning rod for controversy during his time in Texas.
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I also follow Mary Maverick, one of the first Anglo women to settle in San Antonio, whose diary offers a poignant and revealing window into the world of unremitting loneliness and hardship that Anglo women experienced on the western frontier.
Because the birth of early modern Texas was as much a Mexican story as it was an American one, I wanted to examine the roles of the Yucatán liberal Lorenzo de Zavala and his protégé, Jose Antonio Mexía, who were both enthusiastic promoters of Anglo-American immigration, and thus unwittingly paved the way for the loss of Mexico’s northern territory.
Fleshing out the lives of Native Americans is considerably harder, given the lack of primary source materials, but I also focus on the Cherokee leader Richard Fields, who tried to unite the East Texas tribes under his leadership in the 1820s, and the Comanche war chief, Buffalo Hump (Potsanaquahip), who led the Great Comanche Raid into the Guadalupe River valley in 1840.
Your book taught me much more about the indigenous and immigrant Native Americans. Why are they so often left out of the stories of the Revolution and the Republic?
With regard to the Revolution, I think it’s because we just don’t give much thought to what the American Indians were doing during the siege of the Alamo and the battle of San Jacinto, despite the fact that they represented about a third of the population in 1836.
But they were certainly aware of the conflict, and tried to use it to their advantage.
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More importantly, though, I think we have an obligation to broaden our focus and acknowledge that there was an American Indian world that existed separate and apart from the Anglo-Texan experience, and which needs to be included in the story, too.
A lot more has been written about Native Americans during the Republic period, but still primarily from an Anglo perspective.
I was especially interested in the more detailed accounts of the Cherokee experience. What roles did they play in this period?
One of the most important narrative threads in the book — and perhaps the saddest — is the Cherokees’ tortured quest for a permanent homeland in East Texas. By the mid-1820s there were several thousand Indians living in an area extending from the Piney Woods to the Red River. Refugees from the United States, they far outnumbered the Anglos living in Austin’s colony at that time.
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Of the 20 or so tribes, the Cherokees were the most persistent in their efforts to obtain from Mexican authorities a formal grant for the lands they occupied. But the wheels of Mexico’s bureaucracy turned slowly, and when the revolution came the Cherokees signed a peace treaty with Sam Houston, hoping they would have better luck with the Anglo rebel government.
They didn’t. The treaty was never ratified, and the Cherokees soon had to deal with Houston’s successor as president, Mirabeau Lamar, an inveterate Indian hater who was determined to bring about their “total extinction or expulsion.”
You introduce us to free African Americans in Texas who lived during this period, some of whom thrived and became locally powerful. Tell us more.
One of the central figures in the book is William Goyens, a free person of color who came to East Texas from North Carolina in the early 1820s. Since he left no letters or writings of any kind, the broad outlines of his life in Nacogdoches can only be pieced together from court and tax records, but they tell a remarkable story.
Plying his trade as a blacksmith and gunsmith, he also ran a Nacogdoches boarding house, as well as a freight-hauling business that shipped skins and furs into Louisiana.
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Surprisingly, Goyens managed to thrive under white rule after independence, in large part because he could rely on powerful friends. Goyens spoke the Cherokee language fluently, and for many years served as an intermediary between whites and the East Texas tribes, making him indispensable to Sam Houston during his first term as president.
With the cash generated by his many business interests, Goyens speculated in land when the economy tanked in the late 1830s, and by the time of his death on the eve of the Civil War he was one of the largest landowners in East Texas.
Regimes changed in Mexico all during this period. How did that decades-long instability affect what happened in Texas?
That’s a really complicated question. I think Hispano Texans were much more concerned with their relationship with the government in Mexico City than Anglo colonists, most of whom, I would argue, never took their obligations as citizens of their adopted country very seriously.
Certainly they benefited from Mexico’s chronic political instability, which left the national government unable to exercise any real control over Texas during the early years of settlement.
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But most Anglo-Texans would have preferred no government at all. Although the pretext for revolution came when Santa Anna abolished the federal constitution and took steps to impose military authority over Texas, I take the view that a rupture with Mexico City was bound to happen sooner or later.
You describe a multiracial Texas that became increasingly geared toward a white class as the republic and then statehood arrived.
When the rebellion broke out in the fall of 1835, there was some reason to hope that Texas Hispanos, the East Texas tribes, and even free persons of color would share in the benefits of an Anglo-American victory.
Many prominent Texas Hispanos supported the war, at least initially, while the rebel government promised the Cherokees a permanent homeland in exchange for their neutrality. A handful of free blacks fought alongside whites during the rebellion, and believed they would receive land as compensation for their service.
These hopes would be quickly dashed after San Jacinto, as it became apparent that the new government was defiantly and unapologetically committed to the ideology of white rule.
By the end of the decade, the Lamar administration had expelled virtually all the Native American tribes who had immigrated to Texas during the Mexican period.
Although Texas Hispanos were citizens of the new Lone Star Republic, persecution and prejudice caused many to flee below the Rio Grande.
As for free blacks, the new government tried unsuccessfully to expel them from Texas in 1840. The law proved unworkable, but men like William Goyens still had to petition Congress for permission to stay.
What do we continue to misunderstand about this period?
I think we’re still fixated on a version of events that places a handful of Anglo alpha males at the center of the story. Some newer works have challenged this celebratory narrative — “Forget the Alamo,” for example — pointing to the economic motives of the slaveholders who led the revolution.
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But even a critique of the familiar Texas story doesn’t fundamentally alter the way we look at these events. We’re still hostage to a narrative dominated by Anglo-American actors.
And because we have been laser-focused on these iconic-figures, we still tend to define the revolution in very narrow terms, as an epic event that ends with a crash of cymbals and blast of trumpets with Sam Houston’s decisive victory at San Jacinto.
The battle, of course, freed Anglo-Texans from Mexican rule, but I would argue that the revolution was far from over. For non-whites, independence from Mexico meant the loss of freedom, a fact that only became evident as the Lone Star Republic moved aggressively to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved.
In 1836, the work of creating a new society, radically different from anything Texas had known under Mexico, had only just begun.
Given that there are dozens if not hundreds of books in print about Texas during this period, did you set out to create a new frame of reference for the subject?
I wrote “Unsettled Land” because I’ve known for a long time that the traditional narrative was badly in need of an overhaul. The version of events that is taught in Texas classrooms simply can’t accommodate the region’s many diverse peoples, all of whom have stories of their own that need to be told.
So when I started this project, I knew that I didn’t want to just revise the standard narrative. I wanted to dispense with it entirely, as if telling the story of the birth of early modern Texas for the first time.
That’s not to say that the iconic figures we know so well don’t have a place in this story — they certainly do. But we can’t shoehorn the experiences of other peoples —Hispanos, Native Americans and people of African descent — into a narrative that is really only interested in highlighting the heroic exploits of white alpha males.
When a wider lens is used, a fuller — and, in many ways, richer — picture of Texas in the early 19th century comes into view.
Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at mbarnes@statesman.com.
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