Inventing Texas: Early Historians of the Lone Star State

2 Texas Historians and the Romantic Revolution

2 ★ Texas Historians and the Romantic Revolution Americans, like Spaniards, had from the beginning many romantic elements in their view of the New World. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the American Romantic Movement was under way, and it was to have a profound and lasting effect on the way Americans viewed the world and their place in it. Whereas the Enlightenment emphasis on science and reason influenced the writing of the earliest Texas historians, romanticism produced greater emphasis on cultural evolution, mysticism, and universal themes. Moreover, to the writers of the romantic era, literary style assumed greater importance. History was considered literature, and writers of the s and s conformed to the model of novelists like Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. Historians of the Spanish borderlands had before them the works of Washington Irving and William Hickling Prescott to emulate . History, filled as it was with battles, heroes and villains, and adventures in the wilderness, was romantic by its very nature and a tremendously popular subject with the reading public, a fact that did not escape those writing histories of Texas. The romantic era in America coincided with an explosion of growth in the book trade. Some consider it the golden age of literary production in the United States. Book production, in dollar terms, rose from an estimated $. million in  to $. million in , figures that confirm a great increase in reading between  and , attributable to new interest in primary and secondary education and the establishment of the penny press as well as many major periodicals.1 The sheer number of Texas histories that appeared between  and  distinguished Texas history writing from that of other parts of the North American frontier. The bibliographies of early imprints related to Texas attest to the tremendous volume of publication.2 During this period more than thirty monographs were published on Texas, at least a dozen of which claimed to be histories. Americans produced half of these; Europeans, the other half. All were visitors in Texas; none became permanent residents. They wrote about Texas history for a variety of reasons, mostly related in one way or another to personal interests. Certainly, they all expected to take advantage of the public’s burgeoning appetite for books to make a profit. Texas in the early nineteenth century became a hot political topic.3 History , because it commanded a wide readership, became a favored medium for those deeply interested in the Texas controversy for personal or political reasons, who wished to appeal to public sentiment. Thus, though Texas historians might philosophize to some extent, they wrote primarily for more practical purposes. Unlike William Prescott, who created vividly accurate descriptions of Mexico and Peru from his sources without ever visiting either, none wrote about Texas without having experienced it firsthand, however brief the encounter. Almost without exception they had specific, pragmatic reasons for writing that rarely involved such lofty aims as teaching moral lessons , providing models for society, or demonstrating ultimate reality—the typical uses for romantic history. As a consequence, form followed function. They produced history as immigrant guide, polemic, legal brief, or stirring narrative as suited their specific purposes. Few wrote about Texas purely out of curiosity. Europeans had been curious off and on for centuries. Perhaps even more compelling to European writers than the land itself was the phenomenon of the American revolutionary experience and America’s peculiar brand of liberty , which spread rapidly as the century advanced. It provided a topic of immediate interest to their readers. American writers seemed, in this as in virtually every other field of American endeavor, compelled by a desire for gain of one sort or another.4 Americans demonstrated little preoccupation with Texas at the turn of the eighteenth century, but their attention to it increased considerably with the Louisiana Purchase and intensified with the struggles for Mexican and South American independence. Zebulon Pike’s narrative, first published in , spawned serious American interest in Texas. Even as early as Pike’s account, American nativist attitudes appeared in print and were incorporated into perceptions of Texas.5 That interest increased further with the signing of the Adams-Onís Treaty in , an event that, combined with American fervor for the cause of liberty, prompted geographer and journalist William Darby to visit the vicinity and publish a short history of the ill-fated GutiérrezMagee expedition to Texas in . “The existing state of our relations with Spain; the revolutionary state of the Spanish...