Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas by Jeffrey Stuart Kerr (review)

The city of Austin symbolizes the political chaos and seething interpersonal conflict that existed in the Republic of Texas as few other sites can. In his engaging, approachable, and highly-enjoyable style, Jeffery Stuart Kerr relates the story of the Texas Republic’s frontier capital with a solid command of his material and an obvious familiarity and fondness for Austin itself. The creation of Austin, Texas, he argues, was largely defined by the struggle between “two Texas giants” (5). President Mirabeau Lamar’s dream of Austin as the central metropolis of a Texan empire had many obstacles, and none more trenchant than Lamar’s political enemy Sam Houston. Against the backdrop of this rivalry, the residents of Austin carved their city out of the wilderness, contended with frontier privation, and dealt with Comanche attacks; neither, however, caused as much grief as Houston’s attempts to deprive the remote village of its political status, which was not secure until Texas was annexed to the United States. Kerr tells this story well, and tells it with the clear emphasis that “but for a few twists and turns of history,” Austin would not exist (5).

Kerr’s work provides a relatively chronological narrative broken into nineteen chapters over 220 pages of text. While focusing primarily in the years 1838–1846, Kerr often pauses to relate relevant personal histories of the major players as necessary. Beginning with Lamar’s introduction to the future town site of Austin, then called Waterloo, on a buffalo hunt, and ending with the U.S. annexation ceremony held there in 1846, Kerr relates events in between using chapters dedicated to specific events such as the city’s construction, the so-called Pig War, the so-called Archive War, Comanche attacks, and the several political episodes that challenged, but ultimately affirmed the destiny of Austin as the political center of Texas.

In support of this narrative, Kerr relies on a sturdy framework of published primary sources, newspapers, archival material, and secondary works, relying on the last primarily to provide historical context. The vast majority of his narrative is based in primary sources. For examples, his relation of the Congressional sessions is taken from official journals, and his description of notable details concerning life in the city of Austin relies heavily on the remembrances of residents such as Frank Brown and Julia Sinks. Kerr uses the Republic Claims Files at the Texas State Archives to reconstruct the goods furnished for building the city, as well as providing details of the men who were paid to build it. Letters and newspapers are most frequently used to detail the several inter-personal conflicts. These sources, although sometimes quoted in the narrative to excess, do valuable service in supporting the story, and are well cited in footnotes. Kerr’s work also provides a thorough bibliography and index for reference.

As a book intended for general audiences, Kerr does not challenge or attempt to deal with existing historiography. In this sense, his coverage of the rivalry between Sam Houston and Lamar, for example, or his description of peripheral events such as the Comanche raid on Linnville, Texas, are very familiar and break no new ground. But Kerr’s narrative shines when dealing with the details of Austin itself. Both professional historians and laypeople alike will benefit from Kerr’s well-written and thoroughly-enjoyable reconstruction of the very human history of a city that never became the center of an empire, but is, despite the odds, still very much a part of Texas.