Herman Ehrenberg's Memory: A Research Note

Several stanzas of "New Yankee Doodle" shown in Alex Dienst, "Contemporary Poetry of the Texan Revolution," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 21 (October 1917): 158. University of North Texas Libraries, the Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.

The longest passage written in English in Herman Ehrenberg's 1843 German-language memoir of the Texas Revolution is a song that he claims to have heard sung in the spring of 1836 by a fellow escapee from the Mexican army named John Hitchcock. The scene takes place in the abandoned home of a Texan settler by the name of Thomas Kelly, located near the right bank of the Colorado River, a few miles above the quaint port city of Matagorda. None of these details is likely to be exactly true, as Ehrenberg appears to have invented the heroic details of his second capture by the Mexican army after his escape from the murder of the Texan prisoners at Goliad. Moreover, the names of neither the alleged singer nor the alleged settler quite match the historical record.¹

Nevertheless, there appears to be far more than a germ of truth behind Herman's tale of the former prisoners' reunion in a house left empty by the "Runaway Scrape," and their surprise meeting with the soldier/settler, just returned to his home from Sam Houston's army. The facts behind these and other stories are documented in the latest effort to bring Ehrenberg's long-misunderstood volume to the public: Inside the Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg, which was published in 2021. Interestingly, there is in the lyrics of the song that he gave to his readers in Europe evidence of the accuracy of Herman's memories of his exciting experiences in what he called the "prairie republic" of Texas.

These are the song's lyrics, as written by Ehrenberg:

In Mexico none shall be freeThe people is too blind to seeThey can not cheer the libertyO Yankee doddle dandy.

A recent review of Texas Revolution material by the present author (and editor of Inside the Texas Revolution) in the pages of the last 124 years of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly disclosed the source of Ehrenberg's lyrics. The first stanza of a poem titled "New Yankee Doodle," published in the Telegraph and Texas Register on October 31, 1835, reads as follows:

St. Ana did a notion take that he must rule the land, sir;The church and he forthwith agree to publish the command, sir.In Mexico none shall be freeThe people are too blind to seeThey cannot share the LibertyOf Yankee Doodle Dandy.²

The source of Ehrenberg's lyrics is thus obvious—and the phonetically similar sounds of "cheer" and "share" in the next-to-last line of both song and poem (as well as the slight variations in spelling) make it clear that Herman was using his memory rather than a written source as his muse. Throughout his memoir, Ehrenberg was constantly recalling the vocabulary and the cadences of speech of the Americans and Anglo Texans with whom he served—with the New Orleans Grays at the Siege of Béxar, and in the doomed command of James W. Fannin at Coleto and Goliad. If we needed one more bit of evidence as to the lasting impressions made on the mind and memory of Herman Ehrenberg by his service in the Texas Revolution, these snippets of verse and song should suffice.