Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

13. THE TEXAS SIGNERS

+13+ TH ETEXAS SIGNERS I CANNO T LET the month of March go by without mentioning the fifty-nine men who came together in a drafty, unfinished building at Washington-on-the-Brazos 173 years ago this month to declare Texas an independent republic. In the seventeen days that they met together there, they also wrote a constitution for the new republic, organized an ad interim government, and appointed one of their number, Sam Houston, as commander-in-chief of the new republic's pitiful little army. They convened on March I, 1836, and adjourned early on the morning of March 17, panicked by reports of Santa Anna's approaching army. It is interesting to compare the fifty-nine men who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence with the fifty-six who signed a similar document at Philadelphia sixty years earlier on July 4, 1776. The Philadelphia signers were members of a Continental Congress that had convened a year earlier, and they were the leading men of Great Britain's North American colonies: lawyers, bankers, merchants, and planters, all substantial citizens. Many of their names have reverberated down through American history because of their subsequent deeds-John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Rush. The men who met at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1836 had been elected from their various districts the month before. Most of them were relative newcomers to Texas and, after coming together to create a new nation, few of them played leading roles in its history. The majority of them went back home and picked up their plows and settled into roles as local patriarchs. Sam Houston, Samuel Maverick, and Jose Antonio Navarro carved out places for them- selves in the history textbooks, but most of the others had to be satisfied with having a county somewhere in West Texas or a public school in their hometown named for them. % 0 has ever heard of Thomas J. Gazley, Benjamin Goodrich, or John Byrom? The delegates to the 1775 Continental Congress were cultured , educated men from cities on the Eastern Seaboard. The men who attended the convention of 1836 were representative of the frontier Texas environment from which they came; in other words, they were a pretty rough bunch. Robert Potter, a delegate from Nacogdoches, had served prison time in North Carolina for castrating two men that he suspected of dallying with his wife (this form of punishment became known in Texas as "potterizing") and had been expelled from the North Carolina legislature for cheating at cards. Potter later served as Secretary of the Navy of the Republic ofTexas on the strength of having been a midshipman in the US Navy when he was fifteen. He eventuallymet his end at the hands of a mob that surrounded his home on Caddo Lake during the Regulator-Moderator feud in 1842. Some of the delegates were literally transients. Jesse Badgett came from Arkansas to Texas in the fall of 1835 to join the revolutionary army and enlisted in Travis's command at the Alamo. On February I, 1836, his fellow soldiers elected him to the convention along with Samuel Maverick. A month later he signed the Declaration of Independence and then went back to Arkansas, leaving others to deal with the consequences of his act. He was interviewed by a Little Rock newspaper on April 12, 1836, giving an account of the fall of the Alamo, and then disappeared from history . There was one exception to these frontiersmen. Lorenzo de Zavala, the delegate from Harrisburg, was a Mexican aristocrat, born into a landowning family in Yucatan. He was a man of the world who had served as a delegate to both the Spanish Parliament and the Mexican Congress and had been Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic of Mexico and the Mexican Minister to France. He was fluent in Spanish, English, and French, and he impressed everyone at the convention with his knowledge, his bearing, and his easy manners. His fellow delegates elected him ad interim vice president of the Republic, and he would undoubtedly have gone on to a distinguished career in Texas had he not caught pneumonia crossing Buffalo Bayou in an open boat and died in November 1836. My favorite delegate is Collin McKinney of Pecan Point in North Texas, a through-and-through frontiersman who at the age ofseventy rode horseback through freezing rain for a week to...