Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

14. THE VILLAIN OF SAN JACINTO

+14+ THE VILLAIN OF SAN JACINTO T HI S SATURDAY will be the 17lst anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, the eighteen-minute fight that gained Texas her independence from Mexico. That battle created Texas's most enduring hero, Sam Houston, a larger-than-life figure whose largerthan -life statue (it is sixty-seven feet high) towers over Interstate 45 at Huntsville. But what about the man who lostthe battle, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was as remarkable in his own way as Houston? He is the villain of Texas history, responsible for the Alamo and the Goliad massacre, and there are no statues to him anywhere. His name continues to fascinate, and stories about him have resonated down through time. One of the remarkable things about Santa Anna was his resilience, and another was his duplicity. He served as president of Mexico eleven times at four different periods. He was first elected in 1833 as a liberal, pledged to support a federal constitution modeled on that of the United States. As soon as he took office he announced that he had decided that he was a conservative and scrapped that constitution, an action that helped cause the Texas Revolution. He was president again from 1841 to 1844, when he was overthrown and sent into exile in C uba. During the M exican War, he promised agents of President Polk that if the US government would get him back into the presidency, he would arrange a peace treaty favorable to the US. Instead, he led an army against Zachary Taylor's troops and was soundly defeated, resulting in his second exile, this time to Jamaica. He came back again in 1853 and stayed in office just long enough to bankrupt Mexico and declare himself president for life with the title of "Serene Highness"; in 1855 he went into permanent exile and lived most of the rest of his life in Cuba, Colombia, and New York. He was allowed to return to Mexico in 1874 and died two years later, penniless and blind. Santa Anna may have died in obscurity, but stories about him continued to circulate down through the twentieth century. VVhen I lived in Round Top, over in Fayette County, I heard a good deal about his vest. It seems that one of his captors after the Battle of San Jacinto was a Round Top boy, Joel Robison. Robison and some other men found Santa Anna wandering on the prairie after the battle, dressed as a civilian. Robison, not knowing who he was, took him up behind him on his horse and brought him into the Texan camp. Before he was recognized and hustled off to Houston's tent, Santa Anna gave Robison his vest, a gray cloth vest with brass buttons. For the next seventy years, every young man in Round Top who got married wore that vest at his wedding. It disappeared , or perhaps disintegrated, about 1910. Then there is the matter of Santa Anna's artificial leg. The dictator 's right leg was amputated below the knee in 1838, after it was shattered by a French cannonball during the bombardment of Veracruz. He had two cork legs made by a North American cabinetmaker , Charles Bartlett. They were quite handsome, equipped with ball bearing joints and terminating in leather ankle boots. VVhen soldiers from the Fourth Illinois Volunteer Regiment captured Santa Anna's coach at the Mexican War Battle of Cerro Gordo in 1847, they found his uneaten roasted chicken dinner, a chest containing $20,000, and his spare cork leg. There is a fanciful contemporary lithograph of the scene, showing one of the soldiers waving the leg at the retreating Santa Anna as Zachary Taylor and his troops charge by in the foreground. The soldiers, who were from Pekin, Illinois, ate the chicken dinner and turned the money chest over to the paymaster, but they kept the cork leg and eventually took it back to Pekin, where First Sergeant Sam Rhodes displayed it in his home. He and his fellow veterans Abraham Waldron and John Gill traveled around the Illinois countryside with it, exhibiting it in saloons and charging patrons a dime to handle it. It eventually found its way to the Illinois State Capitol Building, where it was on public display for nearly a century, and now it can be seen at the Illinois State Military Museum at Camp Lincoln in...