Secret War for Texas

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments this book began with a not uncommon family mystery: the search for my three-times-great-grandfather, James Grant, a doctor from Scotland’s Black isle who once worked for the East india Company but then seemingly vanished from the records in the early 1820s. At first that search was no more than a casual distraction from more serious studies, but then quite by chance a tattered fragment of newspaper turned up with a curious story that he had been killed in Mexico. With that vital clue he was quickly identified as a major player in the Texas Revolution, yet one about whom surprisingly little was written or known. As Sam Houston and others never tired of pointing out, Grant was not a Texan, and it soon became clear that his fate was bound up with the largely untold story of British efforts to keep Texas out of American hands. Earlier historians, such as J. L. Worley and Anton Adams, have long acknowledged England’s interest in Texas at an early date. However , for both, that early date coincided with the establishment of Texas as a republic in 1836. Had they properly reflected that before this Texas was part of Mexico, and had they examined the voluminous Foreign Office files relating to that country, they would have found that Britain’s interest was aroused from the very moment Stephen Austin brought his first colonists to the Brazos bottoms. And Britain’s interest was anything but passive. Foreign Office and Colonial Office files in London yielded a wealth of material. Beyond this, tracing James Grant’s surprising role in the early history of Texas has of necessity been accomplished at some distance from the scene of the events. The task has been eased and rendered all the more agreeable by the advice, comments, and assistance freely given by a number of individuals and organizations, including but by no means confined to Stephen L. Hardin of Victoria College in Victoria, Texas; Craig Roell of Georgia Southern university in Statesboro; the late Jack Jackson of Austin, Texas; Jim Boylston, Kevin Hendryx, Herb True, and david Webb of the Alamo Society; Thomas Ricks Lindley, often an adversary in debate but an indefatigable and generous researcher; reviewer Andrés Tijerina and an anynomous reviewer; and copyeditor Sally Antrobus. Thanks are also due to Warren Stricker of the daughters of the Republic of Texas Library in San Antonio, who among other things provided one of the lighter moments with an electronic transmission of Reuben Brown’s narrative of Grant’s last fight, a story abruptly interrupted at the words: “We saw the enemy charging upon us from every direction. Wheeling around we . . .” it took another twenty-four hours before that particular cliff-hanger was resolved. Closer to home, the staff of the National Archives at Kew, the Scottish Record Office in Edinburgh, the genealogy department of inverness Public Library, and that wonderfully tranquil treasure house of curiosities , the library of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, all provided their usual quietly efficient assistance. Last and not least, i must also thank cousin Jennifer, whose newspaper clipping started me on the road to Mexico without either of us having the least idea of where it would eventually lead us. x • acknowledgments The Secret War for Texas ...