Secret War for Texas

Introduction

Introduction on april 2, 1836, Richard Pakenham, the British minister to Mexico, formally advised the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, of the latest news from Texas. As expected, San Antonio de Béxar and the Alamo had now fallen to General Santa Anna, and it was confidently anticipated that the rebellion would soon be at an end. To the British government this news was neither unexpected nor at all unwelcome, but Pakenham had more to tell. “Simultaneously with the taking of Bexar,” he wrote, “a detached Party of Texans Commanded by a British Subject, of the name of Grant, who had become a Citizen of Mexico and distinguished himself in that part of the Country by a series of very disreputable transactions was cut off, and doctor Grant and 42 of his Party killed in the encounter.”1 Pakenham clearly thought this news to be of equal importance to the fall of the Alamo, yet Grant was not the first or only British subject to have died in the troubles in Texas and northern Mexico. At least eight others had recently been executed at Tampico by the Mexican government, and of course more had just died at the Alamo itself, but they passed largely without comment. What was so different about dr. James Grant? What were those “very disreputable transactions,” and above all why did Richard Pakenham know that the news of Grant’s death would be of particular interest to Lord Palmerston? Answering these questions requires a fresh look at the events that led up to that famous battle for the Alamo, because while its heroic defense against Santa Anna and his Mexican army is rightly described as the creation myth of Texas, the Texan Revolution was not quite the straightforward contest between embattled American farmers and their Mexican oppressors that has passed into popular legend. in a very real sense that Revolution began as an offshoot to a much wider Mexican civil war,  • the secret war for texas and ultimately it was also part of the original “Great Game”: a secret contest played out by London and Washington for more than fifty years to secure mastery of the North American continent and to determine whether the manifest destiny of the united States to stretch from sea to shining sea should be realized or frustrated. That struggle began even before the last shots had been fired in the American Revolution, as both sides fought to establish the boundaries between British and united States territory in the “Old Northwest”; and indeed to settle the even more fundamental question of whether Canada should remain a British colony or be brought into the union—by force if necessary. At first Britain and her native allies held the upper hand in the undeclared war against the nascent republic, but gradually a stalemate became established, and although the bickering along the border came to an end only as late as 1838 with the defeat of an American filibustering group called the Hunters, a new area of conflict had opened up in 1803. The vast but ill-defined Louisiana Purchase, closely followed by the subsequent American seizure of Florida, shifted attention to the Gulf of Mexico and to the Caribbean, brought war to New Orleans in 1815, and opened up the prospect that the manifest destiny of the united States to span the continent from sea to shining sea might soon be an attainable goal. Only two things stood in the way of American ambitions to reach the Pacific Ocean: the British claim to the Oregon country; and the vast but sparsely populated Mexican province of Texas. The prospect of Texas being swallowed up by the united States and thereby upsetting the balance of power and trade in both North America and the Caribbean Basin was therefore viewed with almost as much concern in London as it was in Mexico City. Taking advantage of its emptiness , thousands of American settlers poured across the Sabine River into Texas between 1822 and 1835. Many, perhaps the majority, obtained legitimate land grants and for the most part dutifully became Mexican citizens, as was required of them. But they also determinedly retained their American identity, and when they eventually rose up in revolt in the 1830s it was only natural that they should look eastward to the Sabine and the Old Flag for assistance. However, after their initial easy victories over the central government ’s forces in the autumn of 1835, and then the capture of old provincial capital of...