Secret War for Texas

4. Contending Chieftains

4 • Contending Chieftains texan historians have not been kind either to James Grant or to the expedition that he now led, and most have taken their cue from Sam Houston, who some time later charged in a vitriolic letter to Henry Smith: “is he not a Scotchman who has resided in Mexico for the last ten years? does he not own large possessions in the interior? . . . is he not deeply interested in the hundred league claims of land which hang like a murky cloud over the people of Texas?”1 up to a point all of this was perfectly true. Although he was the possessor of half a league of land on the Colorado near Matagorda, Grant did indeed live south of the border rather than in Texas, and he also had a financial as well as a political stake in the restoration of a federalist government in Monclova. Frank Johnson was quick to respond—that Grant “was one, of many others, who bought land of the state of Coahuila and Texas, is a matter of fact and has not, so far as we know, ever been denied by him or others.”2 But the charge that land speculation was a significant factor in driving the expedition forward was nevertheless both plausible and damaging. At the outset of the revolt, back in October, Houston had successfully urged both the closure of the land offices throughout Texas and a suspension of all the land grants made by the Coahuila y Texas legislature since 1833. Ostensibly this was done to protect the interests of the existing settlers, legitimate or otherwise, and of those joining them from the united States, but it also served notice that the authority of the Coahuila legislature was no longer recognized in Texas. Conversely, many of those now promoting cooperation with the Mexican liberals—and to some degree underwriting the revolution—including Mason, Williams, McKinney, and of course James Grant, were equally anxious to validate those land grants by restoring the federalist government in Monclova. Nor can there be any doubt that Grant wanted to recover his other “large 70 • the secret war for texas possessions” in Mexico and to be reunited with Guadalupe Reyes and his children. However, to charge that his self interest was the real or sole motivation for the Matamoros expedition overlooks the true complexity of his motives and ignores the wider political context in which the expedition had first been conceived and planned by the Mexican liberals and only later taken up by all parties in the Texian ranks. What was more, long before Houston or anyone else denounced Grant as an unscrupulous speculator, the Texians had already become split between those professing continued loyalty to the Mexican federation and those advocating complete independence. As is so often the case, if personal antipathy were set aside, in the end the differences between the two viewpoints came down to degrees of emphasis rather than to diametrically opposed principles. There is no doubt at all that the Texians were united or at least agreed in taking up arms to effect the separation of Texas from Coahuila, but where and how far they were to go from that point was another matter entirely. As early as October 5, 1835, Stephen Austin wrote that “i hope to see Texas forever free from Mexican domination of any kind—it is yet too soon to say this publically —but that is the point we shall aim at—and it is the one i am aiming at.”3 Nevertheless, at the turn of the year Texas was still acknowledged by the rebels to be part of Mexico, and the provisional government still publicly adhered to the principles of the Constitution of 1824 and its supposed guarantees of autonomy to the individual states of the Mexican federation. The importance of holding to this seemingly cautious policy, in public at least, was twofold. in the first place, by demonstrating in their grito or “declaration of causes” on November 7, 1835, that they were behaving strictly within the terms of Mexico’s existing constitution, the Texians invested their actions with a clearly recognizable legitimacy. in marked contrast, their more precarious legal status after the declaration of independence on March 2, 1836, would lead the British foreign secretary , Lord Palmerston, first to remark rather haughtily that “we must see whether the Band of outlaws who occupy Texas will be able to constitute themselves into such a community as it would be decent for us...