Santa Anna accepted Texan independence to save his life

This edited article about Mexico first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 524 published on 29 January 1972.

After a defeat by Texan settlers Santa Anna decided to lead the army himself across the frozen plains of Coahuila towards San Antonio and the Alamo, by Angus McBride

His name was Sam Houston, and he was an unemployed soldier of fortune who, after fleeing from his creditors in Tennessee, had drifted into the wilds of Texas, where he lived for a while with the Cherokee Indians, who, awed by his capacity for consuming vast quantities of alcohol, had named him ‘Big Drunk.’ In short, Sam Houston was a colourful but somewhat disreputable character.

But there was another side to this rough mannered, tall, broad shouldered Texan. He was a Greek scholar who loved to recite the poems of Homer, and he was a friend and disciple of no less a person than the great Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. He was also a born leader of men and a brilliant military strategist. It was these qualities in him which were to contribute to the downfall of Santa Anna, Mexico’s comic opera dictator who had already brought Mexico to the verge of ruin with his extravagances and unhappy habit of helping himself to money from the Treasury.

The stage had already been set for a trial of armed strength, thanks to the situation which had blown up between Mexico and the American frontiersmen who had been allowed to settle in Texas, then part of Mexico’s northern state of Coahuila. It had been an uneasy arrangement from the beginning. The settlers knew no Spanish, and moreover they bitterly resented the restrictions that the Mexican authorities tried to impose on them. The settlers, in their turn, had inflamed the Mexicans by bringing their slaves with them, in direct defiance of Mexico’s recent antislavery degree. Alarmed by their hostility and the ever increasing number of pioneers pouring into Texas to swell their ranks, the Mexican government tried to lessen the danger by forbidding the entry of any more American emigrants. In protest, the pioneers staged a series of riots which had brought Texas to a state bordering on anarchy.

It was this situation which Santa Anna decided to resolve by sending a force to reassert Mexican authority. It was defeated by the settlers at San Antonio, where the Mexicans fought from the rooftops as the Texans pounded at their adobe walls with battering rams. Smarting under the defeat, Santa Anna decided that he, personally, would lead the next expedition.

Gathering together an army which included some 3,000 Indian conscripts, Santa Anna led them across the frozen plains of Coahuila. It was a killing march. Badly equipped and ill clad by grafting contractors who had shared their profits with Santa Anna, the Indians perished in their scores from cold and hunger. Undeterred, Santa Anna pressed on implacably until he reached San Antonio, where 150 men, under the leadership of one William Travis, were holding an old mission house called the Alamo. What followed belongs to American folk lore.

Travis refused to surrender, and for two weeks of February and March, 1836, the occupants of the old mission house managed to beat off every attack that was made upon them. In desperation Santa Anna decided to resolve the battle one way or the other with an all-out assault. In the early hours of the morning, the red flag of no mercy was hoisted on the nearest church tower, and the regimental band began to play, Dueguello, (Cut-throat), the notes of which date back to the Moorish wars in Spain. With the music dinning in their ears, Santa Anna’s force moved on to the Alamo in a massive array of men and horses. Three hours later the mission had fallen – its occupants slaughtered to the last man.

Convinced that he had already broken the back of Texan resistance, Santa Anna moved northwards, completely unaware that during those two hours he had spent storming the Alamo, Texas had made a declaration of independence and had created a volunteer army under the control of Sam Houston. Not that this seemed to make any difference. For a month, Santa Anna’s army swept everything before them, sacking and burning towns until it reached Galveston, where Houston and his volunteers fought a rearguard action until they came to a halt on the edge of an oak forest, near the San Jacinto river.

It was here that Santa Anna made the final mistake of becoming over-confident. Looking across the field which separated him from Houston’s forces, Santa Anna decided he could destroy the Texans whenever he chose. In the meantime there was the balmy spring afternoon to enjoy, and anyway it was siesta time. Settling himself in his tent, Santa Anna dozed off to the smell of baked beans and corn being cooked on the camp fires. His rest was to be a short one.

“Remember the Alamo!”

Santa Anna awoke to this cry swelling in the throats of seven hundred odd Texans as they charged towards the Mexican lines with Sam Houston at their head, his sword held up in the Greek classical style. In eighteen minutes 600 Mexicans were slain, and the rest subsequently captured, including Santa Anna. Houston had won the battle at a cost of three men killed, and eighteen wounded.

Subsequently, Santa Anna was offered his freedom in exchange for his recognition of Texan independence. Santa Anna, who would have gladly bartered the whole of Mexico for his life, eagerly agreed to the terms, and in due course he was allowed to make his way back to Veracruz, where he was immediately disavowed by the Mexican government, who also repudiated his agreement with Houston. A new president named Bustamante, was elected, and Santa Anna returned to his ranch to nurse his wounded pride.

A gambler might well have given large odds on the man who had tried to betray Mexico ever becoming popular again. But like some battered but indestructible old boxer down for the count of nine, Santa Anna was to rise from the floor to a gigantic roar of applause from the Mexican people.

In 1838, less than a year after the downfall of Santa Anna, a French fleet appeared at Veracruz, demanding payment for a number of claims arising from the destruction of French property during the revolution of 1828. When the news was brought to Santa Anna, he immediately buckled on his sabre, mounted his white charger and rode to Veracruz to take charge. Finding the town calm and quiet when he arrived, he decided to indulge in his fatal habit of taking a siesta at the wrong moment. Removing his clothes, he went off to sleep – just as a French raiding party entered the town and advanced on the very house in which he was hiding. Warned of his danger, Santa Anna seized up his sabre, and fled through the streets in his underwear.

He returned later, fully clothed, and at the head of a small force which he led in a charge on the French. It was at that precise moment that a cannon ball from one of the ships came whistling through the air, shooting away his right leg below the knee. He was carried into a nearby house, where, in a room packed with weeping women and men, he dictated in gasping breaths a fifteen page farewell to the nation.

Thanks to the skill of the doctors and surgeons who had been rushed down from Mexico City to save him, Santa Anna survived. His leg was buried in the grounds of his ranch, but later it was disinterred and buried with the due pomp and ceremony in the cathedral. The time was to come when the Mexican people were to wish that they had been able to bury its owner with it.