Grieder - Big, hot, cheap, and right: what america can learn from the strange genius of texas

BIG , HOT , CHEAP ,
andRIGHT

ERICA GRIEDER

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New York

Copyright 2013 by Erica Grieder.

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Book Design by Cynthia Young

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grieder, Erica.

Big, hot, cheap, and right : what America can learn from the strange genius of Texas / Erica Grieder.First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61039-193-1 (e-book) 1. TexasHistory. 2. TexasPolitics and government. 3. TexasSocial conditions. I. Title.

F391.G847 2013

976.4dc23

2012044312

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my brothers:

Daniel, John, Mark, and David

AT NOON ON MARCH 16, 1861, Sam Houston, the governor of Texas, sat down to write his professional obituary. He was nearly seventy years old. Within three years he would be dead, and that afternoon his lifes work was being undone just outside his office, on the grounds of the Texas capitol.

On February 1, delegates to a state convention had voted to secede from the Union, by a crushing margin. A referendum held three weeks later found that nearly three-quarters of voters agreed. Texas formally left the United States on March 2, 1861, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day Texas declared its independence from Mexico. The day in question, March 16, was to be the day the governor of Texas swore his oath of allegiance to the Confederate States of America.

That governor, however, would not be Houston. For more than a year, since the 1859 election, he had been trying to stamp out the secessionist fervor that had taken hold of the state, first by argument, and finally by stalling; in the end, it was the legislature that called for a state convention to vote on the question. And now the secessionists were calling for him to come forward and be sworn in as the governor of Texas in the Confederate States of America. But the governor could acknowledge how Texas had voted more readily than he could accept it.

Fellow citizens, in the name of your rights and liberties, which I believe to have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath, Houston wrote. I love Texas too well to bring strife and bloodshed upon her.

Houston was concluding one of the oddest and most unlikely political careers in American history. He grew up as a fatherless boy from Tennessee, then as a teenage runaway lived with the Cherokees for several years before joining the infantry to fight in the War of 1812. From these semiferal beginnings he went on to power, fame, and, briefly, respectability. He was a congressman from Tennessee, then the governor of that state, until he had his heart broken and took off for the frontier, where he lived in a wigwam and drank himself half to death. Several years later, he roused himself and went to Texas, where he took up arms again and led the revolutionaries to their decisive victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. He became the first official president of Texas, then the governor of Texas, then the states first senator, then the governor again. By the time he finished writing his letter of resignation, that was all over: when he didnt turn up outside, the convention delegates vacated his office, and Houstons lieutenant governor was sworn in instead.

It is, perhaps, meet that my career should close thus, Houston continued. I stand the last almost of my race... stricken down because I will not yield those principles which I have fought for.

The principle at hand was union. Despite having been the president of Texas, Houston was the states most devoted American. He had gone to Texas to see if it could be won for the United States, and he had fought for Texas assuming that it would be. He had called for annexation in his inaugural presidential address.

And for the past several years, although he supported slavery, Houston had been fighting to preserve the Union. He was the only Southern governor who opposed secession. At first, he had said that the state had no right to secede, that Texas had joined the United States, not the North or the South. Several years later, he modified his pitch: maybe the states had that right, he conceded, but the war would be bloody, expensive, and ruinous.

Few were swayed. Texans didnt like to listen.

Neither, for that matter, did Houston. For his whole life he had maintained an idiosyncratic, stubborn, and occasionally self-defeating sense of principle. On his wedding night his wife had confessed to him that she was in love with someone else. He was too humiliated to stay in Nashville, but he took an ad in the papers, warning that anyone who questioned her virtue would pay for the libel with his hearts blood. As he prepared to lead the Texans into the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836, he knew they would be badly outnumbered, again. Twice in the preceding six weeks, the Mexican army had massacred the revolutionariesfirst at the Alamo, where the Texans hadnt surrendered, and then at Goliad, where they had. In light of that, Houston took only one precaution: he ordered his troops to burn the bridges behind them.

And when the Mexican army surrendered, when the monstrously erratic president and general Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna was finally captured, it was Houston whom he asked for mercy. That man may consider himself born to no common destiny who has conquered the Napoleon of the West, said Santa Anna, and now it remains for him to be generous to the vanquished.

You should have remembered that at the Alamo, Houston said. He had been wounded in the battle and was lying on a blanket under an oak tree. A biographer would later write that a ring of savage Texans had pressed around, with ominous looks on their faces and ominous stains on their knives. But Houston spared Santa Annas life and laid out the terms of the armistice that ended the revolution.

And now Houston was wounded again. The severest pang, he wrote, is that the blow comes in the name of the State of Texas.

ITS COMMON FOR STORIES about Texas to start at the siege of the Alamo, and for good reason. That half-accidental battle is at the emotional core of the states story about itself, and in Texas, as in the United States, origin stories have been reified by belief and devotion.

But this isnt just a story about the state. One of the fundamental truths about Texas is that, although the state is genuinely sui generis, and self-consciously different from the other states, it is, in many ways, the most American of all. Texas is part of the United States. This is a story about both of them. Thats why it makes sense to start with Houston. He was among the first people to see that Texas was part of the United States, even before the United States was committed to it, and even if Texans wavered along the way.