The Battle of San Jacinto
The night passed uneventfully as Houston slept on the bear ground having given his saddle blanket to the artillerist to be cut into watting for The Twin Sisters. Sam was a habitual insomniac; but on this night Houston slept soundly.
Sam composed a letter to Henry Regae: “This morning we are in preparation to meet Santa Anna; it’s the only chance of saving Texas. We will only have about 700 to march with the Camp Guard. We go to conquer. It is wisdom growing out of necessity to meet the enemy.
Every consideration enforces it. No previous occasion would justify it. I leave the results in the hands of a wise God and rely upon his providence.”
In the morning General Martin Perfecto de Cos, Santa Anna’s brother-in-law, arrived with re- enforcements bringing the Dictator’s strength to 1,350 men. They had expected an attack during the morning, and when it did not come, they relaxed their guard. About three in the afternoon Houston formed his Army on the plain before their covering oak grove, three regiments of infantry, the artillery, and the cavalry under Mirabeau Lamar to cut off any Mexican escape. There was only one route away from the battlefield, a wooden bridge over Buffalo Bayou at Vince’s Crossing. As the troops assembled, Houston ordered it to be destroyed and announced that the issue was now one of victory or death.
At first, Houston ordered Juan Seguin and his men to remain with the Camp Guard afraid that in the heat of battle they would be mistaken for the enemy. Seguin forcefully protested that his men had greater need to fight Santa Anna than the Americans, because they had no homes to return to unless the Dictator was defeated. Houston relented and the Tejanos placed squares of cardboard in their hat bands to identify them as fellow volunteers.
The advance was hidden from the Mexicans by a rise in the prairie. They only had one battle flag, a bare breasted goddess of liberty, her sword holding aloft a banner that read: “Liberty or Death.” There was a drummer who could beat time but not roll and a fifer. Two hundred yards from the Mexican barricade, Houston ordered the Twin Sisters turned and fired showering the barricade with grape shot and cut up horseshoes. Houston led the charge and told his men to “Remember the Alamo!” As the men went forward with their leader, they also shouted, “Remember the Alamo!”
Two horses were shot from beneath him; he mounted a third horse and a Mexican musket ball shattered his left ankle, but Sam Houston pressed on. The surprise was complete; the route was horrific. The Mexican barricade was overtaken, and the entire Mexican camp secured in only eighteen minutes. At this point the rage of the volunteers could not be restrained. Their lives had been up-rooted; they had starved in traversing the Texas country side; and all soldiers and volunteers had lost friends and relatives at the Alamo or Goliad.
Houston ordered them to begin rounding up prisoners, but they meant to have vengeance.
Many of the Texans only fired their guns once before turning them around to use as clubs, and when the stocks were broken, they pulled fearsome Bowie knives.
The only sight of Santa Anna was had by Colonel Pedro Delgado: “Then I saw his Excellency groaning about in the most exciting manner, wringing his hands, and unable to give an order.”
Houston was well aware Santa Anna’s escort was only a minor portion of the Mexican Army.
The Battle of San Jacinto was one of the most pivotal in all history; it lead to the annexation of Texas, the U. S. Mexican War, and the eventual addition to the United States of almost one third of its land mass in the lower 48 states.
The victory was complete when Santa Anna was captured on the following day hiding in tall grass and dressed in civilian clothes that he found in an empty house.
As Sam Houston lay wounded on his palette under the oak tree, Peggy McCormick who owned the land on which the battle was fought and for whom Peggy Lake was named gained an audience to demand that the hundreds of Mexican bodies be removed. Even in his physical pain, Houston gathered his thoughts to give the first of many orations on the glory of San Jacinto. Telling her that her land would be famed in history as the spot where Texas Independence was won with a glorious victory. Peggy McCormick was not impressed: “To the devil with your glorious history, take off your stinking Mexicans.”
There were no military honors and no funerals, and the dead were left where they fell until they became a public nuisance. Residents in the vicinity had to dig trenches and bury them.
With Texas independence won at the Battle of San Jacinto, the first major decision for Houston was what to do with the captured President and General of Mexico. The volunteers wanted to execute him on the spot, but Houston had a more disciplined view. Sam said, “Living Santa Anna may of some use to us; dead he’s just another dead Mexican.” He meant that by looking at the battlefield of San Jacinto littered with the bodies of 600 dead Mexican soldiers, killing one more was not going to make a difference, even if it was the President of Mexico.