Houston, Sam (2 Mar. 1793-26 July 1863), president of the Republic of Texas and U.S. senator, was born Samuel Houston in Rockbridge County, Virginia, the son of Samuel Houston and Elizabeth Paxton, well-to-do planters of Scotch-Irish descent. Houston's father died in 1806, and he moved with his mother and eight siblings to Blount County, Tennessee, in 1807.
Sam Houston had little formal education and showed no interest in school or farming. When put to work in 1809 as a store clerk, he responded by leaving home to live most of the next three years with the Cherokees. He translated the name given to him by his adoptive father, Chief Oo- loo-te-ka, as "The Raven."
Houston left the Cherokees in 1812, spent eight months teaching school in Maryville, Tennessee, and on 24 March 1813, enlisted in the army. He fought in Andrew Jackson's campaign against the Creek Indians in Alabama, and at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on 27 March 1814 was wounded three times. After recovering he remained in the army, receiving a promotion to first lieutenant on 1 May 1817 and an appointment as subagent to the Cherokees on 18 October 1817. However, following a dispute with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun while visiting Washington with a delegation of Cherokees in the spring of 1818, Houston resigned from the army and as Indian subagent.
Houston moved to Nashville in June 1818, read law, and was admitted to the bar. He then opened an office in Lebanon, Tennessee. In October 1819 he was elected attorney general for Davidson County. He resigned that position a year later and in 1821 was elected a major general in the Tennessee Militia. A strong Jacksonian, Houston was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1823; he was reelected in 1825. When his second term ended, he ran successfully for governor of Tennessee and was sworn in on 1 October 1827.
On 22 January 1829 Houston married eighteen-year-old Eliza Allen, daughter of a prominent Gallatin, Tennessee, family. Less than three months later, for reasons that remain unknown, his wife went home to her family. Although his term had been successful to that point, the separation caused a public furor, and Houston resigned the governorship on 16 April 1829.
Houston left Nashville on 23 April 1829 and went into exile with the Cherokees in present-day Oklahoma. On 21 October he became a member of the Cherokee Nation. During the summer of 1830 he married Tiana Rogers Gentry, who was one-quarter Cherokee. Houston had long been a heavy drinker, and in 1830 and 1831 his weakness for alcohol gained the upper hand. Some of the Cherokees called him "Big Drunk." In 1831 he ran for a seat on the national council of the Cherokee Nation and lost.
As early as 1829 rumor had Houston intending to go to Texas and create a revolution there. Such stories made good gossip then, and they have made good reading ever since. However, the truth of these tales is questionable. When Houston first departed for Texas in 1832, his official reason was to seek an arrangement with the Comanches that would facilitate the peaceful settlement of the southeastern tribes in the Indian Territory. Houston also had determined to end his exile with the Cherokees, and the land to the southwest held the promise of financial opportunity and perhaps even a return to public life. He arranged a divorce from Tiana, rode southwestward, and crossed the Red River at Fort Towson on 2 December 1832. Legal migration by Anglo-Americans into Mexican Texas had begun in 1821 under the terms of a contract granted by Spanish authorities to Moses Austin and confirmed to his son, Stephen F. Austin, and the essential ingredients for revolution were in place well before Houston entered the province. When the central government in Mexico City attempted to levy customs duties in the spring of 1832, settlers in east Texas created violent disturbances and held a convention that adopted resolutions calling for making Texas a separate state in Mexico's federal union. Mexican authorities refused to accept the petition, but the Texans called another convention for April 1833. In the interval Sam Houston arrived in Texas.
Houston met with the Comanches at San Antonio, securing a promise of talks with the United States and the southeastern Indians; visited San Felipe and applied for a land grant in Stephen F. Austin's colony; and went to Nacogdoches where on 1 March 1833 he was elected a delegate to the April convention. At this meeting he supported the call for separate statehood and served on a committee that drafted a constitution for the Mexican state of Texas. Austin was given the task of taking this request to Mexico City, an assignment that would take more than two years. In the meantime, Houston settled in Nacogdoches and practiced law.
Texas remained relatively quiet until the spring of 1835. Then, as the president of Mexico, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna undermined the federal constitution of 1824 and moved toward assuming dictatorial powers over the central government in Mexico City, conflict developed over the collection of customs duties and the threatened arrest of outspoken opponents of his regime. Anglo-Texans called for a consultation of representatives of all the province's municipalities to meet in the fall. Houston was elected a delegate from Nacogdoches.
The consultation rejected independence, protested loyalty to Mexico's federal system, and established a provisional government for the Mexican state of Texas. On 12 November 1835 Houston was appointed commander in chief of the Texas army. The Texans took San Antonio in December, but aggressive militarists then ignored Houston's pleas for caution and planned an attack on Matamoros on the Rio Grande. Disgusted, he asked in January 1836 for a furlough until 1 March, when a new convention was scheduled to meet. Houston was elected as a delegate from Refugio, a small Texas settlement he had visited while opposing the Matamoros campaign.
The convention adopted a declaration of independence on 2 March 1836. Two days later Houston was again chosen commander in chief as attention focused on the Alamo in San Antonio where Santa Anna's army besieged a small force of Texans. Houston was at Gonzales, fifty miles east of San Antonio, when he received confirmation on 13 March that the Alamo had fallen. He then began a retreat eastward that lasted for more than a month. It was not a headlong flight but rather a controlled movement away from a numerically superior enemy while building strength and waiting for an opportunity to strike an effective blow. In early April Santa Anna gave Houston that opportunity by stopping immediate pursuit of the Texas army and moving ahead of his main army with a smaller force in an effort to capture Texas's ad interim government. Houston rushed to block Santa Anna before he could cross the San Jacinto River north of Galveston Bay, and on 21 April 1836 the Texas army routed the Mexican force in an eighteen-minute battle that cost the Mexicans 630 lives and 730 prisoners; the Texans suffered only 25 casualties. Houston was one of the wounded: a musket ball shattered the front part of the tibia just above his right ankle. Two weeks after the battle Houston went to New Orleans to seek medical attention for his wound. He returned to Texas in the summer of 1836 and on 5 September was elected president of the Republic of Texas. He served from 22 October 1836 until 10 December 1838, facing numerous difficulties in establishing his new nation's domestic and foreign policies. His administration gained diplomatic recognition from the United States in March 1837, but efforts toward annexation to the United States failed.
Houston was ineligible for reelection under the Texas Constitution, but in 1839, soon after leaving office, he was elected to represent San Augustine County in the Fourth Texas Congress. In congress Houston distinguished himself by attacking the administration of his successor, Mirabeau B. Lamar, for its aggressive policy toward the Cherokees in East Texas and its large public expenditures.
On 9 May 1840 Houston married twenty-one-year-old Margaret Lea, the daughter of a wealthy Alabama family, whom he had met while on a business trip in 1839. His wife persuaded him to stop drinking and eventually to join the Baptist church. They had eight children, the last born in 1860 when Houston was sixty-seven.
Houston entered the presidential contest in 1841 to win vindication for his opposition to the Lamar administration. His opponent was Vice President David G. Burnet, a bitter enemy who had called Houston a coward for retreating from the Mexicans in 1836. In a campaign marked by extreme personal vituperation, Houston was elected by an overwhelming margin.
Houston's second administration was marked by retrenchment in public finances, treaty negotiations with Texas Indians, and a search for peace with Mexico. These policies were only sensible for a republic with no money and virtually no armed forces, but peace was not popular, especially after Mexico twice invaded Texas in 1842. In 1843 Houston renewed efforts for annexation to the United States. A treaty was signed in April 1844, but it became entangled in sectional politics in the United States and did not win Senate approval. Unable to succeed himself in the Texas presidency, Houston left office in December 1844. He supported annexation when it came in 1845.
The Texas legislature elected Houston to the U.S. Senate on 21 February 1846. He drew a two- year term upon entering the Senate but was elected to a full term in December 1847. As sectional animosity over slavery increased, Houston took what would become an unalterable stance against extremism and in defense of the Union. Houston's moderate views on slavery supported his determination to preserve the Union. He owned slaves throughout his life and did not see the institution as a compelling moral issue; he defended it as a practical necessity, a way of providing labor and race control, and rejected the more aggressive view associated with John C. Calhoun and other extremists that slavery was a "positive good." Time would deal with the institution, he hoped, if fanatics would leave it alone. He voted in 1848 for organizing the Oregon Territory with a prohibition on slavery, and he refused to sign John C. Calhoun's 1849 "Southern Address," which called for sectional unity in defense of southern rights. He voted for all parts of the Compromise of 1850. Houston was elected to a third term in the Senate in January 1853, but his unionism began to injure his political career seriously in 1854 when he voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Many of his constituents never forgave what they regarded as an antisouthern act. In 1855 the state legislature officially condemned his vote and indicated that he would not be reelected when his term expired in 1859. Houston identified with the Know-Nothing party in 1855-1856 and ran for governor of Texas in 1857. In that contest he suffered the only electoral defeat of his career, losing to Hardin R. Runnels, an ultrasoutherner.
When Houston's Senate term ended in 1859, he again ran for governor of Texas against Runnels. Unionism was the primary issue, and this time Houston won, becoming governor in December 1859. Unionists talked of nominating Houston for president of the United States in 1860, but he never became a major contender for the nomination. When Abraham Lincoln won the election, and leading Texans called an extralegal secession convention to meet in January 1861, Houston sought to head off disunion by calling the state legislature into session. However, the legislature endorsed the convention, which then met and adopted an ordinance of secession. A referendum on 23 February 1861 resulted in overwhelming support for disunion. Houston accepted these actions as the will of the people, but when the secession convention adopted an ordinance uniting Texas with the Confederate States of America, he objected on the grounds that the public had not approved that step. On 16 March 1861 he refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy and was removed as governor by the convention.
Houston did everything possible to prevent secession and war, but his first loyalty was to Texas-- and the South. Houston refused offers of troops from the United States to keep Texas in the Union and announced on 10 May 1861 that he would stand with the Confederacy in its war effort. He soon retired to Huntsville where he died.
Bibliography
Major collections of Houston's letters and documents are in the Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas and in the Library of Congress. Most of his papers are published in Amelia Williams and Eugene C. Barker, eds., The Writings of Sam Houston, 1813-1863 (8 vols., 1938-1943), although some important letters and documents have been discovered since the appearance of this work. The most readable study of Houston is Marquis James, The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston (1929), which won a Pulitzer Prize. However, James's study is marked by a great emphasis on the colorful and romantic in Houston's life and a seemingly uncritical reliance on the personal recollections of family members. In places, it resembles semi- fictionalized biography more than a scholarly study. M. K. Wisehart, Sam Houston: American Giant (1962), is the most detailed and judicious account of Houston's life. Llerena Friend, Sam Houston: The Great Designer (1954), is the best political biography. Friend's research is excellent, and her conclusions are balanced and reasonable, except when she tries to force Houston into the mold of her colorful title by interpreting his career as a Unionist during the 1850s as part of a design to win the presidency of the United States.
Randolph B. Campbell