How Texas became American

The late Dennis Brogan used to say – and he knew more American and French history than all but a handful of Americans and Frenchmen – he used to say that if you're not a native of a country, you can live in it for years and still make elementary mistakes. It took me about 40 years before I stopped asking for soda water in grocery stores and started asking for club soda.

And I enjoyed many thoughtless years before it dawned on me why the teaching of American history in England, in my boyhood, stopped short with the defeat of Britain in the American Revolutionary War, the War of Independence. The motive is simple and it's nonetheless childish for belonging to a nation rather than an individual. If they didn't need us any more, we didn't need them. Once the British troops had surrendered at Yorktown, we packed up our curiosity along with our history books and left the Americans to their own devices. After that, American history sank without trace and surfaced again not in the textbooks, but in the newspaper headlines of our own lifetime with such vibrant characters as Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone and Franklin Roosevelt. 

I understand that all this has changed, thanks, no doubt, to the movies and the telly, but mostly to the fact that at the end of the Second World War, Britain and America, like a father/son team of circus acrobats whose strong man with the bulging muscles always supported the young stripling, they now perform and alley-oop somersault leaving the old veteran wobbling on the shoulders of the young son as the curtain descended to thunderous applause. When this happens, the audience is always eager to learn about the life and foibles of the new giant, whereas in the American Revolution David had whipped Goliath; Goliath was still a practising giant. But after the Second War, David turned into Goliath and there are now well-established schools of American history and American literature and even American-inspired schools of business administration in several British universities. 

Now before any American listener, somewhere far from homes, begins to purr, I'd better say I'm telling you all this because I've just come back from Mexico and have heard the loser's side of a war between Mexico and a band of uninvited immigrants, about which I should guess most Americans know only their own, brave, winning version. I'm talking about the almost effortless way in which the Americans annexed Texas, a region of Mexico 800 miles wide, a huge, barren land which for nearly 300 years had been a colony of Spain and for only 15 years before the blow-up came, was a province of Mexico – the northern appendage to the state of Coahuila. Now Mexico won her independence from Spain in 1821 but 20 years before that, Spain had yielded the huge territory of Louisiana, a third of the continent, to Napoleon and two years later he sold it to the United States for $16 million. 

The Mexicans, from the moment of their independence, had fears for the security of Texas. It was on the western border of Louisiana and it was like Coahuila, an enormous stretch of mountains and semi-desert mostly, impossible to police and unlikely to be settled by Mexicans who would have to travel hundreds of miles to the north through their own fierce and trackless country to homestead an almost uninhabitable land. 

By the way, to this day, only 15 per cent of Mexico is arable land. It's not a country where you should expect to eat succulent American beef or delicate English lamb. The goat is the tip off. There are goats everywhere in Mexico because, as they say in Texas, 'where there's no feed for cattle, the sheep will live and where a sheep would die, a goat would survive'. 

But there were hardy people to the north of Texas, Americans who were willing to move down into this wilderness and tame it. And they made this offer to the Mexican government on the understanding that they would have the status of colonists under Mexican sovereignty. Well, the Mexicans gingerly accepted this offer but remembered the line of an agent in New Orleans who'd written, 'The Americans are spreading out like oil upon a cloth'. But precisely because these incoming Americans were tough enough to try and develop a wilderness, they were tough enough to believe – like other settlers, from New England to South Africa – that if they succeeded, the land would be theirs. 

It has to be said, by the way, that before the Americans moved in, the first lot from St Louis, the inhabitants of Texas were scattered Indians and even more scattered Spanish priests in their missions and the American view of the manners and customs of the natives was that of the old English schoolboy's view of all Africans, 'manners they have none and their customs they are beastly’. The new settlers despised the natives and ignored their language. And by the time there were tens of thousands of this hardy breed of Anglos in Texas with attendant Negro slaves, the whole country had become a southern appendage of the United States instead of a northern appendage of Mexico. 

Well, it was not hard to find pretexts for a showdown and men who'd been in the habit of settling all disputes with a rifle complained that Mexican law treated them as compulsory Roman Catholics and allowed them none of the civil liberties, like trial by jury, they'd known in their home states. Much too late, the Mexicans banned slavery in Texas and prohibited all further immigration from the north. Well, the new Texans asked to become a separate Mexican state and still remain a land free for all. It was the end of all pretence by the settlers that they were content to be citizens of a state of Mexico. So the Mexicans marched north to enforce what were already un-enforceable edicts. 

Now, there enters into the story at this point one of the most original characters in Mexican or in any other history – Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. A shrewd Mexican lady of his time, a very cool observer of statesmen and their manners, described him as gentlemanly, good-looking, one would have said a philosopher living in dignified retirement and perhaps one of the most abominable men in the world. 

Ambitious of power, greedy of money and unprincipled, Santa Anna pops in and out of Mexican history for 30 years and in spite of the perils of defeat, exile, threat of impeachment, he would reappear from time to time and pronounce himself president when he didn't like the result of an election. And in riotous times, either an old ally or an old enemy would beg him to take over as commander-in-chief, for he was an adroit soldier with a marvellous sense of timing, and he had a blithe gift of celebrating a stalemate as a victory. He had a leg blown off in a naval engagement and to initiate his next dictatorship, he had the leg disinterred and reburied in Mexico City with full military honours. 

Well, it was this charming man, repulsive character and inspiring soldier, who in 1836 marched, on two legs, to lead his countrymen north and crush the uppity Texans forever. According to the customs of the day, when they had no jumbo jet transport, they marched about a thousand miles, entered Texas and came into San Antonio, the rude capital of what the Americans had now proclaimed as the independent nation of Texas. Santa Anna's forces came into the city which was defended by a negligible but tenacious garrison in an old mission called the Alamo. He massacred them all to a man. And on the walls of the Alamo today there's a sombre inscription, 'Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none'. Texans look on this luckless siege as their Trafalgar, their Battle of Britain. 

Santa Anna now marched confidently east towards Louisiana driving before him an improvised force of Texans under a stubborn adventurer, one Sam Houston, who didn't know defeat when he saw it, so much so that his irregular army covered the retreat of the New Texas government and all the American settlers in Santa Anna's path, till they were hemmed in by a river bank. Now, in one of the most unbelievable turns of military history, Santa Anna mislaid his gift of timing. He paused and Houston's little army regrouped by night and went into a sudden, reverse attack. They demolished the Mexican army in 20 minutes and Santa Anna himself was captured. 

Well it was now useless for the Mexican government to deny the secession of Texas, though they haggled and protested for years over their undeniable legal claim to their own country. There were sporadic expeditions against the Texans and more whippings by the Texans and in 1845 the United States annexed Texas and the Mexicans made a final bid for their land in a war with the giant of the north. It went on for two years and at the end of that time, an American general entered Mexico City. Six months later, the Mexicans were forced to sign a peace treaty under which they not only recognised Texas as gone forever, but surrendered the entire northern part of their country – California, Arizona, Nevada, the whole state of Utah which goes far to the north in the west, in fact, about three-quarters of what is now the American West and what was then one-half of Mexico. 

The Mexicans were paid $15 million for it. There can't have been, in modern history, any harsher price to pay for one country's daring to object to its illegal settlement by foreigners. Of course now it's... it's all far away and long ago but the huge humiliation of it rankles deep in the Mexican spirit and if President Carter had been more delicately briefed, I think, he would not on his recent visit have had such a strong whiff of their lasting resentment. 

The Mexicans, nevertheless, temper a lively chauvinism with the well-known Latin gift of fatalism. I think the last, best word comes from an old seventeenth-century Spanish poet, Francisco de Quevedo, who wrote in a quatrain that's hard to rhyme in English, 'The Saracens came down and beat us to pulp because God makes a point of rewarding the bad guys whenever they outnumber the good guys'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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