Though Gutierrez still retained the nominal rank of general, the actual command of “the Army of the North” now devolved upon Major Reuben Kemper, a gigantic Virginian who, despite the fact that he was the son of a Baptist preacher, was celebrated from one end of the frontier to the other for his “eloquent profanity.” Kemper was a man well fitted to wield authority on such an expedition. He had a neck like a bull, a chest like a barrel, a voice like a bass drum, and it was said that even the mates on the Mississippi River boats listened with admiration and envy to his swearing. Nor was he a novice at the business of fighting Spaniards, for a dozen years before he and his two brothers had been concerned in a desperate attempt to free Florida from Spanish rule; in 1808 he had been one of a party of Americans who had attempted to capture Baton Rouge, had been taken prisoner, sentenced to death, and saved by the intervention of an American officer on the very morning set for his execution; and the following year, undeterred by the narrowness of his escape, he had made a similar attempt, with similar unsuccess, to capture Mobile. The cruelties he had seen perpetrated by the Spaniards had so worked on his mind that he had vowed to devote the rest of his life to ridding North America of Spanish rule.
Such, then, was the picturesque figure who assumed command of “the Army of the North,” now consisting of eight hundred Americans, one hundred and eighty Mexicans, and three hundred and twenty-five Indians, and led it against the Spaniards, twenty-five hundred strong and with several pieces of artillery, who were encamped at Rosales, near San Antonio. As soon as his scouts reported the proximity of the Spaniards, who were ambushed in the dense chaparral which lined the road along which the Americans were advancing, Kemper threw his force into battle formation, ordering his men to advance to within thirty paces of the Spanish line, fire three rounds, load the fourth time, and charge. The movement was performed in as perfect order as though the Americans had been on a parade-ground and no enemy within a hundred miles. Demoralized by the machine-like precision of the Americans’ advance and the deadliness of the volleys poured into them, the Spaniards broke and ran, Kemper’s Indian allies remorselessly pursuing the panic-stricken fugitives until nightfall put an end to the slaughter. In this great Texan battle, for any mention of which you will search most of the histories in vain, nearly a thousand Spaniards were killed and wounded. The Indians saw to it that there were few prisoners.
The next day the victorious Americans reached San Antonio and sent in a messenger, under a flag of truce, demanding the unconditional surrender of the town and garrison. Governor Salcedo sent back word that he would give his decision in the morning. “Present yourself and your staff in our camp at once,” Kemper replied, “or I shall storm the town.” (And when a town was carried by storm it was understood that no prisoners would be taken.) When Salcedo entered the American lines he was met by Captain Taylor, to whom he offered his sword, but that officer declined to accept it and sent him to Colonel Kemper. On offering it to the big frontiersman, it was again refused, and he was told to take it to General Gutierrez, who was the ranking officer of the expedition. By this time the patience of the haughty Spaniard was exhausted, and, plunging the weapon into the ground, he turned his back on Gutierrez. A few hours later the Americans entered San Antonio in triumph, released the prisoners in the local jails, and, from all I can gather, took pretty much everything of value on which they could lay their hands. When Kemper asked his Indian allies what share of the loot they wanted, they replied that they would be quite satisfied with two dollars’ worth of vermilion.
After the capture of San Antonio, General Gutierrez, who, though he had been content to let the Americans do the fighting, now that he was among his own people swelled up like a turkey gobbler, announced that he had decided to send the Spanish officers who had been captured to New Orleans, where they would be held as hostages until the war was over. To this suggestion the Americans readily agreed, and that evening the governor and his staff, with the other officers who had surrendered, started for the coast under the guard of a company of Mexicans. When a mile and a half below the town, on the east bank of the San Antonio River, the captives were halted, stripped, and tied, and their throats cut from ear to ear, some of the Mexicans even whetting their knives upon the soles of their shoes in the presence of their victims. When Kemper learned of this butchery of defenseless prisoners he strode up to Gutierrez and, catching him by the throat, held him at arm’s length and shook him as a terrier does a rat, meanwhile ripping out a stream of invectives that would have seared a thinner-skinned man as effectually as a branding-iron. Then, refusing to longer serve under so barbarous a leader, Kemper resigned his commission and, followed by most of the other American officers of standing, set out for New Orleans.
Of the American officers who remained Captain Perry was the highest in rank and the most able, and to him was given the direction of the expedition, Gutierrez, for reasons of policy, still retaining nominal command. With the departure of Kemper came a relaxation in the iron discipline which he had maintained and the troops, drunk with victory and believing that the campaign was all over but the shouting, broke loose in every form of dissipation. While in this state of unpreparedness, they were surprised by a force of three thousand Spaniards under General Elisondo. Instead of marching directly upon San Antonio and capturing it, as he could have done in view of the demoralization which prevailed, Elisondo made the mistake of intrenching himself in the graveyard half a mile without the town. But in the face of the enemy the discipline for which the Americans were celebrated returned, for first, last, and all the time they were fighters. At ten o’clock on the evening of June 4 the Americans, marching in file, moved silently out of the town. In the most profound silence they approached the Spanish lines until they could hear the voices of the pickets; then they lay down, their arms beside them, and waited for the coming of the dawn. Colonel Perry chose the moment when the Spaniards were assembled at daybreak for matins to launch his attack. Even then no orders were spoken, the signals being passed down the line by each man nudging his neighbor. So admirably executed were Perry’s orders that the Americans, moving forward with the stealth and silence of panthers, had reached the outer line of the enemy’s intrenchments, had bayonetted the Spanish sentries, and had actually hauled down the Spanish flag and replaced it with the Republican tricolor before their presence was discovered. Though taken completely by surprise, the Spaniards rallied and drove the Americans from the works, but the latter reformed and hurled themselves forward in a smashing charge which drove the Spaniards from the field, leaving upward of a thousand dead, wounded, and prisoners behind them. The American loss in killed and wounded was something under a hundred.
Returning in triumph to San Antonio, the Americans, whose position was now so firmly established that they had no further use for General Gutierrez, unceremoniously dismissed him, this action, doubtless, being taken at the instance of Colonel Perry and his fellow officers, who feared further treachery and dishonor if the Mexican were permitted to remain in command. His place was taken by Don José Alvarez Toledo, a distinguished Cuban who had formerly been a member of the Spanish Cortes in Mexico but had been banished on account of his republican sympathies. A few weeks after General Toledo assumed command a Spanish force, four thousand strong, under General Arredondo, appeared before San Antonio. Toledo at once marched out to meet them. His force consisted of eight hundred and fifty Americans under Colonel Perry and about twice that number of Mexicans; so it will be seen that the Spaniards greatly outnumbered the Republicans. Throwing forward a line of skirmishers for the purpose of engaging the enemy, General Arredondo ambushed the major portion of his force behind earthworks masked by the dense chaparral. The Americans, confident of victory, dashed forward with their customary élan, whereupon the Spanish line, in obedience to Arredondo’s orders, sullenly fell back. So cleverly did the Spaniards feign retreat that it was not until the Americans were well within the trap that had been set for them that Toledo recognized his peril. Then he frantically ordered his buglers to sound the recall. One column—that composed of Mexicans—obeyed the order promptly, but the other, consisting of Americans, shouting, “No, we never retreat!” swept forward to their deaths. Had the order to retreat never been given, the Americans, notwithstanding the disparity of numbers, would have been victorious, but, deprived of all support and raked by the enemy’s cannon and musketry, even the prodigies of valor they performed were unavailing to alter the result. So desperately did those American adventurers fight, however, that, as some one has remarked, “they made Spanish the language of hell.” When their rifles were empty they used their pistols, and when their pistols were empty they used their terrible long hunting-knives, ripping and stabbing and slashing with those vicious weapons until they went down before sheer weight of numbers. Some of them, grasping their empty rifles by the barrel, swung them round their heads like flails, beating down the Spaniards who opposed them until they were surrounded by heaps of men with cracked and shattered skulls. Others, when their weapons broke, sprang at their enemies with their naked hands and tore out their throats as hounds tear out the throat of a deer. Such was the battle of the Medina, fought on August 18, 1813. Of the eight hundred and fifty Americans who went into action only ninety-three came out alive. If the battle itself was a bloody one, its aftermath was even more so, the Spanish cavalry pursuing and butchering without mercy all the fugitives they could overtake. At Spanish Bluff, on the Trinity, the Spaniards took eighty prisoners. Marching them into a clump of timber, they dug a long, deep trench and, setting the prisoners on its edge, shot them in groups of ten. It was a bloody, bloody business. That our histories contain almost no mention of the Gachupin War, as this campaign was known, is doubtless due to the fact that during the same period there was a war in the United States and also one in Mexico, and the public mind was thus drawn away from the events which were taking place in Texas. Indeed, had it not been for the war between the United States and Great Britain, which drew into its vortex the adventurous spirits of the Southwest, Texas would have achieved her independence a dozen years earlier than she did.
Toledo and Perry, with all that was left of the “Army of the North,” escaped, after suffering fearful hardships, to the United States, where they promptly began to recruit men for another venture into the beckoning land beyond the Sabine. Though the head of the patriot priest Hidalgo had been displayed by the Spanish authorities on the walls of the citadel of Guanajuato as “a warning to Mexicans who choose to revolt against Spanish rule,” as the placard attached to the grisly trophy read, the grim object-lesson had not deterred another priest, José Maria Morelos, from taking up the struggle for Mexican independence where Hidalgo had laid it down. In order to co-operate with this new champion of liberty, Toledo, at the head of a few hundred Americans, sailed from New Orleans, landed on the Mexican coast near Vera Cruz, and pushed up-country as far as El Puente del Rey, near Jalapa, where he intrenched himself and sat down to await the arrival of reinforcements from New Orleans under General Jean Joseph Humbert.
Humbert, a Frenchman from the province of Lorraine, was a graduate of the greatest school for fighters the world has ever known: the armies of Napoleon. In 1789, when the French Revolution deluged France with blood, he was a merchant in Rouvray. Closing his shop, he exchanged his yardstick for a sabre and went to Paris to take a hand in the overthrow of the monarchy, for he was a red-hot republican. His gallantry in action won him a major-general’s commission, and four years later the Directory promoted him to the rank of lieutenant-general and gave him command of the expedition sent to Ireland, where he was forced to surrender to Lord Cornwallis. Napoleon, who knew a soldier as far as he could see one, made Humbert a general of division and second in command of the ill-fated army sent to Haiti. But Humbert’s republican convictions did not jibe with the imperialistic ambitions of Napoleon, and the former suddenly decided that a life of exile in America was preferable to life in a French prison. For a time he supported himself by teaching in New Orleans, but it was like harnessing a war-horse to a plough; so, when the Mexican junta sought his aid in 1814, the veteran fighter raised an expeditionary force of nearly a thousand men, sailed across the Gulf, landed on the shores of Mexico, and marched up to join Toledo at El Puente del Rey. The revolutionary leader Morelos, who was hard-pressed by the Spaniards, set out to join Toledo and Humbert, but on the way was taken prisoner and died with his back to a stone wall and his face to a firing-party. The same force which ended the career of Morelos continued to El Puente del Rey and attempted to cut off the retreat of Toledo and Humbert, but the old soldier of Napoleon succeeded in cutting his way through them and in 1817, dejected and discouraged, landed once more at New Orleans, where he spent the rest of his days teaching in a French college, and his nights, no doubt, dreaming of his exploits under the Napoleonic eagles.
The same year Humbert returned to New Orleans another soldier of the empire, General Baron Charles François Antoine Lallemand, followed by a hundred and fifty veterans who had seen service under the little corporal, set out from the same city for that graveyard of ambitions, Mexico. Baron Lallemand was one of the great soldiers of the empire and, had Napoleon been victorious at Waterloo, would have been rewarded with the baton of a marshal of France. Entering the army when a youngster of eighteen, he followed the French eagles into every capital of Europe, fighting his way up the ladder of promotion, round by round, until, upon the Emperor’s return from Elba, he was given the epaulets of a lieutenant-general and created a peer of France. He commanded the artillery of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo and after that disaster was sent by the Emperor to Captain Maitland, of the British navy, to negotiate for his surrender. With tears streaming down his cheeks, Lallemand begged that he might be permitted to accompany his imperial master into exile. This being denied him, he refused to take service under the Bourbons and, coming to America, attempted to found a colony of French political refugees in Alabama, at a place which, in memory of happier days, he named Marengo. The experiment proved a failure, however; so in 1817 he led his colonists into Texas and attempted to establish what he termed a Champ d’Asile on the banks of the Trinity River. But the Spanish authorities, obsessed with the idea that every foreigner who appeared in Texas was plotting against them, despatched a force against Lallemand and his colonists and drove them out. The next few years General Lallemand spent in New Orleans devising schemes for effecting the escape of his beloved Emperor from St. Helena, but Napoleon’s death, in 1821, brought his carefully laid plan for a rescue to naught. In 1830, upon the Bourbons being ejected from France for good and all, Lallemand, to whom the Emperor had left a legacy of a hundred thousand francs, returned to Paris. His civil and military honors were restored by Louis Philippe, and the man who a few years before had been pointed out on the streets of New Orleans as a filibuster and an adventurer died a general of division, commander of the Legion of Honor, military governor of Corsica, and a peer of France.
The next man to strike a blow for Texas was Don Luis de Aury. De Aury was a native of New Granada, as the present Republic of Colombia was then called, and had played a brilliant part in the struggle for freedom of Spain’s South American colonies. He entered the navy of the young republic as a lieutenant in 1813. Three years later he was appointed commandant-general of the naval forces of New Granada, stationed at Cartagena. At the memorable siege of that city, to his generosity and intrepidity hundreds of men, women, and children owed their lives, for when the Spanish commander, Morillo, threatened to butcher every person found alive within the city walls De Aury loaded the non-combatants aboard his three small vessels, broke through the Spanish squadron of thirty-five ships and landed his passengers in safety. For this heroic exploit he was rewarded with the rank of commodore, given the command of the united fleets of New Granada, La Plata, Venezuela, and Mexico, and ordered to sweep Spanish commerce from the Gulf. Learning of the splendid harbor afforded by the Bay of Galveston, on the coast of Texas, he determined to occupy it and use it as a base of operations against the Spanish. Accompanied by Don José Herrera, the agent of the Mexican revolutionists in the United States, De Aury landed on Galveston Island in September, 1816. A meeting was held, a government organized, the Republican flag raised, Galveston was declared a part of the Mexican Republic, and De Aury was chosen civil and military governor of Texas and Galveston Island.