Bitter quarrels, however, soon arose between Governor Smith and his council and almost put a stop to all public business. Governor Smith was deposed, and Lieutenant-Governor Robinson was placed at the head of affairs. Finally, after providing for an election for delegates to a convention to be held at Washington on the Brazos March 1, the council adjourned.
About the last of March the following year (1836), the Texans, to keep San Felipe from falling into the hands of Santa Anna, set fire to it themselves. The flames spread from cabin to cabin, roaring around the hearthstones so long noted for their hospitality. They swept past the one-room building where the conventions had been held and devoured the rude, unchinked log-hut in the black-jack grove beyond, where Henry Stephenson had preached, and where the first Sunday School had been organized; they consumed roof-tree and picket and garden-fence, so that in a few hours a heap of blackened ashes alone remained of the cradle of Texas.
V.
GOLIAD.
(1835-1836.)
1. MESSENGERS OF DISTRESS.
On the 20th of December, 1835, there was a spirited meeting of citizens and soldiers at the old town of La Bahia (Goliad) on the San Antonio River.
La Bahia—which means “the bay”—was already old when Austin laid off his town on the Brazos. Captain Alonzo de Leon, on his way to attack La Salle at Fort St. Louis in 1689, stopped there; and in 1718 Don Domingo Ramon with his troopers and friars built there the Mission of Espiritu Santo (The Holy Ghost) for the benefit of the fierce Carankawae Indians.
The town had seen stirring times during the century and a half of its existence. There had been many Indian fights in and around the mission church, when the garrison was weak and the priests could not control their red-skinned converts; it was in the same church in 1812 that Magee’s army was besieged, and from its doors his Republicans sallied forth to their victorious hand-to-hand conflict with the Spaniards. Here, too, in 1819, General Long surrendered to the Mexicans and was carried away to a treacherous death.
And here in October, 1835, the Mexican commandant Sandoval had been surprised in his sleep by the Texans, his soldiers made prisoners, and the fort and its stores handed over to his captors.
The General Consultation at San Felipe in November, 1835, had thought it more prudent to declare their adherence to the Mexican republican constitution than to issue a declaration of independence.
The citizens and soldiers of Goliad, on the 20th of December following, boldly set their names to a document resolving “that the former state and department of Texas is and ought to be a free, sovereign, and independent state.”