You win the most important battle in Texas history. Eighteen minutes, April 21, 1836, Battle of San Jacinto. You take a musket ball to the ankle. And then?
If you’re Sam Houston, you get on a boat to New Orleans, let surgeons dig bone fragments out of your leg, ignore their advice to stay in bed, hobble back to Texas, and spend the summer recovering at your law partner’s house in a small East Texas town called San Augustine. From there — still dealing with a mangled ankle that won’t heal right — you get nominated for president of the new Republic of Texas and win in a landslide.
The wound
The musket ball caught Houston in the left ankle during the battle, shattering the tibia bone just above the joint. He didn’t even mention it in his official report four days later, saying only, “the conflict lasted about eighteen minutes from the time of close action until we were in possession of the enemy’s encampment.”
But the wound wasn’t interested in being ignored. Within days, it was inflamed, and probably infected. Houston spiked a fever that wouldn’t break. The army surgeon looked at it and basically said that Houstong needed a real hospital.
But the nearest real hospital was in New Orleans, and interim President David G. Burnet didn’t want to let Houston leave Texas.
Burnet and Houston already hated each other. Burnet thought Houston was a drunk glory-hound who’d spent the war retreating instead of fighting. Houston thought Burnet was a sanctimonious coward who’d caused panic by fleeing the advancing Mexican army. They’d already had an ugly fight over Santa Anna’s horse — Houston claimed the fine black stallion as spoils of war. Burnet found out it actually belonged to a Texas settler the Mexicans had captured, and forced Houston to give it back. They’d fought over money, too, all of the captured Mexican army treasury. Burnet wanted it for the republic’s empty coffers. Houston had already split much of it among his men, who hadn’t been paid in ages.
So when Houston said he needed to go to New Orleans for medical treatment, Burnet’s first instinct was to say no. The doctor had to convince him that Houston might actually die otherwise.
New Orleans
May 22, 1836. A schooner called the Flora — one contemporary account calls it “a dirty little trading schooner” — sailed into New Orleans. Word had gotten out that Sam Houston was on board. The hero of San Jacinto. Maybe dying.
Crowds packed the levee to see him. There he was, lying on a pallet on the open deck, his ankle still bloody. A band started playing when they spotted him. His old army buddy, William Christy, pushed through the crowd to reach him first. Then Houston reportedly fainted from the fever, and they carried him off the boat on a stretcher.
Some Houston biographers claim a 17-year-old girl named Margaret Lea was in that crowd — the woman who would marry Houston three years later. The story makes for good romance, but the documented record places their first meeting in May 1839 in Mobile, Alabama, when she was 20. Whether she actually saw him carried off the Flora or whether that’s a legend that grew up around their courtship, nobody can say for sure.
The surgery took almost three weeks. The surgeons had to extract fragments of shattered bone — pieces driven deep into tissue by the force of the musket ball. This was 1836. No anesthesia except whiskey and maybe some laudanum if you were lucky. No antibiotics. Just metal probes and forceps, digging around in an infected wound, people holding you down, and hoping you got all the fragments out before sepsis set in.
Houston’s doctors were taking a real chance even trying this. Standard treatment for a musket ball that shattered bone was amputation. Period. Musket balls did horrific damage — the big slow lead rounds would pulverize bone, drive fragments and debris deep into tissue, turn the whole area into an infection factory. Surgeons knew that compound fractures killed most patients, either from blood loss during amputation or from infection after.
But they tried to save the leg anyway. Houston already had chronic pain from a wound at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 — an arrow to the upper thigh and two rifle balls — that never properly healed. Now he had a matching set of permanent injuries.
One person who stayed close during Houston’s recovery was Joshua, an enslaved man Houston had brought to Texas. Joshua would remain with Houston for years, through the presidency and beyond — a presence in every chapter of Houston’s story that most biographies mention only in passing, if at all.
Back to Texas
June 1836. Houston heard the Texas government was falling apart and decided he’d recovered enough. The doctors said absolutely not, stay in bed. Houston left anyway.
By July he’d made it to San Augustine, deep in the East Texas Piney Woods. People called the area “the Redlands” because of the iron-rich red soil that stretched west from the Sabine River toward the Attoyac. This was old territory for Anglo settlement in Texas. More importantly, this was Houston’s territory.
He’d opened his law practice here in 1832, right after coming to Texas. San Augustine sat on El Camino Real, the old Spanish road connecting Mexico City to San Antonio to Louisiana. It was a good location for a lawyer who also had political ambitions, with relatively easy access to the US. Houston had represented the area at the Convention of 1833. People knew him here.
His law partner Philip Sublett had a two-story white frame house on the highway, about two miles east of town. That’s where Houston went to finish recovering. Or to start the next phase of his career, depending on how you look at it.
The missing summer?
The Writings of Sam Houston — the eight-volume collection of his letters and documents — has almost nothing from April 20 to September 7, 1836. That’s the entire summer. The period when Houston went from battlefield commander to president-elect of the Republic of Texas, and there’s barely any documentation.
We know he was in San Augustine in July and August. We know he was writing letters — the historical marker there says he “issued his report of the battle from San Augustine,” except the report is dated April 25 from San Jacinto, so either the marker’s wrong or Houston was filing paperwork from San Augustine later, or something else is going on that the sources don’t explain clearly.
The official story is simple: he was recovering. Resting his ankle. Writing to friends.
But this is Sam Houston. The letters that do survive from around this period show him scheming to get Texas annexed into the United States as fast as possible. Writing to his old mentor, Andrew Jackson. Working every political angle he could find and very much staying busy.
So where are the letters from that summer?
Maybe they got lost. Maybe Houston’s son Andrew Jackson Houston, who was still alive when The Writings were being compiled in the late 1930s, held onto papers he didn’t want published. Maybe there just weren’t that many letters to begin with.
Or maybe Houston was making deals he didn’t want documented. Promising favors. Building the political network that would make him president. Writing things you don’t put in the historical record.
Meanwhile, Burnet
David G. Burnet was still interim president that summer, and he was still furious at Houston.
The personality clash was almost cartoonish. Burnet: uptight lawyer, formal, valued propriety above everything. Houston: loud, profane, charismatic, loved being the center of attention. Burnet thought Houston was reckless and probably drunk half the time. Houston thought Burnet was a boring sanctimonious prig.
Burnet complained Houston swore too much, drank too much, spent too much time collecting battlefield trophies instead of doing his job. Houston’s people said Burnet was ungrateful, impossible to please, completely unable to appreciate the men who’d actually won the war while Burnet was running away.
But this wasn’t just two guys who couldn’t stand each other. They disagreed about the future of Texas. Burnet wanted a stable republic that would eventually negotiate entry into the United States on good terms. Houston wanted immediate annexation — he was worried that an independent Texas was too weak, would either get reconquered by Mexico or get carved up by European powers looking for influence.
The feud outlasted both their careers. Burnet published pamphlets attacking Houston’s character. Houston fired back from the Senate floor. Burnet kept challenging Houston to duels. Houston kept laughing at him and refusing. It went on for decades.
In summer 1836, though, the bad blood was still fresh. Houston was in San Augustine trying to position himself for the presidency while the interim president back in the temporary capital actively disliked him.
And Houston wasn’t the only San Jacinto veteran navigating a complicated postwar landscape. Juan Seguín — the Tejano captain who had fought alongside Houston at San Jacinto, who had recruited Tejano soldiers for the revolution — was dealing with his own political reality. Anglo settlers were already pushing Tejanos out of the power structures they’d helped build. Seguín would serve in the Texas Senate and as mayor of San Antonio, but the republic he’d fought for was already turning hostile to people like him. That tension ran through the entire summer of 1836, even if most histories don’t mention it.
The nomination
August 15, 1836. Philip Sublett nominated Sam Houston for president.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. Houston’s law partner, the guy whose house Houston was staying in, whose town was Houston’s political base, stood up and said: we’re backing this man for president.
This is small-town Texas politics at its purest. The Redlands looking after their own.
Stephen F. Austin was already running — he’d announced on August 4. Austin, the “Father of Texas,” the empresario who’d brought the first legal American settlers. He figured it was his duty and also he really wanted to beat Henry Smith, the former provisional governor who’d had ugly fights with the General Council and wanted to restore his reputation.
Austin actually thought he could win. And then on August 20, Houston officially entered the race.
The election was September 5. That gave Houston eleven days of actual campaigning.
Texas didn’t have political parties yet. No platforms, no party machines. Just a popularity contest. And one of the candidates had won the Battle of San Jacinto two months earlier.
The election
Not even close. Houston swept East Texas and the Red River region and got most of the soldiers’ votes. Austin was the Father of Texas, the man who’d made Anglo settlement possible, and he got 10 percent.
It is worth noting that not even 7,000 votes were cast. Only white men and a few Tejanos who had proven their loyalty were allowed to vote. No women, no one of African descent (free or enslaved), and no Native Americans could vote. The voting age was 21 and up, too. An estimated 50,000 people lived in Texas in 1836.
Houston made Austin his first Secretary of State, probably trying to unify the new government and also genuinely respecting what Austin had done for Texas. Austin died two months later, in December.
What happened after
October 22, 1836. Houston got inaugurated in Columbia, the temporary capital. Unbuckled his sword in front of the crowd, said he’d serve as a civilian now.
San Augustine stayed important to him. The historical marker there says Houston used the Redlands as “a place of business, residence, or refuge” for the next thirty years. He represented San Augustine County in the Texas House from 1839 to 1841. He got his divorce from his first wife Eliza Allen finalized there in 1837. He married Margaret Lea in 1840 — by several accounts, they first met in Mobile, Alabama in 1839, though some biographers insist she’d spotted him years earlier in that New Orleans crowd.
That summer in 1836 mattered. Philip Sublett’s white frame house on the highway mattered. The political networks Houston had built in East Texas over four years of law practice mattered.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: Houston won independence in eighteen minutes on April 21, 1836. That’s the famous part. But the presidency? That got decided in the months after, while he was lying on Sublett’s couch with a ruined ankle, writing letters we don’t have anymore, making deals we can only guess at.
The Battle of San Jacinto made him a hero. San Augustine made him president.
Different kind of victory. Quieter. Harder to see in the historical record. But just as real.
Sources and further reading
- Philip Allen Sublett, Texas State Historical Association
- Philip Sublett nominates Sam Houston for president, TSHA Texas Day by Day
- Sam Houston, Wikipedia
- David G. Burnet, Wikipedia
- Bridges: David Burnet clashed with Sam Houston, Yahoo News
- 1836 Republic of Texas presidential election, Wikipedia
- The Writings of Sam Houston, Volume II, Texas History Trust
- Sam Houston in San Augustine historical marker, Read the Plaque
- Sam Houston’s military wounds, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
- Sam and Margaret Houston, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
- Colonel Phillip A. Sublett House, Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress
- Sam Houston’s April 25, 1836 official battle report, Texas State Library and Archives Commission
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