Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/97

Rh very large number lost in the morass and bayou), 300 sabres, and 200 pistols; 300 valuable mules, 100 fine horses, and a good lot of provisions, clothing, tents, paraphernalia for officers and men, and twelve thousand dollars in silver, constituted the principal spoils."

But the moral and political consequences of the victory far transcended the value of this important booty to needy heroes.

Texan independence was won.

History furnishes in its whole range no spectacle more sublime than this struggle for freedom. In imitation of their ancestors, an outraged, brave people, many of whom tilled the soil on which they fought and for which they had paid in money or labor, not striving for empire nor the glory of a military chieftain, had trusted their cause to the wager of battle. Relying on the God of battles, He had provided for the issue.

Abandoning for a time their fugitive wives, hundreds fought for all that makes life worth living for, or dying for, or gives value to its possessions, eternal freedom for themselves and their posterity.

With the victory of San Jacinto a new era dawned upon the Western Continent.

The Anglo-Saxon race began now to demonstrate the power to rule the new world. France ceased to hold empire in America when the Canadas surrendered to British rule in 1763. Spain had lost control of any portion of the Western Continent, and now her descendants had yielded the sway of a territory grander in extent than France, thus opening a way for a subsequent surrender of a still larger territory on the Pacific coast.

Invited to Texan soil, three hundred emigrants undertook to found a Mexican State coequal with the other United States of Mexico. They asked only that the Federal Constitution of 1824 should be maintained and administered. All they asked for Texas was a concession of the same rights secured to the Mexican States by that Constitution. The superior industry, enterprise, and invention of the new colonists, attributable to that intelligent love of liberty which the Mexican mind did not comprehend and dreaded far more, were a terror to the Mexican Dictators. They regretted that they had invited the 300 Americans to colonize Texas; they resolved that Texas should be a desert, a wide waste, without a civilized inhabitant; occupied, if occupied at all, by savages, and thus prevent all intercourse between Mexicans and the United States of America; thus opposed to progress and enlightened civilized life. Stephen F. Austin, mingling in his grand character the lofty character of the cavalier and the uncompromising nature of the Puritan, led the choice band of spirits who sought to domiciliate themselves in the beautiful province of New Estramadura.