A Sliver of Texas’s Spanish-Mexican-French History

Living through one of the hottest summers in Texas history, I can imagine how uncomfortable it could have been to ride through Bexar (San Antonio) when Governor Antonio Maria Martinez became the last Spaniard to rule what would become Texas. Many had tried to liberate the future Lone Star State. Here’s the story of just one adventurer, James Long, and his wife, Jane.

I selected Tennessean James Long, who recruited just 100 men to take the Spanish territory, starting in Natchez in 1819. He intended to offer it to the U.S. to form it into a state or state.

Let’s not neglect his wife; Jane is also said to be an “adventurer.” The couple met over a backgammon game at a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. Now pregnant with their first child, she made a flag with a Lone Star for him to plant on future Texas soil.

I haven’t researched whether or not hers was the first “lone Star,” but I’ll just give her credit for sewing a single Star into her flag in 1819. For better or worse, she was the niece of James Wilkerson, a brigadier general in the Revolutionary War who schemed to remove George Washington from command and later joined Aaron Burr in an attempt to break up the colonies to form and lead a continental empire. Who knows where Jane stood on either case before her time?

James Long, at twenty-six, had already served under Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, now as a physician who was “equally at home with war and agitation as with healing,” according to Texas author Stephen Harrigan.

The French simplified the process by sailing away from Texas around 1818 before the expected Spanish attack could interrupt their tranquility. They undoubtedly saw the writing on the wall—surrounded by Spain with reinforcements on the way.

John Adams, then U.S. Secretary of State, and Luis de Onis y Gonzales, Spanish minister to the United States, assisted Long by signing the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, ending the long-running border dispute. The old Neutral Ground, operating like a demilitarized zone, disappeared with the treaty. The distinct line now at the Sabine River upset some who thought it should be further West at the Rio Grande. This line indicated to Texans that they’d surrendered to Spain. At that time, “Texas” meant East Texas, where the land was fertile and black and had been ignored by Spain. Others were more interested in politics than farming and saw the 11 (free)-10 (slave) split between states north of the border could provide an opportunity to weigh the scale in Texas for bondage (which was illegal in Mexico).

Long unfurled Jane’s flag in Nacogdoches, occupying the far eastern edge of a sparsely inhabited community without hostilities in a place 400 miles from Bexar and fifty miles from Bahia, the only two Spanish communities of any size in the region. Spanish Governor Martinez raised an army of six hundred under Colonel Juan Ignacio Perez, sending them off to greet Long’s expedition. Then, Long went to Galveston to hook up with Jean Lafitte, a shady privateer and sometime pirate operating along the Gulf Coast, possibly looking for a deal— a chance to expand his profiteering and slaving business in Texas in exchange for cash to assist Long’s exploits. U.S. law banned the importation of slaves in 1808. Still, if enslaved people were found already in the country, they could be seized and turned over to authorities, sold at sheriff’s auction, with half the profits going to the person who “discovered” them. Long offered Lafitte a governorship of what he envisioned to be the “brand-new” Texas. Lafitte double-crossed Long’s activities. When Long returned to his troops, most had fled to Louisiana. This time Long got out of Texas without being captured.

In the spring of 1820, he arrived at Bolivar, seeking assistance from Lafitte in phase two of his attack. But Lafitte, now accused of piracy by the U.S., a capital offense, had left Galveston and was beating a path out of American jurisdiction. He invited the Longs to dinner at his house before he left. Jane found Lafitte not what she’d expected: “an uncouth giant, ferocious in a temper, and in manners as rough and boisterous as the winds and waves he dealt with.” Instead, she noted his fierce black eyes and strong physical presence, yet she found him a “boring pirate.’

Next, the couple traveled to New Orleans to recruit fifty men in the second attempt. He still believed himself to be Nacogdoches’s president and its chief policymaker. They built a fort guarding the pass to Galveston Bay. The government named a collector of revenue and established a military code (which included outlawing profanity!) Then he went to war with the Karankawa village across the bay, killing 30 or 40 Indians, including women and children.

Jane took their four-year-old child, their daughter, back to Bolivar when James sailed off to attack La Bahia, hoping it remained in royal hands. While Long organized the government, the royal military commander, Austin de Iturbide, signed an agreement with Vincente Guerrero, the commander of the largest rebel fighting force. This agreement, the Plan of Iguala, created an alliance among the insurgents fighting to free Mexico from Spanish rule. The forces loyal to King Ferdinand had become disenchanted, but after six years imprisoned in France, he returned to power. 

 With the Treaty of Cordoba, Mexico and its Texas province became independent. Three centuries of Spanish rule ended. Operating on impulse, James Long set out for La Bahia and seized the presidio with little resistance. Perez’s troops forced Long to surrender. Promptly he sent Long to prison in Monterey. After eight months, the Spanish governor released him, but his bad luck continued. Either accidentally or intentionally, Long was shot dead by a sentry in Mexico City in April 1822. It would be nearly a year before Jane learned of the death of her husband.

Jane’s daughter may have been the first Anglo baby in Texas (though now there may be challenges to that role, a title denied to others who had been in Texas for around fifteen thousand years). Her daughter, Mary James, died at age two, but Jane didn’t stop until age 82. She managed a plantation in Fort Bend County so well that she could pay off her husband’s substantial debts.

She opened a boarding house in Brazoria on the coast in 1832. Two of her clients were Sam Houston, the namesake of the largest city in Texas. With a street named for him today in Austin, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar would become the president of the Republic of Texas. But then, the Republic had advanced well beyond what her husband had envisioned.

This “wholly feminine,” kick-tail, pipe-smoking Southern woman drew the attention of both men. Lamar had serious poetic ambitions, which he engaged to impress Jane with his amorous intentions in “Bonnie Jane.” “Oh, brighter than that planet, love/ Thy face appears to me;/ But when shall I behold its light, / Through bridal drapery?” Harrigan resurrected this side of Texas history in Big, Wonderful Thing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), 834. It’s a vast book that sat on my shelf because its size kept me away. Don’t be scared away by the 800+ pages. Plenty of stories are to be found about a state stretching from the ocean to the mountains are here for your enjoyment–one state/one book!