Southern History Series: The Texas Revolution and Anglo-Saxonism

The following excerpt about the true history of the Texas Revolution comes from Reginald Horseman’s excellent book Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism:

“The Texas Revolution was from its beginnings interpreted in the United States and among Americans in Texas as a racial clash, not simply a revolt against unjust government or tyranny. Thomas Hart Benton said that the Texas revolt “has illustrated the Anglo-Saxon character, and given it new titles to the respect and admiration of the world. It shows that liberty, justice, valour – moral, physical, and intellectual power – discriminate that race wherever it goes.” Benton asked “old England” to rejoice that distant Texas streams had seen the exploits of “a people sprung from their loins, and carrying their language, laws and customs, their magna charta and all its glorious privileges, into new regions and far distant climes.”

In his two terms as president of Texas, Sam Houston consistently thought of the struggle in his region as one between a glorious Anglo-Saxon race and an inferior Mexican rabble. Victory for the Texans and the Americans in the Southwest would mean that large areas of the world were to be brought under the rule of a race that could make best use of them. Houston was less imbued with the harsh scientific racial theories that carried most Americans before them in the 1840s than with the romantic exaltation of the Saxons given by Sir Walter Scott and his followers.

Houston’s inaugural address in 1836 contrasted the harsh, uncivilized warfare of the Mexicans with the more human conduct of the Texans. He conjured up a vision of the civilized world proudly contemplating “conduct which reflected so much glory on the Anglo-Saxon race.” The idea of the Anglo-Saxons as the living embodiment of the chivalric ideal always fascinated Houston; the Mexicans were “the base invader” fleeing from “Anglo-Saxon chivalry.” In fighting Mexico the Texans were struggling to disarm tyranny, to overthrow oppression, and create representative government: “With these principles we will march across the Rio Grande, and … ere the banner of Mexico shall triumphantly float upon the banks of the Sabine, the Texian standard of the single star, borne by the Anglo-Saxon race, shall display its bright folds in Liberty’s triumph, on the isthmus of Darien.”

While conceiving of the Texas Revolution as that of a freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon race rising up to throw off the bonds of tyranny imposed by a foreign despot, Houston was also fully convinced of the inevitability of the general American Anglo-Saxon expansion. To him “the genius as well as the excitability” of the American people impelled them to war. “Their love of dominion,” he said, “and the extension of their territorial limits, also, is equal to that of Rome in the last ages of the Commonwealth and the first of the Caesars.” The people of the United States, he argued, were convinced that the North American continent had been bestowed on them, and if necessary they would take it by force. He told one correspondent in 1844 that there was no need to be concerned about the population said to occupy the vast area from the 29th to the 46th latitude on the Pacific: “They will, like the Indian race yield to the advance of the North American population …”

Sam Houston famously opposed Texas joining the Confederacy. He wasn’t so much a hard edged racist as a romantic Anglo-Saxonist and Texas nationalist swept up by Manifest Destiny. To his credit, he was also right that the Confederacy was unprepared for the War Between the States.

Note: If Sam Houston was a Romantic Anglo-Saxonist, President Thomas Jefferson was an Enlightenment Anglo-Saxonist. Both Jefferson and Houston saw the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty as an ethnic quality. Neither Jefferson or Houston would have cared for the modern deracinated cuckservative as both men were patriots and intensely loyal to their own people.