Sam Houston maneuvered the Mexicans to defeat at San Jacinto
It was never Houston’s intention to take the Texian army to San Jacinto. He determined to retreat toward the Louisiana border, lure Santa Anna across the Neches River, and trigger the participation of the U.S. army.
Houston admitted as much. In 1845, during a speech to supporters in his namesake city, Houston was remarkably candid.
I arrived at Gonzales on the 6th [Wrong: Houston arrived in Gonzales on March 11—S.L.H.] and gathered some three hundred and fifty men fit for service, many of them without arms and ammunition. In the course of two days I received the lamentable information that Colonel Travis and his noble compatriots has succumbed to overwhelming numbers and had been brutally slaughtered. I immediately sent a courier to Colonel Fannin ordering him to destroy all his artillery that he could not remove and retreat to Victoria, and informed him of the fall of the Alamo. Deaf Smith having returned from a scout reported the enemy advancing. I then determined to retreat and get as near to Andrew Jackson and the old flag as I could.
Observe that Houston made this determination at Gonzales, at the very outset of the San Jacinto Campaign. What a remarkable admission this is. If Houston was telling the truth, he never intended to fight on the Colorado, nor the Brazos, nor did he intend to turn south at the forks of the road. Did Houston lie to his men and government officials when he repeatedly said he intended to defend the Texian settlements? Yes, what other conclusion can one reasonably draw?
Thus Houston began his retreat. First to Burnham’s Ferry, then to Beason’s Crossing where he learned of Fannin’s surrender and capture, then to San Felipe on the Brazos River, then upriver to a campsite in the Brazos bottoms across the river from Jared Groce’s plantation. While there, Houston’s unwillingness to reveal his ultimate destination generated an abundance of camp talk. On April 12, the Texian army broke camp and began an eastward march. April 16, brought the volunteers to a major crossroad, both actual and metaphorical. The north fork led to Nacogdoches and safety, the south fork toward Harrisburg and confrontation. Tensions ran high as the army approached the spot they would recall as the “forks of the road.” Riding toward the rear of the column, Houston remained uncharacteristically silent; cheering, the army took the south fork.
Since that day, controversy has surrounded the incident. Did Houston intend to turn south at the forks of the road. After the fact, he swore that he did but witnesses on the ground had different recollections. Robert Coleman, a Houston aide-de-camp, quoted the general saying the following while still in camp across from Groce’s plantation: “So soon as it is ascertained in camp that the enemy is at San Felipe, . . . half the army will be teasing me to fight. . . . I am, however, Commander-in-Chief. I will retreat to the Red lands. . . . I will immediately issue marching orders, and a retreat shall be commenced as soon as possible.” Captain William Heard and Orderly Sergeant Eli Mercer recalled that the soldiers compelled Houston to march toward the enemy:
We believe that Gen. Houston intended to take the road to the Trinity when we arrived at thee fork at Donohue’s [actually Donoho], because he had sent Major [George P.] Digges, with another individual, to Robbins’ Ferry on the Trinity, to stop all recruits coming to the army at that place. The men, believing this to be his intention, made no secret of their dissatisfaction, and there was an arrangement among them that, in case he took the road to the Trinity, with his regulars, the volunteers would call out for a leader to go at their head to Harrisburg to meet the enemy, all of which we believe was known to Gen. Houston, and which, we think, was the cause of his turning in that direction.
Anson Jones was confident that the decision to turn right at the forks of the road fouled Houston long-term strategic plan to lure Santa Anna to the Neches River:
In my memoranda for 1839, of April 2d, is a note of a conversation with Mr. J. W. Houston of Washington, D.C., an intimate and confidential friend of Gens. Jackson and Houston, in which he informed me that Gen. Jackson agreed to claim the Neches as the true Sabine and as the boundary between the United States and Mexico under the treaty of 1819, with Spain [This was the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819] and that he would defend and fight for that line. The retreat of General Houston in 1836, was, therefore, doubtless with a view to that understanding, and to place his army behind that line. It was anticipated that Santa Anna would not regard this pseudo claim, and would, in pursuit of the Texans, if the retreating policy were long enough continued, cross the Neches, which would have afforded the Government of the United States a pretext for making common cause with Texas, and produced the same state of things which was brought about ten years later by Gen. Taylor’s advance to the Rio Grande, that is, “:war by the act of Mexico,” and with precisely the same want of truth. This plan was defeated by the determination of the Texan troops, by which Gen. Houston was forced on the 15th of April, 1836, to deflect from the road to Nacogdoches, Gaines’ Ferry, and Fort Jessup, and to take the one which led to San Jacinto. The affair at this place was one of those singularly fortuitous and accidental circumstances, by which “the best laid schemes of mice or men” are sometimes frustrated. The Texan people have great reason to be thankful to a kind Providence for that event, but the schemes of Generals Santa Anna, Jackson, Houston, and Gaines, were all, in different ways, more or less disappointed by it.
If Houston was strangely inactive on April 16, it was because a higher authority had already made the decision—a decision with which the general bitterly disagreed. Robert Coleman (writing in the third person) provided a probable explanation.
After dark, the General met Col. Coleman, and requested him to go amongst the soldiers and say that in the morning he would take the Harrisburg road; that he had been ordered to do so by Col. Rusk, the Secretary of War; and that in so doing he yielded to his own judgment in obedience to his superior. Col. Coleman obeyed these instructions, but the excitement was not diminished; the soldiers were suspicious, and much discontent prevailed.
Colonel Sidney Sherman corroborated Coleman’s version. “General Houston told me that Rusk had given him orders to take the Harrisburg road,” he insisted in an 1859 letter, “and he was bound to obey him as his superior officer and requested me to inform my regiment to that effect.” If Coleman and Sherman were correct, it was Thomas Jefferson Rusk—not Sam Houston—who made the most important command decision of the San Jacinto Campaign.