Sam Houston

Sam Houston commanded the ragged Texian army at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, and in 18 minutes routed the Mexican forces of General Santa Anna, capturing the general himself and effectively ending the Texas Revolution. It was the culminating moment of a life that had already included service under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, two terms as governor of Tennessee, several years living among the Cherokee Nation after his first marriage collapsed, and a move to Texas when the territory was still Mexican soil.

Houston became the first and third president of the Republic of Texas, steered the republic toward annexation by the United States, then served as one of Texas's first U.S. senators. He was a rare Southern Democrat who opposed the extension of slavery into new territories — not from abolitionist conviction but from a Unionist calculation that expansion would fracture the country. His reading proved correct. When Texas seceded in 1861, Houston, then serving as governor, refused to take the Confederate loyalty oath. He was removed from office, offered federal troops by Abraham Lincoln to restore his position, and declined. He died in 1863 as the war he had tried to prevent consumed both nations he had served.

Houston's life traced the full arc of Jacksonian America — the frontier, the Indian wars, the cotton republic, the expansion, and the catastrophe of disunion. He was a man of enormous contradictions: a slaveholder who opposed secession, a white politician who had lived among and married Cherokee women and been adopted into the tribe, a celebrated general who privately doubted the wisdom of war. The city named for him in 1836 grew into the fourth-largest in the United States, an irony that would likely have amused him.