Paul Revere of Texas – Juan Seguin
By U.S. Sen. John Cornyn
After the Alamo fell and its defenders were lost, Gen. Sam Houston retreated eastward with his remaining troops. The Mexican Army was not far behind. Those days, the spring of 1836, were the gravest possible for the fledgling Republic of Texas, and they produced a new Texas hero.
Capt. Juan Nepomuceno Seguin, an officer commissioned by Stephen F. Austin, rode hard on horseback ahead of Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s army after it seized Goliad. He warned settlers of the approaching danger, and became a Paul Revere of the Texas revolution.
As Houston made his way to San Jacinto, even the center of the young Republic at Washington-on-the-Brazos was abandoned. The desperate evacuation—called the Runaway Scrape—was a “pathetic exodus of refugees,” wrote historian James L. Haley, as “whole families quit their land grants, fighting panic and epidemics of measles and fevers, taking only what they could carry, and joining the eastward flight through mud and swollen rivers.”
“Houses were standing open, the beds unmade. The breakfast things still on the tables, pans of milk moulding in the dairies. There were cribs full of corn, smoke houses full of bacon, yards full of chickens … cattle cropping the luxuriant grass … Forlorn dogs roamed around the deserted homes, their doleful howls adding to the general sense of desolation … Wagons were so scarce that it was impossible to remove household goods, many of the women and children, even, had to walk,” Noah Smithwick recalled in The Evolution of a State.
Juan Seguin and his men provided the rear guard for Sam Houston’s army during the Runaway Scrape. When he arrived at San Jacinto, however, he learned his company of soldiers had been assigned to guard the camp while others were to fight the decisive battle on April 21.
“Seguin protested vigorously that no one in Texas had suffered more from Santa Anna than they, no one had a greater stake in the outcome, and indeed, they had no homes to go to unless the dictator was defeated,” historian Haley wrote. Houston agreed. “The Tejanos took their place in the line, with scraps of cardboard in their headbands to identify them as Texans.”
The advance began. Eighteen minutes later, the Texans had won. Many from that battlefield moved on to prominent roles in the Republic, and later the state of Texas. Juan Seguin served three terms in the Congress of the Republic, then two as mayor of San Antonio.
His military heroism and subsequent service did not insulate Juan Seguin from controversies later in life. As tensions mounted between newly arriving Anglos and Mexican Texans, he took his family to Mexico in 1842. In his memoirs, he wrote that he was forced to serve in the Mexican Army during the U.S.-Mexican War four years later.
Today, history remembers Juan Seguin’s courage in Texas’s fight for independence. Within a few years after the battle of San Jacinto, the town of Walnut Springs changed its name to Seguin. The city obtained permission to move his remains from Nuevo Laredo to Seguin in 1976 and erected a statue of him in 2000. Several schools in Texas now bear the name of Juan Seguin.
I was reminded of the bravery of Juan Seguin and the controversy that later enveloped him when I addressed the annual conference of the American GI Forum in Corpus Christi last month. Dr. Hector P. Garcia, a World War II army officer, founded the GI Forum to work on behalf of returning Hispanic veterans.
Throughout Texas history, people of many backgrounds and all walks of life have stepped forward and answered the call in defense of liberty. As we celebrate San Jacinto Day this month, Seguin’s story is another reminder that freedom is never free, and requires constant vigilance and sacrifice to keep it alive.
Sen. Cornyn serves on the Armed Services, Judiciary and Budget Committees. In addition, he is Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. He serves as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee’s Immigration, Border Security and Refugees subcommittee and the Armed Services Committee’s Airland subcommittee. Cornyn served previously as Texas Attorney General, Texas Supreme Court Justice and Bexar County District Judge. For Sen. Cornyn’s previous Texas Times columns: http://cornyn.senate.gov/column.
