Civil War Barons by Jeffry D. Wert

Author:Jeffry D. Wert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

THE DREAMERS

“WAR IS OUR ONLY COURSE,” READ THE PROCLAMATION OF the Committee of Safety. “There is no other remedy but to defend our rights, ourselves and our country by force of arms.” It was September 1835, and the “country” was Texas, a colony of Mexico. Trouble had been simmering for several years between the government in Mexico City and the settlers in this land a thousand miles from the capital. But the proclamation’s words were a declaration of war, a rebellion against national authority.1

The most respected man in Texas and its guiding spirit, Stephen F. Austin, chaired the committee. More than a decade earlier, Mexican officials had awarded him an empresario grant to bring Anglo-American families into Texas. By the 1830s, more than thirty thousand settlers, many lured by the promise of thousands of acres of cheap land, lived in the province. Inevitably, perhaps, trouble arose between the native Tejanos, Anglo-Americans, and the distant government. When the committee issued the proclamation, Mexican troops were on the march toward San Antonio de Béxar.2

Austin and the other five members of the Committee of Safety signed the document, publicly admitting to an act of rebellion. All of them, except one, had been among the three hundred original émigrés from the United States. The sixth member, Gail Borden Jr., had arrived in Texas on Christmas Eve 1829, coming from New York by way of Kentucky, Indiana, and Mississippi. Borden might not have thought of himself as a rebel before, but his family lineage traced back directly to Puritan Massachusetts and to another dissenter who also had espoused “new and dangerous ideas.”3

Born November 9, 1801, in present-day Norwich, Chenango County, New York, Gail Borden Jr. was the first child of Gail Sr. and Philadelphia Wheeler Borden. Both parents’ families had been in America since the 1630s. Philadelphia Borden was the great-great-great-granddaughter of Roger Williams. A Puritan minister, Williams had angered the theocratic leaders of Massachusetts Bay with his advocacy of religious toleration and the separation of church and state. Banished for his heresy, Williams found refuge among Native Americans along Narragansett Bay. Fellow dissenters followed, leading to the establishment of Rhode Island colony. One of the seekers of religious freedom who joined Williams was Richard Borden, the original member of the family in the colonies.4

Soon after their marriage in 1800, the Bordens moved to central New York, where Gail Sr. farmed and speculated in land, and Philadelphia gave birth to five sons. In 1814, the family journeyed west, down the Ohio River on a flatboat, and lived briefly in Kentucky before halting at New London, Indiana, on a U-shaped bend in the river. Tradition claims that at one time New London had served as a rendezvous site for river pirates and counterfeiters. When the Bordens arrived in 1816, the gangs of thieves had departed to ply their nefarious trade farther downstream and away from legal authorities. An early visitor to New London described it as “one of the most pleasant situations on that river,” offering “a charming view of the broad expanse of the Ohio.

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