Know Your White Texas History: William Barret Travis

 

 

Two years before the fateful Battle of the Alamo, the storm clouds—and leaders—of a revolution gathered across Texas.

Things looked up for William Barret Travis in the early months of 1834. The 24-year-old attorney had just set up his law practice in the town of San Felipe in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, and struggled to get his life in order. South Carolina born, he had left home, wife, son and unborn daughter in Claiborne, Alabama, three years earlier and settled in Anahuac, Texas. He soon ran afoul of Mexican authorities there, involving himself in incidents that led to armed conflicts, later known as the Anahuac disturbances. Censured by cooler heads among settlers, he found it expedient to relocate to San Felipe.

Now, he received good news. His estranged wife agreed to send him his five-year-old son, Charles Edward, to raise. He wasted no time arranging for an adult to bring the boy from Alabama.

He also learned of the repeal of the Mexican Law of the sixth of April 1830, which restricted immigration to Texas from the United States, but encouraged it from the interior of Mexico and Europe. Because he’d arrived in the Tejas (Texas) portion of Coahuila y Tejas in 1831, the law’s repeal provided him retroactive legality.

Travis’s law practice and personal life flourished. He kept a diary, recording nearly every activity. The existing portion, August 30, 1833 to June 26, 1834, reveals his devotion to detail. He recorded legal transactions, who he represented or opposed, including James Bowie and Stephen F. Austin. In addition, he kept track of his travels to and from San Felipe, some trips for business and others romantic. He documented purchases and sales; livestock, property, food, clothing, even down to a pair of socks. Some involved human beings, for others and himself. On Thursday, February 13, he recorded writing a bond for a J.W. Moore to the local sheriff, “indemnifying him to buy one Boy [sic] Joe belonging to Mansfield.”

He spent time gambling, with winnings and losses listed in the diary. He also read, favoring heroic stories such as Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs about William Wallace, and Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy.

Kind and generous, in May Travis paid $1 for a pair of shoes for the child of Johnathan C. Peyton. Peyton had died that month. In June he bought two books of J.B. Miller and sent them to the daughters of Dr. Pleasant W. Rose. In that same month he loaned a Padre Jaén $2, borrowed a cot for the padre to move in with him, and took on the responsibility of his board at another location. Sometimes brutal, Travis whipped “old Jack,” a slave who had committed the sin of getting drunk.

Despite not yet being divorced, Travis entered into a relationship with Rebecca Cummings of Mill Creek. On March 9, he attempted to visit her but found Mill Creek flooded and the surrounding countryside too boggy to continue. “The first time I ever turned back in my life,” he reported in his diary. However, he did not give up and the two exchanged gifts a few days later. He gave Rebecca a breast pin and took a lock of her hair, and she gave him a ring. By the end of April, he made plans to marry Rebecca as soon as his divorce became final.

Travis made one historical observation in his diary. He remembered January 8 as the “anniversary of the victory of New Orleans,” which occurred while he was four and a half years old. Stories of Andrew Jackson and his rag-tag army of soldiers, volunteers, frontiersmen, citizens and pirates in their stand against a superior force of the powerful British Army had made a lasting impression upon him.

RTWT

 

In 1835, a new official American map of Texas was published in accordance with the laws of the United States Congress. The detailed map illustrated Texas colonies and land grants, the Nueces River as the border between Texas and Mexico, the Indian Territory attached to Arkansas, and the Mexican state of New Mexico. Courtesy Library of Congress