The Archive War - American History, 1493-1945

Letter from Sam Houston to Edward Burleson regarding the safety of Austin as Texas's capital

11 April 1842

View the letter from Sam Houston to Edward Burleson regarding the safety of Austin as Texas's capital in the resource

From 1836 to 1845, Texas was an independent state, but during this whole period – from its violent separation from Mexico to its incorporation into the United States – it had to struggle to maintain this independence. Even after the success of the rebellion by Anglo-American settlers that threw off Mexican rule, armed conflict still flared up in Texas, between the settlers (‘Texians’) and Mexicans, between settlers and the local Indian tribes, and among settlers with rival visions for the nascent nation.

These three sources of conflict coalesced in 1842 around the seemingly unlikely issue of the location of the Texas governmental archives. The capital of Texas at this time was Austin, founded three years earlier by President Mirabeau Lamar. Austin is geographically towards the center of Texas but was at this time on the frontier of American settlement, and menaced by raids from the local Comanches. In 1841 Lamar had been succeeded by Sam Houston, who set about attempting to return the administration to its former home at Houston, nearer the coast and in a more heavily populated and, so its proponents asserted, safer area. Congress, however, had set its face against another move.

In February 1842 Texas was invaded by Mexico. Austin was put under martial law and President Houston moved himself and his office to the city that bears his name. He ordered that the archives be sent after him, but a committee of citizens, determining that Houston’s departure had already dented confidence in Austin, resolved that this order was illegal and that they would prevent removal. This letter was written by Sam Houston two months later to his vice-president, Edward Burleson, setting out at some length why Houston’s location makes it preferable to Austin as the seat of Texan government, why his order to move the archives was and remains legal, and why the archives should therefore be taken from Austin forthwith:

It is needless for me to suggest to you the evils which would result to our country from the fact that a Mexican force had taken the capital of the Nation and destroyed the archives. Texas, now struggling with difficulties, would be overwhelmed by such a calamity. […] The only question is, are the archives safe? Or as safe at Austin as they would be at some other point in the Republic? All must answer, they are not.

Houston, as a proponent of integration into the USA, also warned that the wrangling over the seat of government and the legality of his own actions risked alienating the people he saw as Texas’s natural allies:

If volunteers from the United States find us in a seditious or insurrectionary state, they will not remain in Texas to unite their efforts or their destiny with a people who will not regard the constitution, and thereby show that they are incapable of self-government.

These concerns went unheeded. In September a Mexican force captured San Antonio, and Houston again demanded that Congress ensure the safety of the archives by moving them; in December a vote on the issue failed to pass in the Senate thanks to Burleson, the presiding officer, casting his deciding vote against. Houston at this point lost patience and privately ordered a detachment of soldiers to Austin. Despite having a cannon fired at them by Angelina Eberly, an enraged townswoman, the soldiers made away with the archives and succeeded in holding on to them until the following night, when a group of pursuers from Austin rode into their camp and stole them back. The dispute ended in a victory for the Austinites: their city remains the Texan capital, and threats to the city were nullified by Texas’s annexation by the United States in December 1845.

Sam Houston and the Archive War