Preface

The Texas Revolution is one of the most remarkable political events ever recorded. A population of twenty thousand throwing off the despotic yoke of eight millions of people who claimed to be the mother state, and nine years successfully contending against such odds, with a steadily increasing ability so to do, makes the wonder of the achievement. Wonderful as it is, it is far from being bloodless. Napoleon, in twenty years' warring with nearly the whole civilized world, did not lose half as many men in proportion to the population of France as has Texas.

At the repeated request of many friends both in Texas* and the United States, the author offers to the public the following pages, in which he has endeavoured to give a faithful account of the most important incident of this sanguinary struggle, about which much has been said by the governments and people belligerant, as well as by friendly neutral powers. In doing so, as authorship is not his desire, he will make no apology for the manner; though, should he interest the reader with a plain tale, told in a plain way - of Texian daring, of battles won and lost, of dungeons and old castles, of imprisonment and hair-breadth escapes, of unparalleled sufferings and cruel murders - he will have fully accomplished the purpose of an impartial record while in a tyrant's chains. If the author has failed in giving the whole truth, it is in this, that a too studied regard for brevity has involved obscurity. The writer's position, also, in the expedition against Mier, and subsequently as a prisoner of war in Mexico, placed him in [viii] another difficulty - that of rendering it necessary to speak of himself. If his conduct throughout has been praiseworthy or otherwise, it would be unnatural to acknowledge the one, and immodest to avow the other.

If the author has been unjust to Mexico, it is in failing to detail more at length her vices; and for fear that a too charitable community would ascribe to him personal vindictiveness, and then more charitably balance that account with his ill treatment and sufferings, he has forborne in many particulars to say what, perhaps, he should have said.

He will assert, that what he has said of the general degradation of that nation, of the wretched want and misery of the million, is far short of the whole

* See Appendix No. VII.