How a historic Texas battle helped lead to the United States as we know it today

We’ve reached the point this year when we mark the origins of our state, even as the health and economic threat of the coronavirus crisis so occupies our daily attention.

Perhaps we should step aside for a moment and reflect upon this anniversary of a major turning point in American history that unfolded on a Southeast Texas battlefield and profoundly shaped the formation of the Western half of our country.

April 21 marks the day 184 years ago when the map of what was ultimately to become the United States was largely determined in 18 minutes of fierce fighting. Gen. Sam Houston’s Texians summarily defeated a larger force under the command of Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna.

The result was the creation of the Republic of Texas, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico through Louisiana and Arkansas and encompassing parts of current-day Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico.

It would be another nine years before Texas became the 28th American state, with the Southern and Western borders still in dispute with Mexico. That conflict was finally decided at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 which extended U.S. territory to the Pacific Ocean.

Although a contested idea of American imperialism, the concept of manifest destiny – the belief that settlers were destined to expand across the continent – was launched by the victory at San Jacinto.

While many folks will say this is not new knowledge for them, a review of how this result was achieved just 53 days after Texas independence was declared is a compelling study. So is that of the most famous Texan of them all.

In those few weeks, Houston had dispatched Jim Bowie to the Alamo with orders to abandon it, as its defenders were up against a far superior Mexican force. Another massacre befell the Texians at Goliad two weeks later, and finally, Santa Anna was out-maneuvered and defeated by the army Houston had finally been able to assemble for the fight.

Houston’s battle tactics were fashioned by his mentor, Andrew Jackson, with remarkable success against the world’s most powerful military at the Battle of New Orleans. That victory ensured the British would not have a stronghold inside the U.S. following the War of 1812.

As a 21-year old lieutenant serving under Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend during that war, Houston survived what doctors believed to be fatal wounds when his heroism bonded him to the future president.

During the next 20 years, Houston would emerge as a leader across two states and during stays with the Cherokee Nation.

With Jackson’s support, he was elected to the U.S. House, and four years later, he became the governor of Tennessee at the age of 34. Two years after that, he resigned and moved to the Arkansas Territory.

He settled in Texas in 1832 and became the top-ranking official in the Texian Army, empowering him as the leader of the forces that would defeat Santa Anna and setting up all that was to follow in shaping the future of our country.

After the war, he was twice elected president of the new republic, then governor after serving as senator. He remains the only person to serve as governor and in Congress from two different states.

His statue looming along Interstate 45, the world’s tallest of an American Hero, is there to remind us that without him, the western border of our country might have been the Rocky Mountains.

Richard Greene is a former Arlington mayor, served as an appointee of President George W. Bush as regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency and lectures at UT Arlington.