A second Texan convention, conducted in 1833, had been bolder than the first. Andrew again had gone as a delegate. Into this one strode a new figure, a delegate from San Augustine who towered over most other men. He was Sam Houston, still less than forty years old but already a former governor of Tennessee, recently come into Texas after a long sojourn among the Cherokee Indians in Arkansas. His reputation had preceded him. Even so, Andrew had been surprised and impressed by Houston’s eloquence and bearing, his physical size, and by the way he seemed to dominate any room into which he walked.

But there had been something about Houston which bothered Andrew. “There’s Stephen F. Austin,” he had told James, “the man who brought the first of us into Texas, the man who’s held Texas together all these years with sweat and blood and guts, the man we owe everything to. Yet when Sam Houston comes in, it’s like Austin isn’t even there anymore. It’s like he doesn’t matter. Everybody’s attention goes to Houston.”

James had said, “From what I heard, Houston was a great scrapper back in Tennessee. Maybe he’s what Texas needs to keep Mexico from overrunnin’ us.”

“What Texas needs is a calm and steady hand. Austin has been real good for us all these years.”

But Texas was to lose Austin’s good services during a most critical period in its existence as part of the Mexican nation. The convention not only asked again for separate statehood, apart from Coahuila, but wrote a constitution for that proposed state over Austin’s objections. Against his better judgment, Austin carried it to Mexico City on behalf of the colonies he represented, in company with his friend Lorenzo de Zavala, a member of the Mexican cabinet. As before, it provoked a hostile reaction. It was widely regarded as part of a plot to separate Texas from the rest of Mexico and deliver it over to the United States. Austin was imprisoned, and de Zavala fled Mexico City for Texas. For a year and a half, Austin languished in a dungeon that had been used during the Spanish Inquisition, while Texans quarreled over where to turn and what to do.

The news out of Mexico was discouraging. Santa Anna had revealed the ugly side of his face. After coming to power on a promise of reinstating the constitution of 1824, he repudiated it. The state government of Coahuila had made welcome concessions to Texas: legalization of immigration, lower tariffs, improvement in the mails. But Santa Anna nullified all this. He disbanded Mexico’s republican congress and set up a new one subservient to his demands. He abolished the state legislatures and local ayuntamientos, declaring that all rules in the future would be written in Mexico City, and that the pen would be his own. When the liberal state of Zacatecas rebelled, he marched in with a force of five thousand men and laid to waste whatever stood in his way, leaving bloody scenes of wholesale rape and murder as an object lesson for any in Mexico who would defy his will. Long a student of France’s Bonaparte, he declared himself the Napoleon of the West and turned his attention to the restive north, to Coahuila, which had fallen into chaos and civil war.