Mexico, with only about 3,500 non-native residents in Texas in the 1820s, encouraged immigration as a buffer against raids and American filibusters. By 1834 about 30,000 Anglos and 5,000 enslaved people outnumbered 7,800 Mexican-born residents, and Texas’s exemption from Mexico’s 1829 abolition of slavery was never written into the constitution. When Antonio López de Santa Anna replaced the federalist Constitution of 1824 with a centralist republic and sacked Zacatecas, settlers at Gonzales refused in October 1835 to return a borrowed cannon under a Come and Take It banner. Texian long rifles outranged Mexican smoothbore muskets, and General Martín Perfecto de Cos surrendered San Antonio de Béxar in December.
The volunteers went home and the provisional government split over independence or the 1824 constitution, while the Tornel Decree classed foreign fighters as pirates. Santa Anna marched overland through snow up to 16 inches deep, took the Alamo on March 6, 1836, and more than 340 of James Fannin’s men were executed at Goliad. Sam Houston retreated east in the Runaway Scrape, then had Vince’s Bridge destroyed and attacked at 4:30 in the afternoon on April 21 at San Jacinto, winning in 18 minutes. Santa Anna, found in a private’s uniform, signed the Treaties of Velasco, which Mexico disavowed.
- Many Mexican conscripts came from the tropical Yucatán and had no winter coats.
- Santa Anna rejected the coastal route because supply ships would reveal his destination.
- Friendly fire within dense assault columns caused many of the 400 to 600 Mexican casualties at the Alamo.
- About 650 Mexican soldiers were killed and 300 captured at San Jacinto.
- After independence many Tejanos who had fought for Texas were forced off their land or pushed into Mexico.
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