ave in popular imagination the status of folk heroes, notably Stephen F. Austin, Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, as well as Sam Houston, who was instrumental in instigating the Texas War and in getting Texas admitted to the Union. The power of personality has, however, obscured a more complex situation that in one sense overwhelmed evolving human motivations and aspirations in Texas and in another sense had the effect of making war there inevitable. The complexity has to do with how Texas came to be a battleground in the first place, and that has to do with the decline of European imperial ambitions in North America and Mexico in the early 19th century and the growing importance in the United States of the concept of Manifest Destiny, the name given to the idea that U.S. territory should extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and enlarge as far south toward Mexico and as far north toward Canada as possible.
Although in the earliest rush of global exploration Spain was the most significant presence in the New World, by the early 19th century the Spanish Empire retained almost nothing of her 16th- and 17th-century luster. Like other Continental states, Spain was vexed by Napoleon's invasion, and by 1830 all of the Spanish colonies of Central and South America had achieved independence. In 1821, after a 10-year revolution abetted by installation of a progressive government in Madrid in 1920, it was Mexico's turn. Independence gave Mexico territory that stretched from Texas to California.
Mere independence, however, did not settle the matter. Mexico's new government was unstable. It began as a reform monarchy under Agustin Iturbide, former royal commander, but Iturbide's monarchy was replaced within a year with a republic proclaimed by Brigadier General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The republican government enabled Santa Anna to consolidate power vis-a-vis the erstwhile anti-Royalist revolutionaries. Even so, Mexico experienced "f...