Gen. Sam Houston is one of the great heroes of Texas history — a general, senator, governor and larger-than-life Texas statesman. His eldest son Sam Houston Jr., while not quite so notable, lived a long and productive life as well.
But the two Houston men had widely differing opinions of Waco.
Gen. Sam — the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto and the founding of the Republic of Texas — lived for a time in the village of Independence, the original home of Baylor University, from 1845 to 1886. Houston enjoyed an excellent relationship with the fledging university, including its irascible president, Rufus Burleson. It was Burleson himself who baptized the legendarily crude and rambunctious Houston in the small creek dividing Baylor’s Male and Female divisions — causing the mass death, Houston quipped at the time — of all fish downstream.
(The Houston home was adjacent to Baylor in Independence where it still stands today.)
His son, Sam Jr., enrolled first in Allen’s Military School in Bastrop then in Baylor University, where he is listed as a student in a rare copy in The Texas Collection of The Fourth Annual Catalogue of the Trustees, Professors and Students of Baylor University, 1856, in the “Preparatory Department.”
Gen. Sam Houston may have been redeemed by Jesus, but he continued his blunt, abrasive style of bare-knuckles campaigning for various offices, both in the Republic and later in the State of Texas, making devoted friends and venomous enemies in equal measure.
As national conventions of 1857 drew near, then-Senator Houston was even widely regarded as a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States. At wife Margaret’s insistence, Houston initially declared he was retiring from politics. However, while meeting in Waco, Texas Democrats nominated Hardin Runnels, Houston’s fiercest rival, for the office of governor. Houston abruptly reversed himself and decided to run against Runnels.
Accounts of the state convention that year in Waco are pretty horrific to read — Houston was viciously slandered and denounced as a traitor to Texas, and his opponents vowed to attack him throughout the campaign.
Houston, in response, violently and repeatedly excoriated his foes — and Waco itself — for hosting the convention, characterizing the city as being full of “fellow thieves, rascals and assassins.”
Alas, Houston lost the race for governor to Runnels and left the Senate at the end of 1859.
The governorship quickly overmatched Runnels, however, and when Houston returned to Texas at the end of his term in Washington D.C., he was inundated by letters urging him to run again. Author James L. Haley cites one such letter from C.B. Way of Waco, “a city that Houston had repeatedly disparaged during the 1857 campaign,” that included a petition from a hundred citizens of McLennan County, all claiming: “We are in earnest. We think Texas needs your services. We don’t believe you can refuse her … We can safely promise a majority in this County larger than in this City.”
This time, Houston won the election and became governor during the pivotal year of 1860 as Texas and other Southern states quickly careened towards secession and Civil War.
The prospect of war horrified Houston, who had experienced war first-hand, been wounded on three different occasions, and had traveled widely in the North. He spoke tirelessly against rebellion, accurately predicting a long and bloody conflict that could only result in the destruction of the Confederacy.
But Houston was opposed by thousands of politicians and preachers — including Baylor’s Burleson — who enflamed their listeners with visions of Southern patriotism and demanded that their young people enlist and fight in a “glorious cause.” Houston found himself in a decided minority, again vilified on every side and sometimes physically attacked.
On his final abortive speaking tour of Texas pleading with his fellow Texans to halt their headlong rush to war, it all came to head in Waco. Marquis James’ biography of Houston, “The Raven,” notes that Houston’s life was “threatened” in Waco. Teri Jo Ryan writes that on New Year’s Day 1861, Houston, now 68 and in poor health, vainly tried to speak over the shouts of a large crowd of Wacoans, many of whom shook their fists, threw stones and loudly threatened him.
Soon, the mob overwhelmed his supporters and chased Houston from the Waco town square. When he took refuge in Capt. Shapley Ross’s hotel on Bridge Street, someone lit a keg of gunpowder by the building. The ensuing explosion knocked down part of the hotel, but Houston escaped to continue this lonely crusade.
When Texas seceded from the Union shortly thereafter, Houston was barred from the governor’s office for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy.
When war broke out, Houston also tried and failed to keep Sam Jr. from enlisting. Sam Jr. was badly injured in April 1862 at the Battle of Shiloh, only a gift Bible in his breast pocket — which stopped a Minié ball — spared his life, though he was left for dead on the battlefield. He spent months in a Union prison with his family not knowing if he was dead or alive.
While he was absent, his father, broken and discouraged, died in July of 1863 in Huntsville.
After the war, Sam Jr. attended medical school in Philadelphia and though he retained the title of “doctor” throughout his life, he apparently never practiced.
Instead, Sam Jr. became a professional writer, penning hundreds of articles, stories, plays, essays and at least one collection, “Sam Houston’s Rambling Rustlings.” Houston even published songs, including the sentimental lyrics to a song whose lyrics bemoaned the impact of his imprisonment on his dear mother, “The Southern Captive,” from 1866 — a copy is in The Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Sheet Music at Baylor.
Despite his father’s antipathy for the town, as a speaker, one of Sam Houston Jr.’s favorite stops on the lecture tour was Waco. In August 1878, The Waco Examiner reported on a lecture delivered by Houston in the District Court Room to a disappointingly small crowd. Houston is described by the writer as possessing a “fine, manly form” and as being “graceful in bearing.”
His topic, “On Broad Horns,” while “naturally suggestive of coarseness and hilarity” was “remarkable rather for subtility and refinement of humor and purity both of language and thought.” The article closes with the writer noting that “we should be very much pleased to hear the lecture again.”
After the positive reception his work in Waco, The Waco Daily Examiner later declared that “Dr. Sam Houston is so pleased he will probably locate in Waco.”
Another article in a Waco paper indicates that the Houstons apparently did move to Waco shortly thereafter.
But after the death of his wife of Lucy in 1886, Houston returned to his childhood home in Independence, joining the household of his sister, Margaret Lea Houston Williams.
Houston returned to Waco one last time in September 1891, where he addressed a chapel service at his alma mater on the topic of “On Foot in Mexico.” The reporter declared that “Dr. Houston is a genius of the first order. Some of his sketches of Mexico which the writer published many years ago would have ranked with the finest produced by any English pen.”
Dr. Sam Houston Jr. died in Independence on May 3, 1894, and was buried in the cemetery of Independence Baptist Church, his family’s home for much his life, and just a block from the original Baylor Male and Female campuses.
