In Perote Prison


Following is a speech made by Hon. Maury Maverick of Texas, in Congress on Monday, March 28th, 1938. It recites the bitter story of the Perote prisoners, taken in San Antonio by General Woll in 1842. This speech was taken from the Congressional Record:

Mr. MAVERICK. Mr. Speaker, usually on March 2, which is Texas Independence Day, I rise on the floor to make certain remarks or place in the Record something which is of general interest concerning my State. Just preceding this March 2, I came upon a document of extraordinary historical interest, and received permission to place it in the Record at that time. However, later events caused me not to insert it as of that date in order to include information concerning Mr. T. C. Thompson, who had sent me the letter. Mr. Thompson had written me about two weeks before Texas Independence Day this year, stating that he had in his family files a letter from a man by the name of Maverick, which had been written in 1843. I immediately wired him and he, in turn, sent it to me. It turns out to be a letter to Jose Maria Bocanegra, Mexican Secretary of State, written by Samuel Augustus Maverick in 1843 while he was chained in a prison in Mexico.

I would not have asked permission to insert this in the Congressional Record except for its historical importance. The Samuel A. Maverick mentioned was my grandfather. Many people have written to me and asked about the origin of the term “maverick” as applied to unbranded cattle. This was not only one of the least of his accomplishments, but a mere accident. There is no romance to the story whatever—he merely had some 400 head of cattle that were left to roam in the wilds of Texas, under the care of a slave who never branded them. So people called them “Maverick’s cattle” finally people called them “Maverick’s,” and then they were called “mavericks.” Sam Maverick was never a cattleman, cared nothing for cattle, but it is true the great legend has grown up around his name. That is all there is to it.

The importance of the letter lies in the fact that he was connected with so many important incidents which have bearing on American history. A South Carolinian, a graduate of Yale University, he came to San Antonio in 1835 and took part in the battle which has had as great effect on American history as any other. It was the Battle of San Antonio, the city I represent in Congress. He arrived on the verge of the attack on San Antonio by Texan troops. Not realizing the situation, he was captured, then summarily sentenced to be executed by the Mexican military commander, but was saved by the intercession of a Spanish lady, who was the wife of John W. Smith, who had moved to San Antonio. Finally, he escaped and joined the Texas forces. These troops were in considerable confusion, and, many of them had returned to their homes. However, a leader arose among them—a simple, common, ordinary fellow by the name of Ben Milam. He listened to the harangues, the grumbling and the grouching for days. Bored, he finally announced that he was going into San Antonio. He said simply: “Who will follow old Ben Milam?” He led the attack, and Sam Maverick was with him. When victory had about come to the Texans, and at the height of the battle. Ben Milam was mortally wounded and died in Maverick’s arms.

This battle was the foundation of Texas’ freedom. It was rapidly followed by other battles, and by the Texas Declaration of Independence. It must be remembered that practically the whole West has been added to the United States of America due to this one little isolated battle and because of the heroism and sacrifice of a few men.

Somewhat after, Sam Maverick was made a delegate to the convention for the Declaration of Independence. In a little blacksmith shop at Washington-on-the-Brazos he signed the instrument which established the Republic of Texas, the only State in the Union which was once an independent nation. In 1836 he married Mary Ann Adams, of Tuscaloosa, Ala., and in 1838, with his wife and son, Sam (not my father, whose name is Albert), took up his residence in San Antonio. To the Republic of Texas he became the first Congressman of Bexar—my district—which then included all of West Texas and parts of the States of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Kansas.

In 1842 Mexico made war on the struggling nation. Texas was invaded and San Antonio was the first place attacked by General Woll, a Frenchman and professional soldier. He captured San Antonio, and one of the prisoners was Maverick. There followed one of the most tragic periods in the world’s history. Over deserts, over high, freezing mountains, the Texans were marched for 1,800 miles. Barefooted, their feet were slashed and cut by stones and thorny cactus. They walked, chained like dumb beasts, this small band of Texans, frequently without food, often fed the rotting entrails of cattle. Some of them died of the brutality and hardships. They were taken to the great castle of Perote, which still stands in majestic and austere beauty today. Not many years past I visited there and saw the cells in which the Texans were chained. Besides the Bexar prisoners were prisoners of the Santa Fe expedition, and also Mier prisoners. I shall not tell those stories here, but anyone caring to make research can find the most bitter and thrilling chapters of American history and of the most gripping interest.

At any rate I had known for a long time that Sam Maverick had finally been offered his freedom by General Santa Anna, the President of Mexico. He had been offered freedom if he would agree not to bear arms against Mexico, and although he was in extremely frail health and was chained like an animal in this prison he refused his freedom upon those terms. He sent a most contemptuous and insulting message to the President of Mexico, stating that he would prefer to die in prison rather than make any such agreement. These forefathers of ours actually believed in and suffered for free, democratic Anglo-Saxon government. General Santa Anna, the President of Mexico, was to these Texans a villain and a tyrant, although a cool view of history would indicate that he was not as evil a man as the dictators of today. The sufferings today in dictator-ridden worlds, the persecution of minorities should remind us—those of us who are overfed and well satisfied—that even our grandfathers really suffered for the establishment of a free government in this country.

But to go on with the story, Maverick was later released upon his own terms. He returned to Texas, where he found his wife, as well as the wives of other prisoners; to some he carried the sorrowful message of the death of their husbands. But he persevered and with other Texans he saw the bright Single Star of Texas enter the field of the Stars and Stripes.

Maverick believed in the future of Texas and of the United States of America. A shy fellow, with very little to say, he asked his captors one favor: that they give him the chains by which he was shackled in the prison at Perote. When he returned to Texas he gave them to his family with the simple statement that they might be preserved as a reminder of what had happened in the history of Texas. Those chains have now been given to the University of Texas, along with his torn buckskin breeches, and are on exhibition there.

The letter which I insert today has never heretofore been published. It has been entirely unknown to history. It is somewhat long, and tells of the sufferings of the Texans in the prison of Perote. It was sent to the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States in Mexico at the time, Hon. Waddy Thompson, of South Carolina, who was a remote relative of Maverick, and the grand uncle of the gentleman who sent it to me. Apparently it was never delivered to the Mexican Secretary of State.

And before I insert the letter, I might say a few words of T.C. Thomson, who sent it to me. It was in the latter part of February that he sent it, informing me that he was “straightening out his matters.” Later I wrote to thank him, and his secretary informed me that he was very ill and not expected to live. Since that time, on March 21, he has died. I have concluded that he sent me the letter, knowing he would soon meet death. Many of my Tennessee colleagues in Congress knew and admired him. He was a distinguished citizen of Chattanooga, and a former mayor of that city. Like his famous uncle, Waddy Thompson, he was born in South Carolina; and his father was also one of the most distinguished men of the South, and was Governor of South Carolina from 1882 to 1886.

The letter which he so kindly sent me, is reproduced exactly as written. It follows:

Perote, (fort and prison),

21st January 1843.

To His Excellency Jose Maria Bocanegra, Secretary of State and of Foreign Affairs, &c.

Sir, I am one of the fifty five Texian prisoners now unhappily confined at this place.

On the 11th of last September at San Antonio de Bexar we surrendered to Genl Woll. Upon the most solem(n) pledge of his honor as a man and soldier “that we should be treated as gentlemen, &c” He was induced to offer this lenity without solicitation because he was satisfied, as he said, that we had truly and honestly mistook his army for a band of highway robbers. Such robbers, he knew, were numerous, organized and daring on that frontier. He had moreover marched his army by a new and untraveled route.

On coming near our town he had seized and detained the three old and respectable Mexicans whom we had sent out with our white flag. In violation of the customs of civilized nations and even of his own proclamation of the 1st of September, Genl Woll kept these Commissioner(s) all night as his prisoners; thus not only unfairly depriving us of the benefit of our white flag, but also, absolutely turning the detention of these Commissioners into a proof, conclusive to every honest mind, that it could not be a regular army, but must, in consequence, be a lawless banditti.

Woll entered San Antonio about the break of day, before it was yet light, and under the convenient shelter of a dense fog. Firing succeeded on both sides, in the midst of which we were visited by a white flag and by Col. Camerco. The General saw our numbers did not exceed sixty men, and that we were undisciplined citizens, and said that it would be madness in us, situated as we were, to resist any longer his large army. It was for these reasons, and because the old Mexican men and women ran out into the streets, telling him that we were of the opinion that we were fighting off a company of robbers, that he urged upon us a surrender, upon those favorable terms.

After our surrender he perused the gazettes of New Orleans and of Texas and saw therein that England and other friendly powers were then offering a mediation between Mexico and Texas; and he perceived that Judge Eaves the American Charge had, a few of his government recommended to our president, a cessation of arms, which did in fact take place on our part, since we had a right to believe that Mexico would, if only out of respect for England &c, suspend hostilities on her part, long enough at least for the proposition to be presented and considered. General Woll saw and owned how natural all this was; and for these and other reasons, he appeared really to lament the error, into which, he saw, we had fallen; and again and again he repeated his promises of kindness and of his recommendations for our speedy release at San Fernando.

On the occasion, I acted as one of the Commissioners, and my memory retains every particular;—but in this connexion I am bound to state that I wanted to stand out in spite of those deceptive terms, refusing to surrender at all and protesting to Woll that I was the agent of desperate men; I demanded of Woll that we be allowed to withdraw in a body with out arms in our hands, otherwise I for one would refuse to answer for the consequences to him. In this I was not sustained; but the majority prevailing, we were in the end, through the specious promises of that general, coaxed into the horrid condition in which we now find ourselves.

Sir, what we told General Woll was, every word, the truth; and the smallest examination of the facts and this reasoning will convince you or any man of sense of the same. Woll’s proclamation was fulminated against those only who should be found in arms opposing the troops of the Mexican government. —Sir, after viewing this proclamation and these admissions of general Woll, does it not follow that we were doing only what was our duty without reference to the Mexican governmnt? and that, not knowing whom we were fighting, but honestly (as Woll admitted) believing it was robbers,—does it not follow that we ought to have been liberated at once? And it is not an undeniable truth that we were in effect kidnapped?—and that we are now here in Pirote, held by cruel force in opposition to law, justice and the plainest common ‘sense? We have made known in respectful terms, these and the other cogent reasons why your government ought to permit us to go back to our suffering families; but it has not deigned to notice us in these cheerless stone arches, unless to notice, be to subject us to the most cruel treatment that humanity can endure.

Good Sir. It has been my hope that the old doctrine, that might is right, has quite lost its advocates—its open advocates—, in all civilized countries.

Sir, right or (w)rong, we are prisoners in Mexico, and most woefully do we own the power of its governm(en)t over us. Trodden on and tyrannized over as we have been and every day, more and more, continue to be, how much better, O merciful God! Would it not have been to have thrown away our blood and our crushed bones under the wheel of a relentless tyranny, rather than have tampered with and tasted that poisoned flattery of the false Frenchman.

——. Mistake me not, it is not of our liberation that I am writing. I shall not call upon you to keep the word of honor of your general. You know the value of the pledge—I am quite at fault,—you shall weight and measure the thing in your own way. Besides it is true that I did not repose that confidence which others did and which they were authorized in doing.

And Sir I confess myself your implacable public enemy; but you owe me food, so long as you hold me a prisoner of war: and I have to request you to interpose your influence to save us from the malicious wrath and the practical cruelty and meanness of Capt Guzman, backed as he is by the Mayor de Plaza. This Guzman is Cammissary and head overseer of our work.

I am loath to think so meanly of any governmt on this continent asto suppose the existence of a particular order to starve us: although it be asserted that such is the case;—Even the Dey of Algiers before he was kicked by Christendom into a compliance with the usages of mankind—even he allowed food enough to his galley slaves to enable them to perform their daily labor. Here at Pirote, after being locked up twelve hours, on cold stone floors, without sufficient clothing, in chains and misery, we were turned out to a breakfast consisting of a very small cup of hot water of a darkish color and a fragment of bread which weighs three little Mexican ounces. We are then hurried out, with hand barrows and cart, loaded with horse manure and the multiplied filth of the place. We are then marched off to the adjacent mountain to pack in loads of stone, a distance of one league—or to a considerable distance for loads of sand—a labor which the human machine cannot stand on three ounces of bread and the false coffee of Pirote.

It is not the work, but the kind of work, and the work without adequate food, that I would complain of. As emigrants from the United States and the various respectable states of Europe we have ever been taught to regard labor as the only foundation of National greatness as well as of personal respectability. Therefore, however it may have been intended, we have not felt the mere labor as a disgrace. But we are chained by the legs with heavy ox chains, coupled like beasts, two and two together, and forced at the point of the bayonet side by side with your shameless convicted felons—robbers and murders.

I have seen the most dastard felon, as overseer, strike an unarmed and free born Anglo American. What is there will erase the memory of these permitted insults? The heavy flow of ocean, the eternal tide of time itself cannot cash out these stinking, clotted, bloody stains. We are made to work, without ever once having the pains of hunger satisfied by the cheapest and commonest food. At dinner time we are allowed a spoonful of rice which is the infinitesimal of eight and a half of your illiberal pounds of weight, only two and a half ounces to each man; the other remaining dinner pot commonly holds Irish potato broth (which is known to be a poison) sometimes, but very seldom it contains a poor soup and some bones, grissel and the voluminous entrails of a beef. Day before yesterday we had what they call a beef ration which is mostly bone and uneatable grissel. Some of the shares not having so much as one ounce of meat.

His Excellency the governor of this Castle, on being applied to through a respectful petition, thought proper to send back the Commissary and his compatriot the Mayor de Plaza, he himself refusing to look into the pot. From what I know of your people, I should as leave as not say that I suspect it to be tenderness of feeling, nay perhaps, even pity for us, and not hatred, that induces the governor to avoid us and evade an answer to our complaints—The dinner is finished out with red pepper and one loaf of bread, three of the size of which are sold by the women about the castle for a picayune.

The afternoons work and its insults, are rewarded by one half of those diminutive loaves of bread of three ouces weight, with a double handful of badly boiled beans and the water of the same. These beans are unsound and unwholesome. Will your Excellency pardon me if I send a little parcel of these beans (frijoles),—they afford such a true specimen of our fare. You will see by these beans how the whole matter stands. I will not think to offend you with a specimen of the meat; you understand——well enough what is literally meant by bone, grissel, and the badly cleaned guts of a poor cow with maggots in them. The convicts get better food and much more of it, than we do. Our cooks being two of our own number, we are enabled to compute with considerable accuracy the cost of our daily food, which, for fifty two men, at retail prices, does not exceed four dollars and three reals, not quite 8½ cents for each man. But as something or other is deficient every day, and the provisions may be bought at wholesale prices, it is evident that Six or seven cents will be nearer the truth.

For a while we had some little means for buying bread, rice &c from Captain Guzman;—it being a truth that notwithstanding he is Commissary and a captain and an overseer, he likewise keeps a little brokerage of eggs, shoes &c in our prison room under the eye of one of the prisoners, and other articles, in his own apartments. We were also made to accept from Lieutenant Hartstone, a stranger, a sum of money which has been of great use in the purchase of the Cheaper articles of food. Very few of us have any means left; and so far from receiving any assistance from the soldiery and the people of the country the truth is that we have been borrowed, begged, and robbed by them in every way and by every scheme and contrivance out of hell.

Four of our number are already in the hospital from starvation and eating badly cooked beans and other unwholesome food.—And others are pining away under the effects of labor and starvation. Three are in Solitary confinement and in chains, almost starved and nearly naked—two of them not having as much shirt on their broad backs as would cover the back of Your Excellency’s right hand. The offence given by these three carpenters is that having for a long time worked in the work shop nine hours per day they now have the audacity to ask for their wages at two bits (or reals) a day, as agreed upon, because they needed the small sum to buy, first bread, then a shirt, &c. God ha’ mercy, these men are much to be pitied:—and, as I take it, they are in no wise to blame. They agreed, at first to work at their trade all day, in order to get a little money for their extreme necessities; and they cannot work so long without twice as much food as they are allowed.

Of all the officers of the castle whom I have seen I am inclined to think most of Captain Bonilla and Lieutenant Mora. I judge from their countenances and manner that they are ashamed of the dirty and low offices to which others have brought themselves, (if not by orders).

Excellent, High Secretary, do I write too plainly?—and are you too elevated to notice these small matters? Perhaps you may be inclined to be ashamed to communicate with an ungrateful Texian; or it may be that the rights of humanity do not include our people. Or, if you mean t(o) degrade us, it will serve you as well to go into a rage at the plain terms in which I have stated plain truths. But Sir, turn as you will, and where you please, neither your anger nor your pride, nor that false and unavailing tenderness of feeling which characterizes the best of your people, can serve you as a shelter. Sir, you shall bear the responsibility of rejecting this appeal.

And if you be indeed the man of sense and feeling which they say you are, you will so order it that this Captain Guzman shall be removed and some other person less crafty and covetous put in his office of commissary;—and it will be so ordered that we be treated with more humanity, and, if required still to labor, fed like laborers and men of stomach. This Commissary and this treatment would disgrace Algiers:—they disgrace Mexico—if you would follow me to judge in this matter, I should say upon my honor and with due consideration, they are a disgrace to human nature, and would shame the Devil himself..

Respected Sir, I thought it proper to address you this on my own separate responsibility, and without consultation with my fellow prisoners; because if evil instead of good come of it, the evil shall fall on me alone. Another reason is that I am wholly insensible to any kind of fear in doing what I conceive to be right. I cannot conceive the idea of bad consequences in such a case; and if such follow, it is no business of mine. Another reason for my being forward in this unpleasan matter is that I am as insensible as a dog about the shame of putting myself in the attitude of a beggar for bread:—I shall even attempt to dignify my poor position ** (text lost; hole in the paper) •• declaring that there is no attitude of the graces so becoming, so full of soul and interest (as) that of the famished beggar, extorting from stony pride the rich morsel which is to prolong his life. A loaf of bread to the starved and abused prisoner is worth more to him than a mine of copper.

Another reason is that on the 5th of this month I was cast into a solitary prison for no other reason than that I said to this Guzman for the majority of my fellowsufferers for whom I was deputed to act, that we were not of right in the condition of slaves;—that the slavish labor exacted from us at the point of the bayonet, was in violation of the laws and usages of nations, and directly opposed to the express terms of our surrender; and moreover, that, if it was determined, in our case to violate all law and compacts, all justice and mercy, all pubic faith and private honor; even then it still remained and was a physical impossibility and high treason against God and Nature to requre and exact from us labor without sufficient food.

You Sir, and none other I thought to address, because I heard something favourable of you, and on account of your being the Foreign Minister, whilst I was a small member of another governmt the name of which I do not choose unnecessarily to mention. I sincerely trust that though plainly, nevertheless your Excellency will feel how respectfully I have addressed myself to your sense of justice and humanity. And in fine, will your Excellency have the goodness to forgive me for the excentricity of offering to make to you one of ** (text lost) ** hearty and truly respectful bows in the world; this significant piece of pantomime I shall however reserve for that blessed day, which I pray God may be close at hand, when, with the kind interference of your Excellency, I shall be permitted to go from hence, with my fellow prisoners.

I have a mind to request either the British or American Minister to hand you this note: I wish to know of its actual delivery; and it was the English convention about Mediation and the request of the American Charge, of which I have made mention, that unhappily, though undesignedly led us into the misery our present situation. For this reason I feel confident that neither of those gentlemen would refuse me the courtesy (I had almost said justice) of placing this in your hands. Besides I have the good fortune to be able to refer you to Genl Thompson the American Minister,—whose word in my favour will both give credit to my complaint and supply the little want of etiquette whicch I have committed in addressing you at all

With every becoming token of profound respect, I am your servant &c

Samuel A. Maverick.

P.S. Owning to the advice of some of my friends who either through timidity or a well apprehended expectation that our miseries as well as the length of our slavery would be rather increased than diminished by such a remonstrance as that above written,—and also deeming it possible that some relaxation might gradually reduce the government over us from extreme cruelty to tolerable moderation, I have till now forborne the sending of this letter.

The evils of hunger, labor, insults, cold and nakedness continue up to this date as intolerable as at first. We have tried the governor and every other authority in vain. There appears to be no relief but in death itself; befeore we die, however, we shall try to make it known to the world how cruelly and how unjustly we have been treated in this devilish inquisition.

It is reported that day before yesterday and President Santa Ana just before leaving here for Mexico, in connexion with something said by the Governor, made this observation, “Oh they do well enough (the Texian prisoners)—just give them plenty of beef and whiskey.”—Yesterday one of our queer Dutchmen was receiving forty nine pounds of stinking uncleaned cow guts for the forty nine of us out of the hospital, and ventured to say to Capt Guzman that he would like to see something of the beef and whiskey prescribed by the president—Guzman as usual remarked that the money was wanting. Yesterday & today we have nothing of the meat kind. Perhaps half the time we receive the refuse parts of the poorest beeves—all the better & fleshy portions being taken off to be eaten or sold by Guzman himself. We are equally unfortunate in the bread. We have changed two or three times from one description of bread to another, but all in vain. What ever kinds we take are artfully reduced in size to mere nothing.

In one word our labor continus as it did. We are heavily chained two and two together and we are in the same extremity of hunder as from the first. In this last extremity will you blame me as rash and presumptious to appeal to whatever sense of justice and humanity may be supposed to exist in the breast of that governmt, whose prime minister you are

With all suitable respect &c

S.A. Maverick

4th March 1843

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