Our First War in Mexico

fior Alaman might well have paused before reviving it. He should have remembered how the dearth of Spanish goods had forced the Spanish colonists from Texas to Peru either to do without or to trade with foreign smugglers (see page 4). He should have remembered the tragic results of the spasmodic attempts of the Spanish authorities to stop this smuggling by savage attacks on the free-traders ?the blazing cities and sunken galleons that paid for the treacherous destruction of Francis Drake's and John Hawkins's trading fleet in the harbor of Vera Cruz; the sack of Panama by the buccaneers after they had been forbidden by the Spaniards to hunt the wild cattle of the West Indian islands and so turned to Spaniard-hunting; and the War of Jenkins's Ear. He should have realized that the American-born Texans and the coastwise skippers who supplied their wants were of the same fighting stock as Drake and the buccaneers, and that when the Texans needed new ploughs, which they could not buy in Mexico and were forbidden to import from the United States, it would take more than a few hundred half-breed Mexican conscripts scattered along the coast to suspend the law of supply and demand. The climax came when Colonel Brad- burn, the Kentucky-born commander of the Mexican post at Anahuac on Galveston Bay lost his temper after two years of constant bickerings, and in May, 1832, arrested and imprisoned without warrant seven prominent Texans to overawe the smugglers and their sympathizer...