An approachable and lively popular history of the founding of an independent Texas.

The author touches on the domestic politics of Mexico and the USA at the time, giving just enough not to slow the pace of his narrative. Each of those topics have made multiple books in themselves, but this was not the place for them.

Dr Brands is discreet and leaves the reader to draw her or his own conclusions about the characters, colorful and perfidious, who are the protagonists.

Brands does the liberation of Texas? I’m in! At least this was my initial reaction to this book. I had read a couple of his histories so I knew the score beforehand. Brands produces serviceable histories centering around the biographies of key players(usually men) in history. He’s never too controversial, but details and analysis can feel rather thinnish. Still, while Brands may have been born in the northwest, most of his education and academic career has taken place within the Lone Star State. So, I’ll admit, I expected something special. What I got was, well, Brands. I’m not complaining. Not really. Brands covers his biographical bases well: Both Austins, Houston, Bowie, Crockett, de Santa Anna etc etc etc are trotted out in an orderly and respectful fashion. The book covers Moses Austin’s initial efforts to establish a colony within Spanish Texas to Houston’s resignation as governor due to Texas entering the civil war as a confederate state over slavery. Alamo buffs will almost certainly be disappointed by the skimpy treatment this iconic event receives in Lone State Nation. Brands takes the long view of history. Readers searching for deep and thorough details concerning specific events probably should avoid his corpus altogether. However, if you’re looking for a popular history of the Yellow Rose State before the US War Between ‘em then Lone Star Nation should serve a sufficient repast until fuller-course meals can be found ahead.

An excellent work which tells the story of Texas, from Austin to Houston. Much about the relationship with Mexico and the battle for Independence. The heroes were all flawed men who sought to live for the principles of freedom.

An engaging and easy to read summary of Texas and its colorful characters. 4 stars because the ending felt a little rushed and I wanted it to discuss annexation to the US and the lead up to secession in a little more detail.

By a large margin, my greatest issue with this work is the title. It reads as being overtly jingoistic and perpetuates that dumb stubborn pride many associate with Texans who share their stately heritage in a way that isn't negative. Even the subtitle is misleading, as the mentioned "Ragged Army of Volunteers" didn't actually obtain Texas Independence; they simply captured one threatening and powerful head of the politically conflicted hydra that was the Mexican Government.

That issue addressed and shelved, the content within this book was incredible. Obviously it's coverage of Texas history is limited, but it honors the complexity of the events and people within its established scope. It does not shy away from or dumbly revere the harsh history and reality associated within its timeline. Selfishness, greed, political duplicity, racism, and many other ugly traits are fully demonstrated here; as are more beautiful and venerable ones.

Nothing is ever presented as to be so one-sided that terrible deeds go without some deeper human understanding, or that great accomplishments ride on without some deplorable aspect clinging on. Mexicans living in Texas fought in tandem with white Americans at the Alamo against Santa Anna's army and the troublesome laws of his dictatorship. Santa Anna established said dictatorship largely in part because of how conflict-laden and slow the newly independent Mexican government was. The Mexican government was so slow and conflict-laden because they had just achieved independence from the Spanish Empire, whose century old traditions had become to burdensome and complicated to carry forth into the new world. So on, and so on. This kind of complexity (of which I'm just grazing some surfaces) is tactfully and entertainingly approached by author H. W. Brands.

If there's any other issue that absolutely has to be addressed outside of the title, it would probably be pacing / attention to detail. While most of the detail is centered around 1836-1845, areas outside of that are sometimes grazed over while others are focused on in a way that feels inconsistent. Ultimately, I think that these detail laden detours and quick summary express lanes dispersed throughout are necessary.

The last thing I'll share is how inspired I am by the history and all those involved. I feel a greater awareness, appreciation, and understanding for the world I am a part of and come from. If there continues to be great changes within my life that I pursue, it will be in some part due to this work and the history of the world that I continue to engage with.

Not sure if it was the topic or what but I just didn't enjoy this a much as the author's book on Grant. Took me much longer to finish this one, that's for sure. Having attended public schools in Texas my entire life, it's possible I've been too heavily steeped in Texas history (and myth) to ever find it interesting.

Great read with a TON of Texas History.

I really liked this books. I listed to it on CD and where the reader did voices for the letters to distinguish them from the text of the book which was mostly helpful and only a little bit weird.

I haven't had an Texas history since high school (17 years ago) so this was a great refresher and full of things I never learned the first time around.

Lone Star Nation (LST) is possibly my favorite book about about the Texas Revolution. So far, I have read three books by H.W. Brands (Heirs of Our Founders, Andrew Jackson, and now LST) and he is an excellent historian and author. LST covers most of the same period as Heirs and Jackson and, as he demonstrates, it is next to impossible to understand the revolutionary experience in Texas without understanding Andrew Jackson, the war of 1812, and (equally important) Mexico's struggle for independence.

LST covers all areas of the Texas Revolution, but specifically digs into Austin's role in found the colony, what led him there and how it influenced the revolution. He also covered Sam Houston's background focusing on his experience in the war of 1812, as the governor of Tennessee, his long-standing relationship with Andrew Jackson and his leadership as he guided the republic into statehood. The background added to Santa Anna, was very important in developing his thesis, as well. Without a full understanding of how Santa Anna came to be you really cannot understand the Texas Revolution.

This book also demonstrates that the Texas Revolution is much more than a war of slavery and free land. The road to independence, as he demonstrates, is the culmination of American settlers' incessant need for more land, their drive to bend the rules and buck taxation when confronted with a corrupt government, and ultimately the settlers drive to make sense of a newly formed nation (Mexico) that was racked by continued revolution (ultimately, it was better to go it alone rather than continue dependence on a despotic nation that couldn't decide on a constitution).

Lastly, I really appreciated that LST did not focus heavily on the mythos of Texas history. This book dug into all the angles.

The Lone Star State of Texas was once a nation – the Republic of Texas. For nine years, from 1836 to 1845, Texas was every bit as much a country as Belgium, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States of America (all of which recognized Texan nationhood). The story of Texas, from Spanish province to Mexican territory to revolution to republic to U.S. statehood, has an epic quality to it, and H.W. Brands captures that epic quality well in his 2004 book Lone Star Nation.

Brands, a University of Texas historian, recounts, in a manner that is both engaging and critical, the saga of How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence – And Changed America (the book’s subtitle). Instead of going straight to the Alamo and the thirteen-day siege there, Brands takes the reader back into the historical context within which Americans began leaving the United States and moving, legally or otherwise, into Mexican Texas.

In 1821, when Mexico gained its independence from Spain, Mexican officials seem to have seen Texas as a inconveniently rugged border region – a place where hostile Comanches made it difficult to establish missions and advance the work of converting Indigenous people to the Catholic faith. Consequently, when an American named Stephen F. Austin presented in 1823 a proposal for establishing an Anglo-American colony in southeastern Texas, most Mexican officials had no serious objection. The general feeling seems to have been that the Anglos could provide a temporary buffer against Comanche depredations, and that the rest of Texas would eventually fill up with Mexicans anyway.

Stephen F. Austin “took his obligations as a Mexican citizen quite seriously” (p. 96). Therefore, when some initial Anglo-Texan discontent with Mexican rule flared up in the Fredonian Rebellion of 1826-27, Austin wanted no part of the Fredonians’ secessionist ways. “Austin’s settlers held title to their land and lived in as much peace and order as they had any right to expect so far from real civilization. Independence couldn’t improve their condition or his; on the contrary, it was likely to throw everything into turmoil” (p. 107).

Mexico was concerned about the increasing influx of Anglo-Americans into Texas; Brands, perhaps with an eye toward current U.S. politics, cleverly refers to the Mexicans’ deepening worries about “illegal immigrants” from the U.S.A. Meanwhile, the United States became increasingly interested – unofficially – in the possibility of acquiring Texas. An important figure in that regard was Sam Houston, a highly successful Tennessee politician who experienced a series of personal setbacks in Tennessee and transferred his home address and his allegiances to Texas.

Travelling in Texas in late 1832 on President Andrew Jackson’s behalf, Houston “learned more [at Nacogdoches] about…the hostility of the Americans toward Mexico.” Among other things, the settlers had called a convention, and “The mere calling of the convention reflected the cultural rift between the Americans and the Mexicans, for where the right of assembly and petition was part of the Americans’ English inheritance, it had no counterpart in the Spanish tradition” (p. 202), and therefore the Mexican authorities saw the settlers’ actions as seditious. Throughout Lone Star Nation, Brands illustrates well the causes and consequences of these differences in cultural perspective.

Throughout Lone Star Nation, Houston’s life and career are counterpointed with the life and career of his future adversary, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna – a charming and mercurial figure who could be a Spanish Empire royalist or a Mexican Republic revolutionary, a liberal or a conservative, a federalist or a centralist – depending on which way the winds were blowing. And, having seen examples of mass executions of captured rebels during earlier conflicts in Mexico, he eventually displayed a willingness to utilize the same sort of brutality.

Brands chronicles well the movement toward open conflict between Texans and Mexicans. He sets forth the somewhat checkered personal histories of future Alamo heroes like James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis, and emphasizes that the Texans were not exactly united on the question of seeking independence: “While Bowie, Travis, and Houston were doing their best to start a war, Stephen Austin was trying just as hard to stop it” (p. 243).

Eventually, armed conflict broke out at Gonzalez. The Texans besieged San Antonio de Béxar, and took it in late 1835, and Santa Anna moved his Army of Operations north toward San Antonio in response. Yet the expedition north showed Santa Anna’s deficiencies in the quartermaster and commissary aspects of tactical warfare. “Napoleon knew that an army travels on its stomach; if the Napoleon of the West knew that, he apparently forgot. Midway through the march, he ordered the five thousand men of the army placed on half rations.” Small wonder that Santa Anna’s own secretary “called the order unjust”, or that a lieutenant colonel of engineers “thought the expedition poorly conceived” (p. 309).

The story of the thirteen-day siege and battle of the Alamo is, of course, legendary in American annals. Brands tells the story of the Alamo well, and describes its overall significance eloquently:

Texas wouldn’t be taken easily. Santa Anna lost some six hundred men in achieving his victory, and though at this stage of the war he could afford the losses, he might not enjoy that luxury for long. On a different plane, the glorious demise of the Alamo garrison gave the Texans a rallying cry that lifted their political struggle against Santa Anna to the moral realm. In life, Travis and Bowie and Crockett were hardly the sort to inspire reverence, hardly the kind parents would name their sons after. But in death they transcended their flaws; absolved of their sins, they entered the pantheon of American heroes….Santa Anna’s great blunder at Béxar was not to lose so many of his own men but to kill so many of the enemy (and after the battle to burn their bodies, which added to the sacrificial significance). A military struggle, he might win; a moral struggle, never. (p. 384)

Not all of the Mexican officers, as Brands makes clear, shared Santa Anna’s bloodthirsty proclivities. Three weeks after the fall of the Alamo, 400 Texans who were supposed to march to the relief of the Texan garrison were instead surrounded at Goliad. General José de Urrea, who had already received Santa Anna’s no-quarter orders, negotiated the Texans’ unconditional surrender, with a tacit understanding that the Texans would be repatriated to the United States; he then notified Santa Anna of what he had done, with a recommendation that the surrendered men be shown mercy. Brands thus describes Santa Anna’s response:

Santa Anna grew livid on receiving this message, probably less from Urrea’s failure to follow orders than from his presumption in trying to push the commander into a corner. The whole point of the no-quarter policy was to kill the rebels on the battlefield, where such killings could be rationalized as occurring in the heat of the fight. By taking prisoners, Urrea had maneuvered Santa Anna into having to give a positive order for a mass execution, which Urrea apparently believed Santa Anna wouldn’t do. (p. 404)

But Santa Anna would and did give just such an order, and about 400 Texians were executed en masse. It is for that reason that, in the great Texian victory at San Jacinto weeks later, the Texians’ battle cry was not only “Remember the Alamo!” but also “Remember Goliad!”

Sam Houston does not come across as a terribly heroic leader during the Texans’ long retreat eastward after the Alamo and Goliad (Texans of later generations would call the flight of Texan soldiers and civilians the “Runaway Scrape”). And the Battle of San Jacinto that defeated Santa Anna and secured Texan independence on 21 April 1836 sometimes seems as if it came about quite spontaneously, as lots of angry, vengeance-minded Texans simply decided it was time to stand and fight. Brands points out that Houston “never succeeded in shaping his men into a regular army. From the beginning of the Texas Revolution to the end, the rebel troops were irredeemably democratic” (p. 283). Perhaps so – but on that day, those irredeemably democratic rebels whipped a properly trained regular army, and decisively, too.

Brands acknowledges that “hindsight would hallow the years of Texas nationhood”, and reminds the reader that “Texas schoolchildren would be taught to cherish the fact that their state, alone of the eventual fifty, had once been a separate republic”; but he wants the reader to be aware that “to those who lived through them, [the Texas Republic years] were fraught with danger and confusion” (p. 493).

The republic’s finances were “a bad joke” (p. 501), and “the underlying insecurity of the republic” (p. 502) was a more severe problem; Mexico still wanted Texas back, and showed that desire by twice raiding San Antonio during the early 1840’s. The republic was a disorderly, violent place where young men constantly drank, gambled, and fought; “crime – lethal and lesser – was a major problem”, and at times, “individual crime escalated to irregular warfare” (p. 504). Most Texans very much wanted annexation to the United States, but increasing Northern opposition to the addition of new slaveholding states meant that Texas’s accession to the Union was delayed.

The politics of slavery not only delayed Texas’s accession to the Union by several years, but also contributed to Texas’s leaving the Union just 16 years after attaining statehood. Brands captures well the dilemma that Governor Sam Houston faced when civil war broke out – “He, the man who had done more than any other to attach Texas to the Union, was now required to approve the severing of Texas from the Union” (p. 527). Ultimately, Houston refused to align with the secessionists, and as a result he was impeached and removed from office.

I found Lone Star Nation in a bookstore in San Antonio, and read it on a road trip across the Lone Star State, from Texarkana to Dallas to the Hill Country to South Padre Island. It is a book of epic scale and scope, fitting for the great state whose early history author Brands chronicles with care.

Nowhere near as good as his previous works. This is a spliced narrative built around a morass of quotations.

Awesome book, well written.