There have been several TV and movie presentations of the battle for Texas Independence and this book is essential to understanding of the trials and turmoil that transformed Texas to a republic and then a state. The book deals with all the players of the conflict between the Texians and the Mexican government and the peoples of Mexico.

What a story and what a History of this great area of the world. The battles and conflicts of the conflict are covered in this book. The personalities of the characters in this turmoil are covered and represented by the narrative and do justice to the importance of the conflict and the times. The Alamo was important but the rest of the effort to create a new state independent from Mexico was the theme that held the narrative together.

This book traces the history of Texas from the earliest explorations by the Spanish through the establishment of the republic and the annexation into the United States. It details the efforts by Moses Austin to get a land grant from the Spanish and the beginnings of settlement under his son Stephen.
It follows the efforts of Mexico to get independence from Spain and the efforts to set up their republic. It then traces the conflict between Texas and Mexico that results in the Texas war for independence. It details the parts played by Houston, Travis and Crockett in the fight. It carries the story through the annexation by the United States.

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.

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.

H.W. Brands "Lone Star Nation: The Epic Story of the Battle for Texas Independence" is an interesting look at the history of the Texas from the point of the state's settlement through the end of the Civil War. Across over 500 pages Brands takes we the reader on a journey across the history of the state and explains some of the myth behind the story that is out there about the state and also fills in blanks about certain parts of the state's history that we the non-native might find interesting and also adds to the history of one of the more unique pieces of the landscape in American history. As someone who is a fan of Brands and his works, this book doesn't disappoint although at times the book can be a bit tedious. Overall though, this is still a book I highly recommend for anyone with a love of history and the parts that make it what it is

A must read for every Texan! I learned more from this book than all the Texas history courses and units from school combined.

H.W. Brands

H.W. Brands, of the University of Texas Austin, is one of America's most prolific historians. One could even say, without too much injustice, that he might be a little too prolific. He's written and edited dozens of books. Most of these cover well-trodden territory, from half a dozen of the most popular and most famous presidents (FDR, TR, LBJ, and so on.) to a smattering of grand narratives (the California Gold Rush, capitalism in the last half of the nineteenth century). In this book on the fight for Texas independence, Brands shows he is a pellucid and accomplished writer, but he leaves the reader without any signposts as the reasons or importance of the events he describes.

Brands begins the book, with nary a thesis or explanation, with Moses Austin, and his son Stephen, going West from Virginia to start a lead mine outside St. Louis, then under Spanish suzerainty. After the land underneath him was a given from Spain to France and then to America, he cemented another deal with newly independent Mexico to start a colony in yet-unsettled Texas. When Moses died in 1821, heavily indebted, his well-educated son took over the debts and project. Austin would spend the next 15 years turning Texas into a thriving colony of Americans (and American slaves), which mainly, on his part, involved constant negotiations with the Mexican government. His colonies attracted people like the inveterate drunk, but already nationally-famous fighter, Jim Bowie; the former law partner but soon-to-be resistance leader William Travis, and the ex-Andrew Jackson confident, Whig Congressman, and all-around wild man Davy Crockett. All three of these men would be killed by Mexican dictator Santa Anna at the Alamo in 1836, after they had helped declare independence against him for abrogating the old Mexican Constitution of 1824. Sam Houston, a giant of a man who once lived for years living with the Cherokee but who also spent years as a self-pitying drunk, got Texas's revenge by taking over the army and capturing Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto soon after, ensuring Texas independence.

In the end, the profusion of names and battles leaves one wondering why it all matters, and Brands does little to add to the drama or explain its significance. Still, at its best, the book has surprisingly forthright letters and diary entries from settlers and leaders like Austin himself, explaining how they used their luggage as cover against Indian attacks and offensive fires, or how they captured smugglers and engaged in impromptu country justice trials. Brands would have done better to let more of these people tell the story, and then help explain it all to the reader.

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Rarely does a title do justice to the story. This one does. You will finish this book with a deep understanding of how the Texas War for Independence totally re-shaped the development of the modern U.S. as we know it. You may find yourself wondering, "what would the western U.S. look like today if events had taken a different turn?" Oh, and for you non-Texans who still don't get our fiercely independent, self-reliant, this-country-would-be-a-total-mess-without-us attitude, GET THIS book and read it thoroughly!

I just completed Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence - And Changed America by H.W. Brands. This is the third or fourth book I have read from Mr. Brands and he has become a favorite of mine. I realized when i saw this book that he had written that I really had little knowledge of the whole story of Texas founding and annexation. I knew the basic story and bits, but honestly, except for the Alamo, we skimp over this part of our history because it is not a particularly proud one. We literally stole it.
It is a fascinating story and honestly got me thinking about a lot of things. One of them was the facts that Texas succeeded from Mexico with, in reality, very little effusion of blood, blinded successionists to the thoughts of just how bloody a civil war would get.

A great historical account of Texas in its formative years - I enjoyed the fine blend of historical facts and the insight into the people who were caught up in these times. I was reminded of another life I lived as 7th grade Texas History teacher.