You.

Hello, and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host today.

My guest is James Allen Bernsen, author of The Lost War for Texas Mexican Rebels, American Rights, and the Texas Revolution of 1811.

James, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you.

Well, I want to say it's a very compelling title.

As Texans, I feel like we like to pride ourselves on knowing our history, but this whole wonderfully large book is about the lost war, for Texas.

Can you just kind of tell us what is the lost war?

What is this conflict?

Sure.

The the lost war is really the first Texas Revolution, which was 25 years before the second revolution we all know and love and the lost war is basically the Mexican Revolution against or from Spain, when the Mexican government was or the Mexican rebels were revolting against Spain, and there were Anglo-Americans who came in and helped them in that cause.

And we'll get more into that.

But, you you mentioned we all know the main one, as you say, that's kind of the one we all love and study and watch movies about.

But why, why, why was this one lost?

Why wasn't this one get as much attention, do you think?

Well, first of all, it's lost in two ways.

They it's forgotten.

But it also was a failed revolution.

So people remember the winners.

That's that's how history works.

And it really didn't fit into anyone's narrative.

After the Mexican-American War in 1845, the Americans were looking for one way of looking at Texas history.

The Mexicans were looking at a different view, and there just weren't any people advocating to talk about this earlier struggle, because it kind of didn't fit in either of their perceived conceptions of how history worked.

I you also used a term in the book, you called it Alamo Blindness, but the, the, the Pomp and Circumstance or the hero were, you know, the stories of the second one, maybe into some people's eyes, kind of shined brighter than I don't think.

Well, I hopefully will prove that not to be true, but in maybe those period historians, the second one shined brighter than the first.

It was certainly dramatic.

The 1836 revolution is dramatic, and it's like World War two.

We talk about D-Day and all these other events, and we forget World War One.

You couldn't have World War II without World War One.

And this war is kind of the World War One of Texas history.

I think that's a wonderful way to to maybe put this to those who wouldn't understand, because once you read about this conflict, it really does set the stage, just like World War One really did.

Set, set all the kind of pieces in motion for the second one to happen.

So that's a great way to to think about that.

Another reason that this is lost, perhaps, is that not a lot was written even by more our modern, modern, modern historians.

Why why do you think that is?

Well, the sources were very limited.

Many of the rebels were killed in the final battle, and very few Americans at the time took notice.

It all took place during the War of 1812.

So the United States is is more worried about Washington being burned down.

And so they're not really paying attention, to this conflict and the Texas, the people who came in 1836, some of them actually were connected to this rebellion.

But even then they lived through 1836.

And they framed everything through that, through that lens.

And so it just kind of got lost in history in a lot of these accounts were never recorded.

And so it was one of those things where you have to piece it together almost forensically to find out whatever happened.

Now, why did this topic appeal to you or how did you become interested in it?

Well, first of all, I've been a Texas history buff all my life, and I've read everything you can imagine on Texas history.

And yet this story came out of who I discovered it about 20 years ago, and I didn't know this.

And I was shocked that something so important happened that I didn't know.

And I looked into it and it really was.

A lot of people just weren't looking into this older history.

And it became a challenge to me because there's so much interesting things here, and they have so much relevance to Texas history.

And yet it was it was a clean slate.

No, no one had written a book on this, to this depth in almost 80 years.

And even you mentioned your sources in the book, some of there are maybe a book or two, but they're not they're not this well researched and this dense and this, comprehensive, I guess, is the word I want to say.

A lot of the older books were hamstrung by limitations and sources I relied heavily on, for example, the bear Archives, which were translated and translated and transcribed from 1930 to 1960.

So the first articles and books written on this didn't have access to that.

Unless you're going to go through and read every document Spanish and try to translate.

And then some of the later books were just piggybacking on this early research.

And a lot of these older sources have come to light in recent years and had not really been utilized.

And that's what I found very helpful.

I yeah, I want to say this is a common theme I get to hear on the show when I talk to authors, is that the internet and the scanning and archiving and putting these things online or in databases that are more accessible than, say, microfiche or going to an archive has, I want to say, revolutionized the way that authors can do research which brings up these lost or forgotten stories that I think we should all be shining light on.

So I imagine that was a big part of your process.

It was indeed, in fact, some of the early research I did.

I put it on a hard drive.

I'm in the military, I deployed to Afghanistan, and I had all my documents on a hard drive in Afghanistan, and I could look at them there.

That's something that you couldn't have done back in the day.

When I went to the National Archives.

I had only a couple days there, and if you were doing it old school, you'd take notes from all the documents.

I just photocopied everything that was there and brought it home and spent time with it.

And then there's all sorts of digitized sources and and sources that were previously not categorized that that now you can find pretty easily.

And when you add in Google and the ability to search and find archives that people didn't know about, there's so many things that you can open up that were not there, not available before.

You also, utilized a lot of genealogy records and research.

Can you talk about why that was important?

Sure.

Genealogy is is really a growth area outside of the historian's typical, focus.

But there's so much there.

Now, of course, with anything with genealogy, you have to take everything with a grain of salt.

Everyone thinks that their ancestors were sexy and important, and sometimes they fudged data to to make it work.

So you have to be careful.

But, for example, a good case is.

I was looking at this one account, which was a first person account of the battle, and it was some historians in question.

It had a few things that were kind of, maybe exaggerated, but I thought that the core of the story might be true.

And the detail I found in there was a name, a very obscure name, that you can't just make up.

And I went through genealogical records and verified that that person was there at the time.

So I was able to verify this account based on a book, a genealogical book that had been maybe only 50 copies were ever made, and it was in a library somewhere in Ohio, and it was scanned.

And that's the sort of thing you can do now that you couldn't have done back in the day.

Absolutely.

And now that you have that name, you can search it, and it just opens more doors and more doors, which must have been very gratifying.

Yeah.

I mean, doing that research, did you mention go to the National Archives?

But did you do other travel?

Yes.

So I went to the National Archives.

I went to, Northwestern State University in, in Louisiana, in Natchitoches, Louisiana, which is kind of a hotbed for a lot of this activity right there all across the border.

And then there were lots of digitized archives, which I didn't travel to, but I could call them up.

If I needed a document or two, I could find it in their list of documents and say, hey, I need a photocopy of this.

I was able, for example, in Missouri to find a key, you know, file of documents I actually had, I missed in the National Archives because I didn't know where to look because there was a folder that had been mis categorized in the National Archives, and I had put on my early research online, and I get a call out of the blue, why I'm in Australia, of all places.

And the guy says, I'm sitting in the National Archives and I found this folder of documents.

It looks like it's related to your research.

Are you interested?

And I said, yes.

The guy photocopied them all and emailed them to me.

That's something you couldn't have done back in the day.

The the internet sometimes is a is a detriment.

But in things like this it's wonderful how quickly we can connect and share information that I'm sure was, was vital to you.

How did your military background inform the research and maybe the writing of the book?

Well, my background in the military, I'm an intelligence officer, and so my background is studying insurgencies and looking at what makes them tick.

And that allowed me to look at this story in a different way than most historians, because it's fundamentally an insurgency.

It's just in 1811, 1812.

And so I looked at it and I knew what patterns to look for.

I'm looking for the the supply lines, the organization structure, these kind of things that a lot of historians say they're looking at the big picture.

They're not looking at these details because it doesn't seem relevant to them.

However, I know that that's how you crack the egg open for these kind of, these kind of research projects.

So that gave me insights, that gave me clues to research.

I knew where to look to research.

And I started looking at the individual people.

One of the reasons why I went so deep into genealogy is because the traditional sources were kind of limited, but by looking at the people, I was able to find connections and sort of Venn diagram things, to see how these people knew each other and, and open up a lot of new avenues for research and discover these networks, for example, the BR connection that actually helped build these, these networks to start this invasion.

Let's obviously as people can tell this is a large book, but if you're at all interested in what we've been talking about so far, I would highly encourage to take a look at it because this is it's a wealth of information, but it's so fascinating to see this part of our history.

So we're going to try to cover as much as we can, but obviously we cannot cover all of it.

So you can give us the date of 1811, what's kind of started in 1811 that made this revolution grow.

One of the things I think that's important is if you look at what most historians frame this period to be, there's an expedition, the Anglo-American invasion, which is called the Gutierrez McGee expedition.

That's in 1812.

And a lot of Americans, from the Americans perspective, oh, Americans are invading Texas.

That's where we're going to start looking.

What they miss is that the origins of this revolution did not start with the Americans.

It started with the native Tejanos in San Antonio, and they lost the revolution in 1811.

And so their revolution started.

This, this central, essentially a war.

They their revolution was was short lived only a couple months that they held San Antonio.

But they connected with these Americans, with these networks and were able to encourage the Americans to come in and invade.

And so what I want to show is that this is a period that starts with a native Tejano, rebellion.

It's the origin of the Liberty story in Texas is not with Anglo Americans, with the honors they started.

And then the Anglo Americans join it.

And I think that talking about this whole era together brings it together in a way people previously had never conceived.

This is always one of my stumbling blocks when I'm thinking about or studying history, is that you think I have a tendency to think of events in a vacuum.

You know, this happened and this happened and this happened, but these things are happening, as you mentioned, we're having, you know, a whole separate war happening on the American side.

But then this revolution is building, and maybe there are some Americans, you know, it all mixes together and melts together.

And maybe a Venn diagram is a great way to think about it because there's overlap, there's there's mixing.

There's there's always when you get to borders, particularly, there's always different.

You mix of different ideas and concepts.

It's one of the reasons why this was forgotten story, because the American historians are looking at American history, that Mexican historians are looking at Mexican history.

And this is the intersection of the two.

And a lot of historians just didn't really see that.

It's like I say, it's the blindness on the American side, but also on the Mexican side.

Even in Mexico, there is very little understanding that Texas was part of the revolution from Spain when when Mexico was fighting against the Spanish for ten years, there was a war in Texas and the people in Texas wanted to be part of Mexico.

They were not actually breaking off to be part of the United States.

They wanted to be part of Mexico.

And so the Mexicans launched this revolution.

And ultimately, though it failed, it played key roles in how the Mexican Revolution evolved.

You mentioned that Gutierrez McGee expedition.

I wanted to ask more about that.

You also in the book to call them, filibusters.

And I want to ask you to explain, I don't know if all of us I didn't know filibuster in that term.

So what is what did that mean?

And what were these people coming in to do?

So the original meaning of filibuster, the original meaning of the word, is kind of a mercenary.

It's a mercenary who invades a foreign country to try to take it over, that you can see how that evolved into the meaning in the US Senate.

You're essentially taking over the Senate when you speak like that.

But the initial, in the initial meaning of the phrase, it was mercenaries usually working with locals as well, invading a country and starting this, this conflict.

The the Americans who were on the frontier had a desire for many years to liberate Mexico from Spain.

First of all, the the American concept that we want to get away from Europe, they wanted to spread democracy and liberty and republicanism, but they also realized that Mexico had one seventh of the world's silver.

And if you can get that country broken away from the Spanish trading network and then run all that trade through New Orleans where your backers are, that becomes a very good motivation for invading that country.

And so these men that came here, you mentioned in the book that they were not only Americans and Anglos, but some French and Creole, I guess, coming through Louisiana.

What, what what were these men, what were their kind of make up of this, of this group?

It was very heterogenous.

There were Anglo Americans.

And there's also something that you don't see because previous historians looked at the names and said, oh, these are all Anglos.

Many of them are actually former British loyalists.

So they're not necessarily attached to the United States government.

Didn't you have the French Creoles?

You have some Germans, Italians.

You get a mix of whoever's in Louisiana at the time, which was very mixed.

And then you get various Spanish, either Louisiana Spanish, but also Texas native Tejanos will ultimately join the Army as they come into Texas.

And they all had really different views.

I don't think you can ever simplify to say a war was just about this 1 or 2 things, but for most of them, they didn't want the unites to come at the United States to come in and take Texas.

That wasn't their motivation.

They wanted to free Texas as a part of freeing Mexico.

Originally, they were going to go all the way to Mexico City.

That didn't happen because the War of 1812 broke the line of their of their manpower.

They wanted to have all these Americans come in.

But when the War of 1812 happens, then the U.S. government says, no, you're not leaving your militia.

We need you.

And so that changes the context of the war and becomes isolated in Texas.

The the previously known list of these names was, I want to think, in the 60s.

And then you were able to increase that number of known participants into the two hundreds.

Was that through genealogical research or how did you do that?

It was a mix I first started connecting with.

There's a small group in San Antonio, in the San Antonio area of people who studied the Battle of Medina.

This crucial battle, and they had over the years put together lists of of people they found associated with it.

So I took those lists and I ran them through my research.

Some of them I had to throw out because they were guesses, and they turned out to be not true.

But then a lot of my went through genealogical sources, and from then I was able to connect to other people in deeper readings of the sources.

I was able to find other names, and then I found names in the, in the National Archives, this, this, this folder that I told you that this guy sent me had a bunch of names in it and through various sources, piecing it together, gigantic spreadsheets, everything I was able to to get all these names.

And then I was able to put the Tejano names, the, the Mexican rebels who fought as well, because there were lists from the Spanish government of who they confiscated, houses and property from, so you could see who was on their side, who was fighting.

So I have appendices of all these people who fought in the revolution.

So we're going to have to skip forward a little bit because there's just a lot of movements and things.

I really, really encourage people.

This is such a fascinating book.

But you mentioned the Battle of Medina and I want to make sure we cover that because maybe people don't.

I feel like if you know something about this area, maybe that's what you know, because it is kind of a big battle that took place.

But it's one of the biggest and I think the deadliest battle that's ever happened in Texas.

And and as you mentioned, it gets overshadowed by more popular ones that that happened later.

Can you talk about the Battle of Medina?

Sure.

There's there's a lot of things in this, in this book that are really over overlooked.

There's a siege at La Bahia that lasts seven times longer than the siege of the album.

But the battle Medina is the one thing that people will know if they if they've done any research, they may not know the full story, but they've heard of this battle because it was the largest battle ever fought in Texas.

And it was it's a it's also a battle that we don't know where it took place.

Have some really vague notions of the geography.

We know roughly in this ten square mile area south of San Antonio.

But it was it was such a, it was a large and consequential battle.

It delayed the Mexican Revolution from succeeding for another eight years.

If it had if it had been successful in Mexican Revolution, it failed.

Texas would have probably become an independent republic earlier.

All of these consequential developments and really, most importantly for the way Texas did evolve, was the aftermath of the battle, because the Spanish came in to San Antonio with a vengeance and they purged San Antonio.

Large numbers of people were killed and others were driven into exile.

Some living in the United States for ten years was totally changed.

How the Tejano saw Americans, because they, many of them, had lived among Americans.

And so all of these things set up essentially, it broke Texas.

And then the Spanish realized, okay, we've got a mess.

The Comanches are going to take over.

If we don't do something, we need settlers.

And that's when Moses Austin shows up and says, I have a deal for you.

And so that history, that's how I make the case.

It's all tied together.

It's not like one story here, one story.

This is like a Shakespearean play.

This is act one, act two, three, and it all connects.

And yeah, I feel like you make a wonderful case in the book of, you know, cause and effects like because they wiped out all the settlers and now they're needing to invite new ones in.

I also, I also think it's you I mentioned a couple times in the book about how we have this myth of the first Texans, the father of Texas, the mother of Texas.

But as you've as you've demonstrated here, there are several, Anglo settlers here.

Americans, there were all kinds of people living here, before the modern myth that we know and.

Well, because a lot of the Americans who came in in the 1820s and 30, including my ancestors, who came in 201 years ago this year, these people came into Texas and they found Texas to be very empty.

There was, in fact, Stephen F Austin called East Texas a wilderness or something like that.

It hadn't always been that way.

The war had created that.

And there they came into Texas, and there were no Anglos living in Texas.

So they assumed, oh, Anglos have never lived here.

But the Spanish had let them in.

The Spanish let Anglos settle in Texas in the 1780s and 90s.

And there were there were Anglos and French, particularly lots of French coming from Louisiana and even Germans, Italians, all sorts of mixed people living in Texas, mostly in the conscious area.

And they lived there legal settlers until right before the revolution.

The Spanish kicked him out.

So this whole period of change really reset Texas, and the people who came in later did not know that history.

And who would tell them because so many people had been killed, of course.

And the, the, the former Spanish are not going to say anything.

We you've met we've mentioned connections.

I want to make sure we highlight two.

There are some direct connections between the first and the second.

Some men who fought in the first one fought also in the second one also sometimes sons.

And there was a lieutenant in the Spanish army who became a very important figure in the second Reverend.

You talk about those threads of connection.

Sure.

There there were there were several people, key players who were in both wars.

Jose Francisco Ruiz was a he was originally a Spanish officer.

Towards the end of the of the war, he switched sides to the rebels.

And he ultimately is going to be one of the signers, the two, Tejano signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, 1836.

Alongside him, there was an American, James Gaines, who was there at the first signing, Declaration of Independence in 1813, helped him sign the declaration.

In 1836, there was once again Father Erasmo Seguin was involved in this war.

He wasn't particularly rebel.

He was trying to thread the needle and stay neutral, which was very hard to do.

And, and keep your family alive at that point.

And and then there were, there were a couple of people, there was a French Creole who was a key leader at the beginning of the revolution, who had two sons who fought in 1836, including one who died at the Alamo.

And then you had, just lots of these people who they came and they fought in Texas.

And then when they came back as settlers, some of them felt a little bit put out because they had fought and bled for Texas.

And then they don't get land grants because the Mexican government didn't recognize their claims.

And these new people who come in under Austin get grants.

So a lot of them are complaining, hey, why do I only get, you know, you know, 500 acres this other person gets 2500 acres, which I'd be happy with either.

Right.

But but that was it was it was an interesting time.

But a lot of them also who went through this moved on with their lives.

We had one guy who who went to he was so excited about helping, Spanish America become independent that he went to, fight with Simon Boulevard down in Venezuela.

And so there's all these interesting stories and that's what I love about this.

It's not just a a boring history book.

It goes into people's stories in its lives.

And that's really what all history is.

There's no event in history that doesn't happen without a human being, as either the victim or the perpetrator of something that I think is the greatest strength to me of this book is that you highlight the human as much as you can with what limited records you have.

You really try to highlight the human aspect, which helps me as a reader, connect to this history that I'm so far removed from.

But I am living on.

You know, I, I'm a part of this state.

I grew up here.

We are sadly running out of time on this, but I thank you so much for for coming today.

I do want to highlight two and mentioned that, I've talked to this book a lot because it's very impressive, but it's also won some awards and is winning one.

Next week it's been announced.

I like to say it, but the Texas Historical Association is giving this the Kate, Brock Bates Research Award, which, if anybody deserves it, it's you.

So I want to congratulate you on.

Thank you, thank you.

So, we just have, like, a couple of minutes left, so we're on our final two minutes.

What would you hope people take away from your book?

Well, I hope first of all, people will look at history as it's not just the story that your grandfather told you.

And we're learning more from history throughout, you know, as as we move along, we're learning ancient history that we never knew before.

We're learning things about the past because there are still documents out there that have not been found.

They're still stories have not been told.

There is great stories hiding in genealogical records that are going to turn up.

And we're going to find out really interesting things.

DNA is proving things we didn't know, for example, about early Americans and about some settlers and and in Texas history, there's this fascinating timeline in which we, we kind of break it into Spanish history, Mexican history, Texas history.

And the borders are not so, so strong.

There is a fluid mixing of these, these things.

And there's also different alternatives that could have gone.

But really there's this great, fascinating story, equally as interesting as the 1836 revolution.

This early revolution had all the drama, had all the the intrigue and everything you need for a great story.

It could make a Hollywood story, but it it was forgotten.

And that is a fascinating story to me, how something so important could be forgotten.

And so it's important that we bring this back and, and teach it to our next generation, especially.

You know, I had a great opportunity about two years ago to speak at the Alamo on March 2nd, and I sat next to the president of a or, sorry, the the principal of a high school just down the street.

And I told him, you know, there was a battle fought on your school's campus in 1813.

He didn't know it.

And he had told me he said something.

He was a Hispanic guy.

He told me I always heard the story of Texas history, as if my ancestors were the bad guys.

And that's not how Texas history happened.

There weren't good guys and bad guys determined by ethnicity.

There were good guys and there were bad guys, and there were a lot of people in between.

And in this war, particularly the Mexicans and the Anglos fought together.

And that story needs to be brought together, brought back, and really taught to a new generation.

Well, I think this book is a wonderful way of achieving that.

Thank you so much for writing it and for shining a light on this, and for coming here today to talk to us about it.

Well, thank you always, always glad to be here.

Wonderful.

Well, that is all the time we've got for today.

Thank you so much for joining us.

The book again is called The Lost War for Texas.

I appreciate you joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

You.