Texas Archive War

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The Texas Archive War was an episode of Texas history that reflects the tenacity of the residents of the period as well as the personalities of many of the people involved in the development of Texas.

During the period of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845), the capital of Texas moved from city to city. The Texas Congress favored a plan to build a planned city in Central Texas as the fledgling country’s capital. However, Sam Houston, President of Texas at the time, preferred having the capital in Houston, the city named for him, and blocked Congress’ plans. In 1839 Mirabeau B. Lamar, who favored Congress’ plan, became President of Texas. The Texas Congress approved the recommendation of a commission to select the small town of Waterloo, on the Colorado River, as the site of the capital of Texas and renamed it Austin, in honor of Stephen F. Austin, the “Father of Texas”. The capital was moved to Austin from Houston later in 1839, including the nation’s archives.

In 1841, Sam Houston was again sworn in as President. He held a very open and public disdain for the Texas capital, and refused to stay in the official President’s residence, preferring instead to stay in the boarding house of Mrs. Angelina Eberly. Then, in March 1842, a division of the army of Mexico under Gen. Rafael Vásquez invaded the southern part of Texas and seized San Antonio, Goliad and Victoria, only to withdraw after a few days. President Houston saw this as an opportunity to remove the government from Austin, and called an emergency session of Congress to meet in Houston, declaring Austin unsafe. Indeed, many Austin residents, upon hearing of the fall of San Antonio, only 70 miles to the south, fled Austin and only a small number of residents remained.

The residents who did remain, however, were wary of President Houston’s intentions, and when he called for the removal of the nation’s archives to Houston for safe keeping, the residents responded by forming a vigilance committee, vowing that they would use force, if necessary, to keep the archives in Austin. Then, in September, General Adrián Woll led another Mexican expedition into Texas and temporarily captured San Antonio. This reinforced President Houston’s claim that Austin was unsafe, and in December he had the Seventh Congress convene in Washington-on-the-Brazos instead of Austin. In order to secure his choice of capital, President Houston ordered Colonel Thomas I. Smith and Captain Eli Chandler to remove the nation’s archives from Austin and bring them to Washington-on-the-Brazos without bloodshed.

Statue of Angelina Eberly firing off warning cannon shot.

Smith and Chandler raised a group of men, and entered Austin in the dead of night on December 29. As they loaded archives stored in the General Land Office Building into wagons, Angelina Eberly, President Houston's former landlady, was awakened by the noise. She ran outside and discharged a cannon, puncturing a hole in the side of the General Land Office Building and alerting the local citizenry that something was amiss. Smith and Chandler fled with three wagons full of archival material. In keeping their word, the vigilance committee gathered and followed Smith and Chandler with cannon in tow. Smith and Chandler were overtaken the next day 18 miles north along Brushy Creek near Kinney Fort, in present day Round Rock. Because of President Houston’s orders that there was to be no bloodshed, the archives were surrendered to the vigilantes, who returned them to Austin. The Texas Archive War ended without casualty.

In January 1843, the Texas Congress admonished President Houston for his actions in trying to move the capital from Austin, but it would not be until 1845 that the Texas government would actually sit again in Austin. To this day many residents of Austin cite this event as a turning point in keeping the city as the capital of Texas. A statue of Angelina Eberly was erected in 2004 in downtown Austin to commemorate the event.