Obviously lots of people have already read the McClellan book, the one about my great-great-grandfather, William Brownlow McClellan, so I don't need to explain about his continued political opposition to Sam Houston. McClellan, in his newspapers of the mid-1800s, mostly published in LaGrange, Texas, consistently campaigned against Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas and later U.S. Senator, in every election and for whatever reason. Kind of makes you wonder why George Bush would be so fascinated the "old hero."
There possibly was a personal aspect to that mutual enmity. Sam Houston was possibly a student of McClellan's grandfather at least for a bit and also friends with the governor of Tennessee, who would be some distant cousin to McClellan, and also friends with McClellan the Choctaw Indian agent not to be confused with my ancestor, but it would seem that my grandfather's cousin does not fully explain that aspect of it. The book mostly just describes the various themes that McClellan wrote about. No need for me to rehash that same old story about "the Mexican Prisoners," those 141 Texans who languished in Mexican prisons for two years, until 1844. Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas, seemed reluctant to do anything about it, busy as he was trying to negotiate annexation into the United States, and McClellan's newspaper makes much of the delay. On April 11, 1844, Houston returned by mail a free copy of the newspaper, the "Intelligencer."
Bad Houston policies:
* Indian peace treaty: McClellan criticizes this Houston policy, saying that "the crack of our sure rifles is the best guarantee" (of peace and safety). (This is not such an unusual opinion. Not much has changed. Even today the U.S. tends to think that the crack of our superior weapons is the best insurance.)
* Texas capital: Removal of the capital of Texas out of Austin, leaving the entire western frontier of Texas vulnerable to Mexican and Indian raids and incursions, crashing land values, etc. But the attempt to move the capital to Washington-on-the-Brazos is not short-lived and by 1845 the capital is back in Austin so obviously the people knew better than Sam Houston on this point.
In 1845, McClellan fails to support Houston for U.S. Senator, preferring to endorse Thomas Rusk and M.B. Lamar (obviously not to be confused with "La Mar," that Spanish song sung by all on the bus on the way back from campamento). Jesse Grimes, in a letter to Anson Jones, then president of Texas, says of McClellan: "The La Grange Intelligencer is early in announcing its favorites for the Senate and has ingeniously selected a ticket that will have considerable tendency to unite the East with the West, but this ticket will not suit, at least a respectable portion of the community. Texas has suffered sufficiently under the profligate administration of the one and the other has recently kept rather bad company; true proverb, that a man is known by the company he keeps." Grimes thinks that Houston and Jones will be unbeatable, but as it turned out, Houston and Rusk won.
In 1854, McClellan, describing a pamphlet in which Gen. T. T. Green criticizes a speech that Houston made in the U.S. Senate, says: "It may be truly said, that Gen. Green has 'lathered the old hero with aqua fortis and shaved him with a whipsaw.'"
Thus we see that McClellan and Houston were not exactly buddies, to put it mildly.
