APPENDIX NO. VII.

General Thomas J. Green:
Dear Sir, - I have perused, with infinite pleasure, your manuscript detailing the Battle of Mier, the captivity, imprisonment, and sufferings of yourself and fellow-prisoners in the loathsome Castle of Perote, together with your adventurous and successful escape from that almost impregnable fortress.

The spirit-stirring incidents, from the commencement to the end of your journal, cannot fail to excite a lively interest in the breast of every reader.

With myself, and your numerous friends in this country, your details have peculiar interest, from our knowledge of the fidelity with which they are given. Independent of my knowledge of the frankness of your character, an intimate acquaintance with many of your fellow-prisoners, with whom I have had frequent conversations, enables me to judge the correctness of your narrative. Permit me, therefore, to solicit the publication of your journal as soon as practicable, inasmuch as it is immediately connected with our Revolution, and forms one of the important events attending its progress.

General Thomas J. Green:
Dear Sir, - Our mutual friend, Dr. Archer, informs me that you have prepared a minute account of the Battle of Mier, and of the incidents, anterior and subsequent, connected with that brilliant though calamitous event.

There are but few instances in which the great superiority of Texian arms over those of our boastful enemies have been more fully illustrated [481] than in that conflict, which has elicited so little of the public sympathy, and attracted so small a share of admiration. It is no new idea that success is necessary to applause. The fame of the brief and almost unresisted onslaught of San Jacinto, of eighteen minutes' continuance, has resounded throughout the world, and in the imaginations of the uninformed, has wreathed the brow of the nominal commander, who was literally compelled into the chase, with the garland of heroism, while the protracted and bloody battle of Mier has scarcely been perpetuated by newspaper advertisement. There is, however, consolation in the thought that, although one's contemporaries may fail to do justice to his public acts, and may confer unmerited plaudits upon the recreant and unworthy, a better-informed and more dispassionate posterity will render honour to whom honour is due.

Among the seventeen decimated victims of your late companions in suffering was a brother of Mrs. B.'s, and it is natural that we should feel a more than common interest in the events you have related. In all my reflections upon that most atrocious act of an atrocious tyrant, to save whose life, during the great excitement at Velasco in 1836, my own was imminently jeoparded, I have not been able to divest my mind of a suspicion that General Houston is and will be held, by a heart-searching God, morally guilty of that most abominable massacre. His gratuitous, uncalled for, and extraordinary communication to Santa Anna, through the agency of the British minister, officially denounced you and your companions in arms as without the pale of nationality, and consequently, as outlawed brigands, and liable to be dealt with as such. There certainly was no political necessity for that pragmatic, and, if not designed for some wicked purpose connected