Thomas Jefferson Green," Williams and Barker, eds., Houston Writings 6:80-81.
6. A refuge for runaway slaves and fugitives from justice in the United States, Matamoros was a town with an international and racially heterogeneous population in the early decades of the nineteenth century. For more on Matamoros, see Berlandier, Journey to Mexico During the Years 1826 to 1834 2:433-438.
Chapter Ten ~ Notes
1. Cadereyta.
2. In 1843, General Francisco Sentmanat, the federalist ex-governor of Tabasco, returned to the state on a filibustering expedition with fifty volunteers. Ampudia's centralist troops quickly captured Sentmanat and his men, most of whom were executed after they had laid down their arms. Sentmanat's head was fried in oil and displayed in a cage for several days. The fact that Ampudia chose not to employ the same Draconian measures against the Mier prisoners indicates that the Mexican general regarded them as lawful belligerents, not rebels, and therefore entitled to the rights of prisoners of war. This was no doubt due to the fact that the Texas Republic, although still regarded by Mexico as a province in revolt, had by 1843 been recognized as a sovereign state by most of the world's major powers. Haynes, Soldiers of Misfortune, 202.
3. Manuel Savariego, a lieutenant colonel at the time of Green's capture, had been a native of Goliad prior to the Revolution. In 1838 he returned at the head of a marauding expedition of two hundred men. The force seized livestock in the Nueces area, and near Refugio attacked and killed two Anglo-American traders. Telegraph and Texas Register, July 7, 1838.
4. Many Anglo-Texans became enamored of Mexican women, although this does not seem to have softened their virulent prejudice against Mexicans in general. For a discussion of this paradox and other Anglo racial attitudes, see Arnoldo de Leon's They Called Them Greasers, 36-48, passim.
5. Other visitors to Mexico were not so favorably impressed by the dancing skills of Mexican women, who, according to the fashion of the day, wore shoes and ball gowns several sizes too small. U.S. Minister Waddy Thompson wrote: "They are eminently graceful in everything but dancing," while the English wife of the Spanish minister "never saw anything to equal it in absurdity." Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico, 161; Fanny Calderon de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 134.
6. The earliest European visitors to the western hemisphere first observed the habit of chewing tobacco among the Indians of South America, who became such proficient expectorators that warriors carried plugs of the leaf into battle and in close combat sought to blind their enemies by spitting tobacco juice into their eyes. By the eighteenth century, the practice had all but vanished in Latin America, where the rolled leaf cigaro and crushed leaf papelito, the latter a forerunner of the cigarette, were in widespread use among both sexes. Among Mexican women, however, the habit appeared to be a passing fad, declining sharply in the years following Green's sojourn. In the United States, by contrast, tobacco chewing became enormously popular in the early nineteenth century, but faded after the Civil War, when cigars and, later, cigarettes became fashionable. Jerome E. Brooks, The Mighty Leaf, 191-227, passim.
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