not met with great success, and he joined the campaign "as poor as the poorest," according to one associate, "Coat out at elbows & pockets empty."39

Despite his enthusiasm for an invasion of the Rio Grande, Green could be relied upon to thwart any enterprise that bore the stamp and sanction of the Houston administration. Given his antipathy toward Houston personally and his policies in general, it was no surprise that from the outset he sought to undermine the authority of Alexander Somervell, the president's choice to head the campaign. True to form, Green emerged as one of Somervell's principal antagonists, although he held no official rank in the army organized to invade Mexico in the fall of 1842. While there were many men on the expedition who were disgruntled with what they perceived to be Somervell's timid leadership, not all believed Green worthy of high command, either. Said one:

He was possessed with that degree of vanity that prompted him rather to rashness than cool, determined valour. He might be termed, by some, a man of tallent[sic], which he did to some degree possess, but they were of an order that I would believe quite ordinary. Vain, bombastic, fond of praise, and withall, ambitious of military glory, he could well be called darring[sic], even fearless; but he was unfit to command an army....40

For his part, Houston regarded his critics as reckless firebrands and feared that an army composed of such men would degenerate into a lawless mob. Such a scenario, he believed, could only end in tragedy and defeat and would destroy what little credibility the Republic still had as a sovereign nation. Although he had succumbed to the outcry for war, privately he seems to have entertained little hope for the expedition's success. The administration's correspondence with Somervell while the army was mustered in San Antonio leaves no doubt that the president wished to discourage his commander from taking up the line of march. Houston could not call off the campaign without provoking a rebellion in the western counties, but the government's inability to provide Somervell with the supplies his army needed may have been a deliberate ploy to prevent the campaign from getting underway.41

From the very outset the campaign proved to be a combination of high camp and tragedy. For several weeks General Alexander Somervell kept his soldiers bivouacked outside San Antonio in miserably wet weather, while he waited for supplies that the Houston administration was either unable or unwilling to provide. The Texas troops soon proved to be as insubordinate as Somervell was incapable of commanding them. With morale low and his army dwindling as volunteers packed up and went home in disgust, Somervell at last gave the order to proceed south. Within a few hours the expedition strayed from the road and