The Black Bean Lottery: October ‘97 American History Feature

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The Black Bean Lottery

In March 1843, 176 membersof an unauthorized army of Texans captured inMexico drew beans from a jar to determine which 17among them would die for their alleged crimes.

By Peter F. Stevens

As war raged across the rugged Mexican countryside during the summer of 1847, Major Walter Lane led a detachment of Texas Rangers toward a small outpost known as the Hacienda del Salado, in central Mexico, surprising its residents at dawn. The American riders employed the local alcalde (mayor) as a guide to take them to their destination. He led them to a ditch on the outskirts of village, where the battle-hardened contingent found the graves of 16 of the 17 Texans who had been executed in the infamous “Black Bean Lottery” of March 25, 1843. Major Lane ordered the corpses of the unfortunate victims exhumed and placed in boxes for reburial in Texas. When the grim task was completed, Lane’s party headed back into the hills with the remains.

The grisly saga of the Black Bean Lottery rose out of the animosity between the fledgling Republic of Texas and Mexico, from which it had gained its independence through revolution in 1836. After winning election to the Texas presidency in December 1841, Sam Houston once again found himself at odds with his old adversary, Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna, whom he had defeated five years before at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. Within days of taking office, Houston learned the outcome of an ill-conceived Texan raid into the Santa Fe region, which was still controlled by Mexico. The expedition, authorized three months earlier by his predecessor, Mirabeau B. Lamar, had left scores of Texans suffering in Mexican prisons. Meanwhile, Santa Anna had sworn to recapture Texas and plant Mexico’s “eagle standards on the banks of the Sabine.”

On March 5, 1842, General Rafael Vásquez and seven hundred Mexican soldiers seized San Antonio, Texas, throwing residents of the Texan frontier into panic. Though the small army soon retreated across the Río Grande, hundreds of angry Texans rushed west, anxious to avenge this insult.* President Houston knew that his government could not afford a war, but when a larger Mexican force of 1,400 soldiers under General Adrian Woll repeated Vásquez’s feat on September 11, Houston could see no alternative but to authorize retaliatory action.

Three weeks later, the Texas president ordered Brigadier General Alexander Somervell to organize a raid into Mexico. When Somervell arrived in San Antonio on November 4 to take charge of his new force, he encountered as motley and fractious an assemblage of recruits as Texas had ever seen. One of them, legendary Texas Ranger William A. A. “Bigfoot” Wallace, later described his comrades as “Dare-devils . . . afraid of nothing under the sun . . .” who had “left their country for their country’s good.”

The impatient band of rowdy frontiersmen and freebooters scorned the general’s attempts to instill discipline. Bound to his orders and bolstered by a handful of loyal, seasoned companies, Somervell struggled to ignore the specter of impending disaster, and on November 25, 1842, 750 Texas volunteers marched south from San Antonio.

With dissension marring their every step, this grandly-named “Southwest Army of Operations” reached the small Mexican town of Laredo on December 8, and only one day later, Somervell’s darkest fears about the caliber of his men were realized. Frustrated by their continual lack of supplies and anxious for action of any kind, a large contingent of the Texans tore into Laredo, sacking the defenseless town.

Appalled, Somervell forced the brigands to return their plunder and placed the worst offenders under arrest. On December 10, he delivered an impassioned address to his impatient troops. Although his speech garnered him renewed support from much of the army, nearly two hundred of his riders voted to quit the expedition and return to Texas.

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