Texas Pages

Sam Houston was a war hero, had been president of a republic, governor of two states, U.S. congressman and now a senator, but the things the hero of San Jacinto said in his letters to wife make him sound a lot like the rest of us non-heroic husbands. From Washington, he wrote to Margaret Lea at least once, sometimes twice, a week. (I'm reading from The Correspondence of Sam Houston, compiled by Madge Thornhill Roberts and published by The University of North Texas Press in 1999.) Margaret was a preacher's daughter and a Daughter of Temperance. So his letters were often testaments to his new-found sobriety. “I was in the parlor,” he wrote, “and was greatly insisted upon to take egg nog, or apple toddy. Well, my dear, you can imagine my reply. `I am a Son of Temperance, and will not drink anything.’ So strong is my resolve, and my purpose so firm, that I would as soon take arsenic, as anything containing alcohol.” But he admitted that he dreamed of whiskey, and bathed in it once when he had influenza.

Though he asked her to write him once or more a week, she didn't. Between June and October of 1850, for example, they exchanged 50 letters, only three of them from her. She suffered from a lack of appetite, indigestion, anxiety, and was pathologically religious. She was “deprest” she wrote (maybe post-partumistically), and “the more I examine myself, the more I see my own worthlessness.” When she heard of the death of President Taylor, her husband’s rival, though, it was like Prozac. She wrote, “How wonderful are the ways of Providence!”

She was his third wife, only 28, half his age, and stuck in Rusk with five young children. But she wasn't “afraid” of the “charms” of competing women in Washington, she wrote. He answered with a real man's version of a romantic sentiment: “I need not tell you, my love, if you even weighed two hundred avoirdupois, that I would be willing that you should sit on my knees for six consecutive hours . . . .” If that didn't bring her out of her depression, he wrote that a certain Mrs. Graham “is good looking but you must know that she has two grand children, and must have faded much, from other days. You need not be uneasy, my Dear, for I assure you, even in our young days, I never made love to her.” Right after that, Margaret was indicted for beating a young girl who worked in the household.

His letters show him as a doting husband and father, worrying that Sam, Jr., might read too much (did I say that he was real man?) He believed in phrenology and mesmerism, justifying them biblically, of course), and wrote that he saw a clairvoyant who could describe Nacogdoches.

She wrote back that she would like a spirit that could look after the children.