By Stephen Hammock
While America as a whole may remember a few of the men who died at the Alamo (Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, William Travis), Georgia seems to have completely forgotten its native sons who marched off from Macon to meet an unjust immortality at Goliad in 1836. The delaying action they fought at the Battle of Refugio - as well as fellow Georgian James Fannin's defeat at the Battle of Coleto Creek - helped Sam Houston gather more men and wait until the right moment to strike the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the Texians won their independence a few weeks later. Texas even promised to raise a monument to the sons of Georgia who lost their lives in battle or who were massacred at Goliad. Sadly, this 165-year-old promise has never been fulfilled by the Lone Star State, which is ironic since that name itself partly derives from the Peach State.
American emigrants to Mexico's province of Texas were alarmed when General Santa Anna announced he was suspending the constitution and taking direct control of the country in 1835. So much so that they asked for volunteers from the United States to give them succour against this new dictator. Most of the men who responded came from Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, & Alabama - as well as three companies organized under William Ward of Macon, Georgia - a man renowned for surviving a shootout in a Milledgeville tavern. These included men mostly from Bibb, Baldwin, & Muscogee counties who later came to be known as the Georgia Battalion of the 1st Regiment Texas Volunteers. They were organized in Macon, Georgia on November 10, 1835, most being young men under 30 years of age eager for adventure and perhaps a chance to earn some land in Texas after victory and independence. Two of the three companies were armed with U.S. model 1817 "Common" rifles on loan from the Georgia State Arsenal in Milledgeville when they marched out of Macon around the 20th of November.
Their first stop was in the Crawford County town of Knoxville, where they were NOT presented with a flag, as is commonly believed, by 17-year-old Miss Joanna Troutman in front of the Troutman Inn. She and some friends made this flag from silk petticoats and sewed a lone azure star in the center with two different patriotic mottos on the obverse and reverse. The flag was completed after the men had departed Knoxville and caught up with them in Columbus. The two rifle companies joined up with a third and final company from Columbus in late November, and marched to Montgomery, Alabama. There the as-yet-unnamed Georgia Battalion of around 120 men was given free passage to Mobile on the steamboat Ben Franklin (which exploded with great loss of life only a few months afterwards), arriving there around the 1st of December and staying there most of a week. From Mobile they made their way aboard the steamer Convoy to New Orleans, where they stayed about a week. By this time the battalion had nearly doubled in number, from Mississippian and Louisianian volunteers picked up along the way, to about 220 men. The enlarged battalion then boarded the schooners Pennsylvania, Camancho, America, and Santiago for Texas.
They arrived at the port town of Velasco, Texas on December 20, 1835, where they were officially organized as the Georgia Battalion. There followed almost three months of training, fortifying the old Refugio Mission, and marching the 27 miles back and forth between there and the former Goliad Mission, where they were stationed part of this time. On March 13, 1836, Fannin ordered the Georgia Battalion to march from "Fort Defiance" at Goliad back to Refugio, thereby splitting his small force, to assist Irish emigrant families evacuating in the wake of the Mexican army's approach. They did not know how close the Mexican army was - this is how the Battle of Refugio happened.
About 140 men in the Georgia Battalion joined a detachment of 25 men who had been cut off by a much larger force of Mexican cavalry at Refugio, but instead of immediately evacuating, the Georgia Battalion found themselves caught up in a sanguinary battle with General Urrea's Mexican Army of around 1,500 men. Desperately holding them off as long as they could, despite such outrageous odds, they eventually slipped away during the night. Hiding in the swamps while on the run, most of the men were eventually captured and marched back to Goliad to join the rest of Fannin's army, which had fought and lost the Battle of Coleto Creek and already surrendered. A few men of the Georgia Battalion slipped away and made their way back to Houston's army.
Some of the prisoners at Goliad were assigned special duties and were spared what was to follow. The other 390 or so had been told that they'd be released if they promised to leave Texas, and were elated when they were finally told their days of captivity were at an end. Marched out from Goliad in four columns headed in different directions, they were suddenly ordered to stop. Mexican soldiers gathered on one side of them, and the order "Feugo!" was given. The majority of the Georgia Battalion and the remainder of Fannin's army fell dead in bloody heaps at that moment. Some escaped but were hunted down and slaughtered later. The dead were gathered together and their bodies were burnt. They were found by a detachment of Houston's army, but not a single man could be identified. They were buried in a mass grave by fellow soldiers of the Republic of Texas, and a belated monument was raised over them a century later.
Only about 25 men made a clean escape that dreadful day. These included a few who later wrote accounts of their travails and adventures with no shoes and only the food they could scrounge up along the way. Only a handful of these survivors of the original 120 members of the Georgia Battalion fought at the Battle of San Jacinto three weeks later - the battle which won Texas its independence.
A great many sons and brothers and fathers never came home to Georgia, having laid down their lives fighting Santa Anna's despotism in defense of liberty on behalf of the Republic of Texas. They served under the banner of the Lone Star, which they brought with them, and their bones rest far from their old Middle Georgia homes and families. And while many of their widows and orphans received Texas land for their sacrifice, the Georgia Battalion still deserves a monument all its own, as promised to the State of Georgia by the State of Texas in 1855. Let such a monument be raised, and may the sons and brothers and fathers of both Georgia and Texas always remember the Georgia Battalion!
References
Baker, D.W.C. (ed.)
A Texas Scrapbook. 1875. Reprint, Austin, Texas: Texas State Historical Association, 1991.
Brown, Gary
James Walker Fannin: Hesitant Martyr in the Texas Revolution. Plano, Texas: Republic of Texas Press, 2000.
Fehrenbach, T.R.
Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. 1968. Updated edition, Boston: Da Capo Press, 2000.
The Georgia Battalion Project
Georgia Messenger
Untitled Newspaper Article Listing the Men of the Georgia Battalion. Fort Hawkins, Georgia: December 20, 1836.
Luther, Joseph
The Odyssey of Texas Ranger James Callahan. Charleston: History Press, 2017.
Sons of DeWitt Colony, Texas
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