Sam Houston

His father died in 1806 leaving debts on a Rockbridge County plantation worked by enslaved people, so Elizabeth Houston took nine children over the mountains into Blount County, Tennessee. Three of the eldest died within a few years of arriving. Sam wanted nothing to do with the farm or with the family store, and at 16 he crossed to Hiwassee Island and the town of the Cherokee chief John Jolly, who took him in. He stayed about three years, learned the language, and was given the name Raven. He came back at 19 to teach in a one-room schoolhouse, enlisted on March 24, 1813, and was severely wounded under Andrew Jackson at Horseshoe Bend.

Everything after that belongs to Texas: San Jacinto in April 1836, two nonconsecutive terms as president of the republic, the push into the Union, 13 years in the United States Senate, and a governorship that ended in 1861 because he would not swear the Confederate oath. BriefHistory carries that record as public history, from the outside. This page runs the other direction, through the marriages, the exiles and the reprimands that went on underneath it the whole way.

Jackson made him a sub-agent for Cherokee removal in 1817, so the man the Cherokee had adopted spent a year moving Cherokee families out of East Tennessee. In February 1818 John C. Calhoun reprimanded him for wearing Native dress to a meeting with Cherokee leaders, and the two loathed each other until Calhoun died. He shot and badly wounded General William A. White in a duel over a Nashville postmastership in 1826. He married Eliza Allen in January 1829, the marriage lasted 11 weeks, and he resigned the governorship of Tennessee in April and went back to the Cherokee, marrying Tiana Rogers in a tribal ceremony in 1830. He owned enslaved people all his life, hired them out, and let them keep part of the wage.

He died on July 26, 1863, of pneumonia, in a Huntsville house built to look like a steamboat, shunned by most of the Texas leadership, his own son sent home wounded from Shiloh. He lies in Oakwood Cemetery there. Texas kept the name anyway and kept multiplying it: Sam Houston State University, Sam Houston National Forest, Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, a ballistic-missile submarine, a Harris County beltway. In 1994 the sculptor David Adickes put up a 67-foot white figure of him beside Interstate 45 outside Huntsville, the ninth-tallest statue in the country. Somebody spray-painted it in 2008.

Sam Houston's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Command of the Texian army mission
  The campaign that ended at San Jacinto with Santa Anna a prisoner 1836
• Presidency of the Republic of Texas other
  First president from 1836 to 1838 and third from 1841 to 1844 1836
• Annexation of Texas law
  He steered the republic into the Union and became one of its first two senators 1845
• Governorship of Texas other
  Won on a Unionist platform and vacated by the legislature in March 1861 1859

• 1806 aged ~13 His father dies and the family moves to Blount County, Tennessee The article gives 1806 in the narrative and 1807 in a Britannica citation.
• c. 1809 aged ~16 Runs away at 16 to live with the Cherokee on Hiwassee Island He stayed about three years and was given the name Raven.
• March 24, 1813 aged 20 Enlists in the U.S. Army at 20
• February 1818 aged 24 Calhoun reprimands him for wearing Native dress to a meeting with Cherokee leaders He resigned from the army the same year.
• April 1829 aged 36 Resigns as governor of Tennessee 11 weeks into his first marriage He went to the Arkansas Territory and rejoined the Cherokee.
• April 13, 1832 aged 39 Beats Congressman William Stanbery with a cane The House convicted him 106 to 89 and a federal court set damages at 500 dollars.
• May 9, 1840 aged 47 Marries Margaret Lea of Marion, Alabama They had eight children, and she got him to stop drinking.
• March 1861 aged 67 The legislature declares the governorship vacant He refused the Confederate oath and then refused federal troops to hold the office.
• July 26, 1863 aged 70 Dies of pneumonia at Huntsville, Texas

• Andrew Jackson 1767–1845
  Seventh President whose populist policies and Indian Removal Act left a deeply contested legacy. served under
• John C. Calhoun 1782–1850
  Vice president and theorist of slavery and states’ rights whose doctrines intensified sectional conflict. reprimanded by
• Davy Crockett 1786–1836
  Frontiersman, soldier, and politician who became a folk hero of the American frontier. fellow Tennessean who died in Texas
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. offered him federal troops
• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. refused his government's oath