Peggy McCormack Damns Sam Houston
To the devil with your glorious history!
Margaret “Peggy” McCormack
When Sam Houston and his Texian army defeated Antonio López de Santa Anna and his Mexican army on April 21, 1836, at the battle of San Jacinto, the field was scattered with some 630 Mexican corpses.1 Seven Texians had been killed outright, four others would die from their wounds shortly afterward. According to one recollection, “The appearance of the battle ground can be better imagined than described. Piles and clusters of [Mexican] dead and dying lay in every direction. Indeed the ground was liberally covered.”2
The Texian dead were buried soon after the battle, not so the Mexican dead. They were left to rot where they fell. The only exception was that of General Manuel Fernando Castrillon. Lorenzo de Zavala, the vice president of the newly formed Republic of Texas, arrived at San Jacinto on April 23, aboard the steamboat Cayuga. Walking among the dead, he discovered the stripped body of Castrillon, an old friend. De Zavala had Castrillon carried across the bayou and buried in his family cemetery—the only known Mexican soldier to receive a known Christian burial.3
Others aboard the Cayuga who surveyed the battlefield included Thomas F. McKinney and John J. Linn, who was in charge of cannon and supplies carried on the steamer for Sam Houston and the Texian army. Linn wrote of what he saw that day:
T. F. McKinney and myself, at San Jacinto, went to visit the field of battle. The ghastly spectacle of six hundred Mexican corpses festering in the sun met our gaze. The pockets of every one had been turned in the search for plunder. In passing the breastworks I noticed a man who was extracting the teeth of the dead Mexicans. He was a dentist from the United States, and was supplying himself with these valuable adjuncts of his trade. We stood uncovered at the grave of our seven slain heroes; and I could but recognize in this unparalleled result the immediate interposition of Divine Providence.
Linn noted the Texians refused to bury the Mexican dead. He “suggested to General Houston that some two or more hundred [Mexican] prisoners, under strong guard, should perform this duty, which ought to be as agreeable to the one as disgusting to the other.” Houston brought the matter to Santa Anna, who, according to Linn, “replied that he was wholly indifferent and cared not what disposition was made of the bodies.” Linn said Santa Anna “volunteered the information that where fuel was abundant and convenient [as it was at San Jacinto] he generally found in cremation a ready solution for similar problems.” And with that, the matter ended. The Mexican dead would remain littered on the ground. “The stench became intolerable,” Linn wrote, “and citizens living in the vicinity of the field were compelled to remove from their houses for some time.”4
The disposition of war dead was a major problem before the advent of modern embalming and refrigeration. Santa Anna’s solution, one practiced by the Greeks and Romans, though gruesome was an efficient and effective means of dealing with many bodies at one time. He had employed it at the Alamo and Goliad, leaving the ashes and bones of those Texians to be carried away on the wind or snatched away by scavengers.
But Houston had no intention of ordering his men to build funeral pyres and pile rotting corpses of enemy soldiers on them. Nor did he intend to order Mexican prisoners to perform the grisly task. This prompted Pedro Delgado, a Mexican prisoner, to complain that the Texians “had not the generosity to burn or to bury” the corpses of his compatriots.5 It was true. Delgado, however, was apparently unaware that his own commanding officer was just as hardhearted, “wholly indifferent” to the proper care of his own dead.
Someone who wasn’t indifferent was Margaret “Peggy” McCormack (sometimes spelled McCormick).6 Born in Ireland around 1788, she, her husband Arthur, and two sons, Michael and John, immigrated to Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred in 1823. The family was granted a league of land south of Buffalo Bayou at the confluence of the San Jacinto River, bordered by San Jacinto Bay on the east. Tragedy struck the family a year later when Arthur drowned in Buffalo Bayou, leaving Peggy and her sons to manage their land.
In April 1836, as the Mexican army advanced east across Texas, the now forty-nine-year-old Peggy and her boys fled as part of the Runaway Scrape. She couldn’t have known when she abandoned her home that the decisive battle of the Texas Revolution would be fought in her pasture. When she returned a few days after the battle, she discovered her crops ruined, upwards of seventy-five bushels of corn consumed, at least 140 head of cattle slaughtered, and two horses missing. In their place were the rotting remains of the Mexican dead.
Horrified by what she saw, and sickened by the stench, she sought out Sam Houston. Fearful the corpses would haunt her, she demanded Houston dispose of them—immediately. Here’s where Linn, who was present, picks up the story.
Mrs. McCormack, on whose estate the principal portion of the slain lay, called at the headquarters of the commander-in-chief and requested him to cause “them stinking Mexicans” to be removed from her land. “Old Sam” replied with mock seriousness: “Madam, your land will be famed in history as the classic spot upon which the glorious victory of San Jacinto was gained! Here was born, in the throes of revolution, and amid the strife of contended legions, the infant of Texan independence! Here that latest scourge of mankind, the arrogantly self-styled ‘Napoleon of the West,’ met his fate!”7
Peggy McCormack didn’t give a rat’s ass about history or Houston either. Her response was rapier sharp—cutting and damning: “To the devil with your glorious history! Take off your stinking Mexicans.”8
“Old Sam” was unfazed, and refused to “take off [his] stinking Mexicans.” But he and his army would take off. On April 26, because of the foul stench of so many decomposing and scavenged corpses, Houston ordered the army to decamp to Dr. George M. Patrick’s property five or six miles from San Jacinto, leaving Mrs. McCormack and her sons with more than six hundred stinking Mexican bodies to bury.
With the odious task done, Peggy McCormack and her son lived on the property, growing it into one of the largest cattle operations in Harris Country. Unfortunately, Houston’s prediction that her land “will be famed in history” was all too prescient. The battlefield became a tourist attraction virtually overnight, with curiosity seekers showing up unannounced and wandering across her pasture.
Not long after the fighting ceased, she petitioned the government of the Republic of Texas for damages to her ranch—for produce consumed and destroyed, cattle butchered for beef, and the theft of two horses. The cash-strapped Republic couldn’t or wouldn’t compensate her.
In time, the majority of her land was stolen through an unscrupulous land survey. The illegality wasn’t uncovered until after her death in 1854.9 Apparently, she burned to death in her home, though the rumor was she had been robbed and murdered before the house was set on fire. Her son Michael, who served as a courier in the Texian army, became a pilot for vessels navigating the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou. In 1875, he drowned in the bayou very near the same spot where his father drowned fifty years before.
In the words of one historian, “San Jacinto was tragic ground for the McCormack family.”10
Notes:
1 See Stephen L. Moore, Eighteen Minutes: The Battle of San Jacinto and the Texas Independence Campaign (Dallas: Republic of Texas Press, 2004), 364.
2 Moore, Eighteen Minutes, 371.
3 See Moore, Eighteen Minutes, 389–90.
4 John J. Linn, Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Texas (New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1883), 263–4.
5 Moore, Eighteen Minutes, 394.
6 On the spelling McCormick see “Peggy McCormick: ‘To the Devil with Your Glorious History,’” Medium, April 25, 2016.
7 Linn, Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Texas, 264.
8 Linn, Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Texas, 264.
9 The Texas State Historical Society places her death on July 30, 1859, though other sources place it five years earlier or simply in the 1850s.
10 Frank X. Tolbert, The Day of San Jacinto (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959), 247.
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