Stephen F. Austin in Love
Stephen F. Austin barely had time for love in his life because of his commitment to the survival of his colony in Texas and then to Texas independence. When Stephen was 27, he inherited the burden of the colony upon his father’s death in June 1821, and also the family debts that his father had incurred.
Stephen had interests in several girls when he was a student at Transylvania University in Lexington. Kentucky. But Stephen withdrew from the University in 1810 due to his father’s near insolvency at the time.
Stephen crossed the Sabine River into Texas in December 1821. In March 1822, Austin traveled to Mexico City to clarify the permissions that his colony needed with the new Mexican government. This took him 16 months. The ensuing years brought a plethora of problems with bellicose Indians, contentious colonists and chaotic Mexican governance. He observed that ”the selfishness, envy, jealousy, false pride, disappointed vanity, and vindictive, furious revenge” had “soured, disgusted and sickened” him. He found little solace among the colonists and missed his family.
In 1831, members of Austin’s family began to move to Texas. His sister Emily moved to Texas in January 1831 and Austin’s first cousin Henry Austin arrived later that year. But it was Henry’s widowed sister Mary that Stephen was most anxious to see. Stephen had not seen this cousin, Mary Austin Holley in 25 years, when she was a 23-year old bride and he a 14-year old schoolboy in Connecticut. Now she was a 47-year old widow, but still youthful and beautiful. Mary arrived from New Orleans in October 1831, but Stephen was laid low by an illness that kept him in bed for 45 days. Finally, in early December, a barely-recovered Stephen braved the bitter cold to travel to Henry’s plantation on the lower Brazos River, really just a three-room log cabin.
The Austin family’s reunion was joyous and Stephen found that Mary measured up to his memory of her. She was his equal in intelligence and was an eager and admiring audience for Stephen’s stories of the colony. They shared a love of books and music and Stephen dreamed of a future in which she would live close by. Duties of state required Austin to leave Mary, but he immediately started writing Mary daily letters, uncharacteristically emotional. “You, my friend, how can I ever thank you for venturing into this wilderness, How to express the happiness of the ten day visit at Henry’s…Yes, we will be happy …We will arrange our cottages…”Stephen might have explained his affection for Mary as merely platonic and cousinly, but he had never felt and spoken this way during his time in Texas. He was daring to think of the future, but the needs of Texas came first.
Stephen went off to the legislative session in Saltillo in March 1832 and Mary returned to Louisiana to write a book on Texas and a biography of Stephen. In April, 1833, Stephen set out for Mexico City to try to heal the rifts that had occurred between Mexico and the Texas colonies and ended up being imprisoned for nearly two years. Mary had returned to Lexington in 1833 to continue writing her books on Texas and Stephen. They met one last time in Lexington in March 1836 and Mary must have been sad to see the ravages of the intervening four years on Stephen. Stephen died of pneumonia at Christmas 1836. Mary’s book Texas was published in 1836. She made several more trips to Texas and finished her biography of Stephen. She died in 1846, never remarrying.
Herndon Williams is affiliated with the Bayside Historical Society and the Refugio
County Historical Commission. He can be reached at coastalbendchronicle@yahoo.com
