"Slave owner, slave dealer, slave hunter", or so one recent author dismisses James Walker Fannin Jr., the ill-starred commander at Goliad. But that is a description that would apply to many men in that time and place, including Jim Bowie, whom history recalls in an entirely different light.
The thing that impresses about all these prominent Texas guys is the degree to which they made something from nothing, early in life.
Phillip Dimmitt arrives in Texas in his early twenties, yet by the next decade his landing and warehouse is a major port of entry into Texas and he's a major figure in Texas. John Linn did him one better. About of the same age, Linn founded an entire town on the coast, Linnville. While Dimmitt was able to supply the Texians after San Jacinto with supplies and men, Linn actually beat him to it, sending his own personal merchant ship likewise loaded with volunteers and supplies.
And to put 'em in context, it wasn't everybody in Texas succeeded like that, there were 30,000 Americans in Texas by then, regular folks, the salt of the earth, almost all of whom lived and died in modest anonymity.
But, whatever his failings, Fannin became one of the famous few, likewise at an early age. Furthermore, Fannin's fortune was derived largely from the illegal smuggling of slaves into Texas and the United States, mostly from Cuba.
Whatever else it may have been, one imagines that the illegal slave trade was hardly for the indecisive or faint of heart. A harsh business all around, and like most illegal businesses prone to attract the participation of dangerous people.
For a while Jim Bowie made his living smuggling slaves, and no one is surprised that a famously deadly brawler like himself would make a living that way. Yet Bowie's fortune, when he died, was proven to be largely illusory, he wasn't nearly as wealthy as he had claimed to be. One has to wonder how history would remember Bowie, if at all, if he had not died at the Alamo (despite his best efforts to extricate that garrison after the siege began).
It does seem a certainty that Fannin would be celebrated as a hero had he chosen to die defending the La Bahia Mission instead of likewise attempting to extricate his force, tho one wonders if a general as capable as Urrea would bother to actually assault the place rather than starving it out and/or making it redundant by maneuver.
Whatever his qualities, unlike Bowie, Fannin DID accumulate wealth, or at least capital, establishing a plantation on the coast at Veslaco in '34 and continuing to broker slaves, both legally and illegally. By the time the war broke out Fannin was just thirty-one years old, and already a man of means.
In his younger days he had famously dropped out after two years at West Point, tho it is difficult to determine if that was to any degree a failure on his part. It is significant that this exposure to the military and the military chain of command would be regarded as rendering him as especially qualified to command in Texas.
After dropping out of West Point in '21 he returned home to Georgia, over the next eight years he married, had two daughters, led the local Temperance Society, established a mercantile business and....
....began to build his fortune in the business of smuggling in slaves.
Just a year after his arrival in Texas, Fannin was a vocal and active supporter of Texian rights and interests. He was present when the shooting started over the cannon at Gonzales in October of '35, and was assigned with Bowie by Houston to assess the conditions and fort at San Antonio. He was present with Bowie at the opening fight at Mission Concepcion later that same month wherein first blood was drawn on the Mexican force there under General Cos. He would later perform a reconnaissance/interdiction mission alongside Travis.
Fannin himself at that point in time clamored for command, wishing to be a general at "a point of danger". He does seem to have had an ingratiating quality, successfully advancing his command status amid so many men vying for the same. Houston thought well of him, so did the members of the Consultation of 1835. If Travis or Bowie, who had served with him, thought ill of him that does not emerge in any correspondence.
Fannin originally had arrived in Goliad in February of '36 in appointed head of the newly-arrived Georgia Battalion of volunteers. At the time his orders had been to join the Matamoras Expedition. On arrival, seeing the situation, he chose instead to remain with the Texian forces at Goliad.
During this interval the body that had appointed him, the Consultation of 1835, was falling apart in dissent. Somehow, amid the warring egos of Dimmitt, Houston, Grant and Johnson, Fannin emerges as the nominal commander at Goliad, heading the largest Texian Army then in existence, and regarded by some in authority back in East Texas as the Commander-in-Chief of all Texian forces.
Likely, had not catastrophe intervened, by the common consent of both Fannin and those disgruntled volunteers serving under him, his tenure as commander would have been brief. Just weeks after taking command, Fannin, the same guy who had aspired to be a general, was begging to be relieved on the grounds that he was singularly unsuited to the task. Likewise surviving correspondence from his men indicate they felt Fannin was poorly qualified for the post he held.
The one guy on the scene who did write well of Travis was that dynamic ex-Marine quoted earlier, John Sowers-Brooks, who worked tirelessly and selflessly as Fannin's de-facto Senior Non-com at Goliad preparing the defenses and forming a fighting unit out of the disparate militiamen present, but Sowers-Brooks comes across as such a generous-hearted and can-do kind of guy he might have been hard-pressed before he publicly criticized anybody, much less his commanding officer.
Birdwatcher
