The things you can only learn around a campfire at Goliad reenactment, where you sit and drink a beer with the guys that write the books.
Who paid for the Texas Revolution?
Follow the money.
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dfm01McKinney, Williams and Company, a mercantile establishment known as the "Barings of Texas," was founded by Thomas F. McKinney and Samuel M. Williams in 1834 at Quintana and moved to Galveston in 1838. As the largest commission-merchant firm in early Texas, it controlled much of the cotton trade at Houston and Galveston.
The company held interests in lands, banking, and industrial and town promotion and helped institute maritime commerce in Texas. It aided the government of Texas during the Texas Revolution by issuing notes to circulate as money. Although neither McKinney nor Williams was wealthy in his own right, each had good credit and wealthy connections in the United States.Up until 1830 the Texas colonies had been granted tax-free status, a couple of years later the Mexican govt starts asking for those tarrifs, worse starts enforcing them with armed schooners.
McKinney and Williams, both out of New Orleans, do pretty good for two guys with no personal wealth. They spring into being as a business partnership already with their own fleet of ships. In response to Mexican interdiction they arm their ships too so that they can shoot back, hence the 18 pounder that was brought to the Alamo.
Fortuitous maybe that somebody forgot to offload the ammunition, else that otherwise incongruously heavy piece would have been drug to San Antonio by the New Orleans Greys in time to knock down the walls of the Alamo around General Cos's ears. Holding said mission against a Santa Anna the following February would then have become a moot point. Not much left to defend one would guess.
Because of those armed merchant ships, Mexico no longer had free access to the Texas ports like Copano Bay, so Santa Anna and Urrea both had to walk more than 600 miles to assault Texas instead of coming by ship and using the ports like any sensible person would do.
First thing Urrea does when he gets here is come in along the coast cutting off Texian access to those same ports from the landward side.
Hate to say it, but slavery was in the mix too. Importing slaves into the US had been illegal for more'n twenty years by that point. A major part if not THE most profitable part of McKinney and William's trade was smuggling slaves into Texas from Cuba, and thence into the United States. Cuba was just a way-station in the African slave trade, since bringing in slaves from Africa was still legal there.
Fannin the slave broker? An employee of McKinney and Williams in that endeavor, their agent in Texas, plucked from obscurity in Georgia (nobody knows how he got the job), part of his duties being to foment revolution, or at least autonomous statehood within Mexico.
To that end he writes much correspondence to his native Georgia, resulting in the raising of the Georgia Battalion, said Georgia Battalion actually being armed by the Georgia state armories. Fannin takes command of them when they arrive by boat from New Orleans, and marches them to Refugio intending to join the Matamoras Expedition.
Fannin's connections too likely explain how he gets the job of top dog at Goliad, Commander in Chief of the Texian Army such as it was at that time.
Fifteen years later, Georgia would formally ask Texas for reparations to cover the cost of their rifles lost by the Georgia Battalion at Goliad.
Birdwatcher
