Edwin Ward Moore was the guiding light of the Texas Navy
during his glory years. The son of an aristocratic Virginia
family, Moore joined the U.S. Navy in 1825 as a midshipman at the age of
15. He was assigned to squadrons serving in the Mediterranean and
Atlantic coastlines until he was transferred to the U.S. West Indies
Squadron aboard the warship Hornet. This squadron, based in
Pensacola, covered the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and it was
during his voyages with this squadron that Moore first became exposed to
warfare in the Gulf, malaria, and Texans. In 1835 he was promoted
to lieutenant, and he quickly proved to be one of the U.S. Navy's
brightest stars. Despite his mastery of naval skills, his quick
intelligence, and his hard work, Moore was unlikely to get beyond
lieutenant for another decade in the peacetime U.S. fleet. Many
captains from the War of 1812 were still around, and Moore’s
midshipman class would not expect to find many commanders in its ranks
until the Civil War. When Moore’s ship anchored at Galveston in
early 1838, it is likely that Moore began thinking of possibilities in
the naval service of Texas.
With the naval appropriations act of 1837, Texas
began rebuilding its navy. Sometime in April 1839, President Lamar
offered Moore the job as commander of the Texas Navy, and Moore
evidently accepted, recruiting officers from the ranks of the U.S. Navy
while at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. The U.S. Secretary of
the Navy, John Forsyth, moved to court-martial Moore for violating the
Neutrality Act of 1819, but Moore managed to resign in July 1839 before
a trial could be convened. He moved to Texas, assuming the rank of
Post Captain, and because he commanded a squadron, he was universally
given the courtesy title of Commodore.
Moore spent the last half of 1839 recruiting men and
procuring supplies for his new fleet, which included the steamer of war Zavala,
the six-gun schooners San Bernard, San Antonio
and San Jacinto, the sixteen-gun brigs Archer and Wharton,
and biggest of all, the 500-ton sloop-of-war Austin. On the
last day of 1839, Moore was arrested in New York for violating U.S.
neutrality laws by recruiting more men for the Texas Navy, and upon his
release on bail, he sailed back to Texas to begin operations.
By June 1840, the largest fleet Texas ever fielded
was ready to sail. The Zavala, the Austin and the
three schooners left Galveston for the Mexican coast, intent on
persuading Mexico to accept Texas independence. During this
cruise, Moore’s fleet allied itself with federalist rebels in Mexico,
particularly those fighting for the government of Yucatán, which was in
revolt against the central Mexican government. In October 1835,
Moore’s squadron forced a garrison of centralists out of the Tobasco
town of San Juan Bautista, earning the fleet $25,000 in silver as
promised by the federalist rebels. Unable to find any warships to
fight, and with his provisions running low, Moore returned to Galveston
on February 1, 1841.
Moore was a brilliant naval commander and an
excellent administrator, but he lacked the kind of political skills
needed to maneuver the labyrinth of Texas politics, and he was surprised
to find that President Lamar’s political support had eroded to
virtually nothing. Congress ordered most of the fleet mothballed,
and Moore spent the summer and fall of 1841 conducting a survey of the
Texas coastline, a mundane but important job that saved the Republic
thousands, if not millions of dollars in insurance by providing a
reliable map of the treacherous Texas coastline.
With the fall of 1841 came the return of Sam Houston.
President Lamar, constitutionally prohibited from succeeding himself,
lost the support of Congress, and prepared to watch Sam Houston undo all
his hard work in creating a first-class fleet for Texas. Before he
left office, however, Lamar signed an extraordinary agreement with the
government of Yucatán which rented the Texas Navy out to Yucatán in
return for $8,000 per month. Moore was ordered out to sea in
October 1841, and he made sure that his ships were well away from
Galveston when Sam Houston was sworn in on December 13, 1841.
Houston tried to recall the fleet, but it was too late. When he
arrived off the Yucatán coast in January 1842, however, Moore was
disappointed to learn that Yucatán was engaged in heavy negotiations to
reunify with Mexico, and Moore saw little action on this cruise.
When Houston’s orders to return reached Moore in March 1842, he had no
choice, and he retired to Galveston to find provisions and men for his
fleet.
The year 1842 was a frustrating one for Moore.
The bankrupt Texas government could not, and did not, pay its officers
or sailors, and Moore chafed under President Houston’s anti-naval
policy, which Moore viewed as tactically short-sighted and strategically
indefensible. Houston demanded that his government save money by
mothballing its fleet at a time when Mexico was building its navy up for
an invasion of Texas. The steamer Zavala was abandoned on
the Galveston shore for lack of funds, and sank into the mud, never to
sail again. The brigs likewise began to decay from lack of
maintenance, and men began to resign and desert with alarming
regularity. Commodore Moore used his personal funds, then his
personal credit, to feed his men and keep the ships safe while he vainly
tried to get President Houston to release appropriated naval funds.
When the public demanded a strong response to Mexico’s capture of San
Antonio in 1842, Houston declared a blockade of the Mexican coast,
although he refused to provide Commodore Moore with any money to fund
the blockade. As 1842 passed into 1843, Mexico’s rebellious
province of Yucatán was again at war with the central government, and
Moore, now stuck in New Orleans with no money to come home, saw an
opportunity to renew the alliance that funded the Texas Navy during the
Lamar administration. He sent the schooner San Antonio to
Yucatán to renew the alliance (it was never heard from again), and by
January 1843, he had pledged to support Yucatán as a means of saving
Texas from another Mexican invasion, which diplomats said was sure to
follow rapprochement between Mexico and Yucatán.
But Sam Houston had other ideas. Convinced that
the Texas Navy was just a glory-hounding waste of money that would serve
no purpose other than to provoke a war with Mexico and complicate
Houston’s plans to annex Texas to the United States. In January
1843, Houston convened a secret session of Congress, convinced the
legislators that the fleet was a waste of resources, would never go to
sea again, and needed to be sold. On January 16, the Texas
Congress passed a law ordering the sale of the Texas Navy at auction,
and President Houston appointed James Morgan and William Bryan to go to
New Orleans, assume command of the decrepit fleet, and sell it.
Moore, now learning about the ways Sam Houston
operated, met the commissioners and showed them a first-rate,
professional fleet, drilled and equipped to make a fearsome naval force.
He used Yucatán silver to fit out the 20-gun Austin and the
16-gun brig Wharton, and convinced the commissioners that Texas
would have no defense against invasion if it sold its fleet and Yucatán
joined Mexico, as Mexico made it clear that once it put down the Yucatán
revolt it would turn its attention to the “Question de Tejas.”
Commissioner Morgan saw that Moore was right, and
authorized Moore to take the squadron home to Galveston, as ordered, via
Yucatán. Moore’s two-ship squadron sailed from New Orleans to
Campeche in mid-April 1843 and broke a Mexican blockade that included
the world’s mightiest warship, the 1,100 ton ironclad steamer Guadalupe.
Mounting monstrous guns that fired 68-pound exploding shells, the
English-made Guadalupe was the most advanced warship in the
world. The Guadalupe was escorted by the equally huge armed
steamer Moctezuma and a squadron of sailing ships. Even
when some small Yucatán ships sailed to join Moore’s sloop and brig,
the Mexican fleet easily outgunned the allies.
The first contact between the two fleets took place
on April 30, 1843, when Moore drove the Mexican fleet off Campeche,
saving the embattled city from capture by the centralist army. The
Mexican fleet dispersed, leaving only the warships Guadalupe, Moctezuma
and Aguila to guard Moore’s tiny squadron. On May 16,
1843, the fleets battled a second time, and Moore’s Austin and Wharton,
unaided by the timid Yucatán squadron, drove off the Mexican ships with
a heavy loss of life. This engagement proved to be the only time
in history that a sailing ship bested an ironclad steam-powered warship,
and signaled the swan song of the Age of Sail.
The Texas Navy returned to Campeche in triumph, only
to find that in March, President Houston had published a proclamation to
the world claiming that his officers were pirates, and calling on the
“naval powers of Christendom” to arrest his rogue officers!
When the Yucatán coast was secure, Moore returned to Galveston to
tumultuous applause and celebration as Texas’ newest hero.
Coastal inhabitants claimed he would be the next president, perhaps even
king, of Texas, and welcomed the fleet home with parades, banquets and
speeches. Moore, however, offered himself to the Galveston County
Sheriff as a prisoner under President Houston’s March proclamation,
but the sheriff refused to arrest Moore. President Houston quickly
dismissed Commodore Moore, and virtually all officers of the Texas Navy
submitted their resignations in protest. Moore demanded a
court-martial, as required by Texas law, and when Houston ignored Moore,
the commodore published a pamphlet, “To the People of Texas,” in
which he set out the doings of the Texas Navy in great detail.
(This pamphlet, which has become the single most important record of the
Texas Navy, survives only in archives and a few libraries today.)
The pamphlet had its desired effect: Congress passed a resolution
forcing Houston to give Moore a court-martial, and the court, a group of
hand-picked friends of Houston, promptly acquitted Moore of virtually
all of Houston’s charges.
Commodore Moore never commanded a warship after July
1843. He spent the remainder of his days trying to get the
Republic, then State, to reimburse him for nearly $50,000 in personal
loans he made to keep the navy afloat. He also worked to get
himself and the other Texas Navy officers inducted into the United
States Navy, on grounds that the treaty of annexation incorporated the
men as well as the ships into that service. The efforts failed,
although in 1857 Congress awarded the Texas naval officers five years’
pay in return for a release of all claims of rank in the U.S. Navy.
Moore married Emma Cox of Philadelphia in 1849, and returned to
Galveston in 1860 to assist with the construction of the Galveston
customs house. He lived long enough to see the conclusion of the
Civil War, and died on October 5, 1865.
In 1876, Texas honored Moore by naming a county after
him. It is one of the great ironies of Texas history that a county
named for Texas’ naval commander should be located in the Texas
Panhandle, about as far from the Gulf of Mexico as a Texan can travel.
For further reading, see Commodore Moore and the
Texas Navy, by Tom Henderson Wells, and The Texas Navy in Forgotten
Battles and Shirtsleeve Diplomacy, by Jim Dan Hill. Other papers
relating to Commodore Moore can be found at the Texas State Library and
Archives in Austin, the Center for American History in Austin, and the
Rosenberg Library in Galveston. Also, check our Texas Navy Bibliography.
The
New Handbook of Texas
Prepared by Admiral Johnathan W. Jordan
Copyright © 2000-2001
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