Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar
is generally thought of (if at all) as a politician who almost inadvertently
served as second President of the Republic of Texas—but he was also a poet, and
if not a distinguished one, he was at least persistent. Lamar was born August
16, 1798, in Louisville, Georgia, and grew up on his father’s plantation in
Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy he was adept at the manly arts of
horsemanship, fencing, oil painting, and writing poetry. One of his verses was called “An
Evening on the Banks of the Chattahoochee” (a river whose charms must be
overpowering, for half a century later they would also provide poetic inspiration
to another poet, named Sidney Lanier).
Lamar dabbled in newspaper
publishing in Cahawba, Alabama, where his New Year’s poem in the Cahawba Press suggested that he had more
aptitude for meter than for rhyme.
It reads in part:
Yearly
doth the Laureat sing
In
honor of his country’s King.
And
Poets annually raise
To
Patrons tributary lays.
With
Printers, too, it is in vogue
To
write to friends a New Year’s ode,
And
in compliance with the fashion,
I’ll
make some rhymes if I can match ‘em.
It is easy to see that
poetry was not and never would be Lamar’s primary occupation. He became the
secretary of the governor of Georgia, founded the Columbus Enquirer, won a seat in the state senate, failed twice to win
election to Congress, and then, after his wife's death from tuberculosis, moved
to Texas in 1835, just in time to be on hand when the Anglo colonists, a
rambunctious bunch of trouble-makers, many of whom were in Texas to escape
authorities in the United States, decided to rid themselves of the nuisance of
the Mexican authorities as well.
Still writing poems, Lamar
had the good sense to avoid being caught in the Alamo in 1836, but then joined
the Texian (as it was then known) army as a private and, given the shortage of
presentable soldiers, wound up being promoted to colonel a mere month later. He
led the cavalry at the Battle of San Jacinto, which resulted in Texas’
independence from the civilizing influence of the Mexicans.
In September of the same
year, his career rising like a rocket, Lamar was elected Vice President of the
fledgling Republic of Texas, an office that made so little demand on his time
that he spent most of his term back in Georgia studying Spanish and blithely
accepting adulation as a war hero.
When he returned to Texas
the following year, he threw himself into organizing the Philosophical Society,
when he suddenly realized that a campaign to elect him to succeed Sam Houston
as President of Texas had been launched without his knowledge or approval. He
opted to stay in the race when the only other two candidates both committed
suicide before the election, making the ease of his victory the envy of every
politician in the world.
As President, Lamar
advocated setting aside land for schools and universities, and even though none
of these institutions was actually established during his administration, he
thereby became known as “the Father of Texas Education.” Delving into his poetic vocabulary, he
once said in a speech that a “cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy,”
and someone translated that into Latin as Disciplina
Praesidium Civitatis and made it the motto of the University of Texas.
Lamar lived more than
twenty years after his Presidency ended, fought Mexicans with General
Zachary Taylor in 1846, served for a couple of years in the 1850s as United
States minister to Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and continued to advocate
secession from the Union by the Southern slave states and to create poetry up
to his last breath—which came quite unexpectedly on December 19, 1859, when in
the midst of preparations for Christmas on his plantation in Richmond, Texas,
he remarked (ungrammatically, it must be pointed out), “I feel very queerly; I
believe I am going to die”—and then promptly did so, at the age of sixty-one.
The attending doctor said death was caused by a “heart ailment” and “apoplexy.”
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