Patriota Tejano, I: Erasmo Seguín
U.S. West History | Latin American History
A special thank you to my students at Santa Anna College in 2018 who encouraged me to break from the textbook-style of teaching — this was first developed that Spring and evolved into this four-part series.
Erasmo Seguín entered history the way frontier men often do — quietly, through geography. He was born on May 26, 1782, in San Antonio, a northern frontier world far from Mexico City, and farther still from the assumptions that power was stable or benevolent. Distance here was not merely spatial. It was political. Authority arrived late, if it arrived at all, and identity formed not through doctrine but through negotiation. On the rim of empire, loyalty was learned the hard way.
Seguín’s origins reflected that layered condition. His family was not Spanish by blood but French, having reached the Americas from Paris via Gévaudan. By 1722, the Seguín family appears in Mexican records, already part of the empire's northward drift. They built their lives in Saltillo, then Chihuahua, before Seguín’s father arrived in Texas in 1778. These were not ideological migrations. They were frontier movements — responses to opportunity, pressure, and survival. Seguín’s identity, like the region itself, was assembled rather than inherited.
San Antonio shaped him. It was a place where survival depended on relationships more than law, and where influence accrued to those who could move between worlds. Seguín lived well. He built a beautiful home he named Casa Blanca, known for its hospitality, for entertaining royalty, and for welcoming Americans. This was not social ornamentation. Casa Blanca functioned as a frontier institution. Meals substituted for treaties. Conversation preceded contracts. In a province where formal diplomacy was thin, hospitality became political infrastructure.
Seguín’s rise was incremental and durable. From 1807 to 1835, he served intermittently as postmaster, when he was not being punished for breaking political boundaries — a position that rarely commands attention in later retellings but mattered enormously on the frontier. Communication was power. Letters carried orders, favors, warnings, and opportunities, and Seguín stood at the center of that circulation. Over time, he accumulated several large land grants around San Antonio, pairing administrative presence with economic weight. He became a broker not by proclamation, but by persistence.
Then the world ruptured.
By September of 1810, armed rebellion against the Spanish crown spread across New Spain. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla launched the movement with the Cry of Dolores, but the rebellion advanced unevenly, dramatic, chaotic, and terrifying in its unpredictability. Discipline fractured. Violence accompanied ideology. Rumor traveled faster than armies.
By January of 1811, Governor Manuel de Salcedo believed the revolt in Texas had been contained. He underestimated the kind of ambition the frontier produces. Juan Bautista de las Casas, a retired military officer, plotted against him. On January 21, Casas won the support of troops in the capital, seized command at midnight, and advanced toward the governor’s palace with his eyes fixed on power. Salcedo escaped briefly, but only delayed capture. He was taken the following day.
Casas justified his coup by claiming Salcedo planned to retreat to the United States. He presented himself as the protector of the province against Hidalgo’s advancing forces. But ambition rarely tolerates restraint. Casas governed oppressively — imprisoning Europeans, enforcing authority with a heavy military hand. What appeared as liberation quickly revealed itself as coercion.
For the Tejano elite, this was not independence. It was a warning. They had heard what Hidalgo’s men had done in Guanajuato — the brutal massacre of Spaniards, property seized, order inverted. These stories traveled north as instruction. Revolution, they learned, could arrive wearing the language of justice and depart carrying blood.
That warning was sharpened later that same year. Hidalgo’s rebellion did not end in triumph or negotiation but in capture and execution. In July of 1811, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was tried by ecclesiastical and civil authorities, stripped of his priestly status, and executed by firing squad. His head, like those of other rebel leaders, was severed and displayed — placed in an iron cage and mounted in Guanajuato as a public lesson in consequence. Independence had not merely been defeated. It had been anatomized and exhibited. For frontier observers in Texas, the message was unmistakable. Revolution could speak in the language of liberation, but the state answered in the language of terror.
This was the world into which the Casas revolt fully revealed itself.
Seguín initially supported Casas, believing he was backing a genuine independence movement. That judgment did not survive experience. Casas increasingly resembled the Hidalgo revolutionaries — not liberators, but men intoxicated by power. Alongside Juan Manuel Zambrano, Seguín helped lead a counter-revolt, aligning — ironically and against preference — with prominent royalists. The choice was not ideological. It was existential. Zambrano captured the province with Seguín’s help and returned it to Salcedo.
Frontier politics offered no clean victories. Suspicion followed everyone who had moved too visibly. In the confusion, some grew wary of Seguín, and his land was confiscated. Yet not all was lost. Seguín gained acclaim for capturing Casas himself. Casas was tried and convicted of treason.
And then Texas learned its lesson in full.
Casas’ head was cut off, impaled on a stake, and displayed in the main plaza of San Fernando — a warning erected in open air, meant to teach the province what rebellion could cost. The Empire had demonstrated the lesson at Guanajuato. Texas repeated it locally. Power is instructed through spectacle.
The punishment for Seguín was not arbitrary. It followed logic, however brutal. Seguín, even for being the hero to capture Casas, was disciplined for having opposed Salcedo. On the frontier, timing mattered more than intention. Even though Seguín helped bring down Casas and personally captured him, the stain of initial defiance lingered. Loyalty, once questioned, could be fully repaired — but only healed by time. His land was confiscated — Texas, like an empire, did not forget its first choices — redemption had to be earned.
This was only the beginning of Seguín’s political ride.
The aftermath of 1811 was treacherous. Seguín worked to rebuild his reputation after surviving a treason-tainted season. It would not be until March of 1819 that he was let back to his previous station, and by 1821, he had become alcalde of San Antonio — and the tide of history shifted again.
In 1821, Mexico achieved independence from Spain. Bexareños arrived in San Antonio, chanting "Viva la Independencia." The old imperial order dissolved unevenly, and the frontier felt the change less as celebration than as opportunity.
That same year, Seguín escorted a small party of Americans into Texas.
In July 1821, he wrote to the governor:
“I am accompanied by 16 Americans from those who expect to settle on the Colorado. They are led by Stephen Austin, who, on account of the death of his father comes to fulfill his contract.”
Moses Austin had sought to bring three hundred families to Texas. He died before completing the project and willed the contract to his son. The Mexican government, for its part, had reasons to tolerate Anglo settlement — buffer logic in a region exposed to Comanche raids and foreign influence.
Tejanos treated the Anglo families “in the best manner possible.”
Seguín had little fear of the newcomers. His impression was that they were of respectable stock. Given his position, he believed he could operate as a political bridge between cultures. Almost immediately, Austin entered into business with Seguín, seeking control of the Indian trade. Within days, they went on a mustang hunt — an excursion that bloomed into friendship between the Seguín and Austin families.
From the start, there was cultural exchange: language, economy, and ideas. Each family influenced the other, growing more liberal in thought and more staunch in ideas of independence. Austin stayed with Seguín’s family whenever near San Antonio. His brother lived with them for nearly two years. Hospitality again became politics.
By 1822, with La Bahía established, imports flowed through Texas and nearby regions, producing substantial commerce and tax revenue. Texas was no longer merely a frontier. It was becoming a hinge between empires, economies, and futures not yet fully imagined.
Seguín stood at the center of that hinge. Seguín would soon be elected to the National Congress in 1823 as a representative. Beneath that rise sat a quieter engine of influence: his long tenure as postmaster and the networks it sustained.
He had learned early what revolution could wear as a disguise. He had seen how quickly liberation could become coercion, how easily power could shed its promises. Before the war ever arrived in Texas, Erasmo Seguín had already lived through its first lesson. He was made before the war — and shaped by the knowledge that history rarely announces itself honestly at the door.
View the other articles of this series:
Bibliography | Notes
Chabot, Frederick Charles. Genealogies of Early San Antonio Families. San Antonio, TX: Frederick Charles Chabot, 1937.
Haggard, J. Villasana. “The Counter-Revolution of Béxar, 1811.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (October 1939): 323–327.
Edmondson, J. C. Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts. Plano, TX: Republic of Texas Press, 2000.
Davis, William C. Lone Star Rising. New York: Free Press, 2017.
de la Teja, Jesús F. Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.
Series Bibliography | Notes
Anna, Timothy E. Forging Mexico, 1821–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Mexico: 1824–1861. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Company, 1885.
Callcott, Wilfred H. “Santa Anna, Antonio Lopez de.” Handbook of Texas Online.
Texas State Historical Association. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/santa-anna-antonio-lopez-de.
Campbell, Randolph B. An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Chabot, Frederick Charles. Genealogies of Early San Antonio Families. San Antonio, TX: Frederick Charles Chabot, 1937.
Davis, William C. Lone Star Rising. New York: Free Press, 2017.
de la Teja, Jesús F. “Seguin, Juan Nepomuceno.” Handbook of Texas Online.
Texas State Historical Association. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/seguin-juan-nepomuceno.
de la Teja, Jesús F. “Seguin, Juan Jose Maria Erasmo de Jesus.” Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fse07
de la Teja, Jesús F. Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.
DeLay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Edmondson, J. C. Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts. Plano, TX: Republic of Texas Press, 2000.
Fischer, Robert Potter. The Life of General Santa Anna. Publication details not specified in document.
Haggard, J. Villasana. “The Counter-Revolution of Béxar, 1811.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (October 1939): 323–327.
Hardin, Stephen L. “Gonzales, Battle of.” Handbook of Texas Online.
Texas State Historical Association. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/gonzales-battle-of.
Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. The Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Howren, Alleine. “Causes and Origin of the Decree of April 6, 1830.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (April 1913): 421–433.
Jillson, Cal. Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.
McLeish, John Lewin. Highlights of the Mexican Revolution. Aurora, MO: Menace Publishing Company, 1918.
Morritt, Robert D. The Lure of Texas. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
OER Project. “Comanche Empire | World History Project.” YouTube.
Rodríguez O., Jaime E. “We Are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno. Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin. San Antonio, TX: Ledger Book and Job Office, 1858.
TSHA. “Gonzales ‘Come and Take It’ Cannon.” Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/gonzales-come-and-take-it-cannon.
TSHA. “Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel.” Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/hidalgo-y-costilla-miguel.
Vargas, Zaragosa. Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.