As a History undergrad who took a very odd career path I am always in jealous awe of your writings and scholarly endeavors. Good job boss, I remain a devoted fan.

Great stuff! Eagerly looking forward to anything you post!

Very neat!!!!

What are you going to do with your thesis after you (successfully) defend it?

it will get published by an academic press in a few years and aalan will be on hand at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association to sign copies. That meeting is in March and I suspect I will buy a boxful for Christmas gifts for friends and relatives.

Some years ago James Haley asked why he had written yet another bio of Sam Houston and his answer to his question was that half the history of our state is sitting unseen in attics all over the country.

Aalan is plowing through what is there and what previously was not. I grew up near where a good part of the action in this matter took place (Goliad) and am busting with anticipation for this book.

Thanks, aalan, for your hard work and resourcefulness.

Well done! Sounds like you got some great stuff.

Quote:

---

it will get published by an academic press in a few years and aalan will be on hand at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association to sign copies. That meeting is in March and I suspect I will buy a boxful for Christmas gifts for friends and relatives.

---

Funny you should say that, I've been recommended for a panel at next year's meeting by my prof. It's a bit of a square peg in a round hole, so not sure if it will come off or not.

TSHA is good fun. Hope it works out for you!

Was it known that A.S. Johnston's brothers fought with Gutierrez-Magee?

Quote:

---

Was it known that A.S. Johnston's brothers fought with Gutierrez-Magee?

---

No, it was not. Most of the names we have of participants only come from various letters and diaries, and the occasional newspaper. Darius Johnston was mentioned in several as an American lawyer who was appointed by the then-commander of the American forces to defend the Spanish officials who had surrendered in what ended up being a show trial by the Mexican revolutionaries. He was not able to defend them and they were convicted, but to ease the Americans' anger, they were paroled and exiled. And then they were marched off 5 miles from San Antonio and beheaded. This was the key moment that soured many Americans on the expedition and a large number of them quit.

In some of the histories, Darius is mentioned as a possible relative of A.S.J. but never is it definitively proven. However, in the Johnston family history written in the 1880s, he and brother Orramel (who also participated, but is mentioned in none of the histories) are clearly shown as participants. In fact, it's stated that both of them had their health destroyed by the expedition and they eventually died (one within 5 years, another 10 years later) from lingering issues related to it.

So the answer is that the family histories knew this, but the historians of the expedition did not, and never attempted to look at individuals the way I did. The reason is that unless you have the Internet available, such a deep dive into multiple obscure people is impossible. What I did is called by many historians "big data" but it's basically just basic Internet research techniques I've been using for 20 years in the professional world.

I defended my thesis this week and got some good feedback. My adviser definitely wants me to do an article of some kind.

It was kind of interesting because I had three professional historians in the room kind of blown away by what I was able to find based off little more than a list of names. What I did, they said was very innovative and cutting edge, but it's basically just Internet research techniques I've developed from 20 years in the private sector as a journalist and researcher, including political opposition research, which is actually very much like the research of a random 19th Century frontiersman. It's basically google plus a few other sites (genealogical, for example), an investigative mind, plus a savvy eye for search terms likely to come out with good options.

It occurs to me that most historians out there are not trained at all in this kind of research, there certainly isn't a class at my university. Most are too old to have grown up with the Internet and even those who did are taught in a way that basically focuses on databases rather than open searches. For most topics, this is better, because you're getting vetted information. But in a case like mine, where you're researching random people from 200 years ago, who don't have a trail of articles, dissertations, etc about them or who are not mentioned in detail in newspapers or traditional primary sources, you're likely to come up cold.

A case study to illustrate what I mean:

Augustus Magee
For the leader of the expedition, surprisingly little is known. Here's his handbook of Texas Article:Augustus William Magee

If you look at the sources, it's basically 6 sources, all of which I've read thoroughly and all of which are based on the same 1 or 2 initial sources. There's only one actual "bio" of Magee, and it's not even referenced here. It's an article in the West Texas Historial Association Yearbook in the 1940s, and it's got no more detail than this. Here's the bio of him before the expedition, which represents everything any historian in Texas knew before I did my research:

Quote:

---

MAGEE, AUGUSTUS WILLIAM (17891813). Augustus William Magee, army officer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1789. After graduating third in his class from the United States Military Academy, on January 23, 1809, he served under Gen. James Wilkinson in an artillery regiment stationed at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and later transferred to Fort Jessup near Natchitoches.

---

So that's not a lot to go on, but we have a date of birth and location. That's a start. I tried genealogical research and got big fat nothings. You can't search just by "Augustus William Magee" because you get circular postings of articles about the expedition that tell you nothing. Some sources list him as William Augustus Magee, but that doesn't get you anywhere (It's wrong by the way).

So I tried to search something to tell me more about West Point, hoping they had some data. I went so far as to contact the academy's history department, but he's obscure and they have so many famous people that he's basically meaningless to them. They may have some old documents that are useful, but they couldn't point me to them or didn't want to waste the time. So back to the Internet.

There's a registry of cadets and it doesn't tell you much more than that he graduated in the class of 1809. But I found a good book with some historical information that told me at least one part of the accepted bio is pure B.S. Magee did not graduate third in his class in 1809. He was the third in his class to graduate, but it does not mean the same thing. Prior to 1815, candidates basically had a curriculum and they graduated when they got through it. So there would be candidates graduating independently at different times throughout the year. Magee graduated 7 months after enrolling, which is maybe slightly above average for the time. Rankings and "classes" as we know them, did not begin until 1815.

Even then, I kept coming up cold so I had to be innovative. If I searched for Augustus Magee and West Point, I got all the same circular biographies like the Handbook. So I tried "Augustus Magee" and the word "cadet." I went through 20 pages of results (this is the key to serious Internet research - go deep, don't just stick to the first few pages). At the bottom of that page, I found a rather curious result that I did not expect:

Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Phillips Exeter Academy

I thought that was odd. It was not West Point, but when I clicked on it, it seemed to be an old book from the 1870s that had been scanned in. I searched and found my jackpot. In the year 1802 was "Augustus Magee" age 13, hometown Boston Massachusetts. Those three facts matched and now I knew something very interesting that no one else did. I couldn't prove it was him, but how many Augustus Magees could there be from Boston born in 1789? I decided to learn as much as I could about Phillips Exeter Academy, and started another search (at this point I was doing this all from a hotel room in Korea because I was on a military exercise) on the school. It turns out that it's a rather elite school. A few years before Magee, Daniel Webster attended. One of Magee's classmates (I googled any of them whose names seemed familiar) was the son of Thomas Pinckney). Future graduates included President Pierce and the sons of Abraham Lincoln and US Grant. Modern graduates included the Zuckerberg kid who invented facebook and Gore Vidal.

In researching that history, I came across Benjamin Abbott, who was the headmaster at the time Magee was there, and who turns out to have been a very transformative person in the school who would have greatly influenced any student who studied under him. So then I turned to various permutations of a search on Abbott and Magee. The key point to a search is to have a few terms that filter out the noise and get you down to something. Using their full names got me nothing. Using just their last names got me modern high school graduations. The version that ended up working was "Benjamin Abbott" (in quotes) and Magee. I looked for anything that stood out and a couple of pages in, I found an article about a Boston trading family named the Perkins family. I had no idea why my search caught it, so I began to read it. I found the article had a James Magee, but no Augustus. This person was an in law of the Perkins family and the Benjamin Abbott from the school was another in-law. That's a pretty thin thread, but private schools in the 1800s being what they were, such thin threads might be relevant.

My next search was everything I could find about James Magee. His age made him a good target for a parent of Augustus. Trying for a homerun, I went back to the genealogical sites but no luck. So I just stuck to finding as much about him as I can. Through some circuitous route that I can't recall (may have been a historical database rather than google search), I found an article called "The Magee Family and the Origins of the China Trade" about James Magee and his brothers, who were pioneering merchants in the Pacific in the 1790s. It had not come up as a hit on Augustus, but when I pulled it up, I found only the abstract was searchable and the article itself (from the 1960s) was only scanned and not searchable. So I searched the old way with my eyes. And lo and behold, on the 13th of 15 pages, I found this quote:

"The third son, Augustus William, lived only to the age of 23 and never went to sea; yet he included in his short career more adventure than either his father and his brothers. Unlike the latter, who seem to have had little schooling, he attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, then presided over by Benjamin Abbot, a brother-in-law of T.H. Perkins. From Exeter, he entered the military academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1809 commissioned as a second-lieutenant, regiment of artillerists."

It then mentions his posting to the frontier, citing all of the typical Texas history sources. All of this was here, and the dots had been connected by a historian in Massachusetts 50 years ago, but he never informed any Texas historian of his findings and the latter simply never perused obscure New England journal articles on maritime trade families. Because to do so would have been impossible to do efficiently with technology no more advanced than microfilm.

And yet, here I was, having connected the dots myself from a hotel room in Korea.

THIS is the power of the Internet for historical research.

From here, I opened up a whole new world on Augustus. It turns out his father James was wealthy. In fact, he bought this house, the former mansion of the Massachusetts royal governor. It's still around and is now a historical park.


This was the home our "obscure" frontier Lieutenant Augustus Magee grew up in, because his father purchased it four years before the child went to his boarding school. I contacted the museum and they put me in touch with a researcher into the Magee family who had a ton of info about the family including portraits of James Magee and his very attractive redhead wife, Augustus' mother. He had less than what I had on Augustus, but it was still helpful. I learned a few things such as that the Magees, despite being Irish were NOT Catholic (allowing me to strike off religious sympathy with Mexicans) and other stuff.

So I started rolling this back into what I knew. Augustus Magee resigned his commission in June 1812 to join the expedition, and his letter of resignation cites him being "personally slighted." He had been denied a promotion, but no reason was ever given. Most historians have assumed that he joined for wealth and glory. While the latter seems possible, the former is hardly necessary. Even though his father had died, the Magee family was still very wealthy, and moreover was still closely tied into the Perkins Family (via Augustus' pretty mom, who was the sister of T.H. Perkins, the leader of that family). Augustus, if he hated his frontier lieutenancy, could simply have gone home to wealth and luxury, but instead he chose to fight in a really dicey revolution and ended up dying in the fort of La Bahia, possibly by sickness, suicide or even poison, while his army was surrounded by the Spanish.

There had to be something more to this. So I kept digging. I had exhausted his father, so I turned to his uncle, T.H. Perkins. This guy's kind of a Bostonian legend, has a hospital named after him to this day, etc. It was almost certainly him who got Augustus Magee into the elite private school run by his brother-in-law, and as I think I've proven, he was likely the guy who got Magee into West Point as well. He was very politically active, but was a Federalist and by 1812, was tied up with the Hartford Convention guys. He had actively campaigned against President Madison, was the escort of a British envoy that Madison hated, and served as the foreman on the grand jury that acquitted a federalist of murder of a republican in the most shocking political crime of the age. Put simply, he was not loved by James Madison and Madison's Sec. of War, William Eustes, who was the one man in charge of Augustus William Magee's promotion.

What I discovered then was that Magee, the son of a probable Federalist and nephew of an arch Federalist (who was actively involved with a northern secession attempt) was probably NOT a secret tool of the Madison administration, and in fact was the LAST person that administration wanted leading an expedition into Texas. It also calls into question the suggestion made by some that the rebels were trying to attach Texas to the U.S.

What I found overall is that the participants were very diverse and had very diverse motivations, which calls into question any centralized control or management of the expedition by any outside force. It was an ad-hoc rebellion that took all comers who wanted to carry a musket and fight, and this has some pretty profound implications on the diplomatic history of the time. I've seen arguments by some pretty elite historians on the administration's involvement/non-involvement, but they all base these arguments on the letters back and forth between "important" men and never get down to the man-with-a-musket level. That's what I've done.

Magee is just the first and most notable, but I was able to look at probably 20 people in depth and present them in my paper. The methods were similar and I found some eye-opening information in some really dark corners of the Internet, but in many cases, I could corroborate the information with other sources to throw some light on these people.

Awesome allen. Good stuff. I love your research method.

On a side note, nothing pisses me off more than growing up in Nacogdoches, a town of such historical significance, and learning nothing about it until much later. Your link mentioned how Magee led his expedition through nac and that is what made me think of it.

Why can't Nacogdoches do better at teaching it's own history??? Rant over.

Nacogdoches was basically the seat of the Republic for 6 months before they took San Antonio.

Congrats! That takes a lot of work!

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

I agree about the older generation of historians/ researchers and Google.

My dad has researched multiple family names for years; all by the old methods. Has never owned a computer not plans to. I showed him what Google can do one day and it is like a whole new world was revealed to him. Turns out that a lot of the information that I find for him during his visits he already has but I have shown him that we can squeeze out bits of new information by searching related words as you have described in you update.

There is a project out there at some university and it's very basic, but what it's trying to do is set up a kind of social network for old historic dead people so you can see how they interacted. I sort of did something like this on the fly and it turns out all these people knew each other. One of my Gutierrez-Magee guys sold land to Jim Bowie's older brother. Jim - and a lot of the Alamo guys - would have known the G-M story very well from acquaintances. There is one guy who fought in the Gutierrez-Magee expedition who had a son who died at the Alamo.

Damn, man. I thought I was obsessed with online research! That's some outstanding work!

2 AM on a Monday and I'm still trying to track down a homeowner's story on my crack shack in King William.

It's a wonderful feeling when it finally starts to piece together, ain't it?

The real kicker, the future of history, is bridging the gap between the accessible online stuff - often sourced from the same limited material and the very informative yet obscure detailed accounts sitting in some random museum or book no longer published/circulated.

Someone just has to come around and connect the dots.

Quote:

---

One of my Gutierrez-Magee guys sold land to Jim Bowie's older brother

---

Sold it or the Bowies made it look that way?

Congrats!

p_bubel, you're right. I feel like there's a niche here, only wish that history made money.

p_bubel said:

---

The real kicker, the future of history, is bridging the gap between the accessible online stuff - often sourced from the same limited material and the very informative yet obscure detailed accounts sitting in some random museum or book no longer published/circulated.

Someone just has to come around and connect the dots.

---

Some groups, like the American Antiquarian Society, are attempting to do just that. But it's extremely time consuming and expensive. And it's not something that can be monetized. Only the well-funded organizations can even try.