The Story
The Man Who Asked Permission: Stephen F. Austin at Brazoria
This week carries two Texas dates that belong in the same sentence, though nothing in the record joins them except one man and one town.
On September 5, 1836, the people of the new Republic voted for their first president. Sam Houston took 5,119 votes. Henry Smith, governor of the provisional government, took 743. Stephen F. Austin took 587 — third place, in a country he had very nearly made by hand.
Three days later on the calendar, a year earlier on the clock, is the date that makes the vote intelligible. On September 8, 1835, at a public dinner in the town of Brazoria, Austin rose and said the thing that opened the door.
Austin’s whole method — the thing he was better at than anyone else in Texas — was the petition. Under Mexican law he obtained three empresario contracts, in 1825, 1827, and 1828, to settle nine hundred additional families beyond his first colony; by 1832 his colonies held eight thousand people. The Handbook of Texas states his governing principle without decoration: “Harmony with state and federal authorities was indispensable to the success of the colonies.” He was not a revolutionary and did not want to be one. He was a man who filled out the forms, and who believed — with real evidence — that the forms worked.
That habit reached into the lodge. Among the first Americans to come to Texas in the 1820s, the Handbook notes, “were a number of Masons, including Stephen F. Austin.” In 1828 he and six other Masons met at San Felipe and petitioned the Grand York Lodge of Mexico for a dispensation. Where and when Austin was made a Mason is not settled by the institutional record, and this series will not invent it; what the record establishes is what he did with it. Presented with a fraternity he wanted in Texas, he did the same thing he did with land and with law — he applied to the lawful authority and waited.
The answer never came. The petition, the Handbook says, “evidently reached Mexico at the height of a quarrel between the ‘Yorkinos’ and ‘Escoceses’ (adherents of the Scottish Rite) and disappeared.” Read that slowly. A request for a lodge was swallowed whole by a fight between lodges — and a colonist’s polite application from the Brazos had no chance of being heard over it. Austin had asked correctly and been answered by nothing at all.
He tried the same instrument on a larger question and it cost him far more. He left San Felipe in April 1833 carrying the colonists’ case to Mexico City, arrived in July, and — this is the part usually forgotten — he won. He “persuaded the government to repeal the Law of April 6, 1830,” the statute that had choked off Anglo immigration. Then, in January 1834, he was arrested at Saltillo “under suspicion of trying to incite insurrection in Texas” and hauled back to the capital, shifted from prison to prison until December, when he was released on bond. A general amnesty freed him in July 1835, and at the end of August he came home by way of New Orleans. Two petitions to Mexico City: one vanished into a quarrel, one cost him eighteen months in Mexican custody.
While he was in those prisons, six men at Brazoria stopped asking.
In the spring of 1835 — March, according to the Texas Historical Commission’s marker at the site — Dr. Anson Jones and five others, in the Handbook’s words, “fearing Mexican reprisals, met secretly under the Masonic Oak near Brazoria and petitioned the Grand Lodge of Louisiana for a charter.” They did not petition Mexico. They had watched what Mexico did with petitions. John Henry Holland, grand master of Louisiana, issued the dispensation, and on December 27, 1835, Holland Lodge No. 36 met for the first time, with Jones presiding as worshipful master. The marker the state set at Brazoria in 1966 records it in fourteen words: “Site of organization, March 1835, the first Masonic Lodge in Texas, Holland Lodge, Brazoria.”
That is the whole argument of the week, and it happened first among Masons, in a field, in secret, over a charter. When the sovereign will not warrant you, you do not stop being a lodge and you do not proceed without a warrant. You find a lawful authority that will answer.
Six months later, in that same town, Austin did the identical thing on the scale of a country. The word “consultation” had first been used at a meeting in Columbia on August 15, 1835, and delegates had not yet been chosen. Austin had been home about a week and a half, and he carried more moral weight than any man in Texas; had he opposed the call, it would likely have died. Instead, the Handbook records, “in a notable speech at Brazoria on September 8 he gave it his sanction, and election of delegates proceeded.” The most cautious man in Texas, the lifelong advocate of harmony with the authorities, blessed a body no government had authorized.
Notice what the Consultation then did with its freedom. Delayed from October 15 to November 1, and without a quorum until the fourth, it voted on November 7, by 33 to 14, to establish “a provisional government upon the principles of the Constitution of 1824.” Not independence — not yet. Even in the act of constituting themselves, they reached for an existing charter to stand on. Henry Smith was made governor and Sam Houston commander, and Austin was sent to the United States as a commissioner to raise loans and volunteers and work toward recognition. He had spent his life getting warrants from other people; he spent his last full year of health doing it for a country.
Then Texas voted, and gave him 587 votes. He accepted the office of secretary of state from the man who beat him, and died in service on December 27, 1836, at the age of forty-three, in Brazoria County — one year to the day after Holland Lodge held its first meeting at Brazoria. Not until October 20, 1910 did the state bring him to the Texas State Cemetery in the city that carries his name, where he lies on Republic Hill, Section 1, Row L, Number 20. The lodge outlasted him by scattering and re-forming: the brethren never reopened at Brazoria, but opened at Houston in October 1837, and on December 20, 1837 Anson Jones called the convention that organized the Grand Lodge of Texas and elected him its first grand master.
Johnson City Lodge No. 561 received its charter from that Grand Lodge on December 16, 1882. Trace the paper back far enough and it runs through Houston in 1837, through the dispensation John Henry Holland signed in Louisiana, and out to six men under a tree at Brazoria who could not get an answer from their own government. Freemasonry is built entirely on permission. A lodge is not a lodge because men wish it; it is a lodge because a Grand Lodge has warranted it, and the first lesson a Mason is given is that he acts by authority rather than by preference. Austin lived that lesson to the letter, and it nearly broke him — silence in 1828, prison in 1834. What Brazoria teaches is not that the lesson was wrong. It is that men who take lawful authority seriously are the ones who can be trusted to constitute something new when the old authority stops answering, because they will immediately go looking for a charter for what they have done. The charter on our wall in Blanco County is the far end of that instinct — a piece of paper granting a handful of men in a small Hill Country town the right to open a lodge, and it exists because in 1835 some Texans decided that the answer to no answer is not disorder. It is a better warrant.
