December 10, 1838 was supposed to be the day Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was inaugurated as the second president of the Republic of Texas…and it WAS…sorta…only Lamar never got to give his acceptance speech.
Here’s what happened…
The campaign of 1838 had been a bitter one. Bound by term limits, Texas’ first president Sam Houston hand-picked two candidates he trusted to carry out his goals for Texas–annexation to the United States, recognition of the Cherokee people’s right to remain in East Texas, and a capital in his namesake city of Houston. But Houston’s first pick, Peter Grayson, took his life in a fit of despondency, and his second choice, James Collinsworth, got drunk and fell off a pier. As a result, the winner of the Texas presidential election was Houston’s nemesis Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. Lamar favored everything Sam Houston opposed–an independent Texas Republic extended to the Pacific, extermination or mandatory expulsion of the Texas tribes, and moving the capitol of the republic to a more central location.
Houston was never what you’d call a gracious loser.
On the day of the inauguration Houston appeared, uninvited, in a George Washington-style colonial costume complete with powdered wig. He walked right past the president-elect to deliver his farewell address which was basically a recitation of all his accomplishments and a litany of all the ways he expected Lamar to mess everything up. Houston spoke for three hours while Lamar fumed. The Texas Senate chaplain, Rev. Samuel Y. Allen, reported, “By the time he was done, Lamar had become so nervous that he could not read his inaugural, and had to commit it to his private secretary, Algernon Thompson, to be read to an exhausted audience.”
Two years later, Sam Houston ran again for president and won, and again he used the inauguration to irritate Lamar. For his 1840 inauguration, Houston appeared resplendent in a green velvet suite and cape, richly embroidered in gold thread, which he had ordered from Paris, France. Already towering over his opponent at 6′-6″ tall, Houston topped off his costume with a plumed hat.
I think we’d have to confess that Houston wasn’t a gracious winner, either. 😉
