Texians were residents of Mexican Texas and, later, the Republic of Texas.
Today, the term is used specifically to distinguish early Anglo settlers of Texas, especially those who supported the Texas Revolution. Mexican settlers of that era are referred to as Tejanos, and residents of modern Texas are known as Texans.
By 1835, the Texians in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila-y-Tejas were organizing to win independence from that part of Mexico above the Nueces River, which the Anglos called Texas.
James P.Trezevant, then nineteen and still in college in Columbia, must have heard about the group of Georgia volunteers that who headed to Texas.
He abruptly left college and went to Augusta to visit a girl friend. He had not yet joined the Georgia group, which had reached Montgomery.
The group was given free passage down the Alabama River to Mobile and then went by steamer to New Orleans, Louisiana.
With the remainder of the money James had for the fall term in college, he set out on his own from Augusta to New Orleans.
He turned twenty years old on November 23, 1835. In December, he joined Ward’s Georgia group in New Orleans.
On December 9, 1835, Ward and his men embarked for Texas on several schooners, arriving at the port of Velasco on December 20.
On December 22, these original, mostly-Georgia volunteers organized officially as a military unit for the first time, calling itself the Georgia Battalion, with Ward as major and commander.
Three companies were formed, and James Trezevant was a private in Bullock’s Company.
For the group from Macon, Georgia, this flag was made by an 18 year old girl, Joanna Troutman.
When the Georgians arrived at Velasco on the Texas coast the flag was raised.
It was one of the most inspirational symbols in the dark months between the defeat at the Alamo and the victory at San Jacinto.
After the Georgia battalion reported at San Felipe, Colonel William A. Ward, in command of the Georgians, led his men to the aid of Colonel Fannin at Goliad.
This flag was saluted again on March 8th, 1836, when Fannin’s men received word of the official declaration of independence of Texas.
On December 25, while still at Velasco, the Georgia Battalion presented itself for service to Colonel James W. Fannin, a fellow Georgian who was commander of all the volunteer troops in Texas.
Eventually, these troops were all stationed at Goliad, near the San Antonio River.
From there James fought in Ward’s Georgia Battalion at the Battle of Refugio on March 14, 1836.
With part of the Mexican army advancing north, General Sam Houston ordered Fannin to leave Goliad and go to Victoria.
Fannin ordered Ward, who had managed to evade the Mexican army while leaving Refugio, to meet him in Victoria.
Unfortunately, the Mexican army forced the surrender of Fannin and his men on March 20 after the Battle of Coleto.
They were taken back to Goliad as prisoners of war.
Meanwhile, Ward and his remaining men, numbering about eighty-five, evaded the Mexican army and eventually took refuge in the Guadalupe swamp near Victoria.
While regrouping his men during the night of March 21, Ward inadvertently left behind eight men from the Georgia Battalion, one of whom was James Trezevant.
Ward and the remainder of his men were captured by the Mexican army on March 22 near Dimmit’s Landing.
They, too, were marched back to Goliad as prisoners of war, bringing the total number of prisoners there to about four hundred.
On Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, most of them were gunned down by the Mexican army in what became known as the Goliad Massacre.
Virtually the entire Georgia command, the “Red Rovers” of Alabama and the Texans including Fannin, a total of almost 390 men, were taken prisoner and massacred at Goliad ,after they lost the battles of Refugio and Coleto.
Though some of its members escaped during the massacre itself, the Georgia Battalion ceased to exist.
Those few who had stayed in the swamp or had escaped the massacre itself set out toward Houston’s army.
James Trezevant met up with three others from the swamp, Samuel G. Hardaway, Joseph Andrew, and M. K. Moses. After a number of days of living with no provisions, they were found by scouts from Houston’s army and taken to his camp on April 2.
From there they and the army set out toward Harrisburg, on Buffalo Bayou near the San Jacinto River.
The armies of Houston and Santa Anna finally confronted each other east of Harrisburg in the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. James fought as a private in Moseley Baker’s Company, along with Hardaway, Andrews and Moses.
At least four other men from the Georgia Battalion also fought in the battle.
The Texans won and Texas became an independent republic.
After San Jacinto, James joined Henry Karnes’s Spy Company, progressing in three months from private to lieutenant to captain and finally to brevet major.
During the summer and into the fall of 1836, he served as quartermaster of the commissary at the port of Velasco. He resigned his commission in the Texas army on November 19, 1836. James was still only twenty years old.
However, his last day of service was November 23, his twenty-first birthday, the age noted on his tombstone for his attaining the rank of major.
In late 1836 or early 1837 inTexas uniform.
In late 1836 or early 1837, he set out for Georgia to visit his family. They wanted a miniature portrait done of him in his Texas uniform.
While he was passing through New Orleans, staying briefly in Georgia, or returning to New Orleans, the miniature was done.
In any case, it ended up in Georgia with his family. Back in New Orleans, James studied law for a while but then moved to upstate Mississippi, to Hinds County, near Jackson.
He got a position as professor of languages and military tactics at an academy or college, probably at Mississippi College in Clinton, which had been established in 1826.
He continued his law studies and was eventually admitted to the bar in Vicksburg.
James and his wife Mary moved to Louisiana in 1852, near what was then called Deerfield, now Delhi, in the original Carroll Parish.
That parish had been carved out of Ouachita Parish in 1832, with its parish seat at Lake Providence. (After the Civil War the parish was divided along the Bayou Macon into East and West Carroll parishes, with Floyd as the seat of West Carroll Parish.)
In 1868, Richland Parish, with Rayville as its seat, was carved out of several adjoining parishes. The area around Delhi ended up in Richland Parish.
James’s younger brother, George Warren Cross Trezevant (1820-1893), also settled near Delhi, where he married and had his family. It is not known which of the brothers arrived in the Delhi area first.
In 1855, James and Mary (ages forty and forty-nine, respectively) had their portraits painted in oil by John Antrobus (1831-1907), an English painter who had come to the United States before 1855 and become an itinerant genre artist based for a while in Montgomery, Alabama.
The portraits were done near Lake Providence, which would not have been far from their home near the Deerfield stage coach crossing of the Bayou Macon.
These portraits and a vintage photograph of each of the subjects are now at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans.
At some time, James and his family moved west into what was a part of Franklin Parish, which had been established in 1843.
In 1858, twenty-two years after the end of James’s service in the Texas army, he applied for two land grants offered to veterans by the state of Texas.
One was a bounty grant of 320 acres for his service from December 23, 1835, to November 23, 1836. The other was a donation grant of 640 acres. A donation grant recognized participation in a specific battle.
For whatever reasons, James chose the Battle of Refugio instead of the Battle of San Jacinto for his application.
His friend Samuel Hardaway, who had become a prominent citizen of Montgomery, Alabama, wrote a letter in October of 1860 that supported James’s involvement at Refugio.
From his tombstone, we know that James Trezevant died at age forty-four on November 2, 1860, at Lucknow in Franklin Parish.
He was just three weeks short of his forty-fifth birthday.
Lucknow was the address of a post office on Clear Lake, near Rayville, so that location was in the original Franklin Parish. That site is now in Richland Parish, created several years after James’s death.
James left a young widow of fifty-three and two teenage sons, John, then seventeen, and George, fourteen. The widow and surviving sons benefited financially when the property in Texas was sold after 1875.
Mary Trezevant died much later than her husband, at age eighty-six, on June 8, 1893. They were both buried in the Masonic cemetery in Delhi.
sources: www.tshaonline.org and my cousin Robert Trezevants site for our family www.TrezevantFamilyProject.com