Post by stuart on Apr 10, 2010 14:12:52 GMT -5
One of the more bizarre curiosities of this business is a memorial plaque in St. John’s Church, Aberdare (Wales) to a Major General Edward Edwards, of the East India Company, who died at the Alamo 6 March 1836.
What is generally known about the General (or rather Colonel) can be summed up in this note kindly provided to me by another member of this board:
“The short version of Edwards' story is that he was in the employ of the East India Company and had requested and received a leave of absence while in the States. He then went into Texas where a ring belonging to him was found on a corpse. An advertisement was listed in the papers and eventually was linked to Edwards. The date of March 6 was apparently in scripted on the ring as a memorial to a first cousin who had committed suicide on that date a few years earlier.”
The truth is quite different and provides an intriguing solution to a problem I’ve had with researching Dr. James Grant’s story.
As you’ll know from my book, when researching the life of my 3 x great grandfather I was alerted to his connection with Texas by a fragmentary Australian newspaper cutting relating how he had been imprisoned, escaped and then murdered in Mexico. The name Edwards was also mentioned and for a long time I took this to be Hayden Edwards or Benjamin Edwards which in turn pointed to involvement in the Fredonian Rebellion. As it happens Grant was indeed in Texas at the time and along with Arthur Wavell, was encouraging the rebels with promises of British assistance, but it has since become clear that the Edwards mentioned in the newspaper was actually none other than Edward Edwards!
Far from dying at the Alamo, as James Ogilvie discovered from Grant’s erstwhile business partner Daniel Toler, “Col E. Edwards… is said to have been killed by the Indians or Mexicans along with Juan Jose Delgado about the 20 Feby 1836 or ten days before Dr. Grant was killed”
(South Western Historical Quarterly XXX:148)
The date is significant for it was on or about February 20 that Grant, having been across the Rio Grande, returned to Santa Rosa with sufficient horses to remount Pearson’s Company and allow Colonel Johnson to return to San Patricio. It was also that night Reuben Brown recorded that “we anticipated an attack from the Indians, our camp being literally surrounded with them, and the wood resounding with their yells until nearly day – when they disappeared.” Brown says nothing about any casualties that night but the fact Toler was able to recall both that date and the fact that another man named Juan Jose Delgado was also killed at the same time, clearly points to this.
Now the rather obvious first point to be made is that the otherwise anonymous Edwards was one of Grant’s men rather than an Alamo defender, but what’s perhaps more important is the fact that there appears to be no other record of his presence in Mexico/Texas, so why was he there? Having been born in 1779 he was hardly a footloose adventurer; on the contrary he was a colonel in the service of the East India Company. Is it merely a co-incidence that Grant was also in the Company’s service? The Company’s records are a monument to bureaucracy, but curiously, despite the fact that Grant last sailed on one of its ships in1819 there is no trace of his either having resigned from its service or been granted a pension, which suggests that he was still a Company man in 1836.
As I’ve discussed in my book, Grant’s initial involvement in what became the Secret War for Texas probably came about through his connection with a gentleman named Charles Grant (later Lord Glenelg), who at the time was the deputy to William Huskisson – and he was not only the President of the Board of Trade and the most active opponent of American expansion into the Gulf of Mexico, but also a former spymaster against Napoleon. The Board was also closely connected with the East India Company, whose political affairs were presided over by a government-appointed Board of Control – which for a time would itself be run by Grant’s cousin – and the Company was also gravely concerned at the prospect of the United States achieving a foot-hold on the Pacific seaboard.
Now the problem I encountered in trying to find more than I’ve already published on the British government’s involvement in what was going on is a lack of hard evidence other than a string of tantalising hints – in contrast to the rather fuller documentation relating to the post 1836 period when William Kennedy was running his spy ring.
The answer, given the otherwise unexplained involvement of Edwards, and Grant’s own connections, would appear to be that for the sake of deniability the operation (like a number of others at this time) was actually being run by the East India Company.
Just by way of a post-script, the curious may wonder why Colonel Edwards ended up with a memorial plaque identifying him as a major general and an Alamo defender. The answer is that for some time his fate was unknown; he was simply missing in action so to speak and accordingly his name appeared in a routine list of brevet promotions for 19 June 1838. Thus, when his death was confirmed by Ogilvie early in 1839, he was already known to his family as General Edwards. As to the Alamo; its possible the story of the ring is true, but rather more likely that he was just one more of those people known to have died in Texas during the Revolution and therefore assumed as a matter of family tradition that he died during that famous battle.
