The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 102, July 1998 - April, 1999 Page: 324

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

the administration expressed renewed interest in Texas after learning of
the initial Spanish refusal to sign the treaty.
The United States government certainly had played at least an indi-
rect role in earlier filibustering expeditions into Texas. Before the
Magee-Gutierrez expedition of 1812-1813, for example, James Monroe
and other members of the State Department had met with leader
Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara in Washington and provided him with
money and letters of introduction for his return journey to the border.
U.S. government agent William Shaler openly assisted Gutierrez while
the latter was in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and he would later advise
American Augustus Magee, the first military head of the expedition, on
strategy while the filibusters were occupying La Bahia (Goliad), Texas.
Shaler even aided and accompanied Jose Alvarez de Toledo, another
prospective filibuster leader, into Texas. With such past American con-
duct, it was understandable that in 1819 Spain would suspect adminis-
tration complicity in Long's venture as well.2
James Long was born in Culpeper County, Virginia, probably in 1793;
his father, a merchant, subsequently moved the family to Kentucky, and
then to Rutherford, Tennessee. At the age of fifteen James entered a
failed merchandising enterprise of his own, after which he clerked in his
father's store for two years. He then studied medicine under a Dr.
Holland and joined the Tennessee state militia for Andrew Jackson's
New Orleans campaign of 1814-1815, serving on the medical staff of
Maj. Gen. William Carroll's brigade. More than one author has
described him as a "great favorite" of Jackson, who supposedly referred
to Long as his "young lion." Present at the battle of New Orleans, Long
left the army in May 1815 and accompanied General Carroll and Gen.
John Coffee to Natchez, Mississippi. In that town he met Jane Herbert
Wilkinson, a fourteen-year old niece of James Wilkinson. They married
in May 1816, after which Long toiled at several professions in
Mississippi: medical practitioner at Port Gibson, owner of a plantation
near Walnut Hills, and merchant at Vicksburg, where he was partners
American Forezgn Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 317-340; George Dangerfield, The
Awakening of American Nationalism, 1815-1828 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 36-71; Harry
Ammon, James Monroe. The Quest for National Identity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1971); Philip Coolidge Brooks, Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819,
University of California Publications in History vol. 24 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1939), 186.
2 For more on the Texas filibusterming era, including the Magee-Gutierrez expedition, see Julia
Kathryn Garrett, Green Flag Over Texas: The Last Years of Spain in Texas (Austin: The Pemberton
Press, 1969) and Harris Gaylord Warren, The Sword was Their Passport: A Hzstory of American
Filibustering in the Mexican Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943). For a
recent treatment of filibustering in general during the early national period, see Frank L. Owsley
and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonzan Manifest Destiny, 18oo-82r
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997).

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