Edward Burleson was an American soldier and frontier leader. He is famous for defeating Mexican insurrectionists (April 1838), the Cherokees at Pecan Bayou (December, 1839) and the Comanches at the battle of Plum Creek (August, 1840).
Background
Edward Burleson was born on December 15, 1798 in Buncombe County, North Carolina. He was descended from Aaron Burleson, who emigrated from England to North Carolina in 1726. His father was James Burleson who had married Elizabeth Shipman. James Burleson moved to Tennessee about 1812 and commanded a company of Tennessee volunteers under Andrew Jackson in the Creek War in Alabama. Young Edward accompanied him and seems to have acquired a taste for military life.
Education
Edward had but little formal education.
Career
In 1816 he moved to Howard County, Missouri, and became a captain and then a colonel of militia. He moved back to Tennessee in 1823 where he again became a militia colonel. In 1830 he visited Texas, and the next year he moved his family there and settled on the Colorado River about eleven miles below the town of Bastrop. This was on the extreme frontier and subject to frequent incursions of hostile Indians.
Burleson, who was a natural leader, took the principal part in repelling the raids, and in December 1832 he was made lieutenant-colonel of his municipality. When the revolution broke out, he joined the Texans who besieged the Mexican general, Cos, in San Antonio; and when Stephen F. Austin resigned the command of the besieging army, Burleson was elected by the men to succeed him, November 24, 1835.
San Antonio was stormed and Cos surrendered on December 10. Soon afterward Burleson returned to his farm, but the news of Santa Anna's approach the next spring again brought him into the field. He was made colonel of a regiment that was organized at Gonzales and commanded it, under General Sam Houston, in the retreat which ended in the victory of San Jacinto and the capture of Santa Anna.
Burleson played a conspicuous part in that battle and afterward commanded the forces that followed the Mexican divisions under Filisola to the Rio Grande. In 1836 he was elected to the first Senate of the Republic of Texas.
In 1838 he discovered, from papers captured from Mexican raiders in the vicinity of Austin, that the Mexicans and the Cherokee Indians, with other tribes, were planning a hostile combination against the Texans.
In January 1839 he was made colonel of a regiment of regulars and commanded them in the Cherokee War the following summer until the Cherokees were expelled from Texas.
In 1844 he was a candidate for the presidency, but was defeated. He was at the battle of Monterey as aide to General J. P. Henderson. After he returned, he removed from his old home to the site of the present town of San Marcos. He was elected to the state Senate and died in Austin while in attendance upon that body.
Achievements
Politics
He supported the movement for annexation to the United States, and when war broke out with Mexico he went with the troops raised in Texas to the support of General Zachary Taylor.
Views
Quotations:
”Every thing goes on well heare as fare as I know nothing is rong I think I shall Give General Cos a few fyers of Canon to knight”
Personality
He was a man of unusual gifts, and these, with his unaffected simplicity, dignity, honesty, and fearlessness, had made him one of the loved figures of Texas.
Connections
At the age of seventen he married Sarah Griffen Owen on 25 April 1816, in Madison County, Alabama.