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Invasion Excitement

was to include all counties between the Trinity and Sabine rivers, including Harrison County, "and the counties of Bowie, Red River, Lamar, Fannin and Harrison" were each to "constitute one regiment." Regimental boundaries and company beats were subject to determination by the respective brigadier generals and company commanders, as the increase or diminution of the population from time to time might require.

Should it become necessary for the President to issue a call, by draft, on the militia, he was authorized to receive volunteers in lieu of drafted men. The volunteers were extended the privilege of electing their own officers, and reporting themselves by companies, battalions, or regiments, as the case might be. When mixed troops, part volunteers and part drafted men, were called out, and should apply to the commander in chief, or the commandant of the expedition so ordered out, they were to be permitted to elect their own officers, and "any companies which shall be called into service, and not enough to form a battalion, the commandant of the expedition shall have power to attach them to any other battalion or regiment."[85]  Congress' decided hostility toward offensive warfare is shown by the insertion into the militia laws of the specific stipulation "that nothing in this act shall be so construed as to authorize the President to call out, either militia or volunteers, except to suppress insurrection or repel invasion."[86]

By another law, approved on February 4, 1841, the frontier counties of Fannin, Lamar, Red River, Bowie, Paschal, Panola, Harrison, Nacogdoches, Houston, Robertson, Milam, Travis, Béxar, Gonzales, Goliad, Victoria, Refugio, San Patricio, Montgomery, and Bastrop were authorized to raise volunteer companies of mounted Minute Men of not less than twenty nor more than fifty-six, rank and file "for the purpose of affording a ready and active protection to the frontier



85. Ibid.; Telegraph and Texas Register, May 11, 1842.

86. Section 16 of the Militia Law of December 6, 1836, stipulated "that the president for the time being, when he deems it necessary, shall call forth into the service of this republic, such a number of militia as he shall deem expedient," but by the supplementary Militia Act of January 18, 1841, this was changed by Section 11 to read: "That nothing in this act shall be construed as to authorize the president to call out, either militia or volunteers, except to suppress insurrection or repel invasion." "An Act to Provide for the National Defense by Organizing the Militia," Approved Dec. 6, 1836, in Gammel (ed.), Laws of Texas, I, 1114-1128; "An Act to Complete the Organization of the Militia," Approved Jan. 18, 1841, in ibid., I, 497-498, and again printed on pp. 579-580 of this same volume.

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AFTER SAN JACINTO: The Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1836-1841
Joseph Milton Nance, 1963