Jane Wilkinson was born in Maryland in 1798. By 1813, she was orphaned and living with an older sister near Natchez, Mississippi. At age sixteen, she married James Long, a nineteen-year-old Army surgeon who served with Andrew Jackson’s troops at the Battle of New Orleans. The young couple bought a plantation near Vicksburg and Jane had her first child, Ann, in November of 1816. James, very industrious, operated the plantation, set up a medical practice at Port Gibson, and became a merchant in Natchez.
Along with many of the South's landed gentry, James Long was upset about the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 (also called the Florida Treaty), which transferred ownership of Florida and established the border between the United States and New Spain. At the time, New Spain consisted of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California, and parts of Oregon and Utah. The treaty was worked out by John Quincy Adams, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Louis de Onis of Spain. Florida was ceded to the United States and the border definition and other provisions of the treaty were very generous to the United States. Spain was in a poor negotiating position, desperately fighting a revolution in Mexico and losing power in Europe.
Prominent citizens in Mississippi, however, wanted the cotton land in Texas and decided they would take matters in their own hands. They financed and recruited a three-hundred man army and placed James Long in charge. A Mexican citizen, Jose Felix Trespalacios, joined the group and became friends with Long. The politically astute Trespalacios had long been involved in the Mexican uprising against Spain, and shared his knowledge with the filibusters. The Long Expedition set out in June of 1819 and, with little opposition, occupied Natchcogdoches.
Jane Long did not accompany her husband because she was in the advanced stages of her second pregnancy. Her new baby, Rebecca, was born on June 16, 1819, and two weeks later Jane left for Texas with her daughters and Kian, a slave girl. After a difficult trip, she arrived in Natchcogdoches in August, only to have to flee in October. The Spanish army decided to put an end to the foolishness in East Texas and sent a detachment to remove the filibusters from Spanish soil.
During the ensuing travel, the baby Rebecca died and James Long took Jane, six-year-old Ann, and the twelve-year-old slave girl, Kian, to Bolivar Peninsula, just across the channel from Galveston Island. Jane wrote of having dinner with Jean Lafitte on Galveston Island, as James tried unsuccessfully to obtain Lafitte’s help against the Spanish.
After Mexico won its independence from Spain, James Long stubbornly continued his filibustering efforts. He and Jane made a fund-raising trip to New Orleans and returned to Bolivar. He left a pregnant Jane there in September of 1821, as he went on a mission to occupy La Bahia at Goliad. He promised to return in a month and Jane promised to wait for him as long as it might take. Unknown to Jane, Long was captured and taken to jail in Mexico City.
Because of dwindling supplies, the other occupants of Bolivar abandoned the settlement, but Jane stubbornly stayed on to wait for her husband. She and the girls fired a small cannon daily to make hostile Indians believe the fort was still occupied. Near starvation, the women survived by pure determination, raw courage, and raw oysters.
On December 21, 1821, Jane gave birth to her third daughter, Mary James. She claimed this to be the first Anglo child born in Texas. It was bitter cold and the child was born inside an ice-crusted tent, with only Kian and little Ann to help. The group stayed through the winter, vainly awaiting James’ return. Twenty-nine-year-old Dr. James Long would not return—he was “accidentally” shot in a Mexico City jail and died on April 8, 1822.
James Long almost certainly met Jean Lafitte when they both served under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. If James William Hayes, the first husband of Margaret Theresa Wright, died of wounds in that battle, Dr. Long may well have treated him. There is evidence that Jose Felix Trespalacios paid a guard to “accidently” shoot Long in Mexico City. No motive is suggested, but Long must have possessed embarrassing or compromising information about Trespalacios. The world was a smaller place, there were fewer people, and politics makes strange bedfellows.
When Jane learned of her husband’s death, she made her way to San Antonio and applied for a pension to the new Governor. Guess who? Long’s old friend, the wily Jose Felix Trespalacios. After ten unsuccessful months, she gave up and moved back in Louisiana, where she lived with her sister’s family. In 1824, little Mary James, the Texas baby, died and Jane and her family moved back to Texas. Jane received a league of land in Fort Bend County and a labor in Waller County from Stephen F. Austin, but chose not to live on the property. Until 1830 she lived in Sam Felipe, the bustling colonial capital of Texas.
In 1832, Jane bought a boarding house in Brazoria and operated it for five years. She claimed romantic connections with several prominent Texans, and these may have happened while she owned the boarding house. Jane was thirty-eight years old when Texas won its independence, a lady of some means who owned a boarding house and several thousand acres. That same year, Sam Houston was forty-two, Ben Milam was forty-seven, Mirabeau Lamar was thirty-seven and William Barrett Travis was twenty-six. She suggested romantic ties with all of them.
Ben Milam was killed by a sniper in December, 1835, but she knew him before the revolution. They lived in the same vicinity for several years. Buck Travis was younger than she, but he was a rounder who kept records of his sexual conquests, and was not the least bit discriminating in his selection of partners. He and Jane certainly knew each other, and if she was agreeable, Buck would never let a little thing like age difference slow him down. That union probably didn’t happen, because there is no record of Jane ever having contacted gonorrhea.
According to Jane, Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar both proposed marriage to her. No one can prove they didn’t. Neither would have known her before the revolution, but both were in her vicinity after. They were such different personalities, and so intensely disliked each other, it is hard to imagine them vying for the same woman. Perhaps Jane was one source of their mutual distrust.
Lamar spent a lot of time with Jane, working on his history of Texas book, which he wrote in 1837 while the revolution was fresh in his mind. Jane, knowing her words were being recorded for posterity, might have embellished her stories with events that she felt should have happened. She and Lamar might have had a real love affair, or she might have imagined one. They were the same age, both unattached and lonely, and Jane was wealthy.
Regardless of her wealth, life had been tough for Jane. She almost starved during the winter of 1821, while she waited for her husband’s return. She lost two baby girls before they were three years old. She operated a boarding house, raised cotton and cattle, ran a prosperous plantation, traded real estate, and owned nineteen slaves at the start of the Civil War. She did all this when women were considered second class citizens and not allowed to vote. Frontier Texas was especially hard on women, and Jane didn’t need to embellish her story. She was a strong-minded, strong-willed woman who lived in a colorful, exciting, and very dangerous time.
Kian, the faithful slave girl, had been allowed to marry and stayed with Jane’s family until her death. She had four children, whose descendents may still live in the Richmond area.
Jane died at age 82 in 1880 and is buried in Richmond, near the site of the league of land deeded her by Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas and, according to Jane, another of her suitors.
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