image: tamu.edu
Her name was Emily Morgan, and she was the sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew. She was, in fact, the Yellow Rose of Texas. That song is not, as you may have thought, simply a celebration of a rather blah ideal of Lone Star womanhood. It is an homage to the accidental heroine of Texas independence.
Our story begins in April 1836, a panicky time for the nascent Republic of Texas. The Alamo had fallen, the garrison at Goliad had been massacred, and the newly elected government was in flight. Sam Houston, in command of a restive volunteer army heavily outnumbered by Santa Anna’s seasoned troops, was busily conducting a combination strategic retreat and basic training program.
There lived at that time, near a settlement called New Washington, at the mouth of the San Jacinto River, an indentured servant girl named Emily Morgan. She was, as Martha Anne Turner writes in her seminal work The Yellow Rose of Texas: Her Saga and Her Song, a “comely mulatto . . . exceptionally intelligent, as well as beautiful.” Emily was a member of the household staff of James Morgan, a North Carolina merchant who had made his fortune in Texas real estate and who, at the time of Santa Anna’s approach, was away commanding the rebel forces on Galveston.
Click here to read more about Emily Morgan and click lyrics to see the original words to“The Yellow of Texas”.
