Today we’re exploring one of Texas’s most enduring legends – the story of the “Yellow Rose of Texas” and her supposed role in the Battle of San Jacinto. We are going to unravel the myth of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” We will explore the woman at the heart of the tale, Emily D. West, who was a free woman of color working in Texas, and untangle her real life from the Texan myth. We will also unravel how Emily’s tale was erroneously tied to the song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
Transcript for: Yellow Rose of Texas: Myth-making and Race in the 19th Century
Written by Elizabeth Garner Masarik, PhD
Produced by Sarah Handley-Cousins PhD and Elizabeth Garner Masarik
Elizabeth: Today we’re going to explore one of Texas’s most enduring legends – the story of the “Yellow Rose of Texas” and her supposed role in the Battle of San Jacinto. In the winter of 1835, a mixed-race woman was working as a domestic servant in New Washington (later known as Morgan’s Point), a small settlement in Texas. In mid-April 1836, weeks after laying siege to, and defeating, a small group of rebellious Texans at the Alamo, Mexican troops commanded by General Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived at New Washington. After looting and burning the settlement, Santa Anna and his soldiers captured Emily and forced her and other captives to travel with the Mexican Army.
Sarah: According to legend, Emily was in Santa Anna’s tent on April 21, when Sam Houston’s Texian Army surprised Santa Anna’s troops, charging the Mexican camp in what came to be known as the Battle of San Jacinto. The Texians took hundreds of prisoners, Santa Anna included, who soon after secured his freedom by signing a treaty recognizing Texas’s independence.
Elizabeth: The myth claims that Emily was deliberately acting as a spy for the Texian cause. By seducing and “distracting” Santa Anna in his tent, she supposedly prevented the Mexican general from organizing an effective defense when Houston’s forces charged the Mexican camp. Her romantic entanglement with the enemy commander allegedly gave the Texans the element of surprise they needed to achieve their stunning 18-minute victory, which secured Texas independence from Mexico.
Sarah: This myth maintains that Emily was enslaved to Texian Colonel James Morgan, and that she heroically sacrificed herself for the cause of Texas freedom. And, Emily is supposedly the inspiration for the song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
Elizabeth: However, almost none of this is true! So today we are going to unravel the myth of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” We will explore the woman at the heart of the tale, Emily D. West, who was a free woman of color working in Texas, and untangle her real life from the Texan myth. We will also unravel how Emily’s tale was erroneously tied to the song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
I’m Elizabeth
And I’m Sarah
And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
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Elizabeth: Personal- I learned this myth as fact as a child growing up in Texas. Recently I was in San Antonio at the Alamo and they have erected a statue of Emily in the courtyard at the Alamo. Although it erroneously gives her name as Emily West Morgan, the statue does attempt to set the record straight regarding Emily’s free status and the nebulous origins of her story and the song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” My sister was with me and as we were reading the placard for the statue, she offhandedly said “there were many ‘roses.’” She went on to say that many Black and mixed-race women were referred to as roses at the time. I had never heard this. I had also not given much thought to Emily’s story and her role in the Battle of San Jacinto since I had learned the myth and the song as an elementary student. And so, dear listener, this episode is a reflection of me trying to parse out this story and determine what is true and what is part of a long history of American mythmaking. This episode, as with all of our episodes, relies on the work of other scholars and historians who have uncovered Emily’s true story as well as scholars working on race, gender, and state building in the 19th century, including Jeff Dunn, Emily Clark, Daniel Livesay, Obiagele Lake, Trudier Harris, Andrew Torget, Frances Edward Abernethy, and James Lutzweiler.
Sarah: The woman at the heart of this story was Emily D. West, a free mixed-race –and because of the one drop rule– Black woman born in New Haven, Connecticut. In October 1835, she signed a legitimate employment contract with James Morgan in New York City to work as a housekeeper for one year at the New Washington Association’s hotel in Texas, for $100 per year plus transportation.[1]
Elizabeth: The New Washington Association was a business venture formed in 1834 by a group of New York investors whose goal was to build a town at the tip of Galveston Bay, at a place where they could control the San Jacinto River, a major thoroughfare on the growing Texas coast. The New York investors made James Morgan their agent and manager for the project. The investors bought two small schooners to transport goods and passengers to New Washington (later Morgan’s Point) and sent workmen to build a hotel and warehouses for goods traveling along the San Jacinto and Galveston Bay.
Sarah: Emily arrived in Texas in December 1835 as a free woman, traveling alongside other workers and settlers, including the well-off Emily de Zavala, the wife of Lorenzo de Zavala who was one of the New York investors.
Elizabeth: Texas in 1835 was an unstable place and anxieties over slavery were threatening a war. For a little backstory, slavery was allowed in New Spain, meaning land that includes present-day Central America north of Panama; Mexico; the U.S. Southwest; and parts of the Philippines and Caribbean Islands that were controlled by colonial Spain.
Sarah: Mexico, like many other South American colonies during the 19th century, fought its own war of independence against Spain and won. The Mexican National period in the Tejas region lasted from 1821- until Texas Independence in 1836. That time period represents the greatest shift in the early history of slavery in Texas.
Elizabeth: The region that would become Texas was sparsely populated and slavery in Texas did not follow the American South’s chattel slavery model until white American settlers began to migrate into the region in larger numbers during the 1820s. Mexico attempted to develop the region of northern Mexico that we now know as central and south Texas by offering land grants to Americans in exchange for bringing settlers to bolster the population in the area.
Sarah: In 1821, the same year of Mexican independence, Mexico granted a Connecticut farmer named Moses Austin, and later his son Stephen F. Austin, permission to colonize the Texas region of Mexico with American farmers. The Austin’s received a large land grant and then re-sold smaller tracts of land to American settlers. To become a settler in the Mexican territory, settlers had to be of good moral character, become Mexican citizens, and practice Catholicism. Few settlers followed those rules.
Elizabeth: Following Mexican Independence in 1821, the Mexican government adopted policies to gradually outlaw enslavement in the newly established country, but Anglo settlers actively worked to ensure slavery was preserved in Texas. Stephen F. Austin negotiated a policy with officials in Mexico in regard to slavery. For each slave that an emigrant brought with them, they would be allowed to purchase an additional 50 acres of land. This later increased to 80 acres of land. Because Austin knew that the only way he could attract settlers would be if they could also bring slaves.
Sarah: Most White Americans willing to emigrate to Texas did so because of the opportunity to get cheap land and to begin making money by producing cotton. And unfortunately, the only way to grow cotton profitably required slaves. Stephen F. Austin made this clear in 1824: “The principal product that will elevate us from poverty is cotton,” he wrote, “and we cannot do this without the help of slaves.” Now obviously cotton can be grown without slaves. Settlers just believed that they couldn’t grow cotton profitably without slaves because large plantations in the southeastern United States relied on slave labor, and competing against those cotton producers with wage labor would have been futile.
Elizabeth: A number of enslaved Black people arrived with Stephen F. Austin and his Anglo settlers in 1824. By the end of 1825, there were around 443 slaves in the colony, roughly a quarter of the Austin colony’s population. By the time that clashes with the Mexican government led to the Texas Revolution in 1836, more than 5,000 enslaved people lived in Texas.
Sarah: However, Mexico would grant free Blacks in Texas full Mexican citizenship and property rights. Many free Blacks and escaped slaves went to Texas early in the 19th century where they received some semblance of equality, on paper at least. Historian Andrew Torget’s book, Seeds of Empire, opens with an anecdote highlighting the nebulous state of free and enslaved Black people in Texas during the 1820s-30s.
Elizabeth: The story written in most histories about Texas’ first American settlers begins like this: on Moses Austin’s first trip to Texas, where he asked for- and received- permission to bring settlers to Texas, he crossed paths with a planter from Louisiana named James Kirkham.
Sarah: This part of Austin’s journey is retold in histories about the beginnings of Texas Independence and the Austin’s because Kirkham stole Austin’s horses and provisions in the middle of the night. Austin was traveling with his son’s slave name Richmond, so Richmond and Austin had to travel by foot in the middle of January. Austin ended up getting pneumonia and although he made it back home, he died a few weeks later. So that’s why his son, Stephen F. Austin took over the settlement of Texas and later became one of the major players in Texas Independence.
Elizabeth: But what’s missing from this story, and I’d never known this until I read Torget’s book, was that Kirkham was in Texas because he was chasing three of his slaves named Marian, Richard, and Tivi, who had escaped and run to Mexico for their freedom. (And they made it! They ended up living out their lives as Mexican citizens by the way. )So, this story of the founder of what we now know as Texas began on this journey with two slave holders, Austin and Kirkham, and four enslaved people, three of which were running to Mexico to emancipate themselves. That’s the part that’s usually left out of the story.
Sarah: In 1827, Mexico outlawed the introduction of additional slaves and granted freedom at birth to all children born to a slave. Within a year however, the State Congress of Coahuila [koaˈwila] and Texas passed a law that allowed slave owners to bring in indentured servants to the region. So, slaveowners simply had their slaves sign contracts of long-term indenture to their masters. Mexico fully abolished slavery in 1829 as well as additional immigration to Texas from the United States. Mexico made an exception for the Austin colony however, and more White Americans came into the state accompanied by their slave laborers.
Elizabeth: So essentially, from 1821 to 1836 the Mexican government threatened to restrict or end slavery, passed laws to do so, but always allowed some sort of out, or loophole, for Texas settlers. So although the Mexican government continually made exceptions for Texas in regard to slavery, many slaveholders in Texas worried that Mexico might at some time attempt to actually uphold the laws of the land and abolish slavery for good in the region. American immigrants in Texas had a lot of money invested in cotton production, and thus slavery and they did not want to see those investments put at stake. Furthermore, the Mexican government began centralizing all authority in Mexico City, instead of dispersed regional government seats. This further enraged the Texans who felt that their voices were not heard with a government so far away.
Sarah: In March 1836, the Texas government assembled in a city called Washington on the Brazos and began writing a constitution for an independent Texas. One of the laws written in the General Provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, stated: “All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude … Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall congress have power to emancipate slaves; nor shall any slaveholder be allowed to emancipate his or her slave without the consent of congress, unless he or she shall send his or her slave or slaves without the limits of the republic.”
Elizabeth: In plain language, the Texans were starting their declaration of independence from Mexico and making sure that slavery was one of the core tenets of the new Texas Constitution.
Sarah: Emily arrived in Texas just a few short months before the Texas Declaration of Independence and the start of the war between Texas and Mexico. She arrived in December 1835 and the Alamo fell in March 1836. So, she’s landing right in the middle of things.
Elizabeth: Needless to say, Texas was a fairly unstable place when Emily D. West arrived. And one has to wonder, what was she thinking during all of this? My first question is, why did she sign a labor contract with Morgan and consent to travel to Texas to work for him? And this is honestly where I come up with more questions than answers. Did she sign the contract with Morgan and head to Texas for work because she thought that Mexico would protect her freedom as a mixed-race woman? She did after all, sign her labor contract in 1835 and Mexican law at that time had legal protections for Black people. Or, was she just so desperate for work that she needed any job available? This seems negligible, there were plenty of opportunities to do domestic work in the Northeast. Plus, the money that she would get, $100 a year, so roughly $1.90 a week, was not an especially generous salary at the time. Did Emily perhaps know some of the people from the New Washington Association and so felt safe traveling to another country, even though it was with Anglos who were set on Americanizing the area? We simply don’t know.
Sarah: Four months into Emily’s contract, Mexican forces arrived at New Washington. James Morgan had joined the Texans and was commanding Fort Travis in Galveston and so he wasn’t at New Washington when Mexican forces arrived.
Elizabeth: The Mexicans were pursuing the President of Texas, David G. Burnet, who escaped. Mexican forces seized Emily West along with others from Morgan’s warehouse. When General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna arrived the next day, he ordered the buildings to be burned and departed to confront Sam Houston’s army. Emily and others in New Washington were taken captive and forced to accompany the Mexican army.
Sarah: Emily’s legend develops from here. According to Texas myth, during the decisive Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, a beautiful young, enslaved woman named Emily Morgan played a crucial role in Texas’s victory over Mexico. The story goes that this “mulatto” woman was in Santa Anna’s tent at the critical moment when Sam Houston’s Texian army launched their surprise attack.
Elizabeth: The myth claims that Emily Morgan was deliberately acting as a spy for the Texian cause. By seducing and “distracting” Santa Anna in his tent, she supposedly prevented the Mexican general from organizing an effective defense when Houston’s forces charged the Mexican camp. Her romantic entanglement with the enemy commander allegedly gave the Texans the element of surprise they needed to achieve their stunning 18-minute victory, which secured Texas independence from Mexico. This story maintains that Emily was a slave belonging to Colonel James Morgan, and that she heroically sacrificed herself for the cause of Texas freedom by seducing the Mexican general on behalf of Texans, one of which owned her.
Sarah: If Emily was indeed in Santa Anna’s camp, the historical reality is far grimmer than the romantic legend suggests. As a woman prisoner of war, she would more likely have been a victim of sexual assault than a willing seductress. The myth transforms a probable victim into a willing participant, obscuring the real experiences of women during wartime.
Elizabeth: The legend perpetuates harmful stereotypes about women of color while erasing Emily’s true identity as a free woman with agency. Storytellers assumed she was James Morgan’s slave simply because she was Black, revealing the racist assumptions of both the 1830s and the 20th-century myth-makers. Furthermore, the fact that she is sexually associated with Santa Anna highlights nineteenth and twentieth century mythology about women of color as sexual objects for the pleasure of white men.
Sarah: This romanticization reflects broader patterns in how American culture has mythologized mixed-race women. As historian Emily Clark demonstrates in her analysis of New Orleans and the mystique of the New Orleans quadroon, she argues that nineteenth-century travel writers, fiction writers, and abolitionists developed false narratives that located the “exotic” mixed-race woman in specific places like New Orleans, “where one could encounter beautiful women produced by a specific degree of procreation across the color line, women whose sexual favors were reserved for white men. The reality was, of course, more complicated than that. Women whose racial ancestry would have earned them the color term quadroon lived everywhere in nineteenth-century America.”[2]
Elizabeth: Clark argues the “quadroon culture” of New Orleans was actually a result of Haitian immigration and practical circumstances – the lack of suitable marriage partners among free people of color, which encouraged relationships with white men who had flooded into the expanding city. Most surprisingly, Clark discovered that “plaçage,” the term now commonly used to describe relationships between antebellum mixed race women and white men, wasn’t even used in antebellum New Orleans. It was a later invention that has been “picked up and repeated endlessly by writers of all kinds,” along with concepts like the “tragic mulatto” of abolitionist literature and the “exotic mulatresse” of the supposedly glamorous quadroon balls. Eventually, the mythology was exploited by those promoting prostitution, who sought out light-skinned enslaved women to sell as “fancy girls” to men wanting to live out fantasies of the wealthy slave owner with an expensive mistress.
Sarah: Seen in this context, it is not surprising that Emily’s story changed her free status. In the myth, she is Emily Morgan, slave of James Morgan, and a mixed-race seductress (sometimes of partial Mexican ancestry as well) who uses her sexual wiles as a light skinned woman, to ensnare the white Santa Anna on behalf of her white enslavers. In the myth she is an exotic, sexualized figure in the “foreign” borderlands of Texas rather than recognizing the reality of free Black women like Emily D. West who lived and worked throughout the United States.
Elizabeth: So what about this idea floating around that mixed-race women were known as roses? Referring to women as roses was commonplace in the nineteenth century. This literary usage coincided with the peak of floriography (the language of flowers), where flowers carried coded meanings in Victorian culture. Roses specifically symbolized love and beauty but also purity and virtue, creating complex, sometimes contradictory meanings when applied to mixed-race women. White flowers like white roses were associated with purity and virtue, while darker or mixed flowers could represent racial mixing. The floral terminology in literature served multiple functions: romanticizing the harsh realities of slavery and racial oppression, creating exotic otherness through aestheticized descriptions, and reinforcing the “tragic mulatto” stereotype by linking beauty with inevitable doom.
Sarah: In England and parts of North America, the beauty standard was to be an “English Rose,” meaning a woman with pink cheeks and red lips with pale skin. Dan Livesay chronicles anxieties over complexion in England in his book Children of Uncertain Fortune, which traced rich white Jamaican families that sent their mixed-race children to England to live in a free society but found that racial anxieties trumped class. Anxieties about complexion were evident throughout the west, as evidenced by elaborate sunshades, bonnets, and the use of harsh exfoliants to keep the skin as light as possible. In regard to Emily’s story and the idea that mixed-raced women were specifically called “roses,” the more accurate portrayal is that young women of all races were referred to as roses in literature and song. Whatever the shade of the rose, it referred to a young woman’s bloom of beauty and youth. White supremacist patriarchy determined whether the bloom (young woman) was “worthy” of being protected and adored or plucked for white men’s pleasure.
Elizabeth: Back to Emily being a key player in the Battle of San Jacinto. Santa Anna’s officers made no reference to any woman in their formal reports upon their return to Mexico, even though many were severely critical of their commander’s conduct. Had such a compromising situation actually taken place, Santa Anna’s numerous political adversaries would undoubtedly have exploited it for their own purposes. Similarly, official Texan military accounts of the Battle of San Jacinto contain no records of discovering a woman in Santa Anna’s quarters.
Sarah: The only written reference to anything resembling this story comes from British traveler William Bollaert, who traveled throughout Texas in 1842-1843. His travel writings document a conversation he had with an unnamed veteran of the Texan war. Apparently the Texan told Bollaert that, “The battle of San Jacinto was probably lost to the Mexicans, owing to the influence of a Mulatta Girl (Emily) belonging to Col. Morgan who was closeted in the tent with G’l Santana.”[3] This was secondhand information from an unidentified source, recorded six years after the battle. These travel logs were not published during Bollaert’s lifetime. They eventually wound up in the archives of the Newberry library in Chicago.
Elizabeth: In reality, following the Mexican Army’s defeat at San Jacinto, Emily West gained her freedom. In 1837, she approached Isaac N. Moreland, an artillery officer who would later serve as a county judge in Houston, requesting a passport for her return journey to New York. Moreland contacted the Texas secretary of state, describing Emily as a 36-year-old free woman who had arrived in Texas in 1835 alongside Colonel Morgan and whose “free papers” had been lost during the Battle of San Jacinto. This marks Emily D. West’s final appearance in historical documentation, presumably having made her way back to the Northeast at the earliest opportunity, perhaps with help from Emily de Zavala who was also hightailing it out of Texas and back to New York. It’s completely understandable why Emily would want out of Texas because once Texas declared independence, they outlawed free Blacks within the borders of the new nation. (Remember Texas doesn’t enter the Union until 1845)
Sarah: So how was Emily’s myth created and how did she turn into the Yellow Rose of Texas? The legend remained largely forgotten for more than a century before two journalists embellished upon it during the 1950s and 60s. Henderson Shuffler, who worked as a publicist at Texas A&M University and subsequently became the inaugural director of San Antonio’s Institute of Texan Cultures, believed that the San Jacinto heroine (already a myth) deserved her own musical tribute. He intentionally linked Emily’s narrative to the well-known 1850s minstrel tune “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” forging a historical connection that had never actually existed. In a 1960 correspondence, Shuffler candidly acknowledged that regardless of whether such a connection was factual, it “should be” created.
Elizabeth: Shuffler concocted the connection himself and Dallas Morning News columnist Frank X. Tolbert took up the story, describing Emily as a “decorative long-haired mulatto girl…Latin looking woman of about twenty,” despite having no documentation for this description.
Sarah: The song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” was first published in 1853 in Christy’s Plantation Melodies. No. 2, a songbook for a blackface minstrel show known as the Christy’s Minstrels. Minstrel shows were usually white people dressed in blackface, singing songs that they imagined Black people would sing. The original lyrics to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” depicted an African American singer who refers to himself as a “darkey” and longs to return to “a yellow girl.” Here “yellow” would be a term used to describe a mixed-race woman with light skin.
Elizabeth: In 1858 the lyrics were updated from “yellow girl” to “yellow rose.”
There’s a yellow rose in Texas that I am going to see,
No other darkey knows her, no darkey only me;
She cried so when I left her, it like to broke my heart,
And if I ever find her we never more will part.
(Chorus)
She’s the sweetest rose of color this darkey ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew,
You may talk about your Dearest May, and sing of Rosa Lee,
But the yellow rose of Texas beats the belles of Tennessee.[4]
Sarah: The song was very popular throughout the nineteenth century. The “Yellow Rose of Texas” was a popular marching song for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. In this version they replaced “darkey” with soldier.
Elizabeth: The song’s original references to race were gradually removed, transforming it into what appeared to be a racially neutral love ballad while completely obscuring its origins in blackface minstrelsy. In 1933, Gene Autry and Jimmie Long adapted the song for country and western audiences, modifying the racially explicit language to make it more commercially acceptable for mainstream white audiences. Darkey was replaced with fellow. Roy Rogers later featured a version in his 1944 film The Yellow Rose of Texas. Mitch Miller recorded the song for Columbia Records in 1955, replacing “rose of color” with “rosebud” and it was number 1 on the Billboard charts for six weeks. Ernie Tubb recorded the song in the same year and topped the country western charts.
Sarah: But the enduringly popular song never had any connection to San Jacinto, Santa Anna, or a woman named Emily West. That was created by Shuffler and Tolbert in the 1960s. But they didn’t concoct the story out of thin air.
Elizabeth: Englishman William Bollaert’s travel diaries collected during his trip to Texas in 1842-1843 were never commercially published but they were held at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 1946, Joe Frantz in his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Texas and subsequently in the published version of his dissertation, mentioned Bollaert’s claim that Emily, a mixed-race woman, sexually distracted Santa Anna before the battle of San Jacinto. W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth Lapham Butler, transcribed Bollaert’s papers into the book William Bollaert’s Texas in 1956. They also mentioned the Emily story, but only in a footnote.
Elizabeth: This is where Shuffler and Tolbert enter the story, picking up on the connection between Emily and the Battle of San Jacinto and running with it. Tolbert went so far as to claim that “one set of original lyrics” from the song named the girl in the song “Emily, the Maid of Morgan’s Point.” Morgan’s Point being the area that the New Washington Association was trying to build up. There has never been any documented proof of this connection.
Elizabeth: In 1976 Martha Anne Turner, a Texas history author and English professor at Sam Houston State University wrote a book, The Yellow Rose of Texas: Her Saga and Her Song. In this book and other articles, Turner accepted the connection between Emily West/Emily Morgan and the song “The Yellow Rose of Texas” uncritically, citing Tolbert as her only evidence of the connection. By the 1980s, the myth had become so entrenched that it was treated as historical fact. Margaret S. Henson was one of the most outspoken historians who attempted to raise an awareness of their flawed analysis and exaggerations, but the link between Emily and the song continued unabated in popular literature.
Elizabeth: The story gained renewed popularity during the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986 (this is when I learned the story). The Texas Sesquicentennial was a HUGE celebration. I think we sang “The Yellow Rose of Texas” in music class every day that year. Simultaneously, James Michener’s bestselling doorstop of a novel, Texas, further entrenched Emily’s myth and her nebulous connection to the song writing, “Immortality was visited upon the least likely participant of the battle. Emily Morgan, who had diverted Santa Anna’s attention that hot afternoon just before the charge of the Texicans, became celebrated in song as ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas,’ and few who sing it in a romantic settings realize that they are serenading the memory of a mulatto slave.”[5] According to scholar Jeff Dunn, the connection between Emily Morgan and the song was being made as late as 2011 in The Handbook of Texas Online (which is a great digital source for Texas history.)
Sarah: So are we just a buzzkill? Some might argue that debunking the Yellow Rose legend is unnecessarily destructive – that we’re removing a heroic woman from Texas history and diminishing an inspiring tale of courage and sacrifice. But this perspective misses the crucial point: we’re not removing a heroic woman from history; we’re probing a myth that hides the exploitative elements of 19th century race and the horrors of war.
Elizabeth: The romanticized legend does more than distort historical facts – it actively perpetuates harm by masking the brutal realities of 19th-century racial exploitation and the violence of war, especially against women facing the constant threat of rape and forced sexual bondage. When we repeat stories that reimagine probable victims of sexual assault as cunning temptresses, we reinforce the same cultural mechanisms that Emily Clark identified in New Orleans – constructing palatable fantasies that shield us from confronting the harsh truths about dominance, abuse, and brutality in our nation’s past.
Sarah: Emily D. West was genuinely heroic – not as a romanticized seductress, but as a free Black woman who survived capture, forced displacement, and the chaos of war, and as far as we know, was able to return to her home.
Elizabeth: Furthermore, studying how these myths are built and maintained helps us recognize similar patterns today. The same impulses that led 1960s writers to create the Yellow Rose story still affect how we tell stories about race, gender, and American history. Learning to distinguish between documented facts and appealing fiction develops the critical thinking skills we need to evaluate the narratives around us now.
Thanks for listening.
Sources:
Jeffrey D. Dunn, “‘To the Devil with your Glorious History!’: Women and the Battle of San Jacinto” in Women and the Texas Revolution, edited by Mary L. Scheer. (UNT Press, 2012).
Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003)
Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821—1865. (LSU Press, 1991).
Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. (UNC Press, 2018).
Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, (UNC Press, 2013).
Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (UNC Press, 2018).
Frances Edward Abernethy, 2001: A Texas Odyssey (UNT Press, 2001).
Jeff Dunn and James Lutzweiler, “Yellow Rose of Texas,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed September 07, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/yellow-rose-of-texas.
Margaret S. Henson, “New Washington Association,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed September 07, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/new-washington-association.
William A. Philpott, Jr. Papers, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. “Front page of employment agreement between Emily D. West and James Morgan, 1835.” UTA Libraries Digital Gallery. 1835. Accessed September 7, 2025, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10007640
Notes:
[1] Front page of employment agreement between Emily D. West and James Morgan, 1835, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Special Collections
[2] Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, (UNC, 2013), 2.
[3] Quoted in Jeff Dunn, “’To the Devil with Your Glorius History,’” in Women and the Texas Revolution, 151.
[4] Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 111.
[5] James Michener, Texas, (New York:Random House, 1985), 418.
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