The San Felipe incident was the first naval battle fought between Mexican and rebel forces during the Texas Revolution. Thomas McKinney deliberately provoked the Mexican government by heavily arming the merchant ship San Felipe with a cargo of munitions intended for Texian revolutionaries and sending it from New Orleans to Brazoria, Texas. The ship carried a crew of Texians and Stephen F. Austin, who had recently been released from incarceration in Mexico and was dedicated to achieving Texian independence.
On September 1, 1835, as the San Felipe was transferring the last of its cargo to another Texian-crewed ship called the Laura, the Mexican Navy warship Correo de Mejico approached the vessels. In an uncharacteristic display of aggression for merchant vessels, both the San Felipe and Laura fired upon the Correo de Mejico and captured it following a day-long pursuit. The San Felipe's captain, William Hurd, arrested the captain of the Correo, Thomas Thompson, who was a British-born American citizen and commissioned officer of the Mexican navy, along with the crew. Hurd brought Thompson and the crew back to New Orleans, treating them as pirates rather than recognized naval personnel.
The capture represented a significant early Texian military success and demonstrated the willingness of rebel forces to engage Mexican naval power directly. Thompson had been seizing smuggling ships along the coast that were carrying arms to the Texas rebels, making his capture a consequential blow to Mexican efforts to interdict supplies to the revolutionary movement.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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