Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno (1806–1890)

Juan Nepomuceno Seguín (b. 27 October 1806; d. 27 August 1890), Texas political and military figure. Son of the politically prominent Erasmo Seguín, he served in a number of political posts between 1829 and 1835, including alcalde and interim jefe político in 1834. Like his father, he was a strong supporter of Anglo settlement.

Seguín, a federalist, involved himself in the 1834–1835 dispute with the centralists over control of the state government. At the outbreak of the Texas revolt, he was commissioned a captain of the Texas forces, and he led the only Mexican-Texan company at the Battle of San Jacinto, 21 April 1836. In the late 1830s Seguín served as senator from Bexar County in the Texas Congress and as mayor of San Antonio.

Compromised by political enemies in early 1842, Seguín was forced to flee to Mexico, where he apparently was given a choice of joining the army or going to prison. He participated in General Adrián Woll's invasion of Texas later that year and remained in the Mexican service through the end of the Mexican-American War. He subsequently returned to San Antonio, and again entered politics in the 1850s, serving as a justice of the peace and as one of the founders of the Bexar County Democratic Party. Increasingly alienated by conditions in Texas, Seguín took his family to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where he lived with one of his sons until his death.

See alsoMexico, Wars and Revolutions: Mexican-American War; San Jacinto, Battle of; Texas; Texas Revolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ida Vernon, "Activities of the Seguíns in Early Texas History," in West Texas Historical Association Year Book 25 (1949): 11-38.

Jesús F. De La Teja, ed., A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín (1991).

Additional Bibliography

Frazier, Donald S. The United States and Mexico at War: Nineteenth-Century Expansionism and Conflict. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998.

Winders, Richard Bruce. Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002.

                                        JesÚs F. de la Teja