Robert M. Coleman (Texan politician)

Robert M. Coleman (1793 - July 1, 1837) was an American Texan politician and soldier, aide-de-camp to Sam Houston; said to be his sober antithesis and the true hero of the republic. Signer of the Texas Declaration, Colonel, and a transitional founder of the Republic of Texas into the United States as a constituent state. His staid stance opposing the strategies of Sam Houston regarding defense of the Alamo, and troup placements on up through the Battle of San Jacinto caused a rift with Houston and a posturing treatise, lending suspicion to the untimely death of Coleman by drowning.

Contents

• Republic of Texas
• The Texas Revolution
• Participant in the Republic of Texas
• Settlement of Mina now Bastrop Texas
• Author of war diary demeaning Sam Houston
• Father and Husband
• Suspicious drowning
• the Murder of his widow and Children
• Memorial Stone
• See also
• References

He was appointed one of the first Texas Rangers, whose outpost Coleman's Fort was later named Fort Colorado. The State Historic site marker now sits within Austin, Texas.

On February 1, 1858 he became the posthumous namesake of Coleman county, Texas and thus apparently also Coleman City, Coleman Lake, and eventually many other features, places, businesses, and identifiers in Coleman county, Texas.

Earlier writers include Noah Smithwick, a contemporary frontiersman, stationed at Coleman's Fort, having an awareness of Coleman in Smithwick's book 'Recollections of old Texas Days'.

The late Sherrianne Coleman Nicol, a possible relative or descendant, has written a detailed biography found in narrative-script form as of April 27, 2016 at Ancestry dot com which suggests that Robert M. Coleman may have ancestral heritage from the often cited proposed Mobjack Coleman lineage of colonial Virginia. Her article includes a substantial bibliography.

It is implied that his family's association with Sam Houston may have begun back in that Appalachian Virginia near Rockbridge Timber Plantation from where the Sam Houston family migrated, it being adjacent to a Coleman Mountain and Coleman Falls in southwest Amherst county and Nelson counties where some of the Mobjack Coleman lineage settled, both surnames typically attributed to Ireland.