From its settlement by the warlike monks of 1692, to its final capture by the Americans in 1836, it was well named "the city of the sword." The Comanche and the white man fought around its walls their forty years' battle for supremacy.

From 1810 to 1821 its streets were constantly bloody with the fight between the royalists and republicans, and the city and the citadel passed from, one party to the other continually.

And when it came to the question of freedom and American domination, San Antonio was, as it had ever been, the great Texan battle-field.
Its citizens then were well used to the fortunes and changes of war.

Men were living who had seen the horrors of the auto da fe and the splendors of viceregal authority.

Insurgent nobles, fighting priests, revolutionizing Americans, all sorts and conditions of men, all chances and changes of religious and military power, had ruled it with a temporary absolutism during their generation.
In the main there was a favorable feeling regarding its occupation by the Americans.