The Legacy of John Short: A Texas Pioneer (1790–1847)
By: Glen E. Lich
Published: September 1, 1995
Updated: January 29, 2026
John Short, a veteran of the battle of New Orleans and the Texas Revolution, was the nominal head of an extended frontier clan that generally kept ahead of the westward movement. Born in 1790 in Georgia, the son of an elder John Short who removed from there to Alabama shortly after 1800, John Short and his younger brother Michael moved to Texas by 1836, served as volunteers in the Revolutionary Army; Michael participated in the battle of San Jacinto. They later established themselves and their progeny, including the Sansom family, near La Grange in Fayette County. Here they engaged in agriculture, milling, speculation, trading, and controversy. John Short died on February 17, 1847, a year after the death of his wife, Dicey Stinson (1799–1846); court battles contesting his will initiated the family to a degree of notoriety that lasted through the Civil War and Reconstruction. With long-standing and long-lasting antislavery and Unionist connections in both the upper and lower South, the Shorts, some historians theorize, may have supported, among other activities in the 1840s in Fayette County, an underground railroad for runaway slaves. This cannot be confirmed. Accounts at the time do confirm that they profited by repeatedly reselling the slaves. A similar cattle theft operation and counterfeiting ring with principals in five states, according to the Huntsville Texas Banner in the issue of October 6, 1849, resulted in the public hanging of one William Short, son of John, and in the incarceration of William Greenbury Sansom, a son-in-law of John Short, as the first inmate of the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. Other members of the family were implicated; son Thomas Short, then sixteen, ostensibly wrote a vivid and imaginative confession, surprising in light of his youth and education, which was printed in the Texas State Gazette on August 25, 1849. He was subsequently listed as Prisoner No 3 in the convict record at the Texas State Penitentiary but was discharged in 1850. Sansom was pardoned by the subsequent governor, Peter Hansborough Bell, on September 15, 1850. During the early 1850s many of the John Short children and grandchildren moved westward across central Texas to the Hill Country, particularly Comal, Kendall, Bexar, Bandera, and Edwards counties. Others continued west to California. During the Civil War Capt. John W. Sansom, a son of William G. Sansom, became a prominent Unionist leader and chronicler in Texas.
Bibliography:
John David (Jack) Short, “The Short Family: A Story of the Descendants of James Short,” 1993, Short NEWSLETTER (http://www.armory.com/~vern/family/newsletter/short.htm), accessed January 20, 2026. Texas State Gazette, August 25, 1849. A Twentieth Century History of Southwest Texas (2 vols., Chicago: Lewis, 1907).
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Glen E. Lich, “Short, John,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/short-john.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FSH37
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- September 1, 1995
- January 29, 2026
