Tom Blue

[2] Blue lived in Houston, Texas "when the stars fell" (Great Meteor Storm of 1833).

[3] In the meantime, Sam Houston resigned his post as Governor of Tennessee (1829) and he settled in Indian Territory.

[7] Mexican law prohibited any religion other than Catholicism, and Houston converted to the faith at the Nacogdoches home of Adolphus Sterne.

Although outnumbered, and with Houston wounded, the Texans were victorious[7] against General Antonio López de Santa Anna of Mexico.

[10] Houston had suffered a serious wound to his foot during the battle[11] and on May 28 boarded the schooner Flora for medical treatment in New Orleans.

[13][14] He was also described as a "negro retainer" along with a man named Esau (also Esaw),[13] both of whom were acquired before Houston's marriage to Margaret Lea.

[18] The march of years had not diminished his passion for motion, and the Houston family, with its cluster of little ones, whose number methodically increased to seven, became as mobile as calvary.

With trunks lashed to the boot, a surplus negro or two perched on the top and a flourish of Tom Blue’s long whip, the great yellow carry-all and four horses would be off in a cloud of rolling dust, General Houston leading the way in a single-seated top buggy beside the gigantic Joshua, his driver… On, on—always in flight.Blue left Huntsville, Texas, for Mexico in the fall of 1862.

Houston was said to have conveyed to them Abraham Lincoln's September 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, which would free all enslaved people on January 1, 1863.

[26] He is mentioned on a Texas historical marker as one of the interred African American citizens of Harrisburg.