Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth Read online

  The distortion of the Alamo story is in many ways comparable to the way Custer’s Last Stand was distorted for the occasion of the United States Centennial on June 25, 1876. America needed heroes and especially martyrs to glorify. For generations, the white, or Anglo, version of the death of Custer and his men was the only received account. Once again, a first-rate military disaster was turned into a moral victory in terms of a myth of self-sacrifice.

  Both the Alamo and the Little Big Horn fiascos were almost incomprehensible to white America, for they shook entrenched racial and cultural assumptions about a God-given superiority over other peoples. Accounts of the struggle at the Little Big Horn in the Montana Territory, which took place forty years after the Alamo fell, repeated the romanticized story of a valiant last stand of white troops heroically battling a darker, “inferior” race against impossible odds. In both cases, American illustrators and painters, in the notable absence of either Indian or Mexican pictorial representations, left an enduring dramatic imprint on the American popular consciousness. Fantasies replaced mundane facts because no white soldiers of either contest survived to describe what actually occurred.

  Much like the story of the Alamo, the Anglo version of Custer’s Last Stand was readily received, even though it ran directly contrary to eyewitness accounts of Native Americans. Again, too, the words of Little Big Horn’s victors were conveniently overlooked, because they challenged the idealized heroics that immortalized the defenders’ courage and demonstrated racial and cultural superiority, despite the fact that they had lost the battle.

  Corroborating a good many Native American eyewitness and oral accounts, recent archeological studies of the Little Big Horn battlefield have shed light on what really happened that hot June day in Montana, including the fact that white troopers offered relatively little resistance and sometimes panicked, paving the way to annihilation. New research derived from archeological evidence taken from the battlefield has proven that the romantic account of Custer’s last stand was in fact false: moreover, Native American losses, like those among Mexicans at the Alamo, were surprisingly low.

  Many contemporaries viewed the fall of the Alamo as the most shameful episode of the entire Texas Revolution. Sickened by what he saw as a complete waste of life on March 6, one angry Texas newspaperman caught the representative mood. Writing with disgust that the Alamo garrison was needlessly “sacrificed by the cold neglect” of the Texians, he cast “shame” on “the hundreds and thousands that might have gone up to the rescue—but they would not.” If a parallel between real life events is to be made, the drama of the Alamo—both inside and outside its walls—was grotesque and hideous, comparable not to Thermopylae but to the sad slaughter of the Southern Cheyenne at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in late December 1890.

  Soldiers on both sides at the Alamo fought and died for what they believed to be right, but these motivations deserve fresh reassessment and closer scrutiny, especially in regard to the complexities of slavery. While the Alamo defenders struggled for possession of a bountiful land yet owned by another people, the Mexicans fought on behalf of a far more equitable republic than the United States. Most Texans were either slave-owners or aspired to become so in order to fully exploit the promises of the land. These sentiments were certainly common to both the pantheon of Alamo leaders such as Travis and Bowie and the rankand-file soldiers.

  Today we can no longer afford to ignore that the Alamo defenders were on the wrong side of the slavery issue, while the Mexicans were in the right. Mexico, unlike the United States, had abolished slavery in 1829, more than half a decade before the Alamo battle. One of the crucial reasons why the Texans revolted against Mexico in 1835 was to maintain the constitutional safeguards of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, which protected slavery, as did the United States Constitution on which it was modeled.

  Given the United States’ current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it all the more behooves us to better understand our past and present military involvements, especially in foreign lands. We must endeavor to strip away as many myths and prejudices as possible in order to more correctly see ourselves, as well as the opposing viewpoints of other lands, cultures, and ethnic groups, especially those of our enemies. Any nation that indulges in the self-serving process of sentimentalizing and glorifying military disasters to bolster cultural and racial fantasies only makes itself more vulnerable to folly in the future. Even today, a host of fresh, practical lessons can yet be glimpsed from the Alamo disaster, if we can only understand the timeless factors that led to the debacle.

  In 1836, as today, the greatest military sin of all is hubris: to thoroughly underestimate an enemy, while overestimating one’s own capabilities, righteousness, and combat prowess. History has proven that such misperceptions often stem from erroneous beliefs rooted in fantasies of racial and cultural superiority. Dismissal or ignorance of the intelligence, determination, organizational skill, cultural pride, sense of personal and national honor, and war capabilities of a foreign opponent in his own homeland has long been a guaranteed formula for inevitable military disasters like the Alamo. Today, as in March 1836, truth is often the first casualty of war, and history’s lessons linger.

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  Golden Prizes:

  Land and Slaves

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  Emphasizing the moral importance of the mythical last stand, the traditional view of the Alamo defenders maintained that they were the highest minded of freedom fighters who died in defense of liberty, republican government, and democratic principles in their struggle against a tyrannical, abusive Mexico. In order to uphold the time-honored stereotype of freedom fighters, historians have minimized the fact that many soldiers of 1835–36 were either slave-owners, defenders of the right to maintain slavery, or aspired to own slaves one day. This historical situation is especially ironic in light of today’s politically correct environment in the United States. Confederate soldiers who fought for the same republican principles as guaranteed by the United States Constitution, including the right to own slaves, have been condemned as politically incorrect, if not immoral, while the Alamo defenders have been transformed into revered saints deserving of endless hero worship.

  Paradoxically, in rewriting history, the victors of the Civil War gained the luxury of tainting the Confederacy’s bid for independence because of slavery, while San Jacinto’s winners benefited from the fact that the importance of slavery to their cause was forgotten. In Alamo and Texas Revolution historiography, therefore, the importance of slavery has been virtually a non-factor. In most books and films about the Alamo, the issue has been noticeably absent, almost as if the institution did not exist in Texas at the time. Texas historians and textbooks have long overlooked slavery, especially in regard to the Alamo, leaving its history relatively free of the excessive “burden of Southern history.” 1

  Instead of developing a “lost cause” mythology, which partially allowed white Southerners to psychologically compensate for their bitter defeat, white Texans developed an Alamo mythology. The romanticism of the Alamo and its heroes—primarily Travis, Crockett, and Bowie—obscured an ugly reality: that so many of the men who fought for Texas liberty were slave-owners at one time or another, and fought and died in part for the “peculiar institution’s” defense.

  From the beginning, the institution of slavery played a vital role in the earliest settlement of Anglo-Celtic Texas. No one realized slavery’s importance to Texas’ future prosperity more than Stephen F. Austin, the “Father of Texas.” Barely ten years after the visionary from Missouri, a slave state, established the first Anglo-Celtic colony in 1821 in east Texas, with the blessing of Mexico City, he emphasized: “Texas must be a slave country [because] circumstances and unavoidable necessity compels it [and] it is the wish of the people there.” 2

  Austin explained, “My object and ambition was to succeed with the enterprise and lay a foundation for the fortune of thousands.” And his vast “fortune” could only be retriev
ed from the rich Texas soil with the assistance of thousands of men, women, and children of African descent in lifetime servitude, especially after the invention of the cotton gin and the power loom. As articulated in 1833, Austin’s unshakeable pro-slavery views represented the opinions of the vast majority of Anglo-Celtic colonists in Texas. Such entrenched attitudes of settlers, mostly from the South, ensured that no single issue more separated the Mexican people and government from the colonists than slavery.The “peculiar institution” was the permanent fissure that divided the two peoples, transcending issues of economics, class, religion, race, and culture. After all, the Mexicans were a mixed-race people of Spanish and Indian blood— the Mestizo—including some African blood as well.

  Anglo-Celtic Texas, therefore, early feared that the more racially egalitarian Mexican republic threatened slavery’s vibrancy and future. Unlike United States citizens, the people of Mexico, with Indios, or Indians, in the majority, embraced an entirely different perspective of race relations. The mere concept of holding people in slavery was revolting to the people of Mexico.

  Texas in the early and mid-1830s, like the South in the antebellum period, was threatened by the new realities of a changing world, including the rise of liberalism, abolitionism, and humanism, especially in Europe. Thanks to the industrial revolution and humanitarian enlightenment, slavery was a dying institution around the world, with British abolitionists leading the way in the 1830s, followed by New Englanders. But as the first Americans to settle west of Missouri, in a vast land ruled by other powers—first Spain and then Mexico—the AngloCelts who migrated to Texas brought no such enlightened thought with them across the Sabine, because slavery was part of Southern AngloCeltic culture, law, and everyday life.

  Texas was an unexploited land, and in need of dramatic transformation after centuries of government neglect, Indian threats, and the lack of successful colonization by both Spain and Mexico that resulted in a low population. As a warm Mediterranean people without a forestto-farm heritage like the American colonists, the Spanish, from the arid, mountainous lands of the Iberian Peninsula, had brought their Romaninfluenced civilization with them to Mexico’s arid northern frontier. Like ancient Rome, Spain’s historic pattern of settlement called for establishing towns centered around churches and protected by military outposts for security against hostile native peoples.

  Even though an anachronism by this time, a vibrant system of slavery was absolutely necessary for the successful economic development of Texas. Consequently, Anglo-Celtic settlers looked with apprehension south at Mexico, when the young republic officially abolished slavery, unleashing a “bolt from the sky.” On September 15, 1829, President Vicente Guerrero, a successful former general during the war of independence against Spain, and in office barely six months before a coup overthrew him and ordered his execution, abolished slavery throughout Mexico. Texas would later be exempted, however. He ensured that the Mexican Constitution allowed all Mexicans—white, black, or Indian— the opportunity to hold office. Mexico’s first president possessed a blend of African, Indian, and Spanish heritage.

  Most significantly, Mexico’s emancipation proclamation was issued more than thirty years before President Abraham Lincoln’s, and not for pressing wartime reasons, unlike in the United States. The Republic of Mexico, although tarnished by a caste system, consequently possessed a proud heritage of liberty for all people, regardless of color. Slavery’s death-stroke in Mexico ensured that a great chasm would be opened between Mexico and the Anglo-Celtic settlers, even though they were already considerably divided by race, culture, and politics. President Guerrero’s “decree was seen in Texas by Austin and all his people, and by members of the several colonies scattered to the east, as a mortal blow to their existence; for the economy of the settlements rested upon slave labor, and ever since their foundation they had had to resist Mexican attempts to abolish slavery by law.” 3

  In late January 1830, a prophetic Captain Henry Austin wrote to his cousin from Mataromos, Mexico on the Rio Grande’s south bank near the river’s mouth, summarizing how Mexico’s anti-slavery stance sowed the seeds of rebellion: “We have many rumors here of a revolutionary disposition in the people of Texas on account of the decree freeing all slaves in the Republic.” 4 But this was not “rumor.” Concerned about the “property” that formed the basis of their agricultural wealth and future prosperity, Anglo-Celtic settlers were literally up in arms against the emerging threat to slavery. Even the ever-prudent Austin, himself a slave-owner, “sternly resolved to fight for the right to hold slaves.” 5

  Slavery had to be defended because few colonists doubted the undeniable truth: as voiced by the political head of San Antonio in response to the 1829 decree from Mexico City, the end of slavery would mean the inevitable destruction of Texas prosperity. After all, the economy was based primarily on cotton culture, which depended on “the aid of the robust and almost indefatigable arms of that race of the human species which is called negroes.” 6

  Long before the transplanted Americans brought cotton culture from the Deep South to Texas with the Austin Colony’s birth, African American slaves in and around the Tejano town of San Antonio were nothing new. The first official census of San Antonio in 1783 revealed that of the 1,248 residents of both the town of Villa de San Fernando de Béxar, the future San Antonio, and the adjacent presidio, the Presidio de San Antonio de Béxar, more than 20, both men and women, were slaves. From the earliest dates, many northern frontier communities of New Spain consisted of a racial mixture of “Spaniards, Mestizos, and Mulattos.” 7

  Widespread race mixing in San Antonio was commonplace from the earliest date. By the middle of the 1700s, the three distinct classes of European-born Spaniards, Indian peasants, and black slaves had been long intermingling and procreating, both inside and outside marriage, gradually becoming one people at San Antonio. Larger numbers of mulattos from the union of Spaniards and black slaves, Mestizos from the union of Spaniards and Indians, and other “mixed- race” people were accepted as equal citizens of San Antonio with fluid upward mobility—an impossibility in the race-conscious United States.

  By 1821, most of Tejano Texas was a Mestizo land. San Antonio provided a rare example of relative racial harmony as part of a Mediterranean-based way of life and vibrant Tejano culture that thrived in Mexico’s north. A successful national liberation effort by a mixedrace people, Mexico’s independence from Spain had naturally bestowed even greater equality on these “new” people along the northern frontier. 8 To the American colonists, even San Antonio’s Tejanos therefore represented a threat to a racially restrictive Anglo-Celtic culture and social values based upon artificial barriers of color and race. The ample visible proof throughout both San Antonio and Texas of how easily widespread racial intermixing could result in a unified people from divergent races shocked newly-arrived Americans, especially migrants from the Deep South.

  The obsessive fear of an abolitionist Mexico played on the historic Southern-based paranoia of the Texas colonists to a much greater extent than historians have recognized. The issues and divisions over slavery served as a primary cause of the Texas Revolution, without which there would have been no struggle for the Alamo. In analyzing the internal dynamics of that revolution, American historians have further overlooked the importance of slavery as a catalyst because of the power of the Alamo myth. Instead of focusing on slavery, most writers on the period have portrayed the Texas Revolution as a righteous struggle for freedom, emphasizing simplistic explanations.

  A much more accurate view was written by Mexican historian José María Roa Bárcena, who concluded with considerable insight that “the rebellion of Texas [was] more due to the emancipation of the slaves in Mexico than to the fall of the federalist constitution of 1824.” 9 Of course, this conviction—in part for which the Alamo garrison died—of the right of one race to keep another in servitude ran directly contrary to the mythical Alamo. 10 Acknowledging the fact that slavery served as a leading cause
of the Texas Revolution would have diminished the lofty status of the Alamo’s heroes.

  First and foremost, the traditional explanations that the Alamo defenders fought and died for liberty have been much too simplistic, Anglo-centric, and one-dimensional. By far, the greatest ambition of the vast majority of Alamo’s defenders was to acquire vast amounts of land. Land hunger was like a raging fever that motivated an entire generation of Americans in the 1820s and 1830s. Heady dreams of acquiring a quick fortune by easily acquiring thousands of acres of rich Texas land served as a powerful motivation. And that burning ambition of mostly lower-class men, including many who had never owned land before, went hand in hand with the institution of slavery because development of the land—cutting down trees, plowing fields, building fences, planting and harvesting crops, and so forth—was essential for successful agricultural enterprises. From the beginning, the sheer vastness of the untamed land and the seemingly boundless fertility of the soil guaranteed the critical importance of slavery in serving as the central foundation of Anglo-Celtic civilization in Texas.

  North Texas and the area around San Antonio was part of the southern end of the Great Plains. Around San Antonio, this fertile region was part of a vast sea of prairie grasslands, the central plains of Texas. Beginning mostly south of the Colorado River, the sprawling prairie extended farther south, reaching almost to the Nueces River. South of the Nueces, the land became less rolling and fertile and more arid. East Texas looked much like the Deep South’s lands of the Mississippi River Valley, covered in a thick, green blanket of pine forests, with fertile soil and wetlands. Blessed with abundant sunshine and a mild climate, this well-watered region west of the Sabine River, the natural dividing line between Texas and Louisiana, was an ideal cotton country eagerly sought by Southerners.