For Those of You That Dont Know Much About the Alamo
On the march of human folly, soldiers haven't exactly owned the road, but they've oft commanded the right of fashion. No soldier dies in vain, if only considering when soldiers fall, their surviving superiors, kin, and compatriots proclaim them heroes and celebrate their sacrifice, regardless of whether the sacrifice accomplished anything more positive than providing an occasion for the patriotic postmortems. Patriotic sentiment is not to be dismissed. Information technology warms the collective middle and oft converts into the colder currency of resolve: The accuse of the Calorie-free Brigade did naught for Britain in the Crimean War simply, equally remembered and retold, added years to the life of the British Empire.
What Tennyson was to Lord Raglan's lancers, William Barret Travis was to the defenders of the Alamo, besides beingness their leader and the hero of their tale. The South Carolina native and Alabama émigré earned the rare stardom of memorializing in words the role he and then immortalized in the mankind. Travis' letters from the Alamo must stir the soul of the most jaded cynic.
To the People of Texas and all Americans in the globe . . . I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans nether Santa Anna. I take sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours and have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded surrender at discretion; otherwise, the garrison are to exist put to the sword, if the fort is taken. I take answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag however waves proudly from the walls. I shall never give up or retreat.
Knowing what happened to Travis, the reader—especially if a devoted Texan—can hardly escape a shudder of vicarious complicity in his demise, which makes his appeal for help the more poignant.
I telephone call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and every thing dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no dubiousness increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this telephone call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die similar a soldier who never forgets what is due his ain honor and that of his country. Victory or Death.
Travis' words take tugged at the censor of Texans for seven generations. Nevertheless neither his gallant prose nor the desperate bravery of the garrison at the Alamo can alter the fact that the battle there was an practise in martial folly. The battle should never accept been fought, and regardless of what the defenders contributed to the mythology of Texas, their contribution to the strategy of the Texas Revolution was nil or negative.
For months later on the outbreak of the revolution, at Gonzales in Oct 1835, the Texas rebels debated the importance of San Antonio de Béxar. The commencement commander of Texas forces, Stephen F. Austin, argued in favor of an attack on the town, which was however in Mexican hands, but his lieutenants and the rank and file besieging the place adamantly refused. Had the Texas ground forces at this point been anything more than a gaggle of irregulars jealous of their correct to do as they pleased, Austin might have ordered an assault; as it was, he gnashed his teeth while his men sabbatum still. "I have at various times submitted the question of storming the fortifications to a quango of officers," Austin complained to his brother-in-law, James Perry, "and they accept uniformly decided confronting it. Yesterday I was in hopes the Regular army was prepared to do it, and I issued a positive order to storm at daylight this morning; just on trial I found it impossible to get one-half the men willing for the measure, and it was abandoned from necessity."
Not to the lowest degree because his men wouldn't follow him, Austin was replaced in command by Sam Houston, whose armed services stature (and physical stature—in those days the two weren't unrelated) much surpassed Austin's. Houston was in the process of eclipsing Austin as the great man of Texas, and every bit on many subjects, he disagreed with Austin regarding the importance of Béxar. Houston considered the town hardly worth fighting for and certainly not worth sacrificing for. It was too far from the American settlements in Texas and too close to the population centers of Mexico. Its people were too friendly to the Mexican government and as well suspicious of Anglos. The war for Texas independence would never exist won at Béxar, just it might exist lost there. The proper line of defence force of the American settlements was the Guadalupe River, where the rebels could count on a sympathetic populace and secure lines of communication.
Yet Houston was as helpless as Austin earlier the recalcitrance of his men. Besides, to club a withdrawal from San Antonio would risk appearing defeatist, which would make controlling the troops even more than difficult. So Houston tried to talk the Texans back from Béxar, tactically belongings out the prospect of a later return. Writing to James Fannin, the helm in charge of the forces earlier Béxar, Houston requested a reconsideration of the siege, which in any event was leaking desperately: "Would it not be best to raise a nominal siege—fall back to La Bahía and Gonzales, leaving a sufficient forcefulness for the protection of the frontier . . . furlough the balance of the army to comfortable homes, and when the artillery is in readiness, march to the combat with sufficient force and at once reduce San Antonio?" Houston added, "The ground forces without ways ought never to take passed the Guadalupe without the proper munitions of war to reduce San Antonio. Therefore the error cannot be in falling back to an eligible position."
Only the ground forces ignored Houston every bit information technology had ignored Austin, albeit with contrary outcome. When Ben Milam, incensed at some personal ill treatment by the Mexican government, volunteered in early December to tempest San Antonio unmarried-handedly, he shamed three hundred volunteers into post-obit him. The iv-24-hour interval battle was the longest and most evenly balanced of the state of war, simply finally the Texans—minus Milam, who was killed by a bullet through the brain— succeeded in expelling the Mexican forces.
It was a brave victory, simply what information technology won the Texans was hard to say. The Mexican capitulation included an agreement past General Martín Perfecto de Cós to evacuate Texas. Only the about optimistic of the Texans, however, idea that this single boxing had decided the war. A larger Mexican army, likely commanded by Mexico'due south most famous general, President Antonio López de Santa Anna, would return, probably at the beginning of spring.
This larger army was the one Houston had to fight, and he sought the about favorable ground for doing so. The victory at Béxar hadn't inverse his thinking on the strategic unimportance of the town, merely it did complicate a retreat to the Guadalupe. Those who had risked their lives for Béxar wouldn't withdraw simply because Houston told them to; as volunteers and stubborn individualists, they heeded their own judgment and ambitions.
Yet that judgment and those ambitions might work in Houston'due south favor. Bored with guarding Béxar, many of the volunteers succumbed to what Houston derisively called "Matamoros rage" and headed south intending to sack the town on the Rio Grande. By mid-Jan Béxar's garrison numbered only virtually 70, a shadow of the force that had captured it. Houston hoped to erase even that shadow, and nominated James Bowie for the job. "Colonel Bowie will leave here in a few hours for Bexar with a disengagement of from xxx to forty men," Houston wrote from Goliad to Henry Smith, the provisional governor of Texas, on January 17. "I have ordered the fortifications in the town of Bexar to be demolished, and if you lot should recollect well of it, I will remove all the cannon and other munitions of state of war to Gonzales and Copano, blow upward the Alamo and carelessness the place."
Merely Houston couldn't command Bowie whatever better than he controlled the residuum of the regular army. When Bowie reached Béxar, he discovered that the remnant there had been busy. Greenish Jameson, the chief engineer under commander James C. Neill, had converted the old mission compound into what he proudly chosen Fortress Alamo. Jameson acknowledged that the garrison needed more men, simply in light of recent intelligence regarding Santa Anna's movements, maybe non so many as to be out of the question. "Nosotros heard of m to 1500 men of the enemy being on their march to this place . . ." Jameson declared. "In case of an attack nosotros will move all into the Alamo and whip ten to 1 with our artillery."
Such confidence was infectious, and Bowie—whose experience at arms consisted mainly of a skirmish with Mexican forces near San Antonio, some Indian fighting, and an infamously encarmine brawl on the banks of the Mississippi—caught the fever. Going over Houston'due south caput, he wrote to Henry Smith to 2nd Jameson's judgment that the Alamo should exist defended. "The salvation of Texas depends in cracking measure in keeping Bejar out of the hands of the enemy," Bowie declared. "It serves as the frontier picket guard, and if information technology were in the possession of Santa Anna, in that location is no stronghold from which to repel him in his march toward the Sabine." Like most of his beau rebels, Bowie took orders as recommendations, and now he disregarded Houston's directive entirely. "Col. Neill and myself accept come to the solemn resolution that we will rather die in these ditches than requite it upwards to the enemy. These citizens deserve our protection, and the public rubber demands our lives rather than to evacuate this mail to the enemy."
Bowie's connectedness to Béxar was stronger than almost of the Texans', as he had married into the family of Juan Veramendi, a leading bexareño, and had actually lived in the town. Just even Bowie'southward professed concern for the citizens rang hollow. While he and Neill and the others might conceivably hold the Alamo, they could never defend the town confronting the strength Santa Anna was bringing. If annihilation, by making the boondocks a battle zone, they endangered those they said they wished to protect.
Houston had no recourse confronting this ill-conceived and disingenuous judgment. Even had he exercised iron control over the army, he would have had difficulty denying Bowie and the others at San Antonio the right to accept a stand up for Texas. Generals oft fret over how to make their men fight. Houston had the opposite problem: how to keep his men from fighting. His predicament wasn't helped past the squabbling that connected to afflict the provisional government. Smith and the General Council couldn't agree on the smallest matters, let alone where the defense of Texas ought to begin, and without the support of the civilian officials, Houston couldn't enforce his views regarding military machine strategy. Equally a result, the determination to defend the Alamo—like well-nigh every other conclusion in the war—was made by those who would have to carry it out.
But they needed assist. From beginning to end, the defence force of the Alamo was premised on the reinforcement of the garrison at that place. Every few days Bowie, Jameson, or Neill wrote to Houston, Smith, or the council pleading for help. "Relief at this mail, in men, coin, and provisions is of vital importance and is wanted instantly," Bowie told Smith. "Our forcefulness is very small . . . only one hundred and twenty officers and men." The latest intelligence from the Rio Grande indicated that Santa Anna had more than than five thousand men. "It would be a waste of men to put our dauntless picayune band confronting thousands."
In answer to the pleas, Smith ordered Lieutenant Colonel William Travis to join Bowie and the others at the Alamo. Travis was skeptical at first, sensing that no ane besides Bowie and those already at Béxar was serious almost defending the identify. Travis asked for 5 hundred men to accompany him; Smith said he could accept one hundred and would have to heighten those himself. Travis managed to muster fewer than iii dozen, provisioned from his own pocket. "I must beg that your Excellency will recall the lodge for me to go to Bexar in control of and then few men," he wrote Smith from the Colorado River. "I am willing, nay anxious, to go to the defence of Bexar, only, sir, I am unwilling to risk my reputation (which is ever dear to a soldier) by going off into the enemy's country with such little means, then few men, and with them so badly equipped."
Smith, notwithstanding, was more intent on fighting his enemies in the conditional government than on fighting the Mexicans, and he neither recalled the order nor increased the resources available to Travis. Peradventure deciding that his reputation every bit a soldier would endure more from refusing this assignment than from complying, Travis reluctantly headed off to San Antonio with his small company. "I shall march today with only about thirty men," he told Smith. He wasn't hopeful. "Our diplomacy are gloomy indeed. The people are cold and indifferent. They are worn downwardly and exhausted with the war, and, in upshot of dissensions betwixt contending and rival chieftains, they accept lost all confidence in their own government and officers."
Travis' gloom persisted later his arrival at San Antonio, on February 3. Every bit a lieutenant colonel, he ranked below Neill, who nominally commanded the entire garrison but in reality controlled merely those soldiers who had enlisted in the regular army or the organized volunteers. About one-half the garrison was made upwards of individuals who had never enlisted in anything and who followed Bowie, a man after their ain contained hearts. Bowie got along with Neill merely refused to defer to Travis, who inherited the regular control when family illness called Neill away. The result was a separate in the garrison, with the enlisted men heeding Travis and the unenlisted, Bowie.
"My situation is truly awkward and fragile," Travis complained to Smith. And information technology was made even more bad-mannered by the fact that Bowie was behaving irresponsibly. "He has been roaring boozer all the time, has causeless all command, and is proceeding in a about disorderly and irregular style." Only Travis' sense of honour kept him at his post. "If I did non feel my honor and that of my country compromitted I would go out here instantly."
Somewhen Bowie sobered up and agreed to share the command with Travis. Although this was hardly less awkward than the situation Travis had complained of, it improved morale. Meanwhile, the approach of Santa Anna encouraged cooperation between the Texas commanders. With fewer than 150 men to face the Mexican general's thousands, neither Travis nor Bowie could beget to quarrel unnecessarily.
The one thing the fractious commanders had no trouble agreeing on was the need for more troops. David Crockett, the celebrated hunter, raconteur, and former congressman from Tennessee (who had answered his recent defeat at the polls by telling his constituents that they could "become to hell, and I would go to Texas"), reached Béxar with a pocket-sized company during the second week of February. Crockett'southward arrival boosted the spirits of the garrison. His stories relieved the tedium; more to the point, his coming indicated that someone out there knew of the garrison's need. Maybe more than help was on the way.
Soon the garrison discovered how much more than help was needed. On Feb 23 the advance guard of Santa Anna's Army of Operations reached Béxar. Travis and Bowie couldn't tell exactly how many enemy troops there were, only the Texans were so outnumbered that they didn't even consider trying to defend the town. They withdrew at one time into the Alamo.
And they connected to weep for assist. "The enemy in large force is in sight," Travis wrote to the alcalde at Gonzales on the twenty-third. "We want men and provisions. Transport them to united states." On the same twenty-four hours, in one of their last articulation statements before Bowie fell incapacitatingly ill, Travis and Bowie appealed to James Fannin, now the commander at Goliad: "Nosotros hope you will send all the men you lot can spare promptly. . . . We accept but little provisions, simply enough to serve us till you and your men arrive. We deem it unnecessary to repeat to a dauntless officer, who knows his duty, that we call on him for assistance."
As the burden of command brutal on Travis, he grew into his authority in a way that must have surprised those who had known him equally a young hothead with a checkered by. He had ever been glib; now he became eloquent. He had been argumentative; now he was resolute. On February 24, the 24-hour interval afterwards the joint appeal to Fannin, he penned his moving alphabetic character to "the People of Texas and all Americans in the world." To Sam Houston, Travis wrote another letter, hardly less eloquent, begging for help: "I have every reason to apprehend an attack from [Santa Anna's] whole forcefulness very shortly. But I shall hold out to the terminal extremity, hoping to secure reinforcements in a solar day or ii. Do hasten on aid to me as rapidly every bit possible, as from the superior number of the enemy, it will be impossible for us to keep them out much longer." Withal, relieved or non, the garrison would fight till the end. "If they overpower us, nosotros fall a sacrifice at the shrine of our country, and nosotros hope posterity and our country volition do our retentiveness justice. Requite me assist, oh my Country!"
The response to Travis' pleas was either disgraceful or realistic, depending on one'southward view of his situation. Fannin halfheartedly attempted a rescue, setting out from Goliad with 3 hundred men and four artillery pieces in ox-drawn wagons. But ane of the wagons bankrupt down, and so the crossing of the Guadalupe went badly, and Fannin and his officers decided that the rescue mission was imprudent and gave it up.
Sam Houston didn't practise even that much. Precisely what Houston did do during the month of February is incommunicable to reconstruct, but information technology had no connexion with the boxing that was about to take place in the west. He journeyed in the opposite direction, toward Nacogdoches, to drum upwardly support for the political convention that would meet in early on March at Washington-on-the-Brazos and to arrange a treaty of friendship with the Cherokees. Peradventure Houston wanted to put every bit much distance as possible between himself and the debacle that was taking shape at Béxar. He had tried to prevent it, but no i would listen. He didn't wish to be saddled with the arraign.
DURING THE FIRST FEW DAYS of the siege, the defenders might accept fought their way out of the Alamo, had they so chosen. But their prospects on the plains beyond the fort, against Santa Anna'southward cavalry, were poor. And by the end of February they were clearly trapped; the just question was whether they would reconsider their refusal to surrender. According to what became the standard version of the Alamo story, Travis gave the men a choice between fighting and escaping. All who wanted to stay should step beyond a line he drew in the clay; the others might try their luck exterior the fort. Besides resting on the flimsiest of testify, this story ignores the fact that escape in any significant numbers was most impossible. The garrison's odds weren't good within the fort, only—especially while promise remained of reinforcement—they weren't much worse than the odds outside.
Some pocket-size relief did go far before dawn on March 1, when a company of 32 horsemen from Gonzales evaded the Mexican sentries and slipped into the Alamo. The reinforcements were hardly numerous plenty to shift the residue between besiegers and besieged, just they permit Travis know that his continuing pleas for help weren't going unheard, and they raised hope that more might follow.
Still the relief from Gonzales was patently the last—doubt remains on this point, equally on many touching the final days of the siege—and when the battle commenced before dawn on March 6, perhaps two hundred defenders confronted approximately two thousand attackers. Despite Dark-green Jameson's boast of beating the Mexicans at odds of ten to 1, the Texans stood no chance. During the initial phase of the fighting, their cannon and rifles inflicted fearful damage on the advancing troops, but the walls of the Alamo were too low and weak to prevent the nigh intrepid Mexicans from mounting the ramparts and opening the gates for their fellows, who poured in and crushed the defenders by mass of numbers. Less than ninety minutes after the battle began, it was over.
For decades student of Alamo history accept refought the battle, debating how many people died there and where they fell. Much less attention has been paid to the larger issue of whether it should take been fought in the starting time place. Questioning patriotic sacrifice is bad form, especially with the powerful words of the dead commander haunting the collective censor.
But sacrifice is not synonymous with good judgment, and in truth the defense of the Alamo was woefully misguided. Houston was correct that San Antonio had lilliputian significance for the defence force of the Texas settlements. Fifty-fifty if Travis and the others had held the Alamo, Santa Anna might easily have left a token force to pin them in that location and sent the master body of his army after Houston and the rest of the rebels. Nor did the delay caused by Santa Anna's insistence on taking the Alamo slow his accelerate appreciably. Santa Anna spent two weeks at Béxar, two weeks in which Houston made scant progress in organizing or grooming the Texas ground forces. The rebels were no readier for battle in early March than they had been in late February, as Houston's subsequent forced retreat east demonstrated, and they would have been far readier had their ranks included the men killed at the Alamo. Santa Anna's losses at Béxar were considerably greater than those of the Texans, but his army was so much larger that he could afford to exist wasteful.
The chief consequence of the Alamo'south autumn was precisely what Santa Anna intended: the terrorizing of the Anglo settlements in Texas. As discussion raced east of the disaster at Béxar, the settlers fled toward Louisiana in what later was called, with relieved levity, the Runaway Scrape. Santa Anna had long since decided that the American colonization of Texas was a mistake, which he intended to rectify by removing the Americans. The destruction of the Alamo, and the refugee flight it precipitated, got the process well under manner.
The only thing that saved the revolution (as it actually became afterward the annunciation of Texas independence on March 2, 1836) was Santa Anna's impatience. Hoping to grab the Texas government, which had joined the flight east, he committed a cardinal sin of invading commanders: He divided his army. And then he immune Houston, who until this point had shown every indication of retreating articulate to the Redlands of East Texas, to corner him where Buffalo Bayou joins the San Jacinto River.
Houston's victory at San Jacinto had nix to do with the defeat at the Alamo (or the subsequent massacre at Goliad), except that it (and Goliad) furnished a rousing battle cry and an alibi for a slaughter that matched in ferocity and scale anything the Mexicans had committed. And in fact, the victory at San Jacinto, though an enormous morale booster, neither ended the war nor guaranteed Texas' independence. The captured Santa Anna was overthrown in absentia, and the agreements he negotiated with the Texans were immediately disavowed by the Mexican authorities. United mexican states continued to claim Texas for some other decade and in 1842 succeeded twice in reoccupying San Antonio. What finally settled the Texas question was the intervention of the United states, which annexed Texas in 1845 and defeated Mexico in the state of war of 1846-1848.
By that time the Alamo had entered the mythology of Texas. A prime number characteristic of myth is that every sacrifice serves a purpose; the larger the sacrifice, the more profound the purpose. During the Texas Revolution itself, the legitimacy of the rebellion was disparaged past opponents of slavery, who held that the chief purpose of the breakaway was to ensure the hereafter of slavery in Texas (United mexican states had outlawed the institution), and by others who judged it a landgrab past armed speculators. The sacrifice of the Alamo afforded an emphatic riposte to the criticism. Would the heroes who died at that place have done and so for the base of operations motives ascribed to them past their critics? Inappreciably. They must have fought and died to secure democracy and individual rights.
And so they did—at least some of them, and at least the rights of some people. But whether the Alamo was the proper place to do it is some other question entirely. It casts no aspersion on the defenders' courage to assert that they got the answer to this question wrong. If anything, at that place is a certain sublime nobility in an act that reflects bravery undiluted by expert sense. And it is entirely in keeping with everything about the Texas Revolution, and with much that is characteristically Texan, that this war machine mistake was not the work of ignorant or fatuous commanders, as has typically been the case in history. No Raglan ordered the Alamo garrison to stand against Santa Anna; the defenders' determination to do and then was theirs alone. Texans have long prided themselves on their individuality, including their correct to be incorrect in their own manner. For them, the Alamo is the perfect shrine.
Source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-alamo-should-never-have-happened/
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