By Scott Huddleson
San Antonio Express-News
Alamo historians typically have not touched on slavery.
Scholars who study forced labor haven’t delved deeply into the Alamo and the motivations of the 189 known Texians and Tejanos who died or were executed in the 1836 battle.
But it’s common knowledge that William Barret Travis had a slave, Joe, who survived the battle and later escaped to freedom. Jim Bowie traded slaves. There also was abolitionist Amos Pollard, the garrison’s chief surgeon, and a 15-year-old boy, William Philip King of Gonzales, among the defenders.
The Alamo Citizens Advisory Committee has held weekly discussions on the history of the Alamo as it moves forward with a $400 million plan to make over the historic fort.
“I’m hoping for an Alamo that interprets those truths, struggles with them, asks lots of different questions,” Carey Latimore, a member of the panel and Trinity University history professor specializing in African American studies, said after the group’s most recent panel reviewed the impact of slavery at the Alamo.
A theory has been brewing for years that slavery was an underlying cause of the Texas Revolution. But it’s recently created tension in discussions about the war for independence from Mexico and the Battle of the Alamo.
Andrew Torget, a leading scholar on slavery in Texas, said Anglos and Tejanos forged an alliance to harness the windfall of a booming cotton economy. He believes the complexity of the 1835-1836 war makes it “more interesting and more useful to understand” as an event that affected all of North America.
“To say that slavery mattered during this period is not a simple, easy thing. It’s to acknowledge that it’s been woven into so many different pieces of these stories … to better understand why the Alamo matters,” Torget told members of the citizen panel in a recent discussion on forced labor in early Texas.![]()
Sandra Salinas, left, a direct descendant of Jose Antonio Navarro, talks with Sharon Skrobarcek before they placed wreaths in front of the Alamo church in honor of the Battle of San Jacinto and fallen soldiers and volunteers at the Battle of the Alamo on April 21, 2021. Skrobarcek said she wants the truth revealed about the causes of the Texas Revolution and feels more research is needed.
But a few people on the 30-member committee, which is helping shape the plan, weren’t ready to rewrite history books.
“We want the truth out there for sure. But it needs to be the truth,” Sharon Skrobarcek, a member of the panel and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, said after the meeting.
Skrobarcek said Torget’s presentation focused on Americans streaming into Texas from other states. It didn’t mention Europeans arriving on ships at Indianola and Galveston. They didn’t know where their land grants would be located.
“Not everybody who lived in Texas owned a cotton plantation and had slaves. What were those other people fighting for?” Skrobarcek said. “I don’t think we have a definitive answer right now.”
In his 2015 book, “Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850,” Torget argues that “a complex tangle of cotton, slavery, and Mexican federalism — rather than any single factor – produced fights that led to the Texas Revolution.”
Latimore agreed with Torget that slavery was “probably a strong piece of the equation.” But Latimore stood by past statements that the war was not caused by a single issue. He pondered other causes historians have discussed, including religious freedom, access to arms and militias for self-protection, local representation and Mexico’s imprisonment of political adversaries without due process.
“That’s where we need to do more work to see if it’s just slavery or if it’s these other issues that many people have argued in the past but left out slavery. Now, maybe we bring all of those issues back into the pit and flesh it out. And why not let it be the Alamo that does that?” Latimore said.![]()
Isaiah Adams hold a sign in front of the Alamo Church on May 31, 2020, during a peaceful protest follow the death of George Floyd.Jerry Lara /San Antonio Express-News
Although the 1836 siege and battle has been romanticized, the Alamo truly is one of the most important founding sites of San Antonio and Texas, having been the first permanent Spanish-Indigenous mission from 1724 to 1793. More than 1,000 people were buried in the area. The Alamo project’s vision and guiding principles seek to tell the site’s full 300-year recorded history, including perspectives of ethnic groups like African Americans and Mexican soldiers.
What can’t be disputed is that Texas adopted a constitution in mid-March 1836, ratified six months later, that put what Torget called “an iron wall” around chattel slavery like no other nation in North America had ever done. Still, the Texas Declaration of Independence, signed March 2, 1836, then printed on broadsheets and newspapers, did not mention slavery.
(Lt. Col. William B. Travis, commander at the Alamo during the 1836 siege and battle, had a slave named Joe in the fort. Travis was killed early in the battle. But Joe survived, and escaped enslavement about a year later.)
Aaronetta Pierce, a tri-chair of the citizens’ committee, said she moved to Texas from Tennesee in the 1960s but didn’t know until decades later about the slave trade that flourished in East Texas. In 1861, when Texas seceded and the Alamo became a Confederate military depot, slave auctions were held on a second-story stairway platform attached to the Long Barrack.
“We haven’t been honest to citizens,” Pierce said.
Denigrating the 1836 Alamo defenders is not the intent, she said. Pierce doesn’t know how aware they were of the issue of slavery, as discussed, perhaps privately, by political operatives of the new Texas government. But the constitution “is the kind of factual documentation we need to perpetuate, more than tearing down heroes.”
Edmund T. Gordon, associate professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, described the condition of being enslaved. It included natal alienation, complete separation from culture and social structures; general dishonor – being considered “the lowest”; and gratuitous violence. It’s “endless discomfort” – often hunger, rough clothing, ill-fitting shoes and sleeping on a hard pallet.
“We’re talking about the ways that people were emotionally and psychologically broken … as a horse needs to be broken,” he said. “It’s about creating a permanent situation of traumatic stress.”
When Texas was a Spanish colonial territory, a heavily race-based caste system, forced Indigenous labor and household servitude were all part of daily life, said history professor Amy Porter from Texas A&M University-San Antonio. But African slaves never exceeded more than 5 percent of the population. Some slaves achieved freedom through self-purchase, or someone else bought their freedom; some owners freed their slaves.
Near the end of Spanish rule, the Tejanos in San Antonio had endured the violence and indignities of an 1813 rebellion that ended with a crushing defeat by the Spanish Royal Army at the Battle of Medina south of town. Then, having been “raided into the ground” by Apaches and Comanches, they were ready to abandon Béjar by 1820, Torget said.
To lift Texas out of poverty and populate the territory, Stephen F. Austin and other Anglos sought to bring American cotton growers into East Texas, with Great Britain paying top dollar.![]()
Lt. Col. William B. Travis, commander at the Alamo during the 1836 siege and battle, had a slave named Joe in the fort. Travis was killed early in the battle. But Joe survived, and escaped enslavement about a year later.
“And they make no bones about the fact that slavery will accompany them,” Torget said. “For the Tejanos in San Antonio, when they make this proposal … sounds pretty good.”
But the newly formed Mexican government opposed slavery, having just won independence from Spain, and not wanting to offend the British and not having any slave-based industry. The Mexican Constitution of 1824 didn’t address slavery, punting the issue to the states. Austin and his Tejano allies kept state officials of Coahuila y Tejas at bay. They found loopholes, such as contracts of indentured servitude, that enabled Americans to keep bringing enslaved laborers.
Centralists led by Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna repealed the 1824 constitution in 1835, and civil war in Texas and five other states began. Santa Anna then launched his Texas campaign.
“He does not come to liberate the slaves. He comes to reclaim the territory,” Torget said. “When you get to the Alamo itself, slavery is infused in this place and in this battle because it’s in the middle of all of these things that have been swirling around Texas throughout this entire revolution.”
Santa Anna’s capture six weeks later after the Battle of San Jacinto ended the war.
The number of slaves in Texas rose from about 5,000 in 1836 to 30,000 when U.S. statehood began in 1846. The figures kept climbing to more than 58,000 in 1850 and 182,500 in 1860, comprising 30 percent of the population.
But the decision to institutionalize slavery left the republic isolated internationally and unable to secure loans. The Panic of 1837 left the United States in a depression that lasted until the mid-1840s. Great Britain offered to rescue Texas financially in exchange for freeing the slaves. The floundering republic turned the offer down and was annexed as a U.S. slave state.
Texas surpassed Mississippi in the 1850s as the highest-producing cotton state in the nation – a title it still holds today.
Scholars who study forced labor haven’t delved deeply into the Alamo and the motivations of the 189 known Texians and Tejanos who died or were executed in the 1836 battle.
But it’s common knowledge that William Barret Travis had a slave, Joe, who survived the battle and later escaped to freedom. Jim Bowie traded slaves. There also was abolitionist Amos Pollard, the garrison’s chief surgeon, and a 15-year-old boy, William Philip King of Gonzales, among the defenders.
The Alamo Citizens Advisory Committee has held weekly discussions on the history of the Alamo as it moves forward with a $400 million plan to make over the historic fort.
“I’m hoping for an Alamo that interprets those truths, struggles with them, asks lots of different questions,” Carey Latimore, a member of the panel and Trinity University history professor specializing in African American studies, said after the group’s most recent panel reviewed the impact of slavery at the Alamo.
A theory has been brewing for years that slavery was an underlying cause of the Texas Revolution. But it’s recently created tension in discussions about the war for independence from Mexico and the Battle of the Alamo.
Andrew Torget, a leading scholar on slavery in Texas, said Anglos and Tejanos forged an alliance to harness the windfall of a booming cotton economy. He believes the complexity of the 1835-1836 war makes it “more interesting and more useful to understand” as an event that affected all of North America.
“To say that slavery mattered during this period is not a simple, easy thing. It’s to acknowledge that it’s been woven into so many different pieces of these stories … to better understand why the Alamo matters,” Torget told members of the citizen panel in a recent discussion on forced labor in early Texas.
Sandra Salinas, left, a direct descendant of Jose Antonio Navarro, talks with Sharon Skrobarcek before they placed wreaths in front of the Alamo church in honor of the Battle of San Jacinto and fallen soldiers and volunteers at the Battle of the Alamo on April 21, 2021. Skrobarcek said she wants the truth revealed about the causes of the Texas Revolution and feels more research is needed.
But a few people on the 30-member committee, which is helping shape the plan, weren’t ready to rewrite history books.
“We want the truth out there for sure. But it needs to be the truth,” Sharon Skrobarcek, a member of the panel and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, said after the meeting.
Skrobarcek said Torget’s presentation focused on Americans streaming into Texas from other states. It didn’t mention Europeans arriving on ships at Indianola and Galveston. They didn’t know where their land grants would be located.
“Not everybody who lived in Texas owned a cotton plantation and had slaves. What were those other people fighting for?” Skrobarcek said. “I don’t think we have a definitive answer right now.”
In his 2015 book, “Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850,” Torget argues that “a complex tangle of cotton, slavery, and Mexican federalism — rather than any single factor – produced fights that led to the Texas Revolution.”
Latimore agreed with Torget that slavery was “probably a strong piece of the equation.” But Latimore stood by past statements that the war was not caused by a single issue. He pondered other causes historians have discussed, including religious freedom, access to arms and militias for self-protection, local representation and Mexico’s imprisonment of political adversaries without due process.
“That’s where we need to do more work to see if it’s just slavery or if it’s these other issues that many people have argued in the past but left out slavery. Now, maybe we bring all of those issues back into the pit and flesh it out. And why not let it be the Alamo that does that?” Latimore said.
Isaiah Adams hold a sign in front of the Alamo Church on May 31, 2020, during a peaceful protest follow the death of George Floyd.Jerry Lara /San Antonio Express-News
Although the 1836 siege and battle has been romanticized, the Alamo truly is one of the most important founding sites of San Antonio and Texas, having been the first permanent Spanish-Indigenous mission from 1724 to 1793. More than 1,000 people were buried in the area. The Alamo project’s vision and guiding principles seek to tell the site’s full 300-year recorded history, including perspectives of ethnic groups like African Americans and Mexican soldiers.
What can’t be disputed is that Texas adopted a constitution in mid-March 1836, ratified six months later, that put what Torget called “an iron wall” around chattel slavery like no other nation in North America had ever done. Still, the Texas Declaration of Independence, signed March 2, 1836, then printed on broadsheets and newspapers, did not mention slavery.
(Lt. Col. William B. Travis, commander at the Alamo during the 1836 siege and battle, had a slave named Joe in the fort. Travis was killed early in the battle. But Joe survived, and escaped enslavement about a year later.)
Aaronetta Pierce, a tri-chair of the citizens’ committee, said she moved to Texas from Tennesee in the 1960s but didn’t know until decades later about the slave trade that flourished in East Texas. In 1861, when Texas seceded and the Alamo became a Confederate military depot, slave auctions were held on a second-story stairway platform attached to the Long Barrack.
“We haven’t been honest to citizens,” Pierce said.
Denigrating the 1836 Alamo defenders is not the intent, she said. Pierce doesn’t know how aware they were of the issue of slavery, as discussed, perhaps privately, by political operatives of the new Texas government. But the constitution “is the kind of factual documentation we need to perpetuate, more than tearing down heroes.”
Edmund T. Gordon, associate professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, described the condition of being enslaved. It included natal alienation, complete separation from culture and social structures; general dishonor – being considered “the lowest”; and gratuitous violence. It’s “endless discomfort” – often hunger, rough clothing, ill-fitting shoes and sleeping on a hard pallet.
“We’re talking about the ways that people were emotionally and psychologically broken … as a horse needs to be broken,” he said. “It’s about creating a permanent situation of traumatic stress.”
When Texas was a Spanish colonial territory, a heavily race-based caste system, forced Indigenous labor and household servitude were all part of daily life, said history professor Amy Porter from Texas A&M University-San Antonio. But African slaves never exceeded more than 5 percent of the population. Some slaves achieved freedom through self-purchase, or someone else bought their freedom; some owners freed their slaves.
Near the end of Spanish rule, the Tejanos in San Antonio had endured the violence and indignities of an 1813 rebellion that ended with a crushing defeat by the Spanish Royal Army at the Battle of Medina south of town. Then, having been “raided into the ground” by Apaches and Comanches, they were ready to abandon Béjar by 1820, Torget said.
To lift Texas out of poverty and populate the territory, Stephen F. Austin and other Anglos sought to bring American cotton growers into East Texas, with Great Britain paying top dollar.
Lt. Col. William B. Travis, commander at the Alamo during the 1836 siege and battle, had a slave named Joe in the fort. Travis was killed early in the battle. But Joe survived, and escaped enslavement about a year later.
“And they make no bones about the fact that slavery will accompany them,” Torget said. “For the Tejanos in San Antonio, when they make this proposal … sounds pretty good.”
But the newly formed Mexican government opposed slavery, having just won independence from Spain, and not wanting to offend the British and not having any slave-based industry. The Mexican Constitution of 1824 didn’t address slavery, punting the issue to the states. Austin and his Tejano allies kept state officials of Coahuila y Tejas at bay. They found loopholes, such as contracts of indentured servitude, that enabled Americans to keep bringing enslaved laborers.
Centralists led by Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna repealed the 1824 constitution in 1835, and civil war in Texas and five other states began. Santa Anna then launched his Texas campaign.
“He does not come to liberate the slaves. He comes to reclaim the territory,” Torget said. “When you get to the Alamo itself, slavery is infused in this place and in this battle because it’s in the middle of all of these things that have been swirling around Texas throughout this entire revolution.”
Santa Anna’s capture six weeks later after the Battle of San Jacinto ended the war.
The number of slaves in Texas rose from about 5,000 in 1836 to 30,000 when U.S. statehood began in 1846. The figures kept climbing to more than 58,000 in 1850 and 182,500 in 1860, comprising 30 percent of the population.
But the decision to institutionalize slavery left the republic isolated internationally and unable to secure loans. The Panic of 1837 left the United States in a depression that lasted until the mid-1840s. Great Britain offered to rescue Texas financially in exchange for freeing the slaves. The floundering republic turned the offer down and was annexed as a U.S. slave state.
Texas surpassed Mississippi in the 1850s as the highest-producing cotton state in the nation – a title it still holds today.
5 comments:
Oh now you fucking liberal idiots want the Alamo torn down? Huh, the Mexicans had slaves OR is that okay? The blacks had slaves and they helped capture blacks who they knew we're going to be slaves BUT that' okay? Slavery along with human trafficking has been part of this history unfortunately! BUT that's history, dumb asses! I don't see anyone yelling for the Texas Rangers baseball organization to change their name? Remember, they killed all Mexicans and Mexican Americans! This country has turned into a bunch of whiny cry babies just to get attention. But that's the norm now, you can promote racism, homosexuality, confuse children as to their gender and create role models out of convicted felons!
God help US!
DON'T MESS WITH THE ALAMO....THIS WAS THE FIRST STEP TO BECOMING AN INDEPENDANT COUNTRY CALLED "THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS" NOTHING TO DO WITH THE UNION ALSO CALLED THE UNITED STATES!!!!! TEXAS EVEN HAD A PRESIDENT!!!! THIS IS HISTORY OF TEXAS NOT THE THE UNITED STATES AND WHEN THE HISTORY IS PRESENT THERE'S NO MENTIONED OF THE UNION???? TEXAS BECAME PART OF THE UNION MANY YEARS LATER AND NOW LIBERALS AND FAR LEFT WANT TO DESTROY TEXAS HISTORY WHEN BLACKS, MEXICANS AND WHITES AT THE TIME HAD THEIR OWN SLAVES???? GOT TO BE KIDDING,,,PLAYING CRT RACE CARD IS SO BULLSHIT!!!! THIS IS HISTORY OF TEXAS NOT THE UNION AT THE TIME SO DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS!!!!! DEMOCRATS ARE GOING SO FAR LEFT THAT THEY HAVE ALREADY LEFT LEFT FIELD AND INTO THE FAN BLENDERS!!!! I'M SO SAD THAT I AM A HISPANIC CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRAT TEXAN...AND WITH OUR PARTY GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION????? DON;T MESS WITH THE ALAMO....IT'S THE ONLY THING LEFT OF TEXAS HSITORY!!!!
WITH YOU BROTHER OR SISTER......POSTING JULY 18,2021 @5:02PM
It was a land grab at the heart of it all. The rest is just collateral history.
@ July 20, 2021 at 4:16 AM
You don't get to start history wherever you want because it fits your narrative.
Who did Spain steal the Southwest and Mexico and South America from? Native lived in the Southwest and Mexico for centuries before the Spanish Europeans brought their diseases and soldiers to the New World.
Spain was the worst of all land grabbers, they just consistently were out done by other more resourceful Europeans.
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