FORGET THE ALAMO: THE MYTH EXPLODED 189 YEARS LATER

 (Ed.'s Note: In one of my previous lifetimes I was a reporter for the San Antonio Light and was sent one March 6, 1981 to interview author T.R. Fehrenbach, who wrote the classic "Lone Star, A History of Texas and Texans," long considered the definitive work on the Alamo and the Texas Revolt. It was the 145th anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo and I asked him what he thought if Mexican-American children were offended by the classic portrayal of their people in the Alamo narrative that paints them as tyrannical despots fighting freedom-loving Texians and depriving them of their liberty and property.

Fehrenback: "Why, if it hurts a child, then it should be torn down."

I got the story and quote and went back to the news room to write it, but on the way I thought to myself: Hey, wait a minute. Really, why should they feel hurt if the Mexicans won the battle? In fact, it was a massacre. 

A commenter to this blog wrote that "The American story of the Alamo is a myth. The guys that wrote this book were going to give a talk at the state Museum and it was canceled. Texas leaders couldn’t handle the truth. Everybody should read ”Forget the Alamo” especially those of us that had coonskin caps - I did, and my dad even bought me a Polly Crockett bicycle.")

By Juan Montoya

For years, Texas school children have been taught that the Battle of the Alamo pitted freedom-loving patriots against a tyrannical Mexican government that was hell-bent on oppressing them and who died fighting its oppression rather than give up their freedom.

You have coonskin cap wearing Davy Crockett swinging his rifle Betsy until he was overrun by nasty Mexican soldiers, but not before he had clubbed a handful of them to death  and went down fighting. 

Then there was Col. William Travis, drawing a line in the sand and asking the Texians to decide whether to stay and fight, or to leave the mission. Then there was Jim Bowie fighting hordes of Mexicans with his knife and Sam Houston struggling to bring aid to the beleaguered 200 or so Texians trapped in the old mission and surrounded by thousands of Mexican troops under mean old dictator Antonio Santa Anna.

In fact, Houston had written Travis and other Texians and advised them to abandon the mission since he considered it indefensible and suicidal to remain there. It had no strategic value. They refused. They wanted "liberty or death," and Santa Anna was only too happy to oblige them.

That's the so-called Heroic Anglo Narrative amply magnified by Fehrenbach's book. The fact of the matter  that these men – Bowie and Travis –  traded in slaves and that Stephen F. Austin spent years fighting to preserve their right to own property (slaves) from the attacks of Mexican abolitionists on his colony has been conveniently glossed over and ignored.

In "Forget the Alamo," three Texan authors – Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford  – published their book in 2022 and peeled back the layers of myth and white supremacy to reveal the truth behind the encounter of the Texians (and Tejanos) and the Mexican troops under Santa Anna and its historic context. The cause for the rebellion, they assert, was that the freedom that the Mexican government was depriving these courageous martyrs was their asserted right to own other human beings, i.e. black slaves.

Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1821, but Austin lobbied the Mexican governments to allow the establishment of this peculiar institution or he would be unable to establish the colony that would settle in central Texas and cement Mexican authority and prevent other nations (notably France and Britain) from claiming any of the far-flung territory distant from the central government in Mexico City.

They write: "The story of Texas' first 15 years as an Anglo colony is the success story of a band of misfits and dreamers who came to forge sprawling cotton plantations. In just a scant few years, Texas cotton was being made into clothing as far away as England. The "Texians," as they called themselves, revolted because they believed a new Mexican government threatened this economic model.

"What was it they feared losing? In the pamphlets and newspapers articles that swirled through the revolt, it was always called "property." The inarguable fact is that there was only one kind of property the Mexican government ever tried to take from its American colonists, and it tried to do so repeatedly. In the 10 years before the Alamo, this single disagreement brought Texians and Mexican troops to the brink of warfare multiple times.

"So what did the Mexicans want to take? It wasn't the cotton. Or the land it was grown on. It was the third leg of the Texas economic stool, the 'property' in which Texas farmers had invested more money, more working capital than any other asset. The slaves."

"As hard as it may be to accept, Texas as we know it exists only because of slave labor. Southerners – and most Texians came from the South – wouldn't immigrate to Texas without it. Thousands didn't, in fact, worried that the Mexican government's ingrained opposition to slavery put their 'property' at risk. For Mexicans, newly freed from Spanish oppression, abolishing slavery was a moral issue. For the American colonists, it was an issue of wealth creation. In the early years, each new effort to ban slaves got Texians packing to head back to America. In later years, many put away their suitcases and took out their guns."

Of course, as kids in school, we were never taught this. But from the beginning, the settlements in Texas were entirely dependent on slavery. It was no secret. Everyone knew it and Austin would say it over and over: The only reason Americans would come to Texas was to farm cotton, and they would not do that without slaves. They really didn't know any other way.

  

Slavery had existed under Spanish law, but was a problem in the new country of Mexico. There were only some 8,000 slaves left in Mexico anyway. Who really cared if they were set free? Stephen F. Austin, that's who. 

Austin, the authors argue, was not some pro-slavery zealot. He belonged to a long line of Southern intellectuals (like Thomas Jefferson) who understood slavery was morally repugnant but who nonetheless owned slaves because it was the best way to make money. "In other words, Stephen F. Austin was a sellout, a not -uncommon kind in his day."

He detested slavery because he felt its growth would inevitably lead to slave revolts

"The idea of seeing such a country as this overrun by a slave population almost makes me weep," he wrote a cousin in 1830. "It is vain to tell a North American that the white population will be destroyed some 50 to 80 years hence by the negroes, and that his daughters will be violated and butchered by them."

Austin also wrote the colony's legal code which set out slavery laws in detail. Any slave who left a plantation without permission was to be tied up and whipped. A slave who stole was to receive 10 to 100 lashes. Harboring a runaway slave meant a $500 fine; helping one escape was $1,000 fine. 

Yes, the harsh truth is that the early Texas economy was funded on slave labor and that the defenders of the Alamo were fighting for the freedom to own other human beings. In fact, the Texas constitution remains the only one in world history to guarantee slavery and actually outlaw any and all emancipation. No free Black people were to be allowed. In a direct reflection of cotton's wholesale dependence on slave labor, Texas was to be the most militant slaveocracy anywhere.

And no, Travis did not draw a line in the sand. Crockett surrendered and was executed on Santa Anna's orders despite some of his officers' pleas for clemency. After all, before the assault on the mission, the Mexican army flew the red deguello flag warning that no prisoners would be taken. 

And Bowie was sick in bed when the long barracks were overrun by Mexican troops who killed him. 

Yeah, Forget the Alamo.