Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (10 page)

Ironically, what these Anglo-Celts, who were familiar with slavery and generally comfortable around it, could hardly realize that as early as the 1720s, half a century before the American Revolution and at a time when many of their own ancestors lived in squalor in Europe, a black soldier, Juan Blanco, in the service of New Spain was killed by Apaches just northeast of the Alamo. And conveniently, they also forgot about the vital role played by the free black battalion—composed of young men from St. Domingue—at the battle of New Orleans, where white riflemen from Tennessee and Kentucky gained almost sole credit for the success over Wellington’s British veterans, who had just defeated the French in Spain.
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Even more unsettling for the Anglo-Celts in Texas was the easy, effortless intermixture of diverse peoples of a wide variety of colors and hues. Unlike the English, the Spanish had always been more open-minded and tolerant toward different races, including intermixing. The mixed-race Mexican of part Indian and part Spanish blood, the
Mestizo
, was a horror to the Anglo-Celts, despite the fact that whites often fathered children with their slaves. To the Anglo-Celtic mind, slavery ensured that a free mixed-race people, children of slave women and whites, remained slaves; the increasing numbers of these “new people” were meant to be forever in bondage. Consequently, the mere threat of a successful slave revolt sparked by a Mexican invasion was seen as a prelude to racial intermixing on a grand scale. In general, those of Anglo-Celtic descent rarely mixed with any other people, be they French, Spanish, Indian, or black. Although both the Anglo-Celts and the Spanish had existed on the North American continent for more than 250 years, intermixing between them was still rare.

Just as Mexicans were outraged by whites who owned slaves, Anglo-Celts were shocked by the racial background of Tejanos like Rafael Morales of San Antonio. The blood of the Comanche, the ancient enemy of the Texas settlers, flowed in Morales’ veins, inherited from both sides of his family. His great-grandfather Ramon Balderas, a Spanish Army Captain, had married a Comanche woman out of love, while stationed on the untamed northern Texas frontier of New Spain. When Santa Anna’s Army invaded Texas and employed some of “the ways of the Comanche,” Morales served as a scout, providing intelligence about the lack of preparedness at the Alamo.
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As in Rafael Morales’ case, the Tejano people of San Antonio and other parts of Texas consisted of a mixture of Spanish and a variety of Native American peoples: Comanche, Tlaxcalan, and Coahuilatecan. This race mixing had been a regular feature of life in Mexico for nearly three hundred years by the time of the Texas Revolution. The Coahuilatecans were a native people indigenous to both Texas and Coahuila. Tlazcalen warriors, who had allied themselves with Hernando Cortes to defeat the Aztecs, had accompanied Spanish soldiers and missionaries north to Texas to settle along the northern frontier. A mixture of Tlaxcalans, Spanish, and Coahuilatecans, with a lesser blending of African and sprinkling of Aztec, had produced the Tejano people.
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Anglo-Celts generally looked down upon the Mexican and Tejano people, denouncing the Mexican people simply as a “despicable race” of mulattoes. Long accustomed to the slave regime of Virginia, William Fairfax Gray, who migrated Texas to locate land for opportunistic United States investors, wrote with disgust how the Mexicans were “swarthy, dirty looking people, much resembling . . . mulattoes, but having straight hair.”
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By 1836, whites in Texas viewed the Texas Revolution almost purely in racial terms as a battle against a “mongrel Spanish-Indian and negro race.”
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Most galling, if not unbelievable, to Texans was the fact that both blacks and mixed race people enjoyed the status of free citizens in the Republic of Mexico. Such an ideology threatened the entire social order that Texans had been taught since birth.
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A distinguished African heritage, both slave and free, went all the way back to the beginning of New Spain, or colonial Mexico. In fact, colonial Mexico contained more free blacks than anywhere else in the New World. Slipping away from Spanish masters soon after arrival from Africa, escaped slaves established maroon communities in the remote mountains and swamps of Mexico. By 1810, the number of free blacks, 624,000, equated to ten percent of Mexico’s total population, most of whom were concentrated around Mexico City. Compared to the United States, where color rather than religion mattered the most, a greater acceptance of blacks by both the Church and the Crown was in part a cultural, societal, and military legacy of the wars against the Moors. For centuries, Christian blacks fought beside white Spaniards against Islamic warriors, with religion superseding race.

Along with more liberal attitudes toward race and sex than the British of North America, this greater acceptance of Africans resulted from wider race mixing. Across the breadth of Mexico, Spanish, African, and Indian people mixed as one on a scale unlike anything seen in the United States. This development led to the mulatto class of blacks—the largest free class of African descent in all of the Western Hemisphere. Clearly, for African Americans, Mexico and not the United States was the land of freedom and equality.
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The one exception to the rule was the Mexican province of Texas.
Conversely, like the Spanish (especially the pure bloods, or peninsulars), the Mexican people expressed a xenophobia toward the AngloCelts that was deeply ingrained in their Mediterranean-based culture. To them, these non-refined Protestants, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians, mostly Scotch-Irish from the north, were heretical
northamericano
barbarians who threatened civilization.
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The fact that the Anglo-Celts held darker-skinned people in contempt caused widespread underestimation of Mexican fighting men, which helped set the stage for the Alamo fiasco. Unlike the Christians of Spain, the Anglo-Celts of Texas had never learned of the ferocity of the Muslim warriors who had conquered Spain in the name of Islam and successfully defended it for hundreds of years. The fact that so many Moors who had invaded Spain and southern Europe were black created the popular European name for this dark-skinned Islamic people from North Africa, “Blackamoor.”
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Yet another factor that fueled the Anglo-Celtic revolt against Mexico City was a little-known scheme favored by the Mexican government to establish a free black colony in Texas. Planned by a white Quaker abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, and a former Mexican Army officer, who was a mulatto, this colony was to be composed of free blacks from the United States.
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To the Anglo-Celtic mind, free blacks would further threaten the stability of slavery in Texas, and possibly incite a slave revolt.

Texans, like most Southerners, most of all detested abolitionists, especially if they were dressed in Mexican Army uniforms and armed to the teeth. Clearly, in all forms, the issue of slavery and the abolitionist views of Mexican political and military leaders, became “a major source of discontent.”
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The “battle” of the Alamo would never have been fought without the unbridgeable gulf in the way the issue was perceived by Anglo-Celts and the Mexican people. Anglo-Celts viewed Mexicans as a natural, almost inevitable enemy because of their race, just as Native Americans had been for generations, and as African Americans would be if they rose up in revolt. In their eyes, they therefore faced a potential triple threat if these three groups united against them. Clearly, the outnumbered Texians could never successfully resist the combined might of Mexicans, Native Americans, and Africans.
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Symbolically, Santa Anna’s Army of Operations soon would march into Texas after crossing the Rio Grande River at the little river town of Guerrero, southwest of San Antonio, where he established headquarters after emerging from the depths of northern Mexico. Amid the deserts of rocky hills, a few mesquite trees, and patches of prickly pears, this quaint little community had been named in honor of the president of part-African blood who had freed Mexico’s slaves in 1829. It was an ominous warning for the people of Texas for more than one reason.
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The Texas Revolution was also very much a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. This was nothing new, and had been largely the case in America since its first struggle for liberty. During the War of 1812, a Scotch-Irishman, Samuel McKee of Kentucky, correctly predicted how it would be the burden of the hardy “yeomanry of the country,” which was largely Scotch-Irish of lower and middle-class origins, to fight “an ignoble war” against Great Britain, and to pay the high cost of an unprepared young nation’s headlong rush into war.
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Although historians have portrayed the 1835–36 conflict largely as a classless struggle with Texians united as one, class was very much a factor in the Texas Revolution, and played an essential role in the Alamo disaster.

The Texas Revolution and the struggle with Mexico were also about big business. Sizeable loans from United States banks were contingent upon a declaration of independence in Texas, which would ensure a dramatic rise in land values and hence guarantee repayment of the loans in timely fashion, once victory over Mexico was secured. Average United States volunteers in the Texas Army likewise realized that the promises made to them of hundreds and thousands of Texas acres, “vast amounts of land,” could only become reality with ultimate victory.
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Mostly the poor, especially the squatters, migrated to Texas to create a new world for themselves by acquiring large amounts of land. Along with the lower classes, middle class men like Bowie and Travis also aspired to rise higher by fulfilling their Texas dream.
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James Atkins Shackford perhaps made an appropriate tribute to Crockett, focusing on the key aspect of class without the usual romanticism: “A poor man who had long known the devastating consequences of poverty and who all his life had fought a dedicated life for the right of the dispossessed to a new opportunity, he died defending a poor and insecure people” in Texas.
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Indeed, the “greatest ambition” that fueled Crockett’s migration to Texas was the desire to do what no one in his family had been able to accomplish since arriving in the New World from Ireland: move up the social ladder to become a large, landholding gentleman. Like no other place on earth, Texas possessed the potential to fulfill such dreams that had eluded generations of lower and middle class citizens across America for so long.
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It was largely the poor who fought and died in the Texas Revolution, and especially at the Alamo. The wealthy cotton planters and other members of the upper class remained largely absent from the Texas Army’s diminutive ranks. Commanding United States volunteers, Thomas J. Green was appalled by the inequitable situation that caused so many poor soldiers to die like sacrificial lambs. In disgust that could not be disguised, he wrote how the common soldiers in the field fought and died in the “defense of the poor men, women & children in this country,” while the rich were nowhere to be seen. “In God’s name,” he wrote, “where are the larger land holders? Why are they not fighting for their freedoms? . . . Is our blood to be split defending their immense estates?”
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While Alamo defenders risked their lives in the hope of gaining their relatively small piece of the Texas dream, those longer-resident colonists who had already fulfilled that dream—the majority of “Old Texians,” wealthy merchants, large landowners, and politicians—were indeed noticeably absent from the army’s ranks at the time of the Alamo’s fall.
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The assumption that the Texas Revolution was inspired by the common man of Texas, much like the lower and middle-class Minutemen of Lexington and Concord, has become a staple of the myth of the Alamo. One editor of a major eastern newspaper, the
Baltimore Gazette
, for example, denounced the Texas Revolution as a vast covert conspiracy by “secret agents,” lamenting that lower class American citizens in Texas fought and died only to “enrich a few land speculators, robbers, and brokers” from Wall Street.
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Modern scholarship has verified this claim. The historian Will Fowler wrote: “Of the rebels who defended the Alamo, only a handful had been born in Texas. The great majority were settlers of U.S.-European extraction, backed financially by the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company and other land speculators based in New York and New Orleans.”
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The flow into Texas of both colonists and squatters was largely a product of a convulsive economic event east of the Sabine: the Panic of 1819. With deflation racking the financial markets, fear spread across America. Thousands of common people across the United States lost their land, experiencing soaring debt, defaults, and mortgage foreclosures that resulted from the bursting of a great land bubble, itself based on ever-rising prices, which deeply affected the entire national economy. Additionally, cotton prices plunged to new lows, although previously the ever-increasing price of cotton had been the key catalyst not only for new settlement of the southwest, but also for the spread of the institution of slavery.
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The migrant population was clearly in search of both cheaper and better lands; and these existed for the taking in Texas more abundantly than in any other place on the continent. So many squatters illegally flooded across the Sabine’s brown waters that Mexico overlooked the longtime threat the Indians had posed to its existence, and redirected this omnipresent menace toward the increasing numbers of Anglo-Celtic newcomers. Mexico’s leaders now viewed the thousands of newly arriving Americans as the greatest potential threat to Texas’ future, because Anglo-Celts were beginning to dominate the Tejano land.
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