The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (5 page)

After a decade of
empresario
-induced immigration, settlers had little to complain about aside from intermittent Indian attacks. They were slowly but steadily taming the Texas wilderness, and some were doing more than just surviving. Farms throughout the territory were producing enough crops to feed families and take to market for sale or barter. Near the coast, extensive river-bottom plantations were springing up to take advantage of a highly profitable cash crop: cotton. These large enterprises required plenty of manpower, and that meant, for optimum results, slave power.

Slavery had recently been made illegal in Mexico, and that included Texas. (Never mind that Mexico had its own “peculiar institution”—its peonage system—in which dirt-poor peasants toiled on huge haciendas with little chance of earning freedom. They were burdened with massive debt, and, like southern slaves, endured hopeless conditions such as corporal punishment and severe penalties for escape. The sale of these human beings resembled slavery to a discomfiting degree.) But this abolition was roundly ignored by Texians, as they called themselves, most of whom had come from southern slave states, and it was not long before they figured a way to get around it legally: a slave owner would force his chattels to enter into contracts as indentured servants, whose length of service—usually ninety-nine years—and pitiful rate of compensation made it impossible for them to earn their freedom. Even without such pretense of legality, slaves were openly bought and sold, and advertised in the colonists’ newspapers. The Mexican authorities made no effort to police these widespread violations. Though slave-owning colonists were in the minority, by the mid-1830s slaves would make up a tenth of the Texas population.

In this and other matters, the distant Mexican government interfered little with the affairs of their new citizens, and for the most part this laissez-faire approach was appreciated by the colonists. True, there was little in the way of government services or infrastructure, such as good roads, public schools, a just and efficient court system, and other necessities that Americans were accustomed to. But while each
empresario
acted as a one-man government, settling disputes and organizing militia and issuing rules and laws when necessary, the level of freedom enjoyed was extraordinarily high. No effort was made to enforce the Catholic religion, conscript soldiers, or levy taxes, even after the seven-year grace period had elapsed. The colonists were left alone to handle virtually every aspect of their lives. For most of them, the situation was more than tolerable.

But events several hundred miles to the south would change everything.

A
FTER THE
M
EXICANS HAD OVERTHROWN
their Spanish oppressors, they adopted a republican form of government in 1824 that was in some ways more liberal and federalistic than that of the United States. Battered by the country’s weak economy and inexperience with democracy, Mexico went through several leaders and coups d’état in the ensuing years, until one leader, the conservative Anastasio Bustamante, executed his predecessor. When his centralist party, desirous of curtailing states’ rights, extending privileges to the military and the Church, and effecting a regime headquartered in Mexico City, came to power in the early 1830s, things began to change—especially with respect to the nation’s most distant territory. Mexico regarded its neighbor to the north with great suspicion, convinced that the United States hungered after Texas. (In fact, the U.S. government had made several overtures about buying the area, and had tendered several offers for it, from the Adams administration onward.) Spurred by a detailed report that vividly described a plethora of industrious, thriving Anglos eager to re-create their United States on Mexican soil, the new regime decided to take action. A law passed in April 1830 provided for military occupation of Texas, in the form of garrisons in the larger municipalities, and called for customs houses to be erected in several towns, which would act as ports of entry and would collect duties on imports. Worst of all, any further American immigration was prohibited.

The diplomatic Stephen Austin managed to obtain a temporary exemption from the immigration ban, but as troops—largely unschooled peasants pressed from the fields—began to march into Texas, the colonists’ dissatisfaction with the new regime continued to escalate. And with thousands of Americans each year illegally entering Texas across the Red River to the north and the Sabine to the east—many of them rough elements and squatters who felt less loyalty to Mexico than those who had received land grants—rumors of an American invasion, whether government-sponsored or fostered through independent filibustering schemes, increased, and Mexican distrust and jealousy kept pace.

After another round of political maneuvers in Mexico City, an ambitious military hero of the revolution named Antonio López de Santa Anna—a tall, charismatic criollo hailed as the savior of Tampico, the coastal city where he had driven off an invading Spanish force—swept into power in late 1832. Since he fought on the federalist side, with those favoring the liberal constitution of 1824 and stronger states’ rights, Texians eager for separate statehood hailed the general’s victory and looked forward to his support. Bored with the actual work of running a country, and aware that the capital was a hotbed of centralists, the new president retired to his extensive hacienda in Jalapa, in the state of Veracruz, and left his liberal vice president, a former physician and professor named Valentín Gómez Farías, in Mexico City to run the country. But he kept his finger to the wind.

A change in its direction was not long in coming. Farías initiated several expansive reforms, most of which reduced the power of the Church and the military, but resistance from those two institutions and the landed gentry pushed Mexico deeper into political chaos and potential civil war. Representatives of those three classes made the journey to Santa Anna’s hacienda to implore him to help. The new system was not working, they told him, and stronger leadership was required. Fortunately for them, Santa Anna’s only loyalty was to his own ambition.

In April 1834, fifteen months after his retirement, Santa Anna made a triumphant return to Mexico City and seized the reins of power from his vice president. Making short work of the liberal constitution of 1824, he assumed near-dictatorial powers, dissolved the country’s Congress, and canceled Farías’s republican legislation. Mexico, Santa Anna decided, was not ready for democracy. “A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty,” he told the former American minister to Mexico. “They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them.”

When he called for greatly reducing the independent state militias and declared that state governors and legislatures would be controlled by the central government, almost half the country’s nineteen states expressed their dissatisfaction in some way, several in outright revolt. Those states farthest from Mexico City protested most.

The liberal-leaning city of Zacatecas, home to several rich silver mines, refused to disband its large, well-trained militia. Santa Anna decided to act quickly to crush the uprising there first. He knew the region well, having spent years as a young cadet with General Joaquín de Arredondo hunting down insurgents and Indians throughout the area.

In April 1835, he led a four-thousand-man army out of Mexico City north to Zacatecas. Three weeks later, before dawn on May 11, he met the city’s four thousand militiamen on the outskirts of the mountain city. They were well armed and supplied, but undertrained and badly led, and their commander, former Zacatecas governor Francisco García, lacked military experience. The apparently evenly matched contest proved to be no contest at all. The centralist artillery and infantry successively battered and overwhelmed the
cívicos,
and when the latter turned and ran, the government cavalry turned the right flank and swooped down on the survivors from the rear. After two hours, the battle was over. The centralists incurred only a hundred casualties; the Zacatecan militia lost as many as twelve hundred citizens. “The field of battle presents a most horrifying picture,” exulted Santa Anna after the carnage, in a letter to Mexico City.

Santa Anna’s
soldados
were rewarded with a period of forty-eight hours in which to sack Zacatecas, and they responded enthusiastically in a riot of destruction, rape, pillage, and murder. Foreigners, especially the British and Americans, were paid particular attention, and many were killed. The city would not recover for years. The victorious commander returned to Mexico City in a triumphal tour that wound through several cities, whose inhabitants turned out to celebrate him with parades and parties.

When news of the Zacatecas butchery reached Texas, Anglo colonists took note, and some settlements organized Committees of Safety and militia companies. They knew that Santa Anna would likely attend to them next. He had visited punishment and death without mercy on his own people. They were in no doubt as to what he would do to those born on foreign soil.

Soon after his return to Mexico City, the “Hero of the Fatherland” met with an Anglo political prisoner. At the April 1833 Consultation, Texian delegates had drafted a constitution for statehood, and Stephen Austin had been chosen to deliver it to the Mexican authorities. He arrived in Mexico City a few months later and presented the petition to acting president Farías, who ignored Austin for several months. A disgusted Austin wrote a letter in October to the Béxar
ayuntamiento
recommending that they organize a state government without permission. The letter contained several incendiary statements, including “The country is lost if its inhabitants do not take its affairs into their own hands.” Soon after, Austin succeeded in persuading the government to repeal the April 1830 immigration ban, and gained several other concessions—though statehood was put on hold.

In January 1834, on his journey home, Austin was arrested at Saltillo on suspicion of attempting to incite insurrection in Texas: his October letter had fallen into the wrong hands and been sent to Farías in Mexico City. The man who had preached and lived allegiance to his adopted country for so long was transported to the capital in irons and jailed in the century-old Prison of the Inquisition. He was denied a trial, and kept in solitary confinement for three months. The authorities moved him to another jail, and then another. He was finally freed eleven months later, on December 25, under a general amnesty for political prisoners. But he was not allowed to leave the city until June. He reached the port city of Veracruz in July 1835 and prepared to sail for New Orleans.

But the weary
empresario
ran into trouble leaving the country—a not-so-simple matter of the wrong papers. To gain permission to leave, he called on Mexico’s president, the general again relaxing at his hacienda just outside Veracruz. The hero of Tampico, and now Zacatecas, the self-styled Napoleon of the West, cleared up the problem, and told Austin he would visit Texas the following March—as a friend. Austin took his leave, but was unconvinced. “His visit is uncertain—his friendship more so,” Austin wrote of his meeting with Santa Anna. His suspicions would prove to be well founded.

THREE

“The Celebrated Desperado”

He seemed to be a roving man.

C
APTAIN
W
ILLIAM
Y. L
ACY

O
n the warm, clear morning of September 19, 1827, two groups of well-dressed men made their way by small boat, by horse, and then by foot to a peninsular sandbar on the Mississippi side of the Mississippi River, just above Natchez. A duel had been arranged between Samuel Wells and Dr. Thomas Maddox. There was bad blood between the two, and between several other members of this unusual excursion party, most of them prominent gentlemen from Rapides Parish in Louisiana.

Samuel Wells had brought with him one brother, two cousins, and two other friends, one of whom was thirty-year-old James Bowie.

Ten men and several servants accompanied Dr. Maddox, including Major Norris Wright, the former sheriff of Rapides Parish—a small man but a crack shot with a pistol who had slain more than one enemy in a duel. A year earlier, Wright and Bowie had crossed paths at an Alexandria, Louisiana, hotel card game, and a long-simmering enmity between the two—likely a mix of politics and personal animus—erupted. Bowie, having heard that Wright had been slandering him, confronted the major; in response, Wright had fired a pistol at point-blank range. Somehow, the bullet—perhaps deflected by a pocketknife or a silver dollar—only bruised the target’s left side, and the tall, thickly muscled Bowie pounced on the smaller man and had to be dragged off before he strangled him.

The single-shot flintlock pistols of the day were unreliable and took time to reload, and might “snap,” or misfire, for one reason or another. After the altercation, Bowie decided to carry a large hunting knife in a leather scabbard for protection, as a regular part of his dress. He would not be found defenseless again.

Most of the men this September day were armed with one or two pistols. At least a couple in the Maddox party carried shotguns, another a hunting rifle, and two others wielded sword blades concealed in canes. Five doctors in both groups were present to minister to any wounded.

Previous incidents in the long-simmering feud included political arguments, unpaid loans, personal insults, a sword-cane stabbing, shootings, and, inevitably, an insult to a woman’s name. Several other dueling challenges had gone unanswered; this one would decide, in an instant, whose side would claim the greater honor.

The location on the Mississippi side of the river had been chosen because dueling was illegal in Louisiana. The sandbar was heavily wooded, save for an open area in the center, where only an occasional piece of driftwood jutted out from the bare sand. For decades men had fought duels here—a Mississippi governor for one, the military man Winfield Scott for another—and some had died here.