Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (14 page)

The fiercely xenophobic Santa Anna was well aware that liberal Anglos had played a key role in the Zacatecas revolution. One noted example was German-born Edward Harcourt, who commanded the Zacatecas artillery and tried to take charge of the hapless militia upon its collapse. Believing, as did leaders in Mexico City, that the revolt was largely Anglo-inspired, an enraged Santa Anna ordered the execution of every foreign fighter, especially any Americans, found among the militia’s ranks or in Zacatecas. Then, to set a bloody example for other revolt-minded liberals throughout Mexico, including any potential revolutionaries in Texas, he unleashed his troops in an orgy of rape, pillage, plunder, and murder. As one foreign official wrote, surviving Americans became special targets, with men executed on sight and women stripped and “run through the streets.”
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Less than two years later, having earned renown as the “Hero of the Fatherland,” Santa Anna determined to wipe out the Anglo-Celtic presence in Texas, just as he had in Zacatecas, when the “once fair city was [left] a burning, screaming shambles.”
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The slaughter of the Alamo garrison would send a bloody message throughout Texas and the United States. Confident after his victory at Zacatecas, Santa Anna dissolved the Mexican Congress, and dismantled the liberal Constitution of 1824. With the death of republicanism, he became Mexico’s dictator. And in seizing absolute power, it was again as if Santa Anna were following Napoleon’s script.

For Santa Anna, it was all the more crucial to crush revolutionary resistance as soon as possible because Texas was on the United States border. He therefore dispatched his brother-in-law, General Perfecto de Cós, to maintain order and quell unrest among the unruly Texians, sending five hundred Mexican troops into the last bastion of liberalism and final “Federalist stronghold” in Mexico.
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But the people of Texas rose up as one and descended on Cós, who was far from Mexico City and reinforcements: ironically, this would be the future predicament of the Alamo garrison only a few months later. General Cós surrendered San Antonio to besieging Texas forces on December 11, 1835, leaving Santa Anna determined to avenge both the stain to his family name and Mexico’s national honor—a potent motivational mixture. Thus he began to prepare a mighty expedition to punish and reclaim Texas.

Launching a large-scale expedition overland to reclaim a wayward Texas was a daunting task for Mexico, especially in regard to logistics and securing sufficient manpower for the ambitious push north of the Rio Grande. As a poor agrarian nation long wracked by internal strife, and severely handicapped by a lack of industry and manufacturing, Mexico had a pathetically small treasury. Budgets were all the more strained because of the great expense of suppressing revolts over a vast arid, mountainous, and tropical land that stretched from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico had only a small army, which combined with the size and difficulty of the terrain made it extremely difficult to wage an aggressive war, especially a lengthy one, located far from the army’s base of operations.

In addition to securing established, or regular, units—the disciplined, well-trained
permanentes
—for the 1836 campaign, Santa Anna also relied upon impressments, largely drawing from the Indian and Mestizo population to gain recruits for a new force, the Army of Operations. Thinned ranks were “filled by recruits snatched away from the crafts and from agriculture, by heads of families, who usually do not make good soldiers,” lamented de la Pena. He also complained that the army consisted of too many young and overaged soldiers. In derogatory fashion, the Texians derided these fighting men of Mexico as “colored hirelings,” fusing issues of race with revolution.

Arriving in early December some 600 miles below San Antonio, Santa Anna began the formidable task of assembling an army at San Luís Potosí, designated as his headquarters, with his customary energy. It was here that the Army of Operations was born. Ironically, while Santa Anna sought to redeem his brother-in-law’s tainted military reputation for the defeat at San Antonio, yet another brother-in-law, Colonel Ricardo Dromundo, who was the army’s commissary general and married to Santa Anna’s sister Francisca, either squandered or stole the already limited funds allocated by the government to properly clothe and uniform the approximately two thousand new recruits. A third brother-in-law, Gabriel Nuñez, who would be captured at San Jacinto, stayed out of trouble, much to Santa Anna’s relief.
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In the process of forming an army from units yet arriving, Santa Anna relocated at Saltillo, founded in 1577 and the oldest colonial city in northern Mexico, in early January. Located just over 360 miles southwest of San Antonio amid the arid mountains of northeast Mexico, Saltillo served as the launching point for the march into Texas. The capital of the state of Coahuila, Saltillo was an important staging point both logistically and politically. Both regular units (
permanentes
) and the active militias (
activos
) from across Mexico now marched toward northern Mexico to join Santa Anna. These included General Sesma, who received his orders in Zacatecas, where he had been placed in command to organize the newly designated “Vanguard Division of Operations.” Sesma originally had moved north to reinforce Cós in Texas, but San Antonio’s fall aborted the movement.

Another command destined to join the Army of Operations was the disciplined Tres Villas Active Battalion garrisoned at San Carlos at old Fort Perote, which dated from the previous century. The battalion departed the state of Vera Cruz on December 9, 1835, in an early indication of the extent of Santa Anna’s frantic preparations for the Texas campaign prior to Cós’ defeat. As a proud Veracruzano, Santa Anna especially desired these troops from his native state.

Battalion commander Colonel Agustín Alcerreca, like his men (of whom less than one-third were recruits), was inspired to defend “the sacred rights of our Fatherland.” Dusty and weary from their lengthy march, the
soldados
of the Tres Villas Active Battalion joined the army at Saltillo, ready for the challenge of the Texas campaign. It was a good command that would serve as the Second Brigade’s rear guard during the push north.

Hundreds of troops drilled at Saltillo in the early winter weather, made even chillier by the high altitude, as the sun shone brightly through the thin mountain air, reflecting off muskets, buttons, and belt buckles. Among them was the Active Battalion of San Luís Potosí, commanded by Colonel Juan Morales, along with the Jimenez and Matamoros Battalions and the Dolores Cavalry Regiment. Together, Morales wrote, these units “formed the 1st Brigade who took the vanguard of the army [when] we marched into Texas.”
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As demonstrated in the past, and especially when he vanquished the Spanish invader at Tampico, Santa Anna was a genius at improvisation. This was never truer than when he could count on little government assistance or support, as was the case in early 1836. At the time of Cós’ defeat, Mexico had been unable to respond to the Texian uprising because the troubled republic had been caught without a standing army. Always fearful of a coup, anti-standing army liberal politicians had committed the folly of defanging and dispersing the regular army. And now Santa Anna was busily creating one almost from scratch.

Santa Anna was confident of success, despite the host of obstacles he encountered as he prepared for the invasion. He knew full well that San Antonio’s garrison was weak—more than five hundred men, including artillery and cavalry, had departed with the Matamoros Expedition near the end of December. He also knew that the remaining Alamo garrison, lacking cavalry to perform scouting missions, could be surprised by a quick strike. As reported in the
New York Herald
, “From Saltillo where [Santa Anna] was encamped on the first of February, he had written to a gentleman in Mexico, that he would conquer and that he could easily vanquish the Texians [in a war] which the Mexican Congress had declared to be a national contest against insurgents.”
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As Santa Anna himself wrote in a report to the Secretary of the War and Navy on February 1, 1836: “The last Brigade of Cavalry and other sections have left from this city (Saltillo) and already the whole army is marching for the Capital of San Antonio de Béxar whose plaza I will occupy precisely before the end of the month. Today it begins, despite the fact that the distance from here is almost 600 miles.”
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To successfully crush the latest filibuster attempt to wrest Texas from Mexico, an attempt that was also the first serious challenge to the republic’s territorial integrity, Santa Anna once again relied upon Napoleon’s example. His timing could not have been better—the smug overconfidence, complete disorganization, and non-vigilance of the Texas revolutionaries was at its peak in early 1836. Texas victories of 1835 had been too easy and relatively bloodless, creating hubris among the rustic victors.

The successful Texas Army of 1835 dissolved and faded away once General Cós and his paroled soldiers marched south, heading for Laredo, where he would link with Sesma’s advance leading the way for Santa Anna’s army into Texas. Convinced that the war was over and that the Mexicans would never return, native Texans went back to their homes and families and placed their muskets above their fireplaces. There was much work to do on ranches and farms, for the men had been absent during the later summer, fall, and early winter of the 1835 campaign. The handful of soldiers who remained garrisoned at San Antonio were there by default—especially the Irish and other young immigrants from Europe who had nowhere else to go.

While Santa Anna worked overtime to mold a formidable invasion force, the Texas military thus remained disorganized, chaotic, and much too democratic for its own good, becoming weaker with each passing day. By early 1836, the tiny force of volunteers and handful of regulars were least able to successfully defend San Antonio at the exact time they were to face their greatest challenge.
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Santa Anna’s knowledge of his opponent’s vulnerabilities allowed him all the better to formulate his strategy. This was two-fold: he would rely on the element of surprise by advancing swiftly in the dead of winter, and also take the least expected route. Rather than advancing through Laredo, to which Cós had withdrawn, Santa Anna decided to take a circuitous route, going by way of Guerrero. Although the way through Laredo, on the Rio Grande almost directly south of San Antonio, was the most direct, it also included the harshest terrain—the deserts and mountains of northern Mexico. Going by way of Guerrero, which was up the Rio Grande and more directly west of San Antonio, increased the chances of victory through surprise, and perhaps even without a struggle, by striking from where least expected.

Meanwhile, some at the Alamo believed that Santa Anna would advance northward by way of Matamoros. Downriver from Laredo and slightly southeast of San Antonio, this well-traveled route ran through the mesquite flatlands of south Texas, hugging the coastline. Amateur military thinkers were convinced that Santa Anna would favor this route in order to supply his army from Mexican ships plying the Gulf of Mexico. Others thought the Mexican Navy might stage an amphibious landing, and launch a seaborne invasion from the Gulf. Much like United States volunteers who had landed on the east coast of the Gulf from New Orleans and then marched inland to San Antonio, so Santa Anna’s Army could land north of Matamoros along the lengthy coast for a direct march westward to San Antonio to take the city from the flank or rear.

While Santa Anna closely embraced his Napoleonic lessons, young William Travis failed to do so, although he likewise possessed a lively interest in Napoleon. The aspiring gentleman-planter from the Alabama River country devoured an 1831 book,
Court and Camp of Bonaparte,
studying Napoleonic warfare and learning about the qualities necessary to become a great commander. Santa Anna knew that speed, above all, was essential, regardless of which route he chose, in order to achieve surprise. Napoleon marched rapidly from the French coast and across central Europe to catch the Russians and Austrians off guard at Austerlitz; so, too, Santa Anna planned to strike the Alamo rapidly and by surprise before additional volunteers, cannon, and supplies from the United States could arrive. His concerns were valid and his decision was wise—in a classic Napoleonic division of force, he planned to advance his right wing to occupy the strategic city of Matamoros before he pushed north up the Gulf Coast of Texas and toward the east Texas settlements. He would thus thwart efforts from New Orleans, preventing any shiploads of guns, munitions, and volunteers from reaching San Antonio.
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Perhaps the most timeless aspect of the Alamo is its continued relevancy in providing valuable military lessons. For the most part, the real story of the Alamo is not about romantic heroics or an alleged, deliberate self-sacrifice, but concerns the consequences of sheer folly. A fatal mixture of overconfidence, unpreparedness, and miscalculation ensured that an easily avoidable mistake—deciding to remain in San Antonio, or Béxar (as it was long known by the local Tejanos) to defend the Alamo—made Santa Anna’s job much easier than he imagined.

Much more than the flawed strategic vision, the lack of tactical and strategic insight on the part of the Alamo’s leaders—James Clinton Neill, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis—brought Santa Anna a relatively easy victory. Revealing their collective inexperience and lack of military training, all three Alamo leaders possessed a poor grasp of strategic realities. Combined with little tactical insight, and aggravated by personal ambitions and priorities, the failure of command judgment doomed the Alamo garrison to a tragic fate.

A forgotten San Antonio commander, Colonel Francis White Johnson, also played a key role in setting the stage for the disaster in two ways. Johnson led the Matamoros Expedition south from San Antonio after its members stripped the diminutive garrison of provisions, munitions, and supplies. Johnson wrote on January 3, 1836 to inform the Council that before departing San Antonio for Matamoros on December 30, 1835, he “ordered all the guns from the town into the Alamo.”
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The recipe for disaster was already set firmly in place.

The longest lasting misconception that ultimately doomed the Alamo was the widespread belief across Texas that the war with Mexico was already over after the successful 1835 campaign. Even before the war had begun in early October, Texans had believed that victory was inevitable, in large part because they counted on so much support from the United States, especially in manpower. In October 1835, for instance, George Fisher confidently wrote to Austin of the flood of U.S. volunteers headed for Texas: “You see you will have plenty of men . . . and in a short time you will have more fighting people in Texas than necessary.”
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Captain William R. Carey, of Austin’s Colony, viewed the mission of the volunteers at San Antonio and the Alamo as only temporary. As he saw it on January 12, 1836, he and the other handful of volunteers had only decided to “maintain the post until [the] Texas government could make some provision to keep the Standing army here.”
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By early 1836, this band of men at San Antonio consisted of fragmentary remnants of Austin’s ad hoc “Army of the People,” which had captured San Antonio, and recent volunteers from the United States. Laying out plans for the defense of Texas in late 1835, after San Antonio’s capture and in preparation for the upcoming spring 1836 campaign, General Sam Houston initially wanted to defend this remote “station” on the southwestern frontier. He thus appointed James Clinton Neill, second in command of Fannin’s regiment, to take command and fortify the “Post of Béxar.” He even appointed Green B. Jameson, an engineer, to assist Neill in “fortifying the place.”

But Houston rethought the situation after learning from Neill of the garrison’s “alarming weakness.” The lack of supplies among the volunteers in San Antonio made garrisoning of the remote outpost impractical. The troops of the Matamoros Expedition, which picked up 200 men from the San Antonio garrison who had been infected by “Matamoros fever,” and who had enlisted against Neill’s protests and orders, swept through the town in late December 1835 like a plague of locusts. Merely a token force sent by Houston—Bowie and a small relief party of mounted men—rode toward San Antonio in a classic case of too little, too late. Bowie reached San Antonio on January 19, possessed with Houston’s authority—if the governor gave final approval—to abandon the exposed and isolated position.

Like Neill, Bowie was simply “the wrong person” for this key assignment because of his personal, financial, and emotional ties to San Antonio and the Tejano people. After having realized that a mighty Mexican Army was about to invade Texas, Houston dispatched only Bowie, who was too alcoholic and unhealthy for active command responsibilities. Having tried to resign not once but twice, after the 1835 Texas Campaign, he had lost his “old fire” for offensive operations.

Eventually, Governor Henry Smith was influenced by the defenseminded Neill, despite some initial apprehension because of the garrison’s size. He was also persuaded by the newly converted Bowie, who likewise embraced Neill’s strategic viewpoint, to disregard Houston’s advice and instead bolster the tiny garrison. Seemingly everyone, including the Council, which had by then been influenced by the governor, had eventually all come around to Neill’s way of thinking for defending the Alamo. But the fatal decision to maintain a remote garrison in an indefensible place, in a distant land that belonged to another republic, whose population far exceeded that of Texas, began with Neill, who was much worse than simply a “second-rater.”

The governor subsequently ordered Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis and his small party of regular Texas horse soldiers to the Alamo. In a disastrous chain reaction, Neill had influenced Bowie, and Bowie had influenced the governor, selling the folly that the Alamo could and should be defended at all costs. Neill might also have been unduly swayed by the inexperienced Captain Carey, one of the few Alamo officers to carry a sword and whose judgment Neill respected, even though the young captain believed that “a small number of us can whip an army of Mexicans.” This was a dangerous illusion at a time when realistic thinking was needed.

Although their forces were “very small,” Bowie felt misguided enthusiasm, heavily influenced by Colonel Neill, who had become the Alamo’s first commander after Johnson’s departure, to defend San Antonio to the bitter end. By February, Bowie had been transformed into a passionate convert to the growing faith of holding San Antonio and the Alamo. Even Travis, who hesitated to take the San Antonio assignment and seemed to sense a monumental disaster in the making, was eventually seduced. Despite initial objections to the concept of defending the place, which served as little more than an isolated, earlywarning outpost for the east Texas settlements, the leading officers had been converted to the defensive-stand faith by San Antonio’s seductive, if not mysterious, appeal. Among the converts, Travis can perhaps be excused because he lacked combat experience and maturity; he was also a product of a later generation, as compared to Neill, Bowie, Crockett, and Houston, and knew even less than them about the art of war.

As much as anything else, the Alamo’s story was more about the mistakes and misjudgments of leadership, both military and civilian, that doomed the band of defenders as much as the overwhelming might of Santa Anna’s Army. Now the key players in the unfolding disaster, hallowed Texas revolutionary leaders—albeit men who were more land speculators than conventional military leaders like Neill, Bowie, Johnson, Grant, and Fannin— recklessly, if not foolishly, gambled with their men’s lives.
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Ironically, before Neill’s and Bowie’s arguments—proffered by Governor Smith—turned him into a blind believer, a radical who shunned any idea of uniting with Mexican liberals had advised on January 22 against the folly of attempting to defend San Antonio and the dilapidated Alamo: “The siege of Béxar [and General Cós’ December 1835 surrender] ought to be sufficient to teach us a lesson. That fortress . . . is now stripped [by members of the Matamoros Expedition], and left with only seventy naked men, destitute of clothing, provisions, ammunition, and every comfort, threatened by a large invading Mexican army, who, hearing of the weakened situation of that garrison, ha[s] determined to re-take it.”
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Even worse, the Texas government still thought mainly in terms of remaining within the Mexican Republic under the Constitution of 1824. In early 1836, the rebellious Texans did not therefore declare independence, in the hope that Santa Anna and Mexico would not retaliate for General Cós’ defeat by sending an army north to reconquer Texas. Once again, the Anglo-Celts had badly miscalculated, underestimating the resolve of a proud Mexican nation and her leaders, both military and political. Santa Anna’s Army now included General Cós and more than eight hundred soldados who simply ignored their paroles.
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In evaluating the decision to defend the Alamo, which only repeated General Cós’ earlier fatal mistake of his “drastic withdrawal,” into the entrapment of the Alamo’s confines, Colonel Robert I. Chester declared in no uncertain terms: “The fight at the Alamo was a blunder. What did a man [Neill, Bowie, and Travis] shut himself up in a fort, and allow Santa Anna to surround him for? It was downright folly!”
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Clearly, it was foolish to attempt to defend the Alamo given the state of the Texans’ preparations. Quite simply, as Houston had warned, the overly confident Texans in October 1835 had plunged into a “bloody struggle with Mexico, before she was prepared for it.”
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However, now it would be different as the Mexicans resolved to strike back.

The Texans were pressing their luck. Texas had been most fortunate in winning the 1835 campaign, when Mexico had been unready for the challenge posed by the rise of revolutionaries on her northern frontier. But at that time, few installations in all of Texas were more ill-suited for a defensive stand than the Alamo. Across the river from San Antonio, the fort was located just east of a big looping bend in the San Antonio River. Situated at almost the lowest point of the San Antonio River valley amid an otherwise flat, grassy landscape of sprawling prairie, the Alamo had adobe walls as high as twelve feet at some point, consisting of a mixture of relatively soft limestone and even softer sandstone. It was not located in a geographically advantageous position to thwart an enemy army’s march through the surrounding terrain or along a vital road. Instead, the compound merely defended under three acres of strategically unimportant ground.

The sturdiest building was the Alamo’s limestone church, or chapel, which served as the defensive anchor at the compound’s southeast corner. This had likely been quarried by missionary Indians under Spanish supervision from deposits in the hill country to the northwest, or at some rocky point along the San Antonio River. Regardless of the height of its formidable-looking walls, the Alamo was indefensible. Enrique Esparza described the edifice as “old and gray and tumbling.” Only months before the Alamo fell, a keen observer, Captain John Duncan of Mobile, Alabama, writing in the
New Orleans Bulletin
, evoked the serious disadvantages of defending the Alamo, which was located in “a valley upon the banks of a river [San Antonio] commanded by the hills on both sides,” and he stated that it was “therefore … indefensible.”
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The captain was also was convinced that “Goliad is of vastly more importance in a military point of view than Béxar.”
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Explaining Houston’s own strategic views, which called for abandoning the Alamo, historian H.W. Brands correctly stated: “San Antonio wasn’t essential to the Texan cause. It was too far from the American settlements, too close to the rest of Mexico, too hard to defend. The war would never be won at San Antonio, but it might be lost there.”
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Consequently, Houston, the newly appointed major general of the Texas Regular Army that still existed mostly on paper, considered Gonzales, around seventy-five miles to the east, as “the most important interior key to Texas (proper).” In a letter to Wylie Martin, he advocated making a defensive stand at Goliad as early as November 24, 1835.

Unfortunately for the Alamo garrison, Bowie and Neill thought otherwise, relying on their instincts rather than military realities. Even though both Houston and Johnson had advised the government to destroy the fortifications because the garrison was insufficient and an isolated frontier “post” was of no strategic consequence, Neill was more responsible than any other single leader for making the fatal decision to defend the delapidated “ancient Mexican fort,” and “very old building,” as Captain Carey penned in a January 12, 1836 letter. This error was later compounded by his the promotion of the idea to Bowie and others, including the governor.

Neill, a low-ranking Tennessee and Alabama militiaman and Indian fighter with an undistinguished record but an overly inflated military reputation, not only ignored Johnson’s advice but also Houston’s orders to abandon San Antonio and withdraw to the east to better defend the east Texas settlements. Born in 1778 in North Carolina, Neill was a slave-owner who passionately embraced the folly that a small band of men could successfully defend the Alamo, despite having witnessed the slaughter of hundreds of Creeks who attempted to defend a fortified point within the confines of Horseshoe Bend. Neill, “unmilitary-like . . . ignored the order of his commander-in-chief Sam Houston to abandon the fortification at San Antonio and retreat to Gonzales.” Compounding this mistake, he was the most influential leader to think that the Alamo could be successfully defended, and also held “to the last” man: “If I have only 100 men, I will fight 1,000 as long as I can and then not surrender,” he wrote.
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Odds never concerned Neill. He and 17 other nondescript citizensoldiers of Gonzales had driven off a hundred finely uniformed Mexican dragoons of Cós’ command on Ezekiel Williams’ ranch along the banks of the Guadalupe River, just outside Gonzales, on October 2, 1835. He thus had the ear of a good many people, especially Bowie, who listened to his glowing words praising the possibilities of a successful defense of the Alamo. Neill’s opinion also may have commanded respect because he knew something about artillery when few others in Texas did. Perhaps he believed that with all the Alamo’s cannons, he could simply scare the enemy— regardless of their numbers—with a few shots, as he had done at Gonzales in October.