Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (9 page)

A wide variety of diverse factors—the expansion of slavery, self preservation, reaping vast profits, quest for land, and especially the unforgettable lessons of St. Domingue’s holocaust—combined to lay a firm foundation for the eventual fateful break with Mexico.
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Because of General Cós’ own words, and because he was notably leading hundreds of “colored hirelings,” in John W. Hall’s words, of the Mexican Army to Texas, revolution was inevitable. It was believed that the intention of Cós’ men was to liberate the slaves. As William H. Wharton wrote, Mexico’s abolitionist ambitions were to “emancipate [the slaves] and induce them to turn their arms against their masters.”
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Subsequent events demonstrated that the fear of “another San Domingo” in Texas was not unfounded or unwarranted paranoia. In 1833–34, Colonel Juan Nepomuceno Almonte was dispatched by the Mexican government on a top secret mission to spread the news to slaves in Texas that a day of liberation lay ahead for them: freedom and even land ownership in the Republic of Mexico.
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Complicating the situation was the fact that Texas slaves were more prone to insurrection because many of them were aware that slavery was illegal in Mexico. Mexico was a nearby land of the free and a magnet for escapees.

When the Texas Revolution erupted in the early autumn of 1835, nearly a hundred slaves rose up in revolt among the east Texas settlements along the Brazos River, which flowed between the Trinity River to the north and the Colorado River to the south. This desperate bid for freedom was sparked by rumors of an approaching Mexican Army. Bringing immediate retaliation from whites, the budding revolt was put down swiftly before it could escalate into something more serious.
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For the Anglo-Celts, this premature slave insurrection demonstrated that if a large Mexican Army invaded Texas, slaves would be more than ready to turn on their masters in a bid for freedom. If so, then the rustic Texas revolutionaries would face two foes at once: Santa Anna’s invading army and a homegrown army of enraged slaves in their midst—a guaranteed no-win situation. Indeed, the outnumbered Texians would have no chance at simultaneously defeating opponents on two fronts, front and rear.

Dark-haired Ben Milam was killed during the attack on San Antonio in December 1835 and buried near La Villita, or the “Little Village,” a collection of Tejano huts (
jacales
) that stood several hundred yards beyond the Alamo’s south wall. Before his death, he presented a stern warning to Colonel Frank White Johnson. Milam had been granted a large segment of land to establish his own colony, which was annulled in 1832 because of lack of process. He emphasized that the Mexicans’ overall strategic plan was to subdue the Texans not only with Indian allies, but worst of all, “if possible to get the slaves to revolt.” Such a combined threat would leave “a wilderness of Texas, and beggars of its inhabitants.”
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In 1836, even Austin, in a desperate appeal for United States aid, emphasized that Santa Anna was determined to conquer Texas and inhabit “that country with Indians and negroes.”
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Nor was this much-feared alliance between slaves and Native Americans an idle threat. In late 1835, the diminutive United States Army engaged in a bitter guerrilla conflict, a virtually unwinnable war of attrition, in the morass of the Florida wilderness. Seminoles and their black allies—Black Seminoles from distinctive African American villages hidden deep in the Florida swamps, and ex-slaves—rose up as one to devastate the vast sugar plantations and liberate gangs of slaves along the St. John’s River in Florida during the Christmas season of 1835. It seemed to be an eerie repeat of the St. Domingue insurrection of 1793. In both cases, the rebellious slaves sought not only to destroy the whites, but also to deliver a crippling blow to the hated institution of slavery.

At that time, Brevet Major Francis Langhorne Dade, of King George County, Virginia, and his command of United States regulars, including many Irish immigrants, were ambushed on a grey, overcast winter day. Amid a semi-tropical forest of tall grass, ancient oaks dripping with lengthy strands of Spanish moss, dense stands of pines and palmettos, the Seminoles struck back with a fury. More than a hundred regulars were wiped out on a bloody Monday, December 28, 1835. The event, which occurred barely two months before the Alamo’s fall, caught the attention of America, sparking the Second Seminole War. Nearly fifty Black Seminoles and former slaves extinguished what little life remained among the piles of wounded white soldiers, hacking away at them with axes and knives in a grim celebration of the one-sided victory.

In this vicious Florida conflict, the combined might of Indian Seminoles, Black Seminoles, and ex-slaves proved more than a match in combat for the best U.S. regular troops and their West Point-trained officers. The Second Seminole War provided a painful lesson that reminded Anglo-Celtic settlers of Texas about the potential enemy in their midst, who already possessed a natural ally in the Plains Indians.
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Even the Mexican Secretary of War warned the United States of its perpetual Achilles heel: “Is the success of your whole Army, and all your veteran generals, and all your militia calls, and all your mutinous volunteers against a miserable band of five or six hundred invisible Seminole Indians, in your late campaign, an earnest of the energy and vigor [necessary to win a] far otherwise formidable and complicated war? . . . Your Seminole War is already spreading to the Creeks, and, in their march of desolation, they sweep along with them your negro slaves, and put arms into their hands to make common cause with them against you; and how far will it spread, sir, should a Mexican invader, with the torch of liberty in his hand, and the standard of freedom floating over his head, proclaiming emancipation to the slave and revenge to the native Indian, as he goes, invade your soil?”
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Mexico’s insightful secretary of war indeed had threatened the United States with the nightmare of “a Mexican, an Indian, and a negro war.”
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Fears were fanned among the Texas settlements when Horatio Allsbery, who visited Mexico, proclaimed a grim warning to the people of Texas in a public letter. Relying on the worst possible interpretation of events, he stated how the Mexicans were determined to march into Texas to “put your slaves free and then loose upon your families.”
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It is no wonder that the arrival of Santa Anna’s Army on Texas soil sent shock waves across the South. As reported in the pages of the New York
Herald
in spring 1836: “Santa Anna has proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves in Texas and called the Indians to his aid. This is one of the most alarming aspects for the safety, peace, and happiness of the south and west . . . Santa Anna not only wars against the colonists of Texas, but he has unfurled the flag against the domestic institutions of the South and West.”
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Sharing the historic fears of the Southern planter class from which he hailed, Sam Houston accused Santa Anna of desiring to arm Texas slaves “for the purpose of creating in the midst of us a servile war.”
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In February 1836, just before he launched his invasion of Texas, Santa Anna wrote to the Minister of War and Marine in Mexico City of his intentions: “There is a considerable number of slaves in Texas. . . . Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose kind laws granted the liberty of man without distinction of cast[e] or color?”
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On Texas soil in 1836, Santa Anna was destined to play the role of enlightened liberator to those held in chains during his campaign north of the Rio Grande. In Texas, he did not plan to act as an abolitionist fanatic, but was determined to uphold the anti-slavery laws and principles of the republic by liberating the slaves. Clearly, Santa Anna was in step with the day’s most enlightened thought, and especially with humanitarian thinking in Great Britain. In late 1835, as Santa Anna was laying his well-conceived plans to invade Texas, Frenchman Gustave de Beaumont, the grandson of Marquis de Lafayette of American and French Revolutionary fame, published a harsh critique of American slavery. He denounced the nation’s hypocrisy as a betrayal of its fundamental republican principles that victimized millions of African Americans across the South.
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The alarmed editor of the New York
Herald
warned, “Santa Anna has proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves in Texas. . . . Taking this movement in connection [then] we should not be surprised to see the whole South and West pour en masse [to Texas because] Santa Anna not only wars against the colonists of Texas, but he has unfurled the flag against the domestic institutions [slavery] of the South and the West— he throws out menaces upon their safety, which as far exceed the puny efforts of the northern abolitionists as it is possible to conceive . . . Santa Anna has declared war against the inhabitants of the south.”
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Although the editor was a northerner, he concluded: “If Santa Anna and the Mexicans are allowed to possess Texas, they will cause negro insurrections in the south, and thus become one of the most dangerous neighbors to the Union that ever appeared on our borders.”
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Texas settlers were also incensed by rumors that Mexican agents were stirring up the Indians, an ancient foe in Texas, seeking their assistance in wiping out a white enemy. A September 14, 1835 letter from Nacogdoches, Texas, told of how “the people of Texas are in a great state of anxiety, in consequence of the despot Santa Anna having excited the Indian tribes to war against the settlers.”
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A good many tribes, especially the Creeks, or the Muskogee people, had old scores to settle with whites after the slaughters in Alabama, especially at the battle of Horseshoe Bend during the Creek War. A letter in the
Philadelphia Gazette
published during the early stage of the Texas Revolution expressed the opinion that the Texians were most concerned not about native Texas tribes, but the Creeks because of the cruel legacy of the War of 1812: “The people of Texas have written to President [Andrew] Jackson to arrest the emigration of the Creeks, 3,000 of whom were soon expected, and who, it was feared might be induced to join the other Indians” of Texas in a holy war against the Texians.
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The hard-fighting General Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irishman who had learned of war’s cruelties as a South Carolina teenager in the American Revolution, was most responsible for the conquest of the Creeks, who made the fatal mistake of allying with the British and standing up to Jackson during the War of 1812. In distinctly CelticGaelic fashion, the Irish-born Jackson had taken the war aggressively to the Creeks, or Redsticks, striking deep into their Alabama heartland. The Creeks however only rose up in a “sacred revolt” in 1813–14, when the encroaching whites threatened to forever destroy their way of life and culture. In his typical no-nonsense style, General Jackson unleashed a frontal assault on a strong defensive position to decisively break the back of Creek resistance at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, in a loop of the Tallapoosa River in late March 1814.

There at Tohopeka, Jackson’s troops, including United States regulars and their Indian allies, took more lives of Native Americans, who refused to give up, than in any other battle of the Indian Wars. Indeed, “the butchery was continued for hours [and] None asked for quarter.” Tragically for the Creeks, their ancestral homeland of Alabama, which was admitted to the Union in 1819, became part of a vast cotton kingdom. At the time of the Texas Revolution, the Creeks yet nursed deep grievances against the whites in Texas, including soldiers like Houston who had served under Jackson as a regular, and David Crockett who had served as a volunteer.
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Not surprisingly, Indian trouble in Texas reached new heights in 1835, and further escalated shortly after October, when the Revolution broke out. “The war with the Indians began in 1835,” wrote frontier ranger George Bernard Erath, who had seen many horrors of Indian warfare. Isolated cabins of Texas settlers and parties of surveyors and migrants were attacked throughout the fall.
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As in Florida during the Second Seminole War, Indian uprisings sparked slave revolts, with Native Americans and African Americans forming a formidable alliance. One Alamo garrison member destined to die on March 6 had just returned from battling the Seminoles: Ohio-born Robert Musselman, age 31 and a former sergeant of the New Orleans Greys. One indication of exactly how close an Indian and Mexican alliance came to forming in Texas was the headdress of a Comanche chief who met Houston wearing “a Mexican officer’s hat, of which he was quite proud.”
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Historians have not bothered to look beyond the freedom of a relative handful of men at the Alamo to understand the larger issue of freedom for all people in Texas. While the Texans and United States volunteers at the Alamo in part defended slavery, “Mexican leaders indicated that slavery would be one of the casualties in their conquest of the rebels.”
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A sense of outrage, if not incredulousness, rose among Texians at the sight of an invading Mexican army that included black soldiers in neat uniforms, dressed in both the Napoleonic style of the regulars and the much plainer militia garb of the conscripts. Although such a sight was almost unbelievable to the average Texian, the tradition of Africans, including slaves, serving faithfully in the military ranks in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spanish Florida, and Louisiana, and of course in Spain was as lengthy as it was distinguished, existing long before the American Revolution.

In contrast to America’s historic reluctance, including that of George Washington, to use soldiers of African descent, Mexico continued the tradition of European nations, particularly Spain in Latin America, of employing black troops. Not surprisingly, then, a number of blacks served as soldados of the Morelos Battalion, which marched under General Cós. Significantly, these men proved to be the most reluctant of any command to surrender in December 1835. The battalion’s members were considered by some Anglo-Celts as “the best soldiers in the [Mexican] Republic” in Texas in 1835 and for good reason.
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