Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  These plans had been made as early as the previous summer. The disgraceful conduct of Cós at San Antonio, which Santa Anna felt reflected upon his own honor, triggered him into quicker action than any Texan thought possible. Santa Anna did not wait for the end of the winter rains or the coming of the green spring forage grass. He was a professional soldier, not a Comanche.

  His Texas policy had already been ratified by his Congress. Every colonist who had taken part in the rebellion was to be executed or exiled. Those who had not were to be removed to the interior. Never again would any North American be permitted to enter Texas. Texas would pay for all expenses of the campaign, through the sequestration of lands, to be reallotted to the Santanista soldiery. Every foreigner found in arms in Texas, or who aided the revolt in any way, was to be treated as a pirate. The North American presence was thus to be extinguished.

  This was perfectly in accord with internal and international law, if harsh; the province was in revolt. Armed Americans on Texas soil were devoid of legal rights. Historically, these measures made good strategic sense. A large minority allied by ethnic background with a powerful neighbor was a dangerous luxury on the Mexican frontier. Santa Anna intended to remove the Anglo-Saxon peril forever.

  The President, in personal command, drove his brigade columns north without mercy. He arrived on the Rio Grande near Laredo in mid-February 1836; this was a remarkable pace, but he had paid a price. Hundreds of horses and some men had been lost; far more important, Santa Anna had been forced to abandon his heavy artillery to the muddy roads. The big guns followed far behind. When the Mexican columns came in sight of San Antonio, they dragged with them only two batteries of small six-pounders.

  Santa Anna was surprised, though not alarmed, to find the Alamo fortress defended. The population of Béxar, which now flocked to his banner, gave him accurate information about the foreigners. They had only 150 men, and while there were more than a dozen cannon on the Alamo walls, the defenders had very little powder. This was important, since the long eighteen-pounder burned twelve pounds of gunpowder with each shot. Santa Anna was also told that the Anglos had stripped the town of all its corn, and driven thirty beeves within the walls.

  He had in fact almost taken them by surprise; Bowie and Travis had barely got their men inside before the Mexican cavalry wheeled into San Antonio on February 23.

  It is still a matter of controversy which flag, if any, the Texians hoisted over their walls. Official Texan accounts claim the national red, green, and white emblem of Mexico was flown, on which were superimposed the numerals 1 8 2 4, showing the rebels fought not against the Mexican nation, but for the liberal constitution. Other, contemporary accounts indicate this was not so. However, there is no dispute about Santa Anna's banner. Here the President made his first great historic mistake in Texas.

  His decision to reduce the Alamo made military sense. But he ordered flown from the towers of San Fernando Church, the tallest building in Béxar, a long, flapping, blood-red banner which could easily be seen from the Alamo. This was a sign that no quarter was to be given. Now, with historic irony, the legitimate Mexican army went to battle on Mexican soil underneath the pirate flag.

  Human folly is far easier to explain than human valor.

  The Texan government at this time was gripped by chaos, dissension, and rivalry; the people of Anglo-Texas were still mostly concerned with their private affairs. The volunteers camped at Refugio and Goliad were dreaming of loot below the Rio Grande. Life east of the Colorado went on almost as before. No Texan really believed that Santa Anna was anywhere near Texas with an army, until Travis's couriers rode splashing winter mud and shouting alarm through the Colorado-Brazos country. Governor Smith, who held the title but actually governed nothing and no one, did try to raise a force for Travis. In the time remaining, he failed.

  In all this, there was nothing new to history. The Texans seemed to be following an old and often-trod path to defeat and destruction.

  But at the Alamo history was altered. It is not easy to explain exactly why. The complete details of the battle, like those of all the battles of the Texas Revolution, simply are not known, or agreed upon. Few wars of such eventual historic importance have been so poorly documented or reported. Myths have sprouted, and legend has embellished fact. The story has been well told; it needs no retelling. But certain perspectives of the battle are often ignored.

  There is no question but that Travis and his conglomerate force of Texians, Americans, Scots, Englishmen, and Texas-Mexicans could have escaped from the Alamo had they chose. Long after the siege began, the Mexican net was not tight. Couriers came and went on horseback to the very end. Yet 150 men stayed on stubbornly to fight an army; no one ran away, unless the tale of the mercenary Rose is credited. No competent Texas historian really believes that Travis actually drew his line on the ground with his sword and invited his men to leave or stay. This was not Buck Travis's style. He intended to keep his command on the walls regardless of what the men wanted. He was consciously guarding the ramparts of Texas.

  Bowie and Travis, together, for a time in co-command, agreed to hold the Alamo. The reasons must have been a combination of strategy, stubbornness, and not to be overlooked, sheer exaltation. There was a core of barbarian hardihood, and barbarian Warlikeness, in each of these men, different as they were. At first, there were problems of command. Colonel Neill, called home on business in mid-February, scrupulously passed the command to Travis, the only regular field officer present. This angered Bowie's following. The Texans in the fort accepted Travis's commission, but the majority of the American and other volunteers claimed Bowie was the better man. They obeyed his orders only. Certainly, Bowie's reputation as a fighting man far exceeded Travis's.

  Travis burned for the honor of commanding the most dangerous post in Texas. When some of the men looked to Bowie after every order, he almost resigned and returned to the Brazos. He did not, because William Barret Travis, on the surface a fiery, almost unstable rebel, was in his deepest soul a traditionalist. He was a regular Texas officer, and immensely proud of it. The Governor had ordered him to the Alamo. Honor, loyalty, and military dignity were important things to Travis; he stayed. He was surrounded by paladins, who insisted on fighting as paladins. The whole Revolution was marked and marred by commanders and men who fought with fierce independence, ignored orders, sulked in their tents, and with their coteries freely came and went. But Travis, according to his lights, was a soldier. He had been trained at an academy in the state of his birth, South Carolina; it was typical of the man that he was thrown out of school for inciting a student revolt but retained the values he had learned.

  The greatest measure of his ability was not the bravery he had shown in inciting the Texan rebellion, or his citation under fire at San Antonio in December. It was revealed when Bowie's health failed as the Mexicans approached, and Travis took command of the men, and held them. Bowie, collapsing with pneumonia on February 23, passed his authority publicly to Travis. The true measure of this man, with his soldier's cap, his sword, his exalted ideas of honor, and his florid rhetoric, was that he captured these violent frontiersmen and bent them to his purpose.

  His message to Smith and the world, on February 24, revealed Travis's exaltation at commanding the Alamo, the values in his heart and mind, and the grimness with which he would hold to them. Throughout the 19th century, this message was regarded as one of the great statements of defiance and courage in the English language.

  Commandancy of the Alamo

  Bexar, Feby 24th, 1836

  To the People of Texas and All Americans in the World—

  Fellow Citizens and Compatriots:

  I am besieged with a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna. I have sustained a continual Bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours and have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison is to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag st
ill waves proudly from the wall. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism, and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his honor and that of his country.

  VICTORY OR DEATH.

  William Barret Travis

  LT. COL. COMD'T.

  Buck Travis was one of those most fortunate of men; on the grim stone walls of the Alamo he had found his time and place. He was between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age.

  The characters of Travis, Bowie, and Davy Crockett, who arrived the day Neill left, seem to be increasingly puzzling to later Americans. They were widely disparate, but in some ways very similar men. All were tall—six feet or more—and all were fair. Bowie and Travis shared red hair. All had what the Mexicans came to call blue-gray killer's eyes. They were all highly intelligent men, and each was a creature of the American frontier.

  Bowie, born somewhere in the South in the 1790s, was raised in a family that became wealthy in Louisiana early in the century. He roamed, running slaves with Jean Lafitte in contravention to what every Southerner felt was a stupid law, exploring Texas, fighting Indians. Bowie was remarkable in two respects. He fitted in easily with the best society of the Creole towns and vast plantations, and he had the enormous respect of the wildest and toughest men on the harshest of all American frontiers. He was a killer: he killed the son of Jean Lafitte, who crossed him, crippled "Bloody" Sturdivant, gutted Major Norris Wright and a verified number of others, in the most desperate "medleys" or duels. He made the great knife his brother Rezin forged for him a glittering legend; soon Bowie knives were manufactured in England for sale on the American frontier. Yet Bowie was simply not a killer in the modern, civilized sense. He lived in a violent society, and men of keen judgement and good breeding considered him quite sound. The respect tendered him far exceeded that of any duelist.

  After a bloody feud in Louisiana, he drifted into Texas. At San Antonio, he entered Spanish society easily. He married the beautiful Ursula Veramendi, daughter of the Vice-Governor of Texas, and ended up owning leagues of Texas lands. Tragedy struck his life in 1833, when in the great cholera epidemic his wife, his infant son, and daughter died. Bowie had had no contact with the Texan colonists until this time. He was a wealthy, and honored, citizen of Mexico. But blood called to blood, and with his ties gone, Bowie drifted into the Revolution. He served with distinction before Houston dispatched him to the Alamo. Houston sent him because Bowie was one of the few men in Texas Houston knew and respected.

  Crockett, the other living legend in the Alamo, was also a frontiersman, born in the State of Franklin before it became Tennessee. Like Bowie's, his father had fought against the British, and had arrived from Ireland. And like Bowie, he was one of the two most famous characters in the Old Southwest. But Crockett was never a planter or a businessman; he remained a hunter and a drifter all his days.

  When the planters and farmers filled Tennessee in the normal pattern in the early years of the century, Crockett failed to prosper. Instead of moving on, he entered politics, as a representative of the hunter-trapper-squatter population. Eventually, he served in Congress, and here came into opposition to the powerful President of the United States, Andrew Jackson. Jackson, for all his outward democratic biases and prejudices and the propaganda of his being the first President "from the people," concealed a deeply conservative nature. The frontiersman in Jackson never liked the gentry-born, despite his enormous holdings at the Hermitage and his hundreds of black slaves, and his Kitchen Cabinet and other peculiar manifestations of vulgarity in the White House were symbolic of this. But if Jackson, like all classes of Westerners, disliked tight money and the United States Bank, he also removed the "civilized tribes" from the territory of the United States and paid off the public debt. Crockett opposed all these things, and came into violent opposition to the Administration. Crockett seems to have been an early Populist, who wanted federal funds used for domestic spending in the states, something Jackson's Roman sense of values opposed. The mass of the public was with Jackson on both the Bank and Indian questions; the Bank was closed, and the Indians forcibly removed. Neither Davy Crockett nor the Supreme Court prevailed, whatever the constitutionality of their cause. Further, Jackson, who controlled the patronage of Tennessee, saw to it that Crockett was effectively purged at the polls.

  David Crockett's national fame rested on his ability with a rifle, and his ability to tell about it as a raconteur. He made a short concession speech, in which he told his constituents to go to Hell, while he went to Texas.

  Crockett had had a wife and children along the line, who somehow had gotten lost. He had had woman trouble, like almost every one of the Texas immortals: Houston, Bowie, Travis, and a hundred others. Houston and Travis separated from wives in the United States under circumstances of scandal, though no evidence attached blame to either. Bowie's life was blasted by tragedy. Crockett, like Houston and Bowie a man in middle years, drifted into the Texas Revolution in search of a cathartic, a new life, and a new career. Destiny, manifest or otherwise, worked in devious ways.

  This fact is disturbing to some determinist historians, because destiny, in the Texas Revolution, hardly bears inspection. With these admitted and admired paladins were a thousand men, lesser probably in only minor ways. Twelve Tennesseeans marched west with Crockett. Three dozen, more or less, each came to the Alamo with Bowie and Buck Travis. Here they found a hundred kindred souls, from every walk of the frontier. They had one thing in common. They were all instinctive warriors, bred to arms if not formal warfare. They rode to the scent of trouble. None of them consciously planned to die. In the Alamo, in the shadow of Santa Anna's blood-red flag, loyalty to Bowie, to Travis, and in some way few of them could define, to their land and people, and to themselves, held them fast. Travis, in his glory, distributed his paladins great and small across the walls. Crockett, who refused a command and asked to be a "high private" among his Tennessee boys, was allotted the most dangerous and exposed part of the wall. Travis tendered it, and Crockett accepted it, as an honor.

  Some measure of the grim, not heady, determination and exaltation that pervaded this group can be glimpsed in James Butler Bonham, courier and honorary colonel, who made dangerous trip after trip to the outside, carrying requests for help, begging Fannin at Goliad to move his army west. There was no help, except thirty-two Texans who gathered at Gonzales. They rode to the Alamo and fought their way inside, when they knew no other help would come. In these men Travis's words struck home; they came to fight, and die. At the very end, the weary Bonham, a lawyer, a Carolinian of exalted family and a friend of Travis, turned his mount around and rode back toward San Antonio. He was told it was useless to throw away his life. He answered that Buck Travis deserved to know the answer to his appeals, spat upon the ground, and galloped west into his own immortality.

  On March 3, 1836, after days of siege and bombardment, Travis addressed his last letter to the Council at Washington-on-the-Brazos. He knew a new consultation was now being held, but he did not know that Texas had declared its independence. His battered walls still flew the Mexican colors; his men, on duty and in combat day and night, were reeling with exhaustion. Travis no longer expected rescue. He wrote, apparently, to stir his countrymen into action, that the country might be saved:

  . . . I shall have to fight the enemy on his own terms. I will . . . do the best I can . . . the victory will cost the enemy so dear, that it will be worse for him than defeat. I hope your honorable body will hasten reinforcements. . . . Our supply of ammunition is limited. . . . God and Texas. Victory or Death.

  As the struggle for the continent recedes, Travis has become less and less an acceptable, understandable hero. But from the Alamo, from his first
message before the arrival of the Mexicans to his last, his words had the ring of prophecy. The Texas historian who stated publicly that few people would want to have a son serve under William Barret Travis had forgotten, in the comforts of long security, the reasons men make war.

  After ten days of siege, of cannon battery and counterbattery, which the Texans lacked powder to pursue effectively, and of numerous sallies by the defenders at night, and after some dozens of Mexican gunners had been picked off by rifle fire, the besieging army worked its guns in close. On March 5 a breach was battered in the Alamo east wall.

  Santa Anna was now impatient. His intelligence told him that the Texans were meeting again on the Brazos, but he knew no other resistance lay between the Alamo and the Sabine. The fortnight he had lost, hammering at the mission walls, had delayed him by that long from the destruction of Anglo-Texas. He called a commanders' conference on March 4, and talked with his generals of brigade. They were divided; some were prepared to attack now, with a decisive assault; others preferred to wait until after the 7th, when two twelve-pound siege guns were due to arrive. With these guns the Mexicans could completely breach the defending walls. Those officers, like Cós, who had seen Texan rifle fire at close range were cautious; Santa Anna, his mind on the campaign's delay, was not. When Colonel Almonte warned him the cost would be high, Santa Anna remarked he did not care; the nut must be cracked. Orders for the assault were issued on the afternoon of March 5.

  Five battalions, about 4,000 men, were committed to the action. Only trained soldiers were used; others, whose training was not considered sufficient, were confined to barracks. The attack order was efficiently written and issued, and ended, since this was a professional, more than a patriot army, as follows: