Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  It only got worse. Seeing his authority being usurped by the council, Smith now tried to cancel the whole operation, and then on January 6 Johnson himself withdrew his application for authority to command the expedition when he learned that the council was not going to adopt his recommendations for commissions for some of his officers. Learning of that, Bowie went before the council that evening around 7 P.M., and this time exhibited his direct orders from Houston to take the command.72 Apparently curious about the nature of the order from Houston, since the council had not authorized it, they sent a delegation after Bowie to get from him a copy of the document, and were lucky to catch him as he was already packing his saddlebags at Peyton's to leave for Goliad.73 The next day the council appointed Fannin to the command, but Houston began giving orders of his own for a concentration of the army near Copano, and on January 8 left himself to assume command. Bowie, meanwhile, was on his way, and by January 10 was a day's ride from Goliad, when he learned that James Grant had passed through the town a few days before and appropriated for his command all of the army horses there.74 Hearing that, Bowie left at once for Goliad, determined to assume his responsibilities in spite of Johnson, Grant, or anyone else. He sent a quick message to Houston before leaving: “Some dark scheme has been set on foot to disgrace our noble cause,” he said. He expected to ride all night and reach Goliad by dawn to “put a stop to Grant's movements.”75

  Behind him affairs deteriorated. The feud between Smith and the council broke into open war on January 9, and the next day Smith severely upbraided the council, when he learned how destitute Johnson and Grant had left the San Antonio garrison under Neill. Smith now blamed the Matamoros expedition that he had once championed, and he used such intemperate language in lecturing the council that it responded in kind. Smith tried to dissolve the council, and it tried to impeach him, setting up Robinson in his place. Then, in a move to strike against Smith by undermining Houston's authority, on January 11 the council issued a proclamation stating that it did not recognize Bowie as an officer in the Texian army, and that therefore Houston had no authority to give him orders, and Bowie had none to organize or lead volunteers.76 In fact the council was quite correct. Bowie held no commission either by election or appointment. His “colonelcy” referred only to the honorific title of command of the Nacogdoches militia the previous summer. Johnson, Fannin, and even Grant actually held acknowledged commissions, either as elected commanders of companies or by appointment. Bowie rather had been a knight errant, serving as a volunteer aide to Austin, then briefly on his staff, and afterward as a roving troubleshooter. Ironically the one Texian who to date had seen more action in independent command than any other held no official rank whatever.77

  Reaching Goliad on January 11, Bowie found matters in a shambles. Grant and Johnson—for Johnson had once again changed his mind and was now with Grant—were raising their force in absolute defiance of orders from anyone now. Fannin appeared to be the current holder of the council's authority for the Matamoros expedition, yet Grant and Johnson acted as if he did not exist. Bowie did what he could, but the opposing forces were clearly in the majority. Since he had himself no formal commission, and since Grant and Johnson simply ignored Houston's order of December 17, there was nothing for Bowie to do but wait until Houston himself arrived on January 14, and by then new exigencies arose that, mercifully, removed him from the Matamoros morass.

  While Houston began to deal very diplomatically with the volunteers currently adhering to Grant and Johnson, he also turned his eyes north-west to San Antonio. Even before learning of what Johnson and Grant had done there—destroying many of the fortifications, and leaving Neill with a hundred men to hold a position that Cós could not sustain with seven hundred—Houston made plans for its safety. On December 15 he suggested sending a new field commander and several commissioned officers to the town to take over the army, and at the same time wanted a good engineer to go to work on its fortifications. He left no doubt of his intention. He maintained that the necessity of occupying and holding Béxar was so “manifest” that his reasons did not bear repeating.78 Now within two days of reaching Goliad, Houston got a letter from Neill detailing just how bad his situation was. His men had been in the field for four months and were broken down, some nearly naked, and none of them had been paid in some time. Desertions mounted, and Neill expected more, reducing his strength in a day or two no more than eighty. Reports of up to 3,000 Mexicans massing at Laredo, 140 miles south on the Rio Grande, only heightened the crisis. “We are in a torpid, defenseless condition,” he said, warning that he could be overrun in as little as eight days.79

  Here was a new crisis, and one made for Bowie. Houston would have to deal with the Johnson-Grant problem himself, as only he had the legal or moral authority to do so. But a mission to Béxar was perfect for his friend of the roving portfolio. On January 17, shortly after he received Neill's urgent plea, Houston met with Bowie and outlined the situation to him. He asked Bowie—he could not really order him—to go to Béxar immediately, taking thirty to fifty men with him, if they agreed to go. Once he reached Béxar he was to start tearing down the remainder of the fortifications not already demolished, and if threatened by the enemy presumably withdraw men and munitions into the Alamo church compound. But before that could happen, Houston continued, he hoped to have permission from Smith for Bowie to blow up the Alamo entirely and remove all the artillery and remaining munitions to Gonzales and Copano. He simply did not believe that volunteers could hold such a place if besieged by Mexican regulars.80

  Houston remembered that Bowie undertook his mission “with his usual promptitude and manliness.”81 First Bowie unleashed again his most persuasive eloquence to persuade the necessary number of volunteers to accompany him. “He used every means in his power to effect this object,” recalled one man in Goliad, but in the end he only influenced about thirty to accompany him.82 Even though Bowie was going voluntarily, Houston still gave him written instructions, no doubt so that Neill would take any order coming from Bowie as having the force of coming from Houston himself.83

  It was a hard ride to cover the eighty miles in a day, but on January 18 Bowie saw the mission Espada ahead, then the familiar ground of San José, San Juan, and Concepción, and beyond them San Antonio itself. For all of his travels these last few years, and despite the personal tragedy that emptied the Veramendi house of the joy he had once found there, this town was still the only real home Bowie had known in Texas. Yet he helped besiege it once as an attacker several weeks before, and now he came as a potential destroyer.

  Bowie arrived to find Neill briefly absent, and felt no hesitation in immediately assuming temporary command of the motley garrison on the strength of his written orders from Houston.84 He was nothing if not decisive. When Neill returned, Bowie found him a capable man, an Alabamian who came to Texas nearly the same time as Travis. The first shot of the revolution from that cannon at Gonzales was his, and Bowie probably already knew him at least in passing from their being at the siege of Béxar together in November and December.85 Now he held a commission as a lieutenant colonel of artillery. One of his artillerymen, Lt. Almeron Dickenson, had also been at Gonzales, and Bowie may have heard of another officer present, his own distant cousin by marriage, James Butler Bonham.86 There were old friends there, too. Toribio Losoya, a tejano in the garrison, was of the family of José Domingo Losoya, who had served with Bowie in Johnston's Louisiana volunteers back in 1815.

  In fact Neill had far more guns than he had men to serve them. When Cós surrendered Béxar, he left behind some twenty bronze and iron cannon of sizes ranging from two- to twelve-pounders, and perhaps one or two of larger bores. A few were in such bad shape that they could not be fired, but most of the remainder Neill now had emplaced in and around the old Mexican works. The Texians also captured from Cós powder, solid shot, and canister totaling more than twelve hundred rounds, though some of the powder seemed of poor quality. The Mexicans also gave up four hundred or m
ore British brown Bess muskets, and even after Johnson and Grant ransacked the arsenal, there were still sixteen thousand or more rounds of ammunition in hand for them.87

  Neill had recently divided his small command, stationing part of it in the town, with his own headquarters in a house at the end of Potrero Street on the Civil Plaza, while the balance occupied the Alamo itself, commanded by Lt. William R. Carey, and including most of the cannon.88 He also had an excellent amateur engineer officer in Green B. Jameson. Just the day of Bowie's arrival Jameson counted a total of 114 men and officers present, though nearly a third of those were either sick or wounded, leaving just 80 fit for duty, and some of them had to divert attention to deal with the 50 or more sick and wounded Mexicans left behind by Cós.89 Jameson knew there to be Mexican spies in town, and feared that almost every night someone left town to take information south to the enemy. He tried to catch them, but Johnson and Grant had taken virtually all of their horses, so patrols had to go out on foot and were usually officers at that. In fact the officers steadily performed more and harder duty than the enlisted men, including standing guard at night. It was not an enviable situation.90

  About the only good news awaiting Bowie was that discipline among the volunteers had improved somewhat with the renewed rumor of a thousand or more Mexicans somewhere south toward the Rio Grande, gathering to invade. Moreover, Jameson and Neill were energetic, and the engineer especially seemed anxious to strengthen rather than destroy the fortifications. He fully believed that if attacked, his artillery could repulse odds of 10 to 1. Of course Bowie had to await receipt of Governor Smith's approval before he could carry out Houston's demolition instructions, but until then—and on the chance that the Mexicans might advance—he prudently allowed Neill and Jameson to go ahead with emplacing the guns and strengthening the works as manpower allowed.

  Once more politics in San Felipe intervened. By the time Houston's request for approval of his plan to destroy the Alamo and abandon Béxar reached San Felipe, Smith and the council were at open war. There was no one there to deal with Houston's communication because council members had taken all official papers away from Smith and refused to allow him to give any orders, supporting Robinson instead. Houston, meanwhile, tamely stayed with Johnson and Grant, trying by persuasion to win back his army, and all but forgot the Béxar command for several days. Bowie, quite unwittingly, had stepped into a vacuum. In a situation like that, his own instinct was to take charge and act on his own initiative.

  The more he studied the defenses of Béxar, especially the Alamo compound, the more Bowie's initiative suggested to him that this post was too promising to yield without a fight. After all, if Cós and his superiors thought it significant enough to endure a siege of more than a month, then the position meant something and should not be abandoned. Certainly only two principal roads made paths of invasion into Texas. The post at Goliad blocked one, and Béxar the other. Whether the forces of Johnson and Grant took Matamoros, or stopped at Copano as Houston wanted, or even remained at Goliad, no invasion by way of the Atascosita could get past them without a fight. But if their forces did advance to Copano or below, and San Antonio were abandoned, then a Mexican army coming into Texas by the Presidio de Río Grande could easily pass Béxar and suddenly be at Gonzales or even San Felipe, in their rear, cutting them off from supply and communications, and with unfettered opportunity to range about the Texian interior at will. San Antonio was the only place to stop such an invasion south of the Colorado, and maybe even south of the Brazos.

  Besides, with Grant taking all the horses and draft animals when he left, Bowie and Neill had no means of hauling away all those prize cannon, and considering that the Alamo's complement of artillery was at that moment the largest west of the Mississippi, they could not afford simply to abandon the guns or disable them. Late on January 22 Neill and Bowie got a report that Santa Anna himself was coming, with three thousand men at Saltillo, while he had sixteen hundred more at Presidio de Río Grande. Faced with that news, Neill wrote to Smith saying that if he only had the teams, he would haul away the guns and evacuate at once to Copano. But then, as if to add more force to the logic of holding the place instead, Bowie got a report from Padre Garza that same day.

  Immediately on coming back to San Antonio, Bowie reestablished the old relationships he had enjoyed in better days, and as the son-in-law of the respected and lamented Veramendi, he still commanded some respect in the town. Garza repeatedly confided in him, and a number of the townspeople became sources of information, though it is also possible that some hid their Mexican sympathies and intentionally gave him false intelligence. But not Garza, and now the priest told him that tejanos coming from the Rio Grande reported that the enemy intended to send its main advance against Copano and Goliad, where the principal Texian army would be found. The foe would send only a few hundred cavalry against San Antonio. Thus Béxar faced relatively little immediate danger. If its works were strengthened, and only a few reinforcements sent, one hundred or more men and those twenty cannon could certainly hold the Alamo against a few hundred mounted Mexicans.91

  Inevitably politics inserted itself into the formula. San Antonio was a divided town, the Texians and many of the tejanos favoring the resistance, and even the almost inevitable declaration of independence, while the other tejano inhabitants remained loyal to the old Mexican regime, even if disturbed by Santa Anna's autocratic leanings. That alone provided cause for concern, and a deplorable weakness of internal security. But political dissatisfaction also gripped the garrison. Then, feeling isolated and forgotten, yet in danger as a forward outpost of the resistance, the volunteers realized that by being away from their homes, they would have no votes or voice in the coming election for delegates to the consultation to meet at Washington on March 1. On January 23 Neill wrote to Smith again asking for a writ of election to allow the volunteers to elect two representatives of their own to attend the convention, making it clear that “they are all in favor of Independence.” Moreover, most of the citizens of Béxar asserted that they, too, wanted a break from Mexico, he said, and they all supported the beleaguered Smith himself as the properly constituted head of the provisional government.92

  There is no question that by now Bowie, too, had come over to independence. His protest of loyalty to the 1824 constitution back in October may have been genuine at the time, but the persuasions of Houston and Smith must have exerted some influence on him in the meanwhile, encouraging his naturally independent leanings. Besides that, he had fought and risked his life for Texas now, and somehow that sort of thing demanded a higher cause than a return to some previous state of affairs. Then, too, by friendship and chance, he stood allied with Smith and Houston. If their side won the internal power struggle, and independence followed, James Bowie enjoyed the high regard of both and could expect it to accrue to his benefit in the future. He probably crossed the line by December, if not before. Bowie's own sense of self-interest surely contributed a full share to his decision, as it did with many of these men. But by now a species of budding patriotism motivated him as well. For all his scheming and avarice, he was not immune to more altruistic impulses. In 1815 he had enlisted in the Louisiana militia, prepared to risk his life in battle when he had as yet no property in land or slaves to defend, or at that time any prospect of future material gain to protect. He can only have been answering then the twin calls of youthful enthusiasm for adventure and the desire to protect his homeland—be it Louisiana or the United States—from an invader's heel. There is no reason to believe that those same engines did not drive him now, only fueled the more by his dreams of personal empire. There are few absolutely pure patriots, and few indeed among the leaders of the Texian uprising. But by any mature measure, James Bowie was a patriot nonetheless.

  As if to punctuate Neill's expression of support, he called a meeting of the volunteers and interested citizens on January 26, Bowie among them. Calling attention to the political chaos at San Felipe, Neill suggested that they
express their views, and appointed Bowie, Bonham, Jameson, Dr. Amos Pollard, Juan Seguín, and two others a committee to draft resolutions for discussion and a vote. They retired to deliberate, and then returned with a report that condemned the act of the council in trying to unseat the governor and abrogate his acts when they had no constitutional authority to do so, there being, of course, no constitution. Their originally mandated role was purely advisory. Moreover, the council had countenanced Grant's attempted usurpation of Houston's command. They had misappropriated money donated for the succor of the Béxar garrison, and “private and designing men” among them were seeking to reopen the land offices in order to continue speculating while other brave men ran the risks of the field. Bowie no doubt felt a special interest in that last charge.