It was a nasty dilemma. Or it would have been, if the Texans hadn’t solved it for Lee. Somewhere near the Alamo, a bugle brayed: either that or McCulloch’s men had found some reason to torture a poor, defenseless donkey. No, it was a bugle, and a signal. Pistols and longarms banged all around the perimeter. Sudden plumes of gray smoke marked the shooters. And a bullet smacked the bricks warding the window behind which Lee stood. Six inches lower and it would have torn into him.
A cry from the wall near the rebuilt Alamo said at least one U.S. soldier was hit. Lee nodded to himself. However little he might like it, now his course was perfectly clear. “We have been attacked,” he said. “We shall defend ourselves by all the means at our command.”
His men had all the formidable discipline the U.S. Army instilled in—beat into—its regulars. Not a single soldier returned fire till Lee gave the order. Once he did, though…
Disciplined or not, no one would have claimed the Texans weren’t brave. Shouting “Hurrah!”, the men carrying the battering ram charged across the plaza toward the Alamo’s barricaded entrance. Unlike their comrades in the militia, they didn’t even have firearms with which to defend themselves against the fire from the U.S. Army’s stronghold in Texas.
And they paid a cruel price for their courage. Lee thought the regulars could have kept them from getting any good out of their ram even with smoothbores. Against the new rifle muskets, the battering ram got barely halfway across the plaza before most of the bearers fell. Few of the Texans whose blood puddled in the dirt would ever rise again, either, not till the Last Trump sounded.
When the ram finally fell, the last few men who’d held it pelted back toward cover. Only one made it. The regulars coldly shot the rest in the back. Lee deplored that, but not enough to say anything about it. For one thing, he knew the hard cases who served under him would ignore an order demanding that they show mercy. Issuing an order bound to be disobeyed would only weaken his own authority. For another, war and mercy seldom met. Had those Texans reached safety, they would have snatched up muskets or pistols and tried to kill the U.S. soldiers here. Better not to give them the chance.
The ram lay in the plaza, a symbol of the militiamen’s failure. To order his men forward like that, Ben McCulloch must have imagined the regulars would fire a few shots for honor’s sake and then put out a white flag. If nothing else, he would be disabused of that notion now.
Perhaps thinking along with Lee, Major Thomas asked, “What do you suppose they’ll try next, sir?”
“Something less wasteful of their manpower, one would hope,” Lee replied. “They have more men than we do, and they can replace their losses where we cannot, but their numbers are not unlimited.”
“Getting ordered to stick your hand in the meat grinder isn’t exactly grand for morale, either,” Thomas said.
“Indeed not,” Lee agreed. A couple of the Texans down in the plaza weren’t dead yet. Dead men didn’t make noises like those. Lee, of course, had heard such cries before, more often than he hoped to remember. Some of the inexperienced militiamen would have trouble hardening themselves against them. “Our opponents will need time to realize this is no game, and the pieces taken off the board will not be returned to their starting places for the next match.”
“Nope. They’re gone for good, all right,” Thomas said.
Little by little, the firing eased off. A militiaman showed himself with a large white flag. When no one potted him, he shouted, “Will you let us pick up our wounded?”
“You may do so,” Lee shouted back, and then, to his own men, “Do not fire at them!”
Stretcher-bearers ran forward. The wounded Texans screamed louder as their rescuers moved them. Maybe the doctors could do something for them. Lee hoped so.
In the lull, blue-coated U.S. soldiers smoked cigars or boiled coffee or gnawed on salt pork. No doubt the militiamen were doing the same kinds of things, out there where the regulars couldn’t spy them and draw a bead on them. Quite a few men in the Alamo compound also seized the chance to use the latrine trenches. Lee was sure the Texans out beyond the wall were easing themselves when and as they could, too. Nothing loosened bowels and bladder like a bullet cracking past. Reminding a man he was as mortal as a shoat was the sharpest terror in the world.
After a little time went by, Major Thomas remarked, “Still their move.”
“Yes. They tried the easiest and most obvious way to storm our position first,” Lee answered. “The next most obvious, it seems to me, would be a general attack from all sides at once, hoping to overwhelm us by sheer numbers.”
“Mmm…” The younger man mulled that. “Makes sense, all right. Might even work, too.”
“True. It might,” Lee said. “But storming a fortress is a more expensive proposition than defending one. How big a butcher’s bill is McCulloch prepared to pay?” Here with Major Thomas, he didn’t bother giving the Texans’ commander the rank the ruffian claimed.
Nothing much happened for the next couple of hours. Lee heard occasional shouts from outside the Alamo. The militiamen were arguing among themselves about what they ought to do. Lee nodded to himself. Amateurs were prone to such problems. He might consult with his junior officers before giving orders, but there would be no back talk once he did.
It was getting on toward noon before the Texans’ atrocious bugler winded his horn again. A U.S. sergeant shouted to his men: “Watch yourselves, you sorry bastards! They’re up to something!”
George Thomas chuckled wryly. “Couldn’t have put that better myself.”
“Nor I,” Lee said. Officers told enlisted men what to do. Sergeants made them sorry if they didn’t do it right this second. Sergeants mocked officers as softies. Officers, commonly full of genteel scorn, looked down their noses at sergeants. No army could have held together for more than twenty minutes without both.
The Texans started banging away again, all around the Alamo. “Here they come!” somebody inside the fortress yelled. A New Englander, Lee guessed by his accent—in any case, surely not a Texan.
He peered out again through the slit in the window. The Texans were coming, all right, swarms of them. Each swarm included a scaling ladder. If they could get over the walls and inside the compound, they might be able to serve the U.S. soldiers as General Santa Anna’s men had served the Texans defending the Alamo twenty-five years before. Maybe the Texans now would be less inclined to massacre than the Mexicans had been then. But it was war, as Lee had recently reminded himself. Only a fool counted on mercy.
Best to make sure McCulloch’s militiamen didn’t get in, then. Lee needed to issue no orders on that score. The regulars, not a few of them veterans of the Mexican War like him, could see it as plainly as he did. Like the men with the battering ram, the Texans carrying the ladders and the ones who would climb them had to show themselves. When they did, the regulars knocked them over.
There was very little malice in it, and very little fuss. The regulars had a job of work to do, and they did it as well and as neatly as they could. The bullets cracking by them were simply a hazard of their trade. As blacksmiths were liable to get burned and farriers were liable to get kicked by the horses they shod, so soldiers were liable to get shot. Anyone who didn’t care for that possibility needed a different career.
The rifle muskets’ long effective range paid off. The Texans didn’t pull back from even the warmest fire, which did them no good at all. It only added to the number of men the soldiers in blue killed or wounded. One ladder did go up against the wall, not far from the Alamo itself. Whooping Texans climbed it as fast as they could.
That proved not to be fast enough. Ignoring the militiamen’s fire, a U.S. Army second lieutenant emptied first one Colt revolver and then another into the poor devils on the ladder. He shot twelve times in a minute or less, at a range where he hardly needed to aim. By the time he finished, the ladder was bare of climbers. He stepped back. A corporal tipped it over before any more militiamen could nerve themselves to m
ount it.
“Bravely done,” Lee said.
“It was,” Major Thomas agreed. “A pity the Army doesn’t have some kind of decoration for men who show courage above and beyond the call of duty.”
“You’re right,” Lee said in surprise. The notion had never occurred to him. He wondered why not. Plenty of European armies pinned medals on their soldiers till the poor men could hardly walk. Such incentives had always seemed alien in the sternly republican United States, but perhaps there was such a thing as too pure an adherence to political principle.
Thomas scraped a lucifer against the sole of his boot and lit a twisted stogie. “Here’s hoping we have the chance to give our bright idea to the big cheeses back in Washington. If the Texans gain a lodgement, everything turns…what do you call it? Academic, that’s the word I’m after.”
“I hope they would not slaughter us, even after a victory,” Lee said, unhappily aware the garrison, alone against the biggest state in (or, more to the point, at the moment out of) the Union, could not hold out indefinitely. Following Major Thomas’ train of thought, though, he went on, “The powers that be would surely feel less inclined to listen to us if we gave in before exhausting the resources at our disposal.”
“We’ve given McCulloch a proper bloody nose this time around, by God,” Thomas said. “Sounds like his boys are pulling back.”
Lee cocked his head, listening. “So it does. God has been kind to us today.” As the firing eased, the cries of the wounded became more apparent. Lee amended his words: “To most of us, I should say.”
Half an hour later, Ben McCulloch rode up to the Alamo with a flag of truce. A bloodstained bandage was carelessly wrapped around the militia officer’s forehead. He’d likely been in the thick of the fighting, then. Lee thought better of him for that. As McCulloch had before, he shouted, “Colonel Lee!”
“I am at your service, Colonel McCulloch,” Lee replied.
“Lord knows you’ve fought well enough to satisfy your honor now,” McCulloch said. “We’ll let you march away flying your own flag. We’ll feed you till you get over the border. Best bargain you’ll get, Colonel Lee. You know you can’t win in the long run.”
Since that same thought had crossed Lee’s own mind only minutes earlier, he considered the offer more seriously than he would have otherwise. Not without regret, he decided his answer had to stay the same. “I must decline, sir,” he said. “I am not defending my honor. I am defending my government, as I swore to do with my soldier’s oath.”
“Your government’s writ runs here no more,” McCulloch insisted.
“I mean no disrespect to you when I tell you you are mistaken.”
McCulloch glared toward the Alamo. “I mean no disrespect when I tell you that, if you don’t give up, the only way you’ll come out of there is feet first.”
“No one unaware of that chance should ever take the oath to serve his country,” Lee replied placidly.
The militia colonel started to say more. Then, giving it up as a bad job, he spat on the hard earth of the plaza instead. He jerked his horse’s head around in a way that would have made Lee or any other cavalry officer speak sharply to him and rode off.
In the wake of his fury, Lee expected another all-out Texan attack. But McCulloch showed more in the way of shrewdness than Lee credited him with—or perhaps simply realized he couldn’t make his men rush forward again so soon after such a painful repulse. The Texans sniped at U.S. soldiers from cover, but showed themselves as little as they could. Bluecoats fired back as they saw the chance. With their rifle muskets, they had more hope of hitting what they aimed at.
As the sun sank, Lee said, “We will sleep in shifts. I want the walls manned at all times. A night attack strikes me as the insurrectionists’ best chance to gain a foothold within our perimeter.”
“Sounds sensible to me,” George Thomas agreed. “Wonder how long McCulloch’ll need to figure out the same thing.”
“It seems obvious enough to make West Point training scarcely necessary,” Lee said.
“For you, that kind of training wouldn’t be needful, sir,” Thomas replied. “For a Texas backwoodsman? Well, who knows?”
Night fell. Some of the wounded men inside the Alamo continued to moan and groan. Off in the distance, so did some of the wounded Texans. The melancholy chorus kept Lee awake longer than he would have liked—but not much longer. Combat was wearing work, especially for a man past fifty.
He’d left orders to be awakened on the instant if anything the least bit unusual happened. But nothing did. He slept like a drugged man—and so he was, drugged with weariness—till just before sunrise.
He found Major Thomas drinking coffee and nibbling on hardtack. “All quiet?” Lee asked.
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said. “Should perk up now that it’s getting light out.” He paused to sip from the tin cup, then resumed: “You know, sir, I expect we’re heroes now, heroes all over the North. ‘The new heroes of the Alamo!’—can’t you just see the headlines in the papers?”
“I care nothing for the newspapers,” Lee said with distaste.
“I know, sir. But the papers’ll care about you,” Thomas predicted, which struck Lee as much too likely to be accurate. The younger man continued, “And in the South, the two of us’ll be the foulest traitors since Judas Iscariot.”
Lee clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I am loyal to my state. But Virginia yet remains in the United States, and the Texans have attacked us with no legal justification of any sort. ‘I want it, so it’s mine!’ is reasoning for children and thieves, not states.”
“If I felt any different, sir, I’d be over there with McCulloch, not in here with you,” Major Thomas said.
“Believe me, Major, I am glad of your company.” Lee briefly set a hand on Thomas’ shoulder. For a man who held so much inside himself, it was an uncommon show of feeling. He was never sorry for it, though.
The next few days were quiet. The Texans kept sniping at the U.S. soldiers, but mounted no great assaults. The bluecoats shot back. One of them picked off a militiaman at upwards of six hundred yards. His friends cheered and carried him through the walled courtyard on their shoulders, as if he’d won a prizefight.
Texas’ voters proved themselves in accord with the secession convention, ratifying the state’s withdrawal from the Union. The militiamen shouted the news to the besieged U.S. soldiers. Under flag of truce, they brought up papers so the bluecoats could see they weren’t making up the news.
“It does not matter,” Lee said. “They have no right to federal property without negotiating its transfer with duly constituted authority, and less than no right to seize it by force.” No doubt the Texans were seizing small forts and outposts up and down the long frontier. No doubt some local U.S. commanders would sympathize with secession and make the seizure easy. Lee did feel a certain sympathy for secession, but none whatever for illegality.
He made sure the men garrisoning the Alamo stayed alert through the night. Sooner or later, Ben McCulloch was bound to realize the cloak of darkness gave him the best hope of breaking into the fortress…wasn’t he?
McCulloch was. He set the attack for two nights after the Texas plebiscite. It proved foredoomed. A Texan who favored the Union sneaked through the militiamen’s line after darkness fell and warned the U.S. garrison. The bluecoats let down a rope when he softly called. The local was spry enough to climb it. The soldiers took him to Lee, who had been about to go to bed.
Lee didn’t need long to decide the man—his name was Andrew Crouch—was telling the truth. “They’ll come tonight for sure,” Crouch said. By the way he talked, he’d been born in the Midwest, and come to Texas to better his fortune. He sounded contemptuous as he continued, “They can’t keep a secret for hell, Colonel, and that’s a fact. The way they’re carrying on, I’m surprised you didn’t hear ’em in here.”
“They make a good deal of noise a good deal of the time,” Lee observed, not without scorn of his own. “
They are not the best-disciplined troops I have ever encountered.”
“I believe that, by God,” Crouch said. “If you give me a musket, I’ll help you shoot the buggers.”
“I will give you a musket and a uniform and swear you into the Army for a term of one month. That way, if things go against us” —as Lee expected they would, though he did not say so— “they cannot treat you as a bushwhacker taken in arms against them.”
“And hang me, you mean?” Crouch asked. Lee nodded. So did the other man. “Fair enough, sir, and I thank you kindly for the thought.”
The attack came around ten o’clock: well before the moon rose to spoil the darkness. The Texans were noisy there, too. The bluecoats on the walls blazed away at the chattering, clattering bands of militiamen. Wild screams gave them fresh targets at which to aim. “Firing by earsight,” one soldier said, which put it better than anything Lee could have come up with for himself.
However badly disciplined the Texans were, they had courage aplenty. They came on despite the raking the bluecoats gave them. Ladders thumped against the walls of the Alamo compound. Carpenters inside had made forked sticks to help the U.S. soldiers push them over with less risk to themselves. All the same, in one place McCulloch’s men got up onto the wall and started running down from it.
Sword in hand, Lee rushed there to do what he could. But his men soon controlled the irruption. More of them carried six-shooters than did their foes. And a long rifle musket tipped by a long bayonet made a fearsome close-quarters weapon the Texans couldn’t hope to match. Some of them fled back over the wall, jumping down outside when they found their ladder was gone. Some surrendered. Most of the men who’d made it into the Alamo compound fell. Blood’s iron reek and the fouler latrine stench of pierced bowels filled the air.
“You bastards weren’t supposed to know we was comin’,’” a prisoner complained to Lee as a U.S. surgeon sutured and bound his gashed arm. He paused to hiss at the pain.
“No doubt Colonel McCulloch is sure he can sneak an elephant into church without letting anyone notice, too,” Lee said.
Lee at the Alamo Page 3