The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation

by James Donovan

  Some of the colonists had left then, when Cós had surrendered and marched his eleven hundred soldiers out of Texas—gone home to their families and farms. The war was over; they could return to their lives, at least until spring.

  Most of the volunteers from the United States, such as the Greys, were young men with no homes to return to. They had left their homes for Texas in response to the call for aid and arrived weeks later to assist their Texian cousins in the ousting of a despot—much as their fathers and grandfathers sixty years before them had rebelled against George III. They saw this cause as similar, the parallels too strong to ignore: a tyrannical dictator running roughshod over the rights of his subjects and violating the covenant accepted by the immigrants and residents alike, whether Anglo or Tejano. Taxation without proper representation, and a complete lack of a representative political system upon the dissolution of the state congresses… the abrogation of the most basic of civil rights, including the absence of trial by jury and the writ of habeas corpus… military occupation that threatened to increase dramatically… the insistence that the colonists deliver up their arms—such burdens these sons of 1776 found intolerable.

  So these men had come to Texas to fight for liberty, and also to gain the land that would make them truly free men, earning their living independent of any other and providing a better life for themselves and their families. And they thought these things worth dying for.

  The American Revolution had been the first great uprising of modern times, its principles so just and honorable, its conduct so sound and admirable, that a wave of revolution inspired by the American colonists had swept across Europe and the civilized world. It was a movement still finding entire nations of converts in countries such as Greece and Poland.

  Americans were beseeched for assistance to these causes, and they had responded. Now their own brothers and sons and cousins and friends and neighbors, their own blood, were fighting for the same cause right next door. And all across the country, from New England to the newest state, Missouri, rallies were held to raise money and soldiers for Texas and its liberty, and thousands of men had answered the call.

  Little more than five decades after Americans had secured their freedom, the word “liberty” remained far more than an abstract term, a right taken for granted. Liberty or death, as Patrick Henry put it, represented the American stand on the subject, and in 1836 the cost of freedom paid for with human lives was still vivid in the mind of every citizen and the memory of many. The word represented one of the basic rights every man was entitled to by birth. And the rebels believed passionately, just as Thomas Jefferson had written in the Declaration of Independence, that legitimate political authority rested on the consent of the governed, who retained the right to withdraw their consent and change their government if it threatened those inalienable rights it was formed to protect. As Texians saw it, that was exactly what Santa Anna was in the process of doing.

  Linked to this new concept of liberty, this idea of truly free men, and essential to its core, was landownership. Its importance went beyond the desire for riches, or large-scale exploitation of resources in the pursuit of progress. Suffrage, the right to vote and elect representatives, that most essential component of a republic, was even in the United States initially confined to property owners; land meant power. While that requirement had gradually been eliminated in all but a few states, the mind-set remained. Too, it was a time, a world, an existence, based on an agrarian way of life—eight of ten men worked the land. To own land in 1836 was viewed by all as an essential condition of liberty. A man without land was nobody.

  Eight of the Alamo’s defenders were Tejanos who had bravely decided to join the colonists in their rebellion—they, too, were outraged by Santa Anna’s actions. But like the great majority of Americans at the time, the rest were of Anglo-Saxon stock. Most of the men in the fort were Scots-Irish whose Scottish ancestors had fought for their freedom from the British at Stirling and Bannockburn, and then fought the Irish at the same time they were marrying and breeding with their women. A dozen or so were Englishmen whose forefathers had defeated the French at Agincourt and Crécy, and beheaded their own king for aspiring to tyranny. And for those who were American-born, 1776 was no such distant memory; there were veterans of that struggle still living. At least fifty of the defenders proudly claimed fathers or grandfathers who had participated in the Revolutionary War. No, whatever else happened, these men would back down from no one.

  There were other factors involved. Most of the men, established settlers and fresh volunteers alike, hailed from the contiguous southern states, and many of them considered slavery an accepted part of the order of things. The defense of slavery was at best an underlying cause, not a prime factor, in the Americans’ desire to aid their countrymen in gaining their liberty. For that is how they considered their Texian cousins—as Americans, still. But few of the Texian colonists actually owned slaves, and those who did were able to reconcile their adherence to that institution with their belief in the basic rights of man, just as their revolutionary forefathers had. Many colonists considered Mexico’s antislavery law hypocritical, given the country’s system of peonage, which was used primarily to man the huge haciendas in the south of Mexico. Its victims, who numbered in the tens of thousands, endured many of the same conditions as slaves did: hopeless indebtedness, corporal punishment, and severe penalties for escape; they were even sold as commodities.

  Almost all the men from the southern states claimed Scotland and Ireland as their hereditary birthplaces, many of them only one or two generations removed from the old countries. Journeying west—for freedom, for land—was in their blood. And they were fighters. Fighting for these things, and other, sometimes lesser things, too—family, honor, justice, or even sport—was also in their blood. Truth to tell, some of the men had walked or ridden hundreds of miles just for a good fight.

  Most of them were not trained soldiers. Save for the New Orleans Greys, they wore no uniforms, and their arms were their own, a mixture of muskets, rifles, shotguns, pistols, tomahawks, and blades. In almost every respect they did not meet the definition of an army. But in a letter to Sam Houston, Green Jameson had summed up their most important quality: “They have all been tried, and have confidence in themselves.”

  That confidence would soon be tested.

  ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILES to the east, in the town of Washington, other express riders had left with important news of their own.

  On the afternoon of March 1, forty-one convention members—enough for a quorum—had met in the unfinished building a quarter mile up from the Brazos River landing. There were no doors, nor was there glass in the windows—only cotton cloth, which did little to keep a below-freezing north wind from entering the unheated hall. “Everybody [was] shivering and exclaiming against the cold,” noted an observer. But spirits were high, and compared to the previous Texian political conventions, this one was a model of brisk efficiency. They quickly came to order and elected officers, then began conducting the business at hand. Delegates spoke disapprovingly of the quarrel between the governor on the one hand and the lieutenant governor and the General Council on the other, and refused to hear complaints from either side, calling on each only for their official information.

  They wasted little time authorizing a committee of five, headed by George C. Childress, to draw up a declaration of independence. Even the most pacifist among them understood that the time for reconciliation with Mexico was past. The next morning Childress and his committee presented their document, modeled closely on the United States’ 1776 declaration. (Childress, an attorney and former newspaper editor, had clearly begun preparing it before he arrived and likely wrote it himself.) The draft was read aloud, and in less than an hour, with no changes made, it was approved.

  Only one man rose to speak to the declaration: Sam Houston, representing the citizens of Refugio. His arrival on February 29, fresh from a successfully negotiated treaty with the Cherokees, “cre
ated more sensation than that of any other man,” wrote an observer; a delegate remembered his appearance as “that of an Indian chief. A piece of red flannel with a hole cut in it for his great head to go through for a shirt with a buckskin over-shirt and buckskin breaches, so eager to fight the massacrerer of the Alamo that he had no time or taste for dress.” Houston was waiting for clear authorization from this new legal body before assuming military command; he wanted no repeat of the underhanded shenanigans and schemings of the interim government that had tied his hands so badly. He had learned a hard lesson; this time he would not leave without complete authority over all forces, volunteer or regular. Houston may have been eager to fight Santa Anna, but as yet he had no official title under this new government, and thus no power to command anyone.

  That afternoon, Houston’s forty-third birthday, enough misspellings were found in the declaration that the signing was delayed until a corrected version was ready. The next day, March 3, every delegate present—including three prominent Tejanos—signed the document, officially declaring independence. Five copies were ordered, to be sent to Brazoria, Béxar, San Felipe, Nacogdoches, and Goliad, and express riders left town for those destinations, announcing the news along the way.

  The mood in Washington improved when a courier rode into town with the news that 350 men under James Fannin were on the march to Béxar, and others were on their way. And the latest from Travis—his letter of February 25, which had arrived the previous day, March 2—reported that a Mexican attack had been fought off, and the Alamo garrison was holding its own. The Alamo, it was believed, was safe for the time being. In any case, Houston and many of the other delegates in Washington went on a two-day drinking spree—eggnog fortified with spirits, the libation of the moment—to celebrate the new nation.

  WHILE THE TAVERNS OF THE VILLAGE on the Brazos reeled to the merriment of their representatives, the Alamo defenders shivered through another chilly night, another chilling dawn. For them, eggnog was a distant memory, and even coffee now counted as a luxury. But they had cause for celebration, too, though they could not know it. The nature of their struggle had changed. They had been fighting for independence all along. Now, at last, it was official.

  FIFTEEN

  “His Excellency Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty”

  Our honor, now outraged,

  In blood and fire shall be assuaged.

  JOSÉ JUAN SÁNCHEZ

  Before he left Béxar on February 11, garrison commander James Neill had told his men he would return within twenty days. He would not keep that promise, though for the best of reasons.

  After visiting his family in Bastrop and tending to the illness there, Neill had traveled east to San Felipe to see Henry Smith. Though deposed, Smith was still acting as though he were governor, and performing what limited duties he could until he removed to Washington to attend the convention. Neill found him just before he left, and on February 28, Smith gave Neill $600, part of the $5,000 donated to Texas by Harry Hill of Tennessee, for the use of the Alamo garrison. With funds finally in his hands, Neill headed back to Gonzales. A week later Smith would write, “Much confusion prevails among our volunteer troops on the frontier, but, by using much vigilance, I have now got Bexar secure”—sad evidence of his ignorance of the situation 180 miles to the west of him.

  Neill arrived in Gonzales a couple of days after the March 1 departure of James Bonham and immediately began purchasing supplies, including much-needed medicines, for his command. Major Robert Williamson had just left to organize his rangers in Bastrop, leaving Neill as the ranking officer in charge. When John Smith made it into town at three p.m. on March 4 with Travis’s latest communiqué and reported the size of the Mexican army after the arrival of three more battalions, it was clear that they would need a sizable number of troops to ride to the rescue of the Alamo garrison. Smith, wrote Dr. John Sutherland, “announced that if one hundred men could be raised, that they would be sufficient to sustain the fort, at least until others could reach it, and that he would start with them, as guide, as soon as they could get ready.” But one hundred men could not be convinced to ride to Béxar. Fifty would be ready soon, Smith was told, but by the next day the number had dwindled to twenty-five, who would be ready the next day. By Sunday, March 6, they had still not left, though the town was full of men.

  Alerted by express riders sent out from Gonzales and San Felipe, companies of colonists within a few days’ ride were finally mobilizing and making their way to the small village on the Guadalupe. About two hundred had gathered in Gonzales by the time Neill arrived, but none of them continued on to Béxar. Reports of the size of the Mexican army there went up to six thousand soldados, including plenty of the feared lancers. Texians generally derided the bulk of the Mexican army as little more than unwilling, untrained conscripts who marched in chains with whips at their backs, but the cavalry was accorded respect. It would be suicide to attempt to break through the lines with only a couple hundred volunteers.

  SOME MEN, however, had left for Béxar since Albert Martin led George Kimble’s and Thomas Jackson’s companies out of Gonzales on February 27. Not long after Martin’s departure, a courier rode into town with a message from James Fannin at Goliad. He had sent an advance party to Seguín’s hacienda on the San Antonio River to gather provisions and beef. Fannin and three hundred men would be right behind them, marching to reinforce the Alamo. They would rendezvous with any troops from Gonzales at the Cibolo crossing.

  Despite his injuries, Sutherland rode out the next morning, February 28, with Horace Alsbury, who had just returned from the east, and ten other men. They crossed the Guadalupe and waited on Juan Seguín and two dozen of his Tejanos—after his escape from the Alamo on the night of February 25, Seguín had obtained a horse at a nearby ranch and headed south toward Goliad. But he only made it less than halfway there before running into Fannin’s foraging company; they had just left Seguín’s ranch, where they had collected beeves and corn. Seguín sent an express rider with Travis’s oral message to Fannin—beseeching him to march immediately to the Alamo’s rescue—and then rode east to Gonzales after gathering some of his men.

  They met Sutherland and Alsbury a few days later, and with a force of about sixty men proceeded toward Béxar, to the Cibolo crossing. When Fannin arrived, they would join up with his battalion and ride to the Alamo. Perhaps they could even overtake Captain Martin and the Gonzales men. They reached the Cibolo shortly after dark on Monday, February 29—and just missed Martin’s group of thirty-two, who had left a short while ago, at sunset. Sutherland’s men bivouacked and waited for Fannin.

  But Fannin never came. Sutherland and Seguín waited two days, until the turn of midnight on Wednesday, March 2, then headed back toward Gonzales. They rode into town to find another letter from Fannin, written soon after his previous one, with devastating news. After a council of war, he and his officers had decided to remain in Goliad. There were good reasons for the decision, but it meant almost certain death for the men in the Alamo.

  FRIDAY, MARCH 4, dawned windy and cold, in the low forties, in Béxar. The Mexican batteries began their bombardment early. The rebels remained out of sight, not returning fire for several hours, and then delivering only one or two shots. “It is only known that there are men in the Alamo by the cannon and rifle shots that they fire,” wrote Captain Sánchez in his diary, “and because no more is heard than the blows of hammers and various obscenities.”

  In the afternoon, Santa Anna’s council of war convened in his quarters at the Yturri house on Main Plaza. Virtually every officer of the rank of lieutenant colonel and above was present: Generals Ramírez y Sesma, Castrillón, and Cós, and Colonels Almonte, Duque, Amat, Uruñuela, José María Romero, Mariano de Salas, and a few others.

  As the high command gathered around the detailed map of Béxar and the Alamo prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Ygnacio de Labastida, chief engineer, His Excellency “expounded on the necessity of making the assault,” remembered Jos�
� Enrique de la Peña, who was not present but heard about it later. Everyone agreed on that point—but the question of how to make the assault invited more discussion and evolved into one of timing and methods. A few of the officers, including Castrillón, Uruñuela, and Romero, argued for waiting until Gaona and his twelve-pounders arrived—they were expected on Monday, the seventh—and blasting the Alamo walls until a significant breach was made, probably in eight or ten hours. Others agreed with Santa Anna that the assault should be made immediately; after all, the likelihood of rebel reinforcements arriving increased every day.

  When someone brought up the subject of prisoners, the discussion became heated. Santa Anna reminded them that there would be no prisoners. Someone cited the example of General Arredondo’s conduct in 1813. “He had hanged eight hundred or more colonists after having triumphed,” recalled de la Peña, “and this conduct was taken as a model. General Castrillón and Colonel Almonte then voiced principles regarding the rights of men, philosophical and humane principles which did them honor.” But their appeals failed to sway Santa Anna. As announced in secretary of war Tornel’s December decree, captured rebels were to be considered pirates, and treated as such. They would be executed.