by Various
In a near-whisper, Thomas said, “You know something, sir? We could clean out the lot of them without breaking a sweat.”
“We could clean out this lot of them. More would come,” Lee replied. “Besides, I will not be the first to open fire on my countrymen. If they want war so badly, they must begin it.”
“Do you think they’d be so mad?” The tiny voice in which the other U.S. officer spoke stressed his reluctance to believe it.
“They do not demand our powder for a fireworks show, nor our bayonets to beat them into plowshares,” Lee said. His foot came down in a hole he hadn’t seen—couldn’t have seen. He stumbled and almost fell. Something most un-Christian came close to crossing his lips. He bit it back. Flailing his arms, he kept himself upright. Major Thomas caught his elbow and helped steady him. He wondered how Thomas did it. Could he see in the dark like a cat?
“Just luck, sir. Luck and hearing where you were,” the younger man answered when Lee asked.
The U.S. Army soldiers stole through San Antonio’s silent streets. They weren’t as silent themselves as Lee would have liked. But then, no commander ever thought his men moved quietly enough. As long as McCulloch’s men failed to realize they were out and about, he couldn’t really complain.
Lee had thought he knew San Antonio well. And he and his men were going less than half a mile. All the same, they took two wrong turns—at least two. Had the night been overcast so they couldn’t steer by the heavens, they might never have found their way at all. As things were, Lee thought more than half an hour passed before the arched top of the front of the building he sought blotted out the stars near the horizon.
A man on the roof saw, or perhaps more likely heard, them coming. “Halt!” he called softly. “Who comes?”
“Friends,” Lee answered, also in a low voice. They would be nervous in there. If the militiamen had got wind of this move…
“Give me the word, then, ‘friend,’” the watcher up there said.
“Liberty.” Since Lee had chosen the word, he knew it, sure enough.
He heard the soldier call, “You can open up, Fred. It’s the right bunch.” Someone—presumably Fred—unbarred the stout door beneath that arched front. Torches and lanterns burned inside. To Lee’s dark-accustomed eyes, they blazed bright as the sun. He could see—now he could see—several of his men lifting hands against the sudden, startling glare, so he wasn’t the only one it caught off-guard.
“Made it!” Major Thomas said: the first exultant murmur Lee had ever heard.
“We did,” he agreed. Since they’d made it, he could raise his voice a little. “Come on, men,” he said, and hurried forward. In a neat column of fours, the blue-clad soldiers followed him into the Alamo.
The sun came up around seven. By then, Lee and the new loyalist garrison were busy making their stronghold as defensible as they could. Lee did not care to recall that the Alamo had fallen before. Despite the war cry from the Texans’ fight for independence, he would sooner have forgotten that.
Bricks and mortar turned the row of windows above the entrance into firing slits. The stone wall around the compound was three feet thick. He put out as many extra ladders as his men could find, and had them nail together a few more from planks. The faster they could get up to any threatened part, the better.
That he had ladders to deploy was one of the advantages of holing up in a quartermaster depot. There were others. Ammunition would not be a worry. He had plenty of cartridges for the Model 1855 rifle muskets most of his men carried. There were also bullets and loose powder for smoothbores and for revolvers, crates of percussion caps for the six-shooters, and Maynard percussion tapes for the rifle muskets.
Nor would the U.S. soldiers starve. Hardtack was uninspiring, but it kept body and soul together. The same went for salt pork. This being San Antonio, the depot also boasted several hundred pounds of spicy Mexican sausage. It was tastier than salt pork, but also more likely to give a man the runs. The quartermaster sergeant proudly showed off tobacco and three small barrels of coffee, still in the bean to prevent adulteration.
Just as the sun rose, the men who’d guarded the pro-Confederate soldiers came in. They’d released their quondam comrades once secrecy mattered no more. As soon as they arrived, Lee turned loose the handful of quartermaster’s assistants who also favored the South. Then he set his men to nailing planks to the inside of the doorway and piling anything hard and heavy they could find behind it.
And he ordered the men to mount a flagpole on the Alamo’s roof and to fly the Stars and Stripes from it. The American flag’s canton displayed thirty-four stars. Lee was obliged to believe that each state a star represented still belonged to the Union. The entity using the Stars and Bars had no legal existence. The Lone Star flag was the flag of a state in the United States, even if Texas’ referendum was about to ratify a secession convention that had declared otherwise.
“What do we do now, sir?” George Thomas asked as the sun’s first rays touched the red, white, and blue.
Looking up from the walled-off compound behind the Alamo, Lee doffed his hat to salute the colors. Then he said, “We await developments, Major. I am at war with no man and no government. If any man or government be at war with me, deeds must inform me of that unfortunate fact.”
For developments he had not long to wait. Somebody started shouting in the square in front of the Alamo. The shouts were not ones of delight. “Will you talk to that fellow?” Thomas asked.
“I will talk to anyone who will talk to me,” Lee answered.
He went into the Alamo and up to one of the newly bricked-in windows. Out on the bare dirt of the plaza in front of the former mission stood a Texan with a strip of red flannel tied around his left sleeve and a flag of truce in his hand: not Ben McCulloch but a younger man, an emissary.
“You wish something of us?” Lee called through the narrow opening in the brickwork. The sharp smell of still-wet mortar filled his nostrils.
“Damned right I do!” the Texan said angrily. “What in blue blazes do you sons” —he checked himself— “you people reckon you’re up to?”
“Protecting the property and the sovereignty of the United States of America,” Lee replied. “I swore an oath to do so against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I aim to keep it.”
“But Texas ain’t in the United States no more!” the man outside cried, with more passion than grammar.
“There, I fear, we must disagree,” Lee said.
“Colonel Ben, he’ll make you sorry for playing the fool,” the Texan predicated. “He’ll blow the lot of you to smithereens.”
“And start a senseless war against his own government? Believe me, sir, I hope not. With all my heart, I do,” Lee said.
“You’ll be sorry—that’s all I’ve got to tell you.” The Texan turned on his heel and stormed out of the plaza.
Lee did not leave the windowslit. A soldier brought him a tin cup of coffee, which he sipped gratefully; he’d been up a long time. As he’d expected, Ben McCulloch rode into the square less than a quarter of an hour later. The militia commander cupped both hands in front of his mouth and bawled, “Lee! Colonel Lee! You there?”
“I am here,” Lee answered calmly.
“Are you going to give us what’s ours or not?”
“If I have anything of yours, sir, nothing will please me more than to furnish it to you. But I may not give you anything belonging to the United States.”
“Nothing in Texas belongs to the United States any more,” McCulloch said furiously.
“As I told your comrade not long ago, we differ on that score.”
McCulloch fished out a gold-cased pocket watch—a finer timepiece than Lee would have expected him to own. He flipped it open and made a show of studying the hands. “I’ve got twenty minutes till eight, Colonel. I’ll give you a day—twenty-four hours on the nose—to come to your senses and hand over what belongs to us anyways. If you don’t, me and my boys’ll come in and take it.”
“If you are mad enough to make the attempt, sir, I must tell you you will not enjoy a hospitable reception,” Lee said.
“Twenty-four hours,” McCulloch said grimly. “After that, by God, we’ll see who enjoys what.” He rode away, his horse’s hoofs clopping amidst vast silence.
Lee stayed at the windowslit. Men—he was sure they would be armed men—began peering out at the Alamo from the buildings and alleyways across the plaza. He had no spyglass to read their expressions at such a distance, but he doubted he needed one. Could their looks have killed, he would have lain dead on the badly planed floorboards here.
Footsteps behind him made him turn. He nodded to George Thomas. “Do you think we can hold out two weeks?” his fellow Virginian asked.
“It depends on how vigorously they press the assault, of course.” Considering the situation as an abstract military problem helped ease Lee’s mind. “Most of all, I should say, it depends on whether they command any proper artillery. Why do you ask in that particular way?”
“Because Lincoln doesn’t take office till the fourth proximo,” Thomas replied. “No matter what happens up till then, Buchanan won’t do a thing about it.” He didn’t try to hide his contempt. “Old Head-in-the-Sand, that’s him.”
“He is the President. He is your commander-in-chief.” Lee’s voice was starchy with rebuke.
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said, in a way that couldn’t mean anything but No, sir. “I respect the office, of course. I truly do. But I’m afraid respecting James Buchanan is beyond my poor, humble powers. Sir.”
Since Lee himself had no great personal regard for the current inhabitant of the White House, he let that go. He had no great personal regard for Abraham Lincoln, either. But Thomas had to be correct in guessing that Lincoln would make a more energetic chief executive. Nothing this side of a kitchen stool could make one less energetic. Lee did say, “The Texans might have done better to attack at once. Now we have another day to strengthen things here.”
This time, Thomas’ “Yes, sir” sounded sincere. He went on, “Odds are, though, that they’re no more ready to come at us than we are to hold ’em off. Didn’t you tell me McCulloch looked ready to swallow his chaw when you said he couldn’t have what he wanted?”
Lee hadn’t phrased it that way, which didn’t make the younger officer wrong. And Thomas had a point, an important point, that Lee hadn’t considered. He’d unconsciously assumed that the Texas militiamen would show the same automatic competence as his own long-service veterans. Most of the Texans, though, including many if not all of their leaders, would be rank amateurs, one short step above Cortinas’ bandits—if that.
As his own men worked, Lee wondered what Ben McCulloch was doing. Conferring by wire with state authorities in Austin? Lee doubted it. Despite the secession convention, Sam Houston remained governor, and he would have opposed a move like McCulloch’s with every fiber of his being. He was doing everything in his power to keep Texas in the Union. But his power shrank by the day: indeed, by the minute. And Edward Clark, the lieutenant governor, was as much a secessionist as any South Carolina fire-eater.
More and more militiamen rode into San Antonio. Maybe McCulloch hadn’t been stretching things so much when he said he could soon bring in a couple of thousand of them. The alleged officers with their red flannel armbands did less and less to keep them under control as their numbers swelled.
Taking advantage of the truce, militiamen showed themselves all around the Alamo. Some were obviously drunk. They shook their fists at any blue-uniformed soldiers they saw. They cursed them, too; Lee had long since resigned himself to the foul mouths on the frontier. Some even pointed muskets or pistols at U.S. Army men. Lee had ordered his troops not to shoot first no matter what. To his relief, the militiamen didn’t open fire ahead of schedule, either.
Night fell. The regulars inside the Alamo worked on. The irregulars outside lined up for supper at stewpots hung over large fires. Then they started carousing. Guitars twanged. Women laughed. Men sang raucously. Were they holding a dance out there? By everything Lee could hear and glimpse, that was just what they were doing.
He snatched a few hours’ restless sleep on a lumpy mattress plopped atop an iron bed frame. “Have me awakened at once for anything even the least bit untoward, and at half past six in any case,” he told Major Thomas.
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said, and not another word. Lee needed no other words. He knew he could rely on Thomas.
No one rushed in the rouse him in the middle of the night. He woke up on his own, a few minutes before six. The eastern sky was just beginning to go gray. He broke his fast on hardtack and Mexican sausage and two cups of the quartermaster sergeant’s excellent coffee.
Then he had nothing to do but wait. He took his place at the windowslit through which he’d conversed with Colonel McCulloch the day before. From time to time, he checked his own watch, then slid it back into his pocket. The appointed moment rapidly approached. Would McCulloch prove punctual? Lee had no idea whether he could rely on the Texan even that far.
The event proved he could. McCulloch rode into the plaza in front of the Alamo at twenty-five to eight. “Colonel Lee!” he shouted. “You there, Colonel Lee?”
Since McCulloch’s men surrounded his own stronghold, Lee found it unlikely that he should be anywhere else. Nevertheless, he answered, “I am here, Colonel McCulloch.”
“Right.” McCulloch went straight to business: “The great state of Texas is no longer part of the misbegotten thing that calls itself the United States of America. Since we aren’t, we are taking possession of U.S. property in Texas. Will you give it up to me like a peaceable fella, the way I asked you to this time yesterday?”
“My fixed view, Colonel, is that neither you nor Texas has the right to make any such demand,” Lee said. “That being so, I must refuse. And I must tell you I shall resist any effort on your part to take U.S. government property by force.”
“Oh, you will, will you?” Ben McCulloch made a great show of looking at his pocket watch. When he closed the top, Lee distinctly heard the click. McCulloch said, “The twenty-four hours I gave you to think again are gone. One more chance, though—will you change your mind?”
“No,” Lee said: perhaps the hardest word he’d ever spoken.
“On your head be it, then.” McCulloch raised his voice so the bluecoats in the Alamo and his Texans around it could all hear: “The U.S. soldiers won’t give us what’s our property now. On account of they won’t, we’ve got the right to come take it. We’ve got that right, and we’re gonna use it.”
He drew a heavy Colt revolver from the holster on his left hip and took deliberate aim: not at Robert E. Lee through the firing slit, but higher, at an easier target. Lee realized the pistol pointed at the Stars and Stripes streaming above the Alamo. McCulloch pulled the trigger. Flame and a big puff of gunpowder smoke spat from the six-shooter’s muzzle.
The gunshot echoed across the plaza. Lee feared it would echo down through the years. Wild, raucous yells from the Texans said their leader had succeeded in wounding the American flag.
“War!” McCulloch shouted. “By God, let it be war!” He wheeled his horse and rode out of the square.
“If you ask me, sir, you should have had the dirty son of a bitch shot down like the cur dog he is,” George Thomas said. “That would’ve given the fools who follow him something to chew on, damned if it wouldn’t.”
With a weary sigh, Lee shook his head. “Whoever succeeded him would not be much worse, and might even represent an improvement. This being so, what point to puncturing McCulloch’s pretensions?”
“I don’t know about that, sir, but seems to me there was plenty of point to puncturing his liver and lights,” Major Thomas said.
Lee peered out once more through the slit in the bricked-in window. “Good heavens! What are they playing at now?”
“Let me see, sir?” Thomas asked. Lee stepped aside. Thomas looked for himself. His grunt of astonishm
ent might have come from a hog suddenly seeing itself in a mirror. Lee made no such uncouth noise, but he was similarly amazed. Thomas went on in words: “Dog my cats if that’s not a battering ram!”
And so it was. Where the Texans had found such a stout tree trunk in this land of chaparral Lee couldn’t imagine, but find it they had. Not only had they found it, they’d plated the business end with corrugated sheet iron. The weapon was ancient and ugly. It also might prove most effective.
He and Thomas weren’t the only besieged U.S. soldiers to see it, of course. “Shall we kill ’em, Colonel?” a man called to Lee.
The Texans were within range. With a rifle musket, a decent shot could hit what he aimed at out to a quarter of a mile. The smoothbores the new weapons replaced weren’t accurate past a hundred yards. That wasn’t what made Lee stop and think. Yes, Ben McCulloch had fired a shot at the American flag. But neither he nor his men had yet made any true effort to hurt the U.S. soldiers in the Alamo compound. Wouldn’t opening up on the militiamen carrying the ram feel too much like murder then?
But what if the bluecoats didn’t open up on the Texans? What if they let them smash down the door and seize the Alamo? Wouldn’t that say the federal government was only playing when it declared the seceding states had no right to its property within their borders?
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.”