A Time to Stand

by Walter Lord

  His own losses? Easily swallowed. True, the toll was high-some 600 killed and wounded—one-third of the actual assault force. Yet this was still only 10 per cent of the army. Most of Gaona’s men were fresh … Tolsa’s battalion completely intact … Urrea’s troops all-victorious. With San Antonio safely out of the way, they would now move on to far greater things. The Alamo was, in short, a slight distraction, a small pebble cast in the waters of a very large pond.

  But if this was just a pebble in the pond, the ripples from the splash went far indeed. “The effect of the fall of Bexar throughout Texas was electrical,” reported the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, and that was just the beginning.

  At a lazy plantation near Jackson, Tennessee, little Mary Autry was gathering dog blossoms on a lovely April morning, when a strange horseman clattered up the drive. A few moments later, one of the slaves came running to her: “You must come to the house! Your father has been killed, and your mother is half-dead with the news.”

  In bustling Nashville, Edmund Goodrich tore open a letter from his brother Benjamin in Texas: “It becomes my painful duty to inform my relations in Tennessee of the massacre of my poor brother John.” At a country home in Alabama, Sally Menefee read a distraught note from her sister Fanny Sutherland: “Yes sister, I must say it to you, I have lost my William. O, yes he is gone. My poor boy is gone, gone from me. The sixth day of March he was slain in the Alamo. …”

  In South Carolina, James Bonham’s family learned from the April 6 Charleston Courier:

  BY THE RAILROAD:

  IMPORTANT FROM TEXAS!

  FALL OF SAN ANTONIO AND MASSACRE OF

  THE TEXAN TROOPS

  The dispatch had been picked up from the New Orleans papers of March 28, and was in turn relayed on to the North. New York, April 11 … Boston, April 12 … Portland, April 13. News spread slowly in these days before the telegraph, but it was no less fresh when it arrived. Everywhere the Alamo produced an immense sensation.

  Santa Anna’s “small affair” quickly shoved aside the other stories of the day—Robinson the Murderer … the plans for a steamship line across the Atlantic … the auction sale of “the remaining lots in the town of Chicago.” And as people read the details, the private sorrow of a few families quickly turned to national grief and anger.

  “The news is melancholy indeed,” declared the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, “and here is opened another field of action for the noble hearts now returning triumphant and covered with laurels won on the banks of the Withlacoochee.” This last referred to General Scott’s campaign against the Seminoles, and a young nation that found idealistic fulfillment in chasing several hundred Indians through the Florida swamps needed little stimulus to support this new, far more glorious crusade.

  “Tyrant” … “butcher” … “bloody tiger” were only a few of the more printable invectives hurled at Santa Anna. “He will shortly see,” the New York Post shrewdly observed, “that policy would have required that he govern himself by the rules of civilized warfare. Had he treated the vanquished with moderation and generosity, it would have been difficult if not impossible to awaken that general sympathy for the people of Texas which now impels so many adventurous and ardent spirits to throng to the aid of their brethren.”

  Indeed it was so. The “small affair” crystallized sentiment, welded the nation together as it hadn’t been for years. Benjamin Lundy might warn of a slave-owners’ “plot”—and the die-hard Whigs might grumble—but America as a whole went all-out for Texas. The previously neutral Frankfort Argus hesitated briefly, then kicked over the traces and urged that Santa Anna be taught “the virtue of American rifles and republicanism.” Even the opposition papers were caught in the tide. “We have been opposed to the Texan war from first to last,” admitted the Memphis Enquirer, “but our feelings we cannot suppress—some of our own bosom friends have fallen in the Alamo. We would avenge their death and spill the last drop of our blood upon the altar of Liberty.”

  Crockett’s loss especially won many skeptics over. He had been the darling of the Whigs, the bitter foe of the expansionist Andrew Jackson—and now here he was, martyr for one of Jackson’s pet causes. Thousands of Crockett’s political followers suddenly saw new virtue in Old Hickory’s Texas policy.

  Even more moved was the ordinary citizen. He may have taken no sides in the Texas question, but he certainly adored Davey. It was impossible to dislike this warm, gentle, companionable man. How could anybody want to massacre him? The Natchez Courier perfectly expressed the feelings of most Americans everywhere:

  Poor Davey Crockett!—We lament the fate of the sick Bowie—we feel sad and angry, by turns, when we think of the butchery of the gallant Travis—but there is something in the untimely end of the poor Tennessean that almost wrings a tear from us. It is too bad—by all that is good, it is too bad. The quaint, the laughter-moving, but the fearless upright Crockett, to be butchered by such a wretch as Santa Anna—it is not to be borne!

  In their mounting indignation, the papers outdid each other in calling for vengeance, in appeals for action, in summoning their readers to march to the rescue. “Let your patriotism finish a sentence too sublime for the quill—your rifles publish a theme too exalted for the press!” urged the Louisville Journal. The editor of the Memphis Enquirer quickly topped this—he offered to go himself: “If volunteers are few, our quill shall be placed in the hand of some one of ‘the fair’, and with trusty firelock and bristling bayonet, ourself shall be a host against tyranny—and for Liberty.”

  Few editors went that far. Most preferred to retain the “quill,” but it has rarely been used with more fury. Perhaps the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin achieved the high point with this bit of poetry:

  Vengeance on Santa Anna and his minions,

  Vile scum, up boiled from the infernal regions,

  Dragons of fire on black sulphuros pinions,

  The offscouring baseness of hell’s blackest legions,

  Too filthy far with crawling worms to dwell

  And far too horrid and too base for hell.

  The nation responded with enthusiasm, and it was soon clear that the “small affair” had produced far more tangible results than indignation and angry poetry. The night the news reached Mobile, crowds packed the courthouse, raised nearly $5,000 on the spot. The ladies of little Bardstown, Kentucky, held a fair, collected $516 from their quilts and pies.

  But the real money came from New York. Here a big throng jammed the Masonic Hall on April 26, whooped it up for a great fund-raising drive. Books for the “Texas Loan” opened on the 28th with $100,000 subscribed immediately, another $100,000 the following day.

  Philadelphia, home of five Alamo defenders, seethed with excitement. Donations poured in from a rally at the Tontine, from another at the courthouse … from a flurry of theatrical benefits. The Arch Street Theater staged The Fall of the Alamo or Texas and the Oppressors, then followed it several nights later with a benefit performance of Othello. The curtain descended somewhat incongruously with the cast singing, “All for Texas, or Volunteers for Glory.”

  Representatives direct from Texas seemed to be everywhere—addressing the meetings, stirring up the crowds, enthralling them with new, thrilling stories of the Alamo. Texas Commissioner B. T. Archer harangued the largest citizens’ meeting ever held in Richmond, Virginia. George Childress held the Natchez rally spellbound as he told how Santa Anna was boasting he might march all the way to Washington.

  A roar of rage, and the Natchez citizens passed an immediate resolution, “That the proud dictator Santa Anna, like the fort Alamo, must fall. And the purple current of valiant gore that has moistened the plain in the cause of liberty must be avenged.”

  Next week all Natchez came down to the river to see off its first volunteers. Thirty of the town’s finest men were leaving under Judge John A. Quitman on the steamer Swiss Boy. Young John Ross of the newly christened “Quitman Fencibles” gave the farewell speech, and as the little w
hite steamboat headed downstream, there was not a dry eye on the wharf.

  It was the same everywhere. A huge throng gathered at Cincinnati’s Exchange Hotel to honor 80 volunteers leaving on the steamer Ontario. The lake-front workers of thriving Buffalo cheered on another 80; the sleepy little town of Greensborough, Alabama, came proudly to life one sweltering April noon, as its own little company marched gallantly off.

  Nor was the home front idle. At Lexington, Kentucky, Mary Austin Holley organized a sewing group, and within a month the girls turned out twenty-seven shirts, twelve shirt bosoms, six collars, three roundabouts, and twenty-four pocket handkerchiefs—just the thing, they felt, for the hot, dusty plains.

  What was it that stirred people so? What was there about this “small affair” that made Americans not only angry but wildly anxious to join the fight?

  The massacre of the whole garrison was of course shocking. The facts were bad enough, and an imaginative press was happy to embellish them. The Arkansas Gazette described the Mexican troops as “more brutal than the untutored savages of the desert, bent only upon glutting themselves with the blood of helpless victims.”

  But massacres were an old story on the frontier—Indian raids were a constant terror—and it was not just the killing of men that aroused the nation. It was the killing of these men. They were not remote frontiersmen—they were friends from Natchez, Charleston, Boston, home. With few exceptions, they were not rough adventurers—they were farmers, artisans, professional men, idealists. As the Memphis Enquirer put it, “Some of our own bosom friends have fallen in the Alamo. They were refused quarter and life—young men with whom we have associated—endeared to us by the power of goodness and greatness. We would avenge their death and spend the last drop of our blood upon the altar of liberty.”

  And when the citizens of little Russellville, Kentucky, heard the news, they didn’t regard it as a massacre of Texan patriots; it was the murder of their own Daniel Cloud. The young men of the town solemnly assembled, and in the way of the rimes, recorded their sorrow in the form of some revealing resolutions:

  Resolved, That the many ties of friendship which he twined about our hearts—the high respect we cherished for his talents and enterprise, and our admiration of his amiable deportment, and his virtues, shall embalm his memory in our recollections.

  Resolved, That the early fate which closed his mortal career, has stricken from his profession a scion among the most cultivated and flourishing our country has reared.

  Resolved, That if any reflection can lighten the gloom that is spread in our hearts, it is the conviction that he has nobly bared his bosom as a patriot, and received the fatal shaft in the defense of liberty and humanity.

  This last was important. For above all, these good friends had died for a cause that was sublimely in keeping with the spirit of the times. The Alamo fitted so perfectly with the young republic’s somewhat mauve memories of ’76 … with its heartfelt conviction that America was the true custodian of liberty. The lesson of the Alamo, in fact, seemed lifted right from Byron’s stanzas:

  For freedom’s battle, once begun,

  Bequeath’d by bleeding sire to son,

  Though baffled oft, is ever won.

  So the “small affair” became also a symbol, inspiring men to great deeds by the example it set of courage, determination and sacrifice. And because the symbol matched the era so beautifully, the defenders of the Alamo enjoyed a happy windfall. Unlike many of history’s heroes, they did not have to wait for immortality; they achieved it right away.

  “We shall never cease to celebrate it,” predicted the Telegraph and Texas Register less than three weeks after the siege. “Spirits of the mighty, though fallen! Honors and rest are with ye: the spark of immortality which animated your forms, shall brighten into a flame, and Texas, the whole world, shall hail ye like the demi-Gods of old, as founders of new actions, and as patterns of imitation!”

  Perhaps it was impossible to see such things through the dust and smoke of the Alamo at 6:30 A.M. on the morning of March 6. In any case, Santa Anna devoted himself to poking around the rubble and idly inspecting a few of his victims. He was still at it when a commotion erupted toward the main gateway. The troops had just found six Texans still alive, hidden under some mattresses in one of the barracks rooms.

  Several Mexican soldiers rushed at the group, but General Castrillón intervened. He ordered the soldiers away, and with an almost courtly gesture offered the Texans his protection. He then led them across the littered plaza to Santa Anna and his staff. “Sir,” Castrillón announced, “here are six prisoners I have taken alive; how shall I dispose of them?”

  “Have I not told you before how to dispose of them?” the General exploded. “Why do you bring them to me?”

  Turning on his heel, he impatiently told some passing troops to shoot the men. When the officer in charge hesitated, Santa Anna’s own staff saw an opportunity to show their loyalty. They drew their swords and set upon the prisoners. In the carelessness of their enthusiasm, they almost killed Castrillón too.

  Colonel Pena and Almonte, standing nearby, always remembered the scene—partly because it seemed so unnecessary; partly because they both were told that one of the victims was the famous David Crockett.

  In the Alamo church Mrs. Dickinson sat listening to the occasional cries that still came from outside. As the last firing died away, she and Angelina had been ordered from the sacristy to a little room just right of the main entrance. Soon Mrs. Esparza, her children, and the other women in the church were also brought in. Apparently the Mexicans planned to keep them all here together, until somebody decided what to do with them. As the only “Anglo-American” in the place, Mrs. Dickinson’s prospects seemed anything but bright.

  Suddenly a Mexican officer appeared in the doorway and called in broken English, “Is Mrs. Dickinson here?”

  No answer.

  “Is Mrs. Dickinson here? Speak out! It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “Yes,” she finally answered.

  “If you want to save your life, follow me.”

  He quickly led her outside—how long it seemed since she last saw the sun. Across the yard they went—the officer leading, Mrs. Dickinson carrying Angelina close behind. There was little time to look around, but she couldn’t help seeing many familiar figures crumpled on the ground. Among them was the mutilated form of David Crockett, lying between the church and the long barracks.

  The whole scene was so hideous it should have been etched on her mind forever. Oddly enough—perhaps through some blessing of Fate—she remembered almost nothing. The only thing that stood out in this weirdest of settings was the one thing that looked perfectly normal: Crockett’s coonskin cap lying neatly by his side.

  The rest of the women soon followed. Mrs. Esparza and the others in the church; Mrs. Alsbury, her baby and sister Gertrudis from their shelter by the west wall. Of them all, Mrs. Alsbury was the only one whose heart felt a lift on this heaviest of mornings. She had been found by Manuel Pérez, the brother of her first husband. He lived in town and had come to inspect the ruins.

  “Sister!” he cried, discovering Mrs. Alsbury standing in the debris. “Don’t you know your own brother-in-law?”

  “I’m so upset and distressed that I scarcely know anything.”

  It was the same with them all. In a dazed, frightened group they stepped through the litter to the gate. Numb with fatigue, they were taken to town—Mrs. Alsbury and Gertrudis to their family home, the Navarro place; the others to the big, handsome house of Ramón Musquiz on Main Plaza. Behind them, they left the Mexican Army now happily pillaging the Alamo. It was quite a celebration—at one point the rejoicing troops even killed a stray cat because it was “American.”

  But one American was still very much alive. From the room where he hid after Travis’ death, the Colonel’s slave Joe crouched and waited in trembling uncertainty. The battle was over now—the noise of the firing gone—but there were new, equally
harrowing sounds: the shouts of rampaging Mexicans; the last cry of some dying Texan. It was not very reassuring.

  “Are there any Negroes here?” An officer appeared in the doorway.

  “Yes, here is one,” and Joe emerged slowly from his corner. For a moment it must have seemed like a mistake: one nearby Mexican fired at him, another nicked him with a bayonet. But the officer shoved them aside and took Joe safely away.

  Minutes later, he stood face to face with Santa Anna himself. It turned out there was nothing to fear. His Excellency assured Joe that this was no war against Negro slaves—he would soon be freed. Meanwhile, would he kindly point out the bodies of Bowie and Travis? Joe grimly obliged.

  Satisfied, Santa Anna then assembled all the troops in the plaza and rewarded them with a victory address. No one paid much attention to what he said, but the air was filled with vivas. The men were finally dismissed, and the celebration roared on.

  Off to one side, Captain Sánchez felt in no mood to celebrate. He was depressed, dreadfully depressed by the casualties. Some 400 wounded—and no hospitals, doctors or medicines. Not even any mattresses or blankets. The town supply had been taken over by Santa Anna’s enterprising brother-in-law, Colonel Dromundo. He would make bedding available, if a man could pay the price.

  Santa Anna was much too busy for such details. He had to make his official report. Calling in Ramón Caro and the portable escritoire, he dictated a letter to Secretary Tornel in Mexico City.

  “Victory belongs to the army,” the message began, “which at this very moment, 8 o’clock A.M., achieved a complete and glorious triumph that will render its memory imperishable.” This was, of course, poetic license, for the battle was actually over by 6:30. But Santa Anna loved dramatic effect and could be forgiven a mild exaggeration. Less pardonable were his casualty figures—over 600 Texans killed; “about” 70 Mexicans dead and 300 wounded.

  Anyhow, it would read nicely in Mexico City, and as a final touch he sent along the captured flag of the New Orleans Greys. It was more than a battle trophy; it was dramatic proof that this time he hadn’t beaten just another group of tattered peons—he had crushed the “perfidious foreigners” themselves. There it all was: the American eagle, the call for liberty, the very word “New-Orleans” arrogantly written on the banner. Lest anyone fail to appreciate the full meaning of this flag, he triumphantly concluded, “The inspection of it will show plainly the true intention of the treacherous colonists and of their abettors, who came from the ports of the United States of the North.”