Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  Autry wasn’t the only newly arrived American who linked boundless prosperity with vast Texas acreage and cotton cultivation. Daniel William Cloud, a 24-year-old Kentuckian who had failed to find meaningful work as a lawyer in St. Louis, was then unable to secure sufficient farming land, and who was likewise to be killed at the Alamo, served Texas as a lowly enlisted man. But the young man from the Kentucky Bluegrass region already felt fabulously wealthy with the knowledge that, as he penned in a letter, “If we succeed, the country is ours. It is immense in extent, and fertile in its soil, and will amply reward all our toil.” 40

  The liberal land bounties only grew larger as the Texas Revolution lengthened, ensuring that the irresistible appeal to serve Texas consumed citizens all across the United States. Originally, each volunteer in the People’s Army of Texas was entitled to 640 acres. But after March 2, 1836, unknown to the Alamo defenders, this amount was increased. After that date, each Texas soldier would gain an entire league of land, or 4,428 acres and one labor, or 177 acres, if he settled his family in Texas. Even a single man was entitled to 1,476 acres. 41

  Clearly, the powerful lust for land was a principal, if not the most dominant, motivation for United States citizens to cast their fates with the Texas Revolutionary Army. Having placed their high-stakes bet, and having made the gamble with their lives, Alamo garrison members served in large part because they possessed such a sizeable stake in one of the richest natural empires on the North American continent. In an agrarian society where status, wealth, and class were linked directly to the acreage one owned, such easy availability to thousands of prime Texas acres could not only mean a fortune for the Alamo men and their families, but also for future generations to come. Never before in the nation’s history had Americans been offered such vast land-holdings for military service, even as a lowly private.

  But the gamble made by these ambitious young men was that they might well die at obscure places with Hispanic names hundreds of miles from home. One such remote location had been bestowed the Spanish name for a thick stand of cottonwood trees, nourished by the warm rivers of the San Antonio River, that grew beside the old Spanish mission at San Antonio—the Alamo. Overall, strange twists of fate, fortunes, and tangled destinies brought most of the men who would die at the Alamo to Texas. Losing a hardscrabble Kentucky, Virginia, or Missouri farm for failure to pay debts or taxes; repeated crop failures due to bad weather; poor yields because of infertile, badly eroded soil; the collapse of crop prices; and an overall declining market for the average yeoman farmer during the American nation’s first great depression motivated the United States volunteers to risk their lives at the Alamo. 42

  From the beginning to end, the real bone of contention in the Texas Revolution was about possession of the land. The territory consisted of more than 267,000 square miles. Ironically, the recent volunteers from the United States felt a greater sense of entitlement to all of Texas than the “Old Texian” colonists, who had been granted only a limited number of acres in east Texas. American citizens who joined the Texas Revolution, including many of the Alamo defenders, already sincerely believed that Texas, Mexico’s northeastern frontier, was already part of the United States.

  A common view existed across the United States that Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon included Texas, all the way south to the Rio Grande River. Because the southwest boundaries of the Louisiana territory was “vague,” to say the least, everexpansionist minded Jefferson had long insisted that the Rio Grande was its true southern boundary, while Spain claimed the Sabine River, or Louisiana’s western border. John Quincy Adams, however, agreed to Spain’s claim as a trade-off for its 1819 cession of Florida to the United States, and for Spain’s claim to the Oregon territory. But the average American citizen believed that Texas, all the way to the Rio Grande, rightfully belonged to the United States. The many settlers in Texas, especially the late U.S. arrivals, felt that they possessed both a natural and a moral right to Mexico’s fertile lands. 43

  With Spanish and then Mexican approval, the dream of hard-luck Missourian Moses Austin, father of Stephen Austin, who took over the ambitious colonization project after Moses’ death, had become a reality by the early 1830s. Austin’s ambition was to establish an immense empire in Spanish Texas, comparable in prosperity to nearby Louisiana. In the beginning, the elder Austin had planned to lay out a new town at the mouth of the Colorado River, which he hoped would eventually rival bustling New Orleans.

  As in Louisiana, the new western empire envisioned by Austin called for thousands of slaves. Texas could best prosper from the development of agricultural estates comparable to the vast cotton and sugar cane plantations of Louisiana, which had been modeled after the highly profitable plantations on the French islands of the Caribbean. The most prosperous of all the French islands in the West Indies during most of the 18th century had been St. Domingue, or today’s Haiti—minus the massive 1791 slave revolt that brought an end to French dominion, it provided a proven formula for Texas, but with cotton replacing sugar cane.

  From the beginning, Austin’s colony offered a rare opportunity for Americans to bring large numbers of slaves to cheap virgin lands. At this time, acreage in the United States, for sale privately or by the government, was simply too expensive for the average man, especially the lower classes. In stark contrast, before Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, the Spanish government simply “gave away rather than selling its open land to settlers acceptable to it.” 44

  Left both undeveloped and under-populated by first Spain and then Mexico, Texas land seemed endless, boundless, and with unlimited potential. No one had seen anything as expansive yet empty as Texas, unless it was the ocean itself. Not only fertile and virgin, the land was also breathtakingly beautiful. More than a dozen rivers, smaller than those east of the Mississippi Valley, ran roughly parallel from northwest to southeast, flowing toward the Gulf of Mexico. The rolling hills of east Texas, the rich, low-lying coastal plain, and the relatively light flow of river water meant little erosion and flooding. The best soils hence were not washed away as they were along the Mississippi, making Texas river valleys ideal for agricultural production. Consequently, the river bottomlands remained amazingly fertile; combined with an ideal climate and sufficient labor, the situation fairly beckoned large-scale cultivation.

  The fertile gulf coastal plain, the heartland of Tejano settlement with its dominant ranching economy, lay to the east and south. This land became more arid farther south toward the Rio Grande (or the Rio del Norte to the Spanish), and was more like northern Mexico than east Texas. The most prominent east Texas rivers were the Brazos (the largest in the state), the Trinity, Red, Colorado, Rio Grande, and Sabine Rivers. The generally flat or gently rolling land, carpets of virgin hardwood forests, and soil fertility of the gulf coastal plain was comparable to Louisiana and Mississippi, where the cotton culture dominated.

  Of the major Texas rivers flowing gently into the gulf’s warm waters, the Rio Grande was the southernmost. This river spawned from the snow-capped mountains around the Continental Divide in southern Colorado, and at 2,000 miles was the longest watercourse in Texas. Three distinct and vibrant civilizations—Native American, Spanish, and Mexican—had developed along this historic river and mixed into one people, although in the process they had often fought each other and died for possession of the land they loved. 45

  A prophetic Stephen Austin early predicted an undeniable truth: “Nature seems to have formed Texas for a great agricultural, grazing, manufacturing, and commercial country.” 46 Dr. John Sibley at Natchitoches, Louisiana, just east of the Sabine, agreed with Austin’s heady vision of future possibilities. Marveling at what he had seen in Texas, Dr. Sibley wrote with passion: “The Country is Larger than all France & has a finer Climate & the soil is as rich as any & can support a great population.” 47 As reported in the New-Orleans Mercantile Advertiser, the prosperity of the Austin Colony and east Texas was based upon the “rivers
running through the colony [and] the soil of the margins of the Colorado and Brazos is generally alluvial, and covered with timber . . . and is to the planters considered equal to any soil in the world for the cultivation of cotton and sugar.” 48

  For the men of the Alamo, possession of this land was well worth risking one’s life, regardless of its rightful ownership by the Republic of Mexico. More than any other crop, cotton was ideal for the thick soils of the fertile Blackland Prairie, where the annual rainfall and the hot summers were especially similar to the Black Belt of Alabama. 49 Another incredibly fertile region of east Texas was in the area just west of the Sabine River around Nacogdoches and San Augustine. This area was known was the Red Lands, named after the region’s lush red soil, which was ideal for high crop yields. Anglo-Celtic settlers of this distinct area were known as the “Red Landers,” a name they embraced with provincial pride. 50

  By the early 1830s, Texas had caught the imagination of an entire generation of Americans. For thousands of young men and their families, this promise of regeneration and the prospect of future fortunes made severing ties with the United States relatively easy. The lure of obtaining wealth in Texas was stronger than the ancestral bonds to old family farms carved out of the Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina wilderness by ancestors who had fought at Cowpens and Kings Mountain—like David Crockett’s namesake grandfather—during the American Revolution. Land had always been the great catalyst that pushed restless Americans westward; migrating much like their forefathers, those who went to Texas posted notes or carved the letters G.T.T.—Gone to Texas—on cabin doors throughout the 1820s and early 1830s.

  To understand why so many Texas revolutionaries fought on behalf of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, it is first necessary to examine the complex dynamics of both land and slavery and their intertwined relationship and synergies. The Constitution of 1824 was established only three years after Mexico achieved its hard-won independence from Spain after an 11-year struggle, breaking from its Spanish centralist past. But why were so many American volunteers in Texas willing to fight for the Mexican Constitution instead of independence, if they were in fact battling for the principles of liberty and freedom during the Texas Revolution as so commonly believed?

  For the most part, to the average American and Texas volunteer in the ranks, this conflict was primarily about land ownership, but it was also about the right to possess slaves. Modeled after the United States Constitution, the Mexican Constitution of 1824 safeguarded both land ownership and slavery. After winning its independence, Mexico naturally looked to the United States, not to Spain, as the best example of representative government. For the nationalists, Mexico’s future lay in the promise of New World liberalism, not the feudal Old World past. 51

  Within the context of slavery, the violent beginning of the Texas Revolution was not at Gonzales, Texas, during the “Lexington of the Texas Revolution” in early October 1835; instead the first battle line was drawn in the fight led by William Barret Travis years earlier against Colonel Juan (or John) Davis Bradburn, an abolitionist serving Mexico. Bradburn was an enlightened liberal, having fought in the wars for Mexican independence from Spain. Ironically, the native Kentuckian was an active abolitionist in the service of an anti-slave nation in a Texas dominated by slavery.

  Fueling the worst Anglo-Celt fears, he correctly informed Texas slaves that Mexico, rather than the United States, now “knew no slavery” and was the true land of the free. Therefore, he allowed two escaped slaves, who appeared in August 1831 seeking asylum, to join his Anáhuac military garrison, after having recently established both the town and fort on Galveston Bay. Here in east Texas, near the future site of the city of Houston, men of African descent became soldiers for the Republic of Mexico. Bradburn, who with his troops founded Anáhuac to stop slave smuggling along the coast, engendered the early wrath of the American colonists, stirring up this most sensitive issue and guaranteeing that open revolt was only a matter of time. Of this Bradburn was well aware. The Texas colonists, he wrote, “have only observed Anglo-American laws” and not those of Mexico. 52

  To this day in Alamo and Texas Revolution mythology, Bradburn has been portrayed as an arch-villain second only to Santa Anna. Bradburn served in the Louisiana Militia during the War of 1812 and was present at the battle of New Orleans, and then commanded the “American Division” of filibusters who invaded the Mexican coast to be defeated by the Spanish, but he has since been viewed as a traitor in the tradition of Benedict Arnold. In truth, Bradburn, born in Richmond, Virginia in 1787, was not unlike one of the heroes of America’s War of 1812, William Hull, who as Governor of the Michigan Territory, refused to return slaves who had fled Canadian owners. Hull furthermore viewed men and women of African descent as United States citizens, just as Bradburn considered runaways deserving of freedom. 53

  DEEP CELTIC-GAELIC ROOTS

  The Texas Revolution was about the clash of different races—Mexican, Tejano, African American, and Anglo-Celtic—as much as it was about land. The settlement of Texas and the Texas Revolution had deep CelticGaelic, or Irish, antecedents, in terms of both the ancestry of its principle migrants and its dominant culture. The Mexican republican government had in part allowed the establishment of the Austin Colony to serve as a buffer against the greatest menace to the development of Texas for three hundred years, marauding Indians. Now confronting this threat, most new settlers who migrated to Texas were Scotch-Irish, the latest wave in the western Scotch-Irish migration that had begun before the American Revolution.

  Two primarily Catholic Irish colonies, one at San Patricio and the other at Refugio, were established by Mexico to contain the ever-growing Anglo-Celtic threat by way of “countercolonizing.” Once again Irish Catholics were pitted against Protestant Scotch-Irish, at least potentially, as they had been for hundreds of years in northern Ireland. Ironically, in this regard, Mexico merely repeated what the English government had done in establishing the Ulster Plantation system of lowland Scottish settlers—the Scotch-Irish—to counter the Irish Catholic, or native, influence in the seventeenth century.

  Mexico City’s timely development of a strategic plan based upon the fighting prowess of the always-cantankerous Scotch-Irish was not only nothing new, it was a familiar remedy. Born near Belfast in northern Ireland, James Logan had deliberately settled the western Pennsylvania frontier during the colonial period with hardy Scotch-Irish, his “brave fellow countrymen,” because he knew how tenaciously they had fought the native Irish people, or Catholics, in northern Ireland to claim the land of Ulster Province as their own. Ever-combative, the Scotch-Irish were specifically chosen to serve as the best protective buffer to ensure that Philadelphia and other Pennsylvania communities farther east would be secure from the Indian threat. 54 In much the same way, Mexico City and also the Tejanos understood that Anglo-Celtic settlers were simply the “most efficient, quick, and economical means to destroy the Indians,” the ancient enemy of both the Mexican and Tejano people. 55

  In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning historian Paul Horgan, the wrong-headed government decision to settle Texas with immigrants from the United States “released forces that must clash in always increasing energy until in the end they would meet in bloody battle,” during both the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. Most of all, the conflict between Mexico and Texas was inevitable because the Anglo-Celtics brought to Texas the cultural baggage that was most guaranteed to lead to open warfare: the institution of slavery. 56 This process began once the Appalachian barrier was breached, and settlers pouring from the eastern seaboard encountered no more huge natural obstacles to further movement westward. Emphasizing the impact of the historic Anglo-Celtic migration, historian T. R. Fehrenbach concluded that when Kentucky became a state in 1792, “the doom of Hispanic empire on the continent [including the fate of Texas] was sealed.” 57

  Ironically, the initial success of Austin’s colonizing enterprise only caused Mexico to issue additional land gra
nts for colonization along the same liberal lines as the Austin grant. Land was free for settlers of the Austin colony; he waived the cost of around 6 cents per acre, while public lands in the United States cost around $1.25 per acre. This offer came at a time when many common people in the South could barely make a living especially in North Carolina and Virginia, where the soil had become infertile and eroded due to over-extensive tobacco cultivation. 58 By 1829, thanks to the prosperity enjoyed by the Austin Colony, the price of land had gone up, but it was still incredibly cheap.

  Aside from official land grants issued by Mexico, the heavy flow of illegal migration from the United States to Texas made conflict all but inevitable. An influx of thousands of illegal aliens from the United States took possession of Texas lands as squatters without paying a cent and without Mexico’s consent. Free Texas land for squatters was available at a time when land along the Mississippi River’s rich alluvium plain were selling for around $35.00–$40.00 per acre. 59 The disparity between the costs per acre of prime farming land versus uncleared forested land was wide, but American citizens securing Texas land were attracted by the fact that large land-holds for both settlement and military service, at least in theory, included a good many prime acres along creeks or rivers. This meant that a settler could obtain not only a large number of acres that he could not afford in the United States, but also some of the most fertile acres, which were too expensive for the average man east of the Sabine.