Dark-haired Ben Milam was killed during the attack on San Antonio in December 1835 and buried near La Villita, or the “Little Village,” a collection of Tejano huts (jacales) that stood several hundred yards beyond the Alamo’s south wall. Before his death, he presented a stern warning to Colonel Frank White Johnson. Milam had been granted a large segment of land to establish his own colony, which was annulled in 1832 because of lack of process. He emphasized that the Mexicans’ overall strategic plan was to subdue the Texans not only with Indian allies, but worst of all, “if possible to get the slaves to revolt.” Such a combined threat would leave “a wilderness of Texas, and beggars of its inhabitants.” 113 In 1836, even Austin, in a desperate appeal for United States aid, emphasized that Santa Anna was determined to conquer Texas and inhabit “that country with Indians and negroes.” 114
Nor was this much-feared alliance between slaves and Native Americans an idle threat. In late 1835, the diminutive United States Army engaged in a bitter guerrilla conflict, a virtually unwinnable war of attrition, in the morass of the Florida wilderness. Seminoles and their black allies—Black Seminoles from distinctive African American villages hidden deep in the Florida swamps, and ex-slaves—rose up as one to devastate the vast sugar plantations and liberate gangs of slaves along the St. John’s River in Florida during the Christmas season of 1835. It seemed to be an eerie repeat of the St. Domingue insurrection of 1793. In both cases, the rebellious slaves sought not only to destroy the whites, but also to deliver a crippling blow to the hated institution of slavery.
At that time, Brevet Major Francis Langhorne Dade, of King George County, Virginia, and his command of United States regulars, including many Irish immigrants, were ambushed on a grey, overcast winter day. Amid a semi-tropical forest of tall grass, ancient oaks dripping with lengthy strands of Spanish moss, dense stands of pines and palmettos, the Seminoles struck back with a fury. More than a hundred regulars were wiped out on a bloody Monday, December 28, 1835. The event, which occurred barely two months before the Alamo’s fall, caught the attention of America, sparking the Second Seminole War. Nearly fifty Black Seminoles and former slaves extinguished what little life remained among the piles of wounded white soldiers, hacking away at them with axes and knives in a grim celebration of the one-sided victory.
In this vicious Florida conflict, the combined might of Indian Seminoles, Black Seminoles, and ex-slaves proved more than a match in combat for the best U.S. regular troops and their West Point-trained officers. The Second Seminole War provided a painful lesson that reminded Anglo-Celtic settlers of Texas about the potential enemy in their midst, who already possessed a natural ally in the Plains Indians. 115 Even the Mexican Secretary of War warned the United States of its perpetual Achilles heel: “Is the success of your whole Army, and all your veteran generals, and all your militia calls, and all your mutinous volunteers against a miserable band of five or six hundred invisible Seminole Indians, in your late campaign, an earnest of the energy and vigor [necessary to win a] far otherwise formidable and complicated war? . . . Your Seminole War is already spreading to the Creeks, and, in their march of desolation, they sweep along with them your negro slaves, and put arms into their hands to make common cause with them against you; and how far will it spread, sir, should a Mexican invader, with the torch of liberty in his hand, and the standard of freedom floating over his head, proclaiming emancipation to the slave and revenge to the native Indian, as he goes, invade your soil?” 116
Mexico’s insightful secretary of war indeed had threatened the United States with the nightmare of “a Mexican, an Indian, and a negro war.” 117 Fears were fanned among the Texas settlements when Horatio Allsbery, who visited Mexico, proclaimed a grim warning to the people of Texas in a public letter. Relying on the worst possible interpretation of events, he stated how the Mexicans were determined to march into Texas to “put your slaves free and then loose upon your families.” 118 It is no wonder that the arrival of Santa Anna’s Army on Texas soil sent shock waves across the South. As reported in the pages of the New York Herald in spring 1836: “Santa Anna has proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves in Texas and called the Indians to his aid. This is one of the most alarming aspects for the safety, peace, and happiness of the south and west . . . Santa Anna not only wars against the colonists of Texas, but he has unfurled the flag against the domestic institutions of the South and West.” 119
Sharing the historic fears of the Southern planter class from which he hailed, Sam Houston accused Santa Anna of desiring to arm Texas slaves “for the purpose of creating in the midst of us a servile war.” 120 In February 1836, just before he launched his invasion of Texas, Santa Anna wrote to the Minister of War and Marine in Mexico City of his intentions: “There is a considerable number of slaves in Texas. . . . Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose kind laws granted the liberty of man without distinction of cast[e] or color?” 121
On Texas soil in 1836, Santa Anna was destined to play the role of enlightened liberator to those held in chains during his campaign north of the Rio Grande. In Texas, he did not plan to act as an abolitionist fanatic, but was determined to uphold the anti-slavery laws and principles of the republic by liberating the slaves. Clearly, Santa Anna was in step with the day’s most enlightened thought, and especially with humanitarian thinking in Great Britain. In late 1835, as Santa Anna was laying his well-conceived plans to invade Texas, Frenchman Gustave de Beaumont, the grandson of Marquis de Lafayette of American and French Revolutionary fame, published a harsh critique of American slavery. He denounced the nation’s hypocrisy as a betrayal of its fundamental republican principles that victimized millions of African Americans across the South. 122
The alarmed editor of the New York Herald warned, “Santa Anna has proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves in Texas. . . . Taking this movement in connection [then] we should not be surprised to see the whole South and West pour en masse [to Texas because] Santa Anna not only wars against the colonists of Texas, but he has unfurled the flag against the domestic institutions [slavery] of the South and the West— he throws out menaces upon their safety, which as far exceed the puny efforts of the northern abolitionists as it is possible to conceive . . . Santa Anna has declared war against the inhabitants of the south.” 123 Although the editor was a northerner, he concluded: “If Santa Anna and the Mexicans are allowed to possess Texas, they will cause negro insurrections in the south, and thus become one of the most dangerous neighbors to the Union that ever appeared on our borders.” 124
Texas settlers were also incensed by rumors that Mexican agents were stirring up the Indians, an ancient foe in Texas, seeking their assistance in wiping out a white enemy. A September 14, 1835 letter from Nacogdoches, Texas, told of how “the people of Texas are in a great state of anxiety, in consequence of the despot Santa Anna having excited the Indian tribes to war against the settlers.” 125 A good many tribes, especially the Creeks, or the Muskogee people, had old scores to settle with whites after the slaughters in Alabama, especially at the battle of Horseshoe Bend during the Creek War. A letter in the Philadelphia Gazette published during the early stage of the Texas Revolution expressed the opinion that the Texians were most concerned not about native Texas tribes, but the Creeks because of the cruel legacy of the War of 1812: “The people of Texas have written to President [Andrew] Jackson to arrest the emigration of the Creeks, 3,000 of whom were soon expected, and who, it was feared might be induced to join the other Indians” of Texas in a holy war against the Texians. 126
The hard-fighting General Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irishman who had learned of war’s cruelties as a South Carolina teenager in the American Revolution, was most responsible for the conquest of the Creeks, who made the fatal mistake of allying with the British and standing up to Jackson during the War of 1812. In distinctly CelticGaelic fashion, the Irish-born Jackson had taken the war aggressively to the Creeks, or Redsticks, striking deep into their Alabama heartland. T
he Creeks however only rose up in a “sacred revolt” in 1813–14, when the encroaching whites threatened to forever destroy their way of life and culture. In his typical no-nonsense style, General Jackson unleashed a frontal assault on a strong defensive position to decisively break the back of Creek resistance at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, in a loop of the Tallapoosa River in late March 1814.
There at Tohopeka, Jackson’s troops, including United States regulars and their Indian allies, took more lives of Native Americans, who refused to give up, than in any other battle of the Indian Wars. Indeed, “the butchery was continued for hours [and] None asked for quarter.” Tragically for the Creeks, their ancestral homeland of Alabama, which was admitted to the Union in 1819, became part of a vast cotton kingdom. At the time of the Texas Revolution, the Creeks yet nursed deep grievances against the whites in Texas, including soldiers like Houston who had served under Jackson as a regular, and David Crockett who had served as a volunteer. 127
Not surprisingly, Indian trouble in Texas reached new heights in 1835, and further escalated shortly after October, when the Revolution broke out. “The war with the Indians began in 1835,” wrote frontier ranger George Bernard Erath, who had seen many horrors of Indian warfare. Isolated cabins of Texas settlers and parties of surveyors and migrants were attacked throughout the fall. 128 As in Florida during the Second Seminole War, Indian uprisings sparked slave revolts, with Native Americans and African Americans forming a formidable alliance. One Alamo garrison member destined to die on March 6 had just returned from battling the Seminoles: Ohio-born Robert Musselman, age 31 and a former sergeant of the New Orleans Greys. One indication of exactly how close an Indian and Mexican alliance came to forming in Texas was the headdress of a Comanche chief who met Houston wearing “a Mexican officer’s hat, of which he was quite proud.” 129
Historians have not bothered to look beyond the freedom of a relative handful of men at the Alamo to understand the larger issue of freedom for all people in Texas. While the Texans and United States volunteers at the Alamo in part defended slavery, “Mexican leaders indicated that slavery would be one of the casualties in their conquest of the rebels.” 130 A sense of outrage, if not incredulousness, rose among Texians at the sight of an invading Mexican army that included black soldiers in neat uniforms, dressed in both the Napoleonic style of the regulars and the much plainer militia garb of the conscripts. Although such a sight was almost unbelievable to the average Texian, the tradition of Africans, including slaves, serving faithfully in the military ranks in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spanish Florida, and Louisiana, and of course in Spain was as lengthy as it was distinguished, existing long before the American Revolution.
In contrast to America’s historic reluctance, including that of George Washington, to use soldiers of African descent, Mexico continued the tradition of European nations, particularly Spain in Latin America, of employing black troops. Not surprisingly, then, a number of blacks served as soldados of the Morelos Battalion, which marched under General Cós. Significantly, these men proved to be the most reluctant of any command to surrender in December 1835. The battalion’s members were considered by some Anglo-Celts as “the best soldiers in the [Mexican] Republic” in Texas in 1835 and for good reason. 131
Ironically, what these Anglo-Celts, who were familiar with slavery and generally comfortable around it, could hardly realize that as early as the 1720s, half a century before the American Revolution and at a time when many of their own ancestors lived in squalor in Europe, a black soldier, Juan Blanco, in the service of New Spain was killed by Apaches just northeast of the Alamo. And conveniently, they also forgot about the vital role played by the free black battalion—composed of young men from St. Domingue—at the battle of New Orleans, where white riflemen from Tennessee and Kentucky gained almost sole credit for the success over Wellington’s British veterans, who had just defeated the French in Spain. 132
Even more unsettling for the Anglo-Celts in Texas was the easy, effortless intermixture of diverse peoples of a wide variety of colors and hues. Unlike the English, the Spanish had always been more open-minded and tolerant toward different races, including intermixing. The mixed-race Mexican of part Indian and part Spanish blood, the Mestizo, was a horror to the Anglo-Celts, despite the fact that whites often fathered children with their slaves. To the Anglo-Celtic mind, slavery ensured that a free mixed-race people, children of slave women and whites, remained slaves; the increasing numbers of these “new people” were meant to be forever in bondage. Consequently, the mere threat of a successful slave revolt sparked by a Mexican invasion was seen as a prelude to racial intermixing on a grand scale. In general, those of Anglo-Celtic descent rarely mixed with any other people, be they French, Spanish, Indian, or black. Although both the Anglo-Celts and the Spanish had existed on the North American continent for more than 250 years, intermixing between them was still rare.
Just as Mexicans were outraged by whites who owned slaves, Anglo-Celts were shocked by the racial background of Tejanos like Rafael Morales of San Antonio. The blood of the Comanche, the ancient enemy of the Texas settlers, flowed in Morales’ veins, inherited from both sides of his family. His great-grandfather Ramon Balderas, a Spanish Army Captain, had married a Comanche woman out of love, while stationed on the untamed northern Texas frontier of New Spain. When Santa Anna’s Army invaded Texas and employed some of “the ways of the Comanche,” Morales served as a scout, providing intelligence about the lack of preparedness at the Alamo. 133
As in Rafael Morales’ case, the Tejano people of San Antonio and other parts of Texas consisted of a mixture of Spanish and a variety of Native American peoples: Comanche, Tlaxcalan, and Coahuilatecan. This race mixing had been a regular feature of life in Mexico for nearly three hundred years by the time of the Texas Revolution. The Coahuilatecans were a native people indigenous to both Texas and Coahuila. Tlazcalen warriors, who had allied themselves with Hernando Cortes to defeat the Aztecs, had accompanied Spanish soldiers and missionaries north to Texas to settle along the northern frontier. A mixture of Tlaxcalans, Spanish, and Coahuilatecans, with a lesser blending of African and sprinkling of Aztec, had produced the Tejano people. 134
Anglo-Celts generally looked down upon the Mexican and Tejano people, denouncing the Mexican people simply as a “despicable race” of mulattoes. Long accustomed to the slave regime of Virginia, William Fairfax Gray, who migrated Texas to locate land for opportunistic United States investors, wrote with disgust how the Mexicans were “swarthy, dirty looking people, much resembling . . . mulattoes, but having straight hair.” 135 By 1836, whites in Texas viewed the Texas Revolution almost purely in racial terms as a battle against a “mongrel Spanish-Indian and negro race.” 136 Most galling, if not unbelievable, to Texans was the fact that both blacks and mixed race people enjoyed the status of free citizens in the Republic of Mexico. Such an ideology threatened the entire social order that Texans had been taught since birth. 137
A distinguished African heritage, both slave and free, went all the way back to the beginning of New Spain, or colonial Mexico. In fact, colonial Mexico contained more free blacks than anywhere else in the New World. Slipping away from Spanish masters soon after arrival from Africa, escaped slaves established maroon communities in the remote mountains and swamps of Mexico. By 1810, the number of free blacks, 624,000, equated to ten percent of Mexico’s total population, most of whom were concentrated around Mexico City. Compared to the United States, where color rather than religion mattered the most, a greater acceptance of blacks by both the Church and the Crown was in part a cultural, societal, and military legacy of the wars against the Moors. For centuries, Christian blacks fought beside white Spaniards against Islamic warriors, with religion superseding race.
Along with more liberal attitudes toward race and sex than the British of North America, this greater acceptance of Africans resulted from wider race mixing. Across the breadth of Mexico, Spanish, African, and Indian people mixed as one on a scale u
nlike anything seen in the United States. This development led to the mulatto class of blacks—the largest free class of African descent in all of the Western Hemisphere. Clearly, for African Americans, Mexico and not the United States was the land of freedom and equality. 138 The one exception to the rule was the Mexican province of Texas.
Conversely, like the Spanish (especially the pure bloods, or peninsulars), the Mexican people expressed a xenophobia toward the AngloCelts that was deeply ingrained in their Mediterranean-based culture. To them, these non-refined Protestants, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians, mostly Scotch-Irish from the north, were heretical northamericano barbarians who threatened civilization. 139
The fact that the Anglo-Celts held darker-skinned people in contempt caused widespread underestimation of Mexican fighting men, which helped set the stage for the Alamo fiasco. Unlike the Christians of Spain, the Anglo-Celts of Texas had never learned of the ferocity of the Muslim warriors who had conquered Spain in the name of Islam and successfully defended it for hundreds of years. The fact that so many Moors who had invaded Spain and southern Europe were black created the popular European name for this dark-skinned Islamic people from North Africa, “Blackamoor.” 140
Yet another factor that fueled the Anglo-Celtic revolt against Mexico City was a little-known scheme favored by the Mexican government to establish a free black colony in Texas. Planned by a white Quaker abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, and a former Mexican Army officer, who was a mulatto, this colony was to be composed of free blacks from the United States. 141 To the Anglo-Celtic mind, free blacks would further threaten the stability of slavery in Texas, and possibly incite a slave revolt.
Texans, like most Southerners, most of all detested abolitionists, especially if they were dressed in Mexican Army uniforms and armed to the teeth. Clearly, in all forms, the issue of slavery and the abolitionist views of Mexican political and military leaders, became “a major source of discontent.” 142 The “battle” of the Alamo would never have been fought without the unbridgeable gulf in the way the issue was perceived by Anglo-Celts and the Mexican people. Anglo-Celts viewed Mexicans as a natural, almost inevitable enemy because of their race, just as Native Americans had been for generations, and as African Americans would be if they rose up in revolt. In their eyes, they therefore faced a potential triple threat if these three groups united against them. Clearly, the outnumbered Texians could never successfully resist the combined might of Mexicans, Native Americans, and Africans. 143
Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth Page 8