Everything That Went Wrong for The Alamo to Happen

Thank you my friend LTC Greg Henning for posting the documentary remember the Alamo.

In addition to remember the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad resulted in the rallying cry of remember the Alamo and remember Goliad.

THE ALAMO: THE REAL STORY (WILD WEST HISTORY DOCUMENTARY)
On March 6, 1836 the 13-day siege of the Alamo ended. Among the dead were three men destined to become martyrs and heroes: David Crockett, James Bowie and William B. Travis. Cries of Remember the Alamo! would eventually fuel an American victory over Mexico. The Alamo and its defenders grew into enduring symbols of courage and sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds.

Controversy has always been part of the history and legend of the Alamo. Whether they hold traditional or revisionist views, people are passionate about their opinions.

~Were Crockett, Travis and Bowie a "Holy Trinity" or less than perfect human beings?
~Why were Tejanos like Juan Seguin, who fought for Texas liberty alongside the Anglos, virtually ignored in history books until recently?
~How did Crockett die?
~Did Travis draw a line in the sand?
~How many defenders were really there, and how many attackers?
~Did everyone die, or were there survivors?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oueKEtP1pl8


Images:
1. The Fall of the Alamo by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk shows folk hero Davy Crockett shortly before being killed by Mexican soldiers
2. Painting by Percy Moran, 1912, reflects the intensity of the battle of the Alamo.
3. A photo-illustration of a group of Mexican soldiers gathered around a captured Texian cannon after the fall of the Alamo, March 6th, 1836
4. La Matanza Inmortal. An original sepia illustration depicting the immediate aftermath of the battle of the Alamo, March 6th, 1836.


Background from
1. sanantonioreport.org/remember-the-alamo-for-what-it-really-represents
2. eyewitnesstohistory.com/alamo.htm

1. Background from {[ https://sanantonioreport.org/remember-the-alamo-for-what-it-really-represents/]}
Remember the Alamo for What it Really Represents
by Ruben Cordova March 5, 2020

In popular culture, the Alamo, a Spanish mission in San Antonio, is regarded as an untrammeled symbol of freedom. Referred to as the “cradle of Texas liberty,” in Texas, devotion to it is fervent. Its name is invoked incessantly: San Antonio is referred to as “the Alamo City” and corporations appropriate the Alamo name and image.
The “defenders of the Alamo,” the men who died there at the hands of the Mexican army in 1836, are regarded as heroic martyrs who valued liberty more than life, and who paid the supreme price on behalf of Texas. They were quickly compared to the 300 Spartans, whose self-sacrifice allegedly saved Greece by slowing the advance of a mighty Persian army. But their alleged martial prowess (most of them did not have much training as soldiers) and the military significance of the 1836 battle (which was virtually nil) were wildly exaggerated.
They did not venture to the Alamo for the purpose of dying there, they were willing to surrender, and they did not fight to the death in a fabled “last stand.” Their mixed motives for fighting against Mexico were suppressed, hidden under the fig leaf of liberty. In the process, the primary reasons for the revolt against Mexico in 1835-36 and the Mexican-American War in 1846-48 have been obscured, as has the overriding significance of the Alamo as a symbol.
The March 6, 1836 Battle of the Alamo likely lasted less than an hour. It would have been even shorter had general Santa Anna waited for the arrival of his largest artillery pieces. It was actually the second battle of the Alamo, since the makeshift fortress had to be captured by the Texans before it could be “defended” by them. In December of 1835, a force composed of rebels, insurgent squatters, and mercenaries from the U.S. took San Antonio and the Alamo. Texas independence was not declared until March 2, 1836, a fact unknown to either side at the Alamo on March 6. Thus the Alamo “defenders” in the 1836 battle could only claim possession of it for less than three months – and only in an unofficial capacity.
Santa Anna executed the few combatants that surrendered inside the Alamo. It is less frequently admitted that a substantial portion of Alamo “defenders” escaped outside the mission’s walls. Santa Anna had them killed as well. Under the Tornel Decree of 1835, armed insurgents who were not part of a declared war between nations were regarded as pirates (they would be terrorists in contemporary parlance). Mexican historian Josefina Zoraida Vázquez terms the decree “a desperate attempt to maintain control” of Mexico’s territory.
How did this situation arise? Historian Andrew J. Torget has demonstrated that the dramatic expansion of cotton production in the Southeastern U.S. caused enormous demand for draft animals. Native American tribes met this demand by looting Spanish and (after independence in 1821) Mexican horses and mules, which they exchanged with traders for advanced rifles. With this advanced weaponry, the Comanches in particular imperiled Spanish/Mexican settlements in what is now Texas. Thus the effects of slavery in the U.S. indirectly destabilized Spain’s and Mexico’s fragile foothold on this territory, creating the opportunity for Anglo-American colonization on very generous terms.
Steven F. Austin, the most important impresario (land agent), chose the finest land in what is now Southeastern Texas and modeled his settlements on Southern slave states. He incentivized slavery by making additional land available for each enslaved person that was brought into Texas. Mexico provided little oversight, though tensions soon developed over the issue of slavery. Mexico imposed several measures to end or limit slavery, and the Anglo-American colonists skillfully found ways to amend, delay, or defy them.
But no one doubted that slavery was a temporary expedient that Mexico would abolish unequivocally. Alarmed by the volume of Anglo-American immigration, Mexico attempted to end it in 1830. But by 1834, that number had doubled from 10,000 to 21,000. Unauthorized immigrants, some of them in the form of organized militias recruited within slave states in blatant violation of the Neutrality Act, played a significant role in the revolt that broke out in 1835. Without the New Orleans Greys, who clamored for battle, San Antonio and the Alamo would not have fallen in late 1835.
The conjunction of slavery interests in the U.S., or “slavocracy,” which included the brilliant and devious President Andrew Jackson, agitated incessantly – though sometimes surreptitiously – for the spread of slavery. Slavery interests openly – though often unofficially, to avoid violating treaties that could bring European intervention – supported the “independence” of Texas. The slavocracy funded and equipped an invading army, hoping to ultimately create one or more slave states out of Mexican territory. The men who fought against Mexico were promised free land. Most of the combatants were relatively recent arrivals, as were most of the delegates to the convention where independence was declared on March 2, 1836.
Speculation in Mexican land had become rampant, and it was not confined to the Southern U.S. But the scripts they traded only had value if the land could be wrenched from Mexico with finality. Cotton was booming. Slavery enabled enormous profits. Most of the official Anglo-American colonists and the undocumented immigrants came from the Southern U.S. They were comfortable with – and often passionately dedicated to – the white supremacist ideology that prevailed in slave states. A Texan’s letter printed in the New Orleans Bee in 1834 decried “degraded” Mexicans as products of racial pollution: “the unfortunate race of Spaniard, Indian and African, is so blended that the worst qualities of each predominate.”
All of the combatants inside the Alamo during the 1836 battle knew that they were fighting for the institution of slavery, as surely as they knew they were fighting for Mexican land. James Bowie, a slave trader and smuggler who William C. Davis says was “easily the largest land swindler of his era,” had arrived in Texas in 1830 with 109 enslaved people. Bowie married well and quickly amassed claims on enormous amounts of Mexican land. His desire to keep Texan forces in San Antonio prevailed, though it was distant from the precious East Texas cotton fields, and of much less strategic value than other garrisons. General Sam Houston thought the Alamo should have been blown up and abandoned. Not surprisingly, the Alamo garrison received few reinforcements or supplies from their rebel compatriots.
After his victory at the Alamo, Santa Anna foolishly separated himself from his more capable generals and the forces under his command were trapped and routed at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. Santa Anna’s capture put an end to fighting, inaugurating the slavery-based Republic of Texas, which Torget calls a “dress-rehearsal” for the Confederate States of America.

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Benjamin F. Lundy, a Quaker abolitionist who hoped to establish a colony of free Blacks, warned in 1836 that a Texan victory would lead to annexation and succession, because the slave states would “confederate a new and distinct slaveholding republic, in opposition to the whole free republic of the North.” He prophesied a sanguinary toll: “blood will flow in torrents,” drenching the land in “crimson gore.” The 1845 annexation of Texas sparked the Mexican-American War, engineered by President James K. Polk, who was Jackson’s protégé. It resulted in the seizure of half of Mexico. The manner of the Texas annexation (without fixed boundaries, in order to provoke a larger war of conquest) and disagreements over where slavery would spread in new territories were important causes of the U.S. Civil War.
Before he learned of the victory at San Jacinto, Stephen F. Austin, in a May 4, 1836 letter to Senator L. F. Linn of Missouri, described the war as one “waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.” Austin says he labored “like a slave to Americanize Texas” to fashion “a barrier of safety to the southwestern frontier.”
The Texan soldiers who were killed at the Alamo in 1836 were aggrandized in a hagiographic manner more appropriate to a state religion than a state history. This type of memorialization celebrated racial superiority and contributed to the development of a racialized Anglo-Saxonism that prized dominance. The term Manifest Destiny originated in a discussion of the 1845 annexation of Texas, though Jeff Long calls the March 6, 1836 battle at the Alamo its “inaugural moment.”

2. Background from { http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/alamo.htm]}

"Remember the Alamo!," 1836
In 1835, a general uprising throughout Mexico sought to overthrow the dictatorial reign of President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. American citizens who had settled in the Mexican province of Texas joined the uprising and successfully forced the Mexican military across the Rio Grande River. The objective of these Texan revolutionaries soon changed from modifying the dictatorial rule of General Santa Anna to establishing an independent state of Texas.

In response, General Santa Anna led his re-organized army back across the Rio Grande River to subdue the insurgents. He instructed his troops to immediately execute any foreign fighters they encountered. Santa Anna marched his force to the Alamo, an abandoned Spanish mission, located in what is now San Antonio. It had been established in 1724 to convert the local natives to Christianity. Here, a defending force estimated at between 180 and 260 awaited their arrival. Led by William B. Travis their number included two legendary figures in American history, Davy Crockett and James Bowie. The men within the Alamo were under no illusion. They knew that their defense could not succeed without the quick appearance of reinforcements.
Arriving on February 23, 1836, Santa Anna’s troops surrounded the Alamo, laying siege to its defenders. The Mexican Army began to bombard the former mission with cannon shot in an effort to systematically reduce its protective walls to rubble. The assault began in earnest during the early morning hours of March 6 as Mexican soldiers swarmed the walls of the fortress. The Alamo defenders successfully repulsed two attacks but were overwhelmed by the third. The combat was characterized by room-to-room fighting in which all but a handful of the defenders were killed. The ferocity of their defense is underscored by the fact that it resulted in the death of an estimated 600 Mexicans.

"Remember the Alamo!" became a rallying cry that swelled the ranks of the Texian Army led by General Sam Houston. On April 21, this force attacked the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto, captured General Santa Anna and forced him to lead his troops back across the Rio Grande. The independence of Texas was assured.
"At last they were all destroyed by grape, musket shot and the bayonet."
The following account is provided by a member of Santa Anna's army that besieged the Alamo. We join his story on the evening just before the attack:
"On this same evening, a little before nightfall, it is said that Barret Travis, commander of the enemy, had offered to the general-in-chief, by a woman messenger, to surrender his arms and the fort with all the materials upon the sole condition that his own life and the lives of his men be spared. But the answer was that they must surrender at discretion, without any guarantee, even of life, which traitors did not deserve. It is evident, that after such an answer, they all prepared to sell their lives as dearly as possible. Consequently, they exercised the greatest vigilance day and night to avoid surprise.
On the morning of March 6, the Mexican troops were stationed at 4 o'clock, A.M., in accord with Santa Anna's instructions. The artillery, as appears from these same instructions, was to remain inactive, as it received no order; and furthermore, darkness and the disposition made of the troops which were to attack the four fronts at the same time, prevented its firing without mowing down our own ranks. Thus the enemy was not to suffer from our artillery during the attack. Their own artillery was in readiness. At the sound of the bugle they could no longer doubt that the time had come for them to conquer or to die. Had they still doubted, the imprudent shouts for Santa Anna given by our columns of attack must have opened their eyes.

As soon as our troops were in sight, a shower of grape and musket balls was poured upon them from the fort, the garrison of which at the sound of the bugle, had rushed to arms and to their posts. The three columns that attacked the west, the north, and the east fronts, fell back, or rather, wavered at the first discharge from the enemy, but the example and the efforts of the officers soon caused them to return to the attack. The columns of the western and eastern attacks, meeting with some difficulties in reaching the tops of the small houses which formed the walls of the fort, did, by a simultaneous movement to the right and to left, swing northward till the three columns formed one dense mass, which under the guidance of their officers, endeavored to climb the parapet on that side.

This obstacle was at length overcome, the gallant General Juan V Amador being among the foremost. Meantime the column attacking the southern front under Colonels Jose Vicente Minon and Jose Morales, availing themselves of a shelter, formed by some stone houses near the western salient of that front, boldly took the guns defending it, and penetrated through the embrasures into the square formed by the barracks. There they assisted General Amador, who having captured the enemy's pieces turned them against the doors of the interior houses where the rebels had sought shelter, and from which they fired upon our men in the act of jumping down onto the square or court of the fort. At last they were all destroyed by grape, musket shot and the bayonet.
Our loss was very heavy. Colonel Francisco Duque was mortally wounded at the very beginning, as he lay dying on the ground where he was being trampled by his own men, he still ordered them on to the slaughter. This attack was extremely injudicious and in opposition to military rules, for our own men were exposed not only to the fire of the enemy but also to that of our own columns attacking the other fronts; and our soldiers being formed in close columns, all shots that were aimed too low, struck the backs of our foremost men. The greatest number of our casualties took place in that manner; it may even be affirmed that not one fourth of our wounded were struck by the enemy's fire, because their cannon, owing to their elevated position, could not be sufficiently lowered to injure our troops after they had reached the foot of the walls. Nor could the defenders use their muskets with accuracy, because the wall having no inner banquette, they had, in order to deliver their fire, to stand on top where they could not live one second.
The official list of casualties, made by General Juan de Andrade, shows: officers 8 killed, 18 wounded; enlisted men 52 killed, 233 wounded. Total 311 killed and wounded. A great many of the wounded died for want of medical attention, beds, shelter, and surgical instruments.
The whole garrison were [sic] killed except an old woman and a negro slave for whom the soldiers felt compassion, knowing that they had remained from compulsion alone. There were 150 volunteers, 32 citizens of Gonzales who had introduced themselves into the fort the night previous to the storming, and about 20 citizens or merchants of Bexar."
References:
Moquin, Wayne, Charles Van Doren (eds.) A Documentary History of the Mexican Americans (1971); Long, Jeff Duel of Eagles: the Mexican and U.S. fight for the Alamo (1990)."

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Where there's a will, there's a way.

Dearest Greg, I thank you; for the great honor you have bestowed upon me; by mentioning my name first. LTC Greg Henning