Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (24 page)

Who were these young men and boys from the Republic of Mexico who fought at the Alamo, and what were their motivations? Were these soldados the so-called “convict” troops, so commonly disparaged in American accounts? Instead of convicts, a little more than half of Santa Anna’s army consisted of active militia and presidio troops, while the rest were regular army, or “permanente” units.

Among the dependable officers of the San Luís Potosí Battalion were junior leaders like Lieutenant Irineo Guerrero. This promising young officer hailed from the small village of San Miguelito, Mexico. Lieutenant Guerrero was married to Hermengilda Vasques, but his wife would never see him again once he marched away from home with his finely uniformed unit. Lieutenant Guerrero was destined to meet his death at the Alamo. A brother officer of the San Luís Potosí Battalion, Second Lieutenant Antonio Carricante, would also be cut down on March 6, 1836.
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Much of Santa Anna’s Army of Operations consisted of recruits who had been either impressed or drafted in Mexico along the army’s route north, as ordered by the commander-in-chief. One of these men was Felix Nunez, who wrote: “I was forcibly conscripted in 1835 in the state of Guadalajara, Mexico [when] I was then 32 years of age.”
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In the enlisted ranks of the San Luís Potosí Battalion were reliable, noncommissioned officers like Sergeant Anastacio Velaquer. Like Lieutenants Guerrero and Carricante, this tough sergeant inspired the battalion’s enlisted men, including Francisco Ordas, Victoriano Tenerio, German Sánchez, Leonardo Ramos, Victoriano Perez, and Correlio Rosales. All of these men would meet their maker at the Alamo since, as fate would have it, the San Luís Potosí Battalion was destined to suffer more fatalities in the battle than any other Mexican unit.
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Also shattering the common Anglo stereotype of the “convict” soldado was Santiago Rabia, who served in the Tampico Cavalry Regiment of lancers. Unlike the Alamo defenders, the blond, blue-eyed Rabia was a professional soldier, well educated, and knowledgeable in the art of war. Looking as American as the Alamo’s defenders, except for his resplendent Mexican uniform, Rabia was born in Spain in 1804. There, in the snow-capped Pyrenees of northern Spain, his Basque family had originally prepared him for the priesthood, but a far different destiny lay in store for the handsome young man of promise.

At age ten, his parents died. Rabia then migrated to the New World for a new start, just like so many Alamo men, after both personal and professional misfortune had changed their lives. Rabia gained entry into a military school in Mexico City, and upon graduation became an officer. Now his strange destiny took Rabia ever-farther north toward the Alamo and a greater distance from his home.
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More typically, soldiers in Santa Anna’s Army had been impressed into service. Eager to secure cannon fodder for his war machine, Santa Anna’s impressment gangs took single males over the age of fifteen from each family whenever possible, especially in large towns such as Saltillo. Like British naval impressment crews of the day, Mexican army recruiters grabbed whoever they could get their hands on.
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Convicts were not necessary to fight this war. Most of all, the revolt in Texas had united and rallied the Mexican nation like no other event in its recent turbulent history. In a December 30, 1835 notice, General Jose Antonio Fernandez implored that: “Everyone needs to cooperate for the support and integrity of the territory of the Republic that is being threaten[ed] by the ungrateful Colonists of Texas.”
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However, Fernandez hardly needed to exaggerate the threat to the Mexican nation at this time. Many Mexican soldiers marched into Texas fueled by heady idealism. Mexican officers especially viewed service in Texas against the revolutionaries north of the Rio Grande as a noble crusade. With pride, Francisco Paredas y Arrillaga wrote to the Mexican Minister of War, Jose M. Tornel, how the Mexican troops that he now had “the honor to command, burn with desires to take some part in the glories of the Fatherland” during the Texas Campaign.
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Most important, contrary to Anglo-Celtic stereotypes of a mercenary, convict, and corrupt soldiery, the Mexican army, except perhaps some of those troops conscripted or impressed into service, was united solidly behind Santa Anna. Not only the republic’s president, he was seen as Mexico’s savior. Both enlisted men and officers believed that Santa Anna was just the man who could continue Mexico’s winning tradition against foreigners. After all, he had first won fame as the governor of the Province of Vera Cruz, when he repulsed Spain’s bid to reclaim her former possession by force. After Spanish forces landed near Tampico, Santa Anna had been at his best, acting instinctively and decisively in the manner of Napoleon. Santa Anna relied upon the axiom that the best defense was an aggressive offense, taking the initiative that the invaders had unwisely relinquished. Striking hard in August 1829, he unleashed “a master stroke of boldness,” in one Mexican general’s evaluation. Santa Anna attacked with vigor, forcing the surrender of the Spanish expeditionary force at Tampico in September. Combined with his recent Zacatecas victory, this smashing success made Santa Anna not only a national hero, but a seemingly invincible figure by the time of the Texas campaign. Most important, he had united the Mexican nation and people, while bestowing a sense of pride upon his newly formed Army of Operations not seen since the struggle for independence.
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And like Napoleon, Santa Anna led by personal example, demonstrating courage under fire. His tactical audacity inspired confidence among both his top lieutenants and the common soldiers in the ranks. Unlike so many other Mexican generals of the time, Santa Anna often rode ahead of his advancing army to conduct reconnaissance or direct tactical movements on his own, while escorted by only a handful of his favorite dragoons.
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Across the republic, therefore, Mexican political and civilian leaders were supremely confident of success by early 1836. Santa Anna was seen across the nation as the one man who could quickly quell the latest unrest to the north. Mexicans universally believed that Santa Anna’s campaign to reclaim the “lost” province of Texas would result in an easy victory over the “northamericano” rabble, which would not stand a chance against Mexico’s professional soldiers.
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Most of all, Santa Anna desired to “plant the eagle of the Mexican Empire” atop the Alamo and over the defenders’ bodies. Just as the United States had adopted the eagle as its national symbol, so did Mexico, making it the central figure on its red, white, and green flag.
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When Augustín de Iturbide declared the new nation’s independence in 1821 with his Plan of Iguala, the Creole colonel proclaimed that he was guided by the divine hand of providence. Iturbide believed that God himself had inspired him to raise the banner of independence with “the Mexican eagle.”
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Embracing a far more distinguished cultural and historical legacy than embodied in Houston’s Cherokee nickname of the lowly, scavenging “raven,” this majestic “imperial eagle” of Mexico had first flown “across the American heavens” to establish Mexican independence, and now it flew into Texas to accompany Santa Anna’s avenging army to uphold the Catholic faith and Mexican nationhood.
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Early and mid-February 1836 was a period of calm for the Alamo garrison. All the while, San Antonio—with its people, food, music, and Tejano culture—continued to be seductive to the young men who recently arrived from the United States. They thoroughly enjoyed this “season of almost utter abandon.” But the most alluring intoxicant continued to be the land—its sheer size and majesty. Quite unlike anything they had seen before, this picturesque land seemed to have no end. The expansiveness and beauty of the rolling hills, fertile valleys, and sprawling prairies around San Antonio was yet an obsession for the Alamo garrison, even while Santa Anna’s Army approached.

During the late winter, almost all of the “Old Texians” remained on their farmsteads of the east Texas piney lands and the fertile reddish soil of the “Redlands” around Nacogdoches. Here they enjoyed their Southern-style plantations, benefitting from the labor of their gangs of slaves, nestled in the river valleys of the Colorado and Brazos of east Texas. Winter in Texas, unlike in the north, was a busy time of year. Crops had to be planted in the spring, which arrived early in Texas, and were then harvested much earlier in the fall than in the United States. Beginning in late summer, the 1835 campaign had been won in no small part because so many farmers across Texas had left their ranches and plantations to win victories before harvest time in late fall. Unfortunately for the Alamo garrison, no such fortuitous sequence could be counted upon in early 1836.

Significantly, the most experienced fighters in Texas, mostly recent migrants themselves, were not at the Alamo. Now largely absent from this war, the “Old Texians” were as much fighters as farmers. Many years of wartime experiences in not only battling Native Americans, but also English regulars during the War of 1812, and even Spanish soldiers as filibusters, had given these men much pre-Texas Revolution military training. For instance, one such natural leader was Walter C. White, who had served with General Long during the filibuster expedition into Texas. And then he raised the “first crop of corn ever cultivated” along the Trinity River. Such experienced soldiers were needed at the Alamo instead of the mostly fresh-faced novices who had been left behind when the Matamoros Expedition left San Antonio.

In addition, a considerable cultural and ideological gap existed between these “Old Texians” which was a distinct “class” by early 1836, and the newcomers to Texas. While these “Old Texians” had been longtime Texas residents, who benefitted from their Spanish and Mexican land claims and had improved their considerable properties to amass assets to become “gentlemen” planters in the Deep South cultural tradition, the newcomers from the United States were on the make. They were mostly young risk-takers, gambling all on one throw of the dice. This resulted in a division between conservatives and radicals, which meant that while the “Old Texans” mainly supported the Constitution of 1824, the men of the Alamo, who were mostly opportunistic newcomers from east of the Sabine, were pro-independence.

Because these men were risk-takers out of necessity to get ahead because they were latecomers to Texas, they now found themselves virtually abandoned and forgotten at the Alamo. These young men and boys had yet to realize their Texas dream and reap the riches from this land of plenty, and this called for making at stand in San Antonio. Open resentment, if not outright hostility, from the “Old Texians” toward many of these new Texans was both natural and ironic. Indeed, these recent interlopers, compared to the long-settled “Old Texians,” now defended the Alamo by early 1836.
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In addition to a generation and residential gap, another forgotten aspect divided the “Old Texians” and the newcomers to Texas as well. Ironically, this difference was based upon ethnicity—not unlike the cultural divide that separated Tejanos from Mexicans. Not only were the newcomers to Texas, including those at the Alamo, younger and of less means than the “Old Texians,” but they were also more foreign, with many hailing from the Atlantic’s other side.

For instance, the San Antonio victory in December 1835 resulted in a flood of European migrants to Texas. Recently from Ireland, England, Germany, Wales, Scotland, and other European nations, these newcomers were now among a surprisingly high percentage of those who defended Texas by the late winter of 1835–36. And the Alamo garrison was a classic example of this phenomena. With a mixture of disbelief, even Fannin complained on February 7, 1836 to acting governor Robinson: “I doubt if twenty-five citizens of Texas can be mustered in [the] ranks,” while United States citizens and Europeans, including at the Alamo, served instead of Texians.

Ensuring a continued prosperity begun decades before, these farmers and ranchers of east Texas were busy in the fields and in improving their ranches, while the Alamo’s soldiers languished in idle complacency far on the remote southwestern frontier. To explain this unusual situation, it was almost as if because the “Old Texians” had settled this land, risked all, suffered for years against the dual ravages of the unforgiving wrath of nature and Native Americans, they felt that these newcomers—including the young men and boys of the Alamo—had to pay the inevitable high price to lay claim to this fertile land.

Already, the great prize of Texas had already doomed one man of promise, Don Miguel Mier y Teran, as if paying for the sin of having loved Texas with a passion. He had been obsessed with the fact that Texas had been transformed into a radical, festering bastion of Protestantism and Anglo-Saxon culture, thanks to the Mexican government’s liberal immigrant policy and naive hope that frontiersmen, pious Protestants, and longtime Anglo-Celtic conquers of nature, land, and Native Americans, could become good, peaceful Mexican citizens and even Catholics—an absolutely impossible transformation of settlers of mostly Scotch-Irish antecedents.

After touring Texas in 1828–29, a distressed Teran had warned the president in Mexico City that Mexican influence had simply “disappeared” north of San Antonio, and that Texas was all but lost to the republic if drastic action was not soon taken. The undeniable reality that Texas was slipping more and more out of Mexico’s grip forever, as he sensed, caused Teran to commit suicide in 1832.
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And now that same alluring, irresistible dream of Texas, and its seemingly boundless possibilities that had doomed the unfortunate Teran was about to be turned into a surreal nightmare—something vindictive that would destroy the tiny Alamo garrison with a vengeance. As historian Barbara Tuchman has emphasized, perhaps the most important factor contributing to the “march of folly” was overconfidence. Indeed, as Tuchman maintained: “the most frequent and fatal of selfdelusions [has long been] underestimating of the opponent.”
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Perhaps the best example of the overconfidence of the Alamo garrison can be found in the words of the capable, if not brilliant, engineer Jamieson. Utterly blinded into believing that the Alamo was a defensive bastion that could keep all of Santa Anna’s Army at bay, he boasted in a January 18, 1836 letter to Governor Smith that, “in case of an attack we will move into the Alamo and whip 10 to 1 with artillery.”
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Yet another example of the fatal overconfidence of the Alamo defenders was seen with the irrepressible Captain Carey and his company of artillerymen, the Invincibles. Unable to even imagine war’s horrors, Cary’s naive fifty-six young gunners, like the captain himself, were cocky and supremely overconfident. Organized after San Antonio’s capture, these artillerymen then elected the young Marylander, Carey, as their captain in the democratic tradition of the western frontier.

In his January 12, 1836 letter to his siblings, Captain Carey wrote with an unbridled confidence that was ill-founded, if not fool-hardy: “I cannot close without saying something about my invincibles, as I call them, about twenty of my company (although the whole [fifty-six men] has been tired and I know them all) that will (to use their words) wade through h-ll, when I am at their head if I should give the order.”
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One of Captain Carey’s Invincibles was thirty-seven-year-old Private Jacob Walker. He was married to a Latin-speaking lady from the French aristocracy of the Mississippi Territory, the former Sarah Ann Vauchere. Walker hailed from Nacogdoches, where he was a landowner before volunteering to serve Texas.
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Another Invincible was Corporal Gordon C. Jennings. He had arrived in Texas from Missouri in 1833. Jennings left behind a wife, Catherine, and four children in a little log cabin on the sprawling prairie outside Bastrop, Texas, along the upper bend of the picturesque Colorado River, when he enlisted. He fought in the siege of San Antonio in December 1835. At age fifty-seven, in good health and sprightly, the Missouri-native was the oldest member of Carey’s Invincibles.
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But even more revealing in his letter was Captain Carey’s boast, which was a representative attitude among the Alamo’s soldiers, who possessed a highly inflated feeling of superiority over any number of Mexicans: “ . . . when we go to fight the Enemy and then I think a small number of us can whip an army of Mexicans.”
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Jameson displayed a different aspect of contempt for his opponent, writing in a letter how: “The mexicans have shown imbecility and want of skill in this Fortress as they have done in all things else.”
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Such unrestrained ethnocentric and racial overconfidence among the Anglo-Celts was pervasive not only at the Alamo, but also across Texas. But, of course, because of racial, cultural, and religious differences, Mexicans possessed equally outlandish prejudices, but less so based purely upon color. In a January 3, 1836 letter, John Lamar described a prevailing attitude in Texas, including at the Alamo, that discounted Santa Anna’s gather Army: “5,000 Americans are fully competent to fight and defeat 20,000 Mexicans.”
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One especially contemptuous Texan, like most settlers who conveniently overlooked the importance of contributions from thousands of slaves, was so confident as to write: “We occupy a country which but for our presence would ever have remained a wilderness, because the Mexicans were afraid to occupy a country inhabited by so many Indians . . . The confidence which the Americans in Texas feel in their power over the Mexican troops gives them less uneasiness than they have from their more powerful neighbors the Indians, most of whom we consider equal warriors to ourselves, while we calculate to whip the Mexican troops with great facility.”
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Another representative example of the fatal overconfidence and bloated sense of racial superiority that had so long dominated AngloCeltic thinking was the belief of some garrison members that, in the words of Micajah Autry, “Santa Anna has become intimidated” by the Texan victories of 1835. Therefore, according to this common attitude across Texas and the United States, Santa Anna would therefore never dare to return at the head of a Mexican Army.
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And even when it was realized that Santa Anna was preparing to push north, the Anglo-Celts seemed to care little about the impending threat. Confidence and a sense of racial superiority remained so pervasive, that nothing could deflate it. David P. Cummings penned from the Alamo, despite knowing that a large Mexican Army was about to descend upon San Antonio, how the defenders “are confident that Texas cannot only sustain what she now holds but [will] take Mexico itself [one day and] did She think [so] on conquest.”
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This, of course, was not only outlandish bravado, but also fatal delusion. But the false illusion of the supremacy of American arms and the superiority of the Anglo-Celtic fighting man over the mixed-race and Indian-Mexican soldier was too deeply culturally ingrained to not be embraced by the Alamo’s soldiers. Ironically, fueling this sense of AngloCeltic superiority based upon racism was the relatively easy 1835 victories, which had instilled a fatal overconfidence. During the campaign of 1835, a poorly motivated Mexican force—garrison troops—and overall poor leadership had made the task of driving all Mexican forces from Texas relatively easy.

The famed Long Rifle, known mostly as the Pennsylvania rifle, where most were made, or the Kentucky rifle where it was first extensively used, was a legendary weapon across America by the time of the Texas Revolution. One of the great myths of American history was that the range, deadliness, and accuracy of the Long Rifle—the best hunting rifle in America—was sufficient to defeat a conventional army. The Anglo-Celtic generation of the Texas Revolution had been raised in the stereotypical belief that the great American military successes—the American Revolution and the War of 1812—had been won largely by the superiority of the Long Rifle over the smoothbore musket. Neither of these commonly held beliefs were true, however. Relatively few of Washington’s troops had been armed with Long Rifles, and these men had formed rifle companies and regiments, primarily from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And instead of the Long Rifle, the battle of New Orleans had been won chiefly by Jackson’s well-placed and expertly manned artillery, including large-caliber cannon, fired both by United States regulars and Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians.
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Nevertheless, the Long Rifle myth persisted among successive generations of Americans, and that enduring fable was alive and well by the time of the Texas Revolution. For example, one supremely confident “Texonian,” with his usual utter contempt for the Mexican fighting man, wrote in a September 8, 1835 letter how: “We look upon our independence as absolutely certain . . . Some fifteen hundred troops have been sent against us, but they have (unexpectedly) returned; being afraid to move against our riflemen, to the amount of 300 or more.”
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These confident words revealed a widespread contempt toward Mexican troops, regardless of their numbers—a dangerous illusion, promising, if not inviting disaster at the Alamo.