A Time to Stand (19 page)

Down in the plaza, Santa Anna’s troops had little time to cheer the change in colors; they were much too busy storming the buildings. They moved methodically, from doorway to doorway, always using the same tactics: first a blast from the captured cannon to smash the doors and barricades … next a storm of musket fire to clear away the defenders … and then the final charge.

As the Mexicans crashed into the barrack rooms, new struggles broke out—more desperate, more fearful than any before. It was an intensely personal business now—pairs of men clutching and wrestling in the smoke-filled darkness. But there were always too many Mexicans, and one after another the defenders were beaten down.

Occasionally some Texan had enough. Colonel Peña remembered one man waving a rifle with a white sock tied to the end. But most of the defenders were doing their best to make Travis’ prediction come true: “Victory will cost the enemy so dear, that it will be worse for him than defeat.”

Yet they couldn’t last forever, and one by one the buildings were taken—the long barracks to the east … the low barracks on the south … the collection of huts along the west wall. In one of these rooms on the west, Mrs. Horace Alsbury crouched with her baby and sister Gertrudis. For some reason they lived apart from the other women in the church—perhaps because their protector Jim Bowie felt they rated more privacy. In any case, they were no better off now: the sound of fighting drew steadily closer.

Gertrudis finally opened the door, hoping to show there were only women inside. A passing Mexican soldier snatched off her shawl, and she ran back in terror. As troops poured in after her, a young Texan (Mrs. Alsbury thought his name was Mitchell) appeared from nowhere and tried to protect them. He was quickly bayoneted at Mrs. Alsbury’s side.

Then a Mexican officer arrived, chased out the troops, and turned on the two frightened women: “How did you come here? What are you doing here anyhow?”

He didn’t even wait for an answer. He simply ordered them out, had them stand against a wall where they were comparatively safe.

To the south, Morales’ men were mopping up resistance in the low barracks. Breaking into a room just to the right of the Alamo gate, they came upon a startling sight. Propped in his cot, brace of pistols by his side, pale as the death that faced him, was Jim Bowie. He undoubtedly did the best he could, but it must have been over very soon.

Now only the Alamo church was left. Dickinson’s crew still fought the 12-pounders on the high platform in back. Bonham had joined them—eleven men altogether. Just below, Gregorio Esparza worked his small gun by the south window, and Robert Evans kept the ammunition coming from the powder magazine by the entrance.

A shower of nails and scrap iron flew from a gun on the roof, ripping the Jiménez men in the plaza. Colonel Morales knew the answer to that. He pulled around the 18-pounder and began raking the church—the timbered platform, the thick stone walls, the strong oak doors, everything.

Bonham fell Dickinson too … gradually the rest of the men on the platform. Unable to stand the pounding any longer, one man took a small child in his arms, ran to the edge, and hurtled to the ground below. Colonel Peña, Felix Nuñez, other Mexicans gasped at the sight.

The heavy double doors splintered and sagged on their broken hinges. The Jiménez and Matamoros men raced through, and spread out in the smoke-filled church. Gregorio Esparza quickly fell under their bayonets. Robert Evans—now wounded—grabbed a torch and crawled for the powder room,
hoping to blow up the magazine. A Mexican bullet got him first.

The women and children huddled in the rear, almost too frightened to move. One young boy stood up, uncertainly faced the advancing troops. He was unarmed and made no move, except to draw a blanket around his shivering shoulders. He found no mercy.

Twelve-year-old Enrique Esparza shrank against the wall, sure that his turn would come next. But fate was capricious, as always in war. Gunner Antony Wolfe’s two boys—they looked less than twelve—were ruthlessly slaughtered, but Enrique somehow was missed in the crush. Stranger still, old Brigido Guerrero—one of the local Mexican defenders—managed to talk himself free. Desperately he pleaded he was just a prisoner, had really been for Santa Anna all the time. For some reason they believed him and let him go.

In the dark little sacristy, just off the transept, Mrs. Dickinson calmly awaited the end. There were other women in the room, but she didn’t notice them. She was only aware of the shouts, the cries, the screams, always drawing nearer. She held Angelina close, deep in the folds of her apron.

Suddenly Jacob Walker, the little gunner from Nacogdoches, burst into the room. He ran to a corner and seemed trying to hide. But it was no use. Four Mexican soldiers rushed in, and as Mrs. Dickinson fell to her knees in prayer, they shot Walker and savagely hoisted him on their bayonets like a bundle of fodder.

The sounds died away. All grew still. By 6:30
A.M.
the last firing was over—the Mexicans weren’t even shooting at the bodies any more. A cheerful sun rose in the east, bathing the silent, smoking Alamo in the golden light of a bright new day.

“I
T WAS BUT A
small affair,” shrugged His Excellency, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, greeting Captain Fernando Urizza in the fallen Alamo.

In some ways, perhaps it was. A minor frontier outpost. Only 183 defenders. And these not even trained soldiers, but mere amateurs who saw fit to stand between the “ungrateful colonists” and the authority of the Central Government. Well, they learned.

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 white 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.