Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (18 page)

Meantime, if the garrison were relying on the strength of the Alamo as a fort, they were mistaken. Santa Anna’s second in command, aristocratic General Don Vicente Filisola, openly mocked the concept that the Alamo fit the definition as a “fortress.” Santa Anna’s personal secretary, Cuba-born Ramón Martínez Caro, who would be captured at San Jacinto, also ridiculed the place, referring to “the so-called fortress of the Alamo.” Not long after the Alamo’s fall, he criticized General Urrea for even referring to the Alamo as a fortress: “Does he call the battered and crumbling walls of the mission of Refugio, the fort of Goliad, and the defenses [sic] of the Alamo fortresses?”
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General Filisola, a seasoned veteran with more than thirty years of military service, including in the Napoleonic wars, easily ascertained the extensive weaknesses and liabilities of the Alamo as a defensive structure. A well-educated Italian who had joined the Spanish army as a teenager, Filisola migrated to Mexico in 1811. Possessing considerable tactical and strategic insight, he was Santa Anna’s most trusted lieutenant during the 1836 campaign. In no uncertain terms, he all but laughed at the Alamo’s lack of strength, realizing that defensively the antiquated structure was utterly “useless at all times and under any circumstances.”
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Of course, no one in the Army of Operations was more aware of the Alamo’s considerable defensive liabilities than General Cós. After all, he had been overwhelmed by the Texians at the Alamo in December 1835. Indeed, the Alamo’s feeble defenses had sealed the doom of his own force, compelling him to surrender only a few months before. Despite extensive preparations made by his engineers and troops to enhance the Alamo’s defensive capabilities, General Cós, who lamented the “circumstances in which I found myself [which were] extreme,” and his Mexican soldiers had learned the hard way that the Alamo compound simply could not be adequately defended. Therefore, throughout the siege, educated Mexican leaders viewed the Alamo as little more than a large cattle pen. Along with General Juan José Andrade, one of these men was Santa Anna’s respected, well-educated personal secretary, Ramón Martínez Caro. He described the Alamo as a “mere corral and nothing more.”

Indeed, and contrary to the mighty “fortress” of myth, this was a common Mexican view of the Alamo. In defensive terms, they realized that the Alamo was already compromised by its large interior space and lengthy perimeter, before the 1836 campaign’s first shot was fired in anger. For such reasons, all of Santa Anna’s senior officers believed that Goliad was not only far more strategically important than San Antonio, but also more defensible. Indeed, the Alamo’s interior space of nearly three acres was so extensive that it had served as a corral for cattle or horses in the past. Here, deep in the heart of Tejano cattle country, such old Spanish missions, now obsolete reminders of Spain’s imperial past greatness, were often utilized as corrals. For instance, Mission Concepcion, located just south of the Alamo, was used as a horse and cattle corral for the vast ranchos that bordered both sides of the river that flowed southeast between San Antonio and Goliad.
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In time, the old Spanish mission that had begun as little more than a church grew so large that new buildings were constructed to form a defensive perimeter. Mission Indians lived in the rows of buildings that now formed the lengthy, rectangular perimeter: the Alamo’s walls. While the presidios were created by military men for defensive purposes, the mission enclosures, like the Alamo, were not created with defense against a conventional opponent in mind. Instead, they were built deliberately large so that large numbers of cattle, sheep, goats, and horses could graze in the interior’s vastness for protection, even as local people took shelter from slashing Indian raids. The walls, such as they existed, were suitable against arrows or musketry, and also limited the mounted tactics of marauding Indians, but they had not been constructed to withstand artillery and a conventional army.
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Therefore, in a strange paradox that doomed the garrison, the Alamo presented an inviting illusion to the Alamo’s leaders that simply could not be resisted, especially by inexperienced commanders. Bowie and Neill failed to appreciate that this massive complex had not been built by military men or trained engineers. The Alamo garrison could not defend its hundreds of yards of perimeter spanning nearly a quarter of a mile, regardless of the number of artillery pieces. Instead the young men and boys of the Alamo were themselves corralled.

Even the thick-walled Alamo chapel was compromised as a defensive bastion because of its proximity to the weakest point in the compound—a low, wooden palisade. Here, at the southeast corner of the Alamo chapel, the Spanish missionaries, thinking more of God than sound defensive arrangements, had not thought of erecting a protective wall. In addition, a small spring that released a trickle of water to make wet, soft ground precluded the erection of a sturdy wall at this point. Consequently, by early 1836, the wooden palisade erected by Cós’ troops was the weakest defensive point along the perimeter.

Extending around 100 feet in length and standing about seven feet high, this wooden palisade—compared to sections of the adobe and limestone walls as high as twelve feet—consisted of two rows of upright cedar logs separated by about six feet and filled with earth. An outside ditch—not as deep as it should have been to impede attackers—and a relatively slight network of abates—cut and sharpened, interlacing tree limbs that pointed toward assaulting force—bolstered the position. Dwarfed by the church’s towering south side to its left and the buildings of the low barracks along the southern perimeter on its right, this wooden palisade extended from the Alamo’s southeast corner to the east end of the south wall.
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Not surprisingly, the educated, military-trained Mexican officers, especially the elite engineers, looked upon the Alamo quite differently from not only the opposing leadership, but also modern historians. Indeed, the various earthen defensive emplacements, or “forts,”—such as the small lunette protecting the Alamo’s main gate on the south side—were created by General Cós’ engineers to better protect the north, west, and south sides of the Alamo. The Mexicans saw the Alamo as not a single fortress but merely a series of fortified bastions of earth positioned along the perimeter. Because they knew that the Alamo had been a Spanish mission and used extensively as a corral, the lunettes on both the west and south side of the Alamo were seen as the true forts, each getting a distinctive name after being constructed by Mexico’s highly trained engineers.

The creation of these distinct “mini-forts” along the Alamo’s perimeter on the south and west side were necessary in tactical terms, because the Alamo’s greatest liability was that its walls could not be adequately defended by infantrymen, or even artillerymen to a lesser degree, regardless of their numbers. General Filisola concluded after a close examination of the Alamo, and after witnessing the feeble defense, wrote how “our losses should have been greater than they were if the [artillery] pieces of the enemy had [sic] could have been placed in the wall or enclosure. But the rooms of the latter of the inner part would not permit it, and those that were in the right location could fire only to the front.”
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It has been estimated that at least a thousand men, perhaps more, were necessary to defend the mission-turned-fort. But in fact, a thousand defenders would have made little difference because of the Alamo’s seemingly endless defensive liabilities and vulnerabilities. As it stood, the Alamo’s total defensive perimeter of nearly 450 yards, or the length of more than four football fields, was to be protected by less than 200 defenders—a recipe not only for a weak defense but for certain disaster.
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For such sound reasons, Houston had been against making a defensive stand at the Alamo. Nevertheless, he left the final decision to Bowie, who was convinced by Neill, almost as if washing his hands of the matter. Houston was certain that “Our forces must not be shut up in forts, where they can neither be supplied with men or provisions. Long aware of this fact I directed, on the 16th of January last, that the artillery should be removed, and the Alamo blown up; but this was prevented by the expedition upon Matamoros.”
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So with memories of Horseshoe Bend yet strong, Houston had wanted to abandon the Alamo in preference for the establishment of a defensive line farther east and closer to the Gulf ports, which received supplies and volunteers from the United States. But compared to the expansive prairie lands around San Antonio, and from where threats would come, the old Spanish mission, almost having a hypnotic affect, seemed to beckon the Anglo-Celtic soldiers. The walls and the church itself offered an unwarranted sense of security. The Alamo seemed to offer a warm, sheltering womb that could keep these young men and boys from harm, or so it seemed to these innocents in the art of war.

At first glance and to the untrained eye, the Alamo appeared to be strong, even formidable. This was not only a mirage but also a fatal illusion. General Cós’ engineers had improved the Alamo’s defensive qualities, but only to a limited degree. Defensive enhancements were principally only in regard to the Alamo’s greatest strength, its plentiful amount of artillery. This heavy arsenal resulted in construction—by Mexican soldiers—of artillery platforms, especially along the north wall, the lunette on the southern perimeter, and at the southwestern corner, where the 18-pounder stood. These defensive improvements by the Mexicans also included “planting cannon on the top of the church, cutting down trees” to form an abatis, as revealed in the
Maryland Gazette
of November 26, 1835.

Cós and his men had focused on maximizing the Alamo’s greatest strength—artillery, in the Napoleonic tradition—at the expense of the Mexican rifleman. Consequently, the engineers had failed to create firing platforms or catwalks for riflemen atop the walls. Additionally, no rifle slots or portholes were cut into the walls for firing. John Sutherland lamented about “There being no portholes in the [north] wall.” Even the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend had cut both lower and upper ranges of portholes for rifles in their wooden breastwork. And no parapet was built to protect soldiers firing from near the top of the walls.

Basically, the Mexican engineers had ample reason for favoring artillery emplacements over positions for infantrymen because Mexican soldiers were largely untrained in marksmanship. Without a cultural heritage of firearm use like American settlers, Mexican troops, who were mostly of Indian descent, were armed with inferior weapons, such as old smoothbore muskets, which were unlike the rifles of the Americans. The standard firearm of the Mexican soldier was the .753 caliber British India Pattern Brown Bess musket. Aging flintlocks, the same Brown Bess that English troops used in battling the colonists during the American Revolution, had been purchased from England by Mexico. Also used by the British Army that had fought Napoleon from the late 1790s to 1815, these smoothbore muskets, now largely obsolete, were notoriously inaccurate and only effective at extreme, shortrange distance.

Ironically, the fact that General Cós’ men had focused on strengthening the Alamo’s defensive positions for artillery and not riflemen—a fact not lost on Santa Anna—now served to undermine one of the Anglo-Celt’s best defensive assets: skilled riflemen. Incredibly, Neill and Bowie chose to make a defensive stand from which a heavy and sustained musketry fire could not be leveled against attackers, especially if they struck all sides of the Alamo at once. In this way, one of the few strengths of the Alamo garrison—its small arms range and accuracy— was already negated long before the two forces met.

Why no Alamo commander—not Neill, Bowie, and later Travis— embarked upon any type of construction project to build a catwalk, erect lengthy firing platforms, create a network of loopholes in the walls, cut embrasures for cannon, or create a parapet atop the walls for riflemen is almost inexplicable. Under Cós’ command, Mexican engineers had done far more to strengthen the Alamo, demonstrating innovativeness and problem-solving skills, than the more complacent AngloCeltics accomplished for months. Incredibly, the Alamo commanders believed that the plentiful amount of artillery would be entirely sufficient to defend the massive compound, especially since there were too few riflemen to adequately defend the walls.

Nevertheless, while Neill possessed a blind faith in artillery, Bowie’s faith resided mainly in the Long Rifle. Bowie realized that past victories—though more skirmishes than battles—had been won by this relatively accurate, long-range weapon. After all, Texas riflemen had unleashed impressive firepower from the cover of a bank in the San Antonio River during the October 28, 1835 battle of Concepcion, and on the open prairie during the so-called November 26, 1835 “Grass Fight.” About a mile south of town along Alazán Creek, this fight resulted in the capture one of General Cós’ foraging details, with Bowie thinking it was reinforcements for the besieged Cós. But these early Texan victories that instilled so much over-confidence were more flukes than authentic military successes. The Texas riflemen won primarily by fighting from the cover of a riverbank, and then from behind the cover of an arroyo, further fueling a dangerous contempt for their opponent and overreliance upon what the Long Rifle could accomplish against soldados.

But in truth, the Texans had yet to engage the elite of the Mexican Army, especially its cavalry. Clearly, Anglo-Celtic soldiers were at home fighting from natural cover in the eastern woodlands as opposed to the grassy plains of the sprawling Rio Grande flats, while Mexican horse soldiers dominated the land south of the Colorado River.
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For this generation of Americans, two opposing military examples provided a rationale to both those advocating a defense of the Alamo and those who wished to abandon it. Houston’s reasoning for not wanting to defend the Alamo stemmed from the lessons of Andrew Jackson’s March 1814 victory at Horseshoe Bend, while the pro-Alamo defense advocates cited the lessons of Jackson’s January 1815 victory at the battle of New Orleans. Not coincidently, Bowie’s own brother, Rezin, who spoke both French and Spanish, had served as a Louisiana militia private during the showdown at New Orleans. Veterans of that battle were scattered across Texas, including among the Alamo garrison.