Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (21 page)

In the art of war, nothing has been more guaranteed to pave the way to certain disaster than military decisions based not upon sound strategy, but upon political and personal factors. As much as Santa Anna’s Army crossing the Rio Grande, Texas politics and political ambitions doomed the Alamo’s common soldiers, who fell victim to the evils of personal intrigue long before Mexican bullets and bayonets. Not aspiring to lofty political and military positions like their inexperienced leaders, these young men and boys only wanted to survive the war to collect their rightful reward for Texas military service—all of those irresistible acres of fertile Texas land, to provide for themselves and their families.

Another factor that undermined the chances of the men of the Alamo was the sudden departure of Lieutenant Colonel Neill. In modern times the holy trinity of Alamo heroes—Travis, Crockett, and Bowie—has overshadowed the leader who was most responsible not only for the decision to defend the Alamo, but also for keeping the garrison together during its darkest days during the gloomy winter of 1836. The departure of the ever-popular Lieutenant Colonel Neill, who had commanded the Alamo troops far longer than any other leader, comprised a psychological blow to the garrison. Neill’s unexpected departure would leave the Alamo garrison “dejected,” and morale would plummet to a new all-time low exactly when Santa Anna was pushing north toward San Antonio.
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But what the Alamo men had failed to realize was that it took more than mere popularity and the ability to make friends and tell jokes to win battles. Blessed with a sense of good timing, Neill would depart the Alamo in a hurry, even though he knew that Santa Anna was moving on San Antonio. Interestingly, this was not the first time in his military career that Neill had missed an important battle—during the siege of San Antonio in December 1835, Neill had fallen sick, or so it has been claimed. At that time, he relinquished command of the army’s artillery to Captain Louis B. Franks, who owned a league of land on the Brazos River in Robertson’s Colony, while Lieutenant William R. Carey continued to serve as his dependable top lieutenant.
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As a regular officer and according to military protocol in midFebruary, Neill would hand over the Alamo’s command to the next highest-ranking officer, Travis of the regular cavalry. This change would be unacceptable to the volunteers who made up the vast majority of the garrison. In the democratic tradition brought across the Sabine with volunteers from the United States, an election would be held at the Alamo. Detesting the thought of serving under a regular officer, the volunteers naturally elected to follow Bowie, while the regulars followed Travis. Therefore Travis and Bowie would agree to share joint command. Exhibiting rare western frontier diplomacy, especially in Texas, both leaders would thereafter share decision-making, even jointly signing correspondence. However, enough of a rift existed that Travis, in typical independent fashion, would establish his headquarters in San Antonio with the regulars, while Bowie and the volunteers occupied the Alamo. Then when Bowie collapsed with illness, falling victim to a respiratory ailment on the siege’s second day, February 24, barely a month after arriving in San Antonio, Travis would suddenly be thrust into the position as the Alamo’s sole commander by default, after having only reached San Antonio on February 3.
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As fate would have it, Travis, an inexperienced cavalryman, very experienced ladies man, and aspiring politician with an undeserved (he had not filled his cavalry legion) rank of lieutenant colonel that had been only bestowed for mostly political reasons a month earlier, and a young man who never wanted to serve at the Alamo in the first place, was destined to command the garrison.
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When given the choice, the Alamo garrison had clearly decided that of Neill, Bowie, and Travis, the young man from Alabama was the leader under whom they least desired to serve. Compared to Bowie and Neill, Travis was the Alamo’s least popular commander, and the garrison’s opinion was only confirmed when Travis would seal the fort’s fate with a defiant cannon shot on the late afternoon of February 23, after Santa Anna’s forces reached San Antonio. As much as Santa Anna, Travis ensured that there would be no quarter for the Alamo garrison. His firing of the 18-pounder—in response to Santa Anna’s demand for an immediate surrender—was the type of flamboyant gesture right out of the popular historical fiction of the day that Travis so loved.
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But Travis’ dramatic flair and sense of melodrama was serious business to Santa Anna. While Travis was only playing the part of a military leader, Santa Anna was a hardened veteran who knew how to crush an opponent. Taking Travis’ defiance as a personal insult, Santa Anna would become more determined to destroy the Alamo garrison than before. Travis’ rash behavior simply symbolized the all-too-common Anglo-Celtic arrogance in the eyes of the Mexican president, who unfortunately by then held the lives of garrison’s members in his hands.

From beginning to end, Travis would be overmatched as the Alamo’s commander. After all, he had arrived at the Alamo with only a handful of horse-soldiers of his “Legion of Cavalry.” This command was one of the few integrated military units in Texas, with Tejanos, including Captain Juan Sequín, Lieutenant Placido Benavides, who had organized a band of local Tejano rancheros in October 1835 to join Austin’s forces for the attack on San Antonio, and Lieutenant Manuel Carvajal, serving alongside young Southerners like Lieutenant James Butler Bonham.
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Besides Neill, Bowie, and Travis, the lack of qualified junior officers at the Alamo was pervasive. Even the few New Orleans Grays soldiers who remained at the Alamo by early 1836 were without their inspirational leader. Captain William Gordon Cooke, age twenty-seven, had arrived in Texas in late October 1835 as second in command of Captain Robert L. Morris’ company of the Grays. He had led these New Orleans Grays with distinction in overwhelming General Cós’ garrison in December 1835, but he then departed the Alamo for more fertile military fields of opportunity, escaping the deathtrap. Cooke was destined to serve on General Houston’s staff in the days ahead; however, even Cooke was more of a druggist than a soldier, learning the trade in Fredericksburg, Virginia before continuing his practice in New Orleans.
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Some good officers were either sick in the hospital or had been discharged for disability during the period before Santa Anna struck. Without facing Mexican soldiers in January and most of February 1836, and with so many social engagements and distractions in San Antonio, the remaining cohesion of the Alamo garrison dropped to new lows. When one low-ranking soldier was about to be arrested for disobeying an officer’s order, he defiantly “resisted and swore with pistols in his hands that he would shoot down the first man that attempted his arrest.”
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The ever-widening gulf between officers and enlisted men became a chasm just before Santa Anna’s Army reached San Antonio. In the western frontier tradition, the Alamo’s soldiers of all ranks cherished a distinct sense of individualism. From the beginning, they placed more faith in the individual than in the arbitrary dictates of government—either Anglo-Celtic or Mexican—wealthy elites, and especially blustering politicians of Texas. Therefore, not surprisingly, the Alamo’s volunteers were almost as much anti-Texas regular army as they were anti-Santa Anna by early 1836. These outspoken volunteers were determined to do as they pleased, fight under the commander of their choice, and make their own decisions in both military and political matters.
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Aside from the shortage of good officers, the diminutive Alamo garrison also suffered from a shortage of simple essentials such as food and clothing. Paying a high price for a fractured Texas war effort in the dead of winter, the Alamo garrison had first fallen victim to three rampaging waves of scavengers: 1) San Antonio’s victors who returned home to east Texas; 2) the Matamoros Expedition troops; and 3) even Cós’ paroled men who took what they wanted or could hide on their persons before likewise marching south.
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By January 12, 1836, in Captain Carey’s embittered words, the Alamo’s soldiers were “almost naked, destitute of funds[,] having expended all for food and munitions of war and not much to eat only some corn that we grind ourselves & poor beef [and] this constitutes our dayly [sic] food.”
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But even more angry than Carey was Lieutenant Colonel Neill, especially after the Matamoros Expedition troops, under Francis White Johnson and Dr. James Grant, completed the process of stripping San Antonio and the Alamo garrison of provisions, horses, and supplies. As Neill complained in a January 6, 1836 letter to the government: “We have no provisions or clothing since Johnson and Grant left [and all the] clothing sent here . . . was taken from us by arbitrary measures of Johnson and Grant, taken from men who endured all the hardships of winter and who were not even sufficiently clad for summer, many of them having but one blanket and one shirt.”
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In addition, the lengthy 1835 siege of San Antonio led to the consumption of provisions far and wide. What had not been earlier taken by General Cós’ troops and later secured by Austin’s besiegers that fall and winter was pilfered by the men of the Matamoros Expedition. In regard to the area around San Antonio, therefore, Fannin complained in a letter to Houston as early as mid-November 1835: “We have nearly consumed all the corn &c. near here.” These words of desperation were an ominous portent for the young men and boys who remained in garrison at San Antonio more than three months later.
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And food was not the only shortage. Precious little firewood to ward off the biting cold had been stockpiled in case of a lengthy siege. Many soldiers billeted themselves in Tejano homes, sharing their food, fires, and shelter, protecting them from January and February’s coldness. The Alamo garrison had become not a cohesive military force but a group of undisciplined and discontented individuals.

While the supply of small arms ammunition seemed sufficient for the Alamo garrison at first glance and on paper, the reserves of high-quality powder were actually quite low, and much of the finest powder had been taken by members of the Matamoros Expedition. In addition, a far-sighted General Cós had his paroled men pilfer the best powder from artillery reserves and place it in their cartridge boxes for the march south, along with artillery supplies. What was left behind at the Alamo was the worst of the powder reserves, reducing both artillery and small arms capabilities. Worst of all, the remaining supply of black powder captured from General Cós’ troops in December 1835 was largely obsolete by early March 1836 because of its inferior quality, made worse by damp winter weather. Stored in two rooms of the church, the powder supply was adversely affected by the phenomena known as “rising damp,” with moisture seeping up the four-foot-thick walls of limestone.

Mexican powder was “so badly damaged” and of such overall poor quality that the Texans who captured Mexican powder throughout the Texas Revolution wisely refused to use it.”
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In the words of one amazed Texan who examined captured Mexican black powder, “[I] found it little better than pounded charcoal and, after a trial, rejected it as all together useless [and] It was the worst powder I ever saw.”
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Even young men in Texas service long used to dangerous lives on the western frontier, where ammunition was always in short supply, merely tore open Mexican paper cartridges to keep the lead ball, throwing away the black powder in contempt. No savvy riflemen or settler wanted their own lives, or those of family members, dependent on inferior powder that could cause a misfire.
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Therefore, not desiring to utilize Mexican black powder, which was all but “useless,” unless nothing else was available, the Alamo’s soldiers could only rely on the relatively limited supply of high-grade black powder (76% nitre, 14% charcoal, and 10% sulphur) from the Du Pont factory in Delaware. Established in 1802 by a French immigrant whose family had fled the terrors of the French Revolution, DuPont had supplied American troops during the War of 1812. Significant for events to come, Matamoros Expedition members left behind Mexican powder at the Alamo, while taking the Du Pont powder for themselves—after all, they were about to invade Mexico itself! Consequently, the lack of highquality powder reserves was destined to become a serious liability for Alamo garrison members on the morning of March 6. On the night of March 5, ironically, the garrison might have assumed that the Mexican powder—already inferior since its creation—was yet good, when in fact it had failed to maintain integrity because of a combination of factors: the lengthy transport from Mexico, the high humidity of the central plains of Texas, lengthy storage in an area affected by “rising damp,” and the cold, wet winter of 1835–36.

Even though the Alamo armory contained 816 British muskets, the 1809 India model Pattern Brown Bess musket (.75 caliber) that had been used by English troops during the later phase of the Napoleonic Wars, and 14,600 cartridges captured from General Cós in December 1835, this supply was of relatively little use to the garrison after the cold weather, rains, and ice storms of winter.
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Unlike the ill-equipped Alamo men, Napoleonic soldiers had long ensured that cartridges and black powder remained dry, because they possessed waterproof, leather cartridge boxes with metal regimental insignia on the flap to keep it down—something that the Alamo’s soldiers did not have among their limited gear brought from home. Especially in Texas with the humid summers and the rainy winters, a lingering dampness wrecked havoc on the Alamo’s black powder supply, making it of relatively little use by the time Santa Anna attacked.
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Indeed, the Alamo’s defensive capabilities were considerably compromised, because the “weapons and ammunition were scarce [and] their ammunition was very low. That of many was entirely spent,” wrote Enrique Esparza of the no-win situation that guaranteed a most feeble defense of the Alamo.
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