Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (5 page)

Born in South Carolina, James Butler Bonham, a young lawyer from Montgomery, Alabama, was a founder of the volunteer military unit known as the Mobile Greys, and a friend of Travis. Bonham, too, was convinced by his friend to migrate to Texas primarily because it was “a place to build a fortune.”
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This great opportunity to “build a fortune” and live a long, healthy life was more probable in Texas, thanks to the healthy, mild climate. The long growing season only reinforced the seemingly limitless agricultural possibilities.

On a journey from New Orleans to San Antonio, George Wilkins Kendall, the founder of the New Orleans
Picayune
, was amazed by the sheer natural beauty in the rolling prairie lands just east of San Antonio. He favorably compared the milder, dryer climate, in contrast to the disease-ridden lowlands around New Orleans and even east Texas: the fertile grasslands of the Texan central plains were free from “the bilious fevers and debilitating agues so prevalent upon the Colorado, the Brazos and other muddy and sluggish rivers of Eastern Texas . . . no finer or more healthy openings exist in America.”
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Kendall’s words of praise were no exaggeration. In describing the success of the prosperous Austin Colony, the editor of the
Connecticut Herald
wrote in the September 22, 1829 issue: “The rivers running through the colony are the Brazos and the Colorado, besides many large creeks. The soil of the margins of the Colorado and Brazos are in general alluvial [which] the planters considered equal to any soil in the world.”
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Incredibly, even though they knew that Santa Anna’s Army was about to push north to San Antonio to initiate the 1836 Texas campaign, Cummings and ten other Alamo garrison members yet planned to take the time to stake out their headright claims, so obsessed were they about securing rich Texas lands, instead of working hard to make the Alamo’s defenses stronger. One of these was Micajah Autry, a 42– year-old slave-owner from Tennessee who was destined to die at the Alamo as a member of the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers. Somewhat of a Renaissance man, he benefited from a fine education as a son from a leading North Carolina family, and was a die-hard romantic who wrote poetry and “played the violin beautifully” on summer nights. He also sketched both nature and people with skill, although his drawings failed to depict the slaves that he or his family owned. After his overly ambitious literary plans met frustration, the young man was forced to become more realistic about life’s expectations. Texas then became his new passion, supplementing youthful fantasies and unrealistic visions.

On January 13, 1836, the optimistic Autry wrote a letter to his wife, whom he was planning to bring to Texas once the conflict with Mexico ended, that emphasized a far brighter future than offered in Jackson, Tennessee. He wrote: “From what I have seen and learned from others there is not so fair a portion of the earth’s service warmed by the sun [than Texas]. Be of good cheer Martha, I will provide you a sweet home. I shall be entitled to 640 acres of land for my services in the army and 4,444 acres upon condition of settling my family here. For a trifle here, (one) may procure a possession of land that will make a fortune for himself, his children and his children’s children of its own increase in value and such a cotton country is not under the sun.”
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For Autry and other Alamo garrison members, such sentiments were not hyperbole. With their gangs of slaves laboring in vast cotton fields and reaping a fortune for their owners with hard work, Texas planters produced the highest quality cotton that ever existed in the cotton market in New Orleans.
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Autry wasn’t the only newly arrived American who linked boundless prosperity with vast Texas acreage and cotton cultivation. Daniel William Cloud, a 24-year-old Kentuckian who had failed to find meaningful work as a lawyer in St. Louis, was then unable to secure sufficient farming land, and who was likewise to be killed at the Alamo, served Texas as a lowly enlisted man. But the young man from the Kentucky Bluegrass region already felt fabulously wealthy with the knowledge that, as he penned in a letter, “If we succeed, the country is ours. It is immense in extent, and fertile in its soil, and will amply reward all our toil.”
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The liberal land bounties only grew larger as the Texas Revolution lengthened, ensuring that the irresistible appeal to serve Texas consumed citizens all across the United States. Originally, each volunteer in the People’s Army of Texas was entitled to 640 acres. But after March 2, 1836, unknown to the Alamo defenders, this amount was increased. After that date, each Texas soldier would gain an entire league of land, or 4,428 acres and one labor, or 177 acres, if he settled his family in Texas. Even a single man was entitled to 1,476 acres.
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Clearly, the powerful lust for land was a principal, if not the most dominant, motivation for United States citizens to cast their fates with the Texas Revolutionary Army. Having placed their high-stakes bet, and having made the gamble with their lives, Alamo garrison members served in large part because they possessed such a sizeable stake in one of the richest natural empires on the North American continent. In an agrarian society where status, wealth, and class were linked directly to the acreage one owned, such easy availability to thousands of prime Texas acres could not only mean a fortune for the Alamo men and their families, but also for future generations to come. Never before in the nation’s history had Americans been offered such vast land-holdings for military service, even as a lowly private.

But the gamble made by these ambitious young men was that they might well die at obscure places with Hispanic names hundreds of miles from home. One such remote location had been bestowed the Spanish name for a thick stand of cottonwood trees, nourished by the warm rivers of the San Antonio River, that grew beside the old Spanish mission at San Antonio—the Alamo. Overall, strange twists of fate, fortunes, and tangled destinies brought most of the men who would die at the Alamo to Texas. Losing a hardscrabble Kentucky, Virginia, or Missouri farm for failure to pay debts or taxes; repeated crop failures due to bad weather; poor yields because of infertile, badly eroded soil; the collapse of crop prices; and an overall declining market for the average yeoman farmer during the American nation’s first great depression motivated the United States volunteers to risk their lives at the Alamo.
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From the beginning to end, the real bone of contention in the Texas Revolution was about possession of the land. The territory consisted of more than 267,000 square miles. Ironically, the recent volunteers from the United States felt a greater sense of entitlement to all of Texas than the “Old Texian” colonists, who had been granted only a limited number of acres in east Texas. American citizens who joined the Texas Revolution, including many of the Alamo defenders, already sincerely believed that Texas, Mexico’s northeastern frontier, was already part of the United States.

A common view existed across the United States that Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon included Texas, all the way south to the Rio Grande River. Because the southwest boundaries of the Louisiana territory was “vague,” to say the least, everexpansionist minded Jefferson had long insisted that the Rio Grande was its true southern boundary, while Spain claimed the Sabine River, or Louisiana’s western border. John Quincy Adams, however, agreed to Spain’s claim as a trade-off for its 1819 cession of Florida to the United States, and for Spain’s claim to the Oregon territory. But the average American citizen believed that Texas, all the way to the Rio Grande, rightfully belonged to the United States. The many settlers in Texas, especially the late U.S. arrivals, felt that they possessed both a natural and a moral right to Mexico’s fertile lands.
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With Spanish and then Mexican approval, the dream of hard-luck Missourian Moses Austin, father of Stephen Austin, who took over the ambitious colonization project after Moses’ death, had become a reality by the early 1830s. Austin’s ambition was to establish an immense empire in Spanish Texas, comparable in prosperity to nearby Louisiana. In the beginning, the elder Austin had planned to lay out a new town at the mouth of the Colorado River, which he hoped would eventually rival bustling New Orleans.

As in Louisiana, the new western empire envisioned by Austin called for thousands of slaves. Texas could best prosper from the development of agricultural estates comparable to the vast cotton and sugar cane plantations of Louisiana, which had been modeled after the highly profitable plantations on the French islands of the Caribbean. The most prosperous of all the French islands in the West Indies during most of the 18th century had been St. Domingue, or today’s Haiti—minus the massive 1791 slave revolt that brought an end to French dominion, it provided a proven formula for Texas, but with cotton replacing sugar cane.

From the beginning, Austin’s colony offered a rare opportunity for Americans to bring large numbers of slaves to cheap virgin lands. At this time, acreage in the United States, for sale privately or by the government, was simply too expensive for the average man, especially the lower classes. In stark contrast, before Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, the Spanish government simply “gave away rather than selling its open land to settlers acceptable to it.”
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Left both undeveloped and under-populated by first Spain and then Mexico, Texas land seemed endless, boundless, and with unlimited potential. No one had seen anything as expansive yet empty as Texas, unless it was the ocean itself. Not only fertile and virgin, the land was also breathtakingly beautiful. More than a dozen rivers, smaller than those east of the Mississippi Valley, ran roughly parallel from northwest to southeast, flowing toward the Gulf of Mexico. The rolling hills of east Texas, the rich, low-lying coastal plain, and the relatively light flow of river water meant little erosion and flooding. The best soils hence were not washed away as they were along the Mississippi, making Texas river valleys ideal for agricultural production. Consequently, the river bottomlands remained amazingly fertile; combined with an ideal climate and sufficient labor, the situation fairly beckoned large-scale cultivation.

The fertile gulf coastal plain, the heartland of Tejano settlement with its dominant ranching economy, lay to the east and south. This land became more arid farther south toward the Rio Grande (or the Rio del Norte to the Spanish), and was more like northern Mexico than east Texas. The most prominent east Texas rivers were the Brazos (the largest in the state), the Trinity, Red, Colorado, Rio Grande, and Sabine Rivers. The generally flat or gently rolling land, carpets of virgin hardwood forests, and soil fertility of the gulf coastal plain was comparable to Louisiana and Mississippi, where the cotton culture dominated.

Of the major Texas rivers flowing gently into the gulf’s warm waters, the Rio Grande was the southernmost. This river spawned from the snow-capped mountains around the Continental Divide in southern Colorado, and at 2,000 miles was the longest watercourse in Texas. Three distinct and vibrant civilizations—Native American, Spanish, and Mexican—had developed along this historic river and mixed into one people, although in the process they had often fought each other and died for possession of the land they loved.
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A prophetic Stephen Austin early predicted an undeniable truth: “Nature seems to have formed Texas for a great agricultural, grazing, manufacturing, and commercial country.”
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Dr. John Sibley at Natchitoches, Louisiana, just east of the Sabine, agreed with Austin’s heady vision of future possibilities. Marveling at what he had seen in Texas, Dr. Sibley wrote with passion: “The Country is Larger than all France & has a finer Climate & the soil is as rich as any & can support a great population.”
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As reported in the
New-Orleans Mercantile Advertiser
, the prosperity of the Austin Colony and east Texas was based upon the “rivers running through the colony [and] the soil of the margins of the Colorado and Brazos is generally alluvial, and covered with timber . . . and is to the planters considered equal to any soil in the world for the cultivation of cotton and sugar.”
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For the men of the Alamo, possession of this land was well worth risking one’s life, regardless of its rightful ownership by the Republic of Mexico. More than any other crop, cotton was ideal for the thick soils of the fertile Blackland Prairie, where the annual rainfall and the hot summers were especially similar to the Black Belt of Alabama.
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Another incredibly fertile region of east Texas was in the area just west of the Sabine River around Nacogdoches and San Augustine. This area was known was the Red Lands, named after the region’s lush red soil, which was ideal for high crop yields. Anglo-Celtic settlers of this distinct area were known as the “Red Landers,” a name they embraced with provincial pride.
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By the early 1830s, Texas had caught the imagination of an entire generation of Americans. For thousands of young men and their families, this promise of regeneration and the prospect of future fortunes made severing ties with the United States relatively easy. The lure of obtaining wealth in Texas was stronger than the ancestral bonds to old family farms carved out of the Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina wilderness by ancestors who had fought at Cowpens and Kings Mountain—like David Crockett’s namesake grandfather—during the American Revolution. Land had always been the great catalyst that pushed restless Americans westward; migrating much like their forefathers, those who went to Texas posted notes or carved the letters G.T.T.—Gone to Texas—on cabin doors throughout the 1820s and early 1830s.

To understand why so many Texas revolutionaries fought on behalf of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, it is first necessary to examine the complex dynamics of both land and slavery and their intertwined relationship and synergies. The Constitution of 1824 was established only three years after Mexico achieved its hard-won independence from Spain after an 11-year struggle, breaking from its Spanish centralist past. But why were so many American volunteers in Texas willing to fight for the Mexican Constitution instead of independence, if they were in fact battling for the principles of liberty and freedom during the Texas Revolution as so commonly believed?