Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (6 page)

For the most part, to the average American and Texas volunteer in the ranks, this conflict was primarily about land ownership, but it was also about the right to possess slaves. Modeled after the United States Constitution, the Mexican Constitution of 1824 safeguarded both land ownership and slavery. After winning its independence, Mexico naturally looked to the United States, not to Spain, as the best example of representative government. For the nationalists, Mexico’s future lay in the promise of New World liberalism, not the feudal Old World past.
⁵¹

Within the context of slavery, the violent beginning of the Texas Revolution was not at Gonzales, Texas, during the “Lexington of the Texas Revolution” in early October 1835; instead the first battle line was drawn in the fight led by William Barret Travis years earlier against Colonel Juan (or John) Davis Bradburn, an abolitionist serving Mexico. Bradburn was an enlightened liberal, having fought in the wars for Mexican independence from Spain. Ironically, the native Kentuckian was an active abolitionist in the service of an anti-slave nation in a Texas dominated by slavery.

Fueling the worst Anglo-Celt fears, he correctly informed Texas slaves that Mexico, rather than the United States, now “knew no slavery” and was the true land of the free. Therefore, he allowed two escaped slaves, who appeared in August 1831 seeking asylum, to join his Anáhuac military garrison, after having recently established both the town and fort on Galveston Bay. Here in east Texas, near the future site of the city of Houston, men of African descent became soldiers for the Republic of Mexico. Bradburn, who with his troops founded Anáhuac to stop slave smuggling along the coast, engendered the early wrath of the American colonists, stirring up this most sensitive issue and guaranteeing that open revolt was only a matter of time. Of this Bradburn was well aware. The Texas colonists, he wrote, “have only observed Anglo-American laws” and not those of Mexico.
⁵²

To this day in Alamo and Texas Revolution mythology, Bradburn has been portrayed as an arch-villain second only to Santa Anna. Bradburn served in the Louisiana Militia during the War of 1812 and was present at the battle of New Orleans, and then commanded the “American Division” of filibusters who invaded the Mexican coast to be defeated by the Spanish, but he has since been viewed as a traitor in the tradition of Benedict Arnold. In truth, Bradburn, born in Richmond, Virginia in 1787, was not unlike one of the heroes of America’s War of 1812, William Hull, who as Governor of the Michigan Territory, refused to return slaves who had fled Canadian owners. Hull furthermore viewed men and women of African descent as United States citizens, just as Bradburn considered runaways deserving of freedom.
⁵³

The Texas Revolution was about the clash of different races—Mexican, Tejano, African American, and Anglo-Celtic—as much as it was about land. The settlement of Texas and the Texas Revolution had deep CelticGaelic, or Irish, antecedents, in terms of both the ancestry of its principle migrants and its dominant culture. The Mexican republican government had in part allowed the establishment of the Austin Colony to serve as a buffer against the greatest menace to the development of Texas for three hundred years, marauding Indians. Now confronting this threat, most new settlers who migrated to Texas were Scotch-Irish, the latest wave in the western Scotch-Irish migration that had begun before the American Revolution.

Two primarily Catholic Irish colonies, one at San Patricio and the other at Refugio, were established by Mexico to contain the ever-growing Anglo-Celtic threat by way of “countercolonizing.” Once again Irish Catholics were pitted against Protestant Scotch-Irish, at least potentially, as they had been for hundreds of years in northern Ireland. Ironically, in this regard, Mexico merely repeated what the English government had done in establishing the Ulster Plantation system of lowland Scottish settlers—the Scotch-Irish—to counter the Irish Catholic, or native, influence in the seventeenth century.

Mexico City’s timely development of a strategic plan based upon the fighting prowess of the always-cantankerous Scotch-Irish was not only nothing new, it was a familiar remedy. Born near Belfast in northern Ireland, James Logan had deliberately settled the western Pennsylvania frontier during the colonial period with hardy Scotch-Irish, his “brave fellow countrymen,” because he knew how tenaciously they had fought the native Irish people, or Catholics, in northern Ireland to claim the land of Ulster Province as their own. Ever-combative, the Scotch-Irish were specifically chosen to serve as the best protective buffer to ensure that Philadelphia and other Pennsylvania communities farther east would be secure from the Indian threat.
⁵⁴
In much the same way, Mexico City and also the Tejanos understood that Anglo-Celtic settlers were simply the “most efficient, quick, and economical means to destroy the Indians,” the ancient enemy of both the Mexican and Tejano people.
⁵⁵

In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning historian Paul Horgan, the wrong-headed government decision to settle Texas with immigrants from the United States “released forces that must clash in always increasing energy until in the end they would meet in bloody battle,” during both the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. Most of all, the conflict between Mexico and Texas was inevitable because the Anglo-Celtics brought to Texas the cultural baggage that was most guaranteed to lead to open warfare: the institution of slavery.
⁵⁶
This process began once the Appalachian barrier was breached, and settlers pouring from the eastern seaboard encountered no more huge natural obstacles to further movement westward. Emphasizing the impact of the historic Anglo-Celtic migration, historian T. R. Fehrenbach concluded that when Kentucky became a state in 1792, “the doom of Hispanic empire on the continent [including the fate of Texas] was sealed.”
⁵⁷

Ironically, the initial success of Austin’s colonizing enterprise only caused Mexico to issue additional land grants for colonization along the same liberal lines as the Austin grant. Land was free for settlers of the Austin colony; he waived the cost of around 6 cents per acre, while public lands in the United States cost around $1.25 per acre. This offer came at a time when many common people in the South could barely make a living especially in North Carolina and Virginia, where the soil had become infertile and eroded due to over-extensive tobacco cultivation.
⁵⁸
By 1829, thanks to the prosperity enjoyed by the Austin Colony, the price of land had gone up, but it was still incredibly cheap.

Aside from official land grants issued by Mexico, the heavy flow of illegal migration from the United States to Texas made conflict all but inevitable. An influx of thousands of illegal aliens from the United States took possession of Texas lands as squatters without paying a cent and without Mexico’s consent. Free Texas land for squatters was available at a time when land along the Mississippi River’s rich alluvium plain were selling for around $35.00–$40.00 per acre.
⁵⁹
The disparity between the costs per acre of prime farming land versus uncleared forested land was wide, but American citizens securing Texas land were attracted by the fact that large land-holds for both settlement and military service, at least in theory, included a good many prime acres along creeks or rivers. This meant that a settler could obtain not only a large number of acres that he could not afford in the United States, but also some of the most fertile acres, which were too expensive for the average man east of the Sabine.

A new Texas colonist who headed a family or intended to raise livestock was promised by the government—both Spanish and Mexican— a total of 4,429 acres, or a square league of land. Best of all for Southerners, Anglo-Celtic settlers who migrated to Texas with capital assets, including slaves, were granted additional leagues of land, promoting the rapid growth of slavery and hence more extensive and quicker development.
⁶⁰

While slavery played a leading role in the antagonism between the slaveowning Anglo-Celts in Texas and the political and military leaders of the abolitionist Republic of Mexico, it was also the most decisive factor in laying the foundation for both “the drive for personal independence” and regional independence. In the estimation of historians James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, “nothing loomed larger than slavery” in the dispute between Texians and Mexico. As in other English-speaking slave regimes in the New World, especially in the thirteen colonies, and even as in Jamaica, slavery fueled a bent toward independence, self-sufficiency, and assertive defiance toward centralized authority, and paved the way for breaking away from government rules and regulations.

The importance of slavery in the American Revolution has been overlooked because it failed to fit the simplistic view of colonists as righteous underdogs and the British as oppressors, rather than the liberators of American slaves. Historians’ negligence on this subject has led to misconceptions and misleading stereotypes about the Anglo-Celts and some of their deepest motivations, including those of the Alamo garrison and principal Texas Revolutionary leaders. Just as slavery played a vital role in fueling colonial resistance to the British, especially in the South, during the American Revolution, so the selective silencing of this complex aspect of Texas’ past occurred because it had no place in the romance of the mythical Alamo.

The supreme importance of slavery can be partly understood by examining the relationship to the peculiar institution of the primary leaders of the Texas Revolution and the Alamo. All of the primary Alamo leaders, James Clinton Neill, James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis, were current or former slave-owners. Colonel Neill, who was proud of his family’s Southern plantation “heritage,” even “dabbled in the slave market” to reap dividends, and then raised cotton that was picked by his own slaves. Crockett was the smallest slave-owner, who “owned [only] a few slaves” in his lifetime. The first member of his hardscrabble Tennessee family ever to own slaves, he was in fact far more anti-slavery in sentiments and actions than Neill, Bowie, or Travis. By far, the wheeling-dealing Bowie possessed the deepest roots and ties to slavery.

As a relatively young slave-owner, Travis fell between Crockett and Bowie in the legendary Alamo triumvirate. Seeking a badly needed fresh start in early 1831, he left a failed marriage with Rosanna E. Cato, as well as a son and unborn daughter, never to return. Departing the little town of Claiborne, Monroe County, located amid the gently rolling lands and “cane country” of southwest Alabama, twenty-one-year-old Travis headed for Texas in a big hurry. Like so many other United States migrants, he was determined to make “a splendid fortune.” Travis then became a lawyer in San Felipe de Austin and Anáhuac, a distinctive Aztec name that held an important place in Mexican culture. Thereafter, he looked to purchase choice east Texas lands for speculation, when not engaged in his legal practice.

In going to Texas, Travis was following the tradition of his South Carolina family, which was largely rooted in the booming cotton culture and slavery in the 18th century. The fertile “cane country” of southwest Alabama, especially along the brown-hued Alabama River, was better for cotton-growing than South Carolina. Here the Travis family had moved and thrived, and the prodigal son was determined to apply the same magical formula for success in Texas.

Travis was fully accustomed to being around African American slaves. He crossed the Sabine with a twenty-year-old male slave by his side, Joe, who served beside him at the Alamo. His own personal household at the little southwest Alabama town of Claiborne had included three slaves. At Anáhuac, one of Travis’ first legal cases was to represent a Louisiana slave-owner seeking the return of two slaves who had fled to Texas and ended up with the Mexican garrison at Anáhuac. Travis was hired to return them to their owner.

Primarily because of deep-seated issues over slavery between Texas and Mexico, Travis emerged as a war hawk and pro-slavery advocate by 1832. He early clashed with Colonel Bradburn, who refused to return the two runaway slaves because they now served as soldiers in his garrison, and had requested Mexican citizenship or freedom. Bradburn also violated traditional “property rights,” as the settlers saw it, impressing the slaves of nearby planters for labor on the Anáhuac fort. But worst of all, Texians feared that Bradburn had indoctrinated African Americans with the ideals of liberation and equality. The early clash over slavery between Travis and Bradburn therefore, in many ways, represented the Texas Revolution in microcosm; it also gave a foretaste of his later showdown with Santa Anna at the Alamo.

As he gained more income from his legal practice, Travis continued to acquire more Texas land. These included property along Buffalo Bayou as early as 1832, and later land holdings in the Ben Milam grant, besides his claims to acreage as a colonist’s right in 1835. The dream of becoming a large landowner and gentleman planter was never far from his mind. To Travis and so many other migrants from the Deep South, Texas was the ideal place to transform themselves into respected members of the planter class.
⁶¹

Year after year, Travis continued to profit from slavery in many ways. As an ambitious young lawyer, he pocketed a tidy fee when he oversaw the purchase of twenty-three slaves for a client. He even earned revenue from clients as far away as New Orleans and San Antonio for lucrative slave transactions. In addition, Travis owned both male and female slaves himself, whom he hired out to ensure himself a steady income. One of his last large purchases was for a slave couple. Like so many Anglo-Celts in Texas by the early 1830s, much of Travis’ total assets was based upon sanctioned slavery, while other enterprising Americans in Texas profited immensely from the illegal slave trade.
⁶²

Jim Bowie possessed a lengthy record as one of the largest slave smugglers and also one of the greatest land speculators in Texas history, activities that went hand-in-hand. Just as in the Travis clan, slaveowning was a Bowie family tradition. His family owned slaves in the 1790s, and throughout its migrations from Tennessee and then across the Mississippi to Louisiana. Bowie’s farsighted father had even jumpstarted the independent adulthood of both of his sons in Louisiana by giving them each ten slaves.