Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth (7 page)

By 1829, Bowie owned plantations in both Louisiana and Mississippi, both worked by gangs of slaves. James and his brother sold property in LaFourche Parish in February 1831, which was paid for partly by their acquisition of sixty-five slaves from the buyer. But he reaped his greatest financial boon when he smuggled into the United States and then sold large numbers of slaves, or “black ivory,” reaping a lavish return. The unfortunate Africans were transported in Jean Laffite’s ships from leading slave-trading ports like Havana. Because the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the United States since 1808, transporting slaves illegally from Texas into chattel-hungry Louisiana made Bowie a lavish fortune.

The fantastic amount of money reaped from selling slaves allowed Bowie to purchase even more land. He thrived as a land speculator on both sides of the Mississippi. After selling thirty-four slaves to raise money in early 1830 to permanently settle in Texas, Bowie developed an ambitious speculative plan to secure three-quarters of a million acres in Mexican lands. Like Travis, Bowie brought slaves into Texas from the beginning; when Bowie first applied for a league of land under Mexican law, he possessed 109 slaves, and their labor remained a large part of his long-term plans for acquiring a fortune in Mexico. He established, for instance, one of the early cotton mills at Saltillo in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, after securing the required approval from the Mexican government.
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Sam Houston grew up in a Scotch-Irish family in Rockbridge County in western Virginia. But like so many other Scotch-Irish, the family migrated west over the mountains to east Tennessee. Here, at the little town of Maryville located in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains, life was made easier for young Houston and his male siblings by a number of hard-working slaves, who cut down trees and cleared the land for farming.
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Another especially enterprising slave-trader who reaped fantastic profits in Texas was James W. Fannin, Jr. Ultimately proving to be a better slave-dealer than a military commander, Fannin forsook a military career, squandering a fine West Point education and a promising future, to make money by smuggling. He illegally brought 153 slaves from the Spanish island of Cuba into Texas in 1833.

In fact, Fannin originally migrated to Texas primarily “to perpetuate his trafficking in African slaves” after the direct importation of slaves from Africa became illegal in the United States. Fannin and other Texas slave traders reaped vast rewards from slave smuggling. Like Bowie, Fannin brought slaves illegally from Cuba to the United States, and later transported gangs of them from Texas for sale in nearby Louisiana. By mid-January 1836, he owned a good many slaves with a value of $17,000. But Fannin was only doing what came natural to a Southerner of sound business mind. He had grown up on a Georgia cotton plantation with plenty of slaves. In Texas, he himself raised crops of cotton, continuing the family tradition of living well as a member of the aristocratic planter class: a privileged existence that he would defend with his life.
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The primary leaders of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution were not alone in owning slaves or engaging in slave smuggling to reap astronomical profits. The majority of the average soldiers, the lowly privates of the Alamo, were either small slave-owners or had visions of one day acquiring them. Slavery was deeply ingrained in Southern Anglo-Celtic culture and society as well as in the legal system—an inheritance from England, which gained its legal legacy from ancient Rome, whose imperial legions had long occupied the island. In fact, slavery had been “America’s original sin,” stemming from the founding fathers’ failure to abolish the institution in the effort to create a union of confederated states.

Typical of the average soldiers found at the Alamo, brothers William and Mial Scurlock departed Tennessee for the express purpose of acquiring as much Texas acreage as possible. They headed for the east Texas area just west of the Louisiana border around San Augustine, bringing one male and a female slave with her four-year-old son. Acquiring 640 acres, the Scurlock brothers and their slaves cleared the land and built a log cabin. Both brothers joined in the attack that resulted in San Antonio’s capture during the 1835 Campaign. While William rode south on the ill-fated Matamoros Expedition that departed San Antonio at the end of 1835, Mial stayed behind with the tiny garrison in San Antonio, where he met his maker at the Alamo.
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Even a strong religious faith failed to alter or diminish the passion for slave-owning across Texas. Protestants and Catholics owned slaves in Texas with equal relish, exploiting them against God’s word in the name of bestowing Christianity upon “heathens.” Jewish Alamo defender Abraham (Anthony) Wolfe, from the Galveston area just south of Anáhuac, was considered “the black sheep” of his family; he assisted Jean Laffite in smuggling slaves from Texas to Louisiana to sell to rich planters and aristocrats in and around New Orleans. An English Jew, he migrated from London to settle in Nacogdoches, Texas in 1835 after the death of his wife, Sarah. One of the few Jews to serve at the Alamo, Wolfe was destined to die with the garrison along with his two sons, Michael and Benjamin.
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Named in honor for the incomparable founding father from Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Smith won widespread “notoriety as a trader in African slaves.”He wrote to the Convention on November 8, 1835, proposing an amazing offer: “At the present time our Country is involved in war, & without means to carry it out—It may become necessary that individuals should contribute to the public fund—I therefore take pleasure in communicating to you that I have eleven leagues of land which I desire [now] to place at the disposition of my country.”
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In November 1835, Fannin, no longer a slave trader but a prosperous cotton planter near the port town of Velasco on the gulf coast, offered the Texas government a deal it could not refuse: authorization to sell his personal property, consisting mostly of the monetary value of 36 of his slaves, for the purchase of munitions to sustain the fledgling Texas war effort.
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Fannin made this decision because he knew that when Santa Anna invaded Texas, he would liberate Africans in bondage. Like other Texas slave-owners, Fannin realized that slave “property . . . will not be worth owning, if we do not succeed” in winning the Texas Revolution. He was fated to be executed by Santa Anna’s troops with hundreds of his command at Goliad on Palm Sunday, 1836.
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Fannin’s motivation was shared by the men of the Alamo as well. Yet despite the extreme importance of slavery, the Texas Revolution and especially the Alamo are primarily viewed as part of western history, rather than part of mainstream southern history. Nevertheless, examining the all-important role of slavery is fundamental to understanding both the Texas revolutionaries and what occurred at the Alamo. Slavery was key to the successful development of Texas and the exploitation of its natural riches, just as it had been key to developing the eastern seaboard in states like Virginia and Maryland. If Santa Anna’s Army emerged victorious, slavery would be illegal in Texas, causing it to revert back to a land of impoverished shepherds and their flocks.
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However, slavery served as a central foundation of Anglo-Celtic settlement. Austin first proposed that Spanish officials grant slave owners an additional 50 acres per slave, and later this was increased to 80 acres for each slave. This bonus for bringing slaves to Texas not only encouraged large planters but also yeoman farmers: by 1825, one quarter, or more than 440, of the Austin Colony consisted of slaves. Indeed, almost one in four of Austin’s colonists owned slaves, making them better off than their middle class peers in the United States. Like his fellow transplanted countrymen, Austin realized that the abolishment of slavery in Texas would ensure that “we [would be] ruined forever.”
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In regard to chattel labor, the world of the Anglo-Celts in Texas and that of the Mexicans, a mixed-race people, could not have been more diametrically opposed. Austin traveled to Mexico City in a desperate 1823 effort to convince Mexico’s enlightened leaders, who wanted slavery abolished in Texas and all slaves to be freed in ten years, to modify their position. Representing prevalent Anglo-Celtic sentiments, Austin advocated life-long slavery for existing Africans in bondage. His only compromise was to suggest that emancipation be allowed for slave children upon reaching adulthood. As during the antebellum period in the United States, compromises over the issue of slavery in Texas only delayed the inevitable conflict to come concerning the highly combustible matters of race and economics.
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When the Mexican government abolished slavery in Mexico in 1829, the freeing of Mexico’s slaves that September 15 caused great consternation among the American colonists, who realized that “immediate, total abolition would destroy at one blow the population, property, and agriculture of an important part of the state.”
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Perhaps no one in Texas was more upset by such anti-slavery developments than Jared E. Groce, aged thirty-nine, from Alabama. A member of one of the original 300 Austin Colony families, he was “one of the first pioneers of Texas, having emigrated here in [January] 1822.”
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Groce reaped considerable financial success from his sprawling cotton plantation, Bernardo, thanks to the hundred slaves that he transported from the Deep South in early 1822. Carving out his own cotton kingdom in the wilderness, he became the lord of “Groce’s Retreat,” adding to his original 44,000 acres to become the largest cotton grower in Texas. By 1825, Groce had built his own cotton gin, the first in Texas, for the New Orleans market. Four years later, Texas could boast of seven operating cotton gins in the Austin Colony, with a cotton crop estimated at 1,000 bales.

Nothing proved more profitable in all Texas than the combination of slavery and cotton culture. A single crop of cotton from a small farmer could reap a fabulous profit of $10,000. When General Manuel de Mier y Teran visited the Groce plantation, he was amazed to discover that the planter already had 30,000 pounds of cotton ready for shipment to New Orleans. Reflecting class differences in the Texas Revolution, no member of the Groce family served in the army’s ranks; however, Groce, who was raised in Virginia, provided supplies to the Texas Army in early April 1836, less than a month after the Alamo’s fall.

In 1833, Texas’ rich, dark soil, especially along the creek and river bottoms, produced 4,000 bales of cotton, each weighing around 2,000 pounds. The following year, 10,000 cotton bales were produced. Aside from smuggling slaves, raising cotton in Texas was the quickest and easiest way to get rich. A single young male slave could pick more than 150 pounds of cotton from sunup to sundown. Not coincidently, the colonists at Gonzales who sparked the beginning of the Texas Revolution in 1835 did so in early October, after the cotton had already been picked and baled at summer’s end. Cotton in Texas was white gold, going hand-in-hand with the amassing of black gold, or slaves
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Shock waves echoed across the United States with Mexico’s September 1829 decision to abolish slavery. The almost unbelievable prosperity of cotton culture across Texas was threatened overnight. Alarmed journalists across the South decried the act, raising a “howl of protest,” as even the South itself seemed threatened by Mexico’s example. And across Texas, talk of separation from Mexico became deadly serious: revolutionary seeds had been planted. Then, the Mexican Congress, based on the 1829 recommendations of General Teran, decided on April 6, 1830, that slaves were no longer allowed to be brought into Texas by United States citizens—a possible first step, it was feared, toward general emancipation of Texas slaves.
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Like Southerners who later viewed slavery’s abolition as inevitable when President Lincoln was elected in the winter of 1860, and thus determined to secede from the Union, so Texans viewed abolition in Mexico as catastrophic. In 1829, just one year before Mexico outlawed the import of slaves into Texas, one Southern journalist, with the “lessons of St. Domingue” in mind, summarized what the abolitionist threat entailed for Texians: “An attempt by the General Government to emancipate our slaves . . . would not only threaten to deprive us of a large part of our property, it would also produce immediate danger of the massacre of our families, and of a horrid servile war.”
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It could no longer be denied that Mexico’s enlightened philosophies and humanitarian principles posed a serious long-term threat to the Texans’ way of life. When Mexico declared independence from Spain, Mexico’s leaders, ironically motivated by the same ideals that had sparked the American Revolution in 1775, promised equality for Mexicans of all castes, colors, and classes. Far more egalitarian than anything in the United States, these enlightened principles for mixedrace peoples and people of African descent, all of whom were denied equality in the United States, astounded white Americans. Mexico’s position posed a serious threat to the firmly entrenched racial, economic, political, and social norms that held the fragile fabric of society together.
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After much protest, Texas received an exemption from Mexico’s president, because the original 1822 grant from the Mexican government to Austin had placed no restrictions on slavery. However, Mexico’s leaders and people yet desired gradual emancipation for slaves in Texas. The clock was therefore ticking away from an early date, and everyone knew it. Austin admitted as early as 1822 what lay at the heart of the differences between the new republic of Mexico and the Anglo-Celtic settlers: “the principal difficulty is slavery.”
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Other than armed might, only legal restrictions from Mexico City on what Anglo-Celts believed to be slavery’s natural extension could slow the flood of Americans migrating to Texas. Austin knew that “ruin would befall the colony if the original three hundred families could no longer rely on their slaves.”
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Yet Mexico, committed to gradual emancipation, declared that all African American children in bondage would be freed once they reached the age of fourteen, ending the cycle of generations of men and women in permanent bondage. In response, Austin, heading a committee to buy time, advocated a key concession: he proposed a revision of abolitionist laws and regulations to provide a legal guarantee that “the slaves and their descendants of the [original] 300 families [of the Austin Colony] shall be slaves for life.”
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