The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (40 page)

So the four-thousand-man Army of Operations began a slow retreat to Mexico by way of Matamoros, over almost impassable roads and nearly uncrossable rivers and streams. The stoic
soldados
and their loyal
soldaderas
slogged slowly through what Filisola called El Mar de Lodo—the Sea of Mud. One twenty-mile stretch of prairie muck took eleven days to traverse. Over hundreds of miles they abandoned supplies, artillery, wagons, ammunition, supplies, oxen, horses, mules, and booty, and by the time they crossed the Rio Grande and eventually reached their homes in Mexico months later, few of them ever wanted to see Texas again. Indeed, only some of the officers, enraged at the shame brought upon them by the ignominious retreat, wished such a thing.

I
N
O
PELOUSAS
, Louisiana, the news of James Bowie’s death reached his mother, Elve Bowie, weeks later, when someone knocked on her door and told the seventy-year-old widow the news. A Bowie family historian related that she received the information calmly, only remarking that she would “wager no wounds were found in his back,” then stoically returned to her housework. Bowie’s brother Rezin—the one to whom he was closest—immediately left for Texas, where he was appointed a colonel in the Texas army.

W
HEN WORD OF THE
A
LAMO’S FALL
and the death of David Crockett reached Tennessee around the same time, Crockett’s youngest son, Robert, also went to Texas to fight for the country his father had given his life for. He attained the rank of first lieutenant in the cavalry. David’s oldest son, John Wesley, took up another of his father’s causes. A year later, in 1837, he ran for Congress in his father’s old district and was elected when the one-legged Adam Huntsman, who had defeated his father in 1835, decided not to seek reelection. Crockett served two consecutive terms, and in February 1841, he was the driving force behind the passage of his father’s land bill, in slightly modified form, which made land cheaply available to the poor in west Tennessee.

J
OSÉ
E
NRIQUE DE LA
P
EÑA
had openly criticized Filisola’s decision to return to Mexico, and the endless slog through the Sea of Mud persuaded him to publish an account of his experiences with the Army of Operations to illustrate the “ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty” that led to defeat and disgrace. (The fact that during the retreat he received an emphatic rejection from his beloved but unfaithful Lucesita may have colored his opinions.) He had kept a diary during much of the campaign, and upon his return began work on his book, based largely on his journal but also incorporating newspaper stories as well as reports, accounts, and observations by other officers and even published letters from Travis, Houston, and others, which he translated and included in his book. Early in 1838, while military commander of Mazatlán, he had pronounced his support for his good friend Urrea’s armed opposition to the centralist government. Upon the failure of that bloody insurrection in July, he was discharged from the army and spent two years in jail, some of it in ill health. He continued to work on his manuscript while incarcerated, sometimes dictating to another prisoner when he was too weak to hold pen to paper. He became a free man in the spring of 1840 and took an apartment in Mexico City, where he spent the next several months without a job, seeking reinstatement in the army and attempting to recover his back pay.

De la Peña’s situation had not improved by October 10. Late in the evening, he became involved in a street altercation, based on a political disagreement, with Lieutenant Colonel José Mariano Cosio, a fellow officer in the Zapadores battalion with whom he had served in Texas—and who had also participated in the attack on the Alamo. In the ensuing struggle, Cosio stabbed de la Peña in the stomach with a sword and killed him. De la Peña was thirty-three years old. His memoir would finally see publication in 1955, more than a century after he wrote it.

Captain José Juan Sánchez would find a brighter future. Despite his objections, and despite a formal request to remain in the Texas campaign, he was sent to Matamoros in April, before the Battle of San Jacinto on the twenty-first, and commissioned to protect the frontier presidios against Indian attacks. He, too, hoped to return to Texas as part of a conquering army set on avenging his nation’s honor. Instead, he spent a decade at a job he disliked, though in December 1836 he finally received his long-awaited promotion to lieutenant colonel. In 1844 he was made colonel, and in 1846, he would be chosen by his old officer-school classmate Santa Anna to serve on his staff during the Mexican-American War. He was brevetted a general by war’s end, and shortly thereafter was appointed commandant general of the state of Coahuila. He was serving in that capacity when he died on June 2, 1849, at the age of fifty-six.

N
O SOONER HAD THE
Army of Operations returned to Mexico than accusations and recriminations over the decision to retreat began flying hard and fast. Several of Santa Anna’s top commanders published books, pamphlets, and articles defending their positions and criticizing their fellow officers. The absent Santa Anna took the worst of it, though public outcry and constant attacks by fellow officers caused Filisola to stand trial for his actions later that year; he was officially exonerated. Though Santa Anna would sign the Treaties of Velasco in May, ending hostilities, Mexico refused to officially recognize Texas independence or accept the loss of her troublesome territory.

Santa Anna would remain in Texas for several months as assurance of the Mexican army’s good intentions. In the fall he was transported to Washington, D.C., where he had a conference with President Jackson. After returning to Veracruz in November on a battleship furnished for him, he remained in seclusion, disgraced, at his Manga de Clavo hacienda. That only lasted a year. In November 1837, a desperate Mexican government gave him command of the army, and he led troops against an invading French force at Veracruz. When he lost a leg after being severely wounded by cannon fire, he insisted that it be buried with full military honors. He survived and would serve as president or dictator of Mexico several more times over the next twenty-eight years—in 1853, his final term, he was elected dictator for life, and he demanded that people address him as Most Serene Highness. He was removed from power a year later and spent most of his remaining life in exile. In 1874, he took advantage of a general amnesty and returned to Mexico City. He died there, penniless, in June 1876.

T
HE TWO YOUNG NATIONS CONTINUED
to tussle sporadically until the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, three years after the republic of Texas was admitted as the twenty-eighth member of the United States. For all practical purposes, however, Texas had won its independence on that open field along the San Jacinto River.

But it is doubtful that the Battle of San Jacinto would have happened were it not for the stand made at an old mission compound on the outskirts of San Antonio de Béxar. The siege of the Alamo occupied Santa Anna for two weeks, and for several more days after his March 6 victory. Beyond the battle itself, which killed or injured some of his best troops, the weeks spent in Béxar retarded the Mexican army’s progress immeasurably. By the time Ramírez y Sesma’s division reached the Colorado River on March 21, heavy spring rains had swelled that river and other waterways to near flood levels and rendered them dangerous and difficult to cross, thus significantly slowing the Mexican advance—which was also checked by Houston’s troops stationed at different points on the opposite side of the Colorado. That army of Texians essentially did not exist as an organized military force until a week after the Alamo’s fall, and almost certainly would not have been able to stop the Mexican army had it reached a more easily crossed Colorado (and many other more easily crossed rivers and streams) early in March, before the rains began.

Just as important, not until the destruction of the Alamo garrison (and the massacre at Goliad, three weeks later) did most Texian colonists begin to appreciate the seriousness of the situation—that their very lives, and the lives of their loved ones, were at stake—and feel compelled and angry enough to take up arms and join Sam Houston’s volunteers to repel an invading army intent on driving them from their homes. (Until then, three-fourths of the Texian forces were recent U.S. volunteers, and only a quarter of them were established settlers; at San Jacinto, those numbers were reversed.) The Alamo and Goliad provided a much-needed rallying cry for the Texian cause. The vengeful fury of San Jacinto would not have existed without them.

Finally, the Alamo garrison bought valuable time for the fledgling Texian government. While the Alamo siege continued, and for ten days afterward, elected delegates at the convention in Washington, representing virtually every municipality in Texas, issued a declaration of independence, crafted and approved a well-constructed constitution, and elected an interim government, measures that significantly legitimized their revolution and greatly assisted them in garnering international political recognition and every kind of assistance and support. Without the stand made by two hundred men at the Alamo, none of that might have happened. More than any other event of the Texas revolution, their sacrifice truly forged a nation that would one day join a country greater than itself.

NINETEEN

Last Rites

They preferred to die a thousand times rather than submit to the tyrant’s yoke.

J
UAN
S
EGUÍN
, A
PRIL
25, 1837

O
n June 4, 1836, Captain Juan Seguín rode down from Powder House Hill at the head of a company of twenty-two Tejano horsemen and approached the outskirts of Béxar. Seven long weeks had passed since their valorous service at San Jacinto, and they were pleased to see the San Antonio River and their town beyond, no matter how battered its structures. All the Alamo’s single walls had been torn down and now lay in heaps of rubble. Only the old church, the
convento,
the main gatehouse, and a few of the houses along the perimeter still stood. Seguín halted his men before entering the city and sent one of his troops in with a message ordering any Mexican forces to evacuate.

The Tejanos had spent most of May in the saddle, observing the Mexican army’s arduous retreat from Texas. They had been tasked with the unpleasant duty of making sure the
soldados
took no private property with them, including slaves. Worse, they soon found themselves forced to care for the sick and wounded
soldados
and
soldaderas
who could not keep up. Seguín’s next orders had been to take possession of Béxar and raise a battalion there to defend the frontier. Comanches were still an ever-present threat, and some believed that the Mexicans would be back.

General Andrade had departed with his thousand men on May 24, headed for Goliad to rendezvous with the remainder of the Army of Operations. Almost a hundred
soldados
stayed in the hospital; the remaining two hundred wounded, some of them on crutches, accompanied him. In the week before leaving, Andrade had overseen the demolition of the Alamo per orders from General Filisola—an especially disheartening task, since his men had spent much of the previous two months improving the fort after the March 6 battle. Behind him he had left a small garrison of eighteen
presidiales
of the Alamo company. Their commanding officer was Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda, the officer sent to Gonzales to seize the colonists’ small cannon the previous September—what seemed a lifetime ago.

Castañeda had lived in Béxar for a dozen years, the last few in his house along the west wall of the Alamo, and he and Seguín had known each other that long. Now Castañeda told him that he could enter the town without opposition. Two days later, the lieutenant and his men left town, bound for Mexico. Several centralist sympathizers and their families departed in the same direction.

The new commandant of Béxar found his family ranch ruined, many of the area fields laid waste, and houses throughout the city little more than rubble—and a citizenry largely unconvinced that the hostilities were at an end. They were thus reluctant to cooperate or assist him in any way, whether it was to join his battalion or just herd cattle to a safer place. A rumor circulated that the Mexican troops had stopped their retreat and were preparing to return. Unable to raise any recruits, Seguín left less than three weeks after his arrival. He returned in November as a lieutenant colonel leading an eighty-man battalion.

Early in January 1837, the Texas high command decided that Béxar would be better off evacuated and destroyed to avoid a second battle of the Alamo if the Mexican army came back. Seguín protested vigorously, and recently elected president Sam Houston reassured his old comrade that the orders would be withdrawn. But difficulties in provisioning, mounting, and paying his men forced Seguín to fall back to Gonzales, whose citizens were only now beginning to return from the east. Before he left, he performed one more important duty.

He ordered a coffin built and covered in black, and placed some of the ashes of the Alamo dead in it; the names of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett were engraved on the inside lid. At four o’clock on the afternoon of February 25, church bells tolled as soldiers carried the coffin to the Church of San Fernando. Accompanied by a procession of other troops, civil authorities, clergy, mourners, relatives, citizens, and a band, they bore it down Potrero Street and across the river. Near the Alameda, at what remained of the largest mound of ashes, three musket volleys were discharged by the entire battalion and the coffin buried with full military honors. In his address, Juan Seguín paid his respects to his fallen comrades. “There are your brothers,” he said, “Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, and others whose valor places them in the rank of my heroes.”