Introduction:
From Fact to Fantasy
The defenders’ ghastly deaths at the Alamo were anything but glorious. Yet the events that took place at that rundown Spanish mission have evolved into an heroic legend, becoming an enduring feature of the American imagination and national memory quite unlike any other historical event. Even though America always loves a winner, the Alamo is a rare example of an American love affair with a loser, an affair that is largely based on the romantic appeal of the mythical last stand.
The Western world has long embraced the ancient Battle of Thermopylae as one of its primary example of heroism, honoring the small band of free men who stood up to Persian hordes who possessed no democratic political tradition. So, too, Americans have long viewed the Alamo as a great symbolic showdown between liberty and slavery, freedom-loving men versus a tyrant, and republicanism versus dictatorship. But what if such traditional interpretations of the Alamo were in fact false, making a mockery of the Spartan heroes of Thermopylae?
The Spartans’ last stand served as the model for the Alamo legend, transforming an instance of relatively weak resistance and massacre into a classic New World myth of an epic battle that represented the epitome of self-sacrifice. Not long after the fighting on March 6, 1836 concluded, the nickname “The Thermopylae of Texas” was bestowed upon the Alamo by those who knew relatively little, or nothing, of the actual facts of the struggle. From their readings in ancient history, enthusiastic mythmakers actually understood far more about the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. than they knew about what transpired at the Alamo. Americans, then and today, have identified with the heroism of King Leonidas’ band of 300 Spartans, who fought to the bitter end against Xerxes’ Persian warriors, defending the key Pass of Thermopylae armed with iron discipline, bronze shields, light armor, and long spears. Here, the king’s forces, including Leonidas himself, died to the last man in a legitimate, heroic stand against the odds in the hope of saving Greece. All perished beside their comrades in the Spartan sacrificial tradition—an ancient cultural value not shared, or even imaginable, by the ragtag members of the Alamo garrison.
How did the last stand myth begin in the first place? On the one hand, it sprung from the overactive imaginations of a good many journalists across the United States. On the other, it grew in large part out of a popular work, published almost immediately after the fall of the Alamo, which quickly reached all corners of the country: Colonel Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas by Richard Penn Smith. This well-received book was supposedly based on David Crockett’s “authentic diary,” which a Mexican officer was said to have taken after Crockett’s death. Needless to say, Crockett had nothing whatsoever to do with its authorship.
The first book to recount the story of the Alamo, this immensely popular work appeared only eight weeks after the fort fell; most recently, it was republished in 2003 to capitalize on the release of the Disney Company’s major film, “The Alamo.”
The spring 1836 publication of Crockett’s Exploits was calculated to sensationalize the Alamo tragedy that had just occurred. The book was an entirely bogus account, written as Smith sat comfortably in his Philadelphia home more than 1,000 miles northeast of San Antonio. One of the most important fictions of Smith’s hyperbolic efforts is the claim that Lt. Col. William Barret Travis exhorted the Alamo garrison that “in case the enemy should carry the fort,” they should “fight to the last gasp, and render their victory even more serious to them than to us.” Travis’ words as imagined by Smith provided an early, though completely unsubstantiated, foundation for the last stand legend, despite many contemporary newspaper accounts to the contrary. Unfortunately, Smith’s work of fiction (and a bad one at that) has long been treated as an authentic document, broadening the emotional and psychological appeal of the heroic last stand concept.
But no one was more responsible for the creation of the myth than early Alamo “historian” William P. Zuber. To counter rumors that some defenders, including Crockett, had surrendered, while others hid instead of fighting to the bitter end, he solidified the central notion that not a single garrison member “escaped or surrendered, or tried to do so; but every man of them died fighting.” Smith’s and Zuber’s unsubstantiated accounts were later picked up and further embellished by Hollywood scriptwriters, distorting reality out of all proportion. More surprisingly, the scholarly and academic community nevertheless still faithfully adheres to the core tenants of the Alamo myth that arose from these early fictionalized renditions.
By contrast, the account written by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who had a penchant for embellishment second to none when it came to his own military successes, shows he was sorely disappointed by the brief, inconsequential fighting. Fully realizing that the Alamo was strategically unimportant, he desired to reap a victory for political effect, and to sow the seeds of terror into remaining Texas forces while impressing his own public in Mexico City. Instead, according to his own account, his minor victory at the Alamo deprived him of glory.
This lack of glory also explains why there have never been any paintings or romantic illustrations of the last stand from the Mexican side. Had the Mexicans encountered resistance on an epic scale, they certainly would have celebrated their great victory in dramatic visual form to display their own heroism against such gallant opposition. Instead, and initially like the Texans themselves, the Republic of Mexico and its people, including the soldados who fought there, simply forgot about the Alamo, as if it was an insignificant footnote to history.
A close look at the sources, both old and newly discovered, and especially the most reliable accounts of Mexican officers and men, reveals a mass exodus by the Alamo garrison. Taken alone, a single Mexican account of an exodus from the Alamo would be highly suspect, but more than half a dozen reliable Mexican accounts exist. Almost all mutually support and reinforce each other, and assert that a large percentage of the Alamo garrison attempted to escape.
General Vincente Filisola, Santa Anna’s second in command, summarized the pervasive sense of disillusionment among the victors: “In our opinion [the engagement at the Alamo] was useless.” And, while historians have grossly inflated the number of Mexican losses, the Filisola document shows that most of the attackers’ losses were due to fratricide. In truth, the Mexicans lost far fewer men than traditional accounts have claimed: in all, less than three hundred casualties. The large percentage of fraticidal casualties means that the entire Alamo garrison may have killed or wounded barely a hundred of their opponents during Santa Anna’s assault. Nor were there ever three distinct attacks; as Santa Anna lamented to Captain Fernando Urriza, his young, competent aide-de-camp: “It was but a small affair.”
Most defenders were neither rugged frontiersmen nor seasoned veterans, thus largely incapable of a tenacious defense, especially when caught in their sleep by a surprise attack. Most of them died at the hands of pursuing Mexican cavalry and lancers on the open prairie outside the walls while fleeing the deathtrap. Quite simply, for the young men and boys at the Alamo, there was no glory on the early morning of March 6, 1836. Unfortunately, none were left to tell the tale of their bitter defeat in military reports, diaries, letters, or memoirs.
Today, A Time to Stand by Walter Lord continues to be considered the best work about the Alamo, even though it was published more than forty years ago. The dismal scholarly track record of Alamo historiography perhaps can be best explained by the continued acceptance of the 1931 doctoral dissertation by Amelia W. Williams, A Critical Study of the Siege of The Alamo and of the Personnel and Its Defenders, written almost a century after the event. Not surprisingly, this dissertation merely reflected the ultra-conservative and traditional rural, cultural, and racial biases prevalent in nineteenth century Texas, and more generally across America. In a bizarre historical paradox, the Alamo’s reputation has been created by the losers, while the victors’ versions—the accounts by eyewitness survivors, including those written shortly after the battle—have remained largely occulted.
The private journal of Colonel Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, which describes in detail what he witnessed at the Alamo, is another excellent case in point. Almonte was an erudite man educated in the United States, whose journal was discovered after his capture at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. This was then translated and published in the New York Herald the following June. As the Herald’s editors candidly admitted in the introduction of the journal’s fourth installment on June 27, 1836, “Almonte’s account differs very differently from what we received at the time through the Texas papers.” Almonte’s journal states: “The enemy attempted in vain to fly [from the Alamo], but they were overtaken and put to the sword,” by Mexican cavalry positioned outside the walls.
Almonte personally witnessed only a single flight of Alamo defenders. Other eyewitness accounts testify to the flight of several large groups as well as individuals, whose numbers taken together comprise the majority of the defenders. This exodus of so many soldiers doomed the relatively few men still fighting inside the walls, especially in the Long Barracks, the infirmary, and the church, sealing their fate and hastening the Alamo’s fall. Another excellent source of information is a rare battle report by General Joaquin Ramirez y Sesma, which was discovered in the Secretaria de la Defensa, Archivo Historico, Militar, in Mexico City. Sesma’s report, written on March 11, 1836, only five days after the fall of the Alamo, corroborates other Mexican sources. It describes multiple escape attempts by a large number of defenders, around 120 men in primarily three separate groups.
In an ironic twist, the mass exodus of so many Alamo defenders now actually places David Crockett’s alleged death by execution on Santa Anna’s orders—the most heated Alamo controversy—in a much more heroic light. If, indeed, the de la Pena account and other sources are correct in this regard, the fact that Crockett was among the minority of soldiers who remained inside the fort speaks for itself.
The flight of so many Alamo defenders does not disparage their characters or courage, although it does erode the heroic romance of their deaths. The Alamo garrison had little chance to resist in any organized manner during the predawn attack that literally caught them asleep. Mexicans began pouring over the top and through a small gate at the north wall “like sheep” in the early morning darkness. Fleeing the deathtrap was not only the instinctive response of ill-fated soldiers; it was also tactically sound and the only realistic alternative under the circumstances.
Mostly boys and young men in the prime of life, these citizen-soldiers possessed promising futures and looked forward to claiming thousands of prime Texas acres. The last thing these men—mostly volunteers from the United States—desired was to throw it all away for the largely apathetic Texians who had failed to reinforce the Alamo, or to give their lives for a factionalized Texas government that had abandoned them. Fleeing in an attempt to survive and fight another day under more favorable circumstances was a much more rational choice. And we should also not forget that once the Mexicans had breached the walls, further resistance inside the Alamo could not have been sustained and made no tactical sense.
The distortion of the Alamo story is in many ways comparable to the way Custer’s Last Stand was distorted for the occasion of the United States Centennial on June 25, 1876. America needed heroes and especially martyrs to glorify. For generations, the white, or Anglo, version of the death of Custer and his men was the only received account. Once again, a first-rate military disaster was turned into a moral victory in terms of a myth of self-sacrifice.
Both the Alamo and the Little Big Horn fiascos were almost incomprehensible to white America, for they shook entrenched racial and cultural assumptions about a God-given superiority over other peoples. Accounts of the struggle at the Little Big Horn in the Montana Territory, which took place forty years after the Alamo fell, repeated the romanticized story of a valiant last stand of white troops heroically battling a darker, “inferior” race against impossible odds. In both cases, American illustrators and painters, in the notable absence of either Indian or Mexican pictorial representations, left an enduring dramatic imprint on the American popular consciousness. Fantasies replaced mundane facts because no white soldiers of either contest survived to describe what actually occurred.
Much like the story of the Alamo, the Anglo version of Custer’s Last Stand was readily received, even though it ran directly contrary to eyewitness accounts of Native Americans. Again, too, the words of Little Big Horn’s victors were conveniently overlooked, because they challenged the idealized heroics that immortalized the defenders’ courage and demonstrated racial and cultural superiority, despite the fact that they had lost the battle.
Corroborating a good many Native American eyewitness and oral accounts, recent archeological studies of the Little Big Horn battlefield have shed light on what really happened that hot June day in Montana, including the fact that white troopers offered relatively little resistance and sometimes panicked, paving the way to annihilation. New research derived from archeological evidence taken from the battlefield has proven that the romantic account of Custer’s last stand was in fact false: moreover, Native American losses, like those among Mexicans at the Alamo, were surprisingly low.
Many contemporaries viewed the fall of the Alamo as the most shameful episode of the entire Texas Revolution. Sickened by what he saw as a complete waste of life on March 6, one angry Texas newspaperman caught the representative mood. Writing with disgust that the Alamo garrison was needlessly “sacrificed by the cold neglect” of the Texians, he cast “shame” on “the hundreds and thousands that might have gone up to the rescue—but they would not.” If a parallel between real life events is to be made, the drama of the Alamo—both inside and outside its walls—was grotesque and hideous, comparable not to Thermopylae but to the sad slaughter of the Southern Cheyenne at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in late December 1890.
Soldiers on both sides at the Alamo fought and died for what they believed to be right, but these motivations deserve fresh reassessment and closer scrutiny, especially in regard to the complexities of slavery. While the Alamo defenders struggled for possession of a bountiful land yet owned by another people, the Mexicans fought on behalf of a far more equitable republic than the United States. Most Texans were either slave-owners or aspired to become so in order to fully exploit the promises of the land. These sentiments were certainly common to both the pantheon of Alamo leaders such as Travis and Bowie and the rankand-file soldiers.
Today we can no longer afford to ignore that the Alamo defenders were on the wrong side of the slavery issue, while the Mexicans were in the right. Mexico, unlike the United States, had abolished slavery in 1829, more than half a decade before the Alamo battle. One of the crucial reasons why the Texans revolted against Mexico in 1835 was to maintain the constitutional safeguards of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, which protected slavery, as did the United States Constitution on which it was modeled.
Given the United States’ current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it all the more behooves us to better understand our past and present military involvements, especially in foreign lands. We must endeavor to strip away as many myths and prejudices as possible in order to more correctly see ourselves, as well as the opposing viewpoints of other lands, cultures, and ethnic groups, especially those of our enemies. Any nation that indulges in the self-serving process of sentimentalizing and glorifying military disasters to bolster cultural and racial fantasies only makes itself more vulnerable to folly in the future. Even today, a host of fresh, practical lessons can yet be glimpsed from the Alamo disaster, if we can only understand the timeless factors that led to the debacle.
In 1836, as today, the greatest military sin of all is hubris: to thoroughly underestimate an enemy, while overestimating one’s own capabilities, righteousness, and combat prowess. History has proven that such misperceptions often stem from erroneous beliefs rooted in fantasies of racial and cultural superiority. Dismissal or ignorance of the intelligence, determination, organizational skill, cultural pride, sense of personal and national honor, and war capabilities of a foreign opponent in his own homeland has long been a guaranteed formula for inevitable military disasters like the Alamo. Today, as in March 1836, truth is often the first casualty of war, and history’s lessons linger.