Misremembering The Alamo
What is the real story behind the legendary battle?
The specifics of how the fort fell, however, interest historians less than why these men fought in the first place. Some argue that their motives can be summed up in two words: cheap land. Houston's call to arms, published in American newspapers, was clear on the SUBJECT "If volunteers from the United States will join their brethren in this section, they will receive liberal bounties of land. We have millions of acres . . . unchosen and unappropriated." (The Mexican government, of course, begged to differ.)
Others insist that the fight stemmed from legitimate political grievances. By the 1830s, there were probably 30,000 Americans living in Texas (compared with around 3,000 Mexicans). Unlike most of the men at the Alamo, many of them were longtime residents who had justifiable complaints about the Mexican government. When Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna seized power in 1833 and dissolved the country's legislature, they were appalled. And they weren't alone: Three popular uprisings were put down in other parts of Mexico before the Texas rebellion.
Revolution. By rising up against tyranny, many Texans felt they were following in the footsteps of their grandparents, who had fought for independence from Britain. The Texans even outlined their objections to Mexican rule in a declaration of independence, signed only a few days before the Alamo fell.
One issue notably absent from the Texas declaration--and from all previous Alamo movies--was slavery. Almost a quarter of the original American settlers in Texas owned slaves. When the Mexican government abolished the practice, Texans viewed it as yet another infringement on their liberty. "The colonists were overwhelmingly southerners," says William C. Davis, author of Lone Star Rising: The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic, "and they felt they needed slaves to capitalize on that vast arable land in the eastern part of the state." To take away slavery, they felt, was to take away Texas.
The slavery question has muddied the pristine image of the Texas revolution. John Quincy Adams, two months after the Alamo, argued on the floor of the U.S. House that "the war now raging in Texas is a Mexican civil war and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished." Popular history never mentions it, says Davis, but in the Texas revolution "you have the same contradiction [that you do in] the Civil War, when you've got several million Confederate citizens and soldiers preaching all the rhetoric of liberty while owning 3 million slaves." The difference, he insists, is that in the fight for Texas, slavery was only an issue, not the issue.
As to what exactly was the issue for Crockett and the rest, experts are uncertain. "I don't think you can go back and say in 1835 and 1836, there was this big slave conspiracy," says Richard Bruce Winders, curator at the Alamo. Nor can historians necessarily attribute the uprising solely to liberty or land. The defenders of Texas, and the Alamo, may have all been fighting for different reasons. As one veteran wrote afterward of his fellow soldiers: "Some were for independence; some for the Constitution of 1824 [which had been abandoned by Santa Anna]; and some for anything, just so it was a row."
And what a row it was. "In the wake of the Alamo," writes Brands, "the specifics shaded into inconsequence. Whatever motivated men to die such a death must be righteous." Today, as historians grapple with the Texas revolutionaries' murky motives and convoluted cause, one thing is for certain: "We have to say they fought bravely," says Brands. "Does that make them heroes? I don't know the answer to that."
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