Misremembering The Alamo
What is the real story behind the legendary battle?
The last time the battle of the Alamo was fought on the big screen, John Wayne played Davy Crockett, the old fort seemed to be garrisoned exclusively by white men in coonskin caps, and myth trumped history at every turn. "There is literally not a line, not a sentence, not a place, not a person, nothing in that film that corresponds with reality in any shape or form," says Frank Thompson, author of Alamo Movies. The film's two historical advisers were so disgusted that they walked off the set.
This week, John Lee Hancock's The Alamo, the 13th version of the epic to be filmed, premieres on the big screen. While experts are circumspect about the movie's historical merits, those who have seen the movie say it is closer to the truth, for what that's worth, than John Wayne's account or any of the others.
For decades, "the Alamo [has been] the shrine of Texas liberty," says Thompson. The 200 or so defenders of the fort in San Antonio, all of whom died trying to hold off up to 6,000 Mexican regulars in 1836, "were the saints who were immolated on that pyre." The first historian who dared suggest, in 1978, that Davy Crockett was captured after the battle and executed--rather than fighting, gloriously, to the end--received death threats. (Most experts now agree with this interpretation.) But over the past decade, what started as a trickle has now become a stream of scholarship offering new insight into the Texas revolution--who the Alamo martyrs really were and what inspired them to fight.
Misfits. Historians take pains to stress that the lily-white image of most Alamo stories is misleading. Not only were there a significant number of Tejanos--ethnic Mexicans living in Texas--fighting in the fort alongside the Anglos, but the heroes of Texas independence were not, well, so heroic--at least not at the beginning. "Many of these guys when they arrived were sort of rotten and nasty," says H. W. Brands, author of Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence--and Changed America. Jim Bowie was a slave trader and land speculator before he came to Texas. Davy Crockett was a backwoods politician who had just been humiliated in an election. Sam Houston, the general of the Texas army who later avenged the deaths of the Alamo garrison and won Texas independence, had a notorious weakness for the bottle. William Travis, who was in command of the Alamo when it fell, had deserted his pregnant wife, young child, and a mountain of debt. He brought his personal slave, Joe, with him to the battle, one of a handful of black men who would be trapped inside the fort. To its credit, historians say, the new movie, unlike its predecessors, embraces the complexity of these men--Houston wrestles with his drinking, Crockett with his image. Travis's slave appears for the first time in an Alamo film.
But the movies can't answer the question that still tantalizes historians: What was it about Texas that made the volunteers so willing to sacrifice their lives for it? It's important to remember, says Brands, that "no one went to the Alamo to die; they all thought they were going to win." Initially, Houston dispatched a group of men to destroy the fort, which guarded one of the two roads into Texas. Once they arrived, however, he was persuaded to let them fight, and the defenders began to dig in. The Mexican Army surprised what was still a tiny garrison in late February 1836. Travis immediately began sending letters to Houston asking for reinforcements. But political infighting in the main army camp prevented Houston from sending help. On the morning of March 6, after a 12-day siege, the Mexicans attacked.
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."
This story appears in the April 12, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.