Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
After a bloody feud in Louisiana, he drifted into Texas. At San Antonio, he entered Spanish society easily. He married the beautiful Ursula Veramendi, daughter of the Vice-Governor of Texas, and ended up owning leagues of Texas lands. Tragedy struck his life in 1833, when in the great cholera epidemic his wife, his infant son, and daughter died. Bowie had had no contact with the Texan colonists until this time. He was a wealthy, and honored, citizen of Mexico. But blood called to blood, and with his ties gone, Bowie drifted into the Revolution. He served with distinction before Houston dispatched him to the Alamo. Houston sent him because Bowie was one of the few men in Texas Houston knew and respected.
Crockett, the other living legend in the Alamo, was also a frontiersman, born in the State of Franklin before it became Tennessee. Like Bowie's, his father had fought against the British, and had arrived from Ireland. And like Bowie, he was one of the two most famous characters in the Old Southwest. But Crockett was never a planter or a businessman; he remained a hunter and a drifter all his days.
When the planters and farmers filled Tennessee in the normal pattern in the early years of the century, Crockett failed to prosper. Instead of moving on, he entered politics, as a representative of the hunter-trapper-squatter population. Eventually, he served in Congress, and here came into opposition to the powerful President of the United States, Andrew Jackson. Jackson, for all his outward democratic biases and prejudices and the propaganda of his being the first President "from the people," concealed a deeply conservative nature. The frontiersman in Jackson never liked the gentry-born, despite his enormous holdings at the Hermitage and his hundreds of black slaves, and his Kitchen Cabinet and other peculiar manifestations of vulgarity in the White House were symbolic of this. But if Jackson, like all classes of Westerners, disliked tight money and the United States Bank, he also removed the "civilized tribes" from the territory of the United States and paid off the public debt. Crockett opposed all these things, and came into violent opposition to the Administration. Crockett seems to have been an early Populist, who wanted federal funds used for domestic spending in the states, something Jackson's Roman sense of values opposed. The mass of the public was with Jackson on both the Bank and Indian questions; the Bank was closed, and the Indians forcibly removed. Neither Davy Crockett nor the Supreme Court prevailed, whatever the constitutionality of their cause. Further, Jackson, who controlled the patronage of Tennessee, saw to it that Crockett was effectively purged at the polls.
David Crockett's national fame rested on his ability with a rifle, and his ability to tell about it as a raconteur. He made a short concession speech, in which he told his constituents to go to Hell, while he went to Texas.
Crockett had had a wife and children along the line, who somehow had gotten lost. He had had woman trouble, like almost every one of the Texas immortals: Houston, Bowie, Travis, and a hundred others. Houston and Travis separated from wives in the United States under circumstances of scandal, though no evidence attached blame to either. Bowie's life was blasted by tragedy. Crockett, like Houston and Bowie a man in middle years, drifted into the Texas Revolution in search of a cathartic, a new life, and a new career. Destiny, manifest or otherwise, worked in devious ways.
This fact is disturbing to some determinist historians, because destiny, in the Texas Revolution, hardly bears inspection. With these admitted and admired paladins were a thousand men, lesser probably in only minor ways. Twelve Tennesseeans marched west with Crockett. Three dozen, more or less, each came to the Alamo with Bowie and Buck Travis. Here they found a hundred kindred souls, from every walk of the frontier. They had one thing in common. They were all instinctive warriors, bred to arms if not formal warfare. They rode to the scent of trouble. None of them consciously planned to die. In the Alamo, in the shadow of Santa Anna's blood-red flag, loyalty to Bowie, to Travis, and in some way few of them could define, to their land and people, and to themselves, held them fast. Travis, in his glory, distributed his paladins great and small across the walls. Crockett, who refused a command and asked to be a "high private" among his Tennessee boys, was allotted the most dangerous and exposed part of the wall. Travis tendered it, and Crockett accepted it, as an honor.
Some measure of the grim, not heady, determination and exaltation that pervaded this group can be glimpsed in James Butler Bonham, courier and honorary colonel, who made dangerous trip after trip to the outside, carrying requests for help, begging Fannin at Goliad to move his army west. There was no help, except thirty-two Texans who gathered at Gonzales. They rode to the Alamo and fought their way inside, when they knew no other help would come. In these men Travis's words struck home; they came to fight, and die. At the very end, the weary Bonham, a lawyer, a Carolinian of exalted family and a friend of Travis, turned his mount around and rode back toward San Antonio. He was told it was useless to throw away his life. He answered that Buck Travis deserved to know the answer to his appeals, spat upon the ground, and galloped west into his own immortality.
On March 3, 1836, after days of siege and bombardment, Travis addressed his last letter to the Council at Washington-on-the-Brazos. He knew a new consultation was now being held, but he did not know that Texas had declared its independence. His battered walls still flew the Mexican colors; his men, on duty and in combat day and night, were reeling with exhaustion. Travis no longer expected rescue. He wrote, apparently, to stir his countrymen into action, that the country might be saved:
. . . I shall have to fight the enemy on his own terms. I will . . . do the best I can . . . the victory will cost the enemy so dear, that it will be worse for him than defeat. I hope your honorable body will hasten reinforcements. . . . Our supply of ammunition is limited. . . . God and Texas. Victory or Death.
As the struggle for the continent recedes, Travis has become less and less an acceptable, understandable hero. But from the Alamo, from his first message before the arrival of the Mexicans to his last, his words had the ring of prophecy. The Texas historian who stated publicly that few people would want to have a son serve under William Barret Travis had forgotten, in the comforts of long security, the reasons men make war.
After ten days of siege, of cannon battery and counterbattery, which the Texans lacked powder to pursue effectively, and of numerous sallies by the defenders at night, and after some dozens of Mexican gunners had been picked off by rifle fire, the besieging army worked its guns in close. On March 5 a breach was battered in the Alamo east wall.
Santa Anna was now impatient. His intelligence told him that the Texans were meeting again on the Brazos, but he knew no other resistance lay between the Alamo and the Sabine. The fortnight he had lost, hammering at the mission walls, had delayed him by that long from the destruction of Anglo-Texas. He called a commanders' conference on March 4, and talked with his generals of brigade. They were divided; some were prepared to attack now, with a decisive assault; others preferred to wait until after the 7th, when two twelve-pound siege guns were due to arrive. With these guns the Mexicans could completely breach the defending walls. Those officers, like Cós, who had seen Texan rifle fire at close range were cautious; Santa Anna, his mind on the campaign's delay, was not. When Colonel Almonte warned him the cost would be high, Santa Anna remarked he did not care; the nut must be cracked. Orders for the assault were issued on the afternoon of March 5.
Five battalions, about 4,000 men, were committed to the action. Only trained soldiers were used; others, whose training was not considered sufficient, were confined to barracks. The attack order was efficiently written and issued, and ended, since this was a professional, more than a patriot army, as follows:
The honor of the nation being concerned in this engagement against the lawless foreigners who oppose us, His Excellency expects every man to do his duty and exert to allow the country a day of glory, and gratification to the Supreme Government, who will know how to reward distinguished deeds by the brave soldiers of the Army of Operations.
The brigades that assembled in the chilly pre-dawn darkness on the open fields beyond the Alamo on March 6 were veteran, and good. They were well-fed, smartly uniformed, and armed with flintlock muskets, which were still the standard weapon of every army of the day. Each man carried a long bayonet in good order; the Chief of Staff's instructions emphasized this. Despite some weaknesses in the top commands, where matters devolved on politics, the officer corps was professional, and competent. Throughout the officers were sprinkled numerous Europeans, most of whom were veterans of the Napoleonic or other respectable wars.
The tactics used were the standard Napoleonic techniques; attack in columns, cavalry on the flanks and in reserve, batteries to soften the enemy before the charge. Two weaknesses here, however, glared: Santa Anna lacked sufficient guns to give the enemy a sufficient Napoleonic blasting, and his heavy cuirassiers could not hurl their shock action against thick limestone walls. The assault had to be infantry in column, bearing bayonets and scaling ladders. Probably, no marshal of France would have faulted the organization or the charge. But neither Napoleonic marshals, nor Santa Anna, had ever assaulted American riflemen ensconced behind high walls.
Nor could they know that British army instructions of the time warned that American riflemen, behind breastworks, could be attacked frontally only at unacceptable cost. British officers had seen the Sutherland Highlanders shot to a standstill, and battalions chopped to pieces, before the massed cotton bales at New Orleans in 1815. There, Jackson, and men like these men in the Alamo, had commenced firing at the unheard-of range of three hundred yards. At one hundred yards, a British, or a Mexican, musket could not hit a man-sized target one time in ten.
Both history and legend record that Travis gave only one coherent order to his awakened, stumbling men: "The Mexicans are upon us—give 'em Hell!"
The Alamo cannon smashed some columns, then the flat crack of small-bore rifles swelled. Flame and lead sleeted and sleeted again from the sprawling walls. Marksmanship was hardly an American, rather a Western, tradition. The Tennesseeans, Kentuckians, and all the others shot and seldom missed. On the frontier men got guns at about the age of seven; and a boy or man who missed with a single-shot weapon usually went hungry, or lost his hair.
The smartly columned army, marching with its regimentals, bayonets flashing in the dawn, its bands blaring the "Degüello," a blood-tune that reached back to Moorish days, stumbled into a swarm of lead. The first ranks went down, then the ranks behind them. Everywhere, colonels and majors and captains cried out and fell. It was an American tradition to shoot at braid.
The first assault never reached the walls. The defenders sent up a ragged cheer; they were still fighting for their lives.
The bands roared, and the Mexican bugles sent the columns forward again. Now, the ladders went up the walls—but they could not stay.
Fire, ram, put powder, patch, shot, ram, splash the flash pan, aim, fire
—this was weapons-handling the Mexican officers had never seen. Some felt there must be a hundred men inside the fortress merely loading guns. At the wall the ladders wavered, then collapsed. A scattered trail of uniformed corpses marked the Mexican retreat.
But massed musketry had knocked many Texans off the walls, this time; the great fortress had always been thinly held with less than two hundred men. There were now some sections with few defenders, and several Mexican officers had spotted weak points, from where the fire was less.
These brigades were brave men, and as disciplined, if not so stolid, as any British grenadiers. After several hours, in which the battalions were regrouped and the reserve called, the Mexicans came back, at about eight in the morning. Santa Anna remained across the river in San Antonio. If he sensed what was happening to his army—the deeper wounds beyond the dead and groaning wounded he could see—he gave no sign. One of his column commanders was already dead, but the others beat the battalions back into line. Now, from all four sides of the Alamo, a new general assault began. This time, the ladders went up against the north wall and stayed. Mexican soldiers sprayed into the fortress like scuttling ants. Men fell all over the walls. Only flaming courage, and the determined leadership of a number of Mexican junior officers took the charge into the heart of the Alamo.
Now, the defenders no longer fought to win. They charged into the Mexican soldiery to kill as many as they could. These troops had seen much cruelty and understood it; but they had never seen the savagery of the Trans-Appalachian American at close range. The Texans had no bayonets, but by Mexican standards they were enormous men, towering a head higher or more. They smashed, butted, used tomahawks and knives. They had fought as paladins, each touchy of his rights and his own section of the wall. Now, they died as paladins, each with his ring of surrounding dead.
A terrible and understandable fury and hatred suffused the Mexicans who broke into the courtyard. They had been punished in the assault as they had never been punished before. Inside, at last they could employ their bayonets. They had crushing numbers. They killed, and after they had killed, mutilated the bleeding corpses with a hundred wounds. At the end, as the defenders were at last exterminated, Mexican officers admitted they lost control. The one woman in the Alamo, the wife of a Texan lieutenant, who with a Negro slave was spared expressly at Santa Anna's orders, saw Bowie's body tossed aloft on a dozen bayonets. He had been taken on his deathbed. Mexican accounts say, probably accurately, that a few defenders vainly attempted to surrender. These, who may have included Crockett, were shot.