Lone Star Nation (46 page)

Not that the men didn't voice their opinions. More than a few were less adamant than Travis about fighting to the death. According to witnesses who reached Mexican lines before and after the battle, a groundswell for surrender emerged in the ranks during the last days of the siege. De la Peña cited “a lady from Bejar” who fled the Alamo on March 5, “a Negro who was the only male who escaped” (this was Travis's personal slave, Joe), and “several women who were found inside” after the battle, as authority for his statement that “Travis's resistance was on the verge of being overcome.” De la Peña elaborated: “For several days his followers had been urging him to surrender, giving the lack of food and the scarcity of munitions as reasons; but he had quieted their restlessness with the hope of quick relief, something not difficult for them to believe since they had seen some reinforcements arrive. Nevertheless, they pressed him so hard that on the 5th he promised them that if no help arrived on that day they would surrender the next day or would try to escape under the cover of darkness.”

This hearsay may or may not have accurately reflected what Travis told the garrison. It would be unnatural to think that none of the defenders—most of whom were recent arrivals to Texas—were having second thoughts about their predicament. That Travis actually contemplated surrender seems unlikely given all that he had written during the past two weeks. But he may have
told
the men he was contemplating surrender, in order to keep them at their posts another day. According to one version of the story, the “lady from Béjar” carried an offer from Travis to surrender on condition that the defenders' lives would be spared. According to this version, Santa Anna rejected the offer, as he had rejected Bowie's offer to parley earlier. Travis must have known that Santa Anna would reject the offer, but in making it—if he did—he gave his men a warrant of his willingness to consider their views.

Quite conceivably, Travis
was
considering a fighting retreat. After all, by now the chances of surviving a Mexican attack appeared negligible; the Alamo simply could not be held. The men could either die where they were or die trying to get out—and in the latter case some might survive. There would be no dishonor in trying to save his force now that it had become clear—as a result of the refusal of the provisional government, of the rest of the army, and of the citizens of Texas to relieve the garrison—that the Alamo could not be saved. In any event, Travis knew that once the shooting started, he would have little control over what the men did. Would they fight harder in the Alamo, with no hope of surviving, or on the road to Gonzales, with some hope? It wasn't an easy question.

According to de la Peña, conventional wisdom in the Mexican camp held that Travis was contemplating surrender or escape. This was what the “lady from Béjar” said (whether or not she brought a surrender offer), and it was simply common sense. Who wouldn't want to abandon a patently lost cause?

Ironically, the prospect of surrender was what prompted Santa Anna to attack. “He wanted to cause a sensation, and would have regretted taking the Alamo without clamor and without bloodshed,” de la Peña said.

So the attack went forward. The Mexican troops retired early on the night of March 5; if Travis and the men inside the Alamo noticed the unusual calm across the river, they gave no sign. By midnight both camps were quiet.

But soon the Mexican camp stirred, as silently as fifteen hundred men could. They spoke in whispers; every effort was made to keep metal from clanging on metal. By one o'clock four columns were moving toward the river, which the men crossed, two by two, on plank bridges built during the twelve days of the siege. “The moon was up,” de la Peña recalled, “but the density of the clouds that covered it allowed only an opaque light in our direction, seeming thus to contribute to our designs. This half-light, the silence we kept, hardly interrupted by soft murmurs, the coolness of the morning air, the great quietude that seemed to prolong the hours, and the dangers we would soon have to face: all of this rendered our situation grave. We were still breathing and able to communicate; within a few moments many of us would be unable to answer questions addressed to us, having already returned to the nothingness whence we had come.” The fear of death sobered them all; even more sobering was the prospect of agony short of death. Yet another sentiment, a common determination, spurred them forward. “An insult to our arms had to be avenged, as well as the blood of our friends spilled three months before within these same walls we were about to attack.”

Within those walls, the defenders of the Alamo slept. Travis had retired about midnight, according to the recollection of his slave Joe. He had made a final round of the fort and posted sentries outside the walls to warn of enemy approach. His brain doubtless swirled with questions—Would relief come tomorrow? Would an attack? Would the men stand or run? How would he meet death?—until exhaustion overcame him.

He was still asleep when the attack began. The four Mexican columns crept toward the walls of the Alamo. The first, under General Cos, who had disregarded his parole and returned to Texas, filed toward the west wall, the one closest to the town. The second column was assigned the shorter north wall, which held the strongest battery. The third circled around to the east, to the rear of the fort. The fourth was to assault the main gate, on the south side of the fort. A fifth, including de la Peña's sappers, was held in reserve, to be thrown into battle at the critical moment wherever their weight would be decisive.

The approach went smoothly. The rebel pickets must have fallen asleep, for none called out or fired a shot before being surrounded and silently killed. The attackers were in place before dawn, awaiting the bugle that would announce the attack. Nervous anticipation kept most of the men alert; a few, including de la Peña, dozed.

The signal—“that terrible bugle call of death,” de la Peña said—came with the first light of dawn. Their secret revealed, the attackers rushed forward, crying, “Viva Santa Anna! Viva Mexico!”

In that moment the fortress came to life. The sentries on the walls shouted and fired; the noise awoke Travis, who leaped from his cot, seized a rifle in each hand, and raced for the north battery, yelling as he crossed the yard for all to man their posts.

Travis's strategy, such as it was against such numbers, depended on keeping the Mexicans from reaching the walls in force. The Texan rifles could do lethal damage against individual enemy soldiers, but they were slow to reload, and even though each defender had three or four weapons, these simply couldn't kill Mexicans fast enough. For such wholesale slaughter Travis relied on the cannons. Loaded with shrapnel—lacking grapeshot, Travis substituted nails, links of chain, pieces of horseshoes, and anything else that might survive the blast of powder—the cannons could mow down Mexicans by the score. Loaded with balls—many recovered from the incoming Mexican fire during the previous twelve days—they cut narrower but still fearsome swaths.

The Mexican tactics played into the Texan hands. Always thinking himself another Napoleon, Santa Anna employed the European method of massed attack, which allowed a few seasoned officers and veteran enlisted men, positioned at the edges of the advancing columns, to keep the hundreds of terrified conscripts from fleeing at the first enemy fire. This mode of warfare had the additional advantage of conveying implacability: try as the defenders might to resist the advancing columns, the columns kept coming. Yet the massed method was horribly wasteful of life (which was why the ranks had to be continually replenished with those terrified conscripts), especially when the columns faced entrenched artillery, as Santa Anna's did now.

During the opening phase of the battle, the defenders held their own. Their cannons wreaked frightful havoc among the Mexicans. “A single cannon volley did away with half the company of chasseurs from Toluca,” de la Peña said; and other rounds did like damage. Limbs and bones flew everywhere; muskets and bayonets blown from the infantrymen's hands became missiles of death. Those who escaped the cannon fire tripped over their comrades' fallen bodies and slipped in the blood and gore. All wanted to run, to escape the carnage, but those who tried to do so found themselves facing Santa Anna's lancers, whose gleaning weapons reiterated that safety lay ahead in victory, not behind in defeat.

By sheer numbers—there were more of them than the Texan rifles and cannons could possibly kill—the Mexicans reached the walls. Here they were relatively safe, for the makeshift fortress lacked the forward projections that would have allowed the defenders to control their walls with flanking fire. Yet the Mexicans still had to scale the walls, and the first over the top could count on being hacked or shot to death. The ladders Santa Anna had ordered were insufficient, having been poorly made, blasted by the cannon fire, or abandoned on the field where their bearers fell. The bravest attackers began clambering up the walls using their comrades as stepstools; in most cases they came tumbling back down, bayoneted or shot by the Texans. But there were enough of them, compared to the defenders, that eventually they gained a foothold on the ramparts. Once inside, several fought their way to the gates, which they threw open to their fellows.

As the fighting shifted to the interior of the Alamo, the real butchery began. The Texans swiveled their cannons and commenced firing on the Mexicans inside the walls, who had nowhere to turn for shelter and no choice but to charge into the very mouths of the guns. Eventually the attackers' numbers told again, and they captured the cannons, which they employed against the defenders. The Texans beat a fighting retreat to the chapel and other rooms of the compound.

Amid the smoke, the dust, and the dimness of the dawn, the combatants locked in mortal confusion. “Our soldiers, some stimulated by courage and others by fury, burst into the quarters where the enemy had entrenched themselves, from which issued an infernal fire,” de la Peña wrote. “Behind these came others who, nearing the doors and blind with fury and smoke, fired their shots against friends and enemies alike, and in this way our losses were most grievous. They turned the enemy's own cannon to bring down the doors to the rooms or the rooms themselves; a horrible carnage took place, and some were trampled to death. The tumult was great, the disorder frightful; it seemed as if the furies had descended upon us; different groups of soldiers were firing in all directions, on their comrades and on their officers, so that one was as likely to die by a friendly hand as by an enemy's.”

Facing certain death where they fought, some of the defenders tried to surrender. They made white flags of kerchiefs or socks and waved them in doorways or poked them through holes in the walls. By de la Peña's account, some Mexican soldiers initially tried to honor their surrender. “Our trusting soldiers, seeing these demonstrations, would confidently enter their quarters; but those among the enemy who had not pleaded for mercy, who had no thought of surrendering, and who relied on no other recourse than selling their lives dearly, would meet them with pistol shots and bayonets.” The Mexicans quickly learned to ignore the surrender pleas. Some of the Texans went over the walls in an attempt to escape; these were ridden down by the Mexican cavalry and sabered to death.

The last redoubt of the defenders was the chapel. Its thick stone walls stood proof against the cannons the attackers now leveled against it, but eventually its oaken doors were splintered by the eighteen-pound balls of the fort's large gun. The attackers surged through the entrance and didn't stop shooting and hacking till all resistance had ceased.

C h a p t e r   1 6

At Discretion

O
f the Alamo's approximately two hundred defenders, all but a handful were killed in the battle. Travis was one of the first to fall, from the northern parapet where the fighting was heaviest, of a Mexican bullet that pierced his forehead and killed him instantly. James Bowie died in his bed, too feverish to fight, perhaps mistaken by the attackers for a malingerer or a coward.

Where and how David Crockett died has exercised the historical imagination for more than a century and a half. De la Peña said that seven men survived the battle and were presented as prisoners by General Manuel Fernández Castrillón to Santa Anna.

Among them was one of great stature, well proportioned, with regular features, in whose face there was the imprint of adversity, but in whom one also noticed a degree of resignation and nobility that did him honor. He was the naturalist David Crockett, well known in North America for his unusual adventures, who had undertaken to explore the country and who, finding himself in Béjar at the very moment of surprise, had taken refuge in the Alamo, fearing that his status as a foreigner might not be respected.

Santa Anna answered Castrillón's intervention in Crockett's behalf with a gesture of indignation and, addressing himself to the sappers, the troops closest to him, ordered his execution. The commanders and officers were outraged at this action and did not support the order, hoping that once the fury of the moment had blown over, these men would be spared.

But several officers who were around the president and who, perhaps, had not been present during the moment of danger, became noteworthy by an infamous deed, surpassing the soldiers in cruelty. They thrust themselves forward, in order to flatter their commander, and with swords in hand, fell upon these unfortunate, defenseless men just as a tiger leaps upon his prey. Though tortured before they were killed, these unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers.

This version was corroborated, in substance if not in detail, by the account of Fernando Urizza, as told to Nicholas Labadie after the battle of San Jacinto. Urizza was an officer in Santa Anna's army; Labadie was a rebel medic who treated his wounds. Urizza told Labadie:

As I was surveying the dreadful scene before us, I observed Castrillón coming out of one of the quarters, leading a venerable-looking old man by the hand; he was tall, his face was red, and stooped forward as he walked. The President stopped abruptly, when Castrillón, leaving his prisoner, advanced some four or five paces toward us, and with his graceful bow, said: “My General, I have spared the life of this venerable old man, and taken him prisoner.” Raising his head, Santa Anna replied, “What right have you to disobey my orders? I want no prisoners.” And waving his hand to a file of soldiers, he said, “Soldiers, shoot that man.” And almost instantly he fell, pierced with a volley of balls.

Labadie asked Urizza the name of the prisoner. “I believe,” Urizza replied, “they called him
Coket
.” In his retelling, Labadie commented, “At that time, we knew very little of David Crockett. . . . All I knew was that I had heard of David Crockett passing through Nacogdoches in the month of February to join the army, with some fifteen others. But I have never since had any doubt but that Urizza's account gave the fate of Crockett truly. This statement was made some four or five days after the battle of the 21st [of April], and Urizza could have had no motive to misrepresent the facts.”

Perhaps not, but a third eyewitness told a different story. Francisco Antonio Ruiz, the alcalde of San Antonio, observed the storming of the Alamo from the Mexican lines, along with other officials of the town. As the firing ceased and the smoke drifted away, they received a summons.

Santa Anna sent one of his aide-de-camps with an order for us to come before him. He directed me to call on some of the neighbors to come up with carts to carry the dead to the cemetery, and also to accompany him, as he was desirous to have Col. Travis, Bowie, and Crockett shown to him.

On the north battery of the fortress lay the lifeless body of Col. Travis on the gun carriage, shot only in the forehead. Toward the west, and in the small fort opposite the city, we found the body of Col. Crockett. Col. Bowie was found dead in his bed, in one of the rooms of the south side.

It is hard to know what to make of these conflicting accounts. De la Peña's has the advantage of having been recorded close to the events, as a diary (subsequently transcribed). Yet de la Peña had never seen Crockett before the battle and would have required someone else to identify him. The same was true of Urizza, who apparently didn't hear or remember the name quite right. (Though Crockett wasn't exactly “old,” as Urizza said, he might well have seemed so after the horrendous battle.) Ruiz, by contrast, must have met Crockett (and Travis and Bowie) before the siege began and almost certainly would have been able to identify their bodies, as Santa Anna expected. Yet Ruiz didn't record his version till years later (precisely when is unclear), by which time the heroic myth that the Alamo's defenders fought to the last might have influenced what he remembered or chose to record. Labadie, likewise, didn't record Urizza's story till years later, but if the myth was acting by then, Labadie didn't succumb. It may be significant that Ruiz said nothing about
any
prisoners, whereas a fourth eyewitness account, by Santa Anna's secretary, Ramón Martínez Caro, agreed with de la Peña that some rebels were captured alive and subsequently executed. Then again, Martínez Caro—who put the number at five, rather than de la Peña's seven—didn't identify any of the prisoners by name. This is curious if in fact one of the prisoners was Crockett, the most famous man at the Alamo and one whom Santa Anna wanted specifically identified (according to Ruiz).

The details of Crockett's death must remain a mystery, like so much else in the past. (Why they generate such debate is a mystery of a different sort. Many of Crockett's admirers doubt that he would have let himself be taken prisoner while he retained the breath of life, and they argue that he must have gone down fighting. Yet it casts no aspersions on Crockett's resolve to imagine that he was physically overwhelmed by the attackers—perhaps dazed or otherwise wounded—and was simply unable to resist capture. If courage is the question, de la Peña's testimony that he endured torture uncomplainingly is proof of that.)

Wherever Crockett—or any of the others—died, they proved their point. Texas wouldn't be taken easily. Santa Anna lost some six hundred men in achieving his victory, and though at this stage of the war he could afford the losses, he might not enjoy that luxury for long. On a different plane, the glorious demise of the Alamo garrison gave the Texans a rallying cry that lifted their political struggle against Santa Anna to the moral realm. In life, Travis and Bowie and Crockett were hardly the sort to inspire reverence, hardly the kind parents would name their sons after. But in death they transcended their flaws; absolved of their sins, they entered the pantheon of American heroes. The specifics of the Texans' dispute with Mexico were unknown to most of those outside Texas, yet in the wake of the Alamo the specifics shaded into inconsequence. Whatever motivated men to die such a death must be righteous. Santa Anna's great blunder at Béxar was not to lose so many of his own men but to kill so many of the enemy (and after the battle to burn their bodies, which added to the sacrificial significance). A military struggle he might win; a moral struggle, never.

Not everyone in the Alamo that March day died. Susanna Dickinson, the wife of Almaron Dickinson, the captain of rebel artillery, had taken refuge in the Alamo with her husband and their infant daughter, Angelina, upon the approach of Santa Anna's army. When the battle began, Almaron told her to save herself and the baby, and as he ran to his post and his death, she and Angelina found a hiding place (in either the church or the powder magazine; accounts differ). Discovered by Mexican soldiers afterward, mother and child were brought before Santa Anna, with several other women and children who similarly survived the carnage. An undetermined number of slaves, including Travis's Joe, also escaped death, although Joe and perhaps some of the others were wounded.

Santa Anna could be a hard man, as he had revealed in Zacatecas in loosing his convict-troops on the civilian populace and as he had shown just now at the Alamo in expending hundreds of his own men lest the rebels surrender without a fight. But even he had no stomach for killing women and children in cold blood. Besides, he needed envoys to carry the grim tidings of the Alamo east to the American settlements. His decision to spare Joe and the slaves perhaps reflected his judgment that slaves weren't responsible for their masters' misdeeds; it might also have evinced his desire to encourage defection by Joe's fellow slaves among the rebels' bondsmen. Many of the Texans' slaves seemed to think Santa Anna would be their liberator; one Texan reported slaveholders on the lower Brazos saying that “their negroes, God damn them, were on the tip-toe of expectation, and rejoicing that the Mexicans were coming to make them free!”

Santa Anna did set the Alamo slaves free, although Joe, for one, returned to the American settlements, where the executors of Travis's estate reenslaved him. (He subsequently escaped.) As for the women and children, Santa Anna gave each woman a blanket and two dollars in silver and let them and their little ones go.

Susanna and Angelina Dickinson received special treatment. Wishing to ensure their safe passage to Houston's camp, Santa Anna dispatched the servant of one of his officers to accompany them east. En route they encountered Joe, and the three were eventually intercepted by Houston's scouts, who guided them to the rebel commander at Gonzales, where Susanna and Joe told of the final hours of the Béxar garrison.

At Gonzales the bloody news from the Alamo met a less sanguinary report from Washington-on-the-Brazos. The convention had gathered on March 1; on March 2 it unanimously approved a declaration of Texas independence. The obvious model was the declaration of American independence of 1776; the obvious spur was Santa Anna's impending destruction of the Alamo, which made the Texas declaration both imperative, lest the heroes there die in vain, and dangerous, in that nothing worth noting stood between Santa Anna and the convention. As the American declaration had indicted King George for a litany of sins, so the Texas declaration indicted Santa Anna: for revoking the Mexican constitution, for establishing a military despotism, for suppressing the liberty of the Texans, for endangering their lives and property, for rejecting their petitions and imprisoning their emissaries, for demanding that they give up their arms, for sending mercenaries to war against them, for inciting the Indians, for dictating religious practice, for denying trial by jury, and for failing to provide public education. The Texas declaration asserted that the people of Texas had borne these injuries patiently, until patience ceased to be a virtue. The Texans then had risen in defense of their rights and the Mexican constitu-tion. They had appealed to their fellow Mexicans to join them, but their appeal had been ignored, and continued to be ignored.

We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a
FREE
,
SOVEREIGN
, and
INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC
.

As with most such manifestoes—including the American Declaration of Independence—the Texas declaration mingled honest grievances with the exaggerated or imaginary in its charge against the Mexican government. Santa Anna had indeed revoked the constitution under which most of the American settlers came to Texas, and he was ruling as a military despot. But the lack of religious freedom, of trial by jury, and of public education in Mexico was no surprise except to the willfully ignorant. Santa Anna's attempt to disarm the Texans followed years of unrest in Texas, and his army was no more mercenary—indeed, considerably less mercenary—than that of the Texans, which, at this point, consisted largely of foreigners enticed to Texas by promises of land.