Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
Captain William Patton, Houston’s other reinforcer, had arrived from Velasco at the end of January leading eleven volunteers. With Bowie’s company, the garrison now numbered about 115 men, including thirty-four wounded and sick.
Near the end of the month, Neill finally began to receive messages from what was left of the provisional government: a resolution from the General Council empowering him to hire Tejanos to gather cattle and other supplies—pointless, since these were virtually nonexistent in the area. Nothing in the way of money, provisions, or clothing arrived. On January 27, a disgusted Neill sent curtly worded replies expressing his disappointment to both Smith and the council.
That same day a Tejano arrived directly from the Rio Grande with detailed intelligence of a Mexican army marching into Texas, a force he described down to the number of wagons and mules and the identity of the brigade’s commander—General Joaquín Ramírez y Sesma, who had led the cavalry in the battle at Zacatecas. The only bright spot was news of Travis’s imminent arrival; his mounted company would be put to good use in the field.
All the while, Dr. Amos Pollard, serving as chief medical practitioner, did what he could to ease the suffering of the nearly three dozen sick and wounded. Most were billeted in the second floor of the old
convento
building in the Alamo compound. Included in his rounds were visits to the thirty or so Mexican wounded from the Béxar battle, who were lodged in the barracks in Military Plaza and scattered in residences around town. Pollard’s ministrations were limited by a severe shortage of medicines. The arrival with Patton’s small company of Dr. John Sutherland, a forty-two-year-old widower from Virginia, alleviated the problem somewhat. Though Sutherland was a practitioner of the popular but peculiar Thomsonian, or botanic, system—which relied on steaming, sweating, and purging, aided by infusions of roots and herbs, to expel the cause of a sickness—he carried some conventional medicines with him. Between the two of them they managed to alleviate the suffering of their patients, and even cured a few.
The men were incensed upon hearing from an express rider that a loan of $500, donated by a citizen of Alabama for the sole use of the Béxar garrison, had been appropriated by the General Council. They also learned of the council’s impeaching Henry Smith, “the legitimate officer of the government” in their eyes. On January 26, a week after Bowie’s arrival, they called a meeting to craft and approve a proclamation to the council expressing their support for Smith and condemning the council’s actions as “anarchical assumptions of power to which we will not submit”:
Resolved,… That the conduct of the president and members of the Executive Council in relation to the FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR LOAN, for the liquidation of the claims of the soldiers of Bexar, is in the highest degree criminal and unjust. Yet under treatment however liberal and ungrateful, we can not be driven from the Post of Honor and the sacred cause of freedom.
Just for good measure, they also expressed their contempt for anyone connected to the Matamoros expedition.
It was a strongly worded statement of principle and intent. The Béxar garrison was not only standing fast against the advancing Mexican army, they were defying their own Texian government—or at least its current leaders.
A month earlier, Neill, an experienced artilleryman, had boasted that they could defend the broken-down fort against the entire Mexican army with two hundred men. But weeks of neglect from above had weakened his resolution, and Houston’s orders as delivered by Bowie, to remove all the artillery to Gonzales or Copano, made more and more sense—particularly in light of the recent news that there were sixteen hundred Mexican soldiers on the Rio Grande headed for Béxar, with three thousand more under the command of Santa Anna not far behind. The idea of holding out against such numbers appeared foolhardy. By the time Bowie arrived, Neill was fully ready to take his command to Copano to join the forces there. But there were neither the necessary teams nor available carts to carry the pieces—some were siege guns, without carriages—so that idea had to be scotched. And Bowie’s presence, and his aura of confidence, changed things.
Bowie had been instructed to destroy the fortifications in town. Houston wanted to abandon the post completely. But as Bowie and Neill examined the improvements and repairs to the Alamo, which Jameson was supervising, and heard the would-be engineer’s ambitious plans to further fortify it, a peculiar thing happened. The old mission, and the twenty or so cannon there, began to work their spell.
It was an age of artillery. Napoleon, the most brilliant military genius of the time, had been an artilleryman—“Great battles are won with artillery,” he had asserted. More than two decades earlier, the Corsican had won a series of great battles with his trailblazing use of large, mobile batteries, and his triumphs had been extensively reported and analyzed; everyone in the Western world with an interest in the military was familiar with his innovative strategy. As Neill and Bowie watched Jameson position the tubes in the Alamo, the conclusion seemed inevitable: to yield such an impressive collection of cannon seemed a shame. To forget the fundamental wisdom of artillery defense, to underestimate the stubborn punch provided by fortified artillery, would be foolhardy. Had not the Ottomans in the walled port city of Acre, in the Holy Land, withstood Napoleon’s army for two months in 1799 with only mud-and-stone walls and plenty of large cannon until reinforcements had arrived?
Another factor was the citizenry of Béxar. Most of them, particularly the more influential among them, had cooperated with the Texians. Some of the Tejano merchants had generously given their entire stocks of goods, groceries, and beeves for the use of the garrison, and Neill estimated that 80 percent of those remaining would join the rebel cause if reinforcements arrived soon. Besides, Bowie felt sympathy for the people of the town that had once been his own. Santa Anna was likely to treat the
bexareños
as Arredondo had in 1813, and as he had treated the Zacatecans in June: with murder, rape, and pillage of rebels and innocents alike. On February 2, Bowie wrote Smith: “The citizens of Bexar have behaved well… [and] deserve our protection and the public safety demands our lives rather than to evacuate the post to the enemy.” Bowie was clear about the stakes as he saw them:
The salvation of Texas depends in great measure in keeping Bejar out of the hands of the enemy. It serves as the frontier picquet guard and if it were in the possession of Santa Anna there is no strong hold from which to repell him in his march towards the Sabine…. Colonel Neill and myself have come to the solemn resolution that we will rather die in these ditches than give up this post to the enemy.
Bowie was not requesting permission. He and Neill, and whichever men elected to follow their lead, would remain in Béxar. “Our force is very small… the returns this day to the Comdt. is only one hundred and twenty officers & men,” Bowie finished. “It would be a waste of men to put our brave little band against thousands,” he wrote. Indeed, it would be suicide. But, Bowie explained, they would hold the line at Béxar if need be. If they did not fight Santa Anna here, the Mexican army would drive into the colonies—including Bastrop, just a few days’ march up El Camino Real, where Neill lived with his family. His grown sons, Samuel and George, could fend for themselves—the previous summer, they had participated with their father and ninety other Texians in a grueling six-week Indian expedition, and had just signed up with Robert Williamson’s newly formed ranging company. But that left his wife, Harriett, and their teenage daughter alone at home. For Neill and Bowie alike, the defense of Béxar was personal as well as patriotic.
D
ESPITE THE ADDITION OF THE
volunteers under Bowie and Patton, the post was woefully undermanned, and the situation soon became worse as more than a dozen men prepared to leave over the following week or two upon receiving their discharges; to their minds, a couple of months was more than enough time to serve without pay, provisions, or proper clothing. Others took a few days’ leave to explore the area for the land bounties they would receive, further thinning the garrison’s ranks. Some would return. Some would not.
For months rumors had been circulating of hundreds or even thousands of Americans marching to Texas to fight for their cousins’ cause, and when they arrived, the men could leave—at least those with homes. When the call for volunteers had been made in December to keep possession of Béxar, it was assumed that they would stay only until enough regulars arrived to man the post; many of the men had only expected to remain a month. The recent news of a Mexican army marching into Texas made the need for regular troops even more imperative. Yet significant reinforcements remained but a deflated hope.
Not that those who stayed were taken lightly by their leaders. “All I can say of the soldiers here is complimentary to both their courage and their patience,” Bowie wrote. Only a few had ever served as regulars, but most had faced Mexican troops. Many of them had fought at Concepción, endured the fifty-five days of the siege on Béxar, and participated in skirmishes almost daily. If supplied, they would “fight better than fresh men,” observed Jameson in a letter to Houston.
Beyond their lack of training and their mixed experience was a quality that Bowie could not have missed—one that certainly played a significant part in his decision, supported by Neill, to pit this “brave little band” against Santa Anna’s army. These men, volunteers and regulars alike, shared a flinty attitude that heartened their officer corps. These men had not run off with Grant and Johnson on their will-o’-the-wisp expedition, nor had they left, as some had, after the long weeks of neglect at the hands of their government. They had stayed. And they would keep on staying.
The voice of one defender spoke the mood of all: “If we succeed, the Country is ours. It is immense in extent, and fertile in its soil and will amply reward all our toil. If we fail, death in the cause of liberty and humanity is not cause for shuddering. Our rifles are by our side, and choice guns they are, we know what awaits us, and are prepared to meet it.” Regulars would surely arrive, and shortly. But if they were on their own, so be it.
If I were God, I would wish to be more.
G
ENERAL
S
ANTA
A
NNA
A
ntonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, known to most simply as Santa Anna, would be elected president of Mexico a total of eleven times over a period of twenty-two years. His chief appetites were cockfighting, gambling, women, the trappings of luxury, and the acclaim of the Mexican people. To that end, he liked nothing in the world better than riding through the streets of Mexico City to a hero’s welcome after rescuing his beloved young nation yet again. And now he wanted nothing more than to crush the Anglo colonists in the remote northern province of Texas who had rebelled against their new country—no, he did want more than that: only the execution of every last one of the traitors would satisfy him.
Santa Anna was born February 21, 1794, in the mountain city of Jalapa, in the coastal province of Veracruz, one of seven children. His parents were criollos—people of Spanish descent born in Mexico—and solidly middle-class. The elder Santa Anna earned a good living as a mortgage broker, and occasionally served in minor government positions, which provided enough income to send his son Antonio to school. The boy displayed a lively intelligence, but he cared little for schoolwork, and never learned to speak or read any language but his own. He was branded a troublemaker, and when he was in his teens his parents opted to apprentice him to a merchant firm in the nearby port city of Veracruz. Antonio quickly realized he did not want to be a shopkeeper. Instead, in 1810, at the age of sixteen, he joined the colonial Spanish army as an underage infantry cadet. Nine weeks later, the Mexican War of Independence began.
After transferring to the cavalry, where he chased rebels and Indians, he made lieutenant at the age of eighteen. Young Santa Anna had found his calling. A year later, in 1813, he marched hundreds of miles with General Joaquín de Arredondo and an eighteen-hundred-man royalist force across the arid desolation of northern Mexico. Their destination: that charming town of San Antonio de Béxar, scene of an uprising against colonial rule led by a mixed group of Mexican revolutionaries and Anglo filibusters who had defeated a Spanish army and boldly proclaimed themselves the Republican Army of the North. Arredondo, the commandant of Mexico’s Eastern Interior Provinces, had become brutally efficient over the last few years at suppressing revolts.
Young Santa Anna—at 5 feet 10 inches, tall for a Mexican of the time—was handsome, save for his slightly bulbous nose, and had a saturnine expression that women found appealing. He fell in love with Texas and wrote of “the beauty of its country,” one that “surpasses all distinction.” On a sweltering August day, the royalist troops faced a force of fourteen hundred insurgents in the four-hour Battle of the Medina, twenty miles south of town, and emerged victorious, killing six hundred rebels and suffering only fifty-five dead and 178 wounded. One hundred prisoners, including many Americans, were put to death, and on the way to Béxar two hundred more were captured, most of whom were shot. Others were hunted down as far east as the Trinity River, almost 250 miles away. In all, an estimated thirteen hundred republican rebels lost their lives.
Arredondo conducted executions for several days. The heads of those he had killed were placed in iron cages and left on display in Military Plaza for most of the year. The victors occupied the town for two months, executing sympathizers, humiliating women, and enjoying the pleasures and plunder due a conquering army. Arredondo cited Lieutenant Santa Anna for bravery.