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发帖数: 1 | 1 “(Mis)Remember the Alamo: Texas and the Road to War
We all know the comforting tale. It has been depicted in countless Hollywood
films starring the likes of John Wayne, Alec Baldwin, and Billy Bob
Thornton. “Remember the Alamo!” It remains a potent battle cry, especially
in Texas, but also across the American continent. In the comforting tale a
couple hundred Texans, fighting for their freedom against a dictator’s
numerically superior force, lost a battle but won a war, inflicting such
losses that Mexico’s defeat became inevitable. Never, in this telling, is
the word slavery or the term illegal immigration mentioned. There is no room
in the legend for critical thinking or fresh analysis. But since the
independence and acquisition of Texas caused the Mexican-American War, we
must dig deeper and reveal the messy truth.
Until 1836, Texas was a distant northern province of the new Mexican
Republic, a republic that had only recently won its independence from the
Spanish Empire, in 1821. The territory was full of hostile Indian tribes and
a few thousand mestizos and Spaniards. It was difficult to rule and harder
to settle — but it was indisputably Mexican land. Only, Americans had long
had their eyes on Texas. Some argued that it was included (it wasn’t) in
the Louisiana Purchase, and Old Hickory himself, Andrew Jackson, wanted it
badly. Indeed, his dear friend and protégé Sam Houston would later fight
the Mexicans and preside as a president of the nascent Texan Republic.
Thirty-two years before the Texan Revolution of Anglo settlers against the
Mexican government, in 1803, Thomas Jefferson had even declared that the
Spanish borderlands “are ours the first moment war is forced upon us.”
Jefferson was prescient but only partly correct: war would come, in Texas in
fact, but it would not be forced upon the American settlers.
Others besides politicians coveted Texas. In 1819 a filibusterer (one who
leads unsanctioned adventures to conquer foreign lands), an American named
James Long, led an illegal invasion and tried but failed to establish an
Anglo republic in Texas. Then, in 1821, Mexico’s brand-new government made
what proved to be a fatal mistake: it opened the borders to legal American
immigration. It did so to help develop the land and create a buffer against
the powerful Comanche tribe of West Texas but stipulated that the Anglos
must declare loyalty to Mexico and convert to Catholicism. The Mexicans
should have known better.
The Mexican Republic abolished slavery in 1829, more than three decades
before its “enlightened” northern neighbor. Unfortunately, nearly all the
Anglo settlers, who were by now flooding into the province, hailed from the
slaveholding American South and had brought along many chattel slaves. By
1830 there were twenty thousand American settlers and two thousand slaves
compared with just five thousand Mexican inhabitants. The settlers never
intended to follow Mexican law or free their slaves, and so they didn’t.
Not really anyway. Most officially “freed” their black slaves and
immediately forced them to sign a lifelong indentured servitude contract. It
was simply American slavery by another name.
After Santa Anna — Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y
Pérez de Lebrón, an authoritarian but populist president — seized power,
his centralizing instincts and attempts to enforce Mexican policies (such as
conversion to Catholicism and the ban on slavery) led the pro-autonomy
federalists in Texas (most of whom were Americans) to rebel. It was 1835,
and by then there were even more Americans in Texas: thirty-five thousand,
in fact, outnumbering the Hispanics nearly ten to one. Many of the new
settlers had broken the law, entering “Texas after Santa Anna had ordered
the border closed, as was his sovereign right to do.
What followed was a political, racial, and religious war pitting white
supremacist Protestant Anglos against a centralizing Mexican republic led by
a would-be despot. The Texan War of Independence (1835–36) was largely
fought with American money, American volunteers, and American arms (even
then a prolific resource in the United States). The war was never truly
limited to Texas, Tejanos, or Mexican provincial politics. It was what we
now call a proxy war for land waged between the United States and the
Mexican Republic.
Furthermore, though Santa Anna was authoritarian, certain Texans saw him as
their best hope for freedom. As Santa Anna’s army marched north, many
slaves along the Brazos River saw an opportunity and rebelled. Most were
killed, some captured and later hanged. And while slavery was not, by itself
, the proximate cause of the Texan Rebellion, it certainly played a
significant role. As the Mexican leader marched north with his six thousand
conscripts, one Texas newspaper declared that “[Santa Anna’s] merciless
soldiery” was coming “to give liberty to our slaves, and to make slaves of
ourselves.” So once again — as in America’s earlier revolution against
Britain — white Americans clamored about their own liberty and feared to
death that the same might be granted to their slaves. When Santa Anna’s
army was eventually defeated, the Mexican retreat gathered numbers as many
slave escapees and fearful Hispanics sought their own version of freedom
south of the Anglo settlements. “Surely the most evocative image of the
Texas War of Independence was the heroic stand of 180 Texans at the Alamo.
Alamo has entered the American lexicon as a term for any hopeless, yet
gallant, stand. And no doubt the outnumbered defenders demonstrated courage
in their doomed stand. The slightly less than two hundred defenders were led
by a twenty-six-year-old failed lawyer named William Barret Travis and
included the famed frontiersman Davy Crockett, a former Whig member of the
US House of Representatives. All would be killed. Still, the battle wasn’t
as one-sided or important as the mythos would have it. The defenders
actually held one of the strongest fortifications in the Southwest, had more
cannons than the attackers, and superior cannons, and were armed mainly
with rifles that far outranged the outdated Mexican muskets. Additionally,
the Mexicans were mostly underfed, undersupplied conscripts who often had
been forced to enlist and had marched north some one thousand miles into a
difficult fight. Despite inflicting disproportionate casualties on the
Mexicans, the stand at the Alamo delayed Santa Anna by only four days.
Furthermore, “despite the prevalent “last stand” imagery, at least seven
defenders (according to credible Mexican accounts long ignored) — probably
including Crockett himself — surrendered and were executed.
None of this detracts from the courage of any man defending a position when
outnumbered at least ten to one, but the diligent historian must reframe the
battle. The men inside the Alamo walls were pro-slavery insurgents. As
applied to them, Texan, in any real sense, is a misnomer. Two-thirds were
recent arrivals from the United States and never intended to submit to
sovereign Mexican authority. What the Battle of the Alamo did do was whip up
a fury of nationalism in the United States and cause thousands more
recruits to illegally “jump the border” — oh, the irony — and join the
rebellion in Texas.
Eventually, Santa Anna, always a better politician than a military
strategist, was surprised and defeated by Sam Houston along the banks of the
San Jacinto River. The charging Americans yelled “Remember the Alamo!”
and sought their revenge. Few prisoners were taken in the melee; perhaps
hundreds were executed on the spot. The numbers speak for themselves: 630
dead Mexicans at the cost of 2 Americans. It is instructive that the Mexican
policy of no quarter at the Alamo is regularly derided, yet few north of
the Rio Grande remember this later massacre and probable war crime.
“Still, Santa Anna was defeated and forced, under duress and probably pain
of death, to sign away all rights to Texas. The Mexican Congress, as was its
constitutional prerogative, summarily dismissed this treaty and would
continue its reasonable legal claim on Texas indefinitely. Nonetheless, the
divided Mexican government and its exhausted army were in no position (
though attempts were made) to recapture the wayward northern province. Texas
was “free,” and a thrilled — and no doubt proud — President Jackson
recognized Houston’s Republic of Texas on Old Hickory’s very last day in
office.
Thousands more Americans flowed into the republic over the next decade. By
1845 there were 125,000 mostly Anglo inhabitants and 27,000 slaves — that’
s more enslaved blacks than Hispanic natives! One result of the war was the
expansion and empowerment of the American institution of slavery. Because of
confidence in the inevitable spread of slavery, the average sale price of a
slave in the bustling New Orleans human-trafficking market rose 21 percent
within one year of President John Tyler’s decision to annex Texas during
his final days in office in 1845. According to international law, Texas
remained Mexican. Tyler’s decision alone was “tantamount to a declaration
of war. Still, for at least a year, the Mexicans showed restraint and
unhappily accepted the facts on the ground.
Excerpt From: Daniel A. Sjursen. “A True History of the United States.”
Apple Books. |
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