Alamo Traces (3 page)
Authors: Thomas Ricks Lindley
John H. Jenkins, Texas historian and rare book dealer, described the Coleman account with these words:
The volume was issued, without doubt, as a political maneuver, but it must be remembered that Sam Houston himself seldom wrote a word that was not [political]. Scurrilous and biased as it is, there is truth to at least some of the accusations, and it was undoubtedly believed to be literal truth by scores of veterans of the campaign. Many of its accusations were substantiated by some of Texas's most highly revered heroes of that era. One finds, in fact, that a considerable majority of the officers in Houston's army were severely critical of Houston's actions in the campaign. These men sincerely felt that his laurels were too easily won and too lightly granted by thousands of post-revolution immigrants who, fed by a pro-Houston press in the United States, came to Texas thinking of Houston as Texas's savior. General Edward Burleson, second in command, despised Houston till the day he died because of the campaign, as did Col. Sidney Sherman, third in command. David G. Burnet, President of Texas, was even more fanatical than Coleman in his denunciation of Houston's part. Gen. Thomas J. Rusk, Adj. Gen. John A. Wharton, Lt. Col. J. C. Neill, Lt. Col. Mirabeau B. Lamar, Lt. Col. John Forbes, Maj. J. H. Perry, Maj. James Collinsworth, Maj. Lysander Wells, Captains Turner, Moreland, Billingsley, Baker, Calder, Heard, Kuykendall, Ben Smith, Karnes, Fisher, Gillespie, and Surgeons Anson Jones and William Labadie all criticized some of Houston's actions in the campaign. Only three officersâHenry Millard, Alexander Somervell, and J. L. Bennettâappear to have unceasingly supported Houston.
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Texas historians and Houston biographers are familiar with the debate over Houston's command competency during the San Jacinto
campaign. However, Houston's role in the rebellion previous to the 1836 retreat and the April victory, especially the Alamo, is another question. No historian has ever objectively examined Houston's activities in regard to the defense of that frontier outpost. The possibility that blame, big or small, for the fall of the Alamo can be placed on Houston's shoulders may seem implausible. Still, there is ample evidence to show that Houston was not an innocent bystander when the Alamo garrison fell to defeat. Also, the record shows that Houston was well aware of his culpability and thereafter misrepresented his Alamo-related activities to protect his reputation.
The story started on the afternoon of March 11, 1836, at about 4:00 p.m., when Houston, commander of the Texian military forces, arrived at Gonzales to take control of the troops at that location and to reinforce the Alamo. What Houston did not know at that time was that the Alamo had fallen five days earlier. When Houston finally realized that William B. Travis, David Crockett, James Bowie, and the other Alamo defenders were all dead and that the Mexican victory could seriously damage him politically, he began a campaign to separate himself from any blame for the tragic event.
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Houston commenced his defensive offense a week after the Mexican victory in a missive to James Collinsworth, chairman of the government's military committee. Houston wrote: “The enclosed order to Colonel Fannin will indicate to you my convictions, that, with our small, unorganized force, we can not maintain sieges in fortresses, in the country of the enemy. Troops pent up in forts are rendered useless; nor is it possible that we can ever maintain our cause by such a policy. . . . I am informed that Colonel Fannin had about seven hundred men under his command; and, at one time, had taken up the line of march for the Alamo, but the breaking down of a wagon induced him to fall back, and abandon the idea of marching to the relief of our last hope in Bexar. . . . The projected expedition to Matamoros, under the agency of the council has already cost us over two hundred and thirty-seven lives; and where the effects are to end, none can foresee.” The spin that Houston put on the fall of the Alamo was subtle, but the message was clear. Colonel James W. Fannin Jr. was to blame for the Alamo defeat.
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The same day Houston dispatched a letter to Henry Raguet, a close friend at Nacogdoches. This time Houston was direct: “Colonel Fannin should have relieved our Brave men in the Alamo. He had 430 men with
artillery under his command, and had taken up the line of march with a full knowledge of the situation of those in the Alamo, and owing to the breaking down of a wagon abandoned the march, returning to Goliad and left our Spartans to their fate!”
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On March 15 Houston reported to Collinsworth: “Our forces must not be shut up in forts, where they can neither be supplied with men nor provisions. Long aware of this fact, I directed, on the 16th of January last, that the artillery should be removed, and the Alamo blown up; but it was prevented by the expedition upon Matamoros, the author of all our misfortunes.”
10
By 1859 Houston had added Alamo commander William B. Travis to his scapegoat recipe and boiled the story down to a single dish of disobedience. In a speech to the United States Senate, Houston claimed his political life was at an end and declared: “How that service has been performed I leave it to posterity to determine. My only desire is, that truth shall be vindicated, and that I may stand upon that foundation, so far as posterity may be concerned with my action, that they may have an opportunity of drawing truthful deductions.”
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Houston then continued with a speech defending his military leadership in the revolution. Speaking to the Alamo, Houston detailed how he had ordered Lt. Colonel James C. Neill, the Alamo commander, to blow up the fortress and fall back to the Guadalupe River to establish a new defensive position.
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He said that the enemy would advance no farther than Gonzales and continued: “That order was secretly superseded by the council; and Colonel Travis, having relieved Colonel Neill, did not blow up the Alamo, and retreat with such articles as were necessary for the defense of the country; but remained in possession from the 17th of January until the last of February, when the Alamo was invested by the force of Santa Anna. Surrounded there, and cut off from all succor, the victims to the ruthless feelings of Santa Anna, by the contrivance of the council, and in violation of the plans of the Major-General for the defense of the country.”
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The construction took many years, but Houston had set a solid foundation for the story he wanted historians to write. If there was to be any blame for the fall of the Alamo, his story went, it should fall on the provisional government and the victims because of insubordination by the Alamo commanders, Neill, Bowie, and Travis.
Today that false impression persists. In November 1993, at a rededication of Fort Sam Houston in honor of Houston's bicentennial birthday, Madge Roberts, Houston's great-great granddaughter, claimed that the Alamo defenders failed to follow Houston's instructions to destroy the Alamo. She said, “He [Houston] knew that [defense of the Alamo] was a hopeless cause. He knew that the Texians could not defend the Alamo against a siege.”
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Marshall De Bruhl, author of
Sword of San Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston
, expressed the same sentiment this way: “Travis and Bowie's disobedience of Houston's direct orders to abandon and then blow up the Alamo not only cost them their lives. Another 187 brave men were lost with them. But the gallant band's defense against the superior Mexican force that besieged them for thirteen days has become America's greatest example of military bravado. It was rash and foolish, yes, but it was grandly heroic.”
15
In August 1994 De Bruhl stated his position with more precision when he complained: “There are two transcendent moments in the war for Texas independence, at Washington on the Brazos, on March 2, 1836, and the Battle of San Jacinto, at Buffalo Bayou on April 21, 1836, which guaranteed that independence. . . . It is these two events attending the birth of the republic that should be celebratedânot the bitter defeats of the Alamo and Goliad. Those baleful failures were caused by the rash acts of disobedient men and resulted in the unnecessary loss of half the manpower and much of the weaponry available to fight the invader.”
16
Elizabeth Crook, in her work of fiction
Promised Lands
, wrote: “Eccentric and verbose but surefooted as a marching band, Sam Houston spoke with a drumbeat. He had told the volunteers not to go to Matamoros: those who had ignored him were now dead. He had told them to blow up the Alamo and abandon San Antonio de Bexar: those who had disobeyed were now trapped like a nest of rabbits with the hole plugged up.”
17
Jeff Long, in his novel of the Texas Revolution
Empire of Bones
(promoted as historically accurate), contributed this: “If they [Travis and Bowie] had survived their battle at the Alamo and he could ever get his hands on them, Houston thought it might be most fitting to just shoot them out of hand. Goddamn them for not blowing up their pile of mud and falling back. Bowie and the young maniac Travis had deliberately disobeyed his orders. They had stayed in their forts showboating with their
own command. As a direct consequence of their hubris they had sailed off the edge of the world with some hundred and eighty men in that worthless mission corral.”
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Most recently, James L. Haley, an independent scholar and Houston apologist, wrote: “. . . so now Houston sent Jim Bowie with orders to the commander there [San Antonio] to remove the artillery from the Alamo, blow the fortress up and retire to Gonzales.”
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Such is the historical record today: a resoundingly pro-Houston slant in both history and fiction that has been accepted by historians and writers without a single challenge to the tale's veracity. There are, however, other documents that speak to the defense of the Alamoâevidence that gives objective readers the “opportunity of drawing truthful deductions” about Houston's alleged order to destroy the Alamo and abandon Bexar. However, before an examination of the other documents is presented, a detailed analysis of the one document that seems to support Houston's version of the events is necessary.
20
In mid-January 1836 Houston was in Goliad, attempting to bring the various factions of the Texian military machine together for an invasion of Matamoros. While at that location, he received a missive from Lt. Colonel James C. Neill, the commander at San Antonio. Neill wrote: “There are at Laredo now 3,000 men under the command of General Ramirez [y Sesma], and two other generals, and, as it appears from a letter received here last night, 1,000 of them are destined for this place, and two thousand for Matamoros. We are in a torpid, defenseless condition, and have not and cannot get from the citizens here horses enough to send out a patrol or spy company. . . . I hope we will be reinforced in eight days, or we will be overrun by the enemy.”
21
Neill also wrote Governor Henry Smith and the Council about the situation at San Antonio, stressing that he needed horses and men to form a spy unit to scout the area between Bexar and the Rio Grande. Neill believed the enemy was nearer to his command than the rumors indicated, and he did not want to be caught unaware of their approach.
22
The exact nature of Houston's response to Neill's call for help is ambiguous because we have no copy of the orders that Houston sent to Neill. A letter to Governor Smith, however, details some of Houston's actions in response to the anticipated attack on San Antonio. This is the document that is often cited as proof that Houston ordered the Alamo destroyed and the garrison abandoned.
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The letter reads:
Sir: I have the honor to enclose for your information a communication from Lt. Col. J. C. Neill, under the date of [January] the 14th inst. Colonel Bowie will leave here in a few hours for Bexar with a detachment of from thirty to fifty men. Capt. [William H.] Patton's [Columbia] Company, it is believed, are now there. I have ordered the fortifications in the town of Bexar to be demolished, and,
if you should think well of it, I will remove all the cannon and other munitions of war to Gonzales and Copano, blow up the Alamo and abandon the place, as it will be impossible to keep up the Station with volunteers, the sooner I can be authorized the better it will be for the Country
[italics added]. In an hour I will take up the line of march for Refugio Mission with about 209 efficient men, where I will await orders from your Excellency, believing that the army should not advance with a small force upon Matamoros with the hope or belief that the Mexicans will cooperate with us. I have no confidence in them and the disaster at Tampico should teach us a lesson to be noted in future operations. I have learned that Colonel Gonzales is somewhere on the Nueces with one hundred and seventy men, but accounts vary as to the actual number. They are to cooperate in the eastern Confederacy, I am told.
I will leave Captain [Peyton S.] Wyatt in command at this point [with his Huntsville Volunteers] until I can relieve him with thirty-five regulars now at Refugio. I pray that your Excellency will cause all the regulars now enlisted to be formed into companies, and march to headquarters [Copano]. It will be impossible to keep up a garrison with the volunteers. Do forward the regulars. Capt. [Benjamin Fort] Smith had been relieved, and I met him on his way home today. Captain Patton will return to Lavaca County and bring on a company as soon as possible. I have sent Captain [Philip] Dimmitt to raise one hundred more men and march to Bexar forthwith, if it be invested; and if not to repair to headquarters with his company. Captain Patton will do likewise. I would myself have marched to Bexar but the Matamoros rage is up so high that I must see Colonel [William] Ward's men. You have no idea of the
difficulties I have encountered. Patton has told me of the
men
that make the trouble. Better materials never were in ranks. The government and all its offices have been misrepresented to the army.
I pray you send me copies of Austin's letters, or rather extracts. If the Council is in session I do wish they would say something about the Confederacy. Please send me frequent expresses and advise me of your pleasure.
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