The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (15 page)

The junior officer would never forget his first major battle, a complete triumph, which further solidified his emotional attachment to Texas—along with a robust contempt for the Anglo barbarians from the north. Under Arredondo, he also learned the best way to crush a rebellion: destroy every enemy, whether through battle or execution.

Over the next several years Santa Anna spent much of his time pursuing outlaws, Indians, and insurgents. He received several citations and eventual promotion to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In the beginning stages of the War of Independence, Santa Anna fought against the rebels. But a few months before independence from Spain was achieved in September 1821, he declared his loyalty to Agustín de Iturbide, the royalist officer turned rebel and the future emperor of Mexico, and in return was made a full colonel. After victories at Córdoba and his hometown of Jalapa, he led the rebel troops who drove the Spanish out of the city of Veracruz. Iturbide rewarded him with the rank of brigadier general and the post of commandant of the province of Veracruz, where he used his position to acquire extensive landholdings, including a large estate just outside Jalapa.

Santa Anna was a born opportunist, and over the next few years his allegiance changed with Mexico’s constantly shifting winds of fortune. In 1822, he aligned himself with a group of military leaders working to oust Iturbide, eliminate the monarchy, and transform Mexico into a republic. The plan succeeded—Iturbide abdicated, was exiled to Italy, then attempted to slip back into the country, only to be caught and executed by a firing squad—and the result was the liberal constitution of 1824, which emphasized civil rights and a federalist system of government. Santa Anna soon retired and spent the next few years at his hacienda, Manga de Clavo. In 1825 he married a lovely eighteen-year-old with a large dowry. He would father several children by her, and more by other women. (He was notoriously unfaithful: four women would claim to have borne him a total of seven illegitimate offspring.)

In 1828, out of retirement and serving as governor of Veracruz, he, along with other generals, staged a coup that ousted the sitting president, Manuel Gómez Pedraza, and established the liberal-minded Vicente Guerrero in office. Santa Anna resumed his duties as governor. Then, in the summer of 1829, twenty-seven hundred Spanish troops landed on the eastern coast of Mexico near Tampico, three hundred miles up the coast from Veracruz. Here was a situation begging for boldness, and Santa Anna obliged. Without authorization, he mobilized a militia of two thousand men and set sail for Tampico, where he defeated the Spaniards after a few weeks of sporadic fighting. He led his troops to Mexico City, where he received unanimous adulation as the Hero of Tampico. Later that year, the vice president, Anastasio Bustamante, led a conservative coup that unseated and executed Guerrero. The unpopular Bustamante was ousted in 1832, and in April 1833, Santa Anna was elected president of Mexico on a platform of peace, prosperity, and “an end to hatreds.” He was hailed as a federalist hero throughout the country—even the colonists in the far-off province of Texas passed resolutions expressing their approval of “the firm and manly resistance made by the highly talented and distinguished chieftain” and pledged their “lives and fortunes on the support of the distinguished leader who is now so gallantly fighting in defense of civil liberty.” Failing to attend his own inauguration, he retired to his hacienda in Jalapa and left the tedium of administration to his vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías.

But Farías’s democratic federalist reforms, particularly laws curtailing the power of the Church and the army, turned those institutions, and the conservative upper class, against him. Santa Anna, sensing a change in the political weather, gained the backing of those groups and switched sides. In April 1834 he returned to Mexico City and deposed Farías, then dissolved the Congress and began canceling Farías’s reforms in favor of a strong centralist government. In Santa Anna’s opinion, the struggling young country was not ready for democracy: “A hundred years from now my people will not be fit for liberty,” he said. “Despotism is the proper government for them.” With no legislative branch to regulate him, he exercised the powers of a dictator. When a new Congress reconvened in January 1835, almost all its delegates were military or clerical, ready to do his bidding.

As Santa Anna concentrated authority in Mexico City and abrogated civil and states’ rights, a wave of outrage and discontent spread across much of Mexico. Open rebellion occurred in two places: Zacatecas and Texas. Leaving a puppet ad interim president to administrate in his place, His Excellency crushed the uprising in Zacatecas, three hundred miles northwest of Mexico City. Rumors began to spread that his next mission would be to punish the Anglos in Texas. On the last day of August 1835, the government sent a circular to officials throughout the republic.

The colonists established in Texas have recently given the most unequivocal evidence of the extremity to which perfidy, ingratitude, and the restless spirit that animates them can go, since—forgetting what they owe to the supreme government of the nation which so generously admitted them to its bosom, gave them fertile lands to cultivate, and allowed them all the means to live in comfort and abundance—they have risen against that same government, taking up arms against it under the pretense of sustaining a system which an immense majority of Mexicans have asked to have changed, thus concealing their criminal purpose of dismembering the territory of the Republic.

The statement went on to say that “the most active measures” would be taken to rectify this “crime against the whole nation. The troops destined to sustain the honor of the country and the government will perform their duty and will cover themselves with glory.”

His Excellency’s dislike of Americans was made even more apparent a few months later. In Mexico City, before an audience of several foreign ambassadors, he talked at length of the United States’ involvement in Texas. The shocked U.S. consul, who was also present, wrote to President Andrew Jackson soon after:

He spoke of our desire to possess that Country, declared his
full knowledge
that we had instigated and were supporting the Revolt, and that he would in due Season
Chastise us
for it. Yes Sir, he said chastise us: he continued, I understand that Gen. Jackson sets up a claim to pass the Sabine, and that in running the division line, hopes to acquire the Country as far as the Naches. “Sir,” said he, (turning to a Gentleman present) “I mean to run that line at the Mouth of my Cannon, and after the line is Established, if the Nation will only give me the Means, only afford me the necessary Supply of Money I will march to the Capital, I will lay Washington City in Ashes, as it has already been done.”

The meaning and intent were clear. Exactly how His Excellency would accomplish his mission—with a depleted army and an empty treasury—was not.

S
ANTA
A
NNA HAD NEVER BEEN
a brilliant strategist, but he led from the front, much like his idol, Napoleon—indeed, he surrounded himself with books, images, and statues of the French leader. The confidence and loyalty this inspired in his men usually overrode his lack of wisdom, for his admiration of the French military genius did not extend to serious study of his strategy: he aped the Corsican’s style but not his substance. Yet he was also a superb and energetic organizer, and although he was under no obligation to assume command of this army, he chose to lead the campaign personally—for his country, for the glory it entailed, and likely because he did not trust anyone else to do it right. Santa Anna had never relished the humdrum duties and routine of the administrative path. These he left to others, while he sought the spectacular. He “preferred the hazards of war to the seductive and sought-after life of the Palace,” he would write later. His audacity was the quality his countrymen found most alluring, and the main reason why he would be reelected several times.

Years of civil war, rebel uprisings, and political turmoil had left the nation almost penniless, and the military had suffered more than most institutions. Legislation during Farías’s short-lived federalist regime had downsized the army by demobilizing many veteran units. The standing army was dismayingly small. On paper the military counted 38,715 men, 18,219 of them members of the regular army, but the government would only allow 3,500 of those to be assembled for the Texas campaign—the rest might be needed to quell federalist revolutionary activity in central Mexico. That would not be enough.

After putting down the Zacatecas rebellion in mid-May, Santa Anna had returned to another hero’s welcome in Mexico City, then retired to his beloved hacienda in the mountains of Jalapa, ostensibly for health reasons. But when news of the seizure of the Goliad presidio and the confrontation at Gonzales reached the country’s interior, he sprang into action. He arrived in the nation’s capital by early November to begin assembling the Army of Operations, which would eventually comprise six thousand men and which he planned to deploy against Texas. Financing the expedition was an operation in itself: though Santa Anna had assumed almost absolute authority, there were limits to his power, particularly when it came to the depleted treasury. Later that month, the Mexican Congress authorized the government to furnish him with 500,000 pesos, but the money was never issued. His Excellency took matters into his own hands, negotiating several large loans, and even using his own properties as collateral. One loan of 400,000 pesos with steep interest rates was later rejected by Congress. Somehow, he obtained enough to keep the expedition going, though his exertions to cover payrolls and supplies would involve much juggling and coercion over the next several months—and he would still come up short.

Santa Anna ordered units from around the country to supply conscripts to fill out the skeleton ranks of infantry, cavalry, and artillery forces. The Army of Operations would be almost equally divided between
permanentes,
the regular army forces, and
activos,
the active militia, with some frontier presidial units also present. There was no lack of bodies in the higher ranks: the army was top-heavy with officers, quite a few of them owing their commissions to political connections—one of His Excellency’s top aides would later write that there were officers enough for an army of twenty thousand men. Many of these men knew little of their profession.

Most of the higher-ranking officers, however, were veterans who had fought alongside Santa Anna—and sometimes, amid Mexico’s near-constant upheavals and ever-shifting allegiances, against him. As his second commander in chief, largely a ceremonial and advisory position, he named Italian-born General Vicente Filisola, a capable administrator but, at forty-six, past his prime as a battle commander. Filisola lacked the respect of his peers, who would never forgive his foreign birth. (Several high-ranking officers were born in Spain or one of its possessions, but they at least shared the same blood and language as their Mexican-born comrades.) General Manuel Fernández Castrillón, the tall, well-educated former royalist who had fought at Santa Anna’s side for more than a decade, was appointed aide-de-camp. Born in Cuba, he came to Mexico with the Spanish army, but had changed sides during the revolution. Few men had the courage to stand up to their commander in chief when he turned abusive; Castrillón was one of them.

Serving as chief of staff was Colonel Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, the New Orleans–educated illegitimate son of an early revolutionary hero, José María Morelos. The squat, swarthy Almonte had been sent to Texas in 1834 to infiltrate the province and determine its political attitude. He had seen with his own eyes the colonists’ lack of allegiance—and their industriousness in civilizing the province’s wilderness. In his report he had presaged the dangers they presented, and recommended that the army be dispatched immediately to control the unruly colonists.

As commanding general of the artillery, His Excellency named the skilled and ruthless Pedro de Ampudia, another Cuban—one of several in positions of high rank. Dozens of other officers rounded out the fifty-man general staff. As the army’s commissary general, His Excellency appointed his brother-in-law, Colonel Ricardo Dromundo, who had married his sister Francisca, though Filisola and other officers had reservations about his performance and integrity.

One division of the army was already on the move. Forty-year-old General Joaquín Ramírez y Sesma had commanded the cavalry superbly in the Zacatecas victory in May; he had been rewarded with the governorship of that military department. Despite the fact that he and Santa Anna had opposed each other politically until 1833—he had once issued a manifesto mocking Santa Anna—he enjoyed His Excellency’s confidence. He also enjoyed gambling and parties, but he was a brave and determined soldier, though somewhat arrogant. He viewed himself as the Joachim Murat, the dashing French cavalry leader, to Santa Anna’s Napoleon, though that opinion was not shared by some of his peers. When news of General Cós’s besiegement at Béxar reached the capital, orders were sent to Ramírez y Sesma directing him to march at once to the aid of Cós with three battalions of infantry, one cavalry regiment, and a battery of light artillery. On November 11, he began the long trek from Zacatecas to Laredo, situated on the Rio Grande, which would serve as the primary base of operations for the march into Texas.

After sorting out the country’s political affairs in the capital, Santa Anna rode to the city of San Luis Potosí early in December to begin organizing the army. The troops began assembling there and soon moved to the mile-high mountain city of Saltillo, in Coahuila, about 120 miles farther north, where they would take final shape. Saltillo, a city of almost fifteen thousand, lay in a wide valley flanked by the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Madres, its old pink marble cathedral and government buildings gleaming in the sun. The area’s mild winters reassured Santa Anna of the wisdom of his overland strategy. The line of approach would proceed from Saltillo to Monclova, to Laredo, then to Béxar—some six hundred miles total.