When news that the Alamo had fallen on this date in 1836 reached the Mexican residents of El Paso del Norte, they cheered. Though long neglected themselves by the central government in Mexico City, the Texas Revolution far to the east in their eyes was little more than a land grab by greedy Anglos and illegal immigrants bent on wresting Texas from their newly independent nation.
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a shrewd and vainglorious leader with no obvious conviction other than the firm belief that might makes right, had brutally crushed a popular uprising in Zacatecas in 1835, taking no prisoners and letting his army ransack the city. This would be the template for his suppression of the revolt by the Texans.
Santa Anna surrounded the Alamo with an army of 2500 on Feb 23, beginning a 13-day siege of the garrison than numbered fewer than 200 defenders. Whatever had brought them inside the fortress – and greed for land, lust for adventure, and blind bad luck had played as much a part as ideology among the defenders now penned inside – there can be no question of the courage it took to remain behind the walls, watching the red flag of no quarter waving daily from the church belfry a mile away.
When the end came at dawn on the Sunday morning of March 6, it was ghastly, and no romantic retelling of the tale can lessen the horror of the massacre that unfolded in the final 30 minutes. Many, perhaps a third, of the defenders abandoned their posts in a desperate run for freedom, only to be cut down by Santa Anna’s lancers. Others, depleted of arms and ammunition, tried to surrender but were executed on the spot. Mexican soldiers, crazed by the heavy casualties they had taken, rampaged through the courtyard and into every room and sinecure, bayoneting to death every defender and, according to some reports, even the cats in the compound. 182 bodies were counted on the funeral pyre that Santa Anna ordered, the ashes stirred together and buried in a location never to be found.
The disaster at the Alamo was compounded three weeks later at Goliad, where 400 Texans had surrendered with assurances of clemency, only to be marched into the countryside on innocent pretenses, then summarily shot to the disgust of the professional officers of the Mexican army, who nonetheless carried out Santa Anna’s order to take no prisoners.
Santa Anna’s intent, above and beyond whatever blood-lust lingered from a heritage of fighting Moors and the English for a thousand years, appears to have been to create shock and awe across Texas. In that he succeeded too well. By giving no quarter at the Alamo or Goliad, Santa Anna had indeed terrorized the population, but at the same time, had given the Texans nothing to lose by fighting to the end. News of the fall of the Alamo and the atrocity at Goliad turned depression in Sam Houston’s Army of Texas to calls for vengeance. When they finally fell upon the surprised Mexicans at Buffalo Bayou on the San Jacinto, the Texans tore into their ranks with a score to settle. In less than 20 minutes, Santa Anna’s army was decimated, and for all practical purposes, Texas independence was won.
The nine year Republic of Texas that ensued has much to do with the boastful tradition handed down through generations of native-born Texans. But on two accounts, it was particularly sad. First, the Tejanos (native Texans of Hispanic descent) who had settled the land first, been there longest, and contributed significantly to the fight for independence, were marginalized, disenfranchised, and made into second class citizens by the Anglo majority, creating an enmity that has taken 170 years to mend. Equally sad is the total eradication of the peaceful Indians of North Texas, especially the Cherokees, who were well on the road to peaceful coexistence with the newer immigrants.
Another legacy of the Texas revolution was the Mexican-American War. Still smarting from the loss of Texas, Mexico went to war valiantly but unwisely over disputed land in South Texas in 1846. The war went badly for Mexico from the start, and was quickly though not easily won by the North Americans. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico lost over half its national territory – opening the way for the United States to spread from ocean to ocean.
It is tempting to view the Texas Revolution as a prelude to the Civil War. By showing that a slave-holding state could successfully break away from a central government that wished to abolish slavery, Texas set a tragic precedent. The addition of Texas to the Confederacy in 1861 made secession appear more viable, and therefore more likely.
Is this the way it all had to happen? What if the Texas Revolution had failed? What would the world look like today? What if Santa Anna had extended clemency to the surviving defenders at both the Alamo and Goliad, holding them as prisoners of war in exchange for peace? The Alamo and Goliad garrisons alone made up over half of all Texans under arms at the time. It seems highly likely that their capture would have so demoralized the population of Texas, it would have given up its rebellion, especially if prisoners of war could have returned to their farms and families on condition of laying down arms.
Would it really have happened that way? Probably not. Given the ongoing chaos in Mexico, the cultural clash between two proud peoples, and the aggressive expansionism of Anglo Americans, eventual separation of Texas in another few years probably would have occurred anyway.
Yet, an alternative history is not inconceivable. Had Mexico tried to subdue without conquering, then governed its outlying territories more magnanimously and effectively, a bilingual-bicultural state remaining loyal to a central federated Mexico is not hard to imagine. In the best case scenario, a progressive nation equal in size to the United States, gradually achieving economic parity with its powerful neighbor to the east, a barrier to expansionism and a bulwark against the spread of a slave-based economy might have emerged. And deprived of Texas, the Confederacy may have failed much faster, or even never come about.
Had Mexico retained the land it lost in the Mexican-American war, it could have blocked the incursion of English-speaking America onto the northern plains, preserving that vast land and its game as a sanctuary for the Native Americans who chose not to adopt the white or brown man’s ways. By the mid-2Oth century, North America could have been balanced by three equal powers, an English-French federated Canada in the north, the English speaking United States in the east, and a Spanish-English federated republic of Mexico to the west and south. Freedom for African-Americans would hopefully have evolved, with some racial merging, perhaps, especially in Mexico and the western United States where slavery had never taken hold, giving those regions a multi-racial character something like modern-day Brazil.
History, of course, cannot be unwound. Texans today are justly proud of their state’s heroic struggles, tainted though the motivations of some of their ancestors may have been. The long sad estrangement between Anglo and Mexican is almost mended, and Texans feel fortunate to be citizens of a great nation. Had the tragedy at the Alamo ended differently, however, we might all be proud citizens of Mexico today.
