Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  With Wm Conqueror I came

  As one Chief rol'd among the rest

  EPITAPH, PRESTON FREERY, ELEVENTH CENTURY

  When twelve-year-old Berwick Travis found himself an indentured servant in Loudon County, Virginia, in 1763, unsuccessfully petitioning for release from his master, those proud words of his presumed ancestor nearly seven centuries before seemed at best ironic, for he was neither chief nor conqueror. Nearly a decade later, however, he had worked out his period of servitude and at once traveled south, along the Shenandoah Valley route taken by Crockett's grandfather just the year before, into and across North Carolina, and down to the Saluda River in what colonists then called the Ninety-Six District. It was fairly remote country, its only real community the village of Ninety-Six itself, and when Travis got a grant of 100 acres on the north side of the river, beside Mine Creek, his circumstances looked if anything even more removed from the splendors of Tulketh Castle in Preston, England, where the boastful Travers dwelled. This home was no castle.1

  While working his farm Travis kept a tavern for a time, marrying Ann Smallwood the year after he arrived, and there they carved out a living for the next forty years and raised their children. After the Revolution, which Berwick Travis seems to have missed, South Carolina became a state, and the old Ninety-Six District divided, leaving Travis in the new Edgefield District or County. When he died in 1812, he left an estate valued at $4,232.12, nothing to put him on a par with Travers of Tulketh, but a very respectable testament to his hard work. He also left seven heirs besides his wife—four daughters and three sons. Two of those men were already out on their own, and one at least was on the way to making himself a man of note.2

  Alexander Travis, just twenty-two when his father died, had already embraced his life's calling. Three years before, in 1809, he succumbed to the religious revival that swept the backwoods country of North and South Carolina, and ever after drew people to him with his fervid sermons in the millennial tradition of Lorenzo Dow, the great frontier Methodist evangelist. Yet Travis was more scrupulous, and less eccentric, than “Crazy Dow,” and drew attention by his faith rather than any oddity. The other son, Mark Travis, was born September 6, 1783, and was nearly thirty when their father died, and more in Berwick's mold, a farmer and carpenter.3 Yet both brothers shared a regard for education that they passed on in later years, and a mutual devotion to the church, each adhering to the missionary Baptist faith.4

  Mark Travis may also have been a bit of a rogue, for he apparently fathered an illegitimate son named Taliaferro sometime prior to 1807. But he was not a man to shirk responsibility. On June 1, 1808 he married Jemima Stallworth, whose brother was already married to Mark's sister, and soon thereafter he took young Taliaferro into his home, acknowledging him as his son, though whether Jemima was herself the boy's mother is a mystery.5 There was no question about the subsequent outpouring of children that came to the Travises, however. Starting in 1809 Jemima gave birth to ten more in the next two decades, the last being born almost twenty years to the day from the appearance of the first.6 The first of those born in wedlock was William Barret Travis, who came into his parents' home a few miles from Red Bank Church on August 1, 1809, two years after their marriage.7 The middle name they gave him represented the prevalent English pronunciation of his grandfather Berwick's given name, just as their very name Travis itself had evolved from Travers over the centuries to a spelling that matched its sound.8 His time in South Carolina was brief, leaving little impression on his memory. In later years he might have some dim recollections of the Red Bank Baptist Church, where his family attended services, and around which much of community life certainly revolved. There may have been a fleeting memory of some men going off to war with the British, though Edgefield was little touched by the War of 1812. Of course there were glimmers of childhood days with the Stallworth cousins and with children of neighbors. Not very far away, though a couple of steps up the social stair, lived James Bonham and his wife, Sophia, and their children, Julia and James Butler. The daughter would one day marry a Bowie. Brother James, though two years older than young William Travis, may well have met him at church or play, and in the way of children, the differences of age and station could easily disappear when playmates were few and opportunities to frolic even fewer.9

  There would not be time for young Travis to get better acquainted in the Edgefield area, for in the way of those restless young Americans of the age, Mark and Jemima looked to the west, though his younger brother, Alexander, led the way. Tall, dignified, grave in manner and speech, the younger of the brothers was the more adventurous, though he sought souls rather than prosperity on the western horizon. A frenzy called “Alabama Feaver” that followed the end of the war with Britain saw thousands of emigrants from the Carolinas take to the new Federal Road, largely opened by the military during the war. It commenced at Augusta, Georgia, on the Savannah River, scarcely thirty miles from the Mark Travis farm, and by 1820 the Great Migration saw more than one hundred thousand white settlers in the territory that became the states of Mississippi and Alabama. The land out there was not free, but it was cheap. In 1816 Crockett came to Alabama scouting for a likely setting, and the next year Alexander Travis did the same, only he found what he was looking for and settled in Conecuh County, near a place called Sparta—a name apt enough for the living conditions of the place. Yet there was great promise in the hilly red soil and the dense forests of hardwoods and evergreens. He sent word back to his brother, Mark, to follow his lead, just as he preached to guide souls to a better place.10

  Mark Travis cleared his affairs in South Carolina in late spring of 1818, and by William's ninth birthday was ready to put his family on the road.11 They would have made the journey on foot, their worldly goods in a wagon, driving their livestock before them. It was not a long trip, but a hard one in the summer heat and humidity of the Deep South. The Federal Road took them across central Georgia, through Milledgeville and Macon, past the Creek agency on the Flint River, where young William may have seen his first Native Americans, and on to the Chattahoochee. Once across that river, they entered the Alabama Territory, and from there the road led them onward past a succession of frontier forts and battle sites to Burnt Corn in the heart of Conecuh. From there another few hours brought them to Alexander Travis's home.

  While the federal surveyors were still at work making the township plats of the public-domain land, Mark Travis and his family lived with Alexander for a time until May 19, 1819, when the Sparta Land Office opened for business, and Mark stepped forward to purchase its very first certificate.12 For $1.25 an acre, he bought title to eighty-two and a half acres near his brother, and there built his house about five miles from the future county seat, Evergreen.13 A few years later he added more property to his original tract, but that seemed to satisfy any land hunger he may have felt. He stayed there for the rest of his days, and there Jemima gave birth to more children until 1829.14 Alexander Travis, meanwhile, prospered spiritually in Conecuh. He preached every Sunday near a place called Evergreen, and the same year that his brother came, he organized there the Old Beulah Church. He had only one book, a Bible, and when not working his fields or preaching from it in the daylight, he read it in his cabin at night by the light of blazing pine knots. He also acted as a sort of backwoods judge in the absence of more formal justice at the time, and this literate and public-spirited uncle exerted a powerful influence on his nephew William.15 Indeed, where it is difficult to find much of Mark Travis other than his own youthful irresponsibility in this, the first of his sons, the stamp of Alexander Travis was indelibly left on his nephew.

  Nothing signified this more than Alexander's commitment to education. He would himself be a founder and trustee of the later Evergreen Academy, and probably played some role in the petition that led to the legislature of the new state of Alabama incorporating the Sparta Academy in December 1821.16 Up to this time young William, when he went to school, probably attended one of the “blab” classes o
r the so-called old field schools, built on worked-out land, where students simply recited lessons over and over again mindlessly. The academy system, largely built on the Englishman Joseph Lancaster's “Lancastrian” method of older pupils helping to teach the younger ones, started to spread through the state at the same time as statehood itself, and though it would be realized too late to be of any use to this Travis, his younger brothers and sisters would benefit from Alabama's progressive efforts to establish public education.17

  William Barret Travis's first encounter with formal education came at the Sparta Academy, where his uncle Alexander served as a superintendent. There were only two teachers, John McLeod and Murdock McPherson, yet the typical curriculum in such a school included Greek, Latin, French, philosophy, rhetoric, geography, history, mathematics, and more, all for anywhere from six to sixty dollars a term, and here in Sparta much more likely the former.18 Then, too, just going into Sparta itself regularly could be educational, though it was not much of a frontier community. The Methodists and others had to hold their services in the courthouse, while the Freemasons used the second floor for their meetings. There were but two hotels, the Rankin House and the much rougher Gauf House, its dirt floor and log walls softened only slightly by calico curtains.19 Yet to young Travis, just entering his teen years, this was his first taste of town life, of a way of living not tied to the ceaseless toil of the farm, a place where men with professions wore better clothes and talked of the world and not the soil.

  With that taste of learning, and the backing of his father and uncle, Travis went on to the academy of Professor William H. McCurdy, a few miles west of Sparta in new Monroe County.20 Here the introduction to classical learning that he got at the Sparta Academy was extended and rounded, so that twenty years later Bowie's friend William Wharton would speak of Travis being “collegiately” educated.21 Travis must have proved an apt pupil, for when he finished at the academy, probably in 1827, aged nearly eighteen, he almost immediately took a job as a teacher himself, perhaps at this same school.22 Though he held the position less than a year, he showed aptitude as a professor as well, judging by the considerable literacy and skill of expression of at least one of his students.23 Of course that one student, Rosanna E. Cato, “the beautiful Miss Cato,” as he called her, attracted more attention than his average pupil.24

  Still Travis wanted to learn more. It did not take long at a school-master's desk to learn that it would not bring him either the prosperity or the station in life that he craved. On this frontier, that kind of status went only to two kinds of men, the big planters and the lawyers. He had seen enough of the field and the plow to know that his future lay not in that direction, but he liked what he saw of that other profession. There were only a few in Sparta, but his uncle Alexander sometimes preached to the Baptists in Claiborne, county seat of Monroe, on the bluff above the Alabama River, and if William went with him he saw there something far more stirring. This was a thriving community, growing rapidly, tied by the river to Mobile and the rest of the world, with an active and distinguished bench and bar. If he was to learn the attorney's trade, he would have to “read law” under a practicing lawyer for a year or more, and clearly Claiborne was the place to do it.25

  Moreover, one man there stood above the others, and however he got the introduction, Travis sometime in 1828 presented himself to James Dellet.26 Here was a giant of the frontier bar. A native of New Jersey, Dellet was not quite forty, a graduate of the University of South Carolina who came to Alabama at the same time as the Travises, and settled in Claiborne. Almost immediately he became a judge of the circuit court, then spent three terms in the state legislature, being elected its first speaker of the house in 1819.27 He was a stout fellow, of seemingly careless bearing, by turns gregarious and taciturn, but the keen eyes in his round face flashed with brilliance. Given the mood, he always had an anecdote in the rich vein of his Irish ancestors, and could spellbind audiences or juries with pathos or convulse them with laughter. In politics he supported John Quincy Adams against Jackson, as would have been expected of a prosperous professional man who owned fifty-five slaves and a property in Claiborne valued at two thousand dollars.28 When the Marquis de Lafayette visited Claiborne on his tour of America in 1825, Dellet headed the town's celebrations, as the undisputed head of the Claiborne bar. Travis might have been put off at first acquaintance, as was Benjamin Porter, who met Dellet a couple of years later and found him “so morose that I was driven from the idea of pursuing the law,” but this was only the attorney's way of putting potential students on the defensive. On longer acquaintance he proved to be a frank, sincere friend and a man of unrivaled integrity.29 This was the kind of man William Barret Travis wanted to become.

  Once Dellet agreed to take Travis on as a pupil, the young student applied himself intensely, bent on learning as much as quickly as he could. It was the way he would go about everything in life.30 Indeed, now, while only just nineteen and already training for one career, he actively commenced another. Aside from attorneys, no one in a booming town like Claiborne exerted more community influence than the editor of a newspaper. Yet frontier journalism was a risky business, with a high mortality rate. In the past Claiborne had seen no fewer than three weekly newspapers fail. The Alabama Courier commenced in 1819 and lasted three years. Christopher Dameron's Gazette began in 1824 and ran scarcely a year, while the Alabama Whig, published by Thomas Eastin, apparently enjoyed an even shorter life.31

  Somehow young Travis managed to attempt to fill this vacuum. No doubt press and type were available from either Dameron or Eastin, though he could only have purchased them either by his note, which was unlikely, since he had neither property nor income, or else by means of a loan from his father or his uncle. Or he may simply have continued Eastin's defunct Alabama Whig under some private agreement to assume its liabilities but changed its name under his own editorship. In any case, on May 16, 1828, he brought from the press the first issue of his new Claiborne Herald, “Edited & Published by William B. Travis.” To proclaim the independence and incorruptibility of the journal, he chose for his motto, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn,” certainly to the point, if less than stirring.32

  Every Friday the Herald appeared, its annual subscription rate the same four dollars that Dameron had charged for his defunct Gazette. Each of Travis's four pages stood twenty-two inches high by fourteen wide, and the five columns on each page had much the same content as every other rural weekly of the time. As with most small-town weeklies, the editorial matter was mostly borrowed from other newspapers that came into Claiborne—an account of a great storm in Norway, a visit to Niagara Falls, an anecdote from Brooklyn, a three-week-old notice of activity in the U.S. Senate. There was precious little in the way of local news, but then not much that was newsworthy happened in Monroe County. Of course there were the local civic events to be announced; lists of unclaimed letters to be collected at the post office; and always a number of announcements from Samuel McColl, clerk of the circuit court, more from James H. Draughton, clerk of the county court, and even some from neighboring Clarke County.

  Those official notices brought revenue, for naturally the courts paid, though probably at a lower rate than regular advertisers. Advertising was the lifeblood of a sheet like the Herald, few publishers surviving on subscription sales alone. Travis charged a dollar for the first insertion of each ten-line advertisement, and fifty cents for each subsequent appearance. Moreover, like many editors, he included in each advertisement a little reminder to himself of how long it should run, with a code in the lower corner showing the number of the first issue of appearance and then, after a dash, the number of times he was to run it, as in “35-6t”—start with issue 35 and publish six times. The best orders, of course, were those few that he encoded “35-tf”—start with issue 35 and run in every issue “'til forbid.” After nine months he was running ten columns of advertising, with a billing per issue in the neighborhood of $16.50, or monthly revenue
of about $65.00. Considering the cost of paper and ink, the income was hardly princely, especially when bills might go unpaid for months before any hard coin came in. Some, no doubt, he simply took in trade from merchants who advertised with him. Still, the income should have been enough for a bachelor of nineteen to get by on.33

  The problem was, he was not a bachelor any longer. During those months of teaching, he had become irresistibly enamored of Rosanna Cato, the daughter of local Monroe County farmer William Cato, and she returned his interest passionately.34 Travis later claimed that they had agreed to marry as soon as he could acquire a profession and be prepared to support a family, and perhaps they did.35 Yet perhaps there is just the possibility that their ardor got the better of their patience, a trait for which young Travis would have to pay consequences more than once, or that in fact it was their passion that led to the wedding. When they married on October 26, 1828, it is entirely possible that Rosanna, aged just sixteen, had already given birth to a baby boy named Charles Edward two months earlier. If so, it was hardly uncommon then or later, and the postponement of the formality of a wedding only awaited Travis's ability to make a home for his new family.36

  With two mouths to feed and possibly a third, however, that sixty-five dollars a month did not go so far. In addition, the distractions of a family robbed him of time needed on the newspaper. By February 1829 signs of haste and carelessness, showed all too evidently in the Herald. He forgot to lock his type in place on the press, allowing letters to jump out of place above their lines. His proofreading became sloppy, and misspelled words started to appear. Worse where income was concerned, he ran at least one advertisement upside down, and in one issue alone he included five that had already expired, in one case six weeks before. His own contribution to editorial content became marginal, no more than one or two local stories. Recognizing that he could not manage all this, the family, the newspaper, and the studies with Dellet, he advertised in his own pages for a journeyman printer to help him, even there committing a typographical error when he promised “liberal wages, and study employment.” He meant “steady,” of course, but there were no takers.37