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

by James Donovan

  The next day, Edward Burleson left Béxar for his farm in Bastrop, accompanied by his aged father, who had taken sick after the Grass Fight. Many of the remaining settlers, eager to return to their farms, followed, taking their carts and wagons with them. All but a dozen or so Gonzales men walked or rode back to DeWitt’s colony. Most of the colonists were only a few days’ ride from home; with any luck, they would make it in time for Christmas dinner. Their families needed them: Indians had been taking advantage of their absence to step up their raiding, and soon it would be time for plowing. Besides, there was no need for them in Béxar, and it was cold, and few of the men wore winter clothing. Juan Seguín’s company of mounted Tejanos disbanded, and Seguín rejoined his wife, María Gertrudis, and his four young children. Other bexareños began to trickle into their battered town from the ranches along the river.

  Many of the rambunctious young volunteers from the United States signed on for a new adventure that promised plenty of plunder and action—an expedition south to Matamoros, on the south bank of the mouth of the Rio Grande, deep within the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The prosperous port city of six thousand allegedly harbored many federalist sympathizers; together they might spark a widespread uprising in northern Mexico against the centralists. Just as alluring were its rumored riches: $100,000 per month in revenue, which could help fund the Texian revolution. The General Council had tentatively supported the idea, and Colonel Johnson and Dr. James Grant, a wealthy Scotsman and former empresario who owned a large hacienda in northern Mexico, appointed themselves leaders of the expedition. On December 30, after appropriating most of the provisions and ammunition recently sent by the General Council from Gonzales, Grant led two hundred volunteers down the road along the San Antonio River toward Goliad while Johnson rode to San Felipe to obtain authorization for the expedition.

  As word of the victory spread eastward to the colonies, Texians rejoiced in the fact that there were now no Mexican troops in the province. That an undisciplined group of backwoods militiamen could defeat a European-style army almost twice its size called forth echoes of a similar rebellion a half century before, and references to “the sons of ’76” were frequent. The news was celebrated outside Texas as well: in New Orleans, rehearsals began in mid-December for a play to open on January 1 entitled The Fall of San Antonio, or Texas Victorious, which featured Ben Milam’s inspiring call to duty and his death—and threw in an Indian war dance as well. In far-off New York, on the first day of the new year, another drama, The Triumph of Texas, opened at the Bowery Theatre.

  Most Texians assumed the war was over, that the Mexican government would leave Texas alone, or that other Mexican states would join the revolt and overthrow Santa Anna. Only a few thought otherwise. Sam Houston was one of them, and he called for Texians to rally and join the regular army. Nobody listened to him. Newspapers as far away as New York reported what was widely believed: “No other expedition can be fitted out by Mexicans against Texas until spring; and then the army of the Patriots will be sufficiently strong to repel them.”

  On November 24, the day he left, Stephen Austin had told his men that he had received word of an army of ten thousand Mexican soldados preparing to march into Texas and put down the insurrection, much as they had in Zacatecas—that is to say, in a most unpleasant manner. Now, a month later, word began reaching Béxar and then the Anglo settlements to the east that an army was indeed on its way north, its leader none other than the despot himself. It seemed that Santa Anna, the former federalist who considered himself the Napoleon of the West, had definite plans for these traitors to their adopted homeland. In taking Béxar, a Mexican stronghold for a century, the ungrateful rebels had humiliated their mother country. Now it was imperative that he retake and hold the town, not only to establish a supply base from which to attack the Anglo colonies but also for another, more compelling reason: revenge.

  SEVEN

  “A Mere Corral and Nothing More”

  The men in my command have been in the field for four months, they are almost naked, and this day they were to receive pay for the first month of their enlistment, and almost every one of them speaks of going home.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES C. NEILL

  The triumphant Army of the People, or at least what remained of it in Béxar, was dressed in rags.

  By the end of December, Edward Burleson and Frank Johnson had departed the battered town, leaving newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel James Neill in charge of the hundred-man garrison. Neill came from a long line of soldiers—the blood of ancient Irish warrior chieftains dating back to the fourth century ran through his veins. His father and his grandfather had both fought in the Revolutionary War. After commanding an infantry company under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Neill had been commissioned a colonel in the Alabama militia. He had also served two terms as a state congressman there before a statewide drought laid waste to his farm and compelled him to take his wife, daughter, and two sons to Texas in 1831, where he had settled in Austin’s colony. The forty-seven-year-old Neill was an experienced leader of men, a good soldier who followed orders, and was well respected by his comrades. “Nature has given him a giant frame and a mind incapable of despondency,” remembered a friend. But the following six weeks would test his equanimity. He faced serious problems with this command, and it did not take long for the situation to raise his ire.

  Neill had little enough to command in any case. A mass exodus had left him with few men and even sparser resources. Most of the Texian settlers had left for their homes to the east. The remainder, almost all of them young immigrants from the United States hungry for action, had preemptively set off with Dr. James Grant on the Matamoros adventure—a plan for which Colonel Johnson was belatedly seeking approval in San Felipe.

  The volunteers under Grant had taken most of the horses, food, ammunition, clothing, blankets, and medical supplies from the garrison, and had impressed additional livestock from the locals. An outraged Neill immediately began to fire off letters to Sam Houston and Governor Henry Smith imploring them for help, and claiming that the garrison would be unable to defend itself against the imminent Mexican attack—a line of argument more likely to sway them than appeals regarding his unit’s near destitution, which was his primary concern at that moment.

  Neill kept quarters in town, as did about half the soldiers. The others moved into the Alamo. Those residing in the old Spanish mission were commanded by William Carey, the thirty-year-old Virginian who had arrived in Austin’s colony just two months before rushing to Gonzales to join the volunteer army. He had been elected captain by the fifty-six men in his artillery corps—his Invincibles, he called them—after his several displays of bravery during the battle of Béxar.

  The one hundred men left in Béxar soon dwindled to eighty, including two dozen New Orleans Greys, almost all of whom were reassigned to an infantry unit. Most of the eighty were volunteers, each with that infuriating and predictable volunteer’s disdain for orders and military hierarchy. Morale soon became a major problem, and early in January, Neill and Carey twice called the men out on general parade to deliver morale-boosting speeches. Those helped—if only for a while. The soldiers had not been given their wages, though they had volunteered to remain in Béxar with the understanding that they were to be paid monthly, and most of them were still dressed in their now-threadbare summer clothes. They had signed on for a four-month hitch, to serve until regular army units showed up to take over. But after only a month, with no money, monotonous meals, and miserable conditions, the patriotism had worn off for some, and men had begun leaving.

  Those who remained staved off boredom as any army does: with women, gambling, games, and alcohol—mostly corn liquor, which was occasionally supplemented by the Mexican libations of choice, tequila and mescal. The more literate of the volunteers from “the States” wrote the occasional letter home and entrusted it to the next man leaving for the east. In the evenings, the soldiers dropped in on fandangos to dance,
drink, and debauch all night. Though impoverished and stripped of much of its resources—virtually every structure bore innumerable scars from artillery barrages and rifle and musket fire, and fragrant carcasses of livestock caught in the crossfire lay everywhere—the town and its resilient residents had returned to a semblance of normalcy.

  By day the men made themselves a little more useful, after a desultory fashion. They slept, wandered the dirt streets, admiring the pretty señoritas, and occasionally pitched in to help fortify the Alamo under the direction of attorney Green “Ben” Jameson, recently appointed engineer to the post. The previous December, General Cós had moved most of the cannon there; now the rebels dragged the remaining few tubes into the mission and destroyed the fortifications in Béxar, per Johnson’s orders. One work party spent time digging a well in the mission’s courtyard. John W. Smith, the Béxar carpenter and jack-of-all-trades who had guided Milam’s columns into town, was appointed public storekeeper to the garrison, and inventoried the captured Mexican guns and ammo and property in accordance with General Houston’s orders.

  Jameson proved himself invaluable. He and Neill had helped reestablish the functions of government and assured the town leaders that the rebel army would back their civil authority, which encouraged their cooperation when it came to supplies, or at least such supplies as the impoverished area could afford. Houston had also demanded an inventory of needed materials for repairing the fortifications, and toward that end Jameson had drawn up extensive plans to repair and strengthen the crumbling compound. Cós had made some significant additions to the mission during his time there, but after more than fifty days of sporadic rebel bombardment the compound was in need of serious reconstruction. Jameson had spent much time examining Fortress Alamo, as he called it, noting Cós’s fortifications, and was not impressed. But he was confident he could improve them significantly.

  Though Jameson was not a trained engineer—until joining the volunteer army he had acted as sales agent in the coastal town of Brazoria for the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, and had taken on numerous lawyering tasks—he had clearly found some schooling in the subject somewhere. He had also, apparently, found his calling. He produced a detailed plan that included, among many ideas, “a pass from the present fortress to a contemplated drawbridge across a contemplated ditch inside a contemplated half moon battery…. A part of said ditch, as well as a trap door across said ditch, which is contemplated to be raised by a tackle from inside the half-moon battery.” Not all his designs would be implemented, but they were ambitious, and impressive to all who heard them.

  Most of the rebuilding was done by officers, and made more difficult due to the scarcity of tools; the officers also stood guard and patrolled every night—on foot, since mounts were scarce after Grant left. The volunteers’ ongoing resistance to orders still posed a problem; in addition, the severe lack of clothes and the meager diet—all they had to eat was beef and corn—took its toll on morale.

  Eventually the last of the cannon were carted across the river and up through the main gate. Most of the tubes were wheeled onto platforms built along the mission perimeter, while others were positioned at windows and embrasures cut through the walls. A few were placed to fire directly over the wall—en barbette—which increased their field of fire but made their gunners easy targets. A couple of days after Cós’s departure, a large iron-barreled eighteen-pounder had arrived from Captain Philip Dimitt at Dimitt’s Landing (a coastal village founded by him), east of the town of Goliad. Jameson and his crew managed to hoist it onto a wooden platform erected over dirt and rubble from the collapsed roof of a one-story house at the northwest corner of the mission compound, and it now commanded the town to the west and the countryside to the north. They had only a few eighteen-pound balls at the time, but loads of langrage, bags of bits and pieces of iron—cut horseshoes, nails, and such—which could be deadly at close range, as could canister shot. The tube could also be adapted to fire slightly smaller balls if necessary.

  Besides the ongoing problem of supplies, clothing, and ammunition—they were still short on good powder, although the inferior Mexican variety was abundant—Neill had other headaches. Food remained scarce, and rumors had been circulating that a large party of Comanches was near, and was readying an attack. And since Grant’s Matamoros expedition had left them with almost no horses for reconnaissance, they had no definite idea of the whereabouts of the Mexican army. The Texians were sure that Santa Anna’s spies were in Béxar, but they had had no luck catching them. So far, the intelligence advantage seemed all with the enemy.

  On January 6, word reached town that there were a thousand troops on the march from Laredo on the Rio Grande. Rumors of a similar sort had been circulating for more than a month. Neill sent a long report that day to the General Council in San Felipe. “We Know not what day, or hour, an enemy of 1,000 in number may be down upon us,” he wrote, “and as we have no supplies or provisions within the fortress we could be starved out in 4 days by anything like a close siege.” He criticized the actions of Johnson and Grant, praised the valor of his troops over the previous ten weeks, and pleaded for more men, provisions, medical supplies, and his garrison’s pay—“If there has been a dollar here I have no knowledge of it.”

  On January 8, a Comanche appeared in town, the bearer of bad tidings. “His nation is in an attitude of hostilities toward us,” an understated Neill wrote to the General Council. The last thing the Texians needed was hundreds of Comanche warriors assaulting them. Fortunately, the Indian leaders were willing to discuss the situation, and quite possibly a treaty, but it needed to be done soon. Through the first half of January, though, Neill received no reply at all from anyone.

  It would be a while before Neill and the Béxar garrison would find out why no answer was forthcoming. Besides the simple fact that the provisional authority had no money and no source of revenue, relying almost solely on donations and loans—Stephen Austin and the two other Texian ambassadors were in the United States doing all they could to drum up support in cash and manpower—there was a more serious problem. The government was quickly degenerating into a chaotic mess. Tellingly, it had failed to take advantage of the respite from military activity afforded by the victory at Béxar on December 10. The Texian leaders had been presented with an opportunity to address the immediate problems they faced, particularly that of provisioning the army. Instead, they had done almost nothing.

  Upon receiving Neill’s expresses from Houston’s headquarters at Washington, a small village thirty miles upriver from San Felipe, Henry Smith forwarded them to the General Council with a letter excoriating the council for its actions. Smith was severely lacking in diplomatic skills but acutely aware of the danger of dithering while a large army was marching into Texas, a habit polished to perfection by the General Council. Smith and the General Council also differed on other matters large and small—most important, whether Texas was a Mexican state (the council’s position) or an independent nation, which was Smith’s position. As a consequence, their relationship was rocky. Then it got worse.

  In his letter, he called the General Council members scoundrels, Judases, and wolves, and the Matamoros expedition predatory. He tried to suspend the council members; they in turn voted to impeach him. Smith refused to countenance their actions and continued to exercise the powers of his office—or at least he attempted to, given the weakened state of his support, for he was essentially powerless. The two factions spent more time blasting each other with charges and countercharges than applying themselves to the task at hand. Several General Council members left San Felipe in disgust, and when a two-thirds quorum then failed to be reached, those remaining appointed a new governor and a small advisory committee to act for the General Council until a constitutional convention could convene almost two months later, on March 1.

  THOUGH NEILL LACKED THE HORSES necessary for ranging reconnaissance patrols, Béxar was not entirely in the dark. Juan Seguín had sent mounted spies as far sout
h as the Rio Grande. Even before they returned, rumors of Santa Anna’s approach sent tremors through the town. Twenty-three years earlier, an avenging Mexican army had reached Béxar and defeated a large force of rebel norteamericanos and Tejanos. Two days after the decisive Battle of the Medina, General Arredondo’s triumphant army had swarmed through the town in a fever of pillage and murder. Béxar had never completely recovered. Many of its residents retained vivid memories of the nightmarish occupation, and had no wish to repeat it. Now families began leaving town in droves. Several volunteers left with them, and by late January the garrison was reduced to seventy-five men fit for duty.

  Other bexareños remained in town, at least for the moment. The two Navarro sisters, twenty-four-year-old Juana and nineteen-year-old Gertrudis, had been raised by their uncle Governor Juan Martín Veramendi and his wife, Josefa, and Juana had been adopted by them. She and her stepsister, Ursula, had been very close, and she was fond of her brother-in-law, James Bowie, who addressed her as Sister. The Navarro family was one of the most prominent in town. The sisters’ father, Angel, the town’s political chief, was loyal to Santa Anna, while their uncle José Navarro was a supporter of Texian independence and busy in San Felipe politics. Juana’s first husband had died, leaving her with a young son, Alejo, and just weeks earlier she had wedded Dr. Horace Alsbury, a Texian who had taken part in the siege and battle of Béxar and who was still attached to the garrison. Alsbury, one of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred—the first group of settlers in his land grant—hailed from Kentucky. He and his new wife had taken her sister, Gertrudis, into their home.