Exodus From the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth

by Phillip Thomas Tucker

  A new Texas colonist who headed a family or intended to raise livestock was promised by the government—both Spanish and Mexican— a total of 4,429 acres, or a square league of land. Best of all for Southerners, Anglo-Celtic settlers who migrated to Texas with capital assets, including slaves, were granted additional leagues of land, promoting the rapid growth of slavery and hence more extensive and quicker development. 60

  THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION

  While slavery played a leading role in the antagonism between the slaveowning Anglo-Celts in Texas and the political and military leaders of the abolitionist Republic of Mexico, it was also the most decisive factor in laying the foundation for both “the drive for personal independence” and regional independence. In the estimation of historians James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, “nothing loomed larger than slavery” in the dispute between Texians and Mexico. As in other English-speaking slave regimes in the New World, especially in the thirteen colonies, and even as in Jamaica, slavery fueled a bent toward independence, self-sufficiency, and assertive defiance toward centralized authority, and paved the way for breaking away from government rules and regulations.

  The importance of slavery in the American Revolution has been overlooked because it failed to fit the simplistic view of colonists as righteous underdogs and the British as oppressors, rather than the liberators of American slaves. Historians’ negligence on this subject has led to misconceptions and misleading stereotypes about the Anglo-Celts and some of their deepest motivations, including those of the Alamo garrison and principal Texas Revolutionary leaders. Just as slavery played a vital role in fueling colonial resistance to the British, especially in the South, during the American Revolution, so the selective silencing of this complex aspect of Texas’ past occurred because it had no place in the romance of the mythical Alamo.

  The supreme importance of slavery can be partly understood by examining the relationship to the peculiar institution of the primary leaders of the Texas Revolution and the Alamo. All of the primary Alamo leaders, James Clinton Neill, James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis, were current or former slave-owners. Colonel Neill, who was proud of his family’s Southern plantation “heritage,” even “dabbled in the slave market” to reap dividends, and then raised cotton that was picked by his own slaves. Crockett was the smallest slave-owner, who “owned [only] a few slaves” in his lifetime. The first member of his hardscrabble Tennessee family ever to own slaves, he was in fact far more anti-slavery in sentiments and actions than Neill, Bowie, or Travis. By far, the wheeling-dealing Bowie possessed the deepest roots and ties to slavery.

  As a relatively young slave-owner, Travis fell between Crockett and Bowie in the legendary Alamo triumvirate. Seeking a badly needed fresh start in early 1831, he left a failed marriage with Rosanna E. Cato, as well as a son and unborn daughter, never to return. Departing the little town of Claiborne, Monroe County, located amid the gently rolling lands and “cane country” of southwest Alabama, twenty-one-year-old Travis headed for Texas in a big hurry. Like so many other United States migrants, he was determined to make “a splendid fortune.” Travis then became a lawyer in San Felipe de Austin and Anáhuac, a distinctive Aztec name that held an important place in Mexican culture. Thereafter, he looked to purchase choice east Texas lands for speculation, when not engaged in his legal practice.

  In going to Texas, Travis was following the tradition of his South Carolina family, which was largely rooted in the booming cotton culture and slavery in the 18th century. The fertile “cane country” of southwest Alabama, especially along the brown-hued Alabama River, was better for cotton-growing than South Carolina. Here the Travis family had moved and thrived, and the prodigal son was determined to apply the same magical formula for success in Texas.

  Travis was fully accustomed to being around African American slaves. He crossed the Sabine with a twenty-year-old male slave by his side, Joe, who served beside him at the Alamo. His own personal household at the little southwest Alabama town of Claiborne had included three slaves. At Anáhuac, one of Travis’ first legal cases was to represent a Louisiana slave-owner seeking the return of two slaves who had fled to Texas and ended up with the Mexican garrison at Anáhuac. Travis was hired to return them to their owner.

  Primarily because of deep-seated issues over slavery between Texas and Mexico, Travis emerged as a war hawk and pro-slavery advocate by 1832. He early clashed with Colonel Bradburn, who refused to return the two runaway slaves because they now served as soldiers in his garrison, and had requested Mexican citizenship or freedom. Bradburn also violated traditional “property rights,” as the settlers saw it, impressing the slaves of nearby planters for labor on the Anáhuac fort. But worst of all, Texians feared that Bradburn had indoctrinated African Americans with the ideals of liberation and equality. The early clash over slavery between Travis and Bradburn therefore, in many ways, represented the Texas Revolution in microcosm; it also gave a foretaste of his later showdown with Santa Anna at the Alamo.

  As he gained more income from his legal practice, Travis continued to acquire more Texas land. These included property along Buffalo Bayou as early as 1832, and later land holdings in the Ben Milam grant, besides his claims to acreage as a colonist’s right in 1835. The dream of becoming a large landowner and gentleman planter was never far from his mind. To Travis and so many other migrants from the Deep South, Texas was the ideal place to transform themselves into respected members of the planter class. 61

  Year after year, Travis continued to profit from slavery in many ways. As an ambitious young lawyer, he pocketed a tidy fee when he oversaw the purchase of twenty-three slaves for a client. He even earned revenue from clients as far away as New Orleans and San Antonio for lucrative slave transactions. In addition, Travis owned both male and female slaves himself, whom he hired out to ensure himself a steady income. One of his last large purchases was for a slave couple. Like so many Anglo-Celts in Texas by the early 1830s, much of Travis’ total assets was based upon sanctioned slavery, while other enterprising Americans in Texas profited immensely from the illegal slave trade. 62

  Jim Bowie possessed a lengthy record as one of the largest slave smugglers and also one of the greatest land speculators in Texas history, activities that went hand-in-hand. Just as in the Travis clan, slaveowning was a Bowie family tradition. His family owned slaves in the 1790s, and throughout its migrations from Tennessee and then across the Mississippi to Louisiana. Bowie’s farsighted father had even jumpstarted the independent adulthood of both of his sons in Louisiana by giving them each ten slaves.

  By 1829, Bowie owned plantations in both Louisiana and Mississippi, both worked by gangs of slaves. James and his brother sold property in LaFourche Parish in February 1831, which was paid for partly by their acquisition of sixty-five slaves from the buyer. But he reaped his greatest financial boon when he smuggled into the United States and then sold large numbers of slaves, or “black ivory,” reaping a lavish return. The unfortunate Africans were transported in Jean Laffite’s ships from leading slave-trading ports like Havana. Because the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the United States since 1808, transporting slaves illegally from Texas into chattel-hungry Louisiana made Bowie a lavish fortune.

  The fantastic amount of money reaped from selling slaves allowed Bowie to purchase even more land. He thrived as a land speculator on both sides of the Mississippi. After selling thirty-four slaves to raise money in early 1830 to permanently settle in Texas, Bowie developed an ambitious speculative plan to secure three-quarters of a million acres in Mexican lands. Like Travis, Bowie brought slaves into Texas from the beginning; when Bowie first applied for a league of land under Mexican law, he possessed 109 slaves, and their labor remained a large part of his long-term plans for acquiring a fortune in Mexico. He established, for instance, one of the early cotton mills at Saltillo in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, after securing the required approval from the Mexican government. 63

  Sam Hous
ton grew up in a Scotch-Irish family in Rockbridge County in western Virginia. But like so many other Scotch-Irish, the family migrated west over the mountains to east Tennessee. Here, at the little town of Maryville located in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains, life was made easier for young Houston and his male siblings by a number of hard-working slaves, who cut down trees and cleared the land for farming. 64

  Another especially enterprising slave-trader who reaped fantastic profits in Texas was James W. Fannin, Jr. Ultimately proving to be a better slave-dealer than a military commander, Fannin forsook a military career, squandering a fine West Point education and a promising future, to make money by smuggling. He illegally brought 153 slaves from the Spanish island of Cuba into Texas in 1833.

  In fact, Fannin originally migrated to Texas primarily “to perpetuate his trafficking in African slaves” after the direct importation of slaves from Africa became illegal in the United States. Fannin and other Texas slave traders reaped vast rewards from slave smuggling. Like Bowie, Fannin brought slaves illegally from Cuba to the United States, and later transported gangs of them from Texas for sale in nearby Louisiana. By mid-January 1836, he owned a good many slaves with a value of $17,000. But Fannin was only doing what came natural to a Southerner of sound business mind. He had grown up on a Georgia cotton plantation with plenty of slaves. In Texas, he himself raised crops of cotton, continuing the family tradition of living well as a member of the aristocratic planter class: a privileged existence that he would defend with his life. 65

  The primary leaders of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution were not alone in owning slaves or engaging in slave smuggling to reap astronomical profits. The majority of the average soldiers, the lowly privates of the Alamo, were either small slave-owners or had visions of one day acquiring them. Slavery was deeply ingrained in Southern Anglo-Celtic culture and society as well as in the legal system—an inheritance from England, which gained its legal legacy from ancient Rome, whose imperial legions had long occupied the island. In fact, slavery had been “America’s original sin,” stemming from the founding fathers’ failure to abolish the institution in the effort to create a union of confederated states.

  Typical of the average soldiers found at the Alamo, brothers William and Mial Scurlock departed Tennessee for the express purpose of acquiring as much Texas acreage as possible. They headed for the east Texas area just west of the Louisiana border around San Augustine, bringing one male and a female slave with her four-year-old son. Acquiring 640 acres, the Scurlock brothers and their slaves cleared the land and built a log cabin. Both brothers joined in the attack that resulted in San Antonio’s capture during the 1835 Campaign. While William rode south on the ill-fated Matamoros Expedition that departed San Antonio at the end of 1835, Mial stayed behind with the tiny garrison in San Antonio, where he met his maker at the Alamo. 66

  Even a strong religious faith failed to alter or diminish the passion for slave-owning across Texas. Protestants and Catholics owned slaves in Texas with equal relish, exploiting them against God’s word in the name of bestowing Christianity upon “heathens.” Jewish Alamo defender Abraham (Anthony) Wolfe, from the Galveston area just south of Anáhuac, was considered “the black sheep” of his family; he assisted Jean Laffite in smuggling slaves from Texas to Louisiana to sell to rich planters and aristocrats in and around New Orleans. An English Jew, he migrated from London to settle in Nacogdoches, Texas in 1835 after the death of his wife, Sarah. One of the few Jews to serve at the Alamo, Wolfe was destined to die with the garrison along with his two sons, Michael and Benjamin. 67

  Named in honor for the incomparable founding father from Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Smith won widespread “notoriety as a trader in African slaves.”He wrote to the Convention on November 8, 1835, proposing an amazing offer: “At the present time our Country is involved in war, & without means to carry it out—It may become necessary that individuals should contribute to the public fund—I therefore take pleasure in communicating to you that I have eleven leagues of land which I desire [now] to place at the disposition of my country.” 68

  In November 1835, Fannin, no longer a slave trader but a prosperous cotton planter near the port town of Velasco on the gulf coast, offered the Texas government a deal it could not refuse: authorization to sell his personal property, consisting mostly of the monetary value of 36 of his slaves, for the purchase of munitions to sustain the fledgling Texas war effort. 69 Fannin made this decision because he knew that when Santa Anna invaded Texas, he would liberate Africans in bondage. Like other Texas slave-owners, Fannin realized that slave “property . . . will not be worth owning, if we do not succeed” in winning the Texas Revolution. He was fated to be executed by Santa Anna’s troops with hundreds of his command at Goliad on Palm Sunday, 1836. 70

  Fannin’s motivation was shared by the men of the Alamo as well. Yet despite the extreme importance of slavery, the Texas Revolution and especially the Alamo are primarily viewed as part of western history, rather than part of mainstream southern history. Nevertheless, examining the all-important role of slavery is fundamental to understanding both the Texas revolutionaries and what occurred at the Alamo. Slavery was key to the successful development of Texas and the exploitation of its natural riches, just as it had been key to developing the eastern seaboard in states like Virginia and Maryland. If Santa Anna’s Army emerged victorious, slavery would be illegal in Texas, causing it to revert back to a land of impoverished shepherds and their flocks. 71

  However, slavery served as a central foundation of Anglo-Celtic settlement. Austin first proposed that Spanish officials grant slave owners an additional 50 acres per slave, and later this was increased to 80 acres for each slave. This bonus for bringing slaves to Texas not only encouraged large planters but also yeoman farmers: by 1825, one quarter, or more than 440, of the Austin Colony consisted of slaves. Indeed, almost one in four of Austin’s colonists owned slaves, making them better off than their middle class peers in the United States. Like his fellow transplanted countrymen, Austin realized that the abolishment of slavery in Texas would ensure that “we [would be] ruined forever.” 72

  In regard to chattel labor, the world of the Anglo-Celts in Texas and that of the Mexicans, a mixed-race people, could not have been more diametrically opposed. Austin traveled to Mexico City in a desperate 1823 effort to convince Mexico’s enlightened leaders, who wanted slavery abolished in Texas and all slaves to be freed in ten years, to modify their position. Representing prevalent Anglo-Celtic sentiments, Austin advocated life-long slavery for existing Africans in bondage. His only compromise was to suggest that emancipation be allowed for slave children upon reaching adulthood. As during the antebellum period in the United States, compromises over the issue of slavery in Texas only delayed the inevitable conflict to come concerning the highly combustible matters of race and economics. 73

  When the Mexican government abolished slavery in Mexico in 1829, the freeing of Mexico’s slaves that September 15 caused great consternation among the American colonists, who realized that “immediate, total abolition would destroy at one blow the population, property, and agriculture of an important part of the state.” 74 Perhaps no one in Texas was more upset by such anti-slavery developments than Jared E. Groce, aged thirty-nine, from Alabama. A member of one of the original 300 Austin Colony families, he was “one of the first pioneers of Texas, having emigrated here in [January] 1822.” 75

  Groce reaped considerable financial success from his sprawling cotton plantation, Bernardo, thanks to the hundred slaves that he transported from the Deep South in early 1822. Carving out his own cotton kingdom in the wilderness, he became the lord of “Groce’s Retreat,” adding to his original 44,000 acres to become the largest cotton grower in Texas. By 1825, Groce had built his own cotton gin, the first in Texas, for the New Orleans market. Four years later, Texas could boast of seven operating cotton gins in the Austin Colony, with a cotton crop estimated at 1,000 bales.

  Nothing proved
more profitable in all Texas than the combination of slavery and cotton culture. A single crop of cotton from a small farmer could reap a fabulous profit of $10,000. When General Manuel de Mier y Teran visited the Groce plantation, he was amazed to discover that the planter already had 30,000 pounds of cotton ready for shipment to New Orleans. Reflecting class differences in the Texas Revolution, no member of the Groce family served in the army’s ranks; however, Groce, who was raised in Virginia, provided supplies to the Texas Army in early April 1836, less than a month after the Alamo’s fall.

  In 1833, Texas’ rich, dark soil, especially along the creek and river bottoms, produced 4,000 bales of cotton, each weighing around 2,000 pounds. The following year, 10,000 cotton bales were produced. Aside from smuggling slaves, raising cotton in Texas was the quickest and easiest way to get rich. A single young male slave could pick more than 150 pounds of cotton from sunup to sundown. Not coincidently, the colonists at Gonzales who sparked the beginning of the Texas Revolution in 1835 did so in early October, after the cotton had already been picked and baled at summer’s end. Cotton in Texas was white gold, going hand-in-hand with the amassing of black gold, or slaves 76

  Shock waves echoed across the United States with Mexico’s September 1829 decision to abolish slavery. The almost unbelievable prosperity of cotton culture across Texas was threatened overnight. Alarmed journalists across the South decried the act, raising a “howl of protest,” as even the South itself seemed threatened by Mexico’s example. And across Texas, talk of separation from Mexico became deadly serious: revolutionary seeds had been planted. Then, the Mexican Congress, based on the 1829 recommendations of General Teran, decided on April 6, 1830, that slaves were no longer allowed to be brought into Texas by United States citizens—a possible first step, it was feared, toward general emancipation of Texas slaves. 77