The Alamo and the Texas Revolution

After Mexico won independence from Spain, its government invited settlers into Texas. Under the Colonization Act of 1825 immigrants poured in, most from the southern United States and many bringing enslaved people. Mexico’s federal constitution of 1824 appealed to them, but Mexican officials grew alarmed: Anglo settlers far outnumbered Mexicans east of San Antonio and seemed only nominally loyal. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, and the Law of April 6, 1830, tried to stop American immigration and the further introduction of slaves; the colonists largely ignored both. In 1834 Santa Anna took power, repudiated the federal Constitution of 1824, and ruled as a dictator. Fighting broke out at Gonzales in October 1835. In December Texan volunteers, American volunteers, and their Tejano allies captured San Antonio.

Disputes over immigration, customs duties, land titles, military authority, and slavery divided the colonists from the Mexican government; The American Yawp calls the debate over slavery “one of the prime forces behind the Texas Revolution.” The rebels at first presented themselves as defenders of the Constitution of 1824 against Santa Anna’s centralism, then declared independence. The Alamo itself was held because, as its commander James Neill argued, it guarded one of the two main roads into Texas from the Mexican interior; Governor Henry Smith refused Sam Houston’s request for permission to abandon and blow it up.

Santa Anna’s army reached San Antonio on February 23, 1836, sooner than the defenders expected. Travis answered a demand for surrender with a cannonball. When Bowie fell gravely ill, Travis took full command and wrote his famous appeal “to the people of Texas & all Americans in the world,” vowing “Victory or Death” but above all pleading for help. Only thirty-two men from Gonzales broke through to join them. “If my countrymen do not rally to my relief,” Travis wrote, “I am determined to perish in the defense of this place, and my bones shall reproach my country for her neglect.”

Around 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, March 6, about 1,800 Mexican troops attacked from four directions. Cannon fire tore through their ranks, but they reformed and broke over the walls. Travis was among the first to die; defenders fell back to the Long Barracks, where the bloodiest hand-to-hand fighting took place, and Bowie was killed in his sickbed. The chapel fell last. As many as seven defenders survived the fighting, but Santa Anna ordered them executed; whether Crockett was among them is still debated. Women, children, and enslaved people were spared, among them Susanna Dickinson and her infant daughter, and Travis’s slave, Joe.

Dickinson carried the news to Sam Houston at Gonzales, setting off a panicked flight of settlers known as the Runaway Scrape. Meanwhile, on March 2 a convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos — including the Tejanos José Antonio Navarro, Lorenzo de Zavala, and José Francisco Ruiz — had declared Texas independent; its constitution guaranteed the protection of slavery. On March 27 about 350 Texan prisoners who had surrendered at Goliad were executed on Santa Anna’s orders. Then, on April 21, Houston’s army of about 900 surprised Santa Anna’s force at San Jacinto. The battle lasted eighteen minutes, though the killing went on for hours; about 630 Mexican soldiers died and 730 were captured, against 9 Texans killed. Santa Anna was captured the next day and ordered his army out of Texas.

Mexico never recognized the Republic of Texas, but the United States did, and in 1845 Texas joined the Union as the twenty-eighth state — an annexation Mexico denounced as an act of aggression. The Alamo’s defenders, the Handbook of Texas stresses, were not suicidal — they held their post on orders, begging for reinforcements a divided government never sent — and the battle’s real military value was in giving the independence convention time to meet. Novels, plays, and films have wrapped it in legend, but even stripped of exaggeration it remains, in the Handbook’s words, “an inspiring moment in Texas history,” and “Remember the Alamo!” has echoed through American history ever since.