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LifestreamI have come to understand that the Alamo remains one of the most important chapters in American history. But is the story that we keep hearing and being exploited in Hollywood blockbusters really the whole truth and nothing but the truth? In an effort to continue the scrutiny of American history and expose some of the blatant misconceptions that is now considered national treasures, lets look briefly at the Alamo …
The issue arose when I saw this piece being circulated on the net.
A claim on the children’s cable TV outlet Nickelodeon that the 1836 Battle of the Alamo was fought so ‘white farmers could keep their slaves’ has sparked controversy and outrage in this city, where the Texans who died in the historic battle are held up as examples for people to emulate, 1200 WOAI news reported Tuesday.The fifty second long piece on Nickelodeon, which is part of an ongoing series of features about the U.S. called ‘My Back Yard,” shows a San Antonio teenager telling the largely pre-teen audience that ‘in the early 1800’s, most of the people living in San Antonio were white farmers who brought their slaves with them.’ It goes on to claim that conflict over slavery between slaveholding settlers and a Mexican government which had abolished slavery ‘led up’ to the Battle of the Alamo.
Dr. R. Bruce Winders, one of the country’s leading experts on pre Civil War southwestern history, told Nickelodeon producers that the slavery claim was ’simplistic and inaccurate’ …
Source: WOAI news
Winders, also the curator for The Alamo incidentally, then adds that the issue of slavery is a “stretch at best, and mischaracterization as worst” and claims that “Texas had actually been granted an exemption to the slavery ban by the Mexican government, as long as they didn’t call them slaves.”
Needless to say, many are “outraged” to see their childhood heroes “slandered” by “liberal” media networks. And that is perhaps the news value here. The story of the real Alamo has been there for over 169 years for anyone to discover. But nevertheless, for those who still harbour any sort of illusions about the official story … there are those that would challenge with Winder’s account of events …
Slavery is something that we in the 21st Century have little sympathy for. However, ask a 19th Century slaveholder to give up his slaves, which allowed profitability in labour intensive enterprises like cotton farming, and for whom the slaveowner had paid up to $1000 per slave, and you might find yourself looking into the barrel of a gun. This is what happened in Texas, but the story has been sanitised to form the basis of a heroic legend that has become accepted as history.The story started in the 1820’s when Mexico encouraged settlement of Texas by ambitious American planters in order to add a share of potentially huge cotton profits to Mexican tax revenues and, likely, to aid in control of indigenous people. The settlers were Southerners, familiar with cotton agriculture and the administration of the numbers of slaves necessary to accomplish cotton’s brutal labour demands.
To the great dismay of the Texans, however, in December of 1835 President Santa Ana extended the slavery ban to Texas to appease Mexican abolitionists. The Texans immediately rebelled and declared that they were seceded from Mexico, and declared the Republic of Texas. One of their first actions was to ban free blacks from the Republic. Not content with the possibility of withdrawing from Texas, the Texans enlisted the help of citizens of the United States in order to preserve slavery and the huge tracts of cotton growing land. This resulted in the famous siege and battle at the Alamo, a Catholic mission taken over by the Texans.
In 1835, there were about 20,000 Texans and 4000 slaves in Texas.
One month after the Alamo, in March of 1836, Texas adopted a constitution which included a provision declaring slavery was legal in Texas. In April, Texans rallied under Sam Houston and “Remember the Alamo”. They defeated the Mexicans, declared the Republic of Texas, ratified the Texas Constitution and requested U.S. statehood as a slave state. The Mexican American War was fought about 10 years after the Alamo, and added a buffer territory between the slave states and slave-free Mexico, where many Africans had escaped to freedom.
Source: Really Remember The Alamo
The bottom line is that, no it’s not just about slavery, it’s also about taxes and stealing someone else’s land. None of which makes for much heroism. Does it matter today? It might. Especially if large parts of the US considers this a triumph of some sort.
See also:
The African American Registry: The Alamo, why did it happen?
R J. Romero, U of Illinois: The Alamo, Slavery and the Politics of Memory
HNN: Remember the Alamo: The Persistence of Myth (movie review)
People’s Weekly World: Forget the Alamo. White Man Movie Fiction. (movie review)
Part One: I ran across your blog about the Nick News article that discusses linking the Battle of the Alamo with slavery. I had been contacted by Nick to review the comments of the girl to be featured on their segment, “My Backyard.” I told them that the girl was articulate but that here comments were simplistic and inaccurate. They thanked me for my input and said that they just wanted to present the opinion of a Hispanic girl about the Alamo. I e-mailed back that opinion or point of view can be wrong if it is based on faulty information. I asked them what they thought was more important for society, opinion or knowledge. They thanked me again and ran the piece just as it was. I wasn’t surprised.
The issue of slavery is indeed linked to the Texas Revolution. Most historians, however, agree that it was not the main issue as contended by Nick News.
The Texas Revolution is a complicated event. If I can sum it up in one statement, this is what I’d say: “The Texas Revolution was an event that occurred within the context of an ongoing Mexican Civil War.” Having said that, it still needs explaining. Here are the man points.
 Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1821;
 Mexico’s first attempt at self rule was an empire under an army officer who was declared himself emperor—the experiment did not last long;
 Mexico then adopted a republican form of government, just like many of the other newly emerging nations at that time;
 The Federal Constitution of 1824 set forth how the new republic would operate;
 Not all Mexicans favored the republic and worked against its success;
 Opponents of the republicans were called Centralist because they favored the centralized governmental system they were used to under the Spanish;
 Centralism was most popular in the central core of Mexico, around Mexico City;
 Federalism was more popular in the frontier states of the Mexican republic;
 Early on in the 1820s, the military began interring in national elections, initiating a series of revolts and counter revolts as Federalist and Centralist struggled for control;
 Antonio López de Santa became president of Mexico in 1833, turned his administration over to Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías, and left for his estate;
 Gómez Farías, a radical Federalist, began attacking the three most powerful groups in Mexican (the army, the Church, and landowners) as a way to restructure Mexican society;
 The reaction to his attempted reform was the formulation of the Plan de Casa Mata, in which representatives of these factions asked Santa Anna to lead a revolt against his own vice president;
 Santa Ann, who up until then had been an avowed Federalist, switched sides and became a Centralist
 He marched to Mexico City, ousted Gómez Faría, and began to dismantle the federalist system;
 The new Centralist Congress declared that the Federal Constitution of 1824 was no longer in effect;
 The revocation of the constitution essential stripped the Mexican states of statehood and converted them to provinces within the new Central Republic;
 States on Mexico’s frontier began to revolt—one of those states was Texas.
[See Part Two]
Dr. Bruce Winders
Historian & Curator
The Alamo
Part Two: Now having going through that let me get a little more specific on Texas.
 Texas had always been a problem for the Spanish;
 It was difficult to get people to more there because it was a frontier;
 Missionaries and soldiers could be sent but civilians had to be enticed;
 In 1820, Moses Austin approached Spanish officials in Texas with a plan to bring colonists to Texas;
 The plan was adopted, and although Spain soon lost Texas, the new Mexican government decided to continue on with the plan to bring American and European colonists to Texas;
 When the Federal Constitution of 1824 was being written, Texas was deemed to have too small of a population to have separate statehood within the Mexican federal republic;
 Texas was attached to Coahuila to form a new political entity which had not existed under the Spanish—the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas;
 Native born Texans were upset at essentially being demoted, as the new capital of the state was to be located in Saltillo;
 The American colonists, San Antonio de Béxar, and Monclova formed a political coalition whereby they voted to transfer the capital to Monclova, which was closer to Texas;
 The two factions (Texas/Monclova vs. Saltillo) had been feuding for several years by the time the Centralists under Santa Anna came to power;
 The citizens of Coahuila supported the change to Centralism while the citizens of Texas did not;
 The initial demand of the Texans was for the restoration of the Constitution of 1824 and separate statehood for Texas;
 The goal quickly transformed to a call for independence from Mexico.
Now back to the point about slavery being the cause of the Texas Revolution . . . .
Would the revolution have occurred even if the issue of slavery had not existed? The evidence seems to indicate that it would.
This and more is laid out in my two books, Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle for Texas and Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution.
Dr. Bruce Winders
Historian & Curator
The Alamo
Thank you for your input. I’d call that the definitive primer to the events of the Civil war and the Revolution. So far we are in agreement.
It is clear that the call for a return to the constitution and other disagreements would have caused some sort of conflict between the central government end the frontiersmen in Texas. To claim that slavery alone caused all that is not correct, I agree.
But perhaps that is all you have time to say in 50 seconds. TV just isn’t a very good medium, at least not if you’re expressing dissenting views, and can never explain it in the time allotted. So the somewhat inaccurate volley against the Revolution didn’t express the whole story, but it underlined something that is rarely discussed and overstated it just as much as it is usually downplayed. It caught my interest after all and I hadn’t even looked at the Alamo context before that. So far it is mission accomplished …
My sole focus here is the American involvement in the conflict, not native born Texans. The question is what motivated them to act. One could reason that Santa Anna in fact abolished slavery in a desperate effort to offset the ethnic imbalance because of the influx of American colonists.
One could also reason that Americans were the driving force behind the revolution, and the stand at Alamo in particular. Without their efforts, the revolution may not have happened, at least not they way it did. And what did motivate these American colonists? Well, slavery would have been a hot topic of the day.
To an outsider, and an outspoken critic of the US, I am troubled by the fact that Texas was later annexed by the US. That is my beef here. It seems so deviously calculated even though these events are most likely unfortunate coincidences and inevitable in many ways. But it does seem a bit like a Trojan horse strategy.
This is more troubling than the actual slavery issue. The slavery issue just adds a much deserved stain to a national ethos and epos.
I’m not much in favour of the notion of bravery and mythology, men fighting for liberty or some high ideal. In reality, men fight to live, they fight for what they own and the fight because they are ordered to do so. From that point of view, the opinions expressed on Nick are not that far fetched. For the Americans in Texas, I’d think that slavery would have very much mattered and even if it did not spark the conflict, it probably strengthened their resolve to carry it through. It would after all have been seen as an attack on their way of life, their rights, and that usually provokes people, especially Americans, even to this day. Though I’d sooner debate the issue whether the men at the Alamo died as imperialists trying to (albeit unwittingly) expand the nation.
Also, I think that the right-wing outrage that I witnessed online after the broadcast is proof enough that something isn’t right. Had the Alamo not been such a national icon, fact mixed with nationalism and fiction, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But it seems to me that if people are gonna start waving flags (which I also detest thoroughly), they ought to know their history better. After all, most don’t have a clue about the revolution. Like me, they focus on the Americans who fought, and specifically focus on the Alamo. At least when they’re not busy demonizing the Mexicans. They don’t want to hear about slavery at all and they would probably explode if you suggested anything like imperialism.
You are correct that the Nick piece raised an issue that most people would not have otherwise considered. And you are correct again that a 50-second spot doesn’t allow for much development. However, an extreme interpretation is an extreme interpretation, whichever side pushed it.
It is very popular to explain people’s motives in history by asserting that they are always driven by economics. That is just half of the story. Yes, people sometimes do things strictly for economic gain. However, an equally powerful human motive is ideology. People do sometimes act out of personal conviction. Cynics would say that they are duped into do these things by moneyed interests—again the economic angle. But I believe that some people, but not all, do act out of conviction. Here is the thing about motivation, though. People can act out of self-interest and conviction at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive.
There was much at stake in the Texas Revolution. Yes, land was to be had and money was to be made by some. But there was a very palpable republican (not to be confused with the modern political party by the same name) ideology at work as well. To deny it or describe it as some fictional interpretation ignores what was happening in the world at that time.
Dr. Bruce Winders
The Alamo
That seems like a fair compromise. World event are rarely simple, even if individual people often are.
And I’d agree that ideology is a potent motivator. Especially for the average guy, be it 1836 or 2005. Even if he is in reality duped by the powers that be, which I’d certainly say. For most people fighting in a revolution there seems to be little to gain and much to lose. But they are nevertheless swept away by the heat of the moment. The drummed up threat of invading and rampaging hordes, the loss of one’s way of life and the dreams of a better world or whatever. I suppose it works better to separate the people’s history and the history of the elites so to speak. Then again, it depends on what you want to show.