- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
This Week in History: The events that led to the Battle of the Alamo
In the stillness of the night, the lonely outcropping of adobe walls and wood palisades huddled together, the white plaster of what remained of the old mission buildings reflecting the light of the moon.
The scene would almost look peaceful, if it weren’t for the lumps of crumpled bodies lying under the sage and coyote brush outside the walls.
For nearly two weeks, hundreds of men had expended their last reserve of strength, exhaled their final breath and now lay where they had fallen, too close to the enemy fortifications to be retrieved by their comrades.
Now, arranged in four columns of attack, the over 2,000 soldados of General Santa Anna prepared themselves for another assault. For the final assault, it was hoped, against the Alamo.
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Ever since winning its own freedom from Spain in 1821, Mexico had grappled with the difficulty of managing its extensive northernmost territories.
During Spanish control, the lands that would become California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas had primarily served as an unoccupied bulwark against competing French, British and then American expansion.
By 1820, only the Apache and Comanche tribes populated the northeastern section of this land, because so few Mexicans wanted to risk life among the wild country.
In time, the new government of the Republic of Mexico faced a problem, a similar one America was then grappling with: land only becomes a national asset when it is settled and therefore taxable.
Before then, land is just a liability and a drain on the coffers – a place to maintain at all costs lest another country snatch it from you, but one rampant with dangerous natives and impassible to all but an armed group of soldiers.
Previously, Spain had solved this problem by encouraging Anglo-Americans to settle in upper Louisiana (St. Louis, Missouri today) and become Spanish citizens.
When she won her independence, Mexico copied her former oppressor and opened vast stretches of its northern territories to those Americans who wished to settle and integrate into Mexican society.
The government facilitated settlement by offering contracts to specific men, who were then charged with bringing in American families for settlement in designated colonies.
These selected men were called empresarios. The most influential of these would be Moses Austin and his son Stephen Fuller Austin, after whom the city in today’s Texas is named.
For their part, Americans immigrated to Mexican Texas for several reasons, not the least being that America and Mexico didn’t have an extradition treaty for debtors.
A good number of these intrepid American settlers were actually Mississippi valley farmers who had defaulted on their loans and sought greener (and prison-free) pastures in a new land. Other immigrants settled in Texas as a gamble that America would soon buy eastern Texas from Mexico. By 1830, empresarios like the Austins had settled over 1,000 American families in designated colonies.
To encourage American immigration, Mexico exempted these new settlers from certain tariffs and allowed slaveholding settlers to keep their slaves, even though the Mexican government had banned slavery in 1829. These incentives proved wildly popular.
Too popular, actually.
By the early 1830s, so many Americans had taken advantage of the incentives that the Mexican government became concerned of being overwhelmed in foreigners.
A failed rebellion of American settlers in 1830, known as the Fredonian Rebellion, excited further fears among Mexican officials. Many American settlers actually rode alongside the Mexican army to assist in putting down this rebellion, something they wished to forget a few years later in the middle of their own fight for independence.
Over the next few years, the system began to break down as speculators won contracts for new settlements and began selling shares to businessmen in Boston and New York.
This was not only illegal, but contrary to the whole spirit of the law. The Republic’s fears gave birth to the April 6, 1830, law that prohibited the immigration of Americans unless they held a passport for one of two state-approved colonies, including the Austin colony.
The colonists that already lived in Mexican Texas, some 6,000 or more, looked askance at this attempt to stem the tide of – as far as they were concerned – good American families.
They were downright afraid of another matter: all of those tax exemption incentives they were given when they first arrived were approaching their end date.
The settlers held conventions to draft and send demands for reform to the central Mexican government in 1832 and 1833.
They primarily wanted two things: an extension on the tariff exemptions granted to them in the 1820s, and the right to create their own state.
Having been given land, the American settlers now wanted a home and the autonomy to make it. Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
As the Texans worked to negotiate with the government, the newly elected president began a power grab. His name was Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.
As a rule, dictators don’t relinquish power, least of all to newcomers. The Texans’ entreaties fell on deaf ears, and the situation deteriorated. It turned into open war in October of 1835.
So it was that in the new year of 1836, the Texans armed themselves for war.
Their defense rested on a triangle of cities. On the west was San Antonio, on the south was San Patricio, and on the northeast was La Bahía (Goliad).
Militarily speaking, San Antonio shouldn’t have been Santa Anna’s target, since the door to eastern Texas, home to most of the American settlements, was through Goliad.
But it was to San Antonio, and its 180 Texan defenders, that Santa Anna marched his army of some 2,000.
On Feb. 23, his advanced companies reached the front gate of the town’s fort, the old Mission of San Antonio de Valero, known locally as the Alamo.
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Almost two weeks would drag on, bogging down Santa Anna’s army and wasting resources and men.
The final assault took several hours. In reality, though, all but an hour and a half of that was spent inching quietly toward the unsuspecting defenders. The actual fighting lasted less than two hours.
At sunbreak on March 6, all the Texan defenders lay dead, there to keep company the 600 soldados who also lost their lives. All of this in a needless assault on an inconsequential fort.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.