|
|
|
Review
| Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution, by Richard Bruce Winders. Abilene, Texas: State House Press, 2004. 167 pages. $24.95, cloth.
|
| The story of the thirteen-day siege and subsequent Mexican assault on the Alamo has been recounted in numerous books, documentaries, and movies since William B. Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and their comrades died at the old Spanish mission on 6 March 1836, fighting to gain Texas independence from Mexico. Scholarship on the Alamo, however, has suffered due to a dearth of reliable source material and a failure of lay and professional historians to place the event within the wider framework of the nineteenth-century world in which it occurred. Winders, who is both a professional historian and curator of the Alamo, seeks to remedy this problem through a thorough examination of the international trends and local traditions that influenced the character of the Texas Revolution. |
1
|
|
Winders argues that it was French Emperor Napoléon I who inadvertently laid the groundwork for revolutionary fervor in Mexico. French occupation of Spain brought diminished control of the Spanish colonies, allowing the colonials to experience an autonomy they had never known before. Accordingly in 1810, Mexicans rose in a local revolt against Spanish officials, initiating a guerrilla war that would grow in size and span over a decade. Once independent of the Spaniards in 1821, Mexico endured revolts and counter-revolts that established the precedent of creating new governments at gunpoint, a practice that would plague the nation well into the twentieth century. Eventually, Mexican republicans such as Lorenzo de Zavala who desired an end to the centralist governmental system that had been set up under the Spaniards, promulgated the Federal Constitution of 1824, making Mexico a federal republic similar to that of the United States. This government lasted until 1832 when General Antonio López de Santa Anna took power and reinstated centralism. This political development, says Winders, brought civil war because the new government attempted to impose centralization upon the various states. Federalists in Zacatecas, for example, rose in a revolt that was crushed quickly by Santa Anna's forces. Rebellion also brewed in the combined state of Coahuila y Tejas (Coahuila and Texas), where settlers from the United States, imbued with ideals of the American Revolution, likened Santa Anna's regime to that of hated English King George III. To them the only option was revolution, leading to an independent Texas republic. |
2
|
|
The revolutionaries's war effort, however, was hampered by a number of factors, including a frequent lack of unity of command. In the fall of 1835, the provisional government, known as the Consultation, a body constituted to determine what course Texas wound take in the civil war, elected Major General Sam Houston to raise and command the armies of Texas, but that did not mean that he commanded all military forces. Even though the Army of the People, a militia unit with combat experience under the command of Stephen F. Austin, could have provided a ready nucleus around which Houston's forces could coalesce, the resolutely democratic delegates refused to allow it, arguing that the Army existed prior to the Consultation, thus it had no right to claim jurisdiction over it. Consequently, Houston had to build an army from scratch. Texas's ability to defend itself from the advancing Centralist armies was encumbered also by the erroneous notion, held by many, that the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans (1815) proved that any volunteer with a long rifle would perform in combat just as well as any militiaman or regular and could defeat any enemy, even seasoned Mexican soldiers. Because republicanism permeated the thinking of nineteenth-century Americans, volunteers saw service in a regular army as inherently degrading and antirepublican and refused to place themselves under Houston's command. Such thinking had disastrous consequences. Even with Santa Anna's armies mobilized and marching against them, Texas civil and military leaders could not agree on objectives. Some called for a defensive war while others advocated an offensive against Matamoros in order to take the conflict to the Centralists. The abortive Matamoros Expedition took horses and a few hundred troops from the Alamo garrison at a time when it was evident that Santa Anna planned to send his forces against Béxar. In light of Winders's study, it is hardly strange that Travis's command was annihilated. |
3
|
|
Sacrificed at the Alamo is certainly appropriate for use in undergraduate and graduate courses in military, Mexican, United States, or Texas history. His detailed analysis of command and control as well as strategic and tactical issues of the Texas Revolution would be useful in any military history or military science course at West Point or institutions offering ROTC. |
4
|
| | |
| Rogers State University |
Paul B. Hatley |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|