History Lesson 
The Second Battle of Goliad
The first one, during the Texas Revolution, ended in a massacre of Texas troops. Or should it properly be called an execution? How an unlikely war of words has opened cultural and racial rifts in a historic Texas town.
Susan says: The Mexican Army throughout its’ history has long been known to have been without Honor on many occasions..this was one of them, albeit a tyrant of a General who starved his own men..this incident is "Honorably" known as murder. I commend the study and honoring the long and great history of Goliad, Texas, but please do not dwell on one incident, and do not pretend or attempt to rewrite the very real words of our history...has nothing to do with race, but in fact deals with the feelings of both armies at the time, would you deny this to those who endured? The fact is we are all individually imbued with our own rich history no matter if it is American, Irish, Mexican, Texan, or Italian... that cannot be changed..please try not to put words in the mouths of people who long ago fought so we have the opportunity to look back on Texas History and please to remember also, there were a great number of Mexican Texans who fought and died in the Massacre. (July 3rd, 2011 at 7:44pm)
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But there would be no mercy. The captives were marched to the same stone building where Warzecha works today, and for a week they were held in the presidio’s chapel with hardly enough room to lie down. They had been told that they soon would be freed as long as they returned to the United States. That is what Urrea and his officers believed too. But from San Antonio, Santa Anna reminded his officers of the Tornel Decree, which had been issued in December 1835 by the Mexican minister of war. It stated that “foreigners landing on the coast of the Republic, or invading its territory by land, armed with the intention of attacking our country, will be deemed pirates and dealt with as such.”
On March 23 Santa Anna issued a command to execute the prisoners. Urrea, who was in Victoria, was devastated by the edict and sent a letter to the officer he had left in charge of the presidio urging leniency, but the subaltern carried out Santa Anna’s order. Fannin’s men were filed out of the presidio in three groups and led in different directions, and for a brief moment, March 27 was a happy day. Some of them even whistled as they went, thinking they were going home. But less than a mile from the fort, the Mexican guard marching on one side of the Texian columns countermarched toward the guard on the other, forming a single line. They lifted their muskets. And they fired. Back at the presidio, Fannin, who was injured in one leg, was seated and shot in the head; the forty or so Texians who had been wounded at Coleto Creek were taken out to the fort’s open square and killed. Out in the field, those who weren’t killed by the first volley ran for their lives as Mexican soldiers chased after them. Most were finished off with lances, bayonets, and butcher knives, but 28 escaped, and a few later would write accounts about the terrifying incident.
The event enraged the remaining Texian troops and became, with the Alamo, the most obvious justification for revenge when they brutally killed hundreds of Mexican soldiers at the Battle of San Jacinto a month later, even after Sam Houston had ordered them to stop. In their eyes one of the biggest insults was that the bodies of Fannin and his men had not been buried but rather piled in high layers of corpses and wood and burned a short distance from the fort. Says Stephen Hardin, a Victoria College professor and Texas historian who wroteTexian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836: “Unfortunately, the wood was green, the fires went out, and what you have then is a pile of half-roasted Texian corpses.” Those were left to the buzzards, the wolves, the coyotes.
Every March for several years now, Hardin has slipped into a thick wool overcoat, vest, and knee boots, as the Texian civilian soldiers were dressed, and joined members of the Crossroads of Texas Living History Association at the presidio to reenact the killing of Fannin and his men. It is an event that last year drew some four thousand spectators from throughout the state and beyond and filled the town’s two motels and a nearby campground. On the Saturday closest to the anniversary of the deaths, the air around the fort fills with the smoke of black powder as Texian and Mexican soldiers square off at the Battle of Coleto, as it is officially known. That evening, spectators file solemnly through the presidio with a flickering candle in hand to watch as the Mexican officer in charge receives Santa Anna’s orders to kill his captives. They also encounter wounded soldiers strewn about the chapel, their clothes red with blood, pleading for water. Then on Sunday, they follow the men on the “death march” to private property behind the fort, where, leaning on a fence, they watch the Mexican soldiers finish off the Texians. The two-day event ends with a memorial service in the presidio’s chapel and a solemn procession to the Fannin monument a short distance from the fort.
“We can talk about this,” Hardin says regarding the lexical debate, “but the fact of the matter is, if you say, ‘Come to a living history event commemorating the Goliad Execution,’ or ‘the Goliad Misunderstanding,’ or ‘the Goliad Unpleasantness’—whatever term you decide on—people are not going to know what you’re talking about. That event, in history, in the public mind, is known as the Goliad Massacre. I can understand people being upset about that, but that’s a reality. That’s what people have been taught in school to call it.” Besides, Hardin believes firmly that “execution” does not correctly describe a situation in which the soldiers were denied all of the formalities that typically accompany a legal death. “One of the requirements of an execution is that a fellow has to know he’s about to be executed,” he says. “I think that’s a biggie. And without being glib, they just took these guys out and started shooting.”
Yet, critics on the other side can make a good legal case. Considering Mexico’s Tornel Decree, were the Texian soldiers “pirates” instead of prisoners of war? Since most of the men fighting for Texas were volunteers from the United States and the world, were they not foreigners invading Mexico? As is typical of many debates over Texas history, this one is impossible to resolve. The New Handbook of Texas, a scholarly encyclopedia, states that Santa Anna was operating within Mexican law, a position echoed by Fehrenbach, who wrote that “this execution of pirates was not a crime under international law.”
“To me a massacre, by definition, is an indiscriminate killing,” says Emilio “Sonny” Vargas III, who is the president of the local Zaragoza Society and teaches Texas and world history to Goliad middle-schoolers. “To kill indiscriminately is to go out and kill without any reason. A massacre is what Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma. What took place here in Goliad was an execution. It was a time of war. The men raised arms against their nation, and the penalty for that was death.” In January, after the Zermeños called upon the Zaragoza Society for support, the civic organization mailed a letter to the bishop of the Victoria Diocese asking him to bring an end to the use of the term “massacre.” Because the diocese had purchased the fort and its chapel in 1855, the authority over how the presidio conducts its business rests in religious hands. In addition to objecting to a term that is so divisive, the society asked the bishop to do something about the graphic reenactment that occurs each year, arguing that it is “extremely violent” and “counterproductive.”
Those statements offered a glimpse into the real stakes behind the Goliad debate, hinting that their true preoccupation is not with a single word but with that word’s heavy legacy—and with the disproportionate weight of that legacy for some people. Much as memories of the Goliad and Alamo deaths impelled Anglo Texans to persecute Tejanos for years after the war had ended, Estella Zermeño argues that the characterization of the battle in public history and its reenactment continue to foster animosity against Mexico and anyone of Mexican descent. “I feel like they come here and they go back with renewed hatred against us,” she says. Her husband, grabbing his body in simulation, interrupts: “It’s like a thorn we haven’t been able to take out of our side.”
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