History Lesson 
The Alamo Should Never Have Happened
Generations of Texas schoolchildren have been taught that the battle at the center of the Texas revolution was our finest hour. Maybe so—but it was also a military mistake of mythic proportions.
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As the burden of command fell on Travis, he grew into his authority in a way that must have surprised those who had known him as a young hothead with a checkered past. He had always been glib; now he became eloquent. He had been belligerent; now he was resolute. On February 24, the day after the joint appeal to Fannin, he penned his moving letter to "the People of Texas and all Americans in the world." To Sam Houston, Travis wrote another letter, hardly less eloquent, begging for help: "I have every reason to apprehend an attack from [Santa Anna's] whole force very soon. But I shall hold out to the last extremity, hoping to secure reinforcements in a day or two. Do hasten on aid to me as rapidly as possible, as from the superior number of the enemy, it will be impossible for us to keep them out much longer." Yet, relieved or not, the garrison would fight till the end. "If they overpower us, we fall a sacrifice at the shrine of our country, and we hope posterity and our country will do our memory justice. Give me help, oh my Country!"
The response to Travis' pleas was either disgraceful or realistic, depending on one's view of his situation. Fannin halfheartedly attempted a rescue, setting out from Goliad with three hundred men and four artillery pieces in ox-drawn wagons. But one of the wagons broke down, and then the crossing of the Guadalupe went badly, and Fannin and his officers decided that the rescue mission was imprudent and gave it up.
Sam Houston didn't do even that much. Precisely what Houston did do during the month of February is impossible to reconstruct, but it had no connection with the battle that was about to take place in the west. He journeyed in the opposite direction, toward Nacogdoches, to drum up support for the political convention that would meet in early March at Washington-on-the-Brazos and to arrange a treaty of friendship with the Cherokees. Perhaps Houston wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the debacle that was taking shape at Béxar. He had tried to prevent it, but no one would listen. He didn't wish to be saddled with the blame.
DURING THE FIRST FEW DAYS of the siege, the defenders might have fought their way out of the Alamo, had they so chosen. But their prospects on the plains beyond the fort, against Santa Anna's cavalry, were poor. And by the end of February they were clearly trapped; the only question was whether they would reconsider their refusal to surrender. According to what became the standard version of the Alamo story, Travis gave the men a choice between fighting and escaping. All who wanted to stay should step across a line he drew in the dirt; the others might try their luck outside the fort. Besides resting on the flimsiest of evidence, this story ignores the fact that escape in any significant numbers was almost impossible. The garrison's odds weren't good inside the fort, but—especially while hope remained of reinforcement—they weren't much worse than the odds outside.
Some minor relief did arrive before dawn on March 1, when a company of 32 horsemen from Gonzales evaded the Mexican sentries and slipped into the Alamo. The reinforcements were hardly numerous enough to shift the balance between besiegers and besieged, but they let Travis know that his continuing pleas for help weren't going unheard, and they raised hope that more might follow.
Yet the relief from Gonzales was apparently the last—doubt remains on this point, as on many touching the final days of the siege—and when the battle commenced before dawn on March 6, perhaps two hundred defenders confronted approximately two thousand attackers. Despite Green Jameson's boast of beating the Mexicans at odds of ten to one, the Texans stood no chance. During the initial phase of the fighting, their cannon and rifles inflicted fearful damage on the advancing troops, but the walls of the Alamo were too low and weak to prevent the most intrepid Mexicans from mounting the ramparts and opening the gates for their fellows, who poured in and crushed the defenders by mass of numbers. Less than ninety minutes after the battle began, it was over.
FOR DECADES STUDENTS OF ALAMO history have refought the battle, debating how many people died there and where they fell. Much less attention has been paid to the larger issue of whether it should have been fought in the first place. Questioning patriotic sacrifice is bad form, especially with the powerful words of the dead commander haunting the collective conscience.
But sacrifice is not synonymous with good judgment, and in truth the defense of the Alamo was woefully misguided. Houston was correct that San Antonio had little significance for the defense of the Texas settlements. Even if Travis and the others had held the Alamo, Santa Anna might easily have left a token force to pin them there and sent the main body of his army after Houston and the rest of the rebels. Nor did the delay caused by Santa Anna's insistence on taking the Alamo slow his advance appreciably. Santa Anna spent two weeks at Béxar, two weeks in which Houston made scant progress in organizing or training the Texas army. The rebels were no readier for battle in early March than they had been in late February, as Houston's subsequent forced retreat east demonstrated, and they would have been far readier had their ranks included the men killed at the Alamo. Santa Anna's losses at Béxar were considerably greater than those of the Texans, but his army was so much larger that he could afford to be wasteful.
The primary result of the Alamo's fall was precisely what Santa Anna intended: the terrorizing of the Anglo settlements in Texas. As word raced east of the disaster at Béxar, the settlers fled toward Louisiana in what later was called, with relieved levity, the Runaway Scrape. Santa Anna had long since decided that the American colonization of Texas was a mistake, which he intended to rectify by removing the Americans. The destruction of the Alamo, and the refugee flight it precipitated, got the process well under way.
The only thing that saved the revolution (as it really became after the declaration of Texas independence on March 2, 1836) was Santa Anna's impatience. Hoping to catch the Texas government, which had joined the flight east, he committed a cardinal sin of invading commanders: He divided his army. And then he allowed Houston, who until this point had shown every indication of retreating clear to the Redlands of East Texas, to corner him where Buffalo Bayou joins the San Jacinto River.
Houston's victory at San Jacinto had nothing to do with the defeat at the Alamo (or the subsequent massacre at Goliad), except that it (and Goliad) furnished a rousing battle cry and an excuse for a slaughter that matched in ferocity and scale anything the Mexicans had committed. And in fact, the victory at San Jacinto, though an enormous morale booster, neither ended the war nor guaranteed Texas' independence. The captured Santa Anna was overthrown in absentia, and the agreements he negotiated with the Texans were immediately disavowed by the Mexican government. Mexico continued to claim Texas for another decade and in 1842 succeeded twice in reoccupying San Antonio. What finally settled the Texas question was the intervention of the United States, which annexed Texas in 1845 and defeated Mexico in the war of 1846-1848.
By that time the Alamo had entered the mythology of Texas. A prime characteristic of myth is that every sacrifice serves a purpose; the larger the sacrifice, the more profound the purpose. During the Texas Revolution itself, the legitimacy of the rebellion was disparaged by opponents of slavery, who held that the chief purpose of the breakaway was to ensure the future of slavery in Texas (Mexico had outlawed the institution), and by others who judged it a landgrab by armed speculators. The sacrifice of the Alamo afforded an emphatic riposte to the criticism. Would the heroes who died there have done so for the base motives ascribed to them by their critics? Hardly. They must have fought and died to secure democracy and individual rights.
And so they did—at least some of them, and at least the rights of some people. But whether the Alamo was the proper place to do it is another question entirely. It casts no aspersion on the defenders' courage to assert that they got the answer to this question wrong. If anything, there is a certain sublime nobility in an act that reflects bravery undiluted by good sense. And it is entirely in keeping with everything about the Texas Revolution, and with much that is characteristically Texan, that this military mistake was not the work of ignorant or fatuous commanders, as has typically been the case in history. No Raglan ordered the Alamo garrison to stand against Santa Anna; the defenders' decision to do so was theirs alone. Texans have long prided themselves on their individuality, including their right to be wrong in their own way. For them, the Alamo is the perfect shrine.
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