Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution

Abstract

Fans of Bruce Winders now have another book to place on their shelves, one that certainly matches, in quality and clarity, other works by the noted historian and curator of the Alamo. Unlike most studies of the famous siege and capture of the Alamo in 1836, Winders spends little time or effort in detailing who exactly was in the fort, where they were when the final assault took place, what their last words must have been, and whether they fell fighting or fleeing. Not that these are not interesting and worthy issues to many, but this author attempts a macro history to explain what brought a small Mexican army and a still smaller Texas one fatefully to San Antonio in February and March of 1836. In doing so, Winders enriches our understanding of the Alamo in dozens of ways.The author first looks at the meaning of republicanism as an ideology, in order to explain how the Anglo-Texans thought war was to be fought. If ever Jacksonian democracy ran amok, it was among these Anglo-Texans attempting to organize a government, pick civilian and military leaders, craft the war’s objectives, and raise an army of military equals. It did not work, which explains much about the strange indecisiveness of those who defended the Alamo. At the same time, the conduct of the Mexican army under Santa Anna sprang from a different historical environment—one that allowed it to move much faster and more decisively than its northern opponents.No nineteenth-century war among those of European descent was complete with-out homage to Napoleon’s shade. Winders finds the Corsican’s influence everywhere in the Texas revolt, with deference to the unique Gulf Coast environment of flat, hot land sloping toward the ocean. Line and column, volley and bayonet, infantry versus cavalry, and traditional tactics for assaulting a fortified stronghold were common subjects in the training of all military officers, and Texas events followed standard military practices hammered out and honed in the long European wars of the first decades of the century.Winders’s macro approach considers many other topics; among the most interesting is that of the Mexican civil war between centralists and federalists. Regardless of what some Texans might have thought, they were very much a part of this. Sacrificed at the Alamo demonstrates that what happened in San Antonio was merely a smaller version of what had happened to defeated federalists in the north a year earlier, in the so-called Rape of Zacatecas. If Mexican military leadership was consistent about anything, it was in its consensus on proper treatment toward defeated rebels. Giving quarter to traitors never seemed to produce the right results.No historical work on the Alamo will escape criticism, and Winders’s book will certainly receive some. His treatment of Santa Anna, for example, still has elements of an older view of the Mexican leader as a bombastic, inept Latin American caudillo. While acknowledging grave and tragic flaws in his character, modern scholarship has moved toward a more charitable view of the Mexican general, one that finds consistency in his political actions, patriotism in his approach to national problems, and decisiveness in pressing a military campaign. For a good and provocative read about the most famous event in Texas War of the 1830s, scholars on both side of the Rio will find Winders’s book well worth the time.