Everything About the Battle of the Alamo Is Stupid

It’s a dusty late February day in 1836. Around 200 Texians are holed up inside the Alamo, an old Spanish mission near San Antonio de Béxar. Outside are 6,000 Mexican troops who demand the surrender of the makeshift fort’s garrison. Texian leader Sam Houston has ordered that the old mission be defended at all costs.

Col. William Travis, the leader of the group of rebels, draws a line in the sand with his sword. He offers the men a choice: cross the line and defend the Alamo to the death with him, or leave and surrender. All but one step across the line, and all the defenders would die fighting when the Mexican Army attacked on March 6, 1836.

It’s a stirring story of a group of daring freedom fighters giving their lives to resist an oppressive regime. Or at least, it would be if any of this were real, which it isn’t. It’s all a Texas myth. There’s no evidence that Travis drew a line in the sand, and if the myth were true, then everyone would have died there, with no survivors to tell anyone it happened.

That’s just the beginning. Here’s what’s real.

Sam Houston didn’t want the Alamo. Like, at all.

Houston didn’t order the Alamo to be held at all costs, or whatever the legend suggests. It’s actually the exact opposite. Not only did he not order the defenders to defend the Alamo to the death, he specifically wanted them not to. Houston believed the old mission was indefensible and far too much for Travis’ undermanned force of volunteers to defend.

Instead, he wanted the makeshift fort’s guns and men (but mostly the cannon) to meet his army at Gonzales. Moreover, he wanted the defenders at Bexar to abandon and destroy the Alamo so that the Mexicans couldn’t use it. He sent Jim Bowie there to relay his message. Which means…

Everyone at the Alamo simply disregarded Houston

When Bowie arrived at the Alamo, he and the local commander, Col. James C. Neill, decided the position was too important to surrender to the Mexican Army. The governor of Texas agreed that the city should be reinforced and sent William B. Travis with 30 more men to take command. So they all just ignored the Commander-in-Chief.

Imagine the men under George Washington’s command in Brooklyn Heights, given the famous order to silently withdraw across the East River in the dead of night, as the British prepared a deadly assault on the American lines, suddenly thought “nah, f*ck this pu**y, and decided to attack instead. The army would have been crushed, and the American Revolution would have gone along with it. That’s what happened at the Alamo.

The Alamo defenders did literally everything wrong.

An armed force can only be truly effective with a clear chain of command, and it’s a fundamental step the Alamo defenders tossed off right away. Travis was sent to take command, but the men of the Texian Army liked Jim Bowie more, so they elected him leader. Bowie promptly got drunk and declared martial law in Bexar.

In the end, Travis and Bowie decided to share command, which is never a good idea. It was by luck (though not for Bowie) that Bowie fell ill shortly after (with a illness some think was alcoholic pneumonia).

The truth is that Houston was right. There was no need to defend the Alamo, and certainly not to defend it while outmanned and outgunned in a fortification too big for your force (the original Alamo occupied three acres). Houston didn’t want to be bogged down in sieges he was going to lose, and the Alamo’s long perimeter, thin and low walls, and lack of supplies meant it was the worst place to hold out for a siege. When the Mexicans attacked, they could easily climb the wall, and they were safe from cannon fire.

Although Jim Bowie might have been dedicated to “dying in these ditches” to defend Bexar, Travis was counting the growing number of Mexicans outside the walls and didn’t like what he was seeing. Travis knew Santa Anna had thousands of troops, but seemed surprised when they all began showing up at the Alamo. They held their ground because they had no choice by the time the Mexicans arrived. They hadn’t even prepared for a siege.

Then, there’s the legend that defending the Alamo bought time for Sam Houston to build an army and meet Santa Anna. If Sam Houston wanted time to build and train an army, he shouldn’t have taken a vacation the previous January. His army was massing in Gonzales while he was at a constitutional convention in Washington-on-the-Brazos, and the Alamo defenders were busy getting massacred. Even if the battle did buy him time, it took the Mexicans only 90 minutes to win it after a 13-day siege.

They did not die fighting.

When the Mexicans finally assaulted the fort, Jim Bowie allegedly died with his knife in his hand, while Davy Crockett died “swinging Old Betsy,” his famous musket. Alamo lore says no defender tried to run away, and everyone inside the mission was slaughtered in an all-day bloodbath. None of that is true.

The Texian guards were bayoneted because they fell asleep on duty, allowing the Mexicans to advance without being discovered. Col. Travis did die fighting; in fact, he died almost immediately, shot in the head as the battle began. When the attackers overwhelmed the walls, the Texians neglected to spike their cannons, so the Mexicans just turned them around and blew the doors off the chapel.

Bowie might have had his knife in hand, but he was most likely bayoneted in bed by a few of the enemy’s India Pattern muskets, which were 4.5 feet long without the bayonet at the end of them. The Mexicans were probably not worried about getting close enough to Bowie to get stabbed.

As for Davy Crockett, he was captured and executed, as Santa Anna promised. As many as 50 Texians tried to flee from the East Wall, where Mexican lancers mowed them down.

Remember the Alamo. For what it was.

Far from the legendary battle of a handful of Anglo Texans against a cruel, oppressive Mexican dictator, the Alamo not only included Tejanos among its defenders, but was really a fight for slave owners. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna definitely had his problems, but enslaving people was not one of them.

The entire Texas experiment began with such earnestness. Mexico wanted to settle there, but the actual Mexicans were too smart to try to colonize Comanche lands. So in 1921, Mexico City invited Americans and even allowed them to bring slaves as an enticement. It worked. By 1833, there were too many Americans, and they wanted Mexican statehood (and their slaves).

When Santa Anna denied them, they simply decided to not recognize Mexican authority in Texas. With the curtailment of their rights, the increased enforcement of customs duties and immigration policies, the Anglo-Americans in Texas decided to revolt.

But mostly it was about slavery.

Mexico banned slavery in 1829 and was moving to ban the practice completely. Unlike most of the Confederate States' constitutions, the Texian Declaration of Independence doesn’t outright mention slavery. But Stephen Austin, a slaveholder, made his thoughts on the institution well-known, and he believed the Texas economy couldn’t survive without it.

William Travis and Jim Bowie were not only slaveholders, they were slavetraders. Bowie registered more than 100 enslaved people and even smuggled slaves. A Travis slave (known only as “Joe”) was one of the few survivors at the Alamo. Along with Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, Col. James W. Fannin, Sam Houston, and at least 17 of the 59 signers of the Texas Declaration owned slaves.

But if they were all so inept, how did they win independence? A mix of poor decision-making on Mexico’s part, actually following Sam Houston’s orders, and a bit of luck. At the subsequent Battle of San Jacinto, Santa Anna divided his forces, so Houston never had to fight the whole Mexican Army.

Meanwhile, Houston cut off any possibility of escape or reinforcement, hid his forces, and attacked when he knew they’d be the least disciplined, during their afternoon siesta. He opened the battle with the “Twin Sisters” cannons, shocking the Mexicans and routing them in 18 minutes. Then they accidentally stumbled upon Santa Anna in a marsh and took him prisoner.

The Texians did all of this regardless of what happened at the Alamo.