Should We Forget the Alamo?
From the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle, June 4, 2023...
"In the most recent issue [of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, April 2023], John Willingham argues that the controversial 2021 book Forget the Alamo overstates the role that slavery played in the revolution, particularly in regard to the Battle of the Alamo. Ultimately, [Willingham] argues that the 'cause' is more complicated but the slavery-affirming result is certainly clear enough. Willingham, who has a master’s degree in American history but not a Ph.D., is also an example of the range of people who publish in the quarterly, not all of whom are practicing academic researchers affiliated with a university."
The Chronicle editorial called for a civil resolution of the internal conflicts of the Texas State Historical Association, which at the time was involved in a lawsuit filed by a prominent lay member who is an advocate of "traditional," conservative Texas history. (The suit has now been dropped following a mediation settlement favorable to the conservative plaintiff. Please see the page "The Southwestern Historical Quarterly and the Future of Texas History on this site.) The suit alleged that the current board favors academic historians and contributions that "villainize" prominent figures from the state's past. The more conservative lay members have asked for more contributions from non-academic historians. Willingham's essay is critical of extreme conservative positions while also highlighting the exaggerations of Forget the Alamo.
The editorial quotes Dr. Walter Buenger, Chief Historian of the Texas State Historical Association, as saying that "'What appears in the quarterly meets the standards of the profession as they exist now,' meaning they are peer reviewed and evaluated based on the strength of their evidence, argument and contribution." This standard applies to all quarterly articles
Therefore, at least two challenges confront those who favor traditionalist views and seek to have them represented in the SHQ. One especially difficult problem is the relatively small pool of scholars or lay authors who are inclined toward those views and who have the time and knowledge necessary to write papers that meet peer review standards, including a grasp of Texas historiography over the last half century. The second challenge is to find peer reviewers with legitimate credentials who could weigh in objectively on submissions that present traditional or at least conservative-leaning analyses of historical events--for the SHQ cannot sacrifice proper consideration of evidence in the interest of responding to ideological or political demands. These two challenges are likely to remain, given that many, if not most, academicians formerly associated with TSHA have formed a new group, the Alliance for Texas History.
The most likely pool of non-academic contributors appears to be dedicated history enthusiasts whose work focuses on the "who, what, when, where, and how" of historical events, while typically providing insightful descriptions of the many colorful characters of the Texas past. Their evidence-based work is popular with a wide range of readers and is a great asset to the publication and to the state.
Below are excerpts from Willingham's 13,000-word essay "Should We Forget the Alamo? Myths, Slavery, and the Texas Revolution, published in April 2023 by Southwestern Historical Quarterly. The essay considers whether the Texian leaders and combatants launched the revolution primarily to defend and sustain the institution of slavery. It compares the works of four major historians of Texas history with the 2021 book Forget the Alamo, which asserted that the revolution and the Alamo were "as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery.”
Note: None of the 94 footnotes in the full published paper are included in the excerpts. If you want to read the full paper with footnotes but cannot access it online please request a pdf version by emailing the author at [email protected] or accessing it online at Academia.edu. For access to decades of articles in Southwestern Historical Quarterly along with other membership benefits, you will need to join the Texas State Historical Association.
Excerpts, total of 3,125 words:
This essay will argue that, in contrast to Forget the Alamo and traditional historiography, the views of the professional historians [sometimes called "revisionists"] are much more balanced and less influenced by a commitment to one overriding cause of the revolution. The end of this article will discuss whether or how we may forget—or remember—the Alamo....
The traditional approach to Texas history puts the story of Anglo settlers at its center and concentrates especially on the heroic deeds of (usually white) men. The 1968 book Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans by T. R. Fehrenbach is the exemplar of traditionalist history that promotes the story of Texas exceptionalism, taking it as a given that Texas is unique among the states because of its victory in the revolution, its former status as an independent Republic, and its especially exciting if often violent frontier past. Concentrating on the Comanche threat, the grit and violent resolve of “the Anglo-Celts,” the most significant battles of the revolution, the state’s role in the Civil War and Confederacy, and the eventual Anglo conquest of Native tribes and “Mexican bandits,” Lone Star raised high the flag of Texas exceptionalism, still waving defiantly more than half a century later….
As late as 1983, Fehrenbach wrote that “true” Texans “stem by blood or tradition from that vast trans-Appalachian trek that resulted in the wresting of North America from the wilderness, the Indians, and the Mexicans....”
"Forget the Alamo claims that it updates revisionist arguments that have, for decades, documented the importance of slavery in causing the revolution. The update can be summarized as follows: Revisionist and more recent histories assign a prominent role to slavery in causing the Texas Revolution but either stop just short of claiming that it was the necessary cause or, while arguing or implying that it was a necessary or sufficient cause, usually give full attention to other factors. A cause herein is considered to be the necessary cause of an event when, absent its presence, the event would not occur. A sufficient cause, given a valid necessary cause, is strong enough to bring about the event. A proximate cause occurs at a time close to the event, and while not being necessary or sufficient in itself to cause the event, it can precipitate sufficient causes. Forget the Alamo diminishes in text and tone the importance of other factors while laying out the most severe indictment to date of Texians and their commitment to slavery.
Specifically, Forget the Alamo goes beyond revisionist...positions to claim that slavery was “the true underlying cause” of the revolution. The words “underlying cause” are problematic. Proximate causes, sufficient causes, or necessary causes are usually connected to specific, related events. In the course of some of these events, underlying currents can become powerfully manifest—making the event a turning point within the dynamic of persistence and change. A principal task, then, is to determine as precisely as possible when, where, and how the turning point events leading up to the Texas Revolution occurred. A preoccupation with an overriding cause can detract from a close examination of the sequence of events and lead to errors of historical anachronism. On one point, especially, the authors of Forget the Alamo force events to conform to their stated “true underlying cause.” Their claim that “the Battle of the Alamo was as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery” ignores striking differences between Texas in 1835–1836 and the South as a whole in 1861....
Here it might be helpful to pose a pair of questions: Absent aggressive moves by the Mexican government and military toward centralization in Coahuila and Texas, would Texians have rebelled in late 1835 over the status of slavery? And absent any threats to the status of slavery in Texas at that time, would Texians have rebelled over aggressive moves of the Mexican government and military toward centralization in Texas?
Two of the academic historians, [Paul D.] Lack and [Andrew] Torget, would likely answer no to the first question and yes to the second. [Randolph Campbell], the third academic historian, and [T.R.] Fehrenbach, the traditionalist, would likely answer no to the first and yes to the second as well, with the understanding that the threat of centralization was at least partly due to the clash of cultures. The Texian opposition to a strong Mexican military presence, with the threat of more taxes and the possible seizure of Anglo colonists—even the much disliked Travis—was almost universal. And during the first part of 1835, despite the fact that many Texians “were uneasy that the government remained philosophically opposed to slavery, most Texians were satisfied.” The War Party was subdued. Even many, possibly most, slaveholders did not want rebellion at that time. The colonists had weathered threats to slavery in previous years and not rebelled. What turned the relative calm into rebellion? Aggressive centralization and the imminent arrival of Mexican troops in Texas.
Two of the historians we have discussed—Lack and Torget—have assigned, by the analysis here, sufficient causative impact to slavery; Lack, according to the present analysis, leaned toward Mexican centralization as having been the necessary cause, while Torget did not clearly differentiate between the impact of centralization and slavery, respectively, apparently seeing them as mutually entangled and essentially coequal sufficient causes. Campbell, we have said, continued to argue that a clash of cultures was the necessary cause, while seeing Mexican centralization as a sufficient cause and fears of emancipation as a quickly emerging sufficient cause when war was imminent. Fehrenbach clung to the clash of cultures as the necessary cause while discounting slavery as a serious contributing factor.
In light of the best evidence and most thorough historical scholarship on the matter, the centering of slavery as the necessary cause of the Texas Revolution substitutes what is a consensus sufficient cause—slavery—for the more probable necessary cause, aggressive centralization. The causes of the Texas Revolution were indeed tangled, and, in some ways, Forget the Alamo forces the facts to fit the theory.
The result of the revolution, however, was unambiguous: the preservation of slavery, with dire consequences. As Lack and Torget have told us, the Texian commitment to slavery resulted in a weak republic, whose cotton was rejected by Britain as being less important to that nation than the moral condemnation of slavery. In 1845, the annexation of Texas as a slave state reinforced proslavery forces in the South and helped fuel the nation’s sectional crisis. Given these calamitous effects of the revolution and the moral condemnation of Texian leaders who facilitated and pushed for a war to preserve it, one can understand the desire to blame them. Finally, the preservation of slavery, as a sufficient cause of the revolution, certainly came to be the necessary cause of an even greater tragedy in Texas history: secession from the Union and fighting once again, in a losing cause, to preserve slavery....
Forget the Alamo conflates the controversies around the Alamo and its purported heroes with the argument that defending slavery was the necessary cause of the Texas Revolution. The authors try to traverse this uneven ground with the greatest possible agility. They argue, incorrectly in the present analysis, that slavery was the necessary cause; they confirm (easily) that the two Alamo commanders were aggressively proslavery; then they conclude that the fighting at the Alamo, under the joint command of Bowie and Travis, was a fight to defend slavery, thereby justifying their banner headline that we should forget the Alamo. They conclude: “We must recognize that the Battle of the Alamo was as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery.”
The revolution and the Alamo story are not one and the same, and neither was “about slavery” to the same extent as the Civil War....
One study has identified the variety of reasons for the sudden increase in the number of Americans willing to fight [in the Texas Revolution]: “huge bounties” of good land, ranging from 320 acres for a single man who fought for only three months to 1,280 acres for those who served the duration of the war, at a time when the U.S. was experiencing an agricultural decline; patriotism akin to that which motivated their ancestors; defense of the southern slave culture, important to many or most Lower South immigrants; revenge for the “no quarter” killing of the Alamo and Goliad combatants after the revolution was underway; and just plain adventurousness, a need for self re-creation, an impulse to go West, to be a part of an assumed “Manifest Destiny....”
Of the men killed at the Alamo, 61 percent were born in the Upper or Lower South, 22 percent were born in the north, and 17 percent were foreign born. Again, a plurality (at least 35 percent of the total) came from the Upper South. The origins of the Alamo defenders suggest that the cultural impact of the [Lower] South could have been less a factor than it was for the entire group of 3,685 men who fought, at one time or another, for the Texian cause....
Does the argument in Forget the Alamo that the commitment of Texians to the institution of slavery in 1836 was as strong as the commitment of all southerners to the institution in 1860 lead to the conclusion that the men who fought in the revolution are culpable in the eyes of history, as many of their leaders are, for fighting to preserve and expand Black enslavement? In the case of the Civil War, the culpability of Confederate leaders and commanders is evident, as it is of some prominent Texian leaders in 1836. And even when their cause seemed hopeless, ordinary soldiers of the Confederacy were motivated by an officer corps, from lieutenants to field officers to corps commanders, who typically believed in the divinely ordained system of Black slavery. Officers, soldiers, merchants, and women and children on the home front—the majority kept the faith that Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia would restore the South and save its divinely ordained peculiar institution.
Although many rank-and-file Confederate soldiers cited their allegiance to the families, farms, towns, and states they came from, those valid claims cannot erase the clear, formally stated, overriding purpose of their rebellion: the preservation of slavery. From 1830 to 1860, the number of slaves in the South almost doubled. During the same period, in response to an increasingly vocal and powerful abolitionist movement in the North, the religious, political, and economic justifications of slavery grew more intense and vitriolic in the South. A private in the Army of Northern Virginia might surely be fighting for hearth and home in 1861—but he could hardly be unaware that the larger fight was in the defense of slavery.
According to historian Drew Gilpin Faust: “Slavery became, in both secular and religious discourse, the central component of the mission God had designed for the South.” After the Texas Revolution ended all Mexican attempts to ban slavery and require Texians to accept the Catholic faith, the same zealous sense of “mission” would come to characterize much of Texas, especially its coastal areas, as southern Protestants felt more secure in taking up residence. More than 63 percent of new arrivals to Texas after 1835 would come from the Lower South, with the greatest influx between 1845 and 1860. The thesis that Lower South origins were indicative of significantly stronger proslavery sentiments seems to hold true for Texas. Of the fifty-two largest slaveholders in Texas in 1860 whose birth origins and slave holdings are known, each of whom enslaved more than one hundred Blacks, 85 percent were born in the Lower South and 15 percent were born in the Upper South.
Although most Texans came to support secession and the defense of slavery by 1861, the wide range of origins and motives among colonists, soldiers, and volunteers in 1835–1836 does not support the thesis that the hold of slavery had reached the same level of religious and secular saturation that prevailed in Texas and the Confederacy twenty-five years later. As we have noted, Paul Lack wrote that “Texans entered into their quarrel with Mexico as a fragmented people, individualistic, divided from one community to the other . . . bothered by racial and ethnic tensions, and lacking consensus about the meaning of political changes in Mexico.” They also lacked a consensus that the fight was over slavery—but the enslavement of 5,000 Black human beings had clearly failed to raise their moral concerns. By 1860, the number of enslaved Blacks in Texas was almost 183,000, the human cost of unreflective self-interest, expediency, racism, and greed. Like the American Founders before them, most Texians believed that freedom was for White people only, and were as unmoved as many of their forebears by the hypocrisy of their views....
When only the defenders of the Alamo are under scrutiny (versus all Texian commands), however, fighting to preserve slavery in March 1836 might have been the dominant motive of James Bowie and William Barret Travis, but it is less likely to have been the primary motive for most of the other men who fought there. Forget the Alamo, in presenting the Alamo and its commanders as examples of the racist, proslavery origins of the Texas Revolution, does not, as noted above, consider the great variety of reasons that men other than Bowie and Travis fought in the revolution and at the Alamo.
A striking example is the treatment of David Crockett. If Fehrenbach was too generous in his praise of some Alamo defenders, Forget the Alamo offers a severe correction—and an over-correction in the case of David Crockett: “Bowie was a murderer, slaver, and con man; Travis was a pompous, racist agitator and syphilitic lech; and Crockett was a self-promoting old fool who was a captive to his own myth.” This summary description, written to place David Crockett alongside Bowie and Travis in infamy, bows to the contrived side of “Davy” while ignoring David, a man rather than a caricature.
Forget the Alamo does not mention Crockett’s total lack of involvement in bringing about the Texas Revolution. They offer no evidence that he came to Texas to defend slavery. Although Crockett was an Upper South native of the mountains of East Tennessee, he “was not opposed to slavery, having bought and sold slaves over the years, though never on a large scale.” But a slave trader or a planter, he was not. Nor was he “so passionate about slavery that he went to Texas to take part in a revolt . . . Crockett’s only concern with the war that raged between transplanted Americans and the forces of Gen. Santa Anna was whether its outcome would help him get some land sooner rather than later.” Earlier, as a legislator, one of his proposed bills sought relief for a freedman, and he “was dead-set” against a law that would have prohibited buying slaves for the purpose of freeing them. Despite his frequent attention to his own mythmaking, he was not merely a blowhard. Eyewitnesses from the Alamo said that before the final battle the so-called old man of forty-nine years performed in a preliminary action as a staunch and calm leader, rallying the defenders—hardly the actions of an “old fool.” Crockett also stood up to Andrew Jackson over land speculation in western Tennessee and the removal of Native tribes from their southeastern homelands. But Forget the Alamo, preoccupied with Davy’s image and his association in history and myth with Travis and Bowie, depicts David as an accomplice to the discredited Alamo commanders and not as the complicated individual that he was. In order to be culpable, he was reduced to fit the frame.
If the main alternative to Texas exceptionalism is history written primarily for the moment and, sometimes, over-invested in its constructs, the concept of truth will continue to suffer. It may prove to be the case that Forget the Alamo lands some heavy blows against Texas exceptionalism. Its sometimes heedless iconoclasm may well be overlooked, and its blunt but somewhat plausible main point may endure. Indeed, it may be that only blunt points, standard in the rhetorical arsenal of T. R. Fehrenbach, can endure.
In its own time, there was little doubt among most Texians and Americans that the Alamo symbolized a heroic stand in the name of freedom. Leaders and soldiers alike, slaveholders or not, were zealously committed to that cause as they chose to understand it and clearly saw themselves as inheritors of the American revolutionary ideal; yet, the two revolutions were different in one profound way. Although the authors of the 1619 Project argue that defending Black enslavement was a primary cause of the American Revolution, the evidentiary support for such a claim is not convincing. The hypocrisy of slaveholding founders who denied freedom to bondsmen while demanding it for themselves is clear, but they joined other prominent figures in founding a nation dedicated to “unalienable rights,” largely in reaction to punitive British taxation in the face of growing political autonomy in the colonies. Eventually, the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence drove the nation toward emancipation and expanded civil rights.
The Texian reaction to Mexican assertions of authority and impositions of customs duties was strikingly similar to the colonial American reaction to the British measures. But Texians who were convinced that their rebellion was in the name of freedom then embraced the institution of slavery, embodying in their actions an immediate and tragic contradiction not as acutely present in the revolution of their forebears and setting in train the terrible consequences of secession and Civil War. It is this contradiction that also marks the Alamo contextually, despite the undoubted bravery of its defenders and the justifiable motives that can reasonably be attributed to many men who were there. As for actually forgetting the Alamo, its evolving story will live on, corroded by controversy, challenging to memory, used and abused, until one day it may be less a shrine of heroic sacrifice than a testament to the complexity of historical understanding.
"In the most recent issue [of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, April 2023], John Willingham argues that the controversial 2021 book Forget the Alamo overstates the role that slavery played in the revolution, particularly in regard to the Battle of the Alamo. Ultimately, [Willingham] argues that the 'cause' is more complicated but the slavery-affirming result is certainly clear enough. Willingham, who has a master’s degree in American history but not a Ph.D., is also an example of the range of people who publish in the quarterly, not all of whom are practicing academic researchers affiliated with a university."
The Chronicle editorial called for a civil resolution of the internal conflicts of the Texas State Historical Association, which at the time was involved in a lawsuit filed by a prominent lay member who is an advocate of "traditional," conservative Texas history. (The suit has now been dropped following a mediation settlement favorable to the conservative plaintiff. Please see the page "The Southwestern Historical Quarterly and the Future of Texas History on this site.) The suit alleged that the current board favors academic historians and contributions that "villainize" prominent figures from the state's past. The more conservative lay members have asked for more contributions from non-academic historians. Willingham's essay is critical of extreme conservative positions while also highlighting the exaggerations of Forget the Alamo.
The editorial quotes Dr. Walter Buenger, Chief Historian of the Texas State Historical Association, as saying that "'What appears in the quarterly meets the standards of the profession as they exist now,' meaning they are peer reviewed and evaluated based on the strength of their evidence, argument and contribution." This standard applies to all quarterly articles
Therefore, at least two challenges confront those who favor traditionalist views and seek to have them represented in the SHQ. One especially difficult problem is the relatively small pool of scholars or lay authors who are inclined toward those views and who have the time and knowledge necessary to write papers that meet peer review standards, including a grasp of Texas historiography over the last half century. The second challenge is to find peer reviewers with legitimate credentials who could weigh in objectively on submissions that present traditional or at least conservative-leaning analyses of historical events--for the SHQ cannot sacrifice proper consideration of evidence in the interest of responding to ideological or political demands. These two challenges are likely to remain, given that many, if not most, academicians formerly associated with TSHA have formed a new group, the Alliance for Texas History.
The most likely pool of non-academic contributors appears to be dedicated history enthusiasts whose work focuses on the "who, what, when, where, and how" of historical events, while typically providing insightful descriptions of the many colorful characters of the Texas past. Their evidence-based work is popular with a wide range of readers and is a great asset to the publication and to the state.
Below are excerpts from Willingham's 13,000-word essay "Should We Forget the Alamo? Myths, Slavery, and the Texas Revolution, published in April 2023 by Southwestern Historical Quarterly. The essay considers whether the Texian leaders and combatants launched the revolution primarily to defend and sustain the institution of slavery. It compares the works of four major historians of Texas history with the 2021 book Forget the Alamo, which asserted that the revolution and the Alamo were "as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery.”
Note: None of the 94 footnotes in the full published paper are included in the excerpts. If you want to read the full paper with footnotes but cannot access it online please request a pdf version by emailing the author at [email protected] or accessing it online at Academia.edu. For access to decades of articles in Southwestern Historical Quarterly along with other membership benefits, you will need to join the Texas State Historical Association.
Excerpts, total of 3,125 words:
This essay will argue that, in contrast to Forget the Alamo and traditional historiography, the views of the professional historians [sometimes called "revisionists"] are much more balanced and less influenced by a commitment to one overriding cause of the revolution. The end of this article will discuss whether or how we may forget—or remember—the Alamo....
The traditional approach to Texas history puts the story of Anglo settlers at its center and concentrates especially on the heroic deeds of (usually white) men. The 1968 book Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans by T. R. Fehrenbach is the exemplar of traditionalist history that promotes the story of Texas exceptionalism, taking it as a given that Texas is unique among the states because of its victory in the revolution, its former status as an independent Republic, and its especially exciting if often violent frontier past. Concentrating on the Comanche threat, the grit and violent resolve of “the Anglo-Celts,” the most significant battles of the revolution, the state’s role in the Civil War and Confederacy, and the eventual Anglo conquest of Native tribes and “Mexican bandits,” Lone Star raised high the flag of Texas exceptionalism, still waving defiantly more than half a century later….
As late as 1983, Fehrenbach wrote that “true” Texans “stem by blood or tradition from that vast trans-Appalachian trek that resulted in the wresting of North America from the wilderness, the Indians, and the Mexicans....”
"Forget the Alamo claims that it updates revisionist arguments that have, for decades, documented the importance of slavery in causing the revolution. The update can be summarized as follows: Revisionist and more recent histories assign a prominent role to slavery in causing the Texas Revolution but either stop just short of claiming that it was the necessary cause or, while arguing or implying that it was a necessary or sufficient cause, usually give full attention to other factors. A cause herein is considered to be the necessary cause of an event when, absent its presence, the event would not occur. A sufficient cause, given a valid necessary cause, is strong enough to bring about the event. A proximate cause occurs at a time close to the event, and while not being necessary or sufficient in itself to cause the event, it can precipitate sufficient causes. Forget the Alamo diminishes in text and tone the importance of other factors while laying out the most severe indictment to date of Texians and their commitment to slavery.
Specifically, Forget the Alamo goes beyond revisionist...positions to claim that slavery was “the true underlying cause” of the revolution. The words “underlying cause” are problematic. Proximate causes, sufficient causes, or necessary causes are usually connected to specific, related events. In the course of some of these events, underlying currents can become powerfully manifest—making the event a turning point within the dynamic of persistence and change. A principal task, then, is to determine as precisely as possible when, where, and how the turning point events leading up to the Texas Revolution occurred. A preoccupation with an overriding cause can detract from a close examination of the sequence of events and lead to errors of historical anachronism. On one point, especially, the authors of Forget the Alamo force events to conform to their stated “true underlying cause.” Their claim that “the Battle of the Alamo was as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery” ignores striking differences between Texas in 1835–1836 and the South as a whole in 1861....
Here it might be helpful to pose a pair of questions: Absent aggressive moves by the Mexican government and military toward centralization in Coahuila and Texas, would Texians have rebelled in late 1835 over the status of slavery? And absent any threats to the status of slavery in Texas at that time, would Texians have rebelled over aggressive moves of the Mexican government and military toward centralization in Texas?
Two of the academic historians, [Paul D.] Lack and [Andrew] Torget, would likely answer no to the first question and yes to the second. [Randolph Campbell], the third academic historian, and [T.R.] Fehrenbach, the traditionalist, would likely answer no to the first and yes to the second as well, with the understanding that the threat of centralization was at least partly due to the clash of cultures. The Texian opposition to a strong Mexican military presence, with the threat of more taxes and the possible seizure of Anglo colonists—even the much disliked Travis—was almost universal. And during the first part of 1835, despite the fact that many Texians “were uneasy that the government remained philosophically opposed to slavery, most Texians were satisfied.” The War Party was subdued. Even many, possibly most, slaveholders did not want rebellion at that time. The colonists had weathered threats to slavery in previous years and not rebelled. What turned the relative calm into rebellion? Aggressive centralization and the imminent arrival of Mexican troops in Texas.
Two of the historians we have discussed—Lack and Torget—have assigned, by the analysis here, sufficient causative impact to slavery; Lack, according to the present analysis, leaned toward Mexican centralization as having been the necessary cause, while Torget did not clearly differentiate between the impact of centralization and slavery, respectively, apparently seeing them as mutually entangled and essentially coequal sufficient causes. Campbell, we have said, continued to argue that a clash of cultures was the necessary cause, while seeing Mexican centralization as a sufficient cause and fears of emancipation as a quickly emerging sufficient cause when war was imminent. Fehrenbach clung to the clash of cultures as the necessary cause while discounting slavery as a serious contributing factor.
In light of the best evidence and most thorough historical scholarship on the matter, the centering of slavery as the necessary cause of the Texas Revolution substitutes what is a consensus sufficient cause—slavery—for the more probable necessary cause, aggressive centralization. The causes of the Texas Revolution were indeed tangled, and, in some ways, Forget the Alamo forces the facts to fit the theory.
The result of the revolution, however, was unambiguous: the preservation of slavery, with dire consequences. As Lack and Torget have told us, the Texian commitment to slavery resulted in a weak republic, whose cotton was rejected by Britain as being less important to that nation than the moral condemnation of slavery. In 1845, the annexation of Texas as a slave state reinforced proslavery forces in the South and helped fuel the nation’s sectional crisis. Given these calamitous effects of the revolution and the moral condemnation of Texian leaders who facilitated and pushed for a war to preserve it, one can understand the desire to blame them. Finally, the preservation of slavery, as a sufficient cause of the revolution, certainly came to be the necessary cause of an even greater tragedy in Texas history: secession from the Union and fighting once again, in a losing cause, to preserve slavery....
Forget the Alamo conflates the controversies around the Alamo and its purported heroes with the argument that defending slavery was the necessary cause of the Texas Revolution. The authors try to traverse this uneven ground with the greatest possible agility. They argue, incorrectly in the present analysis, that slavery was the necessary cause; they confirm (easily) that the two Alamo commanders were aggressively proslavery; then they conclude that the fighting at the Alamo, under the joint command of Bowie and Travis, was a fight to defend slavery, thereby justifying their banner headline that we should forget the Alamo. They conclude: “We must recognize that the Battle of the Alamo was as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery.”
The revolution and the Alamo story are not one and the same, and neither was “about slavery” to the same extent as the Civil War....
One study has identified the variety of reasons for the sudden increase in the number of Americans willing to fight [in the Texas Revolution]: “huge bounties” of good land, ranging from 320 acres for a single man who fought for only three months to 1,280 acres for those who served the duration of the war, at a time when the U.S. was experiencing an agricultural decline; patriotism akin to that which motivated their ancestors; defense of the southern slave culture, important to many or most Lower South immigrants; revenge for the “no quarter” killing of the Alamo and Goliad combatants after the revolution was underway; and just plain adventurousness, a need for self re-creation, an impulse to go West, to be a part of an assumed “Manifest Destiny....”
Of the men killed at the Alamo, 61 percent were born in the Upper or Lower South, 22 percent were born in the north, and 17 percent were foreign born. Again, a plurality (at least 35 percent of the total) came from the Upper South. The origins of the Alamo defenders suggest that the cultural impact of the [Lower] South could have been less a factor than it was for the entire group of 3,685 men who fought, at one time or another, for the Texian cause....
Does the argument in Forget the Alamo that the commitment of Texians to the institution of slavery in 1836 was as strong as the commitment of all southerners to the institution in 1860 lead to the conclusion that the men who fought in the revolution are culpable in the eyes of history, as many of their leaders are, for fighting to preserve and expand Black enslavement? In the case of the Civil War, the culpability of Confederate leaders and commanders is evident, as it is of some prominent Texian leaders in 1836. And even when their cause seemed hopeless, ordinary soldiers of the Confederacy were motivated by an officer corps, from lieutenants to field officers to corps commanders, who typically believed in the divinely ordained system of Black slavery. Officers, soldiers, merchants, and women and children on the home front—the majority kept the faith that Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia would restore the South and save its divinely ordained peculiar institution.
Although many rank-and-file Confederate soldiers cited their allegiance to the families, farms, towns, and states they came from, those valid claims cannot erase the clear, formally stated, overriding purpose of their rebellion: the preservation of slavery. From 1830 to 1860, the number of slaves in the South almost doubled. During the same period, in response to an increasingly vocal and powerful abolitionist movement in the North, the religious, political, and economic justifications of slavery grew more intense and vitriolic in the South. A private in the Army of Northern Virginia might surely be fighting for hearth and home in 1861—but he could hardly be unaware that the larger fight was in the defense of slavery.
According to historian Drew Gilpin Faust: “Slavery became, in both secular and religious discourse, the central component of the mission God had designed for the South.” After the Texas Revolution ended all Mexican attempts to ban slavery and require Texians to accept the Catholic faith, the same zealous sense of “mission” would come to characterize much of Texas, especially its coastal areas, as southern Protestants felt more secure in taking up residence. More than 63 percent of new arrivals to Texas after 1835 would come from the Lower South, with the greatest influx between 1845 and 1860. The thesis that Lower South origins were indicative of significantly stronger proslavery sentiments seems to hold true for Texas. Of the fifty-two largest slaveholders in Texas in 1860 whose birth origins and slave holdings are known, each of whom enslaved more than one hundred Blacks, 85 percent were born in the Lower South and 15 percent were born in the Upper South.
Although most Texans came to support secession and the defense of slavery by 1861, the wide range of origins and motives among colonists, soldiers, and volunteers in 1835–1836 does not support the thesis that the hold of slavery had reached the same level of religious and secular saturation that prevailed in Texas and the Confederacy twenty-five years later. As we have noted, Paul Lack wrote that “Texans entered into their quarrel with Mexico as a fragmented people, individualistic, divided from one community to the other . . . bothered by racial and ethnic tensions, and lacking consensus about the meaning of political changes in Mexico.” They also lacked a consensus that the fight was over slavery—but the enslavement of 5,000 Black human beings had clearly failed to raise their moral concerns. By 1860, the number of enslaved Blacks in Texas was almost 183,000, the human cost of unreflective self-interest, expediency, racism, and greed. Like the American Founders before them, most Texians believed that freedom was for White people only, and were as unmoved as many of their forebears by the hypocrisy of their views....
When only the defenders of the Alamo are under scrutiny (versus all Texian commands), however, fighting to preserve slavery in March 1836 might have been the dominant motive of James Bowie and William Barret Travis, but it is less likely to have been the primary motive for most of the other men who fought there. Forget the Alamo, in presenting the Alamo and its commanders as examples of the racist, proslavery origins of the Texas Revolution, does not, as noted above, consider the great variety of reasons that men other than Bowie and Travis fought in the revolution and at the Alamo.
A striking example is the treatment of David Crockett. If Fehrenbach was too generous in his praise of some Alamo defenders, Forget the Alamo offers a severe correction—and an over-correction in the case of David Crockett: “Bowie was a murderer, slaver, and con man; Travis was a pompous, racist agitator and syphilitic lech; and Crockett was a self-promoting old fool who was a captive to his own myth.” This summary description, written to place David Crockett alongside Bowie and Travis in infamy, bows to the contrived side of “Davy” while ignoring David, a man rather than a caricature.
Forget the Alamo does not mention Crockett’s total lack of involvement in bringing about the Texas Revolution. They offer no evidence that he came to Texas to defend slavery. Although Crockett was an Upper South native of the mountains of East Tennessee, he “was not opposed to slavery, having bought and sold slaves over the years, though never on a large scale.” But a slave trader or a planter, he was not. Nor was he “so passionate about slavery that he went to Texas to take part in a revolt . . . Crockett’s only concern with the war that raged between transplanted Americans and the forces of Gen. Santa Anna was whether its outcome would help him get some land sooner rather than later.” Earlier, as a legislator, one of his proposed bills sought relief for a freedman, and he “was dead-set” against a law that would have prohibited buying slaves for the purpose of freeing them. Despite his frequent attention to his own mythmaking, he was not merely a blowhard. Eyewitnesses from the Alamo said that before the final battle the so-called old man of forty-nine years performed in a preliminary action as a staunch and calm leader, rallying the defenders—hardly the actions of an “old fool.” Crockett also stood up to Andrew Jackson over land speculation in western Tennessee and the removal of Native tribes from their southeastern homelands. But Forget the Alamo, preoccupied with Davy’s image and his association in history and myth with Travis and Bowie, depicts David as an accomplice to the discredited Alamo commanders and not as the complicated individual that he was. In order to be culpable, he was reduced to fit the frame.
If the main alternative to Texas exceptionalism is history written primarily for the moment and, sometimes, over-invested in its constructs, the concept of truth will continue to suffer. It may prove to be the case that Forget the Alamo lands some heavy blows against Texas exceptionalism. Its sometimes heedless iconoclasm may well be overlooked, and its blunt but somewhat plausible main point may endure. Indeed, it may be that only blunt points, standard in the rhetorical arsenal of T. R. Fehrenbach, can endure.
In its own time, there was little doubt among most Texians and Americans that the Alamo symbolized a heroic stand in the name of freedom. Leaders and soldiers alike, slaveholders or not, were zealously committed to that cause as they chose to understand it and clearly saw themselves as inheritors of the American revolutionary ideal; yet, the two revolutions were different in one profound way. Although the authors of the 1619 Project argue that defending Black enslavement was a primary cause of the American Revolution, the evidentiary support for such a claim is not convincing. The hypocrisy of slaveholding founders who denied freedom to bondsmen while demanding it for themselves is clear, but they joined other prominent figures in founding a nation dedicated to “unalienable rights,” largely in reaction to punitive British taxation in the face of growing political autonomy in the colonies. Eventually, the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence drove the nation toward emancipation and expanded civil rights.
The Texian reaction to Mexican assertions of authority and impositions of customs duties was strikingly similar to the colonial American reaction to the British measures. But Texians who were convinced that their rebellion was in the name of freedom then embraced the institution of slavery, embodying in their actions an immediate and tragic contradiction not as acutely present in the revolution of their forebears and setting in train the terrible consequences of secession and Civil War. It is this contradiction that also marks the Alamo contextually, despite the undoubted bravery of its defenders and the justifiable motives that can reasonably be attributed to many men who were there. As for actually forgetting the Alamo, its evolving story will live on, corroded by controversy, challenging to memory, used and abused, until one day it may be less a shrine of heroic sacrifice than a testament to the complexity of historical understanding.