The Alamo and Goliad: one idealized,
the other misunderstood
The Alamo in 1860
Left, Presidio La Bahia Goliad restored
.
The Alamo, Goliad, and the Age of Romanticism--full essay 3,600 words
I. The Age of Romanticism in the Old South
My novel The Edge of Freedom, A Fact-Based Novel of the Texas Revolution, is on the surface about the Goliad campaign in the Texas Revolution. But the book is also the story of the relationship between Goliad and the iconic symbol of the Revolution: the Alamo.
Occurring within a few weeks of each other in March 1836, the battle of the Alamo and the battle of Coleto Creek, near Goliad, were fought by men who had much in common. They sought to protect their perception of freedom and their own self-interest and were imbued with the unbridled individualism of their time. And in the aftermath of the battles, both the Alamo and Goliad became rallying cries for Texian soldiers as they went on to defeat Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto.
In our collective memory, however, they are far apart.
I believe that the Alamo was emblematic of the Age of Romanticism, a time when passion and idealism seemed to eclipse the previous Age of Reason. Romantics such as the English poet Lord Byron sought to sacrifice themselves to the great cause of freedom, in his case the cause of Greece against the Ottoman Turks. He died of fever in 1824 while trying to unite Greek forces. Americans saw the fight in Texas as a chance to share in the glory of their revolutionary forefathers, and even Texians motivated by greed or a desire for adventure could claim to be chivalrous warriors, knights in the cause of freedom, disdainful of both risk and brute reality.
Here it is necessary to say that most White Americans perceived the Texas Revolution as their generation’s noble fight for freedom, even as many of them who pushed aggressively for rebellion did so in the interest of preserving Black enslavement. The centralization of the Mexican government would lead to less autonomy for Anglo settlers and increase the likelihood that the overwhelming antislavery sentiment in Mexico would at last result in the abolition of slavery in Texas. As we shall see below, abolition not only meant a loss of “property” for slaveholders but also raised the specter of bloody insurrections and revenge.
In this essay, the focus is on a particular strain of Romanticism, one that took hold in the American South during the first half of the nineteenth century and incorporated the preservation of slavery into the region’s version of Romanticism. Before proceeding to a comparison of the Alamo and Goliad, more discussion of Southern Romanticism is in order.
Southern Romanticism was characterized by the purportedly noble and, to use a word of those times, chivalrous devotion to heroic achievement, to fame and glory, to an idea of women, to an idealized past, and to an intense sense of personal honor and pride that would brook no insult or challenge. Even a mild affront could turn into a duel. The few paces between the dueling parties provided the only middle ground there was, with life and triumph on one side, and death or defeat on the other.
The influence of this Southern Romanticism on the people and events of the Texas Revolution has not been the subject of much scholarship. But for this brief attempt to suggest such a connection, I am indebted to the work of the late Rollin G. Osterweis of Yale and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, emeritus professor at Florida, both of whom wrote about the Old South generally, rather than about the impact of the Age of Romanticism on events in Texas.
The term code of honor is perhaps the best description for the manly version of Southern Romanticism, although Wyatt-Brown calls it the “rule” of honor. Within that code there is the cult of chivalry, the glorification of military valor, the adoration of the hero, and the enshrinement of Southern women.
Why was the South receptive to this code of honor? For one thing, the South was and probably still is a more physical culture than the rest of the nation. To be sure, in the early nineteenth century people in the North were no strangers to sometimes brutal working conditions that required great physical effort, yes on farms, but increasingly in cramped, dingy shops and factories. But in the South, so much of life was centered on the outside world—planting, harvesting, hunting, fishing; racing horses; forming militias to fight the Creeks or the Cherokees, and to capture runaway slaves; or, most urgently of all, to put down actual or feared slave insurrections. And so there was an enduring martial spirit, beginning before the American Revolution, drawing strength from it, and carrying forward because of the still-violent Southern frontier, and because of the need to keep enslaved Blacks in check.
But it was heroic military action, above all, that could bring fame, glory, and the most fulfilling form of honor. Not to mention that in a plantation society, a military vocation was often the best honorable alternative to being a great planter or a firebrand politician.
As the issue of slavery became more of a wedge between North and South, Southerners found ways to justify it, calling it a positive good. A major apologist for slavery argued that not only was it a positive good for slaves, who after all—he claimed—were incapable of independent living; but it was also, he argued, the key to honoring Southern women.
In the words of the Rev. Thomas R. Dew of the College of William & Mary: “We behold the marked effects of slavery on the conditions of [White] woman—we find her at once elevated, clothed with all her charms, mingling with and directing the society to which she belongs, no longer the slave but now the equal and idol of man.” [Emphasis added.]
Thus did slavery allegedly emancipate the White Southern woman from tedious household subservience, at least according to the Reverend Day, writing in 1852 but expressing what most slaveholders already chose to believe when it suited them. Of course, most White Southern women did not live in households that owned slaves. In fact, women were not the equals of men, were idols mostly when men needed something to fight over, and were expected to use their real or imagined leisure to instill in their sons the very code of honor that men cherished.
The Reverend Day’s torturous justification of slavery did have the effect of equating Southern womanhood with the survival of slavery, at a time when the South needed all the reasons to sustain the institution that it could find. To denounce slavery was to threaten Southern womanhood, and so it became a matter of honor, that word again, to defend both, and to keep the South as it was, unsullied by crass and commercial Northern dominance. Far from being evil, slavery was essential to maintaining the noble way of life, for what could be nobler than defending womanhood?
Sir Walter Scott, the famous novelist, was already well-known when his book Ivanhoe appeared in 1820. The book conquered the South—or, rather, it spoke romantically to the South in reassuring ways that the South needed.
The novel had it all: the honor of chivalrous knights loyal to virtuous women under duress; the noble heroism, the glory of combat, and a convenient story line that could easily be translated to the American South: just as the Norman knights were far superior to Saxon knaves, so were honorable Southerners superior to the narrow, grasping Northerners who now criticized the Southern way of life.
One aspect of the code of honor, however, was that it was too often dependent on external validation. If it was thought that your wife or daughter had been slighted, you were honor-bound to retaliate, often violently, even if the slight was trivial or even non-existent. Everything depended on appearances. No insult could be borne, compromise was unmanly, the middle way un-heroic. Logic and reason counted for little when honor was a stake. Such was the burden of Southern Romanticism.
So after wandering through the weeds of Southern intellectual history, what, you might ask, does all of this have to do with the Alamo and Goliad?
By way of transition, I want to relate a well-known story about Sam Houston and his mother, which helps to illustrate what I have said up to this point. A Virginian by birth, Sam was nineteen when the War of 1812 broke out. Mostly self-educated and absolutely devoted to Homer’s heroic epic the Iliad, and its vivid story of the Trojan War, Sam no longer wanted only to read about larger-than-life men making their mark in the history of the world, he wanted to be one of those men.
So he informed his mother of his plans to fight in the War. Later, he spoke often of her response: Handing him a musket, she said, “Never disgrace it; for remember, I would rather all my sons should fill one honorable grave, than that one of them should turn back to save his life.”
She then gave her son a plain gold ring. Engraved inside the ring was one word: “Honor.” You may know the rest of the story: Houston fought at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, under the approving eye of Andrew Jackson. Young Sam took a Creek arrow in his upper thigh, then rejoined the fight, leading a charge over breastworks, where musket balls smashed into his shoulder and arm. These were not the last wounds Houston would receive, but they cost him the most: some believe that his first wife, Eliza, who left him after only a few days of marriage, did so in part because of the hideousness of his wounds. Whatever her reasons, Houston would allow no one to question her honor.
We will return to Sam Houston shortly, in order to revisit his reading of Homer, and to explore how that experience might have made him different from the other prominent figures of the Texas Revolution, and how it probably helped him to become a powerful figure in our state’s history.
II. The Age of Romanticism and the Texas Revolution
But now on to the Alamo and Goliad.
The southerners at Goliad, including Colonel James W. Fannin, the commander there, shared the aforementioned romantic impulses, as did many of his men from the North or from Germany and other foreign lands when it came to fighting for freedom. And I believe Fannin wished to be passionate and headstrong in the perceived cause of freedom, as were William Barret Travis and Jim Bowie at the Alamo. All three men had fought duels in the name of honor, whether for other reasons or not; all three men were slaveholders who doubtless would have agreed with the Reverend Day about slavery while often desperately seeking profit and status for themselves. Indeed, Bowie and Fannin were both slave traders, and Fannin upon his arrival in Texas in 1834 immediately sought to expand his illegal business of importing African slaves. Along with their passionate impulses to fight for their idea of freedom was a keen desire to become prosperous, however that could be accomplished.
In The Edge of Freedom, there is an imagined conversation between James Bonham, the famous Alamo courier, and James Fannin, who infamously did not at once order his men to relieve the Alamo. The novel presents a passionate but thoughtful Bonham, a lawyer by profession, speaking eloquently in the voice of the age while urging Fannin to lead his men to the Alamo, while Fannin equivocated over meeting the demands of the age.
Yet when Fannin later answered the impulse to act in defiance of reality, and in the spirit of the age, he did not win the glory he and his men wanted so badly. His eventual effort to march to aid of the Alamo failed miserably, with the inability of his force to ford the San Antonio River because of all the artillery they had brought along. Did they need the artillery? Yes, for otherwise they would have been vulnerable to cavalry attacks, lacking horses themselves. Even knowing all of this, they tried. It was as if they needed to try and fail in order to justify not actually being able to reach the Alamo.
Historians have faulted Fannin for this less than they have for other shortcomings and failures. The main criticism, especially by those who see the Revolution only through a military lens, has been that at a crucial point in March, he divided his force, leading to further delays in leaving the presidio to join Sam Houston at Victoria after the fall of the Alamo was known.
Why did he divide his force? Well, blame it on men convinced that nothing, not military strategy, not the need to preserve the strongest Texian force left in the field, not—surely not—anything so trivial as mere military orders from Sam Houston or anyone else—none of these practical considerations could stand up to the honorable, the chivalrous imperative to march to the aid of a woman in distress.
And such was, or was thought to be, one Louisa Ayers, the wife of the tax collector of Refugio, whom he had left behind, unguarded, with other women and children while he went to Goliad. And this same Mr. Lewis Ayers now enlisted as his knight-errant the former marshal of Refugio, Amon B. King, who himself had been so impatient to join Fannin and his men in Goliad that he had left his town unprotected.
After Mexican irregulars had looted the town, this marshal, now Captain King of the Refugio Militia, and Lewis Ayers demanded that Fannin send troops under King’s vengeful command to rescue the women and children in Refugio. Of course, typical of the chaos of the Texas Revolution, all of this happened just as Fannin received Houston’s order to join him at Victoria.
Now, after all you have read so far about Southern Romanticism and the code of honor, consider this question: What would William B. Travis have done if he had been the commander at Goliad rather than at the Alamo and received word that women and children were in danger from the enemy, barely twenty-five miles away, and in urgent need of rescue? What would Travis have done if he had then learned that the very force he had sent to save those women and children also had to be rescued? What would the age have demanded of Travis? For a Southern commander to have ignored these pleas would have brought dishonor to him and his men. Their code, and their romantic age, demanded action, the consequences be damned. It was all or nothing.
Or, expressed in language more dramatic: “Victory or Death.” Travis’ famous words from the Alamo declared not only the determination to die honorably for a cause but also declared, in the spirit of the age, that nothing mattered but the code—fighting another day be damned; joining a force that might actually achieve victory—be damned. Brute reality, the certainty of annihilation, be damned. There were only the bare, powerful, absolute words of the code: “Victory or Death.” As in a duel, the honor of the Texians had to be preserved; they could not run away, no matter the cost, no matter the odds. And, especially, they could not run away from smaller brown men, many of whose ancestors had been the slaves of Spanish conquerors.
Yet, when Fannin sought to act in the spirit of the age, immortal glory was not the result. The Refugio relief mission not only cost Fannin critical time, but also left him about one hundred men short when he finally met General José de Urrea on the field of battle at Coleto Creek, near Goliad, on March 19, 1836. And on March 20, 1836, when Fannin heard the cries of his wounded and saw the newly-arrived Mexican artillery demolishing his trench work with salvos of grape shot and chain, the all or nothing—victory or death—demands of his age ran smack into a very different reality from the one Travis had faced at the Alamo when the entire garrison would either live or die in a quick, totally decisive battle.
Given the choice of leaving his wounded on the field to die, or waiting, with almost no ammunition remaining, for the Mexicans to kill them with artillery fire, lances, and the sabers of dragoons, Fannin and his officers finally decided that they should try to save the wounded and, possibly, the entire force of 300 men. One can well imagine that rarely was the tension between compassion and the code of honor so great as it was during the deliberations among Fannin and his men on that cold, bleak prairie in 1836.
Pulled both ways, Fannin finally reached an agreement with the Mexican General Urrea, and together they groped for common ground, hoping that a vaguely worded surrender document might buy enough time for Urrea to circumvent the brutal decree of Santa Anna that all Texian captives be executed. Unlike Santa Anna, Urrea was a true soldado, and his brisk, assertive and lethal actions against allegedly superior Anglo combatants was in sharp contrast to later actions of El Presidente. Urrea was no saint; he was far more concerned with waging war than with offering olive branches; and he did order some executions of captured Texian combatants. What is certain is that he could have annihilated Fannin’s force on that prairie near Coleto Creek, probably with relatively few casualties on his side. He held the high ground, and he added artillery and men to his force while Fannin and his battered lay below with little to shield them and almost no ammunition.
I believe that both men deserve our respect for rising above the impulses of the age to fashion an imperfect and in some ways a shrewd compromise meant to save lives. At least as flawed in his character as Bowie and Travis, Fannin's finest moment was not his unquestionably brave conduct in battle. His moment arrived when he tried to save his men. But, because he and Urrea made a pragmatic twenty-first century decision on a nineteenth century battlefield, their efforts to save lives, and the efforts of Francita Alavez, the real Angel of Goliad, and others on the Mexican side, have not received the recognition that they deserve. While their age tended to ignore ambiguities, our own complex age should be able to understand them.
Many Texans view the Alamo as a glorious sacrifice in the cause of freedom, but Goliad for most recalls an episode burdened with blunders and tragedy. While we honor those who were killed in Goliad 186 years ago, let us honor as well what men and women on both sides tried to do before the slaughter of Fannin and almost all of his men took place on Palm Sunday, 1836.
So this is what my interest in the dialogue between James Bonham, the Alamo courier, and James Fannin, the commander at Goliad, has sought: to understand the passions of the age, to find out not only what the men might have said, but to explore, through the techniques of fiction and extensive historical research, why they said what they said, and to glimpse some of the cultural currents in their historic moment.
Finally, I want to return to Sam Houston, and his well-known fascination with Homer’s Iliad. The first two lines of the Iliad are these:
“Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles
“The accursed rage that brought great suffering to the [Greeks].”
For it was the rage and impulsive actions of Achilles that led to even more killing, of his own people, of the Trojans, of Hector, and then to the terrible destruction of Troy—and all because Achilles felt that Agamemnon had violated his honor. Achilles, instead of placing the needs of his people first, indulged a personal hatred and thereby failed to achieve the highest honor, which owes its first allegiance to something beyond the self. There is no real glory for the hero without this higher purpose.
So it was that Sam Houston, grown to early middle age, did not surrender to rage, impulse, or pride, or follow his personal siren song into the haven of seclusion, but instead endured insults and hints at his lack of courage in order to fight another day after the Runaway Scrape; and on that other day, April 21, 1836, at the battle of San Jacinto, he won. He was a man who cared less for appearances at that stage of his life than he did for his country. Even the name, Runaway Scrape, shows what many believed about Sam Houston before his shocking victory. Tragically for Texas, Houston’s new republic quickly became a slaveholding nation, one that was dying by 1845 after Great Britain, its biggest importer of cotton, boycotted Texas exports because of slavery. Then in February 1861, despite the Unionist Sam Houston’s attempts to prevent it, the state of Texas seceded from the Union, once again throwing in its lot with the cause of preserving slavery.
Houston and other Unionists could not prevent secession. Yet he foresaw the folly of yielding to the emotions of the moment, when Texas fell in line with Southern firebrands from South Carolina and other states that seceded earlier. Yes, Houston was a Romantic in some ways, like the more extreme figures of the Revolution; but he was a Romantic with the wisdom of the ancients fixed in his brain, a Romantic who knew not only the greatness that individuals may achieve but also the terrible consequences that often ensue when human passions rule.
And after that day at San Jacinto, though wounded yet again, he refused to let his passions control him and rejected imprudent demands from his men. He spared Santa Anna, and by sparing him and obtaining a pledge that all Mexican forces would leave Texas, he never had to fight General José de Urrea, a real soldier, unlike Santa Anna—and no Romantic himself, but a man who, with equal or superior force, might have won a more extended war.
The Alamo, Goliad, and the Age of Romanticism--full essay 3,600 words
I. The Age of Romanticism in the Old South
My novel The Edge of Freedom, A Fact-Based Novel of the Texas Revolution, is on the surface about the Goliad campaign in the Texas Revolution. But the book is also the story of the relationship between Goliad and the iconic symbol of the Revolution: the Alamo.
Occurring within a few weeks of each other in March 1836, the battle of the Alamo and the battle of Coleto Creek, near Goliad, were fought by men who had much in common. They sought to protect their perception of freedom and their own self-interest and were imbued with the unbridled individualism of their time. And in the aftermath of the battles, both the Alamo and Goliad became rallying cries for Texian soldiers as they went on to defeat Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto.
In our collective memory, however, they are far apart.
I believe that the Alamo was emblematic of the Age of Romanticism, a time when passion and idealism seemed to eclipse the previous Age of Reason. Romantics such as the English poet Lord Byron sought to sacrifice themselves to the great cause of freedom, in his case the cause of Greece against the Ottoman Turks. He died of fever in 1824 while trying to unite Greek forces. Americans saw the fight in Texas as a chance to share in the glory of their revolutionary forefathers, and even Texians motivated by greed or a desire for adventure could claim to be chivalrous warriors, knights in the cause of freedom, disdainful of both risk and brute reality.
Here it is necessary to say that most White Americans perceived the Texas Revolution as their generation’s noble fight for freedom, even as many of them who pushed aggressively for rebellion did so in the interest of preserving Black enslavement. The centralization of the Mexican government would lead to less autonomy for Anglo settlers and increase the likelihood that the overwhelming antislavery sentiment in Mexico would at last result in the abolition of slavery in Texas. As we shall see below, abolition not only meant a loss of “property” for slaveholders but also raised the specter of bloody insurrections and revenge.
In this essay, the focus is on a particular strain of Romanticism, one that took hold in the American South during the first half of the nineteenth century and incorporated the preservation of slavery into the region’s version of Romanticism. Before proceeding to a comparison of the Alamo and Goliad, more discussion of Southern Romanticism is in order.
Southern Romanticism was characterized by the purportedly noble and, to use a word of those times, chivalrous devotion to heroic achievement, to fame and glory, to an idea of women, to an idealized past, and to an intense sense of personal honor and pride that would brook no insult or challenge. Even a mild affront could turn into a duel. The few paces between the dueling parties provided the only middle ground there was, with life and triumph on one side, and death or defeat on the other.
The influence of this Southern Romanticism on the people and events of the Texas Revolution has not been the subject of much scholarship. But for this brief attempt to suggest such a connection, I am indebted to the work of the late Rollin G. Osterweis of Yale and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, emeritus professor at Florida, both of whom wrote about the Old South generally, rather than about the impact of the Age of Romanticism on events in Texas.
The term code of honor is perhaps the best description for the manly version of Southern Romanticism, although Wyatt-Brown calls it the “rule” of honor. Within that code there is the cult of chivalry, the glorification of military valor, the adoration of the hero, and the enshrinement of Southern women.
Why was the South receptive to this code of honor? For one thing, the South was and probably still is a more physical culture than the rest of the nation. To be sure, in the early nineteenth century people in the North were no strangers to sometimes brutal working conditions that required great physical effort, yes on farms, but increasingly in cramped, dingy shops and factories. But in the South, so much of life was centered on the outside world—planting, harvesting, hunting, fishing; racing horses; forming militias to fight the Creeks or the Cherokees, and to capture runaway slaves; or, most urgently of all, to put down actual or feared slave insurrections. And so there was an enduring martial spirit, beginning before the American Revolution, drawing strength from it, and carrying forward because of the still-violent Southern frontier, and because of the need to keep enslaved Blacks in check.
But it was heroic military action, above all, that could bring fame, glory, and the most fulfilling form of honor. Not to mention that in a plantation society, a military vocation was often the best honorable alternative to being a great planter or a firebrand politician.
As the issue of slavery became more of a wedge between North and South, Southerners found ways to justify it, calling it a positive good. A major apologist for slavery argued that not only was it a positive good for slaves, who after all—he claimed—were incapable of independent living; but it was also, he argued, the key to honoring Southern women.
In the words of the Rev. Thomas R. Dew of the College of William & Mary: “We behold the marked effects of slavery on the conditions of [White] woman—we find her at once elevated, clothed with all her charms, mingling with and directing the society to which she belongs, no longer the slave but now the equal and idol of man.” [Emphasis added.]
Thus did slavery allegedly emancipate the White Southern woman from tedious household subservience, at least according to the Reverend Day, writing in 1852 but expressing what most slaveholders already chose to believe when it suited them. Of course, most White Southern women did not live in households that owned slaves. In fact, women were not the equals of men, were idols mostly when men needed something to fight over, and were expected to use their real or imagined leisure to instill in their sons the very code of honor that men cherished.
The Reverend Day’s torturous justification of slavery did have the effect of equating Southern womanhood with the survival of slavery, at a time when the South needed all the reasons to sustain the institution that it could find. To denounce slavery was to threaten Southern womanhood, and so it became a matter of honor, that word again, to defend both, and to keep the South as it was, unsullied by crass and commercial Northern dominance. Far from being evil, slavery was essential to maintaining the noble way of life, for what could be nobler than defending womanhood?
Sir Walter Scott, the famous novelist, was already well-known when his book Ivanhoe appeared in 1820. The book conquered the South—or, rather, it spoke romantically to the South in reassuring ways that the South needed.
The novel had it all: the honor of chivalrous knights loyal to virtuous women under duress; the noble heroism, the glory of combat, and a convenient story line that could easily be translated to the American South: just as the Norman knights were far superior to Saxon knaves, so were honorable Southerners superior to the narrow, grasping Northerners who now criticized the Southern way of life.
One aspect of the code of honor, however, was that it was too often dependent on external validation. If it was thought that your wife or daughter had been slighted, you were honor-bound to retaliate, often violently, even if the slight was trivial or even non-existent. Everything depended on appearances. No insult could be borne, compromise was unmanly, the middle way un-heroic. Logic and reason counted for little when honor was a stake. Such was the burden of Southern Romanticism.
So after wandering through the weeds of Southern intellectual history, what, you might ask, does all of this have to do with the Alamo and Goliad?
By way of transition, I want to relate a well-known story about Sam Houston and his mother, which helps to illustrate what I have said up to this point. A Virginian by birth, Sam was nineteen when the War of 1812 broke out. Mostly self-educated and absolutely devoted to Homer’s heroic epic the Iliad, and its vivid story of the Trojan War, Sam no longer wanted only to read about larger-than-life men making their mark in the history of the world, he wanted to be one of those men.
So he informed his mother of his plans to fight in the War. Later, he spoke often of her response: Handing him a musket, she said, “Never disgrace it; for remember, I would rather all my sons should fill one honorable grave, than that one of them should turn back to save his life.”
She then gave her son a plain gold ring. Engraved inside the ring was one word: “Honor.” You may know the rest of the story: Houston fought at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, under the approving eye of Andrew Jackson. Young Sam took a Creek arrow in his upper thigh, then rejoined the fight, leading a charge over breastworks, where musket balls smashed into his shoulder and arm. These were not the last wounds Houston would receive, but they cost him the most: some believe that his first wife, Eliza, who left him after only a few days of marriage, did so in part because of the hideousness of his wounds. Whatever her reasons, Houston would allow no one to question her honor.
We will return to Sam Houston shortly, in order to revisit his reading of Homer, and to explore how that experience might have made him different from the other prominent figures of the Texas Revolution, and how it probably helped him to become a powerful figure in our state’s history.
II. The Age of Romanticism and the Texas Revolution
But now on to the Alamo and Goliad.
The southerners at Goliad, including Colonel James W. Fannin, the commander there, shared the aforementioned romantic impulses, as did many of his men from the North or from Germany and other foreign lands when it came to fighting for freedom. And I believe Fannin wished to be passionate and headstrong in the perceived cause of freedom, as were William Barret Travis and Jim Bowie at the Alamo. All three men had fought duels in the name of honor, whether for other reasons or not; all three men were slaveholders who doubtless would have agreed with the Reverend Day about slavery while often desperately seeking profit and status for themselves. Indeed, Bowie and Fannin were both slave traders, and Fannin upon his arrival in Texas in 1834 immediately sought to expand his illegal business of importing African slaves. Along with their passionate impulses to fight for their idea of freedom was a keen desire to become prosperous, however that could be accomplished.
In The Edge of Freedom, there is an imagined conversation between James Bonham, the famous Alamo courier, and James Fannin, who infamously did not at once order his men to relieve the Alamo. The novel presents a passionate but thoughtful Bonham, a lawyer by profession, speaking eloquently in the voice of the age while urging Fannin to lead his men to the Alamo, while Fannin equivocated over meeting the demands of the age.
Yet when Fannin later answered the impulse to act in defiance of reality, and in the spirit of the age, he did not win the glory he and his men wanted so badly. His eventual effort to march to aid of the Alamo failed miserably, with the inability of his force to ford the San Antonio River because of all the artillery they had brought along. Did they need the artillery? Yes, for otherwise they would have been vulnerable to cavalry attacks, lacking horses themselves. Even knowing all of this, they tried. It was as if they needed to try and fail in order to justify not actually being able to reach the Alamo.
Historians have faulted Fannin for this less than they have for other shortcomings and failures. The main criticism, especially by those who see the Revolution only through a military lens, has been that at a crucial point in March, he divided his force, leading to further delays in leaving the presidio to join Sam Houston at Victoria after the fall of the Alamo was known.
Why did he divide his force? Well, blame it on men convinced that nothing, not military strategy, not the need to preserve the strongest Texian force left in the field, not—surely not—anything so trivial as mere military orders from Sam Houston or anyone else—none of these practical considerations could stand up to the honorable, the chivalrous imperative to march to the aid of a woman in distress.
And such was, or was thought to be, one Louisa Ayers, the wife of the tax collector of Refugio, whom he had left behind, unguarded, with other women and children while he went to Goliad. And this same Mr. Lewis Ayers now enlisted as his knight-errant the former marshal of Refugio, Amon B. King, who himself had been so impatient to join Fannin and his men in Goliad that he had left his town unprotected.
After Mexican irregulars had looted the town, this marshal, now Captain King of the Refugio Militia, and Lewis Ayers demanded that Fannin send troops under King’s vengeful command to rescue the women and children in Refugio. Of course, typical of the chaos of the Texas Revolution, all of this happened just as Fannin received Houston’s order to join him at Victoria.
Now, after all you have read so far about Southern Romanticism and the code of honor, consider this question: What would William B. Travis have done if he had been the commander at Goliad rather than at the Alamo and received word that women and children were in danger from the enemy, barely twenty-five miles away, and in urgent need of rescue? What would Travis have done if he had then learned that the very force he had sent to save those women and children also had to be rescued? What would the age have demanded of Travis? For a Southern commander to have ignored these pleas would have brought dishonor to him and his men. Their code, and their romantic age, demanded action, the consequences be damned. It was all or nothing.
Or, expressed in language more dramatic: “Victory or Death.” Travis’ famous words from the Alamo declared not only the determination to die honorably for a cause but also declared, in the spirit of the age, that nothing mattered but the code—fighting another day be damned; joining a force that might actually achieve victory—be damned. Brute reality, the certainty of annihilation, be damned. There were only the bare, powerful, absolute words of the code: “Victory or Death.” As in a duel, the honor of the Texians had to be preserved; they could not run away, no matter the cost, no matter the odds. And, especially, they could not run away from smaller brown men, many of whose ancestors had been the slaves of Spanish conquerors.
Yet, when Fannin sought to act in the spirit of the age, immortal glory was not the result. The Refugio relief mission not only cost Fannin critical time, but also left him about one hundred men short when he finally met General José de Urrea on the field of battle at Coleto Creek, near Goliad, on March 19, 1836. And on March 20, 1836, when Fannin heard the cries of his wounded and saw the newly-arrived Mexican artillery demolishing his trench work with salvos of grape shot and chain, the all or nothing—victory or death—demands of his age ran smack into a very different reality from the one Travis had faced at the Alamo when the entire garrison would either live or die in a quick, totally decisive battle.
Given the choice of leaving his wounded on the field to die, or waiting, with almost no ammunition remaining, for the Mexicans to kill them with artillery fire, lances, and the sabers of dragoons, Fannin and his officers finally decided that they should try to save the wounded and, possibly, the entire force of 300 men. One can well imagine that rarely was the tension between compassion and the code of honor so great as it was during the deliberations among Fannin and his men on that cold, bleak prairie in 1836.
Pulled both ways, Fannin finally reached an agreement with the Mexican General Urrea, and together they groped for common ground, hoping that a vaguely worded surrender document might buy enough time for Urrea to circumvent the brutal decree of Santa Anna that all Texian captives be executed. Unlike Santa Anna, Urrea was a true soldado, and his brisk, assertive and lethal actions against allegedly superior Anglo combatants was in sharp contrast to later actions of El Presidente. Urrea was no saint; he was far more concerned with waging war than with offering olive branches; and he did order some executions of captured Texian combatants. What is certain is that he could have annihilated Fannin’s force on that prairie near Coleto Creek, probably with relatively few casualties on his side. He held the high ground, and he added artillery and men to his force while Fannin and his battered lay below with little to shield them and almost no ammunition.
I believe that both men deserve our respect for rising above the impulses of the age to fashion an imperfect and in some ways a shrewd compromise meant to save lives. At least as flawed in his character as Bowie and Travis, Fannin's finest moment was not his unquestionably brave conduct in battle. His moment arrived when he tried to save his men. But, because he and Urrea made a pragmatic twenty-first century decision on a nineteenth century battlefield, their efforts to save lives, and the efforts of Francita Alavez, the real Angel of Goliad, and others on the Mexican side, have not received the recognition that they deserve. While their age tended to ignore ambiguities, our own complex age should be able to understand them.
Many Texans view the Alamo as a glorious sacrifice in the cause of freedom, but Goliad for most recalls an episode burdened with blunders and tragedy. While we honor those who were killed in Goliad 186 years ago, let us honor as well what men and women on both sides tried to do before the slaughter of Fannin and almost all of his men took place on Palm Sunday, 1836.
So this is what my interest in the dialogue between James Bonham, the Alamo courier, and James Fannin, the commander at Goliad, has sought: to understand the passions of the age, to find out not only what the men might have said, but to explore, through the techniques of fiction and extensive historical research, why they said what they said, and to glimpse some of the cultural currents in their historic moment.
Finally, I want to return to Sam Houston, and his well-known fascination with Homer’s Iliad. The first two lines of the Iliad are these:
“Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles
“The accursed rage that brought great suffering to the [Greeks].”
For it was the rage and impulsive actions of Achilles that led to even more killing, of his own people, of the Trojans, of Hector, and then to the terrible destruction of Troy—and all because Achilles felt that Agamemnon had violated his honor. Achilles, instead of placing the needs of his people first, indulged a personal hatred and thereby failed to achieve the highest honor, which owes its first allegiance to something beyond the self. There is no real glory for the hero without this higher purpose.
So it was that Sam Houston, grown to early middle age, did not surrender to rage, impulse, or pride, or follow his personal siren song into the haven of seclusion, but instead endured insults and hints at his lack of courage in order to fight another day after the Runaway Scrape; and on that other day, April 21, 1836, at the battle of San Jacinto, he won. He was a man who cared less for appearances at that stage of his life than he did for his country. Even the name, Runaway Scrape, shows what many believed about Sam Houston before his shocking victory. Tragically for Texas, Houston’s new republic quickly became a slaveholding nation, one that was dying by 1845 after Great Britain, its biggest importer of cotton, boycotted Texas exports because of slavery. Then in February 1861, despite the Unionist Sam Houston’s attempts to prevent it, the state of Texas seceded from the Union, once again throwing in its lot with the cause of preserving slavery.
Houston and other Unionists could not prevent secession. Yet he foresaw the folly of yielding to the emotions of the moment, when Texas fell in line with Southern firebrands from South Carolina and other states that seceded earlier. Yes, Houston was a Romantic in some ways, like the more extreme figures of the Revolution; but he was a Romantic with the wisdom of the ancients fixed in his brain, a Romantic who knew not only the greatness that individuals may achieve but also the terrible consequences that often ensue when human passions rule.
And after that day at San Jacinto, though wounded yet again, he refused to let his passions control him and rejected imprudent demands from his men. He spared Santa Anna, and by sparing him and obtaining a pledge that all Mexican forces would leave Texas, he never had to fight General José de Urrea, a real soldier, unlike Santa Anna—and no Romantic himself, but a man who, with equal or superior force, might have won a more extended war.
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