Alamo Historic Site

DATE Founded in 1718; under siege from February 23–March 6, 1836

SIGNIFICANCE: First founded as a Franciscan mission in 1718, the compound known as the Alamo is famous for the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, in which a small force of Texans defended it for two weeks against a much larger Mexican army. Though the defenders were defeated, the battle catalyzed the Texas Revolution and later became mythologized in American popular culture.

LOCALE: Alamo Plaza, downtown San Antonio between Commerce and Houston Streets

The Alamo was the site of one of the most dramatic battles ever fought, the Battle of the Alamo, but it was never intended to be a military fortress. In 1718, Spanish Franciscans living in Mexico sent Father Antonio Olivares to the San Antonio River with the purpose of starting a mission in what was then Mexican territory. With the authority of Don Martin de Alarcón, military governor of Texas, Olivares established a site for a fort and village. Seventy-two settlers, priests, and soldiers migrated to the area from Mexico, and built a mission named after San Antonio de Valero, the viceroy of Mexico.

Early History

The Valero mission was founded in May, 1718, along with the village of San Antonio de Bexar, 400 yards west, and the smaller Villa Bexar to the south. The mission would not be known as the Alamo until one hundred years later, when Spanish troops from Alamo de Parras named the mission after their hometown. The construction of the present Alamo began in 1756, after a hurricane and fire destroyed the first stone church in 1744.

Between 1680 and 1793, Spain founded thirty-six missions in Texas for the purpose of expanding its religious and political influence. For several decades the Franciscan friars used the Valero mission as a place to convert local Native Americans to Catholicism. The Payaya and Coahuiltecan tribes faced serious threats from the Apache, who were in turn being pushed south by the Comanche of the high plains. Disease and the Comanche decimated the mission’s farming population and livestock, so the Franciscans moved their efforts to a nearby church in 1793. By this date San Antonio had developed into the most important frontier outpost and the provincial capital of Texas.

Texas Independence Movement

A group called the American Volunteers tried to make Texas a republic in 1813, issuing a Declaration of Independence based on the US model. Their efforts were short-lived; a Mexican republican named Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara rejected the Declaration and issued a Mexican Constitution. During this period before the Texas Revolution, the Spanish army used the Alamo mission as a barracks and armory.

The story of the stand at the Alamo begins with slavery. Stephen Fuller Austin led American settlers into Texas after Mexican authorities decided this move would help drive Native Americans out of the territory. By 1830, twenty thousand of these settlers had answered the call to cheap, fertile land in Texas. Many of these Americans were enslavers, however, a practice prohibited by the Mexican government. In 1834, after Austin requested independence for his slaveowning Texans as a preliminary action to joining the United States, he was arrested and jailed by Mexico. President General Antonio López de Santa Anna of Mexico then ordered immediate acceptance of his unified constitution for Mexico and its territories.

Until 1835–36, many Texans were divided over the issue of independence from Mexico. The Consultation of November, 1835, at San Felipe compromised, with delegates electing a legislative council that favored making Texas a self-governing Mexican state, but vesting executive authority in Governor Henry Smith, an advocate of independence. The Texan revolt against Mexico in 1835 was a reaction to the governance of Santa Anna, who revoked several rights of the 1824 Mexican Constitution. After years of disagreement, Texans chose to secede.

Battle of the Alamo

In San Antonio de Béxar, Colonel Benjamin Rush Milam and three hundred Texan volunteers arose against the Mexican garrison under General Martín Perfecto de Cós (December 5–10, 1835). When Cós surrendered, Milam’s men occupied the Alamo and enhanced its fortifications. Colonel James C. Neill took command of the Alamo’s garrison of about one hundred men on December 21.

Acting as emissary and military attaché for Governor Henry Smith and General Sam Houston, Colonel Jim Bowie arrived in San Antonio on January 19, 1836. Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis came with thirty more men on February 2. Colonel Davy Crockett brought about twenty Tennesseans on February 8. With Neill on temporary furlough, Travis and Bowie decided to share command on February 14.

Santa Anna and his army arrived in Béxar on February 23 and immediately began bombarding the Alamo. The Mexicans had hundreds of field pieces, but no heavy siege guns. The Alamo had fourteen smoothbore cannons, the largest an eighteen pounder. When Santa Anna demanded unconditional surrender on the first day of the siege, Travis answered with a blast from that gun. Santa Anna ordered continuous bombardment.

Travis assumed sole command on February 24 when Bowie fell ill with fever, perhaps pneumonia or tuberculosis, and was incapacitated for the rest of the siege. That day Travis wrote a famous letter promising that he would never surrender but begging for help. The Mexican circle around the Alamo was not tight. Messengers could come and go fairly easily, and the Texans could make night raids against the Mexicans. Even reinforcements could get in. The last reinforcements to arrive was a group of men from Gonzales on March 1.

An unverifiable tradition says that Travis, on March 3, having accepted that he would get no aid from either Colonel James W. Fannin at Goliad or Houston at Washington-on-the-Brazos, drew a line in the sand on the parade ground with his sword and asked all who chose to die with him to cross it. All but one, Louis Rose, crossed. Bowie, too weak to move, had to be carried across. That night, the tradition continues, Crockett helped Rose escape. However, like many reported details from the battle, these stories are highly mythologized and there are varying accounts of what actually occurred.

By the twelfth day of shelling (March 5), Santa Anna had become impatient. He announced that his troops would storm the Alamo at dawn. His officers advised waiting because the walls were about to crumble, the north wall was already breached, and the Texans would soon run out of food and ammunition. Few men on either side had yet been killed, but a direct assault would result in considerable Mexican casualties. Santa Anna overruled all these objections.

At 4:00 a.m. the next morning the first wave attacked. Antipersonnel charges from the Alamo’s cannons took their toll as did the sharpshooters on the parapets. The first two waves retreated with heavy losses, but the third wave succeeded in scaling the west wall. Thereafter the fighting was hand-to-hand. Within ninety minutes, all the defenders were dead. Estimates of Mexican casualties range from 600 to 1,500.

Members of the Garrison

The Alamo’s garrison was small throughout the famous battle. Most historians place the final number around 183, though there may have been as many as 260 present at various points. They differed in nationality and profession; some were city dwellers, others roamed the frontier. Bowie, Crockett, and Travis were the most famous defenders and would be most mythologized over the years.

Historically, most popular attention to the Alamo has focused on the Anglo-American Texans, often called Texians, defending the mission. However, a considerable number of the defenders were Tejanos, or Hispanic residents of Texas. Indeed, Tejanos played an important part in the Texas Revolution overall. Yet racial prejudice meant their role was often underestimated or even left out completely in both contemporary accounts and later histories. For example, Travis wrote a letter claiming only three "Mexicans" had joined the force in the Alamo, and said that all other residents of San Antonio were enemies.

Historians have since shown strong evidence that there were in fact many Tejanos involved in the Alamo defense in some capacity. Though exact numbers are difficult to pin down, at least eight are known from final casualty counts. Other Tejano defenders served as couriers, leaving the Alamo to deliver messages. Best known among these was Juan Seguín, an officer in the Texan army who would later play a key role in the Battle of San Jacinto and the early Texas Republic. Seguín had joined the defenders with a small company of men on February 23, but he missed the battle after being sent out to deliver Travis's defiant letter. Some historians believe that some of Seguín's Tejano troops were able to leave the Alamo during a brief ceasefire halfway through the siege, though there is no decisive documentation.

Several noncombatant in the Alamo during the battle were spared, including Bowie’s two sisters-in-law; the widow of Gregorio Esparza and her four children; other Tejano women and children; and Joe, who was enslaved by Travis. Joe and Susanna Dickinson (the wife of Texian defender Almaron Dickinson) were later sent by Santa Anna to Gonzales to spread word of the consequences of resistance. Santa Anna also offered to adopt Dickinson's daughter, but was refused.

Legacy of the Battle

A giant funeral fire in the Alamo’s plaza served as the burial ground for at least 183 Texans. Though Santa Anna tried to conceal the modest number of men who had resisted his forces, claiming six hundred Texans and seventy Mexicans were killed, the harm inflicted at the Alamo would soon be evident. Regardless of the Mexican casualties, a small group of Texans had delayed Santa Anna’s advancing army for two weeks. Traditionally, historians have suggested that their stand provided General Sam Houston with enough time to mobilize his army, though others have doubted whether this timing really had an impact.

Most importantly, the slaughter in San Antonio enraged Americans as no victory could have. News of Travis’s messages for help inflamed emotions and guilt. Soldiers from Goliad and elsewhere were shamed by their failure to answer the call. William Gray predicted that “Texas will take honor to herself for defense of the Alamo and will call it a second Thermopylae, but it will be an everlasting monument of national disgrace.”

Seven weeks after the Alamo, Gray’s prophesy rang true as an army of less than a thousand Texans decisively defeated Mexican forces at the Battle of San Jacinto. Late in the afternoon of April 21, as they swept the ranks of Santa Anna, Houston’s army finally responded to Travis with the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo.” After a battle that killed more than six hundred Mexicans and only a handful of Texans, Santa Anna and about six hundred fifty soldiers were taken prisoner. Some four thousand Mexican troops retreated to Mexico and Texas won its independence. Texas remained independent for nearly a decade, with its entrance into the United States delayed by controversy surrounding admission of another slaveholding state. Finally, on December 29, 1845, it became the twenty-eighth state of the Union.

The Alamo in Later Years

The US Army renovated the buildings at the Alamo in 1849. They went through a variety of uses in subsequent years. A store was built over the long barracks in 1876, and the church, sold to the state of Texas in 1883, was used as a warehouse. In 1903 the long barracks property was put up for sale as a hotel site. To prevent the sale, Clara Driscoll, a member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, bought the property.

In 1905, the state repaid Driscoll and turned all the Alamo buildings and grounds over to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), to maintain and operate as long as the group could do so at no cost to the state. The group turned the former church into a shrine to those who died in the battle, and made the long barracks into a museum. These are the only original structures remaining.

In 2010, a complaint was lodged with the office of the Texas Attorney General that the DRT was mismanaging the site and had been using funds designated for its maintenance for other purposes, resulting in the historic buildings being in poor condition. A two-year investigation ended with the Attorney General's office declaring that the DRT had indeed mismanaged state funds and failed to keep the Alamo in good order and repair. In 2011, while the investigation was still ongoing, a state law was passed to transfer custodianship of the Alamo to the Texas General Land Office; this transfer officially took place in 2015. In October of that year, the state announced that it would be purchasing three more historic buildings on the Alamo Plaza to expand the historical site. They also planned to build a museum and to move the shrine offsite; the latter proposition angered some locals, who felt that this was disrespectful to the memories of those who died.

The Alamo was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015, becoming one of the first sites in the state of Texas to be so designated, along with four other missions in San Antonio.

While the Battle of the Alamo became a celebrated episode in American history and the Alamo Historic Site became a popular tourist attraction, controversy has also arisen around the battle and its memorial. Many historians have challenged the popular conception of heroic Texian defenders fighting for freedom against cruel Mexican forces, noting that the Texas Revolution as a whole was driven primarily by pro-slavery sentiment. In the 2010s and 2020s, increasing public attention to issues of social justice and racism led to much debate over monuments celebrating racist historical figures, including Confederate statues as well as the Alamo. While critics sought to contextualize such monuments and emphasize historical accuracy over romanticized mythology, a backlash arose among conservatives who saw this as unpatriotic. In May 2020, social justice protesters gathered at Alamo Plaza and were confronted by armed counterprotesters. In June 2021 the Texas state government passed a law establishing the 1836 Project, a program dedicated to instilling "patriotic education" and "Texas values," which critics called a reactionary move meant to obscure the historical impact of slavery.

Bibliography

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Hardin, Stephen L. "Alamo, Battle of the." Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, 29 July 2020, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/alamo-battle-of-the. Accessed 17 Dec. 2021.

Hoyt, Edwin P. The Alamo: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor, 1999.

Hutton, Paul Andrew. “The Alamo: An American Epic.” American History Illustrated, March, 1986.

Lord, Walter. A Time to Stand: The Epic of the Alamo. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

Montgomery, David. "'Forget the Alamo' Depicts a Racist Heritage, Sparking Backlash." Pew, 14 Sept. 2021, www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2021/09/14/forget-the-alamo-depicts-a-racist-heritage-sparking-backlash. Accessed 4 June 2024.

Nevins, David. Texans. New York: Time-Life Books, 1975.

Williams, Amelia W., and R. Matt Abigail. "Alamo." Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, 8 May 2018, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/alamo. Accessed 4 June 2024.