Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Alamo accounts

I have been reading Eyewitness to the Alamo and coming to the conclusion that the history we have of wars and battles has to rely on reports and eyewitness accounts of what the participant experienced. Cross checking other witnesses and the official reports are all that a historian can rely upon to reconstruct an engagement. How often is the eyewitness covering for himself or someone else? How often is the report motivated by a desire to extol the virtues of the honored dead over revealing the truth of human frailty?

The Alamo is a mystery because the survivors did not see most of the combat and had obvious interest in not revealing anything that might dishonor the dead. The other witnesses were the enemies of the defenders and had motivation to extol their own prowess and righteousness of their cause and the villainy of the rebellious elements.

The timing of the accounts also bears upon the content and the thesis behind the story. This can be seen in the changing narrative given over a forty year period of Susana Dickinson, wife of Lt. Dickinson who died in the Alamo and who was found hiding in an inner room in one of the mission apartments. Her story changed in certain ways given the period of time that spanned her recorded testimony. Certain names changed here or there, some of the events changed or were dropped. But, her thesis never changed: all of the defenders died for God and country and none but one man asked for quarter. Hers and the slave of Travis and two local women are the only non-combatant testimonies we have. Did her husband really come in one last time, declare the enemy had breached the walls and bid her adieu, brandish his sword and charge back out into the fray? No other testimony is present to corroborate the actions of the defenders during the battle save for recollections of the Mexican participants who claim to have seen certain corpses of Travis and Bowie and alternately of Crocket who either died fighting or died by execution.

The Mexican accounts also range over the decades and were usually printed second or third hand thus leaving much to question of their validity and accuracy. The official reports give low casualty estimates and latter reports give overly high estimates. Some accounts had as thesis the evilness of Santa Anna in a bid to keep him in prison and others even to the heroism of the Texians. Did Crocket really die fighting as Dickinson swears or was he executed as other accounts state? Did 60 men attempt to escape after the breaching of the walls as some Mexican accounts state or did only one man ask for quarter? We will never know, for the Alamo is a symbol and that symbol was a rallying cry steeped in emotion. Why would not Santa Anna quarter to rebels and insurgents who were rebelling against the official government of Mexico? Much has been made of his refusal to give quarter and based on the account and when it was given that refusal was seen in the light of eventual Texan victory.

We will never know what really happened in the Alamo from the Texian point of view for no one who saw it lived to give an account. The enemy accounts are the only ones we have and they are suspect, just as suspect as the civilian accounts of the aftermath.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Alamo


I don't stray very far from WWII or Civil War history in my studying/research, but my wife and I are on vacation this week in San Antonio and of course we had to go to the Alamo. Time and development have not been kind on this significant location. Now, it is an old Mission and no building can survive the ware of time with grace, but this one has had only limited preservation given the significance of the legend and place some of the names hold in our lexicon of heros.


The chapel ediface is the only real part of the Alamo that still stands, other buildings have been re-created and turned into museum space, but of all that still stands it is the most recognizable as an old mission church.


Because the site is run by the Daughters of the Texas Revolution, I was given a renewed appreciation of the NPS run civil war battle sites. The museum portion did lay out the events that lead up to the siege and fall of the Alamo garrison. The story sticks to what is generally accepted as indesputed fact. The Alamo was garrisoned by at least 147 men (could have been as many as 300 but due to the militia nature of its primary defenders there are records to account for only the 147 known), was besieged and was attacked and its defenders wiped out to a man.


From just a casual observer, one would wonder that anyone besides Jim Bowie, William Travis, and Davey Crocket were the only ones present and of those Davey Crocket must have been the most important. The DTR does little to speak to historical realities but instead would rather feed the sense that Crocket was the saving grace and saint of the whole episode. While Crocket was a personage of fame in his own time, he looms larger than the role he actually played in the battle. This then brings to bear an uncomfortable situation for an historian. We need heroes, they remind us that regular people can do or participate in extrodinary deeds. But, is Crocket really the hero of the Alamo? I like John Wayne, but his version and vision of Crocket loomed large in his making of The Alamo. The heroic death where he blows himself and a handful of Mexican soldiers with him, the story of attacks beaten off at incredible odds before they finally overrun the defenses is a fiction. Yet, how many, myself included until I undertook independant study, have this very series of events as our understanding of what really happened?


In the shrine, the now covered ediface of the chapel, are a few personal items on display belonging to Travis and a few other officers as well as Crocket. Yet, by far the Crocket memorabilia and artifacts are the mainstay of the display. In the gift shop John Wayne's face emblazons many curios. Wayne has probably done more for Davey Crocket than Fess Parker and probably more for the DTR and the Alamo than anyone.


I did pick up Bill Groneman's "Eyewitness to the Alamo" at the Tower of the America's gift shop and read through Paul Hutton's forward to the book. I studied under Hutton at UNM and remember his relating how he began recieving hate mail after writing an article defending the Pena diary description relating that Crocket was one of a number of survivors who surrendered and were executed after the battle. I'm curious to read this book as Groneman is on the opposite side of the debate as to how credible the Pena diary is.


So, again, the delimma. Should people know the truth even though it challenges a myth and legend? How much should that myth be allowed to stay because it does speak to our need to see something good and noble about our history?

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Shiloh campaign

Any understanding of the battle of Shiloh must first start with the strategic situation in Tennessee in early 1862. For this, I turn to the man named second in command to Albert Sidney Johnston, the hero of Fort Sumter, P.G.T. Beauregard. In an article written for the New Century Magazine, Beauregard relates how he came to be transferred to the west and his role in the Shiloh campaign. At times self serving in his own praise (a malady all prominent generals seem to share when attempting to explain their role in history) Beauregard was in a position to know the greater strategic plans of Johnston and, as he over and over states, to suggest alternate plans.

Early in 1862, the battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky which ended in the defeat of George B Crittenden and death of Confederate general Felix Zollicoffer ended an early attempt to secure Kentucky for the Confederacy and left open middle Tennessee to federal incursion. As Beauregard prepared to accept his new command, that of all of the troops then located in Columbus, Tennessee, he faced a force under federal general Don Carlos Buell of (an exaggeration) 75,000 men then 40 miles outside of Bowling Green, Kentucky. General U.S. Grant had 20,000 men at Cairo, Illinois poised to move on Forts Henry and Donelson, and a force of 30,000 men under Pope in southern Missouri. In all, including such troops as present in middle and southern Missouri under General Henry W. Halleck, about 125,000 federals threatening the department of the west. Opposing them are 45,000 Confederates distributed as follows: 14,000 with A.S. Johnston at Bowling Green, Kentucky; 5,500 at Forts Henry and Donelson, 8,000 in Clarskville, Tennessee; and 15,000 in West Tennessee and Kentucky under General Leonidas Polk. Spread out and under supplied/equipped the Confederates in Tennessee and Kentucky were holding a line hundreds of miles long and split between holding the river ways open and protecting Nashville's intersecting lines of railroad connections to other points south and west.

Of immediate danger to the whole of the positions in Tennessee was the river line of forts protecting the river communications on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers meaning the fall of either the impossibility of holding on to both Bowling Green, Kentucky and Columbus, Tennessee. Failure to hold on to those forts would mean the abandonment of all of Tennessee to the federals and another defeat for the confederacy in the west. According to Beauregard, Grant's little force of 20,000 threatened the whole of the Confederate positions by his moves towards Fort Henry. Soon, Forts Henry and Donelson would fall. Beauregard attempted to persuade Johnston to abandon Bowling Green and tighten up the defenses on the forts instead of waiting to see if Grant could take them, by which evidence it was clear that he would given the poor state of both forts defensive measures and positions. Of course, Beauregard is writing this some twenty years after the war and without Johnston to rebut his claims. Hindsight is always 20/20.

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