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.

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