Quote of the Day (Davy Crockett, on Hell and Texas)

“Since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”—Defeated Tennessee Congressman David Crockett, in his farewell to constituents at the Union Hotel Bar in Memphis, quoted in J. R. Edmondson, The Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts (2000)

It galled David Crockett ("Davy" to posterity) that he lost to Adam Huntsman, a one-legged lawyer supported by President Andrew Jackson and Gov. William Carroll, by less than three hundred votes. But typical of his talent for raw but effective storytelling, he turned it into a crowd-pleasing anecdote, which he duly recited to an appreciative audience upon arriving in Nacogdoches, Texas, on or about this date in 1836.

Savagely disillusioned with politics (the Whigs had hoped to run him for President), Crockett had come to Texas in the hope of turning around his life, much as another Tennessean (who unlike him, remained on good terms with Jackson), Sam Houston, had done—though he wanted instead to make his fortune as a land agent.

The ex-Congressman and frontiersman was right about a revolution being in the offing in this Mexican-held land, but he was wrong about his long-term prospects. Two months later, he fell at the Alamo and, like everyone else in that garrison, passed into legend.

I used the phrase “passed into legend” in that last sentence, but it might have been just as correct to write “became part of an endless controversy,” for the arguments involving Crockett after that became even more contentious than what had already happened back in his home state, when he became the only member of Tennessee’s Congressional delegation to vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act.

Did he go down fighting the overwhelming forces of Mexican dictator Santa Ana? Or was he executed after having surrendered? The latter interpretation has endured, based on the alleged eyewitness account of a Mexican officer who was there.(For an examination, pro and con, see this piece by Michael Lind in the Winter 1998 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.)

Crockett—and Alamo—partisans fiercely disclaim that any such thing occurred. Who knows when, if ever, the dispute will be resolved?

This Day in Texas History (Independence Won at San Jacinto)

April 21, 1836--For a fight whose great rallying cry was “Remember the Alamo!”, the Battle of San Jacinto did not gain anywhere near the same amount of ink--not to mention screen time, or encrusted myths--as the desperate struggle that took the lives of William Barret Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and their small band of Texans.

But Sam Houston’s victory over the Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna—an almost exact reversal reversal of the results in San Antonio six weeks earlier--was arguably more momentous than the earlier battle. It lifted Houston--who had suddenly resigned in 1829 as governor of Tennessee, in a mystery that reeked of scandal and sent him into an alcoholic tailspin and exile among Indians--higher than he had ever risen previously. Over the next two and a half decades, he would not only occupy the most important posts of the republic and state of Texas, but even be discussed plausibly as a potential Presidential candidate.

More important, the win by the norteamericanos marked the opening salvo in the trans-Mississippi region of manifest destiny--the belief that it was the mission of the United States to become, in the Jeffersonian phrase, an “empire of liberty” from sea to sea. In the deepest of ironies, the anglos who settled in Texas and claimed to be fighting for freedom introduced slavery into a region where it had been banned by the young nation of Mexico. The United States, once (mostly) content to expand by treaty or annexation, would now do so increasingly through conquest--first of Mexicans, then of Native-Americans.

In certain ways, Houston’s victory over Santa Anna can be likened to British general James Wolfe’s over France’s Louis Montcalm at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 (discussed in this prior post of mine):

* Both losing armies were surprised--the French, discovering at dawn that the British had managed to scale the seemingly impregnable cliff in the way of Quebec; the Mexicans, by an assault during their mid-afternoon siesta.

* Both losing generals committed grave mistakes bred by overconfidence: Montcalm, in believing that “We need not believe the enemy has wings!”; Santa Anna, by dividing, in the days before battle, his force, contemptuously dismissing Texans that not only had been retreating for the past month, but whose compatriots he had already defeated at the Alamo and Goliad.

* Both battles were decided within a half hour.

* Both victorious generals were wounded: Houston, in his ankle; Wolfe, three times, the last fatally in the chest.

* Both battles sharply reduced the territories under the sway of the non-Anglo losers. France lost Canada to Great Britain and would never get it back, even after it helped America win its independence. Similarly, Mexico not only lost Texas but, in a war fought a decade later over unresolved tensions from the Texas War of Independence, it would also lose what is now the American Southwest.

* Both Anglo victorious forces might, in hindsight, have wondered if the results of the battle really justified what happened. Having expended blood and fortune to secure an overseas empire, the British were astonished when their American colonists rebelled at shouldering the fiscal costs. What followed was a fratricidal conflict. Six decades later, many Southerners, emboldened by the win at San Jacinto, began to push for the expansion of slavery elsewhere--not just in Texas or even in the American Southwest, but also in Cuba, even as far south as Costa Rica and Nicaragua, both of which fought off attempts by the American filibuster William Walker to seize them by force in the hope of turning them into slave states. That insatiable desire to spread slavery proved to be the last straw for the great mass of Northerners who might not have been sympathetic to the horrifying plight of African-American slaves, but who very much feared the undermining of their own free labor by the “peculiar institution.” The result--the Civil War--was an even bloodier, more fratricidal conflict than the American Revolution.

After all this, you might regard me as a revisionist when it comes to American history--someone like historian-novelist Jeff Long, who, in his account of the Alamo, Duel of Eagles, saw San Jacinto as an atrocity story. (The Texans continued to kill the Mexicans even after the battle was over. )

But I reject the term “revisionist” for myself, and not simply because I resist labeling. History might not be entirely black and white, but neither is it a matter of moral relativism.

Texans might not have been the simple freedom fighters of legend, but their cause and methods were still better than the man who sought to crush them. Santa Anna, who liked to see himself as the “Napoleon of the West,” was in fact a pioneering caudillo, the kind of strongman who has seized and held power throughout much of Latin America for decades. He could have been the George Washington of his country, setting it on a path of stability and continuing improvement. Instead, his greed and lust for power sent Mexico hurtling back and forth, across the decades, between anarchy and dictatorship.

In contrast, Santa Anna’s opponent grew in stature and greatness over time. Houston could have had his foe put to death, the way the cruel Santa Anna had done at the Goliad Massacre and after the last few defenders of the Alamo had surrendered. He did not.

Moreover, Houston not only learned to conquer his own temptation toward alcohol, but voiced dismay to his fellow Texans about the dangers of yielding to their own temptation: expansion that inflamed relations with Native-Americans and Northerners. The history of his state and his country would have been altogether different if his advice had been heeded.