Like Gen. Sam Houston, suspect we too will be saved by the young ones...ps: my boys grew up in Bandera, and we regularly "paid our respects" at the Alamo. Wonderful analogy!
One of the great battles we're fighting is against transnational organized crime, which has gained enough power in the last 100 years to take over nations. IMHO Russia is a captured nation and there are others. Dark money and military psyops are some of the most dangerous elements in our world at the moment.
Really? You're using the Texas chauvinist Alamo myth to compare Texas to Ukraine? Having got the premise backwards, the conclusion is necessarily suspect. Thanks a lot.
Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but the glorious battle of the Alamo has been whitewashed here. Davey Crockett, Sam Houston, & their fellow fighters were fighting to preserve slavery in a part of Mexico, which subsequently became Texas.
At the time of this battle, what is now Texas was a part of Mexico. The Mexican government wanted to ban slavery. Many of the Americans who settled there grew cotton, & owned slaves, & were opposed to giving up ownership of their slaves, so ignored the law. Santa Anna & the Mexican cavalry rode north to enforce the law. This is the setting for the battle.
Of course, it is more complicated than my greatly condensed version here, but this piece of history is more myth than fact. Feel free to research it; there are books, interviews, & articles which verify these facts.
Sadly, this is not the only piece of our American history which puts a spin on what happened to make our history more glorious than it actually was.
I figured this would stir up an ant bed. Yes, there were some 5,000 slaves out of the some 36,000 settlers in Texas. But Santa Anna's declaration of being an emperor for life cut the heart out of the Mexican Revolution fighting against the landed owner class, first Spanish and then Mexican, that was an endemic slavery system—not via ownership per se but by ownership of the best land for sustenance, an economic form of peonage that was the same as much of Europe had endured for centuries with nobility and serfs. Spain and then Mexico rode the backs of peons to develop food sources and state-owned mining, especially around Chihuahua. The Native American uprisings in New Mexico, especially the Pueblos, and the seizure of herds of Spanish horses would change the whole military dynamic of the region and eventually all the Plains, giving birth to the Comanche who would own most of Texas for over a century, from the mid 1700s.
Santa Anna was a turncoat to the Mexican people, pretending to be for liberal land allocation in the early years as a vice-president, and then turning in favor of the Planter class, becoming a dictator for their purposes.
However, to get the the problem of slavery, you have to have the freedom to make that choice. So, when Santa Anna declared the 1824 Mexican Constitution null and void, Stephen F. Austin went to Mexico City to protest the action. He was thrown in prison by Santa Anna for his efforts even though he and his father (deceased by then) were Spanish and then Mexican citizens who had been working lead mines in upper Louisiana—modern day Missouri. When Austin return to Texas in late 1835, he declared in a letter read in Brazoria at the inn of Jane Long, the Mother of Texas, that "...our only recourse is war." That was the start of the revolution.
Slavery was an endemic situation of the South, in 1836 and it really wasn't a consideration in the Texas Revolution. Even if there had been no slaves, the situation would have occurred. You can't get to Problem B (slavery) without solving Problem A (freedom). The present often paints with a very broad brush.
What I wrote was about the emotional impact of the Alamo, but I'm quite aware of the nature of slavery itself. I'm also aware that the USA has never seriously addressed the severe class structures in Mexico and central America; in fact, Americans took advantage of it and still do (see United Fruit company). O. Henry, when he fled Austin to Honduras due to a little fraud, he noted it succinctly as a 'Banana Republic' in his novel Cabbages and Kings. Right now, the spread between the rich and poor in the USA is in the Banana Republic range.
Problem B is a serious and deeper problem that has existed for centuries and goes directly back to European conquest for us but persists in many forms all over the world. We, the American people, are still trying to solve it. The constant theft of labor in one form or another is one of the world's most serious problems.
I appreciate your response to my comment, as you have fleshed out a lot of the backstory to the battle. In my defense, I did say it was « more complicated than my greatly condensed version », which I will admit was a gross understatement, & any reader truly interested in the history could follow up on that. I agree that Santa Anna was an opportunist who was interested in power.
The issue I have is that slavery was a part of the reason that Texas wished independence from Mexico, just as slavery was a part of the reason that the South fought the Civil War. It was not « States’ Rights » for the Confederacy, except in the sense that the states wanted the right to own slaves. I feel if this reason is not at least mentioned that we are doing a disservice to the readers. Note that the 1860 census recorded 182,566 slaves in Texas, 24 years after the Battle of the Alamo.
Thanks for the consideration. As this was a rather letter form meditation on a time and place more than a real history piece, I did pass over much of the history. Mexico banned slavery in 1829; Father Hidalgo actually banned it as part of the Mexican revolution in 1821. However, the formal ban in 1829 was never ever enforced in Texas, so there was no real issue there for the settlers; it was explicitly about freedom and the 1824 Constitution Santa Anna revoked. However, in 1837 the Mexican Congress finally did formally ban slavery in lieu of the earlier edicts and proclamations.
Settlers did flock to Texas from the South after the Revolution but almost all were confined to East Texas and coastal plains where cotton was easier to grow due to rich soils and good rainfall, but there was a stark line along the Colorado River from Austin northward and to the southwest which was all Comanche territory and that frontier was incredibly dangerous to individuals and small groups.
As a further geologic note, there is a spot in Austin where Redbud trail crosses the Colorado River which is considered the geological point where the West begins. East Texas is very much the Ole South in many ways even today.
The Comanches and their allies the Kiowa controlled a territory that was north from Austin through Ft. Worth, into Oklahoma and southern Kansas, east to Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River, going south on the eastern side of the Pecos in New Mexico and into northern Mexico. They depopulated northern Mexico a couple of times. They held this from the early to mid-1700s to 1870s (and the breakouts later: 1873 and '76) or so, for over a century. 'Empire of the Summer Moon' is a quite readable and well researched 2010 book on their history.
The Austin colony was conceived as a buffer to the Comanches but wound being too far east of their territory to do much good. The settlers actually traded with them and things were 'relatively' peaceful until the summer of 1836 when all hell broke loose after the raid that captured Cynthia Anne Parker and her brother.
The epilogue is that there is a certain romantic lure of Comanche warriors and the freedom they had that exists today, a reflection of another time and place from afar.
I don't know if I'm correct, but these issues are complex and deep. There is a serious amount of history where I live that has allowed me to get some deeper perspective and find some balance between these issues and emotions. Thanks for reading, neighbor.
Thanks. I realize our sense of place is sometimes outsized but often that is simply the scale. There once was a road sign coming out of Austin going west on open highway (Tx71/290) that simply said: El Paso 519.
I was born in Texas in 1947 and have lived in Texas my whole life. I spent most of my growing-up years in Gonzales (the town mentioned by William Becker) from which the "immortal 32" volunteers left to meet their destiny at the Alamo.
Gonzales also celebrates itself as "the Lexington of Texas," since presumably the first shot of the Texas Revolution was fired near Gonzales during a skirmish between Anglo settlers and Mexican soldiers disputing possession of a small cannon. (The settlers buried it in a peach orchard.) A flag created for the occasion featured a cannon and defiant words: "Come and Take It." The event is celebrated every year in Gonzales on October 2 as "Come-and-Take-It Day" complete with parade and selection of a beauty queen.
Also, I always remember the Alamo.
Within the past decade I have experienced a belated awakening to the horrors of this country's history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the continuing mistreatment of people of color. This awakening also includes some adjustment to my understanding of Texas history.
The principle source of this adjustment is the book "Seeds of Empire" (2015), written by Andrew J. Torget, associate professor of history at the University of North Texas. Here is a synopsis:
The story of Texas and slavery begins in England in the late 1700s when the textile industry discovered the popularity of cotton fabrics. The result was a huge demand for cotton, which could be satisfied by cotton plantations in the southern United States along the Gulf Coast. The invention of the cotton gin and the availability of slave labor made the cotton trade extremely lucrative for many people.
In 1819, a financial crisis in the United States bankrupted the owner of a lead mine in Missouri. The owner's name was Moses Austin. Desperate to get out from under crushing debt, Moses Austin devised a plan. He saw the southern United States along the Gulf Coast so saturated with plantations that land for new plantations was hard to find and expensive. But he looked westward and saw the fertile unsettled coastline of Texas. Perhaps he could make a deal with the Spanish government of Mexico.
Mexico had two problems with Texas: (1) It was impossible to maintain control of Texas due primarily to hostile attacks on settlements by indigenous tribes. (2) Without Mexican control of the land, Texas was vulnerable to encroachment and annexation by the United States. Moses Austin proposed to bring 300 families from the United States to settle along the Texas coast. Their presence under the auspices of Mexico would assert Mexican control of the land, they would fight off the hostile tribes, and they wood pre-empt encroachment from the United States. The government of Mexico approved the plan.
Just as his project was getting started in June 1821, Moses Austin died. His son Stephen F. Austin assumed management of the project.
Stephen F. Austin understood that the success of the plan depended on offering settlers large inexpensive tracts of fertile land on which they could grow cotton using the labor of enslaved people. He arranged for this opportunity to be promoted in newspapers throughout the United States.
Austin's plan for distributing the land encouraged men to bring their wives, children, and slaves: In addition to an original grant, each man would receive 200 acres for his wife, 100 acres for each child, and 50 acres for each enslaved person.
The biggest existential threat to Austin's project was the determination, first by the Spanish government of Mexico and subsequently by various Mexican governments, to abolish slavery. Austin wrote, "The primary product that will elevate us from poverty is Cotton, and we cannot do this without slaves."
In 1821, Mexico won its war for independence from Spain. Leaders of the revolution, sympathetic with values of the Enlightenment, saw enslavement as inconsistent with the natural rights of man. In spring 1822, Stephen F. Austin made the two thousand mile journey to Mexico City to save his project. According to Andrew Torget, "Stephen F. Austin lobbied with ferocity on behalf of his colony, meeting personally with legislators to stress that opening northeastern Mexico to American colonization depended on ensuring that slavery remained legal in Texas." The best deal Austin could get was the continuation of slavery for a while, but calling for its eventual abolition.
Between 1820 and 1835, Mexico experienced a turbulent assortment of governments, each of which to some degree supported the abolition of slavery. Throughout those years, Stephen F. Austin and his friends exerted themselves mightily to ward off that eventuality.
They suffered a major blow in September 1828 when President Vicente Guerrero declared an end to slavery throughout all of Mexico. There was instant fury and backlash from the Texans.
The following paragraph is an excerpt from Torget's book:
Colonel Jose de las Piedras, the Mexican military commander of Nacogdoches ... advised against any attempt to enforce the decree. "There is no inhabitant of this frontier who does not have some negroes," he cautioned in a letter to San Antonio, warning that without their slaves the settlers "would be reduced to the ultimate state of misery." The more pressing issue, feared the colonel, was that any effort to free the slaves in Texas would push the colonists into outright insurrection, and he urged state officials to defy the national edict as a means of preserving regional stability. "Many have announced to me that there will be a revolution if the law takes effect," Piedras reported, and he believed the settlers would sooner abandon Mexico than the institution and agriculture it supported. "Austin's colony would be the first to think along these lines," he warned. "It was formed for slavery and without it her inhabitants would be nothing."
Ultimately, President Guerrero issued an exemption for Texas in late 1829. But conflicts did not end, and in six years they culminated in the Texas Revolt.
The Texans said they fought for freedom and independence from Mexico. The freedom they sought was the freedom to own slaves; the independence for which they fought was independence from a government that insisted on the freedom of their slaves.
In 1836, Texas won independence from Mexico and became a republic with slaves. In 1845 Texas was admitted to the United States as a slave state. Texas maintained the institution of slavery until "Juneteenth" of 1865.
Like Gen. Sam Houston, suspect we too will be saved by the young ones...ps: my boys grew up in Bandera, and we regularly "paid our respects" at the Alamo. Wonderful analogy!
Thanks.
Excellent history lesson. And a call-out regarding the mob. Great way to start the day.
One of the great battles we're fighting is against transnational organized crime, which has gained enough power in the last 100 years to take over nations. IMHO Russia is a captured nation and there are others. Dark money and military psyops are some of the most dangerous elements in our world at the moment.
Intense spirituality that is perfect now ty
You're welcome. It was a personal meditation.
Sharing is appreciated
Really? You're using the Texas chauvinist Alamo myth to compare Texas to Ukraine? Having got the premise backwards, the conclusion is necessarily suspect. Thanks a lot.
Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but the glorious battle of the Alamo has been whitewashed here. Davey Crockett, Sam Houston, & their fellow fighters were fighting to preserve slavery in a part of Mexico, which subsequently became Texas.
At the time of this battle, what is now Texas was a part of Mexico. The Mexican government wanted to ban slavery. Many of the Americans who settled there grew cotton, & owned slaves, & were opposed to giving up ownership of their slaves, so ignored the law. Santa Anna & the Mexican cavalry rode north to enforce the law. This is the setting for the battle.
Of course, it is more complicated than my greatly condensed version here, but this piece of history is more myth than fact. Feel free to research it; there are books, interviews, & articles which verify these facts.
Sadly, this is not the only piece of our American history which puts a spin on what happened to make our history more glorious than it actually was.
I figured this would stir up an ant bed. Yes, there were some 5,000 slaves out of the some 36,000 settlers in Texas. But Santa Anna's declaration of being an emperor for life cut the heart out of the Mexican Revolution fighting against the landed owner class, first Spanish and then Mexican, that was an endemic slavery system—not via ownership per se but by ownership of the best land for sustenance, an economic form of peonage that was the same as much of Europe had endured for centuries with nobility and serfs. Spain and then Mexico rode the backs of peons to develop food sources and state-owned mining, especially around Chihuahua. The Native American uprisings in New Mexico, especially the Pueblos, and the seizure of herds of Spanish horses would change the whole military dynamic of the region and eventually all the Plains, giving birth to the Comanche who would own most of Texas for over a century, from the mid 1700s.
Santa Anna was a turncoat to the Mexican people, pretending to be for liberal land allocation in the early years as a vice-president, and then turning in favor of the Planter class, becoming a dictator for their purposes.
However, to get the the problem of slavery, you have to have the freedom to make that choice. So, when Santa Anna declared the 1824 Mexican Constitution null and void, Stephen F. Austin went to Mexico City to protest the action. He was thrown in prison by Santa Anna for his efforts even though he and his father (deceased by then) were Spanish and then Mexican citizens who had been working lead mines in upper Louisiana—modern day Missouri. When Austin return to Texas in late 1835, he declared in a letter read in Brazoria at the inn of Jane Long, the Mother of Texas, that "...our only recourse is war." That was the start of the revolution.
Slavery was an endemic situation of the South, in 1836 and it really wasn't a consideration in the Texas Revolution. Even if there had been no slaves, the situation would have occurred. You can't get to Problem B (slavery) without solving Problem A (freedom). The present often paints with a very broad brush.
What I wrote was about the emotional impact of the Alamo, but I'm quite aware of the nature of slavery itself. I'm also aware that the USA has never seriously addressed the severe class structures in Mexico and central America; in fact, Americans took advantage of it and still do (see United Fruit company). O. Henry, when he fled Austin to Honduras due to a little fraud, he noted it succinctly as a 'Banana Republic' in his novel Cabbages and Kings. Right now, the spread between the rich and poor in the USA is in the Banana Republic range.
Problem B is a serious and deeper problem that has existed for centuries and goes directly back to European conquest for us but persists in many forms all over the world. We, the American people, are still trying to solve it. The constant theft of labor in one form or another is one of the world's most serious problems.
I appreciate your response to my comment, as you have fleshed out a lot of the backstory to the battle. In my defense, I did say it was « more complicated than my greatly condensed version », which I will admit was a gross understatement, & any reader truly interested in the history could follow up on that. I agree that Santa Anna was an opportunist who was interested in power.
The issue I have is that slavery was a part of the reason that Texas wished independence from Mexico, just as slavery was a part of the reason that the South fought the Civil War. It was not « States’ Rights » for the Confederacy, except in the sense that the states wanted the right to own slaves. I feel if this reason is not at least mentioned that we are doing a disservice to the readers. Note that the 1860 census recorded 182,566 slaves in Texas, 24 years after the Battle of the Alamo.
Thanks for the consideration. As this was a rather letter form meditation on a time and place more than a real history piece, I did pass over much of the history. Mexico banned slavery in 1829; Father Hidalgo actually banned it as part of the Mexican revolution in 1821. However, the formal ban in 1829 was never ever enforced in Texas, so there was no real issue there for the settlers; it was explicitly about freedom and the 1824 Constitution Santa Anna revoked. However, in 1837 the Mexican Congress finally did formally ban slavery in lieu of the earlier edicts and proclamations.
Settlers did flock to Texas from the South after the Revolution but almost all were confined to East Texas and coastal plains where cotton was easier to grow due to rich soils and good rainfall, but there was a stark line along the Colorado River from Austin northward and to the southwest which was all Comanche territory and that frontier was incredibly dangerous to individuals and small groups.
As a further geologic note, there is a spot in Austin where Redbud trail crosses the Colorado River which is considered the geological point where the West begins. East Texas is very much the Ole South in many ways even today.
That’s very interesting. I didn’t know about the Comanche territory piece of Texas.
I have found history to be more interesting when there isn’t an exam on it later. 😸
The Comanches and their allies the Kiowa controlled a territory that was north from Austin through Ft. Worth, into Oklahoma and southern Kansas, east to Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River, going south on the eastern side of the Pecos in New Mexico and into northern Mexico. They depopulated northern Mexico a couple of times. They held this from the early to mid-1700s to 1870s (and the breakouts later: 1873 and '76) or so, for over a century. 'Empire of the Summer Moon' is a quite readable and well researched 2010 book on their history.
The Austin colony was conceived as a buffer to the Comanches but wound being too far east of their territory to do much good. The settlers actually traded with them and things were 'relatively' peaceful until the summer of 1836 when all hell broke loose after the raid that captured Cynthia Anne Parker and her brother.
The epilogue is that there is a certain romantic lure of Comanche warriors and the freedom they had that exists today, a reflection of another time and place from afar.
That sounds like an interesting read. I’ll put it on my TBR list!
Well, neighbor, I like the way you think! And I certainly hope you are correct.
I don't know if I'm correct, but these issues are complex and deep. There is a serious amount of history where I live that has allowed me to get some deeper perspective and find some balance between these issues and emotions. Thanks for reading, neighbor.
It's clear the Russian mobsters are greedy for more profit. Stealing Ukraine is their solution. They *must* NOT be allowed to win.
FBI report on Russian Transnational Organised Crime
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/organized-crime
Thanks for the link.
Well written piece although the feelings of Texas grandeur do not resonate w me.
Thanks. I realize our sense of place is sometimes outsized but often that is simply the scale. There once was a road sign coming out of Austin going west on open highway (Tx71/290) that simply said: El Paso 519.
Texas is a cult of personality.
I hate hunters that call hunting a Sport.
I saw a skunk on a residential street in Long Beach, CA. At first I thought it was a cat. It was a beautiful animal.
Like a dope I put some fruit out
for him.
I should have put out cat food.
Foiled again
I was born in Texas in 1947 and have lived in Texas my whole life. I spent most of my growing-up years in Gonzales (the town mentioned by William Becker) from which the "immortal 32" volunteers left to meet their destiny at the Alamo.
Gonzales also celebrates itself as "the Lexington of Texas," since presumably the first shot of the Texas Revolution was fired near Gonzales during a skirmish between Anglo settlers and Mexican soldiers disputing possession of a small cannon. (The settlers buried it in a peach orchard.) A flag created for the occasion featured a cannon and defiant words: "Come and Take It." The event is celebrated every year in Gonzales on October 2 as "Come-and-Take-It Day" complete with parade and selection of a beauty queen.
Also, I always remember the Alamo.
Within the past decade I have experienced a belated awakening to the horrors of this country's history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the continuing mistreatment of people of color. This awakening also includes some adjustment to my understanding of Texas history.
The principle source of this adjustment is the book "Seeds of Empire" (2015), written by Andrew J. Torget, associate professor of history at the University of North Texas. Here is a synopsis:
The story of Texas and slavery begins in England in the late 1700s when the textile industry discovered the popularity of cotton fabrics. The result was a huge demand for cotton, which could be satisfied by cotton plantations in the southern United States along the Gulf Coast. The invention of the cotton gin and the availability of slave labor made the cotton trade extremely lucrative for many people.
In 1819, a financial crisis in the United States bankrupted the owner of a lead mine in Missouri. The owner's name was Moses Austin. Desperate to get out from under crushing debt, Moses Austin devised a plan. He saw the southern United States along the Gulf Coast so saturated with plantations that land for new plantations was hard to find and expensive. But he looked westward and saw the fertile unsettled coastline of Texas. Perhaps he could make a deal with the Spanish government of Mexico.
Mexico had two problems with Texas: (1) It was impossible to maintain control of Texas due primarily to hostile attacks on settlements by indigenous tribes. (2) Without Mexican control of the land, Texas was vulnerable to encroachment and annexation by the United States. Moses Austin proposed to bring 300 families from the United States to settle along the Texas coast. Their presence under the auspices of Mexico would assert Mexican control of the land, they would fight off the hostile tribes, and they wood pre-empt encroachment from the United States. The government of Mexico approved the plan.
Just as his project was getting started in June 1821, Moses Austin died. His son Stephen F. Austin assumed management of the project.
Stephen F. Austin understood that the success of the plan depended on offering settlers large inexpensive tracts of fertile land on which they could grow cotton using the labor of enslaved people. He arranged for this opportunity to be promoted in newspapers throughout the United States.
Austin's plan for distributing the land encouraged men to bring their wives, children, and slaves: In addition to an original grant, each man would receive 200 acres for his wife, 100 acres for each child, and 50 acres for each enslaved person.
The biggest existential threat to Austin's project was the determination, first by the Spanish government of Mexico and subsequently by various Mexican governments, to abolish slavery. Austin wrote, "The primary product that will elevate us from poverty is Cotton, and we cannot do this without slaves."
In 1821, Mexico won its war for independence from Spain. Leaders of the revolution, sympathetic with values of the Enlightenment, saw enslavement as inconsistent with the natural rights of man. In spring 1822, Stephen F. Austin made the two thousand mile journey to Mexico City to save his project. According to Andrew Torget, "Stephen F. Austin lobbied with ferocity on behalf of his colony, meeting personally with legislators to stress that opening northeastern Mexico to American colonization depended on ensuring that slavery remained legal in Texas." The best deal Austin could get was the continuation of slavery for a while, but calling for its eventual abolition.
Between 1820 and 1835, Mexico experienced a turbulent assortment of governments, each of which to some degree supported the abolition of slavery. Throughout those years, Stephen F. Austin and his friends exerted themselves mightily to ward off that eventuality.
They suffered a major blow in September 1828 when President Vicente Guerrero declared an end to slavery throughout all of Mexico. There was instant fury and backlash from the Texans.
The following paragraph is an excerpt from Torget's book:
Colonel Jose de las Piedras, the Mexican military commander of Nacogdoches ... advised against any attempt to enforce the decree. "There is no inhabitant of this frontier who does not have some negroes," he cautioned in a letter to San Antonio, warning that without their slaves the settlers "would be reduced to the ultimate state of misery." The more pressing issue, feared the colonel, was that any effort to free the slaves in Texas would push the colonists into outright insurrection, and he urged state officials to defy the national edict as a means of preserving regional stability. "Many have announced to me that there will be a revolution if the law takes effect," Piedras reported, and he believed the settlers would sooner abandon Mexico than the institution and agriculture it supported. "Austin's colony would be the first to think along these lines," he warned. "It was formed for slavery and without it her inhabitants would be nothing."
Ultimately, President Guerrero issued an exemption for Texas in late 1829. But conflicts did not end, and in six years they culminated in the Texas Revolt.
The Texans said they fought for freedom and independence from Mexico. The freedom they sought was the freedom to own slaves; the independence for which they fought was independence from a government that insisted on the freedom of their slaves.
In 1836, Texas won independence from Mexico and became a republic with slaves. In 1845 Texas was admitted to the United States as a slave state. Texas maintained the institution of slavery until "Juneteenth" of 1865.