Comment by superq
8 days ago
No Mexicans died for anyone's freedom, including their own or other Mexicans. They were serving under a dictator and didn't have a choice. (And, yes, there were some slaves in Texas, but comparatively few compared to the rest of the South.)
The small force there knew they would eventually be massacred by the thousands of troops surrounding them. The defenders held them off for 13 days. When they requested parley, Santa Anna signaled no quarter. Legend has it that Davy Crockett was on the roof, fighting to keep the horde from coming up the ladder, but he died with the rest of them.
Santa Anna ordered the execution of the six surviving prisoners of war. The Alamo defenders fought bravely and died in support of an idea: that men can govern themselves and live in freedom. It would take another 30 years before the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, would sign the Emancipation Proclamation and free the slaves.
This is pretty revisionist. Slavery wasn't some ancillary factor that just happened to exist in Texas. It was core to the anglo side of the Texas revolution. The War Party was strongly proslavery and the increasing (Mexican) federal push towards abolition was a key point for them. They especially hated a Mexican predecessor to the Emancipation Proclamation called the Guerrero decree that (attempted to) free most slaves in the northern states. After independence, they wrote slavery into the constitution and some of the first laws passed prohibited slaveowners from freeing slaves without government approval. The events in Texas were just one of half a dozen revolutions opposed to Mexican federal centralization around the same time.
None of this was politically palatable after the American Civil War and people certainly weren't going to focus on the non-anglo sides of the revolution that weren't so deeply proslavery, so the narrative that's taught in schools was sanitized.
As someone who went to public school in Texas, the textbooks in Texas are vetted by revisionists who still claim the Civil War was about states rights and not slavery, my civic teacher argued this repeatedly in the 1980s. A lot of kids are indoctrinated with the BS that downplay the slavery aspect, it's like the Big Lie of the south.
One of the nice things about growing up in Texas is that I 100% know what being the target of state-sponsored propaganda feels like. The extra cool thing is that almost all the propaganda is pretty easy to refute and it is easy to access alternative (and IME more historically correct points of views) which aren't supressed by the state.
That makes it a lot easier to understand the claim that folks often make, that any system is "propaganda free" when disagreements can be publicly stated with no governmental reprisal, is trivially false.
At the same time, it's been pleasantly horrific to look at how objectively bad the reflexive assumptions most of my cohort hold about the world and then try to draw conclusions about how terrible and mistaken my own views have and probably continue to be.
Thanks, Texas!
I went to school in Texas and slavery was absolutely taught as the primary issue leading to the civil war.
It was both. The succession was only about slavery. The economic motivation was only about slavery. The political motivation, after slavery, really was about states rights and that directly influenced all other factors even contributing to a weaker, fragmented, and less well funded military.
The name for post civil war revisionism is the Lost Cause Movement, by the way.
I too attended Texas public schools during that period and did not encounter any such revisionism. It was there that I learned succession started by 14 planters in South Carolina and spread to other states. I have since completed a history minor in college and completed book reports on the subject for military education professional development. Looking back the slant you speak of wasn’t there for me.
The political slant I do remember, though, is that the American Revolution was all about freedom. Not wanting to pay taxes hardly came up.
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1984 / George Orwell: 'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'
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Isn’t it pretty much accepted now that Davy was one of the survivors executed the next morning? I suppose it doesn’t really matter either way, but surprised to see the “died with guns blazing” story still in circulation.