Black Mexican Soldiers Killed Most of Alamo Defenders

We have been constantly told that General Santa Anna of Mexico was a real bad guy, but everywhere he went he liberated slaves from Anglo immigrants that came to Texas. In fact, Mexico had all black regiments in its army since colonial times. These black Mexicans soldiers played an important role against slavery in Texas. Recent research, by Phillip Tucker, PhD, reveals that much of what has been told about the Alamo is simply racial invention. The story concerning the movement to wrest control of Mexican lands by white settlers have all been reported by historians that were either baffled, inadequate in research skills, or in the nastiest case purveyors of racist fabrication that have completely placed in the minds of school children and adults alike an invented version of the wars with Mexico.
Those who believe that all of the Alamo defenders fought a courageous “last stand” will attempt to rebuff the data that Dr. Tucker so masterfully mined and provides in his new book, “Exodus from the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth” (2010). Dr. Tucker shows that the Alamo heroes did not die defending the Alamo walls to the last man is some sort of heroic fashion, but in fact many of them died running from the walls leaving some of their companions behind to die at the hands of Santa Anna’s black troops. Additionally, Historical evidence exists that indicates that Colonel William Travis committed suicide and did not die on top of the walls.
Historical documents mined by Dr. Tucker reveals that approximately one-hundred and ten men left the Alamo and headed in the direction of the Gonzalez Road (now East Commerce Street). According to Tucker’s research, they were ambushed by black Vera Cruz lancers in close proximity to the area of the present day River Center Mall and perhaps further into the St. Paul Square area on present day East Commerce Street. Tucker reveals that the battle took place in the darkness, at about 5:00 am, and not in the daylight hours as mythologized in several Hollywood renditions. The Alamo defenders put up very little resistance because they were attacked in the middle of a strong cold front, in the dark, and were caught napping or in the Alamo hospital where many lay as a result of wounds received in the earlier battle in December of 1835. We know that no more than 300 Mexican soldiers in the fighting and many of them died by friendly fire. In essence, the “last stand” never happened, and the majority of the Alamo defenders died beyond the walls and not inside in some poetic final breadth of life stand. This would mean that generations have been told myths and outright lies about the Alamo defenders, and it makes sense given the central reason for stealing Mexican lands was the issues cotton,slavery, and the defense of white supremacy.
Slave owning interests were shocked and in total fear that the Mexico would outlaw slavery and their lucrative cotton trade. This fear was made every more evident by the order of Black Mexican President Vicente Guerrero who abolished slavery in 1829. Dr. Tucker reveals that this sent shock waves through an Anglo community that was organized around cotton sales that was harvested by free slave labor. Affluent white planters were enraged upon hearing that their system of slavery was in danger. Whites with less social status had also come to Texas in the hopes of getting rich in this environment after receiving land just for coming to Texas. Thousands of poor whites hoped to raise their social status in the cotton trade and eventually climb the racialized class social ladder. All of this was threatened by a Mexican government that abolished slavery many years before it was finally abolished in the United States.
Interestingly, according to this research, the black lancers that killed the Alamo defenders that were on the run killed them with lances made and developed by the Moors, one of the groups that inhabited the eastern side of the San Antonio River since the arrival of the first Canary Islander families, and who conquered Spain. Canary Islanders coming to San Antonio lived under a racist caste system that segregated black Canary Islanders form their lighter-skinned cohorts. Many lighter-skinned Canary Islanders (Tejanos) believed in slavery and therefore their dislike for Santa Anna and the declaration by the Afro-Mexican president Vicente Guerrero in 1829 that put an end to slavery in Texas. Darker skinned Tejanos and others opposed slavery and fought with Santa Anna.
Land in Texas was literally given away to white settlers as part of a system that followed a colonial paradigm. White settlers were given “welfare” in the form of free land. This would have enabled them to pursue the ownership of slaves to work that land, and finally the planting of cotton would make them wealthy. All of this was the object of Texas settlers, and not the grandiose ideas of freedom and independence. In order to make this vision of wealth a certainty, Mexico had to be pillage. Settlers came by the thousands to institute a slave country, but first Mexican lands had to be taken.
Tucker points out that the Battle of Alamo took only about fifteen minutes to kill the few defenders abandoned inside, many of whom were ailing in their beds in the Alamo hospital, and about two and a half hours to kill those who ran outside the walls. Those that ran from the Alamo were killed and their bodies burned some four hundred yards away from the Alamo walls near what is now Commerce Street. Tucker points out that there would have been no reason to transport close to one hundred eighty seven bodies about a quarter of a mile away providing confirmation that they were killed while trying to flee near the spot of where their cadavers were destroyed by fire.