From 23 February to 6 March 1836 a small band of Texian and Tejano rebels, roughly two hundred men, held the old mission of the Alamo in San Antonio against the much larger Mexican army of General Santa Anna. On the thirteenth day the Mexicans stormed the walls and killed almost every defender, among them William Travis, James Bowie and the frontier legend Davy Crockett. "Remember the Alamo" became the rallying cry of the Texas Revolution.5
It was a desperate position, and the men who held it kept calling for help that never came. For thirteen days a couple of hundred rebels kept the Mexican army out of a crumbling mission in San Antonio, and when the walls were finally stormed they died almost to a man. Yet their defeat gave the Texas Revolution the three words that would win it.6
Who won the Battle of the Alamo and why?
The Mexican army of Antonio López de Santa Anna won. Its assault columns, perhaps 1,800 men, overwhelmed a garrison about a tenth their size in roughly ninety minutes. The defenders were too few for the long walls, relief never came, and Santa Anna accepted heavy losses to take the fort at once rather than starve it out.7
Texas in revolt
Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 and, to protect its thinly settled northern frontier, invited colonists into Texas, then joined to Coahuila as a single state. Stephen F. Austin helped bring in American colonists. When Antonio López de Santa Anna, elected president in 1833, abolished the federal Constitution of 1824, Mexico slid into civil war, and in Texas the quarrel turned into a movement for independence.8
The first shots came at Gonzales on 2 October 1835, when the townspeople refused to hand back a small cannon that Mexican troops had come to recover. That autumn rebel volunteers besieged San Antonio de Béxar and, in December, took the town from General Martín Perfecto de Cos, whose troops marched back to the Rio Grande.9
A mission turned fortress
The Alamo had begun as Mission San Antonio de Valero, founded by the Franciscan friar Antonio de San Buenaventura y Olivares on 1 May 1718. After a hurricane wrecked its buildings in 1724 it moved to its present site. Its stone church was never finished in the mission's lifetime, and in 1793 the mission was secularized and its lands divided among its residents.10
San Antonio lay on one of the two main roads from the Mexican interior into Texas, and the Alamo was meant to warn and shield the settlements to the east. Yoakum, writing in 1855, noted that the place had been built as a mission and not as a fortress: its walls were thick but had no bastion to cover them. The Handbook of Texas counts some twenty-one guns at Béxar, most of them mounted on the walls by the engineer Green B. Jameson; the Alamo Trust counts 18 serviceable cannon at the start of the siege.11
The commanders' decisions
The Texian leaders could not agree on what to do with it. On 17 January Sam Houston proposed to demolish the fortifications, carry off the guns and abandon the place, but he asked the provisional governor, Henry Smith, to authorize it, and Smith refused. James Bowie, whom Houston had sent to San Antonio with about thirty men, stayed instead to help the commander, James Neill, hold it.12
Smith then sent reinforcements. Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis, only twenty-six, rode in on 3 February with about thirty horsemen. In early February came Davy Crockett, the Tennessee frontiersman and former congressman, who had taken the oath of allegiance to Texas only after the word "republican" was written into it. When Neill left on furlough, Travis and Bowie shared command.13
On the Mexican side, Santa Anna marched north at the head of the army himself. He reached San Antonio far sooner than the Texians had expected: Travis had not believed the enemy could arrive before the middle of March. Once there, Santa Anna had a choice between a siege and a storm, and his officers were divided. By the journal of his aide Juan Almonte, as Yoakum quotes it, Cos, Castrillón and others wanted to wait for two twelve-pounder guns due on the 7th, while others favored an immediate assault. Hardin, in the Handbook, judges that there was no valid military reason for the costly attack: once the provisions ran out, the garrison would have had to surrender.14
Thirteen days
Santa Anna's army arrived on 23 February and put the mission under siege. He demanded surrender at discretion; Travis answered with a cannon shot, and Santa Anna raised a red flag over the church of San Fernando, the signal that no quarter would be given. Inside were about 150 men. Bowie fell sick on the second day, leaving Travis in sole command.15 › 6 March in military history
Travis sent out desperate letters pleading for reinforcements that, for the most part, never came. In the most famous, dated 24 February and addressed "To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World," he wrote that he had sustained a continual bombardment for twenty-four hours, vowed never to surrender or retreat, and signed off "Victory or Death."16
The nearest sizable Texian force was James Fannin's garrison at Goliad, about ninety miles to the southeast. By Yoakum's account Fannin set out with some three hundred men on 28 February, but a wagon broke down and his oxen could barely move the guns across the river, and a council of war sent the column back. In his last report to the convention, written on 3 March, Travis said he had lost faith in Fannin and looked to the colonies alone for aid.17
The one sizable group to get through was a company of 32 men from Gonzales, who slipped past the Mexican lines on 1 March and brought the garrison close to two hundred. On 3 March the courier James Butler Bonham rode back in with word that help was coming. It did not arrive in time. On 2 March the convention meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos had declared Texas independent; the men in the Alamo never knew it.18
Did Travis draw a line in the sand?
The best-known scene of the siege, Travis drawing a line on the ground with his sword and asking all who would stay and die with him to cross it, rests on a single, second-hand account. It came from Louis "Moses" Rose, a French veteran who left the Alamo about three days before it fell. Rose told the story to the parents of William P. Zuber, and Zuber first published it in the Texas Almanac for 1873, nearly four decades later.19
Zuber defended his account in 1901, admitting that he had learned the facts only second-hand and had got details of Rose's military service wrong. The line may have been drawn, but the story was not in print until 1873. What the documents written during the siege do show is a commander who never stopped asking for help.20
The final assault
Before dawn on Sunday, 6 March, Santa Anna threw his columns at the walls from four directions, about 1,800 men in all, carrying scaling ladders. The defenders' cannon and rifles stopped the first waves, but the attackers reformed and drove forward again until they were over the walls. The fighting then fell to close quarters inside the compound. The assault lasted about ninety minutes.21
Travis was among the first to die, at the north wall: Joe, his enslaved servant, told the Texan cabinet that his master was shot in the forehead while firing over it. Bowie, too ill to rise, was killed in his bed. By the time the sun was up, every fighting man of the garrison lay dead or was about to be put to death.22
How did Davy Crockett die?
How Davy Crockett died is still debated. Joe reported seeing him dead with slain Mexicans around him, and Yoakum, in 1855, placed his body in the corner by the church with piles of the enemy around it. But within weeks of the battle stories appeared in the Texan and American press of Crockett and others being killed after they surrendered.23
The fullest version is the narrative of the Mexican officer José Enrique de la Peña, which places Crockett among a handful of prisoners executed on Santa Anna's orders. De la Peña did not claim to have seen it himself, and his passage may echo the newspaper reports of the day. As many as seven defenders may have been captured and executed; Sam Houston passed on such a report on 11 March. Lofaro, in the Handbook of Texas, concludes that it is almost impossible to know how Crockett died.24
Counting the losses
The number of defenders is usually given as a range. The official list holds 189 names, and the Handbook of Texas notes that research may push the total to as many as 257. Yoakum counted 188 effective men after the Gonzales company arrived, and the Alamo Trust nearly two hundred. Almost all were killed.25
Mexican losses are far less certain. Santa Anna's report, written that afternoon, admitted 70 killed and 300 wounded. Yoakum, following Antonio Pérez of San Antonio, gave 521 killed and as many wounded. The Handbook's best estimate is about 600 killed and wounded.26
The noncombatants were spared. Susanna Dickinson, the widow of Almeron Dickinson, her baby daughter Angelina, Travis's servant Joe and several women and children of San Antonio were released. Santa Anna ordered the defenders' bodies burned.27
Remember the Alamo
Word of the fall reached Gonzales on 11 March, when two ranchers rode in; Houston wrote that day that he had little doubt the Alamo had fallen. A few days later Susanna Dickinson arrived with Joe and confirmed it. Gonzales had lost many of its men, and the news set settlers fleeing east.28
The Alamo was a crushing tactical defeat, but it bought time and, above all, a legend. Hardin, in the Handbook, argues that the siege held up Santa Anna while the convention declared independence, set up a government and drafted a constitution, and that the defenders were not suicidal: they expected help to come. Three weeks later, on 27 March, more than 300 Texian prisoners taken near Goliad were executed on Santa Anna's orders, and the anger grew.29
On 21 April, at San Jacinto, Sam Houston's Texians fell on Santa Anna's army shouting "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" and routed it in about eighteen minutes, by Houston's own report. Santa Anna himself was taken prisoner the next day, and Texan independence was secured in practice.30 › The Greatest Last Stands in History
The Alamo today
After the war the mission church stood roofless until the United States Army, which leased the buildings as a quartermaster depot, repaired it in 1850 to 1852 and gave it the curved gable that makes its outline famous. The State of Texas bought the church in 1883, and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas later became custodians of the site.31
The Alamo church still stands on Alamo Plaza in downtown San Antonio. In 2015 UNESCO inscribed the San Antonio Missions, Mission Valero among them, on the World Heritage List, while noting that the growth of downtown San Antonio has cut the Alamo off from its old river setting.32 › The Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BC
