The latest book on the Alamo is titled, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. On July 29, 2021,Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert Jr. was able to hold a town hall discussion and book signing with the authors to a capacity audience at the Bexar County Courthouse. I have read more than my share of documents about the Alamo over the years and it seems to me that one should look at the issue across several disciplines. I viewed the Alamo battle and the fight for Anglo independence from Mexico across geographic, economic, religious, national issues, regional issues, and cultural and ethnic issues. I am of the belief that once it is looked at across disciplines one always returns to the centrality of slavery as the main reason for the fight of Anglo slave owners against Mexico. The bigger national picture at the time was the removal of native people and the expansion of slavery and Mexico stood in the way of that racist.
The agents of the slavery dream were Sam Houston, Davis Crockett, James Bowie, William Travis, Lorenzo de Zavala, Stephen F. Austin, and the rest. Initially, they were manipulative in their self-interest to use the 1824 Mexican constitution to provide a ghost excuse. Later, they stopped pretending they were supporting democracy as it edged closer to a white supremacist war. Western democracy was poisoned from its beginnings with embedded white supremacy, but the Texas independence leadership initially saw this as a way to extend slavery while appearing to be champions of democracy. Ironically, the former Texas Land Commissioner, Jerry Paterson, tried to grand stand the event by holding up the book and claiming it was “only an opinion.” I chimed it with a simple rebuttal that there “are well-reasoned opinions and willy-nilly opinions,” and Mr. Patterson demonstrated the latter.
Patterson went on to claim that the authors purposefully dismissed a letter to the editor of the Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper from Dr. Amos Pollard. Patterson claimed that he was an abolitionist but that argument was also destroyed. Though Pollard said in his letter that he was opposed to slavery his comments are severely tainted with either ignorance, naiveté, or purposeful machinations. In one sentence Pollard claims that Americans who don’t believe in slavery should go to Texas to prevent slave owners from taking over, but was this his true intent? His words smell of deception given his remarks about Texas having a good climate for cotton and tobacco production.
In any event, Pollard wrote this letter, and all it amounted to was a letter to the editor, in May of 1835. He participated in the Battle of Goliad and it may have well been as a result of a mistaken believe that the Mexican Constitution of 1824 was only about democracy. He may well have been one of the first suckered into believing that this Mexican 1824 constitution was not about slavery—it was! Understandably, Patterson’s remarks are patterned with the Trumper first class political wackiness that wants to deny anything that criticizes the Eurocentric versions of history. Patterson is also a defender of maintaining racist Confederate plaques and monuments and has become a mouth piece for extremist thinking. Jerry Patterson even tried to stand when the floor would not recognize him for an attempted filibuster of the event. He was seen running in and out of the meeting trying to get in another round of defense for the racist Texan war against Mexico. The Alamo was a slave owner racist war—NO DOUBT HERE!
