Loyalty to the gentlemen class of plantation owners, and the institution of slavery itself, made it possible for slave owners to organize militias and hordes of vigilantes in the southern states. These militias were initially used to slaughter Indigenous People and later to serve as slave catchers and enforcers. Those desiring to be gentlemen of the slave owner class and obtain land, migrated to Texas for reasons of debt, abandoning their wives, criminal activity, and poverty. In order to reproduce this social configuration, it became necessary to organize armed men loyal to what was already a racialized American dream in the slave owning states. Texas was the place to go for this dream to become a reality. Many of these poor white immigrants would be used as pawns by the plantation owners seeking racialized dreams of wealth. Recruits would not be hard to find. Most poor whites would never be able to own slaves but the desire to do so was a strong enticement.
No one can honestly say that slavery had nothing to do with the Alamo and the Civil War when whites were expected to respect slavery and the supposed inferiority of nonwhites. Not to accept this southern heritage would result in legal punishments and violence. In this way, white supremacy became the norm, both spoken and unspoken, both legally coded and by tradition. People were racially politicized through a process call “Political Socialization.” This included being socialized with certain political ideas by family, schools, churches/religion, mass media, peers, and events. The “Texan Creed,” which is primarily a belief system of whites in Texas, consists of beliefs in tradition and deed. It includes liberty, individualism, constitutionalism, and equality.
However, these “traditions” cannot be taken at face value. These traditions are loaded with myth and loaded with racist loyalty. They were designed to subjugate, exploit, and oppress people of color and poor whites as well. These nightmare traditions infected whites in Texas for generations but they festered long before Anglo settlers immigrated to northern Mexico.
The formula for honestly looking at the Alamo story is racism plus myth equals falsehoods. Many viruses were created in the laboratories of white supremacy. Popular imagination would become more than whimsical thought with this infection.
There are dozens of ignored or erased facts and invented stories about the war in Texas. The mixologists of patented racism combined myth with hatred. This mix of falsehoods also likes to ignore historical facts. For example, James Bowie was a major slave owner and a drunk. He was basically a foil of Travis. Bowie succeeded in creating problems that resulted in a fragmented joint command structure as a result of trying to seek a surrender option with Santa Anna, as well as releasing prisoners that Travis had court-martialed.
Additionally, there was never a line drawn in the sand, or a Black slave woman named Emily Morgan (Emily West was actually her real name) having a sexual relation with Santa Anna. Santa Anna was easily defeated at San Jacinto but the fact that many of his experienced fighters were not at the scene was erased and reduced to sexual absurdity. The whole of the Alamo story became a white supremacist propaganda campaign made holy by attaching it to the fight against a dictator that abolished a “democratic” constitution. What is ignored is the fact that one dictatorship replaced another after Mexico’s defeat— a dictatorship based on race. There was never a last stand inside the Alamo as most of them ran. We have a lot of lies to refute.
