The Siege of Béxar

The famed Battle of the Alamo was toward the end of the Texas Revolution - a sort of pivot just before the last battle. But at the revolution's beginning, the siege of Béxar played out in almost the opposite way. Here's a link to our show notes, including a correction to our pronunciation of "Bexar."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from dot com. Hello,
and welcomed to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. And
so perhaps unless you are actually from Texas or otherwise
immersed in Texas history, the most famous part of the

(00:24):
Texas Revolution is definitely the Siege of the Alamo. It's
such a big part of the cultural consciousness in the
United States that we have two different episodes in the
archive about it. Once from way back in the beginning,
it walks through the lead up to the siege, of
the siege itself and how remember the ax the Alamo
became this rallying cry for Texas independence. The other episode

(00:45):
is on one of the famous figures associated with the Alamo,
and that was Jim Booie, and he had this long
history is everything from a knife fighter to a slave
trader before the siege actually happened. Today, we're going to
talk about the opposite end of the Texas Revolution. So
the Alamo wasn't at the very end, it was kind
of the pivot before the very end. We're going to

(01:08):
talk about the thing that played out almost at the
very beginning today, and that is the Siege of Bexar
and if you are a Spanish speaker, you can probably
roll your R at the end of that beautifully. If
I try to do that, I sound like a child
practicing Spanish for the first time, so please pardon my

(01:28):
American pronunciation of Bexar. Bexar was in what's now San Antonio.
Spanish conqui Statores first arrived in that area in six
and it was at that time home to the Paaya people.
And unfortunately we don't know much about the Paya beyond
a few Spanish accounts which were written in the seventeenth
and eighteen centuries. These people were either killed or absorbed

(01:51):
into Spanish culture or other tribes in the area when
Spain started started establishing missions there in the seventeen hundreds.
Spain established a mission called San Antonio de Valero on
May one, seventeen eighteen, and this mission would later be
known as the Alamo. A few days later, just over
the river from the mission, they built a garrison known

(02:14):
as San Antonio de Bexar, and together these formed a
stopping point along a highly traveled route across Mexico, and
over time they grew into a town. Although the Spanish
population was huge in other parts of Mexico in what's
now Texas, it was really never all that large. Bexar
became the Spanish capital of Texas, but by the early

(02:36):
eighteen hundreds, there were only eight hundred or so people
actually living there. So in eighteen o three, the United
States acquired the Louisiana territories from France, and so all
of a sudden, Spain was sharing a huge, long border
with the United States where it hadn't before, and this
border ran right along territory where it just didn't have
a lot of people. So Spain wanted to fix this situation,

(03:00):
and it offered low priced land in what's now Texas
to entice about three hundred United States citizens to settle
in that area, provided that they would be loyal to Spain.
So the idea was that they would turn Texas into
this buffer between the United States and the rest of Mexico,
where Spain had a lot more people and resources. This

(03:21):
plan ran into a few problems. One, people did not
actually start moving to Mexico until about eighteen twenty two,
but Mexico had actually become independent from Spain the year
before that. And while Mexico did honor the land grants
that Spain had made most of the Anglos who moved
there found that living in a fledgling nation nation just

(03:41):
out of a war, was less than desirable. Mexico had
actually organized itself into a republic, and it had some
similarities to the government and the United States. But this
new government was really shaky, and it went through this
series of changes in leadership and coups and differences of
opinion between the federalists who wanted the government to be

(04:04):
kind of decentralized, and the centralists, who were a lot
more conservative and kind of wanted all of Mexico to
be ruled by a solid central almost dictatorial government. So
most of the immigrants from the States. Of course, we're
on the federalist side, since that more resembled the ideals
of the United States. Plus, while Spain and then Mexico

(04:24):
had expected their newfound Anglo population to assimilate into the
local culture, what I actually happened was that the new
colonists continued to speak English and kept up their strong
ties to the United States, and soon about fifteen thousand
Anglo settlers and one thousand slaves that they brought with
them vastly outnumbered the Mexicans. That were living in Texas,

(04:45):
so the planned buffer zone instead became a threat. Mexico
tried a number of strategies to stem the tide of
Anglo immigrants. Since so many of the immigrants from the
United States were staunchly pros slavery, Mexico passed a number
of laws to try to limit or abolish slavery, hoping
to discourage further immigration. This didn't work, and it mostly

(05:09):
just made the Anglo colonists resentful of the Mexican government.
Then Mexico outlawed immigration from the United States entirely, but
by that point Texas, with its cheap land and promise
of a new life, held such an allure that people
just emigrated from the United States to Texas illegally anyway.

(05:30):
After a while, Mexico passed a law that provided for
a military occupation of Texas to try to keep things
under control, and it also set up a system of
customs houses to collect tax from these Anglo colonists. Naturally,
none of this set very well with the colonists who
were really hoping to take advantage of all that cheap
Texan land to create their own land of the free.

(05:51):
If you've been listening to our podcast for a while,
or just like to study colonial history. You know what
happens when a nation shows up in a colony and
starts in forcing customs laws. It wasn't long before the
Anglo colonists in Texas, known as the Texians, and their
Spanish speaking allies called Tehanos were on the road to
a revolution. We're going to get to the revolution after

(06:14):
a brief break for a word from a sponsor, so
to return to our story. Tensions between Texas and Mexico
really started building up during the early eighteen thirties, and
then in eighteen thirty five, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna,
who was then the Mexican President, repudiated the Mexican Constitution
and essentially became a dictator. He switched sides from being

(06:37):
a federalist to being a centralist in that process, and
recognizing that these Anglo colonists in Texas represented a threat,
he went after them with a vengeance. And for their part,
the Texians did not really see much appeal in Santa
Anna's rule, which was much less democratic than it had
been before he tossed out the Mexican Constitution. Santa Anna

(06:59):
started trying to disarmed Texians wherever possible, and on October two,
eighteen thirty five, that disarmament involved a small cannon in
the village of Gonzalez. The Texians there resisted and each
side brought in reinforcements until the Texians finally attacked. This
became the Battle of Gonzalez, and it was the first

(07:19):
battle of the Texas Revolution. At this point, Mexico had
control of the town of Bexar, which had both strategic
and symbolic importance. In addition to being the seat of
Mexican government in Texas, it was also the last big
stronghold of Mexican forces in the region, so taking Bexar
would be a huge win for the Texian forces. Some

(07:41):
names that will be familiar to anyone who's learned about
the Alamo or Texas history. What we're really instrumental in
the siege of Bexar as well. Stephen F. Austin had
been elected to command the volunteer Army, which was made
up of Texians and Tanno's. Austin had also established the
first Anglo Amera can colony in Texas, and he was

(08:01):
a hugely prominent figure in Texas at this point. But
it wasn't really a military man, and he led this
revolutionary army, which was also called the Army of the People,
via debates and voting. William Barrett Travis, who was commander
at the Alamo, was at Bexar as well, as was
Jim Booie, who had connections in the town and knew

(08:22):
that Martin Perfecto Dakos, who was in command inside Bexar,
had about six hundred men there before the Texians decided
to try to attack it. The Mexican forces fortified the
town of Bexar with barricades flanked with trenches, lots of
reinforcements on the doors. Many of the barricades also had
holes in them to accommodate muskets and cannons, and then

(08:45):
across the river, Mexico fortified the Alamo with cannons and
other armaments as well, and because it was so well fortified,
in October of eighteen thirty five, Austin and his Council
of officers decided to lay siege to Bexar rather than
outright attack it. Unfortunately, things started to go badly almost immediately.

(09:06):
Because this army was an all volunteer operation, people didn't
have a lot of incentive to stay if they didn't
like how things were going, and as soon as it
became clear that they were basically going to wait and
not fight, the volunteers who were a lot more interested
in fighting started to walk away. One whole company vanished
in the middle of the night. Many of the men

(09:27):
had also joined up in the spirit of fighting for
their ideals, but they really didn't have so much in
the way of practice of being soldiers. Discipline was somewhere
between lax and nonexistent, and the waiting time was spent
in all manner of games and tomfoolery. Drunkenness was actually
such a problem that Austin wrote to the General Council quote,

(09:47):
in the name of almighty Gods, sent no more ardent
spirits to the camp. If any is on the road,
turn it around, or have the head knocked out. When
the October weather started to turn wet and cold, disease
also became a problem, and this was made worse by
the fact that the camp was not far away from
a field that was regularly used to slaughter livestock. And

(10:10):
then in November Austin was ordered to go to the
United States to try to drum up more support for Texas.
He ordered an attack on Bexar in November twenty two,
just before he was to leave, but his men resisted
that idea, so he called off the attack and then
he left two days later. Taking his place was Edward Burlison,
who had fought during the War of eighteen twelve as

(10:32):
part of his father's company. He had a reputation for
really being fearless, but the army that he was taking
over was struggling at this point. Thanks to attriction, there
were only about seven hundred soldiers left. They were also
very low on money and supplies, and many of the
men who had stuck with it for all of these
weeks were quite frustrated. On November six, there was at

(10:56):
last a break in the tedium. Some Mexican forces were
on the move. Their intent was not clear, but there
was a rumor that it was hauling silver. Jim Booie
was sent out on recon in About a mile outside
the town, they found a mule train and they fired
upon it. When the Mexican dragoons fled that Boui's men
pursued almost to the edge of the town until they

(11:18):
were turned back by reinforcements. So when they got back
to what was left of the mule train, they did
not find any silver. What they found was cut grass.
The Mexican forces had been out gathering food for the
cavalry horses who were besieged in Bexar. This kerfuffle became
known as the Grass Fight, and it comes off as
kind of silly, but it was an indicator that things

(11:40):
were not going well inside the town either. Not long after,
Jim Booey was ordered to Goliad to help with the fortifications,
but he had been glad to go. He found Austin's
waffling and all that waiting to just be incredibly tiresome.
Travis left at about the same time. Burlison, kind of
following in Austin's footstep, ups ordered an attack on Bexar

(12:01):
to take place on December one, but once again a
lot of the men really balked at this idea, so
again the advance was called off. Perlson sort of saw
the writing on the wall at this point. It was
not going well. The men were resisting the command and
and the you know, actual step of attacking the town,
so he decided to abandon the siege completely and the

(12:23):
army started packing up to go, but his preparations to
leave were under way. A Mexican officer from Bexar wrote
out and surrendered. He told them that morale among the
Mexican troops was very bad. They had no food and
they were low on supplies, so at that point it
seemed like maybe the army should stay. While all of
this was going on with the Mexican officers surrender, Ben Milam,

(12:45):
who had been out doing recon heard about this plan
to abandon the siege. He had fought in the War
of eighteen twelve, and after moving to Texas from Kentucky,
he had been thrown into a number of Mexican prisons
for a range of offenses. When he heard about this
plan to just call the whole thing off, he was
not happy about it, so he stopped what he was
doing and rode back to Bexar. There he found Frank Johnson,

(13:09):
who was General Burlison's adjutant, and after telling him in
great detail all of the reasons why falling back to
winter Quarters was just absolutely the worst plan, the two
men went to Burlison and laid out a plan to
actually attack the town for real. Burlison, who had not
really wanted to cancel his attack on Bexar in the
first place, gave them the go ahead as long as

(13:30):
they could recruit enough men to carry it out from
all of these guys who were packing up to leave. Fortunately,
word it spread already that there was some kind of
dust up going on between Johnson Milman Burlison, and so
when they left Burlasson's tent, they actually found hundreds of
volunteers waiting for them. Milem asked who would join him

(13:51):
and going to San Antonio, And as the men in
front of him started yelling but they would, he stepped
across the path and said, well, if you're going with me,
get on this side of the roof Almost three hundred
men crossed the road to join him. The some of
the ones who didn't weren't really behind the idea of attacking,
but they agreed to stay behind in the camp as

(14:11):
a reserve. Burlison would stay with them and would also
send out cavalry to make sure that Mexican troops could
neither enter nor leave Bexar while the attack was going on.
And the attacking force gathered on the north side of
Bexar at about three in the morning on December five five.
Some of the three men never showed, perhaps having been

(14:32):
convinced that this was actually a bad idea. Regardless, the
attack began two hours later with a cannon fired at
the Alamo as a diversion, and as Mexican infantry rushed
toward the Alamo, Milum's men moved into Bexar. They separated
into two columns that went down two parallel streets. One
column was led by Mileum and the other by Johnson.

(14:55):
They also had local guides with them. These were Samuel Maverick,
iras To Smith, who was known as Deaf Smith because
he was hard of hearing, John W. Smith, and Henrik Arnold.
And that last person was a free bi racial man
who had come to Texas from Mississippi. The Texian force
broke down the doors of some buildings near the main plaza.

(15:16):
Some of these were homes and their residents fled. Others
were facilities housing Mexican troops, and they fought their way
through and then established a base of operations in bex Barer.
The fighting wound up going on in Bexar for days,
with soldiers going house to house trying to work their
way to the main plaza. When the streets were impassable

(15:38):
because of cannons or musket fire. They took to the roofs,
at least until Mexican snipers started shooting at them from
the bell tower. Mexican forces responded to the slow Texian
advance by digging new trenches and arranging their artillery to
try to catch the invaders in the crossfire, but in
the end it was mostly hand to hand combat with

(15:59):
booie nives and bayonets, plus shots from the occasional pistols.
For the most part, this fighting only took place during
the day, but at night the Mexican forces would use
this time to move around, build new barricades, reinforce their positions,
and generally try to slow down to Texian advance. A
couple of days in the Texians started to try to

(16:20):
figure out a plan to capture General cos who was
holed up in the Mexican command post in a house
south of the main plaza. While planning this assault, milem
who had stepped outside to try to get a better
look at their target, was actually shot in the head
by a sniper. Texian troops nearby returned fire at the
spot where the shot had come from, and after the

(16:40):
battle was over, the body of Felix de la Garza,
purportedly one of the Mexican army's best shots, was found
in the river nearby. Milum was really the one who
had turned the Texian armies tied from let's go home too,
Let's attack Bexar, and so his death was a huge loss.
To make matters worse, rumors started to circulate that there

(17:02):
was a huge contingent of Mexican reinforcements on the way.
The Texians were running out of gunpowder, and it was
also raining. Frank Johnson was selected to take Milem's place
commanding the operation, but morale was really starting to flag,
and reinforcements did arrive in the morning, four hundred of them,

(17:22):
along with Solda danas, who were soldier women who also
cooked clean and cared for soldiers and their children. Under
the command of Captain Jose Juan Sanchez, they marched across
a wooden foot bridge out of Bexar and into the Alamo.
Soon Cos left his command posts and joined them there.
Even though Sanchez had brought lots of troops, he had

(17:44):
not brought any more food with them. The troops were
also nearly starving and had just been through basically a
forced a forced march, so they were exhausted. A lot
of the soldiers were also convicts, which was true of
a lot of the Mexican army, but some of these
convict recruits were so new that they were still shackled.
So it turned out that even though the Mexican army

(18:06):
now had a whole lot more men, it didn't actually help.
At this point, the Mexican Army, hungry, exhausted low on supplies,
had to act. Coast arranged an attack not on the
town of Bexar, but on the Texian camp outside the town.
He sent cavalry and infantry to approach as a pincher,

(18:26):
but the Texians opened fire and the attackers had to
retreat to the Alamo. Finally, with really no moves left
to make, General Coast sent Captain Sanchez to try to
negotiate terms over the great objections of all of the
other men. The siege officially ended on December ninth, and
the Texian force clearly came out on top. The Mexican

(18:48):
officers were paroled and the army had to leave within
six days. They also had to swear not to oppose
the Mexican Constitution of eighty four and that they would
not come back to Texas under arms. There had been
between thirty and thirty five casualties on the Texian side
and about one hundred and fifty casualties on the Mexican side.

(19:09):
Once the negotiations were over, the Mexican troops were allowed
to stay in the Alamo until they were ready to leave,
while the Texian troops kept to the town. Although once
the fighting was done, there was a lot of mingling
between the two camps, especially among the locals, some of
whom already knew each other from before the fighting started.
Once Coast Sanchez and the rest of the Mexican troops

(19:30):
moved out of the area on December fourteenth, they left
behind the Alamo with all of its fortifications, along with cannons, muskets,
powder and ammunition. We're it spread of the Texian victory
at Bexar, and for a while a lot of people
believed that the war was over and the Texas had one.
A lot of the people who had volunteered to be

(19:51):
in the army went back home, and on the following
March first, Texas declared its independence for Mexico at the
Convention of eighteen thirty six. At the Convention, delegates wrote
the Texas Declaration of Independence and they set up a
provisional government with Sam Houston as the commander in chief. However,
Santa Anna was not done with Mexico, and even as

(20:14):
the Convention of eighteen thirty six was underway, the Alamo
was under siege by Santa Anna's forces, which is of
course another story. What is the siege effects? Are it?
Kind of is the other book end to the Battle
of the Alamo and the Battle of Santa Center that
followed it. Do you have a little bit of listener
mail for us? Why? Yes, I do? Uh So, I

(20:38):
know it seems like we've read so many listener males
about our our segregation podcasts and also our special education podcasts.
And part of this is because there's a long stretch
of podcasts that that Holly prepared that are all a row,
and like all of the male is mail that that

(20:59):
the Holly can answer better than I can. So I
keep picking ones from uh from from those ones. And
we also got so much great email about all of
these at of email that's been just wonderful to read. Yeah,
and we'll probably never get the growl of it. I
will have ones that are flags to be read forever.
I think. So this is from Reagan and Reagan says,

(21:20):
I've really enjoyed your recent three part podcast on the
history of segregation and integration in the United States. While
I was already familiar with a great deal of the
subject matter presented, I enjoyed learning about the events in
greater detail. What really struck a chord with me is
your discussion of the continued efforts to integrate public schools
well into the late seventies. Until now, I had always

(21:41):
thought of integration as something that happened during my parents
early years, but after listening to part three, I realized
that I was a participant myself. I'm a black woman
and was educated in public schools for the entirety of
my primary education in three different states throughout the eighties
and early nineties. I attended elementary school in a suburb
of a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio that at that time

(22:03):
was composed of predominantly upper middle class, white, Protestant and
Jewish families. My family was one of the very fleet
few black families in the neighborhood. The year I started kindergarten,
my elementary school transitioned. With this change, the composition of
the student body changed from that reflective of the immediate
neighborhood to a group including a significant number of black

(22:24):
students from an adjacent neighborhood. I didn't realize that the
new students were introduced to better integrate the school, but
I did notice that I could mostly walk or bike
to my white or Jewish friends houses, but needed to
be driven to any black friends houses save one. After
elementary school, we moved to a far western suburb of Chicago,
where I attended middle school and began high school. The

(22:46):
neighborhood in which we lived was predominantly white, Protestant, and Catholic.
The the catchment area of the middle school was quite
large because the area was transitioning from farmland suburbs and
was not yet densely populated. However, there were many more
white students than black. Further to this, I rarely saw
any of the other black students outside lunch and gym class.

(23:08):
The high school drew from an even larger area that
included a neighboring suburb that had a greater number of
minority households, which were created a relatively diverse student body. However, again,
I only occasionally saw other black children in my classes.
In fact, I was the sole black student in several
classes in a school that had greater than two thousand students. Well,

(23:29):
I've are always recognized that nearly all of my classmates
have been white. I never really thought about why that was.
After all, I've been one of the only black kids
in the neighborhood my entire life, and I just assumed
that was why I was one of the only black
kids in my classes. Listening to your podcast enabled me
to be the situation with greater complexity. During my primary
school years, there was a strong trend toward tracking in

(23:51):
Ohio and Illinois. Students were divided into class groups based
on academic performance, and those groups rotated through all of
the academic classes independently at the each other. All throughout
elementary school, I was in the Gifted and Talented program.
My home room classes were reflective of the general student body. However,
I was in a group of children who were separated
for reading and math classes to work at a more

(24:11):
advanced level, and middle school the students were pulled into
three groups. I don't remember the nomenclature, but I was
tracked into the group of above average students and don't
recall seeing other black children in my classes. The middle
schools and more diverse neighborhoods of the adjacent suburb had
lower quality schools. When the students from both schools were
pulled together, it follows that many fewer of those children

(24:33):
were able to test into the high school advanced placement
classes in which I was enrolled. I completed high school
in New Jersey and a relatively wealthy county. The residents
of the three townships that pulled into two sister high
schools were upper middle class and wealthy families. I was
one of two black students in my graduating class, and
there were less than six black students in the entire
school during any of the three years in which I attended. Notably,

(24:56):
the parents of the other black girl and my graduating
class lived in New work She lived with her aunt
and uncle, who could afford to live in my neighborhood
to become a legal resident and attend my school. When
I think about how it was that I had the
privilege of living in these wealthier white neighborhoods and taking
advantage of their high quality public school systems. A parallel
story emerges. Both of my parents grew up in Chicago

(25:18):
during the nineteen fifties, a time when the city was
strictly segregated. My mother's parents were laborers who each worked
two to three jobs simultaneously so they could afford to
send their three daughters to a private school. In both cases,
the parents were aware of the disadvantages inherent to being
a black family in a poor neighborhood and went to
great links to ensure that their children could have the

(25:39):
best education possible. After high school, my mother earned her
bachelor's degree and later went on to earn her master's degree.
I attended an Ivy League college, after which I went
to medical school and the currently a practicing anthesiologist. My
younger brother earned a bachelor's degree from a well respected
university and has been quite successful in the computer slash
informatics industry. Not bad for the child and grandchild of

(26:02):
a black janitor slash taxi drive, taxi driver and machinist.
On an interesting end note, I married a blonde haired,
blue eyed English German Man and my brother's wife is Vietnamese.
When can I help but a Steamer upbringing and public
school educations were significant contributions to this pattern. The positive
and negative implications of this easily spur interesting discussions. Thanks

(26:25):
for continuing to present such interesting and thought provoking podcasts. Uh.
Thank you so much Reagan for sending that. I know
it was very long, but I wanted to read the
whole thing, um because it is so reflective also of
my own uh education, which has come up a couple
of times naturally in the process of doing these podcasts. UM,

(26:48):
I was growing up in the mostly rural South, and
we had a very similar pattern in who was in
the gifted classes and who was not. So hereing from
someone with another perspective on that same pattern, I thought
was really interesting. If you would like to write to us,
we were at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com.

(27:11):
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(27:31):
which is how stuff Works dot com, you can put
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blog posts up there, so you can do all that

(27:52):
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