Welcome to History Undressed, guest author Celia Hayes! She's written a fascinating piece for us today on the America frontier. Enjoy!
Goliad – The Other Alamo
by Celia Hayes
At the very beginning, the 1835 revolt of Texian settlers
against the authority of Mexico rather resembled the American Revolution, some
sixty years before – a likeness not lost on the Anglo-American Texians. Both
the Colonies and the Texians were far-distant communities accustomed to manage
their own affairs with a bare minimum of interference from a central governing
authority. Colonists and Texians began standing on their rights as citizens,
but a heavy-handed response provoked a response that spiraled into open revolt.
“Since they’re trying to squash us like bugs for being rebellious, we might as
give them a real rebellion and put up a fight,” summed up the attitude, in 1776
as well as 1835.
The Mexican government promptly sent an army to remind the
Anglo-Texan settlers of who was really in charge. The rumor that among the
baggage carried along in General Martin Cos’ was 800 pairs of iron hobbles,
with which to march selected Texas rebels back to Mexico did win any friends among the Anglo or Hispanic
settlers in Texas, nor did the generals’ widely reported remarks that it was
time to break up the foreign settlements in Texas. Cos’ army, intended to
re-establish and ensure Mexican authority, instead was ignominiously beaten and
sent packing late in 1835.
Over the winter of 1835-36 a scratch Texan army of
volunteers held two presidios guarding the southern approaches from further
invasion, while representatives of the various communities met to sort out what
to do next. First, they formed a shaky provisional government, and appointed
Sam Houston to command the Army. Then, in scattershot fashion, they appointed
three more officers to high command; it would have been farcical, if the
consequences hadn’t been so dire. With no clear command, with military
companies and commanders pursuing their own various plans and strategies, the
Texas settlers and companies of volunteers were unprepared to face the terrible
wrath of the Napoleon of the West and President of Mexico, strongman, caudillo
and professional soldier, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. He did not wait
for spring, or the grass to grow tall enough, or the deep mud to dry out: he
intended to punish this rebellious province with the utmost severity. Under his
personal command, his army reached the Rio Grande at Laredo in mid-February,
and laid siege to a tumbledown former mission garrisoned by a scratch force of
volunteers . . . San Antonio de Valero,
called simply the Alamo. But this story is about the other presidio, and another
garrison of Texans and volunteers; Bahia del Espiritu Santo, or Goliad.
Santa Anna detached General Don Jose Urrea and a force of
about a thousand soldiers, a third of them heavy cavalry, to guard his eastern
flank along the rivers and lowlands of the Gulf coast….and to mop up the
Anglo-Texan garrisons at San Patricio and Goliad. A small force at San
Patricio, which had embarked on ill-considered expedition to raid Matamoros was
surrounded and wiped out. Then it was the turn of Colonel James Fannin with 500
men holed up at the presidio in Goliad. Those 500 represented the largest body
of fighting men among the Texians – and for the moment were still at large.
Three couriers arrived from William Barrett Travis’ tiny garrison in the Alamo,
begging for help and reinforcements. Fannin was battered from each direction
with bad news and the consequences of bad decisions, or even worse, decisions
not made until they were forced upon him. He made an abortive attempt to march
to 
In the mean time, spurred by the knowledge that they must
either fight, or go under, to death or exile, a new convention of settlers met
at Washington-on-the-Brazos, and declared independence on March 2. In short
time they had drafted a constitution, elected an interim government, and
commissioned Sam Houston as commander of what army was left. Houston
went to Gonzalez, intending to rally the settlers’ militia there and lift the
siege of the Alamo . He arrived there on the
very same day that news came that Santa Anna’s army had finally broken through
the walls. Travis’ rag-tag collection of volunteers had held for fourteen days.
They had bought time with their blood. Houston sent word to Fannin, ordering
him to retreat north. But Fannin had sent out a small force to protect
Anglo-Texan settlers in a nearby town, and refused to leave until he heard from
them. When he finally decided to fall back, and join up with Houston
Fannin signaled for a parley and surrendered; he and his men
believing they would be permitted honorable terms. They were brought back to
Goliad and held under guard in the presidio for a week, along with some Texian stragglers
who had been rounded up in the neighborhood, and a party of volunteers newly
arrived from the States. They were locked up in the small presidio chapel at
night; under such tight conditions as they slept standing up, leaning against
the stone walls or each other. Fannin
and his men all assumed they would be disarmed, and sent back to the United
States. Three English-speaking professional soldiers among Urreas’ officers assumed
the same. They were horrified when Santa Anna sent orders that all the
prisoners were to be executed. Urrea himself asked for leniency and Colonel
Portillo, the commander left in charge of Goliad was personally revolted … but
he obeyed orders.
On the morning of Palm Sunday, 1836, those of Fannin’s
garrison able to walk - about three
hundred - were divided into three
groups, and marched out of town in three different directions, before being
shot down by their guards. Forty wounded were dragged into the courtyard in
front of the chapel doors and executed as they lay on the ground. Fannin
himself was shot last of all, knowing what had happened to his men. Reportedly
he asked only that he not be shot in the face, that his personal belongings be
sent to his family, and that he be given decent burial. He was executed at
point blank range with a shot in the face, his belongings were looted and his
body was dumped into a trench with those of others and burnt, although many
were left where they lay. A handful survived by escaping into the brush or
jumping into the river. Another handful of prisoners were kept out of the
columns; they were concealed in the Presidio by one of Portillo’s officers or
rescued by Francita Alavez, the common-law wife of Captain Telesforo Alavez,
who would become known as the Angel of Goliad,
Santa Anna, who had been thought of as a competent soldier
and a more than usually slippery politician, was branded a brute - and as he
was decoyed farther and farther into Texas in pursuit of Sam Houston - an
overreaching and arrogant fool. A month later, when Houston and finished falling
back into East Texas and training all the men who had gathered to him, Houston’s
army turned and fought. Santa Anna’s grand
army disintegrated, as Houston’s men shouted “Remember the Alamo!”… and
“Remember Goliad!”
My own series about the Germans in Texas, the Adelsverein
Trilogy, starts with a boy soldier escaping from the massacre, which experience
affects him for the rest of his life. It is a curiosity of history that the
Alamo is famous, and the Goliad hardly known outside of Texas. Writer John
Willingham, who came out with a novel about James Fannin and the Goliad last
year, speculates that it might have been because the siege and fall of the
Alamo tapped into a kind of ‘heroic last stand of the 300 at Thermopylae’
mind-set, while the massacre of the Texians at Goliad was a sad and squalid
exercise in judicial murder.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Celia Hayes lives in San Antonio, Texas and is the author of six novels set on the American frontier: To Truckee's Trail -- an account of the first wagon train to cross the Sierra Nevada, the Adelsverein Trilogy -- which tells the story of the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country, and Daughter of Texas, and Deep in the Heart, a two-part account of a woman's life during the years of the Republic of Texas. Visit Celia at http://www.celiahayes.com
*Pictures were taken on scene by the author.
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