{"id":108109,"date":"2025-03-06T19:57:36","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T01:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=108109"},"modified":"2025-03-06T19:57:36","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T01:57:36","slug":"108109","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=108109","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Davy Crockett and the Geopolitics of the Alamo<\/a>
\nThe Texans’ sacrifice at the Alamo and their improbable victory at San Jacinto still define our world.<\/p>\n

Today marks the 189th anniversary of the martyrdom of the heroes of the Alamo, who died to delay the dictator Santa Anna’s army long enough so that Texian troops could rally and defend their homes. Singular among those heroes was\u00a0Colonel and Congressman\u00a0David S. Crockett<\/strong>, \u201cKing of the Wild Frontier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in 1786 in that part of North Carolina which was then the renegade \u201cState of Franklin\u201d but not yet the State of Tennessee, \u201cDavy\u201d Crockett was a legend even in his own time, and long before the Texas Revolution.<\/p>\n

The son of John Crockett, one of the\u00a0Overmountain Men<\/a>\u00a0unleashed by Joseph Martin to turn the tide of the Revolutionary War at Kings Mountain, the future legend in his teenage years repeatedly traveled on foot from eastern Tennessee to Virginia across the Appalachian mountains, developing skills and achieving feats for which he\u2019d become so well known later. \u00a0He served under General Andrew Jackson in the Creek War and in Jackson\u2019s campaign, late in the War of 1812, to drive the British out of Florida. By the age of 32 he\u2019d been appointed a justice of the peace, elected lieutenant colonel of the Tennessee Militia, and started several successful business enterprises.<\/p>\n

In the Tennessee legislature and in the U.S. House during Jackson\u2019s Presidency, he fought untiringly against Congress\u2019s overspending and unconstitutional expansion of its powers. He also vociferously opposed Jackson\u2019s 1830 Indian Removal Act, the only member of the Tennessee delegation to do so. For this, the voters of Tennessee sent Crockett home. Undaunted, he ran again two years later and returned to the House, resuming his previous crusades and also collaborating with Kentucky Congressman Thomas Chilton to produce his autobiography,\u00a0A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, Written by Himself.<\/em><\/p>\n

Crockett embarked upon an extensive book tour which, combined with larger-than-life stage productions such as\u00a0Lion of the West<\/em>\u00a0and mythologized biographies like\u00a0Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee,<\/em>\u00a0cemented in the national mind\u00a0his legend as a pioneer and frontiersman. Everywhere he went, from New York to Little Rock, adoring fans swarmed him. \u00a0More and more, he took the opportunity they afforded him to speak against the military threat and growing tyranny of Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and the need to support an American-style revolution in Texas.<\/p>\n

By the time the voters dumped him again in August 1835, Crockett\u2019s heart was consumed with the Texian cause. \u00a0No longer seeing Washington or the pettiness of politics as worthwhile, he famously told his erstwhile constituents, \u201cYou all can go to Hell, I\u2019m going to Texas.\u201d \u00a0And he went.<\/p>\n

He arrived in\u00a0Nacogdoches with a company of volunteers just five months later in January 1836, swearing an oath to the Provisional Government of Texas. \u00a0Barely a month later he and his group were in San Antonio de Bexar, with fellow Texian heroes Jim Bowie, Antonio Menchaca and Don Erasmo Seguin, a Founding Father of the Mexican republic who helped feed and finance the Texas Revolution (Don Erasmo was also the father of Juan Seguin, a defender of the Alamo who survived to become a hero of San Jacinto and a Senator of the Republic of Texas).<\/p>\n

Less than a month later, Crockett died defending the Alamo.<\/p>\n

Moderns appreciate little of the importance of this. \u00a0Some (outside Texas at least) see the Alamo as a minor incident at most. Many today view the Texas Revolution as an Anglo brutalization of a victimized Mexico. They ignore, willfully or otherwise, the multilingual, multi-ethnic nature of the affair, the many prominent Mexican statesmen who, loyal to the principles of their lost republic, took up arms in favor of the Revolution: men such as Erasmo Seguin and his friend Lorenzo de Zavala, the first Vice President of\u00a0Texas, who was born in Yucatan and had previously served as Mexico\u2019s Minister of Finance.<\/p>\n

The revisionists also ignore the widespread opposition throughout Mexico to Santa Anna\u2019s dictatorship and scrapping of the 1824 Constitution. In addition to Texas, both Yucatan and the Mexican states immediately across the Rio Grande from Texas formed republics and seceded from Mexico, albeit unsuccessfully.<\/p>\n

But beyond the unquestionable rightness of the Texian cause, the successful Revolution served to answer the burning geopolitical question of that era, namely, would America or Mexico \u2014 and would liberty or tyranny \u2014 dominate the New World?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Santa Anna had proclaimed himself \u201cthe Napoleon of the West\u201d: \u00a0his ambitions were vastly greater than just holding a few farms on the Brazos. \u00a0Had he imposed his tyranny on the Texians, he would have been liberated to threaten \u2014 and possibly conquer \u2014 New Orleans, the continent\u2019s single most strategic point.<\/p>\n

Had Santa Anna taken New Orleans, he would have reversed Jefferson\u2019s achievement in securing the Louisiana Purchase and accomplished what the British in 1815 could not: the reduction of the United States to a servile position. And with all commerce in the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi river basins bottled up at Santa Anna\u2019s mercy, not only might America never have generated the capital, industrial strength and military might needed to become a great power, but an authoritarian Mexico might well have supplanted it, expanding throughout the West and the Caribbean Basin as well.<\/p>\n

But for Houston\u2019s victory at San Jacinto<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 but for Davy Crockett\u2019s martyr’s death at the Alamo, enabling Houston\u2019s triumph \u2014\u00a0the American experiment might well have come to nothing.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0America might well\u00a0have been recolonized in that era of global European expansion which saw India and China subjugated (as indeed Mexico was by France for a time, during the 1860s). And with the coming of the 20th Century, freedom might well have perished from the Earth.<\/p>\n

History has long honored the greatness of David S. Crockett, and rightly so. He quite literally paid for our lives with his own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Davy Crockett and the Geopolitics of the Alamo The Texans’ sacrifice at the Alamo and their improbable victory at San Jacinto still define our world. Today marks the 189th anniversary of the martyrdom of the heroes of the Alamo, who died to delay the dictator Santa Anna’s army long enough so that Texian troops could … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108110,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108109\/revisions\/108110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}