Alamo’s ties to slavery stir historical debate
This is a hot topic among those on an advisory panel that’s planning a $400 million makeover for the San Antonio icon
SAN ANTONIO — Alamo historians typically have not touched on slavery.
Scholars who study forced labor haven’t delved deeply into the Alamo and the motivations of the 189 known Texians and Tejanos who died in the 1836 battle.
The Alamo Citizens Advisory Committee has held weekly discussions on the history of the Alamo as it moves forward with a $400 million plan to make over the historic fort.
“I’m hoping for an Alamo that interprets those truths, struggles with them, asks lots of different questions,” Carey Latimore, a member of the panel and Trinity University history professor specializing in African American studies, said after the group’s most recent panel reviewed the impact of slavery at the Alamo.
A theory has been brewing for years that slavery was an underlying cause of the Texas Revolution. But it’s recently created tension in discussions about the war for independence from Mexico and the Battle of the Alamo.
Andrew Torget, a leading scholar on slavery in Texas, said Anglos and Tejanos forged an alliance to harness the windfall of a booming cotton economy. He believes the complexity of the 1835-1836 war makes it “more interesting and more useful to understand” as an event that affected all of North America.
“To say that slavery mattered during this period is not a simple, easy thing. It’s to acknowledge that it’s been woven into so many different pieces of these stories … to better understand why the Alamo matters,” Torget told members of the citizen panel in a recent discussion on forced labor in early Texas.
But a few people on the 30-member committee, which is helping shape the plan, weren’t ready to rewrite history books.
“We want the truth out there for sure. But it needs to be the truth,” Sharon Skrobarcek, a member of the panel and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, said after the meeting.
Skrobarcek said Torget’s presentation focused on Americans streaming into Texas from other states. It didn’t mention Europeans arriving on ships at Indianola and Galveston. They didn’t know where their land grants would be.
“Not everybody who lived in Texas owned a cotton plantation and had slaves. What were those other people fighting for?” Skrobarcek said. “I don’t think we have a definitive answer right now.”
In his 2015 book, “Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850,” Torget argues that “a complex tangle of cotton, slavery, and Mexican federalism — rather than any single factor — produced fights that led to the Texas Revolution.”
Latimore agreed with Torget that slavery was “probably a strong piece of the equation.” But Latimore stood by past statements that the war was not caused by a single issue. He pondered other causes historians have discussed, including religious freedom, access to arms and militias for self-protection, local representation and Mexico’s imprisonment of political adversaries without due process.
“That’s where we need to do more work to see if it’s just slavery or if it’s these other issues that many people have argued in the past but left out slavery. Now, maybe we bring all of those issues back into the pit and flesh it out. And why not let it be the Alamo that does that?” Latimore said.