Did a slave named John die defending Alamo?
Some historians believe store clerk didn’t exist except as a typo in a victims’ list; others suggest he was brought there with owner
SAN ANTONIO—The Alamo’s official website lists “John,” a slave, as among the 189 known defenders who died in the 1836 battle at the fort.
The Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas Online says John belonged to Francis L. Desauque and was a clerk in Desauque’s Matagorda County store near the coast. Both were at the Alamo before Desauque was sent out for supplies before the start of a 13-day siege.
John is said to have died at the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Desauque was killed in the executions at Goliad three weeks later.
But a historical researcher who has meticulously tried to name everyone inside the walls of the Alamo that year believes John is the product of an 1836 printing error and people’s imaginations.
“I don’t think the guy really existed,” said unofficial Alamo historian Bill Groneman, a retired New York City arson investigator who lives in Kerrville.He said the website and handbook should remove any references to “John.”
But Carey Latimore, a Trinity University history professor specializing in African American studies, said the entries on John should be rewritten, not removed. He believes John could have been Anglo or an enslaved Black person, but he almost certainly was not a freed Black man and was not necessarily at the Alamo when the battle occurred.
“There are certain desires to make him Black, to make him a defender of the Alamo, to make him a free Negro, which would mean he’s perhaps choosing to be there. We have to let the evidence drive us, not our own desires,” said Latimore, who serves as a history adviser on the Alamo Citizens Advisory Committee.
Most people familiar with the Alamo have heard of Joe, William Barret Travis’ enslaved servant who survived the battle, gave eyewitness accounts and escaped bondage a year later. Joe said other Black individuals were present during the 13-day siege and battle, which concluded with the death of up to 257 soldiers and volunteers in the fort.
Alamo devotees who have heard of John have long thought he also was among the dead. But Groneman has publicly questioned that narrative for nearly a decade. In a 2012 article in The Alamo Journal, a publication of The Alamo Society, he wrote that “collectively we have built an actual person out of nothing.”
Groneman believes a partial, hastily compiled list of 114 Alamo defenders, printed with an article 18 days after the battle in the Telegraph and Texas Register, has long fooled writers and historians. The list, based on recollections of two surviving Alamo couriers about who was in the fort, included a man named John with no last name and a misspelled parenthetical note that he was a “cl’k in Desanque’s store.”
The next line, indented, listed “Thurstor.” Groneman believes the typesetter intended to identify John Thurston. “It was just a mistake, the way the names were listed,” Groneman said.
But the list became a primary source document. William Fairfax Gray, a lawyer and author in Texas, listed “John” in his 1837 diary. Other writers gave him the rank of private. He was identified for the first time as a Black servant of Desauque in a 1907 novel, “Margaret Ballentine or The Fall of the Alamo,” by Frank Templeton, and called a “slave” by historian Amelia Williams in a 1930s article in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, according to Groneman.
In their 1985 book, “Roll Call at the Alamo,” Groneman and co-author Phil Rosenthal also identified John as Desauque’s slave.
Then, in a 1990 book, “Alamo Defenders — A Genealogy: The People And Their Words,” Groneman gave John’s residence as “probably Matagorda, Texas,” and his occupation as “store clerk, possibly a slave.” He allowed that John may have been a freedman working for Desauque, a slave owned by another Alamo defender or “a defender who was listed solely by his first name on a list with plenty of mistakes.”
Groneman later said many Alamo followers “like to believe that a freed Black died for freedom at the Alamo. But there’s just no evidence of it.”
Latimore commended Groneman for attempting to set the record straight, noting that “as historians, we make mistakes.” But he said he has doubts that the listing of “John” referred to Thurston, and he questions whether Desauque would have left the Alamo alone without his clerk.
“I think John is a person. We need to revise what we say about John,” Latimore said. “I wouldn’t remove it. It is an interesting piece of the story.”