One of the first signs of trouble appeared back on October 23rd when Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick posted on X that he had forwarded a letter to the Board of Directors of the Alamo Trust, Inc. demanding Dr. Kate Rogers’ resignation or removal.
Under pressure from Patrick, who allegedly contacted her directly by phone, Rogers apparently felt compelled to tender her resignation a day later in what the Editorial Board of the San Antonio Express News characterized as her “forced” resignation.
Rogers’ decision to resign was all the more remarkable given the fact that she had recently been promoted to president of the Alamo Trust, Inc., the nonprofit organization established in 2015 to manage and operate the renovation, expansion, and reconceptualization of the historic Alamo site in San Antonio, Texas.
Patrick had apparently taken exception to excerpts appearing in the last two pages of the doctoral dissertation Rogers had written at the University of Southern California. One of the specific points of contention for Patrick, according to reporting by the San Antonio Express News, was a reference Rogers included in her dissertation to a book entitled “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.” This insightful analysis of the mythology associated with the Alamo siege and battle espoused the position that the Texas Revolt “was fought primarily against Mexico to expand slavery in the American South.”
It’s important to note, however, that “Forget the Alamo” is certainly not the only or even the first historical analysis to advance this position. There’s also Randolph B. Campbell’s “An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865” and Alice L. Baumgartner’s “South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War” and Andrew J. Torget’s “Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850” and Gerald Horne’s “The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism,” among many others.
As these and other similar studies clearly demonstrate, serious historical analysis of the Texas Revolt has definitively acknowledged the central role that the issue of slavery played in the conflict that erupted between the Anglo-Texan settlers and the Mexican government.
This particular feature of the Texas Revolt is rarely even disputed by credible historians at this point and is certainly not in any way “controversial,” at least not from any historical perspective. Acknowledging this aspect of the revolt is also not some new “woke” or “politically correct” interpretation as critics on the right have charged, and it really shouldn’t even be considered, in any historiographic sense, as revisionist.
Even at the time of the revolt, the essential cause of the Texas Revolt was never really in doubt. Mexican military officials certainly seemed to recognize the root cause of the conflict. Col. José de las Piedras, a Mexican commander in East Texas, for example, warned that the Texans would undoubtedly revolt if laws prohibiting slavery were actually enforced noting that the colony “was formed for slavery[.]” José María Tornel, Mexico’s Minister of War at the time of the revolt, similar identified the “land speculators of Texas” who were intent upon converting Texas “into a mart of human flesh where slaves from the south might be sold and others from Africa might be introduced” as a factor in the conflict. Even General Antonio López de Santa Anna seemed to be clearly reiterating the Mexican position on slavery in Texas when, on the eve of his military campaign in Texas, he issued orders to all of his generals that “All negros should be liberated and declared free.”
Northern abolitionists including John Quincy Adams, William Ellery Channing, and Benjamin Lundy also astutely recognized the central role that slavery played in the Texas Revolt characterizing the insurgency in various ways as an early pro-slavery rebellion. Lundy would make his perception of the revolt unmistakably clear in the title of his 1837 book “The War in Texas; A Review of Facts and Circumstances, Showing that This Contest Is a Crusade Against Mexico, Set on Foot by Slaveholders, Land Speculators, &c., in Order to Re-Establish, Extend, and Perpetuate the System of Slavery and the Slave Trade.”
Perhaps most importantly though, the Texans themselves understood that they were fighting to preserve the institution of slavery in Texas. In an obvious reference to their slaves, leaders of the revolt justified the rebellion as a fight to preserve the colonist’s “property,” and, at the very outset of the revolt, Stephen F. Austin himself declared that “Texas must be a slave country.” Notably, upon securing their independence from Mexico, the Texans would immediately proceed to enshrine protections in the Texas constitution for slavery effectively outlawing any form of emancipation for African slaves in the independent Republic of Texas.
And yet, Patrick, who has rather dramatically characterized the Alamo as a “fight for liberty and independence,” seems determined to obscure this inconvenient but defining aspect of the conflict.
The latest troubling development associated with the project occurred on April 7th when Patrick announced that he had selected Taylor Sheridan to produce and direct a film depicting the Battle of the Alamo that will eventually be featured at the new Alamo Visitor Center and Museum.
Sheridan is an American screenwriter, director, and producer known for creating “Yellowstone” and other Paramount productions, including his latest project, “Dutton Ranch,” which is incidentally set in South Texas.
Sheridan is undoubtedly popular in certain circles, but his selection should give anyone concerned with a historically accurate rendering of the Texas Revolt and the Alamo serious pause. To begin with, there is no indication that Sheridan has any formal academic training in history. In fact, he has not completed any postsecondary educational program at all, and there’s nothing to suggest, at least that I have been able to determine, that he has engaged in any meaningful or sustained independent historical analysis of the Texas Revolt.
It’s important to recognize that when it comes to interpreting the Texas Revolt, Sheridan may not even be willing to consider anything beyond the mythology associated with the conflict that he has, in all likelihood, unquestioningly accepted all of his life. In Patrick’s press release, Sheridan is quoted as saying that it would be his honor to “chronicle the sacrifice made by the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives defending the Alamo.” This certainly doesn’t sound like someone preparing to objectively explore the complexities of the Texas Revolt including the Mexican government’s principled opposition to slavery. It sounds like someone preparing to perpetuate the same old mythologized version of the revolt.
There’s simply too much at stake, however, especially for Mexican Americans, to permit this distortion of history to continue.
The Texas Revolt was a nuanced and complex historical episode that foreshadowed the American Civil War. Many historians have compellingly argued that the Texas Revolt should not be understood as an isolated rebellion, but rather as an early pro-slavery conflict relating to the expansion of slavery in the United States.
It is also particularly significant to Mexican Americans because it permanently transformed the historical trajectory of people of Mexican descent living in Texas and elsewhere.
In other words, the Texas Revolt is not just another story to be told for entertainment or to advance a political agenda. It is a seminal historical event relating to issues of slavery in the United States, Mexican history, and Mexican American identity that deserves to be taken seriously and not simply reduced to a work of fiction. Historians have spent decades correcting the simple mythology that has been peddled in Texas for too long. Its interpretation should be guided by the historical record and not by the simplistic and compromised vision of a storyteller like Sheridan and his political patron Patrick.
