Texas
Related: About this forumkeithbvadu2
(40,693 posts)Doc Sportello
(7,962 posts)From Time magazine on the enduring myths and false history (no they didn't fight till the last man and it wasn't about freedom) taught in Texas schools.:
"So much of what we know about the battle is provably wrong. William Travis never drew any line in the sand; this was a tale concocted by an amateur historian in the late 1800s. There is no evidence Davy Crockett went down fighting, as John Wayne famously did in his 1960 movie The Alamo, a font of misinformation; there is ample testimony from Mexican soldiers that Crockett surrendered and was executed. The battle, in fact, should never have been fought. Travis ignored multiple warnings of Santa Annas approach and was simply trapped in the Alamo when the Mexican army arrived. He wrote some dramatic letters during the ensuing siege, its true, but how anyone could attest to the defenders bravery is beyond us. The men at the Alamo fought and died because they had no choice. Even the notion they fought to the last man turns out to be untrue. Mexican accounts make clear that, as the battle was being lost, as many as half the Texian defenders fled the mission and were run down and killed by Mexican lancers."
and
"And Mexican-American history isnt the only piece of the past thats distorted by the Alamo myth. Academic researchers long tiptoed around the issue of slavery in Texas; active research didnt really begin until the 1980s. Since then, scholars such as Randolph Campbell and Andrew Torget have demonstrated that slavery was the single issue that regularly drove a wedge between early Mexican governmentsdedicated abolitionists alland their American colonists in Texas, many of whom had immigrated to farm cotton, the provinces only cash crop at the time."
A good synopsis of the myth can be found here:
https://time.com/6072141/alamo-history-myths/
Chainfire
(17,757 posts)He was the chief engineer of the group. (Green Bonito Jamison) His family were plantation owners from Northern Alabama and he had gone to Texas for cheap land to grow cotton, no doubt, using slaves. The whole family from N. Al. had become wealthy on the backs of enslaved men and women and on land granted for Rev. War service, or "bought" from the local Native Americans.