The Alamo's Forgotten Defenders
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The Alamo's Forgotten Defenders

The Remarkable Story of the Irish During the Texas Revolution

Phillip Thomas Tucker

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eBook - ePub

The Alamo's Forgotten Defenders

The Remarkable Story of the Irish During the Texas Revolution

Phillip Thomas Tucker

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Within the annals of Alamo and Texas Revolutionary historiography, the important contributions of the Irish in winning the struggle against Mexico and establishing a new republic are noticeably absent. Breaking new ground with fresh views and original insights, Phillip Thomas Tucker's The Forgotten Defenders of the Alamo: The Irish of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836, sets forth one of the best remaining untold stories of the Alamo and Texas Revolution by exploring a largely forgotten and long ignored history: the dramatic saga of the Irish in Texas. Dr. Tucker has thoroughly explored a hidden history long ignored by generations of historians. Relying upon a wealth of previously unexplored primary sources, The Forgotten Defenders of the Alamo is the first book devoted to the dramatic story of Irish achievements, contributions, and sacrifices in winning independence for Texas. In doing so, Tucker's study bestows much-needed recognition upon the Irish and shatters a host of long-existing stereotypes and myths about the Texas Revolution. Reflecting a distinctive cultural, political, and military heritage, the Irish possessed a lengthy and distinguished Emerald Isle revolutionary tradition reborn during the Texas uprising of 1835-1836. The Irish were the largest immigrant group in Texas at the time and among the most vocal and passionate of liberty-loving revolutionaries in all Texas. Symbolically, the largely Ireland-born garrison of Goliad raised the first flag of Texas Independence months before the Alamo's fall. More than a dozen natives of Ireland fought and died at the Alamo, and the old Franciscan mission's garrison primarily consisted of soldiers of Scotch-Irish descent. From 1835-1836, Irish Protestants and Catholics made invaluable and disproportionate contributions in the struggle for Texas Independence that will no longer pass unrecognized. Presented not only as a military history of the Irish in the Texas Revolution, but also as a social, economic, and cultural history of the Irish in Texas, The Forgotten Defenders of the Alamo will stand as a long-overdue corrective to the outdated "standard" views of the story of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution.

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Publisher
Savas Beatie
Year
2016
ISBN
9781611211924
Topic
Storia
Subtopic
Storia del XIX secolo
Chapter 1
A Natural Revolutionary Union
Second
to none, the story of the bloody struggle for possession of an old Franciscan mission known as the Alamo on March 6, 1836 has become a cherished legend and a Texas and American icon. The dramatic showdown at the Alamo between the band of defenders and a formidable Mexican Army has provided one of the most celebrated chapters in American history. In addition, the 13-day siege of the Alamo has served as the very foundation of the highly-romanticized revolutionary saga known as the “Texian Iliad,” as christened by at least one admiring Texas historian. But in fact, the name “Irish Odyssey” actually far better explains the course of the Texas Revolution and its Celtic-Gaelic roots and antecedents that have been long ignored.
The traditional telling of this memorable life-and-death struggle for possession of the mission, nestled in the shallow valley of the San Antonio River just outside the dusty Tejano town of San Antonio, has long overlooked the considerable ethnic contributions, as well as the extensive cultural diversity of the Alamo garrison long, and incorrectly, viewed as homogenous. In total, 15 Ireland-born Alamo defenders killed at the Alamo during Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s surprise attack on the early morning of March 6, 1836 exceeded the number of Tejano defenders who fell. As important, these young men and boys from Ireland died beside a good many sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of Irish immigrants, who were mostly Scotch-Irish Protestants from Ulster Province, northern Ireland. In fact, the Alamo garrison was predominantly Irish, Scotch-Irish, and Celtic—consisting of members from Wales, Scotland, Cornish (all Celtic)—and those of Anglo-Celtic descent, and whose Irish ancestors had been in America for generations.
Indeed, the Alamo’s doomed garrison’s mostly volunteer soldiers, who possessed scant military experience and training—a classic case of amateurs and rustics in rebellion—were made up of Celtic-Gaelic composition. Even the most famous combat unit of the Texas Revolution, the New Orleans Greys, consisted of a large percentage of Ireland-born soldiers, who had volunteered to assist the Texians in their righteous “struggle for liberty,” according to one Alexandria, Louisiana journalist, including those citizen-soldiers who were killed on that cold, late-winter morning at the Alamo.
Even the Alamo’s famous leadership trinity of William Barret Travis, David Crockett, and James Bowie possesed Celtic-Gaelic roots like the garrison that mostly consisted of men of either Ireland-born, Scotch-Irish, or of Scotch-Irish ancestry. These men hailed mostly from the South, a cultural and ethnic demographic that mirrored the overall dominant Southern (Celtic-Gaelic) composition of Texas Revolutionary soldiers, both the Texians and volunteers from the United States. Providing a representative example of personal Celtic and revolutionary legacies, Bowie’s ancestral roots went back to fiery Scottish Jacobite rebels, who stood against England with a nationalistic and Celtic fury. Therefore, from beginning to end, the last-ditch defense in the Alamo, nestled amid the central plains dominated by Tejano ranching culture that was Mediterranean in origin and a legacy from Spain, was primarily a Celtic-Gaelic one.1
The disproportionate and important Irish contributions throughout the course of the Texas Revolution, including at the Alamo, should not be surprising because of not only the realities of the longtime demographics of America’s western expansion and its largely Celtic-Gaelic composition, but the overall story of the Irish experience, including its role of the “westering Irishmen,” in America.2 In the words of one historian, “No larger nation did more to spark the cause of independence in America, indeed round the world,” than Ireland.3 Unfortunately, in regard to the Alamo’s story, generations of Americans (including historians) relied primarily on “John Wayne [in his Cold War-inspired film The Alamo and others in Hollywood] to get it right.” Instead they failed miserably, creating new falsehoods, distortions, and stereotypes to obscure the historical record.4
Irish immigrants and settlers were the third highest population group and the largest white ethnic group in Texas when the Texas Revolution erupted in early October 1835, comparable to numbers of overall United States settlers, who were likewise mostly of Scotch-Irish descent, and Tejanos. When combined, the number of Irish, Scotch-Irish, and those of Scotch-Irish descent—or Anglo-Celtic—made-up the vast majority of the Texas population by the time of the Texas Revolution’s beginning in early October 1835. Although underestimating the overall Irish and Scotch-Irish contribution, gifted historian T. R. Fehrenbach correctly described the early fundamental make-up of the Texan people by 1836 as “Anglo-Celtic.” Therefore, throughout the Texas Revolution, the self-styled “Army of the People” of Texas was thoroughly dominated by its Scotch-Irish and Irish composition, character, and flavor and until the final decisive victory was reaped by Sam Houston’s forces on the sun-baked plain of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. In the end, an Anglo-Celtic army won one of the most dramatic victories in the annals of American history at San Jacinto.
An historic Celtic-Gaelic restlessness, a burning desire to escape Old World political and economic oppressions and abusive central government, heavy taxation, high rents paid for laboring like slaves on the land of wealthy landlords, and a dreary existence as humble tenant farmers largely explained why so many Irish and the Scotch-Irish had pushed west and eventually settled in Texas by 1835—the same catalysts that led to the first exodus to America from Ireland before the American Revolution. For the Scotch-Irish and their descendants who had already surged beyond the imposing forested barrier of the Appalachians, the fertile lands of Texas loomed as the enticing southwest frontier in the 1820s and 1830s. Earlier migrations spilled into the rich lands of the Ohio Valley and the Old Southwest (the Deep South), and then across the Mississippi River was only part of America’s overall historic migratory process; this continued as they moved yet farther west and across the Red and Sabine Rivers, the Texas-Louisiana border, and entered Mexico’s northern province of Texas
This fundamentally Scotch-Irish experience—members of the lowest class (after blacks) in American society—was rooted in the religious-like conviction the God had chosen this land specially for their own possession. The seemingly limitless natural bounty and beauty of Texas’ virgin lands embodied the fulfillment of those same lofty dreams that had first inspired the relentless push of the Celtic-Gaelic people across America in successive generations.5 In the words of one writer about the Irish: “Those who had settled in Texas a few months, really enjoy more comforts (and these, in addition to the opportunity of realizing a handsome property) than any peasantry with which I am now acquainted.”6
In the early 1820s, Stephen Fuller Austin first settled the original “Three Hundred” norteamericanos on Texas soil. Among these first settlers in Texas were Ireland-born Humphrey and Alexander Jackson, Arthur and Peggy McCormick, a married couple, and Martin Allen. However, other Irish names among the settlers were Kelly, Fitzgerald, Callaghan, Kennedy, Lynch, Moore, Cummings, and others. Irish Protestants, perhaps even including women, were among the first schoolteachers of the children in the Austin Colony, and they played a leading role in bestowing education in this frontier setting. One of these Irish schoolteachers, a man named Cummins, would later be killed in battling Mexicans who threatened the life of Texas.7
But the vast majority of Irish in Texas were never settlers of the Austin Colony, coming to Texas as either individuals or in like-minded groups. John Joseph Linn was one of the early pioneers of Texas, and an early soldier of the Texas Revolution. In his own words that revealed pride of ancestry, he “was born in the county of Antrim, Ireland, on the 19th day of June, A.D., 1798.”8 Like so many Irish, Linn fell in love with Texas, describing the land as a “garden in the wilds of nature 
 a terrestrial paradise.”9
Thanks in part to the influence and sound advice of another County Antrim emigrant, early Texas trader and War of 1812 veteran John McHenry, Linn became a successful trader on the sprawling Gulf of Mexico coastal plain. With merchandise from New Orleans, the enterprising Irishman, who had learned to speak Spanish, traded with local Tejanos and also journeyed to Mexico to trade. Later joined by his two Ireland-born brothers, Linn also brought his parents to Victoria, Texas during the spring of 1831, where he made his new home.10 Victoria evolved into a thriving Irish community by the time of the Texas Revolution. The call to arms resulted in the Victoria Irish playing distinguished roles, with “every man going who could shoulder a gun.”11
More importantly, Linn represented the Irish community of Victoria (formerly Guadalupe Victoria) as a delegate of the revolutionary assembly known as the General Consultation (formed in early November 1835), which, in his words, was the “first organized movement in Texas in opposition to the despotic measure pursued by [Antonio Lopez de] Santa Anna.” He then represented the same community (along with other Ireland-born representatives like James Power and John Malone of the Refugio Colony) when the Texas provisional government was organized from the Consultation.12
In fact, Irish calls for independence predated the Consultation. Patrick Usher, an immigrant from County Cork, Munster Province, in the south of Ireland, who was destined to fight at the battle of San Jacinto, issued a call for independence from Mexico as early as July 17, 1835, galvanizing the people of Lavaca Navidad.13
Other groups of Irish settlers found their dreams coming true in Texas on the fertile lands near the Brazos River west of the Guadalupe River, both of which flowed lazily southeastward into the Gulf of Mexico, in an Irish community named Staggers Point. Established as an “Irish town” in 1833, the town’s name was based on the word “striver,” which alluded to the Irish settler’s sense of determination to conquer the land and succeed. Here, in a pretty wooded tract that looked more like the Deep South lands from which they had departed, these pioneers created their own Scotch-Irish community, with migrants arriving from 1829 to 1834. A dozen years before 1829, eight Scotch-Irish families originally had departed Ulster Province and settled in South Carolina. They then moved on to Alabama, before making Staggers Point their permanent home. To fend off Indians, Ireland-born James Dunn and his fellow Emerald Islanders built a fort for protection, even before they constructed their small Presbyterian Church.
The Irish prudence paid dividends because the Scotch-Irish settlers, such as the McMillan, Dunn, Henry, Scale, Dixon, Payton, Henry, Seale, and Fullerton families, were threatened from the beginning. The most devastating Indian attack came in 1839. The shedding of Irish blood caused the Scotch-Irish, under the command of Ireland-born Benjamin Bryant, to grab rifles, shotguns, and muskets and set off in pursuit of the raiders. However, the eagerness of the Scotch-Irish to strike back led them directly into an ambush. While the Texas frontier would prove to be a harsh land won by force against both the elements and the Indians, the overall experience in battling Indians was put to good use by these Scotch-Irish in 1835-1836. Among Sam Houston’s men at San Jacinto were Staggers Point settlers, led by Bryant, who served with distinction as a captain. The well-armed Irish of Stagger Point, like those across Texas, knew how to defend themselves and to live off the land by the ancient ways of the Fiacra (Gaelic), or Hunter.14
Located on Aransas Creek, the town of Corrigan (in today’s southern Bee County, Texas) was established by Irish immigrants Jeremiah O’Toole and James O’Reilly in 1835. O’Toole migrated from Ireland and journeyed to New York City in 1825. Four years later, O’Toole brought his family to Texas aboard the New Packet, and embarked upon a new life on the southwest frontier.15
When the sophisticated Colonel Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, educated by scholars at a fine Jesuit Catholic school in New Orleans, Louisiana, was dispatched by the Mexican government on a secret expedition to inspect Texas in 1834, he found the land not only teeming with norteamericano settlers of Celtic descent, but also Irish immigrants. He was pleased to report that two of the colonies—those of John McMullen and Martin de Leon—had “progressed the most” and consisted “of Irish and Mexicans.”16
But Almonte also discovered a nascent Irish revolutionary ferment, especially in the form of Father Michael (Miguel) Muldoon, who was born around 1780 in County Cavan, in north central Ireland, Ulster Province. He was the son of an Irishman who had earlier fled the Emerald Isle, perhaps for revolutionary reasons, for Spain, where he married a Spanish woman. Here, at the Irish College in Seville, Spain, the younger Muldoon was ordained and...

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