Lee at the Alamo

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  Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee strolled through the streets of San Antonio. It was a bright February morning, the air mild and moist: almost a promise of spring. But, as Lee knew from his service on the Texas frontier, such promises were more easily made than kept. Another norther might yet howl down to cover the ground with snow and wrap ice around hopeful young leaf buds.

  You never could tell with Texas weather. And you never could tell with Texas politics. More promises there had been made than kept, too. For all his efforts, Governor Sam Houston hadn’t been able to keep his state in the Union. A secession convention had voted Texas out of the Union. Once a referendum ratified that vote, it would join the Confederate States, whatever the Confederate States were or would become.

  As Commander of the Department of Texas (the U.S. Department of Texas, a distinction that would have been meaningless before the North elected Abe Lincoln President), Lee found himself in a delicate position, which was putting it mildly. He wished illness hadn’t kept Brigadier General David Twiggs from assuming command of the department a couple of months before. Then the responsibility would have lain heavy on someone else’s shoulders. With it pressing down on his, he felt like Atlas trying to bear up under the weight of the heavens.

  Nothing has happened yet. He’d told himself the same thing every day since the secession convention met. Every quiet day was another day won, another day in which reason and good sense still prevailed against the madness tearing the country to pieces.

  Virginia remained in the Union. If the Old Dominion left the United States, Lee feared he might have to go with her. How could a man fight against his own state? But for the time being he himself remained an officer in the U.S. Army. And he would do his duty as an Army officer, wherever that duty took him—and took the United States, and took the new-hatched Confederate States.

  In the meantime…In the meantime, a cardinal chirruped at him from an evergreen bush. He smiled back at the bird, liking the splash of color it lent the drab late-winter world.

  San Antonio wasn’t such a bad town, no matter how close to the frontier it lay. It held close to 10,000 people, divided more or less equally among Americans, Germans, and Mexicans. Old men among the latter remembered when this was an outpost of the Spanish Empire. They had become Mexicans when Mexico broke free from Spain, and Texans after Houston beat Santa Anna. They’d turned into Americans when Texas joined the Union. Now they were suddenly on the point of finding themselves Confederates. If any of the abrupt changes in nationality altered the way they lived by so much as a cent’s worth, Lee couldn’t see it.

  The square centering on the Alamo was purely Mexican in its architecture. Some of the cabins were of stakes plastered with mud. Others, larger, were built with adobe bricks. Those had thatched roofs with wide overhangs to keep rain from eating into the unbaked mud. Some were still their original brownish hue; owners had given others washes of white or yellow or blue. The thick bricks fought San Antonio’s savage summer heat as well as anything could.

  Lee had first seen the Alamo when he came to Texas fifteen years before to serve in the Mexican War. Then it had still been scarred from the fight Colonel Travis, Jim Bowie, David Crockett, and their fellow Texas patriots put up against Santa Anna’s vastly larger army back in the 1830s. In 1849, Major E. B. Babbitt repaired the building so the Army could use it as a quartermaster depot. The new roof and the arched front were of his construction.

  Eyeing the place with a military engineer’s perspective, Lee nodded approval. If anything, the fortress was more defensible now than it had been in Travis’ day. The new outwalls enclosed a much smaller perimeter. Men on them wouldn’t be stretched so thin as the Texans had been a generation earlier. They’d won everlasting glory, but only at the cost of their lives.

  If he had to defend the place, his own garrison wouldn’t be much bigger than the one that had served under Colonel Travis. There were, all in all, about 2,600 U.S. soldiers in the Department of Texas. But they were spread thin, divided among dozens of forts and encampments along a frontier hundreds of miles long.

  Military expediency said he ought to concentrate them somewhere: probably here in San Antonio. The only trouble was, he couldn’t. No telegraph lines stretched to most of those scattered strongpoints. Sending out riders would eat up time he knew he didn’t have.

  Worse still, he feared not all his soldiers and officers would obey his commands. Many of them came from the South: the South now splitting away from the Stars and Stripes. And most of those men were more passionately attached to their section than Lee was himself.

  A Mexican drove a two-wheeled cart piled high with vegetables past Lee. The burro in harness didn’t seem big enough for the job. Lee knew how the poor, overworked beast had to feel. The cart’s large, ungreased wheels creaked and squealed. The driver gravely lifted his wide-brimmed straw hat in salute to Lee.

  With equal gravitas, the commander of the Department of Texas returned the courtesy. The way things looked to him, few Mexicans worked as hard as they might. Lee loathed idleness and indolence above almost all other things. No one could say this fellow wasn’t busy, though. And some of his lettuces and radishes and onions were very fine.

  The produce vendor’s wagon rattled on toward the German part of town on the north back of the San Antonio River. There, fair, bushy-bearded men in plug hats had built snug homes of the golden local limestone. Most of the houses were small, but they were all neat, with roofs of slate or tile. A greater contrast to the ramshackle Mexican quarter would have been hard to imagine.

  Many American houses were made of stone, too, but set back from the street rather than right up against it. Some were of brick, and rose to three stories. Lumber hereabouts was scarce and expensive; hardly anyone built with it. Even the white picket fences that marked off gardens and flower beds cost a pretty penny.

  An uncommonly large group of men—fifteen or twenty—rode into the square the Alamo dominated. Almost all of them were young—Lee saw no one he would have thought older than thirty-five. Every one of them was armed, some with a musket, some with a shotgun—a good cavalry weapon—some with a revolver or two. One of them had tied a strip of red flannel around his left arm, up near the shoulder.

  He noticed Lee’s blue U.S. Army uniform and rode up to him. Fanning the air with his hat to put down some of the dust he’d raised, he asked, “And who might you be, sir?” He spoke civilly enough, but with the plain expectation of being answered.

  Lee saw no reason not to oblige him, saying, “I am a lieutenant colonel in the Army of the United States of America, and have the honor to command the Army’s Department of Texas. And who, sir, are you?”

  “Robert Lee, eh?” The stranger stared down at him from horseback. He was a big, broad-shouldered ruffian, with long, greasy hair and a beard that straggled down his chest. “You’re just the fellow we’re looking for, by thunder!” Several of his men—for they plainly followed his lead—nodded.

  “Who, sir, are you?” Lee repeated. He stayed polite, but a little iron came into his voice. He was the Commander of the Department of Texas, and expected to have his questions answered the first time.

  “Me?” The fellow seemed astonished that anyone should need to enquire. “Why, I’m Ben McCulloch, that’s who!”

  “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. McCulloch.” Lee raised his own hat from his head for a moment. “And you are looking for me because…?” He waited, the very image of attentiveness.

  “I was looked for you on account of I’m a colonel in the militia of the great state of Texas, that’s why.” McCulloch tapped his red flannel armband as if it were a rank badge. Perhaps, at the moment, it was.

>   “Do you require aid from the United States for some reason?” Lee asked, hoping against hope. He even went so far as to propose a reason: “Is that devil Cortinas on the loose again, for instance?” The year before, he’d led cavalry to chase bandit chief Juan Nepomuceno Cortinas away from Brownsville, near the Gulf of Mexico, and back over the Rio Grande.

  Ben McCulloch—Colonel Ben McCulloch—shook his head and laughed scornfully. “Nah, that son of a bitch is still skulkin’ down below the border. Long as he leaves white folks alone, I don’t give a damn what he does amongst the greasers.”

  Lee frowned at the needless profanity, but agreed with the sentiment. “Well, then, ah, Colonel” —he used the rank and denied it at the same time— “perhaps you will be so good as to tell me what I can do for you. Since you say you do not need the Army’s help, I cannot imagine that you were looking for me in particular.” A genuinely modest man, he meant that.

  “I don’t need the U.S. Army’s help, Colonel Lee,” McCulloch said, his voice deep and raspy and fierce. “I need the God-damned U.S. Army gone.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Lee knew—knew only too well—that Texas was in the process of dissolving the bonds linking her to the Union. He knew as much, yes. That a jumped-up militia colonel should dare to speak to him so took him aback all the same.

  “Gone,” McCulloch repeated, as if to a simpleton. “If you will surrender your forts and your guns and muskets and munitions without kicking up a fuss, you and any of your men who don’t care to join the great Southern cause can march on out of Texas, and nobody will touch a hair on your head. But if you say no, sir, I cannot answer for the consequences, and that is the Lord’s truth.”

  “You are joking!” Lee blurted.

  “Neither joking nor jesting,” McCulloch said. The mounted toughs behind him nodded as if their heads were on springs.

  ‘“But surely you can see how absurd it is for you to come threatening me with no more than a handful of soldiers” —Lee very much gave McCulloch’s followers the benefit of the doubt— “and demand that I yield not only myself but also the whole Department of Texas up to you.”

  “I’ve only got a handful of men along with me on account of I reckoned we could do this quick and easy and peaceful-like,” McCulloch answered. “You have the name of a reasonable man, Colonel Lee, and I was hopin’ you’d go ahead and do what was reasonable for Texas.”

  “What you want, you mean.” Lee had no trouble translating that into plain English.

  Colonel McCulloch shrugged in the saddle. “However you please. But if you don’t feel like actin’ reasonable…Well, in that case I can have me two thousand Texans in San Antonio by day after tomorrow.”

  The U.S. Army garrison in town numbered between three and four hundred. No doubt McCulloch was stretching—Texans were past masters at it, in Lee’s experience—but even so…. The weather might be springlike, but winter lived in Lee.

  “If you take up arms against your country, you plunge your state over a precipice.” Even here, even now, Lee would not name the Confederacy, an organization whose legitimacy he was at the moment obliged to deny. He did add, “One certain truth is that it is easier to start a war than to end one.”

  “I don’t aim to start a war. I aim to take for Texas what belongs to Texas,” McCulloch said. Again, the men at his back nodded to show their support.

  “A man may aim for one target but unfortunately hit another,” Lee said. “And the forts and munitions in Texas do not belong to your state, however much they may have benefited you in days gone by. They belong to the government of the United States of America.”

  “We are done with that government, Colonel Lee. We will have no truck with the damned abolitionist from Illinois who has grabbed ahold of the reins,” McCulloch ground out. “I heard tell you were a Southern man yourself, sir. You talk like one. How can you stomach taking orders from a no-good son of a bitch who’s only going to steal your property?”

  “I am a soldier. A soldier has no politics.” Lee would rather have seen any of the other three presidential candidates in the crowded election of 1860 inaugurated come March 4. But it was going to be Abraham Lincoln, even if he had won only forty percent of the popular vote. Not showing that on his face or in his voice, Lee continued, “I aim to obey all legal and proper orders from the executive branch.”

  “Legal and proper, yes.” Ben McCulloch bore down hard on the words. “But what happens when he tells you you’ve got to start taking niggers away from honest white men?”

  “He has promised not to interfere with chattel slavery where it exists,” Lee answered uncomfortably.

  McCulloch hooted in derision. “Yes, and a promise is worth its weight in gold, too. When he does what he does and calls in the Army to help him do it, that’ll be just exactly too late, won’t it? Texas won’t put up with getting shoved around by a pack of nigger-lovers, so we’ll stick with the other states as think the same way.”

  “He is not even President yet. You are leaving before the train comes to the station,” Lee said.

  “Like I told you a minute ago, better too soon than too late,” Colonel McCulloch retorted. “Now let’s get down to brass tacks. Are you going to turn over those forts and those guns and those munitions to us, or not?”

  Lee’s eyes filled with tears. “Has it come to this?” he whispered.

  “Damn straight it has. What’s your answer?” McCulloch glared down at him.

  The Devil take you. Lee didn’t say it—it wasn’t his style—but he could feel it inside of himself. It stiffened his back, which was stiff enough already. He felt as if he stood on a level with the Texan, regardless of whether he had to look up in fact. “My answer, Colonel, is no,” he said. Iacta alia est went through his mind, as it had through Julius Caesar’s.

  McCulloch gaped. The Texas militia officer hadn’t looked for a flat refusal. “I ought to shoot you down like the yellow dog you are!” he said.

  “I cannot stop you. If you want war so badly, let it begin here.” Lee touched the brim of his hat. “Otherwise, if you will excuse me…” He walked away, not looking back. The Texans’ stares bored into the skin between his shoulder blades; he could feel them. But the militiamen did not open fire, whether out of respect for him or lingering awe of the government they craved to abandon, he never knew.

  Major George Thomas was a fellow Virginian. Unlike Lee, he had always placed the Union ahead of his state or his section. Now Lee found himself in the same stance, however little it pleased him. Thomas, then, was the logical man with whom to discuss the Department of Texas’ predicament.

  Having heard him out, the younger officer said, “They should have killed you when they had the chance, sir. They’ll be sorry they didn’t. You’re far and away the best man we’ve got.”

  “You give me too much credit,” Lee murmured.

  “Like blazes I do,” Thomas replied. “All the troops in San Antonio respect you. They all admire you.” He paused to light a cigar.

  “They will not all follow me, not against the revolutionary government of Texas,” Lee said dolefully. “Too many of them are in accord with its aims. And the revolutionaries are in earnest. I do not know if the self-styled Colonel McCulloch can have his promised two thousand armed men here by day after tomorrow, but bands of desperadoes have been riding into town all day.”

  “Yes, sir. I know. I’ve seen them, too.” Thomas did not seem impressed. “A lot of ’em headed straight to the taverns to drink themselves blind, or else to the brothels to scratch a different itch.”

  “Indeed,” Lee said with fastidious distaste. “This being so, it behooves us to make haste.”

  “‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,’” Thomas agreed. Lee raised an eyebrow. The ginger-bearded major grinned at him. “Macbeth. Shakespeare wouldn’t have made a half-bad officer. He knew what was what, all right.”

  “Oh, I recognized the line. Something to what you say, too, I should
n’t wonder, though it hadn’t occurred to me till now,” Lee replied. If he didn’t read the Bible to make time spin by at a little fort in the middle of nowhere, he commonly did read the Bard. He far preferred Shakespeare to trashy, vulgar modern novels. He came back to the business at hand: “We had better find out who stands with us and who in opposition.”

  “I was going to say we’d better make sure the ones who want to be Confederates don’t grab the chance to run off and tell this son of a bitch of a McCulloch what we’ve got in mind, too.” George Thomas chuckled. “But since I don’t know that my own self, it’s not likely they will, either.”

  “I will gladly tell you what I purpose doing. If you have a notion you think better, believe me when I tell you I would be delighted to hear it.” Lee spoke for some little while.

  Major Thomas listened intently. After his superior finished, he let out a soft whistle. Then he said, “Well, sir, if we can get there, that sounds to me about the best way to play the hand we’ve got. The only trouble is, it’s a bad hand any which way. Chances are we won’t end up any better off than the last batch of fellows who holed up there.”

  “That did cross my mind, yes,” Lee said. “But the Texans’ demands are intolerable. We may not win—”

  “We can’t win,” Thomas broke in.

  Lee nodded, conceding the point. “Nevertheless, we must make the effort. An open break will show the country the madness engulfing it.”

  Thomas puffed out his cheeks and blew a stream of smoke through parted lips. “Well, let’s get cracking, then.”

  Four in the morning. Blackness cloaked San Antonio. The moon had set more than an hour earlier. Jupiter and Saturn still shone close together in the southwest, but neither their light nor that of the fixed stars let Lee see anything but the faintest and dimmest shapes.

  Behind him, Major Thomas hissed, “Remember, you bastards, keep it quiet. Broken step—no marching. And no cussing if you trip or step in some horseshit. Save it for when we get there, you hear?”