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Misremember the Alamo!
Posted by Clif on 05/11/05 at 8:34 am
Category: Wingnuts
Once again, Michelle Malkin is getting her loyal mouthbreathers, er, readers all worked up by Michelle’s misinterpretations of history. This time Michelle isn’t praising the relocation spas where Japanese-Americans were forced to luxuriate during World War II but instead is wading into an era of history she knows even less about: The Alamo. Michelle’s target is a 50-second Nickelodeon special which, she claims, says the dispute over slavery between white settlers and the Mexican government “led up” to the battle of the Alamo. This, according to Michelle, is “simplistic and inaccurate.”
Simplistic, perhaps; inaccurate, no. No less than John Quincy Adams said, two months after the Alamo, “the war now raging in Texas is a Mexican civil war and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished.” There is no doubt that the Mexico’s abolition of slavery in Texas was one of the reasons that led to the Texas revolution. A succinct explanation of this appeared in this article from the conservative U.S. News & World Report:
Almost a quarter of the original American settlers in Texas owned slaves. When the Mexican government abolished the practice, Texans viewed it as yet another infringement on their liberty. “The colonists were overwhelmingly southerners,” says William C. Davis, author of Lone Star Rising: The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic, “and they felt they needed slaves to capitalize on that vast arable land in the eastern part of the state.” To take away slavery, they felt, was to take away Texas.The slavery question has muddied the pristine image of the Texas revolution. . . . Popular history never mentions it, says Davis, but in the Texas revolution “you have the same contradiction [that you do in] the Civil War, when you’ve got several million Confederate citizens and soldiers preaching all the rhetoric of liberty while owning 3 million slaves.” The difference, he insists, is that in the fight for Texas, slavery was only an issue, not the issue.
Davis is correct about popular history’s omission of the role of slavery in the Texas-Mexico conflict. Go to the official site of The Alamo monument and you will find only one reference to slavery and that reference is to slavery’s role in the U.S. Civil War, not the Texas revolution.
So, it’s hard to have any sympathy for Michelle and her goon squad who have now launched their attack on Nickelodeon. Why aren’t they screaming about the official Alamo site and all the other sources of popular history that completely fail to mention that slavery was at least one, if not the only, cause of the conflict? Well, of course, you know the answer to that.
