On this Day: Fall of the Alamo

     The battle of the Alamo has always been one of those turning-point events which particularly captures my attention and admiration. Stories of sacrifice and courage are (I think) the very greatest of any that can be told and the thirteen-day defense of a sprawling mission by about 130 men against more than ten times their number is among the greatest of these stories.
     I am not an Alamo expert by any means and to date (March 6th, 2019) have never even been close to Texas, so I'll stick to the basic facts in this brief narrative.

     The Alamo and town of San Antonio de Bexar had been captured by Texian forces in December from General Martin Perfecto de Cos, the brother-in-law of Santa Anna. This infuriated Santa Anna, the Mexican dictator and general, who marched his army to San Antonio, turning his attention away from the young Texian government on the Brazos river, the gathering Texian army, and the women and children who were fleeing across the prairie. Santa Anna besieged the Alamo on February 23rd. At the time there was only a small force inside, but they were enough to keep the Mexicans out.
     The tiny garrison inside the mission received reinforcements, led by James Bowie and William Barret Travis. Eventually, there were somewhere around 250 men inside, but eighty or more were sick, leaving only about 130 defenders on a line of weak fortifications which required over a thousand men to properly defend. Multiple pleas for reinforcements resulted in only a few men (less than fifty) joining them. The last reinforcement arrived on March 4th.
     On March 5th Lt. Colonel Travis held a conference with the men, presented the situation, and informed those who wished to leave that they were at liberty to escape, if they could. Up to this point, escape and re-entry had not been difficult, so a large proportion of the men could almost certainly have left. (This is where the "line in the sand" story comes from; unfortunately, as compelling as that story is, it appears to be an embellishment.)
     On March 6th, before dawn, the Mexican army attacked and after a fierce struggle, the Alamo was taken and all the defenders slaughtered.

     Unbeknownst to Santa Anna, he had just lost the war for Texas independence.

Lessons from the Alamo

     The Battle of the Alamo has been on my mind for a few days and here are some of the lessons which I see in this historical event:

1: Pride works its own destruction.  Santa Anna invested the Alamo because of pride. It was a comparatively insignificant post but he could not stand the thought that it had been captured by the Texians, so he wasted his time subduing it instead of crushing the new Texas Government and Sam Houston's raw army. His pride in this instance had two major effects:

     Houston had thirteen precious days given him to prepare for the Mexican army. The Alamo has been called the Texas Thermopylae because the defenders held out long enough to give the rest of Texas time to prepare and organize. How would the war have gone if they had not had those thirteen days?

     The Battle of the Alamo raised the spirits of the rest of the Texians and the slaughter of its defenders infuriated them. Like the Pearl Harbor attacks over a century later, it roused men who were not present at the battle. They gathered around Sam Houston and fought Santa Anna, with eventual success at the Battle of San Jacinto.

     Santa Anna, dictator and general, won the battle - but he lost the war.

2:  The greatest men are those who serve and sacrifice for others.  Santa Anna has gone down in history (American history, at least) the murderer of the Alamo defenders and Goliad prisoners. William B. Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett, with the other Alamo defenders, on the other hand, have been honored as defenders of liberty - whatever their unsavory antecedents might have been.

     Power and position are never given for the possessors to serve themselves - power should always be used to serve and protect others. The greatest hero is the greatest servant.

     There can be no comparison in degree between the Lord Jesus and the defenders of the Alamo, but I cannot write of sacrifice and ignore the ultimate sacrifice in all of history: God, Himself, in the person of Jesus, coming to earth to redeem the people He created. He died and rose again to save us from the penalty of our sins and to free us from the domination of sin and Satan, if we will repent and believe on Him.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

John 15:13