A Texan YouTuber once mentioned offhandedly that his history teacher father had taught him that the The Alamo was largely about slavery. This blew my Yankee-educated mind.
When I looked to research it more I found this piece, also from Texas Monthly, about that year's winner of "The Texas Historical Commission’s annual prize for the best work of Texas history."
I now have to totally revaluate my beliefs about the historical moment in 1982 when Ozzy Osborne got arrested for pissing on the Alamo Cenotaph while wearing his wife's dress.
Eh, like many things, there were a lot of causes for The Texas Revolution, and, by extension, The Battle of the Alamo. It's pretty reductive, and from a 21st century POV, to say that it was about slavery first and foremost. There was a lot of unrest in Mexico around this time (Texas wasn't the only breakaway region), there were plenty of American settlers who didn't integrate with the Mexican culture (although there were plenty that did, and plenty Texians who fought for independence as well), and there was a significant geographical distance between Mexico City and the settlers. Slavery was a motivation for some, that is undeniable. But like much, it's more complicated than that.
>Learning history as kid in Massachusetts, the fact that slavery was any part of the Texas Revolution was never mentioned.
That leads me to wonder what were you taught. It seems strange to me that my Texas education taught more about slavery than a New England state. How could slavery be left out like that. History classes for me were a long time ago, and there are definitely things I have to ask myself if they were not really taught, or I just didn't learn/retain/care when they were taught. For example, my recollection of WWII history classes was heavily focused on the European campaign while the Pacific campaign was much more limited. Is that bias on what I paid attention to, or was that how it was actually taught?
> It seems strange to me that my Texas education taught more about slavery than a New England state.
Me too! As I grow older, so many of my early supposistions have been proven wrong.
Regarding WWII, this has been one of the most interesting threads on HN which I have participated in. For a further example of "it's more complicated than we are taught in school" see my crazy comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089205
While there were more reasons for sure, I had never heard about the slavery aspect until today. Doing some google search showed me indeed historians think that it was one of the reasons and I find it surprising it isn’t talked about as much
> and I find it surprising it isn’t talked about as much
there have been many attempts to talk about it, the latest attempt was turned into a boogeyman called "Critical Race Theory" and censored by all levels of state government in that region of the country
maybe this is an opportunity to look into what people are trying to actually teach and point out about American history
there has been a century of pushback starting from parents for history that isn't resoundingly "go America, #1 in every aspect, moral leader of all time all the time".
eh I'm beating around the bush because the reality might dilute the point in this crowd as it might sound fictional and unfamiliar: white parents want their white children to feel comfortable with the country's history. this neglects that other groups have always felt uncomfortable with that version of American history. other groups trying to merge in aspects of American history that affect them have had a century+ of pushback from the more numerous group of people who have representatives similar to them in office.
yeah yeah #notallwhiteparents, ok.
just enough to get governors and legislatures to continue creating boogeymen and blocking the teaching of history that isn't resoundingly comfortable for those same people.
If I was to learn a larger lesson from experiencing acquiring this major detail about the Texas Revolution myself, it might be that history is much more complicated than we are taught.
Another huge example for me is that even though we escaped the communist-bloc when I was a kid, where my mom had to de-program me from preschool lessons about Lenin...
I still bought into the whole "WWII was won with American industry, and Russian blood" story. Meanwhile, a major missing fact in that story is that Stalin and Hitler started WWII together, as allies. A few days after this pact was signed, Poland was invaded from both East and West. It is very arguable that without this agreement, even nutjob Hitler would not have tried to invade all of Europe. Now that I know that, it makes a lot more sense.
Agreed, both could be true. This is another example of the simplified "kid history" which we were all taught. It is actually much more complicated. As an example from "the other side," in the USA, were we ever taught about the Business Plot?[0] Or the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden?[1] Why doesn't every American know about these events?
However, in the case of “Russian Blood won WWII.”
1) This patriotic story which still rings true in Russia today, would be WTF’ed if the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was mentioned in the same breath. As in, so many died because papa Stalin allied with Satan Hilter? WTF?
2) It was actually mostly Belarusian and Ukrainian soldiers who lost their lives on the front lines, not Russians. Because of course the Kremlin would decide to send them in first.
Countries tend to not teach their bad parts of history, not unique for the us, and one side of the political spectrum is especially bad.
Would less people have died if there wasn't a pact? Wouldn't Hitler have taken Poland anyway? Hitlers plan was always to invade and kill the population east of Germany. Stalin was already suspicious but thought they would have time to rebuild their armies before m the invasion.
I read the soviet union when people say Russia during ww2, so includes other ethnicities for me. Wouldn't surprise me if they used non-russians like that, but I'm not sure about what you say. According to the link 5.7m out of 8.7m military deaths were ethnic russians.
> It was actually mostly Belarusian and Ukrainian soldiers who lost their lives on the front lines, not Russians. Because of course the Kremlin would decide to send them in first.
> I have some numbers on hand from Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna bez grifa sekretnosti (roughly Great Patriotic War declassified) by Krivosheev and Adronikov…
> Out of 8,668,400 total combat losses where nationality could be established, only 5,756,000 were Russian (66%). Ukrainians made up 1,377,400 losses (16%), Belarusians 252,900 (3%), Tatars 187,700 (2%), Jews 142,500 (1.6%), Kazakhs 125,500 (1.4%), Uzbeks 117,900 (1.4%) and other nationalities made up less than one percent of the total losses apiece.
> The number of prisoners of war tallied also show that Russians were the most numerous population involved, but that much. Out of 1,368,849 cases tallied up in the book, 657,339 POWs were Russian (48%), 386,568 were Ukrainian (28%), 103,053 were Belarusian (7.5%), 30,698 were Tatars (2%) 28,228 were Uzbeks (2%), 23,816 were Georgians (1.7%), 23,142 were Kazakh (1.7%), 20,850 were Azeri (1.5%), 20,067 were Armenians (1.5%) and then the remaining nationalities made up less than 1% each.
> When determining the percentages of each nationality that fought in the Red Army it is also important to remember that pre-war populations won't do you much good. Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics were fully occupied by the Germans for the majority of the war, meaning that any civilians who would come of fighting age during this time were unable to join the Red Army. Men of fighting age or nearing it would likely be kidnapped for forced labour in Germany or killed, which further drove down those numbers. In contrast, it would be much easier to draft someone who turned 18 in Eastern RSFSR, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc. so the proportion of these nationalities were higher.
It’s likely that Belarus and Ukraine probably did suffer more in some proportional sense. Is this because the Soviet Union followed a policy of ethnic Russian supremacism (under the rule of an ethnic Georgian dictator), or because Belarus and Ukraine are closer to Germany and got the worst of what the Nazis had to dish out? Likewise, I’ve also seen insinuations that the Holodomor was an ethnically motivated genocide of Ukrainians, and while it did affect Ukraine especially hard, there seems to be very good evidence that it was primarily motivated by communist class hatred towards the kulaks, combined with the sort of brutal forced reorganization of the economy that also led to millions of deaths at the hands of the Chinese and Cambodian communist regimes. Plenty of Russians also died in the terror-famine, and at any rate, the communist regime was preoccupied with questions of class and ideology. It’s much more fair to attribute their atrocities to these motivations more than the ethnic ones that people are perhaps more heavily fixated on today.
I’d also point out that when you’re talking about modern Ukraine, you’re not quite talking about the same country as pre-WWII Ukraine. The eastern parts of Poland that were annexed by the USSR according to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact became the western parts of Belarus and Ukraine. The Ukrainian city of Lviv, also known by its Russian name Lvov had been the Polish city of Lwow. Prior to that, before Poland was granted independence in the aftermath of WWI, it was the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg. Similarly, the Crimea was transferred from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR in the 1950’s for administrative reasons, but even since then was still mostly populated with ethnic Russians.
Speaking of parts of history that don’t get talked about, let’s mention some other borders that got moved. Poland was ultimately “compensated” for the loss of its eastern territory to the USSR with the annexation of most of the easternmost parts of Germany, complete with the forced relocation of Germans into the now smaller territory of occupied Germany, a massive exercise in what most Americans would call “ethnic cleansing” if the US wasn’t utterly complicit in it. This happened to some degree across Eastern Europe during and after the war, and there are perhaps understandable and sympathetic motivations for that, what with the presence of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland providing excuses for German aggression at the beginning of the war. Nevertheless, that doesn’t quite justify annexing parts of Germany and driving out all of the Germans. Altogether, at least 12 million ethnic Germans were driven out of their homes during and after the war, with somewhere between half a million to 2.5 million of them dying in the process. And it’s not like it was always straightforward to accurately identify “ethnic Germans” either—some of the displaced and dead from the territories annexed to Poland were probably ethnic Poles with German citizenship.
Thanks for some interesting details on the USSR casualty numbers.
However:
> Speaking of parts of history that don’t get talked about, let’s mention some other borders that got moved. Poland was ultimately “compensated” for the loss of its eastern territory to the USSR with the annexation of most of the easternmost parts of Germany, complete with the forced relocation of Germans into the now smaller territory of occupied Germany, a massive exercise in what most Americans would call “ethnic cleansing” if the US wasn’t utterly complicit in it.
I am not sure how the US was complicit in this exactly. You skipped the part where ethnic cleansing was also done to the Poles in Eastern Poland, and they were moved at gun-point to where I currently am writing from.. Lower Silesia. The understanding here was that the USSR moved Poland to the East, so that Russia moved further to the East. It sucked for the Germans and the Poles. The Soviet Army did this. BTW, it's oddly not nationalist around here, as there is no multi-century family land history.
Everyone around here does not believe that these new borders were at the request of the USA. If the USA/UK is to blame at all, it is that they abandoned us all to the monsters in Moscow. People are still a little pissed off about that to be honest.
Here is my family story: One of my grandmothers lived in Kalisz, Poland. Her family was considered "reis deutsch," so was not taken for extermination. Her farmhouse was used by German officers as a BnB, as it laid exactly half-way between Berlin and Warsaw.
My other grandmother pretended she was Polish for all of her adult life. However, it turns out she was 100% German. Her parents were shot, in a big public show, by the Red Army in Riga, Latvia - as they owned the brick factory, and were German. After her parents were shot, she walked to Poland at the age of 18 and never spoke another word in German for the rest of her life.
As my Polish grandmother began suffering from dementia, she started to drop her guard and finally started to answer all my dumb WWII questions (we were living comfortably in Seattle at the time.) I was not ready for the answers. In addition to regular wartime, she was SA'ed by both German and Soviet Army members. Meanwhile, my secretly German grandmother didn't have as good a time, having seen her parents shot and then who know what happened during her lost years while she walked to Warsaw over the course of 11 months. Later in adult life, she was committed multiple times.
All in all, my family history turns out to be the definition of: it's more complicated than what I was taught in school, and I can imagine.
When people start to talk about left/right, commie/fascist, as if one is better than the other, I don't know how to respond except that I believe in the horseshoe theory of politics. It's us normies in the middle, and murderous assholes on the edges. Those assholes sign things like the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, call each other "the other," and we all have to suffer.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I truly appreciate communication on this website.
> I am not sure how the US was complicit in this exactly.
We were allied with the Soviet Union and explicitly agreed to the program of forced relocations. I agree with you that the vast majority of the blame should be placed on the communists, but in my opinion the United States was still too naive and conciliatory towards Stalin during the war. If there was some way that the Nazis and communists could have both lost World War II without killing everyone else in Eastern Europe along the way, that would have been ideal. Unfortunately, that’s not how things work. I think the US ultimately took one of the better possible courses of action, but I still have my criticisms.
> You skipped the part where ethnic cleansing was also done to the Poles in Eastern Poland, and they were moved at gun-point to where I currently am writing from.. Lower Silesia. The understanding here was that the USSR moved Poland to the East, so that Russia moved further to the East.
Yes, thanks for bringing this up. Aside from the Kaliningrad Oblast, I think it was mostly Belarus and Ukraine that moved west, though the distinction between Russia and Ukraine is much more salient today than it was at the time.
Thanks for sharing your family history. I absolutely agree that the truth is extremely complicated and defies any simplistic and tendentious narrative that anyone tries to apply to it.
> I agree with you that the vast majority of the blame should be placed on the communists, but in my opinion the United States was still too naive and conciliatory towards Stalin during the war.
Historically, is seems as there is a normalcy bias[0] towards Moscow, whether it's the USA, UK, Germany, or France, trying to consider Russia as a "normal" European peer society. While Moscow keeps proving that they are not, and mostly that their leadership sees an advantage in being some sort of contrarian opposition to the ideals of Europe.
A while back in modern history, imperial Germany was also this type of problem. Is it too late to destroy and rebuild Russia, as Germany was rebuilt, now that nukes are involved?
How this divide is to be conquered all these decades later is still the challenge of our times. I almost give up. Our governments are clearly not up to the task, even today. My only hope at this point are very brave Russian artists like IC3PEAK.
They sure put a lot of effort into enshrining chattel slavery into law and preventing its destruction. It's the only state to secede from another nation twice to protect slavery.
Slavery was the primary motivation (just as it was the primary motivation for the 1861 pro-slavery rebellion of the US South). The weakness of the Mexican central state and its logistical difficulties sustaining its army was a convenient (for the white Texans) bonus that made their pro-slavery revolt possible.
If you want to keep digging, you can add American expansionism and ambitions to conquer big parts of Mexico, i.e. a "manifest destiny" land grab. The US was happy to tacitly support the Texans because whether they failed or succeeded it was relatively low risk for the US government and their success was likely to further US interests.
It's fair to say that the primary cause of Texan separatism was slavery.
It's also fair to say that Santa Anna was a proto-fascist and that was a legitimate factor, not a convenience. Lorenzo de Zavala, the former Mexican finance minister, didn't become Vice President of Texas for slavery or American expansionism.
Mexican elites were a brutal and repressive bunch, both before and long after this time, and "fascism" doesn't even begin to describe the evil racist systems of repression of indigenous people from the 16th up through at least the mid 20th century.
But Texas anglos didn't really give a shit about any of that. They just wanted to left alone to build their own little profitable slave plantation economy modeled after the US southern states.
Texas anglos weren't the only people involved in the Texan revolution. And while it's true that Mexican elites were largely brutal and repressive, they didn't generally generate rebellions in half the Mexican states simultaneously. Santa Anna did.
The periods before and after Santa Anna were also very violent and politically unstable, with armed rebellions all over Mexico. Santa Anna was fairly ordinary in his goals and methods by the standards of Mexican/Latin American caudillos.
The fundamental problem was not one or another particular person, but a society organized along quasi-feudal lines with extreme wealth/power concentration and systematic repression by elite landowners and a central state with limited power or legitimacy and huge logistical challenges. If it had been someone else other than Santa Anna in charge of Mexico, Texas anglo slave owners would have still had the same motivations and more or less the same systemic context, as would the US government, and eventual outcomes would have likely been similar.
Let's take a trip back in time to a period just before the Texas Revolution. Perhaps we can find some basis for claims that a leading cause of the revolution was Anglo settler's desire to increase the number of slaves in Texas to help them build the economy and Mexico's reluctance to allow more slaves.
For this trip we will briefly reflect on the writings of a man who traveled to Texas in 1828 to gather information about Texas - plants, geology, business and industry, the political climate, etc for a report back to leaders in Mexico City so that they could use the intelligence to shape their own policies relating to the province. We will use the book *Texas by Teran*. [0] [1]
He touches on the subject of slavery several times since it is becoming, at the time, a point of friction between the Mexican government and the Anglo settlers. A couple of diary entries that support the fact that slavery was a keystone issue in Anglo settler's decisions to separate from Mexico follow.
pp38 - He is making recommendations in a letter to President Guadalupe Victoria and his second recommendation notes - "If the North Americans are allowed to introduce slaves, the Mexicans of Tejas should also be permitted to do so, but if slavery is denied to some it should be denied to all."
In 1824 Mexico adopted a new constitution that abolished slavery. By 1829 they elected their first president who had partial African ancestry (Guerrero). Slavery was not allowed in Mexico at the time of Teran's journey.
pp 56 - The most persistent goal for this colony is to obtain permission for the introduction of slaves. Without them they say that their settlement cannot prosper, nor can much of the land be cultivated, because there are forests so thick that only with negro labor can they be cleared. They petition the state government for permission to have slaves and make the following proposals: that the slave will be such only temporarily until he repays through his labor the cost of owning him, and that his descendants will be emancipated.
There is more in that entry that I encourage people to read but the gist is that anglo settlers wanted slaves and were willing to get them into the territory whether the Mexicans permitted it or not.
Thank you very much for these details. I know every country wants to teach their children the simplest, easiest to digest truth. But we are not children here, and this is why I come to this website.
You're welcome. I have roots in Texas back to at least 1835. I have always enjoyed reading history, especially obscure stuff. One problem that I run into far too often is the assertion that when children in Texas are taught about anglo settlement, the empresario system, the grants for settlement, etc that state curriculum glosses over the role of slavery in anglo settlement at the time. I had Texas history in grade school back in the 60's and we definitely covered the fact that anglo settlers brought slaves with them into Texas and that this was a contentious point. We covered Mexican history leading up to the Texas Revolution so we could understand the whole background of the relationship between Mexicans already living for generations in the Mexican state of Tejas and the Anglos who hoped to establish themselves in the state. Of course the fall of the Alamo was a sacred event to be remembered forever but we still learned that there were Mexican residents of Texas who opposed Santa Ana.
History always has weird twists and unexpected alliances. That book is a great book full of descriptions of contemporary occurrences that really make you appreciate how far we have all come.
Are you claiming that slavery had nothing to do with it?
> The revolution began in October 1835, after a decade of political and cultural clashes between the Mexican government and the increasingly large population of Anglo-American settlers in Texas. The Mexican government had become increasingly centralized and the rights of its citizens had become increasingly curtailed, particularly regarding immigration from the United States. Mexico had officially abolished slavery in Texas in 1829, and the desire of Anglo Texans to maintain the institution of chattel slavery in Texas was also a major cause of secession.
No trolling, just some light teasing. I found it disturbing that you were repeatedly accusing this publication of 'race baiting" with no real basis. We all need to recognise the gravity of the history of slavery and the continuing social stratification that its legacy is causing around the world. I think it's dangerous to make accusations like you have done here. I asked you several times to clarify what you were saying and only received vague spiels about the Spanish language somehow ensuring that English derivations must be free of racist connotations. This left me a little exasperated and I felt that a bit of light banter would highlight some of the vacuuity of the accusations I was reading.
Totally fine if you think they've made a factual error but the accusation of race bait is a serious one and only serves to undermine any chance of such conversations being held with civility. Not everyone who says things you disagree with are trolling or baiting or acting with insiduous agendas.
Look, I wasn't taught any of this either, and I went to school in Massachusetts (Yankee as heck.)
But search the web for: Texas Revolution Slavery or Texas Cotton Slavery
There are sound arguments from historians that slavery was indeed a significant factor in the Texas Revolution. Was it the only factor? No. But it was significant. In those days, in cotton land, cotton was not economically viable without human slavery. I also didn't know that Texas was cotton land back then.
The Texas Convention of 1836 explicitly legalized slavery.
I was never taught any of that. However, as I said in another comment: "But I get it, it's nicer to wrap up history in a nice bow when teaching children."
I am on the old side of age, and I have to say that it's nice to still be learning things. Maybe the Internet wasn't a mistake :)
edit: BTW, my deceased father's Cameron (Iron Works) and Cooper Oil Tools coveralls are hanging about 20 feet from me. I am not unfamiliar with modern Texas.
It was covered quite well in Texas, the entire 7th grade year history is dedicated to it.
Though recently the coverage has shifted to alternative points of views I've heard, but I don't have a kid so I don't know exactly how they cover it now.
If you would like to pick a "sound argument" from one of those historians I'd like to hear it and cross-examine it.
Hey, so I have made all of the "arguments" that I am willing to make on this topic. Check out other parts of the thread if you are interested.
However, while talking about voting is breaking HN guidelines... your higher-level comment got flagged. While I disagree with some of what of what you said, I vouched for your comment, because I believe that this discussion is important for people to see.
When I looked to research it more I found this piece, also from Texas Monthly, about that year's winner of "The Texas Historical Commission’s annual prize for the best work of Texas history."
> Forget the Alamo
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/forget-the-alamo/