Lines in the Soil; Lines on the Soul: Myths, Fallacies, and Canards That Obscure the Battle of the Alamo
by Stephen L. Hardin
His first visit to the Alamo greatly stirred A. B. Lawrence. The year was 1840 and the old mission still lay in ruins. Nevertheless, already San Antonio de Béxar’s leading tourist attraction, its cold stones possessed the ability to inspire. A citizen of the United States and a Presbyterian minister, Lawrence was touring the Republic of Texas gathering materiel for an emigrant’s guide he was planning to write. What he had already seen of that fledgling nation impressed him mightily. “It contains,” he insisted, “more productive and valuable land than any other country of similar extent in the known world.” Yet, nothing he had previously experienced had prepared him for the sensation of reverence and awe that the Alamo stimulated. Clearly moved, he waxed elegiac:
Will not in future days Bexar be classic ground? Is it not by victory and the blood of heroes, consecrated to liberty, and sacred to the fame of patriots who there repose upon the very ground they defended with their last breath and last drop of generous blood? Will Texians ever forget them? Or cease to prize the boon for which these patriots bled? Forbid it honor, virtue, patriotism. Let every Texian bosom be the monument sacred to their fame, and every Texian freeman be emulous of their virtues.
Lawrence was by no means alone in expressing such sentiments. Almost before the blood dried on those shattered stones, the Alamo and its defenders entered the realm of myth and legend— and there, in large measure, it remains.1