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SLEUTHING THE ALAMO
that “the focus on culture conflict has remained the starting point
for all explanations of the background of the Texas Revolution
and has been emphasized by recent scholars.” But Lack acknowledged that my Yale dissertation had challenged the prevailing view when I maintained
that racial conflict bore little responsibility for the origins of the
Texas Revolution. . . . Crisp argued [said Lack, that] emigrants to
Texas in the 1820s and 1830s came without a full-blown set of negative preconceptions to serve as a taproot for rebellion and learned
to get along reasonably well with the Tejano elite. [Crisp] concluded
that the ugliest expression of racism triumphed with and after the
Texas Revolution, its ironic consequence rather than its cause.
As I labored to turn the dissertation into a book, I found myself in agreement with John H. Jenkins, who published the tenvolume Papers of the Texas Revolution in 1973. Poring through
the thousands of documents Jenkins had compiled, I understood
his blunt assessment that very little that had been published on
the revolution could be trusted. All too often, “facts” about this
conflict proved to be unsubstantiated by the evidence. Assertions
regarding “what really happened” turned out to be myth. I was
also beginning to suspect that many historians had projected
onto the past their assumptions about racial antagonism in the
present.
By the late 1980s, I felt that I was developing an unassailable
case for my thesis that ethnic cleavage had been more a consequence than a motivating cause of the Texas Revolution. I knew
that during the sesquicentennial decade of the Texas Republic
(1986–1996), there would be a horde of historical taxidermists
at work, doing their best to portray that interesting little nation
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Pride and Prejudice
in the most flattering of poses. I hoped that the republic would
also become the object of study of a few historical pathologists,
who would strive not merely to identify and to curse the crippling infection of racism, but also to understand the conditions
that fostered its growth.
Toward the end of 1992, I was completing an article laying
out my revisionist case that the Texas Revolution was less a product of ethnic friction than a precipitating cause of it. But only a
few weeks after sending my final corrections to the publisher, I
found myself reading with dismay a manifestly racist speech by
Sam Houston, the idol of my Texas boyhood. The speech, quoted
in a prize-winning new book by Paul D. Lack, shocked me because it upset not only my best understanding of what the Texas
Revolution meant but also my plans to publish a book about
what I thought I knew.
Over the course of the past decade, my search for what Houston and others actually said and did has propelled me along a
twisted path through some of the fondest myths of the Texas
Revolution. This little book is the story of one historian’s attempt
to separate Texas myth from Texas history. Along the way, I’ve
been forced to tackle more than one Texas mystery. The tale begins with Sam Houston riding toward the small South Texas settlement of Refugio—where he would be forced to make that
speech.
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