Legacy of the Battle of the Alamo

The Battle of the Alamo left a substantial legacy and influence within American culture and is an event that is told from the perspective of the vanquished.

The first major calls to restore parts of the Alamo occurred after 1860, as English-speaking settlers began to outnumber those of Mexican heritage.

Americans had arrived in Texas much later, when the Alamo no longer served in those roles, and they tended to see the compound solely in relation to the battle.

[7] Typical headlines included, "Immortal Glory to the Illustrious General Santa Anna: Eternal Praise to the Invincible Army of Mexico".

[8] Within days of the news, people began composing patriotic marching songs about Santa Anna and his victory at the Alamo.

[9] Santa Anna's political opponents were displeased that the focus had shifted to him; within days, newspapers supporting the federalist viewpoint began questioning whether the victory had come at too great a cost and whether it would actually help Mexico.

Many of the newspapers were disenchanted with Santa Anna's deployment of General Martin Perfecto de Cos, who had been paroled back to Mexico after the Siege of Bexar if he no longer took up arms against Texians.

Within weeks, however, the Mexican government learned of Santa Anna's defeat and capture at the Battle of San Jacinto and so the medal program was immediately cancelled.

U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, whose father had authored the 1905 legislation that allowed the State of Texas to buy the long barracks, often compared the war to the Alamo.

[13] A program on the Craft of Writing: Rewriting History on Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth[14] with Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson[15][16] co-sponsored by Writers' League of Texas with the Bullock Texas State History Museum, included the development of the Alamo's mythos during the Jim Crow era.

”This fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum.” The book received mostly-positive reviews, including from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, with a consensus that it builds on widely-accepted academic research.

[17] The third author, Jason Stanford, wrote one of the myths about the Alamo "leaves... out that Texians opposed Mexican laws that would free the enslaved workers they needed to farm cotton.

As the Mexican army retreated from Texas following the Battle of San Jacinto, it tore down many of the walls and burned the palisade that Crockett had defended.

Within the next several decades, various buildings in the complex were torn down, and in 1850, the United States Army added a gable to the top of the chapel.

[23] In front of the church, in the center of Downtown San Antonio's Alamo Plaza, is a cenotaph, designed by Pompeo Coppini and erected in 1939, which commemorates the Texians who died during the battle.

[29] In 1843 former Texas Ranger and amateur historian John Henry Brown wrote and published the first history of the battle, a pamphlet called The Fall of the Alamo.

[30] The next major treatment of the battle was Reuben Potter's The Fall of the Alamo, originally published in 1860 and republished in The Magazine of American History in 1878.

[37] According to Todish et al., "there can be little doubt that most Americans have probably formed many of their opinions on what occurred at the Alamo not from books, but from the various movies made about the battle.

The Alamo achieved prominence on television in 1955 with Walt Disney's Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, which was largely based on myth.