And, keep an eye on the back door.
History abounds with stories of battles lost because someone left the back door open. One classic example is the Battle of the Alamo, because of amazing shortsightedness on both sides.
Few know that in 1836, just prior to the battle, Sam Houston, the commander in chief of that disgruntled group of militant immigrants (it wasn’t Texas then), said the Alamo – a Franciscan mission on the desolate plains of northern Mexico – was indefensible. He ordered it blown up. Others saw it as a fortress, a strategic post, and ignored his order. They chose to defend it against Mexican President Lopez de Santa Anna’s troops, brought there to enforce Mexico’s laws.
Santa Anna, a surly and unpopular president turned dictator, had lately suppressed three other uprisings, so, to him, the Alamo was another of a series.
Texas, at that time, was called Coahuila y Tejas (Coahuila and Texas); it was a constituent state of the United Mexican States.
Fifteen years earlier, Mexico had invited Americans to settle in this distant region, to develop the area and collect taxes from immigrant settlers (many were American cotton growers). By 1835, however, Santa Anna’s new packet of unwieldy laws had distressed the 200-some settlers – and many local Mexicans (Tejanos), eleven of whom fought alongside the Americans and 26 volunteers from Europe and the United Kingdom.
One law abolished slavery (50 years before the United States), a practice the cotton growers felt necessary for their success. Other laws dealt with taxation. I’m sure, also, that frontier orneriness, a desire for independence, prevailed. Texas became the Republic of Texas before joining the United States. Writer Justin Ewers, in the April 12, 2004 issue of U.S. News and World Report (“Misremembering the Alamo”), wrote, “The defenders of Texas, and the Alamo, may have been fighting for different reasons.”
Historians yet argue the causes and the battle itself, but the Alamo’s indefensibility isn’t questioned. Once Santa Anna’s soldiers attacked, they quickly breached its weakest point, a wooden, back wall the defenders thought would hold. See it as an open back door.
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