Thread by @CrownMaybe

I'm still tickled at the crazy lady who somehow missed the part of Texas History where we learned how Sam Houston overwhelmed a numerically superior force by waiting until the latter had decided to take a nap without posting sentries who could stay awake.

But: Wanna add a bit.

The crazy woman echoes a bit of nonsense that was all the rage when I was in college, which means it will leak out into the wild and become normalized in newsrooms if it hasn't already, to-wit: Beating up sleeping combatants is a war crime, especially if midday naps are cultural.

Put aside that no law of war, ever, has declared that attacking a sleeping enemy is a war crime. Put aside that the Spanish, from whom the cultural nap imperative arises, fielded amazingly competent land armies who -- unlike the successor Mexican army -- posted sentries.

When the Texans attacked at San Jacinto, they yelled, "Remember the Alamo!" and "Remember Goliad!" They weren't rallying themselves by remembering defeats. They were remembering real war crimes.

It's very hard to overstate the extent to which Antonio López de Santa Anna was one of the most successful, vicious incompetents of all time, and one who, if God is just, is currently experiencing the unpleasant end of Asmodeus's pain stick.

Only in Italy, Ukraine, and Mexico could such a brutal incompetent rise to supreme power and not just keep it, but on losing it, return and have it again and again; but it was his great luck to be born in and have his power base in one of the great failed states of all time.

Anyway, having levered himself up the power pole in the wake of Mexican independence, and (honestly, reasonably) worried about a bunch of American Protestants flooding into Texas, he pushed through a law at the start of the Texas Revolution naming all internal foreigners pirates.

Let's pause right there and expand on that. A pirate is, under customary international law, hostis humani generis; that is, an enemy of all mankind, and susceptible to trial and execution by any power the world over.

The reason for this is two-fold: (1) As the philosophers Mitchell and Webb taught us, pirates may be fun, but they are the baddies. We want fewer of them. Making death an outcome aids this. (2) Because they're on the high seas, they're outside territorial jurisdiction.

To extend this category to enemy combatants, operating under clear uniforms and (in many cases) actually citizens of one's state, albeit in rebellion, is a violation of:
(a) customary international law;
(b) Catholic and Christian teaching; and
(c) good common sense.

Anyway, when Santa Anna sent troops into Texas to put down the very in-fashion rebellion underway (Mexico is basically a group of countries held together by a love of the same soccer team, a truth now and then, though then without soccer), it was in two campaigns.*

*Simplified.

Famously, Santa Anna took his column and attacked the Alamo, where William Travis inexplicably decided to defend a former mission missing a wall or two, and where Santa Anna couldn't win for 12 days, inexplicably only if you don't know Santa Anna.

Famously, he played the Degüello, which meant that even on surrender, there would be corpses.

Again, this violated basically all the rules, but Santa Anna was a fairly handsome if stupid ogre.

This is an excuse to play my favorite song of all time.

So, after failing to overwhelm a force he outnumbered between 3 and 30 times over, crouched behind inferior cannon and missing walls, for almost two weeks, the ogre slaughtered every defender.

It was an uncivilized time, but even then, that was a crime against civilization.

The Goliad campaign, spearheaded by the far more competent José de Urrea, is essentially the story of what happens when a competent man is put in charge of a small force and treats them well against a numerically inferior force led by incompetents.

The Texan force lost again and again, in battle after battle, dying and surrendering and retreating, until they finally fell back on the better-defended OPEN FIELDS outside of Goliad, where they surrendered.

(Again, I'm cutting out the near-victories they almost managed, because though they weren't well-led, they fought well, and lost in the end.)

They surrendered because they thought they were fighting civilized men. And in the case of Urrea, they were right!

They were otherwise wrong.

Urrea refused to execute men who had openly and willingly surrendered when they could have fought. Santa Anna ordered him to do it, pointing to the law Santa Anna had pushed through. Urrea refused.

(The correspondence here is actually remarkable; even if my Spanish is awful, I can appreciate Urrea's repeated efforts to say, Dear God in Heaven, man, have mercy and some common sense; and Santa Anna's imperious demands. Remarkable stuff.)

Santa Anna then sent written orders to both Urrea (again) and José de la Portilla, the local fort commander, to execute the prisoners. Urrea countermanded Santa Anna's order.

Portilla slaughtered the prisoners anyway.

(My thoughts on Portilla are complicated, but I believe prayers for his soul are in order, because he believed Santa Anna's order unjust but also felt it his duty to comply, and apparently spent time with his confessor both before and after giving the order.)

Anyway, the crowning moment comes at the execution of Colonel James Fannin, the commander of the Texan forces, who was forced (again over Urrea's order) to watch the systematic execution of his men.

Fannin was not as bad at the shooty-stabby-war thing as potted histories suggest (though he was a slave trader who held slaves and sold them in contravention of the law to which he'd agreed when he emigrated to Texas, so scum), but at any rate, he was not actually an idiot.

He understood that he was not merely going to be executed in violation of the laws of war, he was going to be brutalized. Nevertheless, he asked that his possessions be returned to his family; that he be shot in the heart, not the head; and that he be allowed a Christian burial.

He was, consequently, shot in the heart, his body partially burnt and left for scavengers, and his possessions distributed among the savages who'd executed him.

An old friend of mine is descended from a Tejano ranch owner who sent horses, men, ammunition, and two sons to fight for Sam Houston after the Alamo and Goliad; to that point, he'd opposed rebellion, but apparently nearly tore his diary apart with hatred for Santa Anna after.

So when Sam Houston's ragtag army -- which basically had to learn to fight like an army during a breather -- got ready to attack at Buffalo Bayou, and Houston finished his rally speech with "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" well, God bless that it wasn't a massacre.

It's not like the Anglo Texans were angels. Fannin was human scum. Colonel Travis had most of the same sins, plus abandoning his family. Some of the Anglos took Mexico's offer of land in return for becoming Catholic and renouncing slavery seriously. A lot didn't.

But if we're going to laughably describe an attack on an idiot and his half-savage force who couldn't bother to post meaningful sentries while they dallied with the camp followers as a war crime; well, folks, then it was a war crime that ended a war of atrocities.

(One more note: Santa Anna only stayed around to chase Houston and inevitably lose because Urrea's repeated successes and critical quality of not being an idiotic ogre had his star rising in the quicksand political landscape Santa Anna had conquered and helped make.

Had he withdrawn to Mexico and let Urrea mop up the Texans, history would have gone very differently. Had Urrea either been allowed to re-enter Texas or given the reinforcements he needed to finish off Santa Anna once and for all a few years later, same.

Santa Anna's incompetence, brutality, vainglory, egomania, and love of camp followers almost singlehandedly lost Mexico some of its best territory, and essentially set the stage for the loss of ... even more territory and coherence.

Degüello played, genius.)