Travis Victory or Death Letter

The Travis letter, often called the Victory or Death letter after its closing words, is a dispatch written by Lt. Col. William Barret Travis on February 24, 1836, one day into the Mexican siege of the Alamo at San Antonio de Bexar.¹ The original, which carries notes added by two other men, belongs to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, which acquired it in 1893.¹

Text

The letter carries the heading Commandancy of the Alamo, Bejar, with the date February 24th 1836, and names two audiences in its salutation, the people of Texas and all Americans in the world.² Its body reports the siege, a bombardment of twenty four hours, a demand for surrender at discretion and the answer the garrison gave, and it includes the line “I shall never surrender or retreat.”² It closes with the words Victory or Death and the signature William Barret Travis, Lt. Col. comdt., followed by a postscript on provisions of corn and cattle brought inside the walls.²

The State Library presents the document in four page images. The first carries an instruction to send it on to San Felipe by express, night and day; the letter runs across the second and third; the fourth holds the added notes.² Capt. Albert Martin, who carried it out of the fort, wrote a postscript after hearing cannon fire on the road home, and Lancelot Smither added lines of his own on the reverse after taking the dispatch over at Gonzales.¹²

Printings of 1836

Smither reached San Felipe in less than forty hours.¹ There the printers Joseph Baker and Gail and Thomas Borden set the text in a broadside headed MEETING OF THE CITIZENS OF SAN FELIPE, two hundred copies of which were ordered by the local committee.¹ Baker and Borden produced five printings in all, falling into two versions, and the State Library says neither transcribed the original accurately.¹ The Texas Republican printed the letter in its March 2 issue and the Telegraph and Texas Register on March 5, both from those variant copies.¹ How the text moved through the shops of San Felipe is the subject of the essay on the letter and its printers.

Custody

Reproductions in Texas histories between 1836 and 1891 also follow the printed variants, which the State Library takes as evidence that the handwritten original was returned to Travis’s relatives soon after the Revolution.¹ It passed to Susan Isabella Travis, the commander’s daughter, then to her daughter and to a great grandson, John G. Davidson, who sent it to Austin in February 1891 as a temporary loan.¹ Davidson offered it for sale in 1893 and, after asking $250, accepted $85; a warrant for the purchase was issued five days after his final offer of May 24.¹ The acquisition was entered as accession number 39 in the State Library’s museum log, and a 1903 report placed the letter on exhibition in the library’s main room.¹

The Texas State Library and Historical Commission assumed custody on March 19, 1909. Its one absence came in 1936, when the commission approved a temporary loan of 143 documents, the Travis letter among them, to the Texas Centennial Central Exposition.¹ The agency’s wider holdings are summarized in the State Library’s own reference page, and its online exhibit on the siege ranks the letter as likely the most famous document in Texas history.³

Reproductions

A bronze plaque bearing the text stands on the grounds in front of the Alamo chapel.⁴ Since 2024 duplicates of that plaque have been placed in county courthouses by the group profiled in a separate article on the Alamo Letter Society, each unveiled at a local dedication; the buildings themselves are surveyed in the article on Texas county courthouses.⁴⁵ Related subjects appear in the index of reference entries.

References

1. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, William Barret Travis’ Letter from the Alamo, 1836. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

2. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, William Barret Travis’ Letter from the Alamo, 1836, Full Text. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, The Battle of the Alamo. ↩

4. Alamo Letter Society, alamoletter.com. ↩ ↩²

5. Alamo Letter Society, Dedication Dates. ↩