William Barret Travis

William Barret Travis (1809 to 1836) was an officer of the Texas Revolution who commanded the garrison of the Alamo during the thirteen day siege of February and March 1836 and died when the Mexican army carried the fort on March 6.¹² A newspaper publisher in Alabama and a member of the militant war party in Texas before he held a commission, he is best known for a dispatch of February 24 addressed to the people of Texas, the subject of a separate entry on the Victory or Death letter.¹

Early life

Travis was the eldest of eleven children of Mark and Jemima (Stallworth) Travis, born in the Edgefield District of South Carolina near the Red Bank community. Sources differ on the day of his birth, August 1 or August 9, 1809; the family Bible gives August 9.¹ The family moved to Conecuh County, Alabama, in 1818, where relatives helped found Sparta and Evergreen. He attended an academy at Sparta and a school in Claiborne, where he later helped teach younger pupils.¹

At Claiborne he read law in the office of James Dellet and became Dellet’s partner. On October 26, 1828, he married Rosanna Cato, a former pupil, and a son, Charles Edward, was born the next year.¹ During this period he began the Claiborne Herald, joined the Masonic order and took a post as adjutant in the Alabama militia. About a year later he left Alabama for Texas, leaving Rosanna Cato, their son and a daughter not yet born. The Handbook of Texas records a persistent story about his reasons for leaving, but notes that hard evidence for it is lacking.¹

Anahuac and San Felipe

He reached Texas early in 1831, after the Law of April 6, 1830, had made immigration from the United States illegal, and on May 21 he obtained land from Stephen F. Austin at San Felipe de Austin.¹ He opened an office at Anahuac, a port of entry on Galveston Bay, and joined settlers who opposed that law and the Mexican garrison commander there, Col. John Davis Bradburn.¹

In 1832 Bradburn arrested Travis and his partner, Patrick C. Jack, after a hoax note about an armed party approaching the post. Settlers who gathered to demand their release drafted the Turtle Bayou Resolutions, and the confrontation became the first of the Anahuac Disturbances.¹ Travis afterward moved to San Felipe, where in 1834 he was elected secretary of the ayuntamiento, the municipal council.¹ In late June 1835, with some twenty five men, he forced the surrender of the Mexican customs garrison at Anahuac under Capt. Antonio Tenorio, an action that alarmed the peace party and led Gen. Martín Perfecto de Cos to demand that Travis and others be handed over for military trial.¹

Military service

When fighting began in October 1835 Travis joined the volunteers at Gonzales and went with the army to besiege Bexar, serving as a scout and later leading a mounted unit. He left before the final assault on the town in December.¹ Declining a commission as major of artillery, he accepted one as lieutenant colonel of cavalry and served as the army’s chief recruiting officer.¹

In January 1836 Governor Henry Smith ordered him to raise a hundred men and reinforce Col. James C. Neill at San Antonio. He raised only twenty nine and asked to be relieved; Smith refused.¹ The Texas State Library dates his arrival at the Alamo to February 3 with thirty regulars.³

Command of the Alamo

Neill soon left to attend to illness in his family and placed Travis in temporary command. James Bowie, who led the volunteers, would not take orders from a regular officer, and the garrison divided its votes along those lines until the two men agreed to share command.²³ With the engineer Green B. Jameson, Travis strengthened the walls, built palisades across gaps, mounted cannon and laid in provisions inside the former mission.¹

The vanguard of Antonio López de Santa Anna’s army reached Bexar on February 23, earlier than Travis had expected.² On February 24 Bowie fell ill, Travis took sole command, and he wrote the letter now preserved by the institution described in the entry on the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.² A relief party of thirty five men came from Gonzales, bringing the defenders to roughly 183 by the Handbook’s estimate.¹ Travis sent a last appeal on March 3.³

The assault began shortly before dawn on March 6. Travis was killed early in the fighting on the north bastion, and the bodies of the defenders were burned.¹²

Legacy

The Handbook of Texas observes that the manner of his death turned the commander of a little known garrison into a figure of Texas and American history.¹ His February 24 letter went through several printings in 1836 and many later reproductions,⁴ and bronze castings of it placed in county courthouses are the work of the group covered in the Alamo Letter Society article.⁵ Other people and institutions of Texas history are listed in the site’s reference index.

References

1. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Travis, William Barret. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸

2. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Alamo, Battle of the. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, The Battle of the Alamo. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Texas State Library and Archives Commission, William Barret Travis’ Letter from the Alamo, 1836. ↩

5. Alamo Letter Society, alamoletter.com. ↩