Fox Host Brian Kilmeade's New Book About the Alamo Isn't Fair and Balanced

[TexasTowelie]

On the eve of the publication of his new book about the Texas Revolution, Brian Kilmeade gave a promotional interview to his Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson. “All they wanted was a shot at success,” he said of the Anglo settlers who in the 1820s and 1830s flocked to what was then northern Mexico. “[T]hey said, ‘I’ll be a part of Mexico as long as you give us freedom and liberty.’” But, as Kilmeade explained to Carlson, when the Mexican government abrogated what the Americans believed were their rights—including unfettered immigration from the United States and easy access to cheap land—the newcomers took up arms and fought for independence. It was a choice that many, at the time and ever since, have likened to the actions of the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. This is an alluring story. It is also largely a myth.

In Sam Houston & the Alamo Avengers: The Texas Victory That Changed American History (Sentinel/Penguin Random House), Kilmeade, the co-host of the morning show Fox & Friends, reprises the formula that made his three previous books—and this one—runaway bestsellers: pick a Great (white) Man and a pivotal moment in the American past, and show how the two combined to alter the course of U.S. history. Sam Houston thus joins Kilmeade’s pantheon of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, whose exploits symbolize “What Made America Great,” the name of Kilmeade’s history series on Fox Nation. (Recent episode: “The Walls That Saved America.”)

However familiar this story may be, Kilmeade tells it with élan, offering several vignettes from Houston’s early career to open the book, including the story of a ghastly wound to the groin that he suffered in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend during the War of 1812; his fraught relationship with his mentor, Andrew Jackson; and the time Houston spent among the Cherokee during a self-imposed exile after the dissolution of his brief first marriage. (For their part, the Indians—to whom he remained forever attached—called him “the Big Drunk.”) And once the action shifts to Texas, Kilmeade unspools more than just the story of the Alamo. He leads readers from the battle for San Antonio in 1835 to the massacre by the Mexican Army of more than four hundred captured rebels at Goliad in 1836 and right on through to Houston’s improbable victory at San Jacinto later that spring, which ended the war and effectively secured Texan independence.

Also to his credit, Kilmeade—unlike many popular historians—dips into some of the relevant scholarly literature on the key figures and events of the era. His portraits of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin are sharpened thanks to engagement with the modern biographies by James L. Haley and Gregg Cantrell, respectively. And Kilmeade has clearly grappled with the work of historian James Crisp, who has debunked some of the most cherished myths of the Texas Revolution, especially the circumstances surrounding the death of everyone’s favorite coonskin-cap-wearing Tennessean, Davy Crockett. As such, rather than perishing in action while clubbing a swarm of Mexican soldiers with Ol’ Betsy (a la Fess Parker in Disney’s Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier), Kilmeade’s Crockett—as Crisp has argued—is taken alive with several other rebels and then unceremoniously executed.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/fox-host-brian-kilmeades-book-alamo-isnt-fair-balanced/

[keithbvadu2]

1. Alamo? This guy better never drive to Texas.

Alamo? This guy better never drive to Texas.

[TexasTowelie]

3. And the truck isn't even parked between the lines.

Yeah, that guy can stay away from Texas.

[flotsam]

2. "All they wanted was a shot at success,"

“[T]hey said, ‘I’ll be a part of Mexico as long as you give us freedom and liberty."

Except they objected to the state religion (Catholicism) which they had to convert to in order to own land. And they insisted on their right to impose slavery on blacks.

In 1823, Mexico forbade the sale or purchase of slaves, and required that the children of slaves be freed when they reached age fourteen.[11] By 1825, however, a census of Austin's Colony showed 1,347 Anglo-Americans and 443 people of African descent, including a small number of free Negroes.[17] In 1827, the legislature of Coahuila y Tejas outlawed the introduction of additional slaves and granted freedom at birth to all children born to a slave.[11]

In 1829 Mexico abolished slavery, but it granted an exception until 1830 to Texas. That year Mexico made the importation of slaves illegal.[11] Anglo-American immigration to the province slowed at this point, with settlers angry about the changing rules. To circumvent the law, numerous Anglo-American colonists converted their slaves to indentured servants, but with life terms. Others simply called their slaves indentured servants without legally changing their status.[18] Slaveholders trying to enter Mexico would force their slaves to sign contracts claiming that the slaves owed money and would work to pay the debt. The low wages the slave would receive made repayment impossible, and the debt would be inherited, even though no slave would receive wages until age eighteen.[19] In 1832 the state passed legislation prohibiting worker contracts from lasting more than ten years.[20]

Basically they faked religion and revolted over slavery....

[TexasTowelie]

4. Yes, I lived in the Wharton area and there is the nearby community called Egypt

where there were some cotton plantations and slavery was prevalent. It's still an economically depressed area to this day.

I believe the Austin colony area was where the yellow fever epidemic was prominent in the 1860's. There is some interesting history in the area for those willing to dig for it.

If only Mexico had built the wall to keep out those pesky American immigrants, Texas would still be part of Mexico.