Bound in Béxar County: Slavery in San Antonio

If we do in fact "remember the Alamo," it is largely thanks to one person who witnessed the final assault and survived: the commanding officer's slave, a young man known simply as Joe. What Joe saw as the Alamo fell, recounted days later to the Texas Cabinet, has come down to us in records and newspaper reports. But who Joe was, where he came from, and what happened to him have all remained mysterious until now. In a remarkable feat of historical detective work, authors Ron J. Jackson, Jr., and Lee Spencer White have fully restored this pivotal yet elusive figure to his place in the American story. The twenty-year-old Joe stood with his master, Lieutenant Colonel Travis, against the Mexican army in the early hours of March 6, 1836. After Travis fell, Joe watched the battle's last moments from a hiding place. He was later taken first to Bexar and questioned by Santa Anna about the Texan army, and then to the revolutionary capitol, where he gave his testimony with evident candor. With these few facts in hand, Jackson and White searched through plantation ledgers, journals, memoirs, slave narratives, ship logs, newspapers, letters, and court documents. Their decades-long effort has revealed the outline of Joe's biography, alongside some startling facts: most notably, that Joe was the younger brother of the famous escaped slave and abolitionist narrator William Wells Brown, as well as the grandson of legendary trailblazer Daniel Boone. This book traces Joe's story from his birth in Kentucky through his life in slavery--which, in a grotesque irony, resumed after he took part in the Texans' battle for independence--to his eventual escape and disappearance into the shadows of history. Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend recovers a true American character from obscurity and expands our view of events central to the emergence of Texas.

Every nation needs a creation myth, and Texas's myths bite deep. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. The fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.

This eBook is a digitized copy of the book authored by Benjamin Lundy in 1837. The Portal to Texas History copy is fully text-searchable and covers a wide range of information and supports the viewpoint that the War in Texas was a war to support slaveholders' rights to hold Black Texans in lifelong chattel slavery.


This excerpt on page 6 discusses how closely the fight for an independent Texas separate from Mexico was so closely tied to slavery and the rights of the settlers from the Southern slaveholding states. When Austin was unable to secure that separation he pleaded to the council of San Antonio de Béxar, asking them to organize locally but that many locally. Many local residents were not supportive of Austin's approach, however, and they deemed it aggressive.

From this excerpt one can assume that although slaves were held captive in the Béxar county, the citizens - largely Tejanos - were not keen to fight for independence on the grounds of maintaining new White Southern settlers rights to enslave people.

Summary: Although deeds are sometimes thought of as legal documents that give the holder ownership rights to just land, a deed could give rights to any kind of property ... including slaves. This book compiles early African American historical and genealogical information from Bexar County, Texas deed records. Some records not only give details about the property transaction, but can provide other interesting bits of history.