History, it’s often said, is written by the victors. While that isn’t always true, it’s certainly borne out by many popular accounts of the Texas Revolution of 1835-36, which often tell “a very black-and-white story of the virtuous Texans”—the victors—“fighting against the evil Mexicans.” The San Jacinto Monument inscription, for instance, blames the rebellion on “unjust acts and despotic decrees” of “unscrupulous rulers” in Mexico. A pamphlet produced by the Republican Party-sponsored 1836 Project says that Anglo settlers fought to preserve “constitutional liberty and republican government.”
University of Houston history professor Gerald Horne tells a very different story. In The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism, published earlier this year, Horne contends that the motivation behind the Anglo-American rebellion was anything but virtuous: to make Texas safe for slavery and white supremacy. For others—Blacks, the Indigenous peoples, and many Tejanos—the Anglo victory meant slavery, oppression, dispossession, and in many cases, death.
