The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986 Page: 40
610 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Save but a few enlightened of their people,
They all behold with eyes of livid envy
Our industry and our prosperity."
If the general populace is so contemptible, one can imagine how the
military is presented. In The Trapper's Bride the Mexican army is one
"whose savage legions were given to every kind of horrible excesses
[sic], and whose arms were deeply stained with the blood of helpless
old men, feeble women and innocent children." The head of this army,
Santa Anna, is an opium user, tyrant, and ravisher of fair Anglo-Saxon
womanhood. Davy Crockett calls him an "old coon" in Hiram H.
McLane's play The Capture of the Alamo (1886). In Guy Raymond we learn
that "sensible Mexicans detest him." ' Only rarely is Santa Anna raised
above the level of cardboard tyrant and abuser of everything human.
In Nona's play Santa Anna gives a vigorous speech castigating the op-
posing claims of his Anglo antagonists:
... What is this Texas, speak!
A dreary waste, a desert territory
Of Mexico not worth the name of State,
With outlaws filled and refugees from justice,
The scum of the depraved society
Of the United States."'
Here Nona invests Santa Anna with some of the energy of the truly great
villainous characters in literature, such as Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost.
More often than not, however, Santa Anna is simply the "Herman
Goering of the Texas Revolution," as one writer noted in the 1940s."
While anticlericalism and racism are used to denigrate the Mexican
side of the Texas Revolution, historical analogies are enlisted to elevate
the Texan side. A passage in Ramrod Jones (1905) is typical. Here the
Texan cause is linked to the long tradition of political liberty that began
in England and was brought to fruition first in the American Revolu-
tion and now in the Texas Revolution-"the rights that have been
fought for ever since King John placed his seal upon the provisions of
the Great Charter." In Margaret Ballentine (1907) other, more interest-
ing historical parallels are cited to try to explain the power of resistance
demonstrated by the Texan colonists: "It is kin to the fanaticism that
"''Francis Nona, The Fall of the Alamo: An Historical Drama in Four Acts ... (New York, 1879), 4.
'" Hamilton, The Trapper' Bride, 18; Hiram H. McLane, The Capture of the Alamo: An Historical
Tragedy in Four Acts, with Prologue (San Antonio, 1886), 88; Alsbury, Guy Raymond, 143.
"'Nona, The Fall of the Alamo, 84.
7 Walter M. Langford, "Santa Anna and the Pastry War," SouthwestReview, XXXI (Fall, 1945), 70.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986, periodical, 1985/1986; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117151/m1/66/: accessed May 6, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.