Your point about being grateful Urrea wasn't in charge of all forces is spot on. Patton-esque maneuvering.
Thanks for posting this stuff Birdy.
In trying to iron out all the myriad confusion of events, I'm learning as I go. With all the conflicting egos and interests, developments on the Texian side amounted to a cluster F of gigantic proportions
No wonder many actual residents on the scene were reluctant to get involved.
Of the strategic considerations from the Mexican side, Hardin has this to say of the Alamo....
Purveyors of popular culture claim that the thirteen-day siege [of the Alamo] bought the time that Texas desperately needed to prepare its defenses.... works of fiction pretend that Sam Houston used the time to train an army...
What "army" there was consisted of Fannin's force at Goliad and a few other contingents in the surrounding area. Being volunteers, they exercised their customary right to elect their officers; they had not taken an oath to Texas. There is simply no evidence to support the notion that the sacrifice of the Alamo garrison allowed Houston to raise and train an army.
The delay did, on the other hand, allow the creation of a revolutionary government and the drafting of a constitution....
If Santa Anna had struck the settlements immediately, he might have easily driven the Texians across the Sabine River as he had intended. Even with the delay, he came closer to succeeding than is apparent.
Santa Anna helped make the defenders' loss worthwhile by chucking his best troops against the Alamo and allowing them to be decimated....
Perhaps most important, the slaughter of the Alamo defenders finally awakened the Texians to their perilous situation.... The fate of the defenders and Santa Anna's threats gave Texians a will to fight that they had previously lacked......and of broader strategic considerations....
Given the strategic importance of the coast, which was obvious to both sides, Santa Anna's earlier drive against Bexar [San Antonio] was a wasteful digression....
San Antonio stood on the extreme edge of the western frontier. Santa Anna could have kept his army intact and driven up the coastal prairies along the same route that Urrea took. Once Goliad had fallen, Santa Anna could have sent a column to Gonzales... such a movement would have severed the Alamo lines of communication with the Texian settlements at little cost, thereby isolating the rebel garrison...
Urrea had, however, already [by San Jacinto] given Santa Anna a strategic advantage, his rapid advance up the Texas coast had deprived the rebels of every port except Galveston. Without support from the United States, the revolt would ultimately fail....
Men and materials could still make their way via the land route across the Sabine River, but that would take much longer.For my own part I believe that due to political considerations Santa Anna HAD to go against San Antonio, then the largest city in Texas. What he never anticipated was that the Alamo defenders would sell their lives so dearly. It is not surprising he would feel that way, given his participation in the one-sided slaughter of hundreds of American adventurers during and after the Battle of the Medina River twenty three years earlier, the last time he had been in Texas.
So important was San Antonio symbolically, that six years later in 1842, in order to satisfy Mexican honor in the eyes of the public he would send in ANOTHER Mexican army to take San Antonio, without even beginning to address the issues of coastal ports and Texas settlements further east.
Of course this second invasion failed, and two weeks later as the Texians were finally able to muster a sufficient response, General Woll was obliged to give up San Antonio and retreat back across the Rio Grande.
Birdwatcher
