Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend
Note: This post was originally published on August 23, 2016, in advance of that year’s Save Texas History Symposium.
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If we do in fact “remember the Alamo,” it is largely thanks to one person who witnessed the final assault and survived: a young man known simply as Joe, who was enslaved by the Alamo’s commanding officer. 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, Lt. Colonel William B. 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 Béxar and questioned by Santa Anna about the Texan army, and then to the revolutionary capital, 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. Their 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.
About Lee Spencer White
Lee Spencer White is a seventh-generation Texan whose fourth-great-grandfather, Gordon C. Jennings, died in defense of the Alamo. Over the past twenty years, White has founded the Alamo Defender Descendants Association, and actively researched Alamo history across several states and Mexico. She is an active preservationist who was nominated for the Governor’s 2006 Texas Women’s Hall of Fame Award. Lee has been interviewed hundreds of times by national newspapers such as The Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News about her historical research and preservation efforts. Additionally, she serves on boards for the Former Texas Rangers Association and the Friends of the Texas Historical Commission. She is also the co-author of the upcoming book Last Soul Standing, an historical narrative about Joe, a slave owned by famed Alamo commander William Barret Travis. Lee is also a favorite speaker among Texas historical organizations and has also worked as an historical consultant for The History Channel, Dearg Films and the BBC. She resides on a South Texas ranch with her husband, Larry, and their daughter, Sam.
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