Major shakeups are happening at Texas’s most important historic site. Kate Rogers, the now-former CEO of the Alamo Trust, which manages the site on behalf of the Texas General Land Office, has been forced to resign.
This comes after controversy surrounding the official Alamo social media pages posting an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” post on Columbus Day. That led to Lt. Governor Dan Patrick exposing a thesis Rogers had written, indicating that slavery was a leading cause of Texas’s 1836 split from Mexico.
Despite being easily disproven, the lie that slavery was a key factor in the Texas Revolution has plagued the Texas historical community for years. Former Texas GLO Commissioner Jerry Patterson called this myth out, saying, “If it had been about slavery, you might think they would have mentioned slavery in the reasons given in the Texas Declaration of Independence for Rebellion. Slavery is not in there.”
So why does the myth that the Texas War of Independence was fought over slavery continue to plague the Alamo? Patterson says it’s simply to push an agenda. He said, “They’re making crap up, about history that’s just not factually accurate, and the primary battlefield for this is 1836, and the fight for Texas Independence.”
Patterson also pointed out that in 1836, multiple other Mexican states, which didn’t allow slavery, were also in rebellion. It’s also worth noting that the Texian surgeon at the Alamo was a published abolitionist. All of these facts, along with other mountains of historical evidence, point to the simple fact that the reason for Texas’s split from Mexico, and the battle of the Alamo, was then-Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna’s disregard of the 1824 Mexican constitution, and his setting himself up as the supreme dictator of Mexico.
Patterson has set up the website 1836truth.com to share the truth about the Texas Revolution and the Battle of the Alamo.