Welcome to second half of the virtual tour of the Texas state capitol building complex. In case you missed it, you may want to check out the inside of the capitol building first by clicking on this link.
The battle of the Alamo was fought on the sixth of March,
1836 between 189 Texan defenders and roughly 4000 Mexican
troops under General Santa Anna. All but three of the
Texans were killed, and it is estimated that some 1600
Mexicans lost their lives.
The battle of the Alamo symbolizes at once that old forgotten devotion
to liberty at any cost, and the idealistic determination
of those martyred men to die for freedom's cause. The men who were
slaughtered there knew nothing of the independence
declaration that had been signed. They still flew a
distortion of the Mexican flag with the number 1824
in the center, which referred to the republican
constitution that the Mexican dictator cast aside in
order to impose his evil rule.
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Many of the monuments on the grounds of the Texas
capitol building are in honor of those who fought and
died in the 1861 war between the Confederacy and the
United States. This statue has written on it the praise
of high confederate commanders, including many by
General Robert E. Lee himself, for those Texas units who
fought for the stars and bars. Texas won the
final battle of the war in May of 1865, a full month
after General Lee's surrender. That surrender did
result in the end of slavery's evil, but it also
spelled the end of American federalism and local rule,
which the confederates had fought to defend. In March of
1870, the United States Congress "readmitted" Texas into
the United States. Reconstruction, however, continued for
another four years.
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This is perhaps the most moving of the monuments. It honors all of the confederate dead from all states who fought against the Union. It reads "DIED, for States Rights guaranteed under the constitution...".