Americans yearned for freedom, but did not want to give enslaved Black people their freedom.
Mexico's largest newspaper, the Mexico News, devoted an entire page to reporting the atrocities committed by American immigrants. It fiercely condemned the appalling abuses inflicted on enslaved people and called on all people of conscience and faith to unite and fight the evil slaveholders.
They treated people like livestock! They stripped them of their freedom and forced those poor souls to work without pay. They beat them with clubs and lashed them with whips, then made them wear handcuffs and shackles, forcing them to live worse than pigs and dogs.
Even after those poor souls had endured such pain and torment, the slaveholders still would not leave them alone. They tore families apart and scattered them far and wide, knocked out their teeth, and branded their bodies with marks symbolizing humiliation and inhumanity.
They used hunger and torture to force those poor people to submit.
This was wrong! This was evil! This was shameless!
Did I really have to spell it all out?
No! There was no need!
Our time and energy should be spent on more worthwhile things.
By now, those slaveholders had taken up arms, ready at any moment to turn our free Mexico and the entire civilized world into their own slave plantations.
We could no longer hope to move them with kindness. We had to take up our swords to defend our homes, sever the slaves' chains, and cast every last one of those chains into the furnace of history, so they could never return to plague our descendants.
God was with us!
The article caused a huge sensation throughout Mexico. And it was not just Mexico: thanks to deliberate efforts to spread it, newspapers in Europe and the United States reprinted it as well.
Now the entire Western world knew that a group of Americans planned to reestablish slavery in a country that had already signed an emancipation proclamation.
How shameless, how barbaric! Even the United States was split into two camps, yet both acknowledged that anyone trying to reestablish slavery in a country that had already abolished it was evil.
For a time, Mexico held the upper hand in public opinion, and the factions at home were more united than ever. The Catholic Church acted as a lubricant between them, and everyone was determined to send those damned Protestants and slavery packing back to where they came from.
But an advantage in public opinion alone could not bring true victory.
On September 27, 1835, Gonzales fell without the Mexican army firing a shot.
On October 21, 1835, Goliad fell, and the entire Mexican garrison was wiped out.
On October 2, 1835, San Antonio was surrounded.
On December 9, 1835, San Antonio fell.
On December 30, 1835, all of Texas fell.
Goliad was the most important hub for water and land transportation. Whoever took it would control San Antonio.
At the time, San Antonio was the capital of Texas, as well as its most important grain base and economic center.
That was why Santa Anna chose Goliad as the site of the first battle.
On February 23, 1836, Santa Anna set his sights on Goliad, leading a force of 8,000 soldiers armed with 20,000 rifles and 30 cannons.
Santa Anna liked being treated as a hero. To satisfy his vanity, Franz had specially prepared an Emancipation Proclamation for him.
Every time Santa Anna captured a place, he gathered the local enslaved Black people and had them listen to his speeches. So the army kept stopping along the way.
More and more enslaved Black people asked to join Santa Anna's army. Santa Anna had been wondering what to do with all the rifles, so he quickly formed three Black rifle companies.
At the same time, following Franz's advice to unite with every force that could be united, Santa Anna sent men to contact the nearby Native American tribes.
Santa Anna declared that as long as the Native Americans helped Mexico and obeyed Mexican law, they would be Mexicans and would face no discrimination.
American pioneers had made the same promises, or ones much like them, but the Native Americans had been deceived by white people too many times. They wanted to see proof of Santa Anna's sincerity.
Santa Anna simply ordered his soldiers to hand out rifles, but gave them only five bullets each. He made an agreement with them: as long as they honored the alliance and helped Mexico attack the Americans, they would receive a supply of bullets every week.
The Native American chiefs immediately took a liking to the Mexicans. Of course, they had no intention of risking their lives against the Americans, but they could provide intelligence and harass American supply lines.
And that was exactly the outcome Franz wanted. In truth, even if the Native Americans simply remained neutral, that would already be good news for the Mexican expeditionary force.
If the Native Americans could gather intelligence, raid the American pioneers' supply lines, and hunt down stragglers who fled, that would be perfect.
Meanwhile, elsewhere.
The American colonization businessman Sam Houston was now the commander-in-chief of Texas and would one day become the first president of the Republic of Texas. The pioneers were divided into several factions, and his own forces were too far from San Antonio.
Sam Houston did not want to make pointless sacrifices. He decided to abandon San Antonio and ordered its garrison to leave Goliad and retreat into the countryside, where they would await the arrival of the main Texan force.
In fact, even before Houston's orders arrived, many militiamen and newly enlisted soldiers had already used all sorts of excuses to flee the fort.
The most common excuse was that they had to go home to harvest the wheat. They were all farmers, after all—what was so strange about going home to harvest the wheat?
But Texas grew winter wheat, which was usually planted from mid-September to early October and ripened from late May to mid-June the following year. It was February now. And the local economy was based on plantations, where enslaved Black people did all that work.
Only Colonel William Travis and his 150 men remained, but he still planned to disobey Houston's order.
William Travis knew how important Goliad and San Antonio were to the whole fledgling Texas.
If the Mexicans captured San Antonio, they could provide Santa Anna and his Mexican troops with a steady stream of supplies.
In William Travis's eyes, Texas was desperately short of troops. It had fewer than 2,000 regular soldiers, and even with volunteers arriving from the United States, the total would not exceed 3,500.
Santa Anna's expeditionary force, on the other hand, had 8,000 men. Local Mexican forces would support them, and those damned enslaved people, Native Americans, and traitors were joining Santa Anna's ranks one after another.
William Travis pinned his last hope on the United States. He hoped the country would intervene directly, and for that reason he absolutely could not afford to lose San Antonio.
To hold Goliad, William Travis began writing letters to ask for reinforcements from every direction. He needed more soldiers and more weapons.
But the Texans were divided into several factions as well. Most of their leaders were heads of colonization companies, and those companies had long been rivals. So most people chose to ignore William Travis's pleas for help.
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