Sleuthing the Alamo: Voicing Your Opinion about Racial Equality

This short book gives a good analysis about how to conduct historical researches. Crisp demonstrated how to do it by evaluating the credibility of your sources, he would not allow incomplete statements, and that’s how you make history. Crisp places himself directly into the text. In this book, Sam Houston is one of the main figures. He was Major General of the Texan army and he was also friends with President Andrew Jackson. Houston was a well acknowledge man in both Texas and U. S. history with a notoriety for reasonableness and being and all around a great man with a cleaned set of ethics. One of his goals was to annex Texas to the US and separate it from Mexico. Sam Houston evolves from a typical Texan into a man that speaks for racial equality. He held the speech for the soldiers at Refugio.

As Crisp started his research, he found the speech by Sam Houston. Crisp was surprised about the speech because of the impressive career of Juan Seguin and the friendship between him and Sam Houston. After reading the announcement that Houston made to his men (the soldiers), Crisp felt that something wasn't right. He said “I was stunned and disbelieving. The words seemed so unlike Houston. Part of my reaction, I suppose, could be attributed to nostalgia from my childhood image of Sam Houston, the adopted Cherokee.” (39) He was also skeptical. Crisp was a bit surprised that Houston claimed that his people never could mix with “the indolent Mexicans”, no matter what. This was not the only insult against Mexicans in Houston’s speech. He also said that “The last drop of our blood would flow before we would bow under the yoke of these half-Indians” (38). Because of these statements, Crisp couldn’t believe the way Houston was referring about Mexicans.

Crisp recognizes that Houston's speech didn't fit with the character that history gives of the man. “The speech contradicted much of what I thought I had learned in more than two decades of investigating the causes and consequences of the Texas revolution” (39), Crisp said. He read and examined Houston’s speech, Crisp wanted to know why Houston said all those racist insults when his actions were completely the opposite.

To find out how his speech really was Crisp had to do a lot of research. He went on and dug into documentations of the Texas revolution. Crisp's investigation demonstrated that the speech was really the result of a German worker warrior, who came back to Germany after the war and recorded his diaries there. This is where Crisp he had a breakthrough. This German soldier was Herman Ehrenberg who was known because of his writing “Travels and Adventures of a German in Texas”. Ehrenberg was actually a volunteer in the Texas Revolution and when Crisp started to investigate Ehrenberg’s life, he found something really interesting and not known story about a coffee-house. Whit this German text Crisp was able to make an unbelievable discovery.

Crisp made discoveries about how all those writings were plagiarized and distorted from the real documents. Ehrenberg “had a regrettable tendency to write florid speeches and put them into the mouths of historic personages” (57). Crisp’s research found out that Ehrenberg liked to distort history in his favor, so that he could write what he wanted to make people believe and promote racism. Ehrenberg did not stop there, early works from him tended to show the Texans in an exalted form, while Mexicans seemed to be inferior.

Because of his determination to find out the truth and his knowledge of how Houston operated, Crisp was able to sort of clear Houston’s name from the racist reputation he was given by Ehrenberg. Ehrenberg also had a couple of lies about the Texas Revolution, but Crisp was also able to uncover this and made it right. These kind of events like the one Crisp made, provide a credible and genuine analysis. The moral values are not relegated to the distant past but are very important in contemporary society. This book gives answers to complicated historical dilemmas, and why those inquiries are important to our actual society.