If we do in reality “remember the Alamo,” it's principally due to one one who witnessed the ultimate attack and survived: the commanding officer’s slave, a tender guy identified easily as Joe. What Joe observed because the Alamo fell, mentioned days later to the Texas cupboard, has come right down to us in files and newspaper studies. yet who Joe used to be, the place he got here from, and what occurred to him have all remained mysterious earlier. In a striking feat of old detective paintings, authors Ron J. Jackson, Jr., and Lee Spencer White have absolutely restored this pivotal but elusive determine to his position within the American story.

The twenty-year-old Joe stood together with his grasp, Lieutenant Colonel Travis, opposed to the Mexican military within the early hours of March 6, 1836. After Travis fell, Joe watched the battle’s final moments from a hiding position. He was once later taken first to Bexar and puzzled by means of Santa Anna in regards to the Texan military, after which to the innovative capitol, the place he gave his testimony with obtrusive candor.

With those few evidence in hand, Jackson and White searched via plantation ledgers, journals, memoirs, slave narratives, send logs, newspapers, letters, and court docket files. Their decades-long attempt has published the description of Joe’s biography, along a few startling proof: so much significantly, that Joe was once the more youthful brother of the recognized escaped slave and abolitionist narrator William Wells Brown, in addition to the grandson of mythical trailblazer Daniel Boone. This booklet strains Joe’s tale from his beginning in Kentucky via his existence in slavery—which, in a gruesome irony, resumed after he took half within the Texans’ conflict for independence—to his eventual get away and disappearance into the shadows of history.

Joe, the Slave Who turned an Alamo Legend recovers a real American personality from obscurity and expands our view of occasions important to the emergence of Texas.