The Mexican Wars for Independence: A History

ALSO BY TIMOTHY J. HENDERSON

A Glorious Defeat:

Mexico and Its War with the United States

THE MEXICAN WARS FOR INDEPENDENCE

THE

MEXICAN WARS

FOR

INDEPENDENCE

TIMOTHY J. HENDERSON

Hill and Wang

A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2009 by Timothy J. Henderson

All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2009

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Henderson, Timothy J.

The Mexican Wars for Independence / Timothy J. Henderson. — 1st ed.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-9509-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8090-9509-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Mexico—History—Wars of Independence, 1810–1821. I. Title.

F1232.H45 2009

972’.03—dc22

2008048141

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

www.fsgbooks.com

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

It is very easy to put a country into combustion, when it possesses the elements of discord; but the difficulties of its re-organization are infinite.

—Lorenzo de Zavala

CONTENTS

Map

Chronology

Preface

1. The Colony

2. Shocks to the System

3. Crisis

4. The Querétaro Conspiracy

5. The Hidalgo Rebellion

6. War, the Cortes, and the Constitution

7. The Unraveling Revolution

8. Independence

9. The Tragic Empire

Epilogue

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Index

Illustrations

CHRONOLOGY

PREFACE

The past is a heavy presence in Mexico. In the nation’s capital one sees buildings made from stones taken from demolished Aztec pyramids, some with carved ancient deities serving as humble cornerstones. Without warning, vast excavated sites of black volcanic rock, the remnants of a once mighty civilization, open up amid the teeming city streets and plazas. Ponderous baroque cathedrals with macabre icons and intricate gold and silver ornamentation hark back to the days when Mexico was the jewel in the crown of the Spanish empire. Extraordinary numbers of statues and monuments, patriotic holidays, and streets and parks are named in honor of a crowded cast of national heroes who march and gallop through two centuries of history.

Revolutionary painters did their bit, creating enormous murals on the walls of public buildings, invoking history as the story of the slow, painful process of a people’s redemption. Those artists tended to depict the past in the darkest tones, though such depictions were often leavened with the promise of brighter days in the offing. Take, for instance, Diego Rivera’s mural on the walls of the National Palace: spanning three large walls, it depicts Indians slaughtered by conquistadors or worked like beasts in the cane fields under the harsh gaze of whip- and gun-toting overseers; slaves branded on the face with hot irons and tethered to heavy ropes and chains; heretics garroted by the Holy Inquisition; striking workers clubbed by police. At the culmination of the mural’s left wall, which imagines Mexico of Today and Tomorrow, appears the startling image of Karl Marx—for Rivera, the bright light of truth—explaining to a group of workers and soldiers, through the words of his Communist Manifesto, that it is no use trying to reform the existing society, an entirely new society must be created. In Mexico, the mural seems to suggest, history is about redemption, and redemption is bought with blood.

Mexico’s wars for independence, which were fought from 1810 to 1821, were among the bloodiest episodes in the country’s history, but in this case blood brought no final redemption. A successful outcome of the wars was frustrated by the many severe divisions within Mexican society. Those divisions had been created quite deliberately during the three centuries when Mexico—or New Spain, as it was then known—was a part of the Spanish empire. Spain’s rulers tended to see social inequality as something ordained by God, something mortal folk had no right to question. In accordance with what they considered the Almighty’s grand design, those rulers constructed a fairly elaborate racial pyramid. Spaniards and American-born whites (known as creoles) sat at the apex of that pyramid, together accounting for roughly 18 percent of the population. Beneath them, making up about 22 percent of the population, were people of mixed race—white, black, and Indian—known as castes. And occupying the pyramid’s ample base were the Indians, comprising about 60 percent of the population. This was no melting pot, but rather a rigid caste system. The races were legally unequal, and it was unlikely that those who occupied society’s lower depths might rise very far. In fact, it seemed self-evident to the country’s rulers that dark-skinned people were put on earth for the purpose of labor. The castes faced harsh discrimination, while most of Mexico’s Indians were marginalized, illiterate, desperately poor, and culturally and linguistically separate from the country’s elite.

Yet despite the oppressive realities endured by the majority of Mexico’s people, the colonial centuries were for the most part remarkably peaceful, thanks largely to what the great Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who spent most of 1803 traveling in Mexico, called the equilibrium established between the hostile forces.¹ The Roman Catholic Church and the Spanish monarchy—the two most revered institutions in the empire—were key elements in that equilibrium, for the church taught the poor to bear their sufferings gracefully, and the king was seen as a remote but endlessly compassionate figure. Also helping to maintain peace were the illiteracy and stubborn parochialism of Mexico’s rural society, which ensured that no coordinated mass movement could arise, and that violence seldom reached beyond the boundaries of a given village.

Creoles tended to see themselves as the natural and rightful rulers of the country, yet they too suffered discrimination in the imperial system. In Humboldt’s words, The most miserable European, without education, and without intellectual cultivation, thinks himself superior to whites born in the new continent.² The creoles were systematically deprived of political power and economic liberty, and they had ample cause for complaint. Even so, the idea of rebelling against the mother country was unthinkable. Most creoles had fully absorbed the colonial ethos: they embraced inequality with gusto, they revered church and king, they benefited from the labor of castes and Indians, and they were loath to tamper with a system that—a few irritations aside—afforded them an easy and comfortable life.

It may seem odd that I refer to wars, for in the broadest sense there was but one war spanning the decade. In a more profound sense, however, Mexico witnessed many wars during the independence era. Best known was the war fought by the leaders of the rebellion, most of them creoles, against the Spanish armies and militias. Those leaders aimed to achieve autonomy or independence from Spain and a few social, political, and economic reforms. Unfortunately for the movement’s leaders, most of their fellow creoles quickly came to be horrified by the savagery of the struggle, and they were hardly eager to share their privileged existence with the dark-skinned masses who made up the rebel armies. They threw their support to the royalist regime, thus recasting the war for independence as a civil war. Along with that civil war came many small wars fought by the rank and file of the movement, mostly impoverished Indians and castes. These wars were fought for a wide variety of reasons, most of which responded to very local and even personal concerns—a desire for vengeance against exploiters, a wish to maintain a village’s cultural integrity, a lust for adventure, the will to defend the Spanish king from his heretical tormentors—and those reasons had little to do with any large-scale political project. Few Indians or castes fought to forge a new nation called Mexico; such a scheme would have made little sense, and held little interest, for them. They fought in the hope that their lot in life might in some way improve.

The wars, with all their ambiguity and cross-purposes, only deepened the divisions and antagonisms that plagued Mexico. Predictably, independence was followed by a prolonged period of penury, political paralysis, and ongoing bloodshed, as elites fought one another to advance their notions of what Mexico should become. What Mexico did become was a kind of work in progress, a vast conglomeration of people groping toward some sense of common identity and nationhood. The wars for independence, seen in the broad sweep of Mexico’s history, may not have resolved the country’s dire problems, but they nevertheless played a pivotal part in the story by providing the nation with heroes and myths, even if those heroes and myths were variously interpreted. Many conservatives came to see the wars merely as a cautionary tale revealing the horrors that ensue when the unwashed masses are released from their restraints. Those of a more liberal turn of mind tended to simplify and romanticize the wars’ brutal realities, retelling history as one of martyrs who gave their blood and lives to free a nation from tyranny. And even those at the very bottom of the pyramid could find some inspiration in the drama of independence. A hundred years after the war, peasant villagers in the state of Morelos—a state named in honor of one of the rebellion’s greatest leaders—still spoke proudly of how local boys—their grandfathers—had smuggled food, gunpowder, and liquor to rebels besieged by Spanish forces in the town of Cuautla, and of how a succeeding generation had battled French invaders with equal valor.³ As suggested by Rivera’s muralistic rendering of Mexican history, perhaps the generation that suffered the cruel shocks of Mexico’s independence wars did not suffer in vain. Perhaps that epoch was merely the first act in a slowly unfolding tale of redemption.

THE MEXICAN WARS FOR INDEPENDENCE

ONE

THE COLONY

In the year 1623, so the story goes, a man in the dusty village of San Juan de los Lagos in western Mexico was teaching his young daughters to do acrobatic tricks on the trapeze. To make the show more compelling, he had the girls perform the tricks above several swords affixed in the earth and pointing menacingly toward the heavens. One of the girls fell, was impaled on the swords, and died instantly. The small corpse was taken to a nearby temple, where an old woman named Ana Lucia, renowned for her piety, was caretaker. Ana Lucia took a moth-eaten statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception out of a closet, where the parish priest had hidden it, for he was embarrassed by its sorry condition. When Ana Lucia placed the statue on the child’s chest, the girl was at once restored to full life and vigor. Soon after, a mysterious boy appeared by night and transformed the decaying statue into a beautiful and flawless image of the Virgin, then disappeared without asking for payment. The townsfolk assumed he was an angel.

The miracle transformed the rude village of San Juan de los Lagos into one of Mexico’s most popular religious sites. Each year thereafter, between December 1 and 9, thousands of pilgrims would descend on the small town to pay their respects to the miraculous figure. In 1810, a hundred thousand souls were expected to attend, most of them desperately poor Indians. Those Indians, it could safely be assumed, would have little to lose, and they would loathe Spaniards. The thought of so many Indians gathered in one place, all of them seething with hatred for Spaniards, in the grip of religious fervor and quite possibly drunk, was irresistible to a small group of American-born whites conspiring to overthrow the government.

This, they reckoned, was the perfect time and place to start a revolution.

Indians and Castes

Although the conspiracy to launch the revolution from the festival of San Juan de los Lagos was ultimately foiled, the very fact that such a plan was laid raises several key questions. Why did Indians bear such ill will toward Spaniards? Was there a natural link between popular religious fervor and violence? What reason did whites have to imagine the Indians would be willing to fight their revolution for them? Would Indians and whites fight with the same goals in mind?

Relations between Europeans and Indians began with violence, race prejudice, and exploitation, and the pattern of those relations did not change in their fundamentals over the three hundred years of the Spanish colony. The Spaniards who conquered the indigenous civilizations of Mexico were not professional soldiers, but rather armed entrepreneurs out for wealth and glory. There was not enough gold in the new colony to satisfy those conquerors, and when Tenochtitlán, the opulent capital of the vast Aztec empire, fell to the invaders in 1521, the discovery of Mexico’s rich silver mines was still more than two decades away. The only rewards available, then, were Indians and land. For the Spaniards land had no value without Indians to work it, so royal authorities parceled out the Indians to the conquistadors in the form of grants known as encomiendas. A grant of encomienda allowed the grantee—known as an encomendero—to demand tribute and labor from a specified number of Indian villagers. The demands made on the Indians were often extraordinary, helping to accelerate the appalling decline in their numbers. Waves of epidemic disease swept through the Americas, killing, in some areas, nine out of every ten people. The decline in the native population deprived the Spaniards of labor, but it also freed up quite a bit of land, which the Spaniards hastened to claim. The Spanish American hacienda—an infamous and durable institution that produced crops principally for the Spanish cities and mining camps—was thus born.

The encomienda—the first mechanism the Spaniards used to exploit Indians—was largely ended by the late 1500s, but new forms of exploitation, such as labor drafts and peonage, supplanted it. The essential feature of the system was fixed: Indians worked; whites enjoyed the benefits of their labor.

Catholic missionaries who arrived in New Spain to convert the Indians to Spain’s rigid version of Catholic Christianity tended, at least in the early years of the colonization, to see the natives as God’s providential compensation for the tragedy of the Protestant heresy, a vast multitude of souls ripe for salvation. The harvest of so many souls would surely, in their view, be the harbinger of the millennium, that thousand-year period foretold in the Book of Revelation during which Satan languishes in prison while Christ rules the world, preparing for the fearsome battles of the world’s final days.

Given the high stakes, the missionaries were understandably zealous in their efforts. About sixty Franciscan missionaries claimed to have converted five million Indians to Christianity after only twelve years in Mexico; one friar boasted of having baptized 1,500 in a single day. Obviously, these conversions left the Indians with an extremely imperfect understanding of orthodox Christianity. As late as 1792, one village priest estimated that among his flock of five thousand, fewer than a hundred could mutter even the simplest of prayers. Priests visited remote villages infrequently, so villagers seldom heard mass, took communion, or confessed their sins. Babies went unbaptized, couples lived in sin, and the dead were buried without the proper Christian rites. Secular education was likewise deficient. Village schools were fairly common throughout Mexico by the late colonial period, but their impact was minimal, undone by poverty and Indian resistance. Most Indians in Mexico were never assimilated into the world of the whites.

This is not to say that the Indians were irreligious. In fact, religion penetrated every facet of life. It was a lively, naive folk Catholicism full of spirits in the earth, saints in the heavens, witchcraft, magic, and miracles. From