Independence without liberty and statehood without respect for law are
phrases which sum up the situation in Spanish America after the failure
of Bolivar's "great design." The outcome was a collection of
crude republics, racked by internal dissension and torn by mutual
jealousy--patrias bobas, or "foolish fatherlands," as one of their own
writers has termed them.
Now that the bond of unity once supplied by Spain had been broken, the
entire region which had been its continental domain in America dissolved
awhile into its elements. The Spanish language, the traditions and
customs of the dominant class, and a "republican" form of government,
were practically the sole ties which remained. Laws, to be sure, had
been enacted, providing for the immediate or gradual abolition of
negro slavery and for an improvement in the status of the Indian and
half-caste; but the bulk of the inhabitants, as in colonial times,
remained outside of the body politic and social. Though the so-called
"constitutions" might confer upon the colored inhabitants all the
privileges and immunities of citizens if they could read and write,
and even a chance to hold office if they could show possession of a
sufficient income or of a professional title of some sort, their usual
inability to do either made their privileges illusory. Their only share
in public concerns lay in performing military service at the behest of
their superiors. Even where the language of the constitutions did
not exclude the colored inhabitants directly or indirectly, practical
authority was exercised by dictators who played the autocrat, or by
"liberators" who aimed at the enjoyment of that function themselves.
Not all the dictators, however, were selfish tyrants, nor all the
liberators mere pretenders. Disturbed conditions bred by twenty years
of warfare, antique methods of industry, a backward commerce, inadequate
means of communication, and a population ignorant, superstitious, and
scant, made a strong ruler more or less indispensable. Whatever his
official designation, the dictator was the logical successor of
the Spanish viceroy or captain general, but without the sense of
responsibility or the legal restraint of either. These circumstances
account for that curious political phase in the development of the
Spanish American nations--the presidential despotism.
On the other hand, the men who denounced oppression, unscrupulousness,
and venality, and who in rhetorical pronunciamentos urged the
"people" to overthrow the dictators, were often actuated by motives of
patriotism, even though they based their declarations on assumptions
and assertions, rather than on principles and facts. Not infrequently a
liberator of this sort became "provisional president" until he
himself, or some person of his choice, could be elected "constitutional
president"--two other institutions more or less peculiar to Spanish
America.
In an atmosphere of political theorizing mingled with ambition for
personal advancement, both leaders and followers were professed devotees
of constitutions. No people, it was thought, could maintain a real
republic and be a true democracy if they did not possess a written
constitution. The longer this was, the more precise its definition
of powers and liberties, the more authentic the republic and the more
genuine the democracy was thought to be. In some countries the notion
was carried still farther by an insistence upon frequent changes in the
fundamental law or in the actual form of government, not so much to meet
imperative needs as to satisfy a zest for experimentation or to suit the
whims of mercurial temperaments. The congresses, constituent assemblies,
and the like, which drew these instruments, were supposed to be faithful
reproductions of similar bodies abroad and to represent the popular
will. In fact, however, they were substantially colonial cabildos,
enlarged into the semblance of a legislature, intent upon local or
personal concerns, and lacking any national consciousness. In any case
the members were apt to be creatures of a republican despot or else
delegates of politicians or petty factions.
Assuming that the leaders had a fairly clear conception of what they
wanted, even if the mass of their adherents did not, it is possible to
aline the factions or parties somewhat as follows: on the one hand, the
unitary, the military, the clerical, the conservative, and the moderate;
on the other, the federalist, the civilian, the lay, the liberal, and the
radical. Interspersed among them were the advocates of a presidential or
congressional system like that of the United States, the upholders of a
parliamentary regime like that of European nations, and the supporters
of methods of government of a more experimental kind. Broadly speaking,
the line of cleavage was made by opinions, concerning the form of
government and by convictions regarding the relations of Church and
State. These opinions were mainly a product of revolutionary experience;
these convictions, on the other hand, were a bequest from colonial
times.
The Unitaries wished to have a system of government modeled upon that
of France. They wanted the various provinces made into administrative
districts over which the national authority should exercise full sway.
Their direct opponents, the Federalists, resembled to some extent the
Antifederalists rather than the party bearing the former title in the
earlier history of the United States; but even here an exact
analogy fails. They did not seek to have the provinces enjoy local
self-government or to have perpetuated the traditions of a sort of
municipal home rule handed down from the colonial cabildos, so much
as to secure the recognition of a number of isolated villages or small
towns as sovereign states--which meant turning them over as fiefs to
their local chieftains. Federalism, therefore, was the Spanish American
expression for a feudalism upheld by military lordlets and their
retainers.
Among the measures of reform introduced by one republic or another
during the revolutionary period, abolition of the Inquisition had been
one of the foremost; otherwise comparatively little was done to curb
the influence of the Church. Indeed the earlier constitutions regularly
contained articles declaring Roman Catholicism the sole legal faith as
well as the religion of the state, and safeguarding in other respects
its prestige in the community. Here was an institution, wealthy, proud,
and influential, which declined to yield its ancient prerogatives and
privileges and to that end relied upon the support of clericals and
conservatives who disliked innovations of a democratic sort and viewed
askance the entry of immigrants professing an alien faith. Opposed
to the Church stood governments verging on bankruptcy, desirous of
exercising supreme control, and dominated by individuals eager to put
theories of democracy into practice and to throw open the doors of the
republic freely to newcomers from other lands. In the opinion of these
radicals the Church ought to be deprived both of its property and of its
monopoly of education. The one should be turned over to the nation,
to which it properly belonged, and should be converted into public
utilities; the other should be made absolutely secular, in order to
destroy clerical influence over the youthful mind. In this program
radicals and liberals concurred with varying degrees of intensity,
while the moderates strove to hold the balance between them and their
opponents.
Out of this complex situation civil commotions were bound to arise.
Occasionally these were real wars, but as a rule only skirmishes or
sporadic insurrections occurred. They were called "revolutions," not
because some great principle was actually at stake but because the term
had been popular ever since the struggle with Spain. As a designation
for movements aimed at securing rotation in office, and hence control of
the treasury, it was appropriate enough! At all events, whether serious
or farcical, the commotions often involved an expenditure in life and
money far beyond the value of the interests affected. Further, both
the prevalent disorder and the centralization of authority impelled the
educated and well-to-do classes to take up their residence at the seat
of government. Not a few of the uprisings were, in fact, protests on
the part of the neglected folk in the interior of the country against
concentration of population, wealth, intellect, and power in the Spanish
American capitals.
Among the towns of this sort was Buenos Aires. Here, in 1829, Rosas
inaugurated a career of rulership over the Argentine Confederation,
culminating in a despotism that made him the most extraordinary figure
of his time. Originally a stockfarmer and skilled in all the exercises
of the cowboy, he developed an unusual talent for administration. His
keen intelligence, supple statecraft, inflexibility of purpose, and
vigor of action, united to a shrewd understanding of human follies and
passions, gave to his personality a dominance that awed and to his word
of command a power that humbled. Over his fellow chieftains who held the
provinces in terrorized subjection, he won an ascendancy that insured
compliance with his will. The instincts of the multitude he flattered
by his generous simplicity, while he enlisted the support of the
responsible class by maintaining order in the countryside. The desire,
also, of Buenos Aires to be paramount over the other provinces had no
small share in strengthening his power.
Relatively honest in money matters, and a stickler for precision and
uniformity, Rosas sought to govern a nation in the rough-and-ready
fashion of the stock farm. A creature of his environment, no better
and no worse than his associates, but only more capable than they,
and absolutely convinced that pitiless autocracy was the sole means of
creating a nation out of chaotic fragments, this "Robespierre of
South America" carried on his despotic sway, regardless of the fury of
opponents and the menace of foreign intervention.
During the first three years of his control, however, except for the
rigorous suppression of unitary movements and the muzzling of the press,
few signs appeared of the "black night of Argentine history" which was
soon to close down on the land. Realizing that the auspicious moment had
not yet arrived for him to exercise the limitless power that he
thought needful, he declined an offer of reelection from the provincial
legislature, in the hope that, through a policy of conciliation, his
successor might fall a prey to the designs of the Unitaries. When this
happened, he secretly stirred up the provinces into a renewal of the
earlier disturbances, until the evidence became overwhelming that Rosas
alone could bring peace and progress out of turmoil and backwardness.
Reluctantly the legislature yielded him the power it knew he wanted.
This he would not accept until a "popular" vote of some 9000 to 4
confirmed the choice. In 1835, accordingly, he became dictator for the
first of four successive terms of five years.
Then ensued, notably in Buenos Aires itself, a state of affairs at once
grotesque and frightful. Not content with hunting down and inflicting
every possible, outrage upon those suspected of sympathy with the
Unitaries, Rosas forbade them to display the light blue and white colors
of their party device and directed that red, the sign of Federalism,
should be displayed on all occasions. Pink he would not tolerate as
being too attenuated a shade and altogether too suggestive of political
trimming! A band of his followers, made up of ruffians, and called the
Mazorca, or "Ear of Corn," because of the resemblance of their close
fellowship to its adhering grains, broke into private houses, destroyed
everything light blue within reach, and maltreated the unfortunate
occupants at will. No man was safe also who did not give his face a
leonine aspect by wearing a mustache and sidewhiskers--emblems, the one
of "federalism," and the other of "independence." To possess a visage
bare of these hirsute adornments or a countenance too efflorescent
in that respect was, under a regime of tonsorial politics, to invite
personal disaster! Nothing apparently was too cringing or servile to
show how submissive the people were to the mastery of Rosas. Private
vengeance and defamation of the innocent did their sinister work
unchecked. Even when his arbitrary treatment of foreigners had compelled
France for a while to institute a blockade of Buenos Aires, the wily
dictator utilized the incident to turn patriotic resentment to his own
advantage.
Meanwhile matters in Uruguay had come to such a pass that Rosas saw an
opportunity to extend his control in that direction also. Placed
between Brazil and the Argentine Confederation and so often a bone of
contention, the little country was hardly free from the rule of the
former state when it came near falling under the domination of the
latter. Only a few years of relative tranquillity had elapsed when two
parties sprang up in Uruguay: the "Reds" (Colorados) and the "Whites"
(Blancos). Of these, the one was supposed to represent the liberal and
the other the conservative element. In fact, they were the followings
of partisan chieftains, whose struggles for the presidency during many
years to come retarded the advancement of a country to which nature had
been generous.
When Fructuoso Rivera, the President up to 1835, thought of choosing
some one to be elected in constitutional fashion as his successor, he
unwisely singled out Manuel Oribe, one of the famous "Thirty-three" who
had raised the cry of independence a decade before. But instead of a
henchman he found a rival. Both of them straightway adopted the colors
and bid for the support of one of the local factions; and both appealed
to the factions of the Argentine Confederation for aid, Rivera to the
Unitaries and Oribe to the Federalists. In 1843, Oribe, at the head of
an army of Blancos and Federalists and with the moral support of Rosas,
laid siege to Montevideo. Defended by Colorados, Unitaries, and numerous
foreigners, including Giuseppe Garibaldi, the town held out valiantly
for eight years--a feat that earned for it the title of the "New Troy."
Anxious to stop the slaughter and destruction that were injuring their
nationals, France, Great Britain, and Brazil offered their mediation;
but Rosas would have none of it. What the antagonists did he cared
little, so long as they enfeebled the country and increased his
chances of dominating it. At length, in 1845, the two European powers
established a blockade of Argentine ports, which was not lifted
until the dictator grudgingly agreed to withdraw his troops from the
neighboring republic.
More than any other single factor, this intervention of France and Great
Britain administered a blow to Rosas from which he could not recover.
The operations of their fleets and the resistance of Montevideo had
lowered the prestige of the dictator and had raised the hopes of
the Unitaries that a last desperate effort might shake off his hated
control. In May, 1851, Justo Jose de Urquiza, one of his most trusted
lieutenants, declared the independence of his own province and called
upon the others to rise against the tyrant. Enlisting the support
of Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay, he assembled a "great army of
liberation," composed of about twenty-five thousand men, at whose head
he marched to meet the redoubtable Rosas. On February 3,1852, at a spot
near Buenos Aires, the man of might who, like his contemporary Francia
in Paraguay, had held the Argentine Confederation in thralldom for so
many years, went down to final defeat. Embarking on a British warship he
sailed for England, there to become a quiet country gentleman in a land
where gauchos and dictators were unhonored.
In the meantime Paraguay, spared from such convulsion as racked its
neighbor on the east, dragged on its secluded existence of backwardness
and stagnation. Indians and half-castes vegetated in ignorance and
docility, and the handful of whites quaked in terror, while the
inexorable Francia tightened the reins of commercial and industrial
restriction and erected forts along the frontiers to keep out the
pernicious foreigner. At his death, in 1840, men and women wept at his
funeral in fear perchance, as one historian remarks, lest he come
back to life; and the priest who officiated at the service likened the
departed dictator to Caesar and Augustus!
Paraguay was destined, however, to fall under a despot far worse than
Francia when in 1862 Francisco Solano Lopez became President. The new
ruler was a man of considerable intelligence and education. While a
traveler in Europe he had seen much of its military organizations, and
he had also gained no slight acquaintance with the vices of its capital
cities. This acquired knowledge he joined to evil propensities until
he became a veritable monster of wickedness. Vain, arrogant, reckless,
absolutely devoid of scruple, swaggering in victory, dogged in defeat,
ferociously cruel at all times, he murdered his brothers and his best
friends; he executed, imprisoned, or banished any one whom he thought
too influential; he tortured his mother and sisters; and, like the
French Terrorists, he impaled his officers upon the unpleasant dilemma
of winning victories or losing their lives. Even members of the American
legation suffered torment at his hands, and the minister himself barely
escaped death.
Over his people, Lopez wielded a marvelous power, compounded of
persuasive eloquence and brute force. If the Paraguayans had obeyed
their earlier masters blindly, they were dumb before this new despot
and deaf to other than his word of command. To them he was the "Great
Father," who talked to them in their own tongue of Guarani, who was
the personification of the nation, the greatest ruler in the world, the
invincible champion who inspired them with a loathing and contempt for
their enemies. Such were the traits of a man and such the traits of a
people who waged for six years a warfare among the most extraordinary in
human annals.
What prompted Lopez to embark on his career of international madness and
prosecute it with the rage of a demon is not entirely clear. A vision
of himself as the Napoleon of southern South America, who might cause
Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to cringe before his footstool, while he
disposed at will of their territory and fortunes, doubtless stirred his
imagination. So, too, the thought of his country, wedged in between two
huge neighbors and threatened with suffocation between their overlapping
folds, may well have suggested the wisdom of conquering overland a
highway to the sea. At all events, he assembled an army of upwards of
ninety thousand men, the greatest military array that Hispanic America
had ever seen. Though admirably drilled and disciplined, they were
poorly armed, mostly with flintlock muskets, and they were also
deficient in artillery except that of antiquated pattern. With this
mighty force at his back, yet knowing that the neighboring countries
could eventually call into the field armies much larger in size equipped
with repeating rifles and supplied with modern artillery, the "Jupiter
of Paraguay" nevertheless made ready to launch his thunderbolt.
The primary object at which he aimed was Uruguay. In this little state
the Colorados, upheld openly or secretly by Brazil and Argentina, were
conducting a "crusade of liberty" against the Blanco government at
Montevideo, which was favored by Paraguay. Neither of the two great
powers wished to see an alliance formed between Uruguay and Paraguay,
lest when united in this manner the smaller nations might become too
strong to tolerate further intervention in their affairs. For her part,
Brazil had motives for resentment arising out of boundary disputes with
Paraguay and Uruguay, as well as out of the inevitable injury to its
nationals inflicted by the commotions in the latter country; whereas
Argentina cherished grievances against Lopez for the audacity with which
his troops roamed through her provinces and the impudence with which his
vessels, plying on the lower Parana, ignored the customs regulations.
Thus it happened that obscure civil discords in one little republic
exploded into a terrific international struggle which shook South
America to its foundations.
In 1864, scorning the arts of diplomacy which he did not apparently
understand, Lopez sent down an order for the two big states to leave the
matter of Uruguayan politics to his impartial adjustment. At both Rio
de Janeiro and Buenos Aires a roar of laughter went up from the press at
this notion of an obscure chieftain of a band of Indians in the tropical
backwoods daring to poise the equilibrium of much more than half a
continent on his insolent hand. But the merriment soon subsided, as
Brazilians and Argentinos came to realize what their peril might be
from a huge army of skilled and valiant soldiers, a veritable horde of
fighting fanatics, drawn up in a compact little land, centrally located
and affording in other respects every kind of strategic advantage.
When Brazil invaded Uruguay and restored the Colorados to power, Lopez
demanded permission from Argentina to cross its frontier, for the
purpose of assailing his enemy from another quarter. When the permission
was denied, Lopez declared war on Argentina also. It was in every
respect a daring step, but Lopez knew that Argentina was not so well
prepared as his own state for a war of endurance. Uruguay then entered
into an alliance in 1865 with its two big "protectors." In accordance
with its terms, the allies agreed not to conclude peace until Lopez had
been overthrown, heavy indemnities had been exacted of Paraguay, its
fortifications demolished, its army disbanded, and the country forced to
accept any boundaries that the victors might see fit to impose.
Into the details of the campaigns in the frightful conflict that
ensued it is not necessary to enter. Although, in 1866, the allies had
assembled an army of some fifty thousand men, Lopez continued taking
the offensive until, as the number and determination of his adversaries
increased, he was compelled to retreat into his own country. Here he and
his Indian legions levied terrific toll upon the lives of their enemies
who pressed onward, up or down the rivers and through tropical swamps
and forests. Inch by inch he contested their entry upon Paraguayan
soil. When the able-bodied men gave out, old men, boys, women, and girls
fought on with stubborn fury, and died before they would surrender. The
wounded escaped if they could, or, cursing their captors, tore off
their bandages and bled to death. Disease wrought awful havoc in all the
armies engaged; yet the struggle continued until flesh and blood could
endure no more. Flying before his pursuers into the wilds of the north
and frantically dragging along with him masses of fugitive men, women,
and children, whom he remorselessly shot, or starved to death, or left
to perish of exhaustion, Lopez turned finally at bay, and, on March 1,
1870, was felled by the lance of a cavalryman. He had sworn to die for
his country and he did, though his country might perish with him.
No land in modern times has ever reached a point so near annihilation as
Paraguay. Added to the utter ruin of its industries and the devastation
of its fields, dwellings, and towns, hundreds of thousands of men,
women, and children had perished. Indeed, the horrors that had befallen
it might well have led the allies to ask themselves whether it was worth
while to destroy a country in order to change its rulers. Five years
before Lopez came into power the population of Paraguay had been
reckoned at something between 800,000 and 1,400,000--so unreliable were
census returns in those days. In 1878 it was estimated at about 230,000,
of whom women over fifteen years of age outnumbered the men nearly four
to one. Loose polygamy was the inevitable consequence, and women became
the breadwinners. Even today in this country the excess of females over
males is very great. All in all, it is not strange that Paraguay should
be called the "Niobe among nations."
Unlike many nations of Spanish America in which a more or less
anticlerical regime was in the ascendant, Ecuador fell under a sort
of theocracy. Here appeared one of the strangest characters in a story
already full of extraordinary personages--Gabriel Garcia Moreno,
who became President of that republic in 1861. In some respects the
counterpart of Francia of Paraguay, in others both a medieval mystic
and an enlightened ruler of modern type, he was a man of remarkable
intellect, constructive ability, earnest patriotism, and disinterested
zeal for orderliness and progress. On his presidential sash were
inscribed the words: "My Power in the Constitution"; but is real power
lay in himself and in the system which he implanted.
Garcia Moreno had a varied career. He had been a student of chemistry
and other natural sciences. He had spent his youth in exile in Europe,
where he prepared himself for his subsequent career as a journalist and
a university professor. Through it all he had been an active participant
in public affairs. Grim of countenance, austere in bearing, violent of
temper, relentless in severity, he was a devoted believer in the Roman
Catholic faith and in this Church as the sole effective basis upon which
a state could be founded or social and political regeneration could be
assured. In order to render effective his concept of what a nation
ought to be, Garcia Moreno introduced and upheld in all rigidity an
administration the like of which had been known hardly anywhere since
the Middle Ages. He recalled the Jesuits, established schools of the
"Brothers of the Christian Doctrine," and made education a matter wholly
under ecclesiastical control. He forbade heretical worship, called the
country the "Republic of the Sacred Heart," and entered into a concordat
with the Pope under which the Church in Ecuador became more subject to
the will of the supreme pontiff than western Europe had been in the days
of Innocent III.
Liberals in and outside of Ecuador tried feebly to shake off this
masterful theocracy, for the friendship which Garcia Moreno displayed
toward the diplomatic representatives of the Catholic powers of Europe,
notably those of Spain and France, excited the neighboring republics.
Colombia, indeed, sent an army to liberate the "brother democrats of
Ecuador from the rule of Professor Garcia Moreno," but the mass of the
people stood loyally by their President. For this astounding obedience
to an administration apparently so unrelated to modern ideas, the
ecclesiastical domination was not solely or even chiefly responsible.
In more ways than one Garcia Moreno, the professor President, was a
statesman of vision and deed. He put down brigandage and lawlessness;
reformed the finances; erected hospitals; promoted education; and
encouraged the study of natural science. Even his salary he gave over to
public improvements. His successors in the presidential office found it
impossible to govern the country without Garcia Moreno. Elected for a
third term to carry on his curious policy of conservatism and reaction
blended with modern advancement, he fell by the hand of an assassin in
1875. But the system which he had done so much to establish in Ecuador
survived him for many years.
Although Brazil did not escape the evils of insurrection which retarded
the growth of nearly all of its neighbors, none of its numerous
commotions shook the stability of the nation to a perilous degree. By
1850 all danger of revolution had vanished. The country began to enter
upon a career of peace and progress under a regime which combined
broadly the federal organization of the United States with the form of
a constitutional monarchy. Brazil enjoyed one of the few enlightened
despotisms in South America. Adopting at the outset the parliamentary
system, the Emperor Pedro II chose his ministers from among the liberals
or conservatives, as one party or the other might possess a majority
in the lower house of the Congress. Though the legislative power of the
nation was enjoyed almost entirely by the planters and their associates
who formed the dominant social class, individual liberty was fully
guaranteed, and even freedom of conscience and of the press was allowed.
Negro slavery, though tolerated, was not expressly recognized.
Thanks to the political discretion and unusual personal qualities of
"Dom Pedro," his popularity became more and more marked as the years
went on. A patron of science and literature, a scholar rather than a
ruler, a placid and somewhat eccentric philosopher, careless of the
trappings of state, he devoted himself without stint to the public
welfare. Shrewdly divining that the monarchical system might not survive
much longer, he kept his realm pacified by a policy of conciliation.
Pedro II even went so far as to call himself the best republican in the
Empire. He might have said, with justice perhaps, that he was the best
republican in the whole of Hispanic America. What he really accomplished
was the successful exercise of a paternal autocracy of kindness and
liberality over his subjects.
If more or less permanent dictators and occasional liberators were the
order of the day in most of the Spanish American republics, intermittent
dictators and liberators dashed across the stage in Mexico from 1829
well beyond the middle of the century. The other countries could show
numerous instances in which the occupant of the chief magistracy held
office to the close of his constitutional term; but Mexico could not
show a single one! What Mexico furnished, instead, was a kaleidoscopic
spectacle of successive presidents or dictators, an unstable array of
self-styled "generals" without a presidential succession. There were
no fewer than fifty such transient rulers in thirty-two years, with
anywhere from one to six a year, with even the same incumbent twice in
one year, or, in the case of the repetitious Santa Anna, nine times
in twenty years--in spite of the fact that the constitutional term of
office was four years. This was a record that made the most turbulent
South American states seem, by comparison, lands of methodical
regularity in the choice of their national executive. And as if this
instability in the chief magistracy were not enough, the form of
government in Mexico shifted violently from federal to centralized, and
back again to federal. Mad struggles raged between partisan chieftains
and their bands of Escoceses and Yorkinos, crying out upon the
"President" in power because of his undue influence upon the choice of a
successor, backing their respective candidates if they lost, and waiting
for a chance to oust them if they won.
This tumultuous epoch had scarcely begun when Spain in 1829 made a final
attempt to recover her lost dominion in Mexico. Local quarrels were
straightway dropped for two months until the invaders had surrendered.
Thereupon the great landholders, who disliked the prevailing Yorkino
regime for its democratic policies and for favoring the abolition
of slavery, rallied to the aid of a "general" who issued a manifesto
demanding an observance of the constitution and the laws! After Santa
Anna, who was playing the role of a Mexican Warwick, had disposed of
this aspirant, he switched blithely over to the Escoceses, reduced the
federal system almost to a nullity, and in 1836 marched away to conquer
the revolting Texans. But, instead, they conquered him and gained their
independence, so that his reward was exile.
Now the Escoceses were free to promulgate a new constitution, to abolish
the federal arrangement altogether, and to replace it by a strongly
centralized government under which the individual States became mere
administrative districts. Hardly had this radical change been effected
when in 1838 war broke out with France on account of the injuries which
its nationals, among whom were certain pastry cooks, had suffered during
the interminable commotions. Mexico was forced to pay a heavy indemnity;
and Santa Anna, who had returned to fight the invader, was unfortunate
enough to lose a leg in the struggle. This physical deprivation,
however, did not interfere with that doughty hero's zest for tilting
with other unquiet spirits who yearned to assure national regeneration
by continuing to elevate and depose "presidents."
Another swing of the political pendulum had restored the federal system
when again everything was overturned by the disastrous war with the
United States. Once more Santa Anna returned, this time, however,
to joust in vain with the "Yankee despoilers" who were destined to
dismember Mexico and to annex two-thirds of its territory. Again Santa
Anna was banished--to dream of a more favorable opportunity when he
might become the savior of a country which had fallen into bankruptcy
and impotence.
His opportunity came in 1853, when conservatives and clericals indulged
the fatuous hope that he would both sustain their privileges and lift
Mexico out of its sore distress. Either their memories were short
or else distance had cast a halo about his figure. At all events,
he returned from exile and assumed, for the ninth and last time,
a presidency which he intended to be something more than a mere
dictatorship. Scorning the formality of a Congress, he had himself
entitled "Most Serene Highness," as indicative of his ambition to become
a monarch in name as well as in fact.
Royal or imperial designs had long since brought one military upstart to
grief. They were now to cut Santa Anna's residence in Mexico similarly
short. Eruptions of discontent broke out all over the country. Unable to
make them subside, Santa Anna fell back upon an expedient which recalls
practices elsewhere in Spanish America. He opened registries in which
all citizens might record "freely" their approval or disapproval of
his continuance in power. Though he obtained the huge majority of
affirmative votes to be expected in such cases, he found that these
pen-and-ink signatures were no more serviceable than his soldiers.
Accordingly the dictator of many a day, fallen from his former estate
of highness, decided to abandon his serenity also, and in 1854 fled the
country--for its good and his own.