Mexico becomes an Empire.--Santa Anna deposes the Emperor.--He
proclaims a Republic.--He pronounces against the Election of Pedraza,
the second President.--His situation in the Convent at Oajaca.--He
captures the Spanish Armada.--And is made General of Division.
We left Santa Anna at Vera Cruz, having just completed the first of
those politico-military insurrections which fill up the history of his
times. He had added the city of Vera Cruz to the national cause, by a
timely insurrection. Iturbide had rewarded him for this important
service by bestowing upon him the ribbon of the order of Guadalupe,
making him second in command at Vera Cruz. The chief command of the
department was bestowed upon an old insurrectionary leader, who was
known by the assumed name of Guadalupe Victoria. He was a good-natured,
honest, inefficient old man, whose great merit consisted in having
lived for two years in a dense forest, far beyond the habitations of
men. While thus hiding himself from a host of pursuers, he acquired
that habit, supposed to be peculiar to wild beasts, of passing several
days without food, and then eating inordinate quantities--a habit which
he found impossible to change in after-life, when he had become
President of Mexico. The story of this man's sojourn among wild beasts
had been told all over Mexico, and had given him a great popularity,
which he brought to the support of the national cause.
In 1822 the Mexican nation was still in its swaddling clothes. Its
birth had hardly cost a pang; but its infancy, its childhood, and its
youth, were to be attended with a series of convulsions, the fruits of
the vicious seeds sown in the conception of the new State. By the
_pronunciamiento_ of a part of a regiment of the King's Creole
troops the connection between Spain and Mexico was severed forever, and
the colonel of these troops became the Emperor of Mexico. In this
revolution the nation acquiesced, and thus discovered to the soldiery
their unlimited power when their arms are turned against their own
government. From that time onward Mexico, like every other country
where the Spanish language is spoken, became the victim of her own
soldiery. This liberation of Mexico was by no means the result of the
outburst of national patriotism, but the consequence of the utter
incapacity of Spain longer to hold the reins of her colonial
governments. She indeed sent out a new vice-king to Mexico after the
breaking out of the insurrection; but the best that he could do was to
sanction what had been done by a treaty at Cordova, in which it was
stipulated that Iturbide and the new viceroy, O'Donoghue, should be
associated with others in a regency, until Spain should send out one of
the Spanish Bourbon princes to occupy the imperial throne of Mexico.
The Spanish parliament refused to sanction the treaty of Cordova;
O'Donoghue died, and Iturbide was left in possession of executive
power, without a defined office, while an insane opposition sprung up
against him in the new Congress which he had called together. This
unlooked-for opposition soon convinced him that the tearing away of a
nation from its traditional ideas was like the letting out of waters,
and that he must either ride upon the wave or be overborne by the
tempest. A resolution of Congress, to take from him the command of the
army, brought matters to a crisis. Accordingly, on the night of the
18th of March, 1821, he caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor by his
partisans; and the next day this new revolutionary act was confirmed by
Congress, under the intimidation of military force, and the nation
again acquiesced.
ITURBIDE DEPOSED.
The revolution had caused a stagnation in all the departments of
commerce and of revenue. Iturbide had inaugurated his insurrection by
seizing, at Iguala, a million of dollars belonging to the Manilla
Company, on its way to Acapulco. He made another like seizure at
Perote; but these high-handed measures, while they proved but a drop in
the bucket toward sustaining his government, increased his
embarrassments, by destroying all confidence; so that his new authority
had stamped upon it the unmistakable marks of dissolution. He was an
emperor without traditional associations; he had an empire without a
revenue; a large standing army without pay. The fickle multitude, who
supposed that independence was to prove an antidote for every evil,
began to murmur; while a host of demagogues, who envied the good
fortune of Iturbide, were all beginning to clamor for a republic. The
blow, however, came from an unexpected quarter. Santa Anna had
quarreled with a superior officer, General Echevarri, and Iturbide had
recalled him from his command. But Santa Anna thought it most advisable
to disobey the Emperor; and in the Plaza of Vera Cruz, surrounded by
the garrison, he proclaimed a republic, on the 2d of December, 1822. He
joined in his insurrection the name and the influence of Victoria, yet
both were insufficient to save him from a complete route at the hands
of Echevarri. At the critical moment in the affairs of Santa Anna, the
Grand Lodge of the Ecosces decreed the overthrow of Iturbide, and sent
orders to General Echevarri, who was a member of the order, to unite
his forces to those of Santa Anna in overturning the empire. This was a
bitter pill for that general to swallow, but he swallowed it; and the
two leaders together swallowed the empire.
Iturbide, being unable to stem the torrent of insurrection, had
abdicated; a Republic had been established upon the ruins of the
empire, and Victoria, the "wild man of the woods," was elected first
President. He served out his time; but the last year of his government
was disturbed by the terrible insurrection of the Acordada, which had
arisen out of the election of Pedraza as his successor. Santa Anna was,
at the time of this election, at Jalapa, discharging the duties of
Vice-Governor of Vera Cruz, when the people of the town surrounded his
house and called upon him to pronounce against the election. Thus
becoming implicated, he was forced to make a new insurrection. This
third _pronunciamiento_ of Santa Anna, was on the 5th of September,
1828.
He made his first stand at the Castle of Perote; but finding this too
isolated a position, he marched to Oajaca, in the extreme southwest of
the Republic, and took up his quarters in the Dominican convent of that
city. As he was closely hemmed in by an active enemy, provisions grew
scarce, and he was forced to resort to a novel method of supplying
himself. On a feast-day, at the San Franciscan church, he dressed a
party of his soldiers in the garb of monks, and, having placed them in
a convenient position, he made prisoners of the whole assembled
congregation, and then proceeded to divest them of all ready cash on
hand, and then emptied the contribution-box of the money destined for
the poor saints[8] at Jerusalem, and retired and ended the war; for the
successful termination of the insurrection of the Acordada in the city
of Mexico accomplished the object for which Santa Anna took up
arms--the declaration by Congress, that General Guerrero, a man of
mixed blood was the real President elect, instead of Pedraza, a white
man, and the candidate of the aristocracy.
CAPTURE OF THE ARMADA.
When King Ferdinand had regained his despotic authority, in 1825, by
the aid of French bayonets, he bethought himself of Mexico, the most
productive of his lost colonial possessions in America, which had
yielded, to his predecessors, the total sum of $2,040,048,426,[9] or
rather an annual revenue in silver dollars of $6,800,000 during a
period of three hundred years. He was also incited by his impoverished
_noblesse_, who could no longer obtain colonial appointments for
their sons. The Spanish merchants also complained of the loss of their
monopolies. But what at last aroused him to activity was the expulsion
of the Spaniards from Mexico, in consequence of the ascendancy of the
democratic party. Those of mixed and Indian blood were now truly
enfranchised; and they were heard to utter strange voices, which had
until then been suppressed by the combined power of a spiritual and
temporal despotism: so that the bones of Cortez, the benefactor of the
Kings of Spain, were no longer safe in the convent of San Francisco,
where they had lain for three hundred years.[10] They were in such
imminent danger of being dragged out and scattered to the winds by the
mob, as those of "the accursed" enslaver of their race, that they were
removed by stealth, and for a time deposited in the most sacred shrine
in Mexico: afterward they were secretly removed to Europe, where they
cried to the Spanish king for vengeance on the sacrilegious nation. An
Armada was at last fitted out, and landed at Tampico; and now all
Mexicans, from the President down to the humblest _peon_, watched
the result with the deepest anxiety, as they saw Santa Anna undertaking
the defense of the country with untried soldiers. For on the issue of
the struggle depended the question whether the whole nation should be
again reduced to servitude, or whether they should be left in the
enjoyment of their newly-acquired liberty. The contest was one of
several days' continuance: when at last it was terminated by a
capitulation, all Mexico rang with rejoicing; and Santa Anna, then not
thirty-five years of age, received the military rank which he now
holds--General of Division.
[8] Breva Resena Historica, p. 280.
[9] See King's Proclamation, printed at Havana, 6th September,
1831.
[10] See note 1.