Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands Read Free Book Online

Bajío district northwest of Mexico City, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a creole (American-born) son of Spanish parents, raised the cry—or
grito
—of revolt in the village of Dolores. A large crowd responded, seizing Spanish officials, releasing prisoners from jail, and for the first time taking power into their own hands.
    The revolt in Dolores ignited similar passions elsewhere in Mexico and gravely upset the status quo. A bitter and bloody three-way struggle developed among royalists, who adhered to the existing government of Spain; conservative nationalists, who advocated independence short of revolution; and revolutionaries, who intended for independence to yield a thorough restructuring of Mexican society and politics. Resentments that had accrued over centuries among Indians and their mestizo (mixed-race) offspring gave rise to demands for land and to mass killings of those who opposed them. Fear among the European-born and their creole children fueled reprisals that matched in ferocity the attacks of the rebels.
    The advocates of independence sought help, with many looking to the United States. The Americans’ successful struggle for freedom provided a tested philosophy of republicanism that appeared adaptable to Mexico’s case, and the American people and government might reasonably be expected to support a similar struggle by their hemispheric neighbors—especially if that struggle had the effect of weakening imperial Spain. More concretely, American markets at New Orleans and elsewhere were the logical places for the Mexican rebels to seek the weapons they needed to offset Spain’s advantage in arms. Hidalgo dispatched an envoy toward Washington to negotiate treaties of alliance and commerce akin to those the fledgling United States had signed with France in the 1770s; he also sent an agent north bearing silver seized from the royalists, which was to be used to underwrite the arsenal of freedom. The envoy, however, was arrested by the royalists before reaching the Gulf coast, and the agent was captured at San Antonio de Béxar.
    But another rebel, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, carrying more silver, did manage to make his way across Texas to Natchitoches, where, among the marginal and often criminal elements that frequented the Neutral Ground (as the border region was designated prior to the 1819 treaty), he recruited an insurgent army, before continuing to Washington to solicit aid from the Madison administration. Gutiérrez got nothing formal from Madison, who was on the verge of asking Congress for a declaration of war against Britain, but Madison’s secretary of state, James Monroe, offered moral support and apparently some money, and intimations of further assistance should the rebels’ efforts prosper.
    Returning to Louisiana, Gutiérrez enlisted Augustus Magee, a clever young American military officer (third in his class at West Point) who had grown disaffected after being passed over for promotion. Gutiérrez and Magee led a band of a hundred men against Nacogdoches, which quickly fell. As news of the victory traveled back to Louisiana and beyond, it inspired more enlistments. “The business of volunteering for New Spain has become a perfect mania,” wrote William Shaler, an American merchant who tripled as an agent for the Madison administration and a political adviser to Magee and Gutiérrez. “I hear of parties proceeding thither from all quarters, and they are constantly passing through this village from Natchez. . . . I suppose the volunteer force cannot now be rated under 600 Americans, generally good soldiers, and there is every appearance of its becoming very respectable in a short time, equal even to the entire conquest of the Province of Texas.” In Shaler’s mind, and presumably in the minds of these recruits, more than Mexican independence was at stake. “The volunteer expedition, from the most insignificant beginning, is