Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  FROM A SPEECH TO A SECRET SESSION OF THE MEXICAN CONGRESS, 1830, THE SENTIMENTS OF WHICH WERE WIDELY ECHOED IN MEXICAN PAPERS AND PRONOUNCEMENTS

  The strongest cause in bringing the Texas Revolution, however, was the lack of sympathy between the Mexican people and the Anglo-Saxon colonists. They could not understand our methods of government and we could not endure their idea of a republic.

  FROM A HISTORY OF TEXAS USED IN 19TH-CENTURY TEXAS SCHOOLS

  THREE major facets illuminated and determined the continuing struggle for the North American continent between Hispanic and Anglo-American civilization in the early-19th century. The first was the dissolution of the Spanish empire into successor states, and the enormous crisis of order into which these states, like the entire Hispanic world, now passed. The second was the serious national suspicions and rivalries between the two new republics of the United States and Mexico. The third, which probably made conflict inevitable, was the ethnic clash between two very different peoples and ways of life as they met in Texas.

  In the summer of 1821, when Stephen Austin was exploring the Texas coastal plains for the best site to plant his American civilization, word reached Texas that Mexico was now free of Spain. A shout of ¡Viva Independencia! went up—for the announcement was not of a new revolution but of a fait accompli. But then, for almost a year, nothing changed. No one in distant Texas really knew what had happened to the south.

  In the middle of organizing his colony in March 1822, Austin received bad news from the last Royalist Governor, Don Antonio Martínez. Officials of the new government at Monterrey had revoked Austin's commission. Further, the government of the Mexican nation was preparing a new colonization law for Texas and the Californias. Martínez, who was soon to be replaced, advised Austin to go at once to the capital and protect his interests. This Austin immediately did.

  What had happened in New Spain was never easy for Anglo-Americans, who knew the society dimly, to understand. Padre Hidalgo's revolt in 1810 did not, like the stirrings of the American Revolution, attract the support of substantial men. Its leaders were primarily people's priests, who saw the anguish of the poorest classes, and its masses were a swarm of ragged Indians. Here and there a genuine rico, such as Bernardo Gutiérrez, with genuine republican sentiments, joined the cause. But Hidalgo, Mier, Morelos, and Matamoros led a screaming horde with enormous grievances but with no real hope of success. The army, the Church, the bureaucracy, and the hacendados, all the foundations of the Spanish state, sided with the Crown. One by one, the rebellious priests were defrocked, hunted down, imprisoned by the Inquisition, and stood against a wall. Their followers were massacred.

  The revolution did not die. A few leaders, the most important Vicente Guerrero and Ignacio Rayón, and Gutiérrez through Magee in Texas, kept guerrilla warfare and a spark of resistance alive. But real revolution was so completely crushed that by 1819 the Viceroy, Apodaca, informed the King there was no more need for troops.

  Now the situation completely swung about. A revolution broke out in metropolitan Spain, based in part upon the crushing taxes and thousands of soldiers raised in the home country to put down rebellion in the empire. Spanish liberals came briefly to power; they dominated the Cortés, or parliament, and made a virtual prisoner of the King. The liberals forced Ferdinand VII to restore the liberal Constitution of 1812, which he had voided, and began to dismantle the enormous privileges of the Spanish Catholic clergy. Monasteries that sprouted all over Spain like mushrooms were closed; the lands of the orders were sequestered, and the higher orders of the clergy reformed by civil law. Thus began a Church-State struggle in Hispanic civilization that was to continue for more than a century. The liberals in Spain were soon crushed by a Catholic reaction and by the invasion of foreign troops from Bourbon France, but not before the shock of a revolutionary regime at home wreaked historic damage in New Spain.

  These events, wrote the American Minister to Mexico, "were viewed with dread by the clergy" and also the upper classes. The Mexican Church, the landowners, and a large part of the army went over to independence. The first successful revolt in Mexico came not to end, but to preserve, the old regime.

  The Royalist general Agustín de Iturbide, who had equaled Arredondo's efforts to stamp out the unrest, now made a deal with Vicente Guerrero's surviving forces in the south. Guerrero and Iturbide met, talked, and issued a proclamation called El Plan de Iguala, in February 1821. This was a compromise, or was meant to be, between the Royalists and liberals in New Spain. Mexico was proclaimed an "independent, moderate, constitutional monarchy." The Roman Catholic religion, with all privileges of the clergy, including its enormous property, and racial equality were both guaranteed. Although in perspective this proclamation looked like something of a Royalist plot, it temporarily reunited all classes. When the new Spanish Viceroy, Juan O'Donojú, arrived in Mexico in July, he quickly realized the cause of Spain was lost. He tried to salvage something for the Bourbons by working out a new deal with Iturbide, in which a regency council was formed. The "moderate, constitutional" throne was to be offered first to the King, Ferdinand VII, and then to members of the Royal family in turn. Under these provisions, conflict ceased, and Iturbide and the Republicans entered the capital, Mexico City, in September 1821.

  But O'Donojú soon died. The Cortés in Madrid repudiated his treaty with Iturbide, pending its own solution to colonial problems, and this left the field to a power struggle between Generalissimo Iturbide and a group of uneasy Republicans. When Stephen Austin reached Mexico, he found the regency council quarreling bitterly within itself, and Iturbide quietly increasing his real power.

  In July 1822, the general instigated a sergeants' revolt, and a march on the palace by the Mexico City mob, a coup out of the gaudiest days of the Roman Empire. "Army and people" thus proclaimed Iturbide Emperor of Mexico. On August 1, Augustine I abolished the Mexican legislature and replaced it with a handpicked junta, or council, of forty-five. Here legitimacy, which had at least held the Mexican elite together, was lost, and it remained lost for another century.

  Stephen Austin lived in the capital during these months, learning the Spanish language as rapidly as he could, listening and learning about Mexican politics. He became aware that he was now moving in a different world from the American frontier—a glittering capital of now rapidly shifting loyalties and balances, where intrigue was the normal way of doing business, where appearances were everything and plain talk was dangerous and rarely done. Austin learned to speak facile Spanish with all the proper phrases of gentility, and "to beat about the bush," as he called it, with the best of them. Austin had that rare ability, which most capable leaders have, of being both clear-sighted and without illusions, while at the same time entirely sincere. He had determined on and adopted loyalty to his new country, Mexico, but without blinding himself to realities of its governments. These two qualities allowed him to perform a minor miracle: he talked with every man of the Imperial junta, including the Emperor, and was able to get his empresario commission confirmed.

  But with his decree in hand, Austin dared not leave the capital. Iturbide's power was growing less every day. Several generals came out in opposition to him, were imprisoned, but escaped. The Republican opposition finally staged its own coup. Iturbide fell and was exiled, and Mexico was now proclaimed a republic. All imperial decrees were voided, and now Austin had to do his work all over again. Again he performed a miracle and persuaded the new Congress to confirm his privileges, even before a new colonization law was prepared. In all, Austin was forced to stay in Mexico for a full year, and during this period, 1822–23, his colony on the Brazos almost failed.

  The Mexican Republic resembled that of the United States only slightly, although the Constitution of 1824 created a federal system of sovereign States. Mexico had no tradition of strong, local governments; the Spanish tradition was strongly centralist in both theory and practice, and the Hispanic love of regulating equaled or surpassed the Anglo-Saxon tendency to legislat
e. The Republic of 1824 was the result of a temporary liberal ascendancy in Mexico, and a liberal experiment with new theories imported from the north. Mexico now entered, as did many of the Hispanic successor states, a long period of tension between Federalists and Centralists, who preferred to establish an all-powerful Presidency and Congress to regulate, in minutest detail, the entire domain.

  Although republican ideas enjoyed a great vogue, Mexico faced two enormous problems with republican governments even its own intellectuals did not understand. In Mexico there was no citizenry in the North American or European sense. There were only subjects of different degrees. And there was no tradition, such as had originated in the British world, that governmental powers originated in and with the people. There were no "people" in the fashion of the United States or France. In 1820, 18 percent of the Mexican population were pure European, or nearly so; 22 percent were mixed, or mestizo; 60 percent, the great mass, were Indian. This was almost the exact opposite of the racial composition of the United States in 1820, where 82 percent were white, and 18 percent Negro. The Mexican whites tended to think of themselves as Spanish, with nostalgia for the past. The Indian masses were illiterate and possessed no national sense. The idea of a Mexican nation was centered in the mestizo group; even here it took a century more to jell.

  Mexican society went from Viceregency to Republic almost unchanged. The Church was preserved. The hacendado class retained its lands, with peonage intact. Racial discrimination was abolished by law, but it could not be abolished in fact. The one great and dangerous vacuum created was the empty space left by the abolition of the Crown—and again, this vacuum was not to be successfully filled for a hundred years, until the Mexican Presidency finally acquired legitimacy.

  In a republic without citizens, although there were thousands of men with genuine republican feelings, it was inevitable that the age of caudillaje began. The caudillo, or military dictator, was perhaps a necessary phase, since there was no possible way to hold such a society together except by some use of force. In a state divided severely by class, with tension between Church and State, and with an illiterate majority living in intense poverty, only a balance of forces could preserve the whole. The caudillo was a military adventurer, who gained control of the army, the largest disciplined body within the state, and balanced off the rest through a combination of cajolery and fear. The caudillo or man on horseback was frequently vicious and intolerable; but without him, there usually developed an anarchy that was worse. The caudillo was inevitably a Centralist, backed by army, Church, and landed elite. The republican or Federalist leadership came both from the elite and mixed class, but it could rarely establish more than an ephemeral regime out of its middle-class and Indian support.

  The hacendados ruled the masses on the local level, but they had been denied a political role by the Spanish. They did not adopt one now. So long as its privileges were guaranteed, this potentially powerful group remained inert. Politics became more and more the preserve of the more vigorous, and discontented, mestizos of the educated professional classes. Professionals, such as lawyers or doctors, in Mexico represented a middle, not an upper, class. Faced with a landed elite, this class was often revolutionary. Political struggle tended to become a power struggle between opposing cliques or factions, without real social meaning, however, since the hacendados were too powerful to be disturbed, and the Indians, except for local disturbances, too inert.

  Every military ruler or caudillo tried to preserve republican appearances while exercising an actual despotism. He was aided not by consensus, because a true consensus in this kind of setting was impossible, but by the tensions between landowners and Indians, mestizo professionals and the Church, army and Republican politicos. He employed bribery, and also a vitally useful strain of force. The result was an almost continual civil strife, damped only when an unusually powerful caudillo seized control, until the pot boiled over again. The so-called revolutions, which occurred with monotonous frequency, and which shed some blood, were more or less palace revolutions. The men in power changed, but institutions were in no way altered or damaged.

  This long period of virtual anarchy that began in Mexico in 1821 had fatal effects on the Mexican empire north of the Rio Grande, and, more than any other single cause, cost the Mexican nation its possessions from California to Texas. The Mexican problems with government, above all, convinced North Americans that the Mexicans were an inferior race. It was impossible for Anglo-Americans to respect people who could not rule themselves—and again and again, in crucial years, Mexicans had no real sense of national destiny, or could not unite.

  When Stephen F. Austin went back to Texas from Mexico in 1823, the last thing in his mind was the thought of potential conflict between his adopted country and the United States. The 1819 treaty, by which the United States renounced Texas, seemed to end the possibility for all time. Austin saw correctly that only North Americans could tame Texas, but he did not foresee that there would be terrible strains trying to accomplish this within the framework of the Mexican Republic. Nor did he see that factions in both the United States and Mexico would make the task difficult. Austin was a clever politician, but he had very little ethnic animosity or ideology, and he did not sufficiently perceive the phobias of others.

  Two great underlying problems made relations between the Republic of Mexico and the United States prickly and difficult. The first was that a large body of Americans, primarily in the Southwest, were expansionist; they wanted Texas and all the land to the Pacific Ocean for the United States. The second trouble was that almost all educated Mexicans hated, distrusted, or feared the rapidly burgeoning power of their northern neighbor. Americans were proud of the explosive growth of their country, and extolled their national vigor. They failed to see the other side of the coin—the effect that American expansion was having on the Mexican mind. All educated and upper-class Mexicans were aware that between 1800 and 1820 the Anglo-Saxon United States more than doubled its land area by the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory and Florida.

  These territories were purchased, but there had always been a strong threat of violence underlying the peaceful negotiations for acquisition. The United States government had made it crystal-clear that it would never permit the Spanish authorities in Louisiana, sovereign or not, to close the mouth of the Mississippi. General Andrew Jackson willfully ignored the Spanish border of Florida while pursuing marauding Indians. The entire expansion of the United States in its early years came at the expense of the Spanish-speaking world. Few Americans thought about it in this way, but all Mexicans did. They knew that all these changes came about only because of basic Spanish weakness.

  Thus the Anglo-American settlement of Texas, in itself a great drama, was played out upon a larger canvas, which was the struggle between the English-speaking Americans and the Spanish successor state of Mexico for domination of the North American continent.

  In such circumstances, the historic tides of Mexico's Hispanic centralism and

  Henry Clay's obsession to acquire Texas made Stephen Austin's apparently logical dream of an English-speaking, autonomous, federal state within a Mexican confederacy impossible.

  The United States Presidential election of 1824, indirectly, had enormous effects on American-Mexican relations. In this year, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay drew 121 electoral votes between them, against Andrew Jackson's plurality of 99. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives; deals were made. Adams emerged President, while Clay became Secretary of State.

  The Massachusetts patrician, Adams, had no real taste for western expansion. But he did want to improve his popularity beyond the Appalachians, and he was willing to appease the western states by attempting to purchase Texas. The slavery question had not yet become an overriding moral issue. Adams was to become perhaps the most fanatical foe of Texas annexation, but during his Presidency he pursued that course, with lip service, if not with enthusiasm. The Missouri Compromise did allow the acquisition
of Texas as slave territory, and Adams authorized Clay to work for revision of the 1819 Spanish-American treaty, which Mexico inherited. To move the western boundary of the United States south of the Brazos River, Adams was prepared to offer $1,000,000 and a commercial treaty.

  This offer was not made immediately. In 1825, the American Minister to Mexico wrote Clay that American interests would best be served by delay. His letter stated that "most of the good land between the Sabine and the Colorado" was filling up with grantees or squatters from the United States, "a population the Mexicans would find difficult to govern."

  When the province became thoroughly American and unruly, the Minister believed the Mexican government would be glad to cede it to the United States.

  To say that neither Americans nor Mexicans really understood the psychology of the other would be an understatement. The leadership of each nation operated on a different plane of thought. Americans always made two basic assumptions: that the American nation was more vigorous and certainly superior to the Mexican; and that the western lands in question were useless to Mexico, which had been unable to settle them. Americans expected Mexicans to accept both assumptions reasonably. But in reverse, the American assumption of superiority lacerated the immense Latin pride of the Mexicans, and the fact that their empire north of the Rio Grande was vulnerable suffused Mexicans with such fear and suspicion that it became almost a phobia among the upper classes. No matter what the United States proposed, it was assumed to be part of a Yanqui plot.

  The open suggestion that Mexico "alienate" a portion of its "sacred soil" by selling it to the United States frightened and infuriated so many Mexicans that the few pragmatic souls willing to be rid of Texas could not operate. In a very real sense, Austin was already "alienating" Texas, and many Mexican officials knew this. But this was being done in a covert—or "still"—way, without popular feelings of territoriality or pride becoming involved. Austin's great advantage was that he intuitively understood the labyrinths of Mexican politics and the Byzantine Mexican mind. Never once did Austin broach his request for a colonization grant in public. He met quietly with powerful officers, talked things out politely with junta members. Afterward, decrees were issued. The great mass of Mexicans never were aware of what took place. No demagogue or ambitious opposition politician was able to use Austin as a target for popular emotion.