THE YEARS THAT followed the return of Fernando VII were fraught, as he struggled to keep his kingdom intact, at home and overseas. By 1820, Spain was in the throes of a constitutional second act, triggered by a mutiny in Cádiz of troops about to be sent to the Río de la Plata in Argentina to fight against revolutionaries. The soldiers turned on the king and demanded that he accept the 1812 constitution. Rebellions in support of this move erupted throughout Spanish cities.105 The king capitulated, and the period that followed, known as the Trienio Liberal, saw a restoration of the constitution. The liberals in power tried to reach out to the warring parts of the Americas and call for conciliation, but by 1820 it was too late.106
The Trienio Liberal was brought to an end with a French invasion of Spain in 1823, backed by the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Their aim was to restore Fernando VII’s full authority, which they did. In the Americas, however, a crushing defeat of royalists at the December 9, 1824, Battle of Ayacucho in Peru more or less brought an end to the wars of independence, with Spain defeated. Spanish America became a continent of republics, with the creation of Mexico, Gran Colombia (Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador after 1830), Peru, Chile, the United Provinces of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua after 1840), Bolivia, and the United Provinces of Río de la Plata (Argentina). A reluctant Spain, however, would take years to recognize their independence.
The transformation of their hemispheric neighbors from colonies to nations captivated the U.S. public, echoing their own experience and lending some universalism to their republican ideals. This interest manifested itself in a number of ways, from breathless newspaper coverage to a spate of babies named after the Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolívar.107 Wars so close to the United States had been good for business, too, and merchants sold arms to rebels and, occasionally, royalists. Estimates put the number of firearms sent to rebels during the final decade of fighting at 150,000 or more—a somewhat ironic payback for Spain’s help during the American Revolution.108 The United States began to grant recognition to these emerging nations. However, some of places closest to the United States did not attract the same enthusiasm, because they had followed a somewhat different path. Cuba and Puerto Rico were still loyal to Spain and remained colonies, and Santo Domingo was under Haitian rule by 1822, Although the United States opened diplomatic relations with Mexico in 1822, many were discomfited when it opted to become an empire, rather than a republic.109
A DECADE AFTER HIDALGO’S Grito de Dolores, the creole elites who had balked at his movement had found the ideal moment to implement their vision. The transition from viceroyalty to independent nation was a profound rupture, as would be the transition from a worldview defined by the existence of a divinely appointed king and the Catholic Church to that of an independent republic. After a decade of upheaval and war, it would take some trial—and error—to work out how power was to be exercised in Mexico and how former subjects would transform themselves into citizens.
In 1820, the wealthy landowner and former royalist army commander Agustín de Iturbide reached out to Vicente Guerrero, a prominent rebel general in the south of Mexico, persuading him to put aside their differences and find a way forward. The result, in the following February, was the Plan of Iguala, which based itself on three concepts: independence, religion, and union. Although Guerrero favored total independence, the plan retained a connection to the peninsula. It called for the creation of an autonomous monarchy in the form of a “regency” in the name of the king, with Fernando VII or another Bourbon at the head, but also called for an assembly and a written constitution.110
It also, crucially, protected the existing privileges of the military and the Church, winning the backing of those sections of society. The plan also opened all public offices to people of any background, attempting to put an end to racial distinctions while still more or less protecting the existing social hierarchies. The plan proved popular with the public and was ratified eight months later by the Treaty of Córdoba, which recognized Mexico as a “sovereign and independent nation.”111 The last Spanish viceroy, Juan O’Donojú, felt he had no option but to sign the document that August, and it was followed by a Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire on September 28, 1821. In theory, this political configuration would require the approval of the Cortes and the appointment of a royal to be at the head of this new monarchy.112 However, the crown and government stayed quiet, with no explanation given to the Cortes. Once the legislative body found out about events in Mexico, it decided, after a two-week debate, to send commissioners to Mexico to reject the Treaty of Córdoba.113 With no royal willing to head the proposed constitutional monarchy, the Mexican Congress approved the coronation of Iturbide as emperor, and he was crowned Agustín I in July 1822. His empire, however, soon fell apart, as factions—including the wider public, the Spanish officials now out of office, and the Catholic Church—became dissatisfied. These problems were compounded by a faltering and war-torn economy and provoked as well by Agustín I’s dissolution of the Congress at the end of October 1822. He abdicated in March 1823 and was executed the following year. A few months earlier, in December 1822, Antonio López de Santa Anna, a commander at Veracruz and an early supporter of Agustín I, had issued his Plan of Veracruz in opposition to the emperor, outlining a federal vision for Mexico. This was followed by the Plan of Casa Mata, calling for the restoration of Congress.114 A constitution was approved in 1824 that reflected these changes—in place of a king or emperor of the United States of Mexico (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), a president would lead the country and he would be held to account by a strong legislature in a federal system with regions divided into states and territories.115
Political culture remained fragmented, however, with federalist against centralist, liberal against conservative, and even some lingering monarchists against republicans. Many of the men involved in political life also became associated with certain Masonic lodge orders that were powerful during the 1820s, with their memberships consisting of landowners, military officers, intellectuals, and other prominent people. Their divisions roughly mirrored the wider political ones. The Scottish Rite members, or escoceses, tended to be the Conservatives, who were in favor of centralist government, pro-Church, and pro-Spanish. The Rite of York, or yorkinos, represented the Liberals, who desired a federal government, and also wanted to reduce or eliminate the power of the clerics and of the remaining Spanish. At a time of such significant transition, beliefs and membership were subject to change, but for the moment, the distinct divisions of opinion on how best to proceed as a nation remained.
IN THE UNITED States, the addition of new territory continued to present challenges to its union, though by 1820 a number of states had been carved out: Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, and Alabama. Missouri petitioned in 1819 to join as well, and at this juncture expansion hit a bump. Two New York congressmen, James Tallmadge and John W. Taylor, raised their concerns about the admission of another slaveholding state. Louisiana, which had joined in 1812, included slaves, and there remained thousands of acres of Louisiana Purchase lands that were still unorganized. At the same time, a bloc of southern legislators in Congress had been keeping an eye on the admission of Maine, which was also taking place, fearful that the balance of slave and free states would be tipped in the opposite direction.116
No one expected either of the admissions to be blocked, but Tallmadge put forward a resolution to the Missouri enabling bill in February 1819 that would have banned the further introduction of slaves there and freed, after they reached the age of twenty-five, the ones born there. The bill was killed and any resolution of the matter would have to wait until the following Congress, giving plenty of time for it to build into a full political drama.
After the drawing up of House and Senate bills when Congress resumed, and with much diplomacy on the part of President Monroe and the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, a compromise was reached: Missouri could
enter as a slave state, which it did in August 1821, but any new state formed north of 36°30´ could not be slaveholding. Maine joined the union as a free state in 1820. The balance, fragile as it was, remained even at twelve slave states, twelve free. The Missouri problem may have been solved, but there were still thousands of acres of territory ahead. Southern planters would also begin to take a closer look south, eyeing the Hispanic frontier.
By 1823 the United States was a nation transformed. Over the previous two decades it had acquired the vast lands of Louisiana and the strategic Florida territory, fought back against British incursion in the War of 1812, and weathered the heated Missouri debates. Along the way, it had become a more confident and stable nation.117 In addition, European powers were no longer the proximate or physical threat they had been. Although Britain still had a large and powerful empire, in North America it was relegated to the extremes: Canada to the north, and the West Indies to the south, where its colonies were joined by those of France and Spain.
The creation of the Latin American republics was also a radical change in the political landscape of the Americas, even if early leadership struggles in some of the countries were a source of concern to the United States. There were worries that their instability could result in the return of European colonial powers in uncomfortable proximity. Some people were unnerved to see the Holy Alliance’s 1823 intervention in Spain and feared that these nations might entertain ideas about sending troops to Latin America as well or try to take control of nearby Cuba, a worry that was shared by Great Britain, which claimed to oppose any such intervention.118
This was the general climate in 1823 when President James Monroe set out what would be called his “doctrine” during his seventh annual message to Congress. He told the assembled legislators that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”119 It was a sentiment that immediately took root and would continue to grow in scope over the decades to come.120
A WHITE OBELISK SITS in St. Augustine’s main square, its thin pillar tapering to a point that reaches up to the trees that shade it. It is one of the few tangible remains of this turbulent period in Florida. It owes its existence to a Cortes decree of 1812 that each of the empire’s cities must change the name of its main plaza to Plaza de la Constitución to honor the newly created document. Officials in St. Augustine were happy to oblige: the square was renamed and the monument erected in 1813. However, when news arrived in 1814 that the king had returned, all such celebrations of the constitution were ordered to be destroyed. This time, St. Augustinians were less eager to comply, and now the monument is thought to be the sole 1812 memorial of this type left in Spanish America.
Traveling north along the coast to Amelia Island, Fernandina’s Plaza San Carlos retains little evidence of the chaotic final years under Spanish rule, except a browning patch of grass where a historical marker is planted. The remains of the fort, which overlooked the Amelia River, eroded after it was abandoned in the 1820s, and a lone antique cannon faces out to the water. Both markers are physical reminders of Spain’s long-running Florida problem. While it could be argued that Jackson and some of the more enterprising adventurers had been aggressors, Spain had also failed to anticipate or meet many of the challenges posed by the creation and rise of the United States, and this failure forced it to pay a heavy price.
Although the Spanish presence was retreating from the map of the Americas, its shadow lingered. Many people in the United States shared Thomas Jefferson’s concerns about the larger changes in Spain’s former empire, unconvinced that people there could govern themselves. Jefferson wrote in a letter to the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who in 1803–4 had traveled through parts of Latin America, including New Spain and Cuba, that “they will throw off their European dependence I have no doubt.” What was less certain to him was what sort of system of governance would replace it. The Black Legend of Spanish cupidity and cruelty in the Americas had not yet been laid to rest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the 1770s, well before he started formulating the ideas about the “American” identity that he would expand on in his Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, the French writer Hector de St. John de Crèvecoeur highlighted the differences in the two abutting empires in “A Sketch of the Contrast Between the Spanish and the English Colonies.” Much of the tract focuses on the Spaniards’ Catholicism, claiming, “Their [Spaniards’] immense religious system has no greater effect toward the amelioration of society than the simpler ones of these climes. … Here [in the United States], religion required of the husbandman but little or nothing; there, it absorbs and consumes the best wealth of society by the pomp their church requires.”121 Jefferson echoed this sentiment in a remark to Humboldt: “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.”
Jefferson’s pessimistic prediction was that “the different casts of their inhabitants, their mutual hatreds and jealousies, their profound ignorance and bigotry, will be played off by cunning leaders,” though he did admit that much of his knowledge was secondhand. Unlike Humboldt, Jefferson never ventured so far south, admitting that the scientist’s writings were useful for these purposes: “In truth we have little knowledge of them to be depended on, but through you.”122 Jefferson may have had little experience of New Spain, but in the years that elapsed after his letter to Humboldt, many more people had become familiar with what was now Mexico, especially its northern territory, as adventurers, smugglers, and mercenaries traversed the Sabine River boundary.
* By 1808, there were four viceroyalties—New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and Río de la Plata—and the independent captaincies-general were Guatemala, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chile, Venezuela, and the Philippines.
* The final delegate from the Americas, Pedro Bautista Pino, who represented New Mexico, arrived that summer after the constitution had been issued.
Chapter 9
San Antonio de Béxar, Texas, ca. 1820–48
IN APRIL 1828, the Mexican lieutenant José María Sánchez y Tapia arrived at a village near the Río de los Brazos de Dios. He was on a mission with a small team led by independence hero General Manuel de Mier y Terán and sent by Mexican officials to survey the boundary that had been agreed to a decade earlier in the Adams-Onís Treaty. Along the way, they were to study and take note of the natural resources of the remote region, as well as inspect some of the settlements populated by immigrants from the United States.
They left Mexico City in November 1827 and arrived in San Felipe de Austin, about fifty miles west of modern Houston, on April 27, 1828, having stopped in Laredo and San Antonio de Béxar along the way. Sánchez had not been impressed with Texas. In San Felipe de Austin, he wrote in his diary, the forty or so wooden houses “lie in an irregular and desultory manner,” and added that only around ten of the two hundred people were Mexican.1 He also noted that “they treat with considerable harshness” their black slaves.2 Sánchez was suspicious of the Anglos and sensed that these towns were not as simple or tranquil as they might appear. “In my judgment,” he wrote, “the spark that will start the conflagration that will deprive us of Tejas, will start from this colony [San Felipe de Austin].”3 Mier y Terán shared Sánchez’s concerns and outlined them in even starker terms, writing to President Guadalupe Victoria from Nacogdoches in June 1828 that Texas “could throw the whole nation into revolution.”4
It was not only Mexicans taking note of these frontier settlements. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville mentioned Texas in his now classic Democracy in America, observing that “each day, little by little, inhabitants of the United States are introducing themselves into Texas,” but if Mexico was not alert to the pace of immigration “soon Mexicans, so to speak, will not be found in it.” Published in 1835, Tocqueville’s book was based on his time in the United States five years earlier,
and his observations were prescient. “The limits separating these two races [Spanish and Anglo] have been fixed by a treaty,” he wrote. “But however favorable this treaty should be to the Anglo-Americans, I do not doubt that they will soon come to infringe it.”5
After Mexico had secured its independence in 1821, some people in the United States sensed opportunity in Texas, which abutted Louisiana. While 9.6 million people lived in the United States and 6.2 million in Mexico, Texas was remote from the population centers of both. It was fourteen hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and almost one thousand miles from Mexico City, and so had a low degree of official oversight. By 1823, 3,000 Anglo squatters were already in Texas, though much of the region remained exhausted and impoverished because of the struggle for independence.6 In addition, the region had a large and diverse population of Native Americans, including the Caddo, Wichita, and Lipan Apache, as well as the powerful Comanche, all of whom at various points had been involved in raids and conflicts with the Mexicans.7 The ongoing violence had proved an effective deterrent to extensive settlement in Texas, and some Mexican officials, distracted by their own independence struggle, did not realize that people from the United States were arriving.8
Indeed, the Anglos had not waited long. In 1819, around the time the Adams-Onís Treaty was being finalized, a group of men from Natchez, Mississippi, led by James Long, decided to invade Texas, with the aim of “liberating” it, using Nacogdoches as a base. The Spanish—still fighting against Mexican independence—worried that this presaged a larger U.S.-backed invasion, and troops were dispatched. When Spanish soldiers arrived in the Nacogdoches area, they found at least thirty farms growing cotton, but without the necessary permission. Long and his men fled, and the Spanish troops torched all the homes they could find, though this would prove only a temporary deterrent.9 By the early 1820s some 167,000 settlers were inching toward the border, setting up in Louisiana and Arkansas, but with their eyes on Texas, while only 2,500 Mexicans (Tejanos) lived there.10 Planters along the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico could see the potential in cotton, with the fertile land of coastal East Texas having the right conditions for the crop.
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