Mexico's Royalist Coalition Fragmented Against Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: The Response to Revolution 1808-1821 Author(s): Brian R.
Hamnett Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (May, 1980), pp. 55-86 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/156424 . Accessed: 21/11/2013 13:59
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55
Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution I808-I82I

by BRIAN R. HAMNETT
Consensus politics delayed the achievement of Mexican independence. The numerically small, but variegated elites, regrouped in a common stand against Hidalgo's revolutionarymovement in 1810. Themselves fragmented, mutually antagonistic on central issues, they sank their differences for the duration of the counter-revolutionarystruggle. This re-forged unity proved, needless to say, temporary.A tactical alliance concealed far-reachingdivisions: ultimately, the removal of the revolutionary challenge created a new set of circumstances. Under the impact of the Liberal regime's policies after 1820, the Royalist consensus or coalition began to disintegrate. Nevertheless, many ideas and attitudes of the counter-revolutionary decade survived independence, and contributedeventually to the formation of a Mexican conservative position in opposition to a native Liberalism sprung from Mexican roots. My purpose here is to show how the Royalist coalition came into being, delineate its personnel and assess the measure of its achievements. This, then, will be a study of the elites. Perhaps the entire question of Mexican independence reduces itself to a readjustment of positions among the groups constituting the elites. Even so, the displacement of the Spanish peninsular mercantile and administrativecorps from their dominant position in New Spain involved deeper economic and political repercussions than the preceding statement suggests. Central to the matter were the practicalities of capital ownership and fundamental principles of government. Change of considerable magnitude followed the achievement of Mexican independence in 1821. The Mexican elites in September I8I0 took a decision to preserve the political system as it then stood. That very action, however, pre-supposed a change in itself, for the re-grouping at the political apex took place in response to an attempt to alter from below the entire nature of the system. In the vanguard of this revolutionary attempt were members of the provincial bourgeoisie, members of the professional rather than the business classes, who sought to direct a mass popular uprising towards their own political goals. This provincial bourgeoisie formed a junior segment of the Mexican
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Brian R. Hamnett
elites. The ensuing conflict brought about a tightning of ideology, a realignment of forces and a strengthening of the role of the military in political life. Indeed, many members of the provincial bourgeoisie themselves recoiled at the prospect of mass insurrection and co-operatedwith the Royalist effort to suppress it. Given these conflicting political forces, it was clear that, in the long run, Mexico would never be the same again. I Fragmentation vitiated in practicethe colonial theory of an organic society: polarization brought it near to collapse. The centralizing absolutism of the Galvez period (1765-88) re-opened the friction between creole and peninsular over the question of administrative appointments. Rash conclusions, however, should not be drawn from recent researchon creole exclusion. The Galvez policies did not produce an independence movement: the issue focussed instead on power-sharing and autonomy. The exclusion policy centred upon competition for audiencia positions at the apex of the decisionmaking process within New Spain. Resentment and jealousy tended to hide from view the real nature of the creole-peninsulardispute, which was one of policy. In this dispute many members of the established peninsular mercantile elite, often connected by marriage or business interests to the leading creole landowning and mine-operating families, tended to adopt a similar political stance to their creole counterpartsand relatives. The reaction of the Mexican elites to the efforts of the metropolitan government in Madrid to bind the empire more tightly together may be seen in the two well-known representations by the municipal council of Mexico City to the Crown in 1771 and I792.' These grievances amounted to a demand for power-sharing between the senior creole and peninsular elites within the context of a vice-regal system under the Bourbon monarchy. Under no circumstancesdo they point to any separatist intent. Precisely these groups stood at the summit of colonial society: they were the merchants, financiers, entrepreneurs, innovators, large-scale landowners, noblemen, city councillors and, here and there, members of the bureaucracy: they were also the senior churchmen. They,
1British Museum (BM) Add. Mss. 13,975, Ayuntamiento of Mexico-CharlesIII, 1877-82), I, Ayuntamiento-Charles IV, Mexico, 2 May I792, 427-54. The issue of (Texas, I976), pp. 95-111,
26 May I77I. Juan Eusebio Hernandez y Davalos, Coleccidnde documentospara la historia de la guerra de la independenciade Mexico de i808 a 1821, 6 vols (Mexico, autonomy is clearly analysed in Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780-1826 and by Timothy E. Anna, The Fall of
the Royal Governmentin Mexico City(Nebraska,1978), pp. 35-63.
Mexico'sRoyalistCoalition: the Responseto Revolution 57 moreover, tended to be the principal creditors not only of the viceregal government but of the metropolitan government - in time of need - as well. In short, these groups had the strongest vested interest in the perpetuation of the monarchical system and the nobiliar titles and trappings that went with it. However, they wanted this system to reflect their own interests: for that reason they hated Godoy and rallied in i808 to the cause of the young Ferdinand VII, who seemed to stand for a general redress of grievances. Their objective, then, was not revolution but revindication.2 Nevertheless, the Mexican political situation at the turn of the century posed considerable problems for the survival of metropolitan authority. The point of danger lay not among the creoles but within the ranks of the peninsulares. Galvez had sought to reassert peninsular primacy in New Spain and to diminish the position of the long-established members of the peninsular group. Instead, his single-minded endeavour resulted in a serious division within peninsular ranks at precisely the time of mounting creole resentment at exclusion. These internal divisions involved matters of bureaucratic organization and practice: they extended to the entire regime of finance and the economy. Furthermore, the Madrid government's efforts to terminate administrative and commercial abuses such as the repartimiento suggested a full reappraisalof policy where the Indian and mestizo mass of the population was concerned. Under the impact of later Bourbon legislation the peninsulares divided into two antagonistic groups of 'older' and 'newer' merchants, the former upholding the privileged status of the Consulado of Mexico, the latter defending the Consulados of Veracruz and Guadalajara, established in 1795. Similarly, the introduction of the Intendant system after 1786 divided the bureaucracyinto 'older' and 'newer' groups. The former strove, like the 'older' merchants, through pressurewithin the administrative organs in Mexico City and Madrid to obstruct, dilute or reverse those aspects of Bourbon policy which conflicted with their own interests. Since, in any case, the metropolitan and viceregal governments consisted of individuals not unanimously committed to a programme of clearly defined reforms for the monarchy as a whole, this pressuregenerally found a soft, receding spot. We witness, then, especially in the I79os and i8oos, the paradox of governmental organisms subverting their own policies. Such a case in point was the unilateral suspension of the prohibition of the repartimiento contained in
2
For the literatureon exclusion, see D. A. Brading,Miners and Merchants in Bourbon the Audiencia of Mexico in 1779), and Mark A. Burkholderand D. S. Chandler, From Impotence to Authority. The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias, i687-i808 (Missouri, I977), pp. 9i-9, o08(Mexicans after 1776 lost control of domesticpolicy).
Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 40-2 (i0 peninsulares and 5 creoles in
58 BrianR. Hamnett article 12 of the Ordinance of Intendants (I786) by the Mexican Junta Superior de Real Hacienda in I795. Where it proved impossible to reverse a reform measure, the old tended to co-exist alongside the new. In this way the Consulado of Mexico, which Revillagigedo (1789-94) had, at his most lyrical, wished to see abolished outright, survived throughout the remainder of the colonial period alongside the two newer mercantile guilds. The office of viceroy, absolute monarch in New Spain, survived intact, despite the abortive attempt to weaken it through the creation of a separate financial superior, the SuperintendenteSubdelegado de Real Hacienda. The Audiencia remained the viceroy's consultative committee on policy as the Real Acuerdo, even though the Intendant system, central to the Galvez concept of administrative personnel dependent directly upon Madrid, subsisted beside it. Despite the early idealism placed in the Subdelegates, the Intendants' subordinates in the locality, these virtually unpaid officials rapidly degenerated into the same abuses as the alcaldes mayores,their predecessors.3 If the day-to-day financial administration of the Intendants and the farreaching economic changes of the later eighteenth century had not intervened to dispel such an impression, a superficialglance at the state of political life in the viceroyalty of New Spain at the turn of the century would have suggested that inertia, or worse, paralysis, had fallen upon it. In effect, a series of political positions had been taken, which counterbalanced each other. They were basically four: they correspondedto the various elites, the views of which they articulated. In the first place stood the 'older' mercantile and bureaucratic groups of the Consulado and Audiencia of Mexico, the Tribunal de Cuentas and the Junta Superior de Real Hacienda; secondly,
3
These issues are discussed in detail in Brading, ibid., 102-27, and in Brian R. Hamnett, Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, i750-1821 (Cambridge, I97I), pp. 7I-98, I48-55, I77-82. 'Older' merchants:Antonio Bassoco (Basque, received the title of Count in 181I), Juan de Castafiiza(Basque, title of Marquis, I772), the Fagoaga brothers (investors in the silver mines of Zacatecasand Bolafios), Pedro
Alonso de Alles (from Asturias, married a Mexican from Durango in 1778, title of Marquis in 1792), Pedro Gonzalez Noriega (in the i79os became a Cuernavaca sugar-estate owner), Diego de Agreda, Juan Fernando Meoquf, the Conde de la Cortina (a montanies), Gabriel de Yermo (meat-supplier for Mexico City, sugar planter of the Cuernavaca region) and others. In 1787 the Consulado of Mexico consisted of seventy-five members. 'Newer' merchants: Thomas Murfi (Consulado of Veracruz), Juan Bautista de Lobo, Pedro Miguel de Echeverria, Domingo Lagoa, Joaquin del Castillo (a Veracruz city councillor in I799), Jose Ignacio de la Torre, Gregorio Garcia del Corral and others. See, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Apuntes historicos de la heroica ciudad de Veracruz, 3 vols (Mexico, .1850-3), I, 339, 385-7; II, 5 -3. For the members of the Consulado of Guadalajara see Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville: Audiencia de Mexico, leg. T144, Diputados del comercioJacobo Ugarte y Loyola, Guadalajara 20 August 1791.
Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution
59
were the 'newer' mercantile and bureaucratic elite of the Consulados of Veracruz and Guadalajara and the reformist members of the Intendant corps such as Flon, Riafio and Mora y Peysal in Puebla, Guanajuato and Oaxaca respectively; the third position was that of the creole elite, which sought to recover a voice, if not control, in the decision-making process, that is, to reverse the Galvez policies: here.the career and political stance of the Regente Gamboa cut across positions (i) and (iii); the fourth position was held by the creole provincial bourgeoisie, a disgruntled, resentful, protonationalist group that sought to take political advantage of creole-peninsular antagonism, in order to displace the senior elites from their decisive positions in the political processes. Lawyers, junior militia officers, members of the lower secular clergy, small landowners provided the personnel of this group: the embryo of later Liberalism. Given the frequent provincial resentment at continued dominance from the centre core region, this group would provide the seed-bedof a subsequent federalist position.. Clearly, peninsular reformism found itself caught between the pressure of (i) and (iii): by March I 808 little remained of the absolutist centralism of the era of Galvez and Revillagigedo. Instead, an uneasy patchwork of balances and compromises ensured the co-existence of the deeply-rooted with such elements of innovation that had managed against the odds to survive in
barren soil. Galvez had been warned by Viceroy Bucareli (I771-9) not to
tamper with the precarious balance of forces within the Mexican political system. He had boldly ignored this advice. Yet, the balance had not been upset. The metropolitan government had been neither strong enough nor consistent enough to enforce the Galvez policies; the viceregal administration had, in any case, a realistic comprehension of the limits of the possible. Even
4 For Gamboa, see Brading, ibid., pp. 41-5, 70-1. Another case in point is Jacobo de Villaurrutia, b. Santo Domingo, the creole oidor of the Audiencia of Mexico, who supported the autonomy projects of I8o8 and was chosen as one of the electors in the parish elections of 29 November I812 under the Cadiz Constitution. See Anna, ibid., pp. 42, 56, iii. 'Older' does not necessarily denote either age or length of stay in New Spain: it denotes the type of political position adopted with regard to the Bourbon centralising measures. Brading stresses the newness of the Guanajuato elite: 'Guanajuato's elite was almost entirely composed of recent arrivals, new rich, gachupin merchants and creole miners,' ibid., pp. 318-19. With regard to the creole bourgeoisie, Ladd, ibid., p. 29, suggests a class struggle within the ranks of the elites: 'creole-peninsular strife was evidently a class interest sustained by the middle groups to protest immigrant preference in office and in managerial positions. It was clearly an interest that was not shared by the elites.' (i.e. the senior echelons.) Members of this creole bourgeoisie.would be: Miguel Dominguez, :b. Guanajuato 1756,. Miguel Hidalgo. y Costilla, b. Hacienda: de .Corralejo 1753, Carlos Maria de Bustamante, b. Antequera de Oaxaca .774,. Lorenzo de Zavala, Andres Quintana Roo, Ignacio Allende, Ignacio L6pez Ray6n, and others.
60 BrianR. Hamnett so, change had taken place, and, as a result, a new balance had by the early i 8oos at last emerged, the nature of which demonstratedunequivocally the resilience of (i) and (iii) and the self-assertion of the factors of continuity.5 Spain's wartime failures between I796 and i808 and the credit-raising measure known as the Consolidacion de Vales Reales, adopted by Viceroy Iturrigaray (1803-8), forced a further readjustment of the political balance. This time we witness a coincidence of sentiments among all three groups in opposition to the policies of Charles IV's favourite, Godoy. The Consolidacion de Vales Reales left a once popular viceroy precariously isolated, as, within the peninsula itself, the entire regime began to totter towards a final disintegration.6 Ten years previously it would have seemed incredible that the Consulados of Mexico and Veracruz could be found on the same political side; that they were at this point was the measureof the impact of Iturrigaray's policies upon the peninsulares. The creole notability, moreover, found itself equally adverselyaffected with regard to the Consolidacion.7 II During the political crisis of July-September I808 other factors entered the political spectrum. In the first place the collapse of the Bourbon absolute monarchy in the peninsula during the motin de Aranjuez thrust upon the Mexican elites the task of devising an effective method of preventing the viceroyalty's incorporation into the Bonaparte empire. Notwithstanding the presence of the British fleet in the Atlantic, the political vacuum in Spain obliged each group at the apex of Mexican society to concentrate upon the centre of power. During this summer crisis groups (i) and (iii) once again
5
6
Hamnett, ibid., pp. 72-94. E. Lafuente Ferrari, El virrey Iturrigarayy los origenes de la independencia de
Mejico (Madrid, I941), pp. 4I-4. Brian R. Hamnett, 'The Appropriation of Mexican Reales,' I805-1809,' Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. I, No. 2 (Nov., 1969),
Church Wealth by the Spanish Bourbon Government.The 'Consolidaci6nde Vales pp. 85-113. Among those affected were the Conde de Regla, the Fagoaga family, the Alles heir, now Marquesde Santa Cruz de Inguanzo, the Conde de la Valenciana, Antonio Bassoco, the Marquesde Castafiiza,the Conde de la Cortina, the Marques de Selva Nevada and Gabrielde Yermo. Local creole families such as the Allendes in San Miguel el Grande and the Murguias and Castillejos in Oaxaca forfeited substantial sums. Ladd, ibid., pp. 96-104, strikingly places the Consolidacionin the backgroundto the demand for autonomy. A broader discussion may be found in Brian R. Hamnett, 'Mercantile Rivalry and Peninsular Division: The Consuladosof New Spain and the Impact of the Bourbon
Reforms, 1780-I824,' Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv N.F., Jg. 2 (1976), pp. 273-
305.
Mexico'sRoyalistCoalition:the Responseto Revolution 61 diverged, eventually polarizing into complete opposition. Yet it was not a naked power struggle between the Ayuntamiento and the Audiencia. The former did not appear to envisage the total separation of peninsulares from the government of New Spain. Still less did the city notables propose to remove themselves from the Spanish imperial system.8 Indeed, the tension seems to have been caused by the Audiencia's intransigence in consistently portraying this mild creole argument of devolution, presented by Azcarate and Verdad, as outright separatism, and behaving accordingly. The gachupin coup during the night of 15 September I808 was not, then, directed against the cause of Mexican independence - except in the imagination of the peninsulares, but, in fact, against the principle of self-government within the empire on the basis of power-sharing.9 The crisishad sprung from Iturrigaray'sreluctance to declareunequivocally in favour of the rights of Ferdinand VII and adhere to one or other of the peninsular juntas of resistance to the French. Whether the viceroy aspired to weave his way between competing factions in Mexico City or had yielded to pressure from the cabildo remains difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, five juntas convened by him met in the capital between 3 August and 9 September I808. In consequence, the gachupines assumed that the viceroy had conceded without resistance the creole argument that New Spain constituted a kingdom in its own right. These juntas contained representatives of both the creole and peninsular interests: landowners, mineowners, merchants, civil servants, city councillors, academics, churchmen and soldiers. Their attitudes coincided upon the basic matter of preservation of the existing social structure. The issue in dispute devolved simply upon a small extension of the number of individuals involved in the decision-making process. Autonomist political theory remained vague. From their tentative proposals, it appears that Azcarate and Verdad tacitly assumed the continuation of the sociedad estamental, which had characterized colonial behaviour, if not its juridical structure. They floundered through nebulous realms. The desire implicit in their recommendations for Mexico's political future amounted to a restora8
For the cabildo, see Anna, ibid., pp. 26-3I. There were twenty-five members, of whom four had to be peninsulares: it representedthe double constituency of the senior elite (autonomy) and the creole bourgeoisie.See also Lucas Alaman, Historia de Mejico, 5 vols (Mexico, 1849-52), I, 93. For a parallelstudy of the Pueblacabildo, see Reinhard Liehr, Ayuntamiento y oligarquia en Puebla, 1787-i8Io, 2 vols
(Mexico, I976), I, III-I8; II, 142-57.
9 Including the Regente, Pedro Catani, the audiencia consisted of fifteen members: eight oidores, the principal being the decano, Ciriaco Gonzalez Carvajal,and the three staunch absolutists, Guillermo Aguirre, Miguel Bataller and Jose Arias Villafafie; three alcaldesdel crimen and three fiscales.AGI Mexico 1320, IturrigarayMiguel CayetanoSoler,No. 564, Mexico 24 May i808.
62
Brian R. Hamnnett
tion of an idealized traditionalor corporativeconstitutionalism. Such versions of corporate representationin the form of a Mexican Cortes of Estates had never existed in New Spain through the deliberate choice of the absolute monarchy that they should not. To all intents and purposes Azcarate and Verdad placed the cabildos - in particular, that of Mexico City, which, thoroughly in the tradition of viceregal centralism, they saw in the leadership - at the core of this system of representation by Estates. Since these city councils remained closed, hereditaryand unreformed, the creole stance cannot be describedas an authentic upsurge by the Third Estate.10 The viceroy's intention to convene a Mexican Congress in September proved to be the immediate impulse to the gachutpincoup. Yermo's removal of Iturrigarayin this conspiracy by the Audiencia and Consulado of Mexico and the arrest of the creole leaders ended the prospect of peaceful evolution towards self-government within the empire. Similarly, it deprived the creole notability of taking the initiative in reshaping the political life of New Spain. Mexico City and the centre core region lost the leadership in the movement for devolution and power-sharing. Although the peninsular coup for a time appeared to reassertthe dominant role of the capital city as the centre of viceregal and bureaucratic power, this blow to the city's creole elite proved to have long-term consequences. It signified that initiatives would henceforth come from the provinces. In that respect, their distinct social, ethnic and economic conditions would colour their political orientation. Violent hostility among the creoles towards the golpistas led, however, to no national rising against them. The swift, well-organized coup capitalized upon the disaffection felt towards the Iturrigarayregime. Furthermore, two elite groups, the membership of which cut across creole-peninsularorigins, at this point entered the political spectrum as active participantsin defence of group (i). These new participants were the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the army officer corps. In September I808, each made its first decisive political commitment in the period we are discussing. They made it in favour of sustaining the existing peninsular vested interests. For this reason, group (iii) had no option but to witness its own incorporation into this coalition of traditionalists. In effect, for the ordinary member of the creole noble and professional classes in group (iii) - beyond the ideological vanguard - the coup of 1808 signified an abrupt and unpleasant calling into line.
10 Jose Miranda, Las ideas y las instituciones politicas mexicanas, 1521-1821 (Mexico, I952), pp. 304-I0; Anna Macias, Genesis del gobierno constitucional en Mexico, 63. Support for autonomy came from certain members of the creole nobility: the Marquesesde Guardiola,San Juan de Rayas and Uluapa, and the Condes de Sierragorda, CasaAlta and Santiago.
1808-1821 (Mexico, 1973), pp. I6-28. Ladd, ibid., pp. 95-III; Anna, ibid., pp. 35-
63
The coup succeeded by virtue of the newly rediscovered unity of the peninsular administrative, legal and mercantile interests, acting in alliance with the ecclesiastical hierarchy and with the officer corps, which morally and physically guaranteed the replacement of one regime by another. The new viceroy, Garibay, a senior army officer, established an extraordinary court, the Junta de Seguridad y Buen Orden, on 26 June 1809, in order to circumvent creole-administeredcourts in cases of suspected treason. It thereafter became deliberate government policy to regard political dissent as subversion, and punish offenders accordingly. III Opposition to the revolution of September I810, launched by Hidalgo from the village of Dolores, marked the second decisive political commitment by the ecclesiasticalhierarchy and the army officer corps in this period. Their unequivocal alignment behind the viceregal government provided the Royalist cause with powerful weapons of persuasion and coercion. In essence, the Queretaro conspiracy, out of which sprang Hidalgo's abortive rising, sought like the preceding Valladolid conspiracy of 1809, to reverse the coup of September I808. Both movements considered the possibility of a rising from within the creole militia. Lack of confidence in effective support, however, encouraged the plotters to broach the controversial matter of mass participation. Hidalgo's decision to appeal to the mestizo and Indian masses ensured initial military successes, but, in the long run, solidified the adhesion of the creole propertied classes to the Royalist regime, heir of the coup of i8o8.11 The vagueness of Hidalgo's professed aims and the sparsity of his political pronouncements made it exceedingly difficult to determine whether his movement can be described as an attempted separatistputsch launched from the provinces. The profession of loyalty to Ferdinand VII confused matters considerably. If the revolution had intended to avenge the deposition of Iturrigaray, then it certainly failed to elicit the desired support in the capital
11 Ernesto de la Torre Villar, La Constitucidn de Apatzingdn y los creadores del estado mexicano (Mexico, 1964), p. 32. Hugh M. Hamill, Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt. Prelude to Mexican Independence (Florida, I966), pp. 36-8. By the autumn of i8o8 Iturtroops at Jalapa, Orizaba and rigaray had amassed a militia force of some 12,000 C6rdoba: junior creole officers, such as Lieutenant Jose Mariano Michelena, instigator of the Valladolid conspiracy, Captain Ignacio Allende and Captain Juan de Aldama, associates of Hidalgo in I8Io, trained there. For a recent major study of the army, see Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, I76o-I810 (New Mexico,
1978).
64
Brian R. Hamnett
city, for Azcarate condemned the rising before the College of Lawyers on x i January 181 I as an assault upon civilization and order and a threat to the It was this social and economic dimension that ensured the economy.l2 alienation of the propertied creoles, irrespective of the moderate political stance of such revolutionaryleaders as Allende and Ray6n. Despite the latter's refusal to abandon the initial commitment to uphold the King's sovereign rights in New Spain, notably in his Elementos constitucionales of 4 September I8I2, and in his subsequent repudiation of his signature of the Act of Independence of 6 November 1813, the creole propertied classes appeared to prefer a golpista regime backed by extraordinarycourts to the revolutionary movement.l3 Initially, then, the creole fear of Hidalgo's rising greatly surpassed their resentment at the exclusion from audiencia and other positions as a result of the Galvez policies. Similarly, fear for life and property reconciled them to the peninsular group which had inflicted upon their vanguard the political debacle of I 808. Thus it seemed on the surface of things. The opportunity for devolution had been lost in the coup; separatism, or simply revenge at the frustration of devolution, could not rally the creole notability in I8Io. Whatever creole leverage might be exercised, it would have to be done within the context of a peninsular-dominatedRoyalist regime. Once, however, the Spanish Cortes had opened on the Isla de Leon on 24 September 181 o, creole political aims became dedicated towards altering the balance of forces within the Royalist coalition. Nevertheless, the reinforcement of the traditional political position of the Consulado and Audiencia of Mexico as a result of the coup of i808
and the clear intention of Viceroy Venegas (I810-13) to maintain as much
of the formerly absolute power of his office as he could, considerablyobstructed this endeavour.14 The strength of the government itself increased in proportion to its recovery of the major cities briefly lost to the insurgents:
Guanajuato on 25 November I8I0, Guadalajara on 2I January and San
Luis Potosi on 5 March 181 . The architect of the military victory was Felix Calleja, who had arrived in Mexico with the younger Viceroy Revillagigedo in 1789, helped to realize Branciforte'smilitia projects, and had married into one of the principal creole landed families of San Luis Potosi in I807. In
12 13
14
Hamill, ibid., pp. I73, 243. Alaman, ibid., I, 370; II, 334-5; IV, 666. Torre Villar, ibid., pp. 358-61. Nettie Lee Benson (ed.), Mexico and the Spanish Cortes, 1810-1822 (Texas, I966), pp. 8, 70-3. The viceroyignored metropolitanordersto abolishthe Juntasof Security, and used the abortiveconspiracyof August I811 as the pretext for imposing virtual martial law in the capital under the aegis of a new Junta of Police and Public Security,which supersededthe older body and managed the internal passportsystem. Anna, ibid., pp. 78-82.
65
many respects Calleja, viceroy from 1813 until 81 6, is the key figure during this phase of the Royalist coalition, but he has only recently been studied as such. Clearly, his marriage connection with the de la Gandara family and his long command of the local regiments of militia made him a desirable candidate for a creole-peninsularrapprochementat the highest levels.15 Viceroys Venegas and Calleja governed New Spain at a time of revolutionary civil war, in the midst of which the Imperial Cortes in Cadiz strove to implant a new political system, which provided the creoles with access to governing institutions at three levels. In the first place, Mexican deputies attended the Cortes itself, actively shared in its discussions and decisions, and helped to write the Constitution of 1812. At the second level, creoles took office in the regions with the eventual installation of the new
administrative committees, the Diputaciones Provinciales in Ayuntamientos 813 and I814.
At the local level, creoles staffed the elective municipal councils, the
Constitucionales.l6 The Audiencia and Consulado, ever fear-
ful that constitutionalism might become the prelude to separatism, understandably opposed this creole accession to the institutions of decision and administration. Similarly, Spanish peninsular merchants, magistrates and civil servants tenaciously resisted any alterationof the balance of forces within the Royalist coalition, for the logical consequence of these creole gains would be a recrudescenceof the demand for power-sharingwhich the coup of 1808
15 J. Ignacio Rubio Mafie, 'Antecedentes del Virrey de Nueva Espafia, Felix Maria
16
Calleja,'Boletin del Archivo Generalde la Nacion I ser., Vol. xix, No. 3 (July-Sept. 1948), pp. 323-30; M. Meade, 'Don Felix Maria Calleja del Rey. Actividades anteriores a la Guerra de la Independencia,' ibid., II ser., Vol. i, No. I (I960), pp. 59-86. Jose de J. Nfiez y Dominguez, La virreina mexicana. Dona Maria Francisca de la Gandarade Calleja(Mexico, 1950). Both Anna, ibid., pp. 68, 85-9, and Archer,ibid., pp. 202-3, stressthe role of Calleja. Constitucidn politica de la monarquia espafiola (Cadiz, I812), arts. I, 3, I8, 23-7, 34-8, 59-77, 78-I03, defined the Spanish nation, sovereignty and citizenship, and laid down the rules for the electoral procedure in a system based upon equality before the law and representationaccording to population; arts. 324-35 dealt with the provincial deputations; arts. 309-I8 with the elected municipalities.Details of the elections may be found in Archivo General de la Naci6n (AGN), Mexico, ramo de Historia, tome 445, Diputados a Cortes. Elecciones, i809-i8I3. After I8II twenty-one Mexican deputies sat in the Cortes, among them: Jose Cayetano Foncerrada(Michoacan),JoaquinManiau(Veracruz),MarianoMendiola(Queretaro), Antonio Joaquin Perez (Puebla), Jose Maria Couto (New Spain), Dr Jose Miguel Guridi y Alcocer(Tlaxcala),JoseMiguel Gordoa(Zacatecas) and JoseMariaGutierrez de Teran (New Spain). Neither Juan de Dios Cafiedonor Juan Jose Espinosa de los Monteros, elected in 1813 for Guadalajaraand Guanajuatorespectively,appear to have reached the Cortes. These deputies tended to reflect the attitudesof the creole professional bourgeoisie; many of them were members of the lower clergy or the legal profession.
66 BrianR. Hamnett had frustrated.17The viceroys had no intention of altering their customary method of government, constitutional changes or not. Initial creole electoral gains in the preliminary stages for the selection of members of the Ayuntamiento Constitucional of Mexico City on 29 November I812, provided Venegas with a pretext for suspending the constitutional guarantee of liberty of the press on 5 December. Alleging public unruliness as a result of the victories, Venegas suspended the completion of these elections and delayed those to the Diputacion Provincial of Mexico. The latter did not finally convene until 13 July i814. This suspension did not, however, apply outside the capital city for municipal elections or outside the province of Mexico for the deputations.18The viceroy's actions were illegal; they had been taken in Real Acuerdo, that is in conjunction with the Audiencia meeting as the viceregal consultative committee on policy and matters of State. The I812 Constitution had restricted the Audiencia to a purely judicial role, under the principle of separation of powers. Calleja, however, did not lift the suspension of freedom of the press after his accession to office in March 8 13. The new viceroy, appreciating the necessity of conciliation, did, nevertheless, allow the electoral procedure to continue after April. His disillusionment at the result, which showed a victory in the election to the Ordinary Cortes for candidates regarded by the government as the 'opposition', led to the outright prohibition of the elected deputies, Ignacio Adalid, a creole, and J. M. Fagoaga, a Spanish Liberal, from proceeding to the assembly. Both Venegas and Calleja chose to justify their measures of restriction of the constitutional processes on the grounds that creole participantswere nothing but crypto-insurgents.This allegation, however, could backfire, for government failure to observe the Constitution to the letter might encourage creoles to adopt a more favourable attitude towards the separatist revolutionaries, who themselves had evolved towards a constitutionalist position not radically dissimilar to that of Cadiz. Indeed, a circle of conspirators,centred upon the professional classes, and known as Los Guadalupes, had already contacted Morelos in 1812. Suspension of liberty of the press brought about the defection of the Oaxaquefio lawyer, Carlos Maria Bustamante, from the Royalist camp, followed by other professional men such as Andres Quintana Roo and Juan Nepomuceno Rosains. Their influence, especially after the demise of the clerical caudillos, gradually diluted the messianic aspects of the
17 AGI Indiferente General IIO, Expediente sobre levantamiento e independencia (1818), Audiencia - Regency Council, Mexico 18 November 1813. M. S. Alperovich, Historia de la Independencia de Mexico, 1810-1824 (Mexico, 1967), pp. I57-8. 18 AGI Mexico 1822, Expedientes inventariados(i813-i814), Venegas - Minister of War, Mexico I4 December 1812. Nettie Lee Benson, 'The Contested Mexican Election of 1812', HAHR Vol. 26, No. 3 (Aug., 1946), pp. 336-50.
67
revolution and bestowed upon it the aspect of a liberal constitutionalist movement. Such developments, however, proved ineffectual in face of Calleja's victories. On 2 January I812 Calleja took Zitacuaro, seat of the insurgent provisional government. The Congress of Chilpancingo met in September 1813 as a divided gathering, hardly more than a committee, of insurgent leaders. The Act of Independence on 6 November 1813 and the Constitution of Apatzingan on 22 October 1814 caused little stir at the time. Bustamante and his associates formed a tiny minority of creole defectors; most of their fellows chose not to identify themselves with the caudillo, Morelos, despite the latter's proclaimed opposition to race and class war. Therefore, the creole propertied classes remained imprisoned within the confines of the Royalist coalition, with little possibility of increasing their gains and decisively tilting the political balance in their favour.19 By the time we reach the Constitutions of 1812 (Cadiz) and 1814 (Apatzingan), we find that Mexican political ideology has evolved considerably from the cautious traditionalism of i808. We have now passed well beyond the frontiers of early Liberalism. Nevertheless, the principles of separation of powers, representation according to population rather than estate, and equality before the law held the vanguard of political thought. While many peninsulares might hanker after the old absolutism, a substantial number of creoles dreamed of the kind of hypothetical corporative restorationpropounded by Azcarate and Verdad in 1808. This latter position did not die in the coup against Iturrigaray. It survived in the minds of conservative opponents of Liberalism and separatism to form the doctrinal roots of an indigenous Mexican ConservativeParty during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Already, then, in the issues of the I18 os, debated both within and without the Cortes in Cadiz or Madrid, we can point to the existence of a conservative-liberalpolemic on the ideological plane, which frequently tended to cut across the creole-peninsulardivision. Even so, this political argument derived its origin from Mexican social and economic realities; it did not exist apart from it, as if it were an alien accretion. On the contrary, the polemic involved the problem of Mexico's social structure and economic organization, matters which in themselves had brought about the
explosion of 1810.20 19 AGI ibid., Ores - Regency Council, Mexico 14 December I812. W. H. Timmons, 'Los Guadalupes.A Secret Society in the Mexican Revolution for Independence',
20
380-406. Torre Villar,ibid., Decretode Morelos,Tecpan I3 OctoberI8I I, pp. 335-6. The Extraordinaryand OrdinaryCortes (I8I0-I4) split into factions over the issues of sovereignty, limitation of royal power, the structureof the representativeinstitutions and Church-Staterelations. While the 1812 Constitution in arts. 249-50
HAHR Vol. 30, No. 4 (Nov., I950),
pp. 453-79; Torre Villar, ibid., pp.
291-326,
68 BrianR. Hamnett Regional sentiments and interests characterized much of Mexican life. Nevertheless, the Cadiz Constitution had striven to bind the empire more tightly together. The definition of sovereignty precluded any suggestion of American separatism, and confined representation to the Imperial Cortes which met in the peninsula. There were to be no devolved American assemblies. Furthermore, this Constitution continued and extended the Galvez principles of centralization. Let us not confuse ourselves over terminology at this point. The introduction of the Intendancies after 1786 had not been a measure of decentralizationwithin the viceroyalty, for the Intendants were nominated not by the viceroy or Audiencia, but by the metropolitan government in Madrid. They were not designed to respond to regional sentiments, but to represent the authority of a central government in Madrid intent upon affirming the plenitude of absolute power which it claimed by right. The viceroy was precisely the devolved authority which the Intendants were meant to supersede, but whom, due to the aborted nature of the many aspects of the Galvez reforms, they never did. Similarly, the 1812 Constitution repeated this endeavour of Enlightened Absolutism, and in doing so revealed yet another major objective of that period which had been inherited by early Spanish Liberalism, imperialist and centralizing. Nor should this occurrence cause any surprise. The Cortes sat in Cadiz, principal port of the Spanish American trade. Following in Galvez's footsteps, the 1812 Constitution reduced the viceroy's faculties. The latter became merely Jefe Politico of New Spain proper. Calleja complained that he barely knew what his powers were. This official was strictly an appointee of the metropolitan government at the provincial level, directly responsible to the Regency Council. The Intendant system continued, though confined to administrative matters, at the level beneath the Jefe Politico, until the Cortes should introduce its projected legislation for the formation of departments, modelled on those of Revolutionary France, which had completed the centralizing measures of the absolute monarchs by suppressing the old provincial divisions. The lefe Politico presided over the Diputacion Provincial. This latter body was not designed to act as an embryonic state legislature within a federal system, but as an elective agency for the implementation of central government policies, with the concomitant faculty of consultation.21
preservedthe fueros militar and eclesidstico,the Cortes in September1813 abolished guilds and alteredthe structureof taxation. Constitucion,ibid., arts. 324-35. Nettie Lee Benson, La Diputacion provincial y el
21
federalismo mexicano (Mexico, I955), pp. 30-4I. There were six such bodies Merida, installed on 23 April 1813; Guadalajara, 20 September 18I3; Monterrey, 21 March I814; Durango, 13 July 1814; San Luis Potosi, not installed; Mexico, I3 July I8I4.
69
Intentions in Cadiz counted for much where plans were concerned; they stood little chance of implementation, however, if they conflicted with social realities. The centripetalismof the doceanistasencountered the shifting rocks of centrifugal regionalism and broke in fragments across them. The reduction of viceregal power combined with civil war and perennial difficulties of communications to provide the conditions for the emergence of military satrapies in Guadalajara under General Cruz and in Monterrey under Arredondo, virtually independent of Mexico City. At the same time Calleja's protege, the creole Colonel Agustin de Iturbide, his position resting upon the Celaya Regiment, dominated the counter-revolutionarystruggle in the Intendancies of Guanajuato and Michoacan. Similarly, insurgent caudillos such as Vicente Guerrero, Juan Alvarez and Guadalupe Victoria held out in mountain strongholds or remote regions.22 While the Cortes sought to bind the empire together by offering the constitution as the common platform for a redressof grievances in both hemispheres, political struggles within and without the assembly shattered these aspirations. Over questions of ideology, institutions and Church-State relations, the deputies in the Cortes, irrespective of their provenance, divided into antagonistic factions. Four Mexican deputies adhered to the Manifesto of the Persians of 12 April I814, which appealed to a newly arrived Ferdinand VII to dissolve the Cortes, revoke the Constitution and convene, instead, a traditional cortes of estates or orders on the idealized medieval model. The traditionalist or servil Manifesto provided the King with the political opening to spring a rapid coup d'etat with the aid of an aggrieved section of the regular army. The coup of Io-II May I814 enabled the arrest of many Liberal leaders and supporters,such as the Mexican deputies Maniau (Veracruz) and Ramos Arizpe (Coahuila), on the grounds that they had participated in a Jacobin-inspired conspiracy to strip the monarch of his
sovereignty.23
22
Justo Sierra,Evolucidn politica del pueblo mexicano (Mexico, I957), pp. 163, I67-8. Villoro, ibid., pp. 187-8. AGI Mexico I830, Pedro Somoza - SM, Mexico 29 February and 31 March I816. This writer accused Iturbide of making a business out of the
war.
23
Perez, Foncerrada,Angel Alonso y Pantiga (Yucatan)and SalvadorSanmartfn(New Spain), Representaciony Manifiesto que algunos diputados a las Cortes Ordinarias firmaron... etc., I2 April I8I4. In contrast, Ferdinand VII compiled a list of exaltados to be arrested;Americans'names were Maniau, Ramos Arizpe, Octaviano Obregon (New Spain), Gordoa, Couto, Guridi y Alcocer, Gutierrez de Teran, and Jose Miguel de Quijano (Merida), BN (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) MSS 12,463, no. I2, Conde de Buenavista,if. 46-53, Madrid, 28 May I8I4. The trials of Maniau .and Ramos Arizpe are found in Archivo Hist6rico Nacional, Madrid (AHN), Consejo 6297 and 6298, Comisionde Causasde Estado (1915), respectively.
70
Brian R. Hamnett
By 5 October, Calleja had completely dismantled the constitutional system in New Spain. The viceroy thereby nullified the creole political gains on the two levels, regional and local, and re-asserted his former power. The Audiencias similarly reverted to their pre-constitutionalposition. In this way hopes for the possible viability of a middle position between absolutism and separatism were dealt a bitter blow. It should not be assumed, however, that such a via media had during the first constitutional period come to anything resembling effective realization, for everything depended upon, first, the objectives of the Cortes - which were imperialist and centralist, and secondly, on the attitude and behaviour of the Royalist authorities in Mexico City which remained essentially absolutist and peninsular-orientated.24 IV With the restoration of absolutism in the summer and autumn of i814, the Royalist government in Mexico City, on the offensive in the struggle against the insurgents, assumed a deceptive aspect of strength. Nevertheless, the aspirationsof Liberals, peninsular or creole, had suffered sharp repulse.25 The Ayuntamiento and Consulado of Veracruz, partisans of the constitutional system, had been cowed into conformity. It appeared as though the political situation had returned to the days of September I808. The capture and execution of Matamoros and Morelos encouraged creole members of the Royalist coalition to believe that the revolutionary threat was on the wane. Yet, clearly, in full view of the debacle of 1814, no opportunity presented itself for any creole revindication. The years, 1814-20, were, then to be a time of waiting upon events. Furthermore, this period, on the surface tranquil, was one in which all parties involved in the civil war sought to recuperate in the often vain hope of reconstruction.The revolution had affected the centres of mineral production, and, thereby, restricted the viceregal government's silver supplies for the Royal Mint. Disruption of communications reduced revenues from internal customs houses. This loss occurred at the same time as the abolition of Indian tribute, long a principal government revenue. With reduced income, the regime combated the revolution from below, and fended off pressure from the metropolitan government, itself faced with the French occupation of Spain, for increased contributions.How24 25
AGI Mexico I975, Real Palacio de Mexico, 17 August I814. Lerdo, ibid., II, II8;
Alaman, ibid., V, 5-i6; Benson, Cortes, pp. 80-I. Both Rayon and Dr Cos sought, as a result, to rally constitutionalists to the insurgent cause in two proclamations to Europeans in Mexico on 19 August and 21 October 18r4. Torre Villar, ibid., pp. 283-7.
71
ever, with the revolutionary civil war in New Spain the traditional credit role of the mercantile corporations began to contract. Calleja's financial measures fell heavily upon the Royalist-held cities, particularly Mexico City itself. Peninsular merchants grew at first reluctant and soon recalcitrant in face of increased taxes and forced loans. Their own activities restricted by the civil war, they exhibited a distinct unwillingness to sacrifice their dwindling fortunes to save the viceregal regime, of which they themselves provided the principal support. Under the impact of metropolitan pressure and the revolution at home, Mexican national debt rose from around thirty million pesos in 81 o to about fifty million in 18 5. Although the insurgents failed to bring down the Royalist regime by means of an armed insurrection, they ruined its financial creditability, and ensured that the government's efforts to raise revenue would act as a source of division among the ranks of its partisans.26 The collapse of the Cortes and the military fragmentation of the revolution provided absolutists and traditionalists with the political opportunity to impose their own solution to Mexico's problems, as they diagnosed them. Essentially this resolved itself into an alliance of Throne and Altar. From this position the peninsular and creole conservatives directed their attack against the ideas and representatives of Liberal constitutionalism and separatism. Leaders of the ecclesiasticalhierarchy attacked both constitutions, and identified them with the French Revolution and a tradition of heterodoxy reaching back to ancient Greece and Rome. Other conservative writers followed a similar line of thought. In essence they strove to work out a theory capable of combating the ideology of early Liberalism, but their arguments merely provided a justification for Ferdinandine absolutism and for the political repression that accompanied it. Church and State co-operatedin the apprehension of suspected subversives. Fagoaga, whom Calleja had detained in Mexico, finally went to the peninsula but as a deportee. The Marques de San Juan de Rayas, a participant in the creole attempt of I808, went to Veracruz. Lorenzo de Zavala, Carlos Maria Bustamante, Fray Servando
26
The Urgent Patriotic Loan of August I809 yielded a total of 1,82 ,000 pesos for the Royalist government; contributors included the Prior of the Consulado of Mexico and his brother, the Consul Gabriel de Yermo, the former Consul Jose Ruiz de la Barcena, and the merchants - Tomas Domingo de Acha, Gablied de Iturbe, Sebastian de Heras Soto, Pedro Gonzalez de Noriega and his nephew, Diego de Agreda, Tomas Ramon de Ibarrola, Antonio Bassoco and others. Large sums also proceeded from ecclesiastical corporations. AGI Mexico 2375, Lista de los contribuyentes... etc. Many of the same individuals and corporations contributed to the Patriotic Loan of March I813, which eventually produced I,078,900 pesos. AGI Mexico i638, Calleja - Ministry of Finance, No. 50, Mexico 31 May I813.
72
Brian R. Hamnett
Teresa de Mier and Andres Quintana Roo's wife, Leona Vicario, spent long periods in the fortressprison of San Juan de Ulua.27 Despite the semblance of unity, the Royalist coalition remained divided on the issue of long-term objectives. With the proscription of Liberal ideas, which had provided in notable instances a common cause for Spaniards and Mexicans, the old creole-peninsular tensions began to recur. Even on the matter of unity of Throne and Altar, cracks appearedthat suggested that the Mexican clerical wing of the Royalist coalition preferred the Altar to the Throne. Two representative writers, the ex-deputy for Guanajuato, Fuentes, and the former deputy for Puebla, Perez, implicitly criticized important aspects of Bourbon policy, in calling for the restoration of the Jesuits and full preservation of the fuero eclesidstico.28 During the period of the Cortes, Mexican deputies had sought to undermine the position of Viceroy Venegas, on the grounds that he had obstructed the implementation of the Constitution's provisions. Perez, appointed Bishop of Puebla by Ferdinand VII in December 1814, further denounced the former viceroy in May I8I4 as 'apathetic and voluptuous'. This servil polemicist, however, extended his attack to Calleja as well, whom he portrayed as surrounded by insurgent sympathizers. He further pointed to the viceroy's creole marriage as a potential source of danger for the metropolitan government, and called for Calleja's removal on the grounds that he has been 'indolent', an extraordinary allegation against a victorious military commander and forceful ruler.29Similar imputations came from the Mexican Inquisitor, Manuel de Flores, who had become involved in an unpleasant dispute over jurisdictional competence with both the viceroy and the Cathedral chapter of Mexico, and followed it by an imbroglio with the Audiencia.30 Perez returned to the attack in 1816, a direct assault upon the policies and methods of Calleja's administration. This time, instead of pointing to possible insurgent sympathies, the Bishop of Puebla singled out Calleja's alleged harsh treatment of the rebels, and complained that Royalist authorities had appropriated the
Pedro Fonte, Impugnacion de algunos impios. . . articulos del codigo de anarquia . . etc. (Mexico, 1816), Archbishop of Mexico in succession to Antonio Bergoza y Jordan in 1815, Fonte attacked the Constitution of Apatzingan. The Bishop-elect of Michoacan, Manuel Abad y Queipo, before I8IO a reformist, attacked the Cadiz Constitution in his Informe dirigido al rey D. Fernando VII, 20 July 1815, in Niceto de Zamacois, Historia de Mejico, 21 tomos (Barcelona, I888-I9o0), IX, 86I-9I. 28 AGI Mexico 1827, Victorino de las Fuentes y Vallejo, Madrid 21 September I8I4. AGI Estado 40, Perez-Duque de San Carlos, Madrid 18 May 1814. 29 Ibid. SO The Inquisition was restored in Mexico on 4 January I8I5. Jos6 Toribio Medina, Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion en Mexico (Santiago de Chile, 1905), pp. 465--9.
27
73
funds of certain convents. Calleja countered that Perez's charges amounted to the same as those levelled against him by the insurgents themselves.38 These disputes, following upon the nullifiation of the creole advances in 1814, indicated the failure of Calleja's policy of reconciliation within the Royalist camp. His successor, whose term of office combined a policy of slow economic and financial recuperation with a gesture of clemency towards repentant revolutionaries, continued the attempt to bind the coalition together. Apodaca, moreover, issued some 6o,ooo pardons to rebel applicants, in an attempt to kill the revolution by kindness. Nevertheless, the more the danger of 810o receded, the less remained the need for a united front of peninsular and creole elites. Lorenzo de Zavala emphasized that the political lull of 1818 and 18 9 was highly deceptive. Creole demands for advancement or outright independence remained no less strong then than in the earlier years of the decade. Yet the military defeat of Hidalgo and Morelos removed the possibility that independence would be the achievement of the revolutionary masses. The agents of victory had not been the peninsular merchants, magistrates or civil servants - although, of course, they had helped to pay for it, but the largely Mexican-officeredarmy in New Spain. The officer corps sprang from the creole landed elite. It was upon this group that the fate of the viceregal government hung.32 V In April and May 1820 the surface calm ended. The re-installationof the constitutional system throughout the Spanish dominions eventually broke
31 AGI Mexico 1830, Perez-Calleja, Puebla 14 April I8I6; Calleja-Perez, Mexico io July I816; Calleja-Councilof State, Mexico I2 July I816. 32 Lorenzo de Zavala, Ensayo historicode las revolucionesde Mexico desde i8o8 hasta
I830
Romeo Flores Caballero,La Contrarrevolucion en la independencia.Los espanolesen lacvida politica, social y econdmica de Mexico (i804-1838), (Mexico, 1969), p. 8I. Viceroy Venadito stated that the number of pardons expedited from the time of the publicationof the amnesty order on 30 January1817 and the end of December I818 came to 29,818, AGN Virreyes273, ff. 255-63v, Venadito-Minister of War, No. 761 res, Mexico 31 December I8I8. The first peninsular troops arrived in Mexico City on 13 May I8I2, a force of only 3,000 men. Calleja left a total number of some 40,000 troops by the middle of I816, recruitedwithin New Spain over the past two decades: the peninsular element was small. An auxiliary force of 44,098 loyalists also existed, see AGN Historia 485, Ejercito - organizacion, feb 1816-i821, f. I9, estado que manifiesta la fuerza de los cuerpos y companias sueltas de urbanos y Realistasfieles de todas armas auxiliares del Ej6rcito de Nueva Espana, 31 August I816. Anna, ibid., pp. i8o-I, underestimatesthe continuing insurgent threat after
8rT6.
(Mexico, I969), pp. 70-7; Sierra, ibid., pp. I49, I63-5; Villoro, ibid., p. x80.
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Brian R. Hamnett
apart the Royalist coalition. The return of the Liberals to power in Madrid on 9 March exposed the viceroy to a precarious isolation. Furthermore, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the officer corps were faced with a transformed political situation. As in the period, I8 Io-I4, the Spanish Liberals presented the Constitution and the prospect of representation in the Cortes as the common platform for a redress of grievances for both the peninsula and the Americas. An alliance of creole and peninsular Liberals in Veracruz and Jalapa obliged Venadito to publish the Constitution in Mexico City on 31 May, an action he regarded as pregnant with danger. The abolition of the Inquisition and the restoration of liberty of the press followed. In mid-June elections to the Ayuntamiento Constitutional of Mexico City took place. On 22 August the viceroy sanctioned the release of non-insurgent political prisoners.33On the face of things, the bishops appeared willing to conform to the Liberal system. Fonte's edict of 18 July urged compliance.34Elections to the Ordinary Cortes took place on 17 September, and eventually forty-nine Mexican deputies attended the assemblyin the following year.35 The re-establishmentof the constitutional system restored the creole gains of 1812-14, and revived the possibility of a middle way between absolutism and separatism. Nevertheless, the Spanish Liberals of I820 remained as indifferent to self-government within the American territoriesas the generation of I8Io. At the same time specific measures adopted by the Cortes in Madrid began to alienate Mexican conservatives, and drive them into conspiratorial activity. The restriction of the religious orders accompanied
proposals to curtail further the fuero eclesiastico. In New Spain, 1,500 per-
sons appealed to Venadito in August I820 to ignore the Cortes's decree for the extinction of the Society of Jesus. To the indignation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which now saw its vision of an alliance between Throne and Altar
33
Francisco de Paula Arrangoiz y Berzabal, Mejico desde

(Madrid, I87I-2), II, 3-I0.
I808
hasta I867, 4 vols
4 Karl M. Schmitt, 'The Clergy and the Independenceof New Spain,'HAHR, Vol. 34,
35
(Guanajuato), Lorenzo de Zavala (Yucatan), Manuel G6mez Pedraza (Mexico), Francisco Fagoaga (Mexico), Miguel Ramos Arizpe (Coahuila), Jose Mariano Michelena (Michoacan), Pablo de la Llave (Veracruz), Juan de Dios Cafiedo (Guadalajara)and Jose Maria Murguia y Galardi (Oaxaca),who had been the fifth member of the insurgent Congress of Chilpancingo. Benson, Cortes, 30-6. For the elections to the constitutional city council of Mexico, see Anna, ibid., pp. I95-6: it included autonomistsand Liberals,such as FranciscoManuel Sanchez de Tagle, the young Conde de Bassoco and Gabriel Patricio de Yermo, both nephews of peninsular merchants of the i808 generation, Ignacio Adalid, and Jose Miguel Guridi y Alcocer as secretary.
No. 3 (Aug., 1954), pp. 289-312. AGI Mexico I503, Venadito-Ministro de la Gobernaci6n de Ultramar, No. 71, Mexico 30 SeptemberI820. Mexican deputies to the Cortesincluded: Lucas Alaman
75
obstructed, was compounded that of the officer corps. The Cortes continued the efforts of its predecessorto subordinate the military to the control of the civilian legislature, to place the government of provinces in the hands of civilian Jefes Politicos and to reduce the application of the fuero militar in civil and criminal cases. Two of the principal opponents of these measures were the Bishop of Guadalajara, Ruiz de Cabanias,a peninsular, and the newly-appointed commander of the Celaya Regiment, Iturbide.36 Viceroy Venadito, who had emerged from the complacency of the years, 1818 and i819, into the realization that the metropolitan government's position in New Spain was 'undoubtedly critical', appealed in vain to Madrid for the despatch of peninsular troops. Evidently he distrusted the loyalty of the Mexican-officered army. Since the new troops never came, Venadito found himself obliged to rely on Iturbide's force of 2,479 men to root out Vicente Guerrero from the interior between Acapulco and the capital. At the time of his appointment on 9 November I820, it seems, this officer approached Manuel G6mez Pedraza, one of the deputies en route to the Cortes, with a view to striking immediately for Mexican Independence by using the army as the instrument. The latter, however, felt that neither of the two officers essential to the plan, Gabriel Armijo and Pascual Lifian, could be trusted. The conspiracy had to be abandoned. Gomez Pedraza left for Spain. On i6 November Iturbide himself departed from the capital. While on campaign against Vicente Guerrero, nevertheless, he took the precaution of contacting the second-in-commandof the Guadalajaragarrison, Pedro Celestino Negrete, a peninsular, and other officers. In a similar vein he wrote to the deputy, Gomez de Navarrete, and early in 1821 sent a draft plan of independence to the Mexico City lawyer, Espinosa de los Monteros.37 The fragmentation of the old Royalist coalition assumed a further dimension with the conspiracyof La Profesa. Inspired by the former inquisitor and Rector of the University of Mexico, Matfas Monteagudo, a group of peninsular conservatives discussed measures to restore absolutism, on the grounds
36
37
errs in denying the Benson, ibid., pp. 125-9, 148-5o. Anna, ibid., pp. I98-204, existence of a counterrevolutionary strain in opposition to the Cortes' measures: cf. Ladd, ibid., p. i66, 'Mexican autonomy had decidedly conservative characteristics. It conceived of religion as exclusively Catholic and Catholicism as exclusively national and submissive to the regulation of government agencies. It required the state to be a corporate realm in the Spanish model of semi-autonomous entities reconciled in the person of the king.' Fernando de Gabriel y Ruiz de Apodaca, Apuntes biogrdficos del excmo. senor D. Juan Ruiz de Apodaca y Eliza, Conde del Venadito (Burgos, I849), pp. 114-20. Manuel Payno, Bosquejo biogrdfico de los generales Iturbide y Terdn (Mexico, I843), pp. 7-9. Jaime Delgado, 'El Conde del Venadito ante el Plan de Iguala', Revista de Indias, Nos. 33-4 (I948), pp. 957-66.
76
Brian R. Hamnett
that constitutionalism could only lead to separatism. The possibility exists that Viceroy Venadito may have been aware of these meetings, and, indeed, sympathized with them. However, the most these conspiratorscould hope for was a viceregal suspension of important parts of the Constitution, as Venegas had done in December 812. They lacked the necessary military support to spring a purely peninsular absolutist coup. Initially, then, the Reunion de La Profesa does not appear to have been connected with the project of Iturbide: on the contrary, its aims were the opposite. Even so, a common thread of opposition to Liberal constitutionalism ran through both. The connection between the two may have been made through the mediation of Bishop Perez of Puebla, who had apparently organized a similar junta in his own city. This prelate had, on the face of things, welcomed the re-establishment of the Constitution in his manifesto of 27 June 1820, Hay tiempo de callar y tiempo de hablar, but had become the centre of opposition to the new system after the Cortes had determined to punish the signatories of the Manifesto of the Persians. In face of the outbreak of disturbancesin Puebla on behalf of the bishop, the fiscal of the Audiencia, Odoardo, counselled suspension of the Constitution. From Puebla appeals arrived in the capital from the secular and regular clergy for the suspension of the Cortes's ecclesiastical measures. Venadito informed the metropolitan government that the other bishops had declared their support for Perez. Iturbide tapped this clerical discontent. His letter of 21 February 1821 to the Bishop of Guadalajarapresented his movement as a defence of Catholic orthodoxy and the privileges of the Church. In this way Iturbide isolated the viceroy, deepened the division between the hierarchy and the Spanish government, and branded the ministers in Madrid - much as Hidalgo had done in 1810 as heterodox on religious matters. Mexico, then, was to become the home of true religion and traditional monarchism. The support given to Iturbide's Plan of Iguala after 24 February pointed to the third decisive political commitment by the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the officer corps in this period.38 As a propaganda gesture the Plan of Iguala offered Europeans and creoles a platform from which to make common cause in defence of basic Hispanic traditions in opposition to the innovations emanating from the new regime
38
N. M. Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759-1821. The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege (London, 1968), pp. 248-9. BM 977ok5, Papeles Varios, Manifiesto del Obispo de la Puebla de los Angeles a sus diocesanos, 27 June 1820. AGI Mexico I680, Venadito - Min. de Ultramar, No. i86, Mexico 31 January 1821; Venadito - P6rez, Mexico 24 January 1821; Perez - Venadito, Puebla 26 January 1821. Only two bishops, Fonte (peninsular) in Mexico and Castafiiza (creole) in Durango opposed the Plan.
77
in Spain. Iturbide convinced this conservative wing that Independence provided them with safer guarantees. The details of the Plan are well-known. Less clear is its significance. In face of its clear separatist intent, Viceroy Venadito, never an enthusiastic constitutionalist, denounced it as 'anticonstitutional'. On 2 June i821, he demonstrated the continuity of viceregal attitudes towards the Constitution by suspending liberty of the press. Archbishop Fonte, by condemning the Plan on 19 March, appeared to imply in his appeal for loyalty to the legitimate authorities that the Cortes and constitutional system answered that description. In this way he seemed to defend the Constitution he had attacked in I8I5, on the grounds that it precluded separatism. Iturbide's successes throughout the provinces produced such discontent in the capital among peninsular officers that Novella and Liinan sprang a coup d'etat to remove Venadito upon the pretext that resistance to separatism had been inadequate and ineffective. The Royalist military coup of 5 July I821 destroyed whatever claims to legitimacy the government in Mexico City might still have put forward. By comparison, the Three Guarantees appeared to be the embodiment of legitimacy, continuity and moderation.89The arrival of O'Donoju, the Cortes's Jefe Politico of New Spain, whose task was to reconcile the viceroyalty to the Constitution, signified that two Royalist viceroys now existed. Iturbide's approaches to O'Donojui, which resulted in the conciliatory Treaties of C6rdoba on 24 August 182I, enabled the former's entry into the capital on 27 September. These treaties reiterated the provisions of the Plan of Iguala, but from O'Donoju's point of view they preserved the throne of the Mexican Empire for the Spanish Bourbons. Iturbide had provided that the new sovereign state would be a constitutional monarchy. Even so, it had still not been specified what type of constitution was in the long run to apply. In the interim, all clauses of the Cadiz Constitution that did not conflict with the reality of Mexican Independence subsisted. Ultimately, though, the new sovereign state would have to formulate its own constitution in accordance with its specific needsc The protection of the fueros militar and eclesidstico, and the support given to the Plan by opponents of liberal political forms, suggested that Iturbide would by-pass the inheritance of Cadiz and Apatzingan, and return, instead, to the corporativeposition of Azcirate and Verdad in I808. In the meantime, however, the Mexican Empire entered 89 For the Plan, see Felipe Tena Ramirez, Leyes fundamentalesde Mexico. i8o8-I964
(Mexico, 1964, pp. II3-I6. W. S. Robertson,Iturbide of Mexico (Duke Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 84-104. Apodaca, ibid., 63-77. Carlos Maria de Bustamante, Cuadro historico de la revolucion mexicana, 4 vols (Mexico, i96I), I, 474. Timothy Anna, 'Francisco Novella and the last stand of the Royal Army in New Spain', HAHR
Vol. 51, No. i (Feb., I97I), pp. 92-11.
78
Brian R. Hamnett
into existence as a sovereign state under the provisions of the Cadiz Constitution of 1812. A movement which had gained the support of powerful opponents of the Cadiz system sponsored the emergence of a new political organism temporarily governed in accordance with it. The Plan of Iguala displayed a panoply of paradoxes.4? Iturbide, the professed champion of Catholic orthodoxy, concluded the Treaties of C6rdoba with a celebrated Spanish freemason and Liberal. We have to examine the question whether, after all, Mexican Independence really did amount to a 'triumph of reaction'. Certainly, the Monteagudo plot fell into that category - but that was not a blow for Independence but against the Constitution. The coup of Novella also may be classified as reaction - but that, too, struck against Independence and was directed against the person of the viceroy. In contrast, Iturbide's consensus spanned the entire political spectrum: it excluded only the peninsular absolutist fringe, the 'extreme Right', so to say. It included every political position from the ecclesiastical corporativism of Perez and Ruiz de CabaFiasto the remnants of the old insurgent movement under the leadership of Guadalupe Victoria and Vicente Guerrero.41Despite the stance of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the officer corps, the consensus of Iguala was not exclusively and narrowly directed against the existence of a Liberal government in Madrid. That fact it employed as a pretext on two mutually contradictory accounts. In the first place, Iturbide rallied anti-constitutionalists,both peninsular and creole, to the cause of separatism for the obvious reasons already discussed. In the second place, his movement offered Mexican Liberals whether they were protagonists of continued union or outright Independence - the prospect of realizing more completely the provisions of the Constitution, which the viceroy and Audiencia had generally striven to frustrate. The former group - the traditionalists or conservatives - sought to reverse the consequences of the 1820 Revolution; the latter - Liberal constitutionalistshoped to extend fully to New Spain its achievements. Indeed, Iturbide's declaration of 28 June 1821 for the continuation of the Constitution ensured
uninterrupted functioning Ayuntamientos Constitucionales, the of the Diputaciones Provinciales and essential features of the Liberal system.
One Liberal adherent of the Plan of Iguala, Tornel, secretaryto the Military Command in Veracruz, equated Iturbide's movement in Mexico with that of Riego and Quiroga in Spain, and, further, linked Dolores and Iguala as
40
Vol. 35 (Jan.-March 1949), pp. 25-87. Tena Ramirez, ibid., pp. II6-I9.
41
Jaime Delgado, 'La Misi6n a Mejico de Don Juan de O'Donoju,' Revista de Indias
Probably
RamosArizpe's pressuresecuredO'Donoju'sappointment. Zavala,ibid., p 89; Robertson,ibid., p. 65.
Mexico's Royalist Coalitioni:the Response to Revolution
79
anticipation and fulfilment. According to Tornel, Ferdinand VII's six-year absolutist regime had placed the interests of New Spain in opposition to those of the peninsula. The Revolution of I820 had once more reconciled them. In practice, though, viceregal antagonism to the full application of the Constitution had made necessary Iturbide's revolution.42Other Mexican Liberals warned of the possible dangers to their cause from Iturbide's capture of power, for the Plan of Iguala proposed the separation of Mexico from Spain at precisely the time of the triumph of constitutionalism in the peninsula.43 Liberals of all complexions would have done well to take note of Iturbide's letter of 5 March 1821 to Venadito, in which he had offered the viceroy the presidency of a provisional junta with the absolutist Regente Bataller as vicepresident. It was true that constitutionalists such as Guridi y Alcocer, J. M. Fagoaga and Espinosa de los Monteros were also named as members, but they were to sit alongside the corporativist,Azcarate, the Spanish peninsular merchant of the Consulado of Mexico, the Conde de la Cortina, and none other than Monteagudo himself.41 The Plan of Iguala produced four principal political responses. The viceregal authorities - generally absolutist by inclination and tradition - invoked the 81 2 Constitution to strengthen their argument against separatism. The Iturbidistas sought to preserve the Hispanic and Catholic inheritance of Mexico through a bloodless separationfrom Spain. The two other tendencies were Liberal, for the Liberals had split. One group adhered to the peninsular connexion, and held to the traditional Liberal platform of union under the Constitution. They remained monarchists, hoping, in the long run in vain, that Ferdinand VII had sincerely become converted to constitutional monarchism. This group came to be known as the Borbonistas. Jose Maria Fagoaga was a principal representativeof this point of view. Other Liberals, such as Zavala, Tornel, Mora, Ramos Arizpe and Valentin G6mez Farias, supported Iturbide's separatism but not the anti-constitutionalismcontained within the consensus of Iguala. These Liberals combined the tradition of the Cortes of Cadiz and Madrid with that of the creole lawyers and intellectuals
who had adhered to the Morelos revolution between 1811 and I815. In
them the influence of Cadiz and Apatzingan intermingled. In 1822 Zavala and G6mez Farias went as far as to vote for the establishment of Iturbide's monarchy, in order to bring about the definitive break with the Spanish
42 Jose Maria Tornel, Manifiestodel origen, causas, progresosy estado de la revolucion del imperio mexicano con relacion a la antigua Espana (Puebla, I82I), pp. 3-I I, addressed to O'Donoju's secretary. 43 Javier Ocampo, Las Ideas de un dia. El pueblo mexicanoante la consumacionde su independencia (Mexico, I969), pp. I50-2. 44 Luis G. Cuevas, Porvenir de Mexico (Mexico, I954), pp. 33-4.
80 BrianR. Hamnett Bourbons, and administer the coup de grace to the rival Liberal position of imperial unity under a constitutional monarchy based in the peninsula.45 The Iturbide movement was not so much a reaction against Liberal policies, but a general response, common to all the Mexican elites, to Ferdinand VII's absolutist period during the years, 1814-20: it was partly a reaction to the nullification of the constitutional gains of 1812-14. In effect, Ferdinand VII's royal coup of May 814 amounted, in American terms, to a second gachupin coup: the first had blocked the movement towards devolution; the second had nullified the creole political advances after 1812. In other words, it is very important to focus upon the Constitution of 1812 as a potential via media between absolutism and separatism. We should not concede uncritically the argument of the absolutists, the political 'Right', that devolution, autonomy and constitutionalism,all of them indiscriminately, were the thin end of the wedge, that they inevitably led to separatism. That is to obscure the fact that almost no one among the senior elite wanted outright independence, even less, republicanism. The interests of this elite cut across the simple dichotomies of creole: peninsular or Mexico: Spain. This group wanted the power to decide its own affairs and to govern in its own interests: such interests were internal and Mexican-based.They did not want to be interfered with - and they had been since the time of Galvez - by a Spanish metropolitan government seeking to re-orientate the government of the empire solely in the direction of Spain's particularinterests. As regards most members of the junior branch of the elite, the creole bourgeoisie, fear of the insurrection from below had duly curbed their political ambitions and had locked them within the bounds of the Royalist coalition. In I82I they, too, formed part of the consensus elaboratedby Iturbide. The Royalist coalition - minus viceroy and senior peninsular absolutists brought about New Spain's transformationinto a sovereign state during the course of 1821. These peninsular absolutists became the expendable factors in the political shift among the higher echelons of Mexican society. In their place the renovated coalition acquired the tactical support of the last vestiges of the defeated insurgent movement. For a time, then, Iturbide managed to neutralize the 'Left' by 'incorporating' it into the 'official' coalition. At Iguala the Mexican elites completed the processes begun in 1808 and continued in I812-I4 and I820, and finally took control of political power.
They were able to do this peacefully, because the Mexican Royalist coalition
45 Among the Mexican deputies elected in March i82I to sit in the Cortes of
were Matias Monteagudo (Mexico), Andres Quintana Roo, Cafiedo (New Galicia) and Valentin G6mez Farfas(Zacatecas).Benson, ibid., 38-41. They clearly reflected differentpolitical origins and persuasions.Cuevas,ibid., p. I35; Sierra,ibid., p. I77.
1822-3
81
had won the civil war commonly described as the 'War of Independence'. Furthermore, the experience of the coups of 1808 and 8I14, of viceregal subversion of fundamental aspects of the constitutional system between 8122 and 1814, and finally the Novella coup of July 1821, had destroyed the Spanish peninsular regime's case for legitimacy within New Spain. Iturbide's renovated coalition succeeded in its tactical objectives, because the consensus of Iguala represented the new legitimacy. Liberals, as we have seen, divided in response to the Plan. That division could last only as long as the possibility of a constitutional solution within the imperial framework remained open. On I3 February 1822, the Spanish Cortes repudiated the Treaties of C6rdoba, and thereby dashed the prospect altogether. Opposition to Iturbide's corporative scheme and to his personal power, which by July had converted the Regency into a monarchy, began to reunite Liberal constitutionalists on a republican platform.4 VI We have traced the transition of a viceroyalty administered from Madrid through the mediation of bureaucratic organisms in Mexico City into a sovereign state with representative institutions. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the long struggle within the ruling groups for the control of the decision-making process and the institutions of law and order reached its climax. It is necessary, as we conclude, to take stock of the altered position of the senior strata of Mexican society. Before Independence, the Absolute Monarchy rested upon the twin columns of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, tamed by the Patronato Real, and the magisterial bureaucracy of the audiencias. In each of these departments of the civil service, creole and peninsular had intermingled until the metropolitan government after I770 initiated a concerted attempt to remove the former. In New Spain these two columns formed the governing elite, from which the creole element was in recession. The ecclesiastical elite consisted of the predominantly peninsular
46
Tornel reacted strongly to the Cortesrepudiationof O'Donoji's actions by denouncing the Spanish Liberals in his Derechos de Fernando VII al Trono del Imperio mexicano por un ciudadano militar (Mexico 15 September 1822). The signaturesof the Act of Independence on 28 September 1821 demonstrated the breadth of Iturbide's consensus: Iturbide, Perez, O'Donojui,Monteagudo, Azcairate,Guridi y Alcocer, J. M. Fagoaga, Espinosa de los Monteros, Anastasio Bustamante, Juan BautistaLobo, Marquesde San Juan de Rayas,Juan BautistaRaz y Guzman (one of the 'Guadalupes') and others. Tena Ramfrez, ibid., p. I23. For the corporative project of 8 November 1821, see Robertson,ibid., p. 138, and Ocampo, ibid., pp. 209-o0. Anna, Royal Government,passim, stressesthis peninsular loss of legitimacy in New Spain.
82 BrianR. Hamnett episcopate, the prelates of religious orders, cathedral canons, parish priests and members of religious orders. The Church remained the most numerous profession; more than i,ooo parish priests practised in New Spain. By comparison, the secular bureaucracycontinued to be numerically inferior to the ecclesiastical, and in less intimate contact with the mass of the mestizo and Indian population. At the summit of this bureaucracystood the viceroy and the magistrates of the Audiencia, the latter a corps of professional, university-trained lawyers and civil servants - togados. By and large, they were not a hereditarycaste, despite family traditions of service, and the status of nobility was not acquired upon entering such a position. The Mexican colonial bureaucracy formed a corps rather than a caste, but, even so, its individual members frequently divided among themselves over important issues in the continuous struggle for the supremacy of personalities and policies. Although the civil service, in theory, expressed the authority and executed the power inherent in absolute monarchy, and, by attempting to do so, sought to restrain the principal constituted bodies of the realm, its membership, nevertheless, behaved as if the secular bureaucracyitself formed an estate or order. Alongside this corps, a series of juridically recognized corporationsrepresented the interests of the mercantile, mining and pastoral elites: the Consulados of Mexico, Veracruz and Guadalajara,the Cuerpo de Mineria and the Mesta. On the level of personal contacts through business arrangements and inter-marriage creole and peninsular continued to intermingle at these points. While the Crown governed through the mediation of the Church and bureaucracy, both the viceregal and metropolitan governments relied heavily upon the consulados for credit, which the mercantile community was both ready and willing to facilitate as a result of large-scale commercial activities and its role as aviador in the mining industry. At Independence both the secular column and the mercantile elite of peninsular origin fell away.47 The Crown had customarily governed through the two sectors of the civil service, lay and clerical, the members of which it appointed and examined at the termination of office. It did not govern through the mediation of the
47
See also Ricardo Konetzke, 'La Condicion legal de los criollos y las causas de la
independencia',
'Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy',Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 5 (June, I960), pp. 47-65; Lyle N. McAlister, 'Social Structureand Social Change in New Spain', HAHR, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Aug., I963), pp. 349-70; D. A. Brading, 'Governmentand Elite in Late Colonial Mexico', HAHR,
Vol. 53, No. 3 (Aug., I973), pp. 389-414; Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Los Ministros de la Audiencia de Lima en el Reinado de los Borbones (1700-1821). Esquemade un estudio sobreun nticleo dirigente (Seville, 1974).
Estudios Americanos II (1950),
pp. 31-54;
John Leddy Phelan,
83
local territorial nobility or land-owning class. Although this group was certainly able to apply pressure upon the organs of administration, in order to satisfy its own interests, generally to the detriment of the labouring population, the owners of haciendas did not form an integral part of the governing elite of colonial Mexico. By and large, the closed and unreformed municipal councils, characterized by hereditary and purchased offices, were able to represent the interests of this and other local pressure groups. Decisive action by the Crown during the sixteenth century had prevented the formation of the political institutions of the European Standestaat. For that reason no Cortes of the three estates or orders of the realm had ever met in Mexico City. The absence of such a body seriously vitiated the feasibility of the constitutional forms advocated by Mexican conservatives, whose corporativism led them to propose the restorationof a mythical traditional constitution laid waste by the ravages of 'Ministerial Despotism'. In New Spain there had been no juridically recognized estates or orders as such, despite the fact that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, fortified with the fuero eclesidstico, its privilege or private law, and the creole landed class, possessing in many instances after 1768 the fuero militar, behaved as if they constituted the First and Second Estates.48 New Spain was not a feudal society in I8Io. The Crown had long ago prevented the encomienda from evolving into a hereditary agency for the exercise of jurisdictional rights by landowners (senores) over tenants (vassals). The American viceroyalty lived not in a medieval, feudal world, but in the post-feudal system of the ancien regime, in which commercial capitalism, primary exporting and a royal civil service sharply modified the landed nobility's predominance. In this system the principles of absolutism, then, intermingled with and diminished the attitudes and instincts of corporatism. Nevertheless, the policy objectives of Bourbon ministers frequently encountered the obstacle of Mexican social realities. The many diverse corporations and fueros, the psychology of esprit de corps and regional diversity in an age of transportationdifficulties ensured that, in reality, New Spain assumed the aspect of a sociedad estamental, by attitude and behaviour, if not by right. Furthermore, it is certainly plausible to argue that one essential component of this corporate society was formed by the structure of Indian government,
the reputblicas de indios, with their governors and alcaldes and common
lands. This structure represented perhaps the most traditional level of all in Mexican society, and, indeed, it was recognized as such by the anti-corporative
48
Ricardo Konetzke, 'La Formaci6n de la nobleza en Indias', Estudios Americanos, III (I95I), pp. 33-58; ibid., 'Estado y Sociedad en las Indias,' ibid., pp. 33-58; Lyle N. McAlister,The 'Fuero Militar' in New Spain I764-1800 (Florida, I957).
84 BrianR. Hamnett Liberal reformers of the i85os and i86os. Indian caciques, governors and alcaldes composed an elite of their own within the mass of the population. The determination to retain existing privileges and to recover as much of the elusive past as lay to their capacity may well have conditioned the coolness of Indian communities towards the revolution of I8I0 as well as the antiLiberal stance of later decades.49 Much of our attention has been directed so far to the older components of the Royalist coalition. Although the creole landed class was in no sense a new factor, the possession of the fuero militar by many of its members, who had become officers in the colonial militia or the regular army, certainly amounted to a new departure in Mexican political history. The fuero and officer rank, and with them the command of men, gave the old landed class a renewed importance and potential power at the time of division among the peninsulares. Almost to a man the Mexican officer corps remained in the viceregal camp until the Plan of Iguala presented them with the possibility of conserving their privileges in the new sovereign state. After 1830 this group provided many of the governing personalities of the Mexican Republic. Political ideology and regional distinction of interest rather than different social status or lack of landed estate separated this officer corps from the creole legal and literary elite. This latter group had never formed part of the colonial governing body. Instead, its members, waited in the wings for the decomposition of the magisterial bureaucracyof the audiencias and the regional structure of the Intendancies. These men provided the leadership of the Liberal movements after the I8 Ios. The debt to the Cadiz Constitution remained profound. The Cortes, which had contained both traditionalists and Liberals, Americans and Europeans, strove to plot a new course for the monarchy that would steer the way out of absolutism in favour of some form of representativegovernment. The new Mexican sovereign state inherited this endeavour. Indeed, the effort to prevent the recrudescenceof absolutism bestowed upon Mexico the problem of the weak executive and strong legislature, the diminished central government and the powerful federated state system, which seriously vitiated the applicability of the federal Constitutions of 1824 and I857. To that extent, Liberal constitutionalism reacted against the inheritance of absolutism. On the other hand Mexican Liberalism continued and extended
49
Hamill, ibid., pp. I76-7. Fran9ois Chevalier, 'Conservateurs et Liberaux au Mexique', Asociacion Mexicana de Historiadores. Instituto Frances de America Latina (Mexico, 1965), pp. I-27. CharlesA. Hale, MexicanLiberalismin the Age of and Peasantin Colonial Oaxaca(Stanford,1972).
Mora, 1821-1853 (Yale, I968), pp. 221-34, 243-8. William B. Taylor, Landlord
Mexico'sRoyalistCoalition:the Response to Revolution 85 many of the policy objectives of Enlightened Absolutism: administrative and fiscal rationalization, the supremacy of the civil power, the restriction of the power of the Church. Nevertheless, a decade of revolutionary civil war, the devastation of units of production and the destruction of government creditabilitycreated the adverse conditions as a result of which latent regionalism broke into blatant centrifugalism. Already Royalist commanders had created virtual satrapies for their personal power. The basic problem, especially in view of the disintegration of the Mexican Empire in 1823 and the proclamation of Estados Libres, concerned the efforts of the central government to reimpose its authority over recalcitrant regions, which, for their part, through the doctrine and institutions of federalism, strove to assert their will upon the resented and once overmighty capital city and centre core region. Parallel to this field of tension lay another. The Constitutions of 1812, 1814 and I824 grafted representativeinstitutions upon the reality of a resisting and uncomprehending sociedad estamental. According to Mora, the destructive feature of the latter consisted in the espiritu de cuerpo exhibited by its component elements, in contrast to the desired espiritu nacional. Mora, a proponent of the moderate Liberal strain, regarded the latter as a prerequisite for national unity and the emergence of a mature national consciousness.50 Upon such issues as these Iturbide's consensus of 1821 broke into fragments. By the end of the i82os a new pattern of elite rivalry had emerged. Three subdivisions existed. In the first place, the privileged classes, beneficiaries of the existing social and economic order, stood at the apex: the upper clergy, possessed of the fuero eclesia'stico,senior army officers, with enjoyment of the fuero militar, the old nobility, terratenientes and large scale merchants. This group provided the membership of the masonic order of the escoceses. In rivalry to them stood the second group, formed largely by the professional classes: lawyers, doctors, clergy and military of middle rank, small property-owners and lesser merchants. They provided the membership of the masonic rite of the yorkinos and the leadership of Mexican Liberalism. The largest component of the elite, however, consisted of its lowest group, which, in its struggles for position, opened out from the creole caste towards the mestizo mass. These were the 'outs' of politics, who desired social and economic transformation, in order to improve their status: frustrated politicians, lower officers, soldiers, tradesmen, shopkeepers. In short they were the yorkino radicals, supporters of Vicente Guerrero in the presidential election campaign of 1828. Though the rivalry of the first
5o Jos6 Maria Luis Mora, ObrasSueltas (Mexico, i963), pp. 53-7, 622-9.
Zavala, ibid.,
pp. 669-98.
86 BrianR. Hamnett two groups remained sharp, the example of the realignment of forces in 18 o in opposition to the revolution from below continued to be a customary practice in Mexican politics after Independence. In I828-9 and I833-4 elements of these two groups realigned as imparciales and hombres de bien to frustrate the objectives of the third group, the partido popular.51
51
Michael P. Costeloe, La Primera RepUblicafederal de MIexico,1824-1835

1975), PP. 438-9.
(Mexico,

Mexico's Royalist Coalition Fragmented Against Revolution

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Mexico's Royalist Coalition: The Response to Revolution 1808-1821 Author(s): Brian R.

J. Lat. Amer. Stud.

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution I808-I82I

T23 $02.00 .? T980 Cambridge University Press

the Royal Governmentin Mexico City(Nebraska,1978), pp. 35-63.

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

HAHR Vol. 30, No. 4 (Nov., I950),

pp. 453-79; Torre Villar, ibid., pp.

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Francisco de Paula Arrangoiz y Berzabal, Mejico desde

hasta I867, 4 vols

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

RamosArizpe's pressuresecuredO'Donoju'sappointment. Zavala,ibid., p 89; Robertson,ibid., p. 65.

Mexico's Royalist Coalitioni:the Response to Revolution

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Estudios Americanos II (1950),

John Leddy Phelan,

Mexico's Royalist Coalition: the Response to Revolution

Michael P. Costeloe, La Primera RepUblicafederal de MIexico,1824-1835

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