Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
In 1810, a
mestizo
priest, Hidalgo, raised the
grito
or shout of revolt against the government in Dolores. This was much more a social insurrection than either a republican movement or a national rebellion against Spain. With a horde of Indians and
mestizos
of the lower castes, some of whom were soldiers, Hidalgo seized the city of Guanajuato, looted it, and set up a provisional government. Soon afterward, he captured Guadalajara, and the provinces of Nuevo Santander and Coahuila—on the Texas border—went over to him. The civil insurrection was now a full-scale revolution.
But this revolt divided, rather than unified, the population of Mexico. The traditional arbiters of the Spanish state, the
latifundistas
or landowners, the army, and the Church, and most of the professional and merchant middle class stood with the Crown. Significantly, the revolutionaries came predominantly from the lowest classes, and most of their leadership came from the lower orders of the Catholic clergy. This was a people's revolt against intolerable conditions, not a declaration of independence on the North American order. The threat of social revolution threw most propertied and educated Mexicans on the Spanish side; this alliance doomed Hidalgo and his horde. The revolution failed to take the capital, and one by one its leaders were captured and shot by the superior Spanish soldiery.
The Spanish people of Texas at the outset declared loyalty to the King. But then, volatile, the Bexarites revolted, seized General Simón Herrera and Governor Manuel María de Salcedo—then reinstated them. The entire social order of New Spain, with the power of the Crown gone, resembled nothing so much as a headless chicken, floundering about.
The execution of Hidalgo, Matamoros, and other leaders did not stamp out the revolution. A smoldering guerrilla warfare continued. One of the leaders of this was Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, a wealthy citizen of Revilla in Nuevo Santander, just south of the Rio Bravo. Gutiérrez was a man of profound republican feeling, and he fled to the United States to whip up sentiment for the revolutionaries. He spent time in Philadelphia and New Orleans, unsuccessfully, and then set up a sort of headquarters in exile at Natchitoches on the Texas-Louisiana border. Here he carried on a correspondence with the Texas republicans and suddenly interested Augustus Magee. Magee and Gutiérrez planned to invade Texas, with Gutiérrez in command for obvious political reasons, but with Colonel Magee and his Army of the North doing the dirty work. Gutiérrez began to flood Texas with pamphlets and broadsides; Magee went to New Orleans to recruit men.
Magee soon raised a remarkable army of drifters, borderers, idealists, and men of good family. He enlisted a large number of the men he had driven out of the old Neutral Ground, and even some Indians. But this was not a desperado army in the main; almost all Americans passionately believed that Texas rightfully belonged to the United States, like Louisiana, and they were opposed to the ruthless oppressions of the King of Spain. Most of Magee's recruits were adventurers, but, as they thought, in a good cause. To those who needed further motivation, Magee offered forty dollars per month, and a league of Texas soil.
This conglomerate republican army of Americans, Louisiana French, Mexican rebels, and Indians went across the river to Nacogdoches in August 1812. The Spanish soldiery fled. The population, the descendants of Gil Ybarbo's people, met the liberators with a procession. With Nacogdoches secured, the army moved on, about eight hundred strong, with Gutiérrez in nominal command, but with Magee in actual control. Almost all Magee's officers—Kemper, Lockett, Perry, Ross, and Gaines—were American.
The invaders marched south, toward La Bahía. Here Governor Salcedo stationed about 1,500 troops and planned to hold Magee and Gutiérrez north of the Guadalupe. Magee, however, skillfully flanked and bypassed the waiting Spanish army, struck La Bahía by surprise, and captured the presidio with its stores and cannon. Inside, Magee also found the Spanish army's commissary and military chest. Magee was paying his motley forces in good silver when Salcedo and the enraged Spanish raced back to besiege him.
The filibusters, secure behind the walls of La Bahia, with food and artillery, laughed at Salcedo's demands for surrender. A four months' siege ensued. During this time, in February 1813, Magee died. There are several versions (as with almost every event in Texas history for the next generation) how this happened, because the veterans of these gaudy times widely embellished or told different tales. It is possible he committed suicide, but the most accepted version is that Magee died of disease. Samuel Kemper, his second in command, assumed the rank of colonel and took command of the so-called American Volunteers.
Salcedo, desperate, now ordered an attack on La Bahía. Kemper repulsed this with heavy casualties to the Spanish, and, in March 1813, Salcedo retreated northwest toward San Antonio. The news of this victory spread across Louisiana and jumped the Mississippi. Americans in the Southwest spoke glowingly of the glorious deeds of the American Volunteers fighting for Texas liberty. Dozens of young men, among them the son of General Wilkinson, rode south to participate in these great events. It was firmly held that Kemper's Volunteers were fighting not only for freedom, but to destroy the outmoded claims of a polite, but quite inferior, race.
Reinforced, Kemper followed Salcedo to San Antonio. In another sharp battle, the garrison at the Alamo was driven back. Salcedo asked for terms, and Kemper gave them: if the Spanish surrendered, all the soldiers would be merely disbanded, and the Royalist officers released on their own parole. The Royalists surrendered approximately 1,200 men. The Republican Army of the North, or
Ejército del Norte
, marched into Béxar, "took possession of all treasures, rewarded all soldiers, and released all prisoners found in San Antonio."
This was enormous success. All Royalist forces in Texas were now destroyed, and the Mexican population was coming over to the Republican revolution. The American Volunteers, on April 6, 1813, issued a "Declaration of Independence of the State of Texas"—a document that drew its inspiration almost entirely from the American Declaration of Independence, and which incorporated the liberties Anglo-Americans now took to be self-evident. Kemper and Major Lockett, his principal officer, kept their troops in good control and discussed the imminent possibility of Texas joining the United States.
Now, however, there was trouble. With the destruction of the military danger, Bernardo Gutiérrez and his group of political leaders demanded full control. They informed Kemper the American Volunteers were on Mexican soil, and the Mexicans proceeded to draw up a Texas constitution that Kemper and his officers considered a vicious burlesque of republican liberalism. It followed the ancient Spanish pattern of government slavishly—quite logically, since Gutiérrez knew nothing else—but substituted a governor and a ruling
junta
for the King, with dictatorial powers. The
junta
was not elective, nor was it to be responsible to any people. Loyal revolutionaries filled all the posts.
The Anglo-Americans were particularly stunned with a clause in this constitution:
the State of Texas forms a part of the Mexican Republic, to which it remains inviolably joined
. Since Gutiérrez de Lara and all his principal associates were citizens of Mexico, not Texas, this was inevitable, but it showed that communication, somewhere, had broken down.
Then, the terrible pattern of social revolution that had begun in Mexico, with atrocity and retaliation, could not be damped in Texas. One of Gutiérrez's officers, Capitán Delgado, begged his chief for revenge against Governor Salcedo, who had ordered Delgado's father executed some time before. Whatever his personal feelings, Gutiérrez entered into a plot with Delgado. He told the American Volunteers that the captured Governor and his Spanish officers should be sent to New Orleans to be paroled. Kemper acquiesced.
The Governor and his officers who refused to join the revolution were dispatched toward the coast, guarded by a file of Mexican soldiers under Delgado. A few miles outside of Béxar, he stopped the march, told Salcedo to "expect death," and had all the prisoners bound hand and foot. Then, with great cruelty, Delgado cut their throats.
This murder was quickly discovered. In the uproar, Gutiérrez was deprived of his command. Kemper and Lockett were enraged because their word of honor had been violated, and the high-minded Americans among the Volunteers were sickened. They regarded the attachment of Texas to the United States an act of duty, if not piety, but the callous murder of Royalists was too much. Kemper, Lockett, and most of the idealistic adventurers deserted the revolution and returned to the United States. General Simón Herrera and twelve other Spanish officers who had joined the revolt went with them. These facts, and some of the events that followed, are still controversial among Texas historians.
A man named Henry Perry assumed Magee's old command, and a Spaniard, José Álvarez de Toledo, took Gutiérrez's place. Most of the Americans who remained seem to have been common cutthroats, and while Toledo was an idealist, he had some of this breed among the Spanish.
The Americans were now reduced to freebooters, and the leadership of Toledo created problems among the Mexicans. Don José was a Republican, banished from New Spain, but he was also born in the Indies to an aristocratic family of the pure Spanish race. He was a
gachupín
, and the ordinary Texas Mexican citizenry hated
gachupines
, whatever their liberal political views. Although the Army of the North had now swelled to 3,000, there was dissension in the ranks. However, Perry was able to defeat the Spanish General Elizondo at Alazán Creek, near Béxar, in June 1813.
The defeat of Elizondo resulted in the march northward of General Joaquín de Arredondo, who was both an experienced and a clever commander. Arredondo gathered up the remnants of Elizondo's force, and made a camp some six miles south of the Medina River, in the oak forests about fifteen miles from Béxar.
There was a great deal of argument in the revolutionary camp. Toledo insisted on taking full command. Perry's Americans refused to obey his orders in battle; they also demanded a fight. Toledo wanted to hold the north bank of the Medina and make the Royalists come to him, but the Volunteers pushed him into crossing the river and falling on Arredondo's lines. On August 18, 1813, the Army of the North crossed the Medina and tried to take Arredondo in the flank.
What was repeated was a version of Senlac Hill, in reverse. When the revolutionary vanguard charged, whooping and yelling, the Spanish general, on prearranged orders, had several companies fall back, apparently in disorder. The American Volunteers broke into a run, and immediately ran into a trap. Arredondo's forces opened into an enormous V, with the Americans in the middle, enfiladed from each side.
Toledo gave an order to retreat. The Mexicans and most of the Indians in the force obeyed. The other wing, all American, of his army, emotionally stood its ground. Someone shouted: "Goddamit, we
never
retreat!" There was a great roar of approval, and in this way the fate of 850 American Volunteers was sealed.
At that, the frontier rifles among the Americans almost counterbalanced Arredondo's cunning and the regulars' discipline. The Volunteers inflicted heavy losses on Arredondo's 2,000 men, until disorder and a lack of ammunition broke their ranks. Slaughter followed. Only ninety-three Americans of the entire Volunteer force survived; these escaped into the woods and straggled back across the Medina. Colonel Perry was one who got away.
Toledo, who was badly wounded in the battle, eventually made his way to Louisiana. Finally, he took an oath of allegiance to the Spanish King, and was made Ambassador to the Court of Naples. Ever afterward, he retained, as he said, an awe of American irregulars. If he'd had 2,000 at the Medina, he claimed, he would have conquered all Mexico.
Now, atrocity bred atrocity. Knowing the fate of the Spanish Royalists the Army of the North had captured, Arredondo ordered no prisoners be taken. The broken elements of the Republicans were hunted through the woods. About eighty men surrendered at a place called Spanish Bluff. These men were marched, hands bound, in groups of ten to a cypress tree lying across a huge mass grave. Among those shot here was the bloodthirsty
Capitán
Delgado.
The battle at the Medina effectively destroyed the Republican cause in Texas. Arredondo and Elizondo, veterans of the social wars in Mexico, followed up the victory with the determination to stamp out rebellion forever. The Royalist soldiery swept the whole province, executing any citizen who was suspect.
In San Antonio de Béxar, the rebel capital, Arredondo arrested three hundred townsmen who had supported the revolution. They were crowded into a single adobe building overnight in August, and eighteen died of suffocation. The next morning most of the survivors were shot without trial. About five hundred of the wives, daughters, and other female relatives of these traitors were rounded up and put to work for the Royalist army, making thousands of
tortillas
, or Mexican corn cakes, daily for the soldiers. General Elizondo pursued refugees from Béxar as far as the Trinity River, and returned with a large number of women and children captives on foot. The property of suspected Republicans was confiscated. Afterward, Nacogdoches suffered a similar fate. Some hundreds of Texas residents fled across the Sabine to the United States. Although Arredondo had pledged to kill every Anglo-Saxon found on Spanish soil, a few Americans flushed out later were merely deported. No similar mercy was shown native rebels.