Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
In July 1822, the general instigated a sergeants' revolt, and a march on the palace by the Mexico City mob, a coup out of the gaudiest days of the Roman Empire. "Army and people" thus proclaimed Iturbide Emperor of Mexico. On August 1, Augustine I abolished the Mexican legislature and replaced it with a handpicked
junta
, or council, of forty-five. Here legitimacy, which had at least held the Mexican elite together, was lost, and it remained lost for another century.
Stephen Austin lived in the capital during these months, learning the Spanish language as rapidly as he could, listening and learning about Mexican politics. He became aware that he was now moving in a different world from the American frontier—a glittering capital of now rapidly shifting loyalties and balances, where intrigue was the normal way of doing business, where appearances were everything and plain talk was dangerous and rarely done. Austin learned to speak facile Spanish with all the proper phrases of gentility, and "to beat about the bush," as he called it, with the best of them. Austin had that rare ability, which most capable leaders have, of being both clear-sighted and without illusions, while at the same time entirely sincere. He had determined on and adopted loyalty to his new country, Mexico, but without blinding himself to realities of its governments. These two qualities allowed him to perform a minor miracle: he talked with every man of the Imperial
junta
, including the Emperor, and was able to get his empresario commission confirmed.
But with his decree in hand, Austin dared not leave the capital. Iturbide's power was growing less every day. Several generals came out in opposition to him, were imprisoned, but escaped. The Republican opposition finally staged its own coup. Iturbide fell and was exiled, and Mexico was now proclaimed a republic. All imperial decrees were voided, and now Austin had to do his work all over again. Again he performed a miracle and persuaded the new Congress to confirm his privileges, even before a new colonization law was prepared. In all, Austin was forced to stay in Mexico for a full year, and during this period, 1822–23, his colony on the Brazos almost failed.
The Mexican Republic resembled that of the United States only slightly, although the Constitution of 1824 created a federal system of sovereign States. Mexico had no tradition of strong, local governments; the Spanish tradition was strongly centralist in both theory and practice, and the Hispanic love of regulating equaled or surpassed the Anglo-Saxon tendency to legislate. The Republic of 1824 was the result of a temporary liberal ascendancy in Mexico, and a liberal experiment with new theories imported from the north. Mexico now entered, as did many of the Hispanic successor states, a long period of tension between Federalists and Centralists, who preferred to establish an all-powerful Presidency and Congress to regulate, in minutest detail, the entire domain.
Although republican ideas enjoyed a great vogue, Mexico faced two enormous problems with republican governments even its own intellectuals did not understand. In Mexico there was no citizenry in the North American or European sense. There were only subjects of different degrees. And there was no tradition, such as had originated in the British world, that governmental powers originated in and with the people. There were no "people" in the fashion of the United States or France. In 1820, 18 percent of the Mexican population were pure European, or nearly so; 22 percent were mixed, or
mestizo
; 60 percent, the great mass, were Indian. This was almost the exact opposite of the racial composition of the United States in 1820, where 82 percent were white, and 18 percent Negro. The Mexican whites tended to think of themselves as Spanish, with nostalgia for the past. The Indian masses were illiterate and possessed no national sense. The idea of a Mexican nation was centered in the
mestizo
group; even here it took a century more to jell.
Mexican society went from Viceregency to Republic almost unchanged. The Church was preserved. The
hacendado
class retained its lands, with peonage intact. Racial discrimination was abolished by law, but it could not be abolished in fact. The one great and dangerous vacuum created was the empty space left by the abolition of the Crown—and again, this vacuum was not to be successfully filled for a hundred years, until the Mexican Presidency finally acquired legitimacy.
In a republic without citizens, although there were thousands of men with genuine republican feelings, it was inevitable that the age of
caudillaje
began. The
caudillo
, or military dictator, was perhaps a necessary phase, since there was no possible way to hold such a society together except by some use of force. In a state divided severely by class, with tension between Church and State, and with an illiterate majority living in intense poverty, only a balance of forces could preserve the whole. The caudillo was a military adventurer, who gained control of the army, the largest disciplined body within the state, and balanced off the rest through a combination of cajolery and fear. The caudillo or man on horseback was frequently vicious and intolerable; but without him, there usually developed an anarchy that was worse. The caudillo was inevitably a Centralist, backed by army, Church, and landed elite. The republican or Federalist leadership came both from the elite and mixed class, but it could rarely establish more than an ephemeral regime out of its middle-class and Indian support.
The
hacendados
ruled the masses on the local level, but they had been denied a political role by the Spanish. They did not adopt one now. So long as its privileges were guaranteed, this potentially powerful group remained inert. Politics became more and more the preserve of the more vigorous, and discontented,
mestizos
of the educated professional classes. Professionals, such as lawyers or doctors, in Mexico represented a middle, not an upper, class. Faced with a landed elite, this class was often revolutionary. Political struggle tended to become a power struggle between opposing cliques or factions, without real social meaning, however, since the
hacendados
were too powerful to be disturbed, and the Indians, except for local disturbances, too inert.
Every military ruler or
caudillo
tried to preserve republican appearances while exercising an actual despotism. He was aided not by consensus, because a true consensus in this kind of setting was impossible, but by the tensions between landowners and Indians,
mestizo
professionals and the Church, army and Republican politicos. He employed bribery, and also a vitally useful strain of force. The result was an almost continual civil strife, damped only when an unusually powerful
caudillo
seized control, until the pot boiled over again. The so-called revolutions, which occurred with monotonous frequency, and which shed some blood, were more or less palace revolutions. The men in power changed, but institutions were in no way altered or damaged.
This long period of virtual anarchy that began in Mexico in 1821 had fatal effects on the Mexican empire north of the Rio Grande, and, more than any other single cause, cost the Mexican nation its possessions from California to Texas. The Mexican problems with government, above all, convinced North Americans that the Mexicans were an inferior race. It was impossible for Anglo-Americans to respect people who could not rule themselves—and again and again, in crucial years, Mexicans had no real sense of national destiny, or could not unite.
When Stephen F. Austin went back to Texas from Mexico in 1823, the last thing in his mind was the thought of potential conflict between his adopted country and the United States. The 1819 treaty, by which the United States renounced Texas, seemed to end the possibility for all time. Austin saw correctly that only North Americans could tame Texas, but he did not foresee that there would be terrible strains trying to accomplish this within the framework of the Mexican Republic. Nor did he see that factions in both the United States and Mexico would make the task difficult. Austin was a clever politician, but he had very little ethnic animosity or ideology, and he did not sufficiently perceive the phobias of others.
Two great underlying problems made relations between the Republic of Mexico and the United States prickly and difficult. The first was that a large body of Americans, primarily in the Southwest, were expansionist; they wanted Texas and all the land to the Pacific Ocean for the United States. The second trouble was that almost all educated Mexicans hated, distrusted, or feared the rapidly burgeoning power of their northern neighbor. Americans were proud of the explosive growth of their country, and extolled their national vigor. They failed to see the other side of the coin—the effect that American expansion was having on the Mexican mind. All educated and upper-class Mexicans were aware that between 1800 and 1820 the Anglo-Saxon United States more than doubled its land area by the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory and Florida.
These territories were purchased, but there had always been a strong threat of violence underlying the peaceful negotiations for acquisition. The United States government had made it crystal-clear that it would never permit the Spanish authorities in Louisiana, sovereign or not, to close the mouth of the Mississippi. General Andrew Jackson willfully ignored the Spanish border of Florida while pursuing marauding Indians. The entire expansion of the United States in its early years came at the expense of the Spanish-speaking world. Few Americans thought about it in this way, but all Mexicans did. They knew that all these changes came about only because of basic Spanish weakness.
Thus the Anglo-American settlement of Texas, in itself a great drama, was played out upon a larger canvas, which was the struggle between the English-speaking Americans and the Spanish successor state of Mexico for domination of the North American continent.
In such circumstances, the historic tides of Mexico's Hispanic centralism and
Henry Clay's obsession to acquire Texas made Stephen Austin's apparently logical dream of an English-speaking, autonomous, federal state within a Mexican confederacy impossible.
The United States Presidential election of 1824, indirectly, had enormous effects on American-Mexican relations. In this year, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay drew 121 electoral votes between them, against Andrew Jackson's plurality of 99. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives; deals were made. Adams emerged President, while Clay became Secretary of State.
The Massachusetts patrician, Adams, had no real taste for western expansion. But he did want to improve his popularity beyond the Appalachians, and he was willing to appease the western states by attempting to purchase Texas. The slavery question had not yet become an overriding moral issue. Adams was to become perhaps the most fanatical foe of Texas annexation, but during his Presidency he pursued that course, with lip service, if not with enthusiasm. The Missouri Compromise did allow the acquisition of Texas as slave territory, and Adams authorized Clay to work for revision of the 1819 Spanish-American treaty, which Mexico inherited. To move the western boundary of the United States south of the Brazos River, Adams was prepared to offer $1,000,000 and a commercial treaty.
This offer was not made immediately. In 1825, the American Minister to Mexico wrote Clay that American interests would best be served by delay. His letter stated that "most of the good land between the Sabine and the Colorado" was filling up with grantees or squatters from the United States, "a population the Mexicans would find difficult to govern."
When the province became thoroughly American and unruly, the Minister believed the Mexican government would be glad to cede it to the United States.
To say that neither Americans nor Mexicans really understood the psychology of the other would be an understatement. The leadership of each nation operated on a different plane of thought. Americans always made two basic assumptions: that the American nation was more vigorous and certainly superior to the Mexican; and that the western lands in question were useless to Mexico, which had been unable to settle them. Americans expected Mexicans to accept both assumptions reasonably. But in reverse, the American assumption of superiority lacerated the immense Latin pride of the Mexicans, and the fact that their empire north of the Rio Grande was vulnerable suffused Mexicans with such fear and suspicion that it became almost a phobia among the upper classes. No matter what the United States proposed, it was assumed to be part of a
Yanqui
plot.
The open suggestion that Mexico "alienate" a portion of its "sacred soil" by selling it to the United States frightened and infuriated so many Mexicans that the few pragmatic souls willing to be rid of Texas could not operate. In a very real sense, Austin was already "alienating" Texas, and many Mexican officials knew this. But this was being done in a covert—or "still"—way, without popular feelings of territoriality or pride becoming involved. Austin's great advantage was that he intuitively understood the labyrinths of Mexican politics and the Byzantine Mexican mind. Never once did Austin broach his request for a colonization grant in public. He met quietly with powerful officers, talked things out politely with
junta
members. Afterward, decrees were issued. The great mass of Mexicans never were aware of what took place. No demagogue or ambitious opposition politician was able to use Austin as a target for popular emotion.
Compared to Austin, Joel R. Poinsett, the first American Minister to independent Mexico, was a bungling meddler. Poinsett should have been knowledgeable. He had lived in Mexico, served in other Latin countries, spoke Spanish, and knew the Spanish social niceties. But Poinsett was apparently utterly impervious to understanding the Mexican national psychology. He persisted in trying to do business like an American. He was contemptuous of "acting in Rome like the Romans."