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1	Introduction to Historical Essay on the Mexican Revolutions from 1808 to 1830 *

In undertaking the publication of Ensayo histórico de la últimas revoluciones de México, I intend to elucidate the character, customs, and different situation of the people involved rather than to create weary narratives in which, as Mr. Sismondi says so well, one encounters only a repetition of the same acts of cruelty, evil deeds, and baseness that fatigue the spirit, cause boredom in the reader, and, in a certain way, degrade the man who spends a large amount of time going over the horrors and havoc of parties and factions. “The history of peoples,” says this same writer, “commences only with the beginning of life, with the spirit that animates nations.” As the time prior to the events of 1808 is a period of silence, sleepiness, and monotony, with the exception of some glimmers that appear from time to time breathing liberty, the interesting history of Mexico truly commences only in that memorable year. But it is more advisable that readers, in order to begin reading this Ensayo histórico with understanding, be instructed about the customs of the inhabitants and of their condition before the referenced epoch.

The discovery of the Americas that Christopher Columbus made at the end of the fifteenth century and the conquest of those regions carried out a short time later are among those events that, to a large degree, have contributed to changing the political course of societies. My goal is not to speak of the influence these events have exercised on Europe, but rather of the course that political matters in the ancient empire of the Aztecs have taken, not in the time immediately subsequent to the conquest, regarding which various Spanish and foreign scholars have already written. In their writings, one can encounter repeated facts that will confirm those that form the picture I am going to present to my readers and which, perhaps, will shed more light on important political

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questions which will doubtless recur successively in the course of the coming times. Is it not true that the heterogeneity of the elements that have made up European societies in different epochs has entered into the calculations and measures of their legislators and leaders in organizing their progress? The history of the middle age, of this period of grand vices and heroic virtues, of ignorance, energy, and universal upheaval, teaching statesmen what the basic parts that make up the nations they governed have been, showed them at the same time the different sources that are the basis of the rights or the aspirations of each class, of each hierarchy, of each family. In Spanish America, where there were no other foreign invaders, nor that tumultuous invasion of semisavage nations, we must assume that the conquistador laid down the law without conditions, and peaceably used the right of force with no restrictions except those to which he would subject himself.

The historians of the conquest of Mexico have given to their accounts an air of exaggeration that has been the origin of many ridiculous fables and amusing romances. The most judicious writers have not been able to protect themselves from giving credit to some entirely false and even absurd facts, which has led them into errors of great consequence. We can affirm that no history has been more adorned with illusions, hyper-bole, romantic stories, and episodes than that of those far-off lands, the distance and isolation in which the policy of the Spanish government maintained them causing almost the same results as those the heroic times produced. Cortés himself, in his letters to Carlos V, paints pictures so flattering, so poetic and extraordinary of what he had seen and conquered with his fearless companions, that it was difficult not to believe oneself transported to a new world, to a land similar to and even superior to the imaginary Atlantis, or to those lands of gold, incense, and aromas of which Eastern writers speak. Magnificent palaces covered with gold and silver; kings and emperors richer than the most powerful potentates of Europe; temples comparable to those of ancient Greece; rivers that carried grains of the most precious metals and emeralds and diamonds instead of stones; extraordinary birds, monstrous quadrupeds; men of different physiognomy due to their features, color, lack of beard, and bristly hair; climates in which one breathes a fiery atmosphere or in which a perpetual spring represents the closest image of paradise. A religion made up of the most ridiculous and horrible ceremonies; a worship whose dogmas are a monstrous mix of everything that had been regarded

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as the most bizarre. All of this, partly true, waxing in the pens of writers, came to produce indelible impressions in Europe. But, how differently were these same things seen in those lands!

The Spanish conquest in America reduced the Indians to such a state of slavery that each white man considered himself to have the right to be served by the indigenous, without the indigenous having either courage to object or even the capacity to assert any right. Those who escaped the effects of the first slaughters were distributed among the conquistadors. In the beginning, there were only masters and servants. The authorities did not govern by laws, of which there were none, but rather in the name of the king. Later they were given those ordinances that they called the Laws of the Indies, which had as their goal moderating the tyranny of the descendants of the conquistadors and of the chieftains who left Spain to govern those lands. But inasmuch as the only ones who had those laws or royal decrees were those who were to execute them, in reality there did not exist anything but the will of the captains general, viceroys, or governors. Distributions of territories were in part converted into encomiendas, which had as its final result the payment of an annual tribute to the holders of the encomiendas, who were like the borough mongers in England. Later the kings reduced these privileged ones to receiving from the royal treasury the amount equal to the annual yield of the tributes they collected from the Indians who were their share in the original distributions, eliminating, in this way, much ill treatment produced by the method of collecting it, an abuse that later was adopted by the subdelegates and chief magistrates charged with collecting levies from the Indians, who were obligated to deliver them in kind, that is to say, in ordinary fabrics of cotton that their women wore or in other similar manufactured goods.

The Indians had their special laws, their judges, their attorneys and defense counsels that the government named for them because, legally, they were considered minors. The state of brutishness in which it kept them made them, in effect, unfit to demand any kind of rights or to enter into important contracts, which assumed the need for some complex ideas. Those who have tried to defend the policy of the Spanish government with respect to its colonies have cited the existence of this Code of the Indies that seems to have been formed as a bastion of protection on behalf of the Indians. But those who examine the questions

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from a philosophical point of view have considered this institute only as a system of slavery established on seemingly indestructible bases, and from whose effects those governments will continue to suffer for some centuries. In effect, those laws are nothing but a prescribed method of domination over the Indians. They take for granted, in the monarchs that issued them, rights over the goods and lives of the conquered ones, and consequently any act that was not absolutely an oppression was deemed in them a favor, a benefit from the legislator. There were laws that determined the weight with which they could be burdened, the distances they could go, what they had to be paid, etc. etc. So as to maintain this systematic order of oppression, it was necessary that the oppressed were never able to enter, so to speak, into the rational world, into the moral sphere in which other men live. In the majority of the provinces, they did not know, nor do they yet know, any language but their own, which is generally different from the others. The language (without excepting Mexican, which some novelists have pompously praised) is impoverished and lacks words to express abstract ideas. The speeches historians or poets imagine to have come from the mouths of the Jicotencales, Magiscatzines, and Colocolos are no more genuine than those that Homer, Virgil, and Livy attribute to the Agamemnons, Turnuses, or Scaevolas. Those Indian chiefs were as, or perhaps more barbarous than these Greek and Roman heroes, and their language could not lend itself to the beautiful oratories that a long sequence of centuries of civilization and regular governments assume.

It is certain that Spanish America before the conquest was more populated than today and that the Indians under their national governments began to develop some ideas. They had confused notions regarding the immortality of the soul, they had made a small number of observations, although highly imperfect, regarding the course of the stars, they were not completely lacking in the art of working metal. But such knowledge remained in its cradle, and now it is known how many centuries are necessary for peoples to attain the level of perfection that would allow them to deserve the title of civilized. The conquest destroyed entirely this movement that began to give flight to the spirit of invention among those indigenous peoples. A new worship as well as an unknown government substituted the bloody superstitions of Huitzilipoxtli and the patriarchal regimes of the Guatimocines and Moctezumas. The images of the saints and gods of the Roman Catholics were put in places that

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had previously been occupied by the horrible idols of the Aztecs; and the defenders of the conquistadors will not be able to deny, even if it is painful to admit it, that the Indians also had their martyrs, sacrificed because of the religious zeal of the Roman priests, because of the tenacious adherence of many of them to their ancient worship. But eventually force and terror triumphed over fanaticism for a religion that had against it the horrific dogma of demanding human victims. On the other hand, the Indians encountered much more perfect images than their monstrous idols, and the change was not very difficult, moving to our saints the ceremonies and tributes that they made to their gods. The assistance of miracles came about, and a multitude of celestial apparitions came in support of the new worship, because of which the astonished Indians could not but believe that their gods, along with their monarchs and rulers, had been defeated in a just war.

Missionaries dedicated themselves and, with the aid of troops, made wondrous conversions. The religious constructed their convents in high places like forts and gave those buildings all the solidity necessary to resist in case of attack. Very rare are the temples and houses of the clergymen that do not suggest the reasons that led the founders to make them works of fortification. They were together in them during the night, and by day they occupied themselves with gathering the Indians into settlements. It is clear that their sermons and preachings were not at first able to have any effect, because as they did not have the gift of languages, it was not easy to make their listeners understand dogmas, mysteries, and doctrines that assume many preliminary lessons. Catechisms and small books of rules were created in the languages of the land, not so the Indians could read them, because they didn’t know how, but rather to repeat them in the pulpits and to make the people memorize them. There is not a single version of the sacred books in any language of the land; there is not a basic book that contains the fundamentals of the faith. But how could these works exist for the Indians, when their conquerors themselves could not read them? What I want to show by this is that the religion was not taught to those men, nor did they become convinced of its divine origin through proofs or reasoning; the entire foundation of their faith was the word of their missionaries, and the reasons for their belief, the bayonets of their conquerors. The Inquisition could not understand the motives of the Indians. Such was the Indians’ state of degradation and so strong the idea that was held regarding their incapacity,

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that never could they be persuaded that an Indian was able to be the creator of some heresy, or even be the stubborn sectarian of any doctrine whatsoever. This exception came to be a protection, as a concession in favor of the Indians, owing to the judgment that had been formed of their stupidity.

Besides the tribute that the Indians paid to the royal treasury, or to their encomenderos, other ecclesiastical contributions with the name of obvenciones were created. They were exempted from the tithe and the parochial fees because their exploiters had carefully calculated that a man who possesses nothing, nor has more needs than the basics, could pay little of the tithe. The calculation was very correct, because in effect the Indians did not have territorial properties, or any kind of industry, generally speaking. They lived and live in huts covered with thatch or palm fronds, whose size is generally from fifteen to sixteen feet in length, by ten or twelve in width, oval in form. There, of course, are gathered the children, the domestic animals, and an altar on which are the saints or household gods. In the middle is a fire that serves to heat the water in which corn is cooked, their sole food, with few exceptions. There are not five among a hundred who have two garments, which are limited to one long shirt of ordinary cloth and some sandals; their women or daughters, dressed with equal simplicity or poverty, do not know that inclination so natural to their sex of looking good in front of others. In the same proportion referred to previously, there are not property owners, and they are content with gathering thirty-five or forty fanegas of maize per year, on which they live satisfactorily. When, because of some labor or day work, they have earned a small amount of money, they go to make some feast to the saint to whom they are devoted, and they expend their small personal money on fireworks, masses, feasts, and intoxicating drinks. The rest of the year they spend in idleness, sleeping many hours of the day in the warm lands, or in games of their liking in the delightful climates of the cordilleras. Two in a hundred learned to read; but today their situation has been greatly improved in this regard. In several provinces, the clergymen had such power and exercised such authority over the Indians that they ordered them whipped publicly when they did not pay the obvenciones on time or committed some act of disobedience. I have frequently seen many married Indians and their wives whipped at the doors of the temples for having missed mass on some Sunday or feast day, and this scandalous act was customarily authorized in my province!

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Those who were whipped were obligated afterward to kiss the hand of the person who whipped them.

In speaking of the ecclesiastical influence in the land and of the moral situation of this privileged class, it is impossible not to collide with interests sustained by superstition and created by despotism. The principle of national sovereignty, recognized subsequently in those lands, might have uprooted prejudices destructive of liberty and made presumptions to blind obedience disappear if the declarations of abstract doctrines alone, even the most solemn, were sufficient. The force of habits created for three centuries will still remain an obstacle, so that at mid-century, enlightenment and philosophy have to triumph over this colossus after a terrible and hard battle. In those lands, the persons of the bishops were, without hyperbole, as reverenced as the person of the great Lama among the Tatars. When he went out into the street, the Indians knelt down and bowed their heads to receive his blessing. The friars in the towns and small villages distant from the capitals were the teachers of doctrine and the masters of common lands, in the large cities, directors of the conscience of landowners and women. The convents of the Dominicans and the Carmelites possessed and possess riches of great importance in rural and urban real estate. The convents of the religious in Mexico, especially the Conception, the Incarnation, and Saint Theresa, possess in property at least three quarters of the individual buildings of the capital, and the same happens proportionally in the other provinces. So one can be assured without exaggeration that the wealth that the clergymen and religious of both sexes possess amounts to the annual proceeds of three million in income. Put this revenue in the weight of the balance with respect to their influence, and one is able to calculate approximately what it will be among a poor population where properties are very badly distributed.

Now I enter into another delicate subject that can be considered one of the elements of discord in those countries and that will offer great obstacles to their legislators, depending on the degree to which they abandon infantile and frivolous questions and concern themselves more deeply with the true interests of their patria. I speak of the distribution of lands that the Spaniards made and the way those lands are divided today.

The Spanish government had to make concessions of lands to those persons who had contributed most to the conquest of that rich and beautiful

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territory. Naturally, the conquerors selected the best situated and most fertile plots of land in the order in which each one was believed to have the right or did have the right to receive this kind of compensation. The rich and considerable possessions of the Counts del Valle, de Santiago, San Miguel de Aguayo, the Marshall de Castilla, the Duke of Monteleone, and others occupy an immense and arable territory. The other rural farms that surround the towns and cities, which belong to the convents and pious establishments, have their source in royal concessions, others in testamentary bequests, gifts inter vivos, and some few come from contracts of purchase and sale. The third class of large landowners is that of families descended from rich Spaniards who bought, in distant times, lands from the government or from Indians when they had an extremely low price, and they were successively augmented until they formed haciendas that today are worth from a half-million pesos to two million, like those of the Reglas, Vivancos, Vicarios, Marquess del Jaral, Fagoagas, Alcaraces, and others. The fourth class is that of small landowners, who have rural farms whose value is not more than between six and fifteen thousand pesos, acquired by purchase or inheritance or other similar title. Here is how the greater part of the lands of the Mexican Republic were distributed, especially those that surround cities or great population centers. All these possessions are in the hands of Spaniards or their descendants and are cultivated by Indians who serve as day workers. Of the seven million inhabitants that will now occupy that immense territory, at least four are Indians or people of color, among whom nine-tenths are reduced to the state I have discussed before. Consequently, there does not exist in that land that gradation of fortunes that constitutes a common scale of comforts in social life, principle and foundation of the existence of civilized nations. It is an image of feudal Europe without the spirit of independence and the energetic force of those times.

During the three hundred years of colonial government, these classes, reduced to subsisting on their daily labor, had no notions whatsoever of a better condition of life, or at least did not even suspect they could be called to enter into the pleasures of any other kind of existence than the sad and mean one in which they remained. Their desires, on the other hand, were proportionate to their ideas, and these, as has been said, occupied a sphere so small that one could say with accuracy that they knew only the physical side of life. Those activities that put them

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in contact with white people, such as attendance at church and few, very rare, gatherings for some public act, were purely mechanical, and it was a phenomenon to hear a reasoned statement from the mouths of those degraded beings. Many travelers have said that the indigenous peoples of America are reserved and silent, mistaking what is only the effect of their ignorance for contemplation or not caring to speak. But if by some unknown caprice of nature a genius stood out, a notable character, at the moment he spoke to his companions with the language of desperation and, exhorting them to throw off their enslavement, he was sacrificed by the oppressors. Tupac-Amaro in Peru and Quisteil in Yucatán can be cited, among others.

“The equality or inequality among the different orders of citizens in a new and semisavage nation,” says a famous writer, “depends essentially on the distribution of territorial property; because a nation that is not civilized does not have commerce, or accumulated capital, or manufacturing and arts; it cannot then possess other riches than those the earth produces. The earth is the only one that feeds men in a land without commerce and without accumulated riches, and men consistently obey the one who can, at his will, give them or take from them the means of living and enjoying. A nation,” continues the same author,

sometimes without revolution and without conquest, acquires an imperfect degree of civilization, where lands are cultivated but commerce and the arts have not yet made any progress at all: then it is probable that the lands belonging to this nation were, at its beginning, divided among the citizens in more or less equal portions, or at least that none of them obtained from their compatriots permission to appropriate an amount of land extremely disproportionate to the abilities of the family to cultivate it. The haciendas can be more or less large, but never were they like provinces, and the inequality that existed in this case among individuals would not be such that it might place some necessarily in dependence on others. Citizens, unequal only in enjoyments, would not forget that they were equal by origin, and all were free. Such is the history of ancient Greece and ancient Italy, and here is where that idea originates that, from the most distant times, free governments are seen only in these regions. In our times, the distribution of fortunes in the colonies of North America retain some analogy with the early establishment of agricultural

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nations. The colonists give, it is true, a greater expanse to their haciendas than we give in Europe, but they are always proportional to the capacities of their families. Consequently, there exists among them a kind of territorial balance, as Harrington called it in his work, Oceana, a balance that contributes to the preservation of liberty in the United States of the North. For the rest, even without this balance, it might be able to have established that liberty; because the Americans have accumulated capital, have vast commerce and arts, the poor and the rich alike finding in their country abundant means to subsist with independence.

These doctrines, whose accuracy one cannot dispute, lend substance to very profound reflections, given the data I have noted in an orderly manner regarding the state of territorial riches in the Mexican Republic. What role will more than three million individuals, summoned suddenly to enjoy the broadest rights of citizenship from the state of the most ignominious enslavement, with no real property, no knowledge of any craft or office, neither commerce nor any industry, come to play in this society in which, appearing suddenly, they can be considered the progeny of Deucalion and Pirra? How are we to judge them, so detached from the desire to improve their fate that, having in their hands the ability to exercise their political rights in the assemblies and elective magistracies, they do not take advantage of their position? More to the point: What should the conquered families do, over whom ill treatment of all kinds has been exercised for three centuries, to become incorporated by the constitutions of the country into the great national family? How have the inexpert directors of those societies been able to forget or close their eyes to what has happened in all nations? Which have been the constant movements of the radicals in England, the liberals in continental Europe, and particularly in France, that laid the foundation for their revolution of ’89 over the distribution of feudal properties? Is it perchance believed that the flight taken recently by the project of the bill of reform in England is in order to have a few more deputies or electors?

Every government has its principle of existence for which, once unsettled or distorted, another, analogous to the changes that have occurred in the country, must be substituted. The colonial system established by the Spanish government was founded: (1) On the terror produced by immediate punishment of the smallest actions that might lead to disobedience;

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that is to say, on the blindest passive obedience, without permitting the examination of what has been ordered nor by whom. (2) On the ignorance in which one must keep those inhabitants who could not learn more than what the government wanted, and only to the degree agreeable to it. (3) On religious education and, most of all, on the most despicable superstition. (4) On a Jewish isolation from all foreigners. (5) On monopoly in commerce, of territorial properties and of positions. (6) On a number of troops ready to carry out in a moment the orders of the mandarins, and who were more like gendarmes of the police than soldiers of the army, to defend the country.

After the Mexicans had secured their independence, the terror inspired by the Spanish authorities, maintained by custom passed down from fathers to sons, disappeared, and the broadest declarations of liberty and equality have been substituted. Ignorance, without having been able to disappear, has given place to a political charlatanism that takes possession of public dealings and leads the state to chaos and confusion. Popular superstition not ceasing, a large number of books have been introduced that corrupt the mores without enlightening the understanding. There is now no monopoly of commerce, positions, or territorial properties, and this item requires a long explanation.

Commerce has been opened to all foreigners, and speculators have taken out great profits, as was to be expected. Articles of merchandise conveyed by second, third, and fourth hand, passing from northern Europe to merchants in Cádiz, and from them to Veracruz in Mexico, had necessarily to arrive much more expensive, especially with no competition among the markets. In this area the fate of the country has improved a great deal, and many fewer destitute people are seen than in other times. But very few are the foreigners who, after having made great earnings, remain in the country and join with Mexican families. It appears that they see themselves in the country as in tents, ready to break camp as soon as they have concluded their business. On this point, one can expect much improvement with time. As for the monopoly of positions, it exists only among the factions that fight among themselves to attain them, but all are Mexicans. The territorial properties are among the great objects that will occupy the attention of those governments. On this, I have already said how it is enough to make known the difficult position of the directors of those towns, and I have not intended to make a treatise on insurrections. I reserve giving greater consideration

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to these ideas in my memoirs that should be published within a short time, and that I have at hand.

One of the greatest woes that will afflict those peoples for some time is that of the permanent troops, both for the useless expense they cause and because they work as organized masses under the direction of ambitious leaders, so the civil governments cannot offer resistance to them and are consequently their instruments or their victims. Ten or twelve colonels of regimental bodies and four or five generals, forming a united system, oppress the country, and, without altering the republican forms, everything proceeds under their inspirations. Foreign businessmen, who can have no other interests than their profits, which depend on the state of tranquility or slavery, favor this system to the extent they can unite with Spaniards who desire the same, and it is very common to see many liberals from Europe in Mexico enrolled in the ranks of the oppressors. This explains the mystery of why some newspapers, even those of the party of liberty in Europe, make apologies for the military governments of America. Receiving communication and news from overseas agents, and those agents always speaking in the sense of their profits and interests, it is clear that the military party must be considered most useful to their speculation.

But one must not lose sight of the principles I have set forth on the well-known facts to which I have also referred. The greatest and most dangerous errors of those who direct public affairs is not to think about the generations that will be following, nor about their advances and aspirations, and in no place is this error susceptible of easier realization than in the new states of America. From the year 1808 until 1830, that is to say, in the space of a generation, such is the change of ideas, opinions, factions and interests that has occurred, that it is enough to turn a respected and recognized form of government upside down and have seven million inhabitants pass from despotism and arbitrariness to the most liberal theories. Only the customs and habits are transmitted in all movements; actions and continuous examples have not been able to change, because how can abstract doctrines make the course of life suddenly change? Consequently we have in contradiction to the theoretical systems of established governments those powerful agents of human life, and the founders of republican forms will not be able to deny that they have only dressed, with the clothing of declarations of rights and principles, the old man, the same body or confluence of prejudices, the

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mass organized and shaped by previous institutions. What have they done to substitute usages and customs analogous to the new order of things?

There is, then, a continual clash among the doctrines that are professed, the institutions adopted, the principles established; and among the abuses sanctified, the customs that dominate, semifeudal rights that are respected; among the national sovereignty, equality of political rights, freedom of the press, popular government, and intervention of the armed force, laws of privilege, religious intolerance, and landowners of immense territories. Might the conserving principles of any social order whatsoever at least be made harmonious? If a federal system, which is what seems to me most suitable to those countries, is adopted by conviction, by rationality, by a judgment formed after profound reflection, not for that reason should the system of the neighbors of the North be copied exactly, nor, much less, literal articles from the Spanish Constitution. The height of absurdity and the absence of all good sense is the sanction of laws of privilege and privileges in a popular government. Let there be established an ecclesiastical, military, and civil aristocracy if one wants or believes it useful to the good of the country; let the republics of Genoa or Venice be imitated if it is possible; then might there be laws of privilege and privileged classes; might there be laws for each hierarchy or for each corporation or each person if it is judged suitable. But a constitution formed on the foundations of the broadest liberty, on the model of that of the North Americans, conserving a state religion without tolerance for another; privileged troops and military leaders in civil commands; convents of religious of both sexes instituted in conformity with the canons of the Roman Church; three million citizens with no property at all nor no known means of subsistence; half a million with political rights to vote in elections without knowing how to read or write; military tribunals judging certain privileged cases; finally, all the incentives of an unlimited liberty and the absence of all social guarantees, cannot fail to produce a perpetual war among such heterogeneous factions and such opposing interests. Make disappear that confluence of anomalies that mutually contradict each other. I will conclude this discourse presenting to the readers the state of income, expenses, and resources of New Spain, omitting minute details that form the object of my work.