Читать книгу The History of Texas - Robert A. Calvert - Страница 55

The execution of Miguel Hidalgo in 1811 by royalist forces did not end New Spain’s rebellion against the mother country. Another priest, José María Morelos, assumed command and committed the movement to a repudiation of the Spanish past. In Spain, meantime, the liberal Cortes (parliament) that had fought off Napoleon turned its attention to reform. Heeding the ideals of the Enlightenment, Spaniards penned the Constitution of 1812; the document forced King Ferdinand to acknowledge the will of the Cortes and provided the means by which people could gain better representation at all levels of government. An absolutist, Ferdinand suspended the constitution upon returning from exile in 1814, and Morelos’s capture and execution in 1815 spawned a royalist resurgence. Guerrilla bands carrying the Hidalgo/Morelos banner went underground for the next five years. Then, surprisingly, in 1820, liberalism returned to Spain when a military revolt coerced the king into reinstating the Constitution of 1812.

Alarmed, conservatives in New Spain–who had envisioned a nation retaining the basic foundations of the colonial era, but with themselves presiding over the society–considered independence preferable to living under a liberal rule that might well encourage the lower classes to challenge the social order. Agustín de Iturbide surfaced as the leader of this conservative faction, but he successfully recruited among the liberal resistance fighters who shared with him and the other conservatives the belief that liberation would be for the common good. In 1821, New Spain’s viceroy, realizing that the power of this expedient conservative/liberal coalition prevented the further subordination of the colony, recognized Mexico’s independence.

Finally free from the yoke of the Old World, Mexico confronted the task of forming its own kind of government. Liberals wished to mold a republic based on the liberal precepts of the Enlightenment and the Constitution of 1812. The conservatives, however, disliked the egalitarian ideas that Enlightenment thinking put into the minds of the lower classes. In a conservative countermove, Iturbide, who had been responsible for uniting all classes and political elements in Mexico behind the rallying cry of independence, centralized rule by establishing himself as emperor of Mexico. No sooner had he taken the throne, however, than he was denounced in the Plan de Casa Mata (issued in February of 1823), a liberal edict issued by a young military commander named Antonio López de Santa Anna. After successfully removing Iturbide from power in March 1823, the liberal supporters of the Plan de Casa Mata sought to solidify their victory by establishing a federalist republic.

Besides ideological differences over class distinctions, several other issues plagued the newly independent Mexico. These included economic chaos, the desire of military and Church officials to preserve their traditional standing alongside government, and the political inexperience of the nation’s new leaders.

Equally pressing was the need to defend the Far North from the United States and the Comanche nation. Texas, especially, had been the scene of an increased amount of activity by American adventurers since the close of the eighteenth century. In 1801, Spanish soldiers caught the mysterious Philip Nolan, an American who claimed to be looking for mustangs for subsequent sale in Louisiana. Nolan had no official permission to be in the area (present‐day Hill County, historians believe), and the Spanish soldiers, suspecting Nolan of conspiring to acquire Texas and perhaps other parts of the Crown’s northern empire, killed him. In 1806, the Spaniards repelled two US encroachments into East Texas. One was a scientific expedition dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson to clarify the boundaries of the Louisiana Territory acquired by the United States in 1803; royal troops turned back the small party at Spanish Bluff in today’s Bowie County. The second was an intrusion made by General James Wilkinson over the same disputed eastern boundary of Texas. Wilkinson and a Spanish commander avoided a major dispute when they mutually agreed to recognize a neutral ground between the Arroyo Hondo (a branch of the Red River close to where the presidio of Los Adaes once stood) and the Sabine River.

Then, in 1819, the Spaniards faced an attempt by Dr. James Long and a force of fellow filibusters to wrest Texas from Mexico. This endeavor apparently had the backing of a group of Natchez entrepreneurs who were upset over the passage of the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819. Under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, many Americans believed the United States had bought lands that extended west from Louisiana into Texas. But the Transcontinental Treaty established the Sabine River as the dividing line between the United States and Spanish Texas. The agreement led many land‐hungry southerners to make the argument that the United States had “surrendered” Texas in order to acquire Florida from Spain. Taking it upon themselves to “reclaim” Texas from Spain, Long’s small army of filibusters penetrated into eastern Texas. The invasion was quelled in October 1821 when Spanish troops apprehended Long and took him to a prison in Mexico City. The whole Long incident created enormous distrust of Americans by Spanish (and later Mexican) officials.