After a slight skirmish, in which eight men were killed and six wounded, General Bravo and his party were made prisoners; and thus perished forever the party of the Escocés. This victory was so complete as to prove a real disaster to the Yorkinos. The want of outside pressure led to internal dissensions; so that when two of its own members, Guerrero and Pedraza, became rival candidates for the presidency, the election was determined by a resort to arms, which brought about the terrible insurrection of the Acordada.
CHAPTER VI.
Mexico becomes an Empire.—Santa Anna deposes the Emperor.—He proclaims a Republic.—He pronounces against the Election of Pedraza, the second President.—His situation in the Convent at Oajaca.—He captures the Spanish Armada.—And is made General of Division.
We left Santa Anna at Vera Cruz, having just completed the first of those politico-military insurrections which fill up the history of his times. He had added the city of Vera Cruz to the national cause, by a timely insurrection. Iturbide had rewarded him for this important service by bestowing upon him the ribbon of the order of Guadalupe, making him second in command at Vera Cruz. The chief command of the department was bestowed upon an old insurrectionary leader, who was known by the assumed name of Guadalupe Victoria. He was a good-natured, honest, inefficient old man, whose great merit consisted in having lived for two years in a dense forest, far beyond the habitations of men. While thus hiding himself from a host of pursuers, he acquired that habit, supposed to be peculiar to wild beasts, of passing several days without food, and then eating inordinate quantities—a habit which he found impossible to change in after-life, when he had become President of Mexico. The story of this man's sojourn among wild beasts had been told all over Mexico, and had given him a great popularity, which he brought to the support of the national cause.
In 1822 the Mexican nation was still in its swaddling clothes. Its birth had hardly cost a pang; but its infancy, its childhood, and its youth, were to be attended with a series of convulsions, the fruits of the vicious seeds sown in the conception of the new State. By the pronunciamiento of a part of a regiment of the King's Creole troops the connection between Spain and Mexico was severed forever, and the colonel of these troops became the Emperor of Mexico. In this revolution the nation acquiesced, and thus discovered to the soldiery their unlimited power when their arms are turned against their own government. From that time onward Mexico, like every other country where the Spanish language is spoken, became the victim of her own soldiery. This liberation of Mexico was by no means the result of the outburst of national patriotism, but the consequence of the utter incapacity of Spain longer to hold the reins of her colonial governments. She indeed sent out a new vice-king to Mexico after the breaking out of the insurrection; but the best that he could do was to sanction what had been done by a treaty at Cordova, in which it was stipulated that Iturbide and the new viceroy, O'Donoghue, should be associated with others in a regency, until Spain should send out one of the Spanish Bourbon princes to occupy the imperial throne of Mexico.
The Spanish parliament refused to sanction the treaty of Cordova; O'Donoghue died, and Iturbide was left in possession of executive power, without a defined office, while an insane opposition sprung up against him in the new Congress which he had called together. This unlooked-for opposition soon convinced him that the tearing away of a nation from its traditional ideas was like the letting out of waters, and that he must either ride upon the wave or be overborne by the tempest. A resolution of Congress, to take from him the command of the army, brought matters to a crisis. Accordingly, on the night of the 18th of March, 1821, he caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor by his partisans; and the next day this new revolutionary act was confirmed by Congress, under the intimidation of military force, and the nation again acquiesced.
ITURBIDE DEPOSED.
The revolution had caused a stagnation in all the departments of commerce and of revenue. Iturbide had inaugurated his insurrection by seizing, at Iguala, a million of dollars belonging to the Manilla Company, on its way to Acapulco. He made another like seizure at Perote; but these high-handed measures, while they proved but a drop in the bucket toward sustaining his government, increased his embarrassments, by destroying all confidence; so that his new authority had stamped upon it the unmistakable marks of dissolution. He was an emperor without traditional associations; he had an empire without a revenue; a large standing army without pay. The fickle multitude, who supposed that independence was to prove an antidote for every evil, began to murmur; while a host of demagogues, who envied the good fortune of Iturbide, were all beginning to clamor for a republic. The blow, however, came from an unexpected quarter. Santa Anna had quarreled with a superior officer, General Echevarri, and Iturbide had recalled him from his command. But Santa Anna thought it most advisable to disobey the Emperor; and in the Plaza of Vera Cruz, surrounded by the garrison, he proclaimed a republic, on the 2d of December, 1822. He joined in his insurrection the name and the influence of Victoria, yet both were insufficient to save him from a complete route at the hands of Echevarri. At the critical moment in the affairs of Santa Anna, the Grand Lodge of the Ecoscés decreed the overthrow of Iturbide, and sent orders to General Echevarri, who was a member of the order, to unite his forces to those of Santa Anna in overturning the empire. This was a bitter pill for that general to swallow, but he swallowed it; and the two leaders together swallowed the empire.
Iturbide, being unable to stem the torrent of insurrection, had abdicated; a Republic had been established upon the ruins of the empire, and Victoria, the "wild man of the woods," was elected first President. He served out his time; but the last year of his government was disturbed by the terrible insurrection of the Acordada, which had arisen out of the election of Pedraza as his successor. Santa Anna was, at the time of this election, at Jalapa, discharging the duties of Vice-Governor of Vera Cruz, when the people of the town surrounded his house and called upon him to pronounce against the election. Thus becoming implicated, he was forced to make a new insurrection. This third pronunciamiento of Santa Anna, was on the 5th of September, 1828.