On the night of January 3d, 1832, the garrison of Vera Cruz pronounced against the usurping government of Bustamente, which was then suffering dreadfully from the want of funds. A delegation was sent the same night to Santa Anna, who had been in retirement at his estate of Manga de Clavo since the murder of his friend, President Guerrero. This fourth insurrection was prosecuted with varying success for several months, but was finally terminated by the capitulation of Bustamente at Puebla, and the recalling of Pedraza from banishment in the United States, to serve out the few months that remained of his term of office as President.
In 1832 Santa Anna was elected successor to Pedraza as President of the Federal Republic of Mexico. Texas had now of right the option of returning into the family of Mexican States, or of maintaining her separate existence; but she was under no obligation to return, for, the confederacy having been once broken up, it was optional with the only member that had not submitted to the usurper to re-enter this unreliable family, or to continue outside. This election was not long open; for, by the pronunciamiento of Toluca (1835), the Federal Constitution was again abolished, and Santa Anna became dictator in fact, if not in name. The clergy were at the bottom of this last revolution, and they demanded, as the price of their support, the extirpation of heresy from the territory of the Republic. This meant the indiscriminate slaughter of all Texans. Santa Anna, who, in all his previous wars, had never shown a disposition to be cruel to the vanquished, was so dazzled with the prospects before him as to be willing to make the slaughter of the Alamo and of Fannin's division an offering to a priesthood who were plotting for the restoration of the Inquisition. The battle of San Jacinto was, in its consequences, more disastrous to the designs of the ecclesiastical party than even to Santa Anna himself.
MEXICAN VIEW OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS.
Let me stop in my narrative of events to translate a Mexican's eloquent denunciation of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is from the pen of General Tornel, a most uncompromising enemy of that race and of its religion. Thus he opens his account of the Texan difficulty:
"In order to understand what we to-day (1852) are, and what we to-day value, it is indispensable to discover, and to perpetuate the history of one of the greatest scandals of the age—all of its antecedents, all of its consequences, all that can aid in coming to knowledge of this greatest act of injustice of which the Mexican nation has been the victim.
"Those who cross the sea change their skies, but not their nature. The Anglo-Saxons abandoned their country from physical and moral necessities, and on account of their political and religious quarrels. Transporting themselves to the virgin forests of America, they brought with them the characteristics of Northmen; they were distinguished for sobriety, laboriousness, and industry; for ardor in their enterprises; for constancy, and for that spirit of adventure which subjugates all by the right of conquest. They leveled all obstacles by the vigor of their arm and the sweat of their brow, and from their successes has arisen the hope of acquiring every thing by the inspiration of their talents and the force of their genius.
"The English, of whom John Cabot was a compatriot, came by the northern route [to America], and discovered an immense country, whose rivers are the grandest, whose forests appear to be antediluvian, whose lakes would be called seas in Europe; with harbors on an extensive coast which rival the greatest in the world. It has a soil suited to every purpose of agriculture. In short, it has facilities for all enterprises, and for raising the material of a productive commerce sufficient to establish advantageous relations with the Old World, and for creating an independent society; for supplying its necessities; for making its condition enviable; for rivaling the power, the influence, and the destinies of its parent country.
"The country which they discovered they found scarcely inhabited, although here and there wandered some tribes without social organization, without government, without the power of concentration, even to the extent which numbers give to savages. They [the colonists] early learned that they could establish their dominion without resistance, and that they could extend it as far as they could open the country with the ax of the active colonist, who considered himself the heir of undiscovered wealth, which would result from an inevitable destiny. The colonies which were established along the coast, and those which were formed in the interior, increased, as increases the gentle rill in its onward course by uniting with other rills and with rivers, until, becoming one vast torrent, it precipitates itself into the ocean. The colonies of Tyre, of Carthage, or Rome were never comparable with the Anglo-American colonies, who appropriated to themselves, in less than a century, regions more extended than the half of Europe.
"The observer of the providential destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race in America notices that the emancipation of the thirteen American colonies, which constituted so many states and an independent nation, instead of being the result of the alleged political grievances, was rather the impulsive force of expansion, which encountered insuperable obstacles while the states were colonies subordinate to a European nation. They were retarded in their advances by relations and compromises with other nations. The Anglo-Saxon, when translated to the wilds of America, needed only a stopping-place in order to found a peculiar and exclusive polity, which should enable him to march ever onward in his aggressions and usurping institutions.
"The United States of America lost no time in making themselves powerful; a nation rich in its industry, enviable in its commerce, respectable in its social organization, which are so favorable to the advancement of the condition of man. When the government had regulated, with great prudence and wisdom, the interior system of the states, it placed itself upon the watch for the compromised circumstances of embarrassed European states that possessed colonies on the American continent. Some of these colonies were contiguous to the limits which the United States had acquired definitely by the treaty of peace of 1783. In order to augment, at the expense of her neighbors, her possessions, already immense, and not yet well populated, she set about acquiring territory by astuteness, by cunning, by violence, and also by justifiable means, when such were available. Spain first, and Mexico afterward, have been her victims; and to-day these rich and powerful states display the spoils, for such they are in reality, which they have wrested from us. Such are the people that already rival those nations of Europe whose territories are the most extensive, and whose commerce is spread over all the seas."