Even before the Spanish could seize the military initiative, they acted to quell the rebellion. In October 1810, without waiting for permission from Spain, Viceroy Francisco Javier de Venegas, who had taken office only forty-eight hours before Hidalgo launched his rebellion, abolished tribute for Indians and those of mixed race. He ordered that the decree abolishing tribute be published in Nahuatl, as well as Spanish, so that the literate Indian elite could read it in their own language. Publishing the decree in Nahuatl to reach out to the indigenous community reversed a 1770 ban on the official use of Nahuatl and other Indian languages, implemented in the name of Bourbon efficiency.80
The Church also entered the fray. On September 24, 1810, Bishop-elect of Michoacan Abad y Queipo declared Hidalgo and three other rebel leaders excommunicated. The Church automatically excommunicated all who joined the rebellion after that date. Abad y Queipo justified the excommunications by declaring that the rebels were “violators of public order, seducers of the people, sacrilegious perjurers who merited the highest level of excommunication: Siquis Suadente Diabolo.” He also declared it sacrilege to use the Virgin of Guadalupe to promote insurrection.81
The church hierarchy consistently backed the royalist cause. The Archbishop of Mexico declared Hidalgo the “precursor of the Antichrist.” In 1816, when it became apparent that Spanish American rebellions would continue, Pope Pius VII issued the encyclical Etsi longissimo, which urged bishops and clergy in Spanish America to inform the faithful of the dreadful consequences of rebellion against legitimate authority.82
Hidalgo responded to Abad y Queipo’s charges, noting that had he not attempted
To liberate our country from the great evils which afflict it, and from even worse misfortunes which are about to befall it, I would never have been accused of heresy. . . The oppressors reacted by excommunicating us. However, they are well aware that the excommunications serve to frighten the unwary and terrorize the ignorant, and sow fear of excommunication, even though there is no reason to be afraid. . . Do they really feel that one cannot be a true Catholic if one is not subject to Spanish despotism?83
Initially, royalists controlled all the printing presses in the country. Royalists used them to print appeals to Catholicism, to urge support for the restored monarchy (after 1814), to call for harmony in a society produced by the intermarriage of Creoles and Spanish, and to emphasize the shared social and economic interests of the colonial elite. By modern standards, the propaganda lacked subtlety. The title page of an 1813 collection of Abad y Queipo’s works stated that the book had been published
To further the general welfare of New Spain and the happiness of its inhabitants, especially the Indians and castas, and to expose the atrocious calumnies that have been published by insurgent ringleaders, in order to make them odious to the public, and to refute, by this means, writings that have been published since the start of the insurrection. 84
When royalists addressed those of European descent, they claimed non-whites threatened to destroy society. In other cases, they made broad appeals to racial unity. In one appeal, Agustin Pomposo Fernandez, one of the most skillful of royalist pamphleteers, wrote:
All of us, Spaniards, Indians, castas, are a single nation, of a single religion, of a single society, of a single family governed by a single prince. We are now one with the Spaniards born in the Old World. . . . There is no position or honor, however elevated it may be, that cannot be achieved by a loyal Indian or even the son of an Indian man and a Spanish woman or the son of a Spaniard and an Indian woman.85
Pro-Spanish priests manned most of the pulpits and often formed the principal source of information for their parishioners. The Spanish exercised control of the presses, the paper supply, and the pulpits in the Valley of Mexico. This also limited support for Hidalgo, even after his victory at Monte de las Cruces.86
The royalists required people to obtain official permission to change residence. New dependants, servants, or guests could only be admitted to households after notifying officials and providing an explanation. Residents could not spend more than two days away from home without permission, and innkeepers had to compile lists of their guests. Government-issued (G. I.) passports attempted to limit movement to those authorized to travel. However, the number of merchants requiring passports overwhelmed local bureaucracies, and shipments of blank printed passports on their way to regional officials repeatedly fell into insurgent hands. Government officials further undermined the passport system by supplying rebels with passports due to their sympathizing with them or receiving bribes from them.87
After capturing a printing press in Guadalajara, the rebels launched their own propaganda effort. There they published six issues of the newspaper El Despertador Americano, which denounced Spaniards for controlling the colony’s wealth, occupying top Church and government positions, and marrying rich heiresses. Later, in other locations, the rebels published the Ilustrador Nacional, the Ilustrador Americano, the Semanario Patriotico, and the Correo Americano del Sur. None of these papers appeared after 1813. While they portrayed the insurgents in a favorable light, for logistical reasons, they never had the impact of royalist propaganda.88
Fray Servando Teresa de Mier undertook another propaganda effort single-handedly. He wrote a book, the History of the Revolution of New Spain, to justify rebellion against Spanish rule and refute Spanish critiques of the insurgency. Rather than portraying the Spanish presence in Mexico as three centuries of Christian enlightenment, he chronicled the destruction Spaniards had wrought and portrayed their rule as a dark age. By rejecting both Spanish political control and the Spanish monarch, he sought to break the mental bonds that still linked many Creoles to Spain. Teresa de Mier published his work in England since even before the outbreak of rebellion he had been exiled for publicly questioning whether the Virgin of Guadalupe had actually appeared.89
Given the prevailing illiteracy, information (true and false) propagated at markets, drinking establishments, and areas where women drew water and washed clothes. The difficulty either side
Figure 63
Leona Vicario
Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, the University of Texas at Austin had in communicating with the rural population was compounded by the inability of many indigenous people to speak Spanish.90
The Guadalupes, a secret society of rebel sympathizers in Mexico City, supported the insurgency. Its members acted as an informal political party during the 1813—1814 elections for the Spanish parliament (Cortes). They helped elect sympathetic Creoles, whom they felt could further the cause of Mexican independence while serving in the Cortes. They also helped obtain a press and materials for insurgent publishing operations, sheltered refugees, furnished recruits, provided information, and smuggled arms to insurgents. They infiltrated the viceregal palace and pilfered correspondence from the office of the viceroy’s secretary. The Guadalupes’ activities so peeved Viceroy Calleja that he referred to them as a “diabolic assembly.”91
The most famous member of the Guadalupes was Leona Vicario, a member of an elite Creole family who received a good education by the standards of the time. She began to aid the independence movement by using her Mexico City home as a meeting place for insurgent sympathizers. She later sent arms to rebels, used her family inheritance to finance the insurrection, and recruited and armed rebels. Late in 1813, authorities intercepted letters she had written the rebels, investigated her activity, and confined her under the authority of nuns at the Colegio de Belen.92
A group of rebels soon freed Vicario, enabling her to join the insurgents. After joining Morelos’s army, she administered its finances and supervised care of the ill and injured. She soon married another rebel, her uncle’s former law clerk, Andres Quintana Roo, and gave birth to their first child in a cave in Achipixtla. Royalist authorities responded by confiscating her goods and declaring her a traitor.93
World History
