The executions of Hidalgo and Allende shifted the focus of the insurgency to southern Mexico. There, Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, a priest from Caracuaro, a backwater, hot-country village in Michoacan, led the struggle. Morelos, the mixed-race son of a carpenter, came from more humble origins than the original leaders of the rebellion. He had worked for years as a mule driver before entering the priesthood at age thirty-two. This experience gave him an intimate knowledge of southern Mexican terrain.65
Morelos, a former student of Hidalgo’s, met with him as the rebel army marched east toward Toluca and then joined the insurgents. Hidalgo ordered him south, where he proved to be an astute guerrilla leader. The social programs he proposed went beyond Hidalgo’s. Morelos called for racial equality, declaring, “Slavery will be forbidden forever, as well as caste distinctions, leaving everyone equal, and the only thing that will distinguish one American from another is vice and virtue.” Morelos’s emancipation proclamation facilitated his recruiting the large Afro-Mexican population in his area of operations.66
Morelos absolved Creoles of paying debts to Spaniards, but left unaffected debts owed by Spaniards to Creoles. He said agriculture should be
Based on many cultivating small plots separately, with their own industry and labor, with no
One individual having large expanses of unused land and enslaving thousands to work that land
Which was cultivated.67
The rebellion reached its high point between 1812 and 1814, with insurgents operating over much of southern and western Mexico. During these years, rebels felt they could destroy the colonial government by conquering increasing amounts of territory and establishing civil administration in the areas they controlled.68
Both sides followed a scorched-earth policy that destroyed substantial wealth. The insurgents burned haciendas, looted towns, and drove off cattle in areas supporting the Crown. The royalists, in turn, burned villages and crops in areas supporting the insurgents. Alaman reported that every day in the early months of 1814 an average of twenty-five insurgents, or suspected insurgents, faced firing squads. Many Spanish officers excelled at counterinsurgency, since they had been guerrillas during the Spanish struggle against the French. Royalist officers recognized that effective counterinsurgency demanded mobility, speed, and flexibility. They combined the use of exemplary terror and “flying detachments,” which chased down and punished guerrilla bands and the civilian population that supported the insurgency. The royalist captain general of Nueva Galicia, Brigadier Jose de la Cruz, wrote in April 1811: “We must spread terror and death everywhere so that not a single perverted soul remains in the land. . . These bandits will learn what war to the death really means.” Despite the terror, the royalists found that the traditional social ties and habits of obedience, once broken, could not be reestablished.69
Morelos’s small army, which never exceeded 6,000 men, attacked swiftly and then vanished in classic guerrilla style. In coastal areas, Morelos’s ability to recruit blacks and mulattos who were already skilled with firearms contributed to his success. Morelos energetically suppressed any outbreak of looting or racial warfare. The insurgents had learned that they could not challenge disciplined royalist units in conventional battles, and so there were no battles such as occurred at Aculco.70
By the end of 1812, the insurgents controlled territory stretching north from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to Acapulco (under siege) and toward Veracruz, Puebla, and Mexico City. In November of that year, the rebels had taken Oaxaca. Morelos’s mountainous domain provided an ideal location for waging guerrilla war. It contained a large Indian and mixed-race population and few Creoles.71
During 1813, the rebels consolidated their gains. However, the following year, a royalist offensive penetrated deep into rebel territory and recaptured Oaxaca, Chilpancingo, and Acapulco. In addition, the rebels lost key leaders. Other rebel leaders began to act independently of Morelos.72
In an attempt to unite the scattered insurgent groups and to project a favorable image to Creoles outside rebel territory, insurgent leaders convened a Congress on September 14, 1813, at Chilpancingo, the capital of the modern state of Guerrero. At its inauguration, Morelos declared that indigenous leaders such as Montezuma, who had resisted Cortes, were national heroes. He linked Montezuma and the independence movement, referring to the latter as “the auspicious movement in which your illustrious children have gathered to revenge the outrages and abuses committed against you and free ourselves from the grasp of the tyranny. . ..” The unelected Congress never actually legislated. Given the military situation, elections could be held for only two of its members, while the rest were appointed to represent areas where the rebels could not hold elections.73
On November 6, 1813, the Congress issued a declaration of independence, definitively laying to rest the notion that the rebels were fighting for Fernando VII. In social matters, the Congress generally ratified the decrees Morelos had already issued concerning the abolition of class distinctions, slavery, and tribute.74
The Congress did write a constitution, which it promulgated on October 22, 1814, at Apatzingan, where it had been forced to move by royalist forces. The constitution declared all Mexicans to be legally equal and divided powers into executive, legislative, and judicial. The drafters’ fear of absolutism led them to grant the legislative branch the power to choose a three-man executive and appoint justices of the supreme court. The document resembled the Spanish constitution in that it declared the Catholic Church as the official and only religion of Mexico. Given that the rebellion was in decline by the time of its promulgation, the constitution never served as the law of the land.
Despite Morelos’s efforts to prop up a civilian administration, the Congress never managed to unite the scores of guerrilla bands and military satrapies resisting the colonial regime. Rather than enhancing the rebels’ stature, it weakened them by introducing politics, debate, and divisions within rebel ranks and by weakening Morelos’s position.75
During 1815, the rebel Congress spent much of its time fleeing from one small town to another to avoid royalist troops. In the fall of that year, Congress members decided to seek refuge among rebel forces in the Puebla—Veracruz area east of Mexico City, feeling that would facilitate the rebels’ communications with groups abroad. In November, royalists captured Morelos while he was fighting a rearguard action to protect the Congress during its move.76
The Inquisition tried Morelos on twenty-six charges, which included: 1) carrying out priestly functions after being excommunicated; 2) attacking the king and his ministers; 3) executing prisoners; 4) possibly being tainted with atheism for espousing principles of anti-Catholic authors and of the U. S. Constitution; 5) imitating Luther and other heretics in criticizing the Church; and 6) sending his thirteen-year-old son to the United States, where, it noted, there was religious toleration. The indictment declared that Morelos’s low birth (baja extraccion) aggravated the charges. The court convicted Morelos on all counts, defrocked him, and sentenced him to death.77
While Morelos showed tactical brilliance, he did commit one strategic mistake—the prolonged siege of Acapulco in the summer of 1813. Hit-and-run attacks on mule trains would have effectively interrupted shipping from that port. Instead, by tying up his men there for months until he finally took the city, he gave the royalists time to regroup in the north, receive reinforcements from Spain, and then turn south from a position of strength that he could never overcome.78
Morelos and Hidalgo failed to impose twentieth-century values on a colonial, politically underdeveloped, conservative society. As with Hidalgo, Morelos failed to attract substantial Creole support, even though he sought such support by preventing peasant land-takeovers, which would have alienated wealthy Creoles, and by promising to respect property and give Creoles high military and civil posts. Morelos’s elimination of racial categories and his proclaiming the right of Indians and peasants to land prevented Creoles from embracing his cause. Even though Morelos retained control of his army, Creoles did not trust it. A royalist soldier held prisoner by Morelos commented on the social background of his force: “None of them came from a decent family. . . there are Indians, Negroes, mulattos, and delinquents, fugitives from their homelands.” The issues Hidalgo and Morelos raised would not be seriously addressed until a century later in the Mexican Revolution.79
World History
