A Life Together: Lucas Alaman and Mexico, 1792-1853 9780300258745

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A Life Together

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A L i f e To g e t h e r

 Luc a s A l a m á n a nd Me x ico, 1792 –1853

Eric Van Young

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College. Copyright © 2021 by Eric Van Young. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941589 ISBN 978-0-300-23391-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper). 10

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For Maggie, Marin, Adrian, Arden, Sebastian, Dashiell, and August—always.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I | Youth 1. An Old and Distinguished Family 13 2. A Silver-Plated Youth (1792–1815) 30 3. Years of Pilgrimage, First Steps in Politics, and a Betrothal (1816–1823) 65 Part II | The Statesman Emerges 4. The Spanish Cortes and a Final Sojourn in Paris (1821–1822) 85 5. Brothers 123 Part III | Into the Maelstrom (1823–1825) 6. The Meanings of Anarchy 139 7. Domestic Tranquility 188 8. Diplomacy 215 9. The Poinsett Saga 232 Part IV | Making Money 10. Shafted: The United Mexican Mining Association (1824–1830) 255

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11. Managing the Feudal Remnant: Alamán and the Duque (1824–1853) 307 Part V | High Tide of Power, Fall, and Internal Exile (1830–1834) 12. An Ordered and Prosperous Republic 355 13. Texas 410 14. The Banco de Avío 442 15. The War of the South and the Death of Guerrero 465 16. The Reckoning 483 17. Weaving Disaster: Cocolapan (1836–1843) 521 Part VI | Alamán at Midlife, Brief Return to Power, Last Days (1835–1853) 18. Politics and Family 551 19. Texas, Santa Anna, and War 569 20. The Monarchist Plot and the US Invasion 592 21. City, Congress, Wealth, Health 611 22. Santa Anna Returns, Alamán Exits 632 Part VII | Lucas Alamán the Historian 23. Getting the Historia Written 651 24. What Is in the Historia de Méjico? 680 Epilogue: On Decolonization and Modernization 707 Notes 717 Bibliography Index 819

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Acknowledgments

So many friends and colleagues have been so patient with me for so long that this list of acknowledgments has grown embarrassingly lengthy. It would be longer still had I not lost some names along the way, for which I ask pardon from those I may have forgotten. I am very appreciative of the reading of chapter drafts, sometimes several of them at a go, and comments offered by Dana Velasco Murillo, Peter Gourevitch, Paul Kenny, Tom Passananti, Susan Fitzpatrick, and my dear, late friend Paul Vanderwood. The initial proposal for the book got careful readings and very helpful suggestions from Margaret Chowning and Gilbert Joseph. Two anonymous readers of the book manuscript for Yale University Press did their work well, for which I thank them. I have in no case followed all the suggestions offered by readers, but they were all thoughtful, meant in good spirit, and taken that way. For financial support of the research and writing it is a pleasure to acknowledge the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the University of California, San Diego; UCSD’s Office of Research Affairs also furnished a subvention to support publication. Large parts of this book were written at Twiggs Coffee House and Bakery in San Diego, a nice place to hang out. The staffs of the following archives and libraries were often helpful and always patient: Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), Mexico City; Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CARSO (formerly CONDUMEX), Mexico City; Special Collections Library, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas-Austin; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Archivo Histórico del H. Congreso del Estado de Guanajuato, Mexico; Archivo Histórico de la Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico; Archivo

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Histórico del Distrito Federal, Mexico City; Archivo Histórico de Defensa Nacional, Mexico City; Special Collections and Government Documents libraries, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego; Los Angeles Public Library. For help of various kinds—comments, suggestions, the loan of materials, references, aid with translations, and even medical support—I thank the following people: Agustín Acosta, José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, Catharine Andrews, Linda Arnold, Alfredo Ávila, Mílada Bazant, Michael Bernstein, Eric Blau, M.D., Jeffrey Bortz, Christopher Boyer, Roberto Breña, Sergio Cañedo Gamboa, John Coatsworth, Brian Connaughton, the late Michael P. Costeloe, Guillermina del Valle Pavón, Christopher Domínguez Michael, Michael Ducey, Ricardo Fagoaga, Celia Falicov, Josh Fierer, M.D., Carlos Forment, Will Fowler, Grael Gannon, Julie Gollin, M.D., Virginia Guedea, the late Charles Hale, Luis de Pablo Hammeken, Paul Hoffman, Antonio Ibarra Romero, Iván Jaksic, Alan Knight, Paul Kruger, José Luis Lara Valdés, William Roger Lewis, Andrés Lira, Rick A. López, the late John Marino, Jorge Mariscal, Salvador Méndez Reyes, Frederick Millard, M.D., Beatriz Montes Rojas, Paola Morán Leyva, Matthew O’Hara, Erika Pani, Rosa María Pérez Luque, Sonia Pérez Toledo, José María Portillo, Karen Racine, Andrés Reséndez, David Ringrose, Jaime E. Rodríguez O., Richard Salvucci, José Antonio Serrano Ortega, Carlos Silva, Donald F. Stevens, Christopher Stroot, Angela Thompson, Cynthia Truant, María Eugenia Vázquez Semadeni, Matthew Vitz, Richard Warren, Robert Westman, Howard Williams, M.D., the late Eliot Wirshbo, Gisela von Wobeser, and María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés.

A Life Together

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Introduction

As his final illness dragged him toward death in early June 1853, and as his wife, children, his doctor, and a few friends and government colleagues moved quietly in and out of the dying man’s bedroom, Lucas Alamán must have contemplated the fate of his soul. But the fevered, nearly incoherent words of a mind quickly winding down, wrote one of his elder sons, revealed that fleeting thoughts about the reorganization of the country still jostled bits of free-floating memory and contemplation of the dark horizon he was fast approaching. He died in the early morning hours of 2 June; the funeral and burial took place the following day. Among the public men who contested for power in the national life of the young Mexican republic Alamán was surely among the least romantic, least histrionic figures in style. The thoughtfulness and serene exterior of his personal presentation marked him out as a reserved haut bourgeois—the éminence grise of the political reaction—in an age of sometimes strutting machismo, especially among the military politicians who dominated public life. In Europe and America it was the age of Byron and Géricault, of Chartism and Jacksonianism, of the steam engine and the telegraph, of Dickens, the young Verdi, and the aging Rossini, of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy, of revolutions triumphant, suppressed, and superseded, of Napoleon’s Hundred Days, Prince Metternich (to whom Alamán was compared at least once), the Decembrists, and Queen Victoria. By the time he died some of his thinking was less anachronistic than discredited, his political project unappetizing to many people. His conservative principles had been fatally tainted through association with flawed instruments and instantiation in some of the extreme policies and actions he

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sponsored. His personal role in the history of early republican Mexico was vilified by his liberal opponents, and his political legacy would be anathematized by subsequent generations. Lucas Alamán had struggled to bring Mexico within the circle of epochal change—of modernization, in other words—widening out from the North Atlantic world to incorporate ever larger chunks of the globe, yet he also expressed in his last writings grave reservations about the social dislocations and rampant materialism produced by this process. It is illuminating to see the Mexican experience within the context of a wider world, locating the country’s history during the century 1750–1850 within the framework of decolonization and modernization. These two intertwined processes form a thematic double helix that directly or indirectly receives much attention in this book and are considered in greater depth in the conclusion. Like two massive weather fronts colliding, it is their turbulent interaction that generated the stormy atmosphere through which Mexico passed during much of the nineteenth century. The problems of decolonization and modernization were key issues for all the new polities in the Americas, but the construction of workable institutions and the achievement of economic development followed a bumpier trajectory in some countries than others. Chile, for example, saw a more or less stable oligarchic republic dominating the nineteenth century; in Brazil an oligarchicmonarchical-slavocratic regime prevailed, in part transplanted directly across the Atlantic; while in the Andes and Mexico an enduring “Indian question,” unstable dictatorships, and civil struggles marked the period. Modernity had arguably fallen upon the world within the span of his six decades.1 Some of its aspects Alamán viewed warily or rejected outright as corrosive to an ordered, rational society, while others he embraced. Modernization encompassed commercial and industrial capitalism, new technologies that touched most people’s lives, and a strong state system, all of which he sought to nurture in Mexico. But the period also saw the emergence of liberal concepts of the rule of law, citizenship, economic life, popular sovereignty, and of the self as well as the replacement of the religious worldview by a scientific-rationalist one in private life, the educational system, and large segments of the public sphere. Many of these features alarmed him. Paradoxically, Lucas Alamán sought to modernize Mexico but keep aspects of modernity at arm’s length. Among the most important of his personal principles were a deep personal piety and attachment to an idealized Spanish colonial past, but an idealization more critical than many of his contemporaries and subsequent critics suggested. He also demonstrated a willingness quite ruthlessly to contract a robust popular

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political sphere in favor of government by enlightened men, social stability, and economic development, a trade-off that would emerge repeatedly in Mexican history. Most of what Alamán envisioned for Mexico would come to be realized only under the nominal aegis of liberalism a quarter century after his death, in the era of Porifirio Díaz (1876–1911). Like Simón Bolívar, he may well have felt that during his own time in politics he had plowed the sea. Judged by a number of conventional criteria, certainly, Alamán’s public life was a failure. The arc of his career shadowed that of Mexico itself—from youthful promise, optimism, and experimentation following independence from Spain to a chaotic adulthood corresponding to the early decades of the young republic and then to crisis and near death as he exited the scene. As politician, policy maker, and diagnostician of the nation’s ills he failed for the most part to realize his vision of an aristocratic, centralized, internally stable, industrializing, and territorially secure nation. As a private entrepreneur he lost a good deal of his wealth during the last two decades of his life. After a halting start, the industrialization of the country faltered. The protracted episode of Greater Texas dogged Alamán’s entire public career. The loss of more than half the national territory to the United States in 1848 proved Mexico to be anything but secure. The continuing political shakiness that followed this amputation in part prompted Alamán to found a formal conservative party in 1848 and to invite the egregious Antonio López de Santa Anna back from exile to guide the destiny of the country. The ideal of the aristocratic republic ruled by men of education and experience was disputed by liberal socalled Jacobins and undermined by the clownish dictatorship into which Santa Anna hurled Mexico after the counterweight of Alamán’s tempering influence was removed by his death barely six weeks into the regime. It is one of several richly layered ironies in modern Mexican history that the liberal Constitution of 1857 and the war powers assumed by the triumphant Benito Juárez during and after the French Intervention (1862–67) finally brought upon the national political scene the centralized government Alamán had tried for so long to construct. The convergence of a liberal developmentalist ideology with authoritarian political forms was the hallmark of the long-lived Díaz dictatorship, realizing many of the policies Alamán had envisioned. Most of Lucas Alamán’s failures were strongly determined by the times in which he lived. Early republican Mexico did not present a promising setting for large-scale industrial enterprise, for example, a preoccupation of Alamán’s both as an individual economic actor and a maker of public policy. Relatively few entrepreneurs succeeded. While recent research has demonstrated that

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the market involvement of ordinary people was more widespread than previously thought, markets were still relatively shallow. Real wages and disposable incomes remained low and sticky, transport costs high, capital scarce and expensive, the tax structure regressive, technological innovation muted until later in the century, imported machinery costly, and domestic supply of many primary materials unpredictable. Alamán ran afoul of all these obstacles at one time or another, most notably in the failure of a large-scale textile enterprise he established near Orizaba in the late 1830s. His actions both as policy maker and private entrepreneur were severely constrained by Mexico’s huge foreign debt, vengeance and predation by European powers (Spain, France) and the young United States, weak state capacity, stubborn resistance to centralized governance in the country, and a legitimacy vacuum at the center of national political life. Many of his ideas rebounded and emerged triumphant in the sphere of state action, as those of Alexander Hamilton had done decades after his death. Although the stimulation of industrialization through a government development bank was never again undertaken in the form in which the Banco de Avío (1830–41) existed, state intervention to spur industrialization did become a key feature of economic modernization beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and has remained so. In political life, today’s conservative party, the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), can trace the genealogy of many of its ideas back to Alamán. Alamán was one of the most conservative Mexican statesmen and political thinkers of the time. Supported by the authority of long experience in government, acute analysis of Mexican realities, wide reading and much research, and high confidence in his own opinions, his pronouncements must be taken seriously, if not always at face value. For example, his lament that there were no Mexicans in Mexico due to the “complete extinction of national spirit” after the Mexican–American War captured a good deal of the political reality of his time.2 He devoted most of his monumental Historia de Méjico (1849–52) to demonstrating that Mexican independence (1810–21) had been a disaster for the political and economic life of the country. Alamán regarded separation from Spain as inevitable, but the manner of its achievement had set Mexico on a path of political instability, underdevelopment, and vulnerability to foreign predation.

Mexico in Lucas Alamán’s Time Mexico began the century 1750–1850 with considerable potential. The trajectory of silver mining was generally upward despite the characteristic wax-

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ing and waning of production. The outpouring of wealth from the colony’s mines reached new heights just after 1800, although most of it escaped the country in the form of private exports of bullion and coin, payment for imported goods, and taxes. The population of New Spain increased from about 3 million in 1750 to around 6 million in 1810 and to 7–8 million in 1850. Mexico City grew from about 70,000 people in 1750 to 120,000 in 1810, Guadalajara almost quadrupled in size, from about 10,000 in 1750 to nearly 40,000 in 1810, and other cities, such as Puebla, followed suit. Domestic consumption stimulated growth in textiles, tobacco products, and some other manufactures despite low consumer incomes. After 1789 reformed commercial policies throughout the Spanish Empire facilitated exports a bit and the consumption of imported goods as well. Commercialized agriculture was growing to feed the mines and cities, while exports were overwhelmingly dominated by silver. There were clouds on the horizon, however. The number of well-documented serious riots and uprisings, primarily in rural areas, increased after 1750, although few of these attained even regional dimensions. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century prices for food and other items of wide popular consumption were rising, pressing upon the declining real incomes of laboring people. A series of fiscal, governance, and religious reforms, dubbed the Bourbon Reforms after the eponymous reigning dynasty, increased rates of extraction from the colony through various taxes, tightened the reins of government, and sought to “cleanse” popular religious practice by suppressing the more florid forms of baroque piety to which Mexicans were fondly attached. When independence from Spain was achieved at the end of a bloody decade of civil conflict ending in 1821, the country’s potential was more highly touted than ever by Mexicans and foreigners on the basis of the optimistic account of New Spain (1803) by the great German cosmopolite and polymath Baron Alexander von Humboldt. This optimism was not born out. During the years 1824–30, for example, there was a flurry of British capital investment bent on rehabilitating the silver mines. These had languished during the long decade of the insurgency, the struggle initially for autonomy, then for independence from Spain between 1810 and 1821. This bubble collapsed almost as quickly as it had inflated, leaving behind it a detritus of abandoned mines, rusting equipment, lawsuits, crushed hopes, and bankruptcy. The providentialist rhetoric of Mexicans and foreigners about the country’s bright future failed to disguise a daunting array of problems facing the new nation. The thinness of the population in the Mexican north and Spain’s imperial overreach in attempting to hold the region in the first place prompted the policy of the postindependence

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Mexican government to colonize much of the area under contracts with American entrepreneurs, chief among them Moses Austin and his son Stephen. Mexico lost about half of its territory in little more than a decade, beginning with the independence of Texas in 1836 and its annexation to the United States in 1845. There quickly followed the cession to the US of what are essentially the US Southwest and California made by a defeated Mexico as an outcome of the Mexican–American War and the treaties that codified the victory. The war took Mexico to the precipice of state failure, its disastrous outcome being only one among a number of symptoms of the malaise Lucas Alamán diagnosed in his writings. Other symptoms of the enormous problems faced by the young Mexican republic were endemic political instability, exemplified by the astounding total of 1,139 pronunciamientos, or military uprisings, that occurred in the country between 1821 and 1876; very weak state capacity owing to an inadequate tax system; and extremely high levels of domestic and foreign debt.3 Yet another major problem was sluggish population growth over the last third or so of the period. The pace of increase was probably slowed by a combination of mortality in war and civil disturbance, continuing epidemic disease, including recurrent epidemics of cholera and typhus, and general economic debility. Mexican conservatives and liberals alike struggled after 1821 to assert their competing but overlapping visions for the country’s future, public life dominated by the perhaps two thousand or so men who made up what I call here the political nation. Ordinary people, poor, largely voiceless politically and with little prospect of upward social mobility, still enjoyed public celebratory life, the consolations of religion, the intimacy of the domestic sphere, and the other human pleasures—emotional, aesthetic, sensual, and interpersonal. Around 1850 or so most Mexicans still lived in the countryside on family farms, haciendas, and in villages or perhaps small towns and earned their living from the land as farmers or laborers. The urban population of the country was perhaps 10 percent of the whole, literacy rates correspondingly low. In Alamán’s day landed wealth was still extremely concentrated. The Indians, who made up about 50 percent of the country’s population in 1850, lived in villages and hamlets, farmed at a near-subsistence level, and produced some small surpluses of maize, small livestock, and horticultural products for sale in towns and cities within a short distance of where they lived. Most of them lived within the traditional structures of the village community: much churchcentered activity and religious celebratory life, a male-dominated, gerontocratic political structure, and the time-consecrated patterns of family formation.

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In most areas of the country landlord hegemony was still strong, and until the extension of state power in the Porfirian period the reach of the government was limited, as was that of transportation and communication systems. The performance of the Mexican economy during the early republican period is hard to assess. Scholarly work has shown that the Mexican economy as a whole stagnated or grew only very slightly between independence and 1850. By contrast, on the eve of the independence struggle, in 1810, Mexico lagged not far behind the fledgling United States in the size of its economy; by the end of the nineteenth century, however, the American economy was many times bigger than the Mexican.4 Recent research has somewhat brightened the picture for the 1820–50 period in contrast to the long-accepted image of a universal economic downturn reversing itself only in the last quarter of the century. Certain regions of the country and sectors of its economy demonstrated signs of recovery, growth, and even development. While most of the mining industry lay in ruins, and huge areas of the countryside were slow to recover from the devastation wreaked by the insurgency, some regions of the country rebounded more robustly. To the west, for example, the Michoacán area was not bogged down in the stagnation thought to characterize these decades, and the same was true of the region of San Luis Potosí to the east.5 There is evidence of an early recovery of the farming economy in certain parts of the Bajío, the traditional breadbasket of Mexico sprawling outward from the great mining center at Guanajuato. And despite competition from chiefly British imports, the textile industry gained a foothold in the east-central city of Puebla and somewhat on the western side of the country, in Guadalajara. Notwithstanding some positive signs of recovery, in the early decades of republican life political instability, very modest economic growth if not outright stagnation, and social malaise prevailed. How had this declensionist story of Mexico’s stormy passage from colony to nation come about? Certainly politics had a good deal to do with it—the failure of political actors to reach a consensus about the legitimacy of power arrangements and the continual resort to violence to settle conflicts in the public sphere. Weak state capacity arose from the absence at the national level of a firm, rational fiscal base, a function arrogated to themselves by the individual states during the spasms of federalist ascendancy. At most times this reduced to bare bones the government’s ability to perform essential tasks, putting control of fiscal resources largely in the hands of private lenders to the government, the agiotistas. Issues of human capital also played some role: the weakness or even total absence of educational opportunities for common peo-

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ple, for example, and very low rates of literacy, at most 10 percent or so at independence, as I have suggested. The expulsion decrees of 1827 and 1829 sent many European-born Spaniards out of the country, bearing with them their experience, knowledge, and what capital they could carry, helping to deplete the new country of a valuable human resource.

Sources and Methods The original manuscript version of this book contained several hundred more footnotes citing archival sources than the published version, notes left aside here due to space considerations. But the major primary sources are amply represented in the text, cited fully in the notes and at the beginning of the bibliography. The suppressed notes almost exclusively reference documents from sections of the National Archive of Mexico and the Carso Historical Archive in Mexico City; the Lucas Alamán Papers and other collections of nineteenth-century correspondence in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas-Austin; and the correspondence published in the Aguayo Spencer edition of Alamán’s Obras. A very important secondary source for this book has been the biography by José C. Valadés, Alamán: Estadista e historiador (Mexico City, 1938). Born in Mazatlán, Valadés (1899–1976) was a journalist, diplomat (serving at various times as ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Portugal, Colombia, and Uruguay), college professor, cofounder of the Partido Comunista de México, and an extremely prolific writer on Mexican history from a left-wing perspective. Although he was a man of the political far left, his biography of Lucas Alamán is balanced and sympathetic, even celebratory, and heavily documented from unpublished sources. Unfortunately, the scholarly apparatus in Valadés’s work is not all that one might wish. Although he cites primary sources (if most of the time imprecisely), it is almost impossible to link quotations or assertions of fact with the documents and other materials from which Valadés drew them. Where I have been able to trace passages of his work to unpublished sources, however, I have found his quotations and assertions to be unfailingly accurate. He was clearly able to consult the unfinished Alamán autobiographical fragment now in the Carso archive, for example, which I have relied on heavily as a key to Alamán’s personal history, thought, and career. On the whole I am satisfied that Valadés’s work is to be trusted and have felt comfortable leaning on it for certain aspects of Alamán’s life not documented elsewhere.

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Finally, let me add a brief word to readers about the many lengthy block quotations included here, primarily from Lucas Alamán’s letters and other written works. Very little in the way of Alamán’s personal correspondence, to his wife and children, for example, survives, or at least little that I have seen. José Valadés possessed a large collection of Alamán papers, cited in his biography as “in possession of the author,” which remains in private hands and which I was not permitted to consult. From what I can tell, access to the Valadés collection would not have made a material difference in my understanding of Lucas Alamán. This gap in the sources accounts for the importance I have accorded to his unfinished memoirs. But if one wishes to fathom his personality, his mind, and his thinking to some depth—to extract some sense of Alamán the man—it is essential to look closely at his business and political correspondence, much of it with the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone. For this reason I have felt justified in quoting directly from his written letters and papers more extensively than might have been the case had documents of a more personal nature survived. All translations from the Spanish are mine unless otherwise specified.

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1 • An Old and Distinguished Family

Memoirs of an Internal Exile “I come of one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Guanajuato, capital of the province of that name.” Thus Lucas Alamán began an account of his background and early life, writing while in hiding in Mexico City in 1833 to evade the prosecution of charges against him for his alleged complicity in the murder of President Vicente Guerrero in February 1831. The thoughts of exiles often turn not only homeward but also to the past, since home is in the past. Wrote Alamán: “I began to write this work during the persecution I suffered in the year 1833. My object was not and is not to publish it, at least during my lifetime. . . . I write shut up in a room provided to me by the generosity of a friend in the most secret part of his house, without seeing or communicating with anyone.”1 An intensely private man, he presented to the world at large the very model of buttoned-up, haut bourgeois reserve and respectability. The Memorias focus less on the writer’s childhood than on the social structure of New Spain in the colonial twilight, the society of his time in the mining city of Guanajuato, and on his family background. There is a chapter heading without a chapter (regrettably never written) with the descriptive caption “Old customs of Guanajuato and of this country in general: opulence and happiness enjoyed by it. Some private anecdotes.” If it is true, as Freud wrote, that neurotics suffer from reminiscences, then so also must memoirists and autobiographers, all the more so if they see the present as fraught with risks and the future as cloudy. When Alamán began writing he was in exile, his political future highly uncertain, his economic situation in free fall. He was able to stay in contact with his wife only through intermediaries. Within the extended decade between 1830 and 1842 or so, as Mexico’s slide into po13

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litical instability accelerated, he ascended to the pinnacle of his political power, started down the other side, and saw his hopes for the acquisition of great personal wealth effectively dashed for a second time. There is an elegiac tone in Alamán’s depiction of the Guanajuato of his childhood, the early passages of the Memorias combining the personal and the political. The Memorias” begin with an epigraph drawn from Ovid: Maestus eram, requiesque mihi, non fama petita est Mens intenta suis, ne foret usque malis —Ovid, Tristium IV. Eleg. [I was melancholy; solace, not fame, has been my object, that my mind dwell not constantly on its own woes.]2 In a brief meditation on the writing of memoirs, he noted that such works were few and far between among Hispanophone writers. He remarked that a cholera epidemic was raging in Mexico City while he was in his internal exile, each day taking people he knew to their deaths.3 Alamán cited Boccaccio’s Decameron, although, as he asserted, he did not write “among beautiful women and gallant gentlemen, nor in the perfume of gardens or surrounded by delicacies, but shut up in a room. I write, then, to entertain myself.” He had no thought of publication except by accident at some future time. He regarded his Memorias, in other words, as a hostage to fortune, a message in a bottle that friends, family, or succeeding generations might or might not encounter. The following entry appears in the baptismal register of the Guanajuato parochial church for 18 October 1792: “In the year of Our Lord of 1792, on 20 October, in this Holy Parochial Church of Guanajuato, I, Dr. Don Manuel de Quesada, curate and ecclesiastical judge of this city and its district, solemnly performed baptism with holy oil on Lucas Ignacio José, Joaquín Pedro de Alcántara, Juan Bautista Francisco de Paula, a Spanish infant of three days old, legitimate child of Don Juan Vicente Alamán and Doña María Ignacia Escalada. His godfather was Don Tomás de [sic] Alamán, whom I advised of his spiritual kinship and the obligation to educate his godchild in Christian doctrine.”4 Tomás Alamán was the younger brother of Lucas’s father, Juan Vicente. While Juan Vicente Alamán achieved considerable wealth and political visibility during his lifetime, the real distinction came from the side of Lucas’s mother, María Ignacia Escalada. In his classic study of eighteenth-century Guanajuato’s

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mining industry and the society it spawned, David Brading remarks on this feature of Alamán’s background, writing of his “decidedly curious genealogy” that he had to go back to his great-great-grandfather to find a Mexican-born Spaniard among his male forebears.5 Lucas Alamán barely mentions his father at all, mentioning incidentally the elder Alamán’s origin in the Kingdom of Navarre, in northern Spain, but misattributing the birthplace of his great-greatgrandfather to Spain rather than Mexico. He wrote that his mother, doña María Ignacia, descended “through the feminine line” from the family of the Marqués de San Clemente, one of the richest miners Guanajuato had produced. The history of this family connection would convey to the reader an idea of how “that type of Aristocracy that has existed in this country” was formed and of the mining industry of Guanajuato, “now [in 1833–34] at the point of extinction.” This emphasis on his maternal ancestry bespeaks Alamán’s desire to recover aristocratic distinction in his family’s life. The autobiographical fragment ends with his guilty admission that in 1824 he sold the house where he was born and raised, while evoking the “many happy years” he spent there as a child. The house still stands in Guanajuato, now converted into an up-market boutique hotel, La Casona de Don Lucas. While the mystery of the ghostly father remains unsolved, Alamán spent many pages exalting the family connections of his mother, nested within his sociological musings on ancien régime society. Alamán’s nostalgic, melancholy tour of the Mexican mining aristocracy and the circumstances of his childhood and young manhood casts a long shadow over his life as a mature man, an influence that must be inferred from his other writings and public activities. In the public realm, the reconstitution of the faded titled aristocracy of his youth as a natural aristocracy of property and talent was an issue much pondered by Atlantic-world political thinkers of the early republican age. Such men would guide the fate of the young Mexican polity as an unofficially bounded political nation embracing the hombres de bien, individuals of education, purpose, property, and unimpeachable integrity. His perception of status loss in the generations before his birth impelled him as a private entrepreneur to overreach in a compensatory stretch. Intellectually, Lucas Alamán’s positive view of the Spanish colonial past and negative verdict on the process of Mexico’s independence from the metropolis were clearly influenced by this background. Alamán was a conservative less because of what he feared to lose than because of what he had lost already, a modernizer in large measure because of what he hoped to recover and more a nostalgic than a reactionary. Not all of us are fated to act out our personal dramas on a large public stage, as Alamán did. Erik Erikson referred to this as the

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intersection of a life history with a historical moment.6 The Memorias illuminate his life and the times in which he lived through his own eyes—shaped by a project of self-fashioning and viewed through a lens tinted with nostalgia but ground on the stone of his sharp intelligence. He invoked the religious sensibility and good works of the silver aristocracy to flog the contemporary liberals for their nihilistic destruction of the old, serviceable pieties and the public practices to which they gave concrete form, discussions layered with memories of his youth and family background. The genealogy Lucas Alamán proudly claimed stretched back seven generations on his mother’s side, principally through the Busto family, which originated in the far north of Spain, in the area of the Valle de Escaño in the mountains of Burgos.7 In his Anales de Aragón, the sixteenth-century chronicler Jerónimo Zurita placed one Pedro de Busto, a “caballero de Ocaña,” at the head of an uprising in the city of Ocaña against the forces of the Marquis of Villena and King Henry of Castile, in support of the young Princess Isabella. This took place around 1475 at the height of the civil strife in Spain that eventually produced the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Kings.8 The homonymous Pedro de Busto, a descendant of the Isabelline warrior, arrived from Spain and settled in Guanajuato about a hundred years later, in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Pedro de Busto’s grandson Francisco de Busto y Jérez became a silver miner in Guanajuato. Busto y Jérez renovated the Mellado mine in Guanajuato, discovered around 1550, piling up a considerable fortune. Located along the same mother lode (veta madre) as the great Valenciana, Rayas, and Cata mines, the Mellado was closely associated with the Cata, which was to play an important role in the Alamán family fortunes. Busto y Jérez married the Creole woman Francisca de Moya y Monroy around 1650 and fathered four children, among them Francisco Matías de Busto Jérez y Moya Monroy, the maternal great-great-grandfather and totemic ancestor of Lucas Alamán, ennobled as the first Marqués de San Clemente in 1730. Foreshadowed in the transmission of diminishing mining wealth by inheritance from Francisco de Busto y Jérez’s generation to that of his children, the loss of economic and social prepotency over time haunted Alamán’s life. The Mellado mine’s thirty-two shares were divided equally among Busto’s four children; the first marqués thus received by inheritance only eight shares. Much of his wealth and the basis of his ennoblement derived from the neighboring Cata mine, in bonanza during his mature years.9 Born in Guanajuato in 1684, Francisco Matías de Busto Jérez y Moya Monroy was the eldest son of Francisco de Busto y Jérez. In Alamán’s memoir, a

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curious error crept into his account of his great-great-grandfather in identifying the first Marqués de San Clemente as a Spaniard rather than a Guanajuatoborn Creole.10 In his early twenties, around 1708, Busto married Luisa Marmolejo y Esquivel, the Creole daughter of the owner of the Hacienda San Juan de los Otates, a substantial estate located just east of León, in the direction of Guanajuato.11 Very wealthy by his midforties by virtue of his earnings from the Mellado and Cata mines and a regidor perpetuo on the city’s cabildo (a life member of the city council), Francisco Matías de Busto was ennobled in 1730 as the first Marqués de San Clemente in recognition of the large number of pious donations given by him and his wife. At the same time, he was named a knight in the honorific Spanish military Order of Santiago. The title San Clemente derived from a mining refinery (hacienda de beneficio) of that name located just below the Mellado mine, one of several owned by the silver magnate. Of Busto’s ennoblement, Alamán wrote, “A Spanish poet has said of this common pattern: ‘An Indiano cedes the fruit of his mines / So that he will be known as a count.’ ”12 He offered a truncated but acute analysis of novohispano society and its values: “Almost all the noble titles of this country have the same origin: in Guanajuato there later came the Marqueses de Rayas and the Condes de Valenciana, [taking their names from] the names of the mines that enriched the Sardaneta and Obregón families. . . . And in sum . . . [with few exceptions] . . . he who set himself to write a Mexican nobiliary would not need to tire himself much in encountering in every [noble] house proof of what Quevedo said, Money is quality.”13 The Mexican noble titles never conferred seigneurial rights or other privileges. Wealthy ennobled Mexicans established pious foundations, sponsored public celebrations, built new churches or adorned existing ones, and paid for the construction of other public buildings, which “would always confer advantage in favor of the men who built them even if they were things as useless as the pyramids of Egypt.” Comparing the Mexican aristocracy’s impulse toward doing social good with the destructive Jacobinism he saw in the liberals of his own time, he wrote, [On the other hand] those who are always applauding themselves on their education and wisdom have done nothing but destroy and annihilate everything that existed without building anything in its place. The aristocracy that existed in this country was therefore entirely nominal, since it exercised no advantage or privilege over the rest of the inhabitants, nor any other distinction than that which wealth confers. . . . But in our day we have seen attacks on those property holders called aristocrats,

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and a concerted plan is being carried out against anyone who has anything, since by equality is understood an equality of poverty, and our liberal mandarins hope that this country will be rich when all its inhabitants are equally poor.14 The signs and works of Francisco Matías de Busto’s great wealth everywhere around Guanajuato reminded Alamán of the faded grandeur of his clan. Busto had built a “magnificent house” near the central plaza of town, on a site known to this day as the Cuesta del Marqués (the Marquis’s Hill). When the Busto family lost much of its wealth in the late eighteenth century the mansion was sold to the Conde de Valenciana, later still (1831) acquired by the State of Guanajuato to house the state legislature, and demolished in 1887. Busto also sponsored the construction of the chapel next to the parish church of Guanajuato, which served in his great-great-grandson’s time as the baptistery, with a joint portrait of the marqués and his wife still hanging there. In the vault below the chapel the body of the first marqués was entombed, which Alamán claimed to have seen about a century after his death (in about the 1840s), still well preserved and dressed in the mantle of the Order of Santiago. The first marqués’s piety and philanthropy supported most particularly the Jesuits, who arrived in the city in 1732 borne on a wave of Busto benevolence. Workings in the Cata mine had typically Jesuit names, as did members of the family, including Lucas Alamán’s mother (Ignacia), his aunts, and himself (Ignacio and Francisco Xavier). The Jesuits were so widely known for their discretion and dignified public presence, Alamán wrote, that even in his own day when someone did something vulgar or ill-mannered in public it was said of the person that “he was not educated by the Jesuits.” Even while the first Marqués de San Clemente was reaching the peak of his wealth, social prominence, and public visibility during the second third of the eighteenth century, the seeds of the Busto family’s decline were quite literally being sown in his marriage bed. There were too many Busto heirs, too much conspicuous consumption (including the piling up of debt), and too little reinvestment of capital in the mines that formed the basis of family wealth. When Francisco Matías de Busto died in 1747 at the age of sixty-three he was a wealthy man by the standards of the time. He and a partner each reaped a fortune of 300,000 to 400,000 pesos from the mines. But Busto had ten children, and the estate was not entailed, so it was subject to rules of equal partible inheritance. The holdings included the Hacienda de Villachuato, located to the southwest of Guanajuato, valued at a very substantial 325,000

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pesos, while another hacienda was valued at a modest 55,000 pesos. In Guanajuato itself Busto’s property included an hacienda de beneficio (San Clemente) worth 30,000 pesos and his house, valued at 45,000 pesos. The first marqués’s eight shares in the Mellado mine and twelve in the Cata had no assigned value. His total assets therefore amounted to 454,000 pesos. But against this sat debts of some 240,000 pesos, probably owed to the silver bankers who financed the capital-intensive and risky mining business. Brading asserts that much of the distribution of the estate to the heirs was nominal, the total less dowries already paid to Busto daughters and shares in the value of virtually uncollectible debts owed to the estate. By 1753 Villachuato was ceded outright to the major creditor, and the remaining assets finally shared out in 1756. This destroyed the capital accumulation of two generations and led to the abandonment of the Mellado and Cata mines.15 Alamán got some of the specific facts about the reproductive vigor of the Bustos wrong, but the general drift of family history was right. He wrote that Francisco Matías de Busto Jérez left only a son and daughter as heirs, when in fact his first marriage, to Luisa Marmolejo y Esquivel, produced seven children. Of the six surviving offspring, five daughters married peninsular Spaniards, one of them Antonio Jacinto Diez Madroñero, Lucas Alamán’s maternal great-grandfather. The sole surviving male child, Francisco Cristóbal, became the second Marqués de San Clemente. The first marqués’s second union, with Lorenza de Reynoso y Manso, produced five children, including a pair of twins; two of the boys became clergymen of some distinction, while the daughters married. The peninsular Spanish husbands of the Busto daughters benefited from their wives’ inheritances and the backing of the marqués in starting their own businesses in Guanajuato. The second marqués, Francisco Cristóbal de Busto, married only once, in 1749 to Mariana Francisca Pereda y Carrera, but proved nearly as prolific as his father, siring seven children, among them the third Marqués de San Clemente, Pedro José. Against his mother’s strong objections Pedro José married his mistress, the mixed-race servant girl Andrea Martínez, and ended up renouncing the title due to his inability to support it economically.16 Alamán in his memoirs cited a proverb still current in Guanajuato in his youth to the effect that “Bustos, burros, y bastones en Guanajuato a montones.” Although the poetry is not easy to render in English, the sense of it is that there were heaps (montones) of Bustos. The drainage of wealth through the great mining clans of Guanajuato provoked Alamán to call on an old saying: “El padre mercader, el hijo caballero, y el nieto pordiosero,” which roughly translates to “Father merchant, son

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gentleman, grandson beggar.” One sees here the three-generation slide from wealth and social position to poverty and obscurity, which is exactly what happened with the Marqueses de San Clemente. Alamán commented that the numerous progeny of the first two ennobled Bustos produced a “scene of waste and disorder which conducted to ruin and poverty one of the most opulent families that has existed in this country.” He ascribed this process principally to the division of the shares in the Cata and Mellado mines among a score of heirs and the gambling habit plaguing the adult men in the family. He depicted this vividly by describing the days on which ore from the mines was sold to refiners at auction: “The day of the auction . . . all the relatives, brothers, sons-in-law, and cousins gathered at the Cata mine. . . . There, after a splendid meal, a monte game was set up, attended by all the gamblers in Guanajuato, and in it vanished all the wealth just garnered from the sale [of ore] made in the mine. Many times, seated beside the table on which the ruin of my grandparents and relatives was consummated, I have been gripped by the saddest reflections, considering on the one hand the abysses beneath my feet from which such treasures had come, and on the other the poverty I saw among my relatives and the paths by which they arrived at it.” There were relatively few sons, but the numerous daughters placed heavy demands for dowries on the first and second marqués’s fortunes: “Thus ended the prosperity of the house of the Marqueses de San Clemente, and this has been the ending point of almost all the opulent houses of this country. If some branches of it [i.e., the Busto family] have survived . . . in Guanajuato until our day [i.e., 1833], this has not come from the original wealth of the family, but from the marriages that the various daughters and granddaughters of the second Marqués contracted with industrious Spaniards, who with the fruit of their labors formed new fortunes and families that today are also almost all destroyed.”17 He portrayed what one might call the Creole escape hatch, that is, the pattern of Mexican-born elite women marrying peninsular Spaniards and establishing new dynasties, the history of Alamán’s own parents. Francisco Cristóbal de Busto y Marmolejo, the only surviving male of the first marriage of Francisco Matías and thus heir to the marquisate, was born in 1727 and died in the 1790s at a relatively advanced age.18 He wed in 1749 and fathered three daughters and four sons; one of these sons, Pedro José, was born in 1765 and would become the third marqués. By the time Francisco Cristóbal inherited the title the family fortunes were much diminished through inheritance and dowering practices, litigation among various heirs, gambling and conspicuous consumption, and the lack of capital necessary to

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maintain the mines. Alamán cites him with considerable reverence but no details. His son, Pedro José de Busto y Pereda, born in 1765, became the fourth Marqués de San Clemente, living exclusively off income from rural properties he owned in the Celaya area. Although he married his mixed-race mistress, Andrea Martínez, over the strong objections of his mother, he was noted locally for his piety. Idle rentier or not, pious or not, the fourth marqués eventually found himself forced to relinquish the noble title of San Clemente for lack of the means to support it adequately. Alamán concluded that except for “numerous bastard branches, since apparently gambling was not the only slip [desliz] made by my relatives,” the name of Busto was almost extinguished. One of these slips showed up in the form of an artillery captain named José María Bustos [sic], killed on 4 December 1828 “fighting valiantly” to suppress the Acordada Revolt in Mexico City. Other, less problematic unions linked Alamán as a distant cousin to the families of the Marqueses de Rayas (Sardaneta) and Condes de Valenciana (Septién) and to other prominent families of Guanajuato.19 Despite the complicated marital intermingling of these Creole and peninsular Spanish families over the generations, however, Alamán also pointed to tensions between these groups—“the fatal rivalry between peninsular Spaniards and Americans that has caused such evils”—often identified as a major factor behind the independence movement. Lucas Alamán’s place in this illustrious genealogy derived from his mother, the great-granddaughter of the first Marqués de San Clemente through his first marriage. One of the marqués’s daughters, Josefa Antonia, had married Jacinto Antonio Diez Madroñero, a peninsular Spaniard from Extremadura who arrived in Guanajuato in the early decades of the eighteenth century. As is true of many of the Busto women, there is little information about Josefa Antonia except for the twenty-six thousand pesos she brought as dowry to her marriage. In addition, the property left to Diez Madroñero at his wife’s death included “strong shares” (fuerte participación) in the Cata and Mellado mines, later embroiled in intrafamilial litigation. Diez Madroñero enjoyed considerable success as a miner during the early decades of the eighteenth century, serving as an elector in the mining deputation at least twice, as regidor (city councilman) of the city, and as alcalde principal (governor) of the province of Guanajuato. Alamán devoted considerable attention in his memoirs to this maternal great-grandfather, in his words “a man of singular presentation and character,” who must have died well before Alamán’s birth. Anecdotes about him were intended to illustrate the seriousness with which such people took matters of philanthropy, piety, and the transitory nature of mining wealth.

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Alamán wrote that his great-grandfather’s fortune was already in decline when his first wife, Josefa Antonia de Busto y Marmolejo, died. But looking tearfully at her corpse, he swore that much as he had loved her, should his Santa Urzula mine come into bonanza he would remarry. The enterprise enjoyed at least a brief burst of renewed productivity, since Diez Madroñero honored his vow to marry a second time. Still, he died much diminished in his fortune. In Lucas Alamán’s time his maternal great-grandfather was remembered chiefly through a street in the city bearing his name, Calle de don Jacinto. Diez Madroñero fathered six children. His daughter Antonia from his first wife, Josefa Antonia de Busto, married Captain Francisco Antonio de Escalada y La Flor Septién, a peninsular Spaniard from Llerena, in Spain, born in 1727, who settled in Guanajuato some time before midcentury and was probably involved in mercantile or mining activity or both. One of the children of this union, born about midcentury, was Lucas Alamán’s mother, María Ignacia. Her sister Gertrudis married Alamán’s paternal uncle, Tomás Alamán; the two Alamán brothers, in other words, married the two Escalada y la Flor sisters.

María Ignacia Escalada and Gabriel Arechederreta María Ignacia Escalada y la Flor’s son claimed she was one of the most beautiful women ever to be seen in Guanajuato. She bore four children, lived to quite an advanced age, handled her own business affairs while twice widowed, and was adored by her two famous sons. After the loss of most of her grandfather’s wealth the family lived in much-reduced circumstances, but her beauty, family background, and genteel upbringing portended an advantageous match. Married on 12 November 1770 to Gabriel Arechederreta, she was widowed in 1779, a year later marrying Juan Vicente Alamán, Lucas Alamán’s father, a pairing in fact advised by Arechederreta himself at the end of his life. The younger man was, at the time of his marriage, heavily involved in Arechederreta’s commercial enterprise, may already by that time have entered the mining business, and even have had his way eased by the arrival in Guanajuato of his brother Tomás some time previously. Ignacia Escalada y la Flor’s marriage to Arechederreta produced one son, Juan Bautista Arechederreta, Lucas Alamán’s much older (by two decades) half brother, born in 1771, who was to become a distinguished churchman. Her second marriage, lasting nearly three decades, produced three children. One of these, Agustina, died in infancy. Lucas Alamán’s surviving elder sister, María de la Luz Alamán Escalada, born a decade before him, in 1782, was to marry Manuel Iturbe e Iraeta,

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two decades her senior. One of their sons, Luis Iturbe Alamán (b. 1803), Lucas Alamán’s nephew, was to figure importantly as a correspondent of his uncle and in business arrangements with him. On 12 November 1770 the lovely nineteen-year-old María Ignacia married Gabriel Arechederreta, already firmly established in the Guanajuato merchant-mining community by this time. Born in the Villa de Durango in the Basque country of Old Spain in 1735, he was to die a relatively young man in 1778, at the age of forty-three, leaving behind a seven-year-old son and a wealthy, attractive young widow of twenty-seven. By the time of his marriage he was serving as alcalde ordinario de segundo voto (one of two municipal magistrates) in Guanajuato and was subsequently to occupy positions in the mining deputation (1771, 1774) and a second time on the city council (1778). In partnership with another Basque merchant- aviador, Arechederreta advanced capital to Vicente Sardaneta, the owner of the San Juan de Rayas mine. This led to the discovery of “one of the most stunning silver deposits there has been in Guanajuato,” in Lucas Alamán’s words as well as to Sardaneta’s ennoblement in 1774 as the Marqués de San Juan de Rayas. Arechederreta emerged from this episode enriched, subsequently worked the Espíritu Santo mine in the area, and engaged in other profitable business dealings with local miners. We know something of Gabriel Arechederreta’s fortune from an inventory of his estate made by his executors in 1781 at the behest of María Ignacia de Escalada and her second husband. This fortune provided at least in part the basis for that of Juan Vicente Alamán, Lucas’s father. The conflicting claims over the estate by the Arechederreta and Alamán families were to be the source of considerable friction for many years after don Gabriel’s death, opening a breach not only between Juan Bautista Arechederreta and his mother’s second husband but also between the two half brothers, Juan Bautista and Lucas. Arechederreta owned a large store on the Calle del Real Ensaye in Guanajuato, with an inventory worth nearly 18,000 pesos, being managed at his death by Juan Vicente Alamán. Smaller commercial establishments of his, in Guanajuato itself and elsewhere, totaled 60,000 pesos in value, other property and cash about 36,000 pesos, and debts owing to the store nearly 15,000 pesos. The previous year’s profits on this business had been 8,500 pesos, of which half pertained to Arechederreta’s estate, a quarter to Juan Vicente Alamán, his manager, and a quarter to another partner. Another 150,000 pesos were owing to Arechederreta personally, probably for capital sums and goods supplied to other miners. Personal goods from the home of Arechederreta and María Ignacia were valued at over 5,000 pesos. His estate also held a

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quarter interest in nine barras (a measure of length along an ore face) of two flooded silver mines in the district, valueless in their present condition. The total value of Arechederreta’s estate was just over 300,000 pesos, from which were to be subtracted 160,000 pesos in debts and liabilities, leaving clear the sum of about 142,000 pesos—a substantial estate by any measure but including no landed property. Of this amount, slightly more than 82,000 pesos were earmarked as Juan Bautista Arechederreta’s inheritance, plus about 21,000 pesos in the value of a quinto, an extra amount typically designated for an eldest or favorite heir or another legatee. About 40,000 pesos went to the widow, now remarried. Gabriel Arechederreta’s impact on the Alamán family was to extend well beyond his death in 1779. The bitter legal struggle over his estate between his son Juan Bautista Arechederreta cast a shadow over Juan Vicente Alamán’s last years, distancing the half brothers from each other for some time. On the positive side, Arechederreta had taken an interest in the education and careers of his wife’s brothers. One of these was Miguel Escalada, a wild youth whom Lucas Alamán suggested Arechederreta had treated with “excessive severity” in sending him to the Philippines to prevent his dishonoring the family name, a practice referred to as “throwing [someone] to China.” In this case, alas, the cure was worse than the disease. Wrote Lucas Alamán, “Many times it was observed that such ostracism from the family radically corrected the aberrations of those who displayed them and made productive men of those who would only have been wastrels here [in Mexico]. This did not happen in the case of my unfortunate uncle, who died in Manila at the hand of an offended husband.” Another of Alamán’s maternal uncles whom Arechederreta’s attentions could not save fathered two illegitimate children. A daughter had acquired a “sad renown” for her beauty, louche behavior, and the violent confrontations she inspired between her lovers. The other sibling was a bastard who had been a visible figure in Mexico’s political troubles for his reckless daring and adherence to antigovernment movements. By contrast, Arechederreta’s own son, Juan Bautista, enjoyed a long, distinguished career as a churchman, author on ecclesiastical matters, and rector of the venerable Mexico City schools of San Juan de Letrán and the Colegio de Santa María de Todos Santos, eventually becoming a canon of the capital’s cathedral. In closing the rich, gossipy account he gave of his mother’s family, Lucas Alamán wrote of the rapidly disappearing silver aristocracy and of his own mission to preserve its memory: “Perhaps I have extended myself too much on this junk [antiguallas—an unusually colloquial expression for such a formal stylist as Alamán]

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about my family. It appears useless and boring, [and] within a short time will be absolutely forgotten. I have heard it from many old people among my relatives. . . . In a short time perhaps I will be the only repository of this information. . . . I want, then, to provide this satisfaction to those who may come after me.”

Juan Vicente Alamán Lucas’s father, Juan Vicente Alamán, had arrived in Guanajuato in 1770 at the age of twenty-three. The young Spaniard became the principal employee of his countryman Gabriel Arechederreta, although over the course of the decade he grew to be more like a junior partner in Arechederreta’s substantial commercial establishment. Juan Vicente Alamán almost certainly came to know his future wife in a social context well before their marriage. He was a native of Ochagavia, in the Valle de Salazar, near the French border in what is today the province of Navarre. Juan Vicente’s father (1724–93) bore the same name, and his mother, Francisca Ochoa, died at a relatively young age, perhaps in childbirth, in 1753.20 In the medieval period the Alamanes had been lords of Castelnuovo de Nonafus, Labastida de Levis, Graulhet, Puybegon, and Rabastens, all in the immediate area of Albi in the Languedoc region of southeastern France; other holdings were located around Toulouse, still others south of the Pyrenees.21 These seigneuries were tied strongly to the larger history of the Albigensian heresy, in which members of the Alamán family were implicated (although if they were Catharists themselves is not clear), and therefore to an even more complex, late medieval European history encompassing France and England. How much Lucas Alamán knew of this history is impossible to say; it shows up not at all in his incomplete memoirs but neither does the life of his father. It seems implausible that at least some of the distinguished and dramatic history of the Alamanes should not have been preserved as family myth and memory and would not have come down to the young man from talk with his father (who died when Lucas Alamán was sixteen years old) and other elders. While we know virtually nothing about his personal life, we can reconstruct a good deal of Juan Vicente Alamán’s economic and political presence in his adopted city of Guanajuato during the forty years he lived there. In 1780, at the relatively early age of thirty-three, he was already wealthy and publicly prominent when he married the young widow who was to be Lucas Alamán’s mother; by the time of his only son’s birth in 1792 he was at the peak of his

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career.22 In his Memorias his son wrote that if the history of his mother’s family presented an image of wealth and prodigality, that of his father would present that of simplicity of customs, frugality (economía), and “the happiness that one and the other produce.” From being a clerk working for Gabriel Arechederreta, Juan Vicente quickly found his way to prosperity by setting up his own business (casa de avío) supplying miners and credit to them and was soon investing directly in mining activity. A number of aviadores, among them Gabriel Arechederreta and Juan Vicente Alamán, entered the mining business themselves. Since Juan Vicente Alamán had taken over the substantial store established by Gabriel Arechederreta, it is to be expected that numbers of local people would owe him sums large enough to generate a paper trail. Among the loans he extended to people outside the immediate context of the store, some brought him into contact with families whose sons later played prominent roles in the insurgency of 1810 or the political history of the early republic. Among these were Domingo Narciso de Allende, the father of Ignacio Allende; Roque Abasolo, the father of Mariano Abasolo; and José Francisco Degollado, the father of Santos Degollado, liberal politician and martyr, military commander, Supreme Court judge, government minister, and governor of the State of Michoacán. As so frequently happened, one’s ambition, industriousness, access to capital for investment, social connections, and political visibility did not guarantee success in the actual business of silver mining itself, which could generate huge wealth quickly but huge indebtedness just as quickly. It is possible to offer an informed speculation about the shape of Juan Vicente’s career by tracing the business deals in which he was involved in the two decades before the birth of his son in 1792. In the early 1780s, as an aviador, he counted among his clients the greatest silver magnates of Guanajuato, including the Conde de Valenciana. By the middle of the 1780s Juan Vicente had entered the refining business, partially backed by a loan from Valenciana. By the end of the decade Alamán had acted as banker and supplier for ten miners and was renting his own refining installation. Later still he owned his own ore refinery, El Patrocinio de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato, financed by a thirty-thousand-peso loan from the widowed Condesa de Valenciana in 1789. Lucas Alamán recalled in his memoirs that when he was a young boy his father often took him to the hacienda de beneficio to learn the basics of the refining process. By the time of his death in 1808 Juan Vicente had sunk upward of fifty thousand pesos into the Cata mine without return. As late as 1801 he was paying in taxes on his own mining operations up to 50 percent of those paid by the Conde de

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Valenciana, but by 1805 his payments had declined substantially, suggesting a softening in the family’s economic fortunes in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the 1810 insurgency. Juan Vicente Alamán became increasingly prominent in the civic life of Guanajuato from the early 1780s up to his death in 1808, offering a model for his son. Given his economic success, political visibility, and good marriage, Juan Vicente would have been expected to take a prominent role in the city’s affairs, as successful men typically did. As early as 1782 he was solicited for a substantial contribution for the establishment of a poorhouse (casa de misericordia) in Guanajuato for the relief of the city’s indigent. In subsequent years he pledged funds toward the establishment of convents in the city and assumed a visible place in religious celebrations, both as participant and organizer. He would also have been among those socially prominent local citizens always invited to such celebrations, even when he had not taken a hand in organizing or sponsoring them. One such occasion was the memorial Mass for the recently deceased Condesa de Gálvez, the widow of the former viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez (1746–86), celebrated in the parish church of Guanajuato on 23 November 1799. Alamán was invited to this event by Intendant Juan Antonio de Riaño and the curate of the parish church, Antonio Lavarrieta, attesting to his elite status in the city.23 A document written by Juan Vicente himself around 1793 and preserved by Lucas Alamán among his father’s papers lays out a narrative of the considerable public service Juan Vicente Alamán performed for the city of Guanajuato during the 1780s.24 It was essentially a self-defense justifying his reluctance to serve in an important municipal post for the second time within a decade. His service on the city council had begun in 1781, when he was elected alcalde de primer voto—to the great detriment of his own business activities, he claimed. The following year he became a regular city council member (regidor capitular), remaining in the post for the next decade or so. In this capacity he carried out a number of “serious and difficult commissions,” including overseeing the dredging of the Río Guanajuato, which ran through the middle of town; and the coordination of poor relief in 1785–86 during New Spain’s disastrous “año de hambre” (famine year), the worst harvest failure of the late colonial period. Since there was no bidder for the city’s meat monopoly (abasto de carnes) in 1787, Alamán ran it himself that year, and in 1787 and 1788 he was put in charge of restocking the city’s granary (pósito) and continuing the flow of poor relief. In 1793 he lent his support to the construction of the Alhóndiga, although actual construction of the building did not begin until 1797. This

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massive municipal granary was planned and sponsored by Intendant Riaño, a good friend of the family and a great positive influence on the young Lucas Alamán. But however supportive of the project he was from his post in city government, Juan Vicente vocally opposed Riaño’s plan to make the building architecturally distinguished on the grounds that there was no need to construct “un palacio de maíz” and that the funds should be devoted to something more pressing, such as road building.25 Tired and disillusioned by his decade of service on the city council and feeling that with the birth of his son his personal interests now demanded more of his attention, Juan Vicente concentrated his public activities more in the mining sector of the city during the next few years, taking a prominent role in the mining deputation. Despite this relative wealth of information about Juan Vicente Alamán’s business and political activities, in the end it is difficult to know what to make of him as a man, much less as a father. Lucas Alamán praised his mother’s beauty, but with regard to his father cites only his work ethic and economical ways. Beyond this he tells us in his memoirs almost nothing personal about either parent. Virtually the sole hint Alamán offers about his childhood is to say that he spent many happy years in the home his father built at the time of his son’s birth. But it is possible to offer some gossamer-thin speculations about Juan Vicente. His early life story conforms almost perfectly, at least typologically, to the pattern Brading and other scholars have sketched out of the young, relatively poor but industrious gachupín who emigrates to New Spain from the Basque provinces, works for a while as a commercial employee, and marries a wealthy Creole woman some years his junior—the boss’s daughter or perhaps, as in Juan Vicente’s case, his widow. Through personal application, luck, and an expanding web of social connections he becomes wealthy and respected, assumes a major public role in his community, and might even be ennobled (although not in this case). What sort of social attitudes this successful, even carpetbagging insertion into local society may have bred in Juan Vicente and other Spanish immigrants can only be guessed at, but there must have been at least hints of the ant and the grasshopper fable in the Spaniards’ ideas about their Mexican Creole cousins. Given prevailing notions of gender relations in late colonial elite families and Juan Vicente Alamán’s various business and political activities, we may also speculate that he was out of the home much of the time, thus defining a fairly sharp division between a female domestic sphere dominated by his wife and an external, exclusively male sphere in which he circulated. This may have bred quite possibly respectful, even affectionate but distanced relations between Juan Vicente and his chil-

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dren. There are also indications in his own account of his political activities in Guanajuato of a man touchy about his prerogatives and personal honor— although no more so than other men of his background, class, and time— confident in his abilities and not bashful about claiming credit where he felt it due and somewhat inclined to say “I told you so” when his advice was not followed. Whatever his parents’ influence on him, Lucas Alamán’s life was also shaped by the urban and physical environment in which he spent his childhood and adolescence. The surrounding mountains, the mines, the clear, cool air, the cobbled, narrow streets, and the substantial homes of the social elite— a few palatial (although never on the scale of the more spacious Mexico City), most of them more discrete—surely exerted a pull on his senses and memory as they do on the visitor even today. He returned to the city of his birth frequently when his health allowed, drawn by family and business interests and by its particular charm. Yet against this apparently idyllic backdrop was played out the shocking episode of the Hidalgo rebellion in which Lucas Alamán was himself briefly, almost fatally, swept up and which he was later to chronicle so eloquently. People close to him died either during the attack at the hands of the insurgents or in its wake at the hands of the royalist forces, the life of his natal city was ferociously disrupted, and the brittleness of the society in which he was raised was impressed on him. The elegiac tone of his childhood recollections and the family history were therefore violently juxtaposed against the wrenching apart of the social fabric in 1810. This furnished him not only with the dramatic material he later narrated as a historian, but also with a set of social and political attitudes that came to mark his adult life.

2 • A Silver-Plated Youth (1792–1815)

City of Silver: The Guanajuato of Alamán’s Childhood The beautiful and prosperous city of Guanajuato, long the provincial capital, was designated an intendancy in 1787. A hugely rich mining and commercial center, its silver mines produced much of the world’s silver in the eighteenth century (as Mexico still does) and underwrote several of the greatest fortunes and noble titles of the late colonial period. A late-eighteenthcentury description of the wealthier families could well apply to that of Juan Vicente Alamán: “Guanajuato has an extremely large population, full of native Spanish [i.e., Creole] people and families and many from Europe who through their industry and application have made large fortunes, some from the demanding working of the mines, which is their principal occupation, others from trade and commerce in silver and gold [and] the numerous mercantile establishments.”1 The city was the center of the Bajío, central Mexico’s breadbasket. The rural landscape was dominated by prosperous haciendas and family farms and was dotted with indigenous villages. Much of the wealth from the silver mines flowed into the large-scale commercial agriculture of the countryside, spurring the agricultural economy to rapid growth after 1750. The intendancy’s population grew substantially during the first decade of Alamán’s life, from nearly four hundred thousand in 1793 to over five hundred thousand in 1803, its racial makeup disproportionately European in background compared to the rest of New Spain.2 The city with its suburbs counted over fifty thousand inhabitants, increasing to about seventy thousand by Alamán’s tenth year. The decade-long insurgency hit the region hard, shrinking the city to about fifteen thousand souls, but the numbers

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rebounded quickly with the return of peace.3 Of the city’s adult males at Alamán’s birth, over half were engaged one way or another in mining or refining. From the time of the first silver strikes in the mid-sixteenth century Guanajuato had crept down the hillsides from the silver mining camps toward the Guanajuato River, which occasionally overflowed its banks, flooding the structures along its margins. A late-eighteenth-century description pictured the terrain as “difficult, broken, and sunken among crags and canyons.”4 The streets in the center of the old town were (and are still) irregular, steep, and cobblestoned, making the passage of carriages impossible except in a few areas; the irregularly shaped main plaza had very little level space. Modern vehicular traffic is difficult, and even now one sees pack animals trudging through the city streets. Alamán noted in his description of the town that builders had been very ingenious in their use of space, the streets so steeply pitched that often the threshold of one house was at the roof level of the neighboring one below it. Since there was very little flat land in the growing town, travelers compared it to un papel arrugado, a wrinkled sheet of paper, the same metaphor invoked by Fernando Cortés when Emperor Charles V asked him to describe the geography of New Spain. A comparison is often drawn between Guanajuato and the Spanish city of Toledo, while the picturesque Tuscan city of San Gimignano has a similar feel to it.5 Downstream, in Marfil, lay the silver processing refineries, stretching along the river and numbering more than eighty around 1790. The scores of silver mines above the town were all located in close proximity along the Veta Madre, the main ore face. Most important among these were the Valenciana, Rayas, Sirena, Mellado, and Cata, the latter two closely associated with the Busto and Alamán families. The city had many beautiful churches underwritten by mining fortunes; monastic establishments, both male and female; a number of schools associated with the Church; and even a free school financed by the city government. A full complement of government buildings occupied the city center along with the grand homes of the wealthy. All the basic craft and service occupations were well-represented. The plazas and plazuelas bustled with commerce of all kinds, and at night people of all classes filled the streets: “At night the city is beautifully illuminated so that people may walk about diverting themselves with the agreeable spectacle of the infinity of vendors of food and drink set out for the pleasure of the passersby, with the pleasure and diversion of much music until a certain hour.”6 The mining population, Alamán wrote, “occupied in the hard and dangerous work of the mines, was lively, happy, spendthrift, brave, and bold.”7

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A Privileged Youth Lucas Alamán’s birth was preceded a decade earlier by his parents’ first (his mother’s second) child, María de la Luz Estefania Anna José Ignacia Alamán y Escalada, born on 25 December 1781. The following year another daughter, Agustina, was stillborn. Given the difference in their ages and the structure of elite families at the time it seems unlikely that Lucas and his surviving sister grew particularly close, although she does show up in his correspondence occasionally in later years. In his brief published autobiography, Épocas de los principales sucesos de mi vida, Lucas Alamán explicitly commented on the age gaps between himself and his siblings, underlining their significance in writing that “from the birth of my brother to the second of us [and again to me] there was an interval of ten years.”8 By the time she was twenty years old or so María de la Luz had established her own family through marriage to Manuel Iturbe Iraeta, yet another Basque immigrant to New Spain, born in the tiny town of Anzuola in Guipúzcoa in 1763 and thus nearly two decades her senior. This age difference between Spanish immigrants and their Creole brides was fairly typical, making the four-year age gap between María Ignacia and Juan Vicente Alamán somewhat unusual. Iturbe Iraeta held the rank of major in the Provincial Battalion of Guanajuato, which came to play an important role among loyalist forces during the early weeks of the 1810 insurgency. Long before this he was named governor of Nuevo Santander, today encompassing much of the modern state of Tamaulipas and bits of Texas. The couple went on to have four children between 1803 and 1810. The eldest of these, with whom Lucas Alamán enjoyed a cordial personal and business relationship, was Luis Iturbe Alamán, born in 1803 and thus only a decade younger than his famous uncle. By the time of Lucas Alamán’s birth on 18 October 1792 the family was quite prosperous and would remain so until the early years of the new century saw the sudden bankruptcy of a merchant firm in which they had invested a good deal of money. This event changed their circumstances considerably, shaping Lucas Alamán’s view of the decline in wealth and social status on his mother’s side from the days of the first Marqués de San Clemente. Another financial reverse occurred during the war years, again involving the bankruptcy of a major mercantile house, but by then young Lucas was traveling in Europe, would soon be earning his own living, and would not have been as close to the gravitational vortex of the collapse as when he was a boy. The sudden death of his father in 1808, when Lucas was sixteen years old and staying

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with relatives in the north of the country, left his mother widowed a second time in late middle age, deprived the small family of its anchor and Lucas of the senior male in his life, and threw something of a shadow over the Alamán fortunes. Juan Vicente Alamán had sufficient wherewithal in 1791–92 to build the fine house near the center of town in which Lucas Alamán was raised and that still stands today on the Cuesta del Marqués, where the Busto family mansion was also located. As his wife’s confinement for the birth of her second son approached, Juan Vicente Alamán rushed construction of the building so that the couple’s child might be born there. The house occasioned a construction cost of sixty thousand pesos, a very substantial sum at the time, making for a large, well-located, and well-appointed residence. It was described in a 1929 newspaper article by the Guanajuato poet, historian, and lawyer Agustín Lanuza: “[Its] exterior aspect tells us that it was one of the most solid houses in Guanajuato, with its wide and deeply etched main door, its façade with four spacious balconies, all of wrought iron and supported by carved, pink masonry pedestals, the front of the house flanked by . . . [carved representations of] the royal pennant. . . . The house was a veritable bank that supplied goods and financed miners and refiners, Creoles as well as Spaniards.”9 This was the house whose profitable sale to the Anglo-Mexican Mining Company in 1824 Lucas Alamán would regret. Most of what we know about Lucas Alamán’s childhood up to his early adolescence is circumstantial, with his own figure at the center, silhouetted against events within his family and the outbreak of the independence movement. Child-rearing practices were changing in Mexico, parents becoming increasingly involved with the education and personal formation of their children. In the view of an observer as sharp-eyed as the liberal writer, journalist, and politician Guillermo Prieto, describing the Alamán household in the 1840s and 1850s, Alamán and his wife, Narcisa Castrillo, were attentive and affectionate parents to their children: “In their domestic life they were the model of good spouses and loving parents. Strict in their discipline, they educated their children themselves[,] having apportioned a cloister inside their house [for this purpose].”10 Lucas Alamán maintained a close relationship with several of his children, especially the eldest, the priest Gil and the lawyer Juan Bautista, working with them (particularly the latter) over long periods and furthering their careers when he could. Despite the absence of information about his early years, we know that Alamán’s childhood was a privileged one by any measure. The Alamán home was of a piece with the bustling, wealthy city with its clearly marked class

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system, a cultural life, and a good deal of muted social ostentation by the wealthy. Living in the city there were married aunts (his mother’s sisters), their husbands, and therefore a number of cousins as well as his uncle Tomás Alamán. Given his rather late date of birth relative to the extended family, Lucas Alamán must have been one of the youngest among the cousins. The 1792 census provides some interesting information about the Alamán household. The Guanajuato count corresponds to the year of Lucas Alamán’s birth, 1792. The Alamán household appears on the Calle del Ensaye (Assay Street) no. 37. It was made up of Juan Vicente Alamán, a European Spaniard forty-five years of age, occupation merchant (comerciante), married to María Ignacia Escalada, Spaniard (i.e., Creole). No age or other information besides ethnicity and civil status was given for women since this was a census only of men for military purposes. Bachiller don Juan (without the Bautista) Arechederreta, deacon (diácono), aged twenty-one, also appears, obviously still living under his mother’s roof, as does an “hija pequeña” who must be María de la Luz, Lucas’s elder sister, ten years old at the time and therefore not so very pequeña. There was a mestizo servant of fifty, José Pablo Castro, married to a mestizo woman named Vicenta Campos, along with their fifteen-year-old son Luis, an unmarried servant, and an unnamed, unmarried daughter. Mysteriously, there also appear “two [small] daughters and a [female] orphan,” all Spanish, all unnamed; who these female children were, or who their parents, is not specified. There were two other teenaged boys, José Antonio Aguilar, Spanish, unmarried, sixteen years old, and Lorenzo Villalba, mestizo, unmarried, fifteen years old; presumably they were both servants of some sort. Finally, there were two more female maids (criadas), both widows, both Spanish. Absent is Lucas Alamán, yet to be born in the house on the Cuesta del Marqués that October. Some interesting things about the social ecology are reflected in the 1792 census. First, the household was made up of fifteen people, most of them not related to Juan Vicente or his family and most of them servants of some sort. This was a relatively large household even for the time and place, and it placed the Alamán establishment among the largest of the city, a sign of its prosperity. By comparison, on the Plaza Mayor, where Juan Vicente was shortly to move his family, the home of Intendant Riaño was listed, including only Riaño himself, his wife, three small children (one of whom must be the ill-fated Gil, who was to die with his father eighteen years later in the defense of the Alhóndiga), and a young Spanish clerk. In the same area was the home of Bernabé de Bustamante, a prominent European Spanish merchant of fifty-

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one married to a woman of the Septién clan and therefore a distant cousin of Lucas Alamán through his mother’s side of the family; the household also included the couple’s four minor children, Bustamante’s Spanish (i.e., Creole) mother-in-law, and a widowed mestiza servant. These domestic ménages were much smaller than that of the Alamáns, especially where the number of servants was concerned, although perhaps they had servants come in on a daily basis. Just up the street, at number 35, lived Tomás Alamán, Juan Vicente’s much younger half brother, a twenty-four-year-old bachelor merchant, and two young European bachelor clerks (cajeros), but no sign of domestic personnel. Finally, the house from which Juan Vicente was shortly to move his large domestic establishment was in a somewhat mixed neighborhood. Nearby on the Calle del Ensaye was the home of a young European Spanish bachelor merchant with two slightly younger single clerks, no women and no servants; a mestiza widow with an unmarried daughter; and a Spanish widow with three single daughters. This seems to have been a more modest environment than the rarefied, socially resplendent one of the Plaza Mayor; probably this accounts for Juan Vicente’s wanting to move there. The age difference of ten years between Lucas and his elder sister, Luz, was sufficiently large that he must effectively have been raised as an only child. He also enjoyed the status of being the sole male child in a household in which the carrying on of the Alamán name (his elder half brother did not bear the name and was a priest) and a certain public prominence were to be expected later on. When he came along his parents were relatively advanced in age. Juan Vicente Alamán was about forty-five when his only son was born. This was by no means old for elite fathers at the time, especially among those who had immigrated from Spain to New Spain, typically delaying marriage well into their thirties, forties, or even later. But Lucas Alamán’s mother, María Ignacia, was forty-one years old when her son was born. Given overall life expectancy at the time and the rapid waning of women’s reproductive capacity with age, this was almost elderly. There is no evidence that this late birth event did harm to either mother or son, since she lived to be at least seventy years old, and the chronic lung problems that eventually brought on his death at sixty-one seem to have developed in his adulthood. Still, one is tempted to speculate about the effect this combination of circumstances in his upbringing—privileged economic position, social prominence, possibly doting older parents, status as virtually an only (male) child—might have had on the future statesman’s psychological makeup. I think I have detected a certain strain of melancholy in Alamán’s personality as an adult, his public persona not that of

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a hyper-masculine, aggressive man, much less a flamboyant one. But there is no evidence that he doubted his abilities or significance or that he was insecure; quite the contrary. And while it is impossible to draw a straight line between these qualities and the family circumstances of his upbringing, he may well have enjoyed the sort of mirroring—the positive reinforcement of his accomplishments by his parents, allowing a certain space for infantile and childish grandiosity—that builds a healthy self-concept later in life and steers an individual away from narcissistic personality traits. Lucas Alamán’s education was eclectic, quite common among elite men at the time. There was little attendance at a university except for some classes here and there, since formal university training would have been reserved for ecclesiastics, lawyers, and the higher sort of medical practitioners. Alamán’s early elementary education and socialization outside the home were carried out at an amiga in Calle de los Pósitos, near his family home, run by doña Josefa Camacho. An amiga was a nursery school “run by a woman for the purpose of teaching the catechism, manners, and a few basic manual skills to children from ages three to five or six.”11 He then went on to further his elementary education with the priest Father José de San Gerónimo at the Belén school in the city, an arrangement so satisfactory that out of gratitude Juan Vicente Alamán made a large financial contribution to enlarge the school’s building. As he entered adolescence Alamán’s education was given into the hands of private tutors and secular schoolmasters who taught him primarily classical languages and mathematics, while his father laid down the basics of his training as a mining engineer. Beginning at about the age of eleven or twelve he studied the Latin classics for at least two years under the tutelage of Francisco Cornelio Diosdado, demonstrating “his clear intelligence” by his quick mastery of the language and texts, according to José Valadés. “In a single year,” continues Valadés, “he went through [the early stages of learning Latin] and in ten months of the [second year] he learned to perfection advanced Latin,” going on to translate the works of Cornelius Nepos, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the epistles of Saint Jerome.12 This early training in the Latin classics accounts for Alamán’s facility in using quotations from Ovid and other Latin authors as epigraphs in his works, although he was hardly alone in this among other educated men of his generation. At the age of thirteen he participated in a public examination of other young Latinists in Guanajuato on 6 September 1805, earning the approbation as “best among all [the contestants].” One of the examiners on this occasion was Intendant Juan

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Antonio de Riaño, already a friend of the Alamán family. Riaño was to take a sort of avuncular interest in Lucas Alamán and other young men of the city’s jeunesse dorée over the next five years until his fatal collision with Hidalgo’s army at the Alhóndiga whose construction he had sponsored. Around this time Alamán began the serious study of mathematics at the Jesuit Colegio de la Purísima Concepción under instruction from the young professor and mining engineer Rafael Dávalos, also to lose his life in the fall of 1810, but at the hands of the royalist commanders Félix María Calleja and Manuel de Flon, Conde de la Cadena, who would die on the battlefield at the Puente de Calderón, outside Guadalajara, some weeks later.13 Alamán capped his education in mathematics at another public examination around this time. Aside from normal, day-to-day interactions within the household we have little information about Alamán’s relationship with his father, but we can reasonably assume that it was a mixture of Spanish formality and the warmth generated by the ardent hopes of a man for his obviously precocious only son. There is likely to have been a certain amount of mixing with adult visitors to the Alamán household as the young Master Lucas entered adolescence, in which he would have gained at least an advanced child’s understanding of business and political affairs. His father immersed him in the world of silver mining and refining in which he had become increasingly involved in the early years of the century: “My father set me to mining, taking me every day to learn silver refining at the Patrocinio de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato, which was his and which he had built, and frequently to the Cata mine, which he was working in company with others of my relatives. . . . Because this was my first occupation and all my maternal grandparents had been miners, I developed the attachment I have always had for this endeavor.”14 José Valadés tells us something more about the role of Intendant Riaño in the young man’s life, although Alamán himself was oddly silent on this relationship in both his Memorias and Épocas. Juan Antonio de Riaño had already distinguished himself as a frigate commander under Bernardo de Gálvez in fighting against the English in Louisiana and Florida, not least in the capture of Pensacola in 1781. He had served as the first intendant of Valladolid, when at the age of thirty-five he arrived in 1792 to occupy the same post in Guanajuato. He quickly came to know Juan Vicente Alamán and his family on social terms since at Riaño’s arrival the elder Alamán was still involved in civic affairs and remained prominent through most of Riaño’s career in the silver city. Riaño’s wife, a New Orleans belle named Victoria de Saint Maxent, was sister to the wife of Bernardo de Gálvez. She charmed Guanajuato high society

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with her manners and conversation, adding much to the attractiveness of the society formed around her husband, although she never acquired great fluency in Spanish: “Her sweetness, and her fine and elegant manners, reminded one of the Court of Louis XV, at the same time that her openness led her to become friendly with all the distinguished ladies of Guanajuato, where she was universally esteemed.” One of these distinguished women would certainly have been Lucas Alamán’s mother. Lauding Riaño’s aesthetic sense, his pride, and his unimpeachable personal valor, Valadés sums him up as “the essence of the Castilian” whose many virtues outshone the empire even then guttering out. Although French was spoken in the intendant’s household, the influence of the Enciclopédistes did not come with it openly but instead the ideas of the Spanish Enlightenment and the Bourbon Reforms. Valadés goes so far as to call Riaño “the teacher of Alamán’s thought; with him he learned to love languages, music, painting, [and] the natural sciences.” While it is true that the young man was exposed to the cosmopolitan intellectual currents in the intendant’s home at a formative time in his life, how much he imbibed at Riaño’s salons is difficult to say. The male Creole youths of the city owed much to their contact in the intendant’s home with the scientists, architects, and other intellectuals whom Riaño frequently invited in.15 Some years later, Carlos María de Bustamante, as ardent a Creole nationalist as the era produced, wrote in eulogy of the intendant: “He put to effect the theory of Jovellanos. . . . He foresaw the fate of this continent; he was a victim of his own military honor. . . . Placed at the head of any branch of public administration he would have been the pride of his nation. Such a bright star transcended the orbit he was intended to follow. He loved Americans and was the only commander in the contest for our liberty who observed the principles of war and of peoples. Nature had given [him] at once greatness of spirit and personal beauty.”16 By the beginning of the century the economic fortunes of Alamán’s family had begun to slip. In about 1802 the amount of taxes Juan Vicente paid on his earnings from the Cata mine and other holdings turned quite sharply downward. Around this time another prop was knocked from under the family economy by the collapse of a large merchant enterprise in Veracruz, the Casa de Vertiz, in which Juan Vicente Alamán had invested a considerable amount of money in the form of loaned capital. The exact nature of the relationship is not clear, but it figured subsequently in the sort of collective memory that all families develop about their pasts. The gross indebtedness of the firm was enormous, amounting to nearly 2,250,000 pesos. When the case arrived in

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the commercial tribunal, the prosecuting official there accused the Casa de Vertiz of complete bad faith and fraud in the matter. The resolution of all this was that a committee of commercial tribunal merchants was formed to assess the assets of the enterprise, depositing any liquid sums realized from the sale of holdings with the Casa de Basoco, an old and secure merchant and silverbanking establishment. Where exactly Juan Vicente Alamán’s claims fit into this morass of debts is not clear, nor whether he was in a sufficiently high position on the greasy pole of creditors to recover much if anything. As the ten-year-old Lucas Alamán was continuing his early studies in the Latin classics, a reconciliation was effected in 1802 between his father and elder half brother, Juan Bautista Arechederreta, estranged from each other for some years over the matter of Gabriel de Arechederreta’s estate. A prolonged visit at the end of 1804 by Juan Vicente Alamán and his family to Mexico City may have been the first time the young Lucas saw the great city that would be his home for most of his adult life. Perhaps Juan Vicente’s softening economic position and the losses he incurred in the collapse of the Vertiz firm induced the priest to delay or otherwise moderate his claims against his late father’s estate. The years 1807–8 were to mark a major turning point in the life of Lucas Alamán: at the age of sixteen he was to lose his father. Toward the end of 1807 Juan Vicente Alamán arranged for his only son to journey to the northeastern part of what is today Mexico proper, then the province of Nuevo Santander, of which his son-in-law Manuel Iturbe e Iraeta, had been appointed governor. While at the home of his sister and brother-in-law Alamán made the acquaintance of an old Indian fighter named Ramón Díaz de Bustamante, by his account a Falstaffian character known to the Indians against whom he had fought as the Red Captain because of his reddish complexion and fair hair.17 Bustamante’s colorful tales of his exploits riveted the young visitor’s attention. Alamán wrote to his father a number of highly detailed and evocative letters (now unfortunately lost) about Bustamante, later referring to them as his first literary efforts. The young man’s northern idyll came abruptly to an end in the spring of 1808, however, with the news that his father had died suddenly on 29 April 1808, at the age of sixty-one. Lucas and his elder sister, Luz, returned immediately to Guanajuato to comfort their mother, widowed for the second time at the age of fifty-one. Although we know little of Juan Vicente Alamán’s personality or intimate relationships, José Valadés’s valedictory evokes at least a plausible portrait: “A man of irreproachable life, of great capacity in initiating and

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carrying out large enterprises—qualities that don Lucas was to inherit—, don Juan Vicente died when his fortune had begun to decline, which foreshadowed the end of the mining town that for years and years had been the central support of the colonial economy.”18 Juan Vicente Alamán left no will, oddly enough, which could well have raised complicated questions regarding inheritance, but that did not happen. At least Lucas Alamán mentioned nothing in either his Épocas or his Memorias about conflicts within the family regarding the disposition of his father’s estate. The passing of Alamán pére occasioned within weeks a family reunion in Guanajuato including his widow, María Ignacia, her children Juan Bautista Arechederreta, Lucas, and María de la Luz, the latter’s husband Manuel Iturbe, and Juan Vicente’s brother Tomás. The property settlement stipulated that the sixteen-year-old Lucas receive as his paternal inheritance sixty thousand pesos, control of which remained formally in the hands of his mother until he came into his majority in 1817, at the age of twenty-five, while he was traveling in Europe. Under the rules of equal partible inheritance, Lucas Alamán and his sister would have come into equal shares of their father’s half of the Alamán–Escalada couple’s property, the other half remaining with their mother. Any dowry María de la Luz had taken into her marriage with Manuel Iturbe would have been deducted from her share. Some portion of the estate would have gone to the widow María Ignacia as gananciales, a form of community property representing the increase in value of the couple’s joint property after their marriage, with the value of the widow’s own parental inheritance first deducted. Since Juan Vicente left no will, he could not have increased his son Lucas’s inheritance by any of the legal devices in use at the time. There must also have been debts claimed against the estate by creditors as well as sums owing to it; the former would have reduced its total liquid value while some of the latter surely would have been written off as uncollectible. There is no trace of any significant amount of rural property in the estate, which was somewhat unusual. Juan Vicente Alamán’s wealth consisted primarily of circulating capital, the commercial enterprise in Guanajuato and its related avío (silver banking) activities with other silver miners, at least one major silver refinery, shares in the Cata mine, the capacious house in central Guanajuato, and personal property such as paintings, furniture, jewelry, and silver plate. The total liquid value of Juan Vicente’s estate came to between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand pesos. The house built fifteen years earlier remained with María Ignacia, to be sold some years later by her son. The fate of the mining refinery, Patrocinio de Nuestra Señora de Guana-

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juato, is not clear. The shares of the Cata mine remained in family hands for a long time—inventories of Lucas Alamán’s estate list some of these many years later, although by that time he claimed they were valueless—but how they were distributed is not known. Juan Vicente’s commercial establishment in Guanajuato, which he had taken over from his wife’s first husband, was left intact, to be managed on behalf of the heirs by Gregorio de Trasviña, described by Lucas as “an associate with an interest [in the business]” and an employee for whom María Ignacia “had a great predilection.” In comparison with the estates left by other major entrepreneurs and miners of the period, Juan Vicente’s was not an insubstantial fortune in absolute terms. Lucas Alamán’s paternal inheritance (he would receive a maternal inheritance upon his mother’s death some years later) was a healthy sum, therefore, but there were problems of liquidity, and there may well have been some diminution of his father’s estate subsequent to its initial evaluation. Invested in anything other than a silver mine in bonanza, assuming a steady return of 5 percent on capital, the sixty thousand pesos would have yielded about three thousand pesos per year in income. Even had he wanted to live the life of a sybaritic gentleman of leisure, therefore, Lucas Alamán could not have supported such a lifestyle or the large family he came to have on the basis of his paternal inheritance alone. He needed to work for his income his whole life, looking for the main chance to multiply his modest resources through fortunate investments. This was exactly the course he pursued, although ultimately with little success.

The Tempest Arrives With Juan Vicente Alamán put to rest and his affairs settled in amicable fashion, Father Juan Bautista convinced his mother to move with her younger son to Mexico City to expand the boy’s educational and social horizons. She and Lucas arrived in the great viceregal capital in late September 1808, just after the 15 September overthrow of Viceroy José de Iturrigaray by a powerful group of peninsular Spanish officials and merchants. Alamán commented in later writings that the deposed viceroy had just been imprisoned when he and his mother arrived in the city around 21 September. Amid much political uncertainty in the great city, he continued the study of drawing he had begun in Guanajuato and took up French with the bookseller Manuel del Valle at his home and shop at Calle Tacuba no. 24, very near the site of today’s well-known Café de Tacuba. This was a small school in which banned French and English works were read, an exposure to modern ideas that probably had a lifelong

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influence on Alamán’s broad reading tastes and may have contributed to his run-in with the Inquisition a few years later. The circumstances of María Ignacia and her younger son in Mexico City, where they stayed for the better part of a year, were comfortable enough despite the diminution of the family fortunes. The widow could still afford to respond to the call from the new viceroy, Pedro Garibay, for a two-thousandpeso donativo gracioso (voluntary donation) to support the cause of the Spanish loyalists against the French invaders in the peninsula. While in Mexico City, mother and son stayed for some time in the home of Juan Bautista de Arechederreta, by now in his midthirties and making his way upward in his ecclesiastical career. Staying there at the same time while pursuing a lawsuit was the militia officer, landowner, and future emperor of Mexico Agustín de Iturbide. José Valadés reports from an unidentified source that Iturbide dined with María Ignacia and her son daily and was on familiar enough terms with Lucas Alamán’s mother that he addressed her as mamita.19 After a year or so in Mexico City, mother and son returned to Guanajuato late in 1809 so that she might attend to the commercial and mining interests now operating under the oversight of Gregorio Trasviña. But she herself continued engaged in business, as she was to do into the 1820s, making loans both small and large, and actively involved in cleaning up the affairs of her deceased second husband. During this busy year handling the family’s business affairs, doña Ignacia had her younger son’s help with their mining interests, drawing on the knowledge he had acquired accompanying his father to the refineries and mines. In the meantime, young Lucas continued with his education, partly on the basis of the large personal library his father had left. Years later Alamán wrote explicitly of the spread of the reading habit among educated guanajuatenses and of the penetration of Enlightenment ideas despite the efforts of the Inquisition, “which up until then had had no one to pursue except Portuguese Jews, bigamists, and apostate friars, [but now] had this new field that unfortunately came to be so fruitful.”20 In the library of Father Lavarrieta he read his first work of history in the modern style, an “Historia Universal” translated from the original English, the same book that had been read by Father Miguel Hidalgo. Alamán advanced in his study of mathematics and physics on his own using textbooks by eighteenth-century French academics. He also continued reading in the Greek and Latin classics, studied drawing with a drawing master named Guadalupe García, and taught himself to play the guitar. The eighteen-year-old at this time established a small music publishing business in partnership with some children of Intendant Riaño. Printed music, he was to remark many

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years later, “was at that time scarce and expensive, and we [even] . . . trained a young man to engrave [musical notes].”21 He continued his attendance at Riaño’s home, mingling with the sons of such elite families as the Sardanetas, Bassocos, Irizares, and Bustamantes and improving his French in conversation with the intendant’s French-speaking wife. News of political ferment in the capital, Spain, and Europe and speculation about the fate of New Spain were swirling thickly about him. How this child of peninsular pedigree and Creole privilege metabolized the amalgam of political fact, rumor, and speculation we can only guess; but when the insurgency broke out in the fall of 1810 it could not have been totally unexpected, although its source may have been. On returning to his natal city the young Alamán joined the Franciscan Third Order. What specific doctrinal or spiritual preparation he may have undertaken is unknown. While the young man’s interest in the natural sciences was still being fostered by the circle around Riaño, and in Mexico City he himself would further his education in scientific subjects, another element of his character was emerging in this period—his Christian piety. Despite his ardent political conservatism later in life and his pro-Church ideological and political stance, Alamán was never to wear his religion on his sleeve. He scarcely wrote about his religious beliefs and consistent with his character kept his religious sensibility and practice a private matter. He maintained friendships with a number of churchmen, including his elder half brother; one of his sons became a priest and at least one of his daughters entered a religious order. We must suppose that he was at least conventionally observant, although what his internal religious landscape was is hard to determine. Certainly his joining the Franciscan Third Order strongly suggests a deep personal piety rather beyond the ordinary. He was opposed to the Inquisition both out of intellectual conviction and personal experience, criticized the oldfashioned Scholastic curriculum in Mexican universities, and invested a good deal of effort in establishing secular forms of elementary education (e.g., the Lancasterian System). In his 1853 letter to Santa Anna he shunned the idea of an Inquisition while embracing the concept of censorship of written works as conservative articles of faith. This stance suggests he envisioned shifting some of the traditional functions of the Catholic Church to an essentially secularized central state imbued with Christian values. In this letter as well as in the final passages of his Historia de Méjico he famously declared that in the absence of a true feeling for the nation among its citizens, which he felt had yet to develop, Catholic religious belief was the one social and ideological glue that could keep Mexico together.

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Whatever he believed or felt as an older adult, at the age of eighteen Lucas Alamán was sufficiently pious and public enough about that piety to join the Third Order of San Francisco, a fraternal organization for seculars established by St. Francis of Assisi in 1221. He was inducted on 11 February 1810, shortly after his return to Guanajuato, through the offices of Brother Antonio de la Torre, the secretary of the Third Penitential Order of San Francisco in Guanajuato. Basically unaltered until reformed by papal decree in 1883, the rules of the Third Order imposed a stronger commitment on members to observe practices already obligatory for good Catholics. These included the normal observance of fasting, abstinence, performance of the canonical office, regular confession and communion, and works of charity. Members were also enjoined to observe strict simplicity in clothing and the dressing of their hair; to avoid frivolous entertainments, casas sospechosas, taverns, and gambling; and were prohibited from carrying arms or taking solemn oaths. In general they were to lead exemplary lives, following in the footsteps of the saint himself as strictly as worldly life allowed. Alamán’s personal presentation later in life— the image we have of him from his writings, his public persona, the descriptions of him left by other people—is certainly in keeping with these precepts. His life suggests that he was a man searching for order in all things, but strictly on his own terms. He was a man to whom flamboyance, the wasting of time, public displays of sentiment, and certainly the chaos of democratic politics were at best distractions to be controlled by self-discipline and social engineering, and at worst a sort of social and personal entropy to be avoided at all costs. How closely Alamán kept to the precepts of the Third Order—whether he indulged in wine with dinner, for example, or the occasional postprandial brandy—we do not know. Later in life he was an enthusiastic theater- and opera-goer, but these forms seem not to have constituted the sort of frivolous entertainments to be avoided. The young Lucas Alamán met Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the parish priest of Dolores, at the home of Alamán’s Septién cousins at a Christmas event, a coloquio or pastoral, so it must have been in early January 1810. Alamán described Hidalgo as being of medium stature, somewhat hunched, with dark skin and vivacious green eyes. The fifty-seven-year-old priest, whom the young Alamán took to be more than sixty, was partially bald and graying, his head somewhat drooping over his chest but vigorous in his movements. Having observed the father of Mexican independence in social situations, Alamán described the curate of Dolores as not particularly loquacious but animated in argument “in the style of the college”—Hidalgo had been a professor, after all.

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He dressed in the clothing common to village priests of the time, sporting a black cape, round hat, a large cane or walking stick (bastón), knee-length breeches, and a woolen jacket of a type of material imported from China called Rompecoche. Lucas Alamán later evaluated Hidalgo as being essentially an idealistic but incompetent dreamer, a dangerous egghead. Idyllic as these Christmas celebrations of 1809–10 may have been, in the late summer of 1810 the world of Alamán’s privileged childhood and youth would suddenly implode, throwing him and millions of other novohispanos into a wider and permanently chaotic political drama in which he was fated to play a major role for half his life. In Mexico City the aged Marshal Pedro de Garibay, hastily put onto the viceregal throne in September 1808 by Gabriel de Yermo’s pro-Spanish golpistas (plotters), was replaced after ten months as viceroy by Bishop Francisco Javier de Lizana y Beaumont. The bishop took up his duties in early July 1809 under the auspices of the Junta Suprema Central in Spain, ruling from Aranjuez in the name of the usurped Ferdinand VII. During his brief government Viceroy Lizana began to put New Spain on a war footing to suppress internal subversion and resist a French invasion, which never materialized. One measure the bishop-viceroy took to raise funds was to embargo the properties of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone in the country, the valuable feudal remnant of the conqueror Fernando Cortés’s vast urban and rural holdings, thus guaranteeing a large loan whose funds went into the royal coffers. Alamán would subsequently manage the duque’s holdings for nearly three decades, constantly either fighting off, attempting to reverse, or seeking compensation for such government sequestrations. In Valladolid in late December 1809, meanwhile, a conspiracy led by militia officers was unearthed, among whom José Mariano Michelena figured prominently. Alamán was to serve most of his first government ministry in 1823–25 under the Supremo Poder Ejecutivo (SPE), in which Michelena functioned as one of a triumvirate of executive leaders. Alamán would appoint Michelena Mexican envoy to Great Britain, maintaining a cordial relationship with him despite their political differences. But the Valladolid episode had been preceded by small conspiratorial movements stretching back over nearly two decades, among them the Guerrero Conspiracy of 1794, the Machete Conspiracy of 1799, and the Indio Mariano episode of 1801 in the area of Tepic. All of these received considerable attention a half century later from Alamán the historian, who saw them as foreshadowing signs of major stresses in the colonial order. Political events were moving rapidly in Spain, as well, with the French invasion followed by royal abdications, Spanish resistance, the

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establishment of a governing junta followed by a regency, and the convocation of the Cortes of Cádiz in 1810. Beyond these events there thrummed a constant background noise of speech and writing deemed subversive by the colonial authorities.

Guanajuato Falls News of events in the town of Dolores in the early morning hours of 16 September 1810—that “poisoned spring [which has been] the origin of all the ills the nation laments,” as Alamán was later to write—reached Intendant Riaño on 18 September along with word of the sacking of San Miguel el Grande and similar events in Celaya.22 Father Hidalgo’s grito (rallying cry) at the door of his parish church had raised the banner of revolt in the name of King Ferdinand VII and against the perfidious peninsular Spaniards who, it was feared, would hand New Spain over to the godless French. His call immediately spawned a rapidly growing, ill-disciplined, badly armed force of country people under the standard of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Following these relatively easy victories, realizing that the capture of the city of Querétaro would be militarily too costly an operation, Father Hidalgo resolved to advance instead on Guanajuato. The city held strategic as well as symbolic importance, and a prize of three million pesos in cash and unminted silver. There followed ten days of feverish preparations to defend Guanajuato against an attack that must inevitably come. An experienced military officer, Riaño was everywhere, directing the digging of defensive ditches, the barricading of the principal streets with wooden palisades, and the drilling of the local militia battalion, all of which would prove completely futile. On Thursday, 20 September, the city awoke to find that the trenches and other works intended as a first line of defense against a rebel attack had been destroyed by the encroaching insurgents. In the ensuing panic almost all the European Spaniards and many Creoles fled for safety to the Alhóndiga, the massively built granary that Lucas Alamán’s father had derisively called the corn palace two decades before. Acting partly on the advice of his son, Gilberto Riaño, a young lieutenant in the regular army who happened to be at home on leave with his parents, the intendant resolved to fortify the already massive granary as best he could, essentially abandoning the rest of the city and making a stand against the insurgents until help could arrive to lift the siege of the building. The great rooms in the structure normally devoted to the storage of grain were filled with food, whatever arms could be gathered, gold, minted and unminted silver, and other valuables.

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Written many years later, Lucas Alamán’s dramatic account of these fearful days interjected a touching footnote regarding the Alamáns’ closeness to Intendant Riaño and his family. He conveyed the “anxiety of spirit and bodily fatigue” of an older man whom he much admired, illustrating the discouragement and fear of the European Spaniards in the city: On one of those days on which the intendant was arranging the defense of the city, he went to see the mother of the author, widowed a year and a half [previously], telling her that he was worn out with fatigue and needed a moment’s rest. Upon taking his leave he said to her that he had already complied with what he owed to God, having arranged that day to die like a Christian, receiving the sacraments; [but] that he needed to comply with what he owed to the king, and that he would fulfill [this obligation] with fidelity, indicating by his words and the emotion with which he said them that he expected to die in the attack being planned [by the rebels]. The evocation of this episode follows immediately upon Alamán’s quotation from a letter by Riaño to Félix María Calleja of 26 September expressing his fears of an imminent insurgent attack: “I have the insurgents [almost] on my head,” Riaño wrote, imploring Calleja to hurry to the city’s relief. “[For the past ten days] I have neither rested nor taken my clothes off, and for three days I have not slept for more than an hour at a time,” he added.23 There is no reason to think that Alamán fabricated this episode, and it supports the image he paints throughout these events of Riaño as a brave, resourceful royal servant who did the best he could in a difficult situation. Yet in the end, the intendant made a series of tragically mistaken decisions that forfeited not only his own life but also those of hundreds of other European Spaniards. The insurgent attack on the Alhóndiga came on the morning of 28 September after Intendant Riaño refused to surrender the city to Father Hidalgo’s envoys. The details of this famous sanguinary encounter are well known, not least from Lucas Alamán’s own account of them. Juan Antonio de Riaño, who, the historian says, acted “with more courage than prudence,” was killed by an insurgent rifle shot to the head early in the action, and his son Gilberto died of grave wounds a few days later. After several hours of resolute fighting by the people sheltering in the Alhóndiga, the defenses were breached and by late afternoon a wholesale slaughter of those inside and the sack of the building ensued. Estimates of the immediate casualties vary to this day. Alamán put the number of deaths among the soldiers defending the Alhóndiga at about 200

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and among the European Spaniards who had sought refuge there at 105.24 Over the next few days Father Hidalgo’s undisciplined forces rampaged through the town, attacking and pillaging Spanish-owned homes and businesses. Pillaged goods—clothing, furniture, personal items—made their way onto the backs and into the pockets of insurgents, sympathizers, and inhabitants and into the flea markets of the city for some time to come. Situated not far from the ill-fated granary, the Alamán household first heard a detailed account late on the night of the twenty-eighth from Father Martín Septién, a relative whom Lucas Alamán referred to as an uncle, although the relationship was more likely that of cousins. Father Septién had somehow managed to escape from the besieged Alhóndiga, making his way through the crowd of besiegers dressed in ordinary street clothes rather than his ecclesiastical garb and using a cross he carried as an offensive weapon. Seriously wounded, he arrived at the Alamán house seeking medical assistance and refuge from the chaotic, dangerous streets. Father Septién, however, was not alone in seeking safety at the house on the Cuesta del Marqués. Hardly had he arrived than he was followed by a young woman “unclothed, wrapped in a sheet, covered in blood. She was like one gone mad, showing herself to be insensible to the pain of her injuries or the attention paid them, her mind full of the image of the horrible spectacle she had witnessed, seeing her father, her mother, and her husband murdered before her eyes, after having lost everything they owned. How many people, unhappily, found themselves in the same situation!”25 The young woman was the daughter of the royal tax collector from the nearby town of Salamanca, who had fled with his entire family to the Alhóndiga for protection, where they all died except for her. Alamán wrote that by the next day, 29 September, “Guanajuato presented the most lamentable picture of disorder, ruin, and desolation. The plaza [on which his house fronted] and the streets were full of broken furniture, the remains of goods sacked from stores, liquor spilled out after the crowd had drunk its fill. [The mob] abandoned itself to every manner of excess, and Hidalgo’s Indians presented the strangest figures, wearing over their own clothes items they had taken from the houses of the Europeans, among which were the [ceremonial] uniforms of city councilmen, and they strutted about barefoot with [fine] hats and embroidered coats in the most complete state of drunkenness.”26 According to Alamán, Father Hidalgo attempted to bring the looting to a halt with a decree issued to his forces on 30 September, but to no effect. Having emptied the stores of their goods, the mines and refineries of

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their equipment, and the homes of European Spaniards of their property, the crowds turned to the houses of Creoles (mejicanos, in Alamán’s words), rumored to hold hidden property belonging to Europeans. The Alamáns’ home was attacked. What attracted the “rabble” was a store on the street level of the house in premises leased from the family by a European Spaniard named José Posadas, who had been killed earlier by the insurgents elsewhere in the city. It was common at the time for large, multistoried homes in city centers to have their street-level spaces devoted to commercial enterprises. Posadas’s store had already been sacked once by a crowd, but an employee of the dead owner made it known to looters that in an interior patio there was a storeroom with goods and cash that had escaped the first plunder. Alamán wrote of the situation that “it was very difficult [for me] to control the rabble, which by way of the mezzanine had penetrated as far as the landing of the [interior] stairway; since they thought me to be a European I was at no little risk. . . . [He continues in a footnote:] A group of Indians grabbed me on the landing of the stairway of my house and was dragging me along the mezzanine that connects with it, when the servants, who knew me, some of them of the Guanajuato rabble, made [the men] set me free.” Alamán went on to narrate the denouement of the incident: In this struggle my mother resolved to go see Father Hidalgo, with whom she had old relations of friendship, and I accompanied her. The risk for a decently dressed person to pass through the streets among the mob, drunken with fury and liquor, was great. We nonetheless arrived without mishap to the barracks of the Regimiento del Príncipe, where . . . Hidalgo was lodged. We found him in a roomful of people of all sorts. In one corner there was a considerable quantity of silver ingots, seized from the Alhóndiga and still stained with blood; in another there was a quantity of lances, and leaning against the wall, hanging from one of these [lances], was a painting with the image of Guadalupe, which served as a banner of the movement [empresa]. The curate was seated on a traveling cot with a small table before him, dressed in ordinary clothing and over his jacket a purple sash which appeared to be a piece of a [priestly] stole of that color. He received us courteously, assured my mother of his continuing friendship, and, apprised of what we feared at the house, he provided us with an escort commanded by a muleteer, a resident of the Rancho del Cacalote, near Salvatierra, named Ignacio Centeno, whom he had made a captain. He ordered [Centeno] to defend my house and

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take custody of the property of Posadas, bringing it to his [Hidalgo’s] headquarters when possible, since he wanted to apply it to the expenses of his army. Believing it impossible to contain the riotous gathering that was increasing with every minute, since it was being joined by more and more people intent on entering the house to sack it, my mother sent word with one of his soldiers to Hidalgo, who thought his own presence necessary to contain the disorder that his public decree had done little to stop, and he came on horseback to the plaza, where my house was [located], accompanied by his other generals. They carried in front of them the painting with the image of Guadalupe, led by an Indian on foot playing a drum. There followed a group of mounted country men with some of the Queen’s dragoons in two files. This procession was presided over by the curate with his generals, dressed in short jackets such as worn by militia officers in small towns. And in place of the badges of rank they bore in the Queen’s Regiment, they had placed on their epaulets silver cords with tassels, as they had undoubtedly seen on engravings showing the aides-de-camp of French generals; they all wore on their hats pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Arrived at the place where the largest crowd had gathered, in front of Posadas’s store, the group ordered the people to disperse. Since they did not obey this order, [Ignacio] Allende tried to get them away from the door of the store by moving [directly] into the crowd. The [cobblestoned] surface of the hill is quite steep there, and, being covered with all sorts of filth, it was very slippery. Allende fell with his horse, and inducing the animal to rise, and very angry, he took out his sword and started to attack the rabble, who fled in terror, one man having remained behind gravely wounded. Hidalgo continued to circle the plaza and ordered [his men to] fire upon those who were tearing the balconies off the houses. With this the multitude started to disperse, although for some time larger groups remained, among whom the goods taken as booty were being sold for a pittance. Father Hidalgo was eventually able to impose some order and follow a “more systematized pillage,” in Alamán’s words. He did not have long for this, since scarcely two weeks later his forces decamped on their way to the climactic encounter with the royalist army on the heights above Mexico City at the beginning of November. While the insurgents still occupied the town,

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however, Captain Centeno and the guard he commanded were lodged for some days in the Alamán home, at the family’s expense. During this time Centeno transferred some forty thousand pesos of the dead Posadas’s cash and goods from the storeroom in the interior patio of the house to the cavalry barracks where the insurgents were headquartered. During these days Ignacio Centeno became somewhat familiar to the Alamán family. Lucas Alamán recounts once having asked him why he joined the rebellion: “He replied with the sincerity of a country man that all his objects could be reduced to ‘going to Mexico [City] to place the Señor Curate on the throne, and with the reward he would be given [by Hidalgo] for his services, to return to working the land.’ ”27 When the royalist forces recaptured Guanajuato in late November, General Félix María Calleja perpetrated his own acts of cruelty to stamp out any surviving embers of insurgency there and restore calm and security to the ravaged city. Among many of his retributions was the summary execution of Alamán’s former mathematics teacher, Rafael Dávalos. Calleja demanded the civilian population’s weapons, including ceremonial ones, even of loyal families. María Ignacia was forced to surrender the gold- and jewel-encrusted sword awarded to Lucas Alamán’s deceased father for his long, dedicated service to the city’s town council. Despite his efforts, Juan Vicente’s son was never able to recover this item, whose loss is symbolic of the death of the colonial order. Soon after the royalist recovery of Guanajuato, on 9 December 1810, Alamán and his mother left for Mexico City under the protection of a convoy carrying whatever treasure Calleja’s forces had managed to salvage from the wrecked silver city. They were detained in Querétaro for a number of days awaiting the opening of the road to Mexico City. Alamán and his mother saw much evidence of recent fighting along the highway, including the bodies of insurgents hung from the trees by Calleja’s sometime friend and military collaborator José de la Cruz. They arrived in the capital in late December.

Was Lucas Alamán Traumatized? Looking at Lucas Alamán’s political life and historical works, some scholars and commentators have made much of the deep impact on him of the two weeks or so of his direct exposure to the violence of the insurgency in Guanajuato. It is said to have been a key moment in his life, even a traumatic one, that contributed fundamentally to his later political attitudes and his dark vision of the Mexican independence process. José Valadés stated this view eloquently:

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All that [his experiences between about mid-September and mid-December 1810] produced in Alamán such bitterness and indignation that when he wrote the Historia de México [sic] thirty years later he would not cease condemning the violence, describing it [in detail], although such a description brought upon him partisan condemnation. It is true that don Lucas Alamán gives a coloring of pathetic [sic] excess to some scenes; but those scenes he lived [through] at [the age of] eighteen were to dominate his emotions forever. At eighteen, a man aggrandizes the tragic, views reality in geometric proportions, and makes of a moment a destiny, of a destiny a life. . . . Because of this, reading Alamán one experiences at times the sensation of reading his history, and of losing from one page to the next the historicity that animated his thought. . . . Alamán thus knew how to live in the past, how to penetrate the before and after of the War of Independence. . . . [T]he spectacle of Guanajuato produced in don Lucas the unsurpassed impression of his life [la impresión insuperada de su existencia].”28 That these weeks in Guanajuato constituted for Lucas Alamán a primordial life-event that marked him permanently seems to me an unnuanced view. And although Valadés does not use the word “trauma” in this passage or elsewhere, something very like it is implied.29 Alamán himself never wrote of the emotional impact of these events at the time he experienced them or in his subsequent life. The most he wrote in his Épocas de los principales sucesos de mi vida was that “I ran a great risk that Father Hidalgo’s Indians might abuse me because they took me for a gachupín [a European-born Spaniard]” and that at the end of 1810 the family fled Guanajuato because of the revolution. He might have given readers some version of these events in his Memorias but never got around to it. Just how traumatic an experience was this for him? Is “trauma,” in the sense of a major psychic wound, whether long-lasting or not, even an appropriate category? And in the following weeks, months, or years did Alamán exhibit symptoms of what we would today call posttraumatic stress disorder?30 These questions are not unwarranted given the importance of these two weeks in Guanajuato in his later history of the period, the amount of space he devoted to Father Hidalgo’s capture and occupation of Guanajuato in his Historia de Méjico, and the significance of these events in forming his political attitudes. To begin with, there is the matter of Alamán’s age at the time of the events he describes.31 He was not quite eighteen years old, a young adult in a society

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in which life expectancy was relatively short, childhood temporally compressed, and adolescence an unfamiliar concept. He was not an impressionable young child on whom a traumatic event fell from the sky, who had neither the cognitive development nor conceptual idioms to account for it, nor the psychological defenses to blunt it. Modern clinical studies indicate that the higher an individual’s intelligence, the lower the risk of severe and prolonged psychological effects in the wake of a traumatic event.32 On this score Lucas Alamán certainly had an advantage. It is not clear from the victim’s own account exactly what occurred—if violent hands were laid on him, if there was a struggle, if he suffered physical injury, how many people were involved, what sort of language was used, and so forth. The fact that the attack occurred within his home may well have lent it extra weight, but there is no specific evidence of this one way or another.33 The violence perpetrated by the insurgents in Guanajuato peaked with the fall of the Alhóndiga on 28 September 1810, and one can surmise that Lucas Alamán was unlikely to have experienced further personal violence himself; certainly he mentions no such thing. He did comment on the evidence of fighting he and his mother encountered on their journey to Mexico City, but he lived in the capital uninterrupted from the beginning of 1811 until he departed on his European travels more than three years later, and Mexico City at that time was quite a secure environment. Arguing against any enduring psychological effect on Alamán are several statements of his own. In the Épocas he wrote, [“Since] all the employees of the family were either killed or imprisoned during the revolution of 1810, I had to take over all the affairs of the business.” Furthermore, when he returned to Mexico City with his mother he resumed his drawing, studies, and reading, got into and out of hot water with the Inquisition, and continued to support his mother emotionally while lending a hand with the family’s business affairs. Although he may have experienced physical symptoms of PTSD—eating and sleeping disorders, depression, emotional swings, and so on—he does not mention them anywhere. This does not sound like a young man seized with posttraumatic stress disorder. His involvement in a violent episode, albeit a short-lived one, marked Alamán on a more conscious cognitive level. Yet his personal experience of that time in his life may be seen more usefully not as a sharp inflection but as one point along a trajectory. His wealthy, socially privileged background in a society highly stratified by race appears to have led him to form negative, or at least disdainful, attitudes as a child and adolescent toward the people of color he saw all around him every day—the drawers of water and hewers of wood,

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the mine laborers, muleteers, street vendors, and especially indigenous people. Such views were not out of keeping with members of his class, and most particularly those as close as he to the culture of Old Spain.34 In this sense the violence and indiscipline, even the savagery, he later ascribed to Father Hidalgo’s brown army were to be expected and worked into a version of ethnicity, social class, and politics that produced the profoundly antidemocratic position he consistently occupied throughout his life. It is no accident that in describing the events of the Mexican insurgency he so often used the words indios to describe Hidalgo’s followers—even though ethnic ascription was quite slippery—and plebe (rabble) and chusma (mob) to describe crowds. While still a young man he spent the better part of a decade traveling and studying in Europe, where memories of mass revolutionary violence were still vivid in France and elsewhere on the Continent and monarchical/aristocratic regimes still dominant everywhere. In Mexican politics after the early 1820s he was perhaps the early republic’s greatest exponent of rule by hombres de bien—men of property, education, and background: the stakeholders of society, who could be expected to make rational political judgments, as opposed to the mobocracy represented by a wide franchise and democratic practices. Judging by his social background, his cool, rationalist personal style, his travels and studies, and the circumstances of his coming to political maturity, it is hard to imagine Lucas Alamán as anything other than the deeply conservative thinker and public actor he became. Does one really need to explain his attitudes, then, by recourse to a few minutes of manhandling on the staircase of his childhood home? In this light the incident shrinks to a more proper place in his life—important but more emblematic of attitudes already present and later to be consolidated by experience than formative.

Life in the Capital Lucas Alamán and his mother arrived in Mexico City in late December 1810, staying first in a house at 9 Callejón de Santa Clara (a stretch of what is today’s Calle de Tacuba), then moving after a few months to a house owned by Lucas Septién, a cousin, at Calle de la Cadena no. 5. As far as we know, they lived here at least until Lucas departed for his European travels in 1814, when he was twenty-two years old. Named for a sixteenth-century royal official and known today as Calle Venustiano Carranza, Calle de la Cadena remained a highly desirable and fashionable street on which to live for most of the nineteenth century. His residence there as a young man foreshadowed much of

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his adult life, when he would live in close proximity to the seats of civil and ecclesiastical power. Just a short distance to the northeast stood the Palacio Nacional; directly to the north of the Alamán residence, across the city’s enormous central square, stood the cathedral; a bit to the east of Calle de la Cadena no. 5 stood the Plaza del Volador. In Alamán’s time and later many prominent people lived very close to Calle de la Cadena no. 5, demonstrating how small and intimate the social and political world of the young republic was. María Josefa Sánchez de Barriga y Blanco, the widow of Political Chief Juan O’Donojú, probably lived at Calle de la Cadena no. 4 until her death in 1842. Toward midcentury a number of prominent politicians lived on the same street, men who alternated in government ministries with Lucas Alamán; the publisher of his Historia de Méjico, the bibliophile, printer, and bookseller José María Andrade, was to live and do business at number 1; and later still Porfirio Díaz lived at number 8 for a time. Simón Bolívar was thought to have lived briefly in a house on Calle de la Cadena when he passed through New Spain in 1799. The details of the daily life of Lucas Alamán and his mother during these years are unknown, but I can offer some informed speculations. At least a few servants lived in the household. There would have been frequent religious observance, perhaps even daily attendance at Mass; regular social contact with Juan Bautista Arechederreta; and a round of social engagements, including the tertulias, afternoon or evening gatherings in which gentlefolk drank chocolate and discussed the affairs of the day or books or simply gossiped. Although the city was on a high state of alert and subject to tight security measures for the entire decade of the insurgency, its citizens tried to carry on normal lives as best they could. On the basis of original sources (again very vaguely cited) in his possession, José Valadés renders this plausible description of the lives of the city’s elite during these years, with the old Marxist peeking through his prose: Our elders continued living in the old Spanish style, very leisurely, sticking to their stale customs, at peace and in the grace of God, with their Inquisition and their friars, their picturesque legal inequality, their privileges . . . [and] their complete lack of municipal or political liberty, simultaneously governed by distinguished bishops and powerful magistrates (whose respective powers were not easy to separate, given that [respectively they] entered into the temporal and the eternal). [They] paid tithes, first fruits, sales taxes . . . and fifty more [impositions] with names

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not necessary to mention here. . . . [T]he viceregal structure was firmly in place, but there prevailed that philosophical spirit that the astute monarchs of the eighteenth century, such as Charles III, Joseph II, or Catherine of Russia, utilized to the benefit of their crowns and the aggrandizement of their states . . . that spirit of Kaunitz and of Pombal, [the] subtle defenders of absolutism, disguised as modern thinkers of broad and philosophical tendency.35 The Alamán family finances during the three years between their installation in the capital at the end of 1810 and the beginning of 1814, when Lucas Alamán departed for Europe, remain opaque. Presumably the store in Guanajuato, left in the management of Gregorio de Trasviña after Juan Vicente’s death in 1808, continued to produce an income for the widow; she continued to be involved in making loans and providing avíos to miners and refiners; she made some investments in a commercial enterprise that was to implode in 1816, a loss of a substantial amount of her money; and there were still the shares in the nonproductive Cata mine. María Ignacia apparently commanded a regular, healthy income to maintain the domestic establishment, keep up social appearances, and pay for her son’s continuing education. That education now emphasized mineralogy, mining engineering, and the sciences in general. In an era when being a polymath was still within reach of well-educated men, Alamán was to be distinguished in adult life by the unusually wide range of his interests, reading, and knowledge. For the next two years, however, he was deeply involved in expanding via theory and technical details the knowledge of mining and silver refining he had acquired informally as a boy. He began studies, probably in 1812, at the Colegio de Minería—known also as the Real Seminario de Minería and by other names— in Mexico City, established a decade earlier, in 1792, by the Spanish mining expert Fausto de Elhuyar, who became its director. Its new installation, completed in 1803, was described by a traveler shortly after its inauguration as “severe, symmetrical, and imposing. . . . [E]verything about the building has an air of grandeur and formality.”36 The colegio still stands today, sunken a bit in the middle due to the geological subsidence plaguing various parts of the basin of Mexico, but very much a jewel of the Mexican neoclassical style. At the colegio Alamán must have been a so-called external student who paid fees for classes, which would by no means have strained the family resources. External students chose the subject matter they wanted to study; by contrast, scholarship or residential students went through the full curriculum of four

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years of courses and two years of a sort of practicum. Now twenty years old, he was certainly at the extreme end of the age distribution, since most students fell into the range of fifteen to twenty years of age. He studied mineralogy with Andrés Manuel del Río, whom we have already met and with whom Alamán was to have a long relationship, and chemistry with another professor. Whether he also sat in on classes in mathematics, physics, including solid and fluid mechanics and the nature of matter, or ancillary courses in drawing, French, religion and politics, and so forth we do not know but it seems unlikely since he was pursuing the study of several fields on his own and had done so for several years. He would presumably have taken advantage of the colegio’s fairly extensive library. On 11 November 1813 Alamán was awarded a “very honorable” certificate of studies by a committee of faculty examiners. He also studied botany with the renowned Spanish botanist Vicente Cervantes, the founder of Mexico City’s Botanical Garden, earning yet another certificate later in November 1813 signaling completion of a course of study.37 Outside his courses at the Colegio de Minería, during these years he applied himself to the study of calculus and crystallography, using a text of the famous French mineralogist René Just Haüy, from whose pages, Alamán wrote in his Épocas, he “conscientiously solved all the calculations.”38 Alamán also eagerly attacked disciplines and subjects distant from his interest in mining and mine engineering. His study of drawing would later stand him in good stead not only as a traveler in Europe and art connoisseur but also as a mining engineer. It may have drawn him into an acquaintance with the Spaniard Rafael Jimeno (1759–1825), the director of painting at the Academia de San Carlos, the city’s art academy. A strong influence toward undertaking a grand European tour was Alamán’s reading of Antonio Ponz Piquer’s Viage de España (1772–92), an enormous travelogue in epistolary form, comprising seventeen volumes and dealing particularly with the art and architecture of Spain.39 This work he found in his father’s substantial library, some of which he had taken with him when the family moved to Mexico City. On his own he studied Italian, while taking up again his study of French and English alongside the children of the bookseller Manuel del Valle on the nearby Calle de Tacuba. Two incidents from these years exemplify the young Lucas Alamán’s expanding mental horizon and burgeoning intellectual combativeness in his first published work. In 1812–13 he embroiled himself in a heated public controversy with the older Fermín de Reygadas, a fairly well-known mining engineer, astronomer, and ardent proroyalist pamphleteer. In the Diario de México

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of September 1812 Alamán published an anonymous article deriding the refutation that Reygadas had earlier offered in the Diario of the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system. Young Lucas’s criticism was based on the falseness of Reygadas’s calculations about the respective size, distances, and celestial positioning of the sun and the earth, while casting aspersions on the author for deploying science that was so far behind the times. This drew a sharp rebuttal from Reygadas and from one of his supporters, who skewered Alamán as an intellectual coward for not signing his article.40 There are political undertones in the exchange in that Reygadas condemned the adoption in New Spain of foreign ideas, including scientific ones, while the young guanajuatense defended modern scientific thought no matter its national origin. At about the same time two officials of the Inquisition arrived at the door of the Alamán household inquiring after the young man’s heterodox reading habits. One of the works they encountered among his books was Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), a work to which some suspicion attached even though it was not included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Officially banned by the Church was another work found in his library, the English edition of the Scottish divine William Robertson’s four-volume History of America (1777), one of the Enlightenment’s strongest critiques of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the Spanish imperial tradition, and Spanish historiography, which was on the index. Nothing ever came of this investigation, and if it left a documentary trace in the Inquisition records in the Mexican archives, that document has vanished, the proceedings possibly squelched through the direct influence of Alamán’s elder half brother, Father Arechederreta.

The Mexico City Elections of 1812 Four days after Lucas Alamán’s initial encounter with the Inquisition, on 30 September 1812, Mexico City officially received the newly promulgated Spanish Constitution of 1812 with great rejoicing and public celebration. The first constitutionally mandated elections in the country soon followed, foreshadowing the volatile public life marking the early decades of republican Mexico. This event, alongside the Reygadas and Inquisition episodes, all of which took place within a period of a few months, surely affected Alamán’s ideas as a political actor, although nowhere does he say so explicitly. Polling to choose electors who would then select aldermen for the city council (ayuntamiento) of the capital took place on 29 November 1812. After considerable

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initial conflict between Spanish and Creole factions in the highest echelons of the government over age, race, and other eligibility qualifications for voting, the franchise was left quite flexible and inclusive, although it excluded women, children, and men of African descent; disqualifications were left to the discretion of local electoral officials. The city was divided into several polling districts on the basis of divisions established thirty years earlier. The Alamán household was located in a subdistrict of the Sagrario parish, the largest in the city, which had a total population of nearly ten thousand people and was divided into four smaller polling districts; qualified voters resident in Sagrario parish could cast their ballots at any one of these.41 Under the rules initially proposed by the Mexico City Audiencia, whose judges and lawyers hoped to insure through fairly rigid and exclusive eligibility requirements an outcome favoring the pro-Spanish faction, Alamán would have fallen just short of the minimum voting age of twenty-one. The results of the balloting amounted to a resounding repudiation of the pro-Spanish loyalists, both peninsular- and American-born, although the electoral process was impugned, with some reason, by Spanish loyalists as being fraudulent. Some of those selected in this primary round were suspected of being members of Los Guadalupes, a subversive clandestine, prorebel group operating in the capital. Premarked ballots abounded, and it proved impossible to tell how many people had actually voted. This lent credence to critics’ and pro-Spanish opponents’ accusation that many voters of modest social standing and education, large numbers of whom were supposed to be illiterate, had little idea of what they were doing; that they had been instructed by priests and other local leaders on how to vote; that they had been bribed; and that they had voted multiple times. Given the procedural questions about the validity of the elections, Viceroy Venegas refused to let the electors meet to choose the new city council. The political stalemate in Mexico City continued until the tough Spanish general Félix María Calleja was promoted to viceroy in the spring of 1813.42 Calleja reluctantly allowed the electors to put the new ayuntamiento in place, scheduling preliminary elections for Mexican representation to the Spanish Cortes. Held in July 1813 as a typhus epidemic was ravaging the capital and would reach most of the central areas of New Spain, these elections were held simultaneously with new city council voting and saw a much-diminished voter turnout but similar results. The same trend in the victory of proautonomy electors continued, accompanied by the same shrill chorus of criticism from royal officials and the pro-Spanish faction, including accusations of fraud and subversion. With King Ferdinand VII’s return to the

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throne in 1814, the Constitution of Cádiz was suspended, and popular electoral life went into hibernation for the next six years. More than three decades later Lucas Alamán would devote a number of pages in his Historia de Méjico to the Mexico City electoral contests of 1812, a passage clearly marked by his disapproval of the riotous behavior in the polling and his misgivings about what it might portend.43 His account of these elections is immediately preceded, however, by a discussion of the lifting of press restrictions by the 1812 Constitution, a discussion not wholly unsympathetic to the new freedom of intellectual and political expression that arrived with the temporary loosening of these controls by the colonial regime. In relating the initial journalistic blossoming prompted by the lifting of restrictions, Alamán strongly implied that journalists such as Carlos María de Bustamante, perhaps out of a lingering fear of censure and legal action, perhaps from a sense of decorum, were quite moderate in what they published. He was less charitable toward Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, the famous “Pensador mejicano” (Mexican thinker). He wrote further that only in succeeding years, with the rise of parties and the ubiquity of paid journalists who often beat the party drums (the same criticisms raised during the Federalist / Republican struggles in the young United States in the 1790s), did the public press become corrupted, and he went so far as to liken this trend to the European press of his time. Alamán seems to have thought that, like freedom of the press, widely democratic popular elections within a republican framework were not dangerous or undesirable per se. But elections were prey to virulent factionalism, demagoguery, and corruption by unscrupulous men, making of them elements of dangerous political instability in a politically unsophisticated, ignorant, and malleable population. It is possible to view Lucas Alamán’s grudgingly positive characterization of relative freedom of the press and relatively open elections as a rhetorical subterfuge, a sort of fig leaf to cover his actual condemnation of both so as not to appear to be an atavistic curmudgeon in an era in which a free press and a wide popular franchise had become articles of faith among most liberals and moderates. But there is little reason to suspect this since he had already become so clearly associated with highly conservative political values and was not reluctant to push his views in public discourse, the pages of El Universal, a newspaper he founded, or elsewhere in the Historia de Méjico. A close, open-minded reading of his account of the 1812 Mexico City elections, therefore, suggests that in Alamán’s thinking the potential of more open political processes was to be separated from their actuality in the historical context of early nineteenth-century Mexico. This may

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appear to be a small point, but it goes to the core of Lucas Alamán’s political beliefs, the evolution of his thinking over time, and his view of historical processes. Alamán began his account by noting that “the elections to be held now were something entirely new and unknown.” The scene is set by the much older Alamán writing about his younger self through the lens of experience, so that his words are anything but transparent. It is worth parsing his language for a moment to tease out the “now” of his thinking against the “then” of the background events. Following this path into his text, I find the key phrases to be the observation that the practice of elections was “entirely new and unknown” and a long, inclusive list of groups formerly forbidden to gather without prior license from the king or prelate, including confraternities and colleges. It is sometimes difficult in Alamán’s writing to know when he is being slyly ironic. To my eye there is a hint of irony when he writes of the Laws of the Indies as being “so careful” as well as in his long enumeration of racial groups prohibited from actively participating in what are now called civil society or the public sphere, especially since the list begins with Spaniards when he might just as well have said “everyone” or “all subjects.” In any case, it reads as though he is criticizing the metropolitan policy of shutting down all public activity as excessively nervous-making, even for the laudable objective of promoting piety. The remark about elections being “entirely new and unknown” is, from one point of view, disingenuous because at the municipal level there had been elections since the advent of Spanish colonial power in New Spain, albeit highly restrictive ones governed by practices of oligarchy, patriarchy, and gerontocracy. In fact, the political legitimacy of the Kingdom of New Spain itself was based on the election of 1519 in which Fernando Cortés established his independence from the Cuban government by establishing a separate cabildo. From another point of view, however, the observation marks the novelty of national elections within a republican framework, based on a more or less wide franchise, during a time of intense political crisis on both sides of the Atlantic. In this characterization of political innovations, Alamán is suggesting that there unspooled into the future a long and tortuous learning curve in Mexican public life to adapt the political culture to republican institutions. He was to emphasize this toward the end of the last volume of the Historia de Méjico in observing that independence would not have been so premature and its sequelae so destructive had Mexico not lacked “men for the operation of the state,” people who could have brought with them to public life the lessons of a longer experience of the new political practices being

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implanted in the wake of separation from Spain. Here he likely had explicitly in mind the transition to independence of the Anglo-American colonies facilitated by the political experience of the Virginia House of Burgesses and other representative institutions within the colonial framework. He went on to describe the way voting districts were set up for the 1812 elections and the way slates of Creole and loyalist candidates were fielded. The voting itself, he wrote, was carried out “with the greatest disorder,” noting the highly irregular practices employed by the two factions to insure the election of their candidates: Money was given to the porters on the street corners to distribute voting papers with the names of the electors [already written], and with them the water sellers and [neighborhood] boys voted without even knowing the names on the papers, while others copied the votes of those engaging in these practices who were already at the polling places. As a result of all this, the triumph of the Americans [i.e., Creoles] was complete, with no European [Spaniard] emerging as elector, and with such a uniformity in the voting as a result of the [premarked] ballots that none of the four electors in the Sagrario [parish] came out with fewer than five thousand votes, [this] in a parish in which the number of votes exceeded the [total] number of residents. Popular rejoicing at this resounding Creole electoral victory went on for much of the night after the announcement of the results, with near-violent demonstrations occurring in many quarters of the city. One such incident took place at the Sagrario church, and one can only guess at the effect this might have produced on Alamán as he remembered his rough treatment at the hands of insurgents from the urban plebe in Guanajuato scarcely two years before. Some people even approached the viceregal palace asking that cannons be fired in celebration, which Viceroy Venegas refused to do. “At the head of these groups,” Alamán wrote, “were people of the more decent sort and some ecclesiastics, since, as we have seen, the revolution was sustained through their influence.” “I was an eyewitness to everything related here,” he added in a footnote at this point. At the Te Deum Mass in the parishes the following day, some of the triumphant electors, among them Carlos María de Bustamante, were carried to the parish churches on the backs of the crowds. The viceroy kept the troops in their barracks on alert, and at about four o’clock in the afternoon on the thirtieth the crowds in the streets were ordered to disperse to their homes or face armed soldiers. By nightfall calm had been re-

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stored. Similar demonstrations, Alamán wrote, took place in Puebla, Toluca, and other cities, all showing “hatred toward the [European] Spaniards in keeping with the principles proclaimed by the insurrection.” Alamán discounted a “concerted plan of revolution . . . in this popular movement,” characterizing the demonstrations rather as a “passing disturbance [due to] the transports of joy excited by the triumph obtained in the elections [by the Creoles].” But he did assert that some anti-Spanish groups and individuals had promoted the general ebullience and even violence for their own political ends. He specifically cited Francisco Galicia, the indigenous governor of San Juan Tenochtitlán, one of the Indian districts of the city. In a letter of 9 December 1812 to the major insurgent leader Ignacio López Rayón, Galicia suggested that the unrestrained, riotous outpourings of pro-Creole and anti-gachupín popular sentiment supported the hope that a rebel invasion of the city might be met with an internal rising. The fear on the part of the government, Alamán wrote, was that the upcoming elections for representatives to the Spanish Cortes would provide further opportunities for sinister forces to promote public disorder or subversive activities. Pointed comments by Fernández de Lizardi in his newspaper El Pensador prompted Viceroy Venegas to suspend freedom of the press in early December and then the application of the Constitution altogether.44 Lucas Alamán’s activities in Mexico City in 1813 are very little commented on either in his autobiographical writings or the 1938 biography by José Valadés. Since he received his certificates of completed studies in mining (engineering, mineralogy) and botany late in 1813, the year must have been taken up with the intensive study to which he was naturally inclined. He witnessed the renewed elections of 1813 for the municipal council and, at midyear, for deputies to the Spanish Cortes, of which his elder half brother was one, describing them in his Historia de Méjico in a very tight-lipped manner. Without editorial comment he noted the promulgation of a Spanish Cortes decree of 22 February 1813 extinguishing the Inquisition. Whether this change in the institutional landscape of Mexico City, over and above his elder half brother’s influence, played any role in the petering out of the preceding autumn’s inquisitorial inquiries into the young man’s reading habits is not known. He devoted in these pages some space to an event “of little importance in itself, which attracted much attention in the capital and afforded much food for curiosity.” This was the escape of Leona Vicario, later a much-venerated heroine of independence, from Mexico City in May 1813; she was declared by the government to be a traitor for her involvement with the insurgents, an episode to

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which Alamán dedicated more attention than to the pestilence of that year. In a footnote he tells his readers that since he was unable to consult the voluminous criminal file in the matter of Vicario, all the details about this anecdote were taken from the “Apuntes manuscritos” of his half brother, Canon Arechederreta. Arechederreta may have taken his very presentable half brother, a young man of unimpeachable social credentials and considerable culture, into Mexico City society—to the salons, dinners, and other events that must have marked the associative life of the Mexican elite. The following year would see Lucas Alamán’s departure for Europe and the young man’s absence for nearly six years, followed by a short return to Mexico City and then a long second sojourn in Spain. While he would never leave Mexico again after his return from his second stay in Spain, his travels left a deep imprint on him.

3 • Years of Pilgrimage, First Steps in Politics, and a Betrothal (1816–1823)

The Grand Tour Begins: Madrid, Paris, and London Lucas Alamán was to travel, study, and work in Europe for almost the entire decade 1814–1823, with the exception of a year (1820) back in Mexico. He never left the country again after his return although he had opportunities to do so and at several points considered emigrating with his family to escape the insecurity and deteriorating conditions in Mexico. We can trace his movements during his European years with some exactitude, even down to the dates on which he entered and left various cities, and we have some sense of what he learned about European modernity. But what we cannot get at are either the impressions these travels produced or what these experiences meant to him, even if the importance of this decade to him is suggested in his brief 1843 autobiography. Although he kept up his knowledge of the Old World, he would have missed a personal encounter with the technological and political change sweeping western Europe during the three decades after he returned from his travels. He would not have seen the railroad and the telegraph shrink distance and time so rapidly or the population of London, in his time already the world’s second largest city, behind Peking, triple in size between 1815 and 1860, from about a million inhabitants to over three million, while the Parisian population more than doubled. He could not have witnessed at first hand the spreading shadow of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” throughout western Europe or the political ferment of the post-Napoleonic period—the rise and fall of monarchies, the Great Reform, the outbreak of warfare or rebellion, the early phases of the Risorgimento. While he came to be knowledgeable about the revolutions of 1848 and almost certainly assimilated them to

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the radical political liberalism he felt was so dangerous in Mexico, he never experienced European political events as an observer on the scene. Lucas Alamán left Mexico City for the port of Veracruz in January 1814, embarking for Spain later in the month.1 For several years he had wanted to travel in Europe, preparing by learning French and English. Money proved to be no problem and would not until the family’s further financial setbacks of 1816. Even so the reversal does not seem to have crimped his style much. The signing of the Treaty of Valençay in December 1813 officially paved the way for the return of Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne, but the Peninsular War continued through the early months of Alamán’s stay there. He was slated to cross the Atlantic in the company of a family friend, Tomás González Calderón, a judge of the Mexico City Audiencia recalled to Spain to serve in the new Ministerio de Ultramar. González, however, fell gravely ill, and Alamán traveled instead with Victorino de las Fuentes, a priest from Irapuato who had just been elected a Mexican deputy to the Spanish Cortes.2 He arrived at Cádiz via Havana on 30 May 1814 and stayed a month, traveling to Sevilla at the end of June 1814. There, Ponz’s Viage de España in hand, presumably an abridged version, he visited various sites, including the cathedral, saw the Murillo paintings and other works of art in the churches, looked at the Alcázar, and strolled the banks of the Guadalquivir. The end of July found the young traveler in Madrid. The Spanish imperial capital was a city of 175,000–200,000 inhabitants in 1814, about a fifth the size of London and less than a third that of Paris. A constant stream of migrants was attracted to the city from the interior areas of Spain, most of them day laborers, domestics, and other members of the working poor. Approaching the city from any direction, one would have passed through a desolate countryside plagued with bandits. One memoirist of the later nineteenth century described the Fernandine Madrid of years before as “An extremely ugly town [un pueblo feísimo], with few architectural monuments [and] horrible housing.”3 During the restoration under the tyrannous King Ferdinand VII, government was impecunious and in disarray, so a number of sorely needed infrastructural and monumental projects never got off the drawing boards. When Alamán passed through at the beginning of the restoration, the city was filled with aristocrats and religious, and wealth was highly concentrated, 40 percent of income accruing to 1 percent of the population. This limited the development of manufacturing to the smallest scale, most demand being met by the import of foreign goods. The celebration attendant upon Ferdinand’s return in the spring of 1814 generated a large number of triumphal arches and public rejoicing out of keeping with the city’s reduced economic

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circumstances. The young Mexican visitor might well have heard the jokes circulating in the street about the restored Bourbon absolutist, such as “God keep the king . . . and never let him return!” or “Life to the king—but the less, the better!” In the months after Ferdinand’s restoration and his abrogation of the 1812 Cádiz charter a number of American deputies were still living in the city. Alamán mentions particularly Pablo de la Llave, later to become an important figure in the government of the newly independent Mexico, and Miguel Santa María, strongly connected with the Spanish liberals and a onetime member of the Lautaro Lodge of radical Spanish American revolutionaries.4 He also met the young priest Antonio Joaquín Pérez, the future bishop of Puebla.5 Through them Alamán was introduced into the salons of other prominent public figures, intellectuals, and aristocrats, a highly educated, accomplished, and quite cosmopolitan group of men, all of liberal political inclinations. Alamán left the Spanish capital bound for Paris in late September 1814, getting there at the beginning of November 1814. On arriving in Paris he paid the obligatory visit to the Hotel de Ville to inform the French authorities of his presence, and for the rest of his time on this visit was to live at 1 rue Chaptel, the same street on which such luminaries as Georges Sand, Adolphe Thiers, and James McNeill Whistler would live later in the century. Alamán was in Paris for the next five months, until his departure for London in April 1815. Paris was in considerable flux at the time. Napoleon had just abdicated for the first time in April, and the Bourbon restoration was in full swing. The life of the salons was as vigorous as ever, as Alamán’s experience over the next few months would prove. Like Mexico City, Paris ate people. The death rate was slightly in excess of the rate of natural increase, so that the city had to be replenished constantly with the immigration of young people from the countryside. Unlike London, which was industrializing at this time, Paris remained principally a cultural and administrative center. Urban crime was rampant, compounded by the demobilization of the defeated French armies. The population by 1815 was about seven hundred thousand, considerably smaller than London’s but still one of the largest in the world. The immediate post-Napoleonic period saw much construction in the city, improvement in the urban water supply, the building of markets and fountains, and the spanning of the Seine with magnificent bridges; it is difficult to imagine that the young Alamán did not try on the role of flâneur. This was Paris before Baron Haussmann’s massive urban reconfiguration, but it was also a city on the cusp of modernization, as was London, a process closely associated with science, probably one of Paris’s strongest attractions for the young Mexican traveler.

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His very schematic narrative of his five months in Paris begins with his acquaintance with Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1763–1827), by this time simply Father Mier since he had been secularized out of the Dominican Order in 1802. Mier may even have intended to return to Spain despite the imprisonment likely awaiting him there, as Ferdinand VII’s reaction launched a fullscale witch hunt against Spanish American revolutionaries, liberals, Cortes of Cádiz deputies, and afrancesado (Frenchified) allies of the ousted Napoleonic regime, but he stayed on in Paris for another five months or so. The ideas of the famously picaresque churchman—he escaped imprisonment for his political activities on seven occasions—historian, political journalist, and moderate federalist would not have been too far distant at this time from the young Alamán’s. Alamán himself says only that “there [in Paris] I met the celebrated Father Mier,” whose contacts in the city, as later in London and on the Continent, opened a number of doors to the young traveler and student. In his early fifties when Lucas Alamán met him late in 1814, Padre Mier was “rich in knowledge and erudition [and] he is at the same time very agreeable in his style, full of passion and enthusiasm, [and] abounds in opportune witticisms.”6 Virtually penniless at the time, Mier survived on loans and the charity of friends, among them Alamán himself. Although Mier seems to have occupied a position of minor intellectual prominence in Paris, his claim to Alamán that he had been inducted into the Institut National des Sciénce et Artes was an “academic fantasy” born of “megalomaniac illusion.”7 Alamán’s friendship with Mier opened a number of Parisian doors for him. Together they met Baron Alexander von Humboldt early in 1815, with whom Alamán was occasionally to correspond in coming years and whose letters of introduction were to help him make some contacts in London and during his subsequent travels back on the Continent. During his stay in Paris, Mier renewed an old acquaintance with the Abbé (Henri) Gregoire (1750–1831), member of the Estates General in 1789, later president of the French Convention, ardent republican, alleged regicide, abolitionist, Gallican clergyman, anti-imperialist, and at this time famous even well beyond the borders of France.8 Both Humboldt and Gregoire were to refer to Alamán in very warm terms in later correspondence with third parties, Gregoire calling him in letters of 1824 and 1825, respectively, “our wise and kindly friend” and “our dear friend Sr. Alamán, who left in Europe . . . such honorable impressions,” while Humboldt referred to Alamán about the same time as “my close friend.”9 Through the politician Duc de Montmorency, Alamán met two of the great salonniéres of the age, the celebrated beauty Juliette Recamier (1777–1849),

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and Madame de Staël (1766–1817), the daughter of the famous Swiss banker Jacques Necker (1732–1804), a writer, republican, and political opponent of Napoleon. Dazzling though he must have found these women, the witty conversation and opulent surroundings, and the people who frequented their salons, in his published autobiography many years later he remarks only on meeting Gregoire, Montmorency, “and other personages of the restoration.” The young Alamán was also to meet Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), famously the lover of Madame de Staël and one of the most influential writers on political theory of the time, whose works Alamán would later read, as did his liberal political opponents. He also made the acquaintance of the writer, historian, and diplomat François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), the already famous French revolutionary sympathizer turned conservative. Lucas Alamán was in Paris for too short a period for any of these relationships to become very robust, but over time they became important to him. When he returned there in 1822 he was a well-traveled man of thirty with much experience of the world and a burgeoning political career. Many of the figures he had met in 1814–15 were still living there, although Madame de Staël had died in the interim. Whether he renewed his contacts with them is an open question. Only with one of them, Baron von Humboldt, was he to sustain a relationship over the years to come, and that strictly an epistolary one. Although he lost his father at the age of sixteen, Alamán had had strong male role models in his life—his father, his uncle Tomás, Intendant Riaño, and his elder half brother. Coincidentally, all the intellectually powerful, accomplished men he encountered during this short period in Paris were twenty to twenty-five years older than he. The youngest, von Humboldt, who was to outlive Alamán by six years, was born in 1769. The efforts of men like Constant, who looked to the British constitutional monarchy as a political model in which liberalism was reconciled with stable political forms, and Chateaubriand, who burnished the restored Bourbon regime in France after his own flirtations with both republicanism and absolutism, must have posed questions for Lucas Alamán with which he was to struggle throughout his political career. While in Paris, he furthered his studies in languages and the sciences, taking a number of classes in physics and chemistry at the Collège de France, then as now the most prestigious institution of research and higher learning in the country. For Father Mier and Lucas Alamán this immersion in the Paris of the first Bourbon Restoration ended with the return of Napoleon to the city from his

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exile on Elba on 20 March 1815. The return of the dynasty had begun auspiciously enough with the ascent of King Louis XVIII to the throne of France in April 1814; and following the brief Napoleonic hiatus the king was to return in the Second Restoration in July 1815. In his autobiography Alamán writes of this period simply that “I saw Napoleon enter [Paris] on his return from Elba.” Owing to the renewed military conflict with France’s adversaries provoked by the emperor’s return, he left for England, taking the penniless Father Mier with him at his own expense. The two men sailed on 24 April 1815. The months of May and June 1815 are unaccounted for, but on 3 July 1815 a functionary named J. Beckett in the Alien Office in London issued a permit to the alien “Lucas Alamán, aged 23 years, native of New Spain, gent.” to reside in Britain provided he did not locate within ten miles of the coast or in the neighborhood of any royal dockyards. Samuel Johnson famously quipped that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”10 The population of the city was something over a million people and growing rapidly in the wake of the quarter century of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars begun in 1789. The poor, working poor, and people of modest means, who comprised 75 percent of Londoners, lived in or near the East End or south of the Thames, while the city was expanding northward along streets of new terraced houses toward Whitechapel and toward the west. Alarming slums were ubiquitous, and the “Great Wen,” William Cobbett’s term for the city, remained a devourer of people, much as Paris and Mexico City were, with a constant stream of immigrants filling the gap between high mortality rates and low rates of natural increase. Yet it was also notoriously a city of conspicuous consumption, leisure, and vice, especially for the moneyed class. Beau Brummell (1778–1840) was an intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV, until at a fashionable London gathering in 1813, their friendship already in tatters, Brummel, after being cut socially by the prince, remarked loudly to a companion his famous “Who is your fat friend?” comment. The dandy Brummel was to seek an impoverished exile in Paris in 1816, just after Lucas Alamán’s return there from London but left behind him new trends in gentlemen’s fashions. Venues for gambling were many, prostitutes abounded, the theater was thriving. The great female star of the Georgian stage, Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), had just retired, but Edmund Kean (1789–1833), born with the Age of Revolution, was just becoming a major theatrical figure. There were a thousand or more coffeehouses, some of which we may assume Lucas Alamán visited, and many more of what we would now call pubs. The vast complex of the West India Docks had re-

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cently been constructed (1800–1802) on the Thames, and the city’s main economic activity was the trade of the post-Napoleonic world, although it was also industrializing at a rapid pace. William Wordsworth was to describe London as a “monstrous ant-hill on the plain,” the streets teeming with people and carriages. Life there would only grow more hectic over the next half century or so, the population doubling by the time of Charles Dickens (1812–70), its great chronicler. Alamán tells us in his brief autobiography that during the five months before returning to Paris he traveled over most of Britain and Scotland. A letter from him to Robert Jameson, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, written in English as he was on his way to travels in Italy, indicates that despite some orthographical and grammatical mistakes his written English was quite good. He had obviously met a number of people in Edinburgh through Jameson.11 In the British capital he met the Fagoaga brothers, sons of the great ennobled Mexican mining family. José Francisco Fagoaga y Villaurrutia (d. 1840), the second Marqués del Apartado, had arrived in London with his brother Francisco Antonio (1788–1851).12 Alamán was to travel throughout Europe with Francisco Antonio for much of the next few years, maintain a lifelong friendship and political alliance with him, and write a necrological essay about him. Among others Alamán met in London was José María Blanco White (1775–1841), also known as Joseph Blanco White, the Spanish émigré liberal, lapsed Catholic turned Protestant divine, memoirist, travel writer, and journalist, who showed Alamán around Oxford University. A number of the men he met were involved in the proautonomist or independence causes for New Spain or at the very least politically subversive activities. Fray Servando had been collaborating with Blanco White’s expatriate Spanish periodicals in London since at least 1811 or so, continuing to do so for a number of years. Another figure on the scene was Andrés Bello (1781–1865), the Venezuelan patriot, writer, and educator, with whom the Fagoaga brothers and Fray Servando became friendly. The Fagoaga brothers had also made contact almost immediately upon their arrival in 1809 with the longtime revolutionary Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), whose house and library in Grafton Street had been a magnet for many liberal- and independence-minded Spanish Americans in London earlier in the decade. By this time he was a captive in Spanish hands and would die in prison in 1816. During these years the social thinkers James Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) and Jeremy Bentham were involved with this group in promoting Spanish American independence through newspapers such as Miranda’s El Colombiano, supported financially by the Fagoaga brothers. Another personal and political bond within this

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group was membership in the Lautaro Lodge, originally the Lodge of Rational Knights (Logia de los Caballeros Racionales), a secret organization only tangentially related to Freemasonry and dedicated to Enlightenment ideals and eventually to the liberation of Spanish America. Thirty-five years later Alamán denied unequivocally in his Historia de Méjico that he had ever belonged to any secret society, either in Europe or Mexico. But the fluidity of his political ideas at this time may well have opened him to a flirtation with liberalism and even autonomy for his homeland. What was Lucas Alamán likely to have carried away from his relatively brief visit to London? First, just a few years down the road there was his involvement with English investors in the Mexican mining industry. The knowledge Alamán acquired in a firsthand exposure to British capitalism through reading, travel, and personal contacts may well have laid the groundwork for an inclination toward English investors. Second, as a mature statesman he was always to see Britain as a counterweight to the United States in terms of the geopolitics of Mexico and Spanish America. His presence in both Paris and London at the very moment Britain emerged as the principal arbiter of European politics, and to a great degree of world politics, surely impressed the young traveler with the military and diplomatic might of the island kingdom. Third, Alamán came to admire greatly a number of British writers on politics, foremost among them the Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729–97). Personal immersion in the agitated political atmosphere of the great capital, the reading of newspapers, and conversation within his Mexican expatriate community should be accounted a factor in the development of his political ideas. Finally, he clearly viewed English constitutional monarchy and economic development as key models for the sort of modernization to which he aspired for Mexico. A lesser but more tangible item that Alamán carried home with him from London provides the sort of detail about his life that is all too rare among the thousands of pages of his correspondence, official reports, government and private business documents, and historical writings. Given his scholarly interests, even his bookishness, we should not be surprised to find him sitting in the British Museum during some idle moments, probably in the later months of 1815. His presence there is attested by a printed sheet among his papers with the regulations—the rules of use, hours of operation, and so forth—to be observed by visitors to the museum’s reading room. On the back of the regulation sheet, which seems to have served as a user’s permit for the reading room, is a long set of verses copied out in Alamán’s hand. This is the complete, ardently patriotic, jingoistic poem “Hail England” authored that same

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year by Leigh Hunt, published initially in the magazine Hunt edited, The Examiner.13 The first stanza reads as follows: Hail England, dear England, true Queen of the West With thy fair swelling bosom, and ever-green vest How nobly thou sitst in thy own steady light On the left of thee Freedom, and Truth on the Right While the clouds, as they smile, break apart and turn bright The muses, full voiced, half encircle the seat And Ocean comes kissing thy princely white feet All hail! All hail! Despite the few orthographic errors in Alamán’s transcription, what is most interesting is that he should have copied it at all, an act that may reflect his lifelong Anglophilia.

Travel and Study on the Continent Lucas Alamán returned to Paris in November 1815 and remained until the following spring.14 We may assume he applied himself to study, networking, and seeing the sights he missed the first time around. He studied mineralogy at the Collège de France, developing an enthusiasm to travel to Italy. Alamán and a new friend named Colombelle agreed to travel south together, leaving Paris on 22 March 1816 bound for Naples. Passing through Lyon, they lingered to view the battlefields of Pavia and Marengo, arriving in Genoa toward the last week in April. They spent two weeks in Milan, visiting museums and public monuments, then in mid-May headed for Florence, arriving in the city of Dante, Machiavelli, and Galileo at the end of the month. They remained there for only a week before traveling around Tuscany and moving on to Rome. Alamán spent July, August, and the first half of September 1816 in the Eternal City. He certainly would have visited the Piazza di Spagna, the Spanish Steps, the Bernini fountain in the Piazza Navona, St. Peter’s, and Rome’s many churches. He may have been familiar already with Roman ruins through the etchings of Giovanni Batista Piranesi and almost certainly paid visits to the Baths of Caracalla, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, and the Forum. Lucas Alamán was to demonstrate throughout his life more than a passing interest in the architecture of public spaces and how it embodied and shaped collective memory. While in Rome, did he explore the narrow, tortuous streets of Trastevere or sample the favors of

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Roman courtesans? It seems unlikely, but then he was far from home, a healthy young man in his midtwenties traveling alone or in the company of other young men, with a certain amount of money in his pocket. He continued his pattern of fraternizing with the great and near-great, meeting during his time in Rome Cardinal Gonzalvo, Pope Pius VII’s chief minister; Dionisio Bardají (1760– 1826), a Spanish churchman just raised to the cardinalate in March 1816; and Prince Stanislaw Poniatowski (1754–1833), nephew of the last king of Poland, Stanislaw II August, then living in Rome after the partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) deprived him of the throne for which he was a candidate. “Having seen everything in Rome and its environs,” wrote Alamán, he and Colombelle separated, the Frenchman returning home and the Mexican going on to Naples via the Pontine Marshes and Capua, arriving in Naples on 25 September. Lucas Alamán stayed in the city and its surrounding area from 25 September to 7 November 1816. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been created by the Congress of Vienna just the preceding year and restored to the rule of a cadet branch of the Bourbon family. In Naples he stayed for two months in a hotel or inn at strada Speranzella no. 123, since when he left Naples in early November the innkeeper/hotelier signed a certificate attesting to don Lucas’s good health and stable residence there for about two months. A tourist guide to Naples of thirty years later described the alberghe at Speranzella 123 as a “second-class hotel” owned by Giuseppe Jorio that prepared meals for its guests.15 Since the eighteenth century the street had been the site of a number of workshops where high-quality guitars and mandolins were made. Since Alamán had studied the guitar, we may imagine him looking into the instrument shops in the neighborhood and even buying a guitar or two to take home with him. He could not have attended any sort of performance at the famous Teatro di San Carlo because the theater had been destroyed by fire in February 1816 and was being reconstructed while he was in the city. He would have sampled the fine Neapolitan wine and cuisine, if not in his own hotel, then out in the numerous other locandas. We may also envision him paying extended visits to the nearby Roman sites of Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Pompeii, the latter still being excavated with the more careful archaeological methods introduced by the French marshal and Neapolitan king Joachim Murat, executed scarcely a year (October 1815) prior to Lucas Alamán’s arrival in his short-lived kingdom. José Valadés writes (72) that Alamán also went to Sicily. If he did, it is conceivable that he met José Pignatelli de Aragón, the heir to the extensive properties of Fernando Cortés in Mexico and the title of Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, but there is no evidence that such a meeting took place.

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Alamán left Naples in November 1816, again bound for Rome. The Spanish chargé in Naples asked him to take three sealed documents for Spanish officials in the Eternal City. Arriving in Rome well before the end of the month, he awaited there the return of Francisco Fagoaga in order to resume their travels together, which would take up a good part of 1817. Valadés provides a highly plausible and evocative description of how the two young Mexicans traveled together: They made an arrangement to travel together, and [since] between them reigned the most intimate confidence, they formed a common purse replenished equally by both of them without ever giving an account of how much they put in, each of them managing the funds alternatively by weeks. The young men would spend many happy days looking over the most famous battlefields of history, visiting Venice and Milan, climbing the mountains of Switzerland, [and] following the course of the Rhine. So pleasant were the memories of these travels that “a few days before his death don Francisco still remembered this period of his life, holding it to be the happiest part.”16 Separating temporarily from Fagoaga, Alamán visited several cities, arriving at Perugia at the beginning of March, crossing the Apennines to Bologna, and arriving some days later in Florence. By the end of March he was back in Rome, where he awaited the return of Francisco Fagoaga through April, May, and June. The two Mexican travelers departed from Rome once again on 4 July 1817, Fagoaga for Florence and Alamán for Bologna, where they reunited around 10 July. On their itinerary after Ferrara was Venice, where they viewed works by Verrochio, Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, Giotto, and Donatello. August and early September saw the pair traveling to the principal cities of Lombardy, including Verona, Mantua, and Milan, the last Lucas Alamán would see of Italy during his life. The traveling companions spent the late summer and early autumn of 1817 touring Switzerland, which they had entered via Lago Maggiore after visiting Geneva.17 Their travels then took them to Basel, Lucerne, and a number of Swiss mountain towns, and then to Berne, where they arrived in mid-September. For the next month they made their way in a leisurely fashion down the left bank of the Rhine, arriving in Frankfurt on 7 October. In Mainz the pair split up again on 20 October, Fagoaga going on to Paris and Alamán to travel in Germany through the early months of 1818, for which he had prepared himself by studying German during his long sojourns in Rome.

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Lucas Alamán’s chief interest in the German lands seems to have been the technical aspects of silver mining. At least some of the inspiration for his later investments in mining and attempted innovations in extractive techniques is attributable to his travel and study in Germany. Passing through Dresden and Weimar and pausing briefly to visit the battlefields of Jena—where Napoleon’s French army had triumphed over the Prussians in 1806—and Leipzig—where coalition forces more than evened the score in the autumn of 1813 in the Battle of the Nations—Alamán reached Freiberg, in Saxony, on 3 November 1817 and remained for a month in this ancient silver- and tin-mining district. Of his stay in the area he wrote in his Épocas (22) only that he studied the local mining techniques “with much determination,” making connections with a number of Saxon miners. He may have visited the famous mining school there, the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, established fifty years earlier. The end of the first week of December found him in Berlin, where he remained through the end of the year. In later passing on to Brussels he exercised a mysterious “interino cargo,” which suggests obliquely that, as in his journey from Naples to Rome in late 1816, he was taking part in some sort of confidential diplomatic mission as a Spanish subject. Early 1818 saw Alamán on the road again, this time in the Upper and Lower Harz Mountains, visiting the silver, copper, and iron mines exploited in the area since ancient times. In late January he visited the famous university in Göttingen, where luminaries of the period had studied, among them Wilhelm von Humboldt, the elder brother of Alamán’s much-admired friend Alexander von Humboldt, and also the (German-born) Austrian diplomat Prince Metternich, with whom, according to some of his critics, Alamán shared certain affinities. Given that he was there for ten days and that there must have been precious little else to do in the university town, one assumes that he audited classes, met the local notables, and used the university library. February and March 1818 were occupied in travels to Marburg, Cassel, and Frankfurt, descending the Rhine to Cologne, and arriving at Aix-la-Chapelle in early February. The following weeks took him to Amsterdam, the Hague, Coblenz, and Rotterdam. He returned to Paris on 21 March 1818, a few days later registering at the Spanish embassy for a stay in the city. Lucas Alamán spent almost exactly one year in Paris, leaving the city in the spring of 1819 and arriving in Mexico in the winter of that year, after further travels in Spain. Unfortunately there is almost no documentary trace of this third stay in the French capital—there was to be one more, in 1822, much better documented—except for the extremely condensed account of it he gave in

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the Épocas (22). He met up with Francisco Fagoaga again, who was living at rue de Hanover no. 5 in a reasonably fashionable area of town. Don Lucas installed himself at rue Mirabeau no. 40, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, in what is today the Trocadero district of the city. He continued with his acquisition of languages, especially Greek, as well as his study of mineralogy at the Collège de France. He renewed his social contacts with attendance once more at the salons of the great and sinister Talleyrand, Prince of Benevento. At some point during his year in Paris his mother, doña María Ignacia Escalada, informed him that Juan Manuel Bustillo, to whom she had entrusted much of the family’s capital, had gone bankrupt, losing doña María Ignacia some ninety thousand pesos. What part of Lucas Alamán’s paternal inheritance was lost here is not clear. He was now approaching the age of thirty, having spent most of a decade in the sybaritic pleasures of travel and independent study. He was jolted by the Bustillo bankruptcy into the realization that he must turn his talents and studies to earning a living. He wrote in his Épocas (23): “During this year I received news of the bankruptcy in Mexico of don Juan Manuel Bustillo, who held all the resources that my family had saved from the ruin of Guanajuato, in which failure were lost something like ninety thousand pesos. This made me think of taking advantage of the studies I had pursued [to try to] establish in Mexico the method of refining gold and silver by means of sulfuric acid, applied in France and kept a secret.” Lucas Alamán concluded naturally enough that his future lay with the family enterprise in Guanajuato, silver mining, to which he had been continually exposed as a boy. This had furnished the basis for much of the fading family fortune, and he had studied mining systematically at home as well as in France and Germany. In the Épocas (23) he expressed a good deal of confidence in reviving the fortunes of the Cata mine. Mintage in Mexico dropped by 50 percent in the early years of the insurgency, experiencing a modest recovery in 1818–20 but continuing to be rachitic until after midcentury. As both government minister and entrepreneur Lucas Alamán was to do as much as any Mexican to spur the revival of the industry, especially during the latter half of the 1820s, but without conspicuous success. That he did not know the state of the industry on which he pinned his economic hopes is impossible to believe, so we must conclude that those hopes outran a realistic view of the possibilities, although he was by no means alone in this. Before he left for Spain to obtain a license from the royal authorities for application of the new refining method, he turned down an offer to take over government direction of the mint and mines in Potosí, in what was formerly Upper Peru but had fallen

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into the orbit of the newly independent government in Buenos Aires. The offer came from Bernardino Rivadavia (1780–1845), then on a diplomatic mission to Europe to seek support for the rioplatense (Río de la Plata; i.e., Argentine) revolution, presumably on behalf of the government he would later briefly head as president (1826–27). On exactly what basis this offer was made to Alamán we do not know, since he had yet to acquire hands-on experience in his profession of mining engineer and would never manage a mint. He must have demonstrated considerable knowledge, however, and enjoyed impeccable personal and educational credentials. Lucas Alamán left Paris on 22 April 1819, passing through Bordeaux, arriving at Bayonne on 9 May, and entering Spain through Irún. During the next two months he made a sentimental journey to the area in Navarre from which his father, Juan Vicente, and his uncle Tomás had emigrated to New Spain. He visited the small village of Roncesvalles, of Chanson de Roland fame, just below the French border, which lies on the pilgrimage route of Santiago de Compostela, and where, he tells us in his Épocas (23), his uncle don Juan José Berradé was the superior of an abbey. He continued on to his father’s natal village, Ochagavia, finally arriving in Madrid in early July 1819. Alamán was to stay in Madrid for about four months, pursuing a license from the royal authorities to apply the sulfuric acid method in a private facility in Mexico City. The justification for his petition (Épocas, 23), apart from its utility, was to reward “the great services done by my family in mining.” He had to jump through any number of hoops in petitioning to obtain the license. Given the political upheaval rocking New Spain, Alamán’s method was never implemented, although he was granted a somewhat modified license. The entire episode may have helped to sour him on the overmuscled colonial bureaucracy under which scientific and technological innovation was in some measure stifled. Seen from this angle, his proposals under his first government ministries to make the Mexican mining industry more agile, open to foreign investment, and modern appear in a more expansive light.18 By mid-November 1819 Alamán was making preparations to leave Madrid, having obtained the proper documentation and shortly thereafter returning to Paris by the route he had come, though at a far less leisurely pace. He spent a week in December gathering further information on the refining method, acquiring the necessary sulfuric acid and crucibles for the process and investing some two thousand pesos “that I had left” in “the first commercial speculation I [ever] made,” purchasing fashionable clothing items for resale in New Spain. Leaving Paris on 9 December, Alamán made his way to Le Havre and em-

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barked for Veracruz on about 15 December, sailing on the French brigantine L’Amitié in the company of members of the Fagoaga family. The ship arrived in the Mexican port without mischance on 27 February 1820. Lucas Alamán disembarked with his luggage and the goods he had bought on speculation, which he remarked drily “sold very well in Mexico City.”

First Steps in Politics Eighteen twenty is another year in Lucas Alamán’s life about which we have little detailed information. This is hardly surprising since there is no private correspondence available and no diary, and the returning traveler was not yet publicly prominent enough to have left a trail in the official documents or newspapers of the day. He arrived in Mexico City and found out about the 1820 rebellion in Spain to restore the 1812 Constitution, led by the liberal military officer Rafael Riego, the event that would precipitate him into a political career. Alamán’s account of these months back home is so compressed, however, that the timing of things becomes quite vague. He might just barely have heard of the Riego Rebellion on his arrival in Mexico, since it had occurred on 1 January 1821 while he was still on shipboard in the Atlantic, although the news of the event did not arrive in Mexico until early April. He could not have heard of the reproclamation of the constitution by the beleaguered King Ferdinand VII until about the end of April at the earliest, since it did not occur until 10 March 1820, and the charter was not reestablished in New Spain by Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca until 31 May 1820. Alamán presumably returned to his mother’s home in Mexico City and lived there until he departed New for Old Spain again the following January. These ten months or so back in Mexico City marked the preface to Lucas Alamán’s career as a man of public affairs. This began with a pair of viceregal appointments, one of them quite understandable, even predictable, the second rather mysterious. Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, the Conde del Venadito, appointed Alamán a special inspector (visitador) of silver and gold refining operations early in 1820. This was a logical move on the government’s part given that the returned traveler had studied advanced mining and refining techniques in Europe. How the viceroy came to know of him and his expertise, however, is an interesting question, even though the family background in the industry and its lingering social prominence may have had something to do with it. There may also have been unofficial lobbying on Alamán’s behalf by José Francisco Fagoaga, the Marqués del Apartado, or his younger brother

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Francisco, who had been Alamán’s boon companion in his European travels and would remain a lifelong friend. What the young mining engineer did in this capacity is not recorded; presumably his charge would have included encouraging refinery operators to apply the sulfuric acid technique he had learned in Europe. He could not have been at this post very long because he resigned the commission in the fall to put himself forward as a candidate for deputy to the Spanish Cortes. The second appointment looks distinctly odd, although it too probably came to pass through unofficial influence. This was the position as secretary to the High Commission on Public Health (Junta Superior de Sanidad), newly established by Viceroy Apodaca in keeping with a measure promulgated by the Spanish constitutional Cortes and installed in Mexico City in mid-August 1820.19 The influence here may well have originated with Alamán’s elder half brother, Juan Bautista Arechederreta, still rector of the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán and an increasingly powerful churchman. Arechederreta had a careerlong interest in education, including medical education, and had proposed in 1804 the establishment of a “seminario de medicina” in the viceregal capital. The public health commission was chaired by Apodaca himself, and its members included Archbishop Fonte, Mexico City intendant Ramón Gutiérrez del Mazo, several other officials, and some prominent physicians. Lucas Alamán was to serve without salary or compensation for any costs involved. There is no evidence that he had any expertise in matters of public health. We are left to conclude that since the appointment could not have been seen as a sinecure, it probably came as a mark of official favor and as a result of the lobbying by influential people who had the viceroy’s ear. The closing months of Alamán’s stay in New Spain—it would be Mexico when he returned—were to be pivotal in his life because of two key events. The first was his betrothal to the sixteen-year-old María Narcisa Castrillo Portu (1804–58), whom he was to marry when he returned from Europe in 1823. Her family had been intimately and fatally entangled with the early phase of the independence movement in Guanajuato. Narcisa, as she was known, was the daughter of Juan José García Castrillo, a Spaniard from Palencia who died in the Tacubaya district of Mexico City in 1829, and Ana Josefa Portu Bustamante (1787–1841). She was the eldest of five children, one of whom, a brother, died in infancy, but another of whom, her sister Ana Josefa Castrillo Portu (born 1820), named for their mother, was to live to be ninety-eight years old and die in 1918, just as the Mexican Revolution was winding down. Narcisa’s father had made a substantial commercial fortune in Guanajuato, as Gabriel

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Arechederreta and Juan Vicente Alamán had done before him. Much of this wealth had dissipated by the turn of the century, however, and the family fortune suffered further losses during the time the rebels occupied Guanajuato in September 1810. In the wake of the insurgency, therefore, he was left primarily with his wife’s landed wealth to sustain the family. About the time Lucas Alamán was being roughed up by insurgents in his house on the Cuesta del Marqués, across town Juan José García Castrillo, his future father-in-law, was escaping the Alhóndiga de Granaditas to hide with some other European Spaniards in the Oratorio of San Felipe Neri during the night of 28 September. In December he rendered a brief but very dramatic and evocative eyewitness account of events in the city during the insurgent occupation in an informe directed to Félix María Calleja.20 Narcisa’s maternal grandfather, Manuel Fernando Portu, a Basque from Guipúzcoa (b. 1760), was less fortunate, perishing in the Alhóndiga massacre on September 28 along with his brother Luis and one Juan José Castrillo, possibly a relative. María Narcisa Castrillo Portu de Alamán was to bear eleven children during her marriage, six of whom died in infancy or early childhood. A portrait of her at about the age of forty shows a slightly corpulent, rather ordinary looking woman whom José Valadés described as a typical mid-nineteenth-century Mexican matron of the moneyed classes whose face lacked “any trace of intelligence.”21 Fanny Calderón de la Barca, who met her in 1840 when the two women were approximately thirty-five years old, described her as “one of the most prudish women in Mexico,” leaving unexplained why she had arrived at this conclusion. She would doubtless have found her dowdy had she commented on her physical appearance and personal style. Prudish she may have been and even dowdy, but that she was unintelligent is open to question, especially given the way she helped her husband handle his affairs while he was in internal exile in 1833–34, the point at which she emerges into view most clearly in her husband’s political life. Whatever doña Narcisa may have lacked in the way of scintillating personality or physical attraction, she managed to raise at least two quite accomplished sons among her children, withstood with seeming fortitude the deaths of half her other children, navigated with her husband the turbulent waters of Mexican public life, and ran the sort of household— Guillermo Prieto described it as quiet, pious, and well-regulated—that supported her husband in his multifarious activities. But apart from her rare appearances in her husband’s papers and judging by what we can infer from her likely participation in his public life and from her social status, she remains a virtual cypher in this story. This is a great pity since it throws into

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shadow a major part of Lucas Alamán’s life while it robs his consort of her due. The second important event that year was Alamán’s standing for election as a deputy from the province of Guanajuato for the second session of the Spanish Cortes of 1820–21. A perusal of the list of electors meeting in the city of Guanajuato on 16–17 September 1820 and representing the thirteen districts (partidos) of the province demonstrates that it was composed overwhelmingly of priests and lawyers; the list of deputies turned out to be dominated by these groups. Alamán gave no hint in writing of his motives for standing. An indication of his reasons for undertaking the arduous travel and considerable expense of this service, however, may lie in the fact that in citing the beneficial legislation enacted by the Cortes the following year he mentioned in first place the reduction of royal taxes on the production of gold and silver in New Spain.22 Thus newly elected and newly betrothed on the eve of his departure for Spain on a trip of indefinite duration, Lucas Alamán must have spent some weeks winding up business affairs he had just begun to take up after his long absence in Europe, making travel arrangements, and taking leave of family, friends, associates, and his new fiancé. Conditions in the country were highly volatile, and the lay of the political landscape would be very different when he returned nearly two years later. In mid-November 1820 he was authorized by Viceroy Apodaca to collect from the royal treasury two thousand pesos to support his travel and living expenses while serving as a deputy from New Spain. Around this time he and his fellow deputy-elect José Francisco Fagoaga, the Marqués del Apartado, went to take leave of the viceroy, a meeting of which Alamán wrote in his Historia de Méjico. When he expressed the wish to find Apodaca well upon his return from Spain, the viceroy responded, “Find me here upon your return! Do you know all that will happen in the country during your absence?”23

4 • The Spanish Cortes and a Final Sojourn in Paris (1821–1822)

The Deputy from Guanajuato Takes His Seat At the very end of 1820 and in the early weeks of 1821 the Mexican deputies-elect began to converge on Veracruz for the voyage to Europe and the trip onward to Madrid, where the Cortes sat. In the ranks of the fifty or so representatives headed for Spain churchmen, lawyers, and military men predominated; in fact, the delegation from Nueva Galicia consisted entirely of priests. Lucas Alamán knew several of them, including his former teacher in the Colegio de Minería, Andrés Manuel del Río; his friend and former traveling companion Francisco Fagoaga, living in Spain, and others. Later he would cross paths with several, either in politics or business, in alliance or opposition.1 Alamán sailed for Havana in company with many of the deputies-elect on 13 February 1821, continued to Europe after a brief stay in Cuba, and, owing to bad weather, disembarked at La Rochelle, on the French coast. The deputy-elect from Guanajuato arrived in Madrid at the very end of April 1821. His credentials were approved by the relevant Cortes committee on 1 May, and he swore his oath of allegiance to the Constitution the next day. The Cortes ordinarias had convened on 9 July 1820 as a direct outcome of the successful constitutionalist rebellion led by Rafael Riego (1784–1823). King Ferdinand VII was forced to swear allegiance to the 1812 Constitution, which he had abrogated immediately upon his return to the throne in 1814, thus initiating the “trienio liberal.”2 The Spanish American delegation would eventually comprise seventy-eight representatives, always remaining a minority within the Cortes as a whole. Deputy Alamán was to make frequent, robust, and wide-ranging speeches, especially concerning the status of the American colonies, during the extended sitting of the body, the Cortes extraordinarias, 85

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from September 1821 to mid-February 1822. For the entire six months or so of his participation in the Spanish imperial parliament, all of Alamán’s speeches are recorded verbatim in the printed transcripts of the Cortes debates published some fifty years later. Many of these interventions were based on written versions submitted to the body’s secretaries after the speeches were delivered, but there were also stenographers present using a newly invented standard shorthand or their own systems of notation.3 This record makes for a considerable body of material in Alamán’s case, all of it marked by the same combination of logical acuity, wide-ranging historical, classical, and other references, occasional sharpness of tone and even sarcasm, prolixity, and baroque elaboration that make of his extended writings, in this period and toward the end of his life, a demanding but rewarding read. Alamán embraced subjects as diverse as imperial administrative matters, regulations on the importation into Spain of foreign technologies, and public health issues, including an especially interesting exchange about madhouses. There are a number of reasons for quoting his speeches at length. First, Lucas Alamán was no longer a young man at this time, relatively speaking, and was to celebrate his thirtieth birthday in the autumn of 1822.4 For politicians with military backgrounds, especially those whose careers were launched during the independence struggle, entrance into public life often came in their midtwenties. Alamán’s texts give us a benchmark against which to evaluate his later intellectual and public life. Second, he did come to play at least a walk-on role in the debates occasioned by the breakup of the Spanish Atlantic empire, so hearing what he had to say is essential in locating him in the political landscape. Finally, his interventions in the Cortes adumbrated many concerns he was later to pursue energetically, chief among them his successful proposals to loosen imperial regulations on Mexican silver mining. Most of his energies, however, were devoted to the issues of colonial autonomy and forms of governance for the overseas realms—the so-called American question. Virtually nothing is known of his living circumstances during the ten months or so he stayed in Madrid. He already knew the city fairly well from previous stays there and must have had favorite haunts, restaurants, and homes to visit on social calls. Where he lodged we do not know, although given his closeness to the Fagoaga brothers he may well have stayed in the house rented by the elder brother, the Marqués del Apartado, in the Calle del Turco.5 The deputy-elect stepped into a political atmosphere getting hotter by the day. The liberal anticlerical measures promulgated by the 1820 Cortes gave rise to heated debates in and out of the imperial diet. Alamán thought all this

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a distraction, displacing the issue of the overseas realms’ status to the wings when it should have occupied center stage. The September arrival in Madrid of Rafael Riego, then at the height of his popularity, served to inflame political spirits even further. On top of all this, King Ferdinand’s relations with his moderate ministry grew increasingly tense, so the monarch decamped for El Escorial before closing the Cortes in November 1820. The divisions between the more radical and moderate representatives, and between these and the conservatives, grew still more pronounced with the arrival of the proprietary deputies to the newly convoked Cortes during the first months of 1821. It is not surprising to see Alamán ascribe a good deal of blame for the political factionalism in Madrid to the Freemasonry among liberal politicians both Spanish and Spanish American, while he made light of Masonic ceremonies themselves. Everyone hurried to join Masonic lodges, he wrote, including government ministers, and what he called “regular Spanish Masonry” was the “principal spring of politics in that epoch.” He heaped scorn on the “ridiculous ceremonial” involved in joining a lodge, ridiculing the proliferation of lodges.6 Along with the dark brew served there, Alamán wrote, the coffeehouses of Madrid, those Habermasian incubators of civic modernity, were boiling with political discussion and even conspiracies during these years. One thing the substitute deputies did achieve through a petition to the Spanish ministry of war in January 1821, however, was the recall of the viceroys and military commanders Joaquín de la Pezuela from Peru and Juan Manuel Ruiz de Apodaca from New Spain as well as of the generals Pablo Morillo from Venezuela and José de la Cruz from western Mexico. Apodaca was replaced with the liberal Spanish general, Freemason, and Riego friend, Juan O’Donojú, under the title of jefe político superior, while the other recalls were overtaken by the fast-moving events of the day. Events in New Spain, meanwhile, were following a logic of their own. The 1820 elections for the Cortes of the following year were messy but lacked the ardent enthusiasm and sense of possibility of 1810. Most of those elected were lawyers and churchmen, along with a few military men and merchants; Alamán notes his own election only in passing. Almost all the American deputies were attached to the partido exajerado, an exaggeration in itself. But this leftward tilt did lend weight to continued reform proposals directed at the Church, including the reduction of tithes by half and the selling off of ecclesiastical properties, in the end applied only in Spain itself and not the American realms. The flood of subversive pamphletry in Mexico occasioned by the renewed suppression of restrictions on the press nourished the unrest. But

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discussions on the issue of mechanisms of autonomy for the overseas realms filtered back to New Spain. Alamán wrote, “The desire for independence had come to be general, and although it might have been suffocated [with the suppression of] the disorders of the insurrection, it awakened with greater vehemence when [once] the hope was presented of achieving it by other means.”

Mining Reforms Lucas Alamán delivered his maiden speech on Friday, 4 May 1821: “The mining [industry] of New Spain, in order to avoid the absolute ruin with which it is immediately threatened, and to restore it to its ancient splendor, upon which the [prosperity] of those provinces depends, needs a change in the system of taxes [contribuciones] it pays and in the method by which it is governed. This can be realized in the following terms.”7 The reform legislation submitted by Alamán and his Mexican colleagues initially included twenty-nine articles, dealing primarily with tax reductions and deregulation of the industry, the mining tribunal (the royally chartered body that oversaw the industry and settled disputes within it), and the training of expert mining personnel. The single most important measure was the abolition of the quinto, a royal tax on silver notionally of 20 percent collected since early colonial times, based on the monarchy’s claim to all subsoil rights. The quinto had been manipulated over the centuries, along with the price of mercury essential to the amalgamation refining process, to encourage investment by reducing production costs at key moments. This and other taxes were to be replaced by a simpler, across-the-board contribución directa of 18 percent, basically an income tax paid by mineowners on producing mines. The Mexican proposal was referred to a specially constituted subcommittee of the standing Cortes commission on agriculture, industry, and commerce, on which Alamán served with Juan Antonio Yandiola, a deputy from Vizcaya. Also on the committee was his fellow Mexican Lorenzo de Zavala, already something of a radical liberal. But since Alamán seems to have been more tolerant of the gamut of liberal opinion in these years, he and Zavala may well have got on in a civilized if not cordial manner. Deputy Yandiola was positive about the reform proposals, emphasizing that the restoration of silver production would remedy the shortage of the circulating exchange medium in Europe, with particular benefits for Spain. As a final vote on the proposals drew near, Yandiola voiced highly supportive remarks in a speech during the Cortes’s evening debates of 4 June 1821, suggesting that the moment had arrived

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when the body might revive the industry “from the depression [and even] nullity in which it lies.”8 When discussion in the Cortes had concluded, the first five measures of the Mexican proposal were approved, others modified, and one withdrawn. Like much other legislation promulgated by the Spanish Cortes, these measures became dead letters within a year or so because the empire collapsed. The deputy from Guanajuato had already done a great deal of homework on the situation of mining in New Spain when other proposals were introduced, and he may well have presented a fairly elaborate report to the subcommittee in support of the project. The draft reports among his papers are thus the first real statements we have from him on a theme that would absorb much of his time and energy over the next decade or so but that ultimately did not open the silver cornucopia he hoped for; internal evidence places their composition in 1820 or 1821. They demonstrate the attention to detail, not inconsiderable mastery of technology, breadth of historical and comparative reference, theoretical grasp of political economy, and depth of vision that would come to characterize much of his later writing, whether on politics, economics, or history. While other great writers and public men of the age could claim many of these same qualities in their works, few combined all of them as effectively as Lucas Alamán. At least one of the drafts may have been a preliminary proposal to the Conde de Valenciana for putting back into production the great Guanajuato mine, severely damaged during the insurrection chiefly through flooding, but it is very much of a piece with the other drafts intended for the Cortes. The reports are too long to quote integrally but do warrant selective attention. Alamán claimed that imposts on mining reduced earnings enough to make the Mexican mines unprofitable except under limited conditions and certainly unprofitable under the circumstances of virtual ruin into which they had fallen during the insurgency.9 He wrote that mintage figures in New Spain were presently at about the same level as a century earlier. The absence of sufficient capital and the imposition of high taxes made unprofitable the processing of the relatively ordinary ores “that have always constituted the wealth of [New Spain].” Nor had the industry ever reached its full potential, he asserted, despite its reputation, because it was unprofitable to extract silver due to the taxes imposed on the industry. Alamán recalled that the quinto was established at the time of the conquest as a royal tax on the products of military parasitism—the primitive accumulation of wealth through the appropriation of the indigenous polities’ resources as a windfall in no way comparable to the

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persistence, risk, and work required by silver mining: “[The quinto was] collected on the booty taken by the conquerors, as though despoiling the Indians were the same as working the mines, [which] requires considerable capital and the investment of labor and sweat, [and which] are taxed at the same rate.” Such taxes were inherently regressive because different mines yielded differing ratios of silver/ore, so the quinto was imposed equally on mines that required much labor to extract silver and on those whose product came more easily. Among the papers of this 1820–21 period undergirding Alamán’s proposals is a short draft on the prospects of the great Valenciana mine in his hometown. This was presented directly to the Conde de Valenciana as a sort of case study whose basic elements Alamán may well have deployed in more generalized form in the discussions of the Cortes special committee on mining. He asked a series of rhetorical questions focusing on the central problem in all such deep-shaft mines, but particularly acute given the great depth of the Valenciana—that of draining the water. The solution, he proposed, was the application of steam power, a method widely used in Europe. Here he offered a series of observations and calculations about the specific requirements of applying this technology to the Valenciana, but “not trusting my own results, I have consulted with some of the most distinguished technicians of this capital [i.e., Madrid] and above all with the wise director of the machinery in the mines of Saxony.” Alamán’s calculations encompassed the diameter of the pumps and cylinders required, the horsepower of the steam engines obtainable in Birmingham and Sheffield and the cost of the machines, the resinous properties of European and Mexican pine trees as sources of fuel, the amount of water that could be extracted from the mine, and a number of other variables bearing on the application of steam technology to Mexican mining. In an even lengthier and more detailed document from the same period he focused on the Mexican mining industry as it stood in about 1820, drawing on the Valenciana as a case study primus inter pares. This report touched not only on mining itself and proposed changes in the tax structure of the industry but also on mintage practices in a comparative European context, the history of money, the history of silver production in New Spain, and even briefly on a theory of the state. Alamán began with a disquisition on the economics of mining, whose profitability and therefore the propensity for investment in it depended on a reasonable equilibrium among the value of silver, its production costs, and taxes paid. He recalled the liquidity crisis in Guanajuato during the years of the insurgency, arguing that the collection of the king’s royalties on mintage (regalías) had been accorded priority by the government over the

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interests of the mining industry. The invention of money as a common medium of exchange and its increasing use over time “when with the growth of human wisdom commercial relations also increased among all peoples,” had created the need for monarchies to insure the mineral content of the coinage produced by mints. The centralization of mintage in New Spain, however, had discouraged production through overregulation. He calculated that the Valenciana mine alone had lost the substantial sum of 1.5 million pesos through discounting at the mint, although he did not specify how long this had taken. The argument he made here would come to support one of the Mexican deputies’ proposals, namely, that other mints be established in New Spain in addition to the one in Mexico City, an idea that did not prosper in the Spanish Cortes. One of the most striking aspects of this entire chain of reasoning is the whiff of an argument about internal colonialism within New Spain, and the inordinate attention paid by government officials to the interests of merchants over producers. His emphasis on production over commerce may foreshadow to some degree his later developmentalist ideas concerning the industrialization of Mexico, when he had come forthrightly to criticize silver mining as an open vein bleeding the country’s wealth into the hands of foreigners. The document continued with a litany of complaints against taxes in general, especially against those emergency imposts, which were still in place as he wrote, specifically levied in Guanajuato during the insurgency of 1810. Was it any wonder, he asked, that fiscal exactions debilitated the mining industry almost to the point that it was moribund? Alamán answered his own question partially by propounding a theory of the state and the social compact: “It seems that social order demands that when sacrifices judged necessary for [the general] defense and preservation have been made in common by all its members, [society should] protect equally all those who form the association. At the moment when individuals must prosecute justice by their own hands or provide for their own defense, the bonds that join them cease, since these have as their sole objective their personal security and that of their property, for which ends they sacrifice a part [of their wealth]. Guanajuato having paid its taxes, why should new ones be imposed on it for its defense? And why was it not garrisoned with royalist troops since it had paid to maintain them?” In the wake of these general comments, the author unspooled a thick skein of statistical evidence to show how the industry had declined since 1809. By 1819 or so there were only about one-tenth the number of ore-crushing mills (arrastres) in operation as a decade earlier; and silver and gold production had declined to about a quarter of their 1809 levels. High production costs meant

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that no capital had been invested in searching for new ore bodies, with the result that miners were stripping their holdings in a highly destructive manner, going after interior walls within the mines and the roof-supporting pillars. Extremely high yields were not the secret to the great wealth produced by the Guanajuato mines over the centuries, however, but rather the abundance and consistency of lower-grade ores. Alamán cited Humboldt to the effect that the Valenciana mine alone “offers the almost unique example of a mine that for the past forty years [i.e., since about 1760 because Humboldt was writing in 1802–3] had never left its owners with a profit of less than 400–600,000 pesos per year.” Since about 1700 the great hole in the ground had yielded the staggering amount of 271,183,392 pesos in silver and gold, “making of the Bajío the most populous and opulent corner of the Realm,” and paying the Spanish crown a total of nearly forty million pesos in taxes. Experience demonstrated that lowering imposts on mining produced more revenue for the state over the long run rather than less, he asserted, citing periods in New Spain when the royal quinto had been reduced to a décimo. His grand solution to the problem of reviving the mining sector after the insurgency was to abolish all taxes imposed on it since the start of the insurrection. Flooding as such was not at the heart of the problem but rather the fiscal demands of the Spanish state. Such a policy would revive agriculture, especially in the province of Guanajuato. Miners would start to invest in the sector without the need of foreign capital, “which will never lend them funds without [making them] pay dearly, which is damaging to mining.” Drainage would be encouraged through the application of steam power, and mining recovery would underwrite the comeback of the economy and of state revenues. The irony here is that by the 1830s and 1840s Alamán was unequivocally expressing the view that the economic health and future of Mexico lay along the path of industrialization rather than of silver mining.

What to Do about the Americas Especially in the debates on the American question in the Cortes extraordinarias of January and February 1822, Lucas Alamán was to be as volubly, consistently, and creditably engaged as any deputy from the New World. His participation in the debates over the American question in early 1822 served as a springboard for his growing reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. While his personal political ambitions and thoughts for his future may have played some role in his interventions in the Madrid Cortes, they took second

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place to the heat of the moment and his political thinking, even if the latter was not yet undergirded by a clear ideological position. Behind his warm advocacy of what amounted to a commonwealth arrangement within the imperial structure, we can detect the Mexican nationalism that came to characterize his thinking and actions throughout the rest of his public life, a sentiment he shared with Mexican liberals even as his ideas about the Mexican state were evolving in a very different direction from theirs. Nor was his well-known, deep nostalgia for Mexico’s Spanish heritage incompatible with a nationalist sensibility. This is one of the aspects of his thinking that is most interesting, in fact, and that lies more on the side of paradox than self-contradiction. Around the spring of 1822 the independence of New Spain was, in his eyes, a fait accompli, and neither at this time nor later did he offer a negative moral judgment about independence per se or pine for its reversal, despite the conventional wisdom about him. Aside from the fact that the way in which Mexican independence was achieved signified to him mindless social violence and the thoughtless abandonment of a cultural heritage Alamán regarded as noble and worthy of preservation, what was at issue for him was not the existence of an independent Mexican state but its form and viability. Many years later, in the final volume of his Historia de Méjico, Alamán wrote in a counterfactual framework that in declaring null and void the Treaty of Córdoba signed by Agustín de Iturbide and Juan O’Donojú on 24 August 1821, the Cortes had thrown away any opportunity for a relatively peaceful and orderly transition to a federative Spanish Empire: The Cortes, declaring . . . null and illegal the Treaty of Córdoba, itself closed the door to the advantages . . . [that might have been obtained] . . . as a precondition for the recognition of independence. Even if that treaty were evidently void, it could have been validated by subsequent legislation, taking advantage of an occasion that, once lost, did not present itself again. . . . Iturbide would not have been able to show his pretensions [to a Mexican throne] even if he had conceived them at that time, having to keep his commitments [made in the Treaty], even more had his vanity been flattered and his [personal] interest been stimulated. And Spain, contributing to the establishment of a new empire, sending to occupy its throne one of its princes, would . . . have enjoyed the commercial and political advantages the Mexicans were ready to concede to her.10 The failure to pursue a more conciliatory course, Alamán wrote, led to absolute independence for Mexico, its recognition by foreign powers, and the

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loss to Spain of the advantages of a commonwealth arrangement. He continued: “This . . . [course of action] brought down upon the country many years of anarchy, impeded Mexico from being a nation respected from its birth, and produced all those misfortunes that have fallen upon it, and that still give no sign that they will end. . . . The throne of Méjico . . . remained shaky, [only] to crumble under the attacks of the republicans, or to be the object of intrigues by ambitious men aspiring to gain control of it.”11 This was the much older Alamán, however, writing with the benefit of hindsight and the personal experience of the intervening years. His evaluation of the early 1820s was colored by the palpable disillusion in his great history of Mexican independence and his speeches in the Cortes in 1821 and 1822 supporting a federative structure for the Spanish monarchy. On the Spanish side, the missed opportunities stemmed from denial by the peninsular deputies of what was going on in the overseas realms, a neglect verging on criminal negligence. Indulging in some cultural psychology about the “Spanish race,” Alamán wrote of the Madrid Cortes of 1820–21, before his arrival as a deputy from New Spain: “Not even a word was said about the most important matter facing the monarchy, which was that the Americas were escaping [the empire] very quickly. . . . It appears to be characteristic of the Spanish race in both hemispheres to avoid dealing with unpleasant subjects no matter how urgent they are; or to adopt measures that [although] they may have been useful at one moment, when they come to be applied are already silly. Silence appears to be considered the best remedy in difficult cases, or it is thought that [bad] things will not occur if they are not spoken of.”12 In 1820 commissioners had been named by the government to travel to the American colonies to negotiate adherence to the 1812 Constitution with insurgent leaders in those areas where rebel governments had been established. But since Mexico was still under viceregal authority none were sent there as yet. When Juan O’Donojú was dispatched in the summer of 1821 he went as jefe político superior of New Spain under the restored 1812 Constitution. In November 1820 the Spanish envoys sent to Buenos Aires for this purpose were simply ignored by the rioplatense authorities and returned to Spain empty-handed. Generally these commissions failed, with more or fewer complications.13 The Diario of the debates bears out Alamán’s contention that except for two points—in June 1821 and the last month or so of the extraordinarias in early 1822—at which the American deputies forced the issue of colonial affairs onto the agenda, the Cortes ignored the momentous changes in progress across the Atlantic. Most historians agree, including Ivana Frasquet and Alfredo Ávila,

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for example, who note that few concerns of the American deputies about the volatile state of their homelands received much of a hearing in the peninsulardominated parliament, being pushed aside by intense debates concerning Spanish domestic political and economic matters. Among the few concrete accomplishments of the Mexican delegation was the creation of fourteen new provincial deputations by a decree of 9 May 1821, among them the conjoined body of Michoacán and Guanajuato, with its headquarters in Valladolid. Timothy Anna has suggested that even among the most exalted of the Spanish liberals, such as José María Queipo de Llano, Conde de Toreno (1786–1843), there existed a generalized belief that the reimposition of the 1812 Constitution would solve all the problems raised by the Americans or at least appease them. The notion of autonomy for the overseas realms, therefore, was not on people’s minds, much less independence. Anna ascribed this in part to the pressure on liberal Spanish deputies emanating from their supporters among the Andalusian bourgeoisie, to whom any further free-trade measures for the New World colonies were anathema, since such a policy would undermine commercial profits. Anna further asserted that political tensions in Spain, along with the king’s attempts to restore absolutism, were “no doubt the fundamental explanation of the failure of the new liberal regime to implement a genuinely renewed policy of American pacification.”14 Then, too, King Ferdinand himself was implacably opposed to any reforms of imperial arrangements. Commenting further on the debates in the Cortes extraordinarias of 1821, convened in Madrid on 28 September, the same day the provisional governing junta was installed in Mexico City, the regency named, and the Mexican Act of Independence signed, Alamán wrote that in the Spanish parliament “not a single proposal [regarding American affairs] was made, and while the monarchy was collapsing the Cortes entertained itself tranquilly in discussing whether such and such a village should belong to the Province of Cuenca or La Mancha, and if the capital of this or that district should be this or that secondrate village or town.”15 Despite the posture of stubborn neglect assumed by the peninsular deputies, events in the American colonies finally obtruded themselves into the Cortes debates. The initial breach on 3 May 1821 occurred when Diputado Felipe Fermín Paul of Caracas demanded that the government produce a file with all the documentation relating to recent events in Venezuela. In response to this, the Spanish liberal deputy José María Queipo de Llano, Conde de Toreno, proposed to the Cortes the appointment of a committee to present plans to end the uprisings in the colonies. The committee was constituted on 4 May

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and Alamán named one of its members, just three days after he had presented his credentials as a deputy. Serving with him were the Spaniards Toreno, Juan Antonio Yandiola, and José María Calatrava, and the Americans Paul, Lorenzo de Zavala, Bernardino de Amati, and Francisco Fagoaga.16 According to Alamán, the committee met often, and many other deputies and government ministers attended to listen in. The Mexican historian Alfredo Ávila has remarked that there was little the committee could do: no resolutions were reported out, but there was a great deal of bargaining with the American deputies to attract their votes to one position or another regarding colonial issues.17 In the meantime, in mid-May the government’s colonial minister, Ramón López Pelegrín, convened a separate blue-ribbon committee to examine American issues in general and the long-floated three-regency plan in particular.18 But in the face of King Ferdinand’s refusal to consider sending a prince of the ruling house to the Americas these projects came to naught, although the Mexican deputies would propose similar measures at the end of June. On 3 June Alamán rose to say that his committee on pacification of the overseas realms had in fact concluded its work, but that “the necessity of obtaining as much knowledge and news [of the American realms] as possible had impeded its presenting its report,” a refrain he would repeat often during the debates about the colonies in the winter of 1821–22.19 On the same day, deputies were informed by a dispatch from Viceroy Apodaca in New Spain of the uprising of Agustín de Iturbide. The emperor-to-be had published the Plan de Iguala on 24 February in conjunction with the insurgent chieftains Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria and a week or so later had been proclaimed head of the Army of the Three Guarantees. The Mexican deputies Manuel Gómez Pedraza and José Mariano Michelena argued that Iturbide should be ordered by the Spanish government to await the outcome of the Cortes deliberations before going further with his movement. And there matters stood during the first days of June; now the fat was truly in the fire. Had Lucas Alamán not already emerged to some prominence in the Cortes during the single month he had served as a deputy he would surely have done so over the next weeks, even though he was set among a Mexican delegation whose members would prove to be of great distinction in the years ahead. José Valadés offers a description of some of the most prominent Mexican deputies at about this time, calling Juan de Dios Cañedo the most eloquent of them all (Alamán himself had great respect for Cañedo as an orator, but the two men would become irreconcilable political adversaries later on), Miguel Ramos Arizpe the most restless (inquieto), José Mariano Michelena the most diplo-

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matic, and Alamán the most solid.20 Another description of Alamán around this time, by an anonymous Spanish writer, was distinctly less flattering: There you have the little Secretary [of the Cortes], a bit reserved, a deputy of filigree [i.e., neatly wrought or clever], a proper little diplomat. With a calm as though nothing were going on. Although he sports eyeglasses he does not need them, and although small [in stature] he knows very well where the shoe pinches, as he has shown on certain occasions on which he has placed himself in the middle [position], leaving the extremes to less calculating people. This boy [Alamán was approaching the age of thirty at this time] is the author of the magna carta in partnership with his compadre Michelena, which everywhere to the south of Texas does them much honor, say the industrious searchers of the colonial archives what they will. Qui potest capere capiat.21 With time short and hopes dimming daily among the Mexicans for a robust debate in the body, let alone for the adoption of a project ending hostilities in America on terms even remotely favorable to the colonies, the “little Secretary” and his Mexican colleagues took matters into their own hands. Beginning on 19 June they held a series of meetings at the house of the Marqués del Apartado, Francisco Fagoaga, on the Calle del Turco, where Alamán may well have been staying during his legislative sojourn in Madrid. The main objective of the discussions was to find a way to force the condition of New Spain onto the agenda of the Cortes, specifically embodied in a plan to place one of the king’s brothers on a Mexican throne. The king viewed this proposal as nothing more than disguised independence and therefore intolerable. Prominent among this group of Mexican deputies were José Mariano Michelena, Miguel Ramos Arizpe, the Fagoaga brothers, and Alamán himself. In these informal meetings, Alamán recalled, they discussed presenting to the Cortes the confederation plan proposed decades earlier by the Conde de Aranda. This would divide Spanish America into three autonomous but not independent sections, each ruled by a Spanish Bourbon prince and each with its own parliament: “It may be said that this plan was very analogous to the system that had prevailed in [Spanish] America before the Constitution [of 1812] . . . since each of the great sections of that continent had come to be a separate monarchy, with all the elements necessary for their internal governance, similarly to those established in Spain for the monarchy as a whole.”22 Similar proposals for greater autonomy for the American realms within a confederative imperial structure had been debated for many years and were strongly associated with the name

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of longtime royal minister and diplomat Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea (1719– 98), the Conde de Aranda. What the deputies actually presented to the Cortes on 25 June 1821 came to be known as the Michelena plan, closely associated with José Mariano Michelena and Miguel Ramos Arizpe. Alamán’s involvement was substantial, but his role seems to have been that of editor of the written proposal (which may account for the word redactor, which can mean “editor,” used to describe him by the author of the “Secretario ligerito” remarks quoted above) and oratorical supporter of it in the Cortes rather than its intellectual author. Various draft versions of the Michelena plan were discussed in yet another meeting at Fagoaga’s house on 22 June, and Michelena and Alamán were appointed to reconcile them and ramp down the tone a bit, a task eventually delegated to the deputy from Guanajuato. Alamán wrote many years later that while the original drafts were “pompous and windy,” in his revision he confessed that he himself went a bit over the top, finishing the document in the space of about two hours: “With the fire of youth and a vivid imagination, the author [i.e., Alamán] asserted some things that he would not now sustain and had to copy [i.e., include] various exaggerated and vainglorious expressions from the notes given him.” By 25 June there were forty-nine signatories. The plan contained fifteen points, of which the most important was that New Spain, Peru, and New Granada be recognized as three Spanish kingdoms each to be ruled, if possible, by princes of the Bourbon house, which would have created a confederative structure within the Spanish Empire. The proposal was to be read before the Cortes by a deputy from Nueva Galicia, José Miguel Ramírez, a canon of the Guadalajara cathedral. In the meantime, however, on 24 June the Conde de Toreno presented to the full Cortes a report on behalf of the “comisión de Ultramar” (commission on colonial affairs). Toreno would be a major interlocutor of Alamán’s in the debates the following year over the situation of the colonies; he and Lucas Alamán came to rest at political positions not too distant from each other. Some years after the Spanish Cortes of 1821–22, as a man of about fifty and living through one of several periods of exile in Paris, Toreno turned his attention to the writing of history, as Alamán was to do twenty years later at roughly the same age. He wrote what is still considered one of the great works of nineteenth-century Spanish historiography, Historia del levantamiento, guerra y revolución de España (1835–37), a detailed political and military account of the Napoleonic invasion and occupation of Spain and the expulsion of the French in 1814. Condemned to death and divested of all his property by King Ferdi-

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nand when the monarch returned to the throne in 1814, Toreno spent some years in exile in London and Paris. He finally came to serve as ministro de hacienda (minister of finance) and then as chief minister of Spain in 1834–35, dying in Paris while an exile in 1843.23 Alamán later described Toreno’s report as written in “beautiful language and with the dignity corresponding to the case.”24 It finally came down to looking at the volatile condition of the “remote provinces” as a distraction blocking Spain from addressing more important matters. That Lucas Alamán should find Toreno’s gaseous effusions eloquent is perhaps understandable; that he found them to have a dignity consonant with the grave matters they addressed is less convincing. Given the judgments he was later to offer on how Mexican independence had been achieved, Alamán probably felt that the Mexican plan, that is, the Michelena Plan, about to be put forth offered a much smoother path. Still, he clearly viewed this moment as one of some fluidity, and he deemed the months of the Cortes extraordinarias of the following winter a lost opportunity for both Spain and its American realms, especially Mexico, to avoid future calamities.

What Is to Be Done?: The Michelena Plan On 25 June 1821 José Miguel Ramírez, the canon from Guadalajara, rose before the assembled deputies in the Cortes and, after a long prolegomenon that must have taken a great deal of time to read, presented the Mexican deputies’ proposals. The basic elements of the plan harked back to the Conde de Aranda, while its 1821 version was ascribed to José Mariano Michelena and Miguel Ramos Arizpe, although the latter expressed reservations about parts of it. The language was, in fact, principally Lucas Alamán’s and was based on fragmentary earlier drafts and notes coming out of the meetings at Fagoaga’s house on the Calle del Turco. Several other Spanish American deputies supported the proposal, which concurred substantially with what O’Donojú and Iturbide agreed to in the Treaty of Córdoba a few months later. O’Donojú, in fact, thought it had been adopted as policy in the Cortes by the time he arrived in New Spain. These propositions proved to be the final American gambit in the abortive attempt to keep New Spain within the Spanish Empire; the words are almost entirely Alamán’s and bear the hallmarks of his labyrinthine style:25 In the report read yesterday of the special committee formed for that motive, it is concluded only that the circumstances in the America[s] are most critical, and that the moment has arrived to take measures out of

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the ordinary to remedy the grave ills that afflict them [i.e., the Americas] now, and to prevent the even greater ills that threaten. After [the shedding of] so much blood and [so much] desolation, nothing has been achieved. Buenos Aires, Chile, Santa Fe [modern-day Colombia] and a great part of Venezuela are in effect free; Peru is invaded [by insurgent American forces]; Quito in unrest; and a new revolution of a much more fearful character than the previous one has recently broken out in Mexico. Even supposing that the absolute pacification of all the vast continent of America were achieved, if the motive for discontent is not extinguished it will show itself [again] whenever an occasion arises. What, then, do they [the Americans] want? We will tell you, sir[s]: they desire the same constitution [as in Spain], which should make them happy, but that in the present state of things they consider as a beautiful theory only put into practice in the peninsula. The Americans are free men; they are Spaniards. The general indictment of the unconstitutional and arbitrary actions of royal officialdom in the Americas included the violation of the separation of powers among the branches of government, abrogation of freedom of the press, ignoring of the voice of the governed in the imposition of taxes, and the trampling of the “sacred right to individual liberty.” This bill of particulars actually sounds more like an invocation of the rights of freeborn Englishmen than a petition for redress of grievances by subjects of the universal Spanish monarchy. It was becoming clear that what Alamán and his colleagues aimed at was not some sort of meliorist fix in Spanish colonial government, but a great, deep-cutting change of some kind. He proposed that the people of New Spain had in essence been hoodwinked into believing that conditions would improve. This self-delusion went beyond invoking the ancient formula of “Long live the king and death to bad government!”—that is, the belief that the intentions of the liberal Trienio’s constitutional regime, embodied in the Cortes and government ministries, were benign but had been subverted by tyrannous officials on the other side of the Atlantic: These, sir[s], are not the stories of [foreign] travelers or the declamations of radical politicians: they are the clamors of fifteen million inhabitants speaking to the legislative body of Spain, from whom they expect a remedy for their ills. Because, finally, it is necessary to say frankly that the Americas groan under the enormous weight of despotism, not less now

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than under the previous system, with this difference: that then the peoples sleeping beneath the deadly tree [mortífero arbol] of arbitrariness, seeing themselves as a flock of sheep, . . . or as slaves who must blindly obey their master in everything, were [at least] secure from the attacks of power. But now that it has been announced to them grandly that they are free, that they are encouraged to publish their thoughts and ideas frankly, [and] they are assured that they will not be bothered as long as they do not act contrary to express laws, they allow themselves to be taken in by these beautiful illusions, they give flight to the susceptible part of their imaginations, and in [scarcely] a moment the axe of power falls upon them. What remedy, Sir[s], is left to these unfortunate victims of their own credulity? To recur to the metropolis, two or three thousand leagues [distant], to complain against the despot? Alamán next proceeded with inexorable logic to enumerate the obstacles that stood in the way of seeking redress of these grievances. Although his remarks on this score cover several pages in written form, the gist of them can be boiled down to two points. First, imperial government was simply not efficient in the very broadest sense of the term. Second, current political conditions in the Americas dictated some profound structural changes in the empire to deal with the widespread violence and social disruption unleashed by the insurgencies. Lucas Alamán’s indictment of the inefficiencies of colonial government was relatively mild in tone, relentless in the advance of its logic, and firm in its insistence that the difficulties of geography and the heterogeneity of the American realms made reform imperative. In the final pages of the speech Canon Ramírez (still reading Alamán’s words) moved on to a more general but darker description of the situation of the American colonies and the impossibility of a fair, uniform application of the Spanish Constitution under prevailing conditions: Over and above all these reflections, which demonstrate the great impediment[s], or better said impossibility of operating in America as best suits the [Spanish] state, there are other considerations that in our opinion persuade [us] of the necessity of changing the course we are on. Extinguishing the spirit of the century is unattainable, principally in that land that even in the times of its barbarism produced thousands of heroes burning for their liberty, and millions of valiant soldiers who died to defend the rights of their fatherland [patria].26 Nothing could serve [the purpose of a just, efficient government] better than a moderate

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monarchy, which is not exposed to the convulsions of a republic. For these reasons, then, it should be believed that the Americans will have an interest in keeping this sort of government. This is not merely a theory: the example of Canada presents itself to the view of the congress. Having within its reach [the possibility] of joining itself to the United States, it has not attempted it, because it judges better the [type of] government of which we are speaking. Alamán was explicit that the proposals applied only to “América septentrional,” that is, New Spain and its Central American dependencies, and not to South America, from which there were not sufficient representatives in the Cortes to assure consensus and for which pertinent information about the current state of political affairs was lacking. The most important of the Michelena proposal’s articles were the following: 1. There would be three separate sections of the Spanish Cortes in America, one embracing greater New Spain (including the Provincias Internas of the north and Guatemala), a second the Kingdom of New Granada, and the third Peru, Buenos Aires, and Chile, their capitals in Mexico City, Bogotá, and Lima, respectively. 2. Each of these divisions would have a delegation (i.e., a delegate) exercising executive power in the name of the King of Spain. 3. The delegates would be “freely named” by King Ferdinand “from among the most distinguished [people] for their appropriate qualities, without exclusion of persons of the royal family”; the delegates were removable at the king’s pleasure and were to answer only to the “Cortes generales” [in Spain] and the king himself. 4. Each division would have ministers of government [internal and external affairs], treasury, grace and justice, and war and navy (the cabinet structure adopted in Mexico, in fact). 5. Each division would have its own supreme tribunal of justice and council of state. 6. Commerce within the larger entity embracing Spain and the three divisions was to be free of constraints or duties. The plan itself makes clear that what was not on offer from the Mexican deputies was the creation of three new monarchies. The language of the proposals explicitly referred to the executives of the three divisions as “delegates,” not “princes,” although princes of the Bourbon house were eligible. This differed

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notably from the Plan de Iguala of 24 February 1821 and the Treaty of Córdoba of 24 August 1821, both of which specified that King Ferdinand VII “will be” emperor of New Spain (Articles 4 and 3, respectively) and, failing him, his brothers Carlos, Francisco de Paula, or Carlos Luis, in that order.27 To say that the proposals were not well received by the Cortes is an understatement. One Spanish deputy even proposed that criminal action should be brought against the deputies who had proposed and signed the project, but things never went this far. There matters stood when the Cortes was dissolved on 30 June 1821. But they would be revisited in extenso (again without resolution) when the Cortes extraordinarias, petitioned for by many deputies and convened by King Ferdinand, met in the last week of September 1821. The ostensible motive for calling the extraordinary session was that too many vital issues remained to be dealt with and that the nation could not carry on without a legislative body for the eight months until March 1822, when the next Cortes ordinarias would be convened. Alamán wrote, however, that although this was the excuse given to the Spanish public for convening the extraordinary imperial diet, the real reason was the deputies’ fear that in the interim the king and the absolutist party, with French assistance, would abrogate the Constitution again and that the presence of a sitting Cortes was the only way to forestall this.28 If this was really the fear of the deputies, it was entirely justified, although the speculation about the timing was wrong since the one hundred thousand sons of St. Louis did not pour over the Pyrenees until the spring of 1823. The Cortes extraordinarias were inaugurated in Madrid on 22 September 1821. We know nothing of Lucas Alamán’s activities during the nearly three months between the end of the regular Cortes and the opening of the extraordinarias in September. He probably continued to meet with the other Mexican deputies who remained in Spain, discussing strategies for reviving the Michelena plan. He may well have traveled outside Madrid; Paris seems an unlikely destination in view of the time involved in traveling back and forth. Or he may have carried on his personal activities, such as his studies related to mining, or in pursuing business interests. When the Cortes extraordinarias did go into session several Spanish deputies proposed the disqualification of all diputados suplentes except for those from the Philippines, Peru, and Cuba, in keeping with their efforts to marginalize discussion of the overseas realms; or if that was not possible, at least to tilt the balance in favor of intransigent policies toward the American realms. This measure provoked heated protests from the American deputies but was eventually adopted over their objections.

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The Mexican delegation was by this measure depleted of some of its major talent, including Couto, Ramos Arizpe, and Cañedo, all of whom found themselves in Paris when the Cortes opened. Although much was happening behind the scenes outside the government, at the Council of State and ministry levels things were moving at a snail’s pace with little of significance regarding American affairs occurring in the Cortes itself before the beginning of 1822. News reached Spain in November of the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba on 24 August. While this bombshell occasioned little immediate reaction in the parliament, despite Juan O’Donojú’s accompanying letter explaining the circumstances (he had died on 8 October), the Spanish deputies, the government, and the king joined in rejecting the agreement as unauthorized and therefore illegitimate. On 1 December Santo Domingo declared its independence from Spain. In the midst of all this, news of the Treaty of Córdoba and discussion regarding its implications created, or exacerbated, a schism among the Mexican deputies in Madrid between monarchists and republicans. One such confrontation between Manuel Cortázar, a republican, and Manuel Gómez Pedraza, still counted a royalist, nearly came to blows in a meeting of the Mexican deputies. Looking back on this incident nearly a quarter century later, Alamán remarked that the division between monarchists and republicans “produced uneasiness that with the passage of time came to be personal enmities, and gave rise to a thousand anecdotes with which the republicans heaped ridicule on their adversaries.”29 Alamán rose on 26 October 1821 to castigate the government in no uncertain terms for its dilatory pace.30 The royal government seemed virtually inert, but it was purposely dragging its feet. In early November the Council of State finally sat down to draft a plan for the pacification of the American realms. Among the major elements was an insistence that there be no dismemberment of the empire in any form. Spanish naval forces should immediately be dispatched to Callao, in Peru, and to Veracruz; Britain would be called upon to send naval forces should Spain find itself incapable of doing so, in exchange for the concession of commercial privileges; the exclusive Spanish imperial trading system was to be dismantled; and the American realms should be urged to send delegates to the Cortes of 1822–23. The idea of recognizing the independence of the American realms was clearly in the air, although “no one dared to mention it openly,” as Alamán wrote much later. The one exception to this timidity was Gabriel Císcar (1760–1829), a distinguished scientist, naval official, and deputy from Valencia, who spoke up during a secret session of the Cortes later in the year. Alamán later wrote of Císcar that he offered the

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possibility of absolute independence for the American realms, couched in the terms of his profession of astronomer, “as a mere hypothesis, as Copernicus had explained the solar system by reference to the annual and diurnal movement of the Earth.” Using his brief allusion to Císcar as a platform for a larger discussion and for assuming a deeper historical focus, Alamán evoked events that in 1822 lay fifteen years in the future: “For a similar reason, the Mexicans, children of the Spanish in this sort of hypocritical [farisáico] reverence for something that cannot be sustained [i.e., the constitutional prohibition of dismembering the empire] against the force of [real] events, refused to recognize the independence of Texas when it could have been done to advantage, and this scruple not to erase five letters from the [Mexican] constitution has caused through a chain of subsequent events the loss of more than half the national territory.”31 Finally, on 17 January 1822, the Ultramar minister López Pelegrín, the object of Karl Marx’s scorn and of whom Alamán remarked that he had absolutely no knowledge of American affairs, submitted his report to the Cortes. The report was accompanied by the text of the Treaty of Córdoba, the proposals of the Council of State, and the letter from O’Donojú, who by this time had been dead for more than three months, explaining the steps he had taken and why. The proposals from the ministry included a two-year suspension of hostilities with the American provinces and an invitation to the Americans to send their complaints and suggestions to the Spanish government. With time very short until the closing of the Cortes extraordinarias, the sharp debates of February 1822 over American affairs in which Alamán was to be a major figure lay right around the corner. On Thursday, 24 January 1822, the “comisión de Ultramar” of the Cortes reported on the government’s proposals, characterizing them, according to Alamán’s recollection of many years later, as so inadequate as hardly to warrant discussion. For its part, continued Alamán, the committee proposed that special commissioners be sent by the government to receive proposals from the governments established in the Americas. As eventually adopted, the measure decreed primarily that commissioners be sent to the Americas to discuss reconciliation and that the Treaty of Córdoba be declared null and void. All this eleventh-hour backing and filling reflected the absence of information as to what the concrete state of affairs across the Atlantic actually was on a month-to-month basis. The influential Conde de Toreno, for one, thought any recognition of independence “unbecoming [and] impractical,” in the words of the historian Michael Costeloe, although he thought reconquest still possible, while other Spanish deputies remained implacably

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opposed to any move in the direction of recognition. The majority of the Cortes seems to have acknowledged Spain’s military impotence even as discussions were still taking place in the ministry about the dispatch of a naval force to suppress the rebellions. Costeloe summarized the situation at this point as reflecting Spanish public opinion, which was unwilling to accept colonial emancipation.32 Meanwhile, events on the international front were swiftly overtaking Spain and its colonies. On 8 March 1822, shortly after the close of the Cortes extraordinarias, President James Monroe requested and received from the US Congress funds to establish formal, if not yet ambassadorial rank, relations with Chile, the Río de la Plata, Gran Colombia, Peru, and New Spain; the Monroe Doctrine was officially enunciated on 2 December 1822; and the first Mexican minister to Washington presented his credentials there on 12 December. Alamán would later shade his account of these conversations in favor of the Cortes deputies favoring some form of autonomy for the colonies, painting the government ministry as both dilatory and ignorant. On 27 January 1822 the much younger Lucas Alamán rose in the Cortes to take up the issue of the Americas and would continue with a number of powerful interventions in the same vein until the Cortes was dissolved about two weeks later. He endorsed the overseas committee’s idea that commissioners be sent to the Americas to hear proposals from the governments already established there and that close attention be paid to the information and judgments of Americans of experience and probity already resident in Madrid. The speech is notable because of the contrast it makes with the account Alamán was later to offer of the prevailing atmosphere of early 1822, and therefore it casts light both on the change in his own thinking and his practice as a historian. But it is also of interest because it presents an acute analysis of the situation in the provincias de Ultramar as he perceived it at the time: It is not a matter here of resolving what is to become of the Americas: this is now decided irrevocably. The question is this: supposing the present state of the Americas, and that they cannot now return [to their previous condition], what course should the Peninsula adopt? The first proposal: to declare an armistice with the overseas provinces. This measure is within the attributions of the government, without the intervention of the Cortes being necessary. And why [would the government] try to make such an armistice? In order to open (second proposal) [sic] a sort of grievance procedure [juicio de agravios] between

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the provincial deputations of the overseas [realms] and the Cortes. And how can this be put into effect when in all the overseas provinces there are de facto governments established that do not permit such exchanges with the provincial deputations because [in doing so] they would deny their own essential [character]? Thus, this second measure proposed by the government is entirely illusory.33 The third measure he summarized as suspension of certain articles of the Constitution deemed injurious to the overseas provinces. Alamán continued on to the internal dynamics of the insurgency, disputing the opinion expressed by the Council of State and the overseas ministry that the rebellion in New Spain was the responsibility of only one social group or one cadre of disaffected leaders: The revolution was already made before the epoch to which reference has been made, and has not been the movement of one class. In New Spain a single voice was raised simultaneously in favor of the present revolution [i.e., that of Agustín de Iturbide], which was not raised in the previous [revolution] because the leaders then, taking to the point of inhumanity the lack of forethought, stirred up division among our spirits. It is said that the first measure was taken on another occasion, and that it proved illusory; but I say that the measure now suggested by the committee has never been applied. The commissioners sent overseas in the happy epoch of the reestablishment of the constitution [i.e., in 1820] bore no other instruction than to say “Submit!,” now not to a despotic government but a constitutional one. And those peoples answered that they had not separated [from Spain] because the government was absolutist or moderate, but because it suited them to govern themselves independently of the Metropolis. . . . It has been said that therefore it would be appropriate to recognize independence. But I think . . . [that] this recognition should be the outcome of a treaty, and to arrive at it, it is necessary to begin by understanding each other, something that up to now has not been done since nothing other than firing bullets has been thought of. When asked the ministry’s opinion of the Cortes overseas committee’s suggestion in whose support Alamán had spoken at such length, the Ultramar minister López Pelegrín replied that he saw no problem in sending commissioners, with the proviso that their only purpose be conciliation or pacification

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rather than any sort of negotiation. In the face of this response the Cortes committee presented a revised recommendation on 7 February. This occasioned heated debate and several minority views (votos particulares) from committee members, articulated chiefly by the Conde de Toreno with the support of two other Spanish deputies. The principal additional proviso, adopted by the Cortes on 12 February 1822, was that all treaties or agreements so far undertaken with the American governments—this was aimed clearly at the Treaty of Córdoba—be considered absolutely null. At this point, 12–13 February 1822, Alamán in his Historia basically leaves off discussion of his final interventions in the Cortes debates related to the American question. This is rather odd since the speeches of the deputy from Guanajuato during 12–14 February 1822 are among the most impassioned he delivered to the Spanish deliberative body, put him directly into dialogue with the European deputies, and are very revealing of his political thinking at this time, his broad knowledge of history, and the first-rate quality of his mind. Perhaps an uncharacteristic reticence or modesty was in play in Alamán’s silence on these days or possibly the conviction that since debates on the status of the Americas had gone as far as they would ever go, an account of the final debates would be gratuitous. Much of Tuesday, 12 February 1822, must have been devoted to debate on the proposals of the Ultramar committee. Alamán began on a faintly sarcastic note what during the course of the day would develop into a salty exchange with the Conde de Toreno, implicitly characterizing all the talk about the committee’s original proposal as hot air. Alamán then went on to address remarks made by some other Spanish deputies in the course of the debates: Speaking of the turbulent [events] overseas, [the deputy] says that the word war should not be used; but I do not know how the state of struggle in which those provinces find themselves can be called anything but war. If the gentleman thinks that it is peace, I would wish him to be there to experience what it is. He has said . . . that we should not speak of governments [there] since these are not recognized [as such], and that all this can only be called anarchy. This is not so: anarchy means the absolute absence of government, not the lack of legitimacy in it. Pacification should be achieved according to the particular state of each one of the provinces, since Méjico [sic], for example, which has its independence in fact and will never retreat before any human force, requires certain different elements [to end the fighting] than other provinces that do not find themselves in the same situation.

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Warming to his task of defending what he saw as a viable proposal to salvage something of the imperial relationship by converting it into a commonwealth, Alamán went on to attack directly the votos particulares of the Conde de Toreno and the other Spanish deputies: It has . . . been said that those states do not exist while the Cortes does not recognize their independence. They will not legally exist, but they will exist in fact. . . . To assert that during the war for independence of the United States commissioners were not sent by England to treat [with the colonies] . . . is not true. Many times [the English] refused to hear the proposals of the Americans; but at the end of the war commissioners were sent from England, and it then being too late, the same thing happened that has occurred with those [envoys] sent by Spain to CostaFirme [i.e., northern South America], to wit: that nothing could be agreed upon because in the end, it was necessary to start with the idea of recognition. . . . In my opinion [the commissioners] should be authorized to hear everything proposed to them. Lucas Alamán’s major interlocutor in the debates of these days was the Conde de Toreno, and while ostensibly couched in the gentlemanly terms expected of speeches in the Spanish imperial diet, their exchanges took on an increasingly acidic note as the Cortes extraordinarias wound down. Hearing what the conde had to say gives some idea of the tone of these debates and of the atmosphere in which Alamán set out on his maiden outings in political life. On this same day, 12 February 1822, Toreno responded immediately to the American’s speech, particularly addressing the issue of guarantees for the persons and property of Spaniards resident in the Americas, on which Alamán had placed much emphasis. In response to Alamán’s assertion that the Treaty of Córdoba already offered sufficient guarantees in the matter, Toreno characterized the Treaty of Córdoba as vague and iniquitous (inicuo): And what, I ask Señor Alamán—is this enough? No. And then: Is Spain to remain apathetic and tranquil if she sees that her Spanish sons are being robbed, [even] killed, against all the laws of nations? Spain knows well what she must do in case Spaniards are not respected there, and if the laws of nations are disdained and ignored. One must find one’s self lamenting deeply the horrors that now in one, now in another region of America have been committed. . . . The gentleman who has just spoken says that there is no anarchy there [in Mexico], but [rather] an established

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government de facto. [But] let us not descend to examine [in detail], I repeat, the situation in America. Anarchy consists not only in not having a fixed and stable government subject to change every two weeks; and certainly in Buenos-Aires [sic] this is the history of its revolution.34 Alamán responded that the functioning government in New Spain would provide all necessary guarantees of the safety of both European Spaniards and Creole loyalists, adding, “For myself, I have perhaps more interest in this than many others, since it may affect my family, relatives, and friends.” And as a final dig at the Conde de Toreno, he added, “The other errors into which His Excellency has fallen do not surprise me because since they represent opinions new to His Excellency that he did not have at the close of the last ordinary legislature, it need not be noted that he must not hold them very firmly.”35 On 13 February 1822, the day before the official close of the Cortes extraordinarias, which the king and queen were to attend, Lucas Alamán made one of his longest and most impassioned speeches. He condemned the view expressed by the government’s minister of Ultramar, López Pelegrín, that general opinion in the transatlantic provinces did not favor any move for separation from the metropolis. Warming to his theme, he insisted strongly on the incompetence at best and duplicity at worst of the government in arriving at recommendations and policies for dealing with the increasingly critical situation in the overseas provinces: I wanted to know then, as I do now, what basis the Ministry had to assert that [public] opinion [in the] overseas [provinces] was still not prepared for a definitive measure [favoring independence]. If we look at the facts, [we see that] it was prepared. . . . A prodigious revolution was taking place [in New Spain] that could only have been effected [with the support of] general opinion. . . . The same armed forces that had previously spilled their blood in defending the [movement for] independence from the Metropolis [i.e., the insurgents] put themselves at the head of the revolution. The majority of the [military] chiefs who before had contributed to pacifying the interior [of the country], are those who now rise up and sustain the cry for independence. . . . If, then, general sentiment [opinión] was not prepared either in Europe or in the overseas provinces, how did the revolution come to be? . . . [Even while] it was asserted with confidence [by minister López Pelegrín] that there were not in those lands [i.e., Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador] [the necessary] elements to establish a new order of things, this has [in fact] been established, and

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the marriage [of Creole patriots with elements of the Spanish loyalists] of which so much has been spoken has taken place, to which no other impediment has been offered than its having been celebrated without the consent of the parents, as if the parents would never give consent to such an alliance. Nor will I spend time in relation to Peru, Chile and Buenos-Aires. Continuing to a review of what was actually happening in New Spain and Peru, Alamán again implied the incompetence of the López Pelegrín ministry: “I do not know if the information [possessed by] the overseas secretariat is very accurate, nor if it has received news of the great events that have occurred in Lima and Mexico City. . . . I speak of the deposition of the viceroy of Peru and of the jefe superior político of Mexico [City], carried out by violent movements.”36 The Spanish government was well aware of these events, so Alamán’s suggestion that its information was faulty or entirely lacking and its responses inadequate was a rhetorical flourish meant to emphasize his characterization of the overseas ministry as incompetent at best. He was shortly to twist this particular rhetorical knife as his speech continued. His passing remark about the ills stemming from the overthrow of the Peruvian and Mexican viceroys offers some insight into his attitudes at this time toward the maintenance of legal forms as against the force of historical contingencies. Here Alamán is implicitly expressing less his belief in the virtues of the Spanish colonial regime, which he would famously rhapsodize about later in life, than in the rule of law as the preferred mode for organizing political life. He would come to think of Mexican independence as ill-starred from the beginning by the social forces and institutional chaos it had unleashed, but beyond this he seems never to have found convincing the politico-legal arguments made to justify it, since the very process that had set it off was in a sense extralegal. We see him arguing in the Cortes debates of this period in favor of the sort of orderly political transition from imperial monarchy to some sort of looser commonwealth arrangement for the fragments of the Spanish transatlantic empire in the face of the fait accompli of effective independence. He obviously believed that option to have been aborted by the incompetence of the Spanish government and the impetuousness of the Spanish Americans, especially in New Spain. And while it is true that Lucas Alamán was himself none too fastidious about legal and constitutional niceties during his nearly thirty months as the soul of the Anastasio Bustamante regime in the early 1830s, a decade earlier he can be characterized as a constitutionalist and

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moderate imperialist in his thinking. In combining this view with strands of Machiavellian realpolitik and the natural law tradition, his political thought showed considerable complexity and subtlety but also at times gave the appearance of inconsistency and even hypocrisy. He was always ready to rationalize his own abrogation of established legal forms and limits when he judged the force of historical circumstance to warrant such circumventions but did honor the rule of law rather than the rule of men, at least in theory. In the end, it was perhaps as much his personality and habits of mind—that is, an imperious belief that he was the smartest guy in the room, which he usually was—that legitimized any course of action he deemed appropriate in the light of changing circumstances. In his Cortes speech of 13 February Alamán continued to chastise the Spanish government, especially and although never by name the overseas minister López Pelegrín, for its failures in American policy, growing ever sharper in his criticism: “The door is open to place responsibility on the persons upon whom it may fall. If there has been such a delay in proposing measures for pacification [of the American provinces], which by now will be entirely useless, it [i.e., the blame] will fall on the ministry.” Alamán concluded his intervention by further impugning the competence and implicitly the honesty of the ministry for not providing the Cortes with sufficiently robust information in support of its recommended policies. Lucas Alamán’s last speech to the imperial diet came on the final day of the Cortes extraordinarias, 14 February 1822. It was addressed to the provision of the Moscoso-Toreno voto particular declaring illegitimate and null the Treaty of Córdoba negotiated by Iturbide and O’Donojú the previous summer. The speech puts forth the view that the independence of Mexico was inevitable, like a tidal wave that could not be held back, and that it was the terms of that emancipation that might still be negotiated with Spain to the advantage of both parties. He began by disputing very simply the constitutional capacity of the Cortes to approve the proposition nullifying the treaty because it was not really a treaty: it had been submitted to the Cortes as one document among others illuminating the situation in New Spain and therefore had no legal standing. Having made a rather lawyerly argument concluding that the Treaty of Córdoba was not really a treaty, the deputy from Guanajuato asserted that the document still formed the basis for a contract of potential benefit to Spain. He then spread his rhetorical wings and soared on the updraft of the Enlightenment into the eighteenth-century origins of the independence impulse:

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The cause of the revolution is none of those that have been presented. There is a fundamental cause [however], the most powerful; we should not speak of injuries done those provinces [by Spain]—the revolution has no such ignoble origin. From the moment in which such latitude was given to the commerce of America, which compared with the fleet system of the preceding epochs [truly] deserved to be called free trade [comercio libre]; from the moment when the ergotism [ergotismo] of the lecture halls [aulas] was replaced with the solid principles of mathematics and physics;37 each increase in enlightenment has seen an increase in the desire for emancipation; these advances cannot be turned back. . . . This opinion [i.e., the desire to turn back the clock] may very well be that of some individuals on the right in the French chamber of deputies who, unhappy with the enlightenment of the past century, desire to return to the twelfth or thirteenth [century], toward which they are taking great steps. But this will never be [the opinion] of the Spanish Cortes. Enlightened thinking will grow day by day, and with it the desire for emancipation in the overseas provinces. There the matter of Spanish policy toward the American realms rested, the Cortes having reached no resolution. Slightly less than a year later the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis invaded Spain on behalf of other European absolutist states, ending the Trienio Liberal and sending into exile the more conciliatory Spanish liberals like Juan Antonio Yandiola, who might have come to terms with the provincias de Ultramar had a window for this still remained open. Thus any lingering hopes that the Spanish Empire might mutate into a commonwealth of independent states were dashed. This was not to be the end of the story as far as Spain and the newly independent Mexico were concerned, since Spanish forces were to hold until 1825 the island of San Juan de Ulúa, opposite and within bombardment range of the port city of Veracruz. Alamán as Mexican foreign minister was deeply involved in the negotiations to dislodge the Spanish, although the capitulation actually occurred about two months after he left office. King Ferdinand’s government then launched an unsuccessful invasion of the country in 1829 and did not finally recognize the independence of its recalcitrant former colony until 1836. On the Mexican side there were the expulsion decrees of the later 1820s directed at European Spaniards, and gachupín-bashing was always to be relied on as a convenient prop for Mexican politicians. Of this Alamán was to become acutely aware during the first two decades of republican life as he strove to defend the interests of

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the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone in the press and the corridors of power, an association that did nothing to counteract the popular perception of him in Mexico as being pro-Spanish. In his very compressed evaluation of his nine months or so at the Madrid Cortes, Alamán expressed a particular sense of accomplishment at the legislation he had drafted reducing regulations and taxes on the Mexican mining industry and transferring the process of separation of gold from silver (the apartado) from government to private hands.38 Lucas Alamán’s first major political voyage demonstrated that the young man of affairs could accelerate to ramming speed quite quickly. In the debates of the Cortes and Cortes extraordinarias of 1821–22 he deployed publicly many of the gifts on display throughout his later political life: inexorably logical thinking, a wide command of history and classical allusion, an adamantine prose tending much toward an elaborate but never florid style, the ability to employ sarcasm sparingly but to good effect, and the capacity to cut to the heart of matters, even if with some prolixity. The anonymous description of the “filigreed” deputy from Guanajuato, on the other hand, sets out a series of impressions that some of his political contemporaries would surely have recognized in future years: that if highly intelligent he was nonetheless too clever by half, a bit affected, self-contained, elegant in a very subdued manner, and Machiavellian—some would say unprincipled—in his political dealings. As a man of thirty Lucas Alamán’s self-presentation was anything but military, strongly molded to that of a civilian politician, his style that of an haut bourgeois from an aristocratic background. His interests in policy, ranging from issues of public health, education, and science to political economy and high politics, were very broad and would remain so, and he did not hesitate to make his opinions known with confidence. Aside from lifting tax burdens and restrictions on Mexican mining, his other major interventions dealt with the American question. In this he and the other Spanish American deputies faced the implacable resistance of most of the peninsular Spaniards sitting in the Cortes, the king, and the metropolitan government to their proposals for what amounted to a commonwealth arrangement between Spain and its overseas provinces. In the end, developments in the Americas acquired their own historical momentum, however, and the efforts of Alamán and his compatriots to salvage the Spanish Empire on their terms were overtaken by events. In the early 1820s he quite clearly believed, as he did later, that the virtual independence of New Spain was inevitable. He certainly demonstrated no republican sympathies at this time, but in any case this was not a view represented openly among the Mexican delegation or among other Spanish American deputies,

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whatever their later political orientations turned out to be. Whether in these years Alamán was in any recognizable sense a liberal is a harder question to answer. Liberalism meant different things to different people and did not map easily onto positions on either side of the great issue of Spanish American autonomy or independence. Lucas Alamán seems to have occupied a space to the right of moderate liberals and to the left of died-in-the-wool monarchists and Spanish imperialists. Modernization and certain sorts of reform were certainly on his agenda but more in the economic than the political sphere. While it is possible to say, therefore, that in 1822 he held essentially many of the same views he would hold until the mid-1840s or so, history—personal and impersonal—was to chisel away much of the flexibility he displayed during the Spanish Cortes. As time went on, his positions shifted to the right and hardened, especially where politics was concerned.

Another Parisian Interlude Almost a year to the day after Lucas Alamán had left Veracruz bound for Spain, his passport for his departure from Madrid and return to what was now an independent Mexico was issued on 12 February 1822. He was described as a “diputado de la provincia de Guanajuato” returning to Mexico via France or England, accompanied by Francisco Escobar, with whom he had traveled in 1821. The previous day, along with other departing deputies, he had petitioned the secretaries of the Cortes extraordinarias for the unpaid subsistence funds (dietas) owing to him for his time in Madrid. On 26 February the French legation in Madrid issued his passport to travel through French territory, and to his two passports were later added a permit for travel by diligence from Madrid to the French frontier as well as numerous visas issued by officials of the Spanish and French towns through which he would pass on his journey to the City of Light. The Cortes did not formally end until 14 February, the day Alamán made his final speech, and he and Escobar did not leave the Spanish capital until 1 March. While taking a central part in the momentous events in Madrid, Alamán was, typically, also busy pursuing his private affairs. He mentions rather laconically in the Épocas (24) that while a deputy he managed to secure a prebend (prebenda), a canonry in the Mexico City cathedral, for his half brother Juan Bautista Arechederreta, thus concluding successfully on his behalf a struggle for ecclesiastical preferment going back more than a decade. He does not say what sort of contacts he mobilized for this, whom he had to wait upon

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in the imperial bureaucracy—one imagines the minister of state for grace and justice—what it might have cost, in addition to the substantial sums Arechederreta had invested over the years, or whether he just gave a final push to an appointment already in process. But since the appointment was effective in 1821, he doubtless had some central part in finalizing it. Finally, now well into adulthood—he was thirty years old in 1822—on the verge of marriage, and thinking how to meet the economic obligations he knew awaited him at home, Alamán declined yet another invitation, as he had that of Bernardino Rivadavia in 1819, to join the ministry of a government outside Mexico, that of Spain during the Liberal Triennium. The offer was made by Juan Antonio Yandiola, the national treasurer of Spain in 1822 and about to enter the government as finance minister, a post he held for some months before the fall of the liberal constitutionalist regime late in 1823.39 What the post was exactly Alamán does not say, but it likely had something to do with fiscal matters, given where Yandiola was situated in the government. Lucas Alamán and Francisco Escobar, who was traveling on to England, shared their diligence with Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza (1789–1851), the Veracruz-born playwright, bibliophile, soldier, and diplomat who was to serve as ambassador to Great Britain about a decade later under Alamán’s ministry during the first Anastasio Bustamante government. The journey from Madrid to Paris by diligence and the Canal du Midi took about six weeks and was apparently uneventful except for a three-day sequestration in quarantine after passing through Irún into France. After living for a brief time at another location in Paris, Alamán installed himself for the remaining six months of his stay in the city at the Hôtel de Cahors, at rue de Richelieu no. 16, a street boasting “some of the finest hotels in Paris” according to the English traveler Thomas Fragnall Dibdin. During the first half of the nineteenth century this was one of the most fashionable streets in the city. Dibdin’s description of the rue de Richelieu, in about 1821, dates from virtually the exact moment when Alamán lived there, before Baron Hausmann’s redesign of the Paris cityscape after midcentury. It is worth quoting, since it conveys the flavor of the Paris Lucas Alamán knew during his last residence outside Mexico: “The Rue de Richelieu is called the Bond-street of Paris . . . and is rendered more striking by containing some of the finest hotels in Paris. Hosiers, artificial flower makers, clock makers, and jewelers, are the principal tradesmen in the Rue de Richelieu; but it has no similarity with Bond-street. The houses are of stone, and generally very lofty—while the Academie de Musique and the Bibliothèque du Roi are public buildings of [much] consequence and capacity. . . . [No doubt other nearby streets] claim

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precedence, on the score of magnificence and comfort . . . but to my taste there is nothing (next to the Boulevards) which is so thoroughly gratifying as the Rue de Richelieu.”40 Most of Alamán’s stay in Paris during these months was spent in trying to put together a company for investment in the revival of the devastated Mexican mining industry. Alamán wrote of these months that virtually from the moment of his arrival in March 1822, “I began to solicit funds for the rehabilitation of the Cata mine in Guanajuato, whose great bonanza at the beginning of the [eighteenth] century made my grandparents rich, and in which my family had a considerable role.” This statement exemplifies the habitual linkage in Alamán’s thinking of past to future glories, as reflected in the autobiographical fragment analyzed above (see chapter 2). A few paragraphs further on in his text, after he has narrated the efforts that eventually brought into being the United Mexican Mining Association, he wrote, “Thus [my] casual acquaintance with Mr. Andriel from a note of four lines by Baron von Humboldt was the origin of that torrent of pesos that came to give new life to the Mexican mines”—but that achieved little lasting success in doing so, he might have added.41 The disillusionment in this statement is implicit if one knows what was to follow, namely, a cascade of mining investment failures in the decades after independence. Lucas Alamán’s introduction to the Frenchman Andriel came by way of a brief note from Humboldt, with whom Alamán had become quite friendly during his previous extended stay in Paris. Immediately prior to this meeting Alamán was engaged with French capitalists in the organization of his first mining enterprise under the name of Vial, Alamán y Compañía. The principal investor was Nicolás de Vial y Eydelin, who was married to a woman of the wealthy and ennobled Bassoco mining family of Guanajuato. He was a descendant of the Vial and Eydelin families, two of the most notable clans of southern France and northern Spain, which was the region where Alamán’s own paternal genealogy was rooted. Alamán tried to engage other French investors, for the moment without luck. This prompted him to ask Francisco Borja Migoni, a Mexican merchant then in London, to explore the possibilities with English investors, but the response in Britain was also tepid. Such was the state of play when Humboldt asked Alamán to inform Andriel about the Mexican mines, presumably reflecting the Frenchman’s interest in making investments. The two men met at Alamán’s hotel, almost certainly the Hôtel de Cahors on rue de Richelieu, in the late spring or early summer of 1822. Alamán referred to Andriel as an aventurero, which literally translates as

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“adventurer” but in this context means something like “venture capitalist.” The two discussed Andriel’s ambitious hopes for mining enterprises in Mexico, “[but] finding them all imaginary,” Alamán wrote, he suggested that the best “speculation” would be the drainage of existing mines, the Cata among them, that had been flooded during the decade of the independence struggle. Andriel agreed to this plan but, lacking sufficient capital, pledged to gather 6 million francs (1.2 million pesos) through the sale of shares (acciones) to his contacts for the capitalization of what he and Alamán christened the Compañía Franco-Mejicana. This venture did not go any better than Alamán’s earlier efforts in France, however, since “the French were little inclined to distant speculations.” What the terms of the Alamán–Andriel partnership were Alamán did not say. The unresponsiveness of French investors turned Alamán’s eyes once more across the Channel to the possibility of mobilizing British capital. This time he enjoyed notable success. Through José M. del Barrio, at one time the Guatemalan minister to Mexico, Alamán gained the interest of the London investment bankers Hullett Brothers and Company, with whom over a number of years he was to sustain a relationship in his mining projects. Hullett Brothers had widespread interests in Spanish America, including in Chile and the Río de la Plata; through them Alamán was able to sell more shares in the Compañía Franco-Mejicana. The English bankers insisted on running the company from London, however, so it quickly became the Compañía Unida, or the United Mexican Mining Company, to take account of the union with French investors. Alamán himself traveled to London during the summer of 1822 to meet the Hullett brothers, arriving around 15 July and returning to Paris at the end of August.42 But since he needed to return to Mexico in the fall of 1822 to see to his family affairs and to marry, the actual move of the company to Britain and the process of its incorporation there were overseen by an intermediary to whom he delegated his power of attorney, Vicente González Arnao (1776–1845). González Arnao was a well-known Spanish lawyer, writer, historian, and liberal politician who had served as minister in the government of José Bonaparte and was to live in exile in France after King Ferdinand’s restoration to the throne.43 The initial capital of the Unida was 1.5 million pesos, rising eventually to 6 million. Writing of these events around 1850 and looking forward from the perspective of these months to a future yet to unfold, Alamán commented ruefully, “Nothing is more uncertain in the mining business than choosing which mines should be worked. With a capital of six million pesos at my disposition to invest in whatever mines I pleased, and with

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the greatest desire to succeed, [several] mines were proposed to me [for investment], among them those that later have produced such wealth, with which the United Company would have had the most brilliant results, [but] in which for various reasons I did not wish to invest. . . . I had in my hands, therefore, the enterprises that have been the richest, and I was so mistaken [in my decisions] that I did not take advantage of any of them.”44 These disappointments lay in the future, however, as a sort of ever-receding fata morgana, while the hopeful time of the early 1820s opened a prospect of silver-based wealth never to be realized. In addition to his early entrepreneurial projects Lucas Alamán continued his attendance during these months in Paris at various salons. He renewed his connection with Talleyrand’s circle and met the Marquis de Lafayette. Humboldt introduced him to Jules de Polignac (1780–1847), later successively minister of foreign relations and then, until the July Revolution toppled the regime in 1830, president of the royal council under King Charles X. Polignac’s rise occurred at almost the same time that Alamán was to reach the highwater mark of his political career in the government of Anastasio Bustamante. At this point Alamán was spending a good deal of money, some of it directly for himself, some of it in commercial speculation, but none of it frivolously. In the months before his departure for Mexico he made a number of purchases of minerals for his natural history cabinet and library (German authors on mineralogy and mining) from August Breishaupt (1791–1873), a prominent German mineralogist and professor at Freiberg whom Alamán probably met during his stay there in 1817. Invoices among his personal papers from these months indicate that he also bought a fair number of books on mining, crystallography, chemistry, and other scientific themes from various Parisian booksellers. Living in a fashionable district of the city and attending the salons of Parisian high political society may have whetted Alamán’s desire to acquire the French luxury goods setting standards of consumption in the Atlantic world at the time, but he also had more practical objectives in mind as he shopped for and purchased myriad fashionable items to take home with him for sale. He may also have been acquiring items for the household he was to set up after his marriage to Narcisa Castrillo the next year or for her trousseau. He was spending extravagantly during these months, at least to judge from the pricey goods he was looking at in shops and through lists of available items from specialized merchants and manufacturers. These items included fine linens, China, including a dinner service for up to thirty-six people, and high-end glass objects. Finally, Alamán was collecting the business cards of

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many concerns in and out of Paris announcing a wide variety of wares, including leather goods, cloth, linen, metal items, parasols, books with gilded bindings, lingerie, jewelry, perfumes, guns, clocks, watches, and cases and boxes for shipping goods rapidly and securely. He did not discover until his return to Mexico that while he was in London during the summer assembling the Compañía Unida, Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, who ascended the throne in May 1822, had named him envoy to France to negotiate French recognition of Mexican independence. Alamán must have been tapped for this post on the basis not only of his previous public service both in Old and New Spain but also his long-standing personal acquaintance and friendship with Iturbide, his command of French, and the connections he had formed near the highest echelons of French society and politics. Lucas Alamán’s appointment was formalized by an official letter to him from Emperor Agustín I of 14 August 1822, endorsed by the Mexican minister of interior and exterior relations.45 This dispatch names him “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary” to the French government with full powers to conclude and sign “stipulations and agreements” to the mutual interest of both countries, specifically French recognition of Mexican independence. But separate instructions to him from the minister delved deeper into extremely confidential levels of his duties, including the confidentiality of his mission. Alamán was also asked to help Mexican deputies with the expenses of their return to Mexico from the Spanish Cortes, for which he would be reimbursed in a timely fashion. Beyond this, he was to carry forward negotiations for a one-million-peso loan from the English adventurer James Barry, which turned out to be one of the first of many disastrous or outright failed foreign loans contracted by the impecunious Mexican government.46 Another instruction emphasized that his principal diplomatic mission was to secure French recognition of Mexican independence, while no treaty of alliance or trade was envisioned for the moment. The envoy’s letters home were to be frequent, and he was to exercise special care that they not be intercepted by the Spanish forces still occupying the island fortress of San Juan de Ulúa opposite Veracruz. He was instructed to maintain close contact with the envoys of Britain, the United States, and the South American republics who were in France, and to send numbers of the most important French periodicals to Mexico. The draft version of this letter also contains some “instrucciones secretas” to the effect that Alamán make use of “confidantes” in ascertaining the thinking of other European powers regarding Mexican independence, sparing no expense; in other words, he was to employ bribes or even paid spies. His final

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instruction read: “The envoy will omit nothing to inform himself of the secrets of the Madrid government and to discover [desentreñar] its most hidden doings, its plans for intrigues, and its agents, whether they are destined to come and work mischief among us, or whether they already exist within the Empire and enjoy the trust of the Spanish.”47 Emperor Agustín I would be forced off his throne in March 1823, so the appointment never took effect. Alamán would have another opportunity to assume the same post fifteen years later, in the end declining after seriously considering it for a time. Lucas Alamán left Europe in the late fall of 1822, never to return. On 26 October 1822 he received his French passport, on 4 November the approval of his papers by the Spanish embassy in Paris, and in the days that followed other authorizations. In one document he was described as being twenty-nine years of age when in fact he had turned thirty about three weeks earlier. He was described as being about five foot five, with black hair, eyebrows, beard, and dark eyes, a high forehead, an ordinary nose, average mouth, and oval face. In the company of the ex-deputies Cortázar and Miguel Ramírez as well as his old friends the Fagoaga brothers, he sailed from Le Havre in the last week or so of November on the French brig Navarrois, which he described in his Épocas (25) as a “terrible and heavy [i.e., sluggish] ship.” Shortly before his departure Alexander von Humboldt informed him that substantial funds were being raised in France for investment in the Mexican mines. The letters Alamán bore from Prince Polignac and the French naval ministry insured him and his party of a hospitable welcome on the French island of Martinique, where they arrived in mid-January 1823. Accompanied by a French man-of-war, the Navarrois arrived in Veracruz on 19 March 1823, the day Emperor Agustín de Iturbide abdicated his throne. Informed that there were no fewer than five deputies from the Spanish Cortes on board, the Spanish commander of San Juan de Ulúa, Brigadier Lemaur, bade Lucas Alamán and his traveling companions to pay him a visit in the fortress, receiving them with courtesy and informing them of the political situation in the country and the changes they would encounter there. An interview with Guadalupe Victoria, the Mexican commander of the port of Veracruz, ensued on the mainland, Alamán having the impression that the insurgent leader, because of his modest conversational skills, was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact, he described the future president, in whose cabinet he would serve during 1824–25, as “un viejo mentecato,” an old fool or idiot, depending on one’s translation. After a brief sojourn in Veracruz, Alamán continued via Puebla to Mexico City. He was never to leave Mexico

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again. While his ideas were far from ossified by this time, he was, after all, thirty years old upon his return to Mexico, had seen something of the world, and his interventions in the Cortes debates foreshadowed much of his mature thinking as statesman and historian. In short order he would enter a much larger theater for political action when he became the central minister in the presidential cabinet of the “viejo mentecato.”

5 • Brothers

Father Juan Bautista and His Half Brother Juan Bautista Arechederreta, Alamán’s elder half brother, played a very important role in Alamán’s life up to and even beyond the churchman’s death in 1836, by which point the younger of the two was himself well-advanced into middle age. I interject that story here so as not to lose the coherence of the priest’s life-narrative, even though Alamán experienced his half brother’s life episodically, in a more disjointed fashion, with periods of close association and times of separation. Since no meaningful pieces of correspondence between the brothers survive, the web connecting their lives has vanished with the paper on which it was partially inscribed. At any given point in Alamán’s life it proves difficult to close the distance between their parallel lives; but traces of the relationship nonetheless remain. The biography of Father Arechederreta can be discerned only through a few fleeting references to him within the context of the Alamán–Escalada family, documents relating to his career trajectory, and a few of his published writings. Thus he remains a somewhat shadowy figure but an important presence in his half brother’s life. The highlights of his career in the Church also illustrate something of the social and political milieu of the early republican period. The relationship between the two men seems to have been a cordial one after the reconciliation around 1804 between Juan Vicente Alamán and his stepson, but whether the cordiality was infused with fraternal warmth is difficult to tell. Given that Juan Vicente died in 1808 and that there was a twentyyear age difference between the half brothers, it is likely Juan Bautista played the role of mentor, protector, and promoter in his younger brother’s life, perhaps substituting for the absent father to some degree. The brothers lived in 123

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close proximity to each other in Mexico City, in the Sagrario parish, for more than a dozen years after Alamán’s final return to Mexico, until he moved to the western part of the capital. For the first couple of years after Lucas Alamán’s return from Europe they had their mother and her table in common and would have frequented the same, or overlapping, social circles embracing the ecclesiastical and political elite of the country, especially among those of conservative politics. Their closeness or distance from each other would have been less a matter of physical and social than emotional proximity. When Lucas was not yet twenty years old and Arechederreta already well established, the older brother almost certainly introduced his younger half sibling to capital society and may well have intervened to have the Inquisition inquiry into his younger brother’s wayward reading habits quashed without trace in 1812. He may also have been instrumental in having Alamán appointed by Viceroy Apodaca to the post of secretary to the High Commission on Public Health in 1820, a charge that jump-started the younger man’s political career. When Alamán was in a position to return the favor, while he was in Madrid as a deputy in the Spanish Cortes, he played some role in securing for Arechederreta an appointment to a canonry in the cathedral chapter in Mexico City in 1821. Much harder to assess than such singular events, however, is the question of mutual influence between the brothers and of their intellectual and political affinities. Because of their age difference the stronger influence was probably exerted by Arechederreta. Alamán leaned very heavily on his brother’s “Apuntes” as a source for his history of the independence movement. So great was his confidence in Canon Arechederreta’s completeness, exactitude, and veracity, in fact, that the footnotes of the Historia de Méjico bear no evidence that the author cross-checked his brother’s facts or assertions, although some critical evaluation may have gone on before references to the “Apuntes” went into the source citations.1 Arechederreta’s interpretive perspective was quite conservative, as one might suppose from his social background, education, and career path. While he lauded independence from Spain, he thought the nation fatally marked by the means of its achievement, a stance closely overlapping his younger half brother’s. In addition, the weight of Arechederreta’s mere presence on the scene during many of Lucas Alamán’s most active political years—the sense that he had an ideological ally, an influential lobbyist and observer at the highest levels of the Church, and a supportive friend who also happened to be a close family member—cannot have failed to lend his public and personal life a greater degree of security and even confidence than he would have had in their absence.

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Ascent of a Young Churchman Arechederreta was the child of María Ignacia Escalada’s first marriage, in 1770, to Gabriel Arechederreta, an enterprising Spanish immigrant (see chapter 3). Almost nothing is known of Juan Bautista’s childhood except for dates and what we can infer from the history of his parents—the eldest Alamán–Castrillo son was named for him. He was born on 3 September 1771, scarcely a year after his parents’ marriage, raised in Guanajuato, and spent his childhood in comfortable circumstances. His father died in 1778, when Juan Bautista was seven years old and his mother twenty-eight, leaving behind a substantial fortune that for purposes of management passed into the hands of María Ignacia’s second husband. One modern author characterizes Juan Bautista’s childhood under the roof of his mother’s second husband, Juan Vicente Alamán, as being bitter (amarga), presumably because Juan Vicente favored his own son Lucas over his stepson. How true this is and whether his own mother, who seems to have been a strongminded woman, would even have countenanced such treatment is open to question. The only evidence for it is the conflict between stepfather and stepson over the latter’s inheritance when he was a young adult of twentyfive, so any bitterness may well be a backward projection.2 Conflicts among adult siblings over their parents’ and stepparents’ estates were not so uncommon given the complicated inheritance laws of the time and the complexities of dowering practices. There was also the possibility that within the rules of equal partible inheritance parents had a certain latitude in favoring some children over others, thus engendering sibling jealousy. Having chosen a career path into the Church, Juan Bautista began his studies in the Valladolid seminary in 1782, at the age of eleven or twelve, and was probably permanently out of the parental home from that time onward.3 He obtained his doctorate in theology in 1794 at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Mexico City. Access to at least some of his paternal inheritance, most likely in the form of a stipend, offered Arechederreta the means eventually to become something of a scholar. His paternal inheritance came to something over eighty thousand pesos, the income from which would have supported him comfortably, although not lavishly. It was over the disposition of this money, much diminished by the financial reverses of Juan Vicente Alamán, that the breach within the family developed around the mid-1790s. What Father Juan Bautista’s maternal inheritance would have amounted to at his mother’s death in 1825 we do not know, but he did receive from her the title

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of third Marqués de San Clemente, whether at her death or by earlier cession is not clear; had he not done so, the title would have devolved on Lucas Alamán.4 Juan Bautista’s rise in the Church was slow to gain momentum until about 1800, when he was nearly thirty years old. His ambition embraced Valladolid and Mexico City, in both of which he maintained homes. By the time the Hidalgo rebellion broke out in 1810 he had definitively shifted his life to Mexico City, where his widowed mother and stepbrother lived for a number of months beginning in 1808. He was licensed to preach in the bishopric of Michoacán by Bishop Fray Antonio de San Miguel in 1794, the year he was awarded his doctorate, and in 1801 to confess female religious. In 1807 came the license to preach, say Mass, and confess in the archbishopric of Mexico, extended by Archbishop Lizana y Beaumont and renewed by Archbishop-elect Pedro Fonte in 1813. His first regular ecclesiastical post (1797–1805) was as curate of the pueblo of Santa Fe de la Laguna, near Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, one of the famous “pueblos-hospitales” established by Bishop Vasco de Quiroga in the sixteenth century for the religious indoctrination, political instruction, medical care, and protection of indigenous people. During this period of early professional activity, Arechederreta began to take a more active role in the intellectual life of the Church and in civil affairs. This began with the publication in 1796 of the Catálogo de los colegiales del insigne viejo y mayor Colegio de Santa María de Todos los Santos (Mexico City: D.M.J. de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1796). Founded in 1573, Todos Santos was a residential study house for young men— not only ecclesiastics but also lawyers—taking their degrees at the Universidad Católica in Mexico City. More than a simple catalog of the three hundred or so members’ names over two centuries, Arechederreta’s work was in effect a prosopography based on the colegio’s archive in which he provided data about each young man and his subsequent career and gave a thumbnail history of the colegio itself.5 As early as 1794, the year he completed his doctorate, Arechederreta was lobbying hard through his representatives in Madrid for admission to the enormously prestigious Order of Carlos III, to which he was admitted as a Caballero sometime before 1800; expenses attendant upon both efforts were substantial. These costs may well have made demands on the paternal inheritance he had still not come into, occasioning the strains with Juan Vicente Alamán, but this is a speculation. Among the expenditures typically involved with this sort of lobbying effort was genealogical research to document the candidate’s limpieza de sangre, that is, his racial purity—freedom

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of any taint of Moorish, African, or Jewish blood. Father Arechederreta thus instructed his legal representative in Durango, his ancestral town in Spain’s Basque country, to find evidence in local archives of the nobility and limpieza of Domingo de Ysunsorbe, the father of his paternal grandmother. More serious and revealing were the expenses related to Juan Bautista’s actual admission to the order. Relatively minor incidents related to his joining the order, incidents regarding his sharp faultfinding with some craft items he commissioned from artisans in Spain and his refusal to pay for them, reveal that he was somewhat cranky and inclined to provoke conflict. This behavior hints at a finicky and at least mildly contentious personality that may explain his problems with his stepfather and the tone of some of his later writings. Father Arechederreta’s ambitions were certainly grand. He had been petitioning the royal authorities both in Spain and New Spain at least since 1794 for an appointment to a canonry in a cathedral chapter. A series of letters and petitions to King Charles IV in Spain and successively to Viceroys Iturrigaray and Garibay in New Spain give a retrospective view of this protracted process. The most comprehensive of these petitions was directed to the king on 30 April 1807. In it, the major claim to preferment for high ecclesiastical office, aside from his “distinguished career in the literary realm,” was the role Father Juan Bautista’s family had played in the mining industry in Guanajuato for several generations. The petition foreshadowed the laments of his younger half brother over the years about unremunerative investments and unrealized hopes for wealth. Miners and their families always deserved greater rewards than anyone else at the hands of the crown, he wrote, since mining is the principal support of the monarchy, the fecund mother of the general subsistence, but on the other hand [since] this endeavor is so risky [expuesta], costly, and generally of such dismal outcomes for the greater part of those who undertake it. . . . My family has been one of the founding and oldest [families] of the Real de Guanajuato, discovered more than two centuries ago, and consequently its services have continued during all this time. My immediate ancestors have been active miners, have spent large sums without much profit for themselves but with great benefit to Your Majesty’s royal treasury, to which they introduced by way of royal taxes [on mining] 1,524,794 pesos fuertes, without retaining anything near this amount for themselves, and even less for their heirs, since they invested [their funds] in those

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same subterranean depths where their hopes were also buried, leaving their poor families only a memory of riches. The ambitious priest also alluded to the project he had presented to royal authorities in 1804 for the establishment of studies in medicine and surgery in the capital, a presentation that had won the endorsement of the viceroy and even royal license.6 Over the ensuing years the tone of Arechederreta’s petitions to the royal authorities grew increasingly aggrieved. In the meantime, in 1805 Arechederreta began serving as interim curate of the Sagrario parish of the Valladolid cathedral, an appointment officially regularized early in 1806 by the dean and cathedral chapter of Valladolid sede vacante. The year in which he took up this post was the last of his service in the pueblo of Santa Fe, and he resigned the Sagrario curacy shortly, returning to Mexico City, where in 1807 Archbishop Lizana y Beaumont licensed him to preach and offer the sacraments. Here his half brother and mother encountered him in 1808, and here he seems to have remained for the rest of his career. Around this time he may well have taken up an appointment in the capital as rector of the Colegio de Santa María de Todos los Santos, a position he held for some years. While he was still in Michoacán, in 1804 he addressed his petition to establish a “seminario de medicina” in Mexico City to King Charles IV’s minister of grace and justice. It is difficult to know exactly what he had in mind since the detailed plan for the seminario seems not to have survived; there had existed since the sixteenth century a distinguished group of chairs (cátedras) in medicine and allied biological sciences within the Pontificia Universidad Católica. Quite possibly Arechederreta envisioned the establishment of an entirely separate medical training faculty outside the university. In later years, as he continued his struggle to procure a canonry in the Mexico City cathedral, he would claim for this project a good deal of importance and social benefit as he repeatedly made the case for his civic virtue. The list of individuals whom Arechederreta named as being able to provide supportive testimony is impressive. Among them were José Mariano Moziño and Martín Sessé y Lacasta, both living in Spain in 1804 and both major figures in the royal botanical expedition to New Spain in the 1780s and 1790s. Moziño (1757–1820), a Mexican-born naturalist, was the author of a well-known account (1794) of the Pacific Northwest. A physician and botanist, Sessé (1751–1808) for a time directed the royal botanical garden in Mexico City, in which Lucas Alamán was later to take a notable interest as chief government minister. These men

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belonged to the international republic of letters and therefore, by association, so did Arechederreta.

A Career in the Great Capital Juan Bautista Arechederreta’s career thrived in the great Mexican capital, and we may glimpse him on an ascending trajectory of ecclesiastical posts as well as stumbling briefly into the realm of electoral politics. For a time he served as rector of the Colegio de Santa María de Todos los Santos before moving up in 1816 to the rectorship of the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán, one of the most venerable educational establishments in the city. In the meantime, he was elected as deputy for the Province of Mexico in the Spanish Cortes of 1814. When summoned in March to take his post by the intendant of Mexico City, Father Juan Bautista begged off, pleading a number of excuses and asking that a substitute be invited to attend in his stead. Among his reasons were his delicate health, which, he suggested, would be further damaged by a long Atlantic voyage; a “septuagenarian mother” who required his presence (born in 1751, María Ignacia Escalada was sixty-three years old at this time); and a widowed sister with five young children whom he was supporting. He made no mention of his traveling half brother, which is fair enough since Lucas Alamán was spending money rather than making it. By the fall of 1814, however, King Ferdinand repudiated the constitution and canceled the Cortes, thus absolving Arechederreta of the service he found potentially burdensome. In 1816 Father Juan Bautista was appointed rector of the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán.7 Established by the Franciscans in 1529 and directed by Pedro de Gante (1480–1572) until his death, the school’s patronage passed from the Mexico City Ayuntamiento to the protection of the viceroy. Originally founded for the education of children from the unions of Spaniards and noble Indian women, it had considerably broadened its educational mission by the late colonial period, coming to be one of the most outstanding schools in Mexico City after a curricular reform in 1792. By the time Arechederreta came to the rectorship, however, the school had fallen on hard times and was almost closed for lack of funds, its endowment being the smallest of any of the capital’s major colegios. Some income came to it from the renting out of its license to have a butcher shop and a bit more from the rental of houses the colegio owned in its immediate neighborhood, but the former disappeared under the 1812 Constitution and the latter was extremely insecure because of the difficulty of collecting rents. Funds from the royal treasury dedicated to the

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support of a dozen student scholarships (becas reales) had gone unpaid for several years because of the stressed state of the colony’s finances, and paying students barely covered their food costs. A considerable recovery propped the institution up, however, under the patronage of Viceroy Ruiz de Apodaca (1816–21), who apportioned it a substantial income from the lotteries in the city, possibly as a result of Arechederreta’s lobbying efforts. He modernized the curriculum yet further, prescribing, for example, the use of Benjamin Constant’s works for the teaching of public law to the colegio students, a very progressive move for the time. The years immediately preceding and following Arechederreta’s appointment to the rectorship were taken up by his continued expensive, frustrating, but eventually successful efforts to win a canonry, carried on through reams of correspondence with his apoderado, or general factotum with power of attorney, in Madrid. It is not clear whose death created the vacancy in the cathedral chapter to which Arechederreta was finally appointed. In February 1822 the long-coveted title to a post as a prebendary (prebendado) of the Mexico City cathedral finally arrived from the Spanish capital, the wheels quite probably having been greased by Arechederreta’s young half brother, by now a politician with a burgeoning reputation. The years 1815–22 saw other forms of recognition arrive at the priest’s doorstep, even if the main prize—the canonry—for the moment eluded him. The same year as his appointment to the rectorship of San Juan de Letrán, he was invited by Juan José Flores Alatorre (1766–1851), a distinguished jurist, to become a member of the Academia de Jurisprudencia Teórica-práctica, in which the churchman was formally enrolled in February 1817. In late 1819 or early 1820 he was appointed capitular in the Colegiata of Guadalupe, at the famous basilica north of Mexico City, surely a sign of a rising trajectory and official favor. This office was not without its problems, however, since he was still rector at San Juan de Letrán, and he feared that the taxing commute between Mexico City and the basilica might damage his fragile health. An exchange of letters with Viceroy Apodaca in the summer of 1820 indicates that his petition to the royal authorities in Madrid to hold the two posts simultaneously had been denied. At the viceroy’s urging, however, he had agreed to stay on in the rectorship temporarily, which he did until at least April 1821. Other honors came thick and fast, among them the position of consultant/ adviser to the Junta Eclesiástica de Censura, established to assume the censorship duties of the extinguished Inquisition. In mid-1822 Emperor Agustín I appointed him honorary chaplain to the imperial family, a post he did not

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occupy for long, since Iturbide reigned for less than a year; this must have been about the same time the emperor was appointing the canon’s half brother to be minister to France for the negotiation of diplomatic recognition. After his fall, in fact, Iturbide expressed his concern that Arechederreta would be penalized by the new republican government for his close association with the short-lived empire. In his political testament of 1823, written shortly before sailing into exile in Italy, Iturbide remarked wryly, “Who knows if the Sovereign Congress will despoil my good compadre [Juan Bautista Arechederreta] of the rectorship [of San Juan de Letrán] as a reward for his merits. If this were to be, he could go to Peking to found some college where the young Chinese [chinitos] might learn an even greater servitude than they [already] have.”8 Between 1823 and 1835 Arechederreta served as vicar general of convents in the archbishopric of Mexico, and in 1831–32 he was appointed senator from the State of Guanajuato, perhaps partially at the behest of his half sibling, then the dominant figure in the national government. He served a second term in 1835–36, until just before his death on 12 January 1836. He was buried in the Capilla de Tepeyac, Guadalupe. Juan Bautista Arechederreta was not just a pretty face, however, and occupies a small but honorable niche in the history of the Mexican Church. He is best known today less for his ecclesiastical career than for being the elder half sibling of Lucas Alamán and for his literary efforts, an inclination the two men shared. Less an original writer than a compiler, cataloguer, editor, and translator, Arechederreta published a number of works during the 1820s, two of which occupy a degree of renown in Mexican literary and political history, both on their own and for their importance to his half brother: his translation of an Italian treatise on natural rights and his chronological notes on the insurgency of 1810. Of less importance but still providing some insight into early nineteenth-century Church history was his pastoral letter of 1826 addressed to the mothers superior of the female religious under his vicarship, El Dr. D. Juan Bautista de Arechederreta, prebendado de la santa Iglesia Metropolitana de México . . . a las RR. MM. preladas y religiosas de los conventos sujetos a la filiación ordinaria del Arzobispado de México (Mexico City: Oficina de la Testamentaria de Ontiveros, 1826), written in his capacity as vicar general of the archbishopric’s convents and other establishments for women and female children. Although a mere thirty pages long, this work was a densely packed compilation of regulations governing conventual life in the archdiocese of Mexico from the time of the reforming archbishop and, later, cardinal Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana (1722–1804) up to 1826, a span of more than fifty years. Ostensibly it was compiled so that mothers superior

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would have in one manual all the basic rules, thus saving them the trouble of looking them up in different sources. But one suspects that Arechederreta also compiled it to counteract what was perceived by the upper Church officialdom as a certain loosening in the practices of conventual life in the early republican period.9 The work covered everything from the regulation of conversation in the sacristies of conventual churches, to the proper uses of the wheels (tornos) installed in exterior convent walls to communicate with the interior areas, to decorous practices for novices; for example, candidates were not to pass through the streets “in luxurious coaches, as used to be permitted.” That same year saw the publication of Canon Arechederreta’s description of the establishments of female religious within the archbishopric of Mexico, his Noticia de los conventos del Arzobispado de México, año de 1826 (Mexico City, n.p.), also about thirty pages in length and dated 22 May 1826, ordered compiled by the dean and cathedral chapter of Mexico City the previous March. The data compilation itself is mildly interesting, offering information on the numbers of profesas, novitiates, female students, and domestics in each of twenty-six establishments, mostly in Mexico City, their yearly income and expenses, and so forth. The introductory pages of the Noticia offer Arechederreta’s fairly spirited defense of female monastic life on several heads. He alluded to the hostility (desafecto) with which these establishments were viewed by people of liberal political inclinations, including exaggerated ideas of their wealth. The critique of the regular Church that Arechederreta sought to counter had been in the air in Spain and its American realms since at least the preceding century and was to bear fruit a few years later in the laws promulgated under the short-lived liberal governments of Valentín Gómez Farías (1833–34) and even more so a quarter century later in the laws of the Reforma and the 1857 Constitution. The second charge against female monastic establishments he sought to refute was that of their general uselessness (inutilidad). Although he did not directly address the social and theological issue of the efficacy of prayer by nuns on behalf of the general population, he did suggest that the training of the young women being educated in the convents for domestic tasks and the female estate was an important social good. And he at least implied that conventual life offered a decent and decorous life for many other young women who had chosen lives of gentle reclusion as brides of Christ rather than hazard the perils of the century. How, then, was this sort of life useless, he asked? Of much greater import than any of these works to the intellectual and political history of nineteenth-century Mexico and also to its probable influence

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on the thinking of his younger brother and other Mexican conservatives was Arechederreta’s 1824 translation of the most consequential work of the Italian priest Nicola Spedalieri (1740–95), I diritti dell’uomo (The Rights of Man) (1791).10 While the publication of books and pamphlets of Italian political thinkers in Spanish translation was by no means unusual in the early republican decades, theoretical works translated from the French dominated the field. The obvious reason was that the French Revolution had set off tremendous shock waves in the Atlantic world and continued to generate an enormous number of works condemning it, defending it, or drawing out its implications, many of them from the pens of French writers. In one sense Spedalieri’s book was hardly radical or innovative given that he developed in his work ideas about immanent popular sovereignty and the right to rebel against tyranny that had formed part of Spanish political theory since the days of Francisco Suárez in the sixteenth century. While his essay on human rights was welcomed by Pope Pius VI, it was banned as subversive in some parts of Europe. He acquired the sobriquet of the Jacobin priest, many liberals of the time claiming him for their own. Although Spedalieri’s treatise should be viewed as a response from the political right to the challenge of the French Revolution, specifically the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), it certainly represented a more liberal tendency within the Church. In his brief introduction to Spedalieri’s work Juan Bautista Arechederreta suggested a parallelism between the situation of the newly independent Mexico in the early 1820s and that of Italy under the impact of French revolutionary ideas. Spedalieri’s approach to human rights, according to the historian Enrique Covarrubias, was couched in a Benthamite, utilitarian idiom that would furnish central intellectual elements for Mexican conservatism. This influence was seen in the thinking of Alamán and Luis Gonzaga Cuevas (1800–67), the author of an oft-cited conservative analysis of Mexico’s problems, El porvenir de México (1851), and several times foreign secretary. His was a natural rights–based juridical theory proposing as basic human rights the preservation of life, the rights to individual self-perfection, legitimately acquired property, and personal liberty, and the legitimacy of force to defend these when absolutely necessary. Arguing against the ideas of Rousseau, Spedalieri wrote that only in civil society could man perfect himself and that only a Christian society—by which he meant a Catholic one—offered guarantees of these natural rights. He wrote against the use of force and violence in politics, secularization (and ipso facto against the seizure of ecclesiastical property), religious tolerance, and modern materialism, which he felt lay at

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the root of the social evils plaguing contemporary societies. Spedalieri’s ideas can be located along that spectrum of religious writers of the period who sought to accommodate to the forces of social and political change without eviscerating structures of social hierarchy, religious orthodoxy, and traditional forms of governance characteristic of the ancien régime. For example, in writing about the basic human right to resist tyranny, if necessary by resorting to violence, he hedged it around with so many qualifications as to make it almost impossible to justify except in the most extreme circumstances, and never countenancing violence against the person of the tyrant/monarch himself. In associating himself with these ideas, Arechederreta signaled his position as what we might call a reformist conservative.11 This stance was in sympathy with efforts in the political sphere to allay the headlong rush toward liberal secularization and the hollowing out of the spiritual life in the face of nineteenth-century materialism without drawing in the sand the absolutist line of prominent conservative ideologues of the age, such as Joseph de Maistre. In the context of early republican Mexican political and intellectual life, however, more important than Arechederreta’s views in and of themselves are his/their influence and that of European writers such as Spedalieri on his younger half brother. That Lucas Alamán must have read Arechederreta’s translation of the Italian’s treatise, if only out of fraternal piety, seems virtually beyond question. Since Alamán himself wrote very little directly on general political theory, and when he wrote on politics he typically had more immediate and concrete goals in mind, one must suss out his views primarily from his policy writings and historical works. Certainly he shared with Nicola Spedalieri a general view of human rights based on a natural law tradition. He held highly elitist opinions about the political capacities of the mass of the Mexican population, handicapped, in his view, by its racial heritage, lack of education, poverty, and a limited stake in the fate of the nation. These ideas fostered a quite negative idea of the potential for the full exercise of political rights based in human rights and for a constructive intervention of common people in the national conversation. Among the range of Spedalieri’s ideas of basic human rights, that held by Alamán most unequivocally was the right to the absolute enjoyment of legitimately acquired private property; but this was a hallmark principle of the age all across the ideological spectrum. Closer to Spedalieri’s thinking, the Benthamite view of the social utility of religious belief, practice, and institutions does come through clearly, especially in the writings of the older Alamán. And Lucas Alamán’s condemnation of the corrosive forces of modern materialism echoes the Italian’s. That Alamán imbibed all

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this solely from reading Spedalieri is highly doubtful, but such reading as well as conversations with Arechederreta over the fifteen years or so of their parallel lives in Mexico City probably reinforced ideas the younger man already held or was developing. Finally, Juan Bautista Arechederreta is well known to have kept an extensive unpublished journal covering the era of the insurgency in New Spain, beginning in February 1810, seven or eight months before the outbreak of the Hidalgo rebellion, and terminating at some point in 1820. Lucas Alamán relied heavily on this work in writing his Historia de Méjico and is not reticent about citing it in the footnotes of that magisterial work. The canon’s extensive notes, which belong in any discussion of his literary career, were partially published in 1927 in a volume of documents concerning José María Morelos.12 Alamán wrote in the prologue of his Historia that of the many sources he used in composing his history, his brother’s was one of the most important: “[He left] very judicious observations on the state of the revolution, and so that the history would be complete, afterward added a summary of everything that occurred between [1808 and 1811] when his daily notes began. All together this makes four manuscript volumes in my brother’s hand. . . . This legacy, so precious to me not only for the genuinely fraternal affection I professed for the author, but also for the complete confidence merited by his truthfulness and good faith, almost entirely fills in the period in which I was not present or did not take part in the events to which I refer [in the Historia].” Something between a diary and a chronicle, the “Apuntes” begin, in fact, on 14 February 1810, rather than in 1808 with the overthrow of Viceroy Iturrigaray, so this earlier section of the document has apparently been lost. The truncated version we have, then, actually covers the period before Lucas Alamán’s departure in January 1814 on his European travels, although he says in his acknowledgment of his brother’s “Apuntes” that it was most valuable to him as a source for the years 1814–20, while he was out of the country. The “Apuntes” themselves take the form of completely neutral, unadorned, and sparely written entries beginning with the 14 February 1810 note of the “convocation for deputies to the Cortes, even [from among] the Americans.” The entries do not become regular on a daily basis until September 1810, and from then on, with days skipped here and there and quite often with multiple notations for single days, the entries are mostly written in a very few lines but occasionally extend for a printed page or more. The entry for 16 September 1810, for example, reads as follows: “Proclamation of independence in Dolores with [sic] the curate Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla with five volunteers and Bachiller

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[i.e., someone with a bachelor’s degree] Mariano Abasolo. They then leave for San Miguel el Grande where they join Aldama with the Queen’s Regiment, the juanino friar Luis de Herrera [the brothers of the Order of San Juan de Dios were dedicated chiefly to the management of hospitals], and they take the Villa [town] of San Felipe. In San Miguel they arrest the administrator of the tobacco monopoly, Tomás Ygnacio de Apesteguia.”13 Other entries record armed encounters between insurgent and royalist forces, troop strengths, promotions among royalist officers, and so forth. Internal evidence suggests that Arechederreta took most of his information from the official newspaper, the Gaceta de México, although in no case does he acknowledge his sources. What Arechederreta intended by keeping these notes—whether a personal record or as a basis for a later work of his own about the decade of the independence struggle—is unknown. So anodyne in tone are the hundreds of entries that reading the “Apuntes” is actually quite tedious; they seem to have been meant as raw material or an aide-mémoire—true notes, in other words. But they do provide a day-to-day account of military actions and political events during the years of the insurgency, which obviously proved extremely useful for Alamán the historian writing a dozen years after his half brother’s death. Lucas Alamán and his elder half brother were to remain close after the family reconciliation, up until the canon’s death in 1836, although the degree and quality of their intimacy are undisclosed except for the tone of the few cordial letters they exchanged. How often they saw each other we do not know, but we can suppose their meetings were quite regular while their mother was alive and maintained a household in the capital, and even after her death. That they helped each other out from time to time through political leverage and social connections is clear, and they must have been proud of each other’s intellectual and professional attainments. It’s reasonable to assume that for both of them, having a sibling of high public visibility and some political power gave each a sense of security and an anchor in a volatile time.

6 • The Meanings of Anarchy

Lucas Alamán’s Mexico City When Lucas Alamán arrived in Mexico City in late March or early April 1823 he was thirty-one years old and as yet unmarried. An undated description of him written by his son Juan Bautista after his father’s death agrees with others offered during these years: “D. Lucas Alamán was short [bajo de cuerpo] but well-formed. The whiteness of his complexion revealed the Spanish blood coursing through his veins. His wide, clear forehead made it quite obviously the seat of a superior intelligence, and his naturally wavy hair gave him the appearance of a bust modeled by a Greek sculptor. An expression of kindness [bondad] tempered the vigor of his gaze, deep [i.e., thoughtful?] rather than penetrating, and that same expression of kindness of his features, together with the dignity of his manners, made him easily recognizable as a gentleman [hombre de bien] and easily as a great man.”1 By the time he reached his late fifties or so the expected ravages of time—sagging, graying, weight gain, disappointments, etc.—the wear and tear of his physical ills, and a life of unremitting work had aged him considerably. But to judge from the well-known portrait we have of him, he must still have been a commanding presence, although anything but flamboyant. His hair was still full and wavy, his expression quite serious, even a bit severe, in keeping with the conventions of portraiture at the time, the spectacles perched on his nose giving him a scholarly appearance. As a young man of eighteen he had come with his mother in 1810 to live in the great capital: there he was to marry and establish his household with his wife, Narcisa Castrillo; raise all his children, see them into adulthood, marriage, or other life-paths, or bury them; carry on most of his business activities, pursue his public career, and live his last days. He maintained strong ties with 139

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his native Guanajuato and spent a good deal of time in extended stints at his hacienda in Celaya. He often visited the Hacienda de Atlacomulco, near Cuernavaca, whose management he oversaw for the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone. He spent long periods there and in Orizaba, but he made his life in the “great wen” of Mexico.2 During those thirty years Mexico City’s footprint expanded as the moneyed class moved to the west and southwest. Alamán and his family were eventually to follow this course, occupying for a time a spacious house on the Ribera de San Cosme that he owned until the time of his death. The population of the city hardly grew at all during his decades of residence there. In 1811 it had around 170,000 people, temporarily grown much larger during the years of the insurgency as people flocked into the city to escape the violent countryside, and was about the same by the early 1850s. The capital was not a very healthy place to live, since massive infrastructural projects to improve public hygiene—lake drainage, potable water supply, sewer system— were not within the fiscal reach of the state until the Porfirian era. Repeated epidemic outbreaks of scarlet fever (1822, 1825, 1838, 1842, 1844, and 1846), measles (1822, 1826, 1836, 1843, 1848), and smallpox (1825–26, 1828–30, 1839–40) scourged the city during Alamán’s lifetime. Typhus, typhoid fever, and cholera morbus regularly exacted high mortality, as attested by Alamán’s mention of recurrent epidemics in his writings. Given that Lucas Alamán and Narcisa Castrillo lost about half of their children either in infancy or at tender ages, it is reasonable to assume that some of these diseases invaded their family, probably mostly the dysentery or other gastrointestinal ailments always active even absent an epidemic. The relatively rapid growth of the city that was to increase its population to more than 700,000 by 1910 came after Alamán’s time, in the last third of the nineteenth century during the pax porfiriana. Residential zoning by class was clearly demarcated. In Alamán’s time the original traza, the plan of rectilinear streets radiating out from the great central plaza, the Zócalo, still dominated the urban layout, although it petered out in the poor barrios to the north and became irregular as one moved to the increasingly affluent west. Generally speaking, the closer one’s home to the Zócalo, the more elevated one’s status. The city’s upper class, among whose residents Lucas Alamán and his family were counted most of the time, was ministered to in the Sagrario parish, attached to the cathedral. This zone would almost certainly have encompassed most of the family’s social relationships as well except for when they journeyed out of town to Celaya, Guana-

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juato, the Cuernavaca area, or the Veracruz region. I have the impression, however, that Lucas Alamán did almost all of this traveling by himself, the needs of attending to her large brood of children, a large domestic establishment, and a natural shyness keeping his consort at home most of the time. The Palacio Nacional dominated the east side of the Zócalo, housing the government offices where Alamán conducted most of his business during his days in the official political spotlight, with the ruins of the Aztec Templo Mayor, still unexcavated in his time, just to its north. The cathedral occupied the north side of the plaza; and the municipal building, the ayuntamiento, the south side. The rest of the southern edge and the western side hosted portals with cafes, booksellers, and shops, much as they do today. Beginning with the removal from the Zócalo in 1822 of architect and sculptor Manuel Tolsa’s massive bronze equestrian statue of King Carlos IV, there were a number of projects to reconfigure and beautify the enormous space. The Parián, the structure housing scores of commercial establishments in the southwest corner of the Zócalo, was torn down in 1843, prompting an impassioned written response from Alamán condemning the demolition and the desecration of other historic structures in the city.3 In the same year President Santa Anna initiated the construction of a grandiose monument to Mexican independence, uncompleted save for its plinth, or zócalo, for which the enormous plaza was thenceforth named. The Plaza del Volador, belonging to the Marquesado del Valle and eventually unloaded by Alamán onto the municipal government, lay to the south of the Palacio Nacional and was also the site of market stalls. Churches, convents, and monasteries thronged the city right through the liberal reforms, measures that closed many of them and demolished a few. By 1840 or so there were nearly sixty churches, not including the cathedral, twenty-three male monastic establishments, and fifteen female convents. There were well over a hundred cafes, popular eating establishments, boardinghouses, and restaurants by the early 1840s, most of which had dreadful reputations for their lack of cleanliness and amenities. Many more informal vendors sold food on the street and to passersby at the doors of their homes. Much of the city’s food supply arrived via the La Viga canal from the areas of Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco and changed little in its makeup by midcentury, a vivid reminder that the Aztec city and its Spanish colonial successor had been built in the middle of a group of lakes. The urban hinterland supplied maize, beans, wheat, barley for animal feed, potatoes, meat, and so forth; pulque came from the Apam area to the east; fruit, sugar, and rum from Cuernavaca to the south.

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Foreign visitors of the period had a good deal to say about the city, much of it negative. The French traveler Louis de Bellamare (the pseudonym of Gabriel Ferry the elder, 1809–52) remarked that the city was the most beautiful the Spaniards had built in the New World. But the condition of the streets, where raw sewage flowed down the middle, contrasted shockingly with the elegance of the buildings, private and public. He was echoed in much of what he said by Fanny Calderón de la Barca (1804–82), the Edinburgh-born wife of the first Spanish diplomatic envoy to Mexico, the Marqués Calderón de la Barca, in her justly famous account of the country in the early 1840s, Life in Mexico (1843). Public safety was tenuous at the best of times, the police presence visible but insufficient to guarantee the security of individuals’ homes or their safe passage through the streets, especially at night. An analysis by the political prefecture of the Department of Mexico in 1837, encompassing the temporarily suppressed federal district, noted that crime was rampant despite the police presence and perpetrators rarely punished.4 Almost all visitors noted the ubiquitous presence of the city’s poor, the street people, beggars, and cutpurses known as léperos typically responsible along with soldiers for the public drunkenness, lewdness, petty crimes, and small-scale violence that abounded. English-speaking travelers in particular consistently noted the presence of such people, choosing to ignore the fate of the working poor in the “dark Satanic mills” of their homelands as they delivered themselves of sententious comments on the léperos. Not untypical was Fanny Calderón’s description in 1839 of “the lounging léperos with next to nothing on, moving bundles of rags, coming to the window [of our house] and begging with a most piteous but false sounding whine, or lying under the arches and lazily inhaling the air and the sunshine, or sitting at the door for hours basking in the sun or under the shadow of the wall.”5 The favorite intoxicant of the city’s poorer inhabitants was the mildly fermented drink pulque, sometimes adulterated with other substances such as tepache (fermented fruit juice). By midcentury there were nearly four hundred pulquerías in the city, popular drinking establishments where no “decent people” ventured, serving the pulque produced in rural zones east of the city. The largest income item in the municipal budget consisted of the licensing fees for these popular watering holes, the largest expenditure for the jails. Of those inhabitants gainfully employed, nearly one-third were artisans of various sorts, about a quarter service providers, such as porters, water sellers, bearers, coachmen, domestics, and so on, and fully a fifth soldiers, a perennially turbulent population.6

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Popular entertainments in Alamán’s mature years continued much as they had before his arrival in the city. Gambling, cockfights, bullfights, street dances, and spontaneous musical soirées dotted the urban landscape, occupying the leisure hours among people of modest means. Foreign travelers frequently made slighting comments about Mexican habits. Brantz Mayer, for many years secretary of the American legation in Mexico City, remarked in his early account of the country published in 1844 that the chief diversions of the Mexicans were revolutions, earthquakes, and bullfights, in that order. There does seem to have been a carnivalesque atmosphere surrounding elections, patriotic celebrations such as Independence Day, and religious occasions. Indoors theatrical performances in a variety of venues catered to different income groups, tastes, and levels of cultural pretension. In the early 1840s Mayer described them as follows: “The Principal [Theater], attended by the old aristocracy, was the serious theater; the Nuevo Mexico attracted people [of more recent social ascent] who dismissed ‘legitimate drama’ and tolerated the spiritedness of innovation and novelty; the [Teatro de la Unión was] . . . where the ‘people’ [i.e., the lower classes] enjoyed themselves with somewhat coarse jokes and more spontaneous scenes of ad libitum productions.” The ambit of Lucas Alamán’s life within Mexico City would certainly have been quite closely bounded. The Alamán household was a relatively affluent one, so that much of the daily minutiae of caring for the growing family would have been carried out by servants and by tradesmen bringing their goods and services to the house, thus limiting the need for Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán to shop or run errands. The homes of the wealthy and socially prominent were arrayed along the streets radiating out from the Zócalo. The handsome buildings that today adorn the city’s central precinct, some colonial and some dating from the nineteenth century, attest to the well-delineated social geography of Mexico City during Alamán’s lifetime and before, but in the present era have been turned to civic, governmental, and business uses. They were two or three stories high, typically, constructed or at least surfaced with the reddish volcanic rock called tezontle native to the Valley of Mexico and often brightly colored. Arched gateways led to interior courtyards with colonnades, a variety of outbuildings, including stables, and so forth. The family generally occupied the upper floors, with street-level rooms rented out to commercial establishments. The houses that Alamán and his family occupied for many years on the Calle de San Francisco and then on the Calle Segunda de San Agustín shared these characteristics. The Calle de San Francisco, today’s Avenida Madero, ran from the Alameda (the central park) to the Zócalo, and located

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along it were the Casa de los Azulejos (House of Tiles, today a large restaurant and store) of the Condes del Valle de Orizaba and the homes of Agustín de Iturbide, known today as the Palacio de Iturbide, and the famous beauty La Güera Rodríguez. In 1839 Fanny Calderón described the Calle de San Francisco as “the handsomest street in Mexico [City] both as to shops and houses.”7

First Days in the Ministry His traveling trunks scarcely unpacked, on 12 April 1823 Alamán was named by the Supremo Poder Ejecutivo (SPE) on an interim basis to the most important post in the cabinet, the Ministerio interino de Estado y del Despacho de Relaciones interiores y exteriores. Established in the wake of Iturbide’s fall by act of the reconvened congress on 31 March 1823, the SPE consisted of a triumvirate of men who had assumed the executive functions of the central government. In his letter of acceptance the following day to Ignacio García Ilueca (1780?-1830), who had held all four portfolios of State, Treasury, Justice, and War under the recently extinguished Iturbide government and who continued in office for a time under the SPE, Alamán wrote, “Although my knowledge of my own abilities should frighten me off from accepting such a sensitive post under the present circumstances, these last demand that all [citizens] cooperate with the Supreme [Executive] Power in taking up the offices for which it deems them worthy.”8 By 16 April the public was informed that Alamán had taken the oath of office. When exactly the appointment was regularized from its interim status is not clear, but 16 April 1823 is the date generally accepted for the start of Alamán’s first ministry. García Ilueca ceded his ministerial functions incrementally as other men were appointed to the three remaining departments of the government and entered the cabinet with Alamán. Francisco Arrillaga (1776), a Spanish-born Veracruz merchant and later the first railway concessionaire in Mexico (1837), was appointed treasury minister on 2 May; Pablo de la Llave (1773–1833), a noted botanist who had served as director of the Madrid botanical gardens, took the portfolio of justice and ecclesiastical affairs on 6 June; and José Joaquín de Herrera (1792–1854), a military man, later president, and an almost exact contemporary of Alamán’s, assumed that of war and marine on 12 July.9 Although Lucas Alamán quickly became the dominant figure in the cabinet, we do not know how the youngish politician just returned from Spain was invited into the government in the first place. The decision to appoint him must have originated with the triumvirate of the SPE, whose records are very

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opaque.10 Through the spring and early summer of 1823 the SPE consisted of Guadalupe Victoria, Nicolás Bravo, and Pedro Celestino Negrete, all men of centralist, conservative political tendencies. But with the intermittent absences of Bravo and Victoria, on 1 April 1823 congress designated two substitutes: Miguel Domínguez (1772–1852), the famous district magistrate of Querétaro, was a lawyer, later (1825–27) president of the Supreme Court, and husband of the even more celebrated Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, La Corregidora. Also appointed was José Mariano Michelena (1772–1852), soldier, independence conspirator, federalist, and York Rite Mason; Vicente Guerrero was added to the group on 3 July. The mix of men from across the political spectrum was intended to create a government of national unity after the highly polarizing rise and fall of Agustín de Iturbide, still very much a presence in Mexican politics even after departing Mexico for exile toward the end of March. In the frequent absences of the other members of the SPE Michelena had become the dominant one and probably exerted strong influence in the selection of the minister of relations. The following year Alamán would appoint him emissary to the Court of St. James, at that time the most important of all Mexican diplomatic posts. Michelena would play a key role in securing for Mexico the initial loans from British banking houses. Despite having divergent political views and a substantial age gap between them, their friendship was a warm one and may have begun when they served in the Spanish Cortes together. Their cordial relationship suggests that men of the political nation of very disparate ideological tendencies could be quite friendly with one another, although at this point Alamán was admittedly more moderate in his views than later and therefore more likely, issues of personality aside, to get on well with all but the most radical liberals, for example, Lorenzo de Zavala. Ambassador Michelena was to address his chief in diplomatic correspondence on more than one occasion as “My dear friend” (mi amado amigo), placing great confidence in his personal support, professional discretion, and sympathy.11 It is plausible that Michelena’s influence brought the younger man into the government in April 1823, although Lucas Alamán was hardly an unknown quantity in public life even before his first ministry. As noted earlier, he had served briefly on a public health board at the very end of the viceregal regime; had emerged as something of a political prodigy from the Spanish Cortes of 1821–22; and had been appointed by Emperor Agustín de Iturbide as minister plenipotentiary to France in 1822, a post he declined. Moreover, due to his background, his education, his travels in Europe and familiarity with its people and politics, his command of several languages, and his high-visibility

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service in Spain, he bore a certain patina of civilization and a strong association with the North Atlantic world upon which much of the elite of newly independent Mexico had, even at this early date, fixed its gaze as a model for modernization. Lorenzo de Zavala, the radical liberal tribune of the age—as Lucas Alamán came to be of the conservatives—put his finger on some of Alamán’s appeal, although he spun it negatively: “[Alamán was] one of the best-informed men in the cabinet. . . . Although his studied manner of speaking and presenting himself in society have earned him a reputation as a man of importance in a country in which civilization is not yet much advanced, and he speaks with facility, he never delves deeply into any question, much less analyzes it.”12 Barely a week before Alamán’s arrival in the government the interim congress had begun the process of expunging the works of the short-lived Iturbide regime by abrogating the Plan de Iguala and the Treaty of Córdoba. Retained, however, were the Three Guarantees of religion (the monopoly of the established Catholic Church), independence, and union (the equality of European and American Spaniards). The brief experiment with post-Bourbon kingship had discredited the concept of monarchy for the moment. There is no evidence that when he entered the cabinet of a government clearly headed toward a republican form Alamán had the serious reservations he would increasingly develop, or that he intended to subvert republican institutions. His strongly centralizing inclination was quite another matter; it would emerge from the beginning, provoking early and fierce political opposition. Congress itself was filled with interesting men, many of whom would remain on the national scene for some years and form relationships of alliance or antagonism with the new minister of interior and exterior relations. Among the leaders of the centralist block of deputies, those most in tune with the new minister’s ideas, were Francisco Fagoaga (1788–1851), a scion of the great mining family and an old friend of Alamán’s from London days and before; the military intellectual Manuel Mier y Terán (1789–1832), a sort of prior-day Felipe Ángeles (1868–1919, the Mexican revolutionary soldier); and Carlos María de Bustamante. These men were called successively Bourbonists, centralists, Escoseses (from their Scottish Rite Masonic affiliation), or simply hombres de bien. The chief voice among the federalists was the formidable political priest José Miguel Ramos Arizpe (1775–1843), seconded by ardent liberal federalists such as Valentín Gómez Farías (1781–1858), Francisco García Salinas (1786–1841), Juan de Dios Cañedo (1786–1850), and the ever-vocal Lorenzo de Zavala. A more moderate republican-centralist position was oc-

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cupied by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1765–1827), the picaresque Dominican priest and much older traveling companion of Alamán from their days together in Europe. The congressional debates were often turbulent, and Alamán attended almost daily, speaking to the assembled deputies several times, mainly in specially convoked evening sessions. In these appearances he consistently warned that failing strong resolution and proactive steps on the part of the central government, the country was at risk of dissolving entirely. The members of the SPE were ill-suited to the delicate political tasks at hand and thus ceded much space for action to Alamán. Vicente Guerrero was “withdrawn and suspicious, more peasant than powerful official”; Miguel Domínguez old and decrepit, although he was scarcely more than fifty years old at the time; and Michelena “indecisive [but] headstrong.”13 The everyday tasks of running the country mostly fell to Alamán’s ministry. Within his section of the government the oversight functions were vast, far exceeding those of any other area of ministerial responsibility. The more important units of the nearly fifty under Alamán’s direct supervision were as follows: State: Diplomatic affairs Government: Provincial deputations congressional deputies Passports Public disturbances (turbulencias) Public security Police Guatemalan affairs City councils (ayuntamientos) Territorial divisions Community treasuries Public festivities Constitutional infractions Suppression or expansion of regular clergy Political chiefs (jefes políticos) Postal service Public lands Statistics

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National militia Public works Census Charitable institutions: Poorhouses Cemeteries Medical regulation Public health Missions (as in the Californias) Epidemics Vaccinations Development: Colonization Mining Arts and inventions (i.e., patents) Agriculture Public instruction Commerce Consular officials Highways Money.14 As the federal government’s reach extended during and after Alamán’s first years in office, other responsibilities were added, including administration of the federal district, created in November 1824 during Alamán’s ministry. When fully staffed, his office included six senior officials, six lesser officials, four clerks (dictation clerks and copyists), a porter, a file clerk (archivero) with two assistants, and a general helper (mozo). His ministerial salary amounted to six thousand pesos annually, a substantial sum. Taking into account what came in from the provinces, other units of the government, and abroad, the ministry’s capacity to organize the mountains of correspondence, reports, and other documents lagged far behind its capacity to generate new paper. What is remarkable about the collections in the Gobernación section of the Archivo General de la Nación, however, is not the random nature of many of its surviving files, but the legibility Alamán and his staff managed to impose on them in the face of the naturally entropic tendency of paper.15

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Little documentation survives as to how Lucas Alamán ran his complex, understaffed satrapy. His detailed and characteristically eloquent ministerial reports to congress of 1 November 1823 and 11 January 1825 he certainly wrote himself, although the data cited in them would have been gathered by the officials under his supervision. His manner of dispatching business was to read carefully the most important letters, petitions, reports, and other documents demanding attention that reached his desk through the phalanx of senior ministry officials. He would then annotate fairly brief but occasionally longer replies in the margins, have an official or even a clerk write up a response to the originating person based on these notes, in some cases correct the draft and interlineate phrases or sentences, then sign the final clean copy. In some cases he would write notes, letters, or longer responses himself. Shortly after assuming office he did write a revealing letter in early July 1823 to the jurist, Supreme Court justice, journalist, and politician Juan Gómez Navarrete (1785–1849), occasioned by criticisms launched at Alamán from congress to the effect that he had peremptorily discharged certain officials from the ministry. This certainly fell within his purview as minister but probably stepped on some congressional friend’s or patron’s toes. He was also accused of not being sufficiently available to all comers who wanted to approach him on official business and of having provided government financial support for the antifederalist newspaper El Sol. The accusations were certainly politically motivated. But in attempting to refute them the minister revealed in his tone something of the cool hauteur and prickliness that many people seem to have found off-putting. Alamán dismissed the first accusation by defending his prerogative to discharge and hire officials short of legally proven malfeasances. He continued: There is no difficulty whatsoever in getting to [see] me, since I receive everyone whom my pressing duties in the office or attendance at congress permit me [to see], particularly on Tuesdays and Fridays. As for the rest, I have no part at all in the editing or ownership of El Sol, although I confess that if the attentions of the ministry left me a free moment, I would use it with pleasure to do something for a newspaper whose editors, always constant in their liberal principles, had the courage to sustain [those principles] without bending their knees before an idol adored by so many now calling themselves true federalists. I will also contribute as much as I can to the success of all the newspapers, not only those with articles in line with ministry thinking, but also [with those of] the opposition as long as these

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have, as in England, the goal of improving the present system [of government] and not destroying it. [I] will adopt as my own the judicious observations of the press, above all those of my compatriots, since it seems [to me] that a foreigner is not the most appropriate [person] to enunciate an opinion about our domestic affairs, about which they cannot have the necessary knowledge.16 Matters of transcendent political significance—for example, the calling of new elections for a constitutional congress and the federalist movements that threatened for a time to dismember the new republic—were mostly to occupy minister Alamán’s attention from at least the beginning of May. Among other matters needing attention were the resistance of the Franciscan missionaries of California to swear an oath of allegiance to independent Mexico; the issue of seating precedence in the city council of Guadalajara; a report from the municipal authorities in Veracruz concerning a painting of ex-emperor Iturbide hanging in its council chamber; accusations of “disaffection from the government” of some prominent military men; complaints against the Mexico City police; reports regarding thieves and highwaymen; a petition aimed at the reestablishment of the Jesuits (expelled from New Spain in 1767); a report from the north of the country that families from the US were “passing into Mexican territory,” presumably without license, and so forth. And foreshadowing legislative initiatives that Lucas Alamán was to undertake was a memorandum written on 23 April by Francisco Calderón, one of the six senior ministry officials, dealing with pending issues of fomento (i.e., economic development). Among the most interesting of these were projects for the colonization of Texas, New Mexico, and California, involving eight empresarios and upward of three thousand families, some from Switzerland or the Netherlands, others from Louisiana. A veritable torrent of executive announcements, decrees, and descriptions of congressional measures poured from the government printing offices, published in circulars over Lucas Alamán’s name and presumably written by him after consultation with the SPE.17 Certainly the SPE afforded the political legitimacy under which the government was run, but how much the triumvirs actively intervened in the minister’s work remains an open question inasmuch as many records of the body’s deliberations never existed or have been lost. Major decisions, such as the convocation of elections, must have been deliberated seriously, but it seems likely that the elaboration of the thinking and the language in which it was couched were Alamán’s.

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Hardly of a trivial nature but unfolding over a much shorter time span was the question of what to do with Agustín de Iturbide and his family. This raised the weightier problem of strong restorationist sentiment in the country. Two iturbidista deputies in the reconvened congress petitioned Alamán on 24 April for the ex-emperor’s father and sister to be allowed to remain in Mexico. José Joaquín de Iturbide, formerly Prince of the Union, was eighty-five years old and in frail health, and his daughter Nicolasa, formerly Princess Iturbide, presumably remained behind to care for her father. Having left the capital at the very end of March under a military escort commanded by Nicolás Bravo, the Iturbide party during these weeks was on its way to Veracruz to take ship for Europe on the English frigate Rawlins, contracted by the government to carry the former emperor into exile. On 26 April, while Iturbide was still en route to Veracruz, Guadalupe Victoria wrote to Secretario de Relaciones Alamán of the anticipated difficulties of accommodating Iturbide’s larger party. The government had arranged for the frigate to be supplied with water and food for a group of twenty-five to thirty people, but the Iturbide party amounted to sixty or more. Alamán responded rather laconically on 2 May that the group should be kept to the number originally contracted for, including the abdicated monarch’s immediate family, chaplain, secretary, and servants. Eventually the party was reduced to twenty-eight. Iturbide departed from Mexico on the Rawlins on 11 May 1823, bound for the port city of Livorno, on the west coast of Tuscany, where he would live with his family and entourage before moving to England at the end of the year.18 Iturbide was gone for the moment but hardly forgotten. All the reports of the many plots to restore his reign came across Alamán’s desk, some of them indeed scarcely more than rumors of half-baked plans. But these were in evidence from early in the summer of 1823, the moment of the abdicated monarch’s departure for his Italian exile. Some of them originated from unexpected quarters, including Sonora and Texas. Yet another plot involved an attempt to induce Manuel Gómez Pedraza to lead a restorationist rebellion; restorationist placards appeared around the capital in March 1824; twenty people were arrested in May 1824 for complicity in a plot to assassinate the members of the SPE and return Iturbide to the throne; suspicions surfaced that Anastasio Bustamante favored Iturbide’s restoration; and charges were also raised against Luis Quintanar in Guadalajara, alleging that he too wished to restore the ex-emperor to the throne under the banner of federalism.19 Lucas Alamán had to deal with the chaotic state in which the country found itself in 1823. The eruption of conspiracies to restore Iturbide was one element

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among several here, another being the transition from the short-lived monarchical system toward a republic. The federalist movements took a central position in this political landscape, which included the anomic opportunism presented to individuals to further their political or personal goals, and the semivacuum created by the weakening of state police capacity. Alamán’s repertoire of responses included spying, repression, negotiation, and reward for loyalty to the central government. Diffuse political suspicions about plots and disloyalty to the regime of the SPE arose in Querétaro, Durango, Guanajuato, Izúcar, and elsewhere beginning in May. On the other hand, in mid-May the secretario drafted a circular to the jefes políticos all over the country ordering them to remit the names of outstanding individuals who might be recompensed in some fashion for their services to the republic. This sounds very much like an attempt to identify not only meritorious men but dependable ones who might be entrusted with government commissions or who could be counted on to furnish reliable, confidential information as informants or even spies. How many names Alamán actually harvested in response to this canvass is unknown, but a number of names did come from Veracruz, Tlaxcala, and Puebla, the latter including a long list of clerics and military men, among them three members of the Flon family.20 The counterpoint to this was the problem of banditry perpetrated by mustered-out Spanish soldiers whom the local commander in Oaxaca, for example, wished to disarm by force. Similar complaints about the carrying of prohibited weapons and the frequency of crime came from towns such as Guanajuato and Zumpango.21 Alamán’s role in the export from Mexico City of the very much alive former emperor found an ironic counterpoint in the import of the independence heroes’ mortal remains to the capital later in the summer of 1823. Most of what remained of the heroes’ bones were in Guanajuato, where the severed heads of Miguel Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende, Juan Aldama, and Mariano Jiménez had been displayed in metal cages on the four corners of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas for many years after their execution and decapitation in Chihuahua in the spring of 1811. Now, along with the remains of Pedro Moreno and Javier Mina, the skulls of the independence heroes were to be sent to Mexico City to be reinterred with high honors in the city’s cathedral. Minister Alamán monitored the process at every step, beginning with his authorization on 28 August of a stately cortege from the relics’ resting places to the national capital. The heads of Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama, and Jiménez were exhumed on 31 August from the church cemetery of San Sebastián in Guanajuato, to which they had been removed from the Alhóndiga. The headless skeleton of Pedro Moreno

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was brought to the silver city from the Hacienda de la Tlachiquera to be reunited with his skull, brought from Lagos, while the intact remains of Javier Mina arrived from Pénjamo, where they had been interred in the cemetery of San Gregorio. A route to Mexico City was carefully planned out, leading from Guanajuato to San Miguel el Grande, Querétaro, San Juan del Río, Cuautitlán, and the Villa de Guadalupe, with lesser stops along the way. The skulls of the four heroes were all put into an urn together, in which confused state they remain today, having been moved from the Mexico City cathedral to the independence monument on the Paseo de la Reforma in 1925. One can only imagine that Lucas Alamán must have bitten his tongue over all this, but, on the other hand, his attitudes had not hardened into the condemnatory position toward the process of Mexican independence he was to adopt in the years after 1832 or so and was to express so eloquently in his great historical work. He was also a political realist and may well have felt that the young, politically unstable republic was in dire need of patriotic icons to forge its people into a nation, a goal he felt had still not been achieved by midcentury. But before an “imagined community” and patriotism could be birthed, the political and territorial integrity of Mexico must be guaranteed, and these appeared gravely at risk in the spring and summer of 1823.

The Federalist Crisis of 1823: An Introduction Before plunging into the complex narrative of the federalist crisis of 1823, I want to say what the following pages are and are not intended to accomplish. Through much of 1823 Lucas Alamán was attempting to hold Mexico together with his bare hands. That the country did hang together was owing to a great many factors beyond his control but also in large measure to his statesmanship. It is difficult to dispute Timothy Anna’s relatively restrained judgment that during this period “Alamán was perhaps the most skilled of the conservative antifederalists.”22 As the principal figure in the national cabinet he played a key role in reining in the impulse toward national dissolution occasioned by the impassioned center/periphery conflict over the nature and locus of political sovereignty and the control of fiscal resources that went with it. The immediate causes of the crisis were to be found in the centrifugal forces unleashed by the philosophy and practice of federalism, the bankruptcy of the national treasury, the struggle between center and periphery over taxing powers and fiscal revenues, and the precipitous fall of the first Mexican Empire. Other political actors besides Alamán also played key roles, including Minister

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of Defense Mier y Terán, factional elements in the national congress, and the provincial leaders whose stance ranged from absolute allegiance to the central government to determined separatism. There were a host of other factors at play as well, such as the capacity of the central government to exert selectively both political and military intimidation, the good sense of politicians at both ends of the struggle, and at some point a certain burnout from the acute federalist crisis among men of the political nation. This period of struggle between the central government in Mexico City and the provinces soon to become states eventuated in the federal constitution of 1824, although it was a relatively short-lived triumph. Federalist philosophy and practice and particularly the crisis of 1823–25 have been studied extensively, and there is little to add to the discussion of federalism.23 So central a figure was Alamán in this crisis of governance and so important this historical passage in his political career that his actions and views require close attention. The creation and durability of nation-states have come to be seen as one of the major hallmarks of modernity, their violent disaggregation into their constituent parts or the incapacity to carry out even their minimal functions— maintenance of territorial integrity, effective political control within national borders, a monetary system, domestic policing, and so forth—as state failure. While the fragments left in the wake of such failures are not necessarily the same as federal entities, they may bear a resemblance to them. The lines of internal perforation along which states break apart often correspond to previously existing parts with more or less strong identities that were joined together in federative or even centralized systems to make up a nation-state. What we in the modern world have come to think of as a natural polity—the unitary nation-state—was not necessarily the default object of enlightened political thinking in the early nineteenth century. In the case of New Spain, the intensely subregional or local interests aggregated into the recently decolonized provincial units were represented by the provincial deputations claiming to speak for them. These small polities rested on material and political bases that trade patterns, geography, transport systems, ethnicity, and a host of other elements would long combine to reinforce and preserve. Although with the later resurgence of centralism the Mexican federal states emergent in these months would temporarily be reduced to departments, the basic template for states within a federal union had been set. During the course of 1823 the provincial units would rapidly mutate into the states with their legislatures and strongly autonomist postures, for many people of high condition and low an altogether more natural arrangement than that of a strongly centralized

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Mexican nation. If any diagnosis of political pathology is ascribed to this period, therefore—and Alamán’s habitual invocation of anarchy seems to fit just such a political nosology—it can be attributed more aptly to the nation-making ambition than to the federalist impulse. In this sense one might consider whether the vortex of political conflict that whirled up during these months should more properly be labeled a centralist crisis than a federalist one. Whatever territorial arrangements or loci of power might come to prevail as things worked themselves out, Alamán made clear through his entry into the cabinet in April 1823 that he was prepared to work within the bounds of a republican form of government despite his elitist predilections and his reservations about the viability of a republic.24 By now it was reasonably clear that reestablishing the empire or inventing a new monarchical regime was off the agenda for the time being. Moreover, Alamán remained at his post until nearly the end of September 1825, with one hiatus of about three weeks in the spring of 1824 and a longer one, spanning the twilight of the SPE and the dawn of the Guadalupe Victoria government, stretching from the late fall of that year until early 1825. Neither Victoria’s election to the presidency nor the enactment of the Constitution of 1824, uncongenial though he may have found them, proved so unpalatable as to force him from the cabinet. Battered though he had been by the events of 1823–24, there is some doubt in my mind as to whether Lucas Alamán left the government in the autumn of 1825 because of any strong antipathy to the new constitutional order or the newly elected president or because of the attacks on him from liberal quarters as a Bourbonist and aristócrata and the burgeoning tensions with Joel Poinsett. Lucas Alamán’s north from his early days in politics was economic development, supported by inviolable rights to private property and a well-ordered national polity, a goal that did not change throughout the next thirty years. What the most efficacious political structures to achieve this objective might be were somewhat open questions for him. His ideas about means were always subordinate to a reasonably clear vision of ends, in other words, and politics likely never became an end in itself to him. It was when discussion moved in the direction of what he regarded as ill-advised political experimentation, as under the liberal government of Valentín Gómez Farías in 1833–34, that he turned increasingly conservative and more clearly Burkean in his attitudes. In fact, had he known Auguste Comte’s works—and widely read as he was, I have encountered no evidence that Alamán was familiar with the Frenchman’s ideas—he might well have agreed that nineteenth-century liberalism corresponded to the metaphysical stage of Comte’s theory of social evolution. But

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these attitudinal changes were an outcome of changing circumstances acting on inclinations rather than of deep-graven convictions rising to the surface. Nor was centralism theoretically or practically incompatible with republicanism, as his own outings in government and the midcentury and later liberal ascendancy would amply demonstrate.25 On the whole, however, his preferred model for the Mexican polity was probably a constitutional monarchy, in line with his espousal of the tripartite plan for the Spanish Empire in the debates over Spanish America’s fate in the Madrid Cortes a couple of years earlier. He had a lifelong affinity, apart from the geopolitical concern of counterbalancing US territorial ambitions, for British governmental forms, or at least a strongly centralist republic. It is therefore quite revealing to see Alamán grappling with the federalist crisis of 1823–24 from the very center of the government and to hear his opinions about party, faction, and the so-called anarchy against which he saw himself struggling. His role and the ideas behind it were articulated in his correspondence with federalist chieftains and other public figures while the political bonds integrating the young republic were being strained virtually to the breaking point. This was, however, even if several military confrontations almost tipped over into exchanges of gunfire, almost exclusively a war of words in which remarkably few shots were fired, aside from some local armed confrontations involving Santa Anna. Alamán was thus engaged with provincial chieftains and deputations in a sort of loud discussion about political philosophy and state making, or state maintenance. This was precisely the course of action advocated by Carlos María de Bustamante in his famous diaries, when he suggested that the federalist impulse in the provinces should be addressed through “[eloquent] writings, opening a literary combat in which reason [will] triumph.”26 While the stakes were very high—nothing less than the national integrity of the country— it is remarkable that the parties actually employed armed force so little. True, there was a good deal of threatened violence, which some observers might see as equivalent to the real thing; of marching around and deployment of relatively large armed forces; and of brinksmanship. But the dispute turned out to be virtually bloodless. In the end, as Anna writes with just a whiff of teleological reasoning, “With a unanimity that was truly remarkable . . . the provinces (or at least most of them) made no attempt to propose secession or withdrawal from the polity composed of their sister provinces, whatever that polity might turn out to be. They knew they had to create the kind of nation in which they could voluntarily participate.”27 A good place to begin an account of Alamán’s role is with a timeline laying out the principal events of 1823 (see table 6.1).

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Table 6.1: Timeline of major political events in Mexico from the fall of Iturbide to the presentation of a draft version of the federal constitution of 1824 27 March 1823 29 March 8 April 16 April 18 April 23 April–7 May 9 May 12 May 16 May 20 May 27 May 30 May 1 June 3 June 4 June 5 June

7, 9 June 12 June mid-June 16 June 17 June

Army of Casa Mata enters Mexico City First Constituent Congress reconvenes Congress abrogates the Plan de Iguala and Treaty of Córdoba Alamán enters the ministry Provincial commissioners demand convocation of new national congress Provincial deputations of Puebla, Yucatán, Guanajuato, and Michoacán demand new congress Provincial deputation of Guadalajara revokes recognition of national congress Guadalajara calls for a federal republic, refusing to obey congress or remit funds to Mexico City Provincial deputation of Querétaro polls municipal council, which calls for a new national congress Congress agrees to convene new congressional elections Eastern Interior Provinces demand a federal republic Alamán tells national congress it must act to prevent disintegration of Mexico Oaxaca declares its separation from the national government and installs its own provincial government Santa Anna and the army in San Luis Potosí call for a federal republic; the province of SLP refuses to accept his leadership Saltillo calls for self-government for the Eastern Interior Provinces Provincial deputation of Eastern Interior Provinces calls for federal republic, the intention to form one or more sovereign, independent states, while in San Luis Potosí, Santa Anna declares himself “protector of the federation” Chiapas declares its independence from both Mexico and Guatemala National congress votes in favor of the principle of a federal republic Central government attempts to oust Luis Quintanar as captain general of Guadalajara, but move fails Guadalajara declares itself the “free, independent, sovereign state of Jalisco” and forms alliance with other states Electoral law issued for new national congress (continued)

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Table 6.1: Continued 18 June 20 June 25 June 1 July 1–10 July

July 5 July 18 July 19 July 8–18 August 6 September

14 September 19 October 31 October 20 November

Provincial deputation of Zacatecas withdraws recognition of national congress Provincial deputation of Veracruz endorses demands for federal republic Pablo de la Llave, minister of justice, proposes that congress adopt a provisional federal charter In San Luis Potosí, Santa Anna abandons his first federalist revolt, and Oaxaca installs its state congress In a meeting in Celaya, delegations from Michoacán, Puebla, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí demand a federal republic and the election of a new congress Guadalajara and Zacatecas refuse to reelect provincial deputations as required by the 17 June electoral law An army led by Nicolás Bravo and José Celestino Negrete leaves Mexico City to invade Jalisco Bravo and Negrete halt their advance Provincial deputations of Nuevo Santander and Mexico declare for federalism Meeting in Lagos between central government, Guadalajara, and Zacatecas Pronunciamiento of San Luis Potosí proclaims province as sovereign, free, and independent state but recognizes existing national congress as “convocante”; also recognizes SPE as “centro de la unión” for external defense of the nation and arbiter of interprovincial relations Jalisco installs state congress Zacatecas installs state congress Second constitutional congress seated Miguel Ramos Arizpe presents draft of Acta Constitutiva

Source: Adapted from Anna, Forging Mexico, 118–19; and Benson, The Provincial Deputation, 129.

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The Meanings of Anarchy The tempest of the federalist crisis broke just a month or so after Lucas Alamán entered the ministry. It began with the Plan of Casa Mata and moved on to calls from several provincial deputations for the election of a new congress to write a national constitution. It then mutated within a matter of days into open repudiation by some provinces of the Mexico City government’s authority, culminating in a declaration by the politicians of Guadalajara, Zacatecas, and Oaxaca provinces of their definitive separation from the central government for all purposes except national defense and the convocation of elections for a constituent congress. By November the immediate crisis had burned itself out since the country was headed in the direction of institutionalizing federalism in its first national constitution. Underlying centrifugal forces long stressed the national fabric, however, and in the case of Yucatán were to reassert themselves as later separatist movements. The provincial deputations were among the key points of origin of this political turbulence. Nettie Lee Benson established their origins, evolution, and demise many years ago in a definitive study, but nevertheless it requires discussion. The juntas that later became the deputations were established in the various provinces of New Spain in the last years before the outbreak of the 1810 insurgency. At the time of their suppression with King Ferdinand VII’s return to the throne in 1814 there were seven of them, comprising the very large units of Guatemala, Yucatán, New Spain (the central and southern parts of the viceroyalty), San Luis Potosí, New Galicia, and the megaterritories of the Western and Eastern Interior Provinces. Reestablished in relatively short order, their numbers grew to fourteen by 1821, proliferated to eighteen in 1822, and reached twenty-three by the next year. These units closely corresponded in their territorial configurations to the modern states of the Mexican federation but were finally supplanted in many provinces by state congresses under the federalist arrangement of the early 1820s. The deputations had mixed political and administrative functions, one of the most important being oversight of tax collection and spending. Although they represented an assertion of the autonomist impulse on the part of subnational units within New Spain, they were by no means popular institutions. The deputies were elected, but the diputaciones were oligarchical bodies made up of very few men and composed of lawyers, professional men, and wealthy landowners. In summing up their important historical role, their biographer, Nettie Lee Benson, remarked that few if any historians have accorded them more than a passing nod, although

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Alamán noted laconically at the very end of his great history that they brought a federal republic to Mexico. Benson herself summarized their significance cogently: “The Provincial Deputation in Mexico played an important role in bringing autonomy to the provinces of Mexico . . . and finally [in] the establishment of a federal republican system of government in order to maintain Mexico as a single nation and not some eighteen different nations, as occurred in Central America.”28 Minister Alamán’s response to Brigadier Antonio López de Santa Anna’s resounding declaration in favor of a federal form of government and of his role as federalism’s protector came in a printed circular of 5 June 1823: “If the nation were oppressed by despotism, a general who believed himself a force to destroy what weighs on the people would justly merit the title of liberator. But [that] is not the case here, and the circumstances are different.” After reviewing the events of April and May in which the reconvened congress disavowed any provisions in the Treaty of Córdoba and Plan de Iguala linking the form of government to a foreign dynasty, Alamán continued in a sharp rebuke to Santa Anna, without naming him: There can be only one power in the nation, and only the supreme [i.e., central] government can wield it. To create another, separate [power] to guarantee rights that this congress has [already] known how to respect and sustain, to form an army independent of the power to which it owes obedience . . . to entrust to that army the faculty of activating a call for elections [convocatoria] that is already decreed and nearly published, to offer forces to the provinces to carry forward a system [i.e., a republic] that the representatives of the Nation have yet to reject, to divide [the Nation] at precisely the moment when union is most essential . . . to appropriate without any legal authorization an alarming title [i.e., Protector de la libertad Mexicana] that tends openly toward violation of the [as yet unwritten] constitution, to division, and to anarchy—these are things that amid such delicate circumstances can be the origin of infinite troubles, [that may] take us to the most horrible disorder, and because of it to the despotism that disguised [though it may be] under any name would produce in the nation that sad influence we have [recently] experienced.29 This was an unequivocal condemnation of Santa Anna’s activities in proclaiming himself national protector and arrogating to his liberating army the functions of the national congress in convoking elections for a new constitutional congress. Alamán’s argument rested on two points. First, he raises the indivisi-

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ble nature of national sovereignty: “There can be only one power in the nation.” By “power” he intends not simply the practical matter of a monopoly of the means to coerce but, more important, that of a legitimate, undiluted authority. The second, more crucial issue, in relation to which the question of sovereignty was raised, was the danger of anarchy. The undivided sovereignty embodied in a centralized state and the union it represented were therefore a prophylactic against political and social disorder. The idea of anarchy recurs frequently in Alamán’s official papers and correspondence over many years and was also much on the minds of other public men of the time in the Atlantic world. Alamán never invoked “anarchy” with any positive implications, always deploying its suppression as the ultimate justification for policy decisions. What he probably had in mind in the most immediate sense were the scenes of collective violence he had witnessed as a young man in his native Guanajuato. He did not mean it as a condition of endemic social war on an individual or tribal level, such as that speculated upon by Thomas Hobbes for men in a natural, prestate existence. Alamán identified three more extended meanings of the concept: one concerning the constitution of the state, the second the relationship between the state and civil society, and a third, more shadowy understanding—the relationship of law to private property—intertwined with the second. The first sense of the term prevails in his response to the federalist crisis of 1823. The union of which he writes above, a condition antithetical to anarchy, was essential to the preservation of Mexico as a single polity for very concrete reasons, including defense against external threats to the nation. Rumors of a Spanish expedition of reconquest were circulating continually, having materialized at the beginning of 1829 in the news of a Spanish expeditionary force being prepared in Havana, and would continue to do so even after Santa Anna and the mosquitoes repelled such an invasion force in 1829. The foreign policy doctrine that would forever bear his name was not enunciated by President James Monroe until the end of 1823. But the ink was barely dry on the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819 ceding Florida to the United States and fixing the border between New Spain and the United States. This arrangement gave ample notice of American intentions toward New Spain/ Mexico a generation before the term “manifest destiny” came into general usage. The same was true of the beginnings of Anglo-American colonization in Texas, begun in 1820 under the contracts with the colonization entrepreneur Moses Austin. British recognition of Mexican independence seemed on the diplomatic horizon but did not actually arrive until 1825, even if British consular officials arrived before.

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The second sense in which Lucas Alamán used the term “anarchy” was that of widespread political disorder stemming from weak state capacity and the inability of political factions to reconcile their views and arrive at compromises regarding great matters of national policy. During the months of the crisis these apparently irreconcilable differences took the form of a struggle between centralism and federalism, although conservatism and liberalism, respectively, did not map easily onto those projects for the form of the state. One could be a moderately liberal centralist, for example, as Alamán himself was in these years, or a moderately centralist liberal, as Father Mora was. This was an age when still inchoate but recognizable political tendencies were emerging in Atlantic nations as factions with one foot in civil society and the other in parliamentary regimes and state organs, rather than just court parties versus rural parties or aristocrats versus bourgeois commoners. The great bogeyman for Alamán and other public men of his time in Mexico and elsewhere was the French Revolution, whose leading cadres were riven by divisions between Girondists and Jacobins, radical and more moderate Jacobins, and so forth. Alamán’s fear, borne out in the endemic strife plaguing the next decade, was that such divisions might paralyze state action and lead to destructive domestic violence. But this was a fear amply shared by the more practiced politicians of the young North American republic—more practiced in the sense that British colonial institutions, with their provincial assemblies and governors’ councils, had furnished a laboratory (or perhaps a nursery?) for republican political life. The dread of factions based upon interests and prescriptions for palliating their effects, since, given the nature of human beings, they could not be prevented, lay at the heart of one of the most famous and revered of the Federalist Papers, James Madison’s Federalist No. 10. Published in 1787 under the nom de plume Publius adopted by the Federalist authors Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, this essay in theory and practical politics was preceded by Hamilton’s equally cogent but less famous Federalist No. 9. In fact, the most astute modern reader of Alamán’s political writings, José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, has suggested that Madison, not Edmund Burke (whose influence on Alamán’s thinking was deep), was Alamán’s “dios tutelar” in the writing of his Examen imparcial de la administración del general vicepresidente D. Anastasio Bustamante, although nowhere in his text does the Mexican statesman mention Madison explicitly. The acute political analysis in this long essay was produced by Alamán while he was in hiding in Mexico City during 1833–34, a period during which he also wrote his Memorias.30

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Lucas Alamán might well have written many passages of these two Federalist essays himself, hardly surprising given his affinity for ideas paralleling Hamilton’s. Whether he read the Federalist Papers is not clear, but it would be surprising had he not been familiar at least at secondhand with the more wellknown of them. Although in the passage quoted above he ties “anarchy” to the ambitious machinations of Santa Anna rather than to the play of “factions” or “interests” in the Federalist sense, he would adopt the latter meaning in other correspondence written during these months, so what Hamilton and Madison had to say is useful. In the opening paragraph of Federalist No. 9 Hamilton wrote as follows: A firm union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the states as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection. It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions, by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration, between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrasts to the furious storms that are to succeed. . . . The definition of a confederate republic seems simply to be, an “assemblage of societies” or an association of two or more states into one state. The utility of a confederacy, as well to suppress faction and to guard the internal tranquillity [sic] of states, as to increase their external force and security, is in reality not a new idea. [If we are to take Montesquieu’s ideas as a model] we shall be driven to the alternative, either of taking refuge at once in the arms of monarchy, or of splitting ourselves into an infinity of little jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt.31 And in Federalist No. 10, published as a newspaper article the day after Hamilton’s (22 November 1787), Madison wrote of factions less obliquely, linking them to “interests” in the economic sense: Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. . . . By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of

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passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. . . . [T]he most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.32 Madison’s definition of factions as political groupings formed primarily around common material interests leads to the third sense in which Alamán used the term “anarchy.”33 To jump ahead to the 1828–34 period, when Alamán reached the pinnacle of his political career in the Bustamante administration and started down the other side of the mountain, Aguilar Rivera notes of the statesman’s Examen imparcial (1834) that it was produced in a context of elite fears of class warfare. These were provoked first by the Parián Riot and then by the clearly populist Guerrero regime: “In general, the property-owning classes feared the anarchy they had seen in the destruction of the Parián Market at the hands of a lower-class mob [el populacho], [which] ‘had been surpassed in the few months of the Guerrero administration.’ ”34 I contend, however, that Alamán’s preoccupation with anarchy dated from an earlier time, was present from the start of his public life, and was mostly linked to his concern with establishing the absolute sanctity of private property rights, of which the chief guarantor was social and political order (i.e., the absence of anarchy). His emphasis on the security of private property as the basis for a peaceful, prosperous civic life in his statement in mid-May 1823 of the SPE’s goals was not gratuitous. Given his class background as the scion of a declining clan of the silver aristocracy, it is not unexpected. But in the congressional debates of 1822 over the removal of Fernando Cortés’s coat of arms from the Hospital de Jesús, of which the conqueror had been patron, Alamán would have seen an alarming harbinger of liberal attacks not only on Spanish traditions but also on the symbols of private property. Such a form of possession fully applied to the holdings of the ex-Marquesado del Valle, the sprawling

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holdings of the Cortés heirs, as he spent much of the following decade insisting in the newspapers, the courts, and the corridors of power. Moreover, while he was still in the thick of the federalist crisis entails were abolished by congress in August 1823. The right to untrammeled possession of private property thus became one of the chief tenets of his political thinking and anarchy its chief potential enemy.

“Federalism, That Beautiful Invention of Modern Politics” The most radical cases of the federalist impulse that Lucas Alamán viewed as leading inexorably to the spread of anarchy and the dissolution of Mexico as a nation occurred in Oaxaca and Jalisco, with secondary but nevertheless important roles played by federalist outbursts in Zacatecas and other provinces. So it was chiefly in his correspondence with the leaders of those movements during 1823 that his ideas about federalism, centralism, the nature of states, and the shape of the national polity first found expression. The federalist crisis of these months embraced two successive, intertwined, but discernibly distinct political conflicts—the first between Iturbide and the congress regarding the limits of executive power, the second over the balance of power between provinces and federal government. The political horizon of the Iturbide regime did not darken suddenly but clouded over incrementally with a series of movements protesting the emperor’s high-handed suppression of political dissenters, the mass arrest of congressional deputies, and finally his 31 October 1822 decree dissolving congress entirely. One such movement was a revolt in Nuevo Santander launched on 26 September 1822 by its governor, Felipe de la Garza, with the support of the provincial deputation. Prompted by Iturbide’s actions, this uprising aimed at forcing the release from prison in Mexico City of the congressional deputies José Servando Teresa de Mier and Carlos María de Bustamante, both sometime friends, if hardly intimates, of Lucas Alamán. The pronunciamiento was squashed by the dispatch of troops and had faded within a month.35 The immediate trigger for the fall of the empire was the rebellion headed by Antonio López de Santa Anna in Veracruz in early December 1822. This grew out of a personal rivalry between him and José Antonio Echávarri, a peninsulaborn military officer who had fought in the royalist ranks during the insurgency, later attached himself to Iturbide’s Plan de Iguala, and was subsequently much favored by the emperor. By way of easing the tension Iturbide removed Santa Anna from the military command of Veracruz, prompting him to

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declare for a republic in his Plan of Veracruz on 6 December 1822 and to demand the restoration of congress and the establishment of a regency to replace the emperor. He was joined in this by a number of the old insurgent chieftains, among them Guadalupe Victoria. Quickly defeated by Iturbide’s army and entrapped with his forces in Veracruz, Santa Anna had his plan coopted from an unanticipated quarter on 1 February 1823 by Echávarri’s own Plan of Casa Mata (named for the town in which it was published), to which Santa Anna quickly adhered along with Victoria and Nicolás Bravo. This plan called for the election of an entirely new national congress and the drawing up of a constitution, two of the most basic demands soon to be launched by the federalist movements in the provinces; what it did not call for was the overthrow of Iturbide. Within a few weeks the Plan of Casa Mata attracted the adherence of the province of Nueva Galicia under its military and political chief, Luis Quintanar, and in short order of the provinces of Guanajuato, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Michoacán, Yucatán, and all the Eastern Interior Provinces save Texas, then of almost all the others. Meanwhile the emperor temporized, commissioners scurried back and forth, meetings were held, politicians debated what course of action to pursue, and the country effectively found itself without a functioning government. On 4 March Iturbide recalled the congress he had earlier closed at bayonet point, now in the absence of most of its deputies restyled the Junta Nacional Instituyente. Even some of the sitting deputies themselves, however, among them Lucas Alamán’s uncle Tomás, José Joaquín de Herrera, and Lorenzo de Zavala, insisted on the illegitimacy of this body. Agustín de Iturbide abdicated on 19 March, and the liberating army of Casa Mata entered the capital a week later. Now composed of 123 deputies, congress declared itself in legitimate session and named a committee to designate a provisional executive power. In the absence of definitive action from congress toward initiating the constitution-writing process, several provinces, most notably Nueva Galicia and Oaxaca, moved toward establishing state governments completely independent of the central authority, allied horizontally to other states solely for purposes of mutual defense, and reserving to themselves exclusive control over all matters within their borders. Through May the provincial deputation of Guadalajara consolidated this position, receiving a flood of supportive correspondence from outside the province.36 The military and political chief of Nueva Galicia, Luis Quintanar (1772–1837)—long a royalist commander during the insurgency, then a supporter of Iturbide’s Plan de Iguala, and later the first governor of Jalisco—deployed troops along the frontiers of Nueva Galicia,

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blocking a large force dispatched from Mexico City sent to replace him with Herrera. During June the provincial deputation of Nueva Galicia sent minister Alamán a plan for a provisional government of the “free, independent, and sovereign” State of Jalisco that designated Quintanar as governor but recognized Mexico City as the center of a national union. The provincial deputation ceded its powers to the new state government and snuffed itself out on 18 September, replaced by a state congress. The Jalisco state government rejected the new law for elections to the national constituent congress, prompting the SPE to send a force under Nicolás Bravo and José Celestino Negrete to compel its submission. In the face of militia mobilization in Zacatecas and Jalisco the centralist forces halted their march on 18 July, and, despite the collapse of a series of inconclusive meetings between the two sides on 18 August, the military confrontation never took place. Meanwhile, in midAugust Alamán was urging negotiation with the breakaway provinces rather than military measures; failing some accommodation, he suggested, Mexico as a nation would cease to exist. The new national constituent congress was seated at the end of October, its work in concocting a national constitution fully accommodating federalist aspirations and obviating the necessity of a military confrontation between center and provinces. During these months Alamán and the SPE were to focus more efforts on bringing Guadalajara back into the fold than on any other province, although Oaxaca and Zacatecas also raised grave concerns. The main issues of contention were the repudiation of the central government by what was now Jalisco, its refusal to remit any fiscal proceeds to Mexico City, and its resistance both to the calls for new congressional elections and those to renew the provincial deputations through election. Many figures in the central government in Mexico City also feared that both Quintanar and his military associate Anastasio Bustamante harbored secret wishes for an iturbidista restoration. Any such plot would seem disproven by a mid-July 1823 exchange of letters between Quintanar and Alamán in which the former advocated the federal republic as a preemptive measure insuring that any attempted return of Iturbide would not acquire much political traction. Jaime E. Rodríguez O. has noted that centralist politicians may have been alarmed that, given the city’s importance, an untamed but powerful Guadalajara might edge Mexico City out of the picture by taking on the role of national capital or might even become the center of an entirely separate nation embracing the western and northern parts of the former New Spain.37 Events in the province of Oaxaca had begun earlier and moved faster by the time Agustín de Iturbide abdicated on 19 March. Following the election of a

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provisional governing junta in February, its dissolution in April, and the reinstatement of the provincial deputation, the complete independence of the province from Mexico City was declared on 1 June, precipitated in part by popular demonstrations and the establishment of governing principles substantially similar to those of Nueva Galicia. The native oaxaqueño Carlos María de Bustamante described his home province as “delirious, and the same prudence was necessary [on the part of the Mexico City government] to deal with it as would be used to deal with a crazy person [or] a child.”38 The city’s ayuntamiento supported the separatist position, as did most major social groups save the upper clergy, who remained irresolute. After elections the provisional congress of the Free State of Oaxaca was seated on 6 July, supplanting the deputation completely; a formal and definitive declaration of statehood came on 28 July. Armed forces sent by the SPE to bring the errant province to heel failed to dislodge the jefe político Antonio de León, now the chief executive of the new state.39 Leading militia units, León advanced to meet central government forces. Negotiations ensued, and rather than coming to blows on the field the two commanders agreed on 21 September that Oaxaca would submit to the newly convoked constituent congress and await the establishment of the federal system. The provincial deputation of Zacatecas declared the territory a state on 18 June, seating its first elected congress in the fall and recognizing the sitting national congress exclusively for purposes of convening elections for a new, constituent body. Laws, regulations, or decrees emanating from the congress in Mexico City would be accepted only if they did not come into conflict with those already in place or yet to be promulgated by the State of Zacatecas, a clear statement of where sovereignty was thought to reside. The new state also initiated negotiations with the authorities in Guadalajara regarding a mutual defense pact. Similar steps were taken through the summer by other provinces, establishing themselves as free and sovereign states, repudiating the Mexico City government and arguing for a federal system with complete autonomy for each state in its internal affairs. Attempts at armed intervention in these processes by the central government proved to avail as little as with Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas. During these months Lucas Alamán’s letters were addressed to the authors of the many provincial declarations establishing statehood and favoring a federal republic, demonstrating the minister’s efforts to slow the onrush of events until congress could issue a call for new elections, which did not go out until 17 June 1823. Jaime Rodríguez has written that “the politics of the period appear confusing because no one seemed to be in charge of the country,” and

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Timothy Anna that the concurrent unfolding of political events in so many places made for an “overly complex narrative.”40 Alamán was also charged during these months with the conduct of ordinary government affairs, none of which ever proved to be quite ordinary. These included everything from overseeing Guadalupe Victoria’s negotiations with the Spanish forces occupying San Juan de Ulúa, expediting legislation to deal with banditry and public security issues, and negotiating foreign loans. Although nothing is known of the internal deliberations of the SPE, much can be learned from the minister’s correspondence with Luis Quintanar, the political and military chief of Nueva Galicia. The lengthy, sometimes heated exchanges between Alamán and Quintanar are very interesting in and of themselves because of what they reveal about the political language of the day. They also comprise the most complete documentation of the minister’s role in the federalist crisis and of his political thinking. These exchanges make clear that Alamán assumed the country would be governed as a republic, that he was prepared to work within that framework, and that this was not just a bargaining position dissembling monarchist motives. He was also prepared to countenance a federal organization for Mexico if it did not imply a disavowal of the central government by the provinces or the arrogation to themselves of what he considered the proper spheres of authority of the national power. On 1 May 1823 Quintanar wrote to Lucas Alamán from Guadalajara describing the ardent profederalist sentiment in the city and expressing concern that the local military commanders might declare for separation of the province from the central government rather than awaiting resolution by the national congress.41 The question arises as to why his posture changed just a few weeks later from a respectful wait-and-see attitude, with an implicit criticism of profederalist officers and their sympathies, to one taking the province of Nueva Galicia to the brink of secession. Possible explanations are that on 1 May he was being disingenuous with minister Alamán; or that he experienced a genuine federalist epiphany over the ensuing weeks; or that within a short span of days he decided to get out in front of his provincial political constituency and effectively lead from the rear by proclaiming the independence of the free and sovereign State of Jalisco. Whatever the explanation, by 9 May the provincial deputation had revoked its recognition of the national congress, and on 12 May it called for a federal republic, with Quintanar refusing to obey the sitting national congress or remit tax funds to Mexico City. Toward the end of May, in an order drafted by Alamán, the SPE revealed its decision to resist the federalist tide by replacing Quintanar as jefe político with the congressional deputy and

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brigadier general José Joaquín de Herrera. The dispatch of the force toward the borders of Nueva Galicia in what Quintanar described as “the insulting character of pacifier” was later clearly ascribed by the provincial deputation primarily to Alamán.42 Learning of this in less than a week, Quintanar wrote to Herrera from Guadalajara on 1 June telling him in no uncertain terms to keep his troops out of what was soon to become the State of Jalisco, adding that his own actions had “no object other than to sustain civil liberties and to organize themselves in a manner most conducive to [the people’s] happiness. The opposition of a small aristocratic party, very far from aspiring to the perfect equality [of citizenship] enjoyed in free states, yearns to fix a despotic throne [solio] in the center [of the country], the Mexican capital, to exercise over all a prideful domination . . . that can[not] be suffered under the enlightened ideas of the nineteenth century.” While praising Herrera’s integrity and patriotism, Quintanar warned him not to bring his troops into Jalisco. Some interesting exchanges ensued between Herrera and Alamán, in which the soldier assessed the feasibility of invading the province of Nueva Galicia as low because of the small size of his force.43 Lucas Alamán’s first extended response to Luis Quintanar’s protestations of his honorable intentions, obedience to the central government “insofar as my own honor permits,” and fervid adherence to the federal system supported by a virtual unanimity of public opinion came in a letter of 11 June 1823: How can it be called an offense [insulto] to the provinces that the sovereign [national] congress occupy itself with the urgent matters of public finance, war, and justice? Can it be claimed perhaps that until the gathering of the new congress everything remains in a state of disorder incompatible with the political existence of the nation? . . . [O]nly to the representatives of this same nation, empowered by it [i.e., the nation] to this end, does it correspond to resolve [the issue]. . . . Without previously establishing by common accord the mutual relations of the federated provinces, without providing for the means to meet common expenses and to cover common obligations, how can a provincial deputation pretend [to do this] without [the country] ending up in the most complete anarchy? . . . [I]t is evident that society will dissolve if before a new pact is celebrated the existing one is not honored . . . [L]acking the unifying center that should exist in any government, whatever its form—a center that cannot be maintained if the segregation of the provinces were to proceed without previously establishing the bases for their federation—

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this disunion would open the door to cruel despotism, a necessary and inevitable consequence of anarchy.44 Prior to this passage, Alamán invoked some very practical reasons for national union: the necessities of territorial defense, of paying common expenses conducing to national prosperity, and so forth. In addition, he called up the vaguer argument that national disunion—that is, the disaggregation of what was formerly New Spain into large, disconnected territorial units—would open the door to anarchy, and anarchy to despotism. How exactly this chain of events was to follow from the dissolution of the country he did not specify, unless the dissolution itself would produce such a condition. Here as elsewhere in his writings of this period, however, the key concept seems to be anarchy in the sense in which I have tried to tease out above, a bogeyman whose conjuring-up probably worried him as much as it was intended to warn his readers. He asserted as an inherent property of functioning polities that they have centers—“the unifying center that should exist in any government, whatever its form”—lest they fall into chaos and society itself dissolve. Later in the letter he insisted that sovereignty, or the legitimate authority to define the form of government and to make laws, resided in the nation as a whole through its representatives—in other words, in a republican structure—rather than in what were essentially little more than administrative units charged with municipal affairs and the expenditure of taxes. Lucas Alamán’s differences with the federalist views expressed by provincial leaders like Luis Quintanar were based on complicated historical and constitutional reasoning but were quite clear for all that. On the one hand, Alamán’s position was that there was a preexisting center, that there always had been, and that disavowing it before making arrangements for altering it to fit the circumstances of the age would produce a dreadful state of political liminality, namely, anarchy. Referring to Mexican nationhood not in any affective or mystical register but as a concrete system of state institutions exercising dominion over a unified territory, he wrote to the authorities in breakaway Oaxaca province in June 1823 that “it would be the greatest absurdity to destroy that which is already built in order to rebuild it afterward.”45 On the other hand, Quintanar and the provincial deputation of Guadalajara expressed the view that the center had basically disappeared already. In the resulting political vacuum the provinces, now rapidly evolving into states, had always been the repositories of sovereignty, they asserted, and might construct a totally new one through a process of horizontal pact making. In this latter view,

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awaiting the convocation from the sitting congress of new congressional elections was at best a matter of convenience. To put all this in spatial terms, the question was whether the center of the union was a hub (Alamán) or a virtually dimensionless point (Quintanar and other federalist chieftains). But events were running against the minister in Mexico City. While this political colloquy was going on, the provincial deputation of Guadalajara, under Quintanar’s leadership, had issued a manifesto on 5 June affirming Nueva Galicia’s agreement with the other Mexican provinces that a convocatoria for new congressional elections should go out, that the only acceptable national arrangement would be federalism, and that interpreting the province’s stance as advocating complete secession from Mexico was false. In the absence of a functioning legislative branch, since Guadalajara recognized the national congress only for purposes of convoking new elections, Nueva Galicia acknowledged the government in Mexico City as the center of the union. The tapatíos nonetheless asserted that any laws emanating from Mexico City regarding the province would be obeyed or not according to the wishes of the provincial authorities and only insofar as they did not touch on matters internal to the province / state.46 As the situation played out over June, July, and August the respective positions waffled rhetorically somewhat for the sake of striking a mutually conciliatory tone, even while at their core both views remained consistent and even hardened. That is where matters stood when a printed circular convoking elections for a new constituent congress was finally issued by the Mexico City government on 17 June 1823. It is virtually impossible to believe that Alamán was not its author. Beginning with a good deal of flowery language, the convocation continued as follows: “Federation, that beautiful invention of modern politics, requires without doubt to be founded on solid and just bases: that the different interests of the provinces be combined; that its [i.e., the federation’s] constitution make a harmonious whole of the parts that compose it; that stability be reconciled with liberty, that every seed of dissolution be banished, and that a congress in which are united the interests and ideas of all put [on a firm footing] the unstable fatherland and steer it toward a happiness that for long has been the most ardent of its desires.”47 Timothy Anna implies strongly that Alamán meant the phrase with which he began the circular decree, the invocation of “federation, that beautiful invention of modern politics,” ironically.48 It certainly sounds odd coming from his pen, but absent documentary evidence to the contrary one must assume the words are his. No such irony was intended, even if in the phrase he was truckling to federalist sentiment through-

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out the provinces. In his Historia de Méjico, Alamán would later come to express unequivocally the power of the foundational moment of the conquest and of Spanish rule in the creation of the country. Here he justifies union and a powerful central government on the self-evident principles of natural law, political philosophy, and practical necessity. Had this convocation of new congressional elections ended matters by quelling the objections to centralized government or forestalling the personal ambitions of Luis Quintanar or any other provincial chieftain, things would not have escalated over the course of the summer up to the threshold of armed conflict. But it did not. About a week after the SPE’s convocatoria went out, the provincial deputation of Nueva Galicia, now converted into the provincial deputation of the State of Jalisco, wrote to Alamán with the political chief’s assent in an ostensibly more conciliatory tone wrapped around a political position actually hardening quickly: “Never could the Deputation have conceived of a violent separation of this State from its sisters, much less in ceasing to recognize the center of the union of all of them. The State of Xalisco [sic] glories in being part of the great Mexican Nation.” But the lack of progress in Mexico since independence from Spain was palpable, the letter continued: “There is no treasury, there is no administration of justice, there is no mining, there is no agriculture, there is no industry, there is no commerce, and there is no credit or confidence: everything has disappeared, and such a lamentable situation must of necessity [have] led the Nation to the edge of the precipice, if the measures necessary to remedy such grave ills were not undertaken.” These perceptions were amply shared by Alamán, but the curative measures he attempted to apply during his first ministries depended on strengthening the central government rather than the periphery. The provinces had decided that the best solution to these problems was the adoption of a popular, representative, federal form of government. In Guadalajara a federal republic had been declared two days before, and public tranquility was now complete, even though the reseated national congress had declared Jalisco to be in a state of criminal resistance to the authority of the central government. At a time when “liberality and honesty” were required of all, the Guadalajara authorities continued, “there was being put into execution [by the central government] the tricks of the viziers Venegas, Callejas [sic], and Cruz to sow discord between brother and brother.” This might have led to outright national dissolution, Quintanar asserted, had not he and the provincial deputation intervened to calm the situation. One power the State of Jalisco had arrogated to itself was the appointment to virtually all official posts:

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In monarchies and central[ized] republics all [public] employments are conferred by the supreme governments without consultation with the provinces, and it is proper [in this form of state] that the provinces obey the orders of the metropolis [i.e., the central government]. But in a federated republican regime, which has been declared by this State and asked for by the other States of the great Mexican Nation, [as well as] by the congress and the SPE, Your Excellency knows full well that each federated state confers all the Posts within its territory, and only those positions are reserved to the general Executive Power of the union that look directly to the preservation of that same General union.49 This was followed up in short order by another communication from Quintanar warning the minister that if the rump national congress did not write into law the existence of “provincial [i.e., state] legislatures,” the “horrors of the political storm that threatens us” would be inevitable.50 Events elsewhere in Mexico had been moving swiftly (see table 6.1). In his response to Quintanar some days later, Lucas Alamán asserted even more strongly than before his conviction that sovereignty could not be divided but resided exclusively in the people and was delegated by them to the national congress without any intervening institutions or bodies. The SPE would make no proposal regarding the establishment of state legislatures to the sitting congress, since it was not within its legal or political purview to do so, and such an enactment could arise only from provisions of a constitution yet to be written: “[To act] contrary is to shatter the social order, introducing among us a cruel and desolating anarchy and precipitating . . . us into all the ills and misfortunes afflicting for some time past Buenos Aires and Colombia. . . . Where would we be led by the bizarre system of a partial sovereignty that in dividing us one from another . . . would lead to [each individual’s] sovereignty, and that dissolving and defying all social bonds would reduce us to that terrible and pitiful situation in which only the right of force is recognized?”51 In the weeks that followed, Quintanar maintained a certain temperamental equilibrium and moderate tone in his correspondence with Alamán, while the latter seemingly became more and more frustrated, agitated, and angry. Alamán’s biographer José Valadés claimed that the minister faced the federalist crisis in general, and the events in Guadalajara in particular, with “the greatest serenity,” expounding his ideas about the political organization of the country with “the clarity of noon-day.”52 One does see the clarity in many of these exchanges but less of the serenity. Nor is there much in these long letters of his on the political organization of Mexico in the positive sense, but

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rather sharp criticism of federalist ideas and prophetic thunderings about the anarchy to come should a radical federalist program prevail. It may have been easier for Quintanar to maintain his equanimity because the authorities in the State of Jalisco had staked out a position they felt they could defend, one echoed by most of the other major provincial units of the country as they accelerated rapidly toward a unified federalist stance. By contrast, the minister in Mexico City felt himself besieged and on the defensive, with hardly any resources but his strong words to forestall or prevent national dissolution. As noted earlier, the man whom the SPE had sent to Guadalajara to replace Quintanar, General José Joaquín de Herrera, had been turned away; and on 5 July an armed force left the capital under Pedro Celestino Negrete and Nicolás Bravo to subdue rebellious Jalisco but halted its advance about two weeks later on the grounds that it did not have enough men to make an invasion of Jalisco plausible. Lucas Alamán’s ripostes to other letters from Quintanar defending Jalisco’s stance followed with regularity, tending to be quite sharp in the first passages, then ramping down in tone to a lecture in the latter parts. On 19 July he wrote to the political chief of Guadalajara of the “various errors” in his latest communication, of contradictions between the actions and words of the provincial deputation, of their obvious inconsistency with “the institutions that govern us, and even with the general [rules] adopted by all societies,” and of the deliberative pace at which the SPE had judged and answered the expressions emanating from Guadalajara. Referring to the plan of governance put forth by the provincial deputation on 5 June, Alamán continued, When the SPE ordered that I tell you that it was very satisfied because in analyzing the plan of 5 June it noted conformity with [the general] desire that the nation constitute itself a federal republic, it did not intend to say that it approved the measures Guadalajara has adopted without the authority of the national government. Its approval extended [only] to the recognition of a common center and of supreme authorities constituted by previously [existing] laws and the vote of the people; for how could it authorize proceedings that infringe so far on the constitution that has been adopted [i.e., the Constitution of 1812 and its modifications]? What has pleased the SPE is that you have not aspired to provoke a fatal break with the nation [patria] to dissolve those bonds that in common interest unite all the provinces. . . . To approve the separation of Guadalajara and its subsequent steps would be to abrogate faculties that do not pertain to the SPE, and to stray from the constitutional path.

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The pretext of popular sovereignty with which Guadalajara has sought to justify its proceedings is very much misapplied. Sovereignty resides solely in the Nation: this is an Axiom in politics; but its exercise pertains [exclusively] to legitimate representation, and this cannot be assumed by only one state or Province of those that have always comprised a [single] society, because the result would be as many sovereignties as there are states. And since there is no reason why the pueblos in themselves cannot then enjoy a similar mastery [preeminencia], they would be sovereign unto themselves, and there would everywhere be a monstrous confusion, an infinite disorder of the most dismal and far-reaching consequences, anarchy and destruction. Now is the time to banish the spirit of party among us. The national interest demands sacrifices. The closest union with the center of power is the only [thing] that can guarantee our liberties and independence.53 Alamán in this official communication drew with considerable adroitness on several different arguments and rhetorical forms. Beginning with a reproof of Quintanar for misconstruing official policy, he passed on to a constitutional argument, namely, that it was not within the purview of the SPE to countenance Jalisco’s separation even had it wanted to do so, and thence to a disquisition on sovereignty: “sovereignty resides solely within the Nation.” Beginning about the middle of July, Quintanar and Alamán had an interesting exchange about the rumored return of Agustín de Iturbide to Mexico that opened up the minister’s thinking and demonstrated his rhetorical resources and the sharpness of his pen even further. Quintanar used the exchange as an opportunity to urge upon the central government a federal system, and the impatient, angry Alamán to reassert the foolhardy nature of extreme federalism while dragging in the international context as a motive for maintaining a strongly centralist government within a republican, moderately federal framework. Alamán’s increasingly irascible tone, moreover, might well have been aggravated by Quintanar’s appearing to lecture him on the nature of politics, since the minister himself almost invariably liked to occupy the role of lecturer. Quintanar wrote on 15 July 1823 of a rumor in wide circulation that Iturbide was in the US, having reversed his plan to emigrate to Italy, and although he himself did not believe it, it does not cease to agitate public opinion, since the hope that many harbor of an imperial return leaves them irresolute as to the form of government desired by the majority [of the population]. . . . [T]he Su-

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preme Government should once and for all save us and protect itself from the storm clouds that threaten us on every side, redoubling its patriotic efforts for the congress to organize the nation on a federal basis as quickly as possible [and decree] the establishment of provincial legislatures. . . . Accepting [this system] would undoubtedly result in permanent stability for the nation because if the return of Sr. Iturbide is true, it will happen that finding ourselves already constituted under another form [of government] the hope that monarchy will gather force or influence will perish, and if it is not true, [adopting federal forms] will at least [admonish] the proponents of that system not to make more efforts to increase opinion in its favor. [Once the federal system is adopted], then Iturbide and his henchmen will find no support for their machinations.54 Alamán characterized the rumor of Iturbide’s return as “absolutely false”— only for the immediate future, as it turned out, although no one could foresee this at the time. Moreover, he asserted that the pro-Iturbide conspiracies so far uncovered in the capital had few supporters and involved only “a few ambitious opportunists . . . having as their object the proclamation of a tyrant of odious name.” Of the rumored return he wrote, The falsity of that news is almost palpable and no man gifted with common sense would dare to give it any credence. . . . The supposed arrival of D. Agustín de Iturbide at a port of some neighbor state of ours is a means to fragment [public] opinion into factions, alarm the population, and tear it apart and [thus] introduce the most disastrous anarchy, afterward gathering the fruit of such a brutal misfortune. And the situation may even become more delicate: it is not a remote prospect that the political affairs of Europe may become more and more delicate. The League of sovereigns [arrayed] against the liberties of the [Iberian] Peninsula perhaps has as its object not only the [maintenance] of royal absolutism on the European continent; our [own] independence and liberty, secured by the most prodigious effort, may be endangered if we find ourselves divided. If the provinces, repudiating the very federation they proclaim, appropriate to themselves at their whim the faculties of the Government, impeding its policies, what could then be done in the possible case of an exterior attack? . . . [Internal] separation will always damage general interests, but in the present circumstances no better means could have been invented to make our independence and liberty illusory.

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To avoid the approaching storm we see coming upon us, the SPE sees no other remedy that can save us from shipwreck than union.55 The heated colloquy with Luis Quintanar over these months is the most robustly documented of Lucas Alamán’s responses to the expressions of federalist sympathies in the provinces and in the face of the snowballing declarations of statehood by the provincial deputations.

The Protector of Federalism Parallel to the events in Guadalajara, the provinces continued to boil with provincial assertions of federalist autonomy and repudiations of the central government mostly disguised with the fig leaf of contingent recognition. In late June, if not earlier, the provincial deputation of Zacatecas, in concert with the city’s ayuntamiento, declared for federalism but was urged by minister Alamán not to pursue a separatist course. The Zacatecas leaders then agreed to recognize the authority of the sitting congress and the SPE until a new congress was elected, essentially the same watch-and-wait position adopted by most federalist provinces. Tangled episodes of provincial assertion and central government counterassertion also arose in the provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa stretching over the summer and into the fall of 1823 and in San Antonio de Béjar.56 Much of the agitated political activity of these months reached a crescendo in the profederalist junta celebrated at Celaya early in July 1823 by representatives of the provincial deputations of San Luis Potosí, Valladolid, Guanajuato, and Querétaro.57 Discussions took place there during 1–10 July. Coincidentally Santa Anna, having failed to capture the federalist leadership for himself, on 10 July marched his troops out of San Luis Potosí, and the central government forces of General Gabriel Armijo marched in. Invoking yet again the specter of anarchy lurking behind federalism, minister Alamán wrote to the four deputations on 5 July that the talks were no longer necessary. The convocation for congressional elections had been issued, the new congress once elected would surely be summoned and seated without delay, and the SPE, despite the centralist leanings of its members, had in principle endorsed the establishment of a federal system of government. Alamán described with horror the rumored project of the four provinces to form a single state separate from and independent of the rest of the country, writing that central government forces under the command of Bravo and Negrete had been dispatched to discourage any further military adventurism.

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The stern warnings of minister Alamán notwithstanding, the Celaya junta met, elected a president, and approved the credentials of the men representing the four provinces. They wrote to the SPE justifying the conference due to the delay in issuing the convocatoria for new elections, which had provided “the motive, or served as pretext, for the pronunciamiento” of Antonio López de Santa Anna in San Luis Potosí, some uprisings in the garrisons in Guanajuato, and yet others feared imminent in Valladolid. It was to tamp down these outbreaks that they had decided to meet to formulate a general and uniform policy. After the 10 July meeting the four delegations proposed to recognize the SPE as “the single point of unity” in the country while at the same time expressing their strong sentiment in favor of a federal republic, thus staking out a middle position between Quintanar and Alamán. Agreeing to accept the convocatoria issued by congress despite the document’s flaws, they elevated to high military command of the four provinces’ forces Brigadier Miguel Barragán. In the “remote, but possible, case” that the central government should fall, the four pledged to band together to repel any invasion force from outside. Finally, on 11 July the junta agreed to disband because it would be “ escandaloso [shocking, outrageous] to disobey the government that has ordered it to do so”; but since it had concluded its business anyway, there was nothing to be lost in this bit of theatrical submission.58 Despite the relatively conciliatory tone of this exchange between Alamán and the Celaya junta, it seems quite clear that the respective positions of the central government and profederalist forces had hardened beyond recall. On the day the newly seated constituent congress elected its officers, the SPE issued a printed manifesto describing the condition of the country. It was sent out over the names of the triumvirs Miguel Domínguez, Vicente Guerrero, and Mariano Michelena but was quite probably written by their chief minister. With the fall of Iturbide, the manifesto stated, the Mexican provinces began to pull away from the center, thus abrogating the pact of republican nationhood made after the breakdown of the empire: The Government found itself in a dismasted ship and at the mercy of the waves. With paper but no credit, with employees but no funds [to pay them], with resources, and means finally exhausted, it is a miracle that [the Government] has not yet been shipwrecked. . . . Now, as is hoped, if the proposal of the Government to the Sovereign congress for a [foreign] loan of twenty million [pesos] is approved, What a promising future! We will have the army and navy we need, smuggling will disappear, the public

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treasury will be replenished, our commerce and industries will flourish, and the loan [itself] will become the guarantee of our independence, and the creditors our friends and allies. In a word, we shall be happy. This fortunate condition and the means to achieve it, however, were contingent on maintaining public order and legal forms and on “some provinces not arrogat[ing] to themselves faculties and attributions that the rest do not enjoy. All that is necessary is the sacrifice (if it merits this name) of two months while the future congress gathers, and that once the national assembly is installed we solemnly commit ourselves to respect and obey its decisions.”59 Yet despite these sanguine predictions the country continued beset with unrest well into the fall of 1823. Provinces and their subunits continued to fall like dominoes before the federalist tremors sweeping Mexico almost everywhere but the capital. From among all this political Sturm und Drang I have opted above to devote a good deal of discussion to events in Guadalajara. But federalist self-assertion embraced an enormous and extremely vital segment of the country’s territory and its economy. It also generated an interesting exchange of communications between Lucas Alamán in the capital and Luis Quintanar in the principal city of Nueva Galicia, much of which survives and reveals the political thinking on both sides. But a good deal was going on elsewhere in the country as well.

Oaxaca Under the revived provincial deputation, suppressed in favor of a governing junta and then reinstated in April 1823, the province of Oaxaca had declared itself independent on 1 June 1823. The elected congress of the state was seated on 6 July. During these summer months, then, in the order of priority he seems to have accorded them, Alamán had federalist Guadalajara in front of him, federalist Oaxaca at his back, and Santa Anna over his right shoulder, roiling the waters in and around San Luis Potosí. In a printed circular analyzing the situation, his arguments about undivided sovereignty and the threat of anarchy echo those he was pressing at these very moments upon Luis Quintanar in Nueva Galicia. The tone adopted here, harsher than in some other public declarations by the minister, bespeaks his impatience and also the undeniable power of his prose: It is incontestable that Sovereignty resides in the Nation. But from this principle it does not follow that each section of it may have the faculty of

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altering the constitutive laws recognized by the whole, and to disobey the orders of the legitimately constituted government. . . . How can it not be recognized that in whatever the form of government ultimately adopted, there must be demands common to the entire Nation, as there are common obligations to undertake? . . . Will we not precipitate ourselves into anarchy, and into the most frightening disorder, [if we] attempt to separate from the government at [such] critical moments? It is not to be thought that the provinces [will] attempt to govern themselves in isolation [from each other] and with no center of union until they unite again under the arrangements of federation.60 The sense and purpose of this document are abundantly clear: to warn that dissolution of the national union would bring anarchy upon Mexico, sap the central state’s already weak capacity to fulfill basic public needs, and lay it open to internal subversion, the return of despotism, and possible foreign predation. In its baldest terms, the question Alamán asked of provincial federalists in this exchange and others was, “If we are doing what you want anyway [i.e., moving in the direction of a federal government], what is the basis of your completely renouncing political allegiance to the institutions of the central government, in whose hands the fate of the nation lies?” If there were ever any lingering doubt as to whether Lucas Alamán was a republican at this point in his life, these words should put it to rest. These occurrences initiated a sort of rhetorical duel in political theology that might have produced interesting results had it not been truncated by events. The newly seated congress of the State of Oaxaca conceded in early July that the central government “should not stop existing for even a single day.” On the other hand, the Oaxaca congress’s statement seemed to envision that the government in Mexico City, the “centro de unión,” had become a dimensionless point rather than a hub or circle of authority, thus echoing the opinion of the officials in Guadalajara. Invoking the concept of the general will, the minister in the capital insisted that this resided in the national congress, not in the constituent provinces of the nation, and that in effect abrogating it would produce anarchy and disorder. He further asserted that the Oaxaca state congress could not and would not be recognized by the SPE.61 A printed edict of 28 July by the Congreso del Estado Libre de Oaxaca setting forth the interim bases of its own state charter pending the writing of a national constitution drew no direct response from Alamán. He refused to communicate with any Oaxacan authorities save the jefe político. The minister had thus

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placed himself in the somewhat awkward position of trying to deal with a body he insisted did not exist—and dealing severely, at that. The leaders of the state congress answered in a somewhat more philosophical tone that throws some light on the political theory of what amounted to secession. Whereas the minister invoked the national congress as embodying the general will, the Oaxacans tried to trump it with reference to both natural, that is, inherent, and positive, or man-made, law: “If the wellbeing [salud] of the people is the supreme law, and if natural and positive law authorize men collectively, or individually, in the defense of their physical or political existence, this state [Oaxaca] has in no way betrayed those principles, and even less has it strayed from the path laid out by them.” Yet another powerful motive, the Oaxacans claimed, had forced their hand to action while the national congress dithered over calling new elections: a popular clamor for the clawing back of sovereignty by the state government from the central authority. The error of the central government, the Oaxacans continued, was to construe the state’s position as a rejection of all legitimate central authority, including the SPE, an attitude of which the state, its leaders, and its newly seated congress had never given any evidence. Should the central government move against the state without any attention to the justifications for its actions, the blow to the honor and rights of Oaxaca would criminalize its authorities, subjugating them “with violence, and [acting] contrary to liberal principles.” Oaxaca’s legislature suggested that the charges hurled against it arose from misapprehensions about the motives for embracing federalism, unfounded predictions of disaster, and even a “theatrical fantasy.” Nonetheless, the Oaxaca authorities sought a reasonable compromise, backed by the state’s resolution and resources.62 In his continued stern rejoinders to the breakaway oaxaqueños, Alamán also asserted that the SPE had directed all its actions toward the goal that the provinces “not change by themselves the system that they voluntarily recognized, nor violate the pact contracted between them and the supreme [i.e., central] authorities.”63 Except for his correspondence with the breakaway Oaxacan authorities, nowhere else in his writings in this period have I encountered the idea of a voluntary pact between provinces and central authorities. When he imagined this voluntary pact to have occurred he does not say. It may be that he had in mind a sort of tacit pact arising out of the three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, or even from the putatively unified action of the Mexican regions to overthrow Spanish authority during the independence wars. Or he may have been thinking of some concrete moment of agreement among the constituent parts of New Spain/Mexico, such as the elections for the Span-

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ish Cortes of 1812 or 1820–21, the elevation of Agustín de Iturbide to be emperor, or the election of the first national congress in 1821. While this usage points toward a theory of pacts within polities, it also implies one of secession. So Alamán’s argument in support of the authority of the central government rested not only on the practical matters of avoiding a state of anarchy, preventing internal subversion, defending the country against possible foreign predation, and so forth—on negative grounds, in other words. It also depended on positive grounds—a pact voluntarily undertaken by the provinces whose unilateral abrogation was precluded by the prior cession of sovereignty to the central government. This was the nexus creating a nation out of the Mexican provinces, a sort of corpus misticum for which a contract was presumed to exist, sanctified by a common history. At this point in his political thinking Lucas Alamán seems to have been more concerned with what might be termed the mechanical or legal solidarity of the country than with its affective cohesion. He could give no ground even in response to the vague and coy overture from the Oaxaca legislature offering to “cede part of its rights” for the sake of the nation, since to do so would have undermined his staunch posture of resistance to the radical federalist pretensions of Nueva Galicia and other provinces as well.64 The federalist venture in Oaxaca was approaching implosion despite the legislature’s boast of its defensive capabilities. The province of Tehuantepec, a dependency of Oaxaca, had refused to adhere to the separatist movement, overpowering and expelling the state forces there, whose men were now drifting back to Oaxaca City, and the national-level treasury officials had fled the new state. In late July several other districts followed suit. By the end of July or so the federalist state congress in the city of Oaxaca had been reduced to six of its ostensible fourteen deputies. The fourth of August saw the resignation of the municipal Ayuntamiento in the state capital, leaving the city effectively without a government. Describing what he considered a situation of anarchy in Antequera, an unnamed city official wrote to Alamán at the ministry that a murder had been committed in town on 4 August, but since the municipal alcaldes had renounced their offices and the alleged killer had sought sanctuary in a church, the victim was buried without any further action being taken for the moment. The writer characterized the incident as “a frightening occurrence, which would not be seen [even] in the saddest town anywhere on the globe.”65 There followed the advance of central government forces upon Antequera, the mobilizing of resistance, the avoidance of bloodshed on the field of battle by the negotiations between Antonio de León and the government commander Manuel

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Rincón, and the dénouement in a sort of standoff between the breakaway province, now state, of Oaxaca, and the central government. The immediate outcomes of the political crisis of 1823—the Mexican national constitution of 1824 and the structuring of Mexico as a popular, representative, federal republic—have generally been construed by historians of the period as a victory for federalism and, to some extent, for liberalism. On this interpretation the victory, therefore, must have meant defeat for a centralist vision of the nascent republican state. The forces arrayed against the autonomist impulse of the provinces (soon to be states) were portrayed as an aristocratic, Bourbonist reaction, or of those politicians and military men promoting the restoration of Iturbide’s “humane tyranny,” or advocates of centralism pure and simple. Notwithstanding what I have suggested above in calling a federalist arrangement rather than a unitary nation-state, the default position adopted by much of the political nation at this time, the situation is not quite so clear. On the one hand, a “Mexican nation” was invoked a good deal in the language of provincial politicians; I doubt very much that this was purely empty rhetoric—a fig leaf, in other words, hastily pulled over nefarious separatist intentions. The doctrine that men like Quintanar, León, and many members of the congress were espousing was federalism, after all—a form of state structure that not only implies but ipso facto requires a bond between constituent political entities and a center. What provincial federalist leaders wanted, therefore, was a nation without a center or at best a very weak one charged with coordinating external defense and some other minimal but basic public functions. In other words, they sought a weakened central authority in which sovereignty was not nominal but shared asymmetrically or delegated from the provinces, since a center with claims to dominate the constituent parts had carried over from the colonial government, even though it was soon discredited by the Iturbide regime. That such men seriously contemplated the sort of Balkanization into statelets absolutely autonomous from each other and from an erased center—such as we have seen in our own time, for example, in the case of the former Yugoslavia—or a central authority reduced to a dimensionless point seems out of the question, even though their sharp rhetoric sometimes belied their reservations. The issue in contention was where the fulcrum of balance should lie. What the ontological status of “the nation” was remained vague, and the way it worked out was a matter not only of ideology but also of practical struggle in the political and military arenas. If the federalist chieftains were far from envisioning a total Balkanization of the country, Lucas Alamán was at this point hardly the adamantine central-

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ist that he would later become and that historians have portrayed him as. The evidence of his strong advocacy of a tripartite structure for the Spanish monarchy, the Michelena plan, in the Cortes debates of 1821–22 suggests that he thought federative (or confederative) political arrangements under certain circumstances to be both viable and desirable. While it is true that loosening up the Spanish monarchy in this way in order to keep it intact was not the same thing—in scale, complexity, or historical antecedents—as putting into place a federative structure for the eighteen or twenty states of the young Mexican republic, it did bear a certain resemblance to it. The point here is that Alamán seems to have been predisposed to accommodate the federal arrangement before the circumstances of Iturbide’s fall and the centrifugal crisis of the spring and summer of 1823 imposed it on him, even if he did not think it quite the optimal one. This willingness to do what he could with what he had suggests one of his major characteristics as a statesman—that he was less an ideologue than a practical politician. It may be, in fact, that he had less trouble with a federal structure than with federalism and federalists. In other words, he was not sympathetic either to a theoretical political system—here his Burkean tendencies were emergent—with known but rigid boundaries or toward politicians whom he viewed as using the leverage such a system provided either to promote their own advantage or to further the interests of factions inimical to the realization of a broader vision. To borrow a term from the field of statistics, Alamán preferred a nonparametric centralist system embracing a federal structure, which is what the United States came to have; how robust the powers of the federative entities were to be was a matter of discussion. This brings us back to his fears of anarchy and the forswearing, should his fears of anarchy be realized, of economies of scale in political and economic life that would inevitably result from the fragmentation he saw inherent in the provinces’ disavowal of central authority. The issue was not primarily that of national identity, but of maximization—of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and of what that whole would be enabled to accomplish by the very fact of its unity. From the perspective of the provinces looking in, Alamán’s centralist position as well as that of the SPE he served smacked of the tyranny so recently overthrown. But from his point of view looking out, it was intended to build a bulwark against political disorder, and the waste of material resources and human capital—of potentialities—that such disorder necessarily implied. In fairness, Alamán’s views and actions in favor of a weightier or even dominant, central government were not entirely disinterested or altruistic. The ends he sought to achieve were all more easily attained through the agency of a uni-

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fied nation with a strong central authority than by individual Mexican provincesturned-states or even clusters of them. Among these were a sound national credit, an inflow of foreign capital, a plausible foreign policy—including recognition of Mexican independence by the European powers and the development of a network of alliances among the Spanish American nations—the corraling of popular political forces, and eventually the broadening and deepening of the national market and the rooting of industrialization. Should they be attained, several of these objectives would benefit him directly. For example, the derogation of colonial prohibitions against foreign, that is, nonimperial, investment in mining properties was best achieved, for purposes of uniformity, inclusiveness, and credibility, by a national government. This policy, which was to allow British investment to flood into the Mexican mining sector, was one that deputy Alamán had advocated in the Madrid Cortes, that minister Alamán was to push through during his first turn in the cabinet, and from which the mining entrepreneur Alamán harvested personal profit—or at least hoped to. The same was true a few years later of the Banco de Avío project and the national tariff policy, with much the same unhappy result for its sponsor. On which side of this argument did victory lie? The established wisdom is that Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Zacatecas, and the other self-assertive provinces got their way in the end, with the convocation of the 1823 elections, the backing away of centralist military elements from enforcing the centripetal mandate the SPE thought itself to enjoy, and the federalist constitution of 1824. This certainly looks like a failure of centralist nerve. How the federal system that Lucas Alamán probably had in mind, however, based on a sort of distributed sovereignty with most of that precious substance pooled at the center, would have been worked out was a matter of practical politics rather than ideological prescription. He articulated perhaps his most powerful statement of the unitary nature of sovereignty in dealing with Santa Anna’s abortive attempt in San Luis Potosí to seize control of the federalist movement in the late spring of 1823: “There can be only one power in the nation, and only the supreme government can wield it.” Most likely this statement was not principally a rhetorical gesture on Alamán’s part meant as a slap in the face to Santa Anna and therefore an exaggerated expression of his views to give the slap more sting, although that may have been part of his thinking. The idea of an indivisible sovereignty appears in other writings of his of the time. What he may have meant is that sovereignty inhered in the national legislature within a republican framework and that therefore if the provinces/states were to exercise any part of it there had to be a sort of regranting of it from the national congress

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outward. There is some irony in his insistence in 1823 on the primacy of the legislative power, however, since a decade later his analysis of the failure of the 1824 Constitution was to place the blame not only on Mexico’s lack of experience with such institutions but also on the failure of this charter, with its hypertrophied legislative branch, to achieve a balance among the powers of government.66 He was to restate this position strongly in the closing passages of his Historia de Méjico three decades later. Alamán may also have calculated that the apparent concessions to the federalist project by the SPE would turn out to be a sort of Trojan horse from which reconstituted central power would later emerge. The ardent tribunes of federalism may actually have been less willing than they appeared to Balkanize the country, which would have been the logical endgame for them. They were not bluffing, exactly, but neither were they looking ahead sufficiently to work out the consequences of their position. Centralists, on the other hand, particularly Lucas Alamán, were more ambivalent about the federalist project and less opposed to it on grounds of principle than on process. Seen in this light, the supposed victory of federalism appears less a victory than a compromise between the contending parties. This was a tug-of-war, in other words, in which no one ended up in the mud— or perhaps everyone did.

7 • Domestic Tranquility

Out of the Public Spotlight: Family Life At the age of thirty Lucas Alamán was not only a highly prominent public figure but also a private citizen and a very private man. Despite the scarcity of evidence concerning his domestic life and his daily routine, one can speculate by drawing on what is known of his personal life and extrapolating from the descriptions of elite capitalino families of writers, travelers, and a few memoirists, among them Fanny Calderón de la Barca, Guillermo Prieto, H. G. Ward, and others. A bit easier but still difficult to track are Alamán’s friendships. The major entrepreneurial projects in which he was involved as a private citizen, on the other hand, are relatively well documented, mostly because they were less than successful, and we get strong hints of his personality in those documents. By all accounts Lucas Alamán was happily married, and happily played the role of paterfamilias in the very large family of which he was the sole breadwinner. As to his relationship with his wife, one gets the impression of great uxoriousness on his part and of a quiet, orderly domestic life. Nothing is known of conflicts that may have arisen between Alamán and Narcisa Castrillo or within the large family. This was certainly no mariage blanc, however, since the first little Alamán Castrillo came along almost exactly nine months after the wedding, and he and his wife went on to have ten more children together. He must have enjoyed some of the pleasures of the urban elite of his time, among them days in the country with his family, possibly at the Hacienda de Atlacomulco but probably nearer to the city at the homes of friends and relatives, or even on rare occasions at his estate near Celaya. He probably joined family and friends for the occasional afternoon tertulia, with its typical sociability over gossip and hot

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chocolate. Almost certainly he went to the theater, where one imagines that his taste ran to classic drama and opera seria, while his wife’s may have tended toward lighter fare. The couple certainly went on drives in the Alameda, and he enjoyed the society of his mother and elder brother, spent calm moments reading works from his large personal library, and so forth. He was often out of the capital city on business, although the method of his travel is unknown—he considered himself a mediocre horseman at best, so it’s probable he journeyed by coach of some sort. Of the country house on his Celaya hacienda we have no inkling but can suppose it to have been more than respectable. Together with his wife he maintained a large domestic establishment in the capital that would have included a number of servants. José Valadés described Lucas Alamán’s lifestyle in the mid-1820s as that of “un gran señor” in his house at Bajos de San Agustín no. 3 (it had reputedly belonged to the Conde de Santiago Calimaya), in Sagrario parish, which the young couple occupied immediately following their marriage.1 The smooth functioning of this household near the center of the city and also of the one in which his family lived for years on the Ribera de San Cosme would have been in the charge of doña Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán. Some descriptions of their domestic life indicate that she kept the household running in a very orderly and tranquil fashion— not only because that is the way elite homes were managed but also because of her husband’s particular distaste for disorder—although at any given time there were undoubtedly several of the couple’s children running about. These little ones, giggling and shouting, were unlikely to have invaded their father’s study and been swept up affectionately and indulgently into his arms, however. He stood at his writing desk—Guillermo Prieto described Alamán as working this way—transacting government business, seeing to his affairs, or composing his historical works. It takes no stretch of the imagination to envisage the couple attending Mass with great regularity, trailed by those of their brood who had reached an age at which they could take the sacraments, while the younger ones remained at home in the care of a governess. On the whole the Alamán-Castrillo household and the family life that filled it almost certainly ran like a well-oiled machine, a model of haut bourgeois decorum, piety, and prosperity. The best-known portrait of Alamán reflects this, a retouched daguerreotype done in the 1840s. The great statesman-historian looks out at the viewer with a serious, even somber, expression. It is the face of a middleaged man that might almost be considered handsome were it not for the turned-down corners of his mouth—not in a scowl, exactly, but an expression of determination—his spectacles, and the right hand thrust into his coat in the

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Napoleonic fashion so typical of male portraits of the age. Still, if one looks at the image for a while, it is possible to detect the faintest of sub-Gioconda-like smiles on his face. Of María Narcisa Castrillo Portú de Alamán we know unfortunately very little. Born in 1804, she was nineteen years old when she married and thus a dozen years younger than her husband, an age gap by no means uncommon for the time, especially among elite couples. She was the eldest of five children, one of whom had died at a young age, so her three younger siblings may well have attended her wedding to the youngish, now-famous politician. Other considerations aside, this would in the future prove to be a good marriage for her from a financial standpoint since the couple’s wealth at its peak amounted to at least two hundred thousand pesos. In 1823, however, their resources were not very obvious. Even though the Castrillo family fortunes had been diminished by the 1810–21 insurgency, Narcisa brought a substantial dowry into the marriage, consisting of the total amount she expected to inherit from her parents together, adding up to something over seventy-two thousand pesos, more than twice her husband’s declared net worth of thirty thousand pesos. He enjoyed a ministerial salary of six thousand pesos per year, but in 1823 had yet to purchase his hacienda in the Celaya area. Nor had he begun to receive a yearly retainer or commissions for handling the properties of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone or any income from the mining ventures in which he was managing very large infusions of British capital. Whether the house at no. 3 Bajos de San Agustín was rented by the couple, recently purchased, or inherited I do not know. If the building was arranged like other large houses in the center of the city, the family’s quarters would have occupied the second floor and businesses the street floor, probably retail stores of some kind leased out by the owner of the house and thus providing a modest stream of cash income. There would have been a large portal with massive, more or less elaborate double wooden doors through which carriages and mounted horsemen might enter, an internal courtyard/patio, possibly with a stone fountain, and somewhere toward the back a stable for horses and perhaps other outbuildings. The family later occupied a house on the Calle de San Francisco, in the same area, and some of their final years were spent in a spacious residence west of the city center, on the Ribera de San Cosme. Narcisa and Lucas were married in the chapel of the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán on 31 July 1823, about three and a half months after he assumed his ministerial post. Given the groom’s heavy official responsibilities at that moment it was logical that the ceremony be held in the capital, which would have

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necessitated travel on the part of some guests. The venue is most likely explained by the fact that Juan Bautista Arechederreta had only recently stepped down as rector of the institution to take up his canonry in the cathedral chapter and probably still retained considerable influence at the school due to the old association and the new, highly visible post. Alamán’s mother and Narcisa’s parents were all still living, she in Mexico City, they possibly in Guanajuato. Lucas’s elder sister María de la Luz Alamán Escalada (b. 1782), who had married at the age of twenty and had several children, was now widowed and also probably still living, although I have been unable to verify the date of her death. His paternal uncle Tomás, as of 1805 a remarried widower seeking to produce a second family and who would sire a total of ten children from his two unions, would likely have been there, and there were also a good number of Castrillo and Alamán cousins. Whether any of Lucas Alamán’s ministerial colleagues or political friends and associates attended there is no way of knowing, but I am inclined to think this unlikely. At most there may have been a small, select group given that in the coming years he went to some lengths to maintain a separation between his family life and his public life. Carlos María de Bustamante, the chatty diarist to whom we owe much knowledge of Mexico City and national political life during the years 1822–48, and who became Alamán’s sometime friend and political ally, remarked of the union, “Feliz él!” (Happy is he). Whether he was praising the charms of Narcisa Castrillo or the married state in general we do not know.2 Narcisa Castrillo and Lucas Alamán had eleven live-born children over the course of their marriage. Doña Narcisa had at least one miscarriage, and there may well have been others—given her fertility, in fact, it would be surprising had there not been—but I have encountered no record of them. We do not have an account of Narcisa Castrillo’s obstetric travails, if any, the only references being in her husband’s letters. The birth of the couple’s first son, Gil, in the fall of 1825, saw his mother suffering from dysentery, but she recovered relatively quickly. Less lucky at the time, as the same illness assumed epidemic proportions, were many other inhabitants of the capital. Lucas Alamán wrote to his friend Migoni in London, “This illness has sent to the grave during the last three months a number of people, especially young people, among them one of my nephews, 21 years old, who died on the thirtieth of last month [i.e., 30 August 1825].”3 The first child, Catalina Alamán Castrillo, came into the world on 29 April 1824 and was baptized in the parish of San Miguel Arcángel the following day. Born almost nine months to the day after her parents’ marriage, she spent her life as a nun and was to be one of the longer lived of the Alamán

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children, dying in 1892, at the age of sixty-six. That the married pair had been sexually active together before their wedding seems almost inconceivable (readers will forgive the pun), so one supposes they were just lucky to have a first child so quickly. Theirs was a fecund union, certainly. With one exception the children who survived into adulthood were not a particularly long-lived group, even taking into account the relatively modest life spans of the middle and later nineteenth century and even though they all enjoyed a reasonably elevated social status.4 The two eldest sons, Gil and Juan Ignacio, otherwise known as Juan Bautista, were born in 1825 and 1826, respectively, and enjoyed successful careers, Gil as a parish priest and Juan Ignacio, who lived well past 1900, as an attorney. Since children loom so large in the life of any couple, biographically and affectively speaking, and since there are some interesting aspects to the lives of the Alamán-Castrillo offspring, including marriages among cousins and linkages with famous historical figures, the little that can be documented about them warrants some attention (see table 7.1). As each of his children was born, Alamán had their baptismal entries from the parish register printed on rich silken cloths festooned with braids and tassels made from gold and silver thread, as was then the custom in Mexico among the moneyed classes. The texts of two anonymous sonnets dedicated late in 1826 to Lucas and Narcisa early in their marriage, as their family was growing, are given by Valadés. Apparently they were meant to evoke in poetry the domestic pleasures the pair enjoyed.5 The first two stanzas of the sonnet dedicated to Lucas Alamán read as follows: Fix your eyes for a moment, Lucas, On those two volcanoes to the east Snow-covered their broad sides Which the sun dresses in pearls and diamonds In our time, not long since They were mountains of fire so hot That their flames even heated the heavens And turned to ashes the poor traveler And those dedicated to Narcisa Castrillo: If you enjoy the wellbeing of a tender spouse Whose joy is embodied in pleasing you

Table 7.1: Children of the Lucas Alamán–Narcisa Castrillo marriage Name

Date of Birth

Date of Death

Marriage/Children

Comment

Catalina Gil Juan Ignacio

29 April 1824 10 September 1825 9 December 1826

29 January 1892 2 May 1882 after 1900

unmarried unmarried married to María Josefa Vidaurrázaga Castrillo, 7 children

nun parish priest lawyer

Antonia Pedro Justino (1) Lucas Pascual

17 January 1829 1 August 1830 26 September 1831 13 September 1837 17 May 1839

24 September 1829 1834 1849 1839 9 January 1893

Justino (2) Sebastián

25 September 1849 20 January 1845

unknown 20 July 1905

Carlos

unknown*

5 June 1854

unmarried married to Rita Guerrero Meza [children: unknown] unknown married to María Encarnación Vidaurrázaga Castrillo, 7 children unknown

died at 8 months died at 4 years died at 18 years died at 2 years

lawyer ministry clerk

*I have not found the birth date of Carlos Alamán, whom his father, in his 1850 testament, refers to as living. An exchange of letters on 5 June 1854 between Juan Bautista Alamán and Manuel Diez de Bonilla sheds some light on Carlos’s fate. Juan Bautista informed Bonilla that Carlos had died of cholera at 11:30 a.m. on 5 June 1854, having held the post of escribiente primero (senior clerk) in the American section in the foreign relations ministry. This was a respectable position but hardly more than that. According to Bonilla, Carlos “knew how to gain special esteem for his knowledge, hard work, and excellent behavior, arising from the principles and distinguished education he had received.” President Santa Anna ordered that Carlos Alamán be interred in the chapel of the Hospital de Jesús, where his father’s remains were. On 1 August Bonilla named Ángel Lerdo de Tejada (1828–90), one of the Lerdo de Tejada brothers, to the clerkship vacated as a result of Carlos Alamán’s death; Manuel Diez de Bonilla to Ministro de Gobernación, 5 June 1854, SRE-LE, 742-78v; Bonilla to Juan Bautista Alamán, 5 June 1854, ibid., 79r-84r, 1 August 1854.

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If in every action he shows that he loves you In that is constituted your repose What desire more laudable and loving Can you long for, other than to see yourself Glorying in a union that not even death Can take from you a pleasure so loving? It is actually rather difficult to make out what the elaborate trope of the volcano in Alamán’s case was meant to convey as opposed to the simpler, more conventional images in his wife’s. Perhaps masculine power, although a volcano would be an odd phallic image, or the risky geography of politics, and the modest contentments of the domestic sphere, respectively? The joys of family life notwithstanding, neither Lucas Alamán’s children nor their children ever achieved the public renown of their father or grandsire. Father Gil enjoyed some success as a clergyman. Juan Bautista carried on his law practice—it is sometimes assumed that his father was a trained attorney, but he was not—working with his father on the affairs of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone as a young man, taking over these duties after the elder Alamán’s death and seeing them through into the early twentieth century. Given that two of the eleven children pursued careers in the Church, that at least four died in infancy, childhood, or very young adulthood, and that we know nothing of another, the second Justino, there were perhaps fewer grandchildren than might have been expected of such a fecund union as Lucas’s and Narcisa’s. Among the pair’s fourteen grandchildren infant and child mortality seems to have declined considerably during the late nineteenth century, reflecting the improved public hygiene conditions of the Porfirian period, improvements from which even elite families benefited. Infant mortality still continued high, though, since two of Juan Ignacio’s four children died in infancy, and two of his younger brother Sebastián’s seven children died very young. The repetition of given names within and across generations was relatively frequent. Among Lucas Alamán’s own progeny there was a Lucas, who died in 1839 at the age of two, and two Justinos. Among the grandchildren of Narcisa and Lucas there were a María de la Luz, named for Lucas Alamán’s sister; a Lucas, a Sebastián, a Narcisa, and a Gil. Also notable were the marriages of Lucas Alamán’s sons Juan Ignacio and Sebastián, nearly two decades apart in age, to children of their mother’s sister, that is, to first cousins.

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While there is no specific evidence that the Alamán-Castrillo children or grandchildren came to violent ends, one death did occur unnaturally, under peculiar circumstances. One of Juan Ignacio’s sons (and therefore the elder Lucas Alamán’s grandson and namesake), Lucas Alamán Vidaurrázaga, born in 1871, died in a hunting accident on Saturday, 6 February 1909, in the prime of his life. In the press coverage of the incident he was referred to as belonging to “the principal social circles [of the capital],” as a member of a distinguished family, grandson of the historian Lucas Alamán—the headline read “El Nieto del Gran Historiador Alamán muerto en una Cacería”—as the wealthy (acaudalado) owner of the Hacienda Xhijay or Xalay straddling the states of Querétaro and Hidalgo, and as related with “our aristocracy.” Among these aristocratic connections (aristocratic in the widest nontechnical sense) was the then ambassador to the United States, Francisco León de la Barra, described as his host’s concuñado, that is, in this case the spouse of Alamán Vidaurrázaga’s sister-in-law. An ardent aficionado of hunting, don Lucas had invited a small party of friends to go deer hunting with him on his property.6 After traveling from the capital to the hacienda on the Ferrocarril Nacional the party enjoyed a lavish meal at the estate, “attended splendidly by the [estate] staff [servidumbre].” The guests then split up into groups, Alamán accompanied only by his young servant, a ten-year-old boy named Villafuente. The shotgun being carried by the boy, the only witness to the hacendado’s death, accidentally discharged, Alamán taking the full blast to the area of his liver. In the short time it took the guests to run to the scene, their host had already died. An autopsy and an inquest were conducted in Mexico City, and the final judicial verdict would presumably have been something like the modern “death by misadventure.” Lucas Alamán’s grandson left behind a grieving widow, Refugio Borneque Schneider (1876–1953), and three children. The widow seems not to have grieved for long, however, since on 11 February 1911, almost exactly a discreet two years after her husband’s death, she married Francisco León de la Barra, then still serving as Mexico’s ambassador to the United States and shortly to serve as interim president of Mexico between the fall of Porfirio Díaz and the installation of Francisco Madero. Doña Refugio was the sister of León de la Barra’s deceased first wife, María Elena.7

The Minister Buys an Hacienda Whether in the government or out of it Lucas Alamán was never bashful about pursuing his business interests. During the early and mid-1820s he had

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additional reasons to look to his investments and other income-producing possibilities as little Alamán-Castrillos started arriving in the world. Catalina was born in 1824, her brother Gil the next year, and by the spring of 1826 Juan Ignacio was on the way, arriving in December. Narcisa was only twenty-two at this point, and whatever his more deeply submerged concerns about the issue of regaining the social status that had ebbed along with the Busto-Alamán mining wealth, extrapolating from the couple’s current rate of reproduction Lucas Alamán must have realized that short of declaring the conjugal bed offlimits he needed to provide for a family likely to grow considerably in the years ahead. Even were he to remain in the most elevated reaches of government service—highly unlikely given the typically short turnaround time in the tenure of cabinet-level posts—his salary would be inadequate to support his household in the aristocratic style to which he aspired and had probably already adopted. The wealth to be reaped from silver mining undergirded by British capital investment was one solution and would take time to materialize, but it never did so to the extent he hoped. His annual retainer and other emoluments from his position as Terranova y Monteleone’s factotum helped a bit but were only just beginning to contribute to his income. At this time he took his first steps in the textile industry, investing much of the money he received from the sale of his parents’ home in Guanajuato in a woolen textile installation in nearby Celaya. Not only these interests in Celaya but also the management of the mines in Guanajuato kept him traveling back and forth constantly between the capital and the silver city. He would have passed through Celaya going in both directions, so he would have become aware of the availability on the market of the Hacienda de Trojes in the area.8 In a sale registered in Celaya on 9 September 1826, Alamán bought the Hacienda de Trojes from the heirs of Colonel José María Fernández and María Inés Fernández, who in turn had inherited it from Colonel Manuel Fernández Solano. The purchase price was a substantial 55,000 pesos, of which Alamán put down 5,500 pesos in cash—realized in part from the sale of his natal home in Guanajuato—agreeing to pay an additional 7,287 pesos within six months, and within five years the balance of whatever equity value the sellers retained of the remaining 42,213 pesos of the purchase. Such properties were typically burdened with debt, sometimes heavily, from Church loans or liens made in favor of ecclesiastical institutions, for which the purchaser assumed the obligation of the principal and the debt service. In this way rural estates of substantial size and value might change hands for relatively little liquid cash, since the loans were generally considered to be perpetual and the equity por-

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tion of the hacienda’s value to be bought out by the buyer relatively small. What is clear from a mortgage arrangement he had notarized in 1828 is that he exercised the power of attorney of his elder sister María de la Luz, forty-six years old and by now the widow of Colonel Manuel de Yturbe, and that the hacienda and its attached properties had been purchased “by virtue of the partnership [compañía] that he manages for both.” Also figuring centrally in this rather complex transaction was a two-story house in Guanajuato valued at 16,000 pesos, which Lucas and María de la Luz inherited jointly from their parents, Juan Vicente Alamán and Ignacia de Escalada. Possibly he wanted to reduce the debt service on the hacienda in order to take more profit out of the property or perhaps to reduce the debt load so that he could borrow more for its development.9 How much total mortgage debt Lucas Alamán and his sister took on with this purchase of the Hacienda de Trojes—payable to the sellers and/or recognized already to be charged on the property from previous debts or liens—we do not know, but it may have been large. His later financial woes with the estate may have resulted from his inability to service the original debt or from additional debt he took on while he owned the property. He immediately bought the Hacienda de Juan Martín and the Rancho de San Lorenzo, smaller properties presumably both adjacent to Trojes. The lands of all three properties together comprised about eleven thousand acres, a reasonable size for a heavily cultivated, fertile area like the Bajío and the Valley of Mexico, where land values were high but the estates were quite small compared to haciendas in the more northerly areas of the country. About 22 percent of the acreage was devoted to irrigated or irrigable land, which would have been planted to cereal crops; about 15 percent to rainfall-dependent cereal lands farmed as demesne, with another 10 percent rented out; about 20 percent in grazing land; and 33 percent in hilly land (terreno cerril). Describing Alamán’s experience with the Hacienda de Trojes and its adjunct lands, Valadés writes that when the ex-minister purchased the principal property it was in a state of virtual abandonment because of damages wrought by the insurgency of 1810–21: its buildings were deteriorated, the irrigation works a shambles, livestock of all kinds and even agricultural tools totally absent. The new owner lived in Celaya for months at a time after his purchase, investing large sums to recover and even increase the productivity of Trojes. He planted olive trees, grape vines, fruit trees like quinces, apricots, chirimoyas, pomegranates, figs, and peaches; experimented with mulberry trees to produce silkworms; produced olive and linseed oil, vinegar, and wine made

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from quinces; cultivated alfalfa and wheat; and rebuilt herds of cattle, horses, and sheep while adding burros and goats to the livestock. This all suggests a highly commercialized property linked to the markets of Mexico City and Guanajuato. Alamán later commented that land values in the Bajío had risen precipitously after the mid-eighteenth century as nearby urban and mining markets presented rapidly rising demand. Despite the attention and investment he lavished on the hacienda, however, he had certainly sold it off by the end of the 1840s, since it does not appear in his testament of 1850. The sale probably resulted from the unprofitability of Trojes itself and/or Alamán’s inability to service the burden of debt on the estate, combined with the need to realize funds to deal with liabilities arising from the collapse of the Cocolapan textile factory in the early 1840s. He enjoyed much more success managing the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone’s sugar hacienda in Cuernavaca than in efforts on his own behalf. Many years later he claimed that the hacienda was “the cause of all my [financial] setbacks.” But in the fall of 1826, almost exactly a year after he left the government, the estate must have seemed a highly attractive and promising investment. Between these two points in time, in 1831, he was still hopeful if guarded; his brief correspondence about the issue with Francisco Borja Migoni in London sheds some light on his experience in this regard. In response to a passing remark of Alamán’s in the summer of 1831 that he was going to spend some time on his Celaya hacienda—Alamán never mentions taking his family with him on these trips—Migoni queried his friend regarding the price of a rural estate like his and its projected level of profitability. Alamán answered his question about the profitability of haciendas by citing the variations in soils and other variables, concluding, “Up to now, not only have my haciendas yielded me nothing, but I have invested much money in them, [given] that I have had to supply [them] with everything, since everything was lacking. This year they will begin to produce something, which I think will not be less than ten percent [on investment].”10 His personal involvement in the agricultural sector suffered much the same fate as his adventures with British capital in the mining industry and his direct entry into textile production, thus completing a trifecta of entrepreneurial failures and disappointed hopes for any accumulation of wealth. Family events continued to run their course. Lucas Alamán’s mother, María Ignacia Escalada Madroñero, died on 10 December 1824 of a “terrible pneumonia” at the relatively advanced age of seventy-three.11 By this time she had seen her second son married and had met the first of her grandchildren,

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the infant Catalina. She lived to see Lucas not only launched on a public career but also occupying one of the highest offices in the young republic, and her elder son attaining great success as a churchman. His mother’s death must have affected Lucas Alamán deeply, since one has the impression that he was very close to her. Lucas Alamán’s and Narcisa Castrillo’s first son, Gil, was born on 10 September 1825. Alamán wrote to his friend Migoni in London that the delivery had been an easy one, but that Narcisa was struck with a serious case of dysentery immediately thereafter (this could not have been fun for a woman recovering from childbirth). And as he was to do all his life, Lucas Alamán continued to buy high-end goods from Europe: books, scientific instruments, mechanical devices. Sometime in late 1825 he received on the English ship Hottentot a chiming pocket watch of gold manufactured by Barwise of London, “watchmaker to the king,” at a price, exclusive of shipping and insurance, of fifty-seven pounds, about three hundred pesos, the equivalent of the annual salary of a white-collar clerk or minor bureaucrat in the capital.12

Preserving the National Memory As a statesman, Lucas Alamán made mistakes, bad decisions, and on occasion even acted in ways some would describe as sinister. As an entrepreneur he proved pretty much a failure in most of his ventures and cut some corners in his economic dealings with a few people. His promotion of science, however, and his efforts to maintain and organize the material remains of the nation’s past are areas of his public and intellectual life that stand virtually unblemished. His prodigious intelligence, acknowledged even by his political enemies, and his avowing of interests both broad and deep, led him to be strongly predisposed to take more than a casual interest in the sciences of his day. These included geology because of its connection to the mining industry and also chemistry, botany, and other fields. His scientific studies in Europe during his extended travels there as a youth as well as his lifelong friendship with Alexander von Humboldt and other Continental scholars of distinction such as the Swiss botanist Augustin de Candolle laid a solid foundation for his continuing interest in the sciences of the time. He was something of a polymath in an age when an educated man could still know a good deal about many subjects without specializing in any one of them. Alamán’s efforts in preserving and exploring the historical memory of the nation might well have grown out of his political activities even had his obvious deep concern with his family’s past not driven him into Clio’s embrace. The first concrete manifestation of this

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sensibility was the official establishment of the Archivo General y Público de la Nación on 23 August 1823, commemorated today as the Archivo General de la Nación by a prominently displayed stone plaque visible to anyone using the archive. Certainly the founding of the repository responded to the practical administrative needs of his ministry and the other organs of national governance and to the need to overhaul the antiquated system of the viceregal secretariat. But Alamán was also doing his future historian-self a great service given that he was to ransack the national archive for his historical works, especially his Historia de Méjico. But in the beginning were the garden and museum. In early June 1823 the congressional deputy José María de Bustamante (not to be confused with the historian Carlos) received a note via Alamán’s ministry from the SPE expressing a desire to give every possible support to the development of “science and useful knowledge” in the country. The triumvirs had therefore decreed the collection for a national museum of “Mexican antiquities already gathered, and [also] the observations of [those foreigners] who have traveled the Americas.” Bustamante had in his possession many such materials, including objects, sketches, and field notes, collected by one Mr. Dupée; these he was asked to place at the disposal of the ministry, which he did immediately.13 Two days later minister Alamán asked Vicente Cervantes, professor of botany at the university and director of the capital’s botanical garden, if there were any nearby buildings that might serve as a museum suitable for the deposit of the “curiosities” from Dupaix’s and other collections.14 There followed a long, detailed correspondence between Alamán and Cervantes evaluating the feasibility of locating the planned museum and expanded botanical garden in various places in the center of the city.15 The botanical garden had been established by royal edict in the early 1780s as part of a major botanical expedition to New Spain sponsored and funded by the Spanish crown.16 Officially inaugurated in 1789, it was directed for many years by Cervantes, the Spanish-trained botanist who made his career and home in Mexico. Bedeviled during its initial phases by problems of swampiness at the huge site chosen for it in the middle of Mexico City, the Royal Botanical Garden eventually came to occupy two separate but complementary locations: one in the interior patios of the viceregal (later the national) palace on the Zócalo, the other on the hill of Chapultepec, where the castle that today dominates the Parque de Chapultepec, begun in the late eighteenth century, was still an unfinished construction. The garden’s fortunes waxed and waned, but the initial steps after independence to resuscitate it and combine it with a

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museum of antiquities were undertaken by minister Alamán. In his report to congress of late November 1823 the minister made the case that the botanical garden had suffered terrible neglect in recent years and was now barely adequate to support instruction in the most basic rudiments of this “beautiful and useful science.”17 In his report he proposed to congress that the decommissioned Hospital de Naturales, or General Indian Hospital, be repurposed for a national museum and some installations of the university’s school of medicine, that the attached cemetery be devoted to the Jardín Botánico, and that another plot serve the botanical garden as well as a place for the enjoyment of the general public. But like so many other projects aimed at the betterment of Mexican society in this era, the museum–botanical garden fell victim to the fiscal weakness of the central state, and the grandiose plans stalled. Cervantes was finding it impossible to comply with the simplest requests of Alamán’s ministry, as when the minister asked that he send some seeds and other plant samples to England, presumably for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. The tone of the sections in Alamán’s memoria dealing with the museum, botanical garden, and archive is the most elaborate and enthusiastic of the entire long document, hinting strongly as to where the minister’s personal and intellectual sympathies lay. The foundation of the archivo was already a fait accompli when Alamán presented it to the congress. In the viceregal secretariat “the heaping of the files [expedientes] in confusion, with no division into sections nor any indexes to their contents, has made it necessary to begin [the work of organization] and to extend it not only to the archive of that secretariat, but also to those of the sections for war and government, with the object of forming a well-arranged general archive where the public can find with ease and promptness the documents it requires.”18 Viceroy Iturrigaray had initiated a reevaluation of the viceregal secretariat’s organization in 1803 under one of the senior clerks, but the effort bogged down with the advent of the permanent political crisis through which New Spain passed beginning in 1808. There were practical reasons for undertaking this organizational effort. Although the minister had about six months to write his first memoria before he delivered it in November 1823, a great deal of preparatory work was required. Documents were constantly going astray: they were not filed properly even under the rather loose criteria prevailing at the time, or had drifted into private hands or to other ministries, or were simply not to be found at all. The ad hoc nature of paper management continued even while the Archivo General itself was being set up. At the end of 1823, for example, a group of native people

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from the town of San Miguel el Grande asked the minister to locate some papers related to litigation over the title to certain lands in which they were engaged with the Spanish vecinos of the town. Alamán referred the request to the archivist of his office, only to be told that the documents could not be located anywhere.19 Clearly, action to resolve such problems was called for, so minister Alamán reassigned some of his own staff to the project while asking for the transfer of personnel from other departments. The minister wanted not only to have a functioning bureaucratic archive at his own disposal and that of other high officials as well as the public but also to conserve important elements of the nation’s past. Here his ideas of an archive merged a bit messily with the museum–botanical garden project and even spilled over into the area of a broader public enlightenment. Alamán wrote in his Memoria (ministerial report) that “precious testimonies of Mexican antiquities”—primarily consisting of rare texts, travelers’ accounts, and so forth, gathered “due in great measure to the enlightenment of the celebrated traveler Boturini”—be combed out of the archives and collected in a separate department.20 Alamán even proposed regional or local museums of antiquities, an idea never to be realized in his time.

“No One Would Be Secure”: The Pursuit of Domestic Tranquility Overseeing the daily operations of the Mexican government and responding to crises as they arose often took precedence over projects that would only unfold completely over time, such as the archive, the museum, and the botanical gardens. This was a critical moment in the new nation’s history, when recognition of its nationhood by European powers needed to be pressed in foreign capitals, loans secured for the operation of the impecunious government, Spain’s final exit from Mexican soil engineered, the country’s relationship to the area of Central America resolved, and the territorial ambitions of an increasingly powerful northern neighbor kept at bay. All these goals may be gathered under the broad rubric of imposing order on Mexico, as Lucas Alamán understood the concept. Whether the country was really teetering on the edge of entropic doom, as Alamán seemed to think in continually invoking the specter of anarchy, is a matter of interpretation. The first item of business in the imposition of order was internal security; without some semblance of public tranquility nothing else could be accomplished. In practice, however, a strong state posture in this regard often amounted to a sort of Kabuki theater

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that expressed the necessity of offering pardons, extending terms, and arriving at accommodation with dissenters and rebels, at least until after the revolutionary settlement of the 1920s. The concern to keep the highways safe for travelers and commerce and to maintain a basic level of calm in the countryside, was hardly unique to Lucas Alamán. The drive to create and maintain public order reflected his ideas about exerting control over the military, insuring the sanctity of private property, and keeping the lower orders in their place. He would also have thought of robust police measures, large-scale information gathering, spying, and other technologies of state power not only as contributing to internal security within the country but also as instilling the larger principle of the rule of law—in other words, order through purposive government action undergirded by the delegation of sovereignty from citizens to central power. This maps very well onto his lifelong belief in the virtues of centralized state institutions. That Mexico had barely thrown off the yoke of centralized colonial control two years before he entered the government and had repudiated a failed domestic monarchical experiment scarcely a month before in large measure accounts for the fact that he was seen as a reactionary and a Bourbonist and his ideas so retrograde, both in his own time and since. If any national political actor in the early republican period saw “like a state” in James C. Scott’s evocative phrase, however, it was Lucas Alamán.21 While political tempers cooled during the late summer and fall of 1823, episodic disturbances in the provinces continued. Santa Anna was out of the picture temporarily. The declaration by the reseated national congress favoring a federalist arrangement of the country had cleared the political horizon somewhat, and Alamán repeatedly assured restive provincial chieftains that a convocation for new elections was right around the corner. Minister Alamán’s expectations were excessively sanguine by a long shot, however, in assuming that new elections would obviate most of the difficulties when the convocatoria for new elections was finally published on 17 June 1823. His invocation of “the federation, that beautiful invention of modern politics” was prefaced in the printed circular with a summary of the salutary effects Alamán and the SPE foresaw resulting from elections, among them the expression of “the general will” in any constitution to be written.22 Nor did the rules under the new federal constitution for the election of the first congreso ordinario, the procedures for the presidential election of 1824 and those for the election of Supremo Tribunal judges and other officials, or the numerous decrees issued for the organization of the legislative branch placate dissident spirits outside the capital city.

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While Lucas Alamán was dealing with the large matters of public security and asserting the authority of the central government, the manifold life of the great capital eddied about him, some of it criminal in nature. Monthly criminal reports from the overlapping authorities in Mexico City flowed across his desk with regularity. The month of August 1823 is quite representative. In the early morning hours of Friday, 1 August, a suspicious man carrying a large wrapped object was detained on the Calle de Vizcainas near the center of the city; later it was discovered that a house on the same block had been broken into, so he was taken to jail on suspicion of burglary. A woman had been beaten up by a man, resulting in the arrest of both. The following night five drunken individuals, three of them women, were hauled off to jail. Robberies, burglaries, fights, unruly and abusive soldiers, transvestites, stolen livestock, military deserters, murderers, madmen, and couples cohabiting adulterously thronged these reports. On Wednesday the twenty-seventh a soldier stumbled into an ice cream parlor on the Calle de la Cadena, near minister Alamán’s house, with a knife wound in his stomach inflicted by an unknown assailant; last rites were administered to him on the spot. And so it went, night after night, month after month. Security problems of a much higher order occupied minister Alamán’s attention for the two and a half years he occupied the post. Reports came in regularly from the provinces/states of movimientos revolucionarios, often conflated with banditry, either in reality or in the perception of officials, as in San Antonio de Béjar (Texas) and San Martín Tesmelucan (Puebla) in July and September 1823, respectively. In September Alamán received detailed news of disturbances in Querétaro from the jefe político Antonio Gama. The situation had grown out of a drunken encounter between soldiers and civilians, but there was no evidence of “any faction bent on attacking order and the system [of government].” Minister Alamán tersely ordered that such groups be pursued militarily “without pause until [their] complete extermination.” Nor was the landscape free of conspirators and spies. From Querétaro, again, came charges from Gama of subversive, pro-iturbidista activities by the lawyer and former congressional deputy Ramón Martínez de los Ríos, whom Alamán ordered watched carefully and eventually arrested. Spies for foreign powers (or at least suspicions of such) also showed up from time to time. The minister informed the Jalisco governor Prisciliano Sánchez in the fall of 1824 that a certain French physician named Fessel had arrived in Guadalajara. He urged that Fessel be watched carefully since “all the individuals of that nation should be justly suspicious to us while she [France] does not recognize our independence”; recognition would come in 1830.23

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The partial surviving records of the SPE’s deliberations for the May 1823 through July 1824 period, for most of which Alamán was in the cabinet, are full of allusions to civil disturbances, subversion, and political conspiracies. Although he was deeply preoccupied with the problem of imposing order on Mexican society by almost any means possible, he himself was not above attempting to circumvent the rules, as when he embroiled himself in a monarchist conspiracy in the 1840s. Why conspiracies should have loomed so large in Mexican political culture of the time is a complex problem, with no single convincing answer. To suggest that early republican political instability in itself inspired conspiracy is to beg the question, but there was observably a circular relationship in which instability bred repression, repression conspiracy, and conspiracy further instability. A major nutrient for the growth of a conspiratorial tradition was the legitimacy vacuum produced when Mexico came out from under the umbrella of the Spanish monarchy. There were also a number of factors that tended to restrict the space for open political discourse, debate, and contention, thus driving dissent into the shadows, where it might fester into conspiracy. Among these were the failure of institutionalized political parties to develop until quite late, the generally limited electoral franchise, and the periodic censorship of the press. Yet other contributing elements were a certain casualness of attitude toward legal norms in general and the weakness of civil society. So important a problem were political conspiracies that in the fall of 1823 the national congress considered passing a law suspending certain procedural guarantees for those credibly accused of political conspiracy against the government. The law was proposed by Carlos María de Bustamante and another deputy and favorably recommended out of a congressional subcommittee in early October. The unease was over conspiracies to raise “el bajo pueblo”—the lower class, in other words—in revolt; under debate was the suspension of legal forms in the arrest of accused conspirators and the summary detention of such people for months. The subcommittee went so far as to suggest, in a sort of hypothetical aside, “the establishment of a dictatorship, which may in the end be absolutely necessary.”24 What Alamán thought of this proposed measure when it crossed his desk is not recorded, but given what he had earlier proposed to congress with regard to the suppression of banditry it is not a stretch to imagine that he approved of it. Then there was the problem of endemic, purely criminal banditry to be dealt with. Whether banditry in Mexico—violent criminal activity, especially in rural areas and often on the highways, exercised by groups of armed men ranging in size from a pair of miscreants to large gangs of a score or more—

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was ever purely criminal or not has come in for a certain amount of discussion by historians. Endemic it certainly was, increasing in frequency and scale during and after periods of civil unrest, especially the insurgency of 1810. Travelers during the early republican decades often wrote of it, it became a central theme in costumbrista novels of a slightly later period, and modern historical scholarship has devoted a good deal of attention to it. There was little the central government could do to control it, however, since the national coffers were virtually empty during these years, and the states of the federation born in 1823–24 either had no resources to dispose of or refused to apply their scant means to the suppression of rural criminality. Moreover, having just asserted their autonomy during the federalist crisis of 1823, the states were loath to empower the central government by creating any sort of national gendarmerie. The newly created State of Mexico, for example, simply refused to comply with a November 1823 order from Mexico City, whose author must have been minister Alamán, to establish two companies of rural mounted police. While he could do little to establish a police presence in the Mexican countryside, however, Alamán might at least tinker with the legal framework within which banditry was confronted. In his first annual memoria to congress at the end of 1823 he invoked briefly the conditions that gave rise to and sustained endemic banditry: “After a tenacious and bloody war, which during ten years caused the desolation of our countryside, transformed the tools of cultivation into instruments of destruction and death, the ruin of property, and the other inevitable consequences of domestic turmoil, a great number of the [country’s] inhabitants became accustomed to violence and murder.” He reminded the legislators that the government’s response to banditry was the law of 27 September 1823 enacted by congress at his behest, a project for a law streamlining the procedures for trying highwaymen.25 The document I have seen is undated as to composition but was clearly drafted by Alamán. The proposed law would suspend constitutional rules normally guiding judges regarding imprisonment and criminal proceedings, authorizing the commanding officers in pursuit of bandit gangs to proceed with criminal prosecutions, sentencing, and punishment up to and including lengthy presidio sentences and the death penalty. The low threshold for action was that the accused belong actively and voluntarily to any bandit group, whether as mere highwaymen (salteadores) or as attackers against public order and tranquility. The minister, the SPE that backed the proposal, and the congress that would approve it were all aware that such a radical suspension of procedural norms placed a high degree of authority in the hands of military officers untrained in the law and that miscarriages

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were bound to occur. These factors apparently made congress pause because similar proposals from the central government had been rejected on at least two previous occasions. Still, the situation with banditry was so dire that the risks of the measure seemed outweighed by the benefits to public order.26 While the application of this severe measure did something in the short term to alleviate the damages done by banditry to travel and the economy, there were always more bandits on hand, and bandolerismo was thus to remain a constant feature of Mexican rural life until the latter part of the nineteenth century.27 There is an interesting coda to this episode involving Lucas Alamán. The passage of a quarter century made him less enthusiastic about the law of 27 September 1823, a measure he himself had urged on the congress. By the time he wrote the final volume of his Historia de Méjico in 1852, he had come to see the legislation suspending constitutional guarantees of due process for conspirators and highwaymen as a potentially nefarious tool in the hands of political factions. In writing about this he subtly distanced himself by attributing the initial impulse first to the discredited tyrant Iturbide and then to the congress, while he himself faded into the background.28 Was the once and future minister being disingenuous here or really reflecting on the 1823 law in the light of experience? Perhaps a bit of both. He was certainly not above ascribing sinister motives to his political opponents and purer ones to himself.

Breaking Away Having labored to make the central government’s gravitational pull under the SPE and the presidency of Guadalupe Victoria more potent, Alamán found that escaping it when he wanted to leave the ministry was difficult. Officially he served from 16 April 1823 to 23 April 1824, from 15 May to 21 September 1824, and from 12 January until 26 September 1825. But he also tendered his resignation on several occasions, both to the SPE and to President Victoria, and enjoyed a number of temporary leaves to see to his personal affairs. At the end of 1825 Alamán responded to an earlier letter from Francisco Borja Migoni in London complaining that the minister had not corresponded with him often enough of late, writing, “I will have plenty of time [now], since I have separated from public affairs and am dedicated exclusively to private ones.”29 His absence from the government was to last for the rest of the 1820s. The politics behind his final departure were quite complicated, resulting not least from Joel Poinsett’s gaining the upper hand in a struggle with the British diplomatic presence in Mexico to influence officials in the government. But there

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were domestic and business reasons as well, including the need to spend time with his growing family, his accelerating involvement in the affairs of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, the daily and minute demands of the mining investments he was overseeing for British capitalists, and the rehabilitation and management of the Hacienda de Trojes. He had first offered his resignation sometime early in November 1823, barely six months after entering the cabinet. What had prompted his offer to leave were the violent, popular anti-Spanish sentiments expressed in the streets of the city during the attempt to incinerate Hernán Cortés’s remains and in response to the minister’s order to remove Manuel Tolsa’s great equestrian statue of King Carlos IV to the patio of the university. Although the minister’s sentiments were not in favor of a monarchy at this time, much less a Bourbon restoration in Mexico, he was thereafter branded an apologist for the conquest, a monarchist, and a Bourbonist. On this occasion the SPE refused to accept Alamán’s resignation, and he remained at his post: with what degree of reluctance is not clear. What power the ruling triumvirate had to enforce its decision to keep him on is not obvious, but the decision to stay was in part prompted by an eloquent protest against the resignation offered by the ministry staff. The tone of the petition to the SPE illustrates the admiration and loyalty Lucas Alamán could inspire in his subordinates despite his propensity to make enemies. The petition to the triumvirate bore the signatures of twentytwo members of the ministry staff. The petitioners wrote as follows: A step of this nature will fill us with sadness, since his [Alamán’s] promptness and judgment in the office, the skill with which he has conducted the most sensitive affairs that have arisen in the difficult circumstances in which the Patria has found itself, his patriotism, his zeal in behalf of the public welfare and happiness; and, to sum up, the combination of qualities of all kinds that he possesses makes us regret his absence extremely. Your Highness [i.e., the SPE] has witnessed his disinterest and probity: [in him] the Nation has seen an official dedicated exclusively to the tasks of his ministry and has felt the zeal that animates him for the prosperity and greatness [of Mexico]. The knowledge he acquired in his travels in Europe he has turned to good use for the Patria, and although it may seem presumptuous [of us to say so], we believe that he will be replaced with difficulty.30 Citing his “outstanding qualities,” the SPE rejected the resignation. And so, in the face of this testimonial from his ministry staff and repeated urgings from the SPE, he stayed.

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On 7 February 1824 an official printed circular announced Alamán’s resignation from the ministry of interior and foreign relations, to be replaced by his ministerial second in command. Alamán initially intended the separation to be permanent or at least quite extended rather than temporary, although the retirement from the government was never acted on. The day the circular announcing his departure from the government appeared, he wrote to Hullett Hermanos in London that having left his ministerial position he could now attend to his business affairs. He noted in his letter that although “there have been troubles here, I can promise myself that the public tranquility will not be disturbed in future, and industrial enterprises can advance,” almost making it sound as though his work in the government was finished. He had tendered his resignation to the SPE on 4 February, shortly after the suppression of a barracks revolt in the capital led by the former insurgent general José María Lobato (1790–1830). The Lobato Rebellion, as it came to be known, began on the evening of 22 January, when Lobato barely avoided arrest for his putative participation in an anti-Spanish conspiracy, and the short-lived military uprising was put down by the twenty-eighth. In the loudly anti-Spanish pronunciamiento the rebels demanded the expulsion from the country of all peninsulares and the removal from the executive triumvirate of Michelena and Domínguez, both thought to be pro-Spanish in their political inclinations. This echoed the kerfuffle that had prompted Alamán to resign in November of the previous year and foreshadowed the later expulsion decrees enacted by the national congress in 1827 and 1829. As it happened, Michelena and Dominguez, who by now was relatively elderly, being sixty-seven years old, did end up on the political chopping block. Both left the SPE in short order, Michelena to accept an ambassadorial appointment to the United Kingdom engineered by Alamán, and Domínguez the presidency of the Supreme Court, where he remained until his death a few years later. In proffering his resignation, Alamán wrote to the SPE on 28 January 1824 that his health had been affected by his work in the ministry and that in any case the critical circumstances that had induced him to remain had now passed. There was a larger political question at issue, however, involving the balance of powers between the executive and legislative branches of the government. In his Ensayo histórico Lorenzo de Zavala implied that Alamán himself instigated the Lobato Rebellion through Michelena, then the presiding member of the SPE. Zavala does not specify what the men’s motives were, but presumably they would have been to demonstrate the necessity of a strong, agile central executive, a vacuum Michelena was well situated to fill, at least temporarily. In the end, however, the incident effectively squelched

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any presidential ambitions José Mariano Michelena might have harbored. Meanwhile Alamán remained in the cabinet, his position fortified in short order with the appointment to the war and naval ministry of his political ally Manuel Mier y Terán. Alamán’s hold on power was strengthened further with the announcement in March that Great Britain had extended diplomatic recognition to the new republic, a long process in which he had played a key role.31 Alamán’s comings and goings from the government shed some light on the politics of the era in that they were by no means unique to him during these tempestuous early years of state formation. The holders of the other secretarial portfolios—treasury, war and navy, and justice and ecclesiastical affairs—could turn over with striking rapidity. Sometimes the ministers lasted only a few weeks in office, then left, and might return again. Some of the same names kept cropping up over a number of years, occasionally rotating among the various ministries in an irregular fashion. Calculating the average time in a ministry for each of the 43 periods in office of the men who occupied the four major departments between 2 April 1823 and 1 April 1829—that is, under the SPE and the administration of Guadalupe Victoria—yields a period of 26 weeks, or about six months. Some individuals in the group of officials represented by this sample served more than once. Some of them stayed in office for quite extended and uninterrupted periods. For example, Alamán served in his first stint for 52 weeks, Pablo de la Llave for one stretch of 56 weeks, Francisco Arrillaga for 60 weeks, Juan José Espinosa de los Monteros for 80 weeks, and the title holder, Miguel Ramos Arizpe, for 108 weeks. If one subtracts these and some other anomalously long continuous periods the average for the entire group drops to 18 weeks, or just over 4 months. Several names keep recurring, sometimes at the head of different secretariats, among them Pablo de la Llave, Francisco Arrillaga, José Ignacio Esteva, and Manuel Gómez Pedraza. Alamán finally left the scene in September 1825 after serving on three separate occasions. One wonders what the learning curve of such officeholders might have been and how it would have affected the conduct of government. True, a number of them returned several times to the same position, but with few exceptions they were in a sense amateurs, some with significant political experience but mostly with no administrative or institution-building credentials. There were a number of reasons for this generally rapid movement through the government, none of which in themselves accounted for the volatility of ministerial careers. The four cabinet secretaries served at the pleasure of the

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executive, their appointments and resignations thus reflecting the uneasy equilibrium of centralist and federalist tendencies within the executive authority.32 Moreover, sharp, even vindictive criticism and accusations of the ministers flew around congress and were aired in the robust political press. Alamán was a particular target of this owing to his principal role in the government and his tendentious personality. Public criticism of this sort could turn up the heat on high officials and make ministerial life highly uncomfortable, and there were personal and family considerations as well. Although ministerial salaries—six thousand pesos annually for many years—were respectable relative to what private professionals or entrepreneurs could expect to earn, they were by no means munificent—bribes and peculation aside. Most of the men who held these portfolios therefore had to sacrifice their economic interests while in the government and might need to depart the halls of power to attend to their finances after a few months. This seems to have been the case with Lucas Alamán, who apparently suffered throughout his public career what amounted to bouts of financial exhaustion that impelled him to retreat to the cultivation of his own garden from time to time. When ten weeks or so had passed after his return to his ministerial duties some time in February 1824 following a hiatus of at most a few days, Alamán tendered his resignation once again, on 24 April 1824, and once again under circumstances that are not entirely clear. Since his and Narcisa’s first child, Catalina, was born on 29 April 1824 and since death of the mother in childbirth or postpartum medical difficulties, among them puerperal fever, was not uncommon, Lucas Alamán might well have wanted to be at home with his wife as they saw their first child into the world. If so, his resignation from the government might have been the equivalent of the increasingly fashionable paternity leave in our own day. His resignation on this occasion was probably connected more to politics and his personal business interests than to domestic considerations, however. He might simply have grown tired of political attacks from the likes of Lorenzo de Zavala, Brigadier Juan Pablo Anaya (1785–1850), and other federalist politicians, finding the impending triumph of federalism unpalatable. But it is worth remembering that federalist ascendancy, the Constitution of 1824, and the presidency of the “viejo mentecato” (old fool) Guadalupe Victoria notwithstanding, Alamán eventually stayed on in the government until the fall of 1825. So one should take at least partially at face value his explanation that business interests claimed his attention. The day of his official resignation, 24 April 1824, the SPE appointed Pablo de la Llave, just recently returned to the ministry of justice and ecclesiastical affairs

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after a bout of illness, to the portfolio of secretary of state for interior and exterior relations. Alamán was out of office for only three weeks, returning to the ministry on 15 May 1824. His return was prompted by an official recall from the SPE in a letter drafted by de la Llave, dated 13 May. This letter, taken at face value, hints at the esteem in which the minister’s talents were held by the SPE: Since the first days of its installation, Your Excellency, with great prudence and foresight, worked with [the SPE] in the salvation of the Fatherland, and helped with your [wise] counsels to free [the Fatherland] from the anarchy and other ills that have threatened it. Nor has it forgotten that the good name Your Excellency has won in some European countries has contributed much to reestablish the credit of the Nation, and to supply it with those resources demanded by its great and urgent necessities. And such [being the] case it [the SPE] is pleased again to name you to the Ministry of State and Relations. Their Highnesses are certain that Your Excellency will not hesitate to accept this honored and distinguished post, and that to this end you will dispense with the motives that obliged you to resign it at another moment. Alamán’s reply to de la Llave and the SPE came the next day: I see from Your Excellency’s letter that Their Highnesses [of the SPE], weighing [my reasons] in their prudent [judgment], have not found them as pressing as in my opinion they are, [so] I must nonetheless present them again. Although the esteem and appreciation of hombres de bien appears to have accompanied me to the solitude of my House, it would be very regrettable if, at the same time I took upon my shoulders a post so much beyond my powers, my name should give occasion to new pretexts [for criticism] that would increase the difficulties that even in the best of times beset such a dangerous post. [And] add to this motive [that] the affairs with which I am presently burdened [are] increased recently with the foundation of a company for the financing of mines whose management I have the honor of accepting. I will not mention [as an excuse] the peculiar difficulties of the [present] circumstances; nor the troubles and unpleasantness that embitter the life of a public man at every moment; nor the continual sacrifice of one’s calm, [domestic] tranquility, and even reputation. Your Excellency

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knows this from practical experience, as do the worthy individuals of the Supreme Executive Power, who experience it daily. This is the tribute that every hombre de bien is obliged to pay to his Fatherland, which has the right to require of its children any kind of service. But true as this principle may be, I confess frankly to Your Excellency that I cannot look but with horror upon the high post that Their Highnesses are pleased to confer upon me. Please convey to the Supreme Executive Power my reasons, at the same time making clear to them my deepest expressions of gratitude for the many and repeated proofs of appreciation with which they have honored me, and protesting all the recognition and obedience that I owe. On behalf of the SPE de la Llave replied to Alamán that having considered the former minister’s reasons carefully, they still insisted that he return to take charge of the ministry.33 On 15 May Alamán took the oath of office and returned to the cabinet. Over the following weeks the announcement of his return provoked a wave of objections from liberals and federalists who saw him as the bête noir of aristocentralist reaction but also a flood of congratulatory letters from state governors, bishops, and other officials. Fairly typical, if more fulsome than most, was a note from Governor Pedro José López de Nava of Zacatecas, one of the states that had been at the forefront of the federalist wave the preceding summer: “I know well Your Excellency’s enlightenment, which extends to the knowledge of many fields, not just politics, but other sciences [widely] different [from each other], a circumstance that excuses you from paying heed to my own limited understanding.” It is not at all clear what the dynamics were of Alamán’s return to the ministry just a day after strongly insisting he could not accept the appointment. Whether he was shamed into it (unlikely, I think, given his character), flattered into it (slightly more plausible), had second thoughts about it based on what he believed he might accomplish with a return to the cabinet (possible), or whether he arrived at some secret arrangement with the SPE—about the scope of his powers, for example, or an amplification of his ministry’s resources—he does not tell us. On the very day he renewed his refusal, however, he sent a note to his English agents, the firm that brokered the financing of the United Mexican Mining Association (the Unida referred to in the letter), that partly reveals his thinking: “The energy with which the government is acting, and the stability that the [European] loan gives it, will consolidate the order of things. It is being asked of me that I

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return to the ministry, and I will need to do it very soon since only some personal considerations delay me [in accepting]. This will not damage the company and thus it [the company] can rely on the support of the government.” This letter suggests that Alamán was less than frank with de la Llave and the SPE. He may have reached the conclusion that returning to the cabinet would give him more leverage in his efforts to revive the mining economy with the injection of British capital. That would prove to be important to the early republican economy, if episodically and of uneven effects.34

8 • Diplomacy

Perfidious Albion and the New Republic: Loans and Gunboats There were three routes by which British capital might enter the newly independent Mexican republic. The least significant of these by volume but the most visible in the day-to-day lives of ordinary Mexicans was the establishment of private commercial enterprises in the major cities of the country.1 Another was the massive infusion of capital that flowed through the London bond market into mining enterprises like the United Mexican Mining Association and other concerns. The third route was that of sovereign loans, also originating with private British investors but in the form of obligations assumed directly by the Mexican government. The foreign loans that so alarmed many of Lucas Alamán’s contemporaries were all undertaken in 1823–25 while he occupied the chief ministerial post in the national government. The Iturbide regime had also negotiated loans whose principals and interest charges the later contracted debt was intended to amortize in part.2 Amounting to £6.4 million borrowed from London banking houses, the loans of 1823–25 went into default by 1827, and the accumulating sovereign debt would haunt Mexico for many decades to come. Defaulted British loans to the new Latin American republics during this period came to some £21 million, of which the Mexican share thus amounted to nearly a third. Even before Mexico formally defaulted in 1827, the accumulated weight of these bad loans played a large role in the London stock market crash of 1825. A final settlement of the Mexican debt came only via an agreement between the government of President Manuel González and the British stakeholders in 1887. Aside from ruining Mexico’s credit rating, the loans themselves, the terms on which they were contracted, and the disposition of the funds realized kicked 215

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up a considerable amount of political dust and tended to stain the reputation of anyone involved with the transactions. The story of these debts is immensely complicated and far-reaching. Was Mexico a victim in the situation, did the country victimize itself, or was the nation at least initially in a more advantageous position, with more bargaining room, than the received wisdom suggests? Opinions vary, but rehearsing this history here in its entirety would needlessly duplicate the work already done by scholars, most recently Richard J. Salvucci, whose book Politics, Markets, and Mexico’s “London Debt,” 1823–1887 (2009) tells the story in detail while keeping in sight the larger issues involved. The snowballing defaulted loans and accumulating debt service, despite attempts to restructure the debt through conversions in 1830, 1837, 1846, 1850, and 1864, all of which failed, prompt Salvucci to comment, It is no exaggeration to call the London Debt one of the great issues of nineteenth-century Mexican history. Indeed, as late as 1891, several years after the London Debt had finally been resolved, the great liberal newspaper, El Siglo Diez y Nueve, termed the “contracting of the loans of 1823 and 1824 with the houses of Goldsmith [sic] and Barkclay [sic]” one of the great economic disasters of the century, the fruit of precisely the sort of economic ignorance that the paper had been launched to eradicate. . . . [C]apitalizing arrears produced a debt that doubled each decade, even as the Mexican economy stagnated. Something more than juggling was required to hold this set of arrangements together, but in the end that something, real economic growth, did not materialize.3 Lucas Alamán was deeply involved with the British loans through his personal relationships with the two main Mexican negotiators, Migoni, in political matters a centralist with monarchist sympathies, and Michelena, a moderate federalist. He was also at the helm of Mexico’s foreign relations, and the British loans were much affected not only by the ill health of other Spanish American loans and the political situation in Europe but also by the effort of the Mexican government to tie the interests of British capitalists, and therefore of Britain itself, to Mexico via the bonds sold on the London market. This link, it was believed, would hurry along diplomatic recognition while making Britain a guarantor of Mexican independence against the ever-present threat of the Spanish reconquest of its errant colony. It also seems likely that Alamán’s success in getting the United Mexican Mining Association off the ground with British capital, along with his own high reputation in Europe, generated a more favorable environment for the transactions than they would have had he

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not been in the government. Centralist reconfiguration of the government at various points during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s in part drove the London market for Mexican debt, since the increases in the collection of fiscal revenues supposedly linked to centralism corresponded to an increased likelihood that foreign bondholders would be paid.4 This story begins with the “Manifiesto del Supremo Poder Ejecutivo a la nación,” published on 16 May 1823 and probably written by Alamán on instructions from the SPE: “Convinced of the necessity of equalizing the income and expenses of the state, and [since] it is impossible to raise the former with the promptitude desired, the SPE has occupied [itself] in reducing the latter, [while still] desiring to provide public officials and employees with a reasonable wage. . . . [Public finances are being reorganized] so that [government affairs] will receive a new energy with the foreign loan that the Sovereign Congress has authorized it to contract.” The new loan authorized by congress was to be paired with a recognition of the old debts, “illegal though they may appear.” The imperial government had also printed too much paper money, undermining in value even the low tax income flowing haltingly into state coffers. This led to the difficulty of paying the salaries of government employees.5 The public penury calling forth these measures during the first years following independence can be ascribed to a number of causes. The destruction in the mining sector wrought by the decade of insurgency has generally been cited as the major one. In the wake of independence what domestic capital there was tended to take shelter wherever it could owing to the generally insecure state of the country and out of justified fear of forced loans by the state. The loans from abroad crowded out domestic capital from the private financiers (agiotistas) who later became so important in keeping the central state afloat financially. Where investment in manufacturing might have occurred, the shallow national markets, technological underdevelopment, inadequate infrastructure, and expensive transportation that characterized the tiny industrial sector discouraged investment. Nor was the country awash in tradable exports apart from silver. There were other tradables, such as cochineal, but they were produced in relatively small quantities and certainly not on a scale sufficient to fill the empty coffers of the national treasury with taxes collected on them, much less by revenues produced by the stream of backward and forward linkages emanating from them. The “misalignment” of the exchange rate between the silver Mexico produced and the gold standard to which Great Britain adhered put the new republic at a considerable disadvantage in terms of the exchange rate and trade. Burgeoning industrial and entrepreneurial

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groups clung to the high-tariff policy advocated by centralists, but this measure reduced imports and therefore fiscal income from customs duties. Absent economic dynamism in the country, it was clear by the late 1830s that the Mexican economy was stagnating. So Mexico could either sell its way out of public penury with the export of tradable goods or borrow its way out. The country did have one important export good, however, in addition to the product of its mines: the overly sanguine, as it turned out, expectation in Mexico itself and in Europe that the new nation was rich in resources, would rebound quickly from the effects of the insurgency, and was headed toward a bright future.6 In a Britain flooded with capital following the Napoleonic wars, this vision of the country encouraged investors to take risks with their money, but within a few years they and the people they lent to would have a rude awakening. Independent Mexico’s debt problems had begun with the financial shortfalls of the Iturbide regime in 1822. Alamán commented of the pre-Iturbide regency’s actions in the fiscal arena that they “seem to have had no other object than to increase expenditures . . . while reducing resources” and that this course arose from an impulse to “popularize the revolution.” After the fall of Iturbide there was much debate in and out of congress on the merits and dangers of funding the Mexican state this way. At this point Francisco Borja Migoni entered the picture. He was the Mexican-born merchant—although he had secretly been naturalized a British citizen—who would come to be named Mexican consul-general in London by President Guadalupe Victoria in 1824. Prickly, abundantly ambitious, and unselfconsciously given to trading on high associations in the Mexican government for his own advantage, he was on fairly intimate terms, at least familiar epistolary terms, with Lucas Alamán and would become a major player on the London end of the SPE’s search for loans. Alamán and Migoni continued an active and familiar correspondence, chiefly concerning the United Mexican Mining Association, through the 1820s and probably up until Migoni’s death in 1831. By the summer of 1823 Migoni was authorized by the government to negotiate an eight million peso loan in London on the best terms he could get. The first serious loan to be negotiated was that underwritten by B. A. Goldschmidt and Company, one of the smaller London merchant banking houses. Patrick Mackie, a Glasgow physician about whom not much is known, had been sent to Mexico by the British foreign secretary George Canning to explore the issue of diplomatic recognition with the Iturbide government. He returned to London and put himself in contact with Migoni, offering to intercede with the British govern-

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ment to facilitate the transaction with Goldschmidt. Mackie dropped out of the loan picture after having somehow managed to extract some £39,000 from Migoni, which the latter buried in the administrative costs of the Goldschmidt loan. Early in January 1824 Migoni made an oral agreement with the Goldschmidt concern to borrow £1.6 million (about eight million pesos) against a Mexican government bond issue of twice that amount, formalizing the contract in January and February 1824. Migoni claimed that the terms on offer were the best he could obtain because the bond issues of Colombia, Peru, and Chile had had a chilling effect on the international bond market, and the federalist uprisings of 1823 had further aggravated the situation, forcing interest rates up in the face of increasing risk factors. The conditions of the deeply discounted Goldschmidt loan were in fact the most unfavorable of any Latin American bond issue before 1826. Even while the terms of the Goldschmidt loan had been agreed to by both contracting parties, Migoni approached another London merchant-banking house, Barclay, Herring, and Richardson, and received an immediate positive response about extending a sovereign loan to Mexico.7 Appointed by the foreign and interior minister Lucas Alamán as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain, meanwhile, José Mariano Michelena arrived in England in June 1824 and immediately clashed with Migoni. The most likely explanation for their mutual antipathy was jealousy on Migoni’s part over Michelena’s diplomatic appointment and their economic competition regarding commissions over the loans to be secured. In letters to Alamán, Migoni repeatedly referred to Michelena as being arrogant and rude, while Michelena accused Migoni of being disrespectful and evasive, particularly with regard to the Goldschmidt loan.8 Michelena continued the negotiations with the Barclay, Herring, and Richardson firm where Migoni had left off, managing to consummate a deal for a bond issue of £3.2 million which went on sale on 7 February 1825. This was the basic chronology of the two loans that were to plague Mexican public finance for the next sixty years. Lucas Alamán maintained a regular correspondence with Migoni even before the entire affair of the London loans began. Migoni’s tendency to querulousness was in evidence by the summer of 1823, when he wrote to the minister that other initiatives to borrow English funds cut across his own, impeding his progress in finding an underwriter for the eight million peso loan he sought. He wrote that in 1820–21 Spain, “nothing more than a pile of rubble,” had secured a loan from a Paris merchant bank; so if ruined Spain, why not promising Mexico?9 By the fall of 1823 Migoni was in discussions

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with B. A. Goldschmidt, which he described as “a house of the first rank”; it was not. Constantly playing up the delicacy and difficulty of his task, Migoni wrote that the only place to seek such a loan was London, “the center of riches of America, Africa, and Europe.” Buoyed by Migoni’s optimism about obtaining a London loan, Alamán saw a cloud on the horizon in the manly form of the exiled emperor “since [his return] is the only thing that can interrupt the [present] state of things.” There followed a blistering epistolary war between Migoni and Michelena beginning in June 1824, Michelena accusing Migoni of single-handedly lowering the creditworthiness of Mexico and botching the Goldschmidt loan. Michelena wrote of his rival’s activities in an increasingly apocalyptic tone, saying in one letter that “never has a government been as humiliated as that of Mexico, and never has an excess so prejudicial to the interests of the Nation [as the Goldschmidt loan] been committed.”10 An infuriating burr under Michelena’s saddle was his inability to shake loose any of the proceeds from the Goldschmidt loan from Migoni’s grasp. Michelena continued his avalanche of letters directed to Alamán, sending no fewer than twentythree between 28 July and 1 August 1824, mostly addressing the issue of securing British recognition for Mexico but mixed in with more critical remarks about Migoni. The hostility between the two boiled unabated through the summer of 1824, although Michelena’s energies were increasingly devoted to the diplomatic recognition question and to his dealings with British Foreign Secretary George Canning. Both Migoni and Michelena continued to address Alamán in cordial, even intimate, terms: amado amigo (dear friend), Alamanito, Alamanito mío, and even Alamancito. Each expected the minister to support him against the other. In August Migoni essentially threatened to hold his breath until he turned blue, expecting his friend Alamán to back up his position against Michelena. In resigning his posts as receiver on behalf of the Mexican government of funds borrowed in Britain and as consul general in London, Migoni continued to complain, now aiming his invective at Michelena’s fatuous secretary, Vicente Rocafuerte; he suggested even that people were opening his mail, adding the spice of paranoia to the fermenting brew of his dissatisfaction.11 Alamán eventually tilted somewhat in the direction of Michelena in this rivalry, probably because the crucial question of British recognition lay in his and Michelena’s hands. The subsequent history of the two loans is quite complicated. Lucas Alamán largely dropped out of the picture by the end of 1824 or so, turning his attention both to the domestic politics that were to make his position in the ministry increasingly untenable during 1825 and to the pressing issue of British

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diplomatic recognition. Major incidents in that history included the increasing involvement of Rocafuerte, whom the envoy left as chargé d’affaires in London upon his return to Mexico in late in 1824. Rocafuerte was tasked with managing the two loans and the application of much of the funds from Barclay to pay off Goldschmidt. Also important were the appointment of a British parliamentary commission to look into the Spanish American bond market, the failure of both the Goldschmidt and Barclay, Herring, and Richardson houses, and the assumption of the Barclay loan by Baring Brothers. Furthermore, a general collapse of the London bond market in 1826 rippled outward to the rest of Europe. Finally, Mexico defaulted on payments to its bondholders in 1827. In the end, the Mexican government realized about 15 million pesos from the loans. Michelena, in the meantime, managed to put together a small fleet of ships, under the command of British and American officers, to whose activity Alamán ascribed the surrender of San Juan de Ulúa in November 1825 and thus the final expulsion of Spanish forces from Mexican soil.

Getting the British In . . . There were other important strategic geopolitical and commercial interests at stake for Great Britain in considering the diplomatic recognition of the new Latin American states as Britain became the major trading partner of the Latin American republics. From the Mexican point of view, British recognition carried a number of positive benefits, chief among them the hope that it would ward off a Spanish invasion backed by the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, and Prussia. In 1824–25 George Canning effectively engineered the diplomatic recognition of Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina by virtue of signing bilateral commercial treaties with the three new states.12 The expulsion of the French forces from Spain and the return of Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne in 1814 restored Bourbon rule. Following Napoleon’s downfall, the congress of Vienna (1815–16) aimed at creating an overwhelmingly conservative and solidly monarchical post-Napoleonic settlement in Europe. The trienio liberal (liberal triennium) in Spain (1820–23) and the second restoration of King Ferdinand to his throne by dint of the return of the French in an armed intervention by his cousin King Louis XVIII (1823) plus the establishment of the Holy Alliance (1815) helped forestall the spread of republicanism. The most important diplomatic-military issue immediately affecting the question of British recognition in the early 1820s was the possibility of a Spanish attempt to reconquer its wayward reinos de ultramar (overseas kingdoms).

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Canning’s role in the recognition of Latin American independence and therefore in the political consolidation of the young Mexican nation was singularly important. Several of the Latin American nations whose official birth he attended certainly acknowledged this. When he died on 8 August 1827, after only a few months in office as British prime minister, mourning among Spanish Americans was general. Rejoicing among the conservative monarchical courts and ministries was just as widespread since they had regarded him as little better than an anti-Christ.13 Prince Klemens von Metternich, for example, had called him “a malevolent meteor” and “the scourge of Europe,” and Tory ultras in Britain loathed him, while European liberals, among them Goethe and Heinrich Heine, lauded him. Until 1985 there were streets in Buenos Aires and Montevideo named for the British foreign minister and, briefly, prime minister. There is also a street named for him in Rio de Janeiro, while Santiago, Chile, boasts two. In Mexico there is no street, plaza, or even alley bearing his name. The story of the struggle for British diplomatic recognition begins with the arrival in Mexico of the Scottish physician Patrick Mackie, sent by Canning in late 1822. He addressed a series of favorable confidential reports about Mexico to Canning, and with Alamán’s backing held a series of meetings with Guadalupe Victoria in Jalapa. He exceeded his instructions about opening negotiations for recognition by Britain, however, and was recalled. To replace Mackie, Canning sent the British commissioners Lionel Hervey, Charles O’Gorman, and Henry G. Ward to explore the situation. In the meantime, Iturbide had appointed Arthur G. Wavell (1785–1860) to represent Mexico in London, his mission aborted by the fall of the Iturbide regime in March 1823.14 In short order the Mexican government (i.e., Alamán) appointed Francisco Borja Migoni as its representative in London, until he was replaced by Michelena. The basic dramatis personae of the recognition episode had now been set and included Canning, Alamán, Migoni (in the first act), and Michelena, with walkon parts played by the British Parliament and the Mexican Congress. While actively working toward British recognition, however, minister Alamán was not idle on other fronts. He put together a treaty of perpetual union and confederation with Colombia, basically a treaty of mutual military assistance in case of external attack, ratified by the Mexican Congress in November 1823 and envisioned by Alamán as the basis of a broader arrangement among the Spanish American states. During 1823 Canning’s position was evolving toward recognition, where it would definitively settle by the spring of 1824. In a letter of 31 December to a

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political colleague he touched on a number of issues of politics and geopolitics as they concerned Mexico, even adding a prophetic pronouncement regarding Mexico–US relations: “The Spanish American question is, essentially, settled. There will be no congress upon it; and things will take their own course on that continent which cannot be otherwise than favorable to us. I have no objection to Monarchy in Mexico—quite otherwise. . . . Monarchy in Mexico and Monarchy in Brazil would cure the evils of universal democracy, and prevent the drawing of the line of demarcation which I most dread: America versus Europe. The United States, naturally enough, aim at this division, and cherish the democracy which leads to it. . . . Mexico and they are too neighborly to be friends.”15 Pressure on London to extend recognition increased as the United States officially recognized Mexico in 1822, building even further when President James Monroe enunciated his doctrine regarding hemispheric affairs at the very end of 1823. Yet Canning did not immediately bend to it. Under the apparent unity between the US and Britain in keeping powers other than themselves out of the Western Hemisphere, however, lay a fundamental Anglophone rivalry about domination of the half globe. The War of 1812 had been ended less than a decade earlier by the Treaty of Ghent, after all, and the conflict between the United States and Great Britain over the Oregon Territory would drag on into the 1840s. In Mexico the diplomatic and economic rivalry was exemplified by the struggle between the diplomatic representatives H. G. Ward and Joel Poinsett to influence the national government. The latter and his yorkino (York Rite Freemason) allies emerged triumphant, at least for a while, an outcome that in part prompted Lucas Alamán to leave his post in the cabinet of President Guadalupe Victoria. When José Mariano Michelena assumed his duties as Mexican commissioner to Great Britain in the early summer of 1824, he carried both general and secret instructions from Lucas Alamán. The secretary of relations strongly insisted that his envoy keep clear of British domestic politics and not try to outflank Canning, a Tory, by appealing to the Whigs. Recognition once granted, a reciprocal treaty of commerce and navigation was to be negotiated. The secret instructions ordered Michelena to work toward the independence of Cuba from Spain and the prevention at all costs of the island’s acquisition by the United States. He was also to keep the ex-emperor under strict surveillance and acquire ships for the blockade of the Spanish forces on San Juan de Ulúa.16 After about a month or so in London, however, Michelena was less than sanguine about diplomatic recognition, summarizing the situation in an interesting and acerbic letter to his friend Alamán. The British government,

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he observed, only acted when its interests were threatened, as by overtures of the newly independent Spanish American republics to France; he thought French policy was pretty much the same. Canning he believed to be highly talented but hard to pin down. The Mexican government, he wrote, “has not been received with a just acknowledgment of its overtures. It is [even] less considered than the King of the Sandwich Islands [i.e., Hawaii], and the Mexican nation endures a snub and occupies in the British court the same position as the Comanches.” Michelena asserted as well that the reconquest of Mexico was acknowledged by all informed people he was dealing with to be beyond Spain’s capacity, “except for the stupid government [estúpido gabinete] in Madrid.”17 Bumps in the road to recognition notwithstanding, the cause of British recognition was moving forward. By the fall of 1824 Alamán’s notes to Michelena had taken on a distinctly impatient tone regarding the matter. French forces, the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis, had only completed the restoration of King Ferdinand VII to his throne near the end of 1823. Upon his return the king once again launched a ferocious reprisal against the Spanish liberals. In early September 1824 Alamán wrote to Michelena that in light of such recent developments he saw little hope either for Spanish recognition of what “she still calls her colony” or presumably for the surrender of Spanishoccupied San Juan de Ulúa. The news of Agustín de Iturbide’s execution in Mexico—Canning had refused to receive him in London—arrived in Britain on 27 September 1824, changing the diplomatic calculus quickly and giving major forward impetus to the conversation about recognition. The manner of Iturbide’s passing meant that the conditions laid down by Canning for recognition—the adoption of a national charter (the federal constitution of 1824), the establishment of a solid executive authority (President Victoria), and general political stability (the federalist crisis for the moment quelled)—had been met, and Alamán instructed Michelena to press the British foreign secretary once more for recognition. Events in London now gathered momentum, Canning finally agreeing to meet with Michelena on the last day of November 1824. Several factors pushed Canning over the goal line. Among them was his fear that the French influence in Spanish America might ascend in the face of British inaction. Another element was that commercial interests in Britain, with which Canning was in sympathy, continually pressed for recognition because of the benefits of free trade with the new nations that presumably would follow. In the Cabinet, Canning and Lord Liverpool proposed recognition of Buenos Aires, Colombia, and Mexico on 14 December and the next day, over

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the strong objections of the Duke of Wellington, agreement was reached. Canning wrote to a political colleague shortly after this that “the fight has been hard, but it is won. The deed is done. The nail is driven. Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs she is English and Novus saeculorum nascitur ordo (a new order of the ages is born).”18 Then, in an evening meeting on 30 December 1824, Canning told Michelena that formal diplomatic recognition would soon follow. When the news was received in Mexico in March 1825, President Victoria ordered three days of bell ringing, artillery salvos, illuminations, and the decoration of house balconies. The “Gaceta Extraordinaria” accompanying the circular reproduced Michelena’s note to Alamán of 4 January 1825, in which the envoy stated, “It is done: England recognizes our independence.” And by the summer, writing to Migoni, Alamán was painting a rosy picture of the state of Mexican affairs—“everything is progressing marvelously”—at least partially due to British recognition.19 At some point during the early weeks of 1825 George Canning announced to all the ambassadors resident in London his intention to negotiate a treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation with Mexico. This was new territory for the Mexican government, as was diplomacy itself, since the colonial entities within the Spanish Empire had made no such treaties. In characteristically punctilious fashion, minister Alamán requested that his envoy acquire and remit the best collection of such treaties among foreign powers that he could gather, along with “the best diplomatic dictionary known,” since the process on the Mexican side would require consulting such documents “at every step.” A draft was completed by early April, but the treaty was not ratified by both parties for another two years. A key issue in the discussions was the freedom of religious practice for Britons resident in Mexico, a point insisted on by Canning. There was certainly a constitutional issue here in that the Mexican constitution of 1824 had left Roman Catholicism as the established and exclusive religious persuasion in Mexico. In his assurances to Canning that constitutional reform would allow an accommodation on this point, President Victoria blamed initial Mexican rigidity on Lucas Alamán, suggesting that he had been forced out of the government because of it. Alamán’s views on the matter of religious liberty for foreigners, in fact, were more nuanced. The issue had arisen in connection with the burial of non-Catholic Englishmen who died in Mexico, since they could not be buried in Church cemeteries. In response to this situation, in July 1824 Alamán had ordered the city’s Ayuntamiento to set aside a separate, spacious plot of land for the burial of non-Catholic British subjects. Consul General Charles O’Gorman extended his “profound gratitude.”20

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The alacrity with which Alamán had intervened with the Mexico City council to establish an English cemetery does not mean he favored freedom of religious worship in Mexico, but neither does his support of an established Roman Catholic Church in the country bespeak a reactionary attitude. Most liberals of the time, after all, even if they believed privately in religious freedom, were loath to express such opinions. It was the more or less liberal federalists who had framed the Constitution of 1824, which established Catholicism as the country’s only permitted religion. From one point of view, Alamán may well have been trying to forestall Canning’s objections to the treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation by making a small concession and portraying it as a large one. And he would aim critical remarks at the Inquisition as the guarantor of religious orthodoxy on a number of occasions throughout his public life, including in his 1853 letter to Antonio López de Santa Anna explaining the principles of the Conservative Party and inviting the perennial president back to take the reins of government. For all its dark history and enormous connotative power, the Inquisition was clearly an archaic institution and therefore a relatively easy target, a sort of straw man at which Alamán and other conservatives might aim their criticism without imperiling the entire structure of the hierarchical society they wanted to preserve.

. . . and the Spanish Out The campaign to dislodge Spanish forces from the island fortress of San Juan de Ulúa ground slowly on during the years recognition and loans were being negotiated. Begun before Alamán entered the ministry and not completed until November 1825, after he had left, the military expulsion of the Spanish was intertwined with negotiations for Spanish recognition of Mexican independence, itself a major consideration in George Canning’s evolving foreign policy in Europe and the New World. While the mainland was now under Mexican control in the wake of the Plan de Iguala and the Treaty of Córdoba, a substantial and heavily armed Spanish garrison still held San Juan de Ulúa, only a kilometer or so distant from the city of Veracruz and within easy range of Spanish guns. Sustained by logistical support from Cuba, Spanish possession of the island went considerably beyond sheer symbolism or nuisance value. It compromised Mexican national sovereignty and might conceivably have served as a military launching pad for a Spanish reconquest of the errant colony. The actively aggressive Spanish military presence interfered

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with and then totally cut off shipping through the harbor of Veracruz, the western terminus of the country’s Atlantic lifeline, although the slack was temporarily taken up by the ports of Alvarado to the south and Tampico to the north. The strangling of shipping made life extremely difficult for the successive governments of Iturbide, the SPE, and President Guadalupe Victoria because it deprived them of customs duties, the country’s principal source of fiscal revenues. When Lucas Alamán came into the government of the SPE in 1823 in the key cabinet post, it was already clear that getting the Spanish out of San Juan de Ulúa, whether by diplomatic or military means, was a major problem.21 By the time Alamán entered the government, the empire had disappeared, and a pair of commissioners, Juan Ramón Oses and Santiago de Irisarri, had been sent by the Spanish Cortes to negotiate terms for some sort of rapprochement between Mexico and its former metropolis. Oses was a lawyer and former audiencia judge with a decade’s experience in New Spain, and Irisarri was a high-ranking military officer. Their mandate from king and Cortes was vague enough—to reach some sort of conciliation with New Spain— but their actual powers were strictly limited.22 By the time they arrived, the Spanish commander of the island fortress had been replaced by Francisco Lemaur de la Muraire (1769–1857), a high military and political official from Cuba who had arrived with Juan O’Donojú. The talks of the Spanish delegation with their Mexican counterparts took place chiefly in the more salubrious and comfortable setting of Jalapa. Nearly three decades later Lucas Alamán wrote that the negotiations were essentially doomed from the start.23 Acting on the authority of the SPE, Alamán and Guadalupe Victoria, the governor of Veracruz who was shortly to become president, exerted themselves to establish correct and civil relations with Oses and his party. On 14 May 1823 minister Alamán issued instructions to Victoria reflecting a remarkably sanguine expectation of the results of the talks about to be undertaken, stressing that, before anything else, Spain must recognize Mexico’s absolute independence. This dictum was intended as a repudiation of the Plan de Iguala and the Treaty of Córdoba and particularly of any claim the Spanish government might have to reestablish the Bourbon monarchy in Mexico. In another instruction of the same date regarding the style of the talks rather than their substantive points, Alamán told Victoria “to exercise particular vigilance that [the commissioners] not be in contact with suspicious persons whose influence might induce mistrust [in them], changing their motives and opinions. Similarly, you will make sure that neither the common people nor any individual insults them or lacks in the smallest degree the consideration

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and harmony that should be observed, since they must be treated with the decorum of all civilized nations and the civility due persons of their rank.”24 The stakes of the talks were high for both sides. On the Spanish end the commissioners sought a constructive disengagement with the former colony, the preservation of trade ties, the maintenance of a transatlantic Hispanic culture zone, and a strategic foothold in a Spanish America rapidly slipping from Spain’s grasp. On the Mexican side the SPE looked not only for recognition of Mexico’s absolute and unconditional independence but also for a favorable commercial treaty and the recovery of San Juan de Ulúa by diplomatic rather than military means. But the Mexican minister was acutely conscious of the international context and of how his country appeared in European eyes. Guadalupe Victoria realized this as well and in early June articulated it to Alamán, whose own thoughts it must have echoed, despite his famously low opinion of the future president: “Upon receiving the said commission I realized [as negotiator] my insufficiency to take on such an affair, which weighs heavily on my weak shoulders, and which only several [compelling] considerations and above all my deep obedience [to the national authorities] could have induced me to accept. All of Europe has its eyes fixed on our present political behavior, and on the nature of the first agreements celebrated between Mexican America and Spain. On the correctness of our [decisions] depends the higher or lower estimate of our sophistication [ilustración] and what in [European] judgment can be expected of us.” In the meantime, Oses transmitted to Alamán an eloquent, somewhat formulaic, highly conciliatory, but finally rather patronizing statement of what he viewed as the profound bases of a possible rapprochement between the Spanish motherland and its wayward child. Citing the bonds of three centuries between Spain and Mexico, Oses pointed out that New Spain had been “settled, formed, and educated, let us say” by Old Spain. The bland assurances of cultural and historical commonalities, with Spain assuming the parental position, very probably caused radicals like Lorenzo de Zavala to grind their teeth in rage. The ideas were in large part to be paraphrased and elaborated upon with equal eloquence by Alamán a quarter century later in the first volume of his Historia de Méjico, where he lauded the Spanish heritage Mexico seemed to have repudiated. But that was a much older, disillusioned, more openly Hispanophilic Alamán imputing the arc of his country’s decline in part to that same thoughtless rejection of its own history and transatlantic roots. By the third week of the talks Guadalupe Victoria was actually sounding an optimistic note, suggesting that “after long debates” the Spanish commission-

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ers had agreed in principle to consider three propositions that might be codified in a treaty: the recognition of Mexico’s absolute independence, the territorial integrity of the country (implying the evacuation of San Juan de Ulúa), and the uncompromised right of Mexicans to constitute their government as they saw fit. During this critical period Alamán was dealing with the federalist movements. Although his presidency would soon be played out under the auspices of the federalist Constitution of 1824, Victoria voiced his own grave qualms about federalism and the way in which it could destroy the credibility and therefore the negotiating position of the national government. This perception was certainly shared by minister Alamán: “In the critical circumstances of the day, when everything seems to augur the dissolution of the [national] state through the immature pronouncement of some provinces, which will necessarily produce the . . . lack of recognition of the supreme powers because of the rapidity with which the pernicious and fatal maxims of partial [i.e., divided] sovereignty are spreading . . . it must be clear to the superior apprehension of the Supreme [Executive] Power that [even so] the business of such high importance has much advanced along a terrain strewn with difficulties, to the point of leaving the door open to all sorts of relations [with Spain].”25 The outcome of meetings between Victoria and the Spanish commissioners in May and June was a series of tentative agreements boiling down to procedural matters, provisional trade arrangements, and a determination to let the respective congresses arrive at formal determinations. What was not met either to Guadalupe Victoria’s or Alamán’s satisfaction was any stipulation about recognizing Mexico’s absolute independence. Victoria repeatedly insisted on this, stating that “a definitive and satisfactory response can contribute very much to end the rumors that still exist among the common people [gente vulgar] about the sinister intentions of that [i.e., the Spanish] government,” but was met only by polite diplomatic evasions from the Spanish commissioners. As though things were not already complicated enough, two other factors now came into play: the aggressive actions of Francisco Lemaur from San Juan de Ulúa and the desire of the Mexican Congress to intervene in the situation. The need to establish a tactical foothold to embarrass any impending blockade of San Juan de Ulúa by the Mexican naval fleet being assembled in Britain prompted Lemaur to lay claim to the Isla de Sacrificios, a small, nearly desolate island thought to control the approach to the larger island fortressprison. Alamán saw this as flagrantly contradictory to the negotiations going on with the Spanish commissioners. Victoria was ordered to determine

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whether Lemaur’s intention was to dislodge Mexican troops from the Isla de Sacrificios (there were none) or if his forces had already occupied it; in either case, the Spanish commissioners were to be handed their passports. Victoria meanwhile was overseeing the placing of the entire Veracruz area in a state of military preparedness. Oses and Irisarri seem genuinely to have been caught in the middle by the impetuous actions of Lemaur and claimed to have no knowledge of the Spanish commander’s doings. More and more heated notes were exchanged; Mexican military measures accelerated; claims and counterclaims flew over whether the Isla de Sacrificios had always been considered an extension of San Juan de Ulúa, whether Lemaur was sheltering smugglers, and so forth. Both sides threatened to resort to artillery bombardments. Alamán wanted Victoria to press on with the treaty negotiations, but if he could not, then military action could be launched against the fortress island. Eventually Lemaur agreed to remove his small garrison from the Isla de Sacrificios, haul down the Spanish flag, and abandon the tiny island, an arrangement agreed to by the SPE and an apparent step forward in the talks. But events in Spain conspired to abort the negotiations over the recognition of Mexico’s independence, a commercial treaty, and the rendition of San Juan de Ulúa. There had perhaps been some hope of a peaceful resolution of these issues while the liberal government in Spain was in power and King Ferdinand was out of the picture, but the French invasion of early 1823 signaled the return of royal absolutism and the dashing of these prospects. Pressure mounted on the Spanish commissioners to complete the treaty by the end of September or leave the country. On 25 September at one o’clock, without warning, Lemaur’s artillery began firing on Veracruz, and Guadalupe Victoria handed Oses and his companions their passports. Upon their departure from the port of Alvarado they expressed their warm appreciation for the manner in which they had been treated while they were in Mexico. On 30 September the SPE severed all relations with Spain, all Spanish warships in Mexican waters were ordered to depart immediately, a complete embargo was placed on the entry of any Spanish goods into Mexico through any port, and the government decreed that any Spanish merchant ships arriving after January 1824 would be treated under terms of war. There things stood for the next two years without forward movement—the Spanish forces dug in on San Juan de Ulúa, the city of Veracruz being shelled periodically, the commerce of the port paralyzed, and relations between Spain and its former colony completely cut off.26 In late January 1825 Lemaur was succeeded as commander by José María Coppinger (1773–1844), a Havana-

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born military man who had been the last governor of Spanish East Florida (1816–21). About this time the ships purchased in Britain with the proceeds of the London loans arrived at last, commanded by English and American officers, and the island was blockaded. The relief force dispatched from Cuba was finally deemed inadequate by its commander to break the Mexican blockade of the island fortress and sailed back to Cuba. Coppinger surrendered San Juan de Ulúa on 18 November 1825 and, about two months after Alamán had left the ministry, the Spanish garrison vacated the island. Relations with Spain would remain very delicate even after the Mexicans repulsed the invading Cuba-based Spanish invasion force in 1829, but after that year there was no realistic prospect of reconquest.

9 • The Poinsett Saga

Joel Poinsett in Spanish America I see with pain that Alamán in his Registro Oficial repeats these calumnies [that Poinsett speaks ill of Mexico and its government at every opportunity]. Really, if I had not the sweetest disposition in the world I should verify their opinion, and then they would find that [even then] my revenge was not to be [satisfied]. . . . I wish you would say from me to Mr. Alamán that I have both spoken and written in favor of Mexico ever since my return without distinction of persons or parties, but that it is time these attacks upon me should cease. They are unworthy of the Mexican government.1 Even as the situation with Spain had reached stable hostility in the mid-1820s, relations between Mexico and its sister republic to the north were becoming ever more tense. Principal among the problems, all of the United States’ making, was US concern over the form of government in Mexico itself—whether it was to be monarchical or republican, although whether federalist or centralist was less the issue. Other issues concerned the fate of the “ever loyal isle” of Cuba; the aggressive American approach toward commercial relations, especially regarding the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and New Mexico; the geopolitical position of Mexico in the world order, which assumed the form of a contest between British and American influence in the country; the establishment of plausible territorial limits; and the effective possession of Texas. The first American minister plenipotentiary to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett, a South Carolinian, was to be a key player in these struggles between the two republics during his nearly five years as envoy (1825–29). The British loans that had underwritten the Mexican naval

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blockade of San Juan de Ulúa were intertwined with the question of British global strategy (the security of its sugar islands in the Caribbean and Atlantic sea lanes, the embarrassment of Spain, the thwarting of the Holy Alliance), British economic interests in Mexican mining and commerce, and the ascendancy of British influence in Mexico during much of the 1820s. Poinsett’s difficult relations with Alamán and his incautious mixing in Mexican domestic politics arose from his perception of a sinister British sway over the government, as opposed to the more liberal, republican, and salutary influence of the United States. Poinsett arrived in the early summer of 1825, Alamán resigned the ministry at the end of September, and the envoy had been recalled before Alamán reentered the government at the beginning of 1830; the two thus overlapped in an official capacity for less than four months. But this was enough time to breed between the two strong-willed men an open enmity that echoed down the years even though at the time it was partially covered over with the strict protocols and artificial niceties of diplomatic formality. The chief grievance of Lucas Alamán and other Mexican moderates and conservatives toward Joel Poinsett was that by establishing York Rite Masonry in the country he had been a principal mover in implanting factionalism in national political life, contrary to ancient norms of diplomatic neutrality in domestic politics. This had created a sort of seismic fissure through which the mass politics of the great unwashed spewed forth, especially in the capital city.2 In the view of the hombres de bien, the York Rite Masons wrested the tiller of the ship of state from the hands of the rational political class, thus destabilizing public life and laying the groundwork for the populist style of the more radical liberals, the 1828 coup d’état by Vicente Guerrero, and the bloody internal war that followed. There is no denying that the York Rite provided a set of political idioms and a rallying point for liberals long before parties in the traditional sense arrived on the scene. But that Poinsett’s activities were anything more than a proximate contributing factor in the political instability of the late 1820s is a gross exaggeration. As the federalist crisis of 1823 and other episodes of the pre-Poinsett years amply demonstrate, Mexican domestic politics had long since reached the boiling point on its own. There were already differences among factions within Scottish Rite Masonry, for example, and with the passage of time these might well have constituted the same vehicles for dispute furnished by the conflict between the Escoseses and the Yorquinos. Some other foreigner, or one of the more cosmopolitan Mexicans, such as Lorenzo de Zavala, might have introduced the York Rite. In this sense Masonry was less a cause of political conflict than a channel for the focusing of established, if still

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somewhat inchoate, conflictual tendencies. Added to Poinsett’s self-righteous pronouncements, his meddling, and his violation of diplomatic norms and the dictates of good sense were his often expressed and patronizing views of Mexicans in general, attitudes that probably became palpable to the Mexicans themselves in his interactions with them and in his public statements. He was particularly dismissive of most men of the Mexican political class, whom he found to be sinister, inexperienced, without talent, or simply to be like dangerous children. Had he been less serious or less accomplished, the life of Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779–1851) might in some respects be described as picaresque; it was certainly adventurous. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Poinsett made much of his long political career in that state. Upon the death of his father he inherited at least one plantation, various urban properties, and holdings of English bonds. Substantial but not enormous, his wealth nonetheless underwrote a gentlemanly lifestyle, extensive travel as a young man, an important role in international diplomacy (a gentleman’s game), an active political career that brought him into the US Congress and national cabinet, and along the way a serious interest in botany and intense involvement with Masonry. He toured extensively in Europe and Russia for several years around the beginning of the nineteenth century, following some of the same routes Lucas Alamán, Poinsett’s junior by about a dozen years, was to travel fifteen years later. While in Europe, Poinsett and Alamán even hobnobbed with some of the same social, intellectual, and political luminaries of the age, among them Germaine de Staël: the American met her in Switzerland, the Mexican in Paris in 1814–15. President James Madison appointed Poinsett consul general to Chile, Peru, and Argentina (1810–15), which set the course for much of his life. He spent these years mainly in Chile, where he urged the Chileans to draft their first constitution in 1812 and eventually rose to the rank of general in the army, gaining, on the basis of this experience and his fluency in Spanish, a reputation as an expert on Spanish American affairs. Elected to the US House of Representatives from his native Charleston district in 1820, he was soon obliged by poor health to seek a more salubrious climate and a cure abroad but continued to hold his congressional seat until 1825, although with long absences. Even while serving in congress he was appointed special envoy to Mexico in 1822 by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, traveled extensively in the country and met a number of important political and other figures. In 1825 he published an account of his sojourn there and of the state of the country, titling it Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of 1822. Accompanied by an

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Historical Sketch of the Revolution and Translations of Official Reports on the Present State of that Country. In this work Poinsett offered a fairly detailed and pessimistic picture of the state of the Guanajuato mining industry, specifically mentioning among other mines the Cata, in which the Alamán family still held a major ownership stake. This could hardly have endeared him to Lucas Alamán, who, when Poinsett’s book was published, was trying to revive the industry with huge infusions of British capital. After a stormy five years in Mexico, in 1829 Poinsett, at the request of the Mexican government, was recalled to the US by President Andrew Jackson. He returned to the US, served again in the South Carolina legislature and as secretary of war under Martin Van Buren (1837–41), then retired from politics to spend the last decade of his life on his South Carolina plantation. A Jacksonian Democrat unequivocal in his Southern loyalties, he was nonetheless a strong Unionist during and after the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, which had originated with the Ordinance of Nullification passed in his home state of South Carolina. In terms of personality, even many of his Mexican enemies praised his personal charm, genteel manners, and abilities. The British envoy H. G. Ward, with whom Poinsett was to find himself in a continual state of tension, remarked that had he met the American in any circumstances other than those of sharp rivalry, he would eagerly have sought his friendship.3 Having opposed US recognition of the emergent South American republics in 1818, Poinsett as a congressman later reversed his position and vocally supported President Monroe’s request that congress appropriate funds for support of diplomatic postings to the region.4 Poinsett shared with Lucas Alamán the opinion that the process of divergent development between Spain and colony would sooner or later have prompted separation even absent the peninsular political crisis of the Napoleonic period. In the meantime, Manuel Zozaya (1775–1853), a lawyer from Salvatierra in Alamán’s home state of Guanajuato, presented his credentials as Mexican minister (not yet at ambassadorial rank) in Washington, DC, in June 1822. Appointed by the first Regency, he was to serve through the Iturbide regime and was briefly succeeded by a chargé d’affaires. Zozaya was followed as minister plenipotentiary by Pablo Obregón (1796–1828), who served until he hanged himself in 1828 when he became, in the rendering of J. Fred Rippy, Poinsett’s biographer, “deranged because of unrequited love and financial difficulties.”5 The process of appointing a minister plenipotentiary to the Republic of Mexico began under President Monroe and continued into the first month of the John Quincy Adams administration. First offered by Secretary of State Adams to a senator, the

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appointment next fell in early 1823 to Andrew Jackson, who turned it down, ostensibly out of potential embarrassment at dealing with a monarchical regime. Next in line was Senator Ninian Edwards of Illinois, who accepted but resigned almost immediately, then Thomas Hart Benton, William Henry Harrison, and Poinsett, all of whom declined. Poinsett claimed to be more interested in domestic politics and the upcoming presidential election, in which his vote in determining the ballot of his home state might be decisive should the election be thrown into the House. Pressured by the newly elected President Adams through his secretary of state, Henry Clay, the congressman from Charleston, although disappointed that the job of secretary of state did not fall to him, reluctantly accepted the post of envoy to Mexico on 6 March 1825. Poinsett’s biographer, Rippy, described him as well-suited to the job of envoy because of his ardent republican sympathies, his fluency in Spanish, and his experience in Spanish America. But Poinsett was also “a flaming evangel of democracy” who had already revealed in his previous diplomatic activities “both an imprudent aggressiveness and a disposition to violate the rules of diplomatic decorum.”6 Poinsett’s instructions from Secretary of State Clay called on him to promote democracy in a government dominated by aristocrats and monarchists and among a people to whom the concept might prove alien; promote American interests over European ones, especially those of Britain; press for “most favored nation” trading privileges for the US; oppose Mexican designs on Cuba; and acquire territory for the US if possible.7 This was not a particularly friendly slate of objectives, but Poinsett pursued all the points vigorously— and impolitically. He did step into a highly fraught situation, bringing with him a set of negative predispositions toward the Mexicans. Along with the existing anti-American attitudes of many public men in Mexico, the identification of Poinsett in particular as undesirable arose from what was known of his career in South America. Manuel Zozaya had written from Washington, DC, in 1822 that the United States “will be our sworn enemies, and foreseeing this we ought to treat them as such from the present day.” President Guadalupe Victoria saw Americans, quite correctly, as it turned out, as “ambitious people always ready to encroach” on others’ territory and “without a spark of good faith,” as evidenced by the situation in Florida and Louisiana and by the constant menace of filibuster invasions. Even before his arrival in the country Poinsett was described by the envoy Pablo Obregón as “not a person of great talents.”8 On the day after he received his instructions Poinsett declared in a letter to a Charleston friend that “the society of Mexico is only calculated to

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give or to confirm dissipated habits.” He did not seriously consider the many applications he received from young men eager to attach themselves to his mission because he felt there was no diplomatic career to be made in Mexico.9 In addition to two other men staffing the mission, the position of unpaid private secretary to the minister was filled by Edward Thornton Tayloe (1803–76), the twenty-two-year-old son of a Virginia grandee planter father who footed the young man’s bills. Tayloe had been educated at Harvard, and he had some command of Spanish, Italian, and French.10 Sailing from Norfolk, Virginia, in April 1825, Poinsett’s party arrived in Mexico on 3 May. Joel Roberts Poinsett presented his credentials to President Guadalupe Victoria on 1 June 1825, a day after the British chargé d’affaires, Henry George Ward, who at twenty-eight was eighteen years younger than Poinsett and whose official recognition was accompanied by much fanfare. The open tension between Escoseses and Yorquinos can be seen as a proxy for the British– American struggle for influence in Mexico, which seeped into the domestic political sphere as well as the foreign relations of the new republic. British chargé Ward wasted no time in writing to Foreign Secretary George Canning to describe the situation. Poinsett’s speech on the occasion of his presentation was more than likely offensive to the Mexican officials present. While his mention that one goal of his mission was to arrive at a treaty of friendship, navigation, and commerce was unlikely to have raised many Mexican eyebrows, the same polite reception was not accorded Poinsett’s allusion to his other diplomatic task, the establishment of firm territorial limits between the two nations. And the American envoy’s depiction in his speech of the US government’s pleasure at seeing that Mexico’s 1824 constitution had mandated a federal form for the nation “so similar to our own” must have antagonized the Mexican foreign minister. Taking a swipe at the British, he reminded the Mexicans of the early sympathy of the United States for their country’s independence. Poinsett wrote to Washington three days later that the secretary of state and other cabinet members strongly favored the British over the Americans in almost every way. On the other hand, he wrote, there was a “respectable party” in both houses of the Mexican Congress—foremost among their leaders he would have counted Lorenzo de Zavala, with whom he had become friendly during his Mexican sojourn of 1822—along with “a vast majority of the people” inclined to closer relations with the United States and a distancing from Britain. So as not to burn any bridges, diplomatically speaking, Poinsett sought to establish cordial relations with representatives of all political viewpoints. To mark US independence he hosted a lavish banquet on 4 July

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attended by all members of the government, presumably including Lucas Alamán but excluding President Victoria. Toasts were offered by the future presidents Nicolás Bravo, Vicente Guerrero, and Antonio López de Santa Anna.11 From the very outset of his mission to Mexico, Poinsett identified minister Alamán as the leader of the “European party, and therefore the government figure chiefly inimical to American interests.” In a dispatch to Henry Clay of 1 August 1825 he wrote, “The secretary of state is entirely devoted to England and not disposed to ultimate friendly relations with the U.S. [In the Mexican Senate Alamán had remarked that the US should be regarded as an enemy] and [that] Mexico had everything to fear from our ambition and nothing to hope for from our friendship. . . . The present ministry is adverse to the interests of the United States and will avail themselves of every means to lessen our influence with the people.” Poinsett characterized Victoria as decent, weak but well-intentioned, and easily manipulated by Alamán; the minister plenipotentiary was also convinced that the president disliked him personally. Poinsett saw José María Tornel (1789–1853), the president’s secretary—he had previously been Santa Anna’s—as exercising a nefarious influence over his boss and went so far as to accuse Tornel of being in the pay of the English. While acknowledging along with other political contemporaries that Alamán was “talented and especially well prepared to deal with whatever Mexico faced” and that the minister’s ideas of political economy were sophisticated, Poinsett wrote that Alamán’s notions of the national political interests were misguided, in part because he was “Anglicanized” (sic) and was earning a large poundsterling salary as director of a major mining enterprise.12 Poinsett believed that the inclination of Victoria and members of the government toward the British had originated with the president’s first contacts with Patrick Mackie. He included among the number of targets of British envoys’ flattery Tornel, a “vain and banal” man.13 In general Joel Poinsett’s letters portray Mexican politics of the time as a viper’s nest of competing personalities and interests. This estimation was perhaps not so far from the truth, but the interpersonal striving and back stabbing did not necessarily map neatly onto political orientation. There is precious little direct evidence, unfortunately, of Alamán’s reaction to all this ill will or to the personality of the American envoy, but one can reasonably assume that it was the mirror image of Poinsett’s suspicious, if not hostile, reaction to the Mexican statesman. From the perspective of about a quarter century Alamán laid the blame for the establishment of York Rite

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Masonry at Poinsett’s feet, and beyond this his attempt to change entirely the so-called aristocratic and pro-British cast of the government. Alamán wrote, He had been in the country shortly after independence was achieved, having traveled to Chile, in whose bloody revolutions he took no small part. Scarcely [having] arrived in the character of minister plenipotentiary, he formed a plan to eliminate the somewhat aristocratic character the government had retained, where people of old families, churchmen, and the army had influence, to put in their place not a democracy— impossible [in any case] in a country in which the people take no part in public matters—but [rather] the unbridled seeking after office [aspirantismo] of some individuals full of ambition and of less respectable social standing. . . . With the arrival of Poinsett, Zavala [and other public men who had belonged to the Scottish Rite] planned to form a different Masonic [rite], which Poinsett offered to incorporate into the York Rite then prevalent in the United States. [President] Victoria adopted the plan, which he discussed with his ministers [Finance Minister José Ignacio] Esteva and [Father Miguel] Ramos Arizpe, the first of whom exercised such influence over the president that he could have been called his royal favorite instead of his minister. As a consequence, in the month of August 1825 five lodges of the [York] rite were established.14 The history of the Masonic lodges in Mexico during the mid- and late 1820s has been studied a good deal by historians.15 The first formal lodges appeared about 1806 and received a boost with the arrival of the Spanish military officers who fought the insurgents after 1810. The last viceroy of New Spain, the ill-fated Juan O’Donojú, whose formal title was jefe político superior y capitán general, was himself high up in the Spanish Masonic hierarchy. The five lodges in Mexico already loosely linked to York Rite Masonry obtained official charters from the New York Grand Lodge in the late summer and fall of 1825 through the good offices of minister plenipotentiary Poinsett, himself a prominent officer in the York Rite before arriving in Mexico. This was one of the two or three great offenses alleged of him by Mexicans of conservative views. Among the prime movers in forging this affiliation among politically prominent Mexican public figures of liberal tendencies were Guerrero, Zavala, Esteva, and Ramos Arizpe, all political foes of Alamán, although the last was on reasonably good personal terms with him. The Scottish Rite Masons were a good deal more conservative, their lodges bastions of Spaniards and Creoles, while many among the political opposition to the SPE and the more radical

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liberals joined York lodges. Alamán himself appears not to have been a Mason, although in an oblique manner he occasionally expressed sympathy for the general drift of the Escoseses’ political ideas. To say he was cagey about his possible membership is unfair given that he was never accused of it and would have felt little need to deny membership if he had ever joined. Many years later Alamán wrote, With the arrival of Poinsett, [Lorenzo de] Zavala and D. José María Alpuche, both separated from the Scottish Rite to which they had belonged, planned the formation of a different Masonic [rite], which Poinsett offered to incorporate in the York Rite [then] dominant in the United States. The Yorkinos, under which name the adepts of the new sect came to be known, expanded their numbers rapidly [since] they counted with all the support of the government since Esteva had at his disposition all the funds of the [British] loans. Thus they enlisted in their ranks all the pretenders to [government] position, all the aspirants to the post of [congressional] deputy, [and] all those who wanted to escape responsibility for the management of public affairs . . . and, in sum, all the worthless men [gente perdida] who aspired to make their fortunes, many abandoning the Scottish Rite, which offered no such advantages.16 Although in neither his public nor private writings did Poinsett link the establishment of the York lodges explicitly to his effort to block the advance of British influence in the government, Lucas Alamán and other people did so at the time, and historians have done so since. The Scottish Rite was connected to the aristocratic faction in the government, and that faction to British interests. The York Rite ipso facto occupied that part of the political spectrum opposed to the Bourbonists, including the liberals and “popular groups,” and was thus positively disposed to the more democratic US influence. J. Fred Rippy described the envoy’s role in organizing the York Rite as “a dangerous step [that] at first worked like a charm” in counteracting British influence. A cabinet shuffle by President Victoria removed the Alamán ally Manuel Mier y Terán from the ministry of war and marine, replacing him alternately with Manuel Gómez Pedraza and José Ignacio Esteva for the remainder of 1825 and beyond. Alamán was thus left in a virtually untenable position in the cabinet as the sole pro-British minister. Esteva hastened to assure Poinsett of his friendship and sympathy for American ideas, while President Victoria visited the American envoy to offer the same reassurances; on the other side Ward worked on the president to discredit Poinsett and the American diplomatic

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goals more generally. Not incorrectly, Lucas Alamán saw a conspiracy in all this “to remove the [minister] of relations [i.e., Alamán himself], against whom other persons surrounding and influencing Victoria were also conspiring.” The principal anti-British conspirators he identified as Gómez Pedraza, Ramos Arizpe, and Esteva, but he clearly also had Poinsett in mind.

Poinsett and Texas The principal material issue between Mexico and the United States while Alamán’s ministry and Poinsett’s envoyship overlapped was the status of the boundary between the two nations; that and the question of Texas would loom large for Lucas Alamán during his second administration (1830–32), under President Anastasio Bustamante. Alamán’s friend, political ally, and fellow cabinet minister General Manuel Mier y Terán would write to him in 1830, “How will Texas end? Where God wills” (En qué parará Texas? En lo que quiere Dios).17 But for the moment it nestled in (or perhaps even bulged, like a cuckoo hatchling) among other foreign policy issues: the expulsion of the Spanish forces from San Juan de Ulúa and consolidation of national independence from Spain, the British loans, the status of Central America, and initiatives in the direction of some sort of Pan-American cooperative arrangement. American settlers had started coming into Texas under the terms of the 1820 Spanish government land grant made to Moses Austin (1761–1821) and carried forward after his death by his son Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836). The initial modest trickle of three hundred American families contracted by the Austins began to arrive at the end of 1821 but quickly swelled to a flood that neither Alamán nor his successors could contain, try as they might through legislation, menace, negotiation with Austin, and a highly attenuated military presence in the Mexican northeast. Alamán was certainly not opposed at this time to colonization of the emptier parts of the republic, and in the absence of European settlers was content, if wary, to have Americans come in. In his 1825 Memoria for congress minister Alamán spoke approvingly of the Austin colony at San Felipe de Austin: “Those [families] that make it up are working energetically [con empeño] in farming the land and raising livestock. Other colonists have arrived in the same state, and their settlement awaits only the conclusion of the regulations to govern [their settlement].”18 Lucas Alamán’s concern with regard to American colonization, however, was that it might eventually erode Mexican sovereignty over the settled territories and should be subject to strict regulation. Mier y Terán, a military intellectual who had

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become friends with Alamán while he served (March–October 1824) as minister of war and navy under the SPE and then the Guadalupe Victoria presidency recommended the substantial increase of the Mexican military presence in east Texas in his report on the 1828–29 boundary commission expedition. But such a buildup was far beyond the capacity of the government, and by the middle of the next decade it was too late to keep Texas from escaping the Mexican orbit. Joel Poinsett was authorized to accept at worst the 1819 line of demarcation stipulated in the Adams–Onís Treaty if the Mexicans proved unwilling to agree to any modifications but was instructed to acquire more territory for the United States. He entered into discussions with Alamán immediately upon his arrival in Mexico City, encountering adamant resistance to pushing the Adams–Onís line further west. The first step for the Americans in the acquisition of territory, either de jure or de facto, was the opening of the Santa Fe Trail. Poinsett followed a conscious, aggressive policy of infiltrating as many American material goods and as many American settlers into the Texas–New Mexico area as possible, reasoning that this would resolve the question of effective possession of a vast territory over which Mexico exercised little actual control. Alamán, on the other hand, played the delaying card during the few months he interacted with the American envoy, insisting that the opening of the Santa Fe Trail must await a formal demarcation of the international boundary, which could be accomplished only through the work of a surveying commission. In a note of 20 June 1825 the “gobierno mexicano” (i.e., minister Alamán) informed Poinsett that it declined to open the Santa Fe Trail until a treaty of limits and commerce between the two nations had been ratified. The issue of territorial boundaries would be highly time consuming, however, due to the nature of the trigonometrical calculations to be made in a vast, difficult, and unexplored territory. The Mexican government would therefore give priority first to the separate negotiation of the commerce treaty, leaving the question of the trail to the territorial limits agreement. In a note sent two days later Poinsett wrote to his government that “this [Mexican] government regards all our movements towards Texas and New Mexico with jealous apprehension; and I much fear that they are resolved to postpone marking out the road in question through their territory, until commissioners are appointed to make a regular reconnaissance of that portion of the country with a view to the ultimate settlement of the boundary line between the two nations.” By the end of July he was writing to Clay in a coded message: “Most of the good land from the Colorado [River] to the Sabine [River] has been granted . . . and is rapidly

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peopling with either grantees or squatters from the United States, a population they will find difficult to govern, and perhaps after a short period they may not be so averse to part with that portion of their territory as they are at present.” And on 5 August 1825 Poinsett wrote, “I feel very anxious about the boundary line between the two nations[;] while it will be politic not to justify the jealous fears [of the Mexicans] on that subject by extravagant pretensions, I think it of importance that we should extend our territory toward the Rio del Norte either to the Colorado or at least to the Brassos; we ought to have on the frontiers a hardy race of white settlers between the Mississippi and the Balsabine [sic].”19 Poinsett proposed rather disingenuously that the cession of Texas would leave the central government in Mexico City in control of a more compact national territory easier of administration and that the US would assume sole responsibility over the troublesome Comanche Indians. His concise account of what must have been his last meeting with Alamán, on 20 September 1825, portrayed the two men continuing to wrangle in polite terms over the appropriate boundary line, Poinsett insisting on the validity of the Adams–Onís demarcation of 1819, Alamán on that of the Treaty of San Lorenzo between Spain and the US of 1795. After about a year of talks, first with Lucas Alamán and then with his successors holding the portfolio of relations, Manuel Gómez Pedraza and Sebastián Camacho, Poinsett reached the conclusion that it was wiser to accept the Sabine River line. Later attempts on the American’s part to buy large chunks of the territory proved fruitless, so at the beginning of 1828 he signed an agreement acknowledging the 1819 boundary.20 In the meantime, the boundary commission had left for Texas in November 1827. Parallel with these negotiations, talks regarding the treaty of friendship, navigation, and commerce were carried on from the US side by envoy Poinsett and from the Mexican side by Alamán and treasury minister Esteva beginning in late August 1825. Alamán was replaced by Manuel Gómez Pedraza in late September, and the treaty itself was not ratified until the spring of 1831, when Alamán had returned to the government and Poinsett was no longer on the scene. By then, too, the Mexican Congress had passed a law at Alamán’s instigation prohibiting further American settlements in Texas. In a long letter to Secretary of State Henry Clay written on 8 July 1827, Poinsett conveyed his perception of the political situation in Mexico from the time of his arrival in June 1825 to the summer of 1827.21 Alamán had left the government nearly two years before and was now deep into his private economic affairs. Granted that Poinsett’s letter was a privileged diplomatic

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communication and that he was trying to absolve himself of charges the Mexicans had made against him for meddling in the domestic politics of the country, his dismissive attitude toward the Mexican political class had not softened over the two years of his mission. And although he does not mention Lucas Alamán by name, it is clear that he had the former minister of relations in his sights as representing the most retrogressive elements on the political scene even after he had left office. Poinsett wrote, Many of the [Scottish Rite Masons] conscientiously believe their countrymen to be incapable of self government, . . . still regard as visionary the existence of a republic in Mexico, and still wish to see planted on the throne of Mexico a prince of the house of Bourbon. . . . Their leaders had frequently declared . . . that Mexico ought to regard the United States as natural enemies [sic]. . . . This party has behaved towards me . . . in a most unfriendly manner. [T]he people, until my arrival, have been taught to believe that Great Britain had set the example to other nations in the recognition of the independence of this country. The principal charge brought against me is that I established the Grand Lodge of Ancient York Masons . . . [but since then] the progress of liberal principles has been most rapid. . . . In what is really nothing more than the natural course of events they see the direction of some able hand, and have thought proper to attribute the success of the republican party, the consolidation of the federal system, and the establishment of liberal principles exclusively to my influence. We ought in the United States to view the errors committed by these people with great indulgence. The science of government is new to them . . . [and] the revolution found them surrounded by an impenetrable barrier which had for ages shut out all access to the ordinary means of information. Foreigners were not permitted to enter the country, the study of foreign languages was discouraged, and the introduction of some of the best and most useful books prohibited. The improvements in the arts and sciences, which made such rapid progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to the inhabitants of this country as a sealed book. From almost utter darkness a full blaze of light has suddenly burst upon them, and it is not to be wondered at, that they have passed almost instantaneously and without any preparation to the enjoyment of the freest and most liberal form of government. . . . Born with strong passions, living without occupation and without incentives either

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to industry or study, divided by nature and by their interest into distinct classes, their only excitement consisted in mutual hatreds and jealousies, and they waged against each other a perpetual war. . . . [I]t is not to be expected that milder and better feelings should immediately succeed the change from slavery to liberty. This most desirable alteration in the character of this people must be a work of time, and years will pass away and another generation arise before they will cease to slander and vilify and calumniate each other and every foreigner they may think proper to mingle in their domestic squabbles, and that without the slightest regard to the truth or falsehood of the charges which they may bring against them. There exists, moreover, an inbred distrust of foreigners; a most inordinate vanity on the subject of the vast superiority of the natural resources of Mexico over those of any other nation: an unfounded idea, that their neighbors are jealous of their rising prosperity.22 Joel Poinsett’s uncomplimentary remarks about a number of Mexican public figures, his insistence on the nefarious ambitions of the British–aristocratic party, and his sincere, ardent, but self-congratulatory puffing of himself as the valiant defender of republicanism continued unabated until his recall by Andrew Jackson and departure for the United States in 1829. To be fair, Poinsett found himself under constant attack from the conservative capitalino newspaper El Sol, one of whose important backers and moving spirits was ex-minister Lucas Alamán. Putting aside the superior, patronizing tone of his 1827 letter and other communications, there is a good deal of irony in the fact that Alamán himself might well have agreed with much of what the undiplomatic American diplomat wrote, albeit reversing the positive and negative signs of the purportedly monarchist and republican factions.

The Minister Departs The backstory of Lucas Alamán’s definitive departure from the government in the autumn of 1825, after nearly two and a half years, took a long time to spool out. He tendered his resignation shortly after the third meeting of himself, Treasury Minister Esteva, and envoy Joel Poinsett on 13 September 1825, at which Alamán objected strongly to the American envoy’s proposals to specify in the agreement under negotiation the preferential commercial treatment of the United States over other nations—a most-favored-nation clause.

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Alamán’s growing discomfort in the ministry originated much earlier than his tensions with Poinsett over York Rite Masonry, the treaty talks, or the question of Texas, however, going back at least to the adoption of the federal constitution of 1824 if not before. It is not difficult to construct a teleology of his fall in which the inevitable rise of liberal federalism, particularly as embodied in that first Mexican constitution, simply made the government too hot for him. With its devolution of powers to the new states of the union and the dominance within the central government of the legislative authority over the executive, the constitution was a clear repudiation of the centralizing impulse. Still, Alamán remained in the government through the drafting and adoption of the charter and nearly a year into the administration of Guadalupe Victoria. He could have resigned, which he did on at least two occasions but was persuaded to stay on, at any time before late September 1825. José Valadés writes, “If Alamán committed errors in his political career, the greatest of them was to have participated in the ministry of a President whom, like Victoria, he considered a fool. Don Lucas never explained why he served that administration, especially since he was [almost] always in complete disagreement with his colleagues in the cabinet.”23 So the question is why he remained at his post, and why he left it when he did. The likely answers do not suggest any particularly sinister motives on Alamán’s part. In favor of his remaining, no matter what the minister’s personal opinion of his boss, was the fact that after the inauguration of President Victoria a number of highly important and delicate matters in which Alamán was playing a key role were left pending. The British loans were still being negotiated in 1824–25, and British recognition of Mexican independence was not made public until March 1825. Furthermore, the expulsion of Spanish forces from San Juan de Ulúa was not made good until November 1825, after Alamán left the cabinet. Then there were such issues as the regulation of American settlers pouring into Texas in numbers well in excess of those permitted in the Austin concessions, the plan for the colonization of the Tehuantepec region and the building of a canal across the isthmus, and various domestic projects. In other words, since Lucas Alamán was not a man to cut and run in the face of political opposition or to abandon projects once begun—in fact, he tended instead to dig in his heels—there simply were things to accomplish that could be done only from the seat of government and which he felt himself uniquely positioned to oversee. Then, too, since in the early months of the Victoria administration he was said to exercise a heavy influence over the president, he may well have hoped to be a counterweight to

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the federalists and liberals in the government and the congress, something that became especially critical with the arrival of Joel Poinsett. In favor of his stepping down were not only the changing political environment but also the fact that his personal interests screamed for attention, a factor not often acknowledged by historians writing about this period. He would again invoke the need to repair his own neglected economic situation when he left the Bustamante government in 1832, although in that case there were also political pressures on him to resign. In 1825 his family was growing with the birth of his second child and eldest son, Gil, just two weeks or so before he tendered his resignation; he had recently purchased an hacienda that required close management; and he was increasingly involved in the affairs of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone. Perhaps most important of all, he was the linchpin of a large part of the British investments in the silver mines in Guanajuato and elsewhere, an activity that was held against him by his political opponents, always on the prowl for ways to discredit him. For Lucas Alamán the transition from the government of the SPE to the constitutional-presidential regime had not been an easy one. The spring and summer of 1823 plunged him and the country into the federalist crisis. Hardly had this begun to abate when charges were brought against him in congress over his assignment of salaries to some government appointees without congressional approval. He was accused especially of having favored his friends, an accusation similar to that made against him two years later in the same body by Deputy Juan de Dios Cañedo regarding the appointment of consular officials in US cities. The minister appeared before congress on 1 September 1823 to defend himself, as he was to do on a number of other occasions, asserting that rather than usurping congressional powers the executive authority had in fact generally acted timidly and certainly well within the limits of its legitimate sphere. He remarked on that occasion, “It is not liberal [i.e., proper or just] conduct to attack a government [i.e., the SPE] established by your [own] Sovereign Authority. To proceed liberally [i.e., justly] with a government of the nature of the present one, it should be supported while it exists and removed if it is judged bad, but by no means weakened.”24 His counterattack against the accusations suggests a theory of government in which sovereign authority might lie with the legislature, but executive authority lay with the government ministries and bureaucracy once the legislative power had delegated governmental functions to those bodies. This was perfectly in keeping with his critical views of the 1824 constitution, the idea that the branches of the government occupied separate spheres and his career-long advocacy of a centralism anchored in a

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strong and agile executive. Alamán was exonerated of the charges by a congressional committee at the end of the month, but this was hardly the last time he would be accused of cronyism or of overstepping his authority. The constituent congress that produced the popular, federal, representative constitution of 1824 was elected on the basis of the 17 June 1823 convocatoria published over Lucas Alamán’s signature on the authority of the SPE, and it finally met on 7 November. The constitutional charter was drafted by a committee in relatively short order but was debated for nearly a year before its formal ratification on 4 October 1824. The congressional debates dealt primarily with the issues of distribution of sovereignty among the Mexican people as a whole, their elected congressional representatives, the newly formed states, and the powers in Mexico City; and, within the central government, of the distribution of power between legislative and executive branches. Although the more radical confederationist structure was avoided and a compromise adopted, many of the more moderate federalists were not happy with the charter. Changes in the composition of the SPE, meanwhile, alternately strengthened and then undermined Lucas Alamán’s position, while disturbances continued to rock various parts of the country. Guadalupe Victoria and Nicolás Bravo, both of whom had unimpeachable revolutionary credentials, highly vaunted personal character, and centralist tendencies, faced each other in the presidential election (indirect, by state), the former emerging the winner by a margin of eleven states to six, with Bravo as vice president. They were inaugurated on 9 October 1824. Of the cabinet changes and President Victoria’s drift toward federalism over the following year, Alamán later wrote, “The seeds of future misfortunes were being sown, the first symptom of the changes that would [shortly] be suffered in public affairs [being] those in the ministry.” He added that Ramos Arizpe formed an alliance in the cabinet with Manuel Gómez Pedraza, who had replaced Mier y Terán, to “remove the minister of relations [i.e., Alamán himself], against whom other persons surrounding and influencing Victoria also conspired, due to which plot he [Alamán] had to resign [his] post.” Offering a general characterization of the transition from the regime of the SPE to that of the new constitutional order, Alamán was later to write, [There was a grave] scarcity of resources at first, since on the day of its installation there were found in the treasury no more than 42 pesos; and in the course of its [the SPE’s] existence there were continual revolutions. Nonetheless, in the midst of the uncertainties caused by the fre-

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quent changes in the individuals making it up, all these [men] and their ministers being opposed to the system that [others were] trying to establish [i.e., federalism], [the ministers] knew how to control [the expression of] their opinions [and] worked with determination to implant the very [system] they disdained. . . . President Victoria, then, found himself in the most prosperous circumstances. His authority was recognized by all, and insofar as the great problem—the lack of funds—that had so much contributed to the fall of Iturbide was concerned, [Victoria’s] treasury minister had only to take letters of credit on London to obtain as much as was desired, and the wise investment of them was all he needed to do.25 On the one hand, when he left office the tensions between Escoseses and Yorquinos were still intense. And although there had been something of an economic rebound during the mid-1820s, the foreign loans so easily drawn on for current government expenses sowed the seeds of immense future problems. On the other hand, there was a hiatus in serious political violence during the Victoria administration. What is especially striking in the above passage is Alamán’s assertion that he and other figures in the government worked to implement the new constitutional system together with federalism, even though they profoundly disagreed with it. This assertion is supported by the fact he remained in the cabinet for nearly eighteen months after the adoption of the federalist constitution of 1824 and nearly a year after Guadalupe Victoria’s assumption of office. However much he might have aspired to curb wrongheaded liberal-federalist excesses in governance and policy, surely he could not have hoped to subvert it single-handedly from inside. As in other instances of the older Alamán looking back on his political life, this raises the question of whether the younger man was actually as conservative as the older man portrayed him or whether the mature, disillusioned Alamán was shading his own biography to match the views he held later in life. Alamán departed from the ministry for the last time in tendering his resignation to President Guadalupe Victoria via the minister of war and navy, Manuel Gómez Pedraza, on 26 September 1825. The next day the president thanked him for his service in the post, and Alamán left the government. One factor leading to this was that Alamán could no longer stomach the machinations of Joel Poinsett, especially the terms he was proposing for the preferential treatment of the United States over all other powers in the treaty of friendship and commerce at that moment under negotiation. Neither could

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he tolerate President Victoria’s drift toward federalism or recent changes in the makeup of the cabinet. Carlos Bosch García, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent historians of Mexican diplomatic relations, basically agrees with much of this interpretation of Alamán’s final departure but differs with it in some respects and adds meaningful details. He notes that during 1825 there was a faction of growing strength in the Mexican Senate pressing for Alamán’s removal from the ministry. His withdrawal was precipitous, however, since his relations with Henry G. Ward had become frosty for the moment—they were restored to cordiality a few years later—and the British envoy was pressuring President Victoria to dismiss his minister of interior and exterior relations. Alamán found out about Ward’s stance and resigned before he could be dismissed. In the wake of Alamán’s exit, Ramos Arizpe tried to have José Mariano Michelena appointed, but the president feared and disliked him. In the end, the ministry of relations went briefly (27 September– 2 November) to Manuel Gómez Pedraza, then for the rest of 1825 and the first half of 1826 to Sebastián Camacho (1791–1847), a Veracruz-born lawyer, sometime state governor, congressional deputy, and diplomat, who was to occupy the post briefly on two more occasions. A series of other men filled the post for the rest of Victoria’s presidential term.26 Joel Poinsett saw in Alamán’s fall the triumph of American over British influence in Mexico, while Lorenzo de Zavala ascribed it to Miguel Ramos Arizpe’s entry into the cabinet to hold the portfolio of justice and ecclesiastical affairs—this did not actually occur until two months after Alamán had left. Zavala offered an interesting dual portrait of the two men that, although exaggerated by his intense dislike of Alamán, nonetheless echoes several other impressions of him rendered over the years: “There was nothing in common between these two individuals. Arizpe is impulsive, Alamán calculating [astuto]; Arizpe is open, Alamán reserved; Arizpe invites danger, Alamán avoids it; Arizpe is generous, Alamán greedy [ávaro]; Arizpe, like all men of strong imagination, does not act with method or order; Alamán is meticulously orderly and methodical. Consequently, [while] Arizpe has friends, Alamán has none. Finally, with Alamán everything is artifice, and in Arizpe everything in natural.” Another equally ardent but less volatile liberal republican, Vicente Rocafuerte, who had been secretary to the Mexican legation in Britain, assessed Alamán’s talents on the basis of his recent ministries and proffered an alternate evaluation of the ex-minister some months later. In a cover letter to the ex-minister transmitting a communication from Baron von Humboldt regarding the isthmian canal project, Rocafuerte wrote, “I pray you will allow me

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[this] occasion to tell of the fine esteem I profess for you, which grows from a natural sympathy augmented by the admiration and respect inspired by the superiority of your talents, so happily cultivated and of such use to the Nation. I would not have allowed myself to write of these sentiments before, wary that [their expression] could be attributed to a spirit of adulation, which I disavow, [thus] confusing flattery with the sincere expression of friendship and gratitude of this, your very faithful servant and friend.” Meanwhile, Alamán’s Hullett Brothers correspondent in London lamented his departure from the government: “We see from the newspapers that you have withdrawn from the ministry, which will certainly give the Company [i.e., the Unida] the advantage of your complete attention in its affairs. But at the same time the friends of prosperity in that republic should regret the loss of your intelligence to a new [i.e., newly established] government that requires the unity of all men of talent, experience, knowledge, and pure patriotism.” Almost immediately following his departure from the cabinet Alamán spent a good deal of time traveling to Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Sombrerete to oversee the interests of the United Mexican Mining Association.27 Alamán might leave the government, but the government would not leave him. He faced generally scathing criticism both while he was in office and after he left, typically from liberal politicians and newspapers. He was saved from immediate attack in the final rerun of the Santa Anna administration in 1853 only by his death after about two months in office, although his reputation suffered deep opprobrium reaching into our own era for his role as architect of the dictatorial regime whose excesses in part ushered in the Reform era of the mid-1850s. Alamán was the most visible conservative politician of the early republic. He had a strong but completely unflamboyant personality whose selfpresentation easily lent itself to the perception of him as a ruthless conspirator. Moreover, as a public servant he showed a strong penchant for conducting the business of governance with opacity rather than transparency. Called “the man with the black brain,” he drew more fire than most and had acquired a sinister reputation even during his lifetime. This more or less constant stream of criticism, even invective, directed at him began quite early in his first ministry and continued through and beyond it. An example during one of his early periods out of the ministry, in the spring of 1824, was the indirect but ferocious attack by Juan Pablo Anaya (1785–1850), a prominent insurgent, brigadier general, liberal politician, and sometime cabinet member. The allegations were of peculation by Alamán in connection with diplomatic appointments he had made. Not surprisingly, accusations launched against public figures for ostensibly

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ideological reasons or to allege corruption originated in less than disinterested motives, including political or personal animosity or both, which is what appears to have happened here.28 Another instance among several occurred immediately after his definitive resignation from his ministry, in late September 1825. The liberal Juan de Dios Cañedo brought charges against Alamán in the Senate having to do with his appointment of vice-consuls in some US cities, allegedly a violation of the 1824 constitution. As Cañedo continued to allege and Alamán to defend himself, the accuser launched yet another formal charge that revealed his more fundamental problem with Alamán, describing him as “[being] in continual struggle with our system [i.e., federalism], and swept along by a vehement passion for arbitrary [power]. In the end, we now see him humiliated before public opinion, and without influence in the government; but this is not enough for the complete repayment of his ill deeds . . . and if we have patriotic love, and if we desire to build the confidence of the states [in the government], it is necessary to punish him so that his successors [in the ministry] learn from this example.” Most members of the body discounted the vehemence of these vague accusations, although others were raised. A senator from Tamaulipas, Father Eustaquio Fernández (1780?—1843), a theologian, lawyer, and politician, charged Alamán with raising the salaries of some ministry officials without congressional approval, for which he deserved exemplary punishment. And in the same vein as Cañedo, the senator added that Alamán was an enemy of the republic, of the federalist system, and of liberty, allegations often leveled against him during his public life. At a Senate session in mid-January 1826 these charges were found to have no substance, and yet another minor accusation was dismissed, although the Yorquino members of the body, including a relation of Alamán’s wife, Narcisa Castrillo, supported them. The next time serious charges were raised against him for his actions while in office, shortly after the fall of the Bustamante administration in 1832, Lucas Alamán would be less lucky. He would be forced into internal exile and hiding to protect himself and would live under a political cloud for the rest of his life. But that lay a decade in the future.

10 • Shafted The United Mexican Mining Association (1824–1830)

Alamán and the Unida: An Introduction The United Mexican Mining Association, or Unida, was formally incorporated in London on 14 February 1824. The enterprise survived longer than most Mexican mining companies established in these boom years of British investment and mining revival and in time produced some profits. In the short and medium term, however, the enterprise fell far short of everyone’s expectations.1 The tsunami of British mining investment had receded by the late 1820s after millions of pounds sterling had drained away down the deep shafts of silver mines in Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Real del Monte, and other silver fata morganas, leaving behind a detritus of abandoned works, rusting equipment, and shredded hopes. As he did in regard to his other abortive attempts to become rich, Alamán remarked ruefully in later years that “I had, then, in my hand what have been the richest enterprises, [but] I went so far astray that I benefited from none of them.”2 In his early reports to the Court of Directors of the new company, no less than in private surveys, Alamán’s projections of the wealth to be taken out of the Mexican mines breathed optimism. This was certainly the experience of Henry G. Ward, the British chargé d’affaires in Mexico during the mid-1820s. Ward’s account of his travels, the general state of the country, and its mines, México en 1827, has become a classic among the works by foreign observers of Mexico during the early republican decades. Cordially received by Alamán, Ward arrived at Veracruz with his family on 11 March 1825 as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a treaty of amity and commerce between Britain and Mexico (ratified in 1827). The Englishman had had previous diplomatic experience in Stockholm, The Hague, and Madrid.3 Ward wrote of the years when 255

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British investment in Latin America in general was just beginning to gather momentum and when Lucas Alamán directed the operations of the Unida, as the company came to be known: “Mr. Alamán . . . declined to venture any specific calculation about the likely production of the mines operated by the Association because (to use his own words) it can never be said that the production of a mine is in exact proportion to the capital invested in it. . . . [But] since the great capital of the company allows it to work in various districts at the same time, the probability of large profits [grows] in proportion to the number of mines capable of producing them.”4 Ward’s observations conveying Alamán’s optimistic predictions, shared by many participants in the early wave of mining investments, were seductive to readers in Britain.5 Captain James Vetch, for example, the first director of the Real del Monte Company, told Ward that within short order his company could expect a yearly return of $1.5 million [i.e., pesos].6 Along with the flourishing British capital markets of the post-Napoleonic decades, the wide familiarity in Europe of Alexander von Humboldt’s famous Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, available in English from 1811, supplied much material to stoke the fire of the “Mexicomania” raging among British investors and statesmen in the 1820s, singeing many people and burning itself out just as quickly as it had been ignited.7 In a reflection on his own book, Ward wrote that he himself relied very heavily on Humboldt’s account.8 Still more tinder for the blaze of enthusiasm was heaped on by Lucas Alamán’s reputation, personal networks in France and Britain, and acknowledged expertise about the Mexican mining industry. In the middle of the decade, by which time several British mining investment companies had already gone belly-up, Ward explicitly conveyed the impression that Alamán’s prestige in Europe and the Mexican statesman’s belief (later to change) that silver mining should continue to be the central pillar of a flourishing Mexican economy were key to opening the spigot of British capital. Writing in the 1840s after the high tide of British investment had long ebbed, Fanny Calderón de la Barca remarked that “Don Lucas Alamán went to England and raised, as if by magic, the enthusiasm of the English.”9 Yet scarcely a year after the incorporation of the Unida the London merchant bankers brokering the sale of company shares on the English market, Hullett Brothers and Company, were remarking on the dangerously volatile atmosphere of British investments and the rapid shakeout of many less robust firms and projects.10 By the end of 1825, less than two years after the establishment of the Unida, the investment bubble had largely deflated, leaving many

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an English investor staggering to find a footing. Lucas Alamán had earlier purchased some shares of the Unida set aside by the English directors specifically for Mexican investors but now wanted to unload them, probably to provide him with liquid cash for some of his other economic projects. In counseling him to wait for a more advantageous moment to sell, Hullett Brothers wrote, “A year ago there began in this market the madness of speculations in the shares of mines, funds, and commodities of all sorts, of which the cause is said to be in part the abundance of capital. After increasing for several months this madness began to calm itself. . . . The disdain in which many shaky businesses find themselves has dragged [down] public opinion regarding others established on sound foundation.”11 The passage of another half dozen years or so would see Alamán completely out of the Unida as officer and shareholder, even though the Unida was one of the few British-backed mining concerns to survive the bust. Almost all the others proved unprofitable and had disappeared by 1830, among them the Catorce Company (1826), dragged down by the bankruptcy of the English merchant-banking house of B. A. Goldschmidt; the Tlalpujahua Company (1828); and the smaller Mexican Company. The Anglo-Mexican Mining Association, or Anglo-Mejicana, as it was called, survived slightly longer, to be dissolved in 1838, the Bolaños and Real del Monte companies struggling on until 1849.12 The United Mexican Mining Association probably survived as long as it did and produced the profits it did because of the strategy of diversified investments that Lucas Alamán had put in place while he was Mexican director. The Unida was beginning to produce dividends for its investors by about 1830, the year Alamán withdrew from the company. His resignation stemmed from his differences with English company officials working with him in Mexico, from his disillusion with the prospects for his enrichment, and from the press of responsibilities arising from his newly assumed government ministry (January 1830). Had he stayed longer he might well have harvested some of the wealth to which he aspired. A close account of Alamán’s involvement with the Unida illuminates not only his talents and aspirations but also the political culture, economic environment, and state policies of the young Mexican republic. The story knits together across the Atlantic the peripheral capitalism of Mexico with the Britain fast gaining fame as “the workshop of the world” and its position as the major capital exporter of the nineteenth century. To Lucas Alamán the conservative modernizer nothing seemed more plausible at this moment of risk and promise in the life of the young republic than to return the mining industry to

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the robust health that had made New Spain an object of general cupidity. But the very considerations that directed Alamán’s hopes outward—the underdeveloped condition of the Mexican economy, the weakness of state capacity insofar as domestic economic stimulus was concerned, the lack of technical expertise in the country, and obstacles, chiefly geographical and infrastructural, to the circulation of goods and services—proved to impede the full utilization of the foreign capital that flowed into the country in the second half of the 1820s. The disappointments produced by the Unida episode demonstrated to Alamán that what were essentially palliative measures intended to modernize an old economic sector by half measures via the injecting of massive capital infusions and new technologies, important though that sector was, would at best produce indifferent results. Some of these limits on modernization were overcome by the Porfirian regime sixty or eighty years later. To suggest that Mexico was not yet ready for modernization in Alamán’s time is to say both a good deal and very little at the same time. But for the moment optimism ran high on both sides of the Atlantic.

A Hectic Boom: British Investment in the 1820s and the Foundation of the Unida The potential profitability of the industry was substantially a matter of mythologizing and wishful thinking, considerably overestimated. Up to 1810 the colony’s mines poured forth legendary riches that made some Mexican mineowners lavishly wealthy, propelled the economy of New Spain, and seduced the Spanish crown into overextending itself militarily. By the eve of the independence struggle Mexican silver amounted to about two-thirds of the world’s total production of the precious metal, the three thousand or so registered mines in New Spain employing about forty-five thousand Mexican workers. Although there is some controversy over mining production data and the interpretation of trends, a precipitous fall began in 1810, so that the levels of 1810–40 were approximately equal to those of the mid-eighteenth century. According to Lucas Alamán’s figures, silver production in Guanajuato alone had fallen by about 75 percent between 1809 and 1818.13 Production at the fabled Valenciana mine in his native Guanajuato reached its nadir in the years 1825–28, precisely when the United Mexican Mining Association was investing heavily in the district. Although the mine enjoyed a relatively consequential recovery in the early 1830s, even then it returned only to the level of 1820, far below production results on the eve of the insurgency.14 One observer of

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this was Joel R. Poinsett, who passed through Guanajuato in November 1822, noting the “melancholy effects of the late civil wars” in the form of dilapidated buildings among the still handsome houses in the city. The great Valenciana mine he described as being ruined, its former population of twenty-two thousand workers reduced to a mere four thousand. Sharing the Veta Madre ore body with the Valenciana were the Cata workings, one of the so-called principal mines of the district and the pit from which the Busto, Alamán, and other family fortunes had been drawn. Poinsett wrote of these mines that “they are now nearly filled with water, and are but partially worked.” Putting his finger on precisely the problems that all pursuers of mineral fortunes were to grapple with over succeeding years, the American traveler continued, “The state of these mines is deplorable. The expenses of working them have already been prodigiously augmented by the depth of the shafts and prolongation of the galleries, and it will require a large capital to establish . . . pumps to extract the water. In many instances it will be impossible to employ steam as the moving power, from the great scarcity of fuel.”15 Investment in Mexico was but a single example, however, of a general frenzy that seized British capital markets in the first half of the 1820s. Between 1824 and 1825, 624 joint stock companies were established in Britain with a total authorized capital of £102,781,600.16 This was equivalent in 2010 sterling values to about £6.6 billion, a staggering sum.17 Humboldt’s Political Essay played a major role in sparking interest as speculators and entrepreneurs beat the drum for investment in Mexican mining. Humboldt was thought to provide detailed information regarding the mining districts targeted for investment. Never mind that the information it contained was a quarter century old or that the intervening decades had seen enormous, generally unfavorable changes in the Mexican economic sphere, above all, in mining: Humboldt’s book was nevertheless a sort of holy text. Another vital element in the rapid development of the London market for Latin American mining shares was publicity, where Lucas Alamán’s name figured more prominently than any other apart from Humboldt’s. Much of the publicity was propagated by word-of-mouth stories from one investor of large wealth to another. Many of the most respected British newspapers and periodicals, among them the Morning Chronicle, the London Times, and the Quarterly Review, paid a good deal of attention to Latin American affairs, emphasizing the potential of investment in Mexican, Peruvian, Colombian, Brazilian, and even Haitian mines. Not untypical of the sort of tub-thumping about the money to be made in Mexico, often steeped in the romantic exoticism and extravagant

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political tropes attached to the “land of the Montezumas,” was this passage from one of the catalogs published by the museum entrepreneur William Bullock for the exhibition of Mexican antiquities at his Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1824: “Mexico, the unreal El Dorado of Elizabethan times, seems destined to become, in our day, really what it was pictured centuries ago. It has obtained a distinct political existence; its long-riveted chains, and its long-endured slumbers, have broken; it starts and struggles at first . . . there is the confusion of the waking; but there is also the riches and the strength of nature, which need but to be cherished in order to convert a poor powerless province into a wealthy and mighty empire.”18 The mining companies hired writers to sing the praises of the mining sector in general and their own concerns in particular. Among the works of this sort whose authorship can be traced, one of the most interesting involved the young Benjamin Disraeli and the mining promoter John Diston Powles. The Danish-born Powles (1787–1867) was chairman of the London-based merchant firm Herring, Graham, and Powles, which had substantial interests all over Latin America, especially in Colombia. He hired the young Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) as a flack to promote the concern’s interests in mining, probably while the future statesman and novelist was pursuing his abortive legal studies in Lincoln’s Inn at about the age of twenty. In 1825, at the height of the investment boom, Disraeli anonymously wrote three long pamphlets, at least two of them printed and distributed by the famous literary publisher John Murray (1778–1843). At about this time Powles, Disraeli, and Murray also established a newspaper together, The Representative, dedicated to flogging the interests of the Latin American mining concerns and supporting political candidates, among them George Canning, sympathetic to the fledgling Latin American states and their mines. When the mining bubble burst, it took Powles down with it, loaded Disraeli, who had also invested in the Powles firm, with debts that shadowed him for the rest of his life, and cost other investors dearly, among them Simón Bolívar. The financial problems faced by Disraeli arising in part from this dèbâcle turned him to the pursuit of literature to earn a living, beginning with his first novel, Vivian Grey (1826). The most important of Disraeli’s pamphlets—at 135 pages a short book, really— An Inquiry into the Plans, Progress, and Policy of the American Mining Companies, third edition, with considerable additions (London: John Murray, 1825), began on a portentous note: “Among the undertakings of the present age, paramount in importance for the magnitude of the interests, which are involved in their management, may be ranked the American Mining Compa-

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nies” (7). Although many of the American projects—later in his account he included among these the Poyais scheme of Gregor MacGregor, not strictly a mining enterprise—had proved fraudulent, many others were genuine and had produced such “brilliant expectations [that] we should almost be tempted to believe . . . Eldorado [sic] was no longer an idle dream” (8). Disraeli wrote in a confident voice of the geography, economic structure, potentialities, and technical aspects of the American mines, establishing his authority through his claims of objectivity as against the “wild conjectures” (8) in circulation at the time, even though he had never set foot in the New World. He wrote of the backwardness and inefficiency of the mines in Mexico and elsewhere, not to discourage investors but to induce the belief that European capital and expertise could bring forth great wealth if applied strategically. Disraeli devoted singular and favorable attention to the United Mexican Mining Association, and to “Don Lucas Alamán, late a representative in the Spanish Cortes for Guanajuato, [who] had been associated with the company, and was to be appointed President of the Mexican Board of Management” (38). In glossing recent debates in the Mexican Congress over the tax and ownership status of foreign investment in the country’s mines, Disraeli wrote, “We must also remember that Alamán, one of the most influential men in Mexico . . . is now a leading member of the Mexican administration” (51). In the final pages of the work he quoted Alamán’s ministerial reports extensively. Disraeli obviously intended to create a sort of halo effect radiating out from the Mexican’s absolute integrity, talent, and wide knowledge of the mining industry.19 In a passage of truly Disraelian literary flair, the future British prime minister evoked the way in which the speculative fever in mines had spread in Britain: Then began the game. We heard of Lord Knows-Who lounging upon ‘Change, of Sir Frederick Fashion’s Colombian curricle, and of the Honourable Mr _____ condescending to become a Director of ‘the New Company.’ The mines were la chose; they were the sujet at concerts, conversaziones [sic], and clubs . . . and the hebdomadal assemblé of ‘the Athenaeum’ diversified their usual topics of conversation, strictures on modern literature, and their own execrable wines, by an occasional inquiry ‘after the state of the market.’ . . . A mining story was as regularly expected [among those dining out] with the second glass of Johannisberg, as a dissertation on the operatic legalities, or the latest piece of scandal served up with the sauce piquante . . . of modern exaggeration,

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and jeweled beauty listened, if not to tales of ‘Africa,’ at least ‘to golden joys.’ After continuing in this vein for a while, Disraeli circled back around to Lucas Alamán “to show, that the present state of the Mexican mines arises only from the revolution of 1810, which to borrow the words of Alamán ‘ . . . began in the districts in which the richest mines are situated, and their proprietors were the first victims. . . . ’ The mines [Alamán] observes, ‘are the fountain of the true riches of this nation; and whatever some speculative economists have said against this maxim has been victoriously refuted by experience.’ ”20 The tide of optimism that was to bear all this ill-fated British investment to Mexican shores began with a modest diplomatic wavelet. Immediately in the wake of New Spain’s effective separation from the Spanish Empire, the ink on the Treaty of Córdoba (24 August 1821) barely dry and the throne of Mexico scarcely warmed by the imperial derriére of Agustín I (his coronation took place on 21 July 1822), fully two years before formal recognition was to come, the British Foreign Office under the leadership of George Canning began to explore the possibility of recognizing Mexican independence. Canning sent as confidential and unofficial emissary to Mexico Patrick Mackie (discussed in chapter 9 in connection with the London loans of 1823–25), a Glaswegian physician about whom little is known. Apparently he had lived in Mexico previously and claimed to know a number of the major political players in the immediate postindependence years, among them Agustín de Iturbide and the future president Guadalupe Victoria. Although dubious of Mackie’s claims, Canning nonetheless dispatched him to Mexico late in 1822 to open discussions about diplomatic recognition with Iturbide’s government; he stayed for much of 1823. The emissary was instructed by Canning to remit observations concerning the stability of the political situation, the disposition of the Mexican leadership to establish friendly diplomatic and commercial relations with Great Britain, and whether British commercial agents who came to reside in the capital or the country’s port cities would be received well and guaranteed their full civil rights. The Glaswegian arrived just a few months short of Iturbide’s fall and the assumption of the government’s reins by the SPE. Exceeding his instructions from Canning, Mackie sought meetings with Guadalupe Victoria, facilitated by Alamán, then in the ministry. Four of these encounters took place during July and August 1823, during which discussions (unauthorized from the British side) took place regarding diplomatic recognition. News of Mackie’s freelance activities prompted Canning to repudiate and recall him

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and to send in his place formally accredited British agents. One of them was Henry George Ward, who arrived in Mexico late in 1824 and was officially accepted as His Britannic Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires in May 1825.21 Aside from the wealth that the regeneration of mining might produce in the country, from the standpoint of Mexican leaders there were a number of political reasons to encourage foreign investment in the sector. First, there were the taxes that would accrue to the national treasury. Moreover, by creating external stakeholders in Mexico’s sovereignty and political integrity, foreign investment would naturally encourage diplomatic recognition by European sovereign states in the face of Spain’s obstinate refusal to do so and of the continuing threat of Spanish attempts at reconquest.22 Finally, the Monroe Doctrine was enunciated at the end of 1823 in President James Monroe’s annual address to the US Congress, and Alamán certainly envisioned the British as a counterweight to burgeoning American power. The Mexican statesman’s growing predilection for British-style constitutional monarchy over American democratic republicanism, or failing that a highly centralized republic, drove him during his career to keep the British connection strong, beginning with sovereign loans and private investment. Before foreign capital could flow into the mining sector, however, some roadblocks had to be cleared away, and this Lucas Alamán set about doing immediately upon his assumption of the ministry in 1823. The revival of his own family fortunes with the Cata mine in Guanajuato seems never to have been far from his mind. He had been the main drafter of a measure presented in 1821 by the Mexican deputies in the Spanish Cortes proposing the reform of the tax structure of silver mining as well as instituting changes in the Mexican Tribunal de Minería. When Alamán took up his first ministry he renewed his effort to facilitate the entry of foreign investors into the Mexican mining industry. The legislation eventually enacted permitted foreigners to contract with mineowners investments of all kinds for the rehabilitation of existing mines.23 These initiatives provoked a surge in economic nationalism and some resistance in congress, where a sellout of Mexican natural wealth to foreigners was alleged. The mining tribunal that oversaw mineral extraction activities was abolished in 1826, after Alamán left the ministry, in accordance with liberal notions anathematizing special tribunals. The path had now been cleared legally for foreign capital to attempt the revival of Mexican silver mining. In his Historia de Méjico, Lucas Alamán wrote, “The greatest things often proceed from an insignificant or casual beginning, and thus it was with the United Company for the development of the Mexican mines, after whose

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example the other [companies] were formed.”24 The prehistory of the United Mexican Mining Association is shadowy. The concern was built on the ruins of the Franco-Mejicana company, which Alamán had established in Paris in the early months of 1822 with French partners but lamentably few investors, as we have seen. About the middle of 1823 he made contact with the merchant-banking firm of Hullett, which was convinced to act as English agents for the sale of Franco-Mejicana shares in Britain as soon as a prospectus and shares could be printed.25 The reluctance of English investors to buy shares of the French company, however, reflected not only concerns about the solidity of the company itself and about the feasibility of mining operations in Mexico but also anti-French sentiments. In a letter to Alamán of October 1823 his Hullett correspondent put the difficulties with the Franco–Mejicana into the context of British anti-French feelings: “Nonetheless, we confess to you that our efforts to stimulate the sale of shares have encountered many grave difficulties, born in large part from the concerns of the English public, which has a repugnance to enter speculations under French direction, and would have preferred the name of the company to be [simply] the ‘Mexicana.’ ” Hullett Brothers had tried a number of tactics to “humor English worries” about the Franco-Mejicana, emphasizing Alamán’s on-the-scene involvement, describing him as “the master key to the whole building.”26 While interest in the French company remained tepid, a new mining company, the Anglo–Mexican, was established in London under the directorship of a mysterious figure named John Dollars, attracting much favorable attention from British investors. So the Franco-Mejicana was abandoned and trading in its shares suspended in late 1822 and early 1823. The idea for the United Mexican Mining Association—“uniting” French and British capitalists but effectively pushing aside the former—originated among the Hulletts. The French concern of Vial, Alamán y Compañía was dissolved, and Alamán’s French partners, in exchange for monetary compensation, renounced any claims they might make against the new company, in which Alamán was absorbed as a director. The initial offering of six thousand shares was snapped up by British investors and the first installment of five pounds per share paid in immediately.27 Those associated with the newly established company—the English directors, the auditors, the bankers of Hullett—were all “men of the first rank in society.” The United’s Court of Directors consisted of twelve men, two of whom were partners in the firm of Hullett Brothers. The social, political, and economic prominence of many of these companies’ directors was notable. The United Mexican Mining Association’s own board included

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Sir John Easthope (1784–1865), a successful stockbroker, newspaper owner, and a liberal MP during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Serving at the same time was Thomas Masterman, almost certainly the distinguished naval commander Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy (1769–1839), Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flag captain at the Battle of Trafalgar (fatally struck down by a French sniper, among Nelson’s last words were, “Kiss me, Hardy”). Hardy had some experience of Spanish America, having commanded the British navy’s South American station from 1819 to 1824, charged with interdicting any Spanish threats to the newly independent Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. Another member of the board, shortly to become more distinguished as a notorious debtor than a successful public figure, was Rowland Stephenson (1782–1856). Born at sea between Florida and England, he became a banker in London and was elected a Tory MP in 1826, at about the time the United was being organized. His bank collapsed under the weight of unsecured loans in 1828, plunging him into bankruptcy. Fleeing to Savannah, Georgia, briefly jailed in debtors’ prison in New York, and evading extradition, he lived out his days on a rural estate in Pennsylvania.28 Alamán’s own title in the concern would be presidente de la junta de administración de México. The junta was to be composed of Alamán and two Englishmen jointly selected by him and the London directors and sent out to Mexico. Capital calls for the present would amount only to £5 of the £40 face value of the shares until the organization of the company in Mexico was completed. Should initial indications under Alamán’s directorship prove favorable, the remaining capital would be called in, while the English directors reserved the right to offer further shares for sale in future. For the present, capitalization would remain at £200,000 (about a million Mexican pesos), with a reserve fund of £40,000. Alamán’s compensation entitled him to a one-eighth share of any profits above 10 percent of the invested capital. His role in the United was thenceforth to be that of both shareholder and salaried employee, albeit one of enormous authority and influence. He held his ministry in the national government, with interruptions, between April 1823 and October 1825. The salary element proved a somewhat delicate issue, since the payment of a salary by a foreign company to a high government official might prove unseemly (it did) and was almost certainly illegal. Competition was stiff among British companies eager to invest in the mines of Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and Real del Monte, and they fell over each other to secure contracts with Mexican mineowners, making aggressive action essential to success. The cutthroat rivalry between the United Mexican

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Mining Company (later Association) and the Anglo-Mexican Company, another London-based concern, was not in itself due primarily to the efforts of either group to corner opportunities but rather to the questionable ethics of the mysterious John Dollars, the Anglo-Mexican’s director, and his associates. The backers of the Anglo-Mexican “directed against it [the Unida] maneuvers [maniobras] that seemed to have as their objective to suffocate [the company] at birth.” Rumors were propagated in the London press that the Anglo-Mexican was based on preexisting contracts with Mexican mineowners, an advantage the Unida lacked and that would have attracted to its rival a disproportionate amount of investment capital. The intention here was to reduce potential investors’ confidence that the United Mexican Mining Company could operate successfully in a Mexican environment.

The Unida in Operation Lucas Alamán’s codirectors on the Mexican end of the United Mexican Mining Association were to be Arthur David Louis Agassiz, generally referred to as Louis Agassiz, and William Glennie; Agassiz arrived first, Glennie some time later. According to Hullett Brothers, Agassiz (no relation, it appears, to the famous geologist and paleontologist of the same name) was “a respectable and knowledgeable merchant,” for many years the head of a trading company with connections in the major economic centers of Europe and the Americas but with no experience in mining. He had traveled in Spain and Spanish America and spoke Spanish. The directors intended him to be a sort of liaison between Alamán and the British directors in all operations “requiring tact, good judgment and commercial experience,” and he was to act as treasurer of the Mexican operations. Agassiz was on his way to Mexico—he arrived around the end of May 1824—even as final documents for the establishment of the United Mexican Mining Association were being reviewed by the lawyers in London. Arrangements to draw on company funds for Mexican operations were still incomplete, but Lucas Alamán was beginning to order specialized refining equipment and chemicals from Paris and London. William Glennie, the third codirector, was a slightly younger contemporary of Alamán’s descended on one side from a landed Oxfordshire family. Glennie (1797–1856) had made his early career in the Royal Navy as an engineer. After his stint in Mexico he would work briefly under the direction of the famous English railroad and marine engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, specifically on the Box Tunnel on the Great Western Railway in England, the longest railway tunnel

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in the world at the time of its completion in 1841. Glennie remained a director of the Unida at least as late as 1834, several years after Alamán had quit the concern.29 While the first of Alamán’s codirectors was on his way to Mexico, the Unida investors back in London were close to ratifying the establishment of the company, and a series of complicated financial arrangements were being carried out by Hullett Brothers to get cash flowing to underwrite the expenses Lucas Alamán was incurring on its behalf. By May 1824 news of Alamán’s resignation from the government at the end of the previous month had reached London. The timing of Alamán’s resignation in relation to the establishment of the Unida suggests that he relinquished the post to devote his energies exclusively to the company’s affairs. And while the Hulletts and the directors of the Unida may have felt they had reached a truce with the Anglo-Mexican Mining Company, their principal Mexican director clearly did not. Now out of office for the moment and perhaps therefore feeling himself free as a private citizen of the need for discretion, he wrote of the mining companies in May 1824 to his friend Francisco Borja Migoni in London. He communicated his view of the relationship of the foreign firms’ prospects to the political situation in Mexico and his feelings about Iturbide: [I have had a letter] informing me of the dissolution of the unhappy Compañía Franco-Mexicana and the establishment of the new United whose management I am charged with. . . . I hope for an outcome all the happier since the mismanagement and ignorance with which the interests of Dollars’s [company] and the bad reputation and ill fame of the people contributing to its formation will [allow] us soon to surpass it. [The economic prospects of Mexico] have taken on an encouraging aspect with the promising hopes presented by the [English] loan and the mining companies. God grant that Iturbide does not get it into his head to come and cause new problems, as I do not doubt he intends in view of the letter to [the Mexican] congress of which I spoke to you in my previous letter! Renew your vigilance of him, since [his return] is the only thing that can interfere with our [promising] situation.30 Lucas Alamán plunged immediately into the operations of the Unida, characteristically assuming a role at all levels of the operation. In his capacity now as Mexican manager of the Unida, Alamán had taken steps to sign contracts with several mineowners, fully aware that his prestige would ease the way. The day before he returned to his ministry (15 May 1824) he wrote, “We will

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not be wanting for contracts and the reputation I enjoy in this country means that they [the mineowners] will prefer me [to any other contractor].” Pressing the London directors to increase the capital of the Unida, he wrote that while a million pesos might be sufficient for the moment to carry on the operations of the company, more would certainly be required later. He was involved in negotiations with the owners of the Valenciana, whose rehabilitation, because of its size, might well absorb the capital that could be invested in six or eight smaller mines. But the Valenciana was so famous an enterprise that when it became known that the Unida had contracted to invest in it, this fact alone would, in Alamán’s words, “augment the credit” of the company. However the increase in capitalization and the transfer of funds was achieved, these were crucial tasks since the Mexican mineowners wanted to see cash immediately; for lack of capital, the Dollars contracts were already shriveling. Descending to more detailed questions, Alamán wrote that steam-driven pumps for draining deep-shaft mines were not practical in Guanajuato or Zacatecas because of the lack of fuel, while horse-drawn winches had generally been successful. Equipment, sulfuric acid, and an expert—perhaps recommended by “my friend” William Wollaston—with the knowledge to apply them to the separation of gold from silver, he advised, should be sent from Paris. Alamán also informed the Hullett Brothers that he was about to return to his ministry after a hiatus of only about three weeks, expressing an optimism about Mexico’s prospects that would progressively fade over the coming years: “The energy the government is displaying and the [fiscal] consistency that the [new London] loan provides will affirm the [more stable] order of things. I am being urged to return to the ministry and I will have to do it very soon; I am only detained by some personal considerations. This will not damage the company and because of it [the Unida] can count on the support of the government.”31 Generally speaking, Alamán took care to avoid conflicts of interest, or at least the appearance of such impropriety, either between his own affairs and those of the Unida or between the company and the government while he was in it. Still, he certainly was not above envisioning how his position at the heart of the national government might benefit the interests of the company. There is evidence that he may have cut some financial corners at other times in his life. The question therefore arises as to how impervious the firewall actually was that he tried to build between the United Mexican Mining Association’s more generalized interest in a great number of Mexican mines and his own particular stake in Guanajuato’s Cata mine.32 Barely had the dust settled from the collapse of the Franco-Mejicana and the first course of the Unida’s founda-

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tions been laid in 1824 when Alamán’s intense interest in the rehabilitation of the Cata mine surfaced. In May of 1824 he noted in a letter to his Hullett correspondent that an Englishman named Mornay was working to rehabilitate the Cata, in which don Lucas and other members of the Alamán family held shares. He was almost certainly referring to the Yorkshireman Aristides Franklin Mornay (1779–1855), who was also involved in negotiations with the Conde de Valenciana to drain and bring back into production his great enterprise. Alamán remarked to the Hulletts, “I have said I have a share in the Cata mine, and this circumstance would have [prevented] me from ever contracting to rehabilitate it on the account of the [Unida] company so that it might never be said that I had employed [company] funds to my own benefit; but since it has already [begun to be] rehabilitated by Mornay, I could not have this hesitation.”33 Perhaps in response to the frankness of this and other letters—his repeatedly disparaging remarks about John Dollars, for example—Alamán’s Hullett correspondent suggested discreetly to the Mexican director of the Unida that “in future all your reports to the Court of Directors or the Secretary should be of an official nature and without any reference to what you may direct to us in [other] familiar and friendly letters, since anything communicated to the Directors is archived and can lead to consequences. . . . [O]ur correspondence should be perfectly private. . . . At the same time you may remain completely persuaded that we will never abuse your frankness and that we will make use of all your reports with prudence and discretion.”34 Just how Mornay’s activities meshed or conflicted with those of Alamán and the United Mexican Mining Association is far from clear. Mornay seems to have been an engineer or a merchant, while he is sometimes identified as a mineralogist. Given the role he was to play in the Guanajuato mining industry he probably possessed experience, if not expertise, in all three activities. He was a partner in the commercial firm of Herring, Graham, and Powles, the London-based merchant concern with substantial interests in mining companies all over Latin America.35 The firm was behind the Colombian Mining Association, headquartered in Bogotá, established in about 1825 to revive the gold mines of Colombia. It also represented Colombia’s British creditors, had a contract with the Colombian government for a colonization scheme, and was involved in mining ventures in Brazil and Chile. Partner Charles Herring Jr. was superintendent of the company’s operations in Brazil and served on the executive boards of concerns in Mexico and Chile. The director of mining operations in Brazil between 1824 and 1827 was Robert Stephenson (1803– 59), the son of the famous English railway entrepreneur and inventor George

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Stephenson. Powles served on the board of directors of the Anglo-Mejicana, while Captain James Vetch managed mines in Real del Monte and Bolaños, served on the board of the Anglo-Mejicana, and was for a time associated with the United Mexican Mining Association.36 Much like these other British firms, the Hullett Brothers had more eggs in their investment basket than just mining investments in Mexico, interests that pulled them to the very center of British policy toward the newly independent Spanish American states. These relationships included investments and commercial connections in the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata and Chile, at least, although the firm profited more in Mexico than elsewhere. Among Alamán’s large problems in managing Unida operations in Mexico were his efforts to diversify Unida holdings in the mining sector, the uneven progress of the Cata rehabilitation specifically, the lack of competent technical expertise in the actual mining operations themselves, the political condition of the country, and the key but unforeseen difficulty of obtaining cash to finance day-to-day operations. The scarcity of cash operating funds was due to the many domestic mining firms all trying to borrow at the same time, and not even the more highly capitalized British or American merchant houses in Mexico City could be expected to fill the gap for long—that is, lend them funds based on credit with London firms. The most efficient way to maintain liquidity on a daily basis, Alamán suggested, was for the Unida in London simply to send cash through Veracruz or the port of Alvarado—although there were attendant risks, as he well knew, of bandit attacks on the roads. Short of operating funds or not, Lucas Alamán was forging ahead with plans to diversify the investments of the United Mexican Mining Association, a strategy that served the company well in subsequent years, even if Alamán himself was not the beneficiary of it. In keeping with his personal priorities and the fact that the Cata constituted the Unida’s primary foothold in the rich mining district of his birth, Alamán moved more quickly to get the enterprise into production again even while opening discussions with other miners in the region. The major problem with almost all the larger mines at this time, both in Guanajuato and elsewhere, was the flooding that had followed when they were abandoned during the insurgency. This not only made the working of the deep shafts and tunnels impossible but also rotted timber supports and other elements essential to productivity (the major concern) and the safety of workers (a lesser concern). By early summer of 1824 Alamán had three hundred horses powering the winches draining the Cata, with four machines (horse-powered capstans and

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lifting buckets) in operation and a fifth under construction. Despite his heavy official responsibilities he must have overseen much of this work personally during his frequent visits to Guanajuato. Alamán hoped to reduce water levels by as much as four or five varas (twelve to fifteen feet) per week. By about late August promising ore from newly drained areas of the Cata was being excavated, there was a refining plant (hacienda de beneficio) in operation, and he expected that by the end of September silver would be produced. Despite these optimistic assessments Alamán insisted that the technical personnel available in Mexico, including mining engineers, refining experts, experienced builders of waterwheels, men versed in the sulfuric acid technique of separating gold from silver, and other trained men, were woefully inadequate both in numbers and expertise for the scale of operations he envisioned. His recommendation was that such people be recruited from Freyberg, in Saxony, as soon as possible by Hullett Brothers. Henry Ward’s remarks on the Cata around this time, based on observations he made as he toured Mexico’s mining districts during 1826, comport closely with Alamán’s. In Guanajuato Ward’s chief contact was Domingo Lazo de la Vega, the Unida administrator there, who was to continue a personal friendship and business relationship with Lucas Alamán for many years after the dissolution of the United. “One of the oldest [mines] in the district,” wrote Ward, the Cata had acquired its fame at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it was worked together with the Mellado, now being operated by the Anglo-Mexican Company, by Francisco Matías de Busto, who took from it his large fortune and the title of Marqués de San Clemente. Occupying a large site, the mine reached a depth of 360 varas (nearly 1,000 feet). Ward observed that it had been drained and put back into operation within fourteen months, at a cost of no more than 225,000 dollars (i.e., pesos), which comes close to Alamán’s calculations. While Lazo de la Vega and Alamán believed unshakably in the mine’s potential, Ward reported that local public opinion considered it exhausted and any attempt to revive it senseless. The Englishman commented, “From this, however, no conclusion can be drawn, since the same has been said of many other famous mines when their first great bonanzas had ended.” He expressed the hope that the name of the Cata might be added to the glittering list of silver mines that had been brought back into substantial production, among them the Quebradilla in Zacatecas and the Pabellón (and Veta Negra) in Sombrerete.37 The Cata mine’s history over the next few years exemplifies many of the problems Alamán and his English backers faced in reviving the Mexican mines. The

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Cata was the first mine in Guanajuato to benefit from Unida avíos: at least 157,000 pesos had been invested in the Cata alone by the end of 1825, about half the amount spent in the Rayas, and perhaps another 100,000 or so over the next year. But despite the fact that it was producing promising ores even in the early phase of its rehabilitation, yielding to the end of 1825 about a 21 percent return, drainage operations were not concluded until March or April of 1826, nearly two years after they had begun. Alamán’s report to the Court of Directors of early 1826 noted how the successful operations at his family’s mine were achieved in the face of considerable problems involving not only the scarcity of qualified personnel but also the application of modern mining techniques. He made a case for the use of “appropriate technologies,” seemingly backward but well adapted to Mexican conditions, and touched on the problems of modernizing large-scale industrial operations in early nineteenth-century Mexico generally: The draining of Cata is to me the clearest demonstration, that in this country, until we have better roads, iron foundries, and many other material resources, the machines commonly employed, although very imperfect, are notwithstanding preferable, except in some particular cases, to those which might be substituted for them from Europe. . . . You know the time that has been employed in draining, and consequently are in possession of the data necessary to compare the system that has been followed, [and] with the consequences that would have resulted if a steam engine had been employed. Consider the cost of [a steam engine] of a power equal to four whims briskly worked; the expenses and enormous difficulties of conveyance from Vera Cruz to Guanajuato [and other difficulties]; and the conclusion appears to be, that if this method had been adopted in Cata, much more money would have been expended, and perhaps not a drop of water would at this time have been extracted. . . . It appears to me that, except in some very rare cases, no other machines should be used in this country, than those which are easily constructed on the spot where they are required. The draining and internal inspection of walls, supporting columns, and timbers completed, many workers and animals were discharged. Ore samples and a plan of the workings were on their way to London, while the management of day-to-day operations was in the hands of his uncle, D. Tomás Alamán. As the quality of ores had improved, the refining operations had passed from an auction system, in which ore was sold at the mine head to independent refiners, to the company’s own facilities.38

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In this same 1826 report Alamán expounded at some length his strategy for the Unida’s activities, framed within the question of whether it was preferable to invest in new mines or old ones. The passage helps to explain some of the choices he made about the company’s diversified investments. But it also offers some insight into his attachment to the Cata mine in particular as he discusses one of the principal activities of his early maturity, the basis of his family’s lost fortunes, and therefore the origin of his drive to recover those fortunes and the powerful influence this motive wielded over his political life: With the formation of English Companies . . . [t]he question has been frequently agitated, whether the working of old or new mines, is the more expedient. Against the first, it is commonly urged, that they required great expense to drain the water and repair the ruins, that their ores have been, in a great part, extracted already, and that those which remain are more difficult to obtain, from the depth at which they are found, and less profitable . . . in proportion to the depth. And it is said of new mines, that the costs are less . . . and there is a probability of obtaining riches that in the old mines have been cleared. . . . The supporters of the [old mine position] argue, that although old mines require large outlay, it is compensated by the immense advantage of finding the essential works already made, such as shafts, levels, offices, etc. [T]he quantity of water is, in many instances, very great, but this being occasioned by the extent of the works, the opportunity is afforded of examining many points of the lode, an advantage not to be had in a new mine, without much time and expense. [I]n a new mine there are as many probabilities of loss as of gain, or more of the former than the latter, since . . . you depend on a mere contingency, whilst in old mines there are wellgrounded inferences for our guide. . . . These are the guides that we have taken, and it is upon these principles that, in Guanajuato, we have acquired an interest in Rayas and Cata, two mines which have been very rich in former times, and which now offer great hopes of being so again.”39 It is not entirely fortuitous that Alamán’s analysis in this passage closely paralleled his evolving philosophy about politics. There are a number of ways one could encapsulate this approach—as a calculation in opportunity costs, for example, or in risk analysis. It is quite clear, however, that he saw the opening of new mines as both costly and risky, with the prospect of returns extremely unsure in proportion to the investment. Old mines entailed certain

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expenses but were already known quantities, the essential works already made—that is, transposing his perception to the political sphere, solid principles established. If one substitutes in the passage just quoted “federalism” or even “liberalism” for new mines and conservative “centralism” for old mines, one hears a distinctly Burkean, and typically Alamanian, formulation. I am not suggesting his attitude about mining investments shaped his political thinking, and still less that his political experiences in his first ministry influenced the strategies he deployed in his Unida projects, but that they both originated in the same source. Lucas Alamán took a political drubbing during the years 1823–25, first at the hands of the federalist chieftains, then from Joel Poinsett and the yorkinos. So it may be that his deeper-lying dispositions about these and other aspects of his life had begun to shift rightward from a more open-minded conservatism, and even a moderate liberalism, toward the pronounced conservatism observable in him by the time he returned to the government in 1830. That change has been misunderstood, I believe, as the politics of reaction. The value of Unida shares (acciones) in London, meanwhile, soared when Alamán’s participation in the enterprise became known. The execution of Iturbide in July, especially, was perceived to have improved the domestic political situation by promising greater stability and playing favorably into Mexico’s diplomatic situation. By the late fall of 1824 Unida shares had attained a face value of £40, and the premium paid to acquire them had doubled in just a few days from £6 to £12, while the Anglo-Mexican premium was at £10/ share. The news that the British government was about to strike commercial treaties with Mexico, Colombia, and Buenos Aires pushed them even higher. By mid-January Unida shares had climbed as high as £160, four times their nominal value of a few months before. The rise in the face and premium value of some other London-based mining companies, on the other hand, was owing more to manipulation by major shareholders than to a real push from investor demand. By the end of the year Alamán had secured a contract for the rehabilitation of the Rayas mine in Guanajuato, remarking, “The dealings of the company continue to prosper even beyond what I could have promised myself.”40 As Unida shares rose in value, at Alamán’s urging the company directors authorized a further £5 call on the committed capital late in 1824. In January 1825 the directors voted to raise the capital ceiling to at least £1 million, and by March to £1,240,000, a five- or sixfold increase that would translate into a fivemillion- to six-million-peso working fund, of which a million pesos would

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make up a reserve. There was to be a proportional increase in the number of shares that Alamán could dispose of in Mexico, which eventually rose to one thousand or more. The Hulletts remarked that “your wise management [of the Unida] has inspired the [confidence of the] public.” They wrote of the continuing frenzy among investors, pondering whether the “extravagant prices [of shares] can be sustained at the cost of men who have more money or greed than judgment.” The directors discouraged Alamán from approaching the Anglo-Mexican Company about a cooperative agreement between the two companies: the deal had “taken on the aspect of a negotiation as complicated and difficult as a treaty of peace or alliance between two nations.” For the moment the project fell through.41 From its very inception the company was entangled in a complex web of international finance, technology, and industrial inputs extending well beyond the London shareholders and the Hullett Brothers firm. In addition to the financial arrangements, this held true of technical knowledge, mining expertise, equipment, and inputs drawn from France, Germany, and Britain. Importing technology in the form of qualified personnel and equipment could be prohibitively expensive. Among the most fascinating problems illustrated by the Unida’s project to rehabilitate the Guanajuato mint were these technological, logistical, and basic material requirements. In a general way they echo parallel problems on the technological side of mining operations themselves, while foreshadowing similar issues that Alamán and other entrepreneurs would face a decade or so later as Mexico pushed further into the industrialization process. Equipment had to be purchased in Europe and, later on, in the United States, but it was expensive, difficult to handle given its weight, bulk, and delicacy and hard to transport over Mexico’s inadequate or nonexistent roads, especially to interior areas like Guanajuato. Lucas Alamán’s plans for the Unida involved not only the production of silver but also the minting of the ingots into coins for circulation within Mexico. This required the rehabilitation of the Guanajuato mint and therefore contracting for its lease from the government. Employing the most modern equipment, the Hulletts estimated, such a minting operation could produce more than 10,500 coins an hour. The estimated capital cost of such a rehabilitation came to about £8,000, including the physical premises, a small steam engine, and so forth. By March 1825 Alamán was given the green light for this project on the basis of a very concrete budget put together along the lines of a similar enterprise in Buenos Aires. In the case of the Guanajuato mint the transatlantic connection was projected to be with the M. R. Boulton firm,

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founded in the English Midlands in the late eighteenth century by the manufacturer Matthew Boulton (1728–1809). In partnership with the famous Scottish engineer James Watt (1736–1819), Boulton manufactured high-quality steam engines used in mining operations worldwide. His Soho Mint produced British coinage on a vast scale for many decades and was considered a model for up-to-date mintage operations. The United Mexican Mining Association thus looked to Boulton for technological expertise and equipment. The estimated cost of the actual coin-stamping machines themselves was reasonable, but the rolling devices to reduce silver ingots (barras), which were three to four inches thick and five to six inches wide, were very high in cost. Rolling mills of less cost and lower power requirements to run them might be employed, but this would mean developing iron molds to produce longer, thinner pieces of silver more readily handled by the machinery. The transport of the coining presses themselves, each weighing up to several tons, presented an even more serious problem. Skittish though the Court of Directors was about the move to vertical integration suggested by Alamán’s mint proposal, they had not hesitated in March 1825 to raise the company’s capitalization to £1,240,000, which somewhat eased the pressure on operating funds Alamán had experienced the first year. Alamán’s share of the company profits would remain at 12.5 percent, while the London directors felt that the salaries and shares of Agassiz and Glennie should also rise with total capitalization. About this time Alamán was complaining that he had had to concentrate so much of his attention on Unida business that his income from other sources dropped, and he was finding it hard to meet his family expenses. In the meantime, shares in the Unida continued to climb in value. Of the 1,000 shares set aside for Mexican investors, Hullett Brothers suggested that Alamán might want to purchase as many as 750 for himself, presumably against his future profits, although then, as now, such operations in the market required a delicate sense of timing. The United Mexican Mining Association occupied a position above the fray through its first years, relatively immune from the internal dissension plaguing other firms and free of legal entanglements or litigation in Britain. This lack of friction was due primarily to the timely increases in its capital at several key junctures, to the general conservatism and solidity of its contracts—for example, its reluctance, finally, to become involved with the Valenciana—and to the expertise, reputation, and political influence of its principal Mexican director. Alamán had returned to the ministry of interior and exterior relations at the beginning of 1825 and was to remain there until September, this time

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in the administration of the independence hero Guadalupe Victoria, now constitutionally elected president and for many years the only head of state to complete his term. Using his position and influence, Alamán helped to quash, for example, a congressional measure proposed by the finance minister José Ignacio Esteva, a Yorquino liberal and Alamán’s political foe, aimed at raising taxes on gold and silver production. The continuing frenzy of speculative investment in the British market produced conditions in which the bad faith of some speculators and moneylenders spawned more undercapitalized concerns and disputes within those that already existed. The Real del Monte Company, for example, had fallen into an internal dispute that could not be resolved within the company and ended up in court. The lord chancellor, Lord Eldon, was reputed to be a great legal scholar but never reached a decision until there was no doubt in any given case, and since these cases were so full of ambiguities he scarcely ever reached a decision. Some of the newer companies went so far as to obtain private acts of incorporation from Parliament. The Hulletts even had an interview with William Huskisson, president of the Board of Trade, asking him to affirm the solid standing of the Unida, which he did. They wrote to Alamán that while other mining concerns were experiencing legal, administrative, and financial difficulties, “in the meanwhile we remain tranquil, trusting in the merit of our establishment,” owing in no little part, they strongly implied, to Alamán’s role at the helm of the enterprise.42

The Picture Darkens As early as the spring of 1825 the overall prospects of mining investments in Mexico had begun to recede, a downturn to which the Unida was not immune. Stock sales of all sorts were slowing, the value of Mexican government bonds had fallen, and a new issue of Unida shares at the end of April saw the premium per share slip, although it had quickly rebounded somewhat. In late May, Migoni in London was lamenting his failure to sell his fifty shares of the United when the price was up to 140 percent of par value since of late it had dropped suddenly.43 This softening of the market notwithstanding, the Unida’s position remained more solid than that of most companies. Ironically, because of this very solidity the Unida was experiencing some difficulties with a sell-off of its shares in the London market. Speculators in the numerous weaker concerns were selling Unida shares to gain some liquidity, causing their value to fall. This more bearish market for Latin American mining shares contributed to the London directors’ reluctance to undertake risky contracts in

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Mexico. The concern’s (i.e., Alamán’s) risk-averse behavior, however, had certain costs in the form of foregone opportunities. Lucas Alamán, meanwhile, continued to deal on a daily basis with a thousand and one details on the technical end of the mining business. Louis Agassiz, in Alamán’s words, was “useless for the mines but works much in the office,” while William Glennie was “highly determined and a hard worker.”44 Certainly Alamán himself was prepared by his background, training, and experience in the industry to handle technical questions, while his personal style consisted of a hands-on approach and a disinclination to delegate to others what he felt he could and should do himself. For the Unida interests in Mexico, among other tasks, he needed to oversee the order of steel from Milan and the Basque country; manage the reception in Mexico and shipment inland of large quantities of mining supplies; and ensure for the refining process a constant supply of mercury, whose price and availability fluctuated considerably. Foreign technical personnel—for example, Hüttenmeister (foundry master) Lauckner from Freyberg—had to be recruited and their demands for payment negotiated through Hullett Brothers as agents. The problem of transporting heavy equipment from the ports of Tampico or Veracruz to Guanajuato and other mining areas caused constant headaches throughout the period and had to be dealt with quickly or the machinery might be lost to rust or other forms of damage. Certain pieces of this equipment, Alamán wrote, “present great difficulty with their transport from the coast since they are very heavy and are hard on the mules, so that the mule-drivers do not want to deal with them.” New technological procedures had to be assessed for their relevance and applicability to operations in Mexico, and the proposals of foreigners filtered through Alamán himself. “Your countrymen,” wrote the Hulletts, “ . . . have long been involved with the nations of Europe, [but] only with time will they learn to distinguish the adventurers [from the] charlatans, of whom swarms have gathered in that capital [i.e., Mexico City]. . . . Here [in London] the directors of mining companies are besieged by schemers who pretend to have invented miraculous processes for the separation of precious metals from ore quickly, with little work, and with little cost.”45 These and other chronic problems plagued the business. There were also reverses. For example, contracts to run various mints had slipped away from the company into other hands, and the contracts for the Mellado, which would end up with the AngloMexican Company, and Frausto mines in Guanajuato were proving almost impossible to pull off. Still, despite the drain on his time of everyday management, Alamán pronounced himself at about this time “very content with the

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state of things [of the company].” And there were some immediate successes on the horizon, such as the mines at Temascaltepec and the assumption by the Unida of all the mining contracts of the Herring, Graham, and Powles Company, a deal completed in August 1825.46 Alamán’s exchanges with his Hullett correspondent at this time reveal that amid the accumulating investment wreckage of other firms, the Unida Court of Directors believed the company’s success to be attributable in large measure to the prestige, social connections, experience, and wise investment strategies of the Mexican codirector, and therefore that he should be handled gently and kept happy. For this reason he was frequently offered more shares of Unida stock at par, though he declined at least one such offer. And although the Hulletts were not above casting mild reproofs Alamán’s way, they were generally very deferential to him. In offering a detailed description of some refining techniques presently in use in Germany and Hungary, for example, the Hulletts almost tripped over their own feet in their deference: “We flatter ourselves that you will pardon our boldness in explaining a technique you will have seen in Europe and that we know only through books . . . and if you will overlook our impertinence, we will not risk again explaining ourselves badly in a foreign language.” Furthermore, the willingness of the Hullett Brothers company to do a series of favors for him not directly related to the mining business grew from their interest in keeping him happy. The firm opened credit lines, for example, for a young relative of Alamán’s wife, Narcisa Castrillo, who had come to Britain to study English; for the son of General Pedro Celestino Negrete, waiting in London at that moment to take up a position attached to the Mexican legation in Rome; and made purchases in Paris, a pianoforte among them, on behalf of the Condesa de Pérez Gálvez, an Alamán family friend. While Lucas Alamán was esteemed, much flattered, and generally cultivated by the Hullett Brothers on behalf of the United’s directors, he nonetheless had to navigate some sensitive issues with the English investors, and they with him. Expressly forbidden direct contact with the Court of Directors, Alamán knew that his most important official link to company officials and the broader investing public was through the reports he wrote, which were regularly published by the United Mexican Mining Association. The accounts had to strike the correct notes of honesty and optimism, while at the same time not raising the hopes of investors unjustifiably. Another matter of some delicacy was the desire of the Unida’s Court of Directors to send more English employees to Mexico to work in the administration of the company. Eventually

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this practice drove a wedge between Alamán and the company, resulting in his severing his relationship with it. It was not foreigners as such to whom Alamán objected, since technical personnel—of a higher order from Germany and at the craftsman level from England—were always coming and going. German workers were preferred, on the whole, because they were cheaper and less presumptuous than Englishmen. But there is a subtle hint in certain passages of Alamán’s correspondence with the Hullett Brothers that he bridled at efforts to thicken the layer of English middle- and upper-level administrative personnel participating in the operation—mostly engineers who often knew little or nothing about mining and even less about Mexico. These men might compromise the Mexican codirector’s autonomy, and their presence suggested to his prickly sensibility a lack of confidence in his leadership. Louis Agassiz was at first an example of this, although in the end his presence was acknowledged as being helpful; and Alamán wrote warmly of William Glennie’s hard work and effectiveness. Still, the board’s decision to send several men so that there would be “at least one trustworthy Englishman in each principal office of the company to watch over [i.e., insure] honest administration” must have rankled the Mexican director.47 Other Englishmen showed up periodically in this same ambiguous capacity. In the winter of 1825, for example, Alamán was informed that Robert Walkingshaw and James Nelson Schoolbred were on their way to Mexico with a group of millwrights, wheelwrights, sawyers, and smiths. The Hulletts suggested tellingly that Walkingshaw be placed in one of the Unida’s principal mining sites, such as Real del Oro or Temascaltepec, to oversee operations there and report directly to London. Little is known about Walkingshaw (1779–1861) except that he was probably a Scot with some previous experience in Buenos Aires. Schoolbred was to serve as an assistant to Alamán and Agassiz, carrying out ordinary correspondence and other mundane duties (and, one wonders, spying), but at some point he went on to become a Unida manager in Zacatecas.48 Both men, as well as the contingent of artisans they accompanied, were explicitly to place themselves under Alamán’s direction. On occasion it looks very much as though young Englishmen were being dumped in Mexico or sent there principally to make their fortunes rather than to further the Unida’s operations, as in the case of a Mr. Woodfield dispatched to work on Alamán’s staff: “He is a young man of talent and good temper, and we assure ourselves that you will find him useful in any position to which you assign him. It would be convenient that he not be sent to a place with an intemperate climate, such as Zacatecas, Durango, or El Chico, since his delicate

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health requires a more benign and temperate one.”49 Whether Alamán was ever consulted about these appointments in advance is impossible to tell but it seems unlikely. Despite the constant reassurances from the Hullett Brothers that these men were to be at the Mexican codirector’s disposition, in the end it was a falling out with some of the high-level English employees of the Unida that provoked Alamán to separate from the company in 1830. It was easier and simpler for Alamán to deal with imported technologies than imported people. Some technological elements could be applied directly, others needed to be scaled down or otherwise adapted, and still others were not applicable under Mexican conditions. The use of sulfuric acid in separating gold from silver (the apartado process) on the basis of techniques developed in Europe was brought to Mexico by the German foundry foreman Lauckner, for instance, and seemed to the Hulletts and Alamán unproblematic.50 On the other hand, there were certain specialized rolled or cast metal parts used in the mining and refining processes that in their normal scale were too heavy for the mules to carry from Veracruz. So they were made in smaller versions in England to accommodate the animals’ strength and the roughness of the roads over which they moved—in other words, technology was adapted by downsizing it. Then there was the application of steam power. Long in use in European factories and now at the point of revolutionizing land transport in the form of the railroad, steam power was held out by many in Europe not only as the avatar of a new age but also as the great hope for the revival of Mexican mining, especially in the draining of flooded shafts. But, as often remarked in Mexico, there were a number of huge problems to be resolved before steam technology could be applied. The first of these was the depth of the shafts; another the lack of suitable fuels in the mining areas to run steam boilers; yet another the enormous costs and difficulties of transporting equipment from Veracruz to Guanajuato or other inland sites on the central Mexican plateau. Alamán’s friend and mentor Baron Alexander von Humboldt, whose status among Mexican intellectuals of the time approached that of a demigod, wrote a letter in 1825 addressing the prospects for the application of steam power to Mexican mining. Addressed to the secretary of the Court of Directors of the Unida from Paris on 3 November 1825, the letter was written in response to some corrections Alamán had made in his report regarding Humboldt’s observations on the Guanajuato mines twenty years earlier: “I have long since expressed my doubts as to the general applicability of steam engines in Mexico, and, I am convinced, that rapid strides may be made in the science of mining, without having recourse to such assistance, by

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rendering more complete the machines at present in use, and by introducing, where the fall of water is considerable, machines à colonne d’eau.”51 The problems of transport are vividly illustrated by the diary of John Buchan, a member of the large group of Cornish miners engaged about this time in moving some fifteen hundred tons of equipment from Veracruz to Real del Monte, in the Pachuca area. The operation took a year, from May 1825 to May 1826 and faced innumerable obstacles, chief among them the inadequacy of the roads. A number of men died along the route from mishaps, yellow fever, and other causes, and when the equipment was finally installed at Real del Monte the results were very disappointing.52

The Long, Slow Cave-In By the end of 1825 much of the enthusiasm of English investors for mining ventures in Mexico and other areas of Latin America had dwindled considerably; the shakeout of British companies had taken only about a year. There were to be ups and downs for the United Mexican Mining Association over the rest of the 1820s. The Unida survived where other concerns failed, but the overall trend line pointed gently downward. It became increasingly apparent that the fortunes of the company’s shares on the London market were more closely tied to the presence of Lucas Alamán as principal director of its Mexican operations than even the initial years of the company’s history could have foretold. As for Alamán’s personal stake in the company, he realized little if anything from the several hundred shares of stock he owned. His efforts to rehabilitate the Cata mine in Guanajuato came to naught, since by the mid1830s the property was again flooded and unworkable, and by the end of the following decade he would write off his interest in the mine as worthless. In general, the unhappy fate of British investment in the Mexican mines seems to have grown out of two converging miscalculations on the part of almost everyone involved: an overestimate of the richness of the silver ores remaining to be worked in 1821 and an underestimate of the costs involved. As early as the fall of 1825 formerly abundant capital was scarce due to the previous rush into investment in Latin America and because stock and currency manipulations in France had attracted great quantities of liquidity to Paris despite the presumable aversion of British investors to things French. The Hulletts predicted that this situation would prevail for some time but were sanguine about Unida share values in particular because they were sustained by high public confidence in the company. Aside from his stake in the

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general health of the United as a government official and thinker in political economy, Alamán had a particular problem: he held some five hundred Unida shares. Although the long-term prospects of the company might be good, in the short term things looked decidedly precarious. His eagerness to sell was likely spurred by the financial outlays involved in his purchase about this time of the Hacienda de Trojes. In later years he regarded this investment as one of the biggest mistakes of his life, but at the time of its purchase it held out the prospect of profit and the diversification of his personal portfolio. Throughout the fall of 1825 Alamán’s correspondence with Migoni and the Hullett Brothers indicates that he was repeatedly advised that this was a bad time to sell company shares and that he ought to wait. While the capital value of the British mining companies traded in London did not exactly go into free fall at the end of 1825, the situation remained dire for the next six months or so, and many a fortune or at least substantial portions of them must have been lost in the downturn. Toward the close of the year Alamán’s departure from the ministry—he left the government on 26 September—was noted by his Hullett correspondent, in the most flattering terms, as bad for Mexico but good for the United in that the statesman could now turn his full attention to the company’s business. The Hulletts also offered a sobering evaluation of the situation of the market for mining stocks, an account now stated with considerable vehemence, along with an implicit warning to Alamán to hold on to his Unida shares a bit longer: A year ago there began in this market the madness in stock speculation for mines, government bonds, and commodities of all kinds, of which the cause in part has been attributed to the abundance of capital. After growing for some months this madness began to calm down, and it appears that at this moment we have arrived at the extreme of weakness and decadence. . . . Daring speculators, committed to amounts [of investment] beyond their capacity, seduced by excessive greed . . . see them [their investments] turn into large bankruptcies. . . . In these circumstances you can well imagine that we have hesitated to accept [for sale] the shares at your disposition . . . since it would have been impossible to sell a substantial number of these shares at a reasonable gain when sellers were abundant and any increase in supply would have reduced the value [even] further. While Alamán was seeking to liquidate his position in Unida shares, he wanted to purchase British or French government bonds. This certainly looks

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like a tactical retreat from the mining company and hardly bespeaks a vote of confidence in the concern’s prospects, although the purchase of the Hacienda de Trojes and his desire to become a member of the landed squirearchy may have been the most important factors. Never one to sugarcoat bad news, especially since he enjoyed Alamán’s confidence, about six weeks later Migoni wrote that both the government bonds of the new Latin American states and the mining company shares “are as low [as if] trampled by horses, which has ruined a multitude of speculators.”53 The entire Unida episode illustrates one of the hallmarks of Lucas Alamán’s personality. If there was a paradox in his character, one might say that he was conservative but not risk averse. Seeking to achieve stasis in any sphere was never his style but rather a rational feeling for the plausible and least disruptive course of action among alternatives. Alamán repeatedly plunged into projects with great initial enthusiasm only to fail in the end, generally as a result of adverse external circumstances, then drawing back from the project with a certain bitterness. In the case of the Unida at this time, although his correspondence betrays a good deal of concern over the progress of certain of the United’s contracts in Mexico, Alamán typically continued to be proactive on the company’s behalf, renewing his efforts to expand the Unida’s business by exploring the possibilities for new contracts. His reasoned conservatism in affairs of state, as in business, led him to find anarchy, as he so often put it, and unreason in the short and intermediate term as well as the possibility for good in the long term, so long as men’s propensity toward error and the violent pursuit of self-interest could be corralled and their energies focused. Whether this attitude of Alamán’s was theological or characterological in origin is a matter for debate—probably it was both; but it seems to have colored his public as well as his private life. It can be argued that one man’s anarchy is another’s assertion of his freedom and that people occupying the high ground of power and the technologies of coercion often are given to characterizing their own motives as disinterested and other people’s as self-interested. But in this light it is plausible to see the statesman’s espousal of strong central authority as a means to mold, in Kant’s phrase, the “crooked timber of humanity” to higher ends. That a strong state—which was in any case beyond his means given the circumstances of his time—lay beyond his reach pushed him in the direction of increasingly illiberal policies to try to bridge the distance; that it would have served the interests of his class was a secondary benefit, though not a negligible one, but not his only motive.

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After leaving the ministry Alamán traveled extensively between November 1825 and February 1826 to check on the status of mines already under contract and to reconnoiter new ones. His principal itinerary included Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Sombrerete and would eventually include Pachuca, Atotonilco el Chico, El Oro, Temascaltepec, and other sites. The latter months of 1825 and the early months of 1826 saw a flurry of activity in the signing of contracts with mineowners. Under Alamán’s stewardship the United Mexican Mining Association would ultimately come to hold contracts on forty-six silver mines (and one of magistral, or copper sulfate, an essential element for refining mercury), thirteen ore refineries (haciendas de beneficio), the mint and the facility for separating silver from gold (casa de apartado) in Mexico City, and an ironworks in the State of Durango. These holdings stretched across the states of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Michoacán, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Mexico, Guerrero, Durango, Chihuahua, and Sonora as well as the Federal District. Although technically separate enterprises, a number of the mines were adjacent to each other, and their subsurface workings were therefore intertwined, while several of them were abandoned as being unproductive at some point in the Unida’s investment history. Still, in variety and number these holdings were more extensive than those of any other British company operating in Mexico at the time.54 Between the end of 1825 and the summer of 1826, while he was engaged in an intense round of activity for the United and in the takeover of his newly purchased Celaya hacienda, Alamán’s relationship with Hullett Brothers and Company seems to have ended. The firm’s place as his personal business agent was immediately filled by Frederick Huth and Company, a very prominent merchant-banking concern in London. What accounted for this change is not clear. Hullett Brothers did not sever its relationship with the United Mexican Mining Association certainly, given that the senior partner John Hullett was still on the Court of Directors as deputy chairman in the spring of 1827. Alamán’s connection with Huth and Company was to last for many years and may have originated with his recently formalized business relationship as administrator of the Mexican properties of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, for whom the firm may have been acting as business agents before Alamán became involved with it. In any case, Alamán’s history with the Unida after August 1826 can be traced through his correspondence with Frederick Huth and Company rather than Hullett Brothers.55 The history of the Huth firm reflects the cosmopolitan nature of British merchant banking in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and Alamán’s involvement with it. The founder of the firm was the long-lived John Henry Andrew

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Huth, born Johann Friedrich Andreas Huth in Harsefeld, Hanover, in 1774. Establishing himself as an apprentice, then a clerk with a Spanish trading house in Hanover, Huth became the company’s agent in La Coruña in 1797 or 1798 and then made at least two extensive journeys to the Americas, touching at Callao, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. Now a man of the world instead of an untraveled young boy from the provinces, he continued working as a trader in La Coruña and in about 1805 married a Spanish woman of very good family but rather mysterious background, a household member of the Duke of Veragua, a descendant of Christopher Columbus. In the wake of the French invasion of Spain, he and his young family fled to London in 1809, where, five years later, Friedrich (now Frederick) Huth and a partner founded Huth and Company. He was naturalized a British subject by act of Parliament and left a prospering business and a large fortune at his death at the age of ninety in 1864. The company had commercial contacts in Spain, Germany, Mexico, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, at least, and survived as a banking concern until its liquidation in the 1930s. Frederick’s eldest son, Charles Frederick (1806–95), eventually partnered in his father’s business, married the daughter of the lord mayor of London, fathered ten children, became a director of the Bank of England, and was to decline a peerage offered him by William Gladstone. A younger son, the peripatetic Henry (1815–78), worked for the family business in a number of cities, including for a time around 1840 in Mexico City, where he surely had contact with Lucas Alamán. Henry eventually became a famous bibliophile, as was his son Alfred Henry Huth (1850–1910), whose biography of the English historian Thomas Henry Buckle (1821–62) is still cited as the standard work on its subject.56 The latter half of 1826, when Lucas Alamán’s correspondence with Frederick Huth—the founder was fluent in Spanish—was increasing in frequency, saw a rebound in the condition of the London market, but it was a trend marbled with risk. Money was abundant once again, confidence reestablished among investors, and speculative investment rampant. But Huth noted the widespread worries about a continuing shakeout of mining companies. By late fall, trade in the United Kingdom was picking up again after the banking crisis of 1825–26, but a number of mining concerns had gone bust. The lack of knowledge among the English directors of many companies, their bad faith in management practices, and their speculation in the shares of their own companies had brought “total ruin to thousands of English families.”57 The best situated concerns, Migoni suggested, were the United, Anglo-Mexican, Tlalpujahua, and Real del Monte.

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The palmy initial days of the United Mexican Mining Association once past, Alamán grew increasingly uneasy about whether there would be sufficient capital to consolidate the gains already made in the Mexican mines, much less advance them into true profitability. The continual ups and downs of the London bond market and the recurrent meltdowns in the British banking system fueled disquiet reinforced by what he must have been reading in the English press. Juxtaposing the political situation in Mexico to a summary of Unida activities in Guanajuato, he described mine productivity as being “highly promising.” But for some reason he failed to see the connection between lack of investor confidence and political instability in Mexico, perhaps because his personal interests were so closely wedded to the fortunes of the Unida. This constituted a sort of blind spot, or perhaps disingenuousness, so that he had a clear vision of political conditions but a fuzzier one of their connections with economic projects and circumstances, at least in the case of mining. In the succeeding three years or so of his association with the United Mexican Mining Association, Alamán’s growing concern, even alarm, with the issue of inadequate capitalization was to be voiced continually, although tempered with optimistic statements about the immediate progress of the company’s multifarious projects. His worries may have been among the factors that led him to separate from the company in 1830.58 Some of the accounting categories enumerated in the financial summaries in his official reports of the later 1820s may seem opaque, but one can arrive at some rough idea of why Alamán felt success was just around the corner. As of the beginning of the second quarter of 1827, the United Mexican Mining Association had forty-two contracts in its portfolio, of which twenty-two were in force, two had not been activated, six were suspended, and twelve abandoned, including the great Quebradilla mine in Zacatecas. Between about mid-1824 and the end of 1826 some of the major Guanajuato mines in the Unida’s portfolio—by no means a complete list—had produced silver in relation to investment as follows (figures rounded to nearest thousand): Guanajuato: Rayas—expenses: 497,000 pesos; production: 91,000 (18.3 percent) Cata—expenses: 271,000 pesos; production: 71,000 (26 percent) Secho—expenses: 92,000 pesos; production: 68,000 (74 percent) In the case of the major Zacatecas mines the ratios are hard to come by, but production figures for the major properties were approximately as follows:

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Zacatecas: San Bernabé—12,851 pesos Loreto—28,224 pesos Malanoche—52,598 pesos Quebradilla—396 pesos (thus accounting for its abandonment) Furthermore, Alamán calculated that on an annual basis some of the mines were showing an improving ratio of production to operational (not initial investment) costs; for the Pabellón and Veta Grande properties in Sombrerete, for example, the ratio was approaching unity. The production figures for Guanajuato were impressive, but taking into account the entire portfolio production was not up to the expectations of English shareholders. As to what Lucas Alamán personally earned, it is unfortunately impossible to tell even approximately what he had netted in salary advances or profits or what he may have invested of his own or borrowed funds. To cite by way of analogy one welldocumented example of expense/income ratios, and of the sort of losses that eventually forced British investors out of Mexican mining, we may look at the case of the Real del Monte Company. Between its establishment in 1824 and its dissolution in 1849, total expenditures amounted to 16,218,490 pesos (just over £3,250,000) and income to 11,139,207 pesos (just under £2,230,000), for a loss of 5,079,283 pesos (slightly more than £1,000,000).59 Despite his optimism about the future, Alamán’s calculations that many of the projects were already paying their operating costs or were close to doing so and his eloquent lectures about the unpredictability of mining costs, the June 1827 report by the Court of Directors in essence turned most of his arguments on their heads. The cost/yield ratio had already exceeded the investment the company was prepared to make. The directors did commit the Unida to one further capital call on existing shares but alerted Alamán that it would be the last. The Unida directors were prepared to issue a further capital call of £2 10 shillings per share, due on 10 July 1827, but by the end of the month they hoped to tell the shareholders that “not only will calls cease, but the treasures of the new world, will reward the enterprise and perseverance of the old.” This sounds like an effort to sugarcoat a bitter pill. The report of a general shareholders’ meeting in London at the end of July 1827, meanwhile, shows an implicit backing away from the Unida’s direct investment in the rehabilitation of Mexican mines. The directors cited as a major factor in the perceived inadequacy of returns on investments the backward technical state of Mexican mining, once again urging investor patience.60 A resolution of thanks was

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tendered to Lucas Alamán “for his zealous attention to the interests of this Association, in Mexico” and “for the ability and integrity manifested by him in the management of its affairs.”

Last Years with the Unida Lucas Alamán was to spend another three years or so actively involved in the management of Unida affairs in Mexico, only to terminate the relationship in ambiguous circumstances but with some acrimony around the middle of 1830, several months after he had returned to the government under Anastasio Bustamante’s presidency. His correspondence with Frederick Huth and other friends during these years includes only general statements about the changing fortunes of the company. Absent periodic reports from the United Mexican Mining Association for this period, the outlines of his activities and the condition of the Unida’s investments in Mexican mines become quite blurred. It is readily apparent, however, that over and above the drying up of capital infusions from London, Alamán felt political conditions in the country to be deteriorating and often noted how this affected mining in general and the Unida’s activities in particular. As 1826 passed into 1827 the Unida continued to bump along despite Alamán’s unremitting concerns about inadequate capitalization. The Real del Monte Company meanwhile was suffering some reverses, and a number of the surviving South American concerns saw substantial decreases in the value of their shares or failed altogether. By early 1827 the British recession of 1826 had passed, the London financial market had returned to a semblance of order, and the imminent ratification of a treaty of commerce between Britain and Mexico was expected to have a positive effect on both political relations and private investment. But during this period the political situation in Mexico was deteriorating, so that news of events there began to obtrude more and more on the attention of British investors. Although the sudden death of Prime Minister George Canning on 8 August 1827 raised little concern that policy toward Mexico would change significantly, the news from Mexico was not encouraging. Frederick Huth wrote in mid-August 1827, “[The situation in Mexico] present[s] an unpromising aspect and inspire[s] little confidence . . . but it appears to us that this state of things cannot last long [little did they suspect], so we hope for something better.” For his part, Lucas Alamán expressed a much darker insider’s view: “The state of this country is truly distressing in every sense, and everyone is fearful of greater calamities to follow.” Nonetheless, Alamán continued to

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send optimistic reports about the Guanajuato mines through early summer of 1828, his favorite term to describe their prospects being “very promising [muy lisonjero].” Even as general economic conditions in Mexico were weakening after the first congressional decree, of December 1827, expelling Spaniards from the country, Alamán wrote that amid “continual signs of turbulence” in the country “only the mines of the United Company present a very promising aspect.” He predicted it would not be long before he could stop drawing on (already called-in) Unida funds at all, since he foresaw that current operations could be supported by production.61 All these challenges to his managerial skills notwithstanding, Alamán had put the projects of the Unida on a reasonably firm footing over the past three years. This meant not only dealing with engineering, administrative, labor force, and financial problems on a day-to-day basis but also accommodating in some manner the constant, low-level tensions inherent in the close proximity of the United’s competitor, the Anglo-Mexican Company, which had contracts embracing both the Valenciana and Mellado mines, while the United Mexican Mining Association was operating the Rayas and Cata, among others. The two companies had inherited a long-standing legal conflict—a “noisy argument [ruidoso pleito]” in the words of one contemporary Mexico City newspaper— that originated before 1810 and was not brought to a close until the summer of 1828, largely through Alamán’s efforts.62 The way this was resolved evokes the importance of the mines in local culture, and Lucas Alamán’s place in it. The dispute concerned the boundaries of the Mellado and Rayas, located along the same lode, and had cost the owners and English companies a good deal of money, time, and lost production over the years. So bitter had the conflict become that workers from the two mines occasionally came to violence. The flooding after 1810 had put a stop to the confrontations, drowning the dispute temporarily without settling it, but the rehabilitation of the past few years had revived it, and attempted intervention by impartial third parties to arbitrate the conflict had come to nothing. A recent recurrence of flooding in both properties was “causing the ruin of both enterprises with enormous detriment to the Anglo-Mexican and Unida [companies] investing in them” with concomitant losses to the economy and public finances of the State of Guanajuato. On 17 July 1828, however, an agreement was signed by the two parties, Alamán on behalf of the shareholders of the Rayas, of whom the principal figure was José Mariano de Sardaneta, ex-Marqués de San Juan de Rayas, and the United Mexican Mining Association; and Antonio Pérez Gálvez, ex-Marqués de Valenciana, and the Anglo-Mexican Company. During the following two days the

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area under dispute was measured and divided by experts representing the two companies and a boundary marker placed. Rejoicing over this happy resolution was general, while according to the press account in El Sol bells tolled in the churches at the mines and fireworks marked the event. On Sunday, 20 July, a Te Deum Mass was sung in the Rayas church with an overflow crowd in attendance, among whom were shareholders, officers of the two English companies, and “many of the principal people of this capital [i.e., Guanajuato].” A band played military tunes, there were more fireworks and bell ringing, and two women placed on the new boundary marker a wreath of laurel intertwined with flowers. The officialdom of the United—with Alamán at their head, one assumes—laid on a splendid breakfast at the Rayas minehead, with some eighty tables seating a “numerous and brilliant” attendance, including the vice governor of the state, several members of the state supreme court, some legislators, the parish priest, Sardaneta and Pérez Gálvez and their wives, other shareholders in the Mellado, the directors of the English companies and their principal employees, and several distinguished figures from Mexico City. An “abundant refreshment of punch and biscuits” was served up for the mine workers. At the height of the proceedings José Mariano de Sardaneta offered a toast to the prosperity of both enterprises, but most especially to the health of Lucas Alamán, whom he described “with much emotion as the conciliator of [the parties].” Alamán offered a toast to the prosperity of both mines, the city, and the State of Guanajuato; a glass was raised to the health of the ex-Marquesa de Rayas, Asunción Busto, a distant cousin of Alamán’s, for her role in forging the agreement; and the officials of the two English companies toasted each other. That evening the Anglo-Mexican Company gave a dance for the shareholders and backers of the Rayas as well as those of the Mellado and the principal citizens of Guanajuato. Although Alamán still traveled frequently back and forth between Mexico City and Guanajuato supervising mining matters in general, more of his prodigious energies were dedicated to his growing family and his recently purchased Celaya hacienda. Also occupying much of his attention were the increasingly complicated affairs of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, which reached a boiling point (but no resolution) in a series of intense public debates with Lorenzo de Zavala and other liberal statesmen during the years 1827–29. Ever since coming to adulthood Alamán had been a political animal. Even as he withdrew from active public life to pursue his economic fortunes after leaving his first ministry late in 1825, he maintained a keen interest in affairs

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of state. In the last years of his involvement with the United his intense focus on matters relating to the mining concern broadened into a delta of thinking about domestic and foreign politics. He derived a great deal of information about European events and about how Mexico was perceived across the Atlantic from his correspondence with Frederick Huth, whom he obviously trusted, to judge by the tone of their letters. Alamán’s persistent juxtaposition of the prosperity of the Unida’s mining enterprise with the chaotic state of Mexican politics illustrates a fundamental theme of his thinking not evident before this. The country’s economic development, whether through foreign or domestic capital investment, was intimately tied to political stability achieved either by natural evolution or imposition—preferably the former, but if not, then necessarily the latter. The half decade of his involvement with the United Mexican Mining Association served as a laboratory for Alamán to work through his thinking about the connection between political and economic life. These were politically charged, violent times in Mexico, and Alamán’s increasingly grim accounts of the national scene invoked the ills of the country. He remarked in the late summer of 1828 that mining was doing well, promising yet again that soon the Unida directors in Mexico would not need to draw any further credit from committed shareholder reserves since the enterprise would be self-sustaining. By contrast, he painted a dark picture of the political situation. Guadalupe Victoria’s presidency was coming to an end amid revolts, riotous political factionalism, and a looming contested presidential election promising yet more political violence. The Plan de Montaño and the associated uprising of December 1827, captained by Nicolás Bravo, had been suppressed by government forces led by Vicente Guerrero and saw Bravo exiled from the country. Joel Poinsett was becoming more and more a public lightning rod, and the York Rite Masons a cohesive political force on the left. The presidential election of 1 September 1828 was just around the corner and would in part provoke the Acordada Revolt and the Parián riots at the end of the year, although neither Alamán nor any other political observer could have predicted those events. He wrote of Mexico’s political troubles, comparing the state of the country with conditions in Europe, to the great disadvantage of the former: “Those who are not witnessing it [directly] will have difficulty in forming an exact idea of the disastrous picture of anarchy, disorder, and misery [we are seeing], without any expectation of improvement, but rather with the approaching and well-founded fear of greater troubles. In Europe I see that there are also a thousand reasons for worry from the complicated state of things in

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the east . . . and the lack of harmony and stability in the British cabinet. . . . But these are ills of a [quite] different sort than those we suffer here . . . so that [in Britain] credit is maintained, money is abundant, and commerce flourishes.”63 The disputed presidential election of 1828 ultimately brought to power a decidedly left-wing, populist, Yorkist-supported government led by Vicente Guerrero, who was inaugurated as president on 1 April 1829. Initially Alamán had a cautiously optimistic estimate of what might be accomplished by the man in whose judicial murder he was to be implicated less than two years later. Four days after Guerrero’s ascent to his short-lived presidency Alamán wrote again that the Mexican mines, chief among them the Unida’s properties, were the only bright spot in the national picture. But he embedded this brief evaluation in a pessimistic account of politics: “As far as political occurrences are concerned, we have the taking of possession of the presidency of the Republic by Señor Guerrero, who assures [us] that he is well disposed to work for the reestablishment of [public] order and to temper the rigor of the atrocious law of expulsion [of Spaniards] that has so many families in tears. [But] [i]t is to be feared that he may not be able to do everything he wants for lack of resources, since his predecessor [Guadalupe Victoria] had the wit to find this country in a flourishing condition, [of which] now only the skeleton remains, with which it is difficult to do anything.” Scarcely a month later Alamán had reversed his cautious hope that Guerrero might improve the condition of the country: “Here things go from bad to worse, [since] all the promising hopes conceived at one moment for the government of Señor Guerrero [have vanished], giving way to public fears, distrust, and discouragement, and the state of the country is extremely sad. The expulsion of the Spaniards has been effected, with very few exceptions and great cruelty, [bringing with it] the ruin of a multitude of respectable families and the absolute annihilation of the country.”64 Despite brief reversals, these Cassandra-like pronouncements would continue for the rest of his life. The last months of 1829 were a momentous period for Alamán and the nation as a whole, the final month of the year vaulting him again to the center of the national political arena. His activities on behalf of the Unida are thinly documented for these months, but it is clear that he continued in his directorial capacity well past the end of the year. While he was thus occupied, the illfated presidency of Guerrero began to unravel with the declaration of the Plan de Jalapa, issued on 4 December 1829 by Melchor Múzquiz—insurgent, republican, sometime governor of the State of Mexico, congressional deputy, and interim president of Mexico, August–December 1834—and José Antonio

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Facio, shortly to be Alamán’s colleague as secretary of war and navy in the cabinet of Anastasio Bustamante and later accused with him of culpability in the murder of Guerrero. The plan was principally directed against the emergency executive powers granted to President Guerrero by congress to deal with the Spanish invasion earlier in the year, also aiming to defend the federalist system against growing fears of centralism. In mid-December President Guerrero went off to command the army against the pronunciados (rebels), while during the last week of 1829 a junta composed of Alamán and two other men governed the country. This was the closest the talented guanajuatense ever came to becoming president of Mexico, except for a later election in which he was soundly trounced. congress having declared the absent Guerrero unfit to govern, Vice President Anastasio Bustamante assumed the presidency on 1 January 1830, appointing Lucas Alamán secretary of interior and foreign relations on 12 January. Alamán’s plunge into the vortex of Mexican national politics with his return to the ministry after a five-year lapse signaled the beginning of the end of his relationship with the Unida. Under his supervision the Rayas mine in Guanajuato was doing well, although apparently it had not yet produced dividends as such. He does not specifically allude to the Cata mine or to other Guanajuato projects of the company in his later correspondence, but presumably it too was producing at encouraging levels, at least for the present. Despite his disillusion about public affairs and his solemn oaths to himself that he would never again enter the political fray, he was inexorably drawn back into it. Meanwhile, the trajectory of Alamán’s ebbing commitment to the company is documented in his exchanges with Migoni in London, whose letters heavily populate Alamán’s correspondence during the first half of 1830. During these months of his intense political involvement, the United Mexican Mining Association faded more and more into the background, even though news of the successes of some other British mining companies was brought regularly to the minister’s attention. The Veta Grande mine in Zacatecas, for example, now managed by the Bolaños Company, was at last producing prodigiously. Figures from the government’s Registro Oficial, under the editorial control of Alamán’s ministry, indicated that for the calendar year 1829 total expenses for mining operations there had amounted to 1,326,705 pesos and the value of silver extracted to 2,019,862 pesos.65 The considerable decline in the value of Unida shares was a response by the market to the assumption that Alamán would henceforth be preoccupied with affairs of state, “since all the hopes [of the company] depend on your knowledge, labor, and integrity.”66 But all the

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mining companies appeared to be in varying degrees of trouble. Partly this was due to political events over which neither investors nor managers had any control. The July Revolution in France was coming to a resolution with the accession of Louis-Philippe of the House of Orléans in July 1830, King George IV was being succeeded by his younger brother, who would rule for seven years as King William IV, and the French invasion of Algeria was digging in. While all this was happening, the change in the Mexican government and Lucas Alamán’s role in the new regime became widely known and celebrated among the European powers “due to the confidence it inspires, so contrary to the situation with the previous government.” But this confidence did not extend to the Mexican mines despite Alamán’s repeated assurances to the United’s directors that the company’s operations would soon cover their own costs and produce positive dividends. Moreover, were Alamán himself not still at the head of Unida operations in Mexico, the situation would be even worse. Migoni wrote in one of his honest but pessimistic letters in the summer of 1830, “But unfortunately we see that the confidence of this country [i.e., Britain] in the new government of Mexico is not paralleled by [confidence] in the mines, which with every moment become more discredited. Regarding the Unida, you will hear directly from the [Court of] Directors the result of the meeting of the 13th [of July] [to discuss] the raising of more capital. [If] you were not at the head of the [Mexican] Directors—I say this in all honesty—the value of the company’s shares would some time ago have fallen [even further].” During these early months in the ministry, even as Alamán was distancing himself from the Unida he was still encouraging the industry as a whole. For example, when Governor Francisco García of Zacatecas approached the minister in late August 1830 about participating as a shareholder in a new concern, La Segunda Compañía de Zacatecas, to be focused on the Veta Grande mine, Alamán politely declined but offered to approach other potential investors: “For myself, I cannot subscribe for now, since I am attending to other enterprises that require large funds. . . . [But] I have passed the invitation on to . . . other individuals who will be able to contribute to the good success of your project.”67 Lucas Alamán resigned as the Mexican director of the United Mexican Mining Association in late summer or early fall of 1830 with as little fanfare as possible. But the separation was neither easy nor quickly effected. Since Alamán’s style was more deliberative than impulsive, he probably had been contemplating this move for some time. His frustration over repeated unsuccessful attempts to get the company to cough up further capital in support of

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the operations at the Rayas mine in Guanajuato may have had something to do with his decision, as did the continued downward drift in the value of company shares. He wrote that his motives had less to do with doubts over the long-term prospects of the company than with personal issues. Alamán thought that the Unida directors in London would be disinclined to accept his resignation; but such resistance, he wrote, “will put me in a difficult position, since although I certainly owe them much consideration for what they have done for me, I have had too much unpleasantness here [i.e., in Mexico] to be inclined to continue.” Skipping ahead in time a few months throws more light on why Alamán severed his long relationship with the British investors. Not until April 1831, at least five months after his resignation, did Alamán come closer to explaining, but with no details, in a letter to Francisco Borja Migoni: I will content myself [here] with including for you copies of the disagreeable exchanges [no such documents appear in the file] I have had with my associates of the United Company, from which you will see that I have not been able to suffer any longer the continuous irritations to which I have been exposed. . . . I am very much afraid that the affairs of this Company will become entangled. But after I have said and done everything within my power to avoid it, this [situation] is not my fault. And it appears to me that after having worked for nothing [i.e., with no recompense] for some time, and suffered the insults of the gentlemen here, I have done even more than could be expected [of me].68 Whatever Alamán included in his letter to document his problems with his “compañeros of the United Company” produced quite an impression. Even allowing for some tendency on Migoni’s part to be a bit hysterical in his language, the letters must have painted a picture of sharp conflict within the Mexican end of the concern, an impression reflected in Migoni’s response of mid-June 1831: “From what I deduce, you have been in a continual purgatory that only [through] your moderation and sufferance you have been able to endure. Thus I am almost pleased to know that you are out of that happy company, whose shareholders here have shed who knows how many tears of blood [over your resignation].” Who it was within the United—whether a company official in Mexico or in the London Court of Directors—with whom Alamán had had his falling out, or what the nature of the argument was, remains murky. His codirector Agassiz had left Mexico early in 1830. William Glennie was in Mexico at least until 1827 (ascending Popocatépetl) and would remain

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associated with the company for many years after, although whether he was still in the country around 1830 we do not know. What had happened? Lucas Alamán’s separation from the Unida was prompted at least in part by the London directors’ efforts to reorganize the Mexican mining operations. The immediate instrument of this initiative was Simon McGillivray, sent out from England in 1829 to effect the restructuring of the company in Mexico, where he was to remain until 1834 or 1835. McGillivray (1785–1840) was born into a once-landed but now gently impoverished Scottish Highland family. As a young man he made his career in a family trading firm in Canada, earned a substantial fortune and lost it in a bankruptcy, then gained much of it back in the last years of his life, by which time he owned two newspapers in London. McGillivray had ascended to the degree of Masonic Grand Master in Canada, continuing this affiliation upon his return to London in the mid-1830s.69 Nothing about his relationship with Alamán is known, but the coincidence of the timing of his arrival, his ardent Masonic connections, and the larger, tempestuous movement of Mexican political life at the close of the 1820s and the beginning of the 1830s is suggestive. It may well have been Simon McGillivray with whom Alamán had his differences, given that there is no evidence in Alamán’s correspondence with people in London that his relations with Agassiz and Glennie had been anything but cordial during the preceding five years. We do know that in July 1830 McGillivray had supported before the United Court of Directors the unsuccessful proposal to call in more capital on the outstanding shares for the Mexican mining operations. But this may not have been a sufficient shared interest with Alamán to counterbalance any compelling differences between them, including personal rivalry. There was also the matter of Masonic affiliation, which packed very great weight in Mexican political life at this time. As a Mason, possibly of the York Rite and a Grand Master, at that, McGillivray is unlikely to have kept his membership a secret. In the superheated political atmosphere of Mexico during these years such openness may well have put him at odds with Lucas Alamán, who, although not a member, maintained a more benign attitude toward the Scottish Rite. He associated York Rite Masonry and its adherents, such as Lorenzo de Zavala, with Jacobinism and with the recalled American minister to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, who had left the country at the request of the Mexican government in January 1830, just as Alamán was entering the ministry. Then, too, it may be that while the codirectors Agassiz and Glennie had in some degree been subordinate to Alamán, the latter viewed McGillivray as an interloper whose very presence on Mexican

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soil posed an implicit and offensive question about the way he was directing the Unida’s affairs. And although no record of the extent of McGillivray’s authority exists, he was sent out to reorganize the Unida’s affairs in Mexico and may well have thrown his weight around in a manner likely to antagonize the thin-skinned Alamán, who did not like being reorganized. This is pure conjecture, but, considered as a whole, the fragmentary evidence is suggestive. Immediately following his resignation in the autumn of 1830, Alamán offered a summary evaluation of some of the British mining companies while addressing the issue of his resignation. The Unida’s shares continued to drop in value, which he claimed not to understand; he saw here “the manipulation by the speculators” and continued to insist on the soundness of the company’s prospects. In his eyes this optimism was justified for almost none of the other concerns, however, except for the Veta Grande in Zacatecas.70 Lucas Alamán’s separation from the United Mexican Mining Association continued to produce serious ripples for some months. Because many of the United stockholders had entered into the company largely on the assurance that Alamán would be at the helm in Mexico, the London directors asked the minister to stay on temporarily in order to stave off a complete collapse of the concern; he must have done so, although for how many weeks or months we do not know. He wrote rather cryptically, “I will see if it suits me, reserving for that time to make a definitive resolution.” The nature of the reorganization charged to McGillivray is not clear but may have involved a larger role for Glennie. From London, Migoni remarked that “the [Unida] shareholders were so irritated with the company that they would [in hindsight] rather have lost fingers than embark on such an unfortunate affair.”71 His resignation was finally accepted by the Court of Directors in April 1831. At this news the British shareholders, considering Alamán the “anchor for their hopes,” were plunged into dread. Having rebounded slightly in the early spring, the price of Unida shares traced the downward path of the investors’ collective mood, and the prospects for the British mining concerns as a whole followed. By May the shares of the Bolaños Company, the “only shares that had constantly sustained themselves [at a good level],” had fallen from £140 to £110 and those of the “unfortunate United” to the “miserable” price of £5, from which it could be inferred “how the English public stands with everything related to [Latin] America.” And in the fall of 1831 “due to the disastrous state of English mining companies in Mexico, the [English] public is so irritated that they even curse the independence of the new nations of America.”72

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His messy exit from the United Mexican Mining Association may have given Alamán money worries, if not second thoughts. This was not an amicable parting of the ways, after all, and as in many such divorces financial issues remained to be settled between the parties, even as their attentions turned elsewhere. In the last months of 1831, as Alamán approached the end of his ministry (May 1832), he was pressing an outstanding compensation claim against the United for what he called “my direct services to the Company.” The company official charged by the Court of Directors with addressing this claim was Simon McGillivray, although what resolution he and Alamán came to we do not know. The settling of accounts with the United was to drag on for a number of years, at least until the mid-1830s. Although he was to continue his personal involvement with the mining industry for many years to come, now he shifted much of his attention to his hacienda in Celaya, about whose prospects he was very tentative: “Not only have my haciendas up to now not rendered me anything, but I have invested a great deal of money in them [without return], given that I have had to restock them with everything, since everything was lacking. . . . Here [in Mexico] the most productive [estates] are those on which sugar cane is sown, particularly in the Valleys of Cuernavaca and Cuautla. From these, great fortunes have been accumulated.”73 Thus Lucas Alamán’s seven-year relationship with the United Mexican Mining Association fizzled out, although he was to maintain an active but attenuated presence in the industry for the rest of his life. But since I am following this strand of the statesman’s life over several decades as a coherent, linear story rather than in the episodic rhythm at which he lived it day-to-day and month-to-month, I will continue the story past the Unida as far as the documentation goes. Even though he was now out of the United, the company would wind its way through his affairs for a number of years. Furthermore, projects in which he had initially become involved while directing the company’s operations—the Sombrerete mines, for example, not to mention those in his native Guanajuato—would still be part of his personal economic portfolio as late as the 1840s. Whether he became more cautious or not after the Unida experience is hard to tell, but certainly the scale of his involvement declined in proportion to the reduced amount of resources available to him. By the mid-1840s, even as he continued his involvement with the family interests in the Cata mine in Guanajuato, he pulled back a good deal from the industry, greatly modified his expectations, and even suggested that Mexico should pursue national prosperity in other directions.

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Alamán and Silver Mining after the Unida Under Alamán’s guidance, the portfolio of the United Mexican Mining Association had included investments in the Pabellón and Veta Negra mines in Sombrerete, concerns with which he had a personal connection through the Fagoaga family. After his departure from the English company in the early 1830s he made an abortive attempt to revive the fortunes of these mines after one of their periodic downturns. The two deep-shaft workings were, in fact, one mine, having been joined by the extension of an extremely expensive lateral tunnel between them in 1790, and were in bonanza for a time during the last decade of the century. They had long been the property of the Fagoagas, managed as part of a vertically integrated enterprise that produced enormous wealth and in part underwrote the title of Marqués del Apartado, granted to the Fagoaga patriarch in 1771 and inherited by his son José Francisco. Alamán knew the second (later ex-) marqués and his younger brother, Francisco Antonio, traveling with him in Europe for several years and becoming lifelong friends and political allies. As was the case with many other silver mines in Mexico, however, the great problem with the Pabellón and Veta Negra mines for the Fagoaga family and all subsequent owners or contractors was drainage. Eventually the costs became too great in relation to the yield, and the mines were abandoned. The Fagoaga family retreated from the mining business entirely but also saw its wealth dissipate through intrafamily litigation and the same reproductive robustness (i.e., too many heirs) that Alamán was to remark on in his memoirs of his own and other great mining families. The condition in which Narciso Anitua, a local miner, encountered the Pabellón and Veta Negra when he acquired them in 1820 or 1821 was lamentable. As of 1825 he began to rehabilitate them in concert with the United, and they were brought back to respectable levels of production remarkably soon, remaining in operation for the rest of the 1820s. In his report to the Court of Directors and shareholders of March 1827 Alamán described the mines’ condition when Anitua took them over and the progress made during the succeeding eighteen months. Since he rarely had much good to say about any of his collaborators or was at best restrained in his praise, his evaluation of Anitua’s work is striking: “Two such extensive mines as Pabellón and Veta Negra, filled with water, nearly to the surface, and kept full by considerable springs, in a state of almost total ruin . . . situated in a country barren of resources, and moreover of inhabitants have . . . been completely supplied, drained down to

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the lowest levels, [and] repaired, both as to the external and internal works. . . . Such are the surprising effects of the intelligence, economy, and extraordinary activity of Mr. Anitua [which] may be regarded as a model for all great undertakings of the same class.”74 Alamán was not alone in his praise of what capital investment and careful management had done to rehabilitate the Pabellón and Veta Negra, as other observers of the industry joined in the general admiration. After Narciso Anitua’s death in 1830, Alamán tried to have the local mining entrepreneur José María Bracho purchase what remained of the Unida contract on the mines in 1833.75 In the spring of 1833, a year after he had been forced out of the ministry but before he went into hiding to avoid prosecution for his alleged complicity in the judicial murder of Vicente Guerrero, Alamán was involved in negotiations with the state government of Zacatecas about taking over on his own account (por mi cuenta) several other abandoned mines in Sombrerete, possibly in partnership with Bracho, but this came to nothing. In the post-Unida years and after these abortive attempts of the early 1830s to reenter the mining business in Sombrerete, Alamán was occasionally approached by other entrepreneurs about mines in other areas of the country, opportunities he never took up. His prestige as a figure in the mining business, his public visibility, and his connections with prominent figures in the political and entrepreneurial spheres also attracted the attention of investors who sought to use him to mobilize capital for promising ventures. A few years later, in the absence of financial capital of his own, he would trade on this social capital, overplaying his hand and putting himself and his creditors into an extremely difficult situation in the collapse of the Cocolapan textile mill. But for the moment he did not take this step. One such instance was an approach by Manuel Baranda in 1836 on behalf of a group of investors who wished to form a company to work mercury mines in Guanajuato. Alamán knew about the plan and accepted the charge of raising capital “with much pleasure” but did suggest that few shares would be subscribed until the business was up and running. Moreover, he was quite clear in saying that he lacked the wherewithal at the moment to buy any shares himself but expressed the hope that the project would help revive the “languid” mining economy, “or in other words, it [and other such projects] are the only thing that can save [mining] from utter ruin.”76 As for the Cata mine in Guanajuato, the year 1836 was a point of inflection from which his willingness to place any more expectations in the enterprise turned sharply downward. The Cata was a source of continuing disappointment to him for many years, like an adored child who cannot

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find his or her way, and attempts to revive it through investment and management changes proved futile. The next dozen years or so saw Lucas Alamán backing further and further away from mining as an entrepreneur while maintaining an interest in the industry as a thinker and policy maker in political economy. Most modern scholars have suggested that even though British investors enjoyed some small successes, the overall picture for the industry was quite grim until the Porfiriato, the fall in silver production in the second quarter of the nineteenth century catastrophic. The annual share of silver as a percentage of the gross domestic product dropped from about 10 to 5 percent during this period. There were a number of reasons for this, including the rise in the price of mercury, essential for refining, by the early 1850s to three times that of its late colonial levels; the political instability of the era, which proved a disincentive to investment; and vacillating, unpredictable, and often predatory government fiscal policies.77 The value of shares in the surviving British mining companies in general, not just the Unida, dropped precipitously during the last decade and would continue to decline. Shares in the Real del Monte Company, for example, which had reached a price of £1,479 at the beginning of 1824 (against a nominal value of £400), had fallen to £21 by 1836 and to £.63 by 1848, virtually nil.78 A decade before Alamán’s death, the 1843 inventory of his wealth revealed his total liquid worth—the gross value of all his property less outstanding debts—to be about 100,000 pesos, a substantial estate but one that did not locate him in the category of great wealth. Among his holdings were an unspecified number of shares in the Cata mine, which he classified as having no value. There is also some indication that he continued to sell off equipment associated with the mine—to decapitalize it, in other words.79 Yet Alamán’s reputation and expertise in silver mining still made his presence highly desirable in organizations devoted to protecting and furthering the faltering industry. In the closing days of 1848 José María Bassoco wrote with some urgency to Mariano Riva Palacio to ask that he exert his influence for Alamán to be elected as apoderado, or general agent, with power-of-attorney, of the Junta de Fomento y Administrativa de Minas, a body of entrepreneurs charged with educating mining engineers and in general promoting the industry. Bassoco wrote of Alamán, “His intelligent laboriousness will produce much good in the administration [of the Junta]. His talent and the reputation he enjoys will serve powerfully to defend the funds, and his knowledge will serve to stimulate legislators to keep the Colegio [de Minería] under the control of the miners.”80

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A Final Verdict The United Mexican Mining Association was a large-scale, internationally financed enterprise on which Lucas Alamán had fixed high expectations both for himself and for Mexico; it had brought him much public prominence but little wealth, at least in the long run. Some of the company’s projects enjoyed short-term success while others failed, along with most of the other British mining firms. Had he lived for a century instead of his sixty-one years, Alamán would have observed by the 1890s some of the lessons learned by his countrymen from the history of the Unida, and how they were applied after about 1875 or so. The investment boom in silver mining was, after all, the first episode in the history of independent Mexico, if one brackets the sale of government bonds in foreign markets, through which non-Mexican capital was massively injected in an effort to build or rebuild an important economic sector, whether for the domestic or export markets. In this sense it foreshadowed much of the economic history of the country, particularly during the Porfiriato. A number of the problems faced by Alamán and his English backers were attacked with some success by the Porfirian regime under the banner of “order and progress.” For one thing, the political ferment and endemic violence of Alamán’s day, which at moments affected not only mining operations themselves but also the willingness of Englishmen to invest in the revival of the industry, were eventually papered over by the pax porfiriana instituted by the wily old dictator, but at political and social costs that would become clear only in the last years of the regime. For another, the problem of transporting mining equipment and other inputs into the country and mineral products out was in large measure solved by the spread of the railroads. In 1830–31, however, when Alamán withdrew from the English company, these advances still lay nearly a half century in the future, so if he was going to stay involved with mining as an entrepreneur he was obligated to rely on available capital and technology. In the early 1830s he was still hopeful about mining in general and the family’s Cata mine in particular, but these hopes were not met. The tentative steps toward recovery in some of the Mexican mines resulted from their draining and rehabilitation; the constant inflow of British capital during a boom that took off, peaked, and began to fade in no more than about three or four years; and the conditions of relative peace that prevailed in the country during the presidential term of Guadalupe Victoria from 1824 to 1828. When the sudden spurt of silver production ebbed and British investment slowed to a trickle, then to nothing, then to reverse itself, the fragile

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equilibrium was ruptured, and the profits to be had did not warrant the amounts of money invested or the risks undertaken. Whether Alamán felt himself to have been burned in his dealings with the United Mexican Mining Association or whether his withdrawal from mining was primarily a response to objective economic conditions or to the press of his obligations as a government official, we do not know; it was probably a bit of all three. Lucas Alamán’s public pronouncements on the place of silver mining in the nation’s economy changed noticeably between the early 1820s and the early 1840s, a reorientation directly attributable at least in part to his experience with the Unida and his observations about the early 1820s more generally.81 It is revealing to compare his early ministerial informes with his later reports from the perspective of the Junta General de Industria Nacional, which he headed. In his first ministerial report to congress, in 1823, Alamán devoted more time to mining than to any other issue of public policy, praising the 1822 legislation of the Spanish Cortes that reduced taxes on silver production. He also lauded the action of the Mexican Congress of 1823 in lifting restrictions on investment in the mines by foreigners; for both of these measures he had been the strongest advocate. In the same document he even supported enthusiastically the application of steam technology to mining operations, which proved premature for the most part, as his own experience would demonstrate. In offering an analysis of Mexican silver mining, he went on to describe the backward linkages forged by the prosperity of the industry before 1810: Abundance and prosperity then reigned in Zacatecas and Guanajuato. The farmer found in those famous mining districts a quick and secure market for his produce. . . . The nature of our mineral deposits is a powerful cause of these happy results. Generally poor in yield and abundant in quantity, they require for their refinement a multitude of machines and ingredients, and as a consequence it may be said that the miner does no more than take out [of the earth] funds to distribute by the handful among the farmers, merchants, and artisans, [leading us] to conclude that the prosperity of these [groups] depends principally on the impulse lent to them by mining, the main mover of all the other industrial sectors in our country. The minister predicted that the mines could soon be brought back to a state of prosperity on the basis of the “plentiful funds” that foreign capitalists were now poised to invest.82 In the representación directed to the provisional president Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1843 by the Junta General Directiva de la Industria Nacional,

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director Alamán had shifted his focus perceptibly outward from mining to the rest of the Mexican economy. He still dwelt on the backward linkages nourished by the sector but was now more openly skeptical of the benefits of mining per se. Enemies of industrialization, he wrote, claimed that all the nation’s bills could be paid and its ills cured by silver, “to whose exploitation they want to reduce all the industry of the nation, limiting it to the mining sector only. [But] the branch of industry most useful to the nation is not that which produces the most wealth, but that which occupies the greatest number of hands, and it will be still more appreciable if employment is constant, subject to few vicissitudes and which by itself produces a permanent skill transmittable from father to son, from generation to generation.” To an economist, he wrote, mining was no more than one economic sector among many—an important one, to be sure, but only a sector, one whose chief advantage lay in the fact that its products, silver and gold, were easily marketable. The most valuable thing about mining was its ripple effects in the larger economy. Given the capitalintensive nature of the industry and its highly unpredictable character, more like a game of chance than even a speculative venture whose rules were more or less known, no national fortune should rest upon it. The Spanish colonial regime had favored it not for the benefit of Mexico but for that of Spanish commerce and the fiscal exigencies of the crown. Although mineral wealth was important, therefore, and was no more a block to national prosperity than any other sector, it was dangerous to view it as the economic pivot of the nation. He concluded with an eloquent, even passionate defense of the idea that an industrialization broader than mining would forge a prosperous national economy: If, then, our nation cannot pay for the goods it receives from abroad with the products of its agriculture; if it cannot count on any consumption for those [agricultural] products within any market [other] than the domestic one; and if this [market] depends upon the physical constitution of [the nation’s] territory and upon the distribution of population on its surface, factors that do not lie within the power of men to change; if the products of mining cannot enrich the country by themselves—it is [then] necessary to recur to the development of industry as the sole source of a general prosperity. In effect, Sir, due to the peculiar circumstances of our nation, only [industry] can give an impulse to agriculture, providing the market for its products and multiplying their use; only [industry] can increase the wealth of the property owners, giving a value to their estates

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that they hardly possess at the moment, except in this or that point somewhat richer and more populous; only [industry] can make the population grow [by] providing means for its subsistence, and with this improving the state of its inhabitants, and [industry] alone can stimulate more than any other alternative all social advancement. With industry will come peace, abundance, morality and liberty established upon the bases of order, property, and enlightenment, and without [industry] there will be nothing but poverty, disorder, and servitude.83 Lucas Alamán was involved with the mining of silver throughout his life, above all in his native city of Guanajuato—intimately through his midthirties or so, then more critically and at a distance for his last two decades. Generations of the Busto and Alamán family fortunes were built on the industry, he was trained as a mining engineer and knew the technology and chemistry of mining as well as anyone at the time, and even patented a refining process of his own invention. Along with other Mexicans he pinned what would prove to be extravagant hopes on the revival of the mining industry for the recovery and expansion of the Mexican economy, doing much while he was in a position of great influence in the early 1820s to facilitate the recapitalization of the sector through foreign, primarily British, direct investment. But with the substantial failure of the United Mexican Mining Association his desire to grow his own wealth through the revival of the industry was frustrated, disappointing him and leaving him with a certain bitterness. With the shriveling of the Unida, Alamán turned his thinking as a political economist to other paths, coming to argue that the country must not depend so heavily on the production of mineral wealth and that its future lay with manufacturing. For this he established the Banco de Avío in 1830 primarily to stimulate the textile industry through government loans, following his own advice in investing in this sector of the economy and failing here as he had at mining. His family still held shares in a once-successful silver mine in Guanajuato, but at the end of his life, with weary disillusion, he judged this stake to be worthless. The Unida episode may well have taught him that Mexican industrialization, in whatever sector of the economy, could not in this early period depend on foreign investment, but that domestic capital must be mobilized, which is what the Banco de Avío was established to do. Silver mining did recover and flourish again, but only toward the end of the century, too late to make him wealthy or to restore vanished family glories.

11 • Managing the Feudal Remnant Alamán and the Duque (1824–1853)

A Walk through the Paris Exposition As the expatriate American novelist Henry James strolled the Champs de Mars during the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, what might have caught his interest among the many exhibits, entertainments, and national pavilions at the world’s fair?1 Like other visitors he would surely have marveled at (or at least been impressed by) the Eiffel Tower, still unfinished but now open to the public for the first time. James would certainly have paid some attention to the American, French, and British pavilions. Given his resolutely Eurocentric view of the world, however, and the inherent vulgarity of many of the entertainments on offer, he would probably have skipped the display of Western horsemanship and sharpshooting by Buffalo Bill’s troupe, starring Annie Oakley; and of the more exotic ethnographic exhibits, he might well have ignored the zoo-like Negro Village with its four hundred African inhabitants. On the other hand, he might have walked through the Egyptian exhibit, the chaotic bazaar stretched along the mockup of a sinuous Cairo street standing proxy for the devious Oriental mind. Had the writer walked through the Mexican pavilion, with its Aztec theme, he might have cast a glance at the sculptures by Jesús Contreras on the façade of the building and more than a glance at the magnificent landscape paintings of José María Velasco inside.2 What would probably not have captured his attention in the pavilion were food products from Mexico on show, huddled next to crafts and other displays. Among these were sugar and otros frutos produced on the Hacienda de San Antonio Atlacomulco, which had won medals (first prize for sugar, honorable mention for cane brandy) for their high quality. The hacienda belonged to the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, whose general agent in Mexico was still

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Licenciado D. Juan Bautista Alamán, Lucas Alamán’s attorney son. Juan Bautista had been working for the duke’s casa, that is, his administrative establishment in Mexico, since his youth and immediately after his father’s death in 1853 had stepped into the position as apoderado general for another generation of the Sicilian noble family. In 1905, a half century after his father’s passing, Juan Bautista was still the general administrator of the Terranova properties in Mexico.3

The Mexican and the Sicilian More than thirty-five years earlier, some three weeks before beginning his final stint as a government minister under the presidency of Antonio López de Santa Anna and about two months before his death on 2 June 1853, Lucas Alamán dispatched to Palermo what was very likely his last direct communication with the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone. In this relatively long letter Alamán addressed a familiar list of items relating to Terranova’s affairs in Mexico and commenting on the state of the country in general. Sandwiched in with these discussions was a reference to the writer’s health that presaged his death: “I have also not been very healthy, since I find I am not as well here [in the city] as at Atlacomulco, and that just as soon as I come up to this high cold country I begin to suffer from the lung ailment that has been bothering me for some time. But I hope this will not prevent me from completing the arrangement of your affairs.” Alamán lamented the ducal household’s lost opportunity to cash in on the government’s concession of an exclusive right to construct a permanent road across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. He tried to involve his friend Alexander von Humboldt in this enterprise, but the famous German polymath declined. The project eventually lost out to the Isthmus of Panama route. Alamán wrote to the duke, “[To be successful] it [is] necessary to be able to guess [the future], since with the way things turn out, through extraordinary [i.e., unpredictable] events, it is not possible to hit the mark every time, and because of this, more than once I have erred in [conducting] my own and other people’s affairs, with grave injury to myself.”4 Lucas Alamán’s nearly three-decade-long linkage with the Hacienda de Atlacomulco and other ducal holdings, and his relationship—often bumpy but in general trusting, positive, and exclusively developed through letters—with its owner, José Pignatelli de Aragón, Duque de Monteleone, Duque de Terranova, and fourteenth Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, wove together a number of strands in the great statesman’s character, his background, and the

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history of his times. Had Alamán lacked strong personal motives, it is difficult to imagine that a man of his intelligence, amour propre, and public prominence would have put up with the episodic stream of guff directed at him by the duque in his darker moods. Despite all this, Alamán played the key role in rationalizing the duke’s family finances and in keeping money flowing to Palermo. Pignatelli’s greatest claims to virtue seem to have been his descent from Fernando Cortés and his small role in the great drama of Neapolitan and Sicilian politics at midcentury. Among the critics of the duke was the first Spanish ambassador to Mexico, Ángel Calderón de la Barca, who was married to the famous Fanny Calderón. In a letter to the American historian William H. Prescott, the Spanish diplomat remarked that the writing in Terranova y Monteleone’s correspondence with him was “not distinguished for sprightliness.” Prescott himself referred to the duque in a letter as an imbecile, remarking a bit later in yet another letter to Calderón, “I received, by the by, a letter the other day from the Duke of Monteleone in Sicily, who singularly enough is the descendant and representative of the great houses of Gonsalvo de Cordova and Hernando Cortes. What a pedigree! Such blood does not flow in the veins of any living man. I am told he is not likely to pluck a leaf of the same laurel for himself.”5 During most of their thirty-year correspondence, the duque’s side often consisted of whinging about why Alamán was not remitting more cash to him through their English commercial agents and, with tales of his financial obligations, urging his general factotum, or apoderado general, to greater efforts on his behalf. His letters also included a great deal of finger wagging alternating with flattery and occasional expressions of gratitude for the services Alamán was performing in the face of formidable political obstacles. Occasional sparks of exasperation flash from Alamán’s long letters, but he generally managed to keep his temper and maintain a businesslike tone. Alamán’s work on behalf of the Neapolitan magnate was not without its personal economic benefits to himself. These included a yearly salary plus a commission collected at a low but predictable percentage on all the properties he was instrumental in selling as the Cortés entailed estate (mayorazgo) was disentailed and steadily liquidated. In addition, he almost certainly had access to sums of liquid cash he may occasionally have borrowed from the coffers of the Marquesado offices in Mexico City to fund his business investments. He also took advantage of the opportunity, more and more often as he aged, to retreat to the Hacienda de Atlacomulco to escape the winter cold of Mexico City in the lower altitude and more benign climate of the Cuernavaca area. There he rested and restored his health from the chronic lung ailments that

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eventually contributed to his somewhat premature death. Lucas Alamán was probably undercompensated economically for the services he performed for the duque over three decades, and thought himself so. Why, then, did he continue in this role for so long, and why did he tolerate the frequent peremptoriness, recurrent bouts of ingratitude, and insistent dunning for money directed at him by the Cortés heir? There were a number of motives. In the first place, direct economic benefit was not unimportant. Second, Alamán was something of a contrarian. He was a remarkably practical man but could be quite adamant in his beliefs and seems to have liked provoking his political opponents and critics. Overseeing and defending the interests of the duque, who served as a lightning rod for liberal attacks on privilege, feudalism, and the forces of reaction, may therefore have accorded him a certain amount of personal satisfaction since they were tantamount to sticking his thumb in the eye of Mexican liberals.6 Third, Alamán believed ardently in the sanctity of private property, not only as a defense of the privileged classes—the hombres de bien whom he felt should control the destiny of the country by right of their intelligence, inherent abilities, education, experience, and stake in the Public Good—but also as a bedrock principle of political economy and a sound social order. It is no accident that in the initial number, in 1848, of the last newspaper he was to found, El Universal, he began to serialize the treatise on property of the French conservative statesman Adolphe Thiers.7 Finally, Alamán’s involvement with the Marquesado had a more intimate meaning with origins in the circumstances of his youth. On the level of his personal history the Cortés connection was a compensatory identification that shored up his own self-concept in the face of his family’s loss of status. He was protecting the large fortune of a foreign nobleman that had originated in the singular anomaly of a feudal grant from the Spanish crown, defending it on the grounds that it had become private property and was therefore substantially inviolate against state action. This was a case in which his personal psychological needs clashed with his more pragmatic ideas. One aspect of his ideology, that private property was an absolute good and social necessity, contradicted another aspect, that the feudal origin of the Marquesado holdings should have made them illegitimate as a form of accumulated wealth. Some of this contradiction would have been obviated by the legal suppression of entails in Mexico in 1823. This policy stripped the Cortés inheritance of its legal protections, converting it into the modern form of private property, exposing the holdings to normal market forces and in theory eliminating the grounds for

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calling it feudal. At a still higher level, Alamán’s relationship with the duque and his properties spoke to the more expansive issue of political legitimacy in the wake of the colonial regime and the poisoning of the historical well by the very process through which Mexico had gained its independence from Spain. Alamán has been accused with some justice of creating in his historical works a Spanish fantasy past that contrasted with the remarkably messy historical present in which he came to political maturity.8 Although his ideas were more nuanced than is often acknowledged, his apologetic stance toward the colonial regime is very clear. The continued existence of the “feudal remnant” of the Cortés properties in republican Mexico was, to him, symbolic of a time when life ran an orderly course, in contrast with the endemic instability of the early republican period, the ongoing legitimacy vacuum in governance, and the opportunism of military politicians. Thus as an economic actor Alamán derived some material benefit from the thirty-year association with the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone and also psychological ones from the direct, palpable link to the Spanish past he treasured—a link, to recall Peter Laslett’s phrase, to the world he had lost.

The Conqueror’s Bones Lucas Alamán’s long struggle to preserve Mexico’s Spanish heritage began with measures he took to protect the physical remains of Fernando Cortés against grandstanding politicians and enraged, anti-Spanish Mexico City mobs. The long saga of the wanderings of the conqueror’s bones is an interesting one in itself, but an abbreviated version can lead to Alamán’s involvement, which began in 1823. Fernando Cortés died of pleurisy in his sixty-second year, on 2 December 1547, in his house at Castilleja de la Cuesta, near Seville. His initial burial place was the chapel of Seville’s San Isidro monastery, in the family vault of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia. In his last will and testament, however, he had specified that within a decade of his death, if possible, his successor in the marquisate should send his remains for reburial to Coyoacán, near Mexico City, to be interred there in the convent of the Immaculate Conception, of which Cortés had been founder and patron. Fifteen years after Cortés’s death, in 1562, his son Martín, the second Marqués del Valle, had his father’s remains removed to New Spain to the Franciscan monastery in Tetzcoco. In 1629 Cortés’s bones were transferred, with much pomp and splendor, to a new location yet again, this time to the church of San Francisco in Mexico City to lie beside those of one of his grandsons, the fourth marqués,

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Don Pedro, who had died in Mexico City that year. In 1791, at the behest of the twelfth marqués, Hector María Pignatelli, the governor of the Marquesado del Valle, the Marqués de Sierra Nevada (Joaquín Ramírez de Arellano) went with a notary to the Franciscan convent to make a fully certified report as to the resting place, authenticity, and condition of Hernando Cortés’s remains, contained in an elaborate chest behind the church’s principal altar.9 Then in 1794 the remains were moved yet again to the chapel of the Hospital de Jesús, where in one locale or another in the building they have rested until today. The removal and reburial were to be effected secretly, at night, with no public pomp and only the officials and employees of the Marquesado in attendance. At seven thirty in the evening on 2 July 1794, the Marqués de Sierra Nevada went to the church of San Francisco with the required notary in tow. Inside the various nested boxes “the said bones amount to some leg and arm bones [canillas], ribs, and others that although broken are quite hard. The skull is narrow, flattened [achatada, that is, presumably without the septum], and long, but all the bones are brown and of good appearance and odor.”10 The marqués and his party conducted the remains, in their boxes, by coach to the chapel of the Hospital de Jesús, where they were placed on a table in the sacristy. The boxes were opened again at the hospital (presumably to make sure none of the old boy had escaped en route), checked, and locked, the marqués keeping the key. The next morning, 3 July 1794, the relics were transferred to a vault in the church, which was surmounted by a bronze bust of Cortés sculpted by Manuel Tolsa. On Tuesday, 8 July, an elaborate funeral was conducted within the church itself and a Mass sung, following which the Dominican Fray Servando Teresa de Mier “delivered a highly learned funeral oration in praise of the political and moral virtues” of the conqueror, which lasted for threequarters of an hour. In attendance were Viceroy Branciforte, many nobles, and a bevy of public and church officials.11 And there the conqueror’s mortal remains rested, apparently without incident, for almost the next thirty years. Following the fall of Agustín de Iturbide, Lucas Alamán was minister of internal and external relations under the government of the SPE when a crisis blew up over the burial site and fate of Cortés’s remains. During 1822 and 1823 anonymous anti-Cortés and anti-Spanish pamphlets were circulating in Mexico City. The fall of the Iturbide regime and the popular odium focused for the moment on monarchical forms of government, most singularly on the man who had instituted them in Mexico, may have had something to do with the pamphleteering. Helping to heat up the atmosphere was the continuing Spanish occupation of the fortress island of San Juan de Ulúa and the rumors

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of an impending Spanish invasion of its rebellious former colony, both accompanied by sharp anti-Spanish outbursts in the press and by anonymous pamphlets. Congressional debates the previous year relating to the dismantling of the monument over the site of Cortés’s remains in the chapel of the Hospital de Jesús included a proposal by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier that the coat of arms on the hospital and the tomb inscription be removed to a museum. The officials in charge of the Marquesado held a meeting at the end of the month. Present were the duke’s paternal uncle and general agent, or apoderado, the Conde Fernando [Ferdinando] Lucchesi; Manuel de Füica, at this time gobernador of the Marquesado, a loyal, long-serving functionary of the marquisate; and the accountant and attorney of the casa.12 The discussion of the alarmed officials ranged over the resolutions debated in congress, the pamphlets, the rumored attacks on the Hospital de Jesús, and a shadowy plot to extract the bones to take them to the San Lázaro garbage dump. Officials of the Terranova establishment held an emergency meeting in late September, presided over by Count Fernando de Lucchesi, the duke’s paternal uncle. Lucchesi had had conversations with minister Alamán about the menacing situation, and in response the minister had ordered the church of the Hospital de Jesús closed to forestall any attempts at desecration. A priest moved Cortés’s remains to a different place in the chapel to confound any ill-intentioned persons. The immediate danger past, the place of interment was kept secret, and it was long believed that the conqueror’s relics had been shipped to Terranova in Palermo for yet another reburial. More than a century later, in 1929, Antonio Pignatelli, the eighteenth marqués—a title by then extinguished for more than a century in Mexico but still recognized in Italy and Spain—stated categorically that the bones were still entombed in the Hospital de Jesús. In 1946 the remains were unearthed from one of the walls of the chapel, along with a notarized document attesting to their genuineness, and Fernando Cortés eventually came to rest behind a modest plaque in another wall of the church, where he remains to this day. The plausible idea that Cortés’s remains were shipped to Palermo in 1823 survived for a century and may well have originated with Alamán himself in order to forestall further threats against the relics. The American historian Francis A. MacNutt devoted considerable discussion to this in his 1909 biography of Cortés.13 He remarks that a footnote (number 353) in volume 2 of Vicente Riva Palacio’s México a través de los siglos asserts that Cortés’s remains were sent to Palermo in 1823 and suggests that Lucas Alamán himself implied as much in his narrative of these events in his Disertaciones, from which most other accounts

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are drawn. MacNutt, however, says there is no concrete evidence that anything of the sort occurred. To support this belief he quotes from a letter of the great Mexican antiquarian, philologist, and historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta (1824–94) to the historian of the early explorations of the Americas, Henry Harrisse (1823–1910), strongly suggesting that Alamán himself was evasive about the truth of the story: “Notwithstanding the friendship with which Señor Alamán has honoured me, I never could obtain from him a positive explanation [of the whereabouts of the remains]; he would always find some pretext to change the conversation. . . . [B]oth Señor Alamán and Count Fernando Lucchesi . . . assisted at the temporary hiding away of the remains under the steps of the altar.” Although most of the drama had drained out of the story by the time he took over management of the Cortés heir’s affairs in Mexico, Lucas Alamán was to be involved in every twitch in the narrative until it petered out late in the Mexican–American War. In 1835 a plan was broached to move Fernando Cortés’s remains to Palermo, presumably for eventual reburial in Spain. This plan was probably the brainchild of the duke because even though the apoderado was dedicated to protecting the remains, one may assume that he preferred to keep them in Mexico, if possible, so as not to break this palpable link with the history of the former metropole and the conquest itself. The holdings of the ex-Marquesado were sequestered by the government during 1833–35, and Terranova y Monteleone may have feared that the embargo would somehow embrace the Hospital de Jesús and damage the building and its precious relics. Although at first he feared the bones were lost, the following year Alamán had a new chest made to contain them and moved them in the utmost secrecy to a new location within the church, reinterring them in great luxury, as a precaution against their being “damaged and scattered in the streets” during popular disturbances. At the same time Alamán sent to Palermo the arms removed from Cortés’s tomb in 1823 along with a portrait of the conqueror—of which he had a copy made for himself. Along with the portrait of his illustrious ancestor, the duke received the black lace fringe from the cloth in which the bones had been wrapped. He wrote to the apoderado that he “would without doubt venerate [it] as a type of [sacred] relic” (Alamán had taken the liberty of keeping a small piece of the fringe for himself); in 1837 followed a bust of Cortés. Finally, yet another plan to ship Fernando Cortés’s remains back to Spain was discussed during the Mexican–American War, this time at the suggestion of the Spanish ambassador in Mexico, Bermúdez de Castro, who offered his own protection and ipso facto that of Spain for the transfer. The plan was never effected. The knowledge that the conqueror’s

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remains were resting someplace in the chapel of the Hospital de Jesús may explain why Lucas Alamán wanted to be interred there as well. Amid the unsettled circumstances of the early 1820s Lucas Alamán began to forge his long-lived links to José Pignatelli, initially through the Conde de Lucchesi. Little is known about Fernando de Lucchesi-Palli (1784–1847), perhaps because he was one of the less distinguished members of a family that traced its Sicilian roots as far back as the eleventh century or because as a younger son who did not inherit the family titles and entail he had less opportunity to attain distinction. His elder brother Antonio Lucchesi-Palli, seventh Prince of Campofranco, etc. (1781–1856), had married Anna María Francesca Pignatelli Tagliavia d’Aragona Cortez (1784–1837), and the daughter of this union, contessa Blanca [Bianca] Lucchesi-Palli (1801–84), married Lucas Alamán’s employer, José [Giuseppe] Pignatelli Aragona Cortés (1795–1859), Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, principe di Noia, and fourteenth Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca.14 When Fernando Lucchesi had come to Mexico or exactly what he was doing there we do not know, but he seems to have resided in the country for some time. The most plausible scenario is that he came in the immediate wake of independence to manage the extensive holdings of his nephew-by-marriage, who had inherited them at the death of his father in 1818. In June 1824, when he had been in his first ministry for more than a year and the hubbub concerning Fernando Cortés’s remains had subsided, Lucas Alamán received a letter from the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone inviting him provisionally to replace Lucchesi as apoderado general (general legal agent) for the Marquesado in Mexico. In a letter to his nephew of 15 February 1824 Lucchesi gave an account of a number of meetings he had had with minister Alamán and conveyed to Terranova a general idea of the state of the ex-Marquesado interests in Mexico. Terranova y Monteleone voiced his misgivings about whether certain guarantees in the new constitution would protect those people who owned property in Mexico but resided outside the country.15 Writing from Guanajuato in late November 1824, where he found himself on temporary leave from his ministerial duties, Alamán ceremoniously accepted the duque’s charge of the provisional power of attorney, offering “that in any circumstance I will do with pleasure whatever lies within my power to promote Your Grace’s interests in this country.”16 During 1824–25 Lucas Alamán seems to have proven the worth of his services to the casa of the duke. By the end of March 1825 the nobleman was writing to his temporary Mexican agent that his uncle, Fernando Lucchesi, had been heaping praise on the Mexican statesman, prompting Terranova to offer Alamán a permanent

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general power of attorney. Alamán accepted the charge in August, since by September 1825 he was sending a substantial memorandum to Palermo outlining the reforms he intended to make in the administration of the casa. Lucas Alamán’s salary as apoderado was to start at around three thousand pesos per year plus a housing allowance, expense account, and other perquisites that seem to have been established in side agreements between the two men. Terranova did demand in very polite terms that his new general agent post a bond as he took over the considerable annual cash flows and remissions to Palermo from casa income. The amount was reduced from thirty thousand to twenty thousand pesos when Alamán stated that he lacked the resources to cover the larger amount.17 The colonial practice of posting bonds (fianzas) as surety for public and private posts whose duties included the handling of large sums of money remained common for at least some federal government officials into the republican years.18 On 22 May 1826 Alamán signed a formal instrument at a meeting with the junta de administración of the duke’s Mexican properties. Where he got this large sum in the end and, if he did not selffinance it, who his guarantor was is unknown.19 The emphasis in Alamán’s labors on behalf of the Sicilian nobleman changed a good deal over time. From the 1820s to the mid-1830s his attention was directed chiefly toward public relations efforts to keep the ex-Marquesado out of the newspapers, the courts, street-corner conversations, and public consciousness (and Fernando Cortés’s mortal remains out of the garbage dump), to defend it against political attack, and to squeeze a substantial income from it for the duke. In the mid- to late 1830s much of Alamán’s energy was devoted to the liquidation of properties no longer held in entail in order both to make an equitable distribution of the holdings between José Pignatelli, the fourteenth marqués, and his eldest son Diego, who would become the fifteenth marqués at his father’s death in 1859, and to forestall claims against the properties from other family members in Europe. The later 1840s saw the apoderado’s major efforts invested in reviving the Hacienda de Atlacomulco, which became highly prosperous by the time of his death.

The Economic Structure of the Marquesado and Alamán’s Personal Benefits The account books of the property and income streams the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone owned run to hundreds of volumes. And the litigation in which the Marquesado was involved fills hundreds of files, to say nothing

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of the voluminous correspondence Alamán carried on with Terranova and other people with regard to the affairs of the estate. When Alamán took over the management of the casa in 1825 there were five major components. First, there were the large rural holdings, consisting of the Hacienda de Atlacomulco, located about five kilometers southeast of Cuernavaca, the sprawling Haciendas Marquesanas on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and a miscellany of other, smaller rural properties. Second, there were large numbers of censos, basically perpetual mortgages, mostly imposed on urban properties belonging to private individuals and owing annual payments to the Marquesado, some of which reached far back into the colonial period (see table 11.1).20 The third element was made up of a substantial number of residential houses and other properties owned outright by the Marquesado that were rented out to private parties and were located almost entirely in the choicer parts of Mexico City; under this rubric fell other public buildings, public plazas, a municipal abattoir or two outside the capital, and so on. Fourth, the Marquesado claimed against the federal government huge unpaid sums arising from government embargoes during the colonial period, stretching back to the sixteenth century. Finally, the marqués was patron of the Hospital de Jesús, a medical facility for the care of the poor founded near the center of the city by Fernando Cortés himself and supported primarily by urban rents. Although the hospital was formally separate from the casa, Alamán oversaw its activities and finances, and it was economically tied in many ways to the Marquesado holdings. By the time Alamán died in 1853, the ex-Marquesado had shrunk a great deal in size, its supposedly feudal characteristics burned off in the political fires of the early republic, most of its real estate holdings converted to disentailed private property and sold off. What remained was the Hacienda de Atlacomulco; the still-enormous monetary claims against the Mexican government carried on the books of the casa year in and year out but that, as far as I can determine, were never paid to the duke’s successors; a large number of extant censos difficult or impossible of collection; and a portfolio of urban properties reduced to very modest dimensions, not counting those holdings whose income supported the Hospital de Jesús.21 My foray into the sources of Marquesado wealth was motivated principally not by an interest in the ex-Marquesado itself but by the desire to follow Lucas Alamán’s involvement with it. Based on the slim quantitative evidence, it appears that the total income from rentals and censos experienced an uptick at exactly the time Lucas Alamán took over the administration. In years when it was not leased to a

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Table 11.1: Marquesado income from censos and casas (rentals), various years (in pesos) Censos and Casas Combined

Year

Censos

Casas

1821 1822 1825 1826 1827

13,396 16,840 — — 5,965

1,636 1,417 — — 22,000

15,032 18,257 28,136 22,447 27,965

1828 1829

— 3,361

26,071 26,055

— 29,416

1830 1831 1834

— 7,056 5,401

26,109 26,327 34,469

— 33,383 39,870

1840

—

—

Remarks

Another document for same year gives 25,810 With properties outside Mexico City: 39,851

With properties outside Mexico City: 40,224

26,662

private individual but managed directly by the Marquesado under Alamán’s supervision, the Hacienda de Atlacomulco produced, from sales of sugar and other products, some 30,000 to 40,000 pesos. There were considerable fluctuations outside this range until it began to flourish under direct Marquesado stewardship from the late 1840s. About the time Alamán came into the picture, the plantation was valued at some 150,000 pesos.22 From what I have seen, it’s impossible to calculate the total capital value of all these holdings together. One can make a stab, however, at estimating the global value of the urban real estate holdings in Mexico City. Assuming the houses leased out were earning rent at 5 percent of their capital value—a standard practice for the time, given strictures against usury—and taking the average total of rents collected for the five years 1827–31, something over 25,000 pesos, we arrive at a total capital value of just over 500,000 pesos (i.e., 20 ∑ 25,000), a substantial sum indeed. The funds remitted by Alamán to Palermo varied enormously from year to year—for example, 21,500 pesos in 1827, 45,849 in 1829, and 27,597 in 1840—but the spikes and troughs tended to smooth out in the later years of Alamán’s stewardship. Overall, the sums collected from fixed sources fell quite short of what they were expected to be. For

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Table 11.2: Actual income vs. expected income from fixed Marquesado sources, various years

Year

Expected income (pesos)

Actual income (pesos)

Percentage collected

1827 1829 1830 1831 1834

90,669 113,954 129,889 134,558 88,257

59,964 48,252 55,061 97,436 81,794

66 42 42 72 93

the five years 1827, 1829, 1830, 1831, and 1834, the average actually taken in was about 63 percent of nominal value (see table 11.2). Working against the headwinds of perennially difficult conditions in Mexico, Alamán felt this to be a reasonable yield, whereas the duke continually complained that it was too low. A reasonably conservative estimate of the global value of the Cortés holdings for the years before Alamán started to liquidate much of the disentailed estate for the purpose of division between José Pignatelli and his son Diego, therefore, would put it at around a million pesos, probably not less and quite possibly more.23 In combination with his earnings as administrator of the Hospital de Jesús and with commissions he earned on the sale of the duque’s urban properties, Alamán’s earnings formed a substantial part of his family income. So he took up these duties and stayed with them until his death, not simply out of nostalgia or ideological affinity but also because they offered palpable economic benefits. On the other hand, as he noted on several occasions over the years, his association with the Marquesado had cost him because it made him a target of attacks by liberal politicians. While he may have enjoyed a temporary increase in earnings from his position as the director of the United Mexican Mining Association, his longer-term hopes for the revival of silver mining in his native Guanajuato and of his diminished family fortunes along with it went nowhere. Roughly the same thing happened with his central involvement in the Cocolapan textile enterprise in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the difference being that he came out of that episode saddled with heavy debt to a consortium of angry investors. Alamán’s salary as a state minister—6,000 pesos per year between 1823 and 1825—applied only for about five years altogether between 1823 and 1853, although he received lesser sums in other government posts

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from time to time, for example, the commission on the amortization of copper coinage, the Council of State, and the directorship of industrial development.24 So his yearly earnings from managing the Marquesado holdings and as chief administrator of the Hospital de Jesús were certainly the most stable elements of his income over the thirty years he received them. Initially his yearly salary was set at 2,400 pesos, but in addition he drew a 600-peso housing allowance that he took in cash, bringing the total to 3,000 pesos per year. Lucas Alamán’s salary remained at this level for nearly twenty years, until sometime in the first half of the 1840s. Then, inexplicably, by 1846 at the latest Alamán’s salary dropped to 1,600 pesos per year with an annual housing allowance of 567 pesos, most likely remaining at this level until his death. At the same time, however, he was receiving a separate 800 pesos per year as administrator of the Hospital de Jesús, along with the housing allowance of nearly 300 pesos annually attached to that position. This made for a total yearly income from his Marquesado and hospital emoluments of about 3,300 pesos. And he was certainly not above occasionally bringing to the attention of the duke the weight of his workload in connection with the Cortés holdings and the understaffing of estate operations. The spring of 1838, for example, found Alamán feeling vexed with the demands of his duties for the casa and complaining in May that “what I do not do [myself] does not get done, or gets done badly, so I cannot rest.”25 Generally these pleas fell on deaf ears. The annual salary was not the only economic payoff he derived from his work for Terranova y Monteleone. Through the 1830s and well into the 1840s Alamán was the chief agent in Mexico for the liquidation by sale of Marquesado properties removed from entail (mayorazgo) by a law from the Spanish Cortes in 1820, applied in Mexico in 1823 but enforced very patchily in succeeding years. At first it went smoothly, so that by 1838 he had overseen the sale of about 250,000 pesos worth of urban holdings and estimated that the final figure would climb to about 500,000 pesos. Over the course of the next decade things were a bit more difficult given that the low-hanging fruit had been harvested early on, and what remained to be collected was “very little and very uncertain.”26 Lucas Alamán’s agreement with the duke was that he receive a 3 percent commission on all such sales, although he felt that his efforts warranted 5 percent. Assuming that the total sales amounted to 500,000 pesos, Alamán’s cumulative commission would have come to 15,000 pesos, although the later sales of the Haciendas Marquesanas and the Plaza del Volador would have added to this sum. This was not a paltry amount, certainly, but neither was it a great fortune. Calculated as about six times his official annual

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Marquesado salary (minus the housing allowance) it seems like a good deal of money, but when compared to his yearly ministerial salary of 6,000 pesos during his first ministries in the 1820s, it does not look like much. Thus during the 1830s at least, Alamán’s annual cash earnings from the Marquesado came to about 4,500 pesos per year. In addition to his formal salary, commission, and occasional income, Lucas Alamán may have availed himself of the considerable cash resources of the Marquesado on an unofficial basis. There is thin but intriguing evidence to suggest that he made a possibly unauthorized loan to himself from casa funds on at least one occasion and possibly more than once. The loans seem to have been related to covering the outlays involved in his personal venture into the cotton textile industry, namely, the enormous cotton yarn factory at Cocolapan, near Orizaba, in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The details of this incident have not been preserved, but it is alluded to in a letter to Alamán from Terranova y Monteleone in the summer of 1850. The sum involved, 7,000 pesos, was not huge but still substantial. “I am informed,” wrote the duke, that you still owe some seven thousand pesos to the sales account . . . for the house you sold to Señor Tejera, and which you have not been able to reimburse [to the Marquesado] owing to the misfortune that overtook your interests in the [textile business]. . . . [I]f the resources of the house were what they once were, it would not be necessary to speak of this [matter]. . . . [But I ask that you] draw up all the accounts of this . . . activity in order to determine the effective debt, and let me know what it is, indicating to me the easiest and least burdensome terms for you to repay the debt so that I may send to you a separate [back-dated] letter authorizing you to draw from the cash box the resulting amount as a loan payable [by you] in the terms you propose to me. I am sure that in this manner you will be satisfied, and will observe [in it] my desire to please you, declaring that I am sure of the probity with which you have managed my interests.27 Somehow the information had come to the duque about Alamán taking out this loan from Marquesado funds, and he implies that he has only just learned of it. And although the duke offered to let his apoderado set easy repayment terms for himself, he still wanted a formal document in the files in which he authorized the loan retroactively. The matter was still pending three years later, however. In the last year or two of his life and his dealings with Terranova, Alamán received communications from the duque indirectly on a

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number of occasions from a man named Pedro Peláez, some sort of functionary, a secretary, perhaps, in the Palermo establishment. In 1853 Peláez made the same allusion to the loan Alamán had made to himself from the Marquesado cash box. Moreover, an anonymous denunciation of Alamán to the duke hints that this episode was by no means a singular one: Some enemy of yours has written several times to the Duke that you have trafficked with his [i.e., the duke’s] money, that you have gone bankrupt, etc., but the Duke in truth has not lent any credence to these rumors. It was only when you wrote a letter to him during the last cholera [outbreak in Mexico in 1850] that he confirmed that you had made use of some small sum of money. Without anyone in the casa knowing about it, he instructed me to write to you to find out how much it was, in order to authorize you [retroactively] to take the sum from the cash box and pay it back over a number of years. You may believe that the Duke esteems you highly and has the most favorable disposition in your favor; and for my own account, I have always seconded [this sentiment]. I repeat this [to you] because I am convinced that you are a man of honor.28 Neither Terranova nor his man Peláez gave any indication that they saw it as anything other than a loan. How many such nonformalized loans Alamán might have availed himself of is unknown, as is the question of whether he ever actually repaid the funds before his death less than two years later. The most positive construction of this mysterious incident implies that the rectitude so much a part of Alamán’s public persona sometimes slipped in private as he bent the rules to bail himself out of a difficult financial situation. Finally, one material but nonpecuniary perquisite of which Lucas Alamán took increasing advantage over the years of his involvement with the Marquesado del Valle was his privileged access to the beautiful Hacienda de San Antonio Atlacomulco, located near Cuernavaca. He stopped leasing out the estate in the wake of the Mexican–American War, turning it into a highly lucrative agroindustrial enterprise that became something of a showplace in the area. In the mid-1820s Alamán made an inspection of the estate, reporting that in terms of production the hacienda was “only of the second class with respect to other [estates] of this jurisdiction or Cuautla,” its soils nearly exhausted, but the main buildings still in good condition. An 1847 inventory described the hacienda as being in good condition and productive.29 There is no evidence that he ever took Narcisa or their children on the extended yearly visits he made. He apparently kept the estate as a sort of hideaway for himself, although

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he may well have entertained the local squiredom. Perhaps the chief benefit it offered Alamán was its climate and the temporary alleviation this offered from the chronic lung problems he suffered in the capital. He was, in essence, enjoying the spa-like comforts of the countryside on the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone’s dime. The sort of sensual, aesthetic, and spiritual pleasures Lucas Alamán enjoyed on his forays to the more humid, softer, benign climate of the Morelos lowlands are well attested by an account of an overnight stay there with her husband in February 1841 written by Fanny Calderón de la Barca in a letter to her sister in Boston.30 Her impressions of the place as just short of an earthly paradise reveal why visits there were such an important privilege for the duke’s apoderado. After traveling from Mexico City to Cuernavaca by diligence the travel-weary couple were met at around dusk by horses and guides from the hacienda to escort them “over hill and dale” to the estate: At length the fierce fires, pouring from the sugar oven chimneys of Atlacomulco, gave us notice that we were near our haven for the night. We galloped into the courtyard, amongst dogs and Negroes and Indians, and were hospitably received by the administrador. . . . Greatly were we divided between sleep and hunger; but hunger gained the victory, and an immense, smoking supper received our most distinguished attention. This morning . . . we went out into the coffee plantation and orange walk. Anything so lovely! [sic] [T]he orange trees were covered with their golden fruit and fragrant blossom; the lemon trees, bending over, formed a natural arch which the sun could not pierce. We laid ourselves down on the soft grass, contrasting this day with the preceding. The air was soft and balmy, and actually heavy with the fragrance of the orange blossom and starry jasmine. All around the orchard ran streams of the most delicious clear water, trickling with sweet music, and now and then a little cardinal, like a bright red ruby, would perch on the trees. We pulled bouquets of orange blossom, jasmine, lilies, double red roses, and lemon leaves—and wished we could have transported them to you [her sister], to those lands where winter is now wrapping the world in his white winding sheet. The gardener, or coffee-planter—such a gardener!—Don Juan by name, with an immense black beard, Mexican hat, and military sash of crimson silk, came to offer us some orangeade; and, having sent to the house for sugar and tumblers, pulled the oranges from the trees, and

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drew the water from a clear tank, over-shadowed by blossoming branches and cold as though it had been iced. There certainly is no tree more beautiful than the orange, with its golden fruit, shining green leaves, and lovely white blossom with so delicious a fragrance. We felt this morning as if Atlacomulco was an earthly paradise. It belongs in fact to the Duke of Monteleone, and is let by his agent, Don Lucas Alamán, to Señor Anselmo Zurutuza. Its average annual produce of sugar is about thirty thousand arrobas [an arroba was about twenty-five pounds]. . . . There are few Negroes on these sugar plantations. . . . We observed but one old Negro, said to be upwards of a hundred, who was working in the courtyard as we passed; the generality of the workmen are Indians. Alamán typically visited between November and February, his stays tending to become longer over time, eventually extending into March when he could manage it. The weather in the Cuernavaca area was much milder than that in Mexico City during these months, and the air in the sugar zone more humid. Cuernavaca is about twenty-four hundred feet lower in altitude than Mexico City, so for someone with respiratory problems it would presumably have made breathing somewhat easier.31 The trip was demanding, taking about sixteen to eighteen hours on the road, with an overnight stop along the way. The apoderado did not travel by diligence, at least not in the early years, but on horseback and with an armed escort, since during the nearly three decades of his visits to the estate the area teemed with bandits. The first record of a visit by Lucas Alamán to Atlacomulco dates from 1826. He planned to leave Mexico City for the hacienda on Friday, 22 December 1826, but there is no mention of Alamán’s family on this or any other such occasion. After departing on Friday afternoon, he planned to spend the night in San Agustín de las Cuevas, initially deciding that the party should arrive at the hacienda in time for the afternoon comida on Saturday. But he changed his mind and decided to eat and spend the warmest part of the day at Huichilaque, just short of Cuernavaca, then bypass the city and arrive at Atlacomulco in the evening, so that only a light cena would be required to refresh the travelers. His intention was to take advantage of the “many festive days” during the Christmas period to look over the hacienda. He planned to be there eight or ten days, presumably so that he could return to Mexico City to celebrate Epiphany (Día de los Reyes) with his wife and children. He asked the estate administrator to have the hacienda’s account books ready for his inspection and all rents col-

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lected. The Alamán party was not to be a small one. He planned to bring his own horse but ordered that there be available a change of horses “or a mule, taking into account that I am not much of a horseman, [but] it is necessary that the animal [the mule] be very tame; I always prefer a horse [however], since I have little love for mules.” The party would need three pack mules “loaded very lightly, so that they can keep up with us.” He required four hacienda men as bodyguards because the roads were insecure; the number was eventually increased to six just to be on the safe side. Horses, mules, and men, he specified, should be in Mexico City by Thursday, 21 December.32 These visits to the Hacienda de Atlacomulco became yearly sojourns, although on occasion Alamán was too ill to travel. He was ailing in December 1831, for example, when he was still exercising his ministerial functions in the waning months of the Bustamante administration. The estate administrador sent best wishes for his recovery, offering that a visit would give the minister “a rest from paperwork.”33

The Ex-Marquesado under Attack The gifts—a euphemism for bribes—given to government officials by Lucas Alamán over the years on behalf of the duke could not shield the Pignatelli establishment from political attack or predation by the national state. Much of this was announced by the violent assertions of liberals that the duke’s holdings, as property of feudal origins, were not in keeping with republican or modern values. Motivated in part by genuine ideological concerns, these attacks also arose from the desire of state and federal governments to avail themselves of material resources in an environment of perennial fiscal stress. The extended history of sequestrations, for example, stretched back into the early colonial period. More recently, a series of royal provisions extinguished all functions of Marquesado officials and the estate’s legal jurisdiction effective 21 January 1810. This and other punitive measures were provoked by the fact that José Pignatelli’s father, Diego María Pignatelli de Aragón, Duque de Terranova y Monteleone and 13th Marqués del Valle, was in Paris in 1810 serving as the ambassador of Joaquin (Joachim) Murat, king of Naples, to the court of Emperor Napoleon at the very moment the Spanish crown had been usurped by Joseph Bonaparte.34 The political clouds that would shadow the Marquesado del Valle throughout the period between independence and Reform appeared on the horizon almost immediately after 1821. The first indications that the Cortés holdings

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would prove a lightning rod for Mexican nationalism and a screen for the projection of liberal ideas were associated, as I noted above, with congressional debates and public pamphleteering about the resting place of Fernando Cortés’s bones and the public display of the Marquesado’s coat of arms. These questions arose in the national congress in the form of resolutions passed on 6 May, 3 June, and 12 August 1822 decreeing the removal of Fernando Cortés’s coat of arms from the façade of the Hospital de Jesús. His sepulcher was to be removed from the attached chapel, which would be demolished “to erase the ominous memory of the Conquest.” During the congressional debates on these measures in 1822, Alamán’s occasional traveling companion in Europe, Deputy Servando Teresa de Mier, suggested that the coat of arms and the inscription on the conqueror’s tomb be housed in a museum “as monuments of history, of which it was always advisable to preserve a memory even when the memories are not agreeable ones.” Several other deputies supported Mier in this opinion, among them Manuel Mier y Terán, Rafael Mangino, and Carlos María de Bustamante, who cited ample European precedents for such preservation. One deputy took the historically relativist point of view that Cortés had acted merely according to the thinking of his unenlightened time, which condoned military conquest carried out to the greater glory of kings, but that in ensuing centuries the “light of philosophy” had tamed the customs of men. By 16 September 1823 Iturbide’s brief reign as emperor of Mexico had ended and Lucas Alamán had entered the transitional government as minister of internal and foreign affairs. Rumors had already been circulating for some time in Mexico City, where public opinion was “always and so manifestly contrary to the memory of Señor Cortés,” of a plot to seize the conqueror’s remains from the hospital chapel and take them to the public dump in San Lázaro to be burned. This threat raised more general fears among those charged with the administration of the Marquesado interests of attacks against the ducal establishment in Mexico. It was at this point that Alamán’s thirty-year history with the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone began. By the summer of 1825 the political drumbeat of criticism aimed at the Marquesado had reached another crescendo. In a nationalist spasm, congressional deputies had proposed a law mandating that foreigners who owned property might have it confiscated failing their return to take up residence in Mexico within a year of the law’s promulgation. The duke, unsurprisingly, objected violently to this legislation. Behind the effort to move the proposal into law Alamán saw the hand not only of radical deputies but also that of Joel Poinsett. Alamán strongly encouraged Terranova y Monteleone to come to

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Mexico himself to establish residence and oversee the liquidation of his holdings inasmuch as “no powers of attorney or instructions [from you] can suffice.” He predicted that the new congress to be elected for 1826 would prove even more inimical to Pignatelli’s interests than the current one, which indeed turned out to be the case. Alamán wrote to Pignatelli that the situation had worsened since the upper house had approved the measure. He thought the proposal likely to face even less opposition in the Chamber of Deputies, and that President Victoria would surely sign it into law. Alamán saw elections for the new congress as pervaded by “great intrigues [by] the two Masonic parties of Scottish [Rite] and York [Rite], which leave no stone unturned to pursue their respective interests, for you the worst thing that could happen.” After dropping below critical levels for a few years, the argument over the nature and legitimacy of the duque’s property once again came temporarily to a head—although not to a resolution—in congressional debates during the years 1827–29. Alamán vigorously defended the interests of the Cortés holdings in a series of extensive written refutations of direct attacks by liberal politicians against the Marquesado itself. Chief among the political figures arrayed against the Cortés holdings in these episodes and ipso fact o against Alamán himself were José Matías Quintana, Juan de Dios Cañedo, and Lorenzo de Zavala, the last already on his way to becoming an implacable political foe not only of the Marquesado but also of Alamán personally.35 Now a private citizen bound neither by political constraints nor by fear of repercussions for his future public career, Alamán was provoked to make more overtly conservative pronouncements by the expulsion decree of 1827 (another would follow in 1829) against European Spaniards and by the high public profile of Joel Poinsett. His representation to congress in the spring of 1827 was thus the first occasion on which he stated his ideas on these questions publicly and at length. Although written in a restricted, legalistic, albeit nontechnical, framework, Alamán’s exposition lays out his thinking on the natural right of individuals to the unencumbered ownership and disposition of private property. These writings of the late 1820s—in the deployment of historical data and narrative, the wealth of allusion, the careful argument, the complex and adamantine prose style—preview the writing of Alamán the historian as well as his political turn toward the right from his stance as a moderate republican while he occupied his first ministries. One is thus prompted to speculate that Lucas Alamán became the great historian he was at least in part because of his early linkage with the Marquesado del Valle, or at the very least that his interest in history and his involvement with the Cortés heir and his properties were mutually nourishing.

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This public battle was occasioned by the introduction of a measure in the lower house of the congress by Deputy Matías Quintana on 27 April 1827 proposing that a special committee be appointed as quickly as possible to recommend whether or not the properties “donated” to Fernando Cortés and inherited by his descendant ought to be returned to the nation. There were several problematic terms in the proposal. In what sense did the nation hold some primitive or residual claim on properties granted within its present limits by the Spanish monarchs? There followed from this the questions of whether the properties were to be returned to it, and what the nature of the donations or grants made to Fernando Cortés was. The underlying idea of the proposed legislation was that the Cortés holdings in Mexico were in effect illegal and therefore subject to expropriation by the national government. They had originated in now-invalid feudal grants by the Spanish king, grants that independent republican Mexico had repudiated by the very fact of its existence. Alamán asserted that none of the rents presently being collected on properties held by the Marquesado were based on seigneurial rights, but only on the private possession of real property owned as any other individual might own it. Beginning with the proposition that questions about the legitimacy of the Cortés holdings should properly be settled in the courts since they did not fall within the purview of the congress, he also declared that the constitution did not allow the enactment of retroactive laws on such issues. He added that the congress’s aim of depriving an individual of his private property was not only illegal under the Mexican constitution but also at odds with universal social practice “[since] property was the basis of all societies, and the object of government to secure it, and [insure] respect for it, as one of the rights of man consecrated by the fundamental laws of all civilized peoples, whatever the form of the state. . . . The right to property is nothing more than the right of every individual to possess peacefully and under guarantee of authority the properties acquired according to the laws prevailing at the time the acquisition was made.” Alamán’s reference to the “laws prevailing at the time the acquisition was made” was intended to discredit the idea aired in the congressional debates and in the public sphere more generally that because the conquest of the Aztec realm by Cortés had in effect been an illegal, violent, and predatory act of military usurpation, and since Mexico had repudiated the suzerainty of the Spanish monarch by gaining its independence, grants made by the Spanish kings no longer enjoyed validity. Alamán’s argument related to the immediate issue of the Marquesado holdings and the state’s right to sequester them

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or expropriate them outright and furthermore to his vision of the relationship between the Spanish past and the Mexican present.36 Alamán went on to argue that all the rural estates and urban real property in the country found their origins in colonial grants from the kings of Spain or their viceroys. It would therefore be unjust and illegal to question the basis of the duque’s properties in this way unless the legitimacy of all holdings that came into being through the same mechanism were similarly questioned: “Should the principle be granted that all the properties having their origin in the said grants are null and should revert to the nation, it would be necessary to sweep off its very foundations the right to property among us, and thus to cause a general dispossession of all present proprietors. . . . In Mexico as in Peru, all that exists in the present order of things recognizes its origin in the conquest.” Once the absolute respect for private property had been compromised, in other words, society would find itself on the slippery slope of anarchy. His view of historical processes and his absolute fidelity to a natural law interpretation of the right to private property was one of the enduring hallmarks of his activities as a public man. His exposition went on to problematize the concept of the nation as the residual repository of the property rights in question: “Is the present [Mexican] nation, perhaps, that which was despoiled by the conquistadors? Is it not composed of the descendants of the same conquerors amalgamated [amalgamados] with the conquered? We need do no more than cast a glance around us—our religion, our language, our clothing, the variety of color and features of our population, our customs: everything, everything tells us that we are not the nation despoiled by the Spaniards, but a new nation in which everything is recognized as beginning in that same conquest.” If the existing Mexican nation was not despoiled by the conquerors, therefore, but was in part their heir, on what basis could it demand restitution? “If we claim to trace [backward] the chain of peoples who have successively gained domination over these regions, what series of successive usurpations would we not discover, and who could pretend to an incontestable right to restitution? In effect, the Mexicans [i.e., the Aztecs] despoiled by the Spaniards had in their turn despoiled settled peoples they had encountered, these the ones that preceded them, and these yet others who had possessed the land before them.” Alamán went on to assert that private property in all nations originated in the same primordial event as in Mexico, namely, conquest, and that these property regimes were not to be interfered with despite the eras of political instability through which nations ineluctably pass:

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Thus it is that in England, despite the fact that properties proceed in their majority from grants made by William the Conqueror, their owners have been left in the peaceful enjoyment of their [lands], as much under the Republic and Protectorate as during the frequent changes in [ruling] dynasty, and especially during the present happy epoch of law, security, and liberty. In the French Revolution, no one was deprived of their property because of its evil origins. Yes, feudal rights and taxes were suppressed, a law was enacted depriving of their properties those who left the Republic because of their opposition to its institutions, and the penalty of confiscation was imposed, but no inquiry was ever made as to whether these properties originated in grants made by the Frankish kings to those who aided in the conquest of the Gauls, nor if they originated in properties confiscated from Huguenots or Protestants expelled when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. In this discussion of the duke’s rights are three emergent aspects of Alamán’s thought that were to characterize his writing and public pronouncements in years to some. First, there was the absolute defense from the natural rights perspective of private property as the bulwark of social order and the basis of both individual and national economic well-being. Second, there was the tone of Burkean conservatism that viewed the rational observance of historical precedent as essential to the social constitution. The core of this position was that established institutions were not to be meddled with in the service of passing political fashion. Finally, the view of the nation expressed here sees it neither as the inevitable product of a teleological process toward which all of history was tending nor as the best of all possible polities. Rather, the nation was a complex reality that had come about under specific historical circumstances, some of them contingent, some of them inevitable in an almost biological sense. Considering what an ardent nationalist Alamán was to be for all his life as political actor, public intellectual, and historian, this position located him on a rather slippery slope. In demystifying the nation he took on the burden of unrelenting rationalism at the dawn of the Age of Romanticism. In a slight shift in his argument, Alamán asserted that from the beginning of the Marquesado it was impossible to distinguish what part originated in donations from the Spanish king and what from completely legitimate, private entrepreneurial activities. He concluded by asserting that by 1827 there were few holdings left that had originated in grants from Emperor Charles V and that in any case the income realized from them was risible. The Hacienda

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de Atlacomulco in the Cuernavaca area, by far the most important of all the landed properties, grew out of a number of purchases and from protracted judicial suits over ownership rights and boundaries. It had not been consolidated until nearly the end of the seventeenth century and had nothing to do with royal grants. Nor had the urban properties of the Marquesado originated in royal grants, and moreover most of them were committed to the support of the Hospital de Jesús, a pious establishment of great public benefit. According to Lucas Alamán, therefore, the Marquesado did not possess a fraction of the wealth often attributed to it in the aggregate. Marquesado properties did not surpass “an ordinary private fortune inferior to that of other hacendados in this same republic.” The general heating up of the political atmosphere over the ownership of property by nonresident foreigners in general and the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone in particular, the congressional debates, and incendiary stories in the press—all written in bad faith, according to don Lucas—were inducing renters and mortgagees not to pay their outstanding debts to the estate. These people hoped, Alamán speculated, that the properties would be expropriated by the national government, thus relieving them of their obligations.37 Signs of impending disaster were to be seen on all sides. Lucas Alamán continued to advise the duke that the best strategy for the Marquesado was to keep a low public profile. This public relations campaign for a time drew in even one of the greatest polymaths and intellectuals of the age, Baron Alexander von Humboldt. About the time these debates were taking place in the Chamber of Deputies, Alamán was worrying about how the public exposure of Fernando Cortés’s testament might compromise the situation of Pignatelli’s properties. In the spring of 1827 he wrote to the duque that Humboldt planned to insert in a new edition of his Ensayo político a copy of Cortés’s testament. Alamán had urged Humboldt not to do this and had even offered to compensate the German sage for any printing costs entailed in the document’s withdrawal.38 That Alamán should go to such lengths to suppress the publication of a document he felt would compromise the position of the Marquesado and that he would implicitly even hint obliquely to threaten Humboldt by invoking the illegality of bringing the testament to light without the duke’s express permission bespeaks his desperate view of the situation at that moment as well as his confidence that the weight of his name and his friendship with the older man could prevail. Alamán advised that an explicit counterattack to liberal “calumnies” would only further inflame the situation. One detects at this time, however, in his parallel correspondence with Terranova y Monteleone

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and the English merchant bankers Frederick Huth and Sons his effort to manage the former’s anxiety, while he gave the latter a more unvarnished version. To his correspondent in the London firm he remarked that because of the more liberal composition of the new congress there was even less chance of a positive outcome for the Marquesado regarding the legislation under debate.39 Informed of all the continuing threats to his holdings, Terranova y Monteleone wrote to his Mexican agent, with a rare show of sardonic humor: “It seems the entire happiness of the Mexican Empire [sic] depends upon my properties, and that only in them can the necessary resources be found to cure the ills Mexico is suffering, since in any situation thought turns only to them.” The proposals against the Marquesado in the national congress were advancing only slowly, but the legislature in the State of Mexico, in which the Hacienda de Atlacomulco was located, had passed a law imposing surtaxes on properties owned by foreigners.

The Sequestrations of the 1830s Just before another political onslaught by Lorenzo de Zavala against the duque’s holdings late in 1832, Alamán, in one of the most apocalyptic of his statements to Terranova, got around to addressing his patron’s plaintive comments on the rule of law in all civilized societies as a protection of private property. He offered in his letter to Terranova y Monteleone a clear critique of what might be called Mexican political culture of the early republican age. The critique centered on the noxious effects on public life of political factions, on the arbitrary and unpredictable swings in governance and the rule of law that factionalism produced, and on Alamán’s conviction that wide popular participation in politics, especially in electoral life, was conducive to these wild oscillations. For if power were sufficiently concentrated in the state and the play of factional competition and conflict thus reduced, if not eliminated, to that degree the likelihood of maintaining political and economic stability would increase. This model was inherently incompatible with the concept of liberal citizenship and all it entailed—a wide franchise, frequent elections, a free press, guaranteed individual rights: democracy within a republican framework, in other words. The question arises here as to whether Alamán’s impulse toward centralized forms of power and authority grew out of strictly practical considerations or was ideologically based. This is not to say he lacked strongly ideological convictions or the full repertoire of social prejudices against the ignorance, suggestibility, and political malleability of the common

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people. And it may well be that in the end little distinction can or should be drawn between an ideological conservative and a practical one. Conservatism in the sense of a determination to preserve the status quo, after all, was inherently a defensive stance based in existing social realities and dedicated to taking concrete actions to preserve them. But by my reading Alamán was first and foremost a practical man in politics, in business, even in the writing of history, a man who wanted to get things done with as little clamor and misspent energy as possible. In this light his affinity for Edmund Burke is quite understandable. The most revealing passage in his long letter of late 1832 to the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone sets forth his views on political factionalism and the rule of law: You are proceeding here [in citing the universal rule of law] on a very mistaken assumption. . . . This principle [that laws will be objectively applied no matter what party is in power] applied to the circumstances of this country is completely false, because here the laws are completely silenced by the voice of faction. Those laws existed when the debtors of Toluca, in order not to pay [what was due on] their mortgages, petitioned congress to despoil you of your property on the grounds that it had originated in the conquest. Those same laws protective of property existed when various congressmen proposed expropriation. . . . The laws protected the persons and property of the Spaniards [when] the former were expelled and the latter confiscated. . . . There is no trust to be placed in the authority of the laws. They [the laws] had recovered some vigor in the years 1830 and 1831 [emphasis added], but a new revolution has arrived to reverse all that work, so that today the fate of the nation and of individuals depends on the caprice of a junta of generals; and shortly we shall again have congresses composed of the most ignorant and immoral [men of] the country, in which there will be enacted laws for expropriation or any other form of error proposed by any of these rogues by disposition of the [Masonic] lodge to which he belongs, and agreed to by a majority of sans-culottes. The struggle over the Marquesado holdings, cut short in 1830 by the fall of Vicente Guerrero, was renewed in 1833 by Lorenzo de Zavala, an implacable foe of the ducal establishment in Mexico, and returned to the governorship of the State of Mexico. The Hacienda de Atlacomulco and the Marquesado properties in Toluca—both in the State of Mexico since the State of Morelos would

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not be created for another thirty-five years or so—were seized by order of Zavala, who had returned to the governorship as Manuel Gómez Pedraza returned to the short-lived presidency to which he had been elected in 1828. With the change in regime the national congress was dissolved, new elections were called, and many of the liberal officials in the states were restored to the positions they had occupied in 1829. In writing to his aristocratic Neapolitan correspondent of the election of Santa Anna as president later that winter Alamán described the new national congress and state legislatures as composed of “the most extreme [exaltados] men of the victorious party.” Conversations with Governor Zavala regarding the return of the properties had achieved nothing, while Zavala’s ideas about the breakup and redistribution of large properties Alamán described as “the most extravagant and destructive, [which even] in the French Convention of 1792 would have appeared extreme.” A key element for both sides in this dispute was the testament of Fernando Cortés. Alamán was asked in a peremptory manner by the minister of exterior and interior relations in the interim Gómez Farías government to produce this ancient document. When he claimed not to have it he was called a liar by the minister, who then revealed to him that the government already had a copy anyway.40 This involvement on the part of the central government indicates that it was working in concert with or at least parallel to Zavala in the State of Mexico in anticipation of the renewed congressional attack on the Marquesado predicted by the apoderado. Alamán anticipated no remedy from the State of Mexico legislature given that Zavala had filled it, in his words, with “extremely ignorant people . . . who will serve as his instrument to carry out by this means everything he wants.”41 Lorenzo de Zavala was quick to reply to a petition from Alamán in March 1833 demanding disembargo of the duke’s holdings, on 4 March 1833 writing two articles in the Mexico City newspaper El Fénix de la Libertad. He recounted the initial introduction of the question of the Cortés holdings in the national congress by deputies Manuel Cañedo and Matías Quintana in January 1828 and Alamán’s powerful rebuttal before congress of the arguments in favor of sequestration. Governor Zavala argued that raisons d’état and the contingencies of volatile Mexican political life trumped the absolute sanctity of private property rights. This argument might appear to be an irony given our traditional view of nineteenth-century liberalism as the ideological bastion of an aspiring bourgeoisie to which private property, free markets, and a retraction of the state from economic life were central articles of faith—but it really was not. What was in play here was the idea that political interventions might kick-

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start a shift in the concentration of landed property, especially away from the old landowning aristocracy, the Church, and indigenous peasant communities into the hands of more productive groups, thereby effecting a sort of primitive redistribution of capital through political means. Any claims to the historically transcendent priority of private property, therefore, were to be considered socially and politically contingent. This was a historical conjuncture, in other words, intended to consummate the uncompleted transition begun by the Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century, whose étatiste, productivist rhetoric the liberals echoed. The situation was rife with ironies but not necessarily where one might expect to find them. When in power and pressed by circumstances, both liberals and conservatives proved willing to impose forced loans on wealthy private citizens, confiscatory taxes, and other emergency measures. That elements of political ideology such as the right to private property were not present in pristine, undiluted forms in this period has made the political life of the early republic hard to categorize and liberalism and conservatism hard to pin down relative to each other. In the first of his articles Zavala wrote that when he took over the governorship the State of Mexico was plagued by violence and factional conflict, its coffers empty. He therefore felt amply justified in appropriating income from the Marquesado holdings for public purposes. Zavala went on to write that the end had justified the means since depriving the liberals’ enemies of the economic resources to sustain their cause had insured the triumph of a “republic under paternal governments” that guaranteed individual rights and subdued the terror under which citizens had lived. In a rhetorical flourish, Governor Zavala reminded his readers that “any element of aristocratic [privilege] is repellant.” The continued existence of any properties held in entail was therefore illegal.42 Zavala went on in his essay to develop the idea that the good of the community takes priority over the absolute right to private property. He added that by permanent, centuries-long foreign residence the duke’s family had in essence abandoned Mexico except for the Marquesado properties, thereby forfeiting any right to hold property there. Lorenzo de Zavala’s disquisition deployed cool reasoning and warm political rhetoric. But in a second article in the same newspaper on the same day he attacked Lucas Alamán as a public figure, implicitly impugning his character in heated words. In scarcely veiled terms he wrote of the “vipers” whose ardent desire was to devastate the republic, in the next breath assailing “the Alamáns and [allies]” who hid their corrupt cause under the “standard of religion.” He wrote of state legislatures during the Bustamante government “not voted into

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office” but handpicked by “the agents of the ministry ruled by the servant of the Duke of Monteleone,” hinting at conspiracies of dark political forces in the “bloody hands of the Alamáns,” who were constantly attacking Zavala himself with “sarcasm and calumny.” Of these, chief among them the apoderado of the duque, he concluded: “The eyes of such men take pleasure only in misery and bloodshed: they want the people to remain submerged in ignorance in order to tyrannize them at their whim, to enrich themselves with the sweat of the poor.”43 This sort of rhetoric was to follow Lucas Alamán for the rest of his life and even well beyond his death into modern interpretations of the period and his career. As Zavala’s references make clear, Alamán’s long involvement with Pignatelli’s affairs was only one item in the bill of particulars condemning him in the eyes of patriotic Mexicans. His hypocrisy as a defender of religion, his tyrannous propensities while in power, his cupidity and lack of sympathy for the mass of the Mexican people, and above all his complicity in the death of Vicente Guerrero—all these, with the later addition of his monarchist leanings, were to make up the standard version of Alamán’s character and public persona. There matters stood in the spring of 1833, with the Hacienda de Atlacomulco and other Cortés properties in the hands of the State of Mexico government, while the Marquesado and Alamán himself continued in a sort of political limbo through the early and midsummer. Events at the national level meanwhile swirled in their typically unpredictable way. First they surged against the interests of Alamán and the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone during a brief liberal ascendancy, then tided after some time in their favor as conservative tendencies reasserted themselves. At the end of March 1833 Santa Anna replaced Gómez Pedraza in the presidency, with the radical liberal Valentín Gómez Farías as his vice president. During this time Alamán, who remained in hiding in Mexico City, had begun to write the unpublished fragment of a personal memoir I have analyzed. He emerged from hiding in the late spring of 1834 to face a trial before the Cámara de Diputados for his complicity in Guerrero’s murder and to defend himself in the court of public opinion with a long pamphlet on his role in the Bustamante government. Responding to the news that Alamán had emerged from hiding in the spring of 1834, the duque, in one of his oscillations back toward the fulsome praise of his apoderado (sentiments that he insisted would remain “constant forever”), expressed his enormous satisfaction at Alamán’s reappearance in public.44 In the meantime, Lorenzo de Zavala had left the governorship of the State of Mexico in the fall of 1833 to take up a seat in the national congress and then the Mexican ambassadorship to Paris.

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By the end of 1834, with the sympathetic intervention of President Santa Anna, the Marquesado had again come fully into possession of all its recently disembargoed properties in the State of Mexico and efforts were under way to clear up pending problems with yet other holdings elsewhere. A new national congress was about to sit, which would assent officially to the total restitution of the Cortés properties by February of 1835. Alamán regarded this happy circumstance, however, as entirely contingent on the short-term political situation.45 Somewhat earlier he remarked rather dolefully of himself in a letter to the duque that while he would soon be absolved of complicity in the Guerrero murder, he was “very resolved never again to become involved in public [affairs], which have brought me nothing but misfortunes.”46 In keeping with this resolution, even while awaiting final resolution of his trial before congress in the early months of 1835, he declined appointment as ambassador to France (to replace Zavala), partly because of understandable resistance from his family. In subsequent years Alamán would energetically pursue government compensation for the damages to the ex-Marquesado properties and the foregone income sacrificed to the sequestration, but to no avail. If history indeed repeats itself as farce, as Marx famously observed, neither Alamán nor Terranova would have laughed very hard when the Hacienda de Atlacomulco was seized yet again by the State of Mexico during the early months of the Mexican–American War, probably in the autumn of 1846. At this point, if not before, the Spanish chief of mission in Mexico (1844–47), Salvador Bermúdez de Castro, involved himself in the protection of Terranova’s holdings by exerting pressure on the national government through contacts with the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations to lift the embargo on Atlacomulco. Alamán shared with the Spanish diplomat a deep political conservatism as well as literary talent and ambitions, which made for a good working relationship between the two men. The association was not to the benefit of Alamán’s subsequent political reputation, however, inasmuch as during these years the two became embroiled in a monarchist conspiracy to put Mexico back into the hands of the Bourbon dynasty. Bermúdez even offered to transfer Cortés’s bones secretly to Spain for reburial, but neither Pignatelli nor his distinguished agent thought the time right. The embargo on Atlacomulco was lifted by early February 1847. Lucas Alamán’s efforts to protect the properties of the conquistador’s heirs against what he viewed as the unjustified and politically dangerous depredations of the Mexican state, to manage optimally the remains of the Marquesado del Valle, and to burnish the reputation of Fernando Cortés took many forms during the nearly three decades he served the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone. One

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of the most powerful forms, and at the same time one of the most diffuse, was his treatment of the colonial regime in his magisterial history of the independence wars, the Historia de Méjico (five volumes, 1848–52), and in other historical writings. Yet one should not discount the importance of his historical work as a large-scale public relations project intended to sway general opinion away from further governmental molestations of the Marquesado holdings. This is by no means to imply that Lucas Alamán was the hired pen of a grasping Italian magnate, a sort of Mexican Grub Street hack. He wrote to Terranova y Monteleone that his interpretation of Cortés’s role in the conquest of Mexico enjoyed success in pulling public opinion toward the inviolability of the Marquesado and therefore exerted pressure on other opinion makers and the political class. The author of the Historia de Méjico seems genuinely to have been convinced that he had successfully begun to rehabilitate the colonial regime in the eyes of his countrymen and that this redemptive exercise had benefited the duque. On the eve of Antonio López de Santa Anna’s resumption of the presidency in April 1853 little had changed in the relationship with the duke except that Alamán’s health was visibly and irreversibly failing. “I can no longer work at night,” he wrote, complaining of lung trouble, the emphysema that would contribute to his death a few weeks later. Alamán commented about the apparent hopelessness of the duke’s financial claims against the Mexican government: “It is not enough to be right, or even to be able to prove it, without recurring to other means [i.e., bribery] in a time when nothing is accomplished without money, and so much more so now that General Santa Anna is returning to the government. He is a man who does not move without [being paid] money. I think it necessary that you give me wide authorization [to pay bribes] because this is the way things get done in this virtuous republican government.” Just two weeks or so before Alamán’s death, while he was principal minister in the government of the man he had sometimes reviled but had nonetheless invited to return to Mexico to take up the reins of power, Pignatelli wrote in a letter of the “base trivialities” of the Mexican government in refusing to recognize a large sovereign debt to Spain in which his own claims were now ensnared. And there matters stood when Lucas Alamán died on 2 June 1853.

Making the Remnant Pay Alamán, members of his administrative staff, a number of commissioned agents in the provinces, and eventually his own son Juan Bautista spent an enormous amount of time over the years in the collection of money owed to

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the duke in the form of censos (mortgages) and rents. Many of these encumbrances originated well back in the colonial period, looked ancient, and therefore attracted unfavorable comment as being remnants of monarchy, Spanish conquest, and seigneurial privilege. In the cases of both censos and ordinary property rentals, Alamán’s collection policy was to tread lightly so as not to rock the boat of public and political opinion. For my purposes the property rentals are the more interesting of the two sources of income, since they brought Alamán and the Marquesado into direct confrontation with some of the important political figures of the period. The Hospital de Jesús was supported principally by rental income from urban property in Mexico City, although this income stream was kept distinct from that going to the duke. Getting the renters to pay on time or getting them to pay the back rents once they had fallen behind was no less a headache over the years than keeping current with the censos. Interestingly, Lucas Alamán himself seems to have written virtually all of the letters to errant renters; records from the early 1830s, for example, show Alamán writing scores and scores of these dunning notes in his own hand.47 The collection of current rents and arrears on urban properties owned by the Marquesado but leased to private individuals brought Lucas Alamán face to face in potentially awkward situations with a number of prominent public figures. Most of the houses were in the central part of Mexico City, on the more fashionable streets nearest the Sagrario parish, the cathedral, presidential palace, and other stone icons of power. The broader significance of this landlord / renter relationship is to highlight the fact that the Mexican political and social nation was quite diminutive, embracing probably a couple thousand people at most, the largest part of those in Mexico City and others scattered throughout the provinces. This group was certainly gendered exclusively masculine in the sphere of politics, but the social world of such people included spouses and families as well. The much-talked-of category of the hombres de bien encapsulates such people in a general way, as do concepts of economic solidity, even wealth, political influence, and social networking, although none of them captures it entirely. The propinquities of the urban environment—spatial, economic, cultural, and political—made for interaction, if not intimacy or friendship, among people who on other grounds might have avoided each other. They lived in the same neighborhoods, probably crossed paths with relative frequency, and would have attended at least some of the same political, social, and ceremonial functions.

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One of the first lease agreements Alamán made on behalf of the Hospital de Jesús was very probably with doña Josefa Sánchez, the widow of the last viceroy of Mexico, the Spanish military man Juan O’Donojú. She remained behind in Mexico after her husband’s sudden death from pleurisy—or, if one prefers, from poison administered by agents of Agustín de Iturbide, as Carlos María de Bustamante alleged—in the fall of 1821. The lease of a house at Calle de Tacuba no. 19, in a fashionable neighborhood, was for eight hundred pesos annually; according to the 5 percent rule of thumb, the value of the house would therefore have been something like sixteen thousand pesos. By 1832, however, doña Josefa was apparently having considerable difficulty coming up with the rent and had fallen into arrears. The widow O’Donojú deployed all sorts of excuses, including the long nonpayment of a government pension, saying that she had had to pawn her jewelry at the Montepío (the government pawnshop), that her servants had not received their wages, and so forth. What action the duke’s apoderado took in this case is not recorded, but in other instances he was inclined to leniency and the granting of extensions only so far.48 Yet other leases of properties belonging either to the Marquesado or to the Hospital de Jesús brought Alamán into business contact with prominent politicians. One of them was the military politician and former president Manuel Gómez Pedraza, in 1841 renting a house in Tacuba at nine hundred pesos a year. A case of rent arrears messier than some but in the end resolved in a reasonably amicable fashion was that of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada (1812– 61), the author of the famous Ley Lerdo (the 1856 law disamortizing communally held lands, among other measures) and elder brother of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (1823–89), liberal politician, treasury secretary under President Ignacio Comonfort, and later president. The estate that José Pignatelli de Aragón, Duque de Terranova, Duque de Monteleone, and Fourteenth Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, had inherited from his father Diego in 1818 he eventually passed on at his death in 1859 to his son, another Diego, still a minor in the mid-1830s.49 While titles of nobility and the entailment of estates were still legal in Italy and Spain during all this time, they were no longer so recognized in Mexico. The real reason for disentailment had less to do with the mechanics of inheritance than with justified fears on the part of Terranova, fears which Lucas Alamán shared and even encouraged, about the uncertain economic and political conditions endemic to Mexico during most of the three decades of the men’s relationship. So it is certainly no coincidence that the initiative to liquidate as much of the property as possible took shape at almost exactly the same moment that the government embargo of 1833–35 was offi-

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cially lifted, on 24 April 1835. The revolucionarios, as Pignatelli frequently referred to Mexican liberals—Alamán tended to prefer the label jacobinos—could not sequester or expropriate what they could not lay their hands on; so if the Marquesado properties were converted to cash and the cash shipped to Palermo, from the duke’s point of view the problem would be solved. The way sales would work Alamán illustrated with the actual sale of a house on the corner of Calle de Tacuba and Calle de San José del Real that he had made to Manuel Diez de Bonilla, serving at the time as minister of interior and exterior relations. Capitalized at the 5 percent rate, with an annual rental payment of 1,244 pesos, the house was valued at 24,800 pesos, although Bonilla ended up paying 30,000 pesos for it. At 3 percent commission, Alamán netted 900 pesos from the transaction, a not-insignificant sum. By early 1836, when his apoderado was able to tell him that at least four houses had been sold, the duke expressed enormous relief that the liquidation was rolling along. The difficulty, messiness, and unpleasantness of selling houses in Mexico that Alamán anticipated and so often remarked on was not slow in materializing. Indicative of the problematic process of these sales was that of a house occupied as a renter by the sister of Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was out of the president’s chair at the time. Since this sister is referred to in the documents only as the sister of Santa Anna or as “señora,” definitely identifying her is impossible, but the most likely candidate among his four living sisters was Francisca López de Santa Anna, thrice-married and politically active on behalf of her brother. The sale of the house by Alamán to an unnamed party late in 1835 prompted “many very sharp exchanges to arrange with her the transfer [to the new owner].” By the following spring the situation had deteriorated even further, although the difficulties for sellers of rental properties in dislodging occupants was common to other landlords as well: This is exactly what is happening to me with the sister of General Santa Anna, who occupies one of the best houses [you own]. She pays nothing in rent, and she is taking as much time as she wants to vacate the house. [The house] was sold, and despite everything [I have done] there is no way to make her leave. We will end by having to rescind the sale contract and having to pay damages and costs to the purchaser. The lady will end up with the house since she has had the audacity to say that you should give it to her [as a gift] in return for the services her brother has done you, and that she understood the matter in this way.

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By the late summer of 1836 Alamán wrote that the situation with Santa Anna’s sister had become “scandalous, and I am certain that he does not approve in the slightest what she is doing because it is not worthy of a person of quality.”50 In some cases the houses were sold by Alamán to the renter-occupiers, in others to third parties. The properties sold were located in the best areas of the city center, and many of the purchasers were members of the most socially and politically prominent families of the time: not only Manuel Diez de Bonilla but also those bearing the names Escandón, Cortina, Pérez de Castro, and Ortiz de Montellano, among others. From October 1835 to November 1837 Alamán sold fourteen houses and two rural properties, for a total value of 370,000 pesos. Alamán’s commission on these sales, at 3 percent, would have amounted to over 11,000 pesos, nearly twice his yearly income of 6,000 pesos when he had been chief minister in the republican governments of the early to mid-1820s and from 1830 to 1832. Over and above the endemic political instability of the time—a sort of low-level, normal noise and a generalized feeling of apprehension and nervousness about what might be around the corner; and chronically bad economic conditions, such as the lack of capital and the circulation of devalued copper coinage—the effects of specific political events had an impact on the pace at which sales could proceed and the prices that could be obtained. After the spasm of sales in the later 1830s the liquidation of the Marquesado slowed considerably but continued in a desultory manner into the 1840s. In 1849, with his last, small remission to Palermo of funds from the sales, Alamán wrote that what remained to collect was “very little and very uncertain” and hardly worth the cost in time, bad press, and legal fees.51

Going Through the Mill at Atlacomulco Lucas Alamán’s chronic health problems and the restorative power of his extended winter visits to the Hacienda de San Antonio Atlacomulco led him to develop a strong personal connection to the place over and above the concerns of his official position at the helm of the Marquesado administration. Over the years he certainly invested much more effort in bringing the estate back to profitability, improving it, and making decisions about day-to-day activities there than he did on any other aspect of the Marquesado holdings. His most intense direct involvement was probably during the five years or so between the end of the Mexican–American War and his death in 1853. As was true of many Mexicans of his background, from a tender age he was certainly no

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stranger to country life. Family members and friends owned rural estates, and excursions into the countryside could not have been rare occurrences. In addition, many families among the Mexican elite typically sought to diversify their holdings through the acquisition of rural estates. Alamán possessed his own hacienda in the Celaya area from the mid-1820s, experimenting with the introduction of new crops and techniques as an improving landlord, and he may well have regarded the Atlacomulco estate as another laboratory for such innovations. Although Alamán envisioned the country’s long-term future as advancing along the path of industrialization, he realized the essential role large-scale agriculture must play in this development as a domestic source of food and raw materials. What is more, the rural pursuits of humble folk supported a pool of reserve labor. The duties Alamán had thrust upon him in the ultimate supervision of the estate were many, and those he took on himself were many more, since he was loath to assign them to anyone else. Pignatelli generally ratified his apoderado’s decisions. In any given year Alamán generated enormous numbers of letters on managerial matters, almost all in his own hand; reviewed all accounts personally; and signed mountains of receipts for all manner of things. His management of Atlacomulco demonstrates the obsessive perfectionism, the enormous command of detail, and the reluctance to delegate tasks that characterized his work as a government minister and as a historian. In the early period of direct management and from 1848 on the experience and aptitude of the on-site manager, the administrador, was crucial to the health and profitability of the estate. Despite the presence of some highly competent managers, however, political and economic circumstances conspired against the prosperity of the hacienda at various moments. For about fifteen years the management of the hacienda was out of Lucas Alamán’s hands while it was successively leased out to several individuals, periods during which Alamán’s involvement with the estate receded considerably. The attempt to sell Atlacomulco did not prosper given the state of the hacienda nearly up to midcentury, so the leases were in lieu of disposing of the hacienda on the market. Alamán wrote to Pignatelli in 1838, for example, “As far as Atlacomulco is concerned, it is a very difficult property to sell. This is true at present of all rural properties here, which are valued little, but especially this one. . . . Its buildings are [in] bad [condition], and [it is in] frequent conflicts with the neighboring pueblos because its boundaries are not well defined. Add[ed] to all this [is] that like other sugar-producing estates it needs for its operation a considerable sum [of cash].”52 This situation prevailed for a number of years,

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or even worsened, so that by end of the Mexican–American war neither potential buyers nor renters were to be found. Lucas Alamán’s decision in the summer of 1847 to resume the management of the hacienda directly on behalf of the Marquesado after so many years seems to have been his alone, prompted in part by the sequestration of the property in 1846–47 by the State of Mexico government in connection with land suits by Indian communities abutting the hacienda. Other factors were Alamán’s continuing failure to find a renter and the chaotic political situation. The embargo was lifted in the winter of 1847, not because any good reasons to do so were offered, wrote Alamán, but “because in these revolutionary governments reason has no part in any [decision], nor is there any attention paid to justice, but everything is done by caprice, because of rivalries and interests of the moment.”53 Always eager to consolidate his position with the latest occupant of the presidential chair, Pignatelli had sent a congratulatory letter to Santa Anna—who occupied the presidency between 20 May and 16 September 1847—via his apoderado and apparently an earlier one to José Joaquín de Herrera, preceded by Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, preceded by Nicolás Bravo, preceded by Mariano Salas. In a characteristically mordant commentary on Mexican political life, Alamán informed his boss in late October 1847, by which time Santa Anna was out, that the letter should be held back: “Neither the letter for General Santa Anna nor the other for Herrera are worth anything now, and with the rapidity with which revolutions here throw down those who manage to rise, it would be necessary to have an assortment of [such] letters for everyone imaginable, or a blank one [that might be addressed] to [the man] who happened to be in command. But none of these gentlemen are worth much. . . . We will see what is advisable to do according to how things develop, [since] now the [situation] is very unclear.”54 Following the war with the United States and during the American occupation, the real estate properties of the Marquesado were treated quite respectfully by the American officers. They paid visits to the hospital to see the portrait of Fernando Cortés, which “they look upon with veneration” as the second conquerors of Mexico studying the visage of the first, and to look at his burial place, his weapons, and his signature on documents. Alamán’s fears for Atlacomulco were assuaged when the American brigadier general Caleb Cushing—“with whom I have closer relations than with the other [American officers],” he wrote—stationed in San Ángel, enjoined the colonel in charge of troops sent to Cuernavaca not to molest the property. In order to travel to Atlacomulco to oversee operations there, he got a letter of safe conduct from

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Winfield Scott, “imposing the death penalty (and in this business of punishments, they [the Americans] apply the penalties better than [they themselves] give out) on whoever molests or damages in the least the ‘estate of Cortés,’ accompanying this order with very flattering compliments for you [i.e., Pignatelli] and me.” Anticipating the three hundredth anniversary of Cortés’s death on 3 December 1847, Alamán had earlier asked the rhetorical question, “Who would have thought [in the time of Cortés] that three centuries after the death of the great Conqueror, the city he sacked to its foundations would be occupied by the army of a nation that at that time did not have its first beginnings?”55 Alamán’s efforts to turn a handsome profit on Atlacomulco, however, could have availed little had not market conditions at this time of revival (1849–50) of the hacienda’s fortunes under his direct stewardship fortuitously expanded to absorb the huge quantities of sugar the hacienda was producing. The California Gold Rush supplied this market from as early as 1849, although Alamán thought the demand from the north would slacken eventually.56 One aspect of Atlacomulco’s administration over which Alamán himself exercised total control was that of technological innovation. The impulse for it, if not unique to Alamán, was typical of a pattern of interest in modern technologies that always characterized him. Moreover, his experience with innovations on the hacienda echoed his ambitions and problems with the application of foreign mining technology in the late 1820s. These efforts revealed much about the economic environment of his era and the limits of modernization in Mexico up to the late nineteenth century. He was thinking of technological innovations for the hacienda in the later 1820s—very seriously in the areas of distilling and coffee production, for example, as well as the introduction of higher-yielding types of sugar cane originating in Cuba and Tahiti. If not exactly a technological innovation in itself, the building of a distillery to process into aguardiente the large quantities of molasses (miel) produced as a by-product of sugar refining was in the apoderado’s mind since the mid-1820s. This was displaced, however, by other, more pressing matters on the hacienda and resurfaced periodically over the next twenty-five years or so. It took a very long time to get up and running, but the distillery project became successful with the importation of US-manufactured distilling equipment.57 A few months before his death in June 1853 Alamán reported that “everything has turned out so beautifully, and I can even say magnificently, that it attracts the attention of everyone who sees it.”58 English plows replaced old-style Mexican ones to very good effect, but the experiments with new cane varieties had mixed success.

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Milling and refining techniques for sugar were stubbornly resistant to change, however, until much later. In Lucas Alamán’s time commercial agriculture was a risky, insecure undertaking that at best furnished only moderate wealth for proprietors. Alamán battled against a number of specific reverses and chronic problems in his overall management of the Hacienda de Atlacomulco. These included the weather, access to water, incipient soil exhaustion, fluctuations in consumer and capital markets, the recalcitrance of technological innovations, and the availability and tractability of labor. Some of what we might call externalities he and his administrators could control or at least palliate, others not. Among the most bothersome of the latter, from Alamán’s perspective, were land suits brought by neighboring indigenous communities and banditry. These two hindrances were not only nuisances but could also produce mortal outcomes depending on the degree of violence involved. Both affected the security of the estate. Litigation over land imperiled potential sale of the property and its control over productive resources, while banditry disrupted its daily operations, possibly affecting its capital stock and endangering the lives of personnel.

The Personal Relationship In all the hundreds of letters I have seen directed to Lucas Alamán by the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone relating to the management of the former Marquesado holdings in Mexico, only very rarely did the duke express the least interest in these properties for reasons other than their actual or potential value as sources of income. The one or two occasions when he did give voice to any sentimental attachment to his inheritance or pride in it were focused on the Hacienda de Atlacomulco when Alamán sent him either a daguerreotype or painting of the estate. Even then one senses that he viewed the images in the way the seller of a house today might regard a glossy pamphlet produced by a real estate agent. He had never set foot in the country, while the perennial political instability there threatened his ownership and the value of the holdings at every turn. He had a large ducal establishment to maintain in Palermo at decent levels of aristocratic decorum. Whether Terranova managed his income prudently at home or what other sources of income he had in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or elsewhere is unknown. But his constant demand for regular remittances of funds—now friendly and muted, now aggressive and shrill—started in 1825, when Alamán took over the management of his affairs in Mexico and continued in that office for the next thirty years. The

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owner’s badgering set up a tension between Alamán and his principal that played out in the apoderado’s efforts to satisfy the duke’s insistent importunings while at the same time pursuing a prudent course of action in Mexico. For example, Alamán consistently urged Terranova to be cautious about initiating legal action against errant renters or mortgagees so as not to rock the public relations boat by attracting attention to the ex-Marquesado and the putatively feudal holdings so antithetical to republican sensibilities. By the same token, the apoderado counseled against selling properties at bargain basement prices to deepen the duke’s income stream in the short term. Neither did he encourage pushing the sugar cane harvest at Atlacomulco ahead of its cycle of maturity, when a bit of patience might well bring improved economic and political conditions and with them increasing property values and sugar prices. On the other hand, the two men did develop a friendship of sorts through three decades of their epistolary exchanges. In a letter of 1851 acknowledging the duke’s notice that a shipment of coffee beans and cigars Alamán had sent had at last arrived safely in Palermo, in an uncharacteristic intrusion into the ducal household Alamán allowed himself to let the nobleman know he was imagining the pleasure Terranova must be taking in enjoying the produce of his Hacienda de Atlacomulco: “You will have been able to drink a cup of excellent Atlacomulco coffee, [accompanied by] a glass of mezcal from Tequila, and then to smoke a good Havana cigar, all this in the company of my lady the Duchess, whose fondness for the coffee you have told me of on another occasion.”59 It is not a simple matter to characterize the exclusively epistolary relationship between Lucas Alamán and the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, who never met personally. Their consistent, frequent, robust correspondence was the most extended of the Mexican statesman’s life except for members of his family, especially his wife and two elder sons, of which remarkably few examples survive. His correspondence with the duke was marked by a formal tone, although it was often friendly within respectful limits. On neither side was it intimate or self-revelatory despite its long history, although Alamán did offer the occasional tidbit of information about his family life and personal activities in politics. These were not reciprocated by the duke, however; the closest he ever got to discussing his private life were the occasional references to family members who were asserting what he saw as spurious claims against his fortune, to his son in the context of the division of the entail, or to public occurrences in Sicily, such as outbreaks of epidemic disease. Lucas Alamán

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was naturally reserved and not very self-revealing, but next to the dry letters of the duque—now and then tinged with sarcasm, frustration, or anger but betraying little personal information—Alamán looks positively histrionic. The Mexican statesman’s correspondence over the years with his London agent and banker Frederick Huth, by comparison, was much warmer and more cordial in tone and even breathed a sense of mutual confidence up to a point. What accounted for the degree of asymmetry in the Alamán–Terranova correspondence—whether it was a matter of personalities, discretion on the nobleman’s part for political reasons, the difference in their social stations, or what was essentially an employer–employee relationship—is difficult to say. In his letters to Terranova, filled overwhelmingly with business matters and politics, Alamán occasionally alluded to his personal and family life, especially in the early years of the correspondence. Generally speaking, except for his letters to Huth, his other correspondence lacked such references. He wrote to the duke in 1829, for example, of the death of his father-in-law, Juan José García Castrillo; the illness and death of an Alamán infant child the same year; the death of his nephew Juan Vicente Alamán, the son of his sister María de la Luz, in 1830; the birth of another child to him and Narcisa in the summer of 1830; and the death of another child in 1850, news to which Terranova remarked briefly, “I regret very much the loss you have suffered of one of your children, and I sympathize with your pain.”60 On at least one occasion he opened a window into his domestic arrangements, writing to Terranova in 1850 a brief account of moving his home from the city’s western suburbs to a house at Calle de la Tercera Orden de San Agustín no. 5 in the center of town, not far from the Hospital de Jesús. The house, he explained, had been home to the British legation and was occupied by British ambassador Bakhead (i.e., Charles Bankhead) until his return to Britain: “The tasks of the move are very troublesome, and [also those related to] the examination of my second son, Juan [i.e., Juan Bautista], who has been admitted [to the practice of law] with great approbation by the Supreme Court; as well as the new Mass [to be celebrated by] my eldest son, which will take place next Monday, the 6th [of March]; these have taken up much [of my] time. [But] I will soon be free of these duties and although those [occupations] of the congress are not insignificant, not for that will I lack the time to attend to everything [i.e., the duke’s affairs], although I cannot work as much as before.”61 The apoderado’s loss of a child thus raised scarcely a ripple on the Palermo end of the men’s correspondence; to do him justice, it is not clear what more the duke might have said in an age when the loss of children through early death was still quite common. But whereas Alamán’s activities not directly

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related to the management of the nobleman’s holdings impinged on his own interests, Terranova expressed a lively interest in Alamán’s personal news regarding the duke’s properties. One instance of this was the protracted exchange between them regarding Alamán’s possible emigration with his family during a period of high volatility in Mexico’s public life in the years 1828–29. The atmosphere was one of political conspiracies, a hotly contested presidential election, the ascent of Vicente Guerrero’s so-called Jacobin regime, an active civil war, and the second of two expulsion decrees directed at European Spaniards. Exactly what led Alamán to consider this very serious step is not clear. It may have been for fear he would be swept into the political vortex of the expulsion decrees—many of his friends and associates were of Spanish birth, but he was not—and the rise of the radical political faction led by Guerrero. The most likely destination for the family was Great Britain. What initially set off the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, before Alamán even broached the possibility of his emigration explicitly, was Alamán’s suggestion that in anticipation of his absence or incapacity he be allowed to settle on a substitute—presumably his half brother Canon Arechederreta—the general power of attorney to manage the Sicilian’s affairs. This drew forth the requested letter of permission from Palermo but along with it a very alarmed response to the request itself, framed in hyperbolic language: I regret above all things the request you have made of me to confer upon you the authority to substitute [someone else to hold] my power [of attorney] in case of necessity. I do not know where this request originates, but I think that perhaps you may want to leave Mexico, or at least leave [aside] the burden of my affairs, [since] perhaps they are incompatible with your own. In the situation in which things stand in relation to my house, this change does not [conduce] to my tranquility, but instead puts me in deep confusion. I again urge my friend [to look after] my most important affairs, and beg my sincere friend to interest himself in so grave a matter. . . . Do not abandon, then, those properties that up until now you have preserved intact!62

Politics All but the last two years of Lucas Alamán’s life were lived before the telegraphic age, initiated in Mexico in a limited way only in 1851, and he died many years before the transatlantic cables were laid (effectively, 1866). The

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only means for transmitting knowledge of domestic or foreign political developments, therefore, were face-to-face conversations or chains of interpersonal transmission, correspondence, and the newspapers. Particularly where his familiarity with foreign political and economic conditions was concerned, much of what he knew came to him through correspondence with people like Frederick Huth or the Hullett Brothers firm in London or with other business associates and friends, chiefly in Europe, above all Terranova. Even after the advent of steam shipping, assuming decent weather and given the time it took for news to cross the Atlantic, information could be two or three months old by the time it reached Alamán in a letter from Europe; the same was true of the foreign newspapers that he presumably read with some regularity. Since he never left Mexico after his return in March 1823, he had no firsthand knowledge of political events or economic conditions outside of Mexico through personal observation or participation. Lucas Alamán rarely if ever offered Terranova extended descriptions or analyses of political events in Mexico. He was much more likely to do this with his London or other foreign correspondents. Part of the reason for his reticence may have been that he tired of the paraphrases of his own letters that the duke tended to offer in answer to his apoderado’s letters as well as the nobleman’s generally bland responses except where immediate interests of his own were concerned. Such self-involvement could not have been an inducement to enter into detailed accounts and deep analyses of domestic politics or personalities. Alamán may also have sought to avoid alarming the Sicilian with his generally gloomy views to such an extent that the nobleman decided to take precipitous actions where his Mexican properties were concerned. So the best policy for Alamán to pursue in his correspondence with Palermo, above all where information about politics was concerned, was to say just enough to appear serious and knowledgeable and to provide the basics but not so much as to keep the duke in a constant state of alarm. To mask this strategy the statesman occasionally invoked the weight of his responsibilities in the government, which prevented him from writing at greater length. The nearly three-decade business and epistolary relationship Lucas Alamán sustained with the duque de Terranova y Monteleone rewarded both men substantially, even if on the Mexican statesman’s end there were also some political costs. The Sicilian nobleman enjoyed the sagacity, discretion, intelligence, management skills, social-political connections, and loyalty of a major figure in the Mexican political landscape. For his part, Alamán reaped economic advantages in the form of salary and commissions—and some unauthorized

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loans—making up a sizable part of his personal income over many years. His supervisory role in the management of the Hospital de Jesús charitable establishment gave him both the appearance and reality of a public beneficence. In the end, however, this distinction was probably outweighed by the negative associations and outright attacks brought on by his canny, very visible connection to a feudal past vehemently rejected by most Mexicans. Beyond these benefits, his involvement with the Cortés properties yielded more than financial and public relations benefits. It comprised a palpable link to a Spanish past, cultural values, and social practices that he valued highly but that had been repudiated by Mexico’s move through independence into nationhood. Alamán, therefore, retained both an intellectual and affective attachment to the ex-Marquesado del Valle, by virtue of which he sought to protect the duke’s Mexican establishment against the predation of the state and the onslaught of liberals. The irony of his position was that during three decades or so he presided over the dismemberment of the estate through disentailment, sale, and attrition. His emotional calculation was probably that if anyone should kill Fernando Cortés’s patrimony, he should be a sympathetic loyalist rather than a hostile adversary.

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12 • An Ordered and Prosperous Republic

“Saving Once More the National Honor” On 23 February 1831 Lucas Alamán wrote to Urbano San Román in Guadalajara. A major printer of liberal convictions, San Román had been a member of the city’s Ayuntamiento and a militia officer. Judging by the tone of the letter the two were on friendly terms: “I have seen with great sorrow that some individuals are [questioning] . . . the legitimacy with which the Vice-President is exercising the executive power. . . . [T]he low interests that provoked the war in the south [la Guerra del Sur] . . . appeared to have no other object than murder, robbery, arson, and the finishing off of whatever morality remained to us. . . . [T]he agitators who have now shown themselves openly . . . will in the end push us into the pit from which we had [only just] miraculously escaped. It is therefore our duty to offer Resistance . . . saving once more the national honor, the federal laws, and the public tranquility.”1 The legitimacy of the government of Anastasio Bustamante was in question because it had come to power through the violent overthrow of an administration that itself had annulled a constitutional and valid national election, also by means of a political rebellion, the Acordada Revolt. In formal terms the legitimacy of the Bustamante regime rested on the frail reed of an 1830 congressional declaration of President Vicente Guerrero’s incapacity to carry out his executive duties based on a highly ambiguous provision in the 1824 constitution. The reasons adduced for this incompetence oscillated among mental incapacity—that is, stupidity, although no one said as much publicly—lack of experience in governing, the inadequacy of his education for the task, and diminished physical ability owing to his war wounds. The penultimate Senate resolution, into which the qualifier “moral” had crept, declared the old insurgent to be “a man who took on himself more 355

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responsibilities than his natural abilities [could sustain]” and was “morally disqualified” from the presidency. The word “moral” having been suppressed, a joint congressional committee approved the resolution on 4 February 1830. The official printed circular of that date stated simply that “citizen general Vicente Guerrero is disqualified [imposibilitado] from governing the Republic.”2 Congress’s action thus simultaneously affirmed and bypassed the question of the legitimacy of Vice President Bustamante’s claim to authority. For if Guerrero’s ascent to the presidency was illegitimate in the first place, he was not the chief magistrate, so how could his executive incapacity even be called into question? A more legalistic argument advanced by El Sol (8 January 1830, p. 4), Alamán’s instrument of combat journalism, suggested that if Guerrero’s election as president was invalid, Bustamante’s as vice president was also invalid ipso facto. Manuel Gómez Pedraza had renounced his claim to the presidency, the argument ran, and congress in September 1828 had proscribed as traitors all those, among them Guerrero himself, who had supported Santa Anna’s pro-Guerrero Perote pronunciamiento of 16 September 1828. It followed that congress’s designation of Guerrero as president after the Acordada Revolt had placed in the first magistracy a man ineligible for the office, and therefore Vice President Bustamante had legitimately acceded to the presidency.3 This simply clipped Vicente Guerrero out of the presidential loop entirely, as a surgeon would excise a piece of gangrenous intestine. Alamán would use the term “legitimacy,” however, in a much broader sense than that of legality. His effort to justify the legitimacy of the Bustamante regime depended less on the marshaling of facts than on the vivid coloring of his language itself. Alamán’s repeated implicit references to the unnamed figures disturbing public tranquility—“demagogues” and “agitators”—would have included Lorenzo de Zavala, Joel R. Poinsett and other Yorquino notables, Vicente Guerrero, and the individual whose “name [was] many times proscribed,” Santa Anna. There is a shift in Alamán’s thinking over the course of his first year in the ministry leading from the more legalistic reasoning of January 1830 to the combination of rhetoric and realpolitik in his letter to Urbano San Román a year later. The San Román letter tenders some insight into his style as a ruthless practical politician rather than a theorist or legal thinker. He was not trained as a lawyer, although a great many of his contemporaries in the political class were. He was so widely knowledgeable in political and legal culture, however, that he was able to invoke legal and constitutional arguments convincingly when it suited him. He often demonstrated his view that ends justified means, and on a number

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of occasions was none too punctilious about the means employed to achieve those ends. During the twenty-eight months of his ministry under Bustamante he acted on the centralist, republican, but antidemocratic principles toward which he had always leaned, but that had increasingly come to dominate his thinking about political life during the late 1820s. It is difficult to locate a precise point of inflection in his political attitudes. Rather, there was a gradual evolution over several years confirming his dark view of the popular politics of the first decade of Mexico’s independent life. This deep aversion to democratic forms and federalism did not extend to republicanism, at least not until his involvement in the promonarchist plotting of the mid-1840s. By the time he came to treat the 1820s and early 1830s in the final volume of his Historia de Méjico he had smoothed out any ambiguities or ambivalences in his thinking and his behavior as a public figure, assuming the Olympian tone so characteristic of his mature work. In adding in a later passage in the letter to San Román that there was “no Mexican who did not doubt he had a Fatherland”—the double negative in both the original Spanish and in my rendering in English makes the syntax a bit complicated, but the sense is clear enough—he foreshadowed his melancholy and much stronger assertion toward the end of the Historia that “in Mexico there are no Mexicans.” While many Mexicans may have doubted the very viability of their patria in 1831, by midcentury Alamán believed that Mexicanness itself had drained away or never existed in the first place. This affective gap where the patria was concerned was a matter not just of a failed state but of a failed nation and had moved from a political almost to a metaphysical critique. As politically beleaguered as he saw himself in the 1820s and early 1830s, however, he could hardly voice such doubts publicly since he was charged with helping to realize the promise of the young republic rather than wrapping it in a winding sheet. In his private correspondence while out of office during the latter half of the 1820s one can discern an increasingly apocalyptic view of Mexican public life, a stance that seems to have developed steadily between 1823 and 1828. By the time he joined the Anastasio Bustamante government at the beginning of 1830 his ideological arteries had already hardened.

Retirement to Private Life, 1826–1830 Both push and pull factors induced Lucas Alamán’s departure from the Guadalupe Victoria government in September 1825. Among the push factors were the ascent of the Yorquino group around Zavala and Poinsett,

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President Victoria’s own drift in that direction, and the waning of pro-British opinion and waxing of US influence in national political life. He surely wanted to wash his hands of the federal constitution of 1824 under whose auspices he had served his last year in the Victoria government. Chief among the pull factors drawing him back to civilian life was the economic situation of his growing family. Given his background and the displays of wealth around him in the capital, he would hardly have embraced any but a highly respectable living standard reflecting solid prosperity. This would have entailed substantial outlays in maintaining his household, entertaining, keeping a stable, carriage, and riding horses, paying domestic servants, and so forth. His family was growing, four children having been born to him and doña Narcisa between the spring of 1824 and the late winter of 1829—the last of whom, his second daughter, Antonia, died at the age eight months. Throughout his adult life Alamán periodically expressed his worries about money, although less in terms of covering his immediate expenses than of having missed opportunities to acquire and accumulate real wealth. In an undated letter of about 1827 to the administrator of the Hacienda de Atlacomulco, Alamán commented on the desire of one of the estate’s supervisory personnel to find something more lucrative to make his fortune quickly: “I do not know that there are any positions that can make one rich within a few years, and if I knew of any I would certainly try to take it for myself. But only from a mine in bonanza is such a fortune to be made.”4 His managerial duties for the United Mexican Mining Association had yet to yield much financial benefit, and the commissions he would later earn on the liquidation of Marquesado properties were not yet on the horizon. His purchase of the Hacienda de Trojes in Celaya lay in the future and would prove an economic black hole in terms of income flow. Finally, whatever opportunities the ministry of interior and exterior affairs offered for peculation, they were not enough to keep Alamán in the government, and we do not even know if he took advantage of them. During the years of this political hiatus, therefore, Alamán was busy cultivating his own economic garden, largely staying out of the political limelight. The mid and late 1820s saw him increasingly involved with the United Mexican Mining Association. About six months before leaving office he remarked in a letter to Hullett Brothers in London that the business of the Unida was growing rapidly as its capitalization grew in tandem. The private life of the Alamán–Castrillo family meanwhile moved on. This was frequently disrupted by Alamán’s almost continual travel to Guanajuato,

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Cuernavaca, and other districts on Unida or personal business. These trips were almost certainly taken by coach, since he considered himself an indifferent horseman at best, and hated mules. While little documented, the family’s round of ordinary activities—church-going, socializing, attending entertainments, family gatherings at holidays, the household arrangements, seeing to the children’s education, and so forth—has left some traces. There were invitations to dine at friends’ and associates’ homes, although if Lucas and Narcisa attended these as a couple is not clear. Whether the couple did any entertaining is not documented. He was quite fond of the opera, and here one imagines he went with his wife. An uncharacteristically quirky example of this enthusiasm on his part is extant. So taken was Alamán with the performance of the Spanish tenor Manuel García, who sang the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni (generally a baritone role) during a run of performances in Mexico City in 1828, that he crafted a poetic ode to the singer and published it in El Sol, the newspaper he supported, on 9 July 1828.5 Although the piece as published bore only the initials L.A., given Alamán’s well-attested taste for the art form and his relationship with the newspaper his authorship is very plausible. Among the last verses he wrote: ¡Genio del mundo! ¡Divina García! Quien la extension de tu poder midiera? ...... ¡Ay! Qué desierto sin tu vista el teatro En do ora asistes se verá algún día. Todo fenece . . . fenecer tú solo Tú no deberías [World genius! Divine García! Who can measure the breadth of your power? ...... Oh! Some day the theater where now You perform will seem so desolate! Everything comes to an end Only you should not] As the elder generation exited the world and the younger entered, vital events in the family are, predictably, better documented. The couple’s first child, Catalina, destined to become a nun, was born at the very end of April

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1824. The first-born son, Gil, came along on 10 September 1825; a second son, Juan Ignacio—generally known as Juan Bautista—was born on 9 December 1826; and a second daughter, Antonia, born on 17 January 1829, was to live for only about eight months. The sole hint of how her father reacted to the loss of his infant daughter is the mention in one of his letters that for a month or so after her death he had felt unable to carry on his normal business activities. Lucas Alamán’s mother, María Ignacia Escalada Madroñero de Alamán, died on 10 December 1825 “of a terrible pneumonia” at the age of seventy-four. Narcisa Castrillo’s father, Juan José García Castrillo, was at least sixty years old when he died in Tacubaya on 8 February 1829. His widow was to survive him by fifteen years. The death of Narcisa Castrillo’s father necessitated a change in plans under discussion in the Alamán–Castrillo household since the beginning of 1829. This concerned the possible emigration of the family from Mexico, an idea first broached by Lucas’s father-in-law early that year. The most likely destination was England because of Alamán’s business connections and acquaintances there. In a letter to Terranova of 31 January 1829 he described the unsettled conditions in the country arising from Vicente Guerrero’s annulment of Manuel Gómez Pedraza’s election to the presidency, adding that the situation had obliged him to suspend his plans to take his family abroad.6 In early April Alamán wrote to the duke that he was still executing his father-in-law’s will and waiting to see how public events would unfold, particularly the rumored Spanish expedition of reconquest. The passage of six months saw him sworn in on 23 December 1829 as one of three triumvirs, with Luis Quintanar and Pedro Vélez, of a provisional national executive authority, and all consideration of emigration put aside for the moment.7 Increasingly dark forebodings about the fate of the country were to pervade Alamán’s correspondence in 1826–27, a tonality in his thinking that would find its ultimate expression in his Historia de Méjico two decades later. The late 1820s were marked by the definitive Yorquino ascendance, the expulsion from Mexico of peninsular Spaniards in 1827 and 1829, the crisis of the 1828 presidential elections and the seizure of power by Vicente Guerrero, the Spanish invasion of reconquest in 1829, the Plan of Jalapa that same year, and the ousting of Guerrero by Anastasio Bustamante. The backdrop of these events, as Alamán saw it, was the anarchy created by the politics of extreme factionalism. He wrote to the duke, “Each party continues to carry out great intrigues to win the elections for the next congress: the two Masonic orders of Escoseses and Yorquinos leave no stones unturned to further their respective interests.”8

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These Cassandra-like pronouncements had ample foundation. But their obsessive repetition suggests the inclination of their author toward negativity and perhaps even an underlying mild depression as personality characteristics. Psychological speculations aside, his views of these years formed the immediate background to his role in the Anastasio Bustamante government during 1830–32. In a series of letters to Huth and Terranova in 1827–28 Alamán repeated the refrain about the terrible state of the country over and over again, a litany of national woes that continued for years. Among them were the following: 3 October 1827 (to Terranova y Monteleone): “Each letter may be to announce new unfortunate events or new fears.” 3 November 1827 (to Frederick Huth): “Political affairs continue [to be] very sad. . . . There are also unpleasant and dangerous symptoms that more and more are reducing public confidence.” 5 March 1828 (to Huth): “[The state of the country] is worse by the moment.9 [I]n truth the picture of disorder, violence, and poverty of this unhappy nation is most horrible, [and there] is in view no hope of improvement. . . . It seems there is a fleshly [i.e., concrete] fatality pursuing all peoples in which the Castilian language is spoken.” 18 August 1828 (to Huth): “All [the economic troubles] are the consequence of the general state of disorder in which we find ourselves and of the total bankruptcy of means of this political machine. It is feared that [the imminent elections] will produce new convulsive movements and armed uprisings.” 27 November 1828 (to Terranova): “The composition of the [newly elected] Chamber of Deputies is so bad as to inspire prayers . . . for the interests of the country. So, the only thing that can be done is to ride out this violent storm we are in, and which is becoming more fierce and lasting longer than we had expected.” 18 December 1828 (to Huth): “I have been fortunate not to suffer [damage] in my person or property, but it is impossible not to share in the general ruin, and since the future looks so unpromising, I am taking measures to emigrate with my family.” 30 January 1829 (to Huth): “Things continue to be very bad in the country, and we are really in a complete [state of] anarchy, surrounded by fears and with news of new disasters every day, without the horizon clearing anywhere and without hope of any improvement.”

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2 March 1829 (to Huth): “Here we continue in a state of convulsion and ruin. There are no authorities, no government, no security or [public] confidence. Every day new uprisings are spoken of. The highways are infested with robbers.” 1 May 1829 (to Terranova): “The state of the country continues lamentable. . . . The hopes that for a moment were conceived of the government of the new president [Vicente Guerrero] have completely vanished, and we continue with a thousand doubts [and with] mistrust and insecurity.” 18 July 1829 (to Huth): “Here every day we go from bad to worse. News of the Spanish expedition [of reconquest] has come to augment our fears.”10 Alamán painted all of Spanish America in these somber colors, and “in general the picture presented by America is in its totality terrible.” The only exception was Gran Colombia, “where the energy of Bolívar at least maintains calm.”11 In early June he commented in another letter, “Who could have foretold that we would long for [Agustín Iturbide] to put this people at peace? To such a point have we arrived.”12 By the late 1820s anarchy and the sad state of the country seemed to threaten a more profound form of social and political dissolution—not just the failure of the state but the breakdown of the nation. It is incautious to read uncritically the statements Alamán was making to his foreign interlocutors in these years, but it is quite apparent that he viewed the construction of a centralist regime, one that could serve to dampen factional strife, as a logical way to check or even reverse the downward momentum of events. This view inclined him to look favorably on Simón Bolívar’s centralizing tendencies in the government of the megarepublic of Gran Colombia. This observation of Alamán’s, plus a characterological impulse to control situations down to small details, were strong elements in the attitudes he struck and programs he advocated when he again had his hands on the levers of state power.

The Spanish Expulsion, the Guerrero Coup d’Etat, and the Spanish Invasion It is tempting to draw a straight line between Joel R. Poinsett’s appearance and many of Mexico’s political troubles of the late 1820s. No Poinsett, no York Rite Masonry; no York Rite, no Yorquino faction or sharp polarization in the political sphere; no polarization, no Arenas conspiracy in reaction; no Arenas

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conspiracy, no expulsion of the Spaniards from Mexico; no expulsions (possibly), no Cuba-based invasion by Spain; no invasion, no opening for the heroism of Antonio López de Santa Anna, no Plan de Jalapa, no Ejército de Reserva, no assault against the Guerrero government, no Bustamante/Alamán regime, and so forth—tempting but misleading. Public men of liberal or radical opinions would surely have found a point of coalescence absent York Rite Masonry; and liberalism and federalism were already on the scene long before the meddlesome Poinsett arrived. Anti-Spanish sentiment was rife and further nourished by the episode of San Juan de Ulúa, the stubbornly irredentist attitude of King Ferdinand VII, rumors of an impending attempt at reconquest, the fate of the Spanish reformers and radicals upon the fall of the Trienio Liberal, and the threatening posture of Europe’s Holy Alliance. Alamán came to ascribe many of these troubles to the Yorquino–Escosés division, and at least the temporary resolution of the troubles to the centralist government he began to construct under Anastasio Bustamante’s aegis. The instability of the years 1827–30 focused his generalized anxiety about the condition of Mexico onto a number of concrete problems. The more specific of his preoccupations were triggered by the various expulsion decrees of peninsular Spaniards in late 1827. Accounts of the patriot factions in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire (1821–32) as well as the war and the political situation in Portugal may well have added to Alamán’s sense of a global political crisis during the late 1820s. By the time the state and federal legislators took formal action to expel their peninsular cousins from the country, many Spaniards of the moneyed class had already emigrated, carrying with them all the liquid assets they could. Then, in January 1827, a conspiracy to restore the Spanish Bourbon monarchy was uncovered in Mexico City, ostensibly led by the friar Joaquín Arenas, a peninsular Spaniard whom Lucas Alamán claimed was a forger as well as a political conspirator.13 As the official investigation into the matter deepened it swept up several notables, among them the peninsula-born political generals José Antonio Echávarri and Pedro Celestino Negrete. Eventually Arenas and five other putative conspirators were executed. The consensus among historians is that the conspiracy, which Alamán referred to as an act of lunacy, was half-baked and not actually much of a danger to the government. But the plot did have major political implications. Conservatives and the Scottish Rite faction lost much of their credibility, the political balance tipped definitively to the left, and the Yorquinos jumped on the incident to prove that sinister forces were combining to reverse Mexico’s independence. Many years later Alamán

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wrote, “The minister of war, Gómez Pedraza, and the Yorquinos made astute use of [the conspiracy], ascribing to it an importance it was far from having. They took advantage of it as a handy means to carry out their ghastly intentions toward the Spaniards.”14 The anti-Spanish measures that followed prompted Alamán to characterize the expulsions as a self-destructive, inhumane, and unrealistic denial of Mexico’s Spanish heritage. From an economic point of view he thought it a disastrous policy, while from a personal standpoint it jeopardized the lives and fortunes of several valued friends and employees. The national congress promulgated a law in May 1827 purging peninsular Spaniards from all public posts. At the state level Jalisco took the lead, expelling Spaniards on 3 September 1827, a measure adopted within a few months by all the other states. Alamán described the measure to Terranova as fatal “since the Spaniards are related by kinship with most families [in Mexico], are the principal capitalists, and [are] those who carry on trade and the most productive [economic] activities.”15 By year’s end congress had passed a national law of expulsion, although at the state level exemptions were allowed. José María Tornel, the governor of the Federal District, expelled many, while Lorenzo de Zavala and Santa Anna, respectively governors of the states of Mexico and Veracruz, allowed more exceptions. The capitalino newspapers heatedly reported the application of the expulsion decrees, El Sol and El Observador, the latter edited by José María Luis Mora, standing up for the Spaniards, Zavala’s and Tornel’s liberal papers pressing the attack. Anti-Spanish violence took place outside the capital, including riots and even lynchings. In late December Alamán remarked in a letter to his employer in Palermo that “the revolutionary movements with the motive or pretext of demanding the expulsion of the Spaniards have been increasing . . . in Valladolid, . . . Guanajuato, [and] Veracruz. There have been some very serious ones in Oajaca [sic], in Puebla they took the form of the sacking of different houses . . . and finally in Toluca and other places nearby [Mexico City] various groups of armed men are in movement.” Alamán did not escape personal involvement in the forced emigration of the Europeanborn Spaniards. During this time his intention and preparations to emigrate with his family reached their highest pitch. He tried to defend friends and employees of the ex-Marquesado establishment from the application of the decrees, achieving at least some small victories in seeking exemptions. While Alamán pursued his business interests, events at the national level were moving swiftly. The most contentious question was, Who should succeed Guadalupe Victoria in the presidency? In the face of the apparent increas-

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ing radicalization of the Victoria government under the influence of Yorquino figures, aggravated by a personal falling-out between Nicolás Bravo and President Victoria, Bravo mobilized for a rebellion. This eventuated at the end of 1827 in the Plan de Montaño, whose major demands were the outlawing of secret societies (read: York Rite Masonry) and a demand that Washington recall Poinsett. With Vicente Guerrero’s defeat of the pronunciado army under Bravo at Tulancingo in January 1828, the old insurgent chieftain’s popularity and “presidentiability” soared. Nicolás Bravo was forced into exile along with several other conspirators; his only son died on the way to the United States, as did Santa Anna’s brother Manuel, also exiled. The more moderate Yorquinos put War Minister Gómez Pedraza up for the presidency, with Anastasio Bustamante as his vice presidential running mate. Writing in his Historia de Méjico, Alamán ascribed support of the Gómez Pedraza candidacy to such men as justice and ecclesiastical affairs minister Ramos Arizpe, secretary of relations Juan de Dios Cañedo, former minister Esteva, senator and future Zacatecas governor Francisco García, other moderate progressives, and even President Victoria himself. The so-called Jacobins supporting Guerrero included Federal District Governor Tornel, the perennially enragé Lorenzo de Zavala, and Santa Anna. The summer of 1828 saw a presidential campaign (the vote was indirect, via state legislatures) of “unparalleled viciousness,” in the words of one historian, with more conservative–centralist newspapers supporting Gómez Pedraza, the more radical organs Guerrero.16 The balloting by state legislatures on 1 September 1828 produced a slim margin of victory for Manuel Gómez Pedraza, eleven states to nine. From Veracruz, Vice Governor Santa Anna raised the banner of revolt in a pronunciamiento supporting Guerrero, but his attempt fizzled, and he ended up besieged by government forces in Oaxaca. The largely pedracista Senate set about persecuting the Guerrero supporters, sending Zavala into hiding for a short time in Mexico City, indicting Tornel, and making life difficult for other Guerrero partisans.17 By the end of November another rebellion had broken out, christened the Acordada Revolt for the building in which the old constabulary for the suppression of highway bandits and rural crime had once been headquartered, converted now into a military barracks. The movement was led by Lorenzo de Zavala and the generals José María Lobato and Vicente Guerrero. The rebels prevailed following a three-day artillery battle between the mutineers and government forces defending the National Palace and other nearby buildings; in the meantime the Parián market in the central plaza was sacked. Presidentelect Gómez Pedraza fled the city in disguise on the night of 3 December,

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ending up in Guadalajara and sailing into English exile in March 1829. On 12 January 1829 the Chamber of Deputies declared Gómez Pedraza’s election invalid, naming as president in his stead Vicente Guerrero and Anastasio Bustamante vice president, while Guadalupe Victoria finished out the remaining months of his term in a blaze of passivity. Guerrero and Bustamante were inaugurated on 1 April 1829. Considering his later attitude toward Guerrero, Alamán was surprisingly sanguine about the incoming administration: “Señor Guerrero took possession of the presidency of the Republic, and [we are] assured that he is well disposed to work for the restoration of order and to temper the rigor of the atrocious [new] law of expulsion [of the Spaniards] that has so many families weeping [a second law was enacted on 20 March 1829]. [But] it is feared that he will not be able to do what he wants for lack of resources, since his predecessor had such skill that having received this country in a flourishing [condition] it is now [only] a skeleton from which it is difficult to squeeze any resources. . . . Only the mines hold the hope of an economic recovery . . . [and] require public tranquility and calm to enjoy a boom.”18 President Guerrero’s ministry was manned by figures with Yorquino credentials, chief among them Lorenzo de Zavala with the treasury portfolio. Zavala’s measures to revive the treasury, especially a direct income tax proposal of 22 May 1829, were met with general consternation. Rival newspapers in the capital meanwhile continued their political battles, El Sol with vituperative attacks against Joel Poinsett, whose recall Guerrero finally requested of President Andrew Jackson on 1 July; by Christmas the controversial South Carolinian was saying his goodbyes in the capital and left the country in January. Hardly had the dust from the Guerrero coup settled than Mexico was faced with a Havana-based Spanish invasion. Rumors of such an expedition of reconquest had been in circulation for years, supported by the long Spanish occupation of the island fortress of San Juan de Ulúa and by King Ferdinand’s adamant irredentism. Under the command of General Isidro Barradas, the Spanish invasion force of thirty-five hundred men landed near Tampico on 26 July 1829. Since Barradas was working on the ill-founded assumption that he would be welcomed as a liberator, his men were ill-equipped for a full-scale reconquest of the country, and the warm welcome by Mexicans did not materialize. Alamán remarked of the size of the expedition, “Although this number [of troops] is certainly negligible, the state of disorganization and lack of resources in which this country finds itself make [the invasion force] to be feared; and what is more [to be feared] are the means of resistance to be employed, since the president will be endowed with such broad faculties to dispose of the

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persons and property of private [citizens] that only the governments of the Orient have in equal [measure].”19 He did see a small silver lining in all this: “The congress will suspend its sessions, which will be a stroke of luck since the propositions brought before the Chamber of Deputies each day are horrifying.” Alamán described the situation after about a month, the momentum having shifted in favor of the Mexican defenders led by Santa Anna and Manuel Mier y Terán: The Mexican troops under the orders of generals Santana [sic] and Teran have placed themselves around Tampico, cutting off communications and supplies from the Spaniards and having some [armed] encounters with them, as a result of which they [the Mexicans] recovered the town of Altamira that the Spanish had captured. Up to now this is the state of the war: the Spaniards are awaiting reinforcements from the 500 men who strayed from the convoy and ended up in New Orleans, and 2–3,000 who should have left Habana. To avoid the delays of discussions [regarding war funding], congress took the course of dissolving itself, giving to the president the broadest powers imaginable.20 After a brief armed action the “imprudently planned” Spanish invasion force surrendered completely to Manuel Mier y Terán.21 The Spanish invasion indirectly furnished the pretext for the overthrow of Guerrero, made a national hero of Santa Anna, definitively settled the matter of Mexican independence by thwarting Ferdinand’s attempts to recover the lost New Spain, and entered the narrative of Mexican history as a triumphant assertion of national sovereignty, honor, and courage. It merited scarcely a paragraph in Alamán’s Historia, much less detailed than in his private letters to Frederick Huth. The author of the Historia is clearly much more interested in drawing out the political significance of the invasion, “for which reason the congress authorized the president to take whatever measures might be necessary for the preservation of independence, of the federal system of government, and of public tranquility, with no other restriction [on him] than not being able to take the lives of Mexican [citizens] or expel them from the territory of the republic.”22

The Plan of Jalapa President Vicente Guerrero’s problems were evident from the moment he assumed office. The Plan of Jalapa that drove him from the presidency in December 1829 stands out for being successful compared to the numerous

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other pronunciamientos of these years that fizzled. During the elections of 1828 doubts arose even among Guerrero’s partisans as to whether the qualities that had made him an undeniably great insurgent chieftain could sustain him in the presidency. Another motive for his overthrow was resistance to Treasury Minister Zavala’s imposition of forced loans and an income tax on some Mexicans. The administration justified these measures under the president’s emergency powers, required to resist the Spanish expedition, but provoked the strong objection that they infringed on the federative entities’ fiscal prerogatives under the Constitution of 1824. Lucas Alamán’s role in organizing the forces arrayed against Guerrero under the banner of the Jalapa movement has remained shadowy, particularly before about mid-December 1829, although after that time he was by his own admission a key player. He later portrayed himself during these months as a passive victim of events—“I have had to accept the Department of foreign and interior affairs in the new ministry” (emphasis added). He soon became the major figure in the cabinet of Anastasio Bustamante’s government and remained so for more than two years.23 Following the fiasco of the Spanish invasion a group of powerful military politicians mobilized against President Guerrero. Cantoned at Jalapa was the Ejército de Reserva under the command of Vice President Anastasio Bustamante, composed of some three thousand men originally intended as reinforcements but who formed the core of the military elements that overthrew Vicente Guerrero. Lorenzo de Zavala was the first victim of the reaction to Guerrero’s populist regime, his downfall prefaced by a falling-out with Santa Anna over an appointment to the Veracruz customshouse. Increasingly vocal opposition to the tax measures, pressure from the rest of the cabinet, and accusations that President Guerrero had abused the extraordinary powers granted him by congress to combat the Spanish invasion grew in tandem. Given the moderation of the president’s actual policies, however, it is difficult to believe that these grievances were not a pretext. Hoping to appease the opposition, Guerrero forced the treasury minister’s resignation on 12 October, but this did not ease the situation. José María Tornel, another Yorquino ally, was forced out of the governorship of the Federal District and eventually packed off as envoy to the United States (17 November 1829–1 June 1831). The Reserve Army encamped at Jalapa was full of military politicians of antiYorquino leanings, among them Nicolás Bravo, Miguel Barragán, and José Antonio Facio, Vice President Bustamante’s private secretary, the first two back in Mexico from their exile under an amnesty by Guerrero. For the mo-

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ment, Bustamante and Santa Anna remained aloof from any movement against Guerrero but refused his order to disband the Ejército de Reserva. On 4 December Melchor Múzquiz and Facio published the Plan de Jalapa, which rapidly found adherents elsewhere in the army and in various regions of the country. While the plan did not attack the president directly, its main elements were a proclamation defending the federal system and a call for Guerrero to renounce the extraordinary powers conferred on him by congress. A wall of political and military isolation soon surrounded President Guerrero. After some temporizing Bustamante assumed leadership of the developing movement by announcing his adherence to the Plan of Jalapa on 6 December, while Santa Anna, ever inconstant except to himself, first adhered to it and then reneged some days later. Guerrero asked Lucas Alamán to go to Puebla to talk some sense into Bustamante but then cancelled the mission. As President Guerrero prepared to take the field with a hastily organized armed force, the Cámara de Diputados seized the final political initiative on 17 December 1829, electing the Yorquino lawyer José María Bocanegra provisional president; Vice President Bustamante could not fill this political role since the constitution forbade a president or vice president from actively exercising the office while commanding an army in the field. Then, on the night of 22–23 December, General Luis Quintanar, Alamán’s old federalist adversary from Jalisco, deployed an infantry regiment to occupy key locations in Mexico City in support of the Plan of Jalapa. In short order Guerrero’s troops deserted him, leaving him completely unsupported except for Santa Anna’s declared fealty. On Christmas Eve the government council met and replaced Bocanegra, who had occupied the presidency for all of five days, with a provisional executive triumvirate made up of Pedro Vélez (1787–1848), the president of the Supreme Court; General Luis Quintanar; and . . . Lucas Alamán. This was the closest Alamán ever came to being president of Mexico except for a frankly implausible candidacy in the elections of 1837, in which he received one vote of the twenty cast by the states of the federation. He occupied his post in the ruling triumvirate for only the few days before Anastasio Bustamante picked up the reins of government on 1 January 1829. In the meantime, Vicente Guerrero wrote to Alamán on 25 December stating that he was prepared to accept any decision by congress, and Santa Anna once again reversed himself, withdrawing his support from the beleaguered president and agreeing to stand down while the situation resolved itself. Lucas Alamán’s role in all this remains murky—or rather its timing is. He hints at his own part in the Jalapa movement in a documentary appendix to

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volume 5 of the Historia de Méjico: “In these first days of upheaval and disorder, everything was done through private letters rather than official orders, all the more so [since] the ministry had not yet been formed, and these letters were all directed to me, on whom all the work of pursuing the correspondence with all the military commanders fell.”24 Alamán’s assumption of this central position in the rebellion definitely seems to have occurred before late December, if not earlier. Federal District Governor José Ignacio Esteva (Tornel’s replacement) certainly thought Alamán the prime mover of the uprising. He wrote to him on 21 December asking him to “hasten [abreviar] the pronunciamiento” because he could no longer keep the police and night watchmen off the streets. Alamán later wrote, “I answered him that I did not have, as in truth [I did not], the role in the revolution he attributed to me,” referring him instead to Quintanar.25 Written more than twenty years later, the historian Alamán’s version of events boils down primarily to an account of his relations with Quintanar: “I did not know Quintanar personally, given that when I returned from Europe [in 1822] he was in Jalisco and afterward there was no occasion to see him, since we were in opposing [political parties]. The looks of this general were noble: he was above average height, but with hunched shoulders, his complexion so white and high in color that he appeared more German than Mexican, his appearance even more imposing because of his entirely white hair. . . . As soon as he saw me enter the salon in the Palace he approached me and, embracing me, said, alluding to the opposed factions to which we had [formerly] belonged, ‘Against these villains we are all [as] one.’ ” Once Alamán was on the scene and so central an actor, his selection for the short-lived provisional executive triumvirate was only a short step away and his entry thence into the cabinet even shorter. The question is, Why was he so important to these events in the first place? What suggests itself is that he was, in fact, already conspiring against the Guerrero government when the Plan of Jalapa was published. Or at least his involvement was coeval with the promulgation of the plan, a connection he was at some pains to weaken, if not entirely airbrush out of the picture, when he wrote of this period many years later.

The Initial Challenges of the Second Ministry The Bustamante administration (1830–32), or the administración alamánica, as it has been called, was characterized by an atmosphere of crisis; but then, except for brief periods the country was in a state of political crisis from 1808 on. This segment of Alamán’s career was punctuated by the Guerra del Sur,

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the death of Vicente Guerrero at the hands of the Bustamante regime, futile efforts to keep Texas out of American hands, and the establishment of the Banco de Avío. But these events have tended to overshadow developments in foreign relations, domestic policy, and the day-to-day governance of the country, all of whose strings were in Lucas Alamán’s hands. Among such less spectacular and visible affairs were the protracted discussions to accelerate diplomatic recognition of Mexico by Spain, negotiation of a treaty of friendship and commerce with the American government, the ordering of the national fisc, the suppression of rampant rural banditry and urban crime, the bureaucratic reorganization of Alamán’s ministry, and the setting of the national museum and archive on a sound footing. When Bustamante triumphantly entered Mexico City at the head of the Ejército de Reserva on 1 January 1830, the sense of relief among the hombres de bien at the sidelining of Guerrero and Zavala was palpable. Alamán was the first appointment to the new ministerial cabinet (4 January 1830, sworn in on 8 January). Although he intended to remain in the ministry for a relatively short time, the new government afforded him the opportunity to refashion the Mexican state along centralist lines, thereby establishing political stability and laying the basis, he hoped, for national prosperity. What exactly prompted him to remain in the Bustamante administration longer is not clear—perhaps possibilities that opened before him to enact policies to benefit the country, the attractions of power for its own sake, or even the regular ministerial salary. Alamán’s long-held belief that centralism was the best medicine for Mexico now enjoyed the unequivocal support of the chief executive. Political institution building as a necessary precondition of economic modernization was exemplified by his work to establish the Banco de Avío, a government-funded industrial development bank dedicated to moving the Mexican economy away from its extremely heavy dependence on mining, chiefly through bankrolling the cotton textile sector. Alamán had a space of two years or so to move his programs forward even though the prosecution of the Guerra del Sur absorbed enormous amounts of his time and government resources during 1830. The historian Stanley Green has limned the minister’s intellectual dominance and personal influence in the government as well as anyone in noting that Anastasio Bustamante “placed no great store in his [own] ability to direct affairs, and for the duration of his term remained somewhat in the background. It was from Alamán’s office that basic policy came.”26 The minister of interior and exterior relations, writes Green, was “a type of alter ego for the vice-president,” whose strong influence extended beyond his portfolio to

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military affairs and who drafted legislation and Bustamante’s addresses to congress. Privately, Alamán viewed his chief as a man of limited intellectual capacity. But then he seems to have felt this way about many of his contemporaries and probably almost all military men, certain individuals excepted, among them his friend Mier y Terán. Alamán mostly failed in both his political and economic programs, frustrating for him but costly for the country in foregone opportunities. To assert that circumstances were not propitious for economic modernization amounts only to a description. At the time, such a change entailed the industrialization of consumer nondurables, the growth of the domestic market, the development of national infrastructure, stronger territorial integration, government fiscal stability and sufficiency, an economic atmosphere conducive to capital investment, and so forth. Alamán’s strategy of imposing stability in the public realm as the essential precondition of economic development anticipated that of Porfirio Díaz fifty years later whose motto was Order and Progress, but without the tools to effect it. Alamán could limit the franchise, censor the press, and throw political enemies into prison—or, as some asserted, have them assassinated or even murder them with his own hands, as Fayette Robinson wrote. To carry out his deeds Porfirio Díaz had at his disposal not only all these political technologies but also the telegraph, the railroad, the repeating rifle, a flourishing treasury, a national population almost twice that in Alamán’s time, abundant foreign investment, the resolution of the British Debt, and a functioning nationalist mythology. Nor was the sacrifice of political liberties and freedom of expression in favor of economic development a sine qua non of modernization—viz the Anglo-Atlantic—but Lucas Alamán and Porfirio Díaz thought it was. Liberalism was already an important force on the scene but was not as strongly rooted in the political culture, national psyche, and mythology as it was to be later. The grafting of liberalism onto the triumphant defeat of a foreign usurper (the French) lay in the future, the soft authoritarianism of the Spanish monarchy a mere two decades in the past. To Alamán, the sacrifice of democracy and liberal values was both plausible historically and personally congenial in keeping with his ideological predilections.27 Alamán’s window of possibility was little more than two years, half of that time overshadowed by the War of the South, a violent civil conflict with elements of a caste war that proved a major political headache. As the key player in the Bustamante regime after the vice president himself, Lucas Alamán was immediately faced with a number of critical issues

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affecting the viability of the new government. Most prominent among these were security questions in the broadest sense. One of them was the physical security of private citizens and their property, menaced by thieves and bandits. The protection of private property from criminals but equally from state predation and irregularities in legal procedures was a deep preoccupation of Alamán’s, linking conservatives with liberals and Mexicans with Europeans. There were also constant threats to the security of the government itself, the most unpredictable being the unquiet spirit of Antonio López de Santa Anna. Externally, Mexico was compelled to defend its territorial integrity against the insistent claims of King Ferdinand VII despite the embarrassing failure of the reconquest effort in 1829. The making of foreign policy required a constant, trustworthy stream of intelligence from both private and public sources as well as the pursuit of Mexico’s diplomatic interests abroad. Finally, the country needed to resist the creeping territorial ambitions of its northern neighbor. That none of these three problems was ever really resolved during his ministry casts a bright light on the frailty of Alamán’s modernization initiatives. Criminal banditry and Santa Anna’s doleful influence on political life persisted, and Spanish recognition of Mexican independence came in 1836, four years after Alamán resigned. But while there were things he could not achieve during his relatively extended tenure in office—ministries turned over rapidly in these decades—nor could have achieved even had he held his position longer, there were Public Goods he could implant or at least consolidate. These had to do with administration, national memory, raising or maintaining the level of public culture, and health, welfare, and regulation.

An Ordered and Prosperous Republic José Manuel de Herrera (1776–1831), an insurgent churchman during the independence uprising, served as secretary of interior and exterior relations under the first and second regencies and the empire. His 1822 memoria presented to congress was quite schematic at about ten pages in length but established the precedent for such ministerial memorias. Alamán, during his ministries, elevated these to the level of highly analytical, detailed informes on the state of the Republic. He wrote five—in 1823, 1825, 1830, 1831, and 1832— all of them wide-ranging in subject matter and averaging about fifty pages each.28 I am particularly concerned here with tracing Lucas Alamán’s interest in gathering national statistics and in the fates of the national archive, the

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botanical garden, the national museum, and Mexican antiquities as reflected in his memorias and policies. In the early 1830s he was primarily concerned less with diachronic than horizontal knowledge, with the knowledge of the national territory in the most inclusive sense, with drawing information into the center both as an instrumentality of power and for the building of an archive of the knowable. One of the most important tools for collecting that knowledge was statistics. True, his Historia de Méjico demonstrates the shift in his thinking from the synchronic to the diachronic aspects of his society, that is, from the horizontal to the historical dimension. Still, the work’s appendices are replete with statistical tables of all sorts, whereas the great histories of the country and its independence movement written by his contemporaries—Mora, Zavala, Bustamante, Bocanegra, and so forth—were typically not so marked. The first of his ministerial memorias delivered to congress, in 1823, makes clear the importance he accorded to statistics for purposes of good governance: “The basis of economic government should be an exact statistics. From the earliest days of our independence, the Junta Provisional ordered the Provincial Deputations and Ayuntamientos to collect the necessary elements to form them [i.e., statistics]. . . . [On them] depend the proper division(s) of our [national] territory, the fair distribution of taxes, the arrangement of national representation corresponding to each province, and the knowledge of our resources and our productive capacity.”29 He lamented that the collection of statistics from the provinces had advanced little. In his general project to create an ordered and prosperous republic through the action of the central state, one tool was the legibility nourished by statistical knowledge.30 In his ministerial memoria of January 1831, for example, he proposed the compilation of a statistically based Atlas de la República formed with maps of the various states, reconciled and corrected through astronomical observations and trigonometric methods, with accompanying statistical tables.31 Institutions such as archive, gardens, and museum had numerous functions ranging from the bureaucratic to the scientific and from preservation to identity formation. They were key elements in what today is called controlling the narrative. The acquisition, analysis, shaping, and dissemination of knowledge were thus key to modernization and construction of an orderly society. The archive, gardens, and museum seem relatively minor in importance compared to life-and-death questions, but Alamán had a direct personal and ideological investment in pursuing the growth and stability of the three institutions, spent a good deal of time on them in his public work life, and wrote compara-

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tively extensively about them in his ministerial memorias. So they are revealing in a biographical sense since they show us something of his understanding of the past and his vision for the future. In his burgeoning historical sensibility, Lucas Alamán saw these repositories as the reservoir of the national memory. In the ministerial memoria of 8 November 1823 he made an implicit pitch to the congress to continue funding the ordering of the former viceregal secretariat, a “long and troublesome” labor being carried forward solely by cesantes (government workers recalled from retirement) without any specialized skill in working in large archives or handling masses of documents. When he rendered his next accounting to congress in 1825 he was able to report that the “organization of the general archive is progressing with the greatest energy.” Swept back into the ministry by the Jalapa revolution at the beginning of 1830, at the start of 1831 he wrote that the progress of the archival organization had been vigorously renewed since its transfer to another location within the Palacio Nacional but that it was inadequately staffed. He also summarized the work accomplished during 1830, including the gathering in one place of judicial records from the old tribunals of the colonial audiencia, the sala del crimen, the Acordada, and the General Indian Court. Alamán’s 1832 memoria said very little about the archive, but despite interruptions, funding problems, and other issues the Archivo General de la Nación, as it is known today, was on a firm footing by the time he was forced from office in the spring of 1832. The development of the botanical garden and the museum were other pet projects of Alamán’s, but traveled a bumpier road than the general archive, slowed primarily by the stinginess of government support. Alamán the polymath was deeply interested in the sciences of his day, particularly botany, believing that Mexico was uniquely endowed not only with mineral wealth but also with biological diversity (the country is, in fact, one of the most biodiverse in the world). The botanical garden, established in the late colonial period, had long been neglected and underfunded minister Alamán wrote in his 1823 ministerial memoria. The greatest attention paid to it during Alamán’s first ministries was to determine a venue or venues of sufficient size to meet the botanical needs of the medical school, of collecting for its own sake, propagation, and public enjoyment. Where antiquities were concerned, by which Alamán seems initially to have meant manuscripts exclusively, he wrote in the same 1823 memoria, “The same disorder mentioned [for the botanical garden] has produced a similarly bad [situation] difficult to remedy. There existed in the archive of that

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[viceregal] secretariat very precious monuments of Mexican antiquities and of the first years of Spanish domination, the larger part due to the enlightenment of the celebrated traveler Boturini. [But] many have disappeared and others are incomplete or torn.”32 His goal here was not only the preservation of these objects but also their being made accessible to facilitate the work of scholars. By the time Alamán came to write his 1825 memoria he singled out the lack of progress in this project.33 Memorias by other ministers of the later 1820s suggest that both the botanical garden and antiquities museum languished under his successors. The jardín botánico and the antiquities collections had seen some “slight improvements” by 1830, although the longtime botany professor and curator of the gardens Vicente Cervantes had died in 1829. Despite the slight advances, Alamán told congress in February 1830 that he wished to move the projects along more speedily. So he proposed the uniting of the gardens and museum into one megamuseum with sections devoted to antiquities, “productos de industria,” natural history, and botany. A year later the minister revealed that the antiquities holdings had grown through the purchase of a major private collection and the discovery of yet more preconquest material artifacts in excavation sites for the foundation of new buildings in central Mexico City (which is still occurring today). The unification of the museum and botanical garden into one entity had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies.34 The national museum was an institution to be supported not only for the sake of preserving his countrymen’s memory of their remote past and therefore making them more Mexican but also so that European scholars might be made aware of the antiquity and high level of preconquest Mexican civilization.35 This contradicts to some extent the assertion often made that Alamán wanted to expunge the Mesoamerican cultural heritage in favor of exalting Mexico’s European–Hispanic past. The most noteworthy part of Lucas Alamán’s last ministerial memoria, that of 1832, touched on the antiquities of pre-Columbian Mexico: “The ancient monuments of the diverse peoples who inhabited this part of our continent in epochs dating back to the beginning of time still have not [come] to be known or studied sufficiently. Their study will without doubt lead to the discovery of great historical truths that will decide questions of the greatest interest about the antiquity of the first populations of America. It would be a disgrace to our [national] reputation if we did not take part in these learned investigations.”36 Alamán mentioned here a scientific archaeological expedition, that of JeanFrédéric Maximilien de Waldeck (1766?—1875). Most probably born in Prague but acknowledged as being French, Waldeck was an antiquarian, artist, sec-

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ondhand pornographer, and explorer whose 1834–36 travels and sketching of Maya ruins at Uxmal, Palenque, and other sites came to fruition after Alamán had left the government. The minister apparently envisioned the antiquities of the museum, and therefore his burgeoning museum project itself, as playing a major role in beginning to settle the long-standing controversy across the Atlantic world about the scale, social complexity, and antiquity of New World state-level societies.37 Below the level of these formal ministerial status reports, prescriptions, and proposals, the work of the museo in relation to antiquities and natural history went on, as did the collecting, instructional, and other functions of the botanical gardens. Natural history oddities flowed into Mexico City from all points of the republic, including mineral samples, precious and semiprecious stones, fossils, and other objects. This warranted the writing and wide diffusion of an instruction manual on the collection and remission of items of natural history, addressing plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, and minerals, of which the minister may have been the author of all or part.38 As the natural history and antiquities collections started expanding fairly rapidly, the museum soon began to outgrow its physical space, and plans came under discussion for a larger, more permanent venue. Following the recommendation of the museum conservador Isidro Ignacio de Icaza, in May 1831 congress decreed that the museum be installed along with the Academia de San Carlos, the art academy, in the old Inquisition building. But when Alamán left office, sympathy for the project as a whole flagged and with it interest in moving to the new venue. While objects of natural history might come and go and botanical items die, be replaced, or even sent out of the country to grease the wheels of diplomacy, the collection of antiquities for the central national repository was a more delicate matter. Many of these pieces were large and visually striking as well as built into local landscapes and traditions, anchored there by sentimental and historical values, so that their removal by the central government might encounter stiff local resistance.39 To exert near-absolute control in the matter of retaining items within the country and bringing them to the centralized site of the national museum, minister Alamán issued an order in a printed circular of March 1832 that read, “[The national government,] as protector of scientific establishments, enjoys the preferential right as such to purchase over other buyers the beautiful productions of art and science [and antiquities] that may be discovered on private land.” It was also empowered to prohibit the export of such pieces from the country, if necessary paying the owners for the

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items.40 Pre-Columbian artifacts and manuscripts did tend to go astray despite Lucas Alamán’s insistence. The conservador Icaza alleged, for example, that Carlos María de Bustamante had borrowed some pre-Hispanic pieces— whether manuscripts or objects is not clear—and then kept them at his home, a charge Bustamante vehemently denied; there were similar incidents involving other individuals. Controlling the actions of foreigners regarding preColumbian artifacts was even more difficult because they were not citizens and tended to come and go. A Frenchman named Pedro Emilio (PierreEmile?) Perennes, for example, requested a license from Alamán in January 1831 to sketch pre-Columbian monuments already in the hands of the museum and to prospect for more of them throughout the country. Although the license was approved in fairly short order by Vice President Bustamante, the request led Icaza to draw up a list of grievances about the loose practices of foreigners, including an associate of Joel Poinsett’s, with regard to Mexican antiquities. Other complaints Icaza made included one against Waldeck, who had made drawings of many artifacts, free of charge, but refused to let the museum make copies of his drawings for its own collections.41 Waldeck was probably the most interesting and quirky of these foreigners. Often calling himself Baron Waldeck, he was essentially a talented adventurer of dubious origins. Aside from his work on Mexican antiquities, he is closely associated with the republication of a famous set of engraved pornographic images, I Modi, originally published in Italy in 1524 and accompanied by poetry composed by the Italian writer Pietro Aretino. Hired as a mining engineer by one of the numerous European businesses whose massive investments Lucas Alamán encouraged for many years, Waldeck came to Mexico in 1825. He quickly turned his attention to the study of pre-Columbian monumental architecture and sculpture, living at Palenque for a time in the early 1830s. He was commissioned by the Irish peer Edward King Viscount Kingsborough (1795–1837), a keen enthusiast of preconquest Mesoamerican antiquities, to visit and sketch the ruins of the Maya site at Uxmal. His renderings went into Lord Kingsborough’s famous, massive nine-volume work Antiquities of Mexico, mostly published in 1831, whose enormous production cost in part landed the Irishman in debtor’s prison in Dublin, where he died of typhus. In 1838 Waldeck published his own work, Voyage pittoresque e archéologique dans la province d’Yucatan pendant les années 1834 et 1836, whose illustrations, by his own hand, strongly echo his conception of Egyptian structures (to my eye they look a bit like the designs of monumental buildings done for Adolf Hitler by the architect Albert Speer). These images and ones of Palenque eventually

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made their way into the later publication of the French antiquarian Brasseur de Bourbourg and form an important link in the genealogy of arguments seeking to connect the ancient Mexicans to Egypt or Rome or Greece or even to the lost island civilization of Atlantis. Submitted directly to Vice President Bustamante by the “antiquarian draughtsman” and then routed to Alamán, Waldeck’s project must have developed during 1830–31. In the meantime, Waldeck warmed up by making fastidious measurements and detailed sketches of the Teotihuacán pyramids, submitting a brief report to the minister. He promised to include a more detailed description of the site in his work, begging permission to dedicate it to Alamán.42 Waldeck was given the green light on his Maya project in the late summer or fall of 1831, the published volumes to be sold by subscription.

Urban Crime and Banditry Observers of late colonial and early republican Mexico City almost universally remarked on the inundación de malhechores, the flood of criminals and delinquents plaguing the city. The thousands of beggars and homeless poor, the famous Mexico City léperos—some of them timid and harmless, others quite aggressive, even murderous—who made passage through the central city streets somewhat problematic for prosperous-looking citizens and foreigners also provoked much comment. The presence of thieves, robbers, individual bandits, and organized gangs of highwaymen was endemic to rural areas, increasing directly with the distance from centers of police power. Authorities at all levels lacked the resources to secure the vast under- or unpopulated spaces (despoblados) between the cities, towns, and villages. Many civil and military policing personnel worked in concert with highwaymen to prey on travelers, property-holders, and entire communities.43 The legislation promulgated by congress on 27 September 1823 at the urging of minister Alamán and signed into law by Vicente Guerrero—who would be executed under its provisions in 1831!—as president of the SPE, was intended to ameliorate this situation by allowing police authorities to suspend constitutional guarantees in carrying out summary trials and executions. The state’s capacity to suppress criminality declined concomitantly with the embroilment of military and civil forces in political conflict and as fiscal resources dried up or were turned from policing to other purposes. This was occurring as the Anastasio Bustamante regime came into power at the beginning of 1830, and there is little reason to suppose a reversal of the trend over the next fifteen months or

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so as Vicente Guerrero, his allies, and their forces violently disputed control of the country with government armies in the War of the South. Minister Alamán received daily arrest reports from Mexico City’s police authorities through the governor of the Federal District, typically aggregated into larger sets of data. The reports for the entire year 1830, for example, mostly bear the minister’s terse notation “nothing worth the attention of the vice president [i.e., Anastasio Bustamante].” Reported activities included robberies, burglaries, quarrels involving violence, the arrest of hombres sospechosos, and so forth. In some criminal activity minister Alamán took a greater, even a personal, interest. In late March 1830, for instance, he ordered the Federal District governor to redouble police efforts to control the group of thieves active in the plazuela del Volador, a property of the ex-Marquesado del Valle, immediately abutting the National Palace to the south. These criminals attacked and robbed servants from the affluent homes in the city center coming to shop at the market there, as had recently occurred with a servant of the minister of justice himself. The roads around Chapultepec, those between Tacubaya and Mexico City, and other routes were teeming with robbers. Although public safety was a concern of his, Alamán was much more preoccupied with the political security of the Bustamante regime, the extirpation of radicalism, and the suppression of what he referred to as anarchy more generally.

The Microphysics of Centralization: An Introduction In 1847 the American Fayette Robinson wrote in his book Mexico and her Military Chieftains, About the end of eighteen hundred and thirty . . . there occurred at Mexico City a mysterious circumstance, which kept public curiosity long awake. About daybreak the body of the Corregidor Quesada was found near one of the corners of the cathedral. He was lying in the midst of a pool of blood, with a wound in his side, evidently given with great earnestness, for the marks of the guard were deeply impressed on the edge of the wound, and many of the spectators seemed to look with jealousy at the trace of the handiwork of a person who was master of his business. No one was aware that the Corregidor had any personal enemies, but all knew that he had declared himself an enemy of the government. For some days the body, in grand costume, was exposed, as is the cus-

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tom of the country, to public view, and great exertions were made, but in vain, to discover the assassin. A short time afterwards, an event not less strange occurred at Jalapa. A senator generally considered hostile to the government, was poisoned in a manner not less strange than [that in which] Quesada had been stabbed. One day immediately after he awoke, this senator took up a cigar which lay on the table near his bed, and ringing for his valet-dechambre, bade him bring a light. The Mexicans smoke more scientifically than any other people, and never think of lighting a cigar with a blaze, but always from living coals, which are kept in a brazero, which, in this instance, was of silver. Scarcely had he begun to smoke when he was seized with a violent sneezing, in consequence of which, in a short time, a haemorrhage ensued, of which he died. His body was examined, and it appeared that the nasal passages and brain were violently inflamed, that the cigar must have been poisoned and killed him, as described. No one could tell what hand had placed the cigars on the senator’s table, and the appearance of his servant, when he told what had happened, would have convinced the most skeptical that he was guiltless of this assassination of his master. Who, then, was guilty? People insisted on connecting together these two inexplicable murders, and fancied that the hand which drove the dagger so deep into Quesada’s side, was the one which placed the cigars on the senator’s table, and belonged to Don Lucas Alamán. This may be, and probably is, all calumny, for the story of the poisoned cigar is too elaborate, and is evidently copied from the days of the Borgia and La Brinvilliers, but will serve to show the estimate put on the morals of Don Lucas Alamán, whom all the world confessed to be a true patriot, yet who, to secure the good of his country, would not hesitate to trample in the dust, the rights of its citizens and of itself, with a courage which is the more heroic as it neither receives the reward of public approbation nor is sustained by the inspiration of the hope of fame.44 Had these events actually occurred they would have taken place around the end of Lucas Alamán’s first year back in the ministry. The apocryphal ascription of the murders to Alamán’s hand conveys in cartoonish form something of the sinister reputation he was acquiring. It is impossible to imagine Alamán skulking about the cathedral in the predawn hours—the Zócalo was so heavy with pedestrian traffic during the day that any such crime must have been

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nocturnal—wrapped in a cape or other disguise, intent on murdering a political opponent. And to imply that he was a “master at his business,” a practiced assassin, goes beyond cartoonish to mad. At a stretch he might have hired a thug to do the deed and to assassinate the senator as well, but even that is so highly improbable as to put it out of consideration. In his third paragraph Robinson goes on to discount the story as a probable slander, having nonetheless blackened Alamán’s character in the most egregious fashion. Robinson’s practiced assassin is nearly redeemed by the ghostly framework of patriotism, since he goes on to describe Alamán as a truly disinterested, courageous lover of his country. His ill fame could hardly have stemmed from his first ministries during 1823–25 because at that time the SPE barely had a grip on the government, let alone the resources to carry out an effective campaign of political repression. After the spring of 1832 he was out of the government for a year, then in internal exile for about fifteen months, and finally exonerated of the accusations. Although the groundwork for it had been laid in the federalist struggles of the early 1820s, Alamán’s nefarious reputation, caricatured by Fayette Robinson, was primarily acquired during the thirty months or so when he served in Anastasio Bustamante’s government. How did this happen? José María Luis Mora tagged the Bustamante government with the label “the Alamán administration,” a description that has stuck over the ensuing two centuries.45 Anastasio Bustamante had doubts about his ability to direct the government. While he was more than a mere figurehead, especially where military matters were concerned and with regard to the killing of Vicente Guerrero, he was less than the central political strategist or policy maker, roles that Alamán was quite able to assume. So whatever criticisms or anathemas were heaped on the Bustamante regime at the time by outraged defenders of Guerrero, liberals, and ardent federalists—or since then by historians—quite naturally have adhered to Alamán as the architect, tough guy, and fixer of the administration. His dominance over the cabinet and strong influence over Bustamante were noted by Mexican observers as well as by foreigners, the British envoy Richard Pakenham [1797–1868] and the American minister Anthony Butler [1787–1849] among them. Although muted by the noise of the escalating civil war, the overall centralizing strategy of the government was fully in keeping with Bustamante’s leanings, notwithstanding Catherine Andrews’s assertion that he was by conviction a federalist throughout his life. Yet its execution was clearly charged to the minister of relations, making of him the bête noire of the liberal-federalist cause. For another thing, major policy initiatives both domestic and diplomatic seem to have originated with Alamán,

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albeit with the vice president’s approval, the most famous being the Banco de Avío. Alamán’s ministry, furthermore, acted as the gatekeeper of access to the vice president, organized the flow of paper and information within the government, and made decisions about which organs should handle what issues. The position of Alamán in the Bustamante government was somewhat analogous to the president’s chief of staff in the modern-day White House. The senior staff position in the ministry (oficial mayor) was occupied by generally competent and well-educated men chosen by the minister himself—men like José María Ortiz Monasterio (1807–69), a lawyer called to the post fourteen times in eight presidential administrations over two tempestuous decades (1832–51). An interesting illustration of the way this worked is the register of all the documents collected by the oficial mayor of the ministry of relations from the audiencias irregularly held by Bustamante every few weeks during his first administration.46 People who came to see the vice president during these audiences often brought written petitions and other documents collected by the oficial mayor and routed to the appropriate ministry for action, often with brief annotations. Most of these went to the war ministry, a few to those of justice and treasury. Many of the petitions came from military men seeking transfers or promotions, the abuse of which power was charged against Facio in the 1833 congressional grand jury investigation; from parents trying to get their sons’ presidio sentences reduced; or from retired government employees seeking the payment of pensions in arrears. Finally, many of Bustamante’s public political utterances actually consisted of Lucas Alamán’s words, since the minister wrote many of his boss’s speeches. The printed version of Anastasio Bustamante’s speech at the opening of the extraordinary sessions of the national congress on 28 June 1830, for instance, bears across the top of the page an annotation in Alamán’s hand reading, “This and the rest [of the speeches] were written by me, Lucas Alamán.”47 Alamán’s efforts to stifle vocal opposition to the Bustamante regime and entrench rule by the hombres de bien did not go unnoted by Butler in his correspondence with Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Butler’s initial impression was that the minister was implacably hostile toward the US owing to his experience with Joel Poinsett. By implication this hostility extended to the new envoy himself. As early as mid-1830, however, Butler and Alamán seem to have developed a cordial relationship, so much so that by the fall Alamán could emphasize their “particular friendship” in a note to Butler.48 When Alamán went into hiding in May 1833Butler acted as a go-between to keep him in touch with the outside world. And when the American pulled up stakes to

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return to the US in 1836, he sold at least some of his household goods to the Mexican statesman. He was lavish in his praise of the minister’s intelligence, political acumen, and general talent, recognizing in him the linchpin of the Bustamante administration even as he acknowledged his pro-British leanings and imagined him to have been suborned by the British government. Butler repeatedly predicted the imminent fall of the government and was always proved wrong. But he did have one or two interesting observations to make about the repressive policies Alamán was putting into place to maintain the regime’s power. Although hardly Alamán’s Boswell, Butler did record a number of the minister’s opinions, some related to their official mutual interests— Texas and the treaties—and some that came up casually in conversation. Butler observed in the spring of 1830 that the government had neutralized most of its political opponents through the purging of state legislatures, strategic arrests, and banishment of vocal opponents; consolidated itself; and maintained the loyalty of the regular army “no doubt through the address of Mr. Alamán” and Vice President Bustamante’s firmness. Some months later the American emissary wrote of the Guerra del Sur, by then virtually snuffed out as a result of Guerrero’s death, that Alamán’s heavily proarmy policy had worked to shore up the regime.49 As early as August 1830 Butler noted the increased severity of the administration’s measures against its opponents in the country as a whole: “An officer of the government [most likely Alamán himself] told me that clemency had strengthened opposition, and given impunity to their adversaries; that a contrary system was decided on, and would be enforced.”50 Alamán expressed to Butler in no uncertain terms his contemptuous, manipulative stance toward the federal Chamber of Deputies. At the end of 1830, speaking of the chances that congress would approve the treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation with Washington, Alamán remarked to Butler that to introduce it at the moment was injudicious in that the sitting cámara, with its strongly pro-Guerrero tendency, might reject the draft treaty out of collective vindictiveness just to embarrass the government and in particular the minister himself. Alamán’s secretariat issued a variety of executive edicts, circulars, and other instruments bearing the force of law even though they did not originate with the congress. Most often presented as coming from Vice President Bustamante, these went out over the minister’s name, simply “Alamán,” but probably were cooked up by Alamán himself with the vice president’s tacit or explicit consent. Circulars published on 12 January 1830, for example, enjoined city and Federal District authorities to apply smallpox vaccine widely

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and established a schedule for the four cabinet ministers to meet individually with the vice president every week—Relaciones on Mondays, Guerra on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and so forth—between ten o’clock and noon, and for all the ministers to meet together on a daily basis.51

Chambers and “Little Congresses” Alamán’s dual goals were to keep the political lid on during a period of civil war and to reverse the trend in government from the populist-federalist orientation of the short-lived Guerrero regime to a conservative-centralist stance. A letter addressed by Alamán to his friend José María Michelena in Morelia in the earliest days of the Bustamante government illuminates his concept of how republican centralism might work and his attitude toward the legislative branch of government. The letter touches chiefly on the debates then in congress about whether and how to declare Vicente Guerrero permanently unqualified for the presidency: “My dear friend: We are in agreement about [legislative] chambers and little congresses [congresitos]. Here the [Chamber of] Deputies goes well most of the time, either because some have been converted [to the support of the Bustamante government] or because . . . as others . . . plan to go with the prevailing opinion. What is certain is that there are few bad ones, and that it might not be impossible to convert them all to good ones. . . . I think congresses should be purged.”52 What Lucas Alamán meant by the “purging” of the Chamber of Deputies is difficult to say exactly—whether doing away with it entirely, cleansing it of its politically recalcitrant elements, or neutralizing it in some way; some combination of the latter two strategies seems much the most likely. He had developed this deprecatory attitude toward legislative bodies quite early in his public career, perhaps even during the Spanish Cortes of 1821–22. Although he occasionally exempted the Mexican Senate from his dismissive remarks, on the whole congress seems in his view to have varied from a mild nuisance to a nest of Jacobin vipers, from incompetent and indecisive to outright stupid and paralyzed, and from less bad to terrible. In the summer of 1826, for example, he wrote to Terranova y Monteleone of the “fanatical faction” in the cámara and of the radicals’ “great intrigues” to capture both houses in the coming elections. In 1828 he denounced the aspirations of candidates for election to both houses, adding later that those elected to the chamber were “men of opinions or conduct so exaggerated [that] anarchy has come to destroy all the confidence [in the public powers] that remained.” By the end of that year he noted that the radical inclinations

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of the chamber were at least checked to some degree by the Senate: “Fortunately, the Senate remains normal, with enough men of good sense to form a counterweight to the precipitous measures that the other house might take.” In 1829 “there was little room for reason to work in men such as are the majority of the deputies.” In the fall of that year he wrote that the congress would soon suspend its sessions, “fortunate since the propositions raised every day in the Chamber of Deputies cause horror.”53 Lucas Alamán had several reasons for holding the Mexican federal legislature in low regard. First, individuals of radical political orientation who popped up in the Chamber of Deputies repeatedly and were the most vocal, some of whom were his avowed personal enemies—the Cañedos, Zavalas, Quintana Roos, Alpuches, Rejóns, and others—adhered to ideas he regarded as nothing less than Jacobin. This was his inclusive label not only for adherents of Yorquino liberalism but also for the sort of radicalism he felt threatened property, established institutions, and social order. Second, the Cámara de Diputados was the closest thing next to a riot in the streets to a theater for the expression of the popular political inclinations he saw as uninformed and dangerous, as opposed to the stewardship of the hombres de bien. Finally, the legislative process itself was inherently anarchic, clumsy, and slow, opening a space for the inevitable, destructive play of the factionalism he loathed as long as his own faction was not calling the shots. Had it been up to Alamán alone he would have whittled congress down to a nullity in favor of a highly centralized, nominally republican regime with wide executive authority in the hands of a strong first magistrate and an enlightened coterie of hombres de bien, a sort of Bonapartist cryptomonarchy with a close, courtlike circle of ministers and advisers. This is what he aspired to as architect of the last Santa Anna government in 1853. But although a strong executive might approach being a monarchy, and a crowd of hombres de bien might comprise a ministry while mimicking a coterie of aristocratic advisers or a court, there were critically important differences between the republican and monarchical-aristocratic forms of government, differences of which Lucas Alamán was well aware. I believe that until the mid-1840s and then in the last few years of his life he felt the disparities favored republicanism and had embraced monarchism outright only in desperation at the impending failure of the Mexican state. In any case, his communications with congress were generally cool in tone and sometimes testy and disdainful, an attitude that only grew stronger over the years. His problems with the body in 1833–34, when he was brought up on charges before a congressional grand jury as one of the perpetrators of Vicente

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Guerrero’s judicial murder, were seeded in the resentments of his often highhanded, dismissive treatment of congress in the period 1830–32. The elections of late 1829 brought into the chamber a recalcitrant group of deputies who had no intention of rendering subservience to the centralist Bustamante cabinet. To show their teeth, the new congressmen elected as the president of their body José María Alpuche, in Michael Costeloe’s words a “vehement yorkino,” and ipso facto one of the minister’s Jacobins.54 There were also other legislatures to be dealt with—twenty of them, in fact, by the fall of 1830—in the states. The struggle between the central government and these bodies was framed mostly by the conflict between centralism and federalism.55 Much of this clash revolved around what proportion of fiscal revenue was retained at the state level and what percentage would be sucked into the maw of the national government; some of it was about the strength and autonomy of state militias. All this produced extremely difficult circumstances in national politics. Lucas Alamán’s letter to his friend Michelena of 19 January 1830 continued from the congresitos remark to discuss the states of the Republic as obstacles to the progress of the so-called Jalapa revolution and its policies: “It is difficult to legalize every act of the government. . . . Everything presents complications and obstacles which it is necessary to surmount. Much would fall into place if the States would take steps to support those being taken here. . . . The revolution cannot stand still, and everything that originates in the Capital will perhaps not be well received in all the States.”56 What to do? The dismantling of federalism by frontal assault must have occurred to him as a possible solution but would have faced the opposition of his chief, Vice President Bustamante, a lifelong adherent of the federalist viewpoint despite the centralizing tendency of his government. Aside from the fact that the federalist system was embodied in the national charter, it had become an article of faith among large segments of the political nation. Alamán expressed this eloquently in an independence-day editorial in the Registro oficial of 16 September 1830. His statement about why the abolition of the federalist system would endanger the country bears a Burkean stamp: The present government and all the men who support it cannot profess other principles [than those of federalism] because these [principles] are in their keeping and have been practiced by them. It requires only common sense to be convinced that to attempt a change in the political system was to open the abyss of the bloodiest civil war. Perhaps adopted without the preparation, without the knowledge, and without the necessary attention

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to our particular conditions, federalism has [nevertheless] struck [deep] roots and created local and individual interests. And these roots cannot be torn out without resistance and without digging up the [very] ground into which they have extended themselves. All change is dangerous even when [the path] is prepared by [public] opinion or is impelled by immediate, forceful, and sudden causes.57 Alamán was still very much a republican at this point, even if he believed that the republic should be a centralized one, shorn of the extreme politics that a wide, robust, and rambunctious democracy might bring to it. So he went about the business of hobbling federalism and centralizing state power crabwise; by the summer of 1834, according to Costeloe, the 1824 Constitution had virtually been abandoned.58 Resistance in the states to the Alamán program of centralization and the selective suppression of political dissent crystallized around several issues, one of the most important being the situation of state militias, controlled by state governors; the other was fiscal remissions to the federal government. The centralizing tendencies of the national government provoked the strengthening of the militias in several states, and in turn the federal military buildup engineered by War Minister Facio responded to this. But there were other issues as well. Beginning in 1830 the government started naming bishops on the basis of recommendations from cathedral chapters, submitting them to the pope for confirmation, a Mexican Ultramontanism antagonizing many liberal federalist politicians in the states. By late 1832 lists of nominees had been submitted for the states of Michoacán, Puebla, Jalisco, Durango, Chiapas, and Nuevo León, and lists were in the offing to fill vacant canonries in cathedral chapters. What were perceived as the government’s proclerical policies alarmed liberals like Francisco García Salinas (1786–1841) and Gómez Farías in Zacatecas, who asserted the state governments’ right to confiscate ecclesiastical properties. As Costeloe notes, Father José María Luis Mora won a prize from the Zacatecas state government for the best essay defending the state’s right to do this. But even political allies and collaborators of Alamán like the moderate Manuel Mier y Terán had grave qualms about the regime’s direction under the helmsmanship of his old friend. In his grave, moderate way, Mier y Terán wrote to Father Mora in the summer of 1831: I cannot understand or explain the conduct of the ministerial gentlemen, and must confess to you that what you said to me in your letters last year and this seemed somewhat exaggerated. But now I see that they

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are determined to reestablish the power of the ecclesiastical state, that they mistrusted the authorities in the states, and that they desired to see them submitted to the churchmen and the military. The decision they are making does not seem to me the most prudent [course]. . . . The ecclesiastics are the least easy to deal with and recently one marks in them great resistance to anything coming from the authorities not of their corporation [su fuero] and even a certain disdain for all the others. I do not know if Señor Alamán has foreseen these outcomes and what it is that he hopes from them.59 By early 1830 a coalition of state governments led by Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí prepared to confront the central government militarily, if it should come to that, and trouble was brewing in perennially volatile, deeply federalist Guadalajara.60 In an effort to gain control of this situation Alamán relied on his agents—agents not in the formal sense but linked to the minister through influence and friendship—in various cities to purge the governorships and state legislatures. Thus men in some formal body—a local military garrison, the Ayuntamiento—would draft a petition to the national congress demanding the unseating of the governor, the legislature, or both and either the restoration of the previous government—if favorable to the regime—or new elections. Mariano Michelena acted as his operative in Morelia, other men in other cities. Obtaining congressional approval of these petitions depended on complex voting procedures by which one house could pass a law by a twothirds majority if the other house did not reject it by a two-thirds majority, and this mechanism allowed Alamán to bypass the more liberal Cámara de Diputados in favor of Senate support for the proposals. This confirmation of the presumed popular will engineered the fall of several state governments whose authorities were elected during the period of Yorquino dominance in 1828. For example, in Puebla the pretext was electoral irregularities, and in Mexico state various cities and pueblos pronounced against the state government, which was then ousted by the national Senate. Alamán was thus able to throw out eleven state legislatures wholly or in part and replace several state governors with men more sympathetic to the Mexico City government. The states affected were Jalisco, Michoacán, Querétaro, Durango, Tamaulipas, Tabasco, Oaxaca, Puebla, Veracruz, Chiapas, and Mexico. Just as Mariano Michelena acted on Alamán’s behalf in Morelia, so did other friends and political operatives in other states. Costeloe has referred to these men as spies, but that seems to go too far.61 The minister may well have

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maintained a network of paid informants of whose activities and reports to their boss little if any evidence has survived; it is hard to address this possibility one way or another. But much of his information about the political situation outside the capital came to him from people who were less part of a covert network in the way we would understand the practices of espionage than men bound to him through friendship or political sympathy. For example, Manuel Sánchez, whom I have been unable to identify beyond the fact that he was probably a member of the San Luis Potosí state legislature, wrote to Alamán in February 1831 regarding the publication by the congressional deputy Juan de Dios Cañedo of a denunciatory speech aimed at the presidential cabinet. He would do everything he could, he wrote, to persuade the state legislature to adopt Alamán’s repressive policy of declaring subversive any speech or publication attacking the government or advocating an alteration in its form. The state legislature obliged by passing a law to this effect on 23 March. Cirilo Gómez y Anaya, the military commandant of Durango, wrote of the effects of this speech in Durango; and the brigadier general Ignacio Inclán (1789–1854) wrote confidentially of his support for the renewed presidency of Manuel Gómez Pedraza in Morelia.62 The flow of this sort of information to the central government is well-documented in the form of letters to Lucas Alamán during the years 1830–32 from Cirilo Gómez y Anaya and Joaquín Parres, writing, respectively, from Durango and Aguascalientes. One can probably assume he had contacts in all the states and in most major cities in the country. Gómez y Anaya, as I mentioned above, was the military commandant of Durango; Parres (1793–1838) was a military man from Guanajuato, sometime governor of Jalisco, federal deputy, and minister of war and marine for a brief time (February–April 1833) under Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías.63

The Fourth Estate under Alamán The blood sport of politics was played in large measure in the newspapers, which formed much of the informational universe in nineteenth-century Mexico. Where religious matters were concerned there were sermons preached in church, but the immediate reach of these was limited by the number of people who could fit into even a large church, a few hundred at most. Forms of oral transmission in public and private—rumor, songs, even theatrical presentations—could all deal with politics but would also have been limited in their reach, the strength of their signal diminishing with distance from the source. Literacy rates were low, even in the cities, and books relatively expensive: at a

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couple thousand volumes or so, Alamán’s personal library was unusually large for a private individual, and Father Mora’s considered enormous at several thousand volumes. Newspapers, on the other hand, were inexpensive. They could be quite short-lived, but there were a lot of them, especially in the capital, and the startup costs of setting them up were relatively low. The potential audience, as opposed to the actual readership in the sense of holding a newspaper in one’s hands and reading it, was quite large by virtue of groups of people clustering around a single reader. The Mexico City newspapers acquired tremendous importance in the capital’s and nation’s political life, and all national regimes sought to exercise some control over them in order to circulate their message and limit, neutralize, or suppress entirely that of their critics. Costeloe has summarized Alamán’s attitude eloquently in suggesting that he “was resolved once and for all to crush the party of anarchy represented, in his opinion, by the newspapers.”64 The elite view that public opinion was both volatile and malleable was predicated on the idea that the common people, as distinct from the gente decente, were particularly suggestible and vulnerable to demagogic appeals. There was a strong tendency among the political class to see indigenous people in particular as being lazy, improvident, drunken, libidinous, lacking in self-control, and rather stupid. The racialist ideas represented quite explicitly in the famous casta paintings of the late colonial period long remained current in the upper levels of Mexican society; traces of them can be found in the country even today. So Alamán believed that public opinion must be insulated from the political extremes of Jacobinism. In the first number of the Registro oficial, an anonymous author (almost certainly Alamán himself) wrote, At its worst [public] opinion existed only precariously among the indigent mass of the people. It is a fleeting [thing] of the plazas and taverns. What in the long run determines the fate of peoples is the opinion of the statesmen, men of letters [literatos], [and] the honorable and industrious merchant; of the magistracy and the jurisconsult, of the military men who have distinguished themselves through their prowess, and of all the honorable citizens who are so many sentinels of the social order. If these sentinels abandon their post, why should we be surprised that a turbulent and rabble-rousing minority come to occupy it? If such men are not punished, if public imposture is not unmasked, what credibility would the nation have? This passage, obviously proposing a long-term tutelage by the educated white people of the uneducated people of color who comprised the majority of

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the Mexican population, was immediately draped by its author with the fig leaf of the rule of law: “A nation cannot be governed by the decisions of a passing whim that yields to every passion. The laws should be the rule of conduct and the sole authority consulted by the [government] official.”65 The jalapista regime conceived of itself as the party of order, not an order of parties. Since formal political parties did not yet exist apart from their embryonic embodiment in the Scottish and York Masonic rites, newspapers were the nearly exclusive organs of factional expression. To control what went on in the press was therefore to guard against the anarchic force of factional and party conflict that Lucas Alamán so railed against, always provided his party prevailed. The severity of the Bustamante–Alamán government in repressing criticism in the press and public sphere could be rationalized by the state’s efforts to gain the upper hand in the large-scale, destructive civil war initiated by the ousted President Guerrero early in 1830. In the view of Alamán, the pressing issue was that of national security, the perennial excuse of all would-be authoritarian state regimes. The repressive measures directed at liberals, radicals, and regime opponents would have been applied by Alamán even absent the Guerrero–Álvarez movement. What really underlay his policies was the goal of promoting a program of economic development and modernization requiring political order for it to achieve results—very much the same order and progress conundrum that faced Porfirio Díaz a half century later. Here there was a point of convergence between liberals and conservatives, since they all favored economic development. The question posed by Alamán’s critics was less the path to economic modernization than the political costs entailed and who was to bear them. But Lucas Alamán had neither the time, the resources, nor the means to apply don Porfirio’s solutions. Defending the policies of the first Bustamante government two decades or so after its fall, Alamán wrote, The same accusations of excessive rigor were repeated against the government of that era that were directed under similar circumstances against the [Supreme] Executive Power, the response to which is the same as [was earlier] given. I do not pretend, nonetheless, to defend everything that occurred, but it should be kept in mind that it was a matter of a civil war that lasted a year; against a desperate faction that did not abstain from the means it used [even] up to trying [to unleash] a caste war that afterward caused so many misfortunes and is still causing them in Yucatán; that did not respect the rules of war, and that twice conspired

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to assassinate Vice President Bustamante. Having to employ so many different commanders to suppress it, it is not strange that there should have been some excesses—many fewer, however, than those committed before and after [those years] when the same people who have treated the administration of General Bustamante so severely have had power in their hands.66 Whether one finds this raison d’état rationalization convincing or not, Alamán was unembarrassed about offering it. The point of departure for the Bustamante regime in controlling the print space of the capital’s public sphere was the reestablishment of the government’s official periodical in early 1830. In mid-January the minister announced the rechristening of the government newspaper from Gaceta del Gobierno to Registro oficial. The much sterner Registro suggested record-keeping, bureaucracy, and perhaps even a whiff of surveillance, while oficial sounded more official and less chatty than gaceta. The change signaled a break with the ousted Guerrero administration. That the terms of publication, style, and much of the content of the supposedly new journal originated with Lucas Alamán himself there can be little doubt. And although the articles in the journal were nearly all anonymous, his was the guiding genius behind the editorial policy and substantive content. Expenses for printing were to be met from subscriptions, any shortfall made up with funds from the treasury. The editor had a small office staff to support him; the paper was to come out every day between four and five in the afternoon. An undated accounting of the circulation, probably for 1830–31, shows 451 subscribers in the capital and 367 outside it. The official part of the Registro published abstracts of the most important government business: legislation, judicial affairs, administrative orders, foreign communications, etc., while the “parte no oficial” would contain national or foreign news and articles proposing reforms, making political observations, and so forth. The prospectus declared, “Writings in the spirit of faction, passion, or private interest will have no place in the Registro oficial.” When Andrés Quintana Roo, as president of the Chamber of Deputies, sent an article for publication in the Registro, Alamán rejected it.67 Unsurprisingly, the Registro served primarily to defend the interests of the Bustamante regime, taking on a conservative, centralizing tone far from the neutrality suggested in the prospectus. An example of the newspaper’s alleged disinterested language appeared in an unsigned story of 24 December 1830 regarding political affairs in Gran Colombia:

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To the misfortune of this poor city [i.e., Bogotá], and of the entire country, the government [of Gran Colombia] continues to be dominated by the demagogues, declining every day in respect and power, while anarchy and disorder progress in an alarming and frightening manner. . . . But whether Sr. Mosquera or Sr. Caicedo [sic] is at the head of affairs, it is not possible to expect anything good from the government while whoever rules does not shake off fear, which up to now has been the principle of action of the new authority, and the cause of all the false steps, the violence, injustice, and violations of the constitution that have been committed . . . It appears only that the present administration has received from hell the horrible gift of ruining everything. This dark depiction of Colombian politics was laced with phrases describing the Colombian federalists as assuming “the false name of liberals,” and so forth.68 Settlement of the minister’s personal scores with prominent political figures also found its way into the paper, rationalized as a matter of public import, as in the repeated attacks on Joel Poinsett long after he had departed from Mexico. Not all readers were happy with the content or style of the paper, as reflected in some of the letters sent to the editors.69 In response to complaints, the weekly supplement on congressional debates was added in the summer of 1830. On the surface the purposes and content of the Registro oficial were not incompatible with the guarantee of press freedom set forth in the federal constitution of 1824. One of the powers of congress enumerated under section 5, article 50, paragraph 3 was “to protect and regulate the political liberty of the press in such a manner that its exercise can never be suspended, and much less be abolished in any of the states or territories of the confederation.” Hardly a full-throated endorsement of the absolute freedom of the press, this clause was an ambiguous statement of possibility, especially where the words “regulate” and “in such a manner” were concerned. Still, in the early republican period the liberty of political and intellectual expression in printed media, especially the newspapers and pamphletry, was a widely subscribed article of faith among almost all but the most hidebound reactionaries, of whom Lucas Alamán was by no means one. While public men trumpeted their fealty to this inviolable principle of a capacious public sphere, the zone of tolerance for political dissent narrowed when one or another faction came to power; this was particularly true of Alamán’s policies during the Bustamante administration. While he does not appear to have been more thin-skinned or vindictive

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than other powerful politicians of his time, Alamán did envision for the political sphere a lower threshold for what he called anarchy than many public men. His object was the imposition of stability at almost any price that the fragile structures of republican government could bear; and by stability he understood the squelching of the endemic factional squabbling he believed was undermining the possibilities for the country’s economic development. At an even deeper level, the endemic factional conflict of these decades reflected a fundamental crisis of legitimacy—a widespread skepticism as to whether republican institutions and political culture could or should contain dissent and argument and even thrive upon them without the national polity disintegrating. One might think of this as the absence, or at least gossamer thinness, of political empathy in Mexican national life. Brilliant though he was, Lucas Alamán was sucked into this moral lacuna further than most public figures of his time. This legitimacy vacuum prevailed in Mexican political life for the six or seven decades between independence and the boom years of the Porfirian regime, which underwrote a sort of peace. The lack of legitimacy applied not only to whatever government happened to be in power at the moment but also to the other fellow’s right to express his opinions, wrongheaded though they might appear. The rhetoric of political expression could be quite flamboyant, even venomous, and the efforts to suppress it spasmodic rather than constant. Alamán’s efforts to muzzle the opposition press in Mexico City throw a light on his vexation over an anonymous story that appeared in the National Gazette in the US on 23 February 1830 attacking him and defending Joel Poinsett’s tenure as the American envoy to Mexico. The American envoy Butler wrote to his superior, Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, that the arrival of several copies of the newspaper in Mexico “threw everything up in the wind” insofar as treaty negotiations between the two countries were concerned. He sent to his boss a version of the newspaper story and an account of Lucas Alamán’s reaction to it: [In the story] the treatment of Mr. Poinsett in Mexico is freely animadverted upon, and criticisms on the new administration, in which Mr. Alamán, the Secretary of State, is described as the bitter enemy of the United States, full of prejudice against our institutions of government and people, and decidedly the partisan of Great Britain. He called on me with the newspaper; and, after pointing out the passages reflecting on himself, declared that the expression of such opinions in the United

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States precluded his representing the government in the approaching discussions; for, should he and myself unfortunately differ in opinion, and in consequence of such difference fail to arrange a treaty, my government would cast all blame on him—impute it to prejudice against my country, and to British predilections. While the paper’s imputations were all basically true, Alamán did not want his attitudes bandied about in the US at a delicate moment in US–Mexican relations (when has there not been one?). Butler attempted to mollify the minister by pointing out the great latitude of opinions in the US allowed by freedom of the press, opinions not to be construed as representing the views of the American government. He reassured Alamán that these outbursts often were only the opinion of the editor himself and were generally ignored in the discussion of public issues, a questionable assertion given the role of public opinion in American politics. Alamán’s irritation was assuaged by this little lecture, and he did not act on his threat to withdraw from the treaty commission. He may have chosen this instance to convey to the American the message that he did not appreciate attacks on him in American newspapers and that Butler should exert his influence with the government in Washington to discourage them. The tenor of the exchange with Butler, however, suggested that Alamán was genuinely angered by the story and puzzled as to why such scurrilous opinions found expression in the press when some official in the American government should have taken a hand to forestall their appearance or exerted pressure to punish the editors or even shut down the offending newspaper outright. Such a reaction would certainly have fit with the policies he himself was carrying out in Mexico. In his memorias to the houses of congress, Alamán as secretary of relations asserted the liberty of the press as a fundamental building block of democratic life but qualified this absolute principle to exclude abuses from the legitimate exercise of that right. In other words, the official government position put the vaunted freedom of written expression at the mercy of the state, which held the power to decide what constituted abuse and what did not. In the section on “liberty of print” in his January 1825 memoria, Alamán referred to the supposed frequent abuses of this “precious guarantee” having necessitated the appointment of a commission to review existing regulations of press freedoms, a proposal never debated because other matters intervened to prevent it. Absolute freedom of the press, the minister noted, could produce immense benefits but also great evils when it deviated from its true course. Congress, he was sure, would be able to

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strike a balance between freedom and the public good, always excepting attacks on religion, morality, respect for the laws, obedience to the authorities, and care for the reputation and honor of citizens—certainly a wide swathe of areas for possible abuse.70 By the time Alamán had once again assumed ministerial duties in January 1830, he had become even more of a scold in keeping with the burgeoning repressive tendencies of the Bustamante administration. In January 1831 his memoria to congress regarding abuses of freedom of the press was sharp, understandably so given the heated political circumstances. In the previous year’s memoria he wrote of “abuses committed in the exercise of this right, and, no measure having been passed to remedy them, they all continue. So it is that this powerful medium, as much of enlightenment as of sedition, an instrument so efficacious for both good and evil, has been left without any brake.” Alamán’s last word on the subject came in his January 1832 congressional memoria, by which time jurisdiction over charges of “defamatory printed [works]” had been wrested from the hands of press juries and delivered to those of regular judges of first, second, and third instance as specified in a law passed by congress on 14 May 1831.71 This measure afforded a wide latitude for complaints by libeled individuals, who might appeal the decisions of lower judges against them. After discussing the abuses perpetrated against press regulations and censorship by writers, editors, and printers, Alamán presented an even more draconian proposal, namely, to regulate the establishment of printing businesses, which moved upstream from the printed word to the means of producing and disseminating it.72 All this pussyfooting around the freedom of printed expression notwithstanding, Lucas Alamán’s solution to the problem of an anti-administration press and a flourishing oppositional political pamphletry was to shut them down by any means at hand, but selectively. This policy obviously constituted a sort of antipress terrorism, its primary goal being the immediate suppression of newspapers he viewed as especially noxious, the secondary one to sow fear in the government’s more vocal critics. In the early months of the Bustamante government some of the Jalapa regime’s most vocal critics were allowed to return unmolested to their prerebellion activities. Lorenzo de Zavala went back to his newspaper, El correo de la Federación Mexicana, for example, and the Yucatecan radical federalist and Yorquino José María Alpuche (1790– 1840) to the Cámara de Diputados in the national congress, where he was elected president of the chamber. Carlos María de Bustamante’s pro-jalapista newspaper, La voz de la Patria, was actually subsidized by the government, but

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the subsidy was ended as the paper grew more critical of the regime. Other progovernment newspapers in the capital favored with direct subsidies from Alamán’s secret ministerial slush fund were El Sol, perhaps the most visible and loudest in its support of the regime, Observador de la República, and El Gladiador.73 Alamán’s selective crackdown on the opposition press began by the spring of 1830, although a few newspapers were permitted to continue for some time if they stayed within certain limits. In April 1830, for example, El Atleta, coming close to an allegation of monarchism, accused the minister of striving toward a French-style cour pleniére of nobles, high clergy, and other members of the elite, with state governments of “country gentlemen.”74 Published by Alpuche and Juan N. Almonte, the newspaper was closed about a year later when the investors were unable to pay a fine levied against the paper under the expanded definition of libel in the revised press law of 1831.75 Lorenzo de Zavala’s paper, El Correo, constantly sniped at the government and was shut down when Zavala chose to leave the country in May 1830 in the face of congressional charges of having mishandled the treasury ministry under Guerrero in 1829. In early 1831 Andrés Quintana Roo established El Federalista, almost immediately threatened with closure by soldiers. Late that year Manuel Crescencio Rejón (1799–1849), the Yucatecan liberal, started El Tribuno del Pueblo Mexicano, quickly closed by the government. Writers as well as publishers fell afoul of the regime. Vicente Rocafuerte, for instance, initially had some hopes for the jalapista revolution and had sent Alamán a congratulatory note on his entry into the ministry. In March 1831 he published an essay advocating religious tolerance, was almost immediately accused of violation of the press laws, and got off only as a result of a vigorous defense by Juan de Dios Cañedo.

The Sleeping Lion The problems of crime in the capital and banditry in the countryside were never effectively addressed before the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Insofar as the government was concerned, however, the more significant threats came from the political world. A major threat looming on the horizon was the ambitions of Antonio López de Santa Anna, a figure of truly heroic national reputation after his defeat of the Spanish at Tampico in September 1829. Although his political allegiances drifted back and forth over a fairly wide band of possibilities, at this point they were firmly republican and osten-

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sibly federalist. Santa Anna’s most recent biographer, Will Fowler, makes a strong case that the caudillo was obviously not in tune with the “party of order”—the conservative centralist tendency represented by Bustamante and Alamán—from at least 1829, when he threw in his lot with Vicente Guerrero, and that he consistently kept the Bustamante government at arm’s length.76 It’s not clear how worried Alamán was regarding the Veracruz caudillo’s intentions, but Santa Anna’s capacity to make trouble for the new government must have disquieted him. An interesting series of letters addressed to Lucas Alamán during the first few weeks of the Bustamante government, some from Santa Anna himself and others from his private secretary, Juan de Grandi, illuminate Santa Anna’s view of himself and the attitude he struck toward the regime brought to power by his military support of the Plan de Jalapa. Alamán’s replies are missing, but he viewed Santa Anna as a political chameleon and was skeptical of his intentions. A letter by Santa Anna from Jalapa to Alamán in Mexico City on 3 January 1830, composed on the day he resigned all his political and military posts—while retaining his full military pay—was written even before Alamán had been sworn in to his new cabinet job. Santa Anna defended his political conduct, painting himself a Cincinnatus, as he often did—a disinterested patriot who had laid down his sword and returned to his farm after defending the homeland. His rebellion at Perote in 1827 was initiated to “satisfy the general will” of the people, while he subsequently supported the elevation of Guerrero to the presidency for the same reason. When the Jalapa revolution broke out on 4 December 1829 his personal honor demanded continued loyalty to the embattled Guerrero government. But now that the scene had changed, he felt he no longer owed his former adversary allegiance: My conscience is tranquil, because I am persuaded that I have done what I should. I ought to have supported the [Guerrero] government . . . but never its abuses. I pointed these out to Sr. Guerrero a thousand times, and as many times urged him to remedy them. To this effect I wrote friendly letters, employed go-betweens and whatever means were at my disposal. On occasion, casting aside the language of friendship, I thought it necessary to use the sharpness of an officer claiming his rights and those of his fellow citizens. I saw with sorrow that all my efforts were in vain; and that the more I renewed [those efforts], the more my sincerity was doubted, and I was considered suspect and a weaver of projects to overthrow [the government]. To this point I concede and have

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conceded that my friend Sr. Bustamante was correct in his uprising; but not in the manner of its making.77 The revolution over, it remained only for Santa Anna to retire to the bosom of his family and attend to the restoration of his health. He offered his congratulations to Alamán on his appointment to the new government.78 Now, a closing courtesy in a letter of 3 January is interesting because Alamán was not appointed to the ministry until the next day at the earliest, and various sources date the appointment to as late as 8 January. In itself this is an insignificant difference, but it does suggest that Santa Anna may have been consulted by Bustamante about the formation of his cabinet and that Alamán may have played a more central role in the Jalapa pronunciamiento than he was later willing to acknowledge. A remarkable letter of the same day from Juan de Grandi conveys a threatening version of the general’s position. We do not know whether it was commissioned by Santa Anna himself to convey sentiments he preferred not to avow openly or was genuinely confidential and sent at Grandi’s initiative: Santa Anna esteems you and has the highest opinion of your person, knowledge, and probity. If you take advantage of this [high opinion], encouraging it with your continuing correspondence and advice, you can do much good for the country. For the influence this man exercises in the state [of Veracruz], unfortunately swarming with bad elements, cannot be denied. It is necessary not to irritate this sleeping lion [i.e., Santa Anna], whose character, and what he is capable of doing in a moment of desperation, few have understood. I know that Santa Anna desires the friendship of the hombres de bien: do not abandon him [you hombres de bien] so that tomorrow or another day he [illegible—but “joins”?] the uprisings that are the consequence of an [attempted] coup. I know that directed down the path of good, he will go along with you in everything and push forward all your measures. Two weeks later Santa Anna again congratulated Alamán on his appointment as minister of relations, acknowledging that the new minister’s simultaneous pursuit of his private business interests would constitute a heavy burden of the office. The caudillo continued, “In effect, now is when all the hombres de bien and [men] of principle should live united. . . . [F]or my part I will do everything I can from this corner, from which I hope not to leave except in the case that the reckless Spaniards return to profane our territory. In future I intend to

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dedicate myself to regaining my health and to the care of my modest interests in the bosom of my beloved family. [In writing to me from time to time] you should be assured that in me you have a dedicated friend, a title with which I hope you also favor me should you consider me worthy of your friendship.”79 This exchange apparently trailed off at the beginning of February 1830 with a second interesting letter from Grandi to Alamán, emphasizing Santa Anna’s volatility even more and concluding that the government needed to intervene in some way to protect the caudillo from the public suspicion and opprobrium directed against him for his unpredictable interventions in national political life. After praising fulsomely Alamán’s “beautiful qualities of soul, his disposition toward order . . . a man who knows not how to refuse to do good,” he continued as follows: That Santa Anna in his heart thinks as you and I [do] we should not doubt. His principles, his education, the class to which he has belonged, and a thousand other circumstances peculiar to his character are more than sufficient guarantees to convince [you] that he is not for the government of the rabble [canalla]. But unfortunately Santa Anna—young, warlike, full of the martial ardor of a valiant soldier, and, it may be, having something of ambition (which I have never detected)—has unjustifiably been smeared as a striver [after office], persecuted by those with whom he was united, attacked, manhandled, and as a consequence of all this drawn into the revolution of Perote, which has caused so many ills to the republic and is still doing so. Grandi was convinced that “the heart of Santa Anna was not corrupted, and on balance held 90 to 100 percent of good.” Having committed his support to Vicente Guerrero, his withdrawal would have been dishonorable. But now he had retired and had firmly pledged himself “not to get mixed up in anything; but this man sees himself [as] abused. Each delivery of mail brings pamphlets accusing and libeling him.” The Yorquinos were working toward a counterrevolution, and Santa Anna had many perverse men surrounding him bent on undermining his support for the prevailing order. Furthermore, the deputies in the current congress were ragged Yorquinos (Yorquinos descamizados; i.e., rabble). If the abuses could not be stopped, Grandi warned, Santa Anna might take rash action. The solution Grandi suggested was to flatter him and show confidence in him.80 For the next two years Santa Anna steered clear of pronunciamientos and military intervention until a propitious moment should arrive for his reentry

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into national affairs. He rode over his estates, attended to his cattle herds and fighting cocks, spent time with his infant daughter, regained his health, and in general lived the life of a landed country gentleman. What Lucas Alamán may have done through his influence and ministerial powers to anesthetize the sleeping lion, flatter him, reassure him, or neutralize his attackers is not known. When the general did step back into the limelight in 1832, however, it was to demand the resignation of the Bustamante ministers, chief among them Lucas Alamán, mainly on the grounds that some or all of them had instigated the judicial murder of Vicente Guerrero—that same Guerrero against whom Santa Anna had fought as a young royalist officer, with whom he had made common cause under the Iturbide royalist-insurgent alliance and then repudiated. This was not the last interaction between Alamán and Santa Anna before the final return to the presidency of the former at the invitation of the latter in 1853, since they seem to have exchanged letters regularly. It is hardly an exaggeration to say they were the two most important political figures in Mexico during the first three decades of the country’s independence, with Lorenzo de Zavala close behind. Each of them must have taken the other into his own political calculus to some extent, and certainly they used each other. What the two men thought of each other against the background of Mexican national politics is hard to pin down. Alamán probably saw Santa Anna as a strutting military opportunist, while Santa Anna viewed Alamán as some sort of dangerous egghead but less of a threat because a nonmilitary man. Santa Anna, the lion whether awake or asleep, and Alamán, the fox, everwakeful, thought they could manipulate each other, and their relations waxed cooler and warmer with changing political circumstances. With the accession to power of Anastasio Bustamante, Santa Anna retired to his great estate, Manga de Clavo, demonstrating a general sympathy with the regime while using illness as a pretext to keep his distance.81 Alamán frequently unburdened himself to the caudillo about his political problems, and Santa Anna tended to respond with sympathetic, anodyne, homiletic letters. An example was his advice to the minister when the latter complained of his problems with recalcitrant congressional deputies: “I am not surprised, because this happens every once in a while. The public man must naturally be attacked by many because he cannot please everyone. So the only thing you can do is act well and let everyone say what his passion suggests to him.”82 Around this same time, when Alamán was complaining about attacks against him in the press over his attitude toward Yucatecan separatism, Santa Anna offered advice of a similar nature: “Whatever may be said . . . by those who have declared

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war on you [in the newspapers], I think the best thing is to ignore it. Who of sound mind will believe that you are working to centralize the Republic?; or that you have secret ideas of [personal] aggrandizement? Let them chatter, then, and [let] time itself confound your detractors.”83 But for the moment, as Alamán worked during 1830–32 to establish political stability in Mexico, Antonio López de Santa Anna was keeping to his lair in Veracruz.

“The Stubbornness and Presumptuous Ignorance of That Government” The two major external threats to the national security of the young republic were both growing critical as Lucas Alamán took up his second ministry in the early days of 1830. The question of Texas would drag on past midcentury, and the shock waves it produced are still reverberating along the Mexico–US borderlands today. The other critical problem was Spain and the reluctance with which it bowed to the independence of its former colony. The resounding defeat of the Spanish expeditionary force under Barradas at Tampico in 1829 nourished the frail seedling of Mexican nationalism, made Santa Anna into a national hero, and bankrupted the national treasury. It also was the immediate context for the fall of Vicente Guerrero, since it was the emergency powers granted the president by congress to repel the invasion and the taxes his treasury secretary Lorenzo de Zavala increased or imposed to fund the military effort which accelerated discontent with the regime. The defeat was a profound embarrassment for the Spanish government due to the totally inadequate planning of the invasion, the high casualty rate among the invaders (50 percent) and the false assumption on which its success was predicated, namely, that the Mexican population would rise up to restore Mexico to Bourbon rule. There were a great many moving parts in the situation with Spain, among them Mexico’s defensive treaties with its sister republics, Mexican relations with the United States, the involvement of Britain and other European powers with the Spanish American republics, the status of Cuba, and internal politics within the former metropolitan power itself. Spain’s anticipated second attempt to recapture its wayward colonial child was the military corollary of its refusal to grant diplomatic recognition, critical issues that occupied much of Alamán’s time in the first months of his ministry. Scarcely had the boot prints of the defeated Spanish soldiers been swept away by the Gulf tides (9 November—11 December 1829) than rumors of a second invasion began to circulate on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the

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earliest concrete acknowledgments of this possibility was a letter to the minister of relations from Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza (1789–1851), the Mexican envoy in London, published in the government’s Registro oficial on 17 March 1830. Gorostiza insisted the rumor was well-founded, “knowing as I know the stubbornness and presumptuous ignorance of that government [i.e., Spain].” Fernando VII’s ministers, “in order to calm the harsh indignation of Fernando, have endeavored to make him believe that the disaster of Tampico was produced solely by Barradas’s imbecility” and that given smarter tactics the Spanish invasion force could have prevailed. The Mexican envoy revealed that José de la Cruz, the tough old field marshal who had been the scourge of insurgents in western Mexico, was being considered for command of a modest force whose objective would be the capture of a small port city as a military foothold, mostly for the public relations value of impressing other nations. Gorostiza added that in the end the organization of the expedition was likely to be “á la Española”—that is, too little, too late—and would consist of three to four thousand men, about the number Barradas had brought, rather than the rumored twenty to twenty-five thousand.84 How accurate was this information, and, if dependable, what was to be done? Alamán’s instruction to Gorostiza in response to the envoy’s report knitted together a number of strategic concerns involving the potential Spanish invasion project. In view of all that had recently occurred, Vice President Bustamante had decided that the moment was propitious for seeking recognition of Mexican independence from the cabinet in Madrid. Gorostiza was to sound out the British government on its willingness to act as intermediary in talks with Spain over the recognition of Mexico, offering as quid pro quo a guarantee that Mexico would not launch an attack against Cuba, a move the British construed as being against their interests. In fact, Alamán was incubating a plan to attack Cuba, writing to Manuel Gorostiza in early June 1830: “For an attack of this kind a navy is not needed; neither [is it required] to go to the most [heavily] fortified and [easily] defended parts of the island. The Mexican cause will begin to triumph in Cuba if only a few thousand of our soldiers set foot on some point of the coast [the Bay of Pigs, perhaps?]. To this will be added the sympathies [in favor of liberation from Spain] that already exist on the island. . . . But [Mexico] cannot answer for the results of the conflagration that will probably engulf the Island, which without need of external provocations harbors in its bosom combustible materials capable of destroying it [entirely].”85 Although due to the disorderly state of the previous administration, Guerrero’s government, Mexico might not have the resources for a

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full-scale invasion of the island, it could certainly “keep Cuba in a state of disquiet [inquietud].” Approved by Vice President Bustamante and carried out by Lucas Alamán, the Mexican government’s course of diplomatic action was to offer reassurances to both Great Britain and the US that no such expedition was contemplated. The British feared an invasion of the island might set off a massive slave uprising like that on the French sugar island of St. Domingue three decades earlier. The British foreign ministry saw the geopolitical threat of a US takeover of the island in the chaos following a Mexican invasion. Political leaders in the US were deeply concerned that a slave rebellion in Cuba might infect the cotton South. During these years, after the Treaty of Ghent fifteen years earlier had settled territorial issues between the US and Great Britain, the cotton plantation system became ever more firmly rooted in the Deep South, cotton exports to British textile mills boomed, and the slave population grew concomitantly. Any rebellious contagion spreading from Cuba to the US South, therefore, would have disrupted the British textile industry, providing yet another motive for British policy to aim at discouraging any disturbance in Cuba. In essence the competition between the British and Americans for influence over Mexico, which shaped even the composition of the Mexican government, extended to the quadrangular relationship among the two AngloSaxon powers, Mexico, and the Spanish sugar colony, with the US and Great Britain struggling to keep each other at bay regarding Cuba. These worries on the part of the US turned out to have some foundation in fact. Following Alamán’s detailed instruction to Gorostiza, the question of Cuba occasioned an interview between minister Alamán and the newly accredited American envoy, Anthony Butler. Butler’s report to Martin Van Buren of the 19 February 1830 meeting also shows Alamán at work, walking the knife edge of fostering decent relations with Mexico’s northern neighbor while maintaining the national honor and territorial integrity. Butler raised the mission rumored to have been launched in 1829 by Colonel José Ignacio Basadre on behalf of the Guerrero government. Basadre was to go to Haiti, raise an army of blacks, and invade Cuba.86 Butler had sought Alamán’s assurance that the Mexican administration had already disavowed this policy. Alamán pleaded innocence of the mission, which he believed must have been initiated by verbal order. He agreed with Butler as to the inadvisability of the venture and recalled Basadre to Mexico immediately.87 The threat of a second Spanish invasion of Mexico fizzled with the fortuitous death of King Ferdinand VII on 29 September 1833 and the accession to

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the throne of the three-year-old Infanta Isabella under the regency of her mother, Queen María Cristina. The ensuing dynastic dispute between the queen-regent and Ferdinand’s younger brother Carlos plunged Spain into the Carlist Wars, which racked the country intermittently for the next several decades. The first of these enormously disruptive civil conflicts began in 1833, thus immediately blotting out any possibility of Spain’s recovering its lost New World colonies. Still, the threat was perceived to be real, and, even had it not been, it would have occasioned some diplomatic leverage for Mexico in its dealings with Great Britain and the United States. When the Mexican diplomats were corresponding among themselves they tended to scoff at the danger from Spain, viewing the former colonial power as too preoccupied with its own internal problems to consider an expedition to Mexico seriously. On the other hand, when they were dealing with the British or the Americans they conveyed the impression that such an action was quite plausible and even imminent. Spain finally recognized the independence of Mexico in the Santa María-Calatrava Treaty, signed at Madrid on 28 December 1836. As matters stood in 1830, therefore, efforts under the helmsmanship of Lucas Alamán sought to engage Great Britain as a possible mediator of Spanish recognition of Mexican independence. There began a period of intense correspondence, chiefly between Alamán and Gorostiza, regarding the threatened Spanish invasion and Britain’s possible role in dissuading King Ferdinand VII from undertaking such a mad venture. Gorostiza was lobbying figures in the British cabinet and Parliament, with some success—among them Sir Robert Peel, Lord Aberdeen, foreign secretary under the Duke of Wellington, and Sir Robert Wilson—attempting to shift public opinion toward a more pro-Mexican stance.88 The foreign secretary assured Gorostiza that the British ministry intended to turn its full attention to the matter of Spain and Mexico. He asserted that the stubborn refusal to acknowledge the realities of the situation arose from the humiliation that such a bending to facts would imply for Spanish national pride, “the principal ingredient of the Spanish character.” Gorostiza inquired whether British interests were better served by the commercial development of the independent American republics or by allowing Spain to invade its former colony. One part of the Mexican envoy’s tactical plan to encourage a debate in Parliament regarding the British role in mediating a peace agreement between Spain and its former colonies was to place pro–Spanish American newspaper articles in the Times of London; another part was to publish a twenty-two-page pamphlet of anonymous authorship by “An Englishman”: “Cuba; or the Policy of England, Mexico, and

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Spain with regard to that island; by An Englishman” (London, 1830). When the parliamentary debate over what policy to pursue finally took place between Huskisson, of the liberal wing of the Tories, and Peel, for the Conservative government, Peel was finally maneuvered into a position of fully taking on the Mexico–Spain–Cuba question. Alamán’s highly inflammatory language about Spain at this time—including allusions to the madness of the invasion plan and the ravings of the Madrid cabinet—lead one to consider for a moment what such statements might indicate about his thinking with respect to the restoration of Spanish rule over Mexico. His presumed Bourbon legitimism constitutes one of the chief supports for the notion that he was a political reactionary. I discount the possibility—for which on my reading there is no evidence—that when he came to power for the second time, in 1830, he favored restoration of the monarchy through diplomatic rather than violent means. There was quite some distance between the aggressive, monarchist legitimism that led men like José María Gutiérrez Estrada to invite a Habsburg prince to assume the imperial crown of Mexico and a sort of cultural legitimism such as that espoused by Lucas Alamán for much of his life. There is no doubt Alamán’s monarchist impulse grew stronger as he aged and eventually led him into the misstep of the pro-monarchist plotting with the Spanish ambassador Salvador Bermúdez de Castro even as Mexico approached national dissolution during the Mexican–American War. But for most of his life Alamán’s pining after the age of Spanish colonial domination in Mexico, expressed eloquently in the first volume of his Historia de Méjico, was of a sociological kind—a cultural nostalgia rather than a reactionary politics, although it was a reaction of sorts. It has proven all too easy to confound his political ruthlessness, centralizing drive, and aristocratic, antidemocratic leanings with dyed-in-the-wool monarchism, but certainly in 1830–32 these did not add up to a dedication to Bourbon restoration or to a desire to place a foreign prince on a Mexican throne. By May 1830 British government policy had swung to embrace the role of mediator between Spain and Mexico, a shift over which English politicians had debated for the first months of 1830. During the summer, the Registro oficial published extremely detailed coverage of parliamentary debates, including an almost literal version of pro-Mexico speeches by Huskisson, Sir Thomas Baring, and other MPs, punctuated by members’ shouts of “Hear! Hear!” (rendered in translation as “gritos de oid, oid”). The sooner Great Britain helped Mexico consolidate its independence, Baring asserted, the sooner a barrier would be established “against the ambitious and dangerous usurpations of

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those [powers] that [are struggling] for preeminence in the hemisphere” (i.e., the US). The British ministry should make it clear to Spain that it would never recover its colonies, as Spain had made clear to the British as early as 1780 or so that Britain would never recover the North American colonies and that if necessary Britain might intervene militarily to block any such Spanish attempt.89 The issues of a second invasion and recognition of Mexican independence by Spain loomed large during the early months of Lucas Alamán’s second ministry. But for Alamán the rest of the North Atlantic world did not simply drop off beyond the horizon, even if events in it necessarily took third place behind relations with Spain and, increasingly, the US. British and American influence in Mexico for the moment represented no immediate physical threat to the country’s integrity. Relations with the restored Bourbon regime, and then with the Orleanist monarchy in France, were important but did not rise to the level of a strategic challenge, much less a military threat, until the Pastry War (a brief armed conflict with France in Mexican waters) of 1838–39. Many parts of Europe were in violent political ferment or upheaval in the years of Alamán’s second ministry, however, a period of crisis in the Old World not to be equaled until the revolutions of 1848 erupted. In 1830 the Bourbons were pushed off the throne of France, to be replaced by the July Monarchy, despite (or in part because of) King Charles X’s imperialist distraction in launching an invasion of Algeria. In the fall of 1830 the Belgian revolution against Dutch rule broke out, resulting by the end of the decade in Belgium’s independence. The German principalities of Brunswick, Saxony, and Hesse-Kassel saw popular uprisings and the granting of new constitutions by their monarchs. In Britain the machinery of the constitutional monarchy smoothed the peaceful succession from George IV to William IV in June 1830, but that year was marked by the Captain Swing riots in rural England, followed by a very turbulent period culminating in the Great Reform of 1832. Around 1830 the Russian Empire found itself battling on at least two fronts: another in the seemingly endless series of wars between the Russian and Ottoman Empires raged between 1828 and 1829, while the November Uprising of 1830 saw the Poles revolt—unsuccessfully, as so often in the sad history of Poland—against their Russian overlords. The Ottomans, meanwhile, had other worries, chief among them the Greek war of national liberation against Ottoman rule, which occupied the decade 1821–32 and produced Greek independence. The dynastic wars in Portugal disputed the throne between two House of Bragança claimants, while Spain in the years after the publication of Ferdinand VII’s

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Pragmatic Sanction in 1830 was shaken by the War of the Agraviados and the liberal Torrijos rebellion (1831), to be followed after a short time by the advent of the Carlist Wars. Mexico’s interests might not have been affected immediately by the Greeks gaining their independence from the Ottoman Empire, or the Belgians theirs from the Dutch, or even whether a Bourbon or an Orlean sat on the French throne. But for republican Mexico to take its place among the concert of North Atlantic nations it needed to be aware of what was happening in the rest of the world. For the country to exist in diplomatic and informational isolation, in other words, was to be unmodern; so for modernizers like Alamán, living in a more capacious informational universe was an essential feature of being modern. A second motive for the sustained interest of the foreign ministry in European events involved the questions of diplomatic recognition of Mexican independence, and how the likelihood and timing of this were impinged upon by domestic politics in the European monarchies. France, for example, extended recognition to Mexico only in September 1830, after Louis-Philippe had ascended to the throne, since the Bourbon Charles X was not inclined to recognize as independent the wayward colony of his Bourbon cousin Ferdinand VII. A third reason for the Mexicans to follow diplomatic, military, and political developments across the Atlantic was the issue of potential trade and capital investment from abroad. So Alamán kept up with events in Europe especially, through diplomatic dispatches from Mexican agents abroad, newspapers, and private correspondence from Palermo, London, Paris, and other capitals. But the most critical relationship of Mexico at this time lay to the north. What was to be done about Texas?

13 • Texas

The Problem of Texas The problem of Texas pursued Lucas Alamán for his entire official life. The status of Texas and the lands abutting it, stretching along New Spain’s northern tier from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean—let us call the region Greater Texas—was a major diplomatic irritant during the first two of Alamán’s three periods as chief government minister (1823–25, 1830–32), and by the third (1853) the problem was largely resolved, if unhappily for Mexico. It threw its long shadow over Mexican public life as Texas proper broke away to form an autonomous republic in 1836, then joined the American union as a slave state at the end of 1845. This event precipitated the Mexican–American War, whose first engagements were fought on Texas soil, at least President James K. Polk so claimed. The effort to retain the territory spawned exploratory and surveying expeditions, national bankruptcies, domestic political intrigues, and military defeat for Mexico, in much of which convulsion Alamán was involved as an actor or to which he was a highly interested witness. The violent excision of over half the national territory—if one includes Texas, already a state in the American union—as ratified in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) gave rise to domestic political instability but also to a national self-examination, especially by liberals, that would eventually contribute to the blossoming of the Reforma in the 1850s.1 All these factors together prompted Alamán’s oft-quoted gloomy reflection toward the end of his life that in Mexico there were no Mexicans and that the country was essentially a failed state, if not physically, then morally and affectively. To reduce Lucas Alamán’s foreign policy concerns during his 1830—832 stint in the government to problems with the US would be ridiculous, however; and to reduce 410

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the problems with the US to a tussle over control of Greater Texas a great oversimplification. Other points of tension between the two nations included contraband entering Mexico from the US, the counter-balancing of American with British influence in foreign relations and domestic Mexican politics, economic relations—capital investment and technology imports from the US, the opening of the Santa Fe Trail to American commerce, etc.), the Indian question in the Mexican north, and the power dynamics between the United States and the Spanish American republics in the context of the Monroe Doctrine. Mexican control over Greater Texas had always been tenuous at best. The north of New Spain was too far from the centers of population, power, and wealth and on the whole offered too little in the way of returns to warrant the massive investment in men and materiel required to retain it within the Mexican orbit, especially as fiscal resources repeatedly slipped near or into the red after independence. This situation was emphatically not that of the United States, whose population was growing and hungry for land and whose slavebased Southern economy was still vigorous and seeking growing room. The ideology of continental expansion was already becoming an article of faith among Americans, even though the term “manifest destiny” was not coined for another fifteen years. By reducing the friction of distance, the advent of the railroad might perhaps have redressed this asymmetry more in favor of Mexico, but it came many decades too late to counteract the gravitational pull exerted by the American economy. There were also questions of personality involved in Mexico–US relations, especially where Alamán was concerned. Despite the fact that he and Joel Poinsett overlapped in their official capacities for only a few months, the two men came to mistrust and dislike each other intensely. Alamán regarded Poinsett as a self-righteous, politically wrongheaded metiche (busybody), while Poinsett saw Alamán as a rigid, sinister— probably Metternichean—reactionary in thrall to British interests. Although there was some truth in both characterizations, from the perspective of nearly two centuries the balance of the argument surely favors Alamán’s conception of Poinsett. On the other hand, despite the great differences in their personalities, Alamán’s relations with Poinsett’s successor, Anthony Butler, were much better and might even be called friendly. The two men’s amity played some role in Butler’s being able to complete the treaty of friendship and commerce between the two countries at the end of 1831. That Butler was tasked by President Andrew Jackson with negotiating the purchase of Texas was no secret to anyone, least of all Lucas Alamán, and was met with the same stony resistance as when Poinsett had pressed it.

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In January 1830 Alamán’s Registro oficial quoted extensively from President Jackson’s first annual address to the US Congress, in which the president warned Spain that the newly independent Spanish American states were not to be meddled with. Jackson went on to vindicate the talents and zeal of Poinsett, insisting that the refusal of the Mexican government to ratify the already negotiated treaty of friendship, navigation, and commerce was attributable to the ill feeling toward Poinsett of “a part of the people of Mexico.” A new US diplomatic representative had been appointed, equivalent in rank to Mexico’s emissary in Washington. President Jackson added a coda asserting that the recall of Poinsett did not imply that Mexican claims of his meddling in Mexican politics were valid.2 The British took a different view, however. In 1829 the Times of London linked the domestic political turmoil within Mexico, the machinations of the American envoy, and the question of Texas in ways that Jackson was to sidestep in his message to the American congress some weeks later: “Mr. Poinset [sic] has not neglected to muddle things in the [Mexican] capital with an eye toward furthering a certain project of that friendly republic [i.e., the US]. . . . It is a point of moral theology not our business to decide whether a diplomatic agent acts properly in taking advantage of his knowledge [of local politics] to take an active part in inflaming discord within a nascent state with the object of wresting from its miseries a more advantageous agreement to seize an extensive and productive province. . . . The province of Texas should continue being Mexican as it [now] is, and not be swallowed up by any usurping government as [happened to] the Floridas and the entire course of the Mississippi.”3 The article, probably written by Manuel Gorostiza or Francisco Borja Migoni and planted in the great London daily, closed with the overt threat that “nor do we suppose that the king of England would be passive if this cession [of Texas] were to be negotiated.” In these circumstances Anthony Butler arrived in Mexico City, via the Gulf of Mexico and Yucatán, in the late fall of 1829, shortly taking over the American legation in the capital from the departing Joel Poinsett and presenting his credentials as encargado de negocios (chargé d’affaires) of the US. Along the way he met and overcame the usual inconveniences and dangers much remarked by travelers of the period, among them less than comfortable accommodations and the danger of being set upon by bandits.4 Colonel Anthony Butler (1787–1849) was born in South Carolina but made his political career in Kentucky, where he practiced law, owned a plantation, served two terms in the state legislature, ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1820, and during his career went through more than one bankruptcy. He had grown close to An-

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drew Jackson while serving with him against the British in New Orleans in 1812 and came to control some landed interests in Texas (as did Joel Poinsett), so his diplomatic mandate to purchase Texas for the US represented a convergence of his own with American national interests.5 Recalled to Washington in 1836, he was eventually elected to the Third Texas Legislature but left Texas in 1847. Butler died as dramatically as he had lived, attempting to save fellow passengers from a fire on the Mississippi steamboat Anthony Wayne. He was inordinately touchy regarding points of personal honor, even in an era when ritualized male aggression in the form of duels was much in vogue. In later years he fell out with his old chum Jackson, with whom he fought a duel— Jackson himself was no slouch when it came to dueling. Butler also argued with Sam Houston and some other political eminences of the time, building a reputation for being argumentative and irascible, not qualities one would hope for in a diplomat. The former president John Quincy Adams characterized him as a man of loose morals, vain, ill-tempered, and corrupt. José Valadés painted an even less complimentary picture of Butler as a foul-mouthed liar, gambler, drunkard (dipsómano), and speculator in Texas lands.6 The diplomatic historian George Lockhart Rives drew an implicit contrast between Butler and Lucas Alamán, his main point of contact in the Mexican government: “A man more unfit to deal with the punctilious, well-mannered, and sensitive people who controlled the Mexican government, or to attempt the delicate task of restoring confidence in the objects and purposes of the American government, could scarcely have been found.”7 An early twentiethcentury American historian of the Mexican–American War, Justin H. Smith, wrote that Butler’s only qualifications for the post of envoy to Mexico were “an acquaintance with Texas and a strong desire to see the U.S. obtain it.” According to Smith, Butler spoke no Spanish (the record is ambiguous about this), was ignorant of the forms of diplomacy, and was “personally a bully and a swashbuckler,” “shamefully careless,” unprincipled in his methods, and “openly scandalous in his conduct. . . . In brief, he was a national disgrace.” To top this all off, he was a grand master in the Masons.8 In terms of personal style and background he was the very antithesis of Lucas Alamán, and yet, against all odds, the two men developed a cordial relationship. Just days before the triumphant Jalapa revolution brought Anastasio Bustamante to the chief magistrate’s chair—he was still officially vice president and would remain so—and Lucas Alamán to the ministry of internal and foreign relations, Anthony Butler arrived in Mexico City (19 December 1829) bearing instructions from President Andrew Jackson and Secretary of State Martin

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Van Buren to acquire Texas. His own attitude toward Texas he put bluntly in a letter to an unnamed recipient, quite probably Van Buren, from Leona Vicario, Yucatán, en route to the Mexican capital: “It is possible that for some reason or for no reason a transfer [of Texas] to the U. States may be refused by the General Government of Mexico—in this event Texas is the right arm of the Confederation [i.e., Mexico] for a hundred reasons, yet they may lose it by the impolicy of their own conduct or they may continue it in a state of unproductiveness which is the same thing in effect to the Government.”9 The new envoy’s impressions of the condition of the country and of Alamán are vividly conveyed in his correspondence with Washington. He may already have been well versed in Mexican politics before he arrived in the capital, but he was oversanguine in his belief that the unsettled situation offered “the best ground of hope that Mr. Poinsett will attain, with little difficulty, the object so interesting to our government—a retrocession of Texas.”10 The Jalapa revolution was on the cusp of triumph: “Upon my arrival here I found the government in a state of entire disorganization, and just on the eve of a revolution. [Following the actions of December] a new dynasty had usurped and controlled all the functions of government. . . . The persons now in power are considered as devoted to British interests, and hostile as well toward our people as to our government: a hostility doubtless exasperated by the collisions that have taken place between our late minister and some of the leaders of that party, in the course of the past two years.”11 Just after the turn of the year, in a private letter to Van Buren, Butler continued his analysis of the new government in Mexico City (including Alamán at foreign relations and Mier y Terán at war and navy), whose ministers he described as all of the British party and all “our political enemies”: “The Secretary of State is a British agent, and receives a large annual salary from the mining company. This is an appeal to the master passion of a Mexican—his cupidity, and if I gain him or neutralize him, it must be by discovering and addressing myself to some other passion of nearly equal power, and keeping it awake by judicious applications. When I can know him better, I shall task myself to discover where that passion resides. If he is cold and distant, it will be the work of time; but, if I can place myself at ease with him, the labor will not be difficult.”12 Alamán had looked upon the colonization of Texas in the 1820s as potentially of great benefit to Mexico on condition that the numbers of settlers were kept within reasonable limits, the immigrants observed Mexican laws, and they paid their taxes. But by 1830 the population of the territory had doubled in the last half decade, numbering some twenty thousand people, of whom

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about one thousand were black slaves, illegal under Mexican federal and state laws promulgated in the mid-1820s; President Guerrero, himself of mixed race, abolished African slavery in 1829. Other points of severe stress included the efforts of the Mexican government to enforce customs collection on goods entering the zone. This sparked some violent incidents among farmers and merchants who had enjoyed virtually unencumbered commercial privileges ever since the first colonizing contracts were signed with Moses Austin and other entrepreneurs. Plans by the central government to plant colonies of Mexican settlers were to fail utterly, and the Mexican treasury could not sustain the costs of building up a military presence sufficient to control the eastern borders and maintain internal peace. While some of the outbreaks of settler violence in resistance to the Mexican authorities could be suppressed, such as Hayden Edwards’s short-lived Republic of Fredonia in east Texas in 1826–27, they nonetheless alarmed the central government. The general drift was toward an assertive Texan autonomy from the laws of Mexico, if not outright independence. Increasingly vehement and alarming reports about American settlers in the Mexican north cascaded into Mexico City during the 1820s. Portraying the American settlers much like army ants, General Manuel Mier y Terán wrote to the authorities in central Mexico late in 1829: The North Americans have conquered whatever territory adjoins them. In less than half a century, they have become masters of extensive colonies that formerly belonged to Spain and France [e.g., the Floridas and Louisiana], and of even more spacious territories from which have disappeared the former owners, the Indian tribes. . . . The territory against which their machinations are directed, and which has usually remained unsettled, begins to be visited by adventurers and empresarios; some of these take up their residence in the country, pretending that their location has no bearing on the question of their government’s claim or the boundary disputes; shortly, some of these forerunners develop an interest which complicates the political administration of the coveted territory.13 In the autumn of 1830 Mier y Terán wrote that settling anyone in Texas under Mexican government auspices was simply not practical: “It would be so costly and risky to form colonies now along the banks of the Arkansas . . . and Red Rivers beyond the point already occupied . . . that the Mexican nation would consume its resources without any other probable outcome than that of

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discrediting its colonization projects, which would be extremely damaging because it [the nation] urgently needs to make use of this means [to consolidate the national territory]. . . . [In west Texas] there is a great [empty] space not habitable because of the lack of permanent sources of water. . . . With respect to the Department of Texas . . . [much of it] . . . is inaccessible because every day new tribes of barbarous [Indians] come in, arrived from all over the United States.”14 By the middle of the next year Miguel Ramos Arizpe offered an analysis of the way in which commercial and settler penetration in the Mexican northeast had already empowered indigenous tribal groups—Lipan, Comanche, Kiowa, and others—by making arms available to them. The crumbling of the presidio system, which the newly independent Mexican Republic could not sustain financially, created a military vacuum into which the Indians flowed. They attacked settlements in the richest areas of the Mexican northeast and within a period of a few years carried into captivity as many as two thousand Mexican men, women, and children.15 As secretary of state in the John Quincy Adams administration, Henry Clay had overseen the ratification by both countries of the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, which President Adams had negotiated with Spain while secretary of state in the James Monroe government. By this agreement Spain ceded to the US those parts of Spanish Florida not already seized by the avaricious Americans in exchange for the assumption by the US government of up to $5 million worth of claims by American citizens against Spain. The treaty also fixed a border between the US and New Spain preserving Greater Texas under Spanish (and later Mexican) control. But the Mexican ratification had arrived in Washington, DC, after the deadline set for it, and no extension was offered. The treaty was thus not formally ratified by Mexico until 1831, when Anthony Butler was serving as American envoy. The second agreement finalized during Butler’s and Alamán’s tenures was a treaty of commerce originally ratified by the US Congress in 1827 but not by the Mexican Congress until 1831. The ratifications of both treaties were exchanged in Washington in early April 1832, about a month before Lucas Alamán resigned from the ministry. Shortly after John Quincy Adams assumed the presidency in 1825, Joel Poinsett was instructed to pursue the purchase of Texas, but development of this discussion awaited the presidency of Andrew Jackson, pressed on the issue by his crony Anthony Butler. Misguided by Butler’s information about the expedience of acquiring Texas, Jackson instructed Secretary of State Martin Van Buren in August 1829 to order Poinsett to renew the proposal for a change in the boundary already agreed to in the 1819 treaty—but yet to be officially rati-

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fied by Mexico—pushing the line considerably to the west. Poinsett was authorized to offer the Mexican government as much as $5 million for this adjustment. Meanwhile, a newspaper campaign in the US began to beat the drum loudly for the acquisition of all Texas, a proposal pushed by the ardent territorial expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) of Missouri but opposed by forces arrayed against the expansion of slavery.16 Van Buren’s instructions to Poinsett were carried to Mexico City by Butler even as Poinsett was advising Jackson of his pessimism about acquiring Texas short of an armed struggle. As Joel Poinsett was becoming persona non grata in Mexico City, President Jackson left to the envoy’s discretion whether or not to remain at his post. Around this time Andrew Jackson wrote to Butler of the need to purchase Texas to forestall conflict between the two countries that might arise among the restive Texan colonists. By early 1830 Jackson had climbed down temporarily from the purchase project while Poinsett, newly arrived in Washington, was bad-mouthing the Mexican government at every opportunity, and Butler was expressing optimistically that Mexico’s sale of Texas might still be possible. Lucas Alamán now reentered the picture. Installed a month earlier as secretary of interior and exterior relations, he addressed the Mexican Congress on 8 February 1830 regarding the renewed proposal by the Jackson government to purchase all or part of Texas. He suggested that should the US offer be refused—which he fully intended to do—the Americans would seek arbitration by a third party on the pretext that their legitimate claims to the territory had been brushed aside. He went on to cite all the ways in which the Texan colonists had violated the laws and regulations laid down by the Mexican government. His more general description of American doings in Texas makes very clear that what he had regarded five or six years earlier as a movement of potential benefit to Mexico he now saw as an insidious program to wrest from his country a large and valuable piece of the national territory that a vulnerable central state would be hard put to defend: The United States has successively taken control, without attracting public attention, of everything that borders them. Thus we see that in less than fifty years they have come to be owners of extensive settlements belonging to various European powers and of even larger areas [once] possessed by indigenous tribes, achieving these gains not with the noisy apparatus of conquest, but with such silence, such constancy, and such uniformity of means, that they have always had success in [realizing] their wishes.

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They [the Americans] begin by introducing themselves into the territory they covet, upon pretence [sic] of commercial negotiations or of the establishment of colonies, with or without the assent of the government to which it belongs [here he cited the case of Florida]. These colonies grow, multiply, become the predominant part of the population; and as soon as a support is found in this manner, they begin to set up rights which it is impossible to sustain in a serious discussion, and to bring forward ridiculous pretensions, founded upon historical facts which nobody admits. . . . Their machinations in the country they wish to acquire are then brought to light by the visits of explorers, some of whom settle on the soil, alleging that their presence does not affect the question of the right of sovereignty or possession of the land. These pioneers originate, little by little, movements which complicate the political state of the country in dispute, and then follow discontents and dissatisfaction, calculated to fatigue the patience of the legitimate owner, and diminish the usefulness of the administration and exercise of authority. When things have come to this pass, which is precisely the present state of things in Texas, diplomatic intrigue begins. If we examine the present situation in Texas we find that the majority of the population is now [made up] of natives of the United States, [and] that the number of Mexicans living in that area is insignificant. . . . And the moment appears very near [in which they] seize that territory and add it to the United States.17 This is the strongest and most extended statement Alamán ever made regarding Texas, as far as I can determine, either while in the government or out of it. From the perspective of two decades Lucas Alamán was to recognize this struggle over Texas as an enormous policy failure and national disaster. In a remarkably condensed and even muted account of these years in chapter 12, the final section of volume 5 of his Historia de Méjico (1852), he reviewed the state of the Mexican Republic in general. Embedded in that discussion were slightly more than five pages devoted to the debacle of Texas, a noteworthy aspect of which was his unmistakable vilification of Lorenzo de Zavala, dead about fifteen years when Alamán wrote. His decades-long animus toward Zavala, arising from their political positions and a bad interpersonal chemistry, lent his portrayal of the liberal tribune and adoptive Texian (as the Anglo colonists called themselves) a special piquancy. What he had to say about the Texas

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question offers perspective on what the country faced in the early 1830s. After citing the size of the Mexican Republic at its independence—some 216,012 square leagues, or roughly five million square kilometers, Alamán commented on the extensive desert included within these limits, separating to the North the inhabited population of the United-States . . . from the Mexican, which beyond the Rio Grande was reduced to a few isolated establishments, located at long distances [from each other]. The barbaric tribes of Apaches, Comanches, and others less numerous wandered the space in between, alternately attacking the one or other nation, and with whom both [countries] made agreements or treaties lasting no longer than the whim or interest of the savages desired. To keep these subjects [controlled] by more effective means, the Spanish government had formed a line of presidios that extended from one sea to the other, from [the] Californias to the mouth of the Rio Bravo. These [presidios] were true military colonies, in which not only the presidial troops, but all the inhabitants were under the authority of the local [military] captain and [were expected] to take up arms when assaulted by the barbarians. Moses Austin had solicited a concession from the Spanish Cortes to settle three hundred families in the most congenial area of Texas, around the well-irrigated and well-communicated mouth of the Rio Grande. Alamán continued, Although Austin got what he wanted, it was at the time when, [the] independence [of] Mexico achieved, he needed confirmation [of the concession] from the Mexican government. But Moses having died [June 1821], his son Stephen succeeded him in the proposal, which he obtained from Iturbide, and to encourage colonization a set of regulations was formed by the Junta Instituyente. With the federation established, a law of 1824 fixed the rules to be followed by the states in land concessions, leaving to these the power to distribute [lands] according to the particular rules they might form. The concessions multiplied beyond all prudent consideration, and since those who obtained them were foreign adventurers or Mexican speculators who had no means to make them pay, they were being sold to United States citizens, even to the point that a bank was established in New York for the sale of lands in Texas. This was the event, in which D. Lorenzo de Zavala played no small part because of the

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concessions that had been made to him, that called [public] attention to the matter. To avoid the damage [to the country] that might result from this, barely was the administration of General Bustamante established in 1830 when the government, considering this the gravest matter [confronting] the republic, made use of the power reserved to it by the law of colonization and prohibited the settlement, within certain limits, of natives [i.e., American citizens] of the neighboring nation. At the same time General Terán, who had military command of the eastern states, in order to secure the border and contain the colonists already established, formed a line of forts furnished with sufficient garrisons. The sale of lands ceased under these measures, which was one of the reasons for the revolution against the government of Bustamante in 1832, Zavala not dissimulating his bitterness and desire for revenge against those who had closed this road to making him rich. But all these prudent measures disappeared in that revolution, in which General Mejía promoted the uprising of the colonies and forced the surrender of the garrisons established by Terán with such foresight. It is not part of my plan to follow point by point the history of events in Texas, their being so fresh in the memory of all. It is well known that the colonists intended to make themselves independent, [and] Zavala, disloyal [to Mexico] and making common cause with them, died among the enemies of his country. Having arrived at this point, Alamán jumped over one of the most important periods of the country’s tumultuous nineteenth-century history to arrive at the Texas settlers’ rebellion, the defeat of Santa Anna, the American invasion of Mexico, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), all dealt with in one relatively short paragraph. Alamán did go on to offer a page of reflections on the consequences of the territorial loss Mexico suffered in its war with the United States. Just three or four years after this event, the wound to national pride, self-concept, and territorial integrity raw and still bleeding, he wrote, Although the consequences of the cession of such a considerable part of the republic’s surface have not yet become as clear as they will be in the future, since the ceded territories are sparsely inhabited and have been more a burden than an advantage for the government of Mexico, it has quickly become evident what those extensive lands may come to be [if held] in the active and enterprising hands into which they have fallen,

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even more with the discovery of gold placers and deposits of mercury found in them scarcely after they had left Mexican control. Take note also of the difficulty of containing contraband since the dividing line [between the US and Mexico] has moved so much closer to the centers of Mexican population and the desert that separated them has disappeared. But the gravest and most immediate consequence has been the frequency and range of the invasions of the barbarous Indians who, previously contained by the line of frontier presidios, have this year penetrated very near to Zacatecas, devastating the rich livestock haciendas of that State and of Durango, as well as all the other frontier [states]. Alamán here invoked the same fatalism and historical inevitability he saw as shaping Mexican independence. While emphasizing the Nordic genealogy of the North Americans’ invasive spirit, he said nothing of Spain’s invasion and conquest of the Americas. He continued, Nonetheless, it would be unfair [injusto] to attribute these ills to independence. They arise from the growth of population in the United States; [and] from the character of this population, animated by the invading spirit of the peoples of northern Europe from whom they descend, and from the nature of the government of that republic, which claims not to have sufficient power to impede its subjects from invading the territories of neighboring nations, even when completely at peace with them. From the rapid growth of population in those States [i.e., the US] and the closeness of the border to the center of the Mexican Republic, arises [the fact] that the barbarians, who from the nature of their wandering life and practice of hunting need a vast extent of land, pressed from one side by the North American population, which has been turning to farming the lands they [the Indians] inhabit, find themselves forced to throw themselves on the area in which they find less resistance, which is the Mexican frontier. In their destructive rampages they are reaching even to the center of the Republic, from which they had been chased out more than 200 years ago. This very grave problem will have no remedy other than the extermination of the tribes that do not want to submit themselves to a fixed residence and earn their living by means of farming and the raising of livestock, to which they show themselves little disposed. The missionaries who succeeded in reducing to religion and civilization other Indians who already had a thin veneer of social life, or were [even] advanced in it, never managed to make any progress with this type of savage.

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The Spanish government would without doubt have put up longer resistance and better defended the lost territory, being by its nature more energetic [than the American], with a better organized army, because it would have been able to reinforce [its army] with European troops, because it would have had a fleet to protect the coasts, and finally because it would have counted with support, if only in the form of notes and protocols, from the other European powers. All this the Mexicans have lacked. But not even with these resources would [the Mexican government] have been able to impede the effect of a continuous invasion, not by the government of the United States, but [by] all the inhabitants of the frontier along an extension of so many leagues.18 On 6 April 1830 Alamán’s proposed abrogation of the colonization law of 1824 was approved by the Mexican Congress in an omnibus bill dealing with customs and colonization issues. Article 9 prohibited absolutely the entry into Texas of foreigners not already resident there absent a valid visa from a Mexican consular official in the US. The colonists presently established were to be undisturbed in their property, including their slaves, but no slaves were to be allowed into Texas in the future, and no one thenceforth born there could be enslaved. Settled colonists were relieved of taxes on the coastal trade (cabotage) introducing essential items for the settlers through the ports of Matamoros, Tampico, and Veracruz, and import taxes on construction materials and foodstuffs coming through Galveston and Matagorda were suspended for two years. Certain taxes were rescinded, unfulfilled colonization contracts were suspended, and Mier y Terán was sent as a Mexican commissioner to oversee the exact compliance with the law. The legislation of 6 April also granted authority over public lands to the Mexican federal government to establish fortifications and arsenals. Colonization by Mexican families was provided for on generous terms, including land grants, agricultural tools, travel expenses, and maintenance for the first year. Congress allotted five hundred thousand pesos to support the anticipated costs of all this, realized from duties on imported cotton goods, but while these funds were accumulating, the government was authorized to negotiate a loan of up to two hundred thousand pesos at a ruinous 3 percent interest rate.19 Anthony Butler was writing detailed letters to Jackson and Van Buren narrating events in Mexico as he viewed them and conveying his impressions of Mexico and the Mexicans. Butler’s was the uniquely privileged vantage point of an insider in the struggle over Texas and of Alamán at work as foreign minister. The American often emphasized Alamán’s centrality to the government,

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praising his sharp intelligence and abilities as a statesman. He felt that Alamán dominated Vice President Anastasio Bustamante more by the force of his intellect and ideas than by his personality: “If the present administration continue [sic], of which there at present exists little doubt [he wrote in May 1830], the master spirit of that administration—the right arm of the government, is the present Secretary of State, against whose advice and recommendation no successful opposition could be made, and probably but little attempted by the other members of the Cabinet. The acting president [i.e., Bustamante] I know yields implicitly to his guidance, as in all such cases where a superior mind is brought into contact with an inferior one.”20 Moreover, Butler estimated that not just the vice president but the entire Jalapa regime depended on the presence of Lucas Alamán in the cabinet. At the beginning of June 1830, for example, he wrote to the American consul at San Antonio de Béxar, “The political affairs of this country after having been in a very distracted state for several months is [sic] settling down into complete tranquility. This is the result of great vigor, discretion and ability displayed by the present administration, and principally by the Secretary of State who [sic] I consider one of the ablest men in the Republic. I think Mexico may now fairly look forward to better times—to a more tranquil condition, and to a steady advance towards prosperity in her pecuniary and political affairs.”21 A year later, as Alamán and his fellow minister Facio came increasingly under fire for their roles in the Vicente Guerrero affair, the American envoy became more convinced than ever of Lucas Alamán’s indispensability in the government. As the War of the South wound down in the spring and summer of 1831 and petitions by army officers surfaced demanding the dismissal of the two ministers, Butler wrote to Van Buren, Yet, sir, I am by no means convinced that crushing the opposition in the south will give tranquility to this government. On the contrary, the elements of a new contest are even now concocting. Whispers are already abroad that the Secretary of War Facio will be removed, and it is said that the Secretary of State must leave the administration. The expulsion or withdrawal of either of these officers would, in my judgment, be the signal of another revolution. . . . The very fact of such a proposition being possible is a volume upon the character and political condition of the country—the diseased and disorganized state of the body politic. If the Secretary of State should, from any cause, leave the administration, the government cannot exist three months. He directs everything—he supervises all, and I feel confident that without the aid of his talents,

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energy, and unceasing industry, the present administration would long since have dissolved, or been put aside. It will be a powerful combination that can put him down if he chooses to resist, for his influence, his connections, his talents . . . make him a most formidable adversary. But my apprehension is that, if such a plan is seriously in operation, and [he] becomes apprised of it, that he may resign his office from disgust.22 Even after Alamán and his three cabinet colleagues were compelled to resign beginning in May 1832, Butler identified him as the éminence gris during what remained of Vice President Bustamante’s time in office. Whatever opinion Anthony Butler had formed of Alamán as a political actor, he had forged enough of a positive personal relationship with him to aid him and Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán during the months of Alamán’s internal exile in Mexico City, after the fall of the Bustamante government, while he was being pursued by the foes of the ousted regime for his complicity in the death of Vicente Guerrero. This was not necessarily true of Butler’s dealings with other prominent public men of the period, given the reputation he enjoyed for irascibility and even aggressiveness; José María Tornel, for example, with whom he fell into such a hostile exchange the two might well have fought a duel had the argument matured. The mention of funds “to facilitate the Negotiation” over the purchase of Texas in the letter just cited plainly hints at a bribe to someone in a position of power, strongly implying that the person to be bribed was the ex-minister of foreign relations. This was not the first time Lucas Alamán was thought susceptible to bribery. That corruption on the part of public officials was common in the period should come as no surprise and remains a notorious feature of Mexican political life even today. Like successful contraband trade, successful bribery would ipso facto have remained undocumented and therefore hard to detect. Whether Alamán himself accepted bribes seems to me an open question. On the other hand, he was not above either the exercise of power to achieve political ends he thought unattainable through strictly legal means or inventing reasonable sounding justifications for his behavior, thereby applying the rule of law to other men and exempting himself as force majeure imposed the need to act extralegally. Whether this bending of normative practices, or disregard for them, extended to the area of his personal influence peddling is hard to determine. Some evidence indicates that on a few occasions he cut corners in his financial dealings, but my impression is that the florid corruption and self-enrichment of a public figure like Santa Anna was not shared by Lucas Alamán.

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The theme of the irritation Joel Poinsett left behind him is sounded strongly in Anthony Butler’s dispatches to Washington. Poinsett’s time in Mexico and the lingering effects of his presence loom large in the political landscape, animating much of the virulent party conflict that racked the early republican years. As a political actor in his own right and a catalyst in struggles larger than himself, Poinsett’s unpopularity had arisen not only from his bumptious personality and meddlesome character. It also originated in his persistence in pushing the issue of Texas. Butler hoped to smooth over these irritants while still advancing the US agenda of territorial acquisition. So deeply embedded in the politics of the time had the conflictual Alamán–Poinsett relationship become that long after Poinsett had left the scene it colored many aspects of Butler’s time in Mexico, including the issue of Texas, the unfinished work of the treaty of commerce between the two nations, and the general tenor of Mexico–US relations. Joel Poinsett was not one to tolerate passively the public opprobrium of Alamán or anyone else without defending himself. Negative references to him in the official government gazette, firmly under Alamán’s control, provoked the South Carolinian’s ire within a relatively short time of his departure from Mexico. Responding hotly to the accusation that he had spoken ill of Mexico and its government at every opportunity, he wrote to Butler from New York in the summer of 1830, “I see with pain that Alamán in his Registro Oficial repeats these calumnies. Really, if I had not the sweetest disposition in the world I should verify their opinion, and then they would find that my revenge was not to be satisfied. . . . I wish you would say from me to Mr. Alamán that I have both spoken and written in favor of Mexico ever since my return without distinction of persons or parties, but that it is time these attacks upon me should cease. They are unworthy of the Mexican government.”23 Attacks on Poinsett continued for as long as Butler was in contact with Alamán. As late as the waning months of 1833, when the Bustamante regime had been gone for some fifteen months and its erstwhile chief minister was in hiding, Joel Poinsett was still justifying himself over his time in Mexico, as he did in a letter to Butler thanking him for sending an account of affairs in the country (“indeed deplorable”) and praising Valentín Gómez Farías, occupying the presidential chair on an interim basis during one of Santa Anna’s many absences, as a “stern republican and a man of excellent qualities”: “I presume he [Gómez Farías] and his friends are by this time convinced that I was innocent of the charge of [illegible] throwing things into confusion to benefit this country. They must all now see that their frequent revolutions grew out of the institutions they have adopted being at variance with the character of the people.

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I hope however that they will persevere until they adapt the people to the institutions.”24 Joel Poinsett’s strong connection while in Mexico to a “liberal” party in the political struggles of the mid-1820s set him in sharp opposition to a group and political tendency he labeled the British or aristocratic—and certainly in their eyes anti-US, antidemocratic, and even pro-monarchical—party, of which Alamán was the most visible leader whether in or out of government. Summarizing the situation in Mexico after about two months at his post, Anthony Butler wrote to Van Buren early in 1830, “The party at present in power unite in their support most of the wealthy, and the whole of the aristocratic party of the community. But the others have the great body of the people . . . [who shared Guerrero’s political principles and if united could] crush at one blow the whole fabric erected by the aristocracy and a foreign influence, in spite of the bayonets by which they are surrounded.” The generally widespread ill feeling toward the US was fed by the “great odium attached to Mr. Poinsett, and the endeavor to transfer that odium to the people and government he represented.”25 And a month later: “Nothing worthy of formal dispatch . . . since my last, except a conversation held at 12 o’clock today with Mr. Alamán, the Secretary of State. . . . They were designated to me by Mr. Poinsett as the British party—it is certain that towards him they entertained sentiments of inextinguishable dislike. . . . My repeated conversations with Mr. Alamán has [sic] occasioned him so far to commit himself on many very important points as to insure in my apprehension the best results to our country if he remains at the head of the State department.”26 While the so-called British party retained control of the central government, mere association with Joel Poinsett could be damning for public men, and for Poinsett his linkage with opponents of the regime added to the opprobrium heaped on his name. Lucas Alamán was not about to forego any major opportunity to hang the albatross of Poinsett around the necks of the regime’s enemies, nor was the emissary Butler likely to let accounts of such goings-on slip the weave of his dispatches to Washington. A very serious example of this was the alleged plot to assassinate Vice President Bustamante and members of the cabinet, an intrigue uncovered and aborted in late March 1830. Among the alleged conspirators were some prominent opponents of the regime, including the congressional deputies Anastasio Zerecero (1799–1875) and Isidro Rafael Gondra (1788–1861), both of whose insurgent careers, liberal-federalist political sympathies, and Yorquino associations made them perfect targets for the Alamán policies aimed at suppressing opposition to the centralist govern-

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ment. A vice presidential aide had informed the authorities of the attempt to suborn him, the conspirators were led on in an entrapment operation, and arrests followed. Quite summarily sentenced to be shot, one of the conspirators made a confession implicating Deputy Gondra, formerly an intimate of Poinsett’s and Lorenzo de Zavala’s. Among some of the papers captured with Gondra were letters from Poinsett. Butler thought that a great fuss was likely to be made of this, implicating Joel Poinsett’s relationship with the Vicente Guerrero party. The ripples from the assassination conspiracy and its thin linkage to Joel Poinsett did not end here. A few days before Butler wrote to Van Buren, he addressed himself to Alamán in a note sharp in tone but courteous in form concerning an article that had appeared just three days before (26 June) in the Registro oficial. The anonymous article obviously expanded the association of Poinsett to the entire American community living in Mexico through his letters with the alleged conspirators: Many [Americans living in Mexico] have waited on me today complaining of the unmerited reproach cast on the character of our countrymen by that publication. [It is my hope] that the rest of the American citizens may be relieved from the foul slander which a charge so general and comprehensive is calculated to fix on their names, character, and country. . . . [F]or the benefit of both nations, it is time that the jealousy felt and suspicions indulged by some in Mexico against the people of No. America and its government be fully corrected and that the people of the Mexican Republic should be taught to believe that in these jealousies and suspicions the present supreme government of the United Mexican States takes no part and allows to them no credence. Alamán responded quickly (in English) that the corrective article Butler suggested, a sort of retraction, would appear in the Registro oficial the next day. That the minister responded so briskly and almost apologetically throws into doubt his authorship of the article.27 By the end of 1830 Butler was sounding much the same note he had all year, claiming that although things in Mexico were still generally a mess, he had at least put to rest some of the ill feeling associated with Joel Poinsett; he was obviously kidding himself.28 The pressing question of Texas was addressed obliquely in the negotiations between Butler and the Mexican commissioners, Alamán and the treasury minister Rafael Mangino, regarding the long-pending treaty of commerce, navigation, and friendship. The minister’s consistent refusal to consider

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Mexican relinquishment of Texas comes through clearly in all his dealings with the new American envoy and underlay his diplomatic delaying tactics to keep the Americans at bay. It may be that his tactical move was intended to forestall military action by the United States by making Texas a nettle the Americans would hesitate to grasp, in the hope that by strangling or abating the influx of migrants the Texian population would eventually become Mexicanized. Near the close of 1830, however, Mier y Terán addressed a discouraging report to Alamán regarding defensive measures along the northern frontier.29 Although Butler was explicitly instructed in April 1830 by Secretary of State Van Buren to desist for the moment in his attempts to negotiate the purchase of Texas—“now is not the time”—he nonetheless kept pressing the question in his conversations with the Mexican minister while trying to convince his bosses in Washington that he was making some progress in the mission. He claimed to have established a personal rapport and relationship of mutual trust with Alamán.30 Van Buren’s order for a tactical retreat in the Texas matter was based on a verbal report by Poinsett feeding the American secretary of state’s fear that pursuing the course of acquisition could very well lead to war with Mexico. Unlikely though a Mexican victory in such an armed conflict was, Van Buren believed that a Mexican alliance with a European power might jeopardize the peace and prosperity of the US by embroiling it in a wider conflict. Butler countered with the assertion that the negotiation could be consummated if the offer for Texas was raised to $7million, a suggestion rejected by Jackson’s government. Meanwhile, Manuel Mier y Terán was telling his friend Alamán that the Americanization of Texas was increasing from moment to moment.31 In the face of resistance to the purchase project by both American and Mexican officials, Butler continued his optimistic reporting to both Van Buren and Jackson in the hope that positive prospects for negotiations would keep him in his job.32 Whatever the self-interested motives of Anthony Butler in shading his reports to Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson, his initial optimism ebbed and his mood soured over time. That Lucas Alamán ever seriously contemplated the cession of any part of that vast province is implausible, so we are left to conclude that he was playing the American, and that Butler may have been deluding himself. Butler got hold of Alamán’s February 1830 proposals to congress upon which the 6 April measure reforming the colonization law was based, along with provisions specifically aimed at keeping Texas firmly within the Mexican orbit. These he forwarded to Van Buren, commenting that had the proposed measures been applied integrally there would have been an im-

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mediate rebellion by the Texas colonists. Although some slight modifications were made to the interior minister’s proposals, the 6 April law as eventually adopted was severe enough, in fact, to provoke protests from the Anglo settlers in Texas. Anthony Butler thought he had begun to convince Alamán that cession of some territory and the signing of a treaty were both practicable and desirable.33 And about a month later Butler wrote to his friend Jackson concerning the prospects for completing a treaty of limits, including the cession of all or part of Texas as well as the treaty of commerce: As yet, nothing more than conversations have passed between the Secretary of State and myself but they have been so frequent, so full and explicit, and his observations as pregnant of good will towards the United States, with professions of the strongest desire to advance the interests, and accommodate the wishes of our government, and to strengthen by all [proper] means, the relations of amity between Mexico and the United States, that everything favors the opinion of our settling amicably, and to mutual advantage, all the questions now open between the two governments, provided the executive power [in Mexico] remains in the hands of the men who at this time administer the government. . . . Mr. Alamán assured me that as the prevailing insurrectionary spirit [i.e., Guerrero’s uprising] was quelled, and the factions in arms at different points in the Republic were subdued, he would immediately commence with me the discussion and a [sic] adjustment of [a] commercial treaty as well as a treaty of limits, and that the earliest moment would be seized for doing so.34 It looks as though the American envoy was attempting to convince Van Buren and Jackson to assume a more aggressive stance and to persuade the wily Mexican minister of foreign relations that attempting to hold onto the territory was futile. Prefacing his request for monthly remissions of intelligence from Consul John W. E. Wallace in San Antonio de Béxar, he noted that “rumours of every description or character are daily propagated in Mexico, in regard to the affairs of Texas, and so monstrous are many of them as to forbid belief, whilst all present a mass of such contradiction and are so mingled with absurdities, as to preclude a discrimination between the true, the probable, and the untrue.” And still he persisted in the optimistic tone of his dispatches to Washington. In his letter to Van Buren of May 1830 he wrote that he “should not despair” of inducing Alamán to shift his views in a direction favorable to the US.35 To a reader of the documents nearly two centuries later it looks as

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though Alamán was leading Butler down the garden path, that Butler was misinterpreting what he was hearing or deluding himself about acquiring Texas in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, and that he was dissembling in both directions. After the middle of 1830 the question of the US acquisition of all or part of Texas dwindles almost to nothing in Anthony Butler’s reports of his dealings with Alamán, and the issue of finally concluding the treaty of amity, commerce, and navigation moves to center stage. The other treaty between the two republics, confirming the boundary line set by the Adams-Onís agreement of 1819, had been ratified by both governments but had not arrived in Washington within the specified time limits for exchange and finalization. In the meantime, the American influx had become heavier and the boundaries therefore more of an issue.36 Another thorny problem was that of fugitive slaves who might escape from the American settlements in Texas seeking sanctuary and freedom in Mexico, where slavery had been abolished several years before. There was also the question of customs duties, which extended to all of Mexico’s territory, including Texas. This negotiation was obviously regarded by both parties as a good deal less sensitive than the Texas problem as such, and therefore its completion might represent a concrete diplomatic accomplishment tending to strengthen, or at least smooth, relations between the sister republics rather than exacerbate the disagreements distancing them from one another. The Mexican Congress met on 28 June 1830 to begin reconsidering the ratification of the treaty. After a number of delays originating with Alamán, Butler was writing to Martin Van Buren in a tone of obvious irritation at the many holdups in working with Mangino and Alamán and their passivity: “And Mr. Alaman,” wrote Butler, “requested me to prepare the article [regarding trade along the Santa Fe Trail], alleging his constant engagements as a reason why he could not even provide the slightest aid; and indeed the whole treaty, so far, has been my own work, not a single article having been furnished by the Mexican plenipotentiaries. In this business . . . I think I could very often discover a lurking partiality for British interests whenever they were likely to operate.” Beneath the ebb and flow of other issues dealt with between the minister and the envoy on a daily basis, their discussions of the treaty of amity, commerce, and navigation flowed on as slow as molasses, in Butler’s view. From the American’s perspective the document was concluded as early as the beginning of November 1830, although he acknowledged that on the Mexican side “the movements of these people, always slow, has [sic] been rendered still

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more so by the unsettled state of the country.” Continued fighting in the Guerra del Sur took up a great deal of both Mangino’s and Alamán’s time, understandably, but Butler was not inclined to fault the two ministers for this. Except for slight modifications, however, the text of the treaty did not differ materially from that negotiated by Joel Poinsett in 1828, so he often implied that it was the hollow formality, pettifoggery, and inefficiency of the Mexicans that was holding up the treaty. Questions about the Santa Fe Trail, the status of fugitive slaves, and the Indian peoples along the border between the two countries remained unresolved, he admitted, but could be dealt with in a separate binational convention later on. Although Alamán anticipated no difficulty with congressional ratification, the text of the treaty had still not been submitted to the new congress by February 1831, and adjustments were being made to the document almost daily. As talks dragged on, Butler’s tone in his communications both to Alamán and Washington grew increasingly peevish. When the Mexican minister objected that one of the articles of the treaty differed from an article in the 1825 treaty with Great Britain, Butler really bridled, asserting rather testily that as an independent nation the United States was not to be guided by British interests or practices.37 Delays followed upon delays. Alamán on November 9: “If you please we shall speak on Friday a few minutes in order to see if we can finish our treaty which I wish very much.” On 11 November minister Alamán asked for another postponement, until the following Monday: “I shall devote the whole Sunday to put right the translation. . . . I [pray] you to be persuaded that I am more interested than anybody in the termination of the treaty not only for principles of common utility but, I must confess, because after what has been said and printed about me, it is [a personal necessity] for me to finish well and quick [sic] the treaty.” It is charming to think of Lucas Alamán dragging work home for the weekend and imagining Narcisa rolling her eyes as he let the business of state contaminate yet another day with the family. Busy as he was with ministerial and private matters, however, this was a typical practice of his. In any case, more postponements followed. In November 1830 Alamán wrote, “How true it is that times of turbulence are not good for anything useful to nations: last Sunday and this I had planned [to devote] to the conclusion of our treaty and to have it copied for transmission to congress. On both days there has been something unforeseen that has prevented me from fulfilling my desire. Nonetheless, I hope to have time to finish it this week.”38 By the close of 1830 Butler was “mortified” not to be able to send a copy of the completed treaty to Martin Van Buren. Toward the end of February 1831 the minister was asking the

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envoy to send him a copy of a US treaty with Russia that he might consult on some points.39 Around this time the Guerra del Sur took a definitive turn in favor of the government with the execution on 14 February of General Vicente Guerrero, an event that was to mark the life of the thirty-nine-year-old Lucas Alamán indelibly. For his part, Alamán responded in a remarkably restrained manner to Butler’s further proddings and peevishness about the delays in moving the treaty along: “Permit me to say that I do not think the complaint you made a very just one. . . . But you . . . have been living amongst us [and] have witnessed the critical state of the country, and know that its peculiar circumstances have obliged me to dedicate myself entirely to curb the civil war, [so] that we have not been able to do as much as our good wishes have led us to desire. . . . It is certain that we have agreed on [the treaty’s] bases generally, but this ought not to prevent me from making suggestions and observations on parts of any particular articles. . . . [I]t is necessary to accommodate them to the way of thinking in this country, for the purpose of avoiding difficulties on the part of congress.”40 Somewhat mollified by Alamán’s explanation, Butler’s crystal ball had defogged a bit, even if its clock was off by more than a year, when he wrote further to his boss on Guerrero’s death after a few days: “It was known in this place for two weeks that this unfortunate man was in custody, and various opinions expressed as to the course the government would probably pursue towards him. It seemed to be the general opinion that he would be either imprisoned or banished—whilst some few, who spoke as from authority, said he would be executed; and this latter opinion has been verified. The friends of General Guerrero are open and violent in their denunciations against the government for this murder, as it is called, of one of the fathers of the republic, and predict the expulsion of the present administration from office as an immediate and inevitable consequence.”41 Spring saw the submission of the draft treaty to congress for debate, while discussion of the slave question between the two diplomats continued. Severe illnesses (one supposes of a respiratory nature) on both sides kept them from concluding their business and Alamán from being present at his office to transact business at all for long stretches of time. Texts in translation were being exchanged between the two by mid-October, and by early November the Mexican Senate had approved the entire treaty, even though some details remained to be worked out.42 In his awkward but serviceable English, Alamán queried regarding the fugitive slave issue: “To finish today our slave question as I hope it will be, I beg you to make to me an [sic] statement about this to

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[sic—i.e., these two] points which have been touched yesterday in the deliberation [of the Senate]: The slaves run-away from the United States to the English territories of Canada or to the English islands are delivered to their masters? In the same case are they delivered by the Spanish, the English, the French, the Danes, reciprocally from one island to another in the Antilles? I would wish to be just in state [sic] to answer these questions and you will favorr [sic] me very much with some information about it.”43 At the very end of the month the two men dined together at the American’s invitation, the agenda still the pending treaty. And two weeks later Butler wrote to Edward Livingston, by this time the American secretary of state in the Jackson administration, that the treaty had finally been approved by the Mexican Senate after some modifications—removal of the fugitive slave clause—but only by dint of the envoy’s threat to close up his legation and leave town if action was not taken by a certain day; the approved version was on its way to Washington.44 The treaty of limits confirming the boundary line of 1819 was eventually approved as well, and the ratifications of both treaties were exchanged in Washington on 5 April 1832. About six weeks later Alamán resigned his ministry. The wrapping up by Butler, Alamán, and their respective national legislatures of the two treaties did not begin to resolve the problem of Texas from either national point of view. The diplomatic engagement was at best a holding action gaining three or four years for Mexico, during which time it could do nothing to forestall the creeping American hegemony over Texas, nor within the next fifteen years anything to keep both Texas proper and Greater Texas within Mexico’s orbit. The next treaty of “peace, friendship, limits, and settlement,” as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was officially called, would be signed on 2 February 1848, ratifying the acquisition by the US of a vast territory won through a war that Mexico had sought to hold at bay for nearly three decades through the statesmanship of Lucas Alamán and other secretaries of foreign relations. After 1832 and throughout the war of 1846–48 Alamán watched Greater Texas slip away mostly from the vantage point of a private citizen, or as a public servant within whose sphere of responsibility the problem of Texas did not fall. By the time he returned to power very briefly in the last months of his life the halving of the national territory was irreversible. That this struggle, played out on a huge, shifting landscape, ended unhappily for his country cannot be laid at Lucas Alamán’s feet. It is not giving him excessive credit to say that he did the best he could, or that anyone else in his place might have done the same; Mexico was simply overmatched by its sister republic to the north, and its drive to self-preservation undermatched by

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its resources. With a population twice that of Mexico’s, a burgeoning industrial economy, and a number of other advantages, the US was bent on subduing the North American continent directly and the hemisphere indirectly. In this sense Alamán spent much of his public life trying, if not to hold back, then at least to counteract through statesmanship the tidal force of American dominance.

Alamán, Hispanoamericanist Facing south toward Spanish America, Alamán exerted serious efforts to forge what he hoped would be a strategic alliance with Mexico at the center of a hemisphere-wide defensive union, and eventually an integrated economic zone, excluding the US.45 The ideological inclinations behind this design were rooted in the unabashed Hispanophilia of an aristocratic Creole intellectual who believed that the most civilized and desirable traits of his society—its Catholic religion, its literary and linguistic tradition, much of its institutional framework, and more—had been inherited from Spain. What could be more logical and beneficial to all the Ibero-American polities than a horizontal union, based on a common cultural heritage? The strategic considerations behind this internationalist policy were even more powerful. Even after the defeat of the Barradas expedition the menace of a second Cuba-based invasion persisted and behind it the backing of King Ferdinand VII’s ambitions by Europe’s Holy Alliance. This state of affairs suggested the utility of a defensive alliance among the young republics involving a pledge of mutual support. There was also the presence of the US, whose government had sought to carve out a hemispheric zone of influence with the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, not only isolating the Spanish American republics from Europe but also from each other through separate treaties of amity, commerce, and navigation. An alliance of the Spanish-speaking nations promised a special defensive benefit for Mexico, likely to be the first country washed over by American aggression. Finally, the British, bent first and foremost on economic penetration, were to enjoy great success in this respect during much of the nineteenth century. But British diplomatic maneuvering was always present and armed force waiting in the wings. It surely occurred to foreign minister Alamán that Whitehall’s calculations of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the new Spanish American states might be more cautious in the face of alliances among them. Lucas Alamán’s own initiatives to establish a sustained alliance among the Spanish American republics emerged fully with his ministry of 1830–32. A

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decade earlier the foreign minister had responded quite positively to overtures from the chief of Gran Colombia, Libertador Simón Bolívar, about the steps leading up to the convening of the congress of Panama (1826). The strategic object of this alliance was mutual defense against Spain, its vague model the Amphictyonic League of ancient Greek cities. Under instructions from Bolívar, Miguel Santa María, the Gran Colombian envoy to Mexico, began discussions with Alamán that eventuated in the Treaty of Union, Alliance, and Perpetual Confederation between the two countries, following closely the lines of similar treaties Gran Colombia had forged with Peru and Chile. With some modifications—the suppression of a clause pledging mutual assistance in suppressing internal disturbances within the two nations—the treaty was ratified by the Mexican Congress on 31 December 1823 and by the interim Gran Colombian president Francisco de Paula Santander six months later, to be published in Mexico scarcely a week after Alamán left office in September 1825. In December 1824 Bolívar, as president of Peru, issued the invitation to Gran Colombia, Mexico, the United Provinces of Central America, Chile, and Argentina to meet in Panama, with the possibility left open of inviting other powers. On behalf of Guadalupe Victoria’s government, Alamán’s response was warmly positive. The Mexican minister suggested that since “the cause of independence and liberty is not only that of the republics that were Spanish colonies, but also that of the United States of the North,” his government had taken up the task of inviting the US to send a representative as an observer.46 Alamán envisioned Mexico taking the lead in this initiative, disputing Gran Colombia’s pretension to Spanish American leadership. Although the rhetoric on this issue was framed in polite diplomatic terms, the Mexicans were worried about Bolivarian dominance of the congress and possibly in Spanish American affairs more broadly, and Bolívar about the Mexicans.47 And even though the situation with regard to Texas was rapidly growing sticky, the minister contemplated a useful role, within limits, for the US in the congress of Panama and any concrete arrangements emerging from it. The question of US participation in the congress of Panama produced a complicated history. The Gran Colombian emissary in Washington invited the US to take part in the conference, as did Pablo Obregón, the ill-fated Mexican envoy to Washington who committed suicide there at the age of thirtytwo. President Monroe demanded a formal invitation, and he and his successor, John Quincy Adams, elected in 1824, laid down certain stipulations, chiefly that the Americans be fully informed ahead of time about the matters to be treated at the congress. For his part, Alamán, while he still

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carried the foreign relations portfolio, sought American attendance to warn Spain off in the light of the recently issued Monroe Doctrine. The question of the American role also became entwined with domestic politics in the US when President Adams’s enemies sought to block it. The US Senate approved American participation in March 1826, and although the president appointed two representatives funding to support their travel proved to be a problem, and they did not attend. The congress of Panama convened in Panama City between 22 June and 15 July 1826, but it was only one instance among many in which the volatility of Mexican politics heaved Lucas Alamán or other cabinet ministers out of office in the middle of a major initiative. By the time final arrangements for Mexican involvement were being made he had resigned his ministry (September 1825). President Victoria finally dispatched the two Mexican delegates in April 1826, but their instructions from Alamán’s successor were so vague that their hobbled participation actually evoked a complaint from the Gran Colombian delegate. The conference was attended by delegates from Gran Colombia, Peru, the United Provinces of Central America, and Mexico. There were observers from Britain and the Netherlands as well. Chile, Argentina (for present purposes a convenient anachronism), and the Empire of Brazil did not send representatives, and the isolationist Paraguay was not invited. The agenda embraced the formation of a league of American republics, taking measures of mutual defense, and convoking a hemispheric parliament. The Treaty of Union, League, and Perpetual Confederation that emerged was virtually a dead letter, since only Gran Colombia eventually ratified it. The delegates did agree to meet again the following year in Tacubaya, Mexico, apparently envisioned—at least by the Mexicans, with Simón Bolívar’s somewhat grudging assent—as the permanent seat of the congress unless another venue in Mexico proved more apt. Secretary of State Clay appointed none other than Joel Poinsett as one of the two US delegates to this second reunion. He had the advantage of being on the scene already, had some knowledge of the host country, and would thus have saved the US government a boat fare. Had Alamán still been in the government at this time Poinsett’s appointment would certainly have made him apoplectically angry. If the congress of the American republics was not moldering in the grave of abandoned political projects by the time Lucas Alamán returned to power in January 1830, it was certainly moribund. Little or nothing had been done to advance the plan between 1826 and 1830, but Alamán again took up the project energetically. The same geopolitical considerations applied as in

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1825. But the Spanish invasion of reconquest had only been repulsed months before, a reprise of the expedition was plausible, and the Texas situation was deteriorating rapidly. The only thing that had improved for Mexico was that Britain had recognized its independence, and France was on the verge of doing so (1830). In his annual memoria to the Mexican Congress in February 1830, Alamán linked the internal stability and prosperity of Mexico with its ability to earn respect from other nations, form reliable alliances, and carry out foreign policy: The [foreign relations] that should be considered first and most important are those that unite us with the new republics of our continent: the parity of circumstances, the equality of interests, and the holy cause [we] are defending of sustaining [our] independence and liberty, make us consider ourselves more as a family of brothers, separated only by distance, than as foreign powers. But it is necessary to say with sorrow [that] [f]rom the shores of the Sabine [River—i.e., Texas] to the remote extreme of Cape Horn, the vast American continent offers only a uniform spectacle of instability and turbulence that afflicts humanity and upends all political calculations. [Nonetheless], the distance and difficulty of communication with the sister republics of our continent makes it more and more desirable to advance the system of frequent congresses of their representatives, so that in these [congresses] we may determine the political line uniformly to be pursued.48 In his ministerial memoria of 1831 Alamán raised the issue again, announcing that he was dispatching two representatives to promote the plan, one to Central America, the other to the South American republics. Not included along with invitations to the foreign ministers of Buenos Aires, Peru, Bolivia, Gran Colombia, Chile, and Centro América was any mention of outside observers, and this time the US was not invited. The exclusion of the US was hardly surprising in view of the disputes with Texas and the bad taste that Poinsett had left in the mouths of Alamán and Mexican conservatives. In the 1831 memoria the minister opined that the “reciprocal coolness” between Mexico and the US had now been altered to the “most friendly footing” given the imminent ratification of the treaty of amity and the resolution of boundary conflicts that must inevitably follow. But there was a large gap between what Alamán was saying, his thinking in private about the US, and what he was telling the congress in his memorias: was it hypocrisy or canny statesmanship?

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Present circumstances, Alamán insisted, made a renewal of the project urgent, especially in the face of the “violent agitations [in Europe] that will give reason for immense and incalculable alterations in political life in general.” Whatever idealism Lucas Alamán harbored about the brotherhood of the Spanish American republics, it soon became obvious that his foremost aim was to further the interests of his own country. The Tacubaya meeting was principally an instrument for building Mexican preeminence among the Spanish American states rather than advancing the moral and cultural community of the new nations for idealistic reasons. If we compare the tone of his summons to the other Spanish American republics with the general instructions to the two Mexican envoys to South America, Alamán’s ambitions for Mexico emerge distinctly. Some weeks after the invitation to the other hemispheric foreign ministers, excluding the United States, he issued his general instructions to his representatives, alluding to the disadvantageous conditions imposed on the separate Spanish American republics by their individual negotiations with Britain over treaties of amity, commerce, and navigation, and British recognition of their independence from Spain. And he described the neocolonial relationship lucidly: “And thus it is that all commercial advantage over our new republics has been obtained by powers completely foreign to us, [powers] indifferent to our fate and interested only in extracting pecuniary benefits from us. From this point of view the state of the Americas is today worse than in colonial times, since the trade carried on then was much more our own than at present [when it is] carried on by foreign factors [i.e., traders] who, as soon as they become rich, change countries and leave us deprived of the capital formed from our resources.” Moreover, the Tacubaya conference, he said, should be “entirely a family matter,” excluding the Anglophone powers.49 Issued on the same day as the general instructions, the minister’s secret instructions to the two envoys absolutely eliminated the least doubt about the role he envisioned for Mexico among the Spanish American states and his worries about the US. All factors were in favor of Mexico being the permanent venue for this meeting: its external fame, its power (fuerza), the general idea of its wealth, and so forth: All [this] should contribute to give it a decisive influence over the other new republics and to make [Mexico] the political center of all. But if this were announced as such among them, it could cause jealousy and rivalries very prejudicial to the great object the Vice President proposes, as they already [existed] when General Bolívar promoted the meeting at the

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congress of Panama. It is necessary therefore to distance artfully all apprehension that Mexico pretends to exercise influence or obtain any preeminence over the rest, but at the same time it is necessary to do everything possible for the meeting to take place in this capital. This influence, which is inevitable in the nature of things, will be strengthened and spread and Mexico will come to be in foreign affairs the Metropole of all [Spanish] America. Addressing the theme of the threat from the Americans, he implied that Mexico and the US were locked in a zero-sum struggle for influence in the hemisphere.50 It is impossible to take seriously the idea that the defensive alliance of weak states, most of them in constant internal disarray, produced by the projected international congress could have blocked or even discouraged the Texans from breaking away or the US from admitting the infant Texas Republic as a slave state to the Union. That some sort of unified front might have increased Spanish American leverage against the British is more plausible given that the British strategy toward the new states never embraced an armed threat in any case. But beneath these strictly diplomatic and military concerns lies another motive, one whose presence in Lucas Alamán’s vision of hemispheric relations is betrayed by a single phrase in his secret instructions: Mexico’s dominant influence was “inevitable in the nature of things.” This expression strongly implies that despite the political volatility and even civil war the country had lived through in the first decade of independent national life, he harbored a providentialist view of Mexico’s role in world or at least hemispheric affairs. Rationalist though he was, if he held this view it was almost certainly an amalgam of historical, geopolitical, religious, and other elements, but in its totality represented a generalized ethos within which Mexican cultural expressions and thought functioned. This ideal had grown up during the colonial period, nourished by the tremendous outpouring of treasure from the mines of New Spain, and received a fillip from von Humboldt’s glowing, although not unmixed, account of the country a quarter century earlier. It came to be represented iconically by the Virgin of Guadalupe, the brown advocation of the Virgin Mary often associated with the Latin motto “Non fecit taliter omni nationi”—“He hath not dealt so with any nation” (Psalm 147:20). The fervently held belief among Mexican artists, writers, political men, and segments of the general population that their country was destined for greatness could be found in many other nations in the nineteenth century and was very much an aspect of the romantic nation-state mythos characteristic of the age. In this

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way the ardent nationalism embraced as an article of faith by Mexican liberals and conservatives alike might well be projected onto international affairs as the fulfillment of Mexico’s destiny to lead its Spanish American republican sisters. Fueled by nationalist sensibility and a providential vision of the country’s greatness, something of the same impulse may be seen in Mexico’s assumption of a leading political role among nonaligned nations in the 1960s and 1970s. The project had barely gotten off the ground, however, before it began to implode, the fractiousness of the new states proving an insuperable obstacle. For neither of the two arguably most important participants aside from Mexico, Peru and Gran Colombia, were prospects favorable for attendance at the Tacubaya meeting. The Peruvian Chamber of Deputies had failed after a prolonged debate to approve Peru’s attendance in Tacubaya despite the fact that the invitation was viewed positively by President Agustín Gamarra and approved by the Peruvian Senate. Although on the basis of private conversations it was thought that the outcome of the lower house vote might be reversed in a couple of months, the rumors of a new revolution in Mexico may well have cooled the enthusiasm of those Peruvians who supported the congress idea. Furthermore, a proposed league among Chile, Peru, Ecuador—by this time independent of Gran Colombia—and Bolivia might make the Tacubaya plan redundant. As for Gran Colombia, between the time Lucas Alamán assumed the ministry of internal and external affairs in January 1830 and the time he was forced out in May 1832, Simón Bolívar’s superstate had fragmented into three separate entities: Nueva Granada (Colombia), Venezuela, and Ecuador. The interim foreign affairs minister of Nueva Granada, in a note to Alamán (who had left office some months before) in early December 1832, declared the object of Alamán’s original summons to the meeting to be of great importance but begged off Colombian commitment for the moment owing to “the political transformation of the Republic of Colombia, divided into three states as a consequence of well-known events, [that] does not permit Nueva Granada to resolve this business by itself until the assembly of deputies of all [three countries] determine the bonds that should unite them and the means of sustaining their relations.”51 Thus the wheels came off the proposed Spanish American league before Alamán could get it rolling toward Tacubaya, and the second congress never took place. Of the sixteen men who passed rapidly through the Mexican ministry of external affairs during the rest of the 1830s, none pursued his policy of putting the league of Spanish American states on a permanent footing. They

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had no time or no interest or no vision for this sort of thing, whether as a cultural union and mutual defense structure or as a bulwark against US influence and expansion. Treaties of amity, commerce, and navigation were negotiated individually. Lucas Alamán apparently shed fewer tears over this aborted policy than he did, for example, over his lack of success in making his personal family fortune more robust, since the failure of the inter-American project shows up in his writings virtually not at all. But it seems safe to assume that in his thinking about the larger history of the former Spanish colonies he likely ascribed the collapse of the proposal to the same characteristics, with local variations, on which he pinned the descending arc of Mexican fortunes more specifically: the heedless casting aside of the peninsular heritage, the good with the bad; the highly destructive nature of the independence struggle in many parts of Spanish America; and the anarchy and instability plaguing the new states absent a principle of political legitimacy in the public realm. In this sense the fractiousness and inability to identify common interests among the sister republics replicated on a larger scale one of the primary ills he identified within his own society.

14 • The Banco de Avío

Industrialization as a Developmental Strategy Lucas Alamán enjoyed greater success in domestic policy, particularly in the economic sphere, where the terrain was better known to him, his networks served him better, and he had deep access to whatever scarce state resources he could mobilize. Corralling instability was not an end in itself for him, but a precondition for achieving economic development in Mexico, always his true north. During his first stints in his powerful ministry in the 1823–25 period he had concentrated his efforts in the realm of politics, attempting and achieving little in the economic sector aside from his role in securing sovereign loans from Britain. Five years later his program had swung to a more balanced effort to ensure the stability of the centralizing state while kick-starting the national economy into sustained growth, chiefly through industrialization. The economic and political spheres interacted in numerous ways. A stable regime tended to encourage foreign investment, while the various taxes harvested from economic growth would engender a more predictable stream of fiscal resources, reducing state predation like forced loans, for example, and thus reinforcing regime legitimacy and undergirding state efficacy. The other benefits of sustained economic development, above all of industrialization rather than primary product extraction or commercial agriculture, were many. These embraced the employment of hands, the drawing of Mexico’s indigenous population more deeply into the market economy, the reduction of the country’s dependence on foreign imports and therefore of the outflow of specie, the reduction of contraband, the rise of general living standards, and the creation of individual wealth for those people strategically placed in the economy. Another major benefit would be the further spatial 442

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integration of the country with the thickening of commercial bonds among regions. Economies of scale and the knitting together of a national labor market would reshape Mexico from a country with strong regional and weak class structures into one with weak regional and strong class structures. Finally, industrialization would materialize the mimetic impulse toward modernization of the North Atlantic type. Examples were all around: Lucas Alamán observed them in western Europe during his youthful travels, especially in the “satanic mills” of Britain. And although he had never visited the US he must have been aware of the burgeoning factory life of the Northeast.1 Alamán was to travel further down this road in the 1830s and 1840s, making his own initiatives in the textile industry and going on to direct the government agency charged with fostering economic development. For all these reasons he seems to have envisioned manufacturing as the key to economic development, national prosperity, and modernization after the North Atlantic pattern. There was also a direct link between this strategy and the turn away from silver mining as the major font of national economic prosperity, as he asserted in his 1844 memorandum as chief of the government industry council. Where better to seek an entry point into the industrialization-modernization process than to emulate what English entrepreneurs had done and Americans were doing in the manufacture of textiles, a consumer nondurable product with an enormous potential market and the raw materials close to hand in Mexico in the form of cotton and wool? Lucas Alamán shifted the trajectory of his thinking about the wellsprings of national prosperity during the years 1825–30, turning ever more resolutely by the 1840s away from silver mining and toward industrialization of other kinds. In his ministerial memoria of 1825, citing the backward linkages forged by the mining economy, he wrote, The mines are the source of true wealth of this nation, and everything that speculative [i.e., political] economists have said against this principle has been victoriously refuted by experience. We have seen agriculture, trade, and industry constantly follow the course of the mines, flourishing and declining with them in the same proportion. The reason for the close connection among these economic activities essential to national prosperity is the nature of the majority of our mines—poor in quality but exceedingly abundant in quantity. From this has followed the necessity of utilizing great numbers of workers, machines, and animals in both the extracting and the refining phases. This has given rise to an

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immense demand for goods which is equivalent to a considerable exportation and which in turn promotes all industries and especially agriculture. Thus it is that the encouragement given to mining is given also to the others; the recovery and prosperity of all, and consequently of the nation, is simultaneous.2 Yet in his ministerial memoria of 1830 he suggested why it was more difficult to attract entrepreneurs and capital into manufacturing than into mining or commercial agriculture, making the case for the manufacture of textiles as the wedge for industrialization on a broader front: The purely prohibitive system [of tariffs and exclusions] cannot by itself make factories flourish; other elements are needed, such as an abundant population, capital, and adequate machinery. For the very reason that this kind of industry demands more diligence, men do not devote themselves to it, except when they cannot find a living more easily in others. [Government should encourage] factories that produce articles of widest consumption and which are also the easiest to establish. . . . Inexpensive cotton, linen, and wool textiles needed to clothe the most numerous class of the population are the things which should be promoted by encouraging Mexican and foreign capitalists to establish factories with the necessary machinery so that the goods will be available at a moderate price.3 By the time he wrote his report on the state of Mexican industry in 1844, although he did not spurn silver mining, he nonetheless made clear that continued reliance on it would impoverish the country, placing it in what we would now call a state of economic dependency: “To be rich and happy, the republic must have manufacturing, for without it her agriculture will remain reduced to a state of languor and poverty, and the treasures torn form the bowels of the earth, passing immediately from the mines . . . to the ports from which they are embarked, will only serve to demonstrate with this rapid and unproductive passage, that the wealth does not belong to the peoples to whom nature conceded it . . . but rather to those who know how to utilize our precious metals and increase their value.”4 Alamán’s name has been inextricably associated since 1830 with the establishment of the Banco de Avío, the government development bank set up at his initiative, which functioned for about a decade before its defunding by the government of Santa Anna. Had he achieved only this without exerting so

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much political muscle in the problems of the following two decades, such as the killing of Vicente Guerrero, we would think of him now not as a Machiavellian reactionary but principally as an articulate conservative statesman, the accomplished historian he was, and the avatar of import substitution industrialization in Mexico. The chief question about the bank itself is, Was it a success or a failure in opening the path to industrialization in the textile industry? By what metric does one assess this, and what factors were in play predisposing it to success or failure? While I can approximate an answer to the first question by looking at the history of the institution, Lucas Alamán’s role in it, and the case study represented by the Cocolapan textile enterprise, I can only approach the second obliquely in this book. In his superb economic history of the Banco de Avío, Robert Potash concluded that the institution was overall a success, albeit a qualified one, acknowledging the limited scope of its resources and the social ecology within which it operated during its relatively short life. Potash wrote, The primary goal of the Banco de Avío . . . was the development of the textile industry, and it was precisely in this field that the most notable successes were won. . . . [N]ine of the twelve bank-supported cotton and wool undertakings, including seven projected spinning and weaving factories, became going concerns. . . . More than half the capital distributed by the Banco de Avío was utilized productively, at least to the extent of bringing formerly unknown enterprises into existence. . . . [B]oth the officers of the agency and the entrepreneurs were engaged in introducing into Mexico industrial methods and techniques that were completely new to the country. In such pioneering work, mistakes are as inevitable as they are costly.5 Potash’s evaluation seems fair if one attaches certain qualifications. The major criterion he applies to startups supported by the bank is their survival after the extinction of the bank itself. But while it is true, for example, that the huge Alamán/Legrand textile factory at Orizaba was still operating in 1845, Potash was either unaware that it had fallen into bankruptcy two years earlier and been auctioned off at a heavy discount of its capital value or was a bit coy about acknowledging the failure. Conditions after 1821 were not propitious to the development of large-scale, mechanized textile production in Mexico. Puebla had been an important center of cotton cloth manufacture, followed by Mexico City and Oaxaca. By the eve of the insurgency cotton cloth production in Guadalajara was almost equal

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in value to that of Puebla. Potash estimated that around 1800 as many as sixty thousand people in New Spain may have been employed in textile production. But transport costs were high, the supply of primary inputs, especially cotton, unreliable, capital scarce, and the potential market partially occupied by smallscale, domestic production. By 1821 the industry was in “dire straits,” in Potash’s words, affected as much as the mining sector by the physical destruction wreaked by the prolonged insurgency, capital flight, the disruption of transportation networks, and, in the case of textiles, the collapse of the protection afforded by the Spanish colonial system. With the advent of independence much of the domestic demand for textiles, especially cottons, was filled by foreign imports, chiefly British. Moreover, by the mid-1830s the share of customs income in total fiscal receipts remained steady at around 45 percent and foreign-manufactured cloth by far the largest part of imported goods. Tariff policy thus became entangled with the fate of the textile manufacturing sector through the regulation of imports. In the view of the late Araceli Ibarra, in tariff policy the first half of the 1820s was a period of free trade with some protectionist or exclusionist exceptions, the latter half a period of protectionism with some prohibitions. The general level of the tariff rose from about 25 percent in the early 1820s to 40 percent in the 1830s, with some oscillations. Even though an ad valorum rate of 25 percent raised the price of these goods in Mexico considerably, it was still profitable for British firms to market cottons in Mexico because the initial costs of manufacture and shipping were so low. By 1823 a third of all imports by value through the port of Veracruz consisted of cotton textiles. A complete prohibition of such goods or tariffs that by their severity amounted to the same thing would have cut off an important part of state income. Alamán’s ministerial memoria of the same year made the case for mechanizing textile production through a fairly subtle policy of lifting all prohibitions, imposing tariffs that narrowed the gap between domestically- and foreign-manufactured cloth, and manipulating customs schedules to encourage machinery imports. But this still did not resolve the problem of mobilizing domestic capital for investment in the textile industry. Church capital continued to flow into land-secured mortgages and foreign capital into mining. Through the mid-1820s the basic policy problem was to keep tariffs high enough to discourage certain imports but low enough to discourage smuggling. Legislation finally passed by congress, signed into law by President Vicente Guerrero in May 1829 and due to take effect on 1 January 1830, prohibited the entry of coarse cotton and woolen textiles, absolute exclusions then extended to a variety of other imported items.

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By 1 January 1830 the Jalapa rebellion had brought Vice President Anastasio Bustamante to power, and with him Lucas Alamán, the “alma inspiradora” (moving spirit) of the government, whose ideas about industrial and economic policy included a much more activist role for a centralized state than any statesman since Bourbon times. One clause of the Texas colonization law of 6 April 1830 provided that the exclusionary tariff on coarse cottons be set aside for nine months, with 5 percent of the revenues realized from imports earmarked to encourage the textile industry through strategic loans. Assuming duties of a million pesos annually, this would have yielded fifty thousand to one hundred thousand pesos. Alamán’s proposal vastly expanded this and was adopted as law by congress on 16 October 1830, creating the Banco de Avío para Fomento de la Industria Nacional. The projected capital was to be one million pesos realized from duties on imported cotton goods; the suspension of these goods’ exclusion mandated by the 1829 law was now extended indefinitely, coterminous with the accumulation of the million pesos. Alamán was given wide latitude to select the members of the three-man junta—in addition to himself as chairman—governing the bank, to control the funds, and to establish the operating procedures. He designated as the other members of the junta a great landowner, a brigadier general, and a silk merchant, and as chief administrative officer a former secretary of the extinct Mexico City Consulado (the capital’s merchant guild). From the beginning political liberals and opponents of the minister, such as Lorenzo de Zavala, opposed such an unprecedented government intervention in the economy and leveled sharp criticism at its moving spirit. How widely known the project for the bank was among active or potential entrepreneurs and how positively they judged the prospects of its realization is difficult to tell. Much of the political class certainly knew about it, and Alamán’s tendency to cronyism in business affairs would have expanded the circle of the cognoscenti. Article 16 of the 6 April 1830 colonization law for Texas provided for an industrial promotion fund aimed especially at the cotton textile industry, a sort of Banco de Avío in embryo. This article of the 6 April law was superseded by the Banco de Avío project sent to congress by Alamán in the summer of 1830, in which the share of customs devoted to the new development bank was set at 20 percent rather than the feeble 5 cent stipulated in the April law. So while the general idea for such a development bank was in the air, Alamán was the sponsor whose prestige and forcefulness played a large role in carrying the more elaborate project through the process of congressional approval.

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The spring of 1830 saw Alamán moving into high gear with the textile industrialization project even while the Banco de Avío incubated. By early May Alamán was receiving replies and inquiries from officials in Guanajuato, Michoacán, Puebla, Oaxaca, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Texas, Durango, Zacatecas, Nuevo León, and New Mexico regarding the establishment of textile factories. In his notations for responses to various officials Alamán laid out some of the issues involved in establishing industrial plants. In early April he wrote that “what is required is to convoke [a meeting of] various capitalists who, forming a company in which each share is of a low price like 500 pesos, would gather sufficient capital for the purpose.” In response to an inquiry from the jefe político of Tlaxcala about the minimum capital needed to form a company like that, Alamán wrote, “The capital that will be required cannot be determined with exactitude, since [this] is a new thing [for which we] have no information upon which to base calculations. But without giving a firm figure, there should be enough to give a more or less [sufficient impulse] to the operations of the company. For this it would be enough to accumulate fifteen or twenty thousand pesos.”6

La Compañía Patriótica Mexicana Lucas Alamán wasted no time between April and October of 1830 in mounting a large-scale private-sector industrialization project for Mexico City, to be called the Compañía Patriótica Mexicana para Fomento de la Industria Nacional. A printed “Proyecto que para la organización de la compañía industrial” appeared on 3 May—almost certainly composed principally by the minister— was directed to the congressional committee charged with implementing Article 16 of the 6 April law. The very next day a printed circular published over Alamán’s signature summarized the outcome of a meeting held some days earlier attended by “various capitalists” invited by the vice president to discuss the best means to advance the “development of national industry.” The meeting was intended by Alamán to establish a framework for a large, subscriptionbased textile company that would later be in a position to borrow from the bank. There had been some thirty invitees, all of whom received with their invitations a form on which they could specify the number of shares (acciones) they wanted to buy. Alamán pledged to find an appropriate site for the factory in Texcoco, with sufficient water to power the machinery, and to import machinery and technicians from abroad. The central government would forego repayment of the principal loan for these elements, or interest on the funds

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expended, until the enterprise had begun producing sufficient cloth to sustain the payments. These costs were to be borne out of funds accumulated under the auspices of Article 16 of the 6 April law, although these were as yet nonexistent. Shares were to be taken up at five hundred pesos each; the purchase of half shares was allowed. One-fifth the value of the shares purchased by any individual was payable at purchase, the balance when the factory machinery arrived. Other conditions were specified about resale of the shares, management, and so on. Initially the factory would produce only cotton goods, but its operations might be extended later to embrace woolens and silks. The names of 201 individuals or corporations appeared on a list of those invited to buy acciones or fractions thereof, including the thirty or so people invited to the initial meeting. Judging by the social prominence of the first several dozen people on the list, it looks as though many of the early potential subscribers were Lucas Alamán’s friends or political allies or both, although there were also some people with whom his personal or public relations were more problematic. Whatever the minister’s proclivities toward cronyism, this social proximity was inevitable since good society in Mexico City comprised a relatively small group of people who rubbed shoulders with each other and continually dealt with each other in business and political matters if not on terms of interpersonal intimacy. Members of the formerly ennobled Cortina, Romero de Terreros, Pérez Gálvez, Vivanco, and Fagoaga families figured importantly on the list as well as other socially prominent families such as the Iturbes and Yermos. Present as well were political figures like José María Echave, Ignacio Adalid, Ramón Rayón, José Ignacio Esteva, Melchor Múzquiz, Nicolás Bravo, Carlos María de Bustamante, and even Leona Vicario, independence heroine and the wife of Alamán’s political opponent Andrés Quintana Roo. Representatives of commercial firms both foreign and domestic, among them the English house of Manning and Marshall and the German merchant firms La Compañía Alemana and Guillermo (Wilhelm) Drusina, were invited to participate, as were a number of political and religious corporations, including the State of Mexico, the Cabildo eclesiástico of the Mexico City Cathedral—of which Alamán’s elder half brother Canon Arechederreta was a member—the Congregación de San Felipe Neri, the priors of Santo Domingo and San Agustín monasteries, and the abbesses of the Jesús María, Encarnación, and La Concepción convents. By around mid-May Alamán had managed to scrape together nearly thirty thousand pesos; more acciones were sold later on. Of the early purchasers of shares of five hundred pesos each, among the most prominent were Leona

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Vicario (one share), the Cabildo eclesiástico of the cathedral (two shares), the Manning and Marshall firm, Adalid, and Echave (each a single share). Several respondents expressed regret at not being in a position at that moment to purchase more shares, others promised to buy more acciones when the company was “formalized,” while still others pleaded that the demands of other business obligations had prevented them from buying into the company. Alamán followed up on this initiative almost immediately with a similar circular inviting investment in silk production, an activity in which he had developed an avid interest. Although there is no direct evidence of it, it is difficult to believe that Alamán himself did not purchase some shares in the company, perhaps through a proxy buyer. Had he done so directly the impression of impropriety might have arisen because the company expected to draw funds from the government under the auspices of the 6 April law. On the other hand, he came close to this line, or even stepped over it, in a number of other instances: as a beneficiary through the United Mexican Mining Association of the changes in the law regarding foreign investment in silver mining, in loans taken out from the Banco de Avío later on while he still maintained an official role in its direction, and so forth. A flurry of activity in favor of industrial startups rolled across the map of the Republic in the ensuing months, much of it originating from Lucas Alamán’s ministerial office. The fate of the Compañía Patriótica Mexicana can be followed in some detail in the documents of the Banco de Avío. The enterprise was conceived on a larger scale than almost all other textile factory projects of the era—excepting Estevan de Antuñano’s installations in Puebla and, some years later, Alamán’s own ill-fated venture at Cocolapan—and was more visible because of its location near Mexico City. The problems in getting the company off the ground, both technical and organizational, were not untypical of those faced by entrepreneurs more generally. A fascinating correspondence from the year 1830–31 shows the principals, chief among them Alamán, trying to figure out the financial arrangements, deliberating seemingly without end over a site for the factory, overseeing the purchase of machinery, consulting with engineers about the flow of water needed for the huge waterwheel contemplated to drive the weaving equipment, and so forth. Ultimately a site in Tlalpan was selected; thus the concern’s name mutated from Compañía Patriótica Mexicana to Compañía Industrial Mexicana and eventually to the Tlalpan Company. Among other locations considered, all with large existing buildings that might be repurposed, were the old tobacco factory formerly known as the Hospital de San Juan de Dios, the government’s old gunpowder

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factory at Chapultepec, the Molino del Rey, to the west of Chapultepec, and several other places. An American engineer named Thomas McCormick hired as a consultant made several recommendations regarding the potential site at San Juan de Dios, including the construction of an enormous mill wheel some twenty-seven to thirty-six feet in diameter turned by water coming through a masonry aqueduct nearly a mile in length. The cost of the aqueduct alone was estimated to be about 15,000 pesos, or half the initial subscribed capital. Even American envoy Anthony Butler had something to say about the project in a letter to Lucas Alamán of early July 1830, delicately recommending the Molino del Rey site as potentially the most apt for the factory, chiefly because of the abundant water supply.7 Although the factory would eventually be established in Tlalpan and become a going concern, problems plagued the business from the start. A year after the company’s creation on paper the physical site had still to be determined. Imported machinery initially purchased with funds provided by the 6 April law was piling up on the docks in Veracruz with no clear destination in sight. Further obstacles cropped up when some of the initial pledges for the purchase of shares failed to materialize. As late as 1834 the Tlalpan factory had yet to produce a single thread of cotton yarn despite the fact that it was to receive loans from the bank amounting to a whopping 146,000 pesos, exceeded only by Esteban de Antuñano’s 184,000 pesos. The Tlalpan Company was still operating in 1845, however, some years after the bank had been shut down.

Establishment of the Banco Minister Alamán sent his project for the foundation of the Banco de Avío to congress on 5 June 1830. Many industrial concerns were being established, he noted, and required only a small push to achieve sustainability: “In the cotton industry the formation of companies to develop it has been invited, and one is already organized [the Compañía Mexicana Industrial] in this capital, with others in preparation in the different states and territories.” He continued, The supreme government promises that in a few years the nation will find itself with a prosperous industry of ordinary cottons and woolens, raw and thread silk, ribbon, and other [varieties of textiles] that will free it from depending on foreign [sources], occupying a multitude of workers, and conserving within the Republic considerable sums for investment. It would have been much easier and faster, without a doubt, as

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proposed previously in various projects, not to spin cotton but only weave [into cloth] the yarn that came from abroad, but this would only have been to delude ourselves with the appearance of an industry that we would not have in reality, and to sacrifice the interests of our agriculture, so worthy of attention. Due to this the supreme government has thought it necessary to form this industry from its beginnings and establish not only weaving, [but also] cotton spinning, and the development of cultivation and production [of raw cotton], providing for this last object the best seed available. [Of the obstacles yet to be overcome] the greatest is the lack of sufficient capital to invest in the various sections of industry and of convenient and expert management: without these elements the industry will never get out of its diapers. The most effective means to give industry the impulse it requires are without doubt those we have begun to use, but they will prove to be insufficient if limited to what the said law [of 6 April 1830] provides.8 Once established by the law of 16 October 1830, the Banco de Avío began its work immediately, although in lieu of accumulating customs receipts it needed to borrow funds to get going. The first meeting of the junta directiva took place in minister Lucas Alamán’s office in the Palacio Nacional on 5 November 1830. The positions on the four-man body, with Alamán as president, were officially filled, a secretary selected, and various applicable existing laws read as prologue to the opening of business. Alamán delivered reports on a variety of issues, including the funds already available from the customshouses. The junta established its normal meeting times: in Alamán’s office at eleven o’clock on the first and third Friday of every month. A random sampling of the early meetings from the “Libro de actas” (the minutes, basically) suggests that Alamán was always present. The sessions began with the reading of minutes from the previous meeting and must have been fairly long since they covered much ground. The first few touched on such issues as importing merino sheep from France, the cotton seed sent by General Manuel Mier y Terán from Texas—apparently obtained from Stephen F. Austin—the importation from abroad of cotton spinning and ginning equipment, and a commission to Manuel Eduardo Gorostiza in London to contract a master glassmaker and a master potter to set up manufacturing facilities in Mexico.9 Questionnaires were sent out to the states asking for information about agricultural production (chiefly of cotton), mulberry trees, silkworms, silk production, and other activities regarding the textile industry. Contracts were signed

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with foreigners to lend their expertise and services in fields like silk manufacture. Old treatises and technical manuals were retrieved from the archives, revised, and in some cases reprinted and distributed; scores, even hundreds, of proposals for projects were vetted. Alamán’s last meeting was on 24 April 1832, just prior to his departure from the government in May. At the next meeting, on 1 June, he was replaced by the senior official in charge of the secretariat of relations, José María Ortiz Monasterio. The bank’s policies, its procedures, the investments it made, the loans it extended, the politics surrounding it, and its ultimate fate have been examined by Robert Potash. Yet a discussion is warranted of two of the ways in which Alamán dealt with the institution in the eighteen months of his leadership, both of which bear the stamp of his personality and reveal something of his philosophy as an advocate of economic development for the country. In the first place, Alamán was what we might today call an obsessive personality; that is, he wanted to exercise oversight and final decision-making authority over almost all the activities of the Banco de Avío, down to the details. Whatever his personal proclivities, the wide discretionary powers of the minister of relations over the bank had been baked into its charter. Even the smallest disbursement of funds required his signature. A further example among many of this tendency to micromanage is his prescription of the travel itinerary for several men, two Frenchmen and an American, presumably engineers or factory managers who traveled around Mexico in the fall of 1831 to gather data and assess installations contemplated for the production of textiles in various cities, including Querétaro, Morelia, and Guanajuato. Of the American, Thomas McCormick, Alamán wrote to Bishop Portugal in Morelia that “he comes from the same place as the machinery [i.e., the US], speaks no Spanish, [and] consequently is ignorant of the country and will not be able to organize his operations unless he is aided by your protection.” Alamán’s draft of his instructions to McCormick is extremely detailed, perhaps in part because of the American’s unfamiliarity with Mexico and his lack of Spanish, although he did have with him a Mexican secretary and factotum; but also because that is simply the way the minister liked to do things. For his sojourn in Guanajuato, McCormick carried letters of introduction to the governor of the state, to William Glennie, the English associate of Alamán’s in the United Mexican Mining Association, and to Mariano Sardaneta, scion of a great mining family. To cite only some of the highlights of the minutely detailed instructions, in Querétaro he was to scout locations for a textile factory, specifically one site Alamán had in mind, and to “examine the immediate surroundings of the city

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for wood with which to power a steam pump of sufficient capacity to drive the spinning and weaving machines to be installed.” He was to spend no more than two or three days there, passing on to Guanajuato, San Miguel Allende, Celaya, Salvatierra, Acámbaro, and Morelia according to a specified schedule, pick up fresh horses in Maravatio, and return to Mexico City via Tlalpujagua. To McCormick’s escort and interpreter the instructions from the minister covered in detail the amount and manner in which money was to be spent during the trip, the daily rental of a coach, how much was to be paid for accommodations, who was to be contacted in each city, and so forth.10 In the second place, the entire episode of the bank reveals Alamán’s embrace of crony capitalism as a fundamental tool of development. According to Stephen Haber’s recent definition, crony capitalism utilizes political connections to gain access to factors of production, such as capital or cheap credit, that would normally be priced higher by the market.11 This definition describes quite accurately the case of the Banco de Avío as conceived and operated by Alamán. At the heart of the phenomenon is the element of personal relationships—through kinship, friendship, social reference group, and so forth— among economic and political actors. Closely associated with crony capitalism are practices of social networking, and corruption, that is, the personal enrichment of public officeholders through extralegal exchanges of political favors for material consideration.12 The benefits of such relationships flowed in both directions, were absolutely dependent on reciprocity in some form, and the exchanges might be asymmetrical, just as the power of the parties involved might be. There is no question that many of the investors in the Compañía Patriótica Mexicana organized by Alamán in 1830 were his friends; and it seems likely that in the case of one of those investors, the Mexico City cathedral chapter, the transaction was brokered by Canon Arechederreta. On the other hand, once the Banco de Avío was established, many of the loans it made under Alamán’s presidency were to friends or associates of his and to himself—the ultimate in cronyism. Closely related to the practices of crony capitalism were other forms of extramarket lubricant to grease the wheels of economic development. None of these practices are alien to the culture of modern business and corporate life. But such extramarket ways of gaining information carried much weight in an economy like early republican Mexico’s, in which markets functioned very imperfectly, information was sporadic and unreliable, regulation virtually unknown, and a banking system nonexistent. There was, for example, the use of insider information about the advent of the Banco de Avío, to which I alluded

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above. One instance of such use was the setup of the Compañía Industrial Mexicana. As he was working to shepherd the bank charter through congress, Alamán wrote to the junta de directores of the company to inform them that the law was about to be published. They should therefore make sure, he advised, that the enterprise was definitively organized and the instruments of obligation by the accionistas duly signed and registered so that the company could begin to take advantage of the bank’s funds immediately. Furthermore, the equipment to be imported from the United States should be purchased, a site for the plant selected, and the dimensions of other equipment determined so it could be ordered with as little delay as possible.13 By this time the legislation establishing the bank was hardly a deep secret, but many potential investors or entrepreneurs unconnected to the company or to Arechederreta may not have known about the imminent appearance of the Banco de Avío. The tone of urgency with which Alamán wrote to the directors implies that the information would give the company an advantage, however minimal, over other potential claimants in seeking loans from the bank. Another practice of the minister’s during this period was to rely on men with whom he already had done business and with whom he had personal connections to facilitate investment and the setting up of textile plants outside Mexico City. Among these were William Glennie of the Unida, in Guanajuato; in Celaya, Domingo Lazo de la Vega, with whom he was to maintain a business relationship for many years; and a number of other men. He also did Banco de Avío business off the books, in a manner of speaking, intermingling funds from other enterprises to finance textile operations, as he did at least once with a three-thousandpound purchase of spinning or weaving equipment with funds from the United Mexican Mining Association, presumably to be repaid either directly by the Banco de Avío or via funds realized from the sale of the equipment to a third party.14 How might crony capitalism in relation to the Banco de Avío have shaped the disposition of funds by the bank, and generally why was it such a pervasive cultural practice at the time? I discussed earlier the list of people whom Alamán invited to subscribe to the formation of what became the Tlalpan Company. Many of the socially and politically prominent individuals whom he approached were almost certainly known to him, some of them long-standing friends set in a network of elite individuals, such as Francisco Fagoaga and Domingo Lazo de la Vega. Yet another entrepreneur favored by the bank was Santiago Aldazoro, a Mexico City businessman appointed at the end of 1830 as one of the three members of the original junta directiva of the Banco de

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Avío. It is very probable that his increasingly important role as an entrepreneur rested in part on a prior relationship with Alamán; the Tlalpan Company, of which he became director, eventually received 150,000 pesos in loans from the bank. Another example is Estevan de Antuñano, the Puebla entrepreneur famously associated with early nineteenth-century textile industrialization. Born in Veracruz, he was an exact contemporary of Alamán’s (1792–1847) although he died a bit younger, beginning as a businessman who through an advantageous marriage and much effort rose to join the Puebla elite. Potash describes him as the principal beneficiary of the Banco de Avío, from which he borrowed nearly two hundred thousand pesos over a number of years for investment in his great textile mill complex, La Constancia. In a brief but dense essay on Antuñano’s entrepreneurial activities, Evelyne Sánchez strongly implies that there was a prior personal connection with Alamán.15 Antuñano had established a cotton-spinning factory in Puebla that failed by 1824, and this project may have brought the two men into contact. And there were key points in the history of the dealings between Antuñano and the bank at which favorable decisions went in his direction when they might easily have not. The frequency and tone of the two men’s correspondence, especially during the 1830s and 1840s, when La Constancia was in its heyday, point toward a relationship of friendship and confidence between them that antedates the Banco de Avío.16 Many historians have noted that crony capitalism was rampant and that it was to become even more pervasive during the Porfiriato. The question is not whether it was present in Alamán’s time but why, and here several factors come to mind. In the first place, nepotism—in the same class of relationships as crony capitalism but not the same thing—was already an entrenched way of doing things. The custom of powerful representatives of the crown placing their relatives in office was common from the very beginning of the colonial period. This is one of the reasons the highest royal officials in the New World were legally prohibited from marrying local women, that is, to prevent them from installing their kinsmen in office and forming family connections that would compromise their ability to carry out decisions and policies emanating from the Peninsula. Nepotism endured as a cultural disposition and political habit right up to the end of the colonial period, as the doctoral dissertation of María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés demonstrates in the case of José de Gálvez (1729–87), visitor general of New Spain and later Universal Minister of the Indies.17 Beyond her study of Gálvez in particular, Zepeda Cortés notes that in a time of imperial crisis and political

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volatility Gálvez’s reliance on his close business associates, friends, and relatives to apply reform measures in New Spain rather than on the impersonal workings of the imperial bureaucracy made sense because it presumably increased the reliability of information coming to him and helped insure the application of the directives flowing out from him. The groundwork for practices of crony capitalism, therefore, was laid by the nepotistic habits of the colonial era. In the second place, absent a stock market or even a true banking system, no institutionalized, impersonal mechanisms existed for the optimal allotment of capital in response to market forces, no space for the flexing of the invisible hand. Lending and investment were for the most part done face-toface, not through third parties or impersonal agencies. So it made sense to reduce risk and information costs by engaging with people whom one knew directly through kinship, friendship, or affinity. Since Lucas Alamán and other elite political and economic actors moved in the circles of other moneyed individuals, it made sense to approach such people for capital or, conversely, to invest in their enterprises. Alamán sought out his cronies for money and made cronies of those who made their money available. There is a strong case to be made that cronyism in some recognizable form—that is, privileged access to capital or other production factors or to a market, based on personal relationships outside of market relations themselves, or favored access to the resources of the state—lies at the origin of all capitalist systems, a metahistorical question orthogonal to the themes of this book. In this sense crony capitalism in early nineteenth-century Mexico was not a corrupt excrescence or a pathological condition but the norm, and Lucas Alamán the agent of a larger historical process.

The Banco’s Problems The Banco de Avío’s highly checkered history after Alamán’s departure from the government in 1832 has been traced in considerable detail by Potash. During the eighteen months when he dominated the bank’s activities, nothing could insulate the institution from the animus of Alamán’s political enemies; from those politicians, typically liberals, who simply felt this sort of state intervention in the economy was unwarranted, unhealthy, and corrupt; from the volatile political atmosphere of these years; or from the government’s perennial near-insolvency. José María Luis Mora, for example, attacked the Banco de Avío as an experiment at forced industrialization redolent of colonial

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mercantilism and illiberal state intervention. Following Adam Smith, he advocated instead that Mexico adhere to the path of its natural advantages, exporting agricultural products and minerals and importing manufactured goods. Lorenzo de Zavala echoed these liberal economic arguments against the bank but stressed that the institution was a means whereby Alamán and the conservative centralizers sought to extend state power by selectively rewarding privileged elite supporters and allies and accommodating within the government a large group of beholden officeholders.18 As early as August 1831 a proposal was floated in congress for the bank’s abolition. The proposal evoked alarmed responses from officials and entrepreneurs who had counted on the bank to fund projects in various places—factories under construction, machinery ordered, sales arrangements made. The governor of Guanajuato, Manuel Gómez de Linares, wrote to Alamán with great urgency, saying that “proposals of this nature, which appear to be inspired by no other goal than to oppose everything that can lift us from depression and poverty and open to us the road to our prosperity and greatness must cause [disgust] in all good Mexicans who, disavowing local loyalties or personal interests, aspire to nothing but the general happiness to which we should all contribute.” The states within the federal union that had sponsored projects of industrial development, he continued, would be left holding the bag should such a measure be adopted, and public confidence in the reliability of the national government severely undermined.19 The measure did not pass. More serious to the functioning of the bank than political attacks by its enemies was the volatility of the funding stream from the government, the herky-jerky manner in which money charged against the million pesos allotted to the bank flowed and then stopped, only to be restarted. Whether this pattern was consciously intended by its opponents to strangle the infant bank in its crib or was simply an unfortunate side effect of the impecuniousness of the central government is not clear. The Banco de Avío’s financial troubles were certainly not Alamán’s fault. The 1830 law establishing the bank prohibited the use of the earmarked funds for purposes other than industrial development, the textile industry in particular. Just before Lucas Alamán left the government in 1832, the bank sought authorization from congress to borrow 100,000 pesos to meet its commitments to ongoing projects in Puebla, Querétaro, Celaya, and the factory at Tlalpan, not to mention the salaries and other expenses of workers who had been brought from the US. By the beginning of 1833 the bank was broke, not because of its loan policies but because the funds intended for it had been diverted to other purposes. The junta directiva wrote

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to then Secretary of Relations Bernardo González Angulo that it found itself in “the necessity of suspending its commitments to the industrial societies [in the provinces], and these are forced to paralyze their [already] advanced work on [factory] buildings.” Ordered but uninstalled machinery was rusting in warehouses, and the businessmen who had taken it upon themselves to build textile works would be ruined without the funds from the bank. The Mexican consul in New Orleans described a desperate situation in which American companies had begun to foreclose on unpaid-for machinery. The customshouse at Tampico owed the bank nearly 60,000 pesos it had diverted to the payment of troops on campaigns in Tampico and Veracruz. The diversion of bank funds had brought a halt to construction of a textile factory in Celaya and the installation of a steam engine purchased from a foreign mining company (the Unida?). Around this time Treasury Secretary Valentín Gómez Farías ordered the suspension of transfers from the various customshouses to the bank because of the “scarcities [of fiscal revenues] and great necessities of the public treasury” while nonetheless committing his ministry to keeping exact accounts of what was owed the bank and promising reimbursement at a later time. By the end of 1832 the bank had collected and disbursed nearly 550,000 pesos, leaving a balance of about 450,000 of the million pesos nominally committed to it.20 The Puebla industrialist Esteban Antuñano complained regularly that capital expenditures and operating expenses could not be covered when expected funds never materialized. Almost a year and a half after Alamán left his ministry Antuñano wrote to the bank’s directorship trying to shame it into disbursing funds. And regarding a dozen or so skilled American workers contracted to work in his factory in Puebla, Antuñano continued, “Besides, how can we save our honor? How can we ignore the feelings of humanity [toward the workers] and patriotism, abandoning some poor [men] whom we have taken out of their country under the most solemn undertakings?”21 The bank’s junta directiva summed up the effects of this inconstant policy, noting that because construction was not completed on a number of startups, the establishments were “in a pitiful condition.”22 These problems continued to plague the Banco de Avío until its abolition by President Santa Anna in 1842. After his stint as president of the junta directiva during his ministry in the Bustamante administration Lucas Alamán’s relations with the bank continued in the form of his renewed membership on the junta, but not as its president, loans to his own startup company at Cocolapan, and his acquisition of the assets of the Compañía de Celaya.

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Balancing the Books The question about the Banco de Avío remains: was it a success or not, and by what metric is the outcome to be evaluated? This depends to a great degree on what one means by “success.” Most assessments of the bank stress its role in at least laying the foundations for later industrial development. Potash acknowledged short- and medium-term difficulties. Among these were the failure of a number of projects the bank funded, the decision by the agency in its first flush of activity to bankroll too many projects, the inconsistent flow of funds, the unsettling influence of political circumstances—an impecunious national state, internal warfare—and economic externalities like the inadequacy of the raw cotton supply. Still, he thought, the Banco de Avío enjoyed a good record in backing a number of textile mills that survived as productive enterprises for some time after the bank’s demise. Despite the acknowledged problems of the textile industry itself and the environment in which it developed, wrote Dawn Keremitsis, another scholar of the nineteenth-century Mexican textile industry, “the capacity of the industry to sustain itself during these turbulent years constitutes a favorable indicator of the solidity of its foundations,” a judgment that Colón Reyes shares. In her study of the nineteenthand twentieth-century textile industry in Orizaba, where Alamán’s Cocolapan factory was located, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato arrived at a parallel conclusion, and Trujillo Bolio’s work followed suit. On the other hand, some economic historians, among them Walther L. Bernecker and Richard Salvucci, have been agnostic about the Banco de Avío’s role in pre-Porfirian Mexican industrialization. And a negative assessment has been offered by Edward Beatty in his study of the politics of industrialization in Mexico before 1911. In his view, “Despite nearly fifty years of high tariffs, temporary prohibitions on competing imports, and the support of the short-lived Banco de Avío in the 1830s, it was not until the Porfiriato that cloth production began a period of rapid and sustained growth.”23 When all the opinions are tallied and the empirical indicators examined, I think Robert Potash should be given the last word and the Banco de Avío characterized as a qualified success. He points out that of the four cotton-spinning mills operating in Mexico in 1837, all had come into operation with substantial capital infusions from the Banco de Avío. Of four others under construction at the time, one was the beneficiary of loans from the bank, and two more received technical assistance from Antuñano, whose own factory had come on line only two years before as the result of very substantial investment by the

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Table 14.1: Cotton manufactures presented for revenue office stamp, 1838–45 Year

Yarn (pounds)

Mantas*

1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845

63,123 32,565 557,591 1,014,004 777,116 No report 1,632,111 2,783,774

109,305 124,948 88,096 195,758 217,851 279,739 507,565 641,183

* Manta = a single piece of 32 varas. Source: Potash, Mexican Government and Industrial Development, table 11, 161.

bank. By 1840 the number of spinning mills had risen to seventeen, two years later the number had doubled, and by 1844 there were over fifty. Weaving advanced at a somewhat slower pace, but the number of power looms increased by a factor of eight or ten during this same period. Quantities of cotton yarn and cloth saw a rapid increase (see table 14.1). Potash summed up the place of the Banco de Avío in Mexican economic history this way: “But after all is said against it, the fact remains that as of 1846, a mechanized textile industry had been created; the level of employment in manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and other fields had been raised, and concomitantly the income of a goodly number of working people. The creation of the industry, moreover, was not a transitory achievement. It was to survive the shock of foreign invasions and civil wars; it was to witness the growth of plant capacity and of the volume and variety of output; and it was to constitute, in the hands of its predominantly Mexican entrepreneurs, a viable and profitable sector of the economy well before the economic transformation of the Porfirian era.”24 As for the longevity of bank-funded enterprises, the Cocolapan spinning and weaving complex, though it passed out of Lucas Alamán’s hands in what was essentially a bankruptcy, did continue to function under the ownership of the Escandón family until the end of the century. Esteban de Antuñano’s La Constancia Mexicana factory, despite changes in ownership, lasted for more than 150 years. Absent the Banco de Avío, what would the situation of the Mexican textile industry have been? Halting though its development was, the cotton-spinning

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and -weaving industry would certainly have developed eventually but much later and more slowly than it did—perhaps as late as the early Porfirian period. It is possible that capital invested during the 1840s by agiotistas like Manuel Escandón and Cayetano Rubio in acquiring failed enterprises (at deep discounts) might have been put into textile startups in the previous decade. But it was much easier and cheaper to pick up the pieces of businesses after their collapse than to build them from scratch, especially where they had already been kick-started with public funds. Even in cases where new owners of collapsed enterprises had to assume outstanding debts to the bank, they were essentially subsidized in their acquisitions by public funds. Many of the newly founded mills survived the endemic political violence of the 1840s, the American invasion, the wars of the Reform, and the French Intervention. The survival of already established industrial enterprises during periods of political and economic instability, however, was much more likely than their foundation de novo during those same periods. As even the most sanguine observers of the Banco de Avío experiment have acknowledged, the failure rate of textile businesses developed under the sponsorship of the bank was substantial, certainly upward of 50 percent. Perhaps the story of failure should be turned on its head, though, and we should see the survival of many of the factories established with Banco de Avío capital as an indication of unlikely success against the headwinds of an inauspicious economic climate. Viewed from this perspective, despite the obstacles over which the bank could exercise no control— among others, the insufficiency and high price of raw materials, high transport costs, political volatility, the predatory practices of the national government— the record of achievement was quite impressive. Moreover, the bank-sponsored venture into import-substitution industrialization demonstrated that industrialization was possible outside of mining, large-scale sugar production, and one or two other processing activities. The bank experiment also proved the worth of crony capitalism as a starting point for industrialization from the top down through social networks involving elite actors and the state. It is hard to see how the industrialization of the textile industry, or other industries for that matter, could have gotten off the ground in any other way. In any case this was true of development in many capitalist economies and remained a hallmark of the Porfirian economy later on. In all this Lucas Alamán certainly played the central role, mainly during the first two or three years of the bank’s existence, even though he himself never harvested the economic fruits he had hoped for in attempting to follow in the footsteps of Esteban de Antuñano and other industrial entrepreneurs.

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Yet even if one brands the Banco de Avío only a qualified success, the questions remain as to whether it was a wise move or not given the existing conditions at the time of its creation and what its history says about Alamán himself. In evaluating Lucas Alamán’s career in politics and political economy a number of historians have concluded that although a bold project, the bank was a misplaced effort, implying that his vision for the economic future of the country was at best cloudy, his knowledge of the requisite factors for industrialization flawed, and, most damning of all, that he did not really understand Mexico in general. But Alamán knew what the country was about and what its prospects were as well as any other statesman, policy maker, or thinker of the early republican period, and better than most. Having traveled and studied extensively in Europe in the years after Napoleon’s fall, he was if anything too cosmopolitan in his experience and understanding of the direction in which the developed Atlantic world was moving. It might be said that he knew too much or that he knew the wrong things, but not that he did not know Mexico. Historians have asserted that the Banco de Avío was premature, the project for an industrialized textile sector imported from a cluster of totally different North Atlantic environments—especially Britain but also France and the United States—whose situations could not be reproduced in Mexico. There is a case to be made for the determining role of these limiting conditions in the startup of industrialization in the Mexican economic environment. I cite as an example the situation of Mexican infrastructure—or the lack of it— superimposed on a difficult geography. This impediment, which showed up in relation to the transport of inputs to the points of production and of outputs to the points of consumption, can be encapsulated in the concept of the “friction of distance.” As the work of John Coatsworth and other scholars has shown, absent the possibilities of cheap canal or riverine transport—navigable rivers in Mexico are few—it was only with the advent of the railroads in the last third of the nineteenth century that the cost of moving goods of relatively low-unit value fell to levels sustainable at the final price of the goods sold.25 Lucas Alamán took a calculated risk in supply-side economics avant la lettre. In modern times this has been seen as an anti-Keynesian measure implemented through the manipulation of fiscal and taxation policy. But since the Mexican government was chronically short of tax revenues for most of the century, tax reduction to stimulate investment was highly implausible. Alamán therefore turned to the direct government investment of public funds in an industry producing consumer nondurables, in the hope that economies of scale might produce sustainable levels of profits and new investment while

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the market expanded. Secondary benefits would have been rising employment in the industry and the absorption of idle hands, an increase in workers’ disposable income, the backward linkages similar to those he had cited for the mining industry, and a reduction of Mexico’s dependence on foreign imports. The supply-side idea was certainly not novel, having been dealt with in one form or another by thinkers in political economy whom Alamán almost certainly read, among them Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Jean-Baptiste Say, and J. S. Mill. That the calculated risk produced only partially successful results was less an indication of his naiveté than of his overly sanguine hopes and of externalities over which he had no control. Such externalities were at odds with Alamán’s goals and the policies he tried to put in place to achieve them. The most important of these factors were government predation on the bank’s funds arising from the need to finance the Guerra del Sur, the military and other resources poured into defending the Jalapa regime, and the disruptive effects of this violent civil disturbance itself. It is hard to make a case that the way in which Anastasio Bustamante, Lucas Alamán, and their collaborators rose to power did not finally defeat their purposes—that the very process of obtaining the means defeated the ends. In this sense the Guerra del Sur was less an externality than an internal contradiction, although perhaps an externality vis-à-vis the bank as ideally conceived.

15 • The War of the South and the Death of Guerrero

Introduction As in many gripping murder tales, the major facts of the case were clear from the start. In January 1831 Vicente Guerrero, independence caudillo, former president, and leader of an extensive rebellion against the Bustamante government, was captured by treacherous means at Acapulco, tried in a drumhead court-martial in Oaxaca, and, despite pleas from many quarters to spare his life, was executed at the instigation of the government on 14 February. The questions hanging over the incident turn less on the documented facts than on the undocumented, hidden history. For this story the questions of how the decision to kill him was reached, by whom, and exactly what Lucas Alamán’s role in it was are the most important. The decision-making process is almost entirely undocumented except for third-party, hearsay, or circumstantial evidence and therefore remains opaque, as one might expect of such a nefarious deed. The absence of written evidence, in fact, was one of the major points Lucas Alamán adduced in his defense against charges leveled against him that he was a central player in the affair. The debate inside the presidential cabinet surrounding Guerrero’s fate was conducted orally, and many of the arrangements leading up to and away from his capture and execution were carried out in the same fashion. The general consensus among historians is that Alamán was heavily implicated. Some assert that he was one of two central actors in the decision to kill the caudillo, the coconspirator being War Minister José Antonio Facio. Other historians, including Alamán himself, maintain that he stood off to one side in the process and was at most passively complicit in failing to intervene to spare Guerrero’s life. Historians of a conservative bent

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often defend him, while those of liberal orientation assign him considerable guilt. The liberal authors of volume 4 of the great high-Porfirian synthesis of Mexican history, México á través de los siglos (from which I draw heavily here), emphasized several times in their minutely detailed account of Guerrero’s death that precise responsibility was difficult to assign because very few documents relating to the episode existed in the first place, and what few there had been were probably destroyed or altered: Given the nature of that infamous betrayal, which the jalapista ministers [i.e., those men who came to power with the triumph of the Plan de Jalapa] denied having committed, it is undoubted . . . that nothing was agreed in writing with the Genoese captain Francisco Picaluga, who commanded the Sardinian brigantine El Colombo. And it is certain that if perchance some document existed at one time, its authors would have made it disappear upon feeling the weight of public indignation that the event [of Guerrero’s execution] awoke. . . . [Since] the betrayal employed to get rid of don Vicente Guerrero had surpassed anything that could be taken as a trick [i.e., a normal tactic] of war, the administration of don Anastasio Bustamante sought from the first moment to make the evidences [of the plot], which without doubt were few, disappear. . . . [I]n the perpetration of the crime only seven people were involved—the Cabinet, Picaluga, and Miguel Gonzalez, all [of whom were] interested in leaving no trace of the infamy.1 The idea that Lucas Alamán was one of the prime movers in the killing of Vicente Guerrero rapidly gained currency. It blackened Alamán’s reputation to the end of his life and beyond and has been accepted by many writers on the period as proven fact. If ever there were an illustration of the dictum that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the shakily supported assertions made of Lucas Alamán’s culpability is one. Among modern writers, the most recent biographer of Guerrero, Theodore G. Vincent, unequivocally ascribes the killing to Alamán without any real evidentiary backing: “Alamán is probably the key figure to look at. Although the prolific scholar and historian claimed that he did not organize the plot to kill Guerrero, and that he only sinned in knowing about it and not speaking up, his intellectual stance could have led his fellow ministers to believe that they had to go through with the act.”2 While there is something to be said for this view, an “intellectual stance” is not exactly a smoking gun, especially when one considers that the evidence of this stance presented by Vincent comes only from Alamán’s own Historia

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de Méjico, produced about twenty years after the Guerrero murder. Among other modern writers of popular nationalist and left-leaning tendencies the account of José Mancisidor is fairly representative. Amidst clouds of adulatory evocations of Guerrero and melodramatic exclamations of his martyrdom, Mancisidor seems to pin most of the blame for the caudillo’s death on Facio and Bustamante, with some allotted to Nicolás Bravo, while Alamán implicitly brings up the rear as the foremost voice of the reactionary “colonial party.” In this version Guerrero was killed by the structural forces of reaction, not an unfair assessment in the end, no matter who actually pulled the trigger or ordered it pulled.3 A similar position can predictably be found between the lines in the historia patria of the Whiggish liberal tradition. In this school, México a través de los siglos occupies the common ground of ardent nationalism with writers like Mancisidor. But it is seen even in some conservative writers. For example, Luis Gonzaga Cuevas (1800–1867), a lawyer, politician, diplomat, and historian, explicitly asked the question in his 1851 book Porvenir de México, “How should the responsibility of the chief of government [Anastasio Bustamante] and each of his ministers be assigned [in the decision to kill Guerrero]?” He pointed out that “there was no way to know the details of the conduct of the cabinet . . . because the secret of that plot is not known beyond the proven facts.” His answer stepped somewhat gingerly around the specific guilt of Lucas Alamán in concluding that “opinion has naturally fixed [responsibility] on the ministers who exercised the greatest influence [in the cabinet], Alamán and Facio, considered the chiefs [respectively] of politics and war.”4 But Cuevas’s statement certainly does not exculpate Alamán. On the other hand, the extremely conservative politician, diplomat, and historian Francisco de Paula de Arrangoiz y Berzábal (1812?—99) went further in the direction of exonerating Alamán, completely absolving him and placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of Facio, who he says never had the opportunity to vindicate himself because he died in exile in Paris.5 This admittedly narrow sample of historians’ opinions in the matter does not exhaust the range of views, since virtually every scholar, academic or nonacademic, who has looked at the period offers a verdict on the plot to eliminate Guerrero and ipso facto on Lucas Alamán’s involvement. Since no one totally absolves him, opinions embrace two positions: either he was a prime mover, along with Facio, who intended that Guerrero should die and was well aware that the caudillo’s capture and trial would furnish a platform for his execution. Or he was morally complicit in furnishing some of the funds for Picaluga and in not opposing the death sentence when it was discussed in the cabinet. This is not to say that Alamán

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was not involved, and involved substantially, in the killing of Guerrero given that in the end we have only his own disavowal of the accusation that he was the prime mover; the question turns on the degree of his involvement. An example of how quickly the idea that Alamán was the chief conspirator spread is the opposition newspaper, Andrés Quintana Roo’s El Federalista Mexicano, five days after Guerrero’s execution. The newspaper’s comment on Alamán’s role in the caudillo’s death is representative of many of the accusations leveled against the statesman at the time and since. But the newspaper went beyond pinning responsibility for Guerrero’s death on Alamán to linking the minister of relations to a transatlantic Spanish conspiracy to abrogate Mexican independence, asserting that Guerrero’s execution was part of such a scheme: All the old patriots should tremble to see Sr. Alamán and his associates with influence in our political affairs. It is clear that the principal instrument of Spanish vengeance for the unpardonable crime of having gained independence is Sr. Alamán with all the party to which he belongs. . . . [The catastrophe of Guerrero’s separation from Iturbide] was the fruit of the artifices and machinations of Sr. Alamán, who came from Europe at that moment with the necessary instructions to achieve it. The division between Guerrero and Iturbide was achieved, and after the death of the first followed that of the other almost by the same means of betrayal and perfidy. Now [Nicolás] Bravo is exalted [but] the day will come when General Bravo sees himself led to the scaffold along the same path that took Guerrero there. . . . General [Guadalupe] Victoria will also be provoked into a revolution to have a pretext to get rid of him. Sr. Alamán’s plan is to leave [alive] none of the famous men of those who adorn the annals of our independence. His task boils down to avenge in the name of Spain the crime of those who made [Spain] lose the most precious of her colonies. He also believes that while a single old patriot exists, the properties of his master Terranova are not very secure. The servant of a foreign duke now rules the destiny of the Mexican republic.6 The purport of the article is to claim that Alamán’s identification with Spaniards, the heritage of Spain, and political conservatism made for strong circumstantial evidence that he had planned and carried out the murder of Vicente Guerrero through layers of subordinates. Although all of these allegations invoked the death of Guerrero as the most egregious crime of the administration, some accusers embraced a farrago of different accusations, including

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domestic malfeasances instead of adherence to Spain. The belief in Alamán’s guilt in Guerrero’s death, crystalizing from rumor to charge to accepted fact, among not only historians but also a wider public, followed him to the end of his life. When he was proposed for election as a congressional deputy from Jalisco in 1849, for example, nearly two decades after the event, the electors in Guadalajara shouted, “Down with the murderer of Guerrero!, down with the monarchists!”7 Lucas Alamán’s own account of the War of the South and the death of Vicente Guerrero changed considerably in tone over the years. In his ministerial memoria to congress of 7 January 1831, marking almost exactly a year since his return to the government with the Jalapa movement, he wrote, employing, uncharacteristically, a mixed metaphor, that inasmuch as Vicente Guerrero raised the banner of rebellion, the seeds of a fire that would soon engulf all the southern part of the states of Mexico and Michoacán were spreading. . . . Nothing but the shout of “viva Guerrero!” was heard, a cry that terrifies the property owner and that has acquired such shameful meaning in the tragic history of our political convulsions. . . . This war, which, more than a dispute over political opinions, has the character of the invasions by the barbarous peoples of the north [i.e., Vandals, Visigoths] into the provinces of the Roman Empire, desolates the states, annihilates settlements, ruins and outrages families, undermines the [foreign] credit of the nation, and weakens the parts of the social machinery.8 In late March 1831, after the capture and death of Vicente Guerrero, Alamán offered an account of the Guerra del Sur to Mexican diplomatic agents abroad (e.g., Gorostiza in London, Murphy in Paris) through one of his ministry’s periodic reseñas políticas summarizing political events in Mexico. These summaries were meant not only to inform the diplomats but also for use in casting a more favorable light on Mexican affairs than the reportage appearing in the French, British, and American newspapers. Of the Guerra del Sur he wrote that it was being prosecuted by “men known for their immorality, or by those marked by public opinion who flee a society that condemns their aberrations and crimes. Unable to support themselves, they attack the property owner and the farmer, and by this means, boasts the murderer and thief, they make themselves feared by all those who have something [i.e., property] to lose. For these reasons they can only be considered in general as bandits.”9

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The declaration of the new Bustamante government’s legitimacy by congress on 14 January 1830 and the Senate’s approval of the Plan de Jalapa by a two-thirds majority, he described as “a complete change executed by legal means.” These measures were the work of an alliance between “the remains of the Escoseses and all the respectable people among the Yorquinos, who began to call themselves the ‘hombres de bien,’ to whom also adhered the clergy, the army, and the propertied class.” Guerrero, Alamán asserted, had been legally condemned under the law of 27 September 1823, which suspended certain constitutional guarantees, thus providing for the summary apprehension, legal processing, and execution by military authorities of criminal gangs in rural areas. The law had indeed been approved by congress and signed into law by Guerrero as a member of the SPE, but it originated primarily with Secretary of Relations Alamán. This version of Vicente Guerrero’s death is, to my knowledge, the only formal one he ever offered apart from the extended comments in the Defensa. In it Alamán implies that the insurgent hero and president was in essence hoist by his own petard and that his death was not caused by human agency—that he “perished” rather than being captured through treachery and judicially murdered, the generally accepted version. Many men of both factions, Alamán concluded, died “on the gallows or on the battlefield,” Vicente Guerrero’s death only one of many casualties of war. Addressed in this manner, Guerrero’s death was drained of much of its singularity, tragedy, and potential for the victim’s martyrdom.10 Defending the Bustamante regime and his role in it in his Historia de Méjico, Alamán wrote, “Accusations of excessive rigor were repeated against the government of that time as they had been under the same circumstances against the [Supreme] Executive Power, [and] against which the answer was the same as that given earlier. Nonetheless, I cannot pretend to defend everything that happened, but it must be remembered that it was a matter of a civil war that lasted a year, against a desperate faction that did not hesitate in the means it employed, even up to [launching] a caste war.”11 In these lines from the Historia the author has climbed down from his earlier tone of outraged personal honor and sharp counterattack against his accusers. His justifications were, in my paraphrasing, that “unfortunate mistakes are made in the heat of civil conflict,” that “there were too many field commanders to control all their actions effectively,” and that “our enemies did even worse things than we did.” I have devoted so much space to the way the Guerrero episode has been treated by historians and by Alamán himself for three principal reasons. First,

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is the historical importance of Vicente Guerrero as one of the great caudillos of the Mexican independence struggle, and one of the two most visible coconsummators of independence from Spain together with Agustín de Iturbide. The two men met similarly violent ends, albeit Guerrero’s was marked by betrayal and martyrdom, Iturbide’s by political miscalculation and hubris. Guerrero’s death, and the manner of it, loomed large in the political landscape of the 1830s, a period in which Lucas Alamán arguably gained as much power and influence on the national scene as he was ever to enjoy. He had to deal with the event on an almost continual basis for a number of years during and after his most important stint in office, so it formed an important marker in the course of his public life. Second, the question of the nature of Alamán’s involvement illuminates the dynamics of the Anastasio Bustamante regime, the social alignments and tensions it embodied, and the reasons that it came a cropper. That the independence chieftain’s death significantly changed the balance of political forces in the country seems doubtful. His military influence had already waned; the regime under Alamán’s guidance was already provoking highly negative reactions among liberals; and Santa Anna, always fishing in troubled political waters, would sooner or later surely have found a pretext to intervene in the national sphere. In other words, the Bustamante regime would have fallen sooner or later, producing the political ripples it did even without the shameful proceedings surrounding Guerrero’s death. Finally, the Guerrero affair indelibly marked Lucas Alamán’s own public career and private life. Indirectly, at least, it forced him from office, created a crisis for him in which he perceived that a flight into hiding was his only option, and thoroughly interrupted his family life and business affairs. To take up the counterfactual crystal ball, one might ask, for example, what direction the future of the forty-year-old politician might have taken had he not been compelled to resign with the rest of the ministry in May 1832, in large part because of his alleged role in the plot to kill Guerrero. Had he not felt himself forced into internal exile for nearly a year-and-a-half, thus removed from the political limelight for several years and not preoccupied with the duties of high office, would he have begun the memoirs that eventually germinated into his great Historia de Méjico? He would not have written his powerful 1834 Defensa del ex ministro against the charges of his complicity in Guerrero’s murder or his Examen imparcial de la administración de Bustamante. Nor is it far-fetched to speculate that had he not been so thoroughly tarred by the cries that he was an assassin, his career might well have taken a different turn, eventually putting him into the presidency.

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The Death of Guerrero The principal facts of the Guerra del Sur and the events leading up to Vicente Guerrero’s execution are not much in dispute. In the wake of the Jalapa rebellion that toppled him from power in December 1829, Guerrero withdrew from Mexico City and went to ground at his hacienda near Acapulco. There he would await the judgment of congress, he said, on his administration in general, and specifically whether he had exceeded the extraordinary powers granted him to combat the Spanish invasion earlier in the year. His correspondence with political associates and old military colleagues hints that he wanted to live quietly in retirement, devoting his remaining years to his ranching activities and his family. He was nearly fifty years old and had sustained his share of wounds and physical wear in the service of his patria. As the repressive policies of the Bustamante/Alamán government quickly emerged in early 1830, however, in particular its interventions in state governments to consolidate its hold on power, Guerrero and some of his old insurgent companions grew increasingly restive. He was soon joined by the rebel chieftain Juan Alvarez (1790–1867), who had his own score to settle with the Mexico City government. Alvarez had declared his allegiance to the Bustamante regime in its earliest days, but, doubting his loyalty, the nervous centralist regime replaced him as commander of Acapulco and sent him on a wild goose chase to face an imagined impending Spanish invasion force on the country’s west coast. In March, Vicente Guerrero and Alvarez raised the standard of rebellion, backing a profederalist plan conceived by the Michoacán military commander Juan José Codallos (1790–1831), in the name of restoring various state legislatures and governorships that had been purged by the central government. Among contemporaries and historians there has always been a debate as to the makeup of the forces following Guerrero’s banner and about what drove the two caudillos, aside from their declared political grievances, to fight the government. The rebels’ base of strength and operations was the Costa Grande area of the tierra caliente, chiefly in what is now the state of Guerrero and the Acapulco area, where both Guerrero and Alvarez were very influential. One of the first rebel triumphs was the capture by Alvarez of the fortified port city of Acapulco in mid-March 1830. The Costa Grande and its hinterland had been a zone of endemic unrest and rebellion ever since 1810, embracing a major region of insurgent activity during the years of the struggle against Spain. The rural population included a greater admixture of African blood than most

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other parts of Mexico, making for a somewhat different political culture than in the more homogeneously indigenous central highlands of the country. The Afro-Indian complexion of the rebel forces played into the prejudices of men like Lucas Alamán and his fellow cabinet members while affording a pretext for the belief that a caste war was in progress, raising the specter of “Haitian hordes” butchering whites and being commanded by a man of the same “savage” antecedents himself.12 War Minister Facio, thought by many historians to be the prime mover in the plot to kill Vicente Guerrero, summarized this position in his memoria to the national congress at the beginning of 1831: “[Guerrero] disseminated his agents throughout the republic in order to raise the pueblos in insurrection and to take up arms—against the government on the fraudulent claim that it had fallen into the hands of the Spaniards. . . . He raised the indigenous pueblos using the depraved means of offering them the properties of the Mexicans who opposed him, and attempting to excite in them the most barbarous, inhuman, and ferocious hatreds.”13 Atrocities were committed on both sides: the mutilation of captured government officers by the rebels, summary executions, and the burning of Indian villages by centralist forces. The debate concerning the nature of Guerrero’s movement has arisen over the question of whether class resentments played a major role in mobilizing his followers or whether this was genuinely a race war, as Alamán and others insisted. In the latter version the rebellion was fueled by intense antipathies between southerners of color—indigenous people and Afro-mestizos—and the Spanish-Creole whites, representing the central government, who had ousted Guerrero from power with the Plan de Jalapa. This is substantially a moot question since class and ethnicity strongly reinforced each other in the Guerra del Sur, as they had in the massive insurgency of 1810–21 and as they have throughout the country’s history. Aside from racial conflict as such, struggles over land between indigenous communities and nonindigenous landowners played a part in mobilizing support for Guerrero as well as in the stubborn insistence of peasant communities on protecting their municipal autonomy from encroachment by the centralist national state. Finally, the deeply rooted religious belief of rural people that the Virgin of Guadalupe had called on them to fight against Spaniards, that is, whites, under the leadership of men of color who looked like them—Guerrero, Alvarez, Gordiano Guzmán, and others—fueled popular and indigenous resentments. And as if all these factors were not sufficient to propel the armed struggle forward, a territorial and also a larger political conflict framed the Guerra del Sur. On the one hand,

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Nicolás Bravo, who led government forces, was another old insurgent chieftain and onetime compañero of Guerrero whose extended clan dominated the interior areas of the southwest, as Guerrero and Juan Alvarez held sway over the Costa Grande. On the other hand, Bravo’s confrontation with Guerrero’s movement was essentially a military rematch of the Escosés and Yorquino battles of the late 1820s, in which the two men had been leaders of the two parties, respectively. After nearly a year of fighting, the government forces commanded by Nicolás Bravo won a decisive battle against Guerrero’s army at Chilpancingo on the 2 January 1831, a military point of inflection after which the rebellion was on its back foot. Lucas Alamán’s culpability in the death of Guerrero enters the story at this point. He later claimed that the government was quite openhanded in 1830–31 with pardons to rebels who gave up their arms, Juan Alvarez being a prime example. But a number of prominent figures from the ranks of Guerrero’s officers, among them Guadalupe Victoria’s brother Francisco, were executed under his draconian antibandit law of 1823. Nonetheless, capital punishment for antigovernment rebellion or pronunciamientos was quite infrequent in the early decades of the Republic. A casual, nonsystematic perusal of pronunciado minibiographies in Will Fowler’s exhaustive online database of nineteenth-century Mexican pronunciamientos indicates that the military men who led such movements were more likely to die of natural causes or cholera than from an encounter with a firing squad.14 What made the execution of Guerrero such an egregious crime in the eyes of many people was not that it was unprecedented in its severity, but that the victim was a great hero of the independence struggle and a former president of the Republic. On top of this, he had been taken dishonorably by a ruse involving a personal betrayal off the battlefield, and his trial marked by numerous irregularities, suggesting that the outcome was predetermined. How long the plot to capture him had been incubating is not clear—for months, probably, although Alamán and other figures charged in Guerrero’s death vehemently denied this. But the means to achieve the caudillo’s neutralization were a matter of relatively short-term opportunity, the main planner, War Secretary José Antonio Facio, ultimately enjoying the support and approval of Vice President Anastasio Bustamante and other members of the presidential cabinet. The motives behind the order to execute Guerrero combined personal antipathies toward him, racialist ideas about the caste war he was thought to have unleashed, and the massive dimensions of the uprising, which, as it grew, exceeded by far the normal parameters of early nineteenth-century pronunciamientos. Despite the fact

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that after Chilpancingo the rebellion had been brought under control in many areas of the south and its forces dispersed, a threat still existed that it might revive and blossom into a full-scale civil war or blaze into violent antigovernment resistance locally. Famously central to the sad episode of Vicente Guerrero’s death was the Italian ship captain Francisco (Francesco) Picaluga (1792–1859), a native of the fishing village of Boccadasse, now a part of Genoa. While in most accounts he was not the instigator of the scheme to eliminate Guerrero, blame for which has always rightly devolved upon the Bustamante government, Picaluga was the willing proximate instrument of the plan’s realization. Following his role in Guerrero’s death in mid-February 1831, the Genoese drops out of most historical accounts. The author of one of the most circumstantial versions of the episode, Enrique de Olavarría y Ferrari, for example, wrote in volume 4 of México a través de los siglos that he had found no evidence at all regarding Picaluga in the wake of the Guerrero killing. Even the place and date of his death—Genoa, 1836—as rendered in the article on him in the authoritative Diccionario Porrúa are in error.15 A number of versions developed over the years concerning his fate. One has him returning to Genoa, being tried by the Admiralty Court there for his perfidious role in Guerrero’s death—although on what grounds and under whose jurisdiction are not clear—sentenced to make reparations to the Guerrero heirs, and dying in or near his native village; while another version has him being tried in absentia. The judicial action does seem to have taken place, whether Picaluga was present or not. Other stories have him living in Smyrna or Syria or converting to Islam and ending his days in a Turkish seraglio—although, as a man, in what capacity and at what cost we can only speculate; or passing a life of hard penance in a Mexican monastery to expiate his guilt for the crime. Research carried out in the 1940s or so by the military engineer, politician, congressional deputy, and diplomat Amado Aguirre (1863–1949), however, threw much light on the Italian’s history. Making his way to San Blas in 1832 and assuming the name Juan Pazador, Aguirre discovered, Picaluga married a woman from Tepic, adopted three daughters—whom he left in extremely modest circumstances at his death—and moved to Mazatlán. There he invested fifty thousand pesos, his ill-gotten gain for the role he played in apprehending Guerrero, in shipping and business, lost much of his fortune, and in the face of mounting debts committed suicide in the port city in 1859, where a parochial register gave the date of his death as 30 March, the cause a bullet wound.16

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Bearing a cargo from Guayaquil, Ecuador, Picaluga anchored his brigantine Colombo in Acapulco Bay on 23 June 1830, when the War of the South had already been raging for several months.17 While the chronology of events is not entirely clear, the Italian mariner, still owing two thousand pesos in customs duties for his cargo, formed a friendship with Vicente Guerrero and fell into a business arrangement with him, using his ship to move supplies for the rebel forces up and down the west coast of Mexico. Sometime in the fall of 1830 Picaluga journeyed to Mexico City to settle his customs debt to the government, by which time the presidential cabinet, having learned of the tax obligation and his friendship with Guerrero, determined to use this leverage over Picaluga and the opportunity presented by his ship to capture the caudillo. War Minister Facio took on the task of negotiating with the Italian seaman. In several interviews with Picaluga, Facio proposed a plan to capture Guerrero and Juan Alvarez through treachery, offering the Italian a bounty including the write-off of his tax obligation, compensation for the value of his ship, and a payment for handing Guerrero over to military authorities. According to a generally accepted version by Carlos María de Bustamante of the initial meeting between the two, when Facio broached the subject and offered twenty thousand pesos, Picaluga replied, “Oh! Señor, you offend my delicacy and morality! God forbid that I do such a thing!” As the price offered for the capture of Guerrero increased at subsequent meetings by increments of ten thousand pesos, the signal from Picaluga’s delicate moral sensibility grew progressively weaker until he eventually agreed to the amount of fifty thousand pesos in cash for his role in the plot. This was not a spur-of-the-moment scheme, therefore, but was in the works for a number of weeks before the capture was actually executed. For his part, José Antonio Facio later admitted that he had sponsored at least a dozen unsuccessful attempts on Guerrero’s life, while Alamán wrote that the southern rebels had launched at least two assassination plots against Vice President Bustamante. Traveling on a passport supplied by Alamán, Picaluga returned to Acapulco from Mexico City. The minister of relations played another part in the plot by supplying out of the slush fund his ministry controlled about two-thirds, or nearly thirty-five thousand, of the fifty thousand pesos contracted with Facio as the price for cancelling the Italian’s debt to the government, covering the value of the Colombo, and buying his betrayal of Vicente Guerrero.18 Francisco Picaluga continued his dealings with Guerrero, awaiting an opportune moment to kidnap the ousted president and deliver him into the hands of government forces at Huatulco, about three hundred miles southeast of Acapulco on

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the coast of Oaxaca. Hoping to bring the military hostilities to an end but reluctant to take part in any plotting against Guerrero, on November 19 Miguel Barragán, the military commander of Jalisco, sent the former insurgent Manuel Zavala (1793–1878) south to present Guerrero and Alvarez with peace proposals. Zavala arrived just after Christmas 1830, talks began, and the insurgent chieftain committed himself to consider the proposals. At the end of the first week in January, Guerrero commissioned Picaluga to sail north with letters for Barragán, Facio, Anastasio Bustamante, and Alamán. With promising winds, Picaluga was ready to depart on 11 January. As a parting gesture he invited Guerrero and Zavala to dine aboard his ship, which was decked out with the Sardinian flag and other signs in recognition of Guerrero’s rank. The captain ordered a gun salute in honor of the visiting party, which turned out to be a signal to his fellow conspirators on shore that Guerrero was in his hands, so that the news could be relayed to Mexico City. From this point on in the episode the major accounts are primarily based on the later testimony of Manuel Zavala. About four o’clock Picaluga suddenly ordered the weighing of the anchor. It was too late for Vicente Guerrero or Zavala to disembark, although at least two of the other invitees escaped by jumping overboard into Acapulco Bay, and they were secured below decks. On 20 January the ship anchored at Huatulco, where military preparations had been undertaken in advance to resist any possible attempt by Guerrero’s followers to free their chief. Now the proceedings took on the form of a quickly convened court martial in the offing. Guerrero and Zavala were transferred to a Colombian ship riding at anchor off Huatulco, and statements were taken from Guerrero over several days by a young lieutenant acting as prosecutor (fiscal). Among the documents found in Guerrero’s papers upon his capture was a proclamation both eloquent and moving, which he had issued the preceding December. It read in part, Fellow countrymen: . . . The enemies of the popular federal system have attacked me in various ways, presenting me to everyone as the most horrible monster spit out by Nature. But in hurling their imprecations at me they have directed them not only against me personally, but against him who has always made war upon them, and will do so while he lives, in defense of the holy rights of the free and sovereign people of Mexico. . . . A handful of men, insignificant in their idleness, self-satisfied in the capital in the comfort furnished them through their inherited fortunes, were horrified by seeing their rights [made] equal to those of the poorest

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farmer or mule-driver. . . . Preferring to be slaves to a native or foreign despot rather than lose their ancient prerogatives, they decide to kiss the feet of an absolute lord rather than live mixed together with the people to whom they belong. This class of the nation, proud since the cradle, impotent by themselves, are spurred by their malice and seek means to put themselves in possession of their dreamt-of rights torn from them by the representatives of the people by means of the Federal Constitution . . . [B]ut in spite of realizing [the constitution] inexpungible, they doubt not to find means to undermine its foundations through secret and disguised means. . . . We conclude in saying that our war is that of the people against the oppressors who have hounded our representatives, driven the governors from their states, disarmed the civic militias, and squashed the ayuntamientos . . . and who have no other right to call us rebels than the greater number of their bayonets. . . . If I am a criminal for my 1829 administration, require me to answer for it before the competent tribunals, and the ministers who authorized my abuses will answer the charges. . . . But if none of this comes to pass, and [the charges against me] are only pretexts [for them] to exalt themselves, trampling the rights of the Mexican people, I swear before the sovereign nation to sacrifice myself for the sake of the patria and to exhale my last breath with the name of liberty on my lips.19 Putting aside the florid rhetoric and some exaggeration—few of the men in the highest reaches of the Bustamante government were rich from inherited wealth, least of all Alamán—this is not an altogether unfair indictment of the administración alamánica. The party went ashore on 26 January 1831, making its way to Oaxaca City under heavy military escort. Witnesses observed that the captured caudillo comported himself with great calm and dignity. A few days later the courtmartial, made up of ten army captains and headed by the future president Valentín Canalizo (1794–1850)—sometime iturbidista and santanista, exiturbidista and ex-santanista—was formed in Oaxaca City, where Guerrero was imprisoned in the Franciscan monastery. A variety of charges were brought against the former insurgent chieftain, including having fomented a revolution, raised the indigenous villagers of the south in a caste war against white Mexicans, conspired to sell Texas to the United States in exchange for arms to sustain his war effort, and more, none of which were supported by any but the flimsiest circumstantial evidence. Suffering now from fevers, Guerrero was too ill to defend himself effectively. Nor did his appointed military

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counsel mount a vigorous defense, mostly adducing the caudillo’s moral unfitness and stupidity as having made him the object of easy manipulation by others. The court-martial reached a unanimous verdict of guilty on 11 February and sentenced Guerrero to death. He was removed to the monastery town of Cuilapan a few miles to the south of Oaxaca City and executed by firing squad on 14 February 1831. About two weeks after these events Lucas Alamán sent out one of his periodic reseñas políticas to Mexican diplomatic representatives abroad that included the most recent number of the ministry’s Registro oficial, with this account of the trial and execution of Guerrero: This event has profoundly affected the emotions of the Excelentísimo Señor Vice President [i.e., Anastasio Bustamante] . . . because of the sad reflection that we seem condemned to see ending up on the gallows the men who in some way shared in the consecration of national independence. But when destiny shapes things so that the existence of some individual is in direct opposition to the public good, it is indispensable to sacrifice him for the sake of the community. In this case, that ill-fated general honored by his fellow citizens to a point enough to gratify any ambition, having arrived at the highest rank of the military and obtaining from their generosity the difficult-to-attain title benemérito, had not virtue enough to recognize that [to go] one step beyond the accepted limits would be his ruin. He launched an assault on the supreme magistracy and did not scruple to reach it, battering the national will and [menacing] the life and property of a multitude of people. If in the exercise of power he had met the needs and carried the votes of Mexicans, the means to acquire [office] would have been forgotten, and no one would have disputed his legitimacy. But unfortunately this period [of his presidency] was notable for disorder, [the violations of the constitution], and the national discredit. A revolution sanctified by the general will of the people was necessary to remedy such enormous ills. The general congress found it [the Jalapa uprising] just and declared General Guerrero unfit for the government; and despite this declaration to which he had been subjected, he promoted the most scandalous uprising to override it. . . . This last assault on the laws has led to his ruin. Let him be the last stain that the false patriots throw on the history of Mexico! The day is approaching, therefore, of the complete reestablishment of order, and although the revolutionaries try to disturb it again under a thousand pretexts, putting in play whatever means their criminality and desperation [suggest], the good

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sense of Mexicans, the zeal and vigilance of the states, and the energy of the government will overcome their plots.20 The military trial proceedings were marked by numerous legal aberrations and evidentiary weaknesses. At least one scholar has noted that among the “many and obvious” irregularities was the absence of any reliable evidence regarding Guerrero’s having conspired with Joel Poinsett to sell Texas to the US, one of the most damning accusations against him. Furthermore, although adjudged incapacitated by congress for service as president, he had not been divested of that office and thus technically remained chief magistrate of the nation with a high degree of immunity; any judicial action against him must therefore have started with congress and moved to the Supreme Court. By virtue of his rank as a general of division, from which there was no evidence that he had been dismissed, he was still covered by the military füero (privileged jurisdiction) but was not allowed to select his own defense counsel; and so forth. Furthermore, Secretary Facio was in more or less continual contact with the military authorities in Oaxaca, closely following the course of the court-martial and issuing directions as to its conduct. In effect, Guerrero was tried by a kangaroo court, legally speaking, rather than a procedurally correct court-martial: “The accused was judged and condemned by an incompetent tribunal that applied an unconstitutional law and imposed a sentence no longer valid.” This same scholar concluded that the outcome of the trial was predetermined and driven by the hatred of Guerrero’s enemies.21 What evidence there is, then, points to José Antonio Facio, if not as the sole author then as the major executor of the Guerrero killing, the ultimate responsibility for which must lie with Vice President Bustamante. On several occasions the war minister feigned surprise at the capture of Guerrero. For instance, according to the diary of Carlos María de Bustamante, after Guerrero had been taken to Oaxaca City, in a congressional session of 31 January, “[Facio,] like someone chewing a sweet potato [camote] [he] cannot swallow . . . said that [only] some days before had the government found out” about the chieftain’s departure from Acapulco and arrival at Huatulco. At this point in his life neither a friend of radicalism in general nor of Guerrero in particular, Bustamante would later mount a spirited defense of Alamán, unequivocally laying the plot at Facio’s door: The maneuver [i.e., the plot with Picaluga] was carried out by the minister of war himself, don José Antonio Facio, a man of impenetrable secrecy, so much so that when he proposed the idea to his fellow ministers

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at a meeting, they laughed and took him to be delirious or joking. “It is not a joke, gentlemen,” he told them. “The plan has been carried out, a measure I have taken after having tried as many as a dozen times [to kill Guerrero], in all of which I have been frustrated. Picaluga has committed a vile deed [bajeza] in violating the friendship of Guerrero, but I have fulfilled my duty. . . . This is what has happened and my heart is not disturbed by it, nor the peace of my soul upset.”22 The authors of México a través de los siglos wrote that pleas to spare Guerrero’s life from the state congress of Zacatecas, from Santa Anna himself, and from other influential figures did not sway the decision to execute him. Anastasio Bustamante wrote in a letter of 3 February, a full week before the court martial verdict and sentencing, “In a ministers’ meeting an initiative had been agreed to asking that [Guerrero] live in a foreign country with a pension considered adequate for a comfortable life, [and] with the prohibition [against ever] returning to Mexican soil. But having observed that opinion within and outside the congress manifested itself against this measure, it was not enacted, and he will probably be judged according to the laws. This misfortune weighs heavily on my heart, not only for any of our compatriots, but for any member of the human race.” As if this were not enough evidence of a preordained decision to kill Guerrero, there is a similar response by Bustamante to a letter from Santa Anna sent from the Hacienda Manga de Clavo on 15 February 1831, the day after Vicente Guerrero’s death.23 Anastasio Bustamante says nothing about either Facio or Alamán in these letters, charging the responsibility for the death sentence mostly to congress and public opinion, although the efficient instrument for the decision was the cabinet and the ultimate determination his own. Lucas Alamán’s earlier and very sympathetic biographer, José Valadés, devotes some pages in his book to discussing his biographee’s role in the Guerrero episode. In assessing Alamán as a personality, and therefore his likely disposition in the decision to execute Guerrero, Valadés writes that the authoritarian pictured by the minister’s enemies at the time and since “was not the true Alamán. Imaginative, he lacked the instinct of authority; he creates, but [does] not execute; he lectures but does not dispose. Creator and expositor: this was Alamán. He always speaks with the tone of a teacher; doctrine weighs too heavily within him. Of a peaceable and timid character—‘es de carácter tímido,’ wrote General Mier y Terán, who knew him well, to Mora (26 March 1831)—Alamán cannot be any different outside his home than within it. . . .

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An Alamán hatching the Acapulco plot with Facio and Picaluga is not the Alamán we have followed through these pages.” While this assessment is not entirely wide of the mark, I believe it is in some measure a misreading of Alamán’s character. He could be ruthless and decisive in action, although his personal reserve and obvious intellectuality might well have been mistaken for peacefulness and even timidity. As for War Minister Facio, whose character Valadés found antithetical to Alamán’s, his military calling disposed him to take “extreme and destructive measures” in a crisis. Valadés goes on to suggest that the rest of the episode beyond the capture of Guerrero unfolded in an ad hoc fashion, reflecting a complete lack of advance preparation or organized conspiracy. But then, with his analysis of Alamán’s character having planted severe doubt as to whether participation in such mortal plotting was a likely course of action for him, Valadés continues: The execution of Guerrero implies the moral responsibility of don Lucas. . . . In the later accusation made against the Bustamante ministers, it is asserted that the death of Guerrero was resolved in a ministerial meeting. The origin of this version [of events] originated in a letter from Vice President Bustamante to General Santa Anna. In it the execution of Guerrero is said to have been agreed to in a “junta de ministros,” although Bustamante hurried to write a second letter to Santa Anna blaming his [Bustamante’s] secretary for having made the reference to the meeting, even though this was not held. From this grew the story [of the ministerial junta], and must have had no other point of origin. The complicity of Alamán in the execution of Guerrero consisted in his silence.24 While certainly no absolution of the statesman, this verdict reduces him at best to a toady, at worst to a passive, morally compromised facilitator.

16 • The Reckoning

Alamán’s Defensa del ex-ministro Apart from Vice President Bustamante, who was never tried for the crime, the two men thought to be most deeply implicated in the decision to execute Vicente Guerrero were War Minister José Antonio Facio and Lucas Alamán. Born in Veracruz, Facio pursued a military career in Spain. Years after his return to his native Mexico he was heavily involved in Nicolás Bravo’s pronunciamiento against the Guadalupe Victoria government, the Tulancingo rebellion of 1827. Bustamante appointed him secretary of war and navy early in 1830, in which capacity he served until resigning on 19 January 1832. The other two members of Bustamante’s cabinet were Treasury Secretary Rafael Mangino and Secretary of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs José Ignacio Espinosa. Although in April 1833 Mangino and Espinosa were brought up before the congressional grand jury on the same set of charges as their fellow cabinet members, neither man came under much direct fire in the proceedings before congress, and they were absolved of the killing of Guerrero and the accompanying accusations.1 Called picaluganos by those who attached blame for Guerrero’s death to them, Facio and Alamán both published extensive, eloquent, highly indignant self-defenses. Alamán’s was published from his hiding place in Mexico City in 1834, Facio’s from his Parisian exile in 1835, the year before his death. Facio’s Memoria que sobre los sucesos del tiempo de su ministerio is some 250 pages plus several appendices, Alamán’s about 150 pages of text and notes.2 While not as heavily larded with classical, historical, or literary allusions as Alamán’s Defensa del ex ministro and written in an intelligent albeit less stylistically powerful prose, Facio’s Memoria bears the hallmarks of a thoughtful and angry if less philosophical man. What materials he had with him in his Paris exile to

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support his writing is unknown; at a minimum he had the printed trial proceedings.3 Alamán had the same document but lacked other items, since in a number of instances he could not verify quotations from other sources (e.g., Voltaire), which he might well have done had he had access to his personal library. Self-exculpatory as they are, the two responses are quite similar to each other, unsurprisingly, devoting most of their pages to refuting the first charge of the eight brought against them by General Juan Álvarez and Deputy José Antonio Barragán: “1. Of having permitted the murders [asesinatos] perpetrated on the patriots don Vicente Guerrero, don José Márquez, don Joaquín Garate, don Francisco Victoria, don Juan Nepomuceno Rosains, and don Juan José Codallos and the other victims sacrificed in Valladolid and other places.” The claims they make as to their innocence overlap a good deal: that the fate of the Republic turned on the neutralization of the caudillo and the conclusion of the Guerra del Sur; that the confused course of events was proof that no preexisting ministerial plot existed; that no contract had been made to that end with Francisco Picaluga; that the caudillo’s capture was an act of opportunity that surprised the government; that ministerial officials had not intervened in any way in the court-martial proceedings in Oaxaca; that the charges brought against the four ministers had been motivated by political animosities; that there was no credible evidence to support the charges; and so forth. To provide a framework for Alamán’s rather complicated story, a timeline of political and military developments in the country may prove helpful: 2 January 1831 May 1832 8 October 1832 6 November 1832 23 December 1832 10 February 1833 March 1833 1 April 1833 6 April 1833 April 1833 June 1833 5 November 1833 July 1834

Bravo defeats Guerrero at Chilpancingo Alamán resigns from the ministry Alamán takes refuge in British legation Gómez Pedraza assumes presidency Treaty of Zavaleta Juan Álvarez presents his charges in a petition to congress Santa Anna elected president with Gómez Farías as vice president New congress installed Barragán’s charges approved by Cámara de Diputados, forwarded to Grand Jury Alamán goes into hiding in Mexico City Proceso instructivo published Proposal in Cámara for perpetual exile of Alamán Alamán publishes his Defensa

the reckoning

late July 1834 28 July 1834 31 July 1834 22 December 1834 December 1834 January 1835 March 1835

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Alamán emerges from hiding Santa Anna quashes arrest orders against Alamán Supreme Court insists on its authority to try Alamán, old judges return C. M. de Bustamante defends Alamán before Supreme Court Alamán elected to congress Santa Anna resigns the presidency Alamán absolved by Supreme Court

Lucas Alamán’s Defensa del ex ministro placed the Guerrero episode against the larger backdrop of the political legitimacy of the Bustamante regime and was much more lawyerly in tone—although he was not a trained attorney— than Facio’s. His command of the details of the case as they were set forth in the Proceso instructivo was minute, and his ability to draw on literary and historical materials by way of trope, analogy, or precedent impressive and typical of his writing. Yet he adopts the same fundamental strategy as his fellow exminister’s self-defense: to impute to his accusers base political motives (the much-abused term “witch hunt” comes to mind) and to discount the validity of what evidence there was, while continually stressing that that evidence was too thin to have any probative value. In the end, his defense was primarily that any decisions taken regarding Guerrero did not fall within the sphere of his authority or duties as secretary of relations and could therefore not be assigned to his responsibility; that a government plot to rid the troubled republic of the rebel caudillo was simply implausible; that the military authorities in Oaxaca had not exceeded their legitimate authority in carrying out the courtmartial; and that as an enemy of the state and spiller of his countrymen’s blood Guerrero got what he deserved. But the value to readers of this book in a relatively close reading of Alamán’s self-defense lies in more than just synthesizing the essential arguments. As in the case of his other writings— whether monumental in scope, like the Historia de Méjico, or more intimate and on a much smaller scale—there is much to be gleaned by paying attention to the tone and style of the text, especially in that the author is a man as opaque by character and intention as Lucas Alamán. He began his self-exculpatory treatise with a paradoxical assertion: “Without pretending in any way to separate my case from that of my fellow exministers, I can answer only for what touches upon my particular responsibility, since that is what the Constitution imposes on the cabinet secretaries.”4 Separating himself from the accusations as they bore on his fellow accused

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was exactly what he was doing, needless to say. His strategy here was to distance himself from culpability in any collective decision or at least from complicity with that decision in the form of passive compliance, as the first charge against him proposed. This was Alamán’s oft-repeated main argument in addition to the claim that the accusations against him originated in the desire of liberal politicians under the Valentín Gómez Farías regime to square accounts with him for the thirty months or so he had held power under Bustamante. Some pages later he continued, I do not doubt that impartial readers will draw from [the documents relating to Guerrero’s capture and execution] the same conclusions as I: that I had no particular involvement in [the events], [and] since it was not a matter touching my ministry, I had no occasion to see the said documents, which I read for the first time, with the motive of writing this Defensa, when I saw them in the proceso. And this same circumstance persuades me that everyone who considers them without prejudice will be convinced that the arrival of Señor Guerrero at Huatulco not only surprised but confused all the military commanders of the state of Oaxaca, who found themselves with an unexpected situation for which they had received no warning. . . . And if I had neither duty nor authority [in the matter], where is the omission [in the duty to act], and where is the responsibility? Even were it to be proven that the government committed a grave miscarriage in not blocking the formation of the court-martial that tried Guerrero, “it would still be impossible to prove that I, as Secretary of Relations, was responsible for this omission. . . . In all the proceedings of the congressional section the eagerness to incriminate the men who formed the ministry under Señor Bustamante is clear.” Alamán concluded that he was being accused of guilt by association, out of personal and political motives, and that any actions taken to eliminate Vicente Guerrero would not in any case have been within the sphere of his ministerial responsibilities. In passing, the ex-minister advanced an extremely detailed account of the slush fund he controlled, the gastos secretos alleged to have supplied 34,500 pesos of the 50,000 pesos paid to Picaluga. The gist of this long, rather sinuously reasoned passage was to distance himself further from culpability in the affair, subtly throwing the blame on Facio, even though he is not named in the passage: As the name gastos secretos indicates, the minister [of relations] is not obliged to give an accounting of them, and his responsibility is limited

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to not exceeding the sum of 100,000 pesos dedicated annually in the budget. . . . [A]t that time [i.e., of the Guerrero episode] funds of this sort were set aside only for the Ministry of Relations. . . . I provided the [other] ministers with the amounts they required without intervening in any way in their expenditure, which in most cases I did not know about. And because of the frequent political disturbances [of the period], this occurred most often with the Ministry of War. . . . By virtue of what has been said, it is not easy to imagine how I could be responsible in this matter. As minister, certainly not, since my responsibility with that disbursement consisted only in not exceeding the budgeted sum. I repeat, it would be the most shocking injustice for me to be condemned, the Grand Jury having very justly absolved the Treasury Secretary, who in carrying out this affair played the same part as I, and in its execution even more, since by his order the money was delivered through the treasury, and by his hand changed to gold and handed over to the person who was to deliver it.5 His actions, he asserted, should be considered exclusively in the light of his legally prescribed sphere of responsibility, which did not touch on matters of war. Whatever the underlying truth of the situation, this seems both clever and disingenuous. Like Facio, Alamán insisted repeatedly that the grand jury had no plausible proof of any of the allegations, especially where the ministerial conspiracy and contract with Picaluga were concerned. He denied that the government’s agreement with the Italian embraced anything other than the use of his ship for military purposes.6 Alamán asserted as well that the unpreparedness of the government at every turn in the matter—a sort of Keystone Cops fumbling—proved that, contrary to the accusers’ claims, there had been no preexisting ministerial conspiracy to do away with Guerrero and that it had been an unforeseen event.7 All the government’s actions had been undertaken precipitously, indicating that there had been no planning, no conspiracy, and therefore no ministerial culpability. On the other hand, he repeatedly impugned not only the motives but the knowledge of his accusers, particularly Álvarez and Barragán, insisting that they clearly had no idea how the treasury or any other government agency worked. One of Alamán’s major angles of attack was to rebuke roundly the Gómez Farías government for the illegitimacy of its case in prosecuting the four exministers and for its irregular methods, seeking to bolster his contention that he was specifically being persecuted to settle political scores. The political

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narrative of this moment, after all, was that the Bustamante government was toppled by a pronunciamiento initiated by Santa Anna at the beginning of 1832. Santa Anna’s initial complaint was ostensibly over the removal by the government of his ally Pedro Landero as commander of the port of Veracruz. Opposition to the Bustamante regime had been building in private conspiracies since at least the end of 1831 as well as in the opposition press, despite Alamán’s partially successful efforts to throttle it. After a period of military stalemate, in mid-1832 Santa Anna gained the upper hand with the alliance of the Zacatecas governor Francisco García, who threw the powerful state militia onto the scales. By the end of the year Manuel Gómez Pedraza was returned to the presidency on an interim basis by the terms of the Pact of Zavaleta, under which Bustamante left office, his ministers (Alamán along with Ping, Pang, and Pong) having long since resigned. In the late winter of 1833 Santa Anna was elected president by congress, with the ultraliberal Valentín Gómez Farías as his vice president. Over the next two years or so, by dint of temporary license to command the army and health-related leaves of absence from office, Santa Anna was out of the president’s chair for nearly as much time, about fifty weeks, as Gómez Farías was in it, about forty-three weeks. This state of affairs is what brought the latter into collision with Alamán, who in his private correspondence tended to refer to the liberal politician as “Gómez Furias” (roughly, “Furious [or Raging] Gómez”). Alamán wrote that Gómez Farías’s government was “one of the most disastrous” in history. He was a tyrant comparable to the Emperor Tiberius (42 BC–37 AD), notoriously debauched in the latter years of his short reign: “Don Valentín Gómez Farías, to whom it was reserved to perpetrate among us, in the name of liberty, all the crimes that have stained the most detestable tyranny, did not want to show even the respect of Tiberius to public morality and decency.” The goal of this tyranny was to prosecute class warfare. After embarking on a long list of the crimes committed by the Gómez Farías regime, Alamán descended in detail to a specific irregularity of the government’s methods in pursuing its case against him while he was in hiding in Mexico City. The vice president, he asserted, had gone so far as to threaten personally the Alamán family servants to extract from them information about their master’s whereabouts: Señor Gómez Farías did not stop even at pressuring my servants to declare my whereabouts, acting on this occasion personally and without concealment, and taking upon himself the functions of prosecutor, judge, and even executioner. . . . He became infuriated to the point of

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threatening them with his fists (something unworthy of any honorable man, and more so of one occupying the office of first magistrate of the Republic!). And not content with this ill treatment, he ordered them jailed, where they remained for many days. Both [servants] were ignorant of the place of my residence, and one of them, my porter, had the courage to answer that raving beast that even if he knew he would never reveal it. Certainly a notable contrast between the noble behavior of a poor servant and the vileness of a man who pretends to pass for liberal and enlightened, and who occupies a position of honor and [public] representation! Roman law prohibited the forcing of servants to testify in the legal cases of their masters.8 Alamán tied the congressional grand jury’s alacrity in entertaining the charges put forth by Álvarez and Barragán and the distortions and fabrications of evidence to the destructive force of political factionalism (partido). He described himself as a man who deserved better at the hands of the government, essentially a disinterested public servant fallen victim of persecution, a perennial theme in his writings over the years. This is not to say he was paranoid, because he was often persecuted, in fact; but he did tend to see himself as a political martyr. In his Defensa he portrayed himself as “a man mature in age, of some social esteem, in a position of high distinction,” “defeated and humiliated” in the wake of the Jalapa government’s fall: It will be asked with reason, what was the object of so many intrigues [against me]? . . . Was it a matter of discovering through these means a dangerous conspiracy, of containing a destructive revolution, of squashing a terrible enemy? Nothing less than this: Four peaceful men [the cabinet ministers], shut up in their homes, living in the bosom of their families, not only obedient to the laws but bowing to all the caprices of the revolution, dedicated to the fulfillment of their domestic duties, without influence, without power, without pretentions, were the only target of so many shots. Their destruction had to be the object of so many machinations; the ruin and poverty of their large and respectable families the only fruit of so many efforts. And the sought-after glory boiled down to a revenge so much more vile and shameful, since it fell upon enemies [already] not only defeated but humiliated.9 As for the congressional grand jury, it had acted in “scandalously bad faith” in distorting some testimony in the case. “The enemies of the ex-ministers,” Alamán wrote, “had decided [beforehand] to sentence them by judges elected

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to this effect from among themselves.”10 This egregious prejudice directed toward him was prompted by the desire for vengeance of those political men who sought to vindicate the illegitimate Guerrero presidency, and behind this lay the venomous animosities of political factions mapped onto the old Yorquino/Escosés battles: “How the rage for persecution blinds [one]! Even to this point is good sense insulted when the power is held to suppress opinion! Thus is it that in the midst of the errors that an uninterrupted series of revolutions can produce in all political parties, the triumphant faction wishes to exercise the right to punish what it holds to be the opposition, reserving for itself at the same time [the right] to commit worse [crimes] and to outrage justice and reason, when it gives the appearance of avenging them.”11 Apart from impugning the motives and procedures of his accusers, Alamán vehemently disavowed ministerial intervention at any stage of the capture, trial, or sentencing of Guerrero. He denied the widespread canard become serious allegation that there had been a vote in the cabinet in which three members, including Alamán himself, had approved the death penalty and one had opposed it.12 Alamán defended the ruse used by Francisco Picaluga delivering Guerrero into the government’s hands not as a dishonorable betrayal but as a time-honored means to neutralize those who would foment civil strife.13 The author of the Defensa was at some pains to defend the government’s action against the caudillo on the grounds that he had essentially been guilty of lesa nación (to do wrong to the nation) in leading a fratricidal civil war. Of all the charges against Alamán, the one that fully touched a nerve was Juan Álvarez’s accusation that the Bustamante government—by which he meant the ex-minister—had “sent to the grave an Iturbide and a [Manuel Mier y] Terán.” While Terán was in the north of the country before his death by suicide in 1832, he and minister Alamán carried on a very friendly, almost intimate correspondence over several months. Here, Alamán offered the closest thing to a eulogy he ever wrote for his friend Terán: I should answer an imputation of general Álvarez as odious as it is unfounded, who, accusing the government of señor Bustamante of the death of señor Guerrero, says not conjecturally but definitively that “The same [men] sent to the grave an Iturbide and a Terán.” I cannot allow this to stand without objection. Señor Iturbide was condemned by virtue of a decree of the general congress, by which he was proscribed if he showed himself on the territory of the Republic. The deputies of the Constituent congress gathered at that time approved the proposal, one

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of the deputies being señor Gómez Farías, and some gentlemen [who are] present governors of states, and other individuals who now find themselves in important posts in the federation. It would be excessive to speak of the death of general Terán were [it] not a proof of the thoughtlessness [Álvarez] has demonstrated in everything. No one in the republic, except possibly he, is unaware that general Terán took his own life, and many know of the very close friendship that joined him to me. His death was to me a cause of deep sadness, more so since I knew what the nation was losing in the person of a man always guided by principles of honor and rectitude and gifted with a clear talent, cultivated by an uncommon learning. . . . Two days before his death he wrote to me in confidence in a letter something like his political testament. . . . His sensitive soul could not support the specter of the public disasters he felt were growing . . . [and] continually present before his imagination, ended by disturbing his reason and precipitating him to attempt upon his own life. . . . These were the bonds that connected me with the man to whose death general Álvarez accuses me of having contributed. This is the indelicacy with which he deals in such grave matters, which stain the reputation of an honorable man; and this [shows] the credit merited by all the accusations he makes against me.14 Finally, Alamán offered a robust defense against the accusation that he had done everything in his power to undermine the system of government laid out in the national charter of 1824, working to “alter the representative, popular, federal system to another form coinciding with his [centralist] views, even should the change contradict the wishes of the nation.” He spent several pages refuting this notion, which loomed largest in the bill of allegations after the assignment of guilt for the murder of Guerrero. Here Alamán offered a sort of extended philosophical cogitation on the nature of political conservatism and of deep and abrupt political change: In effect, the intent to alter the political system of a nation supposes a complete upending of this [system], which can be realized only by means of a revolution, the more terrible, the more the number of individual interests it attacks. [I]t is only undertaken when public matters have come to such a point that the ills being suffered are definitely more unbearable than the doubtful [outcomes] that may come to pass. This distinguishes very clearly the revolutions that are the effect of the general will from those that are the work of a faction. Everyone who has

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attempted artificially to stir up a revolutionary movement has invariably begun by sowing discontent with everything existing in order to stimulate the desire for a change. On the other hand, those who wish to conserve the present state of affairs attempt to assure it on the basis of prosperity and public order. . . . Certainly the mass of the population does not aspire to a [revolutionary] change, when well-being is found in order. If in [order] the peaceful citizen finds security for his person and his property; the capitalist, confidence in his dealings; and the worker and the soldier, predictability in their wages, there will be no attraction toward change, in which not only will there not be any advance, but on the contrary they would risk in the midst of the vicissitudes consequent to a general upheaval the well-being that in fact they are enjoying. It will not be necessary to demonstrate that all those conditions [i.e., security of persons and property, etc.] prevailed under the government whose members are today the objects of cruel persecution. The most uninformed but impartial observers, and even [that government’s] most bloodthirsty enemies, cannot now deny it, since, to avail myself of the words of a celebrated ancient historian (Tito Livio, XXII:39), “Eventus stultorum magister est” (Experience is the teacher of fools): The occurrence comes to disillusion even the most careless with a terrible lesson.15 . . . Secret societies are the easiest means to effect a revolutionary movement, in that through them action is transmitted rapidly from a central point to the extremities, [since] it counts everywhere on active collaborators obedient to the orders of the central society.16 Vague and undeveloped though it may be, there is definitely a theory of revolution buried within this passage bearing a close resemblance to classical ideas justifying violent resistance to tyranny: that revolution is justified when public ills have become more intolerable than the possible unforeseeable outcomes of assassination or the trashing of the entire political system through mass upheaval. But Alamán poses four problems that tend away from revolution as a solution to tyranny or other political ills. First, the result of a revolution is unpredictable, so that the better course of action may be to leave things as they are rather than embark on a highly risky undertaking that thoughtful men would avoid, knowing from history that the outcome may be more intolerable than the condition they seek to remedy. Second, on what basis is a collective decision to be made about whether prevailing circumstances justify revolution? His answer carries more than a whiff of the Burkean: that if peace

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and prosperity reign, there is no sufficient reason to change things, least of all through violent upheaval. Assuming that the benefits of peace and prosperity must be unequally distributed across society, he does not address the issues of who the beneficiaries of this blessed state may be or of who gets to make the decision. This is a typically aristocratic/oligarchical position but would not have troubled Alamán. Third, there is the problem of how revolution is made. Alamán suggests implicitly that it must be the product of the general will, not of conspiratorial factions. He does not say anything about the means by which the general will is to be ascertained but does seem to imply that the enjoyment of peace and prosperity must bring agreement to the prevailing political arrangements through a sort of civil passivity: qui tacet, consentit. Finally, he places the blame for the troubles of the early 1830s on the operation of “secret societies”—that is, the Yorkino party operating from Mexico City. This move links the impulse for ill-advised revolution—namely, Guerrero’s coup d’état and the Guerra del Sur—to a faction, thus delegitimizing it from one side, and to the French Jacobins, which delegitimizes it from the other side through their association with two of Alamán’s favorite bogeymen, the French Revolution and the Jacobins. The extended discussion of the Defensa offered here certainly hits some of the high points and conveys the tone of Lucas Alamán’s self-defense—his indignation, the scorn he heaped upon his accusers, something of his political philosophy and ideas about the way government worked, and the detail he was able to marshal even though he had been in hiding, presumably in near-complete seclusion, while he was writing it. Although it occurs earlier in the text, the following short passage sums up his attitude toward his accusers and the congressional grand jury that had heard the allegations: “Upon seeing this uninterrupted series of injustices, absurdities, [and] illegalities from those who occupy a place in the highest body [i.e., the congress] of the nation, one can exclaim with more reason than General Álvarez in his accusation: In qua urbe vivimus? Is it a society, a nation governed by laws that we are living in?”17 Carlos María de Bustamante offered to defend Alamán, submitting a memoria on his behalf to the Supreme Court at the end of December 1834, although it is not clear under what auspices—as an interested party, a formal defender of the accused, or an amicus curiae.18 Trained as a lawyer in his youth, Bustamante famously made his career as a journalist, politician, historian, and public intellectual. The version of his brief I have encountered is among Alamán’s personal papers in the Carso (formerly Condumex) archive in Mexico City, quite probably in Bustamante’s own hand, dated 22 December

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1834. It was addressed to the sitting judges of the Sala Tercera de Justicia of the Supreme Court, Pedro Vélez, Juan José Flores Alatorre, and Manuel de la Peña y Peña, all distinguished jurists. The document bore a curious epigraph drawn from a legislative dictionary and surely not intended to flatter the judges: “Criminal lawyers [criminalistas] have been exterminators looking for victims everywhere”—that is, overlooking innocence where it is truly to be found. The long statement, described by José Valadés as declamatory, was addressed directly to the Supreme Court in the matter of the charges brought against Alamán and José Antonio Facio (who by this time had fled to London, on his way to Paris) before the Cámara de Diputados, chiefly in the matter of Vicente Guerrero’s death.19 Bustamante’s rhetorical style contrasted sharply with Alamán’s. For example, the former tended to cite biblical figures and episodes in his allusions, the latter classic authors like Cicero and contemporary political events. The statement is a long one that makes for engaging reading although it is virtually incoherent at points. It introduces no new argument or evidence in the ex-minister’s defense but instead elaborates on points made more coolly and succinctly by the accused himself. While citing Alamán’s international reputation, Bustamante portrayed him as the victim of the same sort of national ingratitude visited upon other great men of history, among them Christopher Columbus. He reiterated Alamán’s own lengthy if implausible defense that since affairs neither of war nor justice fell within the purview of his ministry, he had nothing to do with any plot against Guerrero. Cabinet meetings he painted as basically benign tea parties in which decisions such as eliminating Guerrero were unlikely to have been taken by consensus. Nor was there any personal animosity, he insisted, between Alamán and Vicente Guerrero. In advancing these and other arguments, some reasonable, others fanciful, he made a number of detours, for example, into the biblical tale of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes as a justified act of war and Emerich Vattel’s theories on the law of nations.20 How seriously the judges took these effusions or how much weight they were accorded in the trial proceedings is difficult to determine—probably very little.

A Summation I do not think the question at the center of this complicated affair—whether there was a vote in a ministerial meeting, in essence, to direct the Oaxaca court-martial to return a sentence of death against Guerrero, and, if so, which

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minister voted which way—is resolvable to anyone’s complete satisfaction. Where Alamán’s role is concerned, those historians who have portrayed him as the eminence gris of the Bustamante administration have pinned the blame for Guerrero’s execution on him, supported by War Minister Facio and Vice President Bustamante himself. No matter what Alamán’s or anyone else’s part in the episode actually was, the quite plausible goal was to bring the Guerra del Sur to a close, and the unavoidable means were the elimination of Vicente Guerrero. The conservative cabinet members would also have sought to eliminate a politically radical populist hero and former president around whom the discontent of the great unwashed might coalesce yet again; a destabilizing influence, in other words. Vicente Guerrero was a man of color, so that racialist ideas, if not racism outright, might well have figured in any decisions. Those who would shift the responsibility to someone else, at least partially absolving Alamán, lay the blame squarely on Facio. It has also been suggested that General Nicolás Bravo, an old companion in arms of Guerrero who had defeated him on the battlefield at Chilpancingo in January 1831, in some way exerted pressure to eliminate Guerrero as the settlement of an old personal score. The written evidence in the case and oral testimony by witnesses to various events were highly contradictory, and living principals changed their stories over time. The most convincing piece of evidence that a cabinet meeting had actually taken place to decide Guerrero’s fate, probably in early February, took the form of a highly disputed letter (was it altered, etc.) from Anastasio Bustamante to Santa Anna that ended up in the hands of Guerrero’s widow. This document stated that there had been a ministerial meeting at which three votes out of four were cast in favor of executing the caudillo. Why there should even have been the need for a meeting in the first place is not clear because there was no formal prescription, constitutional or otherwise, for how to proceed in such a situation, and the vice president could well have directed the court-martial verdict on his own initiative. A cabinet meeting and vote, however, would obviously have taken much of the onus of the decision off the vice president since he could claim it was a collective judgment made at the highest level of the executive. In fact, Bustamante himself was never tried, except in the press, in any venue for his involvement. He changed his story about the junta de ministros over the years, first affirming, then denying it. Shortly before his death Lucas Alamán told José María Tornel that there had been a meeting; that he and Mangino had voted for exiling Guerrero to South America, Facio and Espinosa for execution; and that Bustamante had broken the tie in favor

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of a death sentence. The arithmetic here does not jibe with Bustamante’s account, however, which did not assign names to votes. Alamán naturally had ample reason to lie to Tornel, both to clear his name in posterity and to lift any possible opprobrium from his children, but on this point the truth is unknowable. One thing can definitely be laid at Alamán’s door: he supplied 34,500 pesos from his secret ministerial slush fund to make up the 50,000 pesos paid to Picaluga. Despite his detailed account of how such transfers were made within the government, that he could have approved this without knowing the purpose of the transfer is virtually impossible to believe. He attempted to shift the responsibility for this and the concomitant knowledge of the plot against Guerrero onto Treasury Secretary Mangino, who was absolved early of any culpability by congress. The most likely scenario, it seems, is that there was a ministerial meeting that went unrecorded, that a vote was taken, and that Alamán probably voted in favor of exile, as he later told Tornel. Astute as he was, he would have realized the political implications of killing Guerrero under suspicious circumstances. He would also have taken into account that exile, whether perpetual or limited in time, was a very common punishment for political crimes at the time. Moreover, he himself admitted that his ministry supplied funds, presumably with no questions asked, to Facio’s war ministry for the payment to Picaluga. It seems highly probable, therefore, that he was privy to the plan to capture Guerrero at least at the point that it was operationalized, if not at the planning stage, if there was a planning stage. Nor is his disavowal of knowledge of what the other ministers were doing, echoed in his defense by Carlos María de Bustamante, entirely convincing. His reasoning seems to have been that the ministries were constitutionally set up to function independently of each other; that each department chief was solely responsible for the actions of his own secretariat; that there must have been some sort of informational firewall between them; and that therefore he could not have known what Facio planned to do with the caudillo. As a defense against complicity in the Guerrero killing, this seems very weak. José Valadés’s conclusion is perhaps the most well considered: Lucas Alamán was morally culpable in the irregular process that led to Guerrero’s death. Certainly in the matter of the funding for Picaluga he shared responsibility as a facilitator of the fatal process being played out. As many historians have suggested, José Antonio Facio appears to have been the prime mover, with Alamán—perhaps with strong reservations, perhaps not—as a sort of accomplice and Vice President Bustamante putting his imprimatur on the final decision. While Alamán may not have shrugged

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off the death verdict as a matter of little importance, in other words, neither did he run from the room (if there was a room) tearing his hair when the decision was made.

Alamán’s Self-Exile Maestus eram . . . I was melancholy; solace, not fame, has been my object, that my mind dwell not constantly on its own woes. This passage from Ovid is the epigraph of Lucas Alamán’s truncated Memorias (see chapter 2). It opens his account of his internal self-exile within Mexico City between the spring of 1833 and summer of 1834, an account on the whole as unrevealing as it is eloquent, uncharacteristically emotional, and more than a little self-pitying. Not without some justification, he saw himself as being persecuted and martyred and most probably marginalized by the ingratitude of the nation. He was not sent into hiding, after all, while the accusations against him and the other ministers of the Anastasio Bustamante cabinet were tried. He fled into hiding on his own out of apprehension that he might be imprisoned, or worse, since men he correctly regarded as his political enemies were now in control of the government, sought to reverse the centralization Alamán had championed, and were out to avenge the death of Guerrero. On the other hand, this period of self-concealment could not have been easy. There was in effect an all-points bulletin out for him over large areas of the country, not just in the capital; his family was watched, their mail monitored, and his domestics closely interrogated, both in Mexico City and at his Celaya hacienda; and there was at least one search group looking for him in the provinces. Although during his sequestration he managed to stay on top of some of his business affairs, many of them languished. And when he writes of the “illness or death of persons dear to me” he may well have been referring to the death of his young son Pedro, who was born on 1 August 1830 and died sometime in 1834, possibly a victim of the cholera epidemic of 1833. Alamán wrote, as readers will recall, I began to write this work during the persecution I suffered in the year 1833. My object was not, and is not, to publish it, at least during my lifetime. [I wrote] closed up in a room furnished to me by the generosity of a friend in the most secret part of his house, without seeing or dealing with anyone . . . and fleeing the fury of those men who then [at the time

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of his going into hiding] dominated and who in the name of liberty exercised the most horrible despotism. When the only thing that interrupted the silence of my asylum was news of the illness or death of persons dear to me, torn [from us] daily and in great numbers by the cruel epidemic suffered in that year [throughout] the Republic, or news of the persecution, arrest, or exile of my best friends, my spirit required some distraction to drag it away from the dark thoughts inspired by all that was occurring. Sequestered entirely from the world, even if I lacked that tranquility and unburdened heart that works of imagination require, my very isolation allowed me that concentration of ideas and that seriousness of meditation that [the writing of] critical history demands . . . although my return to the bosom of my family and the new occupations to which I had to dedicate my time, as much public as private, forced me to interrupt the writing of these memoirs. . . . The plague of Florence provided occasion or argument for the novels of Boccaccio; the horrible pestilence that today desolates Mexico City and in two weeks of the month of August in this year of 1833 has taken 11,000 of its inhabitants, accompanied by a revolution that increases the damage [wrought by the epidemic], is what puts the plume in my hand. I am not that great ingenious Florentine, nor do I write among beautiful women and gallant gentlemen, nor in the perfume of gardens or surrounded by delicacies, but shut up in a room.21 Neither Alamán himself nor those writing about him tell us much, if anything, with regard to the nearly sixteen months of his deep reclusion from the public eye, where in the city he was during this time, or with whom he was in contact. Besides beginning his memoirs, during these months he composed his Defensa without access to his papers or library, making it all the more impressive a document; it was published within a few days of his emergence from hiding in the summer of 1834. He wrote that while his accusers threw every possible piece of documentation at him and every witness they could muster, “I, as a fugitive and in hiding, can only cite those documents that occur to memory, nor [can I] present more proofs of my assertions [of my innocence] than those same testimonies that my accusers have marshaled against me, and are found in the proceso instructivo formed by the grand jury section of the Chamber of Deputies, which in violation of the laws has been printed and published by act of [the chamber].”22 In his autobiography of 1843 Alamán noted of this period only that “there followed a period of persecution and disasters. I had to hide myself on the . . . [sic] of April of 1833 to save my life,

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which my enemies undoubtedly wanted to take. . . . The revolution again led by General Santa Anna permitted me to emerge from my hiding place. My case was adjudicated by the Supreme Court and I was absolved.” In her short biography of Alamán, Paola Morán Leyva, almost certainly following José Valadés, says only that when the storm of accusations against the ministers broke, Alamán “had to flee and hide for almost two years.” Valadés offers a more robust version than just a half sentence but no details: “Bitter days would follow in the life of don Lucas. He would have to go from one convent to another; he would need to remain [for] weeks and months in narrow, dark cells; his family would live under the vigilance of the government. Nonetheless, from among his sleepless nights and anxieties he would leave two great monuments—one legal and the other political—that even without the Disertaciones and the Historia de Méjico would suffice to make his reputation . . . : the Defensa and the Examen imparcial.”23 The anonymously written Apuntes para la biografía del Exmo. Sr. D. Lucas Alamán, almost certainly composed by one of his sons and published in 1854, the year after Alamán’s death, renders a somewhat longer and more rhetorically florid account than any other except his own but adds little in the way of concrete information: [Asserting] the right that any man has to defend his life when unjustly threatened, he took the only course left to him, which was to hide while the tempest passed. Disheartened because the victim they so desired to sacrifice had escaped their hands, his enemies took measures to achieve his capture. . . . It will be easy to suppose Alamán’s many sufferings during more than a year of hiding. Separated from his wife and children while a devastating pestilence destroyed entire families in [just] a few hours, his affairs in ruins, he received news of the exile of good men . . . and the rumors of civil war. A new turn of the wheel brought a close to that situation, and Alamán could emerge from his seclusion.24 What had precipitated Alamán’s flight into hiding? Some additional background about the two years leading up to it will help to put his reclusion into context.

The Fall of the Bustamante Regime Alamán believed that Nicolás Bravo’s military victory over Vicente Guerrero’s forces at Chilpancingo on 2 January 1831 would bring the Guerra del Sur to an end, “announcing the rapid reestablishment of the peace so needed by

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the country”; and then that the caudillo’s death about six weeks later would consolidate that peace definitively.25 Despite the decision of the other major leaders of the Guerrero uprising to continue military action after his death, the rebellion began to wind down: Álvarez accepted terms from Bravo and withdrew from the fray in mid-April, Gordiano Guzmán in May, and others around the same time.26 Never one to mark time idly, the minister went about the business of government. Presented to the congress on 7–8 January 1831, his ministerial informe provoked a critical hailstorm that continued through the end of the year. Pamphlets were published in all quarters of Mexico, while a typically violent denunciation in Quintana Roo’s El Federalista laid all the country’s troubles at Alamán’s feet, demanding his separation from the ministry. At the end of the year Vicente Rocafuerte started publishing the newspaper Fénix de la Libertad, writing a long pamphlet directed largely against the minister, Consideraciones generales sobre la bondad de un gobierno (General considerations on the generosity of a government). Alamán riposted with his own anonymous pamphlet against Rocafuerte, Un regalo de año nuevo para el Sr. Rocafuerte (A new year’s gift for Sr. Rocafuerte). In response to this volley of political attacks the minister ginned up a government decree allowing the objects of defamations or libels to sue the authors. In the face of all this Alamán considered resigning his cabinet post but hesitated because of his desire to see through various pending projects. Also dissuading him were pleas from his ministerial colleagues, joined by Santa Anna in a letter of June, who judged a possible Alamán exit from the government “an evil to the public cause.”27 In the meantime, former Yorquinos and moderate Escoseses, among them Quintana Roo, Manuel Crescencio Rejón, and other political figures began conspiring to bring Gómez Pedraza back to the presidency in place of Anastasio Bustamante.28 Outside the capital the backlash against the Bustamante regime gained momentum even as the Guerra del Sur fizzled out. In Jalisco the military commandant Ignacio Inclán clamped down on press freedom at the end of 1831—Alamán was charged with having abetted this—stirring up a hornet’s nest of protest that led quickly to the flight of the state legislature to the city of Lagos and a desperate appeal by Governor Cañedo for support from other states. Zacatecas, which had a powerful civic militia, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí offered their alliance, and the leaders of this movement in short order coalesced around the demand that Manuel Gómez Pedraza occupy the presidency to which he had been elected in 1828, a demand that converged

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with the plotting of liberals in Mexico City. In the meantime, War Minister Facio had removed Colonel Pedro Landero (1800–32)—he would be killed in the Battle of Tolomé two months later—from command of the port of Veracruz, prompting the disaffected Landero to pronounce the Plan of Veracruz on 2 January 1832. His manifesto accused the central government of seeking to cripple the federalist system. Santa Anna quickly assumed leadership of the movement, whose demands soon escalated to the removal of the four ministers deemed responsible for the attacks against federalism, an accusation true enough, evade it though Alamán might. This new turn of events obviously implied a volte-face by Santa Anna, who, in a letter of January 1832, six months after characterizing his possible withdrawal from the ministry as a public disaster, urged Alamán to resign from the cabinet: Some time ago, unfortunately, [public] opinion began to be heard against the present ministry, which at first I attributed to certain maneuvers by the personal enemies never lacking to those who govern. But more recently I have seen [that opinion] grow and extend itself like a storm. . . . I will not now pretend, my valued friend, to enter into an enumeration of the talents and personal qualities of the gentlemen who make up the ministry. But the question of the day now is another, because in the various states of the Republic a cry has been raised that demands emphatically that the ministry not continue, and you know how important it is to placate that opinion in our country. This is the place to suggest the importance of [the solution], which for you would come to be a sacrifice if I did not know that I am speaking to a person marked, as you are, by his talents, generosity [of character], and patriotism. These same considerations convince me that for you the sacrifice will be minor, given the great utility to be derived from it and the damages to be avoided. And so I believe that without the necessity of noisier measures you tender your resignation, which will preserve your personal dignity and do you considerable credit. Believe the sincerity of my profession that I want nothing other than what public opinion desires. No revolutions, as I have told you before; nothing of [self-] aggrandizement; not to carry on [with] disorganizing parties. No: far from [all] that, I can assure you that as soon as I have positive news of [public] opinion having been satisfied, I will once more sheath my sword and dedicate myself to the peaceful cultivation of my poor properties and the sweet tranquility of Manga de Clavo.29

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One can only imagine the depth of Alamán’s irritation, which the starchiness of his response suggests, upon receiving this letter from the Mexican Cincinnatus. Rather than responding in kind to Santa Anna’s address to him as “mi amigo apreciable,” his more distanced salutation was directed to “Muy señor mio” (My dear sir): “I hope that it [the enclosure—probably a copy of his ministerial informe of a few days before] and the entire [course] of my public life will convince you that I am not capable of having anything done on my behalf that will bring any ill upon the nation, and that my conduct is never directed toward ambitious or hidden objects. How happy the Republic if everyone in her could say the same with equal truth!”30 It is virtually impossible to believe that this last barb was not directed at Santa Anna himself. The minister went about urging the recruitment of the civic militia to defeat the Santa Anna pronunciamiento. Meanwhile, to prick the resignation of the ministry along, Santa Ana was writing to Bustamante in a highly negative register about Alamán: “Nonetheless, before you were able to answer my official and private notes, and to reach a decision about the said petition [to dismiss the ministry], Señor Alamán has employed every possible means, as I have learned from trustworthy sources, to present it [the petition] in a light furthest from the truth, calling it an attempted coup, a rebellion, etc., adding the notorious falsehoods so abundant in the newspapers he directs and the pamphlets by authors he pays, directing at my person the greatest insults, which offend even public decency.” Armed hostilities could be avoided if the vice president would only replace the present ministry with one that “merits public confidence:” “Let us not fool ourselves, my dear friend; open your eyes and recognize the evils perpetrated by the ministers, in particular Señor Alamán. The nation cries for his removal, and if this general wish is not satisfied, God knows where the violent course of things will lead us.”31 By February 1832 Santa Anna was leading a full-scale rebellion against the central government, in which fighting was to grind on to the ultimate advantage of the pronunciados. The rebel demands had now clearly widened to include the removal of Vice President Bustamante himself, not just his cabinet. Through the spring more military politicians and their forces piled on against the government: the State of Jalisco formally recognized Gómez Pedraza as president, Zacatecas declared against the government, and the amnestied chieftains of the Guerra del Sur, principal among them Juan Álvarez, reemerged to take up armed opposition. In the spring advice with regard to Alamán’s resignation came to him from a quarter that would influence his decision more heavily than others because of the personal friendship that

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stood behind it. This was General Manuel Mier y Terán, with whom he had served in the cabinet in his earlier ministry and become friends and who was three months away from his famous suicide on 3 July 1832. In his Historia de Méjico Alamán wrote of Mier y Terán that he was “one of the most sensible and deeply intelligent men I have known, whom Morelos considered the most important commander of the insurrection” after Morelos himself.32 Wrote the general to the minister in early April 1832: To no one is it a secret that the resignation of the present ministers will not be sufficient to terminate the war: he who started it [i.e., Santa Anna] had no such object [in mind], nor does his situation permit him to be satisfied with [such a separation]. But it is true that up until now they [i.e., Santa Anna and his allies] do not want to base [the war] on any other pretext, and everyone is obliged to work toward the true kernel of the question, which is that there [needs to be] a Government. The rebels still have much to do to arrive at the achievement of their goals. . . . In such circumstances I am of the opinion that your resignations [i.e., the four ministers’] should be accepted, and that immediately Señor Bustamante name [as replacements] García, Governor of Zacatecas; [Melchor] Múzquiz, Pavón, [and] who knows who else. I do not know if Dr. Mora, who was a deputy in the Mexican Congress, is still living [he was].33 Under mounting pressure from many sides, ministers Facio, Espinosa, Mangino, and Alamán tendered their resignations en masse, only to have them refused by Bustamante as the opposing sides faced each other in a rapidly accelerating civil conflict. Lucas Alamán resigned again in early May and made it stick this time, but this was not known publicly until 20 May. Facio had been the first to leave the government, on 19 January 1832; Espinosa preceded his colleague Alamán by three days, stepping down on 17 May; and Mangino was the last out the door, on 14 August. Presidential elections were scheduled for 1 September 1832 but never took place. In the lead-up to them, however, Mier y Terán was increasingly invoked as the most viable candidate. Of moderate republican tendencies himself, he maintained solid contact with men across the political spectrum, from Alamán on one end to Governor of Zacatecas Francisco García on the other. But Terán resisted overtures about the presidency. Burdened by health problems and by what he saw as the unavoidable loss of Texas to the Americans, he became depressed and resolved to commit suicide. He attested his friendship in a letter to Alamán the day before he took his life by falling on his sword,

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Roman-style: “A great and respectable Mexican nation, a nation of which we have dreamed and for which we have labored so long, can never emerge from the many disasters which have overtaken it. . . . My soul is burdened with weariness. I am an unhappy man, and unhappy people should not live on earth. . . . The spirit is uncomfortable, it commands me to set it free, and it is necessary to obey.”34 In the chaotic military and political circumstances prevailing in the country at the time, the imminent elections failed to meet constitutional criteria and were voided by the Treaty of Zavaleta at the end of 1832. At Santa Anna’s urging Gómez Pedraza returned from his New Orleans exile on 6 November to take the presidency on an interim basis until new elections could be held, thus filling out the last months of the four-year term to which he had been elected in 1828. By year’s end the pronunciamiento headed by Santa Anna had fought Bustamante’s forces to a standstill. The fall of the Bustamante government and a call for renewed elections for congress (15 February 1833) together with a fresh presidential poll (1 March 1833) were ratified by the Treaty of Zavaleta of 23 December 1832, to which the major parties were all military men rather than civilians: Bustamante, Gómez Pedraza, and Santa Anna. Reynaldo Sordo Cedeño has written of the treaty that there was “no doubt of its praetorian nature. The army made itself the restorer of constitutional order, breaking all the dispositions of the constitution.”35 When the three signatories of the treaty entered Mexico City on 1 January 1833, Santa Anna in particular was given an adulatory welcome by the populace. The congressional elections of February 1833 were preceded by a barrage of political propaganda in the liberal press vilifying the members of the previous congress and the “Picaluga administration,” proclaiming that the “war had ended but not the revolution.” Sharp criticism and complaint about the riotous nature of the elections came from the right as well as from political moderates like Mora. Richard A. Warren has described many of the newly elected congressmen as “dedicated but inexperienced radicals.” There were also seasoned liberal politicians such as Mariano Riva Palacio (Vicente Guerrero’s son-in-law), Juan Rodríguez Puebla, and Juan Pablo Anaya, Lucas Alamán’s old foe from the mid-1820s. The presidential elections of March put Santa Anna, espousing liberal principles for the moment, into the president’s chair and the Jalisco-born physician and radical liberal Valentín Gómez Farías, considerably to Santa Anna’s left politically, into the vice presidency. As he was to do on a number of occasions, Santa Anna almost immediately withdrew to his Veracruz hacienda, Manga de Clavo, leaving his vice president in charge of the executive. Having wandered

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in the political desert for three years, the ultras came back to the center of power around Gómez Farías: Andrés Quintana Roo, Lorenzo de Zavala, and others. The Gómez Farías administration embarked immediately on a program of radical reforms directed principally at the army and the Church. According to the conservative outs and even moderates the specter of the sansculottes and Jacobins stalked the streets of the capital, and political revanchisme became the order of the day in one of the wildest pendulum swings of the early republican era.

Return to Private Life and a Rehearsal for Exile During the ten months between his resignation from the Bustamante cabinet in late May 1832 and his withdrawal into reclusion in early April 1833, Lucas Alamán returned to the life of a private citizen, but his political involvements were still deep. Even as Vice President Bustamante appeared to be gaining some ground militarily against the rebels during Alamán’s final months in the cabinet, the minister was pessimistic about the state of the war and at no pains to hide it. To Terranova in Palermo he wrote on 1 May 1832, “In the public realm we continue without peace being reestablished, since Veracruz [held by Santa Anna] has still not been taken, and in Tampico there have been disturbances similar to those in Veracruz. We hope that everything quiets down, since if the calamity of the civil war goes on longer [both public and private interests will be gravely damaged].”36 His departure from the presidential cabinet had not removed him from the public eye, and his opponents still deemed him a nefarious force in politics. In mid-June 1832, for example, about a month after Alamán resigned, in speculating about how Manuel Gómez Pedraza might return to the presidency, Andrés Quintana Roo expressed the fear that if Bustamante and the entire government were not completely overthrown, Alamán “or some other beast of the same ilk” might actually be elected president by the sitting congress: “The best way to solve all the difficulties is to finish destroying these tyrants who, supported by the superstition and the aristocracy of the country, and still more by the spirit of Spain (always frightening in the Republic), exert powerful efforts to prevail, beating down the popular party, which is what we need to make triumph or live as slaves all our lives. . . . We [should] guard against Alamán, even though he is not a minister. In effect he is the principal agent of the Madrid court.”37 Undaunted by threats accompanying such imputations of villainy, Alamán continued to manage the affairs of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone in

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Mexico and to pursue business interests of his own. Wanting to make improvements to his Hacienda de Trojes in Celaya but lacking the cash, in September Alamán mortgaged his house in the city center, on the Primera Calle de San Francisco at Calle Vergara, for fifteen thousand pesos.38 As in 1825, Frederick Huth congratulated him on his being free of the heavy responsibilities and cares of major public office in a time of national crisis. Huth’s letter anticipated by several days Lucas Alamán’s to him in which the ex-minister expressed his desire to restore the economic position of his family from its erosion and asked for business referrals from the Huth firm: Now being free of public attentions, I am going to dedicate and widen my dealings and business relations to compensate in this way with useful and productive work the time I have lost in public service that has given me nothing but upsets. I would be most grateful to you [if you might] secure [on my behalf] business commissions and relationships of all sorts, assuring your friends who wish to make use of my services in all sorts of business that they can count with the greatest zeal in their performance, and that the extensive contacts my political situation has afforded me give me better means to serve them. I beg you to make similar recommendations to your friends on the Continent and in Peru.39 As Santa Anna’s uprising against the government headed toward a denouement in the latter months of 1832, as an indirect result Alamán lived through an episode in October 1832 passed over by or unknown to José Valadés or other biographical treatments of his life, and unmentioned in his Memorias or autobiography of 1843. Writing to Terranova on 8 October, after devoting a few pages to business matters, he continues, “I believe that we will have [Santa Anna] in this capital within two days. . . . I am rushing to finish this [letter] so that I may stay in the English legation from this moment and [thus] avoid any problems with the disorders that will doubtless occur for that reason.” He must have secluded himself in the English legation immediately after writing this letter, since that same day Narcisa Castrillo wrote to Terranova, “Because of the political convulsions in this country, Alamán has found himself with the necessity of taking some measures of security and precaution while the crisis we are in passes. When we separated he asked me to write to you, advising you that Sr. Tamariz will have your power of attorney . . . to look after your interests during Alamán’s absence.” How long Lucas Alamán remained in hiding and the details of his reclusion are unknown. He was still hidden outside of his own home later in the month,

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however, as the danger of an attack on the capital by Santa Anna’s forces lingered, although the Veracruz caudillo did not enter the city until the beginning of January, after the Treaty of Zavaleta had conceded power to the pronunciados. In an undated communication to Terranova in late October, Alamán remarked on “the danger in which we were probably going to find ourselves in consequence of Santana’s [sic] having captured the city of Puebla. And since with the part I had in the government of General Bustamante I might soon have had something to fear personally, I thought it necessary to take measures for [my personal] safety, distancing myself from the risk. Because this [situation] has yet to pass, I write to you from there [i.e., from seclusion] without saying from where I do it.” Alamán’s concealment could not have lasted more than a few weeks, a sort of dress rehearsal for his longer reclusion later on.40 One of the most intriguing aspects of this dress rehearsal for the 1833–34 self-exile was the unexpected role of the American chargé d’affaires Anthony Butler in helping to keep the hidden ex-minister in touch with his family and the outside world during October 1832 and apparently in protecting some of his material interests. Butler quite probably played a similar role in Alamán’s internal exile in 1833–34 because he was still the American envoy in Mexico City during the entire episode, remaining in that post until his recall in January 1836, when he was succeeded by Powhatan Ellis.41 As noted earlier, against all probabilities Butler and Lucas Alamán had developed a cordial relationship during the previous two years or so, following Butler’s replacement of Joel Poinsett as American representative in Mexico. Alamán sought protective reclusion in the British legation on 8 or 9 October 1832. An undated missive from the ex-minister, transcribed by the American envoy and labeled “Mr. Alamán’s Note,” alludes to Butler’s willingness to help protect Alamán, his family, and their property: My dear Sir: I have always considered you as one of my best friends and the letter I have just received from you is a proof of it. I thank you very much for your good disposition towards me and I am decided to remove myself and family from the city. You should confer a great favour [sic] on me if you would come to lodge in my home for some days to protect it against pillage and depredation. If you don’t find any political inconvenience in it, it is the only way I find to preserve my property. [Sra] Alamán [suffered] a very dangerous fausse couche [i.e., miscarriage] just after the departure of the English packet [i.e., 8–9 October], and afterwards I have had most of my children seriously ill.

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An undated postscript was added in the writer’s hand: “Keep my resolution of leaving the city intirily [sic] for you.” There are several interesting things about this letter. First, there is Alamán’s warm avowal of friendship for the American, unusual in his correspondence. One can only imagine the stress Alamán was under from his wife’s miscarriage and having a houseful of sick children, even if he had plenty of domestic help. The ex-minister may well have traveled to his Celaya hacienda, from which he might soon have returned to take refuge in the capital, or even to the Hacienda de Atlacomulco. What had prompted his flight was the risk not only to his safety but also of the pillage he feared from the caudillo’s troops with the imminent arrival of Santa Anna’s forces. Butler replied to this in an undated note strongly implying that he himself had been in touch with Santa Anna, who said that if his army entered the capital “he did not think it possible by any means to restrain the soldiers from pillage, and I [i.e., Butler] am of the same opinion.” Butler doubted that the soldiers would invade the capital, however, and therefore that a sack of the city would follow, a possibility “that motivated [your—i.e., Alamán’s] suggestion in yesterday’s note to remove the library and furniture [from your home].” Another undated note from Butler around this time was probably directed to Narcisa Castrillo, regarding the style in which notes to him should be addressed. Butler seems to have taken over the role of information conduit between the Alamáns, since he received several effusive notes of thanks from doña Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán. On 12 October she wrote to Butler, “Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán offers her gratitude to Sr. Butler for his consideration and for the news he has communicated [to her], desiring ardently that these unhappy days come to an end in peace. She will be thankful to Sr. Butler for his courtesies and services anywhere and everywhere.” Then a week later: “Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán sends a million thanks to Sr. Butler for the news he communicates and begs that he continue [sending it] as long as possible. She is grateful also for all the precautionary measures he has taken with respect to the house. She trusts and hopes to God to save all [of us] from the dangers that menace us and will have the pleasure of showing her gratitude [to Butler] verbally [i.e., personally].” It is not clear when Lucas Alamán emerged from hiding, whether he was in Mexico City or outside it—he may even have spent some days in Anthony Butler’s house—but his withdrawal into hiding probably did not stretch beyond the end of October 1832. A partial, undated draft of a Butler letter to Alamán, probably written after Butler left Mexico in 1836, makes for an interesting and even moving coda to the episode, addressed in English to “Dear Sir”:

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Notwithstanding all this, I did my duty [in helping Alamán], obeyed the impulse of my feelings, and certainly placed myself in the condition to forfeit my life in the event of the town being taken by assault, when murder and pillage should have proceeded unrestrained. But feeling that we are separated, never again to meet, and that you will never have occasion to serve me in any manner, I have given you the impression which your conduct has left on my mind. The time may come, and the sign of the times strongly indicates it, when you may be once more placed in jeopardy; if you should be, the worst wish I make for you [sic] is—that you may again find a friend as willing and prompt to serve you as I was in 1832. Dear Sir, your most obedient, etc., A. Butler.42 While Butler’s letter is not exactly an effusive pledge of undying friendship, it does imply the sort of esteem and even loyalty Lucas Alamán could attract from certain people, in this case from the unexpected quarter of the American envoy. By early December, a few weeks before the civil war ended with the Treaty of Zavaleta, Alamán noted in a letter to Terranova that “events [in Mexico] occur with such rapidity and announce a crisis so imminent, that from one day to the next news becomes old and without interest.”43 The events of the next few weeks tumbled through the streets of the capital and through Alamán’s letters to his European correspondents. By the end of December 1832 fighting had ended, a truce and then a treaty had been agreed to, dates for congressional and presidential elections had been decided, and it was increasingly clear that Santa Anna would be elected president with a very liberal, even radical— in Alamán’s view Jacobin—congress. Pleading ill health, the newly elected President Santa Anna retired to Manga de Clavo, leaving the government in the hands of Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías. At least one positive medium-term outcome of this chaotic situation, from Alamán’s point of view, was that Lorenzo de Zavala, after being returned to the governorship of the State of Mexico and then elected to congress as a deputy in October 1833, was shipped off to France as ambassador in December 1833. By the terms of the Treaty of Zavaleta, Anastasio Bustamante would go into exile, remaining in France until 1836. Lucas Alamán saw the change in his and the country’s political fortunes not just as a shift in the wind but a full-scale hurricane bearing down on him, so he resorted to the familiar trope of the French Revolution to describe it to others and explain it to himself. He wrote to London at the end of March,

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Here we continue in the same way that I told you in my previous letter, awaiting the first measures of the new congress which, it is feared, may be very extreme, and anticipating persecutions and violations, the effects of personal vengeance and [also] produced by the spirit of party . . . the new general congress and [the legislatures] of the states [are full] of the most extreme men of the victorious party, whose anarchic principles and ideas of persecution and revenge make us fear a thousand evils in the coming weeks. Soon they will begin to exercise their authority; the most extreme and anarchic measures are anticipated, and we will see [them] unleash all the madness the revolution brought in France, since that is the model they have before them.44 Alamán singled out Lorenzo de Zavala, now in the congress, as the chief anarch, who had always held “the most extravagant and destructive ideas about the distribution of property, in terms that [even] in the French convention of 1792 would have appeared extreme.”45 Targeted for retaliation with Gómez Farías’s ascent to power would be the ministers who had tried to wreck federalism, illicitly emptied the national treasury, plotted the murder of Vicente Guerrero, rewarded the men who carried it out, and committed other heinous crimes against the nation. On 10 February 1833, when Juan Álvarez brought his charges, the accusations were quickly seconded and expanded upon by Deputy Barragán in the newly elected Cámara de Diputados. By a virtually unanimous vote the Chamber of Deputies found the accusations of sufficient merit to put them into the hands of a congressional grand jury of four deputies, which opened its investigation on 7 April. On 22 April the grand jury instructed the war department, headed now by Joaquín Parres (1793–1838) under the Gómez Farías administration, to issue detention orders for Alamán, Facio, who shortly decamped for France, Espinosa, and Mangino, the latter of whom was ultimately absolved and not prosecuted further—although by the Ley del Caso of the following June he would be condemned to exile for his role in the Bustamante cabinet.46 Meanwhile, Vice President Gómez Farías forced out the sitting judges of the Supreme Court, packing it with men favorable to his own views and ill-disposed toward the accused ex-ministers. Alamán got wind of a meeting of some of the chief congressional instigators of the charges against him at the home of General José Ignacio Basadre (1799– 1865) and went into hiding in Mexico City, not to reemerge for some sixteen months.47

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Alamán Goes into Hiding Lucas Alamán’s flight probably occurred within the first two weeks or so of April, certainly well before the end of the month, and seems to have been public knowledge. A letter of 25 April from Ángel Alvares to Senator José Santiago Hernández, for example, speaks of the disappearance of both Alamán and Facio as though it had occurred some time ago: Some days ago the [grand] jury section was working [on the case of] the ministers because of accusations made [against them] for all their crimes, and they remained calm despite their exposure by means of the witnesses examined and the conclusive original orders presented in evidence. They must soon have become aware of this outcome, and when they learned [that prosecution] was inevitable, the most culpable of them knew to run away, or hid themselves [to avoid] being called to testify. This is what Alamán and Facio have done, [and] they have disappeared. [The whereabouts] only of Mangino and Espinosa have been determined, and they are not under arrest. As a result of [all] this a proposal was made in the Senate and preferentially passed on to committee that they [Alamán and Facio] be declared outlaws if they do not surrender themselves within 48 hours.48 Nowhere in his writings does Alamán reveal the exact date he went into hiding; his reasons for absenting himself are not hard to fathom. Although the status of the death penalty at the time was confused, Alamán must have feared some harsh summary judgment at the hands of the radical congress. He anticipated measures such as a permanent exile and confiscation of property or at least some sort of highly prejudiced and irregular judicial proceedings in retaliation for the two years of centralist government under his stewardship, the prosecution of the Guerra del Sur, and the death of Guerrero. As it turned out he was not far off the mark. Two months or so after he went into hiding, on 23 June 1833 the congress passed the notorious Ley del Caso. This was a clearly unconstitutional law intended to rid the liberals of antireform political figures, decreeing the six-year exile of fifty men deemed “perturbers” of the public peace and others unnamed “who are found in the same situation [y cuantos se encuentren en el mismo caso].” Curiously, Alamán’s own name was missing from the list, perhaps because he was already known to be in internal exile, although many of his friends, political allies, and former government colleagues’ names appeared there. Among them were Francisco Sánchez de

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Tagle, Mariano Michelena, Francisco Fagoaga, José María Gutiérrez de Estrada, Anastasio Bustamante, Rafael Mangino, the third Conde de la Cortina, Miguel González, and Manuel Cortázar. The law was abrogated about a year later, but while it was in force a number of prominent public men were forced into exile. In November 1833 a proposal was made in congress to exile Alamán from Mexico for life, with the proviso that should he set foot on Mexican soil again he would be summarily executed, as happened to Agustín de Iturbide. During these months Santa Anna spent much of his time at Manga de Clavo or taking the field against the numerous pronunciamientos that began as early as May 1833. These uprisings were launched ostensibly in defense of the military füero, a venerable corporate privilege protecting members of the army from civil prosecution. It was under siege by congress for being antithetical to liberal principles of citizen equality before the law. The radically liberal congress and the Gómez Farías administration were launching a program of reforms the likes of which were not to be seen again until the midcentury Reforma two decades later. In May 1833 the congress took up the issue of the patronato, the government’s prerogative to nominate ecclesiastics for high Church office rather than leave it to the papacy; during colonial times this privilege had resided with the monarchy. Some of the more radical senators opposed this initiative, arguing for the complete separation of church and state over the nationalist, Gallican sentiment expressed in the measure. The proposal did pass both houses but was vetoed by President Santa Anna. Other measures undertaken included the secularization of the California missions, a massive educational reform, including the closure of the University of Mexico owing to its ancient religious affiliation, the abolition of the compulsory tithe and laws against usury, and the exclusion of clerics from any political activity. While all this was happening, where was Lucas Alamán? We know almost nothing about the material circumstances of his life during the sixteen months between April 1833 and July 1834. How much contact did he have with the outside world? We don’t know if he moved from time to time, or even how, where, and with whom he was living at any given moment. He writes in his Memorias of a few concrete conditions under which he lived: of being shut up in the home of a friend and of having the cholera epidemic of 1833 ravage the city and take the lives of some loved ones, although whether of immediate family members he does not say. He had no books from his library or the documents that might have helped him form a defense against the crimes imputed to the Bustamante ministry. Did he wander the city at night disguised

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as a lépero (highly unlikely), or incognito in the long cape and hat of a prosperous bourgeois, or in mufti as an artisan, laborer, or some other sort of modest citizen (only slightly less unlikely)? Did friends or members of his family visit him, or did doña Narcisa smuggle in culinary treats to him, newspapers or other reading matter, writing materials? We know that he occupied much of his time while in hiding in composing the formidable Defensa, analyzed above, and the Examen imparcial, an analysis of the Bustamante regime. He probably also wrote the unpublished “Examen imparcial del verdadero estado de la República, causas que a él lo han reducido, y remedios que pueden salvarle,” most likely written during the latter months of 1833 as a sort of companion piece to the political essay on the Bustamante administration.49 This extensive but truncated essay concentrates much more on the social than the political situation of the country, offering some comparisons with Europe and the United States. Finally, he began writing the Memorias and thus, in essence. his great Historia de Méjico. Wherever he was hiding, Alamán continued to oversee the management of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone’s properties, but now through a substitute, the lawyer Tamariz, who held his power of attorney, and with the assistance of the Englishman Anthony Drugman. Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán played the role of an intermediary in all this, transmitting letters back and forth and answering her husband’s mail or at least signing letters composed by him, almost certainly through third or even fourth parties since her mail was monitored closely by the government. In early August she wrote to Frederick Huth, “The absence that the political circumstances of this country has imposed upon my husband D. Lucas Alamán puts me in the position of answering insofar as I am able the various letters directed to him that I have received from you. You will by now be aware of the series of events in this unhappy country: the ruin of the house of the Sr. Duke was consummated, and persecution continues of many people who are imprisoned, exiled, or who are fugitives, so that the condition of the country cannot be more awful. I thank you very much for the friendly expressions with which you favor Alamán, and for what little use I may be, I put myself at your disposition.” About a year later, on the very eve of her husband’s emergence back into family and open public life, she received a letter from Palermo responding to earlier letters of her own: “The misfortune suffered by the excellent and very worthy person of Sr. Alamán has afflicted me as much as my own, and I beg that the occasion to write to him presenting itself, you will express to him these sentiments, and the wishes I hold for his well-being.”50

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The Gómez Farías government launched a full-scale propaganda attack against the absent Alamán, primarily through stories in the progovernment press. One example is a broadside written by Vice President Gómez Farías himself, a “manifesto to his compatriots,” that appeared in Mexico City on 12 June 1833. After recalling to the public’s memory in vehement language the “horrible attack [against Vicente Guerrero] without equal in the annals of crime,” he evoked the sinister project of the aristocratic party in Mexico whose goal was to restore the country to the tyrannical power of “senile Spain.” His long list of accusations was ostensibly aimed at this party or faction collectively, but the chief target was abundantly clear: “He finished the final days of his bloody domination by tearing away the . . . mask with which until then he had hidden his aims, opening the doors of the republic to all the emissaries of Spain, establishing public and solemn relations with all points in the Peninsula through a law that permitted the trade in books with them.”

Emergence from Exile While next to nothing is known about Lucas Alamán’s arrangements for hiding himself apart from the approximate dates of their beginning (around 8–10 April 1833) and end (very late July 1834), one can reconstruct to some degree the process of his emergence. He drafted a letter around the middle of July 1834 to the minister of justice and ecclesiastical affairs, Bishop Juan Cayetano Gómez de Portugal y Solís, which he asked the bishop to share with President Santa Anna.51 The completed document was sent as a cover letter with a printed copy of Alamán’s Defensa ten days or so before its official publication on 23 July. The letter to Portugal opened with an apology for the length of the Defensa, confessing that some details in it were out of date: “Since things change with such rapidity in our country from bad to good and good to bad, it is impossible to adjust a somewhat extended written work to the circumstances of the moment because it would be necessary to be revising it every day and to end up not publishing it.” He painted President Santa Anna not only as having the power to intervene in the case and even pardon him but also as having acted always out of disinterested motives, not from considerations of personality or vengeance, a far cry from the way he normally portrayed Santa Anna in his private correspondence. The congress, on the other hand, he dismissed as “those two breeding grounds of bandits called chambers.”52 Basically he wanted to emerge from hiding to be with his family while the accusations were aired before the Supreme Court, with a guarantee he

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would be safe while the case was moving forward. He would proclaim himself a happy man when the entire affair was resolved and he could say to himself “simply, ‘Go to your house; you are now hidden but can come out in the open because all will be forgotten.’ ” He had been in hiding and away from his family for sixteen months, and during this time, in the three houses I can call mine, there has been nothing but tears, adversity, and bitterness. I have lost my son, the survival of another is not certain, and I have also been at the point of losing my wife, without even having the satisfaction of comforting and accompanying her in her illnesses. Take as punished, then, the crime of having contributed what I could to have this country savor the last days of happiness that it has enjoyed. Let me return to the bosom of my family to spend in retirement and obscurity what life remains to me, and if I cannot have this, I will seek to arrange my affairs as [best] I can, [in order] to leave my country, in which one cannot live tranquilly. And even were I to go begging among strangers, I will leave, so that at least it may be said that they leave me in peace This last [course of action] I will see myself obliged to take if the Jacobins return to the ascendancy. He added a coda to Portugal: “I must say it with embarrassment: How different this would be now if I were in Spain! The larger part of the people who form the government [there] at the moment are my friends; they flattered me with offers of employment and many considerations when they were in power in 1822. I refused it all to return to my country, and here [in Mexico] I see myself in the situation of envying the fate I might have enjoyed in a nation of which my duty made me an enemy, and of regretting having served the country in which I was born and in which the only fruit of my labor has been persecution and misfortune.”53 The situation changed quickly in late July 1834, prompting Alamán to articulate some constitutional and philosophical ideas about politics. Bishopminister Portugal responded to Alamán on 22 July that he had read the Defensa the previous night and found himself in agreement with the author’s arguments. The following day a printed broadside was distributed around the city announcing the publication of the Defensa, on sale for a “reasonable” twelve reales at the librería de Galván in the portal de Agostinos as well as at the corner of Tacuba and Calle de la Cadena. Alamán may already have put himself directly in contact with President Santa Anna—who, in Valadés’s words, had “disconnected [himself] from the Gómez Farías group”—but was certainly

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counting on the president’s positive intervention in the still-pending legal case. As Alamán wrote to an unidentified correspondent, he vowed to abstain from political life in future: “All that I want and propose is to return to the bosom of my family, very determined never to take further part in political affairs. Seen in this light, it is as easy to make a person who only asks to be left in peace happy, as it is for Gómez Farías and the Jacobins of his gang to deny it. So, I do not doubt that Señor Santa Anna will do everything for me that he is able within the scope of his authority.”54 The day the publication of the Defensa was announced to the public, Alamán sent a copy to President Santa Anna, accompanied by a plea that his safety be guaranteed while he resumed his liberty. Beginning with a shamelessly flattering reference to the “beneficent measures [that] Your Excellency has begun to effect in the Republic,” he continued, My object is not to solicit through your high influence a pardon [or] an amnesty, since I have neither committed crimes requiring that I be pardoned, nor stained myself with any action that one could wish be expunged from memory. The only thing I ask is the justice owed to me, that I be judged freely [by] the tribunal established by the laws for this purpose, and that the persecution I suffer cease, since I am prepared to appear before [a legitimate court] as soon as it is reestablished. Your Excellency can do both. . . . The nation has confided in you a power like that constituted in the first formation of societies, because it originates as a direct manifestation of the popular will, which is the presumptive origin of all public authority. . . . Your Excellency, then, in the use of your high faculties, may by an act of justice free an innocent [person] from a persecution as atrocious as it is unmerited, and lift from an honorable family the mourning and orphanhood to which my enemies have for so long reduced it.55 On the twenty-fourth Alamán wrote again to bishop-minister Portugal, suggesting that the judges of the Supreme Court were by now so discredited that the public was growing angry and that the government’s failure to remove them would be a sign of its weakness or irresolution: “I confess that I would opt for the first extreme [i.e., removal of the judges], persuaded that if the villains triumph, the guillotine will be erected one way or another, and that everything that can be done to clip their wings is just and legitimate, without worrying myself much about what the constitution prescribes and attending only to general principles and the good of the nation, since by common opinion [the federal constitution] has been dead and buried for some time.”56

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At this point in the process of Alamán’s reemergence his longtime friend and political ally Manuel Diez de Bonilla entered the picture as advocate and mediator. Eager to help his friend, Diez de Bonilla wrote to Alamán that “to convince you that there is nothing I would not do for you” he would pay a visit to Bishop Portugal: “Tomorrow I will go to Tacubaya despite everything I have to do. . . . But all this is less [important] to me than alleviating your [situation] and fulfilling your orders. Soon you will come [out of reclusion]; of all your friends, I will give you the first abrazo; you will be relieved of all fear; you will be restored to your family.” About this time, in late July, Diez de Bonilla again urged his friend to come out of hiding. He would shortly post a bond on Alamán’s behalf to guarantee he would remain in the city while legal proceedings moved forward. Diez de Bonilla wrote that Santa Anna’s insistence [on absolving Alamán] was so strong that he wanted to see you today to discuss matters of foreign relations, in which he wants to hear no other counsel but yours. I offered that I would do everything you asked of me today, and I have the pleasure to tell you that everything is concluded to your satisfaction and so advantageously for you that in today’s El Telégrafo [the government newspaper] the decree [disallowing the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction] has come out. The president showed himself eager to help you, and Sr. Portugal as well in the matter of the Supreme Court. . . . Señora Narcisa read your [last] letter and this document [i.e., the decree], and her tears began to flow instantly. And although my consolations, accustomed in such cases, would have been inopportune, I believe nonetheless that her spirit is calm with the realization that now you will not have to live in a forced divorce.57 On that same day, 28 July 1834, President Santa Anna decreed that all orders for Alamán’s arrest, from whatever authority, be voided; and that the Supreme Court, whose jurisdiction the ex-minister refused to recognize, cease proceedings against him. The “usurping” justices appointed by Gómez Farías insisted on their right to try him, but by 2 August the judges were replaced by the original jurists: Pedro Vélez, Juan José Flores Alatorre, and Manuel de la Peña y Peña; as it turned out, these men were not willing to abdicate the responsibility of completing the judicial process either.58 Lucas Alamán now returned to his family and his private affairs. But this was hardly the end of his judicial travails. Although President Santa Anna’s intervention had quashed arrest orders against him, thus allowing him to emerge from hiding and insuring his safety, the case against Alamán was still pending before the

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Supreme Court, which hung on to it like grim death. The affair was debated within the circle of government power as being vital to the relationship among the three branches, most particularly whether President Santa Anna’s action had represented executive overreach. While Santa Anna had quashed the arrest orders, Justice Minister Portugal had instructed the Supreme Court not to proceed further with the prosecution but to hand it over to congress. This action raised issues of interbranch jurisdiction, the autonomy of the court, and an omnipotent executive. The affair also continued to be litigated in the newspapers of the capital for many weeks, the conservative press predictably supporting the semi-absolution of Alamán, the liberal condemning him and the cadre of aristocratic conspirators thrown out of the ministry in 1832. The conservative newspaper El Mosquito Mexicano (1834–39), although supportive and flattering of Lucas Alamán, criticized President Santa Anna circumspectly for supporting Portugal’s order to the Supreme Court to end the prosecution, on the grounds that it attacked “the third power of the nation.” While the legal and constitutional issues were debated in relatively restrained terms, the Alamán case became a pretext for the venting of still-boiling political enmities, and the two reinforced each other. This long-standing rancor between aristos and Jacobins would not be tamed until the liberal–conservative synthesis of the high Porfirian years, and even then was not laid to rest, as it still survives in one guise or another.59 A hiatus in visible legal activity and public noise regarding the case followed between early August and December 1834. The Supreme Court would have the final word in December. There was a period during which the issue of jurisdiction was settled, then a lapse while the justices reviewed the evidence, testimony, and argument, and the state prosecutor did likewise and rendered his opinion. The summary of charges drawn up and addressed to the Supreme Court by the prosecutor, unnamed in the version I have seen, is extremely interesting. This report reviews not only the Proceso instructivo of 1833 but also the probative value of the evidence presented before the congressional grand jury, the procedural irregularities, and the likelihood that anyone would ever know the complete truth about Vicente Guerrero’s death. The document alludes at several points to what Alamán wrote in his published Defensa. To my eye, at least, there is in the review no overt prejudice one way or another as to the principal accused’s guilt and certainly no political tilt, either right or left. While finding that the government had definitely conspired to direct the courtmartial verdict against Guerrero, the report assigned the blame to Facio, absolving Lucas Alamán of any punishable offense.

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The denouement of the Guerrero affair took still more months yet to play out but added a typically chaotic note to the story. Lucas Alamán was summoned to appear before the court on 15 December 1834; Carlos María de Bustamante presented his florid defense statement some days later. When the judges met on 27 December, they were headed toward absolving Alamán and Espinosa when Deputy Andrés Quintana Roo insisted on the suspension of the deliberations until certain pending procedural issues could be settled, announcing that he himself had now assumed the role of an accusatory party.60 In the meantime, despite the legal and political clouds hanging over him, Alamán had been elected deputy to congress, along with Espinosa. President Santa Anna presented his resignation from the presidency to congress on 27 January 1835, but it was refused, congress instead granting him a leave of absence to regain his health. The following day the Chamber of Deputies elected Miguel Barragán interim president; he would serve until the end of February of the following year. Finally, in mid-March 1835 came the official absolution of Alamán and Espinosa by the Supreme Court. A long statement signed by Justices Flores, Peña y Peña, Vélez, and José Rafael Suárez Peredo asserted unequivocally, As demanded by justice, Señores Alamán and Espinosa have finally been absolved of the crimes imputed to them despite the reprehensible maneuvers interjected to prolong indefinitely a case whose resolution the entire public awaited with eagerness and impatience. The charge against both Alamán and Espinosa of the complicity attributed to them in the atrocious and infamous crime of the purchase of Señor General Guerrero’s head and his horrible murder is based primarily upon the meeting of ministers alleged to have been held for this purpose. [But] this has been disproved by the declaration of the widow of Señor Guerrero, and by that of Señor General Bustamante. On the other hand, Facio was judged the responsible party in ordering Guerrero’s death, but because he was not in Mexico his punishment must await his return or remain suspended. Alamán and Espinosa were set free— a formality since both were free already—absolved, and had their bonds canceled.61 Lucas Alamán was never again to occupy as powerful a position as he had during the first Bustamante administration. In terms of what he could hope to accomplish during the little more than two years he held office, the relatively brief period of centralized government and fiscal health was overshadowed by

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the looming problem of Texas and the War of the South. Most of what he managed as chief minister in the cabinet was of a defensive rather than constructive nature. His role in putting together the Plan of Jalapa is not entirely clear, but it was a central one; it was a matter of overthrowing the Guerrero government and installing the Bustamante regime. Prosecuting the War of the South was not primarily his area of responsibility although he took some part in it and was the central player in promulgating the 1830 law that attempted, unsuccessfully, to choke off American immigration into Texas. The repression of crime and banditry, the imposition of press censorship, and the harassment and jailing of the Bustamante regime’s political opponents may have been necessary, but they were not creative activities in themselves, looking more like preparations for constructive policy than policy itself. On the other hand, the negotiations for Mexico’s diplomatic recognition, the attempt to bring the Spanish American republics together diplomatically to pursue cooperative agreements, and the establishment of the Banco de Avío were positive accomplishments even if in the end they did not flourish. The fundamental support and organizing energy Alamán supplied for the national archives, the botanical garden, the museum, and scientific pursuits more generally did project beyond his lifetime, although these initiatives and institutions also followed a bumpy trajectory as ministerial interest and fiscal capacity after Alamán waxed and waned. All in all, it looks as though Alamán was trying to construct the machinery for positive policy enactments, but, except for an instance or two, did not accomplish much of what he would have liked since he was pushed out of office and into hiding too soon to use that machinery successfully.

17 • Weaving Disaster Cocolapan (1836–1843)

Alamán in Pursuit of Wealth Now free for a time from overt attack by his political enemies, Alamán was tired, disillusioned, and much reduced financially by the events of the past few years. At forty-four, he was in midlife, had a young family to support, and was possessed still by the idea that he could become rich if only he encountered the right opportunity. He would have found the range of possibilities for profitable investment limited by Mexico’s struggling economy and endemic political instability. Chastened by the Compañía Unida experience, he placed few hopes in silver mining. Wealth was not to be sought in commercial agriculture either inasmuch as subsistence farming was still pervasive in the country and urban demand relatively inelastic. Agricultural exports were constrained both by high transport costs and the absence of tradable products meeting the requirements of external demand without duplicating commodities produced domestically in Europe or the United States. Expanding farming operations on his Celaya-area hacienda, therefore, was not a viable option absent an enormous injection of capital (which he lacked) for the acquisition of more land, and even then the returns would have proved modest. Alamán did not have the resources to enter the risky business of lending large sums to the national government. He would always earn some income from his connection with the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, from his writing, and from his salary when he was in government service, but neither these sources individually nor all of them combined could begin to yield the sort of prosperity he sought. What Alamán did possess in abundance was human and social capital: engineering expertise and experience; a wide familiarity with the sciences, technological advances, economics, and business practices of the time; a muted

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but powerful ambition; great energy; an acute and highly educated intelligence; and political and personal connections within the upper levels of Mexican society and government. Given that his views on the political economy of the country’s development had shifted away from a too-great dependency on mining and toward manufacturing as a potential wellspring of modern prosperity, he turned to manufacturing in general and to the textile industry in particular in the wake of his emergence from political disgrace. There was clearly an ideological element in his motivation as well. The founder of the Banco de Avío might hope in part to realize his vision of an industrialized Mexico through a personal experiment in the manufacturing sector, while providing a model for his countrymen and drawing on the bank for loans to him personally. The same sort of growth in this primary area of consumer nondurable goods and the application of the technologies it had spawned across the Atlantic might be hoped for even in an economy in which the subsistence sector remained central and the urban population amounted at most to 10 percent of the country. In terms of his personal aspirations, as it turned out, he had neither sufficient capital nor enough luck to make a go of it, although an ambition propelled by excessive optimism and poor judgment also played a part in his eventual failure. Certainly Lucas Alamán entered the last decade of his life a poorer man than he had been ten years earlier. In a letter of 23 February 1837 to Antonio López de Santa Anna, shortly after the latter’s return from American captivity, Alamán wrote, “I do not want or aspire to anything but to be cloistered in my own home, and to attend to my own affairs. These [affairs] have led me to be a veracruzano (although not from [the part of the state] where there is disease) because of a business I have established in Orizaba that will require some trips there, and perhaps some winter they will take me to Manga de Clavo or Veracruz. A number of enterprises of this nature are forming in various areas to which the nation will owe its [future] prosperity. But for them to succeed we need above all other things peace and not political theories, and you can contribute much to procure it for us.”1 The enterprise on which Alamán pinned such high hopes both for himself and Mexico was the enormous cotton textile mill of Cocolapan, near Orizaba, whose failure was to drag him into a vortex of debt, litigation, and public criticism that would swirl around him for the rest of his life and thwart his dreams of great wealth. In this letter to Santa Anna, Alamán situates comments about his personal investments within a rhetoric of patriotism; for example, his reference to “enterprises . . . to which the nation will owe its prosperity” says as much. He was

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such a visible public figure, and at least the appearance of disinterestedness was expected of public men in the early decades of the republic, that linking potential individual enrichment to patriotic ends distanced him from an unseemly striving after personal wealth. Despite the presence of capitalist relations of production in Mexico from early in the colonial period, the conception of liberal capitalism as an ideology, and therefore of the personal acquisitiveness, forms of personhood, and ideas of citizenship associated with it— “possessive individualism,” in the words of C. B. Macpherson in his analysis of liberal democracy—were as yet somewhat alien to public discourse in Mexico and even incompatible with the republican vertu expected of men who were prominent within the political nation.2 This would have made it advisable as a rhetorical strategy for Alamán to portray his itch for wealth as patriotic public purpose. Alamán had a long-standing interest in nourishing textile manufacture in the country. In his ministerial report of 1823 he advocated a flexible tariff policy allowing the importation of capital equipment for cotton spinning and weaving. Such an outlook was in keeping with government policy in the 1820s, when more or less liberal tariff policies regarding textile imports were intended to raise revenues at the expense of domestic manufactures. In the decade 1821–30 textiles made up 60 to 70 percent of all imports, and import duties as a whole 50 percent of all fiscal revenues. In 1825 Alamán took the first steps to establish a woolen textile factory in Celaya, near the haciendas he would acquire. This effort would eventually mutate into a project for a vertically integrated enterprise in which cotton yarn from Cocolapan would be elaborated into cloth at the Celaya factory, a plan that occupied his attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s but crashed along with the Orizaba factory. All through these years Alamán was following the experiences of the Puebla textile entrepreneur Esteban de Antuñano (1792–1847), with whom he corresponded regularly both as director of the Banco de Avío and private citizen. With some direct but limited previous experience in textile manufacture, Alamán was ready to take the plunge. The first mention of the Cocolapan venture I have encountered is an 1836 letter from Alamán to Bishop Francisco Pablo Vázquez y Sánchez Vizcaíno of Puebla, within whose diocese Cocolapan lay. He wrote that he was “committed to various industrial enterprises, above all in the [textile] sector.” In his autobiographical writings Alamán dated the start of the project to 1836.3 By the end of October he was writing of “a business partnership for a vast enterprise of cotton spinning.”4 It seems that from the beginning Alamán may have envisioned a vertically integrated business. The

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tardiness of disbursements of funds by the Banco de Avío, however, was interfering with the purchase of equipment ordered from the US: “I have little hope for my cotton factory. Since the Banco de Avío has failed to remit to the United States funds to complete payment on the machines that were constructed, these have been sold at public auction and the Bank has lost other machines for which it had [already] paid no small sum, and now owes more than 20,000 pesos in damages and interest. And since the interest runs at a half percent per month, the 20,000 pesos are lost and will give rise to a thousand claims.”5 By the very end of 1836, at the latest, Alamán had entered into an agreement as a partner in the Cocolapan enterprise with don Agustín Legrand, a French-born merchant and tobacco farmer from the Orizaba area.6 Legrand had two brothers whose involvement in the project remains shadowy. Alamán’s contact with the fréres Legrand had been mediated initially by an Orizaba resident and lawyer, Rafael Argüelles, whom Alamán addressed in the warmest terms in their correspondence, whose father Alamán had known, and who apparently vouched for Alamán with Legrand and his brothers, whom he had known for nearly a decade. By the time the partnership with Lucas Alamán was formed, Legrand had developed plans for a large-scale textile mill in the area and had begun renting or acquiring properties on which to construct it. Within a few weeks Alamán had become so deeply enmeshed in the project that he felt it essential to visit Orizaba despite the fact that he had recently been named to the vice presidency of the powerful Consejo de Gobierno under the second government of General Anastasio Bustamante and found himself overwhelmed with official duties. The terms of the partnership between Lucas Alamán and the Legrand brothers were to remain controversial, especially as the entire enterprise passed into bankruptcy and litigation in the early 1840s. Initially, the understanding seems to have been that Alamán owned a third of the Cocolapan business, subsequently elevated to a 50 percent interest, and two of the Legrand brothers the other two-thirds; presumably this distribution applied to responsibilities for capital investment, profits, and losses. But more than capital and a certain level of business and technical acumen, what Lucas Alamán brought to the partnership was his reputation, political connections, and knowledge of how things worked in Mexico; in other words, he was a fixer. Alamán’s apoderado Argüelles remarked in a letter to him that “despite the fact that the said gentleman [Agustín Legrand] is very energetic and diligent in his business dealings, with your presence [the enterprise] will advance more successfully [owing to] the confidence you inspire because your name is [so

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well] known and always mentioned favorably.”7 Alamán remarked at the beginning of 1837 that “the only way to make things completely secure for the future is to put the purchase of the mill and all its dependencies in my name.”8 As Alamán himself acknowledged, although he thought Legrand—at least during this early honeymoon period of the partnership—energetic and effective, “he lacks the knowledge of the country that is necessary for all this.” Lawyer Argüelles commented that the Frenchman “does not have the entire ease in Spanish to explain his ideas and desires,” so that on one occasion he had urged him to express himself in French.9 Alamán’s intimate familiarity with the Banco de Avío was one obvious advantage here, another his recent appointment to the Consejo de Gobierno. But it was above all the familiarity of his name and his connections that facilitated the many arrangements necessary to get the factory going. Argüelles further remarked on this as construction of the facilities at Cocolapan proceeded in February, 1837: “Don Agustín Legrand is very commendable because he is a fine man with excellent manners, but this is not enough for our vulgar people [in Orizaba], who, not understanding the advantages of this new establishment, did not look upon him with the greatest approbation. But since it has become known that you are the buyer [of the lands for the factory] and are presumed to be the principal investor, peoples’ attitudes have changed; and I have repeated to Legrand that they have accorded more importance to your name than to anything else.”10 Alamán hoped to integrate the Cocolapan spinning mill at Orizaba vertically with the cotton-weaving factory in Celaya.11 Bishop Vázquez predicted great benefits for the regional economy in the increase of employment not only around Orizaba but also nearby Córdoba, where owing to a labor scarcity farmers were turning away from sugar cultivation to the less labor-intensive cotton production. The bishop thought the enterprise would turn out to be even more successful than Esteban de Antuñano’s in Puebla because it could produce finer yarns and would have more spindles operating. By February 1837 construction at Orizaba was well under way, continued through the spring, and proved to be an object of great local curiosity as crowds of local people came to look at the works as part of their paseos, especially on Sundays and holidays.

Cocolapan’s Time in the Sun During the relatively short arc of its history under Lucas Alamán’s stewardship the factory passed through the apogee of its success from about the summer of 1837 until late 1840. Starting in the early winter of 1840–41 the

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overextension of debts, the unreliability of the raw cotton supply, a probable excess of installed capacity that drove up debt service costs in relation to revenues, market competition from smuggled textiles, and problems among the major partners began to sap Cocolapan’s strength fatally. It is difficult to tell with any precision what the economic dimensions of the 1837–40 flowering were in terms of actual production, local economic impact, or profitability, since the accounts appear to have been lost. The enterprise certainly employed upward of a thousand workers in at least two shifts; by contrast, in 1912 the factory employed only about six hundred workers, boasted a capital value of around a million pesos—its selling price in 1900 was 670,000 pesos—and was producing annually several hundred thousand pounds of cotton yarn woven into cloth elsewhere. An informed estimate by the town council of Orizaba in the fall of 1843, when the collapse of the business had already created real economic dislocation in the area, gives some sense of its economic impact on the town and its surroundings. At its high point Cocolapan had employed around twelve hundred people on a daily basis, amounting to a weekly payroll (raya) of 5,000 to 6,000 pesos, which the council members calculated sustained nearly six thousand people directly as well as contributing to local commerce and agriculture. Basing his figures on those of Dawn Keremitsis, the economic historian Jeffrey Bortz estimates that just as Cocolapan was entering its final death throes in 1843, there were nearly sixty textile mills in the country with over one hundred thousand spindles in operation. According to a slightly earlier estimate by Esteban de Antuñano, about one-third of these were located in Puebla, Orizaba, Jalapa, Mexico City, and Querétaro. Cocolapan was the largest of these establishments, outstripping in size even Antuñano’s famous La Constancia factory in nearby Puebla. La Constancia had been one of the first mechanized mills in Mexico, not far behind those in Lowell, Massachusetts, and just twenty years or so behind the first mechanized factories in the US. The Puebla manufacturer estimated that La Constancia’s operations directly or indirectly employed some fifteen thousand people, including the factory’s own employees, the weavers who rendered the yarn into cloth, and the merchants, artisans, farmers, and other businessmen and wage earners drawn into its gravitational field.12 What profits Alamán or his partners may have drawn from the business is impossible to say absent accounts, and there is no indication in his correspondence or other documents of the time of anything other than liabilities. In 1837 he wrote to Manuel Gómez de Linares in Celaya that he was neither earning nor losing anything from his properties, including the establishment at Cocolapan.13

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Alamán was active in developing the business partly on the basis of his still-vibrant political connections, overextending himself economically in the process. He was buying machinery that had languished in the warehouse of the Banco de Avío and soliciting additional loans from the bank. Still serving on the bank’s board of directors, Alamán took out a new loan of 60,000 pesos for the factory with little resistance even though the bank’s lending operations were in some difficulty owing to the disappearance of customs income caused by the French naval blockade of Veracruz in late November and early December 1838 during the so-called Pastry War. He was helping the younger male relatives of friends, collaborators, and family members find employment in the Puebla–Orizaba cotton industry. Even the occasional political archrival received his help, as in the case of the nephew of the liberal federalist politician and sometime government minister Miguel Ramos Arizpe.14 Difficulties in the marketing of its production was one reason the enterprise did not ultimately thrive. It is hardly surprising that Alamán should rely on personal relationships of an ostensibly noneconomic nature to dispose of the cotton yarn being produced in Orizaba and the cotton cloth produced in Celaya. One striking example of this, in which a merchandising opportunity can be inferred to have accompanied the forging of a patronage relationship, was the behind-the-scenes assistance Alamán rendered to the priest José Ignacio Pérez Madrid in obtaining the curacy of Ixmiquilpan, an important town in the Mezquital Valley. Father Pérez Madrid certainly had a preexisting personal relationship with the Alamán family and may even have provided services to it as a chaplain; he signed at least one of his letters “your affectionate chaplain” and asked to be remembered to Alamán’s eldest daughter. On taking formal possession of the parish on 1 March 1839 one of the first things Father Pérez did was to write to Alamán thanking him for his help in securing the lucrative position. On 3 March Alamán responded, asking for the priest’s help in establishing a market in the area for the cotton goods of Cocolapan and Celaya. So one is left to infer that the possibility of using the priest’s services in this way was seen by Alamán as a possible benefit from the facilitation of his appointment to the curacy. Father Pérez was now under obligation to his patron and dutifully proceeded to contact local merchants. Where such patronage relationships could not be built, Alamán continued to make many of the sales contacts himself. The production of Cocolapan / Celaya was being marketed in San Luis Potosí and elsewhere, and fairly large sums of money were changing hands (one sale was valued at twenty-four hundred pesos). The

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sale of yarn was limited by shallow demand that could not be deepened as quickly as Alamán had hoped. By the spring of 1839, nonetheless, the problem at Cocolapan was not overproduction but the underutilization of expensive installed capacity. Production and continuing capital investment bumped along well enough for the next year or so, but by early 1840 clouds threatened on the horizon. One perennial problem for Alamán, as for other entrepreneurs who took loans from the Banco de Avío, was the almost continual arrears in which the loans were funded by the national treasury. Aside from interruptions in the stream of revenue to the national government, the treasury tended to prey on the bank by applying funds earmarked for it to other needs. By the fall of 1839 the total owing from the government to the Banco de Avío amounted to nearly four hundred thousand pesos for the period 1836–39, although nearly three hundred thousand had been paid out on the committed loans to various enterprises. Among these paid-out sums were ninety thousand pesos to Lucas Alamán, part of which appears to have been a loan of sixty thousand pesos for the startup of a paper factory in Celaya. This was over and above the substantial amounts he had borrowed to finance Cocolapan and the Celaya weaving factory.15 When exactly the point of inflection in the fortunes of Cocolapan occurred is difficult to tell. By early 1840 Alamán owed substantial amounts in interest for outstanding loans for his other projects and was asking the bank for more time to pay “since with the [order of] the new machinery [for the paper mill] I am not oversupplied with funds.”16 The spring of 1840 saw pressure building on Alamán to handle accumulating interest debts to the Banco de Avío. Only two years away from being closed down by President Santa Anna, the Banco de Avío was itself in such difficult straights—“pressed by the obligations that surround it”—that it was dunning Alamán for his delinquent interest payments on the grounds that its employees were not being paid their salaries. The master of Cocolapan was in turn scrambling to find the required sums and requesting further extensions on his payment schedule. He wrote to the vice president of the bank on Friday, 10 April 1840, “Finding myself burdened with expenses occasioned by finishing [the installations in] the establishments of Cocolapan and Celaya, I have not had the necessary funds available to keep current and punctually pay the interest on the capital I owe to the Banco, and because of this I cannot immediately produce the thousand pesos that I [now] owe.” In mid-May Alamán was still angling for additional time to pay, ascribing the arrears in payments to “the

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very considerable expenses that at present I am saddled with for the receipt and transport to Orizaba of the new machinery that has arrived [at Veracruz].”17 This pas de deux of stalling and renegotiation continued for the rest of the year, although by this time Alamán’s finances had gone into a sort of freefall. In the autumn of 1840, if not before, his affairs were already in the courts, and the prominent attorney and politician José María Bocanegra was promising he would do everything he could to protect Alamán’s legal interests. By November 1840 raw cotton was in short supply and very costly. At the end of 1840 the bank was pressing Alamán for information regarding the state of his factories for inclusion in its annual report to congress. He had the account prepared and even sent with it an engraving showing Cocolapan, which the bank officials put into a gilded frame with glass. This gesture, however, did not improve the situation of his accumulating unpaid interest. This he proposed to pay in five-hundred-peso installments beginning in January 1841. The bank had little alternative to accepting the terms he proposed for incremental payment, reasoning that half a loaf was better than none. A rough, nearly incomprehensible summary of the accounts of Legrand y Compañía’s assets and liabilities at the end of April 1841 indicates that the brothers Legrand claimed equity of about 400,000 pesos in the concern and Lucas Alamán nearly 500,000. His equity was almost entirely illusory, however, being in fact more than overbalanced by the enormous debt overhang.

Cocolapan Begins to Unravel June 1841 saw a fatal reckoning for Cocolapan and for Lucas Alamán’s dreams of entrepreneurial wealth. By this time his major creditors had pushed him to a settlement to salvage something from what looked like a major industrial shipwreck in progress. In the middle of that month his creditors met to hear his proposals for repayment of what he owed and to consider decisions about the control of his businesses. In a document he drafted, Alamán proposed what any modern debtor might: to consolidate the debts, pay them off within a reasonable time, and ask his creditors to suspend the interest payments so as not to compound the difficulties of repaying the principal sums. The proposal gives a reasonably clear picture of where things stood with Cocolapan and the Celaya installation at the time and how Alamán viewed his position. While the tone of the document is plaintive and self-serving at points, and some of its facts later came into dispute, there is no reason to think it does not set out the essentials as he understood them.18

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Alamán wrote, “The circumstances that in recent months have prevailed with respect to the investments in which I am involved have brought upon me great difficulties for making the payments due this month. And although these may not be large sums . . . it is to be feared that the same circumstances will present themselves to me in the following months. It is necessary to take all this into consideration so that once these matters are arranged the gentlemen who hold my debts may count on the certainty of their payment, and so I will see myself free of the bitterness and conflict in which I find myself for lack of the funds to fulfill my obligations as they fall due.” One factor was the scarcity of raw cotton, requiring that it be purchased well ahead of time, either in cash or on very disadvantageous credit terms. A general commercial slowdown in the country was another. Yet a third unfavorable circumstance was the inroads in domestic markets made by contraband in foreign cotton textiles. Finally, commercial interest rates were very high, even for large credit transactions, so he had not been able to borrow “the necessary funds to cover previous obligations.” To this Alamán added, in a tone at once imperious and manipulative, honest and self-pitying, “As far as a mode of getting around this roadblock [is concerned], I have made it clear that the interested gentlemen can adopt any they choose. Since my principal creditors are friends of mine, I do not doubt that at the same time they try to assure [the security of] their own interests they will take care not to damage mine. I have said and say [again] that I desire nothing other than to cover my obligations and free myself from the painful existence of continually counting the days, and always seeing letters of credit that are falling due suspended over my head like the sword of Damocles.” Alamán proposed that the group of his creditors allow him to suspend interest payments long enough to redirect these sums to cover the lesser sums owed, thus consolidating the debts in the hands of a smaller number of creditors; and that he then come to an agreement with these men on fair amounts to be paid to compensate them for the time during which interest on the original loans had been foregone. As the arrangements descended from these general ideas into concrete proposals they became extremely complicated. The Mexico City mercantile court would describe this tangle of credit and personal relationships as comprising the most complicated case ever litigated before it. There eventually came to be several successive, superimposed agreements with important changes made at every iteration. Digging through these unearths an archaeology of failure. At each stage Lucas Alamán’s situation worsened, his financial operations came to look more and more byzantine and suspicious, and his creditors

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became progressively more exasperated and shrill in their claims and criticisms of him. Alamán’s draft proposals of June 1841 seemed eminently reasonable on their face, but the elements in the proposals to square things with his creditors were tangled and often changed. Large debts were acknowledged to a private commercial house, Messers Collado, Subervielle, and Zurutuza, and to various individuals in New Orleans, whose claims were demoted to a lower priority than those of the Mexican creditors.19 Although the draft minute to the creditors of 11 June was intended as confidential, news of it leaked to the public before a meeting of the committee of creditors, sparking “a multitude of exaggerated rumors” about the affair that neither the debtor nor the claimants could do much to control.20 In late June 1841 the Legrands offered up their own version of the partnership and its disintegration to the commissioners acting for the entire group of debt holders, different from Alamán’s not so much in fact as in tone. They implicitly blamed Alamán for overreaching in the expansion of production, calling his oft-voiced criticism of their management techniques persecution. They began: “We think that to facilitate your [the committee’s] work it is appropriate to give you an exact overview of the dealings of the Company since its beginning . . . since the persecution that some people have directed against the administration of our affairs is unjust. . . . We began our enterprise in 1837.” The initial plan was to accumulate a capital sum of 150,000 pesos for the startup of the factory itself, but because much of what was collected had to be applied to the liquidation of previously existing obligations of the Legrands, they ended up with 50,000 pesos, all put into the business by Alamán. Although the initial combined capital was weak, it underwrote the putting into operation of over 4,000 spindles, producing some 1,500–2,000 pounds of cotton yarn per day. About the middle of 1838, Alamán’s recommendation that production be scaled up did not seem imprudent. To do this during 1840 and early 1841 they increased the number of spindles in operation to 12,000, but only by dint of borrowing large sums at high interest rates. This increase in scale saw a correspondingly steady upsurge in the daily amount of cotton yarn produced. By May 1841 the monthly production of cotton yarn had risen to 101,000 pounds, which roughly bears out their estimates of daily output averaging around 4,000 pounds—i.e., 26 days x 4,000. They suggested, however, that if the committee of creditors were to talk with the proprietor of another cotton factory, they would find that the obligations the Cocolapan managers had incurred in the expansion of production were comparatively modest. In their account the Legrands placed the

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value of Cocolapan’s assets—including some attached lands and buildings, the machinery, the stock on hand, the debts owed to the company, and so forth—at nearly 1,120,000 pesos, and its liabilities at exactly the same amount. By far the largest item among the liabilities was the huge sum of nearly a half million pesos owed to Lucas Alamán, which, as we know, he had borrowed from other people.21 The meeting of Lucas Alamán with almost all of his creditors finally took place on 3 July 1841 in an unspecified venue—quite possibly Alamán’s home in Mexico City—both to confirm unofficially an agreement among them reached two days earlier and to set a few ground rules for the process of the discussion to solidify the proposals.22 This agreement proved untenable within a couple of years and was supplanted by another, provoking considerable ire among the remaining creditors and additional legal tangles. The actual contract arrived at in July 1841, a document of fifteen folio pages, was notarized in Mexico City two weeks later. Present at the 3 July meeting, all signing and all vecinos of Mexico City, were Lucas Alamán, representing himself; the lawyer Bernardo Couto as apoderado of the Legrand brothers; representatives of the Banco de Avío, and of the commercial firms Montgomery y Nicod and Wolfin y Rusch; and about twenty other men, either stakeholders themselves or their legal proxies. The contract contained a brief summary of the firm’s history and the reasons for its problems, concluding that “despite [the fact] that this [factory] is the first [in importance] among all those of its type to be found in the Republic, the company was unable to meet its payments to its creditors on the terms agreed with them, since owing to unforeseen circumstances it found itself obligated to advance to cotton producers a considerable part of the price agreed to, and [also because] at various times the sales of the factory’s products were paralyzed while ordinary cotton products imported through our ports were consumed [instead].” By the time a notary came to register the settlement, it had mutated to provide that once the major debts had been liquidated, half the Cocolapan business would remain with Alamán and the Legrands and half ceded to the creditor group. But since the enterprise could not be divided and sold without considerable losses, the creditors agreed that a company should be formed among themselves, Alamán, and the Legrands without any additional investment of capital by the debt holders. The factory itself was to be managed by a committee including Alamán, two representatives of the creditor group, and Agustín Legrand and his brother Próspero. The fortunes of the Cocolapan complex—because of the establishment’s size and capital value, the sanguine hopes for its success and the rapidity of its

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fall, the prominence of the investors, and Lucas Alamán’s own visibility— were widely commented on by third parties in private, the news of the statesman’s difficulties traveling remarkably fast. While neither Alamán’s creditors nor the debtor himself were as yet openly speaking of bankruptcy, other people were using the term and viewing Alamán’s involvement in a distinctly unfavorable light. In a letter of the time to a correspondent in Mexico City, the prominent Guadalajara-area hacendado and former governor of the State of Jalisco, José Ignacio Cañedo, wrote that “buried on the hacienda I had learned nothing of the bankruptcy [quiebra] of the famous Alamán.” Although Alamán’s supporters defended him vociferously, wrote Cañedo, he thought that Alamán had acted in the Cocolapan affair “in a very calculated bad faith.” By late August the Anglo-German merchant banker Frederick Huth, Alamán’s correspondent at the firm’s London office, was expressing his sympathies over Alamán’s “desgracia,” a reference to the encroaching disaster of Cocolapan.23 The developments in the situation were also remarked upon in the public domain, the July 1841 agreement with the creditors occasioning considerable attention. Shortly after the arrangement was formalized, the editors of the journal Semanario de la Industria wrote, “The noisy affair of the suspension of payments by Sr. Alamán has concluded in a manner satisfactory to all the stakeholders. According to the agreement reached among them, [outstanding] debts will be covered by the income of the Cocolapan business, and shortly the [concern] will be run by a company held [jointly] by the creditors and present owners, bearing the name Compañía de Cocolapan, administered by a [management] group made up of Sr. Alamán, and Señores don Fernando Collado and don Francisco Iturbe, named by the creditors.” The editors went on to crow: “The enemies of national industry that took such pleasure in the certain ruin they foresaw for this beautiful factory, and of the man who with such energy has promoted the establishment and progress of Mexican manufactures, have seen their hopes ridiculed; since not only will Cocolapan continue in operation, but since stakes [in the company] are distributed among a larger number of people, [the business] will find as many defenders as there are new investors in the concern.”24 Essentially the business went into receivership, as a modern bankrupt concern might do. The liability of the Legrand brothers was limited. Lucas Alamán’s personal liability was pegged at 68,000 pesos, a not insubstantial sum; he was to make three payments of 22,666 pesos each over the next year, which would completely liquidate his debt. Initially all his property was to be put up as surety for his debt, a provision later eliminated. All but three of the

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creditors agreed to a further extensive set of terms including side agreements with several creditors, among them the Banco de Avío, several religious confraternities, and a minor heir of doña Narcisa’s deceased mother; the agreement also provided for the cession of overall (but not daily) management of the new Compañía de Cocolapan to a junta directiva including Alamán. The creditors granted a formal extension in the payment schedule to Alamán and the Legrands for as long as might prove necessary to pay off the debts, while they also renounced any right to bother the debtors “either judicially or extrajudicially.” Lucas Alamán’s position grew progressively more perilous during the summer and fall of 1841 as he struggled to keep his head above water financially while keeping the Cocolapan and Celaya factories in production. His situation required more borrowing since he had little liquidity himself, but this occurred in a generally unfavorable economic climate. In late July, for example, he contracted a loan of 50,000 pesos for the purchase of raw cotton in the state of Veracruz. But the market for cotton cloth was weak and profits correspondingly low due to the general economic climate. Faced with making the first 22,666-peso installment on his debt to the Cocolapan creditors, Alamán sent instructions to his Celaya agent, Domingo Lazo de la Vega, to realize as much cash as possible from any source he could, which included calling in outstanding loans payable to Alamán and selling off some assets in the area. Alamán’s febrile efforts to raise cash availed him little, however. On 22 October he wrote to Collado and Iturbe, representatives of the junta of Cocolapan creditors, in about as pleading a tone as he ever allowed himself, that he must fail to meet the first deadline of the payment schedule stipulated in the July 1841 agreement. Despite his efforts to gather the 22,666 pesos for the first scheduled installment he had so far managed to scrape together only 8,000 to 9,000 pesos: “So that you will be convinced that I have omitted no effort to fulfill my obligation, I must tell you that I have let no postal pickup pass without repeating order after order to initiate the collection of debts [owing to me] and the sale of goods. And despite the great difficulties that [current] circumstances present for all [such activity], I have accomplished much, and I think that the amounts collected from various places would cover [the payment due], or at least with very little shortfall, if they could be brought here. By the next post I hope to have news of what is at each location, and I will inform you of it.” Alamán had not only made efforts to sell cotton cloth in the Celaya area and to collect debts owing to him but also to sell substantial quantities of maize from his Hacienda de Trojes. The unsettled political conditions of fall

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1841 conspired with Alamán’s situation to derail his efforts to raise cash. An attempt to send wheat from his hacienda for sale in Mexico City was stymied by the political unrest in the country; a lawsuit he brought to recover 10,000 pesos owed to him was stalled; and his effort to collect back salary owed him for his membership on the Consejo de Gobierno came to nothing.25 As Lucas Alamán struggled to make good on his debts, mollify his creditors, and keep his dignity and credibility intact, as early as midsummer of 1841 the entire matter of Cocolapan was spilling into the courts and accusations against him growing uglier by the month.26 More interesting than the financial substance of these suits are the political aspects. A French citizen had brought a complaint before the commercial tribunal of Orizaba involving a letter of credit for 10,000 pesos for which Alamán and the Legrand brothers were jointly liable but which they had repudiated. When the French complainant had failed to find satisfaction in Orizaba, the case moved to the Mexican Supreme Court. Alleging that both the Orizaba tribunal and the Supreme Court acted improperly in the matter, King Louis-Philippe’s ambassador addressed a note to the minister of foreign relations in the second Anastasio Bustamante government. Alleged irregularities included the exertion of political influence to distort the judicial process, laid explicitly at Lucas Alamán’s door. Delays were justified by frivolous excuses, the complainant’s attorney protesting in exasperation, “In this way, from pretext to pretext and hearing to hearing [the matter was delayed].” No direct evidence was presented by the creditor or his attorney that Alamán had actually exerted an occult and sinister influence to distort, delay, or scotch the proceedings, but then one would expect that this was done informally, if it was done, to avoid leaving a documentary trace. It is certainly possible that he did so, speaking with members of the Orizaba commercial tribunal or even communicating with judges on the Supreme Court or people close to them. He had the connections at every level of the government and was a member of the prestigious Consejo de Gobierno at the time. A number of his contemporaries thought him capable of any manner of chicanery. But even discounting some of the political opportunism, personal animosity, and vitriol in pronouncements about the once and future government minister by prominent public men, the criticisms of Lucas Alamán’s doings as the Cocolapan bankruptcy unfolded seem at least plausible. His back was against the wall economically, and he may well have felt that he needed to expend some social capital in exchange for exposing less of his exiguous financial capital. And as I have said earlier, he was not above taking advantage of a situation for his own

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benefit, even to the point of bending ethical norms to the breaking point. The truth is we will never know for certain; my intuition is that in this instance he quite possibly overstepped ethical and legal boundaries. Yet, given Lucas Alamán’s high intelligence, subtlety, and worldliness and the upright persona he always presented in public, such lapses only make him the more interesting. The outcome of this specific legal confrontation is not known. What is known is that adversity continued to pile up around him during the several years following his initial agreement with his Cocolapan creditors in mid1841. A document from late 1841 conveys robustly an idea of the accusations some of the Cocolapan creditors were leveling at Alamán. Unsigned and undated, the report, judging by internal evidence, appears to have been written by Fernando Collado, one of Alamán’s fellow commissioners of the Cocolapan creditors’ committee, when Alamán was starting to have trouble keeping up his end of the bargain to resolve his liability. The tone of the report is apoplectically angry, the document worth quoting less for the details of the financial arrangements it divulges than for the accusations of what amounted to fraud directed toward Alamán and the expression of personal betrayal by the writer. The draft report began with a severe condemnation of the favorable picture Alamán had painted of the Cocolapan business several months previously, when he was negotiating the agreement with his creditors: In seeing the written report presented by Sr. Alamán and what he expressed verbally at the meeting of his creditors, we believed that the state of his business was much more promising and that [purely] accidental circumstances had impeded his making some payments. But upon examining with care the notes and figures that have been given to us, we were shocked, because what arrangement is fitting for a business in which nearly a million pesos have been invested without [the entrepreneur investing] any of his own capital? And that today presents a loss that he has sought to hide by putting the value of the Cocolapan factory at more than 200,000 pesos when it only cost 15,000 pesos, which are still not paid? To this was added the charge that Alamán had diverted a large amount of the capital borrowed for Cocolapan to other unspecified purposes of his own: What has been said is enough to know that the loss of capital and the difficulties in which Sr. Alamán finds himself, and in which we find ourselves entangled, are the precise result not of unforeseen circum-

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stances, but of the temerity of a project for the establishment of such a large business without [his] own capital, and without containing himself within the limits advised by prudence. . . . We omit some details but cannot pass over in silence one very notable [fact]. This is that in all the letters of credit Sr. Alamán contracted, he not only burdened the enterprise [instead of himself] with the interest payments, but also, far from investing any of his own capital, realized large sums; thus it was to be expected that the business should be buried under debt.27 Continued Alamán’s accuser: Of commercial [enterprises] in this epoch, no other will prove to have been undertaken with the temerity of Cocolapan, in which was established a yarn and cloth factory that, although it brought to its principal creator fame for its size and laudable ends, manifests in its outcome a lack of the necessary means and a total absence of his own resources in its startup. Sr. Dn. Lucas Alamán captured the hopes [of investors] because of his reputation for vast knowledge, high integrity, and indefatigable energy, [and] did not find it difficult to avail himself of credit on a large scale when he launched the factory. Purses were opened to him until at one blow [he] suspended payment on his obligations. Hoping to stave off litigation that would have squeezed him economically even more, Alamán wrote early in 1842 that to bring the matter into the courts any further would be disastrous for all parties, suspending production and ruining the physical plant, which would, in the end, “produce nothing more than a multitude of interminable suits, which would benefit only the lawyers.”28 This particular crisis in the long, slow-motion collapse of Cocolapan never entered the courts, but still Alamán’s troubles continued to mount. By the latter half of 1841 he had paid off about half the 68,000 pesos specified in the June agreement, some in cash of his own, some in kind, and some in the form of debts he had called in.29 While a modern reader may find the rhetoric of both the report and response repetitive, it is essential to see how defrauded and betrayed Alamán’s investors and creditors themselves felt. The Cocolapan episode was no less a downward turning point in his life than his implication in the death of Vicente Guerrero a decade earlier. While his entrepreneurial efforts and involvement in the public life of the nation were to continue for another dozen years, neither ever again reached the high-water mark of his brief success with the textile enterprise nor that of his dominant role in the first Anastasio Bustamante

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government. Given this fact, his resilience—his role in the central government, as national commissioner for industrial development, as a member of various policy-making bodies, the burgeoning literary reputation of his final years, and his rebound as moving spirit behind the foundation of the conservative party and of Santa Anna’s last regime—is especially impressive but seems in some ways a coda to a life whose greatest achievements, at least by the standards of his time, had peaked by the time he was fifty.

Father Mora Is Heard From Direct verbal collisions between prominent men of politics occurred frequently enough in the newspapers of the time—although often thinly disguised by anonymous authorship—congressional debates, and other public venues. It is relatively rare, however, to find unbuttoned criticism of one such figure by another in private correspondence, although there must have been a good deal of this, and even more of it in conversational form. But there are at least two surviving such private letters in which Father José María Luis Mora commented on Lucas Alamán in a highly critical vein, both from the years 1842–45 and both written from Paris. Apart from Alamán himself and Antonio López de Santa Anna, it would be difficult to find a more prominent figure in this period than Mora, priest, lawyer, politician, diplomat, journalist, and liberal tribune. Mora was drawn into the Cocolapan episode in a peripheral role when his legal opinion was sought by Manuel de Lizardi in 1842 as to the degree of Lucas Alamán’s personal responsibility in the unfolding disaster of the textile enterprise. Living in Paris at the time in respectable poverty, Father Mora received a letter from Lizardi, then in London, dated 7 July 1842, asking the lawyerpriest’s legal opinion concerning the nature and degree of Alamán’s liability in the collapse of the textile concern, which was becoming all too obvious in the summer of 1842. Enclosed with the letter (but now lost) was the copy of a mortgage of 110,000 pesos in favor of Lizardi and his brother against the value of the Cocolapan installations, bearing Alamán’s signature, along with copies of the agreements between him and the Cocolapan creditors. The occasion for the letter was Lizardi’s dismay at the legal opinion offered by a lawyer named Esteva concerning the advisable course of action in the matter of collecting the principal sum.30 After offering some personal and family news, Lizardi wrote, I have, along with the family of my good brother, a considerable financial interest in that [enterprise], which we thought perfectly secured with

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the said mortgage. [The lawyer] should easily win a lawsuit [over the debt], or [prevail] in a legal action to require embargo and sale of the property to execute the mortgage, but he firmly advises that one of the proposals with the creditors be adopted. . . . This would be the equivalent of a total loss, taking into consideration the [principal] amount invested to secure a privileged place [among the creditors]. Given this state [of things], and not knowing the laws that apply in such material, I beg you to tell me frankly the opinion that you form [of the matter], since they [presumably the other investors and attorney Esteva] are asking for a timely answer. Please excuse the bother, but the friendship that you bear for us prompts me to bring it to your attention.31 Father Mora’s long answer to Lizardi’s questions was closely reasoned, detailed, and moderate in tone. There is no reason to believe, on the basis of internal evidence in the letter itself, that the venerable statesman consciously sought to vilify his sometime political enemy Lucas Alamán. Nevertheless, that he should have been completely free of any schadenfreude at Alamán’s failure seems unlikely, even though he might try to suppress any expression of it, especially given his own precarious economic circumstances at the time he wrote and for the rest of his life. Mora wrote, I have believed from the beginning [of this affair] that the principal difficulties were ones of fact and not of law [“de hecho y no de derecho”]. That is to say, to be able to consent to an agreement or initiate a strong [legal] demand, it was important above all to know in all its details the [state of] Sr. Alamán’s situation as debtor and creditor in an exact and complete manner. I sought therefore to find this information in the documents that accompany your letter. . . . To [my] questions [my informant] answered as follows. 1) The assets of Cocolapan are about 700,000 pesos, and it owes 1,300,000. There are [so] many liens on these assets that it would be impossible to realize 700,000 pesos [from its liquidation]. 2) Cocolapan has been handed over to its creditors in order that they be paid what they can from its profits. 3) Sr. Alamán has presented separate properties to his personal creditors, and it appears that these [creditors] will have better luck than those [creditors] of Cocolapan due to the separation. The disadvantages of accepting [either of the debt proposals] are greater than those of ignoring them, and this being the case, it is necessary to bring a suit. As [the situation] exists today, you have the right to

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bring suit against the Cocolapan enterprise and against the rest of Sr. Alamán’s properties [as well]. This last mortgage [against Alamán’s personal property], which is the best [of all], is lost if either of the two proposals is accepted, since in them there is no other guarantee of payment than the business itself. The acceptance [by you] of either of the two proposals is very advantageous for Sr. Alamán, but to the degree that it falls to his advantage, [to that degree] it is your loss. Let us now look at what security a mortgage on the Cocolapan enterprise presents to you to count upon. Obviously [the continued functioning] of the factory would entail considerable capital unobtainable except at very high [rates of] interest. This capital should provide what is necessary to pay the very high operating costs in that country [i.e., Mexico] because of the extremely high interest rates [payable] to those who furnish [the funds], to pay dividends to the creditors, and to cover the inevitable losses due to a thousand permanent causes of disorder that disturb public peace, even not counting the political revolutions whose occurrence grows more frequent from one day to the next. Mora went on to say that the former owners of the enterprise, from whom Alamán and the Legrands had purchased it, had experienced exactly the same problems as the new investors. They were self-sustaining for a time but then needed to start borrowing large sums at high interest rates. Then Alamán came onto the scene and the enterprise revived under the auspices and name of Sr. Alamán. He ran the firm more or less like his predecessors, which has resulted in a second crisis, graver and more difficult than the first, since the obligations have increased and the means to contain them diminished. The Cocolapan business, from the difficulty of finding capital, the impossibility of obtaining it at a moderate interest, the state of insecurity of the country, from its own history and from the obligations charged to it, is a ruinous enterprise incapable of serving as a guarantee of any mortgage. Necessity could make [you] enter such an arrangement if the enterprise offered [even] the remotest chances for success. But since everything points in a contrary direction, the unfortunate situation must arise in which the business can no longer continue operating, and since it is probable then that the income it produces will be less than now, it is prudent to start now to recover what corresponds to you on a prorated basis. . . . If you initiate an embargo against Sr. Alamán, the sale of Co-

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colapan will proceed, and in it you will obtain more than fifty per cent of the value of the debt you hold. For whatever is not covered [by Cocolapan] Sr. Alamán’s other properties will be liable, and [be it] much or little, something will be realized from their sale or from an arrangement with Sr. Alamán or his agents. In a letter of early fall to Mora, Lizardi thanked the priest for his advice and remarked that he had given instructions to his agents in the matter but expressed a fear that through his influence and connections Alamán might deflect justice.32 And whether or not Lizardi was able to recover some of what he claimed was owed him, his epistolary exchange with Father Mora ties Alamán’s involvement in the Cocolapan disaster both to another great political figure of the day and, through Manuel Lizardi, to the world of midcentury high finance and speculation. Things fall apart.33 By the late fall of 1842 cracks were showing in the relatively united front of the creditors, and economic conditions were deteriorating in the country as a whole and in the textile industry in particular. The image presented by Alamán of his troubled but nonetheless potentially rich business was coming to be seen in its true light, as illusory if not downright fraudulent. A report written by Juan de Dios Pérez Gálvez and Fernando Collado, addressed to the Cocolapan creditors as a whole and dated 28 October 1842, told a sorry tale: “It being [no longer] possible to keep the Cocolapan factory operating, and without hope of the profits promised to pay the creditors who agreed to the pro rata celebrated in June of the previous year because the larger part of the capital counted upon was not to be had, and due to other intervening factors that have damaged the industry, [as well as] the opposition by dissident creditors,” a new plan had to be worked out, “without which nothing can be done, and the factory will be destroyed.”34 Alamán’s failure to keep to the payment schedule specified in the June 1841 agreement was first brought to the attention of the creditors by Anselmo Zurutuza. He had summoned the creditors to a meeting at his home sometime in the fall of 1842 at which he made the situation clear. The group was then reconvened some time later at Alamán’s home, and a commission—different from the junta directiva—was appointed to make recommendations. The upshot of the commission’s inquiry was that a large gap existed between the value of the Cocolapan enterprise and the much larger debt claims upon it. Alamán provided some calculations purporting to show that on the basis of the factory’s monthly production of 120,000 pounds of cotton yarn,

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net profits of 400,000 pesos per year might reasonably be expected. The creditors feared that bringing suit to liquidate the business would tie all the stakeholders up in red tape for a long period. That a forced sale would be difficult and entail great losses to all concerned convinced the creditors to try to keep the business running. Although Alamán’s personal property had been exempted as a guarantee of the June agreement, a lawsuit to recover money from the liquidation of Alamán’s property was expected to yield little or nothing since his holdings were already heavily encumbered to other creditors. “With respect to the personal responsibility of Sr. Alamán, a careful examination was made of his property, [and it was found that] he had only a house in this city and his hacienda in Celaya, both encumbered with debts, and that he had only limited [cash] available.” The commissioners did concede that whatever economic miscalculations Alamán and his partners may have made or whatever mistakes in administration, the general economic conditions of the time were not conducive to the optimal functioning of such an ambitious enterprise: “The truth is that general and well-known causes have contributed to [the failure of the business], among them the scarcity of [raw] cotton since last year, the loss this year of the majority of the cotton crop, the effect of copper money on keeping down the price of cloth and yarn, as well as the general paralysis of commerce in this city [i.e., Mexico City] during the forty days of the last revolution, and the large amount of contraband in this class of manufactures entering through the [country’s] southern ports.” To these difficulties were added certain problems peculiar to Cocolapan, such as some weak or abrogated contracts with suppliers as well as technical issues regarding the actual cloth produced in a division of the factory. Although the general consensus among the creditors was to continue running the business, it could not go on under the old agreements. This may have been the key moment, the tipping point, beyond which any resolution short of bankruptcy and a forced sale was impossible. There matters stood between Lucas Alamán and the Cocolapan creditors for most of the next three months, suspending the statesman’s affairs in a sort of limbo. One can imagine an increasingly angry and frustrated traffic of notes and personal confrontations among the stakeholders. In mid-January of 1843 things took on an even darker aspect for Alamán and the embattled textile concern. A somewhat reconfigured commission had been mandated by the creditors to break the stalemate over the continuing validity, or lack thereof, of the June 1841 agreement. By now Alamán’s liability had inched back up to 80,000 pesos, a total ruinous for him as the condition of the business deterio-

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rated and the overly sanguine estimates of profits from continued operation came to be seen as more and more inflated. In an idiom much more formally legal and therefore perhaps more ominous than what had characterized previous informes, commissioners Pérez Gálvez and Heras wrote on 13 January 1843 that “before coming to a resolution of this question, Sr. Alamán and the Legrand brothers should be asked peremptorily if they can supply for the operation of the business the sums to which they are respectively obligated, and if they respond in the affirmative the continuation of the business may be attempted; but if [they answer] to the contrary, it is obvious that this would be impossible.” “Peremptorily” quite obviously conveys the idea that this was a final ultimatum to the debtors whose terms were never to be met. Under these circumstances there was probably a new arrangement, but the beleaguered partners once again were unable to meet their obligations under it. By the autumn of 1843 the matter had already been before the Tribunal Mercantil of Mexico City for some months, prompted by Alamán’s petition for a time extension from his creditors. The judges in the case had been removed, making it necessary to appoint new ones. Whether this was because Alamán himself or his friends had applied pressure directly or indirectly through his political and social connections, as had been alleged two years previously in the episode of the Orizaba mercantile court, remains unknown. The proposal to rent out the factory complex at Cocolapan briefly alluded to and dismissed in the commissioners’ memo of January 1843 had been laid before the committee of creditors with official government sanction at some point in the intervening months and was rejected, although that decision was shortly to be reversed. In the words of one Tribunal Mercantil official to War Minister José María Tornel in a letter of early October, however, this plan aroused “the most determined opposition on the part of some of the stakeholders.” The same official added, “This business is in itself so complicated that it is not strange, in spite of the energy of the judges [in prosecuting the matter], for it to suffer delays not common to the other matters aired before the Tribunal.”35 The strong objections of some of the creditors notwithstanding, the lease of the Cocolapan factory complex was put up for auction in October 1843. Also disappointed at this turn of events were certain financial speculators who had hoped to swoop down on Cocolapan’s installations and equipment and pick them up at bargain prices. Given the shadowy outlines of these interactions, we will never know exactly what happened. What is certain is that by the fall of 1843 the situation for Alamán had become irretrievable, and Cocolapan was lost to him. It’s not

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clear either what sort of losses his creditors were to incur—substantial ones, most likely. By the end of September at the latest and shortly before leaving office, President Santa Anna had resolved that the auction for the lease should take place, not only to cut the knot of the economic interests immediately entangled in the suit but also to avoid any public disturbances in the Orizaba area due to unemployment or insecurity about Cocolapan’s future. The entire Cocolapan affair throws considerable light on Alamán’s entrepreneurial practices and problems, the way in which Cocolapan slipped from his grasp, and the glacial pace (perhaps not at Bleak House speed, but with a marked lack of agility) at which both civil and commercial tribunals moved. As the case ground toward resolution repeated allegations of irregularities in the judicial proceedings were voiced as well as of “occult and sinister influences” delaying the creditors’ recovery of their investments from whatever assets might be salvaged. The record shows that Lucas Alamán’s friends and associates, and even members of kin and fictive kin networks, exerted their influence and at points their active intervention to protect him.

Collapse and Afterlife Toward the end of 1843 the Cocolapan factory and its attached lands were finally taken out of the hands of Lucas Alamán and his partners. The lease proposal seems to have been overcome by objections from the dissenting creditors. Under what circumstances the sale of the enterprise took place is not clear. The financier and entrepreneur Cayetano Rubio had purchased Alamán’s textile manufacturing interests in Celaya in 1842 by buying up the outstanding debts to the now-defunct Banco de Avío and probably acquired the entire operation at a substantially discounted price.36 Beginning in about 1840 Rubio had begun speculating in the raw cotton market by buying up as much as he could, and it is entirely possible he had in view starving Cocolapan of its essential primary material to encourage just the outcome of which he now took advantage. The supply of raw cotton, in fact, was one of the most vulnerable points in the entire enterprise, pitting the interests of cotton growers against those of mill owners. In 1836 cotton producers in Veracruz and Oaxaca spearheaded legislation to prohibit the import of raw cotton. Within months, however, domestic production fell behind the requirements of the textile industry, shortages became critical beginning in about 1838, and prices for cotton rose precipitously. Neither President Anastasio Bustamante nor interim president Santa Anna, who between them occupied the chief magis-

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trate’s chair between April 1837 and October 1841—with a brief hiatus of about a week during July 1839, when control of the government fell to Nicolás Bravo—was disposed to relax the ban, Santa Anna because he had too many commitments to cotton growers in Veracruz. To solve this problem in a typically ad hoc and clientelistic fashion, Santa Anna undertook the issuance of special import licenses, of which Cayetano Rubio was one of the main beneficiaries. Moreover, this was to occur again, long after Alamán had exited from Cocolapan, when President Mariano Arista (January 1851—January 1853) issued import licenses for cotton, many of which, like bonds or debt, were bought up by Cayetano Rubio and the German merchant-financier Guillermo Drusina. Whether Cayetano Rubio’s speculation contributed to Alamán’s difficulties with the factory or not, in 1843 the agiotista Rubio joined with Juan Pérez Gálvez to purchase the entire Cocolapan complex, a partnership that dissolved in 1846. Two years later the business was bought up for nearly a half million pesos, about 50 percent of its estimated value at the time Alamán and the Legrands owned it. The buyer was the successful entrepreneur Manuel Escandón, who hoped to solve the primary material problem by importing raw cotton from the United States. Cocolapan remained in the Escandón family for the rest of the century, although around 1900 it was no longer competitive in the face of larger, better capitalized enterprises such as the nearby Rio Blanco textile complex and was sold by the Escandóns.37 The Cocolapan factory had an interesting afterlife beyond 1900, when it became part of the textile empire of the large firm Compañía Industrial de Orizaba, S.A. During and after the Mexican Revolution workers there acquired a reputation for being radical, prone to striking, and even planning attacks on local government military posts. They were thought to be red as late as the 1920s.38 The collapse of Cocolapan was to throw a long shadow over the last decade of Lucas Alamán’s life. When he came to write a second, much less transparent autobiographical sketch in 1849—the one by which he is substantially known to history—he handled the episode in such a way as to avoid any selfcriticism, throwing most of the blame for the failure onto the Legrand brothers, which may have had much truth in it but by no means told the entire story: “In this same year of 1836 I formed a company to establish the Cocolapan Cotton factory in Orizaba, with the three brothers Legrand, an enterprise from which I promised myself great profits, and which would have produced them [had it been] managed by [someone] other than the Legrands and had it not been so large. . . . The excessive [amounts of] capital demanded by these

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businesses, and the interest rates at which I had to borrow it, caused me to go bankrupt in May 1841. Since then not only have I had to give up all the hopeful expectations I had conceived, but I have [also] found myself involved in a thousand suits and unpleasantnesses.”39 The political attacks aimed at Alamán as he reemerged into a more active role in public affairs after a period of withdrawal, and especially with the foundation of the conservative party in 1848, occasionally made reference to the Cocolapan debacle to discredit him. Thus the liberal newspaper El Monitor Republicano accused him of fraudulent dealing in the management of the business, a charge Alamán answered both by bringing a defamation suit and by defending himself in print in El Universal, his own newspaper: “Sr. Alamán has never gone bankrupt, much less fraudulently. . . . [H]aving come up against some difficulties in covering the obligations of the Cocolapan business, he came to an agreement with the creditors to keep it running as a company, and they [the creditors] were always [so] convinced of the probity and good faith of this gentleman that they left him in free control [of his personal property] and of Cocolapan, until Sr. Pérez Gálvez acquired the business by buying up all the [outstanding] shares.”40 The newpaper’s assertion that Alamán had never gone bankrupt explicitly contradicts what he wrote of himself that same year. And it is manifestly untrue that all the creditors were convinced of his probity and good faith, although Manuel Lizardi’s exchange with Father Mora is the only remaining written evidence that creditors felt they may have been bilked. Given that the accounts and the financial instruments of the enterprise have not survived, it is difficult to know if the failure of Cocolapan was attributable in some degree to mismanagement on Lucas Alamán’s part, on the part of the Legrand brothers, simply bad luck, or all three in combination. Certainly he was personally overextended and sought to make up at least a portion of one financial gap with an unauthorized loan from the funds of the Terranova y Monteleone establishment, for which he was later called to account. Just as certainly, despite his somewhat truculent attitude in the face of accusations that he had defrauded investors, the entire episode must have embarrassed him profoundly, damaging his reputation and leaving him with a large debt overhang as the outcome of arrangements among the various creditors. He was a substantially less wealthy man at his death in 1853 than at the moment of the 1841 inventory of his property and appears to have liquidated some holdings to satisfy Cocolapan creditors. In large measure the bankruptcy of the firm was due to the difficult economic circumstances of the time, to problems with securing predictable supplies of primary materials, to the shal-

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low consumer markets, and to the undercutting of the mill’s position by contraband. That Lucas Alamán was aware of these factors and how they might impinge on the textile enterprise must be taken as a given, so that the plunge he took into the business spoke to the triumph of hope over experience. The irony here, as I have mentioned, is that he was one of the most informed and perspicacious economic thinkers of the period and even something of a prophet where Mexican industrialization was concerned.

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18 • Politics and Family

Alamán in His Forties and Fifties Insisting that he was through with politics, Lucas Alamán would periodically return to private life and rededicate himself to repair the family economic fortunes. Although he may have exaggerated his economic losses while in public office to portray himself as a self-sacrificing public servant, there was truth behind his complaints even though when in the government he maintained an impressive level of effort as breadwinner. Alamán’s retreat from public life allowed him to become the historian who wrote arguably the greatest single work of nineteenth-century Mexican historiography, his Historia de Méjico. On the other hand, among the most important of his activities in his forties and fifties were membership on the Consejo de Estado under the centralized constitutional regime; his leadership of the commission to retire copper coinage from the Mexican monetary system; his authorship of extensive, government-commissioned reports; directorship of the newly created agency for national industrial development; stints in the Chamber of Deputies, the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City, and as a candidate for the Mexican presidency; his continuing role in combat journalism and his founding of the conservative party; and, on the darker side, complicity in the promonarchist plotting of the mid-1840s. While Alamán was doing all of this, Texas broke away from Mexico, established its independence as a republic, and nine years later was admitted as a slave state to the American Union, precipitating the Mexican–American War and the loss of a further enormous chunk of national territory. A French naval fleet blockaded Veracruz and extracted a compensatory settlement that the Mexican government was ill-prepared to pay, thus leaving unmet financial claims in the hands of a powerful, aggressively imperialist European state and

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sowing the seeds for the French Intervention of the 1860s. A new centralist constitution replaced the federalist charter of 1824; presidential regimes rose and fell rapidly, often through violence. Antonio López de Santa Anna emerged definitively as the arbiter of national politics, and the country was racked with lesser pronunciamientos, regional disturbances—the so-called Southwest peasants’ war of the 1840s, for example—and endemic banditry. Why did Lucas Alamán keep returning to the political fray even while he was putting so much time and effort into improving the economic situation of his family, and then pursuing his absorbing avocation of writing history? To say that he was an inveterate politician is to say much and little. A number of factors in combination made politics a continuing passion for him. He certainly had a strong inclination toward public service, modeled in part on the civic activities of his father, Juan Vicente Alamán. But this commitment went far beyond the obligation that many well-educated and economically comfortable men of his class felt to serve on city councils, engage in public debates, and participate in philanthropic activities. Moreover, he was a man of great energy to whom the sphere of politics offered a natural outlet for it. Alamán also seems to have found political life interesting from a human point of view. As a historian, however, he is often Olympian in his distance from human foibles, as if he were Zeus bemusedly observing the puny forked creatures scrambling around down on Earth and occasionally hurling lightning bolts at them. That he was in his own relatively quiet manner naturally combative or pugnacious is also clear. The volatile politics of the era accommodated this, the unbridgeable gap between conservatives and liberals aggravating it. Finally, engagement in political life promised its own possible rewards—a sense of self-worth, a field for the exercise of power over other men, and even financial benefit. Although there is no direct evidence that Alamán ever solicited or accepted bribes, kickbacks, or other forms of corrupt emolument, his proximity to national political power afforded him certain advantages in his entrepreneurial activities. I believe he was also driven by a genuine, very strong impulse to change Mexico for the better. That this desire for change contradicted his conservatism is not really a paradox at all. Much of his lingering reputation as a reactionary grew out of what he wrote, especially in his Disertaciones and in the first and last hundred pages or so of his Historia de Méjico, rather than out of what he actually did while in power. His preoccupation with imposing stability on the country was a manifestation not primarily of an authoritarian streak in his personality, but principally a way of confronting the actual situation he encountered when

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he entered political life. The achievement of political stability was more a forward-looking change than the enactment of a backward-looking, reactionary utopia. Certainly the industrialization of Mexico he struggled to foster embodied an enormous change in the country’s mining and agricultural past, in its future trajectory, and potentially in its social arrangements. That his style of governance was associated with monarchy, with deep skepticism about republican forms, and a real antipathy to popular democracy meant that it has been characterized as reaction, but it was modern in nature. Although the centralized state regime he labored to construct in some measure mimicked the late Bourbon colonial regime, it was a very different sort of beast in its basic assumptions and actually looked forward to the centralizing project of subsequent Mexican state builders right up to the present. If this vision made Lucas Alamán a reactionary, then the same label applies to many of the statesmen who have sought to guide the nation’s destiny from his time onward. But whether reactionary, conservative, or moderate liberal—all positions along the political spectrum that he occupied at one time or another—Alamán found politics to be the great theater in which to perform himself.

Cultivating the Garden Officially absolved of a major role in the killing of Vicente Guerrero, Alamán again took up the skein of his private and public activities during 1835–36. Congressional elections were called by President Santa Anna in the fall of 1834 despite the objection that off-cycle elections violated the 1824 constitution. Rehabilitated politically with remarkable speed, Alamán was elected to the Cámara de Diputados for Guanajuato, his home district, but had already resigned by April 1835, finding his politics incompatible with those of at least some of the new deputies. Although he did not serve on this occasion, his election was in keeping with the wave of hombres de bien elected in the pendulum swing back from the radicalism of the brief acting presidencies of Valentín Gómez Farías and the 1833–34 congress. Of higher priority to Alamán at this time was reinflating the depleted balloon of his own affairs. He returned to the administration of the now-disembargoed properties of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, lavishing attention in particular on the Hacienda de Atlacomulco. He did not neglect improvements to his Celaya hacienda and must have been contemplating the project for the great textile factory at Cocolapan that he was shortly to take up. On the intellectual front, appointments brought him into the capital’s new Academia de la Historia and the Academia

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de la Lengua. And the exonerated ex-minister took up his pen as a more or less private citizen, both in the Mexico City newspapers and in historical writing. The town of Celaya and its surrounding area, around sixty miles southeast of Alamán’s native Guanajuato, was to be the chief axis of his economic efforts in the mid-1830s. In the long run the outcome of his hacienda was not good, he eventually got rid of the property, and by the end of his life he declared the mining interests worthless. By the mid-1830s the pattern of failure in both enterprises had been set for the next two decades. Nonetheless, he was heavily engaged in Celaya around this time with the improvement of his Hacienda de Trojes and the annexed San Martín lands as well as with plans to develop a cotton textile factory in the town. Since Alamán himself had little liquid capital to invest in the textile project, he thought to rely on the Banco de Avío to supply the most expensive input, the machinery, but was disappointed. In the end, the Celaya project was a total bust, and its physical assets were sold off piecemeal, even including the roof beams in the unoccupied building. Whatever his hopes for the Celaya industrial installation or his hopes for vertical integration in the cotton textiles business, he saw it as ancillary to what he was beginning to build in Cocolapan; in the array of his activities in Celaya his hacienda was much more important. By 1850 or so the Hacienda de Trojes had been sold, but in the mid-1830s he spent months at a time at Trojes, constantly traveling back and forth between the estate and Mexico City. Alamán was not an enthusiastic traveler, especially as he aged. For a man so active he was remarkably sedentary, at least in terms of geographic range, and after his youthful wanderings in Europe mostly limited his travels to the Guanajuato/ Celaya area, Cuernavaca, and Jalapa, in all of which he had business interests. Whether he took his family with him on his visits to the Celaya hacienda is nowhere made clear in his correspondence. But as the logistics of moving his large household back and forth would have proved formidable, he probably traveled alone for the most part. In trying to improve the property Alamán borrowed substantial sums of money from the Church and private individuals. There are some hints that he was already in a bit over his head, since he was having trouble paying the interest on at least one of the loans. He sought to rent pasturage at some distance for the hacienda’s livestock, looked into the acquisition of other agricultural properties in the area, and bought seeds and cuttings from Europe. At the very least the hacienda produced maize, wheat, and cattle and probably maintained herds of horses, mules, and oxen for work. In partnership with Celaya friends, the estate also produced hidromel (mead) for a strictly local market, which entailed beekeeping on a significant scale;

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and cidro-vino (a citron-infused wine), which implies the production of wine grapes. While the Alamán family did not live in baronial style, the backgrounds and expectations of Lucas Alamán and Narcisa Castrillo, Alamán’s extremely visible political position, and the couple’s social standing would have dictated a level of material comfort and consumption that put them well within at least the lower bounds of Mexico City’s elite families. Alamán’s repeated efforts to increase his income or even to make a killing of some sort while also earning a baseline living as a salaried government official and manager of the exMarquesado properties were motivated not only by the desire to make good the status deprivation of his family’s intergenerational fall from wealth but also to underwrite the maintenance of an expensive domestic establishment. Ordinary day-to-day expenses—marketing, new clothing, fees associated with the childrens’ schooling, and so forth—would probably have been handled by doña Narcisa through a household budget and larger expenditures by her husband. It is impossible to know what degree of vertical integration connected the Alamán urban establishment with the Hacienda de Trojes; most probably this consisted only of riding mules, carriage horses, and some odds and ends of consumable items. We do know from Lucas Alamán’s papers that he consistently imported items from Europe, including cuttings and seeds for Trojes, but also scientific instruments for his own use, books, wine, and furniture. Besides making money and spending it, Alamán wrote. Temporarily relieved of the heaviest political responsibilities connected with ministerial position, he began, in the mid-1830s, to emerge fully as a man of letters. Many of his short essays and editorial interventions in the periodical press from this time arose from their author’s preoccupation with the history and meaning of Mexican independence. A revealing example was an editorial Alamán published in a Mexico City daily on the occasion of the Mexican independence commemoration in September 1834.1 Alamán insisted in his writings over the next two decades that independence as such should be separated from the insurgency begun in Dolores on 16 September 1810, and Agustín de Iturbide rather than Father Miguel Hidalgo celebrated as the real consummator of independence. He and his fellow conservatives thus elected to mark 27 September 1821 as the true independence day, the date of Iturbide’s entry into Mexico City at the head of the Army of the Three Guarantees (and coincidentally the future emperor’s birthday). This followed from his argument that while independence from Spain itself was inevitable, the manner of its achievement had fatally marked Mexico’s subsequent history, so that Father Miguel Hidalgo’s

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uprising was to be condemned rather than celebrated. He took this line in newspaper writing in the conservative dailies with which he was closely associated in the last years of his life, El Tiempo (1846) and El Universal (1848–55) as well as in his historical works. The debate over the date to be honored continued into the early 1850s, although by that time the 16th of September had acquired the status of orthodoxy.2 His 1834 editorial was the sharpest denunciation he ever voiced of the disastrous direction the process of independence had taken and the ways in which it had crippled the young Mexico. He pointed out that in actuality Iturbide had achieved independence after the great bloodletting of the preceding decade. Alamán evoked and discounted one by one the excuses that Mexicans might claim for the wasted opportunity of their independence, starting with political inexperience: The same causes always produce the same effects. Continual revolutions, extravagant theories, pretended reforms that in reality had no object other than to destroy from its [very] foundations the religious and social structure, and whose only outcome will have been to enrich a few greedy demagogues who acclaimed the name of the fatherland in order to adorn themselves in its spoils, have produced the necessary consequence of destroying everything, annihilating everything, and reducing to pathetic ruins all that existed. Let it not be said, as Mirabeau exclaimed speaking of the French Revolution, that we have only worked to create a vast desolation. [Let us suppress] anarchy, let us establish a political order in consonance with the state of our civilization and our capacities, and then, and not by any other means, will we enjoy the fruits of independence, and every anniversary of it will bring with it the memory of new and greater prosperities. Alamán does seem to have written for money when he could, as when he composed a “noticia histórica del palacio nacional de Mégico” for the famous Calendario de Galván of 1838.3

The Death of Father Arechederreta Eighteen thirty-six was an especially eventful year for Lucas Alamán, his family, and for Mexico. In early September his friend, business manager, and fellow Celaya hacendado Manuel Gómez de Linares summed up the national scene when he wrote that “the circumstances could not be worse: war, hunger, copper, and intestine dissensions cannot presage our prosperity.”4 Armed

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hostilities broke out with the American colonists in Texas. President Santa Anna was at first victorious in battles against the Texans, then rumored killed, and finally returned to Mexico as the vast province slipped into independence. The overabundance of copper coinage was undermining the economy. The political situation was as tense as ever. In the midst of all this, Alamán was accepting an appointment to the Consejo de Gobierno under the new centralist constitution, writing a report and making recommendations for the government on the critical situation regarding copper coinage, taking up again his demanding responsibilities on behalf of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, putting together the Cocolapan textile enterprise, and working feverishly to revive the fortunes of his Celaya properties. Within his immediate circle of family and friends, starting with himself and reaching out to the extended Alamán–Castrillo–Portú family and beyond, a series of more or less grave illnesses and deaths succeeded one another from the beginning of 1836 through at least the summer of the following year. While Alamán himself was not chronically ill, he had for some years past fallen ill periodically, a foreshadowing of the increasingly severe lung ailments that were eventually to kill him. In the early winter of 1835, for example, he was so sick with “an attack to my chest [ataque de pecho]” and an accompanying “catarrhal fever”—vague symptoms suggesting a viral or bacterial infection of the lungs—that his letters had to be written for him by someone else; similar episodes of illness were to crop up regularly in his correspondence. In midOctober 1836 Alamán mentioned in a fairly matter-of-fact manner that “I have again suffered [the same] nervous attack as last year, which has seriously affected me recently.” What the nature of this “nervous attack” may have been and whether it was a sort of nervous prostration accompanied by physical symptoms, a purely emotional condition (e.g., a depressive episode), or what might have triggered it Alamán did not say. In the spring of 1836 his good friend Gómez de Linares was apparently quite ill (he recovered), prompting Alamán to write in a letter how “very, very much” he would regret his passing, “since I have really esteemed him. It seems as though this year is destined to take from me many people I am fond of.”5 He rarely expressed his feelings openly in his correspondence, a reticence entirely in keeping with his reserved personality. Naturally he was not unique in suffering these trials; women miscarried, and many children died in infancy, a tragedy the Alamán-Castrillo couple had borne more than once. People young and old were stricken by epidemic diseases like cholera morbus, measles, typhoid, and various malign fevers. But the family was struck by a number of medical difficulties in

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succession in 1836–37, any one of which would have been hard to bear if it had occurred singly. For those Mexicans who could afford the ministrations of a physician, the medical care of the day often aggravated patients’ illnesses rather than alleviate them. This was the case in the bleedings administered to the older Lucas Alamán in an attempt to palliate his lung problems, while successive bleedings during an illness may have hastened the death of his elder half brother. The first blow to strike the Alamán-Castrillo family, especially Lucas Alamán himself, was the death of his elder half brother, Father Juan Bautista Arechederreta, in Querétaro on 12 January 1836. Sixty-five years old at the time of his death, some two decades older than his younger half brother, he would have been considered elderly by the standards of the time. The priest had gone to Querétaro at the behest of the Cabildo eclesiástico in Mexico City to carry out an inspection tour of the city’s convents in keeping with his previous work on female religious establishments. Although the nature of his fatal illness is not mentioned in the correspondence occasioned by his death, the fact he was traveling a fair distance from the capital hints that whatever it was, the illness was of short duration; or if chronic, that it had been in abeyance and overtook him on his travels. Alamán was in Querétaro some days earlier, presumably to spend time with his brother, but had returned to Mexico City; by 12 January Arechederreta was dead.6 Notes of condolence began to reach Alamán in Mexico City within a day or two: from Manuel Gómez de Linares, from the national congress, and then strung out over succeeding weeks and months from distant places within Mexico and from well-known public figures. Several bishops and other high Church officials were among them, including the bishop of Michoacán and the abbot of the Colegiata de Guadalupe. Writing of his brother’s death a month later, Alamán said that his sadness over the priest’s passing was “mitigated somewhat by the great tranquility and Christian resignation of the sick man, who had a truly enviable death, having been very happy during the course of his life.” So affected was Alamán by his elder brother’s death and so busy with the details of the funeral and the execution of the testament that he fell behind in his many other obligations. The canon’s embalmed body was shipped to Mexico City to be entombed in a chapel near the Basilica of Guadalupe. Of greater symbolic and emotional significance than the material bequests to family and friends was the now-lapsed noble title of Marqués de San Clemente, which Arechederreta had rehabilitated some time before the abolition of noble titles in 1826 but which was extinguished by 1836. Alamán also inherited his elder brother’s “Apuntes” about

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the independence struggle, upon which he would lean heavily in writing his own magisterial Historia de Méjico. Some months after Arechederreta’s death, Miguel Septién, a descendant of a powerful Guanajuato mining family and a close Alamán cousin, died of pneumonia, affecting the family deeply.7 But by far the darkest shadow cast over these years by family health issues was the recurring delicate condition of Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán. With his return from internal exile and at least nominal withdrawal from political life, Lucas Alamán returned to the marital couch. Now in her early thirties, Narcisa bore another son, Lucas, on 13 September 1837, which means the child was conceived at the end of 1836; he was to live for only two years. Alamán had returned from one of his frequent visits to his properties in Celaya to find that his wife had miscarried in the early summer of 1836, so that the conception of the ill-fated Lucas followed by only a few months. Between the summer and the conception of this baby, Alamán reported in early November that “in my house Narcisa is in bed with symptoms of a miscarriage.” How this episode related to the failed pregnancy of early summer 1836 and to the conception of the baby Lucas is not clear. What is clear is that although Narcisa was quite fertile, she was having recurrent problems with carrying pregnancies to term. Adding considerably to these reproductive mysteries is a letter from Juan Cayetano Portugal, the bishop of Michoacán, of mid-April 1836 congratulating doña Narcisa on the birth of a son, Carlos, some time previous to that date, and lamenting that he had not been in Mexico City in time to baptize the infant. I have found no record of such a birth, although a Carlos Alamán came along quite a bit later. Compounding and possibly complicating these reproductive troubles, Narcisa was struck by measles in early February 1837, as were several of the children in the house, although the worried husband and father escaped illness. Measles had hit Mexico City on an epidemic scale, prompting Alamán to remark that even older people who had already had the illness were contracting it. Alamán’s deepening worry about Narcisa was well justified, his Celaya friend commented in mid-March, “since the symptom of spitting blood is no small thing without divining what may cause it, and it will be terrible if the physicians make a mistake [regarding her] internal condition.” By early April she was much improved, but her condition continued to be delicate through the summer, with occasional worrisome signs of relapse. Against this medical background the baby Lucas was born in September 1837; that his mother’s encounter with measles accounted in some degree for the infant’s death at two months of age seems a distinct possibility.8

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The Gravitational Pull of Politics In Lucas Alamán’s continuous involvement with politics throughout the decade there were some successes, some regretted opportunities, and some misses. In the spring of 1835 the interim president, Miguel Barragán, offered him the ambassadorship to King Louis Philippe’s court when Lorenzo de Zavala was fired after a falling-out with President Santa Anna. Tempted as he had been at times by such positions, he refused it on this occasion in the face of resistance from his family. On the domestic political front, the centralist constitution of 1836 known as the Siete Leyes (Seven Laws) bore the imprint of Lucas Alamán’s thinking, political preferences, and influence as much as those of his friend and fellow conservative Manuel Sánchez de Tagle (1782– 1847), whose name was often associated with Alamán’s in newspapers and pamphlets attacking the “aristocratic party” in Mexican politics. Sánchez de Tagle chaired the drafting committee. Alamán was to have a secondary but visible official role in most of the centralist regimes under the Siete Leyes, those of José Justo Corro (February 1836—April 1837), his old boss Anastasio Bustamante (April 1837—March 1839 and July 1839–22 September 1841), Antonio López de Santa Anna (March 1839—July 1839), and Nicolás Bravo (July 1839). This charter is often justifiably characterized as representing the victory of conservative centralism over liberal federalism, but at least in this incarnation the period of centralism’s ascendancy was plagued by many of the difficulties a centralist regime was supposed to have cured or forestalled. Among these problems were virulent political factionalism, provincial uprisings, and instability; rampant fiscal problems and economic downturn; massive territorial loss and national humiliation. The 1836 centralist constitution supplanted the federalist charter of 1824, and its promulgation by interim president Corro on 30 December 1836 was preceded by a long drafting and debate process. The reforms proposed went beyond changing the criteria of citizenship or the franchise, cutting deep into the balance of power among the three branches of government and reducing the political autonomy of the states. The authority of congress to undertake such a fundamental change was much debated. In the end, the new constitution effectively did away with the structure formalized by the 1824 charter, however, leaving Mexico representative and republican but less popular and no longer federal. Nowhere was this change more explicitly indicated than in the reduction of the states to departments. State legislatures were replaced with juntas departamentales, bodies of seven individuals elected by deputies in

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the national congress, along with departmental governors designated by the president. Changes to the electoral franchise effectively blocked off much of the nonurban population with income requirements and explicitly barred from voting domestic servants and certain other groups, including women, because they were deemed to be dependent. The election of the president was provided for by an elaborate indirect system in which the Congress, Supreme Court, and Executive branch participated, and the presidency was extended to eight years. The great innovation of the Siete Leyes, thought to have been adapted by Sánchez de Tagle from the writings of Benjamin Constant, was the Supreme Conservative Power (Supremo Poder Conservador [SPC]). This was conceived as a fourth, coequal branch of government intended to dampen the enthusiasms of republicanism and the temptations toward dictatorship on the part of the chief executive. Made up of five men qualified by their moral and civic virtue, education, economic independence, and previous service in high public office, the SPC could, among other things, depose presidents under certain circumstances, suspend congress, and annul laws. One member was to be replaced every two years, nominations and voting for the body passing from the juntas departamentales to the Chamber of Deputies and thence to the Senate for final confirmation. The conservative Manuel Sánchez de Tagle was appointed to the SPC, as was the liberal Melchor Múzquiz, but the balance favored the conservatives. Also provided for was a Consejo de Gobierno, an advisory body to the president of thirteen men chosen by him from a slate submitted by congress, the qualifications for this salaried office being the same as for deputies. Taken as a whole, the Siete Leyes were explicitly elitist, restrictive of broad popular participation in the political process, and engineered to place the fortunes of the country in the hands of that sector of the political nation embracing the hombres de bien: mostly white men of property, education, gentlemanly status and manners, civic virtue, and conservative principles. Having declined the ambassadorship to France, Alamán accepted his appointment by interim president José Justo Corro to the Consejo de Gobierno, a position he took up in January 1837 and would occupy for three years (1837– 40) at an annual salary of four thousand pesos.9 He was immediately elected the body’s vice president. To Santa Anna, freshly returned and in disgrace from his American captivity after the Texas debacle, he wrote of his appointment and of the Siete Leyes more broadly: As you will know, I find myself again, although to my regret, mixed up in public affairs, even though the post in the Consejo is largely passive.

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The new constitution that created that body has been for the most part modeled on the forms discussed before you in the meetings held on the matter. And although, as expected in all works of this nature, it still has many gaps to fill and many parts that require adjustments, the general plan is good and all of it very superior to what preceded it. They are trying now to establish and consolidate it: they are trying to found upon it the happiness of the nation and make of [the nation] a power respectable for its order and internal strength now that external circumstances are favorable due to the recognition of our independence by Spain.10 While his official duties as a member of the consejo were limited, the presidents and their cabinets with whom he served consulted him on many matters of national import. In 1836 he was appointed to chair a commission to investigate the excess copper coinage in circulation and to issue a report with recommendations. Copper money was a nettlesome problem deeply affecting the Mexican domestic economy in the 1830s and into the 1840s and linked to the outflow and domestic scarcity of circulating silver. In her book El comercio y el poder en México the late Araceli Ibarra suggested several reasons for this drainage in the early republican period.11 Commenting briefly on the copper coinage issue in his Historia de Méjico, Alamán wrote that “even more damaging than [the use of] paper money” was the excessive mintage and accompanying falsification of copper coins. The object of copper mintage had been to democratize the domestic economy, a policy view adhered to by most liberals. In 1829 the Vicente Guerrero government arrogated copper mintage from the states to itself. After an ineffective flurry of government activity to address the problem, in late July or early August 1836 Alamán accepted the “burdensome honor” of appointment by interim president Corro to head a commission to propose measures for amortizing copper money—in other words, to extinguish it in favor of a return to silver and some reduced quantity of copper as legitimate money.12 Alamán’s commission issued a set of recommendations, an amortization bank was established to retire much copper money, and a number of urban riots occurred as the retirement of plentiful, and much counterfeited, coinage was discussed. In the end, the problem died of its own accord in the early 1840s. As if this commission and his other responsibilities as member of the Consejo de Gobierno were not enough, some months later Alamán was tapped by President Bustamante to chair yet another temporary entity, this time charged with overhauling the entire system of public administration under the Siete

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Leyes. The commission generated a dense slate of recommendations, all tending to reinforce the centralist regime shaped by the Siete Leyes, even then under constant attack by federalists in the press, in political pamphletry, and in the pronunciamientos continually sprouting around the country. To muddy the waters even further, three days after the commission completed its report, on 11 February 1838, Valentín Gómez Farías returned to Mexico from his New Orleans exile to a tumultuous welcome by antiregime elements. With the national treasury extremely stressed by the deficit backwash from the Texas debacle, the body’s proposals were never implemented. As one might imagine, the remit of the commission was extremely broad, its task “to prepare the bases and assign the work relative to the general organization of public administration.”13 Lucas Alamán’s propensity to invoke explicitly or implicitly Edmund Burke’s political principle not to toy with political abstractions or introduce change for its own sake or in an unconsidered manner may have been what he had in mind in composing the final report. The prolegomenon reflected Alamán’s philosophy of governance—and that of Porfirio Díaz some forty or fifty years before he came to coin it: “Poca política, mucha administración.” This was a doctrine both antiliberal and antidemocratic, seeking as it did to compress the space for political thrust and parry into as small an area as possible. The commission’s proposals relating to the ministry of war and marine were comparatively minor, but the treasury ministry was targeted for some fairly notable reforms inasmuch as in that department “the disarray [is] even greater than the scarcity [of money].” The most far-reaching reform measures proposed related to the conduct of Mexico’s foreign relations, whose ministry at this point had been separated from that of interior matters. The last administrative area to be addressed was that of interior affairs. Recommendations included the establishment of a national gendarmerie “organized in the style of the old Acordada,” the institution of a national cadastral survey with a view to setting the values of landed property for tax purposes and the codification of the functions of ayuntamientos and of their fiscal bases. The commission went on to urge the reform of the justice system, the compilation of a national law code, and substantial recruitment of bureaucratic personnel. Fourteen years after the 1838 report, in the very last pages of the final volume of his Historia de Méjico, Alamán passed from the descriptive to the prescriptive, exchanging the voice of historian for that of political analyst, policy maker, and political philosopher. Thrust from the inner circle of political power by the fortunes of his career, Alamán in his last decade came as close to being a professional historian as any figure of the time, although he would

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probably have preferred to consider himself a man of letters. In light of the last fifteen years or so of the country’s history he basically reiterated in greater detail many of the recommendations his commission had advanced in 1838 but which had never been acted upon. Most interesting here is how he proposed that the necessary reforms to the structures of public administration be carried out. He began by posing a rhetorical question his presumed readers might ask: “I will be asked, ‘What can be the [means of realizing these reforms] when the formalities prescribed by the constitution to make reforms in it are so many and so slow, and any change has to depend on the approval of the state legislatures?’ Even if this difficulty did not exist, it is impossible for a [national] congress to make, even in many years, such a substantial reform, [together] with the codes and all the laws indispensable to put it [i.e., the reform] into practice.” His answer was that congresses must essentially be circumvented by more expeditious means—“facultades extraordinarias”— because such legislative bodies are too inefficient and reforms often run against the interests vested in them. Having laid down this argumentative foundation, he continued, deploying the panoply of historical allusions always within his reach: It is worthy of note that the ancient nations, even when they had established congresses [i.e., representative bodies], whenever [the necessity] of forming a law code or making some change in the constitution occurred, made use of special commissions for this sort of work. Thus, to draft the laws of the Twelve Tables, the Roman senate appointed the decemvirate; to reform the constitution it created as dictator Sila [i.e., Sulla], who carried out the reform in such a way that the republic would have been able to survive had not the ambition of Pompey not repealed all that he had done; and later, the purpose of appointing the triumvirs was to [re]constitute the republic. Congresses are better suited to conserve that which [already] exists than to create new things. For this reason a nation in which everything remains to be done, if it has to depend on an ordinary congress to have a fiscal system, codes, and all those organic laws without which the general principles contained in a constitution cannot be developed and reduced to practice, will never have them. To work with the terrible energy it did, the French Convention ceased to be a congress and transformed itself into as many dictatorships as there were committees accountable to it, which proceeded independently the ones from the others. And the organization that Napoleon later gave to

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France and the formation of the codes that bear his name were the result of deliberations in his council of state.14 Alamán is certainly promoting here the political expediency of bypassing large representative bodies (the congresitos of which he had complained) and their drawn out, messy deliberative processes. Given the author’s espousal of dictatorship under certain conditions, it is a bit difficult to tell if he is arguing in favor of the development of basic political reforms and lawmaking by relatively small bodies, or by a dictatorship, or for the one to make proposals and the other to enforce them. But he concludes with a long paragraph condemning the destructive effects of an executive delegated broad powers by a congress to cope with an emergency situation and the sort of corrupting abuse—in the moral sense—of resulting executive dominance. The example he gives is that of Vicente Guerrero in 1829, when the Mexican national congress essentially wrote him a blank check to deal with the Spanish invasion. In Alamán’s view Guerrero’s vast overreach of his authority and the prolongation of the extraordinary powers granted to him resulted in great damage to the republic, including sowing the seeds of disaster in Texas, running up the external public debt, ruining the treasury, putting up ostentatious public buildings, and “instead of elevating the character of the citizens, nourish[ing] adulation and subjugation.” And he ends with a resounding condemnation of dictatorship: “The idea of dictatorship, which some [political] partisans tend to have, should, then, be absolutely excluded from the means to be thought of to reform the constitution.”15 This puts Alamán’s construction of the final Santa Anna regime in a somewhat different light and points toward his predilection for conciliar forms of governance, which in form, if not exactly intent, harked back to pre-Bourbon, Habsburg patterns.

The Alamán-Castrillo Family in the Late 1830s Little information about Alamán’s domestic and family life during this period or indeed during the last two decades of his life has survived, and therefore the hints there are of it are precious to the biographer. Around this time the Alamán-Castrillo family lived in the large house it had occupied for many years in the Sagrario parish, near the cathedral, in the first of the city’s eight major divisions (cuarteles), at Primera Calle de San Francisco no. 1, today’s Avenida Madero. This was the city’s high-rent district, with a predominantly

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Spanish population; those people enumerated here as indigenous or castas in the censuses of the era were likely to be domestic servants.16 With residence in this intensely urban district came the daily pleasures and aggravations of city life, most of which evade documentation and of which there is virtually no record for Alamán. Anyone who has ever had a next-door neighbor with a barking dog or a downstairs neighbor who plays their recorded music too loudly will appreciate the exchange the statesman had in the spring of 1836 with Francisco Pérez de Palacios, who owned the house next to his in the center of downtown Mexico City. In a very polite note fortuitously preserved among his papers, Alamán wrote to Pérez regarding “matters [between] neighbors” (cosas de vecinos). He pointed out that one of the bedrooms in his house got its sunlight “over your roof.” Pérez had put up some sort of tenting or awning on the flat roof, “doubtless to cover [the roof] with plants,” but this arrangement obstructed the sunlight from Alamán’s house, making the bedroom in question “dark and perhaps unhealthy.” Alamán therefore asked Pérez in the most courteous terms if “without prejudice to the enjoyment of your family you might agree to remedy this inconvenience.”17 No reply is preserved with the note. The Alamán-Castrillo family was a large one, but typically for the time and place many of their children died in infancy or very young, as I indicated earlier. We do have some information about the children who survived into adulthood, and even two of Lucas Alamán’s grandchildren. By mid-1839 eight of the eleven Alamán-Castrillo children had been born. Narcisa Castrillo was thirty-five years old at this time. Catalina, the eldest, born in 1824, was to become a nun and would have been reaching adolescence during the mid and late 1830s, probably under the principal charge of her mother. The two oldest boys, Gil, born in 1825, the future priest, and Juan Bautista, born in 1826, the future lawyer and his father’s helpmate, were just behind their sister. Father Gil Alamán was ordained in 1849. Juan Bautista, who worked with his father on the affairs of the ex-Marquesado, would have read law with an established attorney and entered the profession that way. At the beginning of 1851, in a letter to the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, Alamán wrote of Juan Bautista that his “examination . . . as a lawyer has been received with much applause by the Supreme Court.”18 Juan Bautista was married to María Josefa Vidaurrázaga on 29 October 1863, and according to their wedding announcement the young couple were to be found at home at no. 3 Portal de Santo Domingo, in the city center. Their son Rafael, born in 1870, whose profession was later listed as propietario, was married in 1893 to the twenty-one-year-old

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Guadalupe Bolado; one of the witnesses was Ricardo María de Vidaurrázaga, probably the young bridegroom’s maternal uncle. The tenth child of Lucas and Narcisa, Sebastián, was a lawyer like his considerably older (by almost twenty years) brother Juan Bautista and was married to another woman of the Vidaurrázaga family, probably a cousin to judge by the fact that her name was Vidaurrázaga Castrillo. As noted earlier, another Alamán grandson was killed in a somewhat mysterious hunting accident in 1909. Of the Alamán-Castrillo offspring who reached adulthood, none was particularly long-lived, the second son, Juan Bautista, dying at the age of 74, the oldest of the siblings by some years. Lucas Alamán took care educating his sons, but almost certainly there were private tutors or attendance at one of the capital’s better colegios or both. This attention may well have extended to the boys’ elder sister Catalina, given the patriarch’s lifelong interest in education, educational institutions, and educational reform. A second daughter, Antonia, born in 1829, died in infancy; Pedro, born in 1830, died at the age of four, in 1834; Justino, born in 1831, was a young child in this period; Lucas, born in 1837, died at the age of two; and Pascual, born in May 1839, was an infant. Hence there were a great many family tragedies the couple and their living children had to survive during these years, but there were also some lighter moments. One of these speaks to the protective impulses of any father toward a teenage daughter no matter what the era. Although destined for a monastic life, Catalina was in late adolescence around this time, must have been living at home, and seems to have attracted the ardent attentions of a young Englishman who had become a familiar visitor in the Alamán household, at a guess an employee of one of the British commercial houses in the capital or perhaps attached to the British legation. Lucas Alamán had apparently directed a complaint about the young man’s forward behavior to John Parkinson (1772–1847), the British consul in Mexico from 1838 to 1840, who responded with a letter to the paterfamilias: My Dear Sir: I am truly concerned at the disquietude occasioned to you and your excellent family by the romantic imaginations of my young countryman. I should be disposed to condemn him very seriously, did I not feel that his disappointment and mortification is [sic] attributable to motives and feelings in themselves innocent, and bespeaking the highest possible respect and attachment towards your family. So much kindness and so long continued, has rendered him captious, and impatient. I can scarcely

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persuade myself that he is so weak or so headstrong as to contemplate any sinister project. I should indeed lament any such result. I fully participate in your anxiety to obviate any such mischance. Your suggestions as to a modification in the mode of his visiting, are truly kind, and may I think reduce him to reason. I have written to desire to see him tomorrow morning. I would have named an earlier period but that I knew not where to find him this evening. I entertain no doubt that he will call on me, and if so, you shall know the result as early as possible.19 Beyond his immediate household, Alamán apparently took considerable interest in his extended family, not only his uncle Tomás’s children but also his sister María de la Luz’s son and even the Portu connections of his wife’s family, especially the younger generation. Although he had dismissed as incompetent his young nephew Miguel’s management of the family’s Cata mining interests in Guanajuato, for example, he may have intervened to facilitate an ecclesiastical dispensation for Miguel’s marriage to his cousin Juanita. Miguel acknowledged this in a letter addressed to his “querido Tío Lucas,” thanking him for the “beneficent influence you had on my [recent] marriage.”

19 • Texas, Santa Anna, and War

Politics and War By the time Alamán joined the Consejo de Gobierno in a powerful position in the spring of 1837 the Texians, as they styled themselves, had gained their independence, and Santa Anna was temporarily off the scene although still very much a presence hovering in the political ether. One way in which the war in Texas impinged on Alamán’s life was that it thrust him forward as a possible presidential candidate in 1836–37. Elected president in April 1834, Santa Anna occupied the office until late January 1835, when he stepped down, alleging ill health, and retired to his beloved Manga de Clavo hacienda, as he did so often. He was succeeded on an interim basis by Miguel Barragán (January 1835— February 1836), who also stepped down for reasons of health, died a short time later, and was succeeded in turn as interim chief magistrate by José Justo Corro (February 1836—April 1837). With Santa Anna in disgrace and out of the country by this time, new presidential elections were anticipated for January 1837 under the auspices of the as yet incomplete Siete Leyes constitution. Beginning in the summer of 1836 Alamán was mentioned as a potential candidate, along with Bravo, Victoria, and Tornel. Writing to President Andrew Jackson in August 1836, the American emissary Powhatan Ellis claimed that Alamán might have a good chance should he choose to run but doubted that he would.1 As early as the summer of 1836 Gómez de Linares commented from Celaya on his friend’s possible candidacy: “You are now mentioned [ya U. anda en lenguas], and also various military men. I would not wish for you to take up that burden in the present circumstances, and I would want you to obtain it [only] when we have come to desire judgment, stability, and intelligence [in a president]. God save you from the precipice and give you those

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satisfactions that soothe your spirit.” Less out of false modesty than a realistic assessment of the political situation, Alamán responded, “As far as the presidential elections are concerned, let us not think about them now, nor for some time, since on the supposition that that cannot take place until the constitution [i.e., the Siete Leyes] is concluded and what it may establish [regarding elections], it is a thing that moves very, very, very slowly. [My candidacy] will only have been spoken of in jest, since I seriously think no one will have thought of it, and if others were to think of it you may be sure I would not consider it.” As the presidential balloting drew nearer, the various potential candidates became the targets of attacks in and outside the press and in the vigorous space for political pamphletry. One such writing published in Alamán’s home city of Guanajuato was described by a correspondent of his as “entirely prostituted and vicious”; but Alamán was to take heart in the fact that he was “esteemed as he justly merited, by all honorable men of good judgment.”2 Anastasio Bustamante returned to Mexico to a tumultuous welcome in late December, quickly becoming the odds-on favorite to win the presidential poll, a highly cumbersome process. As the results of the departmental voting became known over the next few days, first from Mexico and Puebla, then from the other areas of the country, it became clear that Bustamante had carried the day by a large margin. Of the departments, only Sinaloa favored Nicolás Bravo, while Alamán carried Nuevo León. It is rather odd that he had not withdrawn his name from consideration early on, and one can only speculate as to his motives. It is not hard to imagine why he lost, though. In a Mexican political environment in which both political hatreds and loyalties ran hot, he was a man who had attracted more negative feeling than many other figures; and he had in any case been reluctant to assume two high posts within recent memory. He accepted his seat on the Consejo de Gobierno only after Bustamante was elected, and then took up a position in which the work of governance was carried on largely behind the scenes, always his clear preference. Some months after the election he remarked to Terranova, “There was [never] much probability of my being chosen, of which I am very glad, as well as not having a more direct commitment than my place on the Consejo.”3 The immediate cause of all the presidential scrimmaging was the disgrace and (temporary) absence of Santa Anna after the Texas debacle of 1836. Lucas Alamán observed all this from the sidelines, since he was not appointed to the Consejo de Gobierno until 1837, when the Siete Leyes constitution came fully into effect, and held no other official post at this time. He says nothing about Texas in his brief 1843 autobiography, so almost all of what we have of his re-

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action to the events there comes from a series of letters he wrote in 1836 and 1837 (as he would later do in 1847–48), most of them to the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone and one or two to Santa Anna himself. To set Alamán’s reportage in context I first want to discuss the Texas rebellion. Continuing Anglo settlement in Texas—by 1830 there were some twenty thousand Americans there, compared with about three thousand Mexicans— was hardly stanched by the law of 6 April 1830 closing off the state (later, the department) to further American immigration. The measure, of which then minister Alamán had been chief architect, was promulgated largely in response to General Manuel Mier y Terán’s ominous report about Mexico’s tenuous hold on the area during his boundary commission travels in Texas. The issues bringing matters to a boil in Texas were the threat to slavery from President Guerrero’s abolition decree of 1829, although Texas was actually exempted from its provisions, at least for the moment; the central government’s attempt to choke off further colonization; the imposition of taxes and tariffs; and the imminent restrictions on local political autonomy following President Santa Anna’s centralist turn after his assumption of the presidency in March 1833. At least three tendencies developed among the Texians: a vehement proindependence party led by men like Henry Smith (1788–1851), the first American governor of Texas; equally vehement annexationists represented by the Jackson crony and latecomer Sam Houston (1793–1863); and a more conciliatory group headed by Stephen F. Austin. While a series of Texas settler conventions produced demands that the Mexican federal constitution of 1824 be fully reinstated, sentiment among the Texians grew ever hotter despite Austin’s efforts to calm the more ardent spirits, and Texas’s fate became a heated issue in the United States. Austin’s efforts during a trip to Mexico City to reconcile Texas autonomy within a looser federalist structure were unsuccessful even as the situation in Texas itself grew increasingly tense over 1834–35. A June 1835 attack on a customshouse and the subsequent formation of a Texas settler “army” prompted Santa Anna in November 1835 to undertake a northward military expedition with an ill-equipped conscript force to suppress what was now correctly viewed from Mexico City as an open rebellion. The lack of logistical planning and the hardships of the march to Texas through the arid and semiarid north of Mexico presaged the disastrous outcome of the expedition, as they would again a decade later. Early Texan victories against modest Mexican forces at Goliad and San Antonio produced some overconfidence, leading the Texans to disperse. Santa Anna arrived at San Antonio

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with an army of about twenty-five hundred men on 23 February 1836, the Texans declared their independence from Mexico on 2 March, and Santa Anna wiped out all the American defenders of the Alamo on 6 March, bloodshed that was followed by another massacre at Goliad. On 21 April 1836 the military situation was reversed with the Texans’ decisive victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. Santa Anna escaped the destruction of his army but was captured the following day and forced to sign two treaties—known collectively as the Treaty of Velasco—on 14 May to secure his freedom and return to Mexico. The public treaty formally ended the war, secured the evacuation of all Mexican forces from Texas as well as a pledge that they would henceforth remain below the Rio Grande, and promised reparations for any colonist property destroyed or looted during the fighting. A second, secret treaty granted Santa Anna his freedom in exchange for his promise to try to gain recognition of Texan independence in the Mexican Congress. It also acknowledged the Rio Grande as the border between Mexico and the newly independent Republic of Texas, whereas the boundary had always previously been recognized as the Nueces River, further to the north. This difference of opinion became the casus belli for the American invasion ten years later. In April 1836 Bustamante was elected president of Mexico and proceeded to revoke all of Santa Anna’s decrees and disavow the two treaties immediately upon assuming office. Spared the hanging that many Texans wanted, Santa Anna himself was sent to Washington, DC to meet with President Andrew Jackson. The Mexican offered assurances against any attempt by his countrymen to reconquer the wayward state of Texas. The Americans then put him on a ship that landed him at Veracruz in February 1837, whence he immediately retired to his beloved Manga de Clavo hacienda. Santa Anna mobilized his forces for the march to Texas late in 1835, and by the end of March 1836 Alamán wrote to Terranova y Monteleone “Santa Ana [sic] is carrying out with success his Texas campaign.” Two days before the events at San Jacinto in April, which he could not have foreseen, Alamán wrote that Santa Anna’s victories had nearly resolved the situation. In June 1836, by which time news of the catastrophic encounter at San Jacinto had arrived in the Mexican capital, Alamán’s friend, the sharp-penned Manuel Gómez de Linares, was writing from Celaya excoriating Santa Anna’s character: “That man is destined to keep us [forever] in anxiety and shocks, making himself more memorable for his ill deeds than his ballyhooed military prowess. He will be the unique agent of the great dissensions that await us, and being also the object of our opprobrium no other reward awaits him than the universal execration of the entire world.”4

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By midsummer 1836 things had taken a more decidedly dark turn, as Alamán wrote to Gómez de Linares, “There remains no doubt at all that Señor Santa Ana [sic] [has] been shot by the colonists . . . for having violated the law of nations and of war in having shot his prisoners. . . . Santa Ana ended his days miserably, and great though his misdeeds that plagued us may have been, one can do [no] less than lament his tragic end. Who knows what awaits us, beginning with the mess of the upcoming presidential election.”5 Although by the end of June 1836 the rumors of Santa Anna’s death had been put to rest, it was now clear that a disaster had occurred, as Alamán wrote to Palermo: “In a short time the political affairs of this country have taken a terrible turn. But [Santa Anna], no doubt flattered with the idea of finishing the war by himself with a [single] decisive blow, and perhaps jealous of the [military] glory gained by his subordinates, advanced recklessly and with little prudence with a small body of troops, and was defeated and taken prisoner on the 21st of April past. Being a prisoner, General Santa Ana celebrated an armistice with the single goal of gaining his liberty, and by virtue of it is soon expected at Veracruz. [E]verything assumes a dark and uncertain aspect.” About a month later Alamán continued his account of the Texas debacle, elaborating on some of the points he made in late June: “In the meantime, the rest of public matters are in a sorry state. The army retreated from Tejas, leaving the country in the hands of the rebels, who find themselves in a state of complete anarchy, changing their leaders from moment to moment, and, as always happens in such cases, the last ones are the worst [undoubtedly referring to the rise of Sam Houston]. They have President Santa Ana in their hands, are treating him dreadfully, and there is no doubt he will perish either because of the bad treatment or because they shoot him in reprisal for the unheard-of atrocities he committed among the colonists.”6 When Santa Anna’s imminent return from the United States became known, Alamán’s apprehensions turned toward the destabilizing effects that might follow from the general’s presence on Mexican soil. Along with many other people, he felt that a Texas independence guaranteed by Britain would create a buffer between the voracious northern neighbor and the weaker republic to the south. Shortly after Santa Anna’s landing at Veracruz in February 1837, Alamán’s fears were mollified by the caudillo’s “most solemn protests of his adherence to the constitution that has just been established” and by the fact that he had made no commitment of any kind to the Texans—both of which statements, characteristically, turned out to be lies.7 Lucas Alamán’s evaluation of the political situation in Mexico as of February 1837 was expressed in a long letter he wrote to the caudillo himself at

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Manga de Clavo that month. The letter stands out because of its eloquence, its unusually abject toadiness, and its clear expression of the author’s political values: Yesterday the news of your safe arrival at Veracruz was received. . . . This is the moment in which you are returning to your country after the terrible storm that it [Mexico] and especially you have suffered. For a thousand reasons you will today be the object to which the factions direct their gaze, and you are the one who can contribute very powerfully to realizing their ends. I think it a duty, then, of all those who love their country to represent to you with honesty the state of things. . . . I hope you have come to know me well enough to be persuaded that I will tell you nothing but the truth. Thinking you hopelessly lost, [some newspapers] unleashed against you [invective] applauding with barbarous pleasure the news, so apparently true, that you had perished at the hands of the rebellious colonists. In the meantime, the [writing of] the Constitution was advancing, and its publication came to be the last blow to [the federalists] because the order established in it for the elections to congress and juntas departamentales puts authority in respectable hands, and the stability of public order on the basis of individual property. Your arrival has been a ray of light happily dissipating the clouds. You will now be deluged with a thousand rumors, a thousand anonymous [notes]. And the same [men] who have been such bloodthirsty enemies of yours now want to transform you into their instrument, reserving to themselves [the right] to turn against you at their discretion the power they want to recover, since they never pardon, and revenge is their favorite passion. If you pay attention to them, the nation will be exposed to new disturbances. [But] if you ignore them and continue [to place] your confidence in those who will [neither] deceive nor abandon you, matters will continue tranquilly along the happy path they have begun to take, and we can finally have a fatherland and glory in being Mexicans. Here there can be no doubt what characterizes the parties: federation [and] liberty are nothing more than pretexts that no one believes [in]. On one side are the men of property and respectability, the army, the large majority of the population; on the other are some ambitious men who want to advance at the cost of the nation, and who are ready to serve whomever takes them by the hand to raise them out of the dust. . . .

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You will forgive such a long letter, which must have appeared very trying to someone who is tired and desirous of enjoying the domestic pleasures he has missed for so long. Attribute it to the sincerity of my wishes for the public benefit, since I am without fear and without ambitions, [and] I aspired to nothing and want nothing except to be shut up in my house and to be busy with my affairs.8 By the spring of 1837 Alamán was predicting war with the United States, which he had earlier thought staved off by US recognition of Texan independence. The ongoing political debates in the US over annexation, he thought, could lead only to the absorption of the Texas Republic as a slave state. By summer he was hoping that the Panic of 1837 might keep the US at bay for the moment. Mirroring Alamán’s account and what he was undoubtedly reading in European newspapers, Terranova acknowledged that war with the US would be “disastrous for the federation”—and so it would prove.9

The Pastry War and Continued Instability Of the diplomatic and military imbroglio with the French between 1837 and 1839, in which he was more observer than key actor, Alamán says not a word either in his Historia or in his autobiography of 1843. It would set off a chain of events that were to grip the country in the 1860s. His silence is very odd in view of his drafting by the government to collaborate with Guadalupe Victoria and his old friend Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza in negotiations with the French admiral Baudin for the withdrawal of the French fleet from Veracruz. He also had a hand in the invitation to the British envoy Richard Pakenham to mediate regarding French claims against the Mexican government, thus bringing to a halt the diplomatic and armed conflict early in 1839. In the end, the war with Mexico was essentially a mistake born of irreversible prickliness on both sides about national honor, aggravated on the French side by a racialized contempt for the Mexican people that led the French to underestimate the resistance they would face. The French stumbled into a war with Mexico, in other words, primarily out of ignorance, inattention, and recklessness.10 The conflict with France over its monetary claims against Mexico for damages done to French citizens residing in the country had been gathering steam at least since the sack of the Parián market in Mexico City in 1828. The claims stemmed primarily from the ransacking of a pastry shop in the Parián by Mexican soldiers, attacks on other French-owned businesses in the capital,

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and the occasional murder of a French national, grievances aggravated by the resistance of French merchants to enforced loans by the government to pay for the Texas war. As principal minister in the Jalapa government Alamán looked favorably upon the July Revolution in France and the ascent of LouisPhilippe to the throne in 1830.11 After a precipitous recognition of Mexican independence, however, French policy toward the new nation vacillated. There was still no commercial treaty with Mexico by 1835, mostly because of French stubbornness revolving around tariff policies. Official contacts between the two countries had been reduced to a minimum even though some four thousand or so French nationals were said to be living in the country. The French envoy to Mexico, Baron Antoine-Louis Deffaudis (1786–1869), assumed his duties early in 1833 after heading the commercial section of the French foreign ministry. His dispatches to the ministry in Paris did much to heat up the situation and to encourage a threatening French posture toward Mexico. In the face of continuing Mexican resistance to negotiate over the outstanding claims, he wrote to the French foreign minister in June 1837 that “what these people [the Mexicans] need is a lesson, a severe lesson, to knock a little reason and justice into their heads.”12 Early in 1837 Deffaudis presented a “memorandum-ultimatum” to the Mexican government demanding that certain claims be met, a commercial treaty signed, and the guilty persons in attacks on French citizens be apprehended and punished. Over the course of a few months in 1838 the demand came down to an indemnity of eight hundred thousand pesos and eventually to six hundred thousand. The continuing adamant Mexican resistance to meeting French demands prompted Deffaudis and Foreign Minister LouisMathieu Molé (1781–1855) to decide in 1838 on a naval blockade of the Gulf port of Veracruz, thereby choking off the customs receipts normally collected in the port, the largest single element in the country’s fiscal array. The blockade was put in place in mid-April 1838 with a relatively small naval force. Watching from the diplomatic sidelines but invested in the Bustamante government by virtue of his role on the Consejo de Gobierno, Alamán wrote to Terranova that the growing hostility between Mexico and France was perhaps due less to the substantive issues involved than to offended national honor on both sides. The naval squadron was later increased in size and in late October put under the command of Rear Admiral Charles Baudin (1784–1854), accompanied by the Prince de Joinville, King Louis-Phillipe’s son. The talks shortly broke down over the French demand that its nationals in Mexico be allowed absolute freedom to engage in trade without being molested. Following a brief

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bombardment, the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa capitulated to the French on 28 November 1838. The government in Mexico City refused to engage in further negotiations, expelled all French citizens from the country, declared war on France on 30 November, and in short order appointed Antonio López de Santa Anna commander of the Mexican forces in conjunction with General Mariano Arista, a future president. With talks suspended, a state of war existing between the two nations, and both locked into position by commitments to defend their national honor, Admiral Baudin sent a large armed force into Veracruz on 5 December. Santa Anna’s soldiers offered an unexpectedly spirited resistance, but in the affray he was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, which was amputated the following day. Alamán wrote to Palermo that Pakenham was awaiting a squadron of fourteen English warships from Canada to intervene: “I don’t know how in France they have managed this affair so stupidly in the way they have done, and with a negotiator like Admiral Baudin it could only end in the complete ruin of French interests in this country.”13 Eventually Pakenham mediated a peace between the French and Mexicans, the Mexican government agreeing to pay an indemnity of six hundred thousand pesos, delivered in three installments beginning in March 1839. José Valadés asserts that it was Alamán who invited Pakenham’s intervention as mediator.14 The indemnity was never paid, however, establishing in part the pretext for the second French Intervention nearly twenty-five years later. The French forces departed in late April, and diplomatic relations between the two countries were restored, but France had come off badly in the episode, in the end getting less favorable terms than either Deffaudis or Baudin had demanded. The second Anastasio Bustamante administration (April 1837—September 1841), although interrupted by the interim presidencies of Santa Anna and Nicolás Bravo, must have seemed to most people a political idyll in contrast to what followed. During the nearly four years between late 1841 and the summer of 1845 no fewer than five men sat in the chief magistrate’s chair on nine separate occasions as constitutional, interim, or substitute president, all but one of them military figures: Santa Anna three times, Valentín Canalizo and José Joaquín de Herrera twice each, Nicolás Bravo and Francisco Javier Echeverría once each. In the succeeding eight years, while the country was at war with the US and then partially occupied by the American army, there were fifteen presidencies, either constitutional—that is, duly elected for full terms— or temporary. Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, Bravo, Mariano Salas, Valentín Gómez Farías, Herrera, Mariano Arista, Juan Bautista Ceballos, and Manuel

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María Lombardini each served once, Manuel de la Peña y Peña twice, Pedro María Anaya twice, and Santa Anna three times. Eight of these figures were military men, two were lawyers (Ceballos and Peña y Peña were presidents of the Supreme Court), and one (Gómez Farías) a physician by training but a politician by vocation. The turnover among cabinet ministers was dizzying, creating chaos in the making and execution of policy. The most extreme case of this muddle was the passing through President Herrera’s cabinet between June 1848 and January 1851 of sixteen treasury secretaries, hardly a surprise given the chronically impecunious state of the treasury. The numbers of pronunciamientos also spiked during 1841 and 1846. One fundamental explanation for such instability is that the basic principles of political legitimacy within a republican framework, whether federalist or centralist, were not subscribed to by all parties with stakes in the nation’s governance. The rightness of governmental authority, in other words, and the willingness of all men within the political nation to abide by the outcomes of legislative or judicial processes, elections, and other forms of decision making without resorting to force to change those outcomes in their own favor was highly contingent on constructions of party, faction, and interest. Seen from this perspective, the recurrent discussion of monarchy as a form of state offering the most likely cure for chronic instability may seem less bizarre and anachronistic, especially given its prevalence in the world of the mid-nineteenth century almost everywhere but in the Americas (with the exception of the Brazilian Empire). What was odd about such a project when it flashed across the Mexican political horizon in the mid-1840s was that it represented a return, after more than two decades of republican life, to an old form of governance associated with colonial domination. But I want to traverse here the first part of this broken ground, up to about the end of 1846, by way of painting in the background of Lucas Alamán’s activities up until the War with the United States, setting the scene for the war, and getting some idea of why Mexico fell victim to the invaders with such relative ease—although perhaps not as easily, all things considered, as the Americans might have anticipated. In July 1840 one of Alamán’s most radical nemeses, Valentín Gómez Farías, launched an extremely violent anticentralist coup against the Anastasio Bustamante regime in the capital. Although put down by the government, the revolt was to become the forerunner of a successful effort to overthrow the government led by General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga from Guadalajara in the summer of 1841, quickly adhered to by Santa Anna and General Gabriel Valencia. After some political to-ing and fro-ing, the government collapsed, clearing the way for

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Santa Anna to occupy the presidency provisionally and forcing Bustamante into European exile.15 An elite committee of political men then cooked up the highly conservative centralist constitution known as the Bases Orgánicas, upon which Santa Anna, elected president in his own right in November 1843 and confirmed in that capacity by both houses of congress in January 1844, built a military dictatorship in all but name. Pronunciamientos, political declarations (actas), and actual uprisings were wracking the country—for example, the socalled Southwest Peasants’ War—while the quixotic project of reconquering Texas hung fire. Desperately short of resources to support the army, President Santa Anna went on a taxation rampage to replenish the empty government coffers, exacting forced loans from the Church, confiscating some of its properties, and levying heavy imposts on merchants and the wealthy. When in May 1844 news arrived in Mexico City that President John Tyler had submitted a treaty to congress annexing the Republic of Texas to the Union as a state, Santa Anna put a conscription system into place to raise the manpower for an inevitable war with the US. In November Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga launched his revolt and Santa Anna set out to suppress the rebellion, leaving Vice President Valentín Canalizo in his stead. On orders from Santa Anna, Canalizo tried to shut down the congress on the pretext that it was subverting the effort to gather resources for the impending war with the US. That unruly body refused to disperse. In December 1844 José Joaquín de Herrera, the president of the Consejo de Gobierno, led a successful uprising against the Santa Anna–Canalizo government, occasioning riots and the disinterment of Santa Anna’s leg from its mausoleum by an angry crowd. Named provisional president by the Senate on 7 December 1845, Herrera was then elected president in his own right by the asambleas departamentales (under the centralist system) in August. Defeated by Herrera’s forces at Puebla in early January 1845, Santa Anna was sent into exile for life at a general’s half pay, leaving the country on 3 June 1845. A moderate centralist, Herrera favored negotiations with the US since he was acutely aware that Mexico could not sustain a war, even as the liberals, led by Gómez Farías—returned from exile—beat the drums for war over Texas. At the end of December 1845 Herrera’s government in turn fell to a coup headed by Paredes y Arrillaga, replacing Herrera as president in January 1846, eventually with Nicolás Bravo as his vice president. Paredes’s Plan de San Luis Potosí accused Herrera of being insufficiently bellicose in the face of the looming war with the US. At this point the monarchist plans of the Paredes y Arrillaga government became transparent, with Lucas Alamán and the

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Spanish ambassador, Salvador Bermúdez de Castro, guaranteeing the funding to find and install a European prince on the throne of Mexico. The plan came to nothing. Paredes’s government lasted for about six months until he was arrested by General José Mariano Salas (1797–1867) on his way north to lead Mexican troops, upon which Salas assumed the chief magistracy. By the end of 1846 Salas yielded the reins of government to Valentín Gómez Farías, who kept the presidential throne warm for Santa Anna, now a convinced liberal on his way back from exile in Cuba to assume the presidency to which he was named by congress in December 1846. Gómez Farías yielded power to Santa Anna in March 1847 under the auspices of the revived federalist charter of 1824, the Lazarus of constitutions.

Guiding the Invisible Hand Even though he would surge into the public spotlight in 1845–46, in the early 1840s Alamán mostly kept his head down, tended his garden, and launched his career as a historian. Santa Anna’s dictatorship having been overthrown at the turn of 1844–45, Alamán wrote to Frederick Huth, his London epistolary confidant, that the caudillo’s government “had come to be insupportable,” that his arrest and exile would be loudly applauded, and that anarchy would shortly follow.16 He explained his political reticence in the autumn of 1846 in response to a summons from then president General Salas to attend a meeting at the National Palace that evening regarding a matter (unspecified by Alamán) of the greatest importance to the patria. Another regular army insurgent-fighter who had adhered to the Plan de Iguala in 1821 and made a successful military career—including as the leader of a column in the attack on the Álamo in 1836—Salas had assumed control of the presidency as the commander of the Ciudadela rebellion in 1846. In his letter begging off attendance, Alamán offered yet another of his periodic resolutions to abstain from politics: The particular situation in which recent events have placed me, be it for the part that I actually played in them or for the much larger role attributed to me, has appeared to me to require my separation from all sorts of public and even private affairs, limiting myself to those necessary for the carrying on of my employment and the management of my personal affairs, and even [necessitating] my retirement to live outside of the city. If in such a state of things, counseled by prudence, or rather required by

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circumstances, were I now to attend a large meeting in which there must be a public discussion of some very important matter, [my attendance] would only renew the slander [directed against me] by journalists and public speakers, and perhaps draw the censure of both upon Your Excellency and upon the Supreme Government. . . . I will always be disposed to share [my advice] with you [in private] in honesty and good faith. . . . But for the reasons stated, I am resolved never to take part [in politics] again.17 Alamán was referring to the public opprobrium heaped upon the monarchist project and his role in it, that is, supporting the Paredes y Arrillaga overthrow of the Herrera government at the end of 1845. The employment to which Alamán alluded in his letter was his salaried position as director of national industry, a post he occupied under one title or another between 1841 and 1846. The four-thousand-peso annual salary he was paid for this job constituted an important component of his total income and the position a platform for his ideas regarding economic development. Sometime in 1841 his old boss, President Anastasio Bustamante, appointed Alamán to the Junta de Fomento, an agency intended to encourage the growth of industry, of which he became president. Alleging reasons of ill health and his objection to the government’s announced policy of lifting prohibitions on the importation of foreign cotton textiles, he subsequently resigned his reelection as chief of the junta but agreed to stay on as a conciliario. When Nicolás Bravo assumed the presidency as a substitute for Santa Anna in the fall of 1842, he invited Alamán to draft a project creating the Dirección General de la Industria Nacional, a more robust, better funded incarnation of the Junta de Fomento, and a few weeks later followed up with an appointment as chief of the Dirección’s Junta General Directiva for a term of four years. As director, Alamán moved the agency with characteristic energy toward encouraging the linen and cotton textile industries, the use of distilling equipment on sugar plantations and of machinery in agriculture more generally, initiated the formation of the Compañía Michoacana para la Industria, formulated a plan for the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura, and so forth. The Dirección was established by Bravo between mid-October 1842 and the end of February 1843 in a presidential decree clearly written by Alamán at Bravo’s behest, and Alamán was appointed in November.18 The director was the only salaried member of the Junta General Directiva and was supported by a vice director, three deputies, four suplentes (substitutes for the deputies), and several support staff.

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There was also to be a Junta General made up of experienced industrialists from all the departments of the Republic. Rules were established for elections of delegates to the junta, within the junta directiva, and for annual reports from the director. The functions of the agency included keeping abreast of foreign developments in industry, distributing books and manuals, conducting studies, establishing schools, putting on periodic exhibitions of industrial products, furnishing statistics to the government. Its budget was to come from the government and from fines levied on contraband. A national registry of industrialists was to be formed, with mandatory inscription by industrialists employing more than twenty people and voluntary membership for others. The branches of industry covered explicitly were textiles, ceramics, glass, paper, and iron; and, among farmers, those who produced silk, cotton, wool, linen, grapes, and olives. In focusing its attention strongly on the domestic textile sector, the Dirección General defended in aggressive language the necessity of prohibitive tariffs and their enforcement to protect burgeoning large-scale spinning and weaving enterprises and the choking off, or at least diminution, of the robust contraband activity originating chiefly with British manufacturers and traders. The early reports and recommendations of the junta, all of which were probably created by Alamán himself, vibrate with economic nationalism and a statecentered developmentalist economic strategy. Liberals and conservative centralists espoused the same ambitions of uncompromised national independence, economic autonomy, and widespread prosperity, but the liberals sought to achieve them through a broad play of market forces, international free trade, and the laws of comparative advantage. Ideas about economic nationalism and the central role of industrialization had a complicated genealogy in the nineteenth century, but much of the doctrine can be traced to Alexander Hamilton and his Report on Manufactures (1791). Whether Lucas Alamán read Hamilton is difficult to say. The work does not appear in the inventory of his library, but that does not mean he had not read it by the early 1840s or even a decade before. Some of what Alamán produced in his various writings on industrialization sounds like it could have been written by Hamilton. This was due partly to the similarity of their viewpoints on these questions, partly to the prose style of the age, and partly to the penetrating intelligence, wide literary culture, and somewhat obsessive-compulsive character of both men. Take Hamilton’s ventriloquism of what might be said by opponents of state policies to spur industrialization—unwarranted, distortive interventions in the economy—an idea he spent much of the Report refuting. If left to itself, the economy would

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find its way to the greatest comparative advantage, opponents of industrial policy would say; and besides this, state overreach was itself an evil. Or consider his idea that the growth of manufacturing and nonfarming occupations would have the effect of increasing the domestic demand for agricultural products, thus benefiting the agricultural sector, something one finds in Alamán’s writings on political economy. The basic tenets articulated so forthrightly by the American treasury secretary—strong central government, a sound public debt, infrastructural development, industrialization—showed up in the work of other more or less contemporary thinkers on political economy, such as Henry Clay’s American System and the German Friedrich List’s National System.19 The junta’s report of January 1841 to the treasury began with an expression of the role of an activist government in industry and went on to make a clear statement of dependency theory. It was easily demonstrable, Alamán wrote, that the Mexican government should extend its protection to the textile industry through “prohibitive laws” and their strict enforcement: All the essentially industrialized nations of the other hemisphere [i.e., Europe] make every imaginable effort . . . to insure their [economic] subsistence and maintain their preponderance with respect to the nations of this hemisphere. And what richer or better market can they develop to fulfill their goals than Mexico, so abundant in precious metals, and that can be called the capital of the Americas as much for its [large] population as for its civilization and riches? And so, of course, all the maneuvers of foreigners to keep stagnant all our industry that can compete with theirs must be aimed at Mexico, and this Republic must suffer all the wounds so that it never progresses and remains forever in the sad condition of needing the Foreigner to provide [for] its needs. To appreciate this truth it is enough to know that a country is not independent of another [country simply] because it has proclaimed its independence and given itself a government, but because neither the said country nor its rulers need anything at all from the nations surrounding [it], and have in the interior [of the nation] all the means to supply their necessities and to exercise their power. In this consists the true independence that, happily, Mexico has begun to conquer from the moment in which it began to develop industry among Mexicans, giving to innumerable families useful and decent work, suddenly transforming a people that had gone almost naked into a people clothed and with all the signs of culture and civilization, reducing the crime so abundant in times of unemployment and poverty—in a word, working a metamorphosis in all the towns that have wanted to dedicate

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themselves to industry, and sowing everywhere industrial establishments that should be seen as so many proofs of the stability of the Republic, [and] which in the end, insure it against future revolutions and disturbances.20 The first annual memoria of the Dirección, addressed to President Valentín Canalizo, was produced toward the end of 1843. Alamán excused its length and detail in the name of establishing a baseline for future reports.21 The author’s general views are reducible to five. First, the centrality of the textile industry in Mexican industrialization stands out starkly, primarily in the production of cottons; the scarcity of domestically produced raw cotton at the time had considerably hindered the growth of this sector. Second, he saw a flexible and discriminating tariff policy as key to the protection of nascent industries. Third, he stressed the benefits of economies of scale in industrial production; that is, the reduction of production costs and the deepening and widening of the national market through falling prices—down to a sweet spot at which profits could be earned and entrepreneurs not discouraged—that would enable consumers to purchase articles of prime necessity. Fourth, in this report and elsewhere he was obviously advocating a shift for Mexico, but not abandonment, away from such a marked dependence on silver production as the major exportable and prop of the national economy. And finally he was unmistakably advocating an activist role for the state in nourishing industrialization and development in all sectors of the economy, including agriculture: “If [Mexican industry] is still in its infancy, this infancy is so vigorous that it is approaching maturity. If what may be hoped for [in future] is calculated from what has been accomplished in a few years, the good Mexican can do no less than be filled with pleasure, being able to say from this moment that his country is now an industrious nation and [that] within a short time it will be able to compete with the happiest [nations] in the universe. For this what is needed more than anything is the energy and protection of the national government.” In other passages of the report his critique of Spanish colonial policies prohibiting the manufacture within New Spain of certain products, monopolizing them for producers in Spain, is prominent. This was one of his charges against Spanish colonialism, discussed in the first volume of his Historia de Méjico. Alamán was sanguine regarding the state of Mexican industry at the very moment his own textile enterprise, Cocolapan, was collapsing. One of the interesting peculiarities of the 1843 memoria that lends the lengthy report robustness and three-dimensionality is the framing of Mexican industrialization in historical terms. In assessing the state of agriculture, for example, he wrote that in the 1840s farming “had not emerged among us

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from the routines established from the time of the conquest.” He quoted over nearly three pages a long passage from a letter to Emperor Carlos V by Fray Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548), the Basque Franciscan who became New Spain’s first archbishop, concerning agriculture in the colony. Alexander von Humboldt was an obligatory reference in the memoria, as were unpublished sixteenth-century documents culled from the Hospital de Jesús archive. The report was thus almost as much a historical survey of the Mexican economy as it was a midcentury snapshot or a spate of recommendations about how to develop it. Continuing in a historical vein, Alamán’s memoria touched on a number of traditional and more recent economic activities, but what drew his sharpest comments was the counterpoint between silver mining and cotton textile production. He praised the varied nature of New Spain’s economy in the years immediately following the conquest, lamenting that this diversity had given way to an overly heavy dependence on silver. Emphasizing the negative consequences in distortion of the Mexican national economy of that reliance on silver production, he was to write in his industrial memoria of 1844: “To be rich and happy, the republic must have manufacturing, for without it her agriculture will remain reduced to a state of languor and poverty, and the treasures torn from the bowels of the earth, passing immediately from the mines . . . to the ports from which they are embarked, will only serve to demonstrate with this rapid and unproductive passage, that the wealth does not belong to the peoples to whom nature conceded it . . . but instead to those who know how to utilize our precious metals and increase their value.”22 This report constituted the most explicit discussion in all his writings of the importance of large-scale textile manufacture to the modernization process, taking as his models what had occurred in Britain, particularly, and in the United States somewhat later. In describing the historical arc of textile production in Mexico he again adverted to the colonial period, asserting that it had thrived during colonial times, helping to create a prosperity due not only to mining, “but resulting from the happy integration of all the [economic] sectors among themselves: mining facilitated consumption, and this created a path not only for the agriculture of the provinces near the mines, but also for the industry of the most remote [provinces], and this in its turn consumed the fruits of agriculture, which transformed into cloth spread over the entire country, giving work to a large number of people. The war [for independence] interrupted this order, which was the result of a long [period] of tranquility, and when independence should have reestablished [the order], the favor dispensed to foreign commerce removed even the hope of a new epoch of prosperity.”

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But now the supply of raw cotton for the factories had become a critical problem for the entrepreneurs and therefore also for the Dirección. Production in the state of Veracruz, the primary cotton-producing zone, had fallen by about two-thirds over three years, with the 1843 harvest in total collapse. Factories might have ground to a halt in 1843 had not the president allowed the import of sixty thousand quintals of foreign cotton. “But this has been only a temporary remedy,” wrote Alamán, “and always of a dangerous nature, since a privilege is never anything more than a monopoly.” If only a steady domestic supply of cotton could be assured, strategic state investment in the sector, a skillfully applied tariff policy, and the suppression of contraband would help to create a market for inexpensive textiles through economies of scale: “Products necessarily follow the means of production, and hand work and the simple, imperfect machines of that time cannot be compared to the ingenious and powerful inventions owed to the talent of Arkwright. . . . If, as is to be expected, the price of cotton cloth falls even further, with the fall in price of the primary material, and cheapening the costs of manufacture by the economies [of scale] that will be introduced, the consumption of cloth will grow incredibly, with great benefit to the mass of the population.” Alamán concluded his 1843 memoria with a number of policy recommendations, including the need to gather better statistics on industrial production, the establishment of juntas de industria wherever appropriate, the extension of an existing tax exemption on cotton production for another decade, and the introduction of foreign raw cotton under strict conditions that did not imperil domestic production. Funding should be provided for an annual industrial exposition, and a system of patents instituted along the lines of those in the US, Britain, and France. Further reports and recommendations, all of them written by Lucas Alamán, continued to flow from the Dirección over the next couple of years. Alamán’s stewardship of Mexican industry crashed to a halt on 10 October 1846, when he was suspended overnight from the directorship by President Mariano Salas. The reasons for this sudden action on the president’s part, of which Alamán had no warning, are not at all clear. Questions had been raised about his management of the Dirección, although a thorough inspection of the books absolved him of any malfeasance. His firing may simply have been motivated by a policy change involving the consolidation into one agency of industrialization and colonization matters. On the other hand, the date of his suspension, 10 October 1846, was suspiciously close to the date (1 October) on which he had declined to join in some government discussions at the behest of President Salas. His removal from the directorship may in some sense have

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been a retaliation for his reluctance to accede to the president’s invitation, meant to remove him from a key position formulating policy in an area of national life in which he was intensely interested and to deprive him of the substantial salary attached to the post. Summoned suddenly to the offices of the Dirección to meet an interior ministry official awaiting him there, he had no time to speak with his employees and saw all the papers of the agency seized. The next thing he knew, he was reading in the newspapers that a new Dirección de Colonización e Industria had been established, supplanting the agency he had led for five years. Nearly eighteen months later he wrote of his suspension in El Monitor Republicano: Dear Sirs: Having been suspended from the position I exercised as director general of industry on 10 October 1846 and ordered to undergo an inspection of the offices of the Dirección, this sudden order must have made [people] think that there had been discovered, or at least suspected, some grave abuse in the management of the affairs under my care. Nonetheless, I thought it gratuitous to justify myself then, leaving to time and [subsequent] events the clarification of all the facts. And thus it has occurred, since the report presented to congress by Minister Lafragua in December of that year not only accords honorable mention to the work of the Dirección . . . but includes the report made to the government by the official named to carry out the inspection [which] is a complete vindication of my management.23 He went on to defend himself against a charge of suspicious financial losses and irregularities in accounting for his oversight of an agricultural school established on the Hacienda de la Ascensión, the salaries of Dirección employees (including his own), and other management practices. The one agricultural school actually established by the agency—there were to have been several—failed due to the insufficiency and inconsistency of government financial support and the difficulty of finding qualified teachers. There was also to have been an escuela de artes, essentially a technical school, but the instructors in mathematics, mechanical engineering, and applied chemistry were difficult or impossible to find in Mexico, while efforts to recruit such men from Europe failed. In contrast to Alamán and many other conservatives, liberal thinkers of the time believed that industrialization would blossom where it could but on its own and without much government stimulus; they favored the mechanisms of comparative advantage in international markets and Mexico’s strength as

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an exporter of primary products, principally silver. Late in 1840 industrial entrepreneurs gathered in Mexico City to attend the establishment of the Junta de Fomento de Industria, which was to replace the decade-old Banco de Avío. In one early number of the Semanario de la Industria Nacional, published by the junta, Alamán wrote, “The principal arguments deployed against factories can be reduced to this: A country rich in mines and situated in the tropics should limit itself to take advantage of those [endowments] and its geographic position to cultivate [the production of] precious metals and those [agricultural] products that cannot be produced in Europe, and will receive in exchange all the manufactured goods for which the use of machinery has constituted a sort of privilege in favor of the old continent. And without having knowledge of the rapid steps taken by the United States of the North in the path of industry, that example has been cited as a country exclusively [dedicated to] farming and trade.” Alamán, on the other hand, strongly favored a policy of industrialization through import substitution, relying on the tools of a centralized government to manipulate tariffs and taxes, finance incipient manufactures, and create a general atmosphere favorable to entrepreneurial activities across economic sectors. His undated draft report, probably from the late 1840s as president of a commission on tariff reform, affords a distinct picture of the sort of subtly differentiated tariff schedules he thought essential to the encouragement of domestic industry. This reformed tariff schedule would admit certain primary materials, equipment, and machinery, while absolutely excluding finished products that would compete with domestic manufactures.24 This twopronged tactic, Alamán hoped—selective tariff policy and the encouragement of domestic capital formation and technical expertise—would jump-start Mexican industrialization.

Allies and Enemies Whether in or out of office, Lucas Alamán remained the target of attack both in private conversations and in the press. Some of them quite venomous, these attacks came mostly from liberals. On the other hand, he was the object of high praise from friends and political allies, who appreciated his intellectual gifts, history of public service, and accomplishments. One example of this admiration is the description of him by José María Bassoco (1795–1877) in a letter to Mariano Riva Palacio (1803–80) in late 1848.25 Alamán’s “industrious intelligence,” “his talent,” “the [generally] high opinion of him,” and his “wide

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knowledge” all recommended him strongly for a position in the development bank and lobbying organ for Mexican miners. While the shape of praise and attack followed political lines, they did not always conform to this geography; he enjoyed cordial relations, if not exactly warm friendships, with men whose politics ran counter to his own. He was on good enough terms with the ardent liberal federalist Miguel Ramos Arizpe, for example, to do the older man favors outside the strict limits of politics. Another prominent example of such a positive relationship was with the younger liberal politician Mariano Riva Palacio, the son-in-law of Vicente Guerrero. In a letter to Riva Palacio of late August 1848, for instance, in which Alamán gently reproved the younger man for resigning the ministry of the treasury in the Herrera regime, Alamán professed openly that he had liked Riva Palacio ever since he first dealt with him several years earlier, complimenting him on his solid political goals, his integrity, and his talent. This was positively expansive praise from a man normally more reticent, which Alamán would not likely have ventured had he not believed the sentiments reciprocated.26 Alamán’s liberal political opponents, however, were relentless in their attacks, which lasted from the days of his clashes with Lorenzo de Zavala and Andrés Quintana Roo in the mid-1820s until years after his death in 1853. Recurrent themes were his complicity in the death of Vicente Guerrero, which followed him into the grave and beyond; his political ruthlessness; and his involvement in the monarchist conspiracy of the mid-1840s. His staunchest political enemies were José María Luis Mora and Valentín Gómez Farías, the two most prominent liberal politicians of the time. But Alamán and Mora did share certain ideas, among them the deep distrust of the masses in political life and the necessary role of strong government intervention in the modernization process. They differed deeply, however, regarding the place of the Church in Mexican life, Mora advocating separation of Church and state and the expropriation of Church wealth, Alamán arguing for the Church as a pillar of the state and a sort of social glue in Mexican society. A letter from Mora to Gómez Farías, written from Mora’s self-imposed Parisian exile in 1845, conveys the flavor of highly partisan, liberal political opinion at the time: Mexico is a country of which unfortunately there is very little or nothing good to say, but such as it is the ideas about it here are even worse than it deserves. The political factions are better known now than ten years ago, but it is believed that their leaders have no conscience, directing them not [toward] the triumph of ostensibly [liberal] doctrines, but only

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to their personal aggrandizement. The two parties seen as most solid and robustly constituted are the federalist and the clerical. Most sympathy is with federalism, but it is thought that the clerical party is much stronger than its opposition, and a very exaggerated idea is held of its influence and power over the masses, as of its intelligence and morality. It is believed in general that public men [i.e., statesmen of talent] are scarce in Mexico, and it is necessary to agree that the examples [of public men] that have been sent here convey a poor idea of the country. . . . Among living [statesmen] you and Alamán are those who enjoy the most favorable opinion here: you as a moral man, an energetic reformer, as not bloodthirsty, as firm and conscientious in your ideas. . . . The ideas of Alamán are considered extreme [exajeradas], [and he] a man who loves power above all [else], shamelessly, only to enjoy its [personal] benefits; [but also] as a man of administrative ability for his intelligence and talent, and he is thought to be chief of the clerical party in everything. . . . His character is estimated less [favorably] for the base dealings [bajezas] he has had with Santa Anna and for his fraudulent bankruptcy, which has ruined his creditors. . . . All that I have said is what is generally believed among public men in England and France, but Mexico, its men, and its affairs are better known and better appreciated in England.27 Father Mora’s remarks were representative of what was said and written by liberals during these years. Widespread liberal opinion, for example, asserted that Alamán controlled in sinister fashion the entire administration of the José Joaquín de Herrera government in 1845 and that he was at the center of a “phalanx [falange] of intriguers who pullulate in the ministries and in the administration.” By 1848 he was said to have “lost his head” politically, presumably because of his formation of the conservative party and his advocacy of monarchy for Mexico in his newspaper, El Tiempo, and then in the longer-lived El Universal. Upon his election to congress in 1849, when the results of the balloting were disclosed there were cries of “Death to the murderer of Guerrero!” and “Death to the monarchists!” In the context of this drumbeat of attacks, it is hardly surprising to find that the private, personal correspondence between Valentín Gómez Farías and his son Benito is full of vituperative accusations against Alamán as the prime mover in all the country’s ills.28 Toward the very end of Alamán’s life, in 1852, the conservative santanista military politician Juan Suárez y Navarro (1813–67) wrote to Santa Anna comparing Alamán to the notoriously Machiavellian French diplomat the Prince of Benavente,

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Charles-Maurice Talleyrand Perigord (1754–1838), whom Napoleon Bonaparte referred to as “a piece of dung in a silk stocking.” A comparison was occasionally made between Alamán and the Austrian politician-diplomat Klemens, Prince von Metternich (1773–1859). Synthesizing for a modern reader many of these sharp-edged criticisms, the historian Arturo Arnaiz y Freg wrote of Alamán, “We see him acting as an archreactionary. Did the popular classes [even] exist for him? He hardly had [enough] time to protect the sciences and arts and take care of the interests of ‘society.’ He was the mainstay of the reaction, the horror of the liberals and the terror of the revolutionaries. Because of his obsessions [manías], and for having lived in Mexico, he was a Metternich in the land of Indians.”29

20 • The Monarchist Plot and the US Invasion

Alamán and the Monarchist Project Second only to his complicity in the killing of Vicente Guerrero in the black book of Lucas Alamán’s political sins was the charge of advancing a project to install a foreign prince as monarch of Mexico. He was identified from the 1820s as the leader of a supposedly aristocratic faction in national politics portraying him as favoring an oligarchical government or rule by notables rather than a monarchy. At the beginning of 1846 Alamán himself addressed the issue of a titled aristocracy unequivocally in the editorial “Nuestra profesión de fe política” in El Tiempo, the short-lived capitalino newspaper of which he was the chief moving spirit and editorialist; the “our profession” was that of the conservative monarchists whom he led: “We desire that . . . there be no aristocracy other than that of merit, talent [capacidad], education [instrucción], property, [and] military and public service; that a man not be asked who his parents were, but what he has achieved, [which is] enough to admit him to all posts and honors [italics added].”1 The monarchist project of which he was accused had blossomed into a supposed “conspiracy” or “plot” during late 1845 and early 1846, publicly carried forward chiefly in the pages of El Tiempo and revolving around the pronunciamiento and ascent to the presidency of Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga.2 Then, during the years 1848–50, the monarchist project itself receded to a more “traditional conservatism,” thenceforth a distinct obligato in the pages of another capitalino daily, El Universal, of which Alamán was the cofounder, coeditor, and most prominent writer.3 The reasons for this transformation include the political chaos attendant on the American victory in the war; the recall of the Spanish envoy, Salvador Bermúdez de Castro, who had been the

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presumed chief conspirator in 1845–46; and the fall of the Paredes y Arrillaga government with its chief’s equivocal attitude toward a Mexican monarchy. Monarchist ideas were discredited as well owing to the tepidity of public support for them and a strongly negative reaction in the liberal press to both the ideas and their immediate sponsor, that is, the Spanish envoy. Monarchism had to some degree lost its edge and now served as a proxy for heated debates in the liberal and conservative press about the viability of republican institutions, the virtues and dangers of popular political participation, the form and appropriate reach of the central state, the locus of national sovereignty, the question of citizenship, and the territorial organization of Mexico. Absent the territorial ambitions of President James K. Polk and his political allies in the government and US Congress, it is extremely unlikely that the so-called monarchist conspiracy of 1845–46 would have materialized and then burned out as quickly as it did. However, the idea of installing a foreign prince and Mexicanizing him was already on the table. As novohispano deputies in the Cortes de Madrid of 1820–21, Alamán, Miguel Ramos Arizpe, and José Mariano Michelena had taken up the 1783 plan of the Conde de Aranda to send three Spanish princes to establish separate monarchies in the Spanish American realms, tightly linked to the metropolis but administered separately from each other and highly autonomous. The failed experiment of Agustín de Iturbide a quarter century earlier was given new currency by the famous 1840 letter of Manuel Gutiérrez de Estrada to President Anastasio Bustamante arguing that a monarchy was the only way to save Mexico from dissolution.4 The headwinds faced by the monarchist project are hinted at in a private letter from José Bernardo Couto (1803–62), a liberal lawyer, politician, and writer, to José María Luis Mora in Paris in October 1840: “Your good friend Gutiérrez Estrada finds himself at this moment in a very difficult position. . . . This week he published [a letter] proposing the establishment in Mexico of a monarchy with a European prince. You cannot imagine the hornet’s nest he has stirred up with this. In public everyone speaks the language of the most exalted republicanism: some from personal resentments, many out of calculation and ulterior motives, and very few because they truly believe in it. They have pronounced an anathema against the poor author, who has had to hide himself, leaving the printer to face the consequences. Everyone is in [a state of] alarm, and fearing the future, which today seems darker than ever.”5 Moreover, there was the presence of the primary conspirator, the Spanish minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinaire who served in Mexico between 1845 and 1847, the trained lawyer, diplomat, and poet Salvador Bermúdez

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de Castro y Díez (1817–83), Marqués de Lema. Bermúdez was charged by his government with doing everything possible to create conditions for the enthronement of a Spanish prince in Mexico. Potential candidates were the two younger brothers of King Ferdinand VII, the Infantes Carlos de Borbón (1788– 1845) and Francisco de Paula de Borbón (1794–1865). Bermúdez was able to draw on substantial subsidies from the government of Queen Isabella II, laboring assiduously to further the monarchist cause until the Paredes y Arrillaga government collapsed in the summer of 1846, taking the project down with it. In addition, President Herrera’s politically moderate, increasingly shaky, and virtually bankrupt government had failed to make good on its 1844 commitment to engage militarily American forces gathered menacingly and provocatively at the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) should Texas join the Union. Herrera and his cabinet realized, however, that for Mexico it would be an extremely uneven and certainly fatal contest. So the president temporized, choosing to pursue secret negotiations with Polk’s government involving the settlement of the Texas border at the Rio Bravo and the possible sale of other northern Mexican territories to the US. President Polk’s representative in these talks, the Southern Democrat politician John Slidell (1793–1871), arrived in Veracruz at the very end of November 1845. In the face of loud public opposition to a negotiated settlement and virulent attacks from the liberal press, President Herrera refused to receive him under the pretext that his credentials were not in order. Here, a fourth factor, the ever-restless Paredes y Arrillaga, entered the picture. Ordered by Herrera to march on the northern frontier from San Luis Potosí, Paredes refused on the grounds that his army lacked sufficient weapons and other matériel. Summoned back to Mexico City to be court-martialed for insubordination, on his own impulse, backed by his officers, and urged on by Bermúdez de Castro and Alamán in their secret correspondence with him, on 14 December 1845 Paredes initiated another pronunciamiento under the Plan de San Luis Potosí. He accused Herrera of welcoming a foreign envoy (Slidell) for the purpose of alienating part of the national territory, of destroying the Mexican army by underfunding it in favor of state militias, and failing to take up a robust defense of the country against the Americans. The plan said absolutely nothing, however, about installing a monarchy of any kind, leaving to congress the form of the new government’s executive power, a clause in the Plan de San Luis Potosí to which Paredes publicly held quite consistently. Supported by other prominent political generals and a rash of sympathetic pronunciamientos around the country—in Tampico, Querétaro, Veracruz,

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Tamaulipas—Paredes y Arrillaga marched his army south instead of north. By early January he had been designated interim president by a junta of notables of his choosing, including Alamán, and Herrera had decamped, only to serve as president again in 1848–51. Lucas Alamán, then, was another major element in the chemistry of Herrera’s fall, Paredes’s rise, and the blossoming of the monarchist conspiracy of 1845–46. He was the coconspirator of Bermúdez de Castro and cofounder and chief editorialist of the promonarchist newspaper El Tiempo, which began publication on 27 January 1846. Alamán’s path must have crossed that of the Spanish envoy in social situations after Bermúdez arrived in the country in February 1845. Their correspondence between late 1846 and the spring of 1847 intimates that the two men may also have met over questions dealing with the much-reduced holdings of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone.6

Alamán, Bermúdez de Castro, and El Tiempo In his book about the conspiración monárquica of these years Miguel Soto analyzes in detail the joint correspondence of Alamán and Bermúdez de Castro between the autumn of 1845 and the spring of 1846. While Alamán’s promonarchist opinions at this time are expressed in the columns of El Tiempo, the correspondence he addressed to Paredes together with Bermúdez de Castro presents the problem of joint authorship. The letters Soto has analyzed, which, along with Bermúdez de Castro’s diplomatic dispatches to the Spanish foreign office, are the chief sources for his reconstruction of the alleged conspiracy are almost exclusively found in the Paredes y Arrillaga Papers in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. These are all unsigned and not written in the hand of either Alamán or Bermúdez, while Paredes’s responses are signed. The conjoint authorship makes it impossible to determine either who wrote what or what the balance of the authorship was.7 Given Alamán’s personality, it is not credible that he was a passive partner in the correspondence, leaving the composition of the letters to the Spaniard alone. That he was unaware the diplomat was receiving funds from Spain to further the monarchist cause is not plausible either; he apparently condoned this illegal activity, although I doubt whether he really approved of it. But that he shared the promonarchist sentiments of Bermúdez is clear from his writings in El Tiempo. On the other hand, Bermúdez de Castro was the main driver of what can be called a conspiracy, since he was a foreign national enjoying officially protected status as an envoy while interfering

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in Mexican domestic politics and basically suborning a public figure, Paredes, with promises of funding for his movement. Had Alamán written the letters by himself they would have done no more than echo in private what he was writing in public—exerting a sinister influence, perhaps, but hardly to be characterized as conspiratorial since his views were already so transparent and well-known. He was doubtless a partner in this enterprise, but insofar as there was a conspiracy—that is, an organized effort by more than one person to bring about an illegal end—the weight of it fell mostly on Bermúdez de Castro, Alamán being an accomplice. This reading does not let Alamán off the hook, but it does help to highlight who bore most of the responsibility. As early as 1832 Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga had expressed the view that only a monarchy could quell the chaos of national politics and save the country from predation by the US, but later he equivocated about whether monarchism or republicanism was the most suitable form of governance for Mexico.8 He eventually plumped for republican forms less out of conviction than practical political considerations. Paredes y Arrillaga also evaded the influence of the two conspirators, chiefly in ignoring their advice to abandon the effort to reclaim Texas and assume a less bellicose attitude toward the US. President Herrera resigned on 30 December 1845, leaving behind a political vacuum for several days and thus putting into doubt the leadership of the country, a question settled by 3 January when a hastily appointed temporary junta of notables elected Paredes interim president. Paredes swore to uphold republican institutions, although several days later in a meeting with Bermúdez and Alamán he claimed this was only a ruse to mollify public opinion. Somewhat later the British minister, Charles Bankhead, wrote to the British Foreign Office that Paredes had confessed to being a convinced monarchist but was opposed to the enthronement of a Spanish prince. On 10 January Paredes published a manifesto stating that only the new congress elected in the spring was empowered to make any decision about the form of government, selecting Alamán to write the convocatoria for elections. This resulted in an extremely restricted, property-based franchise envisioning a congress based on professional groupings, with strong Church and military representation. On 27 January 1846, meanwhile, El Tiempo had started publishing, with financial backing from Bermúdez and an editorial board composed of Alamán, his political ally Manuel Diez de Bonilla, the Carmelite priest Manuel de San Juan Crisóstomo Nájera (1803–53)—linguist, educator, polymath, and prolific writer—of whom Alamán was later to write a posthumously published biographical essay, and several other prominent conservatives. Initially the news-

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paper was not openly monarchist but quickly ran up its true colors with an editorial on 12 February, the above-mentioned “Nuestra profesión de fe política.” Ostensibly composed by José Dolores Ulibarri but widely assumed to have been written by Alamán, this article repeated, paraphrased, or elaborated on many of the ideas in Gutiérrez de Estrada’s 1840 letter, laying out the lines of argument the newspaper would follow for the next four months of its existence. “The republic has created nothing,” wrote Alamán/Ulibarri: “It has destroyed everything.” He went on to condemn republican democracy not just as unsuited to Mexico but as absolutely pernicious. Political institutions in the new nation should have been shaped by the national realities, he wrote, not by the realities by the institutions. The “absurd constitution” of 1824 had been adopted under US influence, while many of Mexico’s subsequent troubles he ascribed to Joel Poinsett, his favorite bête noire. Alamán asserted that it was not the insurgency of 1810–21 that had consummated independence from Spain, but Iturbide’s Plan de Iguala of 1821. Failing the acceptance of all Bourbon candidates, another prince from a European royal house would be offered the throne. But the Spanish Bourbons had refused the offer, and Iturbide himself had hijacked the throne. The only solution to the ensuing political chaos was a constitutional, representative monarchy inspired by the British model but without the titled aristocracy. Wrote Alamán, “We desire a Representative Monarchy, we desire the unity of the Nation, we desire order together with political and civil liberty. . . . We desire, finally, [the fulfillment of] all the promises and guarantees [offered by] the Plan de Iguala to assure [that] our glorious independence [rests on] strong foundations.”9 The congress would represent all social groups, giving special weight to the “productive classes” (i.e., men of property) and would moderate the monarchical power. The regime would also rest substantially on the partnership of the army and the Church and would attract the alliance of European monarchies. The highly centralized monarchical state would see a shift in power from the legislative authority to the executive; during the transition Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga would be the necessary strongman to shepherd all this into reality. That Paredes may have stepped aside in such a disinterested manner is open to speculation; perhaps he envisioned being the power behind the throne. But El Tiempo advanced more philosophical arguments as well, all of which bore the stamp of Alamán’s thinking. The paper invoked a number of historical examples purporting to prove that republics had always failed—Athens, Sparta, Rome, Venice, Poland, France. The possible counterassertion was that many monarchies had failed too—that they had been brought down by wars,

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coups, assassinations. The El Tiempo writers would surely have responded that while individual monarchs might have failed, dynasties burned out, or kingdoms been overthrown or absorbed into other kingdoms or empires through war, the institution of monarchy had survived through the ages and was overwhelmingly the prevailing form of state around the world in the midnineteenth century. The economic argument acknowledged that while the republican US was in a continual and robust economic expansion, so was Britain, “the workshop of the world,” thus unlinking economic development from the form of the state. There were other assertions to be made: the nimbleness of a royal chief executive, the predictability of succession, the (questionable) disinterestedness of a monarch who would be free of avarice because enormously wealthy, and the elevation of a monarch above party rivalries. One of the most interesting notes repeatedly struck in the El Tiempo editorials had to do with the moral aspect of the republic as instantiated in the industrializing US, so often held up as an ideal by liberals. Here, the eagerness of the Americans to acquire Mexican territory was linked to the spirit of individualism and acquisitiveness believed to inhere in a liberal republic. The striving for material prosperity among Americans had pushed other values aside and was incompatible with the sort of corpus misticum of an ordered and moral society: in the US “there are no social bonds, there is no morality, there are no customs.”10 The notion of political equality inherent in republicanism was a philosophical chimera that Mexico was not prepared to clasp to her bosom, even if it existed, due to the country’s historical circumstances, the El Tiempo editorialists wrote. Primarily because of the low educational level of the majority of Mexican citizens—for which one may read incapacity linked to ethnicity—the hallmark popular elections of republics would bring and had brought to office men unfit to rule, thus encouraging disrespect for authority. Since men’s natural and social endowments, including their talents, their learning, and their wealth were unequal, republican equality was impossible: “Equality has confused the wise with the ignorant, the judicious and moderate with the restless and the rowdy. . . . What matters to the property owner, the miner, the merchant, and the farmer all that mumbo jumbo [jerga] of imprescriptible rights of the social contract, of the rights of man, and that nomenclature of absurdities dreamed up seventy years ago by visionary publicists, if it all offers them no advantages, but instead losses in their fortunes and in the means to gain advancement?” What Mexico needed were “the great talents, the high respect for religion, the innate docility of the people, valor, morality in all classes of

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society, patriotism, education, submission, obedience, and respect for authority; a definite love of order, cordial bonds among families, [and] innate hospitality with the foreigner. This [should be] the moral picture of the inhabitants of this happy land.”11 War with the US loomed closer and closer meanwhile, crashing down on Mexico in late April 1846. But before this, after sending a good many mixed signals about his attitude toward the monarchist project, in March 1846 President Mariano Paredes finally declared publicly his commitment to uphold republican institutions until the new congress should decide the form of government for Mexico. He thereby distanced himself from El Tiempo and the monarchists who still, nonetheless, lent him their support in the hope that the congress, for which elections went on between March and May, would fall over onto the monarchist side. As the “polémica de los diarios” raged in Mexico City, the liberal opposition papers placed special emphasis on the anachronistic character of the Plan de Iguala, one of the columnar supports of the monarchist project.12 Alamán was elected to the new congress. The initial engagement of the war took place on 25 April 1846; the Mexican army under Mariano Arista was quickly defeated by a smaller force commanded by Zachary Taylor at the battles of Palo Alto (8 May) and Resaca de Palma (9 May); and the US Congress approved President Polk’s declaration of war on Mexico on 13 May. Bermúdez de Castro thought the Paredes regime gravely discredited by these early defeats, informing his government in late May that the window for the enthronement of a prince had closed. The newly elected congress sat at the beginning of June. In his opening address to the body, President Paredes y Arrillaga urged the legislators to maintain republican institutions, firmly foreclosing efforts to install a monarchy; on 7 June El Tiempo ceased publication a bit more than four months after it had begun. Resistance to the Paredes regime erupted in the Mexican departments, while a separatist movement roiled Yucatán. The most important antigovernment movement was led from early April by the southern caudillo Juan Álvarez, whose central demand was Santa Anna’s return to the presidency. During the spring Valentín Gómez Farías and other liberals had been corresponding with Santa Anna, residing in Cuba, who now took up the cause of liberal federalism. Repressive measures by the Paredes government delayed Santa Anna’s return, but the perennial president had secretly colluded with President Polk to let him reenter Mexico on the understanding that Santa Anna would end the war, cede certain territories to the US, and receive ample recompense in return. Gómez Farías viewed Santa Anna’s reconversion to liberal federalism with caution, but by August

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the hero of Tampico was back in the country, the 1824 federalist constitution had been reinstated, the election of a new congress had been decreed, all of Paredes’s measures had been voided, and Paredes himself was gone. These developments opened the way for the return to the supreme magistracy of Santa Anna after short interim presidencies by Nicolás Bravo, Mariano Salas, Gómez Farías, Santa Anna himself, and Pedro María Anaya. The question remains: Was Lucas Alamán a monarchist? The answer is, yes and no, or rather at some moments yes, at others no. Most of his career demonstrates that he was certainly a conservative centralist, but not an essential monarchist, that is, not a committed monarchist his entire political life, although his views changed over time. He himself addressed this issue in the fifth volume of his Historia de Méjico, in response to an opinion of José María Tornel in his Breve reseña histórica of 1852 writing of the Guadalupe Victoria administration of 1824–28: “General Tornel, in the cited Reseña histórica [sic], supposes in the author of this work [i.e., Alamán] monarchical opinions acquired during his youth in his travels in Europe. It was precisely to the contrary: the people with whom he [i.e., Alamán] dealt most immediately in these travels formed in him opposite opinions, and, at the time discussed, the opinions he professed were the same as those of General [Mier y] Terán: a central republic, with a certain amplitude of faculties in the provinces, divided in smaller territories in order to achieve local welfare without the inconveniences produced by the sovereignties of the states.”13 This statement refers to the early and mid-1820s, when Alamán served as minister of relations, first under the SPE, then for much of 1825 in the Guadalupe Victoria administration. Writing in 1852, twenty years after Manuel Mier y Terán’s famous suicide, Alamán invoked his dead friend’s political orientation to exemplify his own views; Mier y Terán could never have been characterized as a monarchist. Although tarred with the brush of monarchism over the years, Alamán was more often called an aristocrat, a much looser political epithet implying a conviction that oligarchical or elite rule was best for Mexico. He certainly gave no signals other than those of a staunchly antidemocratic centralist while he was the principal minister in the Anastasio Bustamante government in 1830– 32. Nor do I believe he was in any sense knocked into the extreme antidemocratic position of monarchism by the constant attacks from his political opponents. But a strongly centralist, antidemocratic stance was not necessarily antirepublican. How realistic was the monarchist project, really? I believe that Alamán was induced to join his still formidable energies to those of Bermúdez de Castro in

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the conspiracy of 1845–46 less out of long-standing commitment to the monarchist ideal than out of a strong inclination toward centralist rule overlaid by desperation at the state of Mexican politics at the time. At face value, what he and his collaborators wrote in El Tiempo espouses the conviction that the strength and supposed disinterestedness of a king and royal dynasty could stabilize domestic politics, while tying Mexico to the European monarchies as counterweights to the Americans. But even Paredes y Arrillaga, by all accounts a convinced royalist, drew back from his heavy flirtation with monarchism. Although confidentially assuring Bermúdez de Castro, Alamán, and the British envoy Charles Bankhead that he favored the monarchist plan, he simply faced too much flak from liberals, the political class more widely, journalists, and the general public. To look to the events of the 1860s for a parallel requires the invocation of too many ceteris paribus assumptions, in the process wiping out such intervening events as the Reforma and the civil war of 1858– 61, which, if anything, embedded republicanism even more firmly in the political culture. It required a large French expeditionary force with substantial Mexican collaboration to put Maximilian von Habsburg on the Mexican throne and keep him there even for three years. Had it not been for the American Civil War the short-lived monarchy would have found itself more on its back foot and been even more abbreviated. There was no such external military force in the offing in 1846, and the American invasion of that spring and the ensuing eighteen months of warfare closed whatever opening there had been for a domestic uprising in support of a monarchy. The events at Resaca de la Palma and Palo Alto basically sealed the fate of the monarchist project for the moment. The initial adherence of Lucas Alamán and his El Universal collaborators to the monarchist position during the relatively stable period of the Herrera and Arista governments (1848–52) receded to a more traditional form of conservatism linked to the formation of a party system—viz., the foundation of the Conservative Party announced in the columns of El Universal in 1848—as Elías Palti has sugested.14 The more earnest and programmatic monarchism of the mid-1840s might therefore be interpreted as a political over-bid. The conscious strategy was to stake out the outré monarchist position of Gutiérrez de Estrada from 1840 in order to gain leverage by which to criticize republican institutions more essentially. Ruthless, duplicitous, and manipulative though Alamán may have been at times, however, he was not a faker where his political beliefs were concerned; if anything, he was too forthright for his own good. He seems to have been willing to work within the framework of republicanism during his

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entire public career, although he criticized the system profoundly, especially where popular elections and the dominance of the legislative branch of the government were concerned. There’s no doubt Alamán favored an oligarchical form of rule, but whether he actually thought the reinstallation of a royal house in Mexico was feasible is, in the end, something of a puzzle. The institutions of Britain before the Great Reform came closest to his ideal form of governance. In this sense he saw Santa Anna in 1853 as being the closest he could get to a crypto-constitutional monarchy. Whether he could have tolerated President Santa Anna styling himself Your Serene Highness seems unlikely, but he never had to face the problem because he died six weeks into the Santa Anna presidency. So the answer to the question of whether Lucas Alamán believed in kingship for Mexico is that he was an antidemocratic centralist, not necessarily antirepublican if republicanism could be corralled into the hands of the hombres de bien and kept as far away from the vox populi as possible. We can call him, therefore, a situational monarchist.

The Mexican–American War The most fateful event in the nation’s life between the gaining of independence and the civil unrest ushered in by the Reforma of the 1850s was the American invasion of 1846–47 and the amputation of half the country in the Carthaginian peace imposed by the victors. Numbering about twenty-three million people by 1850, the rapidly growing US population was three times that of Mexico and the American economy much larger and more advanced. The contest would have been extremely asymmetrical on these grounds alone even had Mexico been politically unified internally, but Mexico was not. The politics of the early 1840s revealed once more the irreconcilable schisms between federalists and centralists, liberals and conservatives, and the situation was aggravated by the destabilizing presence of Antonio López de Santa Anna. When the Americans got to Mexico City, Alamán was an eyewitness to much of the action there. The Alamán-Castrillo home on the Ribera de San Cosme briefly became the site of some military activity during the defense of Mexico City in September 1847 against the invading American forces led by General Winfield Scott. Furthermore, the Hospital de Jesús interested the Americans very much because of its association with that other conqueror, Hernán Cortés. Of the conqueror’s spirit, historical reputation, and mortal remains there was no more zealous protector than Lucas Alamán, who therefore had direct contact with the Americans. The interest of the American officers had been

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whetted by reading W. H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), a well-received and widely read book in the United States, one that many of the officers carried with them on their Mexican adventure. The war was a major episode in Alamán’s private life, too, but due less to his direct involvement in it than to the effects it had on him intellectually and emotionally, as on other political men of the time. But he devoted little space to it in his Historia de Méjico, while the lead-up to the war, starting with the colonization contracts with Moses Austin and culminating in the absorption of Texas into the American Union, occupied most of two pages. Of the actual Mexican–American War itself Alamán wrote that after the loss of Texas there followed the [Texas] declaration of independence, which lasted little time, that republic shortly joining itself to the United States and declaring that its territory extended to the left bank of the rio Bravo. Resisting this usurpation, the Republic of Mexico undertook with the [United] States an unfortunate war, terminated by the peace treaty celebrated in the city of Guadalupe Hidalgo (formerly the town of Guadalupe) on 2 February 1848, by which cession was made [to the US] not only of Texas, with all the extension it had pretended to occupy, but also of New Mexico and all of Upper California, and considerable parts of the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. The ceded territory formed the extent of 109,944 square leagues, equivalent to half [the territory] possessed by the republic on gaining independence. The consequences of this cession included Mexico’s forfeiture of the California goldfields to the “active and enterprising hands into which they have fallen.” A critical problem arising from the war was Indian raiding into the near north of Mexico, reaching as far south as Zacatecas. Alamán ascribed all of these circumstances not to Mexican independence and the resulting departure of Spain but to the growth of the US population and “to the character of that population, animated by the conquering spirit of the peoples of Northern Europe from which they descend, and the nature of the government of that republic.”15 Thus to see the Mexican–American War through Alamán’s eyes one must rely on his private correspondence, chiefly with the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, which continued without a lapse during these years. In 1844 the fate of the Texas Republic hung suspended between Mexican threats of reconquest and debates in Texas itself and Washington, DC, about possible annexation to the American Union. Prominent political figures in

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Texas favored annexation to the US, others continued independence on the basis of guarantees offered by Britain and France. Its army a shambles, its treasury depleted, and its generals moving on and off the presidential throne so quickly that the seat hardly grew warm, Mexico finally came to see reconquest as a mirage and agreed to recognize the independence of the Texas Republic provided annexation to the US was off the table. Boundary issues, most particularly whether the Rio Grande or the more northerly Rio Nueces was to be the border with Mexico, were left for subsequent settlement. It was understood that annexation would represent a casus belli between Mexico and the United States. In the US the question of annexation was hotly debated following President John Tyler’s initiation of the process with a submission to the American congress early in 1844. Tyler’s successor, the Southern Democrat James K. Polk, a protégé of Andrew Jackson, prevailed in the 1844 presidential election by a slim margin over the anti-annexationist Whig candidate Henry Clay. The dominant question in American domestic politics at this time concerned the extension of slavery and the delicate balance between free and slave states. Whigs, abolitionists, and Northerners feared that if Texas were admitted to the Union this fragile equilibrium would collapse. Polk assumed a more bellicose stance than Tyler, making annexation and the acquisition of the Oregon Territory from Britain the goals of what he promised would be a oneterm presidency. Diplomatic initiatives, offers of monetary compensation (the Slidell mission) for the disputed area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, bribes, and other ploys failed to resolve the situation. Annexation was pushed through the American Senate in 1845. President Polk was now intent on provoking war with Mexico. Although the resolution of the Texas boundary question was the ostensible justification, his real goal was to force Mexico to cede California and New Mexico. With the acquisition of the northern Mexican provinces he would leave the White House having rolled American sovereignty all the way to the Pacific Ocean, making the US a truly continental power. Early in 1846 Polk dispatched General Zachary Taylor with troops to the Rio Grande in the hope that this action would provoke an armed confrontation. The confrontation occurred on 25 April 1846, near Brownsville, Texas, prompting Polk to utter his famously indignant claim that Mexican forces had “shed American blood on American soil,” leading to a declaration of war in May 1846. Taylor’s forces pushed south, winning two engagements against the Mexicans even before the formal declaration of war. The Americans were almost always at a numerical disadvantage for the next eighteen months, but their superior training, morale,

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equipment, and the strength of their artillery tilted the conflict in their favor from the beginning. Despite their disadvantages, the Mexican forces gave a good account of themselves but could not stop the American advance. Winfield Scott’s amphibious landing of his twelve-thousand-man army near Veracruz took place in early March 1847. Known as Old Fuss and Feathers due to his gruff manners and grandiose style, Scott was nonetheless a commander of great military prowess whom the Duke of Wellington praised as the best general then active anywhere in the world.16 Alamán had been keeping the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone closely informed of developments in the war, and in Palermo the duke was also reading the European press coverage. Alamán provided a quite detailed account of the fall of the Gómez Farías government in March 1847 and the designation by congress of Santa Anna as president: “Since that day [25 February 1847] everything has been revolution . . . and thus we have spent the entire month [of March] only hearing cannon fire and knowing of deaths and misfortunes, without being able to walk in the streets, or do anything . . . [and] all the houses are shut up.” He described the civic militia defending Gómez Farías as “all beggars” (i.e., the lowest of the low—puros lazzaroni—a term very particular to Neapolitan civil disturbances and therefore familiar to the duke), the government adrift (todo camina como por casualidad), and the American capture of Veracruz imminent; the city surrendered to Scott on 29 March. He mentioned the battle of Cerro Gordo (18 April) and the American occupation of Jalapa, predicting “a frightening anarchy” following the capture of Mexico City. He concluded that “if some bomb has not finished me off, I think I will write [my next letter to you] under the dominion of the United States.”17 Alamán constructed dramatic contrapuntal narratives of the advance of the American forces and the political chaos in the capital. He described what was happening in Mexico City in the spring of 1847 (28 May): This city is in the most complete anarchy that can be imagined: everything is in disorder, [there are] robberies, and clashes among the governing authorities, whom no one obeys. It is impossible that a nation can remain so for any time without being entirely annihilated. Revolutions here are so frequent that you write congratulating one of our presidents on his election, and [by the time] the letter arrives he has fallen. This is what happened with the letter you sent to me for Herrera [December 1844—December 1845], and the same thing has happened with the one you sent for Santa Anna. Defeated everywhere, insulted and mocked in

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the newspapers, he lost all prestige and has been dragging along in a sad existence in the presidency [May–September 1847]. . . . We will see if in these continuous vicissitudes he rises again, which would not be at all strange, so I will save your letter until then. A month later Scott’s army was expected in the environs of the capital within eight to ten days. Alamán wrote of the American commander’s boldness in advancing on a city of 180,000 inhabitants, defended by a much larger army than his, leaving his route of communication and supply vulnerable to attack. American officers were advancing along the same route from the Gulf coast to “the Halls of Montezuma” described by Prescott: “Notwithstanding this [riskiness], it appears to me certain that he [Scott] will take the city, because all the troops [defending it] are [forcible] recruits, commanded by generals whose speed in retreat is well-known, and the mass of the population does not move for anything, since they are looking at this as though it were occurring in a foreign country, so fatigued are they from the many uprisings.” Alamán advised the nobleman to take no account of Santa Anna’s reassurances in several letters to the duke that his properties would not be seized again, “since he is a man to whom falling into the most jarring contradictions between conduct and words matters nothing”: “Thus we here live without security of any kind in anything, looking with the greatest mistrust on anything coming from the government, not knowing those in authority except to judge who is the worst, and allowing ourselves to be robbed unconscionably. And it is this that explains easily why an army of 10,000 Anglo-Americans has arrived at the center of the Republic and is at the point of capturing the capital without anyone taking an interest in whether or not it is captured.” Late in July it had become apparent that the American forces had yet to leave Puebla, “nor do I believe they are in a position to attempt any attack against this capital. It is obvious that the United States does not have the forces it needs for what it has undertaken. And if in Europe, with the recent events in this country, the Mexican republic has fallen into ridicule, the credit and idea of the power of the United States must necessarily have declined much. With the unjust war they have waged against Mexico they have put themselves in the position of not being able to advance or retreat, but in the meantime they are causing great damage to this country.”18 Alamán related the arrival of Scott’s army at the southern perimeter of the city, where he faced an “impregnable” line of defense manned by twenty-two thousand Mexican soldiers, of whom about a third were “good troops.” On 19 August Scott commanded a

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flanking action around this force, and, with the arrival of reinforcements, defeated the defenders under General Gabriel Valencia, who was not reinforced by Santa Anna as expected, thus leaving the way open to the capture of the city. Wrote Alamán, “The heights on which these actions were fought are in front of the house in the country [i.e., the Ribera de San Cosme] where I am, and from a high mirador in [the house] I was watching with a telescope everything that happened. Master of San Angel, Scott took all the fortifications from the rear; everything was confusion, disorder, and cause for shame. From what I have seen I am convinced of the impossibility of Santa Anna and the other generals ever achieving a victory.” By 28 August 1847 the capital had fallen to Winfield Scott’s forces. An armistice was declared, but the terms of the surrender were so harsh, wrote Alamán, and Santa Anna “so little disposed” to accept them, that fighting resumed on 7 September. Fearing that the battle would engulf his home, Alamán and his family withdrew to the north to the town of Tlalnepantla. He described the attack on the Castillo de Chapultepec and other fortifications in the ensuing days, characterized Santa Anna’s defense measures as imprudent, and related the capture of the western part of the city “in which my house is located.” Here the war touched the Alamán family directly in an eerie repetition of the invasion of his parents’ Guanajuato home by Hidalgo’s insurgents in 1811: “In my house, being the tallest one, they [the Americans] placed two cannons on the roof, with which, and with the fire they drew, the house was considerably damaged. The [American] soldiers who entered sacked it, smashing the doors and furniture, and carrying off clothing and other things. But they did not totally destroy it, because fortunately the general and officers who arrived in large part stopped the disorders of the soldiers, and thus I lost less than other neighbors, from whom they robbed everything.” He offered a slightly different, more sanitized account of this incident in a letter to William H. Prescott in 1849, perhaps taking into account that he was writing to an American even though Prescott was vehemently opposed to the war with Mexico: “I did in fact endure some inconveniences, when soldiers of General [William Jenkins] Worth’s division entered my house, stole clothing, and destroyed some pieces of furniture. But the general himself arrived in time to stop the mayhem, and we became good friends.”19 When the American forces entered the city proper on 14 September, he continued, they were fired upon by the citizens, “so that on that and the following day the entire city presented a scene of horror and disorder, people killing each other in the streets and robbing houses, from which the population has suffered infinitely. Afterward calm

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was reestablished, but there is no confidence nor any security. The North Americans are occupying the city, but the murders of people who stray off the main streets continue, and no one dares to leave their house at night.” When things had calmed down a bit Alamán returned to the home he still owned in the San Agustín neighborhood, both to oversee its safety and because he thought it would be more secure there than in the city’s outskirts “due to the great number of army [one assumes from both sides] stragglers and because with the government dissolved, there will be a desolating anarchy everywhere, with no end to such troubles in sight, since the North Americans do not have sufficient forces to occupy and dominate the [entire] country, nor are there in the country sufficient forces to expel them, for lack of a government and military chiefs capable of command.”20 Alamán’s comments on the political scene up to the end of 1848 reveal his attitudes at the time. A characteristic preoccupation of his was the unpredictability of the government. In late October 1847 he repeated his caustic comment that letters of congratulation to Santa Anna or Herrera on their ascent to the presidency would “serve for nothing now, and with the rapidity with which revolutions overthrow those who rise, it would be necessary to have an assortment of letters for all the imaginable people [who might occupy the presidency], or a blank one [i.e., a form letter] to apply to whoever might be in charge at the moment.”21 Santa Anna occupied the president’s chair between May and mid-September 1847, followed upon his resignation by the constitutionally designated president of the Supreme Court—there was no vice president under the Bases Orgánicas—Manuel de la Peña y Peña (26 September–13 November) in Querétaro, where the government had moved from Mexico City. Peña was succeeded in a matter of weeks by General Pedro María Anaya, who lasted in office for only about two months (November 1847–January 1848). The American troops occupying Mexico City were, by this time, quite disciplined, paying for everything they used. They were occasionally set upon and murdered by the plebes if they ventured into certain areas of the city while drunk or being careless of their surroundings. As for Santa Anna, after a failed attempt to retake Puebla he was now in Tehuacán awaiting the outcome of a court-martial regarding his conduct during the war; there was no Mexican army worthy of the name; and the only viable authority in the capital was the Ayuntamiento. By late November 1847 the authority of the US envoy Nicholas Trist to negotiate peace had been withdrawn; things were in limbo while awaiting the enunciation of a policy by the US Congress; General Pedro María Anaya, “a man of little talent and no great reputation,” had been elected presi-

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dent; Santa Anna was still awaiting his court-martial; and Alamán predicted that with the harsh terms likely in the peace agreement, “we are on the road to certain ruin.”22 By the turn of the year the reinforced American occupying force grew to eighteen thousand to twenty thousand men. Convents and private homes were requisitioned to provide billeting, although Alamán’s own home had been placed off-limits by American officials. Alamán was being “treated with the greatest consideration by all the officers and individuals with whom [he] had had any contact.” December 3, 1847, would mark the three-hundredth anniversary of Cortés’s death, enticing American officers, “[who] look at his actions with admiration,” to visit the Hospital de Jesús to gaze at Fernando Cortés’s portrait hanging and see the place of his interment in the chapel. Outside the city, Alamán personally obtained from Winfield Scott a letter guaranteeing the security of the duke’s Hacienda de Atlacomulco under penalty of death. Alamán thought that if there had to be a war in which Mexico was trounced, the occupation of the capital by the victors could have been worse. The American soldiers for the most part were well-mannered and welldisciplined, and the occupying army was a necessary counterweight to the chaotic criminality he saw unleashed by the collapse of the Mexican government. But as time went by his opinion grew much more negative, and by the spring of 1848 he commented much on the rise of crime in the city perpetrated by US soldiers. Pending the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the war, Alamán came to see the armistice (6 March 1848) as producing no advantages for the inhabitants of the capital: The city is an encampment of bandits, and there is almost no night on which there is not a robbery or violent assault. Four or five nights ago there was an attack on the house of Muriel, one of the principal merchants, on a very central and much-frequented street. The attackers were a dozen North Americans who fled when shots were fired, one of which killed the principal employee of the business. One of the invaders, having been caught within, by his declarations revealed that in the gang were three officers of the American army, and the rest [of them] soldiers and servants [of the officers], who have been arrested and will be tried. Yesterday, Sunday, people returning from a walk alongside a canal, were attacked at the embarcadero by a party of bandits in the service of the North American army . . . posted there to rob the returning people. [In the ensuing battle] there were fourteen killed on one side or another.23

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Yet as disruptive as the presence of an occupying army proved, he feared worse might ensue upon the withdrawal of American forces. The departure of the Americans, “which in other circumstances would be a joy, is to be feared as the beginning of new disasters, since at that moment will begin an interior war that will assume the character of a caste war among the various groups that form this society. And the least numerous among them being the white race, it and all its properties will perish.”24 The background to this dire prediction was the Caste War of Yucatán, begun in 1847 and characterized by fearful racialized violence. From the duke’s letters and from newspaper accounts, Alamán received news of the European revolutions of 1848, although nowhere does he mention them in his writings. In this way he came to see his own country’s endemic political instability as a proxy for the breakdown of traditional institutions and social constraints in the North Atlantic world to which he so ardently aspired to assimilate Mexico. Along with Mexico’s recent defeat at the hands of the United States, this surely accounted in part for his renewed interest in monarchy as a solution to Mexico’s political woes as well as for the tone of nostalgic melancholy that pervaded his Historia de Méjico, which he began writing in 1849. Making Mexico more Atlantic implied this tension between modernization and maintaining the best of traditional institutions: social and racial hierarchy, piety and formal Church structures, a centralized, monarchy-like state, limited popular political participation, and so on. This is one of the keys to Alamán’s thinking and his career, along with his personal attempts to rectify the reversals of fortune that his family had suffered. He struggled through politics and letters to reconcile tradition and modernization, to keep modernization from metastasizing into modernity. Just enough modernization, like just enough liberalism, was a moderation impossible to obtain.

21 • City, Congress, Wealth, Health

Alamán Leads the Ayuntamiento After the end of the war Alamán plunged back into politics. He brought Terranova’s Hacienda de Atlacomulco to greater productivity than ever before. He continued to advise the central government when his politics and those of the regime synchronized, serving stints in the Chamber of Deputies and as president of the Mexico City Ayuntamiento. He established and wrote copiously for two conservative newspapers, El Tiempo and El Universal, and founded the Conservative Party. He invited Santa Anna back to power and laid the foundations of his last government, although these turned out to be shaky in part because of Alamán’s death a few weeks into the regime. Finally, Alamán wrote the five volumes of his majestic Historia de Méjico—all this while his health was growing ever more delicate. Alamán’s political energies in late 1849 were devoted to steering the city government through its financial difficulties and away from “sure ruin, [by] remedying the state of bankruptcy to which its funds came.” Liberal newspapers in the capital dredged up his complicity in the death of Vicente Guerrero almost two decades earlier, kept up the drumbeat of accusations of monarchism against him, and even publicized suspicions that the collapse of the Cocolapan textile enterprise was owing to fraud on his part, in a sense near the truth, as Mora had written, “in fact if not in law.” Alamán believed that from the time of Fernando Cortés the municipal council had been a bulwark of rational political authority and a link with the foundational institutions of the Iberian heritage. At his swearing-in as president of the Mexico City Ayuntamiento on 22 July 1849 he remarked that the “municipal bodies were at their origin the beginning and basis of civil liberty.”1 He viewed the municipal council as the

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most basic cell of good governance, a counterbalance to the centrifugal force of federalism, and the electoral arena as a platform for the Conservative Party. The municipal elections were held on 15 July; the terms of those selected would expire on 1 January 1850, when they would be eligible for reelection. While the qualifications for candidacy were fairly permissive, voting qualifications were tighter.2 The new Ayuntamiento took office on 22 July 1849 with a grandiose reception and swearing in. Others among the newly elected regidores included Gregorio Mier y Terán, Agustín Sánchez de Tagle, and Manuel Diez de Bonilla. So onerous was duty on the city council considered that a group of outgoing councilmen wrote an open letter categorically refusing to serve if reelected.3 Alamán advocated a more activist role for the council, noting in his speech that its functions had been reduced to “only the care and administration of municipal services [ramo de policía],” and even these had been sadly neglected.4 Of the various committees of the city council, Alamán placed himself on those dealing with the treasury and credit and rules. Hardly had Alamán assumed office when he and the newly elected council members were put on notice by the liberal newspaper El Siglo XIX that what funds there were should be spent not on “objects of secondary usefulness,” such as the redecoration of the city council chambers, but on essential urban services. Alamán responded with a report sent to El Universal, El Monitor Republicano, El Globo, and El Siglo XIX “taking advantage with pleasure of this opportunity to put before the public the state of said funds and the activities of the individuals who make up this body [the Ayuntamiento] at present.”5 Several projects were paid for with loans or outright gifts from private citizens, including improvements to the Hospital de Dementes de San Hipólito, largely financed by a ten-thousand-peso donation from Alamán’s old friend Francisco Fagoaga. The municipality’s largest project, costing forty-four thousand pesos, was the construction of the new market in the Plaza de San Juan de la Penitencia, completed in 1850, after Alamán had left office.6 To rationalize the city’s fiscal regime, he targeted the luxury tax on such items as carriages, whose abolition would benefit families of means, including Alamán himself and his wealthy friends. Alamán also planned to reform a number of activities under municipal sponsorship, among them nighttime policing aimed at crime reduction. After his death an anonymous obituary essay in a Paris newspaper suggested that he had wanted to create such an effective level of security against thievery in the city that he could leave his cape in the middle of the plaza one night and expect to find it there the following day.7 Public hygiene was another major issue,

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especially the accumulation of garbage in the streets, for which he proposed a number of measures. The installation of water pipes in imitation of the principal cities of Europe was discussed, as were the elimination of confusing random name changes along the length of major streets, the use of gas street lighting, improvement in city jails and hospitals, and the organization of the municipal archive. Almost certainly unrealizable under nineteenth-century conditions were projects for the widening and straightening of streets to ease the flow of traffic and to improve the circulation of air and light in the city center. The spacing of new buildings was considered for the same purposes, as was the leveling of streets to alleviate the periodic flooding still afflicting the city in Alamán’s time. The continuing lack of resources and the political instability of the time prevented all but a few of these projects—few of the simpler ones, let alone the more grandiose—from being realized in the five months or so of his presidency of the Ayuntamiento. Liberal attacks against Alamán had continued at least at a murmur since the 1820s, rose to a roar at various points (1830–34, 1845–46), then subsided. They now revived during and immediately following his time at the helm of the Ayuntamiento and as he assumed his seat in the Cámara de Diputados. He had generally proved to be fairly thick-skinned in the face of these journalistic assaults. In early November 1849, however, he lodged a defamation complaint with a Mexico City civil judge against an article in El Monitor.8 He was continually accused, in José Valadés’s words, of being an “anti-patriot, an enemy of independence, a Bourbonist, and an absolutist.” The first volumes of his Historia de Méjico were now thrown into the mix as evidence of his antiindependence, putatively promonarchist convictions. In November 1849 he wrote to Tornel that in producing his Historia he had no object other than “to present the facts with truth and exactitude,” relying on a classical reference to make his point: “Tacitus does not stop being a good Roman for having referred with terrible truthfulness [to] the events of the reigns of Claudius and Nero, nor has Herrera [Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas] been taken as a bad Spaniard for having narrated with sincerity in his Décadas de Indias the atrocities committed by the Spanish conquistadores [against indigenous peoples].”9 Aside from vilifying Alamán, the goal of liberals was to drive the conservatives off the Ayuntamiento, which they managed to do. On the morning of 1 December 1849 broadsheets appeared all over the city proclaiming “Death to the monarchists!” and convoking all good patriots and republicans to gather at the National Palace at noon that day to treat of “a matter so vital to unfortunate Mexico”: “Mexicans: The patria is in danger . . . todos somos republicanos, and

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our common enemy the infamous band of wretches who without shame call themselves monarchists. Let us, then, unite against them until we destroy them, before anything else tearing from their parricidal hands the power they usurp. . . . Alert! Alert!”10 At midnight a biggish crowd shouting “mueras!” (death) against Alamán in particular and conservatives and monarchists in general advanced on the municipal palace in the Zócalo, stoning the building and the homes of various city councilmen. Alamán resigned from the Ayuntamiento ahead of the date on which his term would have ended. In his letter of resignation to the governor of the Federal District he accused the authorities of that entity and those of the central government of having abdicated their duty to maintain the public order by looking on passively as riotous crowds surged through the city’s streets and stoned the homes of respectable private citizens. All the regidores swept into office under monarchist—or at least conservative—auspices resigned along with Alamán, emptying the city council and sinking the Conservative Party to a low ebb.

The Conservative Party Alamán undertook two other initiatives in the latter part of 1849 to advance the conservative cause. He was cofounder in 1848 of the newspaper El Universal, which continued the same conservative-monarchist editorial and reportage line of the earlier daily, El Tiempo. A large-format daily published in relatively large numbers, the newspaper appeared first in November 1849, directly confronting the capital’s liberal papers of the same sort, especially El Siglo XIX. El Universal was cofounded by Rafael Rafael (1812–82), a Catalan printer, although Alamán was the most notable collaborator on the paper, which essentially became known as his mouthpiece. Elías Palti has compiled an anthology of articles from El Universal and El Siglo XIX dealing with the public debate, conducted in exceedingly sharp exchanges, between monarchists and liberals in the years 1848–50.11 El Universal’s continuing verbal duels with El Siglo XIX was the journalistic equivalent of the Decena Trágica of February 1913, in which artillery fire between the capital’s military arsenal, the Ciudadela, and the National Palace on the Zócalo, sailed back and forth over the heads of the city’s civilian population. The initiative espoused by Alamán in El Universal was the announcement in 1848 of what was known rather loosely as the Conservative Party, its core consisting of Alamán and the editors and contributors of the newspaper. This was not a party in the modern sense of the word: there was no praesidium, no

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formal organization; no paid dues, membership cards, or bumper stickers; nor were there periodic conventions. But a core set of principles was unequivocally trumpeted in the newspaper: antirepublican, antidemocratic, antiliberal, Burkean in attitudes toward institutional change, centralizing, supportive of the army and especially of the Roman Catholic Church, nationalistic, antiUS and pro-British, ardently defensive of private property, and, in Alamán’s case at least, in favor of economic development along North Atlantic lines. Many of these positions were staked out in the pages of El Tiempo in its “profession of faith” of 12 February 1846, which provides some insight into Alamán’s thinking at the time. After lauding Mexican independence as “a great and glorious deed,” the article went on to say how the promise of the Plan de Iguala and Iturbide’s brief regime had gone astray due to the hero’s ambition, inexperience, and vulnerability to flattery: “Then we began to enter the fatal path along which we are traveling today. Not taking into account the differences in origin, religion, and history nor considering that our social, political, and religious unity advised us [that the proper] form of government was the monarchical . . . we believed that the quickest road to assure [our] political liberty was to throw ourselves into the arms of the United States, to imitate servilely its institutions and follow exactly its perfidious examples.”12 This, he went on, produced the absurd Constitution of 1824, opening the way to the noxious influence of Joel Poinsett, the dominance of the Masonic sects in national politics, a looming overhang of foreign debt, the expulsion of the Spaniards, and almost continual rebellion within the country. The editorialists of El Tiempo had much more to say. They painted a doleful picture of the country’s internal affairs—an administration in disarray, an empty treasury, massive external and internal debt—and of the way Mexico appeared to foreign observers: “Their ears have become accustomed to the perpetual scandal of our revolutions, and we are seen as a nation condemned to the fate of the turbulences and semibarbarous republics of the south [i.e., South America], or destined to be captured and enslaved by the federation of the north [i.e., the United States].” All these terrible effects could be ascribed to the adoption of republican forms of governance in a society ill-equipped to support them: “Because of this we believe that republican institutions have brought us to a similar state of depression and prostration as they would have brought Spain, as they would have brought England, as they would have brought France. We believe that with things such as they are, we are traveling not only toward ruin, to demoralization, to anarchy but also to the complete dissolution of the nation, to the loss of our territory, of our name, of our

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independence.” Although the Dutch under the Republic, the English under Cromwell, and the French before 1803 made the world tremble while under republican institutions, in the end, they fell consumed by intestine divisions and looked to monarchy to remedy their ills. Enjoying today all the benefits of liberty and order, with a fertile and brilliant civilization, they look at those vain [republican] utopias as a mad delirium; the republican parties do not even exist as such; they have died. . . . We believe that our Republic has been a costly experiment, a hard warning; but that there is still a remedy. Now, if we are asked what we want, what we desire, we will say it frankly. We want a Representative Monarchy; we desire the unity of the nation, we want order together with political and civil liberty, we desire the integrity of Mexican territory; we want, finally, all the promises and guarantees of the Plan de Iguala to assure our glorious independence [stands] on stable foundations. If the form of government adopted by the most advanced and civilized countries of the world, after long convulsions, is that promised at Iguala by the army and by its heroic chief [caudillo] [and] is the form suited for us, [it] can be our national happiness and [help us to] avoid our destruction; we want to travel toward it, we yearn for it, we defend it. Speaking on a more concrete level, the El Tiempo writers began to discuss in summary fashion the benefits of the monarchical form for Mexico, beginning with elective legislative houses and a hereditary royal power, to assure political liberty and existing [social] order. We desire, as occurs in all the respective monarchies of Europe, that there be no other aristocracy than that of merit, talent, education, wealth, and civil and military service; that no man be asked who his parents were, but [rather] what he has done. . . . [W]e want an army strong and vigorous that can win laurels nobly defending its country. . . . We want the decorous and worthy support of our forbears’ Catholic religion. . . . But we do not want reaction of any sort. . . . It is madness to believe a prince of royal blood coming to establish a dynasty in Mexico could be sustained by foreigners [i.e., a foreign army]. The model for this “representative monarchy” was clearly the British constitutional one, but many of the problems that Alamán supposed would be

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attenuated by a monarchical form of governance would have originated or persisted even had a monarchy been established. For example, the drive to commend the political destiny of the nation into the hands of an aristocracy of talent—in Mexico, the hombres de bien, in other words—was a central issue in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world despite the existence of blooded aristocrats of undeniable political talent in the European monarchies, especially Britain. But a monarchy without a supporting noble aristocracy existed nowhere and contradicted the very idea of monarchy itself, with the monarch the primus inter pares, and the nobility often connected by links of descent and marriage to the royal family. Nor could an empty national treasury be filled more easily by a king than by a president, so foreign indebtedness would still have plagued Mexico through most of the century. As for political factions, these were rife within the European monarchies. In France, for example, revolution, more or less constitutional dictatorship, a return to monarchy, another revolution, and a return to republicanism were right around the corner even as the El Tiempo editorialists wrote, but political factions were at serious loggerheads in the French parliament. Granted that in Britain the sometimes bitter rivalries between Tories and Whigs were kept from bursting into armed violence, as they did in Mexico; yet factions, parties, and patronage networks still dominated parliamentary life while the monarchy was pushed into an ancillary position by the forces of elite reformism and popular politics. Missing from Mexican political culture was not a monarch but a sense of the legitimacy of political institutions and processes—a belief on the part of public men that despite momentary reversals their turn would eventually come around and that the costs of yielding to popular opinion, or to the more skillful maneuverings of one’s adversaries, were in the long run less than the effects of a resort to arms. This meant that with a coterie’s or faction’s ascent to power there was often an unveiled attempt to rewrite the rules, as with the several constitutions of the pre-1857 period. Sheer political opportunism and group interest were not the only factors in play. Real differences arose from regional loyalties, the centralist–federalist conflict, visions of Mexico’s future, and old vendettas. Nonetheless, a sort of institutionalized rage prevailed that could not be well contained by the thin membranes of constitutional, legislative, judicial, or electoral processes. Finally, one of many things of interest about the monarchist position as outlined in El Tiempo in 1846 is that Lucas Alamán should unself-consciously employ the term partido for the Conservative Party in 1846 when over and over again he had condemned it so vehemently fifteen or twenty years earlier.

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Congress Alamán’s second initiative about this time was to take up a candidacy on the Conservative ticket in the October 1849 congressional elections for a seat representing Toluca in the national Chamber of Deputies. But the town’s electoral college disqualified him from candidacy in early October on the grounds of his presumed complicity in the death of Vicente Guerrero nearly twenty years earlier, a crime of which he had been substantially absolved by the Mexican high court but not in the court of public opinion. The liberal newspapers railed against the merest possibility that he would enter congress, to which El Universal rejoined, “The fear of true merit inspired by this name [Alamán’s] in all the envious mediocrities, in those [over-]heated agitators who can live only from confusion and disorder, caused a cry to be raised from the demagogic party.”13 His congressional candidacy prospered with the electors of the State of Jalisco, however, where he was voted in as a proprietary deputy on the Conservative ticket along with his political adversaries Juan de Dios Cañedo, Valentín Gómez Farías, and Jesús López Portillo. News of his election to congress spread rapidly around the country. Not untypical of negative reactions was a letter to the local newspaper in Actopan in which the writer explained that Alamán was unfit to serve as a deputy because of his still-unresolved complicity in the murder of the independence chieftain. By contrast, someone from Puebla whom the deputy-elect did not even know wrote to Alamán identifying him as chief of the Conservative Party, congratulating him on his electoral victory, warning him of a brewing santanista plot, and describing him as “the only helmsman on whom men of honor can rely for [Mexico’s] salvation.”14 Now out of the Mexico City Ayuntamiento, Alamán was unable to further any of the grandiose plans he had envisioned to make the capital healthier, more functional, and more beautiful. New elections for the Ayuntamiento took place in December, as Alamán was accused of inflaming violent resistance to liberal candidates.15 The capital’s liberal newspapers made much of this. El Monitor Republicano commented in a rhetorical shell lobbed at Alamán’s El Universal that the continuing influence of the monarchists recently driven from the Ayuntamiento and their efforts to shape the electoral outcome represented a new low in politics.16 Alluding to all these events in a letter to Palermo, Alamán expressed serious doubt as to whether he would actually be able to take up his deputyship.17 The congress of 1850 did convene, Alamán did fill his seat, and despite his weakening health he could not resist taking an active role. His first interven-

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tion on the floor of the cámara came early in 1850 when he paraphrased in a speech an El Universal editorial of his own, published on 9 January.18 The speech consisted in part of a rhetorically decorated but clear statement of what conservatism meant: “We call ourselves conservatives because we desire primarily to conserve the fragile life in our poor society, which you [liberals and politicians more generally] have wounded to death, and then restore to it the vigor and health that it can and should have. [We are conservatives] because we do not want the plundering to continue. . . . You have despoiled the fatherland of its nationality, of its virtues, of its valor, of its strength, of its hopes; we want to restore all [of this]. . . . The Conservative Party exists among us since the destructive opposing party was born.” José Valadés has limned an altogether plausible description of Alamán at this time as his fellow deputies must have seen him: “And Alamán, now 58 years old, is near death [he would not die until more than three years later]. The 22nd of January the deputies saw him . . . ascend to the podium with difficulty. In his youth, during his first ministry, don Lucas made himself [easily] heard with his sonorous, pleasant voice. Now he spoke [almost] inaudibly; with each paragraph he paused from fatigue.”19 Barely three months into his congressional term, Alamán requested a leave from his duties as deputy in January 1850 to attend to his failing health. As so often in recent years, he went down to the more salubrious climate of the Hacienda de Atlacomulco, almost certainly without his family, where he remained until the beginning of April 1850. When he returned to congress, as head of the cámara’s fiscal committee Alamán delivered a powerful written opinion in early May strongly condemning the oft-renewed concession for a transisthmian communication route across Tehuantepec initially made to José de Garay in 1842 by President Santa Anna. Although Alamán’s intervention was not the only factor in the congressional rejection of the concession, his was a powerful voice in the outcome.20 By the fall of 1850 he was heading the congressional committee dedicated to studying the proposed US war indemnity, but his manifold activities, the city’s weather, and his advancing age continued to affect his health. To Terranova he wrote, “Being the president of the committee in the Cámara de Diputados that has taken up this very complicated matter [of the indemnity], I have had much to do in it; and although I have again become ill in the lungs, as last year, I have not failed to attend [meetings and congressional sessions].”21 Again writing and speaking on behalf of the committee on fiscal affairs in the Chamber of Deputies, in March 1851 Alamán stirred up a hornet’s nest with a report characterizing as unconstitutional legislation widely expanding President

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Arista’s powers over fiscal matters, nonetheless passed by the chamber. By the end of 1850 he had definitively decided not to run for reelection. He delivered his final speech to the cámara at the end of November 1851, addressing proposals supported by Treasury Minister Guillermo Prieto to adjust tariff schedules in order to raise funds for the government. His long, detailed, closely reasoned intervention proved to be in vain, however, because the proposed reforms were enacted despite his and other conservative legislators’ reservations. Eighteen fifty-one was also a presidential election year since the moderate government of José Joaquín de Herrera was due to relinquish power in January. Though not by his own initiative, Alamán’s name popped up in some places as a candidate for the Conservative Party. In the local balloting in Sultepec, southwest of Toluca, for example, Alamán received fourteen votes, well behind Mariano Arista, in a field including Arista, Nicolás Bravo, Manuel Gómez Pedraza, and Luis de la Rosa (1804–56).22 For what remained of his time as a deputy Alamán upheld the conservative banner amid a largely unsympathetic congress but left the government by the end of 1851 and returned to civilian status. He now tended to decline opportunities to participate actively in formal political affairs. In the summer of 1852, for example, President Arista, contemplating renewed proposals for a transisthmian trade and communication route, invited Alamán to join a commission to evaluate the conditions for such a project, a summons the former deputy declined, citing ill health. Much of his political activity now entailed writing for El Universal. The rest of his waning energy was devoted to looking after the duke’s interests while completing his Historia de Méjico, the fifth and final volume of which went to press in the summer of 1852.

Wealth A man of Lucas Alamán’s social status, relatively comfortable means, and large family was expected to make a will. Fortunately, in addition to his formal testament of 1850 several documents enable one to triangulate on the changes in his wealth over time up to his death in 1853. These comprise an 1841 inventory made in connection with the collapse of Cocolapan, his 1850 testament, a later, undated codicil, documents relating to his property and its disposition, and remarks he made in his personal correspondence during his final years. All the documents convey the strong impression that his wealth had declined between the failure of his textile enterprise in the early 1840s and his death.

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About two months before he died, for example, he addressed the duke’s lament that his Haciendas Marquesanas, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, had been sold too cheaply in view of the projects for a transisthmian route being revived around 1850, which if realized would have raised land values in the region and augmented the duke’s profit. Alamán commented that in order to buy back the sprawling, underexploited properties from their new owner at a deep discount when they had the opportunity, “it would have been necessary to divine [the future], since the way things go, with [often unpredictable and] extraordinary events, it is not always possible to guess correctly. On more than one occasion I have erred in my own and other people’s affairs to my own grave prejudice.”23 The economic circumstances of the time conspired against his schemes to accumulate great wealth, while his tendency to overreach also played a role in undermining his ambitions. At the time of his death he was a man of some material wealth even if his fortune had diminished a good deal over the preceding decade and did not approach that of some of the great landowning, commercial, or capitalist (chiefly agiotista) figures of the day, miningbased wealth not yet having recovered from the post-Independence depression. His wealth near the beginning of his earning life consisted of a substantial but by no means grand inheritance, some shares in the Cata silver mine, some real property, including the house in Guanajuato where he was born, his wife’s dowry, and some other odds and ends. Since his capital appears not to have been large enough to support his family from interest or rents, he always needed to be earning money, whether from a salary, investments, commissions, honoraria, or other sources. An undated, unsigned document in his own hand from the later 1830s, when he was in his midforties, suggests that he was owed a number of outstanding loans at interest, many of them unsecured and made simply on the basis of a handshake.24 The review was occasioned by his doubts about whether the interest he was receiving exceeded criteria of usury, since he may have been charging higher interest rates than allowed on unsecured loans. The general accounting is accompanied by an anonymous consulta from someone Alamán regarded as knowledgeable in such matters, possibly Canon Arechederreta. The anonymous consultant rendered the opinion that none of the investments or loans even approached usurious practice. The consultant’s report advised that Alamán’s capital needed to be employed in the most profitable fashion “for the support of a family,” and had been lent out “in the manner of bank loans at interest” (the first commercial bank in Mexico was not established until 1864).

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Virtually the entire liquid capital he controlled was initially invested in French government bonds yielding the relatively low annual interest of 4½ percent because they were considered to be secure. But the July Revolution of 1830 prompted him to sell these off at a considerable discount. Thinking to reinvest these funds in Mexico, he hoped to have them produce sufficient income to recover his losses from the French episode. In the early 1830s, therefore, he had advanced fairly large sums, in one instance 30,000 pesos, to the government at 2 to 3 percent monthly interest secured against the country’s maritime customs receipts, as was the practice at the time; he engaged in agiotismo, in other words. A project among the tobacco growers of the Orizaba district in 1837 to form a banco nacional of tobacco did not prosper. He also appears to have lent funds to the management of the Hacienda de Atlacomulco so that the sugar and molasses produced during one year might be held off the market until prices reached a maximum level. At least one of the merchants to whom he lent went bankrupt, and Alamán recovered little or nothing of his money. Finally, there were some more successful loans to mining companies, among them the group trying to revive the fortunes of the Fresnillo mines. Apart from Alamán’s worries about usury, it is not clear what the overall picture of all these loans and investments came to, but it does not sound as though they brought the kind of success he sought. A far more comprehensive picture of his wealth as a whole is the 16 June 1841 inventory in his own hand offered to the investors in the failed Cocolapan textile enterprise. There was an incentive here to undervalue or even underreport his assets and exaggerate his liabilities, as any debtor with legal action hanging over him might be tempted to do. But assuming this inventory to have been a roughly honest accounting of his holdings and debts, this listing represents what he was worth in 1841. His total assets came to an impressive 425,700 pesos, most of which was tied up in real property of one sort or another. The most valuable item was the Hacienda de Trojes y Juan Martín in Celaya, which he valued at 152,812 pesos. His family residence on the Primera Calle de San Francisco in the city’s heart was worth 73,000 pesos. The house on the Ribera de San Cosme, part of the preconquest Calzada de Tacuba, did not figure in this inventory given that it was held in Narcisa de Castrillo’s name. Two textile factories in Celaya were valued at 131,275 pesos. Another, much more modest house in the capital on the Calle de Buenavista and another one in Guanajuato together were evaluated at about 21,000 pesos, and, also in Guanajuato, his 70 percent share in the Patrocinio silver refinery came to just over 20,000 pesos. On the other hand, his two- barra share in the Cata

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mine he described as having no value. Not present in the inventory is any listing of the sums he had lent out at interest, which had caused him to seek the expert advice on usury. Either he considered these loans to occupy a separate category, secured with a mortgage, or by 1841 he had liquidated or lost all the sums loaned out. A few other items made up the total of assets, including some 15,000 pesos worth of personal possessions, consisting of a coach, mules, furniture, silver plate, and so forth. Among these was his large personal library, worth about 5,000 pesos, a figure remarkably close to that of the detailed inventory made after his death in 1853. Finally, he was owed 12,000 pesos in back salary by the government for his service on the Consejo de Estado. The problem with Alamán’s property, as it was for many other men of his class at the time, was that nearly two-thirds of it was encumbered by debt. From this point of view only about one-third of it was free of the claims of others and thus actually his. His total debts amounted to 288,418 pesos. A large chunk of this, 81,251 pesos, fell under the amorphous heading of deudas pasivas, that is, money he owed to others about which he gave no details. Most of the remainder took the form of liens against his various real properties, reducing his equity share to 116,754 pesos, or something over a quarter of his gross worth. The principal family residence on the Primera Calle de San Francisco, for example, bore mortgages held by the capital’s Spanish Cofradía de Aranzazú for 15,000 pesos, another mortgage for a whopping 36,470 pesos, and a lien owing to Narcisa Castrillo’s dowry of 12,512 pesos. After deducting the value of these and other mortgages, Alamán’s equity share of his residence came to an extremely modest 5,000 pesos. There were no fewer than twentythree liens against the Hacienda de Trojes, almost all held by cofradías, archicofradías, and capellanías (religious brotherhoods or ecclesiastical benefices). The largest of these mortgages was nearly 60,000 pesos owed to Narcisa Castrillo’s dowry, and 6,000 pesos were dedicated to the endowment of the chaplaincy of their son Father Gil Alamán. Lucas Alamán’s equity in the hacienda amounted, therefore, to under 50,000 pesos, or about a third of its value. More or less the same pattern of encumbrance held for his other properties. Among his creditors were the English merchant house of Manning and Marshall in Mexico City; the trading firm Aguirrevengoa hijo y Uribarren of Paris; the estate of his deceased half brother, Father Arechederreta; and Ángel Calderón de la Barca, the Spanish minister to Mexico. Some of these were relatively small and formally unsecured. That to Calderón, for example, was for furniture Alamán had purchased from him, as he had earlier done from Anthony

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Butler. As he approached his fiftieth year in 1841, therefore, while Lucas Alamán’s wealth was very substantial from the point of view of his assets, when his debts were deducted his resources looked distinctly more modest and his preoccupation with money entirely understandable. One major element of Alamán’s family wealth—that is, the total economic resources of the Alamán-Castrillo couple—although not directly owned by him, made not even a cursory appearance in the 1841 inventory. This was the expansive home the family occupied at no. 23 Ribera de San Cosme, at the northwestern edge of the city. Owned by his wife by virtue of her dowry, this made up a considerable part of his total nominal fortune even as it diminished by the early 1850s. José Valadés describes this property as “a great mansion” with a first floor consisting of five receiving rooms, a kitchen, stables in the back, and a coach house. A main living area (vivienda principal) on the second floor embraced twenty-one rooms—certainly the bedrooms and probably his study and library—and a smaller third floor three rooms. The building had a stone façade, a patio surrounded by gracious colonnades of eight columns each, and decorative elements such as carved stone and wrought ironwork. There was also an annexed building, a casa de vecindad, with ten small rooms. The buildings alone occupied about an acre of land. In addition there was a large garden about a half acre in size with some 100 trees—half fruit, half pines, with a scattering of poplars—a smaller garden with more fruit trees, and a reservoir for irrigation; there must also have been a substantial well on the property in that there was virtually no urban infrastructure until many decades later. Finally, there was an orchard of nearly ten acres with about 350 more fruit trees.25 The family occupied this sprawling property at various times, alternating between it and the house on the Primera Calle de San Francisco; it was from its roof that Alamán was able to watch the battles between invading American forces and the defenders of Mexico City in the fall of 1847. What the family’s motives were in purchasing this property is not clear but can be guessed at. In the 1840s there were still children at home, and Alamán may have wanted a large patch of land for trees and gardens. Moreover, since heating and cooking in the city were done with charcoal until 1940 or so, he may well have reasoned that the air would be cleaner out in the suburbs and therefore easier on his chronically troubled lungs. The western suburbs were also at a higher elevation and at some distance from the miasmas believed generated by the lake bed and stagnant open-air sewers in the city center.26 Since this house belonged to Narcisa Castrillo and was therefore not enumerated among Alamán’s properties in the 1841 inventory, he may well have

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bought it before then; they certainly owned it when he wrote his will in 1850 and a subsequent codicil. In both documents he specified that the Ribera de San Cosme house was purchased “por su cuenta” with all or part of doña Narcisa’s dowry of 72,139 pesos. A further 27,000 pesos were invested in fixing up and improving the property: the purchase of more land, the construction of outbuildings, the planting of trees, and so forth, “all of which makes a productive property [finca].” By the time Lucas Alamán made his testament in 1850, he had definitely seen a decline in his wealth. Dated 5 June 1850, almost exactly three years to the day before the testator’s death, the will was immediately prompted by the recurrence of cholera in the city.27 In it Alamán declared himself “fearful of the death that must come to all human creatures . . . since the city is invaded by cholera morbus.” While the document accords closely with the information I have just given it provides as well some qualitative dimensions. Of his own capital of 30,000 pesos at the time of his marriage he stated, Although from the inventories of the goods of my deceased parents [the capital] appears much larger, the properties of which [their wealth] consisted had declined much in value due to the decadent state of the Guanajuato mines where they were located, and [because] the many debts owing to my family were and remain totally lost. This capital later increased with the wages from my employments and the commissions I have earned, and with inheritances from my mother and from my deceased half brother Señor Doctor don Juan Bautista de Arechederreta, canon of this cathedral; but because of losses suffered in business [dealings] I have had, and the considerable expenses of a numerous family, it [the capital] has diminished much. By 1850 he had sold the house at Primera Calle de San Francisco to Dolores Noriega y Sayago for 73,000 pesos, of which she recognized a mortgage in his favor of 37,000 pesos. The house in Guanajuato, held jointly with his elder sister Luz, had been sold some time before this, although he said nothing of the hacienda de beneficio San Patricio.28 He still held the two barras in the Cata mine in Guanajuato, while one barra each were held by his deceased sister’s Iturbe children, his niece and nephew. He had sold the Hacienda de Trojes (at a date unspecified) for 70,000 pesos to Francisco González y Gómez, another hacendado in the Celaya area, of which 10,500 pesos were still owing. A clause of the testament described his personal library as “numerous and select, with curious documents, manuscripts, engravings, medals, and

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minerals,” which he wanted to leave to his sons Gil and Juan Bautista because of their “literary careers,” that is, their professional standing, respectively, as a priest and a lawyer. Also listed among his property were the “remaining copies of the works I have published [and] what they have produced through sales,” all of which was to be accounted for by José María Andrade, his publisher. Other clauses in the testament related to money due to and by him. He was owed the entire salary, at 4,000 pesos annually, that he had earned while a member of the Consejo de Estado under the 1836 centralist constitution as well as all of his salary during the years he headed the Dirección de Industria. He recounted in a few words the collapse of Cocolapan and its sale to Juan de Dios Pérez Gálvez, declaring himself “free of all responsibility with respect to this transaction and its outcomes.” The liquidation of much of his property— the Calle de San Francisco house, the holdings in Guanajuato, and the Hacienda de Trojes—is plausibly explained by his need to pay off the 60,000-peso debt arising from the Cocolapan bankruptcy and the diminution of his fortune ascribable to this. All his affairs with the United Mexican Mining Association had been settled, and no debt accrued to any of his remaining properties. The undated codicil must have referred to this 1850 testament, its provisions not materially altering those of the testament. He did note two debts still owed by him, however, which must therefore have been contracted by loans subsequent to the 1850 will: a 10,000-peso mortgage on the San Cosme house and another, somewhat ambiguous obligation of 6,000 pesos.29 To summarize, by the early 1850s Alamán’s wealth had declined at least by the unspecified value of holdings in Guanajuato, the second most valuable of the three houses he owned, and his hacienda. While his debts had decreased over the decade of the 1840s, then, the diminution represented by the liquidation of his properties, whatever the cause, more than outstripped the shrinkage of his financial liabilities. Although the documents I have just reviewed offer a plausible picture of the state of Lucas Alamán’s fortune toward the end of his life, one further matter casts some doubt on whether he addressed absolutely everything regarding his finances, while it also throws some light on the straits in which he may have found himself as the 1840s gave way to the 1850s. At some point well before 1850, probably to finance Cocolapan operations in the last years of the textile enterprise, he had borrowed, without prior authorization, 7,000 pesos from the funds he oversaw for the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone. At a guess, this points toward a short-term urgency in his cash flow that he in-

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tended to make good, which is quite probably the way he saw it, rather than as embezzlement. How this matter had come to the attention of the Neapolitan nobleman is not clear—it may well have been brought up by Alamán himself, but the entire episode remains mysterious. This obligation does not show up as an active debt in his testamentary instruments, so how it slipped the weave is not clear, either, but owe it he did. In the summer of 1850 the duke gently reproved his apoderado for not having reimbursed the money as yet, but Terranova offered to send a letter authorizing the “loan” post facto in order to regularize the matter. Three years later the sum had yet to be repaid to the caja of the ex-Marquesado, and Alamán received what amounted to a dunning letter from Pedro Peláez, a functionary in the duke’s employ in Naples, expressing the duke’s “regret that in so many years this matter has not been settled” despite his belief in “your rectitude and honesty.” Peláez added, “Some enemy of yours has not failed to write to the Duke that you have used [traficado con] his money, that you have gone bankrupt, etc., but the Duke in truth has not credited these rumors with any importance. . . . After this account you will see the necessity of concluding quickly everything related [to this matter]. I repeat that I am convinced you are a man of honor.”30 What became of this debt we do not know.

Health Judging by the level of his activities and travel, as a young man Alamán seems to have enjoyed robust health; the work regimen and productivity he sustained well into his middle years certainly attest to this. But by the mid1840s, at least, his chronic lung ailments—probably emphysema occasionally complicated by colds, viral infections, pleurisy, or attacks of bronchitis—had begun to tell on him. While a chronic indisposition of the lungs is mentioned frequently in his correspondence at least by the 1840s, it is possible to follow a steady downward trajectory in Lucas Alamán’s health beginning as early as 1850. Having been elected as a deputy to the national congress from the State of Jalisco for 1850–51, he was so ill at the beginning of 1850 that he could not attend congressional sessions: “For some days I have been quite indisposed from an attack on my lungs, which has impeded me from attending the Chamber of Deputies and attending with precision to [congressional] affairs. Now I am improved by dint of bleedings and much use of preparations of antimony in various forms. And probably to continue my recovery, this coming week I will go to Atlacomulco to breathe the more temperate, heavier air we have

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there, taking advantage of my convalescence to see how things are going there.”31 In early March he wrote to Palermo from the hacienda that he was much relieved by a stay at Atlacomulco.32 Still in congress in the fall of 1850, he found himself at the head of the congressional committee handling the Mexican side of the indemnity from the US for national territorial losses in the war, all the while struggling with his illness.33 Alamán made the trip twice in 1851—once in January, then again in December—complaining on the latter occasion that his lung condition had become worse. In 1852 he may have stayed on the estate for several months and was there again for a prolonged stay in the winter of 1852–53. In his notes for a biography of his father, written in 1855, Juan Bautista Alamán implied that Lucas Alamán was, during these last years and months, preparing as best he could for his death, although he says nothing of his medical condition. He wrote, “Death was not able to surprise a man who had seen it coming from so far away.”34 In the last months of his life Alamán made some ominous comments regarding his failing health. He had updated his will, was probably putting family matters in as finalized a state as he could, and wanted to leave the duque’s affairs in good order. Yet in the midst of all this and on the eve of Santa Anna’s return under Alamán’s all-too-brief tutelage— as though Santa Anna could be controlled at this point by anyone—he was still making plans for the improvement of the Hacienda de Atlacomulco. Writing from the estate during what must have been his last stay there at the very end of January 1853, he laid out an ambitious plan for making improvements to the property over which he clearly intended to preside himself. His devotion to the prosperity of Atlacomulco at the end of his life evinces not only his loyalty to the interests of Terranova y Monteleone but also his strong attachment to the estate. Over the years he visited Atlacomulco he may well have developed an affective bond with the place for all the reasons Fanny Calderón de la Barca suggested in her 1841 description and for the temporary alleviation it gave to his health problems. Having returned to Mexico City sometime after the end of January 1853, he wrote to Terranova, “I have also been unhealthy, since I am not as well here [in Mexico City] as in Atlacomulco, and as soon as I come up to this high, cold country I begin to feel again the indisposition of my lungs that has afflicted me for some time past. But I hope that this will not prevent me from completing the arrangement of your affairs.”35 The obvious decline in Lucas Alamán’s wealth in the last years of his life and an unyielding routine of writing, public work, and tending to Terranova’s affairs may well have told on his health in addition to any constitutional weakness. This was almost cer-

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tainly accompanied by the flagging spirits caused by his frequent bouts of lung ailments, unsuccessful efforts to treat them medically more than temporarily, and extended periods of recuperation. As early as 1848, when he was only in his midfifties and still had an eventful five years to live, he wrote to his friend Mariano Riva Palacio acknowledging with regret the latter’s departure from his position as treasury secretary in the Herrera government: “With your separation from the ministry, it only remains for me to implore you to continue in private the friendship and confidence you dispensed to me [while in] that post, and that you call on me whenever you think that I may be of use, which will be little enough. You have your career open before you: mine closed some time ago, and nothing remains for me to do in the world but fill pages with old things [cosas viejas] and think of the grave.”36 Alamán was wrong about his career being at an end, but the fatigued and fatalistic tone of his letter to Riva Palacio tells a different story. External circumstances played a role in prompting him to make provision for the passage of his soul through Purgatory and the disposition of his worldly goods. The country’s reversals were very much reflected in Alamán’s Historia de Méjico, and although they may not have contributed directly to forebodings of his mortality they also likely did not cheer up this man who was not naturally bubbling with high spirits. The epidemic of cholera morbus that scourged the capital and other parts of the country during the spring and summer of 1850 may have killed his eighteen-year-old-son Justino. Neither was the failing governability of the country an encouraging backdrop for Alamán’s faltering health or his writing. His fears in this regard are amply reflected in his correspondence with Palermo. In May he wrote to the duke, “We have the grave circumstance of the approach of cholera morbus, which has invaded various towns not far distant.” There were some as yet unconfirmed cases in Mexico City, he reported, “and since no one can hold themselves immune from such a calamity, I am working to complete the accounts and to arrange all the papers and affairs of your casa.” The rapid spread of the disease had claimed numerous victims by July, among them several key employees at the Hacienda de Atlacomulco, the attending physician at the Hospital de Jesús, the wife of the physician who replaced him, the Alamán family priest, “and even my tailor. My wife’s brother-in-law has died and so many friends and acquaintances that every day I have heard of two or three [more]. Of my colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies . . . four have died. . . . But in my family, thank God, nothing has happened.”37 By the late 1840s, if not earlier, he was occasionally forced to ask for leaves from his government jobs or

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even to renounce appointments entirely for the sake of regaining his health. He remarked frequently in his letters to Palermo on the salutary effects of his winter visits to Atlacomulco; indeed, this was the only palliative that seems to have brought him relief: February 1849

February 1850

March 1850

September 1850

December 1850

August 1851

“Coming here [to Atlacomulco] will extend my life, since on this occasion, having arrived quite ill, with the passing days I have been much alleviated, thank God.” “For some days I have been quite indisposed from an attack on my lungs, which has impeded me from attending in the Chamber [of Deputies] or paying close attention to any other matters. Now I am better from the effects of bleedings and much use of antimony preparations in various forms. Probably when I am recovered I will go next week to Atlacomulco to breathe milder and more condensed air than what we have here.” [He came to Cuernavaca about three weeks previously] “to seek warm and condensed air to be able to breathe, [since to] be in Mexico [City] I was so fatigued from an illness of the lungs, which the doctors have diagnosed as emphysema, that to talk or walk suffocated me. Here I have recovered much and will stay until the heat or the rebels in the Valley of Sultepec cause me to flee.” [He had much work to do regarding the question of the war indemnity from the US], “although I have become ill again in the lungs as in the past year.” “Having seen the cholera epidemic here, it has left such an impression of horror on my spirit that I think it will never dissipate. I continue very uncomfortable in the lungs, but I think I will improve by going to the hot country.” “We have had in this city an almost universal epidemic of an illness call ‘la gripe,’ from which I am just convalescing and which has affected me for a week.”

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[He has withdrawn from the presidency of a commission to examine proposals for a transisthmian railroad], “having been quite ill in the chest.” [Hopes to live three or four more years, but] “not as many years of life as the ex-slave Tomás Gómez [of the Hacienda de Atlacomulco, who died at 103 years of age],” to put the Hacienda de Atlacomulco in order: “Here I have found myself, as always happens to me, with relief from my illness of the lungs, and I hope the cold season that is returning to the city ends [soon].” [Cannot work much on sales of ex-Marquesado properties:] “I have been in ill health, since I am not as well here [in Mexico City] as at Atlacomulco, and as soon as I come up to this high, cold country I again feel the illness of my lungs that [has bothered] me for some time, but I hope it will not prevent me from finishing the arrangement of your affairs.”38

It was in this frail state of health, convinced that his end lay not far off and undoubtedly concerned about the economic situation of his family, that Lucas Alamán entered the last, brief phase of his long public career.

22 • Santa Anna Returns, Alamán Exits

Always a force to be reckoned with for his influence, as an ideologue, and as a journalist, whether in or out of politics Alamán was a lightning rod for liberal attack and in Valadés’s words was now “the most notable political figure in the country.”1 So synonymous had he become with the conservative project for Mexico in general and the monarchist cause and Conservative Party in particular that an attack on him was an attack on conservatism, and vice versa. The sharpness and occasional vituperation of the language notwithstanding, the liberal newspapers virtually never mentioned political figures by name. Jumping ahead a year or so to the spring of 1853, an article in El Universal, probably written by Rafael Rafael, conveys the tone of opinion among conservatives, and even some liberals, toward Alamán. The immediate provocation was his impending appointment to Santa Anna’s cabinet and the liberals’ clamorous objections. The article printed as its epigraph a phrase from the liberal paper El Monitor Republicano of 6 March 1853: “El Sr. Alamán . . . es un programa en acción” (Thomas Jefferson called Alexander Hamilton “a host unto himself”), embroidered on it, and turned it from an insult into high praise: He is not only a man; he is a program, the program of the Conservative Party: for this he is attacked, and also for this we defend him. . . . It is necessary to keep in mind that if Sr. Alamán is attacked, it is not for his person, which all agree is adorned with the most enviable gifts; not for his conduct, which even his adversaries confess [to be] irreproachable [not entirely true]; and not even for his political convictions, which others share and in spite of this are not criticized with such animosity; but only . . . because Sr. Alamán is a program, and not just any [program], but

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a program IN ACTION. . . . [T]he program of Sr. Alamán is the program of the Conservative Party, and [is] the reverse and antithesis of the program of his adversaries. . . . Who are they who are filled with fear at the mere idea that this man can take up the reins of government? It is easy to see: those who agree with the administration of General Arista, that is to say, with the disorder, money jobbing [agio], and corruption of all kinds; the professional salary grubbers [sueldistas] who have no job other than that of deputy, official, etc., etc., and who must live at the expense of the country; the fools, scarce in talent and abundant in pretentions . . . who subsist from disorder and the squandering of public funds. The substitution of strict order for disorder; of honesty and good faith for low intrigue; of dignity and decorum for degradation and dishonor in foreign relations; of a severe morality for the demoralization seen on all sides: “This is the program of the Conservative Party.”2 In January 1851 President Herrera handed his office over to Mariano Arista, the newly elected chief magistrate of the nation, the first peaceful transition in the presidency since Guadalupe Victoria had assumed it from the SPE more than twenty-five years earlier. A liberal republican and high army officer, Arista headed a moderate government whose chief goal was to impose some fiscal stability on the country, but he managed to achieve little in his two-year stint. During the moderate presidencies of Herrera and Arista, the consolidation of political factions into more clearly identified parties took place— Alamán established the conservatives, Tornel and Juan Suárez y Navarro (1813–67) the santanistas, while liberal tendencies jelled into the moderates and the puros. The armed conservative reaction set in with the pronunciamiento in Guadalajara on 26 July 1852 of José María Blancarte (1811–58), a veteran of the American war from Jalisco.3 Proclaiming the overthrow of the Jalisco state government, in short order his movement would embrace the entire country, demanding the resignation of Arista, the reinstatement of the federal system, a temporary dictatorship, and the seating of a new constituent congress. Following Blancarte’s lead, a rash of other uprisings broke out, and he issued a second manifesto inviting Santa Anna to return from his exile to assume a temporary dictatorship. When congress refused to grant President Arista dictatorial powers to quell the uprisings, he resigned on 5 January 1853, thus avoiding a bloody civil war, and sailed away into exile, where he was to die on shipboard two years later on his way from Portugal to France. The next day the political trajectory was plotted in an agreement at the Hacienda de Arroyozarco by generals José López Uraga (1810–85) and Manuel

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Robles Pezuela (1817–62), approving a one-year temporary dictatorship, the invitation to the exiled Santa Anna to assume the presidency, the appointment of a council of notables to advise the president, and the writing of a new constitution—republican, representative, and popular. Alamán remarked in a letter that although the leaders of the rebellion were friends of his, he had kept his distance from the movement “until the course of affairs is fixed [i.e., stabilized] a bit more.”4 Many felt that the turn toward Santa Anna had corrupted the original rebellion and wrenched it out of its true course. Arista was succeeded by the president of the Supreme Court, Juan Bautista Ceballos (1811–54), who refused to sign on to the Arroyozarco agreements and, with little support from any faction, lasted two months before being ousted by a group of generals. Their leader was Manuel María Lombardini (1802–53), who counted on the vital support of the Mexico City garrison, stepped in as a proxy for Santa Anna, and occupied the president’s chair from February to April. General López Uraga proposed to Lombardini a conservative cabinet including Alamán at the ministry of relations. According to Juan Suárez y Navarro’s detailed account, “The proposal of Alamán shocked Lombardini; and without offering much explanation, he definitively rejected [the appointment], protesting that he would never name a ministry that had [Alamán] as its chief.”5 On 17 March 1853 Santa Anna was elected president by a vote of the states. The perpetual president had been in exile with his family for five years (1848–53), first during a difficult year in Jamaica, then in Colombia, where he settled in Turbaco, near Cartagena. He accumulated considerable property there, receiving as well his general’s salary and the rents from his Veracruz lands. He had been kept apprised of Mexican politics by letters from loyal santanistas, principally Tornel, but also from Alamán, who had written to him both in Jamaica and Colombia. During most of his long public career Santa Anna was more interested in attaining power than in exercising it. Not counting the occasions on which he left the president’s chair to lead the army, he withdrew to his Veracruz haciendas in 1832–34, 1835–36, 1837, 1842, and 1843–44. Moreover, his long periods of residence in exile—1845, 1848–53, 1855–64, 1864 (again), and 1867–74— added up to practically a permanent condition. When his regime fell to the Revolution of Ayutla in 1855 he went into exile yet again and remained in exile mostly in Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands until his final homecoming at the age of eighty in 1872. He died in Mexico City four years later.6 Swept from his exile in Turbaco, Colombia, in 1853 by the Guadalajara “revolution,” he disembarked at Veracruz on 1 April and was met by a large

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delegation of supporters and notables. Among the most prominent of these was Antonio Haro y Tamariz (1811–69), ardent conservative, monarchist, and political ally of Lucas Alamán. Haro y Tamariz had already served as minister of the treasury in the cabinets of Valentín Canalizo and Mariano Salas and would do so again during the first few months of the last Santa Anna government. He delivered to Santa Anna a letter from Lucas Alamán dated 23 March 1853, often referred to as Alamán’s political testament. Santa Anna met Lombardini along with the existing ministerial cabinet, other officials, and Alamán at the Villa de Guadalupe on 16 April. The perennial president’s first act after receiving power from Lombardini was to name his cabinet, whose composition emerged after two weeks of negotiations: Alamán at interior and exterior relations (in May interior would be split off into Gobernación, and Manuel Diez de Bonilla would be appointed to fill the post until he replaced Alamán at foreign relations after the latter’s death); Haro y Tamariz at treasury; the prominent conservative lawyer Teodosio Lares (1806–70) at justice, ecclesiastical affairs, and public instruction; Tornel at war and navy, which appointment spurred some controversy among conservatives, including Alamán; and, a week later, Joaquín Velázquez de León (1803–82), engineer and diplomat, as minister of development (fomento) in the agency Alamán had just established.7 On 20 April Santa Anna entered Mexico City to an uproarious popular reception, and on the twenty-second took the oath of office in the Chamber of Deputies. The oaths of Alamán and the other ministers-designate were then heard in the Palacio Nacional, the Spanish ambassador presented the new president with the Gran Cruz de Carlos III, and the entire party, with Alamán as senior minister following immediately behind Santa Anna, went to the cathedral for a Te Deum Mass.

A Government Is Formed Here, I want to turn back to take a closer look at the two weeks following Santa Anna’s arrival in Veracruz in early April 1853. The general tilt of the presidential cabinet toward conservative centralism was clear early, even if its makeup remained vague as late as the middle of April; the appointments of Tornel and Alamán stirred considerable controversy. A series of newspaper articles written from exile in 1856 by Juan Suárez y Navarro (1813–67), initially published in the liberal newspaper El Siglo XIX and later as a book, throw a bright light on this period. An ardent supporter of Vicente Guerrero’s presidency, Suárez y Navarro opposed the Anastasio Bustamante regime, thus ipso

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facto becoming a political opponent of its directing genius, Lucas Alamán. He was involved in the Guadalajara uprising of 1852, and when Santa Anna returned to Mexico the following year Suárez served as his close adviser and factotum, initially entering the government as oficial mayor in the war ministry under José María Tornel. Suárez y Navarro lent warm and unfailing support to the perennial president, including the writing of a celebratory history of Santa Anna’s military and political career up to 1848. Yet when Tornel died in the fall of 1853, Santa Anna elected not to appoint Suárez y Navarro to replace him in the war ministry. Adding insult to injury, Santa Anna then forced him into exile. Returning to the country in 1859, Suárez joined the liberal government, then later attached himself to the regime of Emperor Maximilian. His articles were written in a spirit of deep vindictiveness toward Santa Anna, whom he viewed as having betrayed both the Guadalajara movement and him personally. They excoriate the president as a grandiose, ignorant, inconstant opportunist and Alamán, in an extended essay, as a Mexican Metternich. Despite their splenetic tone, the articles paint a plausible picture of the formation process of the Santa Anna government and of Alamán’s role in it. Suárez y Navarro’s overall evaluation of Santa Anna’s decisions about the formation of his cabinet is highly negative, reflecting his deep disenchantment with his former patron: “To the many defects, crimes, and errors that Santa-Anna [sic] has committed in the waning days of his residence in the country is to be added an act that comes as the completion of his works, and as an epilogue to his stupidity, ineptitude, and brazenness. . . . [I]n April 1853 Santa-Anna, for whom the lessons of the past valued nothing, inaugurated his administration [by] calling to the ministry men rejected by the opinion of all Mexicans.” Juan Suárez y Navarro composed a vivid description of Veracruz, a beehive of political opportunism at the end of March and beginning of April 1853, where Santa Anna “received the congratulations of the Guelphs and Ghibillines: all of them strove in competition to show their zeal . . . [in a manner] worthy of the dictatorship of Caesar or the Emperor Augustus.” Having received Alamán’s letter of 23 March at the hands of Haro y Tamariz, Santa Anna, on the day of his arrival, called on Suárez y Navarro to see him in confidence and asked (in the latter’s account), “What do you think of what Señor Alamán says of his program, which he says is that of the conservatives?”8 The younger man replied, “I will give you my frank opinion, and as always will be honest even if I appear to sin by indiscretion. This letter [of Alamán’s] is evidence of the limited ability of D. Lucas Alamán as a politician and statesman.

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This letter, if it does not reveal that Señor D. Lucas’s head is limping [claudica], at least proves that he is a man incorrigible in his errors and his administrative ideas.” As a representation of the conservatives’ program, he said, the letter was a mass of generalities without substance or detail, so vague that one could not differentiate its propositions from those of liberals. Santa Anna replied that Suárez was judging Alamán too harshly, and “although I myself do not know if he will come into the ministry, I am resolved to take advantage of his advice, of his name, and of his stature.” Suárez responded that he had no faith in Alamán’s political talent and that his high reputation “[did] not accord with his writings or with his acts while an official. I also think that at the moment his age, his infirmities, and his exhausted reputation will not permit him to be of any use.” At this point in their dialogue, Suárez began to compare Alamán with Talleyrand, to which Santa Anna interjected, “Who was Talleyrand, what did he do, and what has Sr. Alamán done to deserve the comparison?” (Suárez y Navarro remarked later that this question revealed Santa Anna’s ignorance.) Suárez’s long disquisition on Talleyrand’s checkered history served as a platform for his summary judgment of Alamán’s career: Sr. Alamán, when he has participated in public matters, has brought great evils, and his arrival in power has always been accompanied by great misfortunes for the nation. Since he began to figure [in national life] in 1823 he has given ample proof of his lack of political judgment. He has involved us in treaties with foreign nations highly damaging to the republic, and by his decision to reestablish the reign of old ideas [el imperio de las vejeces] he has claimed many victims and dirtied his hands with the blood of one of our heroes [i.e., Vicente Guerrero]. His partisans and friends judge him as larger than he actually is, and their passion makes them think him to have sublime ideas and grand projects when he is perhaps sleeping and snoring at the desk of his study. . . . I think you will be in for a huge disappointment if you trust the regeneration of the country to men of undeserved reputation. The perennial president wanted Suárez to confer with Alamán about the makeup of the cabinet at the start of an intense two weeks of negotiations in the matter. Many of the men proposed for ministerial posts had been prominent in national politics since independence—Bocanegra and Esteva, for example. Of the names Santa Anna put forward, only Alamán and Tornel would eventually end up in the ministry. Santa Anna instructed Suárez y Navarro to propose Haro y Tamariz for treasury, although he did not come to serve in that

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position for the first three months of the regime. Going by Suárez’s account, Alamán enjoyed something very near a veto power over appointments to the cabinet. He did reject vehemently the nomination of Tornel for the war ministry, threatening not to accept his cabinet post if Santa Anna persisted in the appointment, offering resistance to another nomination, and warmly embracing the name of Haro y Tamariz over that of another man. He adduced a number of reasons for his rejection of Tornel, above all “his having frustrated the plans and projects of the Conservative Party in 1846 under the government of General Paredes.” Moving on to other matters, Alamán explained that his 23 March letter was schematic because it expressed general principles, not details. He also insisted at length on the “deficiencies of the federal system, on the necessity for a new territorial division [of the country], and upon the usefulness of limiting freedom of the press.” In the account of this meeting that he gave to Santa Anna, Suárez y Navarro implied that he would leave Santa Anna’s side should he insist on having Alamán and Haro y Tamariz in the ministry and that not sticking with Tornel in the war ministry over Alamán’s objections would be “an act of weakness.” After some further bandying about of names, by the time Santa Anna left Guadalupe on 16 April the composition of the cabinet had been set: Alamán at relaciones (later split, as noted above, into relaciones exteriores and gobernación, with Manuel Díez de Bonilla serving in the latter post for the first month of the administration), Lares at justice—the only man to remain in the ministry throughout Santa Anna’s regime, Joaquín Velásquez de León at the newly created fomento (economic development), Tornel at war and navy, and Haro y Tamariz at treasury. A series of meetings convoked by Santa Anna beginning on 16 April at Guadalupe included as participants Alamán, Tornel, Haro y Tamariz, and probably other men as well. In a meeting between Santa Anna and Alamán starting at around eleven o’clock on the sixteenth and lasting until the wee hours of the morning of the seventeenth, the final makeup of the cabinet was confirmed again. Suárez y Navarro thought that by this time “Señor Alamán had worked a complete change” in what Santa Anna thought, moving him much more in the direction of a highly conservative, centralized dictatorship. When confronted with this observation, Santa Anna, in Suárez’s recollection, responded, “My friend Suárez! I have much experience, and I know that this country needs the government of a single man who gives blows right and left [palos a diestra y siniestra]. Señor Alamán is a very judicious man, and tomorrow when you hear him you will be convinced.” On the eighteenth Alamán presented to a more inclusive meeting of key actors his proposals for the bases

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of government operation during the temporary period of dictatorship until a new constitution could be written. In most of these discussions Tornel appears to have taken a more liberal position despite his enduring santanismo. But Suárez y Navarro remained convinced of Alamán’s subservience to Santa Anna rather than of his judiciousness or virtues as a statesman: Here we have the moral level to which these men had sunk. Here we have that Alamán, the aristocrat by inclination and by ideas, who had shredded Santa Anna’s honor and reputation in his Historia de México, not hesitating to promote and accept a portfolio from that same man that he had presented to the world as a bandit, a rebel, and a thief. Later facts have come to reveal that the honor and the supreme ambition of the conservatives who figured at the side of the dictator can be reduced to one act: to wear and show off the livery of a lord. . . . The conservatives had triumphed, and they celebrated their victory, praising Alamán’s merits, his sagacity, and his virtues. Santa Anna was now in their eyes the only man who could work the happiness of the nation, the great and admirable hero of the country, the only man who had the power to regenerate it. The “Bases para la administración de la República hasta la promulgación de la Constitución” are generally ascribed to Alamán, although when he came up with them is not clear.9 This document was promulgated by presidential decree from the National Palace on 22 April 1853. The use of the term “administration” indicates that the basic form of governance—republican, presidential, highly centralized—was not at issue, only the management of enabling structures. Of the three major sections— gobierno supremo, consejo de estado, and gobierno interior—the very first article of the first section established five secretariats of state, or ministries: Exterior Relations and Interior Relations (later split into two ministries); Justice, Ecclesiastical Affairs, and Public Instruction; Development (fomento), Colonization, Industry, and Commerce (the Dirección de Industria, which Alamán had headed in the 1840s, was suppressed and its attributes absorbed by this ministry); War and Navy; and Treasury. The ministry of Interior Relations would shortly mutate into the separate secretariat of Gobernación, and Justice into its own ministry. While Alamán would have been loath to relinquish control over any aspect of the country’s affairs by splitting his ministry in two, his declining health may well have made it obvious to him, as to others, that reducing the sphere of his responsibilities to foreign relations was the only feasible thing for him. A censorship

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commission for printed works proposed by Alamán was voted down on objections from Santa Anna and Tornel, but censorship of the press along political lines came to be a marked feature of the dictatorship. The suspension (receso) of state legislatures and the assumption of their functions by state governors was the result of a compromise within the group, Alamán advocating their abolition, Tornel opposing the idea. Most historians feel that with the deaths of Alamán on 2 June and Tornel on 11 September 1853, Santa Anna lost two of his most talented supporters. Moreover, in Alamán’s case he also lost a great deal of the intellectual and personal counterweight that might have prevented him from slipping into the grandiosity and even more deeply dictatorial tendencies to which he was prone, encouraged by the group of adulators around him. The Bases as written by Alamán and promulgated by presidential decree, however, did include institutional checks and semichecks on untrammeled executive power that came to be honored more in the breach than the observance. The most interesting of these called for ministerial juntas on matters “involving any general measure, cause of an expense to the treasury, or whose gravity may require it in the judgment of the government.” The opinion of the junta was to be adopted by the president and the minister within whose purview the matter fell, all of this to be recorded formally in a libro de acuerdos. This admittedly vague provision amounted almost to a Habsburgian conciliar arrangement imposing restraints on presidential action. The second section of the Bases was devoted entirely to four succinct articles establishing a twenty-one-member council of state (consejo de estado), an institution that had wound its way in and out of the national government over the decades. The several sections of the consejo were to function essentially as advisory bodies to the ministries, while the council as a whole was to meet for discussion of matters that “in the judgment of the government require it by their gravity, or those in which the government has to proceed in accord with the Council.” Theoretically this group of notables was meant to exercise some restraining influence on the executive authority as well as to offer advice and the imprimatur of legitimacy. Both the “Bases de la administración” cooked up by Lucas Alamán and some of the elements touched on by Suárez y Navarro’s sour but plausible account of Alamán’s role are anticipated in Alamán’s letter to Santa Anna of 23 March 1853. This document looms large in the history of Mexican conservatism and figures to some degree in the complex history of Santa Anna’s call to the presidency in 1853. It was certainly not in itself a determinative impetus to his return, however, and its role may subsequently have been exaggerated.

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Absent the letter, it seems to me, Santa Anna would in any case certainly have sought a return to power inasmuch as the santanistas, including prominent figures like Tornel, were supporting him, and there had been a major uprising espousing his candidacy. Alamán’s letter did, however, pledge the support of conservatives like Haro y Tamariz, Lares, and others. While Alamán himself may have been a “program in action,” the letter was at best only schematically programmatic, laying out some general principles of political thought tending toward the far-right wing of the group calling itself the Conservative Party. Aside from its substance, two general aspects of the letter are notable. First, Alamán portrayed conservatism more like a tendency with widespread adherents than a party or coherent organization, emphasizing the central role of the conservative national press: Since the conservatives are not organized like the Masons, you should not assume that Señor Haro [y Tamariz] speaks for the group that sends him [with the letter]; but all who follow the same opinion are related [politically], so that we understand each other and work together from one end of the republic to the other, [so] you can hear everything he says as the abbreviated expression of property owners, the clergy, and all those who will the good of their country. . . . And to realize these ideas a decided general opinion [i.e., public opinion] favoring them can be counted on, [opinion] that we direct by means of the principal newspapers of the capital and the states, which are all ours. We count with the moral force lent by the uniform support of the clergy, of the propertied class, and of all the sensible people [gente sensata] who are of the same opinion.10 Second, he insisted that the conservatives were disinterested patriots desiring only the best for the country, not adulators or place seekers of whose flattery and misrepresentations Santa Anna should be wary. Such people would try to involve Santa Anna in schemes of advantage to themselves and dishonor to him: “Our representatives, in contrast to these others, will neither ask anything of you nor complain of anything; they go only to show you the principles professed by the conservatives and are followed in a general impulse by all the gente de bien.” In pressing this point, Alamán came dangerously close to implying not just that Santa Anna’s ignorance of the country’s affairs might lead him to stumble into unwise actions but also that he was a do-nothing executive prone to being victimized by others’ opportunism because he might be out of touch, and passive but also impulsive:

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In truth, we fear on the other hand that whatever your convictions may be, that constantly surrounded by men who have nothing else to do but adulate you, you may give in to their blandishments, since we [the conservatives] will not [always] be present, nor will we fight with that kind of weapon. We also fear that some affairs may be undertaken by which you are perhaps impressed because you have not examined them sufficiently . . . and which may discredit you. No less are we fearful that arrived here, you will shut yourself away in Tacubaya, making it difficult to see you . . . and that in the end you will retire to Manga de Clavo, leaving the government in hands that will place [executive] authority in a ridiculous light and cause you to act precipitously, as happened before. Alamán did deploy in very general terms a conservative program, excusing the lack of detail by the contained format of a letter written to a man whose feet had barely touched the soil of his homeland, beset on all sides by voices clamoring for attention. Aspects of what Alamán himself had pursued were not alluded to: industrialization as a national development policy, for example, or the reimplantation of a monarchy in Mexico with a European prince. He placed the blame for the outbreak of the uprising that had brought Santa Anna back to Mexico on reaction to the anticlerical policies of Melchor Ocampo (1814–61) while he had been governor of Michoacán. It was in arguing for unflagging support of the Church by conservatives that Alamán wrote the best-known passage of his letter. This support was foremost among the principles espoused by conservatives: “The first [principle] is to preserve the Catholic religion, because we believe in it and because even if we did not accept it as divinely [inspired], we consider it the only common bond that links all Mexicans [to each other], when all the rest have been broken, and the only one capable of sustaining the Hispanoamerican race, and that can liberate it from the great dangers to which it is exposed.” The counterfactual in this passage about religion— even if we did not accept it as divinely [inspired]—and the corollary of its value as a kind of social glue is a surprisingly Durkheimian formulation of the problem of social cohesion. Alamán had expressed something of the same idea in starker terms in the fifth volume of his Historia de Méjico, published the previous year, writing that “in Mexico there are no Mexicans,” by which he meant that the bonds of nationality—of the “imagined community”—were very weak or nonexistent in the country. From this perspective the liberal attacks beginning with the anticlerical policies of Santa Anna’s vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías, would have been an assault on the only

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strand of cultural solidarity Mexicans enjoyed, transcending political affiliation, class, or ethnicity. Other key supports he argued as being vital to the existing social order were the army and the power of the landed families, whose political loyalty underwrote the conservative coalition, the inviolability of whose holdings represented the sacred order of private property. The touchstones of conservative thought as sketched by Alamán in his letter further included the abolition of the federal system in practice and of federalism as an aspirational goal. The states should be reduced to departments of a unitary national territory along the lines of the French model, “this model being the effective means [to prevent] federalism from returning.” With this went the abolition of the national congress: “We are persuaded that none of this [program] can be achieved by congress, and we desire that you do it, aided by a few councils that would prepare the work [i.e., policy proposals].” Finally, a necessary corollary of the abolition of representative institutions was the doing away with popular elective procedures—“[We are] opposed to the representative system through the practice of elections.” The “Bases para la administración” by default must implicitly have assumed the continuance of the republican-presidential form at least temporarily, in fact, leaving the issue in a sort of limbo. Nor were elections mentioned at all. The “Bases,” then, begin to look like the charter for the continuance of a republic without basic republican institutions, namely, legislatures and popular elections. Since we know from his statements of just a few years earlier that Alamán believed the city council to comprise a basic cell of legitimacy in the political structure, it is difficult to know what he intended by throwing ayuntamiento elections into ambiguity. If one were to speculate, he meant to preserve elections at the local level while abolishing electoral processes at the state and national levels and to institute a conciliar government of notables. Despite some ambiguities, the tenor of his letter is antifederalist, antipopular, and arguably antirepublican or at most an advocation of a sort of attenuated republicanism controlled by notables. The official announcement of President Santa Anna’s cabinet came on 20 April 1853. One of Alamán’s first acts was to write a reseña, or review, of recent political events in Mexico for Mexican diplomats abroad—the official but sanitized version of what had occurred since the beginning of April. This review described Santa Anna’s arrival at Veracruz, his greeting by well-wishers and place seekers, and his acclamation by the population of the capital as “a man destined by Divine Providence to save the Nation in the difficult crisis in which it finds itself and guide it to greatness and prosperity.” The reseña also touched

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on the modification of the ministries, then turned briefly to the issue of press freedom and its radical containment by the new government: “The liberty of the press [in the preceding regime] was as lamentable and scandalous as it was prejudicial; and to correct such excesses a law was indispensable” to curtail the abuses.11 The summary went on to deal with the expansion of the Mexican diplomatic corps, various major diplomatic appointments, the reorganization of the army, and the exile of Mariano Arista. Alamán concluded with the optimistic sentiment that Mexico “considers herself saved from so many calamities by the exercise of an energetic power, and a vigorous and respected hand managing the reins of the State.”12 Lucas Alamán lived long enough to see the Bases declared the temporary law of the land, but little else. Effectively, he was in the ministry for about a month, during which he turned his diminishing energies almost exclusively to foreign affairs. Santa Anna’s foreign policy was to maintain a balance of forces in the Americas principally in order to keep the US at bay by narrowing the diplomatic distance between Mexico and the great European powers, Britain and France. If they were politically invested in the independence and territorial integrity of Mexico, Alamán reasoned, the threat of European military intervention might protect the country against American predation. In the meantime, Alamán wrote to Louis Napoleon inviting him to lead a triple negotiation among France, the United Kingdom, and Spain to discuss the protection of Mexico. This came to nothing but would revive with fatal consequences in the wake of the War of the Reform in the early 1860s, these three powers contemplating an armed intervention in Mexico ostensibly to guarantee the repayment of debts. Only Louis Napoleon pressed forward with the plan. Alamán’s personnel file in the foreign relations archive shows that during his month in the ministry he was carrying on daily correspondence, making diplomatic appointments, issuing instructions to Mexican envoys, and signing documents in the same sure hand as in former years. But basically he was used up. His last day in the work of the ministry, Thursday, 26 May 1853, was in part devoted to issuing instructions to Manuel Larrainzar (1809–84), minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary to the US, regarding the Sloo Concession by the Mexican government for an interoceanic communication route across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. On the day of Alamán’s death, 2 June, his immediate predecessor, the minister of foreign affairs in the shortlived Lombardini government, Miguel Arroyo, who remained in the department under Santa Anna as oficial mayor, appended a short note to a political

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reseña of his own sent to the (unnamed) Mexican consul in Liverpool: “An unfortunate event has this [department] and the entire capital in the Greatest anxiety: Señor D. Lucas Alamán was attacked on Friday the 27th by a grave pneumonia that has placed his important life in danger, and although his constitution has until now resisted the violence of the illness, he is in the gravest condition, and the outcome can only be guessed at. For this disagreeable reason I find myself in charge of the office of this ministry.”13

Death Comes for the Minister Lucas Alamán’s final illness ran its course swiftly. He had fallen ill after attending a function at the cathedral with President Santa Anna on Tuesday, 24 May. According to José Valadés’s account (possibly apocryphal), when urged by his friends to stay home from his office, the minister responded, “I know I am going to die soon, but time is precious, it is not to be lost, and I am resolved to dedicate my final days to my country.”14 His physician, Pedro Montes de Oca, advised him to remain at home, which he did beginning on Friday, the twenty-seventh, when he was unable to get out of bed. Visitors that evening found him to be quite low and depleted, and in short order he was diagnosed as being critically ill with pneumonia. According to Juan Bautista Alamán, his illness had been “aggravated by the medical problems [possibly chronic bronchitis or emphysema] he suffered in consequence of . . . his [selfimposed] concealment in 1833.”15 On the twenty-ninth and thirtieth he suffered considerable pain (possibly pleurisy), fever, and delirium. Alamán’s model of a good death had long been that of Philip II, who faced his end with equanimity. In his lucid moments he talked with Narcisa, with the doctor, and with his fellow cabinet ministers, acknowledging that his death was imminent. He urged his sons Gil and Juan Bautista to be observant of their religion, loving and protective of their mother, and careful to maintain family unity. In his final hours, Juan Bautista wrote, “in this condition, his babbling lips pronounced rambling words showing nonetheless that ideas of reorganization of the country and love for the patria presented themselves to his disordered imagination, like the hands of a clock whose counterweight has broken free still shows for some moments with irregular movements the time it had before marked with such precision.” He received the final sacraments and disposed that he be interred in the church of Jesús Nazareno, where Fernando Cortés’s remains rested. His condition worsened steadily, and finally he died at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, 2 June.

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A black-bordered death notice and funeral invitation with a cross at the top announced Alamán’s death and the funeral at the Iglesia del Hospital de la Purísima Concepción y Jesús Nazareno at 9 a.m. on 3 June. In what must have been the early hours of the morning of 2 June, Juan Bautista Alamán informed President Santa Anna of his father’s death: “Today in the early morning my father, Sr. D. Lucas Alamán, whom you had dignified with the office of the ministry of relations, died; it is my duty to inform you of this very sad event.” A marginal scribble on Juan Bautista’s note, presumably in Santa Anna’s hand, dictated that by “special order” of the president his profound sentiments be expressed for the irreparable loss the nation had suffered in the death of such a distinguished person. In a much more elaborate and flowery version of Santa Anna’s note, oficial mayor Arroyo wrote to Juan Bautista on the same day, in the president’s name, of Santa Anna’s “personal esteem” for the man and “the high gifts that justly captured universal respect.” In the afternoon, his body, clothed in black, was conveyed to the church of Jesús Nazareno preceded by a group of religious, borne on the shoulders of several presidential guards, and followed by priests reciting the prayers for the dead, by his fellow cabinet ministers, and by friends and family members. His body lay open to public view in the church while priests and family members kept vigil during the night of 2–3 June. On the morning of 3 June, after a funeral Mass, Alamán was interred in the church with a rather stiff but perceptive epitaph, perhaps appropriate to his character: “He was adorned by many virtues and distinguished by his wisdom and erudition in History and the Humanities. He stood out easily in fulfilling the arduous tasks of the Republic.” Notes of sympathy poured in addressed to Juan Bautista Alamán and Miguel Arroyo in response to an official circular to the foreign diplomatic corps. In a note fairly typical of those sent by foreign envoys, the American minister Alfred Conkling (1789–1874) wrote from the U S legation on 4 June, “Having been irresistibly led, during the short-lived acquaintance he had the happiness to enjoy with Mr. Alamán, to ascribe to him the same exalted character and worth as a scholar, a statesman, a citizen and a man, that are so eloquently attributed to him in the note of H[is] E[xcellency] Sr. Arroyo, the undersigned cannot be insensible to the magnitude of the loss that Mexico has sustained in his death.”16 Other notes were received from Percy Doyle, the British ambassador; from the Marqués de Ribera, the Spanish envoy; and from the representatives of France, Belgium, Switzerland, Ecuador, Guatemala, and other nations. Many of the notes paraphrased the official communiqué from Arroyo, stressing Alamán’s fame as a scholar and literary man over

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his reputation as a statesman. Manuel Díez de Bonilla was named to the ministry of foreign relations the day after Alamán’s interment, to be replaced at Gobernación by the conservative lawyer, politician, and writer Ignacio Aguilar y Marocho (1813–84). In a note of 1 July to the Mexican consul in Liverpool, Díez de Bonilla called his predecessor’s death [“[a] calamity, since it deprives the Republic of one of its most enlightened citizens who in his last days had dedicated himself with more ardor than ever to procure the regeneration of the Fatherland to elevate it to the level of respectability and greatness it deserves.”17 A major future literary figure, the historian and antiquary Joaquín García Icazbalceta (1825–94), praised Alamán a scant three weeks after his death in a letter to W. H. Prescott: “The country has lost one of its most notable men, the current government has lost its leader, and I, a good friend.”18

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23 • Getting the Historia Written

Alamán the Historian: An Introduction Near the end of his life Lucas Alamán wrote in a despairing tone that there were no Mexicans in Mexico. His melancholy aphorism addressed the horizontality of national sensibility in the way that Benedict Anderson approached nationhood—as a mental exercise, an affective condition, a matter of loyalty, community, and imagination beyond the immediate apprehension of the senses: about the here and the now, the relationship of individual to state and of citizen to citizen in the lived moment.1 “The complete extinction of public spirit,” Alamán wrote, “brought with it the disappearance of any idea of a national character.” The nation-building project in Mexico had produced a weak polity fractured along lines of region, race, and political faction, lacking the affective agglutination of a common Mexican identity and therefore substantially incapable of defending itself or commanding the allegiance of its inhabitants. He ascribed the country’s nearly failed statehood not to externalities but primarily to two factors, both with deep roots in the nation’s past. One of these was the manner in which independence had been won from Spain. The other had to do with Mexico’s own bad choices in political life, “hasty alterations, of which it is very doubtful that they were undertaken with sound judgment,” and the adoption of political forms ill-suited to the country’s capacities.2 His assessment of Mexico around 1850 concluded that “these dreadful outcomes have given reason to discuss whether Independence has been a good or an evil.” The corrosive political factionalism undermining Mexico’s republican institutions arose from the crisis of legitimacy brought on by the independence struggle. In another of Alamán’s most memorable tropes, Mexico had moved in three decades from infancy to decrepitude without passing through

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vigorous youth or a confident maturity.3 The unremedied absences that had led Mexico to the point of near collapse included the lack of workable representative institutions, the irreconcilability of political factions, the feebleness of entrepreneurial spirit, and the conversion of native people into Mexicans. Alamán was a historian first and a political thinker second, although he spent much of his life in the practice of day-to-day politics. Where politics were concerned he resolutely avoided working in abstractions, counterfactual speculations, or utopian blueprints, following a resolutely Burkean line. To him the boundary between political and historical thinking was extremely porous, a view owed to his life circumstances and character. He was of an unusually contemplative nature tending somewhat toward the melancholy, so that thinking or even brooding about the past came to him naturally. The history of his family made of the past an object of rumination, particularly the narrative of “The Fall” that he openly acknowledged in his truncated autobiography of the early 1830s and for which he tried repeatedly to compensate with his economic schemes. While acknowledging in his labyrinthine and coolly Olympian prose that Mexican Independence was inevitable, Alamán nonetheless exalted the Spanish colonial period as a time of good government, prosperity, and social order, lamenting the unrestrained civil and military violence unleashed by Father Miguel Hidalgo’s rebellion and bemoaning the condition of the new nation after the first quarter century of its life. To Alamán, in other words, there had not been too much Spain in Mexico but too little. This double helix of politics and history in his thinking and writing was not unique to him among public men of the age. In their efforts to explain what had gone right or wrong with the country between independence from Spain and the Reforma of the mid-1850s and to anticipate where Mexico’s future course lay, the public intellectuals and statesmen—Alamán, Lorenzo de Zavala, José María Tornel, Father José María Luis Mora, Carlos María de Bustamante, and others—who wrote about Mexican history struggled with the meaning of separation from the metropolis and its costs. They were essentially writing about the process of decolonization; or to flip this on its head, about the path to modernization. And decolonization was not just about structural change—about who governed, who collected taxes, who was white and who was brown, who was a citizen, or who guaranteed property rights. It was also about history—not only projection into the future but also about remembering, preserving, exalting, ignoring, forgetting, and expunging the past—in short, about historical memory and the construction of a plausible national narrative. The writing of history was part of a political battle over what path

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should be followed. The historian Joanne Freeman, in her book on early US republican history, Affairs of Honor, wrote what might also be said of Mexico: “One man’s history was another man’s partisan diatribe, an accusation that reverberated throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a period of prolific history writing. . . . At the outset of the nineteenth century, the politically minded came to a common realization: a history of the nation’s founding had yet to be written. . . . Historical societies were established; records were collected, catalogued, and deposited. . . . History was politics.”4

The Historiographical Landscape One way of situating Lucas Alamán in the historiographical landscape of his day is by comparing him to other major politician-historians of Mexican independence and the early republican period, all of whom he read and with all of whom he sustained a more or less critical dialogue.5 Following the insurgency, many Mexican writers tended to disconnect their evaluation of the rebellion from their views of what the new country had become after its birth rather than analyze the independence movement as an inevitable outcome of the three centuries of colonial rule preceding it. In other words, historians mostly saw the long decade 1808–21 as a beginning rather than an ending point and as a more or less discrete occurrence rather than as a moment in a long historical arc. This tendency grew over time as the postinsurgency history of Mexico followed an increasingly zigzag trajectory. The troubled history of the country up through the first two-thirds or so of the nineteenth century could hardly be attributed to the event that gave it birth, for that would be in essence to deny its own conception. It must be laid instead at the feet of other factors—individual corruption, inappropriate or failed institutions, or political incapacity linked to the ethnic composition of the country. In contrast to some of the great figures of Anglo-American independence, almost none of the heroic pantheon of insurgent leaders left memoirs, wrote their own histories of events, or became notable public intellectuals. Some of the secondary Mexican figures now look more like thugs than liberators, in fact—the Villagrán family, for example, or Pedro Moreno, Rafael Iriarte, Francisco Osorno, and Agustín Marroquín—others, most notably Agustín de Iturbide, remain objects of controversy to this day. The meaning of independence embodied a paradox: the massive, violent political episode of the decade-long insurgency could be criticized at the margins but not in its essence, while its outcome never quite realized the hopes of the protagonists or their heirs. One notable exception to this

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tendency was Lucas Alamán, the bad boy among Mexico’s great historians. Another, in the early twentieth century, was the positivist ideologue Francisco Bulnes (1847–1924), who differed with Alamán about the virtues of Catholicism but agreed with him on much else. Alamán was ideologically wedded to the positive aspects of the colonial regime, although not as reflexively as the conventional view of him suggests. So in contrast to other contemporary and later historians of the era, he had no difficulty at all in acknowledging that a violent and bloody birth process had produced a handicapped offspring. In her account of early history writing in the young American republic, Joanne Freeman has written, “As both Republicans and Federalists realized, the party that won this literary debate would claim the soul of the republic; by shaping popular conceptions of the nation’s founding, they would have a longreaching influence on later events. History was personal, immediate, and politically significant.”6 In the same vein, Enrique Florescano, one of the most durable, productive, and astute of contemporary Mexican historians, has noted that the historical works of the generation of Alamán and the somewhat older Bustamante were “distinctly partisan and polemical”: “In these cases, historical writing, instead of being limited to the reconstruction of the past, overlapped into the struggles that divided political actors in the present and was turned into another arena of the ideological conflict of the moment . . . [as] a weapon to destroy the opposing political faction.”7 A number of these early foundational works were products of political exile and exhibited all the nostalgia, vituperation, and desire for self-vindication that can be inherent in the writings of public figures banished from their homelands. Certainly this was true of three of the most important histories of the period, those of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1813), Lorenzo de Zavala (1831–32), and José María Luis Mora (1836), and might well be said of the origins of Lucas Alamán’s own work (1849–52). Interest in independence and the decades immediately following waxed in the early decades of the nineteenth century because the events of 1808–21 were still fresh in the memory, and some of the participants still alive, although Lucas Alamán entered the fray rather late, in the mid-1840s. During the first thirty years or so of Mexico’s nationhood the independence movement became in many ways the country’s link to an Atlantic republican tradition, to the French Revolution, and thence to modernity. Discussions by this first generation of Mexican historians of independence turned less on whether the insurgent priests Miguel Hidalgo or José María Morelos were heroes, which soon hardened into orthodoxy, than on the argument over what independence meant. Had the early history of the new nation fulfilled or subverted

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the promise of independence? There was a more elusive issue at stake as well, one having less to do with what historians remembered in their works than with how they remembered it and therefore how history was to be written. A romantic nationalist strain led in one direction, a more Rankean, objectivist strain avant la lettre in another. And the historical writing of Alamán’s period can be seen not only as a debate about how historical thinking was to be done but also as a long discussion in which writers were constructing a history as much of the future as of the past. The strongest comparison is between Alamán and Carlos María de Bustamante. Slightly older than Alamán, Bustamante, a journalist, prolific historian and editor, and congressional deputy, wrote another early history that laid the foundations of much subsequent writing by Mexican historians about independence. This history may actually have been more influential than Alamán’s magisterial work in setting the lines for the patriotic narrative of the independence struggle, portraying a gallery of heroic and villainous portraits of the protagonists and molding nineteenth-century opinion among general readers. After these two, writers often tended to mine Bustamante for facts while setting up Alamán’s conservative interpretation and notorious Hispanophilism as straw men. With his rhetorical flights, florid, overheated prose and reluctance to offer contemplative, sociological speculation, Bustamante was no less ardent a nationalist than Alamán but arrived at very different conclusions about what independence meant. He condemned the Spanish colonial regime as an unjust usurpation of the legitimate indigenous states whose heritage the insurgency had vindicated and from whose ruins independent Mexico was to rise, phoenix-like. In his history of Mexican independence he rendered a vivid account of the carnage visited upon the Spaniards who had taken refuge in Guanajuato’s Alhóndiga overrun by Father Miguel Hidalgo’s insurgent army in late September 1810, an incident to which Alamán was an eyewitness. In his treatment, Bustamante invoked the shades of the Spanish conquerors of the sixteenth century and their Indian victims now in some measure avenged by the insurgents: “I imagined that I saw among those cadavers and [still] twitching limbs the spirits of Cortés, of Alvarado and of Pizarro staggering with terror looking at them, and of weeping America throwing herself on them, saying with a terrible voice ‘Of what are you so horrified seeing these victims? Have you forgotten the cruel massacres you carried out three centuries ago in Tabasco, in Cholula, in the great temple of Mexico City, in Cuernavaca? . . . Do you perhaps not know that in the scales of the great [Creator of All Things] all these crimes were weighed, and that He reserved His vengeance for my

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crushed and enslaved sons, after three centuries?’ ” To drive the point home unequivocally, Bustamante added a stanza of poetry condemning the conquistadores: In this way their unjust crimes Will be punished, one by one Blood with blood, and tears, in the end, with tears.8 From the same sources Alamán drew an entirely different lesson. He wrote of the staunch bravery of the Alhóndiga defenders, the frenzied, bloodthirsty assault by the “confused mob” of Indian attackers impelled to atrocities against the besieged Spaniards, and the brutal slaughter of scores of people “whose naked bodies were [later] found half buried in maize and money, all stained with [their] blood.”9 Among other writers to offer early and influential accounts of the independence movement was the brilliant and picaresque Dominican Fray José Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra (1763–1827). Fray Servando had spent much of his adult life in monastic reclusion, prison, or escaping from them. The book began as a highly polemical work defending Creole responses to the usurpation of the Spanish throne by Napoleon in 1808. Independence was justified on the basis of an imagined pact between the Spanish crown and the original conquerors of Mexico and their heirs. In this pact the crown held inalienable dominion over an American kingdom politically coequal to Castile, while the conquerors and their heirs enjoyed preference in political office and a large degree of autonomy in arranging their public affairs. Fray Servando saw the Spanish descendants of the original conquistadores as having been allowed by the crown to oppress both Creole and indigenous inhabitants, thus abrogating the compact. He also defended Spanish America against the calumnies of European writers like De Pauw, Robertson, Buffon, and Raynal alleging the inferiority of New World nature and peoples to those of the Old World, extolling the accomplishments of pre-Columbian civilizations in a tone of highly injured and emotional nationalism, ardently advocating the virtues of republicanism and broad citizenship. But he nonetheless believed that the majority of the Mexican population as they stood in his time were unprepared to exercise the responsibilities of republicanism and that the Creole elite should wield power exclusively in the new nation. Fray Servando’s history was much cited by subsequent historians of independence, including Lucas Alamán—with whom he maintained a long friendship despite their differing

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political views—who wrote of Mier’s book, “This work, apart from everything that is the child of circumstance and which results from the partisan spirit that prevailed at the moment [it was created], is written with elegance and constructed with much artifice, [and] will always be appreciated for the multitude of data it contains and for the talent with which the author treats his themes.”10 Following in the footsteps of Mier’s hypertrophied political pamphletry came two writers linked with the early nineteenth-century liberal view of independence. Father José María Luis Mora (1794–1850) was often identified as the founder of Mexican liberalism, and his somewhat older (by six years) contemporary Lorenzo de Zavala as the tribune of radical liberalism. Educated as a priest and lawyer, Mora enjoyed a long, active public career as a journalist, educator, and political figure, at the height of which he served as a chief adviser in the short-lived liberal regime of Valentín Gómez Farías in 1833–34. In self-imposed exile from Mexico, he lived the rest of his life in Paris, where, in order to alleviate his poverty, he undertook to publish his three-volume México y sus revoluciones (1836), on which he had been working since the late 1820s. Mora’s work was never completed, embracing only the period up to 1812. His virulently anticlerical views emerged clearly enough, disdaining Bustamante’s romantic nationalism and exaltation of the indigenous heritage as the basis of national identity. He was appalled by the social violence unleashed by Miguel Hidalgo’s uprising—his brother joined the insurgent ranks and was killed as a combatant—the religious-messianic character of Hidalgo as a leader, and the lack of a clear programmatic agenda in the movement. Like Alamán, he lauded Fernando Cortés as the progenitor of Spanish Mexico and was less negative about colonial institutions than Zavala but much more critical than Alamán. Like other liberal historians of the time who applauded the fact of Mexican independence while condemning the manner of its achievement, Mora thought the decade of insurgency “pernicious and destructive” for the country albeit necessary. He welcomed Iturbide’s triumph while acknowledging that as emperor he had turned toward dictatorship. Much further to the left in his day than the reputed founder of Mexican liberalism, Lorenzo de Zavala lived a turbulent public life, being at various times a collaborator of Agustín de Iturbide and Vicente Guerrero and a deputy in the Spanish Cortes and the Mexican national congress. He served as governor of the State of Mexico, was a cofounder of York-Rite Masonry—and a great friend of Joel Poinsett—minister of the treasury, ambassador to France, vice president of the short-lived Texas Republic and himself a major landowner there, and an indefatigable writer and combat journalist. Zavala

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began composing and quickly completed his Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de México, desde 1808 hasta 1830 (2 volumes, 1831–32) while in exile in 1831. He saw history as the story of the search for liberty, believed that liberty itself would transform the Mexican people, and much admired US political institutions. The history of his country, he believed, had begun in 1808, preceded by a long, oppressive, obscurantist colonial sleep. Unlike Bustamante, whose romantic nationalism he found laughable and whom he openly derided as a fabulist lacking in common sense and the critical criteria for writing history, he did not exalt the positive heritage of the native societies or look to them for the bases of a national identity. Zavala railed against the spirit of party prevailing in the work of other historians while himself writing to further his own ideas and attack those of his opponents. Still, he was more conscious than most of the subjective nature of virtually all the primary sources underlying historical accounts, making something of a fetish of objectivity. Wrote Zavala, “I must relate the facts [of history] as they occurred, and present events naked of the color given to them by passions and the spirit of faction.”11 He achieved very little objectivity himself, however, often sacrificing the empirical to narrate the independence wars as a struggle for liberty. Describing the events of the insurgency as convulsive and gratuitously violent owing to the ineptitude of the leaders, he nonetheless posited an essentially tragic vision of the initial stages of the movement. Thus Father Hidalgo might still be salvaged as a hero whose hubris led him to unleash forces he could not control. Starting as something of an optimist about the prospects for Mexico, in the years before his death in 1836 Zavala, like Simón Bolívar, had grown increasingly disheartened at the political ineptitude, lack of civic spirit, and ignorance of his countrymen, thus following an arc of disillusionment similar to that of his political archenemy Alamán.

Alamán’s Disertaciones The first of Lucas Alamán’s two major historical works was the Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República Megicana, desde la época de la conquista que los españoles hicieron a fines del siglo XV y principios del XVI de las islas y continente Americano hasta la independencia (3 volumes, 1844–49). On this platform he extolled the virtues, talents, and accomplishments of Fernando Cortés, the illustrious ancestor of his employer the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone and Marqués del Valle, but the encomia Alamán heaped on the conqueror clearly arose from his genuinely adulatory view of Cortés. More

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important, he hoped to influence positively his countrymen’s attitude toward Spanish rule by researching the history of the colonial period, writing eloquently and accessibly about it, and publicizing the beneficent aspects of colonial rule as widely as possible. The writing of this three-volume work overlapped with that of the massive Historia de Méjico, so the two should be understood as the first and second parts of a running history of the country from its colonial origins into the early 1850s. Although there are considerable differences in approach, tone, and writing style between the two, the lines of continuity are quite clear: the Disertaciones was an extended prolegomenon to the Historia. Alamán wrote as much himself in the prefatory remarks of the third volume of the Disertaciones: “This work [i.e., the Historia] will be the complement of the Disertaciones, or rather, these [the Disertaciones] are the introduction to that [the Historia]. Since the object of [the Disertaciones] is to make known the way in which the crown of Spain acquired dominion over these lands and how it exercised it, [the Historia] will show the ways in which [that dominion] was lost.” Initially the colonial essays were meant to comprise the principal part and the projected last chapter on the independence struggle a sort of coda. In the published version, however, the independence chapter was dropped and an enormously expanded form carried forward to comprise most of the fivevolume Historia. What prompted this reversal is not clear. Perhaps the fact that the country was in a political crisis at the time Alamán began the Historia de Méjico; or his resumption of his unpublished Memorias in 1843 may have prompted deeper thinking about the independence process. Except for certain specific parts of them, the Disertaciones are little cited by historians today.12 By contrast, despite its conservative bias, the Historia remains the preeminent nineteenth-century scholarly narrative account of the insurgency of 1810–21, outstripping in beauty of style, analytic power, and empirical density several other major books, including Bustamante’s Cuadro histórico, although the latter has tended to be cited more frequently by some writers. It is also more important than the relevant volumes of the great high Porfirian monument of Mexican historiography, Vicente Riva Palacio’s México a través de los siglos, whose authors mined Alamán copiously for information while vigorously disputing his interpretations. A major reason for the relative neglect of the Disertaciones may be that apart from certain limited sections on Cortés and his family, for which he enjoyed privileged access to the tremendous documentation in the Hospital de Jesús archive, the Disertaciones is principally a work of synthesis based on the writings of other authors. Another factor is that

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Alamán’s generally forgiving, even redemptive, attitude toward Spanish colonial rule ill accords with the liberal cast of most nineteenth-century and postrevolutionary historiography about the colonial period.

The Historia de Méjico: Alamán versus Bustamante The work for which Lucas Alamán is primarily known as a historian is his monumental Historia de Méjico desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon su independencia en el año de 1808 hasta la época presente (HdeM).13 Among Alamán’s papers in the Carso archive in Mexico City is the first draft of the first “libro” in his hand, comprised in the modern edition of seven chapters. At the top of the title page Alamán wrote, “This was the first writing [redacción, by which he meant draft] I made of the first book of this work. On copying it I made so many changes that this book [cuaderno] is no longer of any use.”14 The second title page, that of Libro I, bears the note “The writing of this work was begun in Mexico [City] at the Ribera de San Cosme on 23 October 1846.” On the verso of the second title page there is a line in Latin, then in Spanish, obviously intended as an epigraph but absent from all editions. This is a quotation from the Book of Psalms, chapter 1, verse 19 (in a misattribution by Alamán): “Scribantum haec in generation altera,” “Escríbanse estas cosas para la generación venidera.” In the modern King James Bible (Psalms 102, verse 18) this reads, “This shall be written for the generation to come.” One plausible meaning of this epigraph is that Alamán did not intend the work to be published during his lifetime. The work had begun fifteen years earlier as his Memorias, also never intended for publication during his lifetime, echoing his oft-expressed hope that, although much reviled during his lifetime, he would be rewarded with the positive thoughts of the nation after his death. The author’s intention not to publish is illustrated by the 1854 biography written by his son, the lawyer Juan Bautista Alamán, which appears at the beginning of volume 1 of the Jus edition of the Historia (pages ix–xxxviii) and was updated by him in 1897, shortly before his own death in 1900: He began to write with the intention that it not be published until after his death. . . . The first volume finished, he showed it to various trusted friends, and due as much to their insistence as to believing the general ideas vindicated with the passage of time and the disillusionments caused by the misfortunes of the foreign war [with the United States], he resolved to bring the work to the light of day. But before that he wanted

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to sound out public opinion, for which he wrote and published anonymously the “Biografía de D. Carlos María Bustamante.” Having taken part in many of the events in the war for Independence from its beginning, and having been its historian, although so passionate [in his views] that he sometimes for that reason strayed from the truth, Bustamante’s [work] presented to Alamán the occasion to treat tentatively the points his book [would] embrace.15 The other meaning is that as a work of history it would endure for a number of generations, which it has. Juan Bautista Alamán’s passing remark that the outcome of the war with the US vindicated his father’s views on the structure of Mexican history hints at two intertwined intellectual motives for Lucas Alamán’s beginning the Historia even as he was writing the Disertaciones. The first of these was the substantial destruction of the growing mythology of Mexican independence, whose principal source he identified as Bustamante, in order to reequilibrate the last several centuries’ history in favor of the colonial period. Alamán’s natural tendency to pedantry impelled him to correct what he regarded not only as bad politics and slippery nation-building mythology but also flawed history writing on the part of his older colleague. So in part we have Bustamante’s work on independence to thank for Alamán’s. Bustamante’s Cuadro histórico and its supplementary volumes appeared between 1823 and 1835, twelve to twenty-five years before Alamán began writing his HdeM. The chaotic politics of the 1840s, personal maturity and historical perspective on the post-1810 period, the Mexican–American War, the development of his longformat writing skills in the creation of the Disertaciones, and having the time to write before his election to the Mexico City Ayuntamiento in mid-1849—all these factors played a part in his launching the HdeM project when he did. The year after Bustamante’s death, the same year in which Alamán published the first volume of HdeM, 1849, Alamán wrote, as an anonymous “friend” of don Carlos but an even more ardent friend of “the truth,” the Noticias biográficas del Lic. D. Carlos María de Bustamante y juicio crítico de sus obras, escritas por un amigo de don Carlos y más amigo de la verdad, in which he corrected what he saw as swarms of errors in the older man’s Cuadro histórico. He pointed to Bustamante’s carelessness and even duplicity as a historian in general, hinting at some of his own differences of interpretation regarding the independence movement. A glance at the abundant footnotes of Alamán’s HdeM reveals that he corrected Bustamante or took issue with him in innumerable

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instances while still mining the Cuadro histórico for data on the 1810 insurgency, although by what criteria he distinguished the reliable from the unreliable assertions he does not tell us. Alamán commented that even in the second edition of the Cuadro histórico Bustamante clung stubbornly to errors refuted by concrete documentation, writing that “such unwillingness [to self-correct], incompatible with [arriving at] the truth of history, makes Bustamante’s [history] scarcely loyal [to reality].” He continued, This is, nonetheless, the only history we have of the revolution that ended in independence; this is what foreigners read and quote in their works; [it is] what Mexicans believe and what romantics make still more fabulous with the fabulous lies [pastranas] with which they decorate it; and this proves the necessity of going to the original documents to find out the truth of the facts. . . . It is true that with the same materials, the same cost, and some greater care in editing, Lic. Bustamante could have produced the most important service to national history, leaving in the Cuadro histórico and subsequent works well-attested facts, presented with fidelity and impartiality, even if they were not favorable to the persons in whose benefit he hid them. Alamán was more charitable about Bustamante’s positive contribution to Mexican historical consciousness.16 While coming to a similarly grudging acknowledgment of Bustamante’s contributions, Alamán’s American correspondent William H. Prescott, the historian of Spain and its empire, was much less kind in his evaluation of the prolific Mexican writer even while he was living, writing to Ángel Calderón de la Barca in 1840, “I have long distrusted [Bustamante], though Mexican letters are under obligations to his editorial activities. But between ourselves he is a sorry ranting bigot, with more tongue than brains, I suspect.”17 The first volume of the HdeM appeared in print at the end of 1849, about three years after Alamán began the project. The entire work was printed in five volumes by José Mariano de Lara in Mexico City, sold by subscription, and distributed in the capital and elsewhere by the bookseller and bibliophile José María Andrade, who had also distributed the Disertaciones. Andrade’s establishment in the Portal de Agustinos in the center of the city served as a meeting place for literary figures, among whom Lucas Alamán may have mixed during these years. President Herrera’s edict of November 1849 granted copyright, the author depositing two copies with the ministry of relations.18 Volume 2 appeared near the beginning of 1850, the third volume some months

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later, the fourth toward the middle of 1851, the fifth and last in the fall of 1852, less than a year before the author’s death. Given how substantial these volumes are, how dense with empirical material and documentary appendices, and how polished from a literary standpoint, one is impressed at the speed with which Alamán worked. Other authors of historical works at the time also wrote prodigiously—among them Carlos María de Bustamante and, across the Atlantic, Guizot, Thiers, and Thomas Carlyle, among others; and to the north, Prescott, whose visual impairment may well have accounted for ten or so volumes he was not able to write—but some of them, including Bustamante, Carlyle, and Prescott, had few commitments other than their writing or at least fewer than Alamán. At the end of August 1852 Alamán wrote to Palermo that although he had been made a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Historia in Madrid, with the impending appearance in print of volume 5, “I am going to rest from literary work, and not undertake any others, until I put the affairs of your house totally in order.”19 “Until” almost certainly meant that he would never take up another large-scale project, a feeling arising from a strong foreboding of his imminent death. By this time, therefore, he may well have abandoned the project, alluded to in the Disertaciones, of writing a complete history of the colonial period. As the five volumes of the HdeM came off the press between 1849 and 1852, Alamán sent them to various people and academies, as he had done earlier with the Disertaciones. In the summer of 1851, for example, he sent at least the first two (possibly the first three) volumes to Pope Pius IX in Rome; the Supreme Pontiff acknowledged the gift with a brief note in Latin. He also sent volumes to Queen Isabela II of Spain, who had earlier received the Disertaciones as a gift of the author.20

Lucas Alamán and W. H. Prescott The most interesting relationship generated around the writing of the Historia was Alamán’s epistolary friendship with William H. Prescott (1796– 1859), the great American historian of Spain and its empire, a slightly younger near-contemporary. As young men they had traveled in Europe at about the same time. They were both very friendly with Ángel Calderón de la Barca and his Scottish-born wife, Frances Erskine Inglis. Alamán may have become familiar with Prescott by reading the American’s first great literary success, his History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, which appeared in 1837.21 The American historian and the Mexican historian-in-the-making were

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introduced indirectly to each other—they never met in person—by Calderón de la Barca in 1841, while Prescott was still composing his history of the conquest.22 The Spanish diplomat passed the American’s queries about the history of the conquest and the life of Cortés on to Alamán, who initially answered them through Calderón and then, after the Spaniard and his wife left Mexico in 1841, through direct correspondence. Alamán also facilitated the sending of copies of documents from the Hospital de Jesús archive, although the apoderado of the Marqués del Valle resisted revealing to Prescott the final resting place of the conqueror’s remains for fear that the information might get out and provoke another popular attempt to desecrate them. Prescott contacted Joel R. Poinsett, at the time serving as secretary of war in the Martin Van Buren administration, who recommended that he contact the learned Alamán but “regretted that from political differences I cannot offer you a letter [of introduction] to him.”23 The correspondence between the two historians was interrupted only by the difficult conditions of the war (1846–48). After Alamán sent Prescott not only a complete set of the Disertaciones but also his reports on Mexican industrialization and the first volumes of HdeM, the American scholar wrote of Alamán to his friend Calderón de la Barca: “What a quill-driver he is! He puts such tortoises as me to shame. I suppose he is one of those boiling spirits that must be doing something—making pronunciamientos or writing an account of them.”24 Prescott wrote to Alamán of his admiration for the Mexican statesman’s literary productivity: “Your intrepid spirit fills me with envy, and as I see your great work lying before me, I trust it will prove an incentive to greater industry on my part.” Prescott sponsored Alamán for corresponding membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society and in the American Philosophical Society, to which he was elected on 17 January 1851; with the support of Alamán, Prescott was inducted as a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística. It is curious to note that Prescott confessed to Fanny Calderón de la Barca some years after Alamán’s death that he barely knew anything about the Mexican’s public profile or his other accomplishments despite a decade’s correspondence, the friends they had in common, and the exchange of their works.25 Immediately upon its appearance in 1843, several people in Mexico thought of translating Prescott’s History of the Conquest into Spanish for publication in Mexico. Carlos María de Bustamante and Calderón de la Barca both entertained the idea but were warned off it, Iván Jaksic writes, by a notice in an American newspaper in 1844 that a translation had been announced by Alamán, who would undertake to revise and correct the original, “[annotating]

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those passages in which Mr. Prescott has been led into error by his religious prejudices, or from a want of knowledge of the country or of access to sources of information possessed by Don Lucas.”26 The Spanish translation by José María González de la Vega to which Alamán affixed his name came out in two volumes in 1844; despite ample criticisms by Alamán on several points in the work, Prescott expressed himself “not displeased” with it, accepting the Mexican scholar’s notes in a “liberal spirit.”27 Alamán had suggested to Prescott the suppression of some comments regarding religion “that here would be badly received,” imputing Prescott’s misapprehensions and prejudices against Catholicism to his Protestantism. Prescott was a Unitarian, suggesting that despite his cosmopolitanism and wide learning Alamán knew little of Protestantism in the U S and understood even less. The Mexican statesman expressed strong reservations about other points in Prescott’s book, as well, which he otherwise hailed as excellent. For example, he took exception to Prescott’s use of the term “barbarous” to describe the Aztec structures of government, pointing out how elaborate they were even if different from Old World systems. Jaksic writes that Prescott intended to incorporate at least some of Alamán’s comments in a second edition of his History but did not live to do so.28 Despite a certain anality in Lucas Alamán’s reception of the American’s work on Mexico, the exchanges between the two were very cordial, Prescott’s letters to him respectful, admiring, within limits, and modest. But one senses in their correspondence a gentle tug of war over who has made the most important contributions. Prescott’s letters touched on a number of things not immediately relevant to his exchanges with Alamán vis-à-vis their respective works on Mexican history but nonetheless inherently interesting. He commented in passing (very critically) on President James K. Polk and the war with Mexico, the Texas annexation controversy, the dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory, the condition of his sight and his religious orientation, the dependence of Mexico on American textile manufactures, and other matters. At the end of 1845 Prescott acknowledged the reception of the first few Disertaciones: “Your beautiful volume of Disertaciones . . . unfold[s] the whole of that memorable drama in a most luminous manner, and though I am familiar with the ground, you have suggested new points of view, and furnished much interesting information in regard to the topography of the country. I am glad to find that on the great questions, you do not differ materially from me. Your Appendix contains some valuable contributions to the printed documents for the illustration of the Conquest and occupation of the country.”29

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This tone of reserved praise generally characterized Prescott’s reception of Alamán’s work. Taking into account a certain Yankee reticence on the Bostonian’s part, it seems to me that while “beautiful” and “luminous” were meant wholeheartedly and must have flattered Alamán, “much interesting information” and “valuable contributions” were more measured, even tepid terms of praise. Aside from the chapters directly dealing with the conquest and Cortés he was simply less interested in the other essays due to the almost exclusive focus of his own writing on political and military matters. He neglected social and economic history, a neglect of which Alamán was somewhat less guilty. When Alamán sent more of his Disertaciones along with the two Spanish editions of Prescott’s History, the American thanked him but hardly fulsomely: “The Disertaciones contain some highly interesting and important particulars for the illustration of the Conquest. You have added much to our knowledge of the descendants of Cortés, and the account of Doña Marina is highly satisfactory. The grant of lands in the quarter of Chapoltepec [sic] accounts for the popular tradition of her spirit haunting the woods there.” In the same letter Prescott wrote, “I wish you were in as tranquil a state [as ours] in your own domestic politics. Mexico has the elements of a great nation, but these seem to be in too disorderly a condition to allow the country any fair prospect of developing its natural resources. Yet I trust the time may come.”30 As Alamán published the volumes of his HdeM and sent them to Prescott between 1849 and 1852, the American responded to them in an anodyne tone, perhaps because he never read them or at least not deeply. He did comment on the controversy that Alamán’s treatment of the independence struggle had stirred up in Mexico: “I hope you have continued in the enjoyment of your health [Alamán’s health was, in fact, failing], and that your repose is not disturbed by the rancor of persons who [are] not content to allow the historian to speak. . . . I have heard—I hope it is not true—that you have been exposed to some annoyance from this cause. I think the condition of the country as much to be commiserated as that of the historian when the utterance of truth, or what he deems such, is to be awarded with persecution. . . . [I]n the end truth is mighty and will prevail.”31 And in early 1851, thanking Alamán for sending the second and third volumes of “your very excellent” HdeM and explaining why he had backed away from writing a history of the war with Mexico, Prescott wrote, “It must be a happiness for you to be able to pursue your studies undisturbed, after the terrible convulsions into which your country has been thrown by war and anarchy. I was invited some time since to write the history of the war of the United States with Mexico and was promised that the papers of Scott

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and Taylor should be placed at my disposal. But a little reflection convinced me that such an attempt would plunge me into a domestic war, which would leave me very little ease during the rest of my life,—and I answered that ‘I would meddle with no hero who had not been under ground at least two centuries.’ Do you think I judged rightly?”32 In his HdeM, by contrast, Lucas Alamán had chosen to plunge into near-contemporary history, embracing political controversies in and about his work that Prescott eschewed. Whatever claim his writing may have staked to be an avatar of modern, socalled scientific history—heavily empirical, based on primary sources where he could get them, intended to be objective, apolitical—Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico was written more in a romantic vein in which narrative dominated, analysis was secondary, there was little or no discernible argument, and his story unfurled itself through dramatic prose. Controlling for the Mexican’s drier, more elaborate, Olympian style, the HdeM moved not only along a narrative track but also a political one. He deployed the argument that the very manner by which New Spain had gained its independence from Old fatally undermined that independence itself and the hopes that nationhood had raised. It made perfect sense to him to explain the post–Mexican War situation of the country in terms of the past, so that the HdeM began with the famous hundred pages or so extolling the virtues of the colonial regime. But as he began writing in the fall of 1846 the events of the independence struggle were barely thirty-five years behind him, within the living memory of a large part of the Mexican population. While the survival rate of the insurgency’s leaders was very low compared with that in the United States, there were a host of lesser figures from the decade-long struggle still living, many of whom served Alamán as informants. That he was working on near-contemporary history had the advantage that he could tap people’s memories of events, the disadvantage that those memories did not necessarily correspond to what the documents or other people said of the same events or to what Alamán had found in his research or remembered or wanted to say. Another danger was that people might be offended by what he wrote or angered along political lines, which many were.

A Detour into Lucas Alamán’s Library Although for Alamán both Prescott and Bustamante figured at some points as interlocutors, at others as strawmen, he had many more works on the shelves of his study than just the books of these two men. A literary life consists not

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only of what one writes or of whom one writes against but also what one reads. A snapshot of his personal library is visible in a detailed inventory made of it in September 1853, a few months after his death.33 He owned about 1,800 works, surely one of the larger private Mexican libraries of the day. Of individual books—that is, including in the count each volume in a multivolume set— there were just over 4,600, and even subtracting a large number of pamphlets and other works that cannot be classified as books, the collection must have embraced 4,000 items or so. The representation of unique authors would have been reduced even more by the substantial overlap and duplication among the items. For example, he owned individual sets of the complete works in Latin of most classical authors—philosophers, dramatists, poets, historians—but also a 200-volume collection of “autores clásicos latinos,” including works he possessed in other forms by most of the same authors; individual novels and other works by French writers but also a “colección de autores clásicos franceses” in 120 volumes, etc. Of thematic areas in which some overlap among authors might be expected, the library included several multivolume works on the French Revolution, among them Antoine-Vincent Arnault’s (1766–1834) 20-volume historical dictionary of prominent revolutionary figures; three separate sets of Adolph Thiers’s (1797–1877) history of the French Revolution, the Consulate, and the Empire; and Germaine de Staël’s (1766–1817) work on the Revolution. The total value of Alamán’s library as estimated by the inventory was 5,327 pesos. What became of the collection is a mystery, although given its value and the fact that Narcisa Castrillo de Alamán still had children at home at her husband’s death, the most likely fate of the library is that it was sold at auction to a bookseller or a private party. His two elder sons may well have claimed certain pieces for themselves by the terms of their father’s will. When the library is broken down analytically, the largest group of works, 249 titles, fell into the very broad category of modern—that is to say, the sixteenth through the nineteenth century—literary works, including novels, poetry, and drama in several European languages. Among these were Germaine de Staël’s Delphine (1802) in six volumes, Shakespeare’s works in English, poetry in English and Latin by John Milton (1608–74), Oliver Goldsmith’s (1728–74) novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), several different editions of Cervantes’s (1547–1616) Don Quijote, a volume of works by Washington Irving (1783–1859), and the letters of Madame de Sévigné (1626–96) in French and those of Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) in English. The other major categories of works by size, highly aggregated, were as follows:

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Modern historical works (mostly Europe)—217 Latin and Greek drama, literature, poetry, philosophy, history—209 Sciences, including astronomy, mathematics, botany, geology, works on mining, mineralogy, physics, anthropology, technology of all kinds, craft manuals—186 Mexican history and public affairs—152 Economics, agronomy, politics, sociology—145 Theology, religion, hagiography, moral treatises, church history—129 Geography, including travel and discovery accounts, atlases—109 Dictionaries and grammars, including Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, German, English, Basque, Arabic, Nahuatl, and Otomí—100 Smaller groupings embraced the themes of art and architecture, modern biography, ancient archaeology and travel, modern philosophy, mythology and fables, and statistical compilations; a somewhat larger group of 108 works I have been unable to identify. The collection included many interesting items, implying the expansive base of knowledge in someone who had traveled extensively in his youth but never left the country again after the age of about thirty. There were two English-language encyclopedias, for example—the Encyclopedia Americana (Philadelphia, 1830) in fourteen volumes and the Encyclopedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1823) in twenty-six. Alamán owned eight volumes of the works of the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), but no Machiavelli, and several items by François Guizot (1787–1874). There is no mention in the document of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791), however, a work plainly central to his thinking as both politician and historian. The Comte de Buffon’s (1707–88) Histoire naturelle in eighty volumes found a place in the library, as did the work of Alamán’s European correspondent the botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle and many works of Alexander von Humboldt. Among the throng of historical works in several languages were books by several of his contemporaries (Bustamante, Zavala, and others) as well as W. H. Prescott’s histories of Ferdinand and Isabela (1837), the conquest of Mexico (1843), and the conquest of Peru (1847). The onetime Harvard College president Jared Sparks was represented by his Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution (1829–30) in nineteen volumes and General James Wilkinson (1757–1825) by his Memoirs of My Own Times (1816). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Alamán’s library included the recently published Mexico and Her Military Chieftains (1851) by Fayette Robinson, in

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which Alamán himself was portrayed as a murderous, unprincipled villain. There were multiple sets of the author’s own Disertaciones and HdeM as well as his Defensa of the early 1830s. Opera programs from 1831–33 found a place but also the Catecismo de economía política (Madrid, 1822), a Spanish translation of Jean-Baptiste Say’s (1767–1832) Traité d’économie politique (1803). Alamán’s reading was eclectic, wide, and Eurocentric, embraced a number of Western languages, many of which he read, and furnished him with a universe of knowledge often reflected in references made in his own works.

Working Methods Alamán wrote at a standing desk, Guillermo Prieto has said, but there is no word of whether he worked in the morning or at night. He certainly employed research assistants to scour government archives for him as well as copyists to provide him with copies of important documents, but how many of them and who they were is not recorded. Paper being relatively expensive, especially for drafts, he liberated government forms and wrote on the blank sides. Many of his drafts are remarkably clean but still have Alamán’s characteristic emendations in his own hand. Some printer’s proofs were corrected by him and some in another hand. He was forever making lists and sending notes to the printer, correcting errors of fact made known to him by newly accessed documents or information from informants. As each volume was printed it was sold by subscription both in the capital and in provincial cities. Each of the volumes contains a large number of appendices—altogether there are 111 of these in the five volumes. Some are documents from the government, some from the insurgent side, some statistical tables, and so forth, all in support of points the author was making in the book but relegated to the final pages rather than inserted where they were discussed in the text. Other items in the appendices were from printed sources, including newspapers, some from family papers lent to Alamán by other people and some even from Alamán family papers in his possession. To some of these, in particular the statistical tables dealing with economic matters, Alamán added copious explanatory notes, while others he simply let stand as they were. For written sources he relied heavily on the unpublished “Apuntes” of Canon Arechederreta, despite the fact that parts of this skeletal chronicle might have been missing at the time and certainly have been lost since then. Among his other major sources was an unpublished diario, that is, a sort of diary cum chronicle, by an agente de negocios, literally a business agent but more properly speaking probably a facilitator or

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fixer of some sort: “Among the curious documents I have had to hand in writing this work and that I will cite frequently, of great use to me has been a Diary of all the events in Mexico [City] kept with much exactitude and truthfulness by D. Francisco Riofrío. . . . I found it among the books of my brother Dr. Arechederreta, and among a thousand insignificant things many important ones and curious [items] that I have seen nowhere else. It is a thick volume embracing [the years] from March 1802 until 23 October 1813.”34 Alamán was gathering materials and writing for about three years before the first volume of the HdeM went to press in late 1849. The first volume’s epigraph and Juan Bautista Alamán’s biography of his father both indicate that he expected not to publish the work during his lifetime. In fact, in a note to his friend Ramírez in Durango at the end of 1848, Alamán seems still to have been pondering whether to publish or not: “It may be that I decide to publish soon my history of the revolution from the year 1808.” One of the most interesting aspects of the entire HdeM project is the question of Alamán’s living informants, either those who rendered information willingly or those induced by reading the work to defend their roles in the insurgency or perhaps their father’s or someone else’s. In a letter of 1848 to Ramírez in Durango he said that should he decide to publish, “the information I have asked of you about the executions of priests in that city, and on other points, will be very useful to me.”35 Other examples abound. On 4 December 1848, for instance, Alamán sent a questionnaire to Cayetano Ibarra— a deputy in the national congress representing the State of Mexico and a signatory to the federal constitution of 1824—asking twenty-one very specific questions about the insurgency of 1810. The document was headed “Lucas Alamán begs that Sr. D. Cayetano Ibarra do him the favor of sending to him information on all the following historical points.” The first question, for instance, asked why and where, at the end of 1811, Tomás Ortiz, a rebel commander and cousin of Father Hidalgo, had been executed by order of the insurgent leader Ignacio López Rayón (1773–1832). Other questions touched on the same topic.36 He asked Ibarra about his own history as a rebel, requesting that he lend him all the printed documents he had from the insurgents, including their short-lived newspapers. For Ibarra to answer everything would have required much effort and time. From this and others of Alamán’s requests for information one can ferret out his tendency to seek evidence damaging to his political opponents, men who survived the uprising and became, for the most part, liberals and federalists in the post-1821 period. In this regard, Alamán obviously picked some targets over others.

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Many of the men from whom Alamán solicited information were old and trusted friends who happened to be well situated to fill in details about events or actors, while others simply volunteered information when they learned he was writing a history. Gómez de Linares, Alamán’s friend, neighbor, and business associate in Celaya, was an unusually frank and colorful correspondent. His response to Alamán’s questions about the entry of Hidalgo’s army into Celaya in September 1810 and the execution by the royalists of the Bajío rebel cabecilla Albino García in June 1812 is extant.37 Responding to a question of his regarding the insurgent presence in Guanajuato in 1810, a man named Calderón wrote about the capture of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas: “I do not remember if Sr. Bustamante made use of this document in his Cuadro Histórico, but if you think it can be useful to you, you may count it the favor of a friend to use it.” Calderón went on to recount briefly his own experience as a child during the entry of the royalist troops into the city and remembered emerging from hiding to see his father lying dead in the street. Alamán requested of Cuautla resident Felipe Benicio Montero a list of the insurgents involved in the defense of the town during the royalist siege of 1812, to which Montero responded that he had made up such a list and left it for Alamán in Mexico City. Montero counted himself among people “who derive pleasure by seeing that they are giving the best information as to what happened here or there, so that you can carry forward your history with all the truth required for the public.”38 Alamán was not bashful about asking people for certain kinds of technical assistance as he composed his history. For example, he received information that he must have solicited on Nahuatl language and proper names from Faustino Chimalpopocatl Galicia (?-1877), the scion of a prominent indigenous political family in Mexico City, professor of the language at the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México, and years later the Nahuatl translator and political collaborator of the Emperor Maximilian. In a long letter of April 1849, after explaining the sorts of distortions and corruptions the Spanish conquerors introduced through their inability to pronounce Nahuatl words, Galicia wrote, “All intelligence [of Nahuatl] was erased in the Mexican scientific world, and the names remained completely isolated [i.e., decontextualized?]. Not only were those who did not understand the language unable to grasp the meaning of the names, but not even the natives themselves [who did speak Nahuatl] knew or [now] know what this or that expression means. This is a beautiful way to turn men into irrational beings.”39 Among the most prominent of the men to whom Alamán wrote asking for their personal accounts of the insurgency was Nicolás Bravo (1786–1854).40

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Bravo responded some weeks later in a long letter that appears as document number 5 among the appendices to volume 3 of the HdeM.41 The integral inclusion of the document as an appendix indicates the value Alamán placed on the actual words of Bravo’s account, the deference he felt owed to Bravo as a powerful contemporaneous political figure, and his genuine estimate of Bravo’s character.42 The incident Bravo wrote about was and still is well known. He had defeated a royalist force in a battle in 1811, capturing three hundred soldiers. Almost simultaneously his father, the prominent insurgent cabecilla Leonardo Bravo, was taken prisoner by royalist forces and condemned to death. Viceroy Venegas offered Nicolás Bravo amnesty if he turned himself in and said as well he would spare the life of his father. Bravo declined the offer because of previous instances in which such promises to insurgent commanders had not been honored, and his father was garroted to death. In retaliation Morelos then ordered Bravo to execute his three hundred royalist captives. After wrestling with his conscience during a long, sleepless night Bravo refused to carry out the executions. Alamán devoted three pages to this episode (3: 164–67). He ended the passage with a paean to Bravo like few others dedicated to insurgents in his history: Ancient and modern history present few examples of such a noble act of generosity at a moment in which revenge would have appeared to authorize those cruel reprisals, there being repeated in the course of the revolution few signs of the humanity seen in this worthy chief. Always valorous on the field of battle, off of it he never stained his hands with the blood of the vanquished, and, keeping his reputation pure through the vicissitudes of war, he constantly sustained the nobility of his character, justly meriting the title of the French cavalier, who in truth could be called “without fear and without stain.” How few there were in this unhappy struggle who could pretend to such praise!43

Critical Reactions to the Historia de Méjico Men of liberal political persuasion who read the initial volumes of the HdeM wrote to their friends expressing outrage at Alamán’s views, and liberal newspapers went to town on criticism of the work. But as to the chapters on the insurgency itself, readers of volume 1 began to respond almost immediately to what they regarded as errors, factual gaps in the text, or misinterpretations. Ready as he was to incorporate or at least acknowledge corrections to his

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history suggested or demanded of him by all sorts of readers, including the offended sons or kinsmen of royalist or insurgent commanders, Alamán’s patience seems to have ebbed as the volumes were published. This is hardly surprising given that soon after the publication of volume 1 critics started to nip at his heels, and he may have grown tired and frustrated with the carping of people who felt he had not done justice to this relative or that, this situation or the other. And by the time he saw the fifth volume into print his health had declined considerably, perhaps adding to his sense of frustration at what he felt to be insufficient appreciation of the work. He may well have had oral exchanges with critics, indignant sons, and other people that are not recorded. Alamán’s criticism fatigue stands out in the brief prefatory notes to the “Adiciones y reformas” sections at the end of each volume. The first of these (1: 392–93) is anodyne but businesslike: “The reconsideration of some points contained in this volume, provoked by the collection of [more] information, and conversations held about them with persons situated to illuminate these materials, has made necessary the rectification or expansion of some matters dealt within it.” A similar note in the second volume (2: 422) seems slightly dryer in tone, specifying that the information in the section came to him after the volume had gone to press and that its inclusion was necessary to the second printing to insure the “exactitude and clarity” of the work. Halfway through the five volumes, the note in volume 3 (3: 431) was the most expansive but already sounded a bit crabby. It pointed out both that some of the suggestions for correction had been on very minor points and that critics of the work had not substantiated their reservations with new evidence: As the previous volumes of this history have been published, many knowledgeable people have favored the author with their observations, desirous of rectifying some error or expanding the information relative to the points contained in them. And although at times [their observations] have dealt with things of small importance, it has seemed to him necessary to make use of them here, as much to manifest his gratitude to those people who have honored him with their communications, as to give proof of his desire to omit nothing toward accuracy, correcting even the smallest errors he might have incurred, which have been very few in a work in which it might have been feared that there would be many. [The work] being almost entirely original, in order to write it, it has been necessary to gather data from many and diverse sources. It is very notable that the writers who up to now have pretended to criticize it have only done so with vague declamations, but called upon to present posi-

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tive and well-attested facts about things either referred to as false or omitted intentionally (which is another sort of falsehood), they have presented nothing, in this way confirming the certitude and fidelity with which [the work] has been written, the only merit to which the author has aspired. The note in volume 4 (4: 518) begs off making extensive corrections “in order not to inflate” an already long text, reserving inclusion of various information the author received for treatment in volume 5. The exception to this would be material “dealing with the individual conduct of respectable people, whose sons, justifiably interested in the good name of their fathers,” have wanted it published. Finally, the fifth volume has the shortest prefatory note (5: 684), and at four pages much the shortest section of “Adiciones y reformas.” So Alamán did not fulfill his promise to deal with numerous corrections carried over from the previous volume, at least not in this form: “Because of the changes in some things in this volume during its printing, or due to the correction to some materials that the author has been able to make after the pages referred to were printed, it has been indispensable to make the following additions.” The meaning of all this, it seems to me, is that Alamán had grown weary of making changes even as substantive erratas and frustrated by the continued criticism and corrections. Criticism of the HdeM and its alleged revisionist position, whether in private communications between third parties or in the press, was not long in coming. Mariano Arista (1802–55), serving as minister of war in the government of Joaquín Herrera—whom he would succeed as president in 1853—was enraged when volume 1 appeared in 1849, condemning its unworshipful attitude toward the heroic figures of the independence struggle and describing it as “a book that has overflowed the measure of insult.” Arista’s judgment was generally representative of liberal opinion at the time regarding the HdeM, and long remained so. He wrote to his fellow liberal Mariano Riva Palacio in 1849, “I suppose you will have read a book published by Sr. D. Lucas Alamán about our glorious revolution of 1810, and I also suppose that it will have caused you not a little astonishment that there can be a Mexican so unnatural as to undertake to cast doubt on the deeds to which the movement of the venerable priest of Dolores gave rise. The many and very grave insults he heaps upon the fatherland, and the calumnies of which he makes use to further his intent, deserve to be vigorously refuted by the national press, to which this presents an opportunity to debate the worthiest questions that can attract good journalists.”44 The radical liberal politician and intellectual Melchor Ocampo

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(1814–61) framed a standard liberal critique, concluding that in his preoccupation with the excesses of the insurgency the author had lost sight of its magnificent achievement in creating the Mexican nation.45 Some critics went public with their objections or corrections rather than join the queue of offended sons who wrote to Alamán defending their fathers’ traduced honor. These letters and articles the author included with some generosity as documents or adiciones when second printings of the volumes went to press. For example, a critique of the HdeM appeared in the liberal newspaper El Siglo XIX in several numbers during April and May 1850, after the appearance of the second volume. Written by José Ignacio Anzorena under the title “Some rectifications to the Historia de Méjico of D. Lucas Alamán,” the articles sought to defend his late father, José María Anzorena (1770?–1811), against the charge that he was directly responsible for the execution of a large number of European Spaniards while he served as an Hidalgo-appointed intendant of Valladolid in late 1810. Anzorena went so far as to make sure that readers of the HdeM were made directly aware of his objections to Alamán’s treatment of his father by publishing and circulating them separately. This was one of a limited number of cases in which Alamán included a robust but courteous refutation of objections that had not come to him directly (2: 423–26): “With much regret I must return to this unpleasant material because of the article published in the newspaper ‘Siglo XIX’ by Sr. D. José Ignacio Anzorena, which later, in the form of a pamphlet, was distributed to the subscribers of this work and to other persons. . . . In the present case the commendable desires [of a son to defend his father] are more praiseworthy than they are convincing.” In shoring up the case he had already made for the elder Anzorena’s culpability, Alamán strongly relied on, among other sources, documents furnished by Mucio Valdovinos (1808–64), a secularized Augustinian priest and writer, yielding no ground in the matter. Yet other critiques faulted Alamán less for sins of commission than of omission. A notable illustration of this is José María Liceaga’s (1785–1870) 632-page Adiciones y rectificaciones a la Historia de México que escribió D. Lucas Alamán (Guanajuato: Impr. de G. Serrano, 1868), a work long in the making during spare moments in Liceaga’s judicial career and retirement and published fifteen years after Alamán’s death. Readily acknowledging that the HdeM was the outstanding work available on the independence struggle, Liceaga proposed nonetheless that Alamán could hardly have covered everything and proceeded to fill in many of the gaps. Lucas Alamán maintained that the publication of the HdeM had changed ideas about the independence movement in Mexico, moving the needle more

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in the direction of his interpretation. In an undated draft of a letter in his hand to an unidentified recipient that must have been written during 1850, he averred, “Although in a confidential circular, passed to the state governors by a highly placed person of great influence in current politics [possibly Mariano Arista?], journalists are encouraged to write negatively about this history, the favorable testimonies I have received from all over and the acceptance the first volume has had from the impartial public, show that the truthfulness and sincerity with which [the HdeM] is written have both been appreciated.”46 As the publication of volume 4 neared, Alamán wrote to Terranova y Monteleone letting him know that along with the volume he would send Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, adding, “This work [the HdeM] is the most careful and truthful [account] of events in this country yet published, and is so novel that it has created a revolution in public opinion.” Speculating as to whether the “revolution in public opinion” might have some bearing on the status of the ex-Marquesado properties in Mexico, the duke asked his apoderado what the change consisted of. Alamán replied at the end of 1851, obviously wrapping the Disertaciones together with the HdeM as part of a unified project: It has been to change completely the concept held by force of revolutionary declamations concerning the conquest, Spanish domination, and the way in which independence was achieved. It was thought that the conquest had been a virtual robbery. . . . Independence was attributed to a glorious movement directed by Hidalgo and his companions, although without immediate success. This gave rise to a thousand declamations, particularly in the speeches made in public places during national holidays. All this has changed entirely. It was necessary only to see some of the orations of this year in which the conquest is portrayed as the means by which civilization and religion were established in this country. D. Fernando Cortés [is now seen as] an extraordinary man whom Providence destined to achieve these objects, and the Spanish domination as a moderate and beneficent government that prepared the country for independence by organizing it in every aspect.47 Alamán’s grand claim that his HdeM had changed Mexicans’ minds about the nature of Independence was surely exaggerated; or at least it did not change minds in the direction he might have hoped. It changed some people’s minds, certainly, but there is little evidence to support the general applicability of his statement. One place to test his contention is in the public oratory of the annual Independence Day celebration organized by the city’s Junta Patriótica

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until its disbandment in 1855. This loose organization was generally dominated by liberals throughout the period; unlike other publicly prominent men of both political tendencies, Alamán never joined. Meanwhile, Alamán’s newspaper, El Universal, represented conservative opinion respecting the meaning of independence and did battle with El Siglo XIX and other liberal papers in the capital. The heated controversy about what date to sanctify as marking independence and whom to honor revolved around conflicting beliefs as to whether Miguel Hidalgo or Agustín de Iturbide was the true father of Mexican independence and therefore of the country’s nationhood, and roughly mapped onto Hispanophobe or Hispanophile positions, respectively. Alamán himself unequivocally supported the celebration of Iturbide and the date of 27 September 1821, the day he and his forces entered Mexico City— and, coincidentally, Iturbide’s birthday. This date was celebrated for the first few years after independence had been won, then waned in popularity as 16 September 1810 waxed. In response, on Independence Day in 1849 El Universal published what Michael Costeloe described as “a vitriolic condemnation of Hidalgo and the early stages of the insurgency.” The article characterized Hidalgo and his fellow insurgents as “bandits and murderers,” inspiring a proposal by the liberal congressmen Guillermo Prieto, Ponciano Arriaga, and José Joaquín Herrera to raise the possibility of filing legal charges against the newspaper.48 This would have appeared shortly before the publication of the first volume of the HdeM, which, not coincidentally, followed the same line of argument. In writing the fifth volume of the HdeM, published in 1852, Alamán fulminated against what he viewed as the lie at the heart of these national celebrations: “But this is explained taking into account that the laws, material objects presented to the view of the people, speeches pronounced in public on solemn occasions, partial or careless historians, [and] the press have all contributed stubbornly to cause and sustain the deceit. And from this it has arisen that the great national holiday not only has as its object the celebration of a falsehood, but is every year a repeated act of ingratitude, attributing the glory of having gained independence to those who do not deserve it, to wrest it from him to whom it is justly owed, repeating against the memory of Iturbide the offense that was done to his person.”49 While Alamán may have been right in suggesting to Terranova that the HdeM affected public opinion, the change may not have been as triumphant as he portrayed it and, along with the writing of El Universal, seems to have done much to polarize opinion further rather than forge a wide consensus in the direction of Alamán’s ideas. There is some evidence, however, that

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Alamán’s work was being absorbed into the public consciousness and civic discourse. A few months after the statesman’s death, for example, on 15 September 1853, José María López Monroy, a mathematics teacher, gave the first oration of the evening as part of the Independence Day celebration in Toluca, the capital of Mexico state, in a program that included other speeches, the reading of poetry, and musical performances and was attended by the state governor and other notables. His theme was the heroes of the independence movement, and his oration was printed in its entirety along with the other written elements of the program in the pamphlet Relación de la función cívica que tuvo lugar en el teatro principal de la ciudad de Toluca la noche del 15 de septiembre de 1853 (Toluca: Tipografía del Instituto Literario, 1853). Of nine footnotes in the speech, five referred to Alamán’s HdeM, one only to Bustamante’s Cuadro histórico, and three to other authors.50

24 • What Is in the Historia de Méjico?

The Plan of the Work The nearly twenty-five hundred pages of Alamán’s magisterial history of Mexican independence are crammed with short biographies of insurgent, royalist, and republican political actors heroic, villainous, or neither; detailed accounts of incidents of armed confrontation and tactical maneuver; ruminations on forms of human governance, revolution in general, and the Mexican insurgency in particular; descriptions of the general state of the country at several key moments between 1521 and 1852 and laments over its failed possibilities; descriptions of Mexican social structure and customs; the close analysis of constitutions; and political prescription. The footnotes and the text itself include but are not limited to scores of quotations from the authors of Roman antiquity; comments on contemporary historians’ works both critical (Carlos María de Bustamante) and laudatory (Father Mier), or both (Lorenzo de Zavala); and autobiographical references. One of the most striking facts about the work is that Alamán devoted 80 percent or so of its five volumes to what is frankly military history of a very detailed nature, with a bit of political history thrown in. There are also some striking contradictions in the work, primarily in those extended sections where he offered analysis of a deeper, structural nature or prescriptions to address the nation’s ills. For example, in volume 5 Alamán specifically disavowed any ambition to propose reforms to what he viewed as the failed republican system but then went on for a number of pages to make a fairly detailed set of suggestions for such reforms. These ranged from the reduction of the Mexican states into departments within a much more centralist national arrangement to the downgrading of congress to a unicameral body with strictly limited powers. He also condemned nineteenth-

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century materialism and liberalism as having sapped national energies, while suggesting that the country would benefit from the global modernization that had produced that very materialism. In the end, although Alamán never exactly lost control of his vast pool of materials and ideas, the book tends to ramble a bit, as is virtually bound to happen in a project of this scale. Given all this, only a few of the HdeM’s major themes and characteristics can be discussed in a treatment of any reasonable length. Internal evidence within the HdeM suggests that the plan of the work changed from its initial conception to the publication of the final volume in 1852. In the prologue to the first volume (1: 3–8; 1: 21, fn. 9), dated 27 August 1849, Alamán wrote that the chaotic political situation of the country in the late 1840s led him to abandon his original plan to write a fourth volume of the Disertaciones dealing with the Spanish colonial regime and skip to a multivolume work on the wars of independence. By the time he offered the prologue to the fourth volume, dated 26 June 1851 (a little less than a year before his death), he was writing that the first four volumes of the HdeM completed “the first part” of the history, “a work completely finished and distinct from the second part that will form its continuation” (4: 7): “In the chaos of so many incoherent events, it was indispensable to take some thread and adopt some system to give it clarity and interest. . . . There remains for me in the following volume the much easier task of describing the period from D. Agustín de Iturbide’s proclamation in Iguala of the plan that took the name of that pueblo, until the death of Iturbide and the establishment of the Mexican Republic, which will form the fifth volume, with which ends for now what I have offered to publish.”1 Having reached about the middle of volume 4, where he was still dealing with the insurgency but virtually brushing aside some important episodes, it begins to look as if he were in a rush, feeling that his time was running out. He wrote of producing a separate volume on the other historians of the independence movement, embracing their biographies and critical discussions of their works, but, except for his long necrological/critical essay on Carlos María de Bustamante in a separate publication, this plan was never realized, and his historiographical commentaries are distributed among the footnotes throughout his five volumes.

The Anti-Bustamantead The “thread” he elected to structure the latter chapters of volume 5 was the fate of Iturbide and the Three Guarantees offered in the Plan de Iguala: complete political independence from Old Spain, the unity of Mexico’s inhabitants

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without regard to European or New World origin, and the exclusive practice of Roman Catholicism as the national religion. Although not typically included among the Three Guarantees, the form of government specified in the plan was moderate, by which he meant constitutional, monarchy (monarquía moderada). In the final prologue, dated 18 November 1852, Alamán wrote that the work should have ended with chapter 10 of book 2, which concludes with the death of Iturbide in 1824, but felt the work would be incomplete without extending it to the “entire annihilation” of the Plan de Iguala. To this theme, interpreted very broadly, he dedicated the last hundred pages or so of the volume. While religious exclusivity was not really at issue after 1821, and independence from Spain not seriously in jeopardy after the repulsion of the Spanish invasion of 1829, the principle of unity for all Mexican inhabitants within the framework of legal citizenship remained more an aspiration than an established fact. But what Alamán really had in mind here were the decades-long civil struggles over the form of government—monarchical or republican, centralized or federal—and the failure of republican institutions. Serious as his analysis of these failures is, the history of the post-1824 decades is highly schematic; for example, the Texas rebellion receives scarcely a paragraph or so. Alamán wrote in justification of this thinness (5: 546) that “all this [i.e., events between 1824 and 1852] has been marked with a multitude of revolutions of less importance whose treatment would be as disagreeable and tiresome for the reader as painful for the writer, who, animated by patriotic feelings, must mention events that wound so profoundly a spirit already exhausted by the history of all those [uprisings] that preceded. Leaving to others, then, this tiresome task, or reserving it for when, in more favorable circumstances, he [the author] can return his gaze to the past with the same relief with which the shipwrecked man gazes from the beach upon the storm-tossed sea from whose dangers he has been saved.” Alamán’s primary strawman or punching bag, as I have noted, was his friend—it is not an exaggeration to call him that, although they hardly seem to have been intimates—Carlos María de Bustamante. Whatever his motives, Alamán waited until after Bustamante’s death in the fall of 1848 to fire his critical salvoes, since the first volume of the HdeM did not appear until the following year. Alamán offered his sharp criticisms of Bustamante’s multivolume work not only, in his view, to correct the record but also to shore up his own claims to accuracy and objectivity; in other words, to demonstrate how history should be written, as opposed to how it was written by a famous contemporary of his whose work was undermined by methodological deformities

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and political passions. There are scores and scores of passages in the HdeM, almost entirely relegated to the footnotes, criticizing Bustamante’s Cuadro histórico, sometimes mildly, often very sharply, even insultingly. In fact, Alamán’s work may be thought of as an anti-Bustamantead. He found the older man’s work to be not only melodramatic, prone to exaggeration, and sloppy but actually duplicitous at points. He saw the Cuadro histórico as the major contributor to a mythification of the independence movement and therefore to a counterfeit national sensibility based on falsehoods and distortions that did more harm than good. He scored Bustamante for sins of willful omission: “D. Carlos Bustamante, the historian por excelencia of the revolution, passes so superficially over all the events in Querétaro [regarding Father Hidalgo’s conspiracy]” (1: 242–43) that he neglected many key facts, a “forgetfulness inexcusable in a historian” (1: 32, fn. 7). Accusing Bustamante of having a sketchy relationship with historical reality, Alamán wrote that “Bustamante . . . persists in his terrible propensity always to alter the truth, making other people say what serves his purpose” (1: 253, fn. 6). He commented on what he saw as Bustamante’s propensity “always to present events in a light opposite to what they really were” (2: 256, fn. 18). Elsewhere, in discounting Bustamante’s version of an event, he quoted Horace: “Risum teneatis amici?,” “can you help laughing, friends?” (2: 96, fn. 23), asserting, “These frequent inaccuracies mean that even in small things we cannot have confidence in this author” (2: 275–76, fn. 56). Given this critical drumbeat against Bustamante’s history of the independence struggle but Alamán’s reliance on it throughout the HdeM, it is hard to tell why he credited one statement while discounting others. Sometimes he deployed what he saw as evidence with a greater probability of accuracy, while in other instances he simply waived or suppressed his skepticism and used information he needed to support a point he sought to make. In general, neither in Bustamante’s work nor in that of other historians whom he cited did Alamán cite another author’s opinions, but only evidence, either accepting it or disputing it. Carlos María de Bustamante’s writing served Alamán as a foil to support his claims for the legitimacy of his own account of Mexican history based on its accuracy and objectivity. The accuracy, he believed, rested in turn on a mastery of detail and granularity in the picture he was painting, which explains in part the HdeM’s prolixity in military history. As to objectivity, in terms of nineteenth-century historiographical tendencies, chiefly as they developed in Europe, Alamán was much closer to the school of Leopold von Ranke (1795– 1886) than to that of romantic historians like Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). We

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do not know if Alamán read von Ranke or Carlyle, since the works of neither appear in the 1853 inventory of his library. He did have some ability to read German, so he could have read von Ranke. He was a Rankean in the sense that his vaunted objectivity was buttressed by the coolness and lack of dramatic effects in his prose and by a critical approach to his sources, although he did not go as far as the historians of the German school. Alamán’s claim to objectivity, however—history free from political fervency or party—rests as much on his repeatedly telling us he is objective as on any overt methodology. One does not find in the HdeM that strain of heroic, Sturm und Drang, romantic nationalism based on the “great man” history explicitly embraced by Carlyle and other historians of the period; or, rather, there is plenty of Sturm und Drang but few heroic figures. The closest Alamán comes to this style of history writing is the portrayal of important men as tragic figures, of whom José María Morelos and Agustín de Iturbide were the outstanding exemplars. The mortality rate among the major actors in the insurgency, above all on the rebel side, was so high that many of them came to tragic ends, so the whiff of tragedy was difficult to avoid. Alamán was at pains to portray these men warts and all, ascribing the consummation of the country’s independence to Iturbide rather than to Father Miguel Hidalgo but including in his portrait Iturbide’s several personal faults, including his vanity, flawed political judgment, and financial improvidence. If anything, in his general approach to questions of historical causation Alamán was closer to what one might think of as a structuralist, invoking large forces originating in society as a whole (e.g., 1: 8). Often this approach took the form of statements about historical inevitability and the inscrutable workings of a Divine Providence beyond human understanding, one event leading to another, so that “the first [events] pull those that follow them and these the final [events] in an irresistible manner, the errors, omissions, and crimes, and even the virtues, of men contributing to precipitate a nation to its final extinction, those same means used to [avoid such a fate] serving to take things to the ultimate extreme” (1: 221–22). On the other hand, happenstance was working from below to produce unpredictable outcomes (“On such accidents depend the most important events” [1: 160]). How exactly he reconciled historical inevitability or Divine Providence with chance is not clear, but both strains are present in his writing. Of these large, impersonal forces he also drew nature into his analysis, at one point at the beginning of the HdeM coming close to asserting that geography is destiny but certainly that Mexico’s physical form was of “the greatest significance” in the narrative he was about to unfold

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(1: 11). Alamán was also something of an ironist, one whose descriptions of unexpected outcomes and contradictions often showed up as dry humor. At the start of volume 4 Alamán wrote that his objectivity as a historian was the key to the work’s success with the public and among critics (4: 8). In the prologue to volume 5 he expanded on this theme, asserting that in all the criticisms of the book no doubt was ever cast as to its veracity and objectivity. Some readers, whom he did not specify, had hinted that this history should not have come from the pen of a Mexican, “as if the history of Mexico had come to be a tissue of fictions until a foreigner came to write it.” Was Tacitus a bad Roman, he asked, for having written histories of the reigns of Tiberius and Nero (5: 8)? He wrote that contemporary republican historians had fabricated a “machine for the manufacture of deceits” (máquina de engaños), for example, in their marginalization of Iturbide as the real progenitor of Mexican independence (5: 9), whereas for Alamán “the truth is the only guide that conducts me” (5: 9): “I have not presented [the major actors of independence] as colossi, as another writer of our day has done, because I have not encountered [in them] anything more than men of ordinary stature, nor have I attributed to great and profound thoughts [those] events explained naturally by other contemporary events, and that not only do not present anything heroic but rather originated from causes little noble” (5: 10). Immediately following this passage he invoked the letter and spirit of Edmund Burke’s avowal of his own objectivity and balanced judgment in the Irish parliamentarian’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which he footnoted in its English edition. Toward the close of the last volume Alamán wrote, “Straying from the severity of history, fantasy always prevails over healthy criticism, and enthusiasm over the rigor of the truth. I have managed to present [the truth] as it results from the examination of the facts, so that readers may exercise their judgment with impartiality” (5: 505).

Redemption of New Spain What were the incorrect, duplicitous, or distorted views he worked to counteract with his HdeM? There were several that laid the foundations for what he believed to be a false and pernicious national consciousness in Mexico. There was the root-and-branch condemnation of the colonial regime by such writers as Father Mier and Carlos María de Bustamante, the two piers undergirding what Alamán perceived as the highly negative mythifications of the colonial regime and ipso facto the highly positive ones of the independence movement.

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He asserted that everything in the Mexico of his day had its origins in the conquest (1: 3). In this he specifically pitted his own view against that of Mier, Bustamante, and others, who saw the Spanish invasion as nothing less than a crime on a vast scale, one for which there could be no conceivable justification, religious or otherwise. Alamán’s position was that whatever the nature of the conquest, it was a fait accompli that could not be reversed, and its results were justified because a unique culture and a potentially great nation had been born of it. In other authors, the moral and political outrage in the face of the conquest and the colonial era that followed it hinged on what they had meant to the native peoples of the region. Whereas his contemporaries paid a good deal of attention to the native tradition, Alamán, if not entirely dismissive of it, devoted remarkably little space to it in the HdeM because he emphasized the Spanishness of Mexico. It is quite clear from all his writings that Lucas Alamán held the Mexican indigenous people of his day in very low regard. This was not an uncommon attitude among nineteenth-century intellectuals across the political spectrum, despite a declensionist narrative that indigenous societies had reached a high level of social evolution before the arrival of the Europeans but had become degraded by the nineteenth century. In his correspondence with Prescott, Alamán had defended Aztec political institutions as highly evolved and complex. But centuries-long stereotypes characterized indigenous people as either prone to rebellion or excessively submissive, libidinous, drunken, lazy, wily but dense, a drag on national economic development, and so forth. As to indigenous racial and cultural characteristics as they were consolidated under the colonial regime, Alamán catalogued a number of them, adding some instructive comments regarding mulattos as well: These classes [i.e., groups, including the castas] had all the vices typical of ignorance and dejection. The Indians had an excessive propensity toward robbery and drunkenness; they were seen to be liars, cruel, and vengeful; and on the other hand they were recognized for their frugality, their [submission to] suffering, and all the other qualities that could be ascribed to resignation. Among mulattos these same vices assumed another character due to the greater energy of their spirit and bodily vigor. What in the Indian was lying, in the mulatto became audacity and daring; robbery, which in the first [group] was carried out hidden and sneakily, in the second was carried out in bandit gangs [cuadrillas] and in armed attacks on merchants on the highways; vengeance, which among [the Indians] tended toward horrible and brutal murder, among the [mu-

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lattos] was [personal] combat in which there were often two opponents (1: 26–27). Alamán’s treatment of preconquest indigenous societies on their own terms takes up scarcely more than a page (1: 12ff), while other comments place them within the colonial framework. The degree of civilization of native peoples had been much debated, but that the Aztecs, in particular, had reached a high degree of perfection in political institutions “cannot be doubted” (1: 13, fn. 2). Further along in volume 1 the Indians are already embedded in the structures of colonial rule, which Alamán saw as formally quite benign toward them because of their acknowledged status as minors under the protection of the crown: “The laws had made of the Indians a very privileged class separated absolutely from the rest of the population. . . . They considered as foreign [to themselves] everything that was not of their own, and despite their privileges they were humiliated [vejados] by all the other classes, all of whom regarded them with hatred and distrust” (1: 25). Native people did not appear again until well into volume 3, by which time they had been stripped of their privileged legal status under republican institutions. Despite their position as citizens they were completely unsuited to the obligations and opportunities of citizenship in a nominally democratic republic: “The adoption of a system [i.e., voting] for which the mass of the population was in no way prepared [has had] predictable and transcendent effects. Those five million Indians and castas, whose vices were exaggerated [by some writers], but that were certainly not in a condition even to understand the system in which they were called upon to participate, [and] always strangers to it, have only been the instrument [for others to achieve] their objectives” (3: 57–58). From these propositions Alamán drew the Burkean lesson that laws and political systems must be adjusted to people, and not people to laws or systems. Alamán’s positive, not to say celebratory, attitude toward the colonial system was basically not very complex, but it did embody certain internal contradictions unacknowledged by him. He was not entirely uncritical of the colonial regime, singling out at several points elsewhere in his writings, most notably in his 1853 letter to Santa Anna, the antimodern viciousness of the Spanish Inquisition, often coupled with the backwardness of the educational system. His condemnation of these two institutions and some other minor aspects of the colonial regime reads as though tactically intended to defend himself against charges of reactionary obscurantism, and secondarily as though aiming to burn some noxious warts off Spain’s New World government in order to portray it in a positive light. Almost all his discussion of Spanish colonial

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government appears in the first eighty pages or so of volume 1. Alamán described the entire structure as a highly legalistic, bureaucratized state, in his idealized version a system virtually without politics that would have run perfectly in the absence of “human malice” (1: 60). His model, at least in his rosy picture of the colonial regime, seems to have been a completely apolitical system, something akin to the later Porfirian “poca política, mucha administración.” His general verdict on the colonial system was that “by these means [i.e., the political/bureaucratic machinery], some stable and ordinary, others temporary and circumstantial, all the immense continent[s] of America, today a chaos of confusion, disorder, and poverty, at that time moved with uniformity, without violence, it may be said [even] without effort, and all moved in a progressive order toward continual and substantial improvements” (1: 60– 61). Again sounding a distinctly Burkean note, Alamán wrote, “This system of government had not been the work of a unitary conception, nor did it proceed from the speculative theories of legislators [for which read: the French Convention] who pretend [that] as incontestable oracles of truth they wish to subject the human race to imaginary principles. . . . It was the outcome of the knowledge and experience of three centuries” (1: 61). Alamán largely discounted or glossed over the tensions within the colonial scheme, brushing over colonial-era disturbances as “accidental uprisings” (motines accidentales) (1: 86). From what modern scholarship has taught of the colonial regime, Alamán’s vision truly portrayed a “Spanish fantasy past” in many respects.2 But the historical accuracy of his rendering of the colonial regime is less important here than how it fit into his general scheme of Mexican independence and nationhood. In his extended discussion of the colonial period Alamán concentrated almost all his attention on the eighteenth century, since he believed that the immediate antecedents of the independence struggle arose there. The dynastic change from the Hapsburg regime to Bourbon absolutism, he postulated, had produced great changes in the Spanish Empire. Among the most important was the consolidation of many semiautonomous colonial entities into a single Spain, at least in theory, although the four major units still maintained their legal-political status as kingdoms. He took strong issue with Father Mier’s theory of a colonial pact made between conquistadores and crown, criticizing Bustamante for espousing the same idea. Since no such pact had ever existed, he asserted, he discounted the idea that a rupture justified rebellion. The benefits of Bourbon absolutism and centralization foreshadowed his own political views. The king’s presence counteracted the arbitrary authority of

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colonial officials, protecting his subjects from afar, a point he was later to make in arguing for the restoration of monarchy to Mexico. He provided a detailed description of the political and administrative reforms of Bourbon New Spain and of the vertiginous rise of fiscal revenues under enlightened absolutism (1: 63–67): “All this, united to the abundance and prosperity being enjoyed, made for a general [level of] well-being remembered today in all of America” (1: 80). This is an extremely Whiggish account whose significance lies not in its proximity to reality but to Alamán’s argument. The reformed colonial regime in New Spain rested on the shoulders of talented men like the Spanish journalist Juan López Cancelada, the intendants Riaño and Flon, both of whom met their deaths in the insurgency, and Viceroy Revillagigedo. As Alamán saw it, the destruction of the historically sanctified and benign colonial regime was due not so much to internal contradictions or a failure of institutions as to individuals and the advent of exogenous forces. Herein lies one of several contradictions or blind spots he did not acknowledge: if the colonial system was so universally accepted by its subjects, so well run, and being reformed by its masters so progressively under royal absolutism and men of talent such as Jovellanos, Campomanes, and Gálvez and the talented proconsuls the regime sent to New Spain, why did it prove so vulnerable? The habit of fealty to the Spanish monarchy would have enabled New Spain to remain loyal for many years had not external circumstances intervened (1: 100). Among the most clearly identified villains in the story were Viceroy Iturrigaray, Manuel de Godoy, and Napoleon Bonaparte (1:94); less villainous than weak in the face of looming imperial crisis was King Carlos IV (1: 38), while Fernando VII he characterized not only as weak but also as inconsequential and incompetent (1: 102). As triggers of the independence movement he cited the conspiracies in New Spain during the 1790s (1: 88ff) and the Consolidación de Vales Reales (1: 94). This 1804–8 royal legislation called in ecclesiastical mortgages in New Spain for support of Spanish military efforts, causing a devastating credit contraction in the colony. Among longer-term structural factors were the enduring tensions between European- and Mexican-born Spaniards in social status, preferment for office—especially as the Bourbon regime recaptured government and Church positions meted out to Creoles during the seventeenth century—marriage opportunities, and so forth. Here some autobiographical elements emerged, such as the preference for placing European-born Spanish ecclesiastics in cathedral chapters, possibly a veiled reference to the travails of his half brother (1: 18). He also described patterns of recruitment from Spain as young peninsular Spaniards married wealthy

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heiresses or widows, his father being an example; and as recently created titles of nobility in the Spanish New World realms extinguished themselves as the money behind them drained away (also an autobiographical reference): “The effect of these propensities was the short duration of fortunes, and the industry of the Europeans in working to form them and leave them to their children can be compared to the bottomless barrel that the Danaïdes, as hard as they tried, never succeeded in filling” (1: 16ff). Alamán explicitly identifies this rivalry as “the cause of the revolutions with which I am to occupy myself” (1: 22).

The Villain of the Piece Of the home-bred villains in Alamán’s account of the independence struggle, the foremost was Father Miguel Hidalgo, and among the heroes, Agustín de Iturbide. On the insurgent side he was relatively kind in his assessment of other major leaders of the Hidalgo revolt, among them Ignacio Allende, Juan Aldama, and Mariano Matamoros. Even a few of the lesser insurgent cabecillas who carried on the rebellion drew backhanded praise despite their uncouth characters and savagery in the conflict, such as Albino “El Manco” García (1774–1812), the terror of the Bajío, whose forces Alamán likened to “a band of Bedouins” (3:112). The insurgent leader Nicolás Bravo, with whom Alamán was to share the national political stage during his lifetime, he heaped with praise for his noble character (3: 166) despite his having fought on the wrong side. But the star of the show, for whom Alamán obviously had enormous respect despite his stubbornly insurgent career, was the rebel priest, Hidalgo’s former student and sometime deputy, Father José María Morelos. His leadership of the insurgent military forces up until 1815 sustained the rebellion and worked the royalist regime into a position of near fiscal exhaustion, laying the groundwork for Iturbide’s consummation of independence in 1821. Morelos was “the most formidable enemy of the Spanish cause in New Spain” (1:12), the “most notable [figure] among the insurgents” (2: 203), an “extraordinary man” (2: 217). Alamán believed Morelos to be utterly ignorant of political matters in general and the situation in Europe in particular, ridiculing his conviction that a French invasion of New Spain under King José Bonaparte would lead to an all-out attack on traditional Catholic religion in the country (3: 217). But he also wrote that the history of the Mexican insurgency during these years could be reduced to the history of Morelos and his campaigns and that the rest of the rebel story was one of incompetence, misguided ideas, and

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internal rivalries (3: 219). Very long passages of the Historia, indeed entire chapters, were devoted to Morelos’s talents and importance, the siege of Cuautla, and the capture, trial, and execution of the insurgent priest. By far the two most important figures in Lucas Alamán’s history of the rebellion, however, were Hidalgo and Iturbide. Indeed, the story could be reduced in large measure to the political stupidity of the one and the astuteness, at least initially, of the other, with Antonio López de Santa Anna bringing up the rear in the last hundred pages or so of volume 5. Alamán placed national independence metaphorically in a human development framework, writing that the impulse toward independence was “an inclination as natural and noble in nations as in individuals, which, once the idea to obtain it has awakened, develops with irresistible force, more so when a promising future presents itself [with] a vision of great and incalculable benefits. To further this object, at that time [i.e., in 1808–10] no better opportunity appeared to obtain [independence] easily than the state of the metropolis. Not only was there no new injury [for New Spain] to complain of, no arbitrary act that might justify a legal resistance, but the just cause for complaint, the extraction of capital through the Consolidación de Vales Reales, had been removed” (1: 125–49). Hidalgo’s rebellious banner with the device “Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe y mueran los gachupines” was a gross perversion of this natural and healthy drive, “a monstrous mixture of religion with murder and pillage: a cry of death and desolation which, my having heard it thousands of times in the first days of my youth, still sounds in my ears with a fearful echo!” (1: 243–44). Rarely in the HdeM did Alamán allow himself to write such purplish prose. Repeatedly he emphasized the criminal nature of the insurgency, as in this extended passage: In a people in which, unfortunately, religion was almost reduced to merely exterior practice, in which many of its ministers, particularly in villages, were given over to the most licentious lives, [and] when the dominant vice of the mass of the population was the propensity to rob, it is not strange that there should be found so easily followers of a revolution whose first step was to set the criminals at liberty, abandon the properties of the richest part of the population to unlimited pillage, raise up the plebs against everything they had feared or respected until then, and give free rein to all the vices . . . and open a vast field to the ambition for positions. So it is that in all the villages the priest Hidalgo found such a strong predisposition, which only needed his presence to

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drag behind him all the masses. But the means he employed to win this popularity destroyed the foundations of the social edifice, suffocated every principle of morality and justice, and have been the origin of all the evils the nation laments, which all flow from that poisoned fountain (1: 244). Hidalgo’s growing army “presented the aspect of barbarian tribes migrating from one point to another, rather than an army on the march,” intent on robbery and attacks against property (1: 245, 310). Hidalgo’s Indian followers, he wrote, were attracted to pillage, but Alamán offered no evidence to support this assertion. Added to the disorganization and barbarity of the priest’s “horde” was his vanity, which led him to forego military opportunities and make tactical mistakes (1: 295–96). His army was made up of a “throng of generals, the uneducated, cowards, and incompetents, a mass without form, without knowledge, incapable of any strategic movement and quick to flee at the first shots.” The thoughtlessness of Hidalgo’s uprising and its disorganization could have led only to an “absolute anarchy” or “absolute despotism” (2: 131, 141–42). The movement under Father Hidalgo was a “bandit rabble” entirely given over to destruction and rapine, as opposed to the version of Bustamante and other “partial” historians, who portrayed it as “the effort of a generous people fighting to conquer their independence and liberty” (2: 122). Owing to the ethnic heterogeneity of Hidalgo’s rebellion and its strong propensity to attack property, Alamán assimilated the rebellion to a model of class war. Tinged with elements of ethnic conflict, this was an uprising of the havenots against the haves. He staked out a position with regard to the relationship between race and class that has resonated in Mexican society for nearly two centuries. The rebellion went wrong in transcending the political to become a (failed) social revolution: “The consequences produced from the pretention to change not only the state of politics, but of civil [life] as well, attacking religious belief and established practices and customs, and bringing us to fall into the abyss in which we [find ourselves] . . . have been the cause of the mistakes that have been committed” (1: 9). The rebellion’s failure arose in part from an inability to attract a greater following among the Mexican Creole population. This was due primarily to the “atrocious, impolitic, and absurd system followed by Hidalgo . . . raising the proletarian against the propertied classes” with the promise of sacking European possessions, the takeover of land, and so forth. The combination of stirring up hatred against the European-born Spaniards and of promising their property, “exciting at one time the two pas-

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sions most capable of moving the human heart, religious fanaticism and political vengeance and rivalry, was an accidental thing that had never entered into the initial design of the revolution.” This aspect of the insurgency turned possible white sympathizers into opponents, converting the struggle between those who desired independence and those who did not into one between the rich and the poor. Alamán concluded, It was not a war of nation against nation, as it has falsely been painted; it was not the heroic struggle of a people fighting for its liberty to throw off the yoke of an oppressive power. It was . . . an uprising of the proletarian class against property and civilization. Because of this we see among the chiefs of the independence party so many lost men [hombres perdidos], notable for their vices or come out of the jails, whom in vain it was attempted to reduce to a normal order [by] the few estimable men who followed that path blinded by agreeable ideas whose realization they recognized to be impossible when they were able to plumb the depths of the disorder and confusion around themselves. This produced a reaction in all the respectable part of society in defense of their property and families, who gave men and resources to the government. This was what snuffed out the general desire for independence, and this finally . . . [determined] many men whose opinions were decided [in favor of independence] but who did not want to accept it together with the crimes and disorders accompanying it. The triumph of the insurrection would have been the greatest calamity that could have befallen the country (4:461). Alamán’s summary of the colonial regime typically invokes another classical reference: We have seen [in the colonial regime] a government established and successively improved by the wisdom and experience of three centuries; consolidated through the habit of long obedience; supported by the respect and love of its subjects, and suddenly shaken by unforeseeable causes [the French and American Revolutions]. . . . These ideas encounter acceptance in a corporation then very estimable [i.e., the Mexico City ayuntamiento]; [from] a viceroy [Iturrigaray] seduced or deceived; [and] the propensities awaken that in all the colonies sooner or later arise, to separate from their metropoli. . . . Similar to that ancient oak of which Virgil speaks (Aeneid, book 2, verse 626), attacked stubbornly by woodsmen determined to bring it down, although its trunk is almost cut

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[through], it still resists the repeated blows of the axe; it shakes its high crown majestically, and, conquered at last, as it falls brings down with it the same [men] who destroyed it (1: 221–22).

Iturbide and Revolution Laced throughout the five volumes of the HdeM are observations concerning the perniciousness of revolutions, a broad category of political upheaval embracing everything from large-scale movements to the very frequent pronunciamientos of Alamán’s own day. Not included in this criticism were the rebellions that brought him to power—the Jalapa revolution of 1829–30 or the return of Santa Anna to the presidency in 1853. He may well have abhorred these events for their violence, as well, but did not say so explicitly, so that from this distance his attitude looks hypocritical. On the other hand, he may have seen these events as necessary correctives to the political disequilibrium whose balance could not be reestablished by other means and were therefore not characterized by the personalism and ambition of revolutions more generally. The chief negative example of the ideal type was the French Revolution, which loomed large in his account, as it did for many nineteenth-century political thinkers. He assimilated such violent rendings of society’s political fabric not only to social violence but also, in their extreme form, to the splintering of polities into parties, that is, political factions and the presumed anarchy he always bewailed. An open question is whether he regarded his own foundation of the Conservative Party, less a party in the formal, modern, cardcarrying sense than a broad political tendency, as lying outside the type of partido he found so destructive. Alamán did not so much develop a theory of revolution as lay out a natural history of it: Revolutions are generally formed either by the influence of some daring chief who, by subterfuge or suggestion, makes himself the head of them, awakening the hopes and flattering the passions of individuals, of the popular masses, or of the armed forces, [and] succeeds in forming a party that serves their ends, while he awaits the fulfillment of his own; or by an inverse route, many individuals with common interests, in whom the same opinions hold sway, or who are united by the same bonds . . . all conspire together, moved by the same desires and directed toward the same object. If in these circumstances a man of ability and resolution appears, who may give direction to the common effort, the

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revolution is made and becomes irresistible if the pledged interests embrace a great many people, or if these people, through their audacity and with opportune measures, make up for a shortness in numbers (1:154). He asserted that revolutions in their early stages tended toward great violence and that once the goal was reached internal divisions would begin among the revolutionaries (1:184). Alamán’s model of revolutions fits closely the career of Agustín de Iturbide, whom the historian probably had in mind. One of the central aims of the HdeM, in fact, was to restore Iturbide to what Alamán believed to be his rightful place in the history of the period, and the author devoted much of volumes 4 and 5 to his career. Iturbide’s heroic role had been usurped by the historians, writers, journalists, artists, and public men who in words and images had lionized Father Miguel Hidalgo, his fellow conspirators, and José María Morelos to build a heroic, foundational myth of Mexican nationalism, while pushing Iturbide and his failed empire aside. While Iturbide’s reputation had been somewhat restored by the time the HdeM was published, Alamán wrote that the author of the Plan de Iguala would have rolled over in his grave to see his name included among the beneméritos de la patria along with those of Hidalgo, Morelos, Guerrero, Guadalupe Victoria, and others against whom he had fought (2: 144). The political convictions of these men, most of them diehard republicans, were very different from his own. Representative of Alamán’s anger at this turn of affairs was his blast at the injustice of the renaming of Valladolid as Morelia, after Morelos, rather than Iturbide—Iturbidia (4: 15)? He bookended the Plan de Iguala with a fairly full account of the Creole soldier-politician’s life, portraying his cruelty and opportunism as a royalist officer before 1821, his dissipation while living in Mexico City, and his political ineptitude as a ten-month monarch in 1822–23. Alamán devoted some attention to the wartime profiteering practices from which Iturbide accumulated a large personal fortune. He quoted the Bajío curate Antonio Labarrieta, who related that when Iturbide was removed from his command in the region in 1816 to face corruption charges in Mexico City, the people of Guanajuato wanted to celebrate a Mass of thanksgiving (4: 36ff); he also devoted some space to an account of Iturbide’s atrocities as a royalist officer (4: 291). On the other hand, he also mentioned Iturbide’s personal bravery and conceded that he had some military aptitude. Much of volume 5 is devoted to the rise and fall of Iturbide and the Plan de Iguala, whose fate Alamán saw as a thread running through Mexico’s history between 1821 and 1852.

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Whatever the historical facts of Iturbide’s career and his role in the decade of the insurgency, however, there is the tactical question of why Alamán chose to cast the soldier from Michoacán, twenty-seven years old when Hidalgo’s rebellion broke out (and a distant relative of the priest’s), as the true progenitor of national independence. First, to the degree Iturbide developed a coherent set of political ideas, many of them were embodied in the Plan de Iguala and were close to Alamán’s own later thinking. These included moderate (i.e., constitutional) monarchy as the most viable form of government for Mexico, established religion, the equality of Mexican- and peninsular-born Spaniards, and so forth. More fundamentally, Alamán sought to creolize the independence movement, to make it and the nationhood that followed the work of the class of educated, worldly, politically moderate, white hombres de bien with whom he felt the fortunes of Mexico should rest. Most other major chroniclers of the period, if they did not exactly push Iturbide to one side, regarded him as an opportunist who took advantage of the situation created by other men before him; the national mythology of Mexico reflects this. The Creoles have their place, Father Miguel Hidalgo preëminent among them, followed at some distance by Allende, Aldama, Matamoros, La Corregidora, and a few others. Still further behind is a group of lesser-known figures like Ignacio López Rayón and José María de Cos. Agustín de Iturbide is sometimes at the center, sometimes at the margins of this scheme. But Morelos, Vicente Guerrero, Guadalupe Victoria, El Pípila, and other men of color, especially Morelos, lay great claim to a status nearly coequal to that of Hidalgo. In Alamán’s scheme, people of color, particularly Indians, figured, with rare exceptions, simply as cannon fodder during the decade-long insurgency. Where Agustín de Iturbide was concerned, there was much truth in seeing him as an astute opportunist rather than a moving spirit, as Alamán himself readily admitted. But the recognition by a would-be revolutionary leader of the opening to mobilize human resources to overthrow an existing regime and of the notes to sound to achieve that mobilization was one of the key elements in Alamán’s model of revolution. For him to place Iturbide in this position also meant that a gap of some sort had to be opened up between the initial rebellion under Hidalgo and the consummation of independence in 1821. This Alamán achieved via his close scrutiny of Morelos’s career and his citing of the priest as the greatest military figure of the insurgency, since this former disciple of Father Hidalgo was out of the picture by the beginning of 1816. Alamán could thus assert that the air was rapidly leaking out of the insurgent balloon and that New Spain was pacified at latest by 1818 except for

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an unimportant corner of the south (5: 13): here was the gap the historian required to insert Iturbide. Iturbide threw himself impetuously but astutely into the rebellion, Alamán wrote, to lead it and give it direction: “The same things tend to occur in all revolutions: the opportune moment is the secret of them” (5: 57). Iturbide not only abused the trust that Viceroy Apodaca placed in him in bringing him back into active service and sending him to deal with Guerrero but also compromised his honor as a military man (5: 71). Hidalgo and the others who began the insurrection a decade earlier had not thought clearly about the future course of the country, believing the achievement of independence enough. Iturbide realized that a republic was not appropriate for Mexico and that a moderate monarchy was the only suitable form of governance (5: 80). Following an analysis of the Plan de Iguala, Alamán used Iturbide’s history to offer the observation that “independence had come to be inevitable for Mexico and for the entire American continent” (5: 78). Independence once realized, the form of government must be accommodated to the cultural and historical experience of the population, not the other way around (5: 80–81). Alamán did not discount the possibility that from the start Iturbide was moved by personal ambition (5: 160), but he realized that monarchical ideas were firmly implanted in Mexico and that historical antecedents of republicanism simply did not exist.3 The Creole military man foresaw that the application of “exaggerated liberal theories” of republicanism would experience the same destiny all over Spanish America, noting sardonically that there were even fewer elements in Mexico to support a US-style constitution than in Turkey or Russia (5:82). That Agustín de Iturbide ever thought in such exalted philosophical terms is doubtful; in putting these ideas into his protagonist’s head Alamán was performing an act of intellectual ventriloquism. In this final phase of the insurrection Iturbide acted with “singular energy and judgment” to direct the revolution, “taking advantage of all the opportunities,” acting less as an experienced military man than a “wise politician” (5: 229–30). Whatever other factors might have been in play by May 1822, when Iturbide ascended the freshly minted imperial throne as Agustín I, his political astuteness abandoned him in short order, Alamán wrote (5: 272ff). He assumed excessive powers and titles and spent irresponsibly on his family and the imperial court while not taking prudent measures to shore up the national treasury.4 Iturbide threw his opponents in jail; treated congress in a cavalier and hostile manner while struggling with the legislative branch over the locus and limits of sovereignty; and allowed antagonistic political factions to form

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around his monarchical ambitions. His fall in May 1823, after barely ten months on the throne, Alamán thought due primarily to the sinister intervention of the Masons in overthrowing him (5: 446), to the emperor’s excessive spending, and to the failure of the army’s loyalty (5: 477): “This was the end of Don Agustín de Iturbide’s rule, which because of its short duration can rather be called a dream or theatrical performance than an empire” (5: 475). The execution of the proscribed ex-emperor when he returned to Mexican soil in 1824, Alamán, by then serving in the national ministry, found fully justified, while other chroniclers characterized the action as a crime (5: 501–2). The author added that readers of the HdeM might judge for themselves whether “a man whose sudden rise and rapid fall offers one of the most egregious [examples] that history shows us of the vicissitudes of fortune and the inconstancy of popular favor and applause” (5: 505). In a final elegiac note to his account of Iturbide’s career, Alamán wrote of the amnesias of history and the injustices to which they give rise: “The names of Negrete and Echávarri are now almost forgotten. So also are those of Quintanar, Cortázar, and Parres, all of whom have died, and [the name of Anastasio] Bustamante, the only one who remains of the distinguished officers of the royalist army who proclaimed the Plan de Iguala, soon will be. These names are never heard in the civic orations in praise of independence. . . . But nonetheless these generals, along with Bravo, Filisola, Herrera, and Santa Ana [sic], are those that made [independence]” (5: 523). In Alamán’s time there was no monument to Iturbide anywhere in Mexico. The author of the HdeM believed that the fallen emperor had not been accorded proper credit for achieving the country’s independence, since collective forgetfulness and a false mythology of national independence misattributed it to Hidalgo rather than Iturbide. An example of this was the invention of new forms of address brought in with the 1824 federalist constitution, mimicking what had occurred in the French Revolution. The custom of adding “fourth year of independence,” “third year of liberty,” or “second year of the federation” to dates of years was adopted, as were forms of address such as “ciudadano”: “The courteous and religious salutation of ‘Dios guarde a U. muchos años’ with which it had been the custom to close official notes was replaced with the Voltairean phrase ‘Dios y libertad,’ to which people, according to their taste, added ‘justicia y federación’ and other words of that sort. In time the dating has faded away, the address of ‘citizen, quickly fell into ridicule, and the same is happening with the strange closing of written communications” (5: 510).

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The Mexican Republic The three decades between Iturbide’s fall and the appearance of the final volume of the HdeM, wrote Alamán, “belong to the history of the republic, which is not my object to write for the moment. So I will touch briefly those [happenings] of which [some] knowledge is necessary to understand the final fate of Iturbide and the complete annihilation of the [Plan de Iguala]” (5: 478). In keeping with his pledge to “touch briefly” on the 1823–52 period, Alamán dedicated scarcely a hundred pages to it, but these chapters contain some of his pithiest writing. Among the major incidents treated were the French blockade of 1838–39 (the so-called Pastry War), the loss of Texas and the Mexican–American War (1836–48), the definitive rise of Santa Anna as perennial president, and so forth. Once Iturbide was out of the way, Alamán offered an extremely dark picture of the country’s political condition on the eve of its republican life in 1822–23: “It was not difficult to foresee, then, that a catastrophe was in the making, and that the year about to begin would be memorable for Mexico for the great events that were to occur” (5: 433). Into this chaotic situation emerged Antonio López de Santa Anna. These remarks were the fullest portrait the historian ever offered of the caudillo, published in volume 5 in the fall of 1852, six months or so before their author helped Santa Anna construct his last presidency. After three decades of dealing with each other in political life, now in alliance, now in opposition, it is instructive to see what Alamán had to say of the famous military politician: The history of Mexico from the [start of the] period in which we now enter, may be called the History of the Revolutions of Santa Ana [sic]. Now promoting them himself, now taking part in those promoted by others; now working for the advancement of someone else, now for his own; proclaiming [one set of] principles today, and tomorrow favoring the opposite; raising up a party [only] to oppress and annihilate it afterward and elevate the opposite [party], keeping them always in balance. His name takes first place in all the political events of the country, and the fate of these [events] has come to entwine itself with his own through all the changes that sometimes have brought him to the most absolute power, to make him pass afterward into prison and exile. . . . A combination of good and bad qualities; very clearly of natural talent, but without moral or literary cultivation; a spirit energetic [but] without firm purpose or determined object; energy and disposition to govern obscured by

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grave defects; clever in the general plans of a revolution or a [military] campaign, and very unsuccessful [infelicísimo] in the direction of a battle, of which he has never won a single one; having formed gifted disciples and had many compañeros to fill his fatherland with calamities, and few or none when it has been necessary to face the French cannons in Veracruz, or the rifles of the Americans in the city of Mexico, Santa Anna is without doubt one of the most noteworthy characters presented by the [Latin] American revolutions, and this is the man who dealt the first blow to the imperial throne of Iturbide (5: 435). Despite “the immense ills he has caused in ascending to the supreme command,” Santa Anna fought with honor and bravery against the Spanish invasion of 1829, the rebellious Texas colonists in 1835, the French in 1838, and the American invasion in 1846 (5: 433–34). Although it is complimentary in some respects, the caudillo could not have found this portrait flattering, but if or how he responded to it we do not know. Alamán’s account of these decades is generally less dedicated to personalities or the careful recounting of political events than to constitutional questions and political culture writ large. He viewed the French Revolution and its constitutions, with their radical experimentation and theorizing, as the root of all political evil in the modern world (e.g., 5: 570). This untethered radicalism he also ascribed to the Cortes of Cádiz, to whose history and the constitution it produced in 1812 the first hundred pages of volume 3 were devoted: In [the Cortes] the most exaggerated ideas of reform and innovations predominated, and taking as a model the French National Assembly they [i.e., the deputies] saw the most radical projects rearing up, not to remedy the many and grave evils of which the monarchy certainly suffered, but to tear it down to its foundations and to give way to a civil war, to the ruin and confusion into which that unhappy nation fell and of which it has been a victim for so long, propagating through the same principles the same evils in the colonies, which on separating themselves from the metropolis kept possession of a tragic inheritance . . . (1: 216). Distracted by brilliant theories, misguided by a lack of experience in the management of [such] affairs, entering in very difficult circumstances into an undertaking entirely unknown in Spain, passing from the most absolute government to the wide reaches of a liberty without limits, they committed grave errors, no doubt, but never from dishonest principles, never from greed or mean interests, and in the midst of these

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errors, they still worked with glory and great success to expel the foreign invasion . . . insuring at least independence, if not the happiness and liberty of the Spanish nation (2: 70). The American and Spanish deputies debated political abstractions, while their mutual ignorance furnished no constitutional basis for declaring Indians equal in political rights to white citizens of the Spanish realms. The Cortes deliberations went from long reports by the various committees to votes in which the majority of the deputies had no clue as to what they were voting on, a characteristic of congresses in general, Alamán believed (2: 17, 33–34). The product of a body of generally well-intentioned men opting for theory over the political experience they lacked, the Spanish 1812 constitution was at first blindly imitated in Mexico: “Without any experience, nor more knowledge than that scattered among the speeches of the deputies inserted in the Diario de las Cortes, it is [perhaps] excusable that in Mexico the principles established in the Spanish constitution were taken as political dogmas, which for some time became the universal body of laws, it having been the revolutionary text adopted by the Freemasons’ (2: 311). The same misguided course had been followed in Naples, Piedmont, and Portugal. For Alamán, the problem lay not only in the charters that representative bodies produced but also in the representative bodies themselves and the high degree to which their political wisdom depended on historical experience, and the composition and political culture of the society they sought to represent. He even began to offer a racial theory of the viability of representative institutions for peoples, although he never developed it beyond a suggestion. Riven with political factionalism, plagued by inattention and inflated, overreaching concepts of their power, especially relative to executive authority, legislative bodies were also inefficient, the large sums of money they consumed used to much better effect elsewhere (5: 563). And when turning his critical eye on recent Mexican congresses in particular, he took aim at the newly elected congress of 1833 that came in after the fall of the Anastasio Bustamante government: The new congress was composed of the most radical of the victorious party [i.e., liberals allied with Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías]. In Mexico . . . the representative system is not merely a fiction, as almost everywhere, but a true irony . . . to which the nation appears indifferent, as if the [representative] bodies had nothing to do with them. . . . All the most arbitrary and unjust things that an oriental despot of the most

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absolute power, in a state of dementia, could imagine is in the collection of decrees [produced] by that legislative body. . . . In the parody of the French Revolution being enacted, in which the congress wished to play the part of the Convention, Santa Ana [sic] left to Vice President Gómez Farías the part of Robespierre, causing to fall upon him the hatred of the measures that most offended the public (5: 537, 542). He offered an extremely harsh overall evaluation of the Mexican congressional system from 1821 on: These bodies have fallen into such a condition of ridicule that it is almost impossible to free them from it except by giving them other forms and attributions. All those [congresses] we have had from the Junta Provisional [the Junta Provisional Gubernativa, 1821–22], that is, from the very beginning of independence, have done no good and avoided no evil; alternately seditious, apathetic, or compliant, they have let the public treasury be ruined without having . . . been able to avoid it, and since these same ills have been felt in other countries that have adopted this type of institution, it has come to be doubtful if they are susceptible to be put into practice in countries of Latin speech, or if they are reserved for those that proceed from Teutonic origins (5: 588). Alamán offered some prescriptions for political reform at the end of volume 5 as a remedy for the ills of legislative representation. What he would have preferred, one surmises, would probably have been to eliminate the legislature entirely, replacing it with a conciliar arrangement around a strong executive and centralized government. What he proposed fell short of that. The republican form had become so deeply embedded that he must have realized abolition to be impossible, and so suggested a unicameral legislature, congressional powers to be strictly limited to certain fiscal matters, and direct popular presidential elections (e.g., 5: 588–89).

The Malaise of Materialism Underneath all this analysis of the straying of Mexico from its path and the sharp critique of early republican political figures, programs, and institutions, I believe that a deep philosophical malaise plagued Lucas Alamán in the last years of his life. There is in the HdeM an elusive but detectable consciousness of possibilities foregone and potentials unfulfilled for his country, a bad trade-

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off having been made between social cohesion and the burgeoning material prosperity of certain social sectors. One hesitates to take this too far or to locate it in his spiritual rather than his intellectual life. He saw a possible remedy for this condition in the consolations of religion on a wide social basis, a turn away from empty ceremonial and superficial observance to a more genuine form of spirituality. More than once he insisted that this was the only bond that really held Mexicans together in the face of a fraying national sensibility built on baseless myths. In examining debates and policy decisions regarding cemetery reform in Mexico in the late colonial and early republican periods, the historian Pamela Voekel has identified this sensibility as characteristic of the Mexican bourgeoisie of the time, the hombres de bien in whose hands Lucas Alamán thought political power should be vested. She has linked it to the Jansenist school of Catholic thought, one of whose central tenets was a more internal, less Baroque piety that Voekel has associated with the origins of modernity in Mexico.5 One of the keys to Alamán’s Burkean conservatism—the conservation of history- and practice-sanctified social and political institutions—was his explicit insistence that the institutional baby not be thrown out with the traditionalist bathwater, an attitude that certainly applied to the Church as a potential font of national salvation. Whether he himself was a Jansenist in any meaningful sense of the term is less important than what he thought the role of religion to be vis-à-vis modernization. He was certainly identified politically with the institutional Roman Catholic Church in Mexico. Despite his avowed piety, as far as one can tell from contemporaneous descriptions he did not wear his religion on his sleeve and took pains in his writings to treat the Church more in a sociological than a theological or moralistic vein. That Lucas Alamán should be identified not just as conservative but also as a reactionary in a political world dominated by ascendant liberalism rests on his antidemocratic ideas favoring political centralism and elite rule as well as on his stance in defense of the Roman Catholic Church, albeit not an unreformed Church. And although in his thinking there are some affinities with that of the much older Savoyard Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), he was by no means a de Maistre “lite,” a dogmatic throne-and-altar man but fell in his conservatism more on the side of Edmund Burke. Woven through the HdeM is a thread of discontent about the pervasive presence of materialism in modern life in general and in Mexico in particular, especially among the economically potent class in society. Reviewing the state of the country in 1852, he compared it to that of New Spain: “It has changed its name, its [territorial] extent, its inhabitants in the influential part

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of society [i.e., there were more foreigners], its form of government, its habits and customs, and this not only due to the great revolutions in [Mexico] that we have seen, one rushing behind another, but also by effect of the complete change the world has experienced in the same epoch” (5: 547). He maintained that by midcentury the mining industry had recovered its prosperity despite the lack of success of the foreign mining companies; that agriculture had returned to the production levels of the pre-1810 period; and that large industrial establishments had been founded. All this would have occurred anyway, he suggested, as a result of world modernization, without independence (5: 573), although he would surely have acknowledged that, absent its independence, Mexico would not have benefited fully from the changes. But he also observed that prosperity had produced a certain excess of luxury, especially with increased access to foreign goods: “This accumulation of wealth, the perfection that various crafts [artes] have reached, and the occasion presented by French dressmakers, tailors, and cooks have introduced a luxury so excessive that, [along] with gambling and dissolution, some fortunes have been ruined before they are fully formed, especially among those enriched by the mines, and are the cause of frequent commercial bankruptcies. There is no city in Europe or the United States in which, proportionally to the population, there are so many private coaches as in Mexico City, and those for rent in public sites are three times more numerous than before independence” (5: 574). As an example of the contradiction between private luxury and public penury he cited the deplorable condition of the streets in the capital (5: 577). Yet despite all this accumulation of wealth and conspicuous consumption in the upper reaches of society, Alamán asked, why was the government so weak? The accumulation of wealth in the upper sector of society had widened social inequalities even as the old social hierarchy of noble titles and other forms of distinction had broken down. He voiced a deep concern that there was not anything compelling to replace the striving after material prosperity, or at least subordinate to it. In the first volume of the HdeM he commented, “In this century called philosophical, with all idea of honor and loyalty destroyed, nothing more has remained than the physical and the positive [i.e., empirical], to which those principles have been sacrificed that were previously the foundation of society, and have been reduced to vain and insignificant names” (1: 173). In summarizing the effects of this ardent pursuit of wealth and luxury by the leading sectors of society, Alamán linked materialism to the failure of institutional life, the loss of civic feeling, and the weakness of the nation in

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claiming the allegiance and affective connection of its citizens, in the end invoking the negative example of Louis Napoleon in France: All this fell upon us through the efforts of the antisocial and irreligious philosophy of the eighteenth century. There remained no distinction other than that of money; pursuing it is the sole object of everyone’s efforts, to gain it by any means deemed licit. . . . [Since] there remains no other possible investment for great fortunes than material pleasures, to obtain these is the object of all ambition. . . . The basis of the governments that has been given the name “representative system” is [really only] individual interest, which in its own benefit, it is presumed, will exert itself to establish and conserve the best order possible. . . . But it has not been reflected that, the fundamental principle of modern society being selfishness [egoismo], this cannot be the basis of any political institution; that men who only aspire to enjoy [material things], following the doctrines of Epicurus’s philosophy, cannot commit their opinions in the deliberations of an assembly, because this might diminish their pleasures, nor [will they] venture their lives in the dangers of military service. And since [such societies] . . . cannot or do not want to aspire to obtain [these pleasures] through honest labor, they seek them through the means of revolutions, which are so much easier to make when governments are deprived of all consideration and respect, and all the institutions that should sustain and consolidate them have been destroyed, while the comfortable class, indifferent to all that does not touch its personal interests, only awakens to the crash of a revolution that threatens it with immediate ruin and then, to save itself from shipwreck, as has occurred in France, throws itself into the arms of the first man who tells it: “Come here and I will protect you” (5: 575–76). One irony of this little homily of Lucas Alamán’s is that he had for most of his life, as a private entrepreneur and public official, pursued the modernization that he suggested was the root cause of the anomic behavior he now found so disheartening. For that was the meaning of the industrialization he sought for Mexico, to wean the country off its centuries-long dependence on the wealth of its mines and take the final steps toward decolonization in the economic sphere. A second irony was his invocation of Louis Napoleon as the false savior of France—the political opportunist who came along as French political institutions were cracking under the stress. The irony here consists of his having facilitated Santa Anna’s final rise to power, with the Bonapartist

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overtones of his regime. In helping to design it and in joining it, Alamán may well have hoped he could serve as a check on the Bonapartist aspects of the government, but he died too soon to do much in that respect, and Santa Anna spun out of control very quickly. Aside from tracing in the HdeM the path that had brought the country to a state of institutional breakdown, the best he could do in the end, at least from the perspective of late 1852, was to offer in the final paragraph of volume 5 a prayer to Divine Providence and a valedictory: “I hope that the All Powerful, in whose hand rests the fate of nations, and who by paths hidden from our eyes brings them low or praises them according to the designs of His Providence, dispenses to ours the protection with which so many times He has deigned to preserve it from the dangers to which it has been exposed!” (5: 598).

Epilogue On Decolonization and Modernization

The late Carlos Monsiváis quipped that Mexico had passed straight from a condition of premodernity to one of postmodernity without ever passing through modernity. His aphorism echoes Lucas Alamán’s that the country had transited from infancy to decrepitude without ever experiencing the vigor of youth. To intervene in this process of societal decline, vegetative economic growth, and impose a modicum of predictability in political life were not enough but would do for a start. It was considerably easier to envision economic development, however, than to predict the sort of social alterations it might bring. The modernizing vision required an optimism about national possibilities shared with contemporary thinkers elsewhere in Latin America and at a remove of some decades even from Alexander Hamilton in the fledgling United States. Mexicans of this generation did not write of modernity as a permanent, existential condition or even use the word (the term “modernization” apparently originated in the late eighteenth century, possibly with Condorcet) but instead spoke of national economic development, an ordered political life, and a strong state as characteristics of the great Euro-Atlantic societies they wished to emulate. Rather than speak of “decolonization” they talked of throwing off the yoke of Spanish oppression, on the one hand, or of the foolhardy repudiation of the mother culture in a gratuitously bloody way, on the other. What was the relationship between decolonization and modernization, and between modernization and modernity, particularly as illustrated in the career of Lucas Alamán?

Decolonization One of the most important aspects of decolonization was the idea that the self-determination of peoples was inherently right, a concept that expanded 707

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into national aspirations the individualism characteristic of liberalism. Initially at issue for the elite Creole actors of the Mexican independence struggle was autonomy and some form of home rule within a revived Spanish monarchy rather than independence from the metropolis as such.1 As the intransigence of Spain stiffened in the face of unfolding events in the American world and as political fragmentation emerged within insurgent groups, independence came to seem more and more the only viable option. For someone like Lucas Alamán, decolonization meant primarily eliminating blockages to economic development, and only secondarily the implantation of viable political institutions, the latter in service of the former. For people today, obsessed as we are with the history and sociology of those great invented clans called nations, the issue of nationhood still dominates the headlines and remains very much at the center of Western human sciences. The decline of the traditional nation-state in the face of globalization, whether one applauds or laments it, is much discussed. Whether that decline has been irreversible is an open question given political trends in the North Atlantic world: the travails of the European Union (e.g., Brexit and its seismic echoes, the rise of populism), the abrogation of international efforts to deal with climate change, and the attempts to close borders to immigrants in contravention of international understandings. In Alamán’s time, Mexico’s place in the concert of developed nation-states depended on the consolidation of its nationhood, so the process by which that identity emerged determined the country’s life chances. In the developed Atlantic world of the mid-nineteenth century, the constitutive elements of nationhood—territorial integrity, sovereignty, a state monopoly on the use of force, predictable levels of fiscal resources, and at least a minimal threshold of civic rights for citizens—did not necessarily depend on the system of governance; that is, on whether a given nation (putting empires aside) was a republic or a monarchy. It was in the constitutional monarchies of the time with their elections and representative parliamentary institutions, after all, particularly in Britain and France, that the most rapid economic development and social change were taking place, the great exception being the United States. Viewed in this light, the professed monarchist conspiracy of 1846 and the advocacy of monarchism by the Conservative Party and by Alamán’s newspapers El Tiempo and El Universal seem less absurd, misguided, and anachronistic. The problem was that monarchy was associated with Spain, Spain with the yoke of colonial domination, and the oft-touted candidates Spanish princelings. One difference between Mexico and the western European monarchies of France and Britain was that, aside from the brief,

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violent hiatuses of the French and English Revolutions, the monarchies in those two nations were not only of long standing but also indigenous—with the exception of the Dutch prince William III, who as grandson of King Charles I ascended to the English throne. Reinstalling a monarch in Mexico might well have proved an impossible task in the 1840s, and, as it turned out, could not long have endured in the 1860s, especially when the French bayonets supporting Maximilian were withdrawn. Between the 1820s and the 1840s Mexican political culture had changed, and the republican genie would not be put back in the bottle. I do not think Lucas Alamán believed strongly in the inherent virtues of monarchy but instead in the efficacy of the institution in a particular historical conjuncture. When things went from bad to worse in the years after the Mexican–American War he was willing, in a mood of desperation, to accommodate Santa Anna as a cryptomonarch and did the best he could with what he had, only to be overtaken by death. Decolonization in Spanish America, however, amounted to much more than severing the bonds with the Spanish monarchy and inventing a flag. It moved on several tracks and at different speeds—political, social, economic, and cultural—and these changes were interrelated in complex ways. In the political realm, in the immediate wake of independence one sees what would be expected: optimistic constitution making, debates over separation of powers, an enduring struggle over federalist versus centralist forms of national political organization, and so forth. The transit from subject to citizen implied the construction of a new relationship between individual and state. It was a relatively easy matter by constitutional charter or law to enact the category of citizen but harder to perform it. It was not clear for some time what being a citizen of Mexico meant, let alone who citizens were and what rights and responsibilities pertained to this status. Alamán and other conservatives thought to limit the influence of the common people and popular opinion in political life, creating attenuated forms of citizenship and a restrictive or exclusivist republic of propertied stakeholders to guide and speak for the population as a whole, correcting for its violent, entropic impulses. A major issue in the rethinking of Mexico from colony to nation was how to incorporate indigenous people into the society and polity, a question that has endured in some fashion up to the present although its importance has diminished over time with the declining share of indigenous people in the national population. During the colonial period indirect rule through native elites was the common tool in Indo-America (the term is Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s) for the metropolitan power to establish domination. This system

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was, on the whole, less brutalizing, more efficient, and conducive to lowered imperial overhead costs, while serving the functional need of creating native stakeholders in the colonial regime. In the case of Mexico, and in the Andean area as well, when indirect rule of native peoples was replaced with direct rule by national and regional elites, life in the decolonized polity actually became worse for the mass of the native population. Alamán seems not to have given much thought to this, and neither did many liberals. Liberals believed generally in breaking open the semi-isolation of native rural communities and creating a free yeomanry, a central tenet of liberalism in the wake of independence and a hallmark of market society. Social decolonization took longer than political decolonization, however, and stretched well beyond independence. It had to do with changes in social structure, the emergence of new ruling elites, and ideas about race and class. One aspect of this prolonged process in Mexico, where it intersected with political decolonization, was the abolition of the titled aristocracy (1826–27) and its replacement with a class of hombres de bien, a natural aristocracy of talent, education, and material achievement much discussed in the nineteenthcentury Atlantic world more generally. I have equated a large segment of this group with the “political nation” in whose hands the fate of the country rested but who also sought to control the levers of the modern entrepreneurial economy they themselves hoped to construct. There is no question that independence opened Mexican society up to some degree to people of color, but there were (are still) long-lingering traces of the ethnically graded social hierarchy, the sistema de castas. This was a major component of the threat Alamán and men of his class saw in Vicente Guerrero: a caste war of people of color against those Mexicans of European descent. Economic decolonization took longer still. In the economic sphere, independence is not necessarily the opposite of dependence. The former colonies reentered the world economy as nominally independent nation-states, only to fall into the strong gravitational pull of a different metropolis with which they developed wildly asymmetrical terms of investment and trade. This occurred between Latin America and Britain, and later with the United States, a linkage often referred to as neocolonialism.2 As one of the chief thinkers in political economy of his age, Lucas Alamán was acutely aware of this relationship, which makes his failures as an entrepreneur all the more ironic, although he did better from a policy angle. His mature views on a strongly authoritarian, if not outright monarchical, centralized state were linked to his notions of economic modernization. He viewed political stability as indispensable to achieve

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modernization, while insisting on the continuing hegemony of the Church as guarantor of the social bond among Mexicans. Where economic development in general was concerned and industrialization in particular he faced a panoply of problems, including the virtual lack of a national infrastructure, regressive and inconsistent taxation policies, shallow markets, a scarcity of circulating cash, and the need to import foreign technology and expertise. While in power Alamán advocated selective tariff policies to encourage the shift from dependence on silver mining to a more diversified economy, the development of domestic agriculture, infrastructural improvements, and other measures for Mexico, a program similar to Henry Clay’s American System in the United States. Another problem Alamán and his contemporaries faced was that of replacing a strong regional structure and a weak—because segmented—class structure with a weak regional structure and a strong class structure; that is, to invert the relationship. Federalism and centralism may in part be mapped onto this. One example of Alamán’s efforts to address the creation of strong national markets and domestic capital formation was the Banco de Avío. Finally, cultural redefinition within a new polity like Mexico—that is to say, cultural decolonization—took the longest of any of these processes and has been explored by the development of postcolonial studies. Decolonization in the political sense is a process, with a beginning and an end, and postcoloniality a condition that may persist for a very long time. One famous example in the Mexican case is the centrality of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Mexican cultural and political life and to national identity. Her elevated presence in Mexican public and devotional life may be viewed in a postcolonial context because issues of national sensibility, ethnicity—she is a woman of color—religion, conquest, resistance, and a host of other elements converge in her figure. Her history is emblematic of the sort of rebranding of heavily freighted cultural icons that can persist from colonial to postcolonial situations. Decolonization in the cultural register also involved the development of patriotic epistemologies and a new republican imagining of national space and geography. This progression rested on the glorification of difference between former colony and metropolis, which runs counter to the colonial mindset of flattening geography for purposes of control and extraction, of what James C. Scott called legibility.3 Thus a geography that was perhaps impressive but a nuisance to the extension and application of colonial power became a marker of difference and even providential election to the postcolonial polity. Nineteenth-century romanticism was borrowed from European aesthetics, as, for example, the work of the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). In

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the United States there was the Hudson River School and in Mexico the somewhat later celebratory landscapes of José María Velasco, lauded internationally. The irony here is that postcolonial cultural producers often sought to create geographical uniqueness, mystery, and glory—a sacral national geography which then needed to be flattened out again to install railroads, reduce the friction of distance, and facilitate Mexico’s reentry into the world economy on a more modern footing. These four spheres, registers, realms, analytical categories, or whatever one wishes to call them are intimately co-determinative. One among several such interrelationships in which politics and culture interacted, for example, was the question of citizenship in the new republican milieu. The exclusions within the enactment of liberal citizenship in a republican framework were strongly redolent of traditional, pervasive racialist thinking, and one must ask what such considerations meant vis-à-vis the distinction between legal and effective citizenship in a society still largely rural and indigenous at the end of the period analyzed in this book. Another central realm of seepage or codetermination between political and cultural decolonization, one in which Lucas Alamán cut a wide swath, was in the writing of history in the first three decades or so after independence, assuming history writing is taken to be an activity of cultural production. Decolonization was not just about structural change—that is, who governed, who collected taxes, who offered guarantees of property rights, who was white and who brown, who was a citizen, and who got to say what. Just as crucially, it was about time and history as well, not only projection into the future but also about forgetting, altering, and expunging elements of the past—in short, about historical memory. Alamán basically likened the Mexican independence movement to an extended jacquerie. To him, the French Revolution, to which he often alluded, was less the avatar of liberal republicanism and modernity than a model for the bad copies performed by the Spanish American anticolonial insurgencies, characterized by Jacobin excesses and gratuitous violence, as opposed to a course of thoughtful and incremental reform that might have left the new republics less stained with blood. Yet other historians and public intellectuals of Alamán’s time viewed independence and decolonization as a vindication of conquered indigenous peoples, and some later fashioned an erotics of mourning, a necrophilia directed toward the ancient native tradition. This strain of writing exalted the greatness of the indigenous high-cultural tradition, bemoaning its annihilation by conquest and colonial rule and even championing its exhumation and rehydration with independent nationhood.

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Modernization Modernization and modernity (as opposed to modernism—they are distinguishable though related things)—seem to me much more slippery concepts than decolonization and can be defined in many ways; their genealogy is not unproblematic either. Thinkers in the Western world have been arguing about them since the eighteenth century. One contemporary treatment, as I noted in a footnote to the introduction, by the prolific, conservative British historian Paul Johnson places the advent of modernity to the years 1815–30, albeit with an almost exclusive emphasis on Western Europe, overlapping with Mexico’s independence and Lucas Alamán’s rise to power.4 This era saw the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the passage of the British Reform Act of 1832, the fall of the Bourbon dynasty in France, and corresponds in Mexico to much of the insurgency against Spanish rule, the achievement of Mexican independence, and the first steps in the country’s national political life. Mexico’s capacity to become modern was linked by virtually all historical writers and statesmen of the early republican period, whether liberal or conservative, to the westward displacement from Europe of political power over the lives of the Mexican people—to the emergence of the nation and the consolidation of the state; that is, to decolonization.5 Among the chief manifestations of modernity are the condition of constant, rapid, and discrepant change in the economic, social, political, cultural, and epistemological realms; the disenchantment of the world from a religious point of view and its reenchantment from a scientific one; the rise of the centralized, hegemonic state with its “iron cage” of capitalist and bureaucratic rationality; and a number of attendant diagnostic elements, including rapid rates of urbanization, industrialization, increasing literacy, and so forth. Whether these conditions have anywhere or at any time perfectly coexisted and moved together synchronously is open to discussion. The processes of modernization are not uniform either over time or space, nor are time and space themselves uniform within the frame of modernity. They may occur in cycles of acceleration and deceleration; it is not a requirement of the theory of modernization that change take place at a steady pace, only that it move forward continually and irreversibly. I have painted what I am calling the impulse toward modernization, and similarly the resistance to modernity of conservatives like Alamán, in admittedly stark terms. On the part of Mexican public men, state makers, and nation builders there was apparently no coherent, explicit project to achieve any such thing. An important aspect of decolonization and of greater interest to

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Alamán than issues of sovereignty, citizenship, or territoriality, it seems to me, was that it could produce modernization. By this he understood the absolute sanctity of private property, a modicum of political stability, and an industrialized society that could sustain a growing material prosperity, even if the benefits were distributed in a grossly uneven way so that a highly differentiated social hierarchy was underwritten by a skewed distribution of wealth. The linkage between decolonization and modernization was the reversal of Mexico’s decapitalization presumably implied by the severing the colonial relationship—ending the continual outflow of resources taking the form of taxation, trade prohibitions imposed by the metropolis, artificially elevated prices for consumer and other goods, and the continual drain of silver in one form or another. I am not sure that Alamán had a clear vision of where the process of economic change might eventually lead (would Puebla have become Mexico’s Manchester?), although he had his anxieties. Just the task of jump-starting the economy, of shocking it out of its torpor and focusing its energies in a more inward direction, was difficult enough. The impulse was primarily mimetic, it seems to me, seeking models to follow—for some the United States, for others Britain or France or both—rather than conjuring up programs ex nihilo. From the late eighteenth century the inspiration of the British model—not only what Enlightenment Scots like Adam Smith were writing but also what was happening in the British economy concretely—was clearly at work in the thinking of reformers all over the Spanish world. The colonial experience, decolonization, and modernization were intimately related. One way this was true was in the genealogical sense, in which modernity is said to be a product of colonialism, and in which the victims of the latter bore the costs of the former. For a huge proportion of the world’s population decolonization meant becoming postcolonial, more on an equal footing with the former exploiters, and more in line with the North Atlantic world in a simultaneous act of pushing away and approaching. I think Lucas Alamán’s career exemplified this ambivalence, the approach-avoidance that looks almost like a classic affective disorder writ large. Decolonization meant freedom and self-determination of a sort but also loss. Alamán struggled with the question of what to let go in the old order and what to keep. He advocated, for example, the abolition of the Inquisition, the abandonment of the old Scholastic curricula in the universities, and monopolistic exclusions in trade. And while he sponsored the Lancasterian System of primary schooling, wide public education, university reform, selective tariff policies, and industrialization, he also believed, for example, that the position of the Roman Catholic Church should

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go unchallenged, that some sort of secular mechanism of book censorship be established by the state, and that older styles of aristocratic deference and social stratification be maintained within new forms. Decolonization was not only a looking backward but also a looking forward—decolonization to what? Here is where a selective vision of modernization came into play, favoring moderate republican institutions, a strong central state, and industrialization, but not the secularism, materialism, chaotically democratized political life, and rampant social mobility he saw in the revolutionary Atlantic. Alamán lamented the corrosive effects of these developments in the closing passages of his HdeM: “In this century called philosophical, with all idea of honor and loyalty destroyed, nothing more has remained than the physical and the positive [i.e., empirical], to which those principles have been sacrificed that were previously the foundation of society, and have been reduced to vain and insignificant names” (1: 173).

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Notes

Introduction 1. The prolific British historian Paul Johnson, in his leisurely, anecdotal book The Birth of the Modern, writes that the modern era began in the immediate post-Napoleonic period, 1815–30. 2. Alamán, Historia de Méjico (hereafter cited as HdeM), 5: 566–67. Around the time Alamán offered his gloomy assertion that there were no Mexicans in Mexico, the liberal politician Mariano Otero (1817–50) used similar words to describe the state of the nation in the wake of the war: “In Mexico there is not nor has there ever been that which is called national spirit, because there is no nation”; quoted in Florescano, National Narratives, 279. 3. See the Mexican Pronunciamiento Project by the historian Will Fowler and his collaborators at the University of St. Andrews, at http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/pronun ciamientos/dates.php. 4. Coatsworth, Los orígenes del atraso. 5. See, for example, Chowning, Wealth and Power, and Cañedo Gamboa, Comercio.

Chapter 1. An Old and Distinguished Family 1. Alamán, Memorias; all translations from Spanish are my own. 2. Both the original Latin text and the English translation of Ovid, “Tristia ex ponto.” The late Eliot Wirshbo, of the University of California, San Diego, led me to and through the original poem and corrected my rendering of it in English. 3. On the cholera epidemic of 1833, see Cuenya et al., El cólera; Márquez Morfín, La desigualdad; and the older and somewhat superseded Hutchinson, “The Asiatic Cholera Epidemic.” For the references on cholera I thank Donald F. Stevens of Drexel University.

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4. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Alamán Papers, 39 (hereafter cited as BLAC-Alamán Papers, followed by item number). 5. Brading, Miners and Merchants, 305. The first Marqués de San Clemente was Alamán’s great-great-grandfather, not his great-grandfather, as Brading has it. 6. Erikson, “Life History.” 7. Except as otherwise noted, the genealogical information on which this family reconstruction is based comes mainly from Brading, Miners and Merchants, passim; Valadés, Alamán, passim; to a much lesser degree from Ladd, The Mexican Nobility, passim; from Lucas Alamán’s Memorias; and from Archivo Histórico de Guanajuato (hereafter cited as AHG), ramo Protocolos de Cabildo, 1725, fol. 331v; 1728, fol. 321r; and 1778, fol. 180r. 8. Valadés, Alamán, 4–5; and see also Zurita, Anales de Aragón, Libro 19, Capítulo 37, which Valadés cites. 9. On the division of the Mellado shares among Francisco de Busto y Jérez’s heirs, see Brading, Miners and Merchants, 264. 10. Much of the genealogical information was probably drawn from family oral tradition and from memory; Valadés, Alamán, 5–6, commits the same error about the birthplace of the first Marqués, also garbling his name. 11. On the history of San Juan de los Otates, see particularly Rodríguez Gómez, Jalpa, 120–30; and Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos, 82, 129–34. 12. Alamán, Memorias; the stanza quoted is from a work by the Spanish poet Tomás de Iriarte y Oropesa (1750–91). An “indiano” was a peninsular Spaniard who made his fortune by emigrating to Spanish America. 13. I have found the line “Dineros son calidad” (Money is quality) variously attributed to the Spanish Golden Age writers Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora, and Francisco de Quevedo, all roughly contemporaries. 14. Alamán, Memorias. 15. Brading, Miners and Merchants, 265. 16. On the third marqués’s amatory history, ibid., 304–6. The renunciation of the title by the third marqués is surrounded by a certain ambiguity since, as we shall see, first Lucas Alamán’s mother was said to have inherited the title and then her son by her first marriage, Alamán’s elder half brother Juan Bautista Arechederreta. To my knowledge neither mother nor son ever styled themselves marquesa or marqués de San Clemente, respectively, and titles of nobility were in any case extinguished in Mexico in the later 1820s. Had they not been, Lucas Alamán himself would have succeeded to the title at the death of his half brother in 1836. 17. A granddaughter of the second marqués married Alamán’s peninsular-born paternal uncle, Tomás Alamán. Her dowry included one of the great urban townhouses of Guanajuato. 18. At the death of his mother in 1727, Francisco Cristóbal had six older siblings. Of these, his eighteen-year-old sister Josefa would shortly marry Antonio Jacinto

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Diez Madroñero, a miner from Extremadura. This couple were Lucas Alamán’s greatgrandparents. 19. Brading, Miners and Merchants, 324. 20. Valadés, Alamán, 3, gives the date of her death as 26 April 1753. Juan Vicente’s father (of the same name) had remarried and fathered a second family, all but one of whom remained in Spain. Tomás Alamán, a child of this second union, was born in Spain in 1768 and followed his elder half brother Juan Vicente to Guanajuato, where he was living at least by the early 1790s. 21. Home pages for almost all of these places, promoting tourism, are to be found on the internet. They are for the most part modest but picturesque mid-Pyrenean villages with their own coats of arms, an important wine industry, and an abundance of amenities for visitors. Through a complicated intermarriage arrangement from this time the Alamanes became related to the Lautrec family and thus Lucas Alamán distantly with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. 22. Except as otherwise noted, most of the information about Juan Vicente Alamán’s career in this section is drawn from Valadés, Alamán, 10–20, and some from Brading, Miners and Merchants, 280, 293, 299–300, 353. 23. Intendant Riaño died eleven years later defending the city’s granary, the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, against the famous insurgent attack led by Father Miguel Hidalgo and described by Lucas Alamán in his HdeM. Father Lavarrieta was to fall under suspicion from the royalist government for his political sympathies. As a boy, Lucas Alamán would have known both Riaño and Lavarrieta well. 24. Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Carso (hereafter cited as Carso, with item number), Alamán Papers, 2–116, no date. 25. Alamán, HdeM, 1: 264, n. 6.

Chapter 2. A Silver-Plated Youth (1792–1815) 1. Hernández Chico, “Descripción.” 2. Rionda Ramírez, “Historia demográfica,” 23, 33, 45. 3. Thompson, “Children,” 47, table 1.5. 4. Hernández Chico, “Descripción”; Alamán, HdeM, 1: 2. 5. Lara Valdés, “Lecciones.” 6. Ibid. 7. Alamán, HdeM, 1: 263. 8. Alamán, “Épocas,” 17. 9. Lanuza, “Casas históricas,” quoted in Valadés, Alamán, 19. As of 2011 the house had been remodeled and converted into a boutique hotel, La Casona de don Lucas. 10. Prieto, Viajes, 50–51, quoted in Thompson, “Children,” 184; translation from the Spanish is Thompson’s. 11. Thompson, “Children,” 171.

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12. Valadés, Alamán, 23. Cornelius Nepos (c. 100–25 BC) and Quintus Curtius Rufus (first century AD) were Roman historians and biographers, the former of famous non-Roman military men, among them Hannibal, the latter of Alexander the Great. 13. Born sometime between 1782 and 1786, Rafael Dávalos was basically a mining engineer who happened to be teaching mathematics. Because of his engineering and metallurgical expertise he was commissioned by Father Miguel Hidalgo to take charge of casting cannon for the rebels. When the royalists recaptured Guanajuato, Dávalos made no effort to flee. Found walking the streets of the city among its royalist captors, he was arrested and was about to be released when a soldier in the process of untying his arms discovered hidden in Dávalos’s sleeve a piece of paper indicating that the young engineer had, in fact, overseen the casting of twenty-two artillery pieces. He was condemned to death as a traitor by the royalist officer Manuel de Flon, Conde de la Cadena, intendant of Puebla and brother-in-law of the dead Intendant Riaño. Dávalos was executed inside the Alhóndiga by firing squad on 26 November 1810. 14. Alamán, Épocas, 18. 15. Valadés, Alamán, 21. 16. Ibid., 21–22, quoting Carlos María de Bustamante, Cuadro. 17. There may have been some confusion on the part of the young Lucas Alamán as to who exactly the Red Captain was. Díaz de Bustamante (1756–1813) was a professional soldier born in Nueva Vizcaya, an Indian fighter who occupied various high military posts and was at points governor of Nuevo Santander and the Reino de Nuevo León. The Capitán Colorado better known to history, however, was Hugo O’Conor (d. 1779), the Irish-born soldier in the army of Spain who served from 1767 to 1777 as commandant general of the Interior Provinces of New Spain (the far northern part of the country), founded the city of Tucson, and ended his life as a brigadier general and governor of Yucatán. 18. Valadés, Alamán, 26. 19. Juan Bautista de Arechederreta, an increasingly prominent churchman by the time of Iturbide’s short-lived empire in 1822–23, was appointed honorary chaplain to Emperor Agustín I in July 1822. 20. Valadés, Alamán, 30–31, source uncited. 21. Alamán, HdeM, 1: 288, n. 55. 22. My account of the capture of Guanajuato by the rebels closely follows that of Lucas Alamán himself as he wrote it about forty years later in his HdeM, 1: 243–89 (quotation from 244), except where otherwise noted; and also Valadés, Alamán, 39–49. Of his own status as an eyewitness to many of the events of these days, Alamán wrote (1: 261, n. 2), “Everything relating to the attack and capture of Guanajuato I saw myself [or have from] trustworthy persons who were there. I was eighteen years old and have fresh memories of all the events.” 23. Alamán, HdeM, 1: 270 and n. 18. 24. Ibid., 1: 280.

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25. Alamán, HdeM, 2: 40, and n. 26. Alamán’s future father-in-law, Juan José García Castrillo, barely escaped with his life by hiding with other distinguished citizens in the Oratory of San Felipe Neri as Calleja’s forces approached the city. 26. Alamán, HdeM, 1: 281. 27. Later promoted to the rank of field marshal by Father Hidalgo, Ignacio Centeno was captured by royalist forces outside Mexico City at the beginning of November 1810, tried, and executed on 1 February 1811. 28. Valadés, Alamán, 48. 29. Although the meaning of “wound” for the word trauma seems to have come into common use in English by the seventeenth century, in the psychiatric lexicon “wound” only gained currency around the turn of the twentieth century. 30. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a traumatic event is one in which the victim experiences, witnesses, or has been confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury and to which the person’s response involves intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder are many but include problems with sleeping, eating, concentration of attention, mood swings, replay of the experience(s), lassitude, etc. 31. Almost all modern research on psychological trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder acknowledges that the effects of traumatic events on any given individual are highly idiosyncratic and depend not only on the traumatic occurrence itself but also on previous individual history, settings, interactions with other people, and so forth. 32. See, for example, Breslau, Lucia, and Alvarado, “Intelligence.” 33. See Shields, Nadasen, and Pierce, “A Comparison.” 34. On racialist discourse and late colonial debates among intellectuals, European and Mexican, concerning the nature and potentialities of indigenous people, see Deans-Smith, “That This Should Be Published.” 35. Valadés, Alamán, 50. 36. Flores Clair, Minería, 52, from which most of the discussion of the Colegio is drawn. 37. Vicente Cervantes Mendo (1758–1829) was a renowned botanist born in Spain who came to Mexico (then New Spain) with a royal scientific expedition in 1787, founded the Jardín Botánico the following year, and remained in the country for the rest of his life. 38. René Just Haüy (1743–1822) was a famous mineralogist whose later work concentrated on crystallography. 39. Antonio Ponz Piquer (1725–92) was a Spanish painter who traveled widely in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, worked for a time on the painting collections at El Escorial, and eventually came to be secretary of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. 40. The incident is discussed in Trabulse, Ciencia, 115–28.

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41. The subdistrict, or cuartel menor, where Alamán lived was about 70 percent Spanish in composition. Sonia Pérez Toledo graciously supplied Mexico City demographic data for 1812. 42. Warren, Vagrants and Citizens. 43. HdeM, 3: 183–92. 44. Ibid., 3: 187–88.

Chapter 3. Years of Pilgrimage, First Steps in Politics, and a Betrothal (1816–1823) 1. The journey from Mexico City to the port city of Veracruz by diligence took several days at this time and would have been fairly risky owing to the danger of attacks by insurgents. When Fanny Calderón de la Barca made the reverse trip in late December 1839, it took her party four full days; Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 63–90. 2. De las Fuentes never served in the Spanish Cortes, and by 1819, if not before, he was a member of the cathedral chapter in Mexico City. 3. The quotation is cited in the essay of Navascués Palacio, “Madrid,” 406. 4. Born in Veracruz, like Santa María, Pablo de la Llave (1773–1833) was a botanist and churchman who had spent many years in Spain, whence he returned to Mexico in 1824, after the fall of the Iturbide regime, and was to figure in the government in future years. Miguel Santa María (1789–1837) had a career similar in some of its more picaresque aspects to that of Padre Mier. He attached himself successively to Javier Mina and then to Simón Bolívar, and eventually, acting on behalf of the Mexican government, he negotiated in London the peace treaty between Mexico and Spain recognizing Mexican independence. 5. Pérez (1763–1829) was elected to the Spanish Cortes as a liberal in 1810 and to the presidency of the congress on three occasions. An adherent of Iturbide’s Plan de Iguala and the first signatory on the Acta de Independencia del Imperio Mexicano, he grew more conservative as he grew older. 6. Valadés, Alamán, 66. 7. Ibid., 476. 8. A decade later, in a letter to Father Mier, Grégoire was to express his esteem for the young Alamán, the Fagoaga brothers, and Manuel Ramos Arizpe, all of whom were introduced to him by Mier in the winter of 1814–15; Domínguez Michael, Vida, 666. 9. Méndez Reyes, “Humboldt,” 80, 84, citing letters of Grégoire to Mier of 17 March 1824 and 30 September 1825, and of Humboldt to his brother, 15 October 1824. 10. Porter, London, 165. 11. I owe the text of Alamán’s letter to Robert Jameson to the late Michael P. Costeloe, who encountered it in the Pollock-Norris Correspondence, Jameson Letters, Gen. 1996/15–17, University of Edinburgh. Jameson (1774–1854) was longtime Regius Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh. Known primarily as a geologist and miner-

notes to pages 71–81

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alogist, he was a teacher of Charles Darwin and Thomas Carlyle, both of whom found him to be an extremely boring lecturer. 12. Méndez Reyes, “La misteriosa estancia” and “Humboldt.” 13. Hunt (1784–1859) was an editor, poet, playwright, and political liberal who counted among his friends such English literary lights of the period as Jeremy Bentham, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and fellow poets Byron, long his patron, Keats, and Shelley. 14. The next four years of Lucas Alamán’s life, during which he was to be almost constantly on the move, are documented primarily in Alamán, Épocas, 21–24; Valadés, Alamán, 70–84; and BLAC, Alamán Papers, 83 (mostly his passports for these years). 15. Manuale, 54 [Google digital version]. 16. The brief passage quoted at the end by Valadés is drawn from Lucas Alamán’s necrological essay on his friend Fagoaga. 17. Alamán tells us in Épocas (22–23) that while in Geneva he met the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841), with whom he was to maintain a scientific correspondence over many years. Candolle was a polymath who had lived in Paris, taught at the University of Montpellier, and returned to take up a chair in botany in Geneva in 1816, the year before Alamán met him. He coined the term “nature’s war” to describe the competition among plant species, a concept that influenced Charles Darwin in his development of the principles of natural selection. Candolle dined with the English scientist in England in the late 1830s, so it might be said that Lucas Alamán was one dinner away from the author of The Origin of Species. 18. María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés kindly furnished me with copies of the documents; see the summary of treasury deliberations over Alamán’s original plan in Yale University, MS Latin American History and Culture: An Archival Record, Series 1, Box 62, folder 91, exp. J2, 1819; and Archivo General de Indias (Spain), Mexico, 2830, “Sobre el envoi por la casa de moneda de México de los diseños y modelos,” 1817–20; ibid., “Extractos de cartas del superintendente de la casa de moneda de Méjico,” 1817; ibid., Manuel Ortiz to Secretario del despacho de Hacienda de Ultramar, Madrid, 10 May 1820; ibid., “Minuta al superintendente de la casa de moneda de México,” Madrid, 3 June 1820; and ibid., Conde del Venadito to Ministro de Hacienda, Mexico City, 30 Septiembre 1820. 19. Alamán comments in a footnote in the HdeM, 5: 24, n. 18, that since returning from his travels the viceroy had treated him with “much consideration” (mucho aprecio) and that with his appointment to the public health commission “the political career of the author of this work began.” 20. Curiously, Lucas Alamán never used this document or even much of his fatherin-law’s recollections for his account of these events in his HdeM; the document is to be found in Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico) (hereafter cited as AGN), Operaciones de Guerra, vol. 170, fols. 489–91. 21. Valadés, Alamán, 91.

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22. HdeM, 5: 33, and n. 35. His half brother, Juan Bautista Arechederreta, had been elected a deputy for the Cortes of 1814 but obtained permission from the authorities not to participate; it was a moot point in any case because the body never met after Ferdinand VII was restored to power and abrogated the 1812 charter immediately. 23. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 41, n. 48; Valadés, Alamán, 91–92.

Chapter 4. The Spanish Cortes and a Final Sojourn in Paris (1821–1822) 1. Lista de los señores diputados á córtes por Nueva España para los años de 1820 y 1821 (Mexico City: Oficina de D. Juan Bautista de Arizpe, 1820). One of the deputies-elect from Valladolid was Antonio María Uraga (1775–1830?); on Uraga during the insurgency, see Van Young, The Other Rebellion, 269–76. 2. For an account of the pomp and ceremony of the opening of the Spanish parliament, see Rodríguez O., “We Are Now the True Spaniards,” 246ff. The politics of the Cortes ordinarias and Cortes extraordinarias of 1821–22 are discussed in a great many works, among them Ávila, En nombre de la nación, 204ff.; Frasquet, “El liberalismo doceañista”; Breña, El primer liberalismo español, 443–56; Anna, Spain and the Loss of America, 211–65; and Alamán, HdM, 5: 26–48, 349–69. 3. Diario de las sesiones de Cortes: legislatura de 1821 and Diario de las sesiones de Cortes: legislatura extraordinaria. The texts of Lucas Alamán’s speeches quoted in this chapter are mostly from these Diarios, but some are from Valadés and some from Alamán himself, in HdeM, 5; all of these sources are in close concurrence with each other, and all translations are my own. I owe interesting observations on the submission of written speeches for inclusion in the Diarios and the presence of stenographers to a personal conversation with Alfredo Ávila of the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 4. The average life expectancy of Mexican men at this time for those surviving into their fifteenth year was about forty-five, i.e., fifteen years plus an average of thirty more years; McCaa, “The Peopling of Mexico.” Elite men of Alamán’s background, income level, and life habits could be expected to live a good deal longer than the average, which takes into account rural indigenous people, although it is striking to note how many of his own children died in infancy. Still, he was halfway through his own life by 1822: he was to die at sixty-one. 5. Located near the Cortes building and other government offices, the calle del Turco (today called Marqués de Cubas) in December 1870 was the site of the attempted assassination of General Juan Prim y Prats, minister of war and president of the Council of State. 6. There is a long discussion of the origins and progress of Masonry in Mexico in HdM, 5: 48ff. María Eugenia Vázquez Semadeni, a scholar of Mexican Masonry, finds it highly unlikely that Alamán himself ever belonged to the Scottish Rite; Vázquez Semadeni, personal communication, 11 February 2015.

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7. Diario . . . de 1821, 2: 1406. The proposals also bore the names of the Mexican deputies Cortázar, Ramos Arizpe, Michelena, Fagoaga, de la Llave, Couto, and Medina. 8. Diario . . . 1821, 3: 2051–55. 9. Unless otherwise noted, documents drawn on here come from Carso, 23–1969 [undated], 23–1970 [undated], and 23–1971 [undated]. 10. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 364–65. 11. Ibid., 5: 365–66. 12. Ibid., 5: 32, 353, 354. 13. Anna, Spain and the Loss of America, 235–36. 14. Ibid., 222ff, 233. 15. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 354–55; see also Costeloe, Response to Revolution. 16. Felipe Fermín Paul (1774–1843) was a Venezuelan priest who enjoyed a distinguished career as an educator and politician. Bernardino de Amati was the curate of the town of Tonalá, to the north of Guadalajara in Nueva Galicia, and had arrived in Madrid as a deputy a few weeks before Alamán. Amati became a close friend of Francisco Goya, presumably while both were still living in Madrid, and in 1828 witnessed the certification of the painter’s death and attended his funeral in Bordeaux. Juan Antonio Yandiola (1786–1830) was a moderate liberal from Vizcaya and later finance minister. José María Calatrava (1781–1846) would later serve (1836–37) as Spanish prime minister and minister of state. 17. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 349–69; Ávila, En nombre de la nación, 204. 18. López Pelegrín (1767–1841), a former member of the Council of Castile, was described by Karl Marx some years later as a died-in-the-wool reactionary who boasted of his wholehearted devotion to the Holy Alliance (although he espoused liberal ideas during the trieno liberal); Karl Marx, The New-York Daily Tribune, 23 March 1855 (http:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/revolutionary-spain/ch09.htm). 19. Diario . . . 1821, 3: 2026, 3 June 1821. 20. Valadés, Alamán, 117. Cañedo (1786–1850) came from a wealthy landholding family of Guadalajara, was of a generally conservative political turn, served in a number of ministerial and diplomatic posts in the government of republican Mexico, and was assassinated in a Mexico City hotel under mysterious circumstances. 21. Valadés, Alamán, 125–26. The concluding Latin phrase is taken from the New Testament, Matthew 9:12, and is generally translated as “He that can take it, let him take it,” or, more colloquially in English, as “If the shoe fits, wear it.” The author was most likely Sebastián de Miñano y Bedoya (1779–1845), a churchman, satirist, journalist, historian, politician, and the father of costumbrista writing in Spain. 22. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 350–51. 23. On Toreno’s life and politics, see Joaquín Suanzes-Carpegna, “De la revolución al moderantismo,” and on his historical work, Breña, “La Historia de Toreno y la historia para Toreno.”

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notes to pages 99–113

24. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 352; Toreno’s report appears in the same volume as document 18, 638–41. 25. My account of the Cortes proceedings is based substantially on that of Alamán, in ibid., 5: 352–53; the text of the American proposals is printed in Alamán’s volume 5 as document 19, 641–54 and is headed “Exposición presentada á las Cortes por los diputados de ultramar en la session de 25 de Junio [sic] de 1821, sobre el estado actual de las provincias de que eran representantes, y medios convenientes para su definitiva pacificación; redactada por encargo de los mismos diputados por D. Lucas Alamán y D. José Mariano Michelena.” 26. Here in his reproduction of the text, referring to the invocation of millions of Aztec soldiers and heroes burning to defend their liberty, Alamán inserted this disclaimer in a footnote: “The writer [redactor] had to retain this ridiculously swollen expression because it was in the notes given to him, from which it was necessary to utilize the least jarring language in order not to offend excessively the pride [amor propio] of their [the notes’] authors”; HdeM, 5: 649, n. 2. 27. The following day Ramos Arizpe and Couto presented an almost identical plan, with the exception that members of the royal family were excluded “for now”; see HdeM, 5: 654. Documentary appendix 21 in HdeM, 5: 657–58, is the text of a letter to Alamán from Ramos Arizpe, dated at Paris, 15 September 1821, vehemently denying any involvement in a movement to place the Conde de Moctezuma on the imperial throne of Mexico. 28. Ibid., 5: 354. 29. Ibid., 5: 355–56, 356, n. 14. 30. Diario . . . 1821, 1: 392–93. 31. HdeM, 1: 359. Císcar y Císcar (1760–1829) was a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, scholar, highly placed naval officer, and liberal politician who twice was imprisoned and once sentenced to death (never carried out) when King Ferdinand returned to his absolutist regime and abrogated the constitution. 32. Costeloe, Response to Revolution, 94–95, 224–26. 33. Diario, 3: 2028–30. 34. Ibid., 3: 2281–82. 35. Ibid., 3: 2283. 36. Alamán is alluding here to the overthrow of Viceroy Joaquín de la Pezuela (1761–1830) of Peru by his chief Spanish military commander, José de la Serna (1770– 1832) at the end of January 1821 and of Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca (1754–1835) of Mexico by Francisco Novella, under analogous circumstances, in July 1821. 37. Alamán’s invocation of ergotism, the black mold that attacks barley and other grain crops under certain atmospheric conditions and that in several forms can be highly toxic to human beings, suggests not only the stunting of the grain itself—a metaphor for a benighted educational system, to be sure; but also the delusional mental condition, including psychosis, that can result from ingestion of the chemical; and even bewitch-

notes to pages 114–125

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ment or demonic possession. The reference to the “lecture hall” being replaced by the enlightened principles of modern science is surely an invocation of the stultifying influence of Scholasticism in Spanish American schools and institutions of higher learning. 38. Alamán, Épocas, 24. 39. At first a liberal tending toward the more radical end of the political spectrum and, later, much more moderate in his views, Yandiola (1786–1830) was born in Vizcaya, which he represented as deputy in the Cortes, but spent much of his childhood in New Spain. He supported the Cádiz Constitution, went into exile in England for a time, and upon the second restoration of King Ferdinand VII in 1823 fled into exile yet again, dying in Paris. 40. Dibdin, A Bibliographical Antiquarian and Picturesque, 2: 93. In Dibdin’s and Alamán’s time the library, open to the public, had long been known as the Bibliothèque Nationale, having been nationalized during the French Revolution. 41. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 669–71 (Apéndices, Documento 25), “Noticias de la formación de la Compañía Unida de minas mejicanas.” 42. It may well have been during this relatively brief visit to the British capital that he met William Bullock, the famous English collector of Old World (and later Mexican) antiquities; on this, see Costeloe, William Bullock, 131, 133; and Bullock’s own account of his travels in Mexico, Six Months’ Residence and Travels in Mexico, 157–59. 43. González Arnao, “in the habit of helping out Spanish emigrés in need of advice,” was to aid another Spanish exile find a hotel in Paris in which to live for several months on his way to Bordeaux—the aged Francisco Goya; Hughes, Goya, 389. 44. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 670–71. 45. What survive in the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores archive in Mexico are a much-amended draft of the dispatch, a finished letter without signature, and a modern typed transcript; SRE-GE, LE 364, folios 3r-6v. 46. SRE-GE, LE 364, folios 7r-9r. In the end the Barry loan only realized 56,000; Alatriste, “El capitalismo.” 47. SRE-GE, LE 364, folios 13r-15r.

Chapter 5. Brothers 1. Of the four handwritten volumes of his brother’s “Apuntes,” Alamán wrote in the prologue to his HdeM that “this inheritance, very precious to me, not only because of the truly fraternal affection I professed for the author, but also for the complete confidence merited by his veracity and good faith, covers almost entirely the period [1814–20] in which I was not present [in Mexico] or had no part in the occurrences to which I refer [in my history]”; quoted in Morelos: Documentos, 3: vii. 2. Guarner, “Un documento,” 59–61. 3. The seminary is not specified in any of the sources I have seen but might well have been the Colegio de San Nicolás. If it was, the young seminarian might have

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taken a class in logic or theology with Father Miguel Hidalgo, who taught at San Nicolás between 1779 and 1792. 4. How exactly this line of transmission worked is not clear, since María Ignacia Escalada y Madroñero, the mother of Juan Bautista Arechederreta by her first marriage and of Lucas Alamán by her second, was the daughter of a cousin of the third Marqués de San Clemente, Pedro José de Busto y Marmolejo, with whom the title supposedly lapsed for lack of means to support it. Since Father Juan Bautista apparently inherited the noble title but never used it because titles of nobility had been abolished in Mexico in 1827, at the churchman’s death his younger half brother could have begun to sport the title despite abolition or have been widely acknowledged among the former titled nobility of the realm to have succeeded to it: but there is no evidence that he ever did so or was so reputed. 5. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “El Colegio.” 6. Arechederreta, Mexico City, to King Charles IV, Madrid, 30 April 1807, Carso 3–171; and draft of petition to Viceroy Garibay, 1809, ibid., 4–201. 7. Except where otherwise indicated, the following account of the school’s history and its condition during the decade of the Mexican insurgency is drawn from a long report written by Father Juan Bautista Arechederreta himself and submitted to the country’s Supremo Poder Ejecutivo (SPE) in May 1823, by which time he had stepped down from the directorship and was serving in the cathedral chapter; Carso, Alamán Papers 9–790. The report would certainly have passed through the hands of Lucas Alamán, who had begun to serve in the government as minister of foreign and interior relations on 16 April 1823, about a month before the report was submitted. 8. “Testamento de Iturbide que otorgó antes de embarcarse,” http://soumaya. com.mx/navegar/anteriores/Anteriores09/2/TestamentoAgustinIturbide.html. 9. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, which delves deeply and insightfully into issues of female monastic life for this period, suggests that cycles of reform in monastic life corresponded to external critiques, and that one such period of criticism was building during the 1820s and 1830s, especially from Protestants and liberals outside the country; personal communication, 27 December 2011. 10. My discussion of Spedalieri and of Arechederreta’s translation of his treatise is based in part on the unpublished paper of Covarrubias Velasco, “La publicación”; and Connaughton, “Voces.” Arechederreta’s translation appeared under the title Derechos del Hombre. Born in Sicily, Spedalieri died under mysterious circumstances in Rome, said to have been poisoned by his Jesuit enemies. 11. Brian Connaughton, personal communication, 17 and 21 January 2012. The same author’s Clerical Ideology analyzes the sermons of Guadalajara clergy to find a “moment of youthful innocence” and “a major push in the direction of wedding the new to the old” on the part of churchmen. Spedalieri can be assimilated to this thinking in some degree. 12. Morelos; documentos inéditos, 3: 237–627. This is a truncated version of the “Diario,” which Lucas Alamán referred to throughout his HdeM as “Apuntes históricos de

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la revolución del reino de la Nueva España.” The anonymous editor/compiler of the volume of documents notes that this version of the “Diario” was taken from an anonymous typed transcript determined after “averiguaciones posteriores” to be a part of Arechederreta’s “Apuntes” under a slightly different title, although the nature of these “averiguaciones” is not specified. The editor cites Luis González Obregón (1865–1938), a notable Mexican historian, bibliophile, journalist, and archivist, to the effect that six years (1815–20) of the “Apuntes” are missing from this published version. González Obregón speculated that the entire manuscript might have come to rest in the library of the University of Texas at Austin through its purchase of the Genaro García collection or perhaps remained in the hands of Lucas Alamán’s heirs, then (in the 1920s) residing in London. The full text of the “Diario/Apuntes” is certainly not in the Benson Latin American Collection at UT-Austin, since I have used that collection extensively and found not a trace of it. 13. Diario, 244.

Chapter 6. The Meanings of Anarchy 1. Anonymous [Juan Bautista Alamán], Apuntes, 33–34. 2. The term “great wen” (a boil or other growth on the skin or possibly a cyst) was William Cobbett’s coinage, dating from the 1820s, referring to London as a sort of pathological growth sucking substance from the rest of Britain—not an attractive trope, perhaps, but a powerful one. 3. William Bullock described the Parián as “a trumpery building” and “a disgrace to the taste of the government which permitted it to spoil one of the noblest squares they have”; Bullock, Six Months, 133. 4. Mina, “Policía,” 45. 5. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 91, 106, and passim. 6. Oliveira and Crété, Life in Mexico, 54–57, who drew in turn on accounts by foreign visitors such as Henry Ward, Brantz Meyer, William Bullock, and Fanny Calderón, among others; for Alamán’s comment on sewage in the middle of the streets, HdeM, 5: 851. Also very useful for this brief account of Mexico City were the following: Gortari Rabiela and Hernández Franyuti, La Ciudad de México, and the accompanying volumes by Gortari Rabiela and Hernández Franyuti, Memoria y encuentros, vols. 1 and 3; Pérez Toledo, Elizalde Salazar, and Pérez Cruz, eds., Las ciudades; Pérez Toledo, Trabajadores; Pérez Toledo, Los hijos del trabajo; Blázquez Domínguez, Contreras Cruz, and Pérez Toledo, eds., Población; and Hernández Franyuti, compiladora, La Ciudad de México, 2 vols.; and Pérez Toledo and Klein, Producción, 180, table III.2.1. 7. María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco y Osorio Barba Jiménez Bello de Pereyra Hernández de Córdoba Salas Solano Garfías (1778–1851), La Güera Rodríguez, independence supporter and social belle, was the object of a number of vivid descriptive passages in Fanny Calderón’s famous letters. They first met in 1840, when the sixty-

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year-old La Güera was still quite handsome and güera (fair-haired), although in Fanny’s opinion she wore too much makeup; Life in Mexico, 141–42 and passim; for her comment on the Calle de San Francisco, 101. 8. The printed decree announcing the naming of the SPE is in Archivo HistóricoSecretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (hereafter cited as AH-SRE), Libros Encuadernados (hereafter cited as LE), 1446, folio 200r; Alamán’s letter accepting the ministerial appointment is Alamán to García Ilueca, Mexico City, 13 April 1823, in AGN, Gobierno Sin Sección (hereafter cited as GSS), bundle 55, file 5. 9. My account of the general politics of the 1823–25 period rests in part on the very clear narrative of Green, The Mexican Republic, but also on a number of other published works. 10. Rodríguez, “Struggle,” 10, n. 22, agrees that the records of the SPE are quite unrevealing about how decisions were reached. 11. See, for example, Michelena, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 4 November 1824, BLAC-Alamán Papers, item 116. 12. Valadés, Alamán, 146. 13. Ibid., 150–51. 14. Adapted from Arnold, Bureaucracy and Bureaucrats in Mexico City, table 3.7, 53. 15. The idea that the creation of social legibility is a primary function of states and in large measure a precondition of their existence is eloquently discussed in Scott, Seeing; and, for an interesting exploration of a particular case, that of France during and after the French Revolution, see Kafka, The Demon. 16. Alamán to Gómez Navarrete, Mexico City, 5 July 1823, quoted in Valadés, Alamán, 153–54, although where Valadés found it is not clear. The strong statement in the letter concerning the uninformed and unwelcome opinion of foreigners about Mexico seems a clear reference to Joel R. Poinsett, who had arrived in Mexico a few months into the Iturbide regime, was to stay for part of 1823, and would return in 1825 as the first accredited envoy to Mexico. In the spring and summer of 1823 he had already been shooting his mouth off about Mexican domestic affairs for some time and would continue to do so during the late 1820s. 17. SRE-LE 1446, fols. 226r–257r, collection of printed decrees issued by the Ministerio de Relaciones. 18. Although Alamán conceded in his later writings that Iturbide had consummated Mexican independence, he never counted himself a partisan of the man, thought Iturbide’s assumption of the imperial laurels opened him to ridicule, and viewed the short reign as a rather silly exercise in political theatricality; see Anna, The Mexican Empire, 84 and passim. 19. Jefe político y militar of Sonora to Alamán, 17 June 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 43, file 5, and legajo 48, file 12 (38), no date, but June 1823. For the Mexico City and Guadalajara incidents, see Anna, The Mexican Empire, 229–30; Green, The Mexican Republic, 38; Bocanegra, Memorias, 1: 225; and Zavala, Ensayo, 1: 203–4.

notes to pages 152–164

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20. For the suspicions of subversion and plots, see gobierno político de la provincia de Querétaro to Alamán, 10 May 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 58, file 4, and in the same file various other correspondence—for example, Manuel de Cortázar, Guanajuato, to Alamán, Mexico City, 16 December 1823, and Alamán to Cortázar, Guanajuato, 20 December 1823. 21. Cortázar, Guanajuato, to Alamán, Mexico City, 24 November 1823, AGN-Gobierno Legajos (hereafter cited as GL), legajo 1586, file 1. 22. Anna, The Mexican Empire, 136. 23. Of the multitude of studies devoted all or in part to these issues, the following are among the best—my general treatment of Mexican federalism (although I do not always find myself in agreement with the authors) relies on them except as otherwise noted: Anna, Forging; Benson, The Provincial Deputation; Carmagnani, Economía y política; Costeloe, La primera república; Green, The Mexican Republic; Ibarra Bellón, El comercio; Miño Grijalva, coord., Raices; Serrano Ortega, Hacienda y política; and, above all, the work of Josefina Vázquez, exemplified by Dos décadas and El establecimiento; and Josefina Vázquez and Serrano Ortega, coords., Práctica y fracaso. 24. For a rapid and insightful tracking of the evolution of Alamán’s political thinking that comports closely with my own findings, see Aguilar Rivera, “Alamán y la constitución,” especially the first dozen pages or so. 25. On this point, see Breña, “Consideraciones.” 26. Bustamante, Diario, 1:216, entry of 4 April 1824, cited in Rodríguez, “Struggle,” 6, n. 12. 27. Anna, The Mexican Empire, 99. 28. Ibid., xii; citation of Alamán’s view on xi. 29. Printed circular of 3 June 1823, SRE-LE 1446, fols. 259r–260v. 30. For Aguilar Rivera’s remark, see his Ausente, 184; Alamán, Exámen. 31. Hamilton, Federalist No. 9, “The Utility of the Union.” I have taken the liberty of transposing some of the text to produce a passage more cogent for my purposes. Among other things, Hamilton was arguing against Montesquieu’s notion (De L’Esprit) that republican forms were suited only to small territories. In fact, the position he and James Madison developed was that a very large federative polity stood a better chance of success as a republic because size, geographic differences, and the diversity of interests to be expected from groups in the component parts would tend to prevent one social group or statelet from becoming dominant over the whole. On this issue see Pole’s commentary in The Federalist, 43–47. 32. Madison, Federalist No. 10, “The Same Subject.” 33. For some illuminating reflections on passions and interests in the context of the early development of capitalism, tracing the intellectual genealogy of the concept in the thinking of Adam Smith, and of how interests might be related to political life, see Hirschman, The Passions. 34. Aguilar Rivera, “Alamán y la constitución,” 174; here he is quoting Costeloe, La primera república federal, 239. Madison remarked in Federalist No. 10 (51–52) that pure

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notes to pages 165–172

democracies, by which he meant small polities with direct citizen government, “have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” In a sense there is no purer form of democracy than a violent urban jacquerie like the Parián Riot, and although the Guerrero government was hardly a direct democracy, it certainly leaned much further to the left than any regime seen in Mexico up to that point. 35. Anna provides a brief account of the de la Garza uprising; Anna, The Mexican Empire, 107–8. De la Garza (1798–1832) was pardoned by Agustín de Iturbide and two years later captured and executed the dethroned emperor when he attempted to return to Mexico, in the interim being named jefe político of the Provincias Internas de Oriente (1823). Subsequently elected deputy and then senator to the national congress, he fought against the Isidro Barradas expedition of reconquest in 1829 and died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four, leaving behind him a considerable fortune in land and a widow who survived to the age of ninety. De la Garza was a thorn in the side of Alamán’s good friend, the military official and former minister of war Manuel Mier y Terán. 36. Rodríguez O., “True Spaniards,” 319–25, treats developments in Guadalajara/ Nueva Galicia/Jalisco in considerable detail; my account here relies in part on his. 37. Rodríguez O., “The Formation”; and Rodríguez, “True Spaniards,” 133–34. 38. Anna, Forging, 137. 39. In Guardino’s words a “popular military politician,” León (1794–1847), like so many other military figures of the period, rose to prominence as a royalist commander during the latter years of the 1810 insurgency, adhered to Iturbide’s Plan de Iguala, but then pronounced against the emperor in January 1823; he would later die fighting against the American invasion force in the Battle of Molino del Rey in 1847; Guardino, The Time of Liberty, 182; Anna, Forging, 136–37; and Rodríguez O., “True Spaniards,” 322ff. 40. Rodríguez O., “Struggle,” 9; Anna, Forging Mexico, 117. 41. Quintanar, Guadalajara, to Alamán, Mexico City, 1 May 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 47(1), file 26. Guadalajara (i.e., Quintanar and other officials there) had pledged their adherence to the plan on 26 February. 42. Diputación Provincial de Guadalajara to Alamán, 24 June 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 47, file 24. 43. Quintanar, Guadalajara, to Herrera, Querétaro, 1 June 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 47(1), file 27, and various notes back and forth between Herrera and Alamán. 44. Ibid., draft of letter from Alamán to Quintanar, 11 June 1823. 45. Anna, Forging Mexico, 116. 46. Ibid., printed manifesto of the Diputación Provincial of Guadalajara, 5 June 1823. 47. AGN-GSS, legajo 51 (1), printed circular over Alamán’s name, 17 June 1823. 48. Anna, Forging Mexico, 116.

notes to pages 174–187

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49. Diputación Provincial de Guadalajara to Alamán, Mexico City, 24 June 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 47, file 24. 50. Quintanar, Guadalajara, to SPE [via Alamán], Mexico City, 3 July 1823, in ibid. 51. Alamán, Mexico City, to Quintanar, Guadalajara, 12 July 1823, ibid. (italics added). 52. Valadés, Alamán, 155. 53. Alamán, Mexico City, to Quintanar, Guadalajara, 19 July 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 47, file 24. 54. Quintanar, Guadalajara, to Alamán, Mexico City, 15 July 1823, ibid. 55. Alamán, Mexico City, to Quintanar, Guadalajara, 23 July 1823, ibid. The “league” of European monarchies to which Alamán referred was the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, and Prussia formed in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 and managed by Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian state chancellor. This mutated into a broader alliance in the years that followed but was effectively defunct by 1825. The Holy Alliance endorsed King Louis XVIII’s invasion of Spain early in 1823 to quash the resurgent Spanish liberal government and restore the absolutist regime of his cousin, King Ferdinand VII. 56. AGN-GSS, leg. 48, exp. 12, various letters back and forth. Among the signatories of the initial Béjar declaration were Erasmo Seguín (1782–1857), a collaborator of Stephen F. Austin in his colonization schemes in Texas, later a congressional deputy who participated in the drafting of the federal constitution of 1824, and later still a supporter of Texas independence; and Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop (1759–1827), a Surinamese-born Dutch con man—his title of nobility was pure invention—land developer and also a collaborator of the Austins, father and son. 57. Benson, The Provincial Deputation, 112. Neither Benson nor Anna, nor for that matter many other historians of the period devote more than a passing reference to the Celaya junta, although it seems to me a key moment in the consolidation of federalist sentiment; Jaime Rodríguez O. provides a more detailed sketch of the meeting; “True Spaniards,” 317–19. 58. Alamán to provincial deputations, 5 July 1823, with annexed documents, AGNGSS, legajo 47 (1), file 28. 59. Printed manifesto from SPE, 25 August 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 54, file 6. 60. AH-SRE, LE 1446, fols. 259r–260v, 11 June 1823. 61. Alamán to jefe político of Oaxaca, 15 and 16 July 1823, ibid. 62. Congreso de Oaxaca to Alamán, 1 August 1823, ibid. 63. Alamán to jefe político of Oaxaca, 9 August 1823, ibid. 64. Alamán to Congreso de Oaxaca, 12 August 1823, ibid. 65. “Noticias ocurridas en esta Provincia de Oaxaca hasta hoy 5 de Agosto de 1823,” addressed to Alamán, ibid. 66. For an acute discussion of Alamán’s critique, see Andrews, “Reflexiones sobre algunas reformas.”

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notes to pages 189–200

Chapter 7. Domestic Tranquility 1. Valadés, Alamán, 223. 2. Ibid., 159. 3. Alamán to Migoni, London, 29 September 1825, AGN-Hospital de Jesús (hereafter cited as HJ) 424 (2). 4. In his 1850 testament, Lucas Alamán gave the names of his living children as Catalina, Gil, Carlos, Pascual, and Sebastián. 5. Valadés, Alamán, 223–24. 6. Another of the guests was Salvador Diego Fernández Vidaurrázaga (1879– 1958), a distinguished jurist, a carranzista minister during the revolution to come, and sometime Mexican diplomatic representative in Washington, DC. Judging by the last name, he was related to the Vidaurrázaga family and therefore in some distant fashion to his friend Lucas Alamán, the accident victim. 7. El País, Monday, 8 February 1909, 1, 3. I have been unable to identify the hacienda as a modern settlement or geographical feature under either name. A lawyer from Querétaro, León de la Barra (1863–1939) enjoyed a distinguished career as a politician—federal deputy, foreign secretary for periods under both Díaz and Huerta, governor-elect of the State of Mexico—and diplomat, representing Mexico in Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, the United States, and France, among other countries. He lived out the last quarter century or so of his life in Europe, serving for some time as president of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, established in 1899 and still in existence today. 8. Valadés, Alamán, 214–15. The following discussion of Alamán’s purchase of the Hacienda de Trojes is based, unless otherwise noted, partially on Valadés, Alamán, 216–19, although later references to his activities there are drawn from archival sources. 9. Notary Col. José Ignacio Rocha, fols. 191r–193v, 10 July 1828, Universidad de Guanajuato, Dirección de Archivos y Fondos Históricos, Archivo Histórico Municipal de Guanajuato, Registro de Instrumentos Públicos (hereafter cited as AHMG-IP), 1828. 10. Migoni, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 18 August 1831, and Alamán, Mexico City, to Migoni, London, 29 (?) October 1831, AGN-HJ 440, legajo 2. 11. Migoni, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 26 March 1825, AGN-HJ 424, legajo 2. 12. Migoni, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 5 October 1825, ibid. 13. The letter to Deputy Bustamante was not signed by Alamán or anyone else but clearly was sent at his instruction. Captain Guillermo M. Dupaix (d. 1818) [the nature of his commission is not clear, but he was known by this title and is so referred to in the ministry correspondence with Bustamante] was Hungarian-born of French origins. King Charles IV of Spain sponsored his scientific expedition in 1807 to explore

notes to pages 200–204

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the archaeology of the Yucatán Peninsula, and his lavishly illustrated publications were among the first to approach Maya culture and monumental archaeology in a serious fashion. His best-known work was Antiquités Mexicaines. The executor of his will was Fausto de Elhuyar, the famous Spanish-born mining engineer and director for more than thirty years of the Colegio de Minería in Mexico City, whom Alamán would surely have known as a young man. How Bustamante came into possession of these items is not clear; AGN-GSS, legajo 49, file 16, 2 June 1823. 14. 5 June 1823–2 January 1824, ibid. Cervantes (1755–1829) was another Spanish scientist whose original field had been pharmacology; in addition to his teaching duties as a botanist he was for many years the director of the Hospital de San Andrés, several decades previously converted from a military to a civil hospital. 15. One site under consideration was an old cemetery associated with the Indian hospital (Hospital de Naturales). In an unintentionally ghoulish remark, Cervantes told Alamán that were the campo santo used, the exhumation of the human remains might actually improve the soil quality, by which he meant presumably that aerating the soil and integrating it with whatever remained of the ancient cadavers would increase its fertility; he added that the same effect should be looked for from using material from the city’s tarjeas, basically open sewers, since underground sewers were installed only decades later. 16. For an excellent exploration of the history and meaning of the botanical garden, concentrating on the period 1780–1810, López, “Nature.” 17. Lucas Alamán, “Memoria que el Secretario de Estado.” The instruction mentioned was probably intended for pharmacy and medical students. 18. Memorias 1823, 62–63. 19. Alamán to Juan de Dios Uribe, 10 December 1823, and Uribe to Alamán, 11 December 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 49, file 10. 20. Alamán, Memoria. Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci (1702–53) was the famous Italian-born traveler, antiquary, and historian who, in the middle of the eighteenth century put together during his travels in New Spain an enormous collection of native manuscripts, codices, maps, paintings, and other items subsequently confiscated by Viceroy Fuenclara in 1743, deposited in the archives of the viceregal secretariat, and never returned. 21. Scott, Seeing. 22. Printed circular over Alamán’s name, undated (but almost certainly mid-June 1823), AGN-GSS, legajo 57, file 5. 23. Béjar and Tesmelucan, AGN-GSS, legajo 48, carpeta 12, doc. 35, July 1823, and ibid., doc. 34, September 1823; Antonio Gama to Alamán, 2 and 9 September 1823, and Alamán to Gama, 5 September 1823, Querétaro, ibid., doc. 33; Martínez de los Ríos: Gama to Alamán, 23 September 1823; Alamán to Gama, 27 September and 8 October 1823; Ministro de Guerra y Marina José Joaquín de Herrera to Alamán, 30 October 1823, AGN-GSS, legajo 58, exp. 2; AGN-GL, legajo 18, doc. 13.

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notes to pages 205–216

24. AGN-GL, legajo 56 (2), doc. 16, 2 October 1823 (emphasis added). 25. Alamán, Memoria (1823). 26. Draft proposal and letter of transmission by Alamán, 15 September 1823, AGNGSS, legajo 58, doc. 9. 27. Brittsan, Popular Politics. 28. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 486–87. 29. Alamán, Mexico City, to Migoni, London, 29 September 1825, AGN-HJ 410, doc. 3. 30. Valadés, Alamán, 183; AGN-GSS, legajo 43, doc. 1, 6 November 1823. 31. For the circular, SRE-LE 364, fol. 29r, 7 February 1824, and AGN-GSS, legajo 135, doc. 5, index of “resoluciones del ejecutivo”; letter to Hullett: Alamán, Mexico City, to Hullett Hermanos y Compañía, London, 7 February 1824, AGN-HJ 420, doc. 12; Alamán’s letter of resignation in Valadés, Alamán, 186, and citation of Zavala’s Ensayo, 185. 32. The original three members of the SPE were Nicolás Bravo, Guadalupe Victoria, and Pedro Celestino Negrete, the three substitutes José Mariano Michelena, Miguel Domínguez, and Vicente Guerrero. Bravo, Victoria, and Guerrero would all at one time or another occupy the presidency of the republic. 33. Pablo de la Llave’s letter: de la Llave, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 12 May 1824, AGN-GSS, legajo 68, doc. 23, and Alamán’s reply, 14 May 1824, ibid.; printed circular of 15 May 1824, AH-SRE, LE, 364, folio 30r. 34. López de Nava, Zacatecas, to Alamán, Mexico City, 28 May 1824 (and other letters—e.g., from interim governor of Querétaro, governor of Tlaxcala, bishop of Puebla, governor of Guanajuato, etc.); Alamán, Mexico City, to Hullett Hermanos, London, 14 May 1824, AGN-HJ 420, doc. 12.

Chapter 8. Diplomacy 1. See, for example, Cañedo Gamboa, Comercio, on British merchant houses in the San Luis Potosí region in the decades following independence. 2. In addition to the documentary sources cited, my necessarily schematic treatment of the British loans is based on the following works: first and foremost, Salvucci, Politics; but also Rodríguez O., “Los primeros empresitos”; Zaragoza, Historia; Bazant, Historia; and to a lesser extent, Tenenbaum, The Politics; Green, The Mexican Republic; Ibarra Bellón, El comercio y el poder; Marichal, A Century of Debt; and Ludlow and Marichal, Un siglo de deuda. 3. Salvucci, Politics, 2, 23. In such debt conversions sovereign debtors and creditors (bondholders) renegotiate outstanding debt by recalling existing bonds and exchanging them for new ones at agreed upon prices—typically heavily discounted from their face value—interest rates, terms of payment, and guarantees (e.g., customs receipts). Essentially this is a way of buying time, depending on the forbearance of the

notes to pages 217–222

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stakeholders, so that the owners of bonds do not lose their entire investment and the sovereign debtor go deeper and deeper into a financial hole. I owe this explanation of the conversion process to Thomas Passananti (personal communication, 26 September 2014), whom I have paraphrased here. 4. Salvucci, Politics, 34, 4, 11, 14. 5. AGN-GSS 54, doc. 10, 16 May 1823. 6. Much of this paragraph is based on Salvucci, Politics, 1–15; and see also Coatsworth, Los orígenes and “Obstacles.” 7. The Barclay firm seems to have existed for only a short period, 1823–26, and was not related to the modern megabank Barclay’s; Salvucci, Politics, 46, n. 63. 8. Much of my account of the Migoni–Michelena imbroglio is based on Salvucci, 43–53 and passim. 9. Migoni, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 17 July 1823, AGN-HJ 424 (2); Hullett Hermanos, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 8 August 1823, AGN-HJ 420 (12); Migoni, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 21 August 1823 (marked “secret” [reservada]), AGN-HJ 424 (2). 10. Migoni, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 27 September 1823, AGN-HJ 424 (2); Michelena, London, to Alamán, 24 July 1824, AGN-GSS 61 (4). Having departed from England on 11 May 1824, Iturbide arrived in Mexico on 14 July and was executed on 19 July. Michelena knew of his departure, therefore, but could not have known of subsequent events. 11. Migoni [unsigned], London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 10 August and 23 November 1824, AGN-HJ 424 (2). 12. Canning (1770–1827) had an interesting and illustrious career in British public life. In his politics a moderate Tory, and of relatively modest Anglo-Irish origins—his father died virtually bankrupt and his mother became a stage actress, a profession regarded at the time as little better than that of prostitute—he served in the House of Commons for many years, occupying, among other governmental posts, that of treasurer of the navy, serving his first stint as foreign minister during 1807–9. He served again as foreign minister from 1822 to 1827 and very briefly held the two portfolios of prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer just before his death in 1827. 13. Much of my discussion of Canning in relation to British recognition of Spanish American independence rests upon Rolo, George Canning. 14. Rodríguez O., Emergence, 88, identifies Mackie as English, which would not have been technically correct, in any case, although he was dispatched by the British government. Mackie was from Glasgow. As for Wavell, a very interesting character in his own right, he was to some degree typical of the men, particularly Englishmen, who sought wealth in the new American republics in these years. He was an English soldier of fortune and colonization empresario who had been in the British army, joined the Spanish army and was much decorated for fighting against the French in Spain, made his way first to Chile and then Mexico, and ascended along the way to the rank of major

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notes to pages 223–232

general. A friend, supporter, and sometime partner of Stephen F. Austin, Wavell developed his own colonization scheme in Texas—and in the process must have crossed paths in some fashion with Alamán—and eventually became embroiled in a series of legal disputes over large tracts of land there. On Wavell, see the Texas State Historical Society, Handbook. 15. Rolo, George Canning. 16. Alamán’s instructions to Mexican diplomatic representative in United Kingdom, no signature, no date (apparently a draft version), AGN-GSS 62 (41). 17. Michelena, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 25 July 1824, AGN-GSS 61 (5). À propos Michelena’s remark about Spain’s estúpido gabinete, Alamán himself in a later letter to Migoni referred to Ferdinand VII as Spain’s “estúpido monarca”—Alamán, Mexico City, to Migoni, London, 3–4 March 1825, AGN-HJ 424 (2). Much of this account of the diplomatic maneuvering for recognition is based on Rodríguez O., Emergence, 97–103 and passim. 18. Rolo, George Canning. Virgil’s Latin phrase in one of his Eclogues has been rendered in several variant forms, one of which Canning invokes here; it is roughly to be translated as “a new order of the ages is born.” 19. The printed circular and Gaceta Extraordinaria are in AGN-GL 1806 (1), 1; for Alamán’s letter to his fellow minister, Alamán, Mexico City, to Ministro de Hacienda, Mexico City, 22 March 1825, ibid.; and for Alamán’s optimistic assessment of the State of Mexico, Alamán, Mexico City, to Migoni, London, 20 August 1825, AGN-HJ 424 (2). 20. Alamán, Mexico City, to Michelena, London, 16 March 1825, BLAC-HyD 18– 2.4354 (2488). 21. Much of my account of this episode is based on that of Alamán, HdeM, 5: 425– 516 passim. 22. Oses and Irisarri, San Juan de Ulúa, to Alamán, 20 and 30 April 1823, SRE-LE 2183, fols. 45r and 47r (modern typed copies). 23. HdeM, 5: 445. 24. Modern typed transcriptions of letters from Alamán, Mexico City, to Guadalupe Victoria, Veracruz, 14 and 28 May 1823, SRE-LE 2183, fols. 49r, 50r, 52r. 25. Guadalupe Victoria, Veracruz, to Alamán, Mexico City, 18 June 1823, in ibid., 59r–v. 26. HdeM, 5: 487–88.

Chapter 9. The Poinsett Saga 1. Joel R. Poinsett, Washington, DC, to Anthony Butler, Mexico City, 9 August 1830, Anthony Butler Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, folder 7, “Correspondence on legation business, 1830–1834” (hereafter cited as “Butler Papers”). Butler succeeded Poinsett as American envoy to Mexico. Unless oth-

notes to pages 233–241

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erwise noted, my account of Poinsett’s time in Mexico is based on Rippy, Joel R. Poinsett; Bosch García, El mester político; Green, The Mexican Republic; Rives, The United States and Mexico, vol. 1; Gaxiola, Poinsett en México; Fuentes Mares, Poinsett; Hruneni, Palmetto Yankee; and for the York Rite/Scottish Rite Masonic conflict, Warren, Vagrants, and Vázquez-Semadeni, La formación. 2. A fairly representative view by Mexican historians of Poinsett’s baleful influence is that of Bosch García, El mester político, 7–64 passim, who saw the American envoy as laying the groundwork for political problems that were to outlast his stay in the country by many years. 3. Rippy, Poinsett, 131. 4. My account of Poinsett’s career is drawn in large measure from Rippy, Poinsett. 5. Ibid., 104. 6. Ibid., 105. 7. Clay’s instructions to Poinsett are reprinted in Bosch García, El mester político, doc. 3, 67–78. 8. Zozaya, Victoria, Obregón in Rippy, Poinsett, 106. 9. Poinsett, Washington, DC, to Dr. Joseph Johnson, Charleston, South Carolina, 27 March 1825, Calendar of Joel R. Poinsett Papers, item 39 (p. 12). 10. The young private secretary left a journal of his time in Mexico and a hefty correspondence with his family, chiefly his brother, later interpolated with the journal entries and published as Mexico, 1825–1828. Tayloe offered some negative summary judgments of Lucas Alamán, in this and in other matters generally echoing his boss’s political opinions. 11. Ward’s letter to Canning: Ward, Mexico City, to Canning, London, 1 June 1825, in Bosch García, Mester, doc. 4, 81–82; Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC, 4 June 1825, ibid., doc. 5, 82. 12. Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC, 1 August 1825, ibid., 91, doc. 14. 13. On Tornel, a military man, politician, and accomplished writer, see Fowler, Tornel. Anthony Butler, Poinsett’s successor as US envoy to Mexico, had an even lower opinion of Tornel and was more voluble about it. 14. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 517–18. 15. Major sources on the Masons are the older Mateos, Historia de la masonería; the useful but schematic Díaz Zermeño, La masonería, 127–45; but especially VázquezSemadeni, La formación. On Escosés and Yorquino political conflict and competition during the post-1825 period, see, for example, Green, The Mexican Republic, 87–111; and Warren, Vagrants, especially 75–98, on the 1826 elections. 16. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 517–18. 17. Mier y Terán, Matamoros, to Alamán, Mexico City, 30 April 1830, AGN-HJ 416–1, fols. 22r–v. 18. Lucas Alamán, “Memoria presentada a las dos cámaras . . . 1825,” in Memorias de los ministros, 47 [135].

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notes to pages 243–255

19. “El gobierno mexicano . . .”: [Alamán] to Poinsett, Mexico City, 20 June 1825, in Bosch-García, El mester, doc. 7, 83–84; “This government regards all our movements . . .”: Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC, 22 June 1825, in ibid., doc. 8, 85–86; “I feel very anxious . . .”: Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC, 5 August 1825, in ibid., doc. 15, 92–95. 20. My brief account of these negotiations is drawn from a number of sources, among them Reséndez, Changing; Rives, The United States and Mexico, vol. 1; and Rippy, Poinsett. Poinsett’s letter of July 1825—Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC—is quoted in ibid., 114; the letter to Clay regarding his September meeting with Alamán: Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC, 20 September 1825, in Bosch-García, Mester, doc. 21, 105–7. 21. Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC, 8 July 1827, Bosch García, El mester, doc. 127, 273–81. 22. Poinsett, Mexico City, to Clay, Washington, DC, ibid., doc. 127, 273–81. 23. Valadés, Alamán, 198–99. 24. Ibid., 161–62. 25. HdeM, 5: 509–10. 26. Bosch García, El mester, 15. 27. Alamán, Mexico City, to [Manuel Gómez Pedraza, Mexico City], 23 September 1825, SRE-LE 364, fols. 33r–v; Valadés, Alamán, 208–9; Zavala quoted in ibid., 208; Hullett Hermanos, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 9 December 1825, AGN-HJ 420, doc. 12; Rocafuerte, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 15 February 1826, BLAC-Alamán Papers, 126. 28. Brigadier Juan Pablo Anaya, Mexico City, to Ministro de Relaciones, Mexico City, 11 May 1824, and Anaya, Mexico City, to SPE, via Alamán, Mexico City, 19 May 1824, AGN-GSS, legajo 68, doc. 3; Anaya, San Luis Potosí, to Alamán, Mexico City, 12 June 1824, AGN-GL, legajo 8, doc. 13.

Chapter 10. Shafted 1. For the incorporation, Hullett Hermanos, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 10 February 1824, AGN-HJ 420, doc. 12. Citations of the Hullett–Alamán correspondence in what follows take the form HH (Hullett Hermanos) to LA, the locations London and Mexico City, respectively, unless otherwise specified. 2. Quoted in Morán Leyva, Lucas Alamán, 74; all translations from Spanish are mine unless otherwise specified. 3. Ward’s predecessor, James Morier (1780–1849), was a British merchant, diplomat, traveler, and writer with long experience in Persia, and the author of the Orientalist (in the Saidian sense) classic Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and several other books drawing on his experience of the Middle East. Henry (later Sir Henry) George Ward (1797–1860) had quite a distinguished career in the service of Britain, including mem-

notes to pages 256–259

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bership in Parliament, as first secretary of the admiralty and successively as governor of the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands and of the colonies of Ceylon and Madras, where he died of cholera in 1860. Ward eventually became embroiled in a political sparring match with Joel Poinsett, and both men were recalled for mixing in Mexican domestic politics; Ward, México en 1827, 439; Gilmore, “Henry George Ward.” 4. Ward, México en 1827, 375–77. 5. In the words of Gilmore, Ward’s book “was tremendously important in helping the Mexican mining companies regain public confidence [after the crash of 1825] and obtain more capital”; Gilmore, “Henry George Ward,” 42, 46 n. 31. At this time other figures in Mexico were also putting forth highly optimistic projections of the wealth to be taken out of the rehabilitated Mexican mines, opinions of which Alamán himself was highly critical. See, for example, the 1824 report composed by Licenciado Francisco Azcarate (1767–1831), one of the major tribunes of novohispano autonomy in 1808 and a signer of the Acta de Independencia of 1821, which Alamán described as “full of exaggerations and inexactitudes”; “Informe de la Diputación de Minería de Guanajuato al Congreso de aquel Estado, Escrito por el Licenciado D. Francisco Azcarate,” 1824, with Alamán’s notation on the cover page, Carso 10–815. 6. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 718, n. 8. 7. The term “Mexicomania” is from Leask, Curiosity, 299. Humboldt’s work was republished a number of times in French, Spanish, and German, and disillusioned British investors later blamed Humboldt’s work for having led them on; Miranda, Humboldt y México, 187–202; and see also Weiner, “La riqueza legendaria de México.” 8. Ward, México, 711. 9. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 239. 10. HH to LA, 9 February 1825, AGN-HJ 420 (12). 11. Ibid. Some decades later the mysterious speculator Augustus Melmotte, the central character in Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now (1875), was building a personal fortune on the basis of fraudulent South American mining and railroad projects. 12. Ibarra Bellón, El comercio, 176; Cassidy, British Capital; and Dawson, The First Latin American, 114–24. The Real del Monte company showed consistent losses until its liquidation in 1849, when its assets were acquired by the prominent entrepreneur and financier Manuel Escandón, under whose ownership it was to produce significant profits; Urrutia de Stebelski and Nava Otero, “La minería (1821–1880),” 122; and, more generally, Randall, Real del Monte. On the Tlalpujahua Company, see Staples, “Mineros.” 13. United Mexican Mining Association, Report [1827]. 14. Velasco Ávila et al., Estado, graph II.I, 30; Williams and Sims, Las minas, fig. IV, 28. 15. Poinsett, Notes, 203–33.

742

notes to pages 259–267

16. Rippy, British Investments, 17–18. 17. Ibid.; the £6,600,000,000 number accords reasonably well with the £5,665,000,000 of my own calculations based on the figures for relative sterling values in the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries presented in Sinclair, The Land, “Author’s Note: The Value of Money,” xxv–xxvi, who gives the value multiplier between 1820–30 and 1998 as about 55. 18. Quoted in Costeloe, William Bullock, 140. 19. Other writers of the time did much the same thing. One of many pamphlets from around this time boosting the English mining companies, written by Henry English, cited Alamán in a similar vein, praising his “high character and general information improved by a long residence in different parts of Europe, [and his] fit[ness] for filling the station of Minister of the Interior and for Foreign Affairs,” noting as well his “indefatigable zeal and activity” (32). His presence as a principal in the Franco-Mejicana Company (which would shortly mutate into the United Mexican Mining Association) “not only ensures eventual success by his knowledge, but as a public character with powerful connections, he nationalizes the new establishment in Mexico” (33; italics added). In writing later in the pamphlet about the Unida, which had grown out of the FrancoMejicana, English stated that as president of the Mexican management board Alamán had fulfilled his duties “to the general satisfaction of every person connected with the Company” (102); Henry English, General Guide. 20. Disraeli, An Inquiry, 99–100, 117ff. In passing, Disraeli noted the “almost affectionate spirit which [Alamán’s ministerial report] breathes towards this country [i.e., Britain].” 21. This account of Mackie and his mission is based on Gutiérrez López, La inversión, 36; Reid, The Secret War, 8–9; Rippy, “Britain’s Role,” 2–4; and Costeloe, William Bullock, 148. 22. Alamán, Documentos, 1: 151, cited in Alatriste, “El capitalismo británico,” 3. 23. For a printed circular regarding foreign ownership of mining properties, over Alamán’s signature, see AGN-GSS 57(5), 8 October 1823; and also a printed congressional decree of 11 October 1823, AGN-GSS 53(2). 24. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 669. 25. HH to LA, 8 August 1823, AGN-HJ 420 (12). 26. HH to LA, 1 October 1823, ibid. 27. HH to LA, 10 February 1824, AGN-HJ 420 (12); HH to LA, 21 February 1824, ibid. 28. Http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/DEV/Clovelly/RowlandStephenson1829.html. 29. One of Glennie’s achievements as a very young man during his days in Mexico was his ascent of the volcano Popocatépetl in the company of his brother Frederick, an event he described in great detail in a letter to their father in 1827. 30. Alamán, Mexico City, to Francisco Borja Migoni, London, 12 May 1824, AGNHJ 420 (12). (In what follows, the abbreviations LA and FBM stand for Alamán and

notes to pages 268–280

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Migoni, respectively, and the locations understood to be Mexico City and London, respectively, unless otherwise specified.) 31. Ibid. William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828) was an English chemist and physicist noted for inventing a technique for the processing of platinum and for discovering the elements palladium and rhodium. 32. On some questionable business dealings of Alamán, see Van Young, “Was Mexico’s Greatest.” 33. LA to HH, 14 May 1824, AGN-HJ 420 (12). 34. HH to LA, 14 July 1824, ibid. 35. My account of Herring, Graham, and Powles is based largely on Eakin, British Enterprise; and Safford, “Foreign and National Enterprise.” 36. James Vetch (1789–1869) was in many ways representative of the sort of talent British investments attracted to Mexico and mining enterprises elsewhere in Latin America. As a young engineer in the British army he had served with expeditionary forces in Spain (1810–14) but went on half pay in 1824 and went to Mexico to work for the Real del Monte Company. He arrived as the leader of the British commissioners of the Real del Monte Company in the winter of 1824 and remained with the concern until his dismissal in 1827. Vetch spent much of the period up until 1835 in Mexico, working for another mining company and being active in mapping and road building. An early and notable proponent of an interoceanic canal across the Isthmus of Suez (Ferdinand de Lesseps later appended an early report of Vetch’s to his project for the canal), Vetch, after his activities in Mexico, went on to have a long, distinguished career as an engineer in Britain; and see Randall, Real del Monte, 39–40 and passim. 37. Ward, México en 1827, 566ff. 38. United Mexican Mining Association, Report (1826), 3ff. 39. Ibid., 48–52. 40. HH to LA, 28 September 1824, AGN-HJ 424 (2); FBM to LA, 6 and 23 November 23, 1824, and 14 January 1825, AGN-HJ 420 (12); LA to FBM, 11 December 1824, ibid. 41. HH to LA, 13 January 1825, AGN-HJ 420 (12). 42. Ibid. William Huskisson (1770–1830) was a financier, government minister, and longtime Tory MP who served briefly as secretary of the treasury, secretary of state for war and the colonies, leader of the House of Commons, and president of the Board of Trade (1823–27). He met his accidental death, famously, under the wheels of George Stephenson’s “Rocket” locomotive while attending the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830. 43. FBM to LA, 25 May 1825, AGN-HJ 424 (2). 44. LA to HH, 10 June 1825, ibid. 45. For the “adventurers” remark, see HH to LA, 4 June 1825, AGN-HJ 420 (12). 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid.

744

notes to pages 280–286

48. The Turkish-born Schoolbred (b. Smyrna, 1798), the son of a British merchant, was shortly to marry Sybylla Bullock, the daughter of William Bullock; Costeloe, William Bullock, 162–64. 49. HH to LA, 4 November 1825, AGN-HJ 420 (12). 50. As noted, Alamán held a Spanish royal patent for such a process, but how that squared with what Lauckner brought is not clear. 51. United Mexican Mining Association, Report (1826), 81–85. The machine à colonne d’eau was a pump driven hydraulically, by the weight of water, rather than by a steam engine. 52. For fragments of Buchan’s diary, see “The Great Trek of the Transport Party,” on the website of the Cornish Mexican Cultural Society (www.cornish-mexico.org/ mexicosoc2.htm). 53. HH to LA, 9 December 1825, AGN-HJ 420 (12); FBM to LA, Mexico City, 26 January 1826, AGN-HJ 424 (2). Migoni also drew an interesting connection between prospects for recovery in the mining companies and the state of European politics. Nicholas I had become czar of Russia in December 1825, although Migoni says nothing in his letter of the Decembrist Revolt of 25 December 1825, of which he may yet have been unaware. He predicted cordial responses to this clouded accession to the Russian throne from the French king, Charles X, and the British monarch, George IV, seeing all this as a sign of continuing peace in Europe, and therefore of stable economic conditions and an economic environment more favorable to Latin American investments. 54. Dahlgren, Historical Mines, 22–23. Dahlgren provides a thumbnail biography of Lucas Alamán riddled with errors, 23–24. For example, he misspells his name, mistakes the year of his birth, has him joining the “Army of Independence” as a “mere boy” in 1810, ascribes to him “opposition to the restoration of the Spanish system” as well as to the execution of Agustín de Iturbide, and so forth. 55. Frederick Huth and Company had for some reason moved into the underwriting and management position for the United Mexican Mining Association formerly occupied by Hullett Brothers; see, for example, Frederick Huth, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 15 November 1828, AGN-HJ 374 (2). Citations of the Huth correspondence will hereafter take the form FH to LA or LA to FH, the locations understood to be London and Mexico City unless otherwise specified. 56. For a chatty but fascinating biography of Frederick Huth, see Murray, Home from the Hill. One of the Huth descendants by marriage was the subject of a 1907 portrait by John Singer Sargent. A curious episode involving Frederick Huth is related, from his diaries, by his biographer and distant descendant Andrew Murray. Through his wife’s connection with the Duke of Veragua in La Coruña, Huth was for some years entrusted with the personal jewelry of Princess Marie Caroline of Austria (1752–1814), queen consort of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and sister of Marie Antoinette. Marie Caroline’s ill-fated daughter, Princess Maria Antonietta (1784–1806), was the first wife

notes to pages 286–293

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of Fernando VII. She brought her mother’s personal jewelry and a quantity of cash to La Coruña for safekeeping by the duke, and these items passed into the care of Frederick Huth and his wife, who took them with them when they emigrated to London in 1809. Queen Marie Caroline never recovered her jewels, since she died in Vienna in September 1814 while pressing at the Congress of Vienna for her restoration to the throne of Naples, with Napoleon in his first exile on Elba and Lucas Alamán on his way from Madrid to Paris. Upon Ferdinand’s restoration in 1814, Huth traveled with his sister-in-law to Madrid to restore to the king the property of his first wife, recording that during their very brief interview the monarch seemed highly indifferent to the return of the jewelry. Basing himself on Huth’s account, Murray described “El Deseado” as “completely under the influence of a clique of snuffling priests and very dubious young aristocrats, . . . his manners . . . non-existent”; Murray, Home from the Hill, 108. 57. FH to LA, 15 August and 10 October 1826, AGN-HJ 424 (1); FBM to LA, 19 October and 5 December 1826, AGN-HJ 424 (2). 58. Some evidence indicates that at this time Alamán, now about two years into his formal arrangement as manager of the holdings of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone in Mexico, was in some way commingling funds from the United Mexican Mining Association and the duque to facilitate the remission of cash to the latter, chargeable to his Mexican properties. The outlines of this practice are not entirely clear, but Frederick Huth seemed to feel that there was some element of risk involved, informing Alamán in a friendly but firm tone that his company would assume no responsibility for such transactions; FH to LA, 16 January 1827, AGN-HJ 416 (9). 59. Randall, Real del Monte, table 1, 73. 60. United Mexican Mining Association, Report of the Proceedings (1827). 61. The worrisome political situation included the ongoing conflict between adherents of the York and Scottish Rite Masons; the liberal gains in the congressional elections of late 1826; the late 1827 expulsion of the Spaniards, whom Alamán described as “people very useful for their capital and their industriousness”; and the promonarchical Padre Arenas conspiracy of the first half of 1827. For all these matters, see FH to LA, 20 July and 16 August 1827; LA to FH, 22 August 1827 and 15 March 1828; FH to LA, 24 May 1828; and LA to FH, 16 June 1828, all in AGN-HJ 424 (1). 62. My account of this incident is based entirely on newspaper reportage in the Águila Mexicana, “Suplemento al Águila Mexicana, no. 225,” 28 July 1828; and El Sol, no. 1884, 11 August 1828, respectively in Carso 10–838 and 10–839. Alamán was closely associated with the Mexico City newspaper El Sol, including providing it with financial support. 63. LA to FH, 18 August 1828, AGN-HJ 424 (1). 64. LA to FH, 5 April and 1 May 1829, AGN-HJ 374 (2). One of the European-born Spaniards exempted from expulsion, by action of the Mexican senate, was Lucas Alamán’s uncle Tomás, whom Sims misidentifies as Alamán’s father; Sims, The Expulsion, 36, 99.

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notes to pages 294–304

65. Registro Oficial, 23 March 1830, AGN-GSS 136 (1). 66. FBM to LA, 18 March and 20 May 1830, AGN-HJ 440 (2). 67. Francisco García, Zacatecas, to Alamán, Mexico City, 27 August 1830, and Alamán’s draft reply, written in the margin of the letter, 1 September 1830, AGNGobernación, Banco de Avío (hereafter AGN-BA), 1 (46). 68. LA to FBM, 30 September and 2 April 1830, AGN-HJ 440 (2). 69. The basic biographical data on McGillivray have been drawn from the article on him in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-e. php?Biold=37666. 70. LA to FBM, 4 November 1830, AGN-HJ 440 (2). 71. FBM to LA, 9 November 1830, ibid. 72. FBM to LA, 6 May, 22 September, and 20 October 1831, ibid. 73. LA to FBM, 29 (?) October 1831, ibid. 74. United Mexican Mining Association, Report . . . of 1827, annexed letter of Lucas Alamán, Mexico City, 28 March 1827, iii. 75. Alamán, Mexico City, to José María Bracho, Sombrerete, 23 March 1833; BLAC, Minas de Sombrerete. 76. Manuel Baranda, Guanajuato, to Alamán, Mexico City, 16 September 1836, and Alamán, Mexico City, to Baranda, Guanajuato, 28 September 1836, AGN-HJ 374 (1–22). 77. Marrero and Dobado, “Mining-Led Growth”; and on the quarter century trend in mercury prices, see Randall, Real del Monte, table 6, 168. 78. Ibid., table 3, 84. Over its twenty-five-year life, the Real del Monte Company showed a profit in only five years and ended up some five million pesos in the red; ibid., table 1, 73. 79. For example, see the 1839 inquiry by an entrepreneur in Puebla—asking the caliber and the height to which the machine could raise a column of water—about buying a large water pump; G[umersindo] Saviñon, Puebla, to Alamán, Mexico City, 17 May 1839, AGN-HJ 420 (1–77). Saviñon was the partner of Estevan de Antuñano in the Puebla textile factory La Constancia Mexicana. 80. José María de Bassoco, Mexico City, to Mariano Riva Palacio, Mexico City, 28 December 1848, BLAC-Mariano Riva Palacio Papers, 3003. Bassoco (1795–1877), the ex-conde de Bassoco, although primarily known as a literary figure—he wrote an obituary of Alamán in 1853—came from an extremely wealthy Spanish-Mexican family with heavy mining interests; Riva Palacio (1803–80), a lawyer (appointed to defend Emperor Maximilian), career politician, and sometime government minister, was elected three times to the position of governor of the State of Mexico and was the son-in-law of the martyred independence hero and president Vicente Guerrero, in whose judicial murder Lucas Alamán was centrally implicated. The correspondence between Alamán and Riva Palacio nonetheless suggests a cordial relationship between the two. 81. In analyzing Alamán’s thinking about economics, Francisco Calderón has maintained that his views on the place of mining in the national economic picture re-

notes to pages 304–310

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mained completely consistent throughout his public career, but this is clearly not the case, since Alamán’s opinion about the relative weight of the sector in the economy did evolve over time; Calderón, “El pensamiento económico,” 438. 82. Alamán, “Memoria” (1823). 83. [Alamán], Representación dirigida al Exmo. Señor Presidente (1843).

Chapter 11. Managing the Feudal Remnant 1. James wrote in a letter from earlier that year that “the exhibition will frighten me from Paris—such inventions and such monstrous quantity and number are a direct rejection of everything I hold pleasant or, for myself, possible in life”; Henry James, London, to Miss Reubel, 23 March 1889, as cited in James, Henry James, 216. 2. Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico. 3. A hand-drawn document in the form of a certificate representing the medals garnered by the hacienda’s products, AGN-HJ 390–8, no author, 1891; AGN-HJ 420– 13, no date, 1905. See also Barrett, The Sugar Hacienda; Juan Bautista Alamán died in 1907. 4. Alamán, Mexico City, to Terranova y Monteleone, Palermo, 30 March 1853, Alamán, Obras, 664–68 (hereafter, the parties to the Alamán–Terranova y Monteleone correspondence will be abbreviated LA and TyM, the locations, respectively, Mexico City and Palermo, unless otherwise specified). The concession alluded to, initially for the building of a transisthmian canal, was conferred on the entrepreneur José de Garay by President Santa Anna in 1842. Topographical and engineering studies of the project’s feasibility were carried out, but the work was never undertaken. These early discussions of the project developed while Alamán was in his first ministry; for the involvement of Baron Alexander von Humboldt, who politely declined to be named president of an interoceanic canal company, see Humboldt (Berlin?), to Tomás Murphy, London, undated (but certainly July 1824), AH-SRE, LE 2252. See also Garner, British Lions, 100–104 and passim; and also Glick, “The Tehuantepec Railroad.” 5. Calderón de la Barca, Mexico City, to Prescott, Boston, 20 June–3 July 1840, Prescott, Correspondence, 135–36; Prescott, Boston, to Pascual de Gayangos, London, 15 July 1841, ibid., 234–35; Prescott [Boston?], to Calderón de la Barca, Mexico City, 29 June 1841, ibid., 229–31. Gonzalo (Gonzalvo in Italian) de Córdoba (1453–1515), also known as the Great Captain, was a famous Spanish military commander who fought in the reconquest of Granada and the Italian Wars. A supporter of Isabel of Castile, he was therefore a distant ally of the Busto family in opposing the claims of La Beltraneja. He served as viceroy of Naples in 1504 and held the title Duke of Terranova, a 1502 creation of the Catholic Kings. 6. Although feudal in origin and embracing extensive political and judicial powers, by the early republican period the Cortés holdings were no longer technically

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notes to pages 310–317

feudal since the Marquesado had been shorn of these jurisdictions by Mexican law. Charles Hale points out that Mexican liberals reserved the term “feudal” almost exclusively for the Marquesado holdings; Hale, Mexican Liberalism, 118–19. 7. In introducing the treatise, Alamán noted that Thiers had turned from his earlier Jacobin tendencies and was now (in the late 1840s, as a Bonapartist) on the side of the angels. Karl Marx referred to Thiers as a “monstrous gnome.” 8. The idea of a Spanish fantasy past I owe to Brian Connaughton, personal communication. 9. Abogado de cámara to gobernador of the Marquesado, Mexico City, 23 May 1791, Carso 10–806. 10. What he failed to notice, may not have been trained to see, or simply not mentioned in the notarized document for reasons of propriety were syphilitic lesions on the bones. Modern forensic analysis has suggested that Fernando Cortés suffered a chronic form of the disease. 11. Marqués de Sierra Nevada to Archbishop Núñez de Haro y Peralta, Mexico City, 27 June 1794, with annexed document, Carso 10–807; and account by Marqués de Sierra Nevada of reburials of Cortés’s remains [undated but probably 1794], Carso 9–794. 12. William Bullock visited the Hospital de Jesús sometime early in 1823 in the company of the Conde de Lucchesi; Bullock, Six Months, 158–59. He praised the establishment itself, remarked on the “neat church” located there, and said Tolsa’s bronze bust of Fernando Cortés was “well executed.” The traveling Englishman continued, “A strong iron-bound chest was produced, and when unlocked we were allowed to touch the bones of him who conquered and added New Spain to the territories of Charles V. I attentively examined the cranium of this extraordinary person, but saw nothing to distinguish it—I should judge from it that his person was small. Some of the teeth have been lost before death.” 13. MacNutt, Fernando, 436–38. 14. The Lucchesi-Palli family was highly ramified and related by marriage to a number of German and English noble lineages as well as to the Bourbons. For genealogical and biographical information on the Lucchesi-Palli, see the following websites: www.angelfire.com/realm/goth/goth/lucchesi.html; www.geneall.net/1/per_page. php?id=63375; and it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucchese_Palli#Membri_illustri. 15. TyM to LA, 14 June 1824, AGN-HJ 374 (2), exp. 36. 16. LA to TyM, 24 November 1824, ibid. 17. TyM to LA, 16 January 1826, AGN-HJ 374 (2). 18. Linda Arnold, personal communication, 10 July 2013. 19. TyM to LA, 21 August 1826, AGN-HJ 374 (2). 20. The figures, all from anonymous accounts and fragments of accounts prepared in tabular form by the staff of the casa establishment in Mexico City, and ancillary discussion by Alamán, are drawn from the Hospital de Jesús archive exclusively.

notes to pages 317–324

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21. Barrett, Sugar Hacienda, table 1, 127, indicates that by the mid-nineteenth century the sources and totals of Marquesado income had diminished, despite the considerable profits produced by Atlacomulco. 22. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility, 158–59, says the value of Atlacomulco in 1837 was 100,000 pesos, which seems low to me. On the other hand, the Marquesado holdings had been damaged by the period of sequestration, 1833–35, so perhaps this is a plausible estimate after all. The same author gives a value for the property of 250,000 pesos by midcentury, by which time Alamán had taken over direct supervision of its management, introduced a number of technical innovations and new crops, and the hacienda was benefiting from the windfall prices for its sugar spurred by the California Gold Rush. 23. Alamán himself placed the global value of the Marquesado holdings at 1.4 million pesos in 1821, which is possible. By way of comparison, of other noble fortunes in Mexico in the early republican period, when Lucas Alamán managed the Marquesado interests, the largest were linked to mining, such as that of Alamán’s friend the Marqués del Apartado, with an estimated fortune in the 1840s of 3.3 million pesos. The fortune of the Mariscal de Castilla was estimated at a relatively modest five hundred thousand pesos in 1824; that of the Conde del Alamo at slightly over 1 million pesos in 1826; and those of the Conde del Valle de Orizaba and the Conde del Peñasco each at 1 million pesos in 1830; Ladd, The Mexican Nobility, 184–86. 24. All four cabinet ministers received the same six-thousand-peso salary, the vice president ten thousand pesos, and the president (Guadalupe Victoria) thirty-six thousand pesos per year in the late 1820s. 25. LA to TyM, 3 April 1838, Carso 13–1074; LA to TyM, 23 May 1838, Alamán, Obras, 4: 405–7, and Carso 13–1119; LA to TyM, 3 January 1851, Alamán, Obras 4: 552–57; LA toTyM, 28 February 1853, ibid., 658–62. 26. LA to TyM, 21 June 1838, 3 June 1839, 12 September 1839, 14 October 1839, all in Alamán, Obras, 4: 407–9, 425–28, and 428–30, respectively. 27. TyM to LA, 20 August 1850, Carso 19–1559. 28. Pedro Peláez, Palermo, to Alamán, Mexico City, 28 February 1853, Carso 20– 1701. 29. 1823 report: “Relación hecha al Señor Conde de Lucchesi sobre la situación de la Hacienda de San Antonio perteneciente al Duque de Monteleone [sic], por Federico Waulthier,” 12 May 1823, AGN-HJ 404 (4), exp. 89; 1829: LA to TyM, 29 January 1829, AGN-HJ 440 (3); 1847: inventory of the hacienda, no date but 1847, AGN-HJ 402 (2), exp. 35. 30. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, 375–77. 31. I have held very helpful discussions of Alamán’s possible medical condition with several physician friends, and the therapeutic benefits for him of the lower altitude and warmer Cuernavaca climate. Joshua Fierer, UC San Diego School of Medicine, Eric Blau of Kaiser Permanente–San Diego, and Julie Gollin of Scripps Clinic–San

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notes to pages 325–340

Diego (all of whom I thank) suggested that it was more the lower altitude than the warmer climate that alleviated Alamán’s discomfort, although he himself thought it was primarily the milder climate and makes no mention of the altitude difference. 32. Alamán, Mexico City, to Añívarro, Atlacomulco, 6 December 1826, AGN-HJ 377 (1), exp. 5. 33. Rubio, Atlacomulco, to Alamán, Mexico City, 4 December 1831, AGN-HJ 424, exp. 10. 34. Decree of Lizana y Beaumont, 23 January 1810, AGN-HJ 439–6. 35. Quintana (1767–1841), born in Yucatán, was the father of the better-known Andrés Quintana Roo (1787–1851), also a liberal yucateco and married to Leona Vicario (1789–1842), a famous heroine of the Mexican independence movement. Cañedo (1786–1850) came from a wealthy landowning family in Jalisco and served in a number of important government posts in both liberal and moderate administrations; as noted, he was a political ally of Alamán’s in the Spanish Cortes of 1821–22 and was much admired for his oratorical skills. The most famous person in the group was Zavala (1788– 1836), also from Yucatán, who served in various capacities in the national government, as governor of the State of Mexico, and briefly as vice president of the Texas Republic. 36. My entire account of this episode is drawn from a long file (expediente), LA to TyM, no date, but April or May, 1827, AGN-HJ 337–19. 37. LA to TyM, 17 May 1827, 27 June 1827, 3 October 1827, AGN-HJ 440–3. 38. LA to TyM, undated but probably early to mid May 1827, and 27 December 1827, AGN-HJ 440–3. In his response to Alamán’s letters the duque authorized his apoderado to “spend what you think necessary to secure the protection and influence of powerful individuals in support of my interests,” which sounds quite explicitly like an authorization to offer bribes; TyM to LA, 21 April 1828, ibid. 39. Alamán, Mexico City, to Frederick Huth, London, 30 January 1829, AGN-HJ 374(2)-35. Alamán also indicated in this letter that while he was anxious to emigrate from the country as soon as possible, personal reasons had obliged him to delay his departure. 40. LA to TyM, 8 March 1833, AGN-HJ 374(2)-41. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. TyM to LA, 3 November 1834, Carso 12–980. 45. LA to TyM, 25 February 1835, Alamán, Obras 4: 274–76. 46. LA to TyM, 11 December 1834, Alamán, Obras 4: 272–74. 47. See, for example, AGN-HJ 384, exp. 3, 1831, and AGN-HJ 424, exp. 10, 1832. 48. Josefa de O’Donojú, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 30 July and 25 September 1832, AGN-HJ 424, exp. 10. 49. The title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca passed, in fact, to the grandson of José Pignatelli de Aragón y Cortés (d. 1859), the Neapolitan for whom Alamán worked,

notes to pages 342–355

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since the duque’s son, Diego, failed to pay the fee required to receive the royal charter of succession to the title. 50. LA to TyM, 13 December 1835, Carso 12–1021; LA to TyM, 19 April 1836, Alamán, Obras, 4: 339–41; TyM to LA, 11 August 1836, Carso 12–1049. 51. LA to TyM, 14 October 1849, Alamán, Obras, 4: 512–13. 52. LA to TyM, 3 April 1838, Alamán, Obras, 4: 399–402. 53. LA to TyM, 28 June 1847, Alamán, Obras, 4: 447–49. Alamán was referring here to the interim government of Valentín Gómez Farías, the occasional Santa Anna stand-in. 54. LA to TyM, 28 October 1847, Alamán, Obras, 4: 453–56. 55. LA to TyM, 12 February 1848, Alamán, Obras, 4: 462–66; LA to TyM, 28 November 1847, Alamán, Obras, 4: 456–58. Caleb Cushing (1800–1879) was an American diplomat, congressman, and attorney general of the United States and also something of a historian in his own right, which is perhaps why he and Alamán got along. 56. LA to TyM, 1 February 1851, Alamán, Obras, 4: 557–61. 57. For a suggestive conceptual discussion of technology transfer to Mexico in a slightly later period (1870–1911), see Beatty, “Approaches to Technology.” 58. LA to TyM, 28 May 1852 and 30 January 1853, respectively in Alamán, Obras, 4: 623–28, 652–57. 59. LA to TyM, 3 June 1851, Alamán, Obras 4: 568–73. 60. AGN-HJ 440, exp. 4 and 399 (1), exps. 1–2; AGN-HJ 416, exp. 11, 17 October 1829; AGN-HJ 374 (2), exp. 35, 30 June 1830; ibid.; TyM to LA, 20 February 1850, Carso 18–1520. 61. Charles Bankhead was British minister to Mexico from 1843 to 1847; LA to TyM, 9 March 1850, Alamán, Obras 4: 523–26. At this time Alamán was a deputy for the State of Jalisco in the national congress; his election early in 1850 elicited congratulations from Terranova; TyM to LA, 20 February 1850, Carso 18–1520. In a letter written in the spring of 1851, while he was still a deputy, Alamán assured his employer that he would turn his attention to Marquesado affairs as soon as the current session ended; LA to TyM, 4 April 1851, Alamán, Obras 4: 563–65. At the end of 1852 he assured the duke yet again that his affairs would be attended to: “I will have time to spare, since I will not be in the next Congress”; LA to TyM 3 November 1851, Alamán, Obras 4: 596–98. 62. TyM to LA, 17 August 1828, AGN-HJ 440, exp. 4.

Chapter 12. An Ordered and Prosperous Republic 1. Alamán, Mexico City (?), to San Román, Guadalajara (?), 23 February 1831, BLAC, HyD 21.4815 (2824). I am grateful to Antonio Ibarra Romero for information on San Román.

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notes to pages 356–366

2. For the debate: AGN-GSS 132, doc. 1, 1830; the circular: AGN-GL 110 (1), doc. 9, 4 February 1830. 3. Green, Mexican Republic, 194. 4. Undated exchange with Juan de Añívarro, 1827, AGN-HJ 402 (1), exp. 20. 5. I owe this reference to María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés and Luis de Pablo Hammeken in a personal communication of 15 January 2010. Manuel García (1775–1832) was born in Seville, performed internationally, and became one of the most acclaimed singers of his time. He particularly favored the Rossini and Mozart repertoire, having sung the role of Count Almaviva in the première of Rossini’s Barber of Seville. At the urging of Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, García and his family company—his daughter was the famous mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran—gave the first performances of Italian operas in New York in 1825–26. García’s voice was a deep tenor, which allowed him to sing baritone roles, like Plácido Domingo; he also composed dozens of operas in various formats, from opera seria to opera buffa to the peculiarly Spanish form of the tonadilla. The singer was performing in Mexico City in 1828–29 when Alamán heard him (probably more than once), and hoped to settle there, but he returned to Europe in 1829 because of the same political troubles in Mexico that induced Alamán seriously to consider emigrating with his family. 6. LA to TyM, 31 January 1829, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 4. 7. LA to TyM, 17 September 1829, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 5. 8. LA to TyM, 9 August 1826, AGN-HJ 374 (2), doc. 41; LA to TyM, 14 August 1826, AGN-HJ 374 (2), doc. 36. 9. LA to TyM, 2 June 1827, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 3. 10. LA to TyM, 3 October 1827, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 3; Alamán, Mexico City, to Frederick Huth, London, 3 November 1827, AGN-HJ 424, doc. 1; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 5 March 1828, ibid.; LA to TyM, 18 August 1828, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 4; LA to TyM, 27 November 1828, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 4; Alamán, Mexico City to F. Huth, London, 18 December 1828, AGN-HJ 424, doc. 1; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 30 January 1829, AGN-HJ 374 (2), doc. 35; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 2 March 1829, ibid.; LA to TyM, 1 May 1829, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 5; Alamán, Mexico City to F. Huth, London, 18 July 1829, AGN-HJ 374 (2). 11. Alamán to F. Huth, London, 17 June 1829, AGN-HJ 374 (2), exp. 35. 12. Alamán, Mexico City, to Santa María, New York, 16 May, 5 June, and 17 July 1829, Carso 10–843. 13. My account of the Arenas conspiracy is drawn largely from Alamán, HdeM, 5: 518–19, and the excellent summary in Green, Mexican Republic, 142–45. 14. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 519. 15. LA to TyM, 20 September 1827, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 3. 16. Green, Mexican Republic, 158. 17. For a good summary account of all this, see Vázquez, “Two Reactions.” 18. Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 5 April 1829, AGN-HJ 374 (2), doc. 35.

notes to pages 367–377

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19. LA to TyM, 22 August 1829, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 5. 20. LA to TyM, 17 September 1829, ibid. 21. Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 30 September 1829, AGN-HJ 374 (2), doc. 35. Only about half the thirty-five hundred Spanish troops who arrived under General Barradas’s command survived to return to Cuba, the other half having fallen victim primarily to yellow fever. 22. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 531–32. 23. LA to TyM, 7 January 1830, AGN-HJ 440, doc. 5. 24. “Documento 26, Pormenores relativos a la revolución conocida con el nombre de plan de Jalapa,” Alamán, HdeM, 5: 671–74, at 672. 25. Ibid.; and Green, Mexican Republic, 173, who writes, based on the Esteva note, that “evidence hints at a prominent role for Alamán in the Jalapa movement.” 26. Green, Mexican Republic, 191–92; Catherine Andrews, in her study of Bustamante’s political life, Entre la espada, would take issue with this interpretation, shifting both the repressive and creative impulses of the government more in the direction of the vice president. 27. Torcuato di Tella described Alamán “instead of being a conservative—or, apart from being so—[as] a typical developmentalist” (típico desarrollista) and a “pragmatic developmentalist” (desarrollista pragmático); di Tella, Política nacional, 57, 238. 28. Except as otherwise noted, all the references to the Alamán, Camacho, Espinosa de los Monteros, Juan de Dios Cañedo, and Bocanegra memorias are drawn from the reprinted originals in Memorias de los ministros. 29. Alamán’s Memoria of 8 November 1823, 46. 30. Scott, Seeing. 31. Alamán, Memoria of 8 January 1831, 414–16. 32. Alamán, Memoria of 1823, 61, 63. 33. Alamán, Memoria of 1825, 121–22. 34. Alamán, Memoria of 12 February 1830, 339–40, 359; Alamán, Memoria of 8 January 1831, 416. 35. On the question of how European and especially Mexican intellectuals dealt with the antiquity or newness of the Americas, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write; and Brading, The First America. 36. Alamán, Memoria of 10 January 1832, 459. 37. For a penetrating discussion of the issues involved in this debate, how the Palenque and other Maya ruins fit into it, and their bearing on the development of modern scientific methods, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write. The date of Count Waldeck’s birth is somewhat in question in that if he had actually been born in 1766 he would have been 109 years old at his death in 1875, possible but extremely unlikely. 38. AH-SRE, LE 873, folios 122r–126r, undated, “Instrucción para colectar y preparar objetos de historia natural. Formada por orden del Supremo Gobierno, ” 1830.

754

notes to pages 377–381

39. See, for example, Alamán, Mexico City, to the jefe político of Tlaxcala, 25 September 1830, AGN-GL 102, doc. 1, regarding transfer of an artifact. Several months later Conservador Icaza requested that Alamán have transferred to the museum various items from several locations, one of them being “a cloth with hieroglyphics” (una manta con geroglíficos) at that time in the possession of the ayuntamiento of Tlaxcala city. This item may possibly have been the famous Lienzo de Tlaxcala, commissioned by the indigenous cabildo of Tlaxcala in 1552, relating the story of the Spanish conquest in a series of images in the preconquest style. The single surviving original lienzo was brought to Mexico City during the period of the French Intervention and was subsequently lost, although copies exist. If this painting was in fact the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, it is clear that minister Alamán’s attempt to claim it for the Museo Nacional in 1831 was not successful; for Icaza’s correspondence with Alamán, see Icaza, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 18 March 1831, AGN-GL 102, doc. 23. 40. Printed circular over Alamán’s name, 14 March 1832, AGN-GSS 150, doc. 4. 41. Perennes to Alamán, Mexico City, undated but early January 1831; Icaza, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 13 January 1831, both in AGN-GL 102, doc. 16. 42. Waldeck, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 16 November 1831, Carso 11– 929. 43. The Acordada, a rural constabulary, had ended with the colonial period, and its nineteenth-century counterpart, the Rurales, would not be established—by President Benito Juárez—until 1861, between the Wars of the Reform and the French Intervention; see the classic study of Vanderwood, Disorder. 44. Robinson, Mexico and Her Military Chieftains. When, where, and how Robinson acquired this information is not known, although at a guess it conflates real events, rumors, and creative license. Born in Virginia, Fayette Robinson was trained at West Point, commissioned a second lieutenant of dragoons in 1837, and resigned from the army in 1841; Heitman, Historical Register, 1: 838. He died in New York City in 1859. Robinson’s actual experience of Mexico is not known. While he may have come with the American invasion forces in 1846, it would not have been as a regular army officer, and his name does not show up in Heitman’s list of officers of US volunteer forces in the war. Robinson also produced several works of fiction, a respected survey of the California gold mining regions, and translations into English of the novel Consuelo by Georges Sand and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous Physiologie du gout. It is ironic that he included Alamán in a book about Mexico’s military chieftains given that Alamán was the most unmilitary of civilian politicians. His biography of Alamán is positively riddled with mistakes and fabrications, whether by him or someone else we do not know; see, for example, his short biographical essay on Alamán in “Lucas Alamán y Escalada (1792–1853),” reproduced in www.sonsofdewittcolony.org/alamanbio1.htm. “La Brinvilliers” refers to Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630–76), who confessed under torture to the murder of her father and two brothers in order to gain their estates; she was executed and her corpse burned.

notes to pages 382–389

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While the story of the poisoned cigar may have been apocryphal, the possibility of administering poison in this manner is not. One way to do it would have been to soak the cigar in Aqua Tofana, an odorless, tasteless arsenic- (and possibly belladonna-) based liquid venom said to have been a favorite poison of Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519). The CIA sought to assassinate Fidel Castro in similar fashion, attempting to administer botulinum bacteria to him through an infused cigar. 45. Valadés, Alamán, 282; for a more modern evaluation that agrees with this, see Andrews, Entre la espada, 218–19. 46. AGN-GSS 138–13, 1830. 47. Carso 10–872, 1830. 48. Alamán to Butler, Mexico City, 16 October 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 6. 49. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, 19 May 1830 and 19 February 1831, ibid., Folder 2. 50. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, 26 August 1830, ibid. 51. Arrillaga, Recopilación, 3: 1, 33, 43–44, 71, 117, 125. 52. Alamán, Mexico City, to Michelena, Morelia, 19 January 1830, BLAC-HyD 20– 3.4752 (2773); Warren, Vagrants, 101, cites the same letter very briefly. 53. LA to TyM, 9 August 1826, AGH-HJ 374 (2), exp. 41; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 19 September 1827, and virtually the same letter to the duke in AGN-HJ 440 (3), LA to TyM, 20 September 1827; LA to TyM, 18 August 1828, ibid.; LA to TyM, October [no date], 1828, AGN-HJ 440 (4); LA to TyM, 27 November 1828, ibid.; LA to TyM, 2 March 1829, ibid.; LA to TyM, 22 August 1829, AGN-HJ 440 (5). 54. Costeloe, La primera república, 251. 55. Catharine Andrews shares the view of Josefina Vázquez that the measures Alamán took to geld state governments and shape them to his liking were less an attempt by the Bustamante regime to do away with federalism and establish a centralist regime de facto than to suppress the power of Yorquino opposition and the resistance of the states to the central government. This seems to me a distinction without much of a difference. 56. Alamán, Mexico City, to Michelena, Morelia, 19 January 1830, BLAC-HyD 20– 3.4752 (2773). 57. Quoted in Costeloe, La primera república, 151. 58. Ibid., 12. 59. Ibid., 318; Mora’s essay is Disertación in Mora, Obras completas, 3: 161–241. Initially a supporter of the Jalapa regime, Mora had turned against it by mid-1831, which seems to have been a turning point for a number of people. For Mier y Terán’s letter to Mora, see Costeloe, La primera república, 319, quoting a letter of 9 July 1831, from Mora, Obras sueltas, 27–33. 60. See AGN-GL 67, doc. 1, for printed circulars relating to this coalition. 61. Costeloe, La primera república, 315.

756

notes to pages 390–402

62. Ibid. 63. Gómez y Anaya, Durango, to Alamán, Mexico City, 7 May 1830; Parres, Aguascalientes, to Alamán, Mexico City, 25 May 1830; Parres, Guadalajara, to Alamán, 28 January 1831, and Parres, Sayula, to Alamán, 8 February 1831; Gómez y Anaya, Guadalajara, to Alamán, 20 January, 27 January, and 17 February 1832; all in BLAC—Misc. Mss. 165. 64. Costeloe, La primera república, 269. 65. Registro oficial of 23 January 1830, quoted in Andrews, Entre la espada, 176. 66. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 535. 67. Costeloe, La primera república, 255, n. 23. 68. “Parte no oficial” of Registro oficial, Año 1, tomo III, no. 40, 24 December 1830, in AGN-GL 139 (1), exp. 11, 1830. The references to Mosquera and Caycedo, respectively, were to Joaquín Mariano de Mosquera y Arboleda (1787–1878) and Domingo de Caycedo y Sanz de Santamaría (1783–1843), both of whom served as president or vice president of Gran Colombia/Republic of Nueva Granada/Colombia at around this time. 69. E.g., Registro oficial, Año 1, tomo IV, no. 40, Monday, 1 March 1830, AGN-GSS 136 (1), in which an anonymous subscriber took the editors to task for the long, opinionated editorials that “do not cease to tire your readers, especially those of us who wear glasses.” 70. Alamán, Memoria of 1825, 102–3. 71. For the text of the 14 May 1831 law, see Arrillaga, Recopilación, 1831, 257, “Ley sobre libelos infamatorios impresos”; on the history of the press jury, see Piccato, Tyranny. 72. For the two passages quoted, see the Alamán memorias of January 1831 and January 1832, pp. 381 and 454, respectively. 73. Costeloe, La primera república, 268–69. 74. El Atleta, 23 April 1830, as quoted in ibid., 309. 75. Andrews, Entre la espada, 180. 76. Fowler, Santa Anna, 127, 134. 77. Santa Anna (in an autograph letter), Jalapa, to Alamán, Mexico City, 3 January 1830, Carso 10–854. 78. Valadés, Alamán, 248. 79. Grandi, Jalapa, to Alamán, Mexico City, 3 January 1830, Carso 10–855; Santa Anna, Manga de Clavo, to Alamán, Mexico City, 15 January 1830, Carso 10–856. 80. Grandi, Jalapa, to Alamán, Mexico City, 1 February 1830, Carso 10–861. Santa Anna’s major modern biographer, Will Fowler, has been unable to identify Grandi; personal communication, 21 July 2015. 81. See, for example, a letter to Alamán in August 1830: “The doctor advises me to change climates. . . . I regret I cannot continue [this letter] further, but neither my head nor my pulse permit it”; Santa Anna, Manga de Clavo, to Alamán, Mexico City, 7 August 1830, Carso 11–885.

notes to pages 402–413

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82. Santa Anna, Manga de Clavo, to Alamán, 8 September 1831, Carso 11–920. 83. Santa Anna, Manga de Clavo, to Alamán, 20 September 1831, Carso 11–921. It is hard to believe that Santa Ana’s remark about centralization was not laden with irony. 84. Registro oficial (año 1, no. 56), 17 March 1830, AGN-GSS 136, exp. 1. 85. Valadés, Alamán, 261–62. 86. Basadre (1799–1865) enjoyed a long, distinguished career in the military and politics. Alamán’s recall of Basadre and the aborting of his mission were later raised as a charge against the former minister along with his complicity in the murder of Guerrero. 87. Butler, Mexico City, to Martin Van Buren, Washington, DC, 19 February 1830, Butler Papers. Part of the dispatch was in numerical cipher—e.g., “1372 651 692” for Texas. 88. George Hamilton-Gordon (1784–1860), Earl of Aberdeen, served as foreign secretary between 2 June 1828 and 22 November 1830. Also figuring in these talks indirectly through parliamentary debates was Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), home secretary during roughly the same period. 89. Registro oficial de los Estados-Unidos Mexicanos (año 1, tomo 2, num. 980) Sunday, 1 August 1830, in AGN-GSS 137 (1); (num. 106), 9 August 1830, ibid. In passing, Baring (identified as “A. Baring” in the newspaper) predicted that the United States would never rival Great Britain as a naval power and that not even a hundred years hence would it rival the former metropolitan power in manufacturing output. In fact, it took only about seventy-five years for the US to overtake the UK in industrial production; Woltjer and de Jong, “Output.”

Chapter 13. Texas 1. On the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, see Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty. 2. Registro Oficial (año 1, num. 5), Monday, 25 January 1830, AGN-GSS 136, exp. 1. The entire text of Jackson’s message can be found at the website of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center: millercenter.org/president/jackson/speeches/speech-3632; the Spanish translation of Jackson’s text in the Registro is reasonably good. 3. Registro Oficial (año 1, num. 7), Wednesday, 27 January 1830, AGN-GSS 136, doc. 1. 4. Butler (no location but en route to Mexico City), to State Department (presumably Martin Van Buren, Washington, DC), 17 October 1829, Butler Papers, Folder 1; according to descriptions of him by contemporaries, some of them quoted below, Butler was a bit of a fanfarrón, or braggart. 5. “What of Texas [wrote Poinsett to Butler]? I own 10 shares in the New York Company [presumably the one cofounded by Lorenzo de Zavala]—are they worth or likely to be worth anything?”; Poinsett, Charleston, to Butler, Mexico City, 23 May 1834,

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notes to pages 413–418

Butler Papers, Folder 7. Butler’s correspondence (see Butler Papers, “Folder 1: General correspondence, 1828–1835”) from the mid-1830s indicates that he pursued commercial and land speculation interests in Texas. A particular theme of his correspondence with James Prentiss was the impediments the Mexican government was trying to impose on American settlement of the area. Prentiss (1782–1857) was a businessman and friend of Sam Houston’s who also speculated in Texas lands. By July of 1835 he claimed to own nearly all the land scrip—options on grants, basically—on the market (except for those of Stephen F. Austin and two other men) and asked Butler to offer the Mexican government $10 million for the outright cession of almost all of Texas. Later he claimed to have invested more than $1.5 million in settlement efforts, eventually recouping only about ten cents on the dollar. On Prentiss, see Texas State Historical Association, Handbook, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpr24. 6. Valadés, Alamán, 270, who typically cites no source for his characterization but may well have based it on Rives’s account (see following note). 7. Rives, The United States, 1: 236. 8. Smith, The War, quoted in Texas State Historical Association, Handbook, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbu63. 9. Butler, Leona Vicario, to unnamed, 3 December 1829, Butler Papers, “Folder 1: General correspondence, 1828–1835.” 10. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 3 November 1829, Butler Papers, Folder 1. 11. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 31 December 1829, ibid. 12. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 5 and 10 January 1830, ibid. 13. Mier y Terán, Pueblo Viejo, to Minister of War Francisco Moctezuma, Mexico City, 14 November 1829, quoted in Reséndez, Changing, 18, from Morton, Terán, 99; and for more on Terán’s views of the Texas question, see Jackson, Texas. 14. Mier y Terán, Matamoros, to Secretario de Relaciones [Alamán], Mexico City,14 October 1830; transcription courtesy of Andrés Reséndez. 15. Ramos Arizpe, Puebla, to Alamán, Mexico City, 1 August 1830, Herbert E. Bolton Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, Carton 40, no. 673, no pagination, transcription courtesy of Andrés Reséndez, who provides a gloss of the document in Changing, 51. Ramos Arizpe himself, like a number of other prominent Mexican politicos, had squeezed an enormous land grant out of the state of Texas and Coahuila. 16. Benton himself was a slaveholder who later in life entertained second thoughts, coming to oppose the institution. Like Butler a protégé of Andrew Jackson who fought beside him in the War of 1812, Benton later fell out with Jackson and even fought a duel with him (as had Butler), although they later reconciled and Benton became a staunch Democrat and Jacksonian. 17. Rives, The United States, 1: 193–94; Valadés, Alamán, 272–73. The full text of Alamán’s report appears in Filisola, Guerra de Tejas, 2: 590–612; part of the English

notes to pages 422–428

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translation quoted here was inserted into the transactions of the US House of Representatives and part is my own. 18. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 547–551 passim. 19. The law of 6 April is laid out in detail in a presidential circular of the same date over Alamán’s signature; AGN-GL 110 (1), doc. 6, 1830. 20. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 19–21 May 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 2, “Correspondence with the State Department, May 1830—August 1836.” 21. Butler, Mexico City, to John W. E. Wallace, San Antonio de Béjar, 1 June 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 7, “Correspondence on legation business, 1830–1834.” It is difficult to see how Butler could construe the country to be in a condition of “complete tranquility” when the War of the South had erupted months before. Whether Butler was trying to put a good face on things for his correspondent or was simply not paying attention is not known. A third possibility was that he was led down the garden path by Lucas Alamán, who assured him on any number of occasions—in early April 1830, for example—that “tranquility would be completely restored within a few weeks,” Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 7 April 1830, ibid., letter marked “private.” By November 1830, however, the scales had apparently fallen from Butler’s eyes, and in an undated letter to an unspecified recipient, he described the country as being still in a very unsettled state, “and no appearance that the present administration may remain in power a month. I regret this exceedingly for the sake of this people as well as on our own account”; Butler Papers, Folder 5, “General Correspondence, 1813–1846, and undated Photostats.” 22. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 8 April 1831, Butler Papers, Folder 2, “Correspondence with the State Department, May 1830–August 1846.” 23. Poinsett, New York City, to Butler, Mexico City, 9 August 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 7, “Correspondence on legation business, 1830–1834.” 24. Poinsett, New York, to Butler, Mexico City, 10 October 1833, ibid. 25. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 9 March 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 1, “Correspondence with the State Department, August 1829–April 1830.” 26. Butler, Mexico City, to Jackson, Washington, DC [?], 15 April 1830, ibid.—“I can manage this people better than Mr. Poinsett was able to do.” 27. Butler, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 27 June 1830; Alamán to Butler, undated but probably 28 or 29 June 1830, ibid. 28. Butler, Mexico City, to [Wallace?, San Antonio de Béjar?], 21 November 1830, ibid. (italics added). 29. Mier y Terán, Matamoros, to Alamán, Mexico City, 25 November 1830, AGNGL 85, doc. 2, 1829–1830. 30. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 29 June 1830, ibid. 31. On Van Buren’s instruction, his fears of war, and Mier, who wrote to Alamán on 19 April 1830, see Valadés, Alamán, 276–77.

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notes to pages 428–433

32. Rives, The United States, 1: 246. 33. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 9 March 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 1, “Correspondence with the State Department, August 1829—April 1830.” Van Buren remarked in his response on “the present state of irritation and mistrust which prevails in Mexico, upon the subject of their northern frontiers”; Van Buren, Washington, DC, to Butler, Mexico City, 1 April 1830, ibid. 34. Butler, Mexico City, to Jackson, Washington, DC, 15 April 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 5, “General correspondence, 1813–1846 (Photostats).” 35. Rumors: Butler, Mexico City, to John W. E. Wallace, San Antonio de Béjar, 3 May 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 7, “Correspondence on legation business, 1830–1834”; opinions expressed: Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 21 May 1830, Butler Papers, “Correspondence with the State Department, May 1830—August 1836.” John W. E. Wallace (1796–1877), a Pennsylvanian and early Texas settler, came to Texas as consul in 1830 and pursued a military career as well as ranching on a grant of land from Stephen F. Austin. 36. Rives, The United States, 1: 234–35. 37. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 2 November 1830, Butler Papers, Folder 2, “Correspondence with State Department, May 1830–August 1836.” 38. Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 9 November 1830, ibid.; Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 2 November 1830, ibid.; Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 11 November 1830 [in English], ibid.; Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 19 November 1830, ibid. 39. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 22 December 1830, ibid.; Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 4 February and 19 February 1831, ibid. 40. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 19 February 1831, ibid.; Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 17 February 1831, ibid. 41. Butler, Mexico City, to Van Buren, Washington, DC, 23 February 1831, ibid. 42. Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 28 April 1831, ibid.; Butler, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 26 May 1831, ibid.; Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 7, 10, and 12 October 1831, ibid.; Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 8 November 1831, ibid. 43. Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 19 November 1831, ibid. 44. Butler added that the ratification process would probably have dragged on for the better part of another year had it not been for the decisive attitude of Alamán; Butler, Mexico City, to Livingston, Washington, DC, 15 December 1831, Butler Papers, Folder 2, “Correspondence with the State Department, May 1830–August 1836,” which also mentions Butler’s threat to close up the legation; Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 16 December 1831, ibid., Alamán informing Butler that he intended to devote the entire day (a Friday) to finishing up some small matters relating to the treaty and would be gone for the next ten days; dinner invitation: Alamán, Mexico City, to Butler, Mexico City, 30 November 1831, Butler Papers, Folder 6, “Correspondence with

notes to pages 434–451

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Lucas Alamán, 1830–1836.” Edward Livingston, a congressman, senator, mayor of New York City, jurist, and diplomat, succeeded Martin Van Buren as secretary of state on 24 May 1831. Van Buren would later, as president, reject Texas’s request to join the United States in 1836; Joel R. Poinsett was Van Buren’s secretary of state (1837–41). 45. Extremely useful in following Alamán’s thinking and policy in this area and the historical circumstances is Méndez Reyes, El hispanoamericanismo, from which my discussion has much benefited. 46. Alamán, Mexico City, to José Sánchez Carrión [ministro de relaciones exteriores del Perú], Lima, 23 February 1825, Memorias del general O’Leary, 24: 257–58; quoted in Méndez Reyes, El hispanoamericanismo, 179–80. 47. Méndez Reyes, El hispanoamericanismo, 196–97. 48. Alamán, “Memoria,” 1830, 297–99. 49. Alamán’s general instructions to Mexican envoys to republics formerly Spanish colonies, AH-SRE, LE 873, folios 12r–18r, 3 June 1831. 50. “Instrucciones generales reservadas” for ambassadors to Spanish American republics, AH-SRE, LE 873, folios 20r-21v, 3 June 1831. 51. Vélez [Bogotá?] to Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores [Francisco Fagoaga], Mexico City, 7 December 1832, AH-SRE, LE 873, folios 181r–v.

Chapter 14. The Banco de Avío 1. Potash, Mexican Government, 46, simply asserts that the young Alamán observed European factories, but there is no direct evidence of this from Alamán himself. Lorenzo de Zavala during his travels in the US in 1830 did comment, although not extensively, on industrial development in the US. “In this North America the development of manufacturing is, however, surprising. Who is not amazed at the sight of the town of Lowell, a forest village ten years ago, and today a town of seven thousand people with factories that are competing with those of Europe”; Zavala, Journey, 155. 2. Potash, Mexican Government, 16–17, Potash’s translation. 3. Ibid., 42–43, Potash’s translation. 4. [Alamán], Representación dirigida. 5. Potash, Mexican Government, 125. My account of the bank, especially in the next few pages, leans heavily on Potash. Other extremely useful works on the subject of the industrialization of textile production during this period are Bernecker, De agiotistas; Colón Reyes, Los orígenes; and, for a later period, although with some attention to the era of Alamán, Keremitsis, La industria, and Trujillo Bolio, Empresariado. 6. Alamán, Mexico City, to jefe político of Tlaxcala, 8 April and 7 May 1830, AGNBanco de Avío (hereafter abbreviated AGN-BA), 1: 13. 7. Anthony Butler, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 8 July 1830, AGN-BA, 1: 18. There was a long struggle within the government over the possible purchase by the

762

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company of the old gunpowder factory, Navy and War Minister José Antonio Facio vigorously opposing the sale, Vice President Bustamante eventually concurring. 8. 5 June 1830, AGN-BA, 1: 23. 9. “Libro de actas de la junta establecida para la Dirección del Banco de Avío por ley de 16 de octubre de 1830,” AGN-GSS 130, doc. 1, 1830–32, meetings of 5, 9, 19 November and 3 December 1830. 10. Alamán, Mexico City, to Thomas McCormick et al., Mexico City, 22–23 October 1831, AGN-BA, 3:45. 11. Haber, “Introduction: The Political Economy of Crony Capitalism,” xii. 12. On “amoral familism,” see Banfield, The Moral Basis; and on social networks, Van Young, “Hung in a Web.” 13. Alamán, Mexico City, to Junta de Directores de la Compañía Industrial, Mexico City, 27 September 1830, AGN-BA, 1: 32. 14. Alamán, Mexico City, to Manuel de Gorostiza and Tomás Murfi, respectively in London and Paris, undated but 1831, AGN-BA, 1: 41. 15. Potash, Mexican Government, 167, 66, and table 5, 121; Sánchez, “Estevan de Antuñano.” 16. Copies of nearly one hundred of Antuñano’s letters to Alamán from the 1830s and 1840s, held by the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Carso, were made by Jan Bazant and have been graciously made available to me by Mílada Bazant. 17. Zepeda Cortés, “Empire.” 18. Bernecker, De agiotistas, 104–5. 19. Linares, Guanajuato, to Alamán, Mexico City, 5 September 1831, AGN-BA, 1: 48. 20. Gómez Farías, Mexico City, to Director General de Rentas, Mexico City, 1 March 1832, and other documents in this file, AGN-BA, 2: 38. 21. Antuñano, Puebla, to junta of Banco de Avío, Mexico City, 4 September 1833, AGN-BA, 1: 63. 22. Junta, Mexico City, to secretary of the treasury, Mexico City, undated, but March 1832, AGN-BA, 2: 38. 23. Keremitsis, La industria, 40; Colón Reyes, Los orígenes, 205; Gómez-Galvarriato, Industry; Trujillo Bolio, Empresariado, 209; Bernecker, De agiotistas, 96–109; Salvucci, Textiles, who nonetheless refers to Alamán’s import substitution policies as “brilliant”; Beatty, Institutions, 27 and passim. 24. Potash, Mexican Government, 165 (italics added). 25. Coatsworth, Growth.

Chapter 15. The War of the South and the Death of Guerrero 1. México a través, 4: 271, 276. The authors of chapter 4 of this monumental classic work, edited by Vicente Riva Palacio, were Juan de Dios Arias (1828–86) and Enrique de Olavarría y Ferrari (1844–1919). Arias died while writing the chapter on Mexico

notes to pages 466–475

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between independence and Reform, and Olavarría y Ferrari took over the project. Vicente Riva Palacio (1832–96), a prominent military, political, and literary figure in his own right, was Vicente Guerrero’s grandson. Miguel González was the army captain commanding the detachment of soldiers that escorted Guerrero from Huatulco to Oaxaca City. On Riva Palacio and México a través de los siglos as well as many of his other writings, see Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, 301–6. 2. Vincent, The Legacy, 207. 3. Mancisidor, Hidalgo, 377ff. 4. Cuevas, Porvenir, 2: 486. 5. Arrangoiz y Berzábal, México desde 1808, 356. It is not true that Facio never had the opportunity to defend himself, since he published a Memoria in 1835 (see n. 13 below). 6. El Federalista Mexicano, 19 February 1831, quoted in González Pedrero, País, 1: 200–201, n. 28. El Federalista, a pro-Gómez Pedraza paper, was fined out of existence by the government (i.e., Alamán’s ministry) by April 1831. 7. Gregorio Dávila (location unknown), to Valentín Gómez Farías (location unknown), 9 October 1849, BLAC, Gómez Farías Papers. 8. Quoted in Morán Leyva, Lucas Alamán, 99–100. The trope of the barbarian horde, whether Visigoth or Mongol, invading civilization was common to writers of a certain cast of mind in the age; see, for example, recurrent similar invocations by D. F. Sarmiento in his Facundo. 9. Circular of 24 March 1830, AH-SRE, LE 2209, folios 93r–v. 10. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 533–34. 11. Ibid., 535. 12. On some interesting resonances between the independence insurgency in Mexico, the political upheavals of the early republican period, and the highly racialized violence of the Haitian revolution, see Granados, En el espejo haitiano. 13. Facio’s Memoria was dated 24 January 1831, and is quoted and translated in Anna, Forging Mexico, 241. 14. See Fowler, Forceful Negotiations; Malcontents; and Celebrating Insurrection; and the related online relational database at http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/pronunciamientos/. McDonald, in one of the chapters in the Celebrating Insurrection volume, “The Political Life,” writes, “In that case [the failure of a pronunciamiento] the general trend was the peaceful yet forceful negotiation and pacification of the pronunciados” (74). Will Fowler has further confirmed to me in writing that “the execution of pronunciados was rare indeed. The tendency was to forgive all and sundry, extending amnesties to and fro like there was no tomorrow. . . . It wasn’t the done thing”; personal communication, 22 March 2016. 15. Diccionario Porrúa, 3: 2723. 16. Aguirre, “Picaluga, Francisco,” Enciclopedia Guerrerense, http://www.encicloped iagro.org/index.php/indices/indice-de-biografías/1293-picaluga-francisco.

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notes to pages 476–483

17. Except as otherwise noted, my account of Picaluga’s role in the capture of Vicente Guerrero and of the military trial and execution of the independence hero and president is synthesized from several modern sources, the most important of which is volume 4 of the multiauthored México à través, 4: 265ff; others include Méndez Pérez, “La traición,” accessed online at the site biblio.jurídicas.unam.mx/libros/6/2918/15. pdf; Green, Mexican Republic, 205ff.; Vincent, The Legacy, 200 ff.; and García Velázquez, Quien fué el verdadero responsable. 18. México a través, 4: 278; the rest of the money was put up by Treasury Secretary Espinosa. 19. The full text of the proclama is to be found in ibid., 272–74. 20. Circular of 1 March 1831, AH-SRE, LE 2209. 21. Méndez Pérez, “La traición,” 314–15. 22. Quoted in México a través, 4: 266–67. It is not at all clear what sources Bustamante may have drawn on for this and other speeches deployed in his written works relating to this episode. I suspect he extrapolated them from a word or two furnished him by the actors involved, or he may have simply fabricated them out of whole cloth as the most dramatic forms of plausible statements. In writing (not unsympathetically) about Bustamante’s written works after his death in 1848, Alamán accused him of some scholarly sloppiness and even of fabricating things for effect here and there in his writings. The author of these pages in México a través de los siglos asserts that a late-nineteenth-century examination of the Ministry of War archives showed that the documents relevant to the Guerrero affair had been mutilated, presumably to hide something. Lafragua’s biography of Vicente Guerrero, Vicente Guerrero, insists on the existence of a contract with Picaluga made well in advance of his capture of the chieftain. 23. México a través, 4: 278–79. 24. Valadés, Alamán, 296–99.

Chapter 16. The Reckoning 1. Mangino (1788–1837) was born in Puebla, pursued a military career, and spent some time in Spain in 1813. Upon his return to Mexico he occupied various upper-level bureaucratic posts in the viceregal administration and, after independence, Iturbide appointed him treasurer of the Ejército Trigarante. He served twice as treasury secretary, from 1830 to 1832, when he opposed the establishment of the Banco de Avío, and again in 1836. Under the Anastasio Bustamante government he reorganized the treasury, engineered an upswing in fiscal revenues, and was able to put together budgets that covered government expenses for the first time in a decade. Espinosa, roughly a contemporary (d. 1837), was a lawyer imprisoned during the independence struggle for his membership in the secret patriotic society Los Guadalupes. He also rose with Agustín de Iturbide, who appointed him a member of the Junta Provisional. Of escosés

notes to pages 483–493

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sympathies, he served successively as a deputy and senator in Congress, then as a colleague of Alamán’s and Facio’s in the Bustamante government. 2. Facio, Memoria; Alamán, Defensa, included with Lucas Alamán, Examen imparcial, 47–193. 3. Proceso instructivo. 4. Alamán, Defensa, 63. 5. Ibid., 82–83. 6. Ibid., 74. 7. Ibid., 77. 8. Alamán, Defensa, 99–100. 9. Ibid., 99, 100–101. 10. Ibid., 79, 84. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. Ibid., 86, 88–89. On the very eve of his death many years later, as I have mentioned, he was said to have confessed as much to Tornel, claiming he had voted in favor of exile. 13. In a passing remark in this connection (101), he invoked the case of Caroline, Duchesse de Berry, in France in 1832, who had been arrested for planning an unsuccessful legitimist uprising in the Vendée to topple King Louis-Philippe and restore the Bourbon dynasty to the throne. There were, indeed, some interesting coincidences in the nearly contemporaneous cases of de Berry and Guerrero, although they were situated on opposite ends of the political spectrum. In the French case there was even a Sardinian ship involved, the Carlo Alberto, and some confusion on the part of the Orleanist government as to what to do with the imprisoned duchesse. For an amusing account of the episode, see Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, passim. 14. Alamán, Defensa, 104–5. 15. Alamán here renders a peculiarly tortuous Spanish translation from the Latin, ascribing this common aphorism to Titus Livius (Livy; 64/59 BCE–AD 17), the Roman historian whose famous and sole surviving work is his history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita. I have been unable to locate the passage quoted. An ardent republican, Livy nonetheless forged an important relationship with Emperor Augustus and in his day became very famous throughout the entire Roman Empire; his career as a historian actually bears some resemblance to Alamán’s. Curiously, the aphorism appears in a saloon confrontation between Doc Holiday (Val Kilmer) and the Ringo Kid (Michael Biehn) in the 1993 film Tombstone, in which the two famous gunfighters have an entire dialogue in Latin across a faro table, improbable though it seems. 16. Alamán, Defensa, 135–36. 17. The quotation is from Cicero and may be translated as “In what city are we living?,” the sense of which, more idiomatically, is “What government is this?” and yet more idiomatically still, “What planet are we on?” Had Alamán been given to blasphemous expressions, he might have written, “What the hell is going on here?” He seems

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notes to pages 493–503

to have had considerable exposure to the Greek and Latin classics in general, probably through his tutors, as other educated men of his background would have had at the time, a training that has now largely passed from the scene. Alamán’s propensity for quoting classical authors and the ubiquity of Cicero’s works among men of letters specifically pointed Alamán in the Roman orator’s direction. The ex-minister regarded Guerrero’s movement not as a revolution that might be justified, however, but as a rebellion against constituted authority in which a rabble-rousing populist led men of the lower orders in a bloody uprising bent on overturning the state. Alamán may well have identified Vicente Guerrero with Cataline and himself with Cicero, who as Roman consul spearheaded the bloody suppression of the Cataline Conspiracy in 64–63 BCE. 18. All the quotations that follow are taken from this document—22 December 1834, Carso 12–984. 19. Valadés, Alamán, 345. 20. Emerich de Vattel (1714–67), The Law of Nations (originally published 1758), was one of the books that George Washington borrowed from a library in New York City and failed to return, running up a 221-year fine. Bustamante was citing a Paris edition of 1824, vol. 3, fol. 155. 21. On the cholera epidemic of 1833 there are a number of scholarly works, among them the following: Cuenya et al., eds., El cólera; Márquez Morfín, La desigualdad; and the older, somewhat superceded Hutchinson, “The Asiatic Cholera.” For the references on cholera I thank Donald F. Stevens of Drexel University. 22. Alamán, Defensa, 61–62. 23. Morán Leyva, Lucas Alamán, 322–23. 24. Anonymous [Juan Bautista Alamán], Apuntes, 33–34. 25. LA to TyM, 10 January 1831 and 1 March 1831, AGN-HJ 440 (6). 26. Anna, Forging Mexico, 242. 27. Valadés, Alamán, 309. 28. Rejón (1799–1849) had a highly active and visible political career as a liberal journalist, ministerial official, and diplomat. 29. Santa Anna, Veracruz, to Alamán, Mexico City, 1 January, 1832, Carso 11–933. 30. Alamán, Mexico City, to Santa Anna, Veracruz, 14 January 1832, Carso 11–936. 31. Santa Ana, Veracruz, to Bustamante, Mexico City, 25 January 1832, BLAC-Riva Palacio Papers, 206. 32. Mier y Terán (1789–1832), a moderate republican but hardly a federalist in his sympathies, was highly respected on both sides of the political divide and was postulated by his supporters as the single viable candidate for president in the elections of 1832, which never took place because of the civil war raging at the time. Trained in his youth in the famous Colegio de Minería (as his friend Alamán would be a few years later), Terán had been a highly effective insurgent military leader and at the time of his death was commandant of the northeastern interior provinces. The quotation from

notes to pages 503–510

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Alamán’s HdeM appears in a longish article on Terán in Villaseñor y Villaseñor, Biografías, 2: 141–50, at 149. 33. Mier y Terán, Matamoros, to Alamán, Mexico City, 4 April 1832, quoted by Valadés, Alamán, 312–13. 34. Mier y Terán’s letter is translated and quoted by Anna, Forging Mexico, 251, and is drawn from Castellanos, El Trueno, 210. 35. Sordo Cedeño, El congreso, 19–20, quoted and translated in Anna, Forging Mexico, 255. 36. LA to TyM, 2 April and 1 May 1833, AGN-HJ 440–7. 37. Quintana Roo (to Gómez Farías?), 13 June 1832, location of both sender and recipient unknown, BLAC-Gómez Farías Papers 67 (50). The vehemence of Quintana Roo’s language is notable. The word bicho can be translated in a number of ways, among them “bug” or “pest”—in the context of the letter “beast” seems most appropriate. Whether Quintana Roo used the word “destroy” in a literal, physical way or in a political sense is open to interpretation. 38. Valadés, Alamán, 314. 39. F. Huth, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 16 August 1832; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 28 August 1832; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 10 December 1832, all in AGN-HJ 424–1. 40. LA to TyM, 30 August 1832, AGN-HJ 374(2), doc. 36; LA to TyM, 8 October 1832, ibid., doc. 41; for doña Narcisa’s letter (unsigned), anonymous to Terranova y Monteleone, Palermo, 8 October 1832, ibid.; LA to TyM, [undated] October 1832, AGNHJ 374(2), doc. 36, 41. A Virginian by birth, Ellis (1790–1863) enjoyed a career in Mississippi as a lawyer, federal judge, and senator. He closed the American legation at the end of 1836 but returned as minister plenipotentiary, appointed by President Martin Van Buren, serving between 1839 and 1842. 42. All these notes and fragments among Butler, Alamán, and Narcisa Castrillo are to be found in the Anthony Butler Papers, Folder 4, “General correspondence, fragments, 1831, 1835, and undated”; and Folder 6, “Correspondence with Lucas Alamán, 1830–1836, and undated.” 43. LA to TyM, 10 December 1832, AGN-HJ 424 (1). 44. Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 29 March 1833, AGN-HJ 374 (2), exp. 35. 45. LA to TyM, 8 March 1833, AGN-HJ 374 (2), exp. 41; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 8 March 1833, AGN-HJ 424, exp. 1; LA to TyM, 8 March 1833, AGN-HJ 374 (2), exp. 41. 46. Joaquín Parres had worked as a sort of confidential agent for Minister of Relations Alamán in 1830–31 while serving in military posts in western Mexico, writing dispatches classified as “very secret” (muy reservada) concerning the political and military activities of such figures as Manuel Cortázar (1787–1846) and Gordiano Guzmán (1790–1854).

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notes to pages 510–517

47. Basadre had been an iturbidista, a secretary of Vicente Guerrero’s, a santanista, a diplomat, and would be a cabinet minister and a high military official during the Mexican–American War. As noted earlier, he was commissioned by President Guerrero in 1829 to explore the possibilities of liberating Cuba and recalled the following year by Alamán when the Bustamante regime came to power. 48. Alvares, Mexico City, to Hernández, Mexico City, 25 April 1833, Carso 11–950. I have been unable to identify either of these men beyond the fact that Hernández was a senator. 49. This very interesting document, Carso 11–960, is unidentified as to author but appears to be in Alamán’s hand and can therefore reasonably be attributed to him. Furthermore, the prose style is consistent with his. 50. Narcisa Castrillo (but unsigned), Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 6 August 1833, ibid.; a similar letter is Narcisa Castrillo (but unsigned), Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 11 September 1833, ibid.; and Terranova y Monteleone, Palermo, to Castrillo de Alamán, Mexico City, 14 July 1834, Carso 11–965. The reference to the ruin of Terranova’s establishment is to the sequestration of his properties in 1833. 51. Portugal (1783–1850) was bishop of Michoacán (1831–1850), a conservative, and an ardent defender of the Church’s independence. He had been appointed to his bishopric during the Bustamante administration, so Alamán must have had at least a consultative role in his selection; he served in the Santa Anna cabinet for only a few months, resigning in November 1834 over his differences with the president regarding the patronato. 52. For “breeding ground” Alamán used the word “criadillas” (testicles) when surely he meant to use “criadero,” a curious mistake. 53. A solid guess as to what houses he was referring to would give us the family home on the calle de San Francisco, another house on the Ribera de San Cosme at the western edge of the city, and a house—substantial and comfortable, given Alamán’s tastes and lifestyle, but probably not baronial—on his Hacienda de Trojes in Celaya; no inventory of it survives. Valadés, Alamán, 342, says that the San Cosme house was purchased in the name of his mother-in-law after his emergence from hiding, but if it is the same house he mentions in the letter quoted, it is clear he already owned it before July 1834; Alamán, Mexico City, to Portugal, Mexico City, 19 July 1834, Carso 11– 966. The reference to the loss of one of his children is to the death of an infant son, and that to his wife’s illnesses to the miscarriage she suffered during the period of his self-internment. 54. Valadés, Alamán, 337. 55. Ibid., 339–40. 56. Portugal, Tacubaya, to Alamán, Mexico City, 22 July 1834, Carso 12–967; for broadside sheet, Carso 12–968; Alamán, Mexico City, to Portugal, no location, 26 July 1834, Carso 12–970. 57. I have combined several letters here: Diez de Bonilla, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 27 July 1834, Carso 12–971; Diez de Bonilla, Mexico City, to Alamán,

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Mexico City, undated, Carso 11–958; Diez de Bonilla, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 28 July 1834, Carso 12–972. 58. All three of these men were distinguished lawyers. Flores Alatorre (1766–1851) was from Aguascalientes; Pedro Vélez (1787–1848) had served briefly along with Alamán and Luis Quintanar late in December 1829 in the interim presidency between the overthrow of Vicente Guerrero and the formal installation of Vice President Anastasio Bustamante; and Manuel de la Peña y Peña (1789–1850), previously a judge on the high tribunal (1824), also served at various times as a cabinet member, deputy, senator, and briefly as president in 1847 and again in 1848. 59. El Mosquito Mexicano, num. 44, Tuesday, 12 August 1834, Carso 12–976. 60. For the court proceedings in late December 1834, Valadés, Alamán, 344–46. On Quintana Roo, see, for example, a long article in La Lima de Vulcano, vol. 3, num. 33, Saturday, 14 March 1835, Carso 12–994, whose conclusion was that the deputy lacked the judicial standing to bring charges before the court against any of the ex-ministers. 61. La Lima de Vulcano, vol. 3, number 35, Thursday, 19 March 1835, 135–36, Carso 12–995, reproduces the justices’ statement.

Chapter 17. Weaving Disaster 1. Valadés, Alamán, 367. 2. Macpherson, Theory. 3. Alamán, Épocas, 29. 4. Alamán, Mexico City, to Gómez de Linares, Celaya, 28 October 1836, AGN-HJ 424 (3). 5. Alamán, Mexico City, to Gómez de Linares, Celaya, 21 September 1836, ibid. 6. Most of the textile entrepreneurs who established large-scale mills in the Orizaba Valley in the late nineteenth century, when the industry flourished due to muchimproved domestic economic conditions, were French immigrants known as the Barcelonnettes. A few arrived as early as 1821, and it is possible that the Legrands were part of this wave. They came from the Ubaye Valley, formerly known as the Barcelonnette Valley, in southeastern France, in the foothills of the Alps; Gómez-Galvarriato, Industry, 5–38. 7. Arguelles, Orizaba, to Alamán, Mexico City, 10 January 1837, AGN-HJ 438 (3), 62. 8. Alamán, Mexico City, to Arguelles, Orizaba, 17 January 1837, ibid. 9. LA to Arguelles, Orizaba, 17 January 1837; and Arguelles, Orizaba, to LA, 28 February 1837, both in ibid. 10. Arguelles, Orizaba, to Alamán, Mexico City, 28 February 1837, AGN-HJ 438 (3), 62. 11. Alamán, Mexico City, to Gómez de Linares, Celaya, 4 February 1837, AGN-HJ 424 (3).

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notes to pages 526–533

12. Bortz, “Mexican Textile Workers,” table 3; Keremitsis, La industria, 117; Antuñano, Comercio. 13. Valadés, Alamán, 373. 14. For the Ramos Arizpe nephew, Ramos Arizpe, Hacienda de San Juan de Tetla, to Alamán, Mexico City, 20 February 1839, AGN-HJ 420 (10), 25. An ardent liberal federalist and political foe of Alamán, Ramos Arizpe had written to him a year previously about finding employment for his nephew, a young lawyer, at Cocolapan itself. Alamán either declined or could not accommodate the young man, but he did recommend him to the owner of a cotton-weaving enterprise in Puebla, where the nephew eventually obtained a position. This and other evidence of a similar nature supports the view that many men within the small so-called political nation that ruled Mexico, although they might be quite distant from each other politically and even open antagonists, nonetheless were on speaking terms privately and participated in the same social networks. 15. Among other loan recipients were, respectively, the former and future presidents Guadalupe Victoria and Mariano Arista. 16. Alamán, Mexico City, to José Mariano Marín, Mexico City, 7 February 1840, AGN-BA 4–47. 17. Banco pressed: Marín, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 14 October 1840, AGN-BA, 4–47; “Finding myself”: Alamán, Mexico City, to Banco de Avío, Mexico City, 10 April 1840, AGN-BA, 4–36; “considerable expenses”: Alamán, Mexico City, to Marín, Mexico City, 14 May 1840, ibid. 18. Lucas Alamán draft proposal, 11 June 1841, BLAC, Misc. Mss. 162. Unless otherwise noted, all the details of Alamán’s June 1841 proposal and all the direct quotations are drawn from this document. 19. The Zurutuza mentioned as a creditor was Anselmo Zurutuza, a Basque immigrant to Mexico who became a major entrepreneur, hotelier, and partner of Manuel Escandón in the Diligencias de México. At one time he leased the Hacienda de Atlacomulco from the properties of the Duque de Terranova y Monteleone. The Iturbe mentioned among Alamán’s creditors was probably the politician and sometime government minister Francisco Iturbe y Anciola; the others—Collado, Subervielle, and so forth—I have been unable to identify. For the financial dealings of some of the more prominent among these merchant-financiers, see Tenenbaum, The Politics, passim. 20. Alamán provided for the committee of creditors a fairly detailed inventory of all his property, in his own hand, dated 16 June 1841. This shows a net value (the total value of his estate less his debts) of almost exactly one hundred thousand pesos. 21. “Nota de las libranzas aceptadas por Dn. Lucas Alamán . . .,” BLAC-Misc. Mss. 162. 22. Legal agreement with sixteen signatories, 3 July 1841, BLAC-Misc. Mss. 162. 23. José Ignacio Cañedo, Guadalajara, to José Miguel Pacheco, Mexico City, 27 July 1841, BLAC—Mariano Riva Palacio Papers, 1160; the Huth letter also contains a dis-

notes to pages 533–541

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tinct reference to the “tristeza”(sadness) experienced by Alamán at the death of a child: Federico Huth, London, to Alamán, Mexico City, 16 August 1841, Carso 14–1192. 24. Quoted in Valadés, Alamán, 392–95. 25. The revolution to which he referred was the seizure of power from the second Bustamante government by Santa Anna on 10 October 1841. 26. This paragraph is based entirely on the partial manuscript record of Supreme Court proceedings in July 1841, relating to the “autos de esperas,” or judicial extensions, initiated by Alamán on behalf of the newly formed Compañía Industrial de Cocolapan. The extensions were occasioned by claims brought before the Tribunal Mercantil de Orizaba, and then the Mexican Supreme Court, by the French ambassador to Mexico, 27 July 1841; I thank Matthew O’Hara for a copy of this document. 27. Draft informe regarding the state of Cocolapan, BLAC—Misc. Mss., 1841 [no date]. The reference to Alamán’s realizing funds on the loans he took out for the business apparently refers to his borrowing at a lower interest rate and then relending funds to the business at somewhat higher rates. 28. “Instrucción sobre los créditos que reporta la negociación de Cocolapan,” unsigned and undated, BLAC—Misc. Mss. 162. 29. Alamán’s accounting of what he had paid and in what form, undated and unsigned draft (in his hand), early March 1842, BLAC—Misc. Mss. 162. 30. The lawyer mentioned was almost certainly José Ignacio Esteva González, a young Veracruz politician later to occupy various political offices in his native state, serve as a national congressional deputy, and hold briefly the portfolio of treasury in the Mariano Arista government in 1851. The personal and political entanglements of the major public figures of the period and therefore the constitution of what I have been calling the political nation are illustrated by Alamán’s relationship with the Esteva family as well as by his links to Manuel Lizardi. 31. Manuel de Lizardi, London, to J. M. L. Mora, Paris, 7 July 1842; Mora’s reply, written in a minute hand on the reverse of Lizardi’s letter, is dated at Paris, 28 July 1842, BLAC-Mora Papers, 7–7-42. 32. Lizardi, London, to Mora, 24 Rue de la Fontaine St. George, Paris, 7 September 1842, BLAC—Mora Papers. 33. This much-cited phrase begins the third line of William Butler Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming.” 34. Informe by junta directiva of Cocolapan, 28 October 1842, BLAC—Misc. Mss. 162. The coauthor of this informe, Juan de Dios Pérez Gálvez, would later purchase Cocolapan from Manuel Escandón, although what his stake in the enterprise was as creditor at this point is not clear. He was the son of the first (and only) Conde de Pérez Gálvez and would himself have succeeded to the condado as the second count had titles of nobility not been abolished by the Mexican congress in 1826. Roughly a contemporary of Lucas Alamán, he had married his cousin, a daughter of the first Conde de Rul and the third Condesa de la Valenciana. His father, the elder Pérez Gálvez, had made

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notes to pages 543–557

some investments in the textile industry in Mexico; on the family genealogy, the textile investments, and the abolition of titles of nobility, see Ladd, The Mexican Nobility, 206, 240, n. 59, and 160–61, respectively. 35. José María Tornel, Mexico City, to Manuel Baranda, Mexico City, 3 October 1843, AGN—BA 6–51. There is some confusion about dates here that I have been unable to resolve, but that does not negate the evidence of high-level concern and discussions over the fate of Alamán, his creditors, and Cocolapan. 36. Rubio was to team with Manuel Lizardi, one of the most disaffected of the Cocolapan creditors, to take over the reinstituted national tobacco monopoly in 1854, during the twilight of Santa Anna’s last government. 37. On Cayetano Rubio’s purchase of Alamán’s Celaya interests, on his speculation in the cotton market, and on his partnership with Pérez Gálvez to purchase Cocolapan, see Colón Reyes, Los orígenes, 93–110; and on the purchase by Manuel Escandón in 1848, Pérez-Rayón, “Manuel Escandón.” Colón Reyes also has the purchase in 1848 and the same price but ascribes the transaction to Antonio Garay, Escandón’s partner in the establishment of his famous diligence service in 1833. For the sale of the enterprise to the Compañía Industrial de Orizaba around 1900, see Pérez-Rayón, “Familias Escandón.” Alejandro Arango y Escandón, Manuel Escandón’s nephew, either owned Cocolapan outright or was managing it for the family at the time of the French invasion in 1863; Alejandro Escandón y Arango, Cocolapan, to Felix Cuevas, Mexico City, 12 November 1863, BLAC—Misc. Mss. 162. 38. Gómez-Galvarriato, Industry, 121, 128–29, 158, 172. 39. Alamán, Epocas, 29. 40. Valadés, Alamán, 466–67, quoting from El Universal with no date.

Chapter 18. Politics and Family 1. Carso 12–986. 2. For the controversies and practices surrounding independence day celebrations in Mexico into the early twentieth century, see the essays in Beezley and Lorey, ¡Viva Mexico!, especially those by Costeloe and Rodríguez Piña, 43–76, and 101–30, respectively. 3. Carso 22–1829 undated draft. The Calendario, first produced in 1827, was an almanac published by the Mexico City printer and bookseller Mariano Galván Rivera (1791?—1876); it was staple reading matter in many Mexican homes well into the twentieth century. 4. Gómez de Linares, Celaya, to Alamán, Mexico City, 8 September 1836, AGN-HJ 393 exp. 35. 5. Fever: LA to TyM, 19 November 1835, Alamán, Obras, 309–10; nervous attack: Alamán, Mexico City, to Argomaniz, Querétaro, 15 October 1836, AGN-HJ 374 (1), exp. 3; Gómez de Linares: Alamán, Mexico City, to Francisco Mogrobejo, Celaya, 6 April 1836, AGN-HJ 374 (1), doc. 15.

notes to pages 558–565

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6. Manuel Iturbe, Querétaro, to Alamán, Mexico City, 5 January 1836, AGN-HJ 420, doc. 11, fol. 23r; ibid., fol. 24r, 7 January 1836; ibid., fol. 25r, 9 January 1836. Judging by his symptoms, it is possible that Arechederreta had contracted erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection that often attacks the face and today is easily treatable with antibiotics. If far advanced or left untreated, however, the disease can cause blood clots, blood poisoning, infections of the heart valves, or even gangrene. Another possibility is that Arechederreta had contracted influenza with pneumonitis. I thank Joshua Fierer of the UCSD Medical School for his expertise in suggesting, very cautiously, that the symptoms reported for the priest might have corresponded to these diseases; personal communication, 1 November 2016. 7. Campos, Guadalupe, to Alamán, Mexico City, 9 February 1836, AGN-HJ 374 (2), doc. 41; Christian resignation: Alamán, Mexico City, to Luis Iturbe, Guanajuato, 10 February 1836, AGN-HJ 420, doc. 10; obligations: LA to TyM, 8 February 1836, Carso 12–1028; entombment: Ignacio Argomaniz, Querétaro, to Alamán, 4 February, 17 March, and 23 March 1836, AGN-HJ 374 (1), doc. 3; title: Valadés, Alamán, 356. 8. Lucas: Gómez de Linares, Celaya, to Alamán, Mexico City, 23 June 1836, AGNHJ 393, doc. 35; miscarriage (aborto): Alamán, Mexico City, to Mogrobejo, Celaya, 5 November 1836, AGN-HJ 374 (1), doc. 15; Carlos: Portugal, Tajimaroa, to Alamán, Hacienda de Trojes, 14 April 1836, ibid., doc. 29; measles: Alamán, Mexico City, to Gómez de Linares, Celaya, 4 February 1837, AGN-HJ 424, doc. 3; Narcisa spitting blood: Gómez de Linares, Celaya, to Alamán, Mexico City, 23 March 1837, ibid. The spitting up of blood is not normally associated with measles, so doña Narcisa may have had an accompanying lung ailment of some kind. 9. Corro (c. 1794–1864) was a Guadalajara-born lawyer who came to Mexico City as a young man to make his fortune and in politics followed a very conservative santanista line. A member of Miguel Barragán’s cabinet during 1835–36, he was named interim president by the Chamber of Deputies after Barragán’s resignation and subsequent death from typhus in early 1836, serving until April 1837. Generally considered a rather weak cypher of a president, after a year in office during which Texas was lost, the treasury was emptied, and Mexican currency became increasingly debased, he called elections in April 1837 and was succeeded by Anastasio Bustamante. 10. Alamán, Mexico City, to Santa Anna, Veracruz, 23 February 1837, quoted in Valadés, Alamán, 362. 11. A full account of the copper money problem can be found in Ibarra, El comercio, 264–72. 12. LA to TyM, 3 August 1836, Alamán, Obras, 347–52. 13. Carso 13–1108. 14. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 592–93. Alamán is playing a bit fast and loose with Roman history here, but he was not writing primarily about Rome, after all. Sulla (Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, 138–78 BC) was consul, then dictator of Rome, instituting reforms that reinforced the power of the Roman senate; the Twelve Tables (ca. 450 BC), brought

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notes to pages 565–573

into being after the fall of the last king of Rome, contained a series of laws or principles defining the basic rights of Roman citizens, supposedly inscribed on tablets of bronze or ivory; Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, 106–48 BC) was famously the political rival of Julius Caesar who formed part of the First Triumvirate with Caesar and Crassus; the Second Triumvirate (43–33 BC) was composed of Octavian (Caesar Augustus), Mark Antony, and Lepidus. 15. Ibid., 5: 594–95. 16. I owe the 1811 and 1842 census information to Sonia Pérez Toledo. 17. Miguel Alamán, Guanajuato, to Alamán, Mexico City, 15 January 1836, AGN-HJ 424, doc. 3; Alamán, Mexico City, to Pérez de Palacios, Mexico City, 29 April 1836, AGN-HJ 374 (2). 18. Alamán, Mexico City, to TyM, 3 January 1851, Alamán, Obras, 552–57. Alamán also noted that he had just moved his family back into the city (presumably from the Ribera de San Cosme) to a house not far from the Hospital de Jesús, at no. 5 de la Calle de la Tercera Orden de San Agustín, which had formerly served as the British legation. 19. Parkinson, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, undated. The original note is in English and although undated, given Catalina’s age, is likely to have been written sometime in 1840.

Chapter 19. Texas, Santa Anna, and War 1. Costeloe, who gives a clear, concise account of these elections (154ff.), mistakenly gives Ellis’s first name as Powathen; Costeloe, La República central, 155. A jurist and politician, Ellis (1790–1863) was a Virginian who spent most of his professional life in Mississippi. Jackson appointed him chargé d’affaires in Mexico in 1836, and Martin Van Buren sent him to Mexico as minister plenipotentiary between 1839 and 1842. 2. Ignacio Urbina, Guanajuato, to Alamán, Mexico City, 18 November 1836, AGNHJ 420, doc. 10, folio 11. 3. LA to TyM, 30 September 1837, Alamán, Obras, 388–91. 4. LA to TyM, 19 November 1835, Alamán, Obras, 310–12; LA to TyM, 31 March 1836, Carso 12–1037; LA to TyM, 19 April 1836, Carso 12–1040; LA to TyM, 13 December 1835, Carso 12–1022; Gómez de Linares, Celaya, to Alamán, Mexico City, 23 June 1836, AGN-HJ 393, doc. 35. There had been a federalist revolt in Zacatecas in February 1835, which Santa Anna had put down by May. 5. Alamán, Mexico City, to Gómez de Linares, Celaya, 20 July 1836, AGN-HJ 393, doc. 35. Neither Santa Anna nor his brother-in-law General Cos, also captured, had been executed. Martín Perfecto de Cos (1800–1854), who was married to Santa Anna’s sister, Lucinda López de Santa Anna, had been defeated in 1835 at San Antonio and Goliad by the Texans under the command of Stephen Austin. He surrendered and marched south with his small army after pledging not to return to Texas but the follow-

notes to pages 573–585

775

ing year joined up with Santa Anna’s northbound force and participated in the massacre at the Alamo. 6. LA to TyM, 3 August 1836, Alamán, Obras, 347–52. 7. Alamán, Mexico City, to Gómez de Linares, Celaya, 4 February 1837, AGN-HJ 393, doc. 35. 8. Alamán, Mexico City, to Santa Anna, Manga de Clavo, 23 February 1837, Valadés, Alamán, 64–66. Valadés writes that this letter was published for the first time in his book but does not cite a source; very probably it was in his private collection of Alamán’s papers that has never been made public. Interestingly, given his earlier radical politics, Valadés follows this letter with something of a rant about the dominant role of the state in Mexican history, focusing on the agrarian reform brought about by the Revolution of 1910, a policy, he wrote, “the enemy of private initiative, that intends to destroy religious sentiments, sows disdain for human life, and establishes a cruel paternity, the exercise of ignorance and perversity” (368). 9. LA to TyM, 30 April 1837, Carso 13–1079; LA to TyM, 27 June 1837, Alamán, Obras, 380–82; TyM to LA, 30 July 1837, Carso 13–1091. 10. Barker, The French Experience. 11. Ibid., 36. 12. Ibid., 57. 13. LA to TyM, 30 April 1838, Carso 13–1118; LA to TyM, 30 September 1838, Carso 13–1129; LA to TyM, 5 November 1838, Carso 13–1133; LA to TyM, 5 November 1838, Carso 13–1136; LA to TyM, 30 December 1838, Carso 13–1137. 14. Valadés, Alamán, 377. 15. Bustamante was to have an active political and military career after his return from exile in 1844, dying some months before Alamán in 1853. 16. Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 28 January 1845, Carso 16–1348; Alamán, Mexico City, to F. Huth, London, 31 March 1845, Carso 16–1356. 17. Haro y Tamariz, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 30 September 1846, Carso 17–1388; Alamán, Mexico City, to Haro y Tamariz, Mexico City, 1 October 1846, Carso 17–1389. 18. Draft of the decree in Alamán’s hand with numerous corrections, emendations, insertions, etc., probably late 1842, Carso 16–1344; Valadés, Alamán, 397. 19. Hamilton, “Report . . . Manufactures”; see also Hamilton, “Report . . . Public Credit.” Alamán would also have agreed with Hamilton’s characterization of democracy as a disease; letter to Theodor Sedgwick, July 10, 1804, 1022. I thank Alan Knight for asking me a question that led me to Friedrich List. 20. Junta de Industria, Mexico City, to Ministro de Hacienda, Mexico City, 23 January 1841, AGN-GL, legajo 106, doc. 1, 1841. 21. Draft of the first annual memoria in Alamán’s hand, 15 December 1843, Carso 16–1297. 22. Ibid.

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notes to pages 587–595

23. El Monitor Republicano, segunda época, No. 1002, Monday, 7 February 1848, Alamán letter under “remitidos,” Carso 17–1433. José María Lafragua (1813–75) served as minister of exterior and interior relations in the Salas government for about two months at the end of 1846. A liberal politician, lawyer and legal scholar, diplomat, journalist, historian, and bibliophile, Lafragua was also to serve in the ministries of Presidents Ignacio Comonfort, Benito Juárez, and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. 24. Undated report on reform of tariff schedules from Comisión de Aranceles, addressed to minister of the treasury, with corrections and interpolations in Alamán’s hand, Carso 23–1923. 25. José María Bassoco, Mexico City, to Mariano Riva Palacio, 28 December 1848, BLAC-Mariano Riva Palacio Papers 3003. Bassoco (1795–1877), himself a European Spaniard, was the nephew of the Spanish-born merchant and miner Antonio de Bassoco y Castañiza (1738–1814), Conde de Bassoco, possessor of one of the great fortunes of late colonial Mexico. The younger Bassoco inherited his uncle’s title, devoted himself principally to large-scale agriculture and literary pursuits, and was the founder and first director of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua; he wrote an obituary essay on Alamán, Noticias (1853). 26. Alamán, San Cosme, to Mariano Riva Palacio (Mexico City?), 26 August 1848, BLAC-Mariano Riva Palacio Papers 2909. 27. Mora, Paris, to Gómez Farías, Mexico City, 20 May 1845, BLAC-Valentín Gómez Farías Papers 1182. 28. See BLAC-Valentín Gómez Farías Papers. 29. Arturo Arnaiz y Freg, Excelsior, section 4A, Friday, 16 August 1963.

Chapter 20. The Monarchist Plot and the US Invasion 1. [Lucas Alamán], “Nuestra profesión de fe,” El Tiempo, no. 19, 12 February 1846, in García Cantu, El pensamiento, 256. 2. A major source of my discussion is Soto, La conspiración, whose treatment is so detailed that I have limited myself only to the outlines of the episode. Other useful sources include O’Gorman, La supervivencia; Reyes Heroles, El liberalismo, 2: 340–48; Costeloe, La República central, 356–76; Valadés, Alamán, 414–19; Gurría Lacroix, “Las ideas monarquistas”; and Samponaro, “Mariano Paredes.” 3. Palti, La política. 4. Manuel Gutiérrez de Estrada, “Carta a Bustamante,” 25 August 1840, in García Cantu, El pensamiento, 221–31. 5. Couto, Mexico City, to Mora, Paris, 25 October 1840, BLAC-Mora, Folder 3: 1839–44. 6. Letters exchanged between Alamán and Bermúdez de Castro, November 1846– April 1847, AGN-HJ 393, exp. 41. 7. Soto, La conspiración, 85, n. 7.

notes to pages 596–610

777

8. Costeloe, La República central, 365. The source Costeloe cites for this is Arrangóiz, México desde 1808, 389. Arrangóiz (1812?—99), an ardent monarchist and conservative, was a politician, diplomat, and writer; he later attached himself to Emperor Maximilian but then repudiated him because of his liberalism. Paredes had expressed his promonarchist sympathies to him personally but distanced himself from monarchist ideas in the face of the violent public reaction to Gutiérrez de Estrada’s letter to Anastasio Bustamante of 1840. Arrangóiz’s México desde 1808 was cribbed in large measure from Alamán’s HdeM. 9. Soto, La conspiración, 104–17, at 108. 10. El Tiempo, 5 February 1846. 11. Costeloe, La república central, 361–62; see also Soto, La conspiración, 104–17, and Reyes Heroles, El liberalismo, 2: 340–48. 12. For some discussion of the press wars in this period, see Palti, La política, introduction and 61–108. 13. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 507, n. 2; Tornel, Breve reseña. On Tornel, see Fowler, Tornel. 14. Palti, La política, 45. He suggests that the period between 1821 and Alamán’s death in June 1853, often referred to as the Age of Santa Anna, might with equal or greater justification be called the Age of Alamán because he was the dominant intellectual figure of the period. 15. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 549–50. 16. The war proved to be a testing ground for four future presidents, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan (not a military man but President Polk’s troublesome secretary of state), and Ulysses S. Grant; two unsuccessful presidential candidates, Winfield Scott and John C. Fremont; and the two major antagonists in the American Civil War, Grant and Robert E. Lee, all of whom saw service in Mexico. 17. TyM to LA, 6 January 1847, Carso 17–1396; LA to TyM, 30 March 1847, Alamán, Obras, 443–45; LA to TyM, late April (undated) 1847, Carso 17–1402. 18. LA to TyM, 28 May 1847, Alamán, Obras, 445–47; LA to TyM, 28 June 1847, ibid., 447–49; LA to TyM, 28 July 1847, Carso 17–1416. 19. Alamán, Mexico City, to Prescott, Boston, 17 March 1849, quoted in Jaksic, The Hispanic World, 162. 20. LA to TyM, 28 August 1847, Carso 17–1419; LA to TyM, 28 September 1847, Alamán, Obras, 450–52; for a detailed, almost poetic account of the violent popular response to the American capture of the city, see Granados, Sueñan las piedras. 21. LA to TyM, 28 October 1847, Alamán, Obras, 453–56. 22. LA to TyM, 28 October 1847, ibid.; LA to TyM, 28 November 1847, ibid., 456– 58; LA to TyM, undated but late 1847, Carso 17–1404. 23. LA to TyM, 11 April 1848, ibid., Obras, 468–470. 24. LA to TyM, 13 May 1848, ibid., 470–71. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on 2 February 1848. Its major terms called for Mexico to cede to the United States Upper California, the modern-day states of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts

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notes to pages 611–618

of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas and settled that state’s southern border at the Rio Grande. The United States paid $15 million to Mexico and agreed to assume all claims of American citizens against Mexico. The treaty was negotiated by a commission of three Mexicans and, for the US, by Nicholas Trist, the chief clerk of the State Department, who had been dispatched by President Polk for the purpose of negotiating, was then recalled, and then very controversially signed the treaty of his own initiative. The US Senate ratified the treaty on 10 March 1848, Mexico somewhat later, and the ratifications were exchanged by 26 May 1848.

Chapter 21. City, Congress, Wealth, Health 1. Valadés, Alamán, 450, 452–55. 2. Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal (hereafter AHDF), Fondo Ayuntamiento de México (FAM), serie Elecciones de Ayuntamiento, vol. 863, exp. 45, elections of 1849. The census of earlier in the year showed that the city’s thirty-two districts plus its convents had a combined population of 109,531. 3. Alejandro Arango y Escandón, Mexico City, [to president?], 10 July 1849, ibid. 4. Valadés, Alamán, 454–55. 5. AHDF-FAM, serie Hacienda General, vol. 2108, exp. 71, “Informe publicado por el S. Lucas Alamán como presidente del E. Ayuntamiento de esta ciudad, acerca del estado en que ha recibido la corporación en el presente año dichas rentas, y los gravamenes que estas reportan,” El Siglo XIX, tomo 2, 14 August 1849. 6. The market was designed by the French architect Enrique Griffon and incorporated various innovations in construction and design. 7. Valadés, Alamán, 458. 8. Ibid., 467–72. 9. Ibid., 467–68. 10. Broadsheet printed by Imprenta de Torres, 1 December 1849, Carso 18–1506. 11. Palti, La política, passim, who also offers an extremely acute analysis of the journalistic and argumentative style of the two newspapers and other satellite publications, 7–51. 12. “Nuestra profesión de fe,” El Tiempo, no. 19, 12 February 1846, in ibid., 72–77. 13. Quoted in Valadés, Alamán, 466. 14. Fermín Viniegra, Actopan, to Riva Palacio, Toluca, 30 October 1849, BLACMariano Riva Palacio Papers 3381; Miguel J. [illegible], Puebla, to Alamán, Mexico City, 12 October 1849, Carso 18–1499. 15. José María Godoy, Mexico City, to Mariano Riva Palacio, Toluca, 4 December 1849, BLAC-Mariano Riva Palacio Papers. 16. Reprint of hoja volante (fly sheet) from El Monitor Republicano, no. 1908, no date [but 1850], no place, printed by Vicente García Torres, Carso 18–1510. 17. LA to TyM, 14 December 1849, Alamán, Obras, 516–17.

notes to pages 619–628

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18. My account of this speech is drawn from Valadés, Alamán, 471–72. 19. Ibid., 471. 20. Alamán’s report was published the following year by the ministry of relations. The entire history of Isthmian projects is quite fascinating and may be traced in some detail in, among other sources, Felipe Castro and Marcela Terrazas, coordinadores, Disidencia; and Lucía León de la Barra, “José de Garay.” The initial concessionaire, José de Garay, came from a prominent entrepreneurial family of Veracruz, hoped to attract British investors (as Alamán had done with his mining projects in the 1820s), and estimated that the total cost of the transisthmian road/railroad route would come to £3,380,000; see his An Account. By the time Alamán delivered his report, Garay had passed the concession to Peter A. Hargous of New York on 25 March 1850, although whether the Mexicans were aware of this yet is not clear. In a renewed concession under the last Santa Anna government, just a few weeks before Alamán’s death, the Mexican Supreme Court awarded the rights to an American firm, A. G. Sloo and Company, of which one of the Mexican directors was Manuel Payno (1810–94), a liberal politician, diplomat, writer, and political foe of Alamán. 21. LA to TyM, 3 September 1850, Alamán, Obras, 540–41. 22. De la Rosa (1804–56) was a distinguished liberal politician from Zacatecas who negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on the part of Mexico, served briefly as Mexican envoy to the US and in the national constituent congress, occupied several cabinet ministries, including in the administration of Ignacio Comonfort, and was briefly governor of Puebla. 23. LA to TyM, 30 March 1853, Alamán, Obras, 664–68. 24. Undated, unsigned, Carso 22–1887; I have estimated the year from internal evidence. 25. Valadés, Alamán, 422. 26. I owe these observations about the health considerations of escaping the city center to my colleague Matthew Vitz; see his article “To Save the Forests.” 27. I owe the text of Alamán’s will to Carlos Silva; in addition to the discussion offered here, see Van Young, “El testamento.” 28. Archivo Histórico Municipal de Guanajuato, Registro de Instrumentos Públicos, 1846, fols. 604r—606r; María de la Luz Alamán de Yturbe had died by this time. 29. Undated, unsigned autograph codicil to the testament of 1850, Carso 21–1797. 30. TyM to LA, 20 August 1850, Carso 19–1559; Pedro Peláez, Palermo, to Alamán, Mexico City, 28 February 1853, Carso 20–1701. 31. LA to TyM, 11 February 1850, Carso 18–1518. The mineral antimony has been used in medical preparations and other applications since ancient times. Under humoral theory its function was to aid in the expulsion of undesirable humors from the body by inducing sweating, vomiting, and purging. Its use was still fairly widespread in the nineteenth century to treat chronic inflammation of the chest, bronchitis, wheezing, and pneumonia, often in combination with bloodletting; it was most probably

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notes to pages 628–639

administered to Alamán orally in the form of tartar emetic. On the history of the medical uses of antimony, see Paschal and Hanson, “Dr. William D. Hutchings,” and McCallum, Antimony. 32. LA to TyM, 9 March and 13 April 1850, Alamán, Obras, 4: 523–26, 526–28, respectively. 33. LA to TyM, 3 September 1851, Alamán, Obras, 4: 540–41. 34. Anonymous [Juan Bautista Alamán], Apuntes. 35. LA to TyM, 30 March 1853, Alamán, Obras, 4: 664–68. 36. Alamán, San Cosme, to Riva Palacio (Mexico City?), 26 August 1848, BLACMariano Riva Palacio Papers 2909. 37. LA to TyM, 14 May 1850, Alamán, Obras, 528–30; LA to TyM, 13 July 1850, ibid., 534–36; LA to TyM, 1 August 1850, ibid., 537–40. 38. Illeg. to Alamán, Mexico City, 17 August 1846, Carso 17–1387; LA to TyM, 3 February 1849, Carso 18–1462; LA to TyM, 11 February 1850, Alamán, Obras, 519–23; Alamán, Mexico City to Riva Palacio, Toluca, 10 March 1850, BLAC-Mariano Riva Palacio Papers, 3935; LA to TyM, 3 September 1850, Alamán, Obras, 540–41; LA to TyM, 5 December 1850, ibid., 590–91; LA to TyM, 4 August 1851, ibid.; LA to TyM, 30 September 1852, ibid., 640–45; LA to TyM, 30 January 1853, ibid., 652–57; LA to TyM, 30 March 1853, ibid., 664–68.

Chapter 22. Santa Anna Returns, Alamán Exits 1. Valadés, Alamán, 516. 2. El Universal, segunda época, tomo VIII, no. 326, Tuesday, 8 March 1853, Carso 20–1705. 3. Bancroft referred to him as a hatmaker unknown outside of Guadalajara; Bancroft, History of Mexico, 5: 608–9. 4. LA to TyM, 28 February 1853, Alamán, Obras, 658–62. 5. Suárez y Navarro, El General Santa-Anna. 6. For a detailed and fascinating account of Santa Anna’s years in the Virgin Islands, see Caron, “General Santa Anna in Saint Thomas,” www.rootsweb.ancestry .com/~vicgl/SantaAnnaGenFinal.pdf, an essay brought to my attention by Paul Hoffman. 7. García Cantú, El pensamiento, 338–39, quotes at length the description of the popular reception, oath taking, etc., by the French envoy André Le Vasseur in a letter to the French foreign minister. 8. Valadés, Alamán, 528ff. quotes this passage from Suárez y Navarro more or less verbatim but shortened. Suárez was reproducing from memory very long verbal exchanges reconstructed after the fact, probably without notes, and thus certainly elaborated. 9. The document is reproduced in full in Lira, Los Imprescindibles, 357–62.

notes to pages 641–658

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10. Translating gente sensata into English is a bit difficult. The expression certainly means “sensible people” but has a broader sense including “decent people,” “rational people,” “educated people,” and so forth. 11. The supposed problem of a free press—an opposition press, really—would be addressed by the press censorship law of 25 April 1853, which paved the way for the fierce repression of newspapers and books and even theatrical productions; Fowler, Santa Anna, 297–98. Other measures intended to shore up the dictatorship included the exile of regime opponents, including Arista, Benito Juárez, and Melchor Ocampo; the establishment of a secret police and passport system; and, by decree of 1 August (two months after Alamán’s death), the imposition of summary court-martial and execution for anyone suspected of conspiring against public order. 12. “Reseña política,” issued at the Palacio Nacional, May 1853, Carso 20–1712. 13. AH-SRE, LE 79, 2 June 1853. 14. Except as otherwise noted, my account of Alamán’s death follows closely that of Valadés, Alamán, 537–39, which seems to me highly plausible. 15. Anonymous [Juan Bautista Alamán], Apuntes. 16. AH-SRE, LE 364, fol. 85rff. 17. Bonilla’s appointment: AH-SRE, LE 368, fol. 135, 4 June 1853; his note: AHSRE, LE 79, 1 July 1853. 18. García Icazbalceta to Prescott, 25 June 1853, quoted in Jaksic, The Hispanic World, 159.

Chapter 23. Getting the Historia Written 1. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 2. Alamán, Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República Megicana, 1: 4. 3. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 566. 4. Freeman, Affairs. 5. Much of what follows is adapted from Van Young, “De la infancia.” 6. Freeman, Affairs, 277. 7. Florescano, Historia de las historias, 360 (translation mine). 8. Bustamante, Cuadro histórico, 1:39. Bustamante (1774–1848) was an active participant in the independence movement, a prolific journalist and pamphleteer, almost continually a member of the Mexican congress until his death, and a major historian in his own right as well as an editor of older histories and chronicles. On Bustamante’s life and works, see Castelán Rueda, La fuerza, and Brading, The First America, 634–46. 9. Alamán, HdeM, 1: 274–78. 10. Ibid., 1: 52. 11. Zavala, Ensayo histórico, 1: 156–57 (my translation), quoted in Lozano Armendares, “Lorenzo de Zavala,” 225.

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12. But one example of this neglect is Florescano’s near-comprehensive survey of Mexican historiography, National Narratives, which does not even mention the Disertaciones. 13. There have been several editions of the HdeM, each in five volumes. The first, the one that Alamán himself oversaw, was published by José Mariano de Lara (1800– 1892) in Mexico City, 1849–52; subsequent editions were produced in 1883–85 and in 1938. The edition I have used, still in use by most scholars and readers today, is the fourth edition, by Editorial Jus, 1942, edited by Aguayo Spenser, of which the second edition (or the fifth, depending on how one counts) is actually a second printing by Jus in 1968. 14. In fact, the draft bears very few emendations. Alamán interlineated lines of text with carats indicating where they were to be integrated. Without these, the text would have been remarkably clean, so that if this actually is a first draft, it indicates that his thoughts and prose were well formulated before his pen struck the page. 15. “Apuntes para la Biografía del Exmo. Sr. D. Lucas Alamán, Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de Relaciones Exteriores . . .,” in Alamán, HdeM, 1: ix–xxxviii, at xxx. This is the same biographical essay, under the same title, published in 1854 by José M. Lara, Mexico City, 1854. José Valadés, by the way, apparently relied heavily on this biography by Alamán’s son for his own 1938 biography of the statesman. 16. Draft of Noticias biográficas . . ., Carso 22–1830; Carso 23–1977, in Alamán’s hand, of the biographical part of the essay. 17. Prescott, Boston, to Calderón de la Barca, Mexico City, 25 June 1840, quoted in Jaksic, The Hispanic World, 229, n. 33. 18. Ministro de Relaciones José María Lacunza, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 23 November 1849, Carso 18–1505; Alamán, Mexico City, to Lacunza, November 1849 [n.d.], Carso 18–1502. 19. Alamán, Mexico City, to Terranova y Monteleone, 28 August 1852, Alamán, Obras, 635–39. 20. Pope Pius IX: Pope Pius IX, Rome, to Alamán, 22 September 1851, Carso 20– 1638. 21. My account of the Prescott–Alamán relationship is based in part on Jaksic, The Hispanic World, 120–68; see also Gardiner, “Prescott’s Ties.” The Alamán side of the correspondence is housed primarily among Prescott’s papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society. 22. Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Mexico. Jaksic comments that “Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, a book first published in 1843 and still in print, [could not] be what it is without the detailed comments of José Fernando Ramírez and Lucas Alamán”; Jaksic, The Hispanic World, 14. 23. Ibid., 137–38. 24. Prescott, Boston, to Calderón [Madrid?], 17 December 1850, quoted in ibid., 158.

notes to pages 664–673

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25. Intrepid and Sociedad Mexicana: Prescott, Boston, to Alamán, Mexico City, 19 November 1851, Carso 20–1647; election to APS: Isaac Lea, Philadelphia, to Prescott, Boston, 18 January 1851, Carso 19–1591 (Lea [1792–1886] was a distinguished geologist and sometime vice president of the APS); Fanny Calderón to Prescott, 19 October 1858, quoted in Jaksic, The Hispanic World, 159. 26. Ibid., 154. 27. Prescott, Historia de la Conquista de México; this version also included a separate volume of illustrations compiled by Isidro Gondra, the director of the Museo Nacional. The Spanish translation with which Alamán was associated was Prescott, Historia de la conquista de Méjico (1844). 28. Jaksic, The Hispanic World, 154–55, 158; future edition: Prescott, Boston, to Alamán, Mexico City, 30 March 1846, Carso 17–1385. 29. Prescott, Pepperell, to Alamán, Mexico City, 16 September 1845, Carso 16–1370. 30. Prescott, Boston, to Alamán, Mexico City, 30 March 1846, Carso 17–1385. 31. Prescott, Boston, to Alamán, Mexico City, 13 November 1850, Carso 19–1574. 32. Prescott, Boston, to Alamán, Mexico City, 22 January 1851, Carso 16–1345. 33. Nearly ninety closely written pages in length, the inventory was carried out by Antonio Rodríguez Galván and dated 12 September 1853; BLAC, Alamán Papers, 359. 34. Alamán, HdeM, 1: 401. 35. Alamán, Mexico City, to Ramírez, Durango, 2 December 1848, Carso 17–1455. 36. Alamán, Mexico City, to Cayetano Ibarra, no location, 4 December 1848, Carso 17–1456. 37. Manuel Gómez Linares, Celaya, to Alamán, Mexico City, 8 August 1847, Carso 17–1418. 38. Priests: Ramírez, Durango, to Alamán, 22 December 1848, Carso 18–1458; firstperson accounts: [illegible], Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 1 February 1849, Carso 18–1461; Calderón: F. Calderón, Guanajuato, to LA, 25 May 1849, Carso 18– 1472; Montero: Felipe Benicio Montero, Cuautla, to Alamán, Mexico City, 1 May 1849, Carso 18–1469. 39. Chimalpopocatl Galicia, Mexico City, to Alamán, Mexico City, 28 April 1849, Carso 18–1468. Galicia (1805–77) and Alamán may well have known each other through the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, of which both were members. Galicia was a prominent historian and linguist who later functioned as a sort of Nahuatl language tutor for Emperor Maximilian and lived in exile for a number of years because of it. 40. Nicolás Bravo, Chichihualco, to Alamán, 21 February 1850, Carso 18–1517. 41. Alamán, HdeM, 3: 387–90. In the footnote (fn. 16, 164) Alamán takes yet another of his innumerable swipes at Carlos María de Bustamante, asserting that the latter gave a completely erroneous idea of the royalist action that gave rise to the incident about which he queried Bravo. In fact, in the “Adiciones y reformas” section of volume 2 (428), Alamán commented, “[I] always cite with great distrust [suma desconfianza]

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what D. Carlos Bustamante says when I have no opportunity to compare it with other sources.” 42. Ibid., 388. The “Adiciones y reformas” (which Alamán also referred to as “Adiciones y rectificaciones”) section of each volume was essentially a more or less extended list combining errata and corrigenda; that is, both production errors in printing, spelling, and so forth, and corrections offered by the author on more substantive points. In the HdeM these lists, which could be quite lengthy—in volume 1, for example, the list took up sixteen pages—appeared at the end of the volumes and seem to have been added during second printings of the work. 43. Alamán is here making reference to Pierre Terrail, Chevalier de Bayard (1473– 1524), “le chevalier sans reproche,” but has slightly misquoted it, substituting tacha (stain) where he should probably have written reproche. 44. Mariano Arista, Mexico City, to Mariano Riva Palacio, Toluca, no date, 1849, BLAC-Mariano Riva Palacio Papers 3032. 45. Gannon, “Lucas Alamán,” 74–75. 46. Undated draft in LA’s hand, ca. 1850, Carso 24–2012. 47. LA to TyM, 3 June 1851, Alamán, Obras, 568–73; TyM to LA, 24 August 1851, Carso 19–1631; LA to TyM, 3 December 1851, ibid., Obras, 600–605. 48. Costeloe, “The Junta Patriótica”; and Rodríguez Piña, “Conservatives.” 49. Alamán, HdeM, 5: 483–84. 50. Speech: Carso 20–1715.

Chapter 24. What Is in the Historia de Méjico? 1. Alamán, HdeM, 4: 7. 2. I owe this phrase to Brian Connaughton. 3. Commenting on his embrace of monarchism as the most appropriate form of governance for Mexico, as I noted above, Alamán refuted the claim of José María Tornel in his Reseña, and surely agreed with by other people at the time and since, that he, Alamán, had always been a monarchist (HdeM, 5: 507, n. 2). 4. Alamán remarked that those taking the title of alteza (highness) without being born to it were sure to face ruin, extending the observation to Santa Anna’s assumption of the superlative excelso (sublime) in 1843; HdeM, 5: 243, n. 20. 5. Voekel, Alone Before God.

Epilogue: On Decolonization and Modernization 1. Rodríguez, True Spaniards. 2. For a still-powerful study of this in Brazil, see Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization. 3. Scott, Seeing. 4. Johnson, The Birth of the Modern.

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5. I leave aside here the issue of whether New Spain was technically a colony or not, since its politico-judicial status was that of a separate “kingdom” joined to Spain under a universal monarchy. Jaime Rodríguez has made a powerful case for this latter view in many works, most recently in True Spaniards. Nonetheless, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. The relationship of Mexico to the Spanish metropolis was in most important respects that of colony to mother country, even if the technical distinction could be invoked at certain critical conjunctures to provide political leverage.

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Bibliography

Archival Sources and Abbreviations BLAC—Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin Hernández y Dávalos Collection (BLAC-HyD) José María Luis Mora Papers (BLAC-Mora Papers) Lucas Alamán Papers (BLAC-Alamán Papers) Mariano Riva Palacio Papers (BLAC-Mariano Riva Palacio Papers) Minas de Sombrerete (BLAC-Minas de Sombrerete) Miscellaneous Manuscripts (BLAC-Misc. Mss.) Valentín Gómez Farías Papers (BLAC-Gómez Farías Papers)

Carso—Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Carso (formerly Condumex) Lucas Alamán Papers

AGN—Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico) Banco de Avío (AGN-BA) Gobernación Sin Sección (AGN-GSS) Gobernación Legajos (AGN-GL) Hospital de Jesús (AGN-HJ) Operaciones de Guerra (AGN-OG)

AHDF—Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal Elecciones de Ayuntamiento (AHDF-FAM) Hacienda General (AHDF-HG)

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AHG—Archivo Histórico de Guanajuato Protocolos de Cabildo (AHG-Protocolos)

AHMG—Archivo Histórico Municipal de Guanajuato Registro de Instrumentos Públicos (AHMG-IP)

SRE-AH—Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo Histórico Libros encuadernados (SRE-AH, LE)

Frequently Cited Works of Lucas Alamán HdeM, Historia de Méjico, 5 vols. Obras, 10 vols. Obras, vol. 4 (correspondence with Duque de Terranova y Monteleone)

Published Works Aceves, Patricia. “The First Chair of Chemistry in Mexico (1796–1810).” In Patrick Petitjean et al., eds., Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion, 137–46. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992. Agostoni, Claudia. Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2003. Aguilar Rivera, José Antonio. “Alamán y la constitución.” In Aguilar Rivera, Ausentes del universo: Reflexiones sobre el pensamiento político hispanoamericano en la era de la construcción nacional, 1821–1850, 173–222. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. ———. Ausentes del universo: Reflexiones sobre el pensamiento político hispanoamericano en la era de la construcción nacional, 1821–1850. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. Alamán, Lucas. “Autobiografía de D. Lucas Alamán.” In Lucas Alamán, Obras, vol. 2: Documentos diversos (Inéditos y muy raros), edited by Rafael Aguayo Spencer, 11–28. Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1947. ———. “Defensa del ex ministro de relaciones don Lucas Alamán: En la causa formada contra él y contra los ex ministros de Guerra y Justicia del vicepresidente don Anastasio Bustamante, con unas noticias preliminarias que dan idea del origen de ésta.” May 1834. In Examen imparcial de la administración de Bustamante, with an introduction by José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, 47–193. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2006. ———. Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República Megicana. Edited by Rafael Aguayo Spencer, 3 vols. Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1942.

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———. Documentos diversos: Inéditos y muy raros, compilación y nota preliminar de Rafael Aguayo Spencer. Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1945. ———. Este sí está más picante que el del Señor Bustamante. Mexico City: Imprenta a cargo del C. Tomás Uribe y Alcalde, 1830. ———. Examen imparcial de la administración del general vicepresidente D. Anastasio Bustamante, compilador José Antonio Aguilar Rivera. Mexico City: Conaculta, 2008. ———. “Exposición presentada á las Cortes por los diputados de ultramar en la sesión de 25 de Junio [sic] de 1821, sobre el estado actual de las provincias de que eran representantes, y medios convenientes para su definitiva pacificación; redactada por encargo de los mismos diputados por D. Lucas Alamán y D. José Mariano Michelena.” In Alamán, Historia de Méjico, volume 5, document 19, 641–54. ———. Épocas de los principales sucesos de mi vida, paleography by Isauro Rionda Arreguín and Amor Mildred Escalante. Guanajuato: Archivo General del Gobierno del Estado de Guanajuato, 2003. ———. Historia de Méjico desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon su independencia en el año de 1808, hasta la época presente, 2nd ed. 5 vols. Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1968. ———. Liquidación general de la deuda externa de la República Mexicana hasta fin de diciembre de 1841: Precedida de la relación histórica de los préstamos de que procede y de las diversas modificaciones que han tenido hasta la formación del fondo consolidado, con un resúmen de todos los puntos que han quedado pendientes y requieren resolución del supremo Gobierno. Mexico City: Imprenta de I. Cumplido, 1845. ———. Memoria que el Secretario de Estado y del despacho de relaciones exteriores e interiores presenta al soberano congreso constituyente. . . . November 1823. Mexico City: Imprenta del Supremo Gobierno, 1823. ———. “Memorias de D. Lucas Alamán, Ministro de Relaciones exteriores e interiores en diversas épocas: En las que se contiene la verdadera historia de esta República desde el año de 1808 en que comenzaron las inquietudes que condujeron a su independencia hasta el año de 1843.” 1840. ———. Prospecto: Disertaciones sobre la Historia de la República Megicana. . . . Mexico City: Imprenta de Lara, 1844. [Alamán, Lucas]. Representación dirigida al Exmo. Señor Presidente Provisional de la República por la Junta General Directiva de la Industria Nacional, sobre la importancia de ésta, necesidad de su fomento, y medios de dispensarselo. Mexico City: Imprenta de J. M. Lara, 1843. Alatriste, Oscar. “El capitalismo británico en los inicios del México independiente.” Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México 6 (2006), 1–28. Altamirano, Ignacio. El Zarco: Episodio de la vida Mexicana en 1861–1863, prólogo de Francisco Sosa. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1945.

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Index

Alamán, Lucas: Academia de la Historia, appointment to, 553; Academia de la Lengua, appointment to, 553– 54; baptism of, 14; betrothal, 80; Bustamante administration, minister in, 207–14, 245–52, 370–73, 503; Cámara de Diputados, election to, 553, 618–20; childhood, 32–41; children, 188, 191–95; Consejo de Gobierno, 561–62, 570; death of, 1, 644, 645–47; descriptions of, 97, 121, 139; Dirección General de la Industria Nacional, appointment to, 581–86; Duque de Terranova y Monteleone, relationship with, 308–11, 346–49; education, 36, 37, 41–42, 56–57; European travel, 65–79; family life, 188–95, 358–60, 565–68; father’s lineage, 25–29; finances of, 319–22, 358, 521–25, 555, 620–27; Guerrero, involvement in death of, 465–82, 483, 485, 494–97; health of, 324, 557, 619, 627–31, 749n31; hiding, in, 13, 336, 497–99, 506–7, 511–14; historian, as, 199–202, 651–53, 656; insurgency, impact on, 51–54; Junta de Fomento, appointment to, 581;

Abarca de Bolea, Pedro Pablo, 98 Aberdeen, Lord, 406 Acordada Revolt, 355, 365 Adalid, Ignacio, 450 Adams, John Quincy, 234, 235, 413, 435 Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, 161, 242, 243, 416, 430 Agassiz, Arthur David Louis, 266, 276, 278, 280, 296 Aguilar, José Antonio, 34 Aguilar y Marocho, Ignacio, 647 Agustín I, Emperor. See Iturbide, Agustín de Alamán, Agustina, 22, 32 Alamán, Antonia, 193, 358, 360, 567 Alamán, Carlos, 193, 559 Alamán, Gil, 33, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 199, 247, 360, 566, 623, 626, 645 Alamán, Juan Bautista Ignacio, 33, 139, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 308, 338, 360, 566, 567, 626, 628, 645, 646, 660– 61 Alamán, Juan Vicente, 14, 15, 22, 24, 25–29, 32–33, 34, 35, 38–40, 123, 125, 552 Alamán, Justino, 193, 194, 567, 629

819

820

Alamán, Lucas (continued) library of, 667–70; marriage, 190– 91; Mexico City Ayuntamiento, president of, 611–14; monarchism, views on, 592–602; mother’s lineage, 16– 25; named envoy to France, 120–21; political involvement, reasons for, 552; presidential candidate, 570–71, 620; Santa Ana administration, minister in, 635, 636–40, 641–42, 643–44; Spanish Cortes, service in, 82, 85–115; Supremo Poder Ejecuctivo cabinet, in, 144–53; as triumvir, 360, 369; Unida, involvement in, 255–57, 295; will of, 625–26; writing by, 555–56, 670–73. See also Defensa del ex ministro; Disertaciones; Épocas de los principales sucesos de mi vida; Examen imparcial de la administración del general vicepresidente D. Anastasio Bustamente; Historia de Méjico; Memorias Alamán, Lucas (son), 193, 194, 559, 567 Alamán, Luis Iturbe, 32 Alamán, Pascual, 193, 567 Alamán, Pedro, 193, 497, 567 Alamán, Rafael, 566 Alamán, Sebastián, 193, 194, 567 Alamán, Tomás, 14, 22, 35, 40, 166, 191, 272, 719n20 Alamán Castrillo, Catalina, 191–92, 193, 196, 199, 211, 359–60, 566, 567 Alamán Vidaurrázaga, Lucas, 195 Alamán y Escalada, María de la Luz, 22, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 191, 197, 625 Aldama, Juan, 152, 690 Aldazoro, Santiago, 455–56 Alhóndiga de Granaditas, 27–28, 46, 47–48, 655, 656

index

Allende, Ignacio, 26, 50, 152, 690 Almonte, Juan N., 398 Alpuche, José María, 387, 397, 398 Alvares, Ángel, 511 Álvarez, Juan, 472, 474, 476, 484, 500, 502, 510, 599 Amati, Bernardino de, 96, 725n16 anarchy, 156, 159–65, 185, 202, 360, 362, 386; collective violence as, 161; constitution of state, 161; private property and law, 161, 164; public order, 161, 162, 202–7 Anaya, Juan Pablo, 251, 504 Anaya, Pedro María, 578, 600, 608 Andrade, José María, 55, 626, 662 Anglo-Mexican Mining Association, 33, 257, 266, 270, 275, 290 Anitua, Narciso, 300, 301 antimony, 627, 779n31 Antuñano, Esteban de, 456, 459, 461, 523, 526 Anzorena, José Ignacio, 676 Anzorena, José María, 676 Apodaca, Viceroy Juan Ruiz de, 79, 80, 82, 87, 96, 130, 726n36 Archivo General, 201–2, 374, 375 Archivo General y Público de la Nación, 200 Arechederreta, Gabriel, 22–25, 26, 125 Arechederreta, Juan Bautista, 22, 23, 24, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 55, 64, 80, 115–16, 123–36, 191, 558–59, 623, 671, 718n16, 720n19, 724n22, 773n6 Arenas, Joaquín, 363 Argüelles, Rafael, 524, 525 Arias, Juan de Dios, 762n1 Arista, Mariano, 545, 577, 599, 620, 633, 644, 675 Armijo, Gen. Gabriel, 178 Arriaga, Ponciano, 678

index

Arrillaga, Francisco, 144, 210 Arroyo, Miguel, 644–45, 646 Atleta, El, 398 Austin, Moses, 6, 161, 241, 419 Austin, Stephen, 6, 241, 571 B. A. Goldschmidt and Company, 218, 219, 220, 221, 257 Banco de Avío, 4, 371, 524, 529, 532, 711; assessment of, 460–64; decline of, 457–59, 528; establishment of, 451–57; reasons for, 306, 371, 444, 445–46; termination of, 459 banditry, 152, 205–7, 373, 380, 398 Bankhead, Charles, 348, 596, 751n61 Baranda, Manuel, 301 Barclay, Herring, and Richardson, 219, 221 Bardají, Dionisio, 74 Barradas, Gen. Isidro, 366 Barragán, Miguel, 179, 368, 477, 484, 510, 519, 560, 569 Barriga y Blanco, María Josefa Sánchez de, 55 Barrio, José M. del, 118 Barry, James, 120 Basadre, José Ignacio, 405, 510, 768n47 Bases Orgánicas, 579, 608 “Bases para la administración,” 639, 640, 643, 644 Bassoco, José María, 302, 588–89, 746n80, 776n25 Baudin, Charles, 576, 577 Bellamare, Louis de, 142 Bello, Andrés, 71 Benicio Montero, Felipe, 672 Benton, Sen. Thomas Hart, 417, 758n16 Bermúdez de Castro, Salvador, 314, 337, 407, 580, 593–95, 599 Bernardo Couto, José, 532, 593

821

Berradé, Juan José, 78 Berry, Caroline de, Duchesse, 765n13 Blancarte, José María, 633 Blanco White, José María, 71 Bocanegra, José María, 369, 529 Bolaños Company, 257, 270, 294, 298 Bolívar, Simón, 435, 440 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 67, 69, 689 Borbón, Carlos de, 594 Borbón, Francisco de Paula de, 594 Borneque Schneider, Refugio, 195 Boturini Benaducci, Lorenzo, 202, 735n20 Bourbon Reforms, 5 Bourbon Restoration, 67, 69 Bracho, José María, 301 Bravo, Leonardo, 673 Bravo, Nicolás, 145, 151, 167, 175, 248, 292, 365, 368, 467, 474, 483, 495, 560, 570, 577, 579, 581, 600, 620, 672–73, 690 Breishaupt, August, 119 Britain: British investment in Mexico, 255–57, 258–66; diplomatic recognition by, 221–26, 262; loans from, 215–21, 232–33; relationship with, 72–73; stock market crash of 1825, 215. See also London Buchan, John, 282 Bullock, William, 260, 727n42, 748n12 Burke, Edmund, 72, 685, 703 Bustamante, Anastasio, 111, 119, 151, 294, 355, 356, 365, 366, 369, 387, 423, 426, 467, 471, 474, 481, 495, 502, 509, 512, 560, 570, 577, 581 Bustamante, Bernabé, 34–35 Bustamante, Carlos María de, 38, 60, 62, 146, 156, 165, 168, 205, 326, 378, 397, 476, 480–81, 493–94, 519, 652, 655–56, 659, 661–63, 664, 682–83, 685, 781n8

822

Bustamante, José María de, 200 Bustillo, Juan Manuel, 77 Busto, Asunción, 291 Busto, Francisco Cristóbal de, 19, 20, 718 n.18 Busto, Francisco Matías de, 271 Busto, José María, 21 Busto, Pedro de, 16 Busto Jérez y Moya Monroy, Francisco Matías de, 16–19 Busto y Jérez, Francisco de, 16 Busto y Marmolejo, Josefa Antonia de, 21, 22 Busto y Pereda, Pedro José de, 19, 20, 21, 728n4 Butler, Anthony, 382, 383–84, 395–96, 405, 411, 412–14, 416, 417, 422–24, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429–32, 433, 451, 507–8, 759n21 Calatrava, José María, 96, 725n16 Calderón, Francisco, 150 Calderón de la Barca, Ángel, 309, 623, 662, 663, 664 Calderón de la Barca, Fanny, 81, 142, 256, 323, 663, 664, 722n1 Calleja, Félix María, 47, 51, 59, 81 Camacho, Josefa, 36 Camacho, Sebastián, 243, 250 Campos, Vicenta, 34 canal, transisthmian, 250–51, 747n4 Canalizo, Valentín, 478, 577, 579 Candolle, Augustin Pyramus de, 723n17 Cañedo, José Ignacio, 533 Cañedo, Juan de Dios, 96, 104, 146, 247, 252, 327, 390, 618, 725n20, 750n35 Cañedo, Manuel, 334 Canning, George, 218, 220, 221, 222– 23, 224–25, 237, 260, 262, 289, 737n12

index

Carlos IV, 689 Carlyle, Thomas, 683–84 Caste War of Yucatán, 610 Castrillo, Juan José, 81 Castrillo Portu, Ana Josefa, 80 Castrillo Portu de Alamán, Narcisa, 33, 80–82, 119, 143, 188, 189, 190–91, 196, 199, 279, 424, 506, 508, 513, 559, 566, 622, 623, 624, 625, 645 Castro, José Pablo, 34 Cata mine, 16, 19, 26, 31, 41, 77, 117, 118, 235, 259, 263, 269, 270–72, 282, 287, 290, 301–2 Catorce Company, 257 Ceballos, Juan Bautista, 577, 578, 634 Centeno, Ignacio, 49, 51, 721n27 centralism, 155, 156, 162, 165, 173, 184–85, 203, 371, 380–85, 560, 600– 601, 711 Cervantes, Vicente, 57, 200, 201, 376, 721n37, 735nn14–15 Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de, 69 Chimalpopocatl Galicia, Faustino, 672, 783n39 Císcar, Gabriel, 104–5, 726n31 citizenship, 687, 709, 712 class warfare, 164, 473, 692, 710 Clay, Henry, 236, 238, 416, 436 Cocolapan textile factories, 321, 461, 523–29, 626; Celaya weaving factory, 196, 523, 525, 528; failure of, 4, 319, 529–44; Orizaba spinning mill, 523, 525; sale of, 544–47 Codallos, Juan José, 472 Colegio de la Purísma Concepción, 37 Colegio de Minería, 56 Colegio de San Juan de Letrán, 24, 80, 129, 130, 190 Collado, Fernando, 533, 534, 536, 541 Collège de France, 69, 73

index

Colombelle, 73, 74 Colombian Mining Association, 269 Compañía Franco-Mejicana, 118 Compañía Industrial de Orizaba, S.A., 545 Compañía Industrial Mexicana. See Compañía Patriótica Mexicana Compañía Michoacana para la Industria, 581 Compañía Patriótica Mexicana, 448–51, 454, 455, 456; investors in, 449–50, 454 Congress of Panama, 435–36 Conkling, Alfred, 646 conservatism, 274, 333, 337, 363, 491– 92, 641–43, 703. See also Conservative Party Conservative Party, 3, 4, 601, 611, 614–17, 619, 632–33, 694 Constant, Benjamin, 69 Constitution (1824), 154, 155, 184, 187, 248, 388, 394, 580 Constitution (1836), 560–61 Constitution (1857), 3 Constitution of Cádiz, 60 copper coineage, 562 Coppinger, José María, 230–31 Córdoba, Gonzalo de, 747n5 Correo, El, 397, 398 Corro, José Justo, 560, 561, 562, 569, 773n9 corruption, 454–55 Cortázar, Manuel, 104, 121, 512 Cortés, Fernando, 164, 309, 311–16, 317, 326, 331, 334, 657, 658, 748n10 Cortes of Cádiz, 700–701 Cos, José María de, 696 Cos, Martín Perfecto de, 774n5 cronyism, 447, 449, 454–57 Cruz, José de la, 51, 87, 404 Cuba, plan to attack, 404–5

823

Cuevas, Luis Gonzaga, 133 Cushing, Caleb, 344, 751n55 Dávalos, Rafael, 37, 51, 720n13 decolonization, 2, 652, 707–12, 714; cultural, 711–12; economic, 710–11; political, 707–10; social, 710 Defensa del ex ministro, 470, 485–94, 498, 513, 514, 515, 518 Deffaudis, Baron Antoine-Louis, 576 Díaz, Porfirio, 3, 55 Díaz de Bustamante, Ramón, 39, 720n17 Diez de Bonilla, Manuel, 193, 341, 517, 596, 612, 635, 638, 647 Diez Madroñero, Antonio Jacinto, 19, 21–22, 718n18 Diosdado, Francisco Cornelio, 36 Dirección General de la Industria Nacional, 581–84 Disertaciones, 313, 552, 658–60, 661, 662, 663, 664, 665, 666, 677, 681 Disraeli, Benjamin, 260–2 Dollars, John, 264, 266 Domínguez, Miguel, 145, 147, 179, 209 Doyle, Percy, 646 Drugman, Anthony, 513 Drusina, Guillermo, 545 Dupaix, Guillermo M., 200, 734n13 Easthope, Sir John, 265 Echávarri, José Antonio, 165, 166, 363 Echave, José María, 450 Echeverría, Francisco Javier, 577 Edwards, Hayden, 415 Ejército de Reserva, 368, 369, 371 Elhuyar, Fausto de, 56 Ellis, Powhatan, 507, 569, 767n41, 774n1 England. See Britain

824

Épocas de los principales sucesos de mi vida, 32, 37, 40, 52, 53, 57, 76, 77, 78, 115, 121, 723n17 Escalada, Antonia, 22 Escalada, María Ignacia, 14, 15, 22–25, 34, 35, 40, 42, 49, 51, 54, 56, 77, 125, 191, 198–99, 360, 718n16, 728n4 Escalada, Miguel, 24 Escalada y la Flor, Gertrudis, 22 Escalada y La Flor Septién, Francisco Antonio de, 22 Escandón, Manuel, 462, 545, 741n12, 771n34 Escobar, Francisco, 115, 116 Espinosa, José Ignacio, 483, 495, 503, 510, 519, 764n1 Espinosa de los Monteros, Juan José, 210 Esteva, José Ignacio, 210, 239, 240, 243, 245, 277, 370 Esteva González, José Ignacio, 538, 771n30 Examen imparcial de la administración del general vicepresidente D. Anastasio Bustamente, 162, 164, 513 Facio, José Antonio, 293–94, 368, 369, 388, 423, 465, 467, 473, 474, 476, 480, 482, 483–84, 495, 496, 501, 503, 510, 519 factionalism, political, 233, 333, 360, 386, 392, 395, 489, 651 Fagoaga y Villaurrutia, Francisco Antonio, 71, 75, 77, 79, 85, 96, 97, 121, 146, 300, 455, 512, 612 Fagoaga y Villaurrutia, José Francisco, 71, 79, 82, 121, 300 federalism, 159, 250, 387–88, 643, 711; crisis, federalist, 153–58, 165–78; separatism and, 159, 162, 180–87 Federalista, El, 398, 468, 500

index

Federalist Papers: No. 9, 162, 163, 731n31; No. 10, 162, 163–64, 731n34 Ferdinand VII, 59, 66, 67, 68, 79, 85, 87, 95, 103, 113, 224, 366, 373, 404, 405 Fernández, Eustaquio, 252 Fernández Vidaurrázaga, Salvador Diego, 734n6 Fernando VII, 689 Flon, Manuel de, 689, 720n13 Flores Alatorre, Juan José, 130, 517, 519, 769n58 Fonte, Pedro, 126 France: recognition of Mexico, 409. See also Paris; Pastry War Franciscan Third Order, 43–44 Frederick Huth and Company, 285, 744n55 Fredonia, Republic of, 415 Freemasonry, 87, 233–34, 239, 413, 724n6; Scottish Rite, 233, 239–40, 244, 297, 363; York Rite, 223, 233, 238–40, 244, 292, 297 French Intervention, 3 French Revolution, 133, 162, 694, 700 Fuentes, Victorino de las, 66 Füica, Manuel de, 313 Galicia, Francisco, 63 Gálvez, Bernardo de, 27, 37 Gálvez, José de, 456–57 Gama, Antonio, 204 Gamarra, Agustín, 440 Gante, Pedro de, 129 Garay, José de, 619, 779n20 García, Albino “El Manco,” 672, 690 García, Francisco, 295, 488 García, Manuel, 359, 752n5 García Castrillo, Juan José, 80–81, 360, 721n25 García Icazbalceta, Joaquín, 647

index

García Ilueca, Ignacio, 144 García Salinas, Francisco, 146, 388 garden, botanical. See Jardín Botánico Garibay, Marshal Pedro de, 42, 45 Garza, Felipe de la, 165, 732n35 George IV, 70 Germany, 75–76 Gladiador, El, 398 Glennie, William, 266–67, 276, 278, 280, 296–97, 453, 455, 742n29 Godoy, Manuel de, 689 Goldschmidt. See B. A. Goldschmidt and Company Gómez de Linares, Manuel, 458, 526, 556, 557, 569, 572–73, 672 Gómez Farías, Valentín, 132, 146, 155, 334, 336, 388, 425, 459, 488, 504, 509, 510, 514, 563, 577, 578, 579, 580, 589, 590, 599, 600, 618, 657 Gómez Navarrete, Juan, 149 Gómez Pedraza, Manuel, 96, 104, 151, 210, 240, 243, 248, 249, 250, 334, 336, 340, 356, 364, 365–66, 488, 500, 502, 504, 620 Gómez y Anaya, Cirilo, 390 Gondra, Isidro Rafael, 426–27 González, Miguel, 512, 763n1 González Ángulo, Bernardo, 459 González Arnao, Vicente, 118 González Calderón, Tomás, 66 González de la Vega, José María, 665 González y Gómez, Francisco, 625 Gonzalvo, Cardinal, 74 Gorostiza, Manuel Eduardo de, 116, 404, 406, 412, 452, 575 Gran Colombia, 362, 435, 440 Grandi, Juan de, 399, 400, 401 Gregoire, Abbé (Henri), 68, 722n8 Guanajuato, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 30–31, 42, 46–51, 287. See also Cata mine Güera Rodríguez, La, 144, 729n7

825

Guerra del Sur, 384, 431, 432, 465, 469, 499. See also Guerrero, Vicente Guerrero, Vicente, 96, 145, 147, 179, 233, 239, 292, 293, 294, 355–56, 365, 366, 367–68, 385, 392, 399, 402, 415, 432, 446, 465, 467, 468–82, 485, 495, 562, 565, 657, 696 Gutiérrez de Estrada, Manuel, 593 Gutiérrez Estrada, José María, 407, 512 Guzmán, Gordiano, 500 Hacienda de Atlacomulco, 140, 198, 307, 308, 309, 317, 318, 322–25, 333, 337, 342–46, 553, 609, 611, 627–28, 630–31, 749n22 Hacienda de Juan Martín, 197 Hacienda de Trojes, 195–99, 283, 358, 506, 534–35, 554–55, 622, 623, 625 Hamilton, Alexander, 162, 163, 582 Hardy, Sir Thomas Masterman, 265 Haro y Tamariz, Antonio, 635, 637, 638 Harrisse, Henry, 314 Haüy, René Just, 57, 721n38 Hernández, José Santiago, 511 Herrera, José Joaquín de, 144, 166, 170, 175, 577, 578, 579, 581, 590, 594, 596, 620, 662, 675, 678 Herrera, José Manuel de, 373 Herring, Charles, Jr., 269 Herring, Graham, and Powles, 260, 269, 279 Hervey, Lionel, 222 Hidalgo y Costilla, Father Miguel, 42, 44–45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 152, 555, 657, 684, 690, 691–92, 695, 696, 697, 720n13 Historia de Méjico, 4, 43, 52, 55, 60, 61, 63, 72, 82, 108, 124, 135, 173, 187, 263–64, 338, 360, 365, 367, 374, 466–67, 470, 503, 513, 551, 552, 559,

826

Historia de Méjico, (continued) 562, 563, 603, 611, 613, 629, 659, 660–63, 664, 666, 667, 670–706; critical reception of, 673–79; editions of, 782n13; volume 1, 228, 407, 584, 662, 674, 681, 682, 683, 684–85, 686–87, 688, 689, 690, 691–92, 694–95, 704, 715; volume 2, 662, 674, 676, 683, 690, 692, 695, 701; volume 3, 662, 674, 687, 690–91, 700; volume 4, 663, 675, 681, 685, 693, 695; volume 5, 93, 207, 357, 370, 418, 600, 620, 663, 675, 678, 680, 681–82, 685, 691, 695, 697–98, 699–700, 701–2, 704, 705, 706 history of Mexico, 651–79, 712; historians, 652, 654, 655–58. See also Historia de Méjico hombres de bien, 15, 470, 703, 710 Hospital de Jesús, 164, 312, 313, 317, 320, 326, 339, 340, 602, 609 Houston, Sam, 413, 571 Hullett Brothers and Company, 118, 209, 256, 257, 264, 266, 267, 270, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 285, 358 Humboldt, Baron Alexander von, 5, 68, 69, 92, 117, 119, 121, 256, 259, 281, 308, 331, 585, 747n4 Hunt, Leigh, 73, 723n13 Huskisson, William, 277, 743n42 Huth, Alfred Henry, 286 Huth, Charles Frederick, 286 Huth, Frederick, 285–86, 289, 292, 348, 361–62, 506, 513, 533, 580, 744n56, 745n58 Huth, Henry, 286 Ibarra, Cayetano, 671 Icaza, Isidro Ignacio de, 377, 378, 754n39

index

Inclán, Ignacio, 390, 500 independence of Mexico, 114, 651, 708; day of celebration, 555–56, 677–78; meaning of, 653, 654–55, 656, 676– 77, 678–79; Spanish Cortes speeches about, 92–99, 107, 109, 110–11, 112– 13 indigenous people, 6, 391, 473, 686– 87, 709–10 industrialization, 4, 91, 92, 442–48, 522, 553, 705. See also textile industry Inquisition, 43, 58 insurgency, 30, 41–51 Iriarte y Oropresa, Tomás de, 718n12 Irisarri, Santiago de, 227, 230 Isabella, Infanta, 406 Iturbe Alamán, Luis, 23 Iturbe e Iraeta, Manuel, 22–23, 32, 39, 40 Iturbe y Anciola, Francisco, 533, 534, 770n19 Iturbide, Agustín de, 42, 93, 96, 99, 112, 120, 121, 130–31, 145, 151, 165, 166, 176, 177, 222, 224, 274, 471, 555, 593, 653, 657, 681, 684, 690, 694– 98, 730n18 Iturbide, José Joaquín de, 151 Iturbide, Nicolasa, 151 Iturrigaray, Viceroy José de, 41, 201, 689 Jackson, Pres. Andrew, 235, 366, 411, 412, 413, 416, 417, 572 James, Henry, 307, 747n1 Jameson, Robert, 71 Jardín Botánico, 200–201, 375–76 Jiménez, Mariano, 152 Jimeno, Rafael, 57 Juárez, Benito, 3 Junta de Fomento de Industria, 588

index

Kingsborough, Edward King Viscount, 378 Labarrieta, Antonio, 695 Lafayette, Marquis de, 119 Lafragua, José María, 776n23 Landero, Pedro, 488, 501 Lara, José Mariano de, 662 Lares, Teodosio, 635, 638 Larrainzar, Manuel, 644 Lautaro Lodge, 72 Lavarrieta, Antonio, 27, 42, 719n23 Lazo de la Vega, Domingo, 271, 455, 534 legislative bodies, 187, 385–90, 564, 701. See also Spanish Cortes Legrand, Agustín, 524, 525, 529, 531– 32, 769n6 Lemaur de la Muraire, Francisco, 121, 227, 229, 230 León, Antonio de, 168, 183, 732n39 León de la Barra, Francisco, 195, 734n7 Lerdo de Tejada, Miguel, 340 Lerdo de Tejada, Sebastián, 340 Ley del Caso, 511 liberalism, 115, 162, 184, 372, 657, 681, 708 Liceaga, José María, 676 Lizana y Beaumont, Francisco Javier de, 45, 126, 128 Lizardi, Joaquín Fernández de, 60, 63 Lizardi, Manuel de, 538–39, 541, 772n36 Llave, Pablo de la, 67, 144, 210, 211–13, 722n4 Lobato, José María, 365 Lobato Rebellion, 209 Lombardini, Manuel María, 577–78, 634 London, 70–73. See also Britain López Cancelada, Juan, 689

827

López de Nava, Gov. Pedro José, 213 López Monroy, José María, 679 López Pelegrín, Ramón, 96, 105, 107, 110, 112, 725n18 López Portillo, Jesús, 618 López Rayón, Ignacio, 671, 696 López Uraga, José, 633, 634 Lorenzana, Francisco Antonio de, 131 Loreto mine, 288 Louis XVIII, 70, 221 Louis Napoleon, 705 Lucchesi, Conde Fernando, 313, 315 Lucchesi-Palli, Antonio, 315 Mackie, Patrick, 218–19, 222, 238, 262, 737n14 Madison, James, 162, 163, 234, 731n34 Madrid, 66–67, 78, 85, 86 Maistre, Joseph de, 703 Malanoche mine, 288 Mangino, Rafael, 326, 427, 483, 495, 496, 503, 510, 512, 764n1 “Manifiesto del Supremo Poder Ejecutivo a la nación,” 217 manufacturing. See industrialization María Cristina, 406 Marmolejo y Esquivel, Luisa, 17, 19 Marshall and Manning, 450 Martínez, Andrea, 19, 21 Martínez de los Ríos, Ramón, 204 Masonry. See Freemasonry Matamoros, Mariano, 690 materialism, 2, 134, 681, 702–6 Maximilian, Emperor, 601, 636 Mayer, Brantz, 143 McCormick, Thomas, 451, 453–54 McGillivray, Simon, 297–98, 299 Mellado mine, 16, 19, 31, 290 Memorias, 13, 14, 16, 17–18, 26, 37, 40, 162, 202, 241, 497, 512, 513, 659, 660

828

Mexican-American War, 6, 407, 410, 551, 599, 602–10 Mexico, 4–8; alliances with Spanish American states, 434–41; boundary with United States, 232, 241, 242, 416, 430, 433; debt, foreign, 4, 215– 21; economy of, 4–5, 7; nation-state mythos, 439–40; political culture, 332–33; population of, 5, 6; separatism in, 180–87; South American countries, collaboration with, 434– 41. See also independence of Mexico Mexico City, 5, 41–42, 53, 54–58, 79, 124, 139–44; Ayuntamiento, Alamán in, 611–14; crime in, 204, 379, 398; elections, 58–64; occupation of, 344, 602, 605–10 Michelena, José Mariano, 45, 96, 97, 98, 99, 145, 147, 179, 209, 210, 216, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223–24, 225, 250, 385, 387, 389, 512, 593 Michelena plan, 98, 99–115, 185 Mier, Fray José Servando Teresa de, 68, 69, 70, 71, 147, 165, 312, 313, 326, 654, 656–57, 685 Mier y Terán, Gregorio, 612 Mier y Terán, Manuel, 146, 154, 210, 240, 241, 248, 326, 367, 388–89, 415–16, 422, 428, 481–82, 490, 503– 4, 571, 600, 766n32 Migoni, Francisco Borja, 117, 198, 199, 207, 216, 218, 219, 220, 222, 262, 277, 284, 286, 294, 296, 298, 412, 744n53 Mina, Javier, 152–53 mining, 303–6; insurgency impact on, 217; silver, 4–5, 30, 76, 77, 258, 300–302, 443–44; speeches in Spanish Cortes about, 88–92. See also United Mexican Mining Association

index

Miranda, Fracisco de, 71 modernization/modernity, 2, 4, 115, 257–58, 373, 553, 652, 681, 705, 707, 713–15 Molé, Louis-Mathieu, 576 monarchism, 386, 407, 595–602, 616– 17, 708–9; constitutional, 156, 597, 616–17, 708; plot, monarchist, 363, 592–95 Monitor, El, 613 Monroe, Pres. James, 106, 161, 223, 263, 435 Monroe Doctrine, 106, 161, 263, 436 Montes de Oca, Pedro, 645 Montgomery y Nicod, 532 Montmorency, Duc de, 68 Mora, José María Luis, 162, 382, 388, 457–58, 538–44, 589–90, 593, 652, 654, 657 Morelos, José María, 135, 684, 690–91, 695, 696 Moreno, Pedro, 152, 653 Morier, James, 740n3 Morillo, Pablo, 87 Mornay, Aristides Franklin, 269 Moya y Monroy, Francisca de, 16 Moziño, José Mariano, 128 M. R. Boulton, 275–76 Murray, John, 260 museum, national, 375–78 Múzquiz, Melchor, 293, 369, 561 Nájera, Manuel de San Juan Crisóstomo, 596 Naples, 74–75 nation-state, 154, 165, 171, 708 Navarre, 78 Necker, Jacques, 69 Negrete, José Celestino, 167 Negrete, Pedro Celestino, 145, 175, 279, 363

index

neocolonialism, 438, 710 nepotism, 456 Neri, Felipe Enrique (Baron de Bastrop), 733n56 newspapers. See press Noriega y Sayago, Dolores, 625 Obregón, Pablo, 235, 236, 435 Observador, El, 364 Observador de la República, 398 Ocampo, Melchor, 642, 675–76 Ochoa, Francisca, 25 O’Conor, Hugo, 720n17 O’Donojú, Juan, 87, 93, 94, 99, 104, 105, 112, 227, 239, 340 O’Gorman, Charles, 222, 225 Olavarría y Ferrari, Enrique de, 762n1 Ortiz, Tomás, 671 Ortiz Monasterio, José María, 383, 453 Oses, Juan Ramón, 227, 228, 230 Otero, Mariano, 717n2 Pabellón mine, 300, 301 Pact of Zavaleta, 488 Pakenham, Richard, 382, 575, 577 Panama, Congress of, 435–36 Paredes y Arrillaga, Mariano, 577, 578, 579, 581, 592, 594–95, 596, 599, 601 Paris, 67–70, 73, 76–77, 115, 116–17 Parkinson, John, 567 Parres, Joaquín, 390, 510, 767n46 Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), 4 Pastry War, 408, 527, 575–80 Paul, Felipe Fermín, 95, 96, 725n16 Peel, Sir Robert, 406, 407 Peláez, Pedro, 322, 627 Peña y Peña, Manuel de la, 517, 519, 578, 608, 769n58 Peninsular War, 66 Pereda y Carrera, Mariana Francisca, 19

829

Perennes, Pedro Emilio, 378 Pérez, Antonio Joaquín, 67, 722n5 Pérez de Palacios, Francisco, 566 Pérez Gálvez, Antonio, 290, 291 Pérez Gálvez, Condesa de, 279 Pérez Gálvez, Juan de Dios, 541, 543, 545, 771n34 Pérez Madrid, José Ignacio, 527 Pezuela, Viceroy Joaquín de, 87, 726n36 Picaluga, Francisco, 475–77, 484, 490 Pignatelli, Antonio, 313 Pignatelli, Diego, 316, 340 Pignatelli de Aragón, Diego María, 325, 340 Pignatelli de Aragón, José. See Terranova y Monteleone, Duque de Pípila, El, 696 Plan de Casa Mata, 159, 166 Plan de Iguala, 96, 103, 146, 597, 599, 681–82, 695, 697 Plan de Jalapa, 293, 367–70, 470 Plan de Montaño, 292, 365 Plan de San Luis Potosí, 579, 594 Plan de Veracruz, 166, 501 Poinsett, Joel R., 155, 223, 232–45, 259, 292, 297, 326, 327, 362, 366, 394, 395, 411, 412, 416–17, 425–26, 436, 597, 657, 664, 730n16 Polignac, Jules de, 119 Polk, Pres. James K., 604 Poniatowski, Prince Stanislaw, 74 Ponz Piquer, Antonio, 57, 721n39 Portu, Manuel Fernando, 81 Portu Bustamante, Ana Josefa, 80–82 Portugal y Solís, Juan Cayetano Gómez de, 514, 515, 518, 559, 768n51 Posadas, José, 49 Powles, John Diston, 260, 270 Prentiss, James, 758n6 Prescott, William H., 662, 663–67, 669, 677

830

press, 149–50, 390–98; censorship of, 392–93, 395, 397–98, 500, 640, 781n11; freedom of, 60–63, 394–98, 644. See also Registro oficial Prieto, Guillermo, 33, 189, 670, 678 property, private, 310, 373, 692–93; anarchy and, 161, 164; right to, 327–30, 335 Quebradilla mine, 288 Quesada, Corregidor, 380–81 Quintana, José Matiás, 327, 328, 334 Quintanar, Luis, 151, 166–67, 169–70, 171, 172, 173–74, 175, 176–77, 178, 180, 360, 369, 370 Quintana Roo, Andrés, 393, 500, 505, 519, 750n35. See also Federalista, El Rafael, Rafael, 614, 632 Ramírez, José Miguel, 98, 99, 101, 121 Ramos Arizpe, Miguel, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 146, 210, 239, 248, 250, 416, 527, 589, 593, 770n14 Rancho de San Lorenzo, 197 Ranke, Leopold von, 683–84 Rayas mine, 31, 287, 290, 294, 296 Real del Monte Company, 256, 257, 270, 277, 282, 289, 302, 741n12 Recamier, Juliette, 68 Registro oficial, 387–88, 393–94, 404, 407, 412, 425, 427, 479–80 Rejón, Manuel Crescencio, 398, 500 religion: freedom of, 225–26; national, 226, 642, 682; social cohesion through, 434, 642, 703 republicanism, 156, 184, 357, 386, 598 Revillagigedo, Viceroy, 689 Reygadas, Fermín de, 57–58 Riaño, Gilberto, 34, 46, 47

index

Riaño, Intendant Juan Antonio de, 27, 28, 34, 36–38, 42–43, 46, 47, 689, 719 n.23 Riego, Rafael, 79, 85, 87 Rincón, Manuel, 183–84 Río, Andrés Manuel del, 57, 85 Rivadavia, Bernardino, 78 Riva Palacio, Mariano, 302, 504, 589, 629, 675, 746n80 Riva Palacio, Vicente, 659, 763n1 Robinson, Fayette, 380–81, 669–70, 754n44 Robles Pezuela, Manuel, 633–34 Rocafuerte, Vicente, 220, 221, 250–51, 398, 500 Rodríguez Puebla, Juan, 504 Roman Catholic Church, 43–44, 642, 682, 703. See also religion Rome, 73–74, 75 Rosa, Luis de la, 620, 779n22 Rubio, Cayetano, 462, 544, 545, 772nn36–37 Saint Maxent, Victoria de, 37–38 Salas, Mariano, 577, 580, 586, 600 San Bernabé mine, 288 Sánchez, Josefa, 340 Sánchez, Manuel, 390 Sánchez, Prisciliano, 204 Sánchez de Tagle, Agustín, 612 Sánchez de Tagle, Francisco, 511–12 Sánchez de Tagle, Manuel, 560, 561 San Gerónimo, Father José de, 36 San Juan de Ulúa, 113, 121, 169, 221, 226–31, 241, 366, 577 San Miguel, Fray Antonio de, 126 San Román, Urbano, 355, 356 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 3, 141, 160, 165–66, 178, 193, 336, 337, 341– 42, 364, 365, 369, 398–403, 488, 501–2, 504, 512, 514, 517–18, 519,

index

545, 560, 569, 572–73, 577, 578, 579, 580, 599–600, 607, 608, 634–35, 636–41, 643, 691, 699–700 Santa Fe Trail, 232, 242, 411 Santa María, Miguel, 67, 435, 722n4 Santa María-Calatrava Treaty, 406 Santander, Francisco de Paula, 435 Sardaneta, José Mariano de, 290, 291, 453 Sardaneta, Vicente, 23 Schoolbred, James Nelson, 280, 744n48 Scott, Winfield, 345, 602, 605, 606–7, 609 Secho mine, 287 Seguín, Erasmo, 733n56 Septién, Father Martín, 48 Septién, Miguel, 559 Sessé y Lacasta, Martín, 128 Sierra Nevada, Marqués de, 312 Siete Leyes, 560, 561, 562–63 Siglo XIX, El, 612, 614, 635, 676, 678 silver: minting, 275–76; refining, 77, 78, 281. See also mining Sirena mine, 31 slavery: fugitives, 430, 432–33; in Texas, 415, 422 Slidell, John, 594 Smith, Henry, 571 Sol, El, 149, 245, 356, 359, 364, 398 Southwest Peasants’ War, 579 sovereignty, national, 161, 171, 180–81, 182, 186 Spain, 403–9; Carlist Wars, 406; colonial regime, 111, 652, 655–56, 656, 685–90, 693–94; Constitution (1812), 58, 79, 85, 95, 701; invasion by, 366–67, 403; rebellion of 1820, 79; recognition from, 404, 406; reconquest fears, 161, 221, 403–4,

831

405. See also Ferdinand VII; San Juan de Ulúa; Spanish Cortes Spaniards, expulsion of peninsular, 8, 209, 363–64 Spanish Cortes, 82, 85–115; American independence, speeches about, 92– 99; mining, speeches about, 88–92 SPC. See Supremo Poder Conservador SPE. See Supremo Poder Ejecutivo Spedalieri, Nicola, 133–34 Staël Madame de, 69 Stephenson, Robert, 269–70 Stephenson, Rowland, 265 Suárez y Navarro, Juan, 590, 633, 634, 635–37, 638, 639, 780n8 Supremo Poder Conservador (SPC), 561 Supremo Poder Ejecutivo (SPE), 144, 145, 147, 150, 167, 169, 174, 175, 178, 179, 182, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 248 Switzerland, 75 tariffs, 446, 447, 523, 582 Tayloe, Edward Thornton, 237 Taylor, Zachary, 599, 604 Terranova y Monteleone, Duque de, 307–51, 505, 513, 553, 677; Alamán, relationship with, 308–11, 346–49; correspondence with, 347–49, 350, 361–62; economic structure of holdings, 316–25; embargo of properties of, 333–37, 344; loans from, 321–22, 626–27, 745n58; relationship with Mexico, 291, 325–32; rent collection, 338–41; sales of holdings, 320, 341–42. See also Hacienda de Atlacomulco Texas, 6, 403, 410–34; Anglo-American colonization of, 150, 161, 241, 243, 414, 422, 571; annexation by United

832

Texas, (continued) States, 603–4; border with Mexico, 572; factors in conflict with Mexico, 411; Indians and, 416; Poinsett and, 241–45; rebellion in, 551, 557, 571–73, 682; slavery in, 415, 422 textile industry, 7, 306, 371, 445–46, 448, 452–53, 455, 456, 460–62, 523, 582, 584, 585–86. See also Cocolapan textile factories Thiers, Adolphe, 310, 668, 748n7 Three Guarantees, Army of, 96, 146, 681, 682 Tiempo, El, 556, 592, 595, 596, 597–98, 599, 611, 614, 615–16, 617 Tlalpan Company. See Compañía Patriótica Mexicana Tlalpujahua Company, 257 Toreno, Conde de, 95, 96, 98–99, 105, 108, 109–10 Tornel, José María, 238, 364, 365, 368, 424, 495, 543, 600, 633, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639, 652 Torre, Brother Antonio de la, 44 Trasviña, Gregorio de, 41, 42, 56 Treaty of Córdoba, 93, 99, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 146 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 410, 433, 609, 777n24 Treaty of San Lorenzo, 243 Treaty of Union, Alliance, and Perpetual Confederation, 435, 436 Treaty of Velasco, 572 Treaty of Zavaleta, 504, 507 Tribuno del Pueblo Mexicano, El, 398 trienio liberal, 221 Trist, Nicholas, 608 Ulibarri, José Dolores, 597 Unida. See United Mexican Mining Association

index

United Mexican Mining Association, 118–19, 213, 216, 218, 251, 255–99, 303–6, 358, 626; board of, 264–65; downfall of, 277–99; founding of, 255, 258–66; holdings of, 285; operation of, 266–77 United States: boundary with Mexico, 232, 241, 242, 416, 430, 433; congress of Panama, participation in, 435–36; Mexico relationship with, 232, 412. See also Mexican-American War; Texas Universal, El, 310, 546, 556, 592, 601, 611, 614, 618, 619, 620, 632, 678 Uraga, Antonio María, 724n1 Valdovinos, Mucio, 676 Valencia, Gabriel, 578, 607 Valenciana mine, 31, 90, 91, 92, 258, 259, 290 Valle, Manuel del, 41 Van Buren, Pres. Martin, 414, 416, 417, 428 Vázquez y Sánchez Vizcaíno, Francisco Pablo, 523, 525 Velasco, José María, 712 Velázquez de León, Joaquín, 635, 638 Vélez, Pedro, 360, 369, 517, 519, 769n58 Venegas, Viceroy, 59, 63, 673 Veta Grande mine, 294, 298 Veta Negra mine, 300, 301 Vetch, James, 256, 270, 743n36 Vial, Alamán y Compañía, 117, 264 Vial y Eydelin, Nicolás, 117 Vicario, Leona, 63–64, 449–50, 750n35 Victoria, Francisco, 474 Victoria, Guadalupe, 96, 121, 145, 151, 155, 166, 169, 207, 218, 222, 225, 228–29, 230, 236, 237, 238, 246, 248, 249, 262, 277, 292, 366, 696 Vidaurrázaga, María Josefa, 566

index

833

Villalba, Lorenzo, 34 Virgin of Guadalupe, 46, 50, 439, 473, 711 voz de la Patria, La, 397

Yandiola, Juan Antonio, 88, 96, 113, 116, 725n16, 727n39 Yermo, Gabriel de, 45 Ysunsorbe, Domingo de, 127

Waldeck, Jean-Fréderic Maximilien de, 376–37, 378–79, 753n37 Walkingshaw, Robert, 280 Wallace, John W. E., 429 Ward, Henry George, 222, 223, 237, 250, 255–56, 263, 271, 741n5 Watt, James, 276 Wavell, Arthur G., 222, 737n14 Wilson, Sir Robert, 406 Wolfin y Rusch, 532 Wollaston, William, 268, 743n31

Zavala, Lorenzo de, 88, 96, 146, 166, 209, 228, 237, 239, 250, 291, 297, 327, 333–37, 364, 365, 366, 368, 397, 398, 402, 418, 447, 458, 505, 509, 510, 560, 652, 654, 657–58, 750n35, 761n1 Zavala, Manuel, 477 Zerecero, Anastasio, 426 Zozaya, Manuel, 235, 236 Zumárraga, Fray Juan de, 585 Zurutuza, Anselmo, 531, 541, 770n19