On September 28th, something special is going to happen and it will almost go unnoticed amongst the populace. Texas is going to be 200 years free from Spanish rule. The dominant European power in Texas, Spain claimed sovereignty over Texas for over 300 years, but most of that rule was token recognition of control by nomading Native American chiefdoms, the largest of which were the Comanches, in Comanchería. Then of course, there were the Franciscan missions who faithfully evangelized Catholicism to the Texas frontier.
By 1821, after 300 plus years of Spanish rule, fewer people lived in Texas than they did in 1800, at around 5,000 Hispanic residents. Much of the land lay in ruin, many people were displaced or killed from the horrific convergence of the Mexican War of Independence and the Comanche-Lipan Apache war raids. Most of Texas’s existence occurred under Spain but at the end of that era, not much infrastructure or people were around to tell that story. Plains were still open, rivers were still untamed, and the province was populated by Native tribes hostile towards settlers of different tongues.
Still, it should be said that the effects of Spain are felt across Texas to this day. About one third of all Texans speak Spanish at home, not including those bilingual who prefer using English. Texas also inherited the Spanish-Visigothic legal idea of community property, where the property of a couple belonged to both man and wife, rather than solely the husband as in other English common law states. Lots of Texas food was influenced by Spanish cuisine. The word barbecue came from the Spanish barbacoa, a type of slow cooking originating in Texas.
There’s even a county named after a Spanish governor who fought 300 Apaches. Parenthesis mine. From the Texas State Historical Association:
“On August 20, 1789, he (Juan de Ugalde) launched a lengthy campaign against the Apaches in West Texas within an area bounded by San Antonio, San Saba, and El Paso (about 100,000km2). On January 9, 1790, he and his troops, with more than 100 Indian allies, surprised and defeated 300 Lipan, Lipiyan, and Mescalero Apaches at the Arroyo de la Soledad, the present Sabinal River canyon. In commemoration of this victory, the battlefield was named the Cañón de Ugalde; from it the city and county of Uvalde derived their names.”
So what was Texas to the Spaniards? Nestled between the denser concentrations of Nueva España and Nouvelle-France, (New Spain and New France) the province of Texas started as a humble open plain bulwark between the two powers, under nominal control from Spain. In 1519 Alonso Alvarez de Piñeda was the first person to draw up Texas’s first historical document, the map of the Gulf Coast. It’s a crude but fairly accurate rendition of the Gulf Coast, and today is housed in the Archivo de Indias museum in Sevilla, Spain.
You can tell from this map Piñeda really wasn’t a fan of Miami
After some exploration and sparse church mission planting, the Viceroyalty didn’t focus much attention on Texas. There weren’t any substantial gold or silver deposits, and Spain really liked gold and silver deposits. As long as the Native Americans were converting to Catholicism, albeit at a marginal rate, the status quo of sparse colonial investment remained. This fragile ownership was challenged by France in 1685 with the establishment of a French colony inside Texas. This alerted the Spanish Crown, who rallied explorers to find the French fort. It took them years to find the remains of the fort, in ruins after Karankawa Indian attacks, to which the Spanish surmised that God Himself wanted the French out of Texas.
Still, the paranoia of possible French encroachment spurred the Spanish to invest further into Texas. San Antonio was founded in 1718, one of the oldest towns in Texas (the oldest is Presidio, Texas, founded in 1683). The French encroached again in 1719 during the European War of the Quadruple Alliance. The governor of Coahila and Texas assembled an army of over 500 men, 2,800 horses, and 6,400 sheep, trekking hundreds of kilometers towards the French captured fort San Miguel de Los Adaes, located in modern day Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. This power display became the first cattle drive in Texas, kicking off the first steps of Spanish ranching. The cattle drive occurred right when the war ended, so the mass movement of livestock and people was mostly for asserting dominance.
The rest of the 18th century saw the planting of numerous missions, with the aim to convert the natives and in turn, changing their hearts towards God, the Catholic Church, and towards Madrid. Some Natives appreciated the efforts, but most of the missions were unsuccessful and far from Hispanic population centers. In an effort to draw more royal attention to the rural province from the Crown, a Franciscan missionary, Antonio Margil de Jesus, named Texas the Nuevas Filipinas (New Philippines), after the successful first Philippines colony in East Asia. This did not work.
“Maybe the King won’t notice there’s two Philippines and he’ll send over some extra silver”
The name ‘Texas’ originated as the Native American Caddo word for ‘friends.’ In the late 17th century Spanish explorers Alonso de Leon and Damian Massanet met some native people who introduced themselves as “thecas” or “friends”, which the explorers thought were their tribe, the people of thecas. The name was hispanicized to ‘Texas’ and eventually the name stuck around. Spanish people later changed how to write the x sound for j, so in modern day Spanish, the word for Texas is Tejas. There’s other theories that say the word ‘Texas’ comes from the Spanish word teja for yew tree, which was a tree found in Spain that was similar to the bald cypress trees conquistadores found in the new land. And there’s evidence for the word ‘Texas’ being used 80 years before Leon and Massanet’s meeting the natives. Whichever the cause for origin of Texas, the word stuck and “Friendship” is the official state motto.
Long after this name shopping, San Antonio was upgraded to capital of Texas in 1773, which legally recognized the reality of San Antonio being the only militarily defensible and financially sustainable of the Spanish settlements in Texas. Spanning centuries of colonial rule in Mexico, Spain limited all international trade and shipping from Europe and Mexico to a single port city, Veracruz. This system sent cargo boats only once to twice a year in an effort to protect the large armada from pirates, further exacerbating the scarcity of goods. A ship sailing the whole Spain-Veracruz-Spain route would take, on average, 540 days to complete its voyage. Spain also restricted manufacturing in the colonies in an effort to protect Peninsular manufacturing, embracing the economic philosophy of mercantilism.
The limitation of port trade impoverished most colonial citizens. If you resided in the capital, San Antonio, and wanted to trade with someone from Louisiana, you had to travel 1,350 km south to Veracruz, and ship your goods to Louisiana. Ditto for receiving goods. You just weren’t allowed to economically trade with the outside world. Since Texas was a peripheral territory, goods were expensive, unless smuggled in from the French, and later the Americans, through Louisiana. A group of a few wealthy merchants, smugglers, and pirates benefited from this shaky and inefficient system that stayed afloat until the fall of the Spanish Empire.
Not only was this trade system slow as ants, it also spread fire ants to tropical parts of the world
In 1808 Spain was invaded by Napoleon, and their freshly crowned King Fernando VII was dethroned and imprisoned in France. While the aristocracy and nobles reluctantly supported Napoleon, the average person rose up and fought the Francophone occupiers with whatever tools they could find, resisting occupation in the name of their imprisoned King. Then the elite too joined in the resistance. Spain fought a bloody guerrilla war against the French for years; warfare was so asymmetrical that the term “guerrilla warfare” was coined to describe this Iberian struggle.
How this affected Texas was that there was a disruption in monarchical rule for about seven years. The Spanish Empire of the Americas survived intact essentially on its own, with colonial administrators running the day to day operations and putting down revolts in the name of El Deseado (the desired one, that is, the imprisoned Fernando VII). The Portuguese royal family were more fortunate. They escaped to Brazil before the French could capture Lisbon, and moved the headquarters of the Portuguese Empire to Rio de Janeiro.
What happened when Napoleon was defeated and the Bourbon family restored to the Spanish throne? The local juntas that ran both Spain and the colonies wrote a liberal constitution for the king, known as the 1812 Constitution. They took the inefficient and distasteful parts of colonial rule, much of it unaltered since Christopher Columbus’s era, and updated them for the 19th century. The 1812 Constitution provided a power sharing agreement under a constitutional monarchy, allowed parliamentary representations from American and Filipino colonial citizens, permitted near universal male suffrage, and allowed freedom of the press and freedom of enterprise.
This whole red area would have had equal representation in politics, economics, and speech. Quite revolutionary in 1812
Fernando VII returned to power in 1814. The king listened to these reforms, for about five seconds, and rejected any type of concessions towards the people who fought and died for him. According to the king, what the people needed was absolute monarchy for every person in the Spanish Empire that wasn’t Fernando VII. Unfortunately for Fernando VII, most people in Spain were not Fernando VII, and pledging absolute submission to a guy who was in prison until your forces kicked out his captors didn’t sound like a good return on spilt blood. Naturally, this too pissed off the people running the overseas colonial Empire when their king was imprisoned by Napoleon.
Still, the king assumed absolute control over his dominions for about six to seven years until the people couldn’t take it anymore. It was not wise nor just to treat the citizens who ran a transcontinental empire entirely in your name, while you were imprisoned, like peasant dirt people, but it is how history played out for our Spanish provinces. In Spain the country faced civil insurrection after civil insurrection. In the Americas the Spanish criollo ruling class fought against Spain across the hemisphere, from Mexico to Venezuela to Argentina. Spain lost nearly all its American colonies under the reign of Fernando VII. Since Texas was administered under the auspices of New Spain, later known as Mexico, Texas’s date of liberation is tied with Mexico’s date of liberation.
Turns out you need more citizen support than a creepy lady, a deranged dog, and 1st-art-gallery.com backing your empire
On 1810 September 16th, the Mexican independence movement started when a Catholic priest known as ‘Father Hidalgo y Costilla’ accused the ruling powers of dishonest, unfair, and bad government. Church bells rang and the event became known as his grito (cry) for independence. Curiously enough, he was a priest at the small village named Dolores, which dolores in Spanish means pains, so his “grito de dolores” has a double meaning, “cry of pains” and “cry from the village named Dolores”. Not only that, but the exact words of the speech are lost to history, which is noted by Mexican presidents adding their own versions of the grito every September 16th. Providence has a way of writing good stories from real events.
Various rebel groups rose up and fought criollo and Spanish forces for ten long years. Blood constantly flowed from the Mexican resistance against royal authority. The governor of Texas, Manuel María de Salcedo, was assassinated by one of the rebel groups. This particular rebel group, The Republican Army of the North, was composed of Anglo-Americans, French Louisianans, Apache Lipans, and former Spanish royalists. They proclaimed independence for Texas under a Republic of Mexico and created Texas’s first flag, a green bit of cloth.
Thanks to The Caller Times for illuminating a piece of Texas history for all of us, in the provided photo and caption
The Spanish forces responded by sending General José Joaquín de Arredondo y Mioño to the rebel insurgency, located about 30 km south of San Antonio, killing 1,300 men in the Battle of Medina, becoming the bloodiest battle ever to be fought in Texas. The Battle of Medina still retains that title today, beating out the battles of the Alamo, Goliad, or any US Civil War battles Texas soil witnessed.
From the Houston Chronicle about the aftermath of the Battle of Medina:
“The crushing defeat put an end to the rebellion, and San Antonio endured martial law. Arredondo had the wives, daughters and other female relatives of the rebels imprisoned, where they were raped, brutalized and forced to convert 24 bushels of corn a day into tortillas for the occupying army. Their children begged in the streets for food. For a month after the battle, Arredondo executed 10 men a day in the Plaza de Armas, now the site of City Hall, and placed their heads on spikes.”
Acts of brutality were, unfortunately, common during the Mexican War of Independence. In Arredondo’s previous dealings, other royalist soldiers serving on different fronts would abandon their posts to protect their wives and property from Arredondo’s men. Remember, these guys were on the same side. One royalist provincial commander, Agustín Iturbide, forgave men who abandoned their posts to protect their wives and children from Arredondo´s troops. In warfare, desertion is usually a death sentence.
Arredondo later said that there were three men who “conducted themselves with great bravery during the battle of Medina.” One of these mentioned brave troops sent to fight in the Battle of Medina was Lt. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, future president of Mexico during the Texas Revolution. The total destruction of rebel forces at Medina undoubtedly influenced Santa Anna’s total annihilation of rebel forces decades later in the battles of the Alamo and Goliad.
While Spanish Texas reeled from civil revolt, the Lipan Apaches and Comanches, two rival tribes who often fought against each other, felt confident enough to break their peace treaties with Spain and attack colonial ranchers. With a depleted citizenry, Arredondo ordered the surrounding ranches to abandon their fields and defend the capital of Texas, San Antonio. The Lipan Apaches then slaughtered the untended animals, burned the homes of ranchers, and left the carcasses to rot in the unkept fields. This destruction of the food supply induced a meat famine, where citizens of San Antonio ate leather and other unsavory objects to stave off starvation.The chaos unleashed by Father Hidalgo’s grito was running its course.
As punishment for his outspokenness on New Spain’s broken social structures, the Spanish Inquisition (yes THAT Inquisition) pushed Father Hidalgo, in 1803, out onto a small poverty stricken town, named Dolores, in an effort to silence him. That, uh, didn’t work
Interestingly, it was Arredondo, the general of the battle of Medina, who later approved Moses Austin’s request to establish an Anglo colony in Texas in 1821, forever altering Texas history. In a fashion of the times, many royalist commanders switched sides to the resistance in 1820/1821. Arredondo joined the rebels and pledged loyalty to the Mexican state in this changing of guard.
The most capable commander of the royalist forces was Agustín Iturbide. He nearly wiped out the renegade militias, and the rebels had one last leader, Vincente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña, fighting for independence. Providence then nerfed the royalist movement: a monarchical crisis happened in 1820. Known as the Riego Revolt, a mutiny of army officers led by Rafael de Riego were tired of Fernando VII underpaying troops and overall selfish government administration. They surrounded the royal palace and all of a sudden the king was okay with the 1812 Constitution. This event tipped the balance of power away from Fernando VII, and the Constitution of 1812 was forcibly established for three years. Spain had a constitutional monarchy.
Preparing for European instability, the Mexican aristocracy wanted to provide a way for the Spanish monarch, or one of his relatives, to flee to New Spain, similar to what the Portuguese did years earlier. The Catholic Church was afraid of what policies secular liberals might enact with increased influence, and the remaining insurgents still wanted independence. It was here when Iturbide struck a deal with the leaders of the independence movements ─ the rebels represented by Vincente Ramon Guerrero Saldaña, the second group the Roman Catholic Church, and the third group the royalist factions led by Iturbide.
He proposed a promise of Three Guarantees, that Mexico would be 1) independent from Spain, 2) Roman Catholicism would be the only religion of the land, and 3) that all Mexicans would be equal under the law. Most disparate groups in Mexico liked this compromise. Freedom from Spanish influence didn’t mean the independence leaders would have rejected Fernando VII being Emperor of Mexico. They still wanted a European monarch running Mexico. It just so happened the king was uninterested in the deal, and forbade any of his family members from accepting the Mexican crown. Fernando VII regained some political influence in the societal unrest of the Peninsula. He sent a new viceroy to deal with the rebels. The Three Guarantees was made public 1821 February 24th.
Instead of managing the rebels, the new representative saw the writing on the wall and worked with them on legitimizing their independence. The Mexican Junta (the disparate group of Mexican interests and class groups) signed the Treaty of Cordoba on 1821 August 24th, with the newly arrived viceroy, O’Donojú. This act recognized the independence of Mexico as its own empire and the rebels would pursue independence without a declared emperor for the moment. However, some unfinished tasks remained: the royalists still controlled the capital.
A month later, on 1821 September 27th, eleven years and eleven days after Father Hidalgo’s grito of Dolores, General Iturbide captured Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The last vestiges of Spanish royal authority in New Spain evaporated. It was also Iturbide’s 38th birthday. The next day, on 1821 September 28th, instead of eating day old birthday cake, Iturbide proclaimed the independent reign of the Mexican Empire.
“With that crazy lady and her dog defeated, I’ll never reopen that art gallery”
There’s actually a large area of discrepancy in 1821 of when exactly the Spanish presence left Mexico. You see, communication was slow back then, whether from bureaucracy, lack of reliable communications, or just plain old spite. Take for example the Spanish delay of the ratification of the Adams Onis Treaty. The Adams Onis Treaty, among other things, required United States recognition of Texas under Spanish authority. The document was finished in 1819 but Spain didn’t sign it until 1821, partially to avoid United States recognition of independence of their colonies. This was such a long pause in policy that the US Senate had to ratify the agreement twice. Just in time for the Mexican government to kick the Spanish out in 1821, securing legal claims of Texas for the nascent Mexican Empire.
Mexico had lots of options for selecting the celebration of Independence Day. Iturbide revealed the Three Guarantee Plan on 1821 February 24th, which was the first public proclamation of regime change. Then you have the Mexican and Spanish governments, under the viceroy O’Donojú, signing the Treaty of Cordoba on 1821 August 24th, which finalized the details of the successor to New Spain, the Mexican Empire. But then Spain, from the European side, did not recognize Mexican independence until 1836, and rejected the 1821 treaty.
Mexico recognized that Iturbide marched into the capital September 27th, but chose to celebrate September 16th as the proper day of celebration since Father Hidalgo y Costilla started his cry for independence that day. From the span of seven months, 1821 February – 1821 September, one can say Spanish rule was phased out. You can see the problems pinpointing an exact date of power transition.
We at Texan Thoughts chose September 28th to commemorate the fall of the Spanish Empire in Texas as it’s the last possible day in 1821 that someone can say “Yup, the Spanish stopped ruling Texas after this date.” In Texas the day is largely unknown, which makes it an exciting piece of information to share with Texans. This 200th year long departure is our history, and it deserves to be talked about. Eat some barbecue, listen to a Spanish song, ponder the history, and enjoy the many ways humans from Iberia contributed their shape to the land called Texas.