Ties Unbound: Membership and Community during the Wars of Independence
The Thirteen North American Colonies (1776-1783) and New Spain (1808-1821)1
p. 39-65
Texte intégral
1In 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, the thirteen colonies asserted that they were not rebellious territories within the Empire, but belligerent states at war with Great Britain. That same year, New York native Henry Van Schaack (1733-1823) pondered the moral quandaries into which this conflict plunged conscientious citizens and the authorities that were to rule over them. The prominent lawyer, who had contributed to the revision of New York’s colonial statutes in 1774, and had been a member of its Committee of Correspondence, was to be exiled in England for his Tory sympathies from 1778 to 1785. But before he felt forced to abandon his home, he reflected on the possibility of neutrality, when the nature of government and its ideological underpinnings changed drastically:
in civil wars, I hold that there can be no neutrality; in mind I mean. Every man must wish on side or the other to prevail […]. The ruling powers, therefore, have a right to consider any person, who does not join them in action as averse to them in opinions […] [but] have they a right to punish a mere difference of sentiment? By no means. Punishment as such, is due only to overt acts, to the transgression of some known law; and that there may be strict neutrality in practice, is beyond dispute2.
2Almost forty years later, as New Spain was racked by its own independence war, royalist officer Andrés Amat, speaking in defense of a soldier accused of infidencia – disloyalty to King and Country –, echoed similar sentiments as he questioned the scope of the rights and obligations of governed and government in the midst of a bloody civil war. Gerónimo Camargo, a second lieutenant in the Provincial Infantry Regiment of Celaya, who on six occasions had acted with valor, “risking his life in the defense of Religion and the Rights of the Sovereign,” stood accused because corporal Manuel Galván, an Insurgent agent, had tried to “seduce” him. Nevertheless, argued Amat, it was not proven that Galván had changed Camargo’s mind about who was right in the struggle between Insurgents and Royalists; and even if he had, was there “a chapter, in the wise By-laws that govern us, that establish punishment for thoughts?” Only God, Amat insisted, could be a judge of men’s personal consciences and opinions3.
3Van Schaack was among the most distinguished of New York’s legal and political community, a graduate of King’s College. After independence, he was fully reinstated into society, even founding a law school in Kinderhook. As he wrote, he was trying to make sense of the bewildering choices being made by many of his friends and kin as the colonies opted to separate from the Mother Country. Andrés Amat, a lieutenant in the Spanish army, was probably younger, Creole, and reasonably well-educated and well-connected4. He hoped to save his subaltern – who was also his “godson”– from a militant court of law that he argued was overstepping its boundaries. Although the circumstances, background, position and objective of these two men differ greatly, their deliberations on the nature and exigencies of political allegiance resonate with similar concerns about the nature of political legitimacy and the individual’s relationship to authority. This suggests that, in giving birth to independent states, the societies of British and Spanish America, faced a series of pressing challenges that were surprisingly similar, despite profoundly different traditions and contexts. Contrary to the way the story of independence and revolution have been traditionally told, these movements were not the unshackling of a nation come of age, but required, in both cases, not only the reinvention of political legitimacy and the restructuring of the machinery of governance, but also the often painful reconstruction of community.
4In the thirteen British North American colonies and in Spanish America over three decades later, as imperial crisis became civil wars, they shattered old bonds of allegiance. Membership and community were contested, and the premises on which they had stood fought over and refashioned. In a context in which the ideological scaffolding that had upheld public authority was being pulled apart by revolution, authorities both old and new struggled to enforce community and the obligations of membership, and to meet the exigencies of war. In British North America, men trying to build a new order of things sought to redraw the basis of loyalty and belonging. In New Spain, those who were trying to buttress the old order sought to keep an estranged community together. In this essay, we hope to show the ways in which, in these two cases, the mechanics of inclusion and exclusion were constructed, and allegiance made visible. We hope that the comparative angle will illuminate, by highlighting commonalities and differences, the problems and issues that would prove key to shaping the “Atlantic experiment” that was to be the founding of new states, at the end of the Eighteenth and beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries.
SHIFTING IDENTITIES
To Be American
5The sentiments and visions inspired by “colonial” identity in the Atlantic world had always been contentious and contradictory, in that, as John H. Elliot argues, those who crossed the Ocean to America strove to “reproduce the mother country”, just as they hoped to construct a New World that would be better than the Old. Even as the American subjects of European powers had to fend of the “continuous barrage of calumny” flung at them in metropolitan discourse, both their day-to-day experiences in a significantly autonomous government and the density their commercial, political and affective links to the “Mother Country” make it almost a misnomer to speak of “colonialism5”. Nevertheless, the shift in imperial policy after the peace of 1763, which implied new geopolitical challenges and strategies for both winner and losers, would bring to the fore the subject status of the colonies6. The vindication of America and its injured inhabitants – whose “American” identity would now be systematically articulated against the Old World7 – was soon to follow.
6Both London and Madrid sought to increase royal revenue in the American colonies. The British policies of the 1760s represented a jarring departure from customary practices in Parliament’s exercise of jurisdiction over colonial affairs8. Furthermore, the Stamp and Sugar Acts of 1765, and then the 1767 Townshend duties on tea, glass, paper and paint, established “internal” levies without the consent of those taxed, and subjected Americans to trials without jury under the vice-admiralty courts. In the eyes of British Americans, they violated the British constitution. These acts of Parliament were depicted as “manifestly subversive of public Liberty [… and] utterly destructive of public Happiness9”. They signaled the beginning of the end; only slavery and despotism could follow. “If they succeed in the Sale of Tea”, read a New York broadside in 1773, “we shall have no property that we can call our own10”. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, but insisted on its supremacy over the colonies, and its right to tax them.
7On the other hand, floundering Spain still managed, in its spotty implementation of reform, to set up a bureaucratic and tax-collecting machine of unexpected efficiency. Manned by enlightened “King’s men” that hoped to straighten up and purify the baroque structures of New Spain, the Bourbon state absorbed the kingdom’s economic surplus, encroached on the local elites’ interests, and disturbed communal practices11. In 1766 and 1767, the Bajío region was rocked by violent popular upheavals that decried the expulsion of the Jesuit order and demanded “a New Law and a New King”. Four years later, the members of the Mexico City cabildo protested the King’s appointing European Spaniards instead of native born criollos to posts of honor and profit as contrary to “natural law12”. The former were repressed with unprecedented violence, the latter politely ignored13. In 1766, novohispanos were told that “subjects have to know, once and for all, that they have been born to obey, and not to consider the high affairs of government14”.
8During the last third of the Eighteenth century, then, in Spanish and British America, the second-class status of ultramarine subjects became painfully obvious. In 1765, a Maryland newspaper asked the uncomfortable question: “Are the People of America, BRITISH Subjects? Are they not Englishmen?15” In their plaintive petition to Charles III, elite American Spaniards claimed that the Sovereign’s apparent contempt for his subjects in the Indies would transform its “copious number of vassals […] [into] less than men, deadweights, that will be nothing but a heavy burden16”. As a response to what they considered insult and injury, the colonists’ first line of defense, both north and south, was to reassert their membership in the empire, as His Majesty’s very loyal subjects. In British America, pamphlets were published to “assert” and “prove” the rights of the colonists as Englishmen17. The Mexico City councilmen insisted that, in criollos there was
the same nobility of spirit, the same loyalty, the same love towards Your Majesty, the same passion for public welfare as in the most noble, faithful, devoted and cultured Nations of Europe: and that in judging that our endowments as lesser than those of Your Majesty’s other vassals, the most reprehensible injustice and undisguised injury are done to us18.
9Both the North American pamphleteers and the criollo petitioners articulated a rights-based defense of injured America as an integral part of a transatlantic empire. Since in the case of the threatened elite of New Spain the issue was the exercise of local political power, to the detriment of European Spaniards, greater stress was placed on the privileged nature of the tie that bound the American Spaniard to the soil on which he was born. Because of this, they emphasized the love of the land and the wealth of local knowledge inherent to the native-born, which inevitably made them better governors. While North Americans publicists tended to conflate natural rights –“the inalienable, indefeasible rights inherent in all people by virtue of their humanity”– and “the concrete provisions of English law19”, the elite of New Spain was driven less to speak of inalienable rights, than of the privileges due to them as Spaniards, and the right – enshrined in the Law of Nations – of the native-born to rule. They praised a community based on, as Tamar Herzog has written, “love and natural ties”, and to contrast “natural” and “civic law20”.
10The reaction of both British and Spanish American colonists rested on similar arguments and fed into a growing “creole” consciousness – with all the ambiguities this term implies. It would be misleading to draw from them a straight line to the independence movements, as is shown by the subsequent loyalism of such leaders of the “American cause” as Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania and William Smith of New York in the 1760s, or of Manuel Abad y Queipo, bishop-elect of Michoacán at the turn of the century. Nevertheless, the vindication of the rights and privileges of certain – white – Americans contributed to the reification and glorification of “America” and its “liberties”. But if the colonists’ discourse resonates with similar themes, their audiences, dissemination, and effects were significantly different.
11The colonists’ pleas were designed to sway “public opinion”: they were printed and distributed; they sought to be well argued and convincing to a broad audience. In the thirteen colonies, materially upholding American rights and liberties was put directly in the hands of the people. Ordinary men and women might not read the sophisticated pamphlets of the imperial debate, and their raucous, outdoor popular manifestations against the arbitrary acts of government surely terrified many members of the revolutionary leadership, but the ultimate success of the continental association against British commerce depended on their involvement. It was regular townsfolk and farmers who were to wear homespun and give up drinking tea21. In what T. H. Breen has described as “a brilliantly innovative strategy”, Americans turned “their own economic dependence into organized resistance”, by boycotting British goods22. Resistance to Great Britain could not be, then, but the every-day affair of ordinary people.
12In New Spain, during the last third of the Eighteenth century, one finds, on the one hand, the violent riots unleashed by the Jesuit expulsion, and, on the other hand, the learned disquisitions of what has been described as “Creole patriotism23”. Defending America in print remained in many ways restricted to the rarified atmosphere of the academic polemics of Mexican “intellectuals” – scientists and artists –, who praised the merits of those born on this side of the Atlantic, unacknowledged by a disdainful Europe24. What is arguably the most articulate vindication of “Mexico” was published in Europe, and in Italian25. The learned men involved in this movement had little to do with the Indian, mestizo and mulatto rioters of San Luis de la Paz, Pátzcuaro or Guanajuato who in 1767 vowed to kill European Spaniards – derisively called “gachupines”– because these “Jews” were attempting to deprive them of “God’s law26”.
13Thus, in the northern British colonies, food rioters who demanded price controls="true" and the merchants they condemned both brandished the flag of “Liberty27”. In New Spain, those disgruntled with the state of affairs in the viceroyalty throughout the social spectrum seemed to lack common ground and a common language. To an insightful observer at the end of the century, the fabric of society seemed dangerously frayed and fragile. Manuel Abad y Queipo argued in 1799 that the Indians and castas – mixed bloods – who made up nine tenths of the population were the workers and servants of the Spanish minority, and as such “there resulted that opposition of interests and affections that occurs between those who have nothing and those who have everything”.
What interests can attach [Indians and castas] to [the Spaniards], and the three of them to law and government? [… These] secure and protect [the Spaniards’] life, honor and property […] But the other two classes have no wealth, no honor, no cause for envy that would push another to attack their lives or persons. What is the law to them, when it exercises its authority only to send them to jail, the picota, the penal colony or the gallows28?
The Mechanics of Mobilization
14Protests against the policies of the Mother Country, then, involved broad segments of colonial society, but while in the thirteen colonies they gave off the – perhaps equivocal – sense of unified movement, this cannot be said of New Spain until the outbreak of war. This is due, in part, to the differences between the channels of communication and dissemination and the way they constructed the centers for interlocution between colony and metropole. British and Spanish colonists all insisted on their being their King’s most loyal and loving subjects. The 1765 Congress and the 1771 Mexico City cabildo both asserted their submission and devotion to the Crown, as they humbly petitioned with “the warmest sentiments of affection and duty to His Majesty’s Person and Government29”. But the cabildo took on the voice of the whole kingdom of New Spain, because it was “its Head, and Court of the whole of it30”. Conversely, the Congress which met in New York was made up of delegates from nine colonies, and its declaration followed on the footsteps of the protests and “humble” petitions of the elected assemblies of Massachusetts, Virginia, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. In the wake of the Massachusetts Assembly’s 1768 invitation to other colonies to “harmonize with each other” in the face of Parliamentary incomprehension, contact between colonial legislatures became more systematic. In 1773, following the lead of the Virginia House of Burgesses, these connections would become institutionalized in the Committees of correspondence, which set up the network that provided a concrete, “recognizable basis for colonial confederation,” and made possible a concerted response to the Coercive Acts31.
15The American Independence movement was preceded by almost a decade of public discussion, mobilization and organization, in which the colonial representative bodies were important actors. Other instances, such as the New England town meetings, and voluntary associations such as the Sons of Liberty also took it upon themselves to clarify the issues at stake, mobilize public opinion, and intimidate those who opposed the “American” cause. When the First Continental Congress called for the election of local committees of inspection, and charged them with the enforcement of its non-importation, non-consumption and non-exportation agreement, it set up a system of institutions that were at once local in nature and “continental” in scope and which immediately embodied a concerted resistance movement32.
16The committees were the “regulatory agencies” of Congress: their mandate was, to a certain extent, legitimized and defined both by popular election and by the directives of a “central” representative body33. They involved a large number of freeholders who, before, had probably stood aloof from politics – 1,100 in Virginia, approximately 1,600 in Massachusetts, over 500 in New Jersey, at least 400 in New Hampshire. In their efforts to set up due process and shore up their authority when exposing the “enemies of American liberty”, the committees both channeled and defused popular energies34. They sometimes enforced a “moral economy” by setting prices and controlling the distribution of food35. Perhaps most importantly, both the colonial legislative assemblies – individual dissention notwithstanding – and the committees provided a tangible, on-the-ground, reasonably operative foundation for independent government as royal government frittered away.
17Edward Countryman, Susan Deans and Eric Van Young have already pointed out that organization is a key factor which contributes to the distance between the British and Spanish American experience in the struggle for independence. While the reaction of the rural population in the Bajío to Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 call to arms was similar to that of American colonists’ on hearing of the battles of Concord and Lexington, the Mexican “insurgent hordes” failed to establish civilian structures of any significant permanence, especially at the local level36. From the outbreak of rebellion, as they took up arms against viceregal authority, the rebels attempted to set up structures for political government. Hidalgo named a Junta Auxiliar de gobierno, made up of priests, lawyers and private citizens. In 1812, the lawyer Ignacio Rayón spoke of the illegitimacy of royal government in New Spain, not because of Bonaparte’s usurpation, but because the Peninsular Juntas, who claimed to be preserving Fernando VII’s sovereignty until his return were “null” in that the Americas were not represented within them. Because of this, he sought to set up a representative government37. In August of 1811, the sixteen Insurgent military commanders elected a three – then four, then five – man Suprema Junta Gubernativa de América38. In September of 1813, a representative “National Congress” met in Chilpancingo.
18The composition of the Chilpancingo Congress reflected both the difficulties of establishing mechanisms for political representation in the midst of war, and the differing concepts of representation should be, for men whose references and experiences fit into the corporate framework of the viceregal past. The Mexican Insurgents, like other revolutionaries throughout the West, assumed “the nation” was now the seat of sovereignty, and struggled to find ways in which to translate such an intoxicating principle into operative structures of government. They grappled to define voter elegibility, the mechanisms used to designate representatives, the nature of representation, and the limits to the authority of such “natural” representatives as priest, Indian governors and military commanders. Insurgent leaders wrestled with these questions while they scuffled for primacy within the movement: it is not surprising, then, that the body that met in a dusty, arid valley of the present day state of Guerrero was a hybrid of various views of what a congress should be, and riddled with the divisions of a contest for power.
19Consequently, Insurgent commanders Ignacio Rayón, José Sixto Berdusco and José María Liceaga, all members of the defunct Suprema Junta, represented the provinces that were the main theaters of their military operations. The provinces that were controlled by the rebels, Oaxaca and Tecpan, both sent a representative. José María Gurría y Galardi of Oaxaca was elected by the provincial capital’s vecinos principales – the cathedral and municipal cabildos, leading bureaucrats and wealthy merchants – and representatives from certain outlying districts. Tecpan, were the election methods were very heterogeneous – some towns held popular elections in order to designate their electors, while in others, the elector was the parish priest, the Indian governor or the highest-ranking bureaucrat – sent vicar José Manuel de Herrera. Generalísimo José María Morelos, who had taken up the leadership of the Insurgent movement after the execution of Hidalgo and Ignacio Allende in July 1811, designated representatives for the “oppressed” provinces of Puebla, Veracruz and Mexico, although the representative of the latter, lawyer and publicist Carlos María de Bustamante, bore the added seal of legitimacy of having been chosen parish elector in the 1812 elections in Mexico City39.
20Nevertheless, the life of the Chilpancingo Congress, and of its 1814 Apatzingán constitution, was short, as it followed the fate of the Insurgent armies. After the death of Morelos in December of 1815, the movement was not defeated but reduced to marginal outposts in the lowlands of Tierra Caliente. Nevertheless, both the American and the Hispanic Revolutions implied dramatic transformations in the ways people thought about political representation and participation. In what was to become the United States, the struggle for Independence brought about what was perhaps the most numerically significant broadening of suffrage, although this was a geographically uneven process40. However, all colonies maintained the colonial structure of government – with an executive, a two-chamber legislative (with the exception of Pennsylvania and Georgia, who both adhered to the colonial precedent of a single house of representatives), and a judiciary – and, in many instances, its governing personnel, purged of the agents of royal authority. The fact that, from the outbreak of hostilities, periodic elections were held, and that, after 1776, the drafting of the independent states’ constitutions took place in the midst of war, speaks to the solidity of political culture in British North America and, perhaps, to the more contained nature of its independence war41.
21In New Spain, the novel structuring of political legitimacy around the mechanisms of political representation, undertaken by both royalist and insurgent authorities, was characterized by the instability inherent to novelty, experimentation and war. In the end, both the effort to represent New Spain in the Imperial Cortes and that of setting up an independent representative government failed, the first because of the metropole’s refusal to act upon the much celebrated equality of the “integral parts” of the monarchy42; the latter because of the ineffectiveness of Insurgent government. The 1812 constitution, by excluding the castas – those of African descent – from suffrage, effectively reduced the representation of the American possessions, and they consistently refused to allow for the greater autonomy aimed at by those members of the colonial elite seeking to remain within the imperial framework. Neither the Insurgent Congress nor the Cádiz Cortes managed to embody a neuralgic center for the reorganization of political power throughout the viceroyalty43, in that they failed to create the institutional network that linked the Continental Congress to the local Committees of Inspection that with the war would become Committees of Safety.
22On the contrary, the creation, under the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, of elected town councils (ayuntamientos) in all towns with more than 1,000 inhabitants implied a radical dispersion and popularization of politics in what Antonio Annino has described as the “territorial revolution of the pueblos44”. Nevertheless, these local governing bodies lacked the sense of mission of the North American Committees, and a “national” reference such as Congress. They were unconcerned with the “jealous eye” of other provinces, or with their responsibility in preserving or “dissolving the said union45”. In many cases, during the 1810s, the ayuntamientos’ main goal was the defense of community, against both the royalist and insurgent forces that were wrecking havoc in the Mexican countryside46. The ayuntamiento remained a key player after independence, because the concept of vecino (neighbor) was central to that of citizen47. But if in British America the creation of a network that crisscrossed the colonies contributed to the construction of a “continental” – if not a “national” – perspective, the “municipalization” of New Spain entailed and legitimized a more radical localism.
COMMUNITY REPRESENTED
23In 1808, the constituted authorities of New Spain – the viceregal authorities, its civil and ecclesiastical cabildos, Indian republics, religious communities, etc. – rose unanimously to deplore and protest the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula. The Mexico City cabildo claimed that, with other “bodies that carry the public voice”, it would “keep intact, defend and energetically sustain” the King’s sovereignty over New Spain. This assertion was considered so threatening to Peninsular Spaniards – identified with the kingdom’s superior court, the Audiencia, and the merchants of the Consulado – that viceroy Iturrigaray and some of the city councilmen were imprisoned, in what was effectively a coup d’État48. Two years later, Miguel Hidalgo, a criollo priest, called his parishioners to arms in defense of Fernando VII and the catholic religion, which were being threatened by the irreligious, disloyal gachupines. The Insurgency was contained by a bloody war, in which, at least during the first years, both sides claimed to be fighting for God, the Fatherland and the King. Independence was finally declared in 1821 – although not recognized by Spain until 1836 –, under the leadership of a royalist officer, Agustín de Iturbide.
24Issues seem clearer in the case of British America, but only slightly so. In 1774, delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies refused to submit to a series of Acts of parliament they considered “impolitic, unjust, and cruel, as well as unconstitutional, and most dangerous and destructive of American rights”. Yet they did so as “Englishmen”, and joined the Continental Association as “his majesty’s most dutiful subjects49”. Six months later, Congress had agreed on the “necessity of taking up arms”. The war against the Mother Country lasted until 1783. This profound confusion is symptomatic of how traumatic the concept of breaking up with the metropole was, of why the issue of independence would tear colonial societies apart. In the thirteen colonies, about a fifth of the population would remain loyal to the Crown, and over 50,000 were exiled by the end of the war50.
25In New Spain, the long protracted war against the Insurgency ended only with an alliance with royalist forces, as Iturbide came up with a compromise solution by declaring Mexican Independence and offering the Mexican throne to Fernando VII. Nevertheless, the offer was rejected by the Spanish King, and Mexico went from Colony to Empire to Federal Republic in three years. In the late 1820s the Mexican Congress would pass two laws for the expulsion of the Spanish (peninsular, gachupin) minority, proving that the wounds of Independence had yet to heal51. In both independence wars, much of the fighting was done by Americans52. Independence, then, did not imply the timely separation of two communities. It split communities internally, against themselves.
26It is not surprising, then, that the newly independent states’ “Committees of Safety” spent so much time and energy identifying internal foes, to “more carefully and diligently […] inspect and observe all and every such person and persons as shall, at any time, attempt […] the destruction, invasion, detriment or annoyance “of the province53, or that insurgent and royalist commanders both ordered the men in the towns they occupied to wear distinctive colors in their hats – red for the loyalists, blue and white for insurgents – on the rather naïve assumption that they could make commitment visible, and permanent54. As violence broke out, the line separating friend from foe was far from clear. It became the pressing duty of public authorities to make the bonds of community perceptible, and to set the enemy apart and chastise him. The policies they undertook reflect visions of community – both new and old –, and the exigencies of war.
27The imperial crises were greeted, in both the thirteen colonies and New Spain, with reactions that seem molded on older ways of doing politics: The thirteen colonies’ grievances were expressed in “humble” petitions addressed to the King. “Mobs”, reacting against a perceived violation of traditional rights, obstructed the implementation of the Stamp Act, the levying of the Townsend duties, and the unloading of British goods55. The “people-out-of doors” danced around liberty poles or brought them down, in rituals whose scale and publicity drowned out dissident voices, giving off an image of unanimity that was perhaps equivocal56. In 1808, the population of New Spain, protested the abdications at Bayonne and proclaimed their loyalty to the King with written representaciones and public demonstrations that were structured along the lines of corporate hierarchy, and in which images and symbols of the “spanishness” of New Spain were recurrent. The cabildo of the northern mining city of Zacatecas, for instance, proudly asserted that its proclamations had taken place in perfect order, without the active involvement of a single citizen “of broken color”. In 1810, the municipal corporation of the “very noble, distinguished and always loyal city of Tlaxcala” condemned the insurgency and hailed the glorious feats of conquest of “old Spain” in which the tlaxcaltecans had so “happily served57”.
28It was not, however, completely business as usual: just like on the Peninsula, American Spaniards did not proclaim – as did, in first instance, the Mexico City cabildo in July of 1808 – the unpopular Carlos IV, but his son Fernando, as “our very beloved and very desired Sovereign58”. Moreover, these programmed public demonstrations of “joy and jubilation” were to be considered individually binding. In the words of the Mexico City cabildo:
As the flags are raised for His Royal [Person…] the sacred obligation in which this homage is constituted is inscribed upon the hearts of his [vassals], and neither power, nor force, nor fury, nor even death are enough to erase it59.
29Insurgents, then, would be persecuted for “perjury,” for having “crushed the legitimate duties constituted […] by the oath60”.
30Consequently, the ways in which allegiance to the King and commitment to the war effort were enforced and publicized somewhat loosened, at least on paper, corporate ties and rigid hierarchy. As the viceregal government’s official newspaper printed the list of those who contributed to the twenty million pesos “patriotic voluntary loan”, as well as those who donated money for shoes for the royalist army, it put down the individual’s name and amount donated. The list included viceregal authorities, noblemen, religious brotherhoods, and men such as “the gentleman D. Francisco de Chavarri”, who gave money in his name, that of his wife, two dependents and eight male and female servants, but also “Yustiz the tailor” and several – nameless – “poor men61”. The phenomenon is similar if perhaps not as radical, and certainly not as widespread, as the British Americans’ “making lists” of “subscribers” to the non-consumption movement, which, according to T. H. Breen
taught middling people that the public was not merely a rhetorical device […] organized non-importation rewarded ordinary consumers angered by recent parliamentary policy with a voice in public affairs, and once they discovered they counted for something, they found it hard to return to an older, deferential system of political expression62.
31The British colonists opted for a boycott of British trade as a “most speedy, effectual, and peaceable measure”. They probably did not anticipate that, by relying on the choice and steadfastness of individuals, this strategy would have thorough democratizing effects. In New Spain, the establishment of elections under the 1812 constitution, which allowed all men with an “honest livelihood” and who were not of African descent to vote, implied a similar transformation. In Mexico City, the sound defeat of the royalist party, as only men identified with the criollo party were designated electors, was profoundly disturbing to viceregal authorities, and apparently equally empowering to the capital’s populace. In one of the official reports of the election, Juan de Irisarri, a priest, would tell of the anxiety he felt when, on election day, he heard a young boy shouting “Now we rule!63” But if responses to the imperial crisis implied certain transformations, it was the repression of dissidence and the war that proved to be the great equalizers: men and women who were guilty of treason were to be subject to prosecution “without excepting any class, state or special jurisdiction,” although certain considerations were to be had for clerics64. As early as February 1811, viceroy Félix María Calleja, former commander of the royalist armies, ordered rebels to be executed as soon as they were captured, especially if they were “priests or friars, for this type of crime [is] all the more scandalous among this class65”.
32The pervasive violence unleashed in 1810 was perceived as turning the world upside down. In 1811, a supporter of Hidalgo, who had formally gone around “naked” – en cueros – proudly showed off some beautiful sleeves, which he had allegedly stolen during the gachupín massacre in Guanajuato. He claimed the time had come for men like him, since they had “been kept naked long enough66”. It got to the point where Morelos was so concerned with what he saw as the disruption social order, that he strictly forbid any of his followers to act “the Inferior against the Superior, unless by my Special Orders, or that of the Supreme Junta, not by word but in writing67”. Thus, in both societies, public authorities old and new endeavored to represent, through public ritual, a society united and unanimous in its support of the King, or in defense of “American liberties”. In both cases, radicalization brought about changes in the way society was imagined, as the individual seemed to step to the fore and certain inequalities – if momentarily – seemed to lessen or shatter.
COMMUNITY ENFORCED
33Even as elaborate processions were staged and publicized, oaths taken, and the generosity and constancy of “the public” – as “very loving vassals”, or as “Friends to the Liberty and Trade of America”– recorded in ink, the violence of war made it increasingly difficult to represent a community that was united and unanimous. It became, then, the “disagreeable duty” of public authorities to identify, isolate and punish those who had “deviated from the noble and generous sentiments” that animated the rest of society68. Once again, although the purposes of the powers that be in New Spain and the British colonies were similar, the organization and scope of the mechanisms designed to attain them were different. As the thirteen British colonies became independent states, they sought to assure the populations’ loyalty and prevent dissention. Between 1776 and 1782, all thirteen states implemented “test laws” in order to weed out disloyal citizens69.
34The degree to which Loyalism was persecuted seemed to depend upon how threatened the revolutionary authorities felt. Congress’ “Tory Act” of January 1776, for instance, spoke of the “honest and well-meaning, but uninformed people” who needed to be convinced “with kindness and attention” to adhere to the American cause70. Conversely, on contested territory, conscious neutrality, or apolitical indifference were perceived as criminal. In New York state, for example, where the British occupied Manhattan, Long Island and Staten Island from mid-1776 to 1782, the “Act more effectually to prevent the Mischiefs arising from the influence and example of equivocal and suspected characters in this State”, aimed at those “[affecting] to maintain a neutrality”, inspired by “Poverty of Spirit, and an undue attachment to Property.” The Act proclaimed it “repugnant to justice as well as good policy” that men be “permitted to shelter themselves under a government” which they did not actively support. It compelled such persons to swear they “believed and acknowledged” New York as a free and independent State, and that they would do their duty as “good subjects71”.
35After the 1808 blow against the Mexico City cabildo, viceroy Iturrigaray and the possibilities for a peaceful renegotiation of New Spain’s position within the empire, the royal government in New Spain, its legitimacy eroded, decided to act against perceived threats, amidst fears of French-inspired or supported conspiracies. In 1809, the viceroy archbishop Lizana established a Junta de seguridad y buen orden, charged with dealing with all cases concerning those who had “made themselves suspicious” of disloyalty, of adhering to “the French party”, or of having to do with “seductive or seditious” writings or conversations72. After the Hidalgo uprising in 1810, another Junta was created in Guadalajara – reproducing the Audiencia jurisdictions. Even though the commanders who fought the insurgency would often take matters into their own hands, the administration of justice in cases of treason and sedition was set up as a centralized affair. In order to “reconcile public tranquility, the rights of the throne and the individual safety of citizens”. The members of the Junta –, Pedro Catani, Tomás González Calderón and Juan Collado – were well-versed lawyers with experience as criminal judges on the Audiencia73.
36Conversely, in British America, the Committees of Inspection that had been elected by order of Congress in 1774, were charged with ensuring loyalties and punishing dissention. The committee system embodied the revolutionary order locally and immediately. These elected bodies had a degree of information and control over local affairs that an organization like the Junta could never count on. Ostracism was the price to pay for those unwilling to accept the dictates of Congress. While the Junta pictured itself as a superior court, whose explicit duty it was to “sustain the innocent” in the face of calumny, the Committees of Safety’s relationship to the communities they watched over was intimate and complex. If the Junta strove to be the instrument of a superior and distant power, the committees acted as community organs of both “social division and concord74”.
37Consequently, in the North American States, the prosecution of those “inimical” to the Revolution was likely to turn into a theater for settling local vendettas75, but also for reconciling estranged parties. In the words of a member of the New York Convention, it was the duty of those charged with dealing with “disaffected persons” to “restore to society all those members who have not by their crimes rendered themselves unworthy of being partakers in the exalted privileges of freemen76”. Reintegration was a community affair, usually accompanied by ritualized “recantations”, “confessions” and “apologies”. In New Spain, the granting of amnesty (indulto) was intended as a display of royal mercy. It was a unilateral action, although those indultados were supposed to return to the peaceable lives they led before the rebellion. The reconstitution of a divided community, then, was left in the hands of an increasingly isolated and overwhelmed viceregal government.
38Therefore, in British America, despite the strident rhetoric and exaggerated posturing, the enforcement of community was less violent and intransigent. The very fact that the regulations that sought to restrict loyalist activity had to be repeatedly amended and reissued speaks to their lack of efficiency: New York’s Assembly, in its attempt to limit contact with the enemy, issued two laws in 1778, two in 1779, one in 1780, one the next year, and two in 178277. Although the war was sometimes very cruel – J. Howard Hanson estimated, in 1905, that two-thirds of the population of Tryon county (New York) had lost their lives between 1774 and 178378 –, revolutionary justice seems to have been relatively moderate, with few of the loyalists’ cases coming to trial, and even less being convicted as “traitors79”. The language and focus of the proceedings against them suggest that, as has already been mentioned, because it was attachment to the local community that allowed for reintegration, excessive harping on abstract and polemic political principles was unnecessary.
39Consequently, the town of Brimfield in Massachusetts refused to hold up “to the world a Brother and Fellow towns Man as an Enemy to his Country” for refusing to join into the non-consumption covenant, until they had “the best evidence of his vileness80”. Robert Hooper of Marblehead explained that he had signed an Address to Governor Hutchinson “with no other motive than the Hopes it would have a Tendency to serve the Province in general, and this Town in Particular”, and the town’s committee of safety decreed that he would hereafter be protected “from all Injuries and Insults whatsoever81”. Attachment to one’s own community, and concern for its welfare, not reasons of high politics, were claimed as the decisive factors for changes of allegiance, as well as for the “tenderness” shown by revolutionary authorities to the perpetrators, especially when they had wives and “small children82”. One supposes that when, in the words of a Loyalist militia man, “in a very severe tryal […] Duty” got the better of “Friendship”, Loyalist men and women abandoned their communities83.
40The logic of community attachments and local political culture are also pervasive in what Eric Van Young, in his monumental study about the Independence upheaval in New Spain has called the “rituals of confession and pardon” in an “age of excuses”. Along with recurrent tales of inebriation and of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, those charged with infidencia would insist on having followed the lead of traditional authority figures such as Indian governors or parish priests84. Some also argued that they had followed the insurgents as men “who loved their families, and worked to support them”, compelled by the “right to live and conserve life85”. This line of argument seems to have been less effective in New Spain than in the northern provinces: in the case of a poor rancher who – it was claimed – had joined the rebellion because of his “blind deference” to his superiors, who had been placed above him by the “legitimate powers that be”, the prosecutor declared emphatically that, in cases of treason, “rusticity, seduction or the persuasion of priests” were not exculpatory86.
41In June of 1776, Congress clarified what had become “an anomalous legal situation” for the people in British North America who, although loyal to the Crown, had remained in the rebel provinces/independent states. It passed a law that turned disaffection into treason by establishing that “all persons residing within any of the United States, deriving protection from the laws, owe allegiance to said laws”. The old “community of allegiance” to King and Parliament was fractured, and a new one set up, centered on the traditional exchange between protection on the side of government, obedience and loyalty on that of the governed. The newly independent states were, however, “free”, and peopled, one would surmise, by freemen, who willingly adhered to the political community87. As has already been mentioned, persons suspected of being inimical to the state governments, or to Congress, were required to swear allegiance to the new authorities. In Rhode Island and Connecticut, for instance, Loyalists had to swear not to assist “the wicked instruments of ministerial tyranny and villainy, commonly called the King’s Troops”, and to recognize that “when the sacred privileges of a nation are invaded, neutrality is not less base and criminal [as] open avowed hostility88”.
42An oath, nevertheless, implies personal commitment and choice: Loyalists – be they devoted, reluctant or indifferent – were being forced to voluntarily adhere to a political project their conscience found objectionable89. The irony of this did not go unnoticed. Peter Dubois, on being examined by the New York Committee of Safety for having, among other things, “found fault with the oaths”, asserted that he had spoken “in general” against oaths “administered by compulsion”, for many people, logically, “did not conceive themselves bound by such an oath.” His conduct was found “inconsistent with the philosopher, the soldier and the good man90”. For many loyalists, then, “the liberty we are contending for” had become “that of doing as [patriots] shall direct91”. As Myles Cooper wrote:
Can they be friends to liberty, who will not allow any to think or speak differently from themselves? Will they compel the society to act according to their arbitrary decision, and yet tell us we are free92?
43In the thirteen colonies, if the struggle for the “liberties of America” and the non-consumption movement forged the imaginary bonds of a continental community, it was independence proclaimed, and the exigency of adherence on the part of the new governments that established, on relatively solid ground, the bases of membership in the political community: tacit or explicit recognition and submission. In New Spain, the shocked viceregal government had a hard time coming up with clear guidelines. It was hard to rely on old precepts to anchor allegiance, as, in the midst of rebellion, insurgents made theirs loyalty to the King, religion and the Fatherland. The banner of Catholicism is perhaps the most illustrative of this, since it was so central to Hispanic political culture in the Atlantic Age93. Because, in its early stages, the insurgency was led by rural priests claiming to defend that which America held “most precious, its Holy Religion94”, because “the lexicon and practice of popular piety provided the language of insurgency95”, religion, in rebellious New Spain, proved to be a blunt instrument with which to separate “us” from “them”.
44Consequently, a defense like that mounted in 1809 by the Marqués de Castañiza, rector of San Ildefonso college, in which he asserted that it was impossible for a student indicted for having spit on the emblem of Fernando VII to be an infidente, because he always attended services and took Holy Communion would have been ineffectual after 181096. Even the legitimacy of Hidalgo’s Episcopal excommunication and inquisitorial condemnation, which, in a Catholic community, should have put the rebels beyond the pale, was utterly denied by the insurgents because they had been decreed by gachupines. It was even briefly questioned by high-ranking members of the Guadalajara ecclesiastical hierarchy97. Spanish immigrants, Hidalgo insisted, had broken the most sacred of all bonds, those of blood and family; and they had come to the New World because “their only religion was money98”. The fight against the gachupines was, in Hidalgo’s eyes, a war to purify religion. The insurgent constitution of Apatzingán, published in 1814, conflated religious and political identities, as citizenship was lost for the crimes of heresy, apostasy and treason99.
45Thus, during the first stages of the Mexican war of Independence, the fact that the government and its opponents spoke the same language greatly narrowed the discursive field, raising the stakes and obscuring the issues. Both sides attempted to entice a constituency with concrete measures that would permit men to “increase their fortunes”: Hidalgo abolished slavery and tribute, lowered tariffs and extinguished the tobacco and gunpowder monopolies100. The viceregal government repeatedly pardoned the rebels, proclaimed the “perfect equality” of European and American Spaniards, and liberated all “Indians, blacks, mulattoes and other castas” from paying royal tribute101. Nevertheless, it sometimes seemed that only violence could cut the Gordian knot. In 1811, Calleja ordered the execution of four civilians, drawn by lottery, in all towns where a royalist soldier, government official or “honest neighbor” had been killed, so that towns “would take an efficient interest” in preventing the “cruelties” of the rebels102. Insurgent commander José María Liceaga determined that all citizens had to openly proclaim themselves in favor of the “American party”, for indifference was a “crime against the Fatherland” which was punishable by death103. These excesses reflect the frustration of those trying to forcefully implement community and allegiance, and failing.
46In the end, in New Spain, as had happened in the United States, defining membership in the community depended less on idealized visions of citizenship and nationhood than on the struggle for political power104. In the midst of great ideological and political upheaval on both Atlantic shores of the Spanish Empire, “the Nation” – and who belonged to it – became a bone of contention, not so much as an imagined community, but as the depositary of sovereignty from which government would derive105. As José María Cos wrote in El Ilustrador Americano of June of 1812,
1. Sovereignty resides in the mass of the Nation. 2. Spain and America are integral parts of the monarchy, subject to the King, but equal to each other, and without dependency or subordination of one with respect to the other […] 4. The sovereign being absent, the inhabitants of the peninsula have no right to take a hold of the supreme power and to represent it in these territories […] The American nation, in conspiring against them, repulsed by the idea of submitting to arbitrary domination, is only making use of its right106.
47The war of Independence confronted “the American nation” – those born on “this happy soil”– with an enemy who was trampling over an ancestral right, if only recently revealed by the imperial crisis. In 1808, in denying Americans the right of establishing an autonomous Junta, the Europeans had treated them like “stupid men, or rather like a herd of four-legged animals, with no right to know about our political situation107”.
48Royalists, some of them Americans “by choice”, such as Abad y Queipo, attempted to counter the image of the aggrieved “natural” American nation with a “Spanish nation” which was made up of, as was stated the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, “the union of all Spaniards from both hemispheres108” through which old and new Spain were joined. It was presented as a civic and spiritual transatlantic community, bound by the ties of fealty to the King and by the Catholic religion. In the words of Manuel Ignacio González del Campillo, bishop of Puebla, the violence between European and American Spaniards was all the more atrocious in that
we are effectively brothers, united by bonds sweeter and tighter than those of flesh and blood. We are united in the faith that we profess, and we constitute one mystical body that is the Church of which Jesus Christ is the head. We also make up a civil body, which is governed by our King […] Above all, we are united by the bonds of charity, which are the strongest, and must tie our hearts together so that they shall be one109.
49Nonetheless, metropolitan authorities – be they liberal and constitutional (1812-1814) or absolutist (1814-1820) – proved unwilling to make the much proclaimed equality of the American territories a reality. In denying the vote to American castas, and annulling the 1812 elections for the Mexico City ayuntamiento110, the royalist claim of an imperial community of equal Spanish citizens proved hollow, and became increasingly less credible.
50In 1820 a military rising restored constitutional rule to the Spanish Monarchy. As the efforts of Mexican autonomists were consistently frustrated, and the more radical positions of the restored Cortes in their dealings with the Church were questioned by different sectors of the Mexican elite, royalist officer Agustín de Iturbide published the Plan de Iguala. In it, the independence of a Mexican “moderate monarchy” was proclaimed, and its throne offered to II or a younger Bourbon Prince. The Plan gained the approval of much of the royalist army, many ayuntamientos, and insurgent leader Vicente Guerrero. It was eventually endorsed by new viceroy Juan O’Donoju. In August of 1821, on his way to Mexico City, he signed the Treaties of Córdoba, which meant to set up Mexican independence with metropolitan recognition111.
51In trying to define the new political community, Iturbide relied on the same relationship between government and governed that had set up political membership in the newly independent North American states: those living under the laws of the new nation owed allegiance to the nation and obedience to its norms. He claimed that, regardless of origin, all inhabitants could be “perfect citizens”. The Treaties of Córdoba recognized that, in a critical juncture such as independence, individual will had to be the defining element of membership:
Every person, belonging to a society where the system of government has been altered […] is considered to be in a state of natural freedom, and is at liberty to move wherever is most convenient for him, without any one having the right of restricting this freedom112.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS. THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL ALLEGIANCE
52The struggles for independence in America implied the reconstruction of political community. The ways in which this was done in the British North American colonies and in New Spain would, in many ways, shape not only how independence was won, but how political community was structured afterwards. After the Seven Years War, the reconfiguration of the Atlantic empires’ fiscal policies increased the pressures on the American possessions, thus heightening the sense that American subjects were being denied the rights of full-fledged members of the Empire. In the British North American colonies, resistance to Great Britain, spread out over ten years of mobilization and debate, spawned a web of local organizations, linked to both the colonial assemblies and the Continental Congress. This network would broaden the scope of the resistance movement, bring the revolution home, and provide a tangible basis for a “new” government. In New Spain, the vindication of America apparently remained a discursive device, which constitutes that fascinating but fuzzy entity known as “Creole patriotism”, while popular violence against gachupines remained sporadic, localized and isolated until the outbreak of the 1810 rebellion.
53It would seem then that the thirteen colonies were better “prepared” for independence, in that they already had the infrastructure and personnel of an independent government. Independence still implied, as it did for New Spain, the fracture and reconstitution of political community. In both cases, local communities played a key role in determining identity and membership, although the Mexican ayuntamientos lacked the sense of mission of the revolutionary committees, and their links to a continental – if not a “national”– vision embodied by Congress. Consequently, throughout the first decades of independent life in both young nations, the weight of local and state priorities – over national ones – won out in fashioning political identity. There was no legal definition of an “American” or a “Mexican” citizen until 1868 for the former, 1836 for the latter. In the United States, the granting of political rights – notably the right to vote – arguably remained the states’ prerogative until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Mexico, although the 1836 constitution established the requirements, rights and obligations of Mexican citizens, the quality of vecino, and the ayuntamiento’s involvement in the organization of elections remained central to the exercise of the right to vote, throughout the century.
54Furthermore, in both British and Spanish America, the war, and with it the obligation to “take sides” was a traumatic experience. As older political ties became obsolete, new visions of political membership were put forth. If the belief that the ties of vassalage and subjection were “natural” and beneficial was shattered, if the idea of a “covenant” between ruler and ruled became untenable, if a fatherly King became the “Royal Brute”, these tenets had to be replaced by something else. In that Independence, in the Atlantic context, set up “sovereign nations” as well as autonomous states, citizenship suggested membership in the sovereign entity, constituting part of a “national will”, a commitment to a greater project, in short, “volitional” allegiance. The idea that membership in the post-revolutionary political community had to be voluntary seemed inescapable, even in Agustín de Iturbide’s monarchical scheme. But, as James Kettner pointed out, allegiance which is at the same time voluntary and operative is profoundly problematic. Subjection to laws, taxes and the draft, from the State’s perspective, can hardly be a matter of personal choice. In the midst of revolution, both Henry Van Schaack and Andrés Amat were sunk into conundrums as they tried to figure out what the thorny relationship between governed and government should be like, once it was made obvious that familial relationships were no longer an appropriate simile. Making the revolutionary fiction of “volitional allegiance” believable would prove to be one of the greater challenges of the young American states.
Notes de bas de page
1 I am greatly indebted to Bertha Tejeda of CIDE’s Interlibrary Loan Office, to Alejandra Valdés and Carlos Bravo for their research assistance, and to the participants of the Atlantic History Seminar Anniversary Conference, the 2005 Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, and Columbia University’s ILAS meeting for their valuable comments. All distortions, omissions, blunders and translations are mine.
2 Quoted in William A. Benton, “Henry Van Schaack: The Conscience of a Loyalist”, in Robert A. East, Jacob Judd, eds., The Loyalist Americans. A Focus on Greater New York, Tarrytown, NY, Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1975, p. 44-55, p. 49. The emphasis is in the original.
3 “Regimiento de Infantería de Nueva España, Segundo batallón. Criminal contra el cabo segundo Manuel Galván [y siete otros] por el delito de infidencia, sedición e inteligencia por escrito con el enemigo de el primero y complicidad de los restantes”, in Archivo General de la Nación (henceforth AGN), ramo Infidencias, vol. 41, exp. 1, fojas 130.
4 Amat could be the son of military engineer Andrés Amat de Tortosa, Intendant of Guanajuato, 1787-1790. For the royalist army, see Christon Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760-1810, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1977.
5 John H. Elliot, “Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World”, in Nicholas Canny, Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 3-13. See, in the same volume, Anthony Pagden, “Identity formation in Spanish America”, p. 51-93; Michael Zuckerman, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden”, p. 115-157, David Brading, Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano, México, Era, 1988; Solange Alberro, Del gachupín al criollo: o de cómo los españoles de México dejaron de serlo, México, El Colegio de México, 1992.
6 Edward Countryman and Susan Deans, “Independence and Revolution in the Americas: A Project for Comparative Study”, in Radical History Review, 27, 1983, p. 144-171; p. 148. On America “becoming colonial”, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution. How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 200-204.
7 Richard L Merritt’s quantitative symbol analysis of the colonial press has shown that there is a steady increase in “community awareness” during the four decades preceding the formation of the first Continental Congress, and David Brading and Solange Alberro have traced the development of a “Creole patriotism” and an American (criollo) identity that precedes the second half of the XVIII century. We would argue, though, that it had not acquired, a political, oppositional sense. Richard L. Merritt, Symbols of American Community, 1735-1775, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1966, p. 123-138, 146-147. David A. Brading, Orbe indiano: de la monarquía católica a la República criolla, 1492-1867, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991; Alberro, De gachupín, After the meeting of the First Continental Congress in September 1774, Patrick Henry said that “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American”. Cited in Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution. The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America, New York, Viking, 2005, p. 90-91. For New Spain, see Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach, “La insurgencia de los nombres” in Josefina Z. Vázquez, ed., Interpretaciones de la independencia de México, México, Nueva Imagen, 1997, p. 103-122.
8 Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center. Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788, Athens, London, University of Georgia Press, 1986, p. 76-85.
9 “Resolves of the Pennsylvania Assembly on the Stamp Act”, September 21, 1765, at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/.
10 “The Association of the Sons of Liberty of New York,” in An American Time-Capsule: Three centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera, in www.loc.gov. For the visions of government that stood behind the slightly hysterical fears of XVII century Americans, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967.
11 By the end of the viceregal period, New Spain’s “popular” sectors were contributing around 20% of their income to the Crown, one of the heaviest fiscal burdens in the Atlantic world, while the compulsory deposit of community funds from the cajas de comunidad in the Bank of San Carlos, and the refinancing of the public debt by recalling the capitals lent out by the Church through the consolidación de vales reales severely depleted the economy of New Spain of circulating and investment capital. See Enrique Cárdenas, Cuando se originó el atraso económico de México: la economía mexicana en el largo siglo XIX, 1780-1920, Madrid, Fundación Ortega y Gasset, 2003, p. 21-58, especially p. 36-38; Carlos Marichal, “La bancarrota del virreinato: finanzas, guerra y política en la Nueva España, 1770-1808”, in Josefina Vázquez, ed., Interpretaciones del siglo XIX mexicano, México, Nueva Imagen, 1992, p. 153-186. For the effects of and reactions to the “enlightened” reforms on religious practices, social organization, and popular sensibilities, see Juan Pedro Viqueira, ¿Relajados o reprimidos?: diversiones públicas y vida social en la Ciudad de México durante el Siglo de las Luces, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987; Felipe Castro, Nuevo Rey, nueva ley: reformas borbónicas y rebelión popular en Nueva España, Zamora, El Colegio de Michoacán, México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996; Clara García, “El privilegio de pertenecer: las comunidades de fieles y la crisis de la monarquía católica”, unpublished manuscript.
12 “Representación que hizo la ciudad de México al rey D. Carlos III en 1771 sobre que los criollos deben ser preferidos en la distribución de empleos y beneficios de estos reinos”, in J. E. Hernández y Dávalos, comp., Historia de la guerra de independencia en México, six volumes, México, INEHRM, 1985, vol. I, p. 427-454, p. 428.
13 Of the 854 indighted after the 1767 tumultos, 85 were executed, beheaded, and their severed heads exhibited, their homes destroyed, their fields sown with salt, and their families exiled from the jurisdiction. The others received sentences of varying degrees of severity. José de Gálvez, Informe sobre las rebeliones populares de 1767, Felipe Castro, ed., México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1990, p. 11. The Bourbon reforms postulated the “equality” between the King’s Spanish subjects, and thus the possibility for American Spaniards’ serving elsewhere in the empire, which remained exceptional and did not solve the problem of local interest representation in local government.
14 Decree ordering the expulsion of the Jesuits, cited in Castro, 1996, p. 97.
15 Quoted in T. H. Breen, 2004, p. 202.
16 “Representación,” in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. I, p. 434.
17 See James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, Boston, Edes and Gill, 1764.
18 “Representación”, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. I, p. 452. Pagden, 1983, p. 65.
19 Bailyn, 1992, p. 184-185.
20 Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations. Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 141-152, citation p. 152.
21 Breen, 2004.
22 Breen, 2004, p. 196-234, citation from p. 197. For Massachusetts, see Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts. The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1970.
23 David Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985; David Brading, Orbe indiano: de la monarquía católica a la república criolla, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991; Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, New York, Verso, 1991.
24 Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, “Ilustración, educación e identidad nacionalista en el siglo XVIII”, in Gran historia de México ilustrada, five volumes, México, Planeta DeAgostoni, Conaculta, INAH, 2002, vol. III: Josefina Vázquez, ed., El nacimiento de México, 1750-1856, p. 21-40, p. 32-38. John H. Elliot makes a similar argument – and stresses the Spanish Americans’ inability to construct intercolonial alliances – particularly of the Tupac Amaru rebellion in Peru (1780-1783), and the rebellion of the Comuneros in New Granada (1781-1782), in his luminous Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 325-368, specially 353-368.
25 By the Mexican Jesuit in exile, Francisco Xavier Clavijero, Storia antica del Messico: cavata da’migliori storici spagnuoli, e da’manoscritti, e dalle pitture antiche degl’Indiani… e dissertazioni sulla terra, sugli animale, e sugli abitatori del Messico, Cesena, G. Biasini, 1780-1781.
26 Castro, 1996, p. 117, p. 158. Castro sees hostility against the gachupines, as opposed to against the “white” ruling class – regardless of American or European origin – as expressing resentment and challenging the legitimacy of colonial authorities. Castro, 1996, p. 261-264.
27 Barbara Clark Smith, “Food Rioters and the American Revolution”, in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., n° 51-1 (January), 1994, p. 3-38, p. 7, p. 22.
28 “Representación sobre la inmunidad personal del clero, reducida por las leyes del Nuevo Código, en la cual se propuso al rey el asunto de diferentes leyes que establecidas, harían la base de un gobierno liberal y benéfico para las Américas y para si metrópoli”, in Manuel Abad y Queipo, Colección de los escritos más importantes que en diferentes épocas dirigió al gobierno D. Manuel Abad y Queipo, obispo electo de Michoacán, movido de un celo ardiente ppor el bien general de la Nueva España, y felicidad de sus habitantes, especialmente de los indios y las castas: y los da a luz en contraposición de las calumnias atroces que han publicado los cabecillas insurgentes, a fin de hacerle odioso con el pueblo y destruir por este medio la fuerza de los escritos con que los ha combatido desde el principio de la insurrección, México, Conaculta, 1994, p. 33-86, p. 74, p. 77. The picota was a column or stake placed outside population centers where the head of major criminals would be placed for exhibition, after execution.
29 “Resolutions of the Continental Congress”, October 19, 1765, at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/
30 “Representación”, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. I, p. 427.
31 “Massachusetts circular letter to colonial legislatures”, February 11, 1768, “Virginia Resolutions Establishing a Committee of Correspondence”, March 12, 1773, at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/ David Ammerman, In the Common Cause. American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774, Charlottesville, University of Virginia, 1974, p. 20.
32 Ammerman, 1974, p. 103-124.
33 See, for instance, the argument of the reach of Congressional authority in “The Following Letter Was Some Nights Ago Thrown In Among the Sons of Liberty”, New York, John Holt, 1775. In discussing how the city should treat the Murray brothers, who unloaded goods “in a clandestine manner”, the author of this broadside argued that “Congress intended some [exemplary] punishment […] but as they were not vested with legislative powers [… they] wisely left it to the body of the people in each province”. In American Time Capsule at www.loc.gov.
34 Ammerman, 1974, p. 106-107, p. 122-124.
35 Edward Countryman, “Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York, 1775-1783”, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, VI: 4 (Spring), 1976, p. 645-677.
36 Countryman, Deans, 1983, p. 158-159; Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion. Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 510.
37 Alfredo Ávila, En nombre de la Nación. La formación del gobierno representativo en México, México, CIDE, Taurus, 1999, p. 152-153. I follow Ávila closely in the next paragraphs.
38 José Miranda, Las ideas y las instituciones políticas mexicanas. Primera parte, 1521-1820, México, Instituto de Derecho Comparado UNAM, 1952.
39 Miranda, 1952, p. 346-358; Ávila, 1999, p. 143-182; Virgina Guedea, “Los procesos electorales insurgentes”, in Estudios de Historia Novohispana, 11, 1991, p. 222-248. For conceptions of representation see, among the various works on the topic by François-Xavier Guerra, “The Spanish Tradition of Representation and its European Roots” in Journal of Latin American Studies, 26: 1 (Feb. 1994), p. 1-35.
40 The first constitutions and electoral statutes of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Virginia established a freehold requirement, which remained in effect in Virginia and North Carolina – although it applied only to Senate elections – until de 1850s. Alexander Keyssar, The right to vote: the contested history of democracy in the United States, New York, Basic Books, 2000, Tables A2 and A3; Chilton Williamson, American suffrage: from property to democracy, 1760-1860, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1960. I would like to thank Prof. Herb Sloan for his comments on this topic.
41 For the concept of representation, see Jack Richon Pole, Political representation in England and the origins of the American Republic, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1966; Williamson, American; Keyssar, The right; Erika Pani, “Ciudadanos, cuerpos, intereses: las incertidumbres de la representación; Estados Unidos, 1776-1787 – México, 1808-1828”. en Historia Mexicana, 53: 1 (jul-sep. 2003), p. 65-115; Willi Paul Adams, The first American constitutions: Republican ideology and the making of the State constitutions in the Revolutionary era, Williamsburg, University of North Carolina Press, 1980; Nash, 2005, p. 264-305.
42 José María Portillo Valdés, Crisis atlántica: autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispana, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2006.
43 It can nevertheless be argued that the Cádiz Constitution did provide the basis of independent Mexico’s political geography, not only because of the permanence of the ayuntamientos, but in that the elected Diputaciones Provinciales – excepting that of Tlaxcala – became the legislative assemblies of the federated states. Hira de Gortari “El territorio y las identidades en la construcción de la nación”, in Alicia Hernández, Manuel Miño, coords. Cincuenta años de Historia en México, México, El Colegio de México, 1991, vol. 2, p. 199-220.
44 Antonio Annino, “Cádiz y la revolución territorial de los pueblos”, in Antonio Annino, ed., Historia de las elecciones en Iberoamérica, siglo XIX: de la formación del espacio político nacional, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
45 “The Following Letter”, in An American Time-Capsule, at www.loc.gov.
46 The defense of community was, according to Van Young, the central motivation of the men who took up arms against viceregal authorities. For the defense strategies of the pueblos, see, for Guanajuato, José Antonio Serrano, Jerarquía territorial y transición política: Guanajuato, 1790-1836, Zamora, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2001; for Michoacán, Juan Ortiz, Guerra y gobierno: los pueblos y la independencia de México, Sevilla, Universidad internacional de Andalucía, La Rábida, 1997; for Veracruz, Michael Ducey, “La causa justa: los defensores del dominio español en el norte de Veracruz, 1810-1821” in William Fowler, Humberto Morales, ed., El conservadurismo mexicano (1810-1910), Puebla, Universidad Atónoma de Puebla, 1999, p. 37-58. For a different perspective, see, for Guerrero, Peter Guardino, Peasants, politics, and the formation of Mexico’s national state: Guerrero, 1800-1857, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.
47 See Antonio Annino, “Ciudadanía versus gobernabilidad republicana en México. Los orígenes de un dilema”, in Marcello Carmagnani, Alicia Hernández Chávez, “la ciudadanía orgánica en México, 1850-1910”, in Hilda Sabato, ed., Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones. Perspectivas históricas de América Latina, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999, p. 62-93, p. 371-404.
48 “Acta del Ayuntamiento de México, en la que se declaró se tuviera por insubsistente la abdicación de Carlos IV y Felipe VII (sic.) hecha en Napoleón: que se desconozca todo funcionario que venga nombrado de España: que el virrey gobierne por comisión del ayuntamiento en representación del virreynato y otros artículos”, July 19, 1808, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. I, p. 475-485. Hugh Hamill, “Un discurso formado en la angustia” in Historia Mexicana; Ávila, 1999, p. 66-72.
49 “Declarations and Resolves of the First Continental Congress”, October 14, 1774, “The Articles of Association”, October 20, 1774 at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/.
50 “Introduction”, in Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Loyalists and Community in North America, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1994, p. 2, p. 9. Wallace Brown calculates a total of between 160,000 and 384,000 loyalists, and between 80,000 and 192,000 exiles, out of a population of 2,500,000. Wallace Brown, The King’s Friends. The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants, Providence, Brown University Press, 1965, p. 250.
51 Harold D. Sims, The expulsion of Mexico’s Spaniards, 1821-1836, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.
52 Spain was understandably unable to send troops to America in 1810. In North America, according to Wallace Brown, between 30,000 and 50,000 loyalists fought in the regular army for the King between 1775 and 1783. In 1780, 8,000 Loyalists were in the army, at a time when Washington’s army numbered 9,000 men. Brown, 1965, p. 249.
53 October 26, 1774, in The Journals of each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1774 and 1775 and of the Committee of Safety, Boston, Dulton and Wentworth, 1838, p. 32.
54 “Joseph de la Cruz a la población…”; “Bandos del Sr. Liceaga, sobre la conducta que deben observar los vecinos de las poblaciones al aproximarse las fuerzas realistas, ofreciéndoles indultos y otras materias”, in Hernández y Dávalos, 1985, vol. IV, p. 277. Liceaga was nevertheless exceptional in that he did not proclaim the need to get rid of the gachupines.
55 For the similarities and differences of mob action in Eighteenth century North America and Western Europe, see Gordon Wood, “A Note of Mobs in the American Revolution”, in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, XXIII: 4 (October), 1966, p. 635-642.
56 See, for New York, Richard M. Ketchum, Divided Loyalties. How the American Revolution Came to New York, New York, Henry Holt, 2002. Compare the public demonstrations orchestrated by the Sons of Liberty with the ambiguous results in the elections of the Committee of Fifty-One and of One Hundred.
57 In Guadalupe Nava Oteo, ed. Los cabildos de la Nueva España en 1808, México, SEP, 1973, p. 47; in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, October 5, 1810.
58 “Acta del Ayuntamiento de México…” in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. I; “Bando para la proclamación de nuestro amado monarca FERNANDO VII”, August 13, 1808, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, August 13, 1808. It can be argued that it was the Aranjuez Mutiny of March 1808, headed by supporters of Fernando, which forced Carlos IV’s abdication, which would then be legitimate, as opposed to that of Fernando VII in favor of Joseph Bonaparte. I am grateful to Rafael Rojas anf Alfredo Ávila for their comments on this.
59 “Acta del Ayuntamiento de México…” in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. I, p. 480.
60 Edict of Abad y Queipo, bishop-elect of Michoacán, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, September 28, 1810; “Representación”, Real de Angangueo, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, October 2, 1810.
61 La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, October 2, 5, 28, 1810.
62 Breen, 2004, p. 276-279.
63 In Richard Warren, Vagrants and citizens: politics and the masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic, Wilmington, SR Books, 2001, p. 39. See also Virginia Guedea, “Las primeras elecciones populares en la ciudad de México, 1812-1813”, en Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, VII: 1 (winter), 1991, p. 1-28.
64 “Bando sobre la creación de una Junta extraordinaria de seguridad y buen orden”, September 23, 1809, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, September 23, 1809. See also Juan Ortiz, “¿El despertar de las conciencias en una sociedad de Antiguo Régimen? Veracruz 1812-1825”, paper presented at the Social History Seminar at El Colegio de México, September 2004.
65 “Orden del virey (sic.) para que se fusile á los que se aprehendan aun cuando sean eclesiásticos”, February 22, 1811, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. II, p. 408.
66 “Informaciones contra Romualdo Arias, Nicolás Rodríguez y Cresencio Farías, acusados de ladrones […] en las que aparece que Cresencio farías y Juan José Lossolla […] son asesinos de Granaditas”, July 1811, in AGN, Infidencias, vol. 24, exp. 2, fojas 71.
67 “Bando del Sr. Morelos sobre embargos de bienes de Europeos y otras materias de buen gobierno”, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. II, p. 401-402.
68 July 18, 1775, in Journals of the Provincial Congress, Provincial Convention, Committee of Safety and Council of Safety of the state of New York, Albany, Thurlow Weed, 1842, vol. I, p. 81-82; “Bando sobre la creación de una Junta extraordinaria de seguridad y buen orden”, September 23, 1809, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, September 23, 1809.
69 See Appendix B, in Claude H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution, Safety Harbour, FLA, Simon Publications [1902], 2001, p. 318-326.
70 The Tory Act: Published by Order of the Continental Congress, Philadelphia, January 2, 1776, Philadelphia, John Dunlap, 1776, in An American Time-Capsule, at www.loc.gov.
71 Minutes of the Commissioners for detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York, Albany County Sessions, 1778-1781, Ed. By Victor Hugo Paltsits, three volumes, Albany, State of New York, 1909-1910, Appendix I, vol. II, p. 783-786. See also John Shy, “The Loyalist Problem in the Lower Hudson Valley: The British Perspective”, in East and Judd, eds., 1975, p. 3-13. For the large number of uncommitted citizens, see Joseph S. Tiedemann, “Communities in the Midst of the American Revolution: Queens County, New York, 1774-1775”, in Journal of Social History, XVIII, 1984, p. 57-78; Jonathan Clark, “The Problem of Allegiance in Revolutionary Poughkeepsie”, in David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, Thad W. Tate, eds., Saints and Revolutionaries. Essays on Early American History, New York, London, WW Norton and Co, 1984, p. 285-327. One might suppose, given the number of men who decided to accept amnesty at various moments during the 1810s, that this also happened in New Spain.
72 “Bando sobre la creación de una Junta extraordinaria de seguridad y buen orden”, September 23, 1809”, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, September 23, 1809.
73 “Bando sobre la creación de una Junta extraordinaria de seguridad y buen orden”, September 23, 1809, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, September 23, 1809. Lucas Alamán and Carlos María de Bustamante, who wrote about independence from opposite perspectives, were harshly critical of the Junta’s persecutions. Lucas Alamán, Historia de México desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon su Independencia en el año de 1808 hasta la época presente, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985; Carlos María de Bustamante, Cuadro Histórico de la Revolución Mexicana, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985.
74 David H. Villers, “King Mob and the Rule of Law: Revolutionary Justice and the Suppression of Loyalism in Connecticut, 1774-1783”, in Calhoon, Barnes, and Rawlyk, eds., 1994, p. 17-30, p. 18. On the importance of revolutionary administration of justice as a mechanism of both punishment and reintegration, see, in the same volume, Rebecca Starr, “Little Bermuda: Loyalism on Daufauskie Island, South Carolina, 1775-1783”, p. 55-64; David E. Maas, “The Massachusetts Loyalists and the Problem of Amnesty, 1775-1790”, p. 65-74.
75 In Sketches of Eighteenth Century America, see Judith Van Burskirk, Generous Enemies. Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p. 38 ss.
76 Journals, New York, 1842, vol. I, p. 827.
77 Buskirk, 2002, p. 60.
78 The Minute Book of the Committee of Safety of Tryon County, the Old New York Frontier, Now presented verbatim for the first time, with an introduction by J. Howard Hanson, and notes by Samuel Ludlow Frey, New York, Dodd, Mead and Co, 1905.
79 Robert Calhoon, in reviewing the effects of the Acts of Attainder in Pennsylvania, found that of 500 people affected, 386 failed to appear, 113 surrendered, sixteen went to trial and only three were convicted. Of these, one went mad, the other two were hanged. Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973, p. 400-401.
80 R. Brown, 1970, p. 202-203.
81 Recantations of Robert Hooper, John Pedrick, Robert Hooper, Jun., Geo M’Call, Richard Reed and Henry Sanders In Committee of Saety (sic.), Cambridge, May 4, 1775, in American Time-Capsule, at www.loc.gov. Robert Calhoon has noted that this and other recantations reproduce local patterns of deference and social control. “The Loyalist Persuasion”, in Calhoon, 1989, p. 195-215, p. 196.
82 See the case against Samuel Knap, February 27, 1777, in Jounals, New York, 1842, p. 814.
83 See the defense of Hewlett Cornell, in Buskirk, 2002, p. 2.
84 Van Young, 2001, p. 111-125.
85 Sumaria contra D. Pedro Morales, Sombrerete, 1810, in Archivo General de la Nación (henceforth AGN), Infidencias, vol. 5, exp. 10.
86 Sumaria contra Luciano Pérez, Teniente Coronel de Insurgentes. Pueblo de Meca, 1812, in AGN, Operaciones de Guerra, Vol. 15, Infidencias, exp. 3.
87 James Kettner, “The Development of American Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era: The Idea of Volitional Allegiance,” in The American Journal of Legal History, XVIII, 1974, p. 208-266, p. 215. The issue of “volitional allegiance” is further developed in James Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1978.
88 Quoted in James Westfall Thompson, “Anti-Loyalist Legislation during the American Revolution”, in Illinois Law Review, III, 1908-1909, p. 81-90, p. 147-171, p. 150.
89 See “The Political Shibboleth”, in Van Tyne, 2001, p. 129-145; Robert M. Calhoon, “The Loyalist Persuasion”, in Calhoon, 1989, p. 195-215.
90 April 12, 1777, in Journals, New York, 1842, vol. I, p. 403-404.
91 Frederick Philipse to Elizabeth Phillipse, August 1776, in Jacob Judd, “Frederick Philipse III of Westchester County: A Reluctant Loyalist”, in Robert A. East, Jacob Judd, eds., The Loyalist Americans. A Focus on Greater New York, Tarrytwon, NY, Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1975; Thomas Bradbury Chandler, The American Querist, or Some Questions Proposed Relative to the Present Disputes Between Great Britain and Her American Colonies, by a North American, 10th Edition, New York; 1774, p. 24-25, in Eighteenth century Collection Online, Gale Group, at http://galanet, galegroup.com
92 In “The Character and Coherence of the Loyalist Press,” in Calhoon, 1989, p. 109-146, p. 118.
93 José María Portillo Valdés, Revolución de nación: orígenes de la cultura constitucional en España, 1780-1812, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2000.
94 See “Manifiesto del Sr. Hidalgo, expresando cuál es el motivo de la insurrección, concluyendo en nueve artículos,” in Hernández y Dávalos, 1985, vol. I, p. 472-473. I still need to work on the role of religion in the thirteen colonies during the revolution.
95 Van Young, 2001, p. 512.
96 Causa reservada contra el colegial de San Ildefonso D. Francisco de Mugarrieta, 1809, AGN, Infidencias, vol. IV, exp. 1. See also the 1809 case of the man accused by his servant of infidencia becuase he never hears him pray. We have not run across this line of argument after 1810.
97 “Proclamas de los independientes contra el indulto”, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. II, p. 133.
98 “Manifiesto que el Sr. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Generalísimo de las Armas Americanas, y electo por la mayor parte de los pueblos de este Reyno para defender sus derechos y los de sus conciudadanos, hace al pueblo” in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., vol. I, p. 125-126.
99 Constitución de Apatzingán, Capítulo II, Art. 10.
100 “Bando del Sr. Hidalgo aboliendo la esclavitud; deroga las leyes relativas tributos; impone alcabala a los efectos nacionales y extranjeros; prohibe el uso del papel sellado, y extingue el estanco de tabaco, pólvora, colores y otros”, in Hernández y Dávalos, 1985, vol. II, p. 243-244.
101 “Decreto declarando iguales derechos a los americanos que los que gozan los europeos”, February 19, 1811, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. II, p. 378; Bando del virrey Venegas, October 9, in La Gaceta Extraordinaria del Gobierno de México, October 9, 1810
102 “Bando del Se. Calleja disponiendo que se sorteen cuatro de los habitantes de la población en la que se mata un soldado del rey”, December 1811, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. II, p. 297.
103 “Bandos del Sr. Liceaga”, June 22, 1812, in Hernández y Dávalos, ed., 1985, vol. IV, p. 277.
104 See Rogers Smith, Civic ideals: conflicting visions of citizenship in U. S. history, London, Yale University Press, 1997; Rogers Smith, Stories of peoplehood: the politics and morals of political membership, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la révolution, Paris, Grasset, 2002.
105 See “Mutaciones y victoria de la Nación”, in François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e Independencias. Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispanicas, México; Editorial Mapfre, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992, p. 319-350.
106 “El Ilustrador Americano”, Num. 5, in Hernández y Dávalos, 1985, vol. IV, p. 222.
107 “Manifiesto del Sr. Hidalgo, expresando cuál es el motivo de la insurrección, concluyendo en nueve artículos”, in Hernández y Dávalos, 1985, vol. I, p. 472-473. See José María Portillo Valdés, “La revolución constitucional en el mundo hispano” in www.foroiberideas.com.ar.
108 “Constitución de Cádiz de 1812”, March 18, 1812, Chap. 1, Art. 1.
109 “Pastoral del Sr. Obsipo, Sr. Dr. Manuel Ignacio González del Campillo a sus diocesanos”, in Hernández y Dávalos, 1985, vol. IV, p. 903-904.
110 Manuel Chust, La cuestión nacional americana en las Cortes de Cádiz (1810-1814), Valencia, Centro Francisco Tomás y Valiente UNED Alzira-Valencia, 1999; Marie Laure Rieu-Millán, Los diputados americanos en las Cortes de Cádiz: igualdad o independencia, Madrid, Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1990.
111 For the final acts of Independence, see Timothy Anna, The fall of the Royal Government in Peru, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1979; Jaime del Arenal, Un modo de ser libres: independencia y constitución en México, 1816-1822, Zamora, México, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2002; Jaime Rodríguez, La independencia de la América española, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996.
112 Tratados de Córdoba, in Álvaro Matute, ed., Antología. México en el siglo XIX. Fuentes e interpretaciones históricas, México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1984, p. 233.
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