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Mexicans! My part is taken; the voice of revelation whispers to me that to me is entrusted the work of breaking the chains of your slavery. Juan Cort ina W ith a passionate sense of survival and a thundering voice, Cortina realized he had unleashed a rebellion that stirred the conscience of all Tejanos and Mexicanos and challenged the assumption of Anglo Texan supremacy. Encouraged by his military successes, he issued a second pronunciamiento from Rancho del Carmen on November 23, 1859. Similar to the first proclamation, it was fiery, full of anger, and exceptionally well written. It was also inspirational to the poor and politically dispossessed who were flocking to his banner. In his pronunciamiento, Cortina was more confident and acutely aware he was addressing a much larger audience, even perceiving himself as the spokesman and defender of all “Mexican Inhabitants of the State of Texas.” The loss of land, either through legal chicanery or threats and intimidation, must be avenged, Cortina angrily announced. The impunity with which Anglos and Europeans had killed Mexicans in Brownsville and Cameron County, he continued, must not go unanswered. Moreover, the racism and arrogance of the newcomers who had arrived on the border like “flocks of vampires in the guise of men,” must end. “Many of you have been robbed of your property, incarcerated, chased, murdered, and hunted like wild beasts,” Cortina angrily reminded his followers. Despite its vitriol, Cortina’s second pronunciamiento had a strange fatalism —as if Cortina sensed he might not survive the violence he had unleashed . Perceptive of his emerging place in history, Cortina spoke of being forced to lead a “wandering life” and of becoming a sacrificial lamb to the happiness of his people. He was certainly aware that more powerful forces Chapter Three FlocksofVampiresintheGuiseofMen 68 c h ap t e r t h r ee than the Rangers and the inept Brownsville militia were preparing to move against him and that his revolution on the border might be doomed. The publication and reception of Cortina’s pronunciamiento are telling. The document was published in Spanish in Matamoros and translated and reprinted in English, with a lengthy rebuttal by Somers Kinney in a broadside at the office of the Brownsville American Flag. To Kinney, Cortina was an “arch-murderer and robber” and a “Christian Comanche.” His outcry for justice was little more than a “collection of balderdash and impudence.”Nevertheless , Cortina had “banded together an imposing army, [was] flying a foreign flag . . . on American soil,” and was “levying war against the State and Union.” A week later, the pronunciamiento was published by Henry A. Maltby in the Corpus Christi Ranchero. Once again, desperate pleas and ominous warnings trickled north from the border. One Brownsville resident was sure no American would be left alive south of the Nueces River. Once Cortina had extended his control to the Sabine River, he was certain to free all the slaves in Texas, others speculated . “I advise you who have influence,” a citizen of Brownsville wrote a friend in San Antonio, “not to wait for any action of the Legislature, but come at once at every sacrifice with sufficient force to whip and hang the traitor as high as Haman.” Even before Cortina’s second pronunciamiento, his raiders had started to pillage and destroy farms and ranches in the lower Valley, especially those of individuals known to be in sympathy with Cortina’s enemies. John Graham , contractor on the Corpus Christi-to-Brownsville and Laredo-to-Rio Grande City-to-Brownsville mail routes, lost most of his horses and mules and watched his mail stations go up in smoke. The all-important Brazos Santiago and Point Isabel-to-Brownsville mail route that connected the lower Rio Grande to Galveston, New Orleans, and the outside world had to be abandoned, the mail carried by Mexican couriers on the south side of the river. In a few instances, the mail was even diverted through Monterrey. In a little less than two months, Brownsville’s postmaster, Robert B. Kingsbury, estimated Cortina captured twenty mail riders. A Poisoned Wand The toll exacted by the Cortinistas was amazing as Cortina’s avowed enemies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in property and livestock. Robert Shears, the “Squinting Sheriff,” who was leasing a small ranch only three miles from Brownsville, lost all his horses, cows, oxen, and swine. Cortinistas even stole seventeen of his ducks and forty-eight of his “grown chickens .” Adolphus...

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