Secret War for Texas

2. Revolution

2 • Revolution sheer hard work was what earned James Grant his reputation as a man of progress. According to John Linn, Grant became the “resident agent of an English mining company,” perhaps pointing to a connection with the iron ore mine at Encarnación, which Wavell and Milam leased to an English company at about this time. More likely, it refers to his becoming the general manager “of a number of extensive haciendas” forming the vast Aguayo estates in Coahuila and Zacatecas (map, next page). These were leased in September 1828, to a consortium of British companies headed by the famous banking house of Baring Brothers and by the Mexican-based Staples and Company.1 Grant also purchased and developed his own Hacienda los Hornos—the Hacienda of the Furnaces, near Parras. An 1835 creditors’ claim would mention wheat being grown there, and there were vineyards too, but it was primarily an industrial enterprise.2 in addition to the hornos or furnaces that gave the hacienda its name, Grant obtained a ten-year concession to manufacture cotton and wool in the three departments of Saltillo, Parras, and Monclova and would be in the process of setting up a cotton mill there in partnership with a daniel Toler when the final crisis broke.3 The whole enterprise was reputedly valued at $105,000 in 1838.4 As if all that were not enough, in 1833 Grant entered into partnership with an Englishman named dr. John Charles Beales to settle eight hundred European families on that part of Coahuila lying between the Rio Grande and Nueces rivers and so create the settlement of dolores, near Presidio del Rio Grande. it was little wonder therefore that he should adopt the Spanish style of don diego Grant or that Linn should remark that “at his home in Coahuila he lived like a lord and entertained like a prince.”5 Grant also formally became a citizen of the state on September 21, 1830.6 Just two years later he was elected to the state legislature of 8 • the secret war for texas Coahuila y Texas, as one of the three deputies for the department of Parras. Notwithstanding the accord patched up at iguala nearly ten years before, Mexico at this time was still bitterly and to a large extent unavoidably divided on ideological lines into two mutually antagonistic factions, distinguished as the Federalistas and Centralistas. The former were regarded as liberals, were largely anticlerical, and were conspicuously keen to take a progressive approach to trade and industry. The Centralistas, on the other hand, not only stood in opposition to these tenets but were sometimes accused of being the “Spanish” party and in favor of a return to rule from Madrid. Fundamentally though, the two parties were probably not very far apart on most issues, save for the allimportant one of the states’ rights enshrined in the Constitution of 1824. Mexico was a huge country of many contrasts, comparatively thinly populated , and uncertainly held together by an extremely ramshackle infrastructure . unsurprisingly, federalist sentiment was strongest far away from Mexico City in the outlying states, which through circumstances as much as politics became accustomed to a considerable degree of autonomy. The ultraconservative Centralistas, in contrast, believed with Mexico in 1835. Revolution • 9 some reason that only a strong central government, underpinned by an equally powerful Catholic Church, could hold the republic together by preventing those states from breaking away. in January 1833, Major General Antonio López de Santa Anna became president of the republic on a federalist ticket, but he promptly and prudently retired to his hacienda, leaving his deputy, Valentín Gómez Farias, in charge of the government. Farias equally promptly but far less prudently embarked on a wide-ranging program of liberal reform, which, as so often happens, succeeded in alienating both the Church and the landed gentry or hacendados, while failing to deliver any tangible benefits to the poor. Both his credibility and his popularity plummeted, and in April 1834, Santa Anna walked back into office, sacked Farias, and soon afterward invoked the emergency powers in the constitution to rule by decree. Some time later he justified his actions by declaring that Mexico was not yet ready for democracy: “A hundred years to come,” he remarked to his Texian captors after the Battle of San Jacinto, “my people will not be fit for liberty. A despotism is the proper government...