ver Mexico, causing confusion
in the minds of the colonists, which culminated in the conspiracies of
Queretero and Hidalgo's cry, and the proclamation of Independence on
September 15, 1810. Under Hidalgo an insurgent band seized various
places in the central part of the country, including the great
silver-producing town and mines of Guanajuato, where, unfortunately,
these first exponents of liberty committed serious excesses. Thence,
taking the capital of the State of Michoacan--Morelia--they advanced
upon the city of Mexico. They engaged and defeated the royalist forces
which had been sent against them by the viceroy Venegas, who had
succeeded the _Audiencia_ and the deported Iturrigaray, at Monte de las
Cruces, some twenty miles from the capital, after a well-contested
battle. To the generalship of Allende was mainly due this great
victory, and had Hidalgo followed it up by an attack upon the capital
city, subsequent operations might have been favourable to the
insurgents. As it was, the royalists under Calleja attacked and
captured Guanajuato, taking a terrible revenge upon its
people--ruthless cruelties such as, perpetrated by both sides in these
struggles, have repeatedly written the history of Mexico's revolution
in blood. Finally Hidalgo and his associates, at Guadalajara and
elsewhere, were after valiant fighting, discomfited entirely; disaster
overtook them, and the warrior-priest, with Allende, Aldama, and
Jimenez--valiant generals all--was shot at Chihuahua in July, 1811.
There, in the small chapel of San Francisco, his decapitated body was
laid, and afterwards removed to Mexico.

Was the spark of liberty extinguished by these reverses? The answer was
furnished by yet another militant ecclesiastic--the famous Morelos of
Michoacan. Stoutly did he and his insurgents maintain the city of
Cuantla against the royalist forces under Calleja, until famine
compelled them to evacuate the place under cover of darkness. The
defence of Cuantla has covered the name of Morelos with glory in his
country's history, and at the time it was watched even from Europe with
interest, by the eagle eye of the great Wellington. This remarkable
soldier-priest captured various important places--Orizaba, Oaxaca, and
Acapulco, and established the first Mexican Congress at the town of
Chilpancingo, in the State of Guerrero, in September, 1813. But the
star of Mexico's national independence had yet to reach its zenith.
Disaster overtook the