rement at his estate of _Manga de
Clavo_ since the murder of his friend, President Guerrero. This fourth
insurrection was prosecuted with varying success for several months,
but was finally terminated by the capitulation of Bustamente at Puebla,
and the recalling of Pedraza from banishment in the United States, to
serve out the few months that remained of his term of office as
President.
In 1832 Santa Anna was elected successor to Pedraza as President of the
Federal Republic of Mexico. Texas had now of right the option of
returning into the family of Mexican States, or of maintaining her
separate existence; but she was under no obligation to return, for, the
confederacy having been once broken up, it was optional with the only
member that had not submitted to the usurper to re-enter this
unreliable family, or to continue outside. This election was not long
open; for, by the _pronunciamiento_ of Toluca (1835), the Federal
Constitution was again abolished, and Santa Anna became dictator in
fact, if not in name. The clergy were at the bottom of this last
revolution, and they demanded, as the price of their support, the
extirpation of heresy from the territory of the Republic. This meant
the indiscriminate slaughter of all Texans. Santa Anna, who, in all his
previous wars, had never shown a disposition to be cruel to the
vanquished, was so dazzled with the prospects before him as to be
willing to make the slaughter of the Alamo and of Fannin's division an
offering to a priesthood who were plotting for the restoration of the
Inquisition. The battle of San Jacinto was, in its consequences, more
disastrous to the designs of the ecclesiastical party than even to
Santa Anna himself.
MEXICAN VIEW OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS.
Let me stop in my narrative of events to translate a Mexican's eloquent
denunciation of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is from the pen of General
Tornel, a most uncompromising enemy of that race and of its religion.
Thus he opens his account of the Texan difficulty:
"In order to understand what we to-day (1852) are, and what we to-day
value, it is indispensable to discover, and to perpetuate the history
of one of the greatest scandals of the age--all of its antecedents, all
of its consequences, all that can aid in coming to knowledge of this
greatest act of injustice of which the Mexican nation has been the
victim.
"Those who cross the sea change their skies, but not their nature. The
Anglo-Saxons abandoned t
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