Mexicans

The insurgency lasted eleven years, from the cry at Dolores in September 1810 to the entry of the Army of the Three Guarantees into Mexico City in September 1821, and it killed a large part of the population of the richest colony in the Spanish world. It never held the capital for more than a few weeks and never won a decisive battle. Its first two leaders were both priests, both excommunicated, both captured and shot. Its third settlement was negotiated by a royalist general who had spent a decade hunting its soldiers. Independence, when it came, came as a compromise between the men who had rebelled and the men who had put the rebellion down, and the compromise — a Catholic monarchy with a Bourbon on the throne — collapsed within two years.

None of that makes it a failure. The war destroyed the colonial state, ended the legal distinction between Indians and Spaniards, abolished the tribute that had sustained the viceroyalty, and left behind an army, a debt and a set of political arguments that ran through Mexican politics for the next half-century. It also began the breakup of the Spanish Empire in America: New Spain was the largest and richest of the American kingdoms, and when it went, the rest followed within a decade.

At a glance

Why did the collapse of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 make New Spain ungovernable?

The war began in Spain, not in Mexico. In March 1808 a riot at Aranjuez forced Charles IV to abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand VII; in May, at Bayonne, Napoleon obliged both of them to give up the throne and installed his brother Joseph as king of Spain. What was left of Spanish legitimacy was a set of provincial juntas ruling in Ferdinand's name, and after September 1808 a Supreme Central Junta at Seville. The monarchy had no king, and every corporation in the Indies had to decide where authority now resided.

In Mexico City the answer was contested within weeks. The viceroy, José de Iturrigaray, listened to the creole members of the city council, who argued that with the king captive sovereignty had reverted to the kingdom: New Spain should summon a congress of its own cities and govern in Ferdinand's name until he returned. The proposal was conservative in form — it swore loyalty to the Bourbon — and revolutionary in effect, because it located sovereignty in New Spain rather than in Spain. The audiencia, the archbishop and the peninsular merchants would have none of it. Before dawn on 15 September 1808 a body of armed peninsulars led by a merchant, Gabriel de Yermo, entered the viceregal palace, arrested Iturrigaray and his family, and installed an elderly soldier, Pedro de Garibay, in his place. The leaders of the city council were jailed; one of them, Francisco Primo de Verdad, died in prison. It is one of the accidents of Mexican history that the coup which foreclosed constitutional autonomy was mounted on the same day of the year as the rising that began the war two years later.

The lesson drawn from 1808 was that legal argument would not be allowed to work. Conspiracies followed in Valladolid in 1809, where a group of officers and priests planned a junta on the pattern of the Spanish ones, and in Querétaro in 1810. Both were penetrated and broken up. Meanwhile the colony was hit by the European war: trade with Spain was cut, the mining districts ran short of mercury, the crown's fiscal demands increased, and the harvest failures of 1808–10 sent maize prices up in the Bajío. The men who met in Querétaro were not starving, but the countryside around them was, and the distinction mattered: the conspiracy was organised by a lawyer, a priest and a group of militia officers, and it was carried forward by people with much less to lose.

The wider Spanish world was doing the same thing at the same time. In Caracas a junta took power in April 1810, in Buenos Aires in May, in Bogotá in July, in Quito in August, and in Santiago in September. Only in New Spain did the first attempt at autonomy end in a coup, and only in New Spain did the viceroyalty survive the first decade of the crisis intact — a fact that made the Mexican war longer and bloodier than the South American wars, because there was no early collapse of royal authority to inherit.

What did the conspirators of Querétaro intend?

The Querétaro group met in the house of the town's chief magistrate, or corregidor, José Miguel Domínguez, under cover of a literary academy. Its members were a cross-section of provincial notability: Domínguez and his wife Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez; the militia captains Ignacio Allende and Mariano Abasolo; Juan Aldama; the priest of Dolores, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla; a handful of lawyers, clerks and small merchants. Allende, a professional soldier of the Queen's dragoons, was the organiser; Hidalgo, who had been rector of the college at Valladolid and was known across the Bajío, was the man who could bring a crowd.

Their programme, as far as it can be recovered, was moderate. They meant to depose the peninsular officials, summon a congress, and govern in the name of Ferdinand VII — the same position the Mexico City council had taken in 1808, now to be enforced by militia rather than argued in a chamber. What turned this into a social revolution was not the plan but the army that carried it: when Hidalgo called out the parish, he got the labourers, miners, muleteers and sharecroppers of the Bajío, and their grievances were about land, tithes, tribute and grain prices, not about the constitution of the monarchy.

The date fixed for the rising is one of the small unresolved questions of the war. Mexican accounts usually give 1 or 2 October 1810, with the conspirators to assemble at San Juan de los Lagos; the United States Library of Congress country study says 8 December 1810. No document settles it, and the discrepancy probably reflects a plan that was postponed at least once. What is not in doubt is that the plan was betrayed. A postal clerk, José Mariano Galván, denounced it on 12 September; a captain, Joaquín Arias, gave himself up on the 13th; and the magistrate was ordered to search the house of the brothers Epigmenio and Emeterio González, where pikes, swords and ammunition were found. Domínguez was arrested with his wife. From her confinement Josefa Ortiz managed to send the jailer, Ignacio Pérez, riding through the night to San Miguel el Grande, where he warned Aldama, who rode on to Dolores and arrived before dawn on the 16th.

Hidalgo had perhaps a few hours to decide. He decided to raise the town rather than run, and in doing so he changed the character of the movement: a coup planned by officers had become an insurrection of the parish.

What happened at Dolores on 16 September 1810?

On the morning of Sunday 16 September 1810, the parish priest of Dolores called the people together in the churchyard and told them that the government in Mexico City had betrayed them and that the time had come to take up arms. He had with him Allende and Aldama, some hundreds of parishioners and a handful of armed men; the night before, a group had been sent to the local jail to release the prisoners. Then the crowd moved, first to the shrine at Atotonilco, where Hidalgo took down the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and fixed it to a lance as the standard of the revolt, and then south-east towards San Miguel and Celaya.

What he actually said is unknown, and the uncertainty is not a small antiquarian point: it is the reason the event can be claimed by so many different Mexicos. No participant wrote an account in the first hours, and the earliest versions disagree with one another. Manuel Abad y Queipo, the bishop-elect of Michoacán who excommunicated him eight days later, reported in the Gazeta Extraordinaria of 28 September that the banner carried the words "Long live our most holy Mother of Guadalupe, long live Ferdinand VII, long live America, and death to bad government" — a loyalist formula with no independence in it at all. Diego de Bringas, in the same year, has "Long live America, long live Ferdinand VII, long live religion, and death to the gachupines". An anonymous account collected by the twentieth-century historian Ernesto Lemoine Villicaña has a longer, more religious text. Juan Aldama in 1811 remembered only "Long live America, long live religion, and death to bad government". Servando Teresa de Mier in 1813 kept it to "Long live Ferdinand VII and the Virgin of Guadalupe". Lucas Alamán, writing in 1840, produced the version that became canonical — religion, Guadalupe, Ferdinand, America, death to bad government — and Julio Zárate in 1884 added "Long live independence" and "death to the gachupines".

The one point on which the earliest accounts agree is the Guadalupe banner, and even that has a political history: Abad y Queipo called its use a sacrilege, and the insurgents made it the sign by which villages recognised each other. Two other details of the traditional story are doubtful. The hour was about eight in the morning, not midnight, since the bell had to be rung for Sunday mass in any case; and no contemporary source mentions a bell at all. The story of the Grito is a nineteenth-century construction that hardened into liturgy, and it is now re-enacted every year at eleven o'clock on the night of 15 September by the president of the republic, on a balcony, with the bell of Dolores — which was moved to the National Palace — rung above him.

What is not in doubt is what the sermon did. Within a week Hidalgo had several thousand men; by the time he reached Celaya on 21 September he was proclaimed captain general; on 28 September his army stormed the Alhóndiga de Granaditas at Guanajuato, where the peninsular and creole elite of the city had taken refuge with the intendant, Juan Antonio Riaño, an old friend of Hidalgo's. The defenders held for a day; the gate was set on fire and the survivors were killed — several hundred of them, by the usual count, though the number is a guess. Riaño was among the dead. That massacre, more than any decree, decided the war: it convinced the creole elite that independence meant the end of their world, and it gave the royalists an argument they used for a decade.

Why did the march on Mexico City stop at the Monte de las Cruces?

From Guanajuato the insurgents went south-west to Valladolid, which surrendered on 17 October 1810, and then east along the road to the capital. On 30 October, at the Monte de las Cruces in the pine woods above the valley of Toluca, Hidalgo's advance guard met a royalist detachment under Torcuato Trujillo and drove it back after a hard fight. The road to Mexico City was open. The viceroy, Francisco Javier Venegas, had a few thousand regular troops and a city of perhaps 150,000 people, most of them poor, many of them Indian or casta, and the capital was in something close to panic.

Hidalgo turned back. He gave the order on 31 October or 1 November, marched his army north-west towards Querétaro and Guadalajara, and lost most of it on the way: at Aculco on 7 November Calleja caught the rear of the column and broke it, and by the time Hidalgo reached Guadalajara on 26 November he had perhaps 7,000 men where he had had tens of thousands. The figures given for the army at Las Cruces — 80,000, sometimes 100,000 — come from participants and are almost certainly inflated, but the disparity in numbers was real.

Why he turned is the most argued question in the military history of the war, and the sources do not settle it. Allende wanted to attack; Hidalgo overruled him. The explanations on offer are that his army had been badly mauled at Las Cruces and was melting away; that he doubted whether untrained men with machetes could take a defended city; that he feared a general massacre of the peninsular population, which would have destroyed any hope of a negotiated settlement and united every propertied man in the colony against him; and that he had begun to lose his nerve. The last is the least useful, since it explains nothing. What can be said is that the decision was defensible on military grounds and disastrous on political ones: it threw away the one moment at which the insurgency could have delivered a blow that the viceroyalty might not have survived.

The retreat also exposed the character of the movement. Hidalgo's army was not an army. It was a migration of villages with their families, carts and animals, without supply, pay or officers, and it lived off the country. Where it passed, it took grain, horses and money, and where it met resistance it killed. Allende, a soldier, was appalled; Hidalgo, who understood what hunger does, was not. The two men argued openly, and the quarrel between the professional and the priest ran through the war.

How did the first insurgency end?

At Guadalajara, Hidalgo did the thing for which he is remembered politically. On 29 November and again in early December 1810 he issued a series of decrees abolishing slavery — with a ten-day deadline for owners to free their slaves, on pain of death — ending the tribute paid by Indians and the legal category of casta, cutting the sales tax, and abolishing the stamped paper on which legal business had to be written. He founded a newspaper, the Despertador Americano, and sent an envoy to the United States to ask for help. The decrees were the first social programme of the Mexican state, and they were issued by a general in retreat who could not enforce them outside the city he was about to lose.

The date of the abolition decree is usually given as 6 December 1810, but the surviving printings are inconsistent: the National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico (INEHRM) publishes the whole set of Guadalajara decrees under 29 November, while the National Human Rights Commission dates the slavery clause to 6 December. Both print the same words. The likeliest explanation is that the decrees were drafted together and promulgated over several days, and that the anti-slavery article, the one that mattered, was reissued and dated separately.

Calleja retook Guanajuato in November and Guadalajara in January. Hidalgo and Allende turned to meet him at the Puente de Calderón outside the city on 17 January 1811, with perhaps 80,000 men and 95 guns against 6,000 disciplined soldiers. The insurgents were close to winning when a royalist shell set fire to one of their ammunition wagons; the explosion broke the line, and the army disintegrated. At the hacienda of Pabellón on 25 January the surviving officers stripped Hidalgo of military command and gave it to Allende, keeping the priest as a figurehead. The remnant marched north towards Saltillo and the American border, hoping to reach Louisiana.

They never got there. On 21 March 1811, at the wells of Baján in Coahuila, a royalist officer named Ignacio Elizondo — who had joined the march in order to betray it — arrested Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama, Mariano Jiménez and about sixty others as they came through in separate parties. They were taken to Chihuahua, tried by a military court and, in the case of the priests, degraded from the priesthood first. Hidalgo was defrocked and handed to the civil authority on 27 July; he was shot at dawn on 30 July 1811. He was 58. Allende, Aldama and Jiménez had been shot a month earlier. The four heads were cut off and hung in iron cages on the four corners of the Alhóndiga at Guanajuato, where they stayed for ten years, until 1821.

The country study of Mexico published by the Library of Congress gives the date of the execution as 31 July and the place of the capture as Monclova. Both are wrong, and both are widely repeated: the execution was on the 30th, and the arrest was made at the wells of Baján, some distance from Monclova, which was merely the nearest town of any size.

What did Morelos build in the south?

The man who inherited the war was a 45-year-old parish priest from Carácuaro named José María Morelos y Pavón, who had studied under Hidalgo at the college of San Nicolás in Valladolid, worked as a muleteer before he took orders, and met his old rector at Indaparapeo in October 1810. Hidalgo told him to raise the south and take Acapulco, the port through which the Manila galleon's silver passed. Morelos did both, and did them with an organisation that the first insurgency had never had.

His advantages were local knowledge, an eye for ground and an ability to make allies of the villages and the creole officers who joined him. He recruited Mariano Matamoros, a priest from Jantetelco, and Hermenegildo Galeana, a landowner from the Costa Grande, and with them built a small army with artillery, a foundry, a mint and a hospital service. Between 1811 and 1813 he took Chilpancingo, Tixtla, Orizaba, Oaxaca and Acapulco, and he fought off the siege that made his reputation: at Cuautla, from 19 February to 2 May 1812, Calleja's army surrounded a town holding a garrison and a civilian population, cut off its water, and bombarded it for weeks. Morelos held out until the rains came, then broke out through the royalist lines on the night of 2 May. The siege is conventionally given as 72 days; the dates give 73 by inclusive count, and no two accounts agree on the casualties, which were terrible on both sides.

The political side of the war now caught up with the military. A junta at Zitácuaro had claimed national authority in August 1811 under Ignacio López Rayón, and had issued a set of constitutional "elements"; Morelos, who had his own view of who should govern, convoked a congress of the provinces instead. It opened at Chilpancingo on 14 September 1813, with the delegates taking the name Congress of Anáhuac. Morelos read — or had his secretary read — a document of 23 points that he called the Sentimientos de la Nación. It declared that America was free and independent of Spain and of every other nation; that the Catholic religion was the only one to be tolerated; that sovereignty came immediately from the people; that the powers must be divided; that offices were for Americans only; that the law should moderate "opulence and indigence" and raise the wage of the poor; that slavery and the distinction of castes were abolished for ever, so that "only vice and virtue" distinguished one American from another; that torture must go; and that 12 December, the feast of Guadalupe, should be a national holiday.

On 6 November 1813 the congress declared independence in the Acta Solemne de la Declaración de la Independencia de la América Septentrional. The document is the formal birth of the Mexican nation, and it is worth noticing what it did not do: it did not abolish the monarchy in favour of a republic in so many words, it did not settle the boundaries of the country it claimed, and it did not create a government. That was left to a constitution, which took a year and was written while the congress was retreating.

What did the constitution of Apatzingán try to do?

The Decreto Constitucional para la Libertad de la América Mejicana was signed at Apatzingán, in the hot country south of Valladolid, on 22 October 1814 and published two days later. It is a remarkable document: 242 articles, drafted by a congress in flight, in territory that the royalists were retaking, by men who had reason to think they would be shot. Its first article establishes the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion as the only one that may be professed in the state. Its second defines sovereignty as the faculty of making laws and settling the form of government, and its fifth locates that sovereignty originally in the people, exercised through a national representation of deputies. Article 9 is a direct answer to the conquest: no nation has the right to prevent another from the free use of its sovereignty, and "the title of conquest cannot legitimise acts of force". Article 13 makes citizens of everyone born in America, without property or racial qualification — a wider franchise than the Spanish monarchy's constitution of 1812 allowed, since that text had left the descendants of Africans in a legal antechamber. Articles 19 and 24 make the law equal for all and place equality, security, property and liberty at the centre of the political order; article 30 presumes every citizen innocent; article 32 makes the house inviolable.

The machinery was a compromise that satisfied nobody. The legislature was a Supreme Congress; the executive was a committee of three men of equal authority, rotating the presidency every four months and replacing one member a year; the judiciary was a Supreme Tribunal, with a fourth body, a Tribunal of Residence, to try officials after they left office. There was no president and no single commander — a deliberate refusal of the military dictatorship that the war was making inevitable, and a direct rebuff to Morelos, who had wanted a strong executive and had been offered, and refused, the titles of generalissimo and "Highness", asking instead to be called Siervo de la Nación, servant of the nation.

Two absences matter. The constitution says nothing about slavery: the abolition had been proclaimed in the Sentimientos and by Hidalgo's decrees, but it did not make it into the fundamental law, and the omission was not made good until 1829. And it says nothing about the Indians as a separate legal class: by making all the native-born citizens it dissolved the "republic of the Indians" that had organised indigenous life since the sixteenth century, along with its communal lands and its own courts. That was equality of a kind, and it was also, in practice, the legal ground on which liberal governments after 1821 would attack corporate indigenous property.

The constitution never governed anything. The congress was moving from town to town; the royalists were closing in; and within a year its author was dead.

How did the royalists win back New Spain?

The recovery was the work of one man and one method. Félix María Calleja, a career officer from Medina del Campo who had fought in the Bajío before the war and knew its roads, became viceroy in March 1813 and fought the insurgency as a punitive campaign. His columns moved fast, held the towns, and shot prisoners; his orders, as the Mexican historian Gustavo Pérez Rodríguez puts it, were to shoot those who fell into their hands. He also had troops: with the end of the Napoleonic war in Europe, expeditionary battalions that had been fighting in Spain began to arrive in New Spain in 1814–15, better equipped and better led than anything the insurgents could put in the field.

Morelos's army was beaten in detail. At Puruarán in January 1814 he lost Matamoros, his best commander, who was captured and shot; at the end of that year the congress was scattered and the constitution was a piece of paper; in 1815 he was escorting the government east when a royalist column caught him at Temalaca in Puebla on 5 November. He was taken to Mexico City, tried by the Inquisition on 23 charges that mixed treason with his private life, defrocked, and handed to the civil power. He was shot at San Cristóbal Ecatepec, north of the capital, on 22 December 1815, so that his death would not become a public event in the city.

Calleja was recalled in September 1816 and replaced by Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, who reversed the method. Apodaca offered pardons, paid for surrendered officers to keep their rank or their liberty, and set about restoring the appearance of normal government. It worked. Between late 1815 and early 1817 a long list of insurgent leaders took the indulto, among them José María Cos, José Manuel de Herrera and Juan Nepomuceno Rosains; Ramón Rayón surrendered at El Cóporo, Manuel Mier y Terán at the Cerro Colorado, and the fortified island of Mezcala on Lake Chapala was lost. By 1817 the insurgency was reduced to a few bands, of which the most durable was that of Vicente Guerrero in the mountains of the south.

The last attempt to relight the war came from outside. Francisco Xavier Mina was a Navarrese lawyer and guerrilla who had fought the French in Spain, quarrelled with the restored Ferdinand VII, and gone to London, where he met Mexican exiles and sailed with a small expedition that landed on the Tamaulipas coast in April 1817. He took Soto la Marina, marched inland, and for six months fought a brilliant campaign in the Bajío with a few hundred men, winning a series of small actions that frightened the viceroy more than their size warranted. He was taken at the ranch of El Venadito in October and shot as a traitor on 11 November 1817. His reputation was rescued by the republic, which declared him a hero in 1823.

The guerrilla war that remained was small, cruel and local. It was also unwinnable by the royalists in the way that mattered: they could hold every city and still not govern the roads, and the cost of the war — the garrisons, the convoys, the loans — was being paid by a treasury that had been running deficits since 1810.

Why did the Plan of Iguala succeed where the insurgency had failed?

The answer came from Spain again. On 1 January 1820 an expeditionary force assembled at Cádiz to sail for America rose under Colonel Rafael del Riego and demanded the constitution of 1812. The mutiny spread, the king was made to swear to the constitution in March, and Spain entered the three years of liberal government known as the Trienio Liberal. For the creole elite of New Spain this was worse than the insurgency. A liberal Madrid would abolish the clerical privileges (fueros) that guaranteed the church's courts and incomes, dissolve the corporate properties that sustained the religious orders, and might reopen the question of the castas. The viceroyalty, which had just won its war, found itself defending a monarchy whose government had turned radical.

The instrument was a royalist colonel, Agustín de Iturbide, a creole from Valladolid who had fought the insurgents since 1810 — he had been at Calderón — and who had been briefly suspended in 1816 after accusations of corruption and brutality, then reinstated. In November 1820 Apodaca gave him command of the campaign against Guerrero. Iturbide marched south, and instead of fighting he negotiated. The two men met at Acatempan in February 1821, embraced in what became the founding gesture of the new state, and on 24 February Iturbide published at Iguala a plan of 24 articles that turned the insurgency's programme into a settlement the elite could accept.

The Plan of Iguala promised three things, which it called the guarantees: independence, religion, and union. The Mexican nation was to be independent of Spain and of every other nation (article 1); the religion was to be Catholic, and only Catholic (article 2); all inhabitants were to be united "without any distinction between Americans and Europeans" (article 3); the government was to be a constitutional monarchy, with Ferdinand VII invited to the throne and, if he refused, his brothers, and if they refused, whoever the congress chose (articles 4 and 8–9). Article 11 abolished the distinction of castes, made all inhabitants citizens, and opened office to merit. Article 12 created an army to guarantee the three principles, and from that came its name: the Army of the Three Guarantees. Article 19 protected the clergy in their present state; article 20 kept every official, civil and ecclesiastical, in his post.

The plan was a masterpiece of ambiguity. It gave the insurgents independence, the church its privileges, the peninsulars their property and their lives, the creole officers their commands, and the crown a face-saving formula by which a Bourbon might still rule Mexico. What it did not give anyone was a republic, and what it postponed was every question — slavery, the land, the Indians, the form of government — that the war had raised. It worked because it was vague, and because by 1821 the royal army itself was ready to change sides: the officers who had beaten the insurgency for a decade were the men who would now lead the country, and they preferred a Mexico governed by themselves to a Spain governed by liberals.

The collapse was fast. Regiment after regiment pronounced for the plan through the spring and summer of 1821; Oaxaca, Guadalajara, Zacatecas, Valladolid and Veracruz went over; the viceroy was deposed by his own officers in July and replaced by a junta; and the last Spanish authority, General Francisco Novella, held Mexico City with a garrison that was melting away.

What did the Treaty of Córdoba actually settle?

Madrid sent a new political chief, Juan O'Donojú, who arrived at Veracruz on 30 July 1821 to find that the country had already gone. He had no authority to grant independence and no troops to prevent it. He met Iturbide at Córdoba and on 24 August signed a treaty of 17 articles which recognised "this America" as a sovereign and independent nation, to be called the Mexican Empire, with a moderate constitutional monarchy; which invited Ferdinand VII, then his brother Carlos, then the infante Francisco de Paula, then Carlos Luis of Bourbon-Parma, and after them whoever the congress of the empire should designate; which provided for a provisional governing junta and a regency of three; which allowed Spaniards resident in Mexico either to stay as citizens or to leave with their property; and which obliged the peninsular garrison of the capital to evacuate it without bloodshed.

There is a clause in article 3 that mattered more than the rest. The list of Bourbons ends with "the one whom the Cortes of the Empire may designate", and it was on that clause that Iturbide became emperor nine months later. Whether he intended it from the beginning is doubtful and much argued: the Mexican historian Jaime del Arenal Fenochio found in 2006 a letter of 20 November 1820 showing that Iturbide and Guerrero were in correspondence before Iturbide set out against him, which disposes of the older story that he had tried to crush the rebellion, failed, and then changed sides. It does not show that he planned to take the throne.

The Army of the Three Guarantees entered Mexico City on 27 September 1821, Iturbide's thirty-eighth birthday, and on 28 September a junta of notables declared independence and named a regency. That declaration, not the Grito of 1810, is the legal act of Mexican independence, which is why the country's independence day and its independence are dated eleven years apart.

Spain never accepted the treaty. The Cortes repudiated it in February 1822 on the ground that O'Donojú had exceeded his powers, and Ferdinand VII refused to recognise the empire or to allow any Bourbon to accept its throne. The empire did not last either: Iturbide was proclaimed Agustín I in May 1822, quarrelled with the congress he had summoned, and was overthrown by a military pronunciamiento, the Plan de Casa Mata of February 1823, led by his own officers; he abdicated in March. A constituent congress wrote a federal constitution in 1824 and the republic was proclaimed. Iturbide, who had gone into exile, returned in 1824 and was shot. Spain recognised Mexican independence only on 28 December 1836, in the treaty of Santa María–Calatrava, fifteen years after the fact and twelve after the emperor who had won it was dead.

What did the war cost, and who paid?

Nobody counted the dead. The figures in circulation — 250,000 at the low end, 600,000 at the high — are extrapolations from parish registers that were themselves disrupted, and historians who have looked closely at the registers are sceptical of the top of the range. What is certain is that the mortality was concentrated in the places where the war was fought: the Bajío, the mining districts of Guanajuato and Zacatecas, and the south. Epidemic disease travelled with the armies; the harvests of 1810–11 failed; and the civilian population that fled the columns died of hunger and infection in the hills.

The economy was wrecked. Guanajuato's mines were flooded and abandoned in 1810 and did not recover their pre-war output for decades; the insurgents struck their own eight-real pieces at Oaxaca; the silver that had financed the monarchy of the Indies was now pledged in advance to bankers in Mexico City and Veracruz who lent the viceroy the money to fight. Agriculture in the Bajío lost its labour and its draught animals. The peninsulares, who had owned much of the colony's wholesale trade and a large share of its capital, left in 1821 under the terms of the treaty, taking what they could; the new state inherited an empty treasury, a standing army it could not pay, and a debt contracted to fight the war it had just won.

The social cost was borne by the people who had made the insurgency possible and who gained least from its settlement. The abolition of tribute and of the legal categories of caste was real, and it was the war's most durable achievement. But the land did not change hands; the haciendas that had been damaged were rebuilt by their owners; and the villages that had supplied Hidalgo's and Morelos's armies found themselves, after 1821, citizens of a state that taxed them as individuals and no longer recognised their communal titles. The political cost was a militarised public life: the army that won independence was never dissolved, and the pronunciamiento that overthrew Iturbide in 1823 became the standard instrument of Mexican politics for the next thirty years.

How has the independence been argued over ever since?

The first argument was about the date. 16 September, the day of the Grito, and 27 September, when the army entered the capital, were both observed in the first years of independence, and the choice between them was a choice between the priest who began the war and the general who ended it. Mexico settled on the priest: 16 September was proclaimed a national feast in 1825, and the centenaries of 1910 and 2010 were built around Hidalgo. The choice carries a meaning. To celebrate 16 September is to celebrate the beginning of a popular revolt, and to make Hidalgo — a priest who was excommunicated, who lost every battle he fought, and who was shot as a rebel — the father of the country. To celebrate 27 September is to celebrate the achievement of independence by the men who governed afterwards. Mexico chose the priest and, in 1910 and again in 2010, built its centenaries around him.

The second argument is about what kind of event the war was. One reading, which became orthodoxy in the second half of the twentieth century, treats 1808–21 as a single crisis of the Spanish monarchy: the American kingdoms did not rebel against a king but refused to accept a usurper, then discovered that they could govern themselves, then found that Spain would not let them. In that reading the insurgency of Hidalgo and Morelos is a violent episode inside a constitutional process that ran from the juntas of 1808 through the constitution of Cádiz to the negotiated independence of 1821. A second reading, which has been stronger since the 1980s, insists that the war was a social revolution: that the Bajío rose against the hacienda and the tithe, that the villages fought for their land and their saints, and that the creole elite who eventually took power did so in order to stop the revolution rather than to complete it. The evidence supports both, in different places: the Querétaro conspiracy was a creole affair, and the army that marched from Dolores was not.

The third argument is about whether independence changed anything. The constitution of Apatzingán had promised equality, the abolition of caste, the end of tribute and the raising of the poor. The settlement of 1821 promised independence, religion and union, and left the rest to a congress that spent the next thirty years arguing. What the war certainly did was destroy the colonial state beyond repair and create the political nation — the patria — that the insurgents had named before they had a country. Whether that nation kept faith with the people who fought for it is the question Mexican politics has been arguing about since.

Common myths about the Mexicans

Timeline of the Mexicans

What the map shows next

The polygon under this label belongs to the guerrilla middle of the war, not to its beginning or its end. At 1812 on the map the picture is still that of a movement with armies in the field: Morelos holds the south from Cuautla to Oaxaca, and the royalists hold the cities of the Bajío. At 1817 on the map almost nothing of that remains except bands in the hills — the year Mina landed in Tamaulipas and was shot, and the year Vicente Guerrero kept a small war alive in the mountains of the south. At 1819 on the map the map shows the stalemate that made the settlement of 1821 possible: a royal government that could garrison the country but not pay for it, and an insurgency too weak to win and too rooted to be destroyed.

For what came after, the empire of 1822–23 and the federal republic of 1824 are separate entries; the United Provinces of Central America follow the same crisis in the neighbouring captaincy general, and Gran Colombia shows what happened where royal authority collapsed a decade earlier.