The Army of New Spain and the Wars of Independence, 1790-1821

ROM its inception in the 1760s, the army of New Spain failed to meet the expectations of viceroys, senior military officers, and those it was supposed to protect from foreign invasions, civil unrest, and frontier incursions. Although in 1807 and 1808 Viceroy Jose de Iturrigaray could assemble a cantonment of some 16,000 militiamen and regular soldiers to meet a British assault that did not materialize, were almost no troops available in September 1810 to put down the insurrection led by Padre Miguel Hidalgo. The army appeared to have vanished; officers watched spellbound as the enemy hordes grew and the existing command system collapsed. Rather than marching to raise the siege of Guanajuato, commanders such as Felix Maria Calleja and Manuel de Flon (Conde de la Cadena) wrote letters begging the defenders of the Alhondiga to hold out. In the meantime, the royalist officers fretted and vacillated, paralyzed by fears that New Spain was collapsing about them. At Queretaro, Flon saw the population as spies for Allende and he informed Viceroy Javier de Venegas that there is not an Indian or creole who does not join the insurgents when they go to attack some town.2 His garrison troops from Guanajuato, Celaya, San Miguel, and other

Economic history · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Statistics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Mathematics

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  Open Access•Rodrigo Moreno Gutiérrez•Historia Mexicana•2017

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