The Province That Refused Three Capitals

On November 5, 1811, a group of conspirators in San Salvador, capital of an intendancy of the Kingdom of Guatemala, took possession of about three thousand muskets and more than two hundred thousand pesos from the royal treasury. Among the leaders were José Matías Delgado, a curate of the town, and the brothers Nicolás, Manuel, and Vicente Aguilar, together with Juan Manuel Rodríguez and Manuel José Arce. The intendant, Antonio Gutiérrez y Ulloa, and other royal officials were removed from their posts. The towns of Metapán, Zacatecoluca, Usulután, and Chalatenango supported the movement, but San Miguel, Santa Ana, San Vicente, and Sonsonate reaffirmed their loyalty to Spain, and the promoters soon abandoned the effort. When two envoys of the captain general, Colonel José de Aycinena and José María Peinado, reached San Salvador on December 3 with full powers, they announced a general amnesty.^[1]

Historians have long debated what the men of 1811 intended, and the question is not easily answered, since the revolt occurred in a monarchy whose king was a prisoner and whose subjects were arguing over who should govern in his place. Whatever its aims, it opened a contest between San Salvador and Guatemala City that lasted until 1822. In that year the same province, with Arce again among its commanders, refused to accept the decision of the capital to join the Mexican Empire, and it prepared to fight rather than submit.

This is the story of those twelve years. It follows the Kingdom of Guatemala from the constitutional experiments of the Cortes of Cádiz, through three failed conspiracies and a long period of absolutist quiet, to the declaration of independence in 1821 and the quarrel over union with Mexico. The central problem changed as the years passed. At first the question was who should govern in the absence of the king. Later it became whether a province could be bound by decisions made in the capital, and by 1822 it was whether the newly independent provinces would stay together at all, and on whose terms.

A Kingdom Divided Against Itself

The Captaincy General of Guatemala, known to its inhabitants as the Kingdom of Guatemala, covered an enormous territory. It reached from Chiapas in the north to Costa Rica in the south and held a population of roughly one million people, scattered across mountains, volcanic highlands, and coastal plains with few large towns.^[2] Its government sat in Guatemala City, where the captain general and the Audiencia, the kingdom's highest royal court, presided over the provinces that would later become Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, along with Chiapas.

The capital held a good deal of the kingdom's wealth, and it guarded its position. A small circle of merchant families controlled much of the credit and trade on which the outlying provinces relied. San Salvador depended on that arrangement more than most, for its economy rested on indigo, the blue dye that European textile makers bought in large quantities, and its planters resented the Guatemalan merchants who handled so much of the trade.^[3] The kingdom's administration had also been reorganized in the late eighteenth century, when the crown introduced intendancies, provincial districts headed by an intendant who answered to the captain general. San Salvador was one of these districts. The arrangement gave the province its own officials and a distinct identity as an administrative unit, but it left the province dependent on Guatemala City in matters of justice, church affairs, and trade. That combination of provincial identity and continuing dependence is the background to nearly everything that follows.

None of this amounted to disloyalty to Spain. Creoles, as the American-born Spaniards were called, resented officials sent from outside and the commercial privileges of the capital, but they expressed those complaints within the framework of the Spanish monarchy. The distinction mattered, because when the monarchy itself collapsed in 1808, the grievances already in place supplied the material for a new kind of argument, one about who had the right to exercise authority when no legitimate king sat on the throne.

Cádiz and the Opening of a Constitutional World

The crisis began in Spain. In 1808 Napoleon's armies invaded the peninsula, forced the abdication of Ferdinand VII, and placed Napoleon's brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic refused to accept the change, and local juntas sprang up to govern in the captive king's name. On January 22, 1809, the Supreme Central Junta declared the American possessions to be integral parts of the monarchy and ordered Guatemala, like the other kingdoms of the Americas, to choose a deputy. The kingdom chose a militia colonel, Manuel José Pavón y Muñoz, as its deputy on March 3, 1810, and two substitutes, the post-captain Andrés del Llano and Colonel Manuel del Llano, represented it when the Cortes opened.^[4]

That assembly met on September 24, 1810, in Cádiz, the last major Spanish port still outside French control. Meeting in the king's absence, the Cortes assumed legislative authority and undertook the drafting of a constitution. American deputies took part, though on unequal terms, since the substitutes were Americans who happened to be living in Spain and had not been chosen at home. On August 1, 1811, the American deputies presented a memorial that rejected the charge that advocates of American self-government were sympathizers of Napoleon, and that listed their grievances against the old system.^[4] Not every question was decided in their favor. When the Cortes debated who should count as a citizen, Antonio de Larrazábal, an elected deputy from Guatemala, asserted the incapacity of the black man and urged, in Bancroft's words, that persons of African blood be conceded only the privilege of voting. Bancroft thought him moved partly by his own judgment and partly by an opinion the merchants' consulado had expressed in 1810, and notes that a Peruvian deputy seconded the motion. The same Larrazábal defended American rights elsewhere in the Cortes and was imprisoned for it when Ferdinand returned. The proposal was defeated, but the article as passed provided only that full political rights might be granted to such men by special acts of the Cortes.^[5] The first article declared the Spanish nation to be "la reunión de todos los españoles de ambos hemisferios," the union of all Spaniards of both hemispheres, and the eighteenth article extended citizenship to those who traced their origin on both lines to the Spanish dominions in both. Article 22 withheld citizenship from those of African origin, leaving open a path by which individuals might earn it.^[6]

The constitution was promulgated in March 1812 and reached Guatemala City on September 10 of that year. It was proclaimed there on September 24 and sworn on November 3. By then a new captain general governed the kingdom. José Bustamante y Guerra, a former naval officer and governor of Montevideo, had succeeded Antonio González Saravia in March 1811, and he ruled strictly. According to Bancroft, he postponed for three months the installation of the first provincial deputation, a body of locally chosen men that the constitution provided for, withheld the customary mass, and prevented the publication of its acts. He remained in office until March 1818.^[7] The reforms that Cádiz promised thus arrived in the kingdom under an official who distrusted them.

Miguel Hidalgo had called his parishioners to arms at Dolores on September 16, 1810, only days before the Cortes assembled, and New Spain was soon in open insurrection. The Kingdom of Guatemala produced no comparable uprising in 1810. Its political class, for the moment, pursued a voice within the empire rather than a break from it, and the next test of that strategy came in San Salvador.

San Salvador Rises, and Rises Again

The uprising grew out of local quarrels at least as much as imperial ones. What the conspirators took that day was not symbolic. The muskets and the treasury money were the means to defend a government of their own, and removing Gutiérrez y Ulloa left them the administration of the intendancy. Bancroft names Delgado and Nicolás Aguilar among the leaders and also lists Manuel and Vicente Aguilar, Rodríguez, and Arce.^[8]

The movement did not carry the province with it. Four towns declared for San Salvador and four declared for Spain, and with the province split the captain general in Guatemala City chose conciliation over force. The amnesty his envoys carried ended the revolt twenty-eight days after it began, and Peinado stayed on as acting intendant.^[8] The rebels had arms and money, but they had not won the province, and the amnesty gave them a way to stop.

A second attempt at revolution followed in San Salvador in 1814. Bancroft describes it as less effectively planned than the uprising of 1811. The authorities suppressed it, arrested its promoters, and imprisoned Manuel José Arce for several years. Marure's account is just as brief. A footnote about his own father, Mateo Antonio Marure, quotes an order from Bustamante dated January 12, 1814, accusing him of trying to rekindle the fire of insurrection in San Salvador.^[9] Neither author says where the plotters met or how many were taken.

It would be a mistake to read these two revolts as an unfinished version of the independence that came in 1821. Their leaders were creoles of the Spanish monarchy, and their demands concerned San Salvador's standing relative to Guatemala City at least as much as the relationship between Spain and its American subjects. The historian Aaron Pollack has argued that the years 1811 to 1814 are better understood as the start of a broader period of political mobilization in Central America, driven by economic hardship, the weakening of central authority, and the new constitutional politics, and not as a rehearsal for a nation that did not yet exist.^[10] What the uprisings did establish was a group of leaders, Delgado and Arce above all, and a willingness in San Salvador to answer disappointment with arms.

The Long Quiet

Ferdinand VII returned to his throne in 1814 and repaid the Cortes that had kept his cause alive by abolishing the constitution it had written. The king annulled the constitution and dissolved the Cortes by a decree of May 1814, and absolutist government resumed across the empire. In the Kingdom of Guatemala the political space that Cádiz had opened narrowed again.

Opposition had not waited for the restoration. In Guatemala City a group of creoles had begun to meet at the convent of Belén, and the conspiracy takes its name from that place. According to Marure, who wrote within a generation of the events, Fray Juan de la Concepción, the convent's sub-prior, presided over the meetings and Dr. Tomás Ruiz directed the plot; Bancroft gives the friar's name as Ramón and adds that the group met sometimes in the sub-prior's cell and sometimes at the house of Cayetano Bedoya, and that Ruiz was an Indian. Informers led to arrests, and the prosecutor, Antonio del Villar, opened the inquiry in December 1813. José Francisco Barrundia evaded capture and remained in hiding for six years. On September 18, 1814, Villar asked that Ruiz, Víctor Castrillo, Joaquín Yúdice, and Barrundia, who was tried in his absence, be garroted, and that the sub-prior and ten men of humbler rank be hanged. Others were to serve ten years at hard labor in the African possessions of the crown and then to live in permanent exile. Marure says that this severe request was never carried out, and a royal order dated July 28, 1817, led to the release of all the prisoners in 1819.^[11]

What distinguished Central America from Mexico in these years was less the presence of dissent than its scale. New Spain remained in insurgency for most of a decade after Hidalgo's revolt, and the Kingdom of Guatemala after 1814 saw nothing of comparable size. Its political actors, chastened by the failures of 1811, 1813, and 1814, largely waited. For Arce this meant years in prison, and for the creole elite of Guatemala City it meant a return to the cautious balancing of local interest and royal authority that had defined the kingdom before 1808. The grievances of the earlier years were not resolved, only postponed. The waiting ended in 1820, and again the cause lay in Spain.

The Constitution Returns

In January 1820 a Spanish army officer, Rafael del Riego, led a military revolt against the king he served. The army he commanded had been assembled to sail against the rebellious colonies, and its mutiny helped ensure that no such expedition would depart. Ferdinand VII, under pressure, swore on March 9 to support the Constitution of 1812. News of the change reached Central America within weeks and revived the constitutional politics of a decade earlier. Following the restoration of constitutional government, a provincial deputation was installed in Guatemala City on July 13, 1820. Two parties formed in the capital, known by the nicknames bacos and cacos, and the first was led by José Cecilio del Valle. Pedro Molina published a newspaper, El Editor Constitucional.^[12]

Meanwhile the captain general, Carlos Urrutia, was old and in poor health, and he could not control the growing movement for independence. The provincial deputation persuaded him to hand his powers to the sub-inspector of the army, Gabino Gaínza, a career military officer.^[12] By then a second influence was reaching the kingdom, this one from Mexico. In February 1821 Agustín de Iturbide, a royalist officer who had joined the rebels, proclaimed the Plan of Iguala, which called for Mexican independence and for the protection of the Catholic Church and of the existing social order. It promised separation from Spain without the upheaval that had marked Hidalgo's rising, and it appealed to many conservatives. News of the plan spread quickly through Central America. On September 3, 1821, Chiapas, the northernmost province of the kingdom, separated from Spain and accepted the Plan of Iguala.^[13]

September 15, 1821

By the middle of September the pressure on Gaínza to act had become difficult to resist. On September 15, a meeting at the government house in Guatemala City, with Gaínza presiding, adopted the Act of Independence. Marure reports that Valle argued the proclamation should wait until the provinces had been heard, while others, Delgado among them, voted for immediate independence. The act declared the Guatemalans a free and independent people and provided for a national congress to meet on March 1, 1822, with one representative for every fifteen thousand inhabitants. In a significant departure from the Cádiz Constitution, the act also specified that people of African origin were not to be excluded from citizenship when the representatives were chosen. A clause proposed by Valle allowed the last electoral college to choose the members of that congress, and the advocates of immediate independence objected to it. Two days later Gaínza issued a proclamation that treated any attempt to restore Spanish rule as treason punishable by death. He governed with a provisional consultative junta, which set his salary as captain general at ten thousand pesos a year.^[14]

The Act of Independence was less decisive than the date suggests. It declared political separation from Spain, but it left the question of what government should replace Spanish rule to a congress that had not yet been elected, and it left the authority of the old officials largely intact. Independence thus ended one form of authority without creating another, and it did nothing to settle the old complaint of the provinces against Guatemala City. For San Salvador's leaders, who had long resented the capital's hold over the province, the continuity of authority in Guatemala City was not reassuring.

San Salvador made its own declaration. Its ayuntamiento, or town council, declared absolute independence on September 21, and the declaration was solemnly proclaimed on September 29. The acting political chief, Pedro Barrière, first ordered the election of a subordinate junta, then withdrew the order, called out troops to disperse the crowds that had gathered, and arrested the republican leaders Arce, Rodríguez, and Domingo Lara. Delgado came from Guatemala City as a peacemaker with broad powers, freed the prisoners, who joined his party, expelled Barrière from the province, disarmed the troops, and installed a subordinate junta. He remained at the head of the government.^[15] In the same weeks Honduras and Nicaragua made declarations of their own, and the provinces did not all agree on the terms. León declared Nicaragua seceded from Guatemala on October 11, and Granada refused to concur; on October 21 the authorities at León accepted the Plan of Iguala, annexing the province to Mexico. Costa Rica seceded from Spain on October 27 and kept a neutral position, declining the plans of both Guatemala City and León.^[16]

Union with Mexico

Iturbide did not wait for Central America to settle its own affairs. On November 28, 1821, a letter from Iturbide, forwarded through Gaínza, argued that Guatemala was not yet ready to enter the family of nations and should link its fate to that of Mexico. On a suggestion from the marqués de Aycinena, the junta ordered the ayuntamientos of the former kingdom to give their views within a month. The replies were counted on December 31. Twenty-one ayuntamientos held that only the general congress could decide, 104 favored annexation outright, eleven favored it on conditions, thirty-two left the matter to the provisional government, and two rejected it. Sixty-seven ayuntamientos had not been heard from, so the 104 that asked for annexation outright were fewer than half of the 237 that had been consulted. A recent study by the historian Sajid Alfredo Herrera Mena reaches the same tally.^[17] José Cecilio del Valle moved to postpone the decision until those returns arrived, but Gaínza backed annexation, and on January 5, 1822, the junta decreed the annexation of all Central America to Mexico, conditioned only on the Plan of Iguala and the treaties of Córdoba. Four days later Gaínza issued an edict that forbade criticism of the annexation under penalties for sedition.^[18]

The consultation had not produced consensus. Marure, who lived through these events and later compiled a chronology of them, records under January 5 that the junta in Guatemala City declared that most of the kingdom's towns favored union with the Mexican Empire, and that San Salvador and Granada rejected the result and resolved to defend absolute independence by arms.^[19] The Salvadoran towns seceded from the new arrangement, and the province prepared to fight Santa Ana and San Miguel, which had joined Mexico. Delgado, as acting political chief, and the ayuntamientos protested. The command of the Salvadoran forces went to Arce, who was ordered to bring the people of Santa Ana to reason by peaceful means or by force. Elsewhere the Mexican Empire moved to secure its new territory. A division under Brigadier Vicente Filísola had begun to march from Mexico in November 1821, and many of its men deserted along the way. Filísola reached Guatemala with only about six hundred. The provisional junta in Guatemala City dissolved itself on February 21, 1822, and Gaínza kept his posts and created a provincial deputation.^[20]

San Salvador's resistance grew more organized in the spring. On March 30, 1822, Marure notes, the junta of San Salvador resolved to erect the province as a diocese of its own and named Delgado, a priest, as its first bishop. The step was a bold one. San Salvador's church affairs had been directed from Guatemala City, and the junta was now claiming for its own province an authority that the capital had always held. It was a provincial claim and not a canonical appointment, since a bishop required the sanction of the Church's own authorities, and Marure's entry does not suggest that it was given. He adds that the Salvadoran congress confirmed the nomination in 1824 and that the federal congress declared it void in July 1825.^[21]

Open war followed. Arce's advance into territory that Guatemala had occupied gave the capital, in Bancroft's words, a sufficient pretext to declare war on its "high-spirited and troublesome neighbor." Colonel Manuel Arzú was dispatched on March 19, 1822, at the head of a force that within a few days numbered about a thousand men. He then lost more than two months waiting for reinforcements and artillery and hesitating over the protests of the Salvadorans, who used the time to fortify their city, though they were short of arms to equip a sufficient garrison. Pressed at last by Gaínza's positive commands, Arzú marched on, avoided the fortifications, and entered San Salvador on June 3, taking its defenders by surprise. Bancroft says he might have made himself master of the place had he not carelessly allowed his troops to disband for plunder. The Salvadorans rallied, a street fight followed, and Arzú's force was driven from the city with the loss of its arms.^[22] Marure's entry for the same day, which describes the attack by what he calls the Imperial Column, agrees that the column penetrated the plaza and was then repulsed after a long and poorly directed exchange of fire, its men retreating in complete dispersal.^[23] The two accounts agree that the imperial column was defeated, though they differ in the details of the fighting. Late in the year the province set up a congress of its own. It was installed on November 19, 1822, to decide whether San Salvador should remain independent or join the Mexican Empire.^[24]

On December 2, 1822, that provincial congress took a remarkable step. According to Marure, it declared the province united to the United States.^[24] The declaration was a unilateral political act and not an accomplished annexation. The decision showed how far the leaders of San Salvador were prepared to go to avoid being governed from Guatemala City or Mexico City. It came from a province that had an army in the field against it and few friends in the region, and no help from Washington followed.

A Question Left Open

The year 1822 ended without a settlement. Imperial pressure on San Salvador continued, the imperial government in Mexico City was losing the confidence of its own officers, and the congress promised by the Act of Independence had still not met to decide how the region would be governed. Each party could claim a legitimate grievance, and none had the means to impose a lasting solution. Spanish authority was gone, but the question of who had the right to decide a province's fate remained as open as it had been in November 1811, when Delgado, Arce, and their friends took San Salvador's muskets and treasury in the name of an absent king. The Mexican Empire would collapse in the spring of 1823, and on July 1 of that year the provinces of Central America would declare themselves free and independent. Those events, and the campaign that Filísola led against San Salvador in the early months of 1823, belong to the next chapter.

The twelve years before that chapter show how Central America's separation from Spain differed from Mexico's. Mexico's path ran through a decade of insurgency followed by a negotiated settlement. Central America's ran through constitutional experiments, a few small and failed conspiracies, a quiet period under absolutist rule, and a negotiated independence that was followed at once by a dispute over union with Mexico. In that dispute the same questions kept returning in new forms: who governed in the king's absence, how much autonomy a province could claim from its capital, and whether independent provinces would remain together. That last question was not Central America's alone. Simón Bolívar had spent the same twelve years making Gran Colombia out of the northern provinces of South America, and he would spend the years after them watching it come apart.

San Salvador raised those questions more persistently than any other province, and at some cost. Delgado, a curate in 1811 who had stood among the leaders of a short-lived revolt, was a decade later at the head of a government that claimed a bishopric for its province and defied an empire. Arce, who had spent years in prison after the second conspiracy and had been arrested again in September 1821, now commanded Salvadoran troops against Guatemalan and Mexican forces. Neither man could have predicted that path in 1811, and neither saw its end in 1822. The distance between the town that accepted an amnesty in December 1811 and the province that declared itself united to the United States in December 1822 measures how much had changed in the twelve years since the Cortes first opened the question of who, in an empire without a functioning king, held the right to decide.