Thread by @arctotherium42

Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973) on the Mexican War of Independence. The Mexican criollos were far less impressive than their South American counterparts, and produced no leaders equal to Bolivar or San Martin.

Where the South American criollos quickly declared independence upon the French conquest of Spain, the Mexican ones dithered. Acting quickly, the local peninsulares coup'd the government and the criollos accepted it.

With the criollos basically accepting Spanish domination, leadership of the independence struggle passed to men like Miguel Hidalgo, who turned it from a (hopefully) bloodless coup to a social and race war.

Hidalgo appealed to the lower classes by rebelling in the name of the deposed Spanish king, with the cry "Long Live the King, Long Live America, Death to the Bad Government."

Hidalgo's army was effectively a gigantic mob of indio and casta poor, with a tiny core of the remaining criollo revolutionaries. This mob was quite happy to loot and butcher the European townspeople of Mexico, which led the criollos to side firmly with the viceroy.

The Mexican war of independence was incredibly brutal, with torture, massacres, and decimation of civilians on both sides, perhaps in part because Mexican mortality was so high (higher than anywhere outside the Orient) already.

Hidalgo and his mob were defeated by the smaller but much more disciplined and professional army of the viceroy under General Callejas, but other revolutionaries popped up to replace him.

Anarchy swept Mexico, with hundreds of local bandits rising up in the name of independence and liberty, mostly for themselves, to rob and loot, which alienated civilized Mexicans from the idea of independence.

Morelos, in the south, was another casta priest and probably the most disciplined, effective, and idealistic of the independence fighters. The latter proved his undoing; he gave power over to a congress, which turned out to be an ineffective and quarrelling junta.

By 1819, after years of devastating anarchy and civil war, the Mexican insurgents had been thoroughly suppressed and Spanish power appeared stable in New Spain, while the South Americans gained independence.

This produced Mexican independence almost by accident; Spanish troops headed to South America revolted, a liberal junta took power in Spain, and this liberal junta alienated the now-conservative Mexican creoles into independence, which they gained almost as an afterthought.

Agustin de Iturbide, in charge of a Spanish army to suppress one of the few remaining insurgents, changed sides, entered the capital, and declared independence, and that was that.