Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands

time on the watchword of our men going into battle. In all juntas and senates the demand for your ruin will be added to all deliberations. The memory of Carthage, from whose grandeur you are as far removed as the humble grass from the stately oak, should make you tremble. Mexicans! Carthage never offended Rome as Veracruz has Mexico. . . . God help you.
    Santa Anna’s warning didn’t endear him to the inhabitants of Veracruz, nor did it cause the city’s surrender. The Spanish commandant vowed he would never yield to such a despicable character.
    Eventually he did surrender, but to another officer sent out by Iturbide. Swallowing his pride, Santa Anna rode into Veracruz with the conquering colonel, Manuel Rincón, and joined Rincón in urging all in the city to put past differences behind them.
    He then headed toward Mexico City, where Iturbide was consolidating his power. Upon hearing that the general had made himself emperor, Santa Anna applauded the coup. “I cannot restrain my excessive joy, for this step is the most suitable possible to bring about the prosperity of all,” he told Iturbide. “It is the thing we sighed for and longed for, and although it may be necessary to exterminate some discordant and disturbing elements which do not possess the true virtues of citizens, let us hope that we can hasten to proclaim and take an oath to support the immortal Iturbide as emperor.” Carrying the flattery to an extreme, the dashing twenty-eight-year-old colonel conspicuously paid suit to Iturbide’s sister, a not unhandsome lady but one who, at sixty, wasn’t surrounded by beaus.
    Perhaps the wooing was excessive, or Santa Anna’s ambition too obvious; in either case a chill descended upon relations between the emperor and the general (as Santa Anna became after another promotion). The coolness acquired an edge when Iturbide abruptly transferred Santa Anna to the capital, the better to keep an eye on him. Santa Anna objected to the move, which, he said, the emperor ordered “without extending to me the mere vestiges of courtesy.” In retrospect he added, “Such a crushing blow offended my dignity as a soldier and further awakened me to the true nature of absolutism. I immediately resolved to fight against it at every turn and to restore to my nation its freedom.”
    He discovered allies among the early revolutionaries, who resented Iturbide’s hijacking of their struggle. And in their name, in Veracruz in December 1822, Santa Anna declared the republic of which Stephen Austin wrote that Christmas Day. The improbability of the onetime royalist and recent imperial courtier experiencing another conversion, to republicanism, was overlooked in the excitement of an hour that promised to fulfill the revolutionary dreams for Mexico.
    The fulfillment was delayed when Santa Anna’s attempt to spread the republican gospel to his hometown of Jalapa encountered the combined hostility of Iturbide’s conservative supporters and Santa Anna’s personal enemies; in the aftermath of his defeat there—the one Stephen Austin also remarked upon that Christmas Day—Santa Anna lost his nerve and prepared to flee the country for the United States. But one of the original rebels, Guadalupe Victoria, urged a steady course. “Go and put Veracruz in a state of defense,” the guerrilla leader told Santa Anna. “You can set sail when they show you my head.”
    Santa Anna remained in Mexico, and the republican reaction to Iturbide acquired momentum. Many of those who joined were as opportunistic as Santa Anna, but the weight of their influence, if not of their convictions, drove the emperor from power. In March 1823 Iturbide abdicated, and shortly he, rather than Santa Anna, was the one leaving the country.
    Santa Anna hoped to be the beneficiary of Iturbide’s demise; reportedly he hired enthusiasts to parade about calling “Long live Anthony the