3/19/2023 0 Comments Javier mianaAfter failing to take León, Mina entrenched himself at a nearby strongpoint called El Sombrero. Realizing what a dangerous opponent they were up against, the royal government put one of its top commanders, Marshal Liñan, into the field against him with 2,500 men and 14 cannons. Moving deeper into the Mexican hinterland, Mina met his initial defeat when he failed to capture León. On July 7 the combined force fell on Hacienda del Jaral, seizing supplies and 1,400,000 pesos in cash. Teaming up with his new allies, he smashed a Spanish detachment under General Ordoñez, leaving his foe lifeless on the battlefield. Entering a fort called El Sombrero, he found it occupied by fellow rebels. With 60 casualties, Mina’s band was now down to 240 men. The next day Mina won his most impressive victory, defeating a Spanish formation that outnumbered him six to one. June 14 they arrived at Hacienda de Postillos, on the road to San Luis Potosí. The liberators first went into combat on June 8 at Valle del Maiz, where they defeated a Spanish force under a Captain Villaseñor. In the village of Horcasitas, the invaders seized 700 horses that had been earmarked for the royalists. Mina and his men debarked in Mexico on April 15, at Soto la Marina on the Gulf coast, near what is today the port of Tampico. Departing from New Orleans, he stopped briefly in Haiti to take on additional supplies. In 1816 he left for the United States to organize an expedition that would aid the Mexicans in their struggle for independence.īy early spring of 1817 Mina had assembled an invasion force consisting of three ships and over 300 men. By now determined to resist Spanish absolutism wherever he could, he decided that the best place to play an active role was in Mexico, where an armed struggle was actually in progress. Fearing for his life, Mina left Spain and sought refuge first in France and then in England. But Ferdinand VII - forced by Napoleon to abdicate in favor of Joseph Bonaparte and then restored after Napoleon’s defeat - was an arch reactionary who loathed the doctrines of the Enlightenment and supported the Inquisition.įerdinand, who was reinstated in 1814, detested young liberals like Mina and had them mercilessly hunted down. Of the Bourbon monarchs who had ruled Spain since 1700, some, like Charles III, were quite progressive. During the French occupation, Mina was fighting to unseat Joseph Bonaparte, who had been placed on the Spanish throne by his brother. The French were eventually driven out of Spain but what happened next drove Mina even further into rebellion. Taking to the hills, he resisted the Napoleonic forces as a guerrilla. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Mina made a rapid transition from lawyer to soldier. As a teenager he went to study law in the Navarrese capital of Pamplona. Like so many future revolutionaries - Danton and Robespierre come to mind - Mina was originally trained as a lawyer. His birthplace was Otano, a village in the northern Spanish province of Navarre. Like Burke, Fox and Paine, Mina was a citizen of the mother country who deeply felt the pain inflicted on its colonists.Īppropriately for a revolutionary, Mina was born in 1789, the year the Bastille fell. While most of the leaders of Mexico’s War of Independence were Mexican-born creoles, an exception was Francisco Javier Mina, whose name today appears on street signs and monuments throughout Mexico.
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