Santa Anna's Dictatorship: Revisionist Biography and Legacy

Introduction: Revisionism and Reputation

In his self-described revisionist biography Santa Anna of Mexico (2007), Will Fowler courageously takes up the defense of the Mexican caudillo, fully aware that Santa Anna is all but universally reviled in the historiography of both the United States and Mexico. From the beginning, Fowler makes his intention clear: to vindicate the reputation of a dictator whose "vilification has been so thorough and effective that the process of deconstructing the numerous lies that have been told and retold" is almost impossible.¹ Timothy J. Henderson asserted that Santa Anna had a great talent for exploiting and manipulating political divisions but none for governing a country. In U.S. history and popular culture, he has always been portrayed as a corrupt megalomaniac—the "Napoleon of the West"—responsible for the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad. As John Chasteen and James Wood put it, even his autobiography was an "extraordinary work of self-dramatization" by a dictator who put on a show of being a "vulnerable, introspective protagonist" but was in reality a power-hungry tyrant with "unmitigated vanity" and "obvious self-absorption."²

Fowler is not completely successful in redeeming his subject from all the negative historiography surrounding him, especially given Santa Anna's well-deserved reputation for corruption, nepotism, and brutality. Nevertheless, Fowler may be correct that no one else could have done any better in Mexico under the circumstances. Fowler uses primary sources to disprove some of the most serious charges Mexican historians have made against Santa Anna—for instance, that he was bribed to agree to the independence of Texas in 1836, and that even though he was also bribed by President James K. Polk while in exile in Havana in 1846, he nonetheless fought the Mexican-American War to win as soon as he returned, rather than acting as a puppet of the United States.³

Given the very unfavorable political and economic situation in Mexico in the 1840s, Santa Anna did everything humanly possible to recover Texas and defend the country from a North American invasion. Fowler contends that Santa Anna was not personally responsible for all the disasters that befell Mexico in this period; rather, the whole system had failed. In trying to maintain order and hold the country together against all the centrifugal forces tearing it apart from within, he had no option except to take authoritarian measures that went against his earlier liberal beliefs—but in this he was no different from other Latin American caudillos of his era and afterward, including Simón Bolívar.⁴

Santa Anna's Rise, Powerbase, and Character

By the time Santa Anna died in Mexico City in 1876, disgraced and impoverished, the nation had endured four constitutions (1824, 1836, 1843, and 1857), two empires (1822–23 and 1863–67), and a number of dictatorial periods in which Santa Anna figured prominently. Very soon after his death, another caudillo, Porfirio Díaz, took over the country in the name of Order and Progress and ruled until he was overthrown in 1910—an event followed by ten years of revolution, coups, and civil wars that left millions dead and the country in ruins.⁵ During Santa Anna's lifetime, Mexico was involved in four major wars, losing half of its national territory in 1848, and Santa Anna was present and fighting in every one of them.

Like most Santa Anna biographers and historians, Fowler points out that Veracruz was his powerbase—he was effectively dictator of that strategic province before extending his influence over the rest of the country, and it served as the "main provider of employment, produce, and patronage" for his network.⁶ He consistently staffed the army with his Veracruz clients and allies, as well as the civil administration whenever he held power. His strongest natural affinity, however, was not for politics but for the army, which he first joined at the age of fourteen, fighting against revolutionaries demanding independence from Spain. Santa Anna was always the type of officer who marched toward the sound of the guns, as Napoleon had advised. Although he lost some major battles—San Jacinto in 1836 and Cerro Gordo in 1847—he also defeated a Spanish invasion in 1829 and a French one in 1838.⁷

Richard Bruce Winders finds that Santa Anna dominated the years 1821–54 so completely that the period could well be called the "Era of Santa Anna," at least before he was utterly discredited and removed from power in the wake of the Gadsden Purchase. Like most members of the Mexican elite, he was reluctant to admit that Texas had been lost forever in 1836 and remained prepared to go to war with President James K. Polk a decade later in opposition to his aggressive expansionist policies.⁸

Extremely arrogant and vain, Santa Anna had the leg he lost fighting the French in 1838 buried with full military honors in Mexico City, and was deeply offended when a mob dug it up during the 1845 coup and paraded it through the streets. In his autobiography he protested that he would "always be on hand when my country needed me," regardless of his preference for "a life of solitude," and was outraged at the spectacle of the crowd carrying his limb through the streets.¹⁵ Timothy Henderson found him to be completely amoral and a betrayer of everyone who had ever supported him, yet also courageous, charismatic, and ruthless when action was required.¹⁶ His earlier biographer Wilfred Callicott argued that the true key to his character lay in the training he received as an officer in the Spanish colonial army—"a ruthless and brutal school where fear was the chief taskmaster, where morality and ethics were unknown, and where the end was held to justify the means."¹⁷ Mary Petite described him as a man of extravagant tastes and outlandish ego, vanity, and corruption, who owned a silver chamber pot, a gold-covered saddle, and a $7,000 sword—an enormously expensive item for that time and place. As Henderson contended, about the only consistent political conviction he ever showed was extreme hostility to democracy, whether in Mexico or Texas.¹⁸

Political Opportunism and Ideological Shifts

Fowler defends Santa Anna from the frequent charge that he was a complete opportunist, narcissist, and amoral sociopath who betrayed every friend and ally he ever had, and who would expediently adjust his political views to suit the needs of the moment. He argues that of course "Santa Anna changed sides, but then so did everyone else," and that Santa Anna moved away from his early liberal republicanism and federalism because those systems had totally failed to bring order and stability to Mexico.⁹ In 1836, Santa Anna concluded that excessive liberalism and federalism had led to the secession of Texas, and by 1847–48 had cost the country half its territory.¹⁰ Perhaps these liberal and radical ideas sounded impressive in theory, but in practice he had come to doubt that the Mexican people possessed the education and political preparation to organize a liberal or democratic society for at least one hundred years; they required, in his view, a strong, paternal hand to guide them.

His career followed a downward trajectory—from hope as a young man to despair by the 1850s and 1860s—to the point where he finally supported the French occupation and the Emperor Maximilian as the only hope of saving the country from collapse and a complete takeover by the United States. He was living in exile by that time, but what he learned about the French occupation ultimately turned him back toward the liberal camp, although Benito Juárez regarded him as a traitor and rejected his support and advice.¹¹

Lee Stacy describes Santa Anna as an opportunist even in his early career, when he forced the Emperor Agustín de Iturbide to abdicate in 1823 after initially supporting him. He later backed the conservative government led by Anastasio Bustamante in 1832, but then supported a liberal coup against him in 1835 when he judged Bustamante too rigidly ideological in his authoritarianism and centralization.¹² Mark Wasserman argues that Santa Anna was a brilliant politician and the only Mexican leader before Benito Juárez with the skill and determination to hold Mexico together at all. Like most of Latin America, the nation was badly divided by regionalism, ethnicity, and class, and had a tendency to turn toward military strongmen to prevent collapse and disintegration.¹³ By his final term as dictator in 1853–55, Santa Anna had gone so far in the direction of centralization as to take on the trappings of a monarch, insisting on being addressed as "Your Serene Highness." Wasserman also supports the nearly universal conclusion among historians that Santa Anna was as corrupt as the country he ruled—a judgment that has never been seriously contested.¹⁴

For Fowler, the Santa Anna regime of 1841–45 and his 1843 constitution (the Bases Orgánicas) represented the best and most stable government that Mexico had between independence and the rise of Benito Juárez. Santa Anna favored a centralist republic with a powerful executive, which he deemed necessary to rebuild the army, reclaim Texas, and defend the nation against North American aggression. He allowed for a Senate, but only wealthy merchants, landowners, and industrialists were permitted to serve in it, and only citizens earning over 200 pesos a year were allowed to vote. In opposition to liberal ideology, Roman Catholicism would remain the official religion of the state.³⁶ By European and North American standards of the nineteenth century, this firmly situates Santa Anna on the conservative end of the political spectrum—but he never claimed to be a democrat and doubted that the masses yet possessed the education and capacity to participate in political affairs.

More than any other ruler before Juárez, however, Santa Anna took concrete steps to expand public education in Mexico and genuinely believed in free primary schooling for all—a position consistent with his record as governor of Veracruz in the 1820s. He was also a supporter of land reform, even on his own estates, and regularly provided free farms to landless peasants.³⁷

Conclusion: Systemic Failure and Historical Legacy

Fowler's conclusions about Santa Anna run counter to almost all Mexican and North American historiography of the caudillo, which regards him as corrupt, repressive, egomaniacal, and incompetent—a man willing to sell out his country, his allies, and his supporters without a second thought. On the contrary, Fowler presents the Mexican dictator as a man of many excellent qualities, including patriotism, courage in battle, and a genuine concern for the education and welfare of common people. He became more authoritarian as he aged, but this was driven by despair over the repeated defeats the country suffered, its tendency to fracture along regional lines, and the catastrophic loss of California, Texas, and New Mexico. By the end of his career, he had concluded that every political and constitutional expedient had been tried and all had failed, leaving a return to monarchy as perhaps the only remaining hope for the nation.

Mexico's failures were far deeper than Santa Anna's personal inadequacies, and were beyond the power of any single leader to remedy quickly or easily. Indeed, many of those failures have persisted to the present day, including rampant corruption among the elites. Even his liberal opponents—such as Manuel Otero in 1847—had to concede that Mexico was suffering from systemic failure rather than simply the corruption, duplicity, and tyranny of one man. Perhaps the most severe problem was that the Indian and mestizo majority were poor, unskilled, and uneducated, while the criollo elites governed them through corruption, repression, and favoritism.⁴³

Even Santa Anna seems to have been aware of this and made modest efforts to address it. The fact remained, however, that during his lifetime Mexico was a highly fragmented and dysfunctional polity, incapable of resolving its internal problems or preventing half of its national territory from being seized by the United States—a defeat and humiliation that Mexicans have never forgotten.

Bibliography

"The Alamo" in William Dirk Raat (ed). Mexico from Independence to Revolution, 1810–1910. University of Nebraska Press, 1982, pp. 84–90.

Borneman, Walter R. Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America. New York: Random House, 2009.

Eisenhower, John S.D. So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848. New York: Random House, 2000.

Fehrenbach, Timothy R. Fire and Blood. De Capo Press, 1995.

Fowler, Will. Santa Anna of Mexico. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.

Morgan, Robert. Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion. New York: Workman Publishing, 2011.

Otero, Manuel. "Considerations Relating to the Political and Social Situation of the Mexican Republic in the Year 1847" in Michael Joseph Gilbert and Timothy J. Henderson (eds). The Mexico Reader: Culture and Politics. Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 226–38.

Petite, Mary Deborah. 1836 Facts about the Texas War of Independence. Perseus Books, 1999.

"Protagonist on a National Stage" in John Charles Chasteen and James A. Wood (eds). Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations. Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2005, pp. 99–101.

Stacy, Lee. Mexico and the United States. Marshall Cavendish, 2003.

"Their Decision Irrevocably Sealed their Fate" (1837) in David J. Weber (ed). Foreigners in their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican-Americans. University of New Mexico Press, 2003, pp. 109–11.

Treaty of Velasco, 1836 in Oscar Jaquez Martínez (ed). U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1996, pp. 17–19.

Wasserman, Mark. Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War. University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Winders, Richard Bruce. Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas. Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002.