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As the smoke cleared over the Medina battlefield, it was apparent that the revolution had failed. Texas would not serve as a base from which to bring independence to Mexico, nor would Texas be joining the United States. Instead, Spanish victory meant that Mexico would remain a colonial possession of Spain for the next eight years.
Of the 1,300 rebels who died on August 18, 1813, approximately 112 survived the fighting only to be executed in the battle 's aftermath. The carnage began before the smoke had lifted from the battlefield. Seeking to discourage future revolts, Arredondo told his soldiers to give no quarter. The men covered their noses to ward off the stench of decaying flesh, walked across the battlefield, and used their lances to finish off any rebel who held on to life.
Arredondo dispatched Ignacio Elizondo and 200 cavalrymen to execute any revolutionaries that had been healthy enough to flee. Running until they could run no more, dozens of rebels collapsed in front of Elizondo 's cavalry and begged for mercy. They didn 't get it. The Spanish soldiers shot them, 'cut them in quarters, and suspended them on poles and limbs of trees like beef or pork for the packer. '
Some fifty Americans managed to retreat to the confines of San Antonio where they hoped to find sanctuary among the town 's populace. After all, the people of San Antonio had cheered Guti rrez de Lara and the Republican Army of the North when they 'd taken the city in April. Things had changed in the few hours since the Battle of Medina 's end. Word of Spain 's victory had sent those who 'd supported the revolutionaries fleeing to the United States. Everyone else realized that they 'd need to prove their loyalty to Spain to avoid punishment, so they captured the fleeing Americans and turned them over to the Spanish cavalry when they arrived in San Antonio. The soldiers executed the Americans on the spot.
Arredondo and the rest of the Spanish army remained at the Medina battlefield overnight, where they cared for their wounded and buried their dead. They left the bodies of the revolutionaries to rot in the sun. Their remains would sit on the battlefield for nine years serving as dinner for coyotes and worms.
After loading their wounded on to carts, the Spanish army departed for San Antonio, arriving the morning of August 20. Once there, Arredondo ordered his soldiers to round up anyone who had supported the revolution against Spain. They returned with 700 men and women, many of whom had done little more than sell meat to the rebels. The soldiers locked three hundred of these men in a confined back room of a local church, where the sweltering heat of the Texas sun suffocated eighteen.
The next day, Arredondo chose forty prisoners for execution. Lined against a wall in San Antonio 's square, the prisoners could do nothing but stare in horror as a firing squad took their lives. Every day for the following month, the Spanish picked three of the remaining prisoners to face a firing squad. If anyone brought before the firing squad survived their bullet wounds, soldiers finished them off by 'dragging them round the public square, and then cutting off the arms and heads and placing them in public places. ' The prisoners who were not chosen for the firing squad served as slaves.
The Spanish placed female captives in a prison nicknamed 'La Quinta ' (La Quinta being a term Spaniards used for their country retreats). While in La Quinta, the women worked day and night grinding corn for tortillas to feed the occupying army. This difficult labor eroded flesh from palms and knees. Punishment for taking breaks or poor performance was the lash.
While imprisoned, the unfortunate women of the Quinta 'suffered the impure, lewd gazes and debasing remarks of officers and soldiers who enjoyed that detestable and repugnant spectacle. ' Spanish soldiers also raped them. When one woman tried to resist, a jailer named Acosta stripped her naked, tied her to the outside of the prison, and left her at the mercy of the elements. According to one account, Acosta, a man of African descent, enjoyed forcing his female prisoners to make, 'a comparison between himself and the whites. '
As the revolutionary sympathizers languished in prison, Spanish officials sold their property at auction. Fatherless children wailed outside La Quinta, begging their mothers to feed them.
While the Spanish army was rounding up prisoners in San Antonio, Arredondo ordered 200 cavalrymen east in the direction of the United States. They were to capture fleeing rebels and rebel sympathizers and burn any standing structures to the ground. Arredondo wanted to turn East Texas into a wasteland in order to prevent future invasions from the United States. Make Texas so desolate that invaders would have to cross the 400 miles from the U.S. border to San Antonio without having anywhere to resupply. Following these orders, the cavalry headed east, burned the town of Trinidad, and forced the population of Nacogdoches to flee across the border to Louisiana. Half of Spanish Texas was gone.
While in East Texas, the Spanish cavalrymen captured 200 people from San Antonio who were attempting to flee to the United States. The soldiers forced female prisoners to bathe nude and executed seventy-one other prisoners. In a story that is probably apocryphal, some of those facing execution requested their last rites. A Spanish cavalryman named Padre Camacho stepped forward and claimed that he was a priest. Instead of performing the traditional Catholic last rites ceremony, Camacho informed the prisoners that he 'd been shot during the Battle of Medina, and said, 'you may have been the one who shot me, and if so, may the Lord have mercy on you. ' Camacho then shot each man in turn.
The cavalry shackled the remaining prisoners and returned to San Antonio in a procession described as, 'reminiscent of Roman triumphs. ' They then forced the surviving captives to march between columns of the Spanish army to San Antonio 's central plaza where Arredondo and 1,000 spectators awaited. Arredondo greeted the defenseless prisoners with a tune that he 'd learned from a captive. The exact wording of the song is lost to time, but it described in gratuitous detail what the rebels would do with Arredondo once they defeated him in battle. The prisoners did not have to wait long to discover what Arredondo would do to them if he were victorious. He had his soldiers to execute every male prisoner and hang their bodies around the plaza as a reminder of what faced those seeking independence. The females went to La Quinta.
The Spanish army remained in Texas for the next eight months. During this time, they confiscated civilian firearms, burned seditious literature, and conducted house-to-house searches to root out hiding revolutionaries. Soldiers also consumed almost all of San Antonio 's food supply, leaving the city 's civilians in a state of near starvation. Hostile Comanche and Apache Indians would later take advantage of the people of San Antonio 's weakened condition by conducting daily raids on the city. Too weak to retaliate, the people of Texas could only watch as the Indians rode off with the last of their horses and cattle.
When Arredondo and his army departed in March 1814, they left Texas destitute and under-populated. Including those who died in the battle, those who were executed, and those who fled to the United States, Texas lost half its population in 1813, dropping from 4,000 to 2,000 citizens.
Epilogue
The Spanish victory at the Battle of Medina and the harsh reprisals afterwards had a dramatic effect on North American history. First of all, it postponed Mexican independence. Without Texas and access to the United States, revolutionaries in Mexico struggled to gather supplies and firearms. They couldn 't field an army capable of defeating Spain in a prolonged campaign.
There were attempts to retake Texas for the revolution. Interestingly, former Republican Army of the North commanders Bernardo Guti rrez de Lara and Jos lvarez de Toledo worked together towards this goal. Guti rrez de Lara had retired to New Orleans following his ouster as commander of the Republican Army of the North and Toledo had joined him there following his defeat at the Battle of Medina. In spite of their history, the two became close acquaintances. From 1813 to 1816, they sat in the famous Napoleon House drinking coffee and plotting ways to reignite the independence movement. The men even took out newspaper ads asking volunteers to join them in reinvading Texas. At one point, it was rumored that they had found 5,000 men.
Two things put an end to their schemes. Embarrassed that foreigners were using U.S. soil to plot invasions of a neighboring nation, newly installed president James Monroe ordered that Louisiana officials put an end to any filibustering activity. Although this ended his efforts to recruit volunteers, Guti rrez de Lara stayed in the United States and supported the move for Mexican independence by providing weapons for two invasions of Mexico in 1817 and 1819. Unfortunately for Guti rrez de Lara and those hoping for independence, both of these forays failed.
They failed, in part, because Toledo became a turncoat. Whereas Guti rrez de Lara would continue to fight for independence, by 1816, Toledo had decided that he wanted to live the life of a Spanish aristocrat. He wrote a lengthy treatise to the Spanish King apologizing for his revolutionary activities and promised to help the royalist cause in any way that he could. In exchange for a pension, Toledo kept the Spanish government in Mexico City informed of Guti rrez de Lara 's activities in New Orleans. This, in turn, allowed Spain to remain one-step ahead of the revolutionary.
Both Toledo and Guti rrez de Lara would live to be old men. After years of spying, Toledo retired to Spain and became an advisor to the Spanish King. Guti rrez de Lara became Governor of Tamaulipas once independence was achieved. Today he is honored as a hero in Mexico.
Royalist officer Joaqu n de Arredondo served as the Commandant General of northeastern Mexico from 1814 to 1821. As Commandant General, one of Arredondo 's was to prevent another invasion from the United States. He realized that to do this, he would need to repopulate the province with loyal civilians that would provide a barrier against invaders. Unfortunately for Arredondo, he had left Texas in such poor shape that no one wanted to move to the province.
The failure of these efforts forced Arredondo to consider an unusual request from a man named Moses Austin in 1821. An American citizen, Austin asked Arredondo for permission to bring 300 families from the United States to settle in Texas. Austin argued that they would help revitalize the Texas economy and would be faithful Spanish citizens. Although he detested Americans by this point 'they kept invading his territory 'Arredondo approved Austin 's petition. He needed to repopulate the Texas that he 'd depopulated.
In 1821, Moses 's son Stephen Austin traveled to Texas to implement his father 's colonization scheme. By the time he arrived, however, Mexico had finally become independent of Spain. It took a Spanish general named Agustin de Iturbide siding with the revolutionaries for the people of Mexico to finally be able to overthrow the Spanish government in Mexico City.
Arredondo fled the newly independent nation for the still Spanish-controlled Cuba where he lived out the remainder of his life.
As for Texas, the new independent Mexican government allowed Austin to continue colonizing Americans in the province. Austin 's efforts led to some 35,000 Americans settling in Texas from 1821 to 1836. In 1835, these Americans revolted against their mother country, as the people of Mexico had done with Spain in 1810. To put down the rebellion, an army under Mexican president Antonio Lopez Santa Anna traveled to Texas in 1836, where he defeated and executed some 200 men defending a former mission in San Antonio known as the Alamo. Owing, in part, to anger over the Alamo, an American army defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. After the battle, the victors forced Santa Anna to sign a petition recognizing Texas independence.
Why did Santa Anna choose to execute everyone at the Alamo? As a young man, he 'd served in the Spanish army at the Battle of Medina and had witnessed Arredondo 's merciless retribution in the battle 's aftermath. Santa Anna had learned that violence and cruelty forced fealty. When Santa Anna was asked what should be done with the Alamo prisoners, 'the example of Arredondo was cited. '
Brad Folsom
