Here he rested for some time undisturbed by the Spaniards. He conquered the whole of the province with the exception of Acapulco, to which he laid siege in February, 1813, but it did not lower its flag until the following August. The control of a whole province, and the victories of Bravo and Matamoros, elsewhere in 1812 and 1813, considerably increased the importance and influence of Morelos, who now devoted himself to the assemblage of a national Congress at Chilpanzingo composed of the original Junta of Zitacuaro, the deputies elected by the province of Oaxaca, and others selected by them as representatives of the provinces which were in the royalists' hands. On the 13th of November, 1813, this body published a declaration of the absolute independence of Mexico.[1]
Don Felix Maria Calleja,
LX. Viceroy of New Spain.—1813—1816.
This was the period at which the star of the great leader, Morelos, culminated. Bravo was still occasionally successful, and the commander-in-chief, concentrating his forces at Chilpanzingo, prepared an expedition against the province of Valladolid. He departed on the 8th of November, 1813; and, marching across a hitherto untraversed country of a hundred leagues, he reached this point about Christmas. But here he found a large force under Llano and Colonel Iturbide,—who was still a loyalist—drawn up to encounter him. He attacked the enemy rashly with his jaded troops, and on the following day, was routed, with the loss of his best regiments and all his artillery.
At Puruaran, Iturbide again assailed Morelos successfully, and Matamoros was taken prisoner. Efforts were made to save the life of this eminent soldier, yet Calleja, who had succeeded Venegas as viceroy was too cruelly ungenerous to spare so daring a rebel. He was shot, and his death was avenged by the slaughter of all the prisoners who were in the hands of the insurgents.
For a while Morelos struggled bravely against adversity, his
- ↑ We must mention an event, characteristic of Bravo, which occurred during this period. Bravo took Palmar, by storm, after a resistance of three days. Three hundred prisoners fell into his hands, who were placed at his disposal by Morelos, Bravo immediately offered them to the viceroy Venegas in exchange for his father Don Leonardo Bravo, who had been sentenced to death in the capital. The offer was rejected, and Don Leonardo ordered to immediate execution. But the son at once commanded the prisoners to be liberated,—saying that he wished to put it out of his power to avenge his parent's death, lest, in the first moments of grief the temptation should prove irresistible."—Ward, 1 vol. 204.
