5 - Insurrection — recruitment and extension

Summary

The Mexican insurgency spread through contact between the leadership and local dissident groups. Through the mediation of special emissaries the original leaders brought into their movement a wide range of groups. Hidalgo extended the revolution through contact with those most intimately involved in the management of men: hacienda majordomos, work force overseers, miners' spokesmen, village headmen and councillors, small town lawyers, and parish priests. From them came many of the military leaders, irregular commanders and political ideologists of the insurrectionary movement. The task fell to Hidalgo and later, Morelos, to bring these disparate, often mutually contradictory elements, together. The spontaneous nature of Hidalgo's call for insurrection on the night of 15–16 September 1810 obscures the network of relationships which permeated the insurgency from the start. Concentration upon the official leadership had left in abeyance, as it were, the problem of how, in practical terms, the movement spread. The precedent, often forgotten, had been set during the abortive Valladolid conspiracy of 1809. The Michoacán conspirators, reacting to the coup of 1808, had first raised the question of popular support. Themselves isolated, they set the process of recruitment in motion by sending out agents to outlying districts. Contact was made, therefore, with powerful local figures, such as the cacique, Rosales, reputed to exercise an ascendancy over the Indian villages of Michoacán. Despite the betrayal of this conspiracy, the task of mobilising support still continued.

Both Hidalgo and Morelos worked to spread the insurrection of 1810, either through specially commissioned agents or through contact with local networks of power.