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CHAP. XVII.

Mexico. Buenos Ayres. Character of Liniers. Successive Revolutions in that Province till the Close of 1811.

THE affairs of Venezuela have been carried on into the ensuing year, that the subject might be brought to its close. Of the disturbances in the adjoining provinces, and in Peru and Chile, too little is known to admit of any detailed account ;-suffice it to say, that the fermentation extended to all parts of Spanish America; in some places one party prevailed, in some the other; in others they alternately obtained the upper hand; and every where the violence and ferocity which were displayed, proved but too well how little the inhabitants were qualified to govern themselves. In Mexico a widely-extended insurrection broke out, too much resembling in its causes, conduct, and progress, the dreadful scenes which, in our time, we have seen in Ireland;-a war of havock, cruelty, and extermination, in which one party was exasperated by old wrongs, the other by recent atrocities; each feeling itself equally justified, the one by the desire of independence, the other by loyalty and the defence of social order. Venegas was sent over as viceroy; he had been wanting in activity and enterprize in the Talavera campaign; but in Mexico the advantage of discipline was on his side, and his troops gained victories, which, by the numbers who fell on one side, while there was little loss or none on the

other, seem rather to have been massacres than battles. There was, however, too much provocation for this; for the insurgents, in repeated instances, when they got possession of a town, had filled the prisons with Europeans, and then butchered them. In fomenting and encouraging the rebellion, and in the guilt of these murders, some Anglo-Americans are said to have been deeply implicated. All the first leaders were taken and executed, many of them expressing their repentance for their fatal error; for never did men, in attempting to do good, give occasion to such immediate and tremendous evil. Of these events we have only the Spanish accounts; they show the extent of the misery and the devastation, and it may be inferred from them, that though the termination may be far distant, the government will maintain its superiority, and finally crush the insurgents. On their part no documents have reached this country. Of Buenos Ayres more is known, and more must be said.

There was no part of the Spanish colonies in which the intrigues of Buonaparte might have been thought so likely to succeed as in Buenos Ayres. The people had learnt their own. strength; they were under a viceroy, a Frenchman by birth, who had attained a high reputation by the cap

ture of one British force, and the ignominious defeat of another; and it seemed reasonable to suppose that our miserable expeditions to the Plata would have renewed that hatred of the English name which the piratical enterprises of Drake and Cavendish excited, and which, for more than a century, had been exasperated by the atrocities of the buccaneers. Whitelocke, indeed, had done whatever brutality and incapacity could do, to render the English at once odious and contemptible. The Spaniards execrated him for the excesses which he allowed his men to commit, as much as they despised him for his own personal behaviour; but they did justice to the fortitude which men and officers displayed, when they were exposed so hopelessly to destruction; and the conduct of Sir Samuel Achmuty had been such, that in Monte Video, where the English entered through the breach, the inhabitants saw their departure with tears, and remembered them with affection and regret. Upon the first tidings of the imprisonment and compulsory resignation of Ferdinand, and the great national insurrection which followed, a proclamation was issued, which seemed to imply a disposition to follow whatever party might prove victorious. It was published in the name of the viceroy, and with his sanction; but Liniers was a man so habitually and culpably careless, that, even on this most important emergency, he did not take the trouble of thinking for himself, but suffered the council to draw out the proclamation for him, and signed it as his own. The writer, no doubt, endeavoured to adapt it to what he supposed might be the viceroy's inclination, and its temporizing language was afterwards brought as a charge against him, though his constitutional facility was all for which he deserved to be reproached.

D. Santiago Liniers was the younger son of a noble family in Poitou; at

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twelve years of age he was received into the order of Malta, and became page to the grand master; at fifteen he obtained a commission in the Royal Piedmont regiment of cavalry; and in 1775, entered the Spanish navy, in which service he was present at the reduction of Minorca, and the siege of Gibraltar. In 1788, he went out to the Plata as second in command of the squadron on that station; and from that time became settled in Buenos Ayres. When that city was surpri sed by General Beresford, Liniers, who had prevented the invaders from landing at Ensenada, but could not infuse any spirit into the governor, saw, from a neighbouring height, the aban donment of the town, and retired to his country house, from whence he soon afterwards sent a messenger to General Beresford, saying, that not having been attacked in the post committed to his care, he was not included in the capitulation, but that with his permission he would enter the town, for the sake of seeing his children and settling his affairs.-This permission was liberally granted him; whether it was consistent with strict military honour to have asked it for the purpose of obtaining information of the enemy's strength, and the probabilities of expelling them, may well be doubted. Such, however, was the intention with which Liniers entered Buenos Ayres, and his object was effectually fulfilled. Having recovered the city, he exerted himself with the utmost activity to prepare against a second attack; the. pewter vessels and the gutters of the houses were melted down for bails; powder was brought from Lima and Chile over the Andes, in bottles which formerly carried liqueurs and other articles of luxury; grenades and fire-pots were ranged along the flat roofs of the houses, in the place of flower-pots and orange-trees; and a spirit was excited in the whole people

which England experienced to her heavy loss and humiliation, but to which an Englishman will always render justice. For these great and signal services Liniers was appointed viceroy ad interim; he told the Spanish court, with perfect sincerity, that he was not fit for the office, and advised them to appoint a man of greater energy and integrity, and to send out two regiments of the line with him. This representation was unheeded, and Liniers, against his inclination, found himself at the head of affairs when the revolution called upon him to act a more difficult part than he had sustain ed in Whitelocke's tragedy.

As a soldier, Liniers had shown that he could be active as well as brave; but it was only the sense, or rather the habit, of military duty which could excite him to activity. Nothing else was powerful enough to overcome the easiness of his disposition. This disposition was his only guide; it made him brave, open, and generous; ready to grant to his friends whatever they asked, and so forgiving an enemy, that it seemed as if he were incapable of feeling resentment. But being by birth a Frenchman, and living in a land where an absolving misreligion had completed that corruption of morals which colonial circumstances and a wretched system of misgovernment equally contributed to produce, he had little principle to direct his conduct. After the death of his wife he formed a connection with a French woman, whose husband complaisantly withdrew upon a distant appointment; her extravagant expences required funds which it was not in his power to supply; but her influence was all powerful with Liniers; and therefore under his admi. nistration every thing was venal. He himself was as free from rapacity as from ambition: he had indeed accumulated nothing; and it was believed, that in case of his death, his children would

have found themselves without a provision. Except in this adulterous connection, which was open and avowed, public opinion regarding such things with as much indifference as he himself, Liniers was probably without a vice; a good easy man, who, under favourable circumstances, would have made himself happy and all around him, merely by following the instinct of a happy ature.

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If Spain had submitted patiently to the intruder, or been finally overpowered in the struggle, and the people of Buenos Ayres had looked to their viceroy to direct them, it cannot, be supposed that Liniers would have felt much repugnance in acknowledging the intrusive dynasty. On this point, however, his character must remain unimpeachable. When Buonaparte's agent arrived, he gave him audience, and opened his papers before the council, left them to frame a declaration, and proclaimed Ferdinand as soon as it was made public. The history of this agent is remarkable; amid the mournful detail of errors, and crimes, and sufferings, it is so grateful to meet with any thing upon which the mind can pause with pleasure, that we may well be pardoned for digressing to relate it. He was a French baron, formerly a deputy from Burgundy to the States-General, who had emigrated, and served under the Prince of Conde in the beginning of the revolutionary war, and afterwards removed to America, from whence he had made two trading voyages to the Plata. Circumstances having enabled him to return to his native country, he settled with his family upon his estate at the foot of the Pyrenees. The French government, expert as usual in finding the fit person for every employment, and, in the spirit of its new and insolent tyranny, perfectly regardless of the interests or inclinations of the individual, found him here, sent a detachment of gendarmes to bring him

to Bayonne, and made him set sail in four and twenty hours, without allowing him time to arrange his own concerns, or even to provide himself with other clothing for the voyage than what he could hastily procure in the port from which he sailed. The govérnment expected great advantage from his knowledge of the place, and his intimacy with Liniers; that intimacy, and the natural humanity of the viceroy, saved him from the outrages which an exasperated people were sufficiently inclined to commit; he was, however, arrested and sent to Cadiz, where he was put on board one of the hulks in the harbour, with other prisoners. His wife, as soon as she fearnt what had become of him, went herself to London, to solicit the intercession of the British government for his deliverance. It scarcely need be said that her petition was granted; but just when she had thus happily effected her object, a letter arrived with intelligence that the hulk in which he was confined, had been seized by the prisoners, and carried to the other side of the bay, and that he had already recovered his freedom.

It is proof enough that Liniers was not guided by any passion or policy as a Frenchman, that he immediately admitted the English into Buenos Ayres, hoping and expecting instructions would soon reach him to open a free trade. This he would willingly have done, if he had felt himself authorized; the necessities of the country and of the treasury equally required it. Large as the stores of British goods were which had been landed at Monte Video during our possession of that place, they had by this time disappeared; the demand for European articles was very great; Spain was no longer in a condition to supply it; and while the inhabitants of the vice. royalty were thus deprived of their trade with the mother-country, their

own produce was accumulating upon their hands. This distress directly affected the government, whose chief revenues arose from the customs, but, by a strange effect of impolicy, it happened that every merchant at Buenos Ayres was a decided enemy to the establishment of a free trade. Of late years the adventurous spirit of the Americans had led them to form contraband establishments here, and adventurers of our own country eagerly embarked in the same hazardous lottery. Smuggling was brought to a regular system. In order to protect the property, it was necessary to make a complete transfer into Spanish hands; and the merchant who was thus trust. ed easily found means of evading the duties in a port where every officer in every department had his price. The general calculation was, that he cleared at least 25 per cent. upon every consignment before it came out of his hands; but there were instances in which, not satisfied even with this enor mous profit, they appropriated the whole proceeds to themselves, and set the stranger at defiance; he of course having no law to appeal to against a fraud which he had suffered in at tempting to evade the law.

Hazardous, or rather ruinous, as this system was, it was carried to a prodi gious extent, by the blind avidity of our merchant adventurers. In the course of twelvemonths after the Spa nish revolution had opened the way to Buenos Ayres, the imports into the Plata amounted to no less than two millions sterling, at least nine-tenths of which was. smuggled in, and an equal bulk of return produce smuggled out. Had these goods been regularly entered, the duties which the govern ment would have received would not have fallen short of half a million. As the returns fell greatly short of the imports, about 1,500,000 dollars were smuggled out; had their exportation

been permitted, a duty of two per cent. would cheerfully have been paid upon them, for it cost rather more than this to get them on board.

Great as the sum was of which the government was thus defrauded, or rather of which it deprived itself by the old miserable laws of exclusion, this extensive system of contraband trade did not bring with it, as in other places, à correspondent reduction of price to the consumer. The advantage was wholly confined to the merchants, who, while they intercepted all the advantages which government should have derived from the monopoly, made full use of it for themselves. This was the occasion of the first seditious movements at Buenos Ayres. It was well known that Liniers wished to open the port; the cabildo, afraid of this, which would have cut off at once all their illegal profits, formed a plan which would virtually have deposed him, that they might get the power into their own hands, and regulate the trade according to their own interests. But the people were against them; the soldiers were attached to Liniers, and their scheme was frustrated by the seizure and imprisonment of some of their adherents.

The members of the cabildo go out of office with the year, when they elect their successors. They were at this time all Spaniards except one, and they were determined at the time of election to preserve the same preponderance, and to make another and more vigorous effort to assume the government themselves. On the other hand, the Creoles, relying in some degree upon the disposition of the viceroy, and more upon their own numbers, were determined to have a majority of their body in the new cabildo, which they could only effect by intimidating the old members, or by inducing Liniers to cancel their election, and appoint them himself. By a military re

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gulation well adapted to keep up the mischievous distinction of casts, the Creoles and Spaniards were embodied in distinct corps, and the latter divided according to their different provinces. The cabildo thought they could rely upon the Catalans, the Biscayans, and the Gallegos or Galicians; and the known intention of the Creole party, gave them some prétext for calling out these corps to secure the freedom of election. But they had calculated their strength ill, and they began their measures by an ill-judged attack upon the viceroy.

According to the colonial laws of Spain, no viceroy can give a child in marriage in the country where he holds his appointment, without the king's permission. This is one of the many jealous precautions of a suspicious court. Liniers, with a strange disregard to that sense of honour which he might have been supposed to have derived from his birth, rank, and profession, had just married his eldest daughter to one of the brothers of his mistress, a man of whom it is sufficient to say that he had risen solely by his sister's disgrace. He did this notwith standing the remonstrances of his brother, the Count de Liniers, and of all his late wife's family. The ceremony of complying with the law he had dispensed with, thinking it unnecessary in the present circumstances of Spain, and perhaps having little faith in the stability of the central junta. The cabildo, however, took advantage of this omission, and on the last evening of the year sent to the Audiencia, requesting to be informed whom they were to apply to to confirm their successors, as General Liniers had vaca ted his office in consequence of the marriage of his daughter.

The next day the cabildo, having drawn out the three corps in their favour, harangued the populace; in consequence of which a cry was set up of

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