Biography is the most intimate approach to history; it is the most personal, subjective, and often the most passionate approximation of the past. The life of Antonio López de Santa Anna has frequently been conflated with the history of Mexico. There is a long tradition that blames the turbulence of Mexican political life after independence on the personal failings of Santa Anna, but confusing biography with history is a dangerous synecdoche. In the last thirty years though, historians have made great progress in understanding Mexican politics during what used to be known as ‘The Age of Santa Anna’, and Will Fowler is one of the most prolific and insightful historians of this fundamental and controversial period. His mastery of nineteenth-century Mexican history makes Fowler's Santa Anna a major contribution to the field. There is no better biography of Santa Anna.
Fowler introduces his readers to Santa Anna as a 73 year-old general on trial for treason in 1867. The author acknowledges the prosecution's charge that Santa Anna was (in the title to this introduction) a ‘Traitor, Turncoat, and Tyrant’. As a biographer in the role of defence counsel, Fowler evokes the aged hero of times past in his natural and social environment, the Gulf port city and state of Veracruz. Fowler's assignment is to describe Santa Anna's life in its nineteenth-century context, to explain the complex combination of personal life and public politics in the view of his contemporaries.
The portrait that emerges emphasises Santa Anna's public life, but it also includes a good deal about his personal life, his marriages, his affairs, his friendships, his vices, and the circumstances of his periods of exile from Mexico. One of the many strengths of Fowler's biography is his careful attention to Santa Anna's character traits as revealed by his military service record beginning with his earliest days fighting independence-era insurgents in Tamaulipas and Texas in the 1810s. He was, even then, a complicated individual, capable of gambling, forgery and trickery. At the same time, the evidence shows him to be ‘a dedicated and tireless royalist counterinsurgent, prepared to endure all kinds of hardships to capture the insurgents who hid in the thick, insect-ridden chaparral of Veracruz. He was also a keen village administrator, who dedicated night and day to ensuring that the communities for which he was responsible had fresh water, adequate kitchens, and enclosure for their chickens, and a novel system of government’ (p. 39).
Santa Anna was a socially gregarious individual who was able to maintain affectionate personal relationships with his political opponents and thought of himself and the army as impartial mediators of political disputes. He saw himself as above politics and he expected those he treated as friends to remain faithful to him, even if he shifted his political support. Fowler takes seriously the idea that he did not want to be president; Santa Anna reluctantly intervened in political affairs only for as long as necessary until he could return to his hacienda. This strategic retreat to private life is frequently derided as just another of Santa Anna's ruses, but Fowler demonstrates that both Santa Anna and his first wife devoted considerable care and attention to the administration of his rural estates in Veracruz.
Although the evidence is circumstantial, those haciendas in Veracruz also exemplify the blurred boundaries of Santa Anna's public and private lives. If he did profit from his time in government, Santa Anna was also willing to mortgage his cherished lands to pay Mexican troops fighting the US invasion in 1847. Fowler concludes that, despite his wives' considerable dowries and his careful attention to the profitability of his estates, ‘the sheer scale of his wealth … would appear to demonstrate that, like so many other Mexican presidents, he had helped himself to the national treasury’ (p. 222). Now, surely that would depend on whether the proper context is comparison with other nineteenth-century presidents such as Guadalupe Victoria and Valentín Gómez Farías, or with late twentieth-century examples such as Carlos Salinas and José López Portillo. Like many of his contemporaries, Santa Anna enjoyed gambling as a diversion; chance also played a role in his public life. Fowler concludes that Santa Anna was not a good military strategist, but that he was willing to risk his own life and the lives of many others in a headlong rush to glory. Fowler fully engages the highly charged issue of Santa Anna's conduct of the Texas campaign in 1836. Here he quite correctly emphasises the importance of slavery in the rebellion (a context often ignored in the USA), but Fowler defends Santa Anna against charges that he betrayed Mexico to save himself by signing the Treaty of Velasco after he was captured at San Jacinto. Based on his own interpretation of original documents in Mexico's military archive, Fowler contends that Santa Anna was a careful negotiator who protected Mexico's sovereignty, and that the treaty was invalid, in any case, since Santa Anna was still held prisoner afterwards for seven months, in violation of the same treaty.
Santa Anna's conduct before and during the War of 1847 also receives critical attention. If we condemn factionalism in the face of national crisis, we cannot also write off as opportunists those who work together in the interest of national defence. Santa Anna's reputation as a trickster is again in evidence here as Fowler concludes that ‘he pocketed whatever money [US President James K.] Polk passed to him and set about working hard to organise his country's defense’ (p. 255). Fowler recognises Santa Anna's mistakes at Angostura-Buena Vista and Cerro Gordo but he blames the failure to defend the Valley of Mexico on others.
Fowler finds the defence of Santa Anna more difficult after the war. Benito Juarez ‘characterized Santa Anna as a debauched cynical opportunist devoid of integrity’ (p. 339). Fowler is more sympathetic, contending that ‘his monarchism was, in a strange way, patriotic’ (p. 341). The excess and extravagance of Santa Anna's final presidency are well-known; by early August 1855, Santa Anna was again banished from Mexico. The ironies of this period are less well-known. In the 1860s, Santa Anna sought support in the USA for his return to Mexico but fell prey to confidence men and swindlers. When he managed to set foot in Mexico again, Santa Anna was imprisoned and tried for treason by Juarez's government. When the jury rejected the death penalty and sent Santa Anna to exile again, Juarez ordered the jurors to be imprisoned for six months.
After hundreds of pages detailing Santa Anna's idiosyncrasies, his contradictions, his exceptional circumstances, and his unique perspective, Fowler's conclusions are less satisfying: he retreats into the vague generalities of ‘caudillismo ‘ and the ‘everybody-else-was-doing-it’ defence: ‘His personal corruption and alleged lack of principle differed little from that of many other successful generals and politicians’ (p. 362). Fowler might have managed a better closing argument, one that defended Santa Anna without condemning others on vague charges without any evidence. Nevertheless, Fowler's sympathy for his client, or rather his subject, is to be expected. Santa Anna deserves a spirited defence. Fowler has written an unsurpassed biography of one of Mexico's most famous leaders. Everyone with an interest in Mexican history should read it.
