There have been published of late years two considerable repositories of documentary material respecting the revolutionary period of the Spanish-American provinces. The first of these is Juan E. Hernandez y Dávalos' Coleccion de documentos para la historia

de la Guerra de Independencia de México de 1808 á 1821 (Mexico, 1877, etc.), which has been the work for thirty years of a treasury clerk. The second is Emilio del Costillo Negrete's México en el Siglo xix. (Mexico, 1875, etc.), in which the historical narrative is broken by documentary material.1 Reference may also be made in the American Monitor, a periodical devoted to South American affairs (London, 1824-25), and to El Repertorio Americano (Londres, 1826-27), in four volumes.

Bancroft, in working up the most complete account which we have in English of this later period, and of the succeeding constitutional period, finds the works of Lúcas Alaman the most important contribution which any Mexican historian has made. Alaman was a youth of sixteen when he witnessed the fall of Iturrigaray in 1808, and he was present at Guanajuato during the memorable scenes of 1810. As he went to Spain to pursue his studies in 1814 and remained there till 1820, he had no personal contact with the events of that interval; but he had a half-brother, a canon of Mexico, Dr. Arechederreta, who kept a diary in that city from 1811 to 1820, and this document was of much use to Alaman in his historical work, which is republican rather than democratic in its tone.2 As a member of the Atenéo Mexicana, he had begun his Mexican studies and gathered the results in his Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República Mexicana, desde la 1 Bancroft's Mexico, iv. 624-25. 2 Bancroft's Mexico, iv. 823, for references. *Frontispiece of his Historia de Mejico (Mexico, 1849), vol. i.

Conquista hasta la independencia (Mexico, 1844-49, in three volumes), which proved a preparation for his elaborate Historia de Méjico desde los primeros movimientos que prepararon su Independencia en el año 1808 hasta la época presente (Mexico, 1849-52), in five volumes. Alaman survived its completion only to June 2, 1853, when he died. The book is in the main one of scholarly impartiality, though he manifests little regard for revolutionary excesses, and is inclined to belittle the actions of those not of pure Spanish blood. His appendixes are fortified with documentary proofs, which he obtained in large part from the public archives. He stopped short of his promised end, and finished his work with the events of 1830.

Little of a similar conspicuous character belongs to the Méjico y sus revoluciones (Paris, 1836) of José Maria Luis Mora, likewise a native Mexican. He was thirty-six when in 1830 he set himself to his task, and conducted it in a not very orderly manner as to the arrangement of his periods, his first volume, for instance, describing the Mexico of his day, the second never appearing at all; the third goes over the history of Mexico from the Conquest to 1810, and volume four covers the opening years of the conflict under Hidalgo and the early patriots. Some of the later periods, however, find elucidation in his political papers which appeared in his Obras Sueltas (Paris, 1837).

The student of the history of Mexico hardly confronts a more prominent name than that of Cárlos Maria Bustamante. He has done good work as an editor in publishing a variety of the early writers; and as a commentator on the political events of his own day (born in 1774, he died in 1848), he has left a great mass of publications, somewhat ephemeral often, but warmly expressive, and touched, however wildly at times, with an historian's instinct. Perhaps the best enumeration of his writings is in the list of authorities in Bancroft's Mexico,1 where a considerable quantity of his MSS. is noted as having fallen into Bancroft's hands.2 Bustamante's fervid nature almost necessarily carried him over to the revolutionists when the crisis came in 1810. He organized a regiment under Morelos, and published his Campañas del Gen. F. M. Calleja in 1828; but his activity and criticism were best in other fields than military ones, and he experienced the trials and privations of a political outlaw before the completed revolution in 1821 suffered him to return to the capital, from which he had been excluded for nine years, only in due time to be imprisoned by Iturbide, and to be released upon that emperor's fall.

It was in the heat of the early days of the revolution that he began to make that record of its progress which was later published as his Cuadro histórico de la revolucion de la América Méxicana, Comenzada en 1810, in six volumes, between 1823 and 1832. The book, written from time to time as material accrued, is somewhat disjointed, and his variable states of mind as he went on make the book a rather curious study of a nature unstable, if not at times almost thrown off its balance, all of which perturbations enable Lorenzo de Zavala, in his Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de Megico (Paris, 1831), to accuse Bustamante of many slips and perversions, to say nothing of darker charges, which Bustamante was not slow in resenting. His sixth volume seems to have been suppressed, or at least it was not included in the "Segunda edicion aumentada," which appeared in five volumes in 1843-46. Bancroft's list (Mexico, i. p. xxxiii) shows a volume of MSS. which he says was intended by Bustamante to continue his Cuadro histórico; but he does not inform us whether it contains the matter which Bustamante included in what he published as a continuation, his História del Emperador D. Augustin de Iturbide (Mexico, 1846).3

Bancroft gives in no one place the bibliography of the revolutionary period of the North

1 Vol. i. pp. xxxii, etc.; and some characterizations, v. 804; where also he cites (p. 806) the account of Bustamante in Manuel Larrainzar's Algunas ideas sobre la historia.

2 Bustamante's diary, which was the basis of much of his printed works on contemporary events, was placed by him in the college at Za

catecas. His other MSS. fell into the charge of Andrade, Maximilian's collector; and when that emperor was shot, the collection was carried to Europe and sold, when Bancroft bought most of the MSS. (Mexico, v. 806).

* Bancroft, Mexico, iv. 825; v. 804.

American Spanish provinces, but the titles are included in the lists in the first volumes of his Mexico and Central America, and at intervals in the progress of the movements he gives long notes to the matter, as for instance where (Mexico, iv. 64) he discusses the mass of contemporary publications on the deposing of Iturrigaray. Of this last kind, the books of Juan Lopez Cancelada, the editor of the Gazeta de México,1 and among them chiefly his Verdad Salida y Buena Fé guardada (Cadiz, 1811), which was answered in a vindication of Iturrigaray by José Beye de Cisneros, and in Cancelada's reply, Conducta del Exmo. Senor Iturrigaray (Cadiz, 1812), we find the chief official documents on the fall of that ruler. He found another defender in Servando Tereso Mier y Guerra (pseud. José Guerra), who, having narrowly escaped arrest, fled to London and there published in 1813 his Historia de la Revolucion de la Nueva España (1808–1813), in which, while he defended Iturrigaray, he bitterly denounced Cancelada. He continued the story of the revolution down to the date of publication, and depended largely for the material for the period subsequent to his own escape upon the documentary evidence. As Mier went on in his narrative he swung to the republican side, and made Hidalgo his hero, which led to the distrust of Mier by Iturrigaray, so that, his allowance being stopped, he was put to straits. But a few copies of his book were distributed, as the bulk of the edition was lost on a vessel bound to Buenos Ayres.2 Bustamante's Martirologio de algunos de los primeros insurgentes (Mexico, 1841) is concerned with the revolutionary and later careers of those implicated against the viceroy in 1811.

Bancroft points out the difficulty of securing from contemporary documents very trustworthy testimony of the career of Hidalgo. The press was in the hands of the royalists, and did not hesitate to circulate false statements for political effect. Hidalgo's period has been treated among later writers in a single volume which was published of the Memorias para la historia de las Revoluciones de México (Mexico, 1869) by Anastacio Zerecero, a violent advocate of the revolution. Of the more comprehensive writers notice will be given later.

The earliest account of Mina's expedition in 1817 is in William Davis Robinson's Memoirs of the Mexican Revolution, in which the author made use of the journal of Brush, the commissary-general of Mina. Robinson knew the field, and had had some experience with Spanish methods in trading operations that brought him into the custody of the law, from which he escaped to tell all he could to injure the Spanish name. Some part of his denunciation was omitted in the Spanish translation, and Bustamante finds not a little to refute and something to add. Bancroft (Mexico, iv. 686) tells how he has collated the rival accounts, and gathered other details from different sources, in the account which he gives of the expedition (Ibid. iv. ch. 28).

The literature illustrative of the Iturbide period is extensive, and naturally groups itself round his own Memoirs, which, with an appendix of documents, was published in London in 1824.5 Beside the Historia of Bustamante, elsewhere mentioned, we have the Iturbide of Cárlos Navarro y Rodriguez (Madrid, 1869), a Spanish and monarchical view, and the Apuntes históricos sobre D. Augustin Iturbide of José Ramon Malo (Mexico, 1869), a companion of the emperor, and prompted to say what he could in his defence, as does José Joaquin Pesado in his El libertador de México (Mexico, 1872). When Iturbide's remains were removed in 1838 to the Cathedral in Mexico, José Ramon Pacheco made the Descripcion de la Solemnidad (published by order of President Herrera, Mexico, 1849) the vehicle of an interpretation of such a patriotic intent of Iturbide as was hardly recognized in his day.

1 Bancroft speaks of Diaz Calvillo's Noticias para la Historia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Mexico, 1812) as an emphasized rescript of the versions of events given in the Gazeta (Mexico, iv. 374). On the opposing journalistic phases of the movement in Spain at this time, see Ibid. iv. 450.

2 Bancroft's Mexico, iv. 452.

3 Mexico, iv. 287, where he gives a long list of miscellaneous references.

Philad., 1820; London, 1821; in Spanish, London, 1824.

5 Cf. Mémoires autographes (Paris, 1824), and Denkwürdigkeiten (Leipzig, 1824).

For the period following the consummation of the movement for independence, and through all the revolutionary changes, Bancroft's foot-notes still are the completest record of sources, and he occasionally masses his references, as in vol. v., pp. 67, 147, 249, 285, 344, etc.

The condition of Mexico since its independence was confirmed has been the subject of a few books of good character, which may supplement the story in Bancroft. Such are the Mexico of H. G. Ward (London, 1829), who was the representative of England in the capital in 1825-27; Brantz Mayer's Mexico as it was and as it is (Philad. 3d ed., 1847), Mr. Mayer having been the secretary of the American legation, 1841-42; the Die äusseren und inneren politischen Zustände der Republik von Mexico (Berlin, 1854, 1859) of Emil Karl Heinrich von Richthofen, at one time Prussian minister in Mexico, but he only slightingly follows the course of political events, giving rather a commentary on their results. The Mejico en 1842 of Luis Manuel del Rivero (Madrid, 1844) takes that date as a point to glance back over American history, not confining the survey, however, to the later period. The revolution which resulted temporarily in the placing of Maximilian on the throne produced, and was in part instigated by, sundry publications, which for those political ends ran over the course of Mexican independence.

The period of the presidency of Anastacio Bustamante, from 1836 to the elevation of Santa Anna, is covered in a somewhat impetuous way in C. M. Bustamante's El Gabinete (Mexico, 1842).

The period of Santa Anna, with his ups and downs, is traversed in part (1821-1833) in Juan Suarez y Navarro's Historia de México y del General Santa Anna (Mexico, 1850), the author being a partisan of that leader; and C. M. Bustamante also specially treats a later period in his Apuntes para la historia del gobierno de Santa Anna, 1841–44.1 The story of the revolution in the Central American provinces, with their later changeful destiny, is told in the third volume of Bancroft's Central America, with a full complement of references.