Hidalgo Leads Revolutionary Dress Rehearsal Against Spain

On Nov. 3, 1811, a Mexican on a mission of mercy pleaded with James Monroe, the American secretary of state, to save his brother revolutionaries from certain death.

Events a generation earlier in the faraway mother country had set the stage for rebellion in the Spanish colony. Upon his death in 1788, the competent monarch Carlos III was succeeded by Carlos IV, a certifiable moron whose queen became the real power behind the throne. She entrusted the ship of state to her boyfriend, who swiftly steered Spain into troubled waters.

The high price Mexico paid for this palace soap opera was an insufferable series of corrupt viceroys that picked the country clean. Appalled by such brazen theft as well as their exclusion from posts of power and prestige, the Creoles or New World Spaniards appointed themselves national saviors.

Meanwhile, a short-sighted alliance with France wound up with Napoleon installing his brother Joseph as king. In South America centuries of simmering resentment boiled over into open rebellion which finally reached Mexico in 1810.

Don Ignacio Allende, a captain in the royal army, painstakingly organized the Creole conspiracy. Relying mainly on dissatisfied junior officers, he planned a simple coup rather than a sweeping revolution. Leaving the fatally flawed Mexican system intact, the modest goal of the Creoles was merely to change the cast of characters at the top.

However, into the expanding plot Allende brought many civilians including an obscure parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo. Had the arrogant officer bothered to investigate his philosophy, he would have discovered that the padre had a radically different agenda.

With hundreds involved in the supposedly secret scheme, compromising leaks were inevitable. In September 1810, details of the imminent coup reached the wrong ears and orders were issued for the immediate arrest of the key conspirators. Captain Allende and several high ranking comrades escaped by the skin of their teeth and rode to warn Hidalgo.

A pillar of calm resolve in a sea of total panic, the priest knew exactly what to do. Mobilizing friends and relatives, he jailed every Spaniard in town, and at dawn on Sept. 16, 1810 rang the church bells to summon the people from the countryside.

Nothing so subversive as the word “independence” crossed Hidalgo