MEXICO’S ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE 173
cial revolution. On the other hand, these reforms
did not go far enough to redress the fundamental
grievances of Hidalgo’s peasant and working-class
followers in regions like the Bajío and Jalisco: land-
lessness, starvation wages and high rents, lack
of tenant security, and the monopoly of grain by
profi teering landowners. In the absence of a clearly
defi ned program of structural social and economic
reform, Hidalgo’s followers vented their rage at
an intolerable situation by killing Spaniards and
plundering the properties of creoles and peninsu-
lars alike.
Hidalgo proved unable to weld his rebel horde
into a disciplined army or to capitalize on his early
victories. Having defeated a royalist army near
Mexico City, he camped outside the city for three
days and then, after his demand for its surrender
was rejected, inexplicably withdrew from the al-
most defenseless capital without attacking. It has
been suggested that he feared a repetition of the
atrocities that followed earlier victories or that he
believed that he could not hold the great city with-
out the support of the local population, which,
according to historian Eric Van Young, doomed
Hidalgo’s movement to defeat. But the peasantry
of the central highlands, who still possessed com-
munal lands that satisfi ed their minimal needs and
supplemented their meager crops by wage labor
on large haciendas, also did not rally to Hidalgo’s
cause. With his army melting away through deser-
tions, Hidalgo retreated toward the Bajío. Driven
out of Guanajuato by royalist forces, Hidalgo and
other rebel leaders fl ed northward, hoping to es-
tablish new bases for their movement in Coahuila
and Texas. Less than one year after his revolt had
begun, Hidalgo was captured as he fl ed toward the
U.S. border, condemned as a heretic and subver-
sive by an inquisitorial court, and executed by a
fi ring squad.
The defeat and death of Hidalgo did not end
the insurrection he had begun. The fi res of revolt
continued to smolder over vast areas of Mexico.
New leaders arose who learned from the failure of
Hidalgo’s tactics. Many, abandoning the effort to
defeat the royalist forces with their superior arms
and training in conventional warfare, developed a
fl exible and mobile guerrilla style of fi ghting. The
Spaniards themselves had effectively employed
guerrilla warfare—a war of swift movement by
small units that strike and fl ee—in their struggle
against Napoleon, taking advantage of a familiar
terrain and the support of rural populations to foil
pursuit and repression. The new Mexican rebel
strategy was not to win a quick victory but to ex-
haust the enemy and undermine his social and eco-
nomic base by pillaging the stores and haciendas of
his elite allies, disrupting trade, and creating war
weariness and hostility toward an increasingly ar-
bitrary colonial regime.
Following Hidalgo’s death, a mestizo priest,
José María Morelos, assumed supreme command
of the revolutionary movement. Morelos had min-
istered to poor congregations in the hot, humid
Pacifi c lowlands of Michoacán before offering his
services to Hidalgo, who asked him to organize in-
surrection in that area. Economic and social con-
ditions in the coastal lowlands region bore some
resemblance to those of the Bajío; its principal in-
dustries, sugar, cotton, and indigo, were in decline
as a result of competition from regions closer to
highland markets and from imported cloth. As a
result, the position of estate tenants and laborers
had become increasingly dependent and insecure.
The material conditions of indigenous villagers
had also deteriorated as a result of the renting of
community lands by village leaders to outsiders, a
practice that left many families without the mini-
mal land needed for subsistence.
The discontent generated by these conditions
provided Morelos and his insurgent movement
with a mass base in the coastal lowlands. More-
los was sensitive to the problems and needs of the
area’s rural folk. Like Hidalgo, he ordered an end
to slavery and tribute. He also ended the rental of
indigenous community lands and abolished the
community treasuries (cajas de comunidad ), whose
funds were often misused by village notables or
drained off by royal offi cials; henceforth, the villag-
ers were to keep the proceeds of their labor. Morelos
also extended Hidalgo’s program of social reform
by prohibiting all forced labor and forbidding the
use of all racial terms except gachupines, applied to
the hated peninsular Spaniards. There seems little
doubt that in principle Morelos favored a radical