Jose Maria Morelos

Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon was born on September 30, 1765, in Valladolid, the colonial city in the intendancy of Michoacan that was later renamed Morelia in his honor ^[1]. His father, Manuel Morelos, worked as a carpenter, and his mother, Juana Maria Perez Pavon, was the daughter of a schoolteacher. The family belonged to the mixed race population of New Spain, and colonial records described Morelos in varying terms, a reminder of how fluid such classifications could be in practice ^[2].

His father's death left the household in difficulty, and as a boy Morelos went to work. For roughly a decade he labored on an uncle's hacienda near Apatzingan and drove mule trains along the trade route between Mexico City and the port of Acapulco ^[2]. The years he spent moving goods through the hot country of the south gave him a detailed knowledge of the terrain, the roads, and the people of the region, knowledge that later proved decisive when he campaigned across the same ground as a rebel commander.

At about the age of 25, older than most of his classmates, Morelos entered the Colegio de San Nicolas in Valladolid, where the rector at the time was Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest who would launch the independence movement in 1810 ^[1]. Morelos continued his studies at the Tridentine Seminary in Valladolid and was ordained a priest in 1797. He served poor rural parishes, most notably Caracuaro and Nocupetaro in the Michoacan lowlands, where he lived on a modest income among parishioners of little means ^[3].

When Hidalgo raised the standard of revolt at Dolores in September 1810, Morelos left his parish to meet him. The two men conferred in October near Charo and Indaparapeo, and Hidalgo, rather than taking his former student along as a chaplain, commissioned him to raise forces in the south and seize the port of Acapulco, the terminus of the Manila trade ^[1]. Morelos set out with roughly two dozen poorly armed men.

What followed revealed an unusual military talent. Where Hidalgo led enormous, loosely organized crowds that royalist regulars eventually broke apart, Morelos built smaller, disciplined, and well supplied units, recruiting local farmers, muleteers, and workers from the coastal lowlands ^[4]. Among the officers who joined him were Hermenegildo Galeana, the Bravo family of landowners, and Vicente Guerrero, who would carry the insurgency forward after Morelos was gone ^[3].

Hidalgo was captured and executed in 1811, and leadership of the insurgent cause passed in practice to Morelos, whose southern army was by then the most effective rebel force in New Spain. Anyone asking who was Jose Maria Morelos at the end of 1811 would have received a clear answer from the viceregal government in Mexico City: he was the most dangerous man in the colony ^[4].

Between 1810 and 1813 Morelos conducted several campaigns that brought much of southern New Spain under insurgent control. He took towns across the modern states of Guerrero, Morelos, Michoacan, and Oaxaca, threatening the roads that linked Mexico City to both coasts ^[1]. The most celebrated episode came at Cuautla, south of the capital, where the royalist commander Felix Maria Calleja surrounded the insurgent garrison in February 1812. Morelos held the town for 72 days against bombardment, assault, hunger, and disease, and on the night of May 2, 1812, he led his surviving forces out through the siege lines in a breakout that preserved his army ^[2].

Cuautla cost the insurgents dearly, but the defense made Morelos famous throughout the Spanish world and embarrassed a royalist army that had expected a quick victory. He rebuilt his forces within months. In November 1812 he stormed Oaxaca, one of the wealthiest cities in the south, capturing artillery, supplies, and funds that financed the next phase of the war ^[4]. In April 1813 he finally took Acapulco, completing the assignment Hidalgo had given him more than two years earlier, although the port's fortress of San Diego held out until August ^[1].

Among the most cited Jose Maria Morelos facts is his preference for organization over mass. He kept his armies small enough to feed and move quickly, insisted on training and discipline, and paid attention to logistics in a way few insurgent leaders matched ^[3]. Historians have also noted his severity: like his royalist opponents, he ordered executions of prisoners in reprisal, a reflection of how brutal the war in New Spain had become on both sides ^[4].

Morelos understood that the insurgency needed a political foundation, not just battlefield victories. In September 1813 he convened a congress of insurgent delegates at Chilpancingo, in the mountains of the south. There he presented a document known as the Sentimientos de la Nacion, a set of 23 points that ranked among the most important political statements of the independence era ^[5]. It declared that America was free and independent of Spain, that sovereignty came from the people, that slavery and the caste distinctions of colonial society should be abolished forever, and that laws should moderate the extremes of wealth and poverty ^[5].

On November 6, 1813, the congress issued a formal declaration of independence, breaking with the earlier insurgent position that the movement fought in the name of the deposed Spanish king Ferdinand VII ^[1]. Morelos accepted the title Siervo de la Nacion, Servant of the Nation, refusing grander designations that others proposed. In October 1814, with royalist armies pressing the congress from town to town, the delegates promulgated the Constitution of Apatzingan, the first constitution written for an independent Mexico, though the insurgents never controlled enough territory to put it into effect ^[6].

The political achievement carried a military price. Subordinating himself to the congress, Morelos spent much of 1814 and 1815 escorting the wandering legislature instead of campaigning freely, while Calleja, now viceroy, methodically recovered the south. A failed insurgent assault on Valladolid in late 1813, where a young royalist officer named Agustin de Iturbide distinguished himself, marked the turning point, and Morelos never regained the initiative ^[4].

As a Catholic priest Morelos was bound to celibacy, but like a number of rural clergy of his era he fathered children. The best documented was Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, born in 1803 to Brigida Almonte in Nocupetaro, who accompanied his father during parts of the war as a boy and later became a general, diplomat, and conservative politician in independent Mexico ^[2]. Morelos arranged for the boy's education and acknowledged responsibility for him, an aspect of the Jose Maria Morelos biography that his contemporaries knew and that the Inquisition later used against him.

Those who dealt with Morelos described a stocky, energetic man who suffered from severe headaches and habitually wore a kerchief tied around his head, the image preserved in nearly every portrait made of him since ^[3]. He was practical rather than theoretical, more comfortable with logistics, terrain, and men than with abstract doctrine, yet the Sentimientos de la Nacion shows he had absorbed the political currents of his age and could state them in plain, forceful language ^[5].

By late 1815 the insurgency was collapsing into scattered guerrilla bands. In November, while escorting the congress from Uruapan toward Tehuacan, Morelos fought a rearguard action at Temalaca in present day Guerrero to allow the delegates to escape. He was captured on November 5, 1815, and taken in chains to Mexico City ^[1].

His trial was a double proceeding. A joint ecclesiastical and viceregal tribunal condemned him for treason, and the Inquisition tried him for heresy, stripping him of his priesthood in a public ceremony of degradation ^[6]. Under interrogation he answered with a mixture of candor and evasion, accepting responsibility for his own acts while giving little away that could harm insurgents still in the field. On December 22, 1815, he was taken to San Cristobal Ecatepec, north of Mexico City, and executed by firing squad ^[1]. The viceroy chose the isolated location to avoid public demonstrations in the capital.

With his death the war lost its last commander of national stature. The independence movement survived in the guerrilla campaigns of Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria until 1821, when Iturbide, the royalist officer who had helped defeat Morelos at Valladolid, changed sides and completed the separation from Spain ^[4].

Few figures occupy a larger place in Mexican national memory. In 1828 Valladolid was renamed Morelia to honor its most famous son, and in 1869 the state of Morelos was created and named for him ^[1]. His remains rest beneath the Angel of Independence monument in Mexico City with those of the other insurgent founders. His face has appeared on Mexican coins and banknotes for generations, and a colossal statue of him stands on the island of Janitzio in Lake Patzcuaro.

Historians rank the Jose Maria Morelos achievements above those of any other leader of the first phase of the independence war. He converted a rout into an organized movement, won campaigns against professional armies, and gave the cause a written political program whose central ideas, popular sovereignty, the end of slavery, and legal equality regardless of ancestry, passed into the constitutional tradition of the Mexican republic ^[5]. The 1814 Constitution of Apatzingan never governed a functioning state, yet later Mexican charters echoed its principles ^[6].

His reputation has also been examined critically. Scholars note the reprisal executions he ordered and debate how much of the Chilpancingo program he could realistically have implemented ^[4]. Even so, the trajectory from mule driver to parish priest to Servant of the Nation remains one of the most remarkable in the history of the Americas, and it explains why his name is fixed to a state, a city, and countless streets and schools across Mexico ^[3].