“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun
Mao Tse Tung
Noted socialist historian C.L.R. James was correct in observing that armies do not simply fall from the sky but are rather the product of the culture that spawns them. However, being innocent of military history, he was wrong when he insisted that an army is “a miniature of the society that produces it.”[1] On the contrary, armies are often dramatically different from the societies that produce them. For example, democracies often have armies, but armies are seldom democracies. Although armies are often separate from, and sometimes hostile towards, the society from which they spring, they are nonetheless the product of that culture’s institutions and core values. In times of war or revolution those institutions and values are refracted through the prism of the military. Ultimately, it could be argued, the outcome of a revolution depends more on the nature of the military fighting it than on the ideology articulated by the revolutionary leadership or the inarticulate yearnings of the masses. This effect can be best exemplified by examining four different revolutions: the American; French; Haitian; and Mexican, each of which organized its armed forces differently, and seeing what, if any, effect these differences had on the final outcome of the revolutions.
After the ravages of the Thirty Years War and the series of religious conflicts that had rent Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, the emerging absolute kings of the Eighteenth Century sought for a less socially, and, more importantly, a less politically disruptive method of settling their disputes. They found it in the concept of “limited warfare,” which became the dominant military paradigm of the age.[2] Under this model the only people used in war were those who did not contribute to the economic well-being of the state, mainly the landless poor, the criminal, the aristocrat and the foreigner. With this in mind, raids into neighboring countries to “dragoon” men into a nation’s military became a vital source of troops, while another potent store of soldiers was found in literally recruiting them off the gallows, it being discovered that a man’s willingness to join the army increased dramatically when there was a noose around his neck. [3]
Such standing armies had great advantages and disadvantages, both for the governing class and for the governed alike. The rulers got small, relatively inexpensive militaries that followed orders and stayed out of politics while the people were more or less freed from the hardships of military service and allowed to get on with the business of their lives. The disadvantage, for the rulers was that such armies were, of necessity, small and rather rigid. They had to be brutally disciplined and constantly watched to prevent desertions which of course precluded such age old military practices as skirmishing or foraging since these operations allowed too many opportunities for soldiers to either escape or turn their weapons on their officers. Since their forces could not forage, commanders were tied to their supply lines and the mere threat to those lines would force a general to order a retreat. This resulted in the rather dance-like quality of 18th century warfare which saw armies advancing and withdrawing from one another, often without firing a shot.
The disadvantage of such armies for the average member of society was that, since the soldiers took orders without question, they formed the ruler’s chief bulwark against the ruled, thereby strangling political discourse in its crib. Liberal political philosophers were well aware of this, and the pages of the 18th century philosophes are awash with invective against standing armies. If the pen really were mightier than the sword then the18th century political intellectuals would have slain standing armies outright, but they found, to their chagrin, that institutions do not melt in vitriol and had to content themselves with epigrams..
There was, however, one group of thinkers whose opinions did have a bearing on the matter -- military intellectuals. While the economic and political philosophers of the 18th century were building their airy Utopias or their virtuous republics defended by stout yeoman militia, the practical men of war were undergoing their own philosophical revolution. Just as in the better known wrangles of the political and economic thinkers of the day, military thinkers fired salvos of books and pamphlets at one another in an fervent and often rancorous debate. Chief among these military philosophes were the French, whose armies had been rather roughly handled by the other armies of the day and who were itching for payback, and the most successful of this lot was the Comte Jacques de Guibert (1743-1790).[4] Although trained as a soldier from childhood and proud of his profession, the young nobleman was an ardent disciple of Montesquieu and, understanding full well the linkage between the military system of a country and its civil order, dreamed of making over the military, and through it France, in accordance with the ideals of liberty, equality and “natural” society. Towards this end he wrote his Essai general de tactique in 1772 which laid out the tactics for a nation in arms.[5] Judged by its impact on the outcome of the French Revolution it was one of the most important books of the era.
In in the finest traditions of the European coffeehouse intellectuals, from whom they drew the bulk of their ideology,[6] Colonial American rebel ideologues had no use for standing armies and firmly believed that, come the revolution, the American masses would rise up spontaneously and form themselves into effective militias which would easily sweep the hireling slaves of the British before them.[7] Feeding this fantasy were legions of homespun militia units which every town of any size or pretensions could boast. These units, whose members were often prominent in local politics, would meet sporadically, elect officers occasionally, bicker constantly over uniforms and pay and sometimes even drill.[8] In the first flush of enthusiasm that accompanied the outbreak of hostilities these Hectors turned out in fairly substantial numbers, but the novelty of the war quickly wore off and most discovered urgent matters that needed their attention elsewhere.[9] Writing from the perspective of the British Army, who had to face such soldiers, Sir John Fortescue notes that:
…so long as the quarrel with England meant no more for the Americans than town-meetings, demolition of houses, tarring and feathering of defenseless individuals, assaults on soldiers who were forbidden to defend themselves, and even shooting at convoys from behind walls--so long every man was a patriot; but when it came to taking as well as dealing blows the number of patriots was woefully diminished.[10]
Indeed, so scarce had patriots become that Washington was forced to beg Congress repeatedly for the funds to raise a traditional 18th century style standing army, the Continentals, recruited from the lower socio-economic strata of colonial society.[11] While it is true, as Charles Royster argues, that “poverty and revolutionary ideals were not mutually exclusive categories,”[12] it is equally true that affluence is also no bar to patriotic principles but, on the whole, the well-off seemed to have been better at resisting the temptation to act on those ideals, at least when it came to serving in the army.[13]
Far from being the miniature replica of society that C.R.L. James would have us believe, the Continental army was composed of America’s outcasts, and lead by its elite, with scarcely any representatives of the great middle. The chief sacrifice that the average yeoman farmer or small town tradesman was called on to make in support of the revolution was coming up with the money to pay someone else to fight it for him.[14] By 1778 the majority of the Concord militia, one of whose members most likely had fired the famous shot that started the war in the first place, was composed of out of town urban poor and blacks, drawn there by the prospect of pay.[15] The alienation of most Americans from “their” army is best exemplified by the sorry spectacle of Valley Forge where the unhappy soldiers were forced to starve and freeze in the midst of a countryside brimming over with food and warmth, none of which was offered to them until a timely loan from the Morris brothers of New Jersey allowed them to purchase what most revolutionary peoples throughout the world provide their defenders for free.
Fearful of what they came to call “this armed monster,”[16] those espousing Whig libertarian theory hoped for a quick victory because they mistrusted a standing army and were eager to disband it.[17] The soldiers, embittered by what they saw as the common people’s shameful hostility towards, and neglect of, the troops saw themselves as being alone in the struggle and solely responsible for the final victory. When that victory was at last won the soldiers were peremptorily dismissed and sent home, cheated of their pay, leaving their masters, the Colonial elite, to reap the fruits of the victory won with their blood and even robbed of their fair share of the glory that their sacrifices had bought.
Drawing on the rhetoric of the Great Awakening, republican apologists sought to depict the victory as providence’s vindication of America as the new Israel, a land chosen by God for greatness. The true hero, according to this ideology, was the native genius of the Americans, a spirit which enabled the people, ennobled by their civic virtue and natural martial prowess, to triumph over trained professionals. Whig libertarians, drawing inspiration from English Commonwealth political tradition, developed a hatred for the army that was not merely ideological but emotional. Disgusted by the brutality and commonness of army life, most republican idealists preferred to remember, with advantage, the contributions of the militia, whose importance to the war they inflated out of all semblance to reality.[18]
The practical effect of all this was that the American War of Independence was the most conservative of all the revolutions of the era. Although there was no shortage of populist sentiment among the lower classes and the rural poor, it had no voice since there was no nation in arms to compel the elite to share power, the populace had not been mobilized, and the pathetic and long suffering soldiers, few in numbers, despised by their countrymen and lacking any voice in shaping the country they had built, were quickly absorbed back into the underclass whence they had sprung. Even the attempt by some officers to capitalize on their service by forming the Society of Cincinnatus was quickly quashed. Since then the myth of the Minuteman has become an article of faith for most Americans and, despite the Founding Fathers’ well known antipathy towards standing armies, from Valley Forge to Baghdad, the majority of American wars have been fought by such forces.
American mythology aside, most military historians date the dawn of modern warfare, and modern political ideology, to 1793 and the wars of the French Revolution.[19] Like the other monarchs of the era, Louis XVI had a typical 18th century army of long- serving professionals, most of whom had been press-ganged into the service, or foreign mercenaries. Unlike other kings however, his was an army in turmoil. Ignominiously defeated by all and sundry during the various wars of the century, and starved for funds by the straightened circumstances of Louis’ finances, the soldiers were disaffected and the officers were intellectually galvanized. When the crisis arrived many soldiers went over to the revolution, and those officers who did not flee, helped form the core of the new Army of the Republic, using the writings of the Comte de Gilbert as their guide.[20]
The importance of this last point cannot be overemphasized. There had been popular armies in the past, armed rabble who were contemptuously swept from the battlefield by the discipline and mass firepower of professionals and forced to take to the hills and woods as guerrillas or bandits, but this time things would be different. For the first time the ardor of the masses could be harnessed by simple but effective tactics which made the most of the raw soldier’s strengths while minimizing his weaknesses.
Armed with slow loading, inaccurate, smoothbore flintlock muskets, most armies were forced to rely on precision-drilled troops maneuvering slowly in cumbersome lines to maximize firepower, protect against cavalry charges, and maintain discipline. Skirmishing was out of the question, not only because skirmishers were vulnerable to cavalry but because all but the most trusted soldiers, freed from the supervision of their officers and N.C.O.s, would take the opportunity to desert. Besides, the inaccuracy of the musket made the whole exercise rather pointless and wasteful of manpower.[21]
The French, on the other hand, with manpower to burn, and a motivated soldiery who could be relied on to return to the ranks when called, advanced in narrow, fast marching columns which required a minimum of drill to learn, behind clouds of skirmishers who, if they did not often hit the enemy, nevertheless obscured the advancing columns from the enemy in billows of gun smoke while making the enemy officers nervous since they were the chief targets. When the advancing columns arrived at the enemy position they would deploy into line, fire a volley, and then close with the bayonet. As often as not the excited troops would forget to fire and simply charged in with cold steel.[22]
Accustomed as we are to the accuracy of modern rifles it is often hard to appreciate how ineffective the musketry of the day was. Throughout the latter half of the 18th century the Prussian army conducted a series of tests in which massed units would fire volleys at close range into canvas panels six feet high and a hundred feet long and then count the number of hits anywhere on the panel. Despite the targets being considerable larger than a barn door most units were lucky to hit with 20 percent cent of their shots, which made getting shot a matter of bad luck more than anything else[23]. Under these circumstances the bayonet, or any other pointed object, was quite as effective as a musket, and many early revolutionary units were equipped largely with pikes. Armed with these, and their enthusiasm and numbers, the armies of the French Revolution swept the professional armies of Europe into the dust bin of history. Since they depended on the support of the people, the one thing absolute kings could not count on, this type of army could not be replicated by other European powers until they made the social reforms necessary to enlist the support of the masses. The only country to realize this, and act upon it in time to have an impact on the wars of the era was Prussia, whose magnificent army had been the envy of 18th century Europe. Ignominiously chased from the battlefield of Jena, the warrior nobles of Prussia applied themselves to figuring out what had gone wrong and fixing it. From 1806 until 1815 Prussia underwent a revolution as thoroughgoing as any of the era, but unlike the other revolutions this one was from the top down and it was by fiat.[24]
Whereas America’s war for independence was fought by a small, politically insignificant army of social outcasts, France became a nation in arms, the first one in modern history, and this, more than any ideological wrinkle, explains the radical nature of its revolution. Not only were large masses of the people actually in arms but, given the broad demographic sweep of the army, the bulk of the population not in the military knew someone who was and this sense of a shared struggle helped weld France into the first modern nation-state.[25]
With the whole population involved, to at least some extent, in the struggle, politics became a participatory sport in which anyone could, and often did, become involved. Revolutionary leaders could lead only for so long as the direction they were going was the one the people wanted to go in. If not, their careers tended to come to a sharp conclusion. While the revolution was busy chopping its head off, the army, in no way a miniature of the society, although indisputably a product of it, was just as busy crushing the armies of the crowned heads of Europe. In common with their American cousins, French intellectuals feared the growing power of the army, but unlike their American counterparts, they were powerless to do anything about it. Not only was the army the shield of the Republic against a hostile Europe, they performed a vital economic function as well by removing large numbers of men from the work force, thereby driving up wages for those who remained, while at the same time their conquests filled France’s coffers with booty. Finally there was the problem of reigning in the passions of a nation in arms. Once the genie was out of the bottle it was very difficult to put him back in.[26]
Like the American army of the War of Independence, the French revolutionary army saw themselves as being solely responsible for their victories, but unlike their American counterparts, they had the numbers and means to intervene in the political process. With France’s political process collapsing on itself, it was only a matter of time until the army, as the only functioning institution in being, stepped in to sort things out.
Fearing the loss of his power the Abbe Siryes was on the look out for a successful soldier to be his sword in the battle to remain on top. He had chosen and rejected several likely candidates before the luck of the draw fell to Napoleon. While Bonaparte had undeniable talents, it is equally clear that anyone short of a complete incompetent could command French armies of the day to victory and the war had a way of sorting out incompetents and bringing talented men into positions of power. Although the details would no doubt have been different, there would have been the Napoleonic wars, with or without Napoleon and the legacy of the French Revolution would have remained largely the same. If, as Hobsbawn assures us, the 19th century was largely a struggle for or against the principals of 1789 or the even more incendiary ones of 1793, it was the army, which came into its own in 1793,[27] and not the philosophes, which by giving voice to the masses, assured the survival of those principals and carried them to every corner of Europe.
When we move to Haiti we find a very different sort of civilization than that of colonial America, or France under the Ancien Régime. A slave society, ostensibly built for the capitalistic purpose of making money, Haiti had, by 1791, metastasized into a pathological society in the grip of a collective psychosis. There have been slave societies since the dawn of recorded history and, while all are based to some extent on violence or the threat of violence, most have not been gratuitously cruel. Slaves, being valuable property, were generally accorded at least some measure of rights and were not generally subject to capricious or unnecessary violence.
In Haiti, however, racism combined with boredom, self indulgence and moral degeneracy to produce a singularly sadistic culture filled, with pointless violence, most of which was economically unjustifiable and seemed to have been more directed towards amusing the masters than chastising the slaves.[28] No matter how inexpensive slaves were, and they were not all that cheap, shooting apples off their heads during drunken parties, or filling them with gun powder and blowing them up,[29] could have had very little positive effect on the remaining workforce, and fails capitalism’s chief ideological goal, which is to maximize profits while reducing costs. As Carolyn Fick points out, by 1789 the whole social fabric of the colonial regime was disintegrating, providing fertile ground in which revolutionary movements could take root.[30]
Although both the American and French revolutions were triggered by acts of popular violence, no doubt in part directed by low-level revolutionary organizers, and to some extent sustained by them, both ultimately had recourse to their countries’ military institutions to defend their insurrections and carry them to fruition. The slaves, however, had no military institutions to fall back on and had to create their own from scratch. Lacking the cultural infrastructure to produce or sustain conventional armies, they raised unconventional ones instead built around the natural leaders of their society, the commandeurs or slave trustee overseers, and the Maroons who were runaway slave desperados whose clandestine societies had existed in the hills and jungles of Haiti for generations. In a sense, as Fick points out, marronage became the movement of the masses.[31]
Guerrilla wars are a nightmare for conventional armies to fight, since they no sooner smash one revolutionary head than two more rear up somewhere else. But if this hydra-like quality makes this type of revolution difficult to fight, it also makes it difficult to lead since the lack of structure which is its strength in war is the chief impediment to the formation of a united revolutionary ideology upon which to build the peace. As the war rages on, each guerilla band and local commander is actuated by a different image of what victory looks like. In Haiti, some early leaders were willing to barter away the freedom of their followers for the enfranchisement of themselves and a few hundred of their cronies while the Platon insurrectionists would settle for nothing less than their own kingdom.[32] Many other guerillas started out, and no doubt remained, nothing more nor less than simple bandits motivated by no ideology more lofty than taking what they could grab.
But the guerillas were not the only forces in the field. Various interested parties such as the Spanish, the French Royalists, the British and the mulattos, to name but a few, raised and equipped more conventional uniformed armies with traditional chains of command, which were trained and equipped like other armies of the day and had their ranks filled with paid full-time professionals. While some of these units fought for the revolution and others against it, they all fought, ultimately, for their commanders and would, if ordered to do so, fire on whomever they were told to.[33]
Politics, no less than nature, abhors a vacuum, and it was only a matter of time before these warlords began seizing the reigns of power. Although the inarticulate cravings of the people for land of their own could, through the medium of the guerilla resistance, shape post revolutionary Haiti’s economic future, it was the Praetorianism of the warlords which dictated its political future.[34] Toussaint could, with the help of his army, make himself ruler of Haiti, but when he tried to send the former slaves back to the plantations he lost their support and, lacking that, lost his freedom and ultimately his life.
After Toussaint was gone and the French tried to reassert their control of Haiti, there arose one of the greatest “natural” revolutions of modern history. With almost no central command, and lead for the most part by nameless local commanders, Haiti won its independence. While in no way discounting the courage of the Haitian people, who fought heroically, the deciding factor in the war was undoubtly Yellow Fever, which probably accounted for more enemy soldiers than all of the rebel bands combined.[35] The French had demonstrated in the Vendee[36] that they knew how to fight guerillas, and on an island the size of Haiti, which, unlike Spain, could be isolated from outside help, they would have eventually won had it not been for the disease.
When the battles were over and the smoke had cleared, most of the revolutionaries happily went home to their newly-won plots of land, and left politics to others. The regular forces of the black generals, being the only military forces still in the field as well as being the only functioning social institutions going, seized power for their leaders and set Haiti on the path of military dictatorship which it has followed more or less, ever since.
The Haitian Revolution had two built-in ideologies to sustain it: ending slavery and providing land for the landless, which needed no revolutionary class to propagate. Mexico was not so lucky. A deeply divided culture, the Mexican revolutionary armies were as fragmented as the society from which they sprang and shared little in the way of a common ideology. In some ways it is fair to ask if Mexico even had a revolution or merely a breakdown of law and order and how one could tell the difference.
Following the disasters of the Seven Years War, Spain decided that its American colonies needed to be better protected and therefore ordered the creation of local armies capable of warding off foreign invaders. In Mexico the plan was to raise militia units composed of all castas, or racial groups, except Negroes and Indians, but local racial attitudes forced the authorities to raise segregated units instead. To add to the recruiting officers’ troubles, most upper-cast men had no wish to serve in any sort of militia, segregated or not, and therefore inducements in the form of exemptions from the civilian justice system, and from paying tribute, were proffered.[37]
While some Mexicans, usually drawn from the ranks of the petty criminals, trouble makers and nare-do-wells, falsified their race in order to get into militia units and thereby avoided the civil justice system and the payment of tribute many others, usually those with good jobs, used the same racial prejudices to avoid military service by claiming to be members of the pardos, coyotes or other traditionally exempt casts.[38] In this they were often abetted by their employers. In an effort to impress Madrid with their thrift, most viceroys had, from the outset, kept the military chronically under-funded, even for such necessities as pay and weapons, which led to disaffection among the officers and men. The resulting military was brutal, lawless and corrupt, and quickly collapsed in the face of the Hidalgo Revolt.[39] Had New Spain had a more efficient military in the first place, it is likely that the revolt could have been nipped in the bud, thereby saving Mexico ten years of pointless warfare and lawlessness.
Although historians can cite the moment the “revolution” began, and the leader who struck the spark that set Mexico ablaze with insurrection, the underlying causes remain obscure. There had been droughts and poor harvests in the years leading up to 1810 as well as social injustice of all sorts, and each social group had long lists of grievances, but these things had been going on for years without causing a revolution and would continue to go on long after the revolution was over. Besides there were no unifying ideologies or shared principles to unite the rebels as there had been in the other revolutions we have examined. Each group seems to have been out solely for what it could get for itself and one is tempted to believe that the uprisings occurred when they did simply because they could.
Just as a power vacuum had been created in Spain by Napoleon’s conquest of the country, which was filled by the guerillas, one was created in Mexico by the attempts of the autonomists to use the imperial crisis to further their own interests.[40] Into this vacuum stepped Father Hidalgo and his ragtag band of Indians. What ever the good father’s goals might have been it was clear from the first that a good part of his following was there for the looting. According to Christon Archer:
By 9 October 1810, the Marques del Zaral del Berrio, commander of Calleja’s advance guard, sighted an insurgent force of 40,000 to 50,000 against San Luis Potosi. They came by roads and through the barrancas loaded down with booty from robberies like a “swarm of ants” determined to incite the countryside to rebellion.[41]
Although the bulk of the insurgents were, at first, drawn from the ranks of the peasantry and workers as Virginia Guedea tactfully puts it:
Many of those who for one reason or another had not found a place within the social structure of New Spain--the marginalized of every class and condition--joined the insurgency and made their own imprint on the armed movement. These differences caused important contradictions within the insurgency.[42]
Although the Watts riots of the 1960’s or the Rodney King riot of 1992 may have had a political spark, once things got going the looting and burning was largely apolitical. While no doubt many Mexicans abhorred Spanish rule, robbing one’s neighbors seems a curious way of expressing that abhorrence. In Mexico City crime increased dramatically during the years of war, and murders, rapes and robberies of all sorts abounded in the climate of social disorder that the insurgency fostered.[43] In Jalapa, which boasted walled fortifications, the majority of plebeian inhabitants lived outside the protected precincts and fell easy victim to the “freedom fighters.”[44]
If law and order was ever to be reestablished Mexico was going to need an army, but the Army of New Spain, which had been build in the years leading up to the insurrection, had melted away in the face of the insurgent bands or had gone over to them en mass. The Mexican army, as opposed to the army of New Spain, was created by Viceroy Marques de Branciforte when he implemented a new policy calculated to appeal to the vanity and thirst for office of the wealthy merchants, miners, hacendados and other powerful men by allowing them the privilege of donating large sums of money to raise militia units in exchange for military commissions.[45]
Ten provincial militia brigades were established whose commanders had full charge of all military units in their districts, the power to mediate conflicts with the civil authorities and the right to appoint officers. This made the brigade commanders a powerful new force in regional politics and administration. With all the difficulties of communication that operating in a land controlled by guerillas entailed, these local commanders became increasingly autonomous and began following their own agendas. While some remained loyal and sought to create strong regional bases in order to suppress insurrection and maintain Spanish rule, others used their offices to grow rich and welded their troops into robber bands by distributing the booty of their raids to their men without reporting it to the civil authorities.[46]
Lacking any coherent political agenda, the guerilla bands had, by 1819 degenerated into little more than raiding parties dedicated to the theft of cattle and horses.[47] However the Royalists forces were in decline as well. In 1816 Spain stopped sending European troops to help stiffen the morale of the exhausted and discouraged Mexican units and this, combined with financial troubles which led to the Government failing to pay or equip the troops, further degraded morale.
The end, when it came, came suddenly. Ordered by the Viceroy to crush yet another rebellion in the south, the local commander, Colonel Agustin de Iturbide, a royalist officer, entered into talks with the guerillas instead and persuaded them to declare independence from Spain. Soon rebel cities and towns began flocking to join in the Plan of Iguala, as the Colonel’s independence program came to be called, and before long all major insurgent groups were united behind Iturbide.[48] Sensing the change in the wind, many royalist commanders quickly joined the new movement in order to protect their positions of power.[49] Faced with the new consensus the Spanish bowed to the inevitable and in July, 1821 Spain’s representative made things official by signing the Treaty of Cordoba which recognized the independence of the Mexican Empire with Iturbide as the new emperor.[50] His glorious reign lasted until 1823 when he was forced to abdicate and flee to Italy.
After ten years of fighting Mexico had independence and very little else. None of the social or economic problems which may have prompted the rebellion in the first place had been solved and, to make matters worse, the military system that had grown up to fight the insurgents became the defacto government of the country. Mexico became a culture of violence and instability with the people sunk in poverty and despair. Over the next century governments would come and go in Mexico City with bewildering rapidity leaving the day-to-day administration of the provinces in the hands of the caudillos, or military strongmen, a perfect case of the revolutionary actions of the people being refracted through the prism of the military institutions which in turn colored and transformed the civil culture.
Although a society’s military organization is dictated by its civilian organization and values it is not by any means a miniature version of that society. On the contrary, as we have seen, it is often radically different from the parent culture and has values and goals decidedly different from the society. Each of the revolutions we have examined sprang from dramatically different cultures and were fought by the military that those cultures produced. In turn, those militaries, by their natures, shaped the final outcomes of each revolution.
In America, which relied on a small professional army the results was a revolution, largely in the hands of the elite while in France, which rallied a nation in arms the revolutionary leaders lost control to the masses and eventually to the army. In Haiti the final victory was won by small professional armies backed up by the masses of part time revolutionaries who, once the victory was assured, returned home and left the professionals in possession of power. Mexico’s deeply divided culture produced either a deeply divided revolution or a chaotic period of lawlessness, depending on one’s point of view. With scattered bands of guerrillas in the field, the army had to become a scattered force of semi-autonomous personal armies leading to a culture of chronic decentralization and the rise of Cauldilloismo, the rule of locally powerful warlords. Each different sort of military producing, by their very natures, very different outcomes.
[1] C.R.L. James The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, (New York: Vintage Books, 1938) p. 306
[2] J.F.C. Fuller The Conduct of War, 1789-1961 (U.S.A.:, Minerva Press 1961) p. 15
[4] Robert S. Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic Warfare: The Theory of Military Tactics in Eighteenth Century France, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957) p. 106
[6] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, (Cambridge Massachusetts, London England: The Belknap Press Harvard University Press, 1992) p. 34
[8] Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World, ( New York: Hill & Wang, 1976) p. 60
[10] J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army (Macmillan and Co., Limited: London, 1911) Vol. III p. 200
[11] Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character 1775-1783.(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 34
[18] Edward Countryman, The American Revolution, (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003) p.135
[22] Charles Oman, Studies in the Napoleonic Wars, (London: Methuen & Co. 1929) p.87
[23] Peter Paret, , York and the Era of Prussian Reform 1806-1815, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 21
[27] E. J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1948, ( New York: Mentor Books, 1962) p. 74
[30] Carolyn E. Fick The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below. (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1990) p, 238
[35] Fortescue, Vol. IV, pt 1 p. 565
[36] Peter Paret, Internal War and Pacification; The Vendee, 1789-96. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961) p. 78
[37] Christon I. Archer, “Pardos, Indians, and the Army of New Spain: Inter-Relationships and Conflicts, 1780-1810,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 6, n. 2 p. 233
[38] Archer, “Army of New Spain,” p. 253
[39] Archer, “Army of New Spain,” p. 255
[40] Virginia Guedea, “The Process of Mexican Independence” American Historical Review Feb. 2000, p. 117
[41] Archer, “‘La Causal Buena’: The Counterinsurgency Army of New Spain and the Ten Years’ War” in Rank and Privilege: The Military and Society in Latin America (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1994). p.88
[43] Archer, “La Causa Buena” p. 100
[44] Archer, “La Causa Buena” p. 99
[45] Christon I. Archer, “ The Army of New Spain and the Wars of Independence, 1790-1821,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 61(4) 1981 p. 706
[46] Archer, “La Causa” p. 102
[47] Archer, , “La Causa” p. 102
[49] Archer, “Wars of Independence” p. 713
