The Madison Administration and Mexico: Reinterpreting the Gutiérrez-Magee Raid of 1812–1813

J.C.A. Stagg

IN the summer of 1810 , the collapse of the Spanish-American empire seemed imminent. Since Napoleon's invasion of Spain in May 1808, French armies had advanced steadily throughout the Iberian peninsula and by February 1810 they had reached the outskirts of Cádiz. At that point the principal means of organized resistance to the French invasion, the Supreme Central Junta, was dissolved and its authority transferred to a Regency Council whose members assembled on the Isla de Léon near the port of Cádiz. As he reported these developments to Washington, the American chargé d'affaires, George W. Erving, predicted that the Spanish would make a last-ditch stand, but of Napoleon's final triumph he had no doubt. Accordingly, he made plans to return home. 1	1
The repercussions were soon felt in the New World. In April 1810, the cabildo of Caracas, anticipating that Joseph Bonaparte would soon consolidate his usurpation of the Spanish throne, rejected the authority of the Regency Council and established an autonomous junta to rule on behalf of Ferdinand VII, the legitimate Bourbon monarch imprisoned in France. In Washington, the administration of James Madison could hardly ignore these events, and the president and his secretary of state quickly concluded that the final crisis of Spanish authority in the New World was at hand.2 Their problem was how to respond. Beginning in June 1810, Madison dispatched agents to the Spanish colonies of Buenos Aires, Chile, Cuba, East and West Florida, Mexico, and Venezuela. These agents had varying assignments, but common to all was the administration's desire to acquire information on developments in these colonies, to spread sentiments of good will should they break with Madrid, and to assess prospects for expanding trade.3	2
Joel Roberts Poinsett in Chile became the best known of these agents, but of more immediate importance were the activities of those in the Spanish colonies bordering on, or adjacent to, the United States--Cuba, East and West Florida, and Mexico.4 Accounts of the missions undertaken by William Wykoff, Jr., George Mathews, John McKee, John Hamilton Robinson, and William Shaler have long been staple items in the narratives of how the United States established political relations with the colonies of the Spanish borderlands, and by the middle of the twentieth century historians had reached certain conclusions about the ends and means of American policy for that region. The consensus was that Madison exploited Spanish weakness by using agents to subvert colonial rule in the Floridas and Texas as a prelude to adding these provinces to the United States. American expansion along the Gulf Coast thus proceeded by methods that could not bear close scrutiny--secret agents, clandestine operations, filibusters, and the promotion of insurrection against a nation with which the republic was at peace. Indeed, some scholars have even seen in Madison's methods early "covert operations" of a sort not dissimilar to those associated with the role of the CIA in twentieth-century American foreign policy.5	. . .