CW-1:

The First Civil War, 1830-1842

LIBERAL PROJECTS:
Joel Roberts Poinsett

Overview
Real War
    Grounded Networks
    Control Networks
A Note on Then and Now
What They Called "Civil War"
   Liberal Projects
      J.R. Poinsett
      Levi Woodbury
      Francisco Morazán
      V. Gómez Farías
      Wm. Lyon Mackenzie
   Conservative Demagogues
      Andrew Jackson
      A. L. de Santa Anna
   Fight Scenes
      El Gallinero
      Puebla & Charleston
      Guanajuato & Bravo
      Loot & development
      Texas & Florida
Grounded Reaction
      Guatemala & Carrera
      Lower Canada
      The Huasteca, & North
      The Costa Grande
Outcomes, and Vision

They accused Poinsett of organizing a party to interfere in Mexican domestic politics. Of course he did. That was his object, wherever he went in the New World: to throw his weight on the side of what he considered to be popular government, against the forces of "aristocracy," against any English and Spanish influence that would block U.S. interests. When he went to Mexico in 1825, as U.S. minister, he found democratic elements on the scene, but they seemed to be fragmented and badly organized, struggling to use lodge organization as a means of mutual support. He lent them an ear, gave them advice, helped them connect up their organizations to the York-rite lodges out of Pennsylvania, and told himself that he was helping people who would make Mexico more like the United States. To explain this goal, he listed the causes of U.S. prosperity, centering on the essentials of political and economic liberalism:

liberal Institutions ably and faithfully administered
the liberty every man enjoys, to employ his time and his means, to the improvement of his own fortune, without the intervention of Government.

But then he elaborated with formulas that were designed to make equality and democracy safe for society:

a rigid adherence to the Constitution
a perfect devotion to the will of the people, constitutionally expressed
a strict and impartial administration of justice
the equality of all in the eye of the law
the universal elective franchise, which elevates the character of the mass of the people
and last not least, the abundant and cheap means of education which render the people capable of self Government.

Democracy yes, freedom yes, but also law, strictness, and education for character. Good "administration," but no "Government."

Poinsett's Mexican associates were people like Vicente Guerrero, and the politician Lorenzo Zavala (who tried to act as an intellectual power in the Guerrero camp). His enemies, those who accused him of interfering in ways improper for a foreigner, ran to the likes of Nicolás Bravo, Manuel Gómez Pedraza, and a host of patriot journalists. They accused him of some things that were completely true, other things that were somewhat true but not in the demonic way they pictured, and other things that were the complete opposite of his real intentions. They did not hit the point on which he was most guilty: that he was a conservative slaveowner. Many of them, after all, were conservatives, of a kind common in Mexican society.

The true:

Poinsett spoke out for the Monroe Doctrine, and against the transfer of Spanish territories (that is, Cuba or Puerto Rico) to any independent nations in the New World other than the U.S. (that is, to Mexico or Colombia). Part of the opposition to his political scheming seemed to come from the elements working for a Mexican invasion of Cuba. Though any such invasion would have to be a daring, possibly absurd venture, one Mexican regime had made a recent attempt to annex Central America, and Mexico did take Chiapas from Guatemala. Boundaries between the new Spanish American nations were vulnerable to military changes.
Poinsett transmitted to the Mexican government the U.S. interest in acquiring Texas.
He did interfere in politics, making himself an active participant in liberal party planning, and to an extent that undermined his influence.

The somewhat true:

He thought that he favored a society really different from any known to Mexican landholders and churchmen, a pluralistic society in which no one would exercise paternalistic authority over respectable free men. The lodges he sponsored would be an alternative kind of patronage machine. (As such, the Masons were also opposed by some Protestant moralists in the United States.) When his Mexican critics said that the lodges had produced a "continual struggle of families against families . . . and the loosening of all the most sacred ties of nature," they may have referred to quarrels between father and son over lodge membership itself, over political loyalties, and over participation in business. Some of that was part of social changes at work in many countries. It did not require any "outside interference." Within the United States, Poinsett was the kind of patrician politician who sponsored the efforts of less prosperous men to take up western lands, moving away from family "ties."

But the false:

Poinsett was not trying to "disorganize" Mexican society in order to weaken its powers of agricultural growth. When he described an opposing view that argued for rivalry, his critics simply chopped off his concluding "That's all wrong," and presented the rivalry idea as if it had been his. The practical content of this notion of agricultural rivalry was the conflict of interests over Cuba, plus the aggressive migration of U.S. slaveholders into Mexican Texas.

The opposition between "organic society" and "competitive society" was real. It was also oversimplified in the debates of the day. Many conservative leaders -- hacendados, planters, or authoritarian generals -- were greedy, ruthless competitors within the economy as they knew it. Many liberals, such as independent merchants and farmers, were quite ready to impose authority on labor. Individuals moved between the two extremes, within Mexico, as also within the United States. The flux included, among other things, the competition among British, French, and U.S. merchant interests in Mexico. Movement away from the "organic" was already at work, before Poinsett arrived, and separate from anything he did.

A potential new "class" was growing up, across national lines: a network of middling editors, professionals,
tradesmen, small landowners, and city workers, together with larger-scale operators who thought that they could benefit from a new party. Some individuals within this network gave genuine allegiance to an ideal of political democracy.

This network opened further possibilities.

One was long-range: that its very opportunism would make it sensitive to economic trends, therefore open to modern, productive industry.
Another was short-range, and dangerous: that the large numbers of land-hungry U.S. citizens in this new class, compared with the smaller number of liberals in other countries, would dominate Canadian and Mexican democrats, drawing them into the arms of U.S. expansionists. The movement of white populations from older areas helped to mobilize democratic political machines. In the military sphere, this popular participation supported militia units, ready to uproot Indian settlements, even when regular army men were unavailable or squeamish.

Here the Cuba question revealed the deepest flaw in Poinsett's liberalism. He knew that Mexico and Colombia, in themselves, had hardly the forces to defeat Spanish arms in the island. The forces that they did command might have little means for organizing internal resistance there. Still, that is what Poinsett feared: "What I most dread is that the blacks may be armed and used as auxiliaries by one or both parties." In 1822, just before he left for a first visit to Mexico, he served on a special court in Charleston, which sat on the cases of people taken up in the Denmark Vesey slave plot. It put 37 to death.

This limit on liberalism is also a limit on any "liberal" interpretation of the events in Poinsett's later life:

Supporting Andrew Jackson, he organized Unionist elements in South Carolina during the Nullification crisis of 1832-1833. Here, his language against "aristocratic" Nullifiers like John C. Calhoun was much the same as his language against Mexican "monarchists" like Lucas Alamán. Thus, Jackson's opposition to Nullification was in no way an opposition to slavery, or even to slaveholder leadership. Rather, they stood for a Southern leadership that would participate aggressively in the outside world.
As secretary of war under Van Buren, 1837-1841, he pushed for practical road networks to coordinate troop movements to the Indian frontier. While this stood in contrast to the visionary railroad proposals of General Gaines, it showed Poinsett as a worker in the building of control networks.

References:

Ernesto González Pedrero, País de un solo hombre: el México de Santa Anna, I: La Ronda de los contrarios (1993)
William Ray Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States Concerning the Independence of the Latin-American Nations (1925)
William R. Manning, "La misión de Poinsett a México," Revista americana de derecho internacional (1913)
Joel Roberts Poinsett, Contestación del ministro americano a la escitativa de la Legislatura del estado de México (1829)
Joel Roberts Poinsett, The Present Political State of Mexico: a previous unpublished confidential report . . . in 1822, ed. L. Smith Lee (1976)
Joel Roberts Poinsett, Esposición de la conducta política de los Estados-Unidos, para con las nuevas repúblicas de América (1827)
Biography of Poinsett, in Charles Lyon Chandler Papers, University of North Carolina.
José Fuentes Mares, Poinsett: Historia de una gran intriga (1951)

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CW-1:

The First Civil War, 1830-1842

LIBERAL PROJECTS: Joel Roberts Poinsett

LIBERAL PROJECTS:
Joel Roberts Poinsett