Tiburcio Campe landed in Mexico in 1824, fleeing from political retaliation in Cuba. A staunch liberal who had abandoned Spain in 1814 after the absolutist restoration, he had also seen the dream of a Spanish constitutional monarchy fade again after Ferdinand VII overthrew the Cádiz regime in 1823.
Meanwhile, New Spain had declared its independence in 1821, after Agustín de Iturbide negotiated the Plan de Iguala with revolutionary and royalist leaders. The plan was a political pact that advocated for what it called the “three guarantees”: the preservation of Catholic religion, the protection of independence from Spain, and the promotion of the union between Spaniards and Americanos. The prospect of protecting their family and business interests and the promise of becoming part of the nation after pledging allegiance to the new government inspired many peninsulares to stay in the former New Spain, or to move there. Thus, Campe saw Mexico as an ideal place to start over, a place where the 1812 Cádiz constitutionalist project that promoted the union between Americanos and Spaniards could be fulfilled.
Despite these high hopes, Campe's dream was shattered again in 1827, with a series of fractious anti-Spaniard campaigns demanding the expulsion of peninsulares. Campe fled from Mexico to New Orleans, a city that had turned into a haven for exiles during the years of revolutions. Once in the United States, Campe claimed that the former New Spain was a “huge disappointment to constitutionalists” who sought refuge in “the countries that proclaimed themselves as the promised land of political freedom.”Footnote 1 In the wake of his displacement, he founded El Español, a newspaper published in New Orleans from 1829 to 1830 that advocated for Spanish military reconquest, the Cádiz citizenship regime, and the restoration of monarchical rule in Mexico.
This article analyzes Tiburcio Campe's El Español as a brief yet concerted effort by exiled Spanish liberals in New Orleans that drew on the Cádiz constitutional experiment to demand the return of imperial constitutionalism and the overthrow of the Mexican republican project that emphasized the antagonism between Spaniards and Americanos. The article has two arguments. First, I claim that personal experiences of trauma associated with the rise of exclusionary policies within the new republics led exiled Spanish liberals, such as Campe, to revive ideas of imperial legitimacy. In brief, Spanish liberals’ frustrations with the Mexican Republic and their exile to New Orleans transformed them into advocates of empire. Second, I state that exile in the United States encouraged émigrés to participate in a transatlantic Hispanophone public sphere, facilitating unexpected alliances with Spanish officials in North America, the Caribbean, and Spain.Footnote 2 In the late 1820s, the interests of Spanish liberal exiles in New Orleans and the absolutist imperial government coincided, as both groups aimed to promote Spanish patriotism, collect information from the new republics, and defend pro-monarchical endeavors. Thus, mirroring the time of the Haitian Revolution, exiles turned the United States into a hub where they could discuss the fate of the revolutions, plans of monarchical reconquest, and models of imperial rule.Footnote 3
As a historical resource, El Español provides a privileged window into US-based exiles’ calls to reestablish monarchical rule in the late 1820s.Footnote 4 An in-depth reading of this newspaper shows how the experience of exile in the United States affected Spanish liberals who had put their hopes in the republics, only to see their aspirations crushed by growing anti-Spanish sentiment. The case of Mexico was paradigmatic. Other republics decreed expulsion laws, as Colombia did in 1823, but Mexico had declared its independence on the promise of the union between Spaniards and Americanos. These promises inspired Spanish liberals such as Campe to believe that Mexico could be an “asylum that [would] save them from misery” and a place where Spaniards who supported independence had guarantees to be part of the political nation.Footnote 5 Therefore, disappointment with the republic, following on their expulsion and subsequent exile in the United States, turned Spanish liberal émigrés into monarchists once again. Thus, as soon as they arrived in the United States, Campe and other émigrés allied with Spanish consuls and authorities to give voice to what Rafael Rojas has called a feeling of “republican melancholy,” a deep sense of dissatisfaction among those frustrated with the crises of republics such as Colombia and Mexico in the late 1820s.Footnote 6
Likewise, analyzing El Español illuminates how the debates regarding political and racial equality shaped the political agenda of émigrés. The newspaper reveals that discussions concerning these issues revolved around two opposing poles: equality of all people born on American soil regardless of race, and equality for white people irrespective of birthplace. The Mexican Republic's instigation of ethnic conflict against the Spaniards, and its promotion of abolitionist policies in Mexico and the Caribbean were pivotal drivers of Campe's pro-monarchical stance. Campe's vision of empire mirrored Cádiz's definition of citizenship, which secured equality for Spaniards, Spanish Americans, and indigenous people. Moreover, Campe advocated for the equal application of the law, criticizing the Mexican Republic for exempting Texas from antislavery laws. At the same time, Campe embodied the limits of Spanish imperial constitutionalism. Looking to preserve slavery and racial hierarchies, he contradicted his own calls for equality, proposing to limit the franchise for pardos and suggesting measures modeled on policies restricting free Blacks’ movement within the southern United States. In doing so, Campe embraced a model of imperial constitutionalism that sought to safeguard Spaniards’ political and racial preeminence and at the same time stop the advancement of antislavery sentiment and slave revolts in the Caribbean.Footnote 7
Examining publications such as El Español and the trajectory of émigrés such as Campe contributes to the study of exile politics in Latin America. Historiography has shown that exiles played a crucial role from afar in their own countries’ politics after the Spanish American revolutions by crafting discourses of national identity and developing political relationships with their host countries’ governments.Footnote 8 Additionally, Edward Blumenthal and Romy Sánchez have pointed out that studying exile politics allows us to understand the consolidation of state formation and political belonging within the new nation-states and the remaining empires throughout the Americas.Footnote 9 Within this field of publications, El Español provides a particular case that allows us to enter into exiles’ experiences and worldviews. Exiles such as Campe added to the relegitimization of imperial rule in the Americas precisely because they had experienced forced deracination from the new republics. Instead of seeking to participate in Mexico's politics by crafting discourses of republican national belonging, these exiles sought to recover liberal conceptions of imperial citizenship to criticize the republic's exclusionary policies and promote a solid sense of Spanish patriotism.
This article also illuminates the role of exiles in expanding counterrevolutionaries’ range of action in the Atlantic World. The Age of Revolutions turned political migration into a mass phenomenon, creating a generational zeitgeist in which revolutionaries and royalists traveled abroad to escape retaliation and build support for their causes.Footnote 10 Historians have examined how exiled revolutionary writers founded communities and promoted insurgent causes in the transatlantic public sphere in such cities as Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, London, Bordeaux, and Paris, among others.Footnote 11 These communities shaped notions of identity associated with their places of origin and their relationships with other Spanish speakers in their host societies and abroad.
However, the role of monarchical advocates in the Atlantic World, and especially within the United States, has been relatively less examined. Simeon Simeonov and Tyson Reeder have analyzed how Spanish and Portuguese diplomats sought to establish alliances with United States’ authorities in efforts to sustain imperial sovereignty in the Americas.Footnote 12 This article adds to these two historiographies by revealing how the arrival of Campe and other exiles opened a path to establishing new connections among Spanish-speaking communities, imperial authorities in Madrid and Havana, and Spanish representatives in the United States. Through these alliances, exiles propagated their message against republican exclusionary policies in the transatlantic Hispanophone public sphere, revealing that the United States was an arena where revolutionaries and royalists could envision republican and imperial endeavors.
Last, studying the actions of exiles such as Campe allows us to understand the persistence of pro-monarchical discourses in the Atlantic World after the defeat of royalist troops in Spanish America. Pro-monarchical publications in the United States have been most often labeled as propaganda without exploring the novelty and gradations of the political ideas expressed in depth.Footnote 13 However, historians such as Tomás Straka and Alexander Chaparro have emphasized the necessity of exploring pro-monarchical publications on their own terms.Footnote 14 Throughout the Spanish American revolutions, royalist authors published newspapers to legitimize and defend an order under threat.Footnote 15
However, pro-monarchical publications were not monolithic. Spanish liberal exiles also published widely in diverse locales such as London and Paris to defend the constitutional cause, playing a crucial role in promoting liberalism and forming political networks across the Atlantic World.Footnote 16 Furthermore, traumatic experiences of exile led some Spanish liberals to collaborate with the Spanish American cause.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, analyzing El Español exposes how exiled Spanish liberals began to team up again with imperial authorities in the late 1820s. While exile from Spain motivated some Spanish liberals to join the revolutionaries, expulsion from the new republics encouraged others to reimagine their understandings of Spanish imperial history and to promote the empire as the only guarantor of political stability and racial hierarchies.
This article has four parts. The first part explains developments in Mexico that led to the expulsion of Campe and thousands of other Spaniards. It delves into how discussions regarding political equality shaped revolutionary and post-revolutionary New Spain. The second part focuses on how the United States became an arena of transatlantic political combat for exiles, highlighting the importance of émigrés in New Orleans, Campe's alliances with Spanish authorities, and the newspaper's reception in diverse locales in the Atlantic World. The third part explores the ideas of El Español. The dissolution of the pacts that granted political equality to Spaniards and Americanos in Mexico inspired El Español to urge revival of the Cádiz imperial constitutional project. Campe's project of empire contained its own limits and contradictions, however, and these are the subject of the fourth section. El Español's reaction to Mexican abolitionism and the political alliances between Haiti and the Mexican Republic underscores how Spanish liberalism nevertheless maintained slavery and white supremacy as a critical component of Spanish imperial rule.
Political Equality and the Expulsion of Spaniards from the Mexican Republic
Before he traveled to Mexico, Tiburcio Campe had a prolific career as a political writer and publisher within the Spanish monarchy's territories. He began his career as an editor in Cádiz, where he published the newspaper Duende de los Cafés in 1813.Footnote 18 After 1814, Campe traveled to Cuba, probably running from absolutists’ retaliations.Footnote 19 In Havana he acquired a printing press, resuming his journalistic efforts during Spain's Trienio Liberal (1820-23). He published the newspapers El Esquife Arranchador, Redactor General, and El Español Libre, in which Campe accused Cuban authorities of insufficiently defending the constitution.Footnote 20 Campe's fate changed once again after the Trienio. Facing persecution from absolutist authorities, he abandoned Cuba in 1824 and headed for Mexico. He had several reasons. First, he believed that he would find asylum in Mexico. Second, Mexico was a Spanish-speaking country. Last, he thought that Mexican rulers would not be interested in persecuting him or other Spanish liberals.Footnote 21
Campe had good reasons for his expectations. In 1821, Mexico had declared its independence from Spain after the restoration of the 1812 Cádiz Constitution created many uncertainties within New Spain's population. The Cádiz charter granted citizenship to male Spaniards, Spanish Americans, and indigenous people but preserved slavery and limited citizenship for free Blacks.Footnote 22 Insurgent leaders such as Vicente Guerrero, a pardo officer, and Guadalupe Victoria were opposed to the constitutional's racial hierarchy, especially since many of their troops were pardos and indigenous people.Footnote 23 Furthermore, the Cortes’ opposition to granting home rule to New Spain discouraged Novohispanic elites from supporting the charter.Footnote 24 Last, liberals’ anticlerical stance caused concern among priests and even royalists who believed that Mexico's allegiance to Catholicism was an essential aspect of the nation.Footnote 25
Aware of these concerns, Agustín de Iturbide, a creole colonel from the royal armies, decided to negotiate with both sides. He formed the Trigarante Army with Guerrero and other revolutionary leaders to entrench the three guarantees.Footnote 26 Iturbide believed the Cádiz Constitution was unsuitable for Mexico and urged New Spain to constitute itself into a nation, declare independence, and temporarily accept the charter while drafting a new constitution.Footnote 27 The Plan de Iguala and the Treaty of Córdova would pave the way for the founding of a constitutional monarchy based on the ideals of independence, union between Spaniards and Americanos regardless of their origin, and the defense of the Catholic religion.Footnote 28
It seemed at the time that Mexico could become a territory where Spaniards and Americanos could exist under the aegis of a constitutional government. Spaniards had many reasons to stay. Many of them were deeply engaged in New Spain's economic and political affairs, with some of them even extending loans to the emerging Mexican state.Footnote 29 Furthermore, Guerrero and Iturbide promised the Spaniards that they would respect their properties and lives, while the Plan de Iguala and the Treaty of Córdoba offered them recognition as part of the political nation on condition they swear loyalty to the new Mexican government.Footnote 30 Although the Mexican constitutional monarchy fell in 1823, the Mexican republican constitution of 1824 “was modeled on the Hispanic Constitution of 1812.”Footnote 31 This constitution proclaimed a federal, presidentialist, and republican regime in which the states made decisions regarding issues of citizenship and suffrage. In this respect, many state constitutions proclaimed that people living in their territory were citizens.Footnote 32
His hope renewed by these developments, Tiburcio Campe lived in Mexico between 1824 and 1828, working as a merchant, a comic, a craftsman, and a publisher.Footnote 33 However, he did not set aside his Spanish patriotism. For instance, he accompanied the troops who surrendered at the Castle of San Juan de Ulúa, which was the last Spanish stronghold in Mexico.Footnote 34 Despite this, Campe voted with his feet—by staying. He had found asylum in Mexico, ”a country that enthusiastically supports freedom and protects the wretched.”Footnote 35
In subsequent years, anti-Spanish sentiment increased in Mexico, crushing Spaniards’ hopes for equality and safety. Years of insurgent struggle against royalist forces, calls to remove Spaniards from bureaucratic positions, and Spain's rejection of Mexico's independence contributed to this sentiment. Furthermore, the discovery of a conspiracy to restore Spanish monarchical rule in 1827, and conflicts between two Masonic lodges, the Yorkinos and the Escoceses, intensified the animosity against Spaniards.Footnote 36 The Yorkinos promoted the idea that Spaniards were enemies of the republic, while the Escoceses defended their rights.Footnote 37 Partisan competition boosted xenophobic discourses and popular attacks against Spaniards, leading 12 states to proclaim expulsion laws in 1827.Footnote 38 Though the Mexican government at first opposed these initiatives, it eventually declared a federal expulsion law in December of that year, with exceptions for men deemed helpful to the nation, married to Mexican women or parents of Mexican children, or who had fought for independence.Footnote 39
The situation deteriorated even further after Guerrero, supported by radical Yorkinos, overthrew the elected government of Manuel Gómez Perlaza.Footnote 40 Guerrero's rise to power intensified the Yorkinos’ attacks on Spaniards, leading to the proclamation of a new, much stronger expulsion law in March of 1829. This law exempted only those who could prove they were too sick or too old to travel.Footnote 41 Thus, at least 7,148 Spaniards abandoned the country.Footnote 42 They fled to Cuba, Spain, and France, among other places, and at least 1,468 arrived in New Orleans.Footnote 43 Tiburcio Campe was one of those who left, made distraught by the “barbarous everyday insults that the mobs uttered against Spaniards.”Footnote 44 He abandoned the country on the ship Hiperión with three Franciscan friars and 29 others on January 1, 1828, just a few days after the proclamation of the first expulsion law.Footnote 45
The expulsion of the Spaniards increased the friction between Mexico and Spain, where Ferdinand VII had consolidated a stable government. He implemented repressive policies, negotiated with moderate and radical royalist groups, and formulated a series of reforms aimed at reorganizing the state, liberalizing the economy, and encouraging private investment and speculation.Footnote 46 As it sought to restore its national honor, Spain's interest in reconquering Mexico acquired a new impetus. After receiving Great Britain's blessing, the Spanish crown decided to launch an expedition to retake Mexico in October of 1828.Footnote 47 Furthermore, pressure from exiles in Cuba, France, and Spain helped convince imperial authorities of the feasibility of this operation.
On July 27, 1829, Spain launched an expedition of 3,000 men from Havana that arrived at the Mexican port of Tampico. The campaign failed miserably. Mexican factions united to defend the republic, while yellow fever decimated the Spanish troops, forcing them to surrender on September 12.Footnote 48 The failed expedition caused unexpected political developments within Mexico. Taking advantage of national fervor and the extraordinary powers granted by the Mexican congress to deal with the Spanish expedition, Guerrero abolished slavery on September 15, 1829.Footnote 49 Nevertheless, he excluded Texas to protect the interests of Anglo settlers who had established cotton plantations there.Footnote 50 The exemption did not calm Guerrero's critics: his decisions to abolish slavery, declare the nationalization of selected property to decrease the federal government's debts, and introduce a direct tax on the states to finance the army motivated moderate factions and local officers to rebel against him.Footnote 51 Thus, revolts erupted across the country, forcing Guerrero to resign in December of 1829.
The Spanish crown followed the situation in detail. Despite the Tampico fiasco, Ferdinand VII still hoped to recover Mexico and other territories, such as Spanish Santo Domingo.Footnote 52 However, Mexico countered by offering Haiti a diplomatic alliance to dissuade Spain from attempting a reconquest and to convince Spain to abandon its hopes of retaking Santo Domingo.Footnote 53 These events created political tensions that focused the attention of Spanish representatives and exiles in New Orleans, who began to fear that Mexico would promote the abolition of slavery and the expulsion of Spaniards throughout the Caribbean. These were the topics that dominated the discussions of Campe and other Spanish exiles in the United States.
Political Combat in a Transnational Arena
From the beginning of the Spanish American revolutions, insurgents and royalists had considered the United States a critical arena for the success of their respective causes. Cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans became publishing centers for Spanish and Spanish American diplomats, exiles, and political refugees.Footnote 54 They used the freedom of the press to advance their agendas and support their political allies in their homelands.Footnote 55 The idea of a hemispheric American community inspired part of the American public to support the Spanish American insurgent cause in the first decade of the revolutions.Footnote 56 Meanwhile, the US administrations saw Latin American independence as an opportunity to annex Spanish territories such as Florida and Texas.Footnote 57
The situation shifted after 1822 when the United States, under the administration of President James Monroe, formally recognized Spanish American independence. The egalitarian rhetoric and antislavery stances of the new Spanish American republics, the rising authoritarianism of the Mexican and Colombian governments, and the political and financial proximity of the new Spanish American states to Great Britain alarmed US politicians and public opinion.Footnote 58 By the late 1820s, American public opinion had transformed again, into a battlefield between the defenders of the Spanish American republics and pro-royalist authors seeking to convince transnational publics of the ongoing wrongdoings of their former colonies.
New Orleans became one of the epicenters of this struggle. Since its foundation in 1718, New Orleans had been a Caribbean port city, conceived to serve as a trading entrepôt for the French pro-slavery colonial enterprise in Louisiana and Saint-Domingue.Footnote 59 Racial prejudice had informed the city's social institutions since its onset, a situation that did not change with the increasing number of free Blacks and enslaved populations during the time that Louisiana was under Spanish dominion (1763–1802).Footnote 60 New Orleans’ importance increased exponentially after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Its population grew from about 8,000 in 1803 to 27,000 in 1820; at least one-third of this populace were enslaved people.Footnote 61 This population increase transformed New Orleans into the most important American port in the Gulf region, the largest slave market in North America, and a metropolis that served as a bridge between the growing US empire and the Atlantic World.Footnote 62
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, New Orleans became a haven for émigrés and refugees. Between 1791 and 1815, almost 20,000 refugees from Saint-Domingue landed in New Orleans and its hinterland.Footnote 63 Most of this population arrived in 1809 after Spanish authorities expelled Saint-Domingue's refugees from Cuba following Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. As a result, between 9,000 and 10,000 refugees, including whites, free people of color, and enslaved people, landed in New Orleans, a multiracial influx that almost doubled the city's population.Footnote 64 The newcomers played a key role in the city. White refugees helped to expand slavery in Louisiana by convincing American authorities to permit the admission of slaves, despite federal prohibitions.Footnote 65 Meanwhile, the arrival of free people of color as refugees doubled that population's numbers in the community, bringing in resources as well as political and military experience.Footnote 66 However, it is probable that thousands of free black men and women suffered re-enslavement after they arrived in New Orleans.Footnote 67
The arrival of refugee communities consolidated the city's position as a polyglot metropolis in which émigrés could contribute to transatlantic and local political debates. For instance, refugees from Saint-Domingue founded the main newspapers of the city, including Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, Le Télégraphe, and Le Courrier de la Louisiane. Footnote 68 However, they were not the only émigrés who published. New Orleans's strategic position and the presence of Spanish-speaking populations also motivated émigrés from Spanish American territories to seek refuge in the city.Footnote 69 For example, the Spanish-Cuban Manuel Ariza and the French-Dominican François Delaup, émigrés from Saint-Domingue and later from Cuba, published El Telégrafo in 1825.Footnote 70 The growing number of émigrés led them to increase their publication efforts.
Before the US Civil War, Hispanic publishers had printed at least 63 journals.Footnote 71 Tiburcio Campe was one of them. After leaving Mexico, he returned to Cuba. Nevertheless, Spanish authorities imprisoned and banished him for his writings during Spain's Trienio Liberal. Campe then traveled to New Orleans, where émigrés from Saint-Domingue, Cuba, and Tierra Firme had turned the city into an epicenter for refugees and political exiles during the Spanish American Revolutions.Footnote 72
In spite of growing numbers, the economic situation of the Spanish exile community in New Orleans was dire. Some Spaniards survived by founding cafés, trading with Havana's merchants, and working as doctors, musicians, and teachers, among other occupations. Nevertheless, some of them experienced multiple challenges. First, they and their families, some of whom were born in Mexico, had to overcome the difficulties of establishing themselves in a city where Spanish speakers were a minority, and they had to do so with few resources. For instance, just one year after the expulsion of Spaniards from Mexico in 1829, some Mexican politicians suggested that the national government support the widows and orphans of Spanish exiles who had died in New Orleans.Footnote 73 They claimed that the children and many of the widows were Mexicans and therefore deserved their compatriots’ assistance. To compound their difficulties, Spanish authorities also hesitated to help them. For some of these authorities, the expelled Spaniards were traitors, and their entrance into any Spanish colony was to be forbidden. Meanwhile, others alleged that exiles could be helpful because of their “resentment and their knowledge” and because they could be a vivid example “of the Spanish Americans’ false promises that had seduced many Spaniards.”Footnote 74
Despite these doubts, Campe decided to defend the Spanish cause in New Orleans. He saw no contradiction in collaborating with the Spanish absolutist government, arguing that commerce and industry were recovering under Ferdinand's rule.Footnote 75 Campe felt that his cooperation was a testimony to his patriotism and his desire to defend “Spain and the Spaniards who had not turned their backs on their homeland.”Footnote 76 Probably, he was trying to earn an income too. Campe began working for a printer, where he had access to information regarding revolutionary advocates’ actions. He was especially aware of Feliciano Montenegro, a Mexican agent and former colonel of the Spanish army, who was printing proclamations warning the city's Spanish-speaking community and the Mexican public about the crown's plans to invade Mexico.Footnote 77
Campe shared this information with Antonio Argote, the Spanish consul in New Orleans, but he did not stop there. He also printed a satirical proclamation in which he accused Montenegro and the Mexican consul in New Orleans of introducing “the division and exciting the mutual hate between Spaniards and Mexicans that [were] suffering in exile.”Footnote 78 His actions gained the attention of Argote and Francisco Tacón, the Spanish representative in Philadelphia. Argote told Tacón that Campe could be “useful to the royal service” because of his “talent and readiness.” In addition, Argote emphasized that they would need to reward Campe because “he was in need.”Footnote 79
Campe had several specific aims: to establish a larger enterprise to serve the Spanish exile community in New Orleans and Havana, to advocate for the restoration of empire in Mexico through military means, and to criticize the exclusion of Spaniards from the Mexican political nation. Therefore, in April of 1829, he founded El Español, a newspaper that became the chief platform for promoting these aims. Campe did not think of his enterprise as a solitary endeavor. Thus, he invited Francisco Tacón to collaborate. Tacón received Campe's invitation enthusiastically, telling Madrid authorities that Campe sought to “publish a journal in Spanish to disturb the efforts of Montenegro, Valle [the Mexican consul], and other stooges of the rebels.”Footnote 80 Believing that the publication of El Español could be valuable to the Spanish cause, Tacón asked the Madrid authorities to pay six subscriptions for the newspaper. Nevertheless, Manuel González Salmón, Spanish State Secretary, authorized the payment of only one subscription. Despite this modest contribution, El Español released 29 issues, appearing with a frequency of six times per month between April and July of 1829.
Madrid's miserly payment to support El Español illustrates the difficulties faced in publishing the newspaper. The small number of subscribers, the epidemic of yellow fever in the summer of 1829 that killed some of the publication's readers, and the decrease in commercial activity during that season obliged Campe to suspend the journal for almost four months.Footnote 81 However, Cuban authorities helped to finance the newspaper's second incarnation. Claiming that El Español “[upheld] the Spanish cause against the falsehoods of the rebellious,” Francisco Dionisio Vives, Cuba's captain general, ordered a monthly payment of 30 pesos to “protect” the publication.Footnote 82 Thus, Campe resumed his work, bought a printing press, and printed El Español eight times a month, and later 12 times a month, producing 85 issues between December 1829 and August 1830. In its 14 months of publication, the newspaper ran 114 issues. Regardless of financial difficulties, Campe built a fruitful alliance with imperial authorities, producing many issues of the publication in a short period.
Campe was not the only exile involved in this editorial enterprise. Other exiles such as José Antonio Roca Santi Pietri, the physician Víctor González, and Manuel Velásquez de León wrote pieces for El Español. Others signed their articles with pseudonyms. Such was the case of “Lavativa” and “Alesna.” The newspaper also republished the works of authors who had written elsewhere to criticize the expulsion of Spaniards from Mexico. Yet, Campe went even further. He invited those who had suffered the “painful expatriation” to share news and publish pieces in the newspaper.Footnote 83 The expulsion of Spaniards and their stories deepened exiles’ commitment to advancing an “indestructible patriotism” within the Spanish community.Footnote 84
The alliance between émigrés and Spanish authorities facilitated the distribution of the Spanish exiles’ critiques of the Mexican republican project to transatlantic audiences. El Español circulated in Spain, Mexico, New Orleans, and Cuba. Campe himself helped to distribute the journal in New Orleans, selling single issues and subscriptions in Spanish bookstores and coffee shops.Footnote 85 Meanwhile, people in cities such as Mobile (Alabama), New York, and Pensacola (Florida) subscribed to the newspaper. El Español had subscription houses in Havana too. Furthermore, Spanish consuls in the United States sent several newspaper numbers to Madrid.
El Español also circulated in Mexico. Mexican agents and consuls in New Orleans probably sent some editions to Veracruz in some of the multiple vessels that covered that route. Thus, the newspaper was not only a local enterprise in which exiles in New Orleans condemned Mexico's political situation. Its transatlantic circulation reveals that the newspaper became a well-known voice in the political debates created by the expulsion of Spaniards from Mexico.
The reception of El Español shows the divergence between Spanish authorities in Madrid and the United States and exiles had regarding the role that émigré publications should play. For instance, Francisco Tacón sent copies of the newspaper until the end, arguing that Madrid needed to know the “miserable state of the alleged Republic of Mexico.”Footnote 86 Yet, the metropolitan government received the newspaper cautiously. First, El Español's promotion of a constitutional project did not align entirely with Madrid authorities’ plan for consolidating Ferdinand's rule. Second, Madrid authorities were more interested in receiving news about Mexico rather than émigrés’ viewpoints regarding the crisis of the republic, although they did republish some of the information brought by the newspaper.Footnote 87 Nevertheless, they also complained that El Español consisted mostly of “satirical or serious articles that highlighted the evil and stupidity of some of the rebellion's coryphaeus in the Americas.”Footnote 88 As a result, they gradually lost interest in El Español; at one point, the secretary of state wrote to González Salmón stating that “sending this newspaper is useless.”Footnote 89 Notwithstanding Madrid's lack of interest, El Español drew the attention of Tomás Quintero, a Colombian spy in the Spanish court, who notified his superiors about the newspaper and the activities of Spanish liberal exiles in New Orleans.Footnote 90
The response in the United States was utterly different, especially since Spanish exiles’ actions concerned Mexican agents, representatives, and supporters in New Orleans. For instance, Montenegro tried to stop the newspaper's publication by accusing Campe of plotting his assassination.Footnote 91 Furthermore, L'Abeille, one of the most important papers in the city, responded rapidly to the publication of El Español, calling its publishers a group of people “embittered with the Mexican government” and “slaves of absolutism.”Footnote 92 After the royal army invaded Mexico in September of 1829, L'Abeille even began publishing a Spanish section, La Abeja. Although the editor's objective was to inform people about the failed expedition, the Spanish section often included responses to El Español's articles.
The quick reaction of L'Abeille and the publication of La Abeja demonstrate that the arguments of El Español did not fall on deaf ears in New Orleans. Notably, La Abeja reproached El Español for its claim to speak on behalf of the entire Spanish community in New Orleans. For instance, an author publishing in La Abeja under the pseudonym of “El Español Libre” argued that El Español was devoted to “defending their King with their well-known passion” instead of representing the interests of the Spanish nation.Footnote 93 Last, La Abeja attacked El Español for having subscription houses in Havana and receiving funds from the Cuban administration.Footnote 94 However, this criticism only motivated imperial authorities to offer more support to El Español. Argote, the Spanish consul in New Orleans, stated that it was necessary to support the publication because it “[countered] La Abeja's daily insults and [refuted] the many falsehoods against our government and our nation.”Footnote 95
Meanwhile, newspapers in Mexico received the arguments of El Español with furor. Newspapers such as El Sol and El Gladiador replied to El Español's constant attacks on the Republic of Mexico, focusing on the hostility of El Español and defending the Mexican project as the struggle of an incipient republic to achieve stability. For instance, El Sol emphasized that “the rage, I repeat, the pain of seeing how their prey was taken away from them, a prey that they have enjoyed with impunity for three centuries” was the driving force of El Español's enterprise.Footnote 96 El Sol's response demonstrates that Campe's pro-monarchical stances alarmed part of the Mexican public.Footnote 97 El Sol's editors strongly defended the Mexican republican project: “Sirs of El Español, yield as much as you wish to the interests of Spain, the country of slavery and darkness; but take care not to libel Mexico.”Footnote 98 Aware of the instability of the republican project and the constant threat of a new Spanish invasion, the editors of Mexican republican newspapers understood that they needed to respond to the activities of Spanish exiles in the United States.
In sum, El Español became a well-known voice that highlighted the sufferings of the exiled Spanish community in New Orleans and criticized the consequences of the rise of exclusionary policies in Mexico. Restoring an empire in which Spaniards and Americanos could coexist became a non-negotiable goal for émigrés such as Campe. Therefore, he and his associates devoted themselves to discussing the expulsion of Spaniards, the military preparations for the failed Spanish recovery campaign, the development of the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans, and the rise of abolitionism in Mexico. Imperial authorities, revolutionary agents on the Peninsula and in New Orleans, and Mexican public opinion noticed their efforts, witnessing how exile from Mexico was shaping the newspaper's agenda. It was from his haven in a city full of émigrés that Tiburcio Campe began to advocate for the return of Spanish rule in Mexico.
Claiming Political Equality from Exile
El Español emerged as an effort of Spanish liberals in New Orleans to rescue the idea of imperial citizenship promoted by the Cádiz Constitution. The constitution established that all men born in the territories of the monarchy, naturalized foreigners, foreigners living for more than ten years in any town of the empire, and enslaved people who had acquired their liberty on imperial grounds were Spaniards. Footnote 99 Nevertheless, the citizenship status of these groups was different. Cádiz accepted white and indigenous men but offered only a limited path to citizenship for free Blacks.Footnote 100 Pointing out that the Mexican government had promoted the franchise of indigenous and Black populations in direct opposition to peninsulares’ rights, El Español sought to resuscitate the idea of an imperial constitution that affirmed that both Spaniards and Americanos were part of the political nation.
Possibly, Campe's chosen name for the newspaper was a direct reference to Blanco White's El Español, one of the most important Spanish liberal newspapers, published in London between 1810 and 1814. Blanco White acknowledged the Spanish American colonies’ calls for autonomy and therefore proposed a conciliation between Spanish American territories and the Peninsula based on the principles of a limited liberal monarchy. Blanco White doubted Spanish American capacity for self-government.Footnote 101 Campe's experience in Mexico convinced him that this was true: “We cannot confuse freedom and independence with the horrible disorders that have been so scandalously perpetrated by the tyranny and immorality of the tyrants of Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Buenos Aires.”Footnote 102 Campe raised Blanco White's flags; however, he did so with a significant difference. Rather than reconciliation, Campe argued for military action to restore a liberal monarchical empire.
The protection of Spaniards who had suffered hardships and the celebration of imperial history became the main arguments used by exiles to call for the return of the empire. Campe aimed to unite Spaniards to recover the former colonies and “conserve and defend the integrity of the Spanish monarchy.” Footnote 103 The newspaper admitted that some exiles in the United States and the Caribbean still “desired that Spain would reign over America, no matter under which form of government.”Footnote 104 Defending this option required protecting “the glories of the Fatherland against the treacherous and rabid attacks of those enemies of justice who [did] not stop criticizing an illustrious nation that [was] respected by all Europe.”Footnote 105 Therefore, Campe and his associates strove to contrast an allegedly inclusive history of the Spanish Empire in the Americas with the rise of exclusionary policies in the new Spanish American republics.
El Español framed Spanish history as a heroic narrative built around a worldwide civilizing process that promoted mestizo polities. This narrative adopted a highly romanticized golden-age storyline that extolled Spanish achievements from the medieval period to the present.Footnote 106 Historical figures such as El Cid, Pelayo, and others were recognized as sources of national pride for Spaniards; Cortés and the crown became protectors of the Americas’ indigenous populations. The Spanish notion of inclusive rule relied on the belief that the conquistadors had saved indigenous people from cannibalism and the oppressive government of their native nobility.Footnote 107 Campe claimed that the Spanish monarchy had defended the indigenous populations by “threatening those who tried to exert any kind of violence against the simple and noble indigenous because the Kings loved them, especially because of their courage in fighting to defend their primitive independence.”Footnote 108 For him, the Spanish crown's establishment of a “peaceful government over three centuries” consolidated its rights of conquest in the Americas.Footnote 109 Thus, El Español posited that, as a result, the indigenous populations had formed a strong bond with the crown. For Campe, the rise of the República de Indios and its coexistence with the República de Españoles provided the Spanish crown with enough legitimacy to stay in the Americas.
Meanwhile, Campe and his collaborators criticized the fact that the Spanish American republics, especially Mexico, advocated a discourse of ethnic conflict. El Español promoted a vision of the new governments as degenerate political entities that increased the divisions between peninsulares and Americanos. For Campe and the exiles who sided with him, the end of Spanish rule represented the beginning of political instability and the cessation of a successful process of cohabitation and civilization. Discussing the clashes between different factions in Mexico, José Antonio Roca Santi Pietri, an exile in New Orleans, claimed that the independent Mexicans experienced an unprecedented state of regression in which “civilized men suddenly felt subject to the most abject state of savagery.”Footnote 110
Two incidents underscored the political decadence of Mexico for El Español: the expulsion of Spaniards and the dissolution of the pacts promoted after independence. El Español condemned the Mexican government's decision to expel the Spaniards, more so in light of the government's initial promises that it would incorporate them into the national community. Campe dismissed the Mexican government's allegations against the Spaniards: for him, the Mexican administration was scapegoating the Spaniards to hide its own wrongdoings.Footnote 111 Thus, he published speeches regarding the Mexican republic's “tyranny.”Footnote 112 He described the law of expulsion of March 1829 as a “document of barbarity,” emphasizing the backwardness of the measure.Footnote 113 In his view, the Mexican government was breaking up both the social bonds of Spanish families and the political alliance of Americanos and Spaniards that had held Mexican independence together in 1821.
To support this point, El Español aired the grievances of Mexican women who addressed state assemblies and the national congress to oppose the expulsion of their Spanish husbands. These women emphasized that their husbands “happened to be born in Spain,” but that they “were and are Mexicans by choice.”Footnote 114 Their grievances point to two crucial issues. First, they emphasized that the Mexican government was violating their rights as citizens for the simple reason that their husbands were born “across the sea.”Footnote 115 Second, they stressed that the expulsion had smashed the “sacred pact” of the nation under which the government was to guarantee the civil rights of all citizens, no matter their race or ethnic origin.Footnote 116
The expulsion law tore apart many Spaniards’ families, a fact used by El Español to illustrate how the decisions of the Mexican Republic were destroying the political pacts between Spaniards and Americanos. For El Español, this rupture represented the destruction of the political system's basis, undermining a core source of its claim to legitimate authority. To make that argument, the newspaper emphasized the hardships of the families expelled from the Mexican republic. For instance, it published the story of Juan Bautista Pinto, a Spaniard who lived in Guatemala but had decided to return to Mexico to take care of his elderly father. The Mexican government allowed them to stay on after the initial law of expulsion because Pinto's father had eight sons in Mexico, but then forced them to abandon the country after the second law was passed. Pinto and his father lost everything, arriving in New Orleans in a “poor and atrocious condition.”Footnote 117 El Español sought to publicize stories like this one to highlight the deleterious effects of the expulsion and the consequences of the dissolution of constitutional pacts in the new Spanish American republics.
The epidemic of yellow fever during the summer of 1829 was used to illustrate the results of banishment vividly. El Español heavily publicized the Spanish victims of this epidemic. Spanish doctors started to offer their services to their “miserable” compatriots who were suffering the “seasonal diseases of this country.”Footnote 118 Overcrowding facilitated the spread of the disease, and living conditions exacerbated the situation; numerous Spaniards resided in houses with more than five occupants.Footnote 119 As such, the editorial team urged Spaniards to abandon New Orleans and move to Baton Rouge, Louisville, or Cincinnati, where they could find “a safe and comfortable refuge against the fever that had decimated them.”Footnote 120
Yellow fever indeed devastated the Spanish community, bolstering Spanish exiles’ belief that Mexican policies brought only suffering to a population that supported the independence of the country. As the deaths spread, Spaniards’ disillusionment increased. Pedro León de Guevara, Antonio Anaya, and Vicente Cerio, Spanish exiles in the city, showed their discontent with the Mexican Republic in a letter published in El Español. Highlighting in contrast the support they received from their American neighbors, Guevara, Anaya, and Cerio criticized “Mexican liberals” for sending Spaniards to their “death and banishment.”Footnote 121 They also invited Mexicans to follow the American example by practicing “the sublime virtue of charity” to “shape the opinion of the people” and strengthen “the institutions that rule over them.”Footnote 122 In this way, Campe weaponized the suffering of his compatriots to convince his readers that, rather than secure political rights for Spaniards and Americanos, the Mexican republic had created exclusionary policies that had become deathly for Spaniards.
Thus, according to El Español, the expulsion of Spaniards and their misery in New Orleans represented the failure of republican constitutionalism in Mexico. Campe argued that liberalism should defend “the common good of the people, the individual security of the citizen, [and] the equality of rights.” Footnote 123 Spaniards in Mexico, he stressed, were devoted to the “system of representative government” and had decided to stay in the country despite having their own “liberal Constitution and a moderate monarchy on the other side of the Atlantic.”Footnote 124 For that reason, he claimed that destroying the principles of political equality between Spaniards and Americanos symbolized the death of the Mexican Republic. El Español stated that “the title of republic does not guarantee that the government embraces the virtues of the liberal system.”Footnote 125 To prove this point, El Español reprinted the work of Francisco Ibar, a Spanish writer in Mexico, who proclaimed that the expulsion of citizens according to their birthplace went against the core principles of liberal republicanism.Footnote 126
The stability of the American republic in comparison to Mexico fortified the exiles’ narrative of disillusionment with the liberal-republican projects of the former Spanish colonies. On one hand, Campe argued that the United States “quickly prospered because of the obedience to the law, the respect of morality, the love of true freedom, and the patriotism of all its sons.”Footnote 127 On the other hand, he claimed that Mexican leaders had “expelled the hard-working man, preached immorality, buried in prison the honest citizens, and rewarded with exile those who have served the patria.”Footnote 128
The contrast between the purported success of the American republic and what they considered the corruption of the liberal Mexican government emboldened Spanish exiles to call for the reinstatement of the Spanish monarchy in Mexico. For Campe, however, military intervention was needed to return to the spirit of the Cádiz Constitution, since Spanish imperial power had crippled the possibilities of establishing a liberal republican government in the former colonies. Campe was aware of the perils of calling for a monarchical restoration from the United States. However, he sought to persuade audiences in the transatlantic public sphere that the wrongdoings of the Mexican government threatened the stability of liberal republicanism in the hemisphere.
Although Spanish liberals admired the US version of republicanism that defended private property and slavery and promoted political equality among its citizens, they considered that a return to monarchy would be more in line with Spanish American political culture. For them, monarchical restoration would be the only guarantee against the exclusion of Spaniards from the Mexican republic. Spanish liberals did see the United States as a successful case of political stability, in which “freedom, the law, prosperity” ruled because of the “patriotism and virtues of the children of immortal Washington.”Footnote 129 However, for El Español, the differences between English and Spanish models of colonization and the political cultures produced by their divergent legacies made the American version seem impossible to imitate.
To exemplify these differences, Campe published part of a manifesto printed in Mexico in 1815.Footnote 130 The text claimed that the American colonies developed a more autonomous model of colonization in which the “diverse colonies were independent from each other and established thorough contracts and privileges.”Footnote 131 This model facilitated the establishment of autonomous assemblies in the American colonies. For the colonization of Spanish America, however, the author of the manifesto envisioned a more top-down approach that would emphasize royal patronage and the consolidation of a common system of governance for the entire territory. Spanish Americans, the manifesto claimed, had “[forgotten] that all that they have is because the metropolitan Spanish government and the people from the Peninsula were interested in the splendor of the Americas.”Footnote 132
This call to reestablish imperial constitutionalism reveals some of the most significant components of Spanish liberal exiles’ vision of empire. But Campe's calls for political equality between Spaniards and Americanos had a significant flaw. His persistent calls for military intervention in Mexico could only have increased the Mexican public's distrust of the Spanish. Despite this, Campe and his associates repeatedly defended their form of liberalism, as well as their claim that Mexico was establishing an exclusionary model of republic that did not live up to the promises of the constitution. For that reason, they did not see any contradiction between liberalism and monarchical restoration. On the contrary, they believed that Spanish patriotism should override any political ideology. “We are liberals, and we will be so eternally,” Campe and his associates claimed in one of the last issues of El Español. Footnote 133
Campe and his associates accepted, however, that they would denounce their liberalism if it were necessary to defend their patria. Yet, their Spanish patria was not in the Peninsula itself, but rather was rooted in the memory of a Cádiz imperial constitutional project that sought to protect the political rights of Spaniards and Americanos. Patriotism and liberalism went hand in hand in El Español's vision of a renewed imperial project in the Americas.
Degrees of Inclusion and the Question of Slavery
El Español’s interest in protecting the last Spanish colonies and white supremacy in the hemisphere reveals the limits and contradictions of its publishers’ model of empire. Inspired by what he considered to be the expansion of ethnic cleansing and race war in the region, Campe criticized abolitionism and adopted the anti-Black politics of the US South. At the same time, developments in Mexico set a bad precedent for Spanish liberals who sought to reconcile their perspectives on political equality with pro-slavery stances in the Caribbean. Exiles in New Orleans believed that liberal laws should protect property and be applied equally, but they also believed that racial equality would promote violence and political instability. The possible alliance to liberate Cuba, one that included Mexico, Colombia, and Haiti, increased these fears. Despite their calls for political equality, the vision of Spanish liberals such as Campe and his associates reflected US racial politics—even as it sought to determine the degrees of inclusion for an imagined liberal monarchical empire.
The abolition of slavery in Mexico alarmed El Español's editorial team. Pointing to the expulsion of Spaniards, exiles claimed that the Mexican Republic did not respect the right of property, harming any real possibility of establishing a liberal system. Like many republicans in the United States, especially in the American South, Spanish liberals defended property rights tooth and nail, claiming that Mexico's abolition demonstrated the government's infringement of “the most sacred rights and the constitutional laws.”Footnote 134 El Español framed President Vicente Guerrero's decision to abolish slavery as a clear abuse of power, arguing that he was taking advantage of his position to benefit those closest to him. A note from El Redactor de Nueva York, reprinted in El Español, stated that Guerrero had “abolished slavery throughout the entire republic; namely, he had declared freedom to all the people of his same color and origin.”Footnote 135 Meanwhile, another collaborator of the newspaper, using the pseudonym “Alesna” criticized the Mexican president for using his power to “release the slaves and to enslave the free.”Footnote 136 Spanish liberals argued that the Mexican government menaced political equality and liberal principles by taking this action.
The uneven application of the law also concerned Spanish liberals. Texas was the bone of contention. The Mexican government had decided to privilege the interests of Anglo settlers in Texas by leaving slavery there untouched. As he had done in defending equality of rights for Spaniards, Campe insisted that the laws should be applied to all the inhabitants of the republic. To illustrate this point, he republished a small note from the Mexican newspaper El Sol in which the author disapproved of the Mexican government's decision to preserve slavery in Texas. The author argued that, just like Mexican citizens, Americans had to obey the law: “The United States, in a clear and evident way, disparaged the Mexican Republic by ignoring its laws and authorities.”Footnote 137 Guerrero's decision confirmed Spaniards’ fears regarding Mexico's infidelity to the defense of both national sovereignty and liberal principles.
However, Spanish liberals were also concerned about how abolitionism and the rise of pardo leaders such as Guerrero could increase hostility to Spaniards in Mexico and expand anti-white policies. They viewed the expulsion of Spaniards and the abolition of slavery through the lens of racial persecution against white people. For instance, Campe published a report in which he stated that a “mob led by the iniquitous Martín de Mueses and other infamous persons such as this descendant of Santo Domingo's Blacks” sang military chants calling for the death of Spaniards.Footnote 138 El Español also used the metaphor of the Mexican flag to illustrate the connection between anti-Spanish sentiment and anti-white policies. Such was the case in a satiric piece written by “Lavativa” about the “republican disease.” Footnote 139 In the sketch, one of the characters, a “Black doctor from the south [of Mexico],” stated that “the republic should be Indian and Black, and that any white color harmed its health.”Footnote 140 For that reason, the Black doctor's solution to the “republican disease” was to “obliterate any whiteness that we find.” Footnote 141 The doctor's cure for the disease also proposed to erase “even the white part of the flag.”Footnote 142 By deploying this metaphor, Spanish liberals satirized the ethnic dimension of the expulsion, emphasizing the necessity of monarchical restoration to ease racial tensions.
The expansion of abolitionism and the political alliances between the new republics also increased pro-monarchical authors’ commitment to empire. Proposed diplomatic cooperation between Mexico and Haiti to prevent further attempts of reconquest and to promote the independence of Cuba raised alarms among Spanish exiles in New Orleans. In the late 1820s, Mexican politicians held an ambivalent view of Haiti. While they considered the Haitian Republic as a model of political stability, they also invoked the vision of Haiti as a racial nightmare that could spread to Cuba if Spain continued its attempts to recover Mexico.Footnote 143 Fearing the expansion of a republican model that would exclude Spaniards because of their race and nationality, Campe argued that no one, no matter “the love or hate toward Spain,” should support a possible Haitian invasion of Cuba. Establishing a diplomatic relationship with Haiti was, for Campe, definitive proof of the Mexican intention of extending the “bloody catastrophe of Santo Domingo” to the entire hemisphere. As a result, El Español called on “all the nations of the globe” and “all men no matter their political opinions” to stop the rise of the “sinister empire of the Antilles” funded by “millions of dead bodies.”Footnote 144
For El Español and its supporters, Mexico exemplified the perils of a republican project that had gone too far by expelling Spaniards, pushing too hard for racial equality, and attempting to expand anti-white policies in the Caribbean. Talk of race war began to surface in the newspaper in 1830. For instance, Campe published on the Aguila Negra pro-independence conspiracy, claiming that he was not surprised by “the attempts of an immoral and infamous government that has sent a representative to Haiti to mobilize the cruel arms of the enemy and reproduce the barbarous scenes of Santo Domingo on the island of Cuba.”Footnote 145 Campe believed that Mexico was committed to replicating the Haitian Revolution in Cuba and building anti-Spanish sentiment there. For him, Cuba represented the consolidation of an imperial model that, despite the expansion of slavery, showed the benefits of the harmonious coexistence between Spanish Americans and Spaniards. In case of an invasion of Cuba, Campe claimed, Mexicans would witness how “Spanish Americans and Spaniards lived fraternally on the island of Cuba.”Footnote 146 Thus, for Campe, Mexico represented, by contrast, the failure of republicanism to establish regimes of “racial harmony” and liberal models of government.Footnote 147
Campe and other Spanish liberals believed in the necessity of racial hierarchy to keep social stability, revealing that his project of empire calling for equality between Spaniards and Americanos was partial and highly contingent. Campe feared that a possible alliance between Mexico and Haiti could lead to the destabilization of racial hierarchies. The rise of pardos such as Guerrero to power, the abolition of slavery, and the expulsion of white Spaniards increased the suspicion of Spanish liberals with regard to the Mexican government and its geopolitical plans. Moreover, experiences as exiles in the United States reinforced their belief that, despite calls for political equality, they had to protect racial hierarchies.
The Spanish exiles’ reflections on US racial politics illustrate the contradictory degrees of inclusivity in their project of empire. They criticized American settler colonialism that displaced and eliminated Native American populations from their original lands. For instance, in a speech published in El Español and delivered in New Orleans at the inauguration of the Cazadores de Orleans, a Spanish militia, a militia member declared that the American public judged Spaniards negatively because of “the exaggerations of the atrocities of the conquest of the Americas.” The member underscored that the “English brought tyranny over India, the French over Europe, and after a horrible and barbarous revolution, the Americans had brought tyranny over the Indians, the real owners of the land.”Footnote 148 In comparison, he argued that Spain was less violent than the other European powers, claiming that “conquistadors and the conquered formed one people.”Footnote 149 Thus, the statement defended Spanish colonialism by emphasizing the creation of mestizo polities in the Americas. Likewise, monarchy could imply assimilating indigenous populations, something that republicanism, especially in the United States, was failing to achieve.
Despite Spanish liberals’ criticism of American settler colonialism, the expansion of what they considered an anti-white model of republicanism and their idea of white superiority over black populations led them to promote the model of anti-Black politics in the US South. A polemic exchange with La Abeja illustrates this point. As part of discussions about Spanish claims over Spanish Santo Domingo, L'Abeille published an article that claimed that “any Black from Santo Domingo is better than Fernando VII.” Footnote 150 The comparison enraged Spaniards, who considered it a dreadful insult. Their anger was such that El Español published a letter from one of its readers stating that he would not respond if a Black person committed the “insolence” of saying they are “ten thousand times better than me.”Footnote 151 Thus, to respond to L'Abeille's affirmation and their own readers’ anger, the publishers of El Español endorsed Louisiana's measure of denying the entrance of free Black people to the state as “terrible and necessary.” Although he did not entirely agree with this disposition, Campe claimed that it was necessary to “dispel any possibility of a ferocious hand that would spread out innocent blood upon this lucky soil.”Footnote 152 Spanish liberals in New Orleans believed that the adoption of segregationist laws was a legitimate response to the possibility of a revolutionary invasion of the Spanish Antilles.
The Southern US model became an unexpected and ambivalent paradigm for Spanish liberals in New Orleans. They claimed that the US system was not inclusive enough of indigenous populations. However, fearing the expansion of Mexican abolitionism and republicanism into the Caribbean, El Español embraced US anti-Black politics. The abolition of slavery merely increased Spanish liberals’ disappointment with the Mexican republic. Abolition and the laws of expulsion were closely linked issues for Spanish liberals in New Orleans—both measures represented the Mexican government's lack of commitment to liberalism and the consolidation of an exclusionary republican model that promoted ethnic conflict. For this reason, they also supported the Louisiana laws that restricted the movement of free Blacks. Thus, Spanish exiles’ defense of a liberal imperial project led them to welcome racist and segregationist measures that they believed would stop the expansion of republican systems.
Campe published the last edition of El Español on August 8, 1830, after he and his associates published a goodbye note in the penultimate issue. They stated that their goal had been to provide news about the Spanish American republics to their audiences in New Orleans and Havana and to show that Spain was “a nation full of glory, heroism, and majesty.”Footnote 153 They promised to return on November 1, but they did not. By that time, Spanish hopes for a military recovery of Mexico were fading. Then, in 1831, Campe traveled to Cuba again and bought a printing press that he used to promote a moderate model to allow Cuban demands for autonomy and representation. His actions put him under the scrutiny of Miguel Tacón, Cuba's captain general and a defender of the exclusion of Americanos from the Spanish nation. Tacón portrayed Campe as one of the most “renowned enemies of the Spanish name” and expelled him from Cuba in 1835.Footnote 154 The new Spanish model that took shape after Campe's departure shared his fears about racial equality but did not promote political equality for Americanos.
Conclusion
Campe's project and visions of empire were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, his actions and writings reveal the influence of both exiles and republican exclusionary policies in the renewal of ideas of imperial legitimacy in the Americas. Campe and his associates’ ideas were far from being a mere exercise of imperial nostalgia or an undifferentiated resistance of the staunchest royalists utterly opposed to the new republics. On the contrary, the dissatisfaction with a republican project that they had initially supported, and their subsequent exile from Mexico, led them to embrace monarchical rule once away. Exiles opposed the exclusion of Spaniards from the Mexican nation and the possible expansion of abolitionism and what they considered as anti-white policies in the Caribbean.
Expelled from Mexico because of their birthplace, exiles such as Campe believed that imperial constitutionalism was the best way to preserve political equality, decrease ethnic conflict, and maintain white supremacy over free people of color and pardo populations. El Español's project of promoting the return of a constitutional monarchy was thus the result of liberals’ formative years in the Spanish monarchy, their experiences in US exile, discussions about ideas of political equality, and questions regarding racial hierarchies and slavery in Mexico and the United States.
Furthermore, El Español demonstrates the significance of the United States as a battleground for pro-monarchical writers during the consolidation of republican regimes in Spanish America. The creation of El Español highlights the roles of exiles, Spanish representatives in the United States, and imperial authorities in the Caribbean in crafting an alliance to participate in this arena. This alliance took advantage of the freedom of the press in the United States to disseminate its criticisms against republican exclusionary policies in the Hispanophone transatlantic sphere. The newspaper's reception was heated, showing that the actions and ideas of exiles such as Campe did not go unnoticed by New Orleans’ Spanish-speaking community, the Mexican public, or Spanish officials. On the contrary, they realized that banishment to the United States had shaped the exiles’ agenda, turning them into important actors in discussions of monarchical rule, political equality, and race in the Americas.
