Reflecting on an Enigma
by Jeffrey Dane
© Jeffrey Dane
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna y Peréz de Lebrón was both reviled as a man and revered as a monster in his own day. If this seems contradictory, it just mirrors the absurdities of the world we’re living in today.
The deed for which he’s now best known fostered in others a desire for vengeance and justice that permeated the entire area of the country where it happened and quickly spread elsewhere. It became the Republic (and then, nine years later, the State) of Texas — but it’s easy to forget that the battle of the Alamo was fought in Mexico, and that those who died in the Mission were living in what was then Santa Anna’s own country. One of the most significant and tragic events of any era, what happened at that time and place soon reached an iconic position in the annals of Texas and American history, and has since literally become, in a word, legendary.
So completely is Santa Anna identified with that tragedy that he has become almost synonymous with it, with the appropriate negative connotation. The mention of his name even today calls to mind that occasion and its sweeping and extensive aftermath. We tend to remember him more for that one incident than for anything else, bad or good, in which he was involved during his lifetime.
Serving multiple but intermittent terms as president of his country beginning in 1833, Santa Anna was debatably the most controversial individual involved in the conflicts between Texas and Mexico.
Though he lived well into the photography era, he outlived most of his colleagues and counterparts — and all those he vanquished in that notorious occurrence. They, however, were never photographed: they all perished at the Alamo literally a few years before the advent of the camera. Though only a couple of them were actually famous, all of them became martyrs. The responsibility for their martyrdom falls to Santa Anna. We tend to make heroes out of such martyrs and martyrs of our heroes, especially when those people died young and valiantly. Those who leave life too early — and at whatever age — can prompt intriguing conjectures. Santa Anna’s name has become indelibly linked with the fall of the Alamo, which was arguably the greatest single traumatic event in our country’s early culture until the first presidential assassination.
A plot to kill George Washington had been uncovered and thwarted, but an attempt was actually made on the life of President Andrew Jackson. — On January 30, 1835, a man pointed two Derringer pistols, both of which miraculously misfired, at President Jackson, who was approaching the capitol building to attend funeral services for representative Warren Ransom Davies. Jackson had been a professional soldier; even at his advanced age he was far from frail and was still wiry and forceful; and he was effectively devoid of physical fear (a trait he seems to have shared with James Bowie). Before the culprit, Richard Lawrence, could be subdued by presidential aides, the 68-year-old Jackson, who could be extremely quick-tempered and combative, had already taken his cane to the man and proceeded to beat him severely about the head and shoulders.
A man of contradictions, complexities and paradoxes, in keeping with the ultimate magnitude of the March 6, 1836 incident, Santa Anna could also be compassionate and magnanimous. Beneath the vanity and egotism, there was an underlying desire to serve his people. He was, simply put, a human being, and humans are imperfect by nature and maybe even by definition altogether. Proud and erect of bearing, he could make an imposing appearance, and was in some ways charismatic. It’s impossible to really define it; it’s very difficulty to adequately explain it; and to try to imitate it is hopeless — but charisma is a trait that’s very easy to recognize. Some people have it. Others don’t. This writer can attest that when Leonard Bernstein walked into a room, the temperature changed. That’s charisma. Revealing of Santa Anna is an 1839 eyewitness description of him in his 40s by Fanny (Francis) Calderon de la Barca, an American woman whose husband was Spain’s first Minister to Mexico: ” . . . a melancholy appearance, decidedly the best-looking and most interesting figure in the group . . . of sallow complexion, fine dark eyes, soft and penetrating, an interesting expression of face . . . Knowing nothing of his past history, one would have thought him a philosopher, living in dignified retirement . . . How frequently this look of philosophic resignation, of placid sadness, is seen on the countenances of the most cunning, ambitious, most dangerous men . . . quiet and gentlemanly in his manners, yet here sat he, with this air de philosophé, perhaps one of the worst men in the world: ambitious of power, greedy of money, and unprincipled, having feathered his nest at the expense of others . . . “
The only thing consistently predictable about Beethoven, for example, was his consistent unpredictability. The most predictable thing about Santa Anna, though, was his predictable consistency: he could be counted on to do what would most benefit him. True, there were contradictions in both men — but we find in Beethoven a special and almost unique singularity of purpose we don’t find in Santa Anna. “Your music did not please the listeners,” the composer was told after the previous night’s performance of one of his late (and innovative) string quartets. His arrestingly insightful and memorable reply was, “Some day it will please them.”
Fittingly corresponding to the inconsistencies in his own nature, even the year of Santa Anna’s birth has been disputed and different sources give conflicting data about it. The consensus is that it was February 21, 1794 in Jalapa, Mexico ( — making him, as historian Richard Curilla once observed, a Jalapeño). In that era, Washington was not yet America’s capitol; France was in its Reign of Terror, driven largely by madman Maximillian Robespierre; Beethoven was then making his mark in Vienna; Bach was already decades dead and Brahms was still decades ahead. Unfortunately, the conduct of Santa Anna’s own life and career reflects his participation in the darkest sides of the Age of Enlightenment.
With little formal education (he bragged he’d read only one book), he still eventually arrived, before he was 40, at the pinnacle he sought. His route was bestrewn with treachery and betrayal of friends and causes for his own advancement. During his life he was alternately hated and revered, even by his own countrymen: worshipped as a national hero by some, by others considered an abomination. He erected statues of himself in his own country, but not one of them remains today. Like other dictators before and since, he’s now often remembered, and was even admired by some, for his despicability.
Despite losing his left leg below the knee on December 5, 1838 in an absurd skirmish known as the Pastry War, fought against French invaders, he remained a strutting egoist with a Napoleonic power complex, prompting some to refer to him disparagingly as “The Immortal Three-Fourths.” He had, after all, called himself “The Napoleon of the West.” With such pomposity, he was vain enough to have his disembodied leg placed in a crystal reliquary and buried in a gilded monument, that it might be worshipped by others.
He’s been described as a scoundrel, gambler, womanizer, lecher, conceited, ruthless, shrewd, conniving, unprincipled, and an opportunist. His first wife was 14-year-old Inés García de La Paz; when she died in 1844 after nineteen years with him, within weeks he married a 15-year-old girl, Maria Dolores de Tosta. He was nearly 50. Between his wives and other women, he fathered several children.
Wilfred Hardy Callcott wrote of him: “. . . he demonstrated several of his characteristic . . . strengths and weaknesses: he was able to pull forces together quickly and with severely limited resources, but he also combined elaborate planning with slipshod and faulty execution.” At times cowardly, at others almost recklessly brave, he is reported to have reinforced his courage with opium.
Soon after JFK’s assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren said, “The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn.” His remark has an application to what had happened in San Antonio de Bexar 127 years earlier. In having been responsible for the ultimate martyrdom of the Alamo defenders, Santa Anna committed a blunder which in its stupidity rivals that of the Stamp Act years before.
In the era of quills and inkwells — before the Industrial Revolution, the railroad, the revolver, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, and arts, sciences, venues and entities we now take for granted — his personal traveling accouterments, alone, included sterling silver teapots and cream pitchers, monogrammed china, crystal glasses and decanters with gold stoppers, silk sheets and undergarments, and costly diamond studs. Even his chamber pot was of silver, in a day when most such indelicate items were of pottery or ceramic. One of his coats had enough gold braid to bring its heft to 15 pounds; another weighed nearly 20 pounds and had enough silver decoration for a set of spoons. For years some of his personal effects, like his traveling cot and his ceremonial robe, were displayed, with some poetic justice, in the Long Barracks Museum at the Alamo.
Some are drawn more to evil than to good. “Power corrupts” is a concept that manifests itself as an unfortunate feature of many in positions of power and influence (especially those who are new to it), from heads of state to the heads of corporations — and particularly their self-important underlings, ravished at last to have some positional ability to kindle in themselves the warm glow of superiority their authority will bring them. In our own day the indignity of unjust condemnation is perpetuated in the behavior of some corporate personnel, who unconscionably try to deflect to innocent underlings the responsibility for mistakes for which those subordinates are not to blame.
This tactic found its most worthy model in Santa Anna. In his youth, his worship of his mentors reinforced the savage methods of the worst traits in his own character. Karl Marx admired him. Some of us experiment with questionable practice at some point in our lives, usually in youth, and then outgrow it. Not Santa Anna: he made it a feature of his life. It seems paradoxical that his surname is the Spanish rendering of the mother of Mary — Saint Anne — and that his own grandson, born four years after his death and named after him, became Father Santa Anna: a Jesuit priest, who lived well into the 1960s and whose life overlapped our own.
Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” Dante’s “Inferno.” Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” Michelangelo’s “Moses.” Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” etc., ad infinitum. When Santa Anna is mentioned, what invariably comes to the minds of people-at-large is the most infamous episode with which his name has become indelibly linked: the siege and fall of the Alamo.
Americans saw the episode as a massacre. He called it a victory, saying, “It was but a small affair.” Replied one of his more cultured and sophisticated staff officers, Col. Juan Almonte, “Another such ‘victory’ and we are ruined.” Wheels turn. Within six weeks, the Mexican army was bested by Sam Houston and his forces at San Jacinto, and Santa Anna was captured the day after the battle.
He was also a Mason and evidently attempted to use those connections to his advantage in the hope of promoting himself into others’ good graces. To 39-year-old John Stiles (who had been appointed by Gen. Houston to be among Santa Anna’s bodyguards after the San Jacinto battle), he offered his own Masonic apron, his silk serape, and a personal letter of appreciation.
From his mid-40s until two years before he died, he spent time in exile intermittently in various places including Havana, Cuba; the Dominican Republic; St. Thomas, Virgin Islands (where he is said to have lodged is now a resort); Turbaco, near Cartagena, Colombia; and in Puerta Plata, Nassau, Bahamas, where he wrote his memoirs.
In Mexico he had befriended a Hungarian who invited him to spend some time on the upper Eastern seacoast, where “. . . I had Abraham Baez, a Jew, rent me a furnished house in New York.” New York, in his case, was specifically Staten Island. That the ship on which Santa Anna arrived docked at Elizabeth Port, New Jersey (on May 12, 1866), may have prompted later contradictions about whether he actually lived in the state, and other factors compounded the confusion.
He’s said to have operated a grocery and general store there for a time, living first on St.Mark’s Place and later at West New Brighton on Manor Road. One source claims he had a penchant for cock-fights and three-card monte, in keeping with his sometimes sanguinary and gambling proclivities. About his Hungarian friend, he later wrote, “He, with some other businessmen, deceived and robbed me” — a very determined accusation, considering what he himself had done to others throughout his life.
Tradition says he was instrumental in introducing to the American public a popular habit, to the ultimate delight of youngsters and to the consternation of parents and teachers: chewing gum. He had brought with him a tropical substance, chicle, which produced a whitish fluid. He’s said to have told a group of businessmen, “When you cure this liquid, it hardens and assumes a chewy character,” adding that mixing it with sugar and mint gave it a sensational taste.
He had meanwhile hired a secretary and interpreter named Adams (some sources say James Adams, others say Thomas), who lived in Elizabeth Port. Adams saw how his employer enjoyed chewing the stuff and asked him about it. Shortly before Santa Anna, now in his 70s, got on an American ship on March 22, 1867 and left New York for his native land, he gave Adams what remained of the supply.
Adams soon experimented with it and eventually founded his own firm. Even today the confection has its own modern counterpart: the popular chewing gum Chiclets, for decades made by The Adams Chewing Gum Co., takes its name from the substance the old man had brought with him. Interestingly, and even appropriately, the product distributed today in the USA was for years manufactured in Mexico.
His artificial leg was one of two he purchased for $1,300 each — an astronomical sum, especially considering that the average yearly income was then less than $500, and that a house could be bought for around $750. Made of cork and covered in leather, the false legs were crafted by Charles Bartlett, a former New York City cabinet maker. One of them was lost at the Battle of Cerro Gordo on April 18, 1847. Generalissimo Santa Anna had left the artificial leg behind in his haste to flee on horseback.
It takes little imagination to envision him limping along Manhattan’s Union Square one day in the mid-1860s and entering a portrait studio to have his picture taken. The photographic image of him made that day ultimately found its way to the Library of Congress. The Carte de Visite portrait was made at the Rockwood photographic studio, current during the 1860s & 1870s and which was located at 17 Union Square West in Manhattan. A personal visit to the site shows that the original building was long ago demolished. Santa Anna would not recognize the current structure — but the view from it, Union Square Park, might seem vaguely familiar to him.
In his better days, his country house was at what is now Nr. 42 on the corner of Avenida San Fernando and Calle de Madero, Tlalpan, Mexico City. Among his estates were Manga de Clavo (now a ruin, and said to have been on 220,000 acres), at Puente Nacional, near Veracruz, Mexico; and El Encero (88,000 acres, and now a museum), his hacienda and refuge, between Veracruz & Mexico City, about 70 miles up the National Road from Veracruz and near the village of Cerro Gordo.
Though his union with his wife, Dolores, might have seemed an unlikely one it was surprisingly enduring. Her considerate and attentive treatment of him, particularly in his last years, bespoke a sincerity and rare depth of commitment to him which was apparently quite genuine of feeling, and would be the envy of any elderly husband. She outlived him by ten years.
In and out of favor during the last three decades of his life, he spent his literally declining years in failing health, approaching senility and almost blind. His compulsion to address the masses never left him, and what’s come down to us is the pitiable scene of a devoted wife, to make him feel needed, paying the indigent to gather and listen to him speak and then pretend to cheer, and pathetic scenarios of the arrangements she made to have visitors come to see him on the pretext of seeking his advice on official matters.
He lived into his 80s, dying infirm and in poverty in Mexico City on June 21st, 1876. The end was tragically ironic: his passing went virtually unnoticed, as did Sergei Prokofiev’s death on the same day Joseph Stalin died, on March 5, 1953. While Stalin’s death brought about official, public and published mourning, Prokofiev’s warranted only a small, inconspicuous obituary several days later in Pravda.
The small, relatively modest Mexico City house in which Santa Anna died was at Nr. 6 Calle Vergara, now named Nr. 14 Calle Bolivar; in the 1930s the structure was a radio shop. Buried at Tepeyac Cemetery, near Guadalupe Hidalgo, he survived by four decades those he had destroyed at dawn on Sunday, March 6, 1836 at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas.
The obvious, by its nature, can easily escape our attention: we should be mindful that Santa Anna was as alive then as we are today.