After the Spanish royalist forces had routed Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s forces at the Battle of Guadalajara in 1811, the Spanish chased Hidalgo and what was left of his rebel army into the Spanish province of Tejas ( now present day Texas). Hidalgo wanted to retreat to the U.S.-New Spain border in order to continue resistance against the royal Spanish forces, but he was captured and executed before that could happen. Part of Hidalgo’s rebel army would come under the command of another rebel priest named Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, and he would continue the fight.

                                   Yet another rebel was trying to organize against Spanish rule. His name was Jose Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara, and he was a native of Tejas. I should explain that the Spanish colonial administration had largely ignored Tejas. The Spanish Crown did not care what happened to the people and their needs in this border province, and as a result there were only 4,000 people spread over a large area. Many of these Tejans had to contend with attacks and raids from Native peoples such as the Apaches and Pueblos. Because the Spanish colonial administration had ignored them for so long, many Tejans were more than eager to fight for the Mexican rebels.

                                   Lara needed to raise a force that would be able to not only take on the Spanish royalist army, but be able to protect and preserve Tejan independence so that Tejas could serve as a supply base and support province for the Mexican independence fighters. Lara spent time in the American state of New Orleans and was able to raise an American volunteer army of 800. Called the Army of the North, it marched into Tejas and was wildly greeted by the people in San Antonio, Tejas. Many Mexicans joined this force, and the Army of the North soon numbered 1,400. Lara, in order to spare the people of San Antonio any of the fighting, marched this force south in preparation for fighting any Spanish royalist force. The Spanish colonial government raised a force of 1,800, and put in command a ruthless Spanish general named Joachin de Arredondo. Arredondo had professionally trained and well equipped his army of 1,800 before marching north.

In an oak forest not far from San Antonio, Arredondo arranged his forces in a V-shapped formation. This way he could blunt any attack and then attack the main enemy column with his two flanks. Commanding the Army of the North was a Cuban-born rebel named Jose Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois. The two opposing armies met at a site called Medina Hill, and so the Battle of Medina commenced on August 18, 1813. As Arredondo had predicted, the rebels had attacked the main part of his forces. This allowed the Spanish royalists the chance of their flanks attacking the rebels and routing them. The battle was over in a matter of hours. Having lost, most of the rebels fled into the United States. Those who could not were slaughtered by Arredondo’s forces. What had been a battle turned into a bloodbath as Arredondo’s forces started to slaughter not only wounded rebel soldiers but also women and children in the city of San Antonio.

The Spanish royalists wreaked carnage on the whole Tejan population. Hundreds of men, women and children were killed or tortured to death. Hundreds more were made slaves and sent to the City of New Spain (Mexico City). Arredondo destroyed crops, whole villages and slaughtered Tejan livestock. Tejan farms were burnt to the ground, and Tejan farm families were forced to flee. Those Tejans who could escape did. In a show of complete contempt for the rebels, Arredondo had his men kill any and all rebel wounded and prisoners, and left their bodies to rot on the battlefield while Arredondo had his wounded treated and his royalist soldier dead buried with honor. Out of the the original Tejan population of 4,000, less than 2,000 remained. Yes, Arredondo had brutally crushed Tejas, and so Tejas was prevented from becoming a supply base for the Mexican rebels in the rest of the country.

But the cruelty which Arredondo had visited on Tejas proved to be the undoing for Spanish rule in Mexico. The news of what happened could not be suppressed, and this actually helped keep resistance alive in other parts of the country.  Worse for the Spanish colonial rulers, Arredondo had so devastated Tejas that now the province was no longer secure from Native American attacks. The slaughter of so many Tejans meant that the Spanish colonial administration could not find enough people loyal to the Spanish Crown to want to live in Tejas, and Tejas’ infrastructure had been so demolished that no one wanted to go settle in Tejas. The Spanish royalist forces may had crushed a potential rebel base in Tejas, but Spanish cruelty had in fact shortened Spanish colonial rule. By 1821, there were too many people in New Spain that wanted an end of Spanish colonial rule. New Spain became Mexico, and Spanish rule was ended eight years after the Battle of Medina.

Arredondo, the butcher of San Antonio, was forced to flee to Cuba—then still under Spanish rule. Eventually Arredondo would return to Spain and die there. Toledo sought a royal pardon from the Spanish Crown, and upon receiving it went on to serve the Spanish Crown, eventually dying in Spain. Lara returned to the newly independent country of Mexico, and served in its government and military until his death in 1841.  Despite their defeat, the men of the Army of the North as well as Lara became honored heroes in Mexico’s history and folklore.