Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/392

366 been beaten or victorious. The few trophies, taken in the saddest moments of the action, were sent in triumph to the interior and paraded as the spolia opima in San Luis and the city of Mexico. The public men of the country knew that Angostura had in reality been lost, and Miñon who was seriously assailed in the press by Santa Anna for not co-operating at the critical moment, published a reply in which he treated Santa Anna in the plainest terms and denounced, as false, the general's statement that his troops were famishing for food on the 24th of February, and that his failure to destroy Taylor's army was only owing to this important fact! This system of mutual denunciation and recrimination was quite common in Mexico, whenever a defeat was to be accounted for or thrown on the shoulders of an individual who was not in reality answerable for it.

When Santa Anna returned to San Luis Potosi, he entered that city with not one half the army that accompanied him on his departure to the north. It was moreover worn out and disorganized by the long and painful march over the bleak desert, and had entirely lost its habit of discipline. Such was the condition of things at San Luis in the month of March, when Santa Anna found himself compelled to organize another force to resist the enemy on the east; but whilst his attention was diligently directed to this subject the sad news reached him, that Mexico was not only assailed from without, but that her capital was torn by internal dissensions.

The peace between the president, and the vice president, Don Valentin Gomez Farias, had been cemented by the good offices of mutual friends, though it is not likely that any very ardent friendship could have sprung up suddenly between men whose politics had always been so widely variant. Nor was there less difference between the moral than the political character of these personages. Santa Anna, the selfish, arrogant military chieftain,—a man of unquestionable genius and talent for command,—had passed his life in spreading his sails to catch the popular breeze, and by his alliances with the two most powerful elements of Mexican society,—the army and the church,—had always contrived to sustain his eminent political position, or recover it when it was temporarily lost. Such was the case in his return to power after the invasion of the French, in the attack upon whom he fortunately lost a limb which became a constant capital upon which to trade in the corrupt but sentimental market of popular favor. Valentin Gomez Farias, on the contrary was a pure, straightforward, uncompromising patriot, always alive to the true progressive interests of the