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292 little better than a guerrilla warfare in their vicinity. Such bands generally kept themselves in impregnable positions, making descents upon unprotected towns, and desolating the surrounding country. Although the royalist forces occupied all the most important towns and the immediate vicinities, the revolutionists gradually gained control over the country at large. Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan, Zacatecas, and large portions of Puebla, Vera Cruz, San Luis Potosí, and Mexico at the close of 1811, were almost completely in possession of the insurgents; and their enemies, confined to the fortified cities, were not sufficiently numerous to assail in all parts the numerous hordes which infested the country. The main efforts of the royalists being directed against the better organized armies of the independents, they could send out only detachments against such guerrilla bands, as, gathering strength, made themselves, from time to time, the terror of particular districts. In these cases the in surgents were generally routed and temporarily dispersed with heavy loss, no mercy being shown to those taken with arms in their hands. It was, perhaps, the very best policy the revolutionists could have pursued, although adopted without policy—these incessant diversions which weakened the efforts of the royalists, and rendered useless the concentration of their forces.

There was at this time one man only who stood forth conspicuous among the revolutionists as an admitted chief, a leader round whom they might with some degree of confidence rally, a fit successor of Hidalgo; and somewhat strange to say, this new man was the friend and disciple of Hidalgo, like him an