The Book of the Dead (28 page)

It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Without his cussedness and intelligence, the colony might have fallen to the English much sooner. When it did, it was well established enough for most of the colonists—including Stuyvesant and his family—to segue peacefully into life as New Yorkers. Little is known of Pieter Stuyvesant’s private life, but he did have one passion, inspired by his years in Curaçao. He collected tropical birds, and by the time of his death in 1672 he had several large aviaries full of them. It’s an odd thought that this tight-lipped old moralist, with his black-and-white view of the world, saw out his days surrounded by loud squawks and splashes of brilliant color, on the farm that would one day become famous as the street of bums and drunks.

It’s impossible to tell how much the loss of his leg changed Stuyvesant’s life. One of the central tenets of the modern approach to disability is that no one should be limited or defined by it. Stuyvesant, in his stoical Dutch way, would have assented to that. The career of another one-legged military man makes a dramatic contrast.
General Antonio López de Santa Anna
(1794–1876) holds the unique distinction of being the only person to become head of the same nation state on eleven separate occasions, once for less than a fortnight. From 1833 to 1855, Mexico was unstable even by Mexican standards: The presidency changed hands thirty-six times. To carve out a political career in these unpromising conditions, Santa Anna had to use anything he could to gather popular support, including the shameless exploitation of his missing appendage.

He was born into a respected Mexican Spanish family in the port of Veracruz, and his initial loyalty was to the Spanish crown. He was an outstanding soldier but also a keen gambler, and as a young officer he was often in debt. During his first tour of duty in Texas he appropriated money from regimental funds, got caught, and was sent back to headquarters in Veracruz as punishment. This allowed him to indulge his other passion: women. His military duties were not demanding and he soon acquired a reputation for whoring and for dalliances with other men’s wives.

The first wife of his own was only fourteen when he married her. Too busy fighting to make the ceremony, he deputized his prospective father-in-law to stand in for him. His bride brought a dowry large enough for Santa Anna to buy a country estate, but not long afterward, he made a personal appearance at another marriage ceremony in Texas, having persuaded one of his soldiers to dress up as a priest so he could bed a young woman who had agreed to sleep with him—but only if he married her.

This flexible ruthlessness was to serve Santa Anna well in politics. At various points in his long career others claimed him as a liberal and a conservative, a monarchist and a republican, a liberator and a despot. In fact, he was a pragmatist. Political ideology didn’t excite him: What mattered was to be on the
winning side. His first major defection was in 1821. Now a colonel, Santa Anna was part of the Spanish force sent to crush the uprising of Agustín de Iturbide. Seeing that the tide was about to turn in the rebels’ favor, Santa Anna switched sides. Iturbide promoted him to the rank of brigadier general, and crowned himself Mexico’s first constitutional emperor. But the two men didn’t get on. According to one (entirely believable) rumor, Iturbide didn’t like Santa Anna’s flirting with his sixty-year-old sister. Santa Anna was once more sent back home to Veracruz, but this time as the state governor.

He lost no time in securing himself a luxurious hacienda and large tracts of land, while imposing punitive taxes on the port’s citizens. He became so unpopular that the self-styled emperor had to recall him to the capital. This was a mistake. Santa Anna’s antennae told him the wind was changing once more: He joined forces with the liberals to overthrow Iturbide and establish a republic under a new president, Vicente Guerrero. He later remarked:

I did not know what a republic was myself, but the more I tried to reason with the people, the louder they cried, “Viva La Republica!” so we all went off in search of one.

In 1829 his moment of glory arrived. In Spain’s last attempt to retake their colony, three thousand Spanish troops landed at Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico. Santa Anna, with half as many men, penned in the invaders for six weeks until lack of supplies and yellow fever forced them to surrender. Single-handedly, he had saved the republic and become a national hero. He “modestly” retired to his hacienda in Veracruz “until his country needed him.” He didn’t have to wait long. In 1833 he was elected president for the first time.

As with his wedding, Santa Anna didn’t feel the need to govern in person, staying at home on his ranch and delegating power to his vice president, Valentín Farías. Unfortunately, Farías was a
genuine
liberal and within a couple of years his reforms had enraged the Catholic Church and disgusted the landed gentry—of which Santa Anna was a prominent member. Alarmed by the sudden intrusion of politics into his life, Santa Anna acted decisively, sacking Farías, suspending the new constitution, and imposing a central dictatorship. This provoked several Mexican states, including Texas, to declare their independence. Mexico was at war yet again.

It was the Texan campaign that made Santa Anna famous outside Mexico. On March 6, 1836, after a twelve-day siege, his 1,500-strong force took the small garrison known as the Alamo. Hugely outnumbered, the Texans resisted bravely, but Santa Anna offered no quarter, ordering the execution of all who surrendered. The brutality of his troops that day probably changed the course of the war and certainly ensured his reputation in America as a sadistic tyrant. Even after the garrison had capitulated, Mexican soldiers continued to shoot and bayonet the corpses, which were then heaped into an unceremonious pile and burned. As well as the folk heroes Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, another 250 Texans were slaughtered. Only women and children and two slaves were spared. They were turned loose to spread panic through the rest of the state. Three weeks later, Santa Anna excelled himself by ordering the massacre at Goliad, where 342 unarmed Texan prisoners of war were shot by Mexican troops, the survivors being clubbed, stabbed, or trampled to death by cavalry.

Once news of these atrocities leaked out, the Texan army was
inundated with volunteers. Led by General Sam Houston, they got their revenge by ambushing Santa Anna’s army at San Jacinto while it was enjoying its siesta. Falling on the enemy with the now legendary cry “Remember the Alamo!” they killed more than half the drowsy Mexicans in eighteen minutes. Santa Anna escaped but was captured the next day. Having ditched his fancy uniform, he was identified by the fact that he was the only prisoner wearing silk underwear, hardly standard issue for a Mexican infantryman. Forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty to save his own life, he was disowned by his government and exiled to the United States. Texas became an independent republic with Houston as its president.

In 1837 Santa Anna crept home to lick his wounds. But history intervened again. The French fleet arrived to blockade Veracruz, ostensibly in support of an extremely angry French pastry cook called Monsieur Remontel. He had written to Louis-Philippe I complaining bitterly of the chaos that reigned in Mexico City, which was having a deleterious effect on his pastry business. Like a Hispanic King Arthur, Santa Anna charged into the fray. In Mexico’s hour of need, he would once more save his fatherland from foreign domination. The government had no choice but to back him.

He won the “Pastry War” but lost his leg in the process. A cannonball killed his horse and pulverised his ankle. As he lay waiting for the surgeon he piled on the pathos in a letter to the latest Mexican president, Anastasio Bustamente:

I ask of the government that my body may be buried in these very sand dunes, so that my comrades in arms know that this is the line of battle I leave marked for them: that from today onward, the Mexicans’ most unjust enemies may not dare place the filthy soles of their feet on our territory. All Mexicans, forgetting my political errors, do not deny me the only title I wish to donate to my children: that of having been a Good Mexican.

He didn’t die, but the leg was amputated rather inexpertly: The surgeons left a nub of bone protruding too far and had to overstretch the skin to cover the stump. For the rest of his life Santa Anna suffered pain and inflammation, and sometimes the skin would split and bleed. But it was a propaganda weapon his rivals could do nothing to match: His missing leg was the living embodiment of Mexican independence and sacrifice. In May 1839 he was elected president for the second time.

His second administration was even more oppressive than his first, so he played the leg card. At political rallies, and to inspire his troops, he waved his wooden limb above his head, confirming his status as a war hero. In 1841 he had his original leg ceremoniously disinterred from its last resting place in Veracruz, taken to the capital under escort in a glass casket, and reburied with full military honors in a mausoleum in the cemetery of Santa Paula. It wasn’t enough to stem the tide of resentment. In 1844 a rampaging mob smashed his statue, rushed into the cemetery, and dug up the casket containing the revered limb. It was carried through the streets to cries of “Death to the cripple!” Shortly afterward Santa Anna was deposed and exiled to Cuba.

A year later he was back. The United States, keen to expand and consolidate its southern territories, had declared war on Mexico. Santa Anna wrote to the Mexican government offering his services with the solemn promise that he would not pursue
the presidency. The long-suffering Farías, president once more, reluctantly agreed. What he didn’t know was that Santa Anna had been in secret talks with the U.S. government, offering to sell them large parts of Mexico if he ever returned to power. By early 1846 Santa Anna had returned to the place he loved best, the head of the Mexican army. Never one to do anything by halves, he decided to renege on both promises simultaneously, seizing the presidency and turning his army on the invading Americans. But Santa Anna was outmaneuverd by the U.S. forces and outgunned by their heavy artillery, losing six straight battles in a row. The Mexican-American War ended in disaster for Mexico and humiliation for Santa Anna, culminating in the fall of Mexico City in September 1847 and the loss of more than half of Mexico’s northern territory. On February 2, 1848, the Mexican states of Utah, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and half of Colorado joined Texas as part of the United States. Apart from those who fell in battle, deaths from secondary infection and disease on both sides claimed over fifty thousand lives. Santa Anna went into exile again, this time in Jamaica.

His leg had also had a bad war. In the battle of Cerro Gordo in 1847 the Americans overran the Mexicans so quickly that Santa Anna was forced to leave his half-eaten chicken dinner and both wooden legs behind. The legs were “taken prisoner” by two members of the 4th Illinois Infantry. The fancy one, made of cork and leather, was the work of Charles Bartlett, a New York cabinetmaker. It had cost $1,300 at the time (worth about $35,000 today), and had an articulated foot that moved on ball bearings. After the war, it was exhibited at state fairs for a dime a peek before finding its way to the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield. The simpler (spare) peg leg was used as a baseball
bat by General Abner Doubleday and can now be seen at the Oglesby Mansion Museum in Decatur, Georgia.

That ought to be the end of the Santa Anna story, but it isn’t. He operated on a purely mythological level in the minds of his countrymen and, though he had just lost half the country, was invited back, this time by the conservatives. In 1853 he was sworn in as president for his eleventh and final term. Dispensing with even the pretense of democracy, he appointed himself dictator for life, insisting on the official title His Serene Highness. His Napoleonic fantasy was complete. Writing to a former ally, he made his position quite clear:

For a hundred years to come, my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one.

Unfortunately, Santa Anna was incapable of being either wise or virtuous. Back in power, he sold another chunk of territory to the Americans so they could build a railway, making sure that some of its $15 million price tag found its way into his pockets. Even his conservative allies finally decided he was a liability and, in 1855, he was deposed for good, exiled to Cuba, and tried and convicted in his absence for corruption.

The late 1860s found him living in exile on Staten Island in New York. Here, inadvertently, he made his most significant and lasting contribution to world history. He had become friendly with an American inventor, Thomas Adams. Adams was intrigued by the general’s habit of chewing chicle, the gum from the evergreen
Manilkara
tree, something Mexicans had been
doing since the times of the Mayan empire. Adams hoped to make it into a cheap rubber substitute and bought a ton of chicle from Santa Anna, just in case. He failed to make rubber, but discovered that, by adding sugar, he had a terrific new confectionery product: chewing gum. In 1871, he launched it as Adams New York No. 1. His company later merged with Wrigley’s. In 2006 the chewing-gum giant had a turnover of $4.6 billion and a 63 percent global market share.