assault. He was afterwards appointed to an independent command in the Baxio, (an honour which few Creoles had obtained before him;) but there, as during the course of his previous career, he tarnished the lustre of his military exploits by giving loose to the violence of the most unbridled passions. Few even of the Spanish Commandants equalled him in cruelty: his prisoners were seldom, if ever spared, and a dispatch of his is still extant, addressed to the Viceroy, after an action at Sălvătīĕrră, dated Good Friday, 1814, in which he tells him that, "in honour of the day, he had just ordered three hundred excommunicated wretches to be shot!"
This dispatch has been declared by Iturbide's partisans to be apocryphal; but the original exists in the archives of the Viceroyalty. All, therefore, that can be said is, that these detestable executions, in cold blood, were but too much in consonance with the barbarous spirit of the time; and that, although it is impossible now to determine with which party they originated, they were almost universally practised by both. These were not, however, the only causes of complaint against Ĭtŭrbīdĕ; his rapacity and extortions in his government led to such numerous representations against him, that he was recalled, in 1816, to Mexico, where an inquiry was instituted into his conduct, which was, however, stifled, because the malversations of which he had been guilty extended, more or less, to the whole
