through the plains of Apam and extended across Puebla to the confines of Oajaca. Toward the close of the year the territory of Tlascala was invaded, the city attacked, and many of its towns and their districts devastated. The highway between the capital and Orizaba was almost closed to the royalists, and communication with Vera Cruz interrupted.
The first impulse to the revolutionary movement in the plains of Apam was given by José Francisco Osorno, a highwayman by profession, and so illiterate that he only succeeded in learning to scrawl his name when he became prominent as a leader.[1] Having collected a band of 600 or 700 men, he entered Zacatlan on the 30th of August without opposition. Here he was presently joined by Mariano Aldama a relative of the Aldamas who had been the associates of Hidalgo with the rank of major-general; and their rapid progress soon caused inconvenience in the capital by the stoppage of supplies from the haciendas situated in the plains. Venegas accordingly despatched an expedition against Zacatlan under the command of a naval captain named Ciriaco del Llano.[2] This officer gained a series of successes over the insurgents, but his sanguinary and oppressive proceedings, instead of extinguishing the insurrectionary spirit, only served to inflame it.[3] Thus Osorno, though repeatedly defeated and his followers dispersed, ever reappeared at
- ↑ Such is the statement of Calleja in his manifiesto supplied by Martiñena in his Verdadero Origen de la Rev. en N. Esp., 16-7. Osorno was convicted in Puebla for robbery about the year 1790. He attained to the rank of major general and lieutenant general in the revolutionary service. Bustamante glosses over the criminal antecedent of this leader. Cuad. Hist., i. 358.
- ↑ At the beginning of the revolution the governor of Habana had sent to Mexico a number of naval officers who wished to take service in the royalist army. Id., i. 359.
- ↑ An order which he issued to the effect that no one except a public character might ride on horseback caused great and general discontent, and many joined Osorno in order to save their horses, which were regarded with affection, from being taken for military work. Still more oppressive was Llano's system of burning the homes of the country people on the ranches scattered through the plains, in order to compel the inhabitants to congregate in the larger towns and oppose the insurgents. Id., i. 360-1; Gaz. de Mex., 1811. ii. 932.
