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made the journey to Santa Anna’s hacienda to implore him to help. The new system was not working, they told him, and stronger leadership was required. Fortunately for them, Santa Anna’s only loyalty was to his own ambition.
    In April 1834, fifteen months after his retirement, Santa Anna made a triumphant return to Mexico City and seized the reins of power from his vice president. Making short work of the liberal constitution of 1824, he assumed near-dictatorial powers, dissolved the country’s Congress, and canceled Farías’s republican legislation. Mexico, Santa Anna decided, was not ready for democracy. “A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty,” he told the former American minister to Mexico. “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.”
    When he called for greatly reducing the independent state militias and declared that state governors and legislatures would be controlled by the central government, almost half the country’s nineteen states expressed their dissatisfaction in some way, several in outright revolt. Those states farthest from Mexico City protested most.
    The liberal-leaning city of Zacatecas, home to several rich silver mines, refused to disband its large, well-trained militia. Santa Anna decided to act quickly to crush the uprising there first. He knew the region well, having spent years as a young cadet with General Joaquín de Arredondo hunting down insurgents and Indians throughout the area.
    In April 1835, he led a four-thousand-man army out of Mexico City north to Zacatecas. Three weeks later, before dawn on May 11, he met the city’s four thousand militiamen on the outskirts of the mountain city. They were well armed and supplied, but undertrained and badly led, and their commander, former Zacatecas governor Francisco García, lacked military experience. The apparently evenly matched contest proved to be no contest at all. The centralist artillery and infantry successively battered and overwhelmed the cívicos, and when the latter turned and ran, the government cavalry turned the right flank and swooped down on the survivors from the rear. After two hours, the battle was over. The centralists incurred only a hundred casualties; the Zacatecan militia lost as many as twelve hundred citizens. “The field of battle presents a most horrifying picture,” exulted Santa Anna after the carnage, in a letter to Mexico City.
    Santa Anna’s soldados were rewarded with a period of forty-eight hours in which to sack Zacatecas, and they responded enthusiastically in a riot of destruction, rape, pillage, and murder. Foreigners, especially the British and Americans, were paid particular attention, and many were killed. The city would not recover for years. The victorious commander returned to Mexico City in a triumphal tour that wound through several cities, whose inhabitants turned out to celebrate him with parades and parties.
    When news of the Zacatecas butchery reached Texas, Anglo colonists took note, and some settlements organized Committees of Safety and militia companies. They knew that Santa Anna would likely attend to them next. He had visited punishment and death without mercy on his own people. They were in no doubt as to what he would do to those born on foreign soil.
    Soon after his return to Mexico City, the “Hero of the Fatherland” met with an Anglo political prisoner. At the April 1833 Consultation, Texian delegates had drafted a constitution for statehood, and Stephen Austin had been chosen to deliver it to the Mexican authorities. He arrived in Mexico City a few months later and presented the petition to acting president Farías, who ignored Austin for several months. A disgusted Austin wrote a letter in October to the Béxar ayuntamiento recommending that they organize a state government without permission. The letter contained several incendiary