Plans for the Spanish Reconquest of Mexico
Joaquín de Miranda y Madariaga, 1829
MIRANDA Y MADARIAGA, Joaquín de. "Proyecto de Reconquista de Nueva España," manuscript document signed ("Joaquín de Miranda y de Madariaga"), Madrid, 22 April 1829.

70 pages, 210 x 300mm (dampstaining and soiling on title, tear on upper left corner with loss). Sewn (remnants of former binding).

A Spanish royalist's report of the political and economic landscape of the United States, Mexico and its territories of Texas and California, and other rival powers for the planned reconquest of Mexico, prepared for King Fernando VII of Spain. In July 1829, the Spanish Crown launched an expedition under General Isidro Barradas to reconquer Mexico eight years after its war of independence. The futile campaign was routed by General Santa Anna of Mexico at their first contest, effectively ensuring both Mexican sovereignty and the continued westward expansion of the United States in the years following the Monroe Doctrine. "La Reconquista" was a calculated invasion predicated on a cost-benefit analysis that weighed Spanish military costs against potential gains in natural resources, a decision informed in part by data compiled in this memorandum by Miranda, colonel in the Spanish army corps of engineers and military leader charged with crushing a slave revolt in Cuba in 1827. Availing himself of U.S. census records, British Parliamentary papers, and intelligence collected during his own travels—perhaps clandestine—to the United States, Miranda provides detailed demographic and economic figures for major North American powers and their dependencies, including the United States, Mexico, Great Britain, France, and Russia, which maintained colonial outposts in Northern California and Alaska. Miranda covers population, agricultural and industrial sectors, ports and navigable watersheds, and the status of economic exploitation and potential for growth. Miranda is keen to note growing commercial links between the United States and the newly independent nations of Latin America as well as American interests in western exploration and expansion. He prophetically singles out recent Anglo-American settlements in the Mexican state of "Coahuila y Tejas"—which included much of present-day Texas—as evidence of the United States' strategic designs on the area: "I am suspicious of the great effort that for three years the government of the Union [the United States] has made in directing settlers towards the borders of New Spain" ["juzgo sospechoso el grande esfuerzo con que hace tres años trata el Gobierno de la Union de dirigir los poblabores [h]acia los confines de Nueva España"].

Miranda's manuscript appears to be part of a series of interrelated logistical documents, one of which is preserved in the State Archives in Bremen, Germany, also signed by Miranda and dated two days prior to this one. While the Bremen manuscript is an internal memorandum advocating for military intervention and outlining the logistics of paying, feeding and moving troops from Spain to Mexico, the current document analyzes the potential gains of a successful campaign vis-à-vis the resources of competing powers in the Americas. See "Documento XLI: Proyecto de Reconquista de Nueva España…," in España y México en el Siglo XIX: III Apéndice Documental (1820-1845) (Madrid, 1950); and Manuel Barcía Paz, Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848 (Baton Rouge, 2008), p. 77.