The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  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.

  Santa Anna didn’t make a peseta from his role as father of American chewing gum. In 1874 he was finally allowed back into Mexico. In the two decades since he had left, the country had been plunged into civil war and had had an Austrian puppet emperor imposed on it by the French. Now the liberals were back in power. President Benito Juárez was the first indigenous Amerindian (and the first civilian) to govern Mexico. He ignored Santa Anna’s return: There was to be no reentry to political life for him this time. The “Napoleon of the West” died, almost blind and penniless, stripped of property and honors, in Mexico City in 1876. His wooden leg remains in exile. Several attempts to return it have foundered: The last received a frosty response from a historian at the National Museum in Mexico. Santa Anna, he said, was a theatrical opportunist who looked out for only himself: “Returning the leg wouldn’t mean much. We do not want the leg returned.”

  Did the loss of a leg profoundly alter the course of Santa Anna’s life? Probably not. Was it a defining moment? Without doubt. The lost limb was the symbol of his self-appointed role as savior of his country, a kind of visual proof of his canonization. At the same time, as with Stuyvesant, it became a national joke. Santa Anna’s life, with its vanity, cruelty, and lack of integrity, nonetheless has a compelling quality, rather as if Casanova had put his energy into politics instead of sex. Though the immortal national hero status he lusted after was ultimately denied him, how many people have ever inspired a sea shanty?

  O! Santianna had a wooden leg

  Heave away, Santianna!

  He used it for a cribbage peg

  All on the plains of Mexico

  O! Santianna’s day is o’er,

  Heave away, Santianna!

  Santianna will fight no more.

  All on the plains of Mexico!

  There are no songs dedicated to the “surprising Corpulency” of Daniel Lambert (1770–1809), but for a while his name was the universal cliché for anything big. London was “the Daniel Lambert of cities” and any especially erudite scholar, the “Daniel Lambert of learning.” There have been heavier men since—but not many, and none as fondly remembered. Perhaps for this reason he has kept an honorable mention in the Guinness Book of Records. When he died, aged thirty-nine, he weighed nearly 750 pounds and his waist was 9 feet 4 inches in circumference. In today’s terms that would give him a Body Mass Index of 104—three times the level at which obesity kicks in. Quite how he got so large was as much a puzzle to him as to others. He didn’t eat to excess and drank only water. He just kept getting bigger.

  Obesity is not a modern phenomenon, although it has become a modern obsession. Today, in Britain and America, one in four adults is obese, and the cost (in terms of health care and lost earning potential) runs into hundreds of billions. Cheap food has meant that, for the first time in history, the bottom 20 percent of earners are, on average, more obese than the top 20 percent. The diet industry in the United States alone is valued at $60 billion per annum, more than the global turnover of Microsoft and McDonald’s combined. This double hysteria—overeating then trying to lose weight again—is a long way from rural Leicestershire in the late eighteenth century.

  Lambert came from a cheerful lower-middle-class family. None of the rest of his relatives was in the least remarkable, either in size or achievement. His father was keeper of the Leicester County “bridewell,” or house of correction. Bridewells got their name from the original Bridewell in the city of London, first a royal palace, then a hospital, and finally a prison. They were run by local magistrates and were used to keep the streets clear of vagrants, idlers, and minor offenders. Keepers were salaried but were allowed to supplement their income by hiring out inmates as a source of cheap local labor. Lambert’s institution had eight rooms, three for men and five for women (it wasn’t considered appropriate for women to share a room).

  Daniel grew up living the active, outdoor life of a Leicestershire countryman. He was a passionate devotee of cockfighting and hare coursing, rode with the hunt, and taught children to swim in the River Soar. He matured quickly, reaching almost six feet tall in his teens. He was also extremely strong, said to be able to carry huge cart wheels and quarter-ton weights and swim with two men clinging to his back. Once Lambert’s dog attacked a dancing bear that was due to perform in the town. The bear had retaliated and, to encourage some sport, its handlers removed its muzzle. When they refused Lambert’s request to restrain the bear, he felled it with a single blow to the jaw and rescued his dog.

  When Lambert’s father retired, Daniel took over the running of the prison. He was well liked by his charges, working hard to improve their living conditions and ensure all of them were treated fairly; there are even reports of inmates crying with gratitude for his kindness as they left. The only problem with the job was that it didn’t involve much more than sitting on his seat in the street outside the prison. He became a popular character in Leicester, puffing on a pipe of tobacco, striking up conversations with people as they passed or swapping tips about breeding fighting cocks and greyhounds. It was this sudden transition
to a sedentary life that Lambert blamed for his rapid weight gain, but it’s probable he suffered from a metabolic disorder. Within two years he weighed 450 pounds and was too big to find a horse that would carry his weight. Even simple physical tasks started to exhaust him: It was easier to sit and watch the world go by. In 1803 a prison inspector noted Lambert’s “constitutional propensity to ease…. He is spoken of as a humane, benevolent man but I thought him a very improper person to be the Keeper of a prison.”

  Then, in 1805, the Leicester magistrates decided to close the correction house and set the inmates to forced labor instead. Lambert was awarded a one-off annuity of about $75 as a thank-you, but this wasn’t enough for him to live on (it would be worth about $6,000 today). He was now thirty-five years old and his weight had crept up to seven hundred pounds, making it impossible for him to find work. He couldn’t even squeeze into a standard-sized coach to visit the races. By the end of the year, out of money and deprived by his immense size of the hobbies he loved, Lambert found himself practically housebound. Things weren’t helped by a string of visitors wanting to see if the rumors of Leicester’s “Human Colossus” were true. One pushy man from Nottingham pressed for admission on the grounds that he had a particular favor to ask. Lambert eventually let him in only to have the man ask the pedigree of a local mare, information readily available from the owner. Lambert, who had by now developed a smart line in witty put-downs, answered, “Oh! If that’s all, she was got by Impertinence out of Curiosity.”

  Annoying as these visitations were, they helped him conceive a plan. In early 1806, he surprised everyone by renting a house on Piccadilly in London. He announced his arrival with a flurry of handbills and newspaper advertising: For the price of one shilling, the gentlefolk of London would be able to enjoy an audience with “the Heaviest Man in Britain.” Lambert had decided that because his condition prevented him from working, he would turn people’s nosiness into an income. He had strict rules: Politeness was an absolute prerequisite, and gentlemen were ejected if they refused to remove their hats. He did what he could to defuse the invasiveness of some people’s questions with humor. When a young beau accosted him by peering through the fashionable device of a quizzing glass (a monocle on a long stick) and asking what he most disliked, he retorted, “To be bored by a quizzing glass.” A woman who asked him how much his enormous red coat cost was told, with a twinkle, “If you think it proper to make the present of a new coat, you will then know exactly what it costs, madam.” For rudeness, he operated a zero-tolerance policy: A man who accused him of paying too much attention to the lady guests was threatened with immediate defenestration. His “act” was simply to tell amusing stories, discuss the news of the day, and pick over in detail the qualities of particular horses or packs of hounds. He did brisk business on the side, selling his own lines of pedigree pointers and spaniels. His pet terrier was so admired he was once offered a hundred guineas for it—equivalent to more than $15,000 today—but he refused, pleading that it was his closest and most loyal companion. A visit to Lambert became a must for every fashionable Londoner, and some afternoons as many as four hundred people would pass through his house. The Times wrote admiringly: