[6] Arredondo was rewarded for his actions in suppressing the revolutionaries with an appointment as commandant of the eastern division of the Provincias Internas[7] (comprising the provinces of Coahuila, Texas, Nuevo Santander and the New Kingdom of León); the region had a predominantly royalist population (see below), and the independence movement would not be supported by a majority of the population in those provinces until the late 1810s As part of the New Kingdom of León, the area of Texas then called Tejas was a bulwark against the large-scale marauding attacks of hostile Indian nations such as the Apaches and the Comanches.
This neutrality disappeared when independence fervor spread among the population following brutal suppression tactics by the Spanish colonial authorities and the threat of an even more absolutist government in the province.
In 1811, José Bernardo Maximiliano Gutiérrez de Lara, an idealistic mestizo blacksmith from Nuevo Santander,[8] dedicated himself to the Hidalgo Independence movement.
William Shaler, later an American consul to Havana, Europe and Algiers, as well as a writer, was attached to Gutiérrez's expedition by the United States government to oversee the revolutionaries' invasion of Spanish Texas.
They mustered them to participate in the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition and adopted a solid emerald green flag, thought to have been introduced by Colonel Magee, who was of Protestant Irish descent.
[15] From San Antonio the Texas governor, Manuel María de Salcedo, followed developments through his intelligence network and lobbied intensively for more aid from his superiors and comrades-in-arms south of the Rio Grande to prepare for the invasion and limit distribution of rebel propaganda.
Bernardino Montero, the commander of Nacogdoches, was unable to recruit a single civilian militiaman for the royalist cause, as the majority of the province erupted in support of the fledgling independence movement.
Gutierrez then released all the other rebel prisoners, formed a provisional government with himself as governor, and organized a tribunal which found Salcedo and Herrera guilty of treason against the Hidalgo movement, condemning them to death.
The Anglo officers protested the decision and endeavored to convince the self-appointed generalissimo and governor to spare them and send them either to prison in southern Mexico or to exile in Louisiana.
The brutal atrocity of these events sickened most of the Anglo-Tejano and American forces supporting the independence movement;[22] all the Anglo officers and recruits were horrified, and a party of them rushed to the execution site and gave the victims a Christian burial.
To meet the threat represented by the recently separated province, the Spanish crown appointed General José Joaquín de Arredondo to command the Eastern and Western Divisions of the Provincias Internas.
He quickly re-organized the royalist forces, appointed new officers, drilled his troops, and awaited for additional supplies while planning for a vast implementation of his counter-insurgency tactics.
The anger of the royalist criollos toward the Gutierrez regime, however, was such that many wanted quick and violent retribution by marching toward San Antonio to capture and execute the first "President Protector of the State of Texas.
On 16 June, the Republican Army, under an Anglo-Tejano called Henry Perry, met and routed Elizondo's forces, which suffered 400 men killed and many prisoners taken at the Battle of Alazan Creek outside San Antonio.
On 4 Aug 1813, Gutiérrez was deposed by these elements,[27] who installed their chief propagandist, a formal naval officer and member of the Spanish Cortes from Santo Domingo, José Álvarez de Toledo y Dubois.
On August 18, 1813, under José Álvarez de Toledo y Dubois the Army of the North and the Royal Spanish forces under Arredondo met in the four-hour-long Battle of Medina.
He spent the next year pursuing the remaining rebel leaders, including the civilian leadership of the Texas Republic, sparing few, and destroying all of the farms, buildings, and mills of the province except for a few located in San Antonio and newly built citadels such as that near Goliad.
Ravaged by the war of Independence and the subsequent Indian raids, the Kingdom of León fell backward in wealth and population, and along with the rest of Mexico essentially entered into a period of intense depression and anarchy.