The Hero-Statesman

The Hero-Statesman by Roger Pocock

Roger Pocock's sketch of Diaz presents him as the greatest living statesman and soldier, the half-Spanish, half-Indian founder of modern Mexico, tracing his rise from errand boy to president and supreme pacifier of his nation. Born into poverty, Diaz worked from the age of seven and taught himself sufficiently to hold a chair in Roman law at Oaxaca by the time he was twenty-one. When political conditions forced him into armed opposition, he emerged from his first revolution as mayor of a village of naked Indians, whom he drilled into soldiers, led by assault against Oaxaca, expelled a local usurper, and was rewarded with a captaincy in the national guards. He immediately put those guards to use suppressing a nearby rebellion, though he was seriously wounded in the process. Barely recovered, he repelled a clerical force that came to seize the city, earning promotion to colonel and then a parliamentary seat representing Oaxaca at the capital. When a clerical army besieged the City of Mexico and disrupted congress, Diaz left his seat, gathered his forces, chased the besiegers for two months, fell upon them at supper, and routed them. The clerical faction then invited Napoleon III to intervene, and the liberals met the combined French and clerical army under Mount Orizaba and before Puebla, checking and badly routing them in engagements so decisive that the victory day became Mexico's great national festival. The French returned forty thousand strong. Diaz commanded an outpost before Puebla and, when the outer gate fell and the French rushed the courtyard, he alone stood with a field-piece firing shrapnel until his men rallied and recovered the gates. The city held out sixty days before famine compelled surrender. The French imprisoned Diaz in a tower cell with only a small barred window high in the wall. He forced his way through the bars, escaped, captured a French convoy to arm a handful of recruits, raised the southern states, and held them against French armies for two years. President Juarez had fled north as a fugitive, and the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital while Marshal Bazaine commanded nearly fifty thousand men against Diaz's three thousand. Diaz organised the governance of the southern states from behind a chain of forts and even founded a school for girls in Oaxaca during this period. Bazaine, refusing to bribe Diaz into submission, slowly drove the nationalists back to Oaxaca, where Diaz made what Pocock calls one of the most glorious defenses in the annals of war, melting cathedral bells for cannonballs and fighting from a gun mounted in the belfry until he stood alone among the dead firing into the siege lines. Imprisoned again, he made repeated escape attempts and at last scaled a wall judged impossible, then within two days commanded bandits to capture a French garrison, ambushed a pursuing expedition, and reconquered the south. When the United States compelled the French withdrawal in 1867, Juarez swept down from the north, besieged and captured Querétaro, and had Maximilian shot. Diaz entered the City of Mexico from the south, handed the capital to Juarez, resigned as commander-in-chief, and retired contentedly to make sugar in Oaxaca. For nine years he made sugar while Apache raiding devastated a northern territory the size of France and the government persecuted every man who offered help. When Diaz finally spoke out he was prosecuted, fled, and underwent a period of wild adventures while the government hunted him. He raised a northern insurrection and won a series of remarkable victories but could not march south. He re-entered Mexico disguised as a laborer by sea, landed at Vera Cruz, walked through a succession of near-captures to Oaxaca, raised his final rebellion, ambushed a government army with four thousand men taking three thousand prisoners with all their guns and transport, and when President Lerdo fled with the national funds, Diaz took the City of Mexico and declared himself president. As president he proved as inventive in peace as in war. He selected eleven leading politicians at Vera Cruz and had them shot against the city wall, abating politics as a plague. He invited the principal highway robbers to advise him on government, formed them into mounted police, and used the humane legal prohibition on capital punishment as an excuse to shoot them all for attempting to escape when their work was done. Falling silver prices threatened ruin, but Diaz used the crisis to build railroads across the country, equip cities with electric light and traction power, open seaports, establish factories, pay off the national debt, and stabilise the coinage. He required every child to learn English, which he regarded as the future tongue of mankind. He went about among his people simply and accessibly, riding in the traditional leather dress of Mexican horsemen in the morning and taking the tram to his office in a tweed suit, hunting cougar on holidays, attending church with his family on Sundays. In the wildest districts of the country he had made, visitors found no need to carry cartridges. Pocock, who knew the country, regards Diaz as surpassed in the combined fields of war and peace only by Napoleon and the late Japanese emperor, yet he notes that the people proved unworthy of their chief and that Diaz ended as a broken exile while Mexico collapsed back into anarchy.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1906 · Genre: Biography, Historical Non-Fiction, Military History · 2,047 words

First lines

A. D. 1867

There is no greater man now living in the world than Diaz the hero-statesman, father of Mexico. What other soldier has scored fourteen sieges and fifty victorious battles? What other statesman, having fought his way to the throne, has built a civilized nation out of chaos?

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leadership · political philosophy · heroism · statesmanship · virtue · governance · character development · political theory · idealism · public service · moral character · political thought

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The Hero-Statesman is listed on Textopian as a short story by Roger Pocock, dated 1906 CE.

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