following brutal suppression tactics by the Spanish colonial authorities and the threat of an even more absolutist government in the province. First Texas Rebellion In 1811, José Bernardo Maximiliano Gutiérrez de Lara, an idealistic mestizo blacksmith from Nuevo Santander, dedicated himself to the Hidalgo Independence movement. With his substantial contacts in the region and his personal militancy he received a commission as a Lt. Colonel in Hidalgo's Army of the Americas and traveled to Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia to enlist aid supporting his own goals for the independence movement in Texas. In Washington and Philadelphia he met Caribbean adventurer José Álvarez de Toledo y Dubois who was wanted by Spanish authorities in Texas. Upon both his departure and then his return trip through the Neutral Ground on the Texas-Louisiana border, Gutiérrez was encouraged by numerous sympathetic factions who supported the revolutionary cause. In Natchitoches, which had a long-standing predominantly American settlement, he made plans to invade the rest of Texas from the east. He enjoined another adventurer and former US Army Lieutenant, Colonel Augustus William Magee, to carry out the mission in the field. 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. Shaler, a friend of Secretary of State Robert Smith, had been appointed by President James Madison as a confidential agent; he advised Gutiérrez and Magee with the direct involvement of upper levels of the American government as high as Secretary of State James Monroe; officially, however, the United States maintained a stance of disapproving the invasion. From their headquarters in the Neutral Ground, Gutiérrez and Magee openly advertised for revolutionary recruits from Louisiana and Texas for the "Republican Army of the North". 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. Volunteers were offered forty dollars a month and a square league (4,428 acres) of to-be-captured land. 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. Governor Salcedo was treated condescendingly by his protocol-oriented and bureaucratic uncle,