Scope and Content Note
The papers of Agustín de Iturbide span the period 1799 1880, with the bulk of the items from 1812 to 1824. The collection pertains to military questions in the Mexican civil wars of the early nineteenth century, and a large portion of it documents Iturbide's career before the twelve years his execution in 1824. Material for this period includes the military diary of Iturbide for 1812-1813, official correspondence with Mexican officials, orders, proclamations, accounts, and personal correspondence relating to the military and the government during the revolutionary period in Mexico, as well as official documents of Iturbide's term as emperor and the administration of the Imperial Palace. Persons represented include Juan Gómez Navarrete, Vicente Guerrero, Ana María Huarte de Iturbide, wife of the Emperor, and Agustín Gerónimo de Iturbide and Angel de Iturbide, the sons of the emperor.
When Agustín de Iturbide was banished to Europe in 1823, he carried his important papers with him to Italy, and then to London, where he left them when he made his last voyage to Mexico. After Iturbide's death, the papers were inherited by his descendants. Documents added to the papers by his descendants mainly concern the family and estate of Agustín de Iturbide and litigation relating to lands in Alta California, which had become part of the territory of the United States in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the "millón de pesos" debt owed to the family by the government of Mexico.
The papers were purchased in 1911 and 1912 by the Library from Agustín de Iturbide y Green (Agustín de Yturbide), the grandson of the emperor, son of Angel de Iturbide and the American Alice Green, and the adopted son of Maximillian I, Emperor of Mexico. Yturbide, a resident of Georgetown in Washington, D.C., at the time, had possession of the first part of the papers. Additional papers were still in Mexico, left in the care of the bishop of San Luis Potosí. Because of political disturbances in Mexico, Yturbide feared his grandfather's papers might fall into revolutionary hands and be destroyed. The bishop, with the help of the State Department and the American Consul of San Luis Potosí, arranged to have the second lot of papers delivered to the Library in 1912. The papers were first arranged and described by David Fergusson, a former railroad executive in Mexico and a representative of the Iturbide estate. The papers were organized both for historical preservation and for use in the continuing litigation over the Iturbide estate. The current container list still largely reflects this initial work, which explains the unorthodox and predominantly Spanish language descriptions. The papers were rehoused in 1942 and again in 1977, but the microfilm was made in 1972 and reflects the box numbering of 1942. In the current revision of the finding aid, the box numbers of 1942 have been added as "Old box Nos." to help researchers using the microfilm edition of the papers.