Anna—had not been idle in the midst of his disheartening reverses. In little more than two weeks, he gathered nearly three thousand men from the fragments of his broken army, and marched to Puebla, where he received notice of Worth's advance from Peroté. Sallying forth immediately with his force, he attacked the American general at Amozoque, but, finding himself unable to check his career, returned with a loss of nearly ninety killed and wounded. On the 22d of May, Puebla yielded submissively to General Worth, and Santa Anna retreated in the direction of the national capital, halting at San Martin Tesmalucan, and again at Ayotla, about twenty miles from Mexico. Here he learned that the city was in double fear of the immediate assault of the victorious Americans and of his supposed intention to defend it within its own walls, a project which the people believed would only result, in the present disastrous condition of affairs, in the slaughter of its citizens and ruin of their property. The commander-in-chief halted therefore at Ayotla, and playing dexterously on the hopes and fears of the people in a long despatch addressed to the minister of war, he at length received the Presidential and popular sanction of his return to Mexico.
In truth, the nation at large had no one but Santa Anna, at that moment of utter despair, in whose prestige and talents—in spite of all his misfortunes and defeats—it could rely for even the hope of escape from destruction, if not of ultimate victory.
Whilst the Mexican nation had been thus sorely vexed by intestinal commotions and foreign invasion an Extraordinary Constituent Congress—Congreso Extraordinario Constituyente—had been summoned and met in the capital, chiefly to revise the Constitution, or the "Bases of Political Organization," of 1843, which had been superseded by the temporary adoption of the Federal Constitution of 1824, according