Chapter 1

What is to be Done?

The Mexican Republic would have to draw on its long and rich past, complex and contradictory as it was, in order to rebuild the country and assert its distinct identity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Mexican Republic had failed to resolve the problems of balance between liberty and order; executive power and the legislature and judiciary; central government and the regions; the peaceful transfer of power and legitimisation of its exercise; the relationship between religion and civil power; and, finally, what constituted the often spoken of ‘Mexican nation’?

The Liberals’ leading theorist and commentator, José María Luis Mora (1794–1850), who had published his critical works during the 1820s and early 1830s, remained in exile in Paris from December 1834 until March 1847, moving to London in 1847 until 1850. He corresponded regularly with former associates – Valentín Gómez Farías, Santa Anna’s Vice President (March 1833–April 1834); Francisco García Salinas, Governor of Zacatecas (1829–34); and Manuel Gómez Pedraza – noting their political evolution during this period. Into the 1840s, Mora added Mariano Otero (1817–50), representative of the younger generation, to this list. A major concern of Mora’s continued to be the evident minority nature of Mexican Liberalism.¹

Otero, originating from Guadalajara, became a rising star among moderate Liberals after his arrival in Mexico City in 1842. A link between generations, he aligned with Gómez Pedraza, virtual leader of the moderates, but derived his ideas on the deleterious impact of Church and army from Mora. Even so, Otero upheld the historic position of the Church in Mexican cultural life and did not consider religious toleration to be a relevant issue in Mexico. Although his aim was to separate the clergy from political involvement, he argued for the Christian roots of Liberalism in a common desire for human improvement. Otero viewed federalism as the natural reflection of Mexican regional identities and provincial sentiment, sympathising with García Salinas and Prisciliano Sánchez (1783–1826), his Jalisco forebear and first state governor.²

Otero sought explanations in his writings and speeches during the 1840s for the general malaise in the country and the lack of civil harmony. The conflicts of the 1830s pointed to the urgency of reform. He believed that by 1840–1 Mexico had reached crisis point. Santa Anna’s frustration of reform in 1842 was, in his view, a step backwards. In his discourse of 11 October 1842, Otero took his stand on political liberty and federalism, but warned of the indifference of the majority of Mexicans to political affairs. Parallel to this was the other ‘worst enemy’: apathy among the ‘decent classes’ (‘gentes honradas’).³

Otero clearly did not regard Mexico as a ‘nation’, since, in his view, no sense of common identity or of mutual cooperation existed among its inhabitants, communities or corporations. Otero went as far as to cite Miguel Bataller, the late-colonial magistrate of the Audiencia of Mexico who, after Independence, exclaimed that ‘the worst punishment that could befall the Mexicans is that they should govern themselves’.⁴

Otero saw the army as ‘undoubtedly the element most immediately responsible for the loss of national honour’. He blamed the officers, despite some exceptions, not the ordinary soldier. All governments over the previous twenty years had been brought to power as a result of some military intervention, notably the ‘farce of pronunciamientos’. He wrote to Mora on 15 September 1848 that in his view the ‘destabilising tendencies’ of military-politicians presented the country’s most serious problem. Furthermore, the insecure situation on the northern frontier resulting from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with the United States in 1848 and an alarming ‘disposition to separatism’ on the part of the frontier states struck him as matters requiring attention.⁵

José Fernando Ramírez (1804–71), who came from northern Mexico, saw a generational conflict between the architects of Independence and the younger men, anxious for influence and power, who wanted to transform Mexico and overcome the errors of the past.⁶ Attempts to work out solutions, however, remained beset by overwhelming difficulties. Until 1851, for example, the Mexican Republic had not managed a peaceful transfer of power at presidential level.⁷ Like Otero, Ramírez was a moderate Liberal. Although they differed in temperament and perspective, their diagnosis of Mexico’s situation in the 1840s was remarkably similar. Ramírez identified officer peculation and inattention to the needs of the soldiery as prime causes of the demoralisation of the army in the Texas War of 1836 and the War of 1846–7, blaming Santa Anna in particular.⁸

In Ramírez’s view, two vices kept Mexico behind: lack of any understanding of representative institutions; and indifference to productive work, which had made the United States strong. He pointed to persistent factionalism, which reached its worst point in the middle of the war with the United States. Ramírez’s analysis was steeped in disenchantment and despair.⁹

When he became Arista’s secretary of foreign relations, Ramírez, on 11 September 1851, outlined his objectives: strict observation of the 1824 Constitution and establishment of the rule of law; the balancing of powers within the constitutional processes – especially between the National Congress and the State governments; full integration of the northern states into the Republic; inculcation of moral principles in public administration; the elimination of corruption; and the regulation of public finance. Ramírez also drew attention to another pressing question: inter-oceanic communication across Mexican territory, henceforth an issue between Mexico and the United States, which had expanded to the Pacific coast in 1847–8.¹⁰

Critics of Liberalism, such as Luis G. Cuevas (1799–1867), offered a different perspective on what went wrong in Mexico from Independence. Appearing in stages between 1851 and 1857, Porvenir de México attributed the downhill trajectory to the intrigues of the masonic lodges during the 1820s, the expulsion of the Spanish in 1829, and measures against the Church in 1833–4 and 1847. Cuevas also saw financial incapacity and a propensity to yield to the seduction of any new ideas as parallel causes. As a result, ‘Mexico in the year 1857 is nothing but the object of disdain and compassion by observers’. By 1861, after three years of devastating civil war, he was saying that Mexico ‘is a source of ridicule for its detractors’.¹¹

He put the blame on the Liberals, with Gómez Farías as the arch enemy. The ‘partido demócrata’, as he labelled it, with little base of popular support, intended in 1833–4 to subordinate the clergy, elevate the Civic Militia above the regular army, and favour the propertyless over property owners. He maintained that, exactly as in Spain, the Mexican Liberals believed that everything which sustained the Catholic religion was inimical to the system they wished to install. Their anti-clericalism had done its utmost to break the link that bound Mexico to the universal Church and brought the country to civil war. The Constitution of 1857 had, for the first time, he reminded his readers, removed the exclusive Catholic establishment. Furthermore, none of the Liberal measures concerning religion had been negotiated beforehand with the Holy See. Factionalism had led to anarchy and catastrophe, as well as territorial loss to the United States. Decades of ‘misfortune’ and ‘ignominy’ had made Mexico the victim of US aggrandisement, which currently threatened to remove the country from the face of the universe.¹²

Cuevas highlighted the forebodings of many Mexican thinkers and political figures. Defeat in the War of 1846–7 had been a terrible shock because the fighting had not been confined to the north but had penetrated into the central heartlands.¹³ The capital of the Republic had been occupied by a foreign army and the Mexican government was obliged to regroup in Querétaro. These disasters would be long meditated in Mexico.

Melchor Ocampo (1814–61) opposed Cuevas’s position. Speaking on the anniversary of the Hidalgo Uprising of 16 September 1810, he identified the absence of any sense of civic education, justice, responsibility or social conscience and the persistence of personal interest as the prime explanations for the failure of national integration. Ocampo did not want public office to be regarded as private patrimony or a sinecure. No one in Mexico cared about the patria. Ocampo appealed to the heroism of Cuauhtémoc and Xicoténcatl, who had resisted Spanish dominance, and the example of the champions of Independence, Hidalgo and Morelos. Although Mexico’s strength and distinctiveness resulted from the intermingling of the indigenous and Hispanic races, it still lacked ‘the energy and capacity for work demonstrated by the Anglo-Saxon race’. Like Otero, he criticised the roles played in society and political life by the military and clergy. He argued that the civil power should be supreme, supported by an educational system stripped of clerical influence and with prime attention to what he perceived to be the useful sciences. Ocampo’s beliefs derived from the Mexican Enlightenment, though expressed in the context of a mid-nineteenth century sovereign state, which he aspired to transform into a Liberal republic. Such a position made him a natural ally of Juárez.¹⁴

A ‘Catholic State’ or a ‘Liberal Republic’

For churchmen and many educated members of the laity, the most pressing question was the nature of the new Mexican Republic. Freed from domination by the Spanish monarchs, the Church in Mexico found itself at Independence without a clearly defined relationship to the new secular authorities. Despite the Catholic culture passed on to Mexico by Spain, the Church continued in a weak position after the financial pressures of the late Bourbon era and the divisions of the War of Independence.

In the State of Michoacán, however, Governor Ocampo became engaged in a conflict over jurisdiction with the ecclesiastical authorities, which would have repercussions lasting into the Reform era. Ocampo advocated religious toleration and the separation of Church and State. His government programme of 14 May 1852 expressed his intention to push for the reduction of parish dues for special services conducted by the clergy. This brought him into direct conflict with Bishop Clemente Munguía, who argued that Ocampo’s policies violated the rights and liberties of the Church.¹⁵

Party-polemical news-sheets assumed a key role in the ideological battles from the 1840s and throughout the Reform era. A series of newspapers presented the idea of Mexico as a Catholic nation. La Voz de la Religión (1848–53), which appeared twice weekly, declared itself to be the mouthpiece of Catholicism, refuting ideas expressed in El Monitor Republicano, organ of moderate liberalism from 14 February 1846 onwards. By 1852, La Voz was speaking of the reconquest of the country for the Catholic religion – that is, well before the publication of the Reform Laws after 1855.

In 1848, Bishop Antonio Mantecón of Oaxaca, aroused by those he denounced as ‘los caudillos de la impiedad’, urged his parish clergy and those parishioners who could afford it to subscribe to La Voz and the weekly El Observador Católico.¹⁶ Mantecón by character was neither an extremist nor an alarmist, but his strong language, condemning those allegedly intending to destroy 300 years of the Catholic religion in Mexico does suggest a sense of real alarm among the hierarchy. This begs the question, what brought this on? Oaxaca city might certainly have housed an identifiable group of Liberals, but, like State Governor Juárez, they were largely experienced men, concerned with good government and economic progress, well-educated and accustomed to working with the clergy. The city could by no means be described as a hotbed of inflammatory radicalism and anti-religious sentiment. What, then, generated such language? It can only have come from a reading of the radical Press and pasquinades, and, perhaps more so, from what the clergy had picked up or been told from loose conversations in public places, cantinas and tavernas, or private tertulias.

From Spain, the ideas of Jaime Balmes and Donoso Cortés became known in Mexico. In 1850, La Voz de la Religión published selections from Balmes’s writings, which attributed the Liberal measures of his time to the detrimental influence of the Enlightenment. Balmes, opposed to religious plurality and toleration, became a prime influence in the gestation of Catholic thought during the 1850s in Mexico.¹⁷

Conceiving the Conservative Party

The problem at the heart of the political thinking of Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) was how to rescue the Mexican Republic from irremediable decline. By no means a reactionary who wished to go back to an unattainable past, Alamán sought to build upon what remained of that legacy, centralising and concentrating political power in order to rebuild the economic strength of the country badly damaged from the 1790s onwards. In El Universal he condemned the violence unleashed in 1810 by the Hidalgo uprising, on the anniversary date, 16 September 1849. He portrayed Iturbide as the real architect of Independence. Alamán stressed the positive contribution of the three centuries of Spanish rule. This view encountered fierce rebuttal in the opposing camp from Ignacio Ramírez (1818–79), Castillo Velasco, Alejandro Villaseñor, Arriaga and Ocampo, all of whom, outraged, defended Hidalgo and the uprising against Spanish rule.¹⁸

El Universal, appearing between November 1848 and the summer of 1855, and which became the principal organ of the Conservative Party, dedicated itself to the intellectual subversion of the Liberal programme. The paper played an important role in the elections to the Municipal Council of Mexico City on 15 July 1849, which the Conservatives won. This key institution became a major Conservative base thereafter. El Universal praised the Carrera regime in Guatemala for its defence of the Church.¹⁹ In Otero’s view, El Universal was ‘the organ for ideas even more retrograde and absolutist than those printed in El Tiempo’.²⁰

In the presidential election of 1850, in which Arista failed to gain an outright majority, one-third of the votes went to the Conservative-backed candidate, Nicolás Bravo, supported by El Universal. In the Senate, the three figures of Antonio Haro y Tamariz, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte (son of Morelos) and José María Tornel opposed Arista’s administration in 1852.²¹

Alamán aspired to recover the long-lasting stability of the colonial era. As editor of El Universal, he outlined the position of the Conservative Party on 23 March 1853. It would, in the first instance, support the role of the Catholic Church in society and education. In his view, the Mexican State’s pivotal relationship was to the Catholic Church and the Holy See. For Alamán, the Hispanic and Catholic inheritance bound all Mexicans together as part of a wider ‘Latin and Hispanic race’. The party regarded the Catholic religion as divine revelation. This raised the question of whether the Conservative Party was conceived to be the defensive instrument of the Church or an autonomous unit in the struggle for control of the Mexican State. Its position directly challenged the Liberal view of society. Yet, the Mexican Conservative Party of 1849–67 was as much a product of the modern era as the Liberal Party. It represented a new factor in the political spectrum. The Conservatives were not old absolutists reborn, but constitutionalists, although of a different order to their Liberal opponents. Their preference was for representation through corporate bodies, rather than on the basis of population in accordance with the Liberal theory of equality before the law.²²

The Conservative Party was more difficult to define in terms of its range of support and membership than the Liberal Party. There appears to have been no coordinated national organisation or agreed programme. With the foundation of the Conservative Party, the struggle for control of the national project would last until the collapse of the party and the triumph of the Reform in the summer of 1867. After Alamán, its leaders were not comparable in intellectual strength or political experience and skill to those associated with Liberalism. The provincial and local representatives of the party are often hard to find, not least because the historiographical focus has rarely been directed towards them.

For the party itself, there was much to be explained. How to reconcile defence of the traditional order with the need to expand the social and electoral base, at a time when Liberals were also attempting to do so? How to preserve the existing social order while diversifying the economy? How to uphold traditional and family values at a time of social transformation inside Mexico and beyond it? The party would need to explain its relationship with capitalism: could it defend entrepreneurs and artisans, estate owners and peasants, shopkeepers and big business at the same time? How would it uphold the values of the Christian religion, if in practice its partisans violated those tenets?

The Perspective of the Moderates

Otero’s federalism and opposition to clerical or military intervention in political life distinguished him from the Conservatives, even though he shared a common desire for stability. He set himself between the ‘demagogues’ and the ‘traditionalists’. Like the Conservatives, however, Otero wanted to consolidate a ruling class in Mexico as guarantor of stability. In the draft Constitution of 1842, he saw power concentrated in a ‘clase media’ beyond the limited ‘clase acomodada’.²³

Federalist though he was, Otero had serious criticisms of the Constitution of 1824. His ‘individual voice’ (‘voto particular’) of 5 April 1847 dissented from the constitutional committee’s decision to apply the Constitution unchanged. Otero presented twenty-two proposals for alterations designed make the Constitution more effective. He criticised the failure of the Constitution to create a body capable of deciding the constitutionality of laws. Otero did not say whether the Supremo Poder Conservador, which had been established under the Siete Leyes of 1836 for that purpose, should be repeated in a revision of the 1824 Constitution, but he did highlight an omission requiring attention. He wrote favourably of the unique Mexican legal practice, known as the juicio de amparo, which Manuel Crescencio Rejón had proposed for the projected Yucatán Constitution in 1840. This practice was designed to protect the individual or group from the implementation of executive or legislative decisions that adversely affect their person or interests. It would have a range of applicability and subsequently became one of the most characteristic and original aspects of Mexican law.²⁴

Otero’s mark was clear in the Proyecto de la Ley constitucional de garantías individuales, as discussed on 29 September 1849 by a senate committee, of which he was a member. Articles 33–7 prohibited civil or political distinctions based on birth, origin or race. This anti-corporative position extended to prohibition of entailed estates, noble titles and hereditary or purchased offices, all a concerted reaction to the inheritance of the colonial era before 1810.²⁵

Moderates of all descriptions and affiliations were searching for a middle ground on which to construct a consensus, which could reconcile republicanism, constitutional government and respect for the Church, and facilitate the reconstruction of an army capable of defending the country. Along with Gómez Pedraza, leading moderate Liberals, such as José María Lafragua (1813–75) and Mariano Riva Palacio (1803–80), were committed to federalism, taking on board regional sentiment and local loyalties, while simultaneously seeking to counterbalance them with effective central government and a strong executive. They feared anarchy, which they saw as the inevitable consequence of democracy, a dangerous spectre, somewhere between libertinism and demagogy with racial dimensions and implications. The localised rebellions in Mexico during the 1840s confirmed this suspicion, especially since they were infused with social and racial aspirations.²⁶

Mexican moderates drew on the ideas of Benjamin Constant and the example of the ‘moderados’ in power in Spain between 1844 and 1854, though in response to specifically Mexican circumstances. Both Spanish and Mexican moderates sought to reconcile the Catholic Church and the Liberal state. The striking difference between Spain and Mexico was the monarchism and centralism of the former and the republicanism and federalism of the latter. Even so, the Mexican Liberal moderates shared with the Spanish ‘moderados’ a preference for bicameralism.²⁷

Educational Institutions

In most states, financial difficulties hindered the establishment of primary education. It was a serious matter, since the new republican authorities needed basic-level education in order to instil republican virtues and inculcate a sense of loyalty to the Mexican sovereign state. Governors’ annual reports to their respective State Congress generally stressed the priority of primary education in the Spanish language. The Oaxaca State Law of 12 March 1827, for instance, attempted to start things off in the impoverished south by providing this in every Indian community. However, Governor López Ortigoza reported in 1831 that only 535 out of a total of 921 villages had schools. The Liberal administration from 1847 tried to spur on the establishment of schools, involving prominent individuals in the process.²⁸

Governor Juárez sought to improve the financial situation by regulating the education tax imposed by the defunct centralist regime on 18 August 1843. The Juárez tax fell on legacies and inheritances and would be paid into the State Central Treasury. The national government further accelerated the process on 19 August 1850 by investing the State governments with the authority to set up ‘normal schools’ in their territories, although they had to find the funding for this. Juárez believed that education would be the source of moral progress and social regeneration. This included female education. In 1852, the governor drew the attention of Congress to ‘serious obstacles’. Most of the sierra villages ‘had never had schools and did not want anything to do with them’.²⁹ In the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca, mine operators looked for the training of a skilled workforce. Benito Hampshire, for instance, stressed the importance of primary education in the mining zones.³⁰

One of the oldest higher educational establishments in the provinces was the Instituto de Ciencias y Artes, founded in Oaxaca in 1827. The Institute, combining the natural law tradition with the inheritance of the Mexican Enlightenment, represented the secular alternative to the seminaries. In 1849, the Institute – with nineteen professorships and 308 students – would play the central role in the intellectual history of the State. Considerable attention was given to the various disciplines of medicine – pharmacy, anatomy, physiology and hygiene – which was clearly regarded as an urgent necessity in the poor sanitary conditions of the time. There were six chairs in medical subjects, two of them were created, in January and March 1849, respectively.³¹ A series of distinguished Rectors, such as Marcos Pérez of northern Zapotec origin, presided over the Institute, men associated with the Liberal cause and from a variety of ethno-social backgrounds. Matías Romero (1837–98), Juárez’s future minister in Washington, graduated with the best examination results in 1857. The young Porfirio Díaz, born in the city of Oaxaca in 1830, the son of parents from the Mixteca, attended from 1849 until 1852.³²

The Mexico City Ateneo’s governing body consisted, in January 1844, of such leading figures as Tornel (President), Otero (Vice President), Lafragua (First Secretary) and Guillermo Prieto (1816–97) (Second Secretary).³³ The San Juan de Letrán Academy, founded in 1835 by José María Lacunza (1809–69) and his brother, with the assistance of Prieto and the former insurgent, Andrés Quintana Roo (1787–1851), who became its president in the following year, had as a principal object the purifying of the language and its literary usage in the Mexican context.³⁴ The Instituto Literario for the dissemination of the sciences and humanities, originally founded at Tlalpan, in 1828 in the State of Mexico by Lorenzo de Zavala (1788–1836), then state governor, moved to Toluca, the new State capital in 1833. Political turbulence led to frequent closures until the final reopening in 1846. The predominant influence was its secretary, Ignacio Ramírez, who originated from San Miguel de Allende (Guanajuato) and had been admitted to the Academy in 1839. He would become Juárez’s ministers of justice, education and development in 1861.³⁵ The Institute continued teaching throughout the US occupation and the subsequent French Intervention. Ignacio Altamirano (1834–93), the future writer and leading reformer, who came from Tixtla, passed its entrance examination in 1849. By that time, there were already 150 pupils attending courses. Governor Riva Palacio endowed it with a workshop for typography and lithography in 1851.³⁶

The foundation of the Liceo Hidalgo in 1850 at the suggestion of Tornel, took inspiration from the San Juan de Letrán Academy. The intention in 1850 was to stimulate the emergence of a specifically Mexican literature, a process which would continue in more optimistic circumstances after 1867 under the leadership of Altamirano. Along with Tornel, the founding members of the Liceo included a number of men already attracting attention in literary and political circles, such as Prieto, who would become one of the outstanding figures of the Reform period. Meetings of the Liceo Hidalgo took place in a room in the Mining College of Mexico City and received the specific blessing of President Herrera. The objectives of the Liceo group had repercussions in the state capitals: junior branches appeared in Zacatecas, Morelia, Querétaro, Morelia and Oaxaca. Francisco Zarco (1829–69) became the Liceo’s director in July 1851. He was already editor of the Liberal newspaper El Democrata from 1850 and would edit the Liceo’s La Ilustración Mexicana from 1851–5. On taking office, Zarco described the Mexican Republic as in a ruinous condition, materially and spiritually, with little foundation for a thriving literary life. Zarco, a leading political and intellectual figure of the Reform era, emphasised the precondition of political liberty for the flourishing of intellectual life. He pointed to the example of Great Britain.³⁷ The Liceo provided a platform for younger men, who would shape their future careers in the Reform era and beyond.³⁸