Chapter 5

Political Reconstruction: During and After the War with the United States, 1846–1855

The Decree of 22 August 1846 restored the 1824 Federal Constitution. Restoration brought the return of universal male suffrage. The second federal experiment took place in conditions completely different from those of the first. It might even be asked why moderates chose to support restoration of the Constitution of 1824 rather than apply the Bases Orgánicas of 1843. The explanation may lie in the restrictive franchise adopted by centralists and the defence of provincial poles of power that lay behind commitment to federalism. Moderates and radicals adopted opposed positions, the latter moving more in the direction of unicameralism as the means of facilitating more swiftly their desired political and social changes. In many respects, Herrera, politically significant in the later 1840s, though not particularly gifted, represented the stabilising figure among the moderates. Elections began for the Federal Congress on 27 September 1846. In the results, Juárez led the ten Oaxaca deputies, eight of whom were radicals, allies of Gómez Farías. Juárez met the latter for the first time, in Mexico City, through a letter of introduction from Oaxaca’s Liberal State Governor, José Simeón de Arteaga.¹

In the British Minister’s view, the ‘unlikely coalition’, which had brought Santa Anna back to power could not last. The ‘ultra-federalists’, led by Gómez Farías, remembered the Santa Anna of 1834–5, who had overthrown the First Federal Republic: ‘he and they will be occupied exclusively in the attempt to overthrow each other, while the country in the meantime is falling into a state of dissolution between these unprincipled factions.’ The Minister saw Gómez Farías as leader of a ‘Democratic Party’, which sought to destroy the army. This internal fighting occurred as ‘the Americans’ were preparing to advance on Monterrey and San Luis Potosí and encouraging the Northern Mexican Provinces, as he believed, towards a declaration of their independence from Mexico City.²

The siege of Monterrey, where General Pedro Ampudia was in command, began on 20 September 1846 but by the 22 September, ‘the Americans’ had already lost 1,000 men. Intense street fighting ensued on the following day, involving Tomás Mejía and other younger officers who would later hold commanding positions in the army and in political life. The city capitulated on 24 September: US forces remained in occupation from 26 September until the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848.³

The Crisis of January–February 1847

When the Federal Congress opened on 6 December 1846, irreconcilable divisions between the moderate and radical Liberals precluded any semblance of unity in the middle of a war. The moderates – Riva Palacio, Herrera, Lafragua, Otero and J. M. Lacunza – were ranged against the radicals – Gómez Farías, Rejón, Juárez and Ocampo. Santa Anna departed for manoeuvres at San Luis Potosí, leaving Vice President Gómez Farías in charge of the government.⁴

The radicals in power sought to enact their version of how funds should be raised for the war effort. Congress, on 11 January 1847, authorised the government to levy the sum of 15 million pesos on disentailed ecclesiastical properties. The margin of vote in the chamber was close, at forty-four to forty-one. The moderates opposed this measure and tacitly lent their support to the furious clerical opposition to the proposal.⁵ A further law, on 4 February, invested the government with extraordinary faculties to secure 5 million pesos from ecclesiastical sources. A conflict between the radical administration and supporters of the Church followed, again in the middle of the war.⁶

The Cathedral Chapter of Mexico City protested against the government measure on 24 January 1847, affirming the autonomy of the Church in relation to the state:

the existence of worship in a Catholic country does not depend on the arbitrary wishes of the civil legislature, nor of that country’s politics … the Church is sovereign and independent of civil society; it has never consented to domination by national governments.⁷

Such a bold statement exposed a clash between two concepts of sovereignty, presaging a head-on confrontation between Church and State. Although anticipated in 1833–4 and looking forward to the fierce conflicts of 1855–61, this was hardly what the country needed at that precise time. Yet, the reaction across the country to the measure exposed the isolated position of the radicals. The ‘Rebellion of the Polkos’ in Mexico City on 27 February led to fighting in the capital. Opposition had already spread rapidly across the Republic. The State Legislature of Guanajuato protested to the National Congress, demanding the revocation of the 11 January Law. The recently elected Municipal Governor of Silao warned the State Governor that the Decree of 11 January violated ‘my convictions and my conscience’, and that he could not comply, even if it meant forfeiting his office. The State Legislature of Durango followed on 5 February. Congressmen of the State of Mexico similarly protested.⁸

In the city of Oaxaca, Governor Arteaga, was replaced in a swift coup on 15 February by the businessman, José Joaquín de Guergué, with the support of the State Military Commander, General J. M. Malo.⁹ Guergué reported this action to the Ministry of the Interior two days later, indicating that its cause was the administration’s violation of the 1824 Constitution, which had safeguarded ecclesiastical immunity. The new State governor neither repudiated the national government nor reasserted State sovereignty by withdrawal from the federation, but he did refuse to apply the 11 January measure in the State of Oaxaca. At the same time, he reaffirmed cooperation with the war effort. The State’s most important military figure, ex-Governor León, expressed his repugnance at the decrees of 11 January and 4 February, while preparing to join the fighting against the Americans. Guergué, on 18 February, appealed to Santa Anna to take direct control of the national government and sort out the mess in Mexico City, where the political factions were engaged in fighting one another. Bishop Mantecón gave his support to the new regime on 20 February, seeing it as the working of divine providence.¹⁰

From his position as federal deputy, Juárez strove to persuade Congress to disavow the Oaxaca coup, which it did on 17 April, and restore Arteaga to office.¹¹ Local divisions threatened national unity at a time when the enemy threatened the Mexican central plateau.

The conflict over Gómez Farías’ attempt at a semi-disentailment to the value of 15 million pesos exposed the depth of division in the country over the role of the Church in society. Pressures of war finance understandably exacerbated tensions. The attempt exposed the radicals to the charge of undermining the institution seen as the only permanent force for national unity and the clergy to the charge of preferring their revenues and privileges to defence of the country when under foreign attack. It also meant that the perennial calculation of how wealthy the Church was would remain a political issue.

Disentailment, moreover, was by no means a new issue suddenly sprung on an unsuspecting country by a rabid collection of anticlerical radicals. In fact, most administrations, regardless of political complexion, had broached it, given the penury of the Treasury, the absence of banks, widespread hostility towards the agiotistas, the mounting external debt and the need to service it, and the urgency of funds to defend the country. Moderate political figures, such as Lafragua and Haro y Tamariz, had already proposed the disentailment of ecclesiastical properties in October 1846, as the full implications of the war with the United States on the northern frontiers began to create alarm in Mexico City. After Santa Anna returned to the capital, in order to damp down the divisions in the country, he too turned to the Church for funds. A law, on 28 March 1847, enabled the President to raise 20 million pesos by agreement, after negotiation with ecclesiastical bodies. On 29 March, he nullified the Gómez Farías measures. Then, on 19 May, Luis de la Rosa, the Minister of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs, wrote to the Archbishop requesting cooperation on the above matters. He reminded the Primate that Mexico had sacrificed everything for the preservation of the Catholic religion, that defeat would mean the total disentailment of ecclesiastical property, and that US annexation of the country would destroy the Catholic Church. As if that was not chilling enough, the minister complained that maintenance of ecclesiastical privilege had weakened the country and that upholding Catholic exclusivity – that is, religious intolerance – had driven away potential colonists.¹² It seemed that, where raising money was concerned, it was not so much what was proposed but who proposed it and how it would be done.

Constitutional Reform and Party Conflict

Federalists were divided on the question of reform of the 1824 Constitution. US forces were already in the outskirts of Mexico City when the Constituent Congress issued the Additional Act of Reforms on 22 May 1847. Otero’s Individual Response to the overall reforms reflected moderate Liberal opinion. Moderates and radicals were bitterly divided over the proposed reforms. Otero had hoped to include emergency powers in the Act, providing for the suspension of habeas corpus and constitutional guarantees in time of foreign invasion, but the majority of Liberals had blocked this on 26 April through fear of executive absolutism. Juárez supported the Act, although opposing the restoration of the Senate. From early June, Congress ceased to meet, reconvening in Querétaro in October.¹³

Manuel de la Peña y Peña took over the interim Presidency of the Republic on 27 September 1847, with the intention of securing the approval of the State Governors for the opening of conversations with Nicholas Trist, the United States’ plenipotentiary, designed to terminate hostilities. Elections, held in fifteen states, to the new Congress, which met in November, led to Pedro Anaya’s selection as provisional President. Peña y Peña continued in the ministry as Secretary of External Relations, naming the Mexican team of three negotiators on 22 November, two of whom were Bernardo Couto and Cuevas. Talks with Trist began on 2 January 1848. The Liberals split over proposals to end the war. Otero and the moderates favoured recognition of Texan Independence but not the loss of the rest of the far northern territories. Gómez Farías, Rejón and the radicals opposed all territorial cessions and supported continuation of the war. The task facing Anaya and Peña y Peña was to persuade all factions to accept a peace treaty.¹⁴

A contemporaneous discussion began in the press concerning the causes of the Mexican defeat. The principal newspapers, El Siglo XIX, El Monitor Republicano, El Eco del Comercio and El Observador Católico, pointed to civil conflicts within Mexico, political mistakes, including failure to accept Texan Independence, its subsequent annexation by the United States, and Mexican pride, which overestimated the country’s capacity and underestimated US territorial ambitions. In the view of El Observador Católico, on 29 April 1848, there was nothing left with which to continue the war. The only recourse would be to accept the proposed treaty of peace, thereby preserving national identity and rebuilding the country with the remaining resources.¹⁵

The prospect of a treaty faced opposition in the States of San Luis Potosí and Guanajuato, neither of which had been occupied by US forces. Even so, the treaty was signed and ratified on 30 May. The ongoing discussion of the causes of the defeat accompanied reflections on its consequences. The question of annexation of the remaining territories of the Republic to the United States was broached, only to be roundly rejected in the newspapers. El Eco del Comercio, on 28 June, warned that Mexicans were viewed in the United States as racially inferior and would be pushed down for that reason. Annexation posed a threat to the whole of Spanish America. On 27 October, El Siglo XIX drew attention to discontent in New Mexico at the imposition US rule and the behaviour of US troops.¹⁶

The combination of external attack and internal unrest encouraged the Liberal administration to reactivate former policies designed to promote the National Guard. The Regulation for the National Guard, issued by acting President Salas, on 11 September 1846, imposed on the part of all males between sixteen and fifty years of age an obligation for service on pain of loss of political rights. The war with the United States gave new importance to this.¹⁷ A guard unit was to be formed in every state. Since alliances developed between pueblos, lawyers, town councils and local chieftains, particularly in the south, the National Guard could become mixed up in the conflicts between pueblos and haciendas over boundaries, or become the armed instruments of local interests, powerful families and individuals.¹⁸

Herrera’s Ley Orgánica de la Guardia Nacional of 15 July 1848, in the aftermath of the war, envisaged the guard as the defender of national independence and institutions and the upholder of law and order. The law stipulated that all able-bodied men in full exercise of citizenship, not specifically exempt, would be eligible for service. They would be recruited at the village and town levels. In Oaxaca, the Juárez administration’s priority remained the militia. The decree of 30 October 1847 reconstituted the ‘Guerrero Battalion’ as the principal infantry force in the State, which would be commanded by another politically loyal officer, Lieutenant-Colonel José María Muñoz. By May 1849, the total force consisted of 761 men.¹⁹

In Morelos, the National Guard declined to intervene to prevent villagers from moving on to hacienda land during the social conflicts of 1849–50. Property owners organised their own armed bands, just as they had done during the Insurgency of the 1810s. A committee in Mexico City presided over this process, chaired by Payno and including a range of local interested parties, including Felipe Neri del Barrio and Joaquín García Icazbalceta. Peasant bands, sometimes of more than 200 men, attacked the Morelos estates. National Guard battalions in no way impeded the destruction of hacienda boundary markers and threats to irrigation dams. The relationship between Álvarez and National Guard battalions across the territory between Cuernavaca-Cuautla remained ambivalent. In 1850, the army authorities dissolved the National Guard.²⁰

Such confrontations raised the question of the relationship of the Liberal Party to spontaneous social action in the countryside. This was a crucial matter, since villagers also demanded municipal autonomy, opposed centralist restrictions on representation and tended to view federalism as the preferable system. All such positions were purportedly Liberal positions as well. The formation of a National Guard concerned how the Liberal Party was to defend itself, once in power.

After taking office as governor, Juárez appointed Lieutenant-Colonel José María Castellanos to be Military Commander in the State of Oaxaca. Castellanos was a well-known Liberal and could be trusted to sustain the new administration and the federal system. Unfortunately, he fell victim to the severe cholera epidemic of November 1850. Intending to rebuild state authority in the aftermath of defeat in war, Juárez judged the constitutional order to be only precariously established. In Oaxaca, as elsewhere, Juárez identified a double threat from military commanders in league with opponents of federalism and reform, and from village resistance to taxation. He hoped to rely on the National Guard to enforce respect for the law. Juárez instructed all village and town councils to draw up registers of those eligible for service four days after publication of the Herrera Law. The loyalty of guard commanders, such as Luis Fernández del Campo and Castellanos, countered attempts by regular army officers to remove Juárez from office in 1847–8. Unrest in the Isthmus made the Juárez administration wary that army officers might try to take advantage of it and overthrow the federal system. The events of 1852–3 showed that its suspicions were well-grounded.²¹

Arista, Minister of War from June 1848, acceded to the presidency in January 1851.²² During this time, he reduced the regular army to 1,000 men and pushed forward the formation of the National Militia. Arista proposed to Congress in 1849 that the militia should be called the ‘Ejército Federal de Reserva’.²³

Issues such as these deeply divided political opinion. The relationship between the civil power and the military (as opposed to the militia) had no more been resolved, whether under federalism or centralism, than relations with the Church. If anything, both had worsened under the Second Federal Republic because of Gómez Farías measures of January and February 1847 and Ocampo’s quarrels with the Michoacán clergy early in the 1850s. Newspaper virulence stirred up political hostilities, as the moderate Liberal administration began to disintegrate. Conservative capture of the Mexico City Municipal Council in the elections of 1849 put Alamán in the powerful confrontational position as its president. Arista, intent upon reining in the press, proved incapable of bringing together the disparate and warring factions of the Liberal Party. The way opened for an alignment between Alamán’s Conservatives, the episcopate, and army leaders, whether under Almonte or Santa Anna. The election campaign of 1850 further pitted the two wings of the Liberal Party against one another and highlighted the remoteness of any consensus among the politically contending groups across the Republic. Even so, this election enabled the first peaceful transfer so far, when Arista succeeded Herrera. That, however, did not presage a definitive change in the future.²⁴

Santa Anna’s Last Regime, 1853–1855

Political lines in 1844–55 were not as sharply defined as they would become after 1855. The Lerdo de Tejada family, for instance, remained closely associated with Santa Anna through common Veracruz origins. Miguel Lerdo, although a recognised federalist, formed part of the committee that recalled Santa Anna from exile to resume power in 1853 and acted as his First Official in the newly created Ministry of Development (Fomento). Santa Anna consulted him on 18 April on how he saw the state of the country. Lerdo recommended the immediate convocation of Congress. This advice was not taken.²⁵ For finance, Santa Anna managed to persuade Haro y Tamariz to resume the office for the third time.²⁶

A more ambiguous figure was Teodosio Lares (1806–70), originating from Aguascalientes, who had been professor and director of the Literary Institute of Zacatecas from 1836 until 1850. Two years earlier, he had been elected a deputy for Zacatecas in the National Congress of the Federal Republic. As senator in 1850–1, he was thought of as a moderate liberal with centralist tendencies. He became Santa Anna’s Minister of Justice from 20 April 1853 until 12 August 1855. Lares attempted to separate judiciary recourse from executive freedom of action in implementing policy. He seems to have fallen under the influence of Alamán during the early 1850s. This may explain the notice he took of developments in France, following the establishment of the Second Empire by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1852. Upon Alamán’s premature death on 2 June, Lares became the leading figure in the administration. Lares would later become Justice Minister in the Conservative regimes of General Ignacio Zuloaga from 1858 and General Miguel Miramón’s short-lived Mexico City regime of August to December 1860. By this time a committed Conservative, he supported the Mexican Second Empire, serving on the Supreme Tribunal of Justice from 1863–7 and as President of the Imperial Council of Ministers.²⁷

The Santa Anna regime also established for the first time, on 12 May 1853, a distinct Ministerio de Gobernación to deal specifically with internal affairs, security and public health, and separate from the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores. This office would be held by Díez de Bonilla. His chief official was Ignacio Aguilar y Marocho, who, following Díez de Bonilla’s appointment to the Foreign Affairs Ministry after Alamán’s death, became the Interior Minister.²⁸

Santa Anna, in contrast to Arista’s policies, aimed to rebuild the regular army. Alamán’s Bases for the Administration of the Republic, on 22 April, called, among other aims, for the elimination of the National Guard. Despite the desired concentration of power, Santa Anna’s regime proved to be no more successful than any of its predecessors in dealing with the problems of recruitment and desertion. A rebellion broke out, for example, in the Totonac town of Misantla, in northern Veracruz, on 12 July 1853, against military recruitment through the traditional and hated practice of sorteo.²⁹ The extent of government difficulties, no matter their political complexion or type, was exceeded only by the determination of local communities to resist forcible recruitment into army service. This dilemma no one could resolve. On 24 November 1853, the dictator reprimanded his department governors for insufficient enthusiasm at a time of national emergency. He drew attention to the build-up of US forces on the Río Bravo, complaining that several governors had neither fulfilled their recruitment quotas nor apprehended deserters.³⁰ Younger army commanders, such as Miramón, Leonardo Márquez and Mejía regarded Santa Anna as their mentor. They would be the leaders of the military wing of the Conservative Party for much of the Reform period until the final collapse of the Second Mexican Empire and the Party in 1867.

As his Letter to Santa Anna of 23 March 1853 and the Bases of 22 April indicated, Alamán intended to pick apart the entire basis of Liberal political philosophy, employing the Santa Anna regime as his instrument. In first place came protection of the Catholic religion. Popular sovereignty should not be regarded as the foundation of political institutions; the federal system should be scrapped; a congress should be replaced by consultative councils; the number of municipal councils should be reduced; revenue collection was to be centralised (as had been the aim in 1836, after the destruction of the first Federal Republic); a strong army would be needed for internal purposes and to guard the frontiers, not least because of the incursions of the ‘indios bárbaros’. Alamán singled out Ocampo as an enemy of the Church and a fomenter of revolutions.³¹ The alternative to Liberal constitutionalism pointed to a type of system similar to that advocated in 1846 by Paredes. Santa Anna, uninterested in ideologies, wanted Alamán in the ministry for the purpose of lending intellectual weight.³² Alamán, however, was hated in the south, because of his key position in the Bustamante administration of 1830–2, when Guerrero was put before a firing squad in February 1831.³³

Like Alamán, Lares must have decided to take one more chance with Santa Anna, despite the military and political debacle of 1847. The expectation is likely to have been that Santa Anna could restore unity and stability after the Second Federal Republic failed to do so. The humiliation of defeat and loss of territory indicated the need for a new departure in the form of strong leadership and a tightening of the reins of government across the Republic. That pointed to a termination of the second federal experiment. In this sense, the moderate Liberal administrations of Herrera and Arista in 1848–53 had been in the way, as the previous Herrera government of 1844–5 had been. The aim of both Santa Anna in 1841–4 and Paredes in 1846 had been to avoid radical federalism and a broad franchise, in favour of some form of alternative, which might have combined aspects of the Bases Orgánicas of 1843, with a renovated form of corporatism and authoritarian rule. From such a perspective, the regime of 1853–5 had its roots in 1841 and 1846. By 1853, however, a political party existed, the Conservative Party created by Alamán in 1849, which could, at least in theory, give ideological character and practical support for a third attempt at a regime from the Right. Yet, the outstanding political problem (leaving aside, for the moment, the empty Treasury) was evident to all contemporary observers: could Santa Anna be trusted on anything?

Nevertheless, Alamán and Lares, along with Conservatives like Díez de Bonilla, Aguilar y Marocho and Cuevas, took the decision to support him as head of state. To its opponents on the radical Liberal wing this regime appeared to be an assemblage of reactionaries. Lares, even so, had already acquired a reputation as a potential reformer of the judicial system. Central to Lares’s thinking on constitutional matters was the equilibrium of powers between the executive and the judiciary. In his view, federalism and the liberal stress on separation of powers diminished the effectiveness of the executive. The ‘Lares Law’, properly entitled the Law for the Regulation of Contention in Policy Administration on 25 May 1853 became this minister’s principal contribution to the development of Mexican jurisprudence. It was designed to reduce appeals to the courts by corporations, groups or private individuals against executive policies with the object of protecting their own interests.³⁴

The Santa Anna regime set about tightening control of the press, which leading ministers such as Alamán and Lares believed had been allowed to get out of hand. Lares’ Press Law of 25 April 1853 put the press under police supervision and required a down-payment to guarantee good conduct. It sought, at best, to damp down polemical language, to which he attributed the heightened tension in the country. Publishers were required to register with the authorities on pain of fines for violation of the new law. They were to be held responsible for what was written. Henceforth, all booksellers would have to be licensed by the government as the condition for continuing in business.³⁵

Two subsequent laws, the Law for the Administration of Justice, on 16 December 1853, and the Law concerning the Responsibilities of Justices, on 27 December 1853, dealt with the operation of the judiciary. All together the three laws, including the Law of 25 May, marked the most comprehensive attempt to review judicial affairs since Independence and before the early stages of the Liberal Reform. The Reform, in effect, resumed that process with the Ley Juárez of 25 November 1855. However, the problem with the Lares laws was that they had been formulated and published without a Constitution in place and with no representative institutions in session. This amounted to, as Andrés Lira has pointed out, judicial reform outside a constitutional system, since the Santa Anna regime did not govern in accordance with either the Federal Constitution of 1824 or the Bases Orgánicas of 1843. Without any constitution in place, Lares’s reforms were technically illegal. They were issued by presidential decree, utilising the type of unrestrained executive powers claimed by the military politicians of 1841 in article 7 of the Bases de Tacubaya. Liberals of the Reform era would seize on this. However, they had no grounds for complaint, since Presidents Juan Álvarez and Ignacio Comonfort also governed by decree until the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of February 1857. Since no Congress was in session, the Ley Juárez was was issued by presidential decree. It faced strong opposition for that reason, let alone for its content. The difference between the Santa Anna regime of 1853–5 and the Revolution of Ayutla, which succeeded it, was that Álvarez’s Cuernavaca decree of October 1855 promised the convocation of a constituent assembly to formulate a new constitution. The Liberals, in power, removed the two Lares Laws on judicial reform but left the Law of 25 May in place. The name of Lares was tarnished for his collaboration with Santa Anna and blackened entirely for his association with Maximilian of Habsburg’s Second Mexican Empire of 1863–7.³⁶

Bereft of its three chief figures – Alamán and Tornel through death, the latter on 11 September 1853, and Haro y Tamariz, a capable and honest Financial Secretary, who resigned on 5 August – the Santa Anna regime rapidly fell apart. The departure of Haro was indicative of the future course of events. Escandón proposed a ‘National Bank’ founded upon private subscriptions, which would have handed over to the private sector almost all the state’s principal revenues – this was unacceptable to Haro. The proposal came at a time when the government was running a deficit of 17 million pesos. Escandón offered 9 million pesos as credit to the bank annually, of which 2.5 million pesos would go towards the servicing of internal and external debt, in return for private management of the Customs Houses, the direct tax and the taxes on silver and tobacco. Haro considered that to be outrageous, and Santa Anna backed him up. However, Haro offered as an alternative route an appeal to the Church for credit equal to the sum of the deficit. His proposal implied no appropriations of wealth but the mortgaging of Church properties as collateral for the proposed National Bank. He believed that, since the future of the Church depended upon the survival of the Santa Anna regime, it would agree to his proposal. The collapse of the regime, he argued, would hand the Church over to the Liberal Party. When the Church categorically refused to go along with this proposal, and Santa Anna, fearing full-scale opposition from the clergy, declined to support his minister, Haro left the government.³⁷

Between 1836 and 1855, the Mexican Republic passed through three systems of government: two experiments each of federalism and centralism, and one, in 1853–5, with no Constitution at all. Despite regular elections, all of them indirect in three stages, the representative system, regardless of regime, reached a relatively small section of the population with regard to the institutions at state and national levels. This was partly intentional and partly incidental, both a result of the tiered electoral system for the presidency, National Congress and judicial bodies, as well as for the State governments. The hiatus existing between these institutions and the breadth of the population continued to be wide. Nevertheless, two important elements stand out. The first was the continuing search for viable forms of representative government by means of elections, thereby securing political legitimacy and a less violent transmission of power. The second was the emergence of an evident political class. The component individuals in this class continued to come from a relatively homogenous body of educated professional and propertied men. This group, however, was not necessarily identical in political views. On the contrary, the divisions among them, evident from the 1820s, became sharper during the 1840s and into the 1850s, including the division within the Liberal Party between the moderates and the radicals. Forms of government, electoral systems and the role of the Church in society continued to be the principal sources of conflict. Arguments in a press with party identities reflected and accelerated divisions in the representative institutions and at election times. Although no national party organisation or accepted programme existed, individuals and groupings did gravitate around certain principles and desired measures. They were identified in this way at the time and by historians thereafter.³⁸