Chapter 12

The Federal Constitution and the Road to Disaster, February 1857–January 1858

The overall Liberal aim was to strengthen the Mexican State but, at the same time, to limit the executive power in relation to the legislative power, and to diminish the central government in relation to the State governments in a federal system. These objectives, as can be seen in the developing events, were incompatible.

The Constituent Congress opened on 18 February 1856. This return to constitutional government terminated the executive rule, which dated from elected President Arista’s removal from office on 4 January 1853. The exclusion of the Conservative Party and members of the clergy from representation in this Congress, however, still exposed the Liberal Party to the charge of operating a Liberal dictatorship, this time an elected one. Exclusion meant that, from the start, the Liberals did not envisage the building of consensus as one of their objectives. They clearly regarded such an attempt as impossible and undesirable.

The Constituent Congress

The social and occupational characteristics of the majority of congressmen reflected the support given to the Plan of Ayutla.¹ The most significant factor was the predominance of the radicals in the chamber. Moderate Liberals lost the battle to retain the bicameral congress of the 1824 model. The majority adopted the radical view that the Constituent Congress was engaged in pushing forward a revolution, initiated at Ayutla in March 1854, and that a Senate might have inhibited this.²

Comonfort would have preferred a reform of the 1824 Constitution. The Interior Minister, Lafragua, argued for a referendum to decide whether the projected Constitution should be enacted, although Comonfort disagreed. Payno believed that it gave too many powers to the legislature. Rabasa, writing in 1912, agreed with that.³ Lafragua aspired to control the pace and nature of reform. In retrospect, he criticised the radicals’ desire to ‘reform society in one sole day and in one sole action’. Division among the deputies ultimately opened the way to reaction.⁴ Archbishop De la Garza wryly commented in his Pastoral Letter of 19 August 1859, half-way through the second year of the Civil War of the Reform, that the deputies of the Constituent Congress acted as though they alone constituted the nation.⁵

There were limitations to revolutionary sentiment. Congress shrank from establishing religious toleration. The drama of political conflict and outright civil war, however, would provide the context for the proclamation of liberty of religious belief on 4 December 1860. This meant that the State henceforth no longer gave the exclusive protection to the Catholic Church that it had enjoyed before February 1857.

Although 155 deputies had been elected, only eighty actually turned up for the opening sessions. On the whole, 20 per cent of those elected never appeared in Congress. At the opening session, Congress unanimously elected Arriaga as its President. Although Arriaga chose mainly moderates for the Constitutional Commission, Ocampo and Castillo Velasco, both radicals, exercised considerable influence over discussions. Arriaga as a deputy in the San Luis Potosí Congress had, in February 1847, proposed the establishment of a Procuraduría de los Pobres, in an attempt to alleviate conditions for the poor. He had been Arista’s Minister of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs in 1851–2 but had been forced into exile under Santa Anna in 1853–5, when he had met Juárez and Ocampo in New Orleans.⁶

In the debates concerning the future shape of the federal constitution, Arriaga strongly supported unicameralism and emphasised the importance of resisting any idea of restoring a Senate, which might conflict with the lower chamber and recreate a form of aristocracy. Arriaga, who believed that the Ley Juárez had not gone far enough, stood for equality before the law and the removal of juridical privileges. He argued that the principle of sovereignty of the people should extend to the supervision of ecclesiastical bodies, since, if it did not, the Church would be left outside the jurisdiction of the popularly elected chamber and become an independent entity.⁷

On 10 September 1856, the Constituent Congress, ever suspicious of executive power, approved the principle of division of powers. The intention was to subordinate the executive to the legislature, as though in a parliamentary rather than a presidential system. In consequence, the deputies remained reticent on the question of granting emergency powers to the President at times of perceived crisis. They feared that the suspension of constitutional guarantees would provide an excuse for the abuse of power. When the Constitution was promulgated on 6 September 1857, article 29 did provide for such an eventuality, although, in the case of President Comonfort, the deputies of the Constitutional Congress remained reluctant to concede him emergency powers.⁸

Arriaga and Castillo Velasco pressed for agrarian reform but failed to secure majority support. Castillo Velasco, who originated from Ocotlán in Oaxaca, advocated both formal declaration of municipal autonomy and a guarantee that villages would have sufficient lands for their requirements.⁹ Arriaga advocated the division of large estates to the benefit of the land-needy peasant. In his view, the new nation remained blighted by the uneven distribution of property ownership. He saw the Mexican Republic as a country in which over-large estates and grinding poverty existed side by side. Arriaga regarded division as a springboard for economic development and the base of a republican constitutional system. Society was deformed, he said, by the disproportionate nature of ownership. The rest of the Liberal Party in Congress rejected Arriaga’s position as a threat to private property.¹⁰

This response pointed to the depth of apprehension concerning the impact of popular movements during the previous two decades. It also pointed to the deep divisions within the Liberal movement. If the Liberals, threatened from all sides, were to secure a solid enough base to remain in power for the long duration, they would have to court popular support from the participants in those earlier movements. Otherwise, they would face rejection, indifference or opposition, armed or passive and sullen. They also faced the prospect that Conservatives might be capable of recruiting popular support in defence of Church, community and local religious traditions.

The majority of leading Liberals preferred to address what they considered to be the two most pressing questions of the day: the extinction of Indian communities, regarded as obstacles to progress; and the marketing of the entailed properties of the Church. They saw themselves as revolutionaries deconstructing the ancien régime inherited from the Spanish colonial past and setting the new Republic on a dynamic road of equality and enterprise. State governments in Veracruz, Jalisco, Zacatecas and Michoacán had already begun this process, in advance of the federal government.¹¹

The 1857 Constitution

In Charles Hale’s judgement, the Constitution exposed the essential division of intent at the heart of Mexican Liberalism. This was the desire to construct an effective and lasting form of government, hitherto elusive, and by liberating society from the corporative inheritance of the colonial ancien régime to stimulate private enterprise. During the Reform period, the Liberals attempted to pursue both objectives at the same time. In each, they achieved only partial success.¹² The Constitution of 1857 included a declaration of natural rights with, for the first time, the profession that sovereignty lay with the people rather than ‘the nation’. It aimed to strengthen the role of the legislature in the political processes. This was an idealistic programme, which immediately raised the issue of practicability.¹³ Frank Knapp described it, by 1861, as a ‘Pandora’s Box’. It was already that, the moment it was promulgated.¹⁴

The Constitution of February 1857 was the first such document to abandon Catholic exclusivity as the religion of State. Bishop Labastida, in exile in Rome, protested on 21 June 1857. He declared that it overthrew the fundamental laws of Mexican society, which had evolved through the ages, abjured the true religion and opened the way to an atrocious persecution of its minsters and believers. It did not reflect the popular will, since Mexicans were a Catholic people. The Bishop, moreover, stated his opposition to the doctrine of sovereignty of the people, on the grounds that all sovereignty derived from God. He declared the Constitution invalid in the diocese of Puebla and denied the sacraments to anyone swearing to observe it. He reiterated the view that on spiritual matters, civil governments were subject to the authority of the Church.¹⁵

The Catholic newspaper, La Cruz, refuted the bases of the 1857 Constitution point by point, starting with the doctrine of sovereignty of the people. The paper saw in the Constitution the seeds of division, which would weaken the country in the eyes of its enemies. Readers of La Cruz would have recognised the United States as the principal of these enemies and the source of the threat to spread Protestantism in Mexico. Since the Constitution renounced state protection for the Catholic religion and allowed all religious groups to practice in the country, the only conclusion, according to Pesado, the principal editor, could be state regulation of religion.¹⁶

The Organic Electoral Law of 12 February 1857 upheld the definition of citizen in accordance with the Constitution, enfranchising all adult males (in effect) aged over eighteen years, if married, and over twenty-one years, if unmarried, without qualification of income, property or literacy. The only reservation was that eligibility depended upon having ‘an honest way of life’. This specifically excluded ‘vagrants and malingerers’, ‘professional swindlers’ and ‘habitual drunkards’. Determination was left to the voter assessment boards. Rules were drawn up for the conduct of elections, administered by the municipalities. The electoral system would continue to be indirect, but only in one tier, a departure from the Constitutions of 1812 and 1824. At the final stage, a total of 16/18,000 electors would be eligible to choose the President of the Republic.¹⁷

In Mexico City, the management of elections would be supervised by the radical Liberals, Juan José Baz, Governor of the Federal District, and Castillo Velasco, his secretary. When the list of electors was published on 30 June 1857, well-known names appeared, such as Vicente Riva Palacio, Ignacio Ramírez, Castillo Velasco, Francisco Zarco, editor of El Siglo XIX, Gabino Barreda, the educationalist, Luis Romero Rubio, and the Conservative journalist, Pesado. They represented, in effect, the educated elite of the metropolis, although they were not the richest or most powerful men. Even so, they were not what might be called ‘ordinary people’.¹⁸

The broad scale of the electoral base left the management of elections to the jefes politicos, military commanders, state governors, hacienda owners, and other such wielders of local power. From the beginning widespread abstention characterised the system rather than manipulation. The interim Governor of Oaxaca, José María Díaz Ordaz, published the State’s Electoral Law on 29 October 1857. Each group of 40,000 inhabitants would elect one proprietary deputy to the State Congress and one substitute deputy. The system moved in tiers from the primary or district level upward. At the base level, the ayuntamientos played the main part by organising elections on the basis of sections of 500 inhabitants within their component municipios. Each section was to provide one eligible elector with the right to vote in accordance with the appropriate lists. This elector would then be given a credential document. His full name, age, profession, civil state, place of residence was to be documented three days before the impending election. Those with the right to vote must be Mexican citizens and ‘possess sufficient capital to indicate a respectable style of life’. Each district committee of electors would then appoint proprietary and substitute deputies, who must have lived at least five years in their place of residence, be at least twenty-five years of age, not pertain to any ecclesiastical rank, and ‘to have a material wealth or acknowledged reputation consonant with honest living’. They would then proceed to elect the proprietary deputy of the district every two years. The four-yearly election of the state governor would be direct, as would be the election of justices and councillors, although the election of the President of the Supreme Court of Justice and the judicial ministers of the court, every six years, would be indirect. The state governor was to be at least thirty-five years of age, not a cleric, have seven years’ residence in the state and ‘material capital or sufficient reputation’.¹⁹

The requirement to swear the oath to the Constitution, under article 121, became the major point of contention in the Republic. No public functionary was permitted to take office and assume his duties without first swearing to observe the provisions of the Constitution. President Comonfort’s Regulatory Law of 17 March 1857 made this explicit. That requirement obliged individuals to take sides, when their natural inclination might have been not to do so. This, however, was a religious ceremony, as had been previous oath-takings from the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 onward. The context, however, was different. This oath was to be taken to a Constitution that dispensed with the Catholic establishment. Outright opposition and disturbances occurred in many places across the central core of the Republic, where Catholicism had its deepest roots.²⁰

The Archbishop and bishops rapidly condemned the oath-taking and threatened those who took the oath with excommunication. Those who had already taken it were to renounce the oath publicly on pain of deprivation of the sacraments, including, as specified in the Archbishop’s circular to the clergy on 18 April, Christian burial.²¹ In Oaxaca, Bishop Domínguez condemned the required oath on 1 April. The episcopate hoped to avoid violent conflict with the authorities over this matter, but events quickly took their own course. ‘No one who describes himself as a true Christian should take it, since several articles in the Constitution are incompatible with the holy religion we profess’, the bishop wrote. He forbade the clergy and their parishioners to take the oath, even if under pressure from the political authorities. Should anyone take the oath and then go to confession, no absolution could be given, unless that oath were first retracted, and this retraction were communicated to the civil authorities before which it had been taken. The parish priests were to make this known in their respective areas.²² The Bishop of Guadalajara, Pedro Espinosa, compared the actions of the Liberal administration in Mexico to the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. He saw such actions as a threat to the position of the priesthood in society.²³ In Mijangos’s view, ‘episcopal condemnation converted the oath-taking ceremony into a virtual referendum on the 1857 Constitution’. ²⁴ Liberals responded to the attack from the hierarchy and its partisans by drawing attention to the Christian character of the Constitution, accusing the priests of transgressing their spiritual function of providing succour through the sacraments to every individual without regard to political affiliation. Accordingly, the administration subjected priests who refused the sacraments to those who had taken the oath to severe penalties.²⁵

There is a case for arguing that the oath requirement, despite past precedents, amounted in the political conditions of 1857 to an unnecessary provocation and an invitation to further polarisation. The episcopate, stung by the removal of Catholic exclusivity, reacted with equal intransigence. Opposition to the Constitution as such made the clergy appear as the group subverting a rational attempt to establish juridical equality, civil liberty and popular participation in a renewed representative system. It would take decades for the clergy to climb out of the black pit that it had dug for itself.

In practical terms, the state governors would have the responsibility of organising the oath-taking, which would be held, it turned out, during the religious celebrations of Lent, Holy Week and Easter, a singularly unfortunate time for individuals to be faced with the choice of losing their jobs or their souls. It was the liturgical time of year for reflection, penance and confession, followed by celebration of the Risen Christ. The Minister of War proposed to enforce government authority by deployment of federal troops, where feasible. In Jalisco and Michoacán, opposition was widespread. In the Michoacán towns of Zamora, La Piedad, Maravatío and Pátzcuaro, where el partido clerical was considered to wield great influence, it proved to be impossible to publish the Constitution early in April, due the citizenry’s hostility. Since there were no funds to support military intervention, it was impossible to restore order. In the Jalisco towns of Mascota, Zapotiltic, Tonalá and San Gabriel, disturbances broke out over the authorities’ attempt to publish the Constitution. Similarly, in Lagos, in the Altos de Jalisco, on 12 April, when the town was filled with peasants for the Easter celebrations, at the order of the district jefe político, militiamen fired on the pueblo bajo crying out ‘Long live religion. Death to the government!’ Eleven people died in the struggle. For twenty-four hours, fighting followed for control of the town. It resulted in the flight of the militiamen and the jefe político. It took 400 federal soldiers with five artillery pieces to regain control of Lagos after three days. The town of San Juan rose against the authorities when they tried to publish the Constitution. An uprising was reported from the San Luis Potosí town of Charcas and opposition expected in Santa María del Río and Armadillo. Armed force would be required, according to the State Military Commander, to ensure the publication of the Constitution and the installation of new municipal councils. A riot broke out in Aguascalientes. Force was imposed in Tulancingo.²⁶

When the majority of the Municipal Council of the Tlaxcalan town of Huamantla refused to take the oath to the Constitution, the government ordered the military to arrest recalcitrant members of the local administration. In Zacatecas, the clergy refused the sacraments to anyone who had taken the oath. Accordingly, the state governor requested the national government to advise him what to do about this, since, to him, it was evident that the clergy’s action was intending to nullify laws issued by the civil power, which amounted to a criminal act.²⁷

Comonfort, the Liberal moderate, was no stranger to confrontation with the clergy. Archbishop De la Garza criticised him for upholding the Ley Juárez and for authorising the Organic Law of 27 January 1857 for the Civil Registry, which he regarded as an affront to Mexican piety. Infuriated by the clerical response to these measures, Comonfort, nevertheless, sent his Minister of Justice, Ezequiel Montes, to Rome, in an attempt to work out an arrangement with the Holy See.²⁸ Comonfort, however, was as determined as Juárez or Ocampo, to assert the supremacy of the civil power. Yet, the scale of hostilities exposed the inadequacy of the National Guard in many difficult situations: it was neither fully trained nor equipped or there were no armaments available for ready use.²⁹

Mejía presented a military threat on the government’s eastern flank with potentially dire political consequences. Vulnerable districts around the foot of the Sierra Gorda, such as the mining districts of the present-day State of Hidalgo in the south, the rich sugar valley of Río Verde in the north, and the highway between Santa María del Río and Querétaro, lay open to sudden attack, should government forces lapse into complacency or disarray. Mejía and his lieutenant, Rafael Olvera, issued the Plan of Jalpan on 16 June 1857, following the earlier example of Colonel Diego Castrejón in Iguala, who had called for the return of Santa Anna and government in accordance with the Bases Orgánicas of 1843. Both insurrections defended the fueros eclesiático and militar in the tradition established from 1833–4 onward. Olveda praised Santa Anna as the unique savour of the nation and looked back to the alliance of Church and army forged during the 1830s and 1840s.³⁰

Mejía had moved down, early in May, from his Pinal de Amoles redoubt to threaten Jacala and the mining zone of Zimapan, undefended through inability to organise the National Guard there, with the object of inciting the villages to rebel. These were only raids, however, since he was not strong enough to strike at Pachuca. This raid was sufficient to alarm the authorities into strengthening their position at San Juan del Río on the main route down from Querétaro to Mexico City, since Mejía had already established himself in Cadereyta, which was in striking distance. The government, thereupon, made a concerted effort to force Mejía to desist by striking directly at Pinal de Amoles and thereby neutralising the impact of the Plan of Jalpan. This seemed to work, at least for the time being.³¹

La Cruz, published in Mexico City from 1 November 1855 until 29 July 1858, considered Catholic doctrines and values to be in danger. According to the editors, the undermining of religion had begun only two months after the victorious rebels of Ayutla had arrived in the capital with the Ley Juárez of 23 November 1855. During the nearly three years of its existence, La Cruz identified Mexican national character with the Catholic religion. It strove to seize the political and moral initiative from Liberals of whatever persuasion in the conflict over the role of the Church in society.³²

On the same day that the Comonfort administration coincidentally published the Juárez Law, Bishop Domínguez of Oaxaca was urging his parish clergy and able parishioners to subscribe to the newly issued weekly La Cruz, of which he had read the first issue. It was to be one of their instruments in combating the enemies of religious principles and Catholic morality, ‘good material to arm us against the ideas which are being disseminated against our Catholic beliefs’.³³

Liberals Divided

President Comonfort aspired to steer a middle course without alienating the Church and the army, and, at the same time, hold the Liberal factions together. He hoped to prevent the radicals from provoking an open conflict with the Church, fearing a popular backlash against the Liberal administration, should that happen. Divisions, furthermore, existed not just between moderates and radicals, but within each of those sections of the party. Comonfort, for his part, hoped to count on General Félix Zuloaga, an intimate friend, to hold back the younger army commanders, such as Osollo and Miramón, both heroes of Chapultepec in 1847 and aligned with the Conservative Party. The Liberal radicals increasingly opposed Comonfort in the press and in Congress, suspecting his motives and believing that he was betraying the Ayutla Revolution. Lafragua, who dominated the administration between December 1855 and January 1857, feared that the radicals would bring the new system crashing down on their heads. They, for their part, opposed him as the author of the Provisional Organic Statute of 1856, denouncing him as a centralist and anti-federalist. Lafragua, in turn, commented that Ocampo lived in the clouds.³⁴

During the sessions of the Constituent Congress, after Ocampo had returned to ‘Pomoca’, Mata wrote to him in August 1856 that the Comonfort government was fraternising with the ‘enemies of liberty’, despite the efforts of Prieto, Arriaga and Mata to dissuade the President from such a course. Comonfort wrote to Ocampo, Arriaga and Gómez, that he remained loyal to the Plan of Ayutla but that the Liberals’ enemies thrived on dissensions in their ranks, especially since there was now open conflict with Vidaurri on the northern frontier. He defended the Estatuto Orgánico Provisional on the grounds that national integrity had to be protected, though without an assault on the position of the states within the federation.³⁵ Ocampo considered the government cowardly and missing opportunities for reform. He argued that the government would be too timid to spring a coup d’état against the new constitutional system already taking shape.³⁶

In September 1857, Comonfort received 8,084 electoral votes in the tier system, as opposed to a meagre 639 for Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, thereby, for the first time since 1850, becoming an elected Constitutional President of the Mexican Republic. Juárez was elected President of the Supreme Court of Justice, which, under the Constitution, gave him the automatic right to the presidential succession. Out of the capital city in his capacity as Governor of Oaxaca between 10 January 1856 and 25 October 1857, Juárez was kept informed of developments there by his young protégé, Matías Romero. Comonfort opened the first session of the Constitutional Congress on 8 October. Congress rejected his request for extraordinary faculties on 12 October, fearing an increase in executive power. With the support of Payno, Siliceo, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada and Zuloaga, Comonfort sought to hold back the dangers facing the administration. The first of these was a mutiny in the garrison at Cuernavaca on 16 October, followed on 2 November by Mejía’s descent from the Sierra Gorda to seize control of Querétaro, a strongly Conservative city, in the name of defence of the Church. Such a scale of hostility towards the Liberal administration frightened Congress into granting extraordinary powers, to last until 30 April 1858, on the following day.³⁷

The Plan of Tacubaya, 17 December 1857: Executive Coup

It was clear that a ‘terrible polarisation’ was driving mid-nineteenth century Mexico towards civil war. Juárez, already alarmed at the deep divisions within the Liberal Party, could not believe that Comonfort would ‘precipitate himself into perdition by departing from the legal order’.³⁸ The course of action taken by Comonfort and those ministers who supported him should be understood primarily as an attempt to prevent the likelihood of civil war from becoming a reality.

Payno and Siliceo argued for an attempt by the executive to limit the powers of Congress. In this, they were supported by other moderates, including Doblado. The latter wrote to Comonfort, suggesting reform of the Constitution by increasing executive power, which could only be achieved, if Congress itself permitted it, or by dissolving Congress, should it refuse that. Juárez, when consulted by Comonfort, opposed reform, according to Payno. Comonfort discussed the matter with Zuloaga but it took two days for him to agree to a swift coup, to be executed by the military, to dissolve Congress and nullify the Constitution of 1857, which Comonfort believed prevented him from governing the country effectively. That was how the Plan of Tacubaya of 17 December 1857 originated and developed in execution. This plan was the first of the Mexican Plans after 1821 to originate within the government itself. It was a coup by the executive against the legislature, with the object of enforcing a reform of the Constitution but without destroying the federal system or constitutional government as such. At least, that was the intention of Comonfort and the moderate Liberals who supported him. Zuloaga’s troops occupied the city at dawn, closed Congress, arrested its president, and jailed Juárez, President of the Supreme Court.³⁹

Comonfort must have then considered the way clear for fresh elections, a new Congress and a revised Constitution. From 17 December until 11 January 1858, a shadow Liberal administration depended on Zuloaga’s army, in which its principal officers were pressing for the elimination of those remnants. Comonfort, hoping to neutralise opposition, rescinded the Ley Lerdo on 19 December.⁴⁰

By removing the Constitution, however, Comonfort had forfeited his own legitimacy. At the same time, the enactment of the Plan of Tacubaya nullified the legitimacy of every other authority elected under the terms of the Constitution, including the President of the Supreme Court and the state governors. This, many such authorities could never concede, especially since the plan opened a clear way for the army to hand over power to the Conservatives and heal the breach with the Church brought about by Liberal policies. For this reason, Doblado, aspiring kingmaker in 1855, broke with Comonfort. Prieto, Parrodi and Santos Degollado also repudiated the coup. The State Governors of Aguascalientes, Colima, Guanajuato (Doblado), Jalisco, Michoacán, Oaxaca and Zacatecas similarly stuck by the 1857 Constitution. With Parrodi in Jalisco in the lead, the state governors declared that, since no central government existed anymore, sovereignty had devolved upon the states. The State Governor of Veracruz, Manuel Gutiérrez Zamora, aligned with the Parrodi coalition on 3 December, undercutting Comonfort’s position in the capital. In such a way, the anti-federalist intent of the golpistas unleashed a further phase of federalist irredentism, such as had not been experienced since 1823–4. Comonfort, however, clung on to his position as President in Mexico City, although support collapsed around him, still determined to stand by the principles of the Revolution of Ayutla. Since his potential successor, under the Constitution, remained in jail, a struggle for power would soon begin within the opposition Liberal camp, in the process of being organised by Parrodi in the north-centre.⁴¹

The Conservative Seizure of Power: the Second Coup, 11 January 1858

Into this situation came the second coup, the Pronunciamiento of Santo Domingo, in Mexico City on 11 January 1858. Yielding to pressures within the army, Zuloaga took the decision to remove Comonfort. The latter, however, refused to go, determined to resist the second coup with the fighting men at his disposal. They soon evaporated and, after brief fighting in the city, Comonfort was put under escort and taken to Veracruz on 21 January. Comonfort set sail for exile in New York on 7 February. Before leaving Mexico City, however, he played his last and only available card. He secured the release of Juárez from jail, enabling his escape from the capital and flight to Guanajuato. Juárez, who had never repudiated the 1857 Constitution, took his stand on it in direct negation of the Plan of Tacubaya, thereby maintaining the legitimacy of his accession to the presidency. Guanajuato was the stronghold of Doblado, who also had his eyes on the presidential office. The arrival of Juárez in his city put the cat among the pigeons. We can enquire, therefore, whether this was Comonfort’s ulterior motive.⁴²

The events of 17 December 1857 to 11 January 1858 brought Mexico to civil war. Prieto had warned Ocampo of the dangerous situation in Mexico City and that he should go into hiding. He held Comonfort responsible. The ‘reaction’, consisting of ‘capital-owners, pious faithful, and fanatical villages’, was trying to raise between 6,000 and 8,000 men in the city, and that Liberals were arming themselves to defend the Constitution.⁴³

The war resulted from the impossibility of reconciling the perspectives of the Liberals concerning the nature of the Republic with those of the Church and its supporters. At the same time, it reflected the discrepancy between the outlying states of the north and the south-east, on the one hand, and the central states on the other, where the influence of the clergy had always been much stronger. Conciliators, such as Comonfort and Doblado, failed to prevent armed conflict, and moderates like Lafragua, Payno and Siliceo, who appeared willing to dilute the Reform policies, were swept side. The leadership of the Liberal Party – Juárez, Ocampo, Lerdo, Prieto, Zarco, Degollado, Parrodi, Huerta – fell to the radicals. They stood for the maintenance and extension of the Reform Laws, the Constitution of 1857, the federal system and the supremacy of the civil power. Ocampo informed Mata that the newspaper, Las Novedades, had stated on 24 December 1856 that Juárez, Lerdo and Arriaga, along with himself, were listed as leaders of the radical faction. Accordingly, Ocampo rebuffed that on the grounds that Liberals disliked the idea of leaders. The party upheld ‘ideas of progress’.⁴⁴ Rabasa, looking back from the early stages of the Revolution of 1910, regarded the ‘moderates’ of the early Reform era, as virtually a distinct party, located between the Liberals and the Conservatives. He regarded them as the most numerous among the various political affiliations.⁴⁵