Introduction

Between 1836 and 1861 the Mexican Republic was caught, without allies or outside support, between European powers and an expansionist United States. Throughout this book, I draw attention to the limited fields of manoeuvre available to governments, whether federal or centralist, in the period between the loss of Texas in 1836 and the European Intervention of 1861. The weakness of the authority and effectiveness of the central government in the localities remained a striking feature. The aim here is to explain why this was so and what the consequences were. The overriding issue for the Mexican Republic from 1836 would be how to rebuild a country that no longer formed part of a larger, intercontinental system, but was left impoverished, near bankruptcy and bereft of allies or protectors.¹ The period has been described as Mexico’s worst experience during the nineteenth century.²

This struggling state had been eighteenth-century Spain’s richest overseas dominion and a constant pole of attraction for enterprising Spanish immigrants able and willing to develop business activities there and to found new families with Mexican wives. New Spain, which at least until the 1790s had been remarkably stable and financially viable, experienced a series of debilitating shifts in structure, direction and leadership. Even though Imperial Spain left her American territories in dire financial straits, they also inherited a tradition of law originating in the Middle Ages. The natural law tradition of later seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe, taught in universities, colleges and seminaries, also remained alive in nineteenth-century Mexico, alongside the newer liberal constitutional systems established after 1812. Spanish America inherited the legalism of the colonial era and with it the super-abundance of lawyers and clerics versed in civil and canon law.³

As one of the three countries of the North American subcontinent, the Mexican Republic’s relations with the United States constantly fluctuated. The Mexican War did not provide a lightening victory for US forces that could be celebrated triumphantly at home. On the contrary, the war dragged on from April 1846 to September 1847.⁴ After the war, the United States pressed for further territorial concessions and transit rights across Mexican territory even after acquiring New Mexico and Upper California, while at the same time considering the acquisition of Cuba from Spain.⁵

An overriding theme of this book is the struggle for representative government in the Ibero-American part of the American continent. In Hispanic America, the initial experience dated from the Spanish Cortes of 1810–14, which sought to establish liberal forms of representation based on the principle of equality before the law. The Mexican Federal Constitutions of 1824 and 1857 also followed this practice. Elections played a central role in nineteenth-century Mexican political life. Although indirect and thereby focused on an emerging ‘political class’, they tended to be competitive rather than manipulated. Types of constitutional government might vary, but the overall objective was government by consent.⁶ Whether representative government signified democracy is another matter. In mid-nineteenth-century Liberal thinking, they did not necessarily coincide. When Benito Juárez, Governor of Oaxaca, described in 1848 colonial-era elections of village authorities as ‘democratic’, and claimed that they anticipated municipal elections in the federal era, he was addressing the Liberal congressmen of his time, not a present-day audience with different assumptions. More than likely, what Juárez meant by ‘democratic’ procedure is that elections took place.⁷

Several institutions and practices that prevailed during the colonial era continued in the nineteenth century, although in altered form. This suggests an underlying stability at the middle and lower strata of society beneath the rapid changes and intrigues at the capital-city level and in the state (or department) capitals. The municipalities, transformed into constitutional councils after 1812–14 and again after 1820, offer a good example.⁸ The municipalities provided the electoral base for the representative form of government in independent Mexico.⁹

The form of government, the distribution of power, the composition of the electorate and the nature of citizenship still awaited resolution in Mexico in the period examined here. The extent of the franchise remained a potent issue, contested between conservative centralists and federalist defenders of a broad, popular suffrage. The relationship of the peasantry – much of it Indian – to the various factions of the Liberal Party became an outstanding issue in the 1840s and 1850s.¹⁰ The Siete Leyes of 1836 and the Bases Orgánicas of 1843 inserted income or property qualifications for the vote in order to reduce the size of the electorate and prioritise the wealthy and educated. Dispute continued over the form of the voting process, whether indirect on the tier model initiated in 1810–14, or direct. If direct, should there be restrictions in accordance with income, profession or employment, education or literacy? Electoral practices raised questions of pressure and illegal exclusion.¹¹ A major issue would be executive interference in gubernatorial elections.

Weak though they were, Latin American states were no longer colonies or dependencies under foreign political control or parts of alien empires, subordinated to wider imperial interests. They were sovereign entities. As such, they could determine their tariff policies, whether to protect artisans or emerging industrialists or as a revenue-raising device. Mexican administrations used this technique to effect during the 1840s and 1850s in a way that territories under European control could not. The debate on protectionism focused on Mexico’s relationship to the international market at a time of economic weakness and political confusion. This issue deserves prominence, given the range of artisan groups in the republic whose livelihoods faced adversity, if not ruin, should Mexico’s industries be wiped out.¹²

The three generals’ intervention in 1841 under the terms of the Bases de Tacubaya exposed the failings of the centralist system and the political inadequacy of President Anastasio Bustamante, himself a general of repute. This intervention attempted to reinforce centralism, with the support of the capital-owning and mercantile classes. Military politicians – for that is what they were – frequently intervened in civil affairs, hardly allowing a distinction between civil and military matters. Similarly, civilian politicians, whether federalist or centralist, frequently appealed to army officers to assist them in securing political power. This practice alone should indicate how divided army officers were on the political issues of their time. For this reason, we cannot speak of army intervention in political life, since the army was never one united body. Each commander followed a different direction. The conduct of Generals Anastasio Bustamante, Antonio López de Santa Anna and Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga – to take the most important figures – amply illustrated that. This was not army rule, but the almost indistinguishable intermingling of soldiers and civilians in a common struggle for power. What that power might be worth in a state crippled by financial exigencies and inherited debt, only the contestants could explain.¹³ Two attempts by Santa Anna at personal rule in 1843–4 and 1853–5 collapsed. His attempts to bolster the regular army proved largely unsuccessful.¹⁴

Although monarchy had been abandoned by 1823, the Catholic religion which had consecrated it through practice and symbolism remained. Conflict began over state access to ecclesiastical revenues and the restriction of clerical jurisdiction and immunities. This raised the question of whether the independent and sovereign Republic was a Catholic state or not.

The disaggregation of the episcopate after 1822, when the Primate returned to Spain, left the Church politically weakened. The last bishop appointed in the colonial era died in 1829. Even though the papacy did not recognise Mexican Independence until 1836, in 1831 Pope Gregory XVI appointed six new bishops for Mexican sees. Two of those who survived were Francisco Pablo Vázquez, a distinguished Bishop of Puebla (1831–47) and Juan Cayetano Gómez de Portugal, an able Bishop of Michoacán (1831–50). The diocese of Oaxaca, however, remained without a bishop between 1827 and 1842. It was not until the 1840s that the Mexican hierarchy was reconstituted as a spiritual and political force in the country. By the end of the 1850s, all ten episcopal sees were occupied.¹⁵

Between 1806 and 1833, the overall receipts from the tithe revenue of all the Mexican dioceses fell by half; from 10,691,300 pesos to 5,211,628 pesos. This was before the removal of the legal obligation to pay the tithe in 1834.¹⁶ Vocations had fallen by a third and did not recover until after 1845, coinciding with the restoration of the hierarchy. The Archdiocese of Mexico had the largest total number of clerics with 704, followed by Puebla with 649, Michoacán with 527 and Guadalajara with 436. This meant that the bulk of the clergy in Mexico was to be found in the central provinces, which had been focal points of evangelisation since the 1520s and where two-thirds of ecclesiastical properties were located.¹⁷ This central area would be where the greatest opposition to the Liberal Reforms of 1855–61 would be felt and many of the crucial battles of the Civil War of the Reform (1858–61) would be fought, the first major conflict in Mexico since the Insurgency of the 1810s.¹⁸

Central government weakness opened opportunities for peasant communities to reclaim space from private landlords, local bosses or other communities. Widespread popular mobilisation during the 1810s helped to explain the social psychology of resistance in subsequent decades when faced with perceived outside oppression and interference. In most cases, local issues predominated, which affected everyone’s daily life, such as land usage, livestock grazing, boundary markers and fencing, water rights, access to pasture, access to woodlands for collecting firewood or herbs, and disputes over land titles or parish dues. Official interventions in ordinary people’s lives, through new or increased taxes and military recruitment, incensed opinion, sometimes to the extent of direct confrontation with the public authorities.¹⁹

This book examines the relationship of popular movements of the 1840s and early 1850s with the Liberal Reform Movement. If the Liberals intended to create a national-level popular movement, they would need to bind together widespread local-level grievances into their own political and social objectives. At least in the period before the 1850s, there is little evidence that they did so. It seems likely that this was not the Liberal Party’s prime concern. Similarly, it does not appear to be the case that the Conservatives attempted to do that either.

The Revolution of Ayutla of 1854–55 needed wide support if it were to capture power at the political centre. With this objective foremost, the revolutionary core in the south moved outwards in three directions: to the Liberal exiles expelled by Santa Anna in 1853 and the surviving leadership inside Mexico; to the north-centre and northern political barons, whether lawyers or soldiers or a hybrid of both; and to local strongmen, such as those in the Puebla and Oaxaca sierras. In such a way, the original southern movement gained a broader geographical base, while the remnants of the Liberal Party regrouped in a wide and contradictory coalition, in which racially mixed groups mingled with patricians and professionals, and local leaders – mestizo or Indian by origin, literate and bilingual – with strong popular following. The latter saw Liberal reforms as a means of strengthening their own positions. What Liberal policies offered a lower-class base was a combination of traditional objectives, notably defence of community and formation of new villages on former private lands or the freeing of subordinate villages from district head-towns. Newer goals included the formation of National Guard units and the promotion of primary education. Both were of supreme importance.²⁰ This unstable mixture was made even more unsteady by ideological differences and personality conflicts, both of which meant that the essential character of Mexican Liberalism became factionalism.

Liberal capture of power in August 1855 initiated what would become known as the Reforma, during which, reconstitution of the political structure, constitutional and legal reforms, and parallel social changes were attempted. Radical Liberals, such as Ponciano Arriaga and José María Castillo Velasco, spoke of measures of agrarian reform in the interests of rural lower social groups. Little, however, resulted from that. Melchor Ocampo wanted the disentailment measures of the years following the Lerdo Law of June 1856 to work to the advantage of such groups, with the aim of producing a large base of smallholders for the Liberal Party at national level. This, however, was not the final result. Liberal legislation prepared in the late 1850s and early 1860s opened the way for two opposing developments. First, it enabled private producers to take control of some community lands, which they had previously rented, and, from the 1880s, it facilitated the transformation of large tracts of land into privately owned plantations for the production of cotton, coffee, tobacco or sugar, and for the export of tropical produce and raw materials.

What described itself as ‘the great Liberal Party’ consisted of mutually antagonistic factions and personality-groupings, often as hostile to one another as to those competing for power outside and against the varied Liberal figures and entities. This is not to deny that on occasion, popular and Liberal factions might come together in common defence of municipal autonomy and an extended franchise. The striking factor, however, was the brittle nature of this coalition. Its fracture in December 1857 led to the bitter Civil War of the Reform (1858–61).

Mexican Liberalism was not a European offshoot. Despite admiration expressed by leading Mexican Liberals for various French thinkers and revolutions or for the perceived achievements of the United States, Liberalism in Mexico originated from Mexican necessities. The principal necessity was the formation of an effective governing body, which could hold claimed sovereign territory together and defend it from outside incursions. There is a strong case for regarding Liberalism as a repeated attempt to rebuild the State. Could Liberalism construct a viable, functioning State – or would the contradictory elements in its ideology between individual liberties and State construction break the party further apart?

An alternative Conservative ideology, supported by the Church hierarchy, a strong section of the army, business interests in the centre core, as well as various provincial groupings, challenged the Liberal Reform. The resulting Civil War led to an incomplete Liberal military victory. The terminal year of this book, 1861, began with the renewal of Reform at the national level. The European Tripartite Intervention in December 1861, made possible by the Civil War across the United States, opened a new phase leading to the French Intervention of 1862–7, the Liberal abandonment of the national capital, and the establishment of the Second Mexican Empire of 1863–7.