Reform, Rebellion and Party in Mexico, 1836–1861

By Brian Hamnett

Between 1836 and 1861, Mexico’s difficulties as a sovereign state became fully exposed. Its example provides a case study for all similarly emerging independent states that have broken away from long-standing imperial systems. The leaders of the Republic in Mexico envisaged the construction of a nation, in a process that often conflicted with ethnic, religious, and local loyalties. The question of popular participation always remained outstanding, and this book examines regional and local movements as the other side of the coin to capital city issues and aspirations. Formerly an outstanding Spanish colony on the North American sub-continent, financial difficulties, economic recession, and political divisions made the new Republic vulnerable to spoliation. This began with the loss of Texas in 1836, the acquisition of the Far North by the United States in 1846–8, and the European debt-collecting Intervention in 1861. This study examines the Mexican responses to these setbacks, culminating in the Liberal Reform Movement from 1855 and the opposition to it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838537

Brian Hamnett

Brian Hamnett is Research Professor at the University of Essex, and was awarded a Banco Nacional de Mexico prize for foreign scholar working on Mexican regional history in 2010.

Book preview

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IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Reform, Rebellion and Party in Mexico, 1836–1861

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

Samuel Amago (University of Virginia)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México)

Paul Castro (University of Glasgow)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Luisa-Elena Delgado (University of Illinois)

Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London)

Will Fowler (University of St Andrews)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

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© Brian Hamnett, 2022

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Contents

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Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One: Issues and Contexts

1What is to be Done?

2Villages, Landlords and Businessmen

3Financing Mexican Government

4Political Reconstruction: Before the War with the United States, 1836–1846

5Political Reconstruction: During and After the War with the United States, 1846–1855

6Persistent Pressure from the United States

Part Two: Responses and Reactions

7Social and Ethnic Tensions in their Local Contexts

8Conflict in the Sierra Gorda – Querétaro, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí

9The Struggle in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the State of Oaxaca, 1847–1853

Part Three: Reform and Frustration

10 The Revolution of Ayutla and the First Stages of the Reform, 1854–1856

11 The Lerdo Law of 1856

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

13 The Civil War of the Reform, 1858–1861

14 The Continuation of the Reform and the Final Phase of the War, 1859–1860

15 The Liberals Return to Power, 1861: an Unresolved Dilemma

Final Remarks

Notes

Sources and Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

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Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

For

Dr Josefina Vázquez,

El Colegio de México.

Great scholar and teacher,

who has inspired us all.

Acknowledgements

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A British Academy grant enabled further research for the period from 1824 to 1884 in the reorganised archives in Oaxaca. I am grateful to Dr Manuel Esparza and subsequent Directors of the Oaxaca State Archive for their support. Dr Flor Salazar, Director of the San Luis Potosí State Archive, greatly assisted my research. A grant from the Nuffield Foundation enabled several months’ work in the Historical Archive of the Mexican Defence Ministry. I had the pleasure of talking over many questions with the late Dr Conrado Hernández, when we were both working there. Conversations and correspondence over many years with Dr Josefina Vázquez, Dr Andrés Lira, Dr Pablo Mijangos, Professor Brian Connaugton and Dr José Antonio Serrano Ortega have helped clarify the issues. Professors Connaughton and Guy Thomson kindly read and commented on sections of the manuscript. I greatly miss discussing these themes with the late Professors Jan Bazant, Michael Costeloe and Paul Vanderwood.

Abbreviations

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Introduction

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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.

Part One

Issues and Contexts

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Chapter 1

What is to be Done?

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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