Centralist Mexico

It governed, in theory, some 7.8 million people in a territory that ran from the 42nd parallel to Guatemala and from the Caribbean to the Pacific. In practice it governed the centre well, the north badly and the peninsula hardly at all. The decade is usually remembered for two disasters: the loss of Texas, which declared independence in March 1836 and was annexed by the United States nine years later, and the war of 1846–48, in which Mexico lost rather more than half its territory. Both happened on its watch, and the second was made much more likely by the first.

It matters for a third reason, less often noticed. The centralist decade was the first sustained Mexican attempt to design a state rather than improvise one, and the constitutional machinery it invented — a charter with enforceable rights, a body charged with reviewing the constitutionality of legislation, a professional bureaucracy with departmental prefects — outlived the regime that built it. Mexican conservatives and Mexican liberals both learned their politics in these ten years. So did the army, which discovered that it could make and unmake governments, and the provinces, which discovered that they could leave.

At a glance

Why did the federal republic collapse in 1835?

Because the federation had no arbiter and the states had the guns. The constitution of 1824 gave the states residual sovereignty, their own militias and their own taxes, and gave the federal government no way to settle a dispute with a state except by fighting it. Between 1824 and 1835 the country had a dozen serious revolts, two rival presidents at one point, and a presidency that changed hands by pronunciamiento rather than election.

The immediate turn came from a reform programme. In 1833 the vice-president Valentín Gómez Farías, governing while Antonio López de Santa Anna retired to his estate at Manga de Clavo, pushed through a series of anticlerical measures: the closure of the University of Mexico, the removal of religious instruction from schools, the abolition of the compulsory tithe, and a plan to bring the army under civilian control. The Church, the army and the propertied classes of the capital combined against him. Santa Anna returned, dissolved the congress in the spring of 1834, and let a new congress be elected — a congress of men who had decided that the federal pact itself was the problem.

That decision had a military precondition. In May 1835 the state militia of Zacatecas, the largest and best-equipped in the republic, was broken in the field by Santa Anna's army. With the strongest state force destroyed, the way was open: on 23 October 1835 the congress declared itself constituent and passed the Bases Constitucionales, suspending the constitution of 1824 and announcing a new order. The argument made in the capital was not that federalism was wicked but that it had failed — that a country of regional economies, regional elites and regional armies needed a single centre strong enough to arbitrate between them. The argument was reasonable. The instrument they built to do it was not.

What did the Siete Leyes actually create?

Seven constitutional laws, promulgated on 30 December 1836 over the signature of the interim president José Justo Corro, replaced the federal charter. They were the work of a congress that had been sitting since January 1835, and they were meant to be permanent.

The first law dealt with nationality, citizenship and rights, and it is here that the caricature fails first. It contained a genuine bill of rights: no arrest without a written order from a competent judge, no detention by a political authority for more than three days or by a judge for more than ten without a formal charge, property not to be taken without public cause, prior valuation by two experts and indemnity, no search of house or papers except under the law, no trial by special commission, no retroactive law, no judicial torture. Citizenship, however, was restricted: a man needed an income of at least 100 pesos a year from property, trade or honest labour. Universal manhood suffrage, the great achievement of the federal constitutions, disappeared.

The second law created the Supreme Conservative Power, the institution that made the regime famous. It was five men, each over forty, each with an income of at least 3,000 pesos and a record of high office, one of them replaced every two years. It could declare a law or decree null within two months of its passage if it contradicted an express article of the constitution; it could annul acts of the executive, suspend the Supreme Court, and declare the president physically or morally incapable. Its defenders called it the guardian of the constitution. Its enemies called it a tribunal of supermen, and the reputation stuck: the jurist Emilio Rabasa thought it the institution that most discredited the whole charter. But the power had one restriction that is usually forgotten. It could not act on its own initiative. It could only rule when asked by the executive, by the Supreme Court, or by at least eighteen deputies or senators — which is why, in practice, it did less than its reputation suggests, and why it twice refused Anastasio Bustamante extraordinary powers, even during the French bombardment of Veracruz in 1838.

The remaining laws built the machine. A bicameral congress: a chamber of deputies and twenty-four senators, the senators requiring an income of 2,500 pesos and chosen by the departmental juntas from lists drawn up by the president, the court and the deputies. A president with an eight-year term and the right to re-election, elected indirectly through a three-name shortlist sent to the departmental juntas. A Council of Government, a ministry of four secretaries, and a judiciary with a Supreme Court. The sixth law abolished the states and made them departments — the same boundaries in most cases, but no legislatures with sovereign power. The president appointed each governor; the departmental junta could legislate on local matters, but congress could approve, reject or amend what it passed. Prefects appointed by the governor ran the districts. The seventh law governed the observance and reform of the constitution.

One clause of the territorial decree deserves its own sentence. Coahuila and Texas, a single state since 1824, were divided into two departments; and Article 4 provided that when order was restored in the Department of Texas, the government would organise its authorities and fix its capital. The constitution that provoked the Texas revolt thus created Texas as a department it could not yet govern.

Who actually governed?

The presidency changed hands a dozen times in ten years, and only one man governed for any length of time. Miguel Barragán was president when the Siete Leyes were drafted and died of typhus in February 1836. José Justo Corro, a lawyer with no taste for politics, signed the new constitution and handed over to Anastasio Bustamante in April 1837. Bustamante governed from 1837 to 1841, with an interval in 1839 when he took the field himself, and spent most of the time putting down revolts. Santa Anna held the office in 1839, again from 1841 to 1842, and again from 1843 to 1844, usually as the arbiter between factions rather than as the head of one. José Joaquín de Herrera, Mariano Paredes and Valentín Canalizo filled the gaps.

The social base of the regime was what Michael Costeloe calls the hombres de bien: respectable, mostly urban, mostly professional — lawyers, clerics, merchants, army officers, minor landowners — who had concluded that liberty without order was ruin. They were not reactionaries in the sense of wanting the Spanish monarchy back. The one man who proposed a European prince, José María Gutiérrez de Estrada, was howled down in 1840 and had to leave the country. They were constitutionalists of a narrow kind: they wanted a written charter, a division of powers, an elected congress and a rule of law, and they wanted the vote confined to men like themselves.

The army was the regime's other pillar and its largest expense. Under the federation each state had kept a militia, and the militia had been the federalists' political base; the centralist reform effectively abolished the state militias, and the National Guard was not reconstituted until 1846. What remained was the regular army, paid irregularly, officered by men who had made their careers since 1821, and able to extract money and promotions by threatening the government. The pronunciamiento — a public declaration by a garrison or a general, followed by a plan of government, followed by negotiation — became the normal way of changing administrations. It was cheaper than a civil war and less final than a coup, and it made every government hostage to the next garrison commander with an ambition.

The Church was close to the regime but not identical with it. The hierarchy had opposed the anticlerical laws of 1833–34, and the Siete Leyes restored the standing of the clergy, kept Catholicism as the only permitted religion, and left the ecclesiastical and military courts (fueros) in place. But the state kept the patronage it had inherited from the Spanish crown, and the Church's wealth remained available to governments in the form of loans. When the treasury needed money, it borrowed from cathedral chapters, not from a party fund.

How did Mexico lose Texas?

Texas was lost politically before it was lost militarily, and the centralist reform was the occasion rather than the cause. The province had been joined to Coahuila since 1824 because its population was too small for separate statehood; its Anglo-American colonists, invited in as a buffer against the Comanche, numbered some 30,000 by 1835 against perhaps 8,000 Mexican tejanos. The law of 6 April 1830 had tried to stop further immigration and to garrison the frontier; the conventions of 1832 and 1833 had asked for separate statehood and the repeal of the law; Stephen F. Austin had been arrested in Mexico City in 1834 for carrying the petition.

Then came the constitutional turn. When the congress abolished the states in 1835, it abolished the legal framework the colonists had appealed to, and it sent troops to disarm the militias. The Texans took up arms in October 1835, at Gonzales, in the name of the constitution of 1824 — a federalist rebellion before it was a separatist one. Santa Anna took command in person, and his campaign was ruthless and, for a few weeks, decisive: the Alamo fell on 6 March 1836, and the garrison at Goliad was executed on 27 March. On 21 April, at San Jacinto, his column was surprised in camp by Sam Houston's army; the fighting was over in about eighteen minutes, and Santa Anna was captured the next day.

The rest was negotiation and repudiation. On 14 May 1836 he signed two documents at Velasco, one public and one secret, providing for the withdrawal of Mexican troops and, in the secret article, for his influence in favour of Texan independence. He was a prisoner and no longer president; the Mexican congress refused to ratify either document, and that summer the government disavowed them. Mexico never recognised Texan independence. It could not reconquer the province either: the treasury was empty, the army had to be rebuilt, and the north was in the middle of a decade of Comanche and Apache raids that made the Texan frontier a secondary problem. Texas remained a rebel province in Mexican law and a functioning republic in fact until 1845, when the United States annexed it and turned a Mexican internal problem into an international war.

What was the Pastry War really about?

Money, treaty rights and national honour, in that order. French merchants in Mexico had been pressing claims since the 1820s, when forced loans and the sack of the Parián market in 1828 destroyed property; the most quoted claim belonged to a pastry cook named Remontel, whose shop at Tacubaya had been looted by soldiers in the disorders of the late 1820s, and who asked for 60,000 pesos for damage to a business worth a fraction of that. The name of the war comes from that claim, and contemporaries used it as a joke.

The demands were not a joke. In March 1838 the French minister presented an ultimatum: 600,000 pesos in settlement of claims, the removal of named officials, exemption from forced contributions, and equal trading rights for French residents. Mexico refused to negotiate under the guns of a squadron, and on 16 April 1838 the French fleet blockaded the Gulf ports. The blockade cut customs revenue, which was the government's main income, and it encouraged the federalists: revolts broke out in Michoacán, Puebla, Tampico and Sonora while the government was occupied on the coast.

In November the French admiral Charles Baudin moved against San Juan de Ulúa, the fortress that guarded Veracruz harbour and that Mexicans called the Gibraltar of America. It was built of soft coral limestone and had been neglected for years. On 27 November 1838 a bombardment with shell guns silenced its batteries in a few hours; it capitulated the next day. A French landing on 5 December was fought off at the Merced barracks, and Santa Anna — who had come out of retirement to take command — was hit by grapeshot in the left leg and hand, and lost the leg to amputation. He turned the wound into a political resurrection, writing as though from his deathbed and describing a victory. The leg was buried with honours at his estate, dug up in 1842 and reburied in Mexico City amid speeches, and dug up again by a mob in 1844 and dragged through the streets.

The war ended with a British mediation. By the treaty of 9 March 1839 Mexico agreed to pay the 600,000 pesos within six months and to grant French residents the rights of the most favoured nation; Ulúa was handed back in April. France had gained little and Mexico had lost revenue, ships and men, but the episode mattered beyond its size. It showed that the republic could not defend its own coast, that a foreign blockade could topple a cabinet, and that a general who lost a battle could become a national hero if he bled photogenically enough.

Why did the provinces keep rising?

Because centralism took away the provincial elites' veto without giving them a share in the centre. Under the federation a state governor was a local boss with his own legislature, militia and customs house; under the Siete Leyes he was an appointee of the president, and the department's revenue was assigned by Mexico City. For regions whose economy ran on trade through their own ports, this was not an abstraction. Yucatán, cut off from the centre by jungle and sea, depended on its own customs and objected to excise taxes, conscription and the closure of its militia. Tabasco, similarly placed on the Gulf, revolted more than once. The north, ruined by Indian raids and resentful of appointed officials who could not protect it, produced its own federalist movements.

The south was quieter. Chiapas had joined Mexico in 1824 rather than the United Provinces of Central America, and the frontier with Guatemala gave Mexico City little trouble while Guatemala was itself in civil war; Soconusco, on that frontier, was occupied by Mexican forces in 1842 and its status was not settled for another forty years. The most serious revolt of the decade, though, was in Yucatán. A federalist rising at Tizimín in 1839 spread until Valladolid fell in February 1840 and Campeche in June; by the end of that year the peninsula was governed by its own authorities. On 1 October 1841 its chamber of deputies adopted an act of independence, and its constitution of that year, which guaranteed individual rights and a wider religious toleration than the Mexican charter allowed, declared Yucatán a free and sovereign state. Santa Anna sent an army in 1842; it failed, and in 1843 the government conceded a settlement that brought the peninsula back with its own tariffs. It left again in 1846 and rejoined for good only in November of that year, after the federal constitution was restored.

On the lower Rio Grande the movement was smaller and has been inflated by later writers. A junta at Casa Blanca on 23 January 1840, led by Antonio Canales and Jesús de Cárdenas, withheld recognition from Mexico City and set up a provisional government for Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas until a general convention could restore the federation. Anglo-American newspapers called it the Republic of the Rio Grande; the leaders' own papers speak of a gobierno provisional and a northern frontier, not of a new nation. It was defeated within the year, and Canales surrendered at Camargo on 6 November 1840.

In the capital the federalists tried once more. In July 1840 a group led by General José de Urrea and Gómez Farías seized the National Palace and held Bustamante hostage; the fighting in the streets lasted twelve days and damaged a good part of the centre of Mexico City before an amnesty ended it. The following year Mariano Paredes issued a manifesto at Guadalajara in August 1841, gathered the disaffected, and was joined by Santa Anna. Bustamante, abandoned by his own cabinet, gave up power in October. What replaced him was not a constitution but an army proclamation: the Bases de Tacubaya, signed on 28 September 1841, which dissolved all three powers except the judiciary, named a provisional executive chosen by a junta of two deputies per department, and promised a constituent congress within two months.

What changed in 1843?

Not enough, and the way it was done made things worse. The constituent congress elected under the Bases met on 10 June 1842 and turned out to be strongly federalist — it produced a draft constitution that restored the states and limited the presidency. Santa Anna, who had taken the provisional presidency in October 1841 and handed it to Nicolás Bravo while keeping command of the army, dissolved the congress on 19 December 1842. A hand-picked Junta Nacional Legislativa, installed on 6 January 1843, produced the Bases de la Organización Política de la República Mexicana, which Santa Anna sanctioned on 12 June 1843 and which were published in Mexico City two days later.

The Bases were a partial retreat from 1836. They declared the nation a "representative popular republic" and kept the departments, but they gave the departmental assemblies a real, if subordinate, power to legislate and to levy certain contributions. They replaced the single-chamber politics of appointment with an electoral structure: primary assemblies in sections of 500 inhabitants chose electors, the electors chose secondary electors with an income of at least 500 pesos, and a departmental electoral college chose the deputies and the assembly. The property qualification for citizenship rose from 100 to 200 pesos a year, and from 1850 anyone reaching the age of citizenship would also have to read and write — a literacy requirement that says a good deal about how the regime saw the country it governed. The senate was reorganised on corporate lines: the departmental assemblies each named five senators from each of four classes — farmers, miners, landowners or merchants, and manufacturers. The presidency was cut to five years, with a minimum age of forty, and the Council of Government grew to seventeen members appointed by the president.

What the Bases did not do was create an arbiter. The Supreme Conservative Power disappeared, and nothing replaced it: no court with the power to review legislation, no body able to declare a presidential act void, no convention able to bind the departments. The constitution was, in effect, whatever the president could get away with. Santa Anna governed above it, dissolved congress when it obstructed him, and used the army to settle departmental questions. When congress censured his campaign against Paredes in 1844 and his puppet president Valentín Canalizo dissolved the chamber, the capital rose against him. On 6 December 1844 congress was restored and José Joaquín de Herrera was installed as president; Santa Anna was arrested near Xico as he tried to leave the country. Costeloe's judgement on that coup is worth recording: it was unusual among Mexican pronunciamientos in having no factional or ideological author, only a consensus that one man had to go.

Where did the money come from?

Customs. The republic lived on the duties collected at Veracruz, Tampico, Matamoros, Mazatlán, Guaymas and Acapulco, plus the alcabala on internal trade, the tobacco monopoly, the mint at Mexico City, and a direct contribution levied on property and persons. In a good year the federal treasury took in something of the order of ten million pesos; in a bad year, half that or less, because the customs houses were the first thing a rebellion seized and the last thing a government recovered.

The expenditure was fixed before the revenue arrived. The army consumed the largest share — pay, rations, horses, ordnance, and the pensions of officers who had been on the payroll since independence — and the bureaucracy the next. Debt service came third and was usually unpaid. The London loans of 1824 and 1825 had been spent long before; the interest fell into arrears, and the government lived from month to month on advances from merchant houses in the capital, on loans from cathedral chapters and on forced contributions from anyone with visible capital. When the French blockade closed the Gulf ports in 1838, the government's response was to authorise two loans of six million pesos and an additional tax of four million, most of which was never collected.

The centralist reform made this worse in a specific way. By transferring the main taxes to Mexico City and paying the departments an allowance, it gave the provinces a permanent grievance and the centre a permanent deficit: the money that used to be spent locally now had to be collected, shipped and fought over. Yucatán's complaints about excise and conscription were complaints about this arrangement. So were the northern revolts. A state that cannot pay its soldiers cannot govern, and a state that cannot pay its creditors cannot borrow; by 1845 the Mexican government was doing neither.

Who was Santa Anna in these years?

Not a doctrine. Antonio López de Santa Anna was a Veracruz landowner and cavalry officer who had turned against the empire of Iturbide in 1823, against the Spanish in 1829, against the liberals in 1834, and against whoever was in power when it suited him. His politics in the centralist decade were the politics of the indispensable man: he let others govern, appeared when the regime was in danger, and took the credit. He was provisional president in 1839 while Bustamante commanded in the field, provisional president again from October 1841, and president under the Bases Orgánicas from 1843.

His assets were real. He was personally brave — the wound at Veracruz was genuine — and he had a popular touch that the lawyers in the capital lacked. His liabilities were equally real. He had lost Texas, he had signed documents disavowing Mexican sovereignty over it, and he had a habit of spending money the treasury did not have. His cult of himself became an embarrassment: the reburial of his leg in 1842, with a military procession and a sermon, was mocked even by his allies, and the mob that dug it up two years later was making a political point.

The centralist decade is often called the Age of Santa Anna, and the label is misleading. He was absent from Mexico for much of it, and the regime's institutional work — the Siete Leyes, the departments, the prefectures, the electoral machinery of 1843 — was done by lawyers and administrators who did not much like him. When he tried to govern as a dictator in 1844, the coalition that removed him included conservatives as well as liberals, clerics as well as army officers. His real significance is that he was the only figure who could hold the centre together, and that holding it together required him to be somewhere else.

How did the slide to war with the United States run?

Through Texas, and through a Mexican political system that could not decide whether to fight or negotiate. The United States annexed Texas by joint resolution on 1 March 1845, and Mexico broke off relations. President Herrera, a moderate centralist, understood that Mexico could not win a war and tried to avoid one: he was willing to recognise Texan independence if the United States would guarantee that annexation would not follow, and in December 1845 he let John Slidell reach Mexico City, only for the government to refuse to receive him as minister plenipotentiary. The offer — a Rio Grande boundary, California and New Mexico, in exchange for money and the assumption of American claims — was one no Mexican government could accept and survive.

Herrera's enemies used the negotiations against him. Mariano Paredes proclaimed against the government at San Luis Potosí on 14 December 1845; congress declared the pronunciamiento subversive on 23 December, but the army went over, and Herrera resigned at the end of the month. Paredes entered the capital in the first days of January 1846 and took the presidency on 4 January, promising to defend the territory and, before long, to reconstitute the country as a monarchy. He did neither. In March 1846 General Zachary Taylor moved his army from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande, into the strip between the Nueces and the Rio Grande that Mexico claimed and Texas had claimed since 1836. On 25 April a Mexican cavalry detachment attacked an American patrol in the disputed strip. On 13 May the United States declared war; on 7 July the Mexican congress declared war in return. By then a party of American settlers had proclaimed the California Republic at Sonoma, and the American navy had taken Monterey and San Francisco.

The Mexican army lost the first battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in May 1846, and the political system collapsed. On 4 August 1846 the garrison of the Ciudadela pronounced against Paredes; Mariano Salas took the presidency, and on 22 August the congress installed itself as constituent and restored the constitution of 1824 in its first article. Santa Anna, in exile in Havana, wrote to offer his sword; he was allowed back, took command of the army, and was president again by the autumn. The federal republic had been restored, but not the revenue, the army or the credibility that might have saved it.

Why was federalism restored in 1846?

Because the war made centralism unusable and federalism was the only legitimacy available. A centralised state that cannot defend the country has no argument left; the departments, asked to fund a war they had not chosen, answered with pronunciamientos. Restoring the constitution of 1824 was a way of conceding to the provinces without conceding independence, and of giving the government a legal title that nobody could call usurpation. It was also, for many federalists, a return to first principles: the Acta Constitutiva of 1824 had been a pact between sovereign states, and the preamble of the Acta de Reformas of 1847 would argue that no subsequent constitution could alter that pact.

The restoration did not save the war. The northern departments were lost in 1846–47, Mexico City fell in September 1847, and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848 ceded California, New Mexico and the territory between them. Nor did it settle the constitutional question. The Acta de Reformas of 21 May 1847 amended the restored constitution with a bill of rights and, significantly, with the amparo — a judicial remedy for individuals against unconstitutional acts, which is the direct descendant of the Supreme Conservative Power's review function, redesigned to be invoked by a person rather than by a branch of government. In 1853 Santa Anna returned once more and governed under a new centralist statute; the constitution of 1857, the Reform War, the French intervention and the Restored Republic all followed. Centralism was not refuted in 1846. It was defeated, and it came back once more, in 1853.

What did the centralist decade leave behind?

A state apparatus, a political vocabulary and a cautionary example. The departments, prefectures and departmental assemblies of 1836–43 were the administrative skeleton that the restored federal republic inherited and the Porfiriato later enlarged; the notion of a professional civil service accountable to a ministry rather than to a state governor dates from these years. The vocabulary of the period — federalista, centralista, conservador, liberal, pronunciamiento, garantía — is still the vocabulary of Mexican politics.

The constitutional legacy is the most interesting and the least acknowledged. Catherine Andrews has argued that the Siete Leyes were not the dead end that Emilio Rabasa declared them to be: the Supreme Conservative Power was the first Mexican attempt to institutionalise constitutional review, the congress of 1842 tried to redesign it in its draft constitution, and the amparo of 1847 and the 1857 constitution's guarantees grew out of that debate. A regime that is remembered only for losing Texas also invented the machinery by which Mexican citizens can later complain that a law is unconstitutional.

The cautionary example is the fiscal one. The centralist republic failed, in the end, because it could not pay for itself: it could not tax the provinces, could not borrow abroad, could not demobilise the army, and could not protect the frontier. Every Mexican government after 1846 faced the same problem, and the solution — the desamortización of Church property in 1856, the railway taxes of the Porfiriato, the income tax of the twentieth century — was always a fight about the same question: who holds the revenue, and who decides how it is spent.

Common myths about Centralist Mexico

Timeline of Centralist Mexico

What the map shows next

At 1837 on the map the republic is drawn at its widest in this data, and the widest is still not the country: Texas has already become a separate territory on the map, as it had in fact the year before, and the gap between the claim and the colour is the decade's central problem.

The next frames change the government without changing the shape. At 1841 on the map the republic looks much as it did, though the administration that governed it has just been swept away by an army pronouncement and the Bases de Tacubaya have replaced the constitution. By 1846 on the map the war has begun, the federal constitution is back in force and the army of Zachary Taylor is on the Rio Grande — none of which the border data can show, because it records territory and not legitimacy.