Granadine Confederation

The Confederation matters for two reasons. The first is that it marks the moment when Colombian elites stopped arguing about whether to be a federation and started arguing about how federal to be. For more than thirty years the argument was not whether the country should be federal but how federal it should be, and who would control the provinces while it was. The Granadine Confederation was the first attempt to write that consensus into a constitution, and its failure set the terms for the much more radical settlement of 1863.

The second is that its brief life contains, in miniature, almost every problem that would shape the next half-century: the fiscal weakness of the centre, the electoral mechanics that made state governments into party fiefdoms, the quarrel with the Catholic Church over land and jurisdiction, the strategic value of the Panamanian transit route, and the difficulty of removing a popular general from politics once he has an army. The war of 1860 to 1862 was the only nineteenth-century Colombian civil war in which the rebels won outright, and the constitution they wrote at Rionegro in 1863 founded the United States of Colombia, which governed the country for twenty-three years.

At a glance

Why did New Granada turn itself into a confederation?

The decision was made in stages, and not by the men usually credited with it. The constitution of 1853 had already handed the provinces the right to write their own constitutions, elect their own officials and manage their own finances. Between 1853 and 1856 thirty-six provinces used that right to adopt sixty-one separate provincial constitutions, a rate of constitution-writing that tells you how quickly the country was fragmenting from the bottom up. Panama went further: on 27 February 1855 it was reconstituted as a federal state with its own constitution, largely because its merchant elite wanted control over the transit traffic and resented answering to Bogotá for it.

The other provinces followed within two years. Antioquia became a state on 11 June 1856, Santander on 13 May 1857, and Bolívar, Boyacá, Cauca, Cundinamarca and Magdalena under a single law of 15 June 1857. By the time Mariano Ospina Rodríguez took the presidency on 1 April 1857, the federal map existed in practice and the central government was legislating for a country that had already stopped being centralist.

Ospina was a Conservative, the founder of the Conservative Party, and a man who believed in order, religion and a strong executive. He was also a politician who could count. In 1855 the government had canvassed the provincial legislatures on whether to adopt federation: fifteen pronounced in favour, representing some 1,535,000 people; four against, representing 434,000; five abstained. The tally survives through José María Samper, who reproduced it. Against those numbers a Conservative president could not simply restore the unitary state of 1843, and Ospina did not try. The constitution his Congress produced in 1858 was a compromise in which the Conservatives accepted federalism as the price of keeping the union together, and the provinces accepted a federal government at all as the price of not repeating the break-up of Gran Colombia.

There was a logic to the bargain that went beyond arithmetic. The generation that had fought the wars of independence had watched Gran Colombia disintegrate in 1830 and had lived through the dictatorship of José María Melo in 1854, when a general backed by artisans and the army had dissolved Congress for eight months. Federalism appealed to provincial notables because it protected them from a Bogotá caudillo; it appealed to Liberals because it multiplied the number of places where they could win elections; and it appealed to Conservatives in Antioquia and Cauca because those provinces were Conservative and would run themselves. The same arrangement was being tried, with less coherence, in the Argentine Confederation at the same moment. What looked like a constitutional theory was in large part a mutual insurance policy among regional elites who did not trust each other's capital.

What did the constitution of 1858 actually create?

The text was sanctioned in Bogotá on 22 May 1858, and its first article is worth reading closely, because it disposes of a good deal of later mythology. It names the states one by one — Antioquia, Bolívar, Boyacá, Cauca, Cundinamarca, Magdalena, Panamá and Santander — declares that they "se confederan a perpetuidad", and calls the result a sovereign, free and independent nation under the name Confederación Granadina. There were eight states, not nine. The ninth, Tolima, was carved out of western Cundinamarca by Mosquera in July 1861, in the middle of the war, and recognised by the other states that September.

The architecture was confederal in the strict sense. Article 8 reserved to the states everything the constitution did not expressly grant to the confederation, and the list of federal powers was short: foreign relations, external defence, the public force, public credit and federal revenues, the currency, weights and measures, maritime and foreign commerce, the census, the delimitation of state boundaries and the interoceanic routes, with education, the post and road-building shared between the two levels of government. Everything else — civil and criminal legislation, electoral law, education, appointments, the organisation of the militia, the regulation of the arms trade — belonged to the states. The federal government's own officials were thin on the ground as well: outside the presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court there was very little federal administration to speak of, and what there was depended on state authorities to function.

The executive was deliberately weak and deliberately disposable. The president could not be re-elected for the following term, and the published text does not even fix the length of the term. There was no vice-president. Instead Congress chose three designados every year, in order of succession, and if none of them was available the office fell to the procurador general. That clause turned out to matter enormously: when Ospina's term ended on 1 April 1861, with the country at war and Congress unable to function normally, the presidency passed to Bartolomé Calvo, the procurador general, who held it for three and a half months until Mosquera's army entered Bogotá.

Two further provisions shaped everything that followed. The states were forbidden to "intervenir en asuntos religiosos", which made religion a federal matter and left the Church's legal position dependent on whoever controlled the centre. And the constitution protected ecclesiastical property explicitly: no law, federal or state, could apply churches, sacred vessels or the revenues of religious communities to any other use, or tax them. The Church was, in effect, given a constitutional guarantee by the same Conservative Congress that had conceded federalism — a guarantee that the Liberals would tear up four years later, and that the memory of its destruction would poison Colombian politics for a generation.

Who were the sovereign states, and what did sovereignty mean in practice?

Sovereignty in the Granadine Confederation was not a metaphor. Each state had its own constitution, its own assembly, its own courts, its own governor and its own budget. Several issued their own postage stamps, kept their own militia officers and set their own rules on who could vote. Cundinamarca, the state around Bogotá, was the most awkward of them, because the federal capital sat inside its territory and the division of jurisdiction between the two governments — over the police, the municipal taxes and the courts — was a running sore.

The states were also wildly unequal. In the 1870s, by which time their populations had grown, Boyacá had some 483,000 inhabitants, Cauca 435,000, Santander 425,000, Cundinamarca 410,000 and Antioquia 366,000, while Magdalena had 85,000 and Panamá 221,000. Cauca was by far the largest in area, running from the Pacific coast through the Cauca valley and the Patía to the Amazonian foothills; it was also the most socially complex, with a large Afro-Colombian population in the valley, indigenous communities in the mountains and a white elite divided between Popayán and Cali.

What sovereignty meant in daily politics was control of three things: elections, money and guns. The state assembly wrote the electoral law, which meant the party that controlled the assembly could design the districts, appoint the registering officials and decide whether the opposition's votes would be counted. The state government collected the revenues assigned to it — the liquor monopoly, tolls, the stamp duty, and in some states the tithe — and spent them without federal supervision. The state militia was recruited, officered and paid locally. A party that held a state held it completely, and a party that lost a state lost everything in it.

That arrangement produced a particular kind of political violence. Because the winner took the whole state administration, and because the federal government was forbidden to intervene in a state's internal order, there was no constitutional route by which an excluded minority could regain power. The only route was to capture the state government by force, or to persuade the federal government to overturn the result — which is precisely what the Conservatives were accused of doing in 1859. In the 1850s the collisions were local: Liberals and Conservatives fought over Magdalena, Santander, Bolívar and Cauca well before 1860. The national war, when it came, was an accumulation of these provincial quarrels rather than a single quarrel of its own.

Who were the federalists, and who were the Conservatives?

The labels mislead if they are taken as programmes. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, the central figure of the whole story, was born in Popayán in 1798, had been president of New Granada from 1845 to 1849 as a Conservative, and had spent the 1850s moving steadily towards the Liberals. He was a landowner, a surveyor, a mapmaker, a voracious reader of geography and a man of colossal self-regard. Elected governor of the State of Cauca with effect from 1 January 1858, he built a personal machine there, brought the veteran general José María Obando into his camp, and by 1859 was openly organising a national party of his own around the promise of land, votes and protection to the popular classes of the Cauca valley.

On the Liberal side the leading figures were the radicals proper: Manuel Murillo Toro, a journalist and economist from Tolima; Salvador Camacho Roldán; Aquileo Parra; Santiago Pérez; and later Rafael Núñez, who would end by destroying what they built. Their programme was free trade, individual rights, secular education, the abolition of monopolies and a state too weak to tyrannise anybody. They were genuine federalists, but they were also tactical federalists: a strong central government in the hands of a general like Mosquera was the thing they feared most, and a weak one in the hands of a Liberal Congress suited them very well.

The Conservatives were equally divided. Ospina and his circle wanted a federal constitution administered firmly; Sergio Arboleda and Julio Arboleda wanted a Catholic, hierarchical, centralist republic; the Antioqueño Conservatives wanted nothing from Bogotá except the right to be left alone. The party's formal rejection of federalism did not come until 1878, and even then the Antioqueños dissented. The neat equation of Liberalism with federalism and Conservatism with centralism is a later invention, and it obscures the fact that the strongest federalists in 1858 included a Conservative president and a Conservative province.

What actually separated the two camps in 1859 was less the form of the state than the question of who would control the machinery. Ospina wanted federal officials with the power to inspect elections, supervise the militia and appoint treasury agents inside the states. The Liberal governors wanted those powers to remain where they were, in state hands. Mosquera wanted them in his own hands. Each position was described by its holder as the defence of the constitution.

How did Ospina try to take the powers back in 1859?

Ospina's problem was real. A confederation in which the centre had no revenue officers, no reliable army and no control over elections could not defend itself against a determined state, and by 1859 at least three states were being run by men who rejected his authority. His answer was a package of laws passed by the Conservative majority in Congress, and the package is the immediate cause of the civil war.

Three measures mattered. The electoral law of 8 April 1859 created national electoral districts and electoral councils in each state, taking the administration of federal elections out of state hands; the opposition read it as a device to fix the results in the Conservative interest. The organic treasury law of 10 May 1859 gave the federal executive the right to appoint a treasury intendant in each state to collect and supervise federal revenues; in practice Ospina appointed Conservatives to the post in states governed by Liberals, creating a rival authority inside each of them. The law on the public force subordinated the state militias to federal command in the event of foreign war or internal disturbance, gave federal officers the right to inspect them and to appoint their commanders, and left the states only the logistics.

Each measure was defensible on administrative grounds and each was, in the strict sense, a breach of the federal pact, because all three touched powers the constitution had reserved to the states. On 3 September 1859 the government declared the confederation in a state of war "por causa de conmoción interior a mano armada" — a formula previously used for disturbances inside a single state, now applied to the whole confederation — and then sent troops into Santander to overturn the Liberal government of Eustorgio Salgar. Salgar was captured, along with Aquileo Parra. That intervention settled the question: if the federal government could remove a state government by force, state sovereignty was worth nothing, and the only remaining defence was an army.

It is worth noticing what Ospina did not do. He did not attempt a coup, dissolve Congress or repeal the constitution. He worked through legislation, from a legitimate majority, and his object was to make the confederation governable rather than to abolish it. The Liberals' case against him was not that he had broken the law but that he had used it to destroy the arrangement the law existed to protect — a charge that a later generation of Colombians would bring against the Radicals in their turn, with equal justification and equal lack of success.

Why did the war begin in 1860?

On 8 May 1860 Mosquera signed a decree in Popayán declaring the plenitude of Cauca's sovereignty, suspending the state's relations with the national government and assuming the Supreme Direction of the War. Within weeks the states of Bolívar and Magdalena had joined him, the first under Juan José Nieto, the Liberal leader of Bolívar and a man of Afro-Caribbean descent who had risen through the provincial administration. On 10 September 1860 delegates from Cauca and Bolívar signed a Treaty of Union and Confederation at Cartagena, which Magdalena, Santander and Boyacá later joined, and Mosquera took the title of provisional president of the United States of New Granada while keeping his governorship of Cauca.

The constitutional argument on both sides was serious. Mosquera and his allies claimed to be defending the constitution of 1858 against a president who had violated it, and there is a respectable case that they were right: the 1859 laws did encroach on powers the text reserved to the states. Ospina claimed to be defending the union against a rebellion financed by a provincial strongman, and there is a respectable case that he was right too. María Teresa Uribe de Hincapié and Liliana López Lopera have described the war as a collision between two bureaucracies, the national and the provincial, each trying to establish the kind of domination that would give the republic its shape. Neither side was fighting for a different society; both were fighting over which administration would be sovereign.

There was also a social dimension that the constitutional argument conceals. In the Cauca valley the Liberal Party had built its base among Afro-Colombians, first around emancipation in 1851 and then around access to land. When Mosquera rose in 1860 the Democratic Societies mobilised again, and Liberals recruited heavily among the black and mulatto population of the valley, promising, or being understood to promise, the breakup of the great Conservative estates. Conservative landowners described the war as a race war and feared exactly what they said they feared. The Federalists did expropriate the Arboleda family's haciendas during the fighting, and some Liberals did propose distributing them among the troops; in the end the redistribution was not carried out, but the fear it generated outlasted the war.

The military course was uneven. Mosquera was beaten at Manizales in August 1860 and forced to negotiate; he recovered, drew reinforcements from Bolívar and the coast, and in 1861 marched on the capital. Santos Gutiérrez brought a column down from Boyacá and Santander, defeating the government's forces at Hormezaque and joining Mosquera at Subachoque in early May. On 13 June 1861 the Liberals won at Usaquén, and on 18 July Mosquera's army entered Bogotá. The Conservative government had already lost its coherence: Ospina's term had expired on 1 April, and the presidency had passed to a caretaker.

How did Mosquera win the war?

He won because he controlled more revenue, more men and better lines of communication than the government did. Cauca was large, populous and rich in cattle and gold, and its governor had been preparing for this war for two years. The Caribbean ports of Bolívar and Magdalena gave him customs houses and a supply route; the Magdalena river gave him the only serious artery into the interior. The federal government, by contrast, depended on revenues it could not collect without the state authorities it was fighting, and on officers whose loyalty was to the Conservative Party rather than to the administration.

The Conservatives also lost the war politically before they lost it militarily. Their strongest commanders, Julio Arboleda in the south and Braulio Henao and Pedro Justo Berrío in Antioquia, fought separate campaigns in separate theatres and never combined. Arboleda was killed in the mountains of Berruecos in 1862 while returning from a campaign against Ecuador; the Conservative cause never produced another soldier of comparable weight. Antioquia, the richest Conservative state, held out until September 1862, when its army was broken at Santa Bárbara de Cartago and the state surrendered. Organised resistance ended that autumn.

The cost is impossible to state with confidence. Colombian accounts give figures from 2,500 dead to 19,000, and neither number rests on anything that could be called a count. What can be said is that contemporaries regarded it as much longer and bloodier than the civil wars of 1851 and 1854, and that it was fought by larger formations, over a wider territory, for two and a half years. The Liberal victory in 1862 was the first time in the century that an armed rebellion against a sitting Colombian government had won.

The victory also produced a diplomatic sequel. Ecuador's government, led by Gabriel García Moreno, had backed the Conservatives and hoped to recover the Pasto region; in December 1863 Mosquera's army defeated an Ecuadorian force at Cuaspud, inside Ecuadorian territory, and imposed a peace. The campaign confirmed Mosquera as the most powerful soldier in the country at precisely the moment when the civilians who had ridden to power on his coat-tails were drafting a constitution designed to make sure no soldier could do that again.

What did Mosquera do with victory in 1861?

He governed by decree. On 18 July 1861 he entered Bogotá; two days later he issued the decree of tuición de cultos, subjecting the ecclesiastical authorities to civil authorisation; on 26 July he abolished the name Confederación Granadina by decree and began calling the country the United States of New Granada. In September he decreed the desamortización of mortmain property, and in November he had the archbishop of Bogotá, Antonio Herrán, imprisoned and suppressed the religious communities that refused to submit to the tuición. He also created the State of Tolima out of western Cundinamarca on 12 July, partly because Tolima was Liberal and partly to reduce the power of the state that contained the capital.

His authority rested on the army and on a treaty, not on a constitution. The Pact of Union of September 1861 bound the allied states together provisionally, and Mosquera governed under it as provisional president, with a cabinet of secretaries and a rump congress. The arrangement had no clear rules for anything: not for taxation, not for the succession, not for the relationship between the provisional government and the states that had stayed out of the Pact. For the better part of two years the country was run by a general with a decree book and a council of war.

The paradox of his position was that his own allies did not trust him. The Liberals had fought under him because they had no other general, but they had spent the 1850s building a theory of politics in which strong executives were the enemy. When the Convention met at Rionegro, in Antioquia, on 4 February 1863, its first act was to abolish the Pact of Union and replace Mosquera's presidency with a five-minister executive. Mosquera resigned, and the Convention then elected him president of the United States of Colombia for the remainder of the first two-year term, to 1 April 1864 — a courtesy that gave him the office without the powers.

The decisions of 1861 were nevertheless decisive for the shape of the settlement. The name changed, the Church lost its lands and its legal immunity, Tolima became a state, and the balance of power inside the Liberal coalition shifted towards the radicals, who had argued all along that the war should end with a constitution rather than a dictatorship. Mosquera had won the war; the civilians intended to win the peace, and did.

What was the church question, and how was it settled?

The Church's position in the Confederation rested on an unresolved inheritance. The Spanish crown had exercised the patronato, the right to nominate bishops and administer ecclesiastical revenues in the Indies; the republics claimed to have inherited it, and Rome had never conceded the claim in principle, though it consecrated the bishops the governments proposed. On top of that sat the property question. Religious communities, chaplaincies and confraternities held urban rents, rural estates and, above all, censos — perpetual ground rents charged on other people's property — and those assets made the Church the largest source of credit in a country with almost no banks.

The constitution of 1858 had protected all of it: no law could tax churches or apply ecclesiastical property to other uses. The war broke the guarantee. Mosquera's decree of 20 July 1861 required ecclesiastical superiors to obtain civil authorisation before exercising their functions, which turned the Church's hierarchy into an agency of the state. The decree of 9 September 1861 ordered the sale at auction of the real estate, censos and livestock belonging to religious communities, confraternities and pious foundations, with payment accepted in public debt certificates. In November the archbishop was arrested and the communities that refused the tuición were dissolved; the Jesuits, who had returned in 1858 and ran the country's best schools, were expelled again.

The 1863 constitution turned the decrees into constitutional law. Article 15 guaranteed "la profesión libre, pública o privada, de cualquier religión". Article 23 gave the national and state governments a right of "suprema inspección sobre los cultos religiosos", forbade the levying of contributions for the support of any cult, and required every cult to be maintained by the voluntary contributions of its adherents. Articles 6 and 7 obliged the states to write into their own constitutions the incapacity of religious communities to hold real estate and the prohibition of perpetual foundations, chaplaincies and trust arrangements. The preamble was the first in Colombian constitutional history not to invoke God; it spoke in the name and by the authority of the people.

This was not, however, the separation of church and state in the French sense. The state claimed a supervisory power over worship, retained control of appointments through its refusal to recognise the patronato as a papal right while continuing to exercise it, and used the schools as an instrument of national unification. What it abolished was the Church's economic independence and its corporate legal personality, not its public role. The distinction matters because the clerical grievance that fed the war of 1876 was directed less at the loss of establishment than at the loss of the schools and the property.

The economics were less impressive than the politics. Between September 1861 and the end of 1864 the Union registered receipts of 6,351,166 pesos from the sale of disentailed property — a large sum in a country whose central government had been living hand to mouth, but not a transforming one. In Bolívar, where the operation has been studied in detail, the censos charged on the properties put up for auction exceeded the market value of the properties themselves by about a quarter, so that buyers who took on the encumbrances were often buying a liability. Much of the land went to men who already had capital and debt certificates, which is to say to the same provincial elites in a different legal guise. The reform created a class of Liberal landowners with an interest in defending the new order, and a Church with an interest in overturning it. Both consequences lasted longer than the Confederation.

What was the Panama question?

Panama was the one part of the confederation that the world noticed. The isthmus was the shortest route between the Atlantic and the Pacific before the canal, and after the California gold rush of 1849 it became the busiest. The Panama Railroad, built by American capital with American engineering, opened along its 47 miles in January 1855. It had cost about eight million dollars and, on the estimates made since, between five and ten thousand lives, most of them to cholera, malaria and yellow fever. For a few years it was among the most profitable stretches of track in the world.

The isthmus was also the one place where the United States had a treaty right to interfere. The Mallarino–Bidlack treaty of 1846 had given Washington a right of way across Panama and a guarantee of the isthmus's neutrality, which American governments interpreted as a licence to land troops whenever transit was threatened. In April 1856 a fight over a slice of watermelon in Panama City set off a riot in which American travellers were killed; American troops came ashore that September and occupied the railway stations. It was the first of many landings. Panama's sovereignty, such as it was, had an external guarantor that answered to nobody in Bogotá.

Inside the confederation Panama was a state with its own constitution and a political class divided between the merchant houses of Panama City and Colón and the landowners of the interior. Its revenues came from the transit trade, and its elites had been demanding autonomy since the 1840s. The constitution of 1858 gave them their state but reserved to the federal government the republic's share in the Panama Railroad, which was one of the few genuinely valuable assets the centre possessed. The constitution of 1863 went further and gave the Union the regulation of "las vías interoceánicas que existen, o que se abran" — the existing and future interoceanic routes — a clause that anticipated a canal and made clear that Bogotá would not let the isthmus negotiate its own transit terms.

The war tested the arrangement. In March 1861, with Mosquera's armies advancing and the Conservative government discredited, 151 notables met at Santiago de Veraguas and signed an act calling on Panama to separate from the confederation; ten days later a meeting at David endorsed it. The movement collapsed, partly because it had few supporters in Panama City and partly because the local Liberals expected to win within the Union and did not want to be excluded from it. Justo Arosemena, the Panamanian jurist who had written the case for federalism in the 1850s, explained the failure in exactly those terms. Two years later he presided over the Convention of Rionegro, and Panama entered the United States of Colombia as a sovereign state with its own constitution.

The Panama question was therefore never settled inside the Confederation, and it did not stay inside Colombia. The weakness of the centre, the strategic value of the route and the presence of an external power with a treaty right to intervene formed a combination that no Colombian constitution of the nineteenth century could master. When the isthmus finally seceded in 1903, it did so under the guns of an American warship and with a treaty signed in a New York hotel room; the pattern had been set in the 1850s, when the railroad arrived before the state had the capacity to regulate it.

How did the constitution of Rionegro work?

The Convention met at Rionegro from 4 February to 8 May 1863 and produced the most extreme federal constitution Colombia has ever had. It was signed by delegates from nine states, with Justo Arosemena of Panama presiding and Mosquera sitting as a deputy for Cauca. Its guiding principle was stated in the preamble: the states "se unen y confederan a perpetuidad consultando su seguridad exterior y recíproco auxilio", and form a free, sovereign and independent nation under the name United States of Colombia.

The federal government was reduced to a list. It conducted foreign relations, defended the country, raised and commanded such forces as the Union needed, managed the national debt and customs, ran the post office, coined money, fixed weights and measures, conducted the census and regulated the interoceanic routes. Everything else belonged to the states, and Article 16 said so in terms that left no room for implication: all matters not expressly and clearly delegated to the general government were of the exclusive competence of the states.

The bill of rights in Article 15 was among the most advanced in the Spanish-speaking world at the time. It abolished the death penalty, limited corporal punishment to ten years, guaranteed individual liberty, security, property, absolute freedom of the press and of speech, freedom of movement without passports in peacetime, freedom of industry, equality before the law, freedom of education, the inviolability of the home and of private papers, freedom of association, the right to bear arms and to trade in them in peacetime, and the free public or private profession of any religion. Article 25 went further still: any act of Congress or of the federal executive that violated those rights or attacked the sovereignty of a state could be annulled by the vote of a majority of the state legislatures.

The executive was deliberately enfeebled. The president, the senators and the representatives all served two-year terms, and no one could be re-elected. There were three designados chosen annually. The Union's army was a contingent supplied by the states, and the states kept their own militias, their own officers and their own arms. Amendment required a request from a majority of state legislatures, approval by both chambers and ratification by the unanimous vote of the Senate of Plenipotentiaries, with one vote per state — a procedure so demanding that the constitution was never amended in twenty-three years, and was in practice unamendable.

That combination — an unamendable constitution, states that controlled elections and guns, and a centre with no power to intervene — was intended to prevent a dictatorship of the kind Mosquera had exercised in 1861, and it succeeded in that. It also made political change at the state level impossible without violence, because the party that controlled a state assembly wrote the electoral law and could exclude its opponents indefinitely. Between 1863 and 1885 the country fought two general civil wars, in 1876 and 1885, and a long series of provincial ones. The Radicals who wrote the constitution believed they had designed a machine for liberty; what they had designed was a machine for permanent party control of the provinces.

What did the 1863 settlement produce, and how has it been judged?

For two decades the United States of Colombia were governed by the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, in what Colombians call the Olimpo Radical. Murillo Toro, Santiago Pérez, Aquileo Parra and Julián Trujillo held the presidency in rotation; the state governments were mostly Liberal; and the federal government did what it could with a customs revenue it did not fully control. The period produced the telegraph, the first serious railway building, a census, a national statistical office, secular schools under the reform of 1870, a widening of civil legislation on marriage and registration, and a substantial expansion of the press. It also produced a chronic fiscal deficit, because the states kept the productive taxes and the Union kept the expensive obligations.

The end came from inside the Liberal Party. Rafael Núñez, a Costeño who had been a Radical and a minister, concluded during the 1870s that the federation could not hold, and built a coalition of independent Liberals and Conservatives around the demand for a stronger centre. As president in 1880 he pushed through a public order law that allowed the federal government to intervene in the states, which the Radicals regarded as the beginning of the end. In 1885 the Radicals went to war against him, lost, and in 1886 a council of delegates wrote a unitary, centralist, Catholic constitution that abolished the states, renamed the country the Republic of Colombia and lasted until 1991. Núñez and his ally Miguel Antonio Caro described 1863 as the source of anarchy, and that verdict became the standard account for a century.

Modern historiography has been less severe. Marco Palacios and Frank Safford have described nineteenth-century Colombia as a fragmented land and a divided society, in which federalism was less a doctrine than a recognition of fact. Jaime Jaramillo Uribe argued that the states corresponded to regions with their own economies, societies and cultures rather than being artificial creations of Radical theorists. Edwin Cruz Rodríguez has attacked the teleology that treats 1863 as a stage on the way to 1886 and judges it by the standards of a European nation-state it never tried to be. Richard Stoller pointed out the ironies: Colombian federalism was often hostile to genuinely local power, favouring the intermediate provincial elites who were federalist abroad and centralist at home; the Liberal-federal and Conservative-central equations do not hold; and much of the pressure for centralism came from provincial centralists rather than from Bogotá.

What remains genuinely uncertain is large. The death toll of the war of 1860 is unknown. The social composition of the parties is disputed, though James Sanders has shown that in the Cauca the Liberal Party was in part a black and mulatto party and that its popular base shaped what Liberalism meant. The total value of the property transferred by the desamortización is recorded, but who ended up with it has been studied only state by state. And the question of how much real choice the electorate exercised under a franchise that excluded the illiterate and the propertyless in some states and included them in others has not been settled.

The Granadine Confederation is worth remembering because it is the moment when Colombians tried to make a virtue of the country's fragmentation and discovered that the arrangement could not defend itself. It lasted five years, produced one of the most liberal constitutional texts of the century, and was destroyed by a general whom its own distribution of power had armed. Its successor lasted twenty-three years and was destroyed by a politician who promised order. The argument between those two positions — a weak centre that guarantees liberty, or a strong one that guarantees peace — has been the central argument of Colombian politics ever since.

Common myths about the Granadine Confederation

Timeline of the Granadine Confederation

What the map shows next

At 1859 on the map the confederation is drawn whole, with the eight states in place and the 1859 laws already passed but not yet enforced; the map cannot show the arguments those laws provoked, only the territory they were about. At 1860 on the map the outline still looks intact, because border data records states rather than armies — Mosquera's secession in May and the Treaty of Union in September changed who governed the provinces, not where their frontiers ran.

By 1862 on the map the war is nearly over and Tolima has appeared on the map as a separate state, cut out of Cundinamarca. The successor comes into view at 1863, when the same territory is redrawn as the United States of Colombia and the confederation disappears — a change of name, of constitution and of the balance of power, on almost exactly the same ground.