Republic of New Granada

The republic matters out of proportion to its size because the questions it argued over were the questions every Spanish American republic had to answer. Who counts as a citizen, and on what property or literacy or colour does citizenship depend? Can a state that inherited the Church's patronage from the crown govern the Church, or must it fight it? Can slavery survive a republic that declares all men equal? Should the provinces be administered from Bogotá or govern themselves? New Granada answered all four, in a rush, between 1849 and 1853, and the answers — abolition, universal male suffrage, separation of church and state, elected governors — went further than Chile or Peru would go for a generation. It also produced, in 1848–49, the Liberal and Conservative parties, which would organise Colombian politics into the twentieth century.

Its weaknesses were equally instructive. The state could not pay for itself. Its exports were few, its customs houses were its only reliable revenue, and its interior was a mosaic of small regional economies that traded with each other hardly at all. It fought a civil war in 1839–42, another in 1851, and a third in 1854, and each one was fought over whether the country was one nation or a league of provinces. The answer it finally gave, in 1858, was federation; the answer collapsed within three years into a civil war that ended in a more radical federation still.

One point of naming. The men who wrote the constitution of 1832 called their state the Estado de la Nueva Granada; only with the constitution of 1843 does the title República de la Nueva Granada become standard, and "Republic of New Granada" is a convenience that later historians and the map have kept. The territory itself was never exactly the viceroyalty: Venezuela and Ecuador were gone, the Mosquito Coast and the Amazon were claimed on paper and not governed in fact, and the southern frontier with Ecuador ran through country where Pasto's loyalty to Bogotá was always conditional.

At a glance

Why did Gran Colombia's collapse leave a state called New Granada?

The break-up happened in less than two years, and in the order that geography suggested. Venezuela declared itself separate in November 1829 and elected José Antonio Páez president; the southern departments followed on 13 May 1830, when an assembly in Quito declared for Ecuador. Bolívar resigned the presidency in May, and died at Santa Marta on 17 December 1830. Between those two events General Rafael Urdaneta seized power in Bogotá in Bolívar's name and tried to hold the union together by force. He failed. On 28 April 1831 he signed the Convenio de Apulo with the men who had risen against him, handed over to the vice-president Domingo Caicedo, and left for exile.

What was left was a rump of five departments — Boyacá, Cauca, Cundinamarca, Magdalena and the Istmo — and a political class that had to invent a state quickly. A Granadan convention met in Bogotá on 20 October 1831, declared the union at an end, and issued a fundamental law on 17 November that provisionally constituted the "Estado de la Nueva Granada". The convention then carried on sitting through the winter as a constituent body and produced a constitution, dated in session on 29 February 1832 and sanctioned in the Palacio de Gobierno on 1 March. It was signed, as officer administering the executive, by José María Obando — the same Obando who would lead the rebellion of 1839 — with Florentino González as secretary.

The new state kept almost everything except the ambition. It kept Gran Colombia's laws, its army cadres, its customs schedules and its flag; it kept the foreign debt, whose apportionment with Venezuela and Ecuador had to be negotiated precisely because none of the three could pay it; and it kept the Church patronage the Spanish crown had exercised, which no pope had ever conceded in principle. What it gave up was the federation of regions. The constitution abolished the Gran Colombian departments and restored the old provinces, with their own elective chambers, as the units of administration — a decision that looked like administrative common sense in 1832 and turned out to be the seed of forty years of federalist politics.

Santander was recalled from the exile to which he had been sentenced after the attempt on Bolívar's life. He was elected on 9 March 1832, but was still in the United States, so his vice-president José Ignacio de Márquez governed until he reached Bogotá and took office on 7 October. His interim term ran to 1 April 1833; the congress then elected him in his own right to 1 April 1837, fixing a presidential calendar that Colombia kept, with one change of month, until 1886.

What did the constitution of 1832 actually build?

The charter of 1832 is a cautious document, and the caution is deliberate. It created a bicameral congress — a Senate serving four-year terms and a Chamber of Representatives serving two — and a president with a four-year term and no immediate re-election. It divided the territory into provinces, cantons and parish districts, and gave each province an elected chamber of its own alongside the municipal councils. It guaranteed the freedom of the press and declared all Granadans equal before the law, without distinction of wealth or occupation.

It was also, by modern standards, a very narrow democracy. Citizenship required property, or a trade, or literacy; the literacy requirement was written in but suspended until 1850, which tells you how many citizens the convention expected to be able to read. Domestic servants, day labourers and anyone declared a vagrant were explicitly excluded from the franchise, and the higher offices carried age qualifications that kept them in the hands of men over thirty-five. In a country where most people were subsistence farmers, tenants or labourers, that was a franchise for the propertied and the literate, and for almost nobody else.

The constitution's preamble carries an argument in a sentence. It promises that "centralism shall not be the obstacle to the happiness of peoples, and the prosperity of each of them shall be in the hands of its immediate officials" — a formula that concedes the federalist case while retaining a unitary state. That ambiguity was never resolved. The provincial chambers were real, elected and often truculent; the governor was the president's man; and every dispute over roads, tithes or schools became a dispute about which of the two had the last word.

Two institutions were left outside the constitution's reach. The first was the army, which the state could not afford and could not disband, and whose senior officers were the men who had won the independence and expected to be paid for it. The second was the Church, which kept the tithe, the parish registers, the schools and the moral police of the country, and whose bishops governed a parallel jurisdiction that no liberal congress could abolish by statute. Everything that happened later in the republic — the War of the Supremos, the expulsion of the Jesuits, the separation of 1853, the civil war of 1876 — grew out of those two unresolved powers.

Historians occasionally describe the 1832 constitution as the work of the "Congreso Admirable". It was not. The Congreso Admirable met in Bogotá from January to May 1830 and produced the short-lived constitution of 29 April 1830, which Bolívar's resignation and Urdaneta's coup made irrelevant. The 1832 charter came from a different, later convention, elected after the fundamental law of November 1831.

Who were the hombres de bien, and what did Santander's governments do?

The men who governed New Granada in the 1830s called themselves, without irony, los hombres de bien — the men of substance, the respectable householders. They were lawyers, merchants, mine owners, a few great landowners and the journalists who spoke for them, concentrated in Bogotá, Medellín, Popayán, Cartagena and the Socorro textile district. They believed in order, education, property and a small state, and they feared the army, the mob and the priest in roughly that order. Santander was their model and their patron.

His government's monument was the school system. Between 1832 and 1837 he founded some twenty "grandes colegios" in the provincial capitals — several of which still exist as universities — with chairs of law, medicine, philosophy and theology, and a curriculum built on Bentham's principles of legislation, which he made a compulsory text. The purpose was political as much as intellectual: a republic needed citizens who could read a statute and hold an opinion, and the colegios were meant to produce them. The same impulse produced a drive for primary schools, though the money for them was never quite there, and a short-lived enthusiasm for importing European teachers and scientists.

Fiscally the record was thinner. Santander cut the army, renegotiated the debt, regularised the customs houses and balanced the budget on paper; but the state's revenue depended on import duties collected at a handful of ports, and every reduction in the tariff — which the merchants wanted — cut the revenue that paid the soldiers and schoolmasters. The regime also had to defend itself. In 1833 it uncovered a conspiracy among Bolivarian officers and executed several of them, a repression that its opponents never forgot and that made "the purge of 1833" a standing charge against the civilist tradition.

Opposition crystallised around Márquez, Santander's own former vice-president, who objected to Bentham, to the anticlerical tone of the colegios and to the pace of reform. His followers, together with the surviving Bolivarians, were called los ministeriales — the ministerial party — and it was they who won the election of 1837, sending Márquez to the presidency and Santander into a sour retirement as senator and president of congress. He died at Bogotá on 6 May 1840, in the middle of the war that his opponents' policies had provoked.

The limits of the state Santander left behind are easy to miss because its legislation was so modern. There was no civil registry: births, marriages and deaths were recorded by parishes. There was no rural police, only the militia and the army. There were no roads that a wheeled vehicle could use between Bogotá and the Magdalena, and the mail went on muleback. And there was no national market: the Socorro textile workshops, the Antioquian gold mines, the Cauca cattle ranches and the Caribbean ports each lived inside their own circuit, which is why a tariff or a tax could ruin one province and enrich another.

Why did four convents in Pasto become the War of the Supremos?

The war began with a piece of liberal legislation that the Church had actually approved. A decree of 1838 — some accounts date the measure a year or two earlier — ordered the suppression of monasteries and convents with fewer than eight religious, and the sale of their property for the benefit of public education. In Pasto, in the southern mountains, the decree was executed in the summer of 1839, and the city rose. On 2 and 3 July a riot against the closure of four minor convents turned into a provincial rebellion, and the municipal notables used it to declare for federalism and against Bogotá.

Pasto's grievance was older than the convents. The province had been royalist throughout the independence war, had been occupied by force, and had a local economy tied to the Ecuadorian sierra rather than to Bogotá. Its leaders were also, in several cases, in touch with the government of Ecuador, which had its own interest in the frontier. When the government sent General Pedro Alcántara Herrán south, he defeated the rebels at Buesaco on 31 August 1839, and the rising dissolved into guerrilla bands across the Pasto highlands.

The war became national through José María Obando. Obando was the Cauca's most powerful chieftain, a former royalist turned patriot general, and he had been charged with the murder of Sucre at Berruecos in 1830 — a charge he insisted on answering in person. He had already raised Timbío in February 1840, claiming that his life was in danger; in March he went to Pasto to stand trial, and his presence briefly pacified the guerrillas. At Chaguarbamba on 14 July 1840 he broke with the government for good and had himself proclaimed "Supreme Director of the War". The title was copied within months by a dozen local bosses — in Socorro, Mariquita, Vélez, Casanare, Santa Marta, Cartagena, Mompós, Antioquia and the isthmus — which is why the conflict is remembered as the war of the Supremos, the supremes.

It was never one war. In the Cauca it was Obando's war against Popayán and Bogotá; in Antioquia it was Salvador Córdova's; in Santa Marta and the Caribbean it was a federalist revolt led by two Venezuelan veterans of the independence, Santiago Mariño and Francisco Carmona; in Panama it produced something else entirely. On 18 November 1840 the isthmus declared itself the Estado del Istmo under General Tomás Herrera, and stayed separate for thirteen months — the most successful of Panama's nineteenth-century secessions, and a warning that the map never registered. At the end of 1840, by one contemporary count, only Bogotá, Neiva, Buenaventura and the Chocó still held for the government.

The government survived because it found allies and money. Márquez's term expired in 1841 and congress elected Herrán, who kept command of the army and reorganised it into four divisions under Mosquera, Collazos, Posada Gutiérrez and París. Ecuador's president Juan José Flores, who wanted the Pasto frontier for himself, sent a battalion that helped beat Obando at Huilquipamba; the intervention was resented, and it gave the rebels in other provinces their best recruiting argument. British warships at Cartagena protected the government's remittances, and the British minister Robert Stewart negotiated the terms that ended the fighting — an armistice signed at Ocaña on 29 January 1842, followed by a general amnesty on 19 February. Stewart died of fever in Bogotá a few months later. Obando had already gone into exile in Peru.

The war cost the treasury years of revenue, damaged the army's reputation and left a sediment of local grievance that the next civil war would stir up. Its political legacy was more important than its military history. It fixed the two camps that would fight for the next forty years, and it attached to each a programme: the ministeriales, centralist and Catholic, who became the Conservatives; and the federalists, who became the Liberals. It also taught the governing class a lesson it never forgot — that a rebellion in one province could be paid for by the clergy, the local notables and a neighbouring state, and that the road to Bogotá ran through the Cauca.

What did the reform of 1843 change?

The constitution of 1843 is the settlement of a frightened government. It was drafted under Herrán, dated 20 April 1843, sanctioned on 8 May and put into force on 1 October, and it replaced the charter of 1832 with a much longer and much more conservative one: some 170 articles, a strengthened executive, a Council of Government that could name governors, summon congress and grant pardons, and the abolition of the Council of State that had balanced the president in 1832.

Its most consequential clauses were about belonging. The suffrage was cut back to men over twenty-one with property and literacy, removing the looser provisions of 1832; the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion was declared the religion of the republic; and the Jesuits, expelled in 1767, were invited back to run schools and missions. The provincial chambers survived in name, but the political weight moved decisively to Bogotá. The reform was published with a decree ordering a solemn mass of thanksgiving in every cathedral and parish church, and three days of public rejoicing — an indication of what the government thought it was doing.

The settlement lasted ten years, longer than any other constitution between 1832 and 1886, and it governed the country through the whole of its first export boom and its first foreign treaty. It was also the charter the Conservatives tried to restore when they had the chance: when Melo seized power in 1854 he suspended the constitution of 1853 and put that of 1843 back in force, on the argument that it was the genuinely liberal document. That a Conservative constitution could be defended in those terms says something about how thin the ideological line was in the 1840s, and how quickly it hardened afterwards.

Nor were the 1840s simply a decade of reaction. Herrán's ministers — Mariano Ospina among them — reorganised the treasury, encouraged foreign technicians and missionaries of useful knowledge, and pressed on with primary schooling where the parishes would pay for it. Mosquera's government founded the Instituto Caldas for vocational and scientific instruction and commissioned the survey that became the Comisión Corográfica. In the early 1850s Agustín Codazzi, an Italian engineer who had mapped Venezuela, was put in charge of the Comisión Corográfica, with Manuel Ancízar as secretary and a team of painters and botanists; over the following decade it measured altitudes, collected vocabularies, drew provincial maps and recorded the country's manufactures and crops.

Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, president from 1845 to 1849, carried the same programme further and with less tact. He pushed the Panama treaty, promoted steam navigation on the Magdalena, and proposed to abolish the tobacco monopoly that had been the treasury's most reliable internal revenue. Congress agreed in 1848 but delayed implementation, because nobody could work out how to replace the income. It fell to his successor to carry out the abolition, and with it a great deal more.

Where did the money come from in the 1840s and 1850s?

From very little, and from gold. New Granada was, for the first half-century of its independence, a gold economy with a tobacco export bolted on. Gold from Antioquia and the Chocó accounted for something like three-quarters of exports in the 1840s, most of it mined by slave and free labour in placers and veins, and most of it shipped through Cartagena and Buenaventura. That was a misfortune as well as a resource: gold needed few workers, generated little demand for anything else, and was extracted by a labour force held in slavery, which is one reason the abolition debate of 1849–51 was also an economic argument.

Tobacco was the great change of the 1850s. The crop had been a crown monopoly, then a state monopoly, and its cultivation was restricted to designated districts. The liberal legislation of 1850 freed it, and cultivation spread through the Magdalena valley, above all around Ambalema, where the leaf was cured, packed in bales and floated downriver to Honda and the Atlantic steamers. The results were dramatic. In the years 1854–58 tobacco made up about 28 per cent of exports, while gold — without losing value — fell to about a third; cinchona bark and straw hats from the Cauca and Antioquia each accounted for roughly a tenth. These are the figures of the economic historian Melo, cited in a modern survey of the period, and they describe a real structural shift: for the first time the republic had an agricultural export that employed large numbers of free workers and paid for imports.

Cinchona, the source of quinine, was the second new export and the more fragile. Bark was stripped from wild trees in the Andean forests above Popayán and in the eastern cordillera from about 1850, sold to European pharmacists, and briefly made fortunes for a handful of Popayán families. It was a extractive boom with no cultivation behind it: the trees were killed as they were harvested, and by the 1880s the trade had moved to plantations in Java and Ceylon.

What held all this back was transport and the shape of the internal market. The Magdalena was navigable for some 900 kilometres and was the country's only artery, but in the dry season it was a series of sandbanks, and steam navigation only became regular in the 1850s. Everything else went on muleback. The historian Luis Ervin Prado has described the result as an "archipelago" of regional economies, each producing almost the same things as its neighbours and therefore having little to trade with them — which is why the tariff question was never a simple matter of free trade versus protection, and why the provinces cared so fiercely about which port collected the duty on their imports.

The state's finances never caught up. Customs revenue at Cartagena, Santa Marta, Barranquilla, Buenaventura and Panama paid for the army, the bureaucracy and the debt, and the debt was the largest item of all. The foreign loans of the 1820s had been apportioned among Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, and the service charges fell due in London in sterling, which meant that a fall in tobacco prices or a bad gold year could empty the treasury. Direct taxation was unpopular and easily evaded; the monopoly revenues — tobacco, spirits, salt — were being dismantled by the same liberals who needed the money. The republic spent its whole life improvising.

Why did Bogotá give Washington a stake in Panama in 1846?

Because the isthmus was worth more to the world than the republic could extract from it, and because Bogotá could not defend it. Panama had declared independence from Spain in 1821 and joined Colombia voluntarily; it had tried to leave in 1830 and again in 1840, when Herrera's Estado del Istmo lasted thirteen months. Its merchants wanted a transit route, its elite wanted autonomy, and its geography made it a permanent object of interest to Britain, France and the United States.

The instrument was the treaty signed in Bogotá on 12 December 1846 by the New Granadan foreign secretary Manuel María Mallarino and the American chargé Benjamin Bidlack. It was a treaty of peace, friendship, navigation and commerce, and its commercial clauses gave the United States most-favoured-nation treatment and freed American citizens from differential duties. Its Article 35, the one that mattered, guaranteed to the United States free transit across the isthmus in return for a guarantee of New Granada's sovereignty over it and of neutral passage in wartime. Washington had been trying to obtain such a clause since the 1820s. Bogotá obtained a guarantee it could not enforce and a partner it could not control.

The concession followed fast. In April 1850 New Granada signed the Stephens–Paredes contract with an American consortium for a railway across the isthmus, and the line opened on 27 January 1855: a crossing that carried prospectors to California and changed the demography of Colón and Panama City within a decade. The 1850s also brought the isthmus its own federal status. Under the experimental federalism of the 1853 constitution, Panama was erected into a sovereign state in 1855, with a constituent assembly of its own, and its revenues were henceforth argued over with Bogotá rather than administered by it.

The treaty's costs were deferred, not avoided. The American guarantee became the legal instrument invoked in 1903, after fifty-seven years in which the United States intervened repeatedly to protect transit; and the isthmus's separate political identity, recognised in 1840 and institutionalised in 1855, made the eventual separation thinkable. For contemporaries, though, the calculation was narrower. A railroad, a mail route and a foreign guarantee cost nothing that Bogotá could see, and the alternative was that Britain or France took the isthmus without asking.

What did the Liberals do with power between 1849 and 1853?

They legislated at a speed few Spanish American states matched. The Liberal Party was founded in 1848 around the lawyer Ezequiel Rojas, and in a contested session on 7 March 1849 congress elected General José Hilario López president, with the backing of the artisans' Democratic Societies and against a divided Conservative vote. López was a Cauca soldier of no great intellectual pretensions, but his ministers — above all Manuel Murillo Toro at the treasury — had a programme and used it.

The economic reforms came first. The tobacco monopoly was abolished and cultivation freed; the state gave up its control of gold refining and of the aguardiente revenues; the censos, the perpetual ground rents that encumbered urban and rural property, were redeemed; entails were abolished; and a law of 1850 devolved the yield of tithes, spirits, quintos and minting rights to the provinces. That last measure was intended as administrative devolution and turned out to be the first step towards federalism, because the provinces used the money and the autonomy to build their own political machines.

The religious reforms came next, and they were ferocious. The Jesuits, readmitted in the 1840s, were expelled by decree on 18 May 1850; the ecclesiastical courts lost their jurisdiction over clergy in civil and criminal cases; the state forbade the enforcement of religious vows by public authority; and the press was made completely free by a law of 31 May 1851, whose first article declared the expression of thought through the press to be entirely free. The slogan was "a free church in a free state", but the practice was closer to a war on the Church's corporate power, and it produced, in 1849, one of the first organised Conservative parties in Spanish America.

Slavery was abolished in the middle of this programme. The law of 21 May 1851 declared free, from 1 January 1852, all enslaved people in the republic, and it did so with compensation: the manumission funds were to be paid to owners, and about 2 million pesos were eventually disbursed, more than the annual budget of the state. The number of people affected is disputed. The official statistics of 1851 registered 16,147 enslaved people as beneficiaries, while older estimates put the enslaved population of the 1830s at around 40,000 and calculate that no more than 6,000 had been manumitted in the previous thirty years. Either way, the emancipation was the largest single act of social legislation in the republic's history, and it was also a transfer of public money to the propertied.

The reaction came immediately. In the Cauca and Antioquia conservative landowners and clergy rose against the abolition, the expulsion of the Jesuits, the civil marriage law, the abolition of the ecclesiastical forum and the new direct tax; in Antioquia the rebellion was led by General Eusebio Borrero and lasted from 1 July to 10 September 1851. It failed. Mariano Ospina Rodríguez was taken prisoner in Bogotá at the end of July, and the government's militias — the Democratic Societies' volunteers among them — held the capital. But the war showed that the reforms had not been conceded; they had been imposed, and the Conservatives drew the conclusion that only a federal constitution could protect them from a Liberal majority in Bogotá.

The constitution of 1853 wrote the whole programme into law. It was the shortest charter the country had had — 64 articles in eleven chapters — and it was signed on 20 May 1853 and put into force the next day by President José María Obando, who had succeeded López. It declared flatly, in its sixth article, that there are no slaves and shall be none in New Granada; it separated church and state, abolished the death penalty, legalised civil marriage and divorce, introduced the secret ballot, created the office of attorney-general, and allowed each province to adopt its own constitution. It also widened the franchise to all adult men and provided for the direct election of governors — the provision that turned the provinces into the political units of the next decade.

Why did the artisans of Bogotá overthrow the government in 1854?

Because the Liberal party split, and the poorer half of it found the free-trade half unbearable. The radicals — nicknamed gólgotas, after the place of skulls — were lawyers, journalists and merchants who wanted a minimal state, free trade and individual guarantees. The draconianos were the artisans and their patrons, organised in the Democratic Societies, who wanted tariffs to protect Bogotá's workshops and a state that would employ and defend them. The 1853 constitution was a gólgota document. The election of Obando, a draconiano-friendly general, in 1853 gave the artisans a president but not a programme.

On the morning of 17 April 1854, General José María Melo, commander of the army in Cundinamarca, entered the presidential palace with his troops, offered Obando the leadership of a revolution and, when it was refused, took the executive power himself. He declared the constitution of 1853 in abeyance, restored that of 1843, which he considered the genuinely liberal charter, and put the provinces back under governors appointed from Bogotá. It was not a socialist revolution, though its enemies called it one and its friends have sometimes agreed; it was a coup by a professional soldier, backed by artisans' militias, against a parliament of lawyers.

The reaction was immediate and broad. Radicals and Conservatives, who agreed on nothing else, formed a constitutionalist coalition; the vice-president José de Obaldía took refuge in the American legation; General Tomás Herrera proclaimed himself in charge of the executive; and three armies converged on Bogotá — Mosquera's from Cartagena and the north, López's from the south, and Joaquín París's from Antioquia. Melo fought well and won the first three engagements, at Zipaquirá on 20 May, at Tabio on 21 May and at La Calera on 31 May, but he had no money, no foreign recognition and no way to break the blockade of the capital. Through November the constitutionalists closed in; on 3 and 4 December they fought their way into the streets, Herrera and Camilo Mendoza were badly wounded, Mosquera took command, and the Melo regime collapsed.

The repression was thorough. On 22 December 1854 the war ministry struck Melo, four other generals, five colonels and more than a hundred officers off the army list for treason, sedition and rebellion. Melo went into exile, fought for Benito Juárez in Mexico's War of Reform, and was killed at La Trinitaria in Chiapas on 1 June 1860. The artisans' societies were broken up, the tariff question was settled in favour of imports, and the political initiative passed to the men who wanted a federal constitution — a paradoxical outcome for a coup whose pretext had been that the constitution of 1853 was too radical.

How did the republic become a confederation in 1858?

By a conservative route. After Melo's fall the congress installed Manuel María Mallarino as president on 1 April 1855 — a Conservative who had negotiated the Panama treaty, and who governed as a moderate, cutting expenditure, reorganising the customs, guaranteeing freedom of worship, and taking the civil register away from the parishes and giving it to notaries. His successor, Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, was elected in 1857 as the first president chosen by direct popular vote under the constitution of 1853, with a little over 40 per cent of the vote, and he governed as a party man.

The federal question was settled from below before it was settled at the centre. Panama had been made a state in 1855; Antioquia obtained the same status by the law of 11 June 1856, largely because its Conservative elite had decided that autonomy was the only reliable defence against a Liberal majority in Bogotá. By the time congress met to reform the constitution, half the country was already governed under two different systems.

The constitution of 1858 — dated 22 May, signed by Ospina — turned the republic into the Confederación Granadina. It created eight sovereign states: Antioquia, Bolívar, Boyacá, Cauca, Cundinamarca, Magdalena, Panamá and Santander. Each was to elect its own president and legislature and to legislate on everything not expressly reserved to the confederation; the federal government kept foreign affairs, war and the army, the tariff, the post, the census and the supreme court. The charter abolished the vice-presidency, guaranteed freedom of thought, of the press, of religion and of movement, and left the Church in the ambiguous position of a tolerated establishment.

It did not work, because the division of powers was not clear enough to settle the question that mattered: who was sovereign? When Mosquera, as governor of Cauca, broke relations with the confederation on 8 May 1860, the resulting war was fought over whether the states had reserved powers that the federal congress could not touch. Mosquera won. The constitution of Rionegro, in 1863, replaced the confederation with the United States of Colombia, a much more radical federation, and the name "Colombia" returned to the map.

What did the Republic of New Granada leave behind?

Four things outlasted it. The first was abolition: the law of 1851 came before emancipation in Peru and Venezuela, both of 1854, and it was not reversed. The second was the secular state: the separation of 1853, the civil register, civil marriage and lay education were fought over for the rest of the century, but they were never wholly undone, and the Liberal constitutions of 1863 built on them. The third was the party system, invented between 1848 and 1851, which gave Colombian politics its structure, its vocabulary and its habits of violence for a hundred and fifty years.

The fourth was the problem of the territory. The republic never solved the relationship between Bogotá and the regions, and its two experiments — centralism under the charter of 1843 and federalism under those of 1853 and 1858 — both ended in civil war. The Comisión Corográfica had shown, by the late 1850s, how varied and how disconnected the country actually was: the maps, the vocabularies, the population tables and the watercolours of Manuel María Paz are the republic's most enduring monument, and they are also a portrait of a state that governed a fraction of what it claimed. What was left after 1863 was the outline of Colombia — a country whose nineteenth-century history is largely the working out of questions the New Granadans asked first, and answered too soon.

Historians have argued about the period in three registers. One is the political narrative, which used to be written as a tale of two parties and is now written as a tale of regions: Luis Ervin Prado's account of the War of the Supremos treats it as a collision between a would-be national state and a country of micro-regions that produced nearly the same things and therefore had almost nothing to gain from each other. A second is the social history of the reforms, which has established both how radical the legislation of 1849–53 was and how little it changed on the ground: the enslaved were freed, but the manumission funds paid their owners, and the schools, hospitals and registries that were supposed to make citizens of them were not built. A third is the imperial history of the isthmus, in which the treaty of 1846 and the railroad of 1855 look less like a commercial arrangement than like the first instalment of a long American protectorate.

The reputations have moved with the arguments. Hobsbawm's verdict, quoted approvingly in a modern survey of the period, was that nobody liberalised more radically than New Granada between 1848 and 1854; the corollary, which he did not need to spell out, is that nowhere did liberal legislation outrun the state's capacity to enforce it so completely. Fernán González reads the War of the Supremos as the moment the bipartisan system was born, with its two programmes and its habit of settling elections by force; Luis Javier Ortiz shows how Conservative Antioquia then turned federalism into a shelter, and made the federation work better for its elite than the unitary republic ever had. What none of them claims is that the republic was stable. Its achievement was to legislate a modern society a generation before it had the institutions, the money or the maps to run one.

Common myths about the Republic of New Granada

Timeline of the Republic of New Granada

What the map shows next

At 1840 on the map the republic is drawn as a single block from the Caribbean to the isthmus, at the moment when most of its provinces had pronounced against the government and Panama had declared itself a separate state. The outline is a claim rather than a description: the eastern llanos and the Amazon are shaded as national territory although the state had no presence there, and the southern border with Ecuador runs through Pasto country that had just been reconquered by force.

By 1850 on the map the shape has barely changed, though everything inside it has: the tobacco districts of the Magdalena valley are the new export economy, the isthmus is carrying California traffic and is about to have its railway, and the provinces have begun to tax and legislate for themselves. At 1858 on the map the map still shows one republic, months after the constitution that ended it, which is how border datasets usually behave — they record the state, not the statute.