The South American Republics, Part 2 of 2

by Thomas Cleland Dawson

The liberals and federalists were constantly becoming more powerful and more discontented. Disturbances broke out from time to time and when Mosquera's term expired, the attempt to elect a successor in an orderly and constitutional manner utterly failed. Riots and bloodshed followed, and it was officially announced that no candidate had received a majority of the popular vote. The duty of making a choice fell upon congress, and Lopez, a general of the war of independence who had taken part in the overthrow of Bolivar, was installed. This meant a resumption of the march toward complete decentralisation, temporarily checked during Herran's and Mosquera's administrations. The Constitution was reformed so as to reduce the power of the national executive and guarantee greater privileges to the provinces. The latter were divided and subdivided to suit the exigencies of local politicians until their number reached thirty-five. Lopez had been a revolutionist himself and did not know when he might be one again, and his abolishment of the death penalty for political crimes met with the hearty approval of the large number of Granadan politicians who were in the same case. The central government transferred a large part of its revenues to the provinces, and gave up to them the control of judicial administration, of education, and of transportation. The tide of liberal legislation also swept over the privileges of the clergy. Laws were voted suppressing of tithes, giving the nomination of parish priests to the civil authorities, taking control of education out of their hands, separating Church and State, and establishing civil marriage. But it was easier to pass such laws than to enforce their observance by the Granadans. The clergy were enormously powerful among the common people and the conservative aristocrats. The banishment of the archbishop and several suffragans roused the conservatives. Politics became the principal preoccupation of the educated classes. Hardly a village in the country but had its political club, and more than a hundred party newspapers, besides innumerable pamphlets, thundered against their opponents. The conservative revolution broke out in 1851, beginning in Pasto and immediately spreading over the whole western half of the republic and even to the eastern plateau. Antioquia was the stronghold of the clericals, and there they gathered a force of a thousand men which was beaten at Rio Negro on the 10th of September, 1851, while the insurgent bands in a dozen other provinces were reduced in detail. Although the liberal government was thus triumphant in the field, the danger had been too great and was still too menacing to make it safe to maintain an uncompromising attitude on the religious question.

Lopez procured the election of Obando, another political general of the same type and opinions as himself, as his successor in the presidency. The new president's first act was to summon a convention which abolished the last traces of Herran's moderately centralising Constitution, and depriving the executive of the power of naming provincial governors. Obando gave satisfaction to no one, and in 1854 General Melo, commander of the cavalry in Bogotá, incited the garrison and workingmen of that city to join him in an insurrection. However, the chiefs of the conservative party would have none of him; the recent concessions to the clergy had removed the strongest motives for rousing fanaticism to arms; and the clericals declared in his favour in only a few provinces. The property-holding and educated classes were practically unanimous against him. Mosquera and Herran, the most powerful men in New Granada and the historical chiefs of the moderate conservatives, had modified their views to suit the exigencies of the situation and become in effect moderate liberals. It was Mosquera himself who led the provincial militia against Bogotá and overcome the dictator after much bloody street fighting.

TYPES OF COLOMBIAN NATIVES.

The unhappy country, tired of continual internecine disorder and exhausted by the harrying civil wars, rested willingly for two years under the compromise administration of Mallarino in which representatives of both parties and most of the principal factions had a voice. As a matter of fact the federal government had almost ceased to exercise the greatly reduced functions which nominally remained to it. The executive had only the shadow of a control over the provinces, its revenues sank to well-nigh nothing, its army was reduced to eight hundred men. The very name of the country was changed from the "Republic of New Granada" to the "Granadine Confederation," and the organisation of powerful and independent federal departments was begun, foreshadowing the abolition of the old provincial system. In 1857 three candidates had presented themselves—Ospina, representing the clerical conservatives; Murillo, the advanced liberals; and Mosquera, the moderates. Suffrage had been made universal, and under the conditions necessarily prevailing among a population almost entirely illiterate and used for centuries to monarchical and military government, a satisfactory election was impossible. On the face of the returns Ospina received a plurality, but the radicals were able to force the adoption of a new federal Constitution in 1859 which abolished the old provinces. However, the new system had not the sympathy of the conservative and clerical president. He tried to usurp control of the elections, the liberals accused him of acting unconstitutionally, insurrections broke out in various parts of the country, and the confusion became worse confounded.

In the state of Bolivar, the liberal insurrectionists triumphed, while in Santander the conservatives themselves started a revolution which Ospina only succeeded in suppressing by the bloody battle of Oratorio. Meanwhile Mosquera had become governor of Cauca, and when the conservatives of that state tried to expel him, he beat them and took advantage of his victory to declare himself independent of Ospina. The latter advanced, but Mosquera defeated him, and invaded the upper Magdalena, gaining the battle of Segovia. In every state there was an insurrection against Ospina, and three ex-presidents accompanied the insurgent armies. On the surface the civil war appeared to be a mere contest for personal power between Mosquera and Ospina, but the former had ensured a large support by raising the banner of federalism, and the latter's triumph would probably have meant a strengthening of the national government and certainly a reaction from the radicalism which had gained ground year by year since the fall of Bolivar. Supported by the clericals, conservatives, and reactionists, Ospina fought tenaciously and with a fair prospect of success. But the federalist armies advanced relentlessly from both north and south, and one after another the provinces of the eastern plateaux were wrested from him by bloody and well-contested battles. Bogotá was finally taken and the president imprisoned, but Mosquera's opponents kept up the conflict for some time in the states of Panama, Santander, and Antioquia, and it was near the end of 1861 before the federalists were everywhere triumphant.

With Mosquera at the head of affairs, under the title of "Supreme Director," a congress was summoned whose members were called, not deputies, representatives, or delegates, but "plenipotentiaries" of the sovereign states. This congress adopted a new constitution, New Granada's sixth since 1830. The triumphant liberals expelled the Jesuits, abolished ecclesiastical entails, extinguished the monastic orders, confiscated Church property, decreed the absolute separation of Church and State, imprisoned the archbishop, and secularised the schools. Suffrage was made nominally universal, and the death penalty abolished. The name of the country was changed to the "United States of Colombia," and it became little more than a league of nine federal states for the purpose of defence against foreign attack. The national government was expressly prohibited from interfering in the affairs of the states, even for the preservation of order, and a clause of the Constitution provided that "when one sovereign state of the union shall be at war with another, or the citizens of any state shall be at war among themselves, the national government is obligated to preserve the strictest neutrality." The federal judiciary had no power to decide any constitutional questions nor could its decisions bind the state authorities. The national government was deprived of half its revenue for the benefit of the states, and the receipts of the latter equalled the federal income. This Constitution remained in force for twenty-two years, during which civil wars and factional disputes continually racked Colombia.