Second Federal Republic of Mexico
The Second Federal Republic of Mexico was born at midnight, when congress opened its sessions on the 5th of December 1846, in a country already at war with the United States. Half the national territory would soon be lost. A civil war would tear the country apart for three years. Two foreign armies would invade. And yet, out of this wreckage, a new constitutional order emerged. How did a nation endure all of that and still manage to hold free elections, build schools, and codify civil rights? And who were the figures at the center of it all?
The Mexican-American War broke out in April 1846 during the presidency of Mariano Paredes. A string of military defeats eroded his government quickly. He resigned on the 28th of July, returning to the military rather than staying in office.
Jose Mariano Salas became provisional president. On the 22nd of August 1846, he restored the Constitution of 1824, ending the Centralist Republic and opening the era of the Second Federal Republic. The act was less a triumph than a survival maneuver. The country was already under invasion.
Salas allowed the exiled Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to return to Mexico, and Santa Anna embraced the liberal Constitution of 1824. Congress assembled with a mostly liberal membership and elected Santa Anna and Valentin Gomez Farias as president and vice-president. Both men had won elections together once before, back in 1832.
The government's war financing was a constant crisis. Several state governments refused to contribute. Corruption in the finance ministry deepened the problem. On the 7th of January 1847, a measure came before congress to seize fifteen million pesos from the Catholic Church by nationalizing and selling its lands. The backlash was immediate. On the 27th of February 1847, national guard battalions across the capital revolted. The uprising became known as the Revolt of the Polkos, named for the young middle-class men who staffed those militias and were known for dancing the polka.
American forces under Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz and pushed inland. After the Battle of Cerro Gordo, congress gave the president extraordinary powers but drew a hard line: no authority to sign a peace treaty alone, and no authority to cede national territory. Anyone who attempted to negotiate with the Americans was declared a traitor.
Santa Anna ultimately commanded Mexican forces as the Americans advanced on Mexico City. After the capital fell, the government fled northeast to Queretaro City. Governors gathered there and debated options ranging from continuing the war to surrendering the sparsely populated northern territories.
Manuel de la Peña y Peña assumed the presidency. When congress finally met, Peña y Peña argued plainly that Mexico could not continue the war. He said those who viewed seeking peace as dishonorable were not worthy of being called honest. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was then approved by congress, and Mexico ceded half of its territory to the United States.
On the 3rd of June 1848, Peña y Peña left the presidency in exchange for the presidency of the Supreme Court. Congress named Jose Joaquin Herrera as the next president. The government returned to the capital.
Jose Joaquin Herrera inherited a shattered treasury, but the years that followed were surprisingly stable. Mines increased their yields. Abundant harvests were reported. Construction began on a railway and telegraph line. On the 1st of November 1849, Mexico's first industrial exhibition opened in Mexico City.
Herrera also became the first Mexican president to complete a full term since Guadalupe Victoria had passed power to Vicente Guerrero in 1828. The 1851 election was won by Mariano Arista, Herrera's own Minister of War.
Arista's administration, however, could not escape the financial crisis. Government income stood at 8 million pesos while expenditure stood at 26 million pesos. Salary cuts of up to seventy-five percent hit public employees, but the reductions were applied unevenly and unnecessary spending persisted. The situation became a pretext for Conservative opponents who wanted to see Santa Anna restored.
A revolt led by a Guadalajara hatmaker named Blancarte spread across the country. On the 13th of September, Blancarte proclaimed that Arista should be overthrown and Santa Anna recalled. Arista addressed the chambers on the 15th of December 1852 and resigned on the 5th of January.
Santa Anna returned, this time backed by a Conservative faction led by Lucas Alaman. The centralist system was restored, state legislatures were dissolved, and the military was enlarged and reorganized with instructors hired from Europe. Santa Anna moved his residence to Tacubaya, hosted balls and soirees in a lavishly decorated palace, and revived the Order of Guadalupe from the First Mexican Empire. The first public display of its members in ceremonial dress prompted public ridicule. They were called, by a pejorative nickname, huehuenches. On the 16th of December 1853, Santa Anna passed a decree extending his personal dictatorship indefinitely.
On the 1st of March 1854, the liberal Plan of Ayutla was proclaimed against Santa Anna, indicting him specifically for the Gadsden Purchase and his suppression of democratic government. Civil war followed for a little over a year, with liberal forces led by Juan Alvarez and Ignacio Comonfort.
By October 1855, the liberals had won. Alvarez became interim president and assembled a cabinet that included a younger generation of figures who would define the next decade: the lawyers Melchor Ocampo and Benito Juarez, the poet Guillermo Prieto, and the anti-clerical writer Ignacio Comonfort. Alvarez stepped down from the presidency in December 1855, passing the office to the more moderate Comonfort.
Congress began drafting a new constitution in February 1856. The resulting Constitution of 1857 was promulgated on the 12th of February 1857, set to take effect on the 16th of September of that year. It incorporated two major pieces of legislation already passed under the Alvarez administration: the Ley Juarez and the Ley Lerdo. The Ley Lerdo nationalized collectively owned land, a measure aimed at the Catholic Church's holdings but one that also fell on Mexico's indigenous communities and their collectively held ejidos.
President Comonfort grew uneasy with the new constitution, finding it left the executive too weak to suppress the revolts breaking out across the country. On the 17th of December 1857, General Felix Zuloaga proclaimed the Plan of Tacubaya, declaring the constitution nullified. Comonfort accepted the plan, to the dismay of liberals. He had overestimated how much support he would find among state governors, and when civil war began spreading, he resigned. Before leaving the country, Comonfort released the imprisoned President of the Supreme Court, Benito Juarez, in whose favor he stepped aside.
Benito Juarez narrowly escaped death in those early months of the war and eventually established the Liberal government in the port city of Veracruz. The Conservatives held Mexico City. The initial phase of the war saw repeated Conservative victories, but the Liberals controlled strategic ports that fed them customs revenues.
The Conservatives replaced their commander Zuloaga with Miguel Miramon, a general with a strong record, but Miramon repeatedly failed to take Veracruz. During the Battle of Anton Lizardo, the United States Navy protected the Liberal capital. In the meantime, Liberals passed sweeping anti-clerical reforms, nationalizing the remaining Catholic Church properties to fund the war. They also signed the controversial McLane-Ocampo Treaty with the United States, though the American Senate rejected it.
The turning point came in 1860. Liberal forces began breaking into the Conservative-controlled interior, and the decisive Battle of Calpulalpan was fought on the 22nd of December 1860. Miramon and leading Conservatives fled the country. Conservative guerrillas kept fighting in the countryside, but the Liberal government had won.
Juarez entered Mexico City in victory, but the treasury was empty. In July 1861, the government passed a moratorium on foreign debt payments to stay solvent. France, the United Kingdom, and Spain responded with the Convention of London, agreeing to joint armed intervention to compel payment. On the 8th of December 1861, three navies occupied the port of Veracruz.
France had a separate aim from its partners. Napoleon III intended to overthrow the Mexican Republic and install a monarchical client state. The idea had reached him through two Mexican monarchist expatriates: Jose Manuel Hidalgo y Esnaurrizar and Jose Maria Gutierrez de Estrada. When Spain and the United Kingdom discovered France's true intentions, they withdrew from the expedition.
Napoleon III then discovered that Hidalgo and Estrada had exaggerated the degree of monarchist sentiment inside Mexico. That miscalculation cost France dearly. On the 5th of May 1862, Mexican troops repulsed French forces at the Battle of Puebla, delaying the campaign by over a year. Conservative generals, who had lost the Reform War, eventually found it useful to collaborate with the French invaders.
Mexico City fell to French forces by June 1863, with President Juarez evacuating ahead of the advance. A French-controlled triumvirate took over as executive. Under French direction, it organized a Mexican Assembly of Notables, which resolved on the 3rd of July 1863 to transform Mexico into a monarchy and invited Maximilian of Habsburg to assume the throne. That proclamation ended the Second Federal Republic of Mexico.
Across the turbulent years of the Second Federal Republic, Mexican civic and cultural life was not simply surviving. By 1860, there were 2,400 primary schools in the country, up from 1,310 in 1843.
The philanthropist Vidal Alcocer founded a society for the education of poor children in October 1846. By 1858, in the middle of the Reform War, that society was maintaining thirty-three schools attended by seven thousand students, teaching reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, art, religious instruction, and music. In at least one institution, it also provided food, board, and clothing.
The Academy of San Carlos, an art school, flourished in the years immediately after the Mexican-American War, funded through a national lottery. Its first art exposition was held in 1850. It also became the first public building in the country to be lit at night with gas lighting.
In manufacturing, the textile industry grew from 2,600 looms in 1843 to ten thousand by 1850. By 1857, there were twenty-one factories and shops producing and preparing silk, employing eight thousand people. Trade fairs were held in 1850, 1853, 1854, 1856, and 1857.
Literary life ran parallel to the political conflict. The Conservative statesman Lucas Alaman produced his epochal History of Mexico between 1849 and 1852. The blind poet Juan Valle began publishing in Mexico City newspapers and staged a semi-autobiographical play called Misterios sociales during the Reform War after being forced to flee Guanajuato when Conservative forces took the city. The liberal writer Florencio Maria del Castillo took up arms during the French Intervention and died in French captivity in 1863. Mexican scholars compiled the ten-volume Diccionario universal de historia y de geografia between 1853 and 1856, a reminder that intellectual life continued even as the nation fractured around it.
Continue browsing
Common questions
What was the Second Federal Republic of Mexico and when did it exist?
The Second Federal Republic of Mexico was a period of Mexican history lasting from 1846 to 1863, beginning with the restoration of the Constitution of 1824 during the Mexican-American War and ending when the Second French Intervention led to the proclamation of the Second Mexican Empire in July 1863.
What was La Reforma and what did it change in Mexico?
La Reforma was a series of sweeping constitutional reforms initiated after the liberal Plan of Ayutla overthrew Santa Anna in 1855. Its landmark achievement was the Constitution of 1857, which separated church and state, nationalized Catholic Church lands under the Ley Lerdo, abolished special clerical and military courts, and declared civil rights including freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Why did France invade Mexico during the Second Federal Republic?
France used Mexico's 1861 moratorium on foreign debt payments as a pretext to invade, but Napoleon III's actual goal was to overthrow the Mexican Republic and establish a monarchical client state. The idea had been proposed to Napoleon by two Mexican monarchist expatriates, Jose Manuel Hidalgo y Esnaurrizar and Jose Maria Gutierrez de Estrada. Britain and Spain withdrew from the joint expedition once they understood France's true intentions.
What happened at the Battle of Puebla during the French Intervention in Mexico?
On the 5th of May 1862, Mexican troops repulsed French forces at the Battle of Puebla, delaying the French advance on Mexico City by over a year. French reinforcements eventually arrived, and by June 1863 the capital had fallen to French forces.
Who was Benito Juarez and what role did he play in the Second Federal Republic of Mexico?
Benito Juarez was a liberal lawyer who served in the cabinet of Juan Alvarez and later became president of Mexico after President Comonfort resigned during the Reform War. Juarez led the Liberal government from Veracruz through the three-year Reform War, won the decisive Battle of Calpulalpan in December 1860, and then faced the French Intervention, evacuating Mexico City ahead of French forces in June 1863.
What was the Revolt of the Polkos during the Mexican-American War?
The Revolt of the Polkos was an uprising that broke out on the 27th of February 1847 when national guard battalions in Mexico City proclaimed against the government of Valentin Gomez Farias. The revolt was triggered by a proposal to seize fifteen million pesos from the Catholic Church. The name came from the young middle-class men who made up the militia units and were known for dancing the polka.
All sources
3 references cited across the entry
- 2BookA Short History of MexicoArthur Howard Noll — A.C. Mclurg & Company — 1890
- 3BookProposals for Monarchy in MexicoFrank Joseph Sanders — University of Arizona — 1967