Liberals Vs. Conservatives in Post Independence Mexico
After the end of the Mexican War of Independence, the country was strongly divided as it tried to recover from more than a decade of fighting. From 1821 to 1857, fifty different governments ruled the country. These governments included dictatorships, constitutional republican governments and a monarchy. The political division is roughly divided into two groups, the Liberals and the Conservatives. The Liberal political movements had their beginnings in the secret meetings of the Freemasonry. The secret nature of the society allowed for discreet political discussion. Conservatives favored a strong centralized government, with many wanting a European-style monarch. Conservatives favored protecting many of the institutions inherited from the colonial period including tax and legal exemptions for the Catholic Church and the military. Liberals favored the establishment of federalist republic based on ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment, and the limiting of the Church’s and military’s privileges. Until the end of the Reform period, Mexico’s history would be dominated by these two factions vying for control and fighting against foreign incursions at the same time. The Reform Era of Mexican history is generally defined from 1855 to 1876.
Read more about this topic: Reform War
Famous quotes containing the words liberals, post, independence and/or mexico:
“The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.”
—Lenny Bruce (1925–1966)
“I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;—and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Is this what all these soldiers, all this training, have been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)