Honduras, 1843 to 1850
Tegucigalpa, almost as much as Granada, was the epicenter of secessionism in Central America. Together, it was these two cities that most resented centralized liberal rule and whose actions following the death of Morazán were most crucial to the disintegration of the federation. Consequently, the Republic of Honduras was the first state to declare itself free and sovereign on July 2nd, 1840. Originally led by a provisional government composed of senior senators, Honduras held indirect presidential elections in early 1841. General Francisco Ferrera, freshly returned from victories in El Salvador and Guatemala, won easily and became the nation’s first president.
Pictured: Francisco Ferrera, the first President of Honduras
Ferrera’s government initiated its tenure by rolling back all of the most hated reforms of the liberal era: Church lands were restored, the mandatory tithe was reintroduced, and holy orders reestablished. The government also struck against the liberal shibboleths of free trade and democracy. Although fear of an excess of democracy degenerating into mob rule — as informed by classical political thought — was universal in contemporary politics, conservatives were particularly sensitive to this risk and tried to empower the ‘aristocratic’ and ‘monarchic’ elements of the government. In practice, this meant that the new Honduran constitution, promulgated in 1842, further tightened wealth requirements at each level of the indirect elections to Congress and greatly expanded the powers of the ‘monarchical’ presidency. The new 1842 Constitution also gutted the civil rights which had existed in the federation, severely restricting freedoms of speech, assembly, and print. Ironically for a government that had come to power through a coup of militiamen, these freedoms were limited because they were seen as inflaming popular passions and thus risking anarchy.
The restriction of civil liberties and massive expansion of executive power was followed by a systematic persecution of those who had supported the Morazán regime. The
Proscripción de Ferrera was the most widespread and serious persecution of political opposition thus far in Central America, declaring all those who had supported Francisco Morazán to be enemies of the state, subject to arrest and seizure of assets unless they left the country. In actual numbers, the persecution was small scale — under two hundred people were proscribed — but, within the small and close-knit world of Honduran politics, this was still shocking. The liberals forced into exile in 1842 were replaced by roughly equal numbers of conservatives returning from exiles begun in the wake of Manuel Acre’s defeat. The conservative reaction across Central America facilitated the return of scores of conservatives in all of the republics. These returnees were stalwart supporters of the most despotic policies instituted by the conservative governments.
Upon independence, Honduras also ended free trade and restored some of the old monopolies and protectionist measures from the colonial period. Free trade policies had never been particularly popular in Honduras, which lacked the large coffee and indigo plantations that benefited from these policies. Restoring monopolies on goods like liquor, tobacco, and sugar cane was also the easiest way to create a tax base for the new government and these monopolies, plus tariffs on all trade with foreigners, provided the overwhelming majority of state revenue in the 1840s. The reaction against free trade policies was pursued to the point of severely hampering commerce, primarily through a decree in 1842 that all foreign merchants must become naturalized Hondurans or be subject to what were some of the highest tax rates in the Americas. Unwilling to pay and unwilling to subject themselves to Honduran law as citizens, the primarily British merchants who supplied Omoa and Trujillo simply took their business elsewhere, leaving Honduras even more of an economic backwater.
A few years into its independence, Honduras remained a shockingly poor country devoid of substantial industry and ruled by a tiny minority of its population. For most Hondurans, their situation had changed little in the past decades. Political, social, and economic power in Honduras, as in the federation, was concentrated in the hands of around 2,000 merchants and landowners who met the strict property and literacy requirements for voting; of these, only a few hundred reached the stricter property requirements for office holding. While there were exceptions, including President Francisco Ferrera, the ruling class was overwhelmingly White, governing a nation of some 80,000 Ladino and Amerindian peasants.
Pictured: Houses on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa
The Honduran economy was almost entirely agricultural. Around 90% of the population depended primarily upon subsistence agriculture. Most households supplemented this with income as tenant farmers on haciendas growing cash crops, particularly coffee and tobacco. Industry was entirely limited to the major cities and, even then, restricted to the most basic production of clothes, furniture, and paper for local use. In terms of gross production, finished or manufactured goods accounted for less than 1% of the Honduran economy in 1843. Most manufactured goods had to be imported, primarily through British merchants operating out of Belize, in exchange for fruits, coffee, or raw lumber. This trade, further reduced after the laws passed in 1842, flowed almost entirely through the Caribbean ports of Omoa and Trujillo. The improvement of the fortifications at these ports and a vain attempt to mitigate the silting up of the port of Omoa were some of the earliest priorities of the Honduran government.
Within the wider region, the critical event of the period was the Mexican-American War. It was obvious to all contemporary observers that war between the USA and Mexico was unavoidable once Texas was admitted as a state in March 1843. Mexico had not accepted Texan independence and it would not accept its incorporation into the USA. Knowing that Texas claimed a strip of land between the Rio Nueces and Rio Bravo which Mexico asserted was part of Coahulia, Santa Anna first decided to park an army along this territory, hoping to provoke an attack by the USA. By the end of spring 1844, it was clear that this strategy was unsuccessful. President Tyler was wary of being seen as the aggressor and chastised the Texas government against any moves south of the Nueces. Meanwhile, the Mexican army on the Nueces Strip was exposed to the depredations of well–armed Comanche and Apache raiders, who stole army horses and captured almost all the supplies sent across the Rio Bravo. With the Americans not taking the bait and his supplies running low, Santa Anna ordered his armies to cross the Nueces toward San Antonio in August 1844.
Pictured: Santa Anna's army encamped along the Nueces River
Santa Anna’s soldiers were successful in the initial battles against the American army in Texas, but the advantage very quickly began to split away from Mexico as the conflict lengthened and expanded into the West. Mexico’s presence along its northern frontier had always been minimal and American forces were able to overwhelm the small garrisons in New Mexico and California. The position of the main Mexican army in Texas also weakened over time, as Comanche raids still prevented almost any supplies from reaching the Mexican army. Lacking in food, horses, and ammunition, Santa Anna was forced to lead his troops in a fighting retreat back across the Rio Bravo.
American soldiers followed Santa Anna into Mexico and, managing to outmaneuver his army due to a superiority in horses, positioned themselves between the main Mexican army and a lightly defended Ciudad Mexico in June 1845. Cut off from his own besieged capital, Santa Anna begrudgingly surrendered and allowed a government in Ciudad Mexico under Mariano Paredes to make peace with the USA. The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo transferred Mexico’s northern territories of Nuevo Mexico, Alta California, and Texas to the USA.
Pictured: The US Army fighting on the outskirts of the Valley of Mexico
In Honduras, the whole event was watched with evident glee, as the imperial oppressor Mexico was now given a taste of its own medicine. All of Central America had smarted at Mexico’s occupation of Quetzaltenango and very little sympathy was to be had for Mexico. Public support for the USA was also strong during this time, largely as a result of goodwill from American recognition of Honduran independence in 1843, the first country to do so.
The year 1844 also saw the separation of the eastern half of Hispaniola from Haiti as the newly formed Dominican Republic. Since gaining independence from Spain alongside the rest of the Americas in the early 1820s, the colony of Santo Domingo had united with its wealthier western neighbor, Haiti. Years of mismanagement and inclusion in a crushing debt burden imposed upon Haiti by France convinced prominent Dominicans they would be better off as a separate nation and, in December 1844, a small conspiracy seized the Puerta del Conde fortress in Santo Domingo and declared Dominican independence. Recognition was quickly extended by a number of nations eager to see Haiti discredited, including the USA, Venezuela, and Honduras. With most of their military resources devoted to internecine struggles on the western half of the island, Haiti quickly abandoned efforts to recapture Santo Domingo and came to terms with sharing Hispaniola with an independent Dominican Republic.
To the west of Hispaniola, turmoil also roiled Cuba in the mid-1840s. Although victorious in the Carlist War, the absolutist rule of King Carlos V remained unpopular among large swathes of the Spanish population, particularly in Spain’s remaining Caribbean colonies. In October 1845, large crowds in Madrid set up barricades and demanded the restoration of the liberal Constitution of 1812. Egged on by penpals in Spain, liberals in Havana set up their own barricades in the spring of 1846, coming out in such large numbers that the Spanish governor felt forced to give over control of the city. Unfortunately for the liberal revolutions of Cuba, their capture of Havana in May 1846 coincided with the brutal suppression of protests in Madrid by a Carlist army brought in from the rural north. Carlos V dispatched troop ships to Cuba at the very close of hurricane season and easily recaptured Havana in November 1846, fighting against a force that had largely dispersed on the assumption that they were part of a larger successful revolution back in Spain. The failed revolution of 1846 changed the politics of the Caribbean in two important ways. First, Spain’s invasion of Havana greatly antagonized the USA, which now viewed Spain as the primary antagonist of the Americas. Secondly, it left a generation of Cuban liberals and revolutionaries disenchanted with Spain and unwilling to chain their own efforts to those of liberals back on the Continent.
Pictured: Spanish soldiers disembark in the harbor of Havana in November 1846
Honduras was certainly not immune from liberal conspiracies. The proscriptions had chased open supporters of liberalism out of Honduras, but no action was taken against the much larger number of Hondurans who sympathized with the liberal cause. The liberals of Honduras were also never really alone. Despite the breakup of the federation, Central Americans retained strong social, family, and economic ties between the different republics. Even proscribed individuals, who could not enter Honduras themselves, kept up a steady and uninterrupted correspondence with liberal thinkers and organizers in Honduras. From safe havens in San Salvador, Ciudad Guatemala, and Leon, Honduran liberals organized seditious groups and, through agents, often continued to manage their estates in Honduras and funnel those profits into political activities. Aware of these liberal conspiracies, but lacking the manpower to censor mail or effectively police private clubs, Francisco Ferrera and his ministers felt increasingly vulnerable in the mid-1840s and sought ways to avoid the urban revolutions of Santo Domingo and Havana being repeated in Comayagua.
President Ferrera decided that the best way of retaining power and avoiding a liberal insurrection was to revitalize the sluggish Honduran economy. Many otherwise apolitical landowners and merchants were shocked by the rapid decrease in commerce that had accompanied Honduran independence and they blamed this economic malaise entirely on Francisco Ferrera and his faction. In January 1846, President Ferrera invited a group of Honduras’s most prominent merchants and landowners to form a consultative assembly and advise his government on the best measures to support the growth of trade and industry. This
Sociedad por el desarrollo de bien común was readily embraced by Honduras's economic elite.
La Sociedad por desarrollo would become the chief influence on economic policy for decades and give the nascent capitalist class a position from which to dominate Honduras.
The first meetings of the group were not promising, as each mogul argued for lower taxes or higher tariffs or special privileges for his particular industry. From the minutes of
La Sociedad por desarrollo, this bickering appears to have lasted for months, to the despair and exasperation of Ferrera’s representatives there. By spring 1846, however, the group had moved to a more productive discussion of how to generally increase commerce and industry in Honduras. A clear consensus emerged among all members of
La Sociedad por desarrollo that Britain and the USA were the image of modern, wealthy, developed nations and, therefore, the best path toward prosperity was to imitate those countries. Using knowledge gleaned from Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of his travels to the USA, newspapers from both nations, and stories relayed from British merchants, the Honduran grandees decided that the three things which made Britain and the USA wealthy and modern were textile mills, canals, and railroads. Textile mills in particular were a fixation of the merchants, as it was clearly no coincidence that Boston and Manchester — two of the most indisputably esteemable cities in the world in the minds of the Honduran businessmen — both had textile mills. Canals were unsuitable for Honduras’s geography, so railroads attracted even more attention as crucial to commerce. By the end of 1846, the Honduran magnates had reached a firm consensus that the path toward economic success depended upon the construction of railroads and the development of a textile industry.
The first project of economic development which the Honduran government was to undertake was the construction of a railroad between Tegucigalpa and the chief port of Omoa. Although textile mills were seen as critical to becoming a wealthy nation, the magnates of
La Sociedad por desarrollo were firm in their opposition to any direct government involvement in industry; they would work out the creation of a modern textile mill among themselves, a process that would take the better part of a decade. Technical knowledge of engineering was extremely rare in Honduras and knowledge of the new science of railroads was nonexistent. Therefore, the first step was recruiting skilled engineers from the USA and Britain. Offering very generous compensation, Honduras managed to entice ten British and American engineers into coming to Honduras to oversee the construction of the country’s first railroad. These engineers were also offered stock holdings in the
sociedad anonima that would actually own and operate the railroad on condition of becoming naturalized Hondurans, an offer which all accepted.
The railroad project ran into problems as soon as it began. Based on the distance and maps of the terrain furnished by the Honduran government, the British and American engineers estimated that completion would take a little over 18 months. The project would actually take over two years and experienced major cost overruns due to the difficulty of getting the necessary supplies to where they needed to be. Honduras had no local iron industry capable of producing the tracks or bolts needed for railways, so all of this needed to be imported. Despite the government’s large stake in financing the railroads, those necessary imports still had to pass through the onerous customs process at Omoa or Trujillo, delaying the project and increasing costs. After weeks or months held up at port, the supplies then had a long and difficult journey to the construction site along poor roads. The only reason that the railroad was not further behind schedule was the massive amount of corvee labor placed at the company’s disposal. Peasants living near the new railroads were impressed into providing almost all of the manual labor, often without compensation.
Pictured: Honduran peasants conscripted from nearby farms and villages placing railway ties
The rail line between Tegucigalpa and Omoa ran its first locomotive in October 1848. The railroad greatly reduced the time it took for freign to travel between Omoa and the interior, in turn allowing more produce to reach foreign markets without rotting. The Tegucigalpa-Omoa railroad impressed two lessons upon
La Sociedad por desarrollo: that the construction of a second rail line to Trujillo was of the greatest importance to commerce, and that the country’s system of tariffs and customs was a major obstacle to commercial expansion. The first lesson was put into action immediately: a new
sociedad anonima was established to finance and organize construction of a new line to Trujillo, among its 72 members all of the financiers of the first railway, some dozen Senators and Congressmen, and Vice President José Coronado Chavez. The reform of the customs system was more controversial and a major issue in the Senate’s deliberations to elect President Ferrera’s successor.
Pictured: The first locomotive in Honduras, build and assembled in Britain and shipped to Omoa in 1848
Even under the authoritarian 1842 Constitution, the President of Honduras did not rule for life but was restricted to two four-year terms. This second term came to an end in December 1848, when Francisco Ferrera peacefully relinquished executive power to his cabinet. The Cabinet, minus President Ferrera, would govern until the Senate selected a new president. Much of the deliberation in the Senate, in which sat many of the richest men of Honduras, was over how the new president should respond to
La Sociedad por desarrollo’s call for lower tariffs and a reform of the customs system. Those senators invested in the railroad, and many others who stood to benefit from a railway being built near their haciendas, supported the elevation of Coronado Chavez to the presidency. Other senators, particularly those with interests in protected industries, argued against these reforms and supported the old-time conservative Senator José Lino Matute for the presidency.
The contest between Chavez and Matute was decided by the intervention of the former president. Seeking to retain influence even when his term had ended, Francisco Ferrera urged senators loyal to him to support his former vice president. Ferrera’s endorsement swayed the balance and Coronado Chavez was declared the second President of Honduras in February 1849. Presumably as part of a deal made for assistance in being elected, Francisco Ferrera joined President Chavez’s cabinet as Minister of War. Over the next several years, Coronado Chavez gradually and cautiously lowered tariffs and removed customs duties. Done piecemeal to avoid galvanizing resistance, these small changes had an effect over time; trade was significantly less onerous in 1852 than it had been in 1848.
Pictured: Coronado Chavez, the second President of Honduras
The 1840s closed with the final aftershock of the Mexican-American War. Disgraced by his defeat, Santa Anna himself had left for exile on Cuba in 1846, leaving behind a series of tottering governments trying to keep alive his dream of strong rule from the center, a premise severely discredited by the loss of the northern territories. In March 1849, after four years of agitation and the increasingly bold and open organization of liberal opposition, the edifice of the Centralist Republic of Mexico came tumbling down. From a base in Guerrero, a group of Mexican liberals issued a call to overthrow the government and restore the 1821 Constitution. This call was answered across Mexico, including in the recently annexed cities of Tapachula and Quetzaltenango. Unlike in previous regional revolts that could be picked off one by one, in 1849 the liberals were too strong and in too many places to be crushed by the beleaguered and demoralized Mexican army. Even before the capital was taken, the liberal revolutionaries convened an assembly in Santiago de Querétaro to write a new Mexican constitution, one that protected more liberties and enshrined the sovereignty of the states even more securely than had the 1821 Constitution. Much to the chagrin of Central America, prominent Centroamerican liberals, such as Mariano Gálvez, were participants in this convention and loudly extolled the virtues of an ideology that had been smothered in their native land. From the perspective of Honduras, the reports coming in from Mexico confirmed worries that the lands of Los Altos were forever lost to Mexico and stoked new fears that an empowered liberalism directed from Mexico might threaten conservative rule across Central America.
.svg.png "800px-Political_divisions_of_Mexico_1836-1845_(location_map_scheme).svg.png")
