GRAN COLOMBIA 239
found him guilty of instigating the revolutionary
movements, and sentenced him to death.
By 1854 popular unrest, slave revolts, and pas-
sive resistance to slavery had dramatically raised
its cost, which, combined with the downturn in
global coffee prices, threatened planters’ profi ts.
Conservatives thereafter sought to assist their al-
lies by supporting congressional passage of several
laws designed to give relief to distressed planters.
One of these laws abolished slavery in Venezuela,
guaranteeing compensation to slave owners, some
of whom already were voluntarily freeing their
slaves to avoid paying their support.
In effect, abolition aimed to end an economi-
cally costly and socially destabilizing popular
movement, but emancipation brought little change
in the lives of most freedmen. In the absence of a
modern factory system to provide alternative em-
ployment or any program for distributing land to
them, most were doomed to remain on their former
owners’ estates as tenants burdened with heavy
obligations. Others earned scanty wages paid in
vales (tokens) redeemable only for goods purchased
in the estate store (tienda de raya) at infl ated mo-
nopoly prices.
Hard times continued in the late 1850s. De-
pressed coffee prices and elite fears of a social ex-
plosion persuaded Conservatives and Liberals to
join forces momentarily, but the coalition soon
fell apart. A group of extreme Conservatives seized
power, installed a repressive government, and
imprisoned or deported many Liberals, who re-
sponded with an uprising that began the Federal
War (1858–1863).
The term federal as used here had different
meanings for the Liberal elite and its rank-and-
fi le followers, most of whom were pardos or blacks
who rallied to the federalist battle cry “Death to the
whites.” But whereas Conservatives denounced
the Liberal elite for fomenting a “race war,” the
“colored population” saw it as a war of the poor
majority against the wealthy, propertied elite.
After their victory, Liberal leaders gave the coun-
try a new constitution (1864) with many reforms,
including universal male suffrage and increased
autonomy for the twenty states. But without sub-
stantive social reform, these rights were virtually
meaningless. Federalism under these conditions
simply meant the continued supremacy of the local
caudillo, who often was a great landowner.
However, for peasants and artisans who rose
in spontaneous revolt against the Conservative re-
gime and rallied to the Liberal leadership’s slogan
of federalism, the term had a different meaning.
Their vague hopes were expressed in a manifesto
by Ezequiel Zamora, a veteran guerrilla fi ghter
who supported the occupation of large estates by
their former peons and tenants, creation of federal
states, and election of local governments by the
citizenry. Zamora’s death by an assassin’s bullet in
1860 cut short the life of a leader who represented
a genuinely democratic, social revolutionary ten-
dency in the Federal War.
Fearing the growing power of peasant revolu-
tionists, Conservatives and Liberals agreed to a ne-
gotiated peace. The 1863 Treaty of Coche ended the
war, which had cost some fi fty thousand lives and
infl icted immense damage on the economy. Many
haciendas had been destroyed, and the cattle herds
of the llanos had virtually disappeared because of
wartime depredations and neglect. Like the War of
Independence, the Federal War produced limited
social changes. The old Conservative oligarchy
disintegrated, and victorious Liberal military offi -
cers, some of plebeian background, occupied their
estates. But for the revolutionary rank-and-fi le, the
war’s end forced them to surrender the parcels of
land they had occupied and return as peons to the
great estates.SANTANDER AND THE BIRTH OF A TWO-PARTY
SYSTEM IN COLOMBIA, 1830–1850
Following the secession of Venezuela and Ecuador
from Gran Colombia in 1830, the remaining terri-
tory went its separate way under the name of the
Republic of New Granada (present-day Colombia
plus Panama). Led by Bolívar’s old ally Francisco
de Paula Santander, New Granada adopted a con-
stitution that provided for a president elected for
four years, a bicameral Congress, and provincial
legislatures. The constitution granted suffrage to