GRAN COLOMBIA 241
men to create a cross-class, multiracial coalition
dedicated to immediate emancipation. Some black
freedmen even scandalized Liberals and Conserva-
tives by their insistence upon a “radical Catholic
utopia, anarchist and egalitarian.” Organized into
“Democratic Societies,” this mass movement re-
lentlessly pressured the Liberal government of José
Hilario López to abolish slavery, which he fi nally
did in 1851, but not before quieting a slaveholders’
rebellion by guaranteeing them full compensation.
The measure, freeing about twenty-fi ve thousand
individuals, had its most severe impact on gold-
mining areas, which generally relied heavily on
slave labor.
But the Liberals always equated emancipa-
tion with mestizaje, a belief in “one God, one race,
one tongue” that required the sacrifi ce of African
and indigenous ethnic identities and the invention
of a unifi ed national Hispanic culture. This led to
the sacrifi ce of indigenous and African communal
lands and their autonomous political traditions.
Thereafter, the Liberals intensifi ed the attack on
resguardos (native communal lands) and land
“liberated” by forced division that was often passed
into the hands of neighboring hacendados by legal
or illegal means. Natives made landless by such
means often became peons who were required to
serve the hacendados.
In their effort to fashion a unifi ed “mestizo”
national identity, Liberals sought to distinguish
themselves clearly from their Conservative rivals.
Until the late 1840s, the difference between the
ideologies and programs of the two groups was far
from absolute. Actually, both represented upper-
class interests but accepted the formal democracy
of representative, republican government; both
had faith in social and technological progress, be-
lieved in the freedoms of speech and of the press as
well as other civil liberties, and in economic policy
accepted laissez-faire and liberal economics. Nei-
ther party cared about the agrarian problem or
other problems of the rural and urban masses. The
only genuine issue separating them was the rela-
tion between church and state and the church’s
role in education. The emergent Liberal Party was
distinctly anticlerical, regarding the church as hos-
tile to progress; they did, however, favor freedom of
worship and separation of church and state. The
nascent Conservative Party endorsed religious tol-
eration but favored cooperation between church
and state, believing that religion promoted moral-
ity and social peace.
In the struggle over emancipation, however,
the ideological gap between Liberals and Conserva-
tives widened, and new political factions emerged:
Gólgotas, urban artisans, and Draconianos, military
from the lower offi cer ranks, who would later align
themselves with the artisans. Shaped by the rapid
expansion of tobacco cultivation, the beginnings of
the coffee cycle, and a resulting growth of foreign
and domestic trade, the Gólgotas were the sons of
a merchant class whose population increased to 2
million by 1850. Well educated and infl uenced by
antislavery agitation, French romanticism, utopian
socialism, and the Revolution of 1848 in France,
they developed a peculiar sentimental brand of lib-
eralism that was based on a romantic interpreta-
tion of Christianity in which Christ, described as
the “Martyr of Golgotha,” appeared as a forerun-
ner of nineteenth-century secular reformism. This
ideology’s practical essence was its demand for the
abolition of slavery, the ecclesiastical and military
fuero, compulsory tithing, and all restraints on free
enterprise.
Urban artisans, whose numbers also had in-
creased in the preceding decade, faced growing
competition from foreign imported manufactures,
which caused serious unemployment. Attribut-
ing their distress to lower tariffs that benefi ted
Conservative slave owners and their plantations,
these artisans readily identifi ed with the language
of freedom and equality that shaped the political
struggle against slavery. In 1847 they created a
network of “Democratic Societies,” beginning with
the Democratic Society of Bogotá, which had al-
most four thousand members. These mutual-aid
societies carried on educational and philanthropic
activities, but they also served as important politi-
cal vehicles for the Liberal leadership, enabling the
new merchant elite, with large support from re-
gional landed oligarchies, to seek the triumph of
laissez-faire and modernity.
Clearly, struggles against slavery provided the
historical context within which Brazil, Cuba, Peru,