Melchor Ocampo

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For other uses, including places named in Melchor Ocampo's honour, see Ocampo.
Melchor Ocampo

Melchor Ocampo (5 January 1814 – 3 June 1861) was a Mexican lawyer, scientist, and politician. A

Michoacán de Ocampo
in his honor.

Early life

Melchor Ocampo was perhaps orphaned and left abandoned at the gate of a hacienda of a wealthy woman, Doña Francisca Xaviera Tapia, who raised him as her own and bequeathed him her property.[3][4]

Ocampo studied at the Roman Catholic seminary in

anticlerical ideas of the Enlightenment following the French Revolution. He returned after a year to Michoacán to work his lands, practice law, investigate the region's flora and fauna, and study the local indigenous languages.[6] More importantly, he entered politics in Michoacan, in opposition to Antonio López de Santa Anna
.

Politics

Ocampo was elected to the

U.S. Invasion (1846–48). He was an activist governor, reorganizing the state treasury, building roads, proposing the founding of schools, and improving the conditions of the national guard in Michoacán. During the Mexican–American War he recruited troops without conscription or increased taxes, but solely by persuasion.[7] Ocampo urged that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican–American War be rejected.[8] As governor, Ocampo appointed Santos Degollado the rector of the Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, where revolutionary Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had served prior to his exile to the village of Dolores. Degollado later was murdered seeking the murderers of his patron Ocampo.[9]

Ocampo's beliefs were fiercely

Constitution of 1857.[11]

He began a published polemical debate with a priest or a group of priests in Michoacán about the reform of clerical fees. Historian

separation of Church and State.[14]

Juárez Administration (1858–1861)

During Benito Juárez's administration during the civil war between liberals and conservatives, known as the

Lerdo Law, which called for the sale of property of corporations, meaning the Roman Catholic Church and indigenous communities which was aimed at undermining the economic power of the church and creating a yeoman peasantry of small landowners. Ocampo charged that the law was counterproductive, strengthening the power of the church and preventing the acquisition of land by those of modest means.[15]

The most controversial act of Ocampo was negotiating the

U.S. Senate rejected it on 31 May 1860 on account of the impending Civil War in the United States.[16] Ocampo traveled to the U.S. to ascertain if that it would support the liberal cause if they were unable to defeat the conservatives on the battlefield. The treaty exacerbated the rancor between Ocampo and Miguel Lerdo de Tejada and Ocampo resigned from Juárez's cabinet in January 1860,.[17] Juárez rejected the treaty in November 1860.[18]

With the defeat of the conservatives in the War of the Reform in 1860, Mexican presidential elections were held. Ocampo might have been a candidate, but backed Juárez against his rival Miguel Lerdo. "Juárez may have needed the such help, for even though president, he was viewed by many as second rate in comparison to Ocampo and Lerdo."[19] By 1861, both Miguel Lerdo and Ocampo were both dead, with Ocampo murdered by conservative guerrillas after he returned to civilian life.

Death

Some months after retiring from public service, Melchor Ocampo was abducted from his hacienda in Michoacán by conservative guerrillas on orders from either

himself ambushed, captured, and executed by the conservatives.[21] Ocampo's murder was a scandal, and Juárez's government took "more extreme measures" to repress the conservatives.[22] The remains of Ocampo are interred in the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres
in Mexico City.

Legacy

Monument in Veracruz

He participated in writing new Civil Laws, that in the end would give sense to liberal politics and would end up amending the Constitution from 1857, in order to make civil and political matters independent from ecclesiastic ones. On July 23, 1859, D. Benito Juarez, interim president then, issues, at the Port of Veracruz, the "Civil Matrimony Law", which has 31 Articles. In Article 15, as a way of ceremonial formalization, the famous epistle, attributed to Melchor Ocampo, was included; and which reads as follows:

I declare on behalf of Law and Society that you are united in legitimate matrimony with all rights and privileges granted by law, and with the obligations imposed; and also declare:
“That this is the only moral mean to establish a family, to conserve the human species and to make up for the imperfections of an individual who cannot provide for itself to reach mankind’s perfection. This doesn’t exist in a single person, but in spousal duality. Those married must be and will be sacred to each other, even more than what they are to each self.
The man, whose main sexual attributes are courage and strength, must give and shall always give the woman protection, food, and direction, treating her always as the most delicate, sensible, and finest part of himself, and with magnanimity and generous benevolence that a strong being owes the weak, essentially when this weak delivers to himself, and also when Society has entrusted him.
The woman, whose main attributes are self denial, beauty, compassion, shrewdness and tenderness, must give and shall always give the husband obedience, pleasantness, assistance, comfort, and advice; treating him always with the veneration owed to the person supporting and defending us, and with the delicacy of whom doesn’t want to exasperate the abrupt, irritable and harsh part of him, which is of his nature.
One to another are owed and shall always give respect, deference, fidelity, trust, and tenderness; both will take care of what they were expecting from each other by joining together, and that this will not be contradicted by this union. That both shall be prudent and attenuate their faults. You shall never say insults to each other, because insults among the married dishonors the one saying them, and proves the lack of judgment or common sense of election; and much less shall physically mistreat each other, because it is vile and cowardly to use force.
Both shall prepare with the study, friendly and mutual correction of their defects, up to the supreme judgeship of being family parents, in order to when both become that, your children can find in you good example and good conduct to serve as role models. The doctrine that you inspire in these tender and loved bonds of affection will make your luck to prosper or to be adverse; and the happiness or misfortune of your children will be the parent’s reward or punishment, fortune or sadness.
Society blesses, believes, and praises good parents, for the great good they do to it, for giving them good and courteous citizens; and the same properly censures and despises those, that by abandonment, or misgiving affection, or by setting bad example, corrupt the sacred depot that nature trusted them with, for granting them such children.
And last, when Society sees that such said persons did not deserve to be elevated to have the honor to become parents, but merely should have lived subject to guardianship, incapable of conducting themselves with dignity, grieves for establishing with its authority the union of a man and a woman who have failed to be free and to conduct themselves towards good.”

(Translated by: TRANSFLO)

This is Ocampo's best-known legacy from 1859, which is known as the epistle on marriage, still read out nowadays by judges presiding over civil weddings in many states.

Epístola de Melchor Ocampo (in Spanish)

See also

Further reading

  • Romero Flores, Jesús. Don Melchor Ocampo, el filósofo de la Reforma, 2nd edition. (1953)
  • Scholes, Walter V. Mexican Politics during the Juárez Regime. Columbia: University of Missouri Press 1957.
  • Sinkin, Richard N. The Mexican Reform, 1855–1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-Building. Austin: University of Texas Press 1979.
  • Valadés, José C. Don Melchor Ocampo, reformador de México (1954)

References

  1. ^ Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, New York: HarperCollins 1997, p. 153.
  2. ^ Jan Bazant, "From Independence to the Liberal Republic, 1821–1867" in Mexico Since Independence, Leslie Bethell, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press 1991, p. 41.
  3. ^ Krauze, Enrique (1997). Mexico: A Biography of Power. New York: HarperCollins. pp. 152–156.
  4. ^ D.F. Stevens, "Melchor Ocampo" in Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, vol. 4, p. 213. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1996.
  5. ^ Vicente Quirarte, "Melchor Ocampo" in Encyclopedia of Mexico, vol. 2, p. 1034. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997.
  6. ^ Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, p. 153.
  7. ^ Quirarte, "Melchor Ocampo", p. 1034.
  8. ^ D.F. Stevens, "Melchor Ocampo" in Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, vol. 4, p. 214. Charles Scribner's Sons 1996.
  9. ^ D.F. Stevens, "Santos Degollado" in Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, vol. 2, pp. 363–64.
  10. ^ quoted in Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, pp. 153–54, from Melchor Ocampo, Obras completas, vol. 1, pp. 3–4.
  11. ^ Quirarte, "Melchor Ocampo", p. 1034.
  12. ^ Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, p. 153.
  13. ^ Stevens, "Melchor Ocampo" p. 214.
  14. ^ Stevens, "Melchor Ocampo," p. 214.
  15. ^ Stevens, "Melchor Ocampo," p. 214.
  16. ^ Vicente Quirarte, "Melchor Ocampo" in Encyclopedia of Mexico, vol. 2, p. 1034. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997.
  17. ^ Stevens, "Melchor Ocampo," p. 214.
  18. ^ Hamnett, Juárez, p. 255.
  19. ^ Bazant, "From Independence to the Liberal Republic," p. 41.
  20. ^ Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power. New York: Harper Collins 1997, p. 171.
  21. ^ Stevens, "Santos Degollado", p. 364.
  22. ^ Stevens, "Melchor Ocampo," p. 214.

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