Eight decades inside four successive Colombian constitutions (1821–1903)
Panama entered the post-independence era not as an independent state but as the Isthmian Department of a new country whose name was at the time Republic of Colombia (Gran Colombia to historians). Gran Colombia, founded at the Congress of Angostura (1819) and consolidated at the Congress of Cúcuta (1821), was Bolívar’s design for a single South American republic spanning present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. It was constituted as a unitary centralist state, not a federation, and the dispute between supporters of centralism and federalism would eventually tear it apart [2].
Gran Colombia fractured in 1830. Venezuela seceded first; Ecuador and the remnant Colombia followed, and the federation was formally abolished in 1831, leaving Panama as the Pacific-facing department of a smaller Republic of New Granada [2]. The union survived under a succession of names and constitutions: the Republic of New Granada gave way to a federalist arrangement brought in under the constitution of 1858, and then to the United States of Colombia (1863–1886), under whose 1863 federalist constitution Panama and the other constituent states gained almost complete autonomy over their own administration, before the Republic of Colombia succeeded it in 1886 [4].
The cycle of centralist reforms and decentralist counter-reforms played out across this period. Each reform reorganised Panama’s relationship with Bogotá: as a department, as a state, as a federal territory, as a sovereign state, and back to a department. Through every iteration, the underlying structural problem, that Bogotá’s political gravity faced the Caribbean-Andean axis and Panama’s political gravity ran the opposite direction, persisted.
The Tomás de Herrera secession (1840–1841)
The first serious Isthmian secession movement came in 1830–1831, while Gran Colombia was still formally intact but already fracturing. The movement lost momentum when Bolívar resigned the presidency and left for the Caribbean. A more serious attempt followed in 1840–41: during a Colombian civil war, the isthmus under General Tomás de Herrera declared a short-lived independent republic, the Estado Libre del Istmo (Free State of the Isthmus), in November 1840. After a 13-month independence the Isthmus negotiated its reintegration into New Granada, with Bogotá unwilling to lose control of the transcontinental transit corridor [1].
The 1840-41 secession illustrates the structural complaint the Isthmus had against Bogotá. The transit economy (cargo, passengers, contraband) generated customs revenues whose collection and disbursement Bogotá controlled, and Bogotá allocated the revenues toward the central-budget civil wars (the 1840s through the 1860s saw a near-continuous series of Colombian civil wars) rather than toward infrastructure the Isthmus needed: a road or rail across Panama to compete with the transcontinental steam packet network.
The Panama crisis of 1885 and the United States Navy
The most serious Isthmian secession of the nineteenth century was the Panama crisis of 1885. The province, which had seen frequent rebellious flare-ups since the Herrera episode, was drawn into one of Colombia’s recurrent civil conflicts, and the resulting instability on the Isthmus drew in foreign intervention: a United States Navy presence off the Isthmus and a reaction by the Chilean Navy on the Pacific side, both intended to keep the transit corridor open [1].
The 1885 crisis is the closest that nineteenth-century Panama came to outright secession before 1903. Its underlying causes (Bogotá’s neglect of the Isthmus, the local elite’s frustration at customs-revenue misallocation, and the temptation for foreign navies to intervene) would all return in 1903, when the Colombian senate voted against the Hay–Herrán Treaty (which would have authorised US construction of a canal) and the United States threw its weight behind an Isthmian secession movement it had been quietly positioning for two years.
Why Panama stayed Colombian (1821–1903)
The Isthmus stayed Colombian for eighty-two years (1821–1903) for three structural reasons:
- No practical overland connection to Bogotá. Panama was only tenuously connected to the rest of the country, owing to its remoteness from the government in Bogotá and the absence of a practical overland route across the Andes and the Chocó. Until such a route existed, the only way to move people, troops, or instructions between Bogotá and the Isthmus was by sea, and any political reform that required sustained in-person attention from the capital was, in practice, slow and expensive [1].
- Transcontinental trade dependence. Panama’s economy depended on the flow of cargo and passengers between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and that flow was an asset the Colombian central government was reluctant to give up. Every Isthmian secession movement was met with the threat of customs revision; every successful reintegration was followed by some concession.
- Spanish-American-power regional politics. The United States became an interested party only after the discovery of gold in California in 1848; the United Kingdom had long had commercial interests in Jamaica and the Central American coast; and France began canal-promotion activity in the late 1870s. Colombia’s central government was, for most of this period, unwilling to surrender the Isthmus when it could not defend itself against any major regional power.
The political equilibrium broke down definitively in 1903, when the Colombian senate’s rejection of the Hay–Herrán Treaty gave the United States a reason to support an Isthmian secession it had been exploring since 1902. The events of 3 November 1903, covered in Independence from Colombia (1903), ended the eighty-two-year Colombian arrangement. By the time the Republic of Panama was established, the pattern of Bogotá’s neglect, the Isthmus’s complaint, and the United States’ interest had produced three different secession movements over the nineteenth century, and the only one that succeeded was the one with American backing.
The Panama Railroad and the gold-rush transit economy
The 1849 charter of the Panama Rail Road Company by the State of New York, and the 1855 completion of the transisthmian railroad (covered in The Transcontinental Railway (1850–1855)), transformed the Isthmus’s economic relationship with the United States and, by extension, with Bogotá. The railroad made the Isthmus a much more reliable transit corridor for U.S. commerce crossing between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and turned the Panama Railroad Company into the dominant single business on the Isthmus [3]. The railroad was completed across the Isthmus in 1855, in the thick of the California gold-rush traffic that had drawn American fortune-seekers across Panama since 1848 [4].
The gold-rush transit economy, which the railroad formalised, gave the Isthmus’s transit merchants and the Panama Railroad Company a strong interest in remaining tied to the United States rather than to Bogotá. The merchants’ interest was the practical basis for the 1840-41 Herrera secession (the merchants funded it) and for the eventual 1903 declaration (the merchants helped fund Bunau-Varilla’s lobbying). The transit economy also gave the United States a continuing interest in the Isthmus’s status. The U.S. government did not need to authorise the canal concession to be interested in the transit corridor, because the railroad and the transit merchants were already a U.S. commercial interest. The United States’ active participation in isthmian affairs was formalised in the 1846 Mallarino–Bidlack Treaty with New Granada, which granted the U.S. right of way across the Isthmus; the first U.S. troop intervention followed the 1856 Watermelon Riot in Panama City, when Washington sent forces to protect the railroad stations, the first of many such U.S. military interventions on the Isthmus [4].
The Colombian civil wars’ effect on the Isthmus (1885–1903)
Colombia’s nineteenth-century civil wars had recurrent effects on the Isthmus. The civil wars repeatedly brought Bogotá’s central-government authority to the Isthmus in the form of military conscription, wartime customs levies, and forced loans, all of which the Isthmus’s merchants and landowners resented. The 1885 crisis, the most serious Isthmian secession of the nineteenth century, broke out against this background of recurring civil conflict, which had drained the central government’s ability to keep order on the Isthmus and had left the U.S. Navy and the Chilean Navy as the only credible armed forces in the region. The final and most destructive of these conflicts was the Thousand Days’ War, which was still raging when, in 1902, the United States moved to take up the abandoned French canal works, Colombia being in the midst of the war at the time [4].
The Thousand Days’ War ended just over a year before the 3 November 1903 declaration. The war had left the Colombian central government cash-strapped, militarily exhausted, and politically divided: a situation that made it impossible for Bogotá to put down the 1903 Isthmian declaration with the speed and force that would have been required, and that gave the U.S. Navy the operational freedom to support the secession by blocking the Colombian naval response. The connection between the Thousand Days’ War and the 1903 declaration is one of the underlying structural facts of the separation, even though the proximate cause was the Colombian senate’s rejection of the Hay–Herrán Treaty [4].
Where to take this next
For the moment the Colombian arrangement finally collapsed, see Independence from Colombia (1903). For the events that immediately preceded it and set the stage for US involvement, see Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. For the broader Colombian position on the Isthmus during the early independence decades, see Independence from Spain (1821). For the practical effect of transit trade on Isthmian fortunes, see California Gold Rush and Panama Transit.
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