After Gran Colombia collapsed in 1831, the Republic of New Granada tried to govern from Bogota using the centralist logic of its 1843 constitution. It did not work. The provinces of Panama - Azuero, Chiriqui, Panama itself, and Veraguas - had been demanding autonomy almost from the beginning, their concerns so distinct from Bogota's that they might as well have been a different country. When the Constitution of 1853 loosened the rules to allow internal federal states, Panama was first. On February 27, 1855, the State of Panama was created within the Republic. Antioquia followed on June 11, 1856, carving its mountain department into a federal entity. Santander came next, on May 13, 1857, combining Socorro and Pamplona. The Law of June 15, 1857, sealed the remaining pieces: federal states of Bolivar, Boyaca, Cauca, Cundinamarca, and Magdalena. The 1858 Constitution gathered them all into something new - the Confederation Granadine - with Bogota as its federal capital and conservative president Mariano Ospina Rodriguez at its head.

The 1858 constitution promised federalism. Each state could write its own constitution, elect its own president, run its own legislature. The vice presidency was abolished and replaced with a Congress-appointed dignitary. Senators served four-year terms. Representatives served two. On paper, it was a decentralized republic. In practice, Ospina Rodriguez governed as a centralist in federalist clothing. Two laws passed in 1859 made the contradiction impossible to ignore. On April 8, Congress gave the president the power to remove duly elected state governors. On May 10, it authorized him to create new administrative departments within states and direct the use of their resources. The liberals read these laws for what they were - a conservative grab at federal power - and began organizing resistance.

The resistance had a leader: Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera, a former president of New Granada, a powerful politician, and a man with his own agenda. Many liberal state officials did not fully trust him. They backed him anyway, because they saw no other way to push back. On May 8, 1860, Mosquera broke relations with the federal government, declared himself Supreme Director of War, and proclaimed a separate Sovereign State of Cauca. The civil war had begun. Ospina Rodriguez's federal forces attacked the liberal government of Eustorgio Salgar in Santander, capturing Salgar and other leaders including the future president Aquileo Parra. Fighting spread to Bolivar, Antioquia, Magdalena, and Cauca. On June 18, 1861, Mosquera did what no one had expected - he marched on Bogota and took the capital. He declared himself president of a provisional government. He arrested Ospina Rodriguez, Ospina's brother, and Bartolome Calvo, the newly elected constitutional president of the Confederation. The war ended in 1862 with the last conservative leaders dead or in exile.

Mosquera's relationship with the Catholic Church was something like war. During his first presidency in 1849, he had confiscated religious properties, expelled the Archbishop of Bogota, closed convents and monasteries, and banished the Jesuits. Pope Pius IX personally condemned the Colombian government. After the Confederation was established in 1858, Ospina Rodriguez invited the Jesuits back, and religious tensions briefly eased. When Mosquera took Bogota in 1861, the Jesuits had 72 hours to leave the country - he blamed them for backing the conservative insurgency. His anticlerical laws from 1861 onward were harsher than the 1849 versions: the Tuition of Cults required government licenses for clergy to preach, and the Desamortizacion law confiscated all religious community property - schools, hospitals, monasteries, churches, farmland - for sale to the highest bidder. Mosquera's stated goal was to fund the war effort and, with his slogan *Land for those who work it*, redistribute to farmers. The money mostly went to speculators. The farmers mostly did not benefit.

Part of what made the Confederation fragile was that it was barely a single country. The geography divided it into four effectively separate regions. The Oriental Region - Cundinamarca, Tolima, Boyaca, Santander - was the political core around Bogota. The Cauca Region included Choco and the southern Andes. Antioquia was a third region unto itself, its coffee-and-gold economy orienting toward Medellin rather than anywhere else. The Atlantic Region - the Caribbean coast - connected to the interior mostly by the Magdalena River, and even that was an arduous journey. Between these regions, roads were bad, bandits were common, and goods moved slowly if they moved at all. Each region behaved like a minor country with its own economy and its own political leaders. The federation was a paper unity over a geographic reality that had never been stitched together at all.

On May 8, 1863, liberals who had come to fear Mosquera's power as much as they had opposed Ospina's gathered at Rionegro in Antioquia and wrote a new constitution. It abolished the Granadine Confederation. It created the United States of Colombia, consisting of nine sovereign states. It limited the presidency to a single two-year term - deliberately designed to keep Mosquera from holding power too long. The Rionegro Constitution has been called the most radically federalist document in Latin American history. It protected free trade, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms. It forbade the national government from maintaining a standing army. It placed state sovereignty above federal authority on almost every question. It lasted 23 years, until the Constitution of 1886 reversed almost all of it. But for the five years between 1858 and 1863, the country had tried the middle path - a conservative federation - and the middle path had broken apart in civil war. The United States of Colombia was the opposite experiment, and the Republic of Colombia that followed was the synthesis. Each version tried to solve the same problem: how to govern a country whose geography actively resists being governed as one.