choosing. Though Iturbide did not last long, this pattern of
events was to be repeated time and time again in
nineteenth-century Mexico.
The Constitution of the United States did not create a
democracy by modern standards. Who could vote in
elections was left up to the individual states to determine.
While northern states quickly conceded the vote to all white
men irrespective of how much income they earned or
property they owned, southern states did so only gradually.
No state enfranchised women or slaves, and as property
and wealth restrictions were lifted on white men, racial
franchises explicitly disenfranchising black men were
introduced. Slavery, of course, was deemed constitutional
when the Constitution of the United States was written in
Philadelphia, and the most sordid negotiation concerned
the division of the seats in the House of Representatives
among the states. These were to be allocated on the basis
of a state’s population, but the congressional
representatives of southern states then demanded that the
slaves be counted. Northerners objected. The compromise
was that in apportioning seats to the House of
Representatives, a slave would count as three-fifths of a
free person. The conflicts between the North and South of
the United States were repressed during the constitutional
process as the three-fifths rule and other compromises
were worked out. New fixes were added over time—for
example, the Missouri Compromise, an arrangement
where one proslavery and one antislavery state were
always added to the union together, to keep the balance in
the Senate between those for and those against slavery.
These fudges kept the political institutions of the United
States working peacefully until the Civil War finally resolved
the conflicts in favor of the North.
The Civil War was bloody and destructive. But both
before and after it there were ample economic
opportunities for a large fraction of the population,
especially in the northern and western United States. The
situation in Mexico was very different. If the United States
experienced five years of political instability between 1860
and 1865, Mexico experienced almost nonstop instability
for the first fifty years of independence. This is best
illustrated via the career of Antonio López de Santa Ana.