Melchor Ocampo (4 January 1814 – 3 June 1861) was a Mexican lawyer, scientist, and politician. A zambo and a radical liberal, he was fiercely anticlerical, perhaps an atheist, and his early writings against the Catholic Church in Mexico gained him a reputation as a leading liberal thinker. Ocampo has been considered the heir to José María Luis Mora, the premier liberal intellectual of the early republic. He served in the administration of Benito Juárez and negotiated a controversial agreement with the United States, the McLane–Ocampo Treaty. The Mexican state where his hometown of Maravatío is located was later renamed Michoacán de Ocampo in his honor.
Early life Jose Telesforo Melchor was born in the Hacienda de Pateo, Contepec, Michoacán to José María Morquecho, an indian, and María Bernarda, mulata. 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. Melchor adopted Francisca Xaviera Tapia's husband surname, Don Ignacio Alas Ocampo. Ocampo studied at the Roman Catholic seminary in Morelia, Michoacán, and later law at the Colegio Seminario de México (Universidad Pontificia). He began working in a law office in 1833. For unknown reasons, he left the practice of law and returned to his hacienda, perhaps because of its imminent bankruptcy. In 1840, he traveled to France, where he was influenced by liberal and 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. More importantly, he entered politics in Michoacán, in opposition to Antonio López de Santa Anna.
Politics Ocampo was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1842. In 1844, Manuel Gómez Pedraza became president of Mexico and appointed Ocampo Governor of Michoacán, during the Mexican–American War (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. Ocampo urged that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican–American War be rejected. 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. Ocampo's beliefs were fiercely anticlerical and challenged the power of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico. He viewed the church as sucking wealth from indigenous people with high clerical fees for ecclesiastical services, and impeding progress. He pointed to high clerical fees for ecclesiastical services and the proliferation of fiestas, which encouraged idleness and drunkenness. These provided income for local priests as well as further impoverishing indigenous people who bought candles, incense, and fireworks. Clerical fees for Christian sacraments meant that birth, marriage, and death generated income for priests who charged for baptism, holy matrimony, and burial. A vivid story he related about this practice concerned a peasant who could not afford the burial fees for his son and asked for a free burial. "The priest refused, contending that 'this was what he lived on.' The poor man had asked, 'Sir, what shall I do with my dead son?' and the priest had answered him, 'Salt him and eat him'." The church had the responsibility for education in Mexico and like other aspects of the church's role in Mexico, access was based on the ability to pay. Ocampo advocated free, public, secular education in Mexico. He believed that education had to be grounded on the basic postulates of liberalism, democracy, respect and tolerance for different beliefs, equality before the law, the elimination of privileges, and the supremacy of civil authority. Many of these ideas were later codified in the Reform laws and the liberal Constitution of 1857. He began a published polemical debate with a priest or a group of priests in Michoacán about the reform of clerical fees. Historian Enrique Krauze suggests that the priest was probably Clemente de Jesús Mungía, the bishop of Morelia, the state capital. Ocampo was subsequently deposed as governor and was forced to flee the country by President Antonio López de Santa Anna, taking refuge first in Cuba and then in the U.S. city of New Orleans, Louisiana. In New Orleans he met a group of fellow liberal exiles, including Benito Juárez. Ocampo began to publish pamphlets to promote political change in Mexico. He returned to Mexico in 1855 following the successful ouster of Santa Anna under the Plan of Ayutla. The plan had called for the overthrow of Santa Anna and the installation of the liberal general Juan Álvarez as president of Mexico. With Álvarez's victory, Ocampo served briefly in his cabinet as foreign minister, but when Álvarez stepped down and Ignacio Comonfort became president, Ocampo returned to Michoacán. He was then elected to the Constitutional Convention that drafted the liberal Constitution of 1857, which included strong provisions for the separation of church and state.
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