A generic portrait on an old Latin American stamp. Why not try to figure out who he was. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The stamp todays was printed almost 40 years after the liberal claudillo on the stamp lost his last battle, and the war to unite independent Central America as a progressive single country. While it is not Honduras’s first stamp, it is it’s first professional issue printed in the USA. Was it the country pining for what might have been?
Todays stamp is issue A4, a 1 Centavo (new currency that year so not yet debased) stamp issued by the Republic of Honduras in July of 1878. It was a 7 stamp issue in various denominations displaying Francisco Morazán, who at various times served as President of his native Honduras, El Salvador, and the then Central American Federation. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents mint. There was a reprint of the stamp in 1889 by a different New York printer that used softer paper and a yellower gum. This version is worth $10 mint.
Francisco Morazán was born in Honduras in what was then the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala, New Spain in 1798. He was of moderately well off Creole merchant background with a father from Corsica. He showed to be fairly intelligent and his parents found then rare educational opportunities for him with the Catholic church. Through the libraries of friendly friars, he became literate in the law and the ideals of the French revolution. In the last days of colonial rule he acted as a public defender in the Spanish courts. He married a rich widow and fathered a daughter by her and an illegitimate son via the daughter of a Nicaraguan politician. The money and the contacts placed him well when independence came.
In the early years of independence there was much debate over how to proceed. Most favored a single Central American country but conservatives and liberals differed. Conservatives favored by the Church, the landowning class and many Indian tribes featured centralized power under a strong leader using the institutions of the old colonial administration. The Liberals wanted a Federal system that delegated more power to the states modeled on the USA.
The Liberal system was agreed to but things quickly broke down when the first President tried to dissolve the legislature and start a new one more agreeable to him. Honduras was central to the rebellion against this and Morazán fought with the uprisers. He proved to be accomplished militarily in the skirmishes that followed and was made President of Honduras. He quickly left that job to fight on in El Salvador and then further success brought him into power over the entire Federation in Guatemala.
In power he enacted harsh treatment of the Church, taking away from them educational assets, making marriage civil and ended government support for collecting tithes. He also opened the door wide to new immigrants who were much whiter then the people who were mainly Indian. He lost out on a second term election but then his conservative rival died before he could take office so Morazán ended up getting a second term anyway.
There was much dissatisfaction among the majority Indians. Morazán started jury trials that featured white juries judging mainly Indian defendants. There was then a cholera epidemic that killed many Indians. The Indians came to believe that Morazán was poisoning the water so he could get rid of them and sell their land to companies sponsoring immigration. Conservative forces and Indians united to overthrow Morazán and he fled to El Salvador. There he was made President and lead an unsuccessful invasion of Guatemala to try to reclaim wider power. This time he went into exile and a few years tried to make another comeback. This time he was defeated, captured, and executed. At his request his remains were buried in El Salvador rather than Honduras.
Well my drink is empty and I have come around that a federal system was probably not right for a united Central America. When an area is almost devoid of institutions, it is probably a mistake to expend energy attacking the few institutions existing. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.