Melchor Ocampo

Melchor Ocampo (5 January 1814, Maravatío, Michoacán – 3 June 1861, Tepeji del Río, Hidalgo) was a mestizo by birth, a radical liberal Mexican lawyer, scientist, and politician. He was fiercely anticlerical, perhaps an atheist, and his early writings against Roman Catholic Church in Mexico gained him a reputation as an articulate liberal ideologue. 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. His home state was much later renamed Michoacán de Ocampo in his honor.

Melchor Ocampo was perhaps orphaned and left abandoned at the gate of a hacienda of wealthy woman, Doña Francisca Xaviera Tapia, who raised him as her own and bequeathed him her property.

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 and 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 Michoacan, in opposition to Antonio López de Santa Anna.

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