Background
Manuel Montt was born on 4 September 1809 in Petorca.
government official politician president
Manuel Montt was born on 4 September 1809 in Petorca.
Received his law degree in 1831.
During the administration of President Joaquin Prieto Vial and Manuel Bulnes Prieto, Manuel Montt held several cabinet posts, as well as being for a short while on the Supreme Court and early in 1851 its Chief Justice. He was a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1840 until his election to the presidency.
Manuel Montt was elected president in 1851, as candidate of the political faction then known as the pelucones (“wigged ones”). His election provoked an armed insurrection that continued in the first months of his presidency, but was finally suppressed by Montt’s predecessor in the presidency, but was finally suppressed by Montt’s predecessor in the presidency, General Manuel Bulnes, whom Montt put in charge of the military campaign.
Montt was reelected in 1856 and served for a total of ten years.
Upon leaving the presidency in September 1861, Manuel Montt was named to the Council of State and in 1864 he was elected once again to the Chamber of Deputies. However, President José Joaquín Pérez Mascayano named Montt to be minister of Peru in 1864, and he remained in that country for four years.
At the time of his death, Manuel Montt was a senator and still a leading figure in the National Party.
As vice-rector of the Instituto Nacional, he took a major role in extending the national education system, being responsible for establishing more than 100 schools, as well as the University of Chile. He also organized the Astronomic Observatory, conducted hydrographic surveys along the coast, and carried out Chile’s first population census.
During his presidential term, he energetically stimulated the country’s economic and social development, a railroad from Santiago to Valparaiso was completed and one from Santiago to Talca was begun. The electric telegraph was introduced, and a prepaid and relatively cheap postal service was established. There were numerous public works projects, the educational system was extended further, and a new workers’ savings bank and a mortgage bank were set up.
Bitter political controversies centering on church-state relations marked the Montt administration. The pelucones had generally favored the church, in contrast to the anticlerical Liberal Party. However, an incident in 1856 provoked a conflict between the church authorities and the Supreme Court. When President Montt and his principal collaborator, Antonio Varas de la Barra, supported the Supreme Court, the pelucones broke into two separate parties—the Conservative Party, favorable to the archbishop, and the National Party, formed by the sup-porters of Montt and Varas. Efforts to reunite the two groups failed. The Conservatives formed a somewhat unnatural opposition coalition with the anticlerical Liberal Party.
In 1859 a second military uprising against the Montt government was suppressed with some difficulty. However, that was to be the last serious uprising against the Chilean government until the Civil War of 1891.
