The newly liberated Mexican press however simply inflamed anti-Spanish sentiment, Morelos' rebellion continued, and on the pretext of necessity for subduing the rebels, the constitution was suspended in New Spain the same year it was proclaimed, making Mexican liberals lose hope of attaining reform within the colonial system, while not forgetting the local provincial autonomy that they had temporarily been granted.

The ill-fated Empire which lasted less than a year, never managed to produce a constitution, and the failure to do so was one of the accusations Iturbide levelled at congress when he controversially dissolved it.

[1] Congressional seats were allocated on a basis of one representative per 50,000 inhabitants, elected by manhood suffrage available to any man over the age of 18, and using the three-tiered system established by the Constitution of 1812, by which voters in each parish chose electors, who then met at the district level and chose electors for the province level, whom in turn finally voted for representatives to be sent to Congress.

Through the minister of justice, the executive announced to the congress on November 14, that they must now set to work on answering the popular call to establish the government most suited for the nation.

A committee consisting of Miguel Ramos Arizpe, Juan de Dios Cañedo, Miguel Argüelles, Rafael Mangino, Tomás Vargas, José de Jesús Huerta, and Manuel Crescencio Rejón, submitted an Acta Constitutiva (draft of a constitution) on 20 November.

This was possible because the document was based on the shared Hispanic political theory and practice that Mexicans, the former novohispanos, knew well, since they had played a significant role in shaping it.

The constituent congress, therefore, was filled with educated men with diverse ideas and extensive political experience at the local, state, national, and international levels.

His principal critics were radical federalists like Juan de Dios Cañedo, deputy from Jalisco, who challenged the need for an article declaring national sovereignty.

Servando Teresa de Mier, their outstanding spokesman, argued that people wrongly considered him a centralist, an error that arose from an unnecessarily restrictive definition of federalism.

(...) I have always believed in a medium between the lax federation of the United States, whose defects many writers have indicated, (…) and the dangerous concentration [of executive power] in Colombia and Peru."

The first vote, on the section of Article 6 which indicated that the states were independent and free to manage their own affairs, passed by a wide margin, since the wording pleased all the confederalist/federalist groups, including the one led by Father Mier.

Nevertheless, the proponents of states' rights and those who believed in shared sovereignty possessed enough strength to pass the measure by a margin of 41 to 28 votes.

They gained considerable taxing power at the expense of the federal government, which lost approximately half the revenue formerly collected by the viceregal administration.

Although all agreed on the traditional concept of separation of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, most congressmen believed that the legislature should be dominant.

The majority did not agree with the proposal because it feared the possibility of one individual dominating Congress through military or popular forces, as Iturbide had done.

The authorities in Mexico City immediately concluded that the military commander of the province, General José Antonio de Echávarri, was responsible for the "revolt".

Therefore, the government dispatched an army under the command of Generals Manuel Gómez Pedraza and Vicente Guerrero to restore order.

As a result of the crisis, the majority in Congress eventually decided to establish an executive branch composed of a president and a vice-president.

Nevertheless, on 30 October Congress voted fifty-two to thirty-one to make Mexico City the nation's capital and to create a federal district.

The supreme executive power of the federation is deposited in only one individual who shall be called President of the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos).

Events in Mexico, particularly the assertion of states' rights by the former provinces, forced Congress to frame a constitution to meet the unique circumstances of the nation.

Although modeled on the Spanish Constitution of 1812, the new charter did not address a number of issues included in the earlier document because the new Mexican federation shared sovereignty between the national government and the states.

Similarly, it did not define who possessed the suffrage or the size of the population required to establish ayuntamientos (town councils), two significant factors in determining the popular nature of the Hispanic constitutional system.

Due to the influence of Spanish liberal thought, the fragmentation that had been gradually consolidated by the Bourbon Reforms in New Spain, the newly won Independence of Mexico, the size of the territory—almost 4,600,000 km2 (1,776,069 sq mi)—and lack of easy communication across distances, there resulted a federal system with regional characteristics.

The states of the periphery—Zacatecas, Coahuila y Texas, Durango, Chihuahua, Jalisco, San Luis Potosí and Nuevo León—acquired a moderate confederalism.

The second was influenced by the Yorkist Lodge of freemasonry, whose philosophy was radical Federalism and also encouraged an anti-Spanish sentiment largely promoted by the American plenipotentiary Joel Roberts Poinsett.

[8] And the third was influenced by the Scottish Lodge of freemasonry, which had been introduced to Mexico by the Spaniards themselves, favored Centralism, and yearned for the recognition of the new nation by Spain and the Holy See.

The triumph of conservative forces in the elections unleashed a series of events that culminated on 23 October 1835, during the interim presidency of Miguel Barragán (the constitutional president was Antonio López de Santa Anna, but he was out of office), when the "Basis of Reorganization of the Mexican Nation" was approved, which ended the federal system and established a provisional centralist system.

The Seven Constitutional Laws, among other things, replaced the "free states" with French-style "departments", centralizing national power in Mexico City.

In 1855, Juan Álvarez, interim President of the Republic, issued the call for the Constituent Congress, which began its work on 17 February 1856 to produce the Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1857.