Loosely inspired by the more well-known Paris Commune two years earlier, the Canton of Cartagena existed during a turbulent revolutionary period of Spanish history known as the Sexenio Democrático.

[3] During the first chaotic months of the Spanish Republic following the 1873 election, the FRE-AIT sensed an opportunity to organize a general strike in Alcoy, one of the most industrialized cities in Spain at the time.

By July 1873, tensions were growing in southern Spain with more radical federalists (known as "intransigents") believing that the election's results had provided a mandate to establish autonomous cantons from the bottom-up.

The notion of forming an independent canton in Cartagena modeled after the 1871 Paris Commune was first proposed by Roque Barcia [es] who chaired the intransigent Committee of Public Health in Madrid.

[1]: 261-262  The Committee of Public Health sent Juan Contreras y Román [es] from Madrid to help organize the rebel troops in Cartagena.

[3] Within days of the insurrection in Cartagena, uprisings spread throughout Murcia and southern Spain leading to the larger Cantonal rebellion.

[9] A third land expedition of 3,000 men left in early August for Chinchilla where Galvez hoped to cut off the railway line between Madrid and Valencia, which had recently declared itself the Valencian Canton.

[5]: 209 After the Battle of Chinchilla, Salmerón was able to re-establish republican control in much of southern Spain under the command of General Arsenio Martínez Campos.

[1]: 292  Pressured by the cantonal rebellion in the south and a monarchist Carlist war in the north, Castelar was granted emergency executive powers by the Cortes to bring all of Spain back into the First Republic's control.

The situation in Cartagena grew more dire through the final weeks of 1873 as the provisional junta was unable to secure any foreign allies and city suffered an average of 1,200 shellings per day.

Roque Barcia, faced with the development of events, sent on December 16, 1873 a letter to the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, through his ambassador in Madrid, Daniel E. Sickles, in which he requested to raise the American flag in the canton in order to avoid the bombing, without it finally being carried out.

[10] The First Spanish Republic based in Madrid was unable to maintain its loose grip on control and on January 3, 1874, the federal government was overthrown in a coup led by Manuel Pavía establishing a military dictatorship.