Melchor Ocampo was perhaps orphaned and left abandoned at the gate of a hacienda of a wealthy woman, Doña Francisca Xaviera Tapia, who raised him as her own and bequeathed him her property.
[3][4] Ocampo studied at the Roman Catholic seminary in Morelia, Michoacán, and later law at the Colegio Seminario de México (Universidad Pontificia).
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.
He was an activist governor, reorganizing the state treasury, building roads, proposing the founding of schools, and improving the conditions of the national guard in Michoacán.
He viewed the church as sucking wealth from indigenous people with high clerical fees for ecclesiastical services, and impeding progress.
Clerical fees for Christian sacraments meant that birth, marriage, and death generated income for priests who charged for baptism, holy matrimony, and burial.
He believed that education had to be grounded on the basic postulates of liberalism, democracy, respect and tolerance for different beliefs, equality before the law, the elimination of privileges, and the supremacy of civil authority.
Historian Enrique Krauze suggests that the priest was probably Clemente de Jesús Mungía, the bishop of Morelia, the state capital.
[12] Ocampo was subsequently deposed as governor and was forced to flee the country by President Antonio López de Santa Anna, taking refuge first in Cuba and then in the U.S. city of New Orleans, Louisiana.
The plan had called for the overthrow of Santa Anna and the installation of the liberal general Juan Álvarez as president of Mexico.
Although presidents Juárez and Buchanan were both in favor of the arrangement, the U.S. Senate rejected it on 31 May 1860 on account of the impending Civil War in the United States.
Some months after retiring from public service, Melchor Ocampo was abducted from his hacienda in Michoacán by conservative guerrillas on orders from either Leonardo Márquez or Félix María Zuloaga or both (reports differ).
Ocampo was executed by firing squad on 3 June 1861 at the Hacienda of Tlaltengo, Tepeji del Río, in what is today the state of Hidalgo.
On July 23, 1859, D. Benito Juarez, interim president then, issues, at the Port of Veracruz, the "Civil Matrimony Law", which has 31 Articles.