A successor to Benito Juárez, who died in office in July 1872, Lerdo de Tejada was elected to his own presidential term in November 1872.

Lerdo de Tejada died in exile in New York in 1889, but Díaz invited the return of his body to Mexico for burial with full honors.

[3][4] With the exception of Miguel Miramón, a contested president during the Reform War, he was the first Mexican head of state to be born after the country's independence.

He was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, into a middle class Criollo family, the younger brother of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada.

After studying theology as a scholarship student in the Palafoxiano Seminary in Puebla he received minor orders, but decided not to enter priesthood.

In 1851 he earned a law degree from Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, a famed institution he began directing at the age of 29 (1852–1863).

On 12 September 1863 in San Luis Potosí, Lerdo de Tejada was named minister of foreign affairs, of the interior and of justice in Juárez's cabinet.

Throughout the French occupation and Maximilian's Second Empire, Lerdo de Tejada was President Juárez's closest ally and confident.

[7] Upon the triumph of the Republic in 1867, Lerdo de Tejada, "according to some sources ... convinced Juárez not to pardon Maximilian," who was executed in Querétaro along with two Mexicans loyal to the emperor.

Lerdo de Tejada aided Juárez's push to centralize the power of the federal government and opposing the use of violence against local forces of opposition.

With Juárez's death caused by a heart attack in July 1872, Lerdo de Tejada was the constitutional successor to the presidency.

At this point, Porfirio Díaz, who had been neutralized politically with his unsuccessful revolt against Juárez in 1872, now believed he had the grounds to challenge Lerdo de Tejada, which were articulated in the Plan of Tuxtepec.

[11] Lerdo de Tejada had made himself unpopular by the means he took to secure his re-election, by his disposition to limit state rights in favor of a strongly-centralized government,[1] and because of measures such as the expulsion of the Sisters of Charity.

[12] With Lerdo de Tejada's overthrow, historians have marked this as the end of the Restored Republic and the beginning of the Porfiriato, which lasted from 1876–1911 until the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.

But Lerdo de Tejada's presidency was a continuation of the policies of the Liberal Reform, whose laws could be implemented in times of relative peace.