of a nation rooted in the doctrine of national, rather than royal, sovereignty. At the same time, the Constitution recognized the civil rights of free blacks and mulatos but explicitly denied them automatic citizenship. Furthermore, they were not to be counted for the purposes of establishing the number of representatives a given province was to send to the Cortes. That had the effect of removing an estimated six million people from the rolls in the overseas territories. In part, that arrangement was a strategy by the peninsular deputies to achieve equality in the number of American and peninsular deputies in the future Cortes, but it also served the interests of conservative Criollo representatives, who wished to keep political power within a limited group of people. The peninsular deputies, for the most part, were also not inclined towards ideas of federalism promoted by many of the overseas deputies, which would have granted greater self-rule to the American and Asian territories. Most of the peninsulares, therefore, shared the absolutists' inclination towards centralized government. Another aspect of the treatment of the overseas territories in the constitution, one of the many that would prove not to be to the taste of Ferdinand VII, that by converting the territories to provinces, the king was deprived of a great economic resource. Under the Antiguo Régimen, the taxes from Spain's overseas possessions went directly to the royal treasury. Under the Constitution of 1812, it would go to the state administrative apparatus. Ayuntamientos The impact of the 1812 Constitution on the emerging states of Spanish America was quite direct. Miguel Ramos Arizpe of Mexico, Joaquín Fernández de Leiva of Chile, Vicente Morales Duárez of Peru and José Mejía Lequerica of Ecuador, among other significant figures in founding Spanish American republics, were active participants at Cádiz. One provision of the Constitution (article 310) provided for the creation of a local government (an ayuntamiento) for every settlement of over 1,000 people. The provision was designed to transform the institution from one controlled by elites to representative institutions through elections. Elections were indirect, favouring the wealthy and socially prominent. The proposal came from Ramos Arizpe. That benefited the bourgeoisie at the expense of the hereditary aristocracy both on the Peninsula and in the Americas, where it was particularly to the advantage of the Criollos since they came to dominate the ayuntamientos. In Cuzco, the local elites welcomed the opportunity to participate