The "Congress of the United Provinces," meanwhile, had started meeting again. In spite of Cundinamarca's opposition, the Congress finally achieved an agreement and delivered the Act of Federation of the United Provinces of New Granada on November 27, 1811, a heavily federalist act. The act provided a lot of autonomy to each province, and an extremely weak president who would be subordinate to the congress. This only made the differences between centralist and federalist ideas even stronger. Nariño and his followers became ardent opponents to federalism and to the congress, and were convinced that the economic and political power of Cundinamarca would allow the province to dominate and unify New Granada. Nariño convened an assembly to revise the constitution of the state and make it even more centralist, and then decided to annex the surrounding provinces of Tunja, Socorro, Pamplona, Mariquita, and Neiva, but was mostly unsuccessful on both enterprises. Nevertheless, the relentless hostility and harassment from Nariño's partisans pushed the members of the Congress to leave Santafé and to escape, first to Leyva and finally to Tunja. This would be the start of the period in the history of the recently founded country that would later be called "the Foolish Mortherland."
