This article examines indultos after the Golpe de Melo of 1854. While the government hoped that these acts of clemency would erase all traces of the rebellion, a flood of appeals for indultos ensured that the post-war reckoning went on longer than the war itself. Drawing on archival and published material documenting this phenomenon, the article documents post-war politics in New Granada. The tension between popular ideals concerning pardonable behavior and the dispassionate constitutionalism promoted by the government documents the limits of the early republican project.