Belgrano followed up his victory at Tuc.u.man by another invasion of the Bolivian plateau. Even to a trained general and a regular army such a campaign would have been difficult. The defective organisation of his hastily gathered militia, his own unfamiliarity with the art of war, and the fact that he was opposed by a clever commander whose army was better drilled and better adapted to operations in that high alt.i.tude, all conspired to leave the result in no doubt. October 1, 1813, he was badly defeated at Vilapugio, and six weeks later his army was nearly destroyed at Ayohuma. With the remnant he fled south to Argentine territory and was replaced in his command by San Martin.
The advent of this consummate general and single-minded patriot revolutionised the character of the military operations. Unlike his predecessors and colleagues, he did not concern himself with political ambitions. He had but one purpose--to drive the Spaniards from South America; he knew but one way of achieving it--to whip them on the field of battle. He had none of the brilliantly attractive qualities, none of the eloquence or charm of most South American leaders; he had a horror of display, and made but one speech in all his life.
By sheer force of will and attention to detail, he organised an efficient regular army. The victories that followed were as much due to his painstaking care and foresight as to his brilliant strategical combinations and admirable tactical dispositions. Because he thought another could finish his work better than himself he voluntarily resigned supreme power on the very eve of the campaign which expelled the last Spaniard from South America, and, disdaining to offer an explanation, went into life-long exile. So modest was he that his name and services well-nigh fell into oblivion. That he is now recognised as the saviour of South American liberty is due as much to the literary labours of the greatest of Argentine historians, Bartolome Mitre, as to the spontaneous opinion of his countrymen during the first decades after his retirement.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL SAN MARTIN.
[From a steel engraving.]]
General San Martin was born on the 25th of February, 1778, in a little town which had been one of the Jesuit missions far up the Uruguay River.
His mother was a Creole and his father a Spanish officer, who destined his son to his own profession. When a child of only eight, he was taken to the mother country and educated in the best military schools of Spain. At an early age he entered the army and served in all the many wars in which Spain engaged after the outbreak of the French Revolution.
He saw much active service and became a thorough master of his profession. He imbibed liberal ideas and joined a secret society pledged to the work of establishing a republic in Spain and independent governments in her colonies. When the Spanish people rose against the French conquests, San Martin threw himself heart and soul into the conflict on the side of the patriots, and distinguished himself in the battles that opened the way to the recovery of Madrid. He was promoted to a lieutenant-colonelcy, but the next year he resigned his commission to return to his native land to aid her in her fight for independence.
By a curious coincidence the ship that bore the South American who achieved the independence of his country was called the _George Canning_, after the European who, thirteen years later, did most to secure the independence of South America from external attack. He landed in Buenos Aires in March, 1812. At that moment the anti-Spanish revolution seemed everywhere to be on the point of suffocation. Bolivia and Uruguay were lost; the reaction was gaining ground in Venezuela; Chile was menaced by an army from Lima and shortly fell back into Spanish hands; Peru was steady for the old system. Only in Argentina and New Granada were the fires of insurrection still burning, and between them intervened Peru, the stronghold of Spanish power in South America--a citadel impregnable behind mountains, deserts, and the ocean.
The War of Independence could only succeed by aggressive campaigns which must be conducted through difficult country and over the whole continent, and against forces superior in both numbers and equipment.
San Martin"s first step was to organise and drill some good regiments in Buenos Aires. He selected the finest physical and moral specimens of youth that the province afforded and subjected them to a rigid discipline. After his ruthless pruning only the born soldiers remained, and this select corps furnished generals and officers for the wars that followed. On succeeding Belgrano in command of the army of the north, San Martin saw at once that all attempts to conquer Peru by an advance through Bolivia were foredoomed to failure. A campaign over a mountainous plateau, with the Spaniards in possession of the strategic points, and the inhabitants divided in their sympathies, would be suicidal. On the other hand, to attack and defeat the Spanish forces in Peru itself was absolutely necessary. The three hundred thousand inhabitants of Argentina, distracted by intestine warfare, could not hope indefinitely to resist the Spanish power, backed by secure possession of the rest of the continent. Decisive victories were necessary to encourage the partisans of independence in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
San Martin"s solution of the problem was to organise an army on the eastern slope of the Andes; to invade Chile; to drive the Spaniards thence, and make that country the base of further operations; to improvise a fleet and with it gain command of the Pacific; and, finally, to attack Peru from the coast. The scheme seemed complicated, but San Martin was one of those rare geniuses born with a capacity for taking infinite pains, and his pertinacity was indefatigable. He foresaw and provided against every contingency and carried his plan to a triumphant conclusion. The story of the liberation of South America within the succeeding eight years might be completely told in the form of two biographies--San Martin"s and Bolivar"s.
Trusting the defence of the Bolivian frontier to a few line soldiers and the gauchos of Salta, San Martin solicited and obtained an appointment as Governor of Cuyo. This province was directly east of the populous central part of Chile, and was the refuge of the patriot Chileans who had been compelled to flee into exile after quarrels among themselves had delivered their country to the Spaniards. His authority was purely military and derived only from the dictum of the revolutionary government at Buenos Aires, but San Martin was not a man to hesitate on account of scruples over const.i.tutional questions. He laid the province under contribution and started to create an army capable of crossing the Andes and coping with the Spanish regulars in Chile. The inhabitants of Cuyo were determinedly anti-Spanish, brave, enduring, and enthusiastic.
It was a good recruiting ground in itself; the Chilean exiles were numerous and all anxious to join in an effort to redeem their country.
The government at Buenos Aires sent him a valuable addition in a corps of manumitted negro slaves, but his nucleus was the regiments which he himself had drilled at Buenos Aires. Though civil wars went on in the coast provinces, he was not to be diverted from his purpose. He kept aloof from them, and for three years laboured steadily, building his great war machine--recruiting, drilling, instructing officers, taxing his province, gathering provisions, building portable bridges, making powder, casting guns, organising his transport and commissariat.
Meanwhile, Alvear, his old colleague in the Spanish army, had a.s.sumed the leading position in the oligarchy that ruled at Buenos Aires. He suppressed the triumvirate and placed his relative, Posadas, at the head of the government. The patriot armies were besieging Montevideo from the land side, but it was not until a fighting demon of an Irish merchant captain, William Brown, had been placed in command of a few ships which the Buenos Aireans had gathered, that there was any hope of reducing the place. This remarkable man was nearly as important a factor as San Martin himself in the war against Spain. With incredible audacity he attacked the Spanish ships wherever he found them. Numbers and odds made no difference, and he was never so dangerous as just after an apparent reverse. His victory of the 14th of June put the Spanish fleet out of commission; the reduction of Montevideo followed, as a matter of course; and the destruction of the Spanish sea power on the Atlantic side made San Martin"s campaign on the Pacific coast possible.
Civil wars broke out between the Buenos Aires oligarchy and local military chiefs in the gaucho provinces and soon hurled Posadas from power. He was succeeded by Alvear, but the commanders of the armies refused to recognise the latter"s authority and an insurrection in Buenos Aires itself drove him, too, into exile. One military dictator succeeded another, while the provinces more and more ignored the Buenos Aires pretensions to hegemony. The frail fabric of the confederation fast crumbled into fragments. With the end of the Napoleonic wars re-enforcements began to arrive from Spain, and the royal arms were again victorious and threatened to wipe out the distracted Republic.
Rondeau, one of the generals who had helped depose Posadas and Alvear, had been rewarded with command of the army of the north. Disregarding the experience of his predecessors, he made the third great effort to conquer Bolivia and strike at the heart of Spanish power in Peru by the overland route. His campaign ended with the crushing defeat at Sipe-Sipe. Considerable Spanish forces followed him down into the Argentine plains, but, as San Martin had predicted, the gaucho cavalry under Guemes were able to keep back their advance.
Belgrano and Rivadavia had been sent to Spain in 1813 to try to arrange terms on the basis of autonomy, or the making of Buenos Aires a separate kingdom under some member of the Spanish family. They were informed that nothing except unconditional submission would be accepted, and they were then ordered to leave Madrid. Scheme after scheme was presented in Buenos Aires, discussed, and abandoned. Belgrano wanted to make a descendant of the Incas emperor of South America. Others wished to offer submission to Great Britain in return for a protectorate. The English government rejected the overtures. A more popular idea was to elect a monarch from the Portuguese Braganza family, then reigning in Brazil.
The only definite result of all these confused negotiations was a formal declaration of independence made on the 9th of July, 1816, by a Congress at which most of the provinces were represented, and which met in the city of Tuc.u.man. Many of the members had no hope of being able to enforce such a declaration. However, it cleared the way for obtaining foreign help, and negotiations were continued with a view to inducing some European prince to accept the throne.
Artigas, the independent military chieftain of Uruguay and Entre Rios, attacked in 1813 the Missions to the left of Upper Uruguay which the Rio Grande Brazilians had seized twelve years before. He was defeated by the troops of John VI., who followed him into Uruguay proper and in 1816 captured Montevideo. Though the Buenos Aireans had been compelled to concede Uruguay"s independence, this movement excited among them an intense jealousy of the Portuguese. The scheme for a Braganza monarch at once became unpopular and impracticable.
The taciturn general in Cuyo was, however, preparing a thunderbolt that would clear the Argentine sky of all these clouds except that most portentous of all--civil war. After three years of incessant preparation, San Martin believed that his army was ready to undertake the great campaign. Though it numbered only four thousand men, it was the most efficient body of troops that ever gathered on South American soil. Among the Argentine contingent were the picked youth of Buenos Aires and the provinces--reckless, enthusiastic youths whose ambition, patriotism, or love of adventure made them willing to follow anywhere San Martin might dare to lead. Not inferior to their white comrades were the manumitted negroes. The cruelest charges and the heaviest losses fell to their lot and few of them ever returned over the Andes. The Chilean exiles were picked men--those who preferred death to submission, or who had offended so deeply that their only hope of seeing their homes was to return sword in hand. This force had been drilled and instructed in all the art of war as practised during the Napoleonic era by San Martin himself, a veteran soldier of the great European campaigns--one who had fought with Wellington and against Ma.s.sena and Soult. He was indefatigable in attending to details, and he seems to have foreseen everything. The last months were spent in preparing rations of parched corn and dried beef; in gathering mules for mountain transportation, and in making sledges to be used on the slopes which were too steep for cannon on wheels. The most careful calculations were made of the distances to be traversed; every route was surveyed; spies were in every pa.s.s; the Spaniards were kept in uncertainty as to which of the numerous pa.s.ses along hundreds of miles of frontier would be used for the attack.
San Martin"s real intentions were not revealed by him even to the members of his staff until the very eve of the advance.
When summer came in 1817, and all the pa.s.ses were freed from snow, he was ready. In the middle of January he broke camp at Mendoza and divided his army into two divisions. Directly to the west was the Uspallata Pa.s.s, then as now the usual route between western Argentina and central Chile. Its Chilean outlet opens into the plain of Aconcagua, which is north of Santiago and only separated from that capital by one transverse spur of the Andes. Off to the north was the more difficult pa.s.s of Patos, its eastern entrance also easily accessible from Mendoza, though by a longer detour, and opening at its other end into the same valley of Aconcagua. The smaller of the two divisions was to advance over the Uspallata Pa.s.s, so timing its movements as to reach the open ground of the Aconcagua valley at the same time as the larger division, which, under San Martin himself, went to the north around the Patos route. The Spaniards had a guard at the summit of the Uspallata Pa.s.s, but the advance troops of the Argentines charged it. Before re-enforcements could come up, the division was over and advancing confidently down the canon on the Chilean side. Had the Spaniards sent up a force sufficient to prevent the Uspallata division from debouching on to the Aconcagua plain it would have been caught in a trap. The second division could have bottled it up from below by leaving a small body at the mouth of the canon. But before the Spanish commander had made up his mind what to do, news came that another army was rapidly coming down the valley leading into the Aconcagua valley from the north. Disconcerted by this attack from an unexpected direction, the Spanish commander hastened off with an inadequate force to repel it. He did not reach a defensible point in time; his vanguard was defeated and he retreated along the highroad to Santiago, leaving San Martin to reunite his two divisions at his leisure in the broad Aconcagua plain. Though the army had crossed the Andes over two of the loftiest and steepest pa.s.ses in the world, so admirably had all dispositions been made that hardly a stop was necessary to refit and recruit. Artillery and cavalry, as well as infantry, were ready within four days after reaching the Chilean side to take up the pursuit of the Spaniards.
Marco, the Spanish governor, had not had sufficient time to concentrate his scattered regiments since the first news had come that San Martin was coming in force by the northern pa.s.ses. Of his five thousand men only two thousand were able to get between San Martin"s advance and Santiago. The Argentine general was sure of having the largest numbers at the point of conflict, but the Spanish troops were veterans of the Peninsula and were commanded by a skilful and resolute general. He concentrated his force in a strong position in a valley on the south side of the transverse range that separates Santiago from the Aconcagua valley. He had hoped to make his stand at the top of the pa.s.s, there four thousand feet high, but San Martin had been too quick for him.
However, the position was admirable for a stubborn defence. The highroad to Santiago descended from the pa.s.s down a narrow valley, which, just in front of the Spanish position, opened into a larger valley running at right angles. The artillery of the Spaniards commanded the narrow mouth of the upper valley, and on a side hill there was room to deploy the infantry and cavalry. The Argentine troops would be enfiladed in the close gut before they could form in line of battle. San Martin employed the tactics of the Persians at Thermopylae. There was an abandoned road running over the summit a little to the west of the travelled route and debouching into the same valley a little below the Spanish position.
Through this O"Higgins, the chief of San Martin"s Chilean allies, at two o"clock in the morning of February 12th, started with eighteen hundred men. By eleven he had reached the main valley and turned up it to attack the Spaniards on their left flank. His first a.s.sault, made without waiting for the other division to come down in front, was repulsed. San Martin, sitting on his war-horse on the heights above, galloped down the slope, leaving orders to hasten the descent of the main body. As he reached the lower ground and joined the Chileans, he saw the head of his main column appear through the mouth of the pa.s.s. O"Higgins again attacked, and the Spaniards, taken in flank and with their centre a.s.sailed in _echelon_ by the Argentine squadrons and battalions, were at a hopeless disadvantage. The position of their infantry was carried by the bayonet, while the patriot cavalry charged the artillery and sabred the men at their guns. The infantry were the flower of the Spanish regulars; they formed a square and for a time held their stand. Finally, surrounded on three sides, their artillery gone, and fighting against double their number, they broke and retreated over the broken ground in their rear. Less than half escaped and a quarter were killed on the field and in the pursuit. The patriots lost only twelve killed and one hundred and twenty wounded.
Though the numbers engaged were insignificant, and though the victory was easily won, the battle of Chacabuco was decisive in the struggle between Spain and her revolted subjects in the southern colonies. Since the outbreak of 1810 the revolutionary cause had been losing not alone territory but morale, conviction, and self-confidence. Spanish authority seemed certain finally to be completely re-established, perhaps by a compromise and concession of autonomy, but still on a basis gratifying to the pride of the mother country. The day before San Martin started on his march over the Andes, Chile was quietly submissive; Uruguay was occupied by Portuguese troops; Argentina was a mere loose aggregation of discordant and warring provinces, whose most intelligent statesmen had nearly given up hope of peace and autonomy, except by foreign aid or submission to some alien monarch. But the day after Chacabuco the Spanish governor was flying from Santiago to the coast; Chile had become, and has remained, independent. In Argentina there was no more talk of Portuguese princes, of British protectorates, of compromise with Spain. The declaration of Tuc.u.man had become a reality. There was much more hard fighting still to be done, and time after time during the next seven years the final result seemed to tremble in the balance, but hope and national spirit had been so aroused in South America that defeat was never irremediable.
The rest of San Martin"s military career belongs rather to the history of Chile and Peru than to that of Argentina. It is enough to say that he established his friend O"Higgins as dictator of Chile, thus a.s.suring her co-operation in the prosecution of the war against Peru. Spanish successes in Chile and civil war in Argentina delayed for years his overmatching the Spanish naval power on the Pacific. Without command of the sea he would have had to march his army up a desert coast between the Cordillera and the ocean--an undertaking almost impossible. The help of the Buenos Aires fleet was essential and so was the aid of the Argentine treasury in buying more ships and paying foreign seamen. His friends at Buenos Aires were struggling for their lives against their rivals for supreme power. To San Martin"s demand for a.s.sistance they responded by begging him first to use his army to crush the rebellion.
That he refused them in their hour of bitter need has been pointed out as a blot upon his fame, but his resolution was Spartan. Not even the considerations of grat.i.tude to personal friends diverted him from his great purpose. He had that element of supremely great achievement--steadfastness to adhere to a purpose once conceived that nothing could shake. Puerreyedon might be driven into exile; the warring factions might tear Argentina into fragments, and jealous Cochrane might unjustly accuse him; the ambitious and selfish Bolivar might regard him only as an obstacle to his own supremacy; none of these things could change his course or alter his devotion to the one great purpose of his life.
In 1820 he finally started up the coast, and in four months, without a pitched battle, he had rendered the Spanish position on the coast of Peru untenable. He met Bolivar at Guayaquil, and the personal interview between the liberators of the northern and southern halves of South America was the end of San Martin"s public career. He went to it with the purpose of arranging a joint campaign to drive the Spanish from their last stronghold, the highlands of Peru. But Bolivar did not see his own way clear to co-operation. San Martin explained his predicament to no one; he uttered no word of complaint or regret; he simply gave up the command of the army which he had led for seven years and resigned the Dictatorship of Peru. There was no place for him in distracted Argentina except as a leader in the civil wars--a role he disdained. He went into exile without saying a word as to the reasons for his action.
Rather than precipitate a division between the patriots before the last Spaniard had been driven from South America, he submitted in silence to the reproach of cowardice. Rather than jeopard independence he sacrificed home, money, honours, even reputation itself. The history of the world records few examples of finer civic virtue.
The rest of his life he spent poverty-stricken in Paris. Only once he tried to return to his native country. At Montevideo he heard that Buenos Aires was in the throes of another revolution and that his presence might be misconstrued. Without a word, he took the next ship back to Europe. For many years his struggles against poverty and ill-health were pathetic. It was the generosity of a Spaniard, and not a fellow-countryman, that relieved the last days of his life. But throughout those weary thirty years he never wavered in his devotion to South America. His last utterance about public affairs was a vehement laudation of Rosas--tyrant though he thought him--because the latter had defied France and England when they disregarded Argentina"s rights as a sovereign member of the family of nations.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAZADE MAYO AND CATHEDRAL AT BUENOS AIRES.
[From a lithograph.]]
Reading was the only resource left to lighten his old age, and his last months were embittered by the approach of blindness. His heart began to be affected, symptoms of an aneurism appeared, and he went to Boulogne to take the sea air. Standing one day on the beach he felt the awful shock of pain that announced his approaching end. "Gasping and raising his hand to his heart, he turned with a touching smile to that daughter who ever followed him like a latter-day Antigone, and said, "_C"est l"orage qui mene au port_." On the 17th of August, 1850, being seventy-two years of age, he expired in the arms of his beloved daughter. Chile and Argentina have raised him statues; Peru has decreed a monument to his memory. The Argentine nation, at last one and united as he had ever desired, has brought back his sacred remains and celebrated his apotheosis. To-day his tomb may be seen in the metropolitan cathedral, bearing witness for Argentina to his just distinction as the greatest of all her men of action."
CHAPTER VII
THE ERA OF CIVIL WARS
For half a century, from 1812 to 1862, the story of Argentina is one of almost continual civil wars, of disturbances, and armed revolutions affecting every part of the Republic. But through the confused records of this half-century there runs the thread of a steady tendency and purpose. The nation was instinctively seeking to establish an equilibrium between its centripetal and centrifugal forces, between the spirit of local autonomy and the necessity for union. At the same time, the irrepressible conflict between military and civil principles of government was fought out. Argentina emerged strong and united, while the provinces retained the right of local self-government, and the military cla.s.ses were relegated to their proper subordinate position as servants of the civil and industrial interests of the community. When studied in detail the story of the civil wars is confusing and tedious: it is my purpose to omit all that does not bear on the final rational and beneficent result.
At the outset of the revolution against Spain, the oligarchy of liberals who ruled Buenos Aires a.s.sumed the sovereignty of the whole Viceroyalty. They regarded themselves as successors to the power of the Viceroy himself, and attempted to rule the outlying provinces with no more regard for the latter"s interests than if they had been delegates of an absolute monarch. Though the people of the city of Buenos Aires often quarrelled as to what individual should exercise the supreme power, they were united in insisting that the capital should continue to enjoy the privileges and exclusive commercial rights with which the Spanish system had endowed it. Hardly had the revolution begun when the districts in the neighbourhood of Buenos Aires showed symptoms of revolt against the central authorities. The cities of Santa Fe, Concepcion, and Corrientes, each with its dependent territory, aspired to the status of independent provinces. Military chieftains, called "caudillos,"
organised the gauchos, who were excellent cavalry ready-made to their hands, and defied the Buenos Aires oligarchy. Jose Artigas, a fierce chieftain of the plains on the Lower Uruguay, gathered about him a considerable army from among the gauchos east of the Parana, and did more than the Buenos Aireans themselves to shut up the Spaniards in the fortress of Montevideo. He refused to accept the concessions offered by the Buenos Aires oligarchy, and a desperate civil war broke out. Buenos Aires successively lost Uruguay, Entre Rios, Corrientes, and Santa Fe.
The fighting was b.l.o.o.d.y and these districts were all terribly devastated. Cordoba and the Andean provinces also refused to recognise the validity of orders emanating from Buenos Aires. By the year 1818 all the provinces were practically independent of Buenos Aires, though the latter abated not a jot of her pretensions to hegemony, and continued to send troops against the various caudillos. Her armies obeyed their own generals rather than the orders of the central government. In desperation the oligarchy finally peremptorily ordered San Martin and Belgrano to bring down their armies from the western and northern frontiers and suppress the independent chiefs. San Martin refused to obey, but the imaginative, warm-hearted Belgrano was not made of the same sterling stuff. He managed to lead the army of the north as far as the province of Cordoba, but at Arequito the troops, at the instigation of ambitious officers, revolted and scattered. Many joined the caudillos, and on the 1st of February the provincials completely overthrew the Buenos Aires militia in the decisive battle of Cepeda.
This ended for a time the capital"s pretensions to hegemony.
Decentralisation went on apace. Cuyo dissolved into the three provinces of Mendoza, San Luiz, and San Juan; the old intendencia of Salta became four new provinces,--Santiago del Estero, Tuc.u.man, Catamarca, and Salta,--to which a fifth was added when the city of Jujuy erected itself into a separate jurisdiction in 1834. From the Cordoba of colonial times Rioja split off, while the intendencia of Buenos Aires had been divided into four great provinces, Santa Fe, Corrientes, Entre Rios, and Buenos Aires, besides the independent nation of Uruguay. Each of these provinces practically corresponded with the leading city and its dependent territory, and the Cabildo of each munic.i.p.ality was the basis of new local government.
This process was spontaneous, and the provinces then formed have ever since been the units of the Argentine confederation. To many intelligent patriots of the time, however, decentralisation seemed to be only a sure sign of swiftly approaching anarchy. Power fell more and more into the hands of the military leaders, and war became almost the normal condition of the country. During the four years from 1820 to 1824, there was no material change in the position of the contending forces. The provinces much desired to make a confederation of which Buenos Aires should be an equal member, but the latter refused and only waited for an opportunity in order to renew her pretensions to hegemony.
Two opposing tendencies were, however, at work which soon created two parties within the walls of Buenos Aires itself. Commercial interests had suffered so severely in the civil wars, and communications were so uncertain and so burdened with arbitrary exactions by the provincials, that the property-holding cla.s.ses began to press hard upon the office-holders of the oligarchy with demands for an accommodation and some sort of a union with the provinces. This was the beginning of the federalist party, which naturally found efficient support among the cattle-herding inhabitants on the great pampas of the province of Buenos Aires.
On the other hand, the unitarians were becoming more compact, more determined, and more definite in their purposes. Rivadavia, the greatest constructive statesman of the era, undertook the reform of the laws and the administration. He created the University of Buenos Aires; founded hospitals and asylums; introduced ecclesiastical and military reform; bettered the land laws, and infused into the legislation a modern spirit. The improved tone of political thought tended to stimulate a more general and rational discussion of a _modus vivendi_ with the provinces. The federalists favoured the establishment of a system like that of the United States, while the unitarians clung to the idea of a nation organised more after the model of the French Republic.
In 1825 the provinces were represented at a general const.i.tuent congress which a.s.sembled in Buenos Aires. After much discussion the unitarians, with Rivadavia at their head, finally obtained control. In 1826 he was elected executive chief of the federation. This election, however, did not make him president in fact. Recognition from the Cabildos and the caudillos was practically of greater importance than the vote of a congress of delegates who were unable to insure the acquiescence of their const.i.tuencies. Rivadavia"s favourite plan of placing the city of Buenos Aires directly under the control of the central government excited bitter opposition among the federalists of Buenos Aires. Under their leader, Manuel Dorrego, they protested vehemently against the dismemberment of their home province.
Meanwhile the crazy fabric was subjected to the strain of a serious foreign war. In 1825 the country districts of Uruguay rose against their Brazilian rulers. The Argentines went wild with joy when they heard of the victory which the gauchos won over the imperial forces at Sarandi.
Congress promptly decreed that Uruguay had reunited herself to the confederation. The Emperor"s answer was a declaration of war and a blockade of Buenos Aires. The fighting Irish sailor, Admiral William Brown, again came to the front, and his daring seamanship rendered the Brazilian blockade ineffective. He destroyed a large division of their fleet at the battle of Juncal, while fast Baltimore clippers, commanded by English and Yankee privateer captains, swept Brazilian commerce from the seas. Late in 1826 an Argentine army of eight thousand men was a.s.sembled for the invasion of Rio Grande do Sul. Alvear, now returned from exile, was entrusted with its command, and on the 20th of February, 1827, the Brazilians were overwhelmingly defeated at Ituzaingo, far within their own boundary. The Argentines were not able to follow up their victory, and shortly returned to Uruguayan territory, but the Emperor was never again able to undertake an aggressive campaign.
Negotiations for peace were begun, and Rivadavia"s envoy signed a treaty by which Uruguay was to remain a part of the empire of Brazil. A storm of indignation broke forth at Buenos Aires, and Rivadavia had to disavow his minister and continue the war. The blow to his prestige was, however, mortal; the federalists had, indeed, never ceased to make war against him; and the unitarian const.i.tution which Congress had adopted at his dictation was rejected unanimously by the provinces. He resigned, and Dorrego, chief of the unitarians, succeeded him as nominal executive chief of the confederation. In reality, however, the Republic was divided into five quasi-independent military states. Dorrego ruled in Buenos Aires, Lopez in Santa Fe, Ibarra in Santiago, Bustos in Cordoba, and Quiroga in Cuyo.
Many of the officers of the army which had been victorious at Ituzaingo were dissatisfied with the triumph of Dorrego at Buenos Aires. They belonged to the unitarian party, and they were anxious themselves to usurp the places of the various caudillos. The first division that reached Buenos Aires after the signing of the preliminary peace with Brazil raised the standard of rebellion in the city itself. General Lavalle declared himself Governor, while Dorrego fled to the interior, only to be pursued, captured, and shot, without the form of trial, by Lavalle"s personal order. This began the fiercest and bloodiest civil war which ever desolated the Argentine. The gauchos of the southern provinces rose _en ma.s.se_ to fight the unitarian regulars, while the generals of the latter began a series of campaigns against all the federalist provincial governments and caudillos. General Paz advanced on Cordoba to give battle to Bustos, while Lavalle"s forces invaded Santa Fe. Rosas, the chief of southern Buenos Aires, had rallied the federalists of that province. He himself joined Lopez, the caudillo of Santa Fe, while he left behind a considerable force of his gauchos to threaten the city from the south. Lavalle sent some of his best regiments against the latter body, but to his surprise his veterans were completely cut to pieces by the fierce riders of the plains. He himself had to retreat to Buenos Aires, while Rosas and Lopez defeated him under the very walls of the city.
These victories made the Buenos Aires federalist leader, Juan Manuel Rosas, the chief figure in Argentine affairs. Thenceforth, for more than twenty years, he was the absolute dictator and tyrant of Buenos Aires.
The most bitterly hated man in Argentine history, probably no other leader had as profound an influence in preparing the Argentine nation for the consolidation which was so shortly to follow his own fall from power. His personal characteristics and his public career are equally interesting. The scion of a wealthy Buenos Aires family, from his childhood he devoted himself to cattle-raising on the vast family estates of the southern pampas. He became the model and idol of the gauchos. By the time he was twenty-five, he was the acknowledged king of the southern pampas, with a thousand hard-riding, half-savage hors.e.m.e.n obeying his orders. In 1820 he and his regiment were chief factors in the revolution that placed General Rodriguez in power at Buenos Aires.
Through the more peaceful years that followed, his power grew until he was the acknowledged head of the country people of Buenos Aires province and their champion against the city. He had been fairly well educated, his information was wide, and his intellectual abilities were of a high order. But he thoroughly identified his tastes and prejudices with those of his rude followers, and in politics he was fiercely unitarian. The victories of 1829 over Lavalle placed him in supreme power at Buenos Aires and made him the nominal head of the whole Argentine.
His real power was, however, far from extending over the whole territory. General Paz with his veterans of the Brazilian war had expelled Bustos from Cordoba and firmly established himself as ruler of that province. Quiroga, the redoubtable caudillo of the Cuyo province, gathered his swarms of fierce gauchos from the western pampas in the slopes of the Andes, and descended to the very walls of Cordoba, there to be twice defeated with awful slaughter by General Paz. The latter followed up his victories by establishing unitarian governments in the north-western provinces. In Cuyo he was not so successful, and Quiroga managed to sustain himself. Rosas came to the rescue of the despairing federalists with the whole force of Buenos Aires. In that province all opposition to him had been crushed and he was able to send a strong army against Cordoba which surprised and captured General Paz himself. This misfortune demoralised the unitarians. The federalists and the terrible Quiroga again triumphed in most of the western provinces. It is estimated that more than twenty-three thousand unitarians fell in battle. Part of Paz"s army retired to Tuc.u.man and were there surrounded by an overwhelming force under Quiroga. Though their position was hopeless they did not offer to surrender, nor would quarter have been given them had they asked it. In these internecine conflicts, the beaten side usually fought it out to the last man, selling their lives as dearly as possible. Five hundred prisoners taken at Tuc.u.man were shot in cold blood, and only a few small bands escaped to Bolivia.
Rosas filled the offices in the provinces with his partisans, while the obsequious authorities of the capital conferred upon him the high-sounding t.i.tle, "Restorer of the Laws." He made a feint or two of resigning the governorship, and in fact left it in other hands while he led an army against the Indians of the South. He soon returned with the prestige of having extended white domination far beyond its former boundaries. After much show of reluctance, in 1835 he accepted the t.i.tle of Governor and Captain-General, and a special statute expressly confided to him the whole "sum of the public power."
The thousands of murders, betrayals, and treasons of the long civil wars had sapped the foundations of good faith in human kindness. The unitarians were mere outlaws, their property was constantly subject to confiscation, and their lives were never safe. Rosas himself, least of all, could confide in the faithfulness of his partisans. Things had come to such a pa.s.s that no one could rule except by force. Whoever was in power was sure to be hated by the majority and plotted against by many, though he might have been raised to command by the acclamation of the whole population. Rosas was a product of the conditions that surrounded him. Belgrano, Rivadavia, and every one who had tried to establish a civil government had failed. The forces of militarism and federalism had been too strong for them. From among the ambitious military chieftains the strongest and fittest survived. Rosas understood the conditions under which he held power and took the measures his experience had taught him would be most effective in preserving it. He undertook to forestall revolt by creating a reign of terror; he replaced the blue and white of Buenos Aires by red--the colour of his own faction; the wearing of a sc.r.a.p of blue was considered proof of treason. A club of desperadoes, called the Ma.s.sorca, was formed of men sworn to do his bidding, even though it might be to murder their own relatives. No one suspected of disaffection was safe for a day. Sometimes a warning was given so that the victim might flee, leaving his property to be confiscated; sometimes he was dragged from his bed and stabbed. The charge of deliberate bloodthirstiness against Rosas is, however, hardly borne out by the facts. For political reasons he did not hesitate to kill, and to kill cruelly, but he did not kill for the mere sake of killing.
He was pa.s.sionately jealous of foreign interference. Early in his reign he quarrelled with the government of France over questions in regard to the domicile and obligations of foreign residents. The French fleet, a.s.sisted later by that of Great Britain, blockaded Buenos Aires. But Rosas defied their combined power; although in this very year (1835) he was menaced by a formidable invasion from the banished unitarians. In Uruguay the "colorados" occupied Montevideo and had formed a close alliance with the Argentine exiles. Montevideo was the centre of resistance to Rosas and from its walls went out expeditions to end the revolts which continually broke forth. In 1842 the allied unitarians and colorados suffered a great defeat from Rosas"s right arm in the field, General Urquiza, and thenceforth Oribe, chief of the Uruguayan "blancos"