Produced by Adrian Mastronardi and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Story of the Nations
A Series of Historical Studies intended to present
in graphic narratives the stories of the different
nations that have attained prominence in history.
In the story form the current of each national life is distinctly
indicated, and its picturesque and noteworthy periods and episodes
are presented for the reader in their philosophical relations to
each other as well as to universal history.
12º, Illustrated, cloth, each net $1.50
FOR FULL LIST SEE END OF THIS VOLUME.
[Illustration: CAPE HORN.
_Frontispiece_ [From a steel engraving.]]
THE STORY OF THE NATIONS
THE SOUTH AMERICAN
REPUBLICS
BY
THOMAS C. DAWSON
Secretary of the United States Legation to Brazil
IN TWO PARTS
_PART I_
ARGENTINA, PARAGUAY, URUGUAY, BRAZIL
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
COPYRIGHT 1903
BY
THOMAS C. DAWSON
Eighth Printing
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
TO MY WIFE
I DEDICATE THIS STUDY OF THE HISTORY
OF HER NATIVE CONTINENT
PREFACE
The question most frequently asked me since I began my stay in South
America has been: "Why do they have so many revolutions there?" Possibly
the events recounted in the following pages may help the reader to
answer this for himself. I hope that he will share my conviction that
militarism has already definitely disappeared from more than half the
continent and is slowly becoming less powerful in the remainder.
Constitutional traditions, inherited from Spain and Portugal, implanted
a tendency toward disintegration; Spanish and Portuguese tyranny bred
in the people a distrust of all rulers and governments; the war of
independence brought to the front military adventurers; civil disorders
were inevitable, and the search for forms of government that should be
final and stable has been very painful. On the other hand, the generous
impulse that prompted the movement toward independence has grown into an
earnest desire for ordered liberty, which is steadily spreading among
all classes. Civic capacity is increasing among the body of South
Americans and immigration is raising the industrial level. They are
slowly evolving among themselves the best form of government for their
special needs and conditions, and a citizen of the United States must
rejoice to see that that form is and will surely remain republican.
It is hard to secure from the tangle of events called South American
history a clearly defined picture. At the risk of repetition I have
tried to tell separately the story of each country, because each has its
special history and its peculiar characteristics. All of these states
have, however, had much in common and it is only in the case of the
larger nations that social and political conditions have been described
in detail. A study of either Argentina, Brazil, Chile, or Venezuela
is likely to throw most light on the political development of the
continent, while Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia are more interesting to the
seeker for local colour and the lover of the dramatic.
The South American histories so far written treat of special periods,
and few authorities exist for post-revolution times. Personal
observations through a residence of six years in South America;
conversations with public men, scholars, merchants, and proprietors;
newspapers and reviews, political pamphlets, books of travel, and
official publications, have furnished me with most of my material for
the period since 1825. The following books have been of use in the
preparation of the first volume, and are recommended to those who care
to follow up the subject:
ARGENTINA: Mitre's _Historia de Belgrano and Historia de San Martin_,
in Spanish; Torrente's _Revolucion Hispano-Americano_, in Spanish;
Lozano's _Conquista del Paraguay, La Plata y Tucuman_, in Spanish;
Funes's _Historia de Buenos Aires y Tucuman_, in Spanish; Lopez's
_Manuel de Historia Argentina_, in Spanish; Page's _La Plata_, in
English; Graham's _A Vanished Arcadia_, in English.
PARAGUAY: All of the above and Thompson's _Paraguayan War_, in English;
Washburn's _History of Paraguay_, in English; Fix's _Guerra de
Paraguay_, in Portuguese.
URUGUAY: Bauza's _Dominacion Espanola_, in Spanish; Berra's _Bosquejo
Historico_, in Spanish; Saint-Foix's _L'Uruguay_, in French.
BRAZIL: Southey's _History of the Brazil_, in English; Varnhagem's
_Historia do Brasil_, in Portuguese; Pereira da Silva's _Fundacao do
Imperio, Segundo Periodo, Historia do Brasil, e Historia do Meu Tempo_,
in Portuguese; Nabuco's _Estadista do Imperio_, in Portuguese; Rio
Branco's sketch in _Le Bresil en 1889_, in French; Oliveira Lima's
_Pernambuco_, in Portuguese.
All of the above books may be found in the Columbian Memorial Library of
the Bureau of American Republics at Washington, which, taken as a whole,
is one of the best collections on South America in existence.
T. C. D.
WASHINGTON, January 22, 1903.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTORY: THE DISCOVERIES AND THE CONQUEST 3
_ARGENTINA_
I. THE ARGENTINE LAND 37
II. THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM 47
III. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 58
IV. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 70
V. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTION 80
VI. COMPLETION OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 97
VII. THE ERA OF CIVIL WARS 115
VIII. CONSOLIDATION 130
IX. THE MODERN ARGENTINE 141
_PARAGUAY_
I. PARAGUAY UNTIL 1632 165
II. THE JESUIT REPUBLIC AND COLONIAL PARAGUAY 177
III. FRANCIA'S REIGN 188
IV. THE REIGN OF THE ELDER LOPEZ 198
V. THE WAR 206
VI. PARAGUAY SINCE 1870 220
_URUGUAY_
I. INTRODUCTION 227
II. PORTUGUESE AGGRESSIONS AND THE SETTLEMENT OF THE COUNTRY 239
III. THE REVOLUTION 247
IV. INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL WAR 259
V. CIVIL WAR AND ARGENTINE INTERVENTION 265
VI. COLORADOS AND BLANCOS 272
_BRAZIL_
I. PORTUGAL 287
II. DISCOVERY 295
III. DESCRIPTION 305
IV. EARLY COLONISATION 316
V. THE JESUITS 326
VI. FRENCH OCCUPATION OF RIO 333
VII. EXPANSION 342
VIII. THE DUTCH CONQUEST 350
IX. EXPULSION OF THE DUTCH 361
X. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 371
XI. GOLD DISCOVERIES--REVOLTS--FRENCH ATTACKS 378
XII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 386
XIII. THE PORTUGUESE COURT IN RIO 401
XIV. INDEPENDENCE 411
XV. REIGN OF PEDRO I. 421
XVI. THE REGENCY 436
XVII. PEDRO II. 449
XVIII. EVENTS OF 1849 TO 1864 458
XIX. THE PARAGUAYAN WAR 468
XX. REPUBLICANISM AND EMANCIPATION 478
XXI. THE REVOLUTION--THE DICTATORSHIP--THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
THE REPUBLIC 492
INDEX 513
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
CAPE HORN _Frontispiece_
_From a steel engraving._
FERDINAND, KING OF SPAIN 6
_Redrawn from an old print._
FRANCISCO PIZARRO 9
_From Montain's "America."_
THE AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS 11
MINING SCENE 16
_Redrawn from Gottfriedt's "Neue Welt."_
A YOUNG GAUCHO 28
_From a lithograph._
FOREST SCENE IN ARGENTINA 39
_From a steel print._
DOCKS AT BUENOS AIRES 44
AN OLD SPANISH CORNER IN BUENOS AIRES 76
MANUEL BELGRANO 95
_From an oil painting._
GENERAL SAN MARTIN 99
_From a steel engraving._
PLAZA DE MAYO AND CATHEDRAL AT BUENOS AIRES 113
_From a lithograph._
BUENOS AIRES IN 1845 127
_From a steel engraving._
BARTOLOME MITRE 139
_From a steel engraving._
JULIO ROCA 145
GATEWAY OF THE CEMETERY AT BUENOS AIRES 151
_From a lithograph._
A RIVER ROAD IN ARGENTINA 159
_From a lithograph._
ASUNCION 167
GUAYRA FALLS 179
JOSE RODRIGUEZ GASPAR FRANCIA 193
_From an old woodcut._
FRANCISCO SOLANO LOPEZ 211
_From a photograph taken in 1849._
PALM GROVES IN EL CHACO 217
HARBOUR AT MONTEVIDEO 231
MONTEVIDEO 243
_From an old print._
BRIDGE AT MALDONADO 249
GENERAL DON JOSE GERVASIO ARTIGAS 257
_From an old woodcut._
THE SOLIS THEATRE 275
THE CATHEDRAL, MONTEVIDEO 283
OLD TOWER AT LISBON WHENCE THE FLEET SAILED 296
A TUPI VILLAGE 299
A GARDEN IN PETROPOLIS 307
BAHIA 324
PADRE JOSE DE ANCHIETA 330
_From an old-woodcut._
PLANTERS GOING TO CHURCH 337
_From an old print._
A CADEIRA 340
OLD FORT AT BAHIA 353
RIO GRANDE DO SUL 387
OLD RANCH IN RIO GRANDE 390
WASHING DIAMONDS 391
BOATS ON THE RIO GRANDE 395
_From a steel print._
DOM JOHN VI. 403
_From an old woodcut._
DOM PEDRO I. 414
_From an old woodcut._
DOM JOSE BONIFACIO DE ANDRADA 418
_From a steel print._
EVARISTO FERREIRA DA VEIGA 431
_From a steel engraving._
DONNA JANUARIA 445
_From a steel engraving._
DOM PEDRO II. 447
_From a steel engraving._
BARON OF CAXIAS 453
_From an old woodcut._
PRINCESS ISABEL IN 1889 456
PAMPAS OF THE RIO GRANDE 460
OLD MARKET IN SAO PAULO 465
GOVERNER'S PALACE IN SAO PAULO 469
HOSPITAL AND OLD CHURCH AT PORTO ALEGRE 475
BRIDGE AT MENDANHA 480
CITY OF OURO PRETO 483
EMPEROR DOM PEDRO IN 1889 491
MILITARY SCHOOL OF RIO JANEIRO 493
GENERAL BENJAMIN CONSTANT 496
_From a woodcut._
THE EMPRESS IN 1889 498
AMERICAN LEGATION NEAR RIO 505
CAMPOS SALLES 510
_From a woodcut._
MAPS
MAP OF ARGENTINA, PARAGUAY, URUGUAY, BOLIVIA, AND CHILE 38
OUTLINE MAP OF BRAZIL 288
MAP OF SOUTH AMERICA _At end_
_Showing the progress of settlement and present populated area_
INTRODUCTORY
THE DISCOVERIES AND THE CONQUEST
INTRODUCTORY
THE DISCOVERIES AND THE CONQUEST
_Spain's Discovery of America._--Town or communal government has been
characteristic of Spain since before the Roman conquest. The Visigoths,
who destroyed the advanced civilisation they found in the Peninsula,
never really amalgamated with the subject population, and, happily, they
did not succeed in destroying the municipalities. The liberal,
civilised, and tolerant Saracens who drove out the Goths, left their
Christian subjects free to enjoy their own laws and customs. The
municipalities gave efficient local self-government while a system of
small proprietorships made the Peninsula prosper, as in the best days of
the Roman dominion. The population of Spain reached twenty millions
under the Moors, but finally dynastic civil wars enabled the remnant of
Visigoths who had taken refuge in the northern mountains to begin the
gradual expulsion of the Mahometans. In the midst of these currents of
war and conquest setting to and fro, the old municipalities survived
unchangeable, and always supplying local self-government.
A tendency toward decentralisation was ingrained in the Spanish people
from the earliest times. It was increased by the method in which the
Christian conquest of Mahometan Spain was achieved. The Visigothic
nobility, starting from separate points in Asturias and Navarre,
advanced into Saracen territory and established counties and earldoms
which were virtually independent of their mother-kingdoms. The Asturians
expanded into Leon and thence over Galicia, northern Portugal, Old and
New Castile. The power of the Leonese monarch over Galicia was nominal;
Castile and Portugal separated from Leon almost as soon as they were
wrested from the Mahometans. The Basques were always independent, and
Navarre, though it became the mother of Aragon, had little connection
with the latter region. On the Mediterranean shore Charlemagne drove the
Moors from Catalonia and made it a province of his empire, but no sooner
was he dead than it became independent. Toward the end of the thirteenth
century. The Christian conquest was virtually completed, and the
Peninsula had been divided into four kingdoms. Each of these was,
however, in reality only a federation of semi-independent feudal
divisions and municipalities united by personal allegiance to a single
sovereign. In the course of the continual quarrelling of the monarchs
their kingdoms frequently divided, coalesced, and separated again. The
death of a king or the marriage of his daughter was often the signal for
war and a readjustment of boundaries, but these overturnings did not
much affect the component and really vital political units.
More significant than the political kingdoms were the linguistic
divisions. Spain then spoke, and still speaks, three languages, each of
which has many dialects. From Asturias and Navarre the language, now
known as Castilian, had spread over the central part of the Peninsula
south to Cadiz and Murcia. From Galicia the Gallego had spread directly
south along the Atlantic, where one of its dialects grew into the
Portuguese. On the east coast the Catalonian, imported from Languedoc by
the French conqueror, is a mere derivative of the Provencal. Its
dialects are spoken all along the Mediterranean coasts of Spain as far
south as Alicante, as well as in the Balearic islands.
By 1300 A.D. two great political divisions, Castile and Aragon, covered
three-fourths of the Peninsula, and their boundaries were well
established; each, however, was a mere loose aggregation of provinces,
and every province had its own laws and customs, its jealously guarded
privileges, its legislative assembly, and its free municipalities.
Galicia had never become incorporated with Leon; the Basques ruled
themselves; Catalonia was really independent of Aragon; Castile had,
from the beginning, been virtually independent, although under the same
monarch as Leon, and, indeed, had taken the latter's place as the
metropolitan province of the kingdom.
[Illustration: FERDINAND, KING OF SPAIN.
[Redrawn from an old print.]]
The one great unifying force was religious sentiment, stimulated into
fanaticism by centuries of wars against the infidels. Nevertheless,
during the two centuries before the discovery of America the Spaniards
absorbed much culture from their Moorish subjects. In 1479, the whole
Peninsula, except Portugal and Granada, was politically united by the
accession of Ferdinand to the throne of Aragon, and of Isabella to that
of Castile and Leon. With local liberties intact, and peace prevailing
throughout its whole extent, the Peninsula enjoyed a prosperity unknown
since the golden era of the Moors. The population rose to twelve
millions; Andalusia, Galicia, Catalonia, and Valencia were among the
most flourishing and thickly settled parts of Europe, while the military
qualities of the aristocracy of Castile and Leon and Aragon gave the new
power the best armies of the time.
Colonies founded by a monarchy so organised could never be firmly knit
to each other nor to the mother country. The nobility of the sword would
try to establish feudal principalities; the new cities would endeavour
to exercise the local functions of the old Peninsular municipalities;
and the spirit of local independence still animating Catalonians,
Basques, Galicians, and Andalusians would be repeated on a new
continent. The only bond of union would be personal allegiance to the
monarch.
In the fourteenth century, Christian navigators reached the Canary
Islands--sixty miles from the African coast and six hundred south-east
of Gibraltar. The assurance that land did really exist below the horizon
of that western ocean, so mysterious and terrible to the early
navigators, gave them confidence to push farther into the deep. In
navigation, the Spaniards lagged behind their Portuguese neighbours. But
among the Spanish kingdoms Castile took the lead because her Andalusian
ports of Cadiz, San Lucar, Palos, and Huelva faced on the open Atlantic.
These towns swarmed with sailors who had followed in the track of the
Portuguese and visited their new possessions. The Castilians and
Andalusians were naturally jealous of the successful Portuguese.
Madeira, the Azores, the Cape Verdes, and the gold mines of the Guinea
coast had fallen to the latter, while the Spaniards had only the
Canaries. They gave an eager ear to the rumours that were rife in the
Portuguese islands of more marvellous discoveries still to be made--of
islands beyonds the Azores. An adventurous Italian, Christopher
Columbus, wandering among the Portuguese possessions, heard the stories.
Happily for Spain, he believed them and resolved to lead an expedition
to the farther side of the Atlantic. He entered her service and proved
to be an enthusiast of rare pertinacity. It is immaterial whether the
idea of a route to the East Indies by the west occurred to him at the
same time he became convinced that there were islands in the far
Atlantic waiting to be discovered. That which is certain is that he
devoted his life to persuading someone in authority to entrust him with
ships and men to make a voyage to the far West. The pilots at Palos
backed him, and he finally secured the desired permission and means from
Isabella of Castile. Her interest in exploration and colonisation had
been shown fifteen years before, in her energetic measures in conquering
the Canaries and forcing the Portuguese to renounce their claims to
those islands, and she well deserves the title of founder of the
colonial empire of Spain.
[Illustration: THE AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.]
The story of Columbus's first voyage needs no retelling. He journeyed so
far to the west that he returned convinced he had reached the longitude
of eastern Asia, and the noise of his great discovery resounded
through Europe and began the transformation of the world. Since the last
great century--the thirteenth--Christendom had retrograded. The Tartars
dominated Russia and the Turks were pressing hard on Germany. Unless the
Christian world could find an outlet--unless it could create other
resources for itself and outside of itself; unless feudalism should find
an employment for its military energies outside of the vicious circle of
fruitless and purposeless dynastic wars, it seemed not improbable that
Mahometan aggression would continue until all Europe lay under the
deadening influence of the Turk. Only in the Peninsula was apparent that
spirit of expansion which is the best indication of internal vitality in
a nation. The military nobility, whose determined fanaticism,
magnificent courage, and spirit of individual initiative had driven the
Moors out of Spain in the thirteenth century, welcomed this fresh
opportunity to slay the infidel and carve out new fiefs for themselves.
_Conquest of the Andes._--Columbus showed strategic genius of the
highest order in choosing Hayti as the site of the first settlement.
That island afforded an admirable base for the conquest of the New
World. It was large enough to furnish provisions, and was conveniently
situated with reference to the coasts and islands of the Caribbean. Gold
washings were soon discovered in the interior and the unwarlike
inhabitants were at once impressed into slavery to dig in the mines. The
news of gold stimulated interest as nothing else could have done. The
Castilian government took immediate steps to exclude all other nations.
The Pope divided the globe between Spain and Portugal, and a treaty to
this effect was negotiated between the two countries. Spaniards swarmed
over to Hayti, and thence expeditions were sent out in every direction,
headed by private adventurers bearing their sovereign's commission. The
other Antilles were soon explored and, by the end of the century, the
Spaniards had reached the South American mainland and rapidly explored
its coast from the Amazon up to the Isthmus. Gold was picked up in the
streams flowing from the Columbian Andes into the Caribbean. A few years
later the north-western coast of South America was granted out to noble
adventurers who undertook its conquest and exploitation with their own
means. The Isthmian region became the new centre of Spanish power and
commerce in America. In 1513, Balboa crossed the Isthmus to the Pacific
Ocean--an event second in its far-reaching consequences only to
Columbus's first voyage. During the following years the Gulf of Mexico
was explored, and in 1518 the greatest statesman and general whom Spain
ever sent to the new world--Hernando Cortes--began the conquest of the
empire of the Aztecs.
The mining done in Hayti and along the Caribbean coast seemed pitiably
insignificant compared with the treasures found in Mexico. There
followed a new influx of gentleman adventurers who scoured the coast in
every direction seeking another defenceless empire and mines as good as
those of Mexico. The expeditions down the Pacific coast of South America
started from the Isthmus. Peru was soon found, and in 1532, Pizarro
and his band of blood-thirsty desperadoes, with inconceivable audacity,
struck a vital blow at the heart of the great empire of the Incas by
capturing its emperor. Within half a dozen years nearly the whole of the
vast region over which the Inca power had extended was overrun and the
outlying provinces were ready to submit at demand.
[Illustration: FRANCISCO PIZARRO.
[From Montain's _America_.]]
The rapidity with which a little band of Spaniards conquered the vast
and warlike empire of the Incas is well-nigh incredible. The terror
inspired by horses and firearms did much, but the capture of their
emperor demoralised the imperial Inca tribes still more. Once in the
possession of the sacred person of the monarch, the Spaniards were
regarded by the Indians as his mouthpiece and the successor to his
power. From Cuzco, the capital, a splendid system of roads and
communications radiated to every part of the empire. The military and
political dominance of the imperial tribes had weakened the power of
resistance in the provinces. The elaborate structure which had been
built up by the Incas rather facilitated than hindered the Spanish
conquest, once the decisive blow had been given at the centre. The
provinces submitted to the new rulers as fast as the Spanish columns
could march over the magnificent mountain roads.
South from Cuzco the Inca empire extended 2000 miles. It covered the
whole Andean region as far as the 37th degree of south latitude and
extended from the Pacific to the eastern slopes of the Andean foothills.
In the present Argentine it included the tribes living in the lesser
chains which occupy the north-western part of the republic. Some of
these Argentine tribes seem to have been only tributary to the Incas,
others were completely dependent, and extensive colonies had been
founded in the cotton regions. The general language was Inca, and that
admirable system of irrigation and intensive culture which made Peru
proper a garden had been introduced on the eastern slopes of the
southern Andes.
The southern part of the great Bolivian plateau seems to have submitted
quietly to the Spanish conquerors, and the stream of adventurers passed
on to the south. In 1542, Diego de Rojas led the first expedition, of
which a record has survived, down through the Humahuaca valley into the
actual territory of the Argentine. He himself perished in a fight with a
wild tribe near the main chain of the Andes, but his followers continued
their march. Near Tucuman, they passed out from the mountain defiles
unto the pampa, and, leaving the desert to their right penetrated
through Santiago and Cordoba, to the Parana.
No permanent settlement was then made, but the reports of thousands of
peaceable and wealthy Indians inhabiting irrigated valleys, and the
accounts of the magnificent pastures which stretched away to the east,
soon tempted the Spaniards to take permanent possession. Seven years
after the first exploration a town was founded in latitude 27 deg., midway
between the Andes and the Parana. About the same time other adventurers
came pouring over the Andes from northern Chile, and this current soon
joined that from the north. The Spaniards established themselves as
feudal lords, and the unhappy Indians were divided among them. In one
district, forty-seven thousand Indians were divided among fifty-six
grantees. In 1553, Santiago de Estero, for many years the capital of the
province of Tucuman was founded.
In 1561, the governor of Chile sent from Santiago de Chile over the
Andes an expedition which founded the city of Mendoza in a most
beautiful region, where the vine flourishes in perfection, and where a
wonderful system of irrigation, inherited from the Indians, still exists
to attest the latters' engineering skill. Next year San Juan was
founded, and these two towns were the centres for the settlement of the
province of Cuyo, which remained a part of Chile for two hundred years.
The immigrants from northern Chile and Bolivia established Tucuman in
the tropical garden spot of the republic in 1565. From Santiago del
Estero, in 1573, an expedition was sent two hundred and fifty miles to
the south to a region of fertile valleys and plains at the foot of a
beautiful mountain range. This was Cordoba, which at once became, and
has since remained, the most populous of the interior provinces.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish power was firmly
established in settlements that have since become the Argentine
provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, Catamarca, Santiago, Rioja, and
Cordoba. All these really formed a southern extension of Upper Peru.
Their geographical, political, and commercial relations were with
Charcas, Potosi, and Lima. The discovery, in 1545, of the great silver
mines at Potosi at once made the high Bolivian plateau, then known as
the Audiencia of Charcas, the most valuable and important province of
all the Spanish monarch's South American empire. In 1571, the discovery
of quicksilver mines in Peru vastly increased the output of precious
metals; in 1575, the wonderful Oruro mines were opened, and before the
end of the century the copper-pan amalgamation process was invented in
Bolivia, revolutionising the production of silver.
[Illustration: MINING SCENE.
[Redrawn from Gottfriedt's _Neuw Welt_.]]
The resulting prosperity of the mining regions of Bolivia stimulated the
settlement of the north-western provinces of the Argentine. The miners
needed provisions which could not well be raised in the neighbourhood of
Potosi. There was a demand for cattle for beef, and for horses and mules
for transportation. A solid economic foundation was thus provided for
the plains settlements, and the enslavement of the Indians and the
breeding of cattle went on apace. By the end of the sixteenth century
north-western Argentine--the province of Tucuman, as it was then
called--was the seat of many thriving settlements whose Spanish
inhabitants were mostly pastoral. The Indians in the neighbourhood of
each settlement had been reduced to slavery, and cultivated the fields
that had been their fathers' for the benefit of their white masters. The
Spanish proprietors lived like feudal lords, while the Spanish
authorities left these remote regions largely to their own devices.
Conditions in Cuyo, the western province just across the Andes from
Santiago de Chile, were substantially the same. A political dependency
of Chile, the few external relations it had were with that
captaincy-general. The Spanish grantees ruled their Indian slaves in
patriarchal fashion; agriculture was the principal occupation; pastoral
industry was not so profitable as in Tucuman, and the region was more
isolated. In both Tucuman and Cuyo Spanish rule was superimposed upon a
previously existing commercial and social structure. There was no
attempt to expel or destroy the aborigines. On the contrary, they were
the sole labourers and their exertions the chief source of the wealth of
their conquerors. There began a process of approximation and mutual
assimilation between the Spaniards and their semi-civilised subjects.
While the former continued to be a privileged and ruling caste, the
latter absorbed much European knowledge from them. The Indian language
long held its own alongside of the Spanish and is still spoken in many
parts of the region.
On the Atlantic side, among degraded peoples who had not progressed
beyond the wandering and tribal stages of existence. Spanish settlement
proceeded on entirely different lines. There existed no well-organised
body politic, into whose control the conquerors could step with hardly
an interruption to industry. Campaigns could not be made with the
confident expectation of finding abundant accumulations of food _en
route_. Expeditions among the squalid tribes were slow and dangerous and
settlement stuck close to the rivers instead of following fearlessly
across the plateau to the spots where the finest lands and the most
flourishing Indian communities lay ready for the spoiler.
The beginnings of the coast provinces were painful and disastrous; the
settlements were feeble; centuries elapsed before the natural advantages
of the region were utilised, and before its accessibility and fertility
drew a great immigration. The assimilation of Indian blood did not take
place on a large scale, and the immigrants and their descendants became
perforce horsemen and fighters.
_Discovery of the Plate._--The Portuguese discovery of the east coast of
South America, in 1500, was a disagreeable surprise to the Spanish
government. The Treaty of Tordesillas had been framed with the purpose
of giving America to Spain, while Africa and the shores of the Indian
Ocean were left to Portugal. Nevertheless, the Portuguese vigorously
asserted their right to the prize they had picked up by accident and
insisted on the letter of the treaty. They promptly explored the coast
as far south as Santa Catharina, six hundred miles north of the Plate,
but they had asserted no ownership farther south at the date when the
Spanish expeditions began to be sent to the South Atlantic.
In 1516, a celebrated sea-captain from the north of Spain--Juan Diaz de
Solis--was sent out by the Castilian government to explore the southern
part of the continent. He simply reconnoitred the Brazilian coast, where
the Portuguese had not yet established any settlements, and, pressing on
to the south, finally reached the Plate. His first impression on
rounding Cape St. Maria, where the Uruguayan shore turns to the
north-west, was that he had reached the southern point of the continent
and discovered the sea route into the Pacific. But the freshness of the
water in the great estuary undeceived him. Following along the northern
bank, he landed with a small party and was attacked and slain by a tribe
of fierce and intractable Indians.
When the news reached Lisbon, the Portuguese government protested
against this invasion of territory, which it claimed lay east of the
Tordesillas line. Portugal, however, did not follow up her protest or
try to take possession for herself. At this very time a celebrated
Portuguese navigator, Fernando Magellan, disgusted by the neglect of his
own country, was urging the Spanish government to give him the means of
carrying out his great project for the circumnavigation of the globe. He
was confident he could reach the East Indies by rounding the southern
point of South America or by finding a passage through the continent in
higher latitudes than had yet been reached. The year 1519, when Magellan
sailed from San Lucar on the first voyage around the world, was big with
fate for Spain. Cortes was adding a new empire by the conquest of
Mexico, thus giving Spain control of the world's supply of precious
metals. The popular assemblies of Castile and Aragon, of Catalonia,
Valencia, and Galicia, were preparing for a hopeless struggle against
the might of a monarch who ruled two-thirds of Europe. At the very
moment that Charles V. was crushing Peninsular freedom by brutal
military force, the genius of Magellan and Cortes gave him the whole of
America. Spain had heretofore been a federation of self-governing
communes and provinces, but their independence was now destroyed.
Military despotism proved strong enough to crush liberty, although it
was unable to stamp out the feeling of local segregation. The very
soldiers that conquered America took over an instinctive feeling that
the central government was dangerous and inimical to the people--a
sentiment which has always survived in some form among their
descendants.
Magellan stopped at the Plate in the beginning of 1520, and explored the
estuary to make sure that it did not afford the passage he was seeking.
In October he reached the mouth of the strait that bears his name, and,
wonderfully favoured by wind and weather, threaded his way to the
Pacific in five weeks. Subsequent wayfarers were not so fortunate and
the strait never became a practicable commercial route until after the
introduction of steam navigation. In the succeeding hundred years not
half a dozen ships reached the Pacific around South America.
Practically, the Pacific was accessible only over the Isthmus or by the
immensely long journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Nevertheless, the
importance of this epoch-making voyage has not been overestimated. The
Pacific became, in a sense, a Spanish lake, in which she could maintain
at will a naval preponderance. She occupied the Philippines and secured
control at leisure of the Pacific coast of America. However, the
scientific results were more important. Thereafter, the thorough
exploration of all the shores of the South Sea was only a question of
time. Magellan's voyage made geography an exact science. He sketched the
map of the world with broad and sure strokes and left nothing for
subsequent explorers except the filling-in of details.
The occupation of the Philippines and Moluccas gave rise to new disputes
between Spain and Portugal as to their rights under the Treaty of
Tordesillas. The imperfect instruments of those days left the line
doubtful on the eastern South American coast, as well as on the other
side of the world. In 1526, Sebastian Cabot was sent by the Spanish
government to determine astronomically the location of the line in
America, and then to follow Magellan's track to western Asia. At the
mouth of the Plate he heard rumours among the Indians of silver mines on
the river's banks and of the existence of a great and wealthy empire at
its headwaters. This was Peru--not yet reached by the Castilians on
their way south from the Isthmus, but the coast Indians showed Cabot
silver ornaments which had been passed from hand to hand from the
highlands of Peru and Bolivia down the river to the Atlantic.
Cabot and his band of adventurers determined to neglect their surveying,
trusting that the discovery of silver mines would excuse their
disobedience. They spent three years in vain journeying and
prospecting--exploring the Uruguay to the head of navigation and
following up the Parana as far as the Apipe rapids. Signs of neither
silver nor gold, nor of civilised inhabitants, were found on either
river. Their upper courses came down from the east--the direction
opposite to that in which Eldorado was reported. The gently flowing
Paraguay, coming down the plains in the centre of the continent, seemed
to offer a better hope of success. But Cabot's forces and provisions
were inadequate to penetrating farther north than the present site of
Asuncion. Returning to a fort he had left on the lower Parana, he found
that it had been taken by Indians and its garrison massacred.
Discouraged by such a succession of difficulties and misfortunes, he
returned to Spain.
The news of Cabot's expedition, and its failure, stimulated the
Portuguese to undertake the colonisation of the east coast of South
America. Affonso da Souza started from Lisbon with an expedition,
intending to take possession of the Plate. Lack of provisions, fear of
the Indians, the presence of a Portuguese castaway--one of those
insignificant chances that sometimes change the course of empires as a
twig diverts the current of a river--stopped Alfonso before he reached
his destination. Instead of establishing a colony on the estuary he
founded San Vicente, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. This became
the southern outpost of the Portuguese possessions, and the temperate
zone of South America was left open for the Spaniards to occupy when
they chose.
Two years after Cabot's failure, Pizarro overran Peru. All Europe rang
with the exploit. The Spanish king was besieged by nobles who literally
begged the privilege of risking their lives and fortunes in America.
These "adelantados" contracted to conquer, at their own charges, the
particular districts granted them, certain profits being reserved to the
crown, and Charles V. freely granted such patents. Among the grantees
was a Basque nobleman, Pedro de Mendoza, to whom was given the territory
beginning at the Portuguese possessions south two hundred leagues along
the Atlantic coast toward the Strait of Magellan. He raised more than
two thousand men and reached the Plate in 1535, where he immediately
founded a city on the south bank which he named Buenos Aires. He
intended to make it a base for an advance up the Parana to find and
conquer another Peru. His attempt was foredoomed to failure. The Indians
surrounding Buenos Aires were implacable in their hatred of the
invaders. They lived in scattered little tribes, and neither would nor
could furnish food enough to maintain the Spaniards. The provisions
brought from Spain were inadequate; sorties were useless; the Indians
fled from large parties and ambushed small ones. The preparations for
the advance up the river were delayed for months. Hundreds died of
hunger and disease. Within a year the place had to be abandoned, and in
a desperate condition the expedition fled up the river to Cabot's solid
fort. Here the adelantado stopped, sick and discouraged, while a few
hundreds of the more daring and persevering pressed on to the north,
determined to reach Eldorado. Arrived at the junction of the Paraguay
and Parana, they chose the former river, and pushed on up it as far as
the twentieth degree, to a place they called Candelaria. There they
found vast lakes and swamps spreading to the west. It was necessary to
protect their retreat before plunging into the difficult country that
extends across to Bolivia. Accordingly, they divided and one party
remained on the dry ground near the river, while two hundred desperate
adventurers pressed on through the wilderness, hoping to reach the
Bolivian plateau.
The party that stopped behind as a reserve was commanded by Domingo
Irala, the real founder of the Spanish settlements in the Parana valley.
The main expedition never returned. Years afterward friendly Indians
brought back the tale that it had reached the slopes of the Bolivian
mountains, obtained much gold and silver and started back triumphantly,
but had perished to the last man in an Indian ambush not far from the
Paraguay and safety. Irala waited the appointed time and then floated
down the river. He and his companions were well-nigh in despair. So far
as they knew, they were the only survivors of the three thousand people
who had accompanied Mendoza. To the north the country was inhospitable
and impenetrable, and from their experiences of the year before they
knew that at the mouth of the river no provisions or succour were to be
had. On their way up the river they had passed, about the twenty-fifth
degree, a beautiful and fertile rolling country, covered with
magnificent forests, with park-like openings, and inhabited by a large
and friendly Indian population. Opposite the mouth of the Pilcomayo,
where there was a large Indian village, they stopped on their downward
journey, determined to settle down and take some repose from their
interminable and fruitless wanderings in search of the will-o'-the-wisp
Eldorado. There, in 1536, they founded the city of Asuncion, the first
Spanish settlement on the Atlantic slope of South America.
_The Foundation of Buenos Aires._--The failure of Mendoza, first
adelantado, to establish a colony on the Plate, did not discourage
others from soliciting the grant of his territory. In 1540, Cabeza de
Vaca, a "conquistador" celebrated for his feats in Florida, was
appointed adelantado and set out gallantly to find the second Peru,
which everyone believed to exist at the headwaters of the Paraguay.
Intent on reaching the interior as soon as possible, he made no attempt
to establish a town and port at the mouth of the river Plate, but landed
at Santa Catharina on what is now the Brazilian coast in the latitude of
Paraguay, and set off across country with four hundred men and twenty
horses. The distance was a thousand miles; the route led up a heavily
wooded mountain range on the coast, and thence across a broken, but
open, plateau, where great rivers point out the natural routes to the
Parana. The soil was fertile and the Indians along the road were able to
furnish considerable food supplies. Cabeza de Vaca made the journey
without appreciable loss and arrived in Asuncion eager to take command
and dash across to the Andes. But the sturdy Basques had selected their
able countryman--Domingo Irala--as chief of the colony and gave the new
adelantado a cold welcome. Irala insisted that a reconnoitring
expedition be sent before risking the body of the Spaniards. Its command
was given him and he penetrated almost to the headwaters of the
Paraguay. Next year Cabeza de Vaca followed, but as soon as he left the
Paraguay he got into difficulties. He could not penetrate the swamps nor
make headway against the savage Indians who lived between the river and
the eastern slopes of the Cordillera. He returned defeated and
discouraged, and the people of Asuncion bundled him back to Spain.
Though Irala subsequently did succeed in reaching Peru, by the route up
the Paraguay, no practical results followed. Paraguay remained isolated
from the Spanish empire on the Pacific coast until a roundabout
communication was established down the river and thence west across the
dry and level plains that stretch from the mouth of the river Plate to
the Cordillera.
The early days of the Asuncion settlement were stormy. The rough
adventurers fell to fighting among themselves, and their cruelties often
drove the patient and submissive Indians into rebellion. Their greed for
bigger plantations and more slaves pushed them on to conquering the
aborigines in an expanding circle. By 1553 they had founded a settlement
on the Upper Parana and were dominant from river to river in the
southern half of the present territory of Paraguay. Until his death, in
1557, Irala was the dominating personality in the colony. According to
his lights he was just in his dealings with the Indians. When he died
the settlement was firmly on its feet, and even the Indians revered him
as their benefactor. The mass of the population was Indian, and Guarany
has always remained the prevalent language in Paraguay. Absolutely
isolated from the other European colonies, and almost without
communication with the mother country, the settlement was, however, an
unpromising affair. The few hundreds of Spaniards might have sustained
their social and military superiority over the hordes of Indians by
whom they were surrounded, but, without material and intellectual
communication with Spain, they could achieve no commercial success.
[Illustration: YOUNG GAUCHO.
[From a lithograph.]]
An outlet to the sea was necessary. The original settlers had been
adventurers, willing to follow Mendoza through swamp and forest up to
the walls of Eldorado, and their children were not less enterprising.
The horses brought over by the adelantados had multiplied amazingly, and
were spreading wild over the pampa to the south. Cattle, sheep, and
goats bred by millions. Before long the attractions of a pastoral life
began to appeal to the Spaniards and creoles of Asuncion. The braver and
more energetic preferred the free open existence of the pampa to
idleness in the sleepy villages of Paraguay.
The Argentine nation proper began its existence when the creole mounted
his horse and took to cattle-breeding on the plains. The possession of
horses, as much as of firearms, gave the gaucho his military
predominance over the fiercest aborigines, and the horse was also the
cornerstone of his industrial system. The cattle of the open pampa gave
him an unlimited supply of the best food, and his horses enabled him to
procure it with a minimum of effort. Irala's successors repeatedly tried
to establish a colony near the mouth of the Plate, but they were not
successful until the creoles on horseback had pushed their way south
along the pampa and driven back or subdued the wandering Indians. In
1560, the Guaranies of Paraguay were definitely crushed in the horribly
bloody battle of Acari, but it was not until 1573 that the Spaniards
from Asuncion succeeded in founding a city south of the confluence of
the Parana and Paraguay. Santa Fe was the first Spanish settlement on
the Plate in territory now a part of the Argentine Republic.
The man who led the creoles to the pampa was Juan de Garay, a Basque,
who had been one of the soldiers in the army that conquered Peru. His
energy and vigour, and the bravery of the creole cavalry who followed
his expeditions down the river and over the pampas, at length opened up
communication from Paraguay to Europe and gave Spain a seaport on the
South Atlantic. Curiously enough, in the very year that Garay founded
Santa Fe, the Spaniards from Peru founded Cordoba--the most eastward of
the Andean settlements. Their hard riders had pushed on from Cordoba,
reconnoitring as far as the Parana and there ran across Garay's men. The
two currents of Argentine settlements met almost at the beginning,
though two centuries were to elapse before they completely coalesced.
Eight years later, Garay succeeded in founding Buenos Aires after
Zarate, the third adelantado, had failed as badly as any of his
predecessors. Garay, by sheer force of energy and fitness, became the
real ruler of the settlements. Active, far-sighted, and able, he
perceived that a purely military establishment at the mouth of the river
was foredoomed to failure. To be permanent, the port and town must be
self-sustaining, and therefore must be surrounded by farms and ranches
and be accessible by land from the upper settlements. In the spring of
1580, the acting governor sent overland from Santa Fe two hundred
families of Guarany Indians, accompanied by a thousand horses, two
hundred cows, and fifty sheep, besides mares, carts, oxen, and other
necessaries. The soldiers of the convoy were mostly creoles born in
Paraguay. Boats carried down from Santa Fe arms, munitions, seed grain,
tools, and whatever in those rude days was essential to a settlement.
He, himself, went by land with forty soldiers, following the highland
that skirts the west bank of the Parana from Santa Fe to Buenos Aires.
The Plate estuary affords no proper harbours; the immense volume of
water spreading over vast shallow beds chokes it with sand-bars, and the
shores are so shelving that even small boats cannot approach the land.
The north side is bolder, and at Montevideo and at the mouth of the
Uruguay affords bays partly sheltered from the storms which sweep up
over the level pampas and make anchorage in the river so unsafe. But the
north bank was cut off from land communication with the existing Spanish
towns by the mighty Uruguay and Parana, and Garay desired that his new
city should be always accessible from his older settlements on the right
bank of the Parana. His choice of the particular spot where the largest
city of the southern hemisphere has since grown up, seems to have been
determined by a few trifling circumstances. He kept as near the head of
the estuary as possible, in order to shorten the land route from Santa
Fe, and picked upon a slight rise of ground between two draws, which
made the site defensible. The fact that a nearby creek--the
Riachuelo--afforded a shelter for little boats, may also have been given
weight in reaching a decision.
Though his settlers did not number five hundred, Garay laid out his city
like a town-site boomer. The surrounding country was divided into
ranches and the neighbouring Indians were distributed among the
citizens of the new town. A "Cabildo," or city council, was named, with
the full paraphernalia of a Spanish municipal government. The new town
started off in the full enjoyment of all the guarantees known to
immemorial Spanish constitutional law. Troubles broke out almost
immediately between the creole settlers and the Spaniards who had been
sent over by the adelantado to fill offices and get the best things in
distributions of land and slaves. Garay had hardly left the town to look
after the rest of the province than the creoles, indignant over unfair
treatment, forcibly demanded an open Cabildo. This was an extraordinary
popular assembly which, according to old Spanish custom, might be called
at critical times, and was something like a town meeting. In theory, the
property-owners and educated citizens were called together merely to
give advice, but in practice, it was a tumultuous assemblage to overawe
the office-holders. The Argentine creoles were doing nothing more than
asserting their constitutional rights as vassals of the king of Castile.
They compelled the Spanish office-holders to compromise.
Meanwhile, Garay was clinching his claim to immortality as the founder
of the Spanish power on the Plate. He explored the pampas to the south
and west of the new city, and reduced many of the tribes to slavery or
vassalage. He found the plains already overrun with hundreds of
thousands of horses--the descendants of the few abandoned there
forty-five years before when the remnants of Mendoza's ill-starred
expedition fled up the river. On his way back to Santa Fe this great
Indian fighter was ambushed by Indians and stabbed while he slept.
His death was followed by outbreaks among the creoles, who resented the
efforts of the adelantado's new representatives to establish a monopoly
in horse-hair. Scarcely had they found a way to make a little money, by
hunting wild horses for their hair, than the officials tried to absorb
all the profit. The struggle between the repressive commercial policy of
Spain, and the interests of the Plate colonists, began with the
foundation of the colony of Buenos Aires and went on for more than two
hundred years.
In 1588, the creoles obtained a foothold in the extreme north of the
mesopotamian region by founding the city of Corrientes near the junction
of the Parana and Paraguay. All the new commonwealths south of Asuncion
obtained a solid economic foundation in the herds of cattle and horses
which covered the plains. In the regions adjacent to the Andes the
Spaniards did not become so exclusively pastoral as their brethren of
the pampas near the Plate. While they had more and better Indian slaves,
their pasturage was not so good. Though apparently more isolated, their
proximity to Upper Peru and the trade that went on with that great
mining country--the goal of fortune-hunting Spaniards in those
years--placed them more directly under the control of the viceregal
authorities. Tucuman was a mere southern extension of the jurisdiction
of the Audiencia at Charcas, and Cuyo was an integral part of Chile,
but this did not prevent the early development of a strong sentiment in
favour of local self-government and of hatred of the imported Spanish
satraps.
By the year 1617 the settlements on the Lower Parana had become of
considerable importance. Buenos Aires was a town of three thousand
people; the right bank of the river as far as Santa Fe was a
grazing-ground for the herds of the creoles; towns and ranches were
flourishing in Corrientes. In that year the Spanish crown abolished the
office of adelantado and erected the lower settlements into a province
separate from Paraguay. The new province included the territory that is
now Uruguay, as well as the four actual Argentine provinces of Buenos
Aires, Santa Fe, Entre Rios and Corrientes. Entre Rios and Uruguay were,
however, as yet entirely unsettled.
While the creoles were thus firmly establishing themselves along the
Lower Parana and in the Andean provinces, the Jesuits were converting
the Indians in the east of Paraguay, and early in the seventeenth
century these indefatigable missionaries had penetrated to the Upper
Parana, crossed it, and were gathering the Indians by thousands into
peaceful villages.
ARGENTINA
CHAPTER I
THE ARGENTINE LAND
South from where the great mass of the Bolivian Andes shoves a shoulder
to the east, as if seeking to join the Brazilian mountain system, and
from where a low ridge stretches out to form the watershed between the
Madeira and the eastward-flowing affluents of the Paraguay, extends an
immense flat plain. Two thousand miles from north to south, and nearly
five hundred miles in breadth, hardly a hillock rises above its surface
from the foothills of the Andes westward to the sea. In the tropical
North its surface is partly covered with trees, but south of the Chaco
the only woodlands are narrow belts following the streams. Everywhere
stretch the grassy plains, without an obstruction or interruption. The
soil is a fine alluvium, full of the right chemical elements, and
admirably adapted to agriculture, wherever the rainfall is sufficient.
As a pasture-ground it is the finest on the planet. Within recent
geological times this plain was the bottom of a great shallow gulf which
received the detritus washed down from the Andes on the one side and
the Brazilian mountains on the other. The gradual uplifting of those
youngest mountains--the Andes--raised their flanks until the adjacent
floor of the gulf appeared dry land, a land all ready and prepared for
human occupancy. Nowhere does man encounter fewer obstacles to his
freedom of movement or find it easier to procure his food supply than on
the pampa--the characteristic topographical feature of the political
division of South America known as Argentina.
Skirting the ridge on the east and draining the vast slopes of the
Brazilian mountains of their tropical rainfall, is the great river
Parana. In latitude 27 deg. it turns abruptly to the west, as if about to
cross the pampa, but a hundred miles farther on it resumes its southward
course. At this last turn the Parana flows into a river which comes
straight down from the north, draining the bed of the old inland sea
that used to divide South America. This junction of the Parana and the
Paraguay forms the second largest river in the world--a river without
obstructions to navigation, but which is so immense that it cannot be
bridged. In latitude 32 deg. it turns back to the south-east, soon receives
the Uruguay,--a swifter stream, that drains the southern part of the
Atlantic highlands,--and then opens out into the great shallow estuary
known as the River Plate. Between the Uruguay and the Parana is the
Argentine Mesopotamia,--a flat region where the low-lying plains,
covered with luscious grasses, intersected with streams, and
interspersed with timber, gradually rise up-stream into the highlands of
the Missions.
[Illustration: ARGENTINA, PARAGUAY, URUGUAY, BOLIVIA AND CHILE]
[Illustration: FOREST SCENE IN ARGENTINA.
[From steel print.]]
To the west the pampa is bounded by the foothills of the Andes and the
parallel chains with which that great mountain system reinforces its
flanks. At the Bolivian frontier, the great outward-jutting shoulder of
the Andes looms up among a series of subordinate chains. South of them,
for a thousand miles, is a belt of broken country averaging two hundred
miles in width. The pampa creeps up to the very foot of the mountain
ranges and where it is watered blossoms like a garden. A quarter of the
population of the Republic lives in the irrigated valleys of these
Andean provinces.
A comparatively narrow, arid, belt stretches diagonally across the South
American continent from the Pacific, in Northern Chile, to the Atlantic
in Northern Patagonia. Consequently, from north to south, and from the
Atlantic back toward the north-east border of this arid belt, the
rainfall of Argentina decreases. On the north-eastern frontier it is
about 80 inches a year; at Rosario, 40; at Cordoba, 30; at Buenos Aires,
35. In the Andean provinces it decreases from over forty, near the
Bolivian frontier, to five or six at San Juan in the latitude of Santa
Fe and Cordoba. In the eastern part of the great pampa the rainfall is
ample for cereal crops; in the western half the rains are periodical and
the region is better adapted to grazing than to agriculture, and there
the grass lands are intersected with tracts of desert which grow larger
towards the south. In the Andes the eastern ranges, catching the
rain-laden upper currents, send down ample water to irrigate the valleys
and adjacent plains.
The mesopotamian region and the country directly south of the Plate
estuary have, of course, an ample rainfall. South of the latitude of
Buenos Aires the rainfall of the Andean region, which has grown steadily
less from the northern boundary, begins again to increase. The eastern
slopes of the mountains south for an indeterminate distance are well
watered, while the Patagonian plains to their east are dry and desolate.
The climate varies from tropical, on the northern frontier, to arctic in
Tierra del Fuego. The southern pampa and the Andean provinces are
temperate or subtropical, and admirably adapted for habitation by men of
European descent. Tucuman is the hottest of these provinces. There the
average temperature of the coldest month is 53 deg.; at Buenos Aires it is
50 deg.; at Cordoba 47 deg.. The average temperatures in these localities for
the whole year are, respectively, 63 deg., 61 deg., and 63 deg..
When Columbus landed in the West Indies, this vast territory was
occupied by two separate sets of aborigines. The Andean provinces were a
part of the great Inca Empire. South as far as Mendoza, the Andean
valleys were filled with a vigorous yet peaceful population who had
brought the art of irrigation to a high degree of perfection.
Plantations of corn, mandioc, and potatoes flourished on the terraced
hillsides and in the fertile valleys. The lower and hotter plains
furnished cotton. Constant communication, both commercial and
governmental, was kept up with the centre of the Inca power in Cuzco,
along roads that followed the easiest routes along the valleys and up
over the passes to the Bolivian plateau, and thence to the central
provinces of the Empire. Chile, on the other side of the Cordillera, was
a sister province, and the passes over the great range were well known
and constantly used. The population was greater than it is at the
present day. While the political solidity of the Inca Empire is
doubtless exaggerated, it is certain that the same civilisation extended
from Ecuador to Mendoza and Santiago de Chile, and that the Cordilleran
region was the home of twenty millions of people, organised into
vigorous, progressive, and expanding communities.
The Andean civilisation never showed any tendency to expand over the
tropical plains of the great central depressions. The Incas themselves
never cared to penetrate far down the wooded and steaming slopes of the
Andes lying directly to the east of their own capital. Their dependent
states bordering on the Argentine pampa did not cross the desert plains,
where irrigating ditches could not reach. So far as we now know, the
Andean Indians had never penetrated to the Atlantic.
East of the pampas, in the hilly woods of Paraguay and Brazil, tribes
vastly inferior in intelligence, political organisation, and
civilisation, maintained a precarious existence. Many of those who
belonged to the great Guarany family lived in palisaded villages and
cultivated the soil, but none had advanced far on the road toward a
reasonably efficient social and military organisation. The procuring of
food for their daily wants was their chief occupation; the tribes were
too small to make effective warfare on a large scale; there was no
prospect of any development into a higher culture. Certain tribes,
inferior to the Guaranies, had spread from the wooded regions over the
mesopotamian provinces and into the adjacent pampa, and the districts on
both sides of the estuary, but they never ventured far from the
water-supply. Though brave and intractable, these people showed no real
fighting capacity until after white men had taught them the use of
horses. With this knowledge, however, they were able to offer a very
effective resistance, which was not completely overcome until twenty
years ago.
The area of the whole Republic is 1,212,600 square miles. The
mesopotamian region contains 81,000 square miles, being larger than
England and even more uniformly fertile. The pampa suitable for grain
production, including the semi-forested Chaco plain in the north, has an
area of not less than 350,000 square miles. The Andean provinces contain
nearly 300,000, and Patagonia 316,000. The grazing pampa is partly
included in the Andean provinces; its boundaries to the south and toward
the Atlantic are not capable of exact definition, but it includes
perhaps half the territory of the Republic. Except the higher mountains,
and the so-called deserts of the centre, the whole territory is
productive.
[Illustration: DOCKS AT BUENOS AIRES.]
The description of the white man's spread over this immense country--the
largest, except Brazil, of the South American states, and of all these
the most immediately and unquestionably suitable for maintaining a large
population of European blood--is tedious when told in detail. But it is
a story fraught with significance for the future of the world. On the
plains of Argentina the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have
fought out among themselves all the perplexing questions arising from
the adaptation of Spanish absolutism and ancient burgh law to a new
country and to personal freedom. After more than half a century of civil
war, constitutional equilibrium has been attained. The country ought to
be interesting where there has grown up within a few decades the largest
city in the Southern Hemisphere, and the largest Latin city, except
Paris, in the world. The growth of Buenos Aires has been as dizzying as
that of Chicago, and the world has never seen a more rapid and easy
multiplication of wealth than that which took place in Argentina between
the years of 1870 and 1890. Interesting, too, is Argentina as the scene
of the most extensive experiment in the mixture of races now going on
anywhere in the world except in the United States. In forty years more
than two millions of immigrants have made their homes in Argentina. The
majority are from Southern Europe, but the proportion of British,
Germans, French, Belgians, and Swiss is a fifth of the whole. Will the
Northerners be assimilated and disappear in the mass of Southerners, or
will they succeed in impressing their characteristics on the latter?
Will a mixed race be evolved especially suited to success in subtropical
America? Will the system of administration painfully evolved out of the
old Spanish laws prove permanently suited to the great industrial and
commercial state that is growing up on the Argentine pampa? Will the
municipal and bureaucratic system prove adaptable and elastic enough to
furnish a political framework for the tremendous economic development
which has already made such strides, but which really has only begun?
Will the intellectual and social ideals of the coming Argentine nation
be military, bureaucratic, leisurely, or will they be purely commercial?
Certain answers to these questions cannot yet be deduced from the data
furnished by the history of Argentina. Their solution, however, inheres
in the past of its people. The future of Argentina will have a profound
influence on the rest of the continent. It has the largest territory
except Brazil, the greatest per capita wealth, its population is
increasing most rapidly, and it has received the greatest amount of
foreign capital. Immigration and investment in the other countries may
be expected soon to begin on a large scale. The experience of Argentina
promises to prove invaluable to all of South America.
CHAPTER II
THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM
Spain, as a world-power, reached her apogee in the year 1580, when Juan
de Garay founded Buenos Aires. In that year Portugal was united to the
Spanish Crown, and the East Indies and Brazil doubled Spain's colonial
dominions. But at the very same moment the first symptom of her decline
appeared. For the first time it was proved to the world that she could
not hold the seas against her young rivals from Northern Europe. Sir
Francis Drake, the earliest harbinger of Britain's dominance on the
seas, appeared off the Plate on his way to the Pacific. Spain had
trusted that the difficulty of threading the Straits of Magellan would
protect the South Sea, but Drake slipped through in a spell of
favourable weather and found few Spanish ships which were fit to fight
him along all the coast to Panama. Drake's wonderful raid humbled
Spanish pride where Spain was thought strongest, and encouraged
Englishmen to fight with a good heart, a few years later, the
overwhelming Invincible Armada.
In 1616 a great Dutchman, Schouten, found the passage into the Pacific
around Cape Horn. This discovery revolutionised the navigation routes of
the world. Heretofore the only practicable commercial route to the
Pacific had been across the Atlantic to the north shore of the Isthmus.
Nombre de Dios was the metropolis and the market where all the goods for
South America were landed. Those intended to be sold on the shore of the
Caribbean were sent along its coast, and those intended for the Pacific
were carried overland to Panama to be shipped on coasters down to their
destination. Direct communication across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires
was forbidden by the Spanish government.
Schouten's epoch-making discovery opened up the way for countless Dutch
and English ships to ply a contraband trade with the towns of the
Pacific coast, but did not induce the Spanish government to change its
time-honoured policy or vary its trade routes. America was treated as
the private property of the sovereign of Castile, and its commerce was
to be exploited for his sole benefit. No Spaniard was allowed to freight
a ship for the colonies, or to buy a pound of goods thence, without
obtaining a special permission and paying for that privilege. Cadiz was
the only port in Spain from which ships were permitted to sail for
America, and the whole trade was farmed out to a ring of Cadiz
merchants. To protect this monopoly and to prevent the export of gold
and silver were the chief purposes of the Spanish colonial policy. Every
port on the seaboard of Spanish South America was closed to
trans-oceanic traffic, except Nombre de Dios on the north shore of the
Isthmus. The towns on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts might admit
coasting vessels properly identified as coming from the Isthmus and
loaded with the consignments of the Cadiz monopolists, but the South
Atlantic ports were absolutely closed so far as law could close them.
Legally, no ships whatever, coasters or ocean carriers, could enter and
unload at Buenos Aires. Her imports from Spain must first go to the
Isthmus, be disembarked, and then transported across the mule-paths to
the Pacific. Thence the goods had to go in coasters to Callao, in Peru,
where they were again disembarked, transported up the Andean passes
along the Bolivian plateau, and finally down into the Argentine plain.
Under such conditions in the southern provinces European manufactures
could only be sold at fabulous prices.
On the other hand, such a system made exports impossible, except those
of precious metals and valuable drugs. Hides, hair, wool, agricultural
products, would not stand the cost of such long transport by land and
sea. The Spanish authorities seem deliberately to have come to the
conclusion that America should be confined to producing gold and silver,
and they ruthlessly strangled all other industries. The Plate
settlements especially suffered from the ruinous consequences of this
system. Having no mines of precious metals, they were considered
worthless; their interests were ignored, and their complaints given no
attention. The mere existence of Buenos Aires was a source of anxiety
to the monopolists and to the Spanish government. They feared that the
English or Dutch might take possession of the mouth of the Plate and
thence send expeditions to intercept gold and silver shipments along the
overland routes. More immediate and real was the danger of the
establishment of a contraband trade which would deprive the Cadiz
merchants of their enormous profits on goods sent by the Isthmian route.
The home government enacted laws of incredible severity in trying to
enforce this policy. In 1599 the governor of Buenos Aires was instructed
to forbid all importation and exportation under penalty of death and
forfeiture of property. The shipping of hides and horsehair to Spain
would seem to be harmless enough, but the Spanish government dreaded
that gold and silver might be smuggled out in the packages. The
government would lose its royal fifth and the precious metals might be
sent to Spain's rivals and enemies in Europe. According to the economic
ideas then accepted, gold and silver alone constituted wealth, and every
ounce mined in America which did not reach Spain's coffers was
considered irretrievably lost. To prevent clandestine shipments of the
precious metals all commercial intercourse from the coast to the
interior was made illegal, and no goods whatever were permitted to pass
along the road between Buenos Aires and Cordoba.
In the very nature of things such laws were unenforcible. Even the
governors sent out for the special purpose of repressing evasions
recommended modifications. But the Cadiz monopolists were stubborn and
their influence with the Court was all-powerful. The laws remained on
the statute books only to be constantly disregarded. No human power
could keep people who lived on the seashore, and who had hides, wool,
and horsehair to sell, from exchanging them for clothing and tools.
Perforce Buenos Aires became a community of smugglers. English and Dutch
ships surreptitiously landed their cargoes of manufactures and took
their pay in hides or in silver dollars that had escaped the Spanish
soldiers on the road down from Potosi.
Rio and Santos, in Brazil, became intermediate warehouses for the
commerce of the Plate. The officials in Buenos Aires itself connived at
evasions, and the very governors made great fortunes in partnership with
smugglers. The guards along the interior routes shut their eyes when the
mule trains passed, and the goods of Flanders and France reached
Cordoba, Santiago, Potosi, and even Lima, by way of Buenos Aires, and
were sold at prices with which the Cadiz monopolists could not compete.
Silver came surreptitiously from Chile and Bolivia to pay for these
goods. The net result was that trade followed its natural and easiest
route, although there was a fearful waste of energy in the process. The
bribe-taking official, the idle soldier at the road station, the
smuggler handling his goods in small boats and risking his life at
night, and the numerous middle men absorbed what might have been
legitimate profit to the seller or to the consumer. Commerce was half
strangled, and with it the industries of the Spanish colonies. Civil
government itself suffered, for a community whose daily occupation it
was to break one law could not be expected to have much respect for
other laws, nor for the bribe-taking rulers and mulish legislators.
Nevertheless, against these outrageously unreasonable regulations the
colonists for centuries made no armed protest. They never questioned the
abstract right of the Crown to forbid them to sell what the labour of
their hands had produced. They evaded but did not contest. Centuries of
this sort of thing ingrained into South Americans the belief that
industrial and commercial activity exists only by sufferance of the
government. The right to sell, to buy, to exercise a profession or a
trade, depended on the permission of the government. The people saw the
executives taxing industry at their pleasure, and suppressing its very
beginnings, until such a procedure came to seem a matter of course.
Commercial spirit was constantly hampered and business skill deprived of
its rewards. The evil effects of such a policy can be seen at every step
of the development of the Spanish-American countries. It is no wonder
that office-holding became the most popular of avocations. The farmer,
the stock-raiser, and the merchant seemed to be allowed to exist only to
pay the Spanish functionary, instead of the government's existing for
the benefit of the producing community. To this day, service with the
government is more esteemed than commercial pursuits. The national
ideals are only slowly becoming industrial.
The King of Castile was absolute sovereign and sole proprietor of
America. The continent was an appanage of his crown; it did not form an
integral part of Spain; America and Spain were connected solely through
their common allegiance to him. The King governed America directly,
assisted not by his regular ministers, but by a body of personal
advisers called the Council of the Indies. His representatives in South
America were the Viceroys of Mexico and Peru. The latter's jurisdiction
extended over all South America. Certain great territorial divisions had
been made Captaincies-General, and though theoretically subordinate to
the Viceroy, they were in effect independent of him. In the great
capital cities sat bodies of high judicial and executive officials known
as Audiencias. Among their functions was that of exercising the powers
of the Viceroy during his absence. Charcas, the capital of the mining
region of Bolivia, was the seat of an Audiencia, and since this city had
no resident Viceroy or Captain-General its Audiencia was the real
supreme authority over the Argentine and all the territory east of the
Cordillera, from Lake Titicaca to the Straits.
Viceroyalties and Captaincies-General were divided into provinces, each
of which was ruled by a royal governor. When the Spaniards permanently
occupied a new region their first step was to found a city and organise
a municipal government. Like the Romans, they knew no other unit of
political structure. The governing body was called a Cabildo and
consisted of from six to twelve members who held office for life. It
conducted the ordinary judicial and civil administration through
officers selected by itself and from its own members. Though the
governor was _ex-officio_ president of this body, and although its
members had bought their places, they were not mere figureheads to
register his will. Limited though their functions were, they represented
the time-honoured governmental form into which Spaniards had always
crystallised, and the Creoles could not be prevented from obtaining a
preponderant influence in them. Throughout colonial times they
represented local and Creole interests and operated continually as a
check to the aggression of the military governors.
The territorial jurisdiction of a municipality was usually ill-defined.
Indeed, as a rule, in the days of settlement it extended in every
direction until the claim of another city was encountered, and the terms
"city" and "province," were, therefore, usually synonymous. As
population grew denser new cities were founded which as municipalities
were independent of the capital town, but they were not necessarily
separated from the original province. The Cabildo of the capital of a
province bore a peculiar relation to the royal governor, and often tried
to exercise a control over the affairs of the whole province, deeming
themselves his associates and the sharers of the functions he exercised,
outside of its own boundaries, as well as within them. This assumption
was favoured by the fact that no general body representing all the
cities of a province existed, nor any constitutional machinery by which
they could act in common.
Spanish-Americans have known only two forms of government, which have
everywhere and always co-existed, though they seem inconsistent. First,
there is an executive--the limits of his power ill-defined, and often
imposing his will by force, in essence arbitrary and personal, and
feared rather than respected by the people; secondly, the Cabildos and
the modern deliberative bodies. Never really elective, these have
nevertheless performed many of the functions of bodies truly
representative; they have checked the arbitrary executives and furnished
a basis for government by discussion. For centuries the communities
looked to them for the conduct of ordinary local governmental affairs,
and they survived all the storms of colonial and revolutionary times. On
the other hand, their importance in the Spanish governmental scheme has
been a most potent influence in preventing the growth of local
representative government by elective assemblies and officials.
Consequently, in national matters, freely elected and truly
representative assemblies have been hard to obtain. Legislation has been
controlled by the functionaries, and there has been no general and
continuous participation in governmental affairs by the body of the
people. Government by discussion and by the common-sense of the majority
is difficult to establish among a people accustomed for centuries to
seeing matters in the hands of officials whom they had no practical
means of holding to responsibility. The people have rarely felt that
the executive was their own officer. He was imposed on them from above,
he was not amenable to them, and so far as they were concerned he ruled
at his own risk. The Creoles were intensely democratic in feeling and
hard to control, and when they could not tolerate an executive they
turned him out by force, because no effective machinery existed by which
they could turn him out peaceably.
Though the colonial governor was required to give an account of his
administration at the close of his term, as a matter of fact he was an
irresponsible and despotic satrap, who taxed, judged, and imprisoned
people at his pleasure, restrained only by his traditional respect for
the Cabildos and by the fear of exciting revolt. He commanded the armed
forces, and his power was, in fact, rather military than civil in
origin, method, and application. The Cabildos selected the ordinary
judicial officers of first resort from among their own members' list,
but their authority was not very effective outside the town itself. The
vast plains between the settlements were largely governed patriarchally
by the ranch owners and the popular and capable gauchos who grew into
leaders.
A taste for town life soon became characteristic of the
Spanish-Americans, and wherever able they crowded into the towns in
preference to staying on their ranches. Wealth, intelligence, and
political activity, therefore, came to be concentrated in a few _foci_.
The system of granting immense tracts of land and dividing up the
Indians as slaves among the proprietors would apparently have a
tendency to produce a landed aristocracy. But the money profits in
colonial days were small, and the great landowner lived in the same
style as his poorer neighbour. Titles of nobility did not exist, and the
constitution of society was decidedly democratic. From the very earliest
times no love was lost between the Creoles and the newly arrived
Spaniards. The governor was almost invariably a Spaniard, while the
Cabildo and its officers were usually Creoles.
CHAPTER III
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The greatest name in the history of Buenos Aires during the early years
of the seventeenth century is that of Hernandarias Saavedra. Of
distinguished ancestry and pure Spanish blood, he was born at Asuncion
in 1561. A thorough Creole, his education was confined to the
instruction he received at the convent of the Franciscan Fathers in his
native town. At fifteen he left school and joined an expedition against
the Indians of the Andes. He showed remarkable capacity in fighting on
the plains, and his shrewdness and firmness in dealing with the
aborigines were even more valuable than his courage. Juan de Garay, the
far-sighted Basque who founded Buenos Aires, was the patron, model, and
hero of young Hernandarias, who followed him in his great expedition
over the southern pampa. When Garay, the great Indian fighter and
coloniser, perished, his mantle fell on the young man's shoulders. In
1588 Hernandarias distinguished himself in the defence of Corrientes
against the Indians of Chaco and was the leader in the difficult
campaigns undertaken in retaliation. By the time he had reached thirty
he was the leading Creole in all the vast region from the Upper Paraguay
down to Buenos Aires, and when the Spanish Lieutenant-General of
Asuncion was deposed an open Cabildo called him to the vacancy.
Eleven years later (1602) the governor of Buenos Aires died, and by
common consent Hernandarias filled the office _ad interim_. This popular
selection was soon confirmed by royal commission. He signalised his term
of office by an expedition down the coast in which he carried the terror
of the white man's arms to the limits of the continent, and defeated the
Indians wherever they resisted. Severe with the Indians when occasion
demanded, he was inflexibly just, and as a rule protected them against
the unlawful aggressions of his countrymen. Though he did so much to
curb their military power, he left behind him the name of being their
best friend. He manumitted his own slaves; he opposed the extension of
the system of "encomiendas" with its enslavement of wild Indians, and
after his first term as governor of Buenos Aires he was named official
protector of the aborigines.
Although a Creole, such was his ability as a military leader, and his
shrewdness, wisdom, and firmness as a civil ruler, that the Spanish
government could not ignore him. Though a governor was soon sent out
from Spain to replace him and fatten off the provincials, Hernandarias
remained the most powerful man in the colony. The Spanish authorities
found that they needed him, and he retained their confidence as well as
that of the Creoles. He wisely advised the latter against open
opposition, believing that continued peace must make the colony so
strong that its interests could not continue to be ignored. In 1610 the
Spanish government promulgated laws forbidding the further enslavement
of Indians, and Hernandarias did much to secure their enforcement. At
the same time he encouraged the Jesuits to extend their missions over
the upper valley of the Uruguay, while he secured the ranchers of the
western plains against the encroachments of these energetic priests. The
Creoles prospered in the pastoral pursuits on the pampas, while the
Jesuits developed the more purely agricultural resources of the wooded
hills in the east. The success of his policy soon became evident in the
increasing prosperity of the colony. Three hundred thousand hides were
smuggled out of Buenos Aires in British ships alone in the year 1658,
and by 1630 the Jesuit missions extended in a broad, continuous belt
along the Parana and the Uruguay from the Tropic of Capricorn to the
thirtieth degree. They were the rulers of a great theocratic republic,
whose area could not have been less than 150,000 square miles, and whose
population of something like a million was concentrated in thriving and
peaceful villages. The Jesuits systematically studied the resources of
the country and taught their Indians the cultivation of many crops
suitable for export. Their territory was commercially tributary to
Buenos Aires and contributed to her growth and prosperity.
When the governorship of Buenos Aires again became vacant in 1615, by
the death of the Spanish incumbent, Hernandarias entered on his own
third term, and two years later, by his advice, the rapidly growing
province was divided. Paraguay became a separate province, and the new
province of Buenos Aires included all the territory east of Tucuman and
south and east of Paraguay. The three provinces of Paraguay, Buenos
Aires, and Tucuman were administratively separate, and each was directly
dependent upon the Audiencia at Charcas and the Viceroy at Lima. One
immediate purpose of the Spanish government, in erecting Buenos Aires
into an independent province, was the enforcement of the prohibition of
trade. It was thought that a governor always on the ground, and
concentrating his attention on the subject, would be efficient in that
direction. However, the result was the opposite of that expected. No
governor of Buenos Aires could avoid making the interests of his capital
city his own. If honest, he was constantly pressing the home government
to open the doors a little and to make exceptions of particular cases;
if dishonest, he went into partnership with the traders.
Hernandarias's career is the one striking example of success by a Creole
in colonial times. Though the conquest and settlement of South America
was accomplished by individual initiative, the men who had done the
pioneering, who had fought and journeyed and suffered, who had stained
their souls with horrible cruelties, whose adventures and successes
would not be credited if the physical evidences did not prove the truth
of the chronicles, were displaced with scant ceremony to make room for
impoverished Court favourites. If the original conquerors were thus
badly treated, the Creoles, unfortunate to have missed the inestimable
advantage of being born on Castilian soil, could not look for favour, or
equal treatment with the office-holders sent out from Madrid year after
year.
The story of the provinces that now form the territory of the Argentine
Republic has not great interest during the long years that intervene
from the completion of the romantic conquest until the uprising against
Spanish authority. With the end of the sixteenth century, the spirit of
enterprise among both Spaniards and Creoles diminished. Throughout the
seventeenth century little progress was made in extirpating the savage
Indians even in regions as close to Buenos Aires as Entre Rios and
Uruguay. Settlements were confined to the right bank of the Parana, and
the Indians on the left bank, protected behind the wide flood of that
river's delta, were left undisturbed. On the other hand, the dry and
level pampas gave easy access to the thriving towns of the province of
Tucuman. The Cordoba range, the greatest of the outworks of the Andes,
rises from the plain less than two hundred miles from the Parana at
Santa Fe, and only four hundred miles from Buenos Aires itself. The city
of Cordoba, in the fertile and well-watered slope at the foot of the
sierra, was the capital of the province, the seat of a university from
1613, and the centre of Creole culture. The intercourse of the Buenos
Aireans with their neighbours of the interior constantly increased in
spite of the prohibitions of the Spanish government, while Cordoba and
the other towns of Tucuman prospered with the sale of pack-mules to the
mines of Bolivia.
In the fertile Andean valleys of Rioja and Catamarca had lived since
Inca times the powerful nation of the Calchaquies. Though they had
acknowledged the suzerainty of the Cuzco emperors, they were ruled by
their own chiefs. The first Spaniards that penetrated south from the
Bolivian plateau failed to reduce them to submission. After a bitter
experience the invaders passed to the west. For fifty years this gallant
people were left undisturbed in their Andean fastnesses. Late in the
sixteenth century aggressions again began. The Indians fought
desperately, but were overcome. Forty thousand were sold into slavery;
eleven thousand were exiled to Santiago del Estero, to Santa Fe, and
Buenos Aires. The town of Quilmes, now one of the suburbs of Buenos
Aires, was named from the mountain fastness where the Calchaquies made
their last stand. Rosario was also settled by families of these brave
Indians who were dragged across the pampas by the victorious Spaniards.
About 1655 a leader presented himself to the remnants of this warlike
people, claiming to be the descendant and heir of the ancient Inca
princes. He was known to the Indians as Huallpa-Inca, while the
Spaniards called him Bohorquez. A woman of his own race, by the name of
Colla, accompanied him, and she was greeted with all the ceremonious
honours that belonged to the Inca Queen according to ancient customs.
Even the Jesuit missionaries recognised the validity of the claims of
Bohorquez, but the governor regarded him only as a menace to Spanish
rule. He was pursued relentlessly; his followers rose in revolt; the
rebellion spread northwards, but with the capture of the Inca it
collapsed. He was sent to Lima, tried for treason, and executed, while
the Calchaquies were placed under a military deputy-governor,
subordinate to the governor of Tucuman. Their descendants have
repeatedly proved that they came of fighting stock. They were among the
best soldiers on the patriot side in the war of independence; the
province of Rioja never submitted to Rosas, it resisted Mitre even after
Pavon, the last and decisive battle of the civil wars, and it was the
last province to give its allegiance to the confederation.
The third province into which the whole territory which is now Argentina
was then divided, was Cuyo,--including the three modern provinces of
Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luiz. In its early years, these settlements
did not extend far from the Andes. Late in the sixteenth century San
Luiz was added, thus connecting the Spanish dominions from Chile across
to the borders of Cordoba.
The complicity of the Spanish governors with the contraband commerce
which they were especially charged to suppress is abundantly shown by
contemporary documents. The very first governor sent to Buenos Aires
after its erection into a separate province was accused of agreeing to
allow a Lisbon merchant to land a shipload of goods. He fled to
sanctuary among the Jesuits and there perished of grief and shame. But
others were more impudent and successful. Mercado Villacorta came to his
post announcing that he would so effectively enforce the prohibition
that "not a bird could pass with food in its beak from Buenos Aires to
the interior." However, not many months passed before a Dutch ship
applied for permission to disembark its cargo, presenting papers signed
by a natural son of King Philip himself. The captain offered to turn
over his cargo in return for a certain amount of hides, wool, silver,
and enough food to take him back to Flanders. The proposition, on its
face, was very advantageous, and Villacorta accepted it on account of
the royal treasury. He made a faithful return of the enormous profits
accruing from the cargo of the ship in question, but neglected to report
that three other Dutch ships were anchored just out of sight and that
she passed over to them in the night what had been laden on her the day
before. By chance, a royal commissioner was in Flanders and watched the
unlading of all four ships. He certified that three million dollars
worth of hides, wool, woods, and silver were taken out of their holds.
Villacorta was cashiered for the moment, but a few years later we find
him installed as governor of Tucuman. Another governor, Andres de
Robles, engaged so publicly and impudently in fraudulent transactions
and corrupt contracts that his conduct was the text of sermons in all
the churches, but he calmly went his way and paid no attention to the
clerical boycott and priestly denunciations. Imports by way of Buenos
Aires increased so rapidly that soon the Cadiz monopolists were
complaining to the Council of the Indies that the Potosi shops were
filled with goods which had come by way of the Plate. Absolute
prohibition had manifestly failed, and so palliative measures were
tried. Permission was given to special ships to sail from Cadiz for
Buenos Aires, carrying only enough merchandise to supply the demand of
Buenos Aires itself, and giving bonds to return to Cadiz, so that the
return cargo could be checked over to see that no silver was included.
Naturally, this system proved impracticable and only opened another road
to evasion.
The first severe blow to the extension of the Spanish dominions over the
valley of the Parana was struck by the Portuguese Creoles of Sao Paulo
in 1632. Though King Philip of Spain was at that time also monarch of
Portugal and Brazil, the Paulistas viewed with alarm and jealousy the
encroachments of the Jesuits into the regions lying to the south-east of
the homes they had occupied for a century. They had had a hard fight to
keep the Jesuits from establishing villages in their own neighbourhood,
and now they saw these old enemies creeping up the slope of the
tributaries of the Upper Parana, shutting them off from expansion over
the remoter interior. The Paulistas hated Spaniards and Jesuits; they
wanted Indian slaves; they recked little of the fine-spun discussions as
to the whereabouts of the dividing line between the Castilian and
Portuguese possessions; their allegiance to the Spanish monarch sat
lightly upon them. Their homes were on the headwaters of tributaries of
the Parana, and their expeditions followed fearlessly down the streams
and across the plateau and burst unheralded on the northern villages of
the Jesuits. The poor Indians were defenceless and totally unprepared.
The Jesuits had taught them the arts of peace but not of war; they had
no arms; their spiritual rulers had bethought themselves safe in these
remote plateaux in the middle of the continent; the few thousands of
Paulistas, away over on the Atlantic border, had not been considered
worth taking into consideration. Though few in number, the band of
Portuguese Creoles created immense havoc. The Jesuit chroniclers say
that three thousand Paulistas killed and carried away into captivity
four hundred thousand Indians in a few years. This is certainly an
exaggeration, but we know that all the Jesuit villages were wiped out as
far south as the Iguassu, and that north of that tributary the Spanish
line was pushed back to the Parana. The Jesuits protested, but their
complaints availed nothing. A few years later Portugal regained its
independence of Spain and the work of the Paulistas stood. Spain lost
her opportunity of securing the whole Plate valley, and the way was
opened to the Brazilians to make the interior of the continent
Portuguese.
The Paulistas' raids extended as far as the Jesuit villages in Paraguay
and those on the Upper Uruguay, but here the priests managed to hold
their own. Portugal's next move toward getting possession of all the
territory east of the Parana and the Uruguay was made from the coast.
In 1680, an expedition sent by the governor of Rio landed directly
opposite the city of Buenos Aires and built a fort--calling it Colonia.
This was the first permanent occupation of Uruguayan soil, either by
Portugal or Spain. Both nations claimed it under differing
interpretations of the Treaty of Tordesillas. Portuguese historians
claim that the Paulistas had explored and asserted a right to the region
in the early years of the seventeenth century; and Spanish authorities
state that Jesuits had established a mission on the Lower Uruguay about
the same time. As a matter of fact, Colonia was the first permanent
European settlement south of Santa Catharina and north of the Plate, on
or near the Atlantic coast.
The governor of Buenos Aires promptly raised a force, sailed across the
estuary, and captured the new fort. However, Spain's diplomatic position
in Europe at the time did not justify risking serious trouble over a
matter that seemed so trifling as the possession of a piece of desert in
South America. The governor was ordered to restore Colonia to the
Portuguese authorities, leaving open for subsequent discussion and
determination the question as to which nation was entitled to the
territory on the north bank. With some interruptions, Portugal remained
in possession of the port of Colonia for a century, and its existence
was a constant source of annoyance to the Buenos Aireans. It immediately
became a rival for the trade with the interior, and its merchants had
the advantage of the open aid of their own government. Their
competitors at Buenos Aires across the river were confessedly engaged in
breaking the law of their country. Exportable goods were never safe from
seizure until they had left Argentine soil. Colonia was a convenient
storing-place, and the river crafts, once within its port, could
discharge at their leisure, free from anxiety that active officials
might threaten to enforce inconvenient laws. Every time a war broke out
between the two countries in Europe, the exasperated governor of Buenos
Aires would send over an expedition and capture the Portuguese town.
Three times was it taken and as often restored on the conclusion of
peace. Colonia in Portuguese hands interfered with the trade of Buenos
Aires merchants, and the illicit gains of Spanish officials, and also
destroyed any remnant of efficiency remaining to the prohibition of
commerce across the Atlantic. Back of these commercial and temporary
considerations was the menace to the future occupancy by Spaniards of
the vast and fertile region extending from the boundaries of Sao Paulo
to the mouth of the Uruguay.
CHAPTER IV
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The rapid decadence of Spain itself during the reigns of the last kings
of the House of Austria was reflected in the colonies. With the
accession of the Bourbons a forward movement began, and the colonial
administration was roused into an appearance of activity. Something was
done in the direction of adopting a more rational commercial policy, but
it was already too late. The control of trade had irrevocably passed to
Holland and England, and Spain could not recover the business of her own
colonies. The efforts to improve administration were largely nullified
by the conservatism of her aristocracy. It seemed that her mediaeval
governmental machinery could not be adapted to the conditions created by
her active rivals.
In 1726, Montevideo, the strategic key to Uruguay and the north bank of
the Plate, was occupied and fortified. Thereafter, though Colonia still
remained in Portuguese hands, it was isolated and scarcely tenable.
Immediately the north shore of the Uruguay began to be settled by
Spaniards. Simultaneously the ranchers of the right bank of the Parana,
who had long been tempted by the fine pastures on the opposite shore,
finally ventured to secure a foothold in Entre Rios. The warlike
Charruas had kept the white man out of this favoured region for two
centuries, although it was so near to Buenos Aires. They did not yield
without a struggle, but they were overcome, and those who refused to
submit fled to the east bank of the Uruguay River--the present country
of that name. There they were followed by the proselyting Jesuits, and
it was only a question of a few years before the Argentines proper had
crossed the Uruguay and were pasturing their herds in the rolling
champaign country that extends from that river to the sea. The Spanish
advance would have continued up the coast, probably as far as the
northern boundary of the Rio Grande do Sul, if the Portuguese had not in
the meantime established a town and fort at the mouth of the Duck
Lagoon, which is the only port that gives access to the interior of that
most valuable region.
The increase of population, the extension of the occupied
pasture-ground, and the greater demand from Europe for hides and wool,
tended to multiply the volume and value of Argentine exportable
commodities. Northern Europe made marvellous strides in purchasing power
during the eighteenth century, and prices all over the world felt the
impetus. The commercial policy of the Spanish government became more lax
and the trade prohibition fell into contempt and disuse. The system of
fleets of Spanish ships under convoy was abandoned, and single ships,
mostly foreign owned, and trusting to their sailing qualities and
equipment to escape capture, carried all the trade. The trade of Buenos
Aires grew and the population of the city increased in proportion. The
exhaustion of the surface deposits and richer lodes of precious metals
in the mining provinces during the eighteenth century tended to increase
the relative importance of Buenos Aires and her territory, even in the
mind of the Spanish government, and to turn a current of immigration
toward the pastoral and agricultural provinces.
In 1750 the Spanish government made an effort to get rid of the
Portuguese in Colonia by negotiation. Portugal agreed to exchange that
port for the Jesuit Missions which covered the fine pastures in the
western half of the present Brazilian state of Rio Grande. The helpless
Indians were driven off or massacred in spite of their feeble
resistance, but as soon as the treaty was made public, Spanish and
Jesuit protests against the abandonment of the territory were so violent
that the agreement was formally annulled by mutual consent. The
Portuguese retained Colonia, and though they gave up their formal claims
to the Missions the military operations they had so promptly undertaken
against that region had pretty well rooted out Spanish influence on the
east bank of the Upper Uruguay. It was never re-established, and the
dividing line of 1750 is still substantially the boundary between
Spanish and Portuguese South America.
In 1767 Spain followed the example of Portugal and France and expelled
the Jesuits from her dominions. For generations they had been the
largest property holders in the Plate provinces. In the larger towns
popular education was in their hands. Their great schools, convents, and
churches were the finest edifices in the country. To endow their
educational and religious work they had accumulated town houses,
ranches, plantations, mills, cattle, ships, and even slaves. Along the
banks of the Upper Parana and Uruguay they had succeeded in dominating
and absorbing the whole productive life of the community. Their system
in the Indian regions smothered everything else; no white man was
allowed to visit their settlements; the Indians were kept in absolute
ignorance of the existence of an external world; the Jesuits required
their subjects to work, gathering matte tea, cutting wood, cultivating
the soil, and tending cattle. However, the Indians were kindly treated
and were content with the easy life they enjoyed under the mild Jesuit
rule. The Fathers exported immense quantities of hides and controlled
the production of matte, then, as now, the favourite drink of Creoles
and Indians in the southern half of the continent. The Indians received
their living and the Jesuits absorbed the surplus. Their misfortunes in
Brazil had taught them a lesson, and they had tried to erect their
theocracy in regions where they need not come into close contact and
constant conflict with the lay settlers. For a century, they had been
left undisturbed in South-eastern Paraguay and the region between the
Upper Parana and Paraguay.
Neither their services to civilisation nor regard for the interests of
the Indians, nor their wealth and influence, could avail anything
against the mandate of the Spanish monarch, backed by the Vatican and
joyfully enforced by the colonial authorities. The Jesuits who had been
employed in teaching in the towns were incontinently imprisoned and
summarily shipped off across the seas, while their schools were placed
under the charge of other ecclesiastics, and their estates sold at
auction. In the missions resistance was anticipated, but none was made.
The Indians, accustomed to look to the Fathers for guidance in
everything, were aghast when they saw the Jesuits leaving, and Spanish
officials taking their places. The new shepherds had not the skill to
drive the flocks to the shearing, and could not keep the Indians
together so as to exploit them for the benefit of the royal treasury.
From their cruelties and exactions the Indians fled and sought refuge
among the Creole settlements of Entre Rios and Uruguay, where they
constituted a valuable addition to the population.
This transplantation had hardly been accomplished when the Spanish
government took a step which revolutionised the administration of the
southern half of the continent during the remainder of colonial times,
and determined the future boundaries of the nations of South America. On
the 1st of August, 1776, the Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires was created.
All the territory south of Lake Titicaca was separated from the
Viceroyalty of Peru, and the province of Cuyo was detached from the
Captaincy-General of Chile. The new Viceroyalty covered the territory
that has since become the four countries--Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay,
and Argentina. In colonial times it was divided into eight
"intendencias," of which the northern four covered the region that is
now Bolivia and was then known as Upper Peru. The four southern
intendencias were: Paraguay; Salta, covering the northwestern provinces;
Cordoba, covering the central and western provinces; and, finally,
Buenos Aires, which, besides the present province, included Santa Fe,
the whole mesopotamian region, Uruguay, and the Jesuit country of the
Upper Parana.
The creation of the Viceroyalty was a reluctant and tardy reversal of
the colonial policy which had steadfastly refused to recognise in Buenos
Aires the inevitable outlet of the region. Although the four northern
intendencias contained more than half the population, and Paraguay
probably half the remainder, Buenos Aires was made the capital. Situated
at the mouth of the great system of waterways, it was the natural
commercial centre of the whole Viceroyalty. In fifty years it had
doubled in population, while the old cities on the Bolivian plateau had
remained stationary. In 1776 its population did not much exceed twenty
thousand souls, but was rapidly increasing. Heretofore, it had been
rather a resort of smuggling merchants than a centre of political and
social influence. Nevertheless, from this unpromising root was to spring
the spreading tree of South American independence. Buenos Aires is the
only capital that never readmitted the Spanish authorities, once they
had been expelled, and within her walls San Martin drilled the nucleus
of the armies that drove the Spaniards out of Chile and Peru.
[Illustration: AN OLD SPANISH CORNER IN BUENOS AIRES.]
The alarming growth of the Portuguese power southward was another potent
reason for the establishment of a strong and independent military
jurisdiction at the mouth of the Plate. The Spanish government had at
last determined on vigorous measures to take Colonia, drive the
Portuguese from Rio Grande, and push the Spanish boundaries east to the
original Tordesillas line. Pedro de Zeballos, the first Viceroy, sailed
in November, 1776, in command of the largest force which up to that time
had been sent to the Western Continent. Against his twenty-one thousand
men and great fleet the Portuguese had no force, military or naval,
strong enough to make a serious resistance.
The flourishing Brazilian settlement of Santa Catharina was easily
reduced, and, leaving it garrisoned, the fleet and army went on to the
Plate. Colonia surrendered without resistance, and the army prepared to
march northward and drive the Portuguese from all the coast as far north
as Santa Catharina. Hardly was the advance begun, when news was received
that peace between Spain and Portugal had been signed. The latter
retained eastern Rio Grande, and Santa Catharina was restored, while
Spain's title to Uruguay and the Missions was recognised.
Zeballos returned to Buenos Aires and actively engaged in the military
and civil organisation of the new Viceroyalty. A fresh set of special
regulations had been prepared in Spain, creating an elaborate hierarchy
of executives. The chief provincial governors, now called "intendentes,"
were subject to the orders of the Viceroy in military matters, but as to
taxation they were directly responsible to the Crown. They were
entrusted with the paying of governmental employees, which gave them
great influence with the Cabildos and functionaries.
The intention of the Spanish government was manifestly to enforce close
relationship and greater subjection to the central authority at Madrid.
In practice, however, the financial independence of the provincial
governors stimulated the feeling of local independence, increased the
influence of the Cabildos, and paved the way for the revolution.
Since 1765 the rest of South America had enjoyed the privilege of free
commerce from the mother country. Now, the same rule was applied to
Buenos Aires, and trade with Spain quickly attained respectable
dimensions. In the five years from 1792 to 1796 more than one hundred
ships made the voyage to Spain, and exports ran up to five million
dollars annually. Buenos Aires became the _entrepot_ of the wine and
brandy of Cuyo; the poncho and hides of Tucuman; the tobacco, woods, and
matte tea of Paraguay; the gold and silver of Upper Peru; the copper of
Chile; and even the sugar, cacao, and rice of Lower Peru. By the end of
the century the population of the city was forty thousand. Thirty
thousand more lived in the immediate vicinity; Montevideo had seven
thousand, and the outlying settlements of Uruguay twenty-five thousand
inhabitants. The civilised population of the Buenos Aires intendencia
was about one hundred and seventy thousand, and in population and in
wealth it had become easily the first among the eight great districts of
the Viceroyalty.
CHAPTER V
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTION
The Viceroyalty was a heterogeneous mass. The common subjection of its
component parts to the Viceroy gave it a mere appearance of cohesion.
The centring of the commercial currents in Buenos Aires did not furnish
an organic connection sufficiently strong to unite provinces and cities
so widely separated and so different in social and industrial
constitution. Upper Peru had been a mining region, and its white
population was largely of a shifting character. The bulk of the
population were Indians, and the inhabitants of Spanish blood were still
taskmasters. Society was as yet in unstable equilibrium, and the
different elements had not thoroughly coalesced. Paraguay was an
isolated and almost self-sufficing commonwealth. It was essentially
theocratic, and averse to receiving external impressions. In Salta and
Cordoba the proportion of Indian blood was not so preponderant as in
Bolivia and Paraguay; agriculture was the economic basis; the Creoles
and Indians had largely amalgamated politically and socially; and,
though the people of Spanish descent lived mostly in the towns, they
were in close and friendly contact with the civilised Indians who
laboured in the irrigated valleys. On the wide pampas a new race of men
had sprung into existence--the gauchos, whose business was the herding
of cattle, whose homes were their saddles, and who were as impatient of
control and as hard to deprive of personal liberty as Arabs or
Parthians. The proportion of white blood increased toward the coast.
Buenos Aires was the boom town of the region and the time. Its
population was recruited from among the most adventurous and
enterprising Spaniards and Creoles. Lima and Mexico were centres of
aristocracy and bureaucracy, while the social organisation of Buenos
Aires and its surrounding territory was completely democratic. All were
equal in fact; neither nobles nor serfs existed; the Viceroy was little
more than a new official imposed by external authority, and having no
real support in the country itself. It is not a mere coincidence that
the three centres--Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Pernambuco--whence the
revolutionary spirit spread over South America should all have been
democratic in social organisation and far distant from the old colonial
capitals. In Buenos Aires, the Viceroy himself could not find a white
coachman. An Argentine Creole would no more serve in a menial capacity
than a North American pioneer; and a Creole hated a Spaniard very much
as his contemporary, the Scotch-Irish settler of the Appalachians, hated
an Englishman.
Not even religion furnished a strong bond of union between the widely
dispersed cities and provinces of the Viceroyalty. The priests had not
been organised into a compact hierarchy. They had little class feeling;
they lived the life of the Creoles and shared the same prejudices. Half
the members of the first Congress after the revolution were priests, but
they pursued no distinctive policy of their own and offered no effective
resistance to the growth of the power of the military chiefs.
Commerce with Spain had been authorised, but with other nations it was
still unlawful. The Cadiz monopolists still fought hard to preserve
their privileges and to control the Atlantic trade as they had
controlled the route by the Isthmus. Great Britain had enjoyed a
monopoly of the traffic in negroes during most of the colonial period,
but in 1784 all foreign ships carrying slaves were allowed to enter,
unload, and take a return cargo of the "products of the country." The
Cadiz merchants contended that hides--then the principal article of
export--were not "products" within the meaning of this law, and the
Spanish courts decided in their favour. This absurd decision created a
storm of opposition in Buenos Aires, but even more unreasonable
restrictions continued to be insisted upon. The proposition to allow the
colonies to trade with one another was vehemently opposed by the people
of Cadiz and their agents in Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile, England's maritime victories in the wars of the French
Revolution were sweeping Spanish commerce from the sea, and the people
of the Plate saw themselves again about to be shut off from the sea
unless permission were granted to ship in foreign vessels.
Dissatisfaction grew apace, and the prestige of the Viceregal government
and the influence of resident Spaniards were seriously compromised. At
the same time there were fermenting among the intelligent and educated
youth of the city the new ideas of the North American and French
revolutions--liberty, the rights of man, representative government, and
popular sovereignty.
For generations England had cast covetous eyes at South Africa and South
America. Menaced with exclusion from Europe in her giant conflict with
Napoleon, her statesmen determined to seize outside markets and
possessions. The Cape was captured in 1805, and the next year came the
turn of Argentina. June 25, 1806, Admiral Popham appeared in the
estuary, and fifteen hundred troops, under the command of General
Beresford, were disembarked a few miles below Buenos Aires. The Viceroy
fled without making resistance, and on the 27th the British flag was run
up on his official residence. At first the population appeared to
acquiesce, but finally Liniers, a French officer in the Spanish employ,
gathered together at Montevideo a thousand regulars and a small amount
of artillery. The militia of Buenos Aires soon proved themselves anxious
to rise against the heretic strangers. Liniers crossed the estuary and,
advancing without opposition to the neighbourhood of Buenos Aires,
established a camp to which the patriotic inhabitants flocked. Within a
short time he had armed an overwhelming number of the citizens, the
scanty British garrison was shut up in the fort, and on the 12th of
August the Argentines advanced. After some hard street fighting, the
English were forced to surrender, and the flags which were captured that
day are still exhibited in the city of Buenos Aires with just pride as
trophies of Argentine valour. The British expedition might have been
successful had it been more numerous, or had it been promptly
re-enforced. If the capture of Montevideo had followed that of Buenos
Aires, the Argentines would have had no base of operations, and their
militia would have remained without ammunition and artillery stores. It
is interesting to speculate what would have been the subsequent history
of the temperate part of South America in such a case. It is possible
that the Plate would have become part of the British Dominion; British
immigration would have followed, and the Plate might have become the
greatest of British colonies.
But the opportunity was quickly gone. The successes of 1806 so strongly
aroused the spirit of national and race pride that thereafter the
conquest of Argentina was a task too great for the small armies which in
those days could be transported overseas. No sooner was Beresford
expelled than the victors met in open Cabildo, declared the cowardly
Viceroy suspended from office, and installed the royal Audiencia in his
place. A few months later the dreaded British re-enforcement came. Four
thousand men disembarked in eastern Uruguay, and Montevideo was taken by
assault. In Buenos Aires all was confusion, but the people were
resolute to resist. Again an open Cabildo assembled, and Liniers, the
French officer under whose leadership the victory of last year had been
won, was given supreme authority. Military enthusiasm spread among all
classes and the people were rapidly enrolled in volunteer regiments.
When General Whitelocke approached the city with several thousand
regulars the Argentines confidently marched out to meet him. In the open
they stood no chance, and they were compelled to fly back to the shelter
of their narrow streets and stone houses. On the 5th of July, 1807, the
British troops, disdaining all precautions, marched into the city. Both
sides of the narrow streets were lined with low, fireproof houses, whose
flat roofs afforded admirable vantage-ground. The Buenos Aires men were
well supplied with muskets, and the women and boys rained down stones,
bricks, and firebrands on the masses crowding the pavements below. The
British could not retaliate on their enemies, but pushed stubbornly on
toward the centre of the city, dropping by hundreds on the way. At the
main square, in front of the fort, barricades had been thrown up, and
there the English met a reception which flesh and blood could not
endure. For two days the conflict raged, but finally the English general
was obliged to give up and ask for terms. He had lost a fourth of his
force and was allowed to withdraw the remainder only on agreeing to
evacuate Montevideo within two months.
The political and commercial consequences of the English invasions were
vastly important. The military power of the Argentine Creoles, hitherto
unsuspected, stood revealed; local pride had been stimulated; and, at
the same time, the invasions gave a tremendous impulse to foreign
commerce. A fleet of English merchantmen had followed the warships.
Untrammelled commerce with the world at last became a fact. English
manufactured goods flooded the market. Articles until then beyond the
reach of all but the wealthiest now became cheap enough for the purses
of the gauchos. Buenos Aires's trade was boomed by the sales of imported
goods to the interior provinces. Creole jealousy of Spaniards rapidly
became accentuated. From this time dates the general use of "Goths,"
applied to Spaniards as a term of opprobrium, and of "Argentines," as a
designation for the natives of the Plate. Recognition could no longer be
withheld from the men who had organised and commanded victorious
troops, and henceforth the Creoles were in fact, as well as in law,
eligible to offices of trust and profit. Even in the Buenos Aires
Cabildo, though all the members were native Spaniards, Creole ideas
predominated.
Scarcely had the English retired from Montevideo when the course of
events in Europe precipitated Spanish South America into confusion.
Charles IV., the pusillanimous King of Spain, allied himself with
Napoleon and aided the latter's aggressions against Portugal. The
Portuguese monarch was driven to Brazil, the latter country thereby
gaining complete commercial freedom and virtual political independence.
This naturally suggested to the Argentines that they were entitled to
the same privileges from Spain. Charles IV. and Godoy, the accomplice of
his wicked wife, who really governed in his name, were bitterly hated at
home. Napoleon's troops swarmed over the country and the monarchy itself
was clearly tottering to its fall. Ferdinand, heir of Charles IV.,
conspired against his father and forced the latter to resign in his
favour. The Spanish governor of Montevideo at once took the oath of
allegiance to the new monarch, an act of insubordination to his titular
superior, the Viceroy. The latter was the Frenchman, Liniers, who
sympathised with the Creole party in desiring to wait and obtain
concessions for the colony before recognising any of the various
claimants. A dispute over the oath of allegiance to Ferdinand arose
which marked a definite rupture between the Creoles and the old-line
Spaniards--between those who regarded the special interests of the
colony as paramount and those who wished at all hazards to maintain
connection with the mother country.
Charles's abdication was only the beginning of complications. He
protested that it had been obtained from him by duress, and with
Ferdinand he appealed to Napoleon as arbiter. The latter forced them
both to renounce their claims in favour of his brother Joseph. Everyone
in South America was agreed not to recognise Joseph Bonaparte as King of
Spain, but there was wide diversity of opinion as to what affirmative
action ought to be taken. Most regarded Ferdinand as the legitimate
king, but he was in a French prison. Charles still claimed the throne,
while provisional governments were formed in many cities of Spain to
resist the enthroning of Joseph. A central junta at Seville claimed to
be the depositary of supreme executive power pending Ferdinand's return,
and to this junta the Spaniards of the Plate gave their earnest and
unhesitating allegiance. But the Creoles could not see their way clear
to an unconditional recognition of such a self-constituted revolutionary
body. Few believed that the Spanish patriots could withstand Napoleon's
armies. If Spain had submitted to Joseph the various parts of South
America would have become independent without any serious struggle. The
"Goths" in the Plate were united in a definite policy--loyalty to the
only Spanish government that was vindicating the nationality. The
Creoles could agree on no affirmative programme, but all of them were
determined that the "Goths" should not get the upper hand. The latter
rose against Liniers and tried to install a junta on the model of that
at Seville. In view of the menacing attitude of the Creole militia, the
attempt was a failure, but the Frenchman did not have the resolution to
maintain his advantage. The Seville junta finally named a Viceroy, and,
though some of the resolute spirits among the militia leaders wished to
resist, the majority shrank from open defiance of the highest existing
Spanish authority. On the 30th of July, 1809, the new Viceroy took
possession. He gained popularity by his decree declaring free commerce
with all the world, but his next act opened the eyes of the Creoles to
the real effect of the re-establishment of the Spanish system. He sent
a thousand men to Charcas, in the northern part of the Viceroyalty, to
aid in the bloody suppression of a revolutionary movement undertaken by
the Creole inhabitants of that city. The story that shortly came back of
wholesale confiscations and executions widened the breach between
Spaniards and Creoles.
Meanwhile, another crisis in Spanish home affairs was approaching.
Napoleon's armies were sweeping the Peninsula from end to end. In the
early months of 1810 they overran Andalusia, the centre of resistance.
It seemed as if the subjection of Spain was about to be completed. On
the 18th of May, Viceroy Cisneros issued a proclamation frankly
revealing the critical situation of the Spanish patriot, and of the
junta under whose commission he was acting. All classes of Buenos Aires
immediately engaged in feverish discussions as to what should be done.
The Spaniards wished to retain their privileged position; the Creoles
were determined to put an end to discrimination against themselves.
These were the real purposes of the two parties. The Spaniards did not
especially favour absolutism, nor did the Creoles in general intend to
renounce the sovereignty of Ferdinand, should he ever escape from
captivity. Among the Creoles were many liberals, mostly young and ardent
men, whom study and travel had convinced of the necessity for racial
reform and colonial autonomy. Among their leaders were Saavedra,
commander of the most efficient militia regiment; Vieytes, at whose
house the meetings of the conspirators were held; Manuel Belgrano,
afterwards the brains and right arm of the movement; and two eloquent
young lawyers, Castelli and Paso. The active spirits conspired to depose
the Viceroy, confident that this measure would be popular among all
classes of Creoles. On the 22nd of May a committee of popular chiefs
waited on him to demand his resignation. Resistance was futile, for he
could not rely on the troops. They were Creoles and proud of the fact
that Argentines had expelled the British. The office-holders tried to
arrange a compromise by which an open Cabildo should elect the
ex-Viceroy president of a new governing junta. The populace and the
militia would not submit, and on the 25th of May--now celebrated as the
anniversary of the establishment of Argentine liberty--a great armed
assembly met in the Plaza. The Creole badge was blue and white--then
adopted as the Argentine colours. The proceedings were frankly
revolutionary. A junta was named from among the Creole leaders, and the
Buenos Aires Cabildo obediently proclaimed this body the supreme
authority of the Viceroyalty. There was no pretence of consulting the
other provinces. Spanish constitutional law provided no machinery
through which they could be heard, and the capital assumed, as a matter
of course, the right of governing the dependencies.
The events of the 25th of May were not intended to sever relations
between Spain and Buenos Aires. The acts of the new government ran in
the name of Ferdinand VII., King of Castile and Leon. An able and
ambitious coterie of young men came to the front, whose achievements in
war, administration, and diplomacy were to change the face of South
America. In the neighbouring cities there were no spontaneous uprisings
against the Spanish governors, but the Buenos Aires patriots lost no
time in sending out armies to spread their liberal and anti-Spanish
doctrines. The first movement was towards the old university town of
Cordoba. Here ex-Viceroy Liniers had managed to get a few troops
together, but not enough to make effective resistance. At the first
encounter they were all captured, and the Buenos Aires junta immediately
ordered the execution of the captured officers and of the anti-Creole
chiefs. This barbarous act is a fair sample of the horrible
bloodthirstiness of the war between Creoles and Spanish sympathisers. As
a rule, both sides slew their prisoners, and the combats were,
therefore, incredibly bloody for the numbers engaged.
The Buenos Airean army continued its triumphal march through the
provinces of Cordoba and Salta up to the Bolivian mountains. The Creole
townspeople reorganised the municipal governments on an anti-Spanish
basis, and the army increased like a rolling snowball. Not until it had
reached the high lands of Bolivia was serious resistance encountered. On
the 7th of November the patriots gained the battle of Suipacha. The
Creoles of Bolivia rose, and the Buenos Aireans penetrated rapidly as
far as the boundaries of the Viceroyalty. Meanwhile, Manuel Belgrano had
led a small expedition to Paraguay. However, the inhabitants of that
isolated region showed no disposition to join the Buenos Aireans in
their revolutionary movement. The Spanish governor allowed Belgrano to
advance nearly to Asuncion, but there his little army was overpowered
and forced to surrender on honourable terms. Montevideo's capture seemed
essential to the safety of Buenos Aires itself. Spanish ships under the
orders of its governor blockaded the river and constantly menaced an
attack on the patriot capital. Early in 1811, Artigas with a band of
gauchos from Entre Rios crossed the Uruguay and overran the country up
to the walls of the fortress, defeating the Spaniards in the battle of
Piedras. Re-enforcements came from Buenos Aires, and a siege of
Montevideo was begun.
At this juncture news came of a great disaster in the north. The
Argentines had at first been joined by Bolivian patriots, but the latter
were jealous; and the former, bred on the plains, could not well endure
the high altitude, suffering in health and efficiency. The Viceroy of
Peru rapidly recruited a considerable army among the sturdy and obedient
Indians of the high Peruvian plateau. On the 20th of June, 1811, the
patriot army was attacked at Huaqui, near the southern end of Lake
Titicaca, and was virtually annihilated. Bolivia was lost to the
patriots and Spanish authority was re-established as far down as the
Argentine plains.
This great defeat completely changed the attitude of affairs. The
Argentines evacuated Uruguay, and the Spanish colonial authorities
everywhere took the offensive. The heroic resistance which the Spanish
people were now making to the army of Napoleon's marshals encouraged
the Viceroy and governor to believe that Ferdinand would soon again be
seated on the throne of his fathers. Spanish ships dominated the delta
of the Parana, and the Spanish troops from Montevideo descended at
pleasure on the banks of the Plate or its tributaries. The Spanish
residents at Buenos Aires plotted against the junta, but their
conspiracy was betrayed, and in the middle of 1812 their chiefs, to the
number of thirty-eight, mostly wealthy merchants, were arrested and
garrotted. The situation of the revolutionary government was so
desperate that it is not hard to understand why the junta ruthlessly
repressed all signs of disaffection. Victorious Spanish armies
threatened them from both Bolivia and Montevideo, and fire in the rear
would have been fatal.
In this crisis of their fate, Manuel Belgrano, the great leader of the
Buenos Aires Creoles, came to the front. A native of the city, he had
been educated in Spain, where he had imbibed liberal principles. On his
return he threw himself with all the prestige of his learning, talents,
and wealth on the side of the Creoles. His faith in the triumph of
liberal principles was unalterable, and he was a more radical advocate
of independence than most of his associates. Though without military
training, and though his expeditions in Paraguay and Uruguay had not
been successful, his prestige and his unwavering confidence in the
patriot cause pointed him out as naturally the fittest leader. Again he
was entrusted with the command, and went north to Tucuman, where the
disheartened fragments of the patriot army were fearfully waiting for
the descent of the victorious Spaniards. The inhabitants of Jujuy and
Salta had been driven from their homes, and for the first time gaucho
horsemen appeared as the principal element of an Argentine army. The
junta ordered Belgrano to retire, so as to protect Buenos Aires, but he
disobeyed and stuck to Tucuman and let the Spaniards get between him and
the capital. With the country up in arms, and the exasperated gauchos
harassing his march, the Spanish general did not dare leave Belgrano's
army behind him. The Spanish army turned back to Tucuman to finish with
the mass of militia there before resuming its march on the capital. To
the surprise of South America, the result was a decisive patriot
victory. The gaucho cavalry, armed with knives and bolos, mounted on
fleet little horses, carrying no baggage, and living on the cattle they
killed at the end of each day's march, followed the fleeing Spaniards up
into the mountains and inflicted enormous losses. This victory gave the
Argentines for another year assurance against invasion by land, and
Buenos Aires remained a focus whence anti-Spanish influences could
spread over the rest of South America. The patriots again invaded
Uruguay, shut up the Spaniards within the walls of Montevideo, and
prepared once more to carry the war into Bolivia.
[Illustration: MANUEL BELGRANO.
[From an oil painting.]]
All this while the government at Buenos Aires was involved in internal
quarrels. The first junta soon expelled its fiercest, strongest, and
most active spirit,--Moreno,--who seems to have been the only man of the
period who foresaw the necessity of establishing a federative form of
government. With the disaster of Huaqui the necessity for a more compact
executive became urgent. A triumvirate assumed the direction of affairs.
Its policy was at once despotic and feeble and satisfied neither
federalists, advanced liberals, nor the military element. The latter was
becoming daily more predominant. A radical republican society called the
"Lautaro," composed largely of young officers, was organised and became
virtually a ruling oligarchy. San Martin and Alvear arrived from Europe,
and the prestige which they had acquired on European battle-fields at
once secured for them prominent positions. When the news of the victory
of Tucuman reached the city the military classes revolted, deposed the
old triumvirate, and installed a new one. This revolution marked the
final triumph of the sentiment of independence. The new government was
active in every sense of the word. Belgrano was re-enforced; San Martin
was encouraged in his chosen work of forming the nucleus of a
disciplined army, fit for offensive warfare; the worn-out pretence of
employing Ferdinand's name on public documents was dropped; the
inquisition, the use of torture, and titles of nobility were abolished.
The Argentine revolution had finally assumed a military and republican
character; independence was clearly henceforth its end and purpose.
CHAPTER VI
COMPLETION OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
Belgrano followed up his victory at Tucuman 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 altitude, 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.
[Illustration: 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 constitutional 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 assumed
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 Tucuman. 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 Massena 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
pass; the Spaniards were kept in uncertainty as to which of the numerous
passes 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 passes 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
Pass, 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 pass 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 Pass, 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 Pass, 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 passes 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 passes. 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 pass, 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 pass 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 assault, 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 pass. O'Higgins again
attacked, and the Spaniards, taken in flank and with their centre
assailed 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 Tucuman 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 assuring
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 assistance 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 gratitude 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.
[Illustration: 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 classes 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 assumed 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 bloody 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, Tucuman, 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 municipality 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 classes 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 constituent congress
which assembled 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 constituencies. 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
assembled 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 constitution 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 masse_ 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 horsemen
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 Tucuman 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 Tucuman 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 title, "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 title
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 pass 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 scrap of blue was considered proof of treason. A club of
desperadoes, called the Massorca, 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 passionately 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,
assisted 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"
besieged the colorados in Montevideo and controlled the country
districts. This apparently ended all hope of expelling Rosas from power.
The emigration of the intelligent and high-spirited youth of Buenos
Aires to Montevideo and Chile increased. Among these exiles and martyrs
to their devotion to constitutional government were many Argentines who
shortly rose to the top in politics and whose abilities gave a great
impulse to the intellectual movement. Among them were Mitre, Vicente
Lopez, Sarmiento, Valera, and Echeverria, who share the honour of
establishing civil government in Buenos Aires, and who aided Urquiza in
preventing South America from becoming a military empire, and in uniting
the Argentine province into a stable nation.
[Illustration: BUENOS AIRES IN 1845.
[From a steel engraving.]]
The longer the tyrant reigned, the less men remembered their own
factional divisions. Practically the whole civil population of the
capital was ready to support a rebellion. Rosas, however, was to fall,
not by a revolution in Buenos Aires, but because his system was
inconsistent with the local autonomy of the provinces. He put his
partisans into power as military governors, but no bond was strong
enough to keep them faithful to his interests. As soon as they were well
established in their satrapies, they became jealous of their own
prerogatives and of the rights of their people. Rosas ceased to be a
real federalist when he made Buenos Aires the centre of his power. He
lived there, he raised most of his revenue there, and the city's
interests became in a sense synonymous with his own. He excluded
foreigners from the provinces, he forbade direct communication between
the banks of the Parana and Uruguay and the outside world. Everything
was required to be trans-shipped at Buenos Aires so that it might be
subject to duty.
The chief lieutenant of Rosas was General Urquiza, whom he had appointed
governor of Entre Rios. The latter's generalship overcame the unitarian
rebellions in that province and repelled the invasions from Uruguay.
Under his wise and moderate rule the province flourished and recovered
from the devastations of the previous civil wars. Its fertile plains
were covered with magnificent herds of cattle and horses, which fed and
mounted an admirable cavalry. Urquiza himself was the greatest rancher
in the province and could raise an army from his own estates. Entrenched
between the vast-moving floods of the Uruguay and Paraguay, he was
practically safe from attack, and his relations with his neighbours in
Corrientes, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil were those of warm friendship
and alliance, as soon as he had declared against the tyrant, who, seated
at the mouth of the Plate, cut off the countries above from free access
to the sea. Though Urquiza was a caudillo he had no such ambition for
supreme power as plagued Rosas. He was even-tempered, of simple tastes,
and careless of military glory.
In 1846 the rupture between him and Rosas came, and thenceforth he
devoted himself to the overthrow of the tyrant. Three times his attacks
failed; but, in 1851, he arranged an alliance with Brazil and with the
colorado faction in Uruguay. The war was opened by Urquiza's crossing
the Uruguay and, in conjunction with a Brazilian army, suddenly falling
upon the blancos, who, in alliance with Rosas, were besieging
Montevideo. Most of the defeated forces joined his army, and accompanied
by his Brazilian and Uruguayan allies he recrossed the Uruguay and moved
over the Entre Rios plains to a point on the Parana just at the head of
the delta. The Brazilian fleet penetrated up the river to protect his
crossing, and on the 24th of December the entire force of twenty-four
thousand men, the largest which up to that time had ever assembled in
South America, was safely over and encamped on the dry pampas of Santa
Fe. The road to Buenos Aires was open. Rosas could do nothing but wait
there and trust all to the result of a single battle. On the 3rd of
February he was crushingly defeated in the battle of Caseros, fought
within a few miles of the city. Of the twenty thousand men he led into
action half proved treacherous, and many of his principal officers
betrayed him. He took refuge at the British Legation, and thence was
sent on board a man-of-war which carried him into exile.
CHAPTER VIII
CONSOLIDATION
After forty years of struggle no formula had been found which would
satisfy the aspirations for local self-government and at the same time
secure the external union so essential to the welfare of the whole
country. The questions between the provinces and Buenos Aires, and
between the different cities which were rivals in the race for national
leadership, seemed to a superficial glance to be as far as ever from
solution. There had, however, been a shifting of the material balance of
power which was soon to change the situation. The provinces had suffered
most severely from the long civil wars. Corrientes was well-nigh a
desert, in Santa Fe the Indians roamed up to the gates of the capital
town, and the Andean provinces were isolated and poor. The long peace
under Rosas's rule had increased the wealth and population of Buenos
Aires. The city lost hundreds of enthusiastic young liberals, but it
gained thousands who fled from the disorders of the interior. Its
population had doubled since his accession. Thirty thousand English,
Irish, and Scotch had crowded in to engage in sheep-raising, and the
rural population of Buenos Aires province was nearly two hundred
thousand. City and country together had doubled, while the rest of the
confederation had only increased one-half. The capital province now
contained twenty-seven per cent. of the total population, and the
disproportion in wealth and percentage of foreigners was far greater.
The number of sheep increased from two and a half million in 1830 to
five times that number, and by 1850 there were eight million cattle and
three million horses in the single province.
All over the country rational ideas about government had made progress.
The people were thoroughly sickened of military rule. Civilisation,
education, and general intelligence were spreading their beneficent
influences; industry, commerce, and the pursuit of wealth were absorbing
more of the national energies.
Urquiza, greatest of the caudillos, saw that without peace and union
Entre Rios could not be insured prosperity. He had no sooner entered
Buenos Aires than he took measures looking to the framing and adoption
of a federal constitution. After his victory he was named provisional
director of the confederation, but he showed no wish to play the role of
a Rosas. All the governors met and agreed to the calling of a
Constituent Congress, in which each province was to have an equal vote.
As a further precaution against the predominance of Buenos Aires the
session was to be held in Santa Fe. The provinces were anxious to form a
strong federation and the only opposition came from Buenos Aires. Her
statesmen did not realise that she was bound to be the centre of the
system and that the pull of her superior mass would, before many years,
be sufficient to control the aberrations of the satellites. Though the
governor of Buenos Aires had agreed on behalf of his province, and
though Urquiza's military power was overwhelming, the legislature of
that province refused its assent. It was clear that Buenos Aires and the
other provinces would not be able to agree upon a basis of union. The
ambitious cities of the interior each aspired to take the place of
Buenos Aires as the capital, and to this humiliation the latter city
would never submit unless after another civil war.
Urquiza determined not to use force, and retired to his ranch. As soon
as he was out of sight, the city rose in arms against his nominees. The
broad-minded Entre Rios chieftain sent back word that he had won the
battle of Caseros for the sole purpose of giving Buenos Aires her
liberty and that he would not now intervene to prevent her making the
use of it she chose. He even disbanded his troops. However, when the
Buenos Aireans marched an army to the attack of Santa Fe where the
Constituent Congress, attended by delegates from all the other
provinces, was holding its sessions, he again took the field. A
counter-revolution broke out in the rural districts of the Buenos Aires
province against the faction dominant in the city. Urquiza joined his
forces to theirs and besieged the town. A land siege was useless without
a blockade on the water side, and Urquiza tried to establish one. He
was unsuccessful because the commanders of his ships treacherously
betrayed him, surrendering to the city party for a heavy bribe. He
raised the siege and retired to the northern provinces.
Buenos Aires virtually declared her independence of the other provinces
by this action, but the latter took no further steps to force her into
their union. Urquiza and his followers had, however, accomplished more
toward uniting the Argentine into a firmly knit nation than had been
done in the previous forty years. The opposition of Buenos Aires helped
convince the other provinces of the necessity of a union. With the mouth
of the river in the hands of a hostile state more powerful than any one
of them separately, the position of Entre Rios, Santa Fe, or any one of
the others, would have been critical. Only by uniting could they hope to
maintain themselves and avoid absorption in detail. Intelligent
Argentines had long been convinced of the desirability of a firm and
enduring union, and the present danger crystallised that conviction in
men's minds. Back of all this was Urquiza's influence. At last a
military chief had come to the possession of supreme power who was
willing to aid his country in establishing a stable and free government,
and whose purpose was not merely the gratification of his own love of
power. Argentine writers are divided in their opinion of Urquiza's real
abilities, and many think that ignorance and irresolution, rather than a
lofty patriotism, caused his moderation after his victory over Rosas.
Intelligent foreigners, however, who saw the Plate for themselves
during this period are unanimous in praising his character, his
dignified bearing, his liberality, and his capacities. Argentina had
passed the stage when a military dictator was her natural chief. The day
for constitutional government had arrived; Urquiza was a product of his
time, and consciously or unconsciously embodied the changed political
sentiments of his countrymen.
On the 1st of May, 1853, the Constituent Congress adopted a constitution
substantially copied from that of the United States of North
America--and that constitution, with a few amendments, has continued to
be the fundamental law of the Argentine Republic. The navigation of the
Parana and the Uruguay was declared free to all the world, largely as a
reward to Brazil for her assistance against Rosas, although she
protested against the extension of that liberty to any nations except
those who had territory on the banks. The city of Parana, in the
province of Entre Rios and on the eastern shore of the Parana River, was
made temporary capital of the Republic. The various provincial capitals
had been unable to agree that any one of them should have the honour and
profit of being the political metropolis, and the city of Buenos Aires
was selected as the permanent capital, to become such as soon as the
province of that name should enter the confederation. The delegates had
a double purpose in making this selection. Buenos Aires was the natural
commercial and political centre, and, all things considered, the most
convenient location in the provinces. In the second place, they desired
to weaken the great province of Buenos Aires by cutting it in two, and
to curb the city's political influence by placing it directly under the
control of the federal government.
Urquiza was naturally selected as the first President, and was
recognised by foreign nations. Buenos Aires protested, claiming still to
be, for international purposes, the Argentine nation. She did not,
however, formally declare her independence and seek for recognition as a
new power. Buenos Aires, as well as the confederation, looked forward to
the time when she would join the latter. Throughout Urquiza's six-year
term, the provinces prospered amazingly. His administration of his
province had guaranteed the security of property, and now as President
he extended the blessings of peace to much of the rest of the
confederation. The new bonds sat lightly on the outlying provinces of
the Andean regions, but Urquiza did not stretch his constitutional
authority to interfere with them, satisfied to let them learn by degrees
that the right of local self-government guaranteed by the paper
constitution would be respected in practice. The freedom of navigation
caused unprecedented prosperity in the river provinces. The towns on the
Parana and Uruguay doubled in population during his six-years' service.
Corrientes had been continually ravaged by the civil wars as lately as
the last few years of Rosas's reign, but the assurance of peace was all
that was needed to start the rebuilding of the houses and the restocking
of the ranches. The impulse in population, wealth, and commerce then
given to the river provinces has never since lost its force. Foreign
capital and immigration were invited and the rivers and harbours
carefully surveyed. Rosario, in Santa Fe, was made a port of entry and
began a growth that has made it second only to Buenos Aires itself.
In Buenos Aires events were gradually shaping themselves toward
reuniting that province with the confederation. A liberal provincial
constitution was adopted, and though the ruling bureaucracy preferred
the _statu quo_, fearing that their own fall from power would follow any
triumph of the provincials, they were unable to hold the city in check.
It was too evident that the real interests of the city, and even her
future commercial supremacy, were menaced by a continuance of the
separation. In 1859 the situation became so strained that Buenos Aires
marched an army to attack the federal government. Urquiza met it near
the borders of Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, and administered a defeat. He
advanced to the city and required his vanquished opponents to agree to
accept the constitution of 1853, and to consent that Buenos Aires should
become a member of the confederation. He yielded, however, to the wishes
of many Buenos Aireans and consented in the interests of harmony, that
the question of the dismembering of the city from the province and
capitalising the former should remain open for future determination. The
essential justice in all other respects of the constitution of 1853 had
long been admitted even in Buenos Aires and there remained no reason
why the latter should not enter the confederation once and for all. On
the 21st of October, 1860, General Bartolome Mitre, Governor of Buenos
Aires, swore to the constitution, saying: "This is the permanent organic
law, the real expression of the perpetual union of the members of the
Argentine family, so long separated by civil war and bloodshed."
Meanwhile, Urquiza's term had expired. Dr. Derqui, his successor, was
suspected of designs against the autonomy of the provincial governments.
The assassination of the Governor of San Juan and the succession of a
member of an opposite faction, was made the occasion for Federal
intervention in the affairs of that province. The government of Buenos
Aires protested and it became evident that this untoward event was soon
to disturb the peace of the newly formed confederation. The Federal
Congress, under Derqui influence, refused to admit the members from
Buenos Aires. Mitre marched out at the head of her forces and at the
battle of Pavon, September 17, 1861, he overthrew the provincial forces.
Buenos Aires remained mistress of the situation. The governments of
certain provinces had been imposed on their people by the Derqui
administration, or they were obnoxious to the triumphant Buenos Aires
party. They were overthrown and Derqui was deposed. Happily for the
Argentine, Mitre was a sincere patriot and, though young, was moderate
and conciliatory. Made president of the republic as the representative
of the victorious Buenos Aireans, he set about the final reorganisation
of constitutional government in a spirit of unselfishness and with a
foresight and skill that greatly aided to save his country from the
sterilising anarchy of civil war.
The accession of Mitre in 1862 marked the end of the period of
uncertainty. The government of the Argentine Republic was now finally
and definitely established and fixed, after fifty-two years of conflict.
The constitution of 1853 was left unamended, except that Buenos Aires
became the seat of federal government without being separated from its
province or ceasing to be the provincial capital. The free international
navigation of the rivers was not interfered with, and Buenos Aires
abandoned her pretensions to special commercial privileges. She was
thenceforward more and more the centre of gravitation and power for the
whole republic, but her influence came from legitimate natural causes
and was exercised within constitutional limits. The autonomy of the
provinces was not interfered with, and it was no longer possible, even
in the remotest districts, for a caudillo to rally at his call the
gauchos, always ready for a raid, a campaign, or an invasion.
[Illustration: BARTOLOME MITRE.
[From a steel engraving.]]
Though the form of the federal government was fixed and its theoretical
supremacy has never since been questioned, its real power at first was
feeble. Urquiza was master in the mesopotamian provinces, and in case of
need Mitre could count on little military help except from his own
province. The only result of the battle of Pavon which was immediately
apparent was the shifting of the centre of power from Urquiza's capital
to Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, henceforth the tendency was constantly
toward strengthening the bonds of union. Urquiza and the other
provincial governors showed no disposition to attack the central
authority, and in turn the latter was careful to avoid useless
aggressions against them. The problem of reconciling provincial rights
with the existence of an adequate federal government had at last been
solved. The nation passed on to a still more difficult question,--the
smooth and satisfactory working of democratic representative
institutions in the absence of an effective participation in public
affairs on the part of the bulk of the population. Elections have not
carried the prestige of being the expression of the majority will. The
ruling classes have been anxious enough to obey the popular voice and to
govern wisely, but people can only gradually be trained into the habit
of expressing their will clearly and indisputably at regular elections.
The insignificant disturbances to public order which have occurred since
1862 have been indications of dissatisfaction with the imperfect detail
workings of the complicated system of ascertaining the popular wishes,
or hasty protests against mistakes on the part of those in power. Never
have they endangered the Federal constitution nor diverted the steady
course of the nation's progress in the art of self-government.
CHAPTER IX
THE MODERN ARGENTINE
General Mitre's administration is memorable for the beginning of that
tremendous industrial development which in thirty years made Argentina,
in proportion to population, the greatest exporting country in the
world. Foreign capital and immigration were chief factors in the
transformation that within a few decades changed an isolated and
industrially backward community into a nation possessing all the
appliances and luxuries of the most advanced material civilisation.
In 1865 circumstances forced Mitre into the Paraguayan war. Lopez, the
Paraguayan dictator, hated the Buenos Aireans quite as much as he did
the Brazilians with whom he was constantly quarrelling, and he was only
awaiting a favourable opportunity to vent his dislike on either or both.
He counted on the coolness that naturally existed between Urquiza and
Mitre to insure him the former's aid. In 1864 Brazil intervened in the
affairs of Uruguay by assisting one of the parties in the civil war then
raging. Lopez regarded the action of Brazil as endangering the balance
of power in the Plate regions. In retaliation he seized the Brazilian
province of Matto Grosso, which lay along the Paraguay north of his own
territory. Mitre wished to remain neutral, although he had no sympathy
with the brutal despot, and had an understanding about Brazil's action
in Uruguay which safeguarded the interests of Argentina. Lopez, however,
insolently demanded free passage across Argentine territory for the
troops which he wished to send against Brazil and Uruguay. Mitre's
refusal was followed by a Paraguayan invasion, and national honour
required that this violation of territory be resented. Brazil and the
Flores faction in Uruguay welcomed the alliance of Argentina. The
Paraguayan invasion was repulsed by their combined forces, and the
allies advanced up the Parana against Lopez in his own dominions. It was
natural that Mitre should be commander-in-chief of the allied armies,
although Brazil furnished the bulk of the troops and bore the brunt of
the expense. Urquiza disappointed Lopez in refusing to revolt against
Buenos Aires, and although he took no great personal interest in the war
he co-operated in many ways with Mitre.
The enormous expenditures of the Brazilian government furnished a
splendid cash market for Argentine stock and produce, and the resulting
profits compensated for the pecuniary sacrifices involved. In two years'
fighting both the Argentine and the Brazilian armies suffered tremendous
losses on the field and in the cholera hospitals. After the great
repulse at Curupayty in 1867 the number of Argentine troops was largely
reduced. When the Brazilian fleet finally forced the passage of the
river, opening the way to Asuncion, Mitre resigned the command into the
hands of the Brazilian general Caxias, and the last two years of the war
were carried on principally by Brazilian troops. By the peace of 1870
Argentina's title to certain valuable territory was quieted, and she
gained an important commercial advantage by the opening of Paraguay to
her trade. Her commercial and industrial leadership in the Plate valley
has never since been endangered. Politically also the indirect results
were gratifying. The tremendous sacrifices in men and money had sickened
the Brazilian government and people of foreign complications.
Thereafter, the emperor pursued a policy of non-interference, which has
left to his Spanish neighbours a free hand among themselves. With the
withdrawal of the Brazilian troops from Paraguay, the balance of
political power began slowly to pass from Rio to Buenos Aires.
Sarmiento, the "schoolmaster president," succeeded Mitre in 1868. His
election is said to have been the freest and most peaceful ever held in
the republic and to have represented as nearly as any the will of the
electors. The development of population, wealth, and industry continued
in increasing geometrical proportion. During forty-five years before
1857 the population had only a little more than doubled; during the
forty-five years since that date, the increase has been four hundred and
fifty per cent. The yearly increment holds fairly steady at four per
cent., which is as large as that of any country in the world. In 1869
the city of Buenos Aires had one hundred and eighty thousand people, and
in 1902 it contained eight hundred and fifty thousand. Immigration had
begun to pour in at the rate of twenty thousand per annum, and had
rapidly increased to over a hundred thousand, when the great crisis of
1890 temporarily interrupted the flow. The years from 1868 to 1872 were
prosperous over much of the civilised world, but nowhere more so than in
Argentina. Sarmiento's administration was, however, characterised by the
beginning of that policy of governmental and commercial extravagance
which has so deeply mortgaged the future of Argentina, and has
repeatedly hampered the legitimate development of this marvellously
fertile region. In the ten years prior to 1872 foreign commerce doubled,
but the foreign debt increased fivefold.
The last of the caudillos, Lopez Jordan of Entre Rios, revolted in 1870
against Urquiza, who was still governor of that province. The
redoubtable old patriot was captured by the rebels and assassinated. In
1901 a monument was erected to his memory in the city of Parana, his old
capital, and the day of the unveiling was a national festival in all the
republic. The Federal government avenged his death and suppressed the
insurrection after an obstinate, expensive, and bloody little war.
Sarmiento's administration was, however, not popular, and the news that
he had virtually determined to name his successor created much
dissatisfaction. Mitre headed the opposition in the city, while in the
provinces some of the discontented went so far as to take up arms. Julio
Roca, then a young colonel, defeated them at Santa Rosa, and Sarmiento
was able to hand over the reins of government to Dr. Avellaneda without
any further serious opposition.
[Illustration: JULIO ROCA.]
A commercial crisis was beginning when the new President took office in
1874. He initiated a policy of retrenchment, under which the government
managed to pay its obligations and weather the storm. General Roca was
made Minister of War and came into further prominence as the conqueror
of the Indians, who had hitherto prevented white men from settling on
the vast and valuable southern pampas. In 1854, after the fall of Rosas,
the Indians recovered most of the territory from which he had driven
them twenty years before. Later, the frontier was advanced very slowly,
but in 1877 Alsina, one of the most successful governors Buenos Aires
ever had, undertook a vigorous campaign. In the following year General
Roca threw the power of the Federal government into this vastly
important enterprise. He carried the frontier south to the Rio Negro and
west to the Andes, attacking the Indians in their fortresses--a policy
which insured permanent white domination. The ultimate consequences of
opening up to civilised settlement the immense territories comprised in
Roca's conquests cannot yet properly be estimated. The vast region of
Patagonia, that was marked on the maps in our boyhood as an unclaimed
and uninhabitable arctic waste, has since been added to Argentina as an
indirect result of Roca's campaign of 1878. Buenos Aires put in a claim
for the whole of the territory conquered from the Indians, but the
Federal statesmen refused to allow one province to become well-nigh as
large as all the rest together. By a compromise her area was increased
to sixty-three thousand square miles, while most of the new acquisition
was divided into territories under the direct administration of the
Federal government.
As the time for the presidential election of 1880 approached, political
matters began to look ugly. It was evident that Avellaneda intended to
choose his successor. Through the provincial governors, the police, the
army, the employees on the public works, and the officials of all kinds
he had easy control of the election machinery. Even the most scrupulous
President often cannot prevent the exercise of coercion in his name and
without his knowledge. The opposition in South America usually refrain
from voting: indeed, it is considered almost indelicate for outsiders to
interfere in a matter so strictly official as an election. The privilege
of voting is not so highly prized and so jealously guarded as in the
United States and the northern countries of Europe.
Avellaneda and his adherents had fixed upon General Roca as the next
President. The principal opposing candidate was Dr. Tejedor, governor of
Buenos Aires, who was supported by Mitre's party and also by many of the
other Buenos Aires party, the "autonomists." The contest was really
between Buenos Aires and the provinces. General Roca was strong with the
army and with the country, but so tremendously had Buenos Aires grown
that the result appeared doubtful. Her population, city and province,
had in 1880 reached six hundred and fifty thousand,--more than a quarter
of the total in the whole Confederation. The next three provinces put
together did not equal her numbers and lagged still farther behind in
wealth and ability to concentrate their forces.
Radical counsels prevailed in Buenos Aires. Roca's opponents, seeing
that they were at a hopeless disadvantage with the election machinery in
Avellaneda's hands, determined to use violence. In June, 1880, the
partisans of Tejedor rose against the Federal government. The police and
militia of the city joined them and paraded the streets, while the alarm
flew to the country, and the troops of the line began to concentrate
outside the city. Presently the President and his Cabinet fled for
safety to the Federal camp. For a few weeks there was some skirmishing
and much negotiating, and in one encounter near the south end of the
city a thousand Buenos Aireans were killed. Finally, the two sides came
to an agreement by which the Roca party retained substantially all that
they had been contending for. The General succeeded to the Presidency
without further opposition, and the city of Buenos Aires was detached
from the province. The federalisation of the great city was the last
step in the process of adaptation that had been going on ever since the
expulsion of the Spaniards. Political equilibrium between the provinces
and Buenos Aires had been reached. Thenceforth the latter's direct
predominance was to be purely intellectual, commercial, and social. For
the privilege of being capital of the republic, the city exchanged her
provincial autonomy. Buenos Aires province, as formerly constituted, was
the greatest menace to a peaceful federal union. In an assembly where
the rights and influence of all the provinces were supposed to be equal,
the magnitude of Buenos Aires was a constant occasion for the jealousy
of her smaller sisters and for aggressions on her own part. Deprived of
the city, the remainder of the province was not powerful enough to be
dangerous. Now that it is federalised, the city itself proves to be the
strongest tie binding together the different parts of the Confederation.
The greatest of all the waves of material prosperity reached its
culmination during Roca's first administration. Business fairly boomed;
foreign commerce increased seventy-five per cent. from 1875 to 1885; the
exports of hides, cattle, wool, and wheat swelled from year to year; the
railroad mileage tripled in ten years; the revenues mounted sixty per
cent. in five years; the use of the post-office, that excellent measure
of education, wealth, and higher national energies, tripled. All danger
of disturbances serious enough to affect property rights had long since
passed; the provincial governors worked harmoniously with the Federal
authorities. A part of Roca's system was to rest his power as chief
executive on the co-operation of the governors; the members of Congress
also bore somewhat the same relation to the President. As a rule, a
majority in Congress supported his measures.
In spite of present prosperity, dangers had been inherited from past
administrations. There were weak spots in the political and financial
structure that had grown too rapidly to be altogether well built. The
people still lacked the hard and continued training in business that
older nations have had, and the national temperament tended toward a
reckless optimism. European money lenders stood ready to stimulate this
tendency by offering easy credit facilities in return for careless
promises of exaggerated interest rates. The medium of exchange was a
vastly inflated and fluctuating paper currency. From the beginning
Argentine rulers had resorted to note issues to tide over their
pecuniary difficulties. When Rosas assumed power in 1829 the paper
dollar was worth fifteen cents, and by 1846 he had driven it down to
four cents. In 1866, Mitre's administration had established a new
arbitrary par at twenty-five paper dollars for one gold dollar.
Sarmiento's extravagances made suspension necessary and sent gold to a
premium. In 1883 President Roca remodelled the currency, issuing new
notes convertible into gold, and exchanging them for the old paper at
the rate of twenty-five for one. But his effort to contract and steady
the circulating medium excited protests from a community that was
growing rich in the rapid inflation of values. Foreign money was being
loaned to all sorts of Argentine enterprises on a scale that,
considering the small population of the country, has never been
precedented anywhere. Railroads, ranches, commercial houses, banks, land
schemes, building enterprises, were capitalised for the asking. The
provincial governments borrowed money recklessly, while interest was
guaranteed on new railroads, and charters granted to all sorts of
speculative enterprises. The nation undertook to supply itself in a
single decade with the drainage works, the docks, the public buildings,
the parks, the railroads, that older countries have needed a generation
to provide. So much capital was being fixed that the attempt at specie
resumption cramped the speculative world. Within two years it was given
up, and issues of paper money resumed.
General Roca retired from office in 1886, and was succeeded by his
brother-in-law, Juarez Celman. The four years during which the latter
remained in office are memorable for reckless private and public
borrowing. The healthy activity of General Roca's administration gave
place to a mad fever of speculation. Congress passed a national banking
act, and under its provisions banks of issue were established in nearly
every province. The paper circulation almost quadrupled and the premium
on gold doubled. The Federal government followed the example set by the
provinces and municipalities, and burdened the country with an
indebtedness which has mortgaged the future of the country for years to
come. Between 1885 and 1891 the foreign debt was increased nearly
threefold.
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF THE CEMETERY AT BUENOS AIRES.
[From a lithograph.]]
During 1887 and 1888 few apprehensions of the inevitable result of the
inflation seem to have been entertained. Up to the very day of the crash
of 1889 the government cheerfully continued to borrow, to plan
magnificent public improvements, and to build expensive railways. The
public speculated confidently in the mortgage scrip issued through the
provincial mortgage banks. Early in 1889 the government began to have
difficulty in meeting some of the enormous obligations which it had
undertaken. Conservative people became apprehensive; the independent
press raised a warning voice. A ministerial crisis was followed by a
panic in the Exchange. The new Secretary of the Treasury, in an effort
to prevent further depreciation of the currency, diverted the redemption
fund held by the government for bank issues. The currency dropped with
sickening rapidity; the bubble companies collapsed; the public realised
that many of the banks were unable to meet their obligations.
At this crisis public alarm and indignation found a vent in the
formation of a revolutionary society, called the Civic Union, which was
pledged to overthrow President Celman. On July 26, 1890, disturbances
began and there was a little fighting in the streets. Police and troops,
however, put no spirit into their efforts to suppress the rioters. The
President's best friends urged him to resign, and Congress passed a
formal memorial to that effect. There was nothing for him to do but to
obey the manifest wish of the people; he handed in his resignation and
the Vice-President, Dr. Carlos Pellegrini, peacefully succeeded him.
The situation went from bad to worse; in 1891 the currency dropped to
twenty-three cents on the dollar, the banks failed, and the laws for
collection of debts were suspended for two months. The most which Dr.
Pellegrini could hope to do was to hold things together until the
general election should be held fifteen months later. No human wisdom
could devise measures that would give immediate prosperity, and the
public would be satisfied with nothing less. Dr. Pellegrini had to wait
until later years for a proper appreciation of his labours. The other
two great national figures were General Roca and General Mitre. The
first had the prestige of his strong and successful administration; he
enjoyed the confidence of the army, and he was the head of the great
Nationalist party which was especially powerful in the provinces.
General Mitre, the most eminent citizen of Buenos Aires, and in a way
the living embodiment of the previous forty years of national history,
had inevitably been selected as chief of the Civic Union. He had
therefore led the movement through which the public opinion of the
capital had overthrown Celman.
Mitre and Roca had co-operated in securing a peaceful transfer of the
government from Celman to Pellegrini. Roca was inclined to favour Mitre
for the presidency, but it soon became evident that the latter could
not control the more radical members of the Civic Union, and that his
candidacy would not reconcile all parties. February 19, 1891, an attempt
to assassinate Roca was perpetrated in the streets of Buenos Aires. The
spirit of mutiny grew alarmingly, and a state of siege was proclaimed;
the Civic Union split into warring camps; trouble broke out in Cordoba,
and successful revolutions overthrew the legal state governments in
Catamarca and Santiago del Estero. Mitre and Roca formally withdrew from
active political life in the hope that this might placate the dissident
politicians.
The candidate fixed upon by the wing of Nationals who adhered to Roca,
and the moderates of the Civic Union led by Mitre, was Doctor Luiz Saenz
Pena, ex-Justice of the Supreme Court. The Pellegrini government gave
him its earnest support, and charges were made by the Radicals that
their votes would be forcibly suppressed in the election of October,
1891. They determined to anticipate violence with violence, but, on the
eve of the election in October, 1891, their leaders were imprisoned and
a state of siege declared. Saenz Pena was elected, but the Radicals
began to intrigue to obtain control of the provincial governments, which
would enable them to force his resignation or his compliance with their
wishes. Serious trouble broke out early in 1892 in the province of
Corrientes, with which the Buenos Aires radicals openly sympathised. The
new President quickly cut loose from the Roca wing of the Nationalist
party and allied himself closely with the moderate Civic Unionists, now
usually called "Mitristas." The President's own son, who had been a
candidate against him, headed the faction of the Nationalist party that
had renounced Roca's leadership. Revolutionary movements against the
governors who belonged to the Roca faction began in several provinces.
In February there were armed protests in Santa Fe against a new wheat
tax; a revolt broke out in Catamarca in April; by July the Saenz Pena
administration was in the gravest difficulties. San Luiz and Santa Fe
rebelled, and in August Salta and Tucuman followed. It was manifest that
the President was not strong enough to hold down the selfish factions
who saw in the general dissatisfaction and financial distress only an
opportunity to get into office by force of arms.
Congress remained neutral until it became evident that no accommodation
could be reached between the President and his opponents, and that the
latter would press on to overthrowing the government and probably
precipitate a serious civil war. In this crisis, however, the majority
agreed to laws which authorised armed Federal intervention in the
troubles in San Luiz and Santa Fe. But in September the national troops
themselves showed symptoms of mutiny and by this time most of the
provinces were convulsed by revolutionary movements which the central
government was manifestly not strong enough to suppress or control.
On September 25th, General Roca took command of the army; the most
dangerous radical leaders in Buenos Aires were thrown into prison; and
on October 1st he captured Rosario, the second city of the Republic,
and the chief place in Santa Fe, which for months had been in the hands
of revolutionists. This was a beginning of the end of the troubles that
menaced public order. Six million dollars had been expended by the
government in fruitless marchings to and fro of troops, but no serious
harm had been done. The scene of the contest between the ambitious
factions was transferred to Congress, the Cabinet, and the Press.
Throughout 1893 and 1894 the President struggled with his factional and
financial difficulties, and gradually lost control of Congress and
prestige in the country.
Meanwhile, commercial liquidation was proceeding normally and, as
always, painfully. The great Provincial Mortgage Bank, through the
agency of which a vast amount of the land scrip had been issued in the
Celman days, was granted a moratorium for five years. Other actual
bankruptcies were legally admitted and enforced. The mortgage scrip
payable in gold was replaced by currency obligations. The government had
proved unequal to the task of balancing its own receipts and expenses.
Taxes were increased until rebellion seemed imminent, but expenditures
still outran them. The deficits mounted in spite of the efforts toward
economy and the returning prosperity of the business world. The boundary
dispute with Chile had assumed a threatening aspect; war seemed
imminent, and the military and naval estimates were largely increased.
In January, 1895, President Saenz Pena called an extra session of
Congress to vote supplies for the expected war with Chile and to
consider the financial proposals of the government. Congress demanded
that political grievances should be redressed. The President had been
persecuting the army officers who had been implicated in the
revolutionary disturbances, and a vast majority of Congress insisted
that a complete amnesty be granted to all political offenders. When the
President refused, the Cabinet resigned in a body and Congress and the
opposition brought every pressure to bear. It was soon evident that
Congress must win, and on January 22, 1895, the President resigned.
The Vice-President, Doctor Uriburu, succeeded for the unexpired period
of three years, during which little progress was made toward a
settlement of the nation's financial difficulties. Symptoms of renewed
extravagance appeared. In 1897, the issuance of $10,000,000 of mortgage
scrip was authorised, and the city of Buenos Aires received permission
to borrow $5,000,000. Work on the great docks of Buenos Aires, costing
$35,000,000, was pushed to completion, and in February the paper dollars
dropped back to 33 cents, while the deficit for the year was over
$20,000,000.
In July, 1897, General Roca was nominated for the Presidency by the
Convention of the National party, with Dr. Pellegrini in the chair.
There was no real opposition to his election. Again and again during a
quarter of a century he had proved himself able to cope with the most
difficult situations which had arisen in Argentine affairs. In 1890, his
firmness and adroitness had saved the country from the agony of a
useless political upheaval after the failure of the Celman
administration. During the anxious months that followed the panic, his
generosity had secured a co-operation of the moderates of Buenos Aires
with his own immediate followers in holding back the Radicals and
revolutionists in check. During the critical year of 1892, the outbreaks
against the Saenz Pena administration increased in violence until it
seemed as if the country would be convulsed with a serious civil war,
but when Roca stepped in the tide of disorganisation turned, and his
firm hand re-established the authority of the Federal government. His
prestige and his personality enabled him to count upon an obedience from
the chiefs of the provincial factions which was of inestimable value. He
possessed those rare and indispensable qualities which make a man a
centre around which other men can rally. He had built up the one really
national party in the country and was faithful to his friends and his
adherents, but sufficiently broad-minded to combine with other parties
when the interests of the whole country demanded it.
General Roca entered upon his second presidential term in the beginning
of 1898. One of his first acts was to intervene in Buenos Aires province
and put an end to a deadlock between the governor and the Provincial
Assembly. The boundary dispute with Chile, a question which, in spite of
the earnest desire of both governments for peace, might at any time
precipitate a ruinous war, was submitted for settlement by arbitration.
W. J. Buchanan, the United States Minister at Buenos Aires, named as
arbitrator for the northern frontier, quickly announced a decision
which was promptly accepted by both parties. The more complicated
southern frontier could not so easily be prepared for submission; a
serious misunderstanding arose, and both countries felt compelled to
spend large sums for armaments which they knew they could ill afford.
Happily, a decision was at last rendered in 1902. No question now
remains open which is likely to involve the external peace of Argentina.
[Illustration: A RIVER ROAD IN ARGENTINA.
[From a lithograph.]]
Internal peace has not been menaced during General Roca's term. The
commercial situation of the country has vastly improved. Immigration,
which had largely ceased after 1890, has again risen to over a hundred
thousand a year. Wheat exports rose from 4,000,000 bushels in 1897 to
61,000,000 in 1900. The total exports in 1899 were $185,000,000, twice
as great per capita as the record export of the United States. There
have been no issues of paper money, and the value of the currency has
risen to forty cents. The government has established a new artificial
par at a little more than this sum, and has begun accumulating a gold
reserve. A resumption of specie payments is soon expected.
Nevertheless the chief difficulties and preoccupations of the Roca
administration have been with financial questions. A deficit of
$70,000,000 had accumulated in the few years before 1898, and the
interest on the immense public debt makes an equilibrium in the budget
almost impossible. Many of the provincial governments have defaulted,
and the national government has had to carry their burdens in addition
to its own, to satisfy clamorous foreign creditors. In 1901 it was
proposed to unify the debt, refunding the whole at a lower rate of
interest, and specifically pledging certain sources of public income.
This plan had the approval of the government, but the national pride was
touched by the latter feature. The populace could not bear the idea of
giving a sort of mortgage on the country. The passage of the bill by
Congress was met with so many demonstrations of popular disapproval that
it was abandoned. This change of front was accompanied by the formation
of an alliance between the followers of General Mitre and those of
General Roca.
The industrial impetus already acquired by the Argentine Republic is
sufficient to carry it over all obstacles, and it seems assured that
there will be a rapid settlement of the whole of this immense and
fertile plain. Here nature has done everything to make communication
easy, and a temperate climate insures crops suited to modern European
civilisation. Two grave perils have so far been encountered--namely, a
tendency toward political disintegration and an abuse of the taxing
power. The former is now remote, for since the railways began to
concentrate wealth and influence at Buenos Aires, and to destroy the
prestige and political power of the provincial capitals, the national
structure built by the patriots of 1853 has stood firmer each year.
The Argentine has had a bitter lesson of the evils of governmental
extravagance, and still groans under the burden of a debt which seems
disproportionately heavy, but the growth of population and wealth will
soon overtake it, and the very difficulties of meeting interest are the
cause of an economy in administration, of which the good effects will be
felt long after the debt itself has been reduced to a reasonable per
capita. A nation is in the process of formation in the Plate valley
whose material greatness is certain, and whose moral and intellectual
characteristics will have the widest influence on the rest of South
America.
PARAGUAY
CHAPTER I
PARAGUAY UNTIL 1632
The beginnings of the settlements in Paraguay have been sketched in the
introductory chapter on the discoveries and conquest. In 1526, Cabot,
searching to find a route to the gold and silver mines of the centre of
the continent, penetrated as far as the site of the present city of
Asuncion. He had already, in the exploration of the Upper Parana,
skirted the southern and eastern boundary of what has since become the
country of Paraguay. Ten years later the exhausted and discouraged
remnants of Mendoza's great expedition sought rest and refuge among the
peaceful agricultural tribes of this region. Under Domingos Irala, these
six hundred surviving Spanish adventurers founded Asuncion in 1536, the
first settlement of the valley of the Plate. They reduced the Indians to
a mild slavery, compelling them to build houses, perform menial
services, and cultivate the soil. The country was divided into great
tracts called "encomiendas," which, with the Indians that inhabited
them, were distributed among the settlers. Few women had been able to
follow Mendoza's expedition, so the Spaniards of Asuncion took wives
from among the Indians. Subsequent immigration was small, and the
proportion of Spanish blood has always been inconsiderable, compared
with the number of aborigines. The children of the marriages between the
Spanish conquerors and Indian women were proud of their white descent.
The superior strain of blood easily dominated, and the mixed Paraguayan
Creoles became Spaniards to all intents and purposes. Spaniards and
Creoles, however, learned the Indian language; Guarany rather than
Spanish became, and has remained, the most usual method of
communication.
The Spaniards of Asuncion were turbulent and disinclined to submit to
authority. They paid scant respect to the adelantados, whom the
Castilian king sent out one after another as feudal proprietors. Until
his death Irala was the most influential man in the colony, but his
power rested on his own energy and capacity, and on the fear and respect
in which he was held by his companions, more than on the royal
commission that finally could not be withheld from him.
[Illustration: ASUNCION.]
Across the river from Asuncion stretched away to the west the vast and
swampy plains of the great Chaco. It was inhabited by wandering tribes
of Indians whom the Spaniards could not subdue. They fled before the
expeditions like scared wild beasts, only to turn and mercilessly
massacre every man when a chance was offered for ambush or surprise. To
the east of the Paraguay River the country was dry, rolling, and
extremely fertile. Though covered with magnificent forests it was easily
penetrable all the way across to the Parana. Its inhabitants were the
docile Guaranies, who knew something of agriculture and in whose
villages considerable stores of food were to be found. The population
was dense for savages, but they had no political or military
organisation. Divided into small tribes which did not co-operate, they
rendered little respect or obedience to their chiefs. Under these
conditions Spanish authority rapidly spread over central and southern
Paraguay. Before Irala died, in 1557, the settlers had reached the
Parana on the western boundary and founded settlements nearly as far
north as the Grand Cataract.
Shortly afterwards, the Creoles of Asuncion began their expeditions to
the South. By 1580 they controlled the Parana River from its confluence
with the Paraguay to the ocean, had established Santa Fe and Buenos
Aires on its right bank, and opened up the southern pampa. The pastoral
provinces on the Lower Parana were slowly peopled. A large proportion of
the energetic Paraguayan Creoles preferred the semi-nomadic life of the
plains to indolence among their Indian slaves in the tropical forests of
Paraguay. The two regions were distinct in climate, habits of life,
social and industrial organisation. They became separated in interests
and soon were to be divided politically. Though, until 1619, the whole
province continued to bear the name of Paraguay, the usual residence of
the governor was Buenos Aires. Asuncion was often forced to be content
with a lieutenant-governor, and was fast relegated to the position of a
neglected and isolated district.
In the days of the Spanish conquest, Franciscan monks were the priests
who most often accompanied the expeditions, and they took the most
prominent part in the earliest establishment of religion. The members of
this Order, however, with a few notable exceptions, took no special
interest in the evangelisation of the aborigines. On the contrary, they
were as fierce as the soldiers themselves in their cruelties to the poor
Indians. The shouts of a Franciscan monk set on Pizarro's ruffians to
the slaughter of the Incas that surrounded Atahualpa. Those that came to
Paraguay preferred to live in the towns, and their conduct toward the
Indians differed little from that of the lay Spaniards. It was the
genius of Ignatius Loyola that conceived and perfected a machine able to
carry Christianity and civilisation to these remote and inaccessible
peoples and regions. Within a few years after its foundation, the
Society of Jesus turned its attention to the evangelisation of South
America; in 1550 the Jesuit Fathers began their work in Brazil. Their
successes and failures in that country had little relation with their
work in Spanish South America. It is curious, however, that their most
successful early work in Brazil should have been done in Sao Paulo, on
the extreme eastern border of the wide plateau which drains to the west
into the Parana. For a decade or two after 1550, they laboured hard to
gather the Indians of that region into villages, to teach them
Christianity, and protect them against the tyrannies and exactions of
the Portuguese settlers. The contest was unequal; the Jesuits were not
long able to prevent the enslavement of their proselytes. The Paulistas
destroyed the Jesuit missions in their neighbourhood and became the most
expert in Indian warfare and the most terrible foes of the Jesuit system
of all the colonists of South America. Their determined opposition was
the most potent cause in preventing the subjection of South America to a
theocratic system of government.
About 1586 the Jesuit Fathers entered Paraguay for the purpose of
beginning the evangelisation of the Indians of the Plate valley. They
established a school in Asuncion and pushed out on foot into the remoter
districts. Their success was phenomenal. They spared no pains to learn
the language of the savages so that they might teach them in their own
tongue. They approached them with kindness and benevolence showing in
every gesture. They availed themselves of the Indians' love of bright
colours and showy processions. They went unarmed and alone, offering
useful and attractive presents, conforming to savage customs and
prejudices, and imposing on the vivid savage imagination with the pomp
of Catholic worship. They taught their savage pupils how to cultivate
the ground to get greater results, how to save themselves unnecessary
labour, and how to live comfortably. They persuaded them to gather into
towns, where they built comfortable houses and tight warehouses, while
the men cultivated the soil and the women spun and wove cotton.
The Jesuits came almost immediately into conflict with the interests of
the Spanish colonists. They were welcomed at first, because they were
expected to lend themselves to the enslavement of the Indians. When
their real purposes were discovered feeling against them rose high. The
Creoles clearly saw that it was going to be far more difficult to extend
their power over the Indians gathered together in villages under Jesuit
protection than over unorganised and friendless bands of unconverted
savages.
Before 1610 the number of Jesuits that had come to Paraguay was very
small. Among the first was the Father named Thomas Fields, a Scotchman.
As a matter of fact, the Jesuits were recruited from all the nations of
Europe and under their military system had to go wherever they might be
sent. English, Irish, and German names, as well as Spanish, are to be
found in the lists of Jesuits who laboured in Paraguay.
In 1608 Philip III. of Spain attended to the complaints that came to him
through the powerful chiefs of the Order of the indifference and
opposition shown by the settlers and colonial authorities, and gave his
royal and official sanction to the Jesuit conversion of the Indians
along the Upper Parana. By this time the Fathers had penetrated across
to the Parana and had followed up that stream far north of the Grand
Cataract in latitude 24 deg., which marks the northern boundary of Paraguay
proper. It is hard to understand how they overcame the difficulties of
travelling. To this day it is well-nigh impossible to reach the Grand
Cataract, and years pass without that wonder of nature's being seen by
the eyes of civilised man. No part of the world, outside the Arctic
regions, is less accessible than the Parana above the Grand Cataract.
Yet these heroic priests made that region the principal theatre of their
operations in the early years of the seventeenth century. The territory
is now all Brazilian,--the boundaries of that republic extend on the
east bank of the Parana south nearly to the twenty-sixth degree and on
the west bank to the twenty-fourth. The rivers Paranapanema and Ivahy
are great tributaries coming down from the east between the
twenty-second and twenty-third degrees, and draining a vast extent of
the plateau that extends to the Brazilian coast mountains between
Curitiba and Sao Paulo, and on their banks the Jesuits established their
principal missions.
In those days there were no clearly defined boundaries between the
Portuguese and Spanish dominions. From 1580 to 1640 the king of Spain
was also monarch of Portugal. The Jesuits held his royal letters patent
for the conversion of the Indians of the province of Guayra--the name
which this remote region bore. They had no reason to anticipate that
they would be accused of being invaders of Portuguese territory, or that
they would be interfered with by any Portuguese subjects of the Spanish
Crown. The nearest Portuguese settlement was at Sao Paulo, from which
Guayra could be reached only by the long and tedious descent of the
Tiete River to its confluence with the Parana, and thence down that
river to the Ivahy. Months would be necessary to make such a journey,
great difficulties encountered with waterfalls and rapids, and great
privations from want of food in the vast uninhabited regions on the
route.
The first Jesuits to arrive after the granting of formal authorisation
by the Spanish king were two Italians. They left Asuncion October 10,
1609, and it took them five months of incessant travelling to reach the
Paranapanema. The work already done there by the earlier Fathers had
borne some fruit. The Indians were prepared for the coming of the new
missionaries and readily gathered into the towns which they founded in
rapid succession. For the first few years all went well, and within a
very short time they claimed to have at least forty thousand souls under
their guidance. In 1614 there were 119 Jesuits in Paraguay and Guayra,
and the work of evangelising and reducing to obedience the whole Guarany
population of the Parana valley went on apace. For twenty years these
Guayra missions spread and prospered, while to the east and south the
Jesuits acquired more and more influence with the Indians in Paraguay
proper, and more and more hemmed in the Creoles of Asuncion.
In 1629 a thunderbolt burst upon Guayra out of a clear sky. The
Portuguese from Sao Paulo appeared before the Mission of San Antonio and
destroyed it utterly, burning the church and houses and driving off the
Indians as slaves. Other missions shortly suffered the same fate, and
within the short space of three years the towns had been sacked, most
of the inhabitants of the region carried off or killed, and the remnants
had fled down the river under the leadership of the Fathers. The
Paulistas were animated by motives, some good, some bad. Primarily they
wished to capture slaves. They hated the Jesuits and had themselves
suffered from the latter's system of segregating the aborigines. Only a
few decades before, their fathers had destroyed the Jesuit missions near
Sao Paulo, and they were determined not to permit themselves to be
hemmed in and crowded out by Indians ruled and protected by Jesuits.
They believed in the doctrine of "Brazil for the White Brazilians," and
they regarded the Jesuits and their neophytes as natural enemies and
fair prey. The sentiment of nationality also animated them. As
descendants of Portuguese they hated the Spaniards and their rule. Their
allegiance to the Spanish dynasty that had usurped the crown of Portugal
sat lightly. The Jesuits came by way of Asuncion, their communications
were with the Spanish authorities, and most of them were Spaniards. The
Paulistas, as Portuguese, viewed with alarm a rapid spread of Spanish
ecclesiastics up the Parana valley, which threatened soon to reach their
own neighbourhood. Avarice, love of adventure, race pride, patriotism,
hatred of priestly domination, all co-operated to push them on to
undertaking these memorable expeditions.
The great extension of the Jesuits over the northern and eastern regions
of the Parana valley occurred during the period when Hernandarias was
the dominant figure of the Plate. Creole though he was, this remarkable
man was a friend to the Indian and to the missionary work of the
Jesuits. His aid and encouragement in 1609 were essential to the
latter's success, for he might easily have nullified the effect of the
royal permission to evangelise Guayra, a formal document that would have
been of little value against the delays and excuses of an unwilling
governor aided by the jealous people. After his first term as governor
at Buenos Aires, the Spanish government determined to put a stop to the
more flagrant of the abuses practised against the savages and created
the office of "Protector of the Indians." Hernandarias was named to fill
it, and carried out his instructions in a moderate spirit. He understood
the country and the situation of the colony well, and did not undertake
to abolish Indian slavery. In that tropical climate the whites will not
labour in the fields so long as there are Indians who can be forced to
work, and the Spaniards still regarded the Indian as little better than
an animal.
On the other hand, Hernandarias was too intelligent not to see that
there must be restraints on the cruelties and exactions of the Creoles
if the Indians of Paraguay were to be saved from the extermination that
had been the fate of the Haytians a century before. The outcome was,
that though a new code of laws was promulgated by the impracticable
Spanish king, which forbade any further enslavement of the aborigines,
its provisions were largely disregarded. At the same time, however, the
Indians acquired a legal status, and their condition was gradually
improved until it became not much worse than that of the
contemporaneous European peasantry. The Jesuits were guaranteed against
interference and allowed to go out into the remoter wilderness and give
to the yet unslaved inhabitants the invaluable protection of membership
in their missions.
In 1619 the natural and commercial division between Paraguay proper and
the rest of the province was officially recognised. The region between
the Paraguay and the Parana rivers was made a separate province,
directly dependent upon the Viceroy at Lima and the Audiencia at Charcas
in Bolivia. It included officially the Jesuit missions south-east of the
Parana as well as the present territory of Paraguay.
When the Paulistas began their terrible attacks on the Guayra missions
in 1629, the governor of Paraguay refused to send any assistance to the
Jesuits. The latter charged him with a corrupt understanding with the
invaders, by which he was to share in the profits of the slaves sold.
The Order had agreed with the Spanish government not to put any arms
into the hands of the Indians, so the latter were defenceless against
the Paulistas, who attacked musket in hand. The Creoles and Spaniards in
Asuncion resented more and more the presence and power of the Jesuits,
and viewed with ill-concealed satisfaction the misfortunes that now
overwhelmed the priests. The governor, in declining to send help, was
only carrying out the wishes of the people around him. Had the number of
whites in Paraguay not been so very small the Jesuits might have been
expelled as they were in Sao Paulo.
CHAPTER II
THE JESUIT REPUBLIC AND COLONIAL PARAGUAY
We have no accounts of the Jesuit missions in Guayra, or of the tragedy
of their destruction, except those that were written by the Fathers
themselves. These are filled with manifest exaggerations and marred by
omissions which we have few means of correcting. Nevertheless, the bold
outlines of a story that for bravery, pathos, and devotion rivals any
ever told are clear and indisputable. Within such a short period as
twenty years the Jesuits had not succeeded in training the Guayra
Indians to any very high degree of civilisation. They complain that the
Indians were still prone to return to the worship of their devils.
Nevertheless, the massive walls of churches which have survived the
devastation wrought by three centuries of tropical rains bear witness
that the Jesuits had gathered together a multitude of people and had
taught them a measure of skilled labour.
Of the completeness of the victory of the Paulistas there is no doubt.
Within three years, tens of thousands of Indians were carried off to Sao
Paulo, and hardly a town was left standing in the province of Guayra.
Father Montoya, chief Jesuit, has left an account of the Hegira which he
led down the river. Though he is silent as to the part he took himself,
it is hard to read his pages and not give him a place among the world's
great heroes. Twelve thousand Indians of every sex and age assembled on
the Paranapanema with the few belongings which they had been able to
bring from the homes that they were forced to abandon. The Paulistas
were daily expected to return, and the only hope of escape was to float
down the river and get beyond the Grand Cataract of the Parana. The
journey to the beginning of the falls was made without any great losses;
there the difficulties began. Ninety miles of falls and rapids intervene
between navigable water above and below the Grand Cataract. Across the
river valley extends a mountain chain with slopes rugged and covered
with dense vegetation. The river divides into various channels, and the
sides of the gorges are clothed in cane-brakes and tangled forests
through which a path had to be cut with machetes. These poor Jesuits and
their thousands of scared, patient Indians had no boats awaiting them at
the foot of the falls, so they had to continue their dreary passage
through the gorges and cane-brakes, where wild Indians lay in ambush
with poisoned arrows, until at last a place was reached where canoes
could be built. Still they struggled on, the indomitable Jesuits taking
every precaution. Though out of immediate danger from the Paulistas when
they had passed the cataract, the Spaniards on the right bank below
were hardly less to be feared. They were waiting on the shore of the
Parana for news of the fugitives in order to pounce on them and make a
rich haul of slaves. The provisions were exhausted, but the Jesuits
dared not apply for help to the Creoles. Fever broke out and, sick and
starving, the devoted Jesuits and their uncomplaining followers worked
away on their boats and rafts. At last they got them ready, and,
slipping past the Spanish settlements in the night, they finally reached
some small Jesuit missions near the mouth of the Iguassu, five hundred
miles from their starting-point.
[Illustration: GUAYRA FALLS.]
The Jesuits resolved to evacuate Guayra completely and to build up their
power anew in the country between the Parana and the Uruguay. Within the
next few years they had occupied the country that is now the Argentine
Territory of the missions. This tract lay directly across the Parana,
from that part of Paraguay proper in which the Jesuits were most
powerful, to the other side of the Uruguay, where was a fertile
territory which proved an excellent field for the extension of the
settlement. Before many years these missions stretched in a broad band
from the centre of Paraguay three hundred miles to the south-east; they
dominated southern Paraguay and half the present Brazilian state of Rio
Grande do Sul with the country that lies between, while their towns
lined both banks of the Upper Uruguay and the Middle Parana, cutting off
the Creoles from extending their settlements up either of these great
rivers.
Now that the priests had concentrated their forces so near, the alarm
of the Creoles became acute. The Jesuits managed to obtain the dismissal
of the governor who had refused to send them aid when they were attacked
by the Paulistas and were driven from Guayra, but his successor also
became a partisan of the Creoles as soon as he reached Asuncion. He
visited the missions near the river Parana and ordered that they be
secularised on the ground that these regions had already been subjected
by Spanish arms before its occupation by the priests. But the Jesuits
were good lawyers and had powerful friends at every Court, so the
governor was forced to reverse his action.
The next governor helped to make the Jesuits secure from Paulista
interference below the Grand Cataract, by defeating an important
expedition which had reached the new missions. The Paulistas did not
confine their aggressions to the missions, but alarmed the Spanish
Creoles themselves by penetrating west of the Parana into Paraguay
proper. Even Asuncion did not feel safe for a time. The Jesuits had now
begun to arm and drill the Indians. Though the Paulistas made
expeditions from time to time, and the Spanish and Jesuit frontier
settlements were frequently aroused by the news of a bloody raid and of
the rapid depredations of a band of these dreaded marauders, there was
never again such wholesale destruction as had taken place in Guayra. The
frontiers of the Spanish and Portuguese peoples on the Parana remain to
this day substantially as they were fixed by the Paulista expeditions of
1630 to 1640.
In their conflict with the Jesuits, the Creoles shortly received a
valuable reinforcement in Bishop Cardenas, a very able and energetic
prelate, and a man gifted as a ruler and statesman. Born in the city of
Charcas, on the Bolivian plateau, he was a Creole of the Creoles. He
became a great missionary and evangelist throughout Upper Peru and
Tucuman, acquiring wonderful fame and popularity by his eloquence. In
spite of the fact that he was a Creole, he was immensely popular among
the Indians, and seems to have been a natural leader of both branches of
the native population. He bitterly hated the Jesuits. As a member of the
rival Franciscan Order, his professional jealousy was aroused by their
success, and his Creole prejudices were outraged by their efforts to
prevent the extension of white power among the aborigines.
By sheer force of ability and eloquence, he rose into great prominence
in southern Spanish America, and was rewarded for his successful labours
in Tucuman by being appointed Bishop of Paraguay. There the Creoles
accepted him as their leader, and he soon became the dominant figure in
the community. He quarrelled repeatedly with the governor, but such was
his force of character, and the skill with which he took advantage of
the superstitious reverence for his apostolic office, that he invariably
achieved his ends. Once the governor, at the head of a file of soldiers,
presented himself at the bishop's door to arrest a fugitive whom the
bishop had undertaken to protect. When the door was opened there stood
the dauntless priest in full canonicals, defying the governor to cross
his threshold. He excommunicated the governor and every soldier who had
dared take part in this affront to his dignity, and, like Hildebrand,
was only appeased when the governor had begged for pardon on his knees.
When the governor died, Bishop Cardenas succeeded _ad interim_. His
popularity and prestige were unbounded, and his audacity and courage
unprecedented. Uniting in himself the religious, civil, and popular
power, he controlled the forces of the community more completely than
any one who had preceded him. His great work was the humiliation and
destruction of the Jesuits. He hampered their insidious spread on the
hither side of the Parana, and attempted the secularisation of many of
their missions. In 1649 he took the audacious step of issuing a decree
expelling all the members of the Society of Jesus, and he actually drove
the Fathers from their churches and schools in Asuncion itself. The
Jesuits appealed to the Viceroy, and a governor was sent out to depose
him.
Twenty years had now elapsed since the Jesuits had armed the Mission
Indians and organised them into an efficient militia. An army was,
therefore, ready to the new governor's hand. The Creoles of western
Paraguay were riotous and tumultuous, but in that tropical climate they
had lost much of the military capacity of their Spanish ancestors. The
number of people of Spanish descent was small and while the secular
Indians made admirable soldiers when disciplined and well led, they had
never been organised by the Creoles for serious warfare. The military
system of the Jesuits immediately proved its superiority. Aided by the
prestige of his Viceregal commission, the new governor at the head of
the Jesuit army quickly overcame the hastily gathered levies of the
Bishop.
For the next one hundred and twenty years the Jesuits maintained their
system in south-eastern Paraguay and the regions on both banks of the
Parana and the Upper Uruguay. Until 1728 their territory was nominally
under the jurisdiction of the governor of Asuncion. Really, however, it
was an independent republic ruled by a superior whose capital was at
Candelaria, and who was actually responsible to no one except his
General at Rome and the authorities at Madrid. In the secular part of
Paraguay, the formerly turbulent and secular Creoles sank more and more
into the indifference characteristic of the Indians who surrounded them.
Early in the eighteenth century a governor named Antequera, whom the
Viceregal authorities attempted to depose, was forcibly maintained for a
time by the Paraguayan Creoles--probably the earliest instance of an
important movement toward independence which occurred in South America.
The Paraguayans only yielded when a compromise was offered. The old
ferocity which the original conquerors had felt against the Indians gave
place gradually to kindlier sentiments. From slaves the Indians rose
into serfs and then into peasants, living on good terms with the
proprietors of their lands, and not more oppressed by Spanish officials
than the whites themselves. Secular Paraguay, shut in on the west by
the impenetrable Chaco with its hordes of dreaded wild Indians, and on
the east by the Jesuit territory, could not expand. Indeed the impulse
toward conquest and exploration which so distinguished the Paraguayan
Creoles in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had completely died
out as early as the middle of the seventeenth century.
In 1728, the Jesuit republic was formally detached from the jurisdiction
of Paraguay and placed under that of the government of Buenos Aires. The
missions were all situated on or near the banks of the Upper Parana and
Uruguay, and their line of communication with the outside world ran
directly to Buenos Aires. They had few commercial relations with
Asuncion and it was inconvenient to maintain even a shadow of political
relation with that capital. The Jesuit missions prospered, although,
curiously enough, their population remained stationary. South and east
of the Parana, the country which they occupied was mostly an open,
rolling plain admirably suited for pasturage. Herding cattle was the
chief employment of the Indians and the chief source of the exports.
However, in the forests north-west of the Parana, agriculture was more
practised, and the principal exports thence were the matte tea and
timber. In the pastoral country the Jesuits did not expand farther. They
had already gathered most of the Indians who inhabited that region into
their missions, and the natural increase of population did not justify
any new settlements. But in the wooded country across the Parana a few
tribes of Guaranies had hitherto escaped subjection to either Creoles or
Jesuits, and farther to the west, in the great Chaco, there were many
tribes of savage and intractable Indians. In both these directions the
Jesuits kept up their missionary efforts. In Paraguay, they were
successful and converted many tribes of the northern part of that
country, but in the Chaco they could make little progress.
In 1769 the king of Spain issued his famous decree banishing the Jesuits
from all his dominions. It was feared that in the centre of their power
on the Upper Parana they might offer resistance. They commanded a
population of more than two hundred thousand Indians, fairly well armed
and disciplined and absolutely devoted to them; nevertheless, they
submitted quietly. Spanish officials replaced the Jesuits in control of
the civil and commercial interests of the mission towns, and priests of
other Orders were sent up to continue spiritual instruction. The Spanish
officials were, however, not successful in holding the Indians together.
Their exactions and cruelties drove the Indians to despair, and within a
very few years emigration began. The seven missions to the east of the
Uruguay had been traded by Spain to Portugal in 1750, and most of their
inhabitants had then been killed or driven across the Uruguay. The most
populous missions lay between the Uruguay and the Parana, in the
territory that to-day forms the upper part of Corrientes, and the
Missions Territory. A large proportion of their inhabitants fled down
the Uruguay into Entre Rios and Uruguay proper. Those on the west side
of the Parana largely remained or removed only far enough to coalesce
with the secular Indians of Paraguay; some of the outlying and more
remote missions were abandoned altogether, and Paraguay then assumed its
present extent.
The population was fairly homogeneous, and its vast majority was
composed of descendants of the aborigines, with comparatively few
Spaniards and Creoles of mixed blood forming the upper strata of
society. The country felt few of the quickening and disturbing
influences which were already animating the regions at the mouth of the
river toward the end of the eighteenth century. Little effort was
necessary to get a subsistence from the teeming soil, and, content with
their luscious oranges, their matte, and their unlimited tobacco, the
Paraguayans led an idyllic existence. They had little sympathy with the
turbulent, active-minded population which was crowding into Buenos Aires
and making it a commercial, political, and intellectual focus.
Agricultural in their habits, they disliked the hard-riding gauchos of
the southern plains hardly less than the turbulent Indians of the Chaco.
In the movements that preceded the revolution of 1810 they took no part.
CHAPTER III
FRANCIA'S REIGN
On the 25th of May, 1810, a revolutionary movement in Buenos Aires
overthrew the Spanish Viceroy. Its leaders were young Creole liberals,
natives of Buenos Aires, and a junta was formed from their number which
undertook the supreme direction of affairs. Prompt measures were taken
to overthrow the Spanish provincial authorities and to secure the
co-operation and obedience of all the subdivisions of the Viceroyalty.
Manuel Belgrano, one of the enthusiastic leaders of the movement, was
sent up the river to take possession of Entre Rios and Corrientes for
the junta, and to attack the Spanish governor of Paraguay. He was
accompanied by only a few hundred troops, but he counted on the sympathy
and help of the people among whom he was going.
In Entre Rios and Corrientes, which were mere administrative divisions
of the province of Buenos Aires, he encountered no difficulty. The
gauchos, who formed almost the whole population, hated outside control
and cared little who claimed to be supreme at Buenos Aires. Belgrano
marched through the centre of these districts and reached the Parana at
the old Jesuit capital of Candelaria. Once across the river he found a
different atmosphere. The home-loving Indian population regarded
Belgrano's band as invaders and responded promptly to the call of the
Spanish governor, old Velasco, to take up arms and repel the aggression.
The Paraguayans hated the Buenos Aireans with an intensity born of
ignorance and isolation, and a considerable force of militia assembled
for the defence of Asuncion. Among its most popular leaders was a native
Paraguayan named Yegros. Belgrano was not opposed until he approached
within sixty miles of Asuncion, but on the 19th of January, 1811, the
Paraguayans turned and crushed his little army. He retreated to the
south and on March 9th was captured with his whole force.
This repulse ended, once for all, the hope cherished by the Buenos Aires
liberals of persuading or compelling the submission of Paraguay. The
battle of the 19th of January, and the hostile attitude of the whole
Paraguayan people, definitely assured Paraguay's independence from
Buenos Aires. It soon became evident that independence from Spain had
been secured as well. In contact with their Argentine prisoners, the
more intelligent Paraguayan leaders were quickly convinced of the
advantages which home rule would bring to Paraguay, and that they
themselves ought to control the government until affairs in Spain should
be settled. The governor had no Spanish troops nor any hope of
receiving help, either from the distracted mother-country or from the
governors of other parts of South America. Each of them had enough to do
in taking care of himself. Velasco's secretary was an educated Buenos
Airean, a liberal, and an autonomist. He plotted the overthrow of his
chief in connection with a Paraguayan officer who was popular with the
troops in Asuncion.
Two months after Belgrano's surrender, a bloodless revolution occurred.
The governor offered no resistance; he simply stepped to one side and
became a private citizen, while the patriots took possession of the
barracks and began casting about blindly for a solid basis for a new
government. After a good deal of confusion the prominent citizens of the
province were called together in a sort of rude Constituent Congress,
and a junta was formed. General Yegros and Dr. Francia were the two most
prominent and popular men in the country, and they were naturally and
inevitably selected as chief members. Yegros had been the principal
leader of the militia, and Francia was considered the most learned and
able man in the community. He was a lawyer who had become a sort of
demigod to the lower classes by his fearless advocacy of their rights,
and inspired almost superstitious reverence by his reputation for
learning and disinterestedness. He was selected as secretary, while
Yegros, an ignorant soldier, became president of the junta. Francia's
abilities and courage immediately made him the dominating figure.
Jealousies arose and he stepped out for a while, but the weaker men who
succeeded him could not control the situation. Two years later a
popular assembly met which was ready to submit to his advice in
everything. The junta was dismissed and he and Yegros were invested with
supreme power under the title of Consuls. A year later he forced Yegros
out and with general consent assumed the position of sole executive, and
in 1816 he was formally declared supreme and perpetual dictator.
For the next twenty-five years he was the Government of Paraguay.
History does not record another instance in which a single man so
dominated and controlled a people. A solitary, mysterious figure, of
whose thoughts, purposes, and real character little is known, the worst
acts of his life were the most picturesque and alone have been recorded.
Although the great Carlyle includes him among the heroes whose memory
mankind should worship, the opinion of his detractors is likely to
triumph. Francia will go down to history as a bloody-minded, implacable
despot, whose influence and purposes were wholly evil. After reading all
that has been written about this singular character, my mind inclines
more to the judgment of Carlyle. I feel that the vivid imagination of
the great Scotchman has pierced the clouds which enshrouded the spirit
of a great and lonely man and has seen the soul of Francia as he was.
Cruel, suspicious, ruthless, and heartless as he undeniably became, his
acts will not bear the interpretation that his purposes were selfish or
that he was animated by mere vulgar ambition.
The population over which he ruled had for centuries been trained to
obedience by the Jesuits and the Creole landowners. The Creoles were
few and the Spaniards still fewer. Francia based his power upon the
Indian population and not on the little aristocracy whose members
boasted of white blood. Convinced that the Indians were not fit for
self-government, he also believed that it would be disastrous to permit
the white oligarchy to rule. He proposed to save Paraguay from the civil
disturbances that distracted the rest of South America. He therefore
absorbed all power in his own hands and ruthlessly repressed any
indications of insubordination among those of Spanish blood. The Indians
blindly obeyed him, and he relentlessly pursued the Creoles and the
priests, seeming to regard them only as dangerous firebrands who might
at any time start up a conflagration in the peaceful body politic, and
not as citizens entitled to the protection of the State.
He absorbed in his own person all the functions of government; he had no
confidants and no assistants; he allowed no Paraguayan to approach him
on terms of equality. When he died, a careful search failed to reveal
any records of the immense amount of governmental business which he had
transacted during thirty years. The orders for executions were simply
messages signed by him and returned, to be destroyed as soon as they had
been carried out. The longer he lived the more completely did he apply
his system of absolutism, and the more confident he became that he alone
could govern his people for his people's good. He adopted a policy of
commercial isolation, and intercourse with the outside world was
absolutely forbidden. Foreigners were not permitted to enter the country
without a special permit, and once there were rarely allowed to leave.
[Illustration: JOSE RODRIGUEZ GASPAR FRANCIA.
[From an old wood-cut.]]
He neither sent nor received consuls nor ministers to foreign nations.
Foreign vessels were excluded from the Paraguay River and allowed to
visit only one port in the south-eastern corner of the country. He was
the sole foreign merchant. The communistic system inherited from the
Jesuits was developed and extended to the secular parts of the country.
The government owned two-thirds of the land and conducted great farms
and ranches in various parts of the territory. If labour was needed in
gathering crops, Francia had recourse to forced enlistment. Those Indian
missions which remained free he brought gradually under his own control
and followed the old Jesuit policy of compelling the wild Indians to
work like other citizens. Dreading interference by Spain, Brazil, or
Buenos Aires, he improved the military forces and began the organisation
of the whole population into a militia. His policy, however, was
peaceful, and the difficulty of getting arms up the river, past the
forces of the Argentine warring factions, prevented his organising an
army fit for offensive operations even if he had desired to have one.
As he grew older he became more solitary and ferocious. Always a gloomy
and peculiar man, absorbed in his studies and making no account of the
ordinary pleasures and interests of mankind, he had reached the age of
fifty-five and assumed supreme power, without marrying. His public
labours still further cut him off from thoughts of family and friends;
and, although it has been asserted that he married a young Frenchwoman
when he was past seventy, nothing is known about her. It is certain that
he left no children and died attended only by servants. His severities
against the educated classes increased; he suffered from frequent fits
of hypochondria; he ordered wholesale executions, and seven hundred
political prisoners filled the jails when he died. His moroseness
increased year by year. He feared assassination and occupied several
houses, letting no one know where he was going to sleep from one night
to another, and when walking the streets kept his guards at a distance
before and behind him. Woe to the enemy or suspect who attracted his
attention! Such was the terror inspired by this dreadful old man that
the news that he was out would clear the streets. A white Paraguayan
literally dared not utter his name; during his lifetime he was "El
Supremo," and after he was dead for generations he was referred to
simply as "El Defunto." For years when men spoke of him they looked
behind them and crossed themselves, as if dreading that the mighty old
man could send devils to spy upon them,--at least this is the story of
Francia's enemies who have made it their business to hand his name down
to execration. The real reason may have been that Francia's successors
regarded defamation of "El Defunto" as an indication of unfriendliness
to themselves.
Devil or saint, hypochondriac or hero, actuated by morbid vanity or by
the purest altruism, there is no difficulty in estimating the results of
Francia's work and the extent of his abilities. That he had a will of
iron and a capacity beyond the ordinary is proven by his life before he
became dictator, as well as his successes afterwards. All authorities
agree that he had acquired as a lawyer a remarkable ascendancy over the
common people by his fearlessness in maintaining their causes before the
courts and corrupt officials. He did not rise by any sycophant arts;
indeed, he never veiled the contempt he felt for the party schemers and
officials around him. When he had supreme power in his hands he used it
for no selfish indulgences. His life was austere and abstemious;
parsimonious for himself, he was lavish for the public. He would accept
no present, and either returned those sent him, or sent back their value
in money. Though he had been educated for the priesthood and had never
been out of South America he had absorbed liberal religious principles
from his reading. Nothing could have been more likely to offend the
Catholic Indians, upon whose good will his power rested, than his
refusal to attend mass, but he was honest enough with himself and with
them not to simulate a sentiment which he did not feel. In his manners
and life he was absolutely modest; he received any who chose to see him;
if he was terrible it was to the wealthy and the powerful; the humblest
Indian received a hearing and justice. During his reign Paraguay
remained undisturbed, wrapped in a profound peace; the population
rapidly increased, and though commerce and manufactures did not
flourish, nor the new ideas which were transforming the face of the
civilised world penetrate within his barriers, food and clothing were
plenty and cheap, and the Paraguayans prospered in their own humble
fashion. Though they might not sell their delicious matte, there was no
limitation on its domestic use, and although money was not plentiful and
foreign goods were a rarity, a fat steer could be bought for a dollar,
and want was unknown.
The old man lived until 1840 in the full possession of unquestioned
supreme power, dying at the age of eighty-three years. His final illness
lasted only a few days, and he went on attending to business to the very
end. When asked to appoint a successor he refused, bitterly saying that
there would be no lack of heirs. His legitimate and natural successor
could only be that man who could raise himself through the mass by his
force of character and prove himself capable of dominating the
disorganising elements of Creole society.
CHAPTER IV
THE REIGN OF THE ELDER LOPEZ
Once the breath was out of the old man's body, his secretary attempted
to seize the government. He concealed Francia's death for several hours
and issued orders in the dead man's name. But as soon as the news came
out, the army officers, whose assistance was essential, refused to obey
him. The poor secretary escaped a worse fate by hanging himself in
prison, and the troops amused themselves setting up and pulling down
would-be dictators. After several months of anarchy, it was determined
to assemble a Congress in imitation of the first Congress which had
named Francia consul. A real representative government was, of course,
impossible in Paraguay, but the Creoles, who naturally formed the bulk
of the Congress, were desirous of insuring themselves against another
dictatorship. They wanted a government where the offices would be passed
around. However, an executive was necessary and the only executive they
knew was an irresponsible one. The title borne by Yegros and Francia in
the early days seemed a good one, and so it was agreed that two consuls
should be elected for a limited period, during which, however, they were
to exercise very limited power.
Among the ambitious and turbulent deputies a directing spirit arose in
the person of Carlos Antonio Lopez, a well-to-do rancher who had
received a lawyer's education and had been careful to keep out of public
view during Francia's reign. At this juncture he inevitably came to the
front, because he was the most learned and far-sighted among his fellow
Creoles. He was a man of great natural ability and shrewdness, highly
intelligent, well read, agreeable and affable in his manners. Selected
as one of the two Consuls by the Congress of 1841, he soon pushed his
colleague to one side, and became dominant. In 1844 an obsequious
Congress which had been summoned by him and whose members he virtually
named, conferred upon him the title of President for the nominal term of
ten years, which really was intended to be for life. It is, however,
significant of the milder character of Lopez and the increased power of
the office-holding class that he preferred the more republican title of
President, held for a nominally limited period, to the semi-monarchical
one of "El Supremo," borne by his terrible predecessor. As a matter of
fact, Lopez succeeded to all the absolute power and prerogatives of
Francia.
The new ruler was no such determined _doctrinaire_ as Francia. He was
rather a clever opportunist than a gloomy idealist. He adopted many
liberal measures, such as the law providing that all negroes thereafter
born should be free, and he even attempted to frame a regular
constitution. He abandoned the policy of isolation, so dear to Francia,
and opened the country in 1845. He loved appreciation and especially
wished the approbation of foreigners. Though cautious and reluctant to
engage in outside complications, he was by nature and taste a diplomat,
and he welcomed the opportunity to try his wits in wider competition
than Paraguay afforded. In 1844, Rosas, the tyrant of Buenos Aires, was
engaged in a contest with revolutionists in Corrientes. His ultimate
purpose was manifestly to unite the whole Plate valley under his
authority. Lopez shared the uneasiness of other neighbouring rulers at
the growth of Rosas's power. The latter promulgated a decree forbidding
the navigation of the Parana to any but Argentine vessels. This decree
was an attack on Paraguay's very plain and natural right to reach the
ocean, and absolutely shut her off from the outside world. Lopez
resented the aggression, and after many protests declared war against
Buenos Aires in 1849. Nothing came of it, however, except to give his
oldest son a chance to see actual service and to emphasise Lopez's
enmity to Rosas and his policy. The way was prepared for his friendship
with Urquiza, the great leader of the Argentine provincials, and for the
opening of Paraguay to foreign commerce.
Permission was granted in 1845 for foreign ships to ascend the Paraguay
as far as Asuncion, and foreigners were no longer forbidden to enter the
country. On the contrary, Lopez evinced a marked desire for their
society and encouraged them to come and engage in trade. His manners
were engaging and his courtesies untiring, unless his will was crossed
or his suspicions aroused, when he could be very unreasonable and
arbitrary.
The spirit of the Paraguayan Creoles had been so broken by the terrible
proscriptions of Francia's reign that Lopez did not experience much
difficulty in ruling them. His milder methods and the terror of a
renewal of the cruelties of Francia's time succeeded in holding all
demonstrations of lawlessness or rebellion in check. He was averse to
shedding blood, and his subjects enjoyed substantial liberty in their
goings and comings. Justice was well and regularly administered, and
life and property were almost absolutely safe. Over every kind of
affairs, however, he exercised a patriarchal supervision. One
trustworthy traveller tells of being waited on at table in a remote part
of Paraguay by a fine-appearing man whose face was very sad and who
seemed very awkward in handling the dishes. On inquiry, it turned out
that the waiter was the richest man in eastern Paraguay and had been
condemned by the President to serve in a menial capacity as a punishment
for insulting a woman. Lopez's ideas of freedom did not contemplate that
his people might engage in politics or the discussion of any public
affairs. During the civil war in Corrientes, Paraguayans were forbidden
to speak of what was going on across the river. Sometimes farmers were
required to cultivate a certain area in a certain crop. He maintained
the government monopoly of yerba and completed Francia's work of
incorporating the free Indians.
An instance of his ready interest in foreigners was his connection with
a young American, named Hopkins, who had been sent out in 1845 by the
United States Government to investigate the advisability of recognising
Paraguay, then accessible for the first time. This enterprising young
man fired Lopez's imagination with his accounts of the material progress
of the United States, and Lopez even lent him money to return and form a
company for the purpose of introducing American goods and cigar
manufacture into Paraguay. Hopkins, after several years, succeeded in
interesting some American capitalists and came back and established his
factory. At first Lopez was delighted, but he soon quarrelled with the
Americans. The etiquette in Paraguay was that the President should
remain seated with his hat on when he granted an audience, and the
manners of the visitor were expected to be correspondingly humble. The
Americans mortally offended him by forgetting themselves in his
presence. The situation soon became intolerable and the company retired.
After the overthrow of Rosas in 1851 the Parana was declared free for
navigation to vessels of all nations by Argentine law and by treaties to
which Brazil and Uruguay were parties, although Paraguay was not.
Nevertheless, Lopez permitted ships to ascend freely to Asuncion. Lopez
wished to concentrate all trade at Asuncion and opened no ports north of
his capital. The upper course of the river belonged to Brazil, but the
boundary between Brazil and Paraguay had remained unsettled from
colonial times. In his control of the Lower Paraguay, Lopez had a lever
to force Brazil to terms. He steadfastly refused to permit ships to
ascend into Brazil in spite of the latter's persistent efforts to
procure the natural and necessary right of egress to the ocean by an
international river. While this matter still remained unsettled,
Lieutenant Page of the United States Navy appeared in the _Water Witch_
at Asuncion on his survey of the Paraguay. Lopez was delighted, and
extended every facility to the officer as far as the northern boundary
of Paraguay. Page went on up to Brazil. Lopez was offended, for he
feared that he would be at a disadvantage in his further negotiations
with Brazil by having apparently granted to an American ship the
permission which he had steadily refused to Brazilians. Unfortunately,
just at this time occurred the quarrel with the American promoter,
Hopkins. The American officer took his countryman's side, giving him
refuge on board the _Water Witch_. This so enraged Lopez that he issued
a decree prohibiting foreign war-vessels from entering Paraguayan
waters, and one of his forts fired at the Lieutenant's vessel, killing a
man. This outrage brought about Lopez's ears a naval expedition which
compelled him to apologise and to agree to reimburse the Hopkins
Company.
Brazil also sent a fleet up the Parana to coerce Lopez into granting
free transit along the Paraguay, but he cleverly held the Brazilians in
parley until he had an opportunity to fortify the river. England's
gunboats at Buenos Aires virtually held the Paraguayan flagship, with
Lopez's eldest son on board as hostage for a young British subject named
Canstatt, who had been imprisoned and condemned to death for complicity
in a conspiracy at Asuncion. Lopez was forced to release him and pay
damages.
These humiliations changed his love for foreigners into a bitter hatred,
and he began to prepare his country to resist their aggressions more
effectively. From his youth he had trained his sons to succeed him.
Francisco, the eldest, early evinced a taste for military affairs. When
only eighteen years of age, he commanded the expedition of 1849 into the
Argentine, and thenceforward continued to be his father's
general-in-chief and minister-of-war and the active agent in improving
Paraguay's military resources. The second son, Venancio, was commander
of the garrison at Asuncion, and the third, Benigno, was Admiral. Though
so rigid with his other subjects, he gave both his sons and daughters
unlimited license and they grew up to regard themselves as members of a
royal family. They enriched themselves at the public expense. The sons
took as many mistresses as they pleased and gave free rein to all their
cruel and bad instincts. The selfishness, obstinacy, unspeakable
cruelty, and hard-heartedness of Francisco were soon to bring the
guiltless Paraguayan people to the verge of extinction.
In 1854 Lopez had sent Francisco to Europe as ambassador. The young man
spent eighteen months in the different Courts of Europe, and returned
an expert in the vices of great capitals and enamoured of military
glory. After seeing the reviews of European armies, he became convinced
that Paraguay could be made an efficient military power and that he
himself might play a Napoleonic role in South America. His father,
exasperated by the repeated humiliations put upon him by other
countries, gave hearty support to his plans for the improvement of the
Paraguayan army. In 1862, after a long and painful illness, the elder
Lopez died. Francisco took possession of his effects and papers and
produced a will naming himself Vice-President. Word sent to the military
chiefs of the different towns insured the assembling of an obedient
Congress at Asuncion, by which he was formally elected and proclaimed
President and invested with all the absolute power wielded by his father
and Francia.
CHAPTER V
THE WAR
The new President was thirty-five years old, good-looking, careful of
his appearance, fond of military finery, and strutted as he walked. He
spoke French and Spanish fluently, but with his officers and men used
only Guarany. He was an eloquent speaker and had the gift of inspiring
his troops with confidence in himself and contempt for the enemy. He had
a will of iron; his pride was intense; he was absolutely unscrupulous,
and had no regard for the truth. He never showed any feeling of kindness
to his most devoted subjects. He ordered his best friends to execution;
he tortured his mother and sisters and murdered his brothers. The only
natural affection he ever evinced was a fondness for Madame Lynch, a
woman whom he had picked up in Paris, and for her children. He seems to
have treated her well to the last, but his numerous other mistresses and
their children he heartlessly abandoned. Though physically an arrant
coward, no defeats could discourage him. He fought to the last against
overwhelming odds and was able to retain his personal ascendancy over
his followers, even after he had been driven into the woods and all
reasonable hope was lost.
He began his reign like a Mahometan sultan by ridding himself of his
father's most trusted counsellors, imprisoning and executing the most
intelligent and powerful citizens, and banishing his brothers. The
military preparations which he had begun as his father's Minister of War
were continued with increased vigour. The warlike Argentines and
Uruguayans and the powerful empire of Brazil laughed at his pretensions
to become a real factor in South American international affairs, but
their laughter soon cost them dear. He was a monarch of a compact little
state whose position behind rivers in the centre of the continent made
it admirably defensible. Its eight hundred thousand inhabitants were
obedient, brave, and physically vigorous. Accustomed for generations to
regard their dictator as the greatest ruler in the world, knowing no
duty except absolute compliance with his will, they never doubted that
under his leadership they would be invincible. He knew that he could
raise an army out of all proportion to the size of his country. The
problem was how to arm it. With Buenos Aires commanding the only route
of ingress from abroad it had been difficult for his father and himself
to obtain war material from Europe. For years, however, they had been
buying all that they could and had accumulated several hundred cannon,
most of them antiquated cast-iron smooth-bores. They had fortified the
point of Humaita which admirably protected the Paraguay River from
naval attacks, and had established an arsenal at Asuncion.
Against Brazil Lopez had serious cause of complaint. The boundary
question was still unsettled and his possession of the Lower Paraguay
placed the great province of Matto Grosso at his mercy, while the
existence of that province, geographically a mere northern extension of
Paraguay, was a menace to his own safety. Against the Argentines his
hatred was not so well founded, but none the less bitter.
The usual civil war was going on in Uruguay in 1863. The party which
held the capital was out of favour at Rio and at Buenos Aires, and
Brazil and Argentine were both inclined to support the pretensions of
Flores, who led the revolutionists. Lopez thought that his own interests
were concerned and asserted his right to be consulted as to Uruguayan
affairs. A mighty shout of laughter went up from the Buenos Aires press
at the pretensions of the cacique of an Indian tribe to the position of
guardian of the equilibrium of South America. Brazil ignored his
protests and calmly went on with her preparations to establish her
protege in Montevideo. In the beginning of 1864 Lopez began active
preparations for war. His army already numbered twenty-eight thousand
men, and by the end of August sixty-four thousand more had been enrolled
and drilled. Although ill provided with artillery and horses, and
although the infantry were mostly armed with old-fashioned flintlocks,
no such formidable force had ever assembled in South America. The news
of Lopez's preparations exasperated and somewhat alarmed the people of
Buenos Aires, though no one knew his exact intentions. Lopez had, in
fact, determined to compel the Brazilian and Argentine governments to
accept his wishes as to Uruguay or to risk all in the hazard of war.
Perhaps hazy dreams of himself as emperor of a domain extending from the
southern sources of the Amazon far down the Plate valley and over to the
Atlantic coast passed through his brain. Possibly he foresaw clearly
that Paraguay had come to the parting of the ways, and that she must
either fight her way to the sea or reconcile herself to slow suffocation
between the immense masses of Brazil and Argentina. In such a contest
the only allies he could hope for would be revolutionary factions in
Uruguay and Corrientes, and possibly the virtually independent ruler of
Entre Rios. In case of a war with Brazil alone, the neutrality of
Argentina might have been secured by careful management, but in the
freer countries the feeling against him as a despot was strong, and the
extension of his system would have been regarded as a menace to
civilisation.
Late in 1864 the Brazilian forces marched into Uruguay and joined
Flores. Lopez promptly retaliated by seizing a Brazilian steamer which
was passing Asuncion on its way to Matto Grosso and followed up this
aggression by an invasion of the latter province. His forces quickly
reduced the towns on the banks of the Paraguay as far as steamers could
penetrate. It was impossible to send reinforcements overland from Rio;
Brazil's counter-attack must be delivered from the south. The empire was
unprepared, but its troops poured into Uruguay and Rio Grande as fast as
they could be mobilised. The anti-Flores party were crushed by the siege
and capture of Paysandu late in 1864. The Argentine government under
Mitre proclaimed its neutrality. Lopez was flushed with his easy success
in Matto Grosso. The forces he had on foot overwhelmingly outnumbered
those of the Brazilians in Uruguay and Rio Grande. He wished to strike
the latter before they could be re-enforced, overrun Rio Grande, and, as
master of one of Brazil's most valuable provinces, dictate terms. To
reach the Brazilians it was necessary to cross the Argentine province of
Corrientes. He asked for permission to do so and Mitre refused.
Notwithstanding the risk involved, he promptly decided to finish up both
Argentine and Brazil at the same time. Sending his troops across the
Parana he virtually annexed Corrientes and declared war on Buenos Aires.
Lopez destined twenty-five thousand men for the invasion of Corrientes
and the conquest of the Lower Uruguay valley, but the difficulties of
getting so large an army across the river and ready for an advance into
a hostile country were unexpectedly great. The gauchos of Corrientes,
trained for generations in civil wars, quickly assembled to oppose the
Paraguayans. Meanwhile, a Brazilian fleet came up; and, on June 2, 1865,
at Riachuelo, decisively defeated the Paraguayan naval forces. Lopez
thereby lost all hope of commanding the river. The communications of his
army in Corrientes might be cut off at any time and an advance became
impossible. The battle of Riachuelo threw Paraguay on the defensive and
made Lopez's great plan of carrying the war to the Uruguay
impracticable.
[Illustration: FRANCISCO SOLANO LOPEZ.
[From a photograph taken in 1849.]]
Nevertheless, Lopez did not recall the twelve thousand men he had sent
across the missions to invade the valley of the Upper Uruguay and the
state of Rio Grande. The Brazilians were taken unprepared, and early in
August the Paraguayans had captured the chief Brazilian town in that
region--Uruguayana. The failure of the Corrientes army to reach the
Lower Uruguay left the route up that river free. The Brazilian and
Uruguayan army, which had been victorious at Paysandu, marched up the
west bank and defeated and destroyed the rear-guard which the
Paraguayans had left on the Argentine side opposite Uruguayana. Lopez's
army was therefore cut off from retreat. It was promptly surrounded, and
on the 17th of September, 1865, had to surrender.
This put an end to Lopez's plan of an offensive campaign. Indignant at
the invasion of her soil, Argentina had allied herself with Brazil
against him. A secret treaty was signed between Brazil, Argentina, and
Flores, now recognised as ruler of Uruguay, to prosecute the war to a
finish, to depose Lopez from his throne, and to disarm the Paraguayan
fortifications. Lopez withdrew his army from Corrientes and concentrated
all his forces in the south-west angle of his own territory.
The position was admirable for defence. North of the Parana and east of
the Paraguay stretched a low, wooded country subject to overflow, and
intersected by shallow, mud-bottomed lagoons, which were old abandoned
beds of the rivers. The Paraguay protected his right flank and afforded
him a direct and easy communication with Asuncion. Batteries on the
point of Humaita, which the Brazilian fleet did not dare to try to pass,
insured this line of communication. West of the Paraguay the great
Chaco, there impenetrable, prevented a movement to get north of Humaita
on that side. To the east the swamps along the Parana extended
indefinitely, and an advance of the enemy in that direction would have
had its communications cut by an army encamped near Humaita. Humaita
was, therefore, the key to the situation, and the allies could not
advance until they captured it or, by running the batteries with their
fleet, destroyed Lopez's control of the Paraguay.
By March, 1866, the allies had concentrated a force of forty thousand
men just south of the fork of the rivers. About twenty-five thousand
were Brazilians, twelve thousand Argentines and three thousand
Uruguayans. The Brazilian fleet, numbering eighteen steam gunboats
carrying one hundred and twenty-five guns, lay near at hand ready to
co-operate. Protected by the fire of the gunboats, the whole allied army
had little difficulty in crossing the Parana and establishing itself on
Paraguayan soil. Lopez lost heavily in vain attempts to prevent this
landing. On May 2nd, a force of Paraguayans surprised the allies a few
miles north of the river and badly cut up the vanguard. The allies,
however, continued advancing and took a strong position just south of a
great lagoon. Here, on the 24th of May, they were attacked by the whole
Paraguayan army of twenty-five thousand men, who fought with desperate
valour, but at a hopeless disadvantage. A quarter of the Paraguayan
soldiers were left dead on the field, and another quarter were badly
wounded, while the loss of the allies was half as great. The Paraguayan
army was apparently destroyed, but the allies had suffered so severely,
and the difficulties of transportation through the swamps were so great,
that they did not make the sudden dash upon the trenches at Humaita
which might have ended the war. Lopez did his utmost to reorganise his
army. Practically the whole male population was impressed into service.
The river line of communication to Asuncion, and the strategic railroad
thence up into the most fertile and populous interior of the country,
enabled him comfortably to command all the resources of the country,
both in men and provisions.
Humaita had already been well fortified on the land side, and Lopez now
threw up the trenches at the top of the bluff at Curupayty, the first
high land on the Paraguay River north of the allied army and south of
Humaita, and connected it with the latter fortress. Lopez had the
advantage of the services of a clever English civil engineer; and the
fortifications, though rude, were soon made practically impregnable to
assault. In spite of their defeats, the Paraguayans were as ready as
ever to attack when Lopez commanded, or to stand up and be shot down to
the last man. They were the most obedient soldiers imaginable; they
never complained of an injustice and never questioned an order when
given. Even if a soldier were flogged, he consoled himself by saying,
"If my father did not flog me, who would?" Every one called his superior
officer his "father," and Lopez was the "Great Father." Each officer was
responsible with his life for the faithfulness and conduct of his men
and had orders to shoot any that wavered. Each soldier knew that the men
who touched shoulders with him right and left were instructed to shoot
him if he tried to desert or fly, and those two knew that the men beyond
them would shoot them if they failed to kill the poor fellow in the
centre of the five. This cruel system answered perfectly with the
Paraguayans, and to the very end of the war they never refused to fight
steadily against the most hopeless odds.
Meanwhile, the allies awaited reinforcements and supplies in the noisome
swamps, dying meantime by thousands of fever. By the end of June, when
the allies finally determined to assault the fortifications around
Humaita, Lopez had twenty thousand men on the ground. After some bloody
and indecisive fighting in the swamps, General Mitre, the
Commander-in-Chief, ordered a grand attack upon the entrenchments at
Curupayty. On the 22nd of September, 1866, it began with the bombardment
by the Brazilian ironclads. Eighteen thousand men in four columns
advanced from the south, and threw themselves blindly against the
fortifications. When they came to close quarters they were thrown into
disorder by the terrible artillery fire from the Paraguayan trenches,
which cross-enfiladed them in different directions. The enormous
canisters discharged from the eight-inch guns point-blank, at a distance
of two or three hundred yards, wrought fearful execution. The rifle fire
of the allies was useless, and the Paraguayans simply waited behind
their trenches until the Brazilians and Argentines were close at hand
and then fired. The allies retired in good order, after suffering a loss
of one-third their number. The soldiers obediently kept rushing on to
certain death until their officers, seeing that success was hopeless,
told them that they might retreat. The courage of the Paraguayans had
been proved in their unsuccessful assaults on the allies the year
before, and now the Argentines and Brazilians showed even in this awful
defeat what a stomach they, too, had for hand-to-hand fighting.
After the battle of Curupayty, nothing was attempted on either side for
fourteen months. Both sides had had enough of attacking fortified
positions. The Paraguayans lay in Humaita and the allies occupied
themselves with fortifying their camps. The imperial government made
tremendous exertions to reinforce the army. The Argentines also did
their best, but the efforts of both were hardly sufficient to make good
the terrible ravages of the cholera, which by the beginning of May,
1867, had put thirteen thousand Brazilians in hospitals. It was not
until July that the allies felt themselves again ready to take the
offensive. A division marched up the Parana with the purpose of
outflanking Humaita on the east, while cavalry raids were sent out to
the north and rendered the outlying positions of the Paraguayans unsafe.
Finally, in November, 1867, the Brazilian troops succeeded in getting
over to the Paraguay River, north and in the rear of Lopez, and General
Barreto captured and fortified a strong position on the bank fifteen
miles north of Humaita. This was fatal to the security and
communications of Lopez. He made one more desperate and unsuccessful
assault on the main position of the allies, and then began to plan to
retire toward Asuncion. At the same time the Brazilian ironclads passed
the batteries at Curupayty, compelling Lopez to withdraw his troops up
the river to Humaita. The war became virtually a siege of the latter
place, which was constantly bombarded by the fleet from the front and by
the army from the rear. The Brazilian position on the river to the north
cut Lopez off from direct river communication with Asuncion, and he had
to transport his supplies on a new road built in the Chaco swamps. He
began preparations to evacuate Humaita and retreat to the north. In
January, 1868, Mitre definitely retired from the command of the allies
and was succeeded by the Brazilian Marshal Caxias. A month later
(February 18th) the Brazilian fleet of ironclads finally succeeded in
running the batteries at Humaita, and after throwing a few bombs at
Asuncion, devoted themselves to the more useful task of cutting off the
transports to Lopez's army.
[Illustration: PALM GROVES IN EL CHACO.]
Lopez's line of river communication was now completely at the enemies'
mercy, and a large force could not be maintained at Humaita. He
transported his army to the right bank of the Paraguay, recrossing when
he got beyond the Brazilian positions. The garrison of three thousand
men which he left at Humaita defended itself for six months. In the
meantime, he had fortified a new position less than fifty miles from
Asuncion and accessible across the country from his base of supplies in
central Paraguay. On his right flank a river battery was erected which
again prevented the Brazilians from reaching the upper river. Opposite
this point, however, the Chaco is penetrable, and Caxias landed a force
on the west bank and, marching up, crossed the river in the rear of
Lopez's position. The Brazilians closed in from the north and south on
the few thousand Paraguayans, who were all that survived, and after
several days of desperate fighting, December 27, 1868, the Brazilians
carried Lopez's position and he fled for his life to the interior,
followed by a thousand men.
Even after such a defeat he was indomitable and succeeded in gathering
another small army which was pursued and destroyed in August, 1869.
Lopez again escaped and took refuge in the wild and mountainous
regions in the north of Paraguay. The Brazilian cavalry pursued him
relentlessly, but it was not until March 1, 1870, that he was caught.
In an attempt to escape he was speared by a common soldier.
CHAPTER VI
PARAGUAY SINCE 1870
No modern nation has ever come so near to complete annihilation as
Paraguay during her five years' war against the Triple Alliance. Out of
two hundred and fifty thousand able-bodied men who were living in 1864,
less than twenty-five thousand survived in 1870. Not less than two
hundred and twenty-five thousand Paraguayan men--the fathers and
bread-winners, the farmers and labourers--had perished in battle, by
disease or exposure or starvation. One hundred thousand adult women had
died of hardship and hunger, and there were less than ninety thousand
children under fifteen in the country. The surviving women outnumbered
the men five to one; the practice of polygamy naturally increased, and
women were forced to become the labourers and bread-winners for the
community.
The slaughter was greatest in proportion among the people of white
blood. When Lopez was waiting in 1868 for the final attack of the
Brazilians, he made use of the last months of his power to arrest,
torture, and murder nearly every white man left in Paraguay, including
his own brother, his brother-in-law, and the generals who had served him
best, and the friends who had enjoyed his most intimate confidence. Even
women and foreigners did not escape the cold, deliberate
bloodthirstiness of this demon. He had his own sister beaten with clubs
and exposed her naked in the forest; had the wife of the brave general
who was forced to surrender at Humaita speared, and subjected two
members of the American Legation to the most sickening tortures. The
Minister himself barely escaped with his life.
When the Brazilians captured Asuncion in 1868 they installed a
provisional triumvirate of Paraguayans, but the country was really under
their military government until after the death of Lopez. A new
constitution was proclaimed on November 25, 1870, but it was not until a
year later that the provisional government was superseded by Salvador
Jovellanos, the first President. The new President had no elements with
which to establish a government,--neither money nor men. The country
Paraguayans refused to recognise his authority and he was shut up in
Asuncion. There were three so-called revolutions in 1872, which were
suppressed by the Brazilian troops. The country really remained under a
Brazilian protectorate for the first few years after the war, and the
government was largely a convenience to make treaties and to try to
place loans abroad. Toward the end of 1874 Jovellanos was succeeded by
Gill, and by 1876 the country was finally enjoying peace and freedom
from foreign control. The integrity of Paraguay and her continuance as
an independent power had been mutually guaranteed by Brazil and
Argentina when they began the war against Lopez, and neither of them
could afford to let the other take possession of her territory. So
Paraguay was left substantially intact, although she was compelled to
give up the territorial claims the Lopezes had so long made against
Brazil and the Argentine. The latter even submitted to arbitration her
right to a portion of the Chaco north of the Pilocomayo. President Hayes
was the arbitrator and he decided in favour of Paraguay in 1878. In the
treaty of peace Paraguay had agreed to bear the war expenses of the
allies and these immense sums are still nominally due from her. As a
matter of fact, she has not been able to pay anything thereon, and the
matter of forgiving the debt is one frequently discussed in Brazil.
Population rapidly increased after peace was thoroughly established, and
has more than doubled in the last thirty years. In the late eighties the
influence of the Buenos Aires boom extended to Paraguay, and the
government offered great inducements to attract immigration. The
movement was not very successful, but it had the indirect effect of
transferring great tracts of land from government to private ownership.
Previously, two-thirds of the land belonged to the State. One of the
colonies was composed of socialists from Australia who promptly split on
their arrival over the question of total abstinence. Those who insisted
on being allowed to drink were obliged to leave. Subsequently,
disagreements about doctrine and the application of the principles of
socialism drove out others. The soil of Paraguay is marvellously
fertile, but its isolation and the want of markets for the national
products make it unattractive to European immigrants.
Happily Paraguay has not suffered from civil disorders during the slow
process of national regeneration which has been going on since 1870.
Most of the Presidents have served out their full four-years term, and
the one or two changes which have occurred have not been accompanied by
any bloodshed or interruption in administration. The chief difficulties
of the government have been financial. Revenue is small and paper
currency has been issued until it is at a discount of several hundred
per cent. compared with its nominal value in gold; but since foreign
commerce is inconsiderable and the population lives off the products of
its own farms the results of inflation have not been so disastrous as
they might have been in a commercial country.
The wave of twentieth-century progress and immigration may strike this
Arcadian region at any moment, but up to the present time the body of
the Paraguayans live much as their ancestors. Existence can be
maintained with hardly an effort; the people can always get oranges in
default of more nourishing food; the climate is lovely; the forests
surrounding the peasant's cabin beautiful. Why should a Paraguayan work
when he can live happily and comfortably without labour, merely to
procure things which to him are superfluities? It must be remembered
that the bulk of the Paraguayan people are descended from the Indians
which were found crowded into this garden spot three centuries ago by
the Spaniards and the Jesuits. They have never lost their simple,
submissive, stoical character, and the rule of the three dictators did
not tend to change them. The modern improvements of which they saw most
during the reign of Lopez were muskets and cannon, and they can hardly
be blamed for preferring old-fashioned ways after their experience
during the war. Though the nation was almost destroyed, the surviving
remnants show the same characteristics which distinguished their
ancestors. The new Paraguay, however, is not ruled by any bloody-minded
despot, and the military possibilities of the people will never again be
a menace to the liberties of the surrounding nations. Rather is the
present ruling class disposed to welcome foreign influences and
immigration, and this beautiful, fertile, and easily accessible country
stands open to the world.
URUGUAY
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The most fertile parts of the globe have always been fought for the
most. Uruguay has been the Flanders of South America. Her admirable
commercial position at the mouth of the river Plate has made her capital
one of the great emporiums of the continent. On the track of the world's
commerce, open to the currents of intellectual and industrial life which
sweep from Europe into the luxuriant country of the southern half of
South America or around to the Pacific, her people have always been in
the vanguard of Spanish-American civilisation. Her productive,
well-watered, and gently rolling plains are well adapted for agriculture
and unsurpassed for pasturage. Here the Indians struggled hardest to
maintain themselves and longest resisted the Spanish conquest. From
colonial times, Argentines have crowded in from the west, Brazilians
from the north, and Buenos Aireans and Europeans from the coast, until
this favoured spot has become the most thickly populated country of
South America.
The very strategic and industrial desirability of this region, and the
ease with which it can be invaded, have made it the scene of constant
armed conflict. Uruguay has been the cockpit of the southern half of the
continent, and its people have been fighting continually through the one
hundred and fifty years during which the country has been inhabited.
They fought for their independence against the Spaniards, then against
the Buenos Aireans, then against the Brazilians, then against the Buenos
Aireans again, and in the intervals they have fought pretty constantly
among themselves. In colonial times Montevideo was Spain's chief
fortress on this coast, and that city has always been the favourite
refuge for the unsuccessful revolutionists and exiles from the
neighbouring states. The blood of the bravest and most turbulent
Argentines and Rio Grandenses has constantly mixed with its population.
By habit, tradition, and inheritance the older generation of Uruguayans
in both city and country are warlike.
Though the military spirit had been vastly stimulated by peculiar
political and racial circumstances, in later times commercialism has
been nourished by geographical situation and the fertility of the soil
and by European immigration. The interplay of these contending forces
has been producing a marked people--a vigorous, turbulent race whose
energies have apparently been chiefly employed in war, but who have
found time in the intervals of foreign and civil conflict to make their
country one of the wealthiest and most industrially progressive
countries in South America. They are like the Dutch in their turbulence
and in their eagerness to make money; and they are also like the Dutch
in their determination to maintain at all hazards their separate
national existence. Nevertheless, the origin of Uruguay was artificial.
The reason for the country's separation from Buenos Aires was that
Brazil regarded it as unsafe to permit Argentina to spread north of the
Plate.
The territory of Uruguay is that irregular polygon which is bounded on
the south by the Plate estuary; on the west by the Uruguay River; on the
south-east by the Atlantic; and on the north-east by the artificial line
which separates it from Brazil. Though the most favoured in soil,
climate, and geographical position, it is the smallest country in South
America, the area being only seventy-three thousand square miles. In
prehistoric days, when a vast inland sea occupied what is now the
Argentine pampa, Uruguay was the northern shore of the great strait
which opened into the pampean sea. It is the southern extremity of the
eastern continental uplift of South America. The last outlying ramparts
of the Brazilian mountain system, greatly eroded and planed down into
low-swelling masses little elevated above the sea, run south-west from
Rio Grande into Uruguay, dipping into the Plate at the southern border.
The north shore of the Plate estuary is bold, and not flat as is the
opposite shore of Buenos Aires. There are, however, no mountains,
properly so-called, in Uruguay, and nearly the whole surface is a
succession of gently undulating plains and broad ridges intersected by
countless streams, and covered, for the most part, with luxuriant
pasture. The abundance of wood and water is an immense advantage to
settlers, whether pastoral or agricultural. The extreme south-western
corner, near the mouth of the Uruguay River, is alluvial. On the
Atlantic coast there are level, marshy plains, due to the slow secular
rising of the land and consequent baring of the ocean's bed.
The country is easily penetrable in every part. There are no mountain
ridges or dense forests to interrupt travel, and most of the rivers are
easily fordable. On the west, the broad flood of the Uruguay River gives
easy communication to the ocean, while it affords protection against
sudden invasions from the Argentine province of Entre Rios. The low and
sandy foreshore of the Atlantic has no harbours, but after rounding Cape
Santa Maria and entering the estuary of the Plate, there are several
bays which afford some shelter for shipping. Maldonado, Montevideo, and
Colonia are the principal ports, but the extreme shallowness of the
Plate prevents them from being classed as first-rate harbours for modern
vessels. At Montevideo itself, large modern steamers must anchor several
miles out.
[Illustration: HARBOUR AT MONTEVIDEO.]
Possibly the present territory of Uruguay was reached by the Portuguese
navigators who reconnoitred the coast of Brazil in the first few years
of the sixteenth century, but they certainly made no settlements and
left no clear record of their voyagings. In 1515, Juan Diaz de Solis,
Grand Pilot of Spain, was sent out by Charles V. to reconnoitre the
Brazilian coast in Spanish interests. He did not land on the shore of
Brazil proper, but kept on to the south until he reached Cape Santa
Maria, which marks the northern side of the entrance to the river Plate.
To his left hand stretched beyond the horizon a flood of yellow fresh
water flowing gently over a shifting, sandy bottom nowhere more than a
few fathoms below the surface. It was evident that he was out of the
ocean and sailing up a river of such magnitude as had never been dreamed
of before. He followed along the coast, skirting the whole southern
boundary of what is now the republic of Uruguay and finally reached the
head of the estuary. Directly from the north the Uruguay, a river five
miles wide, clear and deep, seemed a continuation of the Plate, but from
the west the numerous channels of the Parana delta poured in an immense
muddy discharge double the volume of the wider river. At the junction
was an island which Solis named _Martin Garcia_ after his pilot. He
resolved to take possession of the country in the name of the Crown of
Castile, and to explore the coast. He disembarked with nine companions
on the Uruguayan shore: here the little party was unexpectedly attacked
by Indians; Solis and all his men but one were killed, and the ships
sailed back to Spain without their commander.
Three years later Ferdinand Magellan, on his epoch-making voyage around
the world, visited the coast of Uruguay. On the 15th of January, 1520,
he came in sight of a high hill overlooking a commodious bay. This he
called Montevideo--a name which has been extended to the city which
long after grew up on the other side of the harbour. Magellan ascended
the estuary, hoping that he might find a passage through to the Pacific
Ocean, but after he had entered the Uruguay its clear water, rapid
current, and want of tides convinced him that it was only an ordinary
river and not a strait.
Spain determined to take possession of the Plate, and in 1526 sent out
an expedition for that purpose under Diego Garcia. At the same time
Sebastian Cabot was preparing another expedition, which was ordered to
follow in Magellan's track and to make observations of longitude on the
Atlantic coast of South America and in the East Indies. Spain and
Portugal had already begun to dispute about the correct location of the
line which they had agreed should divide the world into a Spanish and a
Portuguese hemisphere, and which was believed to pass near the Plate.
Garcia was delayed on the coast of Brazil, so Cabot reached the mouth of
the estuary first. The latter had encountered bad weather and lost his
best ship, and when he sighted the coast of Uruguay his men were
discouraged. They remained in the mouth of the river for some time, and
to their surprise a solitary Spaniard was encountered on the shore, who
proved to be the only survivor of the party that had gone ashore with
Solis ten years before.
Soon Cabot and his men heard tales of silver mines far up the river, and
of the existence of a great civilised empire on its remote headwaters.
Silver ornaments were shown which had come down hand to hand from Peru
or Bolivia. Cabot determined to abandon his commission to the Moluccas,
and to find the country whence the silver came. Naturally, his first
effort was directed up the broad channel of the Uruguay, but on
ascending this river it was soon evident that the mines and civilised
country he was seeking did not lie on its banks. Fifty miles up the
river at San Salvador the Spaniards attempted to establish a little post
which is sometimes referred to as the earliest settlement in Uruguay or
Argentina. It was probably intended as a mere supply depot and point of
refuge, conveniently near the sea to aid the up-river expedition.
However, the warlike Indians of Uruguay soon left no trace of it. Cabot
entered the Parana, where he spent three years in an unsuccessful effort
to reach Bolivia. He and Garcia sailed back to Spain without leaving
even a settlement behind them, but they were thoroughly convinced that
an adequate expedition could find the silver country.
The tribes who inhabited Uruguay were the fiercest Indians encountered
by the conquerors of South America. For two centuries they succeeded in
preventing the establishment of settlements in their territory and kept
out Spanish intruders at the point of the sword. The Spaniards greatly
coveted the north bank of the Plate and made effort after effort to get
a foothold there, but these savages managed to maintain themselves for a
hundred and fifty years in the very face of Buenos Aires. The river
shore itself was the last accessible and fertile region to be subjected
to the whites. A century elapsed after the foundation of Buenos Aires
before Colonia was occupied by the Portuguese, and another fifty years
went by before Montevideo had been settled and fortified. Uruguay in
pre-Spanish times, as well as since, was a meeting-ground for different
peoples. One after another the Guarany tribes crowded into this favoured
region from the north and west, and the old inhabitants had to fight and
conquer, or be thrust into the sea. The bravest, best armed, and best
organised tribes survived in the harsh struggle. Of the Indians
inhabiting Uruguay when the Spaniards discovered the Plate, the
principal ones were the Charruas. They occupied a zone extending around
from the Atlantic, along the Plate, and a short distance up the Uruguay.
This strong and valiant race never submitted to the Spaniards, and when
at last they were defeated and crowded back from the coast well on in
the eighteenth century, they retired to the north and maintained their
freedom for many years. They belonged to the great family of
Tupi-Guaranies, who occupied most of eastern South America at the white
man's advent, but they were more nomadic in their habits and had
developed the art of war to greater perfection than the mother tribes of
the more tropical parts of South America.
In their fights against the Spaniards, they sometimes gathered armies of
several hundreds which fought with a rude sort of discipline, forming in
column and attacking in mass with clubs after discharging their arrows
and stones. Possibly they learned some of their tactics from the white
men, but it is certain that before the invasion they had developed a
tribal organisation which enabled them to bring far larger bodies into
the field than the tribes to the north, and that soon after the arrival
of the whites they learned the military uses of the horse. Personal
bravery and fortitude were the virtues most admired among the Charruas,
and they chose their chiefs from those who had most distinguished
themselves in battle. They did not practise cannibalism like their
brother Guaranies on the Brazilian coast; they killed defective children
at birth; they were moderate in their eating, lived in huts, and in
winter covered themselves with the skins of animals. Altogether, they
seem to have much resembled the more warlike tribes among the North
American Indians and to have made the same effective resistance to the
whites as did the Iroquois or Creeks. Such a fierce and indomitable
people terrorised the Creoles, and settlement proceeded on lines of less
resistance. The coast of Uruguay was long known as the abode of red
demons who showed little mercy to the adventurous white who dared build
a cabin on the shore, or ride the plains in chase of cattle. The forts
established from time to time by the Spanish authorities in the early
days were invariably starved out and abandoned, and the white man
obtained a foothold only after the Portuguese and Spanish governments
had fortified towns with walls, ditches, and artillery, which could be
supplied with provisions from the water side, and after Entre Rios had
been overrun by the gauchos.
Warned by the experiences of Solis and Cabot on the north shore,
Mendoza, the first adelantado of the Plate, on his arrival in 1535,
selected the south bank of the river as the site of the fortified port
which he proposed to establish at the mouth of the Parana as a base for
his projected expedition up the river. His effort failed completely; he
abandoned Buenos Aires, and the remnants of his expedition fled to
Paraguay and founded Asuncion. In 1573 Zarate, the third adelantado,
made a serious effort to establish a post in Uruguay. He had three
hundred and fifty well-armed Spanish soldiers, more than the number with
which Pizarro had conquered the empire of Peru, but they were not enough
to make any impression on the Charruas. A company of forty men hunting
wood was set upon and massacred, and when the main body tried to avenge
this defeat, it, too, was driven back and only escaped to the island of
Martin Garcia after losing a hundred men. The survivors were rescued by
Garay, the most expert and successful Indian fighter of the time.
This experienced and far-sighted officer wisely left the Charruas alone
and devoted his efforts to the other side of the river, where, in 1580,
he founded the city of Buenos Aires. Hernandarias, the Creole governor
of Buenos Aires, who shares with Garay the honour of establishing the
Spanish power in Argentina, and who had already defeated the Pampa
Indians from the Great Chaco in the north to the Tandil Range in Buenos
Aires province, attempted, in the early years of the seventeenth
century, to subdue the Charruas. He disembarked at the head of five
hundred men in the western part of Uruguay. Few details of the campaign
which followed have been preserved, but it is certain that the Spanish
force was destroyed and that Hernandarias himself barely escaped with
his life. Thenceforth, for more than a century, the Spaniards made no
serious attempts to interfere with the Charruas; the coast of Uruguay
was shunned by European ships, and the interior remained absolutely
unknown.
It is probable, although not certain, that the Jesuits on the Upper
Uruguay established some villages of peaceable Indians in the
north-western corner of Uruguay proper, in the middle of the seventeenth
century. A few Indians, it is certain, gathered under Jesuit control on
an island in the Lower Uruguay, some fifty miles above Martin Garcia,
about 1650. This was known as the Pueblo of Soriano, and is often
referred to by Uruguayan historians as the first permanent settlement in
their country. However, no real progress was made toward getting
possession of Uruguay. The Charruas proved refractory to Jesuit
influence, and only the milder Yaros and the tribes on the Brazilian
border could be converted.
The horses and cattle which the Spaniards had introduced multiplied into
hundreds of thousands and roamed undisturbed over the rolling, grassy
plains of Uruguay, and occasionally parties of Creoles would land on the
shore of the Plate and at the risk of their lives kill some steers and
strip them of their hides. As time went on, the Indians became used to
the white men and some trading sprang up, but for a full century after
Buenos Aires had been in existence Uruguay remained unsettled by
civilised man.
CHAPTER II
PORTUGUESE AGGRESSIONS AND THE SETTLEMENT OF THE COUNTRY
In 1680 the governor of Rio de Janeiro sent some ships and a force of
soldiers to the Plate, with orders to occupy a point on the north bank
in the name of the king of Portugal. Spain claimed that her dominions
extended as far up the coast as the southern border of the present state
of Sao Paulo, and Portugal was equally stubborn in insisting that her
rightful territory extended west and south as far as the mouth of the
Uruguay. Neither country had made any settlements in the disputed
region, and Portugal had determined to take advantage of the negligence
of the Spanish government and be first in the field. To establish a post
only twenty miles from the capital of the Spanish possessions and more
than a thousand miles south of the last Portuguese town seemed an
audacious step, but its success would secure for Portugal the whole
intermediate territory, as well as give her a port which would insure
her merchants the command of the trade of the Plate valley.
The Portuguese commander landed unopposed on the shore of the estuary
directly opposite Buenos Aires, and immediately began to throw up walls,
dig a ditch, and lay out a town called Colonia. When the news reached
Buenos Aires, the indignant governor raised a force of two hundred and
sixty Spaniards and three thousand Indians, crossed the river, and fell
upon the little body of Portuguese in the midst of their delving and
shovelling. The attack was at first repulsed, but superior numbers were
soon effective. The enemy surrendered, and the Spaniards threw down the
walls and destroyed the beginnings of the town. The Portuguese
government protested, claiming that the governor's action was a wilful
and inexcusable aggression against the forces of a friendly power
operating in territory which had never been occupied by Spain. The
Madrid government disavowed the act, and the Portuguese resumed
possession of Colonia in 1683. They rebuilt its walls and made the place
safe against the attacks of Indians. At once it became a centre for
contraband traffic. The Spanish laws and colonial policy forbade vessels
to land at Buenos Aires. In defiance of the prohibition, illegal trade
had been carried on, but the lading of vessels lying in the Buenos Aires
roads was conducted at great risk. Officials might order the seizure of
the goods, and enormous bribes had to be paid to functionaries; often
the governor was the smuggler's partner, but he was a partner who
demanded an exorbitant share of the profit. In Colonia, however,
merchandise could be safely stored and embarked at leisure, so the
latter place rapidly absorbed the export trade and became an _entrepot_
for imported goods destined for sale in the valley of the Plate and in
Bolivia.
Spain had restored Colonia under protest and without prejudice,
explicitly reiterating her own claim to exclusive proprietorship of the
north bank of the Plate. The diplomatists agreed that the question of
right should remain open for determination at some future day, but all
Spanish subjects considered the existence of Colonia as a violation of
Spanish soil, and whenever a war broke out in Europe between the mother
countries, the Buenos Aireans were in the habit of promptly sending an
expedition across the river to capture the Portuguese town. Three times
was it wrenched from the Portuguese, and three times was it restored on
the conclusion of peace.
In 1705, Spain and Portugal being engaged in war, the governor of Buenos
Aires dislodged the Portuguese garrison from Colonia and the place
remained in Spanish possession until after the conclusion of the Peace
of Utrecht. Their eleven years' possession at last convinced the
Spaniards that the settlement of the north bank was feasible. By 1708
the Charrua raids had so far lost their terrors that the Jesuit mission
at Soriano was safely removed from the island in the Uruguay River to
the mainland opposite. The trade in Uruguayan hides and horsehair
increased, and private expeditions henceforth frequently crossed the
estuary.
It had long been known that the best harbours on the Uruguayan coast
were at Montevideo and Maldonado, where partially sheltered bays, with
water deep enough for the vessels of the eighteenth century, were
overlooked by beautiful and defensible town sites. Montevideo is a
hundred miles east of Colonia, and Maldonado another hundred miles
farther on toward the Atlantic. The advisability of seizing and
fortifying one or both of these places was frequently mooted in Buenos
Aires, after the restoration of Colonia in 1716. Nothing, however, was
done until 1723, when word came that the Portuguese had again
anticipated the Spanish authorities and had occupied and begun to
fortify Montevideo for themselves. The governor of Buenos Aires
immediately sent an overwhelming force which compelled the Portuguese to
retire. This time neither dilatory diplomacy nor official ineptitude
prevented his doing the right thing to save Uruguay to the Spanish
Crown, and the following year he finished the Portuguese walls at
Montevideo, and in 1726 the ground plan of a town was laid out and a few
families were brought from Buenos Aires and the Canary Islands. Within a
few years there were a thousand people in the place, and it had been
surrounded with walls and defended by artillery. Four years later,
Maldonado was established. No serious trouble was experienced with the
Indians at either place, and the Spaniards began to spread their ranches
over the neighbouring south-eastern part of Uruguay.
[Illustration: MONTEVIDEO.
[From an old print.]]
Almost simultaneously with this important event, the Creoles from Santa
Fe province crossed over into the wide plains which lie between the
Parana and the Uruguay, and defeated the Charrua tribes who had kept
the Spanish out of that region for one hundred and fifty years. Soon the
gauchos were in possession of Entre Rios as far as the Uruguay. The
Charruas east of the Uruguay could not prevent the gauchos from making
their way across the river to build their cabins and ride the plains
after cattle. The settlement of western Uruguay began, but, except
Colonia and Soriano, no towns were founded. The half-Indian gauchos
lived a semi-nomadic life and needed and received little help from the
authorities in their constant fights against the Indians.
Shortly after the foundation of Montevideo, a Portuguese expedition
tried to recover the place, but it was found to be too strong to attack,
and the party resolved to establish a town farther up the coast. Three
hundred miles to the north-west is found the only opening into the great
system of lagoons which stretches along the seaward side of Rio Grande
do Sul, and at that strategic point the Portuguese, in 1735, built a
fort and town.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the situation between Spain and
Portugal in the whole region between the Plate, the Uruguay, and the sea
had become very strained. Colonia was completely isolated and the
Spaniards controlled all the rest of Uruguay's western and southern
water-front. The Portuguese settlements in the seaward half of Rio
Grande were prospering and multiplying, soon to furnish thousands of
gauchos, as ready as any who rode the Argentine pampas to sally forth
for war or plunder. The territory which the Jesuits had held for more
than a century on the east bank of the Upper Uruguay lay directly back
of these Portuguese settlements and was more easily accessible therefrom
than from Montevideo. In 1750 Spain agreed to exchange the Seven
Missions for Colonia. The Portuguese promptly took measures to secure
the ceded territory, attacked the Indian villages, and massacred or
drove off most of the inhabitants. The Jesuits vigorously protested, and
outraged Spanish public opinion demanded the abrogation of the treaty,
so a few years later the desolated territory was restored to Spanish
possession and Colonia remained Portuguese.
In 1762 Spain and Portugal were again engaged in war, and the governor
of Buenos Aires attacked Colonia with a force of twenty-seven hundred
men and thirty-two ships. The fortifications were strong and the
Portuguese offered a tenacious resistance. After a well-contested siege
the place surrendered, only to be given back to Portugal the ensuing
year. Meanwhile, troops had been sent up from Montevideo against Rio
Grande and the Portuguese settlers driven back to the north-east corner
of the state, only to rise again when the Spanish troops were gone and
to begin a guerrilla warfare which never ceased until they had regained
their towns.
The eighteenth century had entered on its last quarter before the
Spanish home government took any real steps to drive the Portuguese out
of Colonia and to reclaim the disputed territory as far north as Sao
Paulo. The Atlantic slope of Spanish South America was erected into a
Viceroyalty, and in 1777 the greatest fleet and army ever sent by Spain
to America reached Buenos Aires under command of the new Viceroy. The
Portuguese had no forces able to cope with his army and fleet, and he
carried all before him. The island of Santa Catharina in the north of
the disputed territory was captured, Colonia was taken, and an army of
four thousand men started on a triumphal march north-westward to sweep
the Portuguese from the coast. The Spaniards were at the gates of Rio
Grande when news came that peace had been declared. Orders from home
compelled the Viceroy to stop his northward progress while the diplomats
agreed on a division. The treaty of San Ildefonso in the main gave each
country the territory its citizens actually occupied. The Seven Missions
remained Spanish, and the Portuguese were deprived of the southern half
of the great lagoon and of Colonia. Santa Catharina was restored, and
the right of Portugal to the vast interior and to the regions of the
Upper Parana and Paraguay were confirmed. Rio Grande remained Portuguese
and Uruguay was assured of being thenceforth and for ever Spanish in
blood and speech.
CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTION
With the treaty of San Ildefonso, Uruguay began her real existence.
Montevideo was made the greatest fortress on the Atlantic coast,
commanded by its own military governor, strongly garrisoned and
provisioned, and with over one hundred cannon mounted on its walls. The
Charruas had long been driven back from the coast, and as soon as the
danger of Portuguese interference was over settlements spread rapidly
along the whole southern border. Prior to 1777 there were only five
towns in Uruguay, but within the next five years the number tripled. By
the year 1810 there were seventy-five hundred people living in the city
of Montevideo, seventy-five hundred in its immediate district, and
sixteen thousand in the outlying settlements. Outside of Montevideo,
cattle-herding was the sole business, and the people were a hard-riding,
meat-eating, bellicose race. Immediately to the north-east lived fifty
thousand Rio Grandenses of Portuguese blood and speech, who, in like
surroundings, had acquired the same pastoral and semi-nomadic habits as
their Argentine and Uruguayan neighbours, and who constantly made
incursions over the Spanish border. The Uruguayan gauchos retaliated,
and for nearly a century continuous partisan warfare went on, for these
half-savage cattle-herders recked little of treaties or boundary lines.
The Spanish guerrillas bore the name of _blandenques_, and in this
school of arms the future generals of Uruguay's war of independence were
trained. Most of the forays were only for the purpose of stealing cattle
or burning cabins built in coveted regions; nevertheless, one of these
expeditions changed the nationality of a territory larger than England.
In 1801 the Rio Grandenses conquered the Seven Missions, thus doubling
at a single stroke the area of their own state and reducing Uruguay to
substantially its present dimensions.
As the seat of the largest Spanish garrison, Montevideo naturally became
the centre of pro-Spanish feeling and influence in the Plate and the
home of families who boasted distinguished Castilian descent and
conservative principles. In the interior settlements Creole influences
predominated, and the population was substantially homogeneous with that
of the Argentine provinces on the other side of the Uruguay River.
Between the aristocratic Montevideans and the gauchos of the country
districts there was little sympathy.
[Illustration: BRIDGE AT MALDONADO.]
In 1806, the English captured Buenos Aires, and many Spanish officials
and officers fled to Montevideo for refuge. The garrison of Montevideo
furnished troops and arms for the expedition which soon went across
the Plate and triumphantly recaptured Buenos Aires. Late that same year,
British troops from the Cape of Good Hope seized Maldonado harbour in
eastern Uruguay. As soon as re-enforcements arrived a movement was made
against Montevideo. On the 14th of January, 1807, the city was besieged
by sea and land. The attacking and defending forces were about equal in
number, although the British regulars were far superior in discipline
and effectiveness to their opponents, half of whom were militia. A
sortie in force was completely defeated, with a loss of one thousand
men, and after eight days of bombardment the British effected a breach
in the wall and took the town by assault, the Spaniards losing half
their force and the remainder scattering. A great fleet of merchant
vessels had accompanied the British expedition, and as soon as the town
surrendered their goods were landed, and the English traders took
possession of the shops almost as completely as the British soldiers did
of the fortifications. Uruguay was opened up to free trade, the gauchos
were soon selling their hides and horsehair for higher prices than they
had ever received, and buying clothes, tools, and the comforts and
luxuries of civilised life at rates they had never dreamed possible.
A few months later the English attacked Buenos Aires, but were
overwhelmingly defeated, and the British general found himself in such
an awkward situation that, in order to obtain permission to withdraw his
army, he had to agree to evacuate Montevideo. The convention was carried
out and the British soldiers left the Plate forever, but the British
merchants remained behind. Although the English occupation of the city
had lasted so short a time, it created an unwonted animation in
Montevideo by the establishment of a great number of mercantile and
industrial houses. From this time, Montevideo's commerce assumed greater
proportions and it became a place of real commercial importance, as well
as a military post. Both city and country had tasted the delights of
commercial freedom, and material civilisation had received its first
great impulse.
Elio, the Spanish military governor of Montevideo, suspected the loyalty
of Liniers, the Frenchman, who, because he had led in the fighting
against the English, had been created viceroy at Buenos Aires. Spanish
affairs at home were in confusion and fast becoming worse confounded.
The old king had abdicated in favour of his son; civil war had broken
out on the Peninsula; the new king had been compelled by Napoleon to
resign, and Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed monarch of Spain. The
Spanish nation refused to accept Joseph and a revolutionary government
was set up in Seville. Elio, as a patriotic Spaniard, promptly swore
allegiance to this junta, but the Viceroy and the Buenos Aires Creoles
hesitated as to their course of action. The Montevidean governor and the
Buenos Aires Viceroy quarrelled; the former accused the latter of
unfaithfulness to Spain and disavowed his authority, and the latter
retaliated by issuing a decree deposing Elio. On receiving news of this
act, which was strictly legal under Spanish law, the Montevideo Cabildo
met in extraordinary session and appointed a junta, which was to be
dependent solely and directly upon the authority of the banished
legitimate king and in no way upon Buenos Aires so long as Liniers
remained Viceroy. Thus early did Montevideo act independently of Buenos
Aires.
Although the sentiment of loyalty was much stronger in Montevideo than
in Buenos Aires, the English invasion was no sooner over than there
became manifest something of the same profound division between Creoles
and Spaniards. Three years, however, passed without disturbances; and
even when the news of the overthrow of the new Spanish Viceroy by the
populace of Buenos Aires on the 25th of May, 1810, reached Montevideo,
the governor was able to prevent any revolutionary manifestations of
sympathy. On the 12th of July a small part of the garrison rose in a
mutiny, which was easily suppressed. In January, 1811, Elio returned to
Montevideo with a commission as Viceroy and bringing considerable
re-enforcements. He declared war on Creole revolutionists at Buenos
Aires and imprisoned the Montevideans suspected of Creole sympathies and
revolutionary ideas.
Among those who escaped to Buenos Aires was one destined to be the
founder of Uruguayan nationality. This was Jose Artigas, then captain of
guerrilla cavalry. Although born in Montevideo he had lived the life of
a gaucho from boyhood, and since 1797 had been a leader of the gaucho
bands who were continually fighting the Rio Grandenses. He happened to
be in Colonia on the occasion of Elio's declaration of war against the
Creoles and at once fled to Buenos Aires. The junta there gave him a
lieutenant-colonel's commission and some substantial help. The gauchos
of the south-eastern part of Uruguay had meanwhile risen against the
Spanish governor, and within a few weeks Artigas was back on Uruguayan
soil at the head of a considerable force, while all around him bands of
gauchos under other chiefs were preparing to resist the Spaniards. His
bravery, energy, and good luck in the field, and his ruthless
maintenance of discipline, gave him an ascendancy over all the others.
In April, 1811, Belgrano, the chief general of Buenos Aires, arrived
with re-enforcements. Shortly after, a Spanish detachment, which had
reached the western part of Uruguay, was captured, and the gaucho
leaders advanced almost to the walls of Montevideo. A force of one
thousand Spaniards started out to meet them and, on the 18th of May, met
with complete defeat at the battle of Las Piedras. For this victory
Artigas was promoted by the Buenos Aires Junta, and became the greatest
military figure on the patriot side. With a considerable army of gauchos
from both banks of the Uruguay and of patriots from Buenos Aires he
began a siege of Montevideo.
The siege, however, did not last long. The great expedition sent by the
patriots to Bolivia was overwhelmingly defeated in the battle of Huaqui,
and the Buenos Aires Junta, horribly alarmed for their own safety,
ordered all the troops under their control to return and help defend
that city. At the same time a Portuguese army advanced from Brazil with
the avowed purpose of saving Montevideo from being lost to Spain, but
really to take possession of Uruguay for King John's own benefit.
Artigas was compelled to retire to the Argentine, and Uruguayan
historians say that on his long retreat to the Uruguay River he was
accompanied by practically the whole rural population of the country.
The semi-nomadic habits of the gauchos made such a migration easy, and
they quickly found new homes on the opposite shore in Entre Rios, whence
it would be easy to return as soon as the Portuguese troops retired.
Considerations of international politics and English pressure compelled
King John to withdraw his troops from Uruguay in the middle of the year
1812, and the Buenos Aires government immediately began to assemble an
army on the right bank of the Uruguay. Artigas was still encamped with
his Uruguayan forces in the same neighbourhood, and although he held an
Argentine commission he was virtually independent. The Argentine army,
under the command of Jose Rondeau, who in colonial days had been captain
of guerrillas alongside Artigas, advanced against Montevideo, and on the
last day of 1812 won the bloody battle of Cerrito, in sight of the city,
and shut the Spaniards up within its walls. Artigas followed and
assisted in the siege, but he refused to unite his forces with those of
Rondeau until his own claims should be recognised and his demands
complied with. He assumed a dictatorship and sent delegates to Buenos
Aires to advocate the formation of a federal republic, of which Buenos
Aires was to be simply one member. Buenos Aires refused to receive his
delegates, and civil war broke out. Rondeau adhered to the Buenos Aires
interest; and after a year of disputes, in the beginning of January,
1814, Artigas withdrew his own followers from Montevideo, leaving the
partisans of Buenos Aires to continue the siege alone. In May the
celebrated Irish admiral, William Brown, destroyed the Spanish fleet,
which had hitherto dominated the Plate. Montevideo's communications with
both land and sea were shut off, and the fortress shortly afterwards
surrendered to General Carlos Alvear, the Argentine general who was then
commanding the besieging forces.
Meanwhile, Artigas had retired to the west, and the gauchos, not only of
western Uruguay, but also of Entre Rios, Corrientes, the Missions, and
Santa Fe, rallied around his standard. Independent chiefs in these
various provinces had been resisting the efforts of Buenos Aires to
reduce them to obedience. Artigas was, in a way, recognised as their
leader, but only as the greatest among equals. The conflict with the
Buenos Aires party went on throughout the year 1814, and the federalists
continually gained ground. In January, 1815, Fructuoso Rivera, one of
the lieutenants of Artigas, defeated an Argentine force at the battle of
Guayabos, and the Buenos Aires Junta was compelled to withdraw its
troops from Montevideo.
This, however, did not amount to a separation of Uruguay from the
Confederation. It only marked a triumph of the provinces in their
efforts to prevent Buenos Aires from establishing a centralised
government. Artigas had his friends in Entre Rios, Corrientes, the
Missions, and Santa Fe, and even as far as Cordoba; and Francia,
dictator of Paraguay, was another of his allies in this struggle against
Buenos Aires. However, he was nothing more than a military chief,
without the capacity or even the desire of uniting these vast
territories under a rational and stable government.
At the very height of his power he made the fatal mistake of embroiling
himself with Brazil. In 1815 he invaded the territory of the Seven
Missions, which the Rio Grandenses had conquered fourteen years before.
The Portuguese king retaliated by sending a well-equipped army of
several thousand men, and in October, 1816, the forces of Artigas were
overwhelmed and driven with great slaughter from the disputed territory.
Artigas made stupendous efforts to retrieve this loss, but the four
thousand men which he assembled to resist the Portuguese army, which was
now advancing upon Montevideo itself, were defeated and scattered in
January, 1817. The Portuguese occupied Montevideo, and Artigas and his
lieutenants, Rivera, Lavelleja, and Oribe, each of whom later became a
great figure in the civil wars, retreated to the interior, where they
maintained themselves for two years. After many defeats, Artigas himself
lost the support of the chiefs of Entre Rios and Santa Fe. He was
finally driven out of Uruguay and attempted to establish himself in the
Argentine provinces, only to be completely overwhelmed by his rivals.
On the 23rd of September, 1820, he presented himself with forty men, all
who remained faithful to him, at the Paraguayan town of Candelaria on
the Parana, begging hospitality of Francia. Francia granted him asylum,
and this indomitable guerrilla chief, who for twenty-five years had kept
the soil of Uruguay and of the Argentine mesopotamia soaked in blood,
spent the rest of his life peacefully cultivating his garden in the
depths of the Paraguayan forests. He died in 1850 at the age of
eighty-six years; six years later his remains were brought from Paraguay
to Montevideo and interred in the national pantheon. On the sarcophagus
are engraved these words: "Artigas, Founder of the Uruguayan Nation."
[Illustration: GENERAL DON JOSE GERVASIO ARTIGAS.
[From an old wood-cut.]]
Rivera was the last Uruguayan chief to lay down his arms before the
Portuguese. When he surrendered, early in 1820, most of the other
leaders had already given up and accepted service in the Portuguese army
of occupation. In 1821, a Uruguayan Congress, selected for this purpose,
declared the country incorporated with the Portuguese dominions under
the name of the Cisplatine Province. For five years Montevideo and the
country remained quiet under the Portuguese dominion, and Uruguay
peacefully became a province of Brazil when that country declared her
independence. The most celebrated chiefs of the civil war were officers
in the Brazilian army, and few external signs of dissatisfaction were
apparent. Underneath the surface, however, fermented a hatred of the
foreign rule, and the proud Creoles only awaited an opportunity to
revolt.
CHAPTER IV
INDEPENDENCE AND CIVIL WAR
In the beginning of 1825 a group of patriots met in Buenos Aires and
planned an invasion of Uruguayan territory. Word was sent to different
chiefs in the country districts, and on the night of the 19th of April
thirty-three adventurers, with Lavalleja at their head, landed on the
shore of the river in the extreme south-western corner of the country.
No sooner had they landed than the country rose; the troops sent from
Montevideo to meet the band of revolutionists refused to fight, and,
deserting the Brazilian banner, joined their compatriots. The
revolutionists advanced east along the Negro and the Yi to Durazno, one
hundred and thirty miles north of Montevideo, where they found Rivera,
then general in the Brazilian service. He promptly deserted and was at
once associated with Lavalleja in the command.
Lavalleja advanced to the south, calling the population to arms, while
the northern detachments rose in response to Rivera. Only fifteen days
after the thirty-three had crossed the Uruguay, the flag of the
revolution was floating over the Cerrito Hill in front of Montevideo,
and Brazilian power was virtually confined to the walls of that city and
Colonia. The military chiefs formally declared Uruguay separated from
Brazil, and proclaimed its reincorporation with the Argentine. The
number of Brazilians then in Uruguay was small, and infantry could not
be expected to do much fighting on the plains against gaucho cavalry led
by such experienced guerrilla fighters as Rivera and Lavalleja. A
division of Rio Grandense cavalry, under their own chiefs, Bento Manoel
and Bento Goncalvez, met the Uruguayans at Sarandi. The two armies used
substantially the same methods, charging into each other, sword in hand
and carbine at shoulder. The Brazilians were caught in a disadvantageous
position and suffered a complete and bloody overthrow.
The result of this battle was to insure to the revolutionists the
continuation of their complete dominance in the country. Their cavalry
bands roamed at will up to the very walls of Montevideo. Buenos Aires
received the news with extravagant demonstrations of joy, and formal
notice was given to Brazil that Uruguay would henceforth be recognised
as an integral part of the Argentine Confederation. The emperor promptly
responded with a declaration of war. His fleet blockaded Buenos Aires,
while he poured re-enforcements into Montevideo and sent an army to
invade northern Uruguay. Argentine troops likewise swarmed across the
Uruguay River into the country, and the Brazilians could make little
progress. On sea they were not more successful, and by the beginning of
1826 Admiral Brown was blockading Colonia and menacing the
communications of Montevideo.
In August, 1826, the famous Argentine general, Carlos Alvear, took
command of the patriot forces. Jealousies and quarrels had meantime
broken out between Lavalleja and Rivera. Alvear took the former's side
and Rivera's partisans revolted. But the arrival of more re-enforcements
for the Brazilians hushed up for the moment the intestine quarrels of
the Spanish-Americans. Alvear determined to carry the war into Brazil,
and early in January, 1827, succeeded in passing between the northern
and southern Brazilian armies, and penetrated across the frontier to the
north-east. He had sacked Bage, the principal town of that region,
before the Brazilian general, the Marquis of Barbacena, was able to
concentrate his forces and start in pursuit. Alvear turned north toward
the Missions, but he was in a hostile country where defeat meant total
destruction. Though his army numbered eight thousand men he had cut
himself off from his base, and an enemy in equal force was close at his
heels. He resolved to turn and give battle, and on the 20th of February,
1827, his army met that of Barbacena in the decisive battle of
Ituzaingo, which ended in the defeat of the Brazilians. Although
Barbacena was able to withdraw his army without material loss, and
Alvear retired at once to Uruguayan soil, the Brazilians were never
afterwards able to undertake a vigorous offensive. The result of that
battle insured that the north bank of the Plate should remain Spanish
in blood, language, and government.
A few days before Ituzaingo, Admiral Brown had won the great naval fight
of Juncal at the mouth of the river Uruguay, and thenceforth the
Brazilian blockade of Buenos Aires was entirely ineffective. If it had
not been for the civil disturbances in Argentina that paralysed the
Buenos Aires government, the Brazilians might have been swept out of
Montevideo at the point of the sword, and the Argentines might have
undertaken the conquest of Rio Grande itself. Though considerable
Argentine forces remained in Uruguay during 1827 and 1828, they put no
vigour into their operations, and on their part the Brazilians were able
to do little more than hold Montevideo. So hampered was Rivadavia, the
president of Buenos Aires, by revolts, uprisings, and disorders
throughout Argentina that he thought himself obliged to agree to abandon
Uruguay. Public opinion in Argentina would not accept the treaty which
he made; he was deposed, and a leader of the opposite party installed in
power.
Rivera, operating on his own account, had undertaken a campaign against
the western Rio Grande, but so bitter was factional feeling that his
rival, Lavalleja, sent a force to pursue and fight him, while the new
Buenos Aires government was induced to sign a treaty of peace largely
because Rivera's success against the Brazilians might make him strong
enough to be dangerous. Both Brazil and Argentina were tired of the
tedious, expensive war, and both governments had preoccupations within
their own territories. Through the intervention of the British Minister
the terms were agreed upon. Brazil and Argentina both gave up their
claims to Uruguay, the region was erected into an independent republic,
and Brazil and Argentina pledged themselves to guarantee its
independence during five years.
At that time Argentina was convulsed by the struggle between the
federalists and the unitarians, and the Uruguayans were also divided
into two camps--the followers of Lavalleja and those of Rivera. Neither
in Argentina nor in Uruguay were these divisions parties in any proper
sense of that term. They were military factions, whose ambitious leaders
seem to have been always willing to sacrifice the interests of the
country at large to secure a partisan advantage. The Argentine troops
who returned home from the war against Brazil promptly plunged their
country into the bloodiest civil war known in her history, and Uruguay
did not delay in following the example.
The first chief magistrate of independent Uruguay was Jose Rondeau, an
Uruguayan who had become one of the greatest Argentine generals.
However, Lavalleja and Rivera were the real factors in the situation,
and Rondeau's efforts to conciliate both at the same time failed. The
Constituent Assembly, which soon met and framed a paper constitution,
was controlled by Lavalleja's partisans. Rondeau was deposed and
Lavalleja assumed the reins of power. Rivera prepared to march on
Montevideo and dispute the matter by arms, but the representatives of
Argentina and Brazil intervened and a compromise was effected. Rivera
got the best of the bargain, being given command of the army, and after
the constitution had been declared (July 18, 1830), he became, as a
matter of course, the first president of Uruguay.
CHAPTER V
CIVIL WAR AND ARGENTINE INTERVENTION
Except for an expedition against the remnants of the once formidable
Charrua Indians, the first two years of independence passed in peace.
Since the expulsion of Artigas, the country had prospered and its
population had risen nearly threefold within twenty-five years, in spite
of the bloody fighting which occurred from 1811 to 1817 and from 1825 to
1828. The settlements had spread far back from the coast, and many of
the principal interior towns date from this period.
In 1832 the civil wars began again. Lavalleja's partisans organised a
conspiracy, and a certain Colonel Garzon took advantage of Rivera's
absence from Montevideo to raise a mutiny in the garrison and to issue a
pronunciamento deposing the president. The latter soon recovered the
city, and after two years of intermittent fighting the Lavalleja party
was overthrown for the moment and Rivera finished his term in peace.
Manuel Oribe, a chief of the anti-Rivera faction, succeeded to the
presidency by a compromise agreement, but the breach between the two
factions had really grown wider and their mutual hatred became
irrepressibly bitter. Oribe soon began to persecute his opponents.
Meanwhile, the five years had expired during which Uruguayan
independence had been guaranteed by the treaty between Argentina and
Brazil. Argentina was free to solicit the reincorporation of Uruguay
into the Confederation. Rosas, the head of the federalist party, had
made himself master of Buenos Aires, and his authority was recognised in
most of the Argentine provinces, although the unitarians continued their
ineffectual revolts. The new Uruguayan president sympathised with the
federalists, while his rival, Rivera, could count on the unitarians. The
plan of Rosas was to establish Oribe firmly in Uruguay and through his
aid to incorporate that country with Argentina, while the unitarians
were desperately anxious that Rivera should triumph, knowing that
Montevideo would be a base for the organisation of their own forces for
invasions of Buenos Aires and central Argentina.
Thenceforward for many years Uruguay's history is inexplicably entwined
with the story of the struggle between the two great Argentine factions.
The little country became the storm-centre of South American politics
and the chief battlefield of the contending forces. Now for the first
time we encounter references to "blancos" and "colorados," which remain
to this day the names of Uruguayan political parties. All the forces of
the community lined up on either side and never have political parties
fought more determinedly and relentlessly. The divisions between them
entered into all social and business relations, and even friendly
intercourse between the members of the two factions was almost
impossible. Men have often been more blanco or colorado than Uruguayan.
The old conservative resident Spanish families were the basis of the
blanco, or Oribe party, while the colorados, or partisans of Rivera,
were the progressive faction. The latter attracted the Argentine
refugees fleeing from the tyranny of Rosas, and could count upon the
support of resident Europeans and upon the sympathy of foreign
governments. Rosas in Argentina and the blancos in Uruguay represented
the spirit of exclusivism and opposition to foreign influences.
After Oribe's accession to power Rivera hastened to raise a revolt in
the western districts. He obtained help from the unitarians, and his
invasion was accompanied by many Argentine generals who had
distinguished themselves in the wars against Rosas. The Argentine
dictator sent help to Oribe, but for two years the tide of battle set in
favour of the colorados and unitarians. Rivera had obtained so decided
an advantage by 1838 that Oribe abandoned Montevideo and embarked for
Buenos Aires, followed by the chiefs of his party. The colorado chief,
now in control of all Uruguay, celebrated a formal alliance with the
province of Corrientes, then in revolt against Rosas, and war was
declared against the latter. A large Argentine army, accompanied by many
blancos, invaded Uruguay, but was decisively defeated at the battle of
Cagancha, December 10, 1839.
The interval of unquestioned colorado supremacy which followed was one
of the most flourishing periods in the history of Uruguay. Large numbers
of the intellectual elite of Buenos Aires swarmed across the river;
Montevideo became the centre of arts and letters of Spanish America; the
civil wars of the last few years had not been severe, and even during
their continuance property had suffered little. Immigration from
England, France, and Italy began on a large scale, and the population
increased at the rate of four per cent. per annum. In the year 1840 nine
hundred ocean-going ships entered the port of Montevideo, more than
three thousand houses were erected, and twenty-seven great meat-curing
establishments were in active operation. However, Rosas and the blancos
were only awaiting a good opportunity to attack.
In 1841 Oribe, in command of one of Rosas's armies, defeated the
Argentine unitarians under General Lavalle, and marched into Entre Rios
to suppress the insurrection in that province. In January, 1842, Rivera
took an army of three thousand men to the rescue of his unitarian
allies. He crossed the river Uruguay and united his forces to those of
General Paz, but after a year's desperate fighting on Argentine soil he
and the unitarian general were overthrown and their armies completely
destroyed in the battle of Arroya Grande. The way was open to
Montevideo; the colorados and Argentine exiles shut themselves up in
that city, and the so-called nine-years' siege began. Rosas's power
seemed overwhelming, and although Rivera and other colorado chiefs at
the head of scattered bands managed to make some headway in the outlying
departments, they were finally driven into Brazil, while the unhappy
country was given up to pillage and slaughter. This _guerra grande_ was
the bloodiest, longest, and most stubborn war ever fought on Uruguayan
soil.
Montevideo seemed doomed to an early surrender when an opportune
intervention by France and England upset the plans of Rosas. He had
embroiled himself with the ministers of those powers by refusing to give
satisfaction for certain alleged injuries to foreign merchants and naval
officers, and the dispute became so acrimonious that the European powers
finally resorted to the most drastic coercive measures. A French, and
later a British, fleet blockaded Buenos Aires and drove Rosas's vessels
from the Plate. Under these circumstances it was impossible for him to
land re-enforcements on the Uruguayan shore. In 1845 the European navies
forced a passage at the head of the estuary into the Parana and Uruguay,
destroying the batteries which Rosas had erected there and opening up
those rivers to foreign navigation. Thereafter, troops could be sent
from Argentina into Uruguay only by a long detour to the north.
In spite of this hampering of his military operations, and the injury
which the blockade caused to the commerce of Buenos Aires, the Argentine
dictator stubbornly refused to yield an inch to foreign pressure.
France and England were finally tired out; they raised the blockade;
Rosas regained his control of the Plate and the early capture of
Montevideo seemed certain. Just at this time, however, General Urquiza,
governor of Entre Rios, and Rosas's best lieutenant and most successful
general, broke with his chief. Entre Rios became a virtually independent
state, and Rosas's efforts to reduce it were unavailing. Urquiza's
defection again rendered it impossible properly to reinforce Oribe's
army. The colorados of the interior plucked up courage and during four
years no material progress was made on either side. A tedious and
exhausting partisan warfare went on in the interior; guerrilla bands
scoured the country in every direction; inhabitants of the same town
were arrayed against each other, and surprises, treasons, and massacres
were almost daily occurrences. One of the most successful leaders on the
colorado side was the famous Giuseppe Garibaldi. The future liberator of
Italy had made his debut as a revolutionist in the insurrection which
broke out in 1835 in the Brazilian province of Rio Grande. Later he
crossed the Uruguayan border and fought against Rosas for several years.
Early in 1851 a grand combination to overthrow Rosas was made between
Entre Rios, Corrientes, the unitarians, the colorados, and Brazil. The
constant policy of the latter power had been to secure and maintain the
independence of Uruguay, and she welcomed the opportunity to open up the
Parana and Uruguay, on whose headwaters she had great territories,
inaccessible except along those rivers. Urquiza naturally became the
general-in-chief of the alliance. On the 18th of July he crossed the
Uruguay, followed by a large army from his own provinces. A Brazilian
army soon joined him and the colorados flocked to his standard. The
Brazilian fleet came down the coast and controlled the estuary. An
overwhelming force advanced on Montevideo and the blanco army found
itself with a hostile city and fleet in front, a superior army behind,
and deprived of the hope of receiving help from Buenos Aires. The
officers hastened to make terms with Urquiza. Whole divisions deserted,
and Oribe himself was obliged to surrender. Many of the soldiers who had
been fighting in the blanco ranks joined Urquiza, and the latter, after
a vain attempt to reconcile the Uruguayan factions among themselves,
marched his army back through Uruguay and Entre Rios, crossed the
Parana, and, descending to Buenos Aires, defeated Rosas in the great
battle of Monte Caseros.
CHAPTER VI
COLORADOS AND BLANCOS
The overthrow of Rosas and Oribe marked the end of the effort to
re-incorporate Uruguay with the Argentine Confederation. Uruguay was no
longer in peril from foreign aggression, but she was far from being
united. The blancos had apparently been completely crushed, but their
wealth, prestige, and numbers still made them formidable. The seeds of
division lay thickly in the soil of the national society and character,
sure to spring up and bear many crops of wars and pronunciamentos.
For the moment, however, the fierce Uruguayan partisans had had enough
of fighting. The colorados were dominant and the blancos disorganised
and discouraged. It seemed likely that Uruguay would enjoy a prolonged
peace. The wars which lasted almost continuously from 1843 to 1851 had
interrupted immigration from Europe; unitarians had, however, crossed in
multitudes from Buenos Aires and many of their families remained after
the proclamation of peace. To this day Montevideo is full of families
descended from Buenos Aires refugees; the same names constantly recur
on both banks of the Plate, and the social ties uniting the two cities
are intimate. Uruguay's herds of cattle and sheep had suffered from the
depredations of the armed marauding bands which had scoured the country
districts for nine years, but man's cruel destructiveness could not
injure the magnificent pasturage with which nature had endowed the
nation, and animals quickly multiplied again by hundreds of thousands.
In 1860 the cattle in Uruguay numbered more than five millions, the
sheep two millions, and the horses nearly one million. The population
increased at the almost incredible ratio of nine per cent. per annum
after the overthrow of Oribe in 1851 until civil war again broke out in
1863.
During these years colorado chiefs occupied the presidency, sometimes
succeeding one another, sometimes by pronunciamento, and sometimes by a
form of election. General Venancio Flores, an able and ruthless officer,
became the principal figure among the colorados. In 1853 he was a member
of a triumvirate which forced the legal president to withdraw, and in
1854 he was himself raised to the presidency, only to be obliged to
resign the following year. As is usual in South America, the dominant
party split into factions, led by ambitious chiefs, and lost popularity.
The blancos, as soon as they got into power, obtained control of the
senate, and their prestige and wealth soon balanced the military force
of their opponents. In 1860 they finally prevailed, and their leader,
Berro, became constitutional president of the republic.
The colorados, however, did not propose to submit. Massed upon the
Argentine frontier, they held themselves ready to fall upon their
successful opponents at the first opportunity. Flores had been exiled
and joined the Argentine army, but in 1863 he obtained aid in Buenos
Aires and disembarked upon the Uruguayan coast with a considerable
force. His partisans rose and he obtained possession of a large portion
of the country and set up a government of his own. For a year the
contest went on with varying fortunes, and then this fight between
blancos and colorados involved all the neighbouring nations and brought
on the greatest war which has ever devastated South America and which
resulted in the nearly complete destruction of the Paraguayan people.
[Illustration: THE SOLIS THEATRE.]
The unitarians, then in power at Buenos Aires, naturally sympathised
with the leader of their old colorado allies, and were inclined to aid
Flores's attempt to regain control of Montevideo. Brazil favoured his
pretensions even more actively. The Brazilians of Rio Grande owned most
of the land and cattle just over the Uruguayan border, a third of all
the rural properties in the republic being taxed to them, and complaints
of extortion often came to the Rio government. The blanco president
refused the satisfaction demanded, and Brazil determined to enforce the
claims of her citizens. Flores was formally recognised as the legitimate
ruler of the country, and a fleet and army were sent to his assistance.
Lopez, dictator of Paraguay, thought Brazil's intervention in Uruguay
dangerous to the international equilibrium of South America. He
protested, and when the Brazilian government persisted and sent its army
over the border he began war. The Brazilians advanced to Montevideo and
their fleet came down the coast. The city was blockaded by sea and
besieged by land, while the main body of the allies advanced against the
town of Paysandu on the Uruguay River, where the blancos had assembled
in force. The place was taken by assault and given up to a horrible
pillage, the recollection of which is still graven in the memory of
Uruguayans. The blanco party never recovered from the slaughter. Those
in Montevideo saved themselves by surrendering the town without
resistance. Flores entered in triumph and the blanco leaders fled into
exile.
Flores was under obligations to lead a division in the war against
Paraguay, and he absented himself for that purpose for nearly two years,
during which the country districts were somewhat disturbed. In 1867 he
returned and restored order with a strong hand. This short lease of
undisturbed power was employed in making many important improvements.
Great public edifices were completed, the telegraph cable was laid to
Buenos Aires, the building of railroads was begun, and a new civil code
adopted. Immigration was resumed on a large scale and the country felt
the economic impulse that was already transforming the whole Plate
valley. Although the country rapidly prospered under the military
administration of Flores, the feeling of the blancos remained intensely
bitter, and on the 15th of February, 1868, the colorado president was
assassinated in the streets of Montevideo.
Flores's death was the signal for wholesale executions and for the
outbreak of another long blanco insurrection. Although the growth of
wealth and population had never been more rapid than at this very time,
the country was not free from civil disturbance until 1872, when an
armistice was signed. A year later troubles broke out again and the
troops refused to march against the insurgents. To the bitterness of
party feeling and the official corruption which diminished the revenue
and hampered commerce was added the embarrassment of the financial
difficulties which followed the great panic of 1873. The public debt had
doubled in the ten years between 1860 and 1870 and now reached the
enormous figure of over forty million dollars, nearly $150 for each
inhabitant in the country. One president after another was unable to
maintain himself in the face of the financial and political difficulties
of the situation, but in 1876 General Lorenzo Latorre, an intelligent
and determined colorado chief, became dictator. For economy's sake, he
reduced the number of army officers, of whom there were over twelve
hundred for two thousand privates. He rooted out the worst frauds in the
customs service, and refunded the public debt, compelling the foreign
creditors to accept six instead of twelve per cent. interest. At the
same time he rigidly suppressed the disorders which had harassed the
country since the murder of Flores. The bands of marauders, assassins,
and bandits, who had exercised their nefarious occupations under cover
of belonging to the insurrectionists, were relentlessly pursued and
brought to justice. For the first time in years a traveller could
traverse the country from end to end without arms. Like Flores, Latorre
often used brute force to secure peace and order, and the Uruguayans
were too turbulent to submit long to such dictation. Countless
conspiracies were formed which were bloodily suppressed, but public fear
and dislike of Latorre grew continually more menacing. In 1880, tired
out with constant anxieties and grieved over what he considered the
ingratitude of his countrymen, Latorre resigned his office and went into
exile.
His successor, Dr. Vidal, held the presidency for only two years, when
he, too, was forced to resign. The next president, Maximo Santos, served
his complete term of four full years, ending in 1886. Then Vidal managed
to get back into power for a few months and was again replaced by
Santos, who, in turn, was succeeded by Tajes, who governed the country
until 1890. The ten years succeeding the resignation of Latorre were
materially very prosperous. The sheep industry developed tremendously;
the production of wheat was more than doubled; immigration ran up to
nearly 20,000 a year; the population of the country reached 700,000,
having increased from 400,000 in twelve years. Immigration had been so
great that the number of the foreign-born almost equalled the natives,
even when including in the latter those of foreign parentage. In the
mixture of nationalities the foundations have been laid for a race of
unusual vigour and of pure Caucasian descent.
The bitterness of the old factional feeling largely died out during the
disturbances which succeeded the murder of Flores. The blancos had
suffered terrible losses in 1864, and the colorados had become far the
more numerous party. During Latorre's dictatorship the distinctions
between the two were almost lost, and the blanco party, by that name at
least, ceased to be an active factor in politics. New factions, however,
took their place, but the struggles for place and power lacked the
conviction and ferocity of the old civil wars. The gaucho and Creole
element, although still politically dominant, was diluted by the
infiltration of a more industrially minded population. The people were
not so exclusively pastoral and had ceased to be so military in their
tastes. The foreign immigrants wanted peace,--a chance to sow their
wheat and tend their sheep undisturbed,--and the gaucho, living on his
horse, feeding on beef alone, and always ready to ride off to fight by
the side of his favourite chief, ceased in many of the departments to be
the dominant factor. Politics became largely a game played by the ruling
Spanish-American caste and did not directly interfere with the material
interests of the country, and rarely affected the maintenance of law and
order.
The prosperity of the eighties had been accompanied by an enormous
increase in governmental expenditures and debt. The economies so
painfully enforced in Latorre's administration were abandoned. Nearly
as much money was spent in ten years as had been in the previous fifty
years of the republic's existence. The debt more than doubled, and the
deficit each year equalled fifty per cent. of the receipts. The Buenos
Aires panic of 1890 brought on grave commercial difficulties; real
estate dropped one-half; prices fell, and, as usual, the people blamed
the government. Political disturbances began with an attempt at a blanco
uprising in Montevideo in 1891. The clergy were active in fomenting
dissatisfaction, but the trouble was suppressed for the time. Herrera y
Obes, elected in 1890, served his term out, but the government was
getting deeper and deeper into the financial mire, in spite of having
cut down the rate of interest on the public debt fifty per cent. The
murmurs of the public grew constantly more menacing against a taxation
which had become so excessive that it almost threatened the destruction
of industries.
When the election came on in 1894 the outgoing president found that he
had not control of Congress, the body which elects the president. A
deadlock ensued and the ballots were taken amid confusion and fears of
intimidation. Ellaure, the president's candidate, dared not accept
because of the threatening attitude of the opposition. Finally, Juan
Idiarte Borda was declared elected, amid outcries and protests against
dictation and terrorism. The new president pledged himself to reform the
finances and pursue a conciliatory policy toward the different factions,
but he was soon accused of extravagance and favouritism. The blancos had
again become a formidable party after twenty years of eclipse, and they
believed that they were being deprived of their political rights by the
colorado president. In 1896 he procured the election of a Congress
completely under his control, and early in 1897, seeing no hope of a
constitutional change, a blanco colonel named Lamas raised the standard
of revolt, assembled a force in the western provinces, and gained a
victory over the president's soldiers. He marched east and joined
Aparicio Saraiva, a chief belonging to a family celebrated in the
military annals of Brazil, who had brought a considerable force over the
border. The rebels soon had possession of the eastern departments and
menaced Montevideo, while Borda borrowed money right and left and armed
and drilled regiment after regiment to prosecute the war against them.
Nevertheless, the rebels maintained themselves and roamed the country at
will. They would listen to no terms that did not include Borda's
resignation, and it seemed as if the country was doomed to pass through
another long and bloody civil war.
On August 25, 1897, President Borda was assassinated in the streets of
Montevideo by a respectable grocer's clerk. The vice-president, Juan L.
Cuestas, succeeded peacefully to the control of the government in
Montevideo, and at once entered into negotiations with the leaders of
the insurrectionists in the departments. Terms were quickly agreed upon.
Cuestas conceded minority representation and electoral reform, and in a
very short time the rebels had laid down their arms. The few months of
war had cost Uruguay dear. Thirteen million dollars had been spent by
the government, the collection of the revenue had been interrupted, and
internal transportation had been demoralised. Now, however, industry and
commerce resumed their usual course, and, since President Cuestas's
accession to power, the peace of the country has been undisturbed.
Political manifestations have been confined to disputes in Congress and
the press. They became so violent that in 1898 the president dissolved
the chambers and declared himself dictator. He reorganised the army on a
basis which insured that there would be no mutinies, and at the same
time pursued a policy of administrative reform which has done much to
bring order out of the financial confusion. The obligations of the
government have been religiously performed, and Uruguay's currency is on
a gold basis. In 1899 Cuestas was elected president according to the
forms of the Constitution. He carried out the pledge he had given the
blancos not to interfere with the elections, and in 1900 they made great
gains and elected enough members to control the Senate. The political
situation has, therefore, been somewhat strained, but there seems to be
no danger that the congressional opposition will try to interfere with
the executive functions of the president.
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, MONTEVIDEO.]
This gallant and pugnacious little people will continue to play a role
in South American affairs out of all proportion to the size of their
country. Uruguay seems certain to continue to be the political
storm-centre of the Atlantic coast. Climate, soil, and geographical
position insure a rapid increase in population and wealth, while its
political independence must continue to be an object of constant
solicitude on the part of its gigantic neighbours, Argentina and Brazil.
Montevideo is a formidable trade rival to Buenos Aires, and must always
be, as it has so often been in the past, the base for any attach at the
heart of the Argentine Republic. To the north nothing but an artificial
boundary separates Uruguay from Rio Grande do Sul, and the two regions
are alike in everything except language. Should the Portuguese-Americans
again evince those tendencies toward expansion which distinguished them
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Uruguay would be the
natural point of attack, and if Brazil should ever divide into its
component parts, as it came so near doing in 1822 and again in 1837, Rio
Grande and Uruguay might find it necessary to coalesce, or possibly wars
might ensue between them which would change the face of South America. A
not improbable alternative would be the establishment of a power on the
north bank of the Plate strong enough to hold its own, and which might
play the same role in the interaction of Spanish and Portuguese
Americans as did Flanders between the Teutons and Latins in Europe.
BRAZIL
CHAPTER I
PORTUGAL
The motherland of Brazil is Portugal. Profound as were the changes
incident to transplanting a people to a virgin continent;
notwithstanding Spanish dominion and Dutch conquests; large as were the
admixtures of negro, Indian, and alien blood; in spite of independence
and Republicanism; the language, customs, religion, and laws of Brazil
are to-day substantially like those of Portugal.
The parallel between the United States and Britain is not closer. Brazil
has diverged even less than her model. Her population may have a larger
admixture of non-Portuguese blood than the North Americans have of
non-British, but politically there was less opportunity for divergence,
for Brazil was kept under much closer subordination. The discovery of
Brazil coincided with the destruction of popular liberties in the
mother-country. Thereafter, the Portuguese government was a centralised
despotism, and its hand lay heavy on the Brazilian provinces. They were
forbidden intercourse with the rest of the world; functionaries of every
kind were continually imported; the provinces never dreamed of
asserting any right to self-government; from the beginning the system
was centralising and stifling. The North American colonies of England
were left to grow up by themselves; they were never under a colonial
government properly so called; a revolt followed the first serious
attempt to subject them to a real colonial regime. But the independence
of Brazil came because liberties were finally granted, not because they
were threatened to be taken away. The country remained under a tutelage,
growing continually more rigorous, and which ceased only after the
Portuguese monarch had fled from Lisbon and the colony had become
greater than the mother-country.
[Illustration: OUTLINE MAP OF BRAZIL]
It is, therefore, in the little peninsular kingdom, during the centuries
before Cabral caught sight of the South American coast, that we must
look for the beginnings of Brazil. Rome gave to Portugal laws, language,
religion, and architecture; the forests of Germany modified her
political institutions; the Saracens gave her the arts, navigation, and
material civilisation. Her happy geographical position near the Straits
of Gibraltar made her the meeting-place for the Mohammedan and Christian
religions--of Levantine civilisation with Teutonic barbarism and
liberty. That position also enabled the qualities of daring and
enterprise and the scientific knowledge acquired in centuries of long
conflicts and intercourse with the Moors to be turned to immediate
advantage when the Renaissance came. Portugal was the pioneer of Europe
in discovery and colonisation, though Spain followed close after.
Together they led in making Western European civilisation dominant
beyond seas. The nations who followed in their track have long since
passed them, but Portugal had once the opportunity of spreading her
influence and institutions over half the planet. In Brazil she mixed
success with the failure that was her fate elsewhere. Brazil is to-day
the nation which has inherited Roman civilisation in the least modified
form, and is the country where the genuine Latin spirit has the best
opportunity for growth and survival.
The study of Portugal takes on a new dignity and importance when we
reflect that she has given language, institutions, and laws to half of
South America and to a population that already outnumbers her own four
to one. She is entitled to the interest of the world if only because she
has placed her indelible imprint on a region which is as large as Europe
and as fertile as Java, and which is destined within the next two
centuries to support the largest population of any of the great
political divisions of the globe.
In the twelfth century, the coalescence of a fragment of the kingdom of
Leon with the Moorish territory near the mouth of the Tagus originated
Portugal as a separate country. The race was very mixed. Its principal
elements were the Leonese and the Mosarabes--the latter being the
Christians of Moorish Portugal left undisturbed from Visigothic times by
their tolerant Mohammedan conquerors. Each of these elements was, in its
turn, of mixed origin. To the original Iberian population, which had
occupied the Peninsula two thousand years before the Christian era, had
been successively added Phenicians, Greeks, Celts, Ligurians,
Carthaginians, Latins,--and in Roman times,--officials, soldiers, and
slaves from all over the empire, including many Jews. The long Roman
dominion welded all these together into a homogeneous mass. Later, the
Visigothic conquest added a large Teutonic contingent, which is
especially evident in northern and Leonese Portugal. Still later, the
Saracens intermarried in considerable numbers with the Mosarabes of
southern Portugal. After the formation of the modern kingdom, another
element was added in the French, Provencals, Flemings, and English who
came in large numbers to aid in the final expulsion of the Moors. By the
end of the fourteenth century, the Portuguese had become a distinct
nation. Racial and religious tolerance were more advanced than in the
rest of Europe; self-governing municipalities covered the greatest part
of the country, each privileged within a definite territory. The nobles,
prelates, and monastic and military orders were still privileged, and
their property was not subject to tribute, but their power was not
predominant. The king was chief of the army and the proprietor of a very
considerable proportion of the land, but he was under constant pressure
to grant it to the religious orders and to the nobles. The people were
everywhere heavily taxed--in the municipalities and Crown lands by the
king, and on the estates of the privileged orders for the benefit of
their great proprietors. The nobles were under no enforceable
obligation to perform military service. A great general deliberative and
representative assembly--the Cortes--had come into being when the
monarchy was founded. It included representatives of the municipalities
as well as nobles and clergy, and its importance and vitality are shown
by the fact that from 1250 to 1376 it met twenty-five times. By the
latter date, jurisprudence had become generalised and its administration
had fallen into the hands of the Crown. The nation had developed out of
local and class privilege a reasonably consistent and uniform
administration. The municipalities were the basis of the governmental
structure, and a rude but effective local self-government existed
through their instrumentality. The norm for the centralisation and
organisation had not been, as in nearly all the rest of Europe, the
feudal system, but the surviving fragments of the Roman structure. To
the municipalities was largely due the astonishing vigour shown by the
Portuguese people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The norm
even survived the destruction of liberty, and its influence can be seen
in every step of the subsequent development of Portugal and also of
Brazil.
Portugal's heroic era began near the close of the fourteenth century.
The great King John I., founder of the dynasty of Aviz, secured Portugal
for ever from absorption by Spain when he won the battle of Aljubarrota
in 1385. This was the signal for a rapid transformation of the character
and policies of the Portuguese people. The thirst for war and adventure
grew. The old Portugal--laborious, agricultural, home-loving,
conservative--was replaced by a new Portugal--adventurous, seafaring,
eager, romantic, longing for conquest, glory, and wealth, its eyes
straining over the sea, the embodiment of the spirit of the Renaissance
on its material side. The meeting of the Levant and the Baltic, the East
and the West, Mohammedans and Christianity, the arts and knowledge of
the old races with the energy of the new, had at last produced its
perfect work. In 1415 an army was sent into Africa, and Ceuta was
conquered; and there began that marvellous series of voyages which not
only transformed Portugal into an empire, but gave a new world to Europe
and revolutionised the planet. Modern scientific navigation began with
the sailors instructed in the school which was set up at Sagres by
Prince Henry, King John's son. Until then, European nautical knowledge
had been very meagre. The compass served only to indicate direction, not
distance or position, and did not suffice for the systematic navigation
of the open Atlantic. The Portuguese first made that possible by using
astronomical observations and inventing the quadrant and the astrolabe.
This knowledge, once acquired, was promptly applied to the work of
navigation. Madeira was discovered in 1418; the Canaries in 1427; the
Azores in 1432. The first and last were colonised and rapidly became
populous. To the West the explorers pushed no farther for the present,
but to the south they reached Cape Blanco in 1441, Senegambia and Cape
Verde in 1445, and the Cape Verde Islands in 1460. In 1469, they turned
into the Gulf of Guinea, and in 1471 were the first Europeans to cross
the Equator. Their search, at first random, now became definite. They
believed it was only necessary to keep on and they would round the
southern extremity of Africa and reach Abyssinia and India by sea, a
hope which became a certainty in 1487, when Bartholomew Diaz finally
reached the Cape of Good Hope.
Meanwhile, a political revolution had been going on. The strong kings of
the line of Aviz had won for the Crown a moral preponderance over the
nobility and clergy. The latter resisted the royal encroachments, but
the municipalities joined the monarchs in the struggle against them. The
king who established centralised despotism--the Richelieu of
Portugal--was John II., the third of the Aviz dynasty, and who reigned
from 1481 to 1495. Under his rule, the whole military power was
concentrated in the Crown; the nobility became a class living at Court;
the king was the fountain of all honour and advancement; local officers
were replaced by officials appointed by and responsible to the central
government; piece by piece the independent functions of the
municipalities were taken away.
Concentration of power in the hands of monarch and bureaucracy produced
its inevitable effect. A short period of marvellous brilliancy in arms,
statecraft, literature, and the arts was followed by sudden decay. The
self-governing municipalities had nurtured a multitude of men whom small
power and responsibility fitted for great things. The nation turned
eagerly to the work of exploration and conquest and prosecuted it
efficiently.
Such a people would undertake conquest for their king, rather than
colonisation on their own account; they would emigrate under military
leadership and forms; their colonies would tolerate a close control by
the mother country; they would seek to convert the aborigines and reduce
them to slavery; private initiative would be stifled and overshadowed by
that of the government; large proprietorship would be the rule; the
colonies would be burdened with functionaries sent in successive swarms
from home; taxation would be excessive; the best talent would go into
the bureau and not concern itself with industrial matters; invention and
originality would be discouraged; agriculture would not be diversified,
nor manufactures thrive. To this day a few staple crops predominate in
Brazil; small landownership is the exception, and the people show little
aptitude for change when unfavourable circumstances make their crops
unprofitable. Brazilian Creoles have little taste for manual pursuits,
and not much more for commerce. Non-Portuguese immigration has supplied
most of the labour; foreigners have always conducted most of the trade.