Читать книгу The South American Republics (Vol. 1&2) - Thomas Cleland Dawson - Страница 20

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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 Fé, 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. José Artigas, a fierce chieftain of the plains on the Lower Uruguay, gathered about him a considerable army from among the gauchos east of the Paraná, 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 Fé. 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 Fé, 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 Fé, 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 Fé. Rosas, the chief of southern Buenos Aires, had rallied the federalists of that province. He himself joined Lopez, the caudillo of Santa Fé, 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.

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 Paraná 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 Paraná 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 Fé. 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.