target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_41411af2-d07e-513c-812e-1a626d64ac67.jpg" alt="PLAZADE MAYO AND CATHEDRAL AT BUENOS AIRES."/> 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 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
