This was originally going to be a teaser with Mariano Moreno's infobox, but I completed the update ahead of time and realized as I was about to post the teaser that I'd included a glaring error in the infobox, so early update it is!
Chapter 8 - The Platine War (Part 2)
Andresito and his guaraní militia were lauded in the revolutionary press and the native governor of Misiones became a romantic figure throughout the country
With the Brazilians firmly entrenched around Colonia and Montevideo, close enough to succor each other if either Lecor or Silveira were attacked and supported by a fleet that scoured the River Plate, Platine forces had very few options at their disposal to fight the invasion: while Colonia and Montevideo continued to resist - spared from assault thanks to the efforts of Platine privateers and corsairs forcing the Brazilian navy to spread out its forces - the south of the Oriental Provinces was the site of bloody guerrilla warfare.
But Major Jardim was forced to turn his attention northward as slaves rose up in revolt, armed with Platine muskets and lances: although militarily irrelevant, the political threat of allowing the slave revolt to spread demanded a response, and Jardim was forced to decamp from his defensive positions in the Misiones Orientales to stamp them out. It presented Platine troops with their best opportunity to counter-attack since the beginning of the war: Andresito’s guaraní militia would once again cross the river Uruguay, but this time they’d bring with them weapons and supplies of their own, and soon the entire province - majority Guaraní like the Misiones Occidentales - rebelled, swelling Andresito’s ranks with thousands more native volunteers.
As Jardim’s forces spread out to try and defeat the rebels quickly, they were left vulnerable to Artigas’ flying column, and the gaucho veterans would score a string of victories in small engagements across Rio Grande. Although it wasn’t enough for the slave rebellion to succeed as armed militias formed by plantation and ranch owners who depended on slavery for their livelihoods would soon join their strength with the Brazilian army to prevent further uprisings on their lands, the efforts bled Jardim’s detachment dry of manpower and supplies, ultimately forcing his army to withdraw to Porto Alegre and abandon the countryside.
Worse for the Brazilian war effort along the River Plate however was the court’s decision to divert nearly a thousand of Lecor’s vital veterans away from the front as the rebellion in Pernambuco began to spread: initial hesitancy to embrace emancipation as the rebels sought recognition and support from the United States gave way to an enthusiastic campaign to recruit slaves into their ranks as Platine ships sailed into the port of Recife with promises of support and recognition for the fledgling revolution. Like the slave uprisings in Rio Grande, this represented an unacceptable threat to the Brazilian economy - as evidenced by the souring of the Pernamubcan revolution’s relations with some of its early supporters among its own planter class - which prompted the order to send the Portuguese regulars to snuff it out.
Now reduced to fewer than 7,000 soldiers in total with Jardim’s forces holed up in Rio Grande and with 1,000 of its best troops sent north to fight a rebellion that, for all its enthusiasm, was too isolated for Platine supplies or support to reach them, the invasion had devolved into a merciless slog: what had initially been pinpricks that Lecor’s invasion could easily brush off soon turned into painful headaches that Lecor was forced to confront, as the Platine army used the horses it captured to augment its cavalry and turned the guerrilla war into a real threat. While the Brazilians continued to dominate the waves, ensuring that the besieging armies couldn’t be cut off from resupply, what began to worry Lecor most of all was the real possibility that his armies would be cut off from retreat if Artigas brought his army to bear and attacked him.
Forced to score a decisive victory to try and bring the United Provinces to the negotiating table, Silveira’s remaining 2,500 soldiers were ordered to lift their siege on Colonia and join forces with Lecor’s 4,000 troops to storm Montevideo. After a week of bloody fighting, which cost Brazil another 1,000 casualties in the assault and filled the harbor with the wrecks of a half dozen ships, Montevideo would finally fall in April of 1818. But the simultaneous lifting of the siege of Colonia and the loosening of the blockade on the estuary to support the attack courted further setbacks for the luso-brazilian invasion: William Brown snuck into the River Plate with a small squadron of ships, and at Juncal would score the only significant naval victory for Platine forces.
While it did little to dent Brazilian naval superiority - which continued to hamper Platine shipping on the high seas and which was batting off the republic’s efforts to attack Brazilian shipping - it represented a significant morale boost for the United Provinces, and most importantly for its war effort, freed the Uruguay and Paraná rivers of raiders, significantly improving the supply situation of Artigas’ army harassing Lecor’s invasion force[1]. As the war’s second anniversary approached on August 1818, the situation had shifted ever so slightly in the United Provinces’ favor on land: with the siege of Colonia lifted, Artigas secured a strong position south of the Rio Negro to continue his attacks on Lecor’s rear, and much to Rio’s frustration, its armies were limited to probing attacks out of Montevideoo while the interior fell to the United Provinces once more.
The Battle of Juncal did little to alter the balance of power at sea, but helped to alleviate the supply issues of the Platine armies fighting the invasion and was a much-needed boon to Platine morale
Robbed of the horses his cavalry and baggage trains desperately needed, Lecor’s advance ground to a halt: Artigas’ mobile forces wreaked havoc on any detachments sent out to pursue them, and Lecor was forced to encamp in Montevideo for the rest of the year as the attrition of trying to chase the Platine forces down was beginning to threaten the viability of his army as an offensive force. For their part, while Platine guerrilla efforts managed to force Jardim and Lecor to garrison their forces to keep them safe, the cavalry-heavy and artillery-starved armies at Artigas’ disposal remained incapable of threatening the garrisoned armies - and Artigas personally still considered his infantry insufficient for a pitched battle.
As the war dragged on in the field, it scored its most significant casualty in La Plata: Moreno’s failure to secure one of the delegate positions in Buenos Aires in the 1818 elections brought the government of the United Provinces crashing down, and even as its forces began to recover some of the ground lost in the last two years, La Plata was gripped by a severe political crisis. For one, the Federalists would sweep the Littoral and Oriental delegates this time, more than compensating the morenist recovery in the north as the seeming success of the Cuzco rebellion weakened the counter-revolutionary parties in Upper Peru; this meant that as the General Assembly gathered, the two parties were close to parity, and the Federalists would successfully block Juan José Paso’s nomination as Secretary General. Stunned by the upset, especially as Balcarce was handily reelected as Supreme Director (with Artigas on campaign, the Littoral and Oriental delegates backed him unanimously), they would subsequently turn to Manuel Belgrano as a compromise candidate.
Although a morenist, Belgrano enjoyed enough clout of his own that he could portray himself as a successor instead of a placeholder for Moreno, unlike Paso, who just 6 years earlier had proven his bonafides as a Moreno loyalist when he put the powers of the Supreme Director entirely at his disposal. He was also popular among Federalist delegates, as he had spent the early years of the revolution both writing enthusiastically in support of the sorts of land reforms that had secured the Littoral and Oriental provinces for the revolution, even implementing them personally in Corrientes and Entre Rios as attaché to Saavedra’s army in its liberation of Paraguay[2]. Although he maintained several Secretaries from Moreno’s cabinets, chief among them its financial mastermind Juan Larrea, he’d also signal an end to porteño hegemony in the cabinet, especially in his promotion of Monteagudo as chief spokesman of the party in the Assembly.
Further efforts were made to resolve the political crisis through military appointments: Artigas’ commission was increased in rank, and the army under his command was elevated to the same status as San Martin’s; thus, José Artigas was created as Brigadier General of the Army of the East, and several of his close confidantes and allies like Fructuoso River, Manuel Artigas and Juan Antonio Lavalleja were promoted and given commands of their own in the newly-upgraded army. As the war in the north degenerated into a stalemate with its frontline running from Cuzco to the coast, San Martin also dispatched the sapper corps and professionalized grenadiers south; by the end of the 1818, the reinforcements - which compensated their smaller number with years of training at San Martin’s direction - were ready to cross into the Oriental Provinces at last.
The Brazilians were now heavily outnumbered, although they still had the advantage that their Platine enemies were spread out while they had concentrated safely in Montevideo under cover of the Brazilian navy. But the Army of the East would not hesitate: Lecor had dispatched Silveira to interdict Platine efforts to bypass Montevideo and retake Maldonado, and Artigas’ army would take their chance to inflict the most significant defeat against the Brazilian army of the war. Intercepting Silveira’s army north of Montevideo near the Sarandí Creak, recently promoted commander Lavalleja caught the Brazilian army on the march, and the generals faced off with 2,000 soldiers each.
Not only did the Platine infantry fare better in the face of the Brazilian cavalry charge after concerted efforts to train them, the cavalry they faced was much reduced due to the effects of both the regular attrition of war and the success of Artigas’ guerrillas in robbing the Brazilians of their horses. Although able to retreat in good order and hole up in Montevideo with the rest of Lecor’s army, it was a costly defeat for the invaders: of the 2,000 men Silveira arrayed for battle, a quarter of them laid dead or wounded at the end of the day[3]. The Brazilian army had been reduced to just 6,000 soldiers, and while they were of generally superior quality to their Platine counterparts, the gap in quality was closing and the Platine advantage in numbers was growing.
Not even the defeat of the Pernambuco rebellion in November of 1818 could eclipse the news of Silveira’s defeat. With the main Brazilian army trapped in Montevideo, the United Provinces rapidly reconquered the interior of the province: Maldonado was liberated in November of 1818, Rocha a week later, and the border forts on the narrow strip of land leading to the city of Rio Grande were reoccupied by Platine soldiers by the new year. By January of 1819, the war devolved into a stalemate, with Andresito’s forces besieging the last bastion of Brazilian control in the Misiones Orientales at San Borja, Artigas’ army besieging Montevideo, and Jardim’s army trapped in Porto Alegre by roving bands of gauchos and slaves flying the Platine flag.
But Brazil was far from beat: the forces that had been diverted north because of the Pernambuco rebellion were rushing south once more and would be ready to reinforce the invading army soon, and while relatively small, Brazil’s absolute naval superiority meant that they could reinforce Jardim’s army trapped in Porto Alegre as easily as it could reinforce Lecor’s larger and more experienced army in Montevideo. And while the effects of Platine privateering was hurting Rio’s finances, the blockade of the River Plate was even more damaging to La Plata’s. Reluctantly at first, both sides began exchanging feelers for talks, and soon the British would be brought in to mediate an end to the war.
The Battle of Sarandí was the largest single defeat of a Brazilian army of the war so far, as the Platine Army grew bolder and more willing to attack in strength after years of small-scale skirmishing and hit-and-run attacks
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[1] ITTL, the order of events has been inverted: IOTL, the Battle of Juncal preceded the Battle of Monte Santiago, the attack on Ensenada from the previous update. ITTL, the Platine flotilla dispersed at Ensenada is a smaller part of the whole navy, while the battle of Juncal - which, as the update makes clear, still doesn’t actually affect Brazilian naval superiority - is relevant primarily as a morale boost and due to the improvement of the supply situation for Platine forces along the Uruguay and Paraná rivers.
[2] This is a bit of a retcon; as the Castelli-Viamonte structure showed, there was at least an attempt at politically balancing the military appointments, and I think it’s likely that Belgrano would have played a similar role to Viamonte (but inverting the partisan lean) in Saavedra’s army. IOTL, Belgrano lead the invasion rather than Saavedra, but ITTL, he’s attached but subordinate to the President of the Junta. The reforms in the Littoral provinces are from OTL.
[3] Based on OTL’s Battle of Sarandí from the Cisplatine War.
the funniest thing was that I was bent on keeping from getting Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope mixed up, so my mind was visualizing one making sure I didn't call it the other and so I just went with the continent name and got that wrong.
