Chapter 11 - A Decade of Revolution
A portrait of Manuel Belgrano, 2nd Secretary General of the United Provinces, during his time as Ambassador in London.
The United Provinces greeted the 10th anniversary of its Revolution with jubilant celebrations, holding that year’s elections in the middle of the high from the victory over Brazil and the expectation over the invasion of Perú. When the news that Lima had fallen to San Martin’s army on the 25th of May arrived in the middle of the elections, it brought a wave of delegates that sang the praises of the exploits of the Armies of the North and East in unison. For a brief moment, the divisions that had started splitting the delegates into Liberals and Federals seemed to disappear, and would send to the General Assembly both the most radical and liberal of their respective camps. Belgrano and Balcarce were reelected unanimously, and the whole country basked in the glow of the Revolution’s success.
But the regular business of government continued, and as Belgrano saw it, with the Royalist threat dealt with it was time to turn over a new leaf: among the slew of promotions and prizes for the Army of the North, there were instructions for San Martin to begin the process of demobilization of his forces. First San Martín then Balcarce protested: San Martin had been commissioned by Perú’s new government to support Guayaquil’s liberation of Quito, and they both considered the liberation of the continent incomplete as long as the Royalist army survived to threaten Perú.
Balcarce threatened to resign if Belgrano did not extend the Army of the North’s mission, but the Secretary General persisted: funding the invasion of Perú had already sapped the treasury, and with the Oriental Provinces in desperate need of reconstruction, Belgrano could not support maintaining 8,000 soldiers in the northern Andes for an indefinite amount of time. When Balcarce followed through on his threat and resigned in November of 1820, the fate of the Army of the North hung in the balance as Belgrano suddenly found himself in the middle of a debate that placed him at odds with his own allies in the Liberal camp while earning him the support of Littoral federalists, by far the most radical members of their party.
His erstwhile liberal coreligionists spearheaded by Monteagudo, rode the wave of popular support for the war to make him reconsider and force him to compromise: San Martin’s commission was extended, but the Army of the North was split in half. San Martín was ordered to divide the armies as he liked: he would proceed to succor Guayaquil at the head of the Army of the Andes, while a subordinate would return to Alto Perú with the rest of the Army of the North. But Belgrano seized on the opportunity to repay Balcarce for the resignation that precipitated the crisis: to disqualify him from returning as Supreme Director, Belgrano proposed that he be named commander of the Army of the North with San Martín heading to Guayaquil.
With Artigas still under commission as General of the Army of the East, there were no obvious candidates to succeed Balcarce as Supreme Director. The liberal faction would turn once more to a relatively obscure figure, whose primary qualification for the role was his popularity among the majority of liberal delegates at the Assembly: Nicolás Rodríguez Peña was elected as Supreme Director on January 15, 1821, bringing 3 months of political uncertainty to a close but unwittingly opening a new fault line that would further split the parties.
Rodríguez Peña’s appointment was met with a shrug from the rest of the country, which prompted critics of the long-time morenist domination of the General Assembly to complain that the post was meaningless if, when push came to shove, the Secretary General could exploit a vacancy to appoint a lackey - as Moreno had in 1812 - or a minnow - as Belgrano had engineered in 1820 - thanks to their control over a majority of the Assembly by virtue of their position.
By virtue of his prestige and his near-brush with the post himself, Artigas’ criticisms gained the widest circulation; a firm believer in federalism and the radical egalitarian and democratic tenets of the revolution, he complained in letters that it seemed as if Moreno’s allies in Buenos Aires “had a chest from which they pull the next man in uniform to parade in front of the Assembly, noting that “the same men cannot elect both of the highest positions in the country from the same room in the capital”. His solution was relatively straightforward: the Cabildos should elect the Supreme Director, just as they elected the members of the General Assembly.
Indeed, as far as the Federalist delegates were concerned, this was already the case: what had originally been a quixotic decision in the republic’s infancy became a tradition that soon undergirded a core belief, as the Littoral cabildos adopted the custom of voting to “instruct” their delegates to vote for a specific candidate for Supreme Director. But there was no requirement for this, and was confined to the Cabildos from the Paraná to Montevideo, with little sign that the custom caught on in the cabildos of the interior even as they voted for delegates who belonged to the same parties before it became a partisan issue in 1822.
The morenist response was, simply, that if the Cabildos were sovereign, and the Assembly represented the Cabildos, then the discussion was moot: the representatives of the Cabildos were just as legitimate as the Cabildos themselves they said, and closed ranks around the supremacy of the General Assembly. But as their majority implemented more policies that they considered vital for national consolidation, it caused tensions with its most radical northern members as those policies incorporated the concerns of the merchants and beneficiaries of state contracts and the lack of funds slowed the pace of land grants and gave way to bank loans.
The north’s shift away from the Liberals would be the death knell for its monopoly on power: without the afterglow of triumph and revolutionary fervor in 1822, the partisan divide roared back to life and the Liberal majority cratered. Manuel Belgrano was reelected with the thinnest margin in the body’s history until that point, and it would mark the first time that a competing name was voted upon concurrently: Tomás Guido, a one-time ally and private secretary of Mariano Moreno who had drifted away from the firebrand into the arms of the previous leader of the Federalist bloc, Gregorio Funes, fell only a handful of votes short of beating Belgrano for the post of General Secretary.
But the biggest shock came with the vote for Supreme Director: with votes against from northern Liberals, some of whom would switch parties to the Federal before the term was done, Rodríguez Peña was not reelected as Supreme Director. When Paso had been passed over for reelection, his name had been withdrawn before a majority could vote against him; his rejection came as a shock, especially when the Northern delegates informed the assembly that they had also received instructions from their cabildos: reelect Balcarce, who had grown immensely popular in the provinces of the north for his associations with Castelli and his continuation of San Martin’s policy of employing the army for civic projects.
Nicolás Rodriguez Peña, the short-lived 4th Supreme Director of the United Provinces. He would return to his private business as a merchant after his ignomious defeat.
Sensing an opportunity, the Federalists struck: throwing their votes in with the northern delegates, a stunned Manuel Belgrano noted the vote and had the order drafted and sent out for Balcarce to resign his commission and resume his position as Supreme Director. It would be a watershed moment in Platine politics, culminating in 1824 with the formalization of the process from cabildo to cabildo.
The General Assembly also continued to expand as its politics matured and developed: new delegates from northern cities like Atacama, Cobija, and La Laguna were joined by delegates from the newly recognized cabildos of San Borja, Fuerte Saavedra (renamed earlier in the year from Fort Borbón by the provincial assembly in Asunción) and Paysandú in the Littoral provinces and the creation of “frontier” cabildos in Formosa [1], Castellia[2], Carmen de Patagones and Bahia Blanca.
When the instructions from the Cabildos were tallied up in 1824, they returned a result that surprised even the winner: Artigas’ letters in defense of the proposal had earned him considerable fame across the country, and their circulation in conjunction with his earlier prescient warnings about the risk of Brazilian invasion - a drum he beat in frustrating solitude for two years before the federalist press took it up in the run up to the war in 1816 - turned him into a celebrity, especially among radicals who’d grown disillusioned with the more straightlaced style of Belgrano’s liberal governments. Like Balcarce in 1822, he was ordered to resign his commission and take the post of Supreme Director, although unlike Balcarce, Artigas only agreed after considerable cajoling from his own supporters to accept the job and step down as Commander of the Army of the East.
Fortunately for the restless war hero - who had criticized previous holders of the post as “sedentary” and “passive” - it would be a time of turbulence that suited his need for a more active role in day to day affairs perfectly. Chafing at his “confinement” in La Plata early into his term, 1825 would be a difficult year for the United Provinces: the continued strain of maintaining San Martin’s Army of the Andes, much reduced as it was, had significantly deteriorated the country’s financial outlook. A financial panic in London impacted La Plata especially hard, with the Natonal Bank of the United Provinces only spared from insolvency thanks to the silver from Potosí. But the crisis left the government with a shortage of hard cash, and by 1825, the amount of money it was paying in veterancy pensions had ballooned to uncontrollable levels.
To make matters worse, in many cases, the beneficiaries of the veterancy pensions remained active and were still paid as such: thousands of gauchos had joined the Revolutionary army throughout the years, and having fought as far afield as the outskirts of Quito for a decade and a half, many of them find the idea of returning to sustenance farming on someone else’s land thoroughly unappealing. When the General Assembly, short on cash, voted to pay them in promissory notes in 1825, hundreds rose up in open revolt.
Operating primarily in the interior of Uruguay, they weren’t a threat militarily, but for the same reason they’d been such valuable auxiliaries to Artigas, they were still an economic threat. Arguing that the national government was in arrears with them, they began to “collect” taxes themselves in the region, generally in the form of heads of cattle from the ranchers that had advanced into the territory in the Army of the East’s protective shadow. Artigas rode from La Plata to his old headquarters at Purificación del Hervidero, setting himself up temporarily in the old house he’d inhabited before in the middle of a small plateau overlooking the plains around him. Sending one rider to Montevideo to order the Army of the East to rally at his position and another to the rebels to parley, he waited and enjoyed the simple life he’d missed since being forced to relocate to the capital.
Artigas had set up his base and maintained an encampent at Purificación del Hervidero throughout his campaigns against the Royalists and Brazilians
The leaders from the rebellion - all of them veterans of Artigas’ army - arrived as his nephew camped with the Army of the East’s vanguard a day’s ride away. They pleaded with their old commander to support their cause, but as sympathetic as he was with their requests, he could not allow their transgressions - which had included raids against towns under the protection of his government - to continue. No matter how little blood had been spilled as a result, it was still too much blood for former brothers in arms to lose to one another.
The rebels hesitated, but Manuel Artigas’ arrival with several hundred lancers compelled them to negotiate. The deal they struck would be transformative, especially in how it changed the country’s relationship with its territorial claims on Chaco’s interior and to the south of the Pampas; taking advantage of the grounds around his former homestead, which had been granted to him in thanks for his services by the provincial government, he exchanged lots of land from his property for the members of the rebellion to settle on as long as they waived their pension.
This settlement would set the precedent for years to come: as more veterans returned home from the expedition in the Andes or simply retired from active duty, they were offered land on the frontier instead of a costly cash pension, and the pace of colonization of the border areas accelerated accordingly. Their military experience made them better settlers in regions like the north of Uruguay or the eastern shores of the Paraná, since they could withstand native raids that would send traditional settlers running.
Settlement increased faster than just this national-level decision could explain, however: travel from the Alto to Asunción along the Pilcomayo increased faster than could be explained by just the settlement of criollos and gauchos, while the frontier in the interior of Buenos Aires also outstripped what the trickle of veterans could provide. The explanation lies in the provincial militias: an important part of Platine political life in the early days of the revolution and a vital source of manpower as the fighting dragged on. Too large to dismiss in Buenos Aires, and too far removed from civilian life in the North or the Littoral, they proved instead to be fruitful sources of manpower as the provinces pushed the border into the hinterland.
Guaraní settlers spread from Misiones and Paraguay, Quechua settlers trickled south into the plains of Chaco, and to the south of Buenos Aires, the coastal forts built in colonial times grew and were supplemented in the interior by newer fortified colonies manned by veterans of the revolutionary wars. The Platine navy, which had grown at a remarkable pace with the end of the war with Brazil, fueled a migratory boom of its own: timber-harvesting colonies spread to feed the booming shipyards of Corrientes, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, which worked tirelessly to provide the navy with new ships to supply the increasingly far-flung outposts along the Atlantic coast.
Artigas’ resolution of the conflict was transformative politically as well: it gave the position of Supreme Director an authority of its own that it had lacked under previous holders of the office, most of them overshadowed by the Secretary Generals they served alongside with. While he had rallied the army and showed a willingness to use force to restore order, his personal prestige had also allowed him to bring the conflict to a peaceful resolution that simultaneously strengthened and extended the country’s borders.
While he remained stubbornly unaffiliated, openly and proudly fraternizing with liberal and federalist delegates alike, the Federal party benefited most from his popularity, upending the political landscape in 1826 when they finally scored a narrow majority of their own. Manuel Belgrano’s impossible balancing act had finally come crashing down around him as the tensions between the two different strains of radicals in his own supporters exploded: the Liberal delegates that supported him for his land reform policies abandoned him as he was forced to give ground to pressures from monied interests in the heartland, while the Federal delegates that had once sympathized with him blamed his (and Moreno’s) policies for the Panic of 1825 and the rebellion it had caused.
After coming close in 1822, Tomás Guido became the first Secretary General of a different party in 1826, although the country would still have to wait to break Buenos Aires’ monopoly on the post. The bloc of delegates that elected him was as heterogeneous as the one that had elected Moreno for the first time, slowly revealing the hidden fissures within the Federal coalition as they exercised power nationally. The party had formed primarily as a vehicle to oppose the Morenist agenda in all its radicalism and perceived centralism; radical egalitarians celebrated alongside dough faced conservatives from the interior, united first in their distrust of Mariano Moreno and his cadre of porteños and then in their shared desire to loosen the reins of national power over the provinces and their cabildos.
As he had in his first term, Artigas grew bored with life in the Capital, and secured from the newly formed Federal government a special dispensation that inaugurated a new period in Platine history: taking to the field as Commander in Chief as opposed to General, he “joined” an armed expedition led by his nephew to the south, leading the country’s first campaign to “tame the desert” of the Pampas[3].
Artigas would lead the largest Platine expedition into the southern Pampas since independence.[4]
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[1] Same place as OTL’s Formosa, downstream from Asunción on the opposite shore of the Paraguay and halfway between the Pilcomayo and Bermejo rivers.
[2] Located at the location of OTL’s Resistencia, Chaco, opposite the city of Corrientes.
[3] Everything I’ve read so far about Artigas leads me to believe it would be very in character for him to seek new excuses to leave the capital and do literally anything else but sit around and wait for things to get done. It also seems characteristic of his beliefs IOTL to support a military expedition in support of frontier settlements, which were getting their start IOTL around this time as well.
[4] The upcoming campaign will generally be based on the Rosas expedition of the early 1830s, the one this painting represents.
