The Emancipation of South America/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Disobedience of San Martin.
1819—1820.
Three great duties pressed upon San Martin when he withdrew a part of his army to the east of the Andes. First, the prosecution of his plans for the liberation of America; second, his duty as a soldier to support the constituted authorities of his country in a time of civil war; and third, his duty as an Argentine in view of the expected expedition from Spain against the River Plate.
His opinion was in respect to the first, "that if the expedition to Peru is not carried out, everything will go to the devil;" in regard to the second, he had an invincible repugnance to mix himself up in internecine strife; in regard to the third, he could fight against Spain just as well on the West coast as on the East.
Thus, when he had procured through the Lodge authority from the central government to proceed with his plans, he thought only of how to carry them out, but fears of the expedition from Spain for some time yet perturbed all his combinations.
The Court of Spain thought with this new expedition of 20,000 men against Buenos Ayres to strike a mortal blow at the heart of the revolution in South America; but matters had changed considerably since the year 1815, when the last great expedition under Morillo, originally intended for Buenos Ayres, had been diverted to Venezuela. The insurrection had made great progress, and above all, Portugal was no longer the ally of Spain, and had seized Monte Video, which was the necessary base of any operations against Buenos Ayres. Further, the war against the colonies was very unpopular in Spain, not only among the people but in the army.
In spite of all this, the preparations were pushed forward. Six ships of the line, thirteen frigates, three corveties, ten brigs, three schooners, twenty-nine gunboats, and forty transports, with from 18,000 to 20,000 troops, were under orders to rendezvous at Cadiz, under command of the Count of Abisbal, better known to history as José O'Donnell.
The Argentine Government had secret agents in Cadiz, who kept them well informed of all that went on. These men reported great discontent among the troops in cantonments on the island of Leon, and that there was a conspiracy on foot to proclaim the Constitution of the year XII., in which most of the superior officers were implicated.
General O'Donnell, aided by General Sarsfield, affected to join the conspiracy in order to discover the plan of it, but when it was on the eve of breaking out, issued a proclamation to the troops, calling upon them to adhere to their allegiance, and promising them, among other rewards for their loyalty, that they should not be sent to America. The leaders of the conspiracy were without difficulty arrested, but the projected expedition was thus prevented from sailing. In July, 1819, yellow fever broke out in the army; but in spite of all this, Government was still resolved to send off the expedition. The Count of Calderon was put in command, and the Minister of Marine was instructed, in September, to embark the troops at once.
In July of this same year 1819, General Rondeau was, by the influence of the Lautaro Lodge, appointed Supreme Director of the United Provinces in place of Pueyrredon. This was merely a change of names, the reins of power remained as before in the hands of the oligarchy which had ruled for so many years. One of the first acts of the new Government was to send for San Martin to come to Buenos Ayres, to consult on the measures to be adopted in view of the threatened expedition from Spain. San Martin was himself full of apprehension, but without consulting his own Government, he proposed to O'Higgins that the Chilian squadron, under Cochrane, and in the pay of the Argentine Government, should sail to meet the expedition on the Atlantic and destroy it in the open sea, offering to pay at once 50,000 dollars towards the expenses.
This scheme would, he thought, have great attraction for the enterprising spirit of the Admiral, but Cochrane, bent upon destroying the Spanish fleet at Callao, would not listen to it until the business in hand was accomplished, when there would, he said, be ample time yet to meet the new fleet on the Atlantic and blow them to pieces with his Congreve rockets.
In answer to a second letter from Rondeau in August. San Martin offered to march with 4,000 men, of whom 3,000 would be cavalry, to drive the Spaniards into the river, as he had done before at San Lorenzo; "with sixteen squadrons and thirty light field pieces we can be sure of victory."
In October news was received in Buenos Ayres that O'Donnell had rebelled against the Spanish Government, and had marched with the army of Cadiz upon Madrid. This news was false, but it had the effect of causing Rondeau to countermand the orders for the concentration of the army.
Meantime the truce between the central Government and the Gaucho chieftains of the interior had come to an end, Ramirez from Entre Rios, and Artigas from the Banda Oriental, had joined hands with Lopez of Santa Fé, and war had again broken out on the northern frontier of Buenos Ayres. For the third time Government looked to San Martin for help, and ordered him to Buenos Ayres, with the division quartered at Mendoza. Just at the same time he received advices from Chile that all was ready for the proposed expedition to Peru. San Martin hesitated, but wrote to Government that he was about to march to Buenos Ayres with 2,000 cavalry and eight guns, but should leave his infantry in Alendoza. One battalion of infantry was quartered in San Juan, the grenadiers were in San Luis, and his total force of regular troops in Cuyo was now raised by recruiting to 2,200 men, besides which he had called out the militia of San Luis to the number of 2,000 men.
The idea of Government was to concentrate the whole army in the Province of Buenos Ayres to the number of 8,000 or 10,000 men, ready to act either against the Spaniards or against the Gaucho hordes, but as the latter numbered only 1,500, it was a most cowardly measure to abandon the northern frontier, menaced by the Royalists of Upper Peru, and to break the terms of the alliance with Chile, and could only have ended in the isolation of Buenos Ayres from the rest of the provinces. The civil war was a spontaneous effervescence of the people, and could not be cured by the sabre. It arose not only from the semibarbarous instincts of the masses, but also from the discontent of the more educated classes with a political system which was not in accordance with the principles of the Revolution, and this discontent permeated the ranks of the army itself.
Rondeau, in pursuance of his plan, took the field with the Army of Buenos Ayres, and marched to the northern frontier of the Province, against the Gaucho hordes, seeking a junction with the Army of the North, coming from Cordoba. His army alone was superior in number to the enemy. Why, then, did he send for another army from Cuyo?
The real object of this concentration was that Gomez, the Argentine envoy in Paris, had entered into an arrangement with the French Government to crown the Duke of Luca, a Prince of the House of Bourbon, King of the United Provinces; France engaging on her part to divert the projected expedition from the River Plate, and to secure the acquiescence of Portugal and the evacuation of the Banda Oriental by marrying the future king to a Brazilian Princess. Congress, setting at naught the Republican constitution so lately sworn, and without any attempt to consult the will of the people, sanctioned this arrangement in secret session, and on the 12th November authorised their agent to conclude the treaty. As the Spanish expedition would thus be set free to act against Mexico, Venezuela, or New Granada, or to reinforce the Government of Peru, this was an act of treachery to the programme of the revolution and a desertion of the cause of America.
Rondeau was the last weak representative of the centralized system of government, which had so far led the revolution; now the Argentine people took the matter into their own hands, and by civil strife crushed out the last remnant of the colonial system. Now was heard for the first time among them the word Federation. The people, groaning under a load of taxation to supply revenues in the disposal of which they had no voice, found the domination of Buenos Ayres equally oppressive with that of Spain, and gave a new interpretation to the word liberty: they now construed it to mean provincial independence.
At the close of the year 1819 the Army of the Andes was the only Argentine representative of the American propaganda. Stationed on foreign soil, it had escaped the contagion of party spirit, which had infected all the other armies of the Republic, and was ready to follow its great captain whithersoever he should choose to lead it.
Still San Martin hesitated. To obey Rondeau was to plunge into civil strife, to the destruction of his great plan; his regard for discipline impelled him to obey at any cost. He had already given orders to march, when news reached him that the Province of Tucuman had declared itself independent; that the army under Belgrano had mutinied and imprisoned its general; and that there was a similar conspiracy on foot in Cordoba among the officers of the army there, which had ramifications even in Cuyo.
He was suffering severely at the time from rheumatism, and leaving Alvarado in command of the division in Cuyo, he retired to the baths of Cauquenes in Chile, after writing to Rondeau that in view of these complications he had postponed the departure of the army until further orders; but before that he had written to O'Higgins asking him to collect mules in the valley of Aconcagua, in readiness for the day when he should recross the Andes.
Neither Rondeau nor Congress seem to have had any idea of the true state of affairs; they still thought that they could control public opinion by force, and the answer to the despatch from San Martin was a fresh order to him to march at once with all his army to Buenos Ayres. To this San Martin replied by sending in his resignation for the third time. Government refused to accept it, but gave him leave of absence until his health was restored.
The conduct of San Martin at this time has been very severely criticised, but there is no question that his 2,000 men would have been of no real assistance to Government, which fell a victim to its own errors and incapacity; and it is equally unquestionable that without him the expedition to Peru would never have set out. Without his co-operation the success of Bolívar in Columbia is highly problematical, and it is certain that had the Royalists been able to send another expedition from Upper Peru, they would have met no effective resistance in the northern provinces of what is now the Argentine Republic.
San Martin took upon himself the "terrible responsibility" of this disobedience, an act by which the accomplishment of the mission of emancipation which the Argentine people had undertaken was finally secured. Condemned by his contemporaries, he appeals to the judgment of posterity.