Civilization and Barbarism/Chapter 4

by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

CHAPTER IV.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1810.

"When the battle opens, the Tartar utters a terrible cry, closes, vanishes, and returns like a flash of lightning."—Victor Hugo.

I Have been obliged to traverse the whole of the route hitherto pursued, in order to reach the point at which our drama begins. It is needless to consider at length the character, object, and end, of the Revolution of Independence.

They were the same throughout America, and sprang from the same source, namely, the progress of European ideas. South America pursued that course because all other nations were pursuing it. Books, events, and the impulses given by these, induced South America to take part in the movement imparted to France by North American demands for liberty, and to Spain by her own and by French writers. But what my object requires me to notice, is, that the revolution except in its external symbolic independence of the king was interesting and intelligible only to the Argentine cities, but foreign and unmeaning to the rural districts. Books, ideas, municipal spirit, courts, laws, statutes, education, all the points of contact and union existing between us and the people of Europe, were to be found in the cities, where there was a basis of organization, incomplete and comparatively evil, perhaps, for the very reason it was incomplete, and had not attained the elevation which it felt itself capable of reaching, but it entered into the revolution with enthusiasm. Outside the cities, the revolution was a problematical affair, and so far as shaking off the king's authority was shaking off judical authority, it was acceptable. The pastoral districts could only regard the question from this point of view. Liberty, responsibility of power, and all the questions which the revolution was to solve, were foreign to their mode of life and to their needs. But they derived this advantage from the revolution, that it tended to confer an object and an occupation upon the excess of vital force, the presence of which among them has been pointed out, and was to add a broader base of union than that to which throughout the country districts the men daily resorted. These Spartan constitutions, that warlike nature hitherto ill-satisfied by the free use of the dagger, that Roman-like idleness which could only be exchanged for the activity of a battle-field, that utter impatience of judicial control, were all to have at last a fit sphere of action in the world.

Revolutionary movements then began in Buenos Ayres, and the call met with a decided response from all the interior cities. The pastoral districts became unsettled and joined in the movement. Tolerably disciplined armies were raised in Buenos Ayres to be sent to Upper Peru and Montevideo, where the Spanish forces under General Vigodet were stationed. General Rondeau laid siege to Montevideo with a disciplined army, and Artigas, a noted chieftain, took part in the siege with some thousands of gauchos. Artigas had been a formidable outlaw till 1804, when the civil authorities of Buenos Ayres succeeded in bringing him over and inducing him to undertake the duties of country commandant, as a supporter of the same authorities upon whom he had, till then, made war. If the reader has not forgotten the baqueano, and the general requisites of a country commandant, he will readily understand the character and feelings of Artigas. After a time, Artigas and his gauchos withdrew from General Rondeau, and began to make war upon him.

The latter's position was the same as Oribe's when he conducted the siege of Montevideo while taking care of another enemy at his rear. The only difference between the cases is that Artigas was hostile at once to patriats and royalists. It is not my purpose to determine with precision the causes or pretexts which occasioned this rupture, and I am as little disposed to apply to it any designation from the language of politics, for none such would be appropriate. When a nation engages in a revolution, it is begun by the conflict of two opposing interests, the revolutionary and the conservative; among us the names of patriots and royalists were applied to the corresponding parties. It is natural for the victors, after their triumph, to separate into moderate and extreme factions, one set wishing to carry out all the consequences of the revolution, while their opponents seek to restrain it within certain bounds. It is also characteristic of revolutions for the originally conquered party to renew its organization, and to find a means of success in the dissensions of its conquerors. But when one of the parties called to the aid of a revolution, immediately loses its connection with the others, forms a third entity, and shows hostility indiscriminately to both combatants (royalists and patriots), this detached party is heterogeneous, not having been conscious of existence until that time, the revolution having served to develop it and make it known.

This was the element set in motion by the renowned Artigas. It was a blind tool, but a tool full of life and of instincts hostile to European civilization and to all regular organization; opposed to monarchy as to republicanism, because both came from the city and possessed already order and reverence for authority. This tool was employed by the various parties, principally by that least revolutionary, in the civilized cities, until in the course of time the very men who had summoned it to their aid, yielded to it; and with them fell the city, its ideas, its literature, its colleges, its tribunals, its civilization!

This spontaneous movement of the pastoral districts was so ingenuous in its first manifestations, so full of genius and expression in its spirit and tendencies, that its adoption and baptism by the parties of the cities, with the political names which divided them, makes the sincerity of the latter appear in the most unfavorable light. The force which supported Artigas in Entre Rios, did the same for Lopez in Santa Fé, for Ibarra in Santiago, for Facundo in the Llanos. Its essence was individual action; its exclusive weapon, the horse; its stage, the vast pampas. The Bedouin hordes which in our day disturb the Algerian frontier by their war-cries and depredations, gives an exact idea of the Argentine montonera, which has been made use of by men of sagacity, as well as by noted desperadoes. In Africa, at the present day, there exists the same struggle between civilization and barbarism; the goom and the montonera are distinguished by the same characters, the same spirit, the same undisciplined strategy. Immense masses of horsemen wander in each case over the wilderness, offering battle to the disciplined forces of the cities, if they feel themselves the stronger party; dispersing in all directions like clouds of Cossacks, if the fight is even, to unite again; and fall unexpectedly upon their sleeping foes, snatch away their horses, and kill their laggards and advanced parties. Ever at hand, but too much scattered to be successfully attacked, impotent in battle, but powerful and invincible in an extensive region, they finally decimate and overpower an organized force by means of skirmishes, surprises, fatigues, and privations.

The montonera, as it appeared under the command of Artigas in the early days of the Republic, already showed that character of brutal ferocity and the promise of a reign of terror, which it was reserved for the immortal bandit, the Buenos Ayres land-owner, to convert into a legislative system applied to a civilized society, and to present to the contemplation of Europe, to the shame and disgrace of America. Rosas invented nothing; his talent was only that of copying his predecessors and combining the brutal instincts of the ignorant masses into a coolly planned system.

The thongs made of Colonel Maciel's skin, and by command of Rosas converted into a pair of manacles, have been actually seen by foreign officials, an outrage not without its precedent, under the rule of Artigas and the other barbarous and Tartaric chiefs of the time. The montonera of Artigas waistcoated its enemies; that is, sewed them up in an envelope of raw hide, and left them in the fields in this condition.

The reader may imagine all the horrors of this slow death, and this horrible punishment was repeated in 1836, in the case of a colonel in the army. The infliction of death by cutting the throat with a knife instead of by shooting, is the result of the butcherly instinct which led Rosas to encourage cruelty, to give -executions a more barbarous form which he thought would give pleasure to the assassins; in other words, he changed the legal punishments recognized by civil society, for others which he called American, and in the name of which he invited his fellow-Americans to come forward in his defense when the sufferings of Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay invoked the aid of the European powers to assist in their liberation from the cannibal, who was even then overrunning them with his sanguinary hordes. It is impossible to maintain the calmness needed to investigate historic truth when we 'are forced to remember at every step that America and Europe have been so long successfully deluded by a system of assassination and cruelty, scarcely tolerated in the African provinces of Ashantee or Dahomey.

Such is the character presented by the montonera from its first appearance; a singular kind of warfare and civil polity, unprecedented except among the tribes of the Asiatic plains, and not to be confounded with the habits, ideas, and customs of the Argentine cities, which were, like all South American cities, a continuation of European civilization, and especially that of Spain.

The only explanation of the montonera is to be discovered by the examination of the society from which it proceeded. Artigas, the baqueano and outlaw, at war with the authorities of the city, but bought over as provincial commandant and chief of equestrian bands, presents a type reproduced with little change in each provincial commandant who came to be a partisan leader. Like all civil wars in which deep differences of education, belief, and motives divide the parties engaged in them, the internal warfare of the Argentine Republic was long and obstinate, until one of the elements of the strife was victorious. The Argentine Revolutionary War was twofold: 1st, a civilized warfare of the cities against Spain; 2d, a war against the cities on the part of the country chieftains with the view of shaking off all political subjection and satisfying their hatred of civilization. The cities overcame the Spaniards, and were in their turn overcome by the country districts. This is the explanation of the Argentine Revolution, the first shot of which was fired in 1810, and the last is still to be heard.

I will not enter into all the details of this contest. The struggle was of various duration in different places; some cities yielded at first, others later. The life of Facundo Quiroga will afford us an opportunity of displaying this strife in all its naked deformity. What I have now to notice is that the triumph of these chiefs involved the disappearance of all civil order, even as it existed among the Spaniards. In some places it has totally disappeared; in others only in part, but it is clearly on its way to destruction. The mass of men are incapable of distinctly comparing one epoch with another; the present moment is the only one embraced by their observation; and for this reason no one has yet observed this destruction and decadence of the cities; just as the visible progress of the people of the interior to total barbarism escapes notice. Buenos Ayres has so many of the elements of European civilization that it will end by educating Rosas and repressing his bloody and barbarous instincts. The high position which he occupies, his relations with European governments, the necessity of respecting strangers and of denying through the press the atrocities he has committed, in order to escape universal reprobation, all combine to check his outrages,—a perceptible advantage.

Four cities have already been annihilated by the rule of the partisan supporters of Rosas: Santa Fé, Santiago del Estero, San Luis, and La Rioja. Santa Fé, situated at the junction of the Paraná and another navigable river, the mouth of which is close by the town, is one of the most favored spots of South America, and yet contains less than two thousand souls; San Luis, the capital of a province with a population of fifty thousand, in which it is the only city, contains less than fifteen hundred.

To make the ruin and decadence of civilization and the rapid progress of barbarism perceptible to the reader, I must select two cities—one already annihilated, the other insensibly proceeding towards barbarism—La Rioja and San Juan. La Rioja was formerly a city of some account, but its own sons would fail to recognize it in its present condition. When the revolution of 1810 began, it contained a large number of capitalists, and men of note, who have figured in a distinguished manner in arms, at the bar, on the bench, or in the pulpit. From Rioja came Dr. Castro Barros, deputy to the Congress of Tucuman, and a celebrated divine; General Davila, who freed Copiapo from the Spanish power in 1817; Gabriel Ocampo, one of the most noted members of the Argentine bar; and a large number of advocates of the families Ocampo, Davila, and Garcia, at present scattered over the Chilian territory, as well as various priests of much learning, among whom is Dr. Gordillo, actual curate of Huasco.

The ability of a province to produce in a given epoch so many eminent and illustrious men, proves the diffusion of learning among a greater number of individuals, and that it was respected and desired. If such was the case in the early days of the revolution, what an increase of enlightenment, wealth, and population, might we not expect to find now, if a fearful retrogression towards barbarism had not checked the development of that unfortunate people! What Chilian city, however insignificant, is there, in which no progress has been made during a period of ten years, in enlightenment, wealth, and elegance, even if we include among these such as have been destroyed by earthquakes?

Let us now look at the condition of La Rioja, as exhibited by the answers given to one of the many inquiries I have instituted for the purpose of gaining a thorough knowledge of the facts on which I base my theories. These are the statements of a reliable person, who was unacquainted with my object in investigating his memory of matters which must have been fresh in his mind, for it was only four months before that he left Rioja.^[1]

1. What is about the actual amount of the population of Rioja city?

Ans. About fifteen hundred souls. It is said that only fifteen adult males reside in the city.

2. How many persons of note live in it?

Ans. Six or eight in the city.

3. How many lawyers' offices are open there?

Ans. None.

4. How many men wear dress-coats?

Ans. None.

5. How many young men from La Rioja are studying at Cordova or Buenos Ayres?

Ans. I know of only one.

6. How many schools are there, and how many children attend them?

Ans. None.

7. Are there any public charitable institutions?

Ans. None, nor any means for the simplest instruction. The only Franciscan ecclesiastic of the place has given instruction to some children.

8. How many of the churches are in ruins?

Ans. Five; the Matriz is the only one at all serviceable.

9. Are new houses building?

Ans. Not one, nor are people making any of the needed repairs.

10. Are the existing houses going to ruins?

Ans. Almost all, owing to the frequency with which the streets are flooded.

11. How many priests in orders are there?

Ans. Only two young men in the city: one is a secular curate, the other an ecclesiastic of Catamarca.

There are four others in the province. 12. Are there any fortunes of fifty thousand dollars? and how many of twenty thousand?

Ans. None; all the people are extremely poor.

13. Has the population increased or diminished?

Ans. It has diminished by more than one half.

14. Is there any feeling of terror prevalent among the people?

Ans. A very strong one; there is a fear of uttering even harmless words.

15. Is the money coined of full value?

Ans. That of the province is debased.

These facts speak with all their sad and fearful severity. The only example of so rapid a decline towards barbarism is presented by the history of the Mohammedan conquests of Greece. And this happens in America, and in the nineteenth century, and is the work of but twenty years!

What is true of La Rioja is equally so of Santa Fé, San Luis, and Santiago del Estero, which have become skeletons of cities, decrepit and devastated, mere apologies for towns. In San Luis there has been but one priest for ten years past, and for the same period it has contained no school, nor any person who wears a dress-coat. But let us judge by San Juan the fate of the cities which have escaped destruction, but in which barbarism is insensibly increasing.

San Juan is an exclusively agricultural and commercial province. Its want of open country has long kept it free from the rule of the provincial chieftains. Whatever party was in power, its governor and officials were taken from the educated part of its population until 1833, when Facundo Quiroga placed a man of the lower class in possession of the government. This person, unable to avoid the influence of the civilized usages, went over to the party of culture and yielded to their dictations, until he was overthrown by Brizuela, chief of La Rioja. Brizuela was succeeded by General Benavides, whose power has lasted nine years, and has come to seem rather his own property than a magistracy held for a term. San Juan has grown in population,—owing to the progress of agriculture there, and to the emigrants driven by hunger and wretchedness from La Rioja and San Luis,—and its buildings have sensibly increased in number; facts which prove the natural wealth of the region, and the progress that might be made under a government which cared to foster education and culture, the sole methods of elevating a nation.

The despotism of Benavides is mild and pacific, so that men's minds are kept quiet and calm. He is the only subordinate of Rosas who has not reveled in blood; but this does not lessen the tendency to barbarism inherent in the present system.

All the courts are held by men destitute of the slightest knowledge of law, worthless in every sense. There is no military man who has served in regular armies outside the Republic.^[2] Is it credible that such an inferior position is naturally that of a city of the interior? No, the past proves the contrary. Twenty years ago San Juan was one of the most civilized towns of the interior; and what must be the decline and prostration of a South American city which has to look back twenty years for its time of prosperity!

In 1831 two hundred heads of families, youths, educated men, advocates, soldiers, and other of its citizens, emigrated to Chili, Copiapo, Coquimbo, Valparaiso; and other parts of that Republic are still full of these noble victims of proscription, among whom are capitalists, intelligent miners, merchants, farmers, lawyers, and physicians. As at the Babylonian dispersion, none of them have yet been able to return to see the promised land. A second set of emigrants left the city in 1840, never to return.

San Juan had been, before these days, rich enough in distinguished men to give to the celebrated Congress of Tucuman a President of the capacity and rank of Dr. Laprida, who was afterwards assassinated by the Aldaos; a prior to the Recoleta Dominica of Chili, in the person of the distinguished sage and patriot Oro, afterwards Bishop of San Juan. An illustrious patriot, Don Ignacio de fa Rosa, who, in conjunction with San Martin, prepared the expedition to aid Chili, and who scattered through his country the seeds of the equality of classes promised by the Revolution, was also a citizen of San Juan; as were a minister of the government of Rivadavia, Dr. Carril; a minister of the Argentine Legation, Don Domingo Oro, whose diplomatic talents are yet insufficiently appreciated; a deputy to the Congress of 1826, the enlightened priest Vera; a deputy to the convention of Santa Fé, in the presbyter Oro, an orator of note; one to that of Cordova, Don Rudecindo Rojo, as eminent for his talents and genius for industrial pursuits as for his great learning; and, among others, General Rojo, a soldier in the army, who saved two provinces by suppressing conspiracies, which he did solely by his quiet determination of character, and of whom General Paz, a competent judge of such matters, said, that he bade fair to be one of the first generals of the Republic. San Juan then possessed a theatre and a permanent company of actors.

There are still in existence the remains of six or seven private libraries, which comprised the most valuable books of the eighteenth century, and translations of the best Greek and Latin works. I had no other instruction up to 1836 than that afforded me by these rich, though partially destroyed libraries. San Juan had so many illustrious men in 1825 that the House of Representatives contained six noted orators. Let the wretched peasants who now^[3] disgrace the House of Representatives of San Juan, within which have been heard such eloquent speeches and such elevated sentiments, turn from the record of those times and flee abashed at the profanation of that august sanctuary by their diatribes!

The judicial chairs and the administrative offices were then occupied by educated men, and a sufficient number remained to plead the causes of others.

The elegance of manners, the refinement of customs, the cultivation of literature, the great commercial interests, the public spirit which animated the people,—all announced to foreigners the existence of a society of culture advancing rapidly to the attainment of a distinguished rank, and justified the following estimate of San Juan given to America and Europe through the London press:—

"They are showing the strongest inclination to advance in civilization, and this city is regarded at present as only second to Buenos Ayres in the progress of social reform. Various institutions lately established in Buenos Ayres have been adopted at San Juan on a scale proportionate to its size, and the people have made extraordinary progress in ecclesiastical reform, incorporating all the monastic orders with the secular clergy, and suppressing the convents of the latter."

But the state of primary education will give the best idea of the culture of the period we are considering. No portion of the Argentine Republic has been more distinguished by its anxiety for the diffusion of knowledge than San Juan, nor have more complete results been obtained elsewhere. The government, not satisfied with the capacity of the men of the province for the fulfillment of so important a duty, sent in 1815 for a person uniting competent learning and high morals from Buenos Ayres. Some gentlemen of the name of Rodriguez accordingly came to San Juan. These were three brothers worthy of ranking with the first families of the country, with whom they became connected, such was their merit, and such were the many excellent qualities they possessed. My present profession as superintendent of primary education, and my study of such subjects, enable me to say that if ever any parallel to the celebrated Dutch schools described by M. Cousin, occurred in Spanish America, it was in the school of San Juan. The moral and religious instruction was perhaps superior to the elementary teaching given there; and to this cause I attribute the small number of crimes committed in San Juan, and the moderate conduct of Benavides himself, who like most of the present citizens of San Juan, was educated in that famous school, where the pupils were indoctrinated into the precepts of morality with special care.

If these pages reach the hands of Don Ignacio and Don Roque Rodriguez, I trust they will accept this feeble homage, due, as I believe, to the eminent service done to the culture and morality of a whole city, in connection with their late brother, Don José.^[4]

Such is the history of the Argentine cities. They can all claim past glory, civilization, and distinction. For the present they are borne down to the level of barbarism, and this barbarism of the interior has succeeded in penetrating even to the streets of Buenos Ayres.

From 1810 to 1840 the provinces which contained such civilized cities, were yet sufficiently barbarous to destroy by their propensities the colossal work of the Revglution of Independence! Now that nothing is left of what men, enlightenment, and institutions they once held, what will become of them? Ignorance and its consequence, poverty, are waiting like carrion birds for the last gasp of the cities of the interior to devour their prey, and to convert them into fields and pastures. Buenos Ayres may again become what it was; for there European civilization has such strength that it must maintain itself in spite of the brutality of the government. But what can the provinces depend upon? Two centuries will not suffice for their restoration to the path they have abandoned, if the present generation shall educate their children in the barbarism which they have reached. Are we now asked for what we are contending? We are contending for the restoration of their former life, and the promise of improvement to the cities.

1. Dr. Don Manuel Ignacio Castro Barros, canon of the Cordova Cathedral.
2. From 1845, when this book was written, to the present date, a salutary reaction occurred in the province of San Juan. It now contains one male and one female academy, and the Honorable House of Representatives has just proclaimed primary education for both sexes a public institution of the province. More than twenty youths are studying in Buenos Ayres, Cordova, and Chili, for the professions of law or medicine. Music and drawing have become quite frequent accomplishments for both sexes, and the artisans and other grades of society dress by reference in civilized costume, which is a sign of a satisfactory direction of the public mind to the improvement of its condition.
3. 1845
4. A detailed account of the system and organization of this public educational establishment will be found in Popular Education, a special work devoted to that subject, and the fruit of my journey to Europe and the United States, undertaken by order of the Chilian government.