The South American Republics. Thomas Cleland Dawson
the way for obtaining foreign help, and negotiations were continued with a view to inducing some European prince to accept the throne.
Artigas, the independent military chieftain of Uruguay and Entre Rios, attacked in 1813 the Missions to the left of Upper Uruguay which the Rio Grande Brazilians had seized twelve years before. He was defeated by the troops of John VI., who followed him into Uruguay proper and in 1816 captured Montevideo. Though the Buenos Aireans had been compelled to concede Uruguay's independence, this movement excited among them an intense jealousy of the Portuguese. The scheme for a Braganza monarch at once became unpopular and impracticable.
The taciturn general in Cuyo was, however, preparing a thunderbolt that would clear the Argentine sky of all these clouds except that most portentous of all—civil war. After three years of incessant preparation, San Martin believed that his army was ready to undertake the great campaign. Though it numbered only four thousand men, it was the most efficient body of troops that ever gathered on South American soil. Among the Argentine contingent were the picked youth of Buenos Aires and the provinces—reckless, enthusiastic youths whose ambition, patriotism, or love of adventure made them willing to follow anywhere San Martin might dare to lead. Not inferior to their white comrades were the manumitted negroes. The cruelest charges and the heaviest losses fell to their lot and few of them ever returned over the Andes. The Chilean exiles were picked men—those who preferred death to submission, or who had offended so deeply that their only hope of seeing their homes was to return sword in hand. This force had been drilled and instructed in all the art of war as practised during the Napoleonic era by San Martin himself, a veteran soldier of the great European campaigns—one who had fought with Wellington and against Massena and Soult. He was indefatigable in attending to details, and he seems to have foreseen everything. The last months were spent in preparing rations of parched corn and dried beef; in gathering mules for mountain transportation, and in making sledges to be used on the slopes which were too steep for cannon on wheels. The most careful calculations were made of the distances to be traversed; every route was surveyed; spies were in every pass; the Spaniards were kept in uncertainty as to which of the numerous passes along hundreds of miles of frontier would be used for the attack. San Martin's real intentions were not revealed by him even to the members of his staff until the very eve of the advance.
When summer came in 1817, and all the passes were freed from snow, he was ready. In the middle of January he broke camp at Mendoza and divided his army into two divisions. Directly to the west was the Uspallata Pass, then as now the usual route between western Argentina and central Chile. Its Chilean outlet opens into the plain of Aconcagua, which is north of Santiago and only separated from that capital by one transverse spur of the Andes. Off to the north was the more difficult pass of Patos, its eastern entrance also easily accessible from Mendoza, though by a longer detour, and opening at its other end into the same valley of Aconcagua. The smaller of the two divisions was to advance over the Uspallata Pass, so timing its movements as to reach the open ground of the Aconcagua valley at the same time as the larger division, which, under San Martin himself, went to the north around the Patos route. The Spaniards had a guard at the summit of the Uspallata Pass, but the advance troops of the Argentines charged it. Before re-enforcements could come up, the division was over and advancing confidently down the cañon on the Chilean side. Had the Spaniards sent up a force sufficient to prevent the Uspallata division from debouching on to the Aconcagua plain it would have been caught in a trap. The second division could have bottled it up from below by leaving a small body at the mouth of the cañon. But before the Spanish commander had made up his mind what to do, news came that another army was rapidly coming down the valley leading into the Aconcagua valley from the north. Disconcerted by this attack from an unexpected direction, the Spanish commander hastened off with an inadequate force to repel it. He did not reach a defensible point in time; his vanguard was defeated and he retreated along the highroad to Santiago, leaving San Martin to reunite his two divisions at his leisure in the broad Aconcagua plain. Though the army had crossed the Andes over two of the loftiest and steepest passes in the world, so admirably had all dispositions been made that hardly a stop was necessary to refit and recruit. Artillery and cavalry, as well as infantry, were ready within four days after reaching the Chilean side to take up the pursuit of the Spaniards.
Marco, the Spanish governor, had not had sufficient time to concentrate his scattered regiments since the first news had come that San Martin was coming in force by the northern passes. Of his five thousand men only two thousand were able to get between San Martin's advance and Santiago. The Argentine general was sure of having the largest numbers at the point of conflict, but the Spanish troops were veterans of the Peninsula and were commanded by a skilful and resolute general. He concentrated his force in a strong position in a valley on the south side of the transverse range that separates Santiago from the Aconcagua valley. He had hoped to make his stand at the top of the pass, there four thousand feet high, but San Martin had been too quick for him. However, the position was admirable for a stubborn defence. The highroad to Santiago descended from the pass down a narrow valley, which, just in front of the Spanish position, opened into a larger valley running at right angles. The artillery of the Spaniards commanded the narrow mouth of the upper valley, and on a side hill there was room to deploy the infantry and cavalry. The Argentine troops would be enfiladed in the close gut before they could form in line of battle. San Martin employed the tactics of the Persians at Thermopylæ. There was an abandoned road running over the summit a little to the west of the travelled route and debouching into the same valley a little below the Spanish position. Through this O'Higgins, the chief of San Martin's Chilean allies, at two o'clock in the morning of February 12th, started with eighteen hundred men. By eleven he had reached the main valley and turned up it to attack the Spaniards on their left flank. His first assault, made without waiting for the other division to come down in front, was repulsed. San Martin, sitting on his war-horse on the heights above, galloped down the slope, leaving orders to hasten the descent of the main body. As he reached the lower ground and joined the Chileans, he saw the head of his main column appear through the mouth of the pass. O'Higgins again attacked, and the Spaniards, taken in flank and with their centre assailed in échelon by the Argentine squadrons and battalions, were at a hopeless disadvantage. The position of their infantry was carried by the bayonet, while the patriot cavalry charged the artillery and sabred the men at their guns. The infantry were the flower of the Spanish regulars; they formed a square and for a time held their stand. Finally, surrounded on three sides, their artillery gone, and fighting against double their number, they broke and retreated over the broken ground in their rear. Less than half escaped and a quarter were killed on the field and in the pursuit. The patriots lost only twelve killed and one hundred and twenty wounded.
Though the numbers engaged were insignificant, and though the victory was easily won, the battle of Chacabuco was decisive in the struggle between Spain and her revolted subjects in the southern colonies. Since the outbreak of 1810 the revolutionary cause had been losing not alone territory but morale, conviction, and self-confidence. Spanish authority seemed certain finally to be completely re-established, perhaps by a compromise and concession of autonomy, but still on a basis gratifying to the pride of the mother country. The day before San Martin started on his march over the Andes, Chile was quietly submissive; Uruguay was occupied by Portuguese troops; Argentina was a mere loose aggregation of discordant and warring provinces, whose most intelligent statesmen had nearly given up hope of peace and autonomy, except by foreign aid or submission to some alien monarch. But the day after Chacabuco the Spanish governor was flying from Santiago to the coast; Chile had become, and has remained, independent. In Argentina there was no more talk of Portuguese princes, of British protectorates, of compromise with Spain. The declaration of Tucuman had become a reality. There was much more hard fighting still to be done, and time after time during the next seven years the final result seemed to tremble in the balance, but hope and national spirit had been so aroused in South America that defeat was never irremediable.
The rest of San Martin's military career belongs rather to the history of Chile and Peru than to that of Argentina. It is enough to say that he established his friend O'Higgins as dictator of Chile, thus assuring her co-operation in the prosecution of the war against Peru. Spanish successes in Chile and civil war in Argentina delayed for years his overmatching the Spanish naval power on the Pacific. Without command of the sea he would have had to march his army up a desert coast between the Cordillera