The South American Republics. Thomas Cleland Dawson
in other hands while he led an army against the Indians of the South. He soon returned with the prestige of having extended white domination far beyond its former boundaries. After much show of reluctance, in 1835 he accepted the title of Governor and Captain-General, and a special statute expressly confided to him the whole "sum of the public power."
The thousands of murders, betrayals, and treasons of the long civil wars had sapped the foundations of good faith in human kindness. The unitarians were mere outlaws, their property was constantly subject to confiscation, and their lives were never safe. Rosas himself, least of all, could confide in the faithfulness of his partisans. Things had come to such a pass that no one could rule except by force. Whoever was in power was sure to be hated by the majority and plotted against by many, though he might have been raised to command by the acclamation of the whole population. Rosas was a product of the conditions that surrounded him. Belgrano, Rivadavia, and every one who had tried to establish a civil government had failed. The forces of militarism and federalism had been too strong for them. From among the ambitious military chieftains the strongest and fittest survived. Rosas understood the conditions under which he held power and took the measures his experience had taught him would be most effective in preserving it. He undertook to forestall revolt by creating a reign of terror; he replaced the blue and white of Buenos Aires by red—the colour of his own faction; the wearing of a scrap of blue was considered proof of treason. A club of desperadoes, called the Massorca, was formed of men sworn to do his bidding, even though it might be to murder their own relatives. No one suspected of disaffection was safe for a day. Sometimes a warning was given so that the victim might flee, leaving his property to be confiscated; sometimes he was dragged from his bed and stabbed. The charge of deliberate bloodthirstiness against Rosas is, however, hardly borne out by the facts. For political reasons he did not hesitate to kill, and to kill cruelly, but he did not kill for the mere sake of killing.
He was passionately jealous of foreign interference. Early in his reign he quarrelled with the government of France over questions in regard to the domicile and obligations of foreign residents. The French fleet, assisted later by that of Great Britain, blockaded Buenos Aires. But Rosas defied their combined power; although in this very year (1835) he was menaced by a formidable invasion from the banished unitarians. In Uruguay the "colorados" occupied Montevideo and had formed a close alliance with the Argentine exiles. Montevideo was the centre of resistance to Rosas and from its walls went out expeditions to end the revolts which continually broke forth. In 1842 the allied unitarians and colorados suffered a great defeat from Rosas's right arm in the field, General Urquiza, and thenceforth Oribe, chief of the Uruguayan "blancos" besieged the colorados in Montevideo and controlled the country districts. This apparently ended all hope of expelling Rosas from power. The emigration of the intelligent and high-spirited youth of Buenos Aires to Montevideo and Chile increased. Among these exiles and martyrs to their devotion to constitutional government were many Argentines who shortly rose to the top in politics and whose abilities gave a great impulse to the intellectual movement. Among them were Mitre, Vicente Lopez, Sarmiento, Valera, and Echeverria, who share the honour of establishing civil government in Buenos Aires, and who aided Urquiza in preventing South America from becoming a military empire, and in uniting the Argentine province into a stable nation.
The longer the tyrant reigned, the less men remembered their own factional divisions. Practically the whole civil population of the capital was ready to support a rebellion. Rosas, however, was to fall, not by a revolution in Buenos Aires, but because his system was inconsistent with the local autonomy of the provinces. He put his partisans into power as military governors, but no bond was strong enough to keep them faithful to his interests. As soon as they were well established in their satrapies, they became jealous of their own prerogatives and of the rights of their people. Rosas ceased to be a real federalist when he made Buenos Aires the centre of his power. He lived there, he raised most of his revenue there, and the city's interests became in a sense synonymous with his own. He excluded foreigners from the provinces, he forbade direct communication between the banks of the Paraná and Uruguay and the outside world. Everything was required to be trans-shipped at Buenos Aires so that it might be subject to duty.
The chief lieutenant of Rosas was General Urquiza, whom he had appointed governor of Entre Rios. The latter's generalship overcame the unitarian rebellions in that province and repelled the invasions from Uruguay. Under his wise and moderate rule the province flourished and recovered from the devastations of the previous civil wars. Its fertile plains were covered with magnificent herds of cattle and horses, which fed and mounted an admirable cavalry. Urquiza himself was the greatest rancher in the province and could raise an army from his own estates. Entrenched between the vast-moving floods of the Uruguay and Paraguay, he was practically safe from attack, and his relations with his neighbours in Corrientes, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil were those of warm friendship and alliance, as soon as he had declared against the tyrant, who, seated at the mouth of the Plate, cut off the countries above from free access to the sea. Though Urquiza was a caudillo he had no such ambition for supreme power as plagued Rosas. He was even-tempered, of simple tastes, and careless of military glory.
In 1846 the rupture between him and Rosas came, and thenceforth he devoted himself to the overthrow of the tyrant. Three times his attacks failed; but, in 1851, he arranged an alliance with Brazil and with the colorado faction in Uruguay. The war was opened by Urquiza's crossing the Uruguay and, in conjunction with a Brazilian army, suddenly falling upon the blancos, who, in alliance with Rosas, were besieging Montevideo. Most of the defeated forces joined his army, and accompanied by his Brazilian and Uruguayan allies he recrossed the Uruguay and moved over the Entre Rios plains to a point on the Paraná just at the head of the delta. The Brazilian fleet penetrated up the river to protect his crossing, and on the 24th of December the entire force of twenty-four thousand men, the largest which up to that time had ever assembled in South America, was safely over and encamped on the dry pampas of Santa Fé. The road to Buenos Aires was open. Rosas could do nothing but wait there and trust all to the result of a single battle. On the 3rd of February he was crushingly defeated in the battle of Caseros, fought within a few miles of the city. Of the twenty thousand men he led into action half proved treacherous, and many of his principal officers betrayed him. He took refuge at the British Legation, and thence was sent on board a man-of-war which carried him into exile.
CHAPTER VIII
CONSOLIDATION
After forty years of struggle no formula had been found which would satisfy the aspirations for local self-government and at the same time secure the external union so essential to the welfare of the whole country. The questions between the provinces and Buenos Aires, and between the different cities which were rivals in the race for national leadership, seemed to a superficial glance to be as far as ever from solution. There had, however, been a shifting of the material balance of power which was soon to change the situation. The provinces had suffered most severely from the long civil wars. Corrientes was well-nigh a desert, in Santa Fé the Indians roamed up to the gates of the capital town, and the Andean provinces were isolated and poor. The long peace under Rosas's rule had increased the wealth and population of Buenos Aires. The city lost hundreds of enthusiastic young liberals, but it gained thousands who fled from the disorders of the interior. Its population had doubled since his accession. Thirty thousand English, Irish, and Scotch had crowded in to engage in sheep-raising, and the rural population of Buenos Aires province was nearly two hundred thousand. City and country together had doubled, while the rest of the confederation had only increased one-half. The capital province now contained twenty-seven per cent. of the total population, and the disproportion in wealth and percentage of foreigners was far greater. The number of sheep increased from two and a half million in 1830 to five times that number, and by 1850 there were eight million cattle and three million horses in the