The Coup That Made Him Famous for the Wrong Reason

Chapters

1. 0:00 Cannons at his own government
2. 0:29 Not the story you know
3. 0:55 The First Triumvirate
4. 1:25 Two secret societies
5. 1:56 The regiment he was given
6. 2:31 Who Alvear was
7. 3:00 Treated as a threat
8. 3:31 The order to retreat
9. 3:55 Belgrano disobeys
10. 4:22 The press turns on Rivadavia
11. 4:50 The night of October 7th
12. 5:17 The cabildo yields
13. 5:43 Three votes, cast under occupation
14. 6:09 Paso returns
15. 6:32 Cannons, not an election
16. 6:56 The assembly, finally called
17. 7:16 Half of the job
18. 7:37 Pueyrredon presides over independence
19. 8:14 Rivadavia's short presidency
20. 8:36 Alvear, deposed in turn
21. 9:04 Next: San Martin's first battle

Transcript

Cannons at his own government 0:00

Before dawn on October eighth, eighteen twelve, cannons stood in the main square of Buenos Aires, aimed not at Spain, but at the government's own fort behind it. The soldiers manning them were led by a cavalry colonel almost nobody in the city had heard of a year earlier: Jose de San Martin. He was not fighting Spain that morning. He was fighting the government running the war against Spain -- the same government he had sworn, in secret, to remove.

Not the story you know 0:29

This is not the story you already know about San Martin -- the general who crosses the Andes and helps free three countries. That is still four years away. This episode is about what he does first: force an elected government out of power at gunpoint -- in the name of an assembly Buenos Aires had been promised for two years. And the assembly his coup finally produces will do exactly half of what everyone said it would.

The First Triumvirate 0:55

Thirteen months earlier, in September of eighteen eleven, the government reorganized itself into a three-man executive: the First Triumvirate, made up of Feliciano Chiclana, Manuel de Sarratea, and Juan Martin de Pueyrredon. Its real center of power was its secretary, a young lawyer named Bernardino Rivadavia, who ran the daily business of government and set its course: caution, censorship of the press, and a constitutional assembly that kept getting postponed.

Two secret societies 1:25

In March of eighteen twelve, two officers who had spent years fighting Napoleon's armies in Spain landed in Buenos Aires: San Martin and Carlos Maria de Alvear. Within weeks they had founded a secret society, the Lodge of Lautaro, dedicated to full independence. Alongside it, in public, the Patriotic Society held open meetings pushing the same goal -- a republic, not a colony still swearing loyalty to a Spanish king held prisoner in France.

The regiment he was given 1:56

San Martin was no stranger to war. He had spent two decades in the Spanish army, fighting Napoleon's invasion as a captain of the Bourbon Regiment at the battle of Bailen in eighteen oh eight, an action that won him a promotion to lieutenant colonel. In Buenos Aires, it was the Triumvirate itself that gave him his next command: raise and train a new cavalry unit, the Regiment of Mounted Grenadiers. Its second squadron was declared combat ready on September eleventh. Twenty-seven days later, that same squadron helps remove the government that built it.

Who Alvear was 2:31

Alvear was almost as unknown to Buenos Aires as San Martin. Three years earlier, in Cadiz, he had founded his own secret society, the Rational Knights, modeled on a lodge in London and built around two words: independence and constitution. He and San Martin had crossed the Atlantic together, on the same ship. In October of eighteen twelve, they are simply the two officers with troops the Cabildo cannot refuse.

Treated as a threat 3:00

The Triumvirate treated both groups as a threat. Rivadavia tried filling vacant government seats with men opposed to the more radical faction -- Manuel Obligado and Pedro Medrano among them -- blocked Bernardo de Monteagudo, the Patriotic Society's loudest voice, from a seat of his own, censored newspapers that criticized him, and kept delaying the assembly it had promised would finally declare independence and write a constitution. Two years after the revolution began, Buenos Aires still had neither.

The order to retreat 3:31

At the front, the news was worse. The army in Upper Peru had been destroyed the year before, and its last general, Manuel Belgrano, was holding the north with what remained of it. In August, the Triumvirate ordered him to dismantle the arms workshop at Tucuman and fall all the way back to Cordoba -- abandoning the northern provinces to the royalist army chasing him.

Belgrano disobeys 3:55

Belgrano reached Tucuman and found a population ready to fight, not evacuate. He disobeyed the order. On September twenty fourth, eighteen twelve, his outnumbered force met the royalist army of Pio Tristan outside the city -- and won. Two weeks before the government that gave that retreat order was overthrown, its own general had just proven it wrong, by refusing to obey it.

The press turns on Rivadavia 4:22

Word of the victory reached Buenos Aires within days, and Monteagudo used it as a weapon. In the pages of the Gazeta, he published article after article naming Rivadavia directly, asking why a government that ordered retreat from a battle it did not fight deserved to keep running the war at all. The Triumvirate answered with patrols in the streets and warnings against public gatherings. It no longer had an argument, so it reached for policing instead.

The night of October 7th 4:50

On the night of October seventh, the Patriotic Society organized riots across Buenos Aires. Crowds stoned the houses of Pueyrredon and Rivadavia. Before dawn on the eighth, San Martin's cavalry, Francisco Ortiz de Ocampo's militia battalions, and an artillery unit under Manuel Pinto occupied the main square, cannons trained on the fort. Rivadavia and Pueyrredon went into hiding.

The cabildo yields 5:17

The cabildo -- the city council, the only body in the city with any claim to legal authority once the executive had gone into hiding -- had an electoral process already under way that week. Under armed pressure, it stopped that process and took direct control instead, calling on the city's leading residents to vote, right there, in the same square the cannons still occupied, for an entirely new government.

Three votes, cast under occupation 5:43

The count came back lopsided, and close, in the same afternoon. Nicolas Rodriguez Pena: a hundred seventy-two votes for, twelve against. Antonio Alvarez Jonte: a hundred forty-seven to thirty-five. And Juan Jose Paso: ninety-six to eighty-seven -- the tightest of the three, decided by nine votes out of nearly two hundred cast under armed occupation.

Paso returns 6:09

Two years earlier, Paso had been one of only two men who voted against the mechanism that expanded the Junta and pushed Mariano Moreno out of power. He lost that vote, fourteen to two. Now that same mechanism has been replaced by soldiers and cannons -- and Paso is back in government anyway, installed by the closest vote of the day.

Cannons, not an election 6:32

San Martin's first appearance in this history is not a mountain crossing. It is a colonel pointing artillery at his own capital, forcing out a government that had never lost an election, in the name of a popular will nobody had actually asked. The revolution that started by writing down rules for itself just replaced them with guns -- to get, on paper, the same thing it always wanted.

The assembly, finally called 6:56

The Second Triumvirate did, immediately, what the first had refused to do for two years: it called the constitutional assembly. On January thirty-first, eighteen thirteen, the Assembly of the Year Thirteen opened in Buenos Aires with one explicit job -- declare independence, and write a constitution.

Half of the job 7:16

It did neither. The deputies dropped their oath of loyalty to King Ferdinand the Seventh, cutting the legal fiction that Buenos Aires still recognized him -- and stopped there. No declaration, no constitution. Independence would not be declared for another three years, and not by this body.

Pueyrredon presides over independence 7:37

Pueyrredon, chased into hiding by San Martin's cannons, came back to lead the country San Martin was fighting for. In May of eighteen sixteen, a new congress meeting in Tucuman elected him Supreme Director by twenty-three votes to one -- the kind of margin the coup that once removed him never got close to. Two months later, on July ninth, eighteen sixteen, that same congress finally declared the independence the assembly of eighteen thirteen had stopped short of. Pueyrredon's government signed it, and then spent the next three years funding the army San Martin was leading across the Andes.

Rivadavia's short presidency 8:14

Rivadavia's own path back was shorter and rockier. Fourteen years after hiding from these same cannons, in February of eighteen twenty-six, Congress made him the first President of Argentina. He resigned before his second year in office, undone by the same instability that had already ended every government since the revolution began.

Alvear, deposed in turn 8:36

Alvear didn't wait long to test the same lever he had just pulled on someone else. On January ninth, eighteen fifteen -- two years and three months after this coup -- he became Supreme Director himself. He lasted a hundred and one days. In April, one of his own generals turned an army against him, and Alvear resigned and fled to Brazil. The mechanism that made him didn't recognize him as an exception.

Next: San Martin's first battle 9:04

San Martin is not yet the general history remembers. That starts four months later, on February third, eighteen thirteen, at a riverside post called San Lorenzo -- his first battle, where a cannonball drops his horse on top of him, and the soldier who pulls him out from under it pays for it with his life.

Description and sources

Before dawn on October 8th, 1812, cannons stood in the main square of Buenos Aires, aimed at the government's own fort. The soldiers manning them were led by a cavalry colonel almost nobody in the city had heard of a year earlier: Jose de San Martin. Thirteen months into the First Triumvirate -- a cautious, press-censoring government run in practice by its secretary, Bernardino Rivadavia -- San Martin and Carlos Maria de Alvear had returned from years fighting Napoleon in Spain, founded a secret lodge dedicated to independence, and been handed, by the Triumvirate itself, command of a new cavalry regiment that would help remove it.

Two weeks before the coup, the government's own general proved it wrong: ordered to abandon Tucuman and retreat, Manuel Belgrano disobeyed and won the battle instead. On the night of October 7th, riots swept Buenos Aires; before dawn, San Martin's cavalry and artillery occupied the main square, and the men running the government went into hiding. Under armed pressure, the cabildo called an open vote for a new government. The count came back lopsided and close in the same afternoon -- and one of the three men installed, Juan Jose Paso, was the same man who had lost a vote by fourteen to two two years earlier, now returned by the tightest margin of the day.

The new government did immediately what the old one had refused to do for two years: it called the constitutional assembly. It declared half of what everyone expected -- cutting the oath to the Spanish king -- and stopped there. Independence would wait three more years. And none of the men involved were safe from the mechanism they'd just used: Pueyrredon came back to preside over independence in 1816, Rivadavia became president in 1826 and fell within a year and a half, and Alvear -- one of the two colonels who pointed the cannons -- became supreme director himself in 1815 and lasted a hundred and one days before one of his own generals turned on him.

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The Document Set, Vol. 01 — Cajamarca 1532 and Buenos Aires 1595-1680 — the documents at reading size, with author, date, archive and licence

https://therepository.gumroad.com/l/document-set

SOURCES — every image in this video is a public-domain document.

Each plate below is listed with its author, date, holding archive and licence.

• Emeric Essex Vidal — between 1816 and 1817 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Attributed to Jean Baptiste Madou — c. 1828 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Daniel Hernández Morillo — 1921 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Unidentified painter — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Retrato más canónico de José de San Martín | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Carlos Alvear | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Unidentified painter — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Casimir Carbonnier — 1815 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Établissement géographique Erhard frères. Auteur du texte — 1880s | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Francisco Fortuny — 24 September 2012 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Emeric Essex Vidal — 1817 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Emeric Essex Vidal (1791-1861) — 1817 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Retrato de don Juan Martín de Pueyrredón | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
• Asamblea del año XIII | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain