San Martin Asked for the Job Nobody Else Would Take
In 1814 a colonel asks to be sent to the emptiest corner of the country, six hundred miles from any battlefield. It looks like the end of a career. Six months later the government tries to take the posting back, and the town will not give him up.
Chapters
- 0:00 The wrong side of the country
- 0:26 Not exile, and not a demotion
- 0:46 Three towns and a wall of mountains
- 1:09 A governorship with nobody in it
- 1:30 He asked for it
- 1:57 Twenty-two years in the Spanish army
- 2:23 The other road to Lima
- 2:48 The province already had the mules
- 3:11 He did not ask for a garrison
- 3:35 Arriving in a city that no longer exists
- 3:58 Two days at Rancagua
- 4:21 Over the Uspallata pass
- 4:42 Two thousand people, one small town
- 5:05 Soldiery without leaders or officers
- 5:23 Carrera or O'Higgins
- 5:45 Who owned the men who crossed
- 6:05 A thousand troops and two guns
- 6:27 Read that as an administrative act
- 6:47 Buenos Aires notices
- 7:09 The town refuses the replacement
- 7:35 Not the capital's to withdraw
- 7:54 Alvear lasts three months
- 8:19 Two years of paperwork and water rights
- 8:42 Mendoza, 14 August 1815
- 9:00 The shape of it
- 9:18 Money, and people
Transcript
The wrong side of the country 0:00
In August of eighteen fourteen, a colonel in Buenos Aires asked to be posted to the wrong side of the country. Not the northern front, where two armies had just been destroyed. He wanted Cuyo: three small towns against the Andes, six hundred miles from the capital and further still from the war. The government agreed. The man appointed to that job before him had never bothered to go.
Not exile, and not a demotion 0:26
This is what that posting actually was. Not exile, and not a demotion. A request, granted. And six months later the same government that granted it tried to take it back, and could not. What happened next was settled in Mendoza, not in Buenos Aires.
Three towns and a wall of mountains 0:46
Cuyo barely existed as a unit of government. It was invented on November twenty-ninth, eighteen thirteen, cut away from the governorship of Cordoba and made its own intendancy. Mendoza was the capital, with San Juan and San Luis attached. Three towns, wine and irrigated fields, and a wall of mountains on the western edge.
A governorship with nobody in it 1:09
The first man named to run it was Juan Florencio Terrada. He was sent to the Banda Oriental instead, and never took up the post. Marcos Balcarce held it temporarily from July of eighteen fourteen. The job was open because nobody with a career ahead of them wanted a province with no war in it.
He asked for it 1:30
On August tenth, eighteen fourteen, Supreme Director Gervasio Posadas signed the appointment. The wording matters: San Martin got Cuyo at his own request. He had asked for it. Four months earlier he had given up command of the Army of the North, citing his health, and gone to rest near Cordoba. The illness was real. It was also the door.
Twenty-two years in the Spanish army 1:57
It is worth saying who was asking. San Martin was thirty-six, born on the old Jesuit missions on the Parana. He had spent about twenty-two years as an officer in the Spanish army. He fought the French for Spain, at Bailen in eighteen eight. He arrived in Buenos Aires in eighteen twelve, aged thirty-four, a professional soldier of the empire he was now going to take apart.
The other road to Lima 2:23
The reason is a map. Every campaign of this war had gone north, up through Upper Peru toward Lima, and that road had now broken three armies in a row. San Martin had decided it could not be done. The other way to Lima runs west, over the Andes into Chile, and then by sea up the Pacific coast. Cuyo is where that road starts.
The province already had the mules 2:48
And Cuyo was not chosen at random on that road. Mendoza had been the crossing point for two centuries. Wine and brandy went east in leather skins and clay jars; cattle and mules went west over the cordillera into Chile. The province already had the pack animals, the drovers, and the men who knew which pass was open in which month.
He did not ask for a garrison 3:11
And he did not ask for a garrison. He asked to be governor. An intendant held both powers at once. He collected the taxes, ran the courts, called out the militia, and appointed the officials. To build an army out of a province, military authority was not enough. He needed the province itself.
Arriving in a city that no longer exists 3:35
He reached Mendoza on September seventh, eighteen fourteen, and took office five days later. What Mendoza looked like that month is genuinely hard to show you. The colonial city was flattened by an earthquake in eighteen sixty-one. Almost everything you will see of that road here was drawn by an English traveller who came through ten years later.
Two days at Rancagua 3:58
Three weeks after he arrived, the argument for his whole plan arrived with it. On the first and second of October, at Rancagua in central Chile, a patriot force under Bernardo O'Higgins made a stand. It held the town for two days against an army roughly three times its size. On the second day it broke out through the encirclement and ran.
Over the Uspallata pass 4:21
Chile fell. The government, the army, and the families that had backed the revolution went over the Andes on foot and on mules, by the Uspallata pass. The first refugees reached Mendoza on October ninth with the news. The main body came through between the twelfth and the seventeenth.
Two thousand people, one small town 4:42
The size of it is the part worth holding on to. More than two thousand people crossed, by some accounts close to three thousand. The town they came into held five to ten thousand, depending on which count you take. San Martin rode up to Uspallata himself on the twelfth, with over a thousand loads of supplies and pack mules, to meet them.
Soldiery without leaders or officers 5:05
He was not sentimental about what came down that pass. In his own report he described scattered soldiery, without leaders or officers, committing every kind of excess. Two thousand armed and defeated foreigners had just walked into a province he had been governing for one month.
Carrera or O'Higgins 5:23
And they arrived split in two. One faction followed Jose Miguel Carrera, who had governed Chile. The other followed O'Higgins, who had held Rancagua. Seventy-four emigres signed a petition accusing the Carreras of losing the war on purpose. A hundred and thirty-eight signed the other way.
Who owned the men who crossed 5:45
The quarrel was not about honour. It was about who owned the soldiers who had just come over the mountains. Carrera wanted them kept together as a Chilean force under a Chilean government in exile. San Martin wanted them dissolved into an army of his own, raised and paid on Argentine ground.
A thousand troops and two guns 6:05
San Martin chose, and he chose fast. On October nineteenth he ordered the three Carrera brothers out of Mendoza, to San Luis. On the thirtieth he put a thousand troops and two guns around their barracks and made them submit to Argentine authority. By December two of the brothers were under arrest and on the road to Buenos Aires.
Read that as an administrative act 6:27
Read that again as an administrative act. A provincial governor, two months in office, disarmed the escort of a foreign head of state inside his own capital. He was not managing refugees. He was clearing ground, and O'Higgins was the man he intended to put back into Chile.
Buenos Aires notices 6:47
Buenos Aires noticed. On January tenth, eighteen fifteen, Carlos Maria de Alvear became Supreme Director. He did not trust the governor of Cuyo, and he had reason to be nervous about colonels with provinces. He decreed San Martin removed, and named Colonel Gregorio Perdriel to replace him.
The town refuses the replacement 7:09
Perdriel got as far as Mendoza. In the second week of February, the town refused him. The cabildo, with Tomas Godoy Cruz and Manuel Ignacio Molina leading it, called an open assembly. The resolution was blunt. Refuse to recognise Perdriel, and ask the Director to keep the present chief in command. The cabildo of San Juan said the same thing.
Not the capital's to withdraw 7:35
That is a town council telling the national government which governor it would be having. Perdriel went back to Buenos Aires without ever taking the office he had been appointed to. San Martin stayed. And the post he now held was not really Buenos Aires' to withdraw any more.
Alvear lasts three months 7:54
Alvear lasted about three months. His own troops turned around on the road north in April and refused to march for him, and he resigned. The governor he had tried to remove stayed in Mendoza for two more years. San Martin later accused Perdriel to his face of asking Alvear for fifteen or twenty assassins to kill him. That is an accusation, not a finding.
Two years of paperwork and water rights 8:19
So what did he do with those two years? Mostly, paperwork. He counted the province. He drilled militia. And he spent a remarkable amount of eighteen fifteen regulating irrigation. Who got water from which ditch, on which day, in a desert province where the water is the entire economy.
Mendoza, 14 August 1815 8:42
One of the surviving sheets is signed in his own hand and dated at Mendoza, the fourteenth of August, eighteen fifteen. It is in the national archive in Buenos Aires. The future liberator of three countries spent that winter settling water rights between neighbours.
The shape of it 9:00
That is the shape of it. He asked for a province with no war in it, on the far side of the country. The war he intended to fight had not started yet, and it needed somewhere to be built. And when the capital tried to take the province back, the province said no.
Money, and people 9:18
But an army is not built out of authority. It is built out of money, and out of people. Next: what the Army of the Andes cost, and who actually paid for it. In eighteen fifteen three quarters of the bill was carried by Cuyo itself. And a hundred and sixty-one thousand pesos of it went on buying seven hundred and ten enslaved men out of the households that owned them. They were bought in order to be put in the ranks.
Description and sources
On August 10th, 1814, Supreme Director Gervasio Posadas appointed José de San Martín Governor Intendant of Cuyo — Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis, three towns against the Andes, roughly six hundred miles from Buenos Aires and further still from any front in the war. The intendancy had only existed since November 1813, and the first man named to run it, Juan Florencio Terrada, had been sent to the Banda Oriental instead and never taken the post.
The appointment was made at San Martín's own request. Four months earlier he had given up command of the Army of the North citing his health. The illness was real; the posting was also the plan. Every campaign of the war had gone north through Upper Peru toward Lima, and that road had broken three armies. The other road to Lima runs west over the Andes into Chile and then by sea — and Cuyo is where it starts. He did not ask for a garrison. He asked to be governor, because an intendant collected the taxes, ran the courts and raised the militia, and an army built out of a province needs all three.
Three weeks after he arrived, Chile fell at Rancagua. More than two thousand Chilean refugees came over the Uspallata pass into a town of five to ten thousand people, split between the followers of José Miguel Carrera and those of Bernardo O'Higgins. San Martín ordered the Carrera brothers out, then surrounded their barracks with a thousand troops and two guns.
Buenos Aires noticed. In January 1815 the new Supreme Director, Carlos María de Alvear, decreed San Martín removed and sent Colonel Gregorio Perdriel to replace him. In February the cabildo of Mendoza called an open assembly, refused to recognise Perdriel, and asked that the present chief be kept in command. San Juan's cabildo said the same. Perdriel went home without taking the office. Alvear lasted about three months. The governor he tried to remove stayed for two more years.
PRINT-READY, FROM THIS CHANNEL
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.
- Attributed to Jean Baptiste Madou — c. 1828 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Retrato más canónico de José de San Martín | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Daniel Hernández Morillo — 1921 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Juan León Pallière — 1858 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Peter Schmidtmeyer — 1820 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Peter Schmidtmeyer George Johann Scharf — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Peter Schmidtmeyer George Johann Scharf — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Peter Schmidtmeyer Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Giulio Nanetti — 1820 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Peter Schmidtmeyer Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- George Johann Scharf — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Peter Schmidtmeyer Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Johann Moritz Rugendas — 1838 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- H. Meyer — 19th century | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Narcisse Edmond Joseph Desmadryl — 1854 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 1831-1886 — Santiago : Impr. del Ferrocaril, 1857 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Johann Moritz Rugendas — 1838 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Carlos Alvear | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
- Peter Schmidtmeyer Agostino Aglio — 1824 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
... and 5 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.