BUENOS AIRES IN 1845.
[From a steel engraving.]
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 single province.