Many of Artigas's supporters roundly deny the perpetration of these horrors; yet there is little doubt that many such acts were committed throughout the various provinces. To what extent they received the sanction of Artigas is far more uncertain. The probability is that he strongly discouraged wanton torture, although it lay beyond even such powers as his to hold back the Gaucho passions when they were fiercest and to prevent the merciless acts of revenge. Many eye-witnesses have related that he exhibited emotion and pity at the sight of a humanely conducted execution.
Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that Artigas, for all his errors and limitations, was not a true believer in the very lofty sentiments he used to express. One of the many examples of these is to be met with in his letter to the local authorities of Montevideo, when in 1815 they endowed him with the title of Captain-General, with the addition of that of "Protector and Patron of the Liberty of the Nation." Artigas, refusing the honour, which, nevertheless, remained attached to him, says: "Titles are the phantoms of States, and the glory of upholding liberty suffices for your illustrious corporation. Let us teach our countrymen to be virtuous. For this reason I have retained until now the rank of a simple citizen ... the day will come when men will act from a sense of duty, and when they will devote their best interests to the honour of their fellow-men."
The simplicity of Artigas was innate and genuine. One of his own nationality, on a visit to Hervidera, describes the costume of the dreaded leader. On that occasion Artigas was content with the plain costume of a countryman—plain blue jacket and pantaloons, white stockings, and a skin cloak, all rather shabby. The paraphernalia of a meal was of similar quality, and in addition lamentably scanty. Broth, a stew of meat, and roast beef were served on a couple of pewter dishes with broken edges; a single cup took the place of non-existent wine-glasses; no more than three earthenware plates could be mustered, and, since the seating accommodation was restricted to three chairs and a hide box, the majority of the guests had perforce to stand. Such were the clothes and household goods of the lord of five provinces, whose armies were battling with Portuguese Peninsular War veterans and with Argentine battalions, whose vessels had borne his flag to Europe to harass hostile vessels off the coasts of Portugal itself, who made treaties with England and other powers, and whose name was all but worshipped by a hundred thousand people!
J. P. Robertson, an English chronicler of the period, gives an interesting account of a meeting with Artigas. Assaulted and robbed by a band of the noted chief's adherents, he boldly set out for Purificacion to claim redress. His words deserve quotation at some length. "I came to the Protector's headquarters," he says, "of the so-called town of Purificacion. And there (I pray you do not turn sceptic on my hands) what do you think I saw? Why, the most excellent Protector of half the New World, seated on a bullock's skull, at a fire kindled on the mud floor of his hut, eating beef off a spit, and drinking gin out of a cow horn! He was surrounded by a dozen officers in weather beaten attire, in similar positions, and similarly occupied with their chief. All were smoking, all gabbling. The Protector was dictating to two secretaries, who occupied, at one deal table, the only two dilapidated rush bottom chairs in the hovel. To complete the singular incongruity of the scene, the floor of the one apartment of the mud hut (to be sure it was a pretty large one) in which the general, his staff, and secretaries, were assembled, was strewn with pompous envelopes from all the Provinces (some of them distant some 1,500 miles from that centre of operations) addressed to 'His Excellency the Protector.' At the door stood the reeking horses of couriers arriving every half hour, and the fresh ones of those departing as often.... His Excellency the Protector, seated on his bullock's skull, smoking, eating, drinking, dictating, talking, dispatched in succession the various matters brought under his notice with that calm, or deliberate, but uninterrupted nonchalance, which brought most practically home to me the truth of the axiom, 'Stop a little that we may get on the faster.'... He received me, not only with cordiality, but with what surprised me more, comparatively gentlemanlike manners, and really good breeding.... The Protector's business was prolonged from morning till evening, and so were his meals; for, as one courier arrived another was dispatched, and as one officer rose up from the fire at which the meat was spitted another took his place."
The General politely took his visitor the round of his hide huts and mud hovels, where the horses stood saddled and bridled day and night, and where the tattered soldiery waited in readiness for the emergencies that arose so frequently. When Robertson submitted his financial claim, Artigas remained as amiable as before. "'You see,' said the General with great candour and nonchalance, 'how we live here; and it is as much as we can do, in these hard times, to compass beef, aguardiente, and cigars. To pay you 6,000 dollars just now is as much beyond my power, as it would be to pay you 60,000 or 600,000. Look here,' said he, and so saying, he lifted up the lid of an old military chest, and pointed to a canvas bag at the bottom of it. 'There,' he continued, 'is my whole stock of cash; it amounts to 300 dollars; and where the next supply is to come from I am as little aware as you are.'" Notwithstanding this, Robertson then and there obtained some trading concessions that, he says, repaid him the amount of his claim many times over.
Surely this picture reveals Artigas more truly than all the long-winded polemics that have raged about the famous Uruguayan. It is given by one whose sympathies were against the aims of the Gaucho chief, and who has proved himself no lenient critic. Yet the description fits no mere cut-throat and plunderer. On the contrary, it reveals a virile personality, a thinker and worker of a disposition that goes far to explain the adoration accorded him by his troops. Artigas, at the hands of the visitor who had sufficient cause for his ridicule, comes to light as a man—contemptuous of poverty, misery, and sordid surroundings so long as his goal remained as clear and distinct as it ever was to his sight.
The picture is not without its pathetic side. It shows Artigas in the heyday of his power, yet even then hard put to it to supply his men with clothes and the common necessities of life. Imagine the calm force and philosophy of a being capable of governing more than a third of a million square miles of territory with the assistance of a treasury of three hundred dollars! Nevertheless, these opéra bouffe conditions represented the highest point of material prosperity to which Artigas ever attained. For five years he ruled thus, grappling desperately with the invading Brazilian armies, and resisting the efforts of the Buenos Aires forces to regain control of the four Argentine provinces that had espoused his cause.
With a prosperity thus frugally marked, it is easy to conceive the circumstances of the adversity that was to come. To their credit be it said that the Uruguayans faltered not in the least in the face of the ultimate doom that must have appeared inevitable. As their ranks became steadily thinned, the invading hordes of Portuguese soldiers swelled in numbers, while the Buenos Aires attacks on the river provinces became yet more determined. Yet, wanting in everything, its more capable and intelligent officers prisoners of war, the Uruguayans fought on to the very end—gaunt, haggard men who gave back blow for blow, though their courage was often sustained by no other means than the chewing of strips of hide. One of the officers of a regiment of lancers, once the pride of the army, describes the condition of the men in the last days of the struggle. At reveille, on a chilly winter's morning, each trooper would supplement the loin-cloth that alone remained to him by a whole cowhide. Thus when their backs were turned as they retired to their quarters, the number of men could only be judged by the quantity of moving cowhides!
Even then the final hour might have been indefinitely postponed but for the revolt of Ramirez, one of Artigas's own chieftains. After a homeric struggle, Ramirez obtained the victory over his old leader, and pursued him relentlessly through the provinces of Corrientes and Misiones. It was by this incessant chase alone that the victor retained his superiority. For such was the popularity of Artigas that a few days' halt sufficed for a number of fresh Gauchos and Indians to join him. When he had escaped from his penultimate defeat, accompanied by only twelve men, his pursuer lost touch with him for a week. At the end of that time the veteran had collected over nine hundred men, and was besieging Cambay, one of Ramirez's strongholds. A division was sent off post-haste to the spot, and it was here that the old warrior fought his last fight. Artigas, leaving most of his men dead upon the field, fled northwards and passed into Paraguay.
The later years of Artigas present the strangest contrast to his early life. Received and sheltered after some hesitation by Francia, the dreaded tyrant of Paraguay, he was first allotted a dwelling in the north of the country, and was afterwards permitted to dwell in the neighbourhood of Asuncion, the capital. Here he lived in complete retirement and peace until his death occurred, at the advanced age of eighty-three. Both his time and the small pension allowed him by the Paraguayan Government were spent in relieving the wants of his neighbours, by whom he was regarded with affection and veneration. The keynote to the true Artigas undoubtedly lies in these last years, when in humble tranquillity he had leisure at length to practise the benevolence and charity that he had so often preached from a corpse-surrounded pulpit. Difficult as it is to withdraw the personality of Artigas from the sea of blood that flooded his age, he was surely a product of an anarchical period rather than of anarchy itself.