Published in 1891 in the album of El Porvenir, New York, this article highlights the figure of José de San Martín, one of the forefathers of American independence who, for 12 years, was the standard-bearer of the struggle for liberation waged by the peoples of the Americas against Spanish colonialism.
One day, when the stones in Spain were bounding to the footsteps of the French, Napoleon’s eyes fell upon a lean and sunburned officer wearing a blue and white uniform. Approaching him, he read on the button of his dress coat the name of his corps: “Murcia!” He was a poor son of the Jesuit village of Yapeyú, raised in the open among Indians and half-breeds, who after 22 years of Spanish wars took firm hold of the crumbling uprising in Buenos Aires, bound the rebellious Creoles by oath, drove away the royal fleet at San Lorenzo, assembled the army of liberation in Cuyo, and crossed the Andes to greet the dawn in Chacabuco. From Chile, freed by his sword, he went by way of Maipú to liberate Peru, and in Lima promoted himself to the rank of Protector, with gold palms on his uniform. Suffering self-defeat, he yielded his command to Bolívar, withdrew, abdicated, passed through Buenos Aires alone, and died in France in a cottage filled with light and flowers, holding his daughter’s hand. He proposed kings for America, artfully used the national resources for his own glory, retained the dictatorship — visible or concealed — until by his mistakes he was consumed in it, and certainly never reached the sublime merit of publicly and voluntarily laying aside his national empire. But smoldering in his Creole head was the epic idea that hastened and gave balance to American independence.
His veins flowed with the blood of a soldier from León and a granddaughter of conquistadors; his father was governor of Yapeyú on the banks of one of America’s great rivers. He learned to read on the mountain slopes and grew up in the town as a gentleman’s son in the shade of the palms and the urundays. He was taken to Spain to learn dancing and Latin in a school for the sons of noblemen. At the age of 12 the child “who seldom laughed” became a cadet. When as a Spanish lieutenant-colonel of 34 he returned to fight against Spain, he was no longer the man forged by the wind and rain of the pampas deep in his America, but the soldier who, in the glow of his native memories, had nurtured in the shadows of the Masonic Lodge of Lautaro, among young patricians and noblemen from Madrid, the will to work systematically and according to plan for American independence. Under the command of Daoiz and in the war with Napoleon, he had learned from Spain how to defeat Spain. He fought the astute and imaginative Moor, the pompous Portuguese and the brilliant Frenchman. He fought beside the Englishman who dies saluting, with all his buttons buttoned so that he does not disrupt the line of battle. When he left his ship at Buenos Aires with his Moorish cutlass that had flashed in Arjonilla and Bailén and Albuera, all he brought with him was his reputation for boldness, and all he demanded was “unity and direction,” “a system that will save us from anarchy,” and “a man who can lead an army.” The war progressed as expected when a set political plan was not the driving force, for it is then a foray rather than a war, and a breeding ground for tyrants. “No army can exist without officers.” “A soldier must be a soldier through and through.” San Martín came from Spain with Alvear, an ambitious patriot from an influential family. Within a week he was given the task of organizing the corps of mounted grenadiers, with Alvear as his sergeant-major. The skills of the professional soldier dazzle the hesitant heroes of revolutions, those immature heroes who cannot put their ideas on horseback. They confuse what is merely the soldier’s regular task with genius, and the well-intentioned but ignorant man confuses procedure with greatness. Among recruits, a captain is a general. San Martín was in the saddle, and he would never dismount until he reached the palace of the Peruvian viceroys. He selected his officers from among his friends, and these from persons of quality. The regulars never left the rank of lieutenant, the cadets came from distinguished families, the soldiers were strong and well built, and every one of them, at all hours of the day, he commanded: “Head up! A soldier must hold his head up!” He called each of them not by his name but by the name of a war. With Alvear and the Peruvian Monteagudo he founded the secret Lodge of Lautaro “to work systematically and with a plan for America’s independence, and for her happiness, proceeding with justice and honor,” so that “when a brother fills the role of supreme governorship, he will not of his own accord be able to appoint diplomats or generals, governors or judges, high officials, in the clergy or the military”; “to strive to understand public opinion”; “to help one another and carry out their sworn purposes, on pain of death.” He assembled his squadrons man by man. He himself taught them to manage the saber: “The first high and mighty Spaniard you see, split his head open like a watermelon.” He brought his officers together in a secret corps, accustomed them to accuse each other and bow to the will of the majority; with them he laid out the pentagon and the defenses on the drill field. He threw out of the squadron anyone showing fear under fire, or laying hands upon a woman; brought out the salient quality of every soldier; imbued military life with the ritual and mystery of the Church; honed his men to a cutting edge, setting each man like a stone in a piece of jewelry. He appeared with them in the square when their Lautaro Lodge rebelled against the triumvirate government. A cavalier on a magnificent bay horse, he led them in attacking the Spaniards disembarking at San Lorenzo; closing his two flanks over them, “with lance and cutlass” he sent them flying out of their saddles. Although pinned under his horse, he still gave orders and brandished his sword; a grenadier died clutching the Spanish flag; the grenadier who freed him from the animal fell at his feet; Spain fled, leaving her artillery and her dead behind.
But Alvear was jealous, and his party in the Lautaro Lodge “that governed the government” was stronger than San Martín’s. San Martín engaged in an active correspondence with politicians. “To exist comes first, and we will see how later.” “We must have an army, an army with officers of a mathematical turn of mind.” “The last royalist must be thrown out of here.” “I will resign my military commission the moment there are no more enemies left in America.” “Let us strive together and we will be fee.” “This seems to be a revolution of sheep, not men.” “I am republican by conviction and principle, but I will sacrifice even this for the good of my native land.”
Alvear fought against the Spaniards in Montevideo as a general, and San Martín was sent as a general to upper Peru where not even the patriotism of Salta1 was strong enough to raise the spirits. He was then sent to Cuyo2 as an administrator. That was the logical place for him, for those were his people; he would make his fortress in that exile; from those heights he would pour himself over all the Americas! There in that remote place, through his own efforts and with the Andes as counselors and witnesses, he created the army with which he was to cross them. Alone, he planned a family of nations under the protection of his sword; he alone saw the risk run by freedom in every American nation as long as all were not free. While there is a single enslaved nation in America, the freedom of all the rest is in jeopardy! He laid his hand upon the devoted region, to be counted on as a leavening force by anyone who is determined to influence public affairs unaided. He was thinking of himself and of America, because his nobility and the pure gold of his character never permitted him to consider the various nations as different entities, but in the heart of his enthusiasm he could not see the continent as anything but one united American nation. Like all men of instinct he knew about local political facts and the hidden purposes in actions; but like all of them he failed — misled by success and flattery and self-confidence — because of confusing his native wisdom with that knowledge and art of manipulating the intangible and determining elements in a nation, skills attained, through a combination of talent and cultivation, only by the highest genius. That same redeeming concept of America, which would lead the sister nations to an effective unity of spirit, hid from his eyes the differences, necessary for freedom, between the American states, which make unity impossible. He failed to see, as would the profound statesman, the fully matured nations that had evolved from backwardness; he saw only the nations of the future that were bubbling and writhing with birth pangs inside his head. And in his mind he dealt with them as a patriarch deals with his sons. There is something formidable indeed in the clash between a man of decisive will and the accumulated work of centuries!
But for the time being the administrator of Cuyo saw only that he had to bring about America’s independence. He believed and he commanded. And assigned by whatever fate to a region as sober as himself, he inspired love in its people, who recognized in him the very qualities they saw in themselves. He became their natural uncrowned king. Perfect governments originate from a people’s identity with the man who rules affectionately and with a noble purpose, since identity itself is not enough if the noble purpose is lacking, for nobility is innate in every people. The day arrived when San Martín, confused in the rarefied air, sought to rule in Peru with purposes troubled by the fear of losing his glory; in the interest of his tottering command, he carried to extremes his honest belief in the need to have America governed by kings. At times his pride caused him to put his own interests ahead of America’s, when the first thing a public figure must do in times of construction or reform is to renounce the personal, not favoring himself except in what he is worth to the country. On his own account he tried to test a government of rhetoric in a more highly cultivated country that lacked the vigor of its uncurbed originality. But in Cuyo, still close to the justice and freshness of Nature, nothing stood in the way of success for that man who ruled realistically, prepared breakfast with his own hands, sat beside the working man, saw to it that the mule was shod in a humane manner, granted audiences in the kitchen between the stewpot and the cigar, and slept in the open on a steer hide. There the neatly planted earth looked like a garden; the spotless houses standing among the vineyards and olive trees looked newly white washed. There the men pounded to pliancy the skins sewn by the women, and even the mountaintops seemed polished by hand. He stood out among those industrious people, a harder worker than they; among those early risers, the one who knocked on their doors in the morning. He meted out justice with common sense, reserving his reproaches and derision for the lazy and hypocritical. That man could be silent as a black cloud, yet spoke with the force of a thunderbolt. To the priest: “Here, the only bishop is myself; preach me a sermon on the sanctity of America’s independence.” To the Spaniard: “Would you like me to take you for a good man? Well, then, let six Creoles vouch for you.” To the town gossip: “Ten pairs of shoes for the army for having berated the patriots.” To the sentinel he threw out of the powder mill for having entered with spurs on: “One gold doubloon!” To the soldier who claimed his hands were tied by an oath taken before the Spaniards: “The firing squad will untie them for you!” He left some ransomed prisoners penniless “to ransom others!” He ordered a meeting of executors to pay a tribute: “The deceased would have given more to the revolution!” The American revolution was crumbling all around him in the thrust of the reconquest. Morillo came; Cuzco fell; Chile fled; from Mexico to Santiago the cathedral bells rang out the Te Deum of victory; the disorganized regiments took to the mountains in tattered bands. And in the continent-wide catastrophe San Martín decided to raise his army with a handful of men from Cuyo, invited his officers to a banquet, and with a voice as vibrant as a bugle offered this toast: “To the first shot fired upon Chile’s oppressors across the Andes!”
Cuyo belonged to San Martín, and he rose up against the dictator Alvear, the rival who blundered when he rashly accepted the resignation sent him by San Martín at the height of his activities. Cuyo kept its governor who seemed to be declining in favor of his replacement, who explained to the provincial council his detailed reasons for breaking his word and who allowed his militiamen to go into the square out of uniform to demand Alvear’s resignation. Enraged, Cuyo dismissed the one who dared to succeed, with a paper appointment, the man appointed by Nature; and San Martín had Cuyo, the place that could not give him up because he carried within him the redemption of the continent — that friend of the harness-makers to whom he returned intact the saddles required for the country, of the mule drivers whose mules he returned after their service in the army, of the farmers who proudly brought him seed corn for the troops to plant in their little patches of ground, of the region’s notables who trusted the honest administrator and placed in him their hopes of ridding their heads and their properties of the Spaniard. San Martín charged the inhabitants of Cuyo for breathing; even the sprouting root paid a tax. But first he had fired them with such a passion for the freedom of their country, and with such pride in Cuyo, that whatever tax he imposed they considered tolerable, especially since San Martín, with his understanding of men, did not encroach upon local customs but exacted the new taxes by means of the old methods: town council approval. Cuyo would save America. “Give me Cuyo and with its help I will ride into Lima!” Cuyo had faith in anyone who had faith in it, and praised to the skies the man who thought highly of it. In Cuyo, at the gateway to Chile, he created, complete from boots to ships, the army with which he was to liberate it. His men, the defeated; his money, from Cuyo’s people; their meat, the jerked beef wrapped in dough that lasts for a week; shoes, the gaucho’s sheepskin boot drawn together over the instep; clothes, tanned hides; water flasks, horn; sabers honed to a razor’s edge; bugles for music; cannon cast from bells. Dawn found him in the arsenal, counting pistols; in the munitions depot he could tell one cannonball from another. He hefted them bodily, dusted off the powder, and carefully replaced them on the pile. He put an inventive priest in charge of the arsenal, and the army went out of there equipped with gun carriages and horseshoes, canteens and cartridges, bayonets and mechanical devices; that lieutenant-priest, at 25 pesos a month, was hoarse for the rest of his life. San Martín built a saltpeter plant and a powder mill. He drew up the military code, organized the medical corps and commissary. He established an academy for officers, because “an army cannot exist without officers who are also mathematicians.” Early in the morning when the sun hit the mountain peaks, there were field maneuvers, with San Martín’s saber flashing everywhere among the green recruits, the mounted grenadiers, and his beloved Negroes. He would take a swallow from his canteen and say: “Here, let me fix your rifle!” “Your hand, brother; that was a fine shot.” “Come, gaucho, some swordplay with the governor!” At a blast from the bugles the expert horseman was off, galloping from group to group, hatless and radiantly happy: “Faster, faster, while the daylight lasts; battles are won on the drill field!” He sent his officers to fight bulls: “I need these mad men to defeat the Spaniards!” With the stragglers from Chile, the liberated slaves, the conscripts, the vagrants, he gathered together and trans formed 6,000 men. One sunny day he led them into the flower-decked city of Mendoza, put his general’s staff into the hand of Our Lady of Carmen, dipped the blue flag three times in the silence following the roll of drums, and said, “My soldiers, this is the first flag of independence to be blessed in America; swear to defend it with your life, as I am swearing!”
The 4,000 mounted fighting men started crossing the Andes in four columns, with a groom for every 20 horses. There were 1,200 riflemen, 250 artillery men with their 2,000 cannon balls, and nine hundred thousand rounds of ammunition. The two center columns were flanked by a column on either side. Fray Beltrán marched ahead with his 120 wielders of the pickax and crowbar shouldering their implements, his drays and poles to protect the 21 cannons, his rope bridges for crossing rivers, his grapples and cables to rescue those who might lose their footing. At times the men walked along the edge of a precipice, at times they made their way upward by hugging the slopes. When a body of men intended to fall upon the Chacabuco valley like lightning, those men had to live near the lightning. Out of the mass of snow rose the shimmering hulk of Aconcagua. Below them the condors wheeled among the clouds. There the rattled Spanish troops were waiting, wondering from which direction the blow would fall, their forces scattered by San Martín’s subtle espionage and policy of attrition, so that they could avoid a confrontation with his concentrated strength. San Martín dismounted from his mule, wrapped himself in his cape, and slept with a stone for a pillow and the Andes all around him.
It was 24 days later at dawn when to the sound of drums, O’Higgins’s3 flank, jealous of Soler’s, gained the summit by which the surrounded Spaniards might escape. Back in Cuyo, San Martín had been surrounding them in his mind’s eye, hill by hill. Battles are won behind the eyebrows. The fighting man must have the terrain in his pocket. At noon the terrified Spaniard recoiled before the picket guards in the valley, to fall at the onslaught of the horses from the mountains. The liberating cavalry ran through the enemy infantry like a whirlwind and left the gunners lying over their own cannon. San Martín threw his full force against the ineffectual ranch walls used by the enemy as fortifications. The last of the royalists took to their heels through the fields and marshes. Among the 500 dead lay the two halves of a gun shining in the grass. And after winning the struggle that liberated Chile and assured America of her freedom, San Martín wrote a letter to “admirable Cuyo” and had the cloth of his cape turned.
Chile wanted to name him governor with absolute powers, but he declined the offer. In Buenos Aires he resigned his commission of brigadier-general “because I have given my word not to accept any military rank or political office.” The city fathers enshrined his portrait, decorating it with battle trophies, and his fellow countryman Belgrano ordered a pyramid built in his honor. But what San Martín wanted from Buenos Aires were troops, weapons, money, and ships for cutting off Lima by sea as he planned to do by land.
With his Irish aide-de-camp he returned by way of the field of Chacabuco and wept over the fate of his “poor Negroes” who fell there in the cause of American freedom. In Buenos Aires he set in motion the secret power of the Lautaro Lodge, and backed his friend O’Higgins, who was his director in Chile, against the rival ambitions of his enemy Carrera. From his elegant home in Santiago, where he would have no silver plate or salaried retainers, he set about undermining the influence of the Peruvian viceroy. He sighed from the depths of “the sorrow gnawing away at my sad existence” for “two months of peace in the good city of Mendoza.” Astride his horse at the Archbishop’s door way he harangued the Chileans defeated in Cancharrayada, and then emerged in triumph from the bloody field of Maipú, with Lima before him.
He leaped from his battle steed to an Andean mule; threatening to resign, he forced Buenos Aires, prodded by the Lodge, to send him funds for the expedition in Peru. He carried on a correspondence with his faithful friend, the Argentine director Pueyrredón, about the plan that ended in sending a Lodge member to the courts of Europe in quest of a king — just as the Chilean fleet, victorious in the Pacific, came under the command of the Englishman Cochrane who had left his country rather than “see it unmercifully oppressed” by a monarchy, and just as Bolívar was planting the republican flag in nation after nation. And when Chile and Argentina — faced by San Martín’s threat of withdrawing his army across the Andes, leaving O’Higgins without support and the road to Chile and Argentina open to the Spaniards — were forced to submit to his demands for further help; when Cochrane had opened the sea route to Peru with his daring raids; when he was finally about to descend upon the Lima palaces with his reinforced army, assuring America of independence and himself of glory, Buenos Aires recalled him to throw back a Spanish expedition that was thought to be already upon the high seas, to protect the government against the rebellious federalists, and to support the monarchy that San Martín himself had recommended. He refused. He rose up with the army he could never have assembled without the aid of his country, was acclaimed supreme commander of his troops at Rancagua, and as an independent captain carrying the Chilean colors, turned toward Peru to rout the Spaniards, leaving his strife-torn country behind him. “The war will never end until Lima is in our hands!” On this campaign “hang the hopes of this vast continent.” “I must follow the call of destiny…”
Who was that man in gold-embroidered uniform, driving through the mild air of Lima in his elegant state coach drawn by six horses? He was the Protector of Peru,4 who by his own decree proclaimed himself all-powerful ruler, wrote a constitution fixing all power in his hands and establishing the political system, who freed the unborn children of slaves, abolished torture and the lash, and accomplished both good and evil through his fiery minister Monteagudo. He was the man who, on the very day the constitution was put into effect, created the order of nobility — the Order of the Sun; the man who had the breast band of the ladies of Lima inscribed “To the patriotism of the gentler sex”; the “emperor” ridiculed by the popular songs of the day; the “King José” laughed at by his Lodge brothers in the flag room. He was San Martín, abandoned by Cochrane, denied by his troops, detested in Buenos Aires and Chile, thrown into confusion at a meeting of the “Patriotic Society” when he applauded the speech of a priest who favored a king and begged to have some empty-headed fellow sent to Europe to look over an Austrian or Italian or Portuguese prince for Peru. Who was that grim and lonely man leaving the ball after that titanic meeting in Guayaquil, the ball where Bolívar, aglow with victory, unchallenged leader of the armies coming from Boyacá and sweeping the Spaniards before them, waltzed among the modest ladies and riotous soldiers? He was San Martín, who convoked Peru’s first constitutional congress and stripped himself before it of his red and white sash; who stepped out of his state coach in a Peru turned against the Protector because “the presence of a successful military figure is frightening to emerging countries, and I am growing weary of hearing it said that I want to become king.” He left Peru to Bolívar “who won it by his hand,” because “there is not enough room in Peru for Bolívar and me without a conflict that would be a worldwide scandal, and San Martín will not be the one to give the royalists a Roman holiday.” In the dark of night he quietly bade farewell to a faithful officer, arrived in Chile with 120 gold doubloons in his purse, only to find that he was hated. In Buenos Aires they whistled at him in the streets, unaware that because of his sincere patience when luck was against him he had reached a truer greatness than his ambition had sought in vain.
Cured of the blindness and temptations of power, this man who had accomplished one of Nature’s designs, and had secured the triumph of the continent so well that even his own defection could not endanger the American effort, emerged in all his beauty. He, whose vision had brought three free nations into being, lived, as it were, a life of dedicated exile, never involving himself in the affairs of men. He learned from his own experience that a leader’s greatness does not lie in his own person, although so it may seem, but in the degree to which he serves the greatness of his people; they rise higher while following him, and fall when they put his leadership behind them. He would weep when he saw an old friend, and died facing the sea with his heart in Buenos Aires, seated in his armchair, white-haired and serene, no less majestic than the snows of Aconcagua in the silence of the Andes.