Arbiters of Change: Provincial Elites and the Origins of Federalism in Argentina's Littoral, 1814-1820

Early in 1817, in the tiny port of Rosario, a deeply troubled Comandante Tomás Bernal sat down at his desk to pen a confidential private letter to Supreme Director Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, head of the national government based in Buenos Aires. Nearly seven years after the May Revolution against Spain, the territory that would later become Argentina found itself buffeted by civil war. Bernal's region, the jurisdiction of the city of Santa Fe, just up the Paraná River from Buenos Aires, found itself enmeshed in the bitter conflict between the government in Buenos Aires, the former viceregal capital, and its principal rival, José Gervasio Artigas, leader of a federalist alliance based in the nearby Banda Oriental, modern Uruguay. Desperate to contain disputes between the national government and the recently created government of Santa Fe, Bernal counseled restraint. However, he knew that Buenos Aires and Santa Fe were on the brink of war. "For my part," he wrote Pueyrredón:

you can count it as certain that in such a war I will not take part but I will not be able to keep myself from lamenting the loss of a precious part of this land, which has sworn to sacrifice its life only against a foreign enemy that would oppose the enjoyment of its rights. ¹

Considering himself a patriot, Bernal urged Buenos Aires and Santa Fe to overlook their minor grievances against each other and to focus on fighting their external enemies, Spain and Portugal. As a patriot, he also flatly refused to fight against Buenos Aires in the name of federalism.

One year later, José Francisco Bedoya of the neighboring province of Corrientes, further up the Paraná, penned an even more urgent letter to Director Pueyrredón, informing him that he had led his province in its latest revolt against Artigas.

Exhausted by the ill effects of a war that it had never been able to sustain by itself, shaken always by the scandalous abuses with which the governors have marked their public conduct and administration, all notions of honesty having been lost, this Province had begun to realize that amidst the appearances of a false liberty its fate would be no more than that of a victim, that intrigue and factions were dedicated to ambition, personal interest, and to all the passions with which evil men can insult their fellows. . . . Understand that a poor land without resources is in my opinion a multitude of men who, abandoned to the plans that ignorance must suggest, will not see any other result to their meditations than the absurdities and evils to which the spirit of faction and party will imperceptibly precipitate them, and this is enough for you to be sure that in the final perfection that this effort will receive, none, none of the dignity and rights that correspond to the Capital will suffer. ²

Bedoya and his associates, who included most of the province's officials and military officers, recoiled from their experience with Artigas and condemned federalism. In fact, the remainder of Bedoya's letter urged a coordinated campaign against Artigas by Buenos Aires, Corrientes, Paraguay, and Portugal's forces in the Banda Oriental.

From the time of Sarmiento to the present, historians have seen Argentina's littoral region—the provinces of Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, and Corrientes, which lie along the Paraná River—as determined in its opposition to Buenos Aires, as seething with federalist sentiment. Two propositions in particular shape current thinking about the littoral after independence. First, scholars have seen provincial politicians as representatives of regional interests struggling against the capital's monopoly of authority, trade, and revenues. Second, some scholars have portrayed provincial politicians as champions of the popular will, chafing at political control from Buenos Aires. All agree that provincial politicians eagerly embraced federalism, adopting and developing previously existing theories of provincial sovereignty, theories that might include more prominent roles for non-elite actors, and turning them against Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the May Revolution. ³ [End Page...