Jose de San Martin

Jose Francisco de San Martin was born on February 25, 1778, in Yapeyu, a small settlement on the Uruguay River in what is now the Argentine province of Corrientes ^[1]. His father, Juan de San Martin, was a Spanish officer serving as administrator of the town, which had originally been founded as a Jesuit mission among the Guarani people. His mother, Gregoria Matorras, had also come from Spain. Jose was the youngest of five children ^[2].

The family left South America when Jose was still a small boy. By 1784 they had settled in Spain, and the future general grew up in Malaga and Madrid rather than on the Rio de la Plata ^[1]. At the age of eleven he entered the Murcia infantry regiment as a cadet, beginning a Spanish military career that would last more than two decades ^[2].

Any reader curious about who was Jose de San Martin should start with this double formation: a birth on the colonial frontier and an education inside the professional army of the empire he would later fight. He saw action against the Moors in North Africa, fought the French, and served against Britain at sea. During the Peninsular War that followed Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, he distinguished himself at the Battle of Baylen, where a Spanish force compelled the surrender of a French army, and he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel ^[1].

In 1811 San Martin resigned his Spanish commission. He traveled to London, where he made contact with circles of Spanish Americans who favored independence for the colonies, and in early 1812 he sailed for Buenos Aires aboard the British ship George Canning ^[2]. The city had deposed its Spanish viceroy two years earlier and was governing itself, though its revolution remained unfinished and threatened on several fronts.

The government of Buenos Aires accepted his services and asked him to organize a cavalry corps. The result was the Regiment of Mounted Grenadiers, a disciplined professional unit that became the model for the patriot armies ^[1]. In February 1813 San Martin led the regiment in its first engagement at San Lorenzo, on the banks of the Parana River, where his troopers routed a Spanish landing party. His horse was killed under him during the charge, and a soldier named Juan Bautista Cabral died shielding the fallen commander ^[3].

That same year San Martin joined the Lautaro Lodge, a secret society working for South American independence, and became a figure in revolutionary politics as well as in the army ^[2]. In 1814 he took command of the Army of the North after its defeats in Upper Peru, present-day Bolivia. What he saw there changed the course of the war: he concluded that the mountainous northern route to the Spanish stronghold in Lima could never be forced, and that the viceroyalty of Peru would have to be attacked from the west, by way of Chile and the Pacific ^[1].

To pursue that plan, San Martin obtained the governorship of Cuyo, the western Argentine province centered on Mendoza at the foot of the Andes. From 1814 to 1817 he devoted himself to building an army almost from nothing. The province supplied recruits, mules, horses, cloth for uniforms, and gunpowder from a workshop he established; Chilean exiles who had fled the Spanish reconquest of their country, among them Bernardo O'Higgins, joined the force ^[2]. In 1816, at San Martin's urging, the congress meeting at Tucuman formally declared the independence of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata on July 9 ^[1].

The crossing itself began in January 1817. The Army of the Andes, roughly 5,000 men with artillery and thousands of pack animals, moved through several high passes at once, the main columns using the Los Patos and Uspallata routes at elevations above 3,000 meters ^[3]. The operation was planned to deceive the royalists about where the blow would fall, and it succeeded: the divided Spanish forces in Chile could not concentrate in time. On February 12, 1817, San Martin defeated them at Chacabuco and entered Santiago days later ^[1].

Offered the governorship of liberated Chile, he declined and arranged for O'Higgins to take the office instead ^[2]. The war was not over. A royalist counteroffensive surprised and scattered the patriots at Cancha Rayada in March 1818, but on April 5 San Martin won the decisive Battle of Maipu near Santiago, which secured Chilean independence for good ^[1].

Peru remained the seat of Spanish power on the continent, and San Martin had always regarded Lima as the true objective. With Chilean resources and a squadron commanded by the former British naval officer Thomas Cochrane, he assembled a seaborne expedition of about 4,500 soldiers that sailed from Valparaiso in August 1820 ^[1]. Rather than seek an immediate battle, he landed south of Lima at Pisco and waged a patient campaign of maneuver, blockade, and persuasion, encouraging Peruvians to join the cause and royalist units to defect ^[2].

The strategy worked slowly but steadily. The viceroy abandoned the capital, and on July 28, 1821, San Martin proclaimed the independence of Peru in Lima's main square ^[1]. He accepted the title of Protector of Peru and governed for a year, during which his administration abolished the forced labor tribute levied on the indigenous population, declared the children of slaves free, and founded the National Library of Peru ^[3]. Substantial royalist armies still held the Andean highlands, however, and the Protector lacked the strength to destroy them.

In July 1822 San Martin traveled north to Guayaquil for a private meeting with Simon Bolivar, the liberator whose armies had freed the northern part of the continent. No full record of their conversation survives, and historians still argue over what was said ^[2]. What is certain is the outcome: San Martin returned to Lima, resigned his authority before the new Peruvian congress in September 1822, and left the completion of the war to Bolivar, whose forces won the final victories at Junin and Ayacucho in 1824 ^[1].

In 1812, soon after arriving in Buenos Aires, San Martin married Maria de los Remedios de Escalada, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a prominent local family ^[2]. Their only child, Mercedes Tomasa, was born in Mendoza in 1816. Remedios suffered from tuberculosis, and long separations imposed by the war marked the marriage; she died in Buenos Aires in August 1823, at the age of twenty five, while her husband was still returning from Peru ^[3].

San Martin himself lived with chronic ill health for much of his adult life. He suffered from ulcers, rheumatic complaints, and asthma, and he used opium at times to manage pain, a fact his physicians and later biographers recorded ^[2]. Contemporaries described a reserved, methodical man who disliked ceremony and public adulation.

After his wife's death he devoted himself to raising Mercedes. For her education he composed a set of maxims urging honesty, charity toward the poor, respect for others' property, and the ability to keep a secret, a document Argentine schoolchildren still read ^[3]. Mercedes later married Mariano Balcarce and remained close to her father until his death.

San Martin found no place in the politics of the country he had helped to create. The United Provinces were sliding into civil war between centralists and federalists, and he refused repeated invitations to lead troops against fellow Argentines ^[1]. In February 1824 he sailed for Europe with his daughter. He lived first in Britain and Belgium and eventually settled in France, supported modestly by savings, a Peruvian pension that arrived irregularly, and later the generosity of the Spanish banker Alejandro Aguado, an old comrade from his army days ^[2].

He attempted one return. In 1829 he reached the Rio de la Plata, but finding Buenos Aires convulsed by factional violence he declined to land and go into politics, and he sailed back to Europe without disembarking in the city ^[1]. During the French and British blockades of Buenos Aires in the late 1830s and 1840s he publicly supported the Argentine position against foreign intervention, and he offered his services to the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas, who came to regard the old general with respect ^[2].

His final home was a house on the Grande Rue in Boulogne-sur-Mer on the English Channel, where he lived quietly with Mercedes and her family as his eyesight failed. He died there on August 17, 1850, at the age of seventy two ^[1]. In his will he asked that his heart rest in Buenos Aires. His remains were repatriated in 1880 and placed in a mausoleum in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, where a permanent guard of grenadiers still stands watch ^[3].

Any list of Jose de San Martin achievements begins with three national independences. Argentina, Chile, and Peru each count him among their founders, and in Argentina he holds the official title of Father of the Nation. August 17, the anniversary of his death, is a national holiday there, and the crossing of the Andes is taught as the defining feat of the independence wars ^[1].

Military historians rank the Andes campaign with the great mountain operations of history, and studies of the continental strategy he pursued from Mendoza to Lima remain a staple of the literature on the Spanish American revolutions ^[2]. His renunciation of power in 1822 shaped his reputation as much as his victories did: unlike many liberators, he never made himself a ruler, and the contrast has colored two centuries of writing about him, beginning with Bartolome Mitre's monumental nineteenth century biography ^[3].

Statues of San Martin stand across Latin America and beyond, from the Plaza San Martin in Buenos Aires to monuments in Washington and New York. Cities, a Peruvian region, universities, and the highest Argentine decoration, the Order of the Liberator General San Martin, carry his name. His birthplace at Yapeyu is preserved as a national memorial ^[4]. For readers of any Jose de San Martin biography, the essential facts endure: a professional soldier of empire who turned his training against that empire, freed half a continent, and walked away from the power he had won.