Manuel Belgrano

Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano was born in Buenos Aires on June 3, 1770, into a prosperous merchant household. His father, Domenico Belgrano Peri, had emigrated from Oneglia in Liguria and built a successful trading business in the Río de la Plata; his mother, María Josefa González Casero, came from a criollo family with roots in the region ^[1]. Manuel was one of many children, and the family's wealth allowed him an education far beyond what most young men of the viceroyalty could expect.

He studied first at the Real Colegio de San Carlos in Buenos Aires, then sailed for Spain in 1786 to read law at the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid, receiving his license to practice from the chancery of Valladolid in 1793 ^[2]. Spain in those years was absorbing the ideas of the European Enlightenment, and Belgrano read widely in political economy: the physiocrats, Adam Smith, and the Spanish reformers Campomanes and Jovellanos shaped his thinking for the rest of his life ^[3]. He obtained papal permission to read books that were otherwise prohibited, an unusual privilege that reflected both his seriousness and his curiosity.

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 caught him as a student in Spain, and he later wrote in his autobiography that the ideas of liberty and equality then circulating took firm hold of him ^[2]. When the Spanish crown created a Consulate in Buenos Aires, a body charged with promoting commerce, Belgrano was appointed its perpetual secretary. He returned home in 1794, aged twenty four, carrying an economic program well ahead of the closed mercantile habits of the colony.

For anyone asking who was Manuel Belgrano before he became a general, the answer lies in his years at the Consulate of Buenos Aires. From 1794 to 1810 he used his annual reports to argue for causes that colonial administrators mostly ignored: schools of commerce, navigation, and drawing; agricultural improvement; roads; and the education of women, a position that was strikingly rare in the Spanish empire of the 1790s ^[3]. Some of his proposed schools were founded, then starved of funds or shut down by authorities in Spain, an experience that gradually soured him on the colonial system.

Belgrano also helped open the periodical press in the Río de la Plata. He collaborated in the founding of the Telégrafo Mercantil in 1801 and in 1810 edited the Correo de Comercio, a weekly through which he spread economic and educational ideas among the reading public of Buenos Aires ^[4]. His journalism was practical rather than ornamental: articles on farming, trade, and public instruction, written to persuade merchants and landowners that prosperity required reform.

During the British invasions of Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807 he served in the local militias, by his own admission with little military skill, and the episode convinced many criollos that they could defend and govern themselves ^[1]. In the political ferment that followed, Belgrano moved within the circle of criollos who debated the future of the viceroyalty once Napoleon's armies had overthrown the Spanish monarchy in 1808.

When the May Revolution broke out in Buenos Aires in 1810, Belgrano was among its leading civilian figures. On May 25 he was named a member of the Primera Junta, the first patriot government of the Río de la Plata, alongside Cornelio Saavedra, Mariano Moreno, and others ^[1]. He had no formal military training, yet the junta soon pressed him into command, a pattern that would define the rest of his life.

In late 1810 the junta sent him at the head of a small expedition to Paraguay, hoping the province would join the revolution. The campaign failed militarily: his force was beaten at Paraguarí in January 1811 and again at Tacuarí in March ^[5]. Even so, the contact between Belgrano and Paraguayan officers helped set in motion the events that led Paraguay to depose its Spanish governor a few months later. Belgrano negotiated an honorable withdrawal and returned to Buenos Aires, where a tribunal examined his conduct and cleared him.

The episode revealed traits that contemporaries repeatedly noted: personal honesty, insistence on discipline and decent treatment of civilians, and a willingness to accept commands he did not feel qualified to hold because the revolution had few trained officers to spare ^[5].

Any list of Manuel Belgrano achievements begins with the flag. In early 1812, while organizing batteries on the Paraná River near Rosario, he ordered a cockade of light blue and white for his troops, and on February 27, 1812 he raised a flag in those colors for the first time ^[6]. The government in Buenos Aires, still cautious about an open break with Spain, rebuked him for the gesture, but the banner spread anyway and was formally adopted by the Congress of Tucumán in 1816. February 27 and the anniversary of his death, June 20, are both tied to Flag Day commemorations in modern Argentina ^[6].

Later in 1812 Belgrano took command of the Army of the North, the patriot force facing royalist power in Upper Peru. Ordered to retreat toward Córdoba, he instead organized the Jujuy Exodus in August 1812, evacuating the population of Jujuy southward and leaving nothing behind for the advancing royalists ^[5]. Then, disobeying instructions to keep withdrawing, he turned and fought. At the Battle of Tucumán on September 24, 1812 his improvised army defeated the royalist force under Pío Tristán, and at Salta on February 20, 1813 he beat Tristán again and took the surrender of his entire army ^[7]. Historians generally count these two victories among the decisive moments of the independence war, because they secured the northwestern frontier of the revolution at its most fragile hour.

The campaign into Upper Peru that followed ended badly, with defeats at Vilcapugio in October 1813 and Ayohúma in November ^[7]. Belgrano, in poor health, handed the army to José de San Martín in early 1814. The two men respected each other, and San Martín later praised Belgrano's integrity even while reorganizing the force along more professional lines.

After leaving field command, Belgrano served the revolution as a diplomat. In 1814 and 1815 he traveled to Europe with Bernardino Rivadavia, sounding out British and Spanish opinion at a moment when the restoration of Ferdinand VII had turned the diplomatic climate against the American revolutions ^[1]. The mission achieved little concrete, but it left Belgrano convinced that the provinces needed to declare independence formally and settle on a stable form of government.

Back home, he appeared before the Congress of Tucumán, which declared the independence of the United Provinces on July 9, 1816. Belgrano argued there for a constitutional monarchy headed by a descendant of the Inca royal line, with a capital in Cuzco, a proposal he believed would unite the peoples of the old viceroyalty and win legitimacy in European eyes ^[8]. The idea found some support among the deputies from the interior but was mocked in Buenos Aires and never adopted. The debate illustrates how open the question of political form remained even after independence was proclaimed.

He then resumed command of the Army of the North, spending the following years less in battle against royalists than in the wearing task of holding the army together amid civil conflict between Buenos Aires and the provincial caudillos ^[5].

Belgrano never married. He had a daughter, Manuela Mónica, born in 1819 to María Josefa Ezcurra, and a son, Pedro Pablo, born in 1813 to María Dolores Helguero in Tucumán ^[9]. Both relationships remained outside marriage, and the children were raised discreetly; Manuela was brought up in the household of Encarnación Ezcurra and Juan Manuel de Rosas. Contemporaries described Belgrano as reserved, deeply religious, and austere in his habits, a man who donated the 40,000 pesos awarded to him after the victories of Tucumán and Salta to fund the construction of four public schools rather than keep the prize ^[6].

By 1819 his health had collapsed. He suffered from dropsy (edema linked to what modern writers usually interpret as heart or kidney failure) and had to give up his command. He returned to Buenos Aires gravely ill, arriving in a city consumed by the political anarchy of 1820, when governments rose and fell within weeks and the treasury had no money to pay his back salary ^[9].

Manuel Belgrano died in his family home in Buenos Aires on June 20, 1820, a few days after his fiftieth birthday. He was so poor at the end that he paid his doctor with his watch. The city, distracted by civil strife, barely registered his passing; only one newspaper reported the death of the man who had created the national flag ^[9]. He was buried at the convent of Santo Domingo in Buenos Aires, where a mausoleum now holds his remains.

Few figures occupy a larger place in Argentine civic memory. June 20, the anniversary of his death, is observed as Flag Day (Día de la Bandera), a national holiday centered on the National Flag Memorial in Rosario, built near the spot where he first raised the banner in 1812 ^[6]. Alongside José de San Martín, Belgrano is honored as one of the two principal founders of the country, and his image has appeared on Argentine currency, most prominently the 10 peso note.

His name is stamped across the map and the institutions of Argentina: the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, the city of General Belgrano, the Belgrano railway line, football clubs, universities, and warships, including the cruiser General Belgrano sunk during the 1982 South Atlantic war. The Instituto Nacional Belgraniano, a state supported research body, studies and publishes his writings ^[10].

Historians have treated him generously since Bartolomé Mitre's foundational nineteenth century biography presented him as the model of the selfless patriot ^[5]. Modern scholarship gives more weight to his economic thought, his advocacy of schooling for girls and for the poor, and his insistence that independence had to rest on education and productive work. Basic Manuel Belgrano facts, the flag, the victories at Tucumán and Salta, the donated prize money, the destitute death, remain fixtures of Argentine schooling, and any serious Manuel Belgrano biography must reckon with both the reluctant soldier and the persistent reformer.