Argentine Confederation

The territory in question ran from the Andes to the Atlantic and from the Bolivian highlands to the fringes of Patagonia, but effective control stopped well short of the map's edges. Beyond the Salado river lay indigenous territory that no provincial government administered; the Chaco was raided rather than ruled; the south was a frontier of forts, cattle estates and treaties with caciques. Inside the settled provinces the economy was pastoral in the littoral and the pampas, artisanal and increasingly impoverished in the interior, where the cloth and wine of Cuyo and Catamarca could not compete with British and French manufactures. Almost all foreign trade passed through the customs house of Buenos Aires, and that single institution shaped every political conflict of the period.

The Confederation matters because the Argentine state was invented inside it, and against it. The blockades by France and then by Britain and France together forced a poor and thinly populated country to define what sovereignty over its rivers meant. The 1853 constitution, written at Santa Fe while Buenos Aires held aloof, is still the skeleton of Argentine public law. And the conflict between the port and the provinces, fought out at Caseros in 1852 and at Pavón in 1861, set the terms of Argentine politics until Buenos Aires was finally federalised in 1880. One warning belongs here rather than at the end: the map below draws this entity at 1882, twenty-one years after it ceased to exist, and the polygon at that date shows something quite different from the Confederation.

At a glance

Why did the United Provinces fall apart in the 1820s?

Independence in 1816 settled the question of who ruled Argentina and left untouched the question of how. The Congress of Tucumán declared independence for the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, but the constitution it produced in 1819 was rejected by the provinces, and the wars of independence had emptied the treasury and garrisoned the country with armies that answered to provincial chieftains. In 1820 the defeat of the directorate at Cepeda ended central government altogether. A second attempt came in 1826, when Bernardino Rivadavia's unitarian constitution — a president, a senate, a national capital — was adopted while the country was at war with Brazil over the Banda Oriental; it lasted less than a year, and Rivadavia resigned in June 1827. For the next decade each province governed itself, coined its own paper money, raised its own militia and negotiated its own treaties, as the Federal League of the eastern provinces had already done under José Gervasio Artigas between 1815 and 1820.

The failure was fiscal before it was ideological. A national government needed a revenue of its own, and the only reliable revenue in the country was the customs house of Buenos Aires, which taxed the entire foreign trade of the interior as it passed through the port. Any provincial government that surrendered that revenue to a national authority surrendered the engine of its own power; any national government that tried to take it was attacking the province that mattered most. Unitarians and federalists disagreed about many things, but the substance of their quarrel was whether a central state could be financed at all.

The immediate collapse came through a sequence of personal and provincial quarrels. Manuel Dorrego, the federalist governor of Buenos Aires, signed a peace with Brazil in 1828 that recognised Uruguayan independence; the army that had fought the war considered the peace a betrayal, and in December 1828 the unitarian general Juan Lavalle seized Dorrego and had him shot without trial. The execution converted a factional dispute into a civil war. Juan Manuel de Rosas, a rancher who commanded the rural militia of the south of the province, joined forces with Estanislao López of Santa Fe, defeated Lavalle at Puente Márquez in April 1829, and was elected governor of Buenos Aires in December of that year with the title "Restorer of the Laws".

Rosas' first term was short and, by his own standards, moderate. He cut expenditure, improved tax collection, kept the legislature and declined to write a constitution. In the interior the unitarian general José María Paz built a league of provinces against him, and Rosas answered with a treaty rather than an army: the Federal Pact signed at Santa Fe on 4 January 1831.

What did the Federal Pact of 1831 create?

The pact was signed by three provinces — Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos — as an offensive and defensive alliance against the Unitarian League that Paz had organised in the interior. Its terms committed the signatories to resist any foreign invasion of any Argentine province, to make no separate treaties without the consent of the others, to refuse asylum to criminals fleeing a signatory, and to allow the free passage of persons and goods between them without internal duties. It also created a standing body, the Representative Commission of the Governments of the Littoral Provinces, seated at Santa Fe, to coordinate foreign and military policy and to invite the remaining provinces to a general congress that would organise the nation.

What the pact did not create was a government. There was no executive, no national treasury, no supreme court and no mechanism for enforcing the commission's decisions. Every province retained its sovereignty, and the commission's authority rested on the willingness of three governors to use it. Corrientes adhered on 19 August 1831 and sent a deputy; Córdoba, Santiago del Estero, Mendoza, La Rioja, San Luis, San Juan, Salta, Tucumán and Catamarca adhered by law over the following eighteen months. By 1832 the pact covered most of the country on paper.

In practice it failed almost immediately, and the way it failed revealed the whole future of the confederation. Corrientes' deputy, Pedro Ferré, had argued during the negotiations for a commission with real powers over foreign trade, river navigation and the distribution of customs revenue, and for the opening of ports other than Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires' deputy, José María Roxas y Patrón, refused: the province, he replied, carried the national debt, guarded the coast, maintained consuls abroad and answered for the damage done by corsairs. The final text dropped the fiscal question. When Paraguay occupied the disputed Misiones territory in 1832 and Corrientes invoked the pact's mutual-defence clauses, Buenos Aires declined to help, arguing that the Paraguayans were merely retaking land they had once held, and that Corrientes could defend itself. The Representative Commission ceased to meet, no congress was ever convoked, and the pact settled into what it remained for twenty years: a legal fiction under which Buenos Aires conducted the foreign relations of provinces it could not tax and did not defend.

Its afterlife matters more than its operation. Because the pact was never repudiated, it became the constitutional substratum of the country. The preamble of the 1853 constitution opens by invoking the "pre-existing pacts" (pactos preexistentes), and the San Nicolás Agreement of 1852 went further and declared the pact of 1831 the fundamental law of the republic. Argentine constitutional doctrine has treated the federal system as resting on provincial consent expressed in treaties of this kind. The jurist Antonio Sagarna made the doctrine explicit in the 1930s, arguing that the pacts of 1831 and after were the true origin of Argentine federalism and that the failure of 1853 was a failure to consummate a union the pacts had already promised.

How did Rosas turn a league into a regime?

Rosas left the governorship in December 1832 and spent 1833 and 1834 on the southern frontier, campaigning against the indigenous nations of the pampas in what later historians called the Desert Campaign. The campaign combined cavalry war with treaties and bribes: tribes that submitted were recognised as "friendly Indians", supplied with cattle, liquor and rations, and enlisted against tribes that did not. It pushed the effective frontier south and west, opened land for cattle, and gave Rosas a personal network of clients among caciques that outlasted the campaign.

While he was away, his wife Encarnación Ezcurra and his political managers organised the poor of Buenos Aires against the governor who had replaced him, and in October 1833 a demonstration of gauchos and labourers outside the legislature — the Revolution of the Restorers — forced the governor's resignation. Two weak administrations followed. In February 1835 the federalist caudillo Facundo Quiroga was murdered at Barranca Yaco while on a mediation mission, and the legislature, unable to guarantee order, offered Rosas the governorship with the "sum of public power": executive, legislative and judicial authority combined in one person, granted without a fixed term and renewed by the legislature for the rest of his rule. A plebiscite ratified the grant. In 1835, at the age of forty-two, Rosas became the effective sovereign of Buenos Aires and, through it, of the confederation.

He never took the title of president, and the legal fiction of provincial autonomy was preserved to the end. The provinces delegated their foreign relations to him, formally or by acquiescence, and his officials corresponded with foreign governments as the "encargado de las relaciones exteriores" of the Argentine Confederation. Inside Buenos Aires province he ruled through the justices of the peace, magistrates who combined policing, tax collection, electoral management and minor justice in the countryside, and through a legislature whose composition he controlled. Elections were held and were meaningless; the 1835 plebiscite was not untypical.

The regime's coercive arm was the Sociedad Popular Restauradora and its armed section, known from about 1839 as the Mazorca — the "corncob", from the ear of maize carried as a badge. Mazorqueros searched houses at night, intimidated, beat, tortured and killed, and the killings were deliberately theatrical: throats cut, beards torn out, bodies left in the street. No reliable count of the dead exists. Exile propaganda put the figure in the thousands, later Argentine writers repeated it, and the documented cases that historians have been able to establish run to dozens in the worst years, with the intimidation reaching far beyond the killings. Rosas also built a cult of personality around himself, with his portrait carried in processions and displayed in churches, and made the red colour of the federal party compulsory in dress, badges and public buildings.

Coercion alone would not have sustained him for seventeen years. Rosas governed with the support of most of the Buenos Aires landowning class, to which he belonged by birth, marriage and estate, and with a genuine following among the poor of the city — Afro-Argentines, labourers, gauchos and the militia of the suburbs — for whom he was a patron who attended their festivals, protected their religious brotherhoods and kept the poor law out of their lives. Recent Argentine social history has taken that popular base seriously rather than dismissing it as manipulation. The regime was neither a mere landowners' committee nor a personal tyranny floating above society; it was a provincial state that had learned to mobilise the plebeians it policed.

What did the Confederation look like from the provinces?

From Santa Fe, Corrientes or Tucumán, the confederation was not a nation but a market and a hierarchy. The provinces exported cattle products, tobacco, sugar, wine, cloth and mules to one another and to the outside world, and almost all of that trade had to pass through Buenos Aires, where it paid duties that the province kept. The interior's artisanal industries declined under the competition of imported cloth; the littoral's ranchers prospered but could not ship directly to Europe or sell directly to Brazil without the port's intermediation. Free navigation of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, and a share of the customs revenue, were the two demands the littoral provinces never abandoned, and they are the demands that produced every civil war of the period.

Each province was a small state with its own army. Estanislao López ruled Santa Fe for two decades; Juan Felipe Ibarra held Santiago del Estero; Facundo Quiroga dominated La Rioja and the Cuyo provinces until his murder; José Manuel de Aldao and his successors governed Mendoza; Pedro Ferré and then Benjamín Virasoro governed Corrientes; Justo José de Urquiza built Entre Ríos into the richest and best-administered province of the littoral. These men were not Rosas' subordinates. They were allies who accepted his direction in foreign affairs because he had the port, the army and the money, and who broke with him when their provinces' interests required it. That is what happened in 1840, again in 1841, again in Corrientes in 1843 and 1846, and finally in Entre Ríos in 1851.

The confederation's external relations were equally provincial in their logic. Uruguay was a province in all but name for Argentine politicians, and the long siege of Montevideo from 1843 was fought by Argentine and Uruguayan forces under Manuel Oribe, whom Rosas recognised as Uruguay's legitimate president. Paraguay had detached itself in 1811 and was treated as a foreign power that had stolen Misiones territory. Bolivia was the old Alto Perú. Chile was a rival for the Pacific trade and a refuge for exiles. Brazil was the great power of the region, a monarchy that had absorbed the Banda Oriental in 1816 and lost it in 1828, that had spent a decade trying to reconquer its own breakaway southern province, the Riograndense Republic, and that watched the growth of a Rosista bloc with alarm.

Why did France blockade Buenos Aires in 1838?

The French blockade of 1838 began with a consular quarrel and became a test of sovereignty. The French consul in Buenos Aires, Aimé Roger, demanded the release of two French subjects — César Hipólito Bacle, a lithographer who had sold Argentine maps to Bolivia, and a man named Lavié, accused of theft from a regiment — the exemption of French residents from compulsory military service, and most-favoured-nation status for French trade. None of the demands was large. Rosas refused them all, on the ground that conceding any of them would establish a European right to interfere in Argentine affairs, and on 28 March 1838 a French squadron under Admiral Leblanc closed the port.

The timing was not accidental. France was supporting the Peru–Bolivian Confederation of Andrés de Santa Cruz in its war with Chile and Argentina, and Rosas had declared war on Santa Cruz for harbouring unitarian exiles. French naval power in the Plate was meant to knock Argentina out of that war and to install a friendly government in Montevideo, where the French removed Manuel Oribe and recognised Fructuoso Rivera, who promptly declared war on Rosas. France also seized the island of Martín García, at the mouth of the Uruguay river.

The economic effect was severe. Buenos Aires' exports of cattle hides fell from 823,635 in 1837 to 355,993 in 1838 and to 8,501 in 1839; the total value of exports fell from 36.6 million paper pesos in 1837 to 4.2 million in 1839 and 2.1 million in 1840. Some of that collapse reflects incomplete records during the blockade, but the direction is not in doubt. The political effect ran the other way: the blockade allowed Rosas to present a provincial quarrel as a national defence, and even exiled unitarians and the aged José de San Martín offered him their support. A rising of ranchers in the south of the province, the Libres del Sur, was crushed in 1839; a plot in the city led by Ramón Maza was broken and its leaders killed; the governor of Santa Fe, Domingo Cullen, who had proposed that the littoral provinces secede under French protection, was defeated and shot; and Lavalle's invasion from Uruguay in 1840 ended without a battle before Buenos Aires, his army dissolving as it marched.

France, having expected a short demonstration, found itself in a long and inconclusive war, under British criticism for attacking a state with which it was not at war. The Mackau–Arana convention of 29 October 1840 lifted the blockade in exchange for most-favoured-nation treatment on both sides and the withdrawal of French support from Lavalle. Rosas had won, and he had also been changed by the crisis: the years 1838 to 1840 were when his regime became openly terroristic at home and when it acquired a degree of autonomy from the landowning elite that it had not had before. Jorge Gelman's study of the crisis argues that the blockade and the ranchers' revolt pushed Rosas towards a state with its own coercive capacity and a direct, personal relationship with the poor, the militia and the "friendly Indians" — a provincial state built in the emergency of a foreign war.

What did the Anglo-French blockade of 1845 achieve?

The second blockade was about rivers. Rosas held that the Paraná and Uruguay were internal Argentine waterways and that foreign ships had no right to navigate them without his permission; Britain and France held that they were commercial highways that ought to be open to all flags, and that Rosas' closure of them was a device for forcing the trade of the littoral provinces through Buenos Aires. Behind the principle lay the practical aim of trading directly with Santa Fe, Corrientes, Entre Ríos and Paraguay, and of breaking the port's monopoly without breaking the country.

In 1845 a combined Anglo-French squadron entered the Plata and announced a blockade of Buenos Aires, while a convoy of merchantmen prepared to force its way up the Paraná. Rosas' answer was to fortify the river. At the Vuelta de Obligado, a bend where the Paraná narrows to about 700 metres, General Lucio Mansilla — Rosas' brother-in-law — placed four batteries with thirty guns on the heights, sank or moored twenty-four hulks across the channel and strung three heavy chains between them, and deployed some 2,000 men in trenches. On 20 November 1845 the allied squadron fought its way past the chain, suffering heavy damage from the batteries and from the shoals; the Argentines lost perhaps 250 killed. The convoy went on upriver, its ships were attacked again on the return at Paso del Tonelero and at the Quebracho on 4 June 1846, and six merchant ships were lost.

Tactically the allies had forced the passage. Strategically the operation was a failure: the direct trade with the littoral provinces never materialised at the volume hoped for, the cost of maintaining a squadron in the Plate for years was out of proportion to the profits, and the river provinces themselves did not rise to welcome the invaders. Britain ended its part of the blockade by the Arana–Southern convention of 1849 and France by the Arana–Lepredour convention of 1850; both recognised Argentine sovereignty over the internal rivers and the Argentine government's right to regulate navigation, and both withdrew. Rosas had won the legal argument, and the victory was celebrated across Spanish America. The economic cost was nevertheless real: hides exported through Buenos Aires fell from 1,942,297 in 1845 to 436,739 in 1846, and the blockade years saw the trade rerouted through Brazilian ports and Montevideo in small national vessels rather than disappear.

The episode also fixed the terms of a national myth. Obligado is commemorated in Argentina as the Day of National Sovereignty, and the resistance of a poor country to two European fleets is genuinely impressive. It is worth saying plainly that the battle was a defeat on the field in which the Argentine forces were broken and the river forced, and that what made it a victory was the political and financial cost the operation imposed on the invaders.

How was the Confederation governed without a constitution?

The machinery was improvised, provincial and effective enough to last two decades. At its centre sat the Buenos Aires legislature, a body of provincial notables that granted Rosas the sum of public power and renewed it, voted the budget, and provided the legal form for measures that were decided elsewhere. Rosas treated his ministers as clerks, and said so. The justices of the peace ran the countryside. The army was the province's militia, expanded and professionalised, with a cavalry arm recruited from the estancias and the frontier forts.

Beyond Buenos Aires, government was a matter of treaties, subsidies and intimidation. Rosas signed and renewed treaties of friendship, commerce and alliance with each provincial government; he paid subsidies, supplied arms and lent officers to governors who supported him, and supported their rivals when they did not. The confederation had no national army, no national treasury, no national judiciary and no representation. Its nearest approximation to a national institution was the person of the governor of Buenos Aires as the delegate for foreign relations, an office that existed in practice and was never defined in law.

The fiscal core of the system was the customs house. Duties on imports and exports at Buenos Aires paid for the provincial administration and army, financed the subsidies to allied governors, serviced what could be serviced of the foreign debt, and left the interior with no share of the revenue that its own trade generated. The tariff law of 18 December 1835 raised duties on imported manufactures to between 35 and 50 per cent and prohibited some classes of import altogether, protecting the artisans of Buenos Aires and the interior while leaving the fiscal monopoly intact. Rosas also kept the rivers closed, refused to allow new ports of entry, and rejected every scheme for sharing the customs revenue.

The result was a state that was strong at the provincial level and absent at the national one. It could police Buenos Aires, mobilise its poor, fight its Indian wars, negotiate with European powers and crush provincial rivals. It could not build a national administration, a national market or a national law, and it did not try. When the regime fell in 1852, its successors inherited an international personality, a flag and a set of treaty obligations — and almost nothing else. This is the central argument of Tulio Halperín Donghi's reading of the period: the men who took power after Caseros believed they had inherited a state that needed only a constitution, and discovered that the state itself had to be built.

Why did the opposition fail?

The opposition was intellectually formidable and militarily weak. The generation of 1837 — Esteban Echeverría, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Vicente Fidel López, Juan María Gutiérrez — came of age under Rosas, founded the Asociación de Mayo and the Dogma socialista, and produced in exile the books that would define Argentina's self-image: Echeverría's El matadero, Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), Alberdi's Bases y puntos de partida (1852). Nicolás Shumway has argued that these writers invented Argentina before they governed it: they created a national literature and a national myth in which the pampas stood for barbarism and the city for civilisation, and in doing so gave the future state a cultural programme that outlived Rosas.

Their political and military record was a sequence of defeats. The exiles had no army of their own and depended on foreign patrons — France in 1838, the Anglo-French alliance in 1845, the Colorados in Uruguay, Brazil after 1851 — which allowed Rosas to denounce them as the allies of foreigners. The interior risings were regional and uncoordinated: Corrientes rose in 1839 and was beaten at Pago Largo; the northern coalition of 1840 was beaten at Quebracho Herrado and Famaillá in 1840 and 1841, and its leader Marco Avellaneda was executed; Lavalle's army disintegrated without fighting; Paz, the best general the unitarians had, was captured in 1831 and spent the next nine years a prisoner. Each rising gave the regime an excuse for further repression, and the repression worked.

There was also a social reason. The unitarian programme of a centralised state with a national capital and a national bank appealed to the literate towns and to the export merchants; it did not appeal to the rural poor, to the interior's caudillo clienteles or to the provincial elites who preferred a weak centre. Rosas' federalism, whatever its content in practice, spoke the language of provincial autonomy and local power, and that language won. The opposition's eventual victory came not from its own strength but from a split within the federal camp, engineered by a federal caudillo who had concluded that Buenos Aires' hegemony was costing his province more than it was worth.

Why did Urquiza destroy Rosas in 1852?

Justo José de Urquiza governed Entre Ríos from 1842 and made it the most dynamic province of the littoral. Its salted beef went to Brazil and Cuba, its ranches expanded, its rivers carried trade that Buenos Aires taxed and regulated, and its governor commanded the largest provincial army in the confederation after Buenos Aires' own. Urquiza had served Rosas loyally for a decade, defeating Corrientes' risings and commanding the federal army in Uruguay. What changed was the end of the European blockades. With the foreign threat gone, Rosas no longer needed the littoral's cooperation, and he moved to tighten the port's grip: in 1851 he forbade the trade with Montevideo that Entre Ríos depended on, and he refused to consider a constitution or a share of the customs.

On 1 May 1851 Urquiza issued his Pronunciamiento at Concepción del Uruguay, resuming for Entre Ríos the right to conduct its own foreign relations and declaring that he would not accept Rosas' direction any longer. He then did what no unitarian had managed: he built a coalition. He signed an alliance with Brazil and with the Colorado government of Montevideo, promising to expel Oribe from Uruguay and to hold free elections in Argentina, and Brazil supplied money, ships and troops. Oribe, abandoned and blockaded, capitulated in October 1851. In December the allied army — the Grand Army, some 24,000 to 28,000 men, of whom about 4,000 were Brazilian and 1,600 Uruguayan — crossed the Paraná into Buenos Aires province.

The battle came on 3 February 1852 at Caseros, on the outskirts of the city. Rosas had some 22,000 to 26,000 men and a formidable artillery park under Martiniano Chilavert, but his command was divided and his cavalry failed to break the allied line. The action lasted a few hours; the federal army lost perhaps 1,500 killed and wounded and 7,000 prisoners, and Rosas left the field for the British legation and then for exile in Southampton, where he died in 1877. The man who had ruled for seventeen years had not been overthrown by his ideological enemies but by a federal governor of the littoral using Brazilian money.

What did the 1853 constitution do?

Urquiza did not proclaim a new order; he called the provinces to a meeting. The San Nicolás Agreement of 31 May 1852 committed the governors to a constituent congress, to a federal system, to the free navigation of rivers and to the abolition of internal customs. The agreement declared the pact of 1831 the fundamental law of the republic, gave every province two deputies whatever its population, and conferred executive power on Urquiza as provisional director. Buenos Aires rejected it: equal provincial representation would have outvoted the largest province in the country, and the arrangement left the port and its customs in the hands of a government it did not control. In September 1852, while Urquiza was absent from the city, a revolution in Buenos Aires threw out his governor and declared the province a separate state.

The constituent congress met at Santa Fe from November 1852 and sanctioned the constitution on 1 May 1853. Its intellectual author was Alberdi, whose Bases y puntos de partida had set out a programme of European immigration, free navigation, railways, foreign capital and a federal constitution modelled partly on the United States and partly on the pacts of the 1820s. The text created a federal republic with a president, a bicameral congress, a supreme court and provincial constitutions; it abolished slavery, abolished internal customs, made all customs houses national, opened the rivers to all flags, promised to promote European immigration and forbade the federal government to restrict it, and guaranteed civil rights to foreigners. Article 29 prohibited the congress and the provincial legislatures from granting extraordinary faculties, the sum of public power, or any submission or supremacy that placed the life, honour or property of Argentines at the mercy of a government or a person, and declared such acts null and void. It was written against Rosas.

Two articles made Buenos Aires' secession almost inevitable. Article 3 declared the city of Buenos Aires the capital of the Confederation, to be federalised by a special law; article 9 abolished all customs houses except national ones. Together they proposed to take from the province the port, the capital and the revenue in one move. Urquiza was sworn as president in March 1854, governing from Paraná, with the constitution as his mandate and no revenue worth the name.

What was the State of Buenos Aires?

The State of Buenos Aires governed itself as an independent country from September 1852 to 1861. It wrote its own constitution in 1854, elected its own governor and legislature, kept its customs house, raised its own army and militia, conducted its own foreign relations and negotiated its own loans. Its revenues were larger than the confederation's, its port was the outlet for most of the country's exports whether or not the interior recognised its government, and its political class had discovered in the secession a profitable arrangement. Sarmiento, returning from exile, found the city transformed by immigration, journalism and commerce. The first railway in the country, the Buenos Aires Western, opened in 1857; the provincial state built schools, encouraged colonisation and debated whether to rename itself the Republic of the Río de la Plata.

The confederation could not accept the arrangement and could not undo it. Urquiza besieged the city in 1852 and 1853 and failed; a raid by the federal colonel Jerónimo Costa in 1856 ended with the execution of most of his prisoners by Mitre's orders. Buenos Aires, for its part, could not conquer the interior. The two states traded, postured, negotiated and occasionally fought, while the customs revenue that both needed continued to flow through the port that only one of them controlled.

How did the Confederation end at Pavón?

Reunion was agreed twice on paper before it happened in fact. Santiago Derqui, Urquiza's successor as president, took office in March 1860 under a constitution amended at Buenos Aires' insistence: the clause making the city the capital was removed, import duties were made uniform throughout the country, and export duties were abolished for five years. Buenos Aires rejoined the confederation in 1860 on those terms, keeping its customs house and its provincial army, and its deputies entered the national congress.

The compromise did not hold. In November 1860 the governor of San Juan, José Antonio Virasoro, was murdered by a faction with connections in Buenos Aires; in January 1861 the national army intervened in the province and its commander had the new governor, Antonino Aberastain, executed after a skirmish. Buenos Aires treated both as crimes and prepared for war. On 17 September 1861 the armies met at Pavón in Santa Fe province: Mitre with some 15,000 to 16,000 men, Urquiza with 16,000 to 18,000 and more guns. The fighting was indecisive until the afternoon, when the Buenos Aires infantry held and the confederation's cavalry, having driven off its opponents, failed to reform. Urquiza withdrew his army from the field in good order and marched back to Entre Ríos.

Why he withdrew has never been satisfactorily explained, and it decided the country's future. The confederation's army was not destroyed; it left the field intact and could have fought again. Explanations on offer include the disorder of his cavalry, his distrust of Derqui — whom he had not wanted as his successor and whose government he had declined to support — his calculation that a defeated Buenos Aires would be a permanent enemy while an accommodation with Mitre would preserve Entre Ríos' influence in the littoral, and simple political fatigue in a man who had already made and unmade two national governments. Halperín Donghi's reading is the most persuasive: Urquiza had concluded that his own province's future lay in an understanding with the port rather than in the confederation he had created, and he acted accordingly.

The confederation collapsed within weeks. Derqui resigned in November, the national government dissolved, and Mitre governed provisionally until a congress elected under Buenos Aires' influence chose him as president in 1862. The constitution of 1853, as amended in 1860, survived as the constitution of the Argentine Republic; the customs question was settled only in 1880, when the city of Buenos Aires was federalised and its customs became national. The Argentine Republic that took the confederation's place was a different state from the league of 1831: it had a president, a congress, a national treasury, an army and, within two decades, an invented national history in which Rosas was a tyrant, Urquiza a traitor and Mitre a founder.

Common myths about the Argentine Confederation

Timeline of the Argentine Confederation

What the map shows next

The drawn year is 1882, and the polygon is not the Confederation. At that date the dataset shows a single Argentine state with Buenos Aires absorbed, the pampas and the northern Patagonian block annexed, and a southern limit near 43° south — the republic that emerged from the 1879–83 campaign against the indigenous nations, measured at roughly 2.02 million square kilometres against 1.59 million for the 1861 polygon. Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego do not appear until the 1885 polygon, and Buenos Aires never appears as a separate entity after 1861. The label is a dataset artefact: the Cliopatria entity named "Argentine Confederation" runs continuously to 1929, so the name is applied to a state that had ceased to exist twenty-one years before the year drawn.

The years that do show the Confederation are more useful. 1839 on the map catches the regime at the height of its first crisis, with the French blockade closing the port and the Libres del Sur rising in the south. 1845 on the map shows the same territory at the moment of the Anglo-French intervention, before the frontier had moved. 1853 on the map is the most revealing of all: the dataset splits Buenos Aires out as the State of Buenos Aires and draws the confederation of the thirteen interior provinces without the port, which is exactly the political geography of the secession. 1861 on the map shows the two entities reunited, the year the Confederation ended.