Federal League

At its height the league covered the Banda Oriental — the eastern bank of the Uruguay river, now Uruguay — together with Entre Ríos, Corrientes, Santa Fe, the mission country of the upper Uruguay and, nominally and briefly, Córdoba. That is a territory of some 600,000 square kilometres as the map draws it, but the number flatters the league. Real authority thinned out north of the Río Negro, where the cattle ran wild and the charrúa and minuán bands were allies rather than subjects, and it depended on the loyalty of a handful of mounted commanders who had their own provinces to govern. The league's coherence rested on two things the map cannot show: the prestige of one man, and the fact that everyone in it feared Buenos Aires more than they feared each other.

Its importance is out of all proportion to its five years. The vocabulary the league invented — the sovereignty of each people, government by pact, a capital that belongs to no province — entered Argentine constitutionalism and never left it. Artigas himself became the founding hero of Uruguay, although the historical Artigas spent his career insisting that the Banda Oriental belonged inside a larger union and twice refused offers of separate independence. And the league's destruction by a European army, with the connivance of Buenos Aires, is the reason a Uruguayan state exists at all. One warning belongs here. The map dataset draws the league only from 1814 to 1819; there is no polygon for 1820, the year it was destroyed, and the last frame therefore shows a league that had already lost Montevideo to the Portuguese.

At a glance

How did a frontier officer become the head of a league?

Artigas was born in Montevideo on 19 June 1764 into a family of landowners who had been among the town's first settlers; his father was a captain of militia and a royal official. He was sent to the family estancia at Sauce as a boy and, by every account including his own, preferred the country to the town. The record then thins for a decade. He spent his twenties on the northern frontier, in the cattle trade and — most Uruguayan historians now accept it, though the older nationalist literature denied it indignantly — in contraband, which was the ordinary business of a border where a rider could avoid both the Spanish and the Portuguese customs houses by going a day out of his way.

In 1797, at thirty-three, he enlisted as a private in the Blandengues, the frontier cavalry corps created to police that border. He fought the Portuguese incursions, learned the geography of the mission country, and acquired a companion who stayed with him for fifty years: Joaquín Lenzina, "el Negro Ansina", whom Artigas bought in order to free him and who became his aide, friend and first biographer. By 1810 Artigas was a captain, a known frontier officer and, when the revolution came, a man with a following among the gauchos and the small ranchers of the interior — the people the port called vagrants.

The revolution reached the Banda Oriental in 1811. On 15 February Artigas deserted his post at Colonia and rode to Buenos Aires to offer his services; the junta commissioned him lieutenant-colonel, gave him 150 men and sent him home. The rural rising known as the Grito de Asencio had already begun on 28 February, and on 18 May Artigas destroyed the Spanish sortie at Las Piedras — the first real victory of the revolution in the Banda Oriental. He then blockaded Montevideo, the last royalist stronghold on the river, and was acclaimed "Jefe de los Orientales".

The siege ended in betrayal, and the betrayal made him a political leader. In October 1811 the Buenos Aires government, unable to take Montevideo and frightened by a Portuguese army on the frontier, signed an armistice with the Spanish viceroy that committed it to abandon the Banda Oriental. Artigas refused to accept it. He withdrew north with his soldiers and with a civilian column that the participants called la redota — a deformation of "derrota", the rout — and which historians have called the Exodus since Clemente Fregeiro popularised the word in 1883. The caravan covered some 522 kilometres in 64 days and wintered at Ayuí, on the western bank of the Uruguay. A register drawn up at Salto Chico on 14 December 1811 counted 4,435 people and 846 carts, excluding the army and those who joined along the road; the figure of 16,000 that is repeated everywhere is an estimate layered on top of that document.

What was formed at Ayuí was not only an army but a programme. From the end of 1811 the artiguista papers begin to insist on what they called the "soberanía particular de los pueblos": each town and province holds its own sovereignty, and the union is a pact between them, not a grant from a capital. The experience behind the doctrine was concrete. Buenos Aires had twice disposed of the Banda Oriental without asking its inhabitants, and the second time it had done so while the Orientals were besieging Montevideo on its behalf.

Why did the break with Buenos Aires come in 1813?

The break came over representation, and it became a war because neither side could afford to lose. In 1812 the siege of Montevideo resumed under José Rondeau, and Artigas's Orientals served inside an army whose commander spent the campaign trying to detach his officers. When the government of the United Provinces summoned a constituent assembly, Artigas convened a provincial congress at Tres Cruces, near Montevideo, which opened on 5 April 1813. His speech there is the best-known sentence of his career: "Mi autoridad emana de vosotros y ella cesa ante vuestra presencia soberana." The congress elected deputies and gave them instructions, drafted in Artigas's circle on 13 April 1813.

Those instructions are a constitutional document, and they are more radical than anything else produced in the viceroyalty at that date. They demand absolute independence from Spain, a republic with separated powers, a federal organisation in which the general government handles only general business, a capital outside Buenos Aires, a constitution and militia for each province, free ports at Maldonado and Colonia, equal provincial representation and the restoration of the seven mission towns to the Banda Oriental. Recent work has shown that whole passages were lifted from Thomas Paine's Independence of the Coast of the Main and from John McCulloch's Concise History of the United States, both of which Artigas owned or had access to. This was not a gaucho's improvisation; it was the federalist wing of the Atlantic revolution, read in Spanish.

The assembly refused to seat the deputies. The formal ground was that they had been elected in a military camp and had been given binding instructions by a body that claimed sovereignty; the real ground was the instructions themselves. Two Orientals who had been elected earlier and correctly, Dámaso Antonio Larrañaga and Dámaso Gómez Fonseca, were admitted, which shows how thin the formal argument was. Rondeau then had a rival provincial congress meet beside his own camp at the Capilla de Maciel and elect deputies who did as they were told.

In January 1814 Artigas left the siege, followed by his staff and some 1,000 men, and the Directorio declared him a traitor, deprived him of his rank and put a price of 6,000 pesos on his head. Within weeks his lieutenants had taken Entre Ríos, where Eusebio Hereñú defeated the government's column at El Espinillo on 22 February, and much of Misiones and Corrientes. The war of 1814 went badly for him in the south — Manuel Dorrego beat his forces at Marmarajá in October and Alvear took Montevideo in June — but it ended with the destruction of Dorrego's own army at Guayabos on 10 January 1815, where 1,500 Orientals under Fructuoso Rivera routed 800 government troops and drove the Directorio out of the Banda Oriental altogether.

The political consequence came fast. Alvear evacuated Montevideo at the end of February, and in April the mutiny of Fontezuelas destroyed his government. The new director, Ignacio Álvarez Thomas, inherited a war he could not win, and within weeks his envoys would try to buy Artigas off with the independence of his own province. The offer would fail, and the refusal is the hinge of Artigas's career: he would accept autonomy inside a federation, and he would not accept a separate state.

What did the Congress of the East actually decide?

In June 1815 Artigas was at the height of his power: Entre Ríos, Corrientes, Santa Fe and the Banda Oriental obeyed him, Córdoba was friendly, and Buenos Aires had no army worth the name. The Buenos Aires envoys Francisco Bruno de Rivarola and Blas Pico met him aboard a schooner off Paysandú and offered independence for the Banda Oriental, with Corrientes and Entre Ríos free to choose their own protector. Artigas answered with a fourteen-point counter-project: the Banda Oriental enters the United Provinces as an equal party to an offensive and defensive alliance, every province has the same dignity and rights, and none may subjugate another.

He then summoned a congress at Concepción del Uruguay — the villa of Arroyo de la China — for 29 June 1815. Deputies came from Entre Ríos, Corrientes, Santa Fe, Córdoba and the Banda Oriental; Montevideo's three elected deputies excused themselves in the quarrel between Artigas and the cabildo, and the Misiones deputies were elected but arrived too late. The documented business of the opening session was narrow: the Buenos Aires delegates had rejected the league's terms, and the congress resolved to send four envoys — Cabrera for Córdoba, Cosio for Entre Ríos, Andino for Santa Fe and Barreiro for the Banda Oriental — to negotiate again. All four were arrested on arrival. A closing session, probably on 12 August, heard their report and dissolved.

Beyond that the record gives almost nothing, and this is where the legend begins. A strong line of historians, and a great deal of popular writing, holds that the congress declared the independence of the free peoples on 29 June 1815 — making it the first declaration of independence in the former viceroyalty. No minutes survive, and the argument rests on a letter Artigas wrote to the director Juan Martín de Pueyrredón on 24 July 1816, in which he says the Banda Oriental raised its tricolour and swore its absolute independence "more than a year ago". That refers to the provincial oath of 1813, not to an act of this congress. Ana Frega's reading is the sober one: the congress was convoked to settle terms with Buenos Aires and did that and little else, and the independence it is said to have proclaimed is a twentieth-century construction.

What the congress did leave behind was symbolic and legislative rather than constitutional. It ratified the flag — Belgrano's blue and white with a red diagonal sash, the "Pabellón de la Libertad", red being the federal colour — and it was followed within weeks by the two measures on which the league's government actually rests in the record: the customs tariff of 9 September and the land regulation of 10 September 1815, both issued from Artigas's headquarters at Purificación.

Which provinces joined, and what held them together?

Six provinces, with very different degrees of reality. Córdoba was the weakest link: its autonomist governor José Javier Díaz took office in April 1815 on the strength of a local revolution, called himself Artigas's ally, never allowed Artigas's troops into the province and kept his deputies at the Congress of Tucumán. The map below leaves Córdoba outside the league, and on this point it is more honest than the lists: Córdoba was an ally, not a member. Santa Fe was taken in March 1815 when Artigas's men crossed the river and forced the Buenos Aires governor to capitulate; Francisco Candioti, the rancher the port called "the prince of the gauchos", became its first elected governor, and after his death and a confused interval the province passed in July 1818 to Estanislao López, the ablest soldier on that side of the war.

Entre Ríos was less a province than a coalition of local chiefs — Hereñú at Paraná, Basualdo on the Uruguay, later Francisco Ramírez at Concepción del Uruguay — who accepted Artigas's direction while it paid. Corrientes, taken by a federal pronunciamiento in 1814, was contested for years between Juan Bautista Méndez and his rivals, and in August 1818 was occupied for ten months by Artigas's Guaraní commander, Andrés Guazurarí, known as Andresito, who made its leading families acknowledge an Indian as their governor. Misiones was Andresito's own command, stretching over the mission towns on both banks of the upper Uruguay, including the seven peoples the Portuguese had held since 1801. The Banda Oriental was Artigas himself.

Nothing held this together except the protector. Artigas did not claim to govern the provinces: he directed their war and their foreign relations, appointed or confirmed commanders, wrote to every cabildo in sight, and used the title Protector rather than president because a president would have implied a state that did not exist. The one common policy the league managed was economic — the tariff of September 1815 — and it could not be enforced at the river mouths. Each province kept its own militia, which was not a defect in Artigas's eyes but the doctrine itself: the right of the pueblos to keep and bear arms against a standing power was written into the 1813 instructions.

Its social base was correspondingly broad and correspondingly loose. Artigas's cavalry was recruited from the poor countryside — gauchos, small ranchers, deserters, freedmen and the charrúa and minuán bands of the northern plains — and his most disciplined foreign troops were Guaraní from the missions, who fought for him as they had fought for no one since the expulsion of the Jesuits. The league was, in that sense, a coalition of the excluded against the port and its merchant houses, and it was described as such by everyone who opposed it.

How did the war with Buenos Aires go?

Buenos Aires never accepted the loss of the littoral, and the war of 1815–1820 was fought mainly over Santa Fe, the province that controlled the river route between the interior and the sea. In August 1815, two months after the Congress of the East, a government army under Juan José Viamonte occupied Santa Fe, arrested Artigas's envoys and installed a governor who declared the province subject to Buenos Aires. The countryside rose in the following months: the garrison of Añapiré mutinied under Estanislao López, the town was besieged, and Viamonte capitulated on 31 March 1816.

The settlement that followed is the great missed junction of the period. On 9 April 1816 the Buenos Aires commander Eustaquio Díaz Vélez signed the Pact of Santo Tomé with Santa Fe's officers, recognising the province's autonomy and agreeing that a definitive treaty would follow. The new director, Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, repudiated it, refused to concede anything, and had Santa Fe's deputy to the Congress of Tucumán arrested. Artigas then announced that he would send no deputies from the league's provinces until Santo Tomé was ratified. Three months later, on 9 July 1816, the Congress of Tucumán declared independence, and the provinces that had been fighting longest were not in the room. Córdoba was; the littoral was not.

Militarily the war settled into a pattern that repeated itself four times. A government army would occupy Santa Fe; the provincial cavalry would withdraw, cut its communications, take its horses and its cattle, and force it back to the river. Pueyrredón sent three expeditions. The last, in 1818–1819, was the largest: 5,000 men under Juan Ramón Balcarce at San Nicolás, a column of the Army of the North under Juan Bautista Bustos threatening from Córdoba, and orders to San Martín in Chile to bring the Army of the Andes — orders San Martín refused, choosing to prepare the expedition to Peru instead. López fought Balcarce to a standstill at the Carrizal, at Monte Aguiar and at La Herradura, and the government army embarked at Rosario on 29 January 1819 after burning the town.

By then the league's own alliances were cracking. On 12 April 1819 López signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo with Buenos Aires without consulting Artigas, granting the port trade that Artigas had been trying to strangle. He objected, and the objection was the first open breach with the two men who would destroy him a year later. The endgame was quick. The new director, José Rondeau, wrote to the Portuguese commander offering a joint campaign against the federales; the letter was intercepted and published. On 8 January 1820 the Army of the North mutinied at Arequito and refused to fight fellow Americans. On 1 February 1820, at Cepeda, 1,600 federal cavalry — 600 Entre Ríos men, 600 Santa Fe men and 400 from Corrientes — broke 2,000 government troops in about ten minutes. The Directorio, the congress and the constitution of 1819 were gone by the end of the month.

Why did Portugal invade in 1816?

Because the Banda Oriental had been a Portuguese objective for a century and a half, and because in 1816 nobody was going to stop them. Portugal had founded Colonia del Sacramento opposite Buenos Aires in 1680, had taken the Misiones Orientales in 1801, and had invaded the Banda Oriental once already in 1811 at the invitation of the Spanish viceroy Elío. The transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 made the conquest of the left bank a policy of the monarchy itself rather than of frontier captains, and the end of the Napoleonic wars removed the last reason for restraint. The Congress of Vienna had endorsed restoration and legitimacy; a republic of freedmen and mission Indians on the southern border of Brazil was an affront to both. Britain, which had its own reasons for wanting the Plata open, did not interfere.

The government of the United Provinces was complicit by omission and something more than omission. Pueyrredón was at war with Artigas and preferred a Portuguese province to a federal one. His agents in Rio were informed of the expedition before it sailed, and in December 1816 his commissioners, Durán and Giró, were sent to Montevideo not to defend the province but to detach the city from Artigas and return it to the obedience of the Directorio. Frega has shown how the manoeuvre was presented to Artigas: as a choice between submitting to Buenos Aires and abandoning the province to Portugal. He refused both.

The army was large by the standards of the region: some 10,000 to 12,000 men under Carlos Federico Lecor, with Joaquín Javier Curado and Francisco das Chagas Santos commanding in the north, against perhaps 8,000 artiguistas, of whom only a fraction were line troops. The invasion began in August 1816 and came in three columns: one up the Uruguay into Misiones, one across the Cuareim into the northern plains, and Lecor's own along the coast towards Montevideo. The northern war went badly from the start. Artigas was beaten at Carumbé on 27 October, Rivera at India Muerta in November, Artigas again at Arapey on 3 January 1817, and Andrés Latorre at Catalán on 4 January 1817, the bloodiest engagement of the whole campaign. Lecor entered Montevideo on 20 January 1817.

The war then became a guerrilla war in the interior that lasted three more years and has been badly served by historians. Andresito's Guaraní retook the mission towns and won a real victory at Apóstoles in July 1817; Chagas returned, burned the missions, and beat him at San Carlos in January 1818. In the south, Bento Manuel Ribeiro's cavalry swept the countryside, was checked by Rivera at Chapicuy, and destroyed Artigas's remaining field army at Queguay Chico on 4 July 1818. Artigas's last offensive, into the Brazilian border country in December 1819, produced a genuine victory over Abreu at Santa María on 14 December and changed nothing.

Set against this, the league's naval war was the one sphere where it hurt the enemy. Artigas issued letters of marque, and his corsairs — many of them foreign, some of them formidable — took Portuguese and Spanish shipping in the South Atlantic, the Caribbean and even European waters. It was a war of the weak against the strong, and it made the league known in London and Rio out of proportion to its army.

Why did the league collapse in 1820?

The league's government collapsed in a month, and the Portuguese did not do it alone. On 22 January 1820 the Portuguese cavalry under the Conde de Figueira surprised Andrés Latorre's camp at Tacuarembó before dawn. Latorre's 2,000 men, half of them Guaraní from the missions, were caught asleep with the river in flood behind them; Sotelo, commanding the mission infantry, was killed trying to form a line, and the men who could not swim into the flooded stream were cut down. The Portuguese report claims 800 dead and 500 wounded on the other side, one dead and five wounded of their own, and 5,400 horses taken. The casualty ratio is not credible, and Uruguayan historians have treated the figures as inflated at least since Lincoln Maiztegui Casas; what is not in doubt is that the army ceased to exist.

The same day, at Tres Árboles on the Queguay, Fructuoso Rivera signed an armistice with Bento Manuel Ribeiro. Its terms were brutally practical: the Orientals kept their land, Rivera kept command of the rural forces and was recognised as colonel, and in exchange he guaranteed the peace. Lecor approved. Artigas's most capable subordinate changed sides in the week his chief lost his army, and the Portuguese acquired the countryside without having to occupy it.

Ten days later, at Cepeda, López and Ramírez destroyed the Directorio — Artigas's war, won by his subordinates while he was losing his own. On 23 February 1820 the two caudillos signed the Treaty of Pilar with the new Buenos Aires governor, Manuel de Sarratea. It made peace, called a future congress, and left the war against Portugal to a later decision by the signatories; Artigas was mentioned in it as governor of the Banda Oriental and invited to adhere. He refused, and called it treason. His position, stated repeatedly, was that Buenos Aires must first declare war on Portugal and liberate the province; anything else was a partition dressed as a peace.

So the league's last war was with itself. Artigas crossed to the western bank with 300 men, installed himself at Ávalos in Corrientes and, on 24 April 1820, signed a pact with the governments of Corrientes and Misiones by which he was named commander of a war for "the liberty and independence of these provinces" and Protector of the Peoples of the Federal League. He raised perhaps 3,000 horsemen, almost all from Corrientes, and declared war on Ramírez on 8 May. Ramírez, financed and equipped by Buenos Aires and stiffened by Lucio Norberto Mansilla's infantry and artillery, fought him through June and July. Artigas won an indecisive action at Las Guachas on 13 June, was beaten at the Bajada del Paraná on 24 June, and was destroyed in the last week of July at Las Tunas and at Ávalos, where he lost his artillery, his archive and his secretary. On 5 September 1820 he crossed the Paraná into Paraguay with a hundred men.

José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia gave him asylum and saw to it that he had no influence and no correspondence. He lived at Curuguaty, farming, then in Asunción after Francia's death in 1840, and died there on 23 September 1850, aged eighty-six. He never returned, and he took no part in the settlement of 1828 that made his province an independent state.

What kind of economy did the league have?

Cattle, and almost nothing else that could be exported. The Banda Oriental's wild herds north of the Río Negro were among the largest concentrations of wild cattle in the region, and the estancias of the south had been supplying hides and tallow to Europe and salted beef to the slave plantations of Brazil and Cuba since the eighteenth century. Corrientes and Entre Ríos produced hides, timber, yerba and some sugar and tobacco; Santa Fe and Córdoba cattle, mules and coarse cloth. Everything that left the region had to pass through a port, and there were only two that mattered — Buenos Aires and Montevideo — which is the whole of the period's politics in a sentence.

The league's economic programme was an attempt to break that chokehold. The tariff of 9 September 1815 created a common external duty for the "Provincias Confederadas": 25 per cent on most foreign imports, 40 per cent on made-up clothing and footwear, 15 per cent on paper and black tobacco, and 4 per cent on American produce — Paraguayan yerba and tobacco, ponchos, horse gear — with machinery, books, printing presses, gunpowder and medicines admitted free. Exports paid 4 per cent, with hides charged a real each plus surcharges. Internal duties between provinces were abolished. It was a coherent protectionist and integrationist policy, and it was unenforceable: the league controlled neither the mouth of the Plata nor, after January 1817, Montevideo.

Artigas's answer to that was the closure of Montevideo to ships bound for Buenos Aires, and a war of privateers against Portuguese and Spanish trade. Both were weapons of denial rather than of construction. The customs revenue that would have paid for a league treasury was collected in a city held by a foreign army, and the merchant houses of Montevideo, largely peninsular and porteño in sympathy, had no interest in a federal tariff.

On land the league attempted something more original. The regulation of 10 September 1815 ordered the confiscation, without compensation, of the land of "emigrados, malos europeos y peores americanos" — the property of those who had left or fought for the other side — and its distribution to the poor who would work it, with preference for widows with children, for married men over bachelors, and for Americans over foreigners, under the slogan that "los más infelices serán los más privilegiados". It was, arguably, the most radical measure of its kind in the Americas at that date, and it was also narrower than its reputation. Slaves were excluded from grants. The Montevideo cabildo, composed of the city's property owners, obstructed the redistribution from the first day, some commanders distributed land on their own authority, and grants were made inalienable until the province was formally settled. The regulation was in force for about thirteen months before the Portuguese conquest made it moot, and no later Uruguayan government recognised the titles it created. Whether it was a real agrarian reform or a paper programme is a standing argument: the Marxist historians Lucía Sala de Tourón, Julio Rodríguez and Nelson de la Torre argued for its substance in 1969, and the more recent literature is sceptical of both its extent and its results.

What the war did to this economy is easier to describe than to quantify. Armies on both sides lived off the herds; the Portuguese took thousands of horses in every engagement; cattle were driven across the river to feed Santa Fe and Corrientes; and the rural population moved, was conscripted or was killed. By 1820 the Banda Oriental had fewer people, fewer cattle and less capital than in 1811, and the Portuguese occupation completed the transfer of the province's trade into foreign hands.

Was the league a state?

No, and the interesting question is what kind of non-state it was. It had no congress after August 1815, no treasury, no supreme court, no capital in the sense of a city with ministries, no constitution and no citizenship. Its two legislative acts were regulations issued by a military headquarters. Its head was a protector, a title with medieval echoes that Artigas chose precisely because it claimed no sovereignty over the provinces. The nearest thing to a federal executive was Artigas's tent at Purificación, which a Scottish merchant, John Parish Robertson, visited in 1815 and described as a compound of hides, horses and clerks in the middle of nowhere.

It was nevertheless more than an alliance of convenience. An alliance does not issue a common tariff, does not redistribute land, does not coin a flag, and does not conduct its own foreign policy with Brazil, Paraguay and Britain. Frega's term for it — the "Protectorate", or the "System of the Free Peoples" — captures the arrangement better than "league", because it describes a relationship of protection rather than a constitution. The provinces were protected against Buenos Aires and against the Portuguese; in return they accepted Artigas's direction in war and diplomacy and, in practice, very little else.

The naming is a historiographical fact worth stating. Contemporaries wrote of "los pueblos libres" or "el sistema de los pueblos libres"; the phrase Liga Federal is largely a later label, fixed in English by John Street's chapter title in 1959, and it has been retrofitted to documents that never use it. The word matters because "league" implies a treaty among states with defined obligations, and no such treaty survives. What survives is correspondence: hundreds of letters in which a headquarters instructs, persuades, scolds and rewards provincial governors who were free to ignore it and sometimes did.

Judged by the standards of the next decade, the comparison is unflattering. The Federal Pact of 1831 at least created a standing body, the Representative Commission of the Littoral Provinces, with one deputy from each signatory and power to convoke a congress; the league had nothing of the kind. Judged by the standards of 1815, however, it had achieved something no other part of Spanish America had: a working, if fragile, union of provinces across a thousand kilometres, held together without a capital, an army payroll or a bureaucracy — and a doctrine of sovereignty that outlived every institution it built.

What did it leave behind?

In Argentina, the league left a word and a quarrel. The word was federal, which after 1815 meant provincial autonomy, the sovereignty of each people, and hostility to the port; it was claimed by López and Ramírez, by Rosas, by Urquiza, and eventually by the constitution of 1853, whose preamble invokes the "pre-existing pacts" and whose article 29 expressly forbids the grant of the sum of public power. The quarrel was over the customs house, which the league had tried to federalise in 1815 and which Buenos Aires kept until 1862. Argentine historians have oscillated between treating Artigas as a foreign agitator, as Mitre did, and as the true founder of Argentine federalism, as the revisionists did from the 1930s; both readings flatten a man who was neither.

The Argentine Confederation that emerged after 1831 is a different thing, and the two are constantly confused. The Federal Pact signed at Santa Fe on 4 January 1831 by Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos was an offensive and defensive alliance against the Unitarian League of José María Paz, with a representative commission and a promise of a general congress; Corrientes adhered in August 1831 and most other provinces within eighteen months. It was a treaty between governments that had already won their autonomy, not a protectorate built around a single leader, and its commission stopped meeting within three years. What the two have in common is the doctrine: provincial sovereignty, government by pact, and the belief that the nation is constituted by its provinces rather than the reverse.

In Uruguay the legacy is stranger. The state that Artigas is supposed to have founded was created in 1828 by a British-mediated treaty at the end of a war with Brazil in which he took no part, and its first governments were built by men who had fought on both sides. The national narrative that made him the father of the country was assembled after 1880, when a modernising state needed a founder, and it drew heavily on the redota and on the league. His remains were brought back from Paraguay in 1855 and buried in Montevideo in 1856; the 37-metre monument on the Meseta de Artigas, above the site of Purificación, was inaugurated in 1899; the bicentenary of the emancipation process was marked in 2011. The paradox at the centre of the cult is rarely confronted: the national hero spent his political life insisting that the Banda Oriental should not be a nation, and refused independence twice.

The league's defeat also created the conditions for the state it is credited with founding. If the Portuguese had not taken the Banda Oriental in 1816–20, there would have been no Provincia Cisplatina, no landing of the Thirty-Three in 1825, and no Uruguay. Brazil held the province until 1828 and kept the northern mission country, which it still holds; the frontier that Artigas fought over is the frontier between Uruguay and the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, where a separatist Riograndense Republic would be declared in 1836. The league's frontier war, in that sense, never really ended; it only changed flags.

Common myths about the Federal League

Timeline of the Federal League

What the map shows next

At 1814 on the map the dataset draws the league as a single compact shape of some 287,000 square kilometres on the eastern bank of the Uruguay, which is roughly the Banda Oriental plus the Entre Ríos shore: the league before Santa Fe and Corrientes, when Artigas was still fighting the Directorio for the river. At 1815 on the map the shape more than doubles, to some 610,000 square kilometres, running from the Paraná to the Atlantic and north into the mission country — the year of the Congress of the East, when the league was at its widest and its institutions at their thinnest.

The dataset has no frame for 1820, so the map cannot show the collapse: at 1818 on the map and again at 1819 on the map the league is still drawn whole, though Montevideo had been in Portuguese hands since January 1817 and the Portuguese cavalry controlled the countryside between the rivers. That is a limitation of the boundary series rather than a statement about the war, and it is worth remembering when reading the last frames: they show the territory the league claimed, not the ground it held.