State of Buenos Aires

The state existed because of one fact of geography. Every legal cargo entering or leaving the interior passed through the port of Buenos Aires, and the duties paid there were the steadiest revenue in the country. Whoever held the customs house could pay soldiers, officials and schoolmasters; whoever did not could not. The Confederation of the thirteen inland provinces spent the decade trying to build alternative ports at Rosario, Paraná and Corrientes, and failed. Buenos Aires spent the decade insisting that its revenue was a provincial matter, and prospered.

The episode matters because it is where the Argentine state was actually assembled. The constitution of 1853 was written without Buenos Aires and largely against it; the reforms of 1860 were the price of its return. The two questions that dominated the decade — who owns the customs, and where the national capital sits — were not fully settled until 1866 and 1880 respectively. The State of Buenos Aires is usually treated as a parenthesis in the national story. It is better understood as the anvil.

At a glance

How did the confederation come apart in 1852?

Juan Manuel de Rosas governed Buenos Aires for twenty years without a national constitution. His formal title was governor of the province, but from 1835 he also held the "sum of public power" and conducted the foreign relations of the other provinces, which delegated them to him because he controlled the port they all needed. The arrangement suited the ranchers of the province and the merchants of the city, and it starved the interior of customs revenue. Rosas's own justification was that a constitution should wait until the provinces were at peace. That wait lasted a generation.

Justo José de Urquiza, governor of Entre Ríos, broke with him for reasons that were as much commercial as political. Entre Ríos wanted to trade down the rivers to the sea without paying Buenos Aires for the privilege. On 1 May 1851 Urquiza pronounced against Rosas, took the province's foreign relations into his own hands, and assembled the Ejército Grande: some 24,000 men, of whom about 8,500 were from Entre Ríos, 5,500 from Corrientes, 4,500 from Buenos Aires, 3,000 Brazilian, 1,700 Uruguayan and 800 from Santa Fe. Rosas could put perhaps 22,000 in the field. The armies met at Caseros, on the edge of the city, on 3 February 1852. The fighting began at nine in the morning and was decided within a few hours. Rosas resigned the same day, took refuge briefly in the British legation, and sailed for England, where he died in 1877.

The victors agreed that a constitution was needed. They did not agree on who would write it. On 6 April 1852 the four littoral governors met at Rosas's own house in Palermo and conferred on Urquiza the direction of the national government and the conduct of foreign relations. On 31 May a larger meeting at San Nicolás de los Arroyos, attended by governors from almost every province, called a constituent congress at Santa Fe, with two deputies per province, and named Urquiza provisional director with sweeping executive and legislative powers. Buenos Aires was represented at San Nicolás by its governor, Vicente López y Planes, who signed without asking his legislature for authorisation.

That omission gave the opposition its opening, but the substance of the objection was money and power. Two deputies per province meant that Buenos Aires, with perhaps a quarter of the country's population, would have two votes out of twenty-six instead of the weight its wealth and port seemed to deserve. A congress sitting in Santa Fe would be paid and pressured by Urquiza rather than by the city. And the customs house, which the province regarded as its own, would pass under national control. When López returned on 12 June, the press was already hostile and the legislature was in no mood to ratify.

The debate of 21 and 22 June 1852 turned on the legality of the signature and the dictatorship implied in the provisional director's powers. Vicente Fidel López, the governor's son, made the speech that the schoolbooks remember: he loved Buenos Aires, he said, but his country was the Argentine Republic, not Buenos Aires. The gallery shouted him down. The ministers resigned, then the governor, and the chamber named the aged General Manuel Guillermo Pinto provisional governor. Urquiza replied on 24 June by declaring the province in a state of anarchy, dissolving the legislature, closing the opposition newspapers, deporting Alsina, Mitre and Sarmiento, and assuming the governorship himself. He restored López, who resigned for good in July rather than return Rosas's confiscated property.

Urquiza then did what the constitution of 1853 would later call a federal intervention: he governed Buenos Aires directly until 8 September, when he left for Santa Fe to open the congress and handed the city to General José Miguel Galán. In the early hours of 11 September 1852 the Corrientes troops in the city and most of the urban militia assembled in the Plaza de Mayo. Miguel Esteves Saguí rang the cabildo bell; the dissolved legislature reconvened, named Pinto governor, made Alsina minister of government and gave the war ministry to General José María Pirán. There was little violence. Galán withdrew, Urquiza marched as far as San Nicolás and then turned back when he learned that the campaign commanders had gone over to the new government. The province had separated itself from the confederation, and the separation would last nine years.

What kind of state did Buenos Aires build?

The first year was war. On 1 December 1852 Colonel Hilario Lagos, one of the organisers of the September revolution, pronounced against Alsina at Guardia de Luján with the campaign regiments and demanded the province's reincorporation. His troops attacked the city on 6 December and were beaten back in the streets; two days later they settled into a siege. Alsina resigned and Pinto returned. In January 1853 the government's attempt to raise the interior of the province ended in defeat at San Gregorio, and Urquiza joined the siege in person. A provisional treaty signed on 9 March 1853, which left the customs in Buenos Aires' hands and allowed the province up to ten deputies, was rejected by Urquiza and Lagos as a capitulation.

The constituent congress opened at Santa Fe on 20 November 1852 without the Buenos Aires deputies, and sanctioned the constitution on 1 May 1853. It was promulgated by Urquiza as provisional director and sworn in the provinces on 9 July. Its Article 9 was unambiguous: there were to be no customs houses in the territory of the confederation except national ones. Its Article 3 declared Buenos Aires the capital of the confederation. For the men who had made the September revolution, the document was a double expropriation.

The siege of Buenos Aires was broken by money rather than by arms. Urquiza assembled a small squadron to blockade the port, and its commander, the American-born admiral John Halstead Coe, sold the fleet to the province for a large sum in gold on 20 June 1853. The blockade collapsed, the besieging army lost heart, and on 12 July Urquiza withdrew to Rosario. Lagos went with him. The province was free to constitute itself, and it did so with a constitution sanctioned on 11 April 1854 and promulgated the next day.

The text was drafted under the influence of Dalmacio Vélez Sársfield and ran to 178 articles in eight parts. Article 1 declared that "Buenos Aires is a State with the free exercise of its internal and external sovereignty, until it expressly delegates it to a federal government." Article 2 fixed a territory running from the Arroyo del Medio to the Andes and the sea, including Martín García and, by implication, the Patagonian coast — a claim that overlapped Mendoza's and that no other power recognised. Article 6 made citizens of those born in the state and of "the sons of the other provinces that compose the Republic", which conceded, as Alberdi pointed out, that a republic existed. Article 7 gave the vote to men of twenty, to married men of eighteen and to those enrolled in the National Guard.

The institutions were conventional and carefully balanced. A chamber of representatives and a senate formed the General Assembly; senators sat three years, one for every 12,000 inhabitants. The governor was elected by the Assembly, served three years and could not be re-elected until three years out of office; he had to be thirty-five and born in the state. Catholicism was the religion of the state, paid for out of the treasury, and all inhabitants were obliged to respect it, while private worship was declared inviolable. Public education was made a legislative responsibility. The property qualifications were reserved for senators, who needed 20,000 pesos or an equivalent income.

The most revealing article was the sixty-first. Until a general congress met in which Buenos Aires was represented, the provincial assembly would exercise the powers of that congress: it could create customs houses, open and close ports, sign treaties, declare war, contract loans, sell public lands, regulate foreign commerce and sanction legal codes. In other words, the state claimed for its legislature the entire apparatus of national sovereignty while denying that it had left the nation. Alberdi, editing the text for publication in Besançon, called it "a kind of feudal constitution" which preserved "an interior or provincial customs house, a provincial treasury, a provincial army and a provincial diplomacy", forming "a kind of independent state, without subordination to the common order of the Nation, of which it nevertheless recognises itself a part".

Who governed, and who was left out?

The same dozen families governed throughout. Pinto held the governorship from September to October 1852, Alsina from 31 October until the siege forced his resignation in December, and Pinto again until his death in June 1853. Pastor Obligado, a lawyer from a wealthy merchant family and a former Rosas supporter, was elected on 24 July 1853 and then, under the new constitution, became the state's first constitutional governor on 27 May 1854. He served until 4 May 1857, when Valentín Alsina returned. Alsina governed until November 1859, when the aftermath of Cepeda forced him out; Felipe Llavallol held the office until Mitre was elected on 3 May 1860.

Two groupings contested power within that circle. The autonomists, or provincialists, around Alsina wanted separation made permanent, and some of them wanted a formal declaration of independence. The nationalists, around Mitre, wanted the province to re-enter the confederation in order to lead it. Contemporaries called them pandilleros and chupandinos, and later crudos and cocidos, names that suggest how much of politics happened in the street and the club. A third group, the Federal Reformists around Nicolás Calvo, wanted reunion on the confederation's terms; its leaders were threatened and driven into exile in Paraná, among them Lucio V. Mansilla and José Hernández.

Elections were frequent, and the franchise was wide for the 1850s: adult manhood suffrage with a literacy and property barrier only for the senate. In practice the result depended on the ward committees, the police, the printers of the party press and the willingness of gangs to control the polling places. The government's grip on the wards usually decided the outcome; when the notables split openly, as in 1857, the contest became real. The constitution's effective filters were elsewhere: the senate's wealth requirement, the governor's birth clause, and the fact that the Assembly, not the voters, chose the governor.

The exclusions were structural. Women were not citizens in the operative sense: the text speaks of men, and the vote belonged to those enrolled in the National Guard or married. The indigenous peoples beyond the frontier were outside the state altogether, and not passively: Calfucurá's raids were part of Urquiza's strategy in 1859, the frontier retreated in places by tens of kilometres, and estates were abandoned. The constitution was silent on slavery. The confederation's Article 15 had declared slavery abolished in 1853; in Buenos Aires the free-womb law of 1813 had already emptied the institution of much of its substance, and the silence of 1854 says something about how the porteño elite preferred to handle it.

The foreign-born were the largest excluded group of all. By the census of 1855 the city held around 80,000 people, of whom some 8,300 had been born in what would become Italy — the largest single foreign community, and overwhelmingly Ligurian, with smaller numbers from Piedmont and Lombardy. Basques and Irish came for the sheep runs, Spaniards for the shops and the port. They worked, traded and owned property, but they did not vote; naturalisation was possible and uncommon. The National Guard was the school in which immigrant and native poor were turned into citizens, and also the instrument with which the state policed them.

Where did the money come from?

The customs house paid for everything. Almost all legal foreign trade entered through the port, and the duties levied there financed the army, the schools, the paving, the gasworks and the paper money. The confederation's constitution of 1853 had made the customs a national monopoly; the state's constitution of 1854 had made it a provincial prerogative. This was not a disagreement about political economy in the abstract. It was a disagreement about which government would have an income.

The second resource was the printing press. The Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires issued peso moneda corriente notes that were not convertible into gold, and the state paid its soldiers, contractors and officials in them. The notes held their value well enough because the customs house stood behind them: importers needed paper to pay duties, and the duties were collected in paper at a discount set by the market. The confederation tried to copy the trick and failed. Mariano Fragueiro's Banco Nacional opened in 1854, issued notes that the provinces refused, and closed; the government had to withdraw its paper. Confederation loans were raised at 16 per cent in 1853 and at up to 24 per cent from the Brazilian financier Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, later Baron of Mauá.

The tariff war was the confederation's attempt to break the chokehold. In July 1856, by a narrow majority, Congress passed the law of differential duties: foreign goods that had first been landed at another port on the Río de la Plata and were then brought into the confederation would pay double the ordinary duty, while goods entering directly through confederation ports paid the normal rate. A later law added differential duties on exports. The intention was to pull trade upriver to Rosario, Paraná, Corrientes and Concepción del Uruguay. Rosario's customs did grow, and Mauá founded a bank there, but the merchants, the credit, the insurance and the shipping stayed in Buenos Aires, and the interior paid more for its imports. The policy hurt the people it was meant to help and hardened the quarrel.

Public land was the third source. The province replaced the old emphyteutic leases with outright sale at 16,000 silver pesos per square league, about 4,428 acres, and used the proceeds to fund the state while handing the purchasers the land that the wool boom needed. The confederation had no equivalent: its revenue ran at about 2.5 million pesos a year between 1854 and 1859, reached 2,669,380 in 1860, and in 1855–56 spent 2,280,445 against receipts of 1,775,000. The deficit was covered with treasury bills at one and two per cent a month. Buenos Aires' budget was on another scale altogether, and its credit was good enough that its paper circulated at a modest discount rather than at nothing.

What was the economy doing?

Wool transformed the province. In 1822 wool had been less than one per cent of Buenos Aires' exports; by 1851 it was more than ten per cent. Argentina exported about 10,000 tons a year by 1855 and 55,000 tons by 1870, and by 1880 wool was half the value of the country's exports. The merino crosses that produced the finer fleeces were imported from Germany, France, Spain, the United States and Australia, and the flocks spread across the pampas on land taken from the frontier. Basque and Irish shepherds did the specialised work; the labourers were gauchos, Indians and immigrants, paid in paper and rations.

Hides, tallow and salted beef remained important. The saladeros along the Riachuelo and in the southern districts cured beef for Brazil and Cuba, and the trade survived the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade because it fed slaves and sailors rather than only the plantations. Wool was overtaking it in value, but the saladero was the older, harsher industry, and the men who owned it sat in the same legislature as the wool men. The province's exports were still primary, still unprocessed, and still carried in foreign bottoms.

The city changed faster than the countryside. The Stock Exchange opened in 1854, a new customs house in 1855, the Mercado del Plata in 1856, the first Teatro Colón in 1857, the Café Tortoni in 1858 and the British Hospital in 1859. Gas lighting, cobbled streets, a new pier, girls' schools and an orphanage followed the customs revenue. On 29 August 1857 the Western Railway was inaugurated with the authorities aboard, and the line opened to the public the next day: ten kilometres or so to Floresta behind La Porteña, a locomotive built in Leeds, at about 25 kilometres an hour. By 1860 the line reached Moreno, thirty-nine kilometres out.

The prosperity was fragile. The Crimean War had pushed wool prices up by cutting off Russian supply, and when Russian exports returned in 1857 and 1858 prices fell sharply. Yellow fever struck the city in 1852 and again in 1858. The interior fared worse: imported sugar, spirits and wine undercut the artisan production of the north and Cuyo, and the only new growth came from agricultural colonies such as Esperanza in Santa Fe, founded in 1855 by Swiss settlers, and Colonia San José in Entre Ríos, founded by Urquiza in 1857. The railway that might have made the interior competitive was still a project on the confederation's drawing board; the province built the first one because it could.

How did two states conduct one country's foreign policy?

The diplomatic corps solved the problem by splitting itself. The ministers plenipotentiary were accredited to Urquiza at Paraná, because the powers recognised the confederation as the government of the country; their consuls, their merchants and most of their nationals were in Buenos Aires, because that was where the trade was. Britain, France, the United States, Brazil and the Papacy all maintained this double posture, and all of them pressed for reunion, since a customs war on the Río de la Plata was bad for business.

Recognition was the currency of the dispute. The United States had recognised the confederation and signed a treaty on the free navigation of the Paraná and Uruguay in 1853, which Buenos Aires protested as an attempt to strip it of the right to close the rivers. In 1854 Washington accredited James A. Peden to Buenos Aires with the rank of minister resident, a seniority not seen on the river since 1823, and he negotiated a treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation with the state. Not until 18 July 1856 was he formally transferred to Paraná. Paraguay, whose independence Rosas had refused to recognise, opened relations with Buenos Aires in 1855 after the confederation's congress declined to ratify the 1852 treaty of limits; Brazil, Sardinia and Portugal sent chargés d'affaires that year, and Uruguay and Hamburg sent consuls. France, Bolivia, Sweden-Norway and Denmark followed.

The most consequential recognition was Spanish. Spain had never accepted Argentine independence, and Alberdi, representing the confederation in Madrid, signed a treaty on 9 July 1859 by which the former metropolis recognised the country. Buenos Aires rejected it, on the ground that it made the Argentine-born children of Spaniards Spanish citizens and so kept a Spanish claim alive over a large part of the population. When Mitre came to power the clause was renegotiated. The episode is a small masterpiece of the decade's logic: the confederation could obtain recognition, but it could not make it stick without the province that refused to be bound by its treaties.

The two governments also dealt with each other. On 8 January 1855 they signed a convention providing for military cooperation against Indian raids, the extradition of fugitive criminals, the use of the Argentine flag by both fleets, and cooperation on customs and post. In December 1854 they had agreed to keep the peace and not consent to the dismemberment of the territory. These were treaties between states, concluded by governments that each claimed to be the only legitimate authority in the country. The fiction was maintained because both sides needed it: neither could afford to be the one that recognised the split as permanent.

What happened at Cepeda in 1859?

The war came out of San Juan. Nazario Benavídez, the province's federal strongman and a confederation general, was arrested by the liberal government in September 1858; when his friends tried to free him on 22 October, he was killed in his cell. The Buenos Aires press celebrated the killing, and La Tribuna suggested that Urquiza would meet the same end. Urquiza sent a federal intervention, which found evidence of porteño money behind the San Juan liberals, and the intervenor, Colonel José Antonio Virasoro, was elected governor. In Buenos Aires the legislature passed a law annulling every public act of the confederation's government, and Alsina asked for funds to meet an attack.

In May 1859 the confederation's congress authorised Urquiza to settle the question of national unity "by peaceful negotiations or by war, as circumstances might advise", and ordered a general mobilisation. The porteño legislature read that as a declaration of war and ordered Mitre, its war minister, to invade Santa Fe. The province's warships blockaded Paraná until a mutiny aboard one of them delivered it to the national government and the blockade collapsed. In mid-October a federal squadron forced its way past Martín García after a short fight and appeared off Buenos Aires. The United States, Britain, Brazil and Paraguay offered mediation; Alsina and Mitre would accept nothing short of Urquiza's resignation.

The armies met on the Arroyo Cepeda, on the Santa Fe–Buenos Aires border, on 23 October 1859. Urquiza had about 14,000 men — 10,000 cavalry, 3,000 infantry and 35 guns — including strong divisions of ranquel warriors under the caciques Cristo and Coliqueo. Mitre had about 9,000, of whom 4,700 were infantry and 4,000 cavalry, with 24 guns; his forces were thinned by the need to guard the southern frontier, where Calfucurá was raiding in coordination with Urquiza. The fighting began in the afternoon. The porteño infantry checked the federal centre and destroyed part of it, but the federal cavalry enveloped both wings, broke the inexperienced battalions and drove off Mitre's horse. Night ended the battle with the issue settled.

The porteños lost about 100 dead, 90 wounded, 2,000 prisoners and 21 guns; the federal army lost about 300 dead. Mitre withdrew in the night with remarkable discipline and reached San Nicolás the following afternoon with 2,000 men, then embarked the remnants for the city. There he announced that he had brought back his "intact legions", which was not true. Urquiza advanced to the outskirts and camped at San José de Flores, close enough to threaten an assault and far enough to negotiate.

He wanted a settlement, not a storm. The memory of 1853, when a siege had rotted his army's morale, weighed on him; so did the knowledge that a sack of the city would ruin the customs revenue he needed. He kept up the threat, obtained Alsina's resignation on 8 November, and negotiated with a delegation that included Vélez Sársfield, with Francisco Solano López, the Paraguayan president's son, acting as mediator. The pact was signed on 10 November 1859 and ratified the next day, which is why it carries the date of 11 November. Buenos Aires declared itself an integral part of the confederation and gave up the conduct of foreign relations. It would elect a provincial convention to review the 1853 constitution and propose amendments. Its territory could not be divided without its legislature's consent. The customs house became national; in compensation the nation guaranteed the provincial budget for five years, to the extent that revenue fell below the level of 1859. There was a general amnesty, and the national army was to leave the province.

What did the reform of 1860 change?

The provincial convention was elected on 25 December 1859: seventy-five seats, thirty-six for the city and thirty-nine for the campaign, of which seventy-one were filled and sixty-eight members took their places. It sat from January to May 1860 and included Sarmiento, Mitre, Vélez Sársfield, José Mármol and the former governor Obligado. Its majority was unitarian, but already split between the followers of Alsina and those of Mitre. On 3 May Mitre was elected governor of the province, with the incorporation of Buenos Aires into the nation as his mandate.

The convention produced twenty-two amendments. The country's name changed: the "Argentine Confederation" became the "Argentine Nation", and "Argentine Republic" entered the official vocabulary. The clause making Buenos Aires the capital was replaced by one allowing Congress to designate a capital by special law, with the consent of the legislature or legislatures concerned — the formula that survives in the constitution today. Provincial constitutions no longer required congressional approval, and federal intervention was narrowed. The Banco de la Provincia was exempted from national taxation. Export duties were to be eliminated within five years, port tariffs and regulations made uniform, and nationality fixed by birth on the soil rather than by descent.

The national convention met at Santa Fe from 14 to 25 September 1860 and approved almost the whole package without debating it, despite the constitutional prohibition on reform before 1863. Buenos Aires swore the amended constitution on 21 October, and from that day it was legally part of the confederation. The arrangement was completed by a complementary convention of 6 June 1860, negotiated by Vélez Sársfield for Mitre and by the government of Santiago Derqui for the nation, under which the province went on collecting the customs until its full incorporation and undertook to pay the national treasury a subsidy of 1,500,000 pesos.

The union lasted on paper for about six months. Congress was summoned to an extraordinary session on 1 April 1861 to admit the porteño deputies and senators, but on 13 April the deputies were rejected because they had been elected under the provincial electoral law rather than the national one — a law Derqui had privately promised to waive. The two porteño senators withdrew, and Mitre announced that there would be no new elections. The quarrel over the "alquilones", deputies whose provincial residence was said to be a rented room, was the pretext; the substance was that Buenos Aires would enter the congress only on terms that preserved its weight, and the confederation would admit it only on terms that did not.

Why did Pavón decide it?

San Juan supplied the second war as it had supplied the first. Virasoro was murdered in his house on 16 November 1860 by a group of unitarian officers and politicians; Sarmiento and the porteño press had called openly for his removal, and few doubted that money had come from Buenos Aires. Derqui sent a federal intervention under Juan Saá, governor of San Luis. Saá defeated the rebels at Rinconada del Pocito on 11 January 1861, and the defeated governor, Antonino Aberastain, was shot within days. Buenos Aires, which had celebrated Virasoro's murder, now demanded that Saá and Derqui be punished for Aberastain's. Mitre called it "the last gasp of barbarism and violence".

In Córdoba the liberal governor, installed with porteño support, invaded San Luis. Derqui declared a state of siege, intervened in Córdoba, installed a federal governor, raised some 9,000 infantry in his native province and moved them to Rosario, where he placed them under Urquiza's command. On 6 July 1861 Congress authorised the president to use force "to repress the rebel government of Buenos Aires and subject it to the common law". Mitre took the field with 15,400 men, better armed and better disciplined than the confederation's 17,000, having recruited European mercenaries through Hilario Ascasubi and enlisted most of the ranquel bands.

The battle of Pavón was fought on 17 September 1861 and lasted about two hours. The federal cavalry under Juan Saá and Ricardo López Jordán routed both porteño wings; the porteño infantry broke the federal centre and pushed it back. Urquiza never committed his reserve, the best Entre Ríos troops, and then left the field altogether, marching to San Lorenzo and crossing the Paraná into his own province two days later. The porteños lost 64 officers and 162 soldiers killed and some 500 wounded; the federal army lost 1,200 to 1,300 dead and wounded, 1,650 to 1,800 prisoners, and 32 to 37 guns. Mitre withdrew to San Nicolás, as he had after Cepeda, and only some days later understood that he had won — not because of the fighting, but because the other commander had gone home.

Why Urquiza left is the most argued question in nineteenth-century Argentine politics. His own dispatch said that he had withdrawn "ill and disgusted to the extreme by the bitter combat". His defenders cite a kidney illness; others point to his suspicion that Derqui meant to replace him with Saá, and to a calculation that if Buenos Aires destroyed Derqui the province would then have to deal with him on terms favourable to Entre Ríos. Contemporaries spoke of a masonic understanding, and the allegation has never been proved. What is clear is that he did not use the reserve, that his cavalry commanders sent him reports dated "on the field of victory", and that he refused every later request to return. Argentine historians call it the mystery of Pavón, and it remains one.

How was the republic reassembled?

The confederation collapsed faster than the victors could organise. Derqui, unable to concentrate his scattered troops at Rosario, abandoned everything on 5 November 1861 and sailed for Montevideo on the British steamer Ardent. He never signed a resignation, only a personal letter asking Vice-President Juan Esteban Pedernera to settle matters with Urquiza. Pedernera declared the national government in recess on 12 December, after most of the legislators had already left Paraná. Mitre took power the same day as "governor of Buenos Aires, entrusted with the national executive power".

The war continued after the battle. On 22 November Venancio Flores, the former Uruguayan president serving under Mitre, caught the remaining federal cavalry at Cañada de Gómez and had most of them killed, many after surrender. Divisions from Buenos Aires moved into the interior: Paunero to Córdoba, Rivas and Sarmiento to Cuyo, Arredondo to Catamarca, Echegaray to La Rioja. Federal governors were deposed in Santa Fe, Córdoba, San Luis, Mendoza, San Juan, La Rioja, Catamarca, Tucumán, Salta and Corrientes, and replaced by liberals, some elected, some installed by the army. Urquiza shut himself up in Entre Ríos, declared that the province resumed its sovereignty, dismantled the national fleet and handed it to Buenos Aires, and took back the city of Paraná, which had been the federal capital. He did not fight, and he kept his province, his fortune and his life until he was murdered in his palace in 1870.

The legal reconstruction was careful. Mitre declared the constitution of 1853, as reformed in 1860, in force, and had the provincial legislatures resume the authority they had delegated to the national government and then delegate it to him. Elections for deputies and senators were held through the first half of 1862; the new Congress met in Buenos Aires at the end of May. In August the presidential electors chose Mitre and Marcos Paz, and Mitre was inaugurated on 12 October 1862. Three of his five ministers were porteños; the other two were provincials who had lived in Buenos Aires for five and forty years.

The terms of reunion left the two great questions open. A law passed before Mitre took office proposed to federalise the whole province of Buenos Aires, and the provincial legislature rejected it. The compromise law that followed postponed the capital question for five years, allowed the national government to reside in the city and collect the customs, guaranteed the province its annual budget, and left Buenos Aires its National Guard for the frontier. The customs were nationalised definitively by the constitutional reform of 1866; the city was federalised only in 1880, after a final armed confrontation between the province and the nation.

Why is the episode remembered the way it is?

Mitre wrote the history as well as winning the war. His Historia de Belgrano y de la independencia argentina, published from 1857, fixed the national narrative: the nation existed from 1810, Rosas was a tyrant who had interrupted it, Urquiza was an instrument, and Pavón was the restoration of a legitimate order that Buenos Aires had preserved. In that story the State of Buenos Aires is a parenthesis, a deviation produced by a handful of factious men, and its ten years are a delay rather than a subject.

The revisionists reversed the signs without changing the frame. José María Rosa and the historians of the mid-twentieth century made the confederation the true nation and Buenos Aires the agent of foreign commerce, free trade and internal colonialism. Their Urquiza is a betrayed federal leader, their Mitre the lawyer of the estancieros and the British merchant houses, their Pavón a transaction. The economic historiography of the later twentieth century gave this reading a firmer base by showing how completely the customs house determined the outcome, but it also dissolved the moral opposition: both governments were building fiscal states, and one of them happened to sit on the port.

The modern accounts are less dramatic. James Scobie's narrative of the ten years, published in 1964, remains the fullest chronology in English and treats the period as a genuine contest of two states. Tulio Halperín Donghi placed it in the longer failure to build a national order; José Carlos Chiaramonte argued that the provinces, not the nation, were the real political units of the era; Juan Carlos Garavaglia reconstructed the confederation's finances and showed how thin its state was; Hilda Sabato and others have studied how politics actually worked in the city's wards and militias. The 1855 census, digitised and analysed in recent years, has given the social history a quantitative base it lacked.

What the record supports is narrower and more interesting than either myth. The State of Buenos Aires was real: it had a defined though disputed territory, a constitution, an army, a currency, a census, a railway and a diplomatic service that signed treaties. It was also provisional by its own declaration, since its sovereignty was held in trust until a federal government existed. Its independence was a bargaining position rather than a national project, and it gave way when the confederation's collapse made the bargain unnecessary. The decade was not anarchy. It was a duel between two fiscal states over who would inherit the country, and the one with the port won.

Common myths about the State of Buenos Aires

Timeline of the State of Buenos Aires

What the map shows next

At 1853 on the map the province is drawn alone, with the confederation's thirteen provinces to the north and west and the siege only just lifted. The border data gives it 188,688 square kilometres in these first years, then enlarges it to 242,200 from 1857 — a jump of some 53,000 square kilometres that no law or treaty of the period explains, and which most likely reflects a change in the source polygons rather than a real extension of territory.

At 1857 on the map the state is at its commercial peak, with the railway running west from the city and the customs house paying for the gasworks and the schools. At 1860 on the map it is legally back inside the Argentine Nation, though the customs, the capital and the provincial army are all still unresolved — the questions that Pavón would settle by force the following year.