by Robert Booth
General San Martin arrived at Buenos Aires exhausted from his battles. He met with Governor Puerryedon, and they reviewed the state of Argentina and the threats to its stability, which were many. Its eastern army had been defeated by Artigas, and some provincial leaders were opposing the government. San Martin and Puerryedon discussed the presence of José Miguel Carrera and his surprising American fleet. Buenos Aires needed more munitions, and San Martin’s puppet government in Chile could be made safe by removing the only serious threat—Carrera, who had just placed himself in their hands. If they stopped him, there might be fallout from the United States, but probably not enough to stir any formal opposition. They made some decisions, and San Martin rolled away across the pampas, bound for Chile. At the end of the month, a company of Buenos Aires soldiers seized the Clifton and captured Carrera and his men, while the other three vessels were allowed to go home to America, although many of the passengers signed up to fight for Argentina.
Moved from jail, Carrera was imprisoned on a brig moored in the river. His brothers Lucho and Juan José got word to him there that the royalist army of their old enemy, the implacable Mariano Osorio, was on the march from Concepcion toward Santiago to overthrow Supreme Director O’Higgins. By mid-March 1817, San Martin was in Chile at the head of 4,000 men east of Santiago, near Cancha Rayada. On the evening of March 16, Osorio launched a surprise attack. In the darkness and confusion, San Martin had trouble finding his officers. The battalion commanded by O’Higgins bore the brunt of the assault, and in the thick of it, O’Higgins was shot in the arm and nearly killed when his horse went down. San Martin’s Army of the Andes lost most of its artillery but eventually made an organized retreat. Victorious, Osorio went south to await reinforcements and supplies with which to renew his campaign and capture Santiago.
By the fall of 1817, David Porter and some of his friends, deeply invested in the success of José Miguel Carrera, had formed a pressure group in Washington advocating for direct American intervention in Buenos Aires and Chile in order to restore Carrera’s presidency. John S. Skinner, now postmaster of Baltimore, wrote a series of “Lautaro Letters” directed at Speaker Clay and widely reprinted in the newspapers. He argued that the United States must intervene to rescue the region’s one republic, Carrera’s Chile, and work from there to bring about the creation of other, similar republics. If it did not, the continent would be lost to anarchy, dictatorship, and Great Britain. “Recognize the independence of the republic of Chile,” Skinner predicted, and the United States would “shatter to atoms the British intrigues of Buenos Aires, by means of which the fine country of Chile is at present held, for commercial purposes, as a province of that City.” Further, “the real, most sincere, and efficient of the Patriots,” like Carrera, could overcome “the corrupt intrigues of Britain” and return to Chile and create “a Spanish American Republic, from thence to aid in the liberation of the whole New World.” The overwhelming benefit to the United States would be “to open [South America] to our commerce, and prepare it as our ally against the Legitimates of the other Continent.”
James Monroe, the new president, was being pressured by Clay to do something with regard to the South American rebels. No policy had been formulated or even discussed by his new secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who focused on Spanish-American issues in Florida and Mexico.* Adams and Monroe created the new position of commissioner for Spanish America to manage issues for that region, and they agreed that the best man for it was Roberts Poinsett. Monroe offered him the job, but Poinsett was too busy in South Carolina. Hoping to win Monroe’s support against Clay, who continued to favor O’Higgins and San Martin, David Porter and John Skinner wrote letters and speeches insisting that Carrera was the only leader favorable to American goals in the region, that “the interests of the U.S. are jeopardized by the machinations of England,” and that “we are the natural allies of South America [and] that unless we aid them they will throw themselves into the arms of our worst enemy.”
Their campaign backfired. Now that Americans were aware of the existence of two contenders for leadership of an independent Chile, no one wanted to fund a war between them. The Porter-Skinner effort had one other major result: it blocked Henry Clay’s push to recognize O’Higgins in Chile and Puerryedon in Buenos Aires. As a result, Clay, the most powerful legislator in America and the best friend of the independence movements, turned away from Spanish America altogether.
In Buenos Aires, José Miguel Carrera’s brothers, with Manuel Rodriguez and others, had grown desperate. Argentina had made Chile its colony, and nothing had happened to change that. No American fleet had arrived, and no force with Porter or Poinsett intervened in the name of republican solidarity. There was not even a protest against the incarceration of the president of Chile. Clearly, the Americans had lost interest, and now or never, the brothers must head for the mountains. Rodriguez would lead his guerillas into the countryside, and the Carreras were to go to Santiago and raise their old army units against O’Higgins and San Martin. They got word to José Miguel Carrera, who urged them to wait; the time was not right, he said, and they lacked sufficient resources. But he was in prison, unable to lead or dissuade.
“Disguised in the apparel of muleteers,” Luis and Juan José Carrera and their friends set out across the pampas. Near Mendoza, Manuel Rodriguez rode off to raise recruits for his Legion of Death, while the Carreras started their ascent to the cordillera. Betrayed by an infiltrator, both were captured and imprisoned by San Martin’s men at Mendoza. On the morning of April 8, 1818, San Martin’s secretary, Monteaguda, arrived in Mendoza and signed their warrant, and at six o’clock Luis and Juan José were led out of the jail and seated on a bench in the public square. The two liberators, once the chiefs of the army of the Chilean republic, embraced, and Argentine soldiers shot them down.
In Chile, hearing of the executions, people realized that San Martin and O’Higgins were willing to rule by terror. Many now felt “fear of the party that so wantonly” employed violence. Over time, that fear would deepen “into horror against some of the individuals” who “became so intoxicated with power that, with the name of freedom on their lips, they oppressed and murdered.”
Three days later, west of the Andes, at Maipu, just south of Santiago—where Carrera’s soldiers had once scored their great victory over O’Higgins—Osorio brought his army into battle array under the flag of Spain. Having been harassed by Manuel Rodriguez’s rebel guerillas all the way from San Fernando, he looked forward to a real fight. The enemy was close by, with a force no larger than his own. Osorio had defeated this same army before and knew that he could do it again and reclaim his position as captain-general of Chile. His troops held a ridge as the shelling began. The cavalries engaged on the right and left, exchanging the advantage. He sent his infantry division into the center, and the enemy fell back. San Martin’s reinforcements counterattacked ferociously and broke Osorio’s main line. Osorio withdrew, but his lieutenant, Ordonez, regrouped the army and made a strong stand until San Martin’s artillery opened up. At the end of the battle of Maipu, 2,000 royalist soldiers lay dead, and Chile belonged to Argentina.
Mendoza, Argentina, showing the marketplace and the Andes beyond. Like everyone else who traveled overland from Buenos Aires to Chile, U.S. Consul Poinsett passed through Mendoza, the last stop before the ascent of the Andes. This desolate town proved to be a graveyard of the revolution—site of the executions of several Chilean revolutionary leaders and the place to which Poinsett and the shattered remains of the revolutionary army retreated in 1814 after their defeat at the Battle of Rancagua.
O’Higgins was assigned by San Martin to go to Santiago and take over as supreme director, but there was a problem: Colonel Manuel Rodriguez and his Legion of Death. Having learned of the execution of the two Carreras, Rodriguez had ridden straight into Santiago and raised an insurrection, demanding an end to “Argentine interference.” He ruled for thirty hours, until O’Higgins showed up with an army. R
odriguez was captured and taken to the town of Til Til, and there, on May 26, he was executed, and his corpse desecrated. In America, Porter was astonished when the news arrived. These men had been his friends, leaders of independent Chile and enthusiastic admirers of the United States, and America had not come to their aid.
O’Higgins would remain supreme director for five years, until he was deposed by his comrade Ramon Freire in the spring of 1823. He thought about moving to Ireland but instead went to Lima, where Simon Bolivar, rather than San Martin, had brought about the independence of Peru. O’Higgins lived in obscurity for another seventeen years, never seeing Chile again.
On January 1819, the United States frigate Macedonian arrived at Valparaiso, commanded by none other than John Downes, now holding the rank of captain. At last an American battleship had been sent to Chile as an instrument of policy, to protect American commerce. Although ignored by Downes, the most active seagoing trader was Captain Richard J. Cleveland of Salem, formerly a smuggler along the coast of Chile and a proselytizer for republicanism, returned to his old haunts in a last effort to recoup his once-great fortune. Freighting cargo and trading goods, Cleveland, in command of John Jacob Astor’s ship Beaver, finessed both the Chileans and the Peruvians for many months, recovered much of what he had lost, and sailed homeward for the last time, in triumph.
At Santiago, Downes presented the compliments of his government to Supreme Director O’Higgins and arranged to meet Admiral Lord Cochrane, a British nobleman, head of the Chilean navy, very successful in encounters with Spanish warships and funded by a large loan from London. Downes and Cochrane became friends. Downes had learned a few things from his frustrating days under David Porter, who, for all his pursuit of wealth and glory, had not seen that Anson-like plunder was still available and that all things were possible in the name of protecting American trade. For a full two years, without once engaging an enemy or harassing the locals, Captain John Downes patrolled the west coast of South America. Thoughts of José Miguel Carrera and the old republic never troubled him as he bullied his way into ports large and small and set himself up as a floating bank-fortress and smuggling emporium in a highly successful effort to promote American commercial interests, his own foremost.*
Mendoza
José Miguel Carrera, escaped from prison at last, crossed the Rio de la Plata to Portuguese-held Montevideo in 1818 and raised forces against the government of Buenos Aires. With San Martin away in Peru, civil war had broken out in Argentina. Carrera became a warlord, unmoored from any home, living in the hills and sleeping in the open, cut off from his wife and five young children, giving up everything for vengeance. In the process, he lost his ideals and some of his humanity. Inhabiting a permanent war zone, he allowed his men to engage in terror and atrocities, plundering the towns they passed through and fighting other groups in an endless campaign of nihilism and death.
Living in the bush, Carrera thought about his martyred brothers and the Patria Vieja and continued to dream about the liberation of Chile. He battled on for months and then years without any outside assistance, but he got no closer to Mendoza and the pass in the Andes that led to Santiago. He never stopped hoping that the Americans would come to his rescue. When he made his will, he ordered that his little son be sent to America to be raised by David Porter. In the spring of 1821, after a string of brutal victories, his army had shrunk to about 500 men. He was heartened to see that Spain had once more sent land and sea forces against Chile, but the dictator O’Higgins was holding firm with his large army led by San Martin and supplied by the English, and with his navy commanded by Lord Cochrane and manned mainly by British sailors. Still, there was some chance that the Spanish would succeed in destabilizing the province of Santiago. Then the people might look once more to the hills for a smiling man in a beautiful poncho, descending from the Andes as the herald of liberty.
William Yates, one of Carrera’s devoted lieutenants, wrote that his commander had captured many of his enemies over time, but had too much compassion and idealism to be much of a killer. He could not bring himself to execute an opponent “however criminal he might be.” Even “assassins who had murdered our soldiers” could expect mercy “at the expense of justice itself.” Perhaps, wrote Yates, Carrera “believed that by treating his enemies with kindness and loading them with obligations, they would become his friends,” but “if that were his idea he was miserably deceived, and proved himself in a great measure ignorant of the character of his country.”
Finally arrived at the outskirts of the fatal town of Mendoza, José Miguel Carrera was closer to the border of Chile than he had been in a long time. He and his guerillas fought and defeated a much larger force, but his men were desperate enough to believe that he intended to abandon them and go to the United States. They mutinied and took him and his officers into Mendoza. There, in prison, Carrera lived quietly, thinking and wondering, tired of living like a beast, tired of violence. He wrote at length to his friends and family, and to posterity: “I ask future generations to reclaim my name, for I die like a bandit in a strange land.”
On the morning of September 5, 1821—seven years after he and O’Higgins had merged their warring armies and turned to face Osorio—Carrera had a visit from the local officials, and he scoffed when they spoke of a reprieve from San Martin. Priests gathered in the square. “He heartily despised all friars,” wrote Yates; “however, they thronged round him . . . in order to re-convert him, that he might die a good Christian. Passing through the plaza, they employed all their logic in proving the existence of hell, and the torments of the damned.” Carrera knew all about hell, and “he reprimanded them for their insolence in offering and imposing their unasked advice.” He “continued steadfastly to view the troops, and make his observations on the strength of the town to the officer who guarded him”—as if he were in command.
They had him sit in a chair, but he wanted to stand. The padres “renewed their suit for the safety of his soul, which he told them was his care, not theirs.” And he refused to forgive his enemies and the enemies of his family, and of Chile. He removed his poncho and his watch, vestiges of a former life, and then he sat, “but when the executioner came to tie his arms, he stood up rather indignantly, and ordered him to retire.” The man did as he was told, and Carrera reproved the commander: “Since when does a ruffian get to tie up an honorable officer?”
He would not have his eyes covered, but sat calmly and placed his right hand over his heart, and directed the soldiers to proceed. They fired, and he fell over dead in the dirt. Most of his remains were given to his mother-in-law to be interred in the tomb of his brothers, but President Carrera’s killers placed his head on a spike over the door of the town hall and nailed up his right arm under the clock.
Charleston
In 1821, after a stint in the state legislature and as the head of road-building and other internal improvements in South Carolina, Joel Roberts Poinsett, forty-two, was elected to Congress by his fellow Charlestonians. He was finished with Buenos Aires and Chile, having written a final report about those places at the request of the president. In Congress he memorably spoke against sending an American commissioner to Greece, whose people were fighting the Turks for their independence. Poinsett, thinking of Chile, insisted that the United States not become involved unless it was willing first to recognize Greek nationhood.
In 1822, after several failed attempts at revolution, there was a revival of nationalism in Mexico, from which Agustin de Iturbide, leader of the insurgents, emerged as emperor. Whether he had the strength and vision to establish a permanent government was a matter of great interest to President Monroe, who prevailed upon Congressman Poinsett to undertake a mission to Mexico. His predecessor, William Shaler, had carried out his consular assignment in support of the Mexican nationalists until their defeat by the Spanish in 1813; now Shaler was minister in Algiers, and Mexico was again independent. After traveling for three months in almost every Mexican province, Poinsett wrote a de
tailed report concluding with the belief that Iturbide would not be able to hold on to power there—and in fact the news of his overthrow by fellow Mexicans arrived in Washington just before Poinsett himself, who proceeded to publish the report as Notes on Mexico, the first American book on the subject. David Porter, among others, read it eagerly.
In 1823 Poinsett, still a bachelor, was reelected to Congress. Although a firm supporter of Andrew Jackson, he was chosen by the new president, John Quincy Adams, as minister to Mexico—America’s first. Poinsett arrived at Mexico City in May 1825 at a time of great turmoil in a country nominally a republic but actually an oligarchy run by aristocrats and leaders of the military and the church. It was all too familiar. He was importuned by republicans plotting for a change in government. Sympathetic, Poinsett dispensed information but not advice. He was determined not to take a partisan role. He found the British there well advanced toward a pact on commerce. His efforts to co-opt the process met resistance, which he attributed to Mexican concerns about American designs on Texas and other northern parts of their country, but which mainly arose from a secret non-aggression and protection pact that the brilliant British diplomats had made with Mexico in 1823.
