Joel R. Poinsett to James Monroe, 16 November 1815
Joel R. Poinsett to James Monroe
Philadelphia Nov. 16. 1815
Sir
I have received by a friend from Rio de Janeiro accounts from the river of Plate to the first of August.
Shortly after I left Buenos Ayres,1 Posadas withdrew from the command, and Dn. Carlos Alvear was appointed Supreme Director.2 At this period the Expedition under Murillo3 was hourly expected on the shores of La Plata, and all parties united in the common defence. The undisguised ambition, and haughty manners of Alvear had long rendered him unpopular; and as soon as it was known that the expedition had proceeded from Cadiz against Caraccas and Carthagena, the Party opposed to him, whom I left organising their measures to effect a revolution, carried their project into execution. Alvear, the Larreas,4 Garcia, Vasquez, and several others were banished, and retired to Rio de Janeiro. Some were thrown into prison; among them, the Clergyman Vidal, and Mr. White, the latter for the sixth time.5
The Cabildo elected Rondeau supre⟨me⟩ Director, in hopes, by his appointment, to reconcile the Chiefs of the Eastern shore of La Plata with the government of Buenos Ayres. Artigas remains, however, inflexible; he is in possession of the Eastern shore and of Montevideo, and has suspended all communication between that place and Buenos Ayres.6 San Martin7 commands about 2000 men at Mendoza; Alvarez officiates provisionally in Buenos Ayres as Supreme Director; Genl. Rondeau at the head of 8000 men has advanced beyond Potosi, and the royalists under Genl. Pezuela8 retire before him. I have the honor to be with great respect, Sir, Your Most Obt. Servt.
J. R. Poinsett
RC (PHi: Joel Poinsett Papers). Redirected by Monroe to “The President.”
1. Poinsett, who had orginally been sent by JM to Buenos Aires in 1810 as an agent for seamen and commerce, passed much of his time in Chile where he had actively assisted the Carrera family in the cause of independence from Spain. He returned to Buenos Aires in April 1815 and arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, the following month ( 2:488 n. 1; Rippy, Joel R. Poinsett, 35–56).
2. Gervasio Antonio de Posadas, who wrote to JM in March 1814 after he had been named as Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, was replaced in that position by his nephew Carlos María de Alvear in January 1815. Alvear in turn was overthrown by the cabildo of Buenos Aires in May of that year and went into exile in Rio de Janeiro ( 7:358, 359 n. 1; Levene, History of Argentina, 289–91).
3. Pablo Morillo, conde de Cartagena (1778–1837), was the commander of a 10,500-man Spanish army sent to reestablish royalist control in the provinces of New Granada. Originally, the expedition was intended for the La Plata region, but Ferdinand VII redirected it to Venezuela. At great cost Morillo took Cartagena in December 1815, and by October 1816 he completed a tenuous reconquest of New Granada; but disease and desertion had decimated his army, and he was unable to hold the latter against the forces of Simón Bolívar. He was eventually relieved of command in 1820, after a dozen earlier efforts to resign (Stephen K. Stoan, Pablo Morillo and Venezuela, 1815–1820 [Columbus, Ohio, 1974], 63–75, 203–32).
4. Born in Catalonia to a mercantile family, Juan Larrea was instrumental in financing the resistance to the British attack on Buenos Aires in 1806–7, and he was to play a similar role in aiding the Directory’s defeat of Spanish forces at Montevideo in 1814 (Tulio Halperín-Donghi, Politics Economics and Society in Argentina in the Revolutionary Period, trans. Richard Southern, Cambridge Latin American Series 18 [Cambridge, England, 1975], 30, 94, 124–25, 143, 151, 155, 208). Manuel José García had undertaken diplomatic missions on behalf of the Directory, notably to the Portuguese court in Brazil in 1814 (ibid., 227). Ventura Vázquez was a Uruguayan-born army officer in the service of the Buenos Aires Directory (ibid., 222).
5. Pedro Pablo Vidal, a Uruguayan priest, was a member of the Directory under Posadas and Alvear (ibid., 222). William Pius White was a Massachusetts merchant, who like Larrea, had provided financial assistance to the Directory (ibid., 94, 123).
6. The Banda Oriental or “eastern bank” was the region between the Uruguay River and the Atlantic Ocean, and it had long been disputed between Spain and Portugal. After 1811, under the leadership of the caudillo José Gervasio Artigas, the region rejected the rule of Buenos Aires, and efforts at reconquest by forces from Buenos Aires under the command of José Rondeau were unsuccessful. The Banda Oriental was subject to both foreign invasion and civil war until 1828, when it achieved formal independence as the nation of Uruguay (Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 88–104).
7. Argentinian José de San Martín (1778–1850) was educated in Spain and fought in the Napoleonic Wars until his return to Buenos Aires in 1812. He was responsible for the strategy of crossing the Andes from Mendoza in La Plata in order to carry the struggle for Spanish-American independence into Chile, and ultimately into Peru (ibid., xx, 137–40, 171–79).
8. Joaquín de la Pezuela (1761–1830) served as the Spanish general in command at Alta Peru (now Bolivia) from 1805. He inflicted several defeats on Spanish-American rebel forces, including those under the command of Rondeau at Sipe-Sipe in November 1815, after which he was appointed as viceroy in Peru (ibid., xviii, 121–26).