Argentina Under Mitre: Porteño Liberalism in the 1860s

Abstract

A historian, soldier, diplomat, journalist, poet, translator, and politician, Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906) stood out among the most renowned figures of late nineteenth century Latin America. “He is a full handsome man,” declared one of his many European admirers in 1861, “of very eloquent appearance with a fine forehead and thoughtful face. He is a poet and a scholar, and looks altogether too refined and gentlemanly to be mixed up with the dirty doings of second-rate politicians.” Forty years later, Carlos Pellegrini, a former president of Argentina and one of Mitre's leading political opponents, described him as “the most powerful caudillo of our time” who possessed “an aura of personal valor that he imposed on the multitude.” To an American hagiographer writing in the 1940s, Mitre was a “poet in action,” and a “heart in unison with his time and his country.… In the unification of his country, Mitre displayed the astuteness of a Cavour and the ardency of a Garibaldi.”