“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

guarantee their commercial relationships. As Beatriz Bosch noted, Urquiza’s palatial
residence was a virtual “Mecca for litigants” in the late 1860s. 2
Urquiza’s challenge was to reconcile these longstanding aspects of local autonomy
and cross-border trade – the defining aspects of borderlands legalities – with a unified
national system dominated by Buenos Aires. He aimed to do so precisely by using his
position as a lynchpin in the peripheral legal order to place real limits on the radical
federalists that saw open warfare as the natural response to porteño incursions into the region.
Urquiza repeatedly affirmed his desire to serve as a moderating influence. Writing to Mitre,
Urquiza expressed:
[His] confidence that when they judge me for not being carried away [sustraido] by the
passions of my friends and that of those who are not, it was because it was my duty
to cast them aside in perpetual sacrifice to the principle I have always been
compelled to serve, the protection of the law for all beneath an empire of liberty. 3
The key for Urquiza was to restrain the “passions” in his own province while keeping the
national government at arms length.
The endemic local clashes over property, citizenship and personal reputations
complicated Urquiza’s project to strike a balance between local autonomy and emerging
national power. These conflicts had reached particular intensity in the Uruguayan
borderlands. There, colorados and blancos had already left the courthouse for the battlefield.
Venancio Flores, the colorado general and close ally of Mitre, had invaded the country’s
northern borderlands. Flores continued to resist the national government largely by relying
on a steady stream of munitions and other support from both Mitre’s government and
Brazilian allies like David Canabarro and the Ribeiros. Blancos in turn began to court
federalists across the Uruguay River by playing on the old tensions between the Argentine
2 Bosch, Urquiza y Su Tiempo, 642.
3 Mitre and Mitre, Archivo Mitre, vol. 25, 68.
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