Expedition against Buenos Ayres.—Account of the Population of the Country, and of the various Classes which compose it.

WHEN the expedition against Buenos Ayres was ready to sail, I obtained General Whitelocke’s permission to go with the army, under the hope of recovering the property I had in that city, and offered my service to the commissary-general, whom I accompanied. As the details of that disastrous enterprise have been long before the public in an official form, and as my own observations on the occasion are of no general interest, the reader will excuse me if I forbear all mention of them, and confine myself to some general remarks on the colony.

The population of Buenos Ayres and its immediate suburbs, exclusive of the country in its vicinity, has been ascertained to amount to upwards of sixty thousand souls. The proportion of females to males is said to be as four to one, but if we take into consideration that many men are almost daily arriving from Europe, as well as from the South American provinces, and that under the old government neither the militia nor the marine was recruited from the mass of the population, we shall find reason to conclude that the proportion of the sexes is not so unequal. In the interior, the excess of males is very great, for as the lands are granted in large tracts only, and but poorly cultivated, there is no encouragement for the laboring classes to marry and settle upon them. The poor are compelled to remain single, from the very bare resources on which they depend for subsistence, and are accustomed to consider the married state as fraught with heavy burthens and inevitable misfortunes. It is not uncommon to find estates, larger than an English county, with hardly more than an hundred laborers upon them, who subsist upon the sale of a little corn, which each is permitted to grow for himself, but only to such an extent as a single man can plough.

The various races which compose the population are as follow:

1. Legitimate Spaniards or Europeans. In Buenos Ayres there are about three thousand; in the interior the number is very trifling, except in Potosi, which, being a mining country, contains many.

2. Creoles; legitimate descendants from Spaniards or Europeans.

3. Mestizos, the offspring of European and Indian parents.

4. Indians, almost all of whom have some mixture of Spanish blood.

5. Brown mixtures of Africans and Europeans.

6. Mulattos of various degrees.

All these races intermix without restraint, so that it is difficult to define the minor gradations, or to assign limits to the ever-multiplying varieties. Few families are entirely exempt from characteristics of Indian origin, physical as well as moral. It is well known that in the Spanish colonies little regard is now paid to purity of blood; the various regulations for preserving the races distinct have gradually become obsolete. This may be regarded as a momentary evil; but may it not be conducive in the long-run to the good of society, by concentrating the interests of the various classes, which, in remaining separate, might one day endanger the stability of the government, as has been the case in the French colony of St. Domingo?

In describing the orders of society in Buenos Ayres, it is necessary to premise that I mean to class them, not by degrees of birth, rank, or profession, but by the relative estimation in which they stand in point of property or public usefulness.

According to this scale, the first which comes under consideration is the commercial class. Every person belonging to it, from the huckster at the corner of the street, to the opulent trader in his warehouse, is dignified by the appellation of merchant; yet few individuals among them can lay just claim to that title, as they are wanting in that practical knowledge so essential in commercial dealings. They are averse to all speculation and enterprise; the common routine of their business is to send orders to Spain for the articles they need, and to sell by retail, at an exorbitant profit; beyond this they have hardly a single idea, and it has been said that their great reason for opposing a free trade with foreign nations, is a consciousness of their own mercantile inexperience. The more considerable houses are almost all branches of some European establishment; few of the Creoles have any regular trade. Those among them, however, who engage in it, are much more liberal in their transactions than the old Spaniards, and are observed to make less rapid fortunes, for their manly and independent character makes them spurn a miserable economy, and disdain to assume that church-going hypocrisy which must be practised twice or thrice a-day by those who would enrich themselves through the patronage of the opulent families. Among the inferior tradesmen, those who gain most are the pulperos, the warehousemen, and the shopkeepers. The pulperos retail wine, brandy, candles, sausages, salt, bread, spices, wood, grease, brimstone, &c. Their shops (pulperias) are generally lounging-places for the idle and dissipated of the community. In Buenos Ayres there are about seven hundred of them, each more or less in the interest of some richer individual. The warehousemen sell earthen and glass ware, drugs, various articles of consumption, and some goods of home-manufacture, wholesale and retail. The shopkeepers amount to nearly six hundred in number; they sell woollen cloths, silks, cotton goods of all sorts, hats, and various other articles of wearing apparel. Many of them make considerable fortunes, those especially who trade to Lima, Peru, Chili, or Paraguay, by means of young men whom they send as agents or factors. There is another description of merchants, if such they may be called, who keep in the back-ground, and enrich themselves by monopolizing victuals, and by forestalling the grain brought to market from the interior, much to the injury of the agricultural interest.

The second class of inhabitants consists of the proprietors of estates and houses. They are in general Creoles, for few Europeans employ their funds in building, or in the purchase of land, until they have realised a fortune to live upon, which commonly takes place when they are far advanced in life, so that their establishments pass immediately into the hands of their successors. The simple landholders derive so little revenue from their possessions, that they are generally in debt to their tradesmen; their gains are but too commonly engrossed by the monopolists, and having no magistrate to represent them, they find themselves destitute of effectual resources against wrong and extortion. So defective and ill-regulated are the concerns of agriculture in this country, that the proprietor of an estate really worth 20,000 dollars can scarcely subsist upon it.

Under the class of landed proprietors, I may reckon the cultivators, here called quinteros or chacareros, who grow wheat, maize, and other grain. These men are so depressed and impoverished, that, notwithstanding the importance of their calling, and the public usefulness of their labors, they are ranked among the people of least consequence in society.

The third class is composed of handicraftsmen, such as masons, carpenters, tailors, and shoe-makers, who, although they work hard and receive great wages, seldom realize property. The journeymen are usually people of color; the masters for the most part Genoese, and universally foreigners, for the Spaniards despise these trades, and cannot stoop to work along with negroes or mulattos. Many of the lower orders derive subsistence from these and other employments of a similar nature; here are lime-burners, wood-cutters, tanners, curriers, &c. The free porters constitute a numerous body of men; they ply about the streets to load and unload carts, and carry burdens, but they are so idle and dissolute, that no man can depend on their services for a week together; when they have a little money, they drink and gamble, and when pennyless, they sometimes betake themselves to pilfering. These habits have long rendered them a public nuisance, but no corrective measures have hitherto been taken, nor does there appear, on the part of the higher orders, any disposition to reform them.

Persons employed in public offices may be comprehended under the fourth class. The best situations under Government are held by native Spaniards; those of less emolument by Creoles; the former are regarded as mere sinecures, and the persons enjoying them, are considered as in no way serviceable to the community, except by spending their large salaries within it.

The fifth class is the militia or soldiery. Previous to the invasion of the English, the officers were not much noted for military science, or for that ardor which leads to the acquisition of it; their chief ambition was to obtain commands in towns and villages, especially those on the Portuguese frontier, where they might enrich themselves by smuggling. The privates were ill-disciplined, badly dressed, and badly paid. The effective force which the crown of Spain maintained in these possessions, was one regiment of the line, which was to consist of 1200 men, but was reduced to less than half; one regiment of dragoons, amounting to 600, two of cavalry called blandengues, 600 each, and one or two companies of artillery. With the exception of the blandengues, all the troops were originally sent from the Peninsula, but not having for the last twenty years been recruited from thence, their ranks were gradually filled by natives. By eminence they were called veterans, but they have been of late disbanded, and their officers have passed to the command of the new corps which were formed on the English invasion. The force of these corps may be estimated at nine thousand men.

The sixth class is the clergy, in number about a thousand. The seculars are distinguished by their learning, honor, and probity from the friars, who are in general so grossly ignorant and superstitious, that they render no real service to the public in any way, but rather tend to disturb the minds of the honest and well-disposed.

Every observation I was able to make, gave me a favorable idea of the general character of the people; they are tractable, prudent, and generous; and doubtless, had they been under a milder and more beneficent government than that of the Spaniards, they might have become a model to other colonies; but it is lamentable to add, that, in points of morality, they cannot be considered as much superior to the other inhabitants of America. This is attributable to the want of a proper system of education for youth, to the pernicious example afforded by the vices of the Europeans, and, in a word, to the prevalence of an intolerant system, which, by aiming to make men what they cannot be, causes them to become what they ought not to be. The intolerant rigor exercised by the ministers of worship as well as by the government, for the suppression of immorality, defeats its own end; it is like the unskilful practice of a physician, which, directed solely against the external symptoms, aggravates instead of removing the disease. Thus, while open profligacy is discountenanced in Buenos Ayres, libertinism of a more dangerous kind is connived at, if not tolerated; the peace of the most respectable private families is liable to be destroyed by votaries of seduction, who respect neither the purity of female virtue, nor the sacred rights of matrimony. This evil pervades all classes of society, and is the source of domestic disputes, which often lead to serious consequences.

In thus attempting to describe the state of Buenos Ayres, as I found it in the year 1807, I have purposely avoided all discussions of a political nature, and have declined entering into a detail of the events which led to the present struggles of the people for independence.