Qualla: Argentine Confederation

Argentine Confederation: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agustín Cardozo Cabrera, CC BY 4.0. Open the Constitution of Argentina to Article 35 and you will find a list of the country's official names. One of them is the Argentine Confederation, the title under which much of nineteenth-century Argentina conducted its affairs. It is not a museum piece; it is a legal name the republic still answers to. Between 1831 and 1861 this was simply what the country was called, a loose league of provinces with no president, governed in foreign matters by whoever held Buenos Aires. The story of how that confederation rose, split, and finally fused into modern Argentina is the story of how a nation argued itself into existence, and for a crucial stretch of it the seat of power sat not in Buenos Aires at all, but on the high bank of the Paraná River in the city of Paraná.

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Image: Agustín Cardozo Cabrera | CC BY 4.0

Argentine Confederation: Federalists and Unitarians

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agustín Cardozo Cabrera, CC BY 4.0. After winning independence from Spain, the provinces of the old Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata fell into a long quarrel over a single question: who should govern, and from where. Unitarians wanted a strong central state run from Buenos Aires; federalists wanted the provinces ...

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Image: Agustín Cardozo Cabrera | CC BY 4.0

Argentine Confederation: The Chains Across the River

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit François-Pierre-Bernard Barry (1813-1905), Public domain. Rosas governed without the title of head of state, yet for two decades he dominated the confederation, handling its wars with Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, France, and Britain. The most storied of these came in 1845, when an Anglo-French fleet tried to force its way up the Paraná to ...

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Image: François-Pierre-Bernard Barry (1813-1905) | Public domain

Argentine Confederation: A Capital on the Paraná

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agustín Cardozo Cabrera, CC BY 4.0. Rosas fell in 1852, defeated at the Battle of Caseros by Justo José de Urquiza, the federalist governor of Entre Ríos. Urquiza convened a constituent assembly and gathered the provinces at San Nicolás to agree on a path forward, but Buenos Aires balked. In September 1852 the city...

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Image: Agustín Cardozo Cabrera | CC BY 4.0

Argentine Confederation: Two Argentinas, Then One

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agustín Cardozo Cabrera, CC BY 4.0. For most of a decade two rival Argentinas faced each other across the question of the port. The Confederation, governed from Paraná under Urquiza and later Santiago Derqui, drafted and adopted the 1853 constitution that still anchors the country. Buenos Aires wrote its own. They ...

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Image: Agustín Cardozo Cabrera | CC BY 4.0