tions of the Princess Carlota, who asked to reign there independently, but which in effect were always utterly powerless in Buenos Ayres. General Alvear, appointed Director in 1815, had already made submission to the King, but this reaction caused a revolution in April, at the head of which stood the cabildo. The assembly was dissolved, and the Director displaced and exiled. On the 24th of March, 1816, a general congress opened its sessions at Tucuman. It declared the independence of the provinces on the 9th of July, since observed in the Republic as the 4th of July in North America, and Don Juan Martin Puyrredon was appointed Director. He assumed the power on the 29th of July. Three years after, General Rondeau was appointed Director in Puyrredon's place.[1]
- ↑ When Colonel Sarmiento was in France, in 1867, at the awarding of prizes in the Exposition, the Argentine Minister to France, who is the son-in-law of General San Martin, the most remarkable Argentine hero of independence, gave an official banquet to the legation, on which occasion Colonel Sarmiento had the pleasure of relating an historic fact, until then unknown, namely: that General San Martin, by his counsels to the Congress of Tucuman in 1816, at which time Independence was declared, was the moving spirit of that act of the Congress, for which the Deputies were not at that time prepared. To Colonel Sarmiento, also, the public is indebted for the details of the famous interview between San Martin and Bolivar in Guayaquil, which resulted in San Martin's noble self-abnegation and renunciation, not only of his place in the activity of that period, but in the lifelong misunderstanding of his contemporaries, all of which Colonel Sarmiento took from the lips of the grand old man when he
