The History of Paraguay, With Notes of Personal Observations, and Reminiscences of Diplomacy Under Difficulties
By , Commissioner and Minister Resident of the United States at Asuncion from 1861 to 1868. In Two Volumes. Boston: Lee and Shepard.
IN the twelve hundred pages of his two large volumes Mr. Washburn has told a wonderful story. Still, we can imagine the reader, who like us has followed it word for word from the title-page to the somewhat incorrect Index, as under a confused impression that he has read at least two Histories of Paraguay at one and the same time. It is certain that the author might have easily condensed all he has to relate into the compass of either of the present volumes. Nothing is hazarded — except probably the charge of undue compliment to the clumsy arrangement and style of his work —when we say that it contains, in the second volume at least, scarcely a statement which is not repeated once or twice. These repetitions occur frequently on the same page and in the same paragraph, often in the same sentence. Vet the story he has to tell is absorbingly interesting, in spite of Mr. Washburn.
The history of Paraguay begins properly in the greatness of the man who founded the Spanish colony, and it ends in one of the most terrible tragedies of modern times. Domingo Martinez de Irala came to the country of La Plata as a captain, and rose by the force of his character to control for years the destinies of the Spaniards and Indians of Paraguay. In an age when it was the custom to plunder and murder the defenceless natives of America, he did more to protect and civilize them than was ever done by any other European colonist, Spaniard or Anglo-Saxon. He encouraged his followers to marry the Indian women and adopt their language. A distinct nation, differing in almost everything from any other in South America, or indeed in the whole world, has been the result, and to this day the Guarani is the common language of the Paraguayans. “ William Penn,”says Mr. Washburn, “only professed to deal with the Indians honestly ; but Irala labored incessantly to raise them from barbarism to civilization and Christianity. The Indians with whom Penn had to deal have disappeared from the earth ; but the race that Irala undertook to elevate yet exists, is recognized as a nation, and has carried on a longer war against greater odds than was ever known before.” Here a great man has been discovered. His motives certainly cannot be impugned, whether the rearing of the mixed race was a mistake or not. The subsequent fate of the Paraguayans does not, in our opinion, decide the question for us. It seems more reasonable to attribute to the long, enervating tyranny of the ]essuits rather than to the mixture of blood the fact that the terrible reigns of Francia and the Lopezes were passible.
Passing on through the colonial times we come to those of the Dictator Francia. The chapters about this man, or demon rather, are, to our thinking, the best in the whole work. The awe and mystery in which his acts are shrouded seem in some way to have got into the pages. It is almost incredible that in our century a man could have so long hedged in a nation and his atrocious deeds from all knowledge of the outside world. There is nothing in the history of modern times, not even the career of the younger Lopez, to match the lonely grandeur of this inscrutable wretch. He made the way easy for his successors, and their barbarities have become too well known through governmental investigation to be long dwelt upon here. Indeed, no summary or quotation can give a just idea of Francisco Solano Lopez, the man who tortured and put to death not only the most servile ministers of his cruelty, but his own brothers ; and who caused his aged mother to be whipped. The lance that rid the world of him prevented the execution of the sentence of death already pronounced against her and his tortured sisters. “ He made good his threat of driving all non-combatants before him.....All the boys above nine or ten years old had been taken for soldiers, and therefore nearly all of the remainder were females.....Lopez’s orders, as he retreated, were that no Paraguayans should be left to fall into the hands of the allies ; and parties were sent in all directions to drive in and keep in front the women and children that were scattered through the country. To do this required more troops than Lopez could spare ; therefore the scouting-parties, when they found a crowd of women and children too numerous for them to drive into the interior before being overtaken by the allies, indiscriminately slaughtered them..... These people had scarcely anything to eat except what they could pick up in the woods and deserted country.....Seldom in the history of the world has such misery and suffering been endured as by these helpless women and children. Many of them were forced to the severest kind of drudgery, while all of them were driven about through the wilderness, exposed by day to the scorching rays of the sun, with no shelter at night, and with only such food as the forests afforded. Thousands and tens of thousands of them died of actual starvation..... If the guard were not strong enough or numerous enough to drive the fugitives all before them in their retreat, the rule was to cut their throats ; and when the allies came up, they found nothing but the mutilated bodies left unburied on the plains and in the forests. Lopez had said that he would leave none behind him ; that, if he must fall, no Paraguayan should survive him.” At the commencement of the late war it is estimated that there were about eight hundred thousand people in Paraguay. Nine tenths of them have been sacrificed to the ambition, folly, and cruelty of the younger Lopez and his paramour, Madam Lynch. Mr. Washburn says : “ More than seven hundred thousand Paraguayans had perished, and probably the war had cost the allies three hundred thousand lives ; so that the unnatural tyrant, during the seven years of his power, was the immediate and direct cause of the death of a million of people.”
We cannot complain of Mr. Washburn’s bringing so much of himself into his History, though we incline to the opinion that no account of a quarrel told by a party to it can be quite agreeable reading. Still, the attention of the civilized world was first drawn to Paraguay, we may say, hy abuse of him. The same dark machinery which enabled Lopez to sacrifice almost an entire people, and to lead three nations to the verge of bankruptcy and ruin, was applied to the blacking of Mr. Washburn’s character. His personal relations with the Paraguayans, its tyrant, and his enemies have become, therefore, a part of the history of that unfortunate country. No careful reader of these volumes will doubt that their author has made out a clear case for himself, notwithstanding the occasional lapses of taste and evidences of bitterness in which it is done ; and the very decided action of Congress in the matter of Mr. Washburn’s grievances gives us reason to hope that a lasting good will accrue from them to Americans everywhere, in a better understanding and definition of the duties of our naval officers on foreign stations.