José de San Martín is édeSanMartíthe national hero of Argentina, Chile and Peru, and along with Simón Bolívar, the most important Libertador of the Spanish American Wars of Independence. For this reason, he is homaged and depicted in several cultural works of those countries, and even internationally. He led the Campaign across the Andes from Argentina to Chile which has been studied around the world for its complexity.
Remains
José de San Martín died on 17 August 1850, in his house at Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. He requested in his will to be taken to the cemetery without any funeral, and to be moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, afterwards. He also bequeathed his curved saber to the Argentine governor Juan Manuel de Rosas. Mariano Balcarce informed Rosas and the foreign minister Felipe Arana of San Martín's death. Balcarce oversaw the embalming of his remains and his temporary stay in a chapel of the city. He also sent the saber to Buenos Aires.
However, the rebellion of Justo José de Urquiza against Rosas in 1851, Rosas' defeat at the battle of Caseros and the resulting chaos delayed the move of San Martín's remains to Buenos Aires. Still, both Rosas and Urquiza organized public homages to San Martín, regardless of their ongoing conflict. Buenos Aires seceded from Argentina as the state of Buenos Aires, dominated by Unitarians who despised San Martín. Thus, the move of his remains was postponed indefinitely. Aware that there were no favourable conditions to the project, Balcarce arranged the creation of a tomb in the Boulogne-sur-Mer cemetery.
The remains of San Martín were finally repatriated on May 29, 1880, during the presidency of Nicolás Avellaneda. The mausoleum was placed inside the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral. As San Martín was suspected of being a freemason, the mausoleum was placed in an expanded wing of the cathedral.
Historiography
San Martín was first acclaimed as a national hero of Argentina by the Federals, as Rosas and Urquiza. Bernardo de Irigoyen published the Recuerdos del General San Martín () in 1851. The unitarians still resented his refusal to aid the Supreme Directors with the Army of the Andes against Estanislao López and Francisco Ramírez, which led to their downfall at the Battle of Cepeda, and San Martín's constant support to Rosas.
The unitarian Bartolomé Mitre wrote a series of biographies, and established Bernardino Rivadavia as a national hero of Argentina. However, as Rivadavia was a statesman without a military career, Mitre sought to create a military national hero, to complement Rivadavia, and wrote a biography of Manuel Belgrano. This attempt did not prove completely effective, as Belgrano had grave defeats in his military career. Thus, Mitre wrote a biography of San Martín, "Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudamericana" (). By that time, several accounts of San Martín were being written at many countries: Valentín Ledesma from Lima wrote in 1853 about San Martín's campaign in Peru, and Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna from Chile wrote in 1856 about the Chilean War of Independence.
San Martín's support for Latin American integration contradicted the strong centralism of the government party. As a result, the biography written by Mitre modified details about him. The Spanish American wars of independence are not treated as a continent-wide revolution, but merely as an Argentine revolution that extends freedom to Chile and Peru. Bolívar is portrayed instead as a conqueror, annexing the new free countries into an artificial unity. The war is described to be separatist from the beginning, and encouraged and supported by Britain. However, in the specific case of San Martín this scenario could seem contradictory, as he had left America as a child and served for the Spanish army for 22 years. As a result, his military career in Spain is summarized in six pages (the whole book has more than six hundred), giving very little detail about him before his arrival to Buenos Aires. As for the reason for his departure from the Spanish army to join the South American ones, the book describes that "he decided to return to his distant nation, which he had always loved as a true mother, to offer her his sword and devote her his life". Meaning, that his first six years living in America shaped his personality more than the twenty eight he had lived so far in Spain. This point generated controversy among historians.