José de San Martín (1778-1850)
Autograph letter signed (‘Jose de S.ⁿ Martin’) to [General] Mariano [Alejo] Álvarez, Paris, 25 April 1833
In Spanish, 4 pages, 262 x 207mm, bifolium. Provenance: Sotheby's, 12 May 1981, lot 66.

The 'Liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru' asks the Peruvian jurist and politician Mariano Alejo Álvareza (1781-1855) a question which he believes only he can answer: who caused the death of his comrade Bernardo Monteagudo? Martín explains the delay to his reply, updating his correspondent on his health over the previous winter. He intended to send a letter with ‘Coronel Hurreguy’ who had planned to go to Lima, but the colonel was stuck in England, ‘his affairs having delayed his departure longer than he had anticipated’. He then raises ‘a question which for years I have desired an answer, and which only you can give me with more conclusive information.’ This is the question of Monteagudo’s murder. Martín has had a different answer from each person he has asked. Even Bolívar ‘has not escaped such an iniquitous accusation, so much the grosser when one considers his special character which was incapable of such baseness.’ He then reveals his plans to write a memoir of his campaigns against the Spanish, from which this question has arisen. He has amassed a large collection of papers from this period and hopes that they may yield an explanation of Monteagudo’s death. Martín writes that ‘The work to date comes down to classifying events in chronological order with the documents for each year from 1813 to the end of 1822.’ All that remains is to find ‘a pen … capable of showing the light with the help of these memoirs.’ Colonel Hurreguy has since offered to leave England and pay Álvarez a visit ‘a mi nombre’. He tells Álvarez to expect a man ‘que se llama un hombre de bien’.