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Don Yo in America: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Second Visit to the United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
On May 5, 1865, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento returned to the United States as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Argentine Republic. A more accurate title would have been Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Peripatetic, for no other minister or ambassador has ever spent as much time traveling through the United States, talking to its people, and studying its institutions. He was fifty-four years old now, an aging man whose clothes were formal but untidy, whose manner was truculent and conceited, a passionately opinionated man who stated his beliefs with fire and vigor and was rude to the point of insolence to those who sought to waste his time with frivolity—and yet who managed to form many warm friendships and to arouse in many Americans a personal liking for himself and an interest in his country. He was to spend three years and four months in the United States, and they were to be years crammed with work—studying, collecting information to send to Argentina, traveling, and writing. He wrote constantly. Dozens of letters came to him every day, and he wrote dozens himself. He reported often to Argentina's Minister of Foreign Relations, and he wrote constantly to friends and advisers in the United States. During his stay in America he wrote numerous newspaper articles, on topics as varied as grape culture, votes for women, and export laws. He started a periodical, Ambas Américas, whose mission was to draw the United States and all Latin American countries closer together. He wrote and published two books: Vida de Abrán Lincoln, the first biography of Lincoln in Spanish, and Las escuelas: base de la prosperidad y la república en los Estados Unidos. He translated a book on school architecture and a biography of Horace Mann into Spanish.
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- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1962
References
1 In an article published in El Zonda early in 1866, Sarmiento, wrote that he had been in six states in six days. Obras de D. F. Sarmiento: Tomo XXIX: Ambas Américas (Buenos Aires, 1899), p. 90.Google Scholar
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36 The first two teachers sailed from Boston on May 31, 1867. They were Samuel Storrow Higginson, A. B. Harvard 1863, M. A. Harvard 1866, who had served as a chaplain in the Union army during the Civil War, and Foster Thayer, A. B. Columbia 1862, M. A. Columbia 1866, M. D. Bellevue Hospital Medical College, United States Navy acting surgeon 1864-1865. Over 60 American teachers went to Argentina in the years 1867–1880. Luiggi, op. cit., p. 199.
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50 John Sartain (1808-1897) was an English engraver who worked in the United States after 1830. His work was very popular, and he has been called the originator of pictorial magazines.
51 Sarmiento sent Sartain a photograph of himself to be used as the basis for the mezzotint. Sartain later called on Sarmiento in New York in order to study his subject in the flesh.
52 Ibid., pp. 197–198.
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59 Faustina’s husband, August Belin, was a French publisher whom Sarmiento had met in Paris in 1845 and whom he had induced to go to Valparaiso, Chile, and enter the publishing business there. Belin later edited Sarmiento’s complete works (52 volumes), which were published by the Argentine government.
60 Luiggi, op. cit., p. 201.
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