Bartolome Mitre rose through Argentina's mid-nineteenth-century civil wars as a soldier, journalist and politician of the Unitarian tradition, playing a leading role in the 1861 Battle of Pavon that secured Buenos Aires province's dominance over the Argentine Confederation and cleared his path to the presidency of a reunified Argentina in 1862. As president, Mitre pursued national consolidation, modernised the army, and in May 1865 signed the Treaty of the Triple Alliance with Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay's Francisco Solano Lopez, taking personal command as commander-in-chief of the combined allied forces during the war's opening campaigns, including the allied capture of the Paraguayan fortress of Uruguayana and command at the bloody Battle of Curupayty (1866). Political pressures at home and disagreements over strategy eventually led Mitre to hand over active command to Brazilian General Duque de Caxias in 1868, before he returned to Buenos Aires to complete his presidential term. After leaving office Mitre remained a dominant figure in Argentine public life as a senator, an unsuccessful 1874 presidential candidate whose defeat he contested by unsuccessful armed revolt, and above all as founder in 1870 of the newspaper La Nacion and as one of Argentina's most influential historians, whose biographies of San Martin and Belgrano helped shape the country's foundational national narrative.

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