Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros
The news of the fall of the Junta of Seville reached Buenos Aires in May 1810. With both the king of Spain and the Junta removed of power, many people thought that Cisneros had no legitimacy to govern, starting the May Revolution. Cisneros tried to calm down the population, to no avail. He called the commanders of the local armies and requested their support, but they denied it. Cisneros was ultimately forced to allow an open cabildo, which would discuss what to do. Although those meetings were usually composed of the wealthiest population, the army and a group of rioters plotted to prevent the entry of many wealthy people and allow common people instead.
Historiography of the May Revolution
Meanwhile, Esteban Echeverría epitomized the ideals of May in the concepts of progress and democracy. In the future, these concepts would be the axis around which revisionist history would differ from the canonical history in reference to the events of May. The canonical version claimed progress and justify the abandonment or delay the realization of democratic ideals in order not to risk the economic prosperity of society arguing that even then was not able to properly take advantage of political freedom. This situation was known as the establishment of the "Possible Republic." Mitre and Echeverría were part of the '37 Generation, a group of romantic authors born during the revolution itself and formed in the local context generated after it. Those authors did not work purely in intellectual fields, but took instead active part in the political events of their time, and strongly opposed the governor Juan Manuel de Rosas. They were closer to the unitarians than to the federalists, but were not fully unitarians either: they thought that it wasn't enough to apply directly the new ideas generated in Europe or the United States, but instead to adapt them to the local contexts of the Río de la Plata. They choose the May Revolution as the point to mark the birth of the nation because of their rejection to the Spanish or aboriginal cultures.