…Gdańsk Pomerania.

Under López, Paraguay begins to tackle the question of slavery, which has existed since early colonial days.

Settlers had brought a few slaves to work as domestic servants, but were generally lenient about their bondage.

Conditions had worsened after 1700, however, with the importation of about fifty thousand African slaves to be used as agricultural workers.

Under Francia, the state had acquired about one thousand slaves when it confiscated property from the elite.

López does not free these slaves; instead, he enacts the 1842 Law of the Free Womb, which ends the slave trade and guarantees that the children of slaves will be free at age twenty-five, but the new law serves only to increase the slave population and depress slave prices as slave birthrates soared.

Less rigorous than José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, López loosens restrictions on foreign intercourse, boosts exports, invites foreign physicians, engineers, and investors to settle in Paraguay, and pays for students to study abroad.

He also sends his son Francisco Solano López to Europe to buy guns.

Like Francia, López has the overriding aim of defending and preserving Paraguay.

He launches reforms with this goal in mind.

Trade eases arms acquisitions and increases the state's income.

Foreign experts help build an iron factory and a large armory.

The new railroad is to be used to transport troops.

López uses diplomacy to protect the state's interests abroad, yet despite his apparent liberality, López is a dictator who holds Paraguayans on a tight leash.

He allows Paraguayans no more freedom to oppose the government than they had had under Francia.

Congress becomes his puppet, and the people abdicate their political rights, a situation enshrined in the 1844 constitution, which places all power in López's hands.

Paraguayan president Carlos Antonio López installs his nineteen-year old son, Francisco, as brigadier general in 1846, during the spasmodic hostilities currently prevailing with Argentina.

López wears his distrust for foreigners like a badge of loyalty to the nation, but he is not as cautious as he appears.

López recklessly drops Francia's key policies of neutrality without making the hard choices and compromises about where his allegiances lie.

He allows unsettled controversies and boundary disputes with Brazil and Argentina to smolder.

The two regional giants had tolerated Paraguayan independence, partly because Paraguay serves to check the expansionist tendencies of the other.

Both are satisfied if the other cannot dominate Paraguayan affairs.

At the same time, however, a Paraguay that is antagonistic to both Brazil and Argentina will give these countries a reason for uniting.

Francisco Solano López, born in 1826, becomes the second and final ruler of the López dynasty.

He had had a pampered childhood.

His father had raised him to inherit his mantle and made him a brigadier general at the age of eighteen.

He is an insatiable womanizer, and stories abound of the cruel excesses he resorta to when a woman has the courage to turn him down.

His 1853 trip to Europe to buy arms is undoubtedly the most important experience of his life; his stay in Paris proves to be a turning point for him.

There, Solano López admires the trappings and pretensions of the French empire of Napoleon III.

He falls in love with an Irish woman named Elisa Alicia Lynch, whom he makes his mistress

"La Lynch," as she becomes known in Paraguay, is a strong-willed, charming, witty, intelligent woman who becomes a person of enormous influence in Paraguay because of her relationship with Solano López.

Lynch's Parisian manners soon make her a trendsetter in the Paraguayan capital, and she makes enemies as quickly as she makes friends.

Lynch will bear Solano López five sons, although the two will never marry.

She will become the largest landowner in Paraguay after Solano López transfers most of the country and portions of Brazil to her name during the war, yet she will retain practically nothing when the war ends.

She will bury Solano López with her own hands after the last battle in 1870 and die penniless some years later in Europe.

Solano López consolidates his power after his father's death in 1862 by silencing several hundred critics and would-be reformers through imprisonment.

Another Paraguayan congress now unanimously elects him president.

Yet Solano López would have done well to heed his father's last words to avoid aggressive acts in foreign affairs, especially with Brazil.

Francisco's foreign policy vastly underestimates Paraguay's neighbors and overrates Paraguay's potential as a military power.

President Lopez’s son Francisco Solano Lopez, born near Asunción, had been made commander-in-chief of the Paraguayan army by his father, in 1846, during the spasmodic hostilities then prevailing with Argentina.

He had been sent in 1853 as minister plenipotentiary, to Britain, France and Italy, and was to spend a year and a half in Europe.

Empowered to conclude commercial treaties, he has purchased large quantities of arms and military supplies, together with several steamers, and has organized a project for building a railroad and establishing a French colony in Paraguay.

In Europe, Lopez had nurtured a Napoleonic image of himself.

He becomes Paraguay’s minister of war in 1855, and later vice-president to his long-ruling father.

Years of confrontations between the Federal forces of the provinces and the Unitarian Buenos Aires Province had impelled the Congress of Paraná to pass a law on April 1, 1859, directing Urquiza to peacefully reincorporate the dissident province of Buenos Aires, but allowing the use of arms if this is not possible.

The legislature of Buenos Aires, taking this as a formal declaration of war, decides in May to repel any military aggression by federal troops.

Brazil, Paraguay, the United States and the United Kingdom try to prevent conflict through friendly intercession.

Paraguay sends young Francisco Solano López as a special minister.

Argentine lawyer and politician Valentin Alsina, president of Buenos Aires, demands the resignation of Urquiza, who does not comply.

The State of Buenos Aires is also bolstered by its numerous alliances in the hinterland, including that of Santiago del Estero Province (led by Manuel Taboada), as well as its alliances with powerful Unitarian Party governors in Salta, Corrientes, Tucumán, and San Juan.

The 1858 assassination of San Juan's Federalist governor, Nazario Benavídez, by Unitarians had inflamed tensions between the Confederation and the State of Buenos Aires, as had a free trade agreement between the chief Confederate port (the Port of Rosario) and the Port of Montevideo, which had undermined Buenos Aires trade.

The election of the intransigent Valentín Alsina had further exacerbated disputes.

Open hostilities broke out between Buenos Aires and the Argentine Confederation, led by Urquiza.

After Mitre’s federalist forces lose to Urquiza’s centralist army at Cañada de Cepeda, Santa Fe, on October 23, 1859, Alsina has to resign his post, and shortly after Buenos Aires rejoins the Confederation.

Thus the unity of Argentina is generally secured, although it will be two decades before the centralists complete their victory over the federalists.