Manuel Belgranothe VaultISTJ

On 31 March 1813, at army headquarters in Jujuy, General Manuel Belgrano wrote a letter turning down a fortune. He was 42.

His army had beaten the royalists at Tucumán in September 1812 and at Salta on 20 February 1813. The grateful Assembly in Buenos Aires voted him a sword with a gold hilt and forty thousand pesos in state property, his to own outright.

He was a soldier only by necessity. Trained in law, he had spent years as secretary of the merchants' board of trade in Buenos Aires, arguing for free schools, for girls as well as boys. The revolution of 1810 put him in uniform.

He was not always a man of procedure. In February 1812, at Rosario, he raised a new flag for the revolution without asking anyone, and was rebuked for it. It became Argentina's flag.

His reply to the Assembly opened with a principle. “Neither virtue nor talent has a price,” he wrote, and paying for them in money only degraded them. Riches, he added, were a reef on which any virtue that did not learn to despise them would run aground.

Plenty of people refuse a reward. Belgrano went one step further. He assigned the forty thousand pesos to endow four public primary schools, in Tarija, Jujuy, Tucumán and Santiago del Estero. The word he chose was dotación, an endowment, meant to pay out year after year.

Then he did what Vaults do best. He wrote the rules. On 25 May 1813, the third anniversary of the revolution, he issued twenty-two articles for the schools.

Each school got ten thousand pesos of capital, which should yield five hundred a year. Four hundred would pay the teacher. The other hundred would buy paper, quills, ink, books and catechisms for children whose parents could not afford them. The post would go by competitive examination, and every three years the town council could open it again. Nobody was to show off luxury, even if their parents could pay. In the last article he kept the right to send an inspector.

He had just been offered a fortune for winning battles. At the town's public celebrations, his rules gave the place of honor to the schoolteacher.

Rules could not make an empty treasury pay. Buenos Aires promised five per cent a year until the property was sold, and then the war turned. Belgrano lost two battles late in 1813 and was replaced in command. The money did not come. He died in Buenos Aires on 20 June 1820, aged 50, in poverty.

The schools he had costed to the last hundred pesos waited. Santiago del Estero's opened in 1822 in a borrowed room, and Tarija's in 1825, before any money arrived. A boy from Tucumán named Juan Bautista Alberdi later wrote that he learned to read and write “in the public school that Belgrano founded.”

The last of the four to be properly built, in Jujuy, began classes in 2004, 191 years after his letter. The state had taken almost two centuries to keep its side. Belgrano had finished his in eight weeks.