He moved to Montevideo, Uruguay when Juan Manuel de Rosas became Governor of Buenos Aires Province for the second time, in 1835.

After the Battle of Caseros in 1852, his family returned to Argentina, and his father was named a Minister by president Vicente López y Planes.

In 1860, after the Battle of Pavón and the National Union Pact, he took part in the commission responsible for the constitution reform of 1860.

At the end of 1875, the Native Americans of Patagonia and the Pampas, especially the Mapuche, launched organised resistance against the territorial expansion of the southern border of the emerging nation.

Trying to understand the native peoples, he decided to study the situation personally; but he fell ill while in the pampas town of Carhué, and died of renal failure, aged 48.