Simón Bolívar: The Life and Legacy of the Venezuelan Leader Who Liberated Much of Latin America from the Spanish Empire

Table of contents :
Simón Bolívar: The Life and Legacy of the Venezuelan Leader Who Liberated Much of Latin America from the Spanish Empire
About Charles River Editors
Introduction
The Spanish Empire
Bolívar’s Early Years
Bolívarian Thought
El Libertador
Online Resources
Further Reading
Free Books by Charles River Editors
Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

Citation preview

Simón Bolívar: The Life and Legacy of the Venezuelan Leader Who Liberated Much of Latin America from the Spanish Empire By Charles River Editors

About Charles River Editors

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Introduction

“When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is a right.” – Simón Bolívar Although he is unquestionably one of the most studied leaders of the 19th century, Simón Bolívar remains today as enigmatic as he was two centuries ago, when his vision and presence largely inspired the overthrow of the Spanish Empire in the New World. The legend of Simón Bolívar has a great deal to do with the Siddhartha-like transition of a Creole aristocrat into an impoverished revolutionary; a sparsely educated but pampered aesthete into a premier Enlightenment thinker, and a privileged youth into a warrior of almost mythological prowess. And while all of it, to a greater or lesser extent, is true, Simón Bolívar was also a revolutionary of an atypical variety. The transformational ideals of Simón Bolívar did not always

conform to the uncompromising canons of the French Revolution, or the libertarianism and individual freedoms of the American, and nor was he instinctively hostile to the concept of monarchy or aristocracy. His identification with principles of Enlightenment was leavened by exception, and by consideration, and although his military skills have certainly been overstated, they have tended to be judged against the background of Spanish moral and material collapse in the New World. In the end, it is precisely these paradoxes and contradictions that made and still makes Simón Bolívar such an interesting individual. The broad milieu into which he was born was a colonial regime spread across a vast region already many centuries old, well established and with many of the essential social and political structures of the Old World implemented in the New World. Simón Bolívar was an aristocrat, but he was also a “Creole,” which implies that he was not of pure European stock, but of blood mixed over centuries with indigenous people, and sometimes with that of imported African slaves. While this did not inhibit the emergence of a wealthy, and at times extremely wealthy local landed aristocracy, the colonial Creole could never hope to be ranked equal to the appointed Spanish ruling class, and certainly not to the blue-blooded of metropolitan breeding, all of which created an inevitable tension in the relationship between overseas dependency and metropolitan government and society. But in the early 19th century, events transpiring back in Europe would make it possible for independence movements to spread across the New World, especially as the Spanish Empire teetered, and those events would make it possible for Bolívar to become the most famous liberator in the region, forever immortalizing him across the world as El Libertador. Simón Bolívar: The Life and Legacy of the Venezuelan Leader Who Liberated Much of Latin America from the Spanish Empire chronicles how El Libertador successfully freed massive parts of the New World from the grips of the Spanish. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about Bolívar like never before.

Simón Bolívar: The Life and Legacy of the Venezuelan Leader Who Liberated Much of Latin America from the Spanish Empire About Charles River Editors Introduction The Spanish Empire Bolívar’s Early Years Bolívarian Thought El Libertador Online Resources Further Reading Free Books by Charles River Editors Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

The Spanish Empire “A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay…” - Simón Bolívar Naturally, the arrival in 1492 of Christopher Columbus on the leeward islands of the Bahamas triggered the first of the great permutations that would reshape South America and Mesoamerica forever. Though he was Italian, Columbus sailed as an agent of Spain’s Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, and “discovered” the New World in the name of the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Columbus’ log and his early letter to his financier Luis de Santángel, which are the earliest accounts of the “discovery,” project a politically expedient confidence and optimism since he did not wish to lose his contract with Ferdinand and Isabella, but Columbus was likely very confused by what he found. The people and their way of life clashed with what he expected, and the disposition of the many small islands he found was difficult to reconcile with the maps of the East Asian coast he had so avidly studied. His most important goal was to reach terra firma, since it was there that he would find the great trading empires whose wealth he wished to tap into. Thus, the early accounts contain a number of strategies of interpretation that attempt to fit what he has found into his preconceived framework. First of all, he attempted to map the territories he found in the Caribbean, however improbably, onto Asian geography as he understood it. The northern islands of the Bahamas, he imagines, may be part of the island empire of Cipango (Japan); the long coast of Cuba, where he arrived next by heading to the southwest, must be part of China. Second, in his repeated emphasis on the gentleness and peacefulness of the natives, he is also insisting on their status as “natural slaves,” an intellectual category used in the ancient world to justify slavery. More specifically, he concluded, they must be among the peoples from whom the Great Khan drew his many slaves; at the same time, he set the stage for the slavery-based colonization that would soon overtake the Caribbean islands and, within a few decades, wipe out their entire indigenous population. In fact, Columbus began this trend by essentially kidnapping six Guanahaní natives, in his words, “so

that they will learn to speak,” meaning he intended for them to become interpreters for the expedition. By the time Columbus started setting east from the New World, he had explored San Salvador in the Bahamas (which he thought was Japan), Cuba (which he thought was China), and Hispaniola, the source of gold. As the common story goes, Columbus, en route back to Spain from his first journey, called in at Lisbon as a courtesy to brief the Portuguese King John II of his discovery of the New World. King John subsequently protested that according to the 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas, which divided the Atlantic Ocean between Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, the newly discovered lands rightly belonged to Portugal. To make clear the point, a Portuguese fleet was authorized and dispatched west from the Tagus to lay claim to the “Indies,” which prompted a flurry of diplomatic activity in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. At the time, Spain lacked the naval power to prevent Portugal from acting on this threat, and the result was the hugely influential 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. The Treaty of Tordesillas was one of the most important documents of its kind of the age, for it established the essential parameters of the two competing empires, the first of the major European imperial entities. The Treaty of Tordesillas drew an imaginary line from pole to pole, running 100 leagues west of the westernmost islands of the Azores. According to the terms of a supporting papal bull, all the lands to the west of that belonged to Spain, and all of those to the east belonged to Portugal. What this meant in practical terms was that Portugal was given Africa and the Indian Ocean while Spain was granted all the lands to the west, including the Americas and the Caribbean, all collectively known as the “Indies,” or the New World.

A map depicting the line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas The Treaty of Tordesillas contained an anomaly. Unknown at the time to its drafters, the treaty’s line cut across the westernmost brow of South America, more or less from the mouth of the Amazon to Porto Alegre, both in modern Brazil, meaning that everything to the east of that legally belonged to Portugal. This fact was only revealed in 1500 thanks to an expedition by the Portuguese mariner Pedro Álvares Cabral. While en route to India, his expedition sailed in a wide arc in the mid-Atlantic searching for the trade winds and unexpectedly landed off the coast of the South American mainland. There was little the Spanish could do about it, and as a consequence, the vast Portuguese colony of Brazil was established in a region nominally claimed by Spain. Meanwhile, the rapid spread of Spanish influence across the Caribbean and onto the mainland began almost immediately after Columbus made landfall. On the heels of his apparent success and the approval of the Spanish crown, Columbus managed to assemble a much larger fleet for his second trip across the Atlantic, which began on September 24, 1492. His expeditionary force now consisted of 17 ships, including the Niña but neither of the other two vessels from the previous voyage. It is clear from the number of men and quantity of supplies carried over that Columbus now intended to establish more permanent settlements and pave the way for the establishment of full-scale colonies. He also brought with him a

contingent of friars, who would be entrusted with the evangelization of the natives. The urge to spread Christianity, in particular Catholicism, formed part of the royal obligation to the papacy that was written into the informal charter of every European monarchy at the time. The Muslim conquest of Europe and the Reconquista all tended to add urgency to the need to spread the true faith before it could be adulterated by Jews, Muslims, and later Protestants. At the time, during the reign of the Holy Roman Empire, the popes wielded as much power as the kings, and the intertwining of church and state was in many respects absolute. At the same time, Spain commanded a rapidly expanding mercantile empire, so while most of these early journeys of exploration were publicly authorized and sponsored, they were also privately organized and usually led by individual adventurers, or adelantado, acting loosely on contract for the Crown. An essential element of these expeditions was local labor and resources, so early explorers tended to confine their interest to wellpopulated regions. They were not interested in geographic exploration for its own sake, but to evangelize and plunder, which meant the primary regions of the pre-Columbian empires and their capital cities became the targets of the Spanish Empire in the New World. In the course of about a generation, conquistadores led by Hernan Cortés and Francisco Pizarro would subdue the Aztec and Inca. The Inca Empire may have consisted of four parts, but the unity was quite fragile, as the empire had only existed in its current state for about a century when Pizarro arrived. Brought together by a combination of military conquests and peaceful takeovers involving royal intermarriage, a combination of tribute, trade, and centralized administration held the various territories under Inca rule together, even as they remained politically and culturally relatively autonomous. Still, the first Spaniards to see Peru commented on the orderliness of their system of government and the impressive productivity of their agriculture, which produced grain surpluses stored in a network of warehouses and distributed during drought years. With some more recalcitrant conquered groups, the rulers had undertaken forced resettlements and practical enslavement, but for the most part, Inca rule had

been peaceful and prosperous for some time. The civil war between Huascar and Atahualpa had introduced a disorienting period of political chaos and conflicted loyalties that would be initially exploited and then seriously exacerbated by the newly arrived Spaniards.

Pizarro Perhaps inevitably, a regional rivalry developed as the Portuguese began to establish a colony in Brazil and push its boundaries southwards. After the conquest of the Incas in the 1530s, the Portuguese threat prompted the authorization of a second expedition, commanded this time by Pedro de Mendoza with a force of some 1,500 men. The party arrived at the mouth of the Río de la Plata in 1536, and there Mendoza founded the settlement of Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre. This was the basis of the future city of Buenos Aires, but its establishment was not without resistance from surrounding tribes. Members of the Querandí people, already familiar with Spanish methods and tactics of war from earlier encounters among the Incas, responded with violence, and in 1537, a year after its founding, Mendoza ordered the settlement abandoned. Some survivors broke ranks

and sought succour among the Guaraní further upstream on the banks of the Paraná River. These early settlers assimilated reasonably easily with the Guaraní, founding the settlement of Asunción, which later became the capital city of Paraguay. Thereafter, the mouth of the Río de la Plata fell out of favor as the base for deeper expeditions into the vast south-central region of South America. What journeys of exploration and settlement were mounted in the years that followed tended to originate from bases in the central Andes. Groups of triumphant Spanish conquistadores drifted south from the strong points of the old Inca Empire or east across the Andes from Chile, founding a series of settlements that would emerge as some of Argentina’s oldest cities. Santiago del Estero, for example, in the north of Argentina, was founded in 1553, while the central city of Mendoza was established in 1561, San Juan in 1562, San Miguel de Tucumán in 1565, Cordoba in 1573, Salta in 1582, La Rioja in 1591, and San Luis in 1595. All of these cities were founded by movements south, not by movements inland from the Atlantic coast. By the late 16th century, the city of Asunción had grown into a permanent settlement. The first Spanish to arrive in Paraguay, those refugees of Mendoza’s expedition, were treated well by the local Guaraní, granted land, food and gifts. By integrating and assimilating, these early Spanish and their descendants emerged as members of the leadership and elite, spreading Catholicism and commencing the development of one of the unique aggregated cultures of Spanish America. The name associated with this new elite was “Creole,” or “Criollo,” implying a locally born, but nonnative elite referred to as “Creole elites.” The discovery of silver in Peru tended to shift Spanish attention north, but Asunción and the wide spread of satellite communities associated with it were all brought under direct Spanish control. As an indirect extension of Spanish rule, the practice of encomienda was introduced as a system of local patronage by which Spanish settlers were granted effective fiefdoms over certain regions and the subject populations within. According to the general regulations by which individual encomendero could function, they were responsible for the well-being and protection of the communities granted to them. Theoretically, in exchange for assuming responsibility for

the religious conversion and training of the indigenous people, encomendero were granted the right to utilize the labor of the community for their own benefit. The theory underpinning the encomienda system was relatively benign so far as Spanish colonization practices went, but the potential for abuse is quite obvious, and ultimately, the system came to be regarded as a de facto form of slavery, from which, in many instances, it was indistinguishable. Despite the cordiality of early encounters, the indigenous people under the encomienda suffered brutal exploitation at the hands of the Creole elite, and diseases brought by the foreigners began to ravage populations that had no immunity. The populations in the region declined so precipitously that by the late 16th century, the encomienda system had largely collapsed across much of Argentina. That said, in Paraguay, and in and around Asunción, which were isolated by Spain, the system continued, and in places where there were bountiful resources and well-established relationships, the system survived for generations in a mutually beneficial form. The collapse of the encomienda system was attributed largely to the collapse of the native population, but authorities in Lima were also reluctant to entertain appeals that encomienda be transmissible or inheritable. In the absence of viable labor reserves the Spanish elites began to cast around for alternatives, by which time the phenomenon of the Transatlantic slave trade had begun to gather momentum. Indigenous slaves, or yanakuna, were purchased, but their numbers were insufficient, and many indigenous people simply did not adapt to forced labor. By 1580, the first black slaves from Africa were beginning to appear in Argentina, sourced initially from traders and merchants in Brazil. Slaves were never imported into Argentina in the sorts of numbers commonly found in Brazil and the Caribbean, but as agriculture and mining began to take root, more slaves were brought in. Cotton was tried as a commercial crop in and around Tucumán and Salta, which also required slaves, but little came of it, and efforts at mining here and there also produced disappointing early results. By the end of the 17th century, Spanish settlements in the west of Argentina had begun to focus on livestock, most notably the raising of cattle and agricultural produce for local consumption.

The 17th century also brought about the beginning of a decline of the Spanish Empire, despite the dramatic growth of Spanish America and the galleons of gold crossing the mid-Atlantic. Many of these ships fell victim to British and French pirates, and as a result, fewer Spanish ships called in on the coast of the Río de la Plata. A certain amount of social and economic stagnation set in, and by then, the native populations were already in rapid decline. The labor shortages led to demographic shifts that in turn led to sporadic bouts of warfare between settlers and natives. Slave and wage labor helped to plug the gaps, but the 17th century was one of dislocation, insecurity, and economic inertia. Between 1702 and 1714, the “War of the Spanish Succession” was fought, and it secured the Spanish throne in favor of the French Bourbon family. That brought about a series of major policy shifts at home and in the Spanish colonies. The first years of Bourbon rule in Spain were naturally preoccupied with consolidating royal authority over Spain itself, but by the 1750s, under the reign of Ferdinand VI, the Spanish leaders began turning their attention to the affairs of Spain’s overseas empire. What followed was a series of reforms known as the “Bourbon Reforms” that aimed to revitalize the wider colonial bureaucracy and stimulate economic growth. The Bourbon reforms can perhaps best be described as “enlightened” or “benevolent despotism,” a concept of government developed in 18th century Europe during the Enlightenment. Absolute monarchs enacted legal, social, administrative, and educational reforms inspired by the philosophical emergence of the Enlightenment, at least to a point. After all, none of these were meant to threaten the sovereignty of any monarch or compromise the established social order. The Bourbon kings strove to bring the colonial territories of Spain under more effective central control, but they also wanted to expand existing industries and introduce new means of production and economic activity in order to enhance the economic benefits of the colonies to Spain. In conjunction with that, the Spanish rulers sought to enhance military support and protection for Spain and the colonies, and for communication between Spain and her overseas territories in America, Africa, and Asia.

Bureaucratic reforms began with the importation of loyalist royal officers known as intendants to oversee administrative operations, and most importantly to ensure the correct payment of taxes. For example, the Viceroyalty of Peru was split, which was long overdue, and Buenos Aires was then declared capital of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. This represented a significant upgrade of the status of the Río de la Plata region, the result of which was that Spanish appointees in Buenos Aires assumed control over Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and upper Peru. This at last legalized the silver trade in Buenos Aires and surroundings. Buenos Aires then evolved very quickly into a busy regional and international port and trade entrepôt, dealing with the export of precious metals, cattle, leather, and beef products, which, along with its enhanced political importance, made the city one of the important commercial centers in the New World. The Viceroyalty did not survive for long thanks to the sprawling hinterland of numerous territories that lacked internal cohesion and a lack of real support from Spain. By then, the internal dynamics of Europe were changing, and after the catastrophic defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, British naval dominance was unchallenged. Now, the British began to emerge as the first among equals of European imperial powers. The British would ultimately not wield much influence in the region, but when the British attempts to push into the region were relatively easily beaten back by local forces, the results boosted the confidence of the locals and set the tone for a move towards greater independence. It was in the midst of this rapidly changing world order that one of the region’s most famous individuals was born.

Bolívar’s Early Years Simón Bolívar was born July 24, 1783 into one of the wealthiest and most august families of Spanish America. His European lineage could be traced to the aristocratic bloodline of La Puebla de Bolívar, a village in the Biscay province of the Basque Country. The Bolívar family arrived in what would become modern Venezuela in 1548, among the earliest Spanish immigrants to do so. Members of the Bolívar family had occupied important positions in administration and business since the very early days of the Spanish administration, and by the date of Simón Bolívar’s birth, the family operated the largest silver and copper mines in the region, controlled vast agricultural estates and owned thousands of slaves. However, despite the wealth and privilege into which he was born, a great many limitations were implicit in his colonial, and Creole origins. Creoles could own property and could accumulate wealth in an environment of controlled commerce, but they were barred as a matter of ancient convention from holding high office in any colonial administration. Their wealth tended to be heavily taxed, and unregulated international trade was almost unheard of. Information, both inbound and outbound, was heavily censored, foreign travel was controlled and few, if any local voices were heard in matters of colonial administration and imperial policy. In quite the same way as the North American colonists of a generation earlier enjoyed no meaningful representation on the ruling councils of the Empire, so did the Spanish colonists of the New World. However, while it might be fair to say that most Creoles regarded themselves as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown, the ripples set in motion first by the American Revolution, and then by the French, soon enough washed up on the shores of Spanish America. Eight years before Simón Bolívar was born, that “shot heard around the world” rang out in Lexington, Massachusetts, triggering the American Revolution and prompting a generation of Spanish American Creoles to contemplate for the first time their identity as American. When the French Revolution subsequently altered the European political complexion, Simón Bolívar was six years old, and from that moment on, over the course of the next 30 years, his homeland would experience an era of warfare and turbulence.

As a youth Simón Bolívar was removed from all of this by the insulation of wealth and a carefree life in the salons and parlors of Caracas. Both of his parents died when he was young, and according to his own account of his childhood, he was raised for the most part by his black nurse and domestic slave Hipólita, who he loved and later eulogized as “my mother Hipólita…she nourished my life. I know no other parent but her.”[1]

An 18th century portrait of Bolívar’s father

A picture of Bolívar’s birthplace His education, as might be expected, tended to be left in the hands of priests and private tutors, but with a willful and rather entitled attitude, he took none of it particularly seriously. However, this changed one day when a new tutor came into his life, Simón Rodríguez, a young man in his twenties possessed of a lateral and unconventional approach to the finishing of a young aristocrat. Simón Rodríguez appeared at a crucial moment, because he encountered a young boy with an inquiring mind, bored to distraction by royalist history and the obscure canons of Catholicism, who yearned for something of greater substance. Rodríguez was an “educationalist” in the modern sense of the word, concerned with literacy less as a means of inculcating religious doctrine than to impart knowledge, and as such he was certainly unique at the time. He was a product of the philosophical movement of the Enlightenment, and an intellectual itinerant inspired mostly by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract, whose reflections on the “natural man” were very much in vogue in the fashionable salons of the time. Rodríguez seemed also to take his cue on themes of modern education from Rousseau’s playbook, espousing, as did Rousseau himself, the

pointlessness of book learning and the advantages of guiding a child’s thought process in the direction of its natural inclinations. In other words, he believed it was better to teach a child to think independently as an alternative to the overarching and dogmatic indoctrination of the Church, which was de rigueur at that time. Without competing influences from parents or family, and despite the concern of the ever-present Hipólita, Rodríguez laid claim to his young charge’s mind and molded it into a keen instrument of independent thought and roving philosophical inclination. Needless to say, as a student of the Enlightenment, Rodríguez imparted plenty of modernist political and philosophical thoughts that the young Bolívar might never have access to in any other way. It was a fortuitous encounter that helped to formulate a mindset receptive to the wealth of new ideas bubbling up in the revolutionary cauldron of Europe and the New World. In 1797 perhaps not inconveniently, Rodríguez was abruptly snatched away, thanks to his involvement in a revolutionary plot to declare Venezuela an independent republic hatched by a handful of radical Creoles. It was a harebrained scheme with no chance of success, and while its leaders were hunted down and put to death in the grim manner reserved for traitors, Rodríguez escaped through a lack of evidence and was able to slip out the country, reappearing a few months later in London. Although Bolívar was just 14 when this happened, the change had already been wrought. His mind now dwelt on revolutionary themes, and while he was aware of an upswell of revolutionary sentiment beginning to circulate in his own hemisphere, he was not moving in the type of circles at the time that would necessarily facilitate his own direct involvement. As an aristocrat, he did not qualify to mingle with the educated bourgeoisie, the traditional seedbed of radical revolution, which tended to preclude him from much of the conversation. Be it by his own or the urging or that of his family, he made his way to Europe, ostensibly to finish his education in the politically stagnant halls of the Spanish aristocracy. Arriving in Europe in the late spring of 1799, at the age of 16, he stirred a certain amount of amused interest with his talk of justice, equality and revolution. He was a wealthy Creole from the colonies, a social inferior

granted leave to mingle only thanks to the colossal wealth arrayed behind him. Indeed, it was this wealth that allowed him to fall in love with the daughter of one of the leading families of Spain, and moreover, for his proposal of marriage to Maria Theresa de Toro to be answered not by his immediate dispatch back to the colonies. In an effort to douse the fire of his passion, a condition was placed on their marriage that first he spend a year travelling in Europe, and if after that the couple still felt inclined to marry, then it was agreed that they would.

A painting depicting their wedding That year would prove to be pivotal. France was emerging from the turmoil of the Revolution, and Napoleon Bonaparte, an authentic French popular hero, occupied the seat of first consul. The notion that a Corsican soldier could ascent to the pinnacle of political power in the new republic was an inspiration to the young Venezuelan. Indeed, Bolívar seemed to fixate on Napoleon as a natural outgrowth of the revolutionary process. Perhaps Napoleon’s rapid ascent to power, his almost supernatural military

prowess, and his catalytic effect on a hero-hungry French public inspired Bolívar to imagine a place for himself in the global revolutionary pantheon.

Napoleon

Bolívar at the age of 17 In the meanwhile, after the requisite term of a year had passed, he hurried back to Spain, collected the hand of his bride, and returned to Venezuela in a condition of blissful happiness. The revolutionary remained in incubation, eclipsed in the short term by the frivolous playboy with money to burn and the woman of his fascination. It was a brief but golden time, brief indeed, for after just 11 months of marriage, Maria Theresa contracted some unnamed tropical fever and died at the age of 21. Naturally, Simón Bolívar found himself alone and desperately bereaved, but the sudden and yawning vacuum that opened up in his life upon the death of Maria Theresa simply led him back to thinking about revolutionary ideas. In fact, these ideas were not the rebellious and frivolous rantings of an entitled teenager, but the more thoughtful concepts of a nascent revolutionary philosopher. This was certainly the case. Simón Bolívar was never the vagabond caudillo with a pistol in his belt, fist-shaking and determined to die for the republic - he was, in his first casting, a political thinker, and only by necessity a general and an administrator. In the manner of Marx, Lenin,

Mao, and others, he propagated a political “thought” that served as a Bolívarian doctrine, a version of a revolution, and although respectful of the idea of a general revolution, he was interested in shaping his own movement to suit his unique time and place.

Bolívarian Thought

Bolívar in 1804 “A republican government, that is what Venezuela had, has, and should have. Its principles should be the sovereignty of the people, division of powers, civil liberty, prohibition of slavery, and the abolition of monarchy and privileges. We need equality to recast, so to speak, into a single whole, the classes of men, political opinions, and public custom.” – Simón Bolívar The main political themes of the Enlightenment, which was never anything if not a discordant movement, are simply that any government must exist by natural right and social contract, with the basic human rights of liberty and equality. These privileges were not endowed by revelation, as in the case of church law, or by tradition, as in the case of the monarchy, but by reason, the source of all human knowledge and action. Intellectual progress was not to be shaped or hindered by religious doctrine, and the object of government was to ensure the greatest happiness among the greatest number of people. The age of revolution included the Industrial Revolution, which accounted for the growing wealth, mobility and education of the middle-classes, who were, in turn, the engines of a dynamic, liberal, and political doctrine. In short, the French Revolution

offered up a radical, new political ideology, while, in the longer process, the Industrial Revolution produced and paid for it. The French Revolution with all of its chaotic fallout, was viewed in Spanish America with some justified circumspection. Most political thinkers and commentators tended as an alternative to point to the American Revolution as a more worthwhile model. In fact, the essential structure of the American Revolution, and the republic that resulted, was not followed with any particular fidelity south of the Isthmus, and the influence of the United States in that region, in the early stages of its own development, tended to be minor. The work of Thomas Paine and the words of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington circulated among educated Creoles, informing the tone of the local discussion, providing the basis of structure and filling in many of the philosophical gaps. As Spanish America began turning on the same essential pivot as the United States and France, Simón Bolívar was at the forefront of the young, educated Creoles absorbing the energy of revolution. He read widely, and while he was impressed in particular with the work of Hobbes and Spinoza, he studied Helvetius, Holbach, Hume and many others. By this means, he acquired the necessary intellectual gravitas and foundation upon which to build a sound strategy. Obviously, a working revolutionary blueprint required more than its philosophical underpinning, demanding consideration also to a detailed military, political and economic strategy. It would be too much to suppose that in his dilettante years Bolívar achieved anything resembling this, but as one might suppose, and as time passed, with every practical reverse that he encountered, he was able to come up with a practical solution. While there was a hatred of monarchy at the roots of both the French Revolution and American Revolution, this was not necessarily at the core of Bolívar’s conventional thinking. He was not necessarily struck by a revulsion of monarchy, but he certainly did not advocate replacing Spanish monarchy with some contrived local monarchy either, which tended to be a common theme of the domestic discussions. Instead, for him, the philosophical war was between conservatism and liberalism, between aristocracy and democracy, and for there to be a claim of victory,

sovereignty was to reside with the people, and the people were to enjoy natural rights, freedom and equality. Simón Bolívar sought first to understand the notion of revolution in the universal sense, and then to modify and reshape it to suit the particular political circumstances of Spanish America. Ignoring some of the inconvenient truths of the French Republic and Napoleon’s wars of expansion and conquest, Simón Bolívar took the early position that monarchies alone sought to secure their dynastic interests by war and conquest, while republics habitually turned inward, concerning themselves primarily with the development and well-being of their populations. A British-style constitutional monarchy was widely discussed as a possible alternative, and while Bolívar never sought to hide his admiration for the British monarchy, he seemed to believe instinctively that Spanish Americans, steeped as they were in absolutism, lacked the political sophistication to really hope that such a thing could work. It seems that a salient aristocracy, above the vicissitudes and temptations of elected office, something along the lines of the House of Lords, appealed to him as some kind of necessary ballast in any ship of a Spanish American republican state. These were simply variations on an essential theme, and that theme was his fundamental belief that a republic was the only vehicle able to deliver authentic freedom and equality to the masses. His innate sympathy for the aristocracy is probably not that difficult to understand, for he was accustomed to his place at the pinnacle of such an aristocracy, and to the system of patronage innate in a slave-owning family. The notion of noblesse oblige, the obligation of the privilege to act with generosity towards the common man, was ingrained in his world view, and one can easily imagine that he could see no alternative to it. It is fair to say too that the enlightenment philosophers were never universally hostile to aristocracy, and nor, indeed, to monarchy. He would always, and inevitably, suffer a deficit of identity with the common people, retaining throughout the essential DNA of a patron, which, in future years, would emerge as his leadership style. In the words of historian and Bolívar biographer John Lynch, “He was a product and to some extent a spokesman of the landowning elite.”[2] As most historians will agree, the final refinement of Simón Bolívar’s theory of liberation is to be found in a discourse known as the Carta de

Jamaica, or the “Jamaica Letter,” written as a three-dimensional revolutionary manifesto while he was in exile in Jamaica in 1815. The letter was written in response to a letter written to him by an English born Jamaican resident, and in it he articulated his thoughts and reflections on the state of the revolution and the general social and political situation in Spanish America at that time. The circumstances and background of this document we will touch on in a later section, but for the moment, insofar as it articulated his “thought,” there are a few clear political and moral assumptions. These are perhaps best expressed in the passage stating – “… that people have natural rights, that they have a right to resist oppression, that nationalism has its own imperatives, that deprivation of office and of economic freedom justifies rebellion.”[3] By its behavior and actions, Spain had not only delegitimized itself, but it had bestowed a moral requirement upon 16 million colonized subjects in the New World to claim and defend their rights. According to Bolívar, “America was denied not only its freedoms but even an active and effective tyranny.” This, in some respects, was a commentary on the Spanish style of imperialism. The British Empire at least ostensibly sought to absorb and assimilate subject people, offering a path to citizenship in exchange for collaboration. Conversely, no such thing was to be found anywhere in Spanish America. Under Spanish colonial rule, the Creole elites – neither European nor indigenous American – were entirely passive, uninvolved in governance, and rarely if ever consulted over policy. Leadership was from the top down, and as a consequence, the Creoles were denied all rights and held in a state of perpetual political infancy. He then went on to list several specific instances of inequality and discrimination. For example, Americans were deprived of any substantive opportunity to hold public office or nominate public officials, and they were limited in economic opportunity to providing labor, raw materials and commodities to Spain while serving as a captive market for Spanish manufactured goods. They were unable to negotiate imports independently of Spain, and nor to compete with Spain. As Bolívar put it, “We were never viceroys or governors, save in the rarest of cases; seldom archbishops or

bishops; never diplomats; among the military only subordinates. In brief, we were neither magistrates nor financiers and seldom merchants.”[4] Civil war, he concluded, was always between two parties, “conservatives and reformers,” the former always greater in number simply because of the force of habit, traditional loyalties, the comfort of familiarity and a natural resistance to change. The latter were always in the minority, but they were more vocal and almost always more informed and educated. Polarization was inevitable, resulting in an extended and prolonged conflict, and although his exile was certainly proof of that, his belief remained that the masses would ultimately form up behind the reformers in a struggle for independence. He asserted, “As soon as we are strong and under the guidance of a liberal nation which will lend us her protection, we will achieve accord in cultivating the virtues and talents that lead to glory.” In more abstract terms, while Bolívar believed in liberty and equality, he was also wary of despotism, sensing, after years of struggle and two failed efforts to overthrow the monarchy, that from unlimited freedom would inevitably and always emerge some form of despotism. He wrote, “Abstract theories create the pernicious idea of unlimited freedom.” His quest, therefore, was for a balance of freedom with responsibility and practicality: “practical liberty…a mean between the rights of the individual and the needs of society.” This balance would be achieved by the sovereign administration of justice and the rule of law – offering, if not social and economic equality, then, at the very least, equality under the law. In this way, as paupers and kings stand equal on the scales of justice, the weak might be liberated from fear and the rewards of society dealt according to virtue and merit. Like Rousseau, he believed that only the law was sovereign and that just and equitable law was a natural outgrowth of popular sovereignty and human will. Simón Bolívar’s view of equality was double faceted, requiring American equality with Spain and Europe, as well as equality among Americans. America, he was often apt to observe, were neither European nor native but an aggregate of European, Native American and African: “All differ[ing] visibly in the color of their skin, a difference which places upon us an obligation of the greatest importance.”

The obligation as he saw it was to correct the many disparities imposed upon the population by nature and inheritance by ensuring the equality of man under the law and the constitution. While men are born with equal rights, they are not born with comparable virtues, intelligence, talents and capabilities, and these moral and intellectual inequalities were to be corrected by well-crafted laws “so that the individual may enjoy political and social equality; thus by education and other opportunities an individual may gain the equality denied him by nature.”[5] As a pragmatist, his early idealism was challenged by political immaturity and the complexity of human response. He did not imagine that America was ready for an absolute democracy, nor that the law alone could smooth out the inequalities of nature and society: “Complete liberty and absolute democracy are but reefs upon which all republican hopes have foundered.”

El Libertador “I believe Venezuela is ready for independence, but where is the man strong enough to bring it about? All that's missing is the man.” – Alexander von Humboldt After the death of Maria Theresa, Simón Bolívar left Venezuela and made his way back to Paris, where he immersed himself once again in the company of the preeminent philosophers and writers of the age. Among them was Alexander von Humboldt, one of the first of the great modern explorers, who had contributed much to the geographic study of South America. Von Humboldt put it to Bolívar that revolutions are the product, above all else, of great and inspired leadership. According to most of his biographers, this comment provoked a thought process, the net result of it was that Bolívar set about casting himself in precisely that role.

Von Humboldt In 1804, the French Revolution was sullied in the eyes of many by the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France. Bolívar, who had envisioned Napoleon as the greatest and perhaps the purest republican, felt a deep sense of betrayal. As the story goes, while he was in Paris, news reached him that his old tutor and friend Simón Rodríguez was living in reduced circumstances in Vienna, and after making contact with him, the two embarked on a tour of Italy, visiting the symbolic cradle of the republic and the home of Roman law. One day, after climbing to the summit of Monte Sacro, the “Sacred Mountain,” the place to which the plebeians fled the tyranny of the patricians and nobles, where the common man asserted his equality and right to freedom, a moment of profound sentiment seemed to come over Rodríguez. According to Bolívar, “He turned towards me, away from Rome. His eyes were moist, and he was breathing heavily as if with fever. He said: ‘I swear before you, by the God of my fathers and the honor of my country, I will not rest, not in body or soul, till I have broken the chains of Spain.’”[6] However, while the flame of revolution burned hot in intellectual circles in Caracas, and brooded within the small urban bourgeois, it was considerably cooler on the front lines. The most storied revolutionary firebrand of the age was Sebastián Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez de Espinoza, better known as Francisco de Miranda, a handsome and accomplished Venezuelan military officer who had, by 1806, mounted several attempts at armed revolution. All of these were reasonably well organized and competently staged, but they collapsed mainly for want of organized popular support. His assumption, echoed by popular revolutionaries throughout the ages, was simply that an armed insurgency, no matter how insubstantial, would trigger a spontaneous, mass uprising. No such thing happened, illustrating an age-old disconnect between the intellectual strategists and the common man, and a failure of the simple expedient of grassroots political education. Modern revolutionaries like Mao Zedong understood that revolution was not a military but political proposal, and that popular military action could not realistically succeed without the full and well-informed support of the masses. If conditions were comfortable, the masses tended to remain conservative, loyal to the

monarchy and the Church and wedded instinctively to the status quo. Miranda, who had neither the patience nor skill to even begin organizing a popular movement, eventually threw in the towel and accepted asylum in England.

Miranda Simón Bolívar digesting both the news and the cause and effect of Miranda’s failure, left Rodríguez in Italy, and sometime early in 1807 he returned to Venezuela. He was now 24 and convinced of his direction, if not altogether sure how to proceed. However, unlike Miranda, he was possessed of a clear ideological vision, and what remained was to somehow disseminate that vision, educate the illiterate masses, and build a popular movement. Initially, his wealth and social appeal worked in his favor, and during 1807, he proceeded both with caution and diligence to spread the word. Initially, it is easy to imagine that he was indulged as a spoiled socialite seeking to shock, and as a result, he was inclined to believe that the message was being more sincerely received than it actually was.

Nonetheless, the moment seemed to arrive in the spring of 1808 when Napoleon Bonaparte launched the Peninsular War, challenging Bourbon Spain for control of the Iberian Peninsula. In July 1807, Napoleon was able to impose the Treaty of Tilsit upon Russia and Prussia, ending hostilities with Russia and stripping Prussia of over half of its territories. After this treaty, the only major Coalition power still actively at war with Napoleon was Britain, which had still not been defeated in the field and had earlier succeeded in virtually destroying French naval power. Realizing he could not cross the English Channel to invade Britain itself, Napoleon resolved to strangle Britain’s lifeblood: trade. Shortly after the Treaty of Tilsit, he published decrees that instituted a Continental Blockade, banning all British imports into mainland Europe. With no navy to enforce the Blockade it was a largely symbolic gesture, but reducing the British to smuggling must have afforded Napoleon a certain degree of satisfaction. Though the Continental Blockade was not as effective as Napoleon could have hoped, a widely forgotten aspect of it is that the “Napoleonic Codes” he drafted and put in place along with the Continental System were later implemented into societies and nations across the European continent long after Napoleon himself was gone. Furthermore, the Continental System also provided a useful pretext for further conquering across the part of the European continent not yet under France’s control. Portugal, a long-standing British ally, had been flaunting the Blockade with impunity, not least because it had the allegedly neutral Spain as a buffer to shield it from France. Napoleon decided to punish the Portuguese for their defiance and, in the autumn of 1807, he marched across Spain, whose government had granted him free passage, and invaded Portugal. The Portuguese had been unprepared for an invasion from Spain, and Napoleon’s army, moving with the lightning speed that characterized the majority of his campaigns, was able to push forward and secure Lisbon in a matter of weeks. However, his hopes of capturing the Portuguese royal family were frustrated. The Portuguese royals managed to board a ship for Rio de Janeiro, from where they governed the country’s overseas colonies for over a decade. Napoleon could have contented himself with conquering Portugal, but his characteristic thirst for conquest prompted him to attempt an even more

daring plan. In the early spring of 1808, French armies began filing quietly into Spain, ostensibly on the way to reinforce the garrisons still subduing the last pockets of resistance in Portugal. These armies excited no particular suspicion, as the Spanish were sure of Napoleon’s good faith. However, they were to receive a rude awakening when, with his forces placed in key positions throughout the country, Napoleon proceeded to seize key cities and garrisons all across Spain. By May, the entire country was virtually in his hands, with the Spanish armies either defeated or scattered and leaderless. Napoleon, it seemed, had won an almost bloodless victory. In early May 1808, Napoleon forced the Spanish king to abdicate and took him and his son prisoner. After that, he installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne. Napoleon believed, wrongly, that the relatively supine reaction to his conquest was a symptom of Spain’s desire for political change, and so instead of reducing the nation to a client state and allowing it to preserve at least some face, he made the key error of instituting a regime change. The reaction to the coronation of Joseph was instantaneous and awe-inspiring, as the entire country of Spain rose in open revolt. It was a national popular uprising, the first guerrilla war (“guerrilla” is Spanish for “little war”), and it caught Napoleon almost completely unprepared. He had thought Spain subdued, and suddenly his garrisons were being murdered in their beds all across the Iberian Peninsula by a ruthless enemy. For the first time, Napoleon had encountered a military problem beyond his comprehension. He was the master of conventional warfare, but this asymmetric conflict baffled him, as it has scores of great generals ever since. Mistaking the cheerful reports of his generals in the field, who told of battles won against superior Spanish forces, for a sign of victory, Napoleon felt comfortable enough to leave the country despite the insurrection. What he did not realise was that though the Spanish field armies were being made short work of, the fact that the entire country was up in arms against the French meant literally every Spanish peasant could be an enemy – and probably was. Without Napoleon’s presence to bolster their morale and bereft of his tactical acumen, his troops in Spain soon blundered. In the summer of 1808, General Dupont’s entire army, totalling more than 24,000 men, was obliged to surrender to the Spanish at Bailen. Bereft of the

necessary troops to keep his fragile hold on Spain, Joseph panicked and ordered his high command to institute a general retreat. This was an event of truly momentous proportions: Napoleon’s veterans, it seemed, could be beaten after all. News of the victory resonated across Europe, prompting Austria and Prussia to take up arms against France once again. Napoleon’s woes were further compounded by his old enemies, the British. Even as Spain was rising, a British army under the command of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the man who would later become the Duke of Wellington, landed in Portugal and, in a dashing display of soldiering that made even Napoleon sit up and take notice, proceeded to liberate the country from the French. Joseph Bonaparte was obviously deeply unpopular, and since no clear alternative existed, the various provinces of the Iberian Peninsula established local juntas, which had the effect of generating even greater confusion. There was no recognized central authority in Spain, which meant there was no generally acknowledged authority over its overseas empire.

Joseph Bonaparte The impasse was resolved somewhat in September 1808 by the formation of a “Supreme Central and Governmental Junta of Spain and the Indies.” Each of the kingdoms of the Iberia Peninsula contributed two representatives to this central junta, while the kingdoms overseas contributed one each. The overseas kingdoms were defined at the time as “the viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and Buenos Aires, and the independent captaincies general of the island of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Chile, Province of Venezuela, and the Philippines.”[7] The scheme naturally drew criticism for its unequal representation of the overseas territories, but despite this, through 1808 and early 1809, candidates were elected by the various provincial capitals and

representatives were sent to sit on the central Cortes in Spain. At the same time, however, several Spanish American cities attempted to establish their own juntas, which were quickly crushed by the imperial authorities. Massing more than 280,000 troops on the Spanish border, 100,000 of which were his dreaded veterans of the Grande Armee, Napoleon swept into Spain in October 1808. The Spanish armies, plagued by poor organization and indecision, were powerless to resist him; every force that tried to stand its ground was annihilated, and Napoleon won a spectacular series of victories at Burgos and Tudela, forcing what little was left of the Spanish armies to scatter throughout the country. His best Marshals also performed admirably: in the north, Marshal Soult defeated Sir John Moore’s British army, harried it across half the country, and forced it to embark and flee the Iberian Peninsula. Despite being held up by a ruthless defense organized by General Palafox at Saragossa, in little over two months the French had succeeded in subduing Spain once again, leaving tens of thousands of dead and entire cities reduced to rubble in their wake. The Supreme Junta was dissolved in January 1810 thanks to the reverses suffered by Spanish forces against the French, and this triggered another round of attempted junta formation in various capitals across Spanish America. The Spanish Supreme Junta, in the meanwhile, reformed as a smaller, five-man “Council of Regency of Spain and the Indies,” which attracted little if any support from the colonies. Most of the leaders of Spanish America could see no logic in throwing their weight behind a rump government that was already being pushed out of southern Spain, seeking refuge in Cádiz, and at risk of being captured by the French. Instead, in anticipation of a French victory in the Peninsular War, they began to establish individual juntas to avoid the prospect of falling under French sovereignty. In February 1810, French troops marched into Seville, gaining control of the Kingdom of Andalusia, and news of this arrived in Buenos Aires from British merchant ships. Viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros, recognizing the potential for revolution, tried to maintain the political status quo, but he was effectively shouted down by a strong body of revolutionary Criollo lawyers and military officials who organized an “open cabildo” (open meeting) on May 22 to decide the future of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata.

The delegates at the meeting denied any recognition of the Council of Regency of Spain and the Indies, establishing instead a local junta called the Primera Junta. In order to maintain some sort of political continuity, the Viceroy de Cisneros was offered leadership of the Junta, but this did not sit well with the population, and he resigned soon afterwards. The Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata quickly collapsed, and the region thereafter was known as the “United Provinces of the Río de la Plata.” The new Junta included representatives from Buenos Aires and other cities invited to contribute, but there were those who supported the actions of the Junta and those who did not, and a standoff ensued that would evolve into the opening stages of Argentina’s War of Independence, although it would take some time before the first shots were fired and no formal declaration of independence was made. The Junta made a significant point of governing on behalf of the deposed king. Similar events were taking place in many other cities on the continent, and the “May Revolution,” as all of this came to be known, is often regarded as one of the earliest episodes of the wars of independence in the Americas. A formal declaration of independence on behalf of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata was finally issued at the Congress of Tucumán held on July 9, 1816. Meanwhile, successful juntas were also established in New Granada, Venezuela, Chile and Río de la Plata, while others less successful were attempted in Mesoamerica. Ultimately, however, the region, along with most of New Spain, Quito, Upper Peru, the Caribbean, and the Philippine Islands remained substantively under the control of royalists, participating for the remainder of the decade in the efforts of the Spanish Cortes to establish a liberal government for the Spanish kingdom.[8] Some recognized the Spanish regency while others did not, but all to a greater or lesser extent challenged the authority of royal officials who sought to govern on behalf of the Spanish regency. Numerous factions evolved between royalists and anti-royalist, and those advocating independence and those remaining loyal. Even though all of the various juntas carefully carried out their actions in the name of the deposed King Ferdinand VII, their simple existence presented the opportunity for those

favoring complete independence to air their views both publicly and safely. The independence advocates, adopting nationalist positions, referred to themselves as “patriots,” after which the fault lines tended to run between the patriots and the royalists, with the former enjoying a growing majority. Of course, Bolívar was among those who were quick to recognize an opportunity to throw off Spanish imperial rule altogether. It was understood that, if success was even possible, it lay in organization and education, and Bolívar was one of the first to form a “secret society.” The organization was based in his home, and while it did conduct some level of clandestine organization, it was a dilettante effort, and it was ultimately to very limited effect. He was warned that he was being watched, and this was certainly true. Bearing in mind the truly fearsome consequence of treason against Spain, the risks he ran were quite considerable. One of the men in his social circles was Spanish Captain-General Vicente Emparán, who had, unbeknownst to Bolívar or any of the liberal revolutionaries, taken an oath of loyalty to the Spanish Junta and Ferdinand VII. This placed him among the royalists, and it obviously did not position him among those agitating for independence for the colonies, but he was apt to warn Bolívar and a handful of other well-connected youth that they were playing with fire.

Emparán However, while he worked through a network of spies to try and dismantle the revolutionary movement, and while quite a number of suspected plotters were sent into exile, Emparán was sensitive also to news coming out of Spain that the Junta was crumbling under French pressure and may well have already disbanded. It was then that Bolívar’s group decided to act. On April 19, 1810, as Emparán walked to church, he was approached by a group of rebels and told that he was to form a representative council of Venezuelans to govern the country. His reply was non-committal, and only that he would think about it. This was quite obviously unacceptable to the rebels, and when he realized that he could

expect no support from local soldiers, the Captain-General agreed to convene a meeting to discuss the matter. In that meeting, it was made clear to him that he could not remain in the office the Captaincy General, to which he apparently replied that he would put the question to the people. With that, he walked to the window of the governing chamber, and there he stood and addressed a large gathering of people waiting outside, asking them if they wanted him to stay or leave. The response was initially cautious, but as the minutes passed it gathered momentum. The answer unequivocally was “Go!” Thus, the revolution began, and the first victory was bloodless and almost unbelievably chivalrous. Within six months, the Captaincy of every Spanish colony in the New World, with the exception of Peru and Guatemala, followed suit. Simón Bolívar was among the founding members of the new Junta, but not by any means its most senior of influential representative, so he was rather swept up in the tide of events rather than exerting any particular influence on them. He was selected to join a number of other revolutionary diplomats dispatched to the various capitals of the world to try and secure international recognition, his particular destination being London. He was probably given this assignment because he personally covered all of its expenses, along with those of a number of other similar missions. The British received him well, in respect of that fact that the French were their common enemy, but the mood of Whitehall was not encouraging. The British attitude was that while Spanish America was to be commended for resisting the French and would be allowed to govern itself until the restoration, the British stopped short of recognizing the Spanish colonies as independent republics. To win international recognition was only part of Simón Bolívar’s objective in London, for while he was there, he searched for and found the venerable old revolutionary Francisco de Miranda. Miranda was then in his 60s, languishing as the enfant terrible of the exiled political community in England, making a thorough nuisance of himself and thereby ending up impoverished and under virtual house arrest. When the young Bolívar invited him to return to Venezuela and promised to pay his expenses, the

old soldier required no further persuasion. In all of his campaigns, the one thing that he had lacked was a charismatic ideologue to drive home the political message, and one thing that Bolívar lacked in the realization of his own revolutionary ideas was a man of both proven military ability and instantly recognizable name. Back in Venezuela, at the head of his “Patriotic Society,” Bolívar made excellent use of his good looks, natural charisma, and powerful oratorical style to spread the pure doctrine of revolution for so long as the local political environment remained permissive. The local governing Junta seemed stranded in the temporary independence recognized mainly by Britain and the United States, reluctant to formalize separation by a USstyle unilateral declaration. It was for this that Simón Bolívar campaigned and agitated, and on July 5, 1811, the Junta finally voted for a complete severance by unilateral declaration, the first Spanish American colony to seize its independence.

While the revolution had quickly succeeded, no one was under any particular illusion that this was the end of the matter. The transition had been peaceful, but it would require to be made real by blood, and war began almost immediately, with Francisco de Miranda, true to his lifelong ambition, in command of a free Venezuelan army. It was a hastily improvised army of untrained peasants and farm workers, against which Spain moved quickly. In the halcyon days of the revolution, in the fond imagining of its architects, every person in Venezuela would stand firm, but this did not prove to be the case. There were those in every class of society who did not support separation, and an active counter-revolutionary movement began almost immediately. Miranda himself, a military officer of the old school, proved to be rather a liability at the head of a volunteer army that required to be led from the front and not ordered forward from the rear. Powdered wigs, gold spurs and brocaded tunics, along with his instinctive class-consciousness, caused the old soldier to flounder, and before long men were deserting the ranks in droves. This simply manifest the dynamics of popular struggle, the complexities of which have bedeviled similar movements ever since. The metropolitan authorities were determined to put the revolution down with absolute and complete finality, and by doing so, sending a clear and stark message to the rebellious colonials. Placed in charge of the Spanish military response was Juan Domingo de Monteverde, a man of decisive temperament, and with a suitably violent and ruthless streak. He took over command of the Spanish army in Venezuela, supported by a corps of metropolitan troops, and advanced on Miranda with a minimum of delay, scoring a number of early successes.

A portrait of Monteverde However, on March 26, 1812, a violent earthquake struck the Venezuelan coast, wreaking havoc across the north of the country, in particular in the capital Caracas and mainly in areas held by the rebels, apparently sparing the royalists advancing on the capital city almost completely. This fact was adroitly seized upon by Monteverde, who declared it divine retribution for the treasonous actions of the rebels, and this was enthusiastically backed up by the Catholic clergy who were as devoutly royalist as they were Christian. The story is told that as Simón Bolívar was searching the rubble of a collapsed church for survivors, he was recognized and roundly condemned by a local priest who urged God and the shocked congregation to wreak vengeance upon him. As the mob began to respond, circling around him, Bolívar drew his sword and approached the priest, knocking him to the floor with the flat of the blade before turning and ordering the crowd to resume the search. In general, the episode served to demoralize and break up the rebel front, and while Bolívar was now very much the leading figure among the rebels, the movement was nonetheless crumbling. He and Miranda inevitably clashed, with the older man in a much more powerful, almost dictatorial position as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Though he was of very limited utility in that position, he was able to order Bolívar to take command of a distant garrison in order to get him out of the way. Thus, without any real military training or experience, and in command of a

disintegrating garrison, Bolívar was forced to defend the fortress of Puerto Cabello. All the while, Miranda obfuscated and navel-gazed, drilling his men, inventing brilliant strategies, but by growing increments falling back in the face of the Spanish advance. Then, on July 25, 1812, he abruptly surrendered, slipping away from the front line in the hope that he could make his way back to England. He was captured and returned to Monteverde, and although charged with no crime, he remained under lock and key until his death in 1816 at the age of 66. Monteverde made good on his victory by rounding up the leaders of the Venezuelan congress and shipping them out in chains to be tried in Spain. The constitution of the free republic was burned in public, and a long series of revenge killings began. The property of all leading Creoles was seized, and many once wealthy landowners were arrested and held under suspicion of being enemies of Spain. Simón Bolívar was able to slip through the net, taking advantage of the fact that he was still not particularly well known in political circles. After a certain amount of circumspection and reluctance, Monteverde, who was soon afterwards appointed Captain-General of a restored Venezuela, agreed to authorize a passport for the young Bolívar to travel out of the country to New Granada.

Bolivar in 1812 New Granada was a sprawling province covering modern Panama, Columbia and Ecuador, and it too rebelled against Spain at more or less the same time as Venezuela, and parts of it remained under de facto independent status. Simón Bolívar made his way to Cartagena, the principal regional port, and there, for what it was worth, he offered his services to the independent government. It can be taken for granted that the 30-year-old Bolívar ruminated deeply upon the lessons learned in the brief and bloody year of political freedom, concluding that revolution, so simple in principle and ideal, was immeasurably complex in its political and human facets. The situation in New Granada was equally complex, with Cartagena and Bogotá at odds with one another, and with most of the independent cities existing under individual government with little if any cooperation or coordination. By then, in any case, Bolívar had begun to dream on a much larger scale, picturing a unified, federated sub-continent, similar to the United States. At the same time, he naturally pictured himself at its head. Clearly, he concluded, revolution and independence could not be conducted piecemeal,

with isolated pockets of autonomous government existing independent of one another. His experience of Francisco de Miranda in command of a revolutionary army had been less than positive, and he began, despite his own military inexperience, to imagine himself as a revolutionary military commander. First, he returned to the grassroots, writing for local journals and news publications, rebuilding and refining his essential manifesto. His work at this time has been compared to Thomas Paine and in particular his open letters and general writings. All of these culminated in what came to be known as the Cartagena Manifesto which has been compared in spirit and tone to Paine’s highly influential 1776 pamphlet Common Sense. His name was already familiar to the elites of New Granada and his exhortations were heard and digested. The Cartagena Manifesto was, in essence, a warning to the leadership of New Granada that the same fate as Venezuela awaited them if they did not learn from the mistakes of the brief Venezuelan revolution. In a tightly reasoned and logical series of arguments, he advocated for a powerful executive and strong central government to avoid the damaging infighting and disunity that plagued the Venezuelan revolution, and to limit the influence of such institutions as the Catholic Church which worked tirelessly throughout to promote the anti-republican position. His language bore some of the stirring hallmarks of period sloganeering, a good example of which would be the concluding note of the manifesto. For example, he asserted, “Let us hasten to break the chains of those who groan in the dungeons waiting for salvation from you. Do not betray their trust. Do not be deaf to the cries of your brothers. Avenge the dead, save the dying, relieve the oppressed, and bring freedom to all!” More sagely, perhaps, and more practically, he argued for what would become a central theme of many future Latin American constitutions, which can be described simply as a provision, or provisions for the suspension of the rule of law in times of crisis. In this regard, Bolívar’s maturing revolutionary philosophy was nothing if not contradictory. He was forced by recent experience to try and reconcile a sincere republican respect for civil rights, equality before the law, popular sovereignty and representative

government with what he termed the “turbulent realities” and the political immaturity and naivety of the region: “[T]he government must necessarily adjust itself, so to speak, to the context of the times, men, and circumstances in which it operates. If these are prosperous and serene, it has to be gentle and protective, but if they are calamitous and turbulent, it has to be severe and armed with a strength equal to the dangers, without regard for laws or constitutions until such time as happiness and peace are restored.” He contended that the Venezuelan elites placed too great an emphasis on “democracy” in a country where a vast majority of the population were rural, and lacking the sophistication, education and maturity to play any meaningful part in public affairs. The educated and learned among the elites, who were sufficiently sophisticated to understand the political issues, were also incapable of a bi-partisan discourse or any style of political unity. This led him to argue, “Latin America needed a special constitutionalism adapted to the particular local features of the region. For example, Venezuelans did not have political virtues due to their past submission to an absolute monarchy – Spain – which had suppressed the republican spirit and enslaved the people. In light of this backward Hispanic heritage, Venezuelans could not rule themselves as a democratic republic.”[9] All of this impressed the intellectual leaders and governing elites of Cartagena, and Bolívar was subsequently awarded the rank of colonel in the local militia, but while his plans for a march on Venezuela were granted a hearing, there was considerable skepticism. To prove his military prowess, which remained untested at least at a senior level, he was given command of a small garrison on the Magdalena River, most of the length of which was held by royalists who interfered with communications between Bogotá and Cartagena. He was told to simply hold his position and launch no offensive action. Bolívar had other ideas, sensing an opportunity to prove his mettle as a military commander. Today, his military career is often compared to his roles as a statesman and revolutionary, with merits given according to the success or failure of his missions. As such, he has been highly regarded as a military commander, despite only superficial military training, and despite there being no particularly detailed scholarship upon which to assess his

competence. Throughout history, military commanders of esteem and competence have reflected on the enigma of success or failure in the military context. The old axiom that amateurs dream about strategy while professionals imagine logistics speaks to the orthodox military mindset, for the great military commander in a conventional military formation is certainly the one who provides the necessary materiel for his troops to fight, trusting in the quality of frontline command to succeed in a defined mission. In a revolutionary war, or a war of liberation, highly infused with ideology and often asymmetric, the ability of a commander to unify his army in the rapid pursuit of a noble objective tends to be more important. Irregular armies are typically led from the front, and the charisma, courage and passion of a revolutionary leader are often the hidden ingredients of a successful campaign. It is also true that such victories are built on success and tend to burn hot but brief, and there are plenty of examples a revolutionary leader losing his army and his cause through disillusionment and dissipation. Another element of greatness is the perfect union of a man with the times. As Theodore Roosevelt once famously remarked, “If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.” Thus, Bolívar’s competence as a battlefield commander can be judged perhaps best by the quality of his cause, the ripeness of the moment, and the charisma of his personality and passion of his nature. However, to quote Theodore Roosevelt once again, “The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.” In this regard, Bolívar as a military commander tends to score low points, for he was at his most potent in full flight, unchallenged in command and at liberty to inspire his men by action and voice. When required to coexist and cooperate with a senior command structure, with all of its complexities of personalities, ambitions, jealousies and egos, he tended to be conspicuously less successful. Be that as it may, Colonel Bolívar, still young enough to be impetuous but seasoned enough to understand the practical battlefield, decided that the moment was opportune. With a hastily organized contingent of some 200 men, he set off upstream in a series of pontoons and rafts, launching a

surprise attack against the Spanish position of Tenerife on the Magdalena River, about 100 miles upstream of Cartagena. The Spanish were easily routed and the position taken, the effect of which, although it had much to do with the element of surprise and the sheer audacity of it, was electrifying. His small force pushed on upriver to the district of Santa Cruz de Mompox, registering a similar success, and this time another 300 men joined his force. This was precisely the elusive element of a “general uprising,” or a sudden and popular identification with the cause, that the revolution needed, and in conjunction with it, large amounts of royalist equipment and weaponry were also abandoned. Bolívar would often remark in the future that he was born and educated in Caracas, but his name was made in Mompox. And so it continued, until by mid-December 1812 five similar victories had been scored, his army had grown, and his independent authority had been established. The authorities in Granada, although dismayed at his blatant disregard of orders, saw the situation for what it was, and Bolívar was promoted to Brigadier General and granted permission to pursue his objective to invade Venezuela. This was probably creating a virtue out of necessity, since Brigadier General Bolívar was already tearing up the valley that defined the Venezuelan border and overrunning all the enemy camps in the province of Santa Marta, with his force growing exponentially after each victory. That said, even with all this momentum, his army remained small and poorly armed, scantily organized, and led by a dilettante commander thinking on his feet and attempting to respond to a spontaneous movement. Nonetheless, Bolívar crossed the border into Venezuela and threw down the gauntlet in the face of Monteverde, who may then have had cause to regret granting him access to leave Venezuela upon the collapse of the first republic. While the moment was indeed auspicious for his combination of flair and boldness, Bolívar’s difficulties with the senior command imposed on him by Granada again hint at the limitations of his military capability. Most were irritated by his rapid rise to senior command in the independent army of Granada, and they were naturally jealous of the spectacular success for his unorthodox campaign. Since many were older and wedded to the orthodoxy of professional military service, they were unwilling in the first

instance to commit to an invasion of a neighboring territory, and certainly unwilling to do it under Bolívar’s rather erratic and unorthodox command. The story is told of Colonel Francisco de Paula Santander, a Columbian officer who, although younger and subordinate to Bolívar, was more thoroughly trained and perhaps more experienced. When he refused an order to advance, Bolívar sensed a moment of crisis, pulled out a pistol, and threatened his subordinate with an ounce of lead in the brain if he did not advance immediately. The advance went ahead and the campaign continued, but Santander would not quickly forget the episode, nor his humiliation in front of his command.

A depiction of Bolívar and Santander

This kind of high-handedness was reflected also on the battlefield, for he was facing Monteverde, who was nothing if not a brutal and ruthless commander. He waged not only a conventional war but also a war of terror against any real or perceived enemies of the Spanish Crown, utilizing extreme terror and forswearing any of the rules of civilized conflict. Thus, in a battle for the hearts and minds of the population, Bolívar was constantly forced to apply a similar measure of gratuitous terror to his revolutionary doctrine, and he apparently did not balk at this. The Bolívarian army, led by El Libertador himself, arrived on the outskirts of Caracas, marching nearly 600 miles in just 93 days. In August 1813, at the head of a parade of 800 patriots, he marched triumphantly into the city, marking the practical commencement of the second republic. It was still a complex time, and much of Bolívar’s energy was directed towards imposing order and trying to establish a government. Monteverde retreated to Puerto Cabello, on the north coast of Venezuela, and there he awaited reinforcements from Spain. At the same time, a new and formidable force was taking shape on the plains, and it was commanded by José Tomás Boves, a royalist supporter who was also not afraid to employ brutal tactics against his enemies. Boves led an irregular army of Venezuelan plainsmen, a mounted force of men similar in attitude and capability to the Mongol hordes of Asia, fighting under a charismatic leader who might have been condemned as a sociopath had he ever been the subject of a psychiatric examination. He was a fanatical enemy of the patriots, leading the Llaneros – men of the llanos, or the plains – described often as semi-nomadic, gifted horsemen and warlike in the extreme. Boves was, in this regard, a private warlord in the business of warfare and booty, controlling territory and seconded in times of need to the highest bidder. The levels of violence associated with the Llaneros and their leader seem sometimes to be drawn from ancient mythology - in an entirely lawless environment, Boves’ men were at liberty to rape and pillage at will, while Boves himself was free to indulge his appetite for torture and killing, all of which have been documented in both literature and film.

Boves At this time, the Llaneros were on Monteverde’s side, and when an advance contingent of about 1,200 well trained and well-equipped Spanish troops landed at Puerto Cabello, between them and Boves, Simón Bolívar found his second iteration of republic under extreme pressure. In fact, he refused public office in the government of the new republic because he realized that the armed phase of the movement was far from over. He accepted the role of “dictator,” in the Roman sense of the word, acknowledging, as his philosophy allowed, the suspension of popular sovereignty at times of unusual threat, and this was certainly such a time. It was not, at least according to himself, a function that he appreciated. He continued to insist that in a country “where one man holds all the power, it is a land of slaves.”[10]

In the meantime, Spanish forces continued to build strength in Puerto Cabello, ultimately reaching about 4,000, and they were supported by about 8,000 Llaneros under the command of Boves and a Spanish army of about 3,000 approaching from the east. At this vital moment, the same essential weakness of the first republic began to manifest, with Santander deciding this was the time to reject the command of a Venezuelan. This must have had Bolívar tearing out his hair, for as organized and hostile forces were bearing down on the capital, its defenses crumbled in the face of depressingly predictable disunity. Caracas was duly abandoned, and Bolívar led his supporters, along with nearly 30,000 civilian refugees, east to join Santiago Mariño, another senior commander who was then commanding the eastern garrison. Mariño was yet another leader who did not like or respect Bolívar. For this reason, and because the combined patriotic forces found themselves extremely vulnerable to Boves’ mounted plainsmen, they were shattered in the wild and bloody Battle of La Puerta, fought on June 15, 1814. Thus died the second Venezuelan Republic, which had not even managed to last as long as the first. Boves, with a taste for anarchy, continued his rampage, looting, pillaging and murdering, until the end of 1814 when he was killed in battle, after which, in the manner of a cult of personality, his fearsome army of mounted plainsmen began to break up. Around the same time, Bolívar left Venezuela in September 1814, returning to New Granada to settle back into his second period of exile in just two years. Curiously, despite his ultimate failure, which used up the cream of New Grenadian youth, he was recognized by the government as a hero and treated as one by the population. This might have offered the failed revolutionary some small amount of solace, as, no doubt, would his appointment as commander-in-chief of forces. However, the affection felt towards him in New Granada was not universal. His abandonment of his troops did not sit well with many, and there were some who suggested that his ambitions to power were indiscriminate. They believed he was somehow maneuvering to gain control of New Granada. There might certainly have been a grain of truth in this, for Bolívar most assuredly did have a keen appetite for power. At 32,

sensing perhaps that he was now simply too controversial and polarizing to achieve much in the divided aftermath of the second republic, Bolívar opted for voluntary exile. For this he chose the plantation island of Jamaica, trusting in the neutrality and sympathy of the English expatriate population on that island. Another factor influencing conditions on the ground in America was the collapse of Napoleonic France. Napoleon’s forces had been devastated by his invasion of Russia, and shortly after he was defeated at Leipzig in October 1813, he abdicated the French throne. In conjunction with hat, British forces led by the Duke of Wellington took back the Iberian Peninsula from the French, which led to the restoration of the Bourbons and the reclamation of the Spanish throne by Ferdinand VII. The first thing he did once the hue and cry of celebration had died down was to try and reestablish his authority both over Spain and the rest of its empire. He returned Spain to the absolute rule of the monarchy, reinstated the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and generally reversed many of the earlier Bourbon Reforms, blaming them for the political indiscipline at home and in the colonies. As one historian, Stanley Payne, described him, “He proved in many ways the basest king in Spanish history. Cowardly, selfish, grasping, suspicious, and vengeful, [he] seemed almost incapable of any perception of the commonwealth. He thought only in terms of his power and security and was unmoved by the enormous sacrifices of Spanish people to retain their independence and preserve his throne.”

Ferdinand VII The king’s moral failings aside, the prospects for reestablishing royal authority in the colonies were good. The uprising in Mexico was over, New Grenada was back in the fold, and Buenos Aires’ Primera Junta had manifestly failed to consolidate its rule over the interior provinces. There seemed no reason to suppose that a well provisioned and supported Spanish army could not sail west from Europe and whip the colonies back into line. The tide appeared to have turned against the forces of independence in Central America and South America, and notwithstanding the success of the American Revolution, the Catholic monarchy of Spain would maintain its grip on the political future of the Indies until at least the 1820s. With a strong monarchy back in place, political opposition could no longer be construed as anti-French, but simply treason. Edwin Williamson, a historian of Latin America, explained, “As in the period 1808-1810, the majority of creoles had to choose between embracing the devil of absolutism, which they at least knew, and taking a stride into the unknown behind a small number of squabbling radicals.” [11]

On a more intellectual level, the leading ideologue of the republican movement, Simón Bolívar, was given cause to reflect that republicanism in South America and Central America could not function along the lines of the North American model, let alone the French Revolutionary model. Unqualified electoral democracy seemed to him to have no future in societies kept in a state of political immaturity by what he saw as Spanish tyranny. Instead, he pictured a compromise between authoritarianism and democracy, described by some historians as pragmatism born of disillusion. Bolívar and José de San Martín, the Argentine general who became known as the El Libertador of Argentina, individually acknowledged the futility of direct confrontation with royalist forces, opting instead for a strategy of seizing vulnerable territory in order to establish independent government and offering the Creole elites some alternative political destiny other than continued rule by the Catholic monarchy.

San Martin

A portrait of Bernardo O’Higgins holding the Chilean Constitution In the Americas, supporters of Ferdinand VII who had assisted in returning him to the throne did so upon the understanding that a more liberal approach to the colonies would follow the restoration, and thus the colonists of Spanish America waited to discover precisely what this would mean. On the very day – May 14, 1815 – that Bolívar set sail for Jamaica, Ferdinand signed a decree promising an end to the ongoing republican contretemps in the South American colonies. This was generally seen on both sides as a hopeful sign, signaling to the republicans the possibility of a liberalization of the traditional regime, while the royalists assumed this meant a new and proactive approach to dealing with troublesome patriots. In the end, it was the latter that proved to be the case as Ferdinand announced a new push to violently crush any remaining impetus of rebellion in the colonies. Before long, a significant Spanish force, commanded by General Pablo Morillo, arrived off the coast of the Spanish Main, and by then, the guttering flame of the revolution was kept alive only in a handful of pockets, mainly in the Rio de la Plata under the influence of

José de San Martin, in Chile under the iconic revolutionary leader Bernado O’Higgins, and in the person and thought of Bolívar himself.

Morillo As soon as he landed, Morillo set to work, implementing a brutal program to stamp out any trace of revolutionary sentiment, implementing policies so cruel and so violent that ironically he succeeded in turning many nominally loyal communities fiercely against the rule of Spain. Entire city administrations suspected of disloyalty were rounded up and publicly hung while whole families were targeted and killed in arbitrary and extrajudicial executions. This collectively had the effect of stripping the colonies of any minor semblance of liberty and independence. Clearly, then, Ferdinand did more to solidify the bedrock of revolution than break it up. In the words of historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, author of the sweeping History of the American People, “Ferdinand VII, the monarch

restored in 1814, was such an imbecile that the colonies had to strike for freedom.” None of this was lost on Bolívar as he observed events from across the Caribbean Sea and refined his revolutionary theory, culminating in his famous “Jamaica Letter” of 1815. As his writing makes clear, he remained confident of the ultimate destiny of the South American continent. The English authorities in Jamaica, while certainly not making Bolívar unwelcome, were careful to limit his activities, avoiding any possibility of partisanship in the roiling politics of the Spanish colonies. At the same time, he represented a large and standing target to counter-revolutionary forces in Spanish America, and after a particularly close assassination attempt, he decided that it was time to leave Jamaica. At that moment, Morillo was concluding his campaign of “pacification” in the brutal capture of Cartagena and Bogotá, all a part of his savage repression of any resistance. Many of the leading citizens of both cities were killed, their properties were seized, and a general purge was undertaken with extreme prejudice. It was a brutal and bloody affair, intended to shock and awe, and to stamp out the last vestiges of republican support. This, in practical effect, wiped out any effective revolutionary movement in South America, placing Bolívar in a quandary. There were only two free nations in the New World, the United States and Haiti, and since the United States was not in a mood to involve itself in Latin American politics, this left Haiti as the only possible refuge and potential supporter. Haiti achieved its independence on August 22, 1791 as a black republic in the aftermath of the slave rebellion against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue. Bolívar was offered ships, arms, money and even manpower by the president of the republic, Alexandre Pétion, in return for which he offered a commitment to abolish slavery throughout Spanish America.[12]

Pétion Although his first attempt to gain a foothold on the mainland failed thanks to the usual disunity and partisanship of his own officers and an early apathy on the part of a rather shocked population, it is clear that Bolívar understood that disunity in the senior ranks of the army would be a fact of life. This time, instead of complaining about it or pointing pistols at insubordinate officers, he tried to ameliorate it with careful management and adroit diplomacy, succeeding only partially, but certainly improving on the past. In 1816, he landed on the coast of Venezuela, leading a contingent of Haitian soldiers to establish a secure beachhead. A concurrent campaign was launched from Guyana under the command of General Manuel Piar, but after apparently ignoring orders from Bolívar not to execute prisoners, he was withdrawn from the field and sent back to Haiti. Piar, a hero of the

Haitian revolution, promptly organized a campaign against Bolívar, who, in a sign of his new ruthlessness, had him brought before a court-martial in September 1817. Piar was subsequently placed before a firing squad against the wall of the cathedral of Angostura. Piar was a mestizo, and about his rebellion there was an unmistakable flavor of race conflict, something that Bolívar simply could not allow to ferment in a situation that demanded a singular unity of purpose. Aside from those issues, his war quickly gathered momentum, and as he inched towards Caracas, the royalist strongholds falling like dominos, it certainly began to seem that revolution was an idea whose time had come. In anticipation of victory, and understanding that the revolution would need more than simply a military triumph, he began organizing an administration in order to be able to reveal a functioning government to the watching world. The details of this were propagated from the lectern of the House of the Congress of Angostura, which held its inaugural meeting on February 15, 1819. From this series of meetings emerged the “Fundamental Law of the Republic of Columbia” – Gran Columbia as it came to be known – consisting of 14 articles. These were essentially the constitutional provisions of the new republic, and the constitution that Bolívar presented for the consideration of the various delegates was somewhat like that of the U.S. Constitution, with provisions covering land redistribution, reasonable taxation, and a representative government. However, it also called for a presidential life term and a hereditary senate somewhat like the British House of Lords, added in the pragmatic belief, no doubt, that the masses were not yet ready for full democracy. A central theme was the removal of “the dark mantle of barbarous and profane slavery.” The 26 delegates present comprised mostly members of the Creole elite, each of them a slave owner, and while it was agreed that the trade in slaves would cease, blanket abolition was rejected, offering manumission only to those slaves who had performed military service. Historians have since questioned the sincerity of Bolívar’s impassioned plea for abolition, citing his later communication with Francisco Santander in which he observed, “To gain some faithful partisans we need to free the slaves.”[13] At the same time, however, it certainly lent some credibility to his commitment to the government and people of Haiti. In the end, the Congress of Angostura

voted in favor of freeing slaves, in principle at least, but full emancipation did not take place until 1854, 24 years after Bolívar’s death. However, with all of this said, the new government had nothing yet to govern, and while he accepted the role of president with his usual reluctance, he turned the government over to his deputy and retook the field to finish the job of liberation. The key to the next phase was Bolívar’s successful pitch to win the support of José Antonio Páez, the successor of Boves, and it was Páez who brought the powerful Llaneros on the side of the revolution. As the story goes, this change of sides came about as a result of the plainsmen observing the masterful manner in which Bolívar rode and controlled his horse, and while that story may be apocryphal, their addition was a significant military boost.

Páez

The defining battle of the campaign, the Battle of Boyacá, was fought on August 7, 1819 in the Columbian department of that name, and it marked a general turning of the tide. When the patriots marched into Bogota, they found it deserted, and a provisional government was established there.

A depiction of the battle In respect of his long-nurtured vision of a unified nation created from the ashes of Spanish America, Bolívar declared the formation of the Republic of Gran Columbia, or “Greater Columbia,” which included both New Granada and Venezuela, an area covering almost a million square miles. To the position of deputy president, he appointed fellow Creole Francisco de Paula Santander, a gifted administrator, but a cold, unpopular, and ambitious man. The two clashed often, as Bolívar did with many of his senior commanders and top people, causing him to once complain, “Wherever I go there is disunity and disintegration. Soon it will be death. What devilish people we have here.”[14] In 1820, an army assembled in Spain for the purpose of reconquering the rebel territories of the Rio de la Plata on behalf of the Crown, but it abruptly mutinied, sparking a more general military rebellion. The mutiny had little

to do with politics or any liberal convictions, and more to do with pay and conditions, but it severely weakened the monarchy and deeply compromised the Spanish viceroys and military commanders in the Americas. In response, the Spanish government ordered the various colonial authorities to seek truces as a preliminary to negotiations to settle the crises in the colonies. In whatever terms this was couched, it was clear to those in the colonies that this amounted to a capitulation by Spain, an acknowledgement that the monarchy no longer had any real hope of asserting its authority either in Spain or America. This had ramifications that might not have been clear on the surface. Many royalists in the various regions maintained their loyalty simply for the unifying and stabilizing influence of an absolute monarchy, but with royal legitimacy now so visibly reduced, they realized there were no benefits Spain could offer the colonies that the colonists could not offer themselves. After 1820, a majority of Creole elites, the main opposition to the revolutionaries, began to drift away from their obedient loyalty to the Crown and towards an acceptance of the inevitability of independence. The royalist armies still remained to be defeated in battle, but that now seemed to be more like a formality - a political and psychological victory already belonged to the secessionists. Thus, by 1820, the royalists knew that they were in a corner, and Morillo and Bolívar met in November of that year to negotiate. A six-month truce was agreed, but it proved unworkable, and soon afterwards Morillo was replaced. On June 29, 1821, Bolívar once again entered Caracas at the head of a victorious revolutionary army, proclaiming a republic about which there was now a sense of permanence. El Libertador was given the presidency, and as his deputy, he appointed the illiterate plainsman José Antonio Páez, commander of the Llaneros. This was a risky, but necessary choice. Thereafter he applied his energies to the conquest of the province of Quito, the future Ecuador, as an addition to the growing federation, which was achieved in the spring of 1822. The last and strongest of the royalist bastions was Peru, and in cooperation with the Argentine liberator José de San Martin, Bolívar plotted its conquest. This was a potentially problematic partnership simply because

the two men were divided over many details. San Martin, for example, was a royalist whose vision was to replace the Spanish monarchy with some other European royal families to serve as monarch of a reconstituted South American empire. Nonetheless, after a long campaign, Peru fell at the end of 1824, marking the last important military engagement of the New World’s wars of independence. In 1825, “High Peru,” a southern province of Peru claimed by both Peru and Argentina, declared its independence, taking the name “Bolívar” (later changed to Bolivia) and naming Bolívar president for life. He was offered the title of Emperor of the Andes, and at home, Simón I, King of Venezuela. All of this, while flattering, was also somewhat disappointing given the essential canons of his revolutionary philosophy. Nonetheless, this was the zenith of his career, and had he chosen to retire then, his legacy would have been assured. However, he did not, for he still clung to the dream of a federation of the Andes that would include all of the Spanish speaking republics of South America. From June 22- July 15, 1826, he convened the Congress of Panama, ostensibly to formulate a common and streamlined policy towards Spain, but during the conference, he proposed a league of American republics that would support a common military, a mutual defense pact, and a supranational parliamentary assembly. The meeting was attended by plenipotentiaries of Gran Colombia, Peru, the United Provinces of Central America, and Mexico. Chile and the United Provinces of South America (later Argentina) were absent, no doubt due to mistrust of Bolívar's disproportionate influence. In the end, a style of mutual cooperation treaty was agreed upon, but in reality the notion of a federalized republic gained no traction at all, and even the watered-down agreement was abandoned as soon as the doors of the conference were closed. In the future, regional organizations would take their cue from the Congress of Panama, and while Bolívar would be credited with the founding vision, his dream of a greater South America died there. Much of Bolívar's time thereafter was spent putting out fires and trying to keep the grand coalition alive, finding himself pressured on all sides by the deep divisions and disunity within the structure. There was also plenty of

discontent among the upper ranks of the administration regarding Bolívar’s presence, which, in a post-revolutionary environment, was often not helpful for achieving political tranquility. On September 25, 1828, Bolívar narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, which he reasonably suspected was organized by Santander. This tempted him briefly to reassert his control, but the tethers of the union were snapping faster than he could hold them together. Eventually, his influence was no longer regarded as helpful in Venezuela, and he was ordered to leave. Impoverished and suffering from declining health, Bolívar returned to Columbia, hoping from there to make his way to Europe. However, a month later, on December 17, 1830, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 47. Near the end, he compared himself to his favorite fictional character, Don Quixote, whose folly was attempting to right the wrongs of the world. As he had ruefully told an audience at the Constituent Congress of the Republic of Colombia a few years earlier, “"Fellow citizens! I blush to say this: Independence is the only benefit we have acquired, to the detriment of all the rest."

A sketch of Bolívar near the end of his life

Antonio Herrera Toro’s depiction of Bolívar’s death

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Further Reading Arana, Marie. Bolívar: American Liberator. New York: Simón & Schuster, 2013. Bushnell, David. The Liberator, Simón Bolívar. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Bushnell, David (ed.) and Fornoff, Fred (tr.), El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar, Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-19-514481-9 Bushnell, David and Macaulay, Neill. The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Second edition). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0-19-508402-3 Ducoudray Holstein, H.L.V. Memoirs of Simón Bolívar. Boston: Goodrich, 1829. Gómez Martínez, José Luis. "La encrucijada del cambio: Simón Bolívar entre dos paradigmas (una reflexión ante la encrucijada postindustrial)". Cuadernos Americanos 104 (2004): 11–32. Harvey, Robert. "Liberators: Latin America's Struggle For Independence, 1810–1830". John Murray, London (2000). ISBN 978-0-7195-5566-4 Higgins, James (editor). The Emancipation of Peru: British Eyewitness Accounts, 2014. Online at https://sites.google.com/site/jhemanperu Lacroix, Luis Perú de. Diario de Bucaramanga. Caracas: Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Comunicación y la Información, 2009. Ludwig, Emil. "Bolívar: The Life of an Idealist," Alliance Book Corporation, New York, 1942; popular biography Lynch, John. Simón Bolívar: A Life Paperback (Yale UP, 2007), a standard scholarly biography Lynch, John. Simón Bolívar and the Age of Revolution. London: University of London Institute of Latin American Studies, 1983. ISBN 9780-901145-54-3

Lynch, John. The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (Second edition). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986. ISBN 978-0-393-95537-8 Madariaga, Salvador de. Bolívar. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1952. ISBN 978-0-313-22029-6 Masur, Gerhard (1948). Simón Bolívar (Second edition, translation by Pedro Martín de la Cámara). Bogotá: Fundación para la Investigación y la Cultura, 2008. Marx, Karl. "Bolívar y Ponte" in The New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, Vol. III. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1858. O'Leary, Daniel Florencio. Bolívar and the War of Independence/Memorias del General Daniel Florencio O'Leary: Narración (Abridged version). Austin: University of Texas, [1888] 1970. ISBN 978-0292-70047-5 Racine, Karen. "Simón Bolívar and friends: Recent biographies of independence figures in Colombia and Venezuela" History Compass 18#3 (Feb 2020)

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Richard W. Slatta, Jane Lucas De Grummond. Simón Bolívar’s Quest for Glory. (Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 2003) p12 Lynch, John. Simon Bolívar and the Age of Revolution. University of London. Ibid.

Lynch, John. Latin America Between Colony and Nation: Selected Essays. (Macmillan, London, 2001) p144/5 Lynch, John. Simón Bolívar: A Life. (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006) p285 Quoted: Wepman, Dennis. Simón Bolívar. (Chelsea House, New York, 1985) p38 Royal Order of the Central Junta of January 22, 1809, cited in Jaime E. Rodríguez, Independence of Spanish America. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998) p60. Lynch, John. The Spanish American Revolutions 1808-1826, Second Edition. (Norton & Company, New York) Jorge Gonzalez-Jacome. Emergency Powers and the Feeling of Backwardness in Latin American State Formation. American University International Law Review Volume 26, Issue 4 Article 7, 2011.

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Many historians have questioned the ultimate sincerity of Bolívar’s refusal to accept public office, only to later allow himself to be persuaded to accept it. Williamson, Edwin. The Penguin History of Latin America. (Penguin Books, London, 1992) p221 Bolívar freed all of his own slaves a year earlier. Quoted: Blanchard, Peter. Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish America. (University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg, 2008) p73 Quoted: Wepman, Dennis. Simón Bolívar. (Chelsea House, New York, 1985) p93