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  SIMÓN BOLÍVAI

  SIMÓN BOLÍVAR

  A LIFE

  JOHN LYNCH

  Yale University Press

  New Haven and London

  Copyright © 2006 by Yale University

  First published in hardback 2006

  First paperback edition 2007

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

  For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:

  U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com

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  Set in Minion by J&L Composition, Filey, North Yorkshire

  Printed in the USA

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lynch, John, 1927–

  Simón Bolívar: a life/John Lynch.

  p.cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-300-11062-6 (cl.: alk. paper)

  1. Bolívar, Simón, 1783–1830. 2. South America—History—Wars of Independence, 1806–1830. 3. Heads of state—South America—Biography, I. Title.

  F2235.3.L97 2006

  980′.02092—dc22

  2005034838

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-300-12604-4 (pbk)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Maps

  1. OUT OF A SPANISH COLONY

  Venezuelan Homeland

  Family, Friends and Neighbours

  A Youth of Independent Means

  Old Spain, Young Love

  2. LESSONS FROM THE AGE OF REASON

  Life in Paris

  Political Awakening

  A Spanish American in the Age of Revolution

  Bolívar and the Enlightenment

  Return to Venezuela

  3. CREOLE REVOLUTION

  Grievances of a Colony

  1808, the Critical Year

  The London Mission

  Independence, Declared and Destroyed

  War with Spain and with Nature

  The Defeat of the First Republic

  4. WAR TO THE DEATH

  The Cartagena Manifesto

  The Western Front

  War by Terror

  The Liberator

  Counter-Revolution

  Exit and Exile

  5. TOUCHSTONE OF THE REVOLUTION

  The Jamaica Letter

  The Caudillos

  Confrontation with Piar

  The Tactics of Race

  An Army for Liberation

  Páez and the Llaneros: A New Challenge

  6. NEW STRATEGY, NEW FRONT

  The Angostura Address

  Reinforcements and Reappraisal

  A Second Front

  Boyacá

  Tensions after Triumph

  Carabobo

  7. SOCIETY ACCORDING TO BOLÍVAR

  Rousseau in Retreat

  Continuity and Change

  Bolivarian Society

  Citizen Soldiers

  The Bolivarian Economy

  8. WAR AND LOVE IN THE ANDES

  Mountain Barriers

  Conference in Guayaquil

  Defence of the Revolution

  Manuela Sáenz

  Into Peru

  Junín and Ayacucho

  9. THE MAN OF PROBLEMS

  Across the Desaguadero

  The Bolivarian Enlightenment

  The Lost Purity of his Principles

  An Ever Greater America

  A Deal with the Devil

  10. THE MAGIC OF HIS PRESTIGE

  Adios Venezuela

  Quest for Strong Government

  The Road to Ocaa and Power

  The Assassins

  Foundations of the Faith

  The Limits of Revolution

  11. JOURNEY OF DISILLUSION

  Rebels and Invaders

  Sombre Thoughts from Guayaquil

  Monarchist Friends, Republican Enemies

  The Exodus

  Farewell to Power, Salute to Glory

  Journey’s End

  12. THE LEGACY

  Man and Myth

  Ideas and Ideals

  The Realist of the Revolution

  Paths of Glory

  Dynamics of Leadership

  The Cult of Bolívar

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Glossary

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  The Young Bolívar, anonymous artist, Madrid, c. 1802. Fundación John Boulton, Caracas.

  Simón Bolívar, engraved by W. Holt, from an engraving by M.N. Bate, London 1823–8. The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Simón Bolívar, miniature on ivory of 1828, after a painting by Roulin. Reproduced by permission of Canning House, London.

  Simón Bolívar, by José Gil de Castro, Lima, 1825. Salón Elíptico, Palacio Federal, Caracas.

  Simón Bolívar, Libertador de Colombia, by José Gil de Castro, Lima 1827. The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  Daniel Florencio O’Leary by Antonio Meucci, nineteenth century. Quinta de Bolívar, Bogotá.

  Antonio José de Sucre. Casa de Sucre, Quito.

  Bolívar and the Patriot Forces crossing the Andes, 1819, by Tito Salas. Palacio Federal, Caracas.

  Francisco de Paula Santander. Museo 20 de julio, Bogotá.

  Manuela Sáenz. Quinta Bolívar, Bogotá.

  Antiguo camino colonial entre Caracas y La Guaira by Ferdinand Bellermann, 1842–5. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

  Chimborazo, by Frederick Edwin Church, 1864. The Huntington Library Art Collection, San Marino, California.

  PREFACE

  Simón Bolívar lived a short life but one of extraordinary fullness. He was a revolutionary who freed six countries, an intellectual who argued the principles of national liberation, a general who fought a cruel colonial war. He inspired extremes of devotion and detestation. Many Spanish Americans wanted him to be their dictator, their king; but some denounced him as a traitor and others tried to assassinate him. His memory became an inspiration to later generations and also a battleground. To liberal historians he was a fighter against tyranny. Conservatives redesigned him as a cult. Marxists dismissed him as the leader of a bourgeois revolution. And he still evokes public passions and polemics. He has been appropriated by partisans and co–opted by governments: his current incarnation in Venezuela as the model of authoritarian populism projects yet another interpretation of his leadership and challenges the historian to set the record straight.

  Bolívar was an exceptionally complex man, a liberator who scorned liberalism, a soldier who disparaged militarism, a republican who admired monarchy. To study Bolívar is to study a rare and original character, whose mind and will were no less factors in historical change than were the social forces of the time. He knew his own value and protected his reputation, speaking his mind in a flood of words that overwhelm the reader by their eloquence and conviction. Yet he was careless of his archives, gems of originality, which were preserved through the devotion of his followers rather than his own concern. The present book is a history of his life and times based on the Bolivarian documentation and modern research. The commentaries are hardly less prolific than the sources, though it is the sources that enlighten and the commentaries that often obscure.

  Why write a new life of Bolívar? There are those who question the importance of biography and reject the cult o
f the hero. For them the meaning of liberation is to be found in the study of economic structures, social classes and the international conjuncture, not in military actions and the lives of liberators. In this view Carlyle’s claim that the history of the world is the biography of great men is misguided and his assertion that society is founded on hero–worship a curious exaggeration. Yet the independence of Spanish America is incomprehensible without the presence of the liberators and its subsequent history would be empty without the intervention of personal authority. In the action of Bolívar we observe the dynamics of leadership, the power to command and the modes of ruling in the diverse society of Spanish America, not the whole history of the age but a great part of it.

  Many words, though not the last word, have been said about Bolívar. In English Salvador de Madariaga’s interpretation, extensively researched but basically out of sympathy with its subject, was soon overtaken by Gerhard Masur’s more balanced work, which held the field as the leading academic study in English for half a century before it began to show its age. Recently the subject has benefited from further research and new contributions by scholars in the United States, models of accuracy and judgement. In Venezuela Bolivarian writings are part of the national culture and, thanks to the work of generations of historians in the Bolivarian countries, we now have access to an incomparable collection of published documentation, extensive secondary works and numerous specialist studies. For greater understanding of Bolívar, historians everywhere – and none more than the present writer – have long been indebted to Germán Carrera Damas, whose works have illuminated the subject for four decades. The years approaching the bicentenary of Spanish American Independence are likely to see a renewal of interest, a resurgence of congresses, lectures and seminars, and a further upsurge in Bolivarian publications. Yet the life and work of Bolívar remain full of questions and controversies, and his inner motivation and ultimate project continue to challenge the historian. The challenge is one of interpretation rather than facts, although interpretation is impossible without facts, and the facts themselves are often in dispute.

  The study of Bolívar, therefore, still provides the historian with space. But there is a deeper sense in which the subject appeals. The study of the Spanish American revolutions of 1808–26 has advanced significantly in recent decades. Historians have adjusted the chronology of Independence to wider dimensions and see the years between 1750 and 1850 as a time of transition when colonial structures were slowly overtaken by nation states. Social change has been more closely investigated and, inevitably, race, class and gender are now required categories for anyone studying Independence. Elites are searched for allegiances and the popular sectors for commitment. Guerrillas are promoted to prominence and the shift from bandits to guerrillas to patriots is seen as a common sequence, adding a new look to military history. Revolution is not the whole story: the Spanish counter–revolution is investigated in greater detail, and Independence is viewed as a war lost by Spain as well as one won by Americans. The political ideas of Independence have been studied by close textual analysis of revolutionary writings, while forms of political sociability have also made their appearance. The idea of American identity has discarded conceptual inhibitions and can now be studied as the development of imagined communities or even the emergence of nationalism in early modern Spanish America. The time has come to integrate Bolívar more closely into the new research, to incorporate the Liberator into the social, economic, intellectual and political life of the society in which he lived, and analyse his policies towards creole elites, mixed races, blacks, Indians and slaves. His history does not end with his death but leaves a legacy hardly less dramatic than his life, and this too is a subject for the historian and one which brings the present work to a close.

  I am grateful to Yale University Press for asking me to write this book, to its editorial team for helping to produce it, and to James Dunkerley for encouraging the project. To Germán Carrera Damas I have long been indebted for generous guidance to the thought and action of the Liberator, for practical help in pursuit of sources, and for friendship beyond the world of scholarship. I am grateful too to Carole Leal Curiel, who kindly gave me a vital work of her husband Luis Castro, a historian sadly missed by his colleagues. I am pleased to record my thanks for the help I have received from Peter Blanchard, particularly on the subject of slaves and slavery. Catherine Fuller of the Bentham Project at University College London guided me on the communications between Bolívar and Bentham, and directed me to the sources. I wish to express my debt to the Fundación John Boulton, Caracas, and especially to its Director, Carmen Michelena, for generously making available documents from the Archivo del Libertador Simón Bolívar. I am indebted, too, to Alan Biggins of Canning House, Norman Fiering of the John Carter Brown Library, and Gabriela Carrera of Caracas for help with the illustrations. I am glad to record my appreciation of the services over the years of the Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas, and the National Archives (Public Record Office), London. Particular thanks are due to the British Library, the Institute of Historical Research and the Library of University College London, whose holdings between them make London fruitful ground for Bolivarian research.

  I have special words of thanks, inadequate though they are, for my wife, whose support for Bolívar and for me encouraged and sustained the book and helped me to complete it.

  Chapter 1

  OUT OF A SPANISH COLONY

  Venezuelan Homeland

  On 26 March 1812 a massive earthquake struck Venezuela. From the Andes to the coast, from Mérida to La Guaira, the earth heaved and cracked, buildings crumbled and people perished in their thousands. The royalist chronicler José Domingo Díaz was there, his journalist instincts aroused:

  It was four o’clock, the sky of Caracas was clear and bright, and an immense calm seemed to intensify the pressure of an unbearable heat; a few drops of rain were falling though there was not a cloud in the sky. I left my house for the Cathedral and, about 100 paces from the plaza of San Jacinto and the Dominican priory, the earth began to shake with a huge roar. As I ran into the square some balconies from the Post Office fell at my feet, and I distanced myself from the falling buildings. I saw the church of San Jacinto collapse on its own foundations, and amidst dust and death I witnessed the destruction of a city which had been the admiration of natives and foreigners alike. The strange roar was followed by the silence of the grave. As I stood in the plaza, alone in the midst of the ruins, I heard the cries of those dying inside the church; I climbed over the ruins and entered, and I immediately saw about forty persons dead or dying under the rubble. I climbed out again and I shall never forget that moment. On the top of the ruins I found Don Simón Bolívar in his shirt sleeves clambering over the debris to see the same sight that I had seen. On his face was written the utmost horror or the utmost despair. He saw me and spoke these impious and extravagant words: ‘We will fight nature itself if it opposes us, and force it to obey.’ By now the square was full of people screaming.1

  Thousands died in churches that Holy Thursday, and the churches of La Trinidad and Alta Gracia, which were more than 150 feet high, collapsed into ruins no higher than five or six feet. The great barracks of San Carlos plunged on to a regiment waiting to joint the processions. Nine tenths of Caracas was entirely destroyed.2 Nothing could resist the heaving of the ground upwards like a boiling liquid and the shocks crossing each other from north to south and from east to west. The death toll reached nine to ten thousand in the city alone. As cries for help were heard from the ruins, mothers were seen bearing children in their arms desperately trying to revive them, and desolate families wandered in a daze through clouds of dust seeking missing fathers, husbands and friends. A group of Franciscan friars carried out corpses on their shoulders to give them a burial.3 Bodies were burned on funeral piles, and the wounded and sick were laid on the banks of the River Guayra, without beds, linen or medicines, all lost in the rubble. A frightened society suddenly remembered
its duties: partners hastened to get married, abandoned children found their parents, debts were paid, fraud was made good, families were reconciled and enemies became friends. Priests had never been busier. But Bolívar had to fight the Church as well as nature, for the catastrophe was exploited by many royalist clergy who preached that this was God’s punishment for revolution. Amidst the dust and the rubble he confronted one of the priests and forced him down from his makeshift pulpit. He hated the destruction and disarray with a personal hatred. The earthquake was a double blow, to his birthplace and to his revolution.

  ‘Noble, rich and talented,’ an aide recorded of Simón Bolívar, and these were his assets from the beginning.4 He was born in Caracas on 24 July 1783 to Juan Vicente Bolívar y Ponte and María de la Concepción Palacios y Blanco, the youngest in a family of two brothers and two sisters, and he was christened Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad. He was seventh–generation American, descendant of the Simón de Bolívar who came to Venezuela from Spain in 1589 in search of a new life. The family lineage has been scoured for signs of race mixture in a society of whites, Indians and blacks, where neighbours were sensitive to the slightest variant, but, in spite of dubious evidence dating from 1673, the Bolívars were always whites. Their economic base was also secure. Basques by origin, in the course of two centuries they had accumulated land, mines, several plantations, cattle, slaves, town houses and a leading place among the white elite. The San Mateo estate, the favourite of the family, dated from the sixteenth century, when it was supported by an encomienda, or grant of Indian labour in the valley. In Caracas they lived in a large house in the centre of town. The Bolívars were rooted in the history of Venezuela and had a reputation as cabildo officials, militia officers, and supporters of royal policies, accompanied by a claim to aristocratic title. Simón’s uncle José Bolívar Aguirre had collaborated eagerly in the suppression of the popular rebellion of 1749.5 On the maternal side, too, the Palacios were a superior family with aristocratic pretensions and a record as office–holders, their history running parallel to the Bolívars in the public life of Venezuela. There was no doubt that Simón Bolívar was of the elite, but where did his country stand?