Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  But the bishop also knew that the man who stood accused was no ordinary citizen. Don Juan Vicente’s station among Creoles in Venezuela had few equals; his honors and titles flowed directly from the Court of Spain. The bishop decided to recommend that the women commit themselves to prayer, avoid contact with their tormentor, and take up a strict vow of silence. To Don Juan Vicente, he intimated that he really did not believe the witnesses, but that if similar violations continued to be reported, he would be obliged to correct his lordship “by force of law.” He advised him to cease all commerce with females and to contact them only through the offices of a priest. The bishop’s warning had a clear and unavoidable implication: the Church would brook no more complaints. It was time for Don Juan Vicente to get married.

  WHEN MARÍA DE LA CONCEPCIÓN Palacios y Blanco married Don Juan Vicente at the age of fourteen, she was no younger than other brides of her class in Venezuela: American aristocrats were known to marry off daughters as early as twelve. A girl might be sent to the convent at four and then emerge eight years later to exchange lifelong vows with a boy of sixteen.

  These were the Mantuanos, the highest class of Creoles to which the Bolívars and Palacios belonged. Wealthy, white, and exceptionally favored, they were the backbone of Spain’s empire in Venezuela, and oversaw all of the colony’s assets, commanded all the colony’s troops. In Caracas, their ranks were said to consist of nine families. The Mantuanos displayed their coats of arms, carved into great slabs of stone, over their doorways. They wore fancy hats and carried canes. Their wives were the only women permitted to wear mantillas or mantuas, veils that marked their status as they rode through the city on elaborate, gilded litters, borne by black slaves. Wherever they walked, tiny bells sewn into their skirts announced their approach.

  We will never know with any certainty how Concepción’s parents managed to arrange her marriage to the prominent, powerful, forty-six-year-old roué that was Don Juan Vicente, except that there was one strategic advantage: they were his neighbors. The Palacios lived just behind the Bolívars, on the corner of Traposos Street—only a few meters away. The city of Caracas was small, no longer than fourteen blocks in one direction and twelve in the other. In the tiny quadrant the Palacios and Bolívars inhabited, the elite were close acquaintances, often related to one another through generations of intermarriage. It is safe to assume that, in the close, insular world of eighteenth-century Caracas life, Don Juan Vicente learned on his return from Madrid that a baby had just been born to the Palacios family. The father was a mere four years younger, after all, and a fellow military man. Both were eminent Mantuanos, active in the public life of Caracas. Having so much in common with the father, Don Juan Vicente certainly had opportunities to glimpse the daughter. As years passed and Concepción grew to puberty, Don Juan Vicente noticed that she was a lively and beautiful child.

  However the subject of marriage materialized, nuptial agreements were made, two influential families were joined, and Don Juan Vicente settled down to a quiet, even sedate connubial life. Doña Concepción proceeded to dedicate herself to wifely duties. As someone who had grown up in a bustling household with ten siblings, she must have found the Bolívar house, for all its handsome rooms, a dour place, as dark and forbidding as a tomb. She opened the doors to its patios and brightened its halls with light. She decorated the heavy sideboards with an abundance of flowers. She filled the air with music. By the time she was eighteen, she began to populate the many rooms with children. María Antonia, the first, was most like her—petite, brunette, and determined. Three more followed quickly thereafter: Juana, a languid, fair-haired girl, who more resembled her father; Juan Vicente, a sweet, blond boy with blue eyes; and, last, Simón, the scamp with curly black hair.

  For all the differences, Doña Concepción had one characteristic in common with her husband. Her ancestry was as renowned and illustrious as his. Her mother, Francisca Blanco Herrera, was a descendant of medieval kings and princes. Her father, Feliciano Palacios y Sojo, came from a family with a pronounced intellectual bent. From her uncle Pedro Palacios y Sojo, a celebrated priest, musician, and founder of the Caracas School of Music, she learned she had a natural gift for music. She was skilled at the harp, which was her preferred instrument, but she also loved to sing, play the guitar, and dance. Although fate would allow Simón Bolívar only a fleeting time with his mother, there were two traits he would inherit from her: a vibrant, affirmative energy and a hearty passion for dance.

  AS DON JUAN VICENTE SETTLED into his new life, he began to be alarmed by Spain’s dominion over it. For fifty years he had been a loyal subject of the king, a trusted judge, governor, and military commander, but by 1776, just as the British colonies declared their independence, Don Juan, too, was dreaming of insurrection. He had good reason to. Spain’s Bourbon regime, which had high ambitions, had decided to impose a strict rule over its colonies. It put into place a number of anti-Creole laws that had a direct effect on Don Juan Vicente’s businesses. First, Venezuela was separated from the viceroyalty of New Granada, a sprawling region that originally reached from the Pacific to the Atlantic over the northern territories of South America; next, an intendant was installed in Caracas to administer economic affairs, and a captain-general to rule over political and military matters. With a direct umbilical to Madrid now, Venezuela began to suffer tighter restrictions on its ranches, mines, and plantations. The Council of the Indies, which governed the Americas from Madrid and Seville, strengthened its hold. Taxes were increased. A ubiquitous imperial presence was felt in all transactions. The Guipuzcoana Company, a powerful Basque corporation that monopolized imports and exports, was reaping great profits on every sale.

  If Don Juan Vicente feared the impact of these new regulations, he saw that the blow would be more than financial. Creoles were being squeezed out of government roles. Throughout the Spanish Americas, from California to Buenos Aires, Spain began appointing only peninsulares—those born in Spain or the Canary Islands—to offices that decided important affairs. This was a sweeping, ultimately radicalizing change, reversing a culture of trust between Creoles and Spaniards that had been nurtured for more than two hundred years. In Italy, an exiled Peruvian Jesuit priest, Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán, wrote angrily that it was tantamount to declaring Americans “incapable of filling, even in our own countries, places which, in the strictest right, belong to us.”

  The most infuriating aspect of this for Creoles such as Don Juan Vicente was that the peninsulares being assigned the highest positions were often inferior in education and pedigree. This was similar to a sentiment held for years in British America. Both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin had registered strong objections to preferences given to British-born subjects when it was clear that the American-born were far more skilled. In the Spanish colonies, the new emissaries of the crown were largely members of Spain’s middle class: merchants or midlevel functionaries with little sophistication. As they took over the most coveted seats of power, their inadequacies were not lost on Creoles who now had to step aside. In Spain, not everyone was blind to the implications. A Bourbon minister mused that colonial subjects in the Indies might have learned to live without freedoms, but once they acquired them as a right, they weren’t going to stand by idly as they were taken away. Whether or not the court in Madrid understood the ramifications, Spain had drawn a line in the sand. Its colonial strategy shifted from consensus to confrontation, from collaboration to coercion; and to ensure its grip on the enormous wealth that America represented, it put a firm clamp on its laws.

  Don Juan Vicente and his fellow Mantuanos may not have been fully aware of it, but their disgruntlement was part of a rebellious spirit sweeping the world. It was called the Enlightenment. Its seeds had been planted much earlier by the scientific revolution in Europe, which had challenged laws, authority, even faith itself. But by the time Don Juan Vicente and Doña Concepción began having children, the wheels of an extended American revolution—north and south—were al
ready in motion. Adam Smith had published his Wealth of Nations, which advocated tearing down artificially imposed economic controls and freeing people to build stronger societies. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, had posited that monarchies in Europe had done little more than lay “the world in blood and ashes.” In France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire argued eloquently for freedom, equality, and the will of the people. In his Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu had anticipated Don Juan Vicente’s resentment: “The Indies and Spain are two powers under the same master; but the Indies are the principal, while Spain is only an accessory.” It made no sense for political forces to try to shackle a principal to an accessory, he argued. The colonies were now inherently the more powerful of the two.

  On February 24, 1782, a year and a half before the birth of the child who would bring luster to his family name, Don Juan Vicente met with two fellow Mantuanos, composed a letter proposing revolution, and sent it off to Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan colonel and dissident who had been bold enough to say publicly that his homeland should shuck its allegiance to the crown. Miranda had fought in a Spanish regiment in the Battle of Pensacola, been reprimanded by his superiors for exceeding his mandate, and had since turned against Spain, making no secret of his rancor. The letter addressed to him by the elder Bolívar reported that the noblemen of Caracas were exasperated with the insults heaped on them by Spanish authorities. The new intendant and captain-general were “treating all Americans, no matter what class, rank or circumstance, as if they were vile slaves.” The three Mantuanos urged Miranda to take up their cause of rebellion, but went on to express a certain trepidation, given Spain’s ruthless quashing of rebels elsewhere: “We want to take no steps, nor shall we take any without your advice, for in your prudence have we set all our hopes.”

  So it was prudence, not valor, that was the animating spirit behind this sedition. The Mantuanos were not ready to topple their world.

  DON JUAN VICENTE WOULD NEVER have imagined that the child in the cradle under his own roof would be the one to wrest independence from the colonizers, not for Venezuela alone, but for much of Spanish America. What he did know by the time his son reached a mere one and a half was that even if the family estate crumbled the boy would grow up to be a rich man. A priest had ordained it. Juan Félix Jerez de Aristiguieta, who had baptized the boy, was, like many powerful clerics of the day, a wealthy landowner with valuable properties. He was also Don Juan Vicente’s nephew. When he died in 1785 with no direct heirs, he surprised everyone by leaving the diminutive Simón his entire fortune, including a magnificent house next to the cathedral, three plantations, a total of 95,000 cacao trees, and all his slaves.

  The following year, Don Juan Vicente, too, would die. The tuberculosis that had fevered him for years finally took him one warm January night in 1786 as he lay in the house on San Jacinto Street. He was not yet sixty. His son Simón was not yet three. His wife was pregnant with a fifth child, who would not see much light of day.

  Don Juan Vicente’s will and testament, which he had the presence of mind to prepare even as he lay dying, was a model of diligence. In it, he reported that he owed money to no one. He laid out his ancestry and described the lofty positions he had held during his long and illustrious career. Despite his brief, halfhearted flirtation with rebellion, he insisted that his remains be buried in the family chapel in the Cathedral of Caracas, “decorated with my military insignia and interred with the privileges which I enjoy under military law.” He distributed his holdings evenly among his five children (including the one unborn), gave power of attorney to his wife and father-in-law, and added a special clause that required Doña Concepción “to carry out what I have imparted to her in order to relieve my conscience.” The phrase could only mean one thing: he had arranged for her to distribute money to his illegitimate children. The will went on to specify how many priests and friars were to accompany his coffin to its final resting place and how many fervent Masses were to be said for his soul as it approached reckoning day. Clearly, he died a worried man.

  His departure might have thrown the household into turmoil had his wife not had a practical and business-minded nature. Doña Concepción buried her husband, carried her pregnancy to term, lost the baby girl a few days later, and then set about putting the family properties in order. Relying on her father and brothers to help her manage what had become a veritable conglomerate of businesses, she tried to impose some order in her children’s lives.

  Simón, in particular, was an unruly child. He had been raised by his wet nurse, the black slave Hipólita, whom he would later credit as the woman “whose milk sustained my life” as well as “the only father I have ever known.” She was adoring and infinitely patient with the little boy, but she could hardly control him. Willful, irascible, in obvious need of a stern hand, he became progressively ungovernable. As much as his mother tried to enjoin the male members of her family to help discipline him, the men found his impudence perversely funny. No one scolded him, much less punished him. Eventually, she found support in none other than the Royal Audiencia, Spain’s high court in Caracas, which monitored all legal affairs. Since the boy had inherited such a large estate, and since his father was dead and unable to supervise it, the Audiencia appointed an eminent jurist to oversee the progress of young Simón. His name was José Miguel Sanz.

  Sanz was the brilliant dean of the college of lawyers, known for his progressive views on education. An avid reader and writer, he had labored for years to persuade colonial authorities to allow him to import the first printing press to the colony. He was never able to accomplish it. Nevertheless, Sanz was highly respected by Spaniards, admired by fellow Creoles—what’s more, at age thirty-six, he was the very model of a conscientious young father. It would have been difficult to find a better surrogate for the boy. As administrator of Simón Bolívar’s fortune, Sanz had dutifully visited his young ward and seen for himself the extent of the boy’s cockiness. But before Simón turned six, Sanz decided to take fuller responsibility and brought him to live under his own roof.

  Blind in one eye, grim in demeanor, Sanz could be an intimidating presence, even to his own wife and children, but not to Simón, who is said to have issued many a brazen response to his demands. “You’re a walking powder keg, boy!” Sanz warned him after one of Simón’s more blatant insubordinations. “Better run, then,” the six-year-old told him, “or I’ll burn you.”

  As punishment for his many transgressions, Sanz locked Simón in a room on the second floor of his house and instructed his wife to leave him there while he went off to see about his many court cases. Bored, exasperated, the boy yelled and made his fury known, and Sanz’s wife, taking pity, tied sweets and freshly baked breads to a long pole and passed them to him through an open window. She swore Simón to secrecy, making him promise not to reveal her disobedience. Every afternoon when the lawyer returned and asked how he had behaved, she simply smiled and said the child had been the essence of tranquillity.

  Eventually, Sanz hired a learned Capuchin monk, Padre Francisco de Andújar, to come to his house and give Simón a moral education. The mathematician priest, hoping to ingratiate himself with his student, tempered instruction with a liberal dose of entertaining stories, but no amount of patience or charm could budge the boy from what he was: a joker, a prankster, a pampered child. It’s not clear how long Simón remained under Sanz’s care or whether he actually spent nights under his roof, but certainly before his eighth birthday he was back in the house on San Jacinto Street. By then, his mother’s health was failing and she was finding it difficult to focus on the management of her family, much less the comportment of her younger son. Worried that she might infect her children with her disease, she quarantined herself on the sugar plantation at San Mateo and left them and the servants to their own devices. Simón spent his days cavorting with the slaves’ children, running wild.

  If Doña Concepción had one driving ambition during her swift decline, it was to secure for her older son,
Juan Vicente, the marquisate that her father-in-law had purchased so many years before. The Palacios family, unlike the Bolívars, had always attached great importance to prestige and nobility, and when Don Juan Vicente de Bolívar had died, making the title potentially available to her sons, Doña Concepción had sent her brother Esteban to Spain to hurry along the enterprise. When Esteban reported that the proceedings had come to a halt because of Josefa Marín de Narváez’s questionable lineage, Don Feliciano Palacios called off the venture, unwilling to press a case that could reveal unwanted blood in the Bolívars and potentially smear them all. To be sure, managing the Bolívar fortunes had become a cash cow for the Palacios. The income from the properties that stood to be inherited by Juan Vicente and Simón was supporting their mother’s siblings. The in-laws had been living on Bolívar assets for years.

  On one of her long, recuperative visits to San Mateo, Doña Concepción stayed into the rainy season, and her affliction took a grave turn for the worse. She returned to Caracas and died of acute tuberculosis on July 6, 1792, leaving her four children in her elderly father’s care. Not entirely well himself, Don Feliciano Palacios took up his pen and wrote to Esteban in Madrid, delivering the news with admirable equanimity: “Concepción decided to lay her illness to rest and she expelled a great deal of blood through her mouth, continuing her deterioration until this morning at eleven thirty, at which point God took it upon Himself to claim her.” It had been a long and grueling death: she had bled for seven days.

  Once his daughter was interred in the Bolívar family chapel, Don Feliciano dedicated himself to arranging the marriages of his orphaned granddaughters. Within two months, he married fifteen-year-old María Antonia to her distant cousin Pablo Clemente Francia. Three months after that, he wed Juana, who was only thirteen, to her uncle Dionisio Palacios. As for his grandsons, Don Feliciano decided to leave Simón and Juan Vicente—then nine and eleven, respectively—in the house on San Jacinto Street, under the supervision of the Bolívar family servants. He had a connecting passageway built from that house to his own, so that the boys could spend days with him and then retire to their old, familiar beds at night. It seemed a rational enough solution, comforting the children with an illusion of permanence and stability. That flimsy solace did not last long, however. Don Feliciano Palacios died the following year, leaving his grandsons to face yet another loss in their waning family universe.