Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  EVEN AS BOLÍVAR WAS ON his knees, vowing to liberate his homeland, there was an older, worldlier Venezuelan readying himself for the task. On September 2, 1805, a graying war veteran traveling under the name of Mr. George Martin boarded the Polly in Gravesend, England, en route to New York to muster an army of freedom fighters. He was Francisco de Miranda, the famous rebel to whom Bolívar’s father had appealed almost a quarter century before.

  Miranda, at fifty-five, had led a remarkably colorful life. He had met many of the leading personages of the day, including Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Henry Knox, Catherine the Great, Maximilien de Robespierre, General Lafayette, even Joseph Haydn. He was at once a glamorous, well-traveled, sophisticated polyglot and a hapless itinerant who, during the course of his quest for liberty, would be accused variously as a smuggler, a deserter, a charlatan, and a gigolo. He had been born in Caracas in 1750, the son of a Canary Islander. His father, a prominent merchant, owned a number of businesses, including a textile factory and a bakery, but when the Spanish authorities chose him to be the leader of a new militia, the Mantuano elite rose up in fury. The very men—including Juan Vicente de Bolívar—whose signatures were on the letter begging Miranda to mount an insurgency against the Spanish had led a campaign against Miranda’s father, excoriating him as “a mulatto, a government henchman, a mere shopkeeper, an upstart, and unworthy” of his honorary appointments. Miranda’s father was forced into a mortifying legal battle in which he was expected to produce lengthy genealogies proving the “purity” of his blood.

  Stung by that humiliation, Miranda set off for Spain in 1771 at the age of twenty. After two years of study in Madrid, he became a captain in the Spanish army, a position his father bought for him for 85,000 reales. He went on to fight in Spain’s conflict against the Moors in North Africa, against the redcoats in the final stages of the American Revolution, and as a spy on British exploits in the Caribbean. In 1782, badgered by Spanish authorities for a fleeting collaboration with a British smuggler, he escaped to the hills outside Havana. Within a year—even as the infant Bolívar was coming into the world—Miranda was working his way up the east coast of the newly independent United States of America, consulting old soldiers about how to wage a revolution, consorting with rabble as well as founders, enchanting women with his manly good looks and erudition, visiting whorehouses with prominent New Englanders, reading voraciously all the while. He was an irresistibly charming man.

  Eventually, Miranda left the United States and crisscrossed Europe—from Marseille to Istanbul and from Corinth to St. Petersburg—in a campaign to gain adherents to his cause. In London he was put on the prime minister’s payroll as a consultant for American affairs. He gave William Pitt innumerable documents describing Spain’s fortifications and outlining his plan for a unified, liberated South America: its parliamentary system would be modeled after England’s; its head executive would be a descendant of the Inca. For the rest of his days, he would try to get these documents back from the English government, but his pleas would go ignored.

  All the same, Miranda was a tireless diplomat for the cause. He traveled to Prussia with John Adams’s soon-to-be son-in-law, William Stephens Smith; Miranda and Smith became good friends, sharing their wardrobes and carousing in bawdy houses. Miranda had fought in the French Army of the North as a field marshal, a rank he was given on the mistaken understanding that he had been a brigadier general in the American Revolution. Clearly, he was a master of exaggeration. So intimate a friend did he become of Catherine the Great that her court assumed they were ardent lovers. Miranda has “traveled to great advantage,” one friendly observer was prompted to say, and “nothing has escaped his penetration, not even the Empress of all the Russias.”

  Despite his service to France, however, Miranda was caught in the web of French revolutionary intrigue and was tried for desertion and cowardice. He was declared innocent of all charges. But Robespierre, suspecting Miranda of other perfidies, sent him to prison to await the guillotine. Although Miranda survived to have his name engraved in the Arc de Triomphe as one of the Revolution’s heroes, the experience made a deep and bitter impression. He had risked his life for the French, and yet all he had received in return was persecution or imprisonment. “What a country!” he exclaimed in an outraged public letter. As Gual and España conspired to overthrow Spanish rule in Venezuela in 1799, Miranda wrote to Gual, “We have before our eyes two great examples, the American and the French Revolutions. Let us prudently imitate the first and carefully shun the second.” Disgusted with France, he had settled in London, where, in the wake of Gual and España’s failures, he resumed his campaign to liberate his homeland.

  In the fall of 1805, as the British reveled in their decisive victory over the combined French and Spanish naval forces at Trafalgar—as a starry-eyed Bolívar made his way back from Rome to Paris over roads strewn with autumn foliage—Miranda was on board the Polly, headed to North America after a hiatus of twenty years. He had gone, like Hannibal, from country to country, gathering support for his beleaguered people, and he had decided that it was in the United States that those people would be best understood. Five months later, on the icy wintry morning of February 2, 1806, his warship, the Leander, left New York harbor with 180 men on board. Among them was William Steuben Smith, ex-President John Adams’s twenty-year-old grandson—the son of Miranda’s old traveling companion, William Stephens Smith. By then the elder Smith had become an important official for the Port of New York and chief facilitator of the mission. The expedition, ill-prepared and badly equipped, arrived on the coast of Venezuela after six months of serial calamities at sea. Two schooners that had joined the Leander—the Bee and the Bacchus—had fallen into Spanish hands. When General Miranda’s ragtag troops finally entered the Venezuelan city of Coró, they found no one there. Coró’s priests, hearing rumors that the invaders numbered as many as four thousand, had frightened the residents away. The Spanish army dismissed Miranda as a madman, and so the would-be liberators saw little action, apart from nervously shooting at one another from opposite ends of town. Even the Creoles denounced Miranda as a fanatic, a marauder—a deserter who hadn’t bothered to stand on Venezuelan soil for thirty-five years. Not one would be recruited to his cause.

  Miranda and his men were in Venezuela for a total of eleven days, during which time it became all too clear that his war of independence was a rank disaster. On August 13, the frustrated general gave orders to withdraw, and his creaky ship set sail for Aruba, leaving the Venezuelans to scratch their heads and wonder just who he was. Sometime later, the Marquis del Toro, the commanding colonel charged with defending the coast, wrote into a captain’s record, “On August 10th, this officer marched to Coró with his battalion . . . against the traitor Miranda.” The young officer was Juan Vicente Bolívar, the older brother of Simón.

  NAPOLEON’S WAR IN EUROPE HAD a dispiriting effect on Bolívar. Britain, which now ruled the seas, blockaded the entire coast of France, rendering it impossible for Bolívar to receive funds or sail home easily. He was frustrated, too, by the news of Miranda’s botched expedition. He had heard of it well in advance of its ill-fated landing in Venezuela. The campaign was the talk of New York and Washington—indeed of Europe—months before it ever set sail. Writing to a friend more than a month before Miranda stepped foot on Coró, Bolívar declared that it was sure to be a blighted operation. Venezuela wasn’t ready for Miranda’s revolution, Bolívar complained. “He’ll only do harm.”

  He was eager to leave Paris, anxious to go home. A friend obliged by loaning him 2,400 francs, which enabled him to travel from France to Germany and sail from a neutral port. He had a family duty to discharge: he had promised his sister María Antonia to deposit her son—his nephew Anacleto Clemente—in a private school in Philadelphia. Anacleto, a mere ten-year-old at the time, had arrived in Paris sometime before, just as the Napoleonic Wars were escalating. It was a perilous time to be young
and male in France. Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which numbered in the millions—ten times the size of Britain’s standing army—was a ravening war machine that took recruits as young as fifteen. Surely María Antonia worried about her son’s and brother’s safety. Bolívar and his nephew made their way east in October of 1806, hoping to sail from Hamburg, just as Napoleon’s hussars rode through the fog over the plains of Auerstadt, routed the Prussian army, and captured Berlin. Slipping into Germany through Holland in late November, Bolívar and the boy succeeded in boarding a ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina.

  It was a hard winter’s passage, the sea made fierce by icy gales, and when the ship finally hove into Charleston in January of 1807, Bolívar was ill with a raging fever. He was also completely out of funds. But he had established a warm friendship with one of the ship’s passengers, a certain Mr. M. Cormic of Charleston, who offered Bolívar and the boy his hospitality. How long Bolívar convalesced in Cormic’s home we do not know, but before long, he sailed to Philadelphia, where he finally received a shipment of money from Caracas and deposited Anacleto safely in school. Some historians have claimed that, from Philadelphia, Bolívar went on to visit Boston and New York, but there is no evidence to support it. All we know for sure is that by June he was home in Caracas.

  All the same, there is much we can deduce about Bolívar’s trip to North America. It was, after all, a time of great growth and ferment in the United States. He arrived in the South at the very moment when slavery was the most profitable, most deeply entrenched commercial enterprise in its economy. It is very possible that during his brief time in Charleston he visited its infamous slave market, which was only a short walk from the imposing mansions of the rich and whose clamor was all too palpable. As he looked around, he could not have failed to note that there was little evidence of the racial mixing so common in his own America: few mulattoes, almost no Indians, the differences between races extreme.

  He had come, too, during a time of expansion in the newly independent nation. The population of the United States had doubled since the Revolution, a growth rate more than twice as fast as that of any country in Europe. Everywhere he walked, he could hear hammers pounding nails into new construction, carts groaning under loads of marble, the frenzied whir of a nation on the climb. In four short years, since 1803, America had pushed its boundaries west by more than a thousand miles, pressing up against the Rocky Mountains.

  In Philadelphia, Bolívar saw evidence that in the scant twenty-three years since the United States had won its independence, it had become one of the most highly commercialized nations in the world. The people of the North reveled in work, and their attitude contrasted sharply with the leisurely slaveholding aristocracy Bolívar had seen in Charleston. In no country he had ever visited were business and profit more glorified. And in no country he had ever traveled were Sundays so sacrosanct—no music, no drinking, no loud, brazen conversation: the United States of America was quickly becoming the most evangelically Christian nation in the world. Bolívar cannot have helped but be struck by what he was seeing; he knew that his own fellow Americans were nothing like their northern counterparts—racially, spiritually, historically—and he would often say as much throughout his career, but there could be no doubt that freedom had brought great prosperity and democracy: “During my short visit to the United States,” he would later write, “for the first time in my life, I saw rational liberty at first hand.”

  What was surely most remarkable of all to Bolívar at this volatile juncture in history was the attitude North Americans held toward their southern neighbors. It was one of suspicion, and it was not without cause. The country was just emerging from the rancorous trial of William Stephens Smith, who had been charged with treason and, during the course of the proceedings, publicly thrashed for his involvement with Miranda. On the stand, Smith recounted how President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison had dined with Miranda and openly discussed Miranda’s project to liberate Venezuela. In effect, Smith swore, they had approved the Miranda plan. As a result, Smith had felt perfectly justified in supplying Miranda with men, ammunition, and a warship—actions, the prosecution contended, that were in clear violation of the Neutrality Act of 1794. By the end of the affair, which eventually became rabidly political, the real subjects under discussion were the powers of the American presidency, the authority vested in Congress to declare war, the business of supplying weapons to foreign rebels, and the courts’ ability to make a punishment fit a crime. In the course of the trial, the prosecution managed to smear mud on the Adams family, Jefferson, Madison, and any future South American rebel who had the temerity to approach the United States for military support.

  As Bolívar traveled the country, wherever he turned, whomever he met, whenever he identified himself as a Venezuelan, he was confronted with Miranda’s fame. Despite any opinions of the man he might have had or criticisms about his timing, he had to appreciate Miranda’s extraordinary access to world power. In the United States at least, among the people who counted, the name Miranda was synonymous with Spanish American independence. There was no question that any hope for American solidarity had been dealt a mighty blow.

  A mere quarter century after the Declaration of Independence, Latin America had already become a shuttlecock in the larger game of United States world diplomacy. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson had suggested that the United States might want Spanish America for itself. In a letter to a friend, Jefferson confided that Spain’s colonies were ripe for the plucking. “My fear,” he said, “[is that Spain is] too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.” Less than six months later, Jefferson’s political rival John Adams wrote to Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay that London was under the illusion that a revolution in South America would be “agreeable to the United States” and that North Americans would not only refuse to prevent it but would do “whatever possible to promote it.” Once he had won the presidency, however, Adams began to speak differently about the region: “You might as well talk about establishing democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes as among the Spanish American people,” he said. Adams’s secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, seconded the opinion, adding his own jab: those people are “corrupt and effeminate beyond example,” he said, referring perhaps to Miranda himself. Where European dreams of liberty were concerned, the founders’ rhetoric was kinder. “It accords with our principles,” Secretary of State Jefferson said, speaking of the new French Republic, “to acknowledge any government to be rightful which is formed by the will of the nation substantially declared.”

  Acknowledging a nation’s desire for independence may have accorded with American principle, but a more pressing political reality was beginning to take root in the fledgling United States of America. President Jefferson moved to make that clear in a proclamation he issued just weeks before Bolívar stepped into the chill of a Philadelphia winter: any citizen conspiring to go to war against the dominion of Spain, Jefferson announced—anyone planning to rebel against Madrid’s rightful power—would be vigorously prosecuted and punished. Perhaps he was trying to make a point about meddling with sovereign governments. Perhaps he was attempting to counter the stinging embarrassment of the Miranda-Smith affair. In any case, economic realities had come to rule the way North America looked—or didn’t look—on its hemispheric neighbors. No one understood this better than Simón Bolívar as he sailed his way home through the Caribbean in the spring of 1807. The United States would be the last foreign soil he would tread before undertaking the liberation of South America—he would henceforward credit it as an eye-opening experience, an undeniable inspiration. But it could not be a model. Nor was it a country on which he could rely.

  CHAPTER 4

  Building a Revolution

  They say grand projects need to be built with calm!

  Are three hundred years of calm not enough?

  —Simón Bolívar

  Bolívar ar
rived in Caracas in June of 1807, filled with resolve. He was convinced that his America, like France and the United States, could shuck its past, shed its masters, and redefine itself. But he also knew that liberation would not be easy. War and blockades had brought trade to a standstill; Creoles were cut off from the outside, their information restricted to what Madrid and the Inquisition would allow. Yet even Madrid seemed strangely absent now, its regents in Caracas disconnected and rudderless. It was as if the whole of South America were in limbo, awaiting the madre patria’s next move.

  As Bolívar went about managing his estates, improving the family businesses, and tending the fields alongside his slaves, he understood that many Creoles of his class, too, longed ardently for liberation. There were differing views on how it should be won. The young seemed unwilling to contemplate anything less than a revolution; their fathers were afraid of losing all in a race war. But there was no question the will to independence was there. Miranda simply hadn’t cultivated it.

  Little by little, Bolívar attuned himself to the temper of the times. Even as he battled his neighbor Antonio Briceño in a land dispute that began with pitchforks and ended up in the courts, he met with like-minded republicans. They gathered, ostensibly to socialize, in sparkling salons organized by the best and brightest of the colony: Bolívar’s former tutor, the writer Andrés Bello; his in-laws, brothers of the Marquis del Toro; boyhood friends Tomás and Mariano Montilla; his young uncles Pedro Palacios and José Félix Ribas. Scions of the privileged aristocracy, they were conspirators now. Their meetings masqueraded as literary events or musical recitals, even gambling affairs, and many were hosted by the Bolívar brothers, especially at their house on the River Guaire, which was surrounded by ample gardens and so was perfectly suited for clandestine conversations. As Bolívar regaled his friends with eye-opening tales of his travels in Europe or the United States, and Andrés Bello—by then a prominent official—recited his translations of Voltaire, they all spoke freely of sedition. But for all the high hopes and spirited exchange, it would take a miracle to convert rhetoric into revolutionary acts.