Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  After an exchange of letters between the two leaders in August and September, Bolívar suggested that the most appropriate site for a conference would be in San Fernando de Apure, where he intended to establish headquarters. Morillo wasted no time in giving Bolívar his consent. Cautious about giving away his movements, wary of allowing the enemy to see how weak his army had become, Bolívar delayed the meeting several times. In October, he made a number of quick raids on the border provinces, if only to show Morillo that Greater Colombia needed an armistice less than Spain did, but all the while he maintained a remarkably cordial correspondence with Morillo, in which both generals carefully explained every move. The conference to negotiate an armistice finally came to pass in November in the picturesque mountain town of Trujillo, where Bolívar had decreed war to the death seven years before. General Sucre and two colonels were delegated to meet with the royalist commissioners and work out the details of the armistice. On November 21, the patriots and Spaniards met for the first time.

  By November 25, two treaties were ratified. The first called for a six-month armistice; the second recognized Bolívar as president of the republic and set out the terms for an exchange of prisoners. Peace was the ultimate objective. The meetings were cordial, though formal, and Sucre distinguished himself as a coolheaded negotiator. He managed to achieve everything Bolívar wanted. Once the work was complete, Morillo expressed his eagerness to meet the Liberator. A conference was arranged for the morning of November 27 in the scruffy little village of Santa Ana, which lay on a mist-bound limestone ridge between two valleys, some 250 miles southwest of Caracas. Since Santa Ana was well inside Spanish territory, Bolívar took every precaution to put General Urdaneta in command of the army before he, Sucre, and a handful of others set out to see Morillo face-to-face.

  So it was that the archenemies of one of the bloodiest episodes of South American history met on a muddy road, far from the medullas of political power. They approached one another from opposite directions, their paths as contrary as their essential natures: Bolívar had come from a long line of aristocrats and wore his pedigree lightly; Morillo, born into a family of peasants, had become Count of Cartagena in the course of an illustrious career. Bolívar was confident, spontaneous, as only the wellborn can be; Morillo was shrewd and deliberate, having scrapped for every honor he had been awarded. Into that historic moment, Bolívar rode a strong mule, was accompanied by a handful of men, and was dressed in the garb of a humble soldier. Morillo, on the other hand, set out on a magnificent horse, was clad in a uniform bespangled with decorations, and accompanied by fifty of his best officers and a full regiment of hussars. As they rode over the bare hills in the damp chill of a November morning, they might have glimpsed the sparkling expanse of Lake Maracaibo in the distance. If they had glanced south, they would have seen the splendid peaks of the cordillera. Weary of war, anxious about their own capacities to execute it, they came to that crossroad with high and not dissimilar hopes.

  Morillo was first to arrive, and when he appeared at the appointed place he was soon met by Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary, who announced that the Liberator was on his way. As they perched on their horses, peering expectantly down the road, the general asked what kind of escort would accompany the president of the republic. O’Leary replied that Bolívar’s retinue amounted to no more than twelve patriot officers and the three Spanish commissioners who had negotiated the armistice in Trujillo. Morillo was taken aback. “Well,” he finally managed, “I thought my escort too small for this venture, but I see that my old enemy has outdone me in chivalry. I’ll order my hussars to withdraw.” He did so immediately. The Liberator’s modest party soon appeared on the crest of the hill that overlooked Santa Ana, and Morillo moved forward to meet it. As the two neared one another, General Morillo wanted to know which of the horsemen was Bolívar. When O’Leary pointed him out, the Spaniard exclaimed, “What? That little man in the blue jacket and sergeant’s cap; the one riding the mule?” But no sooner had he said it than Bolívar was before him. The generals dismounted and embraced each other heartily. Their words were cordial, warm—filled with the kind of respect and admiration only the most serious rivals can have for one another. They headed to the private house Morillo had commandeered for the occasion, and sat down with their officers for a celebratory lunch.

  For all the enmity that had passed between them, the two leaders were instantly companionable, with much to discuss. Morillo had fought in the Battle of Trafalgar only days after Bolívar had trekked to Rome as a young man and made his spirited vow on the heights of Monte Sacro. Morillo had served under the Duke of Wellington, the brother of Richard Wellesley, whose help Bolívar had solicited when the revolution was but an idea, with much blood yet to be shed. There were innumerable toasts made to the end of hostilities and the future of Spanish American understanding. “To the victories of Boyacá!” one Spanish colonel sang out. “To Colombians and Spaniards,” General La Torre added, “may they march side by side all the way to hell against the despots and the tyrants!” The men spoke of sacrifices, of heroism, of the past ten years of their lives, which had been steeped in the dark business of war. That very afternoon, Morillo proposed the building of a pyramid to commemorate their meeting, and Bolívar readily agreed to it. Together, they proceeded to the spot of their first embrace and called upon their officers to roll out a first stone. More toasts were had; more libations consumed. “I drink,” said Bolívar, “to the heroism of the warriors of both armies . . . to their loyalty, sacrifice, and courage. . . . Eternal hatred upon those who lust for blood and who shed it unjustly!”

  The lateness of the hour finally put an end to the exchange, but the generals decided that even nightfall would not separate them. They hung their hammocks in the same room, said their good nights, and slept soundly, compensating perhaps—as one chronicler put it—for the many sleepless nights they had caused one another. The following morning, Morillo accompanied Bolívar to the large rock that marked their peace, whereupon they repeated their promises, embraced once more, and parted, never to see each other again. On December 17, less than a month later, General Morillo boarded a ship in La Guaira and set sail for Spain. General La Torre was left in command of the king’s army with a single recommendation from Morillo: “Defend the fortress of Puerto Cabello at all costs!” It turned out to be good advice, as the Spaniards would need that port in the harried evacuation of its expeditionary forces.

  Much later, after Bolívar’s enemies criticized him severely for being so conciliatory with Morillo, a general whom even Spain had had to censure for his bloodcurdling cruelties, Bolívar had this to say:

  During the entire course of my public life, I have never shown more political acuity or diplomatic cunning than in that crucial hour; and I can say without an ounce of vanity that I think I bested General Morillo then as I bested him in almost every one of my military operations. . . . The armistice of six months fooled Morillo into returning to Spain and handing over his command to General La Torre, who was less skilled, less energetic, and less a consummate soldier than the Count of Cartagena. Let the dolts and my enemies say what they will. . . . Never was a diplomatic game played more successfully than that of the day and night of November 27 in the village of Santa Ana.

  AS THE WAR LIMPED INTO its tenth year and rumors of an armistice began to spread throughout the English-speaking world, the eyes of foreign governments turned once again to the struggle for Latin American independence. By now, the English were well acquainted with Bolívar’s revolution. Thousands of mercenaries had been recruited to serve the Liberator’s cause; some, who had been promised gifts of land in return for their services, had gone so far as to bring their families. Young brigadiers with high hopes had marched through the tropical wilds singing “Ye Gentlemen of England”; few of them would make it home.

  Bolívar had been a keen advocate of British recruitment. Three of his aides-de-camp were British. Foreign veterans had become as valuable as gold to republican
generals, representing the kind of rigor and training that raw, untested soldiers could emulate. Bolívar’s claim that the true Liberator had been Luis López Méndez, his recruiting agent in London, was a blatant exaggeration, to be sure—a generous, diplomatic flourish—but not without a germ of truth.

  More accurately, the British mercenary experience in Spanish America, despite its triumphs, was marred with bitter disappointment. As one young English colonel put it succinctly: there had been much to regret. Young men were lured by promises that Venezuela was a richly hung garden, that its partisans of liberty were steadfast and united. What they joined instead was poverty, starvation, and a race war “as black and barbarous as the slave trade.” Weakened by typhus, which they had brought with them from Britain, they were especially vulnerable; most died of heat exhaustion, rampant infection, or simply too much rum. Stories began to filter home that the few who had survived were now as barefoot as the locals; that Bolívar was little more than a swindler and bombast; that the only way to survive his revolution had been to sack churches, rob reliquaries. In London’s halls of power, however, the view was very different: with Spain in retreat and Bolívar’s star rising, a lucrative trade loomed on the horizon. There was money to be made.

  In the rapidly expanding United States, a similar awareness was growing. Champions of commerce advocated the recognition of the fledgling South American republics if only because they knew profits were bound to follow. Men of ideals believed that the American nation, itself born of rebellion, should stand behind any impulse to freedom. Some, like Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, however, were slow to see what, if any, advantages diplomatic recognition might bring. Not long before, he had stated with all candor:

  Venezuela, though it has emancipated all its slaves, has been constantly alternating between an absolute military government, a capitulation to Spanish authority, and guerrillas black and white, of which every petty chief has acted for purposes of war and rapine as an independent sovereign. There is finally in South America neither unity of cause nor unity of effort, as there was in our Revolution.

  He was quite right, of course; even Bolívar had warned the congress of Angostura that the world would never recognize the new republic until it spoke with one voice. “Unity, unity, unity,” he had urged. But by 1820, when two large republics—with all their attendant differences—had joined Greater Colombia to stand united behind Bolívar, John Quincy Adams still had not changed his mind. He admitted that he distrusted everything the South Americans said. “There is no community of interests or of principles between North and South America,” he stated flatly. And that was where diplomatic relations would remain for three years to come.

  Indeed, there were reasons for Adams’s reticence. There were the ongoing delicate negotiations between Washington and Madrid about Florida, which Spain owned and the United States wanted. There was the thorny fact that the slave trade was booming in the United States and few legislators in Washington wanted to hear about black revolutionaries or unbridled race mixing. There was also the fact that much of the information Adams was getting about Bolívar was downright negative. In 1818 and 1819, the U.S. government had sent two delegations to Venezuela to meet Bolívar and negotiate the return of American ships that had been seized by privateers in service of Bolívar’s revolution. The Baltimore journalist Baptis Irvine had gone in 1818; the naval hero Captain Oliver Hazard Perry followed in 1819. Neither of their experiences had boded well for diplomatic relations. Commodore Perry had made the harsh three-hundred-mile voyage up the Orinoco at the height of the mosquito season only to find that President Bolívar was not in Angostura, but out on a military maneuver. As it happened, Perry had landed on the very day Bolívar had triumphed in Pantano de Vargas in New Granada, following his harrowing march over the Andes. After a fruitless exchange with the long-winded Zea, Perry had had no option but to return, whereupon he began to display sure signs of yellow fever: By mid-voyage to British Trinidad, he was producing a terrifying black vomit. Before he could board his own ship, he was dead.

  By then, Baptis Irvine had delivered blistering reports about Bolívar to John Quincy Adams. The South American Liberator, Irvine wrote, was “a charlatan general and mountebank statesman.” In numerous discussions with Bolívar, the irascible Irvine had lost his temper, provoking stern responses from the Liberator. It was no surprise that his accounts would be disapproving. “He affects the language of Napoleon,” the journalist wrote huffily, which was to say that Bolívar was mimicking a leader any upstanding American should despise. “Without a ray of true political knowledge or a hint of morality, he apes the style and claims the character of Washington. However . . . he can surpass his present competitors by his knack of composition and fluency of speech.”

  That penchant for oratorical flourish would be on rich display one evening at a dinner given in Irvine’s honor. The Liberator, carried away by his own eloquence, reached such heights of exhilaration that he leapt onto the table, and, with no regard to the shivering flowers and crystal, strode up and down the wooden length to make his point. “Thus,” he cried, “as I cross this table from one end to the other, I shall march from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Panama to Cape Horn, until every last Spaniard is expelled!”

  There was no question that Irvine’s portrait of Bolívar was unrelievedly negative. But there was strong support for Bolívar’s revolution from a fervently egalitarian American public at large, as well as from a certain Samuel D. Forsyth, who, hoping to be appointed official agent to South America, had visited with President Monroe and Adams, expressed his high opinion of Greater Colombia, and called the Liberator a great man. Forsyth, who had served as interpreter for Perry in his travels, had not always thought so well of Bolívar, and so his change of heart made for a good impression. Certainly the most ardent supporter of the Spanish American rebels, however, was Henry Clay, the flamboyant congressman from Kentucky, who electrified his fellow members of the House of Representatives by crying out that the revolution’s potential beneficiaries were no less than “eighteen million, struggling to be free!” Clay argued passionately for more commercial involvement, claiming that South America—with its rich metal resources and hunger for North American goods—represented a vast market with endless opportunities. Clay’s exhortations were resonant tributes to capitalism and the democratic spirit, but they were also expressions of pique against Adams, for, as everyone knew, President Monroe had passed over Clay to make Adams secretary of state. But no one could deny it: the golden-tongued orator from Kentucky was a tireless enthusiast for South American liberty. On February 10, 1821, Clay moved that the House of Representatives join the American people in their support for the distant revolution. When the Adams-Onís Treaty was proclaimed twelve days later and the United States purchased Florida for $5 million, the congressman finally had his way. The delicate negotiations with Spain were over; official Washington could turn its attention to its southern neighbors. With a firm foot in Florida, the United States was now only a small sea away from Bolívar’s war.

  THE ARMISTICE WITH SPAIN LASTED a scant five months. But it was time enough for republican forces to strengthen their numbers, discipline the troops, acquire munitions. Well fed, reasonably well clothed, and supremely confident in Bolívar, they had a marked advantage over the Spaniards now. The royalists, in contrast, were exhausted. With no relief from Spain in sight, they seemed to pass into perpetual limbo. Soldiers who had been told they would fight for a maximum of three years had seen three years come and go. Their pay was late; their food was scarce; many were beset with fevers. Mainly, they wondered why they were fighting a war that Spain itself had rejected. A corrosive ill-humor invaded every rank. Even the generals in charge—La Torre and Morales—were in constant disagreement.

  In early 1821, even as Bolívar sent two envoys to Madrid to discuss terms of peace with the Spaniards, he began to prepare for the next stage of the revolution. He was haunted by the fear that his negotiators would lose the
ir nerve and capitulate to Spanish demands. He had given them permission to trade Quito or even the Isthmus of Panama—lesser colonies—in return for Colombia’s independence, but under no circumstances were they to agree to any constitutional agreements with Spain, or to subjugation under a prince or potentate from any reigning family in Europe. “Colombia will be independent, sovereign, and free from all foreign domination, or it will cease to exist,” he insisted. Clearly, he had little faith that the dialogue in Madrid would amount to anything, and he was right. Although his correspondence shows that he dearly desired peace, among the first documents he dictated after his friendly meeting with General Morillo was an agenda for renewed war.

  It was at about this time that Bolívar learned that the coveted port city of Guayaquil—in what is now Ecuador—had declared independence. The people of Guayaquil, hearing that San Martín’s army had landed in Pisco, just south of Lima, expected the Argentine general to sweep north now to liberate them, and they stormed the royalist halls of government in anticipation. Bolívar longed to go to Guayaquil himself to secure the region for Greater Colombia. It was a strategic port, potentially vital to the republic, and he did not want to see it go to San Martín so easily. But Bolívar was also aware that his priority needed to be Caracas, which still languished under Spanish rule. He sent General Sucre to Guayaquil instead.

  It was a good decision. By April, the armistice was over. A rebellion had erupted in the Spanish stronghold of Maracaibo, fomented by one of Bolívar’s generals, Rafael Urdaneta. It was a clear provocation, and Bolívar had neither sanctioned nor anticipated it. He rushed now to explain to the Spaniards that an unexpected rebellion could hardly count as the willful rupture of a military treaty, but General La Torre was adamant. He demanded the city’s return. He informed Bolívar that—failing Maracaibo’s restoration to the Spanish crown—the armistice would end on April 28.