Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  BOLÍVAR STAYED IN CALI LONG enough to learn that Sucre and his troops were trapped in Guayaquil, unable to advance and meet him halfway in Quito. The royalists had blocked the way north, and for all the support Sucre had raised in Guayaquil, he didn’t have the manpower to take on the stubbornly defended capital. His vain thrusts to penetrate royalist territory had met with devastating defeat. In desperation, Sucre had called on San Martín in Lima to loan him troops, but he would have to wait months for an answer.

  Meanwhile, Bolívar—unable to rely on anyone—forged his way south along the difficult mountain route to Popayán. As he approached that highly fortified town, the Spanish colonel in charge, José María Obando, emerged under a flag of truce and surprised Bolívar by requesting an interview. The Liberator’s charisma and passion for the American cause instantly won over the colonel. Not only did Obando surrender, he offered his services—and the services of his entire garrison—to the patriot side. This bit of politicking persuaded Bolívar that he might have similar success with other royalists. If only he could be allowed to talk to them. He wrote to Santander with an idea:

  I have been awake all night, thinking about the new challenges. . . . I am certain I will reach the Juanambú River with less than two thousand men. I am equally certain that the enemy will meet me with more than four thousand; if I go on, I will be forced to fight a battle more risky than Boyacá, and I will fight it out of rage and despair. . . . My best hope is to take a political tack and try to win over the enemy leaders and troops, if at all possible. Here then is what I propose . . .

  What he proposed was forgery. He instructed Santander to send him letters and documents stating that Spain had yielded the fight and now recognized Greater Colombia’s independence. With these false papers and strategically placed “announcements” in the local Gaceta, he would fool Quito, force it to let down its guard, and allow him to enter the city. “The object of all this fuss,” he wrote Santander, “is to persuade the enemy that there is no other recourse: they must deal with me, and we must prevent more blood sacrifice.”

  His instructions to Santander were specific. The vice president was to create a trumped-up letter from the Spanish general La Torre, requesting safe passage for a commission that had arrived from Madrid to make peace with the new government of Colombia. Vice President Zea and General Páez were to produce appropriately welcoming responses. Santander obliged without delay and produced the bogus documentation. When all was duly delivered, Bolívar presented these “lies”—for that is what he called them—to Quito’s interim president Aymerich as well as the recently arrived Captain-General Mourgeón, and made overtures to Popayán’s bishop, requesting his help in ensuring a peaceful transition. But no one was taken in by this deceit, least of all the people of Pasto, diehard royalists who lay between him and the capital, and who preferred all-out war to any talk about reconciliation.

  All-out war is what Bolívar finally gave them. On April 7, 1822, Easter Sunday, he led his army to the cliffs of Cariaco, on the side of the volcano where the Spanish army had been seen making an advance. Before he rode off to reconnoiter the area—something he always did alone—he ordered his officers not to have lunch until they had secured the overlooking promontory, which at that hour appeared untaken. When he returned, he saw royalists perched on those heights and his army eating leisurely in the gorge. His second in command had misunderstood his order and was full of remorse. But there was no doubt that the liberating army was now at a distinct disadvantage. Fuming, Bolívar moved to make up for it.

  He commanded his men to make a bold, frontal attack. It was a questionable decision, wholly impulsive, built on fury. Wave after wave of patriot lines rushed up the escarpment to sure death. The British battalion—“Rifles”—made a heroic advance with their bayonets drawn, trying to drive the enemy from its fast perch, but to little avail. They couldn’t get close enough. It seemed the whole republican force would be obliterated on that maddeningly pitched slope. Bolívar, watching the butchery from below, was convinced the battle was lost. But as the sun slipped over the rocky ridge, creating deep shadows in the ravine, a miracle was at work in the right flank. Soldiers with nothing but bayonets thrust their blades into the steep incline, then, clambering up a ladder of ascending weapons, scaled the cliff. The fighting went well into night, until the moon vanished in a murky haze and darkness engulfed the fray. “Our camp,” wrote Obando, the royalist who had defected to the patriots in Popayán, “was a mill of destruction. Our rifles were broken, our equipment burned; all that we might have carried away was destroyed. Dawn came and we were unable to withdraw. A thick fog prevented us from seeing the enemy or the position taken by our own Rifles. The Liberator was in a mood.” Bolívar was in more than a mood. For days, he had been fighting a fever. That he had lived through those eight grueling hours was remarkable in itself.

  There were those—including Bolívar—who described the Battle of Bomboná as a triumph for the patriot side; others saw it as sheer folly. It was neither. When dusk covered the field and the enemy withdrew like a frightened phantom, no one was sure who had prevailed. The patriots, dazed, remained in the arena, wondering whether hostilities would return with the sun. If nothing else, they could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they had split the royalist camp and distracted it from its defense of Quito. But by morning, it was clear what price they had paid for it. Bodies littered the ground in obscene heaps; a vile stench permeated the air. Every patriot officer save six lay gravely wounded. Bolívar, sick to death, was carried away in a litter.

  Though doubts about those bitter losses followed, it soon became clear that the Battle of Bomboná had won something after all. It had been a harbinger of change. The citizens of Pasto and Quito—two stout chambers of the royalist heart—awoke the next morning a little less certain, a little more afraid. General Sucre, now able to push north from Guayaquil, rose masterfully to the occasion.

  CHAPTER 12

  Under the Volcanoes

  I am consumed by the demon of war, determined to finish this struggle.

  —Simón Bolívar

  “Either I lose my way, or I press on to glory,” Bolívar had confessed to Vice President Santander, and indeed he seemed to be fighting battles within as well as without. To those seeing him for the first time, he seemed far older than his age. At thirty-eight, he was grizzled by war, jaundiced by illness and fatigue. Though his movements remained nimble, his voice vibrant, he bore the signs of a soldier too long in the fray. His face was weary, his color wan. His hair was long, thinning, shot through with silver, tied back to curb its wild disorder. He was emaciated, given to fevers and mysterious ailments. He was no longer the brash young man who had fought his way up the Magdalena River and triumphed effortlessly in battle. He was no longer the hero of the Admirable Campaign. Although he paid close attention to his hygiene—maintained a strict regimen of baths, drank little and seldom, and resolutely did not smoke—his health had noticeably deteriorated. He was no longer the infamous, indefatigable Iron Ass. For all the vigor of his will and spirit, he was a prematurely aging soldier, a hard-living, hard-bitten veteran who had fought across thousands of miles of punishing terrain and showed it. Few leaders of nations, apart from Genghis Khan, had spent as many hours—months, years—in a saddle. But twelve years of unremitting effort had taken their toll. He didn’t allow his men to see it, but it had become harder for him to tolerate the physical hardship. More than anything, what he needed now was to be assisted by a sprier, younger version of himself: a warrior with all the right instincts, a leader with a common touch, a bright young general who did not question his supremacy and who pledged absolute and undying loyalty to the cause.

  That man was Antonio José de Sucre. “If God had given us the right to choose our own families,” Bolívar would later say, “I would have chosen General Sucre as my son.” The twenty-seven-year-old general of brigade was a vigorous warrior in his prime. Alert, high-spirited, and rigorously disciplined, he
was the quintessential officer and gentleman, respected by all who fought under his command. When Bolívar had elevated him, despite his youth, to the most senior of generals, it was because Sucre’s talents rivaled his own: Sucre was brave, tireless, uncannily adept at making quick decisions. He insisted on doing everything himself, from maintaining troop records to inspecting his soldiers’ rations. He had a sixth sense for battle strategy. In short, Sucre was everything the Liberator admired in the best of soldiers. Together they were the Achilles and Patroclus of the New World.

  By May of 1822, the two were laboring toward each other across a volatile terrain—the lava-encrusted avenue of craters that dominated the bitterly contested ground between Colombia and Peru. With the Battle of Bomboná, Bolívar had managed to distract the enemy enough to allow Sucre to move, and the young general proceeded to make his way up the volcano-studded landscape between Guayaquil and Quito, reinforced by a battalion sent to him by San Martín. For a year now, Sucre and three thousand superbly trained soldiers under his command had pointed toward this moment, awaiting word from Bolívar. But the last missive Sucre had received from the Liberator had been sent months before, in December of 1821. By the time he read it, he had been powerless to obey its orders. So much of the war had gone this way: late correspondence, missed opportunities. Seeing now that the enemy was in disorder, he decided to try to take Quito at all costs.

  Securing San Martín’s support had turned out to be a thorny business for Sucre. The Protector of Peru had announced publicly that he looked forward to traveling north to meet Bolívar, but as time passed, he had grown skeptical about Greater Colombia’s ambitions. Within a month of announcing his eagerness to meet his fellow revolutionaries, he began to chafe about Sucre’s presence in Guayaquil, convinced that the port’s proximity and close commercial ties to Lima made it rightfully Peruvian, and, therefore, under his jurisdiction. In February, after dispatching one of his most talented young colonels, Andrés de Santa Cruz, to help fortify Sucre’s army, he worked himself into a state over reports about Bolívar’s progress toward Guayaquil. Finally, he had boarded one of Lord Cochrane’s ships and hastened north to lay claim on the coveted city. But by the time he got halfway, he saw a copy of a letter Bolívar had sent to Guayaquil’s president, José Joaquín de Olmedo. In it, Bolívar claimed peremptorily that the port of Guayaquil belonged to Colombia. A bomb could not have produced a more shattering effect. Seething, San Martín turned around and sailed back to Lima, where he secured authority to go to war.

  In his fury, San Martín also recalled Santa Cruz’s auxiliary forces, insisting that the colonel return to Peru at once. But the charismatic Sucre soon persuaded Santa Cruz to ignore that order, prepare for greater glory, and join his historic march against Quito. Eventually, San Martín backed down and thought better of prosecuting a suicidal civil war against an equivalent, liberating army. He decided to send one of his generals to take command of the allied forces. Sucre was appalled when he heard of it. But indeed none of those plans came to pass; San Martín was in no position to enforce them. It had all been a tempest in a teacup—a show of martial posturing—but it had revealed everyone’s essential character. Bolívar had been high-handed; San Martín, petulant; Sucre, unyielding. And the young Santa Cruz had proved to be divided in his loyalties, as he would continue to be for all time.

  By the end of April, Sucre was leading a march to the royalist stronghold of Quito. Bearing west of the Pichincha volcano, he skirted the city and positioned his forces due north of the king’s army. He had no way of knowing it, but Mourgeón, the able Spanish captain-general who had arrived only months before, had died suddenly from the complications of a fall, leaving Quito’s president, General Aymerich, to fight alone. On May 13, Sucre’s forces scaled the icy peak of the volcano and, ten days later, descended the other side in an early morning fog. It had rained all night, and negotiating the slippery terrain had been treacherous. Nevertheless, they streamed down on the enemy, meeting them in battle at Riobamba. The hostilities were so close to Quito that the city’s inhabitants clambered onto their rooftops to watch the conflict play out on the slope of their looming mountain. The Battle of Pichincha was hardly a surgical strike, and required constantly shifting strategy, but Sucre wasted no effort, giving his every move an object, a rationale. By the end of the day, when it was clear that his army was prevailing, he offered Aymerich a chance to lay down his arms. On May 25, Sucre declared a victory in Quito, taking the capital and securing the capture of more than two thousand prisoners. His treaty was charitable, allowing the royalists to sail to Spain with full military honors; as a result, many of them decided to stay and fight on the patriot side. Hearing that Quito had fallen, the stubborn bastion of Pasto succumbed completely to Bolívar. By a remarkable blend of strategy and bravura, Pasto, Quito, and the valuable port of Guayaquil were now firmly Colombian. Bolívar had only to take his prize.

  The Liberator was acutely aware that he owed the victory to his gifted general, and he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of jealousy. He fretted that Sucre’s battle at Pichincha—not his, at Bomboná—would go down in history as the “third sister” of Boyacá and Carabobo. Indeed, the surrender seemed all askew. Even as Bolívar negotiated the grudging submission of inglorious Pasto, Sucre was accepting the far more glamorous capitulation of Quito from the illustrious Aymerich. Profoundly exhausted, Bolívar wrote to Santander, exhibiting an uncharacteristic smallness of mind: “Sucre had more troops than I did, and fewer enemies,” he grumbled. “We, on the other hand, have been in hell, struggling with demons. The victory of Bomboná is far more beautiful than that of Pichincha.” He wanted to make sure that Vice President Santander represented it that way.

  It didn’t take long for Bolívar’s spirit to rise, however, as the wider world began to register the triumphs. He entered Quito on June 16, heartened by deafening cheers. He was resplendent in red and gold, mounted on his stately white horse, surrounded by adoring masses. Being a shrewd military man, General Sucre made it a point to leave all glory to the Liberator. The torch of independence was fully ablaze now. The last redoubt of Colombia’s royalists had been subdued; the vital Isthmus of Panama had declared itself for Bolívar. Nearly a million square miles of South America—a region far greater than Napoleon’s empire—answered to a single man.

  ON JUNE 19, THREE DAYS after Bolívar’s descent into Quito, and nearly three thousand miles away, an ailing diplomat was admitted to President James Monroe’s office. Bent, pained, barely able to propel himself across the brightly polished floors of the White House, he clutched a document in one hand. John Quincy Adams recorded the moment:

  At one o’clock I presented Mr. Manuel Torres as Chargé d’Affaires from the republic of Colombia to the President. This incident was chiefly interesting as being the first formal act of recognition of an independent South American Government. Torres, who has scarcely life in him to walk alone, was deeply affected by it . . . moved even to tears. The President assured him of the great interest taken by the United States in the welfare and success of his country, and of the particular satisfaction with which he received him as its first representative. The audience was, as usual, only a few minutes.

  For four long years, Torres had been trying to win diplomatic recognition—not to mention arms, ships, reinforcements—for Bolívar’s revolution. But no amount of courtly palaver got the old gentleman very far. In the end, it was Bolívar’s successes that changed the American president’s mind. As the Battle of Boyacá led to the Battle of Carabobo, and the Liberator set out over the Andes for Quito, there could be no doubt that the tide of revolution was rolling on. Congressman Henry Clay finally persuaded his countrymen of it. After Torres’s emotional meeting with Monroe and Adams, the elderly Colombian dragged himself home to Philadelphia full of joy that he could now relay the good news to Bolívar. Less than a month later, Torres was dead. It is unlikely that anyone in the Colombian army knew it, but on the day of their diplomat’s funeral, which was att
ended by representatives of the United States army and navy and accompanied by full military honors, all the ships in Philadelphia’s harbor flew their colors at half-staff. Indeed, Bolívar and his army were at such a remove in the depths of the equatorial cordillera that they would not be fully aware of U.S. recognition for another half year.

  BOLÍVAR AND HIS ARMY, HARDLY cognizant of the fame they had reaped in the larger world, were living for the moment. Spent by war, reduced by privation, they spilled southward, focused only on the business of staying alive. Few pleasures awaited them. Nevertheless, legend has it that, as Bolívar rode into Quito in his splendid victory parade, he glanced up at the riotously decorated balconies and there saw the woman who would become his greatest love. The truth is probably quite different. The Liberator’s first sight of the comely, rapier-witted Manuela Sáenz may have been at a ball given for him that night, or perhaps in an interview that she sought with the new chief of state to resolve questions of her inheritance. But there is no doubt that the meeting—given the exuberance of the moment—was mutually galvanizing. She was as motivated as he, as moody, as curious, as well read. Within days, or even hours, they were lovers, and would remain so until the end of his life.

  On the face of things, Manuela Sáenz was a respectable young woman: rich, married, a habitué of liberal aristocratic circles in Quito and Lima. But she was also a woman with a complicated past. Born in Quito twenty-five years before, she was the illegitimate child of a scandalous liaison. Her father had been a wealthy Spaniard about town, an established family man; her mother, a middle-aged spinster from a prominent Creole family. The mother had birthed the child in secret, far away from society’s prying eyes, as custom and honor demanded. She had attempted to place her daughter in a good home in Quito, but—failing that—entrusted her to nuns in a convent that was known to take highborn “orphans.” Six years later, the mother was dead. For all his social-climbing ambitions, Manuela’s father—Simón Sáenz de Vergara—did a surprising thing. He took responsibility for the child. He gave large sums of money to the luxurious convent where she lived, introduced her to his other children, welcomed the pretty little girl into his home. Most important, he gave her the biggest gift a father could offer: the door to a new life. Before her twentieth birthday, he married her off to a wealthy businessman in Lima, an English shipping merchant named James Thorne.