by John Lynch
As Bolívar grew up in Caracas his world was a mixture of races and cultures, and he became acquainted with the people who would dominate his public life and determine his political decisions for years to come. The streets of Caracas were becoming more crowded, for this was a growing society: the population of Caracas province probably increased by over a third in size in the years 1785–1810, a growth affecting most racial sectors without altering the balance. The Indians of Venezuela, early victims of disease and dislocation, were mostly out of sight on the margin of society, in remote plains, mountains and forests, or in distant missions administered by friars and unaware of any wider identity. Bolívar’s immediate acquaintances were white creoles at the top of a society of castes. Race consciousness was acute and neighbours made it their business to know each other’s origins. The whites dominated the bureaucracy, law, the Church, land and the wholesale trade, but they were not a homogeneous group. They consisted of peninsular Spaniards, Venezuelan creoles – comprising a small number of leading families but many more with race mixture in their ancestry and ‘passing’ for whites – and Canarian immigrants. At the bottom swarmed the blancos de orilla (poor whites), artisans, traders and wage–earners, who merged into the pardos and were identified with them. Creole Canarians, resident in Venezuela for many generations, also included racially mixed families but were still regarded as Canarians.
Ethnic composition of the Venezuelan Population at the end of the Colonial Period
Source: Lombardi, People and Places in Colonial Venezuela, p. 132; Izard, Series estadísticas para la historia de Venezuela, p. 9; Báez Gutiérrez, Historia popular de Venezuela: Período independentista, p. 3.
People of colour comprised blacks, slaves and free people, and pardos or mulattos, who were the most numerous group in Venezuela. At the onset of independence, therefore, Venezuelan society was dominated numerically by 400,000 pardos and 200,000 Canarians, most of whom would be classified as poor whites. Together, Canarians and pardos, many of whom were descended from Canarians, made up 75 per cent of the total population, though they rarely acted together.
The poor whites had little in common with Bolívar’s class, the mantuanos, owners of land and slaves, producers of the colony’s wealth, commanders of the colony’s militia. Land was their base and land their ambition, though not necessarily to the exclusion of commerce, and successful merchants were known to invest in land and to marry into creole planter families. The wealthiest hacendados were drawn from the oldest families of the province, friends and acquaintances of the Bolívars. They were led by the marqués del Toro, whose annual income was estimated in 1781 at 25,000 to 30,000 pesos and personal wealth at 504,632 pesos, together with numerous properties. Then came a small group of some thirteen individuals with comparable wealth, incuding the first conde de Tovar, followed closely by the conde de la Granja, the conde de San Xavier, Dr José Ignacio Moreno, the marqués de Casa León, Marcos Ribas and Juan Vicente Bolívar. Simón’s father owned two cacao plantations, four houses in Caracas and others in La Guaira, sugar cane on the San Mateo estate, three cattle ranches in the llanos, an indigo plantation and a copper mine, and he left 350,000 pesos to his family, including the young Simón.22 At the end of the colonial period the landed aristocracy, the majority of them creoles, comprised 658 families, totalling 4,048 people, or 0.5 per cent of the population. This was the small group who monopolized land and mobilized labour, but whose riches were becoming fragmented as the older generation died and their heirs divided up their estates. The largest share of the Bolívar legacy, 120,000 pesos, went to the eldest son, Juan Vicente junior. A few of the top families were extremely rich, while most of the elites had middling incomes. But they were obsessed with status symbols and titles of aristocracy, most of which were bought, not inherited. They usually lived in town houses and were active in such institutions as Spanish practice opened to them, the cabildos the consulado and the militia. Almost all the families whose friendship Humboldt enjoyed in Caracas – the Uztáriz, the Tovares, the Toros – had their base in the beautiful valleys of Aragua, where they were proprietors of the richest plantations and where the Bolívars had their historic estate.
The pardos, or free coloureds, were branded by their racial origins; descendants of black slaves, they comprised mulattos, zambos and mestizos in general, as well as blancos de orilla whose ancestry was suspect. In the towns they were artisans and an incipient wage–labour group; in the country they were plantation overseers, or engaged in subsistence farming and cattle enterprises, or they were a rural peonage. With the free blacks they formed almost half the total population; their numbers were particularly noticeable in the towns, where the seeds of discontent often grew into open conflict.23 The pardos were not a class but an indeterminate, unstable and intermediary mass, blurring at the edges downwards and upwards. But whatever they were, they alarmed the whites by their numbers and aspirations. From 1760 they were allowed to join the militias, become officers, and enjoy the military fuero. By a law of 10 February 1795 they were granted the legal right to purchase certificates of whiteness (cédulas de gracias al sacar), which released them from discrimination and authorized them to receive an education, marry whites, hold public office and become priests. The imperial government encouraged this mobility for reasons of its own, which were not entirely clear. It may have been an attempt to release social tensions by allowing pardos to compete with whites, at the same time introducing competition into public life and undermining traditional ideals of honour and status.
Few pardos invoked this law or ventured into the courts to claim their rights.24 They might have made their way in the economy but they were still denied social recognition. In a caste society, where law defined status, the advantage was with the whites. The creoles went over to the offensive and opposed the advance of the gente de color, protested against the sale of whiteness, resisted popular education and petitioned, though unsuccessfully, against the presence of pardos in the militia. Concession to the pardos, they declared, was ‘a calamity stemming from ignorance on the part of European officials, who come here already prejudiced against the American–born whites and falsely informed concerning the real situation of the country’. The protesters regarded it as unacceptable ‘that the whites of this province should admit into their class a mulatto descended from their own slaves’. They argued that this could only lead to the subversion of the existing regime: ‘The establishment of militias led by officers of their own class has handed the pardos a power which will be the ruin of America … giving them an organization, leaders, and arms, the more easily to prepare a revolution.’25 A strict distinction was maintained between white and black militias; in Sabana de Ocumare new militia companies were formed, ‘four of whites, six of pardos, two of blacks, and four of Indians’.26 In the eyes of the authorities the superiority of white recruitment was taken for granted; even so, the creoles resented imperial policy towards the pardos: it was too indulgent; it was ‘an insult to the old, distinguished, and honoured families’; it was dangerous ‘to enfranchise the pardos and to grant them, by dispensation from their low status, the education which they have hitherto lacked and ought to continue to lack in the future’. Race was an issue in Venezuela, usually dormant, but with potential for violence. The creoles were frightened people; they feared a caste war, inflamed by French revolutionary doctrine and the contagious violence of Saint Domingue, the future Haiti.
These forebodings were intensified by horror of slave agitation and revolt. Again the creole aristocracy lost confidence in the metropolis. Slaves were everywhere in colonial society, carrying for their masters in the streets, working as domestics in houses, labouring in workshops. But most of them worked in plantations and without them Venezuela’s production would have stopped, and families such as the Bolívars would have seen their profits plunge. For some reason slave imports into Venezuela began to diminish in the 1780s, a time when an expanding economy had removed trade laws restricting imports and planters were read
y to pay more for slaves.27 The young Bolívar’s widowed mother complained about the price of slaves and their failure to reproduce. On 31 May 1789 the Spanish government issued a new slave law, codifying legislation, clarifying the rights of slaves and duties of masters, and in general seeking improvement of conditions in the slave compounds. The creoles rejected state intervention between master and slave, and fought this decree on the grounds that slaves were prone to vice and independence and were essential to the economy. In Venezuela – indeed all over the Spanish Caribbean – planters resisted the law and procured its suspension in 1794.28
The following year both reformers and reactionaries could claim to have proved their point when a black and pardo revolt convulsed Coro, the centre of the sugar cane industry, the home of fifteen thousand slaves and pardos and the base of a white aristocracy so class conscious that ‘the families of notorious nobility and purity of blood live in terror of the day that one of their members should surprisingly marry a coyote or zambo’.29 The revolt was led by José Leonardo Chirino and José Caridad González, free blacks who were influenced by the ideas of the French revolution and the race war in Saint Domingue. They stirred up the slaves and black labourers, three hundred of whom rose in rebellion in May 1795 with the proclamation: ‘The law of the French, the republic, the freedom of the slaves, and the suppression of the alcabala and other taxes.’30 They occupied haciendas, sacked property, killed any landowners they could lay hands on and invaded the city of Coro. This was an isolated and ill–equipped rebellion and was easily crushed, many of its followers being shot without trial. Yet it was only the tip of a constant underlying struggle of the blacks against the whites in the last years of the colony, when slave fugitives frequently established their own communes, remote from white authority.
The creole elite was conditioned by disorder. The conspiracy of Manuel Gual and José María España frankly sought to establish an independent republic of Venezuela, attacking ‘the bad colonial government’ and invoking the example of the English colonies in North America. The two Venezuelan leaders, white creoles and minor functionaries by career, were prompted by a Spanish exile, Juan Bautista Picornell, reader of Rousseau and the encyclopédistes, and a confirmed republican. Recruiting pardos and poor whites, labourers and small proprietors, and a few professional people, the conspiracy surfaced in La Guaira in July 1797 with an appeal for ‘liberty and equality’ and the rights of man, and it had a plan of action for taking power and installing a republican government. The programme included freedom of trade, suppression of the alcabala and other taxes, abolition of slavery and of Indian tribute and distribution of land to the Indians, and it pleaded for harmony between whites, Indians and coloureds, ‘brothers in Christ and equal before God’.31 This was too radical for creole property–owners, many of whom collaborated with the authorities in suppressing the ‘infamous and detestable’ movement and offered to serve the captain–general ‘not only with our persons and haciendas but also by forming armed companies at our own cost’.32 España was taken and executed in the main square of Caracas, accompanied by tolling bells, solicitous priests and a military detachment, and his limbs were displayed on pikes on the highroads, while his wife was imprisoned for protecting him. The conspiracy may have been small and fleeting but it gave voice to ideas of liberty and equality and left traces of discontent.
Two years later Humboldt observed some of the repercussions of the rebellion. On the road from La Guaira to Caracas he encountered a group of Venezuelan travellers discussing the issues of the day, the hatred of the mulattos for the free blacks and whites, ‘the wealth of the monks’, the difficulty of holding slaves in obedience, and bitterly disputing with each other on all these matters. They had to take shelter from a storm: ‘When we entered the inn, an old man, who had spoken with the most calmness, reminded the others how imprudent it was, in a time of denunciation, on the mountain as well as in the city, to engage in political discussion. These words, uttered in a spot of so wild an aspect, made a lively impression on my mind.’33 He also had an impression of anticlericalism, though this was not an obvious trend in Venezuela.
Religion, reputed to be severe in the Hispanic world, was worn lightly by Venezuelans, and while Bolívar received a large legacy from a clerical cousin he seems to have received little else from the Church. The clergy of this poorly endowed colony had few opportunities of preferment. According to Bishop Mariano Martí few of them deserved it. In the course of his pastoral visitations he became totally disillusioned with his clergy, many of them local creoles, hardly distinguishable from their parishioners in moral behaviour. Negligence, ignorance and incompetence were the norm among parish priests, who seem to have been by–passed by both Counter–Reformation and Enlightenment.34 Martí himself was a model of a Bourbon bishop, an agent of both Church and state, his work an amalgam of functions, inspired by the conviction that priests should be warned against subversion as well as sin and that his visitation should yield a total view of Venezuela, both secular and religious. A Spaniard by birth, he was a reformer, determined to improve the Christian and moral level of America. After heading a diocese in Puerto Rico he became bishop of Venezuela in 1770 at the age of forty–one.
Martí saw his episcopal role as an almost constant visita, lasting from 1771 to 1784, and covering the Venezuelan coast, Andes and llanos: Indians, Africans, slaves, Spaniards and mixed races, rural and urban society, priests and people, no one escaped his interrogations. As he travelled the mountains, valleys and plains of his diocese he invited the people of each town to confide the details of their ‘sinful’ behaviour – and that of their neighbours – which he then proceeded to record and judge, leaving for posterity a vivid picture of how Venezuelans were living. Life was evidently not all work. His records (seven volumes in their modern edition) list over fifteen hundred individuals singled out for accusation, primarily of sexual misdeeds. Adultery, fornication, concubinage, incest, rape, bigamy, prostitution, lust, homosexuality, bestiality, abortion and infanticide, these were the various practices across the land, while drunkenness, gambling, witchcraft, murder, theft and idolatry competed for the people’s pleasure and the bishop’s attention. He took a wide view of sin and his reprobates included hacendados who were cruel towards their slaves, village priests who were harsh towards mission Indians, and merchants and shopkeepers who levied usurious charges on their customers. Nearly 10 per cent of clerics in the province came under criticism, and even the governor of Maracaibo was denounced. Not surprisingly, the bishop’s probing earned him the enmity of many regional elites, as well as some local clerics.
For his part Martí was not impressed by the reluctance of the upper classes to marry their children to racial inferiors, and he insisted that unions be solemnized according to Christian morality, not left informal. But in practice he could not defeat social prejudice and prevent informal partnerships, a practice that avoided interracial marriages. In any case Martí did not challenge prevailing standards and he usually imposed punishments on female slaves rather than the slave owners who seduced them. There was an ingrained bias in religious culture, which regarded women as occasions of sin and blamed their allure, behaviour and dress for all sexual temptations, rather than men and conditions, a mentality characteristic of the Church throughout the Americas.
It was easier to describe the ways of Venezuelans than to change them. Bishop Martí tried to impose a moral code and to encourage Christian behaviour in social and sexual relations. He issued proclamations prohibiting dancing and he proscribed improper dress for women. On his visitation he exhorted priests to preach and apply the commandments. But it was a losing battle to apply the rules of the Church at every level of colonial society, or to narrow the gap between morals and behaviour. In one village drunkenness would be ‘the main sin’, in another robbery. For the majority of Venezuelans, especially the popular classes, marriage was an optional institution, virginity an ideal rather than a practice, illegitimacy acceptable and casual unions n
ot uncommon. For those with little or nothing to lose, marriage and legitimacy were not a particular advantage. They were, it is true, assets to the upper classes, as Bolívar’s marriage documents make clear, but for reasons of inheritance and public office rather than moral repute, and in Hispanic society infidelity was not regarded as a serious threat to marriage.
Martí’s visitation points to an enduring truth about colonial Venezuela, and equally the whole of Spanish America. Faith was not in doubt. The Church preached its doctrine and performed its liturgy in a society that easily accepted both. During his visitation the bishop saw many signs of religious fervour. Of the white, mestizo, mulatto and black population of Tinaquillo he wrote that they are ‘a devout people, many of them daily mass goers; they frequent the sacraments and come to say the rosary at 3 o’clock’. Of Ocumare he reported: ‘The parish priest tells me the nature of these people is such that if they are invited to a dance they all go; equally, if they are invited to a church service they all go. There is no particular vice among them.’ In the small village of Parapara the people were ‘docile, of good disposition, and frequent the sacraments’.35 There was evidently much popular piety in Venezuela. Christian morals, however, were a different matter, accepted by most in theory but ignored by many in practice.
A Youth of Independent Means
Bolívar’s formative years lacked the structure of school and university, and he was denied even the props of family life. His mother, loving in nature but frail in health, was only thirty–three when she died, leaving him an orphan at the age of nine. His memories were mellowed by time and distance and his Caracas childhood came back to him as a period of joy. When the one uncle he trusted, Esteban Palacios, returned from Spain to Venezuela in 1825, Bolívar, who was in Peru at the time, was much moved by the news: ‘I learned yesterday that you were alive and living in our dear homeland. How many memories crowded my mind at that moment. My mother, my dear mother, so like you, rose from the dead and appeared before me. My earliest childhood, my confirmation and my godfather at that event were focused into one as I realized that you were my second father…. All my memories rushed back to reawaken my earliest emotions.’36 The reality was not so idyllic. When his mother died he went to live with his grandfather, who assigned his uncles to him as guardians. Esteban was permanently absent in Spain, ineffectually trying to secure the family’s claim to nobility. So his real guardian was the nearby Carlos, something of a misanthrope, anxious to get his hands on his nephew’s inheritance, and a racist who referred to mulattos as a ‘rabble’. Taking precedence in the child’s esteem was his black nurse Hipólita, a slave from the San Mateo estate, who became a mother and father to him. Years later he asked his sister to look after her: ‘Her milk has nourished my life and she is the only father I have known.’37 An indulgent father, it seems, and he emerged from her care unaccustomed to discipline.