Bolivar: American Liberator Read online

  Almost immediately, Spain’s agents, including the Church, moved to take advantage of the injustices. The archbishop of Caracas directed his priests to educate blacks and pardos about the racial discrimination inherent in the new laws. Royalists traveled up and down the coast trying to provoke a slave insurrection. It didn’t take long for their strategy to work. Slaves, outraged that they they had been cheated of their promised freedom, rose up against their Creole masters, raiding their country estates, massacring whole families, burning fields, and demolishing property. As whites recoiled in horror, the black counterrevolutionary ranks only swelled, drunk now with newfound power.

  In Maracaibo, Coró, and Guayana—a vast swath that reached from the agriculturally rich west to the eastern savannas—the poor and exploited pledged undying devotion to King Ferdinand. Cacao fields languished in the sun, mines went neglected, and the economy began a dangerous downward spiral. On July 19, 1811, a violent uprising erupted in the city of Valencia, less than a hundred miles from the capital. Congress decided to send the Marquis del Toro and his troops to quell it, but neither the congress nor del Toro himself had much faith they could accomplish their mission. Just months before, the junta had directed the marquis to put down a royalist disturbance in Coró, and the old nobleman, more comfortable in a salon than on a field of battle, had proceeded to correspond politely with the leaders of the port city he was supposed to besiege. Eventually, when diplomacy failed, he had set out over two hundred miles of desert road with defective ammunition and a few obsolete cannons, borne on the backs of slaves. Only one in ten of his soldiers carried a gun. When they arrived, the Spaniards simply sprayed them with grapeshot, and the general and his troops turned and fled for their lives.

  Much the same happened in Valencia. No sooner did the marquis’s army attack than the royalists countered with a superior force and the marquis lost his nerve. It became patently clear to the republicans in Caracas that the only real soldier in their midst was Miranda; they offered him the post of commander and called on him to lead a larger expedition. Miranda agreed on the bizarre condition that the eager young Bolívar, who fully expected to march at his side, be given some pretext and removed from his post as commanding officer of the militia of Aragua.

  It is difficult to say what in Bolívar had irritated Miranda more—his inexperience, his brash confidence, his loyalty to the marquis, perhaps even his brilliance—but it was a firm stipulation and Miranda was in dead earnest. Members of congress were surprised, even taken aback by the general’s demand. They asked why he had such a bad opinion of Bolívar, to which he replied, “Because he is a dangerous young man.” In the end, they agreed to Miranda’s terms. When Bolívar heard of it, he burst into their hall in a fit of rage: “How can you refuse me the chance to serve my country?” he fumed. “What will people say when my men march off and their commanding officer is kept behind? That I’m a coward! A traitor!” Bolívar’s fellow Mantuanos were sympathetic, and they all agreed that Miranda was a high-handed prig, but they desperately needed his military expertise. Eventually, the Marquis del Toro, whose troops were still in the field, waiting to be joined by Miranda, took Bolívar under his command as his personal adjutant. Colonel Bolívar distinguished himself in Valencia, driving the royalists out of the city after two battles and fighting bravely under fire.

  Miranda may have been arrogant—perhaps even overly wary of Bolívar’s ambitions—but he was not a malicious man. He decided that Bolívar should be the one to carry word of the republican triumph back to Caracas. Moreover, in his report to congress, he singled out Bolívar for his valor and recommended that his rank of colonel be reinstated. But privately, he was more critical. Bolívar’s style was that of a guerrilla leader, not a disciplined European soldier; he was, according to Miranda, too informal, too dismissive of military ceremony, too free and friendly with his troops. Nevertheless, the victories in Valencia were a turning point for Bolívar. It was there that he established his bona fides as a warrior; and it was there, for all his disagreements with congress, that he plunged wholeheartedly into a revolution that others had made.

  As Miranda’s army continued to hold Valencia, word of the commanding general’s arrogance began to trickle back to the capital. The Mantuanos had never liked Miranda’s foreign pretensions; now the troops were complaining about his undisguised scorn. The word was that, as the ragtag, improvised force of four thousand had stood at attention for his review, he had sneered openly, “Where are the armies that a general of my standing can command without compromising his dignity and name?” He would make exasperated comments in French, baffling his soldiers; snap at officers when he wasn’t paid due deference; wonder aloud when the English or North Americans would come help him make warriors out of these hopelessly inept men.

  To be fair, little was going the way Miranda had imagined it when he had sat in his comfortable library on Grafton Street, nursing his dreams of liberty. The specter of civil war troubled him most. He had come to fight soldiers of the Spanish crown, not raise arms against fellow Venezuelans. He had not anticipated that his most rabid antagonists would be Canary Islanders like his father, as indeed many royalists turned out to be. Although Miranda had prevailed in that first battle at Valencia, much of what he saw about him was dispiriting. His troops were raw and unruly, unlike any he had led before; the enemy, more often than not, was better prepared and armed; and Miranda had sustained a debilitating number of dead and incapacitated—more than half out of a force of four thousand. Wanting to teach a stern lesson to anyone who would dare instigate another royalist revolt, Miranda sentenced the insurrection’s leaders to be hanged in Caracas. But four months later, hemming and hawing about the rights of man, congress dismissed all the charges and sent the insurrectionists home.

  EVEN HERE, IN THESE FIRST glimmers of liberty, we begin to see the character of a continent. The American-born were hungry for liberties, yet unaccustomed to freedom; resourceful, yet unacquainted with self-rule; racially mixed, yet mistrustful of whatever race they were not. For three hundred years of authoritarian reign, Spain had carefully instilled these qualities. “Divide and subjugate” had been the rule. Education had been discouraged, in many cases outlawed, and so ignorance was endemic. Colonies were forbidden from communicating with each other, and so—like spokes of a wheel—they were capable only of reporting directly to a king. There was no collaborative spirit, no model for organization, no notion of hierarchy. It was why the people of Coró or Maracaibo or Guayana refused to obey their newly independent brothers in Caracas; given the choice, they preferred the crown. And even though Americans had been inclined to mix across racial lines from the beginning, Spain had worked hard to keep the races apart, feed their suspicions. Add to this a church that was thoroughly opposed to independence, and a picture emerges unlike any other in that age of revolutions. If Spanish America now found itself strong enough to rise up against Spain, it would never quite rid itself of the divisions that the Council of the Indies had carefully installed in the first place. Bolívar was particularly aware of this deepest of flaws, predicting a fragmentation that remains prevalent to this day. It was why he was so adamantly against federation—a concept he thought far more workable in the United States, where the population was largely homogeneous and, so, inherently more governable.

  The new federalist constitution with its misguided premise and ungainly 228 articles was passed on December 21, doomed from the outset by the querulous times into which it was born. It named the new nation Colombia, after Christopher Columbus, and moved the capital decisively from Caracas to the newly tamed city of Valencia. But even before the start of the new government, which had been set for March 1, 1812, forces were at work to crush it.

  Don Juan Manuel Cajigal, a cousin of the Spanish general under whom Miranda had fought thirty years earlier, arrived in Coró to restore Spanish rule and install a new captain-general, Fernando Miyares. Among his officers was a frigate captain, Domingo de Monteverde, whom Cajigal order
ed to march south and assist a band of conspirators who had declared themselves on the side of the crown. By March 17, Monteverde held the region, but exceeding his orders, he made himself head of his own army; recruited thousands of pardos, blacks, and Canary Islanders; and began to advance against the patriot forces.

  Monteverde was strategizing a raid on a number of towns between him and Caracas when, one sun-filled spring day, nature contrived to assist him. It was Thursday of Holy Week, March 26, 1812, exactly two years after Venezuela’s declaration of independence. In Caracas, the sun was oppressively hot, the air stagnant and still, the sky a deep azure, bereft of even a wisp of cloud. At four in the afternoon, a company of infantrymen was making its way toward the cathedral in preparation for a procession. The churches were full of worshippers, celebrating Mass, reenacting the washing of the Apostles’ feet before Christ’s last supper. Seven minutes into the hour, a sprinkling of raindrops fell, inexplicably, out of that clear blue sky, and then, from the depths of the earth, came a deafening rumble. The ground began a fierce undulation, heaving and rippling, as if something enormous were squirming beneath it, and then the houses began to fall.

  For a seemingly interminable two minutes, a terrible earthquake shook Caracas, its violent convulsions parting the city’s walls and crumbling whole buildings. A cacophony of bells rang out as the Cathedral of the Trinity collapsed to its foundations. José Domingo Díaz, the royalist historian, was rushing to Mass when the earth began to churn beneath him. He watched the Church of San Jacinto brought to rubble in the time it took him to cross the square. Balconies crashed to his feet; roofs creaked and gave way. Terrified cries came from inside the caving houses as their inhabitants struggled to run through the confusion, find doors. When the shaking stopped, the city was little more than debris, bathed in billowing plumes of dust, locked in a sepulchral silence.

  Díaz made a dazed run for the mound of ruin that had been the church. Through dark clouds of dust, he could make out the severed limbs, crushed corpses, and, here and there, the stubborn evidence of life: a flailing arm, a tangle of humanity. As he stepped through the wreckage, squinting into the haze, he chanced on a familiar face coming the other way.

  I will never forget that moment. There, at the very top, I found Simón Bolívar, who, in his shirtsleeves, was doing exactly what I was doing—moving through, trying to reckon the damage. His face was the picture of terror and despair. When he saw me, he called out, addressing me with these preposterous words: If Nature itself decides to oppose us, we will fight and force her to obey!

  Nature had indeed opposed Caracas. Within minutes, the city was reduced to a grave site. More than ten thousand were buried by the rubble. Another six thousand, it was said, were swallowed by yawning ravines. Some, laboring in the open fields, died of shock. Half an hour didn’t pass before another quake shook the city. Survivors, caked with dust and blood, staggered through streets littered with cadavers, looking for their relatives. By nightfall, it was clear that the accumulations of dead would have to be incinerated in pyres. There were far too many to bury in mass graves.

  The looting began almost instantly. The poor rushed in to carry off what they could, rob gold from corpses, rip jewelry from the ears of trapped women who implored for help. Crimes went unseen, unchecked, as smoke from the fires coiled into sky and the thick, yellow dust yielded to darkness.

  Bolívar’s house had been seriously damaged, its floors so buckled that doors had been ripped from jambs, windows from casings, but he was more concerned about the devastation around him. He organized what slaves and friends he could and, with makeshift stretchers, went about exhuming the living and carrying off the dead. There were no tools for digging or clearing away the foul heaps, and so they dug with their bare hands. It was as he was engaged in this work, hurrying across the main plaza, that he saw a red-faced priest shout at a cowering crowd, exhorting them to repent, blaming them for the destruction. “On your knees, sinners!” the priest told them. “Now is your hour to atone. The arm of divine justice has descended on you for your insult to his Highest Majesty, that most virtuous of monarchs, King Ferdinand VII!”

  If Bolívar threatened that priest with his sword—as legend has it he did—he would soon find that it was impossible to defy the entire clergy. He combed the ruins, working hard to disabuse his fellow survivors of their superstitions, but it didn’t take long for the ministry of the Church to convince Caracas that the earthquake was God’s angry hand, punishing them for the perfidy of insurrection. Hadn’t the declaration of independence two years before been on a Maundy Thursday, too? The revolution was a sacrilege, and all its adherents, blasphemers. The people would need to atone for the sin of betraying the madre patria. Fearing the fate of a Sodom and Gomorrah, Venezuelans now rushed to make right with the Lord. As days and weeks went by, men of means married slaves with whom they had had sexual relations. Chastened revolutionaries fashioned colossal wooden crosses and dragged them, Christlike, through the ruined city.

  The quake had coursed through the upper half of South America, its shocks proceeding in devastating opposition from the Andes to the coast. Strange natural phenomena occurred: water had burst from a chasm in the earth to form a new lake in Valecillo; the river Yurubí had dammed up to a standstill; other rivers had changed course. But it was human carnage to which the Church pointed. One traveler estimated the loss of life at 30,000; other estimates climbed as high as 120,000.

  To add fuel to the clergy’s condemnations, it was soon evident that the brunt of the earthquake’s damage had been in republican strongholds. In the port of La Guaira, firmly controlled by the rebel government, the only house that remained standing belonged to Spain’s once all-powerful Guipuzcoana Company. Hundreds of patriot soldiers had been crushed in their barracks in San Carlos and San Felipe, and in Barquisimeto twelve hundred more disappeared into a fissure in the earth. Even Cartagena, a newly independent city in faraway New Granada, reported crippling damage. In royalist outposts, on the other hand—in Coró, Maracaibo, and that hotbed of royalist sympathy, Valencia—there was hardly a brick out of place. Agents of the crown moved quickly to play up this fact and add further evidence of God’s favor: the gallows to which dissident Spaniards had been sent eight months earlier, for instance, had been toppled by a single, rolling stone; the only pillar left standing in a church bore an immaculate image of the king’s royal insignia. The mass hysteria increased. The Venezuelan people, terrified by these revelations and sure now that God had spoken, streamed to the royalist side. Republicans deserted to the king’s army. As Spain’s General Monteverde advanced swiftly toward the republic’s capital, he had no trouble recruiting troops.

  IF GOD HAD UNLEASHED A seismic fury on Venezuela, he had inflicted it on the whole of the Americas. For more than a year, earthquakes rocked the hemisphere. In fall of 1811, a blazing comet half again larger than the sun lit the skies over North America. The first earthquake struck on December 16, its epicenter between Memphis and St. Louis, causing the Mississippi River to churn with a fetid gas and spill its banks so that flatboats sailed into cities and coffins floated down streets. The earth was crazed by great, wide fissures; water spurted as high as trees. In February of 1812, an even more violent shock ripped through Missouri, causing a flood that carried away the town of New Madrid. By April, when news of the Caracas disaster reached Washington, many North Americans became convinced that the entire race of man needed punishing. Religious fervor reached a high pitch. The Pittsburgh Gazette editorialized: “The period is portentous and alarming. . . . The year past has produced a magnificent comet, earthquakes have been almost without number . . . and we constantly ‘hear of wars and summons of wars.’ . . . Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

  The tremors were unremitting, and those who knew to hang a ball from a string could see that the ground was in continuous motion. A week after the Pittsburgh editorial, a volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent hurled a discharge of shattered rock, black smoke, a
nd flaming lava into the vault of sky, shrouding the island in darkness. The subterranean rumblings went on for months. By December, when tectonic shifts had rattled their way north, bringing a tsunami that ravaged the coast of California, the city of Washington was too deep in preoccupation to pay much attention to calamities beyond its ambit. The nation had gone back to war with England.

  The War of 1812 was the result of a series of annoyances bedeviling relations between the United States and its former colonizer. The British navy had rounded up American sailors on the high seas and pressed them into service; the British army had slipped down from Canada to help the Indian tribes resist westward expansion. Americans were weary of England’s ongoing blockade, which—along with Jefferson’s misguided Embargo Act—had sapped the country’s economic vigor; and there were many war hawks who saw the revolution as unfinished until the United States liberated Canada and expelled the colonizer from the continent completely.