by Robert Booth
In his first experience of a coup, Major Carrera had the idea of appealing directly to Santiago’s many soldiers, both militia and veteran regulars, and on September 4, 1811, with Lucho and Juan José at the head of sixty infantrymen, José Miguel bravely presented himself at the regulars’ barracks to explain the need for a new government. The Larrains’ coup was successful. Carrera, the new favorite of the troops, then addressed the captive congress in a speech that was surprising in its revolutionary sweep. He blamed the corruption of King Fernando for the ruin of Spain, praised the French Revolution for its political ideas, and called for total independence for Chile as a true republic like the United States of America. By means of boldness, courage, and oratory, he launched his political career and solidified his brothers’ ascendance as heads of the artillery and the cavalry. Happy to have a populist leader whom they could control, the Larrains proceeded to use José Miguel to deliver their message in the streets and at the barracks.
The Larrains consolidated their hold on government through patronage and nepotism, which did not include the Carreras. They installed Juan Martinez Rozas as head of a three-man junto: he represented the south of the country, Juan Mackenna the center (he was married to a Larrain), and Gaspar Marin the north. The Rozas-Mackenna-Marin junto worked with a new congress to create a supreme court, raise an army, and authorize the drafting of a constitution based on “enlightened liberty.”
But an autocracy with Larrains in place of Spaniards did not appeal to José Miguel Carrera, who concluded that the Larrains’ only interest in Chile was to make it “the patrimony of that family.” If one family could claim all of Chile for itself, who was to stop the next one? To Major Carrera, power had to be earned; it was not a birthright or the result of intrigues. He expected Chile to become fully independent, with its own laws and government structures, and he expected to have to fight the king’s forces to establish that independence. Only after a final victory could the new state be secure, and only then could the people be invested with rights and liberties. The Larrains had certainly achieved ascendancy, but had they earned it? Were they willing to fight for it?
Carrera’s ambition—his obvious sense of himself as a man of destiny, intended for some glorious role in the birth of his nation—was not taken seriously except by Juan Mackenna, who assessed the Carreras as bully-boys at the head of a rabble-in-arms, with José Miguel, in his Spanish cavalry uniform, capable of crossing over from military commander to political demagogue. Mackenna warned his colleagues, but they gave no credence to his conspiracy theories about the Carreras, whom they regarded as mere tools.
On November 15, 1811, shortly before Poinsett’s arrival, José Miguel Carrera led a military coup against the Larrains, and the streets remained calm under the bayonets of the Carreras’ army. Thus, just nine weeks after helping to bring Rozas and Mackenna to power, Carrera ascended to the presidency of Chile himself. Two weeks later, he dismissed the congress and declared himself the guarantor of a new nation and a powerful patriot army that he would lead into war against Spain and its South American governor, Viceroy Abascal. Rozas, in the south, naturally disagreed.
José Miguel Carrera (1785–1821) trained as a cavalry officer in the Spanish army and returned to Chile just as the tide of revolution crested. The idol of the militia and the leader of the people’s faction, he wrested control of the government from the moderates, freed the slaves, extended civil rights and public education to the working classes, and conducted a war of independence against the Spanish viceroy in Lima. Carrera chose U.S. Consul Poinsett as his closest advisor and military strategist. (National Library of Chile)
The more they talked, the more Poinsett admired Carrera as a political leader and as a soldier willing to take the fight into the field—a Chilean George Washington. With an American-style political base made up of working men and soldiers, Carrera had grown too big to be dislodged by the many rival aristocratic factions. Certain of the appeal of his populism, the tall, handsome Carrera projected a winning persona, suave, jovial, gallant, and romantic in his beautiful Spanish cavalry uniform. While he sought “the esteem of thinking men,” he presented an “unaffected bearing, carefully displayed scorn for the privileged classes, and a generosity bordering on extravagance, [which] made him the idol of the troops and the common people.” His vision of Chile was all-encompassing: the entire populace needed to be led out of the darkness so long imposed by the autocrats, toward their own sovereignty.
Poinsett knew that Americans enjoyed the good will of many Chilean Creoles, both historically and in the recent past. Where the British agents had overpromised munitions and support for the revolution, Americans had delivered. The expatriate American merchant Matthew Hoevel of Santiago had recently imported a ship’s cargo of rifles, powder, and shot that was snapped up by Carrera’s government.
Americans were no strangers in the ports of Chile; in fact, they had been regular visitors for many years. Since 1793, with Britain, France, and Spain embroiled in war, the Pacific had been left open to hard-driving Yankee captains flying a neutral nation’s flag and scoffing at Spanish claims as they opened a smuggling trade on the west coast of South America. The Chileans, otherwise restricted to buying Spanish goods at Spanish prices, had quickly developed a taste for American offerings and had been happy to pay in gold and silver for the cargoes that Americans kept unloading. It was no coincidence that Chileans, upon deposing their Spanish overlord in 1810, had instituted free trade as one of their first acts of independence.
Consonant with this history, Poinsett worked with Carrera to introduce an innovation to Chile: its first newspaper, produced by three American printers on a printing press they sold to Carrera’s government. The first issue of Aurora de Chile came out in February 1812 with a front-page article entitled “Basic Ideas About the Rights of The People.” The newspaper’s impact was sensational: “Men ran through the streets with an Aurora in their hand, detaining as many as they met, and read and re-read its contents, expressing congratulations for such happiness, and prophesying that, by this means, the ignorance and blindness in which they had lived until then would be banished.” The four-pager, edited by liberal priest Camilo Henriquez, was packed with pro-American content, starting with a flattering piece about Poinsett’s own reception and continuing in praise of America and its freedoms and the basics of democracy. Soon everyone was reading the Aurora or having it read to them. There was nothing of Britain or Spain in its pages—only America, and translations of speeches by Jefferson and Madison, and messages from Carrera about the wonders of the Chile that would become the United States of South America.
But Poinsett was not blinded by his own propaganda. Chile was a great geopolitical prize, with a million people, vast quantities of copper and wheat, many gold and silver mines, fertile plains and valleys, several seaports, some good roads, and 2,650 miles of Pacific coastline. Success in Chile might win great advantages for his country and glory for him—the sort that could open doors to a splendid career—but Chile had a history, the special nature of which he grasped early on. It posed challenges quite different from those of Buenos Aires: “the comparatively concentrated population, and its military organization, which has grown out of a system nearly resembling the feudal,” meant that there were explosive “consequences of that system, when great and powerful families divide the state into violent and irreconcilable factions.” He was not wrong about the vengeful rivalries.
Revolutionary Chile remained hostage to its internecine divisions, north versus south, youth versus age, Carrera (twenty-six) versus Rozas (fifty-two). The tragedy of civil war seemed inevitable. Carrera, though intent on serving as commander in chief in the field, remained in the capital as long as possible to organize his forces and guard against insurrections. In March 1812, he sent his father, Ignacio, south to Talca with a few companies, after which his brother Juan José joined Ignacio with a division near the River Maule, the northern border of southern Chile. Rozas’ opposing army arrived
near the river by early April, commanded by his protégé, also from the south: Bernardo O’Higgins, son of the former viceroy of Peru, an Irishman who had risen to the top of the Spanish structure in the Pacific.
It was a great irony that Bernardo, sent from Chile to be educated in England in the 1790s, had come under the influence of Francisco Miranda and other radical Spanish Americans exiled in Britain, and had returned to Chile with a love of English freedoms and a set of political beliefs completely opposed to those of his father. Viceroy O’Higgins had died before the uprising of 1810, and Bernardo’s colleague Juan Mackenna, an Irish engineer who had served in the royal Spanish forces, had finally evolved into a Moderado, far to the right of Bernardo but deeply loyal to him as the chosen one—the future leader of an independent Chile. Although he had no military experience, O’Higgins had to be respected. He had his own adherents and his own sense of Chile’s destiny, and there was no doubt that he, unlike Rozas, would fight. Fortunately, he was known to be reasonable and even tractable.
General Carrera himself traveled south when he learned that Rozas had been persuaded to accompany O’Higgins. In a meeting by the riverside, Rozas told Carrera that he wanted to have the congress reconvene; Carrera asked Rozas to give up his southern junto and come to Santiago. While they negotiated, the rainy season began, and in late April they agreed to send home their armies. Neither leader was rewarded for this outcome. Carrera, welcomed with jubilation at the capital, was challenged by his jealous brother Juan. Cannily, he did not resist but resigned his junto post to their father. Rozas, denounced for refusing to fight, lost his following. O’Higgins retreated to his estate at Las Canteras and considered moving with his mother to Argentina, where the rebels were united in a real revolution against the royalists.
In Santiago, it did not take long for Carrera and his brother to reconcile. Restored to power, José Miguel decreed the banishment of Rozas over the Andes to Mendoza. The order was carried out, and Rozas, the troubled godfather of Chile’s independence movement, died in exile within a year.
Carrera resumed his meetings with El Consul Poinsett, who warned him that he looked like a dictator and needed to create republican institutions and to tolerate dissent. Carrera defended his methods and his junto as the only effective means of building an army and preventing his enemies from hijacking the movement, but he agreed to call a new congress and draft a constitution. Without the pressures of agitation in the south or the crisis of impending civil war, he focused on the work of creating a republic and making Santiago into the military, political, and intellectual center of a new nation.
While outwardly traditional, Santiago had been transformed by populist revolutionary spirit. Congress already had effected great reforms. Certain financial powers of the church had been revoked. Spurred by Carrera, the lawmakers had taken on the issue of slavery: children of enslaved people were declared free, people who had been imported as slaves were to be liberated within a few years, and, after the deaths of the oldest enslaved people, slavery would no longer exist in Chile. Virtually everyone felt the excitement of change and possibility and the hope that independence from Spain might be achieved peacefully.
Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779–1851), polymath and linguist, traveled the world in his twenties. The elegant Charlestonian returned to the United States in 1809 hoping for a career as an army general but instead was sent to Buenos Aires as a State Department spy, a position that he soon parlayed into U.S. consul general for southern South America. In revolutionary Chile beginning in 1811, he became a nation-builder, drafting the new republic’s constitution, advising its president, and leading its armies into battle. (from Portfolio of Living American Statesmen, 1837–47, by Charles Fenderich)
Carrera opened up society to debate and discussion, promoted education and the importation of books and scientific instruments, and founded a national library and a university for science and foreign languages. His programs produced results that “were almost inconceivable. Suddenly people had fallen in love with literature and studying, and the products of the press had given the masses a knowledge of various forms of government best suited to advance their rights.”
For the first time, schools opened in every district of Valparaiso and the other cities, mandatory and free to the children of the illiterate poor. Each school day began with a republican catechism:
“What nationality are you?”
“I am American.”
“What are your duties?”
“To love God and country, devote my life to their service, obey government orders, and fight to defend republican principles.”
“What are the republican maxims?”
“They are designed for human happiness. All are born equal and by natural law have certain inalienable rights.”
The teacher would proceed to list the rights and privileges of the citizens of a republic, contrasted with the restrictions of the colonial system. The students held a weekly debate in which one would take the side of a Spanish European, advocating for the divine right of kings and the power of conquest against an ever-victorious champion of human rights and republican values.
Behind the scenes, Consul Poinsett became deeply involved in the new government as its chief philosopher and statesman—a role well beyond the ordinary reach of an American consul, but, in this case, a great and perhaps unique opportunity to build a new nation in the image of the United States. Although an admirer of O’Higgins, the young revolutionary leader from the south, Poinsett learned that O’Higgins was an Anglophile who wished to transform Chile into “the England of South America.” Carrera, on the other hand, represented a complete break with the past and offered a future that no one had thought about. He wanted a true revolution, overturning the forms of colonialism to create a new basis for society at all levels.
Poinsett formed the belief that Carrera, as the commander in chief, had done what was necessary to protect and foster independence in a way that could be made to benefit the United States, still the world’s only example of a national republic formed after having undergone the passions and hatreds of a war of independence. Was the same thing possible in Chile? Poinsett was not sure. The Larrains remained in the wings, darkly plotting, holding on to great amounts of wealth and potential power. Carrera had won the love of the people and the loyalty of the army, all subject to another coup, a loss in battle, or a decision by Buenos Aires to intervene. Chile’s revolution was based on the ascendancy of one man, and one man might easily fail—a possibility that no one felt with greater urgency than Joel Roberts Poinsett.
In his reports to Washington, the consul general did not mention that he and six others, at his house, over the course of weeks, had been drafting a Chilean constitution. It specified liberal civil rights for all men, freedom of the press, separation of church and state, and a governing structure consisting of three branches: the courts, the congress, and the executive, with the latter made up of a three-man junto chosen by the senate and responsible for the military and for foreign policy.
On July 4, 1812, the anniversary of the first meeting of the Chilean congress, Santiago held a gala public event to announce the independence of Chile and to unveil its new constitution. Representatives arrived from the south, where O’Higgins and his adherents had agreed to recognize Carrera as the leader of an inclusive government. Carrera and Poinsett raised the new Chilean flag—blue, white, and yellow—alongside the flag of the United States, and they jointly led an audience of thousands of soldiers and citizens in the singing of a new national anthem and several other patriotic songs.*
José Miguel Carrera, resplendent in uniform, received the adulation of his people, but Chile was a long way from being a republic. Poinsett saw the difficulty of turning ideas into realities in a society that had no experience of democracy: nothing had yet been done to create a process for electing representatives throughout the country; regional leaders in the south were still raising their own troops; church authorities resisted all reforms; the congr
ess was slow to gather; and consideration of the constitution was delayed. The general populace of Chile, wrote the printer Samuel B. Johnston, knew nothing about political systems, having just “emerged from a state of the most abject slavery, which they and their forefathers had endured for centuries” of “ignorance, superstition, and the most blinded bigotry.” Like Poinsett, Johnston admired Carrera for taking on the “arduous task” of creating a government for a people who had been “suddenly elevated to the rank of freemen, before the dawning of their political reason had learned to distinguish between liberty and licentiousness.”
Overcoming bitter rivals, abysmal ignorance, and his own despotic tendencies, Carrera had developed a “system of national independence,” wrote Consul Poinsett, who, with editor Henriquez, had continued to use the Aurora “to arm Carrera with the language of liberty and virtue.” Carrera needed real arms, too, preferably from Poinsett’s United States, including two frigates to support the taking of Lima. Poinsett kept sending out encrypted communications by mule train, hoping they would reach Washington, hoping that Washington would recognize the new republic and send it the assistance it deserved.
In September 1812, Poinsett received the electrifying news that in June the United States had declared war on England. He had been in Santiago for nine months by then, trying to make his own judgments about America’s best interests, even while becoming a leading figure in the new nation of Chile. He and Carrera kept working to build republican structures into the government and to increase the size of the army and improve its capabilities. Carrera had sent 500 of his own men to Buenos Aires to fight against the royalists there, and he provided them with news and intelligence, as they did him. The Argentinians deserved support, having led the way toward independence in southern South America; and their junto had offered to send troops to Chile in time of need. Carrera knew that he would have little support from the outside world once the fighting started.
