Simon Bolivar

by John Lynch

  Enlightenment thinkers could give only a limited education to a young creole seeking ideas on revolutionary change. Two exceptions were Thomas Paine and the Abbé Raynal. Paine’s Common Sense (1776) was an outright justification for colonial rebellion, defending American independence as a ‘true interest’, on account of miseries endured, redress denied and the right to resist oppression: ‘There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.’ This impressed Spanish Americans as an exact statement of their own case, as did his later conclusions: ‘What were formerly called revolutions were little more than a change of persons or an alteration of local circumstances…. But what we see now in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, are a renovation of the natural order of things.’39 Paine was cited and paraphrased by Viscardo, and read by many more. In 1811 a Venezuelan enthusiast published in the United States an anthology of Paine’s works translated into Spanish, which circulated from hand to hand in Venezuela and was an influence on the constitutional thinking of the republic.40

  Paine was also cited by the Abbé Raynal, a minor philosophe, whose Histoire des deux Indes, a clutter of colonial history, irritated many in the Hispanic world for its prejudice and inaccuracy, yet drew approval from the few Spanish Americans who read it for its support of the North American revolution against the British Crown, and its conclusion that ‘the new hemisphere must one day be detached from the old’. Some were also impressed by Raynal’s imitation of Paine: ‘By the laws of bodies, and of distance, America can only belong to itself.’41 Raynal was more significant for his influence on Dominique de Pradt, a French archbishop and supporter of Napoleon, who, though scathing of the flaws in Raynal’s work, recognized its originality in theme and structure. De Pradt, whose views were recommended by Bolívar in the Jamaica Letter, was the first Enlightenment thinker to advocate the absolute independence of the Spanish colonies as a matter of principle and policy; this was made inevitable, he argued, by the example of the United States, Spain’s decline as a colonial power and revolutionary change in Europe – influences that Spain was impotent to stop and which hastened the tendency inherent in colonies to grow to maturity and break away.42

  The Church as well as the state came under the scrutiny of the Enlightenment. Deistic and freethinking writings, first introduced from England, acquired a new lease of life in France in the eighteenth century. When deism emerged into the open with the writings of Voltaire and the ency–clopédistes, it was not a precise theology but a vague form of religion used as a sanction for politics and morals and a cover against the charge of atheism. The growth of scepticism in religion and the specifically anti–Christian offensive of the philosoph.es not only represented intellectual positions, but also supported proposals to increase the power of the state over the Church and even to create a state religion which, however spurious, was regarded as necessary for public order and morals. Bolívar seems to have been marked by some of these influences, though whether they totally destroyed his belief it is impossible to say. He usually handled the subject of religion with caution, but beneath his outward observance there was an element of scepticism, and in private he ridiculed some aspects of religion. Did he then reject the religion as well as the government of the ancien régime? According to o’Leary, an Irish Catholic, Bolívar was ‘a complete atheist’ who believed only that religion was necessary for government, and whose attendance at mass was purely formal. ‘sceptic’ rather than ‘atheist’ would be a closer approximation to Bolívar’s mentality, and still leaves a question: When did his scepticism begin? Was it in France in 1804–06 when he read himself into the modern mind? Or did those shoots grow in the years ahead? Again, we do not know. o’Leary hints that Bolívar’s mentor, Simón Rodríguez, had deliberately instilled in the young man a philanthropic and liberal view of life rather than a Christian one, and had introduced Bolívar to the works of eighteenth–century sceptics and materialists. ‘Yet in spite of his scepticism and consequent irreligion, he always believed it necessary to conform to the religion of his fellow citizens.’43 And he continued to attend mass.

  In the absence of strong religious motivation, Bolívar seems to have embraced a philosophy of life based on utilitarianism, not necessarily the most convincing of moral absolutes but one in vogue among contemporary liberals. The evidence for this comes not simply from his contacts with James Mill and Jeremy Bentham – he described himself as a ‘disciple’ of Bentham and a follower of his doctrines – but from his own writings, where the greatest happiness principle emerges as the driving force of politics. Spanish Americans, he argued, held unrealistic expectations of proceeding directly from servitude to freedom, from colony to independence. He attributed this to their eager search for happiness: ‘In spite of the lessons of history, South Americans have sought to obtain liberal, even perfect institutions, doubtless out of that universal human instinct to aspire to the greatest possible happiness, which is bound to follow in civil societies founded on the principles of justice, liberty and equality.’ A few years later, in his Angostura Address, he stated that ‘the most perfect system of government is that which results in the greatest possible measure of happiness and the maximum of social security and political stability’. In 1822, writing to the vice–president of Colombia, Francisco de Paula Santander, at a time when there were fears that congress might revise the constitution of 1821, Bolívar observed: ‘The sovereignty of the people is not unlimited, because it is based on justice and constrained by the concept of perfect utility.’44 Some years later political circumstances would force him to revise his support for the public application of Benthamite principles, but not necessarily to abandon the philosophy of utility.

  Bolívar’s response to the Age of Reason was inspired by what he saw in contemporary Europe as well as by what he read; he saw the limitations as well as the achievements of the Enlightenment, and asked himself what could be useful, what irrelevant, to Americans. Yet his intellectual journey was not purely pragmatic: while directing the military course of the revolution he would also engage with basic conceptual problems such as the limits of liberty and the nature of equality. Liberty had to conform to the history and traditions of a people, and purely abstract concepts of liberty drew his scorn. In the same way he would define the meaning of equality in the context of American society. And he was always conscious that imperfect human nature precluded perfect political solutions, a criticism of theoretical arguments if not a restatement of original sin. While the experiences of 1804–06 do not give us the whole picture of Bolívar, they already reveal that his world would be based on rational and secular values and would have an intellectual as well as a political framework.

  Return to Venezuela

  From his travels in Italy Bolívar returned to Paris in the spring of 1806, but not to the pleasures of his previous life. Events in his homeland disturbed him. In 1806, despairing of help from Britain, Miranda led a tiny and ill–prepared expedition to Venezuela, where he was coldly received by creole landowners and denounced as a ‘heretic’ and ‘traitor’. Bolívar seems to have regarded the action as premature and more likely to harm Venezuelans than their rulers. Meanwhile his own resources were tied up in the colony by the British blockade. In the autumn of 1806, determined to return to Venezuela and resume an American life, he took his leave of Fanny du Villars, without great drama on his part. On borrowed money, he took ship at the end of November, not from France or Spain, which were at war with Britain, but from Hamburg under a neutral flag, and he sailed not directly to Venezuela but to the United States. He landed at Charleston, the worse for wear after ocean conditions and the onset of fever. He remained in the United States long enough to visit Washington, New York and Boston, and then sailed from Philadelphia for La Guaira, where he arrived in June 1807. Little is known of these travels, though he later recalled that ‘during my short visit to the United States, for the first time in my life, I saw rational liberty at first hand’.45 A rare vision in the A
mericas, as he was to discover.

  The personal events of Bolívar’s life in the years 1804–07 were not chronicled in any detail, either by himself or his friends, and early biographers felt free to fill the gaps with fables. The public history of the time, however, was well known. When Bolívar left Europe in 1806 a number of pieces were coming into place, preparing the ground for revolution in South America and for his own leadership. Spain was finished as an imperial power, its role now a satellite of France, its colonial resources a prop for its ally. Spain no longer controlled America. From the beginning of empire conquest had outstripped control, and claims exceeded the capacity to enforce them.46 Now, having lost power in the Atlantic and with it the route to its own possessions, Spain was not able to secure the trade and loyalty of its colonial subjects. Here was a prize for the taking. For whom? France or Britain? Would Spanish Americans willingly exchange one metropolis for another? This was the situation as read by Bolívar. He had seen that Europe was a threat as well as an inspiration to America. He had begun, if not completed, his political education and learned the realities of the European and Atlantic worlds from observation as well as from study. This was not a unique insight. But how many Venezuelans were as qualified as Bolívar to understand what was happening? How many, even among the enlightened, concluded that liberty in itself was not enough and was not the same as independence? Not all Americans had advanced so far. As long as Spain remained politically intact, defence of creole interests and criticism of Spanish government were made within the confines of the existing regime, as Humboldt suggested. Even when, from 1800, Spain’s economic and political power was in headlong decline, and leading creoles had ever greater reason for criticizing Spain’s commercial and fiscal policies, the threat of rebellion was slight. Bolívar’s thinking was ahead of its time.

  The young Bolívar was not an uncritical reader of the texts of freedom and his scepticism would grow in successive stages of the revolution. While the Enlightenment remained the prime source from which he drew to justify and defend his actions, before, during and after the revolution, ideology in itself was not enough. When he returned from Europe to Venezuela he had to appeal to interests as well as ideas. American interests and American arguments would now be decisive in his thinking and actions. Some of his contemporaries also saw these things at first hand, without, however, possessing his motivation or genius. Power and glory were not everyone’s ambition, but they were central to Bolívar’s world. Alongside the slavery of his country he was conscious of ‘the glory that would come to him who liberated it’.47 Bolívar was not made to live unseen and unknown, to remain ‘a mayor of San Mateo’. He returned to Venezuela an independent spirit with leadership potential and opportunities ahead.

  Chapter 3

  CREOLE REVOLUTION

  Grievances of a Colony

  Bolívar returned to Venezuela in 1807 convinced that the independence of his country was imperative and inevitable. His conviction came not simply from life in Caracas or work on his estates but from his experience in Europe, where the international situation alerted him to impending change and the ideas of the age made a deep impression on his mind. He found that few people in Venezuela shared his views and that political consciousness in the colony was not raised enough to question loyalty to the king and support for the existing order. His arguments convinced his brother Juan Vicente but no one else among his family and friends, who had little awareness of crisis in the Hispanic world or changes in the balance of power. Bolívar’s convictions and his distance from creole opinion explain his political position in the events of the next four years. In this phase of his life he confronted a host of discordant voices without the power to impose his own.

  At heart a revolutionary, he outwardly conformed. These were years when Bolívar followed the same occupation as the rest of the creole aristocracy: he managed his revenues and cultivated his estates. At San Mateo to the west of Caracas on the road to Maracay, at La Concepción near Ocumare and Yare in the Tuy valley, his plantations produced the tropical products that Caribbean and European markets demanded; his labourers were blacks, many of them slaves, and he himself worked among them, hands on. His property in Yare had an ongoing boundary dispute with the adjacent estate of the family of Antonio Nicolás Briceño, and in September 1807 there was a violent stand–off between Briceño and Bolívar, when the former led a group of his slaves armed with pistols, machetes and knives to prevent Bolívar and his labourers working on land they regarded as their own. Bolívar’s lawyers stepped in to defend his position and Briceño was subsequently arrested, though the case died out amidst the political turmoil of the time. Meanwhile, as he produced and sold from his estates, Bolívar observed the reality of making a living in colonial conditions, where the metropolis promoted its own interests without protecting those of its American subjects. And he came to different conclusions from most of his neighbours. A product of the colony, he was to become the colony’s fiercest enemy.

  Venezuelan whites were always aware of the superior numbers of pardos and blacks, and of the hostile eyes around them. Until the last years of the colonial regime the creoles saw no alternative to the existing power structure and they accepted Spanish rule as the most effective guarantee of law, order and hierarchy. But gradually, between 1789 and 1810, force of circumstances eroded their loyalism. In an age of revolutionary change, when Spain could no longer control events either at home or abroad, creoles came to appreciate that their place in the world depended on gaining an immediate political objective – to take exclusive power instead of sharing it with officials of a debilitated metropolis.

  Their economic world was also changing. The Venezuelan economy underwent some diversification in the late eighteenth century, as planters moved away from total dependence on cacao and added coffee, indigo, tobacco and cotton to what they produced. Bolívar took a close interest in his indigo plantations and was concerned about their prospects in the export market. The Venezuelan economy responded positively to the greater opportunities for export once the monopoly of the Caracas Company was removed in 1784 and imperial free trade was extended to Venezuela in 1789. Exports and imports doubled in value in the period 1783–90, and in 1790–6 agricultural exports to Spain doubled over those of 1782–9, while its share of American colonial trade noticeably improved.1 But the great proprietors were still frustrated by Spanish control of the import–export trade, and campaigned against what they called in 1797 ‘the spirit of monopoly under which this province groans’.2 The departure of the Caracas Company left the way open for a new breed of Spanish merchants operating in open market but still protected by the colonial monopoly of Spain and clashing now with local hacendados. The Venezuelan economy, moreover, was a victim of the European wars which overwhelmed Spain and exposed even more glaringly the flaws of colonial monopoly – the great shortage and high cost of imported manufactures and the difficulty of getting the colony’s products to foreign markets.

  From 1796 Spain was dragged through France’s wars against Britain in a satellite role, forced to subsidize its imperial neighbour and sacrifice its own interests. Colonial trade was the first victim and the profits of empire the immediate loss. The British navy blockaded Cadiz and cut the transatlantic route. To supply colonial markets and preserve some returns for itself, Spain allowed neutrals to trade with America, by decree of 18 November 1797. This was revoked eighteenth months later, but the revocation was ignored and neutral vessels continued to trade into the colonies when Spanish vessels simply could not make the crossing. The dominant interest groups in Venezuela responded in different ways to the crisis. Colonial officials were alarmed by the loss of revenue, merchants by the erosion of their monopoly, hacendados by the damage to their exports.3 Their discordant voices added to Spain’s political problems. After a brief respite during the peace of Amiens (1802–3), the renewal of war with Britain speeded the decline of imperial trade. A series of naval reverses, culminating in Trafalgar, deprived Spain of an Atlant
ic fleet and further isolated her from the Americas. Spanish policy was driven by various pressures, from the central government dependent on colonial revenue, from peninsula exporters demanding a monopoly market, and from the colonies anxious to maintain trade and supplies. To satisfy as many interests as possible, the government again authorized a neutral trade and from 1805 neutral shipping dominated the Spanish Atlantic. The future of Spain as an imperial power was now in the balance. The economic monopoly was lost beyond recovery. All that remained was political control, and this too was under increasing strain.

  As the French Revolution became more widely known it appealed to some, frightened others and threatened defenders of the traditional order. A slave revolt in Coro in 1795 proclaimed ‘the law of the French’. From 1796 the British navy cut the trade routes between Venezuela and Spain, and Britain captured Trinidad in February 1797. In the same year Gual and España made their social protest, claiming equality as well as liberty. A sense of crisis was developing, and people felt it in their pockets as defence expenditure rose and with it taxation. Spain’s new war with Britain from 1805 revived the economic depression of the 1790s. Venezuela was shaken by two attempted invasions, in April and August of 1806, when Miranda, with the connivance of British naval authorities in the Caribbean, attempted to revolutionize the colony. Defences remained firm, but there were renewed fiscal demands from Spain at a time of economic depression and in the midst of a series of damaging droughts. Spain’s response to the British blockade was to reopen trade to neutrals and to sell licences to foreigners to trade with its colonies, yet this still failed to revive exports and secure vital imports. As colonial merchants were taxed so they were subject to bewildering policy changes. Yet in spite of war–induced hardships and inconsistent royal policies, veering between liberalizing and restricting trade, the local planter and merchant leaders did not respond to Miranda’s invasion, and they welcomed his defeat, donating men and money against that ‘abominable monster’. Caught in a crisis of authority, they made no move to challenge authority. From 1808, when the reversal of alliances in Europe ended the maritime war with Britain and export quantities improved, the economic prospects of Venezuela looked more favourable. But did this really matter, as long as the colony had to conform to imperial trade rules, deter foreign traders and send large remissions to Spain? The Venezuelan aristocracy were living in a dream world, but the dream was about to end.