Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Okay, so I’m back. I managed to survive the last month and get the main script turned in on time, so everything is aces. The general timeline for the book from here on out, for those of you who have been asking, is that we plan to have all revisions and edits wrapped up by early March, and then it’ll move into production and marketing over the summer with an eye on releasing the book officially in October. The wheels do move slowly in publishing, but they are moving.

Meanwhile, back here at the Revolutions podcast, we have five more episodes of Spanish American independence, as Simón Bolívar first completes the liberation of South America and then slowly descends into a fatal labyrinth from which he will not return. After Bolívar slips the mortal coil in December of 1830, we will hop back across the Atlantic and then back in time just about six months to cover the July Revolution in France to set up the great failed revolutions of 1848. And 1848 will put a closing bracket on our age of liberal revolutions, because 1848 also happens to be the year the Communist Manifesto was published, and budding young revolutionaries will turn away from the kind of bourgeois Enlightenment liberalism they’ve been espousing and move on to proletarian socialism, communism, and anarchism that will be the principal drivers of our 20th-century revolutions. 

So, getting back to it, if I’m not mistaken, we left Bolívar in Guayaquil in August of 1823, finally feeling begged enough to sail down to Lima to take over the struggle for Peruvian independence. And it would be quite a struggle. Not just because the last 19,000 Spanish troops left on the entire continent had taken up a strong position high in the Andes and were proving impossible to dislodge, but also because plenty of people in Peru were not interested in dislodging them. Of the four old viceroyalties — New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and the Río de la Plata — there’s no question that Peru was the most conservative and had largely been untouched by the successive waves of unrest that had been triggered elsewhere in Spanish America by the abdications of Bayonne and then the subsequent fallout from the Peninsular War.

As their neighbors fell to patriotic independence movements one by one, Peru had remained loyal to Spain. For the most part, the rich and prosperous criollo aristocracy of Lima looked on aghast as those independence movements folded in a degree of racial revolution, because both Bolívar and San Martín had succeeded thanks to armies composed of a motley array of blacks and Indians, pardos, mestizos, and everything in between. And if the choice was to remain with Spain and keep their existing racial hierarchies or declare independence and drown under a rising tide of blacks and Indians, Peru’s elite criollo seemed happy to remain with God and the King, as Simón Bolívar was about to discover.

At the end of August 1823, Bolívar got on a boat and sailed south. On September 1, he arrived in the port of Callao that served Lima and made what was, for the moment at least, a triumphant entry into the great city. Bolívar was a well-traveled guy. He had been to Paris, Rome, and London, but certainly no city in the Americas could match the splendid opulence he found in Lima. Built from the silver hauled out of the mines up in the mountains, Lima was filled with magnificent churches and palaces that were all now draped in festive decorations to greet the Liberator. Bolívar would soon learn, however, that those who espoused patriotic slogans only did so when they thought the patriots were going to win. And many of those out there welcoming him with open arms were willing, even eager, to go back to God and the King at the first opportunity.

Navigating these treacherous and duplicitous waters would literally suck the life out of Bolívar. And he would ultimately conclude that Peru was a chamber of horrors, confirming his diagnosis in the letter from Jamaica that the Viceroyalty of Peru was fatally corrupted by gold and slaves, of which he said in the letter, “the first corrupts all it touches, the second is corrupt in and of itself.”

But for the moment, everything was splendid. There was good food, good drink, lots of parties, lots of socializing. Manuela Sáenz was, of course, right by Bolívar’s side, introducing him around to the society that she herself was a prominent member of. It was only mildly awkward that Sáenz was married to another man. To keep up the thinnest of appearances, she officially lived in her own house, but spent her nights with Bolívar in the house that he had commandeered, the same house San Martín had lived in during his own unhappy years in Peru. 

It had been a full year now since San Martín had left, and in that time, the Peruvian government he had helped inaugurate in September of 1822 had been buffeted by defeat and treachery. The President of the new Congress was supposed to be José Bernardo de Torre Tagle. But a defeat at the hands of the Spanish just a few months later led to a military coup spearheaded by General José de la Riva Agüero.

But as we saw last time, when Sucre showed up to pave the way for Bolívar’s arrival, it was Riva Agüero who had gone marching out to confront the Spanish in July of 1823 and instead left Lima wide open and undefended, allowing a Spanish army to march in and strip the city clean. And it was that sack, more than anything else, that led the begging of the patriot leaders in Lima to reach the proper pitch to draw Bolívar down from Guayaquil. With Bolívar now likely on the way, Torre Tagle reasserted his claim to the presidency with the help of lavish bribes to key members of the Congress. So before Riva Agüero made it back to Lima, he found himself ousted from power. But instead of accepting this counter coup, Riva Agüero refused to relinquish the presidency and instead fled north to Trujillo, a good-sized port on the Pacific coast about halfway between Guayaquil and Lima. 

So when Bolívar walked into Lima, he found the government fractured, with two men claiming to be president. Bolívar, for his part, recognized the Congress in Lima, led by Torre Tagle, and entered negotiations to determine what the Liberator’s role would be in Peru. The Congress wanted to vote Bolívar full dictator, which is blanket political, military, and economic authority. But as usual, Bolívar scrupulously avoided the job. He wanted only full military authority. The political power should remain in civilian hands, and Torre Tagle should remain president. It’s just another reminder that Bolívar shared with George Washington a passion for being a military hero rather than a political tyrant, and both wanted sovereign authority to stay out of the hands of military heroes. On this front, Washington was the North American Bolívar, and Bolívar was the South American Washington. 

So on September 2, the Congress appointed Bolívar Supreme Military Commander. Bolívar then wrote letters to Riva Agüero, imploring him to stand down, accept the government, and unify the patriot cause. But now, extra resentful that Bolívar had come down from Colombia to hog all the glory, instead, Riva Agüero did an about-face. He opened up a channel to the Spanish and said he was ready to talk about joint operations to evict the patriots and return Peru to Spanish rule. But for the moment, Riva Agüero’s treasonous treachery did not extend to his senior officers. They were unwilling to go along with the betrayals and instead arrested Riva Agüero and shipped him down to Lima. President Torre Tagle naturally wanted to execute him, but Bolívar intervened and put Riva Agüero on a boat to Europe, and that is the last we will ever hear of him. 

With the Patriot government now unified under President Torre Tagle, Bolívar assessed the military situation. Up in the mountains looming high above Lima, the Spanish had about 19,000 men spread across Peru and Upper Peru as far south as La Paz. For the past decade, these forces had fended off incursions both from Argentina and coastal Peru without really too much effort at all, and they still held the mines that were the true economic engine of the continent. These last Spanish armies were now led by Viceroy José de la Serna, a general who had forced his way into the job in the wake of San Martín’s arrival back in 1821. He had withdrawn into the mountains when Lima fell to San Martín’s army of the Andes. Alongside De la Serna was a French-born general named José de Canterac who had come to South America with the armada of Pablo Morillo and then migrated south down to Peru. Canterac had been the principal Field Marshal for all the operations around Lima and had developed a healthy disdain for the Patriot military. He personally remained undefeated in the field against them and had recently led the capture and methodical sack of Lima. Also serving under Viceroy De la Serna was an unreconstructed royal absolutist named Pedro Olañeta, who was as opposed to treasonous liberal Spaniards as he was to these patriotic American dogs.

Taking over command of the American dogs, Supreme Commander Bolívar inherited four armies in various states of disrepair. They were now mostly Peruvian conscripts, as nearly all of San Martín’s veterans from the Army of the Andes had either been killed, captured, or gone home. Though it does appear that I misspoke last time when I said that they were all gone because, while I was prepping this week’s show, I found about 1,500 Argentinian cavalry still holding the fort down in Callao, and I didn’t realize that they were there, but they’re still there. 

The commitment of the Peruvian conscripts, however, was shaky at best, and indeed, shortly after Bolívar assumed command, one of these armies marched into the interior with 5,000 men and returned home with only 850, and they never even fought a battle. Mother Nature and terrible morale had done all the necessary damage. 

While Bolívar assessed his dismal situation and tried to figure out a plan of attack, he took to trying to make this a great Pan American enterprise to evict the last remaining Spanish. His simple argument was that so long as any Spanish remained on the continent, nobody on the continent was safe. 

But by now, everyone else had their own problems. Buenos Aires and Montevideo were entering into yet another round of civil war mixed with a foreign war against Brazil. The last thing they wanted was for another San Martín to wander off with one of their armies and never come back. Down in Chile, Bernardo O’Higgins was personally a committed Pan American patriot, and he even traveled to Lima to meet with Bolívar. But having fought and won independence, most of his fellow Chileans wanted to focus on securing their country, not go marching off to try to liberate another one. The vaunted Chilean Navy elected to stay in Chilean waters and not get sucked into war in Peru. So Bolívar’s letters, treaties, and begging were falling on deaf ears, and he was going to be on his own. 

Nowhere was the refusal to respond more maddening than from Vice President Santander and the Colombian Congress in Bogotá. Though, to be fair, no one was more sick of listening to Bolívar’s begging than Vice President Santander and the Colombian Congress in Bogotá. It had now been two years since the Liberator had ridden out of town. He was supposed to go secure Quito on his way to Guayaquil to make Gran Colombia a reality. And after one year of hard fighting, he had done it. Gran Colombia was now unified. But instead of coming back, Bolívar had kept going and taken a Colombian army with him. Now, every time Santander opened a letter from Bolívar, it was demands that Colombia send men, money, guns, food, anything, everything, down to Peru. And it’s not like the economy of Gran Colombia was awesome after a decade of nonstop revolutionary civil war, it was hard to just keep the country afloat without sending much-needed resources out to be consumed by Bolívar, as he tilted now at Peruvian windmills. 

The correspondence between Bolívar and Santander became curt and accusatory and then ultimately quite silent. And it was one of those times where both sides were wrong and both sides were right. Bolívar was right that they couldn’t leave a Spanish stronghold on the continent, and also right to point out that none of them would have gained their independence had not foreign troops been of assistance. The Venezuelans had fought for New Granada, the New Granadans had fought for Venezuelans, and then they had both fought together for Quito.

But now nobody wanted to keep going and help the Peruvians. Santander was right that this was getting expensive, and endless overcommitments might reverse what they had already achieved. Bolívar’s point was that leaving the Spanish in place would destroy Colombia. Santander’s point was that pursuing them might also destroy Colombia. 

Helping Bolívar deal with these frustrations was Manuela Sáenz, who now moved beyond just being another of Bolívar’s mistresses. She was so fiercely invaluable that Bolívar enrolled her in the army as a cavalry officer with all due rank and pay, and put her in charge of his papers. From that position, she kept a central eye on all his affairs and became a clearinghouse for patriotic correspondence and planning. So she now traveled with his entourage, not merely as his girlfriend, but as one of his principal secretaries and advisors. 

But for a variety of reasons, Sáenz did not accompany Bolívar on the inspection tour at the end of 1823 that nearly killed him, and so the couple became separated for far longer than either imagined. By now, the years of revolutionary toil were taking their toll on Bolívar. Though still only in his mid-40s, he was prematurely aged from years of earning that affectionate nickname “Iron ass”. And while returning to Lima in early January 1824, he contracted a severe fever. The fever was so bad that the ship he was on had to dock at a random little village on the coast. And there, in a small house, Bolívar drifted in and out of consciousness for an entire week, and he very nearly died right then and there. Even when the fever finally broke, Bolívar was in terrible shape. Always short and trim, Bolívar emerged from the fever a hollow-eyed skeleton. He was unable to travel and had to post up in this tiny little village for two full months. And for weeks, he took audiences from behind a curtain so that people did not see how frail he had become. And ironically, it was because he was in such bad shape that it was agreed that Manuela Sáenz would not rush to his side to care for him. They were both afraid it would spark dangerous rumors in Lima that the Liberator was finished. 

Now, whether it was because of Bolívar’s condition or just a coincidence, just as Bolívar was beginning to pull himself together in February, he was handed grave news from the capital: that Argentine garrison holding the fortress of Callao mutinied because they had not been paid in approximately forever. So just like that, the patriots lost control of the all-important port servicing Lima. In the wake of this drastic emergency, the Patriot Congress declared Bolívar dictator. They gave him all authority, whether he wanted it or not, and Bolívar just had to accept it this time. But President Torre Tagle sniffed at the offense of being so easily brushed aside. And as President, he himself was intimately familiar with the military and political situation and determined that, at this point, the Spanish were likely to prevail.

So on February 27, 1824, President Torre Tagle and 350 high-ranking military officers, political officials, and congressmen defected and declared their allegiance to God and the King. Now obviously, this had been worked out in advance with Viceroy De la Serna, who promptly announced that with the capital back in royalist hands, an army would be arriving shortly to secure the situation. The defection of Torre Tagle sent the truly committed patriots of Lima into a hasty flight, with most everyone streaming north for the relative safety of Trujillo. Among those fleeing the capital was Manuela Sáenz. The Spanish arrived and retook the capital two days later. 

But by the time the Spanish were recapturing Lima, Simón Bolívar was personally mending and finally ready to travel after a two-month convalescence. He sailed for Trujillo, reunited with Sáenz, and there scrambled a response. Bolívar established a provisional Patriot government in exile in Trujillo, using his powers as dictator to dole out an array of titles and ministries — something he was by now a pretty well-practiced hand at. True to Bolívar’s outlook and predicament, the government’s principal job for the moment was winning the war.

And for the first time in his life, Bolívar did not just go racing off chasing glory. He carefully planned his next move. Very much as San Martín had done in Cuyo, Bolívar redirected everyone and everything in Trujillo towards the war effort. Men manufactured war material. Women sewed uniforms. Everyone contributed silver and all other metals, precious or otherwise. Cattle, mules, and horses were all pressed into service. Bolívar also, of course, conscripted like crazy. And he soon had about an equal number of Peruvians to go along with the 5,000 or so Colombian veterans who formed the core of his army. He drew these recruits from the ranks of the lower classes, from the pardos and mestizos and Indians who, unlike the elite criollo of Lima, looked forward to liberation, real liberation. And they were ready to fight for it. 

As his army came together, Bolívar also developed a plan to take the fight into the interior. Control of Lima obviously meant nothing. The capital had changed hands multiple times over the past few years with no obvious change to the balance of power. As long as the Spanish remained in the ancient Incan fortresses of the high Andes, Peruvian independence was impossible. And those Spanish forces could remain in the rich and fertile valleys of the interior indefinitely. And their close proximity to the mines meant that their men were always paid on time and in full. So there was very little hope that those Spanish armies would just disintegrate of their own accord.

So, as he drilled his new soldiers, Bolívar sent Sucre ahead to scout the way through the valleys and foothills that parallel the mountains south. And once that route was scouted, Sucre was to identify the best route up into the mountains near the mining region of Pasco, where they would meet the first major garrison on the road to Cusco. That garrison of 2,000 men was located in the fertile valley around Lake Junín and led by General Canterac, living a very comfortable life and reading reports of patriot activity with leisurely contempt. 

But all was not well on the royalist side. Had they stayed united, it is likely that the coming campaign would have gone very differently. But the die was cast, even as Bolívar lay in bed recovering from his near-fatal fever. The conservative Spanish general Olañeta decided that he was the only one left on the whole damn continent fighting for the true principles of Bourbon absolutism. So, suddenly refusing to take orders from Viceroy La Serna, Olañeta withdrew with his army deep into the south in the middle of January 1824. La Serna could not live with this threat in his rear. So, even as Spanish forces were retaking Lima, La Serna was forced to peel off a good third of his total army and dispatch them south to bring Olañeta to heel. And then, even after Bolívar recovered and began building an army out of the city of Trujillo, he was still not briefed on the depth of his enemy’s troubles. It wasn’t until the end of April that he was told that the Spanish were actually up in the mountains fighting a war against themselves. And when he got this news, all of his old instincts fired. He called a war council and laid out the situation for his officers and then called on a young Colonel to offer the first opinion of what the army should do. The young colonel surveyed the maps and said, “I think we should attack at once.” So Bolívar rolled up all the maps and said, “This boy has taught us all a lesson. We march in the morning.” 

So by mid-May 1824, 9,000 men and 6,000 heads of cattle were on the move south, keeping the mountains to their left as they followed the valleys towards the place that Sucre had identified as the best place to start going up. Bolívar led the army from the van and with Manuela Sáenz in the rear, with all his papers and Bolívar being Bolívar, he carried on an affair with a local girl that he met along the way. This led to furious messages from Sáenz in the rear, but both being fairly libertine in their habits, when the army kept moving, the girl went home and Sáenz returned to Bolívar’s side after – no doubt giving him an earful.

By July, the army was preparing to enter the mountains. And as was standard for crossings into the Andes, it was not going to be an easy march. Narrow paths that skirted sheer cliffs, various mountain streams and rivers and waterfalls that were chasms, bare, hard, cold, wet rock. But this is a new-look Bolívar we’re dealing with here. And he did think ahead this time. The advance crew under General Sucre had stashed supplies all along the planned route and had even built rudimentary shelters along the way. This planning would help keep attrition to a minimum as the army began a slow, sometimes single-file climb up into the mountains. 

As Bolívar’s army approached Canterac’s position in the valley of Junín, where he was sitting with 1,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry, the French general did not seem particularly concerned at all. Bolívar may have a reputation, but Canterac dismissed him as an overhyped, empty shirt who had not yet met a real army or General in battle. And it’s not like patriot armies hadn’t attempted to come up into the mountains before, but Mother Nature had always taken care of them. So Canterac didn’t even try that hard to keep tabs on Bolívar, and it came as something of a surprise when, on August 2, 9,000 men suddenly started emerging onto a high mesa overlooking the Valley of Junín. And even then, it took Canterac another four days to decide that he should probably do something. The thing he decided to do was order a retreat out of the valley. And that’s when Bolívar came down to try to stop him. 

So on August 6, Bolívar personally led about 900 of his cavalry down onto the plains by the lake, many of these being old llaneros veterans who had volunteered for further service, many of whom had now been fighting for Bolívar for years. Canterac responded by sending his own thousand cavalry out to try to buy the infantry time to escape the valley. And the two sides started dancing around each other, and then they started making sweeping passes at each other, and pretty soon, alternating revolving waves of cavalry started clashing. Except it was all done exclusively with swords and lances. No sound rang out except for the pounding of horse hooves and the cries of wounded men. And by this point in the history of war, this was practically unheard of. But if it was going to be a battle of lances, Bolívar’s cavalry was eventually going to win. And they did, proving to Canterac that he was dealing with a much different kind of army than he had in the past. These guys deployed the old retreat, chase, and turn trick that Páez had taught them long ago. Much to Canterac’s surprise and dismay, his cavalry started taking heavy casualties — 400 dead and wounded and another 100 captured. But the survivors of this skirmish escaped, as did the entire infantry, all of them now running towards Cusco. Bolívar’s liberating army then poured into the valley. And after one lousy cavalry skirmish, the emotional course of the war flipped, with Bolívar’s men now believing that they were destined for victory while the Spanish aura of invincibility had been permanently shattered. 

Once again, though, it was a more tempered Bolívar running this campaign. So rather than putting on the rocket skis for Cusco, the Liberator fanned his men out across the valley to consolidate their political and military authority and generally make the region a new forward base for supply and defense. He also got word that in the wake of the Battle of Junín, the Viceroy La Serna was finally prioritizing Bolívar over the renegade conservative Olañeta and was massing upwards of 12,000 men in Cusco to properly respond to this Patriot army now in their midst. 

So that Patriot army remained in the Valley of Junín for two full months. But by October, Bolívar was about to restart the campaign, only to be hit by heavy rains that made any march logistically impossible. So he ordered the army to settle down and wait it out. But Bolívar himself decided that with the campaign idled, he should make a return trip to Lima. The Spanish army that had moved in after Torre Tagle’s defection had moved on again after beefing up the garrison at Callao, and again taking any supplies they could find. So there was a good chance Bolívar would be able to restore Lima to patriot hands, even if Callao itself would remain out of reach and looming ominously on the coast. So, leaving Sucre to lead the army, the Liberator retraced his steps back down out of the mountains. 

It was while on the road back to Lima at the end of October 1824 that Bolívar received devastating news. The Congress in Bogotá, at Vice President Santander’s instigation, had voted to strip Bolívar of the presidency and all military authority that had been granted to him by Colombia. The justification was that by accepting the dictatorship of Peru, Bolívar had abdicated his claim to sovereignty in Colombia. The Congress further ordered that Bolívar immediately give up control of all Colombian forces to his second in command. Now, as fate would have it, that second in command was General Sucre, the ever-loyal protégé of Bolívar. Had it been practically anybody else, it’s possible Bolívar would have rejected the order from Bogotá. But instead, he raged in his tent and then wrote two letters to Sucre. The first was his official public notice of the orders from Congress; the second, a personal letter to Sucre, where he blistered at the perfidy of the politicians in Bogotá but told Sucre to accept the change in command. Not yet 30, General Antonio José de Sucre was now Commander-in-Chief of the Patriot army. 

Now, Sucre and Bolívar’s other senior officers were, of course, outraged by all of this, but Bolívar forbade them from ignoring the Congress or from breaking off the campaign against the Spanish just on his account. He still had the power and authority vested in him as dictator of Peru, and he could wield it back in Lima to the benefit of the greater cause. But though he took the removal of his command in remarkable stride, there is no question that Bolívar would have been crushed. He was a General. He wanted military glory. That’s what he was always after. Now he was going to be forced to sit on the sidelines, and all the glory would go to Sucre, who had already kind of stolen his thunder in Quito when he found the third sister. I mean, really, if it had been anybody but Sucre who Bolívar was handing the army over to, this all would have played out very differently.

Over the next few weeks, though, Bolívar continued to pick his way down out of the mountains, headed for the district around Lima. And then he finally got some good news. Though everybody else had abandoned him, way back off in his home of Venezuela, José Antonio Páez came through. Though he too was no happier about Bolívar’s demands than anyone else, he at least complied. Páez sent 4,500 men on a long march south to reinforce the Patriot cause in Peru. These men were arriving in the country just as Bolívar was descending from the mountains, and though he had been stripped of his Colombian authority, Bolívar asserted his authority as dictator of Peru, put himself at the head of these troops, and led them to Lima. 

So yet again, an army marched virtually unopposed into the capital. Ex-President Torre Tagle and his fellow defectors, plus any remaining Spanish troops, fled into the fortress of Callao. With his enemies trapped inside the fortress, Bolívar began a siege in early December, just a few days before Sucre fought the great decisive battle of Ayacucho. 

Bolívar’s last order to Sucre — well, recommendation, really, since he had been stripped of his ability to give orders — was for Sucre to maintain a strong defensive crouch and not get sucked into a battle. It was one thing to overwhelm a small garrison, quite another to take on the cream of the Spanish army, and Bolívar doubted the Patriots’ capacity to win any battle up in the mountains, not for the least because the Spanish were far more acclimatized to the thin mountain air. But Viceroy La Serna was not going to let Sucre just avoid a battle, and in late November, he marched out of Cusco to go hunt down and destroy the Patriot army. 

Sucre did his best to follow Bolívar’s recommendation and avoid a confrontation with the Spanish. But recognizing that La Serna was trying to swing around him and cut off his line of retreat to the north, Sucre mobilized his forces and led them through a series of deft retreats that prevented the Spanish from outflanking him. But eventually, La Serna’s forces proved too fast and too well acquainted with the terrain, and after a few weeks dancing around each other, Sucre determined that if he was going to make it out of this, he was going to have to turn and punch La Serna right in the nose.

So on December 6, near the plains of Ayacucho, Sucre decided to stop running. With other contingents of his army spread out on their own lines of retreat, Sucre had about 5,800 men under his direct command, while up in the hills overlooking Ayacucho were more than 9,000 Spanish. They had a nearly two-to-one advantage and held the high ground. But Sucre was now determined to fight, and it would seem that just as Bolívar was becoming more prudent, his protégé was picking up the most gloriously reckless of the Liberator’s old habits. 

On December 9, 1824, the two sides lined up for battle, and from La Serna’s perspective, things could not be better. He had the numbers, he had the high ground, and all of his best officers were running his army. Sucre didn’t even have an artillery, well, he had one single solitary cannon. But it’s not like the Spanish troops were in great shape. They had been marching like crazy over the last few weeks and were now badly under-provisioned. They were tired and they were hungry. But when the battle started, it predictably went against the patriots, who endured artillery fire and a steady press of Spanish infantry and cavalry.

But then, at the center of the patriot lines, a young cavalry general dismounted his horse and shot it in the head. He told his fellow officers that he wanted no opportunity to escape. Then he ordered everyone to pick up their long llaneros lances, and the next time the Spanish cavalry charged, the patriot center didn’t just stand firm, they charged right back. The spears played hell with the Spanish horsemen, and after a half hour of intense fighting, Viceroy La Serna could only look on helplessly as the patriot center not only held but surged forward. Rushing the Spanish artillery positions on the hills and capturing them. With his army now suddenly buckling, La Serna ordered a massive infantry to go retake his artillery positions, but they failed and were sent reeling backward. In the midst of all this, his Generals then started getting wounded and captured. Canterac was among them. And then, in a humiliating blow, La Serna himself was surrounded in his command tent and taken prisoner. Everywhere else, his soldiers were either dead, or in full retreat, or in the process of being captured. They left 1,900 dead on the field, with another 2,500 now prisoners of war. General Sucre lost only 310 men. 

At the Battle of Ayacucho, General Sucre won a battle worthy of Bolívar in all of his old glory. Sucre had been outnumbered. He charged uphill against superior forces. And not only was it a great victory, but it was the final victory. With La Serna captured and his army destroyed, there was no Spanish resistance left in Peru — or practically nowhere else. The only remaining Spanish forces now followed Olañeta south of La Paz. Bolívar himself well knew what this victory meant when he heard about it. He was not expecting Sucre to fight a battle, let alone win one so decisively. When he heard the details, he wrote:

“General Sucre is the father of Ayacucho. He is the redeemer of the children of the sun. He has broken the chains with which Pizarro bound the empire of the Incas. Posterity will picture him with one foot on Pichincha and the other on Potosí, bearing in his arms the cradle of Manco Capac and contemplating the chains broken by his sword.”

The Battle of Ayacucho marked the beginning of permanent independence for Peru. But more importantly, it was the last major battle of the wars of Spanish American independence. There would be mop-up work to be done in Upper Peru, and Sucre was already redirecting his forces to secure that very last territory that was still under the chains of Spanish oppression. But at the dawn of 1825, Bolívar could look back with satisfaction on the oath that he had made on the sacred mountain in Rome so many years ago. He had now liberated his country and he had not died trying.

Return to The Latin American Revolutions >>