Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

On July 5, 1811, Venezuela declared independence from Spain. Well, at least part of Venezuela declared independence from Spain. The Congress that had convened in Caracas lacked representatives from most of the western half of the province, as no other major city wanted to be ruled by Caracas. And then on the other side, there was the matter of who exactly they were declaring independence from. Most of Spain at this point was being ruled by the French Bonaparte monarchy that nobody had recognized since its inception way back in 1808. So really, the Congress in Caracas was declaring independence from the regency that was holed up in the port of Cádiz and its allegedly pan-Imperial Cortes that had been convened there. So the Declaration of Independence was really some guys in the region around Caracas declaring independence from another group of guys who were trapped in Cádiz. But still, it was a momentous day, and the patriots in Caracas, Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Miranda chief among them, set out to make their play for freedom permanent. Today is the story of their abject failure to do so.

The mood in Caracas immediately after the Declaration of Independence was jubilant and turbulent. Gangs of patriotic citizens, the kind that had been roused to life by the Patriotic Society for the Development of Agriculture and Livestock, marched around, harassing and disarming all remaining peninsulares and anyone suspected of being a royalist, that is, anyone who still professed loyalty to King Ferdinand. And though the mixed-race pardo community and even the free blacks in the capital were wary of the new regime, for the first few weeks, they joined in the excitement. They joined militias and requested full and equal access to all offices and opportunities. And they really did hope that maybe this would be the start of a real egalitarian liberation project. They would be very disappointed on that front.

Now, the backlash in Caracas at this point, though, was pretty minimal. On July 11, a small insurrection broke out in the northwest part of the city, but it turned out to be 60 guys and was easily crushed. Sixteen of them were summarily executed, hanged, and their bodies then dismembered. But elsewhere, dangers to the new republic rose up on multiple fronts. The most obvious was that the other major cities in Venezuela: Maracaibo, Coro, Valencia had never sent representatives to the Congress, and they were not interested in taking orders from it. And indeed, when Caracas declared independence, those cities in western Venezuela just as loudly proclaimed their continued loyalty to King Ferdinand.

But if you remember from last time, we talked about the four quadrants of Spanish American revolutionaries, right? You had your monarchist centralist, which is what the old Caracas Junta had been. Then you had republican centralists like Bolívar and Miranda. Republican federalists, which is what the first Congress is actually going to morph into as they try to appease these western cities. And then monarchist federalists, which is what those western cities were. So they were pledging fealty to the king, but they are also demanding local home rule. They intended to be as free from Cádiz as they were from Caracas, just under the umbrella of their shared sovereign, King Ferdinand.

But the even bigger danger looming over the new republic was that the elite criollo serving in the Caracas Congress had no intention of touching the racial caste system. Yes, they made a few grand rhetorical gestures and had gone so far as to outlaw the slave trade, but for them, freedom meant freedom for the elite criollo, not necessarily for anybody else. So, for example, any slave that thought that the end of the slave trade might mean the end of slavery was immediately disabused of that notion. Then the free blacks and pardos who joined the patriot militias found themselves dumped in segregated companies run by white officers. Then, as peninsulares abandoned their various posts, criollos stepped into the void without doing much to offer anyone else a shot at those jobs. It soon became clear to the non-white population of Venezuela that their initial suspicions were true: freedom meant freedom for the whites, not for anybody else. And the Congress did not help matters by moving forward with their own version of the active-passive citizen distinction. So property holders like themselves could expect both civil rights and political rights, the right to vote and to stand for office. But everybody else would have to settle for mere civil rights, protection from abuse, but no active participation in government.

Now, for the circle surrounding guys like Miranda and Bolívar, this attitude was massively counterproductive. Most of the population was poor or they were mixed-race or they were both. So the best way to survive as a new Republic in a dangerous world was to harness the energy of the whole population, get them all pulling in the same direction, not go looking for ways to cut out huge swathes of that population and set them down on the sidelines. And it’s worth noting too here, that Miranda and Bolívar and other members of the Patriotic Society did skew more radically enlightened on matters of race and class, especially Miranda. He’s not a slave owner at this point, and his contact with reformers like William Wilberforce had made him far more broadminded than most of his contemporaries. Bolívar, meanwhile, was also not wedded to the caste system, and if clinging to it undermined the legitimacy of the new Republic, he was happy to ditch it or at least reform it, but he was still a slave owner, and his worldview hadn’t yet shaken off all of its old prejudices. And all that said, both men were acutely afraid that this would all turn into the Haitian Revolution, and so they would never press anyone to move too far or too fast on the subject of race.

But by entrenching local white rule, the republicans opened a huge breach for the royalists to step into. Royalist agitators started going around educating the blacks and the pardos about the obvious intention of the Caracas Congress to enshrine elite white rule as the order of the new Republic. And taking the lead in that effort were members of the Catholic Church, from the Archbishop of Caracas on down to local parish priests, the word went out that a bunch of selfish radicals in Caracas were trying to spit in the face of both God and the king, and that following them down the path to hell would be their ruin. It was not a particularly hard sell, and pretty soon, almost the entire mixed-race population of Venezuela had abandoned the Republic. It was not unlike the coloreds of Saint-Domingue sticking with the French in the face of the big white push for home rule. Because, I mean, you call it home rule and you call it freedom, but I’m personally going to have it even worse than ever, so why should I support you? And then, on top of that, royalists started taking an even more radical line. They went out amongst the slaves and told them that, “Nope, you guys are just going to be kept in chains forever. You’re going to have to break them for yourselves.” And in all regions containing major commercial estates, slave uprisings became an endemic problem, which only made the Congress dig in even harder. 

Now, though, I’ve been talking about Miranda and Bolívar as if they both agree about everything, cracks were now beginning to open up between them that will come to a head at the end of today’s episode. And these cracks seem to have followed two principal fault lines. The first was simply that friction exists between any two ambitious, egotistical men, which Miranda and Bolívar both certainly were, especially when you throw in the fact that one is old and wants deference, and the other is young and wants respect. The other fault line, though, was that Miranda apparently had a running feud with the Del Toro family, especially with the family patriarch, the Marquis Del Toro. These two did not see eye to eye on much of anything. And of course, the Del Toros are also Bolívar’s old in-laws and were amongst his closest friends. I mean, for all intents and purposes, they were his family, and he remained close to them throughout this period of partnership with Miranda. Meanwhile, Miranda was getting a little annoyed at Bolívar’s divided loyalties, especially after Congress sprayed some gas on the feud when they made Del Toro Minister of War over Miranda. Bolívar is just caught in the middle of all this. 

But the Marquis Del Toro was not going to turn out to have been a very good choice for Minister of War, and he would fail the very first test that the Republic faced. On July 19, an armed insurrection broke out in the town of Valencia, just west of Caracas. The mostly mixed-race population swore allegiance to King Ferdinand and rejected the authority of the Caracas Congress. This now being a major test of resolve, the Marquis del Toro organized the armed forces at the Republic’s disposal and marched on Valencia. But the old Marquis wasn’t really a military commander, nor his men really soldiers. At the first sign of real resistance in Valencia, they retreated without putting up much of a fight at all. 

So the embarrassed Congress then had to turn back to Miranda and say, “Okay, you are now the Commander in Chief of the army. Please go subdue Valencia.” But before Miranda could leave to take up his command, the strain between him and Bolívar spilled out into the open.

Now Bolívar naturally expected to be taken along with Miranda. But Miranda told the Congress not to assign Bolívar to any important position in the military, and that he was, in fact, a dangerous young man. When Bolívar heard about this, he stormed into the Congress and blustered about his aggrieved honor, and he did kind of have a point. But the situation was ultimately resolved when the Marquis Del Toro, who was still over in Valencia, would take Bolivar onto his personal staff at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

So General Miranda and Lieutenant Colonel Bolívar arrived at Valencia with some reinforcements at the end of July, bringing the total size of the Patriot Army to somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 men, almost all of them white, and they fought against about 750 men who were defending the town walls of Valencia, almost all of them mixed-race. But despite the numerical advantage, Miranda was not impressed with his army. Most of his troops lacked proper guns, and they had never undertaken any kind of official training. In fact, many of them had been persuaded to do their patriotic duty and join the army at the end of a sharp sword, if you catch my draft. 

And thus began Miranda’s very bad relationship with the rank and file. He was dismissive of them and very condescending, saying that they were an absolutely rotten lot, the worst soldiers he had ever seen. He frequently spoke in English and French, which did nothing to make them think that he was actually one of them. And that doesn’t even get into his tactics, which they were not too thrilled about, because upon arrival, Miranda staged a first attack that saw his main column walk into a cannon ambush that resulted in heavy casualties and the failure of the attack. So then Miranda regrouped, surrounded Valencia, and successfully cut off their water supply. He then was able to launch a second and far more successful attack, but he took a play out of the old French revolutionary playbook and just threw his superior numbers at the enemy, hoping to overwhelm them, whatever the human cost. So on August 13, Valencia did finally capitulate. But the combined dead and wounded on the patriot side numbered as much as 50% of the army. So it’s pretty safe to say that Francisco de Miranda was not the most popular general in the history of the world. 

The battles around Valencia, though, also marked the first time Simón Bolívar saw combat. And by all accounts, he performed exceptionally well. He was brave, cool under pressure, a natural leader in the chaos of war. Even Miranda, who had tried to keep him off the battlefield, not only recommended Bolívar for medals but also afforded him the honor of being the man to carry news of the capture of Valencia back to Caracas.

Now Bolívar’s first brush with war here is not going to end well, as we soon shall see. But the attributes that would make him such a remarkable and beloved general, unlike Miranda, were all present at Valencia.

Despite this victory, though, the Republic was unable or maybe unwilling to make further military inroads. The Congress didn’t really want to be fighting a civil war against their brothers in Coro and Maracaibo. Miranda, especially, was not happy that after finally being made Commander in Chief of the great Patriot Army of independent Venezuela, that he was fighting a civil war against other Venezuelans rather than a war of liberation against the hated Spanish. So military action took a backseat to political maneuvering. And as the Congress worked on the constitution that they hoped would define the government of the new Republic, they tried to include as many olive branches as possible that would bring all of Venezuela over to their side.

Now, as these patriots in Caracas tried to really make the French Republic work, the Cortes in Cadiz was in a similar bind as they tried to craft a new liberal constitution that would govern the Spanish Empire. 1811 was a year of stalemate in the Peninsular War, this being the era where something like 350,000 French troops had been brought into the peninsula, but most of them had been dispersed in garrisons or guarding supply routes and under constant demoralizing harassment by local Spanish guerrillas.

But the sword of Damocles hanging over Cádiz had been somewhat secured. And so the Cortes spent the back half of 1811 crafting the framework of a constitutional monarchy that they hoped would govern the Spanish Empire after the hopefully inevitable expulsion of the French. The document they ultimately produced was indeed very liberal and took many elements from the early constitutions of the French Revolution. So sovereignty would now lay with the people, not with the king. And more than that, it would lay with the whole people. Borrowing from that old concept of the French nation, one and indivisible, the members of the Cortes tried to codify that there was no longer a mother country and colonies or even separate kingdoms under a single crown, but rather just one Spain. Whether you lived in Lima or Mexico City or Madrid or Manila. One Spain, one law.

But as we discussed last time, who counted as a Spaniard in this one Spain now lay in the compromise that had already been hashed out over the issue of representation in the Cortes. Those who could trace their lineage to Spanish dominions in Europe or America were counted. If you could trace your lineage back to Africa, you were not.

So on the one hand, this is a pretty radical admission that all the Indians and mestizos are equal to whites, but it shut out the blacks and pardos. And this was a compromise that would come back to bite them because as we just saw, and as we will continue to see, the blacks and the pardos are absolutely ready to pledge their loyalty to the Cádiz government. But the Cádiz government is sitting there pretending like they don’t even exist.

Now, we don’t need to worry too much else about the Constitution of 1812, as it would become known, because while the guys in the Cortes were happy with it, it limited the powers of the king, it made the Cortes the creator of all law, it put the monarchy on a fixed allowance. None of it was ever really going to be put into practice. When the restoration did finally come, King Ferdinand VII planned to pretend like nothing at all had changed since the day he abdicated the throne back in 1808. And he certainly wasn’t planning on accepting the liberal Constitution of 1812. But that was still in the future.

For the moment, the problem with the constitution was that it failed to really do much to appease the Americans. As we also discussed last week, the American principal demands were for free trade, equal rights, and home rule. And those were all pretty much brushed aside. Because even as they talked about one Spain, the peninsular delegates of the Cortes couldn’t shake their unconscious prejudice against the Americans as simply an inferior breed to rule over, not rule with. And the Cádiz merchants were not going to let anybody undo their trade privileges.

So while the Constitution of 1812 is justly celebrated in Spain as a liberal enlightened document, I mean, hey, look, freedom of the press, it did nothing to bring the Americans back into the fold or halt the spread of these independence movements. New Spain was currently being overrun by revolutionary armies, although Father Hidalgo himself was captured and executed in July 1811. And then down in the Río de la Plata, the convoluted little revolution/civil war was unfolding with equal fury. And over in Chile, a liberal republican regime had successfully tossed out their governor, and they were busy writing their own independent constitution. 

So in the face of all this turmoil and the threat it posed to peninsular trade and revenue, the Cádiz government undertook measures to pacify the American domains and force them to recognize their authority. And then eventually, when they promulgated it, the Constitution of 1812. And in particular, it was the Cádiz merchants who undertook this project of pacification, seeing as how they were the only people with any money to pay for anything. So over the winter of 1811-1812, the merchants started outfitting expeditions to the various trouble spots in the Americas to reinforce peninsular authority.

Now, of course, with the Peninsular War still raging, it’s not like they could just send huge armies to put the rebels down. And by the spring of 1812, only about 6,000 men total would be sent over to the Western Hemisphere. But most of those who were sent were officers. And they also took with them weapons and ammunition and supplies to reinforce locals who were still loyal to Spain. And as we’re about to see, a couple of hundred well-armed soldiers could recruit and train armies of counter-revolutionary locals to fight for the cause.

Now, speaking of constitutions that were never actually going to be implemented, in December 1811, the Caracas Congress finally completed theirs. And much to the dismay of Bolívar and Miranda, it was a self-consciously federalist piece of work. As I said, it was designed mostly to coax wary towns like Maracaibo and Coro into the union. They also moved the capital from Caracas to Valencia to try to prove that the government would not be held hostage by the Caracas aristocracy. It also did nothing about the social and racial hierarchy of the Republic, aside from permanently abolishing the special tribute paid by the Amerindian communities. Now, this seems pretty benevolent until you realize that they paid that tribute in lieu of any other taxes or obligations to the state. So lifting the tribute meant they were now liable to be taxed by Caracas at a rate higher than the tribute had ever been. So it’s safe to say that the criollo leadership of the First Republic had pretty much alienated everyone by the time the first new Congress under the Constitution convened in March 1812. 

Now when that Congress convened, the man who would destroy them in the end, the man who would become the bane of the patriot cause had already landed in Coro. His name was Domingo de Monteverde. 

Monteverde was a native of the Canary Islands and a career naval officer. When he arrived in Venezuela, he was simply a frigate captain, nothing more and nothing less. He arrived to support the efforts of the man who had been appointed by the Cortes to become the new Captain General of Venezuela, a Cuban-born officer named Fernando Miyares. Now, Coro welcomed the small force of soldiers and marines and sailors that arrived with the new Captain General to reassert loyalty to Spain, and Coro became the base of the anti-republican campaign of 1812.

But though Miyares was supposed to be the ultimate authority in that campaign, Monteverde proved himself to be so resourceful, aggressive, and independent to the point of insubordinate, that the frigate captain was, in short order, the de facto Commander in Chief of the royalist army.

In early March 1812, Monteverde was dispatched, along with a couple of hundred men, to link up with a pro-royalist insurrection in a small town just south of Coro and due west of Caracas. He entered this town on March 17th and immediately exceeded his orders by recruiting reinforcements from the local population. Again, we’re talking about mostly mixed-race guys here. And his intention was then to advance on Caracas and recruit all along the road. I mean, really, this is the plan that Miranda had once envisioned for himself during the Leander Expedition, except now in reverse.

So, in March of 1812, things are looking not great for the Republic. Successfully defending themselves from all the dangers that surrounded them was not going to be easy. And then a whole new danger lurched up out of nowhere when the Republic was attacked by no less an enemy than almighty God. And it’s never great for your cause when God comes out against you.

So if you remember back two episodes ago, the coup that ousted Captain General Emparán took place on April 19, 1810, but more significantly, it took place during Holy Week on Maundy Thursday. Well, since Easter wanders around the calendar like a drunk stumbling home from the bar, in 1812, Maundy Thursday landed not on April 19, but on March 26. So it was that on this spiritual second anniversary, disaster struck Caracas. Massive, unfathomable disaster.

By the afternoon of March 26, 1812, all the churches in town were packed with parishioners, and the cathedral itself, one of the oldest and largest buildings in the city, was filled to the brim. In their barracks, soldiers prepared for parade. And out in the streets, everybody went about their business as if nothing was about to happen. But then, at 4:00 p.m., a massive earthquake hit. It shook the city for the better part of two minutes. Now, obviously, there’s no way to know what the quake measured on the Richter scale, but the scale of destruction could only mean that it was huge. The great cathedral? It was demolished to its foundations. It crushed everyone inside. All those other churches? Demolished to their foundations. In fact, nearly every major municipal structure was leveled to its foundations. There was a degree to which if you were inside when the earthquake hit, you were just dead. For the next 30 minutes, dust and screams and crashes and chaos swirled as the dazed residents of Caracas tried through their shock to register what had just happened. I mean, what do you do first when everywhere you look is just sudden complete destruction? How do you even process it? That 30 minutes ended when the first major aftershock hit, which took down any structure still hanging on for dear life. And many of those who lived through the first quake did not make it through the aftershock.

Now, I haven’t been able to track down exactly where Francisco de Miranda was during all of this, but I would guess that he was up in Valencia. But everybody knows where Bolívar was because it became a part of his growing legend. He was immediately spotted on top of a pile of rubble in a loose shirt, organizing efforts to dig out what, if any, survivors could be found. I mean, Bolivar is legitimately great at this sort of thing. The whole running towards the fire to help rather than running away from the fire to stay safe. And on top of this pile of rubble, he is alleged to have shouted, “If nature itself decides to oppose us, we will fight and force her to obey.”

Without tools or time to actually think anything through, Bolívar and the others dug with their bare hands. There weren’t very many survivors, though, and soon the screams subsided and the bodies started to pile up. So many bodies that a mass grave was deemed insufficient, and anonymous funeral pyres began to be lit across the city. Estimates are, of course, estimates that have been passed down through the years. But conservatively, the death toll was somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000. 

The Caracas earthquake of 1812 was a catastrophic tragedy in human terms. And it was also the beginning of the end of the First Republic. The royalist clergy wasted 0.0 seconds before blaming the tragedy on God’s divine wrath. Caracas had turned its back on God and the King, and look at what has happened Now, I mean, the clergy would have exploited the earthquake had it happened at any point. But Maundy Thursday, I mean, the anniversary of the coup, it was impossible to ignore. And there is a more apocryphal story surrounding the legend of Bolívar that he happened to cross a priest in the immediate aftermath of the quake, telling the day’s survivors to repent and turn back to the light of God and the King. And Bolívar pulled out a saber and chased the priest off. 

But let’s face it, the earthquake as divine retribution was a story that was going to have legs. And the icing on the top of the cake was that over the next few weeks, it became clear where the earthquake had caused the most destruction, and all of that destruction was in patriot-held republican territory. Cities that had stayed loyal to God and the King, like Maracaibo and Coro, they were all fine and dandy. So in the weeks and months that followed, many families who had gone along with the republican tale now said, “Nope, I am done. I am going back to God and the King.”

With this major crisis at hand, the Caracas Congress reconvened and decided extraordinary measures were needed. On April 23, 1812, they appointed Francisco de Miranda, Generalissimo with dictatorial powers. And for all intents and purposes, Miranda’s word was now law, at least wherever the Republic’s authority extended, which was fewer and fewer places by the day.

With Monteverde’s army continuing to advance east, Miranda decided on May 3 that he could not hold Valencia, and he retreated, leaving the once rebellious city to fall back into rebellion, though at this point it was kind of hard to tell who the quote unquote “rebels” really were. 

But though I’m obviously now moving us towards the inevitable fall of the first Venezuelan Republic, the armed forces Miranda commanded still vastly outnumbered those of Monteverde. Miranda at this point had about 5,000 men under arms. Now, not all of them were in one place, but they did number far more than the 1,500 or so who now formed the core of Monteverde’s army. But again, those guys under Miranda’s command are not well armed or trained, and many had been pressed into service. So who knows what would happen if you actually tried to get them to fight for you. They’d probably all desert at this point.

So rather than attacking, Miranda settled into a strategy of cautious defense. After retreating out of Valencia at the beginning of May, he just kept retreating until he arrived in the town of La Victoria on June 20. Now there, the patriots were attacked by Monteverde’s forces. And the patriots acquitted themselves actually quite well. They didn’t desert, they actually fought and won the battle. But either because Miranda had lost his edge or felt the moral energy of the patriot cause slipping away, or maybe he was just never that great of a commander to begin with, he did not follow up on this victory and try to turn the tide. Instead, he settled in like he really was just waiting for the end to come. 

Now, meanwhile, Bolívar, a man who would always fight, who would never desert, and who would always push for more aggressive action, was currently sitting glumly in the city of Puerto Cabello. After becoming dictator, Miranda had given Bolívar the critical job of defending this critical port city, which had in it a fort which happened to contain all of the patriots’ heavy guns and ammunition. It was really the republican storehouse. This was a very important job, but it also looked a lot like Miranda was once again trying to keep Bolívar back from the front lines. And Bolívar certainly did not appreciate the assignment and considered it to be a slight rather than an honor. And so he sat, unable to do anything about the reports he read of Miranda’s constant retreating.

Now it was perhaps it was because he was in such a funk that Colonel Bolívar did not pay close enough attention to the internal threats he faced in Puerto Cabello. Specifically, the fort in the city held not just the patriot armory but also an assortment of high-ranking royalist prisoners who had been captured over the course of the last year. With enthusiasm for the patriot cause at this point at an all-time low, it was not out of the question that subterfuge and discontentment orchestrated by these royalist prisoners would threaten the patriot hold on the city. And that’s exactly what happened. 

On June 30, everything fell apart. The second-in-command of the fort had already turned traitor and was just waiting for an opportunity, which came along when the senior commander of the fort left to go attend a wedding for the evening. And yes, it is upon such things as history hinges. Left in charge of the fort for the night, the second-in-command went around and let out all the royalist prisoners out of their cells, and then they went and took control of the armory. Now, whether any of the other soldiers up in the fort resisted this is pretty doubtful, because defections from the patriot cause were now a daily occurrence. I mean, now, the minute the fort announced it was now a royalist stronghold, the company guarding the main gates of Puerto Cabello declared their solidarity with them and refused to take orders from Bolívar anymore. 

Now, being the brash guy that he was, Bolívar came out of his house and demanded that the guys in the fort surrender. Whereupon, the guys in the fort turned their guns on the city and said, “Yeah, do your worst.” And there was no worst for Bolívar to do. The shelling started up, and all Colonel Bolívar could do was take cover with the other residents and watch as nearly every soldier under his command deserted or defected. He also learned that a 500-man detachment from Monteverde’s army was on the way. And so he sent a desperate dispatch to Miranda: “Send me reinforcements at once!”

But, Miranda did not get this dispatch until July 5. He was in fact sitting around with his senior staff, toasting the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence when Bolívar’s frantic letter arrived. Allegedly, Miranda said, “That is the way of the world. A little while ago, we thought we were all secure. Yesterday, Monteverde had neither weapons nor ammunition. Today, he has both in abundance. I am told to attack the enemy, but he already has everything in his hands. Tomorrow, we shall see what happens.”

And tomorrow, what happened was that Bolívar gave up. He had with him now just five officers and three enlisted men still willing to follow his orders. This small company slipped out of town on July 6. And on July 7, Bolívar arrived in La Guaira, the main port serving Caracas, where he wrote a now-famous letter defending his conduct. He said,

“My spirits are so low that I do not feel I have the courage now to command a single soldier. My vanity had me believing that desire and patriotic zeal alone could offset my lack of experience. I beg you now to assign me to an officer of the lowest rank or grant me a few days to compose myself. After 13 sleepless nights, under extreme conditions, I find myself in a rare state of mental ruin. I did my duty, General, and had one of my soldiers stayed, I would have fought to the end. But they abandoned me, and alas, the nation is lost at my hands.”

Bolívar’s sense of shame over what had happened and the way it had happened was going to haunt him. And though it is never reported, it is entirely possible that he swore one of those ironclad oaths to never let anything like that happen again, which would kind of help explain one of the darkest marks on Bolívar’s career, which is going to be coming up when we discuss the war to the death. 

When Miranda learned that Puerto Cabello had indeed finally fallen, all the energy went out of him. Despite still having superior overall numbers, he felt the walls closing in and sought to salvage what could be salvaged by negotiation. On July 12, he opened talks with Monteverde to surrender the Patriot Army and return Venezuela to the fold of the Spanish Empire. But these talks were handled by intermediaries because Miranda had more important things on his mind, like how to successfully extract himself from this disaster. He sent his luggage down to La Guaira, where a British naval ship just so happened to be waiting for him. And then, infamously, he also directed that a large chunk of the state treasury—talking silver here mostly—and ordered that it be carried onto this British naval ship as well.

Now, Miranda would later claim that this was because he planned to eventually sail for Cartagena, where the republicans could regroup and carry on the fight. But to his more patriotic brethren, who had a lot more to lose in Venezuela than he did, it looked a lot like Miranda was surrendering without a fight and then running off with the Republic’s money, with the British acting as his prearranged getaway driver. They were not happy about it at all. All of which sets the stage now for the ultimately tragic final chapter for our friend Francisco de Miranda. 

The final armistice was signed on July 25. The Patriot Army was now officially dissolved. In exchange for this, Monteverde agreed to a blanket pardon for the patriots and said that he would not touch their property, and that he would issue passports to anyone who now wanted to leave the country. Miranda himself, of course, wanted to leave the country, and he made his way down to La Guaira as fast as possible. But there, a plot was already afoot to not let the precursor get away quite so easily. And at the center of this conspiracy was Simón Bolívar. 

Miranda arrived down at the port late and was convinced by a patriotic innkeeper that it would be better to eat and rest and sail in the morning. “All of your luggage and all of the silver has been loaded onto the British ship. All you’ll have to do is get up in the morning and go.”

But that night, twelve disgruntled Patriot officers met to discuss whether they were really going to go through with what they were planning on going through with. And they talked themselves into quite a lather about how Miranda had led them to ruin and was now trying to run for it. And they decided that they were going to go through with it—that Miranda was not going to get on a ship and sail away; he was going to go down with the ship that was the Republic of Venezuela.

At 3:00 a.m., these men took over the inn. They posted guards to prevent anyone from entering, and then they banged on Miranda’s door and demanded that he present himself. The old General soon recognized what was afoot. He donned his uniform and presented himself. A heated exchange then unfolded as they accused Miranda of treachery and he tried to defend himself. But the officers had made up their minds. They took Miranda into custody, marched him down to the fort, and tossed him in the dungeon in chains. They planned to leave him for the Spanish to do with as they pleased. Miranda would never again breathe free air.

Simón Bolívar was now himself at a crossroads. And as the patriots who had arrested Miranda broke up, it was pretty much every man for himself. Now, despite all his promises to the contrary, when Monteverde entered Caracas in early August, still mostly a pile of rubble, he had no intention of doing anything but cracking down on the rebel scum. He ordered the ports closed; he was going to issue no passports, and patriot property was fair game for confiscation.

Bolívar, though, was incredibly lucky, which, as you may have noticed over the course of all the podcasts we’ve been through together, is something all great men have in common. Being part of the inner circle criollo aristocracy meant Bolívar had friends on both sides of the lines. And he was able to seek asylum with an old family friend who happened to be a staunch royalist administrator, whom Monteverde happened to trust very highly. So this guy arranged for Bolívar to get a passport, but at the meeting where Bolívar was supposed to come down and get this passport, Monteverde was like, “I’ve heard of this guy. I hear he’s one of the most radical of the bunch.” But he decided to go ahead and issue the passport anyway when he was told of the role that Bolívar had played in apprehending the traitor Miranda. But then Bolívar interrupted and said, “I didn’t arrest Miranda to curry favor with you. I arrested him because he turned out to be a traitor to the patriot cause.” And so Monteverde was like, “Wait, what did you just say?” And Bolívar’s old family friend had to literally step into the middle of this and say, “Look, you be quiet. You please issue the passport, and let’s just get this kid out of here.”

So the passport was issued, and on August 27, 1812, Bolívar sailed away from Venezuela for exile, not entirely sure where he would wind up. The name Bolívar would then haunt Monteverde for the rest of his natural life.

So the First Republic is now crushed. It had failed in the face of near universal dislike for the men who had run it. The other cities had refused to stand in solidarity with Caracas. The mixed-race population saw no reason to support their brand of big white supremacy. The church thought them sacrilegious traitors against God, who had been justly punished for their transgressions.

But this is not even close to the end of the story. Not even close. Because over in New Granada, the dream of independence yet lived. Next week, Bolívar will make his way to Cartagena to pick up where he had left off. Bitter, aggressive, and determined to fulfill his oath, he had sworn on the Sacred Mount to liberate his country or die trying. Bolívar would soon be literally declaring a war to the death.

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