Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Now, when last we left, our intrepid Spanish American revolutionary Simón Bolívar had just signed a six-month armistice with the royalist General Pablo Morillo. And then they had gotten drunk and plopped a big rock down on the side of the road to mark the occasion. But though a monument does indeed sit at the spot in rural Venezuela where they met, the six-month armistice was not the end of the War of Venezuelan Independence. And in fact, the six-month armistice did not even last six months. It was going to take one more campaign to end the war and liberate Venezuela once and for all. 

Now, in later years, Bolívar would come under fire for even agreeing to the ceasefire in the first place. The remaining Spanish army was not in good shape, so why let your foot off their throat? Now, it’s impossible to tell whether Bolívar really thought the armistice was going to last, but he did later defend himself by saying that he had a secret agenda the whole time, that above all, he wanted General Morillo to leave. Morillo was a good General, the best the Spanish had, and Bolívar wanted him gone. And rumors had likely filtered back across the lines that Morillo had been trying to resign his command for years now and was possibly just waiting for a good excuse to say, “Well, my work here is done. I’m going to go home.”

And if that really was what Bolívar had in mind, then his plan went perfectly. He and Morillo parted company on November 8, 1820. General Morillo then rode back to Caracas, made a few final arrangements. He transferred control of the army to second in command, a guy named General Miguel de la Torre. And on December 17, 1820, a mere three weeks after meeting Bolívar, Morillo boarded a ship and sailed back to Spain, never to return. 

Now, beyond just clearing Morillo off the board, though, Bolívar’s further thinking may have been that time was on his side, that a break in the action helped the republicans and hurt the royalists. And if that was his thinking, then he was right about that too. Everybody knew that no more reinforcements were coming from Spain, that the liberal revolt against Ferdinand VII earlier in the year meant that the Spanish troops in Venezuela were on their own. And with so few troops, they were confined to their own territory with little chance of breaking out. And frankly, there wasn’t much territory left anyway. The armistice drew a line between republican-held territory and royalist-held territory across which neither side was to cross. The royalists got the coastline from Caracas west, including some territory around Lake Maracaibo in the far west. Bolívar’s Republic of Colombia got the rest. So as the royalist soldiers sat in their garrisons, they had nothing to do but sit and think about how they were underpaid and underfed and how they had been so far from home for so long. Remember, these are still the soldiers who had come over with Morillo back in 1815. Well, now Morillo has gone home, and look, we’re still stuck. And it cannot have been good for morale when they found out that the reason there had been a giant insurrectionary mutiny back in Spain was because their brothers in arms in Cádiz were not going to allow themselves to get sent to the Americas. Think of how that must have made the guys already in the Americas feel about being there.

And that’s not even counting the fact that that insurrectionary mutiny meant that reinforcements were never going to come. There were somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 men left in Venezuela, but I can’t imagine a single one of them wanted to be there anymore. So Bolívar likely believed that with each passing day, they would get more demoralized and disheartened while his own troops would get better trained, drilled, and equipped.

So while the Spaniards sat and stewed, Bolívar did lend some further proof that he really was just buying time by continuing to focus on training, drilling, and equipping the republican forces just so that they would be ready if, or perhaps, when the armistice ended.

Then in January of 1821, Bolívar got further good news coming out of the south. As we will discuss in detail next week, the armies of José de San Martín had begun their march north and were putting the still loyal Viceroyalty of Peru under intense pressure. This had then triggered a local revolt in the city of Guayaquil, who rose up and declared independence from Spain. Now, we talked briefly about Guayaquil back in Episode 5.7 – “The First Cry of Liberty”. They were the port city under the jurisdiction of Quito who kept refusing to support Quito during the various insurrections that they had staged in the precursor revolts. Well, now things are in reverse. With San Martín poised to take Lima, Guayaquil threw off the Spanish yoke and dared the royalists still holding Quito to do a damn thing about it.

The revolting Guayaquil provided Bolívar an opportunity he did not want to miss. Remember, he envisioned the Republic of Colombia incorporating all the old territories of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and that included Quito and the areas under its jurisdiction, which is today the future nation of Ecuador. The claim to Quito had always been restricted to empty proclamations, though, the revolt in Guayaquil meant that the time to begin incorporating the region was possibly at hand. And even more important than jumping before the royalists were able to nip the revolt in the bud was jumping before San Martín took Peru because Bolívar was certainly not above wanting to state Colombian claims to the Quito region before any other republican faction in South America got there. 

So in January of 1821, he peeled off a thousand troops and ordered them to go reinforce Guayaquil to defend it from royalist recapture and prepare for what Bolívar hoped would be a two-pronged assault on Quito once Venezuela was well and truly secured. And the man he put in charge of the operation was a man whose name I’d been sprinkling into the story but who is now on his way finally to the center of the stage, Antonio José de Sucre. 

Now, around the same time, the new constitutional convention that had been scheduled after the great victory at Boyaca and the liberation of New Granada started to gather in the central city of Cúcuta. As we will see, none of the delegates, Venezuelan or New Granadan, were exactly thrilled about the union. But they were under strong pressure from Bolívar personally, and they could not help but comply with his wishes. Their informal meetings would give way to a formal session that would run from May to October 1821, and which we will talk about in just 1 minute.

So after Sucre left, Bolívar went back to trying to recruit and hold together his army because though he was right, that time was on his side, it’s not like desertion wasn’t still constantly a problem. But come the spring of 1821, he probably had somewhere north of 6,000 men spread out across multiple commands in the west where he himself was based and a few thousand more in the far east under General Bermúdez. As I mentioned a few episodes back, it was the loyal General Bermúdez who now ran the eastern provinces as Bolívar had made it clear to the ever-disobedient Santiago Mariño that Mariño was just too good a commander not to be here by Bolívar’s side. Right here, right by my side. 

Now, while the armistice was in effect, Bolívar did his best to hold up his end of the bargain. He was in fairly regular correspondence with General La Torre to keep the lines of communication between the two sides open, and if any republican units got out of line, he issued suitable punishments. But at the end of April, everybody’s hand was forced by one of Bolívar’s subordinate Generals. The General in question is another one of those long-serving revolutionary officers who have been around since the very beginning but who would just muddy the narrative up if I kept naming them name after name. There are a few guys like that roving around out there, but the one who is about to force everybody’s hand is General Rafael Urdaneta. A few years younger than Bolívar, Urdaneta had joined the army way back in 1810 and then linked up with Bolívar at the beginning of the Admirable Campaign and then had been with the Liberator ever since through thick and thin. He’s probably best known today because a huge long bridge across Lake Maracaibo is named after him, the General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge. 

Urdaneta was himself a native of the city of Maracaibo, which at that moment was on the royalist side of the armistice line. And at the end of April 1821, he apparently got it into his head that he could successfully orchestrate a local rebellion and bring the city and its surrounding territory over to the republican side. Now, given how loyal Urdaneta was to Bolívar, it’s hard to imagine Bolívar did not know what was going on. But the official story was and is that Bolívar did not sanction the operation. The revolt was successful, however, and Urdaneta evicted the royalists from Maracaibo, whereupon General La Torre issued an ultimatum to Bolívar: give the city back by April 28, or the armistice will be considered null and it’s back to war for everyone. Bolívar begged La Torre to reconsider and apologized profusely for the violation, but then he prepared to go back to war.

Pretty much as soon as he received the ultimatum, Bolívar issued orders to Urdaneta on the one hand, and José Antonio Páez on the other. Everyone was to convene at the town of San Carlos, which was about 75 miles southwest of Valencia, to prepare for a final push into royalist territory. He also sent an order to the other side of Venezuela for General Bermúdez to prepare a strategic flanking move by directly attacking Caracas and forcing La Torre to peel off troops to defend the capital. Now, at the moment, Caracas wasn’t particularly well garrisoned because it was never the military stronghold that, like, Puerto Cabello was, or even the nearby port of La Guaira was. Now, it would take time for the republicans to get everything in motion, but as April 28th came and went, they still had time to prepare because despite his stern ultimatum, it’s not like General La Torre was itching to come out from behind his walls and attack. 

On May 15, General Bermúdez made the first move of this latest and what would turn out to be final campaign. A fast march from the east took the lightly garrisoned Caracas by surprise. Republican forces entered the city and captured it. But that said, Bermúdez did not really have the men or munitions to hold the city, but that was never the point. The point was to draw royalist attention and that’s exactly what it did. General La Torre dispatched 2,000 men to push Bermúdez out of Caracas, which they did, no problem. But now that was 2,000 fewer men La Torre had when he went to face Bolívar’s army gathering in the west. 

It took a good six weeks for Bolívar to gather that army in the west, with José Antonio Páez and the cavalry coming over from their base in the south-central llanos, Bolívar coming over from his headquarters in Cúcuta, and then General Urdaneta making a difficult march east along the coastline and then south through the sharp ridge of mountains. Along the way, the intrepid Urdaneta captured Coro and squeezed the royalists out of just a bit more territory. On June 11, Páez and Bolívar forces linked at San Carlos, and then Urdaneta arrived a few days later, bringing their total forces up to about 6,500. 

General La Torre was not idle during this period and determined that he needed to march out and put an army between the republicans and what was left of royalist territory. And he identified a spot between the republicans and the city of Valencia as the ideal location, where the high plains of Carabobo gave way to a valley that led into difficult hill country. If Bolívar was planning to advance, there was only one road he could plausibly take, and so, by mid-June, La Torre had planted an army of about 5,000 men on that road, and they waited. 

With the two armies now just 50 miles apart, at the end of June, Bolívar ordered his army forward, approaching what he hoped would be but could not know that it would be the final decisive battle of the war — the Battle of Carabobo. On the night of June 23rd, with contact between the two armies likely coming in the morning, an ominous portent arrived. The heavens opened up, and a torrential rain began to fall. The Venezuelan soldiers were apparently a little spooked by the omen, but in their midst were a couple of hundred British legionaries, many of whom had been veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, and these guys were laughing and high-fiving each other. They said, “Guys, this is actually awesome because the same thing happened before the Battle of Waterloo, and this thing is in the bag.” And so it would be, and as we will see, it will be thanks in large part to that little corps of British soldiers, half of whom would be dead before the next night fell.

The morning of June 24, 1821, dawned with bright blue skies. Bolívar’s army broke camp and approached La Torre’s position from the direction La Torre knew they would be coming from, which is never the greatest way to approach a battle. There is no question that the royalists would be arrayed to meet them. Now, though he was and would remain in love with the reckless frontal assault, Bolívar decided that this was too obvious even for him. So, he decided to go for the trick that had worked so well in the lead-up to the Battle of Boyaca: use supposedly impossible terrain to his advantage.

He divided his army up into three divisions, with about half the total troops being assigned to the division under General Páez. While Bolívar made a slow approach north through the pass La Torre had his eye on, Páez was to make a daring flanking move around to the west through supposedly impassable narrow defiles that gave way to broken and treacherous high ground. Taking a chance on this supposedly impossible terrain so as not to allow the enemy to fight the battle that they wanted to fight, the republicans slowly made their way towards the final battle. There was no good reason for La Torre to suspect that he was about to get flanked, but he was about to get flanked. 

But even still, it’s not like the Battle of Carabobo wasn’t a close-run thing. Páez led his mixture of cavalry and infantry through the impossible terrain, and it wasn’t until they were right on top of the royalists that their presence was discovered. But La Torre acted quickly. He ordered half his army to rearray themselves to face this sudden presence of enemy troops to their right and he turned all his heavy guns in that direction too and just started blasting away. Páez’s forces fought and dodged their way onto the high ground they had been aiming for, but when they then turned to charge into the royalist flank, they ran into a solid wall of battle-hardened royalist infantry, blasting them with a mix of bullets and cannonballs, critically scattering the llaneros cavalry before they could land one of their deadly lance strikes. With Páez and his horsemen pushed back in a cloud of confused buzzing, the whole operation might have been sunk. But those couple of hundred British legionaries stepped into the breach. Later reports said that the British stood like a solid wall, trading fire for fire and enduring heavy casualties. But they prevented the royalists from taking advantage of their initial success and bought Páez and the cavalry time to regroup.

And then, at a critical moment, the British launched a borderline suicidal bayonet charge right into the enemy line, enduring further heavy casualties as they fought. With the bayonet charge pinning the Spanish down, Páez successfully regrouped the cavalry, on the plains behind the Spaniards. So, when they came charging in this time, it was a deadly strike on the royalist rear, and once that charge came, the battle was basically over.

La Torre’s army was now split in two, with the side that had been facing Páez cut off from the side that was still facing the pass where Bolívar’s part of the Republican army was just now emerging. La Torre determined that there would be no saving the day in his current predicament, and he led the half of the army still under his control on an orderly retreat back north across the plains. They never stopped until they got back to the safety of Puerto Cabello. The men he left behind, those who hadn’t been killed anyway, surrendered as soon as they were surrounded. 

I’ve seen different estimates, but of the 5,000 men La Torre had lined up, somewhere between 2,000 and 2,700 were taken prisoner. The republicans only lost a couple of hundred men, and almost all of those were British legionaries—the men who had decisively turned the tide of the battle.

Now, it feels a little petty to point this out, but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway. In the Battle of Carabobo, the decisive battle in the War of Venezuelan Independence, the battle that secured Venezuelan independence and one of the great victories of all the wars of Spanish American independence, Simón Bolívar himself played no part.

Now the Liberator was well aware of this, and right there on the spot, he promoted General Páez, the man who had actually won the battle, to General in Chief. In the still somewhat rickety structure of the Republican army, Páez answered now only to Bolívar. Not that that really changed anything — Páez had only ever answered to Bolívar, and even then, only when he felt like it. 

Now it would, of course, take a while to play out, but the Battle of Carabobo was the end of the Spanish in Venezuela. General La Torre simply did not have the forces necessary to prevent Bolívar from doing kind of whatever he wanted. And the royalists were all pulled back to either Puerto Cabello or La Guaira. But though they still hold those last key bases, the Venezuelans now have the run of the whole country. Bolívar himself rode straight for Caracas, entering the capital on June 27, 1821. It was the first time he had set foot in his hometown in seven years, not since the famous evacuation he had been forced to lead in the summer of 1814 when the Legions of Hell were descending, and the Second Republic was collapsing. 

When he entered the city, Bolívar found it silent and hunkered down, the residents not really knowing what had happened out there on the plains of Carabobo, not sure who had won, if the reports of total republican victory were actually true. But word soon filtered out that, yes, the republicans had won and the Liberator was actually here in Caracas. The people slowly emerged from their houses and shops. They saw that all was indeed well, that Bolívar was there, and triumphant. So shortly thereafter, silence gave way to cheers and then celebrations and then a long-running, boisterous party. 

Bolívar himself went straight to his old house, a piece of property that had long since been confiscated by the enemy but was now his to rightfully reclaim. Now, I can’t find any reports of what state the Caracas house was in, but in general, Bolívar had been financially ruined by the revolution. The various businesses and estates that had been in the Bolívar family going back to the Conquest had been confiscated years ago, and those that he might now reclaim were mostly in ruins.

For Bolívar personally, the end result of his life as a revolutionary was clear. He had gone from being one of the richest men in Venezuela to being all but destitute. And this was a problem for him exacerbated because of his high-minded virtuous republicanism. He was consciously emulating the career of George Washington, and Bolívar refused, for example, to accept wages for his service either as Commander in Chief of the army or president of the Republic. But whereas Washington could actually afford this kind of republican chivalry, Bolívar really couldn’t. And now that the war was winding down, it was becoming clear just how bad off he was. 

But even facing this down, he was not deterred from setting a virtuous example. And shortly after arriving in Caracas, he decided to do General Washington one better. Bolívar rode out to the old San Mateo estate, the one that he had once been besieged at by Boves and the Legions of Hell. This estate was still clunking along under the labor of about 100 slaves working underpaid overseers. Bolívar showed up and announced that all the slaves were now free. He really did embrace emancipation after his time in Haiti, and he hoped that his example of personally emancipating his own slaves would spark a similar run of emancipation by his fellow owners. But predictably, his lead was not followed. It was a magnificent personal gesture on Bolívar’s part, but the other slave-owning revolutionaries refused to take the economic hit. Bolívar took the hit, despite being one of the poorest of all the senior revolutionaries, because for him, the principle of the thing really was now more important than any base material considerations.

A few weeks after the Battle of Carabobo, the Congress in Cúcuta, the Constitutional Convention, announced that they had now finished the new new constitution for the Republic of Colombia — a constitution that, as I just hinted, none of them were particularly happy with. But they felt like they had to set things up to match the desires of Bolívar rather than their own desires, even if Bolívar was not himself going to be 100% satisfied with the job they had done.

If you remember back to our four quadrants of Spanish American revolutionaries — republican monarchist axis, centralist federalist axis. Well, the monarchist half of that equation has been dead for going on a decade now, but almost everyone else was some version of republican federalist, with Bolívar himself remaining one of the few staunch centralists. For him, the Republic of Colombia could only work if it existed under one single central government. But as I’ve said, despite the fact that he kept harping on this point, no one else ever really agreed with him. They all wanted a decentralized government and for whatever union might exist between New Granada and Venezuela, and then maybe Quito in the future, that it should be nominal at best. Venezuelans did not want to answer to New Granadans, and vice versa. But the Liberator was so singularly insistent on the point of central government that in the end, the Constitution was centralist. 

The model that the Congress took looked a lot like the United States. There were three branches of government: an executive President and Vice-president, a legislative Senate and House of Representatives, and an independent judiciary. And like the United States, at least at the time, the Congress was supposed to be the dominant branch, responsible for all legislation and in whose hands most final decisions lay. The President was there to execute their laws and only had minimal unilateral authority during a state emergency. The judiciary, though they made very strong and independent as most of the men in the room, were lawyers who did not unreasonably think that the rule of law was of primary importance to a new republic. They also tried to break free of the old borders, at least on paper, by abolishing the distinction between Venezuela and New Granada and instead creating a bunch of departments that would each be run by an intendant who answered to the central government. But those old distinctions were going to prove impossible to paper over. Finally, as we’ve seen before, and as would be natural for men of their pedigree, the active-passive citizen distinction was maintained, and suffrage would be based on a property qualification.

When Bolívar was given the draft that they had voted on in mid-July 1821, he was disappointed. As he had stressed since the Cartagena Manifesto, he did not believe his countrymen were quite ready for the responsibility that came with a government run by a committee of elected representatives reliant on blind trust in lawyers and judges. He continued to believe that a vigorous and empowered executive was what the situation required — somebody to cut through all the crap, hold the factions together, and keep the greedy and self-interested men in check while giving the republic enough breathing room to survive.

But it’s important to note that, again, like George Washington, Bolívar did not want to be that man. At least that’s what he said over and over and over again. And I get the feeling like, if nothing else, he really didn’t want to do the job, like dealing with civilian politics, issuing memos, and managing the implementation of laws like Santander seemed to love. But even then, it’s easy to be skeptical of Bolívar’s “Oh, I don’t really want power. Okay, I’ll take power.” But if a guy does say the same thing over and over again, I do think it’s worth taking him at his word.

Bolívar believed that as a military man, a man of war, that vesting him above all others with civilian power was a dangerous thing. Somebody needed that power, but it really shouldn’t be me. He said,

“You tell me that history will say great things about me. I believe that it will say nothing was greater than my renunciation of power and my absolute dedication to the arms that could save the government and the country. History will say, ‘Bolívar took over the government to free his countrymen, and when they were free, he left them so that they would be ruled by law and not by his will.'”

But Bolívar’s election to the presidency was unavoidable. He was the indispensable man. And so, when the congress elected him president on September 7, 1821, with Santander elected vice president, there was nothing Bolívar could do but accept. Though when he rode to Cúcuta to accept the presidency, he did so with a light admonishing of the Congress that he really should not be president. He said,

“I am a son of war, the man whom combat has raised to government. A man like me is a dangerous citizen for a popular government, a threat to national sovereignty.”

And so, acting on his own convictions, Bolívar basically made himself a figurehead president, with the day-to-day operations of the new Republic of Colombia left in the capable hands of Vice President Santander. Bolívar himself then turned his attention back to war, the state within which he felt most comfortable and where his ultimate ambitions had not yet been satisfied. There was still Quito to acquire for the Republic of Colombia. And then, he wanted to move south to Peru to secure the final expulsion of the Spanish from all of South America. The War of Venezuelan Independence may be over, but for Bolívar, the war went on. 

But that said, most of the men who had fought and died with him all these years were now rounding up their own service, and they were starting to relax and think about what to do in their new world of independent peace. So, while Bolívar went back to planning the next phase of his military career, which we’ll talk about more next week, I want to wrap up today by talking a little bit about the country Bolívar would be leaving behind. Because though the war would go on for him, for everyone else, the time had now come to see what it meant to live in a free and independent country. 

So, this is going to bring us all the way back around to the racial and class structures that we had talked about existing at the beginning of the revolution. It’s now basically time to check up and see how everyone is faring now that liberty is at hand.

At the top of the old pyramid, we can clear those guys out right away because it’s the peninsulares. The peninsulares are gone now. Now, that doesn’t mean that men and women from Spain won’t remain in the Republic of Colombia now that it has been liberated, just that any special privileges or access to office or any other economic and social benefits they once enjoyed, those are now gone. That very top of the old hierarchy just got lopped off and tossed into the bin. If you were a Spaniard and decided to stay, that was fine, but you were just another white guy.

So, who stepped up to the top of the pyramid? Well, the old criollo aristocracy, of course. Now, this was not a reward that had been gained without major cost. At least in Venezuela, the estimate is that over the course of the War of Independence, the white population had been reduced by about half, with death and exile taking their toll on the white population. So, to emerge victorious in the new order, you are going to have to have been one of the ones who lived. But those that did live slid naturally into all the major governmental and administrative posts and had money and capital to take advantage of the postwar economic environment where land and opportunity could be had on the cheap. Even a guy like Bolívar, who, as I just said, at least on paper, was now totally destitute in 1821, well he had all the clout he needed to not have his lack of funds really get in the way if he didn’t want them to.

But that old criollo aristocracy did have to deal with one group pushing their way in to join them at the top. Men who had not been a part of the elite prior to the wars, and that was the senior military officers. Now, of course, some of those guys, again Bolívar chief among them, but also guys like Santiago Mariño and Santander had already been a part of the criollo aristocracy. But there were other poor whites who had joined the army and risen up well beyond their original station. General Bermúdez was a good example of that, but of course, the best example is Jose Antonio Páez. The poor, barefoot llanero was now General in Chief of the Republican army and at the moment, one of the dozen or so most powerful men in all of South America. His kind of self-made caudillos were not exactly embraced by the more genteel criollo. But their military service gave them claim to both property and power that made them an undeniable force to be reckoned with. And in fact, at the end of the day, they were the power to be reckoned with because the course of history in Venezuela and Colombia, it’s the story of military strongmen lording it over the civilian government.

But then there was another group that also felt resistant to their ascension to power in the new order, and they felt it even more acutely. This was mixed-race military officers. Remember, about half the population was some version of pardo, that is, a mix of black and white. Most of the pardos were still trapped in the lower classes, and we’ll get to them in a second. But at least a few had joined the army, served with distinction, been elevated at rank, and were now being discharged with legitimate claims to property, status, and influence that would have been unheard of before the revolution.

But the reality faced by these rising pardos gets to the core of the problem of race in postrevolutionary Spanish America. The Constitution of Colombia was explicit on the matter. There were no races in Colombia. There was only citizens, and everyone was equal to everyone else. While the pardos were quick to discover that this ideal did not really translate into reality, and they found themselves consistently maltreated by their supposedly white equals.

Remember, in the final years of the Bourbon Reforms, the Spanish administrators had been the ones pushing to roll back the strict racial caste system that had defined the old order. In fact, one of the reasons the white criollo had resented peninsular administration was that the peninsulares were trying to make the pardos equal of the whites, and the whites didn’t like it. Well, as these new rising pardos tried to transition their children, for example, into being full and equal citizens, giving them access to schools and opportunities, the de jure racism that had defined the old hierarchy was still de facto in effect, even as grand proclamations of racial equality accompanied every patriotic speech.

But at least that handful of pardo officers had the means to live better, even if they were still up the creek socially. The vast majority of their lower-class brothers and sisters, though, found themselves even worse off than they had been on the eve of the revolution. Well, now that the peninsulares were gone, there was no one looking out for the interests of poor pardos anymore, and their status took a decided step back after independence. Again, they were considered equal under the law, but since almost all of them lacked property qualifications to vote, their interests would be virtually ignored by the post-independence government. And in the years to come, periodic revolts and unrest driven by a mixed-race population demanding that the promise of equality be redeemed dot the history of free Colombia.

Now, the group that should have been able to make a decent jump in status were the enlisted soldiers, both white and pardo who had served throughout the wars of independence. But as is often the case, those guys got majorly shortchanged. When wages ran low, they started being paid in land titles by their Generals, and when the whole system was centralized, they started being paid in vouchers that would be redeemable for land at some indeterminate point in the future once the war was over. Well, as had happened with the government bonds paid to enlisted continentals during the American War of Independence, what could a common soldier do with these vouchers? They couldn’t eat them, they couldn’t drink them. And so what happened? That’s right, in come the speculators who are offering cash for as low as 5% of face value for the vouchers. But if you’re a poor enlisted man who needs to buy some food, you sell no matter how low the price. This meant that when the war ended, men who already had means came away with claims to huge amounts of land while all the men who had done the fighting and risked death walked away virtually empty-handed. And this is part of the reason why none of them now have the vote; they had no property to speak of, so their interests too were ignored. And since the constitution put a strong emphasis on private property rights and the judiciary was strict about enforcement, there was no real solution.

“I mean, you sold your voucher, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, that means it’s his property now. End of the story. Next case.”

So in terms of economic and social leveling, the revolution in Colombia left an awful lot to be desired. And this leaving of an awful lot to be desired extended to the issue of slavery because what were they going to do with the slaves?

Bolívar was adamant and would remain adamant that they all needed to be freed. And he used every ounce of his stature and his influence to get the slaves freed without any kind of deep concern about what the economic or social repercussions might be. But as I just mentioned, none of his fellow slave owners were much interested in following Bolívar’s lead. And despite a vague nod to emancipation in the constitution, the government had little interest in following through.

They wrote up a little subsection outlining the process for emancipation, with an emphasis on how to compensate owners for their lost property, a special tax would be instituted that would then create a fund that could pay owners for freeing their slaves. But in practice, this was all a dead letter. Nobody wanted to pay the tax, no one fought too hard to collect the tax, and so no owner freed his slaves because he wasn’t going to be compensated.

So despite Bolívar’s begging, pleading, and cajoling, slavery stayed entrenched in the Republic of Colombia. They did, however, write in that it would be phased out over time, that children of slaves would be freed as soon as they turned 18. Later, this would be bumped up to 21. So in the free Republic of Colombia, and then in the independent nations that would follow in the wake of Bolívar’s death, slaves were still slaves.

Finally, there were the native Amerindian populations who have, for the most part, been completely on the sidelines through all of this. Their population was not nearly as large in Gran Colombia as it was, for example, in Peru, but those who were around were none too thrilled with independence. As I’ve mentioned, they were subject to a special tribute as a community but were simultaneously exempt from all other taxation. In the new order, they were now, quote unquote, “freed” from the tribute but liable for all the other taxes, which ran quite a bit higher. And as if that wasn’t enough, the more liberal economics of the new nation emphasized individual property rights at the expense of any kind of communal ownership. So the rhythm of Amerindian life was about to be severely disrupted, as every plot of land now required an individual name on an individual deed. And if you didn’t have that, it was pretty easy for some speculator to move on in. 

But as I’ve said, how this complicated web of social, economic, and political forces would work themselves out in the months and years after independence, Bolívar himself did not plan to be around to guide it, because his years as a revolutionary had broadened his vision. It was no longer just Venezuela or Gran Colombia that fit Bolívar’s definition of the country that he would liberate or die trying, but all of South America. As long as a single South American was in Spanish chains, Bolívar himself would not be free. 

So, next week will mark the beginning of his pivot south on his way to his fateful meeting with General José de San Martín and the liberation of all of South America. Now, to tell that story, we have to go back and pick up with San Martín. So next week will mostly be a follow-up to Episode 5.13 to catch up with San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins after the liberation of Chile.

So we will come back for that story next week and until then, please go to www.revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com to support the show and make sure that I do come back week after week after week to keep telling you these stories. That again www.revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com. 

Return to The Latin American Revolutions >>