Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

The cause of Spanish American independence was going quite well in the fall of 1817. José de San Martín had just led his army on a remarkable push through the Andes mountains, and after a brilliant campaign, had liberated Chile, and Bernardo O’Higgins had now been installed as dictator of Chile. Once Bolívar is making his approach to Peru, I’ll go back and give you a bit more of the play-by-play because it really is something, most especially because San Martín had already recognized the power of the non-criollo population, and his liberating army was almost entirely non-white. And then up north, as we saw last week, the campaigns of Bolívar and the eastern caudillos had won control of huge swathes of territory in Venezuela, and after capturing Angostura in July 1817, now had a proper capital for the still somewhat ephemeral Third Republic. 

Meanwhile, on the other side, the Spanish were starting to have a hell of a time of it. Now everything had started out according to plan. Morillo had landed in Venezuela in April 1815 at the head of 10,000 men and 60 ships and easily reasserted Spanish authority. Then he had moved on over to Cartagena and captured it in December 1815. And then as Bolívar and company were returning to Venezuela in 1816, Morillo had led his men up the Magdalena River and taken Bogotá, crushing the union of New Granada and reinstalling a viceregal government. The patriotic leaders who had collaborated with Bolívar were forced to scatter, and many were captured. And President Camilo Torres, who had organized and led the Federalist Union of New Granada, was captured and executed in October 1816. And that’s to say nothing of Antonio Nariño, who’s already sitting in a jail cell back in Cádiz.

But after this nice run of initial success, things started unraveling a bit. By the time the reconquest of New Granada was wrapping up, most of eastern Venezuela had fallen back into rebel hands. And that was to say nothing of the vast expanse of the Llanos, the grasslands that stretched across the southern reaches of both Venezuela and New Granada. That wild country proved itself surprisingly resistant to Spanish authority. A small patriot army led by Colonel Francisco de Paula Santander had taken refuge in the New Granadan Llanos when the Spanish began their push into the interior in 1816. And then the Venezuelan Llanos, well, holy heck. I’m going to tell you all about that here in a second. 

So here the Spanish plans stalled out. General Morillo was supposed to pacify Venezuela, then move on to pacify New Granada, and then keep moving south to Lima to complete the reintegration of the Americas into the Spanish Empire. But instead, Morillo now had to circle back to ground he had already covered. With Venezuela falling back into rebellion, Morillo led his army overland back across the border in January 1817, setting up a headquarters in Calabozo from which he could direct the re-reconquest of the Venezuelan interior, which turned out to be a grueling slog.

Now, one of Morillo’s biggest problems was that his forces were slowly being depleted, both in terms of manpower and morale. He arrived in South America in April 1815 at the head of 10,000 soldiers, all well-trained veterans of the Peninsular War. But as usual, as soon as these men arrived, they started dropping dead of tropical diseases. Now, not quite at the epidemic rate of the Leclerc Expedition, but still pretty bad. And it was difficult for Morillo to then replenish his ranks because he had been told to avoid recruiting from the native population. The geniuses back in Madrid wanted a Spanish army to conquer the Americas so that there was no question about who was boss. So rather than inviting possibly loyal Americans to join the struggle, Morillo’s commanders just tried to make do with what they had and accepted attrition as a fact of life. 

Now, this was not an absolute rule, and as soon as he arrived, Morillo augmented his cavalry by incorporating men from the old Legions of Hell. But those guys had already been incorporated into the royalist military structure, and it was a matter of transferring them rather than recruiting them. But even if Morillo had been allowed to go recruit, it’s not clear he would have had a ton of success in the mixed-race populations that had so consistently joined the royalists going all the way back to Monteverde’s campaigns against Miranda, because things have now flipped. The royalists now stand for a re-entrenchment of the old colonial order with all the racist baggage that came with it, while Bolívar and his fellow republicans now proclaimed liberty and equality. So by the fall of 1817, the energy and momentum seemed to be with the patriots. And, oh, by the way, General Morillo, now headquartered in Calabozo, is routinely sending requests back to Madrid asking to be relieved of his command, please. 

Simón Bolívar, meanwhile, was situated on the other side of Venezuela on the Orinoco River in the city of Angostura. Now mostly recognized as El Jefe Supremo, Bolívar spent the last few months of 1817 trying to cement a professional military structure for the armies of the Republic, to take the personal armies of the caudillos and merge them into a single apparatus with a single chain of command, and everybody divided up into armies and divisions and brigades and battalions on down the line, and Bolívar at the top as Commander in Chief. At the end of September, he created a standing general staff to ensure continuity of strategy, tactics, and logistics. To maintain discipline in the ranks, he formalized a network of courts-martial to cut down both on arbitrary punishments handed down by commanders and men escaping punishment for crimes, abuses, and disobedience.

Bolívar also created a tribunal that would regulate the seizure and distribution of captured property. Up until now, the spoils of war had been distributed by the caudillos to their men. But Bolívar now centralized the process under a tribunal who would assume authority over all the plunder. The profits would mostly go to cover the expenses of the army. I mean, wages, provisions, armaments, they all needed to be paid for somehow. Anything left over would then be directed towards the burgeoning civilian government, which for the moment was a council of state that had been established by Bolívar in Angostura. Really, it was just a small committee of civilian and military leaders who El Jefe Supremo Bolívar turned to for advice. But that was all they could offer. Advice. El Jefe Supremo made all the final decisions. 

Then, to further strengthen his army, Bolívar also initiated a program that would introduce a whole new element into the struggle for independence: foreign mercenaries. Up until now, individual adventurers had been popping in and out of the picture, but Bolívar now envisioned something bigger, more systematic, and hopefully more overwhelming. To launch this program, he wrote back to his old friend Luis López Méndez in London. Now, you’ve probably forgotten all about Luis López Méndez, but he was one of the three ambassadors the First Republic sent to London in the summer of 1811, the other two being Andrés Bello and Bolívar. Well, after Bolívar returned to Venezuela, the other two men stayed behind in London and lived in the house on Grafton Street. And that is where López Méndez still was in 1817, acting as an all-purpose ambassador and trade consul and booster of republican Venezuela.

Now, over the past six years, López Méndez had done what he could to support the cause from London, and most especially, that meant purchasing arms and supplies when and where he could. And after 1815, he started having a much easier time of it because with Waterloo come and gone, the British army had excess stockpiles just sitting around that had to go somewhere, and guys like López Méndez could come round and get, like, used tents and boots or whatever at cut-rate prices. At the end of 1817, Bolívar now asked López Méndez not just for supplies, but for men. He wanted veteran British soldiers to come fight for Spanish American independence. So López Méndez got started with the help of paid recruiters and then also men with military ambitions of their own, looking to raise personal legions to go out and conquer in South America. And as you’d expect, these guys painted a picture of Venezuela full of happy little trees and happy fluffy clouds. It’s a beautiful, fertile land, just waiting for some enterprising chap to recognize a golden opportunity when he sees it, to achieve fame and fortune in an exotic land. Besides the war itself is nearly won and all you’re going to have to do is show up, kick out the last few degenerate Spaniards, and then you’ll live like a king. This was all very enticing. 

Now, if potential recruits were veterans, they were promised higher pay and a bump in rank. Captains would be Colonels, Colonels would be Generals. Now, it used to be pretty common to describe all of these guys as veterans of the recently ended Napoleonic Wars. Soldiers who had been discarded along with all those tents and boots and were now just kind of loitering around looking for something to do. But more recent research has shown that this was not really the case. Maybe 30% of the recruits had at some point served in the British army, but the rest had likely never fired a gun in their lives, and they were more attracted by the promise of establishing a profitable colonial estate than the glory and plunder of battle. Now, a lot of guys did claim to be veterans who really just wandered in off the street, and not many questions were ever asked about their service records because the point was to sign up as many men as possible and put them on a boat before they changed their minds. And more than a few of these guys woke up with a vicious hangover to discover that they were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on their way to Venezuela. 

Now, in all, somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 men made the trip across the Atlantic to fight in the wars of Spanish American independence. About half of them were Irish, a quarter English, and then the rest a mix from across Europe – Scottish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, what have you. Wars have always been a multicultural affair. Now, this 6,000 or 7,000 men did not all depart at the same time. That number covers all of the expeditions that sailed from 1817 to about 1825 when the wars wound down, though most of them had departed by 1819 when the British government tried to put a stop to all this by passing a law forbidding British citizens from serving in the Spanish Americas.

That 6,000 or 7,000 also does not represent the total number of men who actually fought in the wars that they were being shipped off to. From the minute the ships left port, the steady attrition began. Men got sick on the ships and did not survive the crossing. At least one ship sank in route. Many who did make it across contracted some tropical disease and died practically as soon as they landed. And a bunch more quickly realized that they had been lied to by the recruiters about almost everything. There were no wages, there were very few provisions, and the terrain was not full of happy little trees and fluffy clouds, but rather enormous crocodiles and poisonous snakes who, yes, reduced their ranks still further.

So now the sick and malnourished would-be legionaries began deserting in earnest. To all told, about a third of those who signed up either died or deserted before they got within 100 miles of battle. But that said, the rest would go on to fight and occasionally play critical roles in the further campaigns of Spanish American independence, most especially the famous British legion, who will fight with Bolívar. On more than one occasion, companies of foreign mercenaries fought heroically to the last man and at least 1,800 would die in service to the cause of Spanish American independence. Most of the survivors would return home at the end of the wars and so of the nearly 7,000 men who signed up, most with dreams of New World riches, only about 500 actually lived that dream and stayed in Spanish America after independence had been won. 

So the first wave of foreign legionaries finally started straggling up the Orinoco River in early 1818. But by then, Bolívar had already moved on from Angostura, and after his few months of relative calm, was returning to the tumults of war. With the eastern provinces settled and a command structure in place for the military, allegedly anyway, Bolívar felt secure enough to make the critical connection of the war of Venezuelan independence, because as the expedition Bolívar had led back to Venezuela from Haiti in 1816 took up the war in the east, out in the western Llanos, a short, stocky illiterate 26-year-old cowboy was arguably doing more to break the Spaniards than all of the eastern caudillos put together. And as he racked up victories, his legend grew. And as his legend grew, his legions grew. So it was clear that the most crucial part of Bolívar’s grand plans for final victory was bringing this man into the fold. And so it is time to bring this man into the fold. Let’s talk about José Antonio Páez.

José Antonio Páez was born in 1790 in a small village in the Venezuelan interior. His father was of Canary Island stock and held a minor government post, but the family was poor, and young José was just one of a pile of children. He never received a proper education. He could not read or write. British officers later claimed that they had to teach him what a fork was and how to use it. And who knows what would have happened to Páez had his life stayed on a normal trajectory? Most likely, he lives and dies in obscurity. But his life did not stay on a normal trajectory because at the age of 15, José Antonio Páez killed a man. 

Now, I’ve heard a few versions of the story, and it’s one of those things that gets all wrapped up in myth and legend. But the most famous account was that he had been given some money to head into town and make some necessary purchases and then come home. But on the way home, he was jumped by some highwaymen. In the ensuing standoff, Páez shot and killed one of the would-be thieves. But now implicated in a murder, the teenage Páez elected to skip town rather than take his chances with the authorities. And so, like so many other refugees, escapees, and runaways from civilized society, Páez wound up deep in the Llanos trying to forge a new life for himself. The teenage Páez caught on at a ranch managed by a huge black slave named Manuelote, which roughly translates as Big Manuel. Manuelote took the boy on as an apprentice and taught him the cattleman’s trade how to ride, how to break wild horses, how to wrangle cattle, how to care for animals, how to endure the bugs, how to live off the land. But it was a hard apprenticeship. Manuelote was strict and unforgiving. As I mentioned earlier, racial roles out in the Llanos were pretty upside down. And so the light-skinned Páez, dubbed the Fair Páez by those around him, practically became the slave of a slave. Every night, Páez had to wash Manuelote’s feet and then rock the big man to sleep in his hammock. After three years of this, Manuelote was ordered to a neighboring estate to help with some cattle branding, and he took Páez along with him. And the owner of that estate took a liking to Páez. And here, no doubt being the Fair Páez, helped the young man catch the attention of the criollo owner. So Páez stayed on that estate and became a trusted agent before being set up with a herd of cattle of his own to go make his way in the world as an independent operator. So in 1810, at the age of 20, Páez got married and settled into what was presumably going to be a long life as a marginally prosperous cattle rancher. 

But, of course, 1810 is when everything went bonkers in Spanish America. After the people of Caracas expelled Captain General Emparán, Páez was recruited into a cavalry company led by his old patron. But the Llanos was nowhere near the center of the action. So after the Declaration of Independence in July 1811, Páez did not really participate in any of the subsequent military campaigns, as Miranda gave way to Monteverde in 1812, and then as Monteverde gave way to Bolívar in 1813. After three years of service, Páez had risen to the rank of sergeant but decided that he had had enough and was granted an indefinite leave of absence just as Bolívar was beginning the Admirable campaign.

But not long after the establishment of the Second Republic, the Llanos became a hotbed of royalism. I mean, this is just as Boves is raising what will become the core of the Legions of Hell. So Páez was recalled to service, but now at the order of a royalist commander. Now, Páez was a patriot, though, and so after duly reporting and being commissioned to Captain, Páez asked for a few days leave to prepare for the campaign and just never came back. Instead, he joined a small company of patriotic llaneros who operated well away from the marauding armies being raised by Boves. When the Legions of Hell really got going in early 1814 and then rode north to take on Bolívar, Páez and his small band stayed behind in the Llanos to continue their own little rear guard guerrilla war.

Páez and his compatriots took the fall of the Second Republic and the arrival of Pablo Morillo’s Armada in stride and just kept fighting, soon discovering that the combination of the death of Boves and the influx of republican refugees into the Llanos in 1815 was swelling their ranks considerably. And though Páez was at this point an inconsequential junior officer, he had stumbled onto something resembling ambition and started swearing that he could raise an army as mighty as the now-disbanding Legions of Hell. And he turned out to be right. By the time Pablo Morillo’s armada was disembarking for Cartagena at the end of 1815, Páez was leading 1,000 men, all of them expert riders, immune to hardship, well-trained in guerrilla tactics, and able to operate independently with only the vaguest of instructions. With the rest of the patriot forces now either destroyed or in exile, by 1816, José Antonio Páez was leading practically the only organized republican army in all of Venezuela. And more than that, he was winning battles and exhausting the supposedly victorious Spaniards.

By now, Colonel Santander had moved down into the far western Llanos over on the other side of the border in New Granada, and he recognized how successful Páez was being. So in September 1816, Santander made a trip over to congratulate Páez, but most especially to bring him under Santander’s overall command. Still carrying a commission from the now-defunct Union of New Granada, Santander was under the impression that he outranked Páez, which turned out to really not be the case. And when it came out that Santander expected to displace Páez as chief, Páez’s men got awfully unruly. Páez told Santander, as a matter of fact, that if he wanted to get out of this camp alive, he better acknowledge that Páez was actually the supreme leader of the Llanos. So Santander left, and Páez remained boss.

So, more than anything else, it was the successes of Páez, even more than those of the eastern caudillos, that brought General Morillo back to Venezuela in January 1817. And as soon as he arrived, Morillo discovered just how treacherous fighting against Páez could be. He dispatched 4,000 men, all experienced veterans of the Peninsular Wars, to go catch the Llanos’ outlaws, and instead, they walked into Páez’s most famous victory. Leading just 1,100 men against the 4,000 Spaniards, Páez approached the Spanish camp at night and had his men kick up a stifling cloud of dust. With the Spanish in sudden confusion, Páez’s cowboys then charged in and drove the Spaniards backwards to a supposedly defensible position. But as soon as they had settled in, Páez unleashed his next trick. He ordered the dry grasslands lit on fire, and that created a wall of smoke and dust and ash. And then he ordered his men to ride straight at the Spanish through this fiery haze, crashing on top of them with a relentless series of charges until the Spanish could take it no more. These hardened veterans of the Peninsula War had just been smoked by a thousand Venezuelan cowboys. It was a major victory for Páez and it helped his legend grow even further. And they were now calling him the Lion of the Apure – the Apure being one of the principal river systems of the Llanos. They also called him the Centaur of the Plains.

His thousand men ballooned possibly tenfold after this victory, and though Morillo continued to try to launch pacification incursions into the Llanos, there was very little to be done, and he later admitted that the whole enterprise was utterly demoralizing. And oh yeah, Morillo is continuing to send in his request to be relieved of his command.

By the time Bolívar was relanding in Venezuela in early 1817, it was well known that this man, Páez, the Lion of the Apure, was kicking ass out in the west, and it would ultimately be essential for the two branches of the patriotic cause to work together. But it would be another year before that connection could be made. Bolívar had to first head southeast into Guayana and then come up the Orinoco to Angostura in July, and then solidify the patriot hold on the eastern provinces. But by December 1817, Bolívar and Páez were exchanging letters, and they agreed to meet the following month to come to an agreement. So Bolívar departed Angostura on New Year’s Eve 1817 at the head of 3,000 men. And over the next 20 days, they traveled 250 miles up the Orinoco River and then out onto the plains for his fateful meeting with the Centaur of the Plains. 

Bolívar’s goal was obviously to do what Santander had been unable to do: to get Páez to recognize him as El Jefe Supremo. But you might at this point be asking yourself, why would Páez do that? And indeed, Páez was very skeptical of this man Bolívar. Páez knew him by reputation, but of course, that reputation is not exactly great. Bolívar has won some great victories, sure, and he’s obviously committed to the cause, but he kind of always winds up in exile. And that was to say nothing of the general llaneros’ disdain for soft criollo aristocrats of whom Bolívar was surely one.

And so it came as much of a surprise to Páez as anyone else that when this little dandy rode up with his immaculate uniform and starched white shirt reeking of cologne on January 30, 1818, Páez found himself liking Bolivar quite a bit. As we’ve seen, Bolívar possessed a disarming charm. He did not come off as imperious and arrogant but rather as an easy-going, down-to-earth soldier who was as immune to personal hardship as the llaneros themselves. And over the course of their time together, most of the cowboys came to respect Bolívar quite a bit, and he was quick to join in any feats of strength or physical challenges that the men amused themselves with in camp. He managed once, after a few tries, to run up on a horse and vault himself from its rear over the horse’s head. On another occasion, he accepted a challenge to outswim a man with his hands tied behind his back, which he did. Bolívar, as it turned out, was not a soft aristocrat. And then, most impressively of all, almost impossibly, it turned out that Simón Bolívar could outride them. He could ride longer and farther than any of them. And the llaneros soon gave him the greatest compliment that they could muster. They started calling him Iron Ass.

But that would all unfold over the next few months. At this first meeting, it was Bolívar’s words more than his actions that won Páez over. And the Lion of the Apure came to believe that Bolívar, with all his education, erudition, and worldly experience, was a better Commander in Chief for the patriot armies than a humble, illiterate cowboy like himself. Plus, Bolívar did not come with nothing in hand. With royalists controlling the northern coast, the inhabitants of the Llanos had lost their ability to export their meats and hides. And as a result, their economy had long been crippled. But Bolívar now controlled Angostura and the Orinoco River and promised the suffering llaneros an outlet for their exports. Now, Páez would never become a hardcore Bolivarian, but he did agree to call Bolívar El Jefe Supremo and let Bolívar take the lead in the next stage of the campaigns. 

That next stage would unfold over the course of the first half of 1818 and lead many to believe that Páez, not Bolívar, really should be El Jefe Supremo. Bolívar always had grand plans, and now he wanted to overrun all of Venezuela and push into New Granada to liberate their brothers in the east. Feeding this particular vision was Colonel Santander, who had written to join Bolívar and Páez when he heard that they were meeting. He begged them to help him reinvade New Granada, and this, of course, Bolívar was ready to do. But Páez was and would remain unconvinced. He would remain thoroughly resistant to the idea of leaving the Llanos behind. His men were plainsmen, and they would lose all their advantages in the mountains.

But the liberation of New Granada was now no longer the end of Bolívar’s dreams. He had even bigger dreams, because reports by then had reached him that José de San Martín had been victorious in Chile and was planning an invasion of Peru. Bolívar wanted in on that action. 

But all three men could agree that the first stage would be marching on General Morillo’s headquarters at Calabozo and clearing the Spaniards out of the Llanos. Páez contributed 1,000 of his best men to the expedition, bringing the whole army up to about 4,000. And they all rode together, leading to a famous little moment that I cannot resist telling you about.

When they reached the Apure River, they came across a small flotilla of armed Spanish boats. Bolívar said, “Well, what are we going to do about this?” And Páez said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ll go take care of it.” And before Bolívar could respond, Páez led 50 riders on a mad charge into the river, straight at the boats. The crews were so surprised that they abandoned the boats and fled. And when you read about this incident, it is often described as the only successful cavalry attack on armed boats in military history. But we know better because way back in Episode 3.40, I told you about that time that the French cavalry charged across the frozen harbor in Den Helder to capture the Dutch navy on January 23, 1795. Now, at the time, I asked if anybody out there could dispute the claim that that was the only time in military history that ships had been captured by a cavalry charge. I’d love to hear it. But when I said that, I did not yet know the details of this incident with Páez. So you can just consider this me disputing myself. It never pays to say first or last or only when you’re talking about history because there’s always something else lurking out there.

Anyway, the combined Patriot army soon had Calabozo surrounded, and Bolívar offered to let Morillo surrender, you know, if he wanted to. But as much as Morillo wanted to go home, he was not going to give up. So on a moonless night, Morillo led his men out of town before the patriots caught wise. They then made their way towards Valencia, with Morillo issuing frantic orders to Caracas for all royalist forces to converge there.

Now, Bolívar wanted to pursue them, but Páez thought it too reckless. He said, “No, we need to finish the job here in the Llanos and go take San Fernando, the one major royalist base left in the grasslands.” Now, Bolívar was annoyed at this suggestion and believed that Páez wasn’t interested in the grand plan so much as securing the whole of the Llanos for himself. But not wanting to make this a test of leadership, Bolívar gave Páez leave to go besiege San Fernando.

Meanwhile, Bolívar himself refused to just sit around and wait. So he marched in the direction of Valencia, but he did not plan to attack Valencia directly. Instead, he envisioned a pretty crazy plan to march up through the low mountains that separated the plains from the coast and attack the Caracas garrison before it could link up with Morillo at Valencia. Now, this was nuts, especially without support from Páez. But Bolívar went ahead and did it anyway. He led his men up into the same hills where the forces of the Second Republic had battled the Legions of Hell, even stopping to camp at Bolívar’s now-ruined San Mateo estate, where he had once spent a month under siege at the beginning of 1814.

But that was as far as Bolívar got. While at San Mateo, he learned that Morillo had left Valencia and was headed straight for him. So Bolívar broke off his approach on Caracas and instead retreated. Now, he planted a rear guard to cover the escape while the rest of his men tried to make it back to the Llanos. But they soon enough found themselves at La Puerta, where twice before republican forces had been crushed. And there the royalists hit him, and at the third Battle of La Puerta, made it a dismal hat trick for the Republican army. Bolívar’s forces were hit flush and blasted out of the water. Once again, leaving a thousand dead on the field, Bolívar fled back to Calabozo with just a handful of men.

When Páez found out about the defeat, he was like, “Well, yeah, what did you think was going to happen?” And subordinates started whispering in his ear that, you know, he really ought to be running this thing, not Bolívar. And over the next few months, Bolívar would be leading just a few hundred men, hardly a grand army worthy of the title El Jefe Supremo. But though you could fault his recklessness, you could not fault his resiliency. And Bolívar kept fighting. He always kept fighting. And now he was running an aggressive guerrilla campaign on the edges of the Llanos, where the hills rise up towards the steep heights of the northern Andes, across which Bolívar wanted to go, if only he could. In the midst of this campaign, he dodged his second major assassination attempt after royalist soldiers managed to beat the password out of a captured patriot. Bolívar only woke up because his mule was startled by the approaching assassins. So the bullet meant for his head missed. In the confusion, the assassins got away, but as usual, Bolívar, lucky Bolívar, caught another break.

But this campaign was going nowhere fast, and across Venezuela, the gains of 1816 and 1817 were being reversed. Calabozo was retaken by royalists. Even Páez had to fall back to the relative safety of his home territory around Barinas. So in mid-1818, Bolívar decided to take a little break to take advantage of the fact that he did now have a secure capital and a refuge back at Angostura. When he reached the republican capital, though, he was inundated with complaints from the recently arrived foreign mercenaries. “Where are the wages? Where is the glory? Where is the food that we can actually eat?” He tried to placate them, but he didn’t really have any answers. López Méndez had promised money that Bolívar didn’t have, and so Bolívar disingenuously claimed that they were supposed to have been paid before they departed. But that would all get worked out, and these guys would eventually serve under Bolívar, because you do have to remember the old rule: always pay your mercenaries in full.

So this now is the moment where you might expect Bolívar to be on the verge of his fifth exile. But remember, he is done being exiled. Though the outlook was grimmer than he would have liked, the royalist forces did not have the ability to dislodge him from the Orinoco River. And so, instead of exile, Bolívar hunkered down. He spent the back half of 1818 living in Angostura, occasionally heading out on inspection tours of the territory controlled by republicans, though occasionally finding that his forces held less territory than they had the last time he checked. Morale was low, though, and the whole project did seem to have stalled out. So, as usual, Bolívar just dreamed an even bigger, more impressive dream, like Wile E. Coyote deciding that the only way to make it to the other side of the gorge was to just run faster. So he started plotting an invasion of New Granada, as audacious an invasion as he would ever plan. And he’s had his share of audacious plans.

By the end of 1818, there had been enough of a reprieve that Bolívar could train and organize some forces and then also come to some sort of terms with the foreign legion so that they would actually fight for him. But before Bolívar departed on this latest mad offensive, he wanted to make a grand gesture because it felt like the eyes of the world were now upon him. And quite literally, they were. Both the United States and Great Britain had sent representatives to investigate how real this independent Republic of Venezuela was and whether it might actually be worth supporting. Remember, this is right on the eve of the Monroe Doctrine, so foreign policy attitudes in the United States are starting to shift. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really a Republic of Venezuela to speak of. There was the army and the Council of State, but that is hardly going to impress foreign emissaries.

So on February 15, 1819, Bolívar convened the Congress of Angostura, 26 delegates representing not just Venezuela but also ambitiously New Granada. And they all now claimed to be the sovereign government of Colombia, an independent nation that covered the whole of the old Viceroyalty of New Granada, from Guayana to Quito. It was an empty declaration, of course, but it did fit with Bolívar’s grand vision and his latest grand plan. And if that latest grand plan succeeded, then the reality would soon line up with the fantasy.

The principal purpose of the Congress of Angostura, though, was to allow Bolívar to formally give up the political power he had wielded as El Jefe Supremo since taking up residence there in July 1817. So at the opening of the Congress, Bolívar delivered a speech declaring that his time as political dictator was at an end and that he now transferred that power to the Congress. Not only was it unbecoming of a real republic to have a military dictator, but the longer he stayed in power, the harder it would be to ultimately disentangle him from it, which was his professed aim. But in this way, Bolívar was a lot like Oliver Cromwell, constantly trying to give up power, invest it in some sort of representative institution, and yet always winding back up with the scepter in hand.

So Bolívar opened up the Congress on February 15, 1819, with an address called now the Angostura Address, which is the third of the great Bolivarian statements of political purpose. And in it, he recapitulated many of the same themes he had been working out since the Cartagena Manifesto: that federalism would fail in the Spanish Americas because the Spaniards had saddled them under the triple yoke of ignorance, tyranny and vice. He said that the Spanish Americans must adapt their own institutions to fit their own population to create the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens, a theory now amalgamating Montesquieu and Jeremy Bentham.

He also reiterated his argument that the Americans were a new species, neither Indian nor European, but a combination, though he did now introduce a new twist: embracing liberty and equality. He finally included the African element as an essential feature of the new American race. He said,

“The European has mixed with the American and the African, and the African has mixed with the Indian and with the Europeans, all born in the womb of our common mother.”

And then he literally begged for the abolition of slavery. He said,

“I beg the confirmation of absolute freedom for the slaves, just as I would beg for my life and for the life of the Republic.”

So Bolívar does now see the whole population together and is not just focused on one sliver of it.

But the Angostura Address was not just Bolívar offering abstract advice, that wasn’t really his thing. And really, it was an explanation for the draft constitution Bolívar had written and now presented to the Congress to debate and hopefully adopt.

Bolívar said that he believed that the British system provided the best working model with a combination of commons, lords, and king, though he did see their roles to be played differently. For one thing, he was a republican, so a president would stand in for the king. And further, he believed that the president should have more power than a British king, that a weak executive had been a major problem for their run of failed republics so far that had been built around juntas and congresses and triumvirs. So Bolívar implored the Congress to create a strong central executive power that would be wielded by a single man, not without checks and balances, but also not powerless. To the lower house, who would be the tribunal of the people, he assigned all the legislative functions, but critically, not the power to execute laws, that would be the purview of the president.

But at the heart of Bolívar’s government was a hereditary senate standing in for the House of Lords. This body, he said, was the soul of the Republic and would, quote, “be the pillar supporting the edifice of political and civil rights.” He dismissed the idea that the Senate would become some out of touch aristocracy and instead argued that they would act to simultaneously moderate the intemperate general will and curb the authority of a power-hungry executive. He said that the Senate would be the mediator that would calm the storms and maintain harmony between the members and the head of this political body.

Now, whether the Senate would have been a bulwark of freedom and the nucleus to perpetuate the Republic, as Bolívar believed it would be, we’ll never know because it was never going to be put into effect. But given that I’m currently writing a book about the failure of the Roman Senate to do just that, well, I’m skeptical of its long-term viability.

Bolívar wrapped up his address by hammering home his key point: that unity, unity, unity must be the national motto, but also that it was time for them to forge that unity without him. He would remain Commander in Chief of the army, but his time as political dictator was now at an end. “Gentlemen,” he concluded, “begin your work. Mine is done.”

It should come as no surprise that his work was not done, and like Cromwell before him, Bolívar would find himself dragged back into politics over and over again. But for now, he did plan to depart Angostura to return to the simple and straightforward life of a soldier. And next time, he will launch the greatest military campaign of his career, greater even than the Magdalena campaign or the Admirable campaign.

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