Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
When Simón Bolívar and his new wife María Teresa del Toro sailed away from Spain in the spring of 1802, the Europe they were leaving behind was just then entering the so-called Year of Peace. The decade of mass conflict that had begun when the Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria in April 1792 finally concluded when Napoleon Bonaparte’s Consulate signed the Treaty of Amiens with the British in March 1802. And no one was more relieved by the peace than the ailing Spanish monarchy. Having been all but cut off from her colonies after getting sucked over to the French side of the war back in 1795, Spain hoped to start reasserting its authority in the Americas again and revived those all important shipments of gold and silver that they needed to survive.
But by the time that a grief stricken Bolívar boarded a ship in October 1803 to return to Europe, war had already returned to Europe. The Year of Peace ended in March 1803 and the Napoleonic Wars had begun. And the Napoleonic Wars were a catastrophe for Spain, and provide the direct trigger for the breakup of her vast American Empire.
When the now 20-year-old Bolívar landed in Spain at the end of 1803, he headed first for the house of his in-laws to deliver the tragic news of their daughter’s death. But he did not linger long in Madrid. In April 1804, he left Spain completely, accompanied by an old friend from Caracas who also happened to be his late wife’s cousin, Fernando del Toro. The two young Venezuelans crossed the Pyrenees and took up lodgings in Paris, living in the thriving expat community surrounded by men and women of all nationalities. The great victories of Bonaparte had transformed Paris from the starved and bloodsoaked nightmare of the heady days of the French Revolution into a rich and vibrant capital of what was on the verge of becoming the mighty French Empire. And indeed, Bolívar and Del Toro were there to witness that transformation firsthand, because on May 18th, 1804, just a few weeks after the two Venezuelans arrived in Paris, the Tribunate voted to transform First Consul Bonaparte into Emperor Napoleon I.
Bolívar found himself simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Napoleon’s imperial ascension. Like most liberal idealists, he had come to greatly admire General Bonaparte, who was “the heroic great man” in every sense of the word, a man to be admired by a guy like Bolívar, whose fanciful ambitions were now starting to harden into a vision of his own future greatness. Everywhere Bolívar looked in France, he saw the fruits of Bonaparte’s victories and it was impossible to miss the sharp contrast between the energetic glory of Paris and the decaying pettiness of Madrid. Everywhere he looked in France, he saw rich, dynamic advancement, while everywhere he had looked in Spain, he saw paper thin facades that covered a kingdom rotting from the inside out.
But also like many liberal idealists, Bolívar was dejected by Bonaparte’s decision to drop the pretense of republicanism and embrace overt imperial despotism. Not unlike Beethoven, Bolívar was angry that Bonaparte, the enlightened republican hero, had given himself over to such tyrannical self glorification. Bolívar did not have a magnificent symphony that he could scratch out the dedication page to, but he was still in Paris when the massive celebration of Napoleon’s imperial coronation consumed the city in December 1804. Bolívar refused to join the revelry and made a point to shut up his doors and windows on the day of the coronation and try to tune out Bonaparte’s disillusioning slip into authoritarianism. And that day will forever stand as a moment of ironic foreshadowing of Bolívar’s own tragic end.
Consumed by a sense of grief and depression and disillusionment, Bolívar threw himself into a fairly debauched Parisian world of drinking, gambling and love affairs. Not paying too much attention to the future or the past, just living for the moment. During these days of endless partying, he started attending the salon of Fanny du Villars. Seven years older than Bolívar, Fanny was a well known fixture of Parisian society life and connected to the world of the imperial family. She was married to a colonel in Napoleon’s army, who would soon enough rise to become a senator in Napoleon’s imperial government. But the Colonel didn’t care much for Paris and often left his wife alone there for long stretches of time, and she and Bolívar fell into a passionate love affair. It was also during these days that Bolívar ran into his old tutor, Simón Rodríguez. Rodríguez had become an itinerant teacher since being exiled from Venezuela back in 1797 and after arriving in Paris, he and Bolívar reconnected – Bolívar now all ears for the grab bag of radical liberal doctrines Rodríguez espoused.
By early 1805 though the running party that Bolívar had been indulging in for the better part of nine months was finally running on fumes, and partly this was because Spain and Britain had finally declared war on each other in December 1804 as a part of the expanding war of the Third Coalition, and Bolívar was now cut off from his fortune back in Caracas. He lost the last of his available cash at the gambling table and was forced to borrow money from Fanny to try to salvage himself. He then made one last run through the tables winning back enough to recover what he had lost and repay Fanny, whereupon he swore off gambling forever. And like his oath to never remarry, he would never again gamble, because when Simon Bolívar swears something, he means it.
Once he had settled all his accounts, he broke things off with Fanny and decided to move on. In short order, she took up with the Empress Joséphine’s son, eventually bearing him a child that she would later strongly imply was actually Bolívar’s.
To clear his head, Bolívar, Fernando del Toro and Simón Rodríguez decided to go on a walking tour down to Italy. They took off for the peninsula in April 1805, making a point to pass by the old house of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Switzerland on their way. And though he was trying to leave his troubles behind, Bolívar could not escape the shadow of Emperor Napoleon. The three Venezuelans arrived in Milan in May 1805, just ahead of Napoleon, who had come to town to place the famous Iron Crown of Lombardy on his head and proclaim himself King of Italy. Again, Napoleon Bonaparte was an attractively repellent figure, and Bolívar would later note that he was mighty impressed that as Emperor, Napoleon still wore the simple, plain uniform of a simple, plain soldier while inspecting his troops. In the end, he was just a soldier among soldiers.
From Milan, the three companions kept moving south through Venice and Florence on their way, naturally, to the eternal city of Rome, and like anyone with any kind of love for the ancient world, Bolívar was captivated by Rome and his head was fired with visions of the great old Roman heroes. And as he later said, from the time he was a boy, he had always dreamed of joining their ranks. Well, his path to entering those ranks had now crystallized in his mind.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how and why he came to set himself on a path of revolutionary glory because, remember, Bolívar would also say that before his wife died, politics had not yet captured his imagination, and had she lived, he never would have become the Liberator. So what has changed? And what has changed him?
Well, it’s clear that from his two tours through Spain, that Bolívar was unimpressed with the quote unquote “mother country” and disgusted by the Spanish monarchy. The energy and vitality of the Empire lay in America. The peninsulares were nothing but deadweight bloodsuckers. Of this, Bolívar was convinced.
Added to this personal revulsion for the Spanish were the modern liberal ideas he had been devouring since first being set loose in the library of the Marqués de Uztáriz. He had by now read and absorbed Locke, and Montesquieu, and Voltaire, and Hume, and Hobbes, and Thomas Paine, and a dozen others. He read history and philosophy and political theory and military manuals. But what’s interesting is that Bolívar always did so with a practical eye. He was not drinking all this in merely to quench some thirst for abstract knowledge. And he constantly brought the ideas and theories back around to how he could use them, how they were applicable in the real world, how they might better inform his plans, make them better plans, make them smarter plans. And then you, of course, also now have the concrete examples of the American and French and even Haitian revolutions to guide his imagination and his ambitions.
So while it’s hard to say when exactly he became convinced of his destiny, it is clear that by the summer of 1805, he was on the path. And we know this because in August 1805, he and Del Toro and Rodríguez climbed the Sacred Mount outside Rome to play out one of the most famous scenes in the legendary life of Simón Bolívar.
On August 15, 1805, the three companions took a day hike to follow in the footsteps of the plebs of Rome, who had once retired to the Sacred Mount en masse in 494 B.C. refusing to return until the patricians agreed to political and social reforms. An agitated Bolívar equated these stubborn patricians with the ignoble Spanish, and he vowed right then and there on top of the Sacred Mount, to liberate his country or die trying. And as I just said, when Bolívar makes a vow, he damn well means it. He would never marry again, he would never gamble again, and from this day forth, he was unrelenting in his obsessive drive to liberate his country from Spanish rule or die trying.
The trip to Italy wound up taking just about six months to complete, and Bolívar, Del Toro and Rodríguez returned to Paris at least by November 1805, just as the dynamics of European politics were changing drastically on all fronts. Because after crowning himself with the Iron Crown of Lombardy, Napoleon had launched his grand army at the Austrians and Russians while his navy went off to try to break the growing British stranglehold on the continent.
And while the land war would end in December 1805, with Napoleon’s spectacular victory in Austerlitz, the naval war had ended in catastrophic ruin at Trafalgar back in October. And it is the fallout from Trafalgar that is of principal interest to us here because the cream of the Spanish Navy was wiped out along with their French allies, and Britain now truly controlled the high seas. This development would have major implications for the future of Spanish America and would immediately set the stage for two failed invasions of Spanish South America. One that seemed to show that the population was not at all ready for independence, the other that they most certainly were.
The first of these invasions brings us back to Francisco de Miranda, because the Leander Expedition is the great embarrassing stumble of his life – the moment when he likely first confronted the reality that he may not go down in history as the Liberator after all.
Since returning to London in 1798, Miranda had been lobbying the British government to help him open up an American front in their larger war against the French. But the British government remained standoffish to his grand plans, and then the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 seemed to firmly close any interest they might have in Miranda’s schemes. So by 1803, Miranda was reconciling himself a bit to the fact that he might be staying in London for a while, like maybe forever. While traveling up in Yorkshire, he met a woman named Sarah Andrews and brought her back to London, where they either married officially or simply lived as common law husband and wife. I’ve seen both reported. The couple then purchased a house on Grafton Street in London, and their first child, a son named Leandro, was born in October 1803. This is just as Bolívar is embarking for his voyage back to Europe.
The Grafton Street house is now justifiably famous as the hub of Spanish American revolutionary activity in the lead-up to independence, because anyone who is anyone passed through the Grafton Street house at one point or another, as Miranda settled into a life possibly dedicated to grooming the next generation to carry on the fight.
But Miranda was not done dreaming of his own glorious return to Venezuela just yet. The breakdown of the Europe peace had led Britain and France back to war and Miranda back to his lobbying efforts. But unfortunately for Miranda, Spain had not yet been dragged into things. And indeed, in 1803 and 1804, the British had some hope that the Spanish might be brought into what ultimately became the Third Coalition.
But ever hopeful, Miranda cast a wider net in his efforts to secure British backing for a move against the Spanish Americas. He lobbied adventurous souls in the British army and Navy, avarice souls in the British merchant community, and intellectual souls looking for a moral crusade they could get behind. And to work on all these fronts, Miranda became a fixture of British social life, dining, dancing and chatting his way through high society. Now mostly, he was indulged as a charming rogue, but he did manage to convert a few influential figures to his cause.
Amongst the intellectual set, for example, Miranda started working with anti-slave hero William Wilberforce. And then, even more importantly, Miranda entered into a rich and mutually beneficial collaboration with Utilitarian reformers Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Because, of course, Miranda becomes tight with Bentham and Mill, and he, no joke, almost convinces Jeremy Bentham to move to Spanish America. But that would come later, after the fiasco that was the Leander Expedition.
Amongst the military set, Miranda made a number of friends, but none more critical than a senior naval officer named Sir Home Riggs Popham, who, as we will see, absolutely believed in the cause of Spanish American independence. If not for the Spanish Americans themselves, then for the British merchants that he envisioned moving into their now open markets. Popham worked tirelessly on the Admiralty to get them to approve a Miranda-led expedition. But for the time being, the British government did their usual thing: nods of approval with nothing ever being approved. And this is even after Britain and Spain redeclare war on each other in December 1804. Because if you’ll recall from that last episode of the French Revolution series on the Empire, the origins of Napoleon’s grand army, the one that is about to steamroll through Europe on its way to Austerlitz, originated along the English Channel coast, where Napoleon had been preparing for what appeared to be the inevitable invasion of Britain. So if you’re the British government, this is 100% not the time to be sending soldiers, sailors, and guns off on some harebrained adventure in Venezuela.
So once again, left hanging by the British, Miranda made up his mind by mid-1805 to act on the suggestion made years earlier by his friend Alexander Hamilton: to make this an exclusively American project. In September 1805, that is, just before Trafalgar, Miranda packed up his bags, left his pregnant wife and young son behind, and sailed for the United States.
Now, unfortunately, by this point, Hamilton himself was dead, shot by Aaron Burr in July 1804. But when Miranda landed in New York City, he was able to reestablish contact with other old friends. For example, his old traveling buddy, William Stephens Smith, now Controller of the Port of New York and former Ambassador in London, Rufus King. They put him in contact with a financier named Samuel Ogden and a community of merchants with experience trading in and around the Caribbean. These are the guys who would have been running guns and supplies in and out of Saint Domingue all those years. Miranda started making real, actual plans for a real, actual operation. He was done dreaming. He was done talking. He wanted to act.
In December 1805, Miranda headed down to Washington, D.C. to try to secure official approval for his operation from President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison.
Now, they took the meeting, but as was their signature style, they were officially noncommittal, while seeming to offer private tacit support. But whatever they really said or really meant to say, when Miranda got back to New York City, he pretty much let everybody think that the White House supported his plan. And it all sure looked legit from the outside. Miranda had high placed friends everywhere and was able to purchase U.S. Government-manufactured guns and arms that he then loaded onto a ship he had rechristened the Leander, an anglified version of his son’s name, Leandro. And then adding to the general air of legitimacy, among those he first recruited was the son of his old friend William Stephens Smith, the similarly named William Steuben Smith, who was going to go along as Miranda’s personal aide-de-camp.
Then Miranda went around further recruiting, and here we get to one of the blacker marks on his record, because his recruiters were really super coy about what they were actually recruiting for. They were just promising big wages and the chance for an adventure to the down and out youth of New York City. And after the whole thing went to hell, most of these recruits claimed to have been duped by Miranda, who did not tell them they were being roped into revolutionary treason, although those claims themselves may be self-serving lies after the fact.
So in the end, Miranda recruited somewhere between 180 and 200 men for his expedition. Now, that’s not very many, but Miranda believed he only needed a small core to start with. That as soon as he landed in Venezuela and raised the banner of freedom, that his real army, an army drawn from the disaffected masses of Venezuela, would surely come running. So he loaded the Leander up with all his guns and ammunition and supplies, including a printing press, and sailed out of New York City in February 1806.
The Leander sailed down the coast and put in first at Jacmel, the port in the south province of now-independent Haiti, which is currently under the dominion of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Miranda and his crew spent about a month in Haiti, and while there, he started formally organizing his forces into what they really were: a vanguard military unit of what he hoped would become a grand patriot army of what he was now calling the country of Colombia.
And it was in Jamel that he first raised the flag that he had personally designed for a liberated Columbia, the familiar yellow, blue, and red that would indeed become the team colors of the patriot revolutionaries. And still today is the basis for the flags of Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
And not to get sidetracked here, but one version of the story of how he came up with those colors is that in 1785, at the very beginning of his long tour of Europe, he was up late chatting with literary giant/statesman/natural philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, because of course Miranda stays up late chatting with Goethe, and Goethe told him that Miranda’s destiny was to, quote, “create in your land a place where primary colors are not distorted.” And according to Goethe’s theories of color, the two primary colors were yellow and blue, with red being a synthesis of the two. Now, don’t bother trying to work out the scientific logic of that or email me about what Goethe’s theories really were because this is just a story that Miranda later tells.
While in Haiti, he also put his printing press to use, running off 2,000 copies of a proclamation to the inhabitants of South America that he planned to distribute upon arrival in Venezuela, advising the population that all men aged 16 to 65 were now subject to conscription into Miranda’s patriot army, and advising everyone to pin a tricolor yellow, blue and red cockade to their hats so that they would not be mistaken for unpatriotic counterrevolutionaries. He also held a ceremony formally swearing his recruits to loyalty to the free people of South America, and swearing that they would obey his orders until Miranda discharged them.
After about a month in Haiti and some growing unrest in the crew about what in fact they were all actually doing, the Leander sailed out of Jacmel in early April 1806, now accompanied by two small transports to carry all the men. After putting in for resupply in Aruba, they had made their final approach to Venezuela.
Now at this point, it had been 35 years since Miranda had set foot on Venezuelan soil. And though his name was synonymous with Venezuela in the United States and in Europe, in Venezuela itself, they hadn’t seen the guy since he departed as a 21-year-old student way back in 1771. A lot has happened since then, and though he had kept up correspondence with a few old friends, it’s not like anybody there knew him personally anymore. I mean, he was just a name, often spat out derisively as the Defector, the man organizing treason with all of the enemies of Spain. And for all his dreams of being the great hero of independence, Miranda was about to discover that the people of Venezuela were just not in the mood for him, or what were fast being revealed as his delusions of grandeur.
The Spanish authorities, of course, had spies all over the world and they were well versed in Miranda’s movements. Even if they ultimately overestimated the size of his army. They thought he might be coming with, like, 4,000 men, not, you know, 200. So as Miranda’s three ships approached the Venezuelan coast at the end of April 1806, a squadron of the local Spanish coast guard sailed out to intercept them. With the Spanish ships approaching, Miranda ordered the captain of the Leander to turn and make a run for it. But in the process they just abandoned the slower moving transports which were quickly intercepted by the Spanish and 60 or so men were captured, all of them citizens of the United States and including young William Steuben Smith. Ten of these prisoners were hanged immediately and the rest were chucked into Spanish prisons in Cartagena, their plight becoming quite a scandal once news of all this broke back home.
The Leander then took refuge back in Aruba until August when Miranda decided to take another run at things, and this time he aimed towards the city of Coro, site of that slave rebellion of 1795, which may or may not have been on his mind. But as he approached, the Spanish once again anticipated his arrival. Priests in Coro went round to all the inhabitants of the city and said that the traitor Miranda, now a British-backed pirate, was coming with a horde of infidels to ransack the town and murder everyone they found.
But this time Miranda was able to land, and on August 3, 1806, he hoisted the tricolor patriot flag and led his men to 12 miles inland to Coro, where active recruitment and conscription would begin at once. When Miranda and his men got to Coro, they found the city deserted. The panicky men did not handle this ghost town well, and there was at least one friendly fire incident when two nervous groups scouting around open fired on each other.
But as it turned out, nobody was jumpier than Miranda himself. It had been more than a decade since he had participated in any kind of actual military operation. He was now 56 years old and had spent way more time drinking and dancing and chatting than he ever had on a battlefield. Of course, if there was one outcome he could not abide by, it would be being captured alive by the Spanish. So with Coro deserted and no one flocking to his banner, and now actively afraid that Spanish forces were converging on the city, Miranda gave the order to retreat back to the Leander. On August 13, everyone reboarded the ship and put out to sea.
Miranda’s glorious return to Venezuela after so many years had lasted a pathetic eleven days and concluded not with a bang but a whimper. Maybe everyone had been right. Maybe Spanish American independence had been a pipe dream all along. But as he sailed away, this had to have been as rotten as Miranda had ever felt in his entire life.
Unable to return to the United States, both because he would have to face angry creditors and possible arrest, Miranda took up residence in British-occupied Trinidad and would remain there for the next year. And he was wise to avoid the United States because not long after the Leander had departed, the Governor of New York accused William Stephens Smith and Samuel Ogden of treason. Specifically, that their participation in Miranda’s expedition violated the 1794 active neutrality that prohibited American citizens from engaging in hostilities against foreign powers. Smith and Ogden were indicted and stood trial in July 1806. Now, their argument was that this had all been authorized by the President and the Secretary of State, but both of them now denied it, though of course they also both refused requests to testify under oath. But a sympathetic jury was unwilling to punish the two men for their participation in the project, and they were both ultimately acquitted.
The plight of the men now held in the Spanish prisons, though, continued to be something of a cause célèbre in the United States for years after the fact. William Steuben Smith managed to escape from his prison in Cartagena, but his more unfortunate colleagues were still there as late as 1809 when a petition was submitted to Congress to appropriate funds to purchase their release. But Congress took no action. Now, unfortunately, I kind of lose track of these guys after that, but it would appear that they each used whatever personal connections or channels they could to secure their own personal release one by one. But ultimately, I do not know how many got out and how many died in Cartagena.
The fallout from the Leander Expedition was felt all over. In the United States, Miranda’s name was now mud. The press was convinced he was a dangerous charlatan who had led American boys to their deaths, and his various American contacts now distanced themselves from Miranda for good. And then back in Paris, Bolívar heard about the expedition as he was getting ready to sail back to Venezuela, and he was furious. He believed the old man had jumped the gun and that the pathetic operation had set the cause of independence back for years.
So after lingering in Trinidad until the fall of 1807, Miranda finally boarded a boat that took him back directly to England, bypassing the United States where he was liable to be arrested. And he returned home to London, now more than ever, his real home, on New Year’s Day 1808. And that might very well have been the end of the line for Francisco de Miranda, but for the moment, history was still on his side, because just as he was returning to Europe, Napoleon invaded Spain and deposed the Spanish monarchy, which marks the beginning of Spanish American independence.
But we’re going to leave that all-important trigger for next week and instead turn our attention to the second invasion of 1806 that we need to talk about. One that coincidentally enough was unfolding at the same moment as the Leander Expedition, just on the other side of the continent. And I speak now of the British invasion and occupation of the Río de la Plata.
So what on earth is the Río de la Plata? Well, for starters, it’s a really big river down in southeastern South America. But more importantly, it was the fourth and final viceroyalty created by the Spanish Crown. So remember, the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain were created back in the mid-1500s. And then they were joined eventually by the Viceroyalty of New Granada in either 1717 or 1739, depending on how you want to date things.
Well, in 1776, right in the midst of the reforms of King Charles III, the Council of the Indies formed a fourth viceroyalty, the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, encompassing territory now roughly conforming to the modern nations of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia, with a capital in Buenos Aires, which lay on the southern banks of the Río de la Plata estuary.
Now, the territory around the Río de la Plata was amongst the last to be organized because it really was still frontier territory. It was amongst the last regions to be settled by the Spanish, and, for example, colonial Argentina didn’t have much going for it economically, except for some cattle ranches. But the Río de la Plata did have the distinction of roughly marking the border between Spanish and Portuguese South America. Buenos Aires had been permanently planted on the south side of the river in 1580, and it had stood as a lonely outpost until 1680, when the Portuguese showed up and built a fort on the north side of the river, staking a claim to the region called the Banda Oriental, or what is today Uruguay.
The two powers lived in uneasy cohabitation, with both claims to the region extremely murky. But to bolster their own case, the Spanish planted the city of Montevideo on the north side of the river in 1724. But in the main, the whole region did not gin up much interest from Spanish administrators. And so, with very little direct oversight, the Río de la Plata region turned into a hotbed of contraband smuggling. This was the best place for foreign traders to get their goods into closed Spanish markets.
So during the reign of Charles III, one of the objectives was to clamp down on this kind of smuggling. And in 1776, the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata was formed. And then the following year, Spain and Portugal signed a treaty establishing more formal boundaries between their two empires, whereby the Spanish traded claims in the Amazon basin for control of the Banda Oriental.
Now, despite the addition of a viceroy, the Río de la Plata was still a minor territory in the grand scheme of things. Really, the only thing it had going for it were these cattle ranches that produced meat and hides for exports, but they now also were the funnel point for the silver coming out of the great Potosí mine in the Andean interior, though by the late 1700s, this once great mine was pretty well exhausted.
Now, over the years, the British and Portuguese had always been able to do a pretty thriving trade in contraband, a trade which picked up mightily during that blackout period between 1795 and 1802 when Spain was cut off from her colonies. And during those years, a British naval officer had cruised the coast and gotten it into his head that the Río de la Plata was ripe for the plucking. That man? Sir Home Riggs Popham, future friend of Francisco de Miranda, an ardent supporter of Spanish American independence.
After serving at Trafalgar, now Commodore Popham was ordered to ferry an expeditionary army down to South Africa in late 1805 to capture Cape Town from the Dutch. All of this was successfully concluded by early 1806, beginning the permanent occupation of Cape Town by the British. Once it was all wrapped up, though, Popham was told to keep an eye on the Spanish American coast in case somebody tried to use it to stage some sort of counterattack against the British in South Africa.
But after surveying the complete lack of defenses around Buenos Aires, no navy or regular army forces to speak of, Popham hatched a plan. Without any explicit orders, he got the General occupying Cape Town to lend him 1,500 men to make a run at invading and occupying Buenos Aires. This expeditionary force landed outside the city on June 25, 1806, and the viceroy panicked when he heard the news, picking up his treasury and fleeing for the interior. Two days later, the British marched into the city practically without firing a shot.
The flight of the viceroy hacked off many of the locals who may have been okay with trading with the British but were super not interested in being annexed into the British Empire. One of those locals was a French mercenary working for the Spanish named Santiago Liniers.
Along with a few other local leaders, Liniers slipped up to Montevideo and from there organized a militia composed mostly of men from the mixed-race middle classes. Once these guys were organized, Liniers launched a counterattack against the British occupiers in Buenos Aires. Unsupported, lacking reinforcements and without clear orders about what they were doing, the British troops lost key strategic points to the locals and soon found themselves surrounded. On August 14, 1806, the day after Miranda fled Venezuela, the British commander signed an armistice with Liniers and the British troops withdrew. As soon as they were gone, the Town Council of Buenos Aires voted to strip the viceroy of his military responsibilities and give them to Liniers, who they now promoted to Captain General. Liniers then set about improving the defenses of the city, drafting all able-bodied men into the militia, regardless of race and class. And then he set about fortifying the city and training them to fight.
Now, when Commodore Popham returned to London after the failure of his little invasion, the Admiralty was furious with him, and he was censured but not dismissed by a court-martial. But obviously, they were not too angry with all this because shortly thereafter, they authorized a second invasion. And by the winter of 1806, a full-blown fleet was sailing for the Río de la Plata, with 15,000 soldiers and sailors.
When the British arrived, they decided this time to first attack Montevideo, landing a force in early February 1807 and capturing the city after a hard fight that saw both sides take some pretty heavy casualties. The British occupied the city for the next few months until General John Whitelocke arrived in May and took over the operation.
In the aftermath of the loss of Montevideo, the audiencias of Buenos Aires took the extraordinary step of voting to depose the Viceroy and named Liniers Acting Viceroy. This new authority in hand, Liniers prepared for the British attack, which came in early July when General Whitelocke buried his forces across the river to Buenos Aires and launched an attack on the city. The militia forces led by Liniers fought hard, but the British managed to push their way into the city. But then, the militia forces just kept fighting and they refused to surrender. And after a few days, General Whitelocke decided it was hopeless. And so, on July 6, 1807, he signed an armistice with Liniers, agreeing to withdraw all British forces inside of two months. The last of the British pulled out of Montevideo in September. And when Whitelocke returned to London, he was not as lucky as Popham had been. Charged with incompetence for allowing himself to get beaten by some ragtag Spanish militias, he was court-martialed and dismissed from service.
So the British invasions of the Río de la Plata had failed. But as I said, where Miranda’s expeditions convinced many that Spanish America was not ripe for independence, the inhabitants of the Río de la Plata were suddenly feeling very self-confident. The population had shown a resolute ability to defend what was theirs from a foreign invader. And what’s more, they had done it without regular Spanish army troops and frankly, without the Spanish Viceroy, who had proved himself to be cowardly and ineffective. So cowardly and ineffective, in fact, that the local town council and the audiencia had assumed the unprecedented authority to depose him from office. This growing local self-confidence and self-assertiveness would feed directly into the great May Revolution that would come along in 1810. And a lot of the guys who fought against the British in 1806 and 1807 would wind up officers in the liberating army of José de San Martín.
So the two invasions of 1806 painted two pictures of Spanish America. The Leander Expedition showing a people willing to turn their back on revolutionary independence, while the defense of the Río de la Plata showed a people ready to embrace it. And who knows how things may have proceeded had not the mother country been overtaken by a fatal crisis. And next week, we will begin with that fatal crisis, because in 1807, Napoleon would march French troops across the Pyrenees, ostensibly to attack Portugal because they were busy defying his continental system. But then, in early 1808, Napoleon would turn on his Spanish allies, seize key Spanish cities, and depose the Spanish monarchy, opening up for himself the Spanish ulcer, but more importantly for us, launching Spanish America on the road to independence.
Return to The Latin American Revolutions >>