Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

So, last time we took Venezuela up to the coup of April 19, 1810, and the establishment of an independent criollo-dominated Caracas Junta. And then we wrapped up in June of 1810 with the departure of a little three-man embassy to London to try to win British support for the cause. But though Venezuela was the first to take advantage of the fall of the Central Junta in the spring of 1810, it was only the first to take advantage of it. And 1810 would prove to be a momentous year in the history of the Spanish Americas as five major rebellions took hold. But since each is as complicated as the other, I am going to invoke my goal to keep the focus here on New Granada, and instead, we’ll just briefly touch on the others.

The most significant of these rebellions, at least at the moment, erupted down in the Río de la Plata, as news arrived of the fall of the Central Junta at the end of May. In a region already brimming with political and military self-confidence, a complicated little game played out, pitting everyone against everyone else. Criollo against peninsular against mestizo, liberals against conservatives, the old viceregal regime against calls for self-government. Taken together, it’s called the May Revolution and culminated in Buenos Aires on May 25, 1810, with the deposition of the viceroy and the beginning not just of the Argentinian War of Independence but also a running civil war that would engulf the region for years. The coastal cities would fight against the interior, Buenos Aires would find itself fighting against everyone else. It’s really quite a mess, and we are not going to fall into it.

The third major rebellion to hit in 1810, though, we do need to talk about because it broke out over in New Granada proper, that is, modern Colombia. Word of the fall of Seville and the Central Junta reached Cartagena in May 1810. And as in Caracas and down in Buenos Aires, the local criollo elite wasted no time establishing a local governing junta to rule in Ferdinand’s name without recognizing the legitimacy of the regency, whatever that was or whatever claims to sovereignty it might be making. This pattern of junta formation then followed news up into the interior of New Granada, passing through Socorro on July 9, Socorro being the scene of the Comuneros revolt in 1781, on its way to the viceregal capital of Bogotá in July.

Now, since the abdications of Bayonne, the viceroy in Bogotá had been doing a pretty okay job keeping a handle on things. Sure, he had lost Quito there in 1809, but with a timely assist from his colleague down in Peru, Quito was pacified again by the end of the year. 

But as time passed, tensions grew between the criollo of Bogotá and the large population of peninsulares, who lived in the viceregal capital, because it was the viceregal capital. Now, the viceroy tried to play fair, but by disposition and, frankly, necessity, he wound up siding more and more with the peninsulares against the growing assertiveness of the criollos.

Now, once word of the fall of the Central Junta arrived in Bogotá, the growing assertiveness of the criollos went into overdrive, and events moved very quickly. Leading criollos immediately demanded local autonomy and the creation of a junta. Then, in a calculated move to provoke the population, there’s this funny little incident where some of these criollo leaders asked a particularly prejudiced peninsular merchant to lend them a vase for a meeting that they were going to have, knowing full well that this guy was going to say, “No, if you want it, you have to buy it.” Then an argument broke out, and after being intentionally provoked, this peninsular merchant allegedly got so mad that he smashed the vase on the ground rather than let them take it. Now, this created an insulting incident that the criollos could then go out to use to rile up the streets, and all of it worked. With the streets now fully agitated, the viceroy agreed to convene a junta. This all took place on July 20, which is today celebrated as Colombian Independence Day, though, to be clear, there are many, many more twists and turns before they actually get there. 

So the elite Bogotá criollos, then called to serve in this junta, tried to maintain some semblance of viceregal authority, at least in appearance, by making the viceroy president of the junta. But as I just said, events were now moving very quickly, and agitators out in the street protested against the prominent position now being played by the viceroy. And on July 25, the junta gave way to the streets, and the viceroy was forced to resign. Bogotá was now in the hands of local criollo leadership. But the big question remained: would their authority be limited to the city itself, or would it encompass the whole of the viceroyalty? This question would run everyone smack dab into the problem of federalism.

Now, the next two rebellions don’t hit until the fall of 1810. So we’ll move now to reconnect with that little three-man Venezuelan embassy we sent across the Atlantic at the end of last week’s episode, who arrived in London just days before the Colombians deposed their viceroy. The senior Venezuelan envoy was 52-year-old Luis López Méndez, a well respected member of the criollo elite and a former mayor of Caracas. Accompanying him were 29-year-old Andrés Bello, a budding intellectual superstar and most recently, secretary to the now-deposed Captain General of Venezuela. And then, last but not least, 27-year-old Simón Bolívar, who was only on the trip because he paid for it. Their mission existed in a very gray diplomatic area, coming as they did from a self-declared rebel junta, they could not and would not be officially credentialed by the British government. But at the same time, they had made the trip across the Atlantic courtesy of the Royal Navy. Like, literally, a British naval ship came and picked them up. So it’s not like they were persona non grata. When they arrived in London, none of them knew anyone. Not one of the three had ever been to England before, and not one of the three spoke English. But that was no matter, because whenever a South American arrived in London, they would always find a warm welcome in the now-famous house on Grafton Street, home of their long-exiled countryman, Francisco de Miranda. And so to Grafton Street they went.

Now, when last week left Miranda, he had just blown a gasket after being told by Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, that their imminent plans for an invasion of South America were being scrapped in favor of throwing everything the British had into the Peninsular War. Well, Miranda is irrepressible by nature, and so, despite yet another setback, he continued to hammer away on the cause of Spanish American independence. And though he had friends in all stations of British society, Miranda’s principal collaborator at this point appears to have been the utilitarian philosopher and reformer James Mill. And just as an aside, given their long standing friendship, it is impossible for me to believe that Miranda did not meet Mill’s young son, John Stuart Mill, who was born in 1806 and from birth was basically the subject of an educational experiment to see what the human brain was actually capable of if pushed to its maximum capacity. The result was that after having a nervous breakdown, John Stuart Mill became one of the greatest philosophers and political economists in British history. And just another one degree of separation in the endlessly fascinating social web of Francisco de Miranda.

Anyway, during these years, Miranda and Mill undertook to translate and publish various treaties on Spanish America, mostly written by those old exiled Jesuit intellectuals. Mill would then review the translation in one of the liberal journals floating around out there and use that review as a launching pad to espouse the cause of freedom in Spanish America. They ginned up enough enthusiasm that, as I briefly mentioned a few episodes back, Jeremy Bentham was making serious plans to move to Spanish America in 1809. Specifically, he was going to go to Mexico where he thought he might set himself up as a constitutional expert for hire if and when the walls of Spanish tyranny finally came tumbling down. But Bentham couldn’t secure the requisite visas from the Spanish Embassy and eventually moved on to other projects. 

Now, in addition to his public PR campaign, Miranda also delved into a more secretive side of his independence project. Sometime in here in 1808 / 1809 / 1810, he founded an offshoot Freemasonic lodge called the Grand Reunion Lodge that he then deployed as an organizational tool to link South American patriots from across the continent into a single unified effort. As various exiles and dissidents would come through the house on Grafton Street from the Río de la Plata or Chile or New Spain or Peru, Miranda would induct them into the lodge. And the membership role of the Grand Reunion Lodge included nearly every prominent South American revolutionary. And their shared brotherhood was one of the underlying connections that allowed for whatever limited coordination took place during the wars of Independence.

Now, I have not talked about the Freemasons even once here on the Revolutions podcast, which I’m sure for some of you has been a noticeable dog that has not barked. Because not only were a ton of the various revolutionaries in the American, French, and even Haitian Revolutions Masons, the theory that all of these revolutions were actually the work of the Masons has long enjoyed a certain popular prominence. 

But I am personally skeptical of the idea that Freemasonry as an organization and movement were the secret drivers of these various revolutions. Yes, it was a secretive organization of enlightened liberalism, and many core Masonic beliefs became cornerstones of the Atlantic revolutionary era. But at the same time, it was also just a fairly banal social club that included educated men on the rise from all walks of life who were looking to make connections with other prominent men. These guys might be radical in their politics; they were often indifferent in their politics, and some were indeed downright reactionary in their politics. And basically, when you start digging around, Masons don’t just show up on the revolutionary side of the line, they show up on every side of the line. So it’s not nearly as straightforward as like, “Oh, a bunch of Masons staged the American Revolution, and then Washington inducted Lafayette and sent him back to plot with the Duke d’Orléans to launch the French Revolution.” And yes, all three of those guys were Masons. 

So mostly I’ve kept Masonry out of the narrative because God knows we’ve had enough other stuff to talk about. But I have had some notion to do a little miniseries at some point to address all of this, the role of Masonry in the revolutions because they are linked in the popular imagination. But I haven’t yet committed to it because I can’t decide where I stand on the theory that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and took his place at some point after the suppression of the Bavarian Illuminati in 1785, which would explain why Washington, who just wanted to retire peacefully to Mount Vernon after the war, suddenly threw himself back into the bubbling cauldron of revolutionary politics. So I can still see both sides of the argument.

Now, all of that said, the one place where you really do find all the Masons loaded over on the revolutionary side of the line is here in the wars of Spanish American independence. And it’s largely thanks to the role of Miranda’s Grand Reunion Lodge. For one thing, Masonry was outlawed in the Spanish Empire, so it’s not like there were many Masons roaming around out there to begin with. But even more importantly is the fact that the Grand Reunion Lodge was founded with an explicitly revolutionary goal. Once Miranda inducted the various exiles and dissidents, they would return home and seek out other like-minded revolutionaries and induct them into affiliated lodges. But really what’s going on here is that these guys were revolutionaries who became Masons rather than Masons who were then turned into revolutionaries.

The kicker to all this here is that while Luis López Méndez and Andres Bello were both confirmed to have been inducted by Miranda into the Grand Reunion Lodge here in 1810, there’s not one shred of hard evidence that the most famous South American revolutionary of them all, Simón Bolívar, ever was. Now, I’ve seen it reported that he was. But a few years down the road, royalists would intercept a list of all the active Masons in Venezuela. Bello and Mendez’s names were on the list. Bolívar’s name was not. And then, during one of his phases of holding dictatorial power, Bolívar would issue an edict suppressing secret societies, which is not exactly something a Mason is going to do, unless it’s part of a larger conspiracy somehow.

But whether he joined the Grand Reunion Lodge or not, Bolívar and Miranda were of one mind that events in Caracas must, absolutely must, be the beginning of independence. Miranda made the necessary arrangements for the three Venezuelans to meet with the British Foreign Secretary, who just so happened to be Richard Wellesley, brother of Arthur Wellesley. And I might as well mention at this point that the British ambassador to the Spanish regency was Henry Wellesley because, at this point, the Wellesley brothers are basically running the Peninsular War like a little family project, like some craft brewery they’ve started up in the basement.

Now, the delicacy here is that the British had a treaty with the regency against whom these three Venezuelans were in rebellion against. So Foreign Minister Wellesley took the meeting in his private home rather than at his office to avoid conferring official legitimacy to the South Americans. The first thing Wellesley tried to do was convince them that the regency was not dead, that all was not lost in Spain, and that the British backed patriot Spain 100%. Bolívar and company, meanwhile, had come to tell the British that they would not accept the regency. This tossed-together self-declared nothing that had no legitimacy and, frankly, had no ability to tell the Venezuelans what to do. The Americans had been kept in limbo for two years by the Central Junta, and they were done taking orders from Europe.

But the Caracas Junta had also given super explicit instructions to their ambassadors that independence, true independence, was not the goal. They were now and would forever remain loyal to King Ferdinand. But, of course, Bolívar is now the one doing the talking, and he just couldn’t help himself. He argued that the war-torn regency could not be expected to adequately govern the Americas and that they could expect nothing from an imprisoned king. So we’re already on our own out there. You can see where I’m going with this. 

But Wellesley wouldn’t follow. The British government was allies with the regency, and he urged the Venezuelans to acknowledge the regency, though he also implied that the British would be neutral. They would not support Venezuelan independence, but they also weren’t about to spearhead a military effort to force them into allegiance.

Now, an interesting wrinkle here is that the Venezuelans and British actually had the same aim. What the Caracas Junta really wanted right now was the ability to trade freely with the British. And what the British wanted was the ability to trade freely with the Venezuelans. I mean, all of Spanish America, really, but they were coming at it from two different directions. The Venezuelans wanted to do this around the regency. The British wanted to do it through the regency. And they, in fact, now planned to use the threat of Spanish American independence as leverage to force the regency to grant the British trade concessions. And indeed, for the rest of 1810, and then all through 1811, Henry Wellesley, that third Wellesley brother, would be down in Cádiz offering to mediate the conflict between Spain and her colonies in exchange for British trading rights in the Americas.

The final upshot from this meeting was that the British made it clear they would neither help nor hinder the Venezuelans, while Bolívar left, having made it clear that he certainly believed this was all headed towards independence. And while Wellesley complimented Bolívar on the passion of his argument, he also noted wryly that in the stack of papers the Venezuelans had just handed him, they had accidentally left the private instructions not to discuss independence. 

But one guy who was always willing to talk independence was Francisco de Miranda, who was thrilled by the news coming out of Caracas and eager now to brain dump his life’s work into Bolívar’s head. And during the two months that Bolívar remained in London, he and Miranda conferred constantly. They were practically inseparable. Miranda introduced Bolívar all around London, and they would stay up late plotting Spanish American independence all the way down to Miranda’s ideas for infrastructure improvements that could be undertaken after independence to improve the economic productivity of their country. They also agreed on one other thing: unity of purpose was essential, one of those we-all-must-hang-together-or-surely-we-shall-hang-separately things.

Now, Miranda and Bolívar had both read their Montesquieu and did not think it was practical or even possible to have all of Spanish America centralized under a single government, but large states roughly conforming to the boundaries of the four viceroyalties sounded perfect. 

Now, as we go forward, we’re going to see that the Spanish American revolutionaries, that is, setting aside unreconstructed conservatives who are opposed to all of this, could be divided along two axes. The X-axis was monarchist-republican, that is, do you want regional political autonomy under the sovereign umbrella of King Ferdinand, or do you really want pure independence? The Y-axis was centralist-federalist, that is, do you want a strong central government ruling a large territory, or do you prefer every city, province, and region holding ultimate sovereignty over itself? And as we’re about to see, the Caracas Junta, for example, was pretty much in the quadrant monarchist centralist. They wanted to rule Venezuela from Caracas but planned to remain loyal to Ferdinand. Other guys out there were republican federalists or monarchists federalists. Miranda and Bolívar are both republican centralists. They favor independence and a strong central government, and through everything that has to come, through all the fighting and all the negotiations, Bolívar would never leave this quadrant. He would remain a republican centralist.

The Venezuelan envoys then continued to meet informally with Foreign Minister Wellesley and his agents over the next few months, but neither side changed their positions. Believing he had now done what he came to do, Bolívar decided in September 1810 to return to Venezuela, and in the run-up to his departure, he lobbied Miranda hard to come with him, though Miranda was understandably reluctant. The Leander Expedition had been a disaster, he was now 60 years old, he had a wife and children, and frankly, a very comfortable, respectable life in London. But Bolívar painted a picture very similar to the one Miranda had long ago painted for himself, that Miranda would return home to Caracas a liberating hero, and finally, Bolívar convinced the old man to come home. 

Now, the two men intended to take the same ship home at the end of September 1810, but Bolívar would again be traveling courtesy of the Royal Navy. And at the last minute, Foreign Minister Wellesley decided it would be too provocative to the regency for the British Navy to transport Miranda back to Venezuela, since everyone in Europe and the Americas knew that Miranda only had one thing on his mind: independence. So while Bolívar departed England on September 22, Miranda was delayed until he could secure passage on a private ship, and he did not depart until October 3. Andrés Bello and Luis López Méndez, meanwhile, stayed behind in London. Bello got working on an intellectual PR campaign, and Méndez ultimately became the great logistical organizer for Bolívar’s patriot armies over the next decade. And he was so important to the cause that Bolívar would later say that it was Méndez who we should all actually be calling the Liberator.

As Bolívar and Miranda set to depart, the fourth and fifth rebellions that I talked about at the beginning of today’s episode rocked Spanish America, and they hit almost simultaneously, even though they occurred on opposite sides of the empire. Down in Santiago, Chile, the local criollos had now learned not just of the fall of the Central Junta but also of the May Revolution over in Buenos Aires. Inspired by the example of the Río de la Plata, the locals of Santiago convened an open meeting of their town council on September 18, 1810. They deposed the local governor, who was a no-good, very bad man, and declared themselves autonomous under an independent junta. September 18 is now Chilean Independence Day and would mark the beginning of the Chilean War of Independence. 

Then, way, way up in New Spain, the really big revolt finally broke. On September 16, 1810, the radical Father Hidalgo issued his famous Cry of Dolores that kicked off the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence, a tumultuous conflict that would engulf Mexico all the way until 1821, and which I said in the first episode of this series, we are not going to get into. But just know that New Spain right now is also exploding into a revolutionary mess.

What I do want to talk about, though, is another key event that took place in September 1810: the convening in Cádiz of the Cortes. As I mentioned in passing two episodes back, since the beginning of the Peninsular War, the British have been pressing the patriot Spaniards to convene a real representative body that would enjoy greater political legitimacy than the self-declared juntas or now the self-declared regency, which, as you can see, the Americans are rejecting. So, just before fleeing Seville in January 1810, the Central Junta agreed to put out a call to convene a General Cortes. Now, you probably don’t remember this, but back in Episode 5.1, we briefly discussed the Cortes, which operated a bit like the French Estates-General. It was an old medieval council comprising the nobility, the clergy, and the commons. And what was on the table now was creating a pan-imperial Cortes that would resemble kind of the early days of the National Assembly, with representatives drawn from all the various Spanish administrative provinces and all the American provinces dumping into one congressional body. The call to join this Cortes would then supersede the call to join the Central Junta, which was fine because, like I said, none of the American representatives, save for one, ever made it to the Central Junta before it collapsed anyway. 

So the situation in Iberia during 1810 was grim, but there was enough stability that the regency could now move forward with the plan to call the Cortes. Now, over the summer, the French had launched the third invasion of Portugal, but by then, Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, had constructed major defensive lines around Lisbon, then halted the French advance and ultimately forced them into retreat, which would then lead to a general stalemate in 1811 that would give way to an allied offensive in 1812. 

But in the summer of 1810, most of Spain was still occupied by the French, and Cádiz wound up being really the last city standing. So patriotic refugees streamed into the port from all over occupied Spain. Cádiz was now a bulging mass of people from all over the empire since it already included a community of Americans and residents, and it was from this available population that the first batch of delegates to the Cortes were drawn. On September 24, 1810, the first assembly of the Cortes convened. And in that first assembly, there were 104 delegates, 30 of them American-born. One of them was actually Bolívar’s uncle Esteban, the one who he had lived with as a teenager during his first stay in Madrid, the guy who had eventually gotten himself tossed in jail.

Now, the first thing the Cortes did was declare itself to be the seat of Spanish sovereignty and the sole generator of Spanish law, which did not sit well with the existing five-man regency. But in the ensuing little power struggle, the Cortes emerged victorious. And one by one, each of the five regents was forced out of office. The old regency was then replaced with a new three-man body that would be there to execute the laws passed by the Cortes.

So the first thing the American delegates tried to do was establish the principle of equal representation. The original decree sent out by the Central Junta had several clauses that we don’t need to get into, but the big one is that Spaniards would be represented at a rate of one delegate per 50,000 people, while Americans would be represented at a rate of one delegate per 100,000 people. And not just people, but a rate of one per 100,000 whites, which, I mean, at this point, the vast majority of the American population is Indian or black, mestizo, pardo, or some further combination thereof. So on day two of the Cortes, the American delegates presented a proposal to make their delegation equal at a rate of one per 50,000 free subjects of the king. And here lay the fate of the future of the Spanish Empire, because at the time it was believed that Spain had a population of about 10.5 million, while the Americas had a population of 15 to 16 million. Now, historians have decided that the latter numbers were probably inflated, but the implication here was obvious. Equal representation for the Americans meant an American-dominated Cortes, full stop!, which even for enlightened peninsular liberals, this was an intolerable shift in the balance of power. Plus, the Spaniards had one very strong rejoinder. The raw population in the Americas may be 15 to 16 million, but everyone knew that the criollo elite would be the ones deciding who represented the Americas. So in effect, “equal representation” would give a tiny minority of American whites, who numbered maybe two to three million, a controlling majority of the seats in the Cortes. 

Now, this being a not unreasonable counterpoint, the two sides worked out a compromise that would have major implications for the future and represent a sea change in thinking about what constituted a citizen inside the Spanish Empire. After much wrangling, the two sides agreed on October 15 to a new formulation. Free subjects who could trace both sides of their ancestry back to Spanish domains would be considered for the purposes of representation. Those domains being Europe or America, which very, very obviously left out anyone from Africa. So, on the one hand, this is a pretty remarkable extension of political and civil rights, not just to mestizo but also to full-blooded Indians, all of whom were now legally equal to the purest, pure white peninsular. But this was accomplished specifically by eliminating blacks and mixed-race pardos from the equation. 

Now, for the guys sitting in the Cortes, this all looked pretty good. The Americans would get more delegates, but by not counting anyone with African blood, the peninsulares still held a majority of the seats. But this new formulation turned out to be kind of disastrous because, for example, in Venezuela, the Indian and mestizo population wasn’t especially big, while the population of those with African blood was. And as we were about to see, those guys at this very moment are actually the strongest supporters of the regency in Venezuela against republican centralists like Bolívar. And guess how loyal they will stay when word comes across the Atlantic that they have just been excluded from the imperial government. 

Before we head back to Venezuela for the arrival of Bolívar and Miranda, I’ll mention one other thing that would also help sync the legitimacy of the Cortes in the Americas. On December 11, the American delegates presented eleven propositions representing the core components of what they wanted out of the new order. Number one was recognition of the October 15 decree on equal representation. But the rest came down to various angles of free trade: no monopolies, unrestricted imports and exports, elimination of various taxes, equal access to government posts, and the civil service. Number eleven, though, returned to a long-held American grievance, demanding the return of the Jesuits. 

Now, the problem with this list of free trade proposals, and indeed one of the fatal problems with the Cortes in general, was that the patriotic government was physically housed in Cádiz, and since 1717, Cádiz had been the monopoly port of entry and exit for all American trade. And even after the free trade decree of 1776, Cádiz still accounted for something like 90% of the American trade. The Cádiz merchant houses were still incredibly powerful, and they now had the government planted right in their front yard. And the really big stick the Cádiz merchants now held over the Cortes was that the patriotic war effort relied exclusively on taxes and revenues from the Americas for funding. And all those taxes and revenues were handled by the Cádiz merchants. It was kind of like they were a wholly independent Treasury Department. And so when the Americans presented the Cortes with a list of free trade demands, the Cádiz merchants were right there to tell the peninsular delegates, “Look, you do what you want. All we’re saying is there might be problems releasing the revenue you need to go fight the French if you try to undermine our monopolies in the Americas.” And you can imagine who won those battles. And so, even as the Cortes hoped that their new government would coax the rebellious Americans back into line, their idealistic liberal fantasies never much materialized in reality. And the reality wound up being way more important to the Americans than the fantasy.

So, coming back now to Venezuela, Simón Bolívar arrived back in Caracas on December 5, just a few days before the American delegates presented the eleven propositions. He looked around, took stock of what had happened in the six months that he had been absent, and did not like what he saw. The Caracas Junta had taken a decidedly conservative turn and were now even more monarchist than when he had left. Meanwhile, efforts to bring the other Venezuelan cities under the leadership of the Caracas junta had mostly failed in the face of federalist resistance. The other principal cities in the province, like Maracaibo and Valencia and Coro, had gone ahead and formed their own juntas. But they refused to say, “Oh yeah, we’ll let the guys in Caracas call all the shots. I mean, why should they get to run themselves but not us?” So Bolívar is a republican centralist who found himself surrounded by either monarchists on the one hand, federalists on the other, or horror of horrors, a combination of the two. 

And this is all to say nothing of the large black and pardo population I just talked about who are filling the streets of Caracas. They were convinced that any separation from Spain would leave them at the mercy of now unchecked criollo race prejudice, and things for them would get worse than ever. Remember, in the latter days of the Bourbon Reforms, the peninsular officials coming in were enforcing rollbacks to the racial caste system, rollbacks that had been opposed by the criollos, who now controlled the juntas, who were saying, “We don’t take orders from peninsular officials anymore.”

The Caracas Junta, though, had done a number of things Bolívar approved of. They wasted no time, for example, enacting the now standard-issue big white reform package. They abolished all export duties, ended the much-hated sales tax, they declared free and open trade with every other nation, and committed themselves to home rule, though under the sovereignty of King Ferdinand. They also replaced the peninsular-dominated audiencia, most of whose members had already fled anyway, with the criollo-dominated high court. They also called for the convening of a province-wide congress that would meet in Caracas, using a version of the old active-passive citizen distinction we talked about during the French Revolution. So property owners would be allowed to vote and be represented. The landless poor would not.

But they did go a little bit further than we’ve seen so far, except for the little La Paz revolution of 1809. The Caracas Junta voted to end what little Indian forced labor still existed in Venezuela, and then they abolished the special Indian tribute that the Indians had been forced to pay all these years. They also voted to outlaw the slave trade. Now, they are not outlawing slavery, just the trade. And I’ve not seen this argued anywhere, but I personally wonder how much of this was to bring Venezuelan trade policy in line with the British slave trade act of 1807 because the British were bound to be one of their principal trading partners for the foreseeable future, and they had already abolished the slave trade. But that is 100% speculation on my part.

Miranda arrived just a few days after Bolívar. He showed up on December 10, and he would immediately discover that the young firebrand had maybe possibly oversold the situation in Venezuela. Bolívar did manage to hustle together a crowd to go greet Miranda at the docks when he arrived. And in anticipation for what he thought was going to be a momentous occasion, Miranda emerged from the ship wearing nothing less than his old French revolutionary general’s uniform. But it soon became clear how manufactured the greeting really was. Only one member of the Caracas Junta attended the welcome ceremony, and he was only there to deliver a curt greeting to the old exile before departing. Not only was the membership of the junta now trending monarchist and conservative, most of those guys were also in their mid to late 30s. They had literally not been born yet when Miranda last actually lived amongst them. Remember, he hasn’t lived in Venezuela since 1771. So to them, he was the embarrassment of the Leander Expedition, a troublemaker exile working for the British, not somebody to be embraced. And there’s even some historical debate about whether the junta had told Bolívar not to make contact with Miranda while in London. Like that was even possible. Mostly, though, they didn’t trust him and they really didn’t want him around. 

So Miranda took up lodgings with Bolívar until he could secure a place of his own to live. And while the junta didn’t quite know what to do with him and didn’t really want him, he did have a few friends and pen pals from his years in exile, and as we just discussed, probably a few fellow Masons around. So the junta commissioned him Lieutenant General in the militia with commensurate pay and privileges. But this was more of a snub than anything else, because clearly Miranda has been led to believe, or he led himself to believe, that he would be made, like, Supreme Commander in Chief of the Venezuelan Patriot Army. I mean, there was literally no one in Venezuela with a longer and more distinguished war record than him. 

With elections to the coming Congress underway and the junta trying to keep more radical republicans at arm’s length, Miranda and Bolívar then set out to wage something no one in Caracas had ever seen before: a real, actual political campaign. Miranda was by now well-versed in British-style electioneering, and since no one else had a clue about it, he and Bolívar and their allies pretty much had the floor to themselves. The first thing they did, and I really do love this, and it’s why it’s the title of the episode, they identified a sleepy little trade organization called the Patriotic Society for the Development of Agriculture and Livestock. Presumably, it was a group of ranchers lobbying to make sure the junta included their interests and all the economic reforms they were passing. Well, Bolívar, Miranda, and a small cadre of allies walked into the Patriotic Society one day, signed themselves up as members, and then just took it over, turning it into a party machine for the advancement of their more radical agenda. Because remember, kids, sometimes it’s easier to go take over an existing organization than trying to start a whole new one from scratch. 

From their base in the Patriotic Society, they then took over a newspaper and started pumping out editorials and pamphlets and sending Miranda around to give speeches. Now, Miranda is incredibly charming and charismatic, of course, but more importantly, he could speak eloquently to the mostly mixed-race crowds about the humiliation his own family had endured at the hands of the arrogant criollo, just because the Mirandas came from the Canary Islands. Miranda then managed to secure himself a place in the new Congress as a delegate from the town of El Pao. And then came the really big coup. The Patriotic Society secured control of the Caracas Gazette, the paper of record in the capital city, which they then used to pump out more pro-independence editorials, which now had something resembling an official seal of approval. The more conservative criollos just couldn’t keep up with this organized rallying of public opinion that they had, frankly, never encountered before.

On March 2, 1811, the Congress finally met, 31 members from seven outlying provinces. But not nearly all of Venezuela was represented, because the problem of federalism would continue to plague them. The Congress proceeded to try to create the foundations for an autonomous government and the permanent implementation of their slate of big white reforms. But at the end of June 1811, a scandal rocked the Congress, and suddenly the great issue Miranda and Bolívar had been working towards and rallying public opinion towards was at hand. It turned out that one of the Congressmen was a plant whose loyalties actually lay with the regency back in Spain. At the end of June, he bundled up confidential war department assessments of Venezuela’s defenses and skipped town. So on July 1, one of the Congressmen rose and said, “We need to decide this issue of political sovereignty once and for all. Are we going to live under the thumbs of the peninsulares forever, or aren’t we?” The Patriotic Society then sprang into action, creating a healthy buzz in the Caracas streets in favor of declaring total independence. And on the night of July 4, the auspicious date not lost on those who knew their recent history of the United States, Bolívar led a great revelry of speechmaking inside the Patriotic Society in favor of independence. 

Then, on July 5, 1811, the Congress met, and they listened as Miranda read war dispatches from Spain. The war was now starting to go in favor of the Spanish and the British. And in the heat of this particular moment, this struck a note of fear in their hearts rather than joy. Because once the French had been expelled and Spain reconsolidated, it was inevitable that the old regime would try to come back and undo everything that they had now done over the past year. Whether you are a monarchist or a republican, it was obvious that maintaining home rule meant acting now before it was too late. With only one dissenting vote, the Congress voted to declare independence, and the first Republic of Venezuela was born. 

Next time, we will cover the first year of the first Republic of Venezuela in all of its ignoble glory. And I do say next time because I’ll be taking next week off, mostly to focus on writing The Storm Before The Storm. But when we return in two weeks, we will watch things go really not great for the patriotic cause. Because the Declaration of Independence may have seemed like the final culmination of something, but it turned out to be little more than a false start.

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