Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

So last time, we ran through the first two waves of rebellion that hit Spanish America in the years after the Seven Years War, before wandering off into the endlessly fascinating life and times of Francisco de Miranda. Now, we left Miranda in Paris, getting ready to head back up to London to reignite his dream of Spanish American independence. But we are going to leave him there for the moment while we hop back in time a little bit. Specifically, we’re hopping back to the summer of 1783, just after Miranda had deserted from the Spanish Army. 

As I mentioned, it is very likely that as the then 33-year-old Miranda sailed from Cuba to the United States, that he was already dreaming of going down in history as the man who liberated Spanish South America. Well, we know that Miranda does not go down as ‘The Liberator’. He is just the precursor. But as historical coincidence would have it, as Miranda departed for his life as a wandering revolutionary, the man who would become ‘The Liberator’ was on the verge of being born back in Miranda’s hometown of Caracas. And it is time to call that man to the center of the stage. 

Simón Bolívar was born on July 24, 1783, into one of Caracas’s most elite criollo families. As I mentioned two episodes back, the original patriarch of the family, Simón de Bolívar, emigrated down to Caracas in 1589, beginning a run of seven generations of the Bolívars occupying the very upper rungs of Caracas society. They owned multiple haciendas all around Venezuela that produce sugar and indigo and tropical fruits. They owned cattle ranches out in the grasslands, copper mines up in the hills. They owned a rum distillery and a textile business, and multiple townhouses in the heart of Caracas itself. And, of course, to do all the work, they owned hundreds of slaves. And generation in, and generation out, Bolívars served as senior officers in the militia and trusted civilian officials who helped administer the province of Venezuela.

And the lineage and status of Bolivar’s mother was no less august. The roots of her family sank even deeper into Venezuela than the Bolívars. She could trace her roots all the way back to a minor German noble who had emigrated to Venezuela way back in the 1530s, when the Welser banking house still ran things. So Bolívar and his siblings, two sisters and a brother, were born into the innerist inner circle of the criollo aristocracy of Venezuela, and they were the princes and princesses of Caracas. 

But they were also born into an aristocracy that was entering a bit of an identity crisis. Caracas itself had not been hit with any overt insurrections yet, but that did not mean the local criollos were not chafing under increased imperial oversight and taxation. An intendant had shown up in 1776 and then a captain general in 1777, and both of these imperial offices brought with them a host of peninsulare agents, and administrators, and bureaucrats, who now seem to be sticking their noses into everything, and generally treating the criollo elite as if they were children rather than men worthy of honor and respect. 

Years later, Miranda would produce a letter that he allegedly received in 1782, that is, just before he departed for exile, that had been signed by Bolívar’s father and two others complaining about the tyranny of these imperial agents and asking advice on what they could do about it – Miranda’s reputation as a dissident officer having filtered back down to Caracas. 

Now, the authenticity of this letter is disputed, and it is entirely likely that it was forged by Miranda years later, which would not have been out of character, but it also wouldn’t have been out of character for the native elite of Caracas to be complaining about the intrusive Spanish authorities. 

Simón’s parents did not have much influence on him growing up. His father died when he was just two, and then his mother died when he was nine, and he was raised principally by a black slave nurse named Hipólita. Bolívar’s father had stipulated in his will that the extensive family estates were to be divided between his four children. And then on top of that, an older cousin, who was a wealthy priest, died in 1785 and unexpectedly left everything to baby Simón on the condition that the child remained loyal to God and the King, which, spoiler alert, that is not going to happen. But the point here is that when Simón’s mother died in 1792, he became an incredibly rich orphan. 

Now, as you might expect from a pampered rich kid who adults rarely said no to, Simón was headstrong, undisciplined, and refused to be told what to do, where to go or how to behave. After the death of his mother, he was placed in the custody of a maternal uncle, but the two clashed immediately. The uncle in question was himself an unsavory moocher who was interested principally in using the Bolívar property he now held in trust for his nephew to his own advantage. Simón repeatedly disappeared into the streets of Caracas with other boys of all social and ethnic classes to just do as he pleased. And then, in June of 1795, 12-year-old Simón got sick of his uncle’s exploitative neglect and ran away to his sister’s house, sparking a legal battle over who would have custody, because controlling Simón meant controlling his fortune until he came of age. 

Now, a settlement finally placed the boy in the custody of a local teacher who then became Simón’s private tutor, the famous, or possibly infamous Simón Rodríguez. Rodríguez was an Enlightenment enthusiast, although his greatest love was reserved for the arch anti-Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Simón was also tutored during this period by a budding young intellectual named Andrés Bello. Bello was only two years older than Simón, but would in time go on to become a cornerstone of Spanish American culture. He was a philosopher, and a poet, and a statesman, and as we will see for ourselves a few episodes hence, an early patriotic revolutionary.

Now, the influence of these two tutors has apparently long been made a central feature of Bolívar biographies, but most modern historians downplay their role, because at this point in his life Simón was basically unteachable and was certainly more interested in blowing off his tutors to go play with his friends than actually listening to a word they said. It would not be until years later that he developed the habit of constant reading that became such a familiar sight in the camps of the patriot armies. 

So as young Bolívar was growing up, the world around him was changing and New Granada in particular was about to become the focal point of a third wave of pre-independence unrest. This one, triggered by the seminal arrival of the French Revolution in 1789. France was suddenly generating and circulating a whole host of dangerous new ideas that the Spanish authorities could not stop from spreading into their American Empire. So right now I want to cover three incidents in particular that would rock New Granada as young Bolívar made the transition from spoiled brat to nauseating adolescent. 

The first is the printing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in Bogotá by one Antonio Nariño, helping launch Nariño into the pantheon of great precursors to Spanish American independence. Nariño had been born back in 1765, so he lands right in between the elder Miranda, who was born in 1750 and the younger Bolívar, who was born in 1783. The Nariños were uppercrust criollo and Antonio carried the family fortunes to even greater heights. He appears to have excelled at practically everything he put his mind to and was one of the richest men in the city. But he was also a child of the Enlightenment and more interested in intellectual pursuits than the simple business of business. Indeed, he seems to have modeled himself on the example of the world famous Ben Franklin: businessman by day, amateur scientist and philosopher by night. 

Nariño amassed a huge collection of books and constructed a large library/laboratory/salon that he then decorated with portraits and busts of famous admirable thinkers, with pride of place going to a bust of Franklin and then the famous line about Franklin posted underneath it that he snatched the lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants. Nariño also hosted a regular intellectual gathering which functioned as a private salon and was one of the few ways that like-minded liberal criollos could share and discuss new ideas in a world where the public sphere was heavily censored. 

Nariño managed to avoid trouble with the authorities, though. In part because he was personal friends with the viceroy of New Granada. But after the French Revolution hit, Nariño got himself into a whole heap of trouble. He followed news of events in France as best he could. And in 1794, he got his hands on something he was really not supposed to have his hands on: the Declaration of the Rights of man. And despite the fact that freedom of the press did not exist in the Spanish world, Nariño had purchased for himself a private printing press. And after getting a hold of the Rights of Man, he made a rather reckless decision. He translated it into Spanish and one Sunday morning ran off 100 copies. He sold one for sure and possibly gave a few more away, before realizing that maybe he should not actually be doing this. He tried to get the copies back, but by then it was too late. They were already beginning to circulate, and they would continue to circulate for years to come. The viceroy was now forced to take action, and he arrested his wayward friend, putting him on trial for printing and distributing censored material.

The Bogotá audienca then sentenced Nariño to ten years exile in Africa, but the ship they put him on sailed first to Spain, where Nariño managed to sneak away and disappear into hiding. He hung around the outskirts of Madrid for a little while, trying to secure a pardon, but when that didn’t come, he kept moving and made his way over to France, where he almost certainly came into contact with the South American émigrés community in Paris that Francisco de Miranda was right in the middle of. And we’re going to deal with them momentarily. But after a brief stay in Paris, Nariño kept moving and eventually wound up in London, where, like most Spanish American expats, he was contacted by and debriefed by the British government. 

But Nariño was not content with life as an exile, and so he decided to return to New Granada under an assumed name. The ultimate objective was, like Miranda’s, Spanish American independence. But after traveling around his country and making discrete observations and contacts, he determined that it was a hopeless project and instead turned himself into the viceroy, whereupon he was dumped in a Cartagena prison, where he sat off and on for the next 13 years, and where he will still be when the winds of Spanish American independence comes sweeping through. 

Now while the imagination of a guy like Nariño was being fired by the example of the American Revolution on the one hand and the French Revolution on the other, there was, as we know, a third major revolution floating around out there that was also firing a few imaginations: the Haitian revolution, which was unfolding practically right next door to New Granada. Just 500 miles north or so as the crow flies. And that brings us to the second incident I want to discuss: the 1795 slave rebellion in Coro, Venezuela. 

Now, the great slave uprising up in Saint Domingue complicated things for liberals in Spanish America, because it represented everything that scared the crap out of the criollo elite. Now, maybe they fancied themselves the next Ben Franklin or George Washington and read approvingly from Montesquieu and Rousseau and Voltaire. But the thought of mass racial revolution sent shivers down their big white spines. At the end of the 18th century, the population of Venezuela was about 800,000, and of those, maybe 4,000 were pure white elite, and that combines the peninsulares and the criollos. Everyone else was some combination of white, black and Indian. And so that tiny white elite was very conscious that they were surrounded by, and could be overwhelmed by the “inferior races” at any moment. 

So after the great slave uprising in Saint Domingue erupted in 1791, the criollo elite of New Granada no doubt heard the tales of white landowners murdered in their beds, a whole colony on fire and mass racial upheaval. And this was all ominous enough, but then their own imperial government seemed ready to betray them. In February 1795, the Council of the Indies had concluded that continuing the rigid racial caste system in their colonies was unsustainable. The vast majority of the population and whatever talent, industry and intelligence it might contain was locked out of full political, economic and social participation. Plus, the Council of the Indies was no doubt getting frequent reports about the mess in Saint Domingue. This all out race war. I mean, they were funding the slave armies and perhaps they were trying to head off just such a race war in their own domains, though I do not know exactly what role that played in their decision making. 

So the Council introduced a new law that, in effect, allowed pardos, that is, mixed race, white and African, to purchase legal whiteness. So if you were a mixed race merchant and had done well for yourself, you could literally go buy a piece of paper that made you legally white. That is, you had access to all offices and privileges and educational opportunities that whites did. And as had happened in Saint Domingue, the home government trying to undo the racial caste system stoked further resentment and complaints among the criollo about the tyranny of the peninsulares who were now trying to enforce this.

And just a few months later, the criollos got hit by an even scarier jolt when the contagion of slave rebellion finally reached Venezuela. Because obviously, a huge chunk of the population wasn’t scared of the revolution in Saint Domingue, they were inspired by it. In particular, a mixed-race merchant named José Leonardo Chirino from the coastal city of Coro had sailed to Saint Domingue and back and seen firsthand that racial revolution was possible, having almost certainly spent his time in the South Province, which at that point was under the control of André Rigaud. 

Now, the area around Coro was one of the principal sugar producing regions of Venezuela, which meant a large concentration of African slaves ready to rebel. So Chirino conspired with another mixed-race partner named José Caridad González to organize their anger and launch a slave rebellion. In early May 1795, they led hundreds of slaves in a mass uprising outside Coro that followed the pattern of the early Saint Domingue uprising. They destroyed sugar plantation infrastructure and killed any whites they could find. But unlike the uprising in Saint Domingue, the Coro rebellion was contained. After three days of unchecked rampaging, the army and militias moved in with overwhelming force. A good 300 men and women were apprehended and summarily executed. 

The slave rebellion in Coro put a lot of elite criollo on notice that playing with revolutionary fire was a good way to burn down their whole world, and so it led them to retreat to more conservative ground. But it put others on notice that if they championed the cause of racial justice, that huge armies might flock to their banner. 

So fast forward two more years to 1797, and along comes the third and final incident. I want to talk about: a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the imperial authorities of Venezuela. 

Now, the root of this third incident also extends back to Europe, where big changes had been wrought by the course of the French revolutionary wars. Because, if you will recall from our episodes on both the French and Haitian revolutions, Spain joined the anti-French coalition in early 1793, but by mid-1795 had gotten trounced. And so, in the summer of 1795, just as the slave rebellion was being suppressed in Coro, the Spanish signed a humiliating treaty with France that made them de facto vassals of the French Republic, complete with an annual indemnity payment and the putting of their military resources at French disposal. 

But peace with France meant war with Britain, and that meant that the British Navy now stood between Spain and her colonies. And this is hugely important. This is going to be a major disruption to the political economies of both sides of the Atlantic, because by 1797, Spanish America was now all but cut off from Spain. Increasingly isolated from the mother country, a group of radical liberals in Caracas got together and started plotting a revolution they hoped would combine the best elements of the American, French and Haitian revolutions. 

And there were three principal ringleaders to this plot. The first was a dissident peninsular named Juan Bautista Picornell, who had been busted trying to get a revolution going in Madrid in early 1795, and for his trouble, had been packed off to prison in far away Venezuela. Upon arrival, though, he simply continued his revolutionary practices and through intermediaries, came into conspiratorial contact with two local radical liberals. And together they further developed the plan, those two being Manuel Gual and José María España. Together, these three plotted a revolution that would topple the existing social and political order. And when they were done, they hoped to declare American self government, unrestricted, free trade, the elimination of all the burdensome imperial taxes, and then follow all that up by establishing the equality of all races and the emancipation of all the slaves. I mean, this is heady stuff. 

But in July 1797, before the project got off the ground, it was uncovered and everyone was forced to scatter into hiding or exile. Now, the conspiracy had by then implicated by either direct association or merely suspected support many liberal minded elites in Caracas. And it was a hugely destabilizing scandal, as young scions of prominent families were revealed to have been a part of the conspiracy. 

Now, that brings all this back around to the now 14-year-old Simón Bolívar, because while he himself played no part in the uncovered conspiracy, this does mark the abrupt departure of his longtime tutor, Simón Rodríguez. Implicated in the plot, Rodríguez was apprehended and only released after promising to vacate Venezuela immediately. He did not even say goodbye. He next turns up in Jamaica under the name Samuel Robinson, marking the beginning of his own life as a revolutionary exile that would soon enough see him reunited with his former pupil back in Europe. 

So those three incidents really helped set up the future dynamic of Spanish American independence, at least in New Granada. The introduction of dangerous French ideas like liberty and equality, especially being filtered through the lens of the slave revolution up in Saint Domingue, deradicalized many elites, making them far more loyal to the Spanish Crown than they might otherwise have been. But simultaneously, it radicalized others who were now fired up by the romance of revolution and wanted to bring the gospel of liberty to their own shores. And when Spanish American independence gets going, it starts to look a lot like a civil war between these two groups. 

So, returning now to young Bolívar, it’s difficult to say exactly where he landed between these two groups. He would later say that as a child, he was fascinated with the great Greek and Roman heroes of old and dreamed of joining their ranks, and that he was also well versed in the American War of Independence and the glorious reputation of George Washington, who had achieved that very feat by becoming nothing less than the American Cincinnatus. But Bolívar was saying all this in retrospect, and at the time, probably he was a typical rich teenager who wasn’t thinking about much of anything beyond himself and his own immediate pleasures. 

So despite the destabilizing winds now swirling through Caracas, Bolívar himself just kind of kept on moving through the standard developmental steps of a criollo aristocrat. He joined an elite militia company and spent a year learning a bit about the military arts, though nothing really serious. Mostly this was a prestige company. It’s not like it was a real battle force. And after a year in militia service, he then prepared to take the next standard step in his aristocratic training: an extended trip back to Spain. So in January 1799, he got on a ship and sailed for Spain to continue his education, or as would be far more accurate, actually begin his education. 

After a long circuitous voyage to avoid British naval patrols, the now 16-year-old Bolívar landed in Spain and made his way to Madrid, where he took up residence with his uncle Esteban, one of his mother’s brothers. Now, the crazy thing here is that Esteban was currently living with a guy named Manuel Mallo, who, at that moment, mid-1799, had managed to become the Queen of Spain’s favorite lover. And that connection allowed young Bolívar to get an up close look at the very heart of the Spanish monarchy and he would be mighty unimpressed with what he saw. 

So the enlightened King Charles III, he of all the reforms that we discussed, had died in 1788, just before all hell broke loose over in France, and he was succeeded by his son, King Charles IV. Now, Charles IV was not a bad guy, but he was also not the guy you wanted ascending to the throne just as the tidal wave that is the French Revolution is about to come roaring over the Pyrenees. He spent most of his time hunting and tinkering around in a workshop and mostly left the boring business of state to someone else. That someone else turned out to be his wife, Queen Maria Luisa. Now, unfortunately, Maria Luisa was not some brilliant leader or enlightened ruler and she was, in fact, all too willing to let her favorite courtiers run the show. And her favorite courtiers were also generally her favorite lovers. And her favorite, favorite lover was the infamous Manuel Godoy. 

Godoy had come into her line of sight as just a good looking member of the royal bodyguard. But after taking up with the Queen, Godoy was promoted and promoted again to positions well beyond his experience, rank or intelligence, culminating with his elevation to Prime Minister in 1792, right on the eve of war with revolutionary France. He then “led” Spain through the war, right to total defeat, bankruptcy, and a humiliating treaty that left the kingdom severed from her colonies, whose gold and silver were really the only thing keeping the monarchy afloat. 

So this was the state of the Spanish monarchy that young Bolívar witnessed firsthand when he accompanied his uncle to court, and it taught him a valuable lesson. The peninsulares were no better or wiser or richer even than his criollo brethren back in the Americas. They instead appeared to be a bunch of dumb, out of touch, petty, shortsighted buffoons, more interested in court gossip than the health, wellbeing and safety of their vast empire. And it’s safe to say that from this first visit to Spain, Simón Bolívar had nothing but contempt for native Spaniards. 

And this was all possibly reinforced even further because the one guy he met in Madrid who seemed at all decent was himself a native of the Americas. And this is the Marqués de Uztáriz. Uztáriz was criollo. He’d been born and raised in Caracas and then come over to Spain. And through talent and skillful politicking had risen up into the very upper reaches of the Spanish monarchy. He was currently one of the most respected members of the Supreme Council of War. He knew the Bolívar family well and agreed to guide the further education of Simón, and the teenager moved into his house. 

Now, what Marqués soon discovered, though, was that Bolívar’s previous education was a bad joke. I mean, the kids seriously could barely write a comprehensible sentence. So the Marqués pushed Simón into a super active and well supervised reeducation program. Bolívar himself appears to have genuinely liked and respected this intelligent and worldly Marqués, and instead of resisting the attempt to mold him, he embraced it. And this really is where Simón Bolívar is born, because he discovered that he actually enjoyed learning new things and contemplating interesting thoughts, and he started to actually apply himself to his studies. Given free reign to the Marqués’ library, he read voraciously. And from this point on, for the rest of his life, it was rare to find Bolívar without a book close at hand. 

In early 1800, a shift in the Queen’s eye left Manuel Mallo out of favor and Bolívar’s uncle Esteban in prison, which likely turned Bolívar even harder against the fickle and petty royalty that was somehow running this great empire. But Bolívar brushed all this aside because it was right around the same time that he fell in love. And the love of his life was María Teresa del Toro. 

Two years his elder, María Teresa’s family was native to Venezuela, but now lived in Spain, so she was herself a kind of reverse criollo. She was born in Spain to American parents, rather than being born in America to Spanish parents. Bolívar met her and fell for her hard. But her father was a little wary of this allegedly love struck 17-year-old and moved his daughter out of Madrid, possibly to test Bolívar’s sincerity. But he was totally sincere, and all he wanted to do now was marry María and return to Caracas to settle down to a life as a gentleman farmer. At this point, he really had no thought of becoming a revolutionary or joining the great cause that Francisco de Miranda was continuing to pursue from his base in London. And so before we head back to Venezuela with the newlyweds, we need to catch up with Miranda. 

Now, it’s hard to say when Miranda personally learned of events back home (the slave rebellion in Coro in 1795 and the busted conspiracy in Caracas in 1797), but he was now at the center of a little expat community of South Americans in France, and as men passed back and forth between the Americas and Europe, he was likely well briefed on events back home. Now, for sure, he and Antonio Nariño met and interacted – meetings that would have taken place not long after Miranda had been released from jail back in 1795. But while Nariño moved on to London quickly, Miranda stayed in France despite the fact that he was under constant surveillance. Finally, though, the Coup of Floréal came along. That was the one that expelled the Conservatives and created the so-called Second Directory. Miranda’s name wound up on a list of suspicious foreigners to be deported. So in one of those you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit moments, Miranda decided to abandon revolutionary Paris for London. 

But before he left, he got together with two other exiled South Americans: a Peruvian named José Godoy del Paz and a Chilean named Manuel José de Salas to draft a document that would make the objective of a free and independent Spanish America explicit. In December 1797, these three guys sat down and signed the so-called Paris Convention. In this document, they claimed for themselves the titles of official agents of Spanish America and then stated their goals, which was to secure the liberation of their homeland from Spain with the assistance of Great Britain and the United States. In exchange, those countries would receive favorable trade deals and straight up cash bonuses once independence had been won. The Paris Convention also stipulated that any military expedition to achieve this end would be headed by General Miranda in light of his unparalleled military experience. With this self proclaimed mandate in hand, Miranda then sailed back to London to once again lobby the British government to back the project. 

Now, as had happened the last time he dealt with Prime Minister William Pitt, talk started out very agreeably, but after a flurry of discussion, Pitt’s attention turned back to more pressing matters in the war with France. We’re right around Episode 3.47, when the French have been making moves that look an awful lot like an invasion of Britain is imminent, though we know that Bonaparte had already convinced the Directory to let him launch the Egyptian Expedition. So, frustrated, Miranda went to work on his old friends in the United States. He sent copies of the Paris Convention to Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox, with Hamilton in particular, expressing enthusiasm for the idea and saying, “Yeah, we should do this, but it would be even better if it was a purely American project, just cut the British out of it.” And it was during these intra-American discussions that Miranda struck up a rapport with the American ambassador to the Court of St. James, Rufus King, which resulted in King lending Miranda a box of papers that had recently come into the possession of the American Embassy. And this box turned out to be quite a treasure trove, seeing as how it was the collected papers of the now late Jesuit exile Juan Pablo Viscardo. 

Now, as I mentioned very briefly at the end of Episode 5.2, Viscardo was a Peruvian Jesuit who had been exiled from Spanish America in 1767. Since then, he had been splitting his time between Italy and Great Britain, and he finally wound up in London in the late 1790s and had then died just a few weeks after Miranda’s arrival in the country. He died in February 1798. 

Now, at some point in all this, Viscardo had begun work on what has become known as “The Letter to the Spanish Americans”, which Thomas Jefferson would later refer to as the Spanish American Declaration of Independence, and which Miranda was now pulling out of this box of papers. 

Now, the Letter to the Spanish Americans was not some quick run of bullet points. It runs 90 pages, and if it was, I would have recorded it as a companion supplemental. Viscardo knew his stuff. He was very well educated, and he began by laying out 300 years of history in the Americas, which he said proved that not only did the Spanish Americans deserve independence, but they had already won it. That the early conquistadors had come with drive and determination, and through their labor and valor had built a new world that was theirs. This is actually like bringing in John Locke’s theory of property. Meanwhile, all the Spanish had done was leech onto this New World and tried to suck it dry. He actually refers to them as “blood suckers employed by the government”. He said that America owed Spain nothing, relied on Spain for nothing, and that all the strong Americans had to do was cut the feeble bond of lingering sentimental attachment to weak Spain, because that was really the only tie that bound them together. I mean, losing America would be disastrous for Spain, sure, but America losing Spain would only cut some dead weight and allow them to rise to ever greater heights. 

Viscardo also made the point that the majority mixed race population of the Americas was not some inferior breed, as the peninsulares supposed, but they were instead stronger and better. The race of the future, rather than the race of the past. And this helped us stamp racial equality as one of the core ideological components of Spanish American independence. 

Viscardo then said that the sum total of Spanish rule in the Americas could be reduced to just four words: ingratitude, injustice, slavery, and desolation. 

Francisco de Miranda read all this and realized that he was holding the manifesto of his dreams in his hands. He set about translating and publishing it and just sending it around the world, and it is now considered to be one of the founding texts of Spanish American independence. 

So Miranda would remain in London for the next few years, continuing to make his plans, meet with exiled dissidents and possible allies from Spanish America, and then just generally set himself up as the center of gravity for any revolutionary Spanish Americans who might come around. But because Simón Bolívar was not yet a revolutionary South American, he had no thoughts of ever making a pilgrimage up to London to meet Miranda. And right now, all he wants to do is get married and go home. 

So we’ll wrap things up today by bringing Bolívar to the great turning point in his life.

Bolívar and María Teresa del Toro were married in Spain in May 1802, and shortly thereafter sailed back to Venezuela. They took up residence in one of Bolívar’s haciendas and settled into what they thought was going to be a long and happy life as landed gentry. But rather than settling into a long and happy life as landed gentry, tragedy struck immediately. As is so often the case with new European arrivals to the Caribbean, young María contracted yellow fever and she was dead just five months after their arrival. By his own admission, Bolívar was mad with grief and he swore that he would never remarry, which was a promise that he kept for the rest of his life. He never does again remarry. After lingering in Caracas for a few months, utterly despondent and unable to function, he resolved to return to Europe and just try to go anywhere and do anything to get over it. And he later said,

“Had I not become a widower, my life would have been very different. I would never have become General Bolívar nor The Liberator. When I was with my wife, my head was filled only with the most ardent love, not with political ideas. Those thoughts hadn’t yet captured my imagination. The death of my wife placed me early on the road of politics and caused me to follow the Chariot of Mars.”

Still only 20 years old, Simón Bolívar made plans to return to Europe in 1803, and there he would begin grasping after the reins of the Chariot of Mars. 

Next week, we will follow Bolívar as he treks through Spain, France and Italy, recovering from his grief and discovering a new purpose in life, a purpose that he would explicitly swear to on the sacred mount outside Rome, the very hill which the plebs of Rome had once famously seceded to as they fought to secure political and social rights from the arrogant patricians. That was Episode 5 of The History of Rome, which, no kidding, I just looked up which episode I talked about it in by breaking out my copy of The History of Rome, Volume One, The Republic, which is now on sale. It turns out it’s a very handy reference guide. But on that same spot, 2300 years later, Bolívar swore that he would liberate his country or die trying.

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