Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

We have strayed a bit from Bolívar in the past few episodes, abandoning him after the victory at Carabobo so we could go down and snag José de San Martín and bring him up to Lima. So when last we left our intrepid Liberator, it was October of 1821, and he had just accepted the presidency of the new Republic of Colombia. But if you will recall, though he didn’t really want the job, and he left day-to-day administration of Colombia to Vice President Santander, who really did want the job.

As much as Bolívar avoided civilian politics to keep his focus on military affairs, Santander embraced civilian politics and was happy to never have to fire a shot in anger ever again. The Liberator and the man of laws were, in that respect, the perfect team: Bolívar running the army, Santander running the government. But their diverging responsibilities would soon lead to friction between the two men. Bolívar would grow impatient with Santander’s obsession with legal formalities, while Santander would get exasperated with Bolívar’s imperious demands.

As soon as the two men formally took up their offices in October 1821, this friction began to reveal itself. Bolívar ordered Santander to dig up 5,000 men and appropriate arms and supplies and have them ready to march south out of Bogotá as soon as possible. Now, Santander did his best to accommodate the liberator, but this was the beginning of a long-running feud between them, with Bolívar constantly demanding more Colombian men, more Colombian arms, and more Colombian money, even as he himself marched further and further away from Colombia. But for the moment, Bolívar’s objective was still to make Colombia whole, to go evict the last remaining royalists from Colombian-claimed territory in some heroic battle, finding that “Third Sister” to join Boyacá and Carabobo to mark the liberation of Quito. So Santander supplied Bolívar with an army.

So, to set the stage here, remember from our last few episodes that after Lord Cochrane’s naval victory secured the high seas for the patriots in 1820, the critical port city of Guayaquil declared independence at the end of the year. As soon as he heard the news, Bolívar dispatched 1,000 Colombian troops under Brigadier General Sucre to ensure that Guayaquil remained free from Spanish rule, but more importantly, that it was eventually integrated into Gran Colombia. So, as Bolívar gathered his troops in Bogotá at the end of 1821 to march off and liberate Quito, his plan was to lead his army to the coast, ferry them all down to Guayaquil by sea, link up with Sucre, and then together they would all push up into the mountains together to capture Quito. And by early December, Bolívar had gathered about 4,000 men — not the 5,000 he had asked for, but it was deemed good enough — and on December 13, 1821, Bolívar marched out of Bogotá. 

But his grand plan was thwarted by some bad intelligence. A report came up from the coast that Spanish ships were landing more troops and controlled the entire coastline. But this was not true at all. Somebody just saw a single ship landing a small party of about 800 reinforcements and then wildly exaggerated what was going on. The false intelligence forced Bolívar to alter his plans. Abandoning the sea route, he would now march the rough mountain road southwest all the way to Quito, while sending orders down to Sucre in Guayaquil to come up and hit them from the other side. The only problem, though, was that royalist forces had pretty well bottled Sucre up in Guayaquil, and he couldn’t get out. And given the communication lag time between the two forces, neither Sucre nor Bolívar really knew what the other was doing. And it was more by luck than anything else that they managed the two-front offensive on Quito. 

The change in plans meant yet another feat of patriotic endurance, as the long march through the mountainous roads to Quito took months and took its toll. It cost Bolívar men to death, injury, and desertion practically every day. But after slogging unhappily along for a few weeks, Bolívar finally got some good news. Approaching Popayán, the first major royalist-held city on the road to Quito, Bolívar was delighted to be presented with a note from the commander of the city’s garrison. Not only was he ready to surrender, but he was willing to defect. So this was great news. Not only did Bolívar not have to fight to secure Popayán, but he got a whole bunch more troops to boot.

Suspecting that this was evidence of collapsing royalist morale, and that this collapse of morale might be exploitable, Bolívar hatched what he thought was a pretty clever plan. As he marched towards Pasto, the next major city on the road to Quito, he wrote back to Vice President Santander, requesting that he compose fake news articles reporting that the Spanish were giving up hope on holding South America, and then plant them in Bogotá newspapers. Bolívar also requested fake official communiqués that would show the Spanish requesting safe passage for negotiators, and warm letters of greeting from both Vice President Santander and General Páez back in Venezuela. Now, given the recent liberal revolution back in Spain, the idea that the Spanish might have dispatched envoys to negotiate surrender was not at all implausible. And so, when Bolívar reached the gates of Pasto, he had this stack of evidence supporting this fake story. 

But unfortunately, he found the royalists in Pasto far more hostile to the republic and not buying this propaganda for a second. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but they were not going to believe it until they heard it straight from the lion’s mouth. So his ruse failed, Bolívar tried to keep marching rather than get bogged down besieging Pasto, but as he moved, 1,200 royalists from the Pasto garrison marched out to block his path. In rough volcanic country, riddled with steep cliffs, the two armies ran into each other at Bomboná in late April, where the royalists successfully took strategic high ground and waited for Bolívar to try to march through. Giving himself back to his old instincts, Bolívar decided that he could take the outnumbered royalists on Easter Sunday, 1822, and he ordered his men on a full frontal assault up the steep cliffs to try to capture the high ground the royalists held. The results were predictably gruesome, as Bolívar’s forces took heavy casualties. But one intrepid patriot officer led a unit on a daring climb up a sheer cliff face to get the drop on the royalists. But even with this success, the fighting went on until night fell, and under the cover of both darkness and fog, the Pasto royalists elected to withdraw from their position rather than keep fighting. So technically, the Battle of Bomboná was a victory for Bolívar, but it was a pyrrhic one, to be sure, costing him 600 dead and wounded, to say nothing of the desertions that followed in the immediate aftermath. 

So, despite claiming it as a victory, the Battle of Bomboná was obviously not the third sister Bolívar was hunting for. And in fact, much to his later chagrin, it would turn out that he would not be the one to find that elusive third sister. And in fact, in the story of the liberation of Quito, the role of the Liberator was to act as mere distraction — a distraction that allowed Antonio José Sucre to break out of Guayaquil and attack Quito from the other direction. And since it would be Sucre and not Bolívar who would find the third sister on the slopes of the Pichincha volcano, let’s now finally bring Sucre onto the board. 

Antonio José de Sucre was born in the eastern Venezuelan city of Cumaná in 1795. Descended from old Flemish nobility that had come over to Spanish America a century earlier, Sucre’s grandfather had served as governor of both Cuba and Caracas, and Sucre’s father was the governor of Cumaná province at the time of his birth. So though little Antonio was not Caracas aristocracy, he was born and raised in Cumaná, and he was still the son of the elite criollo ruling class.

As would have been standard for a boy of his position, he was enrolled in a military cadet academy as a young teenager, but this was right as the world was being turned upside down. I mean, Sucre was only twelve when the abdication of Bayonne hit. So young Sucre remained enrolled in the army through the next few turbulent years, as the Caracas junta took over in 1810 and then as Venezuela declared independence in 1811. Stationed in the east as a junior officer, though, Sucre does not appear to have seen much military service during the campaigns that had been led by Francisco de Miranda. And after the fall of the First Republic in 1812, Sucre appears to have just been amnestied by the victorious Monteverde.

Now, from here, I lose track of him a little bit because, though we know that Sucre got papers that would allow him to depart for British Trinidad, it’s not clear that he ever actually left. If he did go to Trinidad, that means he linked up with Santiago Mariño there and probably joined the 45 who came back over into Venezuela to restart the war. But more probably, Sucre stayed in eastern Venezuela and simply joined Mariño’s growing army when it arrived in early 1813. Whichever it was though, he joined Mariño’s army as it liberated the eastern provinces through 1813. This is as Bolívar was coming through on the Admirable Campaign, all of which culminated in the founding of the Second Republic. But after the founding of the Second Republic, Sucre’s life took a tragic turn. As we saw in Episode 5.11, when the Legions of Hell pushed the republicans east, Sucre’s homeland became a bloody war zone, as the War to the Death was still in full swing. No one was spared — not civilian, not soldier. And most of Sucre’s brothers and sisters and extended family were killed through the bloody year of 1814, as the Second Republic collapsed. Sucre himself only survived because he followed General Bermúdez to the relative safety of Margarita Island. But that turned out to only be a temporary safe haven because Pablo Morillo’s Grand Armada came roaring over the horizon in April 1815, and the last Venezuelan republican holdouts on Margarita Island were forced to flee to Cartagena. 

This means that Sucre was present for Pablo Morillo’s subsequent siege of Cartagena, and along with Bermúdez and the wily Scottish General Gregor McGregor, Sucre was among those who staged the final breakout from Cartagena in December 1815, and was among the patriot refugees who then sailed for the Republic of Haiti. 

In Haiti, Sucre reunited with Mariño and was promoted to colonel, becoming Mariño’s Chief of Staff. But this was also the first time Sucre encountered Bolívar, at least in close quarters. And though I do not know what they made of each other at first glance, by now Sucre had developed loyalties to a greater revolutionary cause that extended beyond the scope of caudillo-style local power, pursued by his longtime superior Mariño. They all then sailed to Venezuela together, but as I mentioned in Episode 5.14, when Mariño started ignoring the orders of El Jefe Supremo Bolívar, Sucre was in the party of 30 officers who abandoned Mariño and rode off to join Bolívar, signaling that his attachment to the revolutionary cause was greater than his attachment to any particular man. 

Made commander of the Lower Orinoco River, he was then elevated to General in 1819 by Vice President Zea, who was looking for men more committed to the greater revolutionary cause than any personal attachments. This was when Zea is trying and failing to exert authority over Mariño and Arismendi, and he promoted the supremely capable Sucre to general, even though he was still just 25 years old.

So, Sucre was not present for Bolívar’s march up into the Andes or the Battle of Boyacá, but he did meet Bolívar as the Liberator came rushing back to Angostura to deal with the coup that had been orchestrated by Mariño and Arismendi – this was all in Episode 5.17. Sucre had already earned Bolívar’s affection when he abandoned Mariño, but this is the point where it appears that he really started viewing Sucre as a potential heir apparent. Though young, Sucre showed wisdom beyond his years. His only fault really was a habit of micromanagement — he wanted to write every dispatch and review every supply shipment. But in the ragtag Venezuelan armies that often seemed slapped together with nothing more than bravado, a little micromanagement was not exactly a bad thing. So, Sucre attached himself to Bolívar and earned the Liberator’s trust to the point that Sucre was one of the principal go-betweens during the final negotiations with General Pablo Morillo in 1820. And so, he was there when they all got drunk and dropped the big rock down on the side of the road. And so when news subsequently came in January of 1821 that Guayaquil had revolted, there was no man Bolívar trusted more to head down to the city and defend it both from Spanish reconquest and, more importantly, to preserve it for future annexation into Colombia. There were very few men that Bolívar could trust out of sight, and Sucre proved to be the best of them. And Bolívar would later say that if God let you choose a family, he would have chosen Sucre as his son. 

After finally arriving in Guayaquil in the spring of 1821, Sucre and his thousand troops proved to be a welcome addition to the cause. Mostly. The all-important port city was technically within the boundaries of the Viceroyalty of New Granada and had been for nearly a century, and was thus slated for future integration into Gran Colombia. But before that, they had been a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and Guayaquil’s daily economic and social ties clearly faced south down the coast to Lima. Everyone passing through the harbor at Guayaquil was either going to or coming from Lima, so the population there was split about how they wanted to handle their independence. Most wanted to join themselves to Peru as soon as San Martín liberated it, while a few others did prefer Colombia, possibly suspecting that with their capital located in hard-to-reach Bogotá, rather than right down the coast in Lima, that their local autonomy might actually be enhanced. So, Sucre and his men were welcome. A thousand men is nothing to say no to, but the pro-Peruvian faction kept their eye on the young Colombian general.

Sucre made an initial attempt to start clearing out the road to Quito in the summer of 1821, but he ran into such heavy resistance that he was forced to fall back to the safety of Guayaquil. In fact, in Sucre’s estimation, without massive reinforcements, he was all but trapped in the city, and he wrote dispatches north to Bolívar and south to San Martín to tell both great Generals just that. 

By this point, though, as San Martín had entered Lima and declared Peruvian independence, and after receiving Sucre’s request for reinforcements, he ordered 1,200 men to march north. Now, this was both a show of patriotic solidarity, but it also offered San Martín a chance to start staking his own claims to the region. With these men on the way, Sucre then marched out of Guayaquil again in January of 1822, taking a circuitous route to Quito. Rather than heading northeast straight at the capital, he instead headed due south, marching along the coast before turning and swinging up to the highland town of Saraguro. There he linked up with the 1,200 Peruvian reinforcements led by the highly capable young Colonel Andrés de Santa Cruz.

Now, Santa Cruz is a minor player in our story, but just so you know, he goes on to be President of liberated Bolivia from 1829 to 1839, in the middle of which he also became the Supreme Protector of the Peru-Bolivian Confederation from 1836 to 1839. That was during the War of the Confederation that was fought against Chile and Argentina. Because, FYI, it’s not like Spanish American independence is going to magically solve all the factional struggles in South America. 

Anyway, Sucre and Santa Cruz prepared to march their combined army, now of about 3,000 men, through the mountains up to Quito from the deep south rather than coming up at them from the coast. As winter gave way to spring, Sucre and his army slowly advanced on Quito, forcing the all but nominal garrisons he encountered along the way to fall back at the first sight of this patriot army. And none of these garrisons could be reinforced because at the same time, Bolívar’s army was marching down from Colombia and was predictably soaking up a lot of royalist attention. 

By late April 1822, Sucre had captured Riobamba and was making his final approach on Quito. The royalist leadership in the capital finally realized that Sucre posed a very real threat, and they heavily fortified the main roads leading into town. These fortifications were strong enough that Sucre determined a direct attack on the city would be suicidal. So rather than take the main roads, Sucre led his men up around through the treacherous volcanic peaks around the city to flank Quito’s defenses. It wasn’t until mid-May that the royalists realized Sucre was marching around them through the mountains. They tried to regroup, but with one final push up and over all 10,000 icy feet of the great volcano at Pichincha, Sucre’s army came pouring down out of the mountains on the morning of May 25, 1822. 

Sucre’s army was met by a royalist defense force about 2,000 strong, and the two sides were instantly locked in an intense battle where neither side seemed to be able to get the upper hand. And they were both quite literally trying to get the upper hand, using the steep terrain to constantly take higher ground than the enemy currently held. Eventually, after hours of fighting, though, the royalist lines collapsed back towards Quito, just ahead of a formal order from their commanders to retreat. The patriot forces pursued these retreating royalists all the way to the gates of the city, but Sucre ordered his men not to enter the city. He didn’t want them charging in and plundering everything in sight because they were here to liberate Quito, not sack it. 

The next day, Sucre demanded that the garrison commander of Quito surrender. And now, believing that it really was hopeless to hold out, the commander surrendered. And so Sucre was able to lead his men peacefully into Quito. A savvy and generous man of honor, Sucre went out of his way to keep his troops on a tight leash so that their arrival would be celebrated by the residents and not resented. He also followed through with the terms of surrender he had worked out. After placing the surviving royalist troops in custody, any Spanish soldier who wanted to depart the country was free to depart with full military honors. Although if anybody wanted to stay and defect to the patriot cause of liberty and justice, et cetera, et cetera, they were free to do so. Most of the soldiers elected to quit the country and go home, but more than a few walked across the lines.

The fall of Quito was the great big domino the patriots hoped that it would be. The remaining royalists held cities in the region threw up their arms and said, “Forget it. We’re done.” As soon as they heard the capital had been taken, even the staunch holdouts in Pasto refused to just go down with the ship. And with Bolívar still lingering in the vicinity, they signaled their surrender. Now, as was usually the case with Bolívar, he was thrilled and dismayed by all this. Thrilled for all the obvious reasons, you know, total victory and all that, but he was a little ticked off that his victory at Bomboná was going to be overshadowed by Sucre’s victory at Pichincha, that the glory for finding the third sister would go to Sucre and not Bolívar. And he wrote a few dispatches back to Santander trying to position the official story of the campaign as Bolívar being the victorious General. But to be fair to Bolívar, he would soon get over his disappointment. I mean, it was Sucre, after all, who won the battle, and if he was going to share the glory with any man, it was Sucre, whom Bolívar quite literally loved like a son. And for his part, Sucre went out of his way to not upstage the Liberator and always gave Bolívar full credit for the capture of Quito. He had no intention of playing Sulla to Bolívar’s Marius. And if you don’t get that reference, boy, I have a book that will explain it all to you, forthcoming from Public Affairs Press. 

On June 16, 1822, Bolívar himself rode into Quito at the head of his remaining forces and was greeted by thronging crowds of jubilant residents. Sucre himself studiously kept out of the way and deferred all hails of liberator to Bolívar, soothing the general’s admittedly fragile ego. Bringing Quito into the Colombian fold was a huge accomplishment and one that would be celebrated without any hurt feelings amongst the senior commanders. What had been a ludicrous pipe dream back in Angostura in 1817, when they first claimed that all of New Granada would be a part of Gran Colombia, was now reality, and Gran Colombia was now whole. 

For Bolívar, the capture of Quito was the end of one chapter in his life and the beginning of another. And not just in terms of his revolutionary career, but also in his personal life. Since the death of Pepita Machado back in 1819, Bolívar had been a bachelor. Yes, there had been some drama in Bogotá concerning a young woman who Bolívar fell for, but who did not fall for him back. But other than that, he had been on his own. And that all changed on June 16, 1822, because of a celebratory ball held the night of his arrival in Quito, Simón Bolívar met Manuela Sáenz, changing both their lives forever. 

Manuela Sáenz was born out of wedlock in Quito in 1797. She was the daughter of a peninsular merchant and an unmarried criollo woman. So, like Bernardo O’Higgins, Manuela’s birth was a scandal. Deposited in an orphanage that specialized in such cases, the girl was raised in polite obscurity until her mother died when she was six years old. Now, normally, this would have left her in complete obscurity all on her own, but to the shock of his family, Manuela’s father decided he was not going to abandon her. So, without formally acknowledging paternity, he totally acknowledged paternity. He not only supported her financially but also routinely brought her around for any family function. So, though Manuela was an orphan, she grew to be a comfortable member of the local criollo society, though due to the circumstances of her birth, she would never be completely accepted. 

So, Manuela’s peculiar insider-outsider upbringing mixed with a naturally precocious personality produced a young woman who was smart, self-confident, and did not give a damn about the conservative social and political values that had made her an embarrassment and got her mother shunned by her family just for the crime of giving Manuela life. By the time Manuela was a teenager, the wars of Spanish American independence were raging, and she became a fire-breathing patriot. When she was 17, her father arranged for her to be married to a middle-aged English merchant named James Thorne, who resided in Lima and who would become Manuela’s path out of the shadow of her orphan childhood. And though Thorne was, in many ways for her, a terrible match, he was a dull man of business, set in his ways, neither spontaneous nor looking for a good time, nor looking to upend the political order, but he was, in other ways, the perfect match. He did not try to contain his young wife’s energy, and while he traveled on business, he was happy to let her run the show back in Lima. A good bookkeeper and a persuasive negotiator, and now mostly free to run her life as she saw fit, Manuela enjoyed an independent life in bustling Lima. 

Always a committed patriot, Manuela was thrilled at the arrival of General San Martín in 1821, and she became a fixture of patriot society after the liberation. So much so that San Martín actually gave her a medal for her work supporting the cause. But when news came along a few months later that Quito was about to fall, she hurried back home to see what she could do to protect her father. An old peninsular set in his ways, her father was not going to survive the new South American order without help. With luck, Manuela would be able to shield him from patriotic retribution, which probably meant securing him safe passage back to Europe. So, she arrived in Quito just ahead of Bolívar. And at the celebratory ball on June 13, 1822, the two laid eyes on each other for the first time. 

Falling for each other instantly, the 25-year-old Manuela and 38-year-old Bolívar embarked on a passionate love affair. And whenever he could get away from official business, they were together. So much so that it would eventually become more convenient to simply mix business and pleasure. And Manuela would become not only his lover but an active partner in the future campaigns to liberate Peru and then the project to try to keep Gran Colombia together as the thunderous cannons of war gave way to the silent long knives of politics. 

But for the moment, Bolívar did not yet realize that he had a partner in Manuela. And within a few weeks of arriving in Quito, Bolívar said, “I have urgent business in Guayaquil and I have to leave.” And it was urgent business. Bolívar had by now traded a further round of correspondence with General San Martín, and it had not been pleasant. The Protector of Peru had written the Liberator and said, “Hey, congratulations for all your success, but don’t even think about annexing Guayaquil.” To which Bolívar had replied, “Yeah, Guayaquil is totally a part of Colombia and I’m totally going to annex it.” But Bolívar did further say, “Let’s not do this by letter. You should come north; we should meet in person, and one great General to another, hash all this out.” So by mid-July, staying in Quito was no longer an option. After extending the invitation to San Martín to come north, Bolívar had to get to Guayaquil before San Martín did. 

So, despite the furious protests of Manuela, Bolívar rode down to the coast, leaving her behind. And next week, Bolívar will indeed beat San Martín to Guayaquil, setting up a summit between the two great Generals that would see one of them depart the revolutionary stage forever.

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