Simón Bolívar

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 18th of August 1805, on a hill outside Rome called the Mons Sacer, a twenty-two-year-old Venezuelan named Simón Bolívar made a vow. Standing where the plebs had seceded from Rome in the 4th century BC, he swore to end Spanish rule in the Americas. He had no army, no office, no plan. He was a recently widowed heir from Caracas on a Grand Tour, still grieving the wife who had died of yellow fever two years earlier. Yet within two decades, the territories that became Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela would all be free of Spain, and he would be called El Libertador, the Liberator of America. How does an orphaned aristocrat with a property dispute and a taste for the salons of Paris become the man who breaks an empire? What did he want for the lands he freed, and why, by the end, did he say that all who served the revolution had plowed the sea? The answers run through earthquakes, exile, a Haitian president's gift, and a country named in his honor while he still lived.

• 2. A Privileged Orphan

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  Simón Bolívar was born on the 24th of July 1783 in Caracas, the fourth and youngest child of one of the wealthiest criollo families in the Spanish Americas. The family fortune traced back to a notary named Simón de Bolívar, who had left the Spanish Basque region and arrived in Venezuela in the 1580s. Death came early and often to the young heir. His father Juan Vicente died of tuberculosis on the 19th of January 1786, when Simón was two. On the 6th of July 1792, his mother María de la Concepción died of the same disease. The British historian John Lynch described the childhood that followed as "at once privileged and deprived." Raised apart from his siblings by African house slaves, Bolívar grew especially attached to a slave he viewed as both a motherly and fatherly figure. His grandfather, certain his own line would inherit the Bolívar wealth, arranged marriages for two of the sisters and, before dying on the 5th of December 1793, handed custody of Simón to an uncle, Carlos Palacios. The boy came to loathe Carlos, who cared for nothing about him but his inheritance. That resentment shaped a child described as notoriously unruly, a boy who fled his guardian's house in June 1795 for the home of his married sister, only to be ordered back by the Spanish court of appeals in Caracas.

• 3. The Education Of A Rebel

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  In 1793, Carlos enrolled the unruly boy in a school run by the Venezuelan educator Simón Rodríguez, a student of Rousseau whose tutelage has long been seen as foundational for Bolívar's beliefs. Rodríguez taught him full-time alongside the intellectual Andrés Bello, until a connection to a pro-independence conspiracy forced Rodríguez into exile in 1797. On the 19th of January 1799, Bolívar boarded the Spanish warship San Ildefonso at La Guaira, bound for Cádiz. In Madrid he met an older relative, Esteban, who found the newcomer "very ignorant" and arranged proper schooling in the Classics and literature. Court politics nearly undid him. After a favorite fell from the Queen's grace, Bolívar was banished from court following a public incident at the Puerta de Toledo over wearing diamonds without royal permission. He also met María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa, the daughter of another wealthy Caracas creole. They married in Madrid on the 26th of May 1802, then sailed home, arriving at La Guaira on the 12th of July. The marriage lasted barely six months. María Teresa fell ill and died of yellow fever on the 22nd of January 1803. Bolívar was devastated, and later told one of his generals that he swore never to remarry. Grief sent him back to Europe, to Paris, where he watched Napoleon proclaimed Emperor on the 18th of May 1804, and where he likely met the naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland and allegedly spoke with them of Spanish American independence.

• 4. Republics That Would Not Hold

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  On the 5th of July 1811, a congress in Caracas declared Venezuela's independence, creating the first Republic of Venezuela. It was born weak, with enemies among conservative whites, disenfranchised people of color, and the hostile provinces of Coro, Maracaibo, and Guayana. Nature seemed to side with Spain. On the 26th of March 1812, a powerful earthquake devastated the republic and nearly destroyed Caracas itself. Many took it as divine retribution for breaking from the crown, and public support collapsed. Bolívar rushed into the ruined city to dig out survivors and the dead. Soon after, he was given command of Puerto Cabello and its fortress, holding the republic's prisoners and most of its remaining arms. On the 30th of June, a garrison officer freed those prisoners, armed them, and turned the cannons inward. Bolívar fled, and the revolutionary leader Francisco de Miranda decided the republic was doomed and capitulated. Furious, Bolívar and other officers arrested Miranda on charges of treason on the 30th of July 1812. Miranda was handed to the Spanish and died in a Cádiz prison on the 16th of July 1816. Bolívar escaped to New Granada, where in December 1812 he issued the Cartagena Manifesto, diagnosing why the republic had fallen. The next year he launched the Admirable Campaign and the brutal Decree of War to the Death, ordering the killing of all Spaniards not aiding his forces. Within six months he entered Caracas, and on the 14th of October 1813 its town council named him El Libertador, the title the people of Mérida had first given him.

• 5. The Haitian Bargain

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  On the 14th of May 1815, Bolívar arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, a defeated exile brooding over the collapse of two republics. There he wrote the Jamaica Letter in September 1815, called a "blueprint of Bolivar's political thought," laying out his vision for the future of the Americas. He survived a Spanish assassination plot only because his manservant mistakenly killed the paymaster in his place. Days later he sailed for Haiti, and on the 2nd of January 1816 was introduced to Alexandre Pétion, President of the Republic of Haiti. The two men impressed and befriended each other. Pétion's price was specific and moral: Bolívar pledged to free every slave in the areas he occupied. In exchange the Haitian president gave him money and military supplies. Returning to Venezuela, Bolívar declared the emancipation of all slaves and annulled the Decree of War to the Death. The campaign that followed was a brutal apprenticeship in command. Republican leaders had splintered into disunited warlords across the Llanos, and Bolívar spent years reuniting them. One refused to bend. He had the pardo general Manuel Piar arrested, and after Piar fomented rebellion, Bolívar had him executed by firing squad at Angostura on the 16th of October 1817. By the 26th of January 1818, his rival Santiago Mariño had pledged loyalty, and the third republic at last had a single leader.

• 6. Crossing The Andes

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  On the 27th of May 1819, Bolívar marched more than 2,000 soldiers toward the Andes, leaving his generals to tie down Spanish forces in Venezuela. His target was New Granada, occupied by the crown. The Republicans reached the Eastern Range on the 22nd of June and began a grueling crossing, descending half-frozen at Socha on the 6th of July. After a brief recovery they routed the Spanish under colonel José María Barreiro Manjón at the Battle of Boyacá on the 7th of August. Three days later Bolívar entered a Bogotá the Spanish had abandoned, seizing the viceregal treasury and armories. The victory let him build the country he had long imagined. On the 17th of December 1819, a congress at Angostura created the Republic of Colombia, merging Venezuela, New Granada, and the still Spanish-held Quito, with Bolívar as president. The war for Venezuela ended on the 24th of June 1821, when Bolívar and José Antonio Páez crushed the Royalists at the Battle of Carabobo. The fight then moved south. Bolívar's general Antonio José de Sucre won the Battle of Pichincha on the 24th of May 1822 and occupied Quito. In that city Bolívar met Manuela Sáenz, the wife of an English doctor, beginning a lasting affair. When he met the Argentine general José de San Martín at the Guayaquil Conference that July, the two liberators of South America found no agreement, and San Martín resigned his offices and went into exile.

• 7. From Bolívar, Bolivia

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  The Peruvian congress named Bolívar dictator of Peru on the 10th of February 1824, with the war still hanging in the balance. His victory over general José de Canterac at the Battle of Junín on the 6th of August put an end to the major military campaigns of the wars of independence. Yet the source notes a paradox: the defeat of Spain also weakened Bolívar, whose legitimacy as Liberator depended on the continuity of the Spanish threat. On the 9th of December 1824, Sucre destroyed the last Royalist army at the Battle of Ayacucho. The next year, as Bolívar toured southern Peru, a congress gathered at Chuquisaca and on the 6th of August 1825 declared the region the nation of Bolivia, named him president, and asked him to write its constitution. The flattery was deliberate. Its founders proclaimed, "If from Romulus, Rome; from Bolívar, it is Bolivia." The constitution he drafted revealed how far his politics had drifted from his liberal beginnings. He had come to believe Spanish America was unprepared for the federalism of the United States, that it needed a strong centralized government and even a president for life. His own contradictions ran through it all. He argued for the abolition of slavery and pardo rights at the Angostura Address, yet ordered Piar's death partly out of fear that mixed-race leadership would bring racial conflict and civil war.

• 8. Plowing The Sea

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  By the late 1820s, the man who had freed six nations was losing them one by one. Bolívar grew disillusioned and authoritarian, and on the 27th of August 1828 assumed supreme power as president-liberator of Colombia, abolishing the vice presidency and sending his old ally Francisco de Paula Santander to a distant posting. On the 25th of September 1828, young liberals broke into the Palacio de San Carlos to kill him. Manuela Sáenz bought him time to escape, and he spent the night hiding under a bridge until loyal soldiers found him. Santander, whom Bolívar held responsible, was pardoned but exiled. Venezuela voted to secede from Colombia. Stripped of fortune and authority, Bolívar submitted his resignation, accepted on the 27th of April 1830, and set out for exile in England. On the 1st of July he learned that Sucre, his finest general, had been assassinated near Pasto. No ship came. His health failing, he was carried to the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino near Santa Marta, where on the 17th of December 1830, at the age of 47, he died of tuberculosis. He was buried in a borrowed shirt. To his general Flores he had already written his bitter verdict, that all who had served the revolution "have plowed the sea." History did not leave him there. In 1842 Páez had his remains paraded through Caracas, and in 1876 they were moved to the National Pantheon of Venezuela. In 1998 President Hugo Chávez renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. And in 1974, an insurgent group so revered him that it stole a sword said to be his from his Bogotá residence.