Bolivar: American Liberator (12 page)

On August 15—a hot, airless afternoon—Bolívar trudged up Monte Sacro with Rodríguez and del Toro, all of them glistening with sweat.
Rodríguez reminded them of the plebeians of ancient Rome, who, weary of patrician rule, had labored up that very hill in 494
B.C.
to vent their fury and threaten secession from the Roman republic. By the time the three travelers reached the top, a flaming sun lingered on the horizon. They sat on a massive block of ruined marble and looked out at the city that lay before them, resplendent and golden. Bolívar seemed lost in thought, contemplating those vicissitudes of history. After a while, he rose and began to ponder aloud why Rome had been so unwilling to grant its people simple freedoms. The arrogant stubbornness of it! The political folly of it! He was pacing, agitated, as if all the tragedies of his short life had predisposed him to understand that rage. Suddenly, eyes bright with emotion, he whirled around, sank to his knees, and clasping Rodríguez’s hands swore by the God of his fathers that he would liberate his country.
“I will not rest until I have rid it of every last one of those bastards!” he cried. Twenty years later, he recalled the scene in a letter to his old teacher:
“Do you remember when we went together to Monte Sacro to swear on that sainted ground that we would not rest until our homeland was free? Surely you haven’t forgotten that day of eternal glory.”

The vow on Monte Sacro was a turning point, the genuine expression of a radicalized spirit. But, ultimately, it can be seen as an extension of Bolívar’s father’s anger, the wrath of colonial frustration, passed down from American to American over the course of three hundred years. In 1824, when the U.S. naval officer Hiram Paulding asked Bolívar what had impelled him to undertake the liberation of America, he replied:

From boyhood I thought of little else: I was fascinated by stories of Greek and Roman heroes. The revolution in the United States had just taken place and it, too, was an example. Washington awoke in me a desire to be just like him. . . . When I and my two companions . . . arrived in Rome, we climbed Mount Palatino [
sic
], and we all knelt down, embraced, and swore that we would liberate our country or die trying.

Bolívar left Rome shortly after the pledge on Monte Sacro and returned to France, although it isn’t clear whether he arrived in Paris at
the end of 1805 or at the beginning of 1806. A record in the
Paris lodge of the Freemasons, the antimonarchical fraternity that was furiously recruiting young men at the time,
lists him as being inducted sometime between November 1805 and February 1806. Most likely, he and his companions knew that they would do well to undertake the walk back in clement weather, arriving in Paris before the November frost. The Bolívar who returned was a different man: robust, energetic, his health renewed by exercise, he never again succumbed to a wastrel’s life. He was the model revolutionary: abstemious, disciplined in his personal habits, insatiably curious. If indeed he joined the Freemasons at this time, it was certainly in order to meet other men who, like him, were keen to change the world.

It is most likely that Fanny was not in Paris when he returned, and, in any case,
she was pregnant with her son Eugène. From the child’s birthdate, April 23, 1806, we can deduce that he was conceived in late July of 1805, just after Fanny’s lover Eugène de Beauharnais was made viceroy of Italy, about a month after Bolívar left Milan. (Beauharnais is
listed on the child’s birth certificate as his godfather.) Much later, when Bolívar was known as the Liberator of South America, Fanny would try to suggest that one of her children
might have been his.

But he had lost all interest in Fanny. His hopes and ambitions had turned elsewhere. Perhaps it was because she was pregnant by another man; perhaps it was simply because he was bored with her. Before leaving Paris for Italy, he had given her
an engraved ring as a parting bauble, and she had cried and begged him not to go. After his rise to glory, after she had fallen into debt,
she would try to borrow money from him, convince him to buy her house, even offer her son in marriage to any female in his family. He ignored her grasping efforts until the very last—until after she had sent him
scores of pleading letters—and then he sent a terse instruction to one of his minions traveling through Europe:
Take this copy of my likeness, he wrote, and deliver it to Mme Dervieu.

EVEN AS BOLÍVAR WAS ON
his knees, vowing to liberate his homeland, there was an older, worldlier Venezuelan readying himself for the
task. On September 2, 1805, a graying war veteran traveling
under the name of Mr. George Martin boarded the
Polly
in Gravesend, England, en route to New York to muster an army of freedom fighters. He was Francisco de Miranda, the famous rebel to whom Bolívar’s father had appealed almost a quarter century before.

Miranda, at fifty-five, had led a remarkably colorful life. He had met many of the leading personages of the day, including Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Henry Knox, Catherine the Great, Maximilien de Robespierre, General Lafayette, even Joseph Haydn. He was at once a glamorous, well-traveled, sophisticated polyglot and a hapless itinerant who, during the course of his quest for liberty, would be accused variously as a smuggler, a deserter, a charlatan, and a gigolo. He had been born in Caracas in 1750, the son of a Canary Islander. His father, a prominent merchant, owned a number of businesses, including
a textile factory and a bakery, but when the Spanish authorities chose him to be the leader of a new militia, the Mantuano elite rose up in fury. The very men—
including Juan Vicente de Bolívar—whose signatures were on the letter begging Miranda to mount an insurgency against the Spanish had led a campaign against Miranda’s father, excoriating him as
“a mulatto, a government henchman, a mere shopkeeper, an upstart, and unworthy” of his honorary appointments. Miranda’s father was forced into a mortifying legal battle in which he was expected to produce lengthy genealogies proving the “purity” of his blood.

Stung by that humiliation, Miranda set off for Spain in 1771 at the age of twenty. After two years of study in Madrid, he became a captain in the Spanish army,
a position his father bought for him for 85,000 reales. He went on to fight in Spain’s conflict against the Moors in North Africa, against the redcoats in the final stages of the American Revolution, and as a spy on British exploits in the Caribbean. In 1782, badgered by Spanish authorities for a fleeting collaboration with a British smuggler, he escaped to the hills outside Havana. Within a year—even as the infant Bolívar was coming into the world—Miranda was working his way up the east coast of the newly independent United States of America, consulting old soldiers about how to wage a revolution,
consorting with rabble as well as founders, enchanting women with his manly good looks and erudition,
visiting whorehouses with prominent New Englanders, reading voraciously all the while. He was an irresistibly charming man.

Eventually, Miranda left the United States and crisscrossed Europe—from Marseille to Istanbul and from Corinth to St. Petersburg—in a campaign to gain adherents to his cause. In London he was put on the prime minister’s payroll as a consultant for American affairs. He gave William Pitt innumerable
documents describing Spain’s fortifications and outlining his plan for a unified, liberated South America: its parliamentary system would be modeled after England’s; its head executive would be a descendant of the Inca. For the rest of his days, he would try to get these documents back from the English government, but his pleas would go ignored.

All the same, Miranda was a tireless diplomat for the cause. He traveled to Prussia with John Adams’s soon-to-be son-in-law, William Stephens Smith; Miranda and Smith became good friends,
sharing their wardrobes and carousing in bawdy houses. Miranda had fought in the French Army of the North as a field marshal, a rank he was given on the mistaken understanding that he had been
a brigadier general in the American Revolution. Clearly, he was a master of exaggeration. So intimate a friend did he become of Catherine the Great that her court assumed they were ardent lovers. Miranda has
“traveled to great advantage,” one friendly observer was prompted to say, and “nothing has escaped his
penetration
, not even the Empress of all the Russias.”

Despite his service to France, however, Miranda was caught in the web of French revolutionary intrigue and was tried for desertion and cowardice. He was declared innocent of all charges. But Robespierre, suspecting Miranda of other perfidies, sent him to prison to await the guillotine. Although Miranda survived to have his name engraved in the Arc de Triomphe as
one of the Revolution’s heroes, the experience made a deep and bitter impression. He had risked his life for the French, and yet all he had received in return was persecution or imprisonment.
“What a country!” he exclaimed in an outraged public letter. As Gual and España conspired to overthrow Spanish rule in Venezuela
in 1799, Miranda wrote to Gual,
“We have before our eyes two great examples, the American and the French Revolutions. Let us prudently imitate the first and carefully shun the second.” Disgusted with France, he had settled in London, where, in the wake of Gual and España’s failures, he resumed his campaign to liberate his homeland.

In the fall of 1805, as the British reveled in their decisive victory over the combined French and Spanish naval forces at Trafalgar—as a starry-eyed Bolívar made his way back from Rome to Paris over roads strewn with autumn foliage—Miranda was on board the
Polly
, headed to North America after a hiatus of twenty years. He had gone, like Hannibal, from country to country, gathering support for his beleaguered people, and he had decided that it was in the United States that those people would be best understood. Five months later, on the icy wintry morning of February 2, 1806, his warship, the
Leander
,
left New York harbor with 180 men on board.
Among them was William Steuben Smith, ex-President John Adams’s twenty-year-old grandson—the son of Miranda’s old traveling companion, William Stephens Smith. By then the elder Smith had become an important official for the Port of New York and chief facilitator of the mission. The expedition,
ill-prepared and badly equipped, arrived on the coast of Venezuela after six months of serial calamities at sea. Two schooners that had joined the
Leander
—the
Bee
and the
Bacchus
—had fallen into Spanish hands. When General Miranda’s ragtag troops finally entered the Venezuelan city of Coró, they found no one there. Coró’s priests, hearing rumors that the invaders numbered
as many as four thousand, had frightened the residents away. The Spanish army dismissed Miranda as a madman, and so the would-be liberators saw little action, apart from nervously shooting at one another from opposite ends of town. Even the Creoles denounced Miranda as a fanatic, a marauder—a deserter who hadn’t bothered to stand on Venezuelan soil for thirty-five years. Not one would be recruited to his cause.

Miranda and his men were in Venezuela for a
total of eleven days, during which time it became all too clear that his war of independence was a rank disaster. On August 13, the frustrated general gave orders to withdraw, and his creaky ship set sail for Aruba, leaving the Venezuelans to scratch their heads and wonder just who he was. Sometime later,
the Marquis del Toro, the commanding colonel charged with defending the coast, wrote into a captain’s record,
“On August 10th, this officer marched to Coró with his battalion . . . against the traitor Miranda.” The young officer was Juan Vicente Bolívar, the older brother of Simón.

NAPOLEON’S WAR IN EUROPE HAD
a dispiriting effect on Bolívar. Britain, which now ruled the seas, blockaded the entire coast of France, rendering it impossible for Bolívar to receive funds or sail home easily. He was frustrated, too, by the news of Miranda’s botched expedition. He had heard of it well in advance of its ill-fated landing in Venezuela. The campaign was
the talk of New York and Washington—indeed of Europe—months before it ever set sail. Writing to a friend more than a month before Miranda stepped foot on Coró, Bolívar declared that it was sure to be a blighted operation. Venezuela wasn’t ready for Miranda’s revolution, Bolívar complained.
“He’ll only do harm.”

He was eager to leave Paris, anxious to go home. A friend obliged by loaning him
2,400 francs, which enabled him to travel from France to Germany and sail from a neutral port. He had a family duty to discharge: he had promised his sister María Antonia to deposit her son—his nephew Anacleto Clemente—in a private school in Philadelphia. Anacleto, a mere ten-year-old at the time,
had arrived in Paris sometime before, just as the Napoleonic Wars were escalating. It was a perilous time to be young and male in France. Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which numbered in the millions—ten times the size of Britain’s standing army—was a ravening war machine that took recruits as young as fifteen. Surely María Antonia worried about her son’s and brother’s safety. Bolívar and his nephew made their way east in October of 1806, hoping to sail from Hamburg, just as
Napoleon’s hussars rode through the fog over the plains of Auerstadt, routed the Prussian army, and captured Berlin. Slipping into
Germany through Holland in late November, Bolívar and the boy succeeded in boarding a ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina.

It was a hard winter’s passage, the sea made fierce by icy gales, and when the ship finally hove into
Charleston in January of 1807, Bolívar was ill with a raging fever. He was also completely out of funds. But he
had established a warm friendship with one of the ship’s passengers, a certain
Mr. M. Cormic of Charleston, who offered Bolívar and the boy his hospitality. How long Bolívar convalesced in Cormic’s home we do not know, but before long, he sailed to Philadelphia, where he finally received a shipment of money from Caracas and deposited Anacleto safely in school. Some historians have claimed that, from Philadelphia, Bolívar went on to visit Boston and New York, but there is no evidence to support it. All we know for sure is that
by June he was home in Caracas.