Bolivar: American Liberator (13 page)

All the same, there is much we can deduce about Bolívar’s trip to North America. It was, after all, a time of great growth and ferment in the United States. He arrived in the South at the very moment when
slavery was the most profitable, most deeply entrenched commercial enterprise in its economy. It is very possible that during his brief time in Charleston he visited its infamous slave market, which was only a short walk from the imposing mansions of the rich and whose clamor was all too palpable. As he looked around, he could not have failed to note that there was little evidence of the racial mixing so common in his own America: few mulattoes, almost no Indians, the differences between races extreme.

He had come, too, during a time of expansion in the newly independent nation. The population of the United States had doubled since the Revolution, a growth rate more than twice as fast as that of any country in Europe. Everywhere he walked, he could hear hammers pounding nails into new construction, carts groaning under loads of marble, the frenzied whir of a nation on the climb. In four short years, since 1803, America had pushed its boundaries west by more than a thousand miles, pressing up against the Rocky Mountains.

In Philadelphia, Bolívar saw evidence that in the scant twenty-three years since the United States had won its independence, it had become
one of the most highly commercialized nations in the world. The people of the North reveled in work, and their attitude contrasted sharply with the leisurely slaveholding aristocracy Bolívar had seen in Charleston. In no country he had ever visited were
business and profit more glorified. And in no country he had ever traveled were Sundays so sacrosanct—no music, no drinking, no loud, brazen conversation: the United States of
America was quickly becoming
the most evangelically Christian nation in the world. Bolívar cannot have helped but be struck by what he was seeing; he knew that his own fellow Americans were nothing like their northern counterparts—racially, spiritually, historically—and he would often say as much throughout his career, but there could be no doubt that freedom had brought great prosperity and democracy:
“During my short visit to the United States,” he would later write, “for the first time in my life, I saw rational liberty at first hand.”

What was surely most remarkable of all to Bolívar at this volatile juncture in history was the attitude North Americans held toward their southern neighbors. It was one of suspicion, and it was not without cause. The country was just emerging from
the rancorous trial of William Stephens Smith, who had been charged with treason and, during the course of the proceedings, publicly thrashed for his involvement with Miranda.
On the stand, Smith recounted how President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison had dined with Miranda and openly discussed Miranda’s project to liberate Venezuela. In effect, Smith swore, they had approved the Miranda plan. As a result, Smith had felt perfectly justified in supplying Miranda with men, ammunition, and a warship—actions, the prosecution contended, that were
in clear violation of the Neutrality Act of 1794. By the end of the affair, which eventually became rabidly political, the real subjects under discussion were the powers of the American presidency, the authority vested in Congress to declare war, the business of supplying weapons to foreign rebels, and the courts’ ability to make a punishment fit a crime. In the course of the trial, the prosecution managed to smear mud on the Adams family, Jefferson, Madison, and any future South American rebel who had the temerity to approach the United States for military support.

As Bolívar traveled the country, wherever he turned, whomever he met, whenever he identified himself as a Venezuelan, he was confronted with Miranda’s fame. Despite any opinions of the man he might have had or criticisms about his timing, he had to appreciate Miranda’s extraordinary access to world power. In the United States at least, among the people who counted, the name Miranda was synonymous with Spanish American independence. There was no question that any hope for American solidarity had been dealt a mighty blow.

A mere quarter century after the Declaration of Independence, Latin America had already become a shuttlecock in the larger game of United States world diplomacy. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson had suggested that the United States might want Spanish America for itself. In a letter to a friend, Jefferson confided that Spain’s colonies were ripe for the plucking.
“My fear,” he said, “[is that Spain is] too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.” Less than six months later, Jefferson’s political rival John Adams wrote to Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay that London was under the illusion that a revolution in South America would be
“agreeable to the United States” and that North Americans would not only refuse to prevent it but would do “whatever possible to promote it.” Once he had won the presidency, however, Adams began to speak differently about the region:
“You might as well talk about establishing democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes as among the Spanish American people,” he said. Adams’s secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, seconded the opinion, adding his own jab: those people are
“corrupt and effeminate beyond example,” he said, referring perhaps to Miranda himself. Where European dreams of liberty were concerned, the founders’ rhetoric was kinder.
“It accords with our principles,” Secretary of State Jefferson said, speaking of the new French Republic, “to acknowledge any government to be rightful which is formed by the will of the nation substantially declared.”

Acknowledging a nation’s desire for independence may have accorded with American principle, but a more pressing political reality was beginning to take root in the fledgling United States of America. President
Jefferson moved to make that clear in a proclamation he issued just weeks before Bolívar stepped into the chill of a Philadelphia winter: any citizen conspiring to go to war against the dominion of Spain, Jefferson announced—anyone planning to rebel against Madrid’s rightful power—would be vigorously prosecuted and punished. Perhaps he was trying to make a point about meddling with sovereign governments. Perhaps he was attempting to counter the stinging embarrassment of the Miranda-Smith affair. In any case, economic realities had come to rule the way North America looked—or didn’t look—on its hemispheric neighbors. No one understood this better than Simón
Bolívar as he sailed his way home through the Caribbean in the spring of 1807. The United States would be the last foreign soil he would tread before undertaking the liberation of South America—he would henceforward credit it as an eye-opening experience, an undeniable inspiration. But it could not be a model. Nor was it a country on which he could rely.

CHAPTER
4

They say grand projects need to be built with calm!

Are three hundred years of calm not enough?

—Simón Bolívar

B
olívar arrived in Caracas in June of 1807, filled with resolve. He was convinced that his America, like France and the United States, could shuck its past, shed its masters, and redefine itself. But he also knew that liberation would not be easy. War and blockades had brought trade to a standstill; Creoles were cut off from the outside, their information restricted to what Madrid and the Inquisition would allow. Yet even Madrid seemed strangely absent now, its regents in Caracas disconnected and rudderless. It was as if the whole of South America were in limbo, awaiting the
madre patria
’s next move.

As Bolívar went about managing his estates, improving the family businesses, and tending the fields
alongside his slaves, he understood that many Creoles of his class, too, longed ardently for liberation. There were differing views on how it should be won. The young seemed unwilling to contemplate anything less than a revolution; their fathers were afraid of losing all in a race war. But there was no question the will to independence was there. Miranda simply hadn’t cultivated it.

Little by little, Bolívar attuned himself to the temper of the times.
Even as he
battled his neighbor Antonio Briceño in a land dispute that began with pitchforks and ended up in the courts, he met with like-minded republicans. They gathered, ostensibly to socialize,
in sparkling salons organized by the best and brightest of the colony: Bolívar’s former tutor, the writer Andrés Bello; his in-laws, brothers of the Marquis del Toro; boyhood friends Tomás and Mariano Montilla; his young uncles Pedro Palacios and José Félix Ribas. Scions of the privileged aristocracy, they were conspirators now. Their meetings masqueraded as literary events or musical recitals, even gambling affairs, and many were hosted by the Bolívar brothers, especially at their house on the River Guaire, which was surrounded by ample gardens and so was perfectly suited for clandestine conversations. As Bolívar regaled his friends with eye-opening tales of his travels in Europe or the United States, and Andrés Bello—by then a prominent official—
recited his translations of Voltaire, they all spoke freely of sedition. But for all the high hopes and spirited exchange, it would take a miracle to convert rhetoric into revolutionary acts.

That miracle arrived in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in the autumn of 1807, crossed Spain under false pretenses to conquer Portugal.

The invasion of the Iberian Peninsula began simply enough, and, some might say, in response to bald invitation. It started in October, when King Carlos IV
chanced upon some papers written in his son’s hand that made it clear that the crown prince was planning to dethrone his father and, very possibly, poison his mother. Horrified,
the king wrote to Napoleon, reporting the whole affair, denouncing his son, and suggesting that a brother of Napoleon should succeed him. Not twenty-four hours later, Prince Ferdinand, too, dashed off a letter to Napoleon, inviting the emperor to choose a bride for him from among his family and so unite the empires. It was a naked lunge for power, fresh evidence of the prince’s treason. For years, Ferdinand had brooded about Godoy’s sexual hold on his mother and the craven way his father had handed the cuckolder all the power. But Carlos IV proved more of a match than his son had anticipated. Goaded by the queen and prime minister, the king now began serious negotiations with France.

Napoleon took rank advantage of the family squabble by flattering
the king and offering him an opportunity to expand his empire. The Treaty of Fontainebleau, put forth by Napoleon and signed by Godoy on October 27, 1807, promised Spain half of Portugal in a joint invasion—a truly perfidious arrangement, given that the king’s eldest daughter, Charlotte, was Portugal’s queen. Napoleon was given
permission to march 25,000 troops through Spanish territory to Lisbon. When time for the invasion came, however, Napoleon
sent quadruple that number, overwhelming Lisbon in a bloodless coup and securing a firm foothold in Spain. By the end of 1807, Queen Charlotte and the royal Braganza family had fled Portugal and, with ten thousand of their most loyal subjects, filled a convoy of fifty ships headed for Brazil. Four months later, in the spring of 1808, the French army slipped into Spain’s most strategic fortresses and took control. King Carlos IV finally understood his predicament. Spain was under occupation. He began to consider
a secret plan to escape to Mexico.

The Spanish people were outraged. They blamed Godoy for all their misfortunes and sacked his palace in a riot. In the course of that uprising, Carlos IV was forced to relinquish the crown to his son, who was now King Ferdinand VII. Napoleon managed to lure the whole royal family—mother, father, and son—to Bayonne for a conference. After a sumptuous dinner, the newly crowned King Ferdinand VII was told that Spain’s Bourbon era was over. He was king no more. In response, Carlos IV tried to nullify his own abdication, but eventually agreed to cede Spain and its colonies to Napoleon for an
annual salary of 1.5 million pesos. By the end of April, the Bourbons were virtual prisoners on French soil. Joseph Bonaparte—the emperor’s brother—was crowned the new king of Spain, making America, from Texas to Tierra del Fuego, a cog in Napoleon’s empire.