Bolivar: American Liberator (4 page)

There was, however, very real reason for gossip in the house where Don Juan Vicente presided over guests and Doña Concepcion cooed over their newborn baby. Little Simón’s great-great-great-grandfather hadn’t been the only one in the family to exercise his
droit de seigneur
over the female servants. His father, Don Juan Vicente, had been doing it for years.

Don Juan Vicente de Bolívar y Ponte had been born into a considerable fortune, the careful accrual of many generations of Creole wealth. He had inherited the splendid house on San Jacinto Street and the lucrative cacao plantations from none other than Josefa; a side chapel in the Cathedral of Caracas from his great-grandfather Ponte; and the sprawling sugar estate in San Mateo from a legacy that dated all the way back to the original Simón de Bolívar. As a youth, he had trained in the military arts and, at the
age of sixteen, served the Spanish king by defending Venezuela’s ports against marauding British invaders. At twenty-one, he was appointed procurator of Caracas and was held in such high esteem by Spanish authorities that he was called to the Court of Madrid for five years. He returned to Venezuela in 1758 an educated, sophisticated man, and so was rewarded with even more prominent responsibilities. By the age of thirty-two, he had become a veritable institution.

He had also become something of
a sexual profligate. He came home to his bachelor’s empire flush with a sense of license.
He began to molest his female servants, demand that they surrender physical favors. He singled out the most attractive and sent their husbands on faraway expeditions. He waylaid the women in bedrooms, boudoirs—in the secluded alcoves of his capacious house. The transgressions were so flagrant, so persistent—verging on outright rape—that his victims could no longer remain silent.
When the bishop of Caracas made a pastoral visit to the plantation of San Mateo in 1765, he began to hear a litany of complaints from Don Juan Vicente’s housemaids as well as from the wives of male employees.

One claimed she had been forced to be his love slave for three years—to be at his beck and call whenever he fancied her. She testified that there were at least two other servants he was abusing similarly at the same time; he would choose among them at whim, summon the unfortunate woman to his bedroom, then lock the door and defile her. Another witness named Margarita claimed he had assaulted her in a corridor and was in the process of dragging her into his room, but when he was told a visitor was on the way, he thought better of it. Even though she had been spared on that particular occasion, Margarita admitted that she eventually succumbed; she didn’t dare lock her room against him,
“fearing his power and violent temper.” Margarita’s sister, María Jacinta, too, wrote a petition to the bishop, begging him to intercede on her behalf against
“this infernal wolf, who is trying to take me by force and consign us both to the Devil.” She claimed that, for days, Don Juan Vicente had been importuning her to sin with him, going so far as to send off her husband to a remote cattle ranch so as to better carry out his designs. “Sometimes I wonder how I can defend myself against this wicked man,” she told the bishop, “and sometimes I think it best for me simply to say yes to him, take a knife in with me, and kill him outright so as to liberate us all of this cruel tyrant.”

The bishop was so appalled by the accusations that he was moved to address them with Don Juan Vicente himself. He suggested to the colonel that his
“loose ways with women” were growing too obvious to go ignored by the Church; that it was known far and wide that he lived in “a state of moral disorder.” The bishop had been careful to warn each of the witnesses that it was of utmost importance that their accounts be absolutely accurate, but as the testimonies emerged—utterly compelling, mutually corroborating—there could be no doubt: Don Juan Vicente was a moral reprobate. He had to be stopped.

But the bishop also knew that the man who stood accused was no ordinary citizen. Don Juan Vicente’s station among Creoles in Venezuela had few equals; his honors and titles flowed directly from the Court of Spain. The bishop decided to recommend that the women commit themselves to prayer, avoid contact with their tormentor, and take up a strict vow of silence. To Don Juan Vicente, he intimated that he really did not believe the witnesses, but that if similar violations continued
to be reported, he would be obliged to correct his lordship
“by force of law.” He advised him to cease all commerce with females and to contact them only through the offices of a priest. The bishop’s warning had a clear and unavoidable implication: the Church would brook no more complaints. It was time for Don Juan Vicente to get married.

WHEN MARÍA DE LA CONCEPCIÓN
Palacios y Blanco married Don Juan Vicente at the age of fourteen, she was no younger than other brides of her class in Venezuela: American aristocrats were known to marry off daughters as early as twelve. A girl might be
sent to the convent at four and then emerge eight years later to exchange lifelong vows with a boy of sixteen.

These were the Mantuanos, the highest class of Creoles to which the Bolívars and Palacios belonged. Wealthy, white, and exceptionally favored, they were the backbone of Spain’s empire in Venezuela, and oversaw all of the colony’s assets, commanded all the colony’s troops. In Caracas, their ranks were said to consist of nine families. The Mantuanos displayed their coats of arms, carved into great slabs of stone, over their doorways. They wore fancy hats and carried canes. Their wives were the only women permitted to wear mantillas or
mantuas
, veils that marked their status as they rode through the city on elaborate, gilded litters, borne by black slaves. Wherever they walked, tiny bells sewn into their skirts announced their approach.

We will never know with any certainty how Concepción’s parents managed to arrange her marriage to the prominent, powerful, forty-six-year-old roué that was Don Juan Vicente, except that there was one strategic advantage: they were his neighbors. The Palacios lived just behind the Bolívars,
on the corner of Traposos Street—only a few meters away. The city of Caracas was small, no longer than fourteen blocks in one direction and twelve in the other. In the tiny quadrant the Palacios and Bolívars inhabited, the
elite were close acquaintances, often related to one another through generations of intermarriage. It is safe to assume that, in the close, insular world of eighteenth-century Caracas life, Don Juan Vicente learned on his return from Madrid that
a baby had just been born to the Palacios family. The father was a mere four years younger, after all, and a fellow military man. Both were eminent
Mantuanos, active in the public life of Caracas. Having so much in common with the father, Don Juan Vicente certainly had opportunities to glimpse the daughter. As years passed and Concepción grew to puberty, Don Juan Vicente noticed that she was a lively and beautiful child.

However the subject of marriage materialized, nuptial agreements were made, two influential families were joined, and Don Juan Vicente settled down to a quiet, even sedate connubial life. Doña Concepción proceeded to dedicate herself to wifely duties. As someone who had grown up in a bustling household with ten siblings, she must have found the Bolívar house, for all its handsome rooms, a dour place, as dark and forbidding as a tomb. She opened the doors to its patios and brightened its halls with light. She
decorated the heavy sideboards with an abundance of flowers. She filled the air with music. By the time she was eighteen, she began to populate the many rooms with children. María Antonia, the first, was most like her—petite, brunette, and determined. Three more followed quickly thereafter: Juana, a languid, fair-haired girl, who more resembled her father; Juan Vicente, a sweet, blond boy with blue eyes; and, last, Simón, the scamp with curly black hair.

For all the differences, Doña Concepción had one characteristic in common with her husband. Her ancestry was as renowned and illustrious as his. Her mother, Francisca Blanco Herrera, was a descendant of medieval kings and princes. Her father, Feliciano Palacios y Sojo, came from a family with a pronounced intellectual bent. From her uncle Pedro Palacios y Sojo, a celebrated priest, musician, and founder of the Caracas School of Music, she learned she had a natural gift for music. She was skilled at the harp, which was her preferred instrument, but she also loved to sing, play the guitar, and dance. Although fate would allow Simón Bolívar only a fleeting time with his mother, there were two traits he would inherit from her: a vibrant, affirmative energy and a hearty passion for dance.

AS DON JUAN VICENTE SETTLED
into his new life, he began to be alarmed by Spain’s dominion over it. For fifty years he had been a loyal subject of the king, a trusted judge, governor, and military commander, but by 1776, just as the British colonies declared their independence, Don Juan, too, was dreaming of insurrection. He had good reason to. Spain’s Bourbon
regime, which had high ambitions, had decided to impose a strict rule over its colonies. It put into place a number of anti-Creole laws that had a direct effect on Don Juan Vicente’s businesses. First, Venezuela was separated from the viceroyalty of New Granada, a sprawling region that originally reached from the Pacific to the Atlantic over the northern territories of South America; next, an intendant was installed in Caracas to administer economic affairs, and a captain-general to rule over political and military matters. With a direct umbilical to Madrid now, Venezuela began to suffer tighter restrictions on its ranches, mines, and plantations. The Council of the Indies, which governed the Americas from Madrid and Seville, strengthened its hold. Taxes were increased. A ubiquitous imperial presence was felt in all transactions. The Guipuzcoana Company, a powerful Basque corporation that monopolized imports and exports, was reaping great profits on every sale.

If Don Juan Vicente feared the impact of these new regulations, he saw that the blow would be more than financial. Creoles were being squeezed out of government roles. Throughout the Spanish Americas, from California to Buenos Aires, Spain began appointing only
peninsulares
—those born in Spain or the Canary Islands—to offices that decided important affairs. This was a sweeping, ultimately radicalizing change, reversing a culture of trust between Creoles and Spaniards that had been nurtured for more than two hundred years. In Italy, an exiled Peruvian Jesuit priest, Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán, wrote angrily that it was tantamount to declaring Americans
“incapable of filling, even in our own countries, places which, in the strictest right, belong to us.”

The most infuriating aspect of this for Creoles such as Don Juan Vicente was that the peninsulares being assigned the highest positions were often inferior in education and pedigree. This was similar to
a sentiment held for years in British America. Both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin had registered strong objections to preferences given to British-born subjects when it was clear that the American-born were far more skilled. In the Spanish colonies, the new emissaries of the crown were largely members of Spain’s middle class: merchants or midlevel functionaries with little sophistication. As they took over the most coveted seats of power, their inadequacies were not lost on Creoles who
now had to step aside. In Spain, not everyone was blind to the implications.
A Bourbon minister mused that colonial subjects in the Indies might have learned to live without freedoms, but once they acquired them as a right, they weren’t going to stand by idly as they were taken away. Whether or not the court in Madrid understood the ramifications, Spain had drawn a line in the sand. Its colonial strategy shifted from consensus to confrontation, from collaboration to coercion; and to ensure its grip on the enormous wealth that America represented, it put a firm clamp on its laws.

Don Juan Vicente and his fellow Mantuanos may not have been fully aware of it, but their disgruntlement was part of a rebellious spirit sweeping the world. It was called the Enlightenment. Its seeds had been planted much earlier by the scientific revolution in Europe, which had challenged laws, authority, even faith itself. But by the time Don Juan Vicente and Doña Concepción began having children, the wheels of an extended American revolution—north and south—were already in motion. Adam Smith had published his
Wealth of Nations
, which advocated tearing down artificially imposed economic controls and freeing people to build stronger societies. Thomas Paine, in
Common Sense
, had posited that monarchies in Europe had done little more than lay “the world in blood and ashes.” In France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire argued eloquently for freedom, equality, and the will of the people. In his
Spirit of the Laws
, Montesquieu had anticipated Don Juan Vicente’s resentment:
“The Indies and Spain are two powers under the same master; but the Indies are the principal, while Spain is only an accessory.” It made no sense for political forces to try to shackle a principal to an accessory, he argued. The colonies were now inherently the more powerful of the two.

On February 24, 1782, a year and a half before the birth of the child who would bring luster to his family name, Don Juan Vicente met with two fellow Mantuanos, composed a
letter proposing revolution, and sent it off to Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan colonel and dissident who had been bold enough to say publicly that his homeland should shuck its allegiance to the crown. Miranda had fought in a Spanish regiment in the Battle of Pensacola, been reprimanded by his superiors for exceeding his mandate, and had since turned against Spain, making no secret
of his rancor. The letter addressed to him by the elder Bolívar reported that the noblemen of Caracas were exasperated with the insults heaped on them by Spanish authorities. The new intendant and captain-general were “treating all Americans, no matter what class, rank or circumstance, as if they were vile slaves.” The three Mantuanos urged Miranda to take up their cause of rebellion, but went on to express a certain trepidation, given Spain’s ruthless quashing of rebels elsewhere: “We want to take no steps, nor shall we take any without your advice, for in your prudence have we set all our hopes.”