Bolivar: American Liberator (46 page)

Securing San Martín’s support had turned out to be a thorny business for Sucre.
The Protector of Peru had announced publicly that he looked forward to traveling north to meet Bolívar, but as time passed, he had grown skeptical about Greater Colombia’s ambitions. Within a month of announcing his eagerness to meet his fellow revolutionaries, he began to chafe about Sucre’s presence in Guayaquil, convinced that the port’s proximity and close commercial ties to Lima made it rightfully Peruvian, and, therefore, under his jurisdiction. In February, after dispatching one of his most talented young colonels, Andrés de Santa Cruz, to help fortify Sucre’s army, he
worked himself into a state over reports about Bolívar’s progress toward Guayaquil. Finally, he had boarded one of Lord Cochrane’s ships and hastened north to lay claim on the coveted city. But by the time he got halfway, he saw
a copy of a letter Bolívar had sent to Guayaquil’s president, José Joaquín de Olmedo. In it, Bolívar claimed peremptorily that the port of Guayaquil belonged to Colombia.
A bomb could not have produced a more shattering effect. Seething, San Martín turned around and sailed back to Lima, where he secured
authority to go to war.

In his fury, San Martín also recalled Santa Cruz’s auxiliary forces, insisting that the colonel return to Peru at once. But the charismatic Sucre soon
persuaded Santa Cruz to ignore that order, prepare for greater glory, and join his historic march against Quito. Eventually, San Martín backed down and thought better of prosecuting a suicidal civil war against an equivalent, liberating army.
He decided to send one of his generals to take command of the allied forces. Sucre was appalled when he heard of it. But indeed none of those plans came to pass; San Martín was in no position to enforce them. It had all been a tempest in a teacup—a show of martial posturing—but it had revealed everyone’s essential character. Bolívar had been high-handed; San Martín, petulant; Sucre, unyielding. And the young Santa Cruz had proved to be divided in his loyalties, as he would continue to be for all time.

By the end of April, Sucre was leading a march to the royalist stronghold of Quito. Bearing west of the Pichincha volcano, he
skirted the city and positioned his forces due north of the king’s army. He had no way of knowing it, but
Mourgeón, the able Spanish captain-general who had arrived only months before, had died suddenly from the complications
of a fall, leaving Quito’s president, General Aymerich, to fight alone. On May 13, Sucre’s forces scaled the icy peak of the volcano and, ten days later, descended the other side in an early morning fog.
It had rained all night, and negotiating the slippery terrain had been treacherous. Nevertheless, they streamed down on the enemy, meeting them in battle at Riobamba. The hostilities were so close to Quito that the city’s inhabitants
clambered onto their rooftops to watch the conflict play out on the slope of their looming mountain. The Battle of Pichincha was hardly a surgical strike, and required constantly shifting strategy, but Sucre wasted no effort, giving his every move an object, a rationale. By the end of the day, when it was clear that his army was prevailing, he offered Aymerich a chance to lay down his arms. On May 25, Sucre declared a victory in Quito, taking the capital and securing the capture of more than two thousand prisoners. His treaty was charitable, allowing the royalists to sail to Spain
with full military honors; as a result, many of them decided to stay and fight on the patriot side. Hearing that Quito had fallen, the stubborn bastion of Pasto succumbed completely to Bolívar. By a remarkable blend of strategy and bravura, Pasto, Quito, and the valuable port of Guayaquil were now firmly Colombian. Bolívar had only to take his prize.

The Liberator was acutely aware that he owed the victory to his gifted general, and he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of jealousy. He fretted that Sucre’s battle at Pichincha—not his, at Bomboná—would go down in history as the “third sister” of Boyacá and Carabobo. Indeed, the surrender seemed all askew. Even as Bolívar negotiated the grudging submission of inglorious Pasto, Sucre was accepting the far more glamorous capitulation of Quito from the illustrious Aymerich. Profoundly exhausted, Bolívar wrote to Santander, exhibiting an uncharacteristic smallness of mind:
“Sucre had more troops than I did, and fewer enemies,” he grumbled. “We, on the other hand, have been in hell, struggling with demons. The victory of Bomboná is far more beautiful than that of Pichincha.” He wanted to make sure that Vice President Santander represented it that way.

It didn’t take long for Bolívar’s spirit to rise, however, as the wider world began to register the triumphs. He entered Quito on June 16, heartened by deafening cheers. He was resplendent in red and gold,
mounted on his stately white horse, surrounded by adoring masses. Being a shrewd military man, General Sucre made it a point to leave all glory to the Liberator. The torch of independence was fully ablaze now. The last redoubt of Colombia’s royalists had been subdued; the vital Isthmus of Panama had declared itself for Bolívar. Nearly a million square miles of South America—a region far
greater than Napoleon’s empire—answered to a single man.

ON JUNE 19, THREE DAYS
after Bolívar’s descent into Quito, and nearly three thousand miles away, an ailing diplomat was admitted to President James Monroe’s office. Bent, pained, barely able to propel himself across the brightly polished floors of the White House, he clutched a document in one hand. John Quincy Adams recorded the moment:

At one o’clock I presented Mr. Manuel Torres as Chargé d’Affaires from the republic of Colombia to the President. This incident was chiefly interesting as being the first formal act of recognition of an independent South American Government. Torres, who has scarcely life in him to walk alone, was deeply affected by it . . . moved even to tears. The President assured him of the great interest taken by the United States in the welfare and success of his country, and of the particular satisfaction with which he received him as its first representative. The audience was, as usual, only a few minutes.

For four long years, Torres had been trying to win diplomatic recognition—not to mention
arms, ships, reinforcements—for Bolívar’s revolution. But no amount of courtly palaver got the old gentleman very far. In the end, it was Bolívar’s successes that changed the American president’s mind. As the Battle of Boyacá led to the Battle of Carabobo, and the Liberator set out over the Andes for Quito, there could be no doubt that the tide of revolution was rolling on. Congressman Henry Clay finally persuaded his countrymen of it. After Torres’s emotional meeting with Monroe and Adams, the elderly Colombian
dragged himself home to Philadelphia full of joy that he could now relay the good news to Bolívar. Less than a month later, Torres was dead. It is unlikely that anyone in the Colombian army knew it, but on the
day of their
diplomat’s funeral, which was attended by representatives of the United States army and navy and accompanied by full military honors, all the ships in Philadelphia’s harbor flew their colors at half-staff. Indeed, Bolívar and his army were at such a remove in the depths of the equatorial cordillera that they would
not be fully aware of U.S. recognition for another half year.

BOLÍVAR AND HIS ARMY, HARDLY
cognizant of the fame they had reaped in the larger world, were living for the moment. Spent by war, reduced by privation, they spilled southward, focused only on the business of staying alive. Few pleasures awaited them. Nevertheless,
legend has it that, as Bolívar rode into Quito in his splendid victory parade, he glanced up at the riotously decorated balconies and there saw the woman who would become his greatest love. The truth is probably quite different. The Liberator’s first sight of the comely, rapier-witted Manuela Sáenz may have been
at a ball given for him that night, or perhaps in an interview that she sought with the new chief of state to resolve questions of her inheritance. But there is no doubt that the meeting—given the exuberance of the moment—was mutually galvanizing. She was as motivated as he, as moody, as curious, as well read. Within days, or even hours, they were lovers, and would remain so until the end of his life.

On the face of things, Manuela Sáenz was a respectable young woman: rich, married, a habitué of liberal aristocratic circles in Quito and Lima. But she was also a woman with a complicated past. Born in Quito twenty-five years before, she was
the illegitimate child of a scandalous liaison. Her father had been a wealthy Spaniard about town, an established family man; her mother, a middle-aged spinster from a prominent Creole family. The mother had birthed the child in secret, far away from society’s prying eyes, as custom and honor demanded. She had attempted to place her daughter in a good home in Quito, but—failing that—entrusted her to nuns in a convent that was known to take highborn “orphans.” Six years later, the mother was dead. For all his social-climbing ambitions, Manuela’s father—Simón Sáenz de Vergara—did a surprising thing. He took responsibility for the child. He gave large sums of money to the luxurious convent where she lived,
introduced her to his other children, welcomed the pretty little girl into his home. Most important, he gave her the biggest gift a father could offer: the door to a new life. Before her twentieth birthday, he married her off to a wealthy businessman in Lima, an English shipping merchant named James Thorne.

There were many reasons the marriage to Thorne was a welcome union. For Manuela’s father, it was undoubtedly advantageous;
Thorne probably assisted him in an uncertain economic time. In any case, it was wise for a Spaniard with considerable property to have firm, family connections with a shipping magnate. For Manuela, Mr. Thorne represented the essence of stability. He was twenty years older, sober in nature, generous with his money. Perhaps most important: as a foreigner, he was less inclined to see the circumstances of her birth as an irredeemable flaw.

At the end of 1817, just as Bolívar was preparing to meet Páez on the desolate plains of Venezuela, Manuela traveled to Lima to meet the fiancé to whom she had been promised. He was not a particularly attractive man. Portly, stuffy, a middle-aged
fuddy-duddy with no intellectual brio or physical vigor, he could be insufferably dull and adamantly set in his ways. But there was no doubt in her mind that the marriage would give her respectability, a comfortable home, and—in that remote metropolis, far from the gossip of Quito—an enviable social standing. In December, as summer chased off the coastal fog, the couple was married under the vaulting dome of the Parroquia de San Sebastián, the most ancient and elegant of Lima’s churches. In time, Manuela’s natural grit and intelligence persuaded Thorne that she could manage his affairs, especially during his regular trips abroad.

She was a natural negotiator, a sparkling conversationalist, eager to inject herself into the arteries of intrigue that coursed through the nervous City of Kings. A fervent antiroyalist, she became
a regular in patriot circles, and like any woman in the revolutionary effort, she served as spy, courier, and recruiter. There is no question that she celebrated San Martín’s arrival in Peru. In time, he favored her with the female version of a
distinguished Order of the Sun, an award he had established to honor outstanding patriots. Eventually she became an intimate
of
Rosa de Campusano, the infamous libertine and fellow Ecuadorian beauty who captivated a long string of Lima suitors as well as the somber San Martín himself.

By late May of 1822, when Manuela Sáenz returned to Quito, she was well known as a revolutionary activist. She had come home because she was worried about her father: a flinty Spaniard with abiding loyalty to the king, a persona non grata among Quito’s new patriot masters. Perhaps she knew that he had decided to return to Spain and that this would be her last chance to see him. If so, she was also hoping that, in the new liberal realignment, she could finally claim the inheritance that her fussy maternal family had denied her since she was six, when her mother had died.

It is not difficult to imagine that when this beautiful, irreverent, and irresistibly magnetic woman presented herself at the victory ball on the arm of a patriot officer—her half brother—or when she made pressing claims in the harried halls of his new Colombia, Bolívar was enchanted. She was, as one biographer has described her, a siren with
gleaming, ebony hair, bituminous eyes, pearly skin, and a conspicuously pleasing figure. She had an alluring feline grace. She could dance; she could ride. She was also breezily unafraid of scandal. He snatched what pleasure he could with Manuelita—which is what he called her—during those busy weeks, spent a scant few weeks in her thrall, and all the while was able to glimpse an insider’s perspective on Lima’s rebels, its royalists, San Martín. Before long, he could see that this spunky, brainy woman was unlike any he had ever known.
“Madam,” he said to her tenderly, “if only my soldiers had your marksmanship, we would have routed Spain long ago.”

But San Martín himself came between the lovers. The Argentine general had written to Bolívar,
protesting Colombia’s designs on Guayaquil. He insisted that the port be allowed to choose its own loyalties in an election.
Bolívar fired back without delay: Guayaquil was incontrovertibly Colombian; it had answered to Bogotá since colonial times, and would continue to do so in the future. But he added graciously that he welcomed the opportunity to embrace San Martín and talk about these things man-to-man. He had already offered San Martín the Colombian
army’s assistance in Peru. Bolívar hastened to Guayaquil, fully aware now that he needed to get there before the Argentine. Tearing himself away from the pleasures of Manuela, he went south to stake his claim.

He didn’t get far before she sent him a brash and demanding letter. He wrote an uncharacteristically hesitant response. Perhaps it was because her
blatant lack of decorum made him worry for her; perhaps it was because she had triggered something deeper in him, but his letter beseeched her to give him room to think:

I want to answer, most beautiful Manuela, your demands of love, which are entirely reasonable. But I have to be candid with you, who have given me so much of yourself. . . . It’s time you knew that long ago I loved a woman as only the young can love. Out of respect, I never talk about it. I’m pondering these things, and I want to give you time to do the same, because your words lure me; because I know that this may well be my moment to love you and for us to love one another. I need time to get used to this, for a military life is neither easy to endure nor easy to leave behind. I have fooled death so many times now that death dogs my every step. . . . Allow me to be sure of myself—of you. . . . I cannot lie. I never lie! My passion for you is wild, and you know it. Give me time.