Bolivar: American Liberator (5 page)

So it was prudence, not valor, that was the animating spirit behind this sedition. The Mantuanos were not ready to topple their world.

DON JUAN VICENTE WOULD NEVER
have imagined that the child in the cradle under his own roof would be the one to wrest independence from the colonizers, not for Venezuela alone, but for much of Spanish America. What he did know by the time his son reached a mere one and a half was that even if the family estate crumbled the boy would grow up to be a rich man. A priest had ordained it. Juan Félix Jerez de Aristiguieta, who had baptized the boy, was, like many powerful clerics of the day, a wealthy landowner with valuable properties. He was also
Don Juan Vicente’s nephew. When he
died in 1785 with no direct heirs, he surprised everyone by leaving the diminutive Simón his entire fortune, including a magnificent house next to the cathedral, three plantations, a total of 95,000 cacao trees, and all his slaves.

The following year, Don Juan Vicente, too, would die. The tuberculosis that had fevered him for years finally took him one warm January night in 1786 as he lay in the house on San Jacinto Street. He was not yet sixty. His son Simón was not yet three. His wife was pregnant with a fifth child, who would not see much light of day.

Don
Juan Vicente’s will and testament, which he had the presence of mind to prepare even as he lay dying, was a model of diligence. In it, he reported that he owed money to no one. He laid out his ancestry and described the lofty positions he had held during his long and illustrious career. Despite his brief, halfhearted flirtation with rebellion, he insisted that his remains be buried in the family chapel in the Cathedral of Caracas, “decorated with my military insignia and interred with the privileges
which I enjoy under military law.” He distributed his holdings evenly among his five children (including the one unborn), gave power of attorney to his wife and father-in-law, and added a special clause that required Doña Concepción “to carry out what I have imparted to her in order to relieve my conscience.” The phrase could only mean one thing: he had arranged for her to distribute money to his illegitimate children. The will went on to specify how many priests and friars were to accompany his coffin to its final resting place and how many fervent Masses were to be said for his soul as it approached reckoning day. Clearly, he died a worried man.

His departure might have thrown the household into turmoil had his wife not had a practical and business-minded nature. Doña Concepción buried her husband, carried her pregnancy to term, lost the baby girl a few days later, and then set about putting the family properties in order. Relying on her father and brothers to help her manage what had become a veritable conglomerate of businesses, she tried to impose some order in her children’s lives.

Simón, in particular, was an unruly child. He had been raised by his wet nurse, the black slave Hipólita, whom he would later credit as the woman
“whose milk sustained my life” as well as “the only father I have ever known.” She was adoring and infinitely patient with the little boy, but she could hardly control him.
Willful, irascible, in obvious need of a stern hand, he became progressively ungovernable. As much as his mother tried to enjoin the male members of her family to help discipline him, the men found his impudence perversely funny.
No one scolded him, much less punished him. Eventually, she found support in none other than the Royal Audiencia, Spain’s high court in Caracas, which monitored all legal affairs. Since the boy had inherited such a large estate, and since his father was dead and unable to supervise it, the Audiencia appointed an eminent jurist to oversee the progress of young Simón. His name was José Miguel Sanz.

Sanz was the brilliant dean of the college of lawyers, known for his progressive views on education. An avid reader and writer, he had labored for years to persuade colonial authorities to allow him to import the first printing press to the colony. He was never able to accomplish it. Nevertheless, Sanz was highly respected by Spaniards, admired by fellow
Creoles—what’s more, at age thirty-six, he was the very model of a conscientious young father. It would have been difficult to find a better surrogate for the boy. As administrator of Simón Bolívar’s fortune, Sanz had dutifully visited his young ward and seen for himself the extent of the boy’s cockiness. But before Simón turned six, Sanz decided to take fuller responsibility and
brought him to live under his own roof.

Blind in one eye, grim in demeanor, Sanz could be an intimidating presence, even to his own wife and children, but not to Simón, who is said to have issued many a brazen response to his demands.
“You’re a walking powder keg, boy!” Sanz warned him after one of Simón’s more blatant insubordinations. “Better run, then,” the six-year-old told him, “or I’ll burn you.”

As punishment for his many transgressions, Sanz
locked Simón in a room on the second floor of his house and instructed his wife to leave him there while he went off to see about his many court cases. Bored, exasperated, the boy yelled and made his fury known, and Sanz’s wife, taking pity, tied sweets and freshly baked breads to a long pole and passed them to him through an open window. She swore Simón to secrecy, making him promise not to reveal her disobedience. Every afternoon when the lawyer returned and asked how he had behaved, she simply smiled and said the child had been the essence of tranquillity.

Eventually, Sanz
hired a learned Capuchin monk, Padre Francisco de Andújar, to come to his house and give Simón a moral education. The mathematician priest, hoping to ingratiate himself with his student, tempered instruction with a liberal dose of entertaining stories, but no amount of patience or charm could budge the boy from what he was: a joker, a prankster, a pampered child. It’s not clear how long Simón remained under Sanz’s care or whether he actually spent nights under his roof, but certainly before his eighth birthday he was back in the house on San Jacinto Street. By then, his mother’s health was failing and she was finding it difficult to focus on the management of her family, much less the comportment of her younger son. Worried that she might infect her children with her disease, she quarantined herself on the sugar plantation at San Mateo and left them and the servants to their own devices. Simón spent his days cavorting with the slaves’ children, running wild.

If Doña Concepción had one driving ambition during her swift
decline, it was to secure for her older son, Juan Vicente, the marquisate that her father-in-law had purchased so many years before. The Palacios family, unlike the Bolívars, had always attached great importance to prestige and nobility, and when Don Juan Vicente de Bolívar had died, making the title potentially available to her sons, Doña Concepción had sent her brother Esteban to Spain to hurry along the enterprise. When Esteban reported that the proceedings had come to a halt because of Josefa Marín de Narváez’s questionable lineage, Don Feliciano Palacios called off the venture, unwilling to press a case that could reveal unwanted blood in the Bolívars and potentially smear them all. To be sure, managing the Bolívar fortunes had become a cash cow for the Palacios. The income from the properties that stood to be inherited by Juan Vicente and Simón was supporting their mother’s siblings. The in-laws had been living on Bolívar assets for years.

On one of her long, recuperative visits to San Mateo, Doña Concepción stayed into the rainy season, and her affliction took a grave turn for the worse. She
returned to Caracas and died of acute tuberculosis on July 6, 1792, leaving her four children in her elderly father’s care. Not entirely well himself, Don Feliciano Palacios took up his pen and wrote to Esteban in Madrid, delivering the news with admirable equanimity:
“Concepción decided to lay her illness to rest and she expelled a great deal of blood through her mouth, continuing her deterioration until this morning at eleven thirty, at which point God took it upon Himself to claim her.” It had been a long and grueling death:
she had bled for seven days.

Once his daughter was interred in the Bolívar family chapel, Don Feliciano dedicated himself to arranging the marriages of his orphaned granddaughters.
Within two months, he married fifteen-year-old María Antonia to her distant cousin Pablo Clemente Francia. Three months after that, he wed Juana, who was only thirteen, to
her uncle Dionisio Palacios. As for his grandsons, Don Feliciano decided to leave Simón and Juan Vicente—then nine and eleven, respectively—in the house on San Jacinto Street, under the supervision of the Bolívar family servants. He had
a connecting passageway built from that house to his own, so that the boys could spend days with him and then retire to their old, familiar beds at night. It seemed a rational enough solution, comforting
the children with an illusion of permanence and stability. That flimsy solace did not last long, however. Don Feliciano Palacios died the following year, leaving his grandsons to face yet another loss in their waning family universe.

The boys were immensely wealthy, with a
net worth equivalent today to at least $40 million, and because of it, they would never go ignored. But money had bought them little happiness. Within the first decade of life, Simón had lost his father, mother, grandparents, a sister, and most of his aunts and uncles on the Bolívar side. That so few Bolívars had survived to lay claim to the family fortune convinced the Palacios it was theirs to take. So confident was Don Feliciano Palacios of this rightful heritage that he took care before his death to make sure that all the wealth eventually flowed to his own children. He drew up a will, making his sons legal guardians of the Bolívar boys. Twelve-year-old
Juan Vicente was put in the custody of his uncle Juan Félix Palacios and transferred to a hacienda fifty miles away. Ten-year-old Simón was entrusted to his uncle Carlos, an ill-humored, lazy, and grasping bachelor who lived with his sisters in Don Feliciano’s house—at the other end of the passageway.

So busy did Carlos become in the venture of squandering Bolívar profits that he had little time for his impressionable young charge. He relegated the boy’s welfare to his sisters and servants. Ever headstrong, Simón began to spend
time in the company of street boys, neglecting everything his tutors had tried to teach him, learning the vulgar language of the time. Whenever he could, he headed for the back alleys of Caracas, or took a horse from the family corral and rode out into the surrounding countryside. He avoided his studies and turned his attention instead to the highly imperfect world around him, a world that Spain had made. He would not understand much of what he saw until later, until he had crisscrossed the continent as a full-grown man. But it was an education that would serve him for the rest of his life.

FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS, FROM
the mid-1500s through the mid-1700s, the world that Spain had made had struggled against fiscal failure. The empire whose motto had once been a rousing
Plus Ultra!
had glutted world markets with silver, thwarted the economic growth of its colonies,
and brought itself more than once to the brink of financial ruin. Nowhere was Spain’s misguided fiscal strategy more evident than in the streets of Caracas in the late 1700s, where a deep rage against the
madre patria
was on the rise.

The case of the Spanish American colonies had no precedent in modern history: a vital colonial economy was being forced, at times by violent means, to kowtow to an underdeveloped mother country. The principal—as Montesquieu had predicted a half century before—was now slave to the accessory. Even as England burst into the industrial age, Spain made
no attempt to develop factories; it ignored the road to modernization and stuck stubbornly to its primitive, agricultural roots. But the Bourbon kings and their courts could not ignore the pressures of the day: Spain’s population was burgeoning; its infrastructure, tottering; there was a pressing need to increase the imperial revenue. Rather than try something new, the Spanish kings decided to hold on firmly to what they had.

At midnight on April 1, 1767, all Jesuit priests were expelled from Spanish America.
Five thousand clerics, most of them American-born, were marched to the coast, put on ships, and deported to Europe, giving the crown unfettered reign over education as well as over the widespread property of the Church’s missions.
King Carlos IV made it very clear that he did not consider learning advisable for America: Spain would be better off, and its subjects easier to manage, if it kept its colonies in ignorance.

Absolute rule had always been the hallmark of Spanish colonialism. From the outset, each viceroy and captain-general had reported directly to the Spanish court, making the king the supreme overseer of American resources. Under his auspices, Spain had wrung vast quantities of gold and silver from the New World and sold them in Europe as raw material. It controlled the entire world supply of cocoa and rerouted it to points around the globe from storehouses in Cádiz. It had done much the same with copper, indigo, sugar, pearls, emeralds, cotton, wool, tomatoes, potatoes, and leather. To prevent the colonies from trading these goods themselves, it imposed an onerous system of domination. All foreign contact was forbidden.
Contraband was punishable by death. Movement between the colonies was closely monitored. But as
the years of colonial rule wore on, oversight had grown lax. The war that had flared between Britain and Spain in 1779 had crippled Spanish commerce, prompting a lively contraband trade. A traffic of forbidden books flourished. It was said that all
Caracas was awash in smuggled goods. To put a stop to this, Spain moved to overhaul its laws, impose harsher ones, and forbid Americans even the most basic freedoms.

The Tribunal of the Inquisition, imposed in 1480 by Ferdinand and Isabel to keep a firm hold on empire, was given more power. Its laws, which called for penalties of death or torture, were diligently enforced.
Books or newspapers could not be published or sold without the permission of Spain’s Council of the Indies. Colonials were barred from owning printing presses. The implementation of every document, the approval of every venture, the mailing of every letter was a long, costly affair that required government approval. No foreigners, not even Spaniards, could visit the colonies without permission from the king. All non-Spanish ships in American waters were deemed enemy craft and attacked.