Bolivar: American Liberator (19 page)

The tremors were unremitting, and those who knew to
hang a ball from a string could see that the ground was in continuous motion. A week after the Pittsburgh editorial,
a volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent hurled a discharge of shattered rock, black smoke, and flaming lava into the vault of sky, shrouding the island in darkness. The subterranean
rumblings went on for months. By December, when tectonic shifts had rattled their way north, bringing a tsunami that ravaged the coast of California, the city of Washington was too deep in preoccupation
to pay much attention to calamities beyond its ambit. The nation had gone back to war with England.

The War of 1812 was the result of a series of annoyances bedeviling relations between the United States and its former colonizer. The British navy had rounded up American sailors on the high seas and pressed them into service; the British army had slipped down from Canada to help the Indian tribes resist westward expansion. Americans were weary of England’s ongoing blockade, which—along with Jefferson’s misguided Embargo Act—had sapped the country’s economic vigor; and there were many war hawks who saw the revolution as unfinished until the United States liberated Canada and expelled the colonizer from the continent completely.

There were many reasons for the country to avoid involving itself in South America’s conflagrations. But it needed to take a pragmatic view as trade in the Spanish colonies had once accounted for a full
forty percent of all U.S. exports. Now, the embargo and blockade—as well as the war in Spain—had put that lucrative traffic into England’s hands, giving British merchants
a virtual monopoly in Latin America. When the newly independent Venezuela sent its ambassador Telesforo de Orea to Washington to establish diplomatic relations, he could hardly be ignored. President James Madison wasn’t quite ready to recognize the new republic, but he needed to make some gesture of support.
In the address in which he urged Congress to arm the nation against the British, the president reported “an enlightened forecast” in the “great communities” of South America. The U.S. Congress, he said, had “an obligation to take a deep interest in their destinies.” The president had little support in Congress—either for his war or for his Pan American intentions.
Congress issued a dry statement promising that when those “great communities” reached the status of nations, it would consider a fitting response.

The message was clear: the United States would not recognize declarations of independence as evidence of full-fledged nations, nor would it spring to assist South America in its harebrained revolutions. Indeed,
when John Adams had first heard of Miranda’s elaborate plan to establish a vast empire in Spanish America with an Inca at its head,
he had said that he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In as gracious a manner as he could, Secretary of State James
Monroe met with Ambassador Orea to advise him of the U.S. position. Within a few months of that meeting, Great Britain and the United States—the very powers on which Miranda and Bolívar had rested their hopes—were at war on land and sea.

WITH CARACAS IN RUINS, THE
republican population decimated, and Monteverde’s army advancing on the new capital of Valencia, the Venezuelan congress was in a panic. Desperate to save the republic and realizing that what was needed most was a swift, unified operation, its members offered the Marquis del Toro a dictatorship. When he declined, they offered it to Miranda, who accepted.

Generalísimo Miranda began his rule by evacuating the capital. Alarmed by the reputation that preceded Monteverde’s invading troops—many of them truculent plainsmen who killed and looted everything in their path—Miranda gathered his army and headed back to Caracas. On the way, he stopped at San Mateo, visited Bolívar, and appointed him to command the strategically vital port of Puerto Cabello. Bolívar accepted, but
“not without misgivings.” On the one hand, it was a serious political responsibility, well beyond any capacities he had ever demonstrated: the dungeons of Puerto Cabello’s fort, San Felipe, held
powerful enemies of the revolution; and the bulk of patriot arms and munitions were stockpiled there. On the other hand, what was offered was command of the town—not the fort. Bolívar preferred the offensive; he longed to be on the glorious front lines of war. On May 4,
the day after Monteverde readily took Valencia, Bolívar rode into Puerto Cabello and had his first glimpse of the squat, gloomy bulwark in whose shadow he would brood for fifty-eight deceptively languid days.

Out on the battlefront, Miranda’s officers, too, were chafing with frustration, eager to engage Monteverde in an all-out war, but Miranda restrained them, vying in skirmishes only as necessary. After every action, whether it was a victory or defeat, he ceded territory and retreated. Certainly, he had his reasons. For all the pugnacity and determination of his officers, the republican soldiers were unproven, skittish.
Many were farm boys, recruited with swords to their hearts, brought to the barracks
in manacles. Nonetheless,
Miranda had six thousand of them; Monteverde had only fifteen hundred, and, for all their truculence, they were surrounded by republicans on every side. On June 20, Miranda withdrew to La Victoria, less than two hundred miles west of Caracas, where he succeeded in repulsing a vigorous attack by Monteverde, by far the bloodiest engagement of that war. Over the years, historians have posited that, had Miranda taken advantage of that golden moment—had he grasped the initiative and ordered a full-scale attack—he might have saved the republic. But he failed to act, and that faintheartedness worried his soldiers. Morale plunged to such an extent during those months that one disillusioned corps in all its entirety
defected to the Spanish side.
Even the Marquis del Toro, the former commanding general of the republican army, deserted with his wounded brother, Fernando, and sought refuge on the island of Trinidad. As Miranda continued to watch and wait, the enemy sent troops in the opposite direction, west toward Bolívar’s garrison in Puerto Cabello.

Why did Miranda hesitate? Because he feared a bloody, unwinnable race war. When a
massive slave insurrection erupted in the farmlands of Barlovento in June,
something turned in Miranda. Just weeks before, he had urged congress to pass
an act that freed slaves if they enlisted in his army;
he had instructed a diplomat in Haiti to recruit blacks to their cause. Now the very people he had hoped to rally were moving through Creoles’ haciendas, butchering whites and burning property. He began to be convinced that the colored population, which amounted to
half the province of Caracas, would fight only for its interests, not for independence at large. In the back of his mind, too, were the vivid horrors of the Haitian revolution—the infamous 1791 Night of Fire, when two thousand whites in the colony of Santo Domingo were massacred and 180 sugar plantations burned to the ground.
“As much as I desire liberty and independence for the New World, I fear anarchy,” he had written a friend. “May God prevent my beautiful land from succumbing to another Santo Domingo. Better would it be for [blacks] to suffer the barbarous, imbecilic rule of Spain for another century.”

But other possibilities, too, began to play on Miranda’s mind. Spain had just installed the most liberal constitution the empire had ever known. In a document released by the Cádiz Regency that spring, there
were hints that the colonies might be granted greater freedoms. With his eye firmly on mounting liabilities—the paralyzed economy, the earthquake’s ravages, proliferating starvation, the threat of a fierce civil war—Miranda began to wonder whether trusting Spain wasn’t preferable to inviting further mayhem. He was an old soldier, weary of battle, with aims that were largely idealistic, and it was difficult for him to imagine his homeland rent by his own hand.

SETTLING INTO AN AUSTERE ROOM
in the municipal hall on Puerto Cabello’s main plaza, Bolívar had no way of knowing he had stepped into a trap. The city was outwardly pleasant enough, filled with
fragrant gardens, well-kept houses, and a charming park that looked west toward a wide expanse of sea. To the north, on a promontory overlooking the city, sat the fort of San Felipe, by far the strongest fortification in all Venezuela—a thick, solidly built bastion that lay less than a hundred miles by sea from Caracas. To the east lay the sheltered port, embraced by long, sandy beaches; behind that, the cactus-covered hills. So still was the air, so absent the wind, that the port was said to get its name, “Cabello” from the single strand of hair it took to moor a ship there.

The people of Puerto Cabello were dependent entirely on rain, situated as they were a mile from the nearest river and blocked from the rest of the country by high, forested mountains. Water was collected in cisterns, and its availability greatly valued, although the ground seemed to be perpetually damp from the mangrove swamps that blighted it. Puerto Cabello, in other words, for all its visual beauty, was an unhealthy town, and a foul, suffocating exhalation hung over it.
“The graveyard of Spaniards,” locals called it; and with reason, for they buried their dead from yellow fever all year round.

Bolívar had little to do in Puerto Cabello during those first muggy weeks of summer but practice his sword fighting; ride through the wide, picturesque streets; and worry about getting enough provisions to the people under his command. But all that changed on June 30, 1812, when the fort’s commandant, Ramón Aymerich, left the premises
to attend his own wedding.
Taking advantage of his absence, his second
in command, Francisco Vinoni—in a flagrant act of treason—released all the Spanish prisoners from the dungeons, raised the Spanish flag, claimed the fort for King Ferdinand, and threatened to fire on the plaza unless Bolívar surrendered it.

Bolívar refused,
urging the renegades to reconsider and lay down their arms. The firing began almost immediately. Since the fort held
most of the republican munitions, Bolívar was at a loss to defend the city. His soldiers had few rifles, little gunpowder, limited food, and no water. Worse still,
the captain in charge of defending the main gate soon defected to the Spanish side with all 120 of his troops. Bolívar and his regiment stood their ground and held the plaza for as long as they could while heavy artillery rained on them and residents ran for their lives, scrambling over walls and out into the hills. But the odds were impossible. On July 1, even as deaths and desertions whittled his unit to a scant forty men, Bolívar was told that
five hundred of Monteverde’s troops were advancing on them. Desperate, he dispatched a messenger with a terse letter to Miranda, begging him to send reinforcements. But by the time his courier was able to put the missive into the generalísimo’s hands four days later, Bolívar’s fate was written. Miranda was sipping coffee with his officers,
chatting breezily of Jefferson and Adams after a dinner marking the first anniversary of the republic, when Bolívar’s letter arrived. He opened it and read:

Generalísimo, At one o’clock this afternoon, a seditious officer with all the troops and prisoners under his command seized the fort and opened a terrible fire on this city. The fort contains 200 tons of gunpowder and almost all the artillery and munitions of Puerto Cabello; the town is in high duress, its houses in rubble, and I am trying—without arms or provisions—to defend her to the very end. The ships’ sailors have all joined with the fort, making the situation even worse. I hope you will hasten to send what reserves you can, and that you will come to my aid before I am done.

For a long while, Miranda was silent. When he finally spoke to his officers, his voice was hard and grim:

You see, gentlemen. Such are the ways of the world. Just moments ago, we were safe: Now everything is uncertain, risky. Yesterday, Monteverde had no gunpowder, no lead, no guns. Today, he has it in abundance. I am being urged to attack the enemy. But the enemy already holds all the power in his hands. The postmark here says the first of July and now it is the fifth, at sundown. Let us see what happens tomorrow.

But tomorrow was too late. On the 6th of July, Bolívar and his tiny
retinue of five ragged officers and three soldiers—all that was left of his troops—had no choice but to flee Puerto Cabello.
They stole along the coast to the nearby harbor of Barburata and slipped aboard a ship for La Guaira. By the time Monteverde’s men arrived in Puerto Cabello, the royalist army had a firm hold on the port and its immense store. Scarcely was it in their hands when
a swarm of Spanish ships packed with fresh troops arrived to support them. There was every chance now that they would try to take Caracas.

Bolívar was dispirited and humiliated, fully aware that he had lost one of the most important footholds of republican power. He assumed responsibility for it. How could he have predicted that, as commandant of the town of Puerto Cabello—a duty that paled alongside that of the commandant of the fort—he would ultimately be accountable for the fort, too? He wrote two tortured letters to Miranda and a fully detailed report of the disastrous events. He was sick with misery at his own failure, disgusted, too, by his men’s fickleness and inexperience. “My General,” he wrote,

my spirits are so low that I do not feel I have the courage now to command a single soldier. My vanity had me believing that desire and patriotic zeal alone could offset my lack of experience. I beg you now to assign me to an officer of the lowest rank, or grant me a few days to compose myself. . . . After thirteen sleepless nights under extreme conditions, I find myself in a rare state of mental ruin. . . . I did my duty, General, and, had one of my soldiers stayed, I would have fought to the end, but they abandoned me. . . . And, alas, the nation is lost at my hands.

Indeed, even as he penned these words from the republican bastion of Caracas on July 12, events were rushing to unravel everything the revolution had accomplished. Within the few days it took Bolívar to send his report and express a profound regret that he hadn’t been
crushed under the ruins of Puerto Cabello, Miranda had decided to cast independence to the winds.