Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios — by family one of the wealthiest Creole landowners of late-colonial Venezuela, by education a cosmopolitan European-trained liberal, by vocation the principal military commander of the Spanish American independence struggle, and by retrospective canonisation the secular saint of Bolivarian Latin America — was born in Caracas on the 24th of July 1783. His parents died when he was a child; he inherited substantial cacao plantations, slaves, and urban property; he was educated by the philosopher Simón Rodríguez, who introduced him to Rousseau and the French Enlightenment; he travelled to Madrid as a teenager, married briefly (his wife María Teresa died of yellow fever in Caracas in 1803), and resumed his European travels. The famous moment of political conversion — the so-called Roman Vow — was made on the 15th of August 1805 on Monte Sacro in Rome, where Bolívar swore, in the presence of his old tutor, that he would not rest until he had freed Spanish America from Spanish rule. The vow has been substantially mythologised. The political project it announced, however, was real, and was undertaken over the next twenty-five years across the entire former Viceroyalty of New Granada.
The colonial setting
The Spanish American colonies in the late eighteenth century were a substantial bureaucratic empire under the Bourbon reforms of Charles III (1759–1788). The Viceroyalty of New Granada — created in 1717, abolished and reconstituted in 1739 — covered modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, with its capital at Bogotá. The Captaincy General of Venezuela was a semi-autonomous administrative subdivision with its capital at Caracas. The population structure was racially stratified in the formal colonial system (peninsulares — Spanish-born — at the top; criollos — American-born of European descent — next; mestizos, mulattoes, free blacks, indios, and enslaved Africans in descending categories), with substantial social complexity in practice but with the principal economic and political privileges reserved to the peninsular and criollo elite. Bolívar belonged to the criollo elite; his estate at San Mateo, his Caracas residence, and his social position were among the most substantial in colonial Venezuela.
The political ideologies that produced Spanish American independence were a combination of the French Enlightenment (read in translation across the elite circles of Caracas, Bogotá, Quito and Lima), the American Revolution's example (Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan general who served in the French revolutionary armies and in the American Continental Army, was the principal early intellectual conduit), the political vacuum produced by Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, and the substantial grievances of the criollo elite against the peninsular monopoly on senior colonial appointments. The French invasion of Spain — Napoleon's deposition of the Bourbon Ferdinand VII in May 1808 and the installation of Joseph Bonaparte — produced a constitutional crisis in the colonies: in whose name were they governed if not the legitimate Spanish king? The juntas movement of 1809–10 across Spanish America was, in form, a series of provisional councils governing in Ferdinand's name until his restoration. In substance, several of them rapidly evolved into independence movements.
The first Venezuelan Republic
The Caracas junta of the 19th of April 1810 deposed the Spanish captain-general and announced provisional self-government. The Venezuelan congress of March 1811 declared independence on the 5th of July 1811 — the first formal independence declaration of Spanish America. Bolívar, returning from a diplomatic mission to London (where he had unsuccessfully sought British support), served as a junior officer in the first republican army. The first Venezuelan Republic collapsed within fourteen months: an earthquake at Caracas on the 26th of March 1812 (interpreted by royalist preaching as divine judgement on republican atheism, with substantial popular effect) was followed by Spanish military counter-attacks under Domingo de Monteverde. Francisco de Miranda, the republican commander-in-chief, signed a capitulation in July 1812 that surrendered the republic. Bolívar arrested Miranda — under disputed circumstances; the episode has been read as either Bolívar's righteous indignation against capitulation or his personal betrayal of his patron — and handed him over to Spanish authorities, who shipped him to Cádiz where he died in prison in 1816. Bolívar fled to New Granada.
The Admirable Campaign
In Cartagena de Indias, where the New Granadan republican government had survived the collapse of the Venezuelan one, Bolívar wrote the Cartagena Manifesto of December 1812 — the foundational text of his political programme, calling for the unification of Spanish American republican forces and for a more centralised and disciplined republicanism than the federalist constitutions of the first independence wave had attempted. With New Granadan support he led a small force of 800 men back across the Andes into Venezuela in 1813 — the so-called Admirable Campaign — defeated Spanish forces in five successive engagements (Cúcuta, San Cristóbal, Mérida, Trujillo, Bárbula), and re-entered Caracas in triumph on the 6th of August 1813. The second Venezuelan Republic was proclaimed; Bolívar was named "Liberator" by the Caracas council; and a brutal counter-insurrection war began against royalist forces that retained substantial popular support, particularly among the Llaneros (the plains cowboys of the Orinoco basin) and the pardos (free people of colour).
The second republic collapsed in 1814 under the assault of the royalist Llanero commander José Tomás Boves, whose cavalry army of approximately 7,000 horsemen broke the republican forces at La Puerta in June 1814. Bolívar fled, again, this time first to Cartagena, then to Jamaica (where he wrote the famous Jamaica Letter of September 1815, the most comprehensive statement of his constitutional vision for Spanish America), then to Haiti, where President Alexandre Pétion provided weapons, supplies, and political support in exchange for Bolívar's commitment to abolish slavery in the territories he liberated. The commitment was real; the implementation was uneven; Venezuela did not abolish slavery completely until 1854.
The 1816–1818 recovery
Bolívar's military and political recovery from the catastrophes of 1812 and 1814 occupied the years 1816–1818. He returned to Venezuela with Haitian support in 1816, lost the Battle of Ocumare, regrouped on the lower Orinoco at Angostura (modern Ciudad Bolívar) in 1817, and substantially reorganised the republican army around three innovations: an alliance with the Llanero commander José Antonio Páez, who brought to the republican side the same Llanero cavalry that had destroyed the second republic; the recruitment of a British Legion of approximately 5,000 veteran soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars (English, Irish, Scottish, German), recruited in London in 1817–1818 and shipped to the Orinoco — an arrangement that gave the republican forces a professional infantry core they had previously lacked; and the foundation, at Angostura in 1819, of the Congress that would proclaim the Republic of Colombia (Gran Colombia) on the 17th of December 1819. The military operations of 1819 that produced the foundation are the next chapter.
End of Chapter I