The calendar year 1819 is the foundational year of the Republic of Colombia, the entity that would, in retrospect, be called Gran Colombia to distinguish it from the smaller successor state that would carry the name after 1831. Three events of 1819 produced the foundation: the Congress of Angostura, which opened on the 15th of February 1819 under Bolívar's military protection on the lower Orinoco; the Battle of Boyacá on the 7th of August, which produced the military possibility of governing the New Granadan core territory from a Spanish-American republican capital; and the Fundamental Law of Colombia of the 17th of December 1819, which formally constituted the Republic of Colombia as a single sovereign state encompassing the former Viceroyalty of New Granada plus Venezuela.
The Congress of Angostura
The Congress that met at Angostura on the lower Orinoco — modern Ciudad Bolívar — opened on the 15th of February 1819 with a famous oration by Bolívar setting out the political and constitutional vision he wanted the Congress to adopt. The Angostura Address is the longest and most carefully argued of Bolívar's political writings; it draws extensively on French Enlightenment political theory, on Montesquieu's analysis of mixed constitutions, on the American constitutional model, and on the specific lessons Bolívar had drawn from the failures of the first and second Venezuelan republics. The principal recommendation was a unitary republic — not a federation — with a strong executive, a senate of life-tenure members appointed by the executive (modelled loosely on the British House of Lords but explicitly secular), a popularly elected lower house, an independent judiciary, and a "moral power" of public-virtue education (a Bolivarian innovation never actually implemented).
The Congress adopted, in modified form, most of Bolívar's recommendations. The constitutional document drafted at Angostura — provisional pending the Congress of Cúcuta's full constitution two years later — provided for a unitary executive (Bolívar himself as provisional president), a single-chamber legislature with deputies from Venezuela and the New Granadan provinces (the latter participating in absentia until the military campaign should liberate them), an independent judiciary, and the basic institutional apparatus for governing a republican state. The territorial scope was provisional: the New Granadan provinces would have to be liberated militarily before they could be substantively represented. The campaign that would do this — Bolívar's crossing of the Andes — opened in late May 1819, three months after the Congress of Angostura had constituted itself.
The Fundamental Law
Bolívar returned to Angostura from Bogotá in December 1819, after the Boyacá victory and his occupation of the New Granadan capital. The Congress, now able to confirm what the military campaign had produced, adopted the Fundamental Law of Colombia on the 17th of December 1819. The Law's principal provisions: the territories of the former Captaincy General of Venezuela and the former Viceroyalty of New Granada are united in a single republic, the Republic of Colombia; the capital will be located on a new site to be determined (provisionally at Bogotá); the territory is divided into three departments (Venezuela, Cundinamarca, and Quito — the latter still under Spanish military control); the executive is a president and vice-president, elected to four-year terms by a body of departmental electors; the legislative is a bicameral congress to be convened in full session in 1821 at Cúcuta on the border between the two former colonial jurisdictions; the constitution will be drafted and adopted by that Congress.
The Fundamental Law was a substantial commitment of Bolívar's centralising preference over the federalist alternative the New Granadan provinces had previously preferred. The federalist tradition in New Granada — established at the first Congress of New Granada in 1810–11 — had favoured a loose confederation of provincial republics on the United States model. Bolívar's argument at Angostura, and the Fundamental Law's implementation of it, was that federalist looseness had produced the first and second Venezuelan republics' military weakness and political collapse, and that a more centralised republic was necessary for both military security against eventual Spanish counter-attack and political coherence in the long term. The argument was politically successful at Angostura. It would be substantially less successful at Cúcuta and across the subsequent decade.
The military implementation
The military implementation of the Fundamental Law required the substantial extension of republican territorial control across 1820–22. Venezuela was still substantially Spanish-controlled in December 1819 — the Boyacá victory had liberated the New Granadan central highlands but had left the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian campaigns to be completed. The Venezuelan campaign of 1820–21, culminating at Carabobo in June 1821, transferred the Caracas-Maracaibo axis to republican control. The Ecuadorian campaign of 1822, culminating at Pichincha in May 1822, transferred Quito and the southern department to republican control. By the time the Congress of Cúcuta opened in May 1821, the central New Granadan territory was secure but the peripheral Venezuelan and Ecuadorian territories were still contested. The constitutional framework had to be drafted in advance of the full territorial-military reality. The drafting is the subject of the next chapter.
The transitional administration
Across 1820 Bolívar's military command at Bogotá functioned, in effect, as the transitional government of the new republic. The principal administrative tasks were the consolidation of the New Granadan treasury, the reorganisation of the colonial bureaucracy under republican supervision, the maintenance of the army that was now engaged in the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian campaigns, and the extension of republican civil administration into the recently liberated provinces. Francisco de Paula Santander — a New Granadan general who had served under Bolívar in the Boyacá campaign — was appointed vice-president and de facto chief executive in Bolívar's absence on campaign; he would hold this position, more or less continuously, until 1827. The Santander administrative apparatus at Bogotá — competent, austere, federalist in instinct but loyal in practice to the Bolivarian constitutional framework — was the substantive day-to-day government of the early republic. The Bolívar-Santander partnership held through the 1820s with increasing strain; its eventual rupture in 1828 is the subject of Chapter VI.
End of Chapter III