The Cúcuta constitution of 1821 created a unitary republic of some two and a half million people, governed from Bogotá, stretching from the Panamanian isthmus to the Peruvian border and from the Caribbean to the Amazon. On paper it was the second-largest state in the Americas. In practice the government at Bogotá could not reliably learn what had happened in its own provinces within the month, could not collect enough revenue to pay its army, and could not enforce in the countryside the laws it passed in the capital.
This chapter is about that gap. The military narrative of the republic is a story of extraordinary achievement; the administrative one is a story of a state that never really existed outside a handful of towns. Both are true at once, and the second is the reason the first did not last.
The distances
Start with the map, because everything else follows from it. The Andes enter the republic from the south as a single range and split into three cordilleras, separated by the deep hot trenches of the Magdalena and the Cauca. East of them lie the llanos and then the Amazon. The population lived in cold high basins two to three thousand metres up, connected to each other by mule tracks over passes, and to the sea by rivers.
A despatch from Bogotá to Caracas took about a month in good conditions. Bogotá to Quito was three weeks, over the Pasto highlands, through country that stayed royalist in sympathy longer than anywhere else in the republic and rose repeatedly against it. Bogotá to the coast meant eight to ten days down to Honda and then a river passage of two to six weeks depending on the season, the champán crews and the water level. The republic's own vice-president reckoned it quicker to write to London than to some of his provincial governors.
There were no roads in the European sense. The Camino Real between Bogotá and Honda, the single most important commercial artery in New Granada, was a mule track that in the wet season required animals to be unloaded and cargo carried by men. Wheeled vehicles were essentially unknown outside a few towns. The Cúcuta constitution appointed provincial governors from the centre and made them answerable to it, which was a reasonable design for France and an impossible one here.
The consequence was that authority in the provinces belonged to whoever was physically present with armed men — which after 1821 meant the generals of the independence war. The constitution said one thing; Páez in Venezuela, Flores in the south and the local commanders in between were the other, and there was no mechanism by which Bogotá could compel any of them. When the crisis came in 1826 it took the form it did because the state had no way of imposing a decision at a distance.
Slavery, and the free womb
The republic was built on a society in which slavery was legal, widespread on the coasts and in the Cauca valley, and defended by a part of the political class that had made the revolution.
Bolívar had committed himself to abolition in 1816, in Haiti, as the price of Pétion's support, and had proclaimed it at Carúpano in June of that year. In practice what happened was narrower: freedom for enslaved men who enlisted, which was a recruitment measure as much as an emancipation, and which sent a great many of them to die in the southern campaigns. At Cúcuta in 1821 he pressed the congress for full abolition and was refused.
What the congress passed instead was the law of free birth — the ley de vientres. Children born to enslaved mothers after the 21st of July 1821 were declared free, but were bound to serve their mother's owner until the age of eighteen in compensation for their upbringing. In 1842 the term was raised to twenty-one, and there were provisions permitting those coming of age to be placed under further supervision. A tax on inheritances was to fund manumission juntas that would purchase freedom for adults; the juntas were chronically unfunded, the money was diverted to the war, and in most provinces they freed a handful of people a year.
Slavery accordingly outlived the republic by two decades: abolished in Ecuador in 1851, in New Granada by the law of May 1851 taking effect on the 1st of January 1852, and in Venezuela in March 1854. The children freed by the womb law of 1821 were, in most cases, adults with children of their own by the time the institution itself ended.
The republic's record on its indigenous population is comparably mixed. Bolívar abolished the colonial tribute and ordered the division of communal lands into individual private holdings, which was intended as liberation from a caste system and worked in practice as a mechanism for transferring land to whoever could manipulate a title. In 1828, facing fiscal collapse, the government reimposed the tribute under another name. The resguardos — the communal holdings — shrank steadily throughout.
The Church
Bolívar was, personally, a sceptic of the Enlightenment sort who thought religion useful and did not believe much of it. Politically he was careful, and the republic's settlement with the Church was pragmatic rather than anticlerical.
The state claimed the patronato — the crown's old right to nominate to benefices — on the argument that it had inherited Spain's sovereignty and therefore Spain's ecclesiastical prerogatives. Rome disagreed, and withheld recognition and the consecration of bishops for years, so that by the mid-1820s several dioceses had no bishop at all. Recognition came slowly from 1827 under Leo XII, who was persuaded that a schism was the likelier alternative.
Cúcuta suppressed the smaller monasteries — houses with fewer than eight professed members — and directed their property to secondary education, which was the single largest educational measure of the republic and produced the colegios that still exist in a dozen provincial towns. It abolished the Inquisition, which had already ceased to function, and confirmed the expulsion of the Jesuits. It did not touch the tithe, which the state continued to collect and share.
The Lancasterian monitorial system was introduced with enthusiasm — cheap, scalable, requiring one teacher and a hall of older pupils to drill the younger — and James Thomson, a Scottish Baptist minister and agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, was brought in to establish it. It produced real schools in the towns and nothing at all in the countryside. Literacy at the end of the republic was probably under ten per cent, which is the figure to hold in mind against the Bolivian constitution's proposal to restrict the franchise to those who could read.
Money, and the London loans
The republic had been financed by confiscation, forced loans and plunder during the war, and none of those was a basis for a peacetime state. It needed revenue, and the revenue it had was colonial in structure: customs, the tobacco and salt monopolies, the tithe share, and the indigenous tribute it had just abolished.
So it borrowed in London. Francisco Antonio Zea, sent to Europe as the republic's agent, contracted a loan in 1822 on terms so poor and with so little authority that the government repudiated part of it; a second and much larger loan followed in 1824, for a nominal £4.75 million issued at 88.5 and netting the republic a good deal less after commissions, discounts and the retention of two years' interest out of the principal. Of the money raised, a share went on arms bought at inflated prices, on the debts of the first loan, and on commissions to intermediaries.
This was part of a wider mania. Between 1822 and 1825 London subscribed enthusiastically to Latin American government bonds and to mining companies formed to exploit the continent's silver, including at least one — the celebrated Poyais loan — for a country that did not exist. The bubble burst in the panic of December 1825. Colombia suspended interest payments in 1826 and was in default for the rest of its existence, which closed the London market to it precisely when it needed money most.
The effect on the ground was that the army went unpaid. An unpaid army in a country whose provincial authority rested on generals is not a technical problem in public finance; it is a political crisis with a timetable. Officers requisitioned what they needed, which alienated the provinces that were requisitioned; soldiers deserted; and the government's practical answer — reimposing the indigenous tribute in 1828, raising customs, attempting to sell off Church and public land — supplied its opponents with grievances at the moment of maximum constitutional tension.
The people of the republic
Who actually lived in this country is harder to answer than it should be, because the republic never managed a reliable census. The usual estimate is around two and a half million people in 1825: perhaps a million and a quarter in New Granada, three quarters of a million in Venezuela, half a million in the south, and a small population on the isthmus.
They were not one people in any sense the constitution acknowledged. The coasts were African and mixed; the high basins were mestizo and indigenous; the Creole elite that had made the revolution and ran the republic numbered perhaps a few tens of thousands. The colonial caste categories were abolished by law and persisted in practice, in marriage, in office-holding and in the army's commissions. Bolívar's private letters return repeatedly to his fear of a race war, and to the conviction — which he did not publish — that the pardo majority would eventually take the republic from the men who had made it.
What held such a country together during the war was the war. Once the Spanish were gone from the territory in 1822, the shared enemy went with them, and what remained was a constitution written for a state that could not administer itself, a treasury in default, an army that could not be paid, and a set of regional loyalties that were older, stronger and much more legible to ordinary people than anything Bogotá could offer.
The remarkable thing, on this evidence, is not that the republic broke up after eleven years. It is that it was assembled at all.
End of Chapter V